weary travelers.

A HERO DOESN'T ALWAYS WEAR A CAPE

The sun glares, shining brightly through the smog of the city air. Dust chokes tired lungs and cigarette smoke drowns out blurry eyes. Red-rimmed hands twitch over plastic knives as children-but-not loose their immortality.

Today is the Yuuei entrance exam and Izuku meets a girl with brown hair and  forever blushing cheeks on his way to the convenience store, Mom is coming over for the first time in a month.

He tells her― the girl at the convince store with a healthy flush to her round face ―that he's from a couple of blocks away, she says she lives in that apartment, too. She tells him that she wants to become a hero, that she's taking the exam. He says he wanted to take it, but couldn't-can't, because of how weak his quirk (or lack thereof) was, not that he tells her that. Then she'd know he was a Deku and she'd look at him like the teachers do or sneer at him like Kacchan does.

He wishes her good luck after they exchange phone numbers on identical phones. He knows she's like him. With calloused hands and chipped fingernails.

Nobody lives where he lives, not if the had options to go anywhere else.

They agree to meet up when the entrance exam is over, he wants to know how she did, he'll never become a hero. (He's a Deku after all, Deku's don't become heroes, Deku's don't become anything. He is worthless, and he has come to terms with it. He is Deku, nothing can change that.)

She waves him goodbye and he grips his hand around the thin string of plastic holding day-old produce. He looks at the ever-blue sky as smoke covers it's radiance, wondering, wondering (always wondering), if it didn't always look so sad.

_

Izuku holds a knives in his hands, it is blunt and dull and it slashes through skin all the same. He cuts his fingers his accident, washing the wound in cold water. Mom isn't back home yet, he's making fried rice and vegetables. The rice is cooking on the stove― only one of the spaces work, flames twitching unsteadily.

His hands follow suit. He sticks an Edgeshot bandaid on the cut. Insignificant as it may be, he didn't want any blood on the food. Mom didn't deserve that kind of disrespectful behavior.

(She didn't deserve a quirkless, pathetic child that was afraid of his own shadow and a husband that rarely talks to her.)

_

She walks in an hour later. All gaunt cheeks and shaking hands and, "Oh Izuku, I missed you. Come give your mother a hug."

He does, wrapping his arms around her, they are both deformed. All skin and bones that never healed right. But Mom is beautiful still, her eyes shine and she kisses his cheek. She makes him feel safe. Something he has forgotten with all the pain and tears and burns.

His hoodie is frayed at the ends. Bits of fabric washing away to the edge of a world unknown. His eyes are like that, too. Drifting, drifting, drifting. It's summer now, and he passed the entrance exam to some prestigious school on the rich side of town. (Is it even a town? Or is it a city? Izuku doesn't know. Or is he forgetting?) Izuku tells Mom, and she pulls him into another hug.

"I-- I made a friend. His- his name is Tomura, and he used his quirk on me-- b-by accident! He said s-sorry a- a bunch of times and helped- he helped me cover the wo-wound."

She trails a broken hand down his face. Scars and indents scatter around the seperate skins of her fingers as she travel the purple marring his skin. She does not callous, no matter how cruel the work. She is careful and kind and the world has not yet left her bitter and tired. "That's great, dear."

And he wonders, not for the first time, if she looked at him like this when he was a child-but-not. Before he could worry about the miseries of life and start to fear the―pop, crackle, boom―sound of his best friends hands.

"'S no problem, Mom." He smiles, but his teeth stay hidden behind his lips. Broken, like his fingertips; worthless, like him.

"C-can you stay? Please? I-- I know work has you- but just f-for a little bit.. mayb-be you c-can m-meet Tomura o-or.. well, I, uhm- I met someone today and― she's applying to Yuuei and she's our neighbor a-and if you stayed m-maybe y-you could meet her a-and―"

She cuts him off, her eyes have watered.

(Good going, Deku. You made Auntie cry, are you happy now? Satisfied, now that you've been selfish enough? God, you're so pathetic, Deku.)

"I-- I'm s-s-sorry, Mom- y-you do-don't have to-- I know work is- is stress- I know work is stressful a-and that y-you― I'm so s-sorry, I wa-wasn't thinking a-and I―"

She wraps him up again, holding him safe in her frail, thin arms for just this moment. Just for now, she thinks. "I'm so sorry, Izuku."

(Suddenly he's five again, staring in front of the computer they no longer have with watery eyes and a breaking heart; asking, pleading, begging for an answer he would never receive. It was no, he think he knew it even back when he was a child-but-not. A selfish little monster running through the same video millions of times. Taking his mother's company for granted.)

"It's- it's okay Mom," He says. He is a liar, it breaks through his skin and bites on his lips breaking through paper flesh, ink spills red to his mouth. He never knew what a color tasted like― when- if he was a child-but-not he would laugh at the concept. You can't taste colors, he could hear his younger self saying. But now he's older, wiser, more fearful, less naïve. He knows that red tastes like pain and copper, that brown tastes like dirt and bile. He knows that yellow is blindingly hot, burning at his hands until they melt away under the wreathing light of the sun. He knows that colors are feelings. And that Izuku only knows pain and hurt and fear.

"It's okay." He says.

It's not.

"Really, I'm fine."