Chapter Text
Midoriya Izuku’s world shatters on a sunny day, standing before his idol, atop a very tall building. All it takes are a few thoughtless statements delivered at precisely the wrong time.
“Without power, can one become a Hero? No, I should think not. If you desire to help people, becoming a police officer is always an option. They are often mocked, but that too is admirable work. It’s not wrong to dream. However, you need to be realistic, kid.”
With a slamming door, the great hero, All Might, made his exit. Meanwhile, Izuku fell to his knees, despair overtaking him as all his dreams, hopes, and aspirations crumbled under the weight of ten years of vicious mockery and discouragement, and amid this despair, a wayward traveler saw its chance. Izuku’s mind went blank, and in the void, he saw two massive things orbiting each other and fragmenting as they fell past him. Caught up in this awe-inspiring sight, he failed to notice that one of the fragments was sailing on a course right for him.
Izuku awoke slowly, uncurling from where he lay on his side with short, furtive movements, even as new tears of self-loathing sprung to his eyes. He pulled himself to his feet, wiping away both his fresh tears and the slight dampness left from before he apparently passed out from how much All Might’s words hurt. If only words could lay him out like that, maybe Bakugou was right calling him a weak, useless, pathetic Deku. Harshly pulling the straps on his backpack to center it on his back, he descended the building down the stairs. He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious so he’d best hurry home and not worry his mother too much.
As he trudged down the stairs, he could hear some explosions off in the distance and even see a pillar of smoke. On an ordinary day, he’d rush over there to take notes on the fighting heroes for his notebooks, but today they were just a reminder of a broken dream, so he kept his head down and went home, deliberately taking a route as far from the fight as he could manage. All Might was in the area, even if he was apparently weakened nowadays, so things shouldn’t go too badly anyways.
Reaching his home, he entered quietly, saying a quick hello to his mother since he hadn’t been conked out long enough for his absence to have registered as anything abnormal, thankfully. He made his way into his room, sighing as he pulled out the notebook that arguably started all his issues today, it was damaged, but not to illegibility and now it even had an autograph from All Might himself in it. If only he had some idea what to do with it now that his hopes of becoming a hero were laid to rest.
He sat at his desk and started transcribing the notebook into a fresh one, letting his mind wander as he did so…
Izuku breathed heavily, mind racing as he looked down at what covered the pages of his notebook. He’d gone into some sort of trance part way through, zoning out and in his head just continuing his transcription while his mind wandered, but apparently, he’d spent the last hour drawing up blueprints for bombs. And not just bombs, but bombs that looked like something out of a pre-Quirk science fiction novel. Bombs that would turn everything in their effective radius to glass, bombs that would teleport their surroundings a good light-second out of Earth’s atmosphere, bombs that would set off every single pain receptor in someone’s body. Horrific things, and the worst was that he could read these blueprints and know down to his bones that he could make these. The glass bomb would be the easiest, followed only by the pain bomb in effective simplicity of materials required.
Was this his Quirk? To make weapons of unparalleled horror and devastation? But… it couldn’t be, Quirks didn’t work like this. There were Quirks that made making support items easier in various ways, such as being able to produce a super-conductive metal or rare chemical, or even a physical transformation or mutation that would make working metals or electronics easier. Quirks didn’t just… dump knowledge of advanced technology into your head. Not to even mention the toe joint that pointed out his inability to develop a Quirk to begin with. What was this?
He had to know if this was real. Make sure that this wasn’t some sort of sick joke his brain was playing on him. He needed to build one of these and test it. And if it worked… he’d deal with that if it came to that.
A week later and he was staring in disbelief at the perfect circle of objects transmuted to glass. He’d hunted down that old beach that had become little more than a junkyard and rummaged through the trash for what he needed. He hadn’t even needed any complex tools, just the screwdrivers and crescent wrench his mom kept around for when they needed to make small repairs on things around the house. And with bits of junk and household tools, he’d made possibly the most advanced piece of technology he’d ever heard of. Every solid object within about a meter of it had turned to glass instantly, anything partway inside the radius only partially transforming. And if the blueprints he could still see in his mind’s eye were correct, he could easily make the effective radius on the bomb closer to thirty or forty meters with barely any more materials.
This was… amazing, but also horrifying. He could make things science could only dream of, but apparently only if it was part of a bomb or something relating to a bomb. He’d tried to see if he could translate any of the designs into something less overtly destructive but had met no success. The most he could do on that front was making blueprints for several different detonation systems and launchers.
And the worst thing was, he still couldn’t be a hero. At most he might be contracted to be the personal Support designer for a hero and given his age, that was a ways off and looking at how heroes tended to make relationships with their Support and theming, he very probably would be forced to work with Bakugou. And, while that would have been palatable if terrifying only a few short weeks ago, the thought of working for Bakugou and most likely never seeing the field or effects of his work himself made his stomach turn.
And that was another thing that kind of scared him, he wanted almost viscerally to make and detonate his bombs and see the effects. He wanted to create weapons and use them. He wanted to fight and show that he wasn’t weak, wasn’t useless. But according to this society of Quirks and heroes, that was all he was. Even with this gift, all he was good for was supplying someone who had a Quirk. And that… that disgusted him. There had to be some way he could show his strength and show how rotten this society was. All the way to the top. All the way to All Might. The seeming beacon of hope who only reinforced the belief that without a Quirk you were nothing. But how?