Chapter Text
Everything started with a notebook. Well, three notebooks. Three notebooks and a drawer that needed a key.
Izuku didn’t often think about these notebooks (except when they were all he thought about), only unlocking them and adding a page here or there when it was truly necessary.
For one of the notebooks, it had been necessary quite a bit lately, and the others were being dragged along for the ride. This wasn’t a problem, exactly, except that the lock was no longer strong enough to hold them. Not when Izuku needed to make a decision.
Izuku didn’t want to make a decision, not really, not when making a decision meant actually trying to control the whirlwinds of ideas and thoughts and emotions that spun in his mind. He was much better at controlling the mutterstorm with Aizawa-sensei’s training, but his mentor never judged when Izuku just had so many thoughts that they just needed out.
Izuku couldn’t disappoint Aizawa-sensei. He wouldn’t. If the man needed a decision, then Izuku would decide. He’d decide, even if it meant dealing with the notebooks in the drawer (the thoughts that needed out of his head, yet couldn’t be spoken and maybe shouldn’t be free).
They’d been on a roof, the evening Aizawa brought Kacchan up in conversation. Not the school roof, never the school roof, but the roof with the overgrown garden where Izuku had left Eraserhead’s first present.
Izuku had his back to the tree, rough bark pressing a reminder that he was really Eraserhead’s intern into his spine, as both of them drank juice pouches after a lesson about patrol routes.
Eraserhead’s gaze had felt like a blanket, heavy and comforting, but also limiting maneuverability as it twined about limbs. Izuku had known that he wouldn’t like what the man had to say, but didn’t expect his breath to freeze when the hero had sighed and finally spoken.
“We need to talk about the burns.”
“What burns?” Izuku asked, momentarily unable to tell if his response had been reflexive or genuine confusion. He’d already been pretty good at avoiding Kacchan before Eraserhead’s training; almost a month in and he was downright excellent. Izuku didn’t think he’d had any burns since the thing with the essay…when the very observant Eraserhead had caught him on a roof. Right.
Izuku opened his mouth again only to close it with a clack when Eraserhead turned red eyes on him. “Kid, I swear, if you say ‘it’s fine,’ I will make you do laps until you collapse.”
This was not an idle threat. Aizawa-sensei had decided that the best way to start handling Izuku’s confidence issues was to make sure Izuku wasn’t at least perpetuating negative self-image out loud (also therapy, but the hero was still letting Izuku pretend he didn’t see that coming). There had been a lot of jumping jacks in the beginning of training.
Eraserhead sighed again, running a hand through messy hair. “Look. I know your schooling sucks and there are many people who make it worse, but I also know that it’s Bakugou who’s the worst, who’s the one responsible for the burns. I know he was your childhood friend, I know no one tried to stop him, but what I don’t know is what you want to do about it.”
Izuku squeaked, then successfully got out, “What I want to do about it?”
“Yes.” Shouta crossed his arms and tilted his head just a bit, clearly being careful not to to display much emotion. “Look, kid, I know you. I know you’re smart. I know you have plans. I know you can handle things, even if for some reason you haven’t. I’m worried that reason is that you don’t think anyone will believe you, which I would have hoped you know isn’t the case anymore.”
Izuku shot to his feet so quickly he stumbled. The idea that Aizawa-sensei thought Izuku didn’t appreciate his teacher, didn’t understand just how much the hero had done, poured like lead through his bones. “That’s not-“
“Easy, kid.” Eraserhead placed one warm hand on Izuku’s shoulder and pressed him back toward the tree with infinite gentleness.
With a shaky breath rattling around in his lungs, Izuku opened his eyes and met the stare of his teacher. “Kacchan’s going to be a great hero.”
“No, he’s not.”
Izuku blinked.
“And he’s certainly not getting into UA. Don’t look at me like that. He’s not the kind of student I want in my class or Nezu wants in his school.”
“But…“ Izuku’s mouth tasted like cotton. He had words, somewhere (bound in paper and locked in a drawer by trembling hands with a key that burned across his collar bones).
Aizawa-sensei collapsed into a cross-legged position. “Heroes aren’t bullies, Izuku. Not the good ones. Not the ones like you already are and I train my students to be.”
Izuku said nothing, just stared and hoped Aizawa-sensei understood what Izuku was trying to say. He wasn’t sure why he hoped that, since Izuku himself wasn’t sure what he was trying to say.
Something must have gotten through, because Aizawa-sensei lifted and arm and placed his palm on Izuku’s curls. “You don’t need to explain now. Or at all, if that’s what you want. But I do need a decision.”
“Me?”
“Yes. If I was making the decision, Bakugou would be charged with assault, at the very least, and possibly sent to juvie.”
Izuku didn’t know what his face did, but he knew it was stiff, and apparently the expected response, since Aizawa-sensei gave a chuckle that sounded like tumbling stones. “Yeah, I didn’t think you’d like that.”
Aizawa-sensei stood, extending a hand that Izuku automatically accepted to help the boy up. “You have a week, Problem Child, to think about it. And not making a decision still counts as a decision. If you want me, or Tsukauchi, or your mom to decide, that’s fine. That’s completely okay, and we’ll all still be both proud and fond of you.”
They stopped under a ledge that provided protection from the starting rain and the flickering light over the stairs cast shadows over Eraserhead’s face. “I want you to ask yourself, though, whether one day, if Bakugou does become a hero, would you trust him to save you? To save your mom? Or, looking at it a different way, is there anyone you know, right now, whom you wouldn’t trust him to save?”
Izuku walked home with the voices of his Quirkless Support Group echoing with each raindrop. His Group that supported each other in their quirklessness, supported him in his desire to be a hero, supported the other society castoffs in their ever-expanding information network (his Group that Izuku wouldn’t let Kacchan near with a ten foot pole and a barricade of steel).
It was his Group that made the decision difficult on multiple levels. If there had been only two notebooks, then Izuku could have decided more easily. Not easily, because Kacchan was his childhood friend and there were ribbons and threads and spools of emotions knotted in his chest all tied to the other boy, but more easily. He could have trusted (trusted, he had adults he trusted) the decision to Eraserhead or his mother.
But the Group, as much as they were people and individuals that Izuku wasn’t sure Kacchan would save, not in a way that mattered, were also his Network. The bones of his Network. And because of them, Kacchan also had an entry in the third notebook.
The first notebook was for Kacchan (never brought to school and not just about his quirk; a potential decision all in its own if Izuku decided to never be bothered by the boy again, decided to hurt instead of help). The second one was for Endeavour (Bakugou could become a hero like him, and Izuku hated to imagine a world where Kacchan would be fine with that).
The third one was one of his Villain Notebooks. Sort of. It held multiple people and multiple entries. The third one was filled with criminals, which Izuku was beginning to understand weren’t exactly the same thing as villains.
The thing was that not all of his Group were law-abiding civilians. Most tried to be, sure, but technically loitering was against the law, even though there wasn’t much else to do when you were homeless and just needed an hour of sleep. Stealing was illegal, but when it made the difference between a gaunt-faced child, well, decisions were made.
The other thing, the mostly-though-not-entirely-accidental thing, was that the Group and the Network were no longer entirely the same entity. Part of this was simply because not everyone in the Group contributed to the same level. Which was fine, excellent even, because Izuku would never force anyone (particularly a quirkless someone so used to force) into something they didn’t want to do.
So some participants just shared their own stories. Some passed along gossip. Some talked about injustices their families and friends faced. Some sought out problems and talked to people and then brought their findings to Izuku. They did whatever they were comfortable with and knew that was okay.
Their comfort levels had grown as Izuku succeeded, as he came back with newspaper articles and arrest records and his first pay check clenched in hands that shook as he whispered of Eraserhead, internship, and shadowed eyes that actually saw potential in a quirkless boy’s thin limbs.
(It had taken weeks, still, before Izuku recognized that increase in comfort, till he realized that he might have adults he trusted, but he also had adults who trusted him, and that. Well, maybe he was the hero Aizawa-sensei said he was.)
As their comfort level and Izuku’s skills had grown, so too had the Network. Izuku didn’t just hear about Yuri’s courier job, but accompanied the man as a pretend apprentice and learnt the seedier sides of the city. He realized that Yuri’s sick mother and Murata’s grandmother are in the same care centre, so connected the two so they weren’t lonely and was invited to the tea they started with several other highly knowledgeable elders.
He learned that Shin, Shin with the quiet voice who talked about his nieces and nephews as if they were his own, worked at an antique shop that dealt in stolen material. Material that Izuku was reasonably sure was provided by Shin’s brother. Izuku didn’t turn either of them in to the police.
He didn’t have proof. He deliberately didn’t have proof, even as Shin brought Izuku information on the occasional pawn broker that fleeced their desperate clients or thefts that had gone horribly, bloodily wrong. What Izuku did have was the blinding smiles of two tiny children in clothes worn and large on thin frames, ridiculously happy to let Izuku read them a story in the library before Group, before their Uncle took them home to a one bedroom apartment next to train tracks that roared all night.
This was the third notebook. This was the third heavily coded notebook that only involved names Izuku had made up, his own hero-villain names because these people could be either. They could be.
Except society had failed them.
These people committed crimes, did bad things, sometimes not even for the right reasons, or well, reasons that Izuku could understand, could justify, but they did it because there weren’t many (sometimes any) other choices. He wasn’t legitimizing crime, Izuku didn’t think. He still believed in heroes and villains.
He just, he got it. He understood how being told you’re one, useless thing over and over and over made it true. Or true enough to invade your every moment and make movement, forward, backwards, sideways, any movement at all, paralyzing. He understood how it never ended up being simply what you were told, but also what you were shown and what your experience amounted to being.
Kacchan wasn’t in this third notebook at first, because Kacchan wasn’t a villain or a criminal. Izuku didn’t give Kacchan an entry in this third notebook until it was three quarters full. Full of people his Network had shown him, sometimes inadvertently. Full of backstories that would never be in the media, but that made so much sense once Izuku had done some digging. Full of vigilantes that had chips on their shoulders and reasons Izuku might sort of agree with, in certain lights.
Kacchan’s entry was after another teen’s. A teen who’d been telling Izuku about a murder, because even if the police were looking for a murderer of homeless children, and this teen didn’t think they were, and even if the police took this teen and his scruffy clothes and stapled skin seriously, he couldn’t risk being sent home. So when a senior on the streets, a tired older man who came to Group with a beaming smile about once every month or two, suggested talking to Deku, this kid who knew things, the teen had figured, what the hell. He could out run a quirkless kid, surely.
Izuku had learned a lot about victimology for this case and found seven other victims from the teen’s description of the crime. Tsukauchi and Eraserhead had put the killer away rather decisively.
Izuku went back. The teen had ghosts in his glare and hunger in his cheeks and a young girl hiding in his shadow. It was weeks later, after twenty-two sets of steamed buns eaten in an alley, that Dabi rested a shaking hand on the napping Toga’s blond hair and told Izuku about quirk marriages and younger siblings and hero training that no one would believe.
Izuku wrote Dabi’s entry that night and Kacchan’s the next morning. They weren’t the same. Kacchan had gone through none of what the older teen had. But. But Izuku had started thinking about the Hero System again. About training and regulations and the time before schools.
Dabi hadn’t been given a choice whether he wanted to be hero (though he had, Izuku recognized the grief of a shattered dream) and trained rigorously for that fate. Kacchan had a choice, yes, but what kind of choice was it when everyone saw his quirk, saw a child’s (a toddler’s) enthusiasm and said yes, you will be a hero (over and over and over again made things true).
No one had ever told Kacchan no. They’d never taught him right from wrong beyond the dichotomies of heroes vs. villains, good vs. evil, and powerful vs. weak. Yes, Kacchan should have picked up some basic social skills and been able to figure out that some things weren’t okay on his own, but that didn’t change the fact that no one had ever taught him his actions weren’t okay, weren’t heroic
His parents were good people, but completely oblivious to the way the rest of their family piled expectation upon goal upon praise for their son in attempt to suck up to the future hero and gain bragging rights for the rest of their lives.
Dabi talked about his father (and Izuku had thoughts about this unidentified father, the kind he figured might belong under lock and key) in fits and starts and Izuku didn’t have to wonder how society could produce a hero that corrupted by power and might and certainty; Izuku was watching it happen before his very eyes (that was Izuku’s childhood friend they were ruining).
So Izuku sat in front of three unopened notebooks, hands tracing over thin paper covers in unsteady, shaking movements. One notebook for a person he loved and hated, one notebook for a hero that wasn’t, and one notebook for the people that society had failed (that weren’t villains yet).
Aizawa had wanted to know what Izuku wanted to do with Kacchan. Kacchan who was wrong and had hurt Izuku and might hurt Izuku’s Group or Network (Izuku’s people). Kacchan, who could end up in all three notebooks if he continued down such as similar path to Endeavour.
Izuku stood up, palms flat on his desk hard enough to still them, with his back hunched and eyed closed. He knew what he wanted to do with Kacchan, what he’d wanted to do with Kacchan since the first time he’d fallen in the creek.
What he wanted to do with everyone in that third notebook.
Izuku placed Endeavour’s book in the drawer, then threw Kacchan’s on top of it. Neither were relevant to his decision.
His hands were steady after the click of the key in the drawer and as he tucked his third notebook carefully into his backpack, followed by two blank notebooks (with cats on them; Aizawa-sensei had bought him notebooks), a new box of pens, and his coat.
He plotted train schedules in his mind as he locked the door and texted Aizawa-sensei to meet him at UA in a couple of hours. Izuku hadn’t actually been to the school yet, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know the way.
Kacchan had hurt Izuku. Badly. Hero society, had hurt Kacchan. Insidiously.
If the problem wasn’t just with Kacchan, then the decision couldn’t be either (Aizawa-sensei wouldn’t accept that answer alone, not after seeing the burns, not if Izuku wasn’t one hundred percent sure that he wasn’t doing this to avoid the issue).
If the problem was with hero society and hero education, then, well. Izuku supposed it was about time he got to know his Grand-Sensei in person.
Izuku was going to help them. (He was a hero, and he wasn’t alone.)