Chapter Text
If Izuku had to describe his life up to that point, he would have done so with a single word: happiness. He was a happy child. He had a loving mother who smelled of vanilla, a spacious house to play in, and practically everything he asked for. Perhaps his father was never home, but to be completely honest, Izuku didn't care; you don't miss what you've never had.
Of all the days of the year, his birthdays were his absolute favorite. Usually, they were quiet celebrations: decorating the living room with colorful balloons, waiting for his mom to buy a strawberry cake, and playing until he was exhausted with Kacchan. However, for his fourth birthday, Izuku already felt like a big boy. A year had passed since he started kindergarten, and he had spent enough time deciding which friends to invite. He already had his list ready.
But in the days leading up to it, Izuku began to notice that something was wrong. The atmosphere at home changed. His mother seemed submerged in constant stress, moving from one place to another with the phone glued to her ear, ordering entire banquets and massive boxes of decorations that Izuku had never seen before.
It wasn't until the morning of his birthday that the little boy understood why. His party was not going to be in the warmth of his home. Nor was he going to play heroes or tag with Kacchan.
They put him in a car and took him to an immense, cold venue with high ceilings and white lights. The place wasn't filled with children carrying toys, but with men in expensive suits and women in rigid dresses: his father's business associates and their perfect children. In the corners, the flashes of cameras and photographers blinked nonstop. It wasn't a children's party; it was his official presentation to society.
Izuku wasn't stupid. He knew his father was an important and recognizable businessman. Perhaps his company wasn't an untouchable titan like the beverage conglomerate "Suntory" or the food giant "Meiji", but Hisashi had inherited one of the most influential coffee and dairy companies in the region. Even so, the boy never imagined how overwhelming and suffocating that world could be.
Just a few minutes ago, Izuku had felt safe, happily sheltered in his mother's arms, until Hisashi appeared out of nowhere and snatched him away with a firm tug to force him to parade in front of the guests.
Now, Izuku walked stiffly, holding his father's hand while a tide of strangers crouched down toward him. Everyone smiled at him with teeth that were too white and fake. They spoke to him in exaggeratedly high-pitched voices, pinching his cheeks until it hurt and throwing empty praise about how much he had grown. It was deeply uncomfortable. The air smelled of expensive perfume and cigarette smoke, not cake.
Feeling on the verge of tears from anxiety, Izuku gently tugged at the sleeve of his father's suit and looked up.
"Dad..." he whispered, his voice trembling. "When does this end?"
Hisashi didn't even deign to look at him. He kept his flawless smile directed at the photographers while his hand tightened just a bit harder around the boy's fingers—a silent warning.
"Behave yourself," he shot back simply, in a sharp, cold voice that brooked no argument.
Izuku lowered his gaze to his shiny new shoes, feeling a knot in his stomach. At that precise moment, surrounded by lights, cameras, and applause, the boy discovered what true discomfort felt like.
It took some time for Izuku to understand the real underlying purpose of that overwhelming birthday party. The lavishness, the photographers, and the expensive suits were not a celebration; they were an investment. At four years old, a child's body normally reaches the biological maturity necessary to manifest their Quirk. His father wasn't celebrating his birth; he was waiting, with an almost feverish impatience, for the arrival of his merchandise.
And that moment arrived shortly after.
Lately, everything in the house felt suffocating. Hisashi, who used to spend entire weeks missing on business trips or at his hero agency, had decided to settle down at home full-time. His only task was to watch Izuku. Lunchtimes, which used to be the boy's favorite time—where he would laugh with his mom, tell her about the scribbles he had made in kindergarten, or watch cartoons together on television—transformed into a dismal ritual.
The television remained off. No one spoke. The only sound in the dining room was the metallic clinking of silverware against porcelain. Izuku ate with his head bowed, feeling his father's fixed, heavy gaze dug into the crown of his head, like a hawk waiting for its prey to make the slightest misstep. Inko, sitting opposite, maintained a tense, forced smile, her knuckles white from squeezing her napkin so hard.
It was in the middle of this sepulchral silence that Izuku's nose began to itch.
He tried to hold it in, but it was impossible. He wrinkled his face and sneezed hard.
"Achoo!"
Out of his mouth came no air, but a violent blast of orange flames that shot across the table, instantly scorching the linen tablecloth and evaporating the water in the glasses. Izuku gasped in fright, falling backward off his chair while covering his mouth with trembling hands, fearing his father's reprimand for causing a disaster.
But the scolding never came.
"Finally..." he heard a deep voice say, loaded with an almost sinister relief.
Izuku looked up from the floor. Hisashi had stood up abruptly, kicking his own chair back. He wasn't looking at the burned tablecloth; he was looking at his son. He wore the strangest, most disturbing, and unhinged expression Izuku had ever seen in his short life. His eyes gleamed with uncontrolled greed, and a twisted, almost maniacal smile spread across his face.
"Finally, it happened," Hisashi whispered to himself, ignoring the muffled crying of Inko, who ran to embrace her frightened son.
It took Izuku a few weeks of painful experiments to understand the true nature of what had just awakened. It wasn't a simple copy of his father's Quirk. Not only could he spit burning fire from his mouth; he discovered that, through mental impulses, he could trap those same flames mid-air. He possessed the telekinetic power to shape them at will, redirect their trajectory with his mind, and, most terrifyingly, compress the fire with such magnetic force that the flames ceased to be gas and became dense, almost solid constructs.
Izuku thought his father would love him more now. He didn't know that cornering that floating fire would be the first bar of the prison his life was about to become.
-------
Hisashi did not consider himself an arrogant man. Not at all. Pride was for the insecure. He simply saw himself for what he was: a perfect man.
For as long as he could remember, the world had seemed like a ridiculously easy place, designed for his convenience. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and already in elementary school, while watching his classmates struggle with basic addition, he came to an inevitable conclusion: he was surrounded by idiots. His teachers seemed predictable, the subjects were a joke, and his parents celebrated his every achievement as if it were a miracle, when to him it was as natural as breathing. Everyone around him always ended up agreeing with him.
In middle school, his contempt for others matured into subtle manipulation. Gaining friends, status, or girls never required the slightest effort.
"Hey, Hisashi, are you going to the robotics club today? We could help you with your project..." a classmate would say, desperately seeking crumbs of his attention.
"Don't waste your time," Hisashi would reply with a charming smile that hid his disdain. "I prefer to work alone. I don't like to be slowed down."
Girls were even easier. He didn't even have to spend his money to impress them; they fell hopelessly for his facade of a polished, intelligent, and mysterious gentleman. However, as the world surrendered at his feet, a deep and bitter apathy took hold of him. Life had become boring. He needed a stage where the difficulty was real, a challenge worthy of his intellect. He decided to become a pro hero. The most dangerous, competitive, and glorified career in Japan would be his playground.
But destiny dealt him a blow he never saw coming.
The UA Academy did not welcome him with a red carpet. He managed to get in, yes, but his Quirk of exhaling fire, though powerful, was not unique. To his horror, his peers did not bow before him; on the contrary, his distant attitude and evident superiority complex caused them to label him as a "weirdo" and pretentious"
"Midoriya, your technique is flawless, but you lack empathy. A hero needs to connect with people, not just pose for the polls," his UA mentor reprimanded him one day after a rescue training session.
"People look for efficiency, professor, not a friend," Hisashi retorted, clenching his fists with a rage he had never experienced before
He didn't graduate in the Top 10. He didn't have million-dollar agencies begging for his contract. When he debuted as a professional, he thought the market would understand his genius over the months, but the reality was crushing: after two years of insignificant patrols, he stalled miserably at rank 231.
Nobody on the streets knew who "Hizashi" was. To the general public and the media, he was simply the young, wealthy CEO who had just inherited the prestigious family coffee and dairy business. A businessman playing at being a hero.
That was an intolerable humiliation. A poison that ate away at his insides every time he attended corporate galas and listened to the condescending congratulations of other businessmen.
It was in his office, contemplating the city lights and the giant screens displaying the Top 10 heroes, where he conceived his masterpiece. If his own body and time no longer allowed him to reach the summit of heroism, he would create the perfect tool to achieve it: an heir.
He analyzed medical records, family trees, and Quirk genetic combinations with the same coldness with which he reviewed his company's stocks. That was how he found Inko. She was a simple, malleable woman with a telekinetic Quirk for attracting small objects which, when crossed with his pyrokinesis, statistically promised an optimal result.
He remembered perfectly the night he proposed to her in a luxurious restaurant. Inko wept with emotion, believing that the handsome and wealthy businessman had fallen in love with her shyness. Hisashi looked at her through the glass of his wine cup, smiling with his usual gentlemanly mask, while in his mind he only calculated the potential of the child she would harbor in her womb.
"I promise you we will be an ideal family, Inko," he had told her that night, gently taking her hand.
"An ideal family," Hisashi repeated to himself years later, looking at the burned tablecloth in his dining room and little Izuku trembling on the floor.
The boy had been born with the perfect Quirk: the ability to spit and shape flames with his mind. The plan was running smoothly on its tracks. He would raise this creature under military discipline, mold him to be the number one hero, and when the entire world knelt before Izuku, everyone would know that he, Hisashi Midoriya, was the genius and the father behind the miracle. He wouldn't be the direct center of attention, but he would be the puppeteer of the legend. And for a perfect man, that was more than enough.
-----
Time does not stand still, and for Izuku, the last four years felt like an endless military march. He was no longer the easily frightened four-year-old child; he was eight now. He had grown a few inches, his mother cut his hair more often so he would look "impeccable" according to his father's demands, and, if he was completely honest with himself, he was sick of it. Sick of the expectations, sick of the schedules, and sick of his own life.
Since that fateful sneeze that unleashed his Quirk, the warmth of his home had vanished. His free time was the first thing to die, devoured by suffocating physical training; the scarce minutes of respite he had left had to be used to complete a mountain of school homework. The second thing was his diet: Inko’s home-cooked meals were replaced by a strict nutritional diet designed to mold the "body of a perfect hero." The third, and what hurt him the most, were his birthdays.
The last birthday Izuku remembered with true happiness was his third. Ever since he turned four, each anniversary was nothing more than a corporate event disguised as a children's party. A runway where Hisashi put his "prodigy son" on display before business associates and the media. If anyone questioned the methods of the hero Hizashi, he simply responded with his corporate smile and a rehearsed speech: "It is an elite education, designed to squeeze the absolute maximum potential out of the new generation."
That supposed elite education had condemned him to solitude. Halfway through his second year of elementary school, Hisashi decided that his heir could not mingle with the "plebeians" of a public school. He enrolled him in an exclusive, immense all-boys private school. Izuku went from playing in the mud to sitting alone on marble benches during recess, surrounded by rich kids who looked at him with suspicion or indifference. He had no friends there. No one to talk to.
Because of that, the day of his eighth birthday felt like a miracle.
Taking advantage of a rare oversight in his father's schedule, Izuku had managed to slip away for a few minutes after class to meet up with the only person who made him feel real: Kacchan. They walked along the busy streets they used to frequent when they were younger. The afternoon air was fresh, and for the first time in months, Izuku did not feel the knot of anxiety in his stomach.
"I'm serious, Kacchan!" Izuku said, moving his hands enthusiastically, imitating a hero's flight. "All Might’s punch in yesterday's video had a perfect trajectory. If I manage to compress my flames into a sphere with that same centripetal force, I could also—"
"Shut up for a whole month, Izuku!" Bakugo interrupted him, giving him a friendly but rough shove with his shoulder, while small sparks popped in the palm of his hand. "Stop babbling like a damn idiot! I don't care how much magnetic force you put into your little floating fires, I'm going to be number one. I'm gonna crush you anyway, no matter what rich-kid school your old man hides you in!"
Izuku let out a small laugh, scratching the back of his neck. He missed that honest aggressiveness. At his school, people smiled with fake politeness; Kacchan, at least, was real.
"I know, Kacchan. I know you're amazing," Izuku replied with a genuine smile. "But I'm not going to make it that easy for you."
Izuku wasn't just happy to see his friend again; he was happy because things at home finally seemed to be giving him a break. That very week, the hero rankings had been updated: Hisashi had managed to climb from rank 299 to 250. It was the highest rank of his entire mediocre professional career. To the world, it was a minor achievement; to Hisashi’s ego, it was a blessed balm.
His father's mood had improved drastically. He had been friendlier, less prone to shouting, and, miraculously, the intensity of the training had decreased to the point of granting Izuku a free weekend. For a few days, Izuku had allowed himself to forget that he was a piece of merchandise. He allowed himself to believe that, perhaps, his family could be normal.
They reached the corner where their paths split.
"See you, Kacchan! Thanks for walking with me!" Izuku said goodbye, waving his hand as he stepped backward.
"Look where you're going, dumbass, or you're gonna trip!" Bakugo growled, turning around, though he couldn't help but shove his hands into his pockets with a less tense posture.
Izuku turned on his heels and rounded the corner of his neighborhood with a light heart and a smile on his face, eager to get home and eat a piece of the cake his mother had secretly promised him.
But the smile froze on his lips.
The afternoon sky was no longer orange. As he turned the corner, the space between the houses was flooded with a violent, rhythmic, and flashing glare. The blue and red lights of multiple ambulances and police cruisers stained the walls of his street, shattering the neighborhood's peace with the dull echo of sirens and the alarmed murmur of neighbors who were beginning to gather.
Izuku’s heart plummeted straight into a void. His house was at the end of that street.
The transition from childhood to maturity was not a natural process for Izuku; it was a violent fracture. At eight years old, his birthday stopped being an uncomfortable date and transformed into something he detested, hated, and despised with every fiber of his being. An annual reminder that his life had ended the same day he was born. Izuku wanted to die.
Sitting on the floor of his new, cold bedroom, hugging his knees, he felt that his existence no longer mattered. What was happening to him couldn't be simple bad luck; it was a curse.
Grief in an eight-year-old child is an amorphous monster. It is not a linear sadness; it is a void that devours the body. Izuku went through weeks of an apathy so deep that he forgot to breathe, followed by nightly panic attacks where he desperately searched for the scent of vanilla in the sheets, finding only the smell of industrial disinfectant in the new house.
He felt devastated, broken, not knowing what would happen to his life. Nothing mattered to him anymore; he just wanted to lock himself away, become invisible, cry until his eyes bled, and that was it.
The official police report had been flawless, a masterpiece of bureaucratic cynicism: a *"tragic collateral attack by an elusive villain"* in which the hero Hizashi supposedly risked his life to save his wife, arriving too late. Inko Midoriya had been incinerated in her own home, and to the rest of the world, the identity of the culprit was a mystery.
The funeral was nothing but a circus show for Izuku. Izuku, with his face swollen and his body trembling from uncontrollable crying, was the center of attention for the camera flashes. His real, childhood pain was the perfect fuel for reporters looking for a tragic story, and the ideal stage for Hisashi.
"It's alright, my boy... Dad is here. We will be strong for her," Hisashi whispered to him in front of the cameras, wrapping him in a protective bear hug, while journalists held back tears at such a display of "heroic fatherhood."
Izuku swallowed his tears, frozen in disgust.
He might have believed that damn story if he didn't know the man holding him. But Izuku lived with his mother's killer. In the days that followed, hidden behind the curtains or under the office desk, the boy had overheard every phone call, every financial arrangement, every favor called in. He had heard with his own ears how the Hero Public Safety Commission and the high-ranking police officials pulled strings to bury the inconsistencies of the case. They cleaned the scene, erased the temperature logs of the fire, and granted Hisashi a perfect alibi in exchange for his silence and his corporate loyalty.
He lived with a monster and could do absolutely nothing. Who was he going to tell? The police who shared drinks with his father?
Not even a month passed before Hisashi began to change things. Hisashi pulled him out of his private school to avoid "distractions and uncomfortable questions from school counselors," establishing homeschooling instead. The confinement was absolute.
They moved to a modern, minimalist, and soulless residence in a gated community. Hisashi got rid of every trace of Inko: her aprons, her teacups, her cookbooks. Everything went into the trash.
The only thing Izuku managed to rescue, hiding it inside his sock while the movers emptied the house, was a pair of his mother's small silver earrings. Earrings he couldn't even wear because he didn't have holes in his ears.
He kept them under his mattress, pressing them against his chest at night until the metal hurt his skin. Hisashi only kept a couple of oil portraits of Inko in the main living room, a strategic decoration to maintain the facade of a grieving widower when receiving important guests.
If Izuku had been exploited before, now he was a slave. His routine turned into a mechanical, gray, and torturous cycle that repeated itself over and over and over again, without a single day of rest:
05:00 AM – The Awakening: The timer in his room turned the white lights on at maximum power. There were no hugs or breakfasts with toast. Izuku had to dress immediately in training gear.
*05:15 AM to 08:00 AM – Physical Conditioning: Running on the treadmill at absurd speeds, heavy calisthenics sets, and endurance exercises. His eight-year-old muscles tore daily, forced to heal with bitter protein shakes that replaced any trace of real food.
08:30 AM to 01:00 PM – Education: Sitting in front of a screen with virtual tutors who demanded high school academic levels from him. If his grades dropped below excellence, lunchbreak was cut in half.
02:00 PM to 08:00 PM – Quirk Training: Six hours locked in the soundproof basement of the house. A reinforced concrete bunker where the air always smelled of ozone and scorched flesh.
It was on one of those training afternoons that hell became explicit. Izuku was standing, his arms trembling, holding three spheres of hyper-compressed fire floating around him. The mental strain made his nose bleed. His telekinetic Quirk crushed the flames so tightly they vibrated with an electric hum.
"Maintain the density, Izuku!" Hisashi bellowed from the observation platform, his arms crossed. "If the magnetic pressure drops, the heat dissipates! A Top 10 hero does not let energy escape!"
"D-Dad... I can't do it anymore... my head hurts," the boy whimpered, feeling his eyes roll back from exhaustion.
Hisashi walked down the steps at a slow pace, but his presence filled the bunker like a poisonous gas. He stopped in front of his son and, without warning, delivered a backhand to his cheek that sent him straight to the floor. The spheres of fire exploded in the air, dissipating into smoke.
"Do not call me that in this place. Here, I am your trainer," Hisashi sentenced, looking down at him with those cold eyes that held not a shred of remorse. "Your mother was a weak woman, Izuku. Someone who had no ambition, a nuisance who only served to move teacups around. The fire consumed her because she was not worthy of it. Do you want to end up like her? Do you want to be a waste of ashes?"
Izuku wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand, his eyes fixed on the concrete floor. The physical pain was nothing compared to the dull fury and hatred that began to germinate in his chest. He glanced sideways at his father's shadow.
"No..." Izuku whispered, with a voice that no longer sounded like an eight-year-old child's, but like someone whose soul had been ripped out.
"Then stand up and ignite the fire again," the killer ordered, turning his back. "Tomorrow we can finally celebrate your birthday, and you are not going to make me look embarrassed."
Izuku stood up slowly, finally spitting fire. His hands, covered in small burns and fresh scars, ignited once more with orange flames.
While he molded the fire with his mind, he stared at Hisashi’s back.