Chapter 1 – Anger Explodes
"When you're sad, you cry. But when you're happy, you should smile even more."
Of all the things Uraraka had ever heard her mother say, that was the one who stuck with her the most. It was something that she often thought about to try to deal with all the bad luck in her life.
Uraraka Ochako first understood that her family was poor when she was only four years old, when she saw her parents giving her the last of the food they had for the day, foregoing dinner so that she wouldn't go hungry.
And while the situation wasn't always that bad, it never really improved either. Uraraka's parents lived from paycheck to paycheck, always fearing any unexpected costs, always looking for the cheapest products and always refusing to waste even a yen.
As she grew up, Uraraka understood that the other kids were different. They could afford new clothes, toys, trips... And the other kids also realized that Uraraka was different from them, and as such, she was an easy target for bullying.
And being poor wasn't the only reason why she was bullied. Uraraka also had the extraordinary bad luck of being born quirkless.
Those things compounded each other, and it would be an understatement to say that Uraraka did not have the best childhood. But that was exactly the reason why she ended up latching on to her mother's words to such an extent.
Uraraka was almost aggressive in how she approached the things she liked. The girl developed an entire system for studying, because she wanted to get good notes to have her parents proud of her. When a neighbor offered to let her take Taekwondo lessons for free to help with the bullying problem, Uraraka practiced with a devotion seldom seen in children her age.
Uraraka struggled for every bit of control over her life that she could get, but besides that Uraraka had another secret passion: Heroes.
It all started with her seeing a television report of the rescue efforts of Space Hero Thirteen. She was fascinated by the image of that hero who used their amazing powers to help the helpless. She looked up everything she could about him, as well as other heroes who, like him, specialized in rescue and relief efforts.
One day, Uraraka told her father that she was feeling sad, that she couldn't be a hero like them, since she didn't have a quirk. His response was another thing that would stay with Uraraka forever.
"So, heroes for you are those who help the helpless, right? In that case, you don't need powers to be a hero, you only need to be willing to help."
And so Uraraka learned about rescue pilots, EMTs and all those other workers whose jobs didn't rely on quirks. Those that did quite a lot of good on their own but didn't receive much media attention.
The girl had found a new passion, and a new goal. She learned everything she could about those workers and what they did, she taught herself first aid and sign language, and she volunteered for every bit of charity work that she could. Her grades, which were already great, became even better when she realized that getting into great universities would be the best way to follow her dreams.
However, Uraraka could never have imagined that at fourteen years old, fate would have one more trick to play on her.
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It happened with a shocking suddenness. One moment she was walking back home from school, the next she had been yanked inside a dark van with a vision being obscured by a bag.
Uraraka tried to scream, but it was muffled by the bag. She tried to struggle, but that only resulted in her being beaten into submission.
Uraraka could feel the movement of the car, and she was sure she was getting further and further away from her home, from safety, from anything that she knew. The quirkless girl lost track of how much time passed, but she could say with certainty that what she experienced that day, the simple fact that she had to wait an agonizingly long time without knowing what she would be going through... That was by far the worst experience of her life.
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What happened next wasn't much better. She eventually had the bag removed from her head and found herself in some sort of dungeon.
It was a windowless place, probably underground, but Uraraka had no way to know. All the walls and floors were a uniform gray and without any features, but the thing that stood out the most to her were the cells.
Because they were the part that made Uraraka think about dungeons. Powerful iron bars were keeping certain "rooms" isolated, and within those rooms were people. Some were mostly normal-looking with only a few mutations, while others had much more severe mutations, some of them stranger than anyone she had seen in her life.
They had one thing in common. Their eyes were dead, hopeless.
The captors forced her to walk forward, and Uraraka turned to look at them. They were two, one on each side. They were young men who looked so normal that she wouldn't have looked at them while going down the street.
"Where am I?"
Her only answer was a punch to the face. She was pretty much dragged into a cell, and it would be there that she would spend the next six weeks.
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The first week was spent waiting and watching. Uraraka received food two times per day, nothing special, only cheap stuff (it was almost like what she ate at home, except prepared and served without any care whatsoever), and when her chamber pot got full, she could push it next to the same opening she received food from, and one of the "guards" would take it away.
That was the extent of Uraraka's interactions with the outside world. Whenever there was not any of the villains around, she tried to talk with the people in the nearby cells, with varying success. Some of them seemed too scared even when alone, but others actually talked, about themselves, their hobbies, their families... Uraraka did the same, since it was a way to pass the time.
In the beginning, she had wondered why they were there, but one (Night? Morning? She didn't know) Uraraka got her answer. One of the guards she had seen before returned, except he was... Different.
Half of his face had become gray and dead looking, and his eyes had turned into deep pools of black. He even walked differently. The man stopped next to one of the cells and pointed with a finger. The woman inside was suddenly shoved to the wall of the cell and had her arms and legs trapped by the shackles connected to it.
Uraraka got startled, since he had seem the man use his quirk before, and it was different (it was extending fingers). He entered the cell.
"Who are you? What are you gonna do with me?!" The woman asked.
(Her name was Hanako Tarumi. Her quirk was Lizard-form, which manifested as scales covering half of her body, a tail and a subtly different body structure. She had been one of the ones who talked with Uraraka.)
Surprisingly enough, the man actually responded:
"You can call me Sensei." His voice was emotionless and clinical "I wish to test the effects of various types of quirks mixing together."
He touched her head, and suddenly Hanako's scales started to shift violently, as her entire body vibrated.
She screamed as if she was dying, but "sensei" didn't stop. In fact, he had just begun.
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Over time, Uraraka realized the truth. Sensei had a quirk that allowed him to take over the bodies of other people. Every day he would come with another body, and he would do his experiments in the same cold and detached way.
Uraraka hated Sensei. The realization was somewhat of a shock, because she had never felt such a vehement and powerful emotion. But perhaps it couldn't be helped, Uraraka loved to help people, but here was someone who harmed people as a matter of course without any regret.
More than that, Uraraka was forced to spend several days (she thought) just helplessly watching as Sensei did his "experiments" on the other prisoners. She saw and heard a lot of things during that time where he seemed to not care about her.
But eventually, she was the one chosen, and remembering Hanako's question, she decided to ask something as well.
"Why am I here when I don't even have a quirk?"
"To serve as the control group." Was his answer.
She wouldn't have believed it possible, but that somehow made Uraraka hate him even more. However, before she could react to that, Sensei's hand had already touched her head, and she finally understood why none of the people had even tried to attack him: His touch made her lose control of her body completely.
And then suddenly she felt as if there were cockroaches burrowing through her flesh. She opened her mouth and screamed.
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It was amazing what a person could get used to. The weeks passed and Uraraka went through experiments several more times. Her body was warped beyond recognition more than once. She felt her organs burn and her bones melt. Uraraka went through horrifying things, and Sensei put her back together at the end so he could do more later... But she soon realized that it was even worse when she had to watch it happening to other people.
Uraraka doubled up on her efforts to talk with her fellow prisoners. She slowly started drawing out of their shells the ones who had been reluctant to talk before, but that only made it hurt all the more when they were the ones who were being tortured.
But even that wasn't yet the worst thing.
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It happened utterly without warning. One moment Sensei was experimenting on Hanako, and the next moment her screams changed from the pure pain they had been expressing before, and into a kind of gurgling sound. Then there was a disturbing fleshy noise followed by some dripping.
"Hmm, looks like that doesn't work." Sensei says.
He then gets up and leaves the cell. So Uraraka can look inside and-nonononono, she saw nothing. She tries with all her heart to convince herself of that. She wills herself to not think of it, to ignore it. To not think about Ha... no, she can't associate the thing left in the cell with Hanako. She refuses to. Uraraka tries her best to think about the woman, about all the things she said about herself...
Later on, one of the guards comes over to clean the cell. Later still, Uraraka cries harder than she ever did.
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One day, everything changed.
And the reason for it is something minor, while at the same time being the sum of everything that had happened until then. It could be said that the event was only a spark that lit up a very big powder keg.
The cause is the guard who had been tasked to give Uraraka her food. She was feeling particularly hungry, so she ran to get the food with more enthusiasm than was really warranted for what was essentially prison food. The guard looked at her doing that and then committed a big mistake.
He snickered.
It was a very small matter in comparison to what she had already been through, virtually nothing in the grand scheme of things, but for some reason that single snicker was too much for Uraraka.
She roared in anger and reached her arms through the iron bars. The guard wasn't very tall, and he was surprised by Uraraka's sudden actions, so she managed to grab onto his head.
Then, with a kind of anger that reflected her whole life, Uraraka pulled his head towards her and slammed it into the bars.
Dazed, the guard was unable to activate his quirk or even scream, and she took advantage of that to keep slamming his head against the bars. On the third time, he tried to struggle, using his legs to get away, but Uraraka simply would not accept his escape, and held onto him with a death grip.
Again and again Uraraka continued her actions, until she realized that he had stopped struggling. She saw blood on the iron bars, and for a moment she feared to have killed him, but she felt that he was still breathing by touching his nose.
At that moment, Uraraka remembered that the guards carried cell keys in their waists, so she kneeled down and reached out to grab the ring of keys.
She tried several keys until she found the right one, and then she left the cell. Only then did she realize that the nearby prisoners were looking at her with awe.
Uraraka worked quickly, going down the cells and opening each one of them to let the prisoners out. Luckily, it seemed like the place was only guarded by a single person, because she did not see another guard coming to attack her.
At one point, Uraraka opened a cell to see an old woman with rocky skin and no legs. The woman was obviously unable to move, so Uraraka struggled to think of some way to help.
It was then that she realized the fact that the freed prisoners were actually following her closely instead of trying to escape on their own. She had no time to think about it, so she just decided to make use of the help.
"Can someone carry her?" Uraraka asked the others.
After a moment of silence, a heavyset woman with elephantine features walked up and lifted the helpless woman to her arms, carrying her without much difficulty. Still, Uraraka looked at her and said:
"If you get tired, ask someone to help."
The woman nodded, and Uraraka went back to freeing the rest of the prisoners. Thankfully, situations like that didn't occur again, and soon she had completely emptied the prison.
Uraraka led the prisoners to the set of double doors that were the only possible exit from the prison. They came out at a corridor that was just as bare and featureless as the walls of their prison. There were still no windows anywhere, so the chance that they were in some kind of underground was high.
There were paths to the left and to the right. Uraraka turned to the others:
"Does anyone have an idea about where the exit could be?"
There was a moment of silence as they looked at each other, but then a little boy began to talk:
"My Quirk is Quake Sense. It lets me create maps of places via vibrations." He looked to be no more than eight or nine years old "From what I can tell, there should be an exit through the right side."
"Thanks. That's where we'll go, then." Uraraka said.
Uraraka again took the lead. They crossed the corridor and went through another door, reaching some kind of storage. There was nothing useful there, mostly books and files, so the group continued going forward. However, when they were about to cross another door, a voice spoke:
"Wait!"
It was one of the prisoners, a tall girl who looked to be around sixteen years old and had dog-like features.
"I can smell it." She said "There is someone on the other side of that door."
Everyone looked at Uraraka. She thought for just a moment:
"The guards don't have strong quirks, so they shouldn't be able to defeat a crowd." She said "If we get him fast, he won't have time to give the alert."
A few of the people in the crowd looked scared, but no one voiced any objections to the idea. Uraraka called for three people who could run to help her in subduing the guard, since there was a limited number who could go through the door all at once.
Then she opened the door and ran at the nearby guard, closely followed by the other three. He had just seen her when she got close enough to hit him on the neck and drop him to the ground. She proceeded to cover his mouth while the other three hit him into submission.
Looking around, Uraraka saw stairs heading upwards, with a door at the end. It seemed like the boy had been right.
The guard had been tied up and muzzled with hair threads from someone's quirk, so Uraraka kept going, leading the others up the stairs, and hoping beyond hope that their luck would hold.
But it wasn't to be.
She opened the door and went through, and the first thing she saw was a person, having just left a room a few feet away.
And she recognized that person. It was Crystal Claw, a well-known villain who specialized in stealing jewelry shops and similar stores.
More of the prisoners were coming out of the basement, and a few of them had already seen him. At the next moment, he saw them as well.
"RUN!" Uraraka shouted, snapping out of her temporary paralysis.
The prisoners ran in the opposite direction from the villain, but there were a lot of them for too little space, so Uraraka grabbed a chair and stood in front of the enemy (the place looked like some kind of meeting room).
Crystal Claw looked angry as he walked towards the escaping prisoners. He held his arm forwards and used his quirk to create crystals that covered it in the form of a door sized hand with sharp fingers.
"Stay back!" Uraraka yelled at him, barely managing to keep her terror under control.
The villain actually stopped for a moment, perhaps out of sheer surprise, but then he kept walking.
So Uraraka threw the chair at him.
With a swipe of his claw, he broke the chair in the air. Uraraka picked up another one to throw and the result was the same. She picked up a third chair, since at least she was able to delay the villain like that. But after he blocked that one, his patience seemed to come to an end.
Extending his claw further, he grabbed onto Uraraka as if she was a toy. The crystals making up his arm were sharp, and Uraraka cried out as she received a lot of cuts.
"You are detestable." The villain spoke, bringing Uraraka closer to him "Sensei will be annoyed when he hears about this."
The mention of that name truly enraged Uraraka. Disregarding her injuries, she ripped her arm from the restraint of the claw and jabbed the villain right in the eye.
"AAAAAAAAHHHHH! YOU BITCH!" He screamed, and then slammed Uraraka to the ground.
She tried to move, but immediately felt an awful pain coming from her whole body. Uraraka was helpless as Crystal Claw raised his arm to crush her. She was going to die...
"I am here!" A voice suddenly resounded through the area.
Uraraka guessed that her head must have been hit somehow, because her vision started to feel kinda hazy. She didn't really understand what happened next, but somehow she felt herself being carried in someone's arms. That was the last thing she knew before losing consciousness.
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When Uraraka next woke up, she was in a hospital bed. She looked around in confusion just in time to see her mother and father sitting in chairs next to her bed. And they had just noticed her waking up.
"Dear... Are you okay?" Her mother asked.
Uraraka gave her a big smile "I'm back." She said.
Both her father and her mother could not hold themselves back anymore, and moved to hug her. Uraraka accepted their contact eagerly after spending so long separated from them. It had been a while since the last time she had truly felt happy, so Uraraka made sure to smile a lot to compensate.
But eventually, she remembered an important matter.
"What happened?" She asked her parents "Did the others manage to escape?"
Her father got a weird expression for a moment, but then he answered:
"Yes. All Might was in the area since there were hints of villain activity, and the commotion attracted his attention."
"Speaking of that." Her mother said "He actually wanted to talk to you."
Uraraka was shocked by it, but the thing that happened next shocked her even more.
"I am here! To visit!"
It was All Might. All Might had just entered into her hospital room carrying a bouquet of flowers with a "Get better soon" card. Things were completely surreal.
However, that was when Uraraka noticed something weird.
"Wait, how come I'm fine?" She asked, because she appeared to have no injuries at all.
All Might was the one who answered "You have to thank Recovery Girl for that. She volunteered to heal your injuries when she heard what happened." Then he put a finger to his chin "One of the doctors told me you had woken up, and since I was in the area, I decided to come because I wanted to talk to you about a few things."
Uraraka's parents looked at All Might and then at each other. Understanding what he meant, they left the room, saying that they would wait outside.
"What happened?" Uraraka asked All Might.
"There are two things I need to talk about. The first is a reassurance coming straight from Recovery Girl: While your body has went through some changes, there is nothing you should be worried about."
"Changes?" Uraraka asked.
"Did you notice that you seem stronger than you used to be?"
"Well..." Uraraka thought about how she managed to subdue adult men "Perhaps...?"
"What was done to you during that time resulted in a few side-effects, but they are beneficial ones." All Might said "You are stronger and more resilient than you should be. Not to a superhuman level, but you are at a level that would usually need a long period of harsh training to achieve." His voice turned into a whisper "Perhaps it is fate..."
"What?" Uraraka didn't hear it well.
"Nothing. Just talking to myself." All Might said, and then his expression became solemn "The other thing I have to talk about starts with a question: Do you want to be a hero?"
Uraraka could barely believe what she was hearing. All Might, the number one hero, was actually asking her if she wanted to be a hero. Uraraka opened her mouth to say yes, but then a series of images and feelings went through her mind, and what ended up coming out was:
"I can't." Uraraka said, barely managing to hold back her tears.
"Why is that?" All Might asked, his voice calm and understanding.
"I wanted to be able to help people..." She started talking "But after everything that happened, I've gotten so angry..." She blinked, her eyes wet "Even now I can still feel it... So much anger in my heart... How can someone like that be a hero?" She asked in despair.
His gaze softened. All Might put a hand on her shoulder and she finally started crying. She cried for a solid minute. When she finally stopped, All Might had something to say:
"You know, anger isn't necessarily a bad thing." Uraraka looked at him "Sometimes, anger can be the thing the drives us to fight against evil." His eyes looked into the distance "My teacher was the same way."
Uraraka still did not seen convinced, so All Might kept talking "And I believe things are not as bad as you think." He winked at her "You should have heard the other rescues talking about you: 'The amazing heroine who freed then from their cells and them led them towards the exit, before standing in front of a villain to protect them.' You really made quite an impression on them." He smiled.
Hearing that, Uraraka couldn't help but smile as well.
"A few of them even asked me if you were a student of Yuuei's Hero Course." He continued.
She had to giggle at that "That would be pretty difficult, considering that I am quirkless."
All Might's expression became serious "But if there was a way for you to obtain a quirk, would you try to aim for the path of a professional hero?"
Uraraka almost dismissed it out of hand, but his serious expression caused her to think about it seriously. After a few seconds of that, she gave her answer.
"I always wanted to help people, and always liked rescue heroes like Thirteen." She said "If I could help people by becoming a professional hero, I would do it."
All Might nodded:
"In that case, I have an offer for you. I want you to inherit my quirk and become a hero. Do you accept?"
At that moment, Uraraka's mind was in chaos. She could barely understand what was going on, but this was a chance to help people, so her mouth answered immediately.
"Yes!"
And that was the beginning of a new legend.
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A.N:
Yes, this will be a full powerswap, but only within Class 1-A, and neither Mineta nor Kouda will be a part of the class, nor will their powers. Mineta for obvious reasons and Kouda because I have other plans for him.
Also, besides Uraraka and Momo's powers, I assigned powers to the rest of the class randomly. This led to some very interesting effects you will see soon.
And, well... I feel kinda bad for putting Uraraka through all of that.
I'll make it up to her, you'll see.
Hope you guys are interested to see what comes next!