It starts – as do all stories concerning Midoriya Izuku – with a visit to the doctor.

In a world where your future potential is determined by your quirk, the result of genetics and chance, it was inevitable that this was going to be a defining moment in his life. A moment which decided what society would deem him worthy of.

It turned out that society would never deem him worth much at all, and as Izuku travelled home that day, clutched in the arms of his sobbing mother as she apologised for the cruelty of life that denied him the same advantage as those around him, he cried for the future he'd been told he could never achieve.

Quirkless.

The word might as well have been a curse. He doesn't know why not having a quirk suddenly makes him worth so much less than anyone else, doesn't understand why Kacchan will be at least polite to him in private but will create explosions hot enough to sear if his jeering friends are nearby, but he does understand that they're not doing anything wrong. Otherwise the teachers who watch with indifferent eyes would do something.

They don't, though, so obviously Kacchan doesn't mean it when he calls Izuku Deku. It doesn't matter when the other kids write nasty things on his desk and destroy his things if Izuku leaves them unattended, Izuku is just sensitive. It doesn't mean anything when the other kids give Izuku bruises in the locker room, they're just trying to shut up Izuku's mumbling, it's only natural they'd stop him when he gets too annoying. It doesn't mean anything that Izuku is the last to arrive and the first to leave from school, hair wild and breathing heavy from running to avoid grasping, hurtful hands.

And it doesn't make Izuku angry, not at all, when the teachers always watch him twice as closely as anyone else in tests to make sure he isn't cheating, because how else could a quirkless boy get such good scores? Or when another student destroys his homework and before he can get halfway through his stuttering explanation is told, no need to try and pin the blame for this on other students, Midoriya, if you didn't feel like doing the work you should've just said so, and then he has to sit through twice the number of detentions any of his classmates would be given for the same infraction.

Izuku is ten when he learns what the word discrimination means, and it's then he starts longing for an even playing field – the chance to start off at the same starting line as everyone else.

It's a struggle to keep his grades up, to not let the hostility stop him from learning, but there was never a world where Izuku didn't dig his heels in at a challenge. He stops taking his textbooks to school after the third time his mother has to replace them, instead suffering reprimands for forgetting them and meekly sitting through detentions, combing through them when he gets home to make sure that he understands the material, that they can't take his grades away from him.

(His grades – his mind – it's the one advantage he has over most of his class, and he won't let them take that away from him. No matter how much it infuriates Kacchan that there is one area, at least, in which Izuku stands with him on equal ground.)

It doesn't stop him from feeling lonely, starved of human contact. The only person who ever had a kind word for him was his mother, and even that was shadowed under pity and guilt. He couldn't even just wander round the neighborhood and exchange greetings with strangers who had no idea what a quirkless, useless freak he was, because Kacchan would see him, Kacchan always saw him, and he was always infuriated by Izuku's very existence.

It was by chance, then, that Izuku struck upon the idea of virtual reality games. Quirks didn't matter there, everyone started with similar stats, and if you wanted to be better you had to work for it.

(Izuku had never had a problem with working to be better.)

He's good at it, he learns. Without the natural advantage of quirks in VR, without the limits of his small, weak body, his analytical skills gained from years of watching heroes out of awe (and his classmates out of fear) are given the chance to shine, to put him forward rather than keep him level with everyone else. Before long he finds he favours fantasy-based games, ones with swords and magic, to the point where he starts getting fencing lessons IRL.

He's more than excited when he's offered the chance to beta-test SAO, so pleased that his cheeks ache from how much he's grinning, and as fun as it was, he's infinitely more excited when it's time for SAO to open to everyone, for the opportunity to explore a whole new world with fifty thousand other people, to see how far he can go.

(He can go far, he learns, very far; but the journey is less kind than he'd expected, and he doesn't make it with all fifty thousand.

Not all fifty thousand make it.)

Midoriya Izuku's journey always starts in a doctor's office where he's told that there are some things he will never be able to do; but in whatever world, Midoriya Izuku manages to achieve more than anyone ever expected he was capable of.

This world was no exception.