Chapter 1:
Inko Midoriya was a kind woman. Her best friend Mitsuki would say she was a saint. Inko was married to one Hisashi Midoriya whom she had a beautiful daughter with named Izuka Midoriya.
On the outside the family looked perfect.
Hisashi, the hard working professional sidekick, doted on his wife and daughter dutifully.
Inko, a beautiful and kind woman, kept the house cheerful and alive.
Izuka, a hardworking child with big aspirations, brought just enough chaos as to keep their lives interesting.
It was during a regular doctor's visit that the family dynamic changed.
"She's quirkless." the doctor's flat tone stunned the Midoriya family into silence.
"What do you mean she's quirkless?" Hisashi asked in disbelief.
"As you can see here she has a toe joint in her pinky toe. This has been the sign for many years now that someone does not have a quirk. It is not 100 percent but the chances she has a quirk are very unlikely at this point." The doctor explained ignoring the angry and worried faces of the Midoriya family.
"So that's it?" Hisashi said his anger boiling over as fire started leaking from his mouth in anger. "A single joint in her toe and she's useless?"
"Honey, calm down. There's nothing we can do about it at this point." Inko replied as she floated the toy that her silent daughter dropped.
Hisashi turned his head towards his wife and gave her a withering glare. "Why are you not upset! Our daughter can never amount to anything without a quirk!"
Inko flinched at his glare and looked down at her distraught daughter, "She's still our daughter."
The family left the doctor's office in different states of distress. Poor little Izuka didn't speak the entire trip hope and silently went to her room as soon as they arrived. Hisashi was furious, billows of smoke rushed from his mouth at an alarming speed. Inko watched her husband and daughter in worry.
From there life changed quite a bit for the family. Hisashi became meaner. Izuka's every move was watched like a hawk. He would look at her with eyes filled with hatred and malice. Every mistake made by the girl was a reason to punish her. Every failing grade was a chance to ridicule her. She was nothing more than a scapegoat for all his anger and frustration.
Inko watched it all happen with overwhelming sadness. She started drinking.
Inko tried at first to help her daughter. She tried to defend her, to reassure her baby girl that she wasn't what her father made her out to be, but to fight against Hisashi was to fight a losing battle. Her gentle nature made it hard for her to stand up to him. So she didn't.
She stopped standing up and simply watched. She stood to the side and watched as her beautiful and fiery tempered daughter withered away. She watched as Hisashi grew from being emotionally abusive to physically abusive. She wept as her beautiful family was torn to shreds by a demon she had once loved.
The worst part was that Izuka saw it. She saw the way her mother cowered from her father. The way she held her tongue when Izuka would get beaten or yelled at. She saw her mother for the coward she was.
But she loved her.
She loved him.
They were her parents and she couldn't change that.
She couldn't change the fact that her her father was a demon and mother was a coward.
What did that make her?
What was Izuka Midoriya?
The house became unnaturally quiet.
Izuka was only ever seen outside or in her room. She would often come home with bruises or puffy red eyes, but she never spoke up about it. She knew her father thought she was a disappointment, he had told her as much. To tell him that she was being bullied would only prove him right. She could see that smug look on his face whenever she would cry at night and any thought of telling them was buried deep within herself.
Initially she fought back. She would go blow for blow with the kids who thought she was defenseless because she didn't have a quirk. That stopped after a call was sent to her home. She had broken a boy's nose and he had went crying to the teacher despite punching her in the face mere moments before. She had been the one to get in trouble despite having a black eye.
Nothing would prepare her for the fury on her father's face when she got home. He kicked her, punched her and even burned her skin. He had spared no part of her any mercy. He finished her punishment by holding her small body in the air by her collar and punching a wall. He had been mere inches away from her head.
The message had been clear as he walked away, "Don't fuck up again."
Izuka withdrew even further. She avoided people in her class and only ever talked to her childhood friend and the birds that seemed to flock to her.
Bakugo had become protective over Izuka once he noticed the changes in her demeanor. Before she would respond to each Deku with a fierce rebuttal, but now each time he called her Deku she would flinch.
He stopped after the fourth time.
He knew she was having a hard time being at home, but he was powerless to stop it. She refused to believe that anything was wrong with what was happening to her. He would bring it up and she'd deny it. She'd get angry and tell him to stay out of her business.
He stopped talking about it, but he could tell it was only getting worse. He could tell by the way they never hung out at her home, the way she tried to spend most of her time outside, the bruises and bandages that frequented her pale skin, the days of school missed only to show up covered in bruised, the way she only went home when it was too dark to stay outside anymore.
He hated Hisashi Midoriya.
In an attempt to make things easier for her he prevented anyone from bullying her. It worked at first, nobody bothered her when he was around, but she quickly had to learn how to make herself scarce when he wasn't around.
The only thing that didn't change with Izuka being quirkless was Izuka's love for heroics. It was her dream.
At first, it was because she wanted to be like her father, but after a while the image of her father saving people was replaced with All Might. She saw his smile and the tightness in her chest that strangled her heart every waking moment loosened if just a little bit. His smile made her feel safe. Like there was nothing to worry about. It was heavenly light that lit up the darkness of her world.
She wanted to be wrapped in the light of his smile.
After being told she didn't have a quirk, her father made her take Judo classes.
His words had been harsh, "Maybe learning martial arts will keep you from being entirely useless."
She wanted to cry when she heard those words, but she hid those tears behind a mask of determination. She went to Judo every other day. The dojo had a strict no quirk policy meaning she was on even ground with everyone else.
She quickly learned that fighting was addictive. All the tightly held frustration and anger that she had spent years holding onto would be funneled through her into her fights. Each time she flung someone onto the hard mats of her dojo it was an almost euphoric feeling of power. Each opponent became her father or one of the many bullies that tormented her.
Her violence in matches was seen as competitive spirit by almost everyone and she would be praised for her strength. She was even offered chances to go to matches against other dojos, but she refused. She had no desire to be their trophy dog.
By the time she started middle school, she was a fourth degree black belt. She was always in the upper end of her classes knowing her father would be angry if she wasn't excelling. She had let her grades slip once and even now she remembers that pain.
Inko Midoriya was a horrible mother.
She wanted him to stay.
Even though he was horrible and abusive towards their daughter. Even though he was constantly humiliating her. She wanted him to stay. She was afraid of what would happen if he left them.
She put financial security over the health and safety of her daughter.
The two Midoriyas struggled against the demon that inhabited their home. Inko struggled to prevent it from leaving and Izuka struggled to rise above it, to go against it. It was truly hell for them, but they always held onto the slim hope that his gentle nature would return, that he would walk into their home one day and give Inko a kiss before tell Izuka he was proud of her, but it never happened. It only got worse.
It was two weeks into Izuka's first year of middle school when she got her quirk.
Izuka was in her room studying for a test when she heard a loud crash. She immediately ran out her room towards the sound. She ran into the kitchen to see her father standing over her mother. She was cradling her face in her hand, and her father was staring at his hands in shock and another undistinguishable emotion.
Izuka looked at her mother's face. It was starting to swell and turn red and she could almost feel the throbbing pain as though it were her own pain. She had been at the end of those hands far too many times not to know that pain.
She felt something in her shift. An emotion started to form in her chest. It boiled over into her veins from her heart and made her body burn. Rage. Pure unfiltered rage flooded her mind and body like a tsunami. It threatened to overtake her and she felt it. She felt her eyes sting and before she knew it she was staring into her father's shocked eyes as the screams of a thousand souls filled her mind.
Her skin felt as though it were boiling as she lunged towards her father.
If she had looked at her hands she would have seen ebony claws that glistened in the low light of their tiny kitchen. She would have seen the shadows that flickered in the low lighting converge on her body. She would have seen the monster. She would have finally got her answer.
Who was Izuka Midoriya?
A monster.
The last thing she saw before she was consumed by the darkness was her father holding desperately onto his bleeding side staring into her eyes with terror filled green eyes.
"Izuka!"