Just through the rainbow from the world we know, lies Fairytopia; where the grass is evergreen and the flowers ever-sweet. In this magically perfect utopia where fairies live a merry and tranquil life in their fragrant homes made out of peonies and bellflowers, it is quite the misfortune to be born without wings.
Everyone knows that fairies have wings. It's sort of a given. A minimum entry qualification, if you will. Fairy children begin to grow theirs around their fourth birthday; some sooner, but none later. None, that is, until one Midoriya Izuku.
There is always an exception, even in magical things. Something, someone, will always be different—for better and worse. In this case, mostly the latter.
Children are generally encouraged to be themselves. This is the same in any society, whether the capitalist humankind or the magical utopian fairies. Diversity is lauded and encouraged, but if you are a little too different—and again, this is the same in any society that exists in the multiverse—then you are kind of shit out of luck.
This is what Izuku, the poster boy of misfortune, learned at the tender age of … um … somewhich. Probably four. Maybe five. Does it matter? His childhood is a traumatic and woeful blur that he'd rather not remember.
That being said, he isn't quite sure what the turning point was. Of course, the actual turning point was the moment he was born—having won the ill-fated gene lottery and all—but what he means is the turning point where he … hm… to put it nicely, where he really realized that he was sort of super clinically fucked.
Not sure what the turning point for that was. But it probably went like this:
"Look at this guy! He has no wings. Stupid Wingless Deku!" said Kacchan.
"I'm growing into it," Stupid Wingless Deku sobbed.
Or, it could very well have gone like this:
"But I want to go play with you guys!" said Wingless Deku.
"You have no wings, moron! What are you gonna do, walk?!" said Winged-just-like-everybody-else Kacchan.
Maybe it was something more congested and precise, like:
"If you want to fly so bad," Kacchan said, "why don't you try jumping off the tree?"
Or perhaps something less graphic than that. Perhaps. But you get the gist.
Izuku isn't even sure if there was a turning point. Maybe he had always known. Maybe there was no before my life turned to shit and no after my life turned to shit. Maybe there was no moment of realization, no moment of epiphany—never was there a blissful, innocent phase in his childhood where he was allowed the delusion of thinking that he was just like everybody else. Maybe he just has always had a shitty life, and known it all along.
But if there ever was a turning point, Izuku is pretty sure Kacchan had something to do with it.
A real nice dude, that guy. A real delight to be around. What would Izuku do without him, really? Enjoying what little joys he has in life, probably.
It should go without saying, but just to be perfectly clear, life as a Wingless fairy is a pretty wretched life to live. Horrible, really. Hellish. Maybe even unbearable. Majorly sucks. Not recommended. Literally nothing good comes out of it, trust him, and Izuku isn't even done living it yet.
But Izuku makes do. Oh, he makes do with a lot of things.
"What the hell is that?" Kacchan says one day.
Izuku, who has resigned with the fact that he will always be tormented by Kacchan's existence every single day of his wretched, horrible, hellish life, replies, "it's a.." he takes a pause. "It's an Up-up-thing."
"What?"
"It's a thing," Izuku explains, "to help me go up."
Kacchan stares at him blankly.
Kacchan likes to make fun of Izuku—it's his life calling, Izuku suspects—but he likes to make fun of Izuku better when he understands what it is exactly that he's making fun of him for. Kacchan might be a bully, but he uses his brain (unfortunately) rather proficiently. This is why Kacchan rarely ever goes for your mom insults and instead goes for you are worthless and nothing you do will ever amount to anything, Deku insults. And also due to the fact that if Kacchan ever used your mom insults, his own mom will be beating the holy hell out of him.
Izuku sighs. To get this bullying procession over with—the quicker the better, Izuku has things to do, and Kacchan won't let him go unless he gets his bullying fix for the day—Izuku decides to demonstrate his Up-up-thing.
The Up-up-thing, as he has christened it less than two minutes ago, is made out of the finest and mightiest stalks Izuku could find in the Magic Meadow. It took Izuku weeks to put the thing together even with his mother's help: it is at least two and a half adult fairies tall, and is as wide as Izuku's waist. The stalks are intricately woven into two long vertical poles, with much shorter horizontal poles wedged consecutively between them.
It's a little heavy, but Izuku manages. He leans the Up-up-thing against a peony, and then begins to climb by putting his foot and hand one by one above the shorter poles. By doing this continually, Izuku manages to get himself up onto the peony.
(A/N: In another world, Izuku's Up-up-thing is what one might call a 'ladder', and thus we will refer to his Up-up-thing interchangeably with 'ladder' henceforth, because 'Up-up-thing' is a pretty stupid name. Although please keep in mind that the word 'ladder' does not quite exist in Izuku's vocabulary because it comes from the Old English word, 'hlæder' meaning 'steps', which derives from the Old German 'leitara' and the Middle Dutch 'ledere', and none of these countries have ever graced the fairy land Fairytopia due to the differences in their designated universes. Though if they had, they probably would have attempted to colonize it.)
Izuku is quite happy with this invention. Sure, it's a little unwieldy, it weighs nearly as much as izuku does, and it does have its short-comings, but now Izuku is able to reach things for the first time in his fifteen years of life.
As fairies are often living their lives in the air rather than on the ground, most things are not designed for downstairs as much as they are upstairs. Izuku isn't the tallest boy for his age, and his little Wingless situation does not help things. Public facilities are often unfriendly to Izuku, you see; they were made for the public as much as they were not made for Izuku in particular. Though 'unfriendly' is a mild word to pick when the word 'heartless' is smiling seductively at you with a sultry wink.
Every morning, for example, Izuku has to go to school an entire hour earlier than his classmates because he needs half an hour to climb the tree where his class is located wherefore his classmates can just fly up there in less than half a minute. Sounds bad? Well, don't get him started on excusing himself to the bathroom mid-lesson. If Izuku knows what a plastic bottle is, he would be bringing one on his person at all times.
To summarize, a great many things in life are out of Izuku's literal and metaphorical reach. But now, with his Up-up-thing, things are finally looking up, don't they?
Feeling somewhat good about himself for the first time in a length of time Izuku doesn't count in order not to feel depressed, Izuku sits up on the peony and looks down at Kacchan in the look that says take that, jerk!
It does not last very long as Kacchan then flies up the air so that he is hovering up over the peony, somewhere above Izuku's eye level. Kacchan has never been on Izuku's eye level the moment he grew wings. And then, without preamble, Kacchan knocks the ladder down.
Just a kick of a foot is all it takes. Izuku's Up-up-thing wobbles and meets gravity without a fight, as you usually do, if you don't have wings.
Izuku watches, stupidly shocked, as the ladder falls to the ground below. It makes a loud thump-ing sound, and then silence. He looks back up to Kacchan.
"What are ya gonna do now?" Kacchan says, with a look that says take that, stupid! And then he flies away leaving Izuku alone up on the peony with no way to get down that doesn't involve a third degree concussion.
Izuku honestly doesn't know what he expected.
If it isn't clear enough, Bakugou Katsuki is the bane of Izuku's life. He is often the reason why Izuku is permanently on the verge of a mental breakdown. Kacchan is simply a major asshole—a majorly unwashed and severely irritated one at that. He is the devil's incarnate, to be precise. Izuku isn't sure if devils really do exist, but he is pretty certain that hell does, because even Kacchan has got to come from somewhere.
But this isn't enough to deter Izuku from coming up with other things. No, sir, not even Kacchan's daily bullying sessions would hold Izuku back from hyperfocusing on imaginary—and then not very imaginary—things. You could even say they inspire Izuku to come up with them. Basically it goes like this:
Kacchan bullies Izuku → Izuku becomes depressed → Izuku makes things to distract himself from depression → Kacchan bullies Izuku and also Izuku's things → Izuku becomes depressed → so on and so forth.
It's an ouroboros of bullying and inventing and bullying again and also a good description of 90% of Izuku's daily life.
Now, about these other things that Izuku comes up with. Inventing is the right word; Izuku is quite an inventor, though his inventions aren't—in the other fairies' words—very useful to anyone else other than Izuku. They also have not been used by anyone other than Izuku unless you count his mother into the fringe, in the same way that you could say Izuku doesn't have any friends unless you count his mother into the fringe.
Fairies are magical things. And in a world where magic exists, science isn't a very substantial concept. This is untrue, because one is just the name for the other, but no fairies in Fairytopia would know this. Not even Izuku, who was not born with magic as he was not born with wings, and therefore has been using science as its substitute. A bit of a paradox, that, so you may give it another moment of thought.
Izuku tinkers with things that, in another world, would have been called 'physics' and 'theories' and 'science experiments'. In this world, they call it 'useless' and 'strange' and 'lost his mind, that one'.
One of Izuku's main focuses is transportation. Fairies transport by flying, and thus distances are often measured by flying. A fifteen-minute distance means that it will take fifteen minutes to get from point A to point B, if you have wings. No one sees anything wrong with this because fairies have wings, unless your name is Midoriya Izuku.
So yes, transportation. Izuku has attempted a lot of things. In a world where barely anybody touches the ground, Izuku has to independently discover the three physics laws of motion in his early youth. This unappreciated discovery has led him to invent what Izuku calls Round-thingy, a cylindrical shaped thing that glides on the ground (A/N: it's a wheel. He invented wheels).
These Round-thingies—wheels—have been implemented to his transport-adjacent inventions in all sorts of fashion. Izuku has tried to stick them underneath his shoes. He calls this Shoe-walk-fast-thing (A/N: basically heelys) which does make walking faster, with the small issue where it also makes him trip on to his face faster. This issue is fixed when Kacchan and his friends use these heelies to play baseball. As the ball.
After several more experiments, he makes a sturdier device out of stalks braided into a plank of some sort, and sticks two wheels underneath it. The theory is that he would stand on the plank and it would glide. Glide-thing, he calls it (A/N: skateboard). This one has the same issue as before, but it works a bit marginally better, until Kacchan finds out and throws it down the river to 'see how it works'.
There is this one that is still in the works. A much bigger and ambitious project than the other two. This one is made out of harder material than stalks, which is wood, which Izuku acquires by scraping barks out of trees for days on end. It has two Round-thingies on the front and back, and there is a seat and a pair of handled bar to steer, along with a pair of Feet-thingy (A/N: pedal) arranged in a certain mechanism with chains that would, when utilized, propel the entire contraption into moving. The same issue as before persists, in which he does not know how to stop its movement in a way that does not involve tripping on his face, but he has some ideas involving the chains. He calls it Stop-thingy (A/N: brake).
This invention took Izuku months, and Izuku hasn't dared to use it outside yet in fear of Kacchan shitting on it. Plus, it's still rough at the edges. But it has shown promising signs so far, and is definitely Izuku's proudest invention to date. He shall call it Transport-thing-that-finally-works (A/N: bicycle).
As you might have guessed—and you would have guessed correctly—Izuku is as good at naming things as he is good at flying.
They laugh at him, at Wingless Deku and his stupidly-named contraptions and his long, sprawling notes of theories and sketches of imaginary useless things. If they aren't laughing, then they are bullying him. If they aren't bullying him, then they go by their day as if he doesn't exist. Sometimes Izuku isn't sure which is worse.
To some, having the world treat you like pigeon dung on your worst days and an inconvenient existence on your best might push them to become, say, understandably murderous. Genocidal, even, in a somewhat understandable kind of way.
Izuku isn't murderous or genocidal. Sometimes he thinks he is murderous, towards Bakugou Katsuki and maybe a couple other boys, but he only thinks it. He won't actually do anything like such. Ever.
He doesn't know that he won't, though. On a couple occasions of his very lowest points—and there really are many low points, trust him—Izuku has sworn to himself that he would one day destroy Kacchan's life, avenge his own misery ten-fold, and a couple other miscellaneous villainous things. But he won't. Izuku might be a pariah, but he is also, at heart, a very nice boy—even if he doesn't think he is, which is a sign that he indeed really very is.
Him having a good heart does not help his case at all, of course. On the contrary, it makes it worse. Maybe if he had been a little bit more vengeful, or crueler, people would go from 'treating him like shit' to 'leaving him alone'. However, unfortunately for him, Izuku harbours this lethal mental condition called Acceptance.
You see, Izuku accepts the fact that he is what he is. Not in a life-inspiring, I-Love-Myself way, but in a Whelp-Whaddaya-Do way. This means he accepts his life as it is, in all its wretched bits—and most of its bits are wretched—and even worse, he tries to make the best out of his horrible, miserable, infairy (A/N: inhumane) situation.
This does not mean that Izuku is a naive and cheerful boy. This just means that Izuku is a naive and severely depressed boy with a fatalistic, sisyphean sort of attitude.
And so Midoriya Izuku—or more infamously known as Wingless Deku, often with various demeaning adjectives tacked at the front—goes on with his Wingless life. It is a wretched life, but it is not so bad, because he is convinced that while this is indeed as bad as it gets, it is also as good as it gets.
(Sometimes persisting in misery, though surely a noble thing to do, is exactly the thing that holds you back.)
This is how he will live the rest of his days, Izuku thinks. This is all there ever is, and it will be like this forever and ever. He accepts that.
It's not true, of course. Things change, even in a magically perfect utopia. Mostly because magically perfect utopias do not exist.
It's a beautiful day in Fairytopia, though there rarely is ever a day where Fairytopia is not beautiful. Come rain or shine, magic persists, and it persists in keeping Fairytopia beautiful. The sun is shining, the water rippling. The wind is blowing, the grass swaying. The birds are chirping, flowers blooming, and—
"The King is dying," the Royal Messenger announces.
—the King is dying. What makes the difference? Fairytopia will always be beautiful.
"Fuck yes," says one Bakugou Katsuki of Magic Meadow.
On a beautiful day like this—which is to say everyday—the fairy kids of the Magic Meadow would play one of their magical games. As baseball is now forbidden after a certain pair of Shoe-walk-fast-thing (A/N: heelys) breaks the window of the principal's office, their choice of activity for the day is Fairytopia's beloved national game.
The game goes like this:
Two teams compete for points by scoring through the three goal posts at the end of the field. There are four balls involved in this game. We shall call them Pquaffle—which players use to score a goal, two Pbludgers—which players use to beat the shit out of other players, and Pgolden Psnitch—which players use to end the game if it's too boring. When caught, this Psnitch is worth disproportionately a lot of points because this game does not make a lick of sense and also is not very fun, if you ask Izuku.
The name of this refreshing and highly original game is Pquidditch™. He has never liked it much, mostly because the rules require you to play it in the air.
(A/N: all the Ps are silent.)
The Pquidditch™ game is going along as per usual, which is to say that Kacchan is winning. Izuku really wishes he could say that Kacchan wins only because the other kids are letting him win due to his being the biggest bully in Magic Meadow. Unfortunately, Kacchan is as blessed in his bullying endeavors as he is blessed in his everything else.
He proceeds to score his thirteenth goal. The keeper who has the unfortunate luck to be playing on Kacchan's opposite side has long since stopped making the emasculating feeble attempt of guarding his goal post.
Kacchan himself seems to have grown bored of winning, so he proceeds to catch the Pgolden Psnitch and end the game. "Aren't you excited, Deku? The King is finally lookin' for a successor."
For days on end, this is what all the fairy kids in all seven regions of Fairytopia are talking about.
The King has reigned for a long, long time, this is known, and it is also known that the King has been ill for a long, long time. In another world, Fairytopia is what you would call a monarchy—a constitutional monarchy, to be exact—in which the monarch will rule until death and/or abdication. At the end of the monarch's reign, the next one will be crowned. The king is dead long live the king and such and such.
Unlike a typical monarchy, however, Fairytopia does not have a royal family; not for eight generations and counting. This is the exciting part: the next ruler is chosen, not born—one lucky child out of the many fairy children of Fairytopia. And everyone, they say, everyone has equal chances to be chosen! Yes, yes, everyone, because presumably, every fairy child has wings, and also magic, like how proper fairies do, and only proper fairies have the right to rule Fairytopia.
One can see how it's a little difficult for Izuku to be excited about the whole affair. It's especially difficult at this moment in particular, because Izuku is hanging upside down on the goal post by his toes. "Sure, Kacchan," he says. "Would you untie me now?"
With this purpose—choosing the next in line, finding the Chosen One, searching for the to-be sanctified all powerful ruler et cetera—the Seven Heroes, sacred guardians of the land shall choose one child from the seven provinces of Fairytopia to be pitted in a Semi-Finals of One of You Little Fellas Get To Be Monarchy competition.
Aizawa Shouta is one of these guardians, and coincidentally, is also the least popular out of the Seven Heroes.
This is not to say that he sucks as a Hero. On the contrary, he is arguably the most venerated and experienced out of all of them. His obscurity is owed to the fact that subterfuge is what he's good at, and also the fact that he is what you would call an anti-social. Though the more precise word would be 'misanthrope', except it's not humans that he doesn't like, it's fairies.
Not in a malicious way, mind you—he is a guardian, after all, and he has saved Fairytopia from its evils a great deal of times. He just doesn't like to be bothered by others, you see, and his standard of being 'bothered' includes nearly every single form of social interaction possible in society as we know it.
Which is why he despises this whole affair.
In another world, Aizawa Shouta would be an excellent teacher. Not in this one, though.
"And this is all the children in the Meadow?" he says, with a tone that says he is severely and debilitatingly unimpressed. So unimpressed, in fact, that it seems like the air around him appears to be withering in a streak of insecurity meltdown.
"Yes, sir," the principal of the only school in the Meadow confirms. Magic Meadow is not Fairytopia's largest region. "They are very good children, sir. Very smart, sir. Promising too, sir."
Aizawa Shouta highly doubts that.
They might be good at their arithmetic, or in their simple transformation spells, or in translating basic conversation from fauna to flora. But it's clear to the world and to Aizawa Shouta's eyes that these children are soft.
It has been a long, peaceful reign by the eighth King. Very long and peaceful indeed. So very long and peaceful that it seems somewhere along the line, these children have it in their heads that they live in some sort of magically perfect utopia. It has made them foolish, arrogant, and spoiled.
And Aizawa does not think of this unkindly, mind you. Children are meant to be foolish, arrogant, and spoiled. He knows this, as well as he knows that children are not meant to rule lands.
Aizawa Shouta has lived a long time, as fairies do. He might have only lived only for half as long as the King, but that is long enough for him to see that none of these children has what it takes to be one. No child ever does. However, he has to choose nevertheless. That is his duty as one of the Seven Heroes.
It doesn't mean he has to make it easy, though.
"Whoever finds the Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring," Aizawa says, "will be chosen as a candidate to be Monarch. You have three days."
The following three days is a time that Izuku will remember fondly forever.
First of all, all the children in Magic Meadow, including Kacchan and and co, are now preoccupied in this hunt for the Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring. Too preoccupied to be bothering him, which gives Izuku precious, precious three days of blissful peace and quiet. There are gods in Fairytopia, and none of them are abhramaic so this metaphor will certainly be lost on Izuku—but these three days are basically his own personal christmas.
Second of all, what with Izuku being what he is, it's a given that this event is not made for him, just like every other thing in Fairytopia. So he gets three days off doing whatever he wants, 'cause he sure as hell isn't going to look for the Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring, because, third of all: he knows full well that the Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring does not exist.
Not Izuku personally. Everybody knows this. The Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring has been known to have the properties that when consumed would grant any fairies' wildest wish, bestow upon them the purity of a thousand unicorns, grace them with the strength of the wings of the mightiest Garuda, beautify them with the incandescence of the northern auroras … and so on and so forth. The list of properties goes on for at least three more scrolls of writing.
In other words, it's a myth.
They might live in a magical world, but that doesn't mean fairies would believe in anything. Or perhaps, it is exactly because they live in a magical world that fairies know intimately that no magic would ever be that complacent.
This is a common human misconception. Magic is not really like an omnipotent solution. Magic is more like a… sellotape, or an electric socket, or a water-heater, or a wi-fi router. Don't get it twisted; magic is powerful stuff, certainly, and very useful too at that—fairies would be absolutely helpless without magic, and in the right and/or wrong hands magic could be magnificently and exponentially lethal. But expecting magic to instantly make you an all-powerful being is the equivalent of a kid wanting to get bit by a radioactive spider so he can become a wall-climbing superhero.
Basically: it's pigeon dung. Nay—Garuda dung, even.
Oh, and how Izuku enjoys that. How Izuku absolutely, completely and thoroughly enjoys watching his peers scratch their heads and roam the Spooky Woods day and night to look for the elusive flower. He enjoys how helpless they look, searching for something that clearly doesn't exist, the absolute idiots. Izuku has never seen Kacchan look so stupid before, and thus this will be a memory that he will treasure forever.
Atop of a peony he climbed with his ladder, he watches as several fairy children fly sullenly empty-handed out of the woods with mosquito bites all over them. It's not quite revenge, because Izuku technically doesn't have a hand in the whole thing, but it's good enough to momentarily cure him of depression. Who's the loser now? Izuku thinks, nibbling on a piece of roasted seed. Suckers.
We have reiterated that Midoriya Izuku is a good kid. This is true. But good kids can be a little spiteful at times, as a treat, and this one in particular is deserving of a lot of treats. This one in particular deserves to, for once, know how it feels like to laugh at the misfortune of others. And oh, it feels good. We all know how good it feels, or else bullying would never be a thing.
This was a good three days for Midoriya Izuku, and not for anybody else.
"Well?" Aizawa Shouta says to the crowd of empty-handed, scowling kids gathering in the vast meadow before him. "Has anybody brought me the Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring?"
A hush falls over the meadow, consoled only by the whistling wind and the distant hustle-bustle of the morning market. Aforementioned kids shuffle and flutter their wings. They must be twelve to seventeen years old, the lot of them; fairy children and teens in a wild array of colors and wings. Candidates for the Next in Line—them? Aizawa sincerely doubts they can even wash their own underpants without tripping over themselves.
His eyes rove from one kid to the next, each of them idling in the air—except for one, he notices. Down there, beneath the crowd, is a boy—a fairy boy, he must be, but without wings. Standing instead of flying, on the lush green grass.
And wouldn't it be great if at this moment, Aizawa Shouta sees something in Midoriya Izuku?
Perhaps in a turn of poignant, poetic justice, he will sense that Midoriya Izuku is in fact destined for great things. That his Wingless condition is a sign from the gods and the skies that he has what it takes to be King. That his differenceness—and his endurance thus far of his differenceness, of his poor, hellish fate—means that he is in fact the Chosen One, and therefore meant to be King. To be Monarch.
Wouldn't it be great?
It would. Unfortunately, life in Fairytopia isn't great, it's perfect. And greatness, to Fairytopians, will never quite measure up to perfection.
Aizawa Shouta's gaze passes Midoriya Izuku like a beautiful woman walking by a slew of catcalling men—uncaring with a hint of uninhibited distaste. Though this distaste is not really aimed at Izuku in particular and more at large, because Aizawa Shouta is a sufferer of what one would call Acute Resting Bitch Face.
"None of you, then?" The Hero says, and at this very second, he can feel the piling hatred of a bunch of Fairy teenagers aimed right at him. Almost enough hatred to be murderous, which makes him, for the first time since he saw these kids, feel somewhat impressed. "Right. Then I shall inform the King that Magic Meadow is lacking of a suitable candidate—"
The thing about teenagers is that, when in a pack, they have this curious ability to grumble a lot of words that sound angry and whiny at the same time with the frequency akin to the buzzing of a hormonal beehive. These words are loud enough to grate your ears, but somehow still not intelligible enough to be comprehensible, and also very super extremely annoying in general.
Aizawa attempts to refrain from rolling his eyes unprofessionally and then decides it isn't worth the effort.
"If any of you are not happy with this arrangement," he says above the irritating grumbling, "you may speak up."
Another thing about teenagers is that while they can speak well enough in a pack, they miraculously lose their verbose ability to communicate when prompted individually. It's a very curious thing indeed.
Aizawa rolls his eyes the second time. To the suddenly dead silent field, he says flatly, "I take it all of you are happy, then—"
But that is not always the case.
There is always an outlier in every batch of kids. There is always that one kid who has a penchant for speaking up. This archetype would usually be the leader, the kingpin, the honcho, the boss of the bunch. Oftentime this character is either the likable and charming type, or the loud and explosive type.
"This is a load of pigeon shit!"
In this case, it seems to be the latter.
Literally. Aizawa watches, dispassionately, as fire sparks fly along the wings of the blond child. Those born with elemental magic are quite rare; these fairies are well known to be difficult to handle as they are temperamental and often needlessly dramatic. At the moment, this child is ticking every box in the stereotype list.
"And you are?"
The stronger the fairy, the mightier their wings, and Aizawa Shouta's ebony wings are mighty enough to envelop his surroundings in a solemn, garish shadow. Amidst the green of the meadow, the Hero is akin to a blot of solid ink. Even Bakugou Katsuki can instinctively recognize the old magic that resides inside the Hero fairy—magic that is much, much older than Katsuki's own fifteen years. Bakugou Katsuki's wings halt unsurely without its owner's consent, all guts and swagger evaporating up the air.
"Ba—" for the first time in his life, Bakugou Katsuki stutters. "Bakugou Katsuki. Sir," and uses honorifics. Aizawa Shouta is a man who, by the sight of him alone, demands you to address him with some sort of honorific tacked at the front.
"Right. Do you wish to be Monarch, Bakugou?"
This question stops him short. "Yes?" the child eventually says, in a tone that is akin to duh? "Of course?"
"Of course," Aizawa echoes. And then he turns to look at the rest of the kids. "Who here wants to be Monarch, raise your hand."
There is a beat. And then all hands are raised.
Would you look at that? Every single one of them wants to be King, apparently. Every single one of them wants to rule Fairytopia, these kids, whose mothers still have to remind them to wash their teeth and make their beds in the morning. Aizawa has never been a fan of comedy, but it appears that he lives in one. "Right. And who here wishes to enlighten me on why you should be Monarch?"
All hands are lowered.
Really, teenagers. "You. Bakugou, was it."
"Wh—I mean, yes, sir—"
"You said this was a load of pigeon shit," Aizawa says. "Why do you think this was a load of pigeon shit?"
Today seems to be the day where Katsuki gets to experience many of his first times, because his cheeks flush furiously. But Katsuki has not been the biggest bully in all of Magic Meadow in the past fifteen years for nothing. He valiantly replies, "because the—the Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring doesn't exist.."
"Thus?"
"Thus it's an impossible task to—"
Aizawa claps his hands. "Bravo. Correct. It's impossible. And would anyone care to remind me of the motto of our beloved Fairytopia?"
In a somewhat confused and unsure chorus of mid-puberty voices, the meadow in front of Aizawa mutters, "Plus Ultra—"
"Plus Ultra," Aizawa agrees. "Go Beyond. Beyond, children. To be Monarch, you must do the impossible every single day to rule this land. If you have to find the Holy-Accursed Azure Phoenixian Rose-Lily of the Great Mighty Queen of Everlasting Spring, you must do it. If you have to dive into a load of pigeon shit—nay, Garuda shit even, you must do it. Magic will not accept anything less, ever, forever. That is what it means to be Monarch."
Silence. Aizawa pauses, letting it all sink in. These children are soft, but perhaps if he tries hard enough, he could cram some hard-earned life lessons into their skulls on the magnanimity of monarchy and honor, on the cruel, heavy hands of magical destiny and its horrors. He hopes that it comes through to them, however little, that being a Monarch is the same as a sentence for life and death and beyond, and that none of them will ever, ever deserve such a curse.
He can only hope. Because maybe, maybe the child who understands all this, is indeed the one who has a little of what it takes to be one.
"Now," he finally speaks, having decided that the lesson has marinated enough. "After knowing all this, who still wants to be Monarch?"
There is a beat. And then all hands are raised.
Aizawa Shouta doesn't know what he expected. He can feel an oncoming headache. His headache will get progressively worse throughout the day and the next several weeks and possibly years because at this moment, a Royal Messenger is huffing and puffing from the other end of the meadow to Aizawa's own end.
Calling her a Royal Messenger is a stretch, because this particular Messenger is only an understudy, which means that she is the same age as the rest of the kids in the meadow. Uraraka Ochako, fifteen years old and at loss of breath and is also not a very good understudy, tries her best to cross the five-minute distance only in one.
Aizawa and also the rest of the fairy children watch as she attempts this honorable feat somewhat unsuccessfully. They stare in silence as she tries to catch her breath. She looks a little green, some of them note.
"S—sir, I, I'm here to report—sir!"
"Report, then," Aizawa says.
"Yes, sir," she says, and then she throws up.
It takes a few minutes, a cup of water, two cups of jasmine tea and a few anti-nausea spells before the understudy manages to find her voice again. "It's bad, sir, it's really very bad—"
"Out with it, Uraraka."
"It's one of the guardians, sir," she says. "The Hero—the Hero Tomoko of the Evergreen Mountains—she has lost her magic, sir!"
Silence.
For the first time in his entire life, Aizawa Shouta says, "pardon?"
The news spread like wildfire. As Fairytopia consists entirely of meadows and trees, one can only imagine how quickly the news spread.
And Magic Meadow, as we have reiterated, is not Fairytopia's largest region. By noon, every fairies' mother and their great-grandmother know about this tragic and harrowing incident.
A fairy, losing their magic—and one of the sacred Seven Heroes, at that! The guardian of Evergreen Mountains! Gasp, haw, hum, pearls clutched. Simply unheard of. Simply horrifying.
"I simply can't believe it!"
"Oh, the poor thing."
"Will it be permanent, you think?"
"What shall the Palace do about it?"
It's an illness, they said. There is no cure yet, they said. This mysterious disease will encroach your wings to malfunction and suck your magic dry, they said. It will possibly kill you, they said, and will also possibly leave you impotent.
"That's a whole lot of pigeon dung, that!"
"No, no, it really is true, It will really leave you impotent!"
"That's just tall tales, the Palace has said nothing of sort—"
"You lissen now, come rain or shine, no damn illnesses can stop me from having—"
"Oh, don't tell me that's what's got Takeshi from Poppy Avenue? Did you know, I heard from his wife that he coudln't get it—"
The illness is airborne, they said. It will especially affect those who are of old age, they said. Fairies are encouraged to stay at home, they said, in order to curb this viral disaster, and will they please cooperate with the Palace for the good of all Fairytopia. One is also encouraged, they said, to cut up onions and put them on the corners of your room to thwart this devil disease.
"No, no, they don't say onions, they say petals of moon-shine corn cobs, my brother sells some, I can put you up if you want some for a real low price—"
"That's a scam, it's s'pposed to be raw seaweed dried for seven nights, and you're s'pposed to put 'em all over your body and braid 'em to your wings—"
"Not leaving my home?! That's a load of dung, man—"
"A violation of my fairy rights, that! Yanno, I bet this 'disease' don't even exist, I bet some crook just cooked this up to—"
News, by definition, is made of facts, which are concrete and provable things. You would be surprised, however, by how quickly one's standards of what constitutes facts can lower. This is the same in any society. Whether the capitalist humans, or the not-so magically perfect utopias.
And while fairies are not in possession of Whatsapp family group chats, they are in possession of mouths, and unfortunately for everyone, their mouths are as good at their jobs as any human mouth worth their salt.
Yes, the news spread quickly. And the disease is just right behind on its heels, doing its part to catch up. However, unlike some news, this disease is indeed a concrete and provable thing.
"Is that true? The disease has reached as far as Fairy Town?"
"Could you believe, my cousin told me in her letters that the guardian of the Cherry Hills has fallen victim to it—"
"Horrible!"
"It won't take long until it reaches Magic Meadow—"
"Could you imagine, a life without magic? I would rather—"
"Hush!"
The gossiping dies down as the women of the market elbow each other, peering conscientiously at the stall next door. The stall next door, which sells handmade trinkets and offers appliances fixing for a bargain—just five silvers apiece!—which belongs to the one and only Midoriya Inko.
Midoriya Inko who, though born with wings and therefore magic herself, has a wingless and magicless son of her own. Midoriya Inko who has listened to jeers and mockeries and other polite synonyms for 'shit-talking' in the past fifteen years of her beloved, wingless, magicless, perfect son.
Midoriya Inko doesn't care.
No, that's not quite true. She does care. She never quite got used to it, the mean things they say about her son. The sadness dissipates over time, morphing into anger, and the anger never dissipates, oh no. The anger stays, the anger grows, the anger calcifies itself down to her bones and the roots of her wings. And she holds her head high. She has held her head high for fifteen years, and she will hold it for fifteen, hundreds, thousands, infinites more.
If Midoriya Izuku suffers from Acceptance, Midoriya Inko doesn't suffer from Perseverance; Perseverance suffers her.
It is a busy day in the market. Fairytopia, it seems, is ongoing its first rough patch after several strong utopian centuries. It's difficult to tell whether hard times bring out the best or the worst in fairies, but judging from the misinformations spreading about, it certainly brings out the hyperbole in them. It also brings out the Avid Shopper.
That noon, everything in the market is sold out. Perishable foods, non-perishable foods (A/N: food charmed with preservative spells), household items, and especially toilet paper—just gone, everything; a thousand year record, some believe. It is as if the fairies are preparing for a drought. Or a severely diarrhetic apocalypse.
(A/N: fairies have fairly sophisticated systems in their bathrooms and disposals because they generally favor cleanliness. Everything is suitably organic and thus they have used toilet paper for centuries. Most of them also prefer to utilize pressure water spray charms—think bidet shower, but magical.
We have established that magic isn't really an omnipotent solution. Charming waste away does not work in the long run and fairies have learned this the hard way. It is also not advisable to try and charm your nether regions without a professional present. This has been learned in an even harder way.)
Inko can't help but wonder what one could do with enough soaps to clean a whole gutter in an apocalypse, diarrhea-adjacent or otherwise. And really, no matter how many preservative spells you use, one can't possibly keep two dozen jugs of milk fresh in one's house unless one has two dozen children to feed.
Hard times seem to bring out the common sense in fairies, but it certainly doesn't stop there. It brings it out, squashes it to smithereens, trades it with stupidity, and sends it back with a bow.
She closes shop in the evening, as she does every single day. The other stall keepers smile tightly at her—with that mix of pity and discomfort that she knows very well—and the rest look the other way. That, too, she knows very well.
She holds her head high. She smiles back. She goes home, and dearly hopes that they have enough toilet paper for the next month.
The Midoriya household lives in a humble bellflower. It is an old bellflower, and not a particularly pretty one, but it will do. It has done so for decades.
Their periwinkle house is located right at the edge of the Meadow, near the Spooky Woods, which is where Izuku spent most of his younger days. He would play all the time with his childhood friends Tanjirou, Hinata, and Gon. They were the names of his favorite trees.
As she flies towards their modest abode, Inko thinks about a lot of things. She thinks about the dying King. She thinks about this mysterious disease. She thinks about what these could mean for the future of Fairytopia—and most of all, for the future of her son.
Her son, who would be waiting for her with his thin-lipped smile, brewing a cup of lavender tea. Her son with his calloused, mechanical hands, and soft-spoken words. Fairytopia persists, it has always persisted, because magic wills it to. But what if magic stops persisting? What could that mean?
What could that mean for her wingless, magicless son?
With these troubling thoughts clouding her mind, she flutters distractedly to enter the petals of her house. So distracted, in fact, that she almost doesn't notice that her house has become more communal than its usual two occupants.
Almost. She looks at the crowd sitting around their cramped—more cramped than usual, at the moment—kitchen. Three pairs of eyes look back at her.
"Well," she says, not quite sure on how to go about this. This being mostly on how to interpret the scene in front of her.
"Um," Izuku begins to say, but his voice is drowned by the brunette girl next to him, who is currently bawling her eyes dry into Inko's dishrag.
"I'm worthle-e-ess," she laments. Her eyes are so swollen they look shut. "I'm worthless—"
"I can explain," Izuku says with a tone that suggests he really cannot. "Um, mom, these are my—my—um, friends.."
"Your friends.." Inko begins to say, but her voice is drowned by the little boy sitting on the other side of Izuku, who is blowing his nose impressively loud for a fairy his size. This one isn't lamenting so much as he is hiccuping sorrowfully.
Well, then.
She never thought this day would come. But her boy is fifteen, now, isn't he, and he has gone and gotten himself some friends.
Izuku's friends, in their house. Izuku's friends. In their house!
And these friends might consist of two fairy children whose faces Inko has never seen in her life dripping with snot and tears for some unfathomable reason—but friends nevertheless! Friends!
Looking over the three children—two of which are weeping—Inko thinks, tearfully, that she had never been happier in her life.
To some, seeing your son bringing two crying strangers into your home might be an alarming event. To Inko, this event is celebratory.
"Well, children," Inko says, her voice cracking at the edges. "Who is up for some honey and lavender tea?"