SYMBOL OF PEACE
Musutafu, two weeks after the Shie Hassaikai attack…
"I know that look on your face, kid. You're a hero fanboy, aren't you?"
This question was posed to one Izuku Midoriya, age 13, by a middle-aged man with odd star-shaped growths on either side of his head. The two of them were part of a large crowd that had gathered at a train station in Tatooin Ward, Musutafu, watching several local heroes apprehend a giant villain that had stolen someone's purse.
"Oh! In a manner of speaking, I…guess I am" the green-haired teen responded, looking up from his notebook to address the man.
"Lemme guess - you want to be a hero yourself, don't ya?" the man continued, chuckling a little.
"How did you guess? The notebook, the starry eyes or the muttering?" Midoriya quipped in response, before his eyes were drawn back to the scene by the arrival of a new costumed crusader - the Arboreal Hero, Kamui Woods.
"Attention, evildoer! You have violated Article One, Section Three, Sub-Section One of the Japanese Quirk Code, and thus have been categorized as a villain!" the hero addressed the man, evading his enraged swings with ease. "Illegal Quirk use, disturbing the peace, disrupting rush hour, theft and assault…you truly are the epitome of evil!"
"That might be an exaggeration…" Midoriya said in exasperation, thinking of his father's various misdeeds over a century and a half of villainy while jotting down notes. "Heck, what I did to Overhaul two weeks ago was legally far worse than this."
Woods began to extend his arm and activate his Quirk, much to the hero fanboy's excitement. "Here it comes! Kamui Woods's restraining super move, the Lacquered Chain Binding Prison!"
"CANYON CANNON!"
Before the move could connect, a gigantic blonde woman wearing a skintight bodysuit appeared out of nowhere and drop-kicked the villain, throwing him into a nearby building. "Good morning, gentlemen! My name's Mount Lady; pleased to meet you!" she said, restraining the villain while posing to show off her greatest…asset for the cameras.
"Alright, I've gotta work, but it was good talkin' to ya, kid" the mutant man said, turning to walk off. "Good luck on your hero journey!"
"Thank you!" Midoriya shouted back, checking his watch in the process. The teen's eyes widened in surprise. "Oh crap, I'm gonna be late for school!" With that, the green-haired villain-in-disguise dashed off towards the hellhole known as Aldera Middle School, trying to figure out the best possible way to get there.
Over a crosswalk, past some trashcans, and down an alley he careened, avoiding a few startled cats before finding a secluded spot to stop. "No cameras here to see me...guess I'm breaking the law today" Midoriya said, before touching the ground and activating Overhaul.
As the pavement enveloped him and sucked him down into the ground, the teenager thought about how he'd adapted to his new Quirk - or more accurately, Quirks - over the past two weeks, and the heavy training he'd put in to master many of them. Overhaul was one he'd hardly scratched the surface of - right now he could only use it to access underground maintenance tunnels, but he hypothesized that eventually he'd be able to near-instantly travel the distance by reshaping the earth around him to create a personalized subway system.
The maintenance tunnels shaved a solid five minutes off his commute, and another use of Overhaul had him popping out of the ground in a camera-free area behind the school's tool shed. Less than a minute later, Midoriya was settling into his desk in Aldera's class 3-C, briefly looking around at how his peers pointedly ignored him. The teenager resisted the urge to sigh when he saw that his desk had been graffitied again with various messages of harassment, before touching the underside and surreptitiously activating Overhaul to repair the varnish and erase the messages.
"Good morning, class!" called their homeroom teacher as he entered the room and took his place behind the lectern.
"Rise! Bow! Sit!" shouted the class president from the room's front, Midoriya obliging as he took part in what he considered a vapid display of obedience to the powers-that-be.
"Today's lesson was going to be career counseling for all you newly-minted seniors, since this is your final year" the teacher began, taking a package of career forms out of his briefcase. A small smile flashed across the man's face, as he threw them in the air with a flourish. "But we all know you want to be heroes!"
The other students fired off their own Quirks in the air, cheering enthusiastically. Midoriya grimaced slightly and held one fist up with a half-hearted "Yay", but internally the display of all these fascinating Quirks was weighing heavily on him. "What are you waiting for?" the voice in the back of his head said, as his hands itched and his brain felt hungry. "Take them! You have the power to do so; why do you not use it?"
"Shut up!" the greenette responded internally, tamping the urge to take his classmates' Quirks down internally.
"Don't lump me with all these losers, Sensei!" came a brash interjection from the back of the classroom. Midoriya rolled his eyes slightly as Katsuki Bakugo, certified arrogant bastard and Aldera Middle School hotshot, stood up to boast at his classmates. "Most of them would be lucky to even be D-list sidekicks out in the country somewhere!"
The other students began to clamor in protest and repudiate Bakugo's claim, but the noise they made was nothing compared to the relief Midoriya felt as they stopped using their Quirks. This peace didn't last, however, as the teacher cut through the noise and addressed the explosion user. "You're aiming for UA High's Heroics track, right Bakugo?" The protests quickly turned into mutters of shock and awe.
"UA High?"
"The national school?"
"Even as good as he is, can he make it?"
"I aced the mock exams!" Bakugo crowed triumphantly. "If anyone can leave this craptastic mess of a middle school behind and rise to the top, it's me, because I'm just that damn good!"
"Speaking of UA, Midoriya is also applying to their Hero Course" the teacher added. The room instantly went so silent that you could hear a pin drop, while the greenette in question stiffened slightly.
"And here we go" he thought to himself, rolling his eyes and counting down from three. A moment later, the laughter hit.
"Midoriya?! Seriously?"
"What is he gonna do, stare the villains into submission?"
"That doesn't seem wise; he'll get beaten up by a purse-snatcher!"
A burning palm landed on the greenette's desk, exploding all the varnish off. Midoriya stared up with an unimpressed gaze at a clearly incensed Bakugo, the blond seething to the point of almost steaming. "I just fixed that desk" he sighed.
"Deku, you insignificant fuck!" Bakugo roared. "You've got some fucking audacity trying to stand in the same ring as me, you know that?"
"This isn't some kind of meaningless contest, Kacchan" Midoriya replied in an unimpressed manner. The greenette had hated his school life for a very long time and much of its issues had stemmed from Bakugo's strange and obsessive hatred of him. "Maybe once upon a time I would have cowered, but compared to the likes of Overhaul, Kacchan and these children are nothing…and I ended Overhaul and took everything that belonged to him, right down to his very individuality."
Before the explosive blond could reply, Midoriya casually stood up and looked around the room, completely ignoring Bakugo. "It's true. A lack of Quirk puts me at a natural disadvantage in the same way that a man with nothing with his bare hands would be at a disadvantage cutting wood against a man with an axe or a chainsaw. But Kacchan is right about a lot of you - many of you would be low-tier sidekicks at best. For this trick, I'll need a volunteer"
Loud protests filled the room as many of the other teenagers decried the fact that their school's "Quirkless Wonder" was calling them weak. Midoriya's eyes scanned the crowd and eventually settled on one figure in particular, a hint of vindictive glee creeping onto the greenette's face at the possibility of humiliating one of his original bullies. "Thanks for volunteering, Yubiri!" he said cheerfully, the students instantly shutting up as he walked over to the student in question.
"W-What do you want, D-Deku?" Yubiri stammered as Midoriya leaned over his desk. Back at Midoriya's own desk, Bakugo was completely motionless, still processing the fact that his target had outright ignored him in favor of the rest of the class.
"Your Quirk, Long Fingers, lets you extend your fingers up to a meter in length" the greenette said. "Tell me, does their strength and durability also scale upwards with size?"
"Uhhhhhh…yes?" the other teen said, extending them to full length, only to be surprised when Midoriya grabbed a fistful of them and squeezed. "Ouch! Ow! Ow! Stop, please! Midoriya!"
"Looks like they don't scale upwards in strength that much" Midoriya responded. "Now imagine that there's been a villain attack and a piece of rubble is about to hit a small child. If you're a good person, you extend those fingers and catch it to save her…except now your fingers are shattered and it's going to take months for you to be at full strength again. A hero who risks debilitating injury every time they use their Quirk in the field won't last long in that field."
"Midoriya, sit down-!" the homeroom teacher began, only to be silenced when the greenette teenager shot him a glare that made him feel like he was being stared down by an angry demon - a little trick the teen had learned from his parents and tested on Rappa and Twice.
"I don't remember asking you anything, Sensei!" Midoriya responded, as the teacher gulped and sat down. Glaring around the room at other students, he addressed them. "Yubiri is just the tip of the iceberg here. Kaku!"
A student near the front gulped. "Your Quirk just makes your neck long but doesn't increase its durability. You're an outright liability, not just disadvantaged." The boy's neck shrunk back to its normal length at Midoriya's harsh words, but now the villain leader in disguise was on a roll.
"Teikoku!" The horned girl in the front row sat petrified as Midoriya addressed her. "Do your horns have any special abilities, or are they just a mutation?" A few moments of silence passed, before Midoriya continued. "That's what I thought. Not useful, but not actively detrimental."
"You three!" he shouted pointing at a girl near the wall, another girl behind his seat and a boy in the front row. "Can any of you do more with your hair than just extend it?" All three shook their heads and cowered. "Stick to modeling; you'd actually be good at that."
"Kintsugi!" Midoriya shouted, pointing at a teen seated directly behind Bakugo. "Yours is actually useful, but why the hell aren't you wearing a shirt?" The teen in question squeaked when he realized his shirt was gone, hastily retrieving a spare gakuran from his bag.
"Hanami!" Midoriya said to a boy against the back wall, who jumped when his name was called. "Your Quirk is just having a long nose; that looks more uncomfortable than useful, especially with the pollen in the air." The teen nodded rapidly before blowing his oversized nose, now a deep shade of red, into a tissue from his jacket.
Looking back around the classroom, Midoriya spread his arms out and addressed the class as a whole. "Out of all thirty-one people in this classroom, only a handful of you have Quirks that would be better for heroism than outright not having one at all" he said, before pointing to the students in question.
"Suika." A brunette girl near the door with a water control Quirk blinked in surprise.
"Hououmaru." The redheaded girl to the right of his desk squeaked, her fire Quirk briefly flaring up at his acknowledgement.
"Kintsugi." The startled teen had just managed to put his spare jacket on and immediately snapped to attention, sighing in relief when he realized Midoriya wasn't saying something negative this time.
"Ishidate." A boy at the front with gravel for hair pointed a stony finger at himself with a quizzical expression, relief melting into his features when Midoriya nodded in confirmation.
"Mokuno." The teen gave a hesitant thumbs-up, having just reconstituted his right arm from smoke.
"Fuwata." The dark-haired girl next to Bakugo's desk blinked a few times before slumping back into her chair.
"And of course…Bakugo." By this point, the blond was silently shuddering in fury and surprise, still shook that Midoriya had ignored him until now. The greenette walked right past him and plopped back into his seat, grabbing the hand that had extended from the front of the classroom.
"Even your Quirk isn't much to write home about, Sensei" he said, watching the man's face contort in discomfort as he plucked at one of the two elastic tendons connecting his hand to his arm like a banjo string. "These tendons don't look too durable; I think I'd rather just have normal hands. Now, any questions?"
"Deku, you bastard!" Bakugo finally snapped out of his reverie with an enraged roar. "How dare you-!"
"No Quirk use in the classroom!" their teacher shouted, clearly unnerved as all hell by Midoriya's little speech. The greenette grinned as Bakugo stomped off and released their teacher's hand, the elastic rebound bowling the man over before he stood up and began to talk about physics.
"We're not done, Deku" Bakugo growled, looming over Midoriya's desk while the greenette scribbled new notes in his notebook on the heroes he'd seen that morning. When he didn't respond after several long moments, Bakugo grabbed the notebook and pondered it for a moment. "Hero Analysis for the Future, No. 13?" he thought, before clapping it between his hands and blowing it.
Midoriya stopped what he was doing and looked up with an exasperated expression on his face as Bakugo threw the notebook out the open window. "Well that was rather rude" he remarked, placing his pencils back in his backpack and slinging it over his shoulder.
"Pay attention, god dammit!" the blond roared, slapping his hands down on top of Midoriya's desk and releasing an explosion as his compatriots with the elongated fingers and oversized nose backed up in terror.
"And why the hell should I do that?!" Midoriya countered, whirling around and slamming one fist down on the desk precariously close to Bakugo's fingers. "Are you mad about that little speech from earlier? If you are, tell me one thing I said about our classmates that wasn't dead accurate."
The explosive teen's eye twitched. "You've got some fucking nerve saying anything about any of them with no Quirk of your own, Deku! That makes you worse than useless!" he roared.
"I'd rather have no Quirk and know my limits than be an overconfident moron who thinks they're hero material despite a Quirk that makes them an outright hazard!" Midoriya countered. "Magaane, for instance! His Quirk lets him pull his eyeballs out of his head; that's quite literally worse than not having one!"
"Shut the hell up!" At this point, Bakugo was running out of ways to reply. "What matters is that they have Quirks - something to distinguish their individuality in the eyes of society - and you don't! I wouldn't wish that fate on the worst villains to ever walk the earth!"
"So you agree society is wrong then? Excellent!" Midoriya laughed. "I'm glad that even someone as arrogant as you can see what a disaster the system is!"
"Hey, Bakugo, maybe we should leave-!" Yubiri began, only for both of the arguing 14 year olds to round on him with fury on their faces.
"Shut the hell up, Fingers!"
"I don't remember asking you a goddamned thing, Yubiri!"
Turning back to the green-haired teen, Bakugo growled at his longtime victim. "You know, Deku, there is still one option available to you. Jump off a rooftop and pray for a good Quirk in your next life!" he shouted, and the room fell silent.
Midoriya just stared at him for a few moments before bursting into laughter. This only confused the blond more, and he made that fact known. "What the hell's so funny, Deku?!"
"You know…I've known for the longest time that you fit a lot of different descriptors. Arrogant, loudmouthed, abrasive and distasteful, to name a few" the greenette began. "But I didn't know that stupid also applied."
Bakugo roared in fury and swung downwards with an explosive palm, but Midoriya dodged to the side and slung his backpack over his shoulder in the process, placing one foot on the windowsill. "But you want to know something really funny, Bakugo?" he said, the blond freezing at the lack of a nickname coming from his childhood victim. Midoriya's glare intensified before he delivered the last word of their argument. "Even my twitching corpse splattered on the pavement would be more heroic than you could ever dream to be."
And then, before anyone could stop him, the green-haired teenager leapt out the window.
Bakugo froze in shock while Yubiri and Hanami leapt forward to look out the window, gaping in surprise. "He's…gone?" the former asked in confusion, looking across the courtyard below.
"I don't see him anywhere. No body, no backpack…I don't even see anyone with green hair down there" Hanami said, looking around the window's viewshed. "What even happened?"
A few blocks away, Midoriya walked down a side street. "Despite what I said earlier, Quirks are actually really cool" he murmured, running a hand through his hair - currently pitch black, while his eyes and backpack were both a deep cerulean blue. Color Change was an incredibly useful Quirk for disguises, especially since he could use it to temporarily erase his freckles. Looking down at the ruined notebook in his hand, he sighed and activated Overhaul to repair it as he passed under a bridge.
A gurgling noise behind him caught the young man's attention, and he turned his head just in time to watch an enormous creature made of slime and filth climb out of a nearby manhole. "Sweet kami, I can't believe someone like him is in town" the sludge warbled. "I've gotta find a suitable escape route, and fast."
At this point, the creature noticed the black-haired, blue-eyed child staring at him at the exit of the bridge. "Perfect - a medium-sized skin suit" he said. "Hate to do this to you, kid, but them's the breaks." With that, the sludge leapt at the teenager, only to be surprised when a look of irritation manifested on his face.
"Suige Dorome, cease this at once!"
"Ack!" the sludge shouted, careening to a stop. "How the hell do you know my name, kid?!" The teenager smirked, before touching a hand to his face. As the villain stared in surprise, the kid's curly black hair turned a dark green, while his blue eyes turned a lighter shade of green and freckles dotted his face. "B-Boss?!"
"Hello, Mr. Sludge" Midoriya said, staring down his former subordinate. "Care to tell me what you're doing attacking me on a side street in Musutafu?"
"Please forgive me!" Dorome shouted, doing his best to bow as a creature made of sewer sludge. "I'm just trying to escape from him!"
"'Him'?" Midoriya questioned. "What hero are you talking about-?"
The manhole cover at the other end of the underpass exploded into the air as Mr. Sludge's eyes widened in fright. "He's here!" the man squawked.
A titanic being of muscles and blond hair stepped out of the manhole, decked out in casual clothes and holding a bag of groceries in one hand. "Have no fear, citizens, hope has arrived!" boomed All Might, the strongest man alive. "Because I am here."
"A-All Might?" Midoriya stammered in shock, overcome by the surprise of seeing his idol in the flesh.
"Unhand that young man, foul villain!" the Symbol of Peace boomed, pulling his left arm back. Midoriya's eyes widened and he prepared to call on Overhaul to get himself out of the way. "Texas…SMASH!"
The blast of compressed air unleashed from All Might's fist ripped through the confined space, aimed like a cannon at Midoriya and Dorome. "Look out!" the sludge man warbled, wrapping himself around Midoriya as if he was attacking the teen but actually cushioning the young man from the attack.
Midoriya returned to consciousness a few minutes later with the feeling of someone slapping his face repeatedly. "Young man, please wake up" All Might said, before the teenager sat up and looked around.
"All Might? What happened to the villain?" the greenette asked, before his brain caught up with his mouth. "Wait, All Might? I need you to sign my notebook- wait, you already did?!" he shouted, seeing the signature that the Symbol of Peace had placed on his entry in the notebook.
"Your notes are mighty impressive, Young Midoriya!" All Might said, holding up two soda bottles containing a familiar gray-green sludge. "However, I need to get this fiend to the police station. So please keep supporting me from the sidelines!"
"Wait, I need to ask you something!" Midoriya shouted, before deciding to do something unfathomably reckless.
All Might soared through the air high above Musutafu, before realizing he was experiencing an unusual amount of drag. Looking down, he realized why this was the case.
"Young Midoriya, what are you doing?!" the Symbol of Peace shouted over the wind. "Get down at once!"
"If I let go, I'll die!" Midoriya responded, gesturing with one hand to the city far below.
"Oh. Fair enough" All Might responded slightly sheepishly, before a small trickle of blood came from one corner of his mouth. "Shit, I'm running out of time."
While All Might was looking away, Midoriya noticed the pocket containing the bulk of Dorome's sludge. "It's my fault he got caught" he thought, reaching up to the pocket and activating Overhaul. "If All Might's pants pocket had a hole in it, who would suspect a thing?"
"What you did was really quite reckless and irresponsible, Young Midoriya" All Might said, after the two of them had landed atop an office building. "Knock on the door a few times and someone should let you in; I have to go."
"Wait! I need an answer from you!" Midoriya said, panting on one knee after his wild ride on the Number One Hero's leg. "Can someone without a Quirk be a hero?"
All Might froze as a familiar pain wracked his body. "Shit, not yet!"
"Becoming a hero has been all I've dreamed of since I knew what a hero was" Midoriya continued. "I need to hear it from you - can I be a hero!"
Internally, the young man was desperate for different reasons. "Come on, take the bait, pity me and maybe I can get you to give me One For All!"
An explosion of steam covered the rooftop, slowly clearing to reveal the emaciated form of Toshinori Yagi. While Midoriya knew All Might had been injured as badly as his father from their clash all those years ago, even he didn't know it was going to be this bad and couldn't help but cry out in surprise.
"Ehhhhhhhhhh?!"
TO BE CONTINUED…
Author's notes:
Surprise update after a week, friends! Now that we've hit canon, I have a lot more to work with, so I feel like my writing muse is back and I may be able to deliver weekly chapters. So without further ado, the recap:
Midoriya's experience with Overhaul has left him deeply changed. He's not some weird giggling psychopath who outwits every hero with no Quirk like I've seen in certain villain Deku fics (not naming names here), but he is certifiably done with his classmates' nonsense and decided his teacher's breach of his privacy was a good time to make that known.
I've always thought it was rich of many of Midoriya's classmates to make fun of him for not having a Quirk given their own, and I wrote that into this chapter. Like the kid who can pull his eyeballs out or the one with the long neck - what the hell are they supposed to do? Their Quirks seem like active detriments to heroic work.
Mr. Sludge is back, and he brought the Symbol of Peace with him. Now Midoriya has a difficult task ahead of him - persuading All Might to choose him as a successor for his late uncle Yoichi Shigaraki's Quirk, One For All
If y'all could favorite and share this fic around, that would be incredible. As ever, thanks for reading!
~DVD181
Next update: October 30th