I do not own My Hero Academia or JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

As Izuku walked down the halls of Aldera Junior High, he couldn't help but feel self conscious about his left ear, or at least, what was left of it. Hopefully, no one would notice. After all, your ears aren't something that people look at very often. Besides, it's not like people came up and talked to him very often anyway.

Even still, he felt nervous. He could only imagine the rumors that would form about what happened to his left ear. He already had a bad reputation at school, and this certainly wouldn't help. And with how most of his schoolmates avoided him, it would probably be awhile until he could set the record straight. Of course, setting the record straight would involve telling people that he got into a fight with a villain. While that might be better than some other ideas people might get about how he lost most of his ear, it still didn't make him look that great.

Izuku was really starting to wish he had stayed home today. His mom even encouraged him to do so, seeing as he was just let out of the hospital yesterday. Ultimately, he decided to go anyway, though he was certainly regretting that decision now.

'It's better to just get it over with anyway.' Izuku thought to himself, 'The rumors would only be worse if I didn't go to school for several days, and then show up missing most of my ear. Besides, keeping up my attendance will keep me on the teachers' good side at least.'

Thankfully, no one seemed to notice at first. His schoolmates tended to ignore him anyway, so really, it was to be expected. Come lunch time, he found a quiet, out of the way place to sit, and stuck his earphones in to listen to music while he ate. Wearing any sort of headphones was basically the equivalent of wearing as sign asking people not to interact with you. Though, again, it's not like people interacted with him very often anyway. But, he wanted to lower the chances of it happening further, and listening to various Blue Oyster Cult songs helped to put him in a better mood.

Sadly, it wasn't too long after lunch that he noticed a few people staring at him, before looking away quickly and whispering to their friends. Izuku had to resist the reflexive urge to touch his ear, less he draw more attention to it. Maybe he should've tried to cover it up with his hair? While he and his mom had decided a long time ago that his curly green locks just did whatever they wanted, neither of them had ever actually tried particularly hard to tame it. At most they had attempted to comb it for a few minutes before giving up. With enough stubborn persistence, Izuku was willing to bet he could probably get his hair to cover up his ear.

At long last, the final bell rang and the school day was over. Izuku hastily packed away his things, with the intent of getting out of the building as quickly as possible. However, just as he finished, he heard a name that stood out amongst the rest of the noise in the classroom.

"Yo, Bakugou! We're going to the mall, you wanna come?" Izuku recognised the voice as Takumi, a boy with a quirk that let him extend his fingers, who used to be friends with him and Kacchan when they were younger. Looking up from his backpack, Izuku saw his spikey blonde childhood friend halfway out the door to the room. He paused and turned around upon be called out to, an annoyed scowl on his face.

Almost every time Kacchan came to Izuku's attention, he couldn't help but think about how far apart they had become and feel guilty. Once upon a time they were inseparable, even during the period of time when Izuku had been thought to be quirkless they were never far apart, simply because Izuku had refused to not be around his blonde friend.

Now though... How long had it been since they had so much as talked to each other? Months? Over a year?

It saddened him that their friendship was over, and there was nothing he could really do to fix it. Izuku doubted that Kacchan would ever stop hating him.

"Fuck off, asshat!" Kacchan barked at Takumi, before turning back around and stomping off. At the very least, Izuku wasn't the only one who Kacchan seemed to despise (even if he hated Izuku more than anyone else). But the fact that Kacchan didn't seem to have any friends only made Izuku feel even worse.

"Dude, why did you even ask him?" Another boy said to Takumi, "You knew he wasn't going to come. He'd never take time off of his precious training." The boy said the last part in a mocking voice, before scoffing, "As if he wasn't already a shoo-in for U.A."

"Can't hurt to ask." Takumi shrugged, "Besides, it's not like he can go his entire his entire life with a flaming stick up his ass."

"Wanna bet?" The other boy replied. Picking up their backpacks, the two students made their way to the exit of the classroom.

Once they were gone and he could no longer eavesdrop, Izuku slung his own backpack over his shoulder and quickly left the classroom. Moving as fast as he could without running the risk of getting yelled at by the faculty, he made his way out of the building. Right now, Izuku wanted nothing more than to put this day behind him. Shortly after he exited the school's front doors, he heard the buzzing of his quirk off in the distance, alerting him that something was going down not too far away. With a small smile, Izuku took off, eager to see the Pros at work and happy for a distraction.

-000-

Katsuki had to resist the urge to set small explosions in his hands to vent his anger as he walked back home. The last time he had done that out in public, he had gotten lectured by police officer about how 'unlicensed quirk usage was illegal' and how 'he was scaring people'. The memory of the encounter only served to piss him off even more, and the fact that he couldn't create those small firecrackers to calm down made him even more mad, resulting in a self feeding loop of anger that had him positively murderous by the time he got to his house.

And keep in mind, he was already angry when he left school. Few things pissed him off more than idiots, and apparently his entire school was filled with unobservant dumbasses who wouldn't notice a volcanic eruption until they were knee deep in lava.

Seriously, how do you miss the fact that someone was missing their fucking ear?! Katsuki had noticed it within a minute after seeing Deku, and he had been across the room from the damn nerd at the time. It took the rest of his schoolmates until after lunch to finally start noticing.

Then again, most people didn't pay nearly as much attention to Deku as Katsuki did. If they did, they wouldn't have so many utterly asinine ideas about him. When it came to how people saw Deku, there were two groups among the students. The ones who had been around longer and thought he was a violent trouble maker who was probably part of a gang, and the newer ones who thought he seemed sweet and didn't understand why he had such a bad reputation, but still realised that interacting with him would only ruin their own social status. And there were also the teachers, who thought Deku was the greatest thing since sliced fucking bread.

All of them were wrong. None of them saw Deku for what he really was, no one except Katsuki.

Deku was a manipulative, scheming, lying bastard. If it weren't for the fact that he already had a bad rep there, he probably would've had the entire school eating out of the palm of his hand by now. The persona he put on of a weak, yet kind push-over was admittedly convincing, enough so to fool anyone who didn't know better. But Katsuki knew just how strong the damn nerd was. He knew how Deku tried to hide his strength.

Slamming the front door of his house open, Katsuki had his normal shouting match with his hag of a mother as he made his way upstairs to his room. As soon as he he slammed his door closed, which resulted in more yelling from his mother, he ripped his gakuran off and changed into workout clothes. He grabbed his exercise bag, and, after making sure it had everything in it, he left his room again. Stomping back down stairs, he grabbed his water bottle and some granolla bars from the kitchen, before heading back to the front door. As he opened it, he shouted back into the house.

"I'M HEADING OUT TO EXERCISE!" He yelled.

"Stay safe!" His father replied from the living room, only raising his voice enough to be heard.

"YOU BETTER NOT STAY OUT TOO LATE AGAIN!" His mother shouted at full volume over her husband from somewhere inside the house, "IF YOU COME BACK AFTER DARK AGAIN, YOU'RE FUCKING GROUNDED!"

"SHUT UP, YOU OLD HAG! I'LL STAY OUT AS LATE AS I WANT!" Katsuki shot back, slamming the front door closed to avoid her response. Unfortunately, she made herself heard even from inside the house.

"STOP SLAMMING THE GODDAMN DOOR! YOU'RE GOING TO BREAK IT, YOU BRAT!"

Rather than respond, Katsuki turned around and stomped off. After a minute, he broke into a run as his training started for the day. He continued running, never once slowing his pace, though occasionally stopping for a brief break, as he made his way towards a forest near town. After some time, he eventually reached the woods. He went straight into them, heading for a part of the forest that he visited regularly. It was fairly deep into the woods, enough so that it was unlikely anyone would hear his explosions.

Because today, Katsuki was going to be training with his quirk. When he had first gotten his explosions, he had thought it was the most amazing quirk in the world, and everyone around him seemed to agree. Now however, he knew all too well that it wasn't good enough. He needed to be stronger, so he needed his quirk to be stronger too.

So, he trained. It was all he ever did anymore really. He still made sure to get his schoolwork done, there's no way in hell that he'd ever let his grades slip. In fact, he pushed himself almost as hard academically as he did physically. But any free time he had went to training. His parents weren't very happy about it, something about it not being healthy for him. What a load of shit, Katsuki made sure he was in peak health. He ate and slept properly, he took needed rest days to let his body heal, and he was careful to push himself hard enough that he would get stronger but not so hard that he would fuck up his body. Eventually, his parents resigned themselves to the fact that they couldn't stop him training. Though his dad still occasionally tried to get him to do other things, and his mom sometimes straight up forced him to skip training to do stuff with her.

Katsuki's dumbass parents didn't seem to understand how important this was. But that didn't matter right now. For now, he had to focus on his training.

Recently, he had just been trying to work on his quirk's raw power, rather than any techniques. He had already mastered flight and maneuverability with his explosions, so that now he could zip around the battlefield pretty much flawlessly. And he had perfected his ultimate attack, Howitzer Blitz, over a year ago (He had to find a new training ground afterwards, since his old one had been utterly fucking decimated by the technique). So, the only thing he had really felt the need to focus on was the sheer size of his explosions, and how well he could pull them off without harming himself.

Until recently, because he had come to realise that he was currently lacking in two things, range and precision. He had been watching a villain fight on the news a little while back when it occurred to him. A new hero, Katsuki didn't bother to remember her name, had been trying to stop some random criminal. The hero's quirk let her produce a powerful shock wave when she clapped her hands together, but the shock wave puttered out pretty quickly so it was only useful in close combat. Watching her try to stop the villain had been fucking embarrassing. It was an utter shit show. The villains quirk gave him a short burst of speed in a straight line, so most of the fight had been the hero chasing after the villain and trying to hit him with her shock waves. By the time she had managed to finally defeat the villain, she had completely wrecked most of the street.

At the time, Katsuki only thought about how pathetic of a hero she was. But that night, when he had been trying to fall asleep, he realised that he suffered from a lot of the same problems. While he was far more mobile than the hero was, and wouldn't have had nearly as much of a problem actually hitting the villain, there was still the problem of how much destruction his quirk caused. Not to mention that it required him to get close to his opponents if he wanted to actually do any real damage. He knew enough about quirks to know that there were some people you did not want to get too close to.

Thankfully, he had recently come up with a solution for both those problems. He pointed his right hand, open palmed, at a tree about four meters away. Then he brought his left hand up to his right, touched his left pointer finger and thumb together to make a small ring with his fingers and pressed that ring against the palm of his right hand. The idea was simple, if he concentrated his explosion on a small point of his palm, it would fire farther and have better aim. Basically, it would be the difference between a water balloon and a squirt gun.

Making sure to only fire between the ring of his fingers, Katsuki set off an explosion at the tree. There was a flash of light and a loud boom... right before Katsuki jerk his left hand away in pain.

"SON OF BITCH!" He screamed, clutching his left hand.

In hindsight, setting off an powerful explosion right next to his fingers might not have been the best idea. Looking at his hand, he could see it wasn't badly injured, maybe a little burnt was all. Though it also felt like he just slammed his fingers in a door. He stuck both fingers in his mouth and sucked on them to try to dull the pain. Thankfully, his hands were tough, due to the fact that they were where he generated his explosions from, so it'd be fine. It was clear though that he fucked up the attack. He must not have focused the explosion enough.

Looking at the tree, however, he couldn't have been happier. Right there in the middle of the tree, was a large round hole. It looked like some one had cut out a perfect circle in the tree with a cookie cutter. So, it was clear that his attack worked, he just needed to work on being able to do it without hurting himself.

He took his fingers out of his mouth, and wiped them off on his pants before bringing them back to his right palm. A viscous grin formed on his face as he turned to another tree, not bothering to wait another minute before trying again. It was like they said, no pain, no gain.

So, um. I'm sorry. Quite a few people seemed to assume that Izuku and Bakugou were going to be friends in this story, but that's not what I had planned. If it's any consolation, they will eventually become friends, it just won't be for awhile.

Also, I'm currently kicking myself, because I have a large chunk of the plot for this fic outlined already, and I'm not planning to reveal exactly what happened in the past that lead to Izuku's terrible reputation or why he and Bakugou aren't friends until The Sports Festival. But now I'm looking at that timeline, and thinking to myself, "That's so long to wait". However, I also don't have any real plans on changing that outline and revealing it earlier, so I'm afraid we're just going to have to wait. Though, since I'm going to drop more hints, I'm sure some of my readers will be able to guess what happened.

I am about 99% certain that Bakugou's lackey with long fingers from the first episode never got a name, so I just made one up for him.

Maelaeran: The t-shirt is not going to be what gives All Might's identity away, it's merely the first piece of evidence. Looking back though, I conveyed that poorly. I put way to much emphasis on it, and due to the PoV I'm going with, it made it seem like a huge eureka moment for Izuku. It was simply meant to show the audience that Izuku was starting to notice things. Thank you for pointing out the problem though. I didn't even realise that it might have come across wrong until you brought it up.