Tired is a simple but vague word. There are a billion different kinds of tired, but the kind of tired that Izuku is feeling is an ache that strikes him deep down to his bones. There is no reason that he is tired. He simply is.

If it shows when he's Facetiming his mom, though, then...Well, he really has nothing to say to her.

Izuku loves his mother. She is the one person in his life who has been consistently there for him. Kacchan went from his best friend to his worst tormentor in the span of a week, after learning he didn't have a quirk. His dad went off to god knows where to work abroad, with nary a word to his family back home. Even All Might, who has always been there for him in spirit, has never actually...been there. (He thinks back to the "Smash!" he heard as he suffocated alone in that dark underpass, but he quickly dismisses the thought.)

As much as he loves her, though, he's never been quite honest with her. He sees that look in her eyes, those worried eyes that have weighed down on his conscience for years, but he's been omitting truths from her for too long to break the habit.

Izuku still remembers the first time he lied to her, as many years ago as it may have been.

The delighted shrieks of little children fill the air, as they enjoy their break time. Izuku sits alone at a table at the edges of the outdoor play area, unaware of his surroundings, when he gets interrupted. "Oi, Deku," Kacchan sneers at Izuku, who is drawing a stick figure of a hero who recently debuted.

"Backdraft...waterhose quirk...looks like a fireman...rescue hero..." Izuku mutters to himself, the words pouring out too quickly for his little mouth to say them properly. It would be adorable, if it weren't for the way that his words were interrupted with sniffs, and his scribbled drawing interrupted by little grubby hands reaching up to dry away tears in his eyes.

One week earlier, Izuku learned that he doesn't have a quirk. The next morning, he confided in his childhood friend, hoping for Kacchan to stand with him. Instead, Kacchan revealed the fact to the whole class just seconds later, uncaring to how that one piece of information would quickly change Izuku's place in the world's pecking order. He learns that sometimes, telling the truth puts you worse off than you were before. The burden of a secret can weigh less than the consequences of revealing it.

Now, Kacchan only fumes at the way Izuku drowns out the world, by filling the silence that surrounds him with muttered words. "I'm talking to you!" Kacchan growls with ferocity that no preschooler should possess, slamming his fist down next to Izuku's notebook.

Izuku jumps, "K-Kacchan! Do you want to play with me?" His eyes are wide, looking up at Kacchan with so much hope.

He is dismissed with a snort. "Stupid Deku, like I'd want to hang out with a quirkless wimp like you."

"O-oh..." Izuku's voice is small, as he looks down to his shoes.

Kacchan's eyes light up in interest, the original purpose of the confrontation forgotten in his mind. "Hey Deku, we're friends, right?" Izuku nods quickly, kicking his legs in excitement, "Well, if we're friends, then you wouldn't mind if I borrowed those shoes, would you?"

Izuku stops. "But...They're limited edition All Might light up sneakers that my mom just got me..."

"So? Don't you think it's better for someone with a powerful quirk like me to have it?" Kacchan opens his palms in demonstration, little sparks lighting them up, "Besides, it's only borrowing. Because we're friends? Not like you have any others."

Izuku bites his lips. Kacchan wasn't wrong...

When his mom asks him why he came back home barefoot, with his socks soaked and his outfit dirty and singed, he tells her the first excuse that comes to mind. That he took his shoes off to play in the creek with the others, but couldn't find them afterwards.

Inko takes his word for it, and buys him a pair of red sneakers that are a tad too big for his little feet. It is the first of many red sneakers that he goes through throughout the years.

Kacchan never asks for his shoes again, with Auntie Mitsuki's curious questions. Instead, they become too small, burn, drown in the river, go missing during school, get written on in bold, black sharpie and return filled with garbage. It's okay, though, because Izuku quickly learns how to reassure his mother with his dazzling smile.

And if Kacchan never returns those limited edition shoes? Well, Izuku has nothing to say about it. He supposes that the closer the friends are, the bigger their secrets.

Izuku finds himself lying less and less to his mother now that Kacchan is no longer in the picture (no longer a problem, he briefly thinks). With every passing day at his new high school, he comes to realize that he no longer has to hide bruised arms from her, or create elaborate explanations for why he's working alone on school projects. It would be a lot easier for him to do, of course, now that she only ever sees him when they're Facetiming, but he doesn't have to.

Instead, he's able to tell his mother of everything that happened at school without lying or leaving out something. The best part is that he's able to tell her that he might have formed an awkward friendship with Kanai. The wide smile that that news brings to her face almost makes him want to actually try to make more friends. (He doesn't, though. He's too scared that doing so will mess up what he already has.)

Now, though, his problem is that he can't explain...it.

It is a variety of things. It is the way that Izuku gives his dinner a blank stare, nudging it around but never finding the appetite to eat it all. It is the way that he spends every free minute he has in school to do his homework and study, so that he can take a really long nap the moment he gets home. It is the daily naps that fail to make up for all of the hours he stares up at the ceiling of his room, unable to sleep.

He isn't stupid. He knows that this isn't healthy. But somehow, being honest to his mother about it seems worse than just dealing with it. After all, if he still managing in school despite it all, then is it really a problem? It's not like he's ruining his future by being a lazy lump in a bed.

Izuku will take this odd state of feeling like he's floating somewhere between reality and the astral plane any day, though, if it means not telling her. He knows his mom loves him, but he's scared that she'll blame herself for it. (Izuku thinks back to those words all those years ago. "I'm sorry." But oh, it was never her fault, it was always his. He doesn't want her to feel sorry for even a second more, not when it is him who should be sorry.)

Izuku feels bad for not being truthful to her. He feels bad for a lot of things, actually. For not trying harder to get a good career that will help to support her in her later years. For being quirkless. For the way he forced her to take late-night work shifts in order to pay for the cost of replacing his clothes and school supplies. For taking advantage of the fact that, right now, she's too far away to see the sorry state that he's in, as she is buried under paperwork that her unconscious husband can't do.

He is so used to only having his mom to show genuine concern towards him, that when it's his new neighbors that step in because of her absence, he's absolutely floored. His neighbors, of all people.

Izuku is a very light sleeper. When the doorbell rings through the empty apartment, he jolts awake. Softly, and with emotion, he whispers, "Fuck." He's not really ready to deal with whoever's at the door, but his mom did say that she's expecting a package at the apartment that requires a signature.

He wipes the drool off of his face, and briefly tugs at his hair in an effort to make himself presentable. After ten solid tugs, he decides to just throw in the towel altogether, abandoning all thoughts of his appearance as he walks to the door.

To his dismay, there is not a person with a package waiting outside for him. It's the couple that he's occasionally seen in the hallways of his apartment building. He's occasionally given them a nod of greeting to be polite, but he's never actually properly talked to them.

Of all the times for him to decide to wear his mom's old crop top and a pair of fuzzy pajamas with chibi All Mights printed all over them. He wraps his hands around the mottled skin of his arms a little self-consciously, and gives them a small smile. "Hello."

"Oh, sorry, is this a bad time?" The man asks, "We can come back another time, if you'd like." The man just. Looks like a dad, there's really no other way for Izuku to describe it. He has that neat Dad™ hairstyle, short dirty blonde hair parted to the right. He's even wearing the khakis and a blue polo shirt that's tucked in. He has broad shoulders and a thick neck, and Izuku briefly wonders if he works in the labor industry.

It is a bad time, but hell if his mother taught him to turn away a person who needed something from him. "No, it's fine. What did you need?"

The woman speaks up this time, "We've been meaning to introduce ourselves for this entire time, but everything's been so hectic for us at work...I'm Fumiko, and this is my husband, Daichi. We wanted to invite you and your mother over to our apartment to have dinner. We live in the apartment right next to yours." Izuku is really grateful she doesn't look like a Mom™ in the same way that Daichi looks like a Dad™. She looks very youthful, with a long brown bob that curls around her neck, and rosy red cheeks.

It is only now that Izuku realizes that the couple doesn't just live in the same apartment building as him—they live next door.

"My mom is actually away on a trip for the next few months. It's just me, right now." His words cause the other two to exchange a look with each other.

"Well, we can't just let a kid like you eat on your own." Daichi says. The dinner proposition that follows might be the kind of thing that a serial killer says to their victim, but Izuku figures they look nice enough. He gives himself a pat on the back for his A+ self-preservation skills. Honestly, he's just too tired to care and figures he has nothing to lose.

Either they are as innocent as they seem, or they're a criminal duo that likes playing the long con, because the dinner that follows is actually...Nice. The two of them manage to incorporate Izuku in their conversation despite his nervous tendencies and his lapses in thought, and the food is damn good. Still doesn't hold a torch to his mom's, of course.

This is how Izuku meets the Urarakas, and this is how he comes to regularly eat meals with them. And the Urarakas simply will not allow him to mope in bed all day, when the concern they show for Izuku could only ever be rivaled by Inko.

It's not like the kind of concern that he's used to. That fake concern, that's really just thinly-veiled pity followed by people's needs to feel good about themselves. Izuku was far too acquainted with the latter, and it's only now that he's moved to a place where his general backstory isn't common knowledge that he's become aware of the fragile way that the adults in his life would handle him.

Teachers who would offer to let him eat in the staff room so that he could avoid the scathing judgements of his peers, but would never do much more. Shop owners who would slip him a free pork bun, but would ignore the way he stumbled to their counter with tears in his eyes and a first aid kit in his hands. Parents of classmates who would give him a smile as he sat alone in the playground, but would say nothing when their kids invited everyone in the class but him to their birthday parties. What they always saw was Midoriya Izuku, that poor quirkless boy with a father who is barely in the picture, and a mother who works day and night to provide for him. What they didn't see was Midoriya Izuku, the boy who looks up at heroes with stars in his eyes, and could probably dissect your quirk in ten seconds flat if you gave him the opportunity to. The adults Izuku has met in his life haven't given him much of a reason to trust adults.

The Urarakas are different. It's only three days of eating dinner with them before they insist that he take their phone numbers, in the case of an emergency at school. It's five days before they pull out a photo album, and tell him all about their daughter, Ochako, who he'd really like to meet. In one week's time, he and Daichi start going on runs around the city together, and Daichi shows him all of the buildings that he and his wife have worked on. After one and a half weeks before he's given an apartment key, so that he can come into their apartment without having to knock. It's not a solution to his daze, but they give him a few hours in the day where the world sharpens into a crystal clarity.

He supposes that a large reason that the two of them are so insistent in not leaving him be is their own daughter. Daichi and Fumiko have yet to tell him where she's going to school, but it's far enough that it's more convenient for her to live in an apartment on her own, not unalike to what Izuku is currently doing.

When the topic of one of their dinners shifts to the upcoming Yuuei Sports Festival, there's little that Izuku can do to stop the excited words that pour out of his mouth. "Yuuei is having the Sports Festival a week later than they usually do, it's probably in response to the USJ attack. I'm really excited to see all of the students from Class 1-A, I'm curious to see if real life experience with villains has any effect on their performance. I could probably compare them to other years. Oh, and then there's Kacchan to look out for, I wonder how he'll do. Knowing him, he won't accept a loss..." Izuku mutters. Fumiko laughs at the pose he's assumed, with his chopsticks hovering in the air, a bite of rice still held between them. Neither Daichi nor Fumiko interrupt his rambling words, though. It's a delightful change of pace for Izuku, though he still frequently gets embarrassed about it, despite their insistence that it's fine.

"Well, there's our own daughter to look out for, too," Daichi comments off-handedly.

Izuku chokes on air, coughing for a bit to clear his lungs before he almost yells, "Your daughter is going to be in the Sports Festival?!"

Daichi speaks with a confused voice, "Did we not tell you? She's in the General Education department, Class 1-C."

Izuku honest to god squeals, "Oh my god, it's going to be even better than I expected! Wait, wait, what's her quirk? No, no don't tell me, I want to figure it out myself when I watch it."

Fumiko claps her hands together, "You can watch with us, if you don't have any plans to watch with any of your friends! The Sports Festival is the kind of thing you watch together with others. We can cheer for Ochako together."

Izuku smiles, "Count me in." He was...kind of dreading having to watch the Yuuei Sports Festival all on his own. Honestly, he was half-prepared to just set the shows for three years on record, so that he could watch it on his own time. Now he actually has a reason to watch it live like he does every year, though.

Daichi winks, "And don't think that our Uraraka won't shine out all the others just because she isn't in the heroics course. I know my girl, and if the Sports Festival is giving her the chance to join the heroics course like she told us about, then she's going to fight like hell for it, right, Fumiko?" He turns to look at Fumiko.

With a fist clenched in front of her and a determined, almost scary look on her face, Fumiko nods, "She'll be up there on the podium, just you wait." Izuku thinks that she just might just make it, if Ochako possesses even a fraction of the fiery spirit that Fumiko is showing.

The Yuuei Sports Festival is only in four days, and Izuku is an idiot who let the date catch up to him. He might not be out there participating like he used to picture himself doing, but that doesn't mean there aren't a ton of things he has to do.

Two weeks ago, Izuku wouldn't have been so geared up for the Sports Festival. Two weeks ago, he was a mopey piece of shit. He is still a mopey piece of shit, but a certain...thing has relit the passion he had for heroes within him. If anything, the fire is going twice as powerful as it did before.

When Izuku got rejected from Yuuei, he kind of pushed his hobby of quirk analysis and hero-chasing down the gutter, his reasoning being that there was no point to him doing it if he wasn't going to be a hero. His hero analysis notebooks got shoved into a box, and stayed there even when he moved. Sure, all of the new quirks he saw on the first day of high school activated a reflex that was impossible for him to get rid of, making his fingers twitch for a notebook that just wasn't there, but he suppressed the urge.

Now, though, he's back in full swing.

He told himself he wouldn't be going back to The Guard's Archives, but it took him only four days after Kanai told him about it before he gave into the urge and found himself poring through pages and pages of old discussions on the website.

The website is filled with people who are extremely informed, and every time that Izuku goes on it, he feels outclassed. Analysis skills that people praised him for on other forums are nothing special on the Archives. It doesn't discourage him. If anything, he loves it. The people there maybe aren't as obsessed with heroes as he is, but every interaction with them is an intellectual exercise. If it was just discussion about heroes, then Izuku wouldn't be learning as much as he is, but the kinds of things people talk about there tackle hero society as a whole. The struggle for police and military to maintain their position in modern society, the deceleration of scientific research as a result of quirks, the decline of skilled labor in Japan, the diminishing influence of Japan's universities, and so much more. Izuku is soaking in all of it like a sponge. He's only been on the website for two goddamn weeks, and he's already learned so much.

Right now, his problem is that, in the five months since he got rejected from Yuuei, he's let his analysis skills stagnate. On top of that, he has an entire set of notebooks that he wants to move to his laptop. He got the idea from one of the members of the Archives. The explosive fate of his thirteenth notebook convinces him that it's safest to put his notes somewhere they can be backed up. He was going to flex his old quirk analysis muscles by trying to type up all of the notes before the Sports Festival, but...

Four days is not long enough to think of an organization system that's supposed to last him. Not to mention, he has no clue what some of these notebooks say. The first five are barely legible, and he briefly curses his younger self for writing all thin and slanty instead of big and readable like most kids do. Did the little asshole think that he was cooler for writing that way? Stick to backwards As, kid! Izuku thinks.

He takes the thirteenth notebook out of the cardboard box that holds all of his notes, wincing. Kacchan could have done a lot worse to it, but the singed pages of the notebook aren't the main problem for him. Izuku probably forgot that this one got tossed into a pond too, because the water damage has made the pages all wavy. He opens up the book, flipping through the pages. Yeah, he could barely read these. The graphite on the pages was all smudged or faded. As he gets closer to the end of the notebook, he prepares to toss the notebook to the side so that he can salvage what he can later, but big blocky letters make him pause. That's not supposed to be there. He finds the page where he saw the giant writing, and his breath hitches. Izuku drops the notebook, but it stays opened to the same page.

"All Might!" The words glare at him almost like a taunt, in thick strokes that seem to be from the whiteboard markers he usually keeps in his backpack. Two simple words, but they take up two entire pages. There's a little drawing of eyes with the signature All Might tufts of hair above them in the corner. It was clearly written after it got tossed out the window by Kacchan, because the writing kind of bends with the wave of the pages. Izuku doesn't need to see that to know exactly when it was written, though.

sludge down my throat

dark, dark, dark

suffocating

can't breathe

going to die

"SMASH!"

Izuku comes back to reality dazed and confused, and a glance at the clock tells him that fifteen minutes have passed. Strange. It felt like a few seconds. It wasn't a panic attack, that's for sure. Izuku is familiar with what those feel like.

He does what he always does whenever something happens to him that's probably cause for concern. He ignores it. Puts a little dog ear on that page to remind him not to visit it again. Sets the notebook to the side, and begins to type up the notes that he can, from the first notebook onwards. He can properly organize them later, but he's going to have one folder for each notebook for now.

It's strange. If he got All Might's signature in any other circumstance, he's sure that he'd be framing it up in his room, constantly fawning over the time that he met All Might. But he never did meet All Might. All he got was the hazy memory of his idol, from a day that he doesn't want to remember.

Perhaps he could organize his notes by hero? By year? By quirks involved? Maybe he could try a program that's specialized for processing and formatting data. The possibilities are endless. Good, Izuku thinks, as he proceeds to drown his mind in the various caveats of organization and note-taking.

sports festival next chapter! aaaaa :D i s2g, u take a single kid out of yuuei and everything starts changing. i'll try to skim over canon stuff cuz. i know y'all have read through the same damn sports festival at least twenty times but i kinda wanna see what izuku would be like as a complete observer, hopefully it ain't too boring

it might take a bit longer but it will definitely be a longer chapter i think. i'll try to get it over with in one chapter but no guarantees. i started writing it and the setup alone is like...2k words so yea i'm fucked :D god before this fanfic, all of my chapters would average at 1.5k words, what the fuck happened? struggles to write enough chapter have now become "oh shit this is getting too long"