If You scream in your head, no one will hear you
If you thought Izuku was a normal kid, you would be just like all of the other kids at his school, he was quiet, he was timid, he was deku. But that is what he wanted, stay low and they will fish you back up, be outstanding and they will beat you back down, but stay average, just enough to not fail, just enough to keep yourself out of their sights, and you will thrive
Life often didn't like Izuku, diagnosed as quirkless at 4 years of age, friends and family turned against him, it is honestly a wonder how nobody foresaw what he was, how nobody saw through his, through his guise.
Deku, his other self, as he liked to call it, the mask he wore every waking second, the mask he used to thrive, the mask he used to make himself naught in his Billy's eyes, the very thing that kept him safe, a coping mechanism, an act, whatever you call it, it wasn't him.
No, no, don't ever think that deku is the same as Izuku, because there is one core difference between the two, one difference so big no one could have noticed, not even himself. He had never thought of himself as smart, but the one thing he knew, there is a cracking point to every mask
The school day had started just like any other, the long walk to school, the pain that had occurred in his shoulder as his held them as far down as he could, trying to make himself smaller as snickers surrounded him in the hall
He knew why of course, he could feel the paper sticking to his back, the mean or teasing graffiti adorning it only adding to the weight of the insult, not a should stood up for him, there were those who had tried in the past, those that had dreamed of heroics the same as he, but they soon found the only reward they would get was pain, and that was never enough for them to stay
"Hey loser! Here, I found a quirk for ya!" A searing hot pain had graced his conscious, he felt it burning against his uniform, the patches he had already sewn into it burning quicker than the actual fabric, reminding him of the hours it had taken to leaf how to sow
Ah yes, the Bain of his very own existence, Bakugo Katsuki, he was an overgrown pomeranian, but there was no mistaking the power he held in the palm of his hand, the searing power of explosions, he could feel the split second reaction happening, the ignition of the nitroglycerin based sweat detonating in his hand
"Oh is he going to cry! Look at him, pathetic little bugger isn't he, I don't even think he is considering the fact his tears are staining the floor with his quirklessness"
The words stung more than the burn on his back, he could barely register the tears as they fell from his chin, they weren't his, they were Deku's. That useless mask he portrayed himself as, it served as his protection, but he could feel it crack as the pressure builds
He stands, wiping away at bus tears until they are only in his eyes, the light he had gone from them, only left with the glimmer of water, Bakugo had left already, leaving him in a heap on the floor, the mask was breaking, he could feel the faults in the mask getting wider as he slowly came back down from his own mind, the words echoed through his mind, each resounding word giving him a greater headache than the ones before
He got up from his seated position, slowly letting himself progress to class like nothing has happened, his shoulder smoldering with the heat of nitroglycerin induced explosions, he was scared for his life each day, and yet it felt as if he could care less, his life was a fickle thing, almost like a candle in a snowstorm, he was cold inside, and yet he had to had to keep going, his mother depended on him, and he couldn't let her down
He was reminded each day of her smiles and how kind she was to him, nothing could change his mind when it came to her, but the ring of the school bell was enough to take his mind off of her, he was now late for class, no matter his excuse, that was a detention, it would be no better if he wanted to skip, but he went, he had to, or his life would just get worse.
He felt as if he was watching his body work from an outside view, watching as his body moved underneath his bruised and battered clothing, his body very much too small for the uniform, an awful byproduct of being forced to throw up every meal via beating. He had told himself time and time again that things would change, they would forget him, that things could be so much worse for him, but for once in his life, even he didn't believe the lies that his mind told him
His feet had finally taken him to the classroom, inside were the snickers tormented his mind as he was slid the detention slip, the teacher looked at him with a sneer, he didn't say a word, but he didn't have to, he already knew what detention meant for him, sentences, holding books, buckets, sometimes even physical punishment if he failed those tasks
The mundane tasks of the classroom bored him, there was nothing in here that he didn't know, he had taken this course time and time again on his own, just to make sure that he couldn't forget it even if he tried, of course, he couldn't doodle in his book, that would only get the teacher mad at him, and he already had plenty of notes on the subject, not that the teacher was teaching well enough to get notes from
So he went to one of the only things he could do during class, dissect his classmates, figure out how their quirks work, and of course, how to neutralize them if he wanted to, going by each and every one of them, treating them as a puzzle, one he would break their fingers, another he would set their head on fire, over and over he went over mundane quirks until he got to his favorite
Katsuki Bakugo of course, his worst bully, but the most interesting of his classmates, his hands secreted a nitroglycerin based mixture it was not exact, but instead held an unbalanced version of the formula, due to his father and mother's quirks mixing in almost a perfect way, his mothers glycerin sweat and his fathers acid sweat combining to make one hell of a quirk, but it had so many weaknesses he could exploit
From making his hands wet to cutting them off in general, once his hands were neutralized it was only mind games from there, spiders or one of his many complexes, it would be so easy just to tear him apart from the inside out, but he didn't, he wanted him to make it to being a hero, he wanted to have him be a good person, but there was no way for him to ever forgive Bakugo, not after what he had done to him