Izuku took a shaky breath as he tore a page out of his singed, waterlogged, All Might-autographed notebook and started writing.

If you are reading this, I am dead, Izuku began. He swallowed and kept going. I met All Might today. It was probably the coolest moment of my life, and I still can't believe I got to talk to him.

I asked him if I could be a hero. I expected the answer he gave me, but I guess it made me realize I had to do something to make my dreams come true. It might kill me, but that's why I'm making this note. And, well, B-

Izuku stopped. He debated starting the whole letter over, but instead scribbled over the single letter until it was unrecognizable.

someone told me I should jump off a roof and hope for a Quirk in the next life if I wanted to be a hero. Not All Might, he would never say something like that, but, someone. Doesn't matter. Anyways, I guess what I am trying to say is, one way or another, I have a Quirk now. I'm going to be a hero. I'm sorry for not saying goodbye, but I was worried you would stop me. I know you've been trying your best, and I know it hasn't been easy taking care of me. It would've been much easier for you to leave like dad did.

A teardrop fell onto the paper. Izuku sniffled and wiped his sleeve across his face.

So, thank you for being there.

Izuku took a few shuddering breaths and read over his note. Satisfied with what he had written, Izuku left it on the kitchen table, underneath his hero notebook, and locked the apartment door behind him.

Izuku navigated the familiar labyrinth of sidewalks and alleyways that led to the abandoned lab. Izuku pulled aside a dumpster, popped the fake sewer grate, and climbed down a ladder. As he descended, he fondly remembered the fateful day, when he was six, climbing down a hole in the alleyway with tied-together bedsheets and pretending to storm a villain's lair.

The ladder ended directly in the middle of a lab. Microscopes, surgical tools, and analytical equipment lined the walls. The computers flickered to life, bringing up genetic sequences and instructions for chemical syntheses.

Izuku brushed past them all and approached a whirring centrifuge. He stopped the machine and plucked out six vials of blood. Plasma, blood cells, platelets and all the other components of blood sat in neatly defined layers. Atop them all was a thin, clear liquid. Izuku carefully strained that layer from all six vials, combined them with a saline solution and some immunosuppressants, and sanitized a syringe.

The restraining chair had clamps meant for someone else to operate it. Izuku made do by tying his legs and an arm with gauze bandages. The gauze made the veins on Izuku's left arm bulge out, giving him an easy target for the syringe.

Needle poised over the vein, Izuku took a deep breath. Tip pointed upward, bubbles pushed out, and nerves steeled, Izuku plunged the tip into his skin. He slowly pushed down, pumping the cocktail of DNA-infused viruses into his bloodstream. He tossed the syringe away, wincing when it shattered on the floor, and slipped his right hand through a premade loop.

Izuku waited. And waited. He checked his watch. The virus was supposed to work within twenty minutes, but Izuku belatedly realized that all the trials were done on rodents. His body was much bigger. It might take longer for the viruses to start working. Or maybe he hadn't injected enough. Maybe the dosage of immunosuppressants was too low, but he had scaled all that up, or maybe-

His arm was set aflame. Izuku hissed and wriggled in his chair as the burning sensation crept up his shoulder. When it hit his heart, a blinding, searing pain erupted throughout his chest. Izuku bit back a scream and dug his heels into the chair. Belatedly, he wished he had thought to give himself something to bite down on.

His hand bubbled. This time, Izuku screamed. Bones snapped like twigs, muscles spasmed until they split apart, and every nerve was flayed open, stuffed with salt water and lemon juice, electrocuted, and stitched back together with barbed wire. He felt his heart rip itself apart with its frantic beating, his lungs fill up with blood, his intestines strangle themselves and his kidneys burst. Izuku's screams rose in pitch and volume until he tore his own throat open, and he still kept screaming. All coherent thought fled before the mind-consuming pain, until all that remained was a constant, repeating, frantic plea for death.

After an eternity of agony, the pain subsided. Izuku curled up on the floor, sobbing quietly and clutching at his throbbing chest. A few shuddering breaths chased the embers of agony from his body. Wiping tears off his face, Izuku shakily stood. The gauze bindings on the chair had torn apart. Izuku scowled exhaustedly and made a mental note to use something sturdier next time.

Izuku staggered over to the bathroom, vomited blood and breakfast into the toilet, and flushed. The mirror caught his eye, and he stopped to look. Green eyes, soft freckled skin, and tousled green hair stared back at him. A red smear stained his lips and chin.

For a moment, Izuku numbly stood there, still processing the excruciating torture he had put himself through. Coherent thoughts trickled back in. First, was that he was alive. He survived. Then, that it worked. He did it.

His eyes darted back to his reflection. Izuku checked his arms, peeled back his shirt, patted himself down. Nothing felt or looked different.

Izuku stared back at his reflection, feeling betrayed by it. Years of poring over the lab's notes and studying genetics on his own, weeks of selecting and extracting genomes, and all that suffering besides, for nothing. His work tortured him to the brink of gibbering madness and didn't even have the decency to kill him. It felt like the universe had played a sick, cosmic joke on him.

Anger boiled over in Izuku's heart. He clenched his teeth, not even noticing he had bitten his own tongue. With a wild, violent shout, Izuku punched the mirror. The glass shattered, and fragments stabbed into his hand. Izuku yelped and yanked his hand back. The glass cut into his skin and his fingers were broken, but the pain felt like a bruise and a papercut to the symphony of agony Izuku had just endured.

Izuku cursed himself for losing his temper. He thought of getting tweezers and surgical thread to patch up his hand when he saw a glass shard pop out. Another followed, and another. Bits of glass tinkled on the sink as Izuku's skin knitted itself back together before his very eyes. Bones shifted underneath his flesh. Izuku felt a numb burning sensation as the pieces fused back together.

Once the healing stopped, Izuku experimentally flexed his hand. Not a scar marred his skin, and not a bone felt out of place. No glass fragments were stuck in his hand. Izuku grinned at it. His gaze drifted back to the mirror. Where his fist shattered the mirror, cracked concrete hid behind embedded shards. Izuku plucked the glass out of the way, ignoring the cuts it made on his fingers, and held his hand against the indent in the wall. It fit his fist perfectly.

A chuckle softly echoed through the bathroom. Izuku's chest shook, and the laughter grew louder and louder, bouncing off the walls, filling the room with mirth and delight. For a moment, Izuku felt a flash of paranoia between the burbling giddiness, wondering who had broken into his refuge. Then he realized he was the one laughing. It had been so long, he had forgotten what it felt like. The realization only made him laugh louder.

After Izuku got the euphoria out of his system, he flexed his biceps. They looked larger to his eyes, but not large enough to explain the hole punched into the concrete. Wondering how much stronger he had gotten, Izuku looked around the lab for anything he could try lifting. His eyes roamed over spectrometers, centrifuges, and computer monitors before he realized that maybe throwing stuff around in his top-secret genetics lab was a bad idea. So, he went to Dagobah Beach.

Dagobah beach reeked of rotting lumber, burnt plastic, and soggy furniture. Crumpled paper and plastic bags covered the grimy sand, and heaps of broken appliances stood like burial mounds among the windswept litter. Bakugo and other kids used the dumping ground as a place to run wild with their Quirks, leaving the area pockmarked with explosion craters, scorch marks, and deep cuts.

Izuku furtively checked for anyone nearby before carefully treading down a path worn into the sand. At its end, the burnt-sugar smell of Bakugo's beach clearing overpowered the general stench of the beach.

Izuku spotted a thick metal table, pockmarked with explosions, standing upright in the sand. The slab of steel would've crushed him before he got his Quirk. Now, though, his hands itched to throw it. Izuku braced his feet, bent his knees, and grunted as he pulled. The resistance of the sand suddenly gave way. Izuku yelped as the table flew over his head. He nearly fell over as he stumbled back, fighting to balance out the table's weight. Once he got it steady, Izuku stood there, panting triumphantly, with a metal table in his grasp. With a grunt, he turned and hurled it twenty feet across the clearing.

With a feral grin, Izuku turned his sights on an old dryer. His fist pounded a huge dent into its thin metal side. A second punch ripped it open. Izuku pulled machines out of the sand, hurled appliances, bent warped lumber beams until the split apart with thunderous snaps, and threw himself into giant piles until he stood panting and heaving in the middle of a scattered, shattered pile of scrap.

As Izuku stood amidst the strewn and shattered wreckage of his rampage, his stomach growled. A wave of hunger hit him with the force of a freight train. Drool dribbled from his mouth as he fantasized about stuffing himself until he burst.

"Mmm… I wonder if mom's making katsudon tonight."

Izuku remembered the note on the table. Panic raced through him as he checked the time and realized she would've been home an hour ago. People shouted at him not to use his Quirk as he raced home at a pace that would've left him a quivering puddle a day ago. He leapt over a dumpster, hauled himself up a rickety fire escape, and leapt across rooftops, oblivious to the shouts and cheers from people below.

Panting and trembling, Izuku faced the front door. A gentle twist of the doorknob showed it was unlocked, and he could smell the aroma of cooking meat wafting from inside the apartment.

His throat tightened. Taking a deep breath, Izuku slowly opened the door and peeked his head through. His mom worked at the stove, humming carefree as she stirred the browning beef in the pan. Drool dripped down Izuku's chin, and he wiped it away.

"Hi mom."

His mom jumped. "Oh, Izuku. Didn't hear you come in. I'm making your favorite, since it's your last day. Did you hang out with Kacchan after school?"

Izuku's mind raced. He had no idea what to make of his mother's nonchalance. Then he saw his notebook on the table, the note beneath it untouched. He nearly sighed in relief. Inko gave him a strange look, and Izuku realized that one, he had been spacing out for half a minute, and two, he had no idea how to explain everything that had happened.

But maybe he didn't need to. He gave her a wide smile and said, "You'll never guess what happened today."

"You met All Might?"

Izuku froze. He hadn't thought about mentioning him. In a gut-reaction panic, he said, "That would've been great too, but this is better."

"What is?"

Izuku eyed the table. It was a solid slab of wood that took three movers to cart into the apartment, perpetually grimy but better than eating off the floor. He picked it up by one end, grunted, and raised it into the air. His notebook, and the note beneath it, clattered to his feet.

Inko gaped at the table. "You got your Quirk?"

Izuku lifted the table over his head so he could grin at her. "Yep! Just like All Might's!"

"When? How?"

Izuku thought about telling her about the lab, telling her about the years of research into genetic engineering and deciphering the lab's notes. Yet, he remembered the way she had faltered, when he asked her if he could still be a hero. Though keeping the secret ate him alive inside, Izuku put on a grin and said, "A dryer fell on my school bag while I was on the beach. When I tried to move it, I practically threw it." With a chuckle, he added, "I might've been that way for a while and never noticed."

Tears flying and admonishing him for going to that dangerous, dirty beach, Inko ran straight to Izuku and wrapped her arms around him. This led to Izuku nearly dropping the table, breaking his wrist trying to keep the table from crushing them both, and awkwardly hiding his wrist behind his back while his bones fused back together.

Later, when Izuku brushed his teeth, he stopped and pulled his lip up.

"Weird. Were my teeth always that sharp?" He looked closer, grinned, and said, "Cool."

That night, once he got in his All Might pajamas, smiled at the posters in his room, and turned out the lights, his eyes glowed faintly yellow in the darkness before he closed them.

A/N: Merry Christmas everyone! This story's getting a chapter update every four weeks from now on until it's done. Probably about 10 chapters. Let me know what you think!