Chapter Text
“Fucking stop staring at me, Deku!”
Kacchan’s usual outburst jogs Izuku out of his reverie and back to the classroom.
The teacher at the blackboard (talking about the quirk factor, which Izuku can recite most known facts about in his sleep) stops too, and levels a half-hearted stern glare in Kacchan’s direction.
“Sorry,” Izuku mutters, and looks away. “I just zoned out. I’ll stop.”
Kacchan gives an annoyed growly huff, but turns back to the teacher and lets the lesson resume.
Izuku lets his gaze drift out of the window to stop himself from staring at Kacchan again. After all these years, it’s just too easy to end up that way, especially when he’s sleep-deprived from staying up until four in the morning analysing the latest video of All Might fighting a villain in the middle of downtown. He has no energy left to listen to the teacher talking about things he already knows, and so his eyes drift to Kacchan, and to the warm light shifting under his skin.
It’s a familiar one, that light. Izuku has touched it so many times he knows its ins and outs as well as he knows the back of his hand. It would be the matter of a breath to reach out and grab it.
Not that he does, of course. Not here, now, and for no reason. He would never, but he can’t resist tugging, just a bit, just to feel that familiar tingling in his palms.
It’s almost hypnotic. Especially when he’s this tired. Tug, tingle. Tug, tingle. Tug…
Kacchan notices, of course. He always does. Izuku would almost worry if he didn’t, and so he shouts, and Izuku looks away.
He looks at people through the window instead. The schoolyard is empty now, everyone being in class, but there are still people walking past on the street beyond the fence, and Izuku focuses on them.
If the teacher notices he isn’t paying attention, she says nothing, and neither do any of the students around him. In fact, most of them try not to look at him at all. That’s the usual state of things, and right now, Izuku is too tired to care.
He looks at the people walking by the fence, and then he looks past them, or through them, past the skin and to the light hidden beneath it. They are far away, but all he needs is to glimpse them to see that light as clearly as if it was right in front of him.
That will probably come in handy on its own, he thinks, when he becomes a hero. (If he can become a hero with a quirk like his.) Being able to tell people apart at a distance is a very neat side effect. He should probably practice it. (Not that it makes up for it, makes up for a power that makes his classmates shy away from him, makes even Kacchan avoid him, out of fear or anger or a mixture of both.)
None of the lights passing by are familiar to him, except a few he has seen passing by before. He still tries to tug at them, for the practice. If he wants to be a hero, he needs to practice his quirk, train it just like he should his mind and his body. (Or, as he would, if he had even the faintest idea of where to begin. He should look into it.)
How easy it is to tug at the lights varies wildly from person to person. It takes most people about five seconds to walk past where he can see them, and in that time, there is only one woman’s light it’s easy enough to tug at that he might have been able to grab it, had he really tried. For most people, the time he would have needed is probably somewhere between ten and thirty seconds, though there are outliers. A little girl with eyes so large they cover half her face has a light so slow Izuku can barely touch it. A man with the head of a komodo dragon stops outside the gate to fiddle with his phone for almost a minute, and Izuku is only halfway to getting close when he keeps walking.
He keeps practicing, tugging at lights outside the window, only briefly distracted by an old woman with no light at all, until class is over and it’s time to go home.
No one talks to him as he packs his bag. No one bumps into him as he walks out of the classroom. No one even looks at him as he walks out of the school and turns towards home. That is fine. Not like he wants to talk to them anyways.
(He does. Even Kacchan at his worst is better than this.)
“I’m home,” he says when he comes through the front door.
Mom and her smooth, calm light meets him in the entranceway. “Welcome home, Izuku,” she says, smiling. “How was your day?”
“It was fine,” he replies, avoiding the question. “I’m actually pretty tired, so I was thinking I’d go take a nap?”
“Oh, is that so? Then I’ll wake you up in half an hour.”
Izuku meets her smile with one of his own, tired but genuine. “Thanks, mom,” he says. “Oh, and, uh, do you mind if I borrow…”
She smiles brightly and waves him towards his room. “Of course, sweetheart. Any time you ask. Now go get some sleep. You look like you need it.”
He nods, and focuses on her light. Even more so than Kacchan’s, mom’s light is familiar. He knows the way it flows with tiny ripples under her skin so well he can (and he actually has tried to) sketch it out without reference. He barely needs to glance at her to grab it, and this time he really does grab, and it flows from her until it is a small ball of rippling light in the back of his head, connected to mom only by a gossamer line on his senses.
If he looks down and focuses, he can see the ripples under his own skin now, but he doesn’t need to. He can feel it’s there.
His toothbrush flies to his hand on its own when he enters the bathroom. As does his towel after he rinses his mouth.
Mom’s quirk is rather weak, but it is practical for things like this, and he will always be grateful she lets him borrow it as freely as she does.
He nudges the ball of light in his mind when his head hits the All Might print of his pillow. Mom’s quirk is so familiar to him, he could never let go of it on accident, but with a firm nudge, he loosens his grip, and it flows down the gossamer line back to mom.
He understands why his classmates avoid him, of course. He understands why Kacchan, who is so proud of his powerful quirk, has never quite forgiven him for the first time a staring contest accidentally turned into a fight for his quirk, or all the times after, when Izuku needed to not have a weapon pointed at him. He understands that his quirk could make him quite a terrifying villain, but he doesn’t want to be a villain.
He wants to be a hero.
If only he had a power he could use at all without taking someone else’s.