Not powerless

chapter 3: Overlooked

Izuku didn't go to school the next day. When his mother asked, he claimed he was ill. She looked like she was about to scold him for lying. Toshinori must have told her about what happened at dinner, but Haru intervened, saying how rough he'd looked and that maybe he was actually feeling sick. Him throwing up in the middle of the night from remembering the sludge villain forcing itself down his throat certainly helped make it look convincing.

She relented, calling him out of school for the day. Unfortunately that meant he had to suffer through her hovering before she went to work. This was combined with the disappointed tone she used when they ended up talking about last night.

"Izuku, I know you sometimes feel like we pay more attention to your siblings than you, but that isn't true. We love you just as much as we do them. You don't need to make up stories so we give you attention."

"But I'm not making it up. I really was attacked by the sludge villain."

"And I spoke with your father and he said he never saw you there," she said, "now, on an unrelated note, I have no idea what you were doing yesterday but your uniform was absolutely filthy and you just left it strewn about the bathroom. Poor Mizuki had to clear it up herself. I've put it in the wash for you since you're ill, but if it happens again, there will be consequences young man."

Izuku bit his tongue and willed his mother to leave him alone. He loved her, he did, but she never believed him. Even if he told her exactly what had happened, how it felt to be completely enclosed in sludge, to feel it creep beneath his clothes, wrap around his dick and push against his ass, she wouldn't believe him. All because Toshinori said he wasn't there.

Like so many times in his life, Izuku wondered what made him so different. Being quirkless didn't make him useless, it just made him normal. Baseline human, just as the species had been for thousands of years before. What made not having a quirk so wrong? Why did it mean people could treat him like garbage for no reason at all? Why did he have to work for every scrap of decency, only to be lied to directly and be told all he needed to do was ask for it? He shouldn't have to ask for it! Not from his teachers and certainly not from his parents.

If only he'd been born with a quirk, any quirk, his life would have gone very differently.

The house felt calmer when it was just him in it, but the peace wouldn't last. He took another shower and retreated back to his room. He removed the headboard from his bed and pried open one of the wall panels, revealing a small nook. There wasn't much in it: a small All Might plushy, a photo in a frame and an old notebook. Izuku took out the notebook. It was one of his first ones, back around the time he discovered he was quirkless but before what he wrote could be called analysis. It used to be on a shelf with the others, but then Mizuki realised what they were and burned them. This was the only one he was able to salvage.

The drawings and little notes inside spoke of simpler times. He could only make out which heroes were which because of the big details. Words like 'so cool' and 'awesome' littered the margin in messy hiragana. Occasionally there'd be a note in a different handwriting, and in a pang of pain, he recognised it as his parents. They used to write out the big words if he struggled with them. They used to help him. Now they barely even looked at him.

A bang came from downstairs as the front door slammed, startling him. Had the day passed by already? Stomping leading further down told him who it was. Mizuki, who spent all day at school training to be a hero, had come home to immediately do more training. If she wanted to completely burn herself out before graduating, she was more than welcome to. At least she got to train at all.

Because that was the problem, wasn't it? Izuku had no training. Both Mizuki and Haru were trained by Toshinori when they started middle school. Izuku had patiently waited for his own training to start, and when it didn't, he was told it was too dangerous for him. Never mind the list of heroes he presented whose quirks didn't help them fight, never mind that he was the same age as his siblings when they started. He wasn't even allowed to be in the training room by himself.