Chapter Text
How come it always starts with a burning smell?
An itching, piercing burning smell that curls into lungs and hug them tight. A burning smell, sweet and sour. Smoke steaming away moisture and leaving nothing but a dried husk.
For as long as Izuku had been alive, burning meant bad. There were no summer campfires in his memory, just stomped out cigarettes and sickly sweet nitroglycerin.
His father loved to smoke. He reveled in licking the end of a cig, letting it catch light and placing the other end in his mouth. Sucking in a breath of sulfur and blowing it into a cloud around his head. Sometimes he’d offer his son a hit, only to chuckle an apology to his wife’s disapproving face.
Izuku was the boy who smelled of smoke. Kacchan had something similar only it had the opposite effect. He smelled strongly of the sugary caramel scent of hot nitroglycerin which he’d light and explode in his hands. It made him strong. Marking him as something special.
Izuku’s scent didn’t mean power. He didn’t have any of that. This smell painted a target on his back saying even his parents didn’t give a shit about their child. Izuku was the quirkless kid who smelled of smoke, a cruel limitation of his fathers fire.
Having the ability to breathe fire had its benefits, one being the inability to succumb to smoke inhalation. Midoriya Hiasashi smoked because he knew it couldn’t hurt him. Izuku’s mother used to say “that man puts the devil in daredevil.”
When the gambling started he didn’t stop smoking, he smoked more actually, no matter how long Mama screamed at him that it was eating their savings. The walls began to stain gray, it would hang in the air above their heads. It peaked a couple months after Izuku’s 13th birthday. The divorce papers have long been signed, his mother winning full custody.
Not that she had any competition.
No matter how many times he put his clothes through the wash, sprayed with deodorant or air fresheners he still stunk of smoke. Maybe he was imagining it but it was like ash was borrowing into his skin and sitting in his pores like a parasite.
He ignored it.
Izuku ignored it as hard as he could.
Until he couldn’t.