Chapter Text
Izuku and Inko Midoriya were huddled together like penguins on the cold ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor. Both family members had their backs firmly pressed against the furthest most dark corner in the room, arms wrapped around one another in a tight, almost suffocating, embrace. The sound of military soldiers banging on the door and shouting at them to open up bounced off the walls and infiltrated their ears causing them to ring painfully.
“Izuku… baby you know I love you right? You know I love you, If they- if they take you please remember that. Please… mama loves you… and I’ll always be here for you even if we are apart.” Inko spoke between painful sobs and heaving breaths that caused a deep aching pain in her chest, her voice breaking and quivering. She isn’t stupid. She knew today would be her last with her son, her baby, her entire world. She wasn’t dumb enough to think she could protect him but there was no way in hell she would just give him up without a fight.
“Mama… I don’t understand… why do they want to take me? I don’t want to go with them. Please don’t- please don’t let them take me mama…” Izuku sniffled and nuzzled his face further into the heaving chest of his mother, Inko strengthened her grip on her son a little and started to pet his fluffy green hair. Every sniffle slices a deep gash into Inkos bleeding heart causing it to ache more, her boy was absolutely petrified of what was happening and there was nothing she could do.
She was scared too.
CRASH!
There it was.
The noise Inko never wanted to hear.
The door being forcefully thrusted off its battered hinges, the door was discarded on the floor there only protection broken and left on the grey carpet of their living room as if it was nothing.
Izuku screamed in fear as three muscular men rounded the corner of the island and entered the kitchen. Inko suddenly regrets renting an open plan apartment because now that the man had entered the kitchen past the island that once covered them, there was nothing hiding the terrified family.
Izuku trembled violently in her firm grasp. Fat tears cascading down his cheeks and heavily soaking Inko’s shirt with the salty liquid as he pushed his face so far into Inko’s chest she struggled to breath. A lanky but strong looking man with straight, oily blonde hair and razor sharp teeth that looked as if they could rip apart human flesh protruding out of his mouth in a threatening bone chilling way approached the two.
The man suddenly locked eyes with Inko and plastered a sinister, malicious grin on his face as he threw his hand forward and firmly grasped onto Izuku's curly green locks. The blonde haired military officer pulled Izuku away from Inko’s grasp so harshly and violently that the sickening sound of hair ripping from its roots invaded its way into Inko’s ringing ears.
She would never be able to forget that sound.
“MAMA!!” the sound of Izuku’s pained screech broke Inko from her trance, her eyes locking with the large tear filled emerald eyes of her son. He was being dragged across the uncleaned kitchen floor towards the front door where two other armed men stood. Izuku was frantically punching, kicking and biting at the evil man that had latched onto his hair.
Inko tried to use her quirk to launch objects at the man. She was desperately trying anything to get to her boy. He was only five years old. He was weak, a quirkless child, in fact. Izuku's screams grew louder and raspier as he finally made it to the doorway.
“IZUKU! GET OFF MY BABY!! PLEASE!!” Inko pleaded desperately. The two men that were previously standing directly in front of the door parted ways in order to create a gap for the screaming and kicking child and his captor to exit through the doorway, Inko lunged forward holding a large heavy book that was on the coffee table. Her mind raced with thoughts of what on earth those men could possibly want with her poor innocent son.
The military has always been known for not liking the quirkless, the weak or the “villainous.” Anyone that did not have a strong, powerful or heroic quirk was nothing but scum to the tainted eyes of the military, but they would never stoop down to the level of kidnapping people, right?!
No.
The military would do this. No one would stop them after all, no one cared if quirkless people went missing since 84% of them kill themselves before adulthood anyway. What would be the point of giving the poor children, who just so happened to be born with something that made this twisted society deem them pathetic, the basic human decency of reporting them missing when they are not seen for days, months, or even years?
Inko can’t help but think how many minors were snatched from their homes just like Izuku was. Were they alive? Was Izuku going to come out alive?
Inko raised the book in preparation to take a swing at one of the men’s bald and exposed head but before it could make contact, the military officer to her right landed a harsh and strong punch to her neck. The second his knuckles slammed into her neck she was plunged into darkness.
She failed.
Her son was gone.
Her entire world was gone all because she was too weak.
When she woke up it was quiet. Her door had been fixed, most likely to mask the evidence of the whole ordeal, but Inko would never forget it. She would never forget the sound of the door being thrown off its hinges or even the pained screams of her son as his hair was being pulled out by being dragged across the dirty floor.
She will never forget the empty apartment, once bright and filled with pleasant emotions, looked lived in and all who entered felt comfortable and welcomed. Now it was dull, dark and the atmosphere of the apartment was no longer welcoming, comfortable or happy. No, it was depressing and uncomfortable. Nothing that once comforted others was there. It had been stolen along with her son.
She will never be the same.
—————————————————————————————————————
The quirkless rehabilitation act was a military project dedicated to cure the quirkless of their “illness.” That was how it was described to the rest of the officers not involved in the project. What it actually was was an act dedicated to creating highly skilled and brutal super soldiers by forcing a quirk manifestation through brutal torture.
Originally, there were sixty children aged four to fourteen in the rehabilitation squad, all from different areas and backgrounds. Those numbers quickly dropped, most couldn’t survive weeks without sleep or food or being electrocuted for hours on end, being tortured, beaten and abused. Out of the sixty chosen for the project, only six developed a quirk, and only one of the sixty survived.
Quirks aren’t supposed to be forced to manifest, if a human doesn’t have a quirk it means that their body is biologically not strong enough. Forcing young, weak and underweight children to develop a quirk that’s ten times stronger than their body is like paying for a funeral before the person is dead.
The only survivor was Izuku Midoriya.
The youngest of them all.
The youngest and the smallest. The doctors were shocked when of all the children they had collected, the weakest one had survived, but they weren’t going to question the blessing when they had lost all their other test subjects. After the experiments came the training, equally as painful and straining but slightly better.
It was two hours of weightlifting and running followed by combat training. After the fourth month of training began the gun training, that was the point where Izuku started to his sanity slipping and being drained through the cracks of his mind, replaced with overwhelming feelings of guilt deep in his gut as he was forced to take life after life after life in the name of “training.”
His “training” started with small animals; dogs, cats, birds, and rodents. Then it got to the hardest part. Killing humans. Humans he knew nothing about, they could have been murders or heroes, they could have been pedophiles or they could have been police. Their role in society didn’t matter, though, because whether it was Izuku that killed them or his observing officer, they would lose their life.
The military were training Izuku to be a hardened, emotionless shell of a human, someone that could cruise through wars and battles without the hindrance of emotion. Izuku tried to keep his emotions, he really did, but day by day he felt himself crack, shatter and fray. One day, he couldn’t take the paralyzing feeling of hurt and sadness he felt every time he had to look into the eyes of someone who had accepted that they were going to die, so he forged an impenetrable barrier around his mind and emotions, one that protected him from cracking any further.
He didn’t want to be that way. As much as he was glad he could put that shield around him he missed feeling. Storing his emotions in a locked box also meant he lost the happy feelings like joy, excitement, comfort, and peace. He felt none of it.
He missed it.
Once he was full of emotion so many people had to tell him to tone it down, it used to upset him but now? He wishes he could feel a fraction of those emotions. He prayed for the day he could feel emotions again. Now he was just tired. Tired of being a shell of a human. A puppet. The military needed a soldier so bad they would kill a child to get it. Izuku isn’t a child. Not anymore. He stopped being a child the
Izuku needed help.
He could only pray there was someone out there that would give it.