Chapter Text
Izuku looked in the mirror to see himself wearing the UA uniform, and the smile on his face was wider than he could have possibly imagined. His lifelong dream had come true. He was finally here.
After a hectic month of preparations, his first day at U.A. had finally arrived. Izuku felt a tangled mix of emotions twisting through his chest during the train ride across the city. Anxiety and excitement refused to leave his chest.
Technically he had been feeling like this for weeks, since the day he received One For All. The closer his start approached, the harder it became to sleep. Every night his thoughts replayed the same memories of the entrance exam and the moment his body rose into the air and smashed into the face of the Zero Pointer. The roar of the collapsing robot still woke him up regularly.
Forty-two bones… He had broken forty-two bones. The number still made him wince. Recovery Girl had fixed him, but Izuku had not forgotten the pain of everything breaking or healing. That memory alone had been enough to keep him awake most of the night before his first day.
Eventually exhaustion won and he drifted off shortly before sunrise, which meant he slept straight through his alarm. When he woke up, he shot out of bed in a panic and rushed through his morning routine with more clumsiness than usual. His tie refused to cooperate with him, and after three attempts he settled for something that looked close enough to ‘presentable’.
His mother delayed him another few minutes with hugs and worried questions about his health. Izuku could never bring himself to rush her when she looked at him like that. Her arms wrapped around him with the same gentleness she had used when he was a child who scraped his knees on the playground. She checked his shoulders, his arms, and even his fingers as if expecting them to fall apart again at any moment.
“Your arms don’t hurt anymore, right?” she asked for the third time.
“They’re fine, Mom,” Izuku said, though he lifted them obediently so she could see. “Recovery Girl said everything healed properly.”
Inko studied him for another second before letting out a small breath that sounded halfway between relief and lingering worry. Izuku knew that expression well. It was the look she had worn during every doctor visit after the entrance exam. Even with Recovery Girl’s Quirk, the memory of forty-two broken bones had not gone away for either of them.
When she told him how proud she was that he had gotten into U.A., the words warmed something deep in his chest and pushed aside the memories of how small he had felt growing up. For years those memories had followed him everywhere. Being told he was useless, to give up or that he could never become a hero.
But when his mother looked at him like that, those voices became quieter.
“I knew you could do it,” she said softly.
Izuku rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed but smiling anyway. “I almost didn’t.”
“You did,” she replied immediately. “That’s what matters.”
Training with her over the last month, both physical training in the dojo and Quirk training in the apartment complex, had also helped more than he expected. When All Might suggested he spend the time between acceptance and the first day learning how to move with [Float], his mom had insisted on helping. At first Izuku worried that practicing with his mother might slow things down, but the opposite turned out to be true.
Their Quirks synergized together in a strange way.
His mother could pull objects toward her with a weak telekinetic tug, something she mostly used for small household chores. Izuku’s Quirk mirrored that motion in reverse. Instead of pulling things toward himself, he pushed himself away from objects or surfaces around him. When the force activated, his body lifted from the ground and drifted upward unless he redirected the movement.
It sounded simple when explained out loud, in practice, it was anything but.
They started in the living room with pillows stacked against the furniture. Inko would stand several steps away and gently tug on him with her Quirk. The moment he felt the pull, Izuku tried to push off in the opposite direction.
The first attempt sent him drifting sideways into the couch.
The second attempt sent him spinning slowly into a bookshelf.
The third attempt lifted him straight upward until his head bumped the ceiling.
“Sorry!” Inko had cried while pulling him back down with hurried little gestures.
After that they moved outside.
In the open air he had more room to move, though controlling his direction remained frustratingly difficult. His mother would pull him at different angles while he practiced adjusting his momentum. Sometimes he managed a smooth change in direction that made his heart leap with excitement. Most of the time he overshot his target and landed in the grass with a surprised yelp.
At least that was the theory. In practice, Izuku still overshot and undershot his movements most of the time. He could use [Float], but controlling how he moved once he left the ground remained frustratingly difficult.
Still, the training had given him something important.
Confidence.
Each day he spent a little longer in the air before losing control. Each day he learned something new about how his Quirk interacted with different surfaces. Even And… well it just felt nice to be close with his mother again.
For years Izuku avoided talking about his dream of becoming a hero because he did not want to worry her… or worry that she wouldn’t support it. Now, those quiet evenings practicing in the yard gave them something new to share.
Eventually that feeling grew strong enough that he told her about One For All.
He couldn’t keep it from her forever. Every time they trained together the truth sat in the back of his mind like a weight he refused to acknowledge. It felt wrong to hide something so important while she was helping him so much.
When he finally explained everything, from meeting All Might to inheriting the Quirk itself, she listened without interrupting. By the time he finished speaking, her eyes were shining with a complicated mixture of worry, disbelief, and pride.
She hugged him again after that and Izuku still remembers the way her voice trembled when she spoke.
“If this power helps you become the hero you want to be,” she said quietly, “then I will support you.”
Remembering those words now steadied his breathing as he hurried toward U.A. Even if today did not go perfectly, he knew something important.
He was not alone anymore.
One For All may not have manifested the way we expected, All Might had said quietly during one of their meetings. My master’s Quirk was [Float], young Midoriya. It is possible that her power still lingers within One For All. Perhaps your body awakened that power first because it resembles your mother’s Quirk? Their functions are not identical, but they are similar. This is only speculation, however. One For All has always been mysterious, even to those who wield it.*
Izuku had tried not to think too deeply about it as thinking about it too deeply tended to make him spiral into nervous rambling. Instead he decided to focus on the enormous building in front of him as he hurried across U.A.’s courtyard.
He had made it. He arrived outside the classroom door with only a few minutes remaining before the bell. His hand hovered on the handle while his thoughts started running in anxious circles again.
Three years in this room full of strangers who were all strong enough to pass the U.A.'s entrance exam.
People who might become friends… or people who might look at him the same way everyone at Aldera used to.
Kacchan might be inside.
The thought tightened something in his stomach, and for a moment Izuku considered the possibility that he might share a class with him again after all these years. Then he reminded himself of what happened outside the principal’s office at Aldera.
Kacchan had cornered him after the acceptance letters arrived. Izuku had braced himself for another explosion of anger or accusations about cheating his way into U.A., and Izuku had given the explanation he and All Might prepared.
He told Kacchan that his Quirk came in late and that it was just the opposite of his mother’s. She pulled objects toward herself while he pushed himself away from things, which allowed him to Float. Kacchan had stared at him for a long moment with narrowed eyes before clicking his tongue.
Apparently the explanation made sense to him and remembering that helped calm Izuku down, at least a little bit. At least Kacchan wouldn’t openly accuse him of lying in front of all of their new classmates.
Izuku inhaled slowly and forced himself to stop hesitating. Maybe Kacchan wouldn’t even be in this class. Maybe the room was full of people he had never met before.
… Maybe the cute brown-haired girl from the exam was inside?
The thought lifted his mood just enough to push him forward. Izuku slid the door open and stepped into the classroom.
“Take your feet off that desk!”
“Huh?”
“It is the first day of school and you are already disrespecting school property and the many upper classmen who came before us!”
Izuku froze as the two voices came from the far end of the room, and unfortunately they belonged to the exact two people he had hoped not to see.
Kacchan leaned back in his chair with his boots planted firmly on the desk in front of him, looking completely unimpressed with the lecture he was receiving. Standing across from him was the tall boy with glasses from the entrance exam, chopping the air with rigid arm movements as he scolded Kacchan with impressive intensity.
“You’re kidding me,” Kacchan muttered. “Did your old school shove that stick up your ass or were you born like that?”
Izuku felt his earlier optimism crumble almost immediately.
Just his luck.
Before he could quietly retreat from the doorway, the boy with glasses noticed him.
“It’s you.”
Suddenly the entire class was looking at him and Izuku’s spine locked up. The boy marched toward him with mechanical precision and stopped a step away.
“Good morning,” he said, before he bowed at a perfect ninety-degree angle.. “My name is Tenya Iida.”
Izuku scrambled to bow back out of reflex. “I’m Izuku Midoriya. It’s really nice to meet you.”
Iida straightened and studied him with intense focus. “Midoriya, you noticed that there was something more to the entrance exam, did you not?”
Izuku blinked in confusion.
“You must possess exceptional perception,” Iida continued. “I completely misjudged you earlier, and I would like to apologize. As a student, you are clearly superior to me.”
Izuku sweat-dropped and opened his mouth to explain that he had not known about rescue points beforehand, but another voice interrupted.
“Hey!”
Izuku turned and felt his brain short-circuit. The brown-haired girl from the entrance exam jogged over with a bright smile.
“You’re the falling boy from the test.”
Izuku’s face immediately heated up. “Y-Yes.”
“You looked really cool when you body slammed that giant robot,” she continued enthusiastically while demonstrating the motion with an exaggerated swing of her shoulder. Izuku nodded rapidly while his brain struggled to process the fact that she remembered him.
“Um,” he said nervously, “I should probably thank you for helping me with the Staff.”
She tilted her head. “How’d you know about that?”
Before Izuku could answer, the room suddenly fell quiet.
A figure earthwormed through the doorway wrapped entirely in an ugly yellow sleeping bag.
“Unless you are planning to spend the year socializing,” the figure said flatly, “you might want to take your seats.”
The class stared in collective confusion as the sleeping bag unzipped and a tired-looking man stepped out and calmly drank from a jelly pouch. He looked like he hadn’t slept in several days.
“It took eight seconds for you to quiet down,” he continued. “That is too slow. Welcome to U.A.’s hero course.”
When the room remained silent, he continued.
“Shota Aizawa,” he added. “Your teacher.”
Mr. Aizawa reached back into the sleeping bag and pulled out a bundle of gym uniforms.
“Put these on and meet me outside,” he said while dropping them on the floor. “We are doing a Quirk assessment test.”
Without waiting for questions, he turned and wiggled back out of the room. Izuku stared at the door for a moment before glancing down at the uniform on the floor.
His first day at U.A. had barely begun, and already his nerves were coming back. Testing his Quirk in front of everyone might not end well if he lost control again. He took a slow breath and reminded himself that he had been training for this.
Even if he still was not very good at it yet.