Chapter Text
Take a swan dive off the roof and pray for a quirk in your next life!
“Stupid… If anyone would believe me that you said that, you’d be blacklisted from even trying for U.A….” Midoriya Izuku mumbled to himself, feet carrying him back towards his house using an indirect route mostly on autopilot to avoid the usual bullies he encountered after school. He usually took this longer route when he wanted to think to himself more.
Now, usually, it was safe and he had nothing to worry about.
He really should’ve been paying a bit more attention rather than mumbling to himself about Bakugou’s poor choice of words just after school let out but before Izuku had been able to make his escape. Because with how the day had gone so far, it was really inevitable that something else would happen.
It’s weird how events blur during high stress situations.
One moment Izuku is aware that there’s the rattle of a sewer grate, turning around to see someone made of some sort of sludge and listening as they’re saying something about a skin suit?
And the next moment he can’t breathe as something forces itself down his throat and up through his nose.
Something keeps slipping through his fingers as he claws at whatever it is, but the motion is more instinctive than anything considering nothing he does is working even with his talons.
For a few seconds as his vision starts going dark, he thinks he’s going to die.
Something thrums a steady pulse in his chest, warm and comforting, an odd sort of phantom heat coursing through his body but centering around the area of his upper back between his shoulder blades.
The sensation fades in the next moment as there’s someone yelling and suddenly Izuku can breathe again. Not that his clarity lasts long, only enough to feel rushing wind and seeing blond hair and blue eyes hidden in shadows.
All Might…?
The world goes dark.
Something in his chest thrums with heat again and centers around the same spot between his shoulder blades before spreading throughout his body.
The feeling fades when he registers a tapping sensation against one of his cheeks, the world around him coming into blurry focus.
All Might is in front of him, checking on him, gathering something up in… Soda bottles?
Izuku can’t think clearly, everything feels so far away and at the same time so close it’s suffocating.
He’s pretty sure he says something, he’s fairly certain All Might says something back… But then he’s going through the air, a weightless sensation overcoming him and feeling so…
Freeing. (He doesn’t want it to end.)
It ends too soon, stumbling forwards a bit on the top of a roof an unknown distance away from where he had been before. He wasn’t keeping track of the distance, too focused on not getting thrown off towards the ground and the sensation that he belongs in the sky.
All Might’s saying something, but Izuku can’t hear him.
His heart is pounding and his chest is thrumming with an unfamiliar warmth of energy.
“Can I be a hero even if I’m quirkless?!” he gets out in a rush, staring at the number one hero, the man who always preached that everyone could be a hero. That everyone and anyone could save others, could do more in their lives to prevent criminals and villains.
There’s a puff of smoke and Izuku feels his world crumbling as All Might speaks of some type of fight, the scar along his torso, the information being on the level of national secret and saying he can’t share it before-
“No. I don’t believe that someone without a quirk can become a hero, it’s simply too dangerous without that kind of power. You should think a bit more realistically, like becoming a Police Officer or a Paramedic, they’re both fine jobs.”
Izuku’s pretty sure he says something else, but he can’t hear him.
Can’t hear the rooftop door opening and then closing.
He can’t be a hero without a Quirk.
That’s the only thought in his mind for several long moments, almost reverberating around in his head like it’s inside of an echo chamber.
Then…
Take a swan dive off the roof and pray for a quirk in your next life!
He hadn’t taken the words seriously before, not when they were said by Kacchan whose personality was usually… Like that, sometimes even with his other friends.
But he hasn’t been Izuku’s friend for a long time now, has he?
Izuku moves, not entirely aware of himself doing it, heading to the railing of the roof and looking down below.
A busy street. Too many people.
He moves to another side, ignoring the thrum and heat in his chest and back, looking down over-
A mostly empty alleyway, a dumpster and a dead-end caused by some brick for a wall marking some other building’s property end.
He sits down and digs through his bag for his notebook, burnt and still a bit waterlogged from when Kacc- from when Bakugou exploded it between his hands and tossed it out the window into the small koi fountain/pond in their school’s garden.
All Might’s signature glares at him a few pages in, spanning two whole pages.
Izuku finds a blank one soon after and tears it out messily before finding a pencil and starting to write.
If anyone finds his shoes and bag they probably won't care, but he wants to leave a note anyway. Just in case.
He tells his story a bit, in vague details, giving his name and age, his reasoning for wanting to jump, and only leaving out the national security secret All Might had revealed to him. Not that he met the man, just the secret about the man’s time limit and apparently hidden fight. His respect for him is gone, replaced by something hollow and upsetting.
The sun is just starting its descent in the sky by the time he finishes, small dots of tears marking the page as he takes off his shoes and folds the note to tuck inside the laces of one of them. Just so it won’t fly away.
He stands, taking a deep breath as he sets his bag by the red high-tops, climbing over the railing.
Heat and warmth and comfort spread through his chest, the heat centering around his back between his shoulder blades…
He takes a deep breath…
And lets it out in an exhale as he steps off the edge.
He falls too fast to think of any regrets, to let out any sound, to scream, to cry…
The last thing he hears before everything goes very abruptly dark is a horrible squelching crunch as he hits the ground.
…
...
…
Izuku groaned, feeling achy in a way that he imagined only an intense full body workout could give someone. Why was he on the ground?
Scratch that, why did he feel like he hadn’t eaten in a week?
He knew sometimes he had to go without, because his mom forgot to go buy groceries or forgot to leave money for him to go buy them… But he hadn’t ever gone longer than two days without a meal (even those were quietly snuck between his mom’s shifts at the hospital) and the hunger pains now certainly felt worse than they had then.
Combine that with how he felt achy all over and his hands, knees, elbows, and one of his cheeks stung as if they’d been scraped up by rough sandpaper…
He didn’t really feel like wanting to be alive right now.
Alive…
Wait.
Izuku scrambled to stand, letting out a quiet little surprised squawk when he nearly tipped over backwards.
There was something on his back, something was stuck to his back, why wasn’t it-
Shimmery light purple, red-orange, and yellow-gold feathers suddenly came into his view, making him lose every single train of thought he could’ve ever even tried to think.
For exactly two seconds before he was feeling around to find out where the hell the wings had come from.
He froze for another solid ten, contorted a bit oddly, as he felt that the base of the wings were connected to him.
Meaning he has a quirk.
He has a quirk…
He has a quirk!
His wings give an aborted, unsteady, unfamiliar, flap that sends him stumbling. Something sharp catches on one of his feet and he hisses out a breath of pain through his teeth. From the sound when he moves his foot away, it’s glass. But why aren’t his shoes… on…
Oh.
He had… He had jumped…
He had jumped off the roof.
How… How was he alive? The building was almost definitely high enough to kill him upon impact… At least he thought it had…
But if he’d actually… Then why wasn’t anything broken? It was absolutely guaranteed that something would be from that height…
He takes an unsteady half hopping step and freezes, looking down as something very wet makes contact with his soaked socked feet.
In the fading light of the mostly already set sun, casting the sky in shades of orange, yellow, red, and purple, there’s a pool of blood.
And judging by the amount…
He wishes he had more light-
With a sudden crackle, two of the largest feathers he has burst into flames.
While startling, it doesn’t hurt.
Izuku can’t wrap his mind around that, at the moment.
Not when it shows just how bad the blood puddle is.
Not when it shows that almost his entire uniform is soaked and torn in some places .
He’d hit the ground.
He’d lost too much blood to be alive.
How was he a l i v e?
Izuku takes a deep breath, holding it for several seconds, and lets it out slowly.
It’s probably to do with his apparent quirk, right? That’s the only real explanation. The flames have to be part of that too, as is the unfamiliar warmth all over his body that’s similar to what he’s read those with fire quirks experience.
He doesn’t… Really know what to do with any of this.
But clearly it’s been several hours since his… Jump.
He needs to get his things and get home, his body still aching unpleasantly and his stomach still painfully empty.
Now… How is he going to get to the top of the roof?
His wings flap once, the flames dying out from the couple of feathers that’d been lit and leaving behind no trace that they’d ever been on fire in the first place.
Well!
Best to try and get a handle on flying now!
You know.
Before he makes a complete and absolute fool of himself in front of other people, since he’d hate to be unable to control them when around others. That’s just asking to be even more heavily bullied than he is now.
He just hopes it doesn’t take him too long to master it.
It takes him hours to figure out how to fly properly.
And that’s no exaggeration, since the digital clock on his bedside table is flashing five am when he finally manages to get in through his window silently.
In the time it’d taken him to get up to the rooftop to get his things, it was a bit after full dark. And, well, he’d been on a rooftop… So he simply decided to try and fly more, to partial success. His nose and face still hurt a bit from where he’d run into more than one pole or billboard he hadn’t quite seen in time, but it was fine!
He discovered he had better night vision at least, something he was pretty sure he had before, but it seemed… Heightened, now. Not to mention the fact that he could blink without blinking fully, which was… Strange to get used to, but not uncomfortable. It helped keep the wind from stinging his eyes at least, which was a good thing!
Flying home had given him time to think, too, and he found that he really did not want to interact with anyone at Aldera Middle School any longer. With his current uniform absolutely beyond repair, and not having another that isn’t similarly ruined (three guesses by who and the first two don’t count), he figured he didn’t have to. His mom wouldn’t care, she barely ever saw him nowadays as is.
So he just… Won’t.
He cleans himself up in the shower once he’s sure his mom isn’t home, letting himself fall into some kind of instinct (which is fascinating all on its own, really, and he definitely wants to write about all of it in a notebook later) when it comes to his wings and cleaning them, cuts slits into the back of the shirt he wants to wear and…
And as soon as his head hits his pillow he’s out like a light, hoping that things end up better for him going forwards.
The first thing he does when he wakes up, clock blinking red digital numbers saying it’s now three pm, is go out of his room and get something to eat. And then several other things when he realizes he forgot to eat before. The second thing he does is grab his rather beat up laptop and start looking up everything he can about people with bird mutation quirks. Sadly, there’s nothing specific about coming back from the dead, but there’s plenty of other information that’s useful!
Such as preening techniques he can try for his feathers and flight tutorials that he gets lost in for hours until it’s fully dark out and he dresses in the most indiscreet clothing he can before going out of his window. Between practicing his flying and making sure to keep an eye on the time, Izuku manages to somehow stop someone from shoplifting and prevents a mugging. Which is how he goes down an entirely different rabbit hole as soon as he gets home around four am.