Be Careful What You Wish For

Discovery; Fear; Relief

AN: Warning for fairly graphic description of gore in this chapter. But it's gonna get worse. 

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The second time. The second time he noticed. He noticed, and the realization hit him like a head on collision on a busy highway.

I have a quirk.

Not the one given to him by All Might, passed on to him after ten months of grueling training that transformed his scrawny and soft body into hard muscle. This one, he was born with. This one, he had from the very start. And he thought-

I lied to All Might.

Of course, it hadn't been intentional. And realistically, he knew-knew that All Might didn't choose him for his lack of quirk, but for his spirit, the spirit of a hero. But that didn't stop the guilt, telling him he'd done something wrong, eating him inside out.

But next to that, next to the guilt and shame, was excitement. Happiness. Because-

I have a quirk!

They had all been wrong: mom, Kacchan, his classmates, the doctor...

"Frankly, I'm not sure what is wrong," the doctor sighed. "My first guess was that your son is one of the unlucky few born quirkless, but none of the test we've performed indicates that that is the case. By all means, he should have a quirk by now.

"It's possible your son's quirk is just too weak to be noticeable, but for now, we just have to assume he's quirkless. I would recommend a quirk therapist in the possible scenario that Midoriya-chan does have a quirk, but haven't figured out how to activate it. It's rare, but possible with quirks requiring very specific conditions to be activated."

The therapist didn't help. Nothing they made him do had any noticeable effect, and by the end of it, they decided to just write him off as quirkless. But now... of course nothing had worked. Despite all the odd little exercises they had him do, there was one thing they could never ask of him. A trigger so specific, there was no way Izuku could have ever discovered it on his own.

Death.

The third emotion, after his initial guilt and excitement, was dawning terror.

I have to save that girl!

The second time Izuku died, it was during the U.A. entrance exam when he fell to his death after failing to save a kind girl from getting crushed by a giant robot. She helped him beforehand, when he was about to embarrassingly fall flat on his face strolling up the road to U.A., preparing to enter the famous hero academy for the first time. With her quirk, she floated him gently to safety, and he had let her die!

The robots were part of the practical exam. Most of them were small, manageable, worth only a few points each, ranging from the one pointers to the more dangerous three pointers. The goal was to either destroy or disable them, but there was one last catch.

The zero pointer. A robot too dangerous to take on, and better avoided. An obstacle, rather than an enemy. Izuku really hadn't been sure what to expect when the hero and U.A. teacher Present Mic explained it to them, but it wasn't this. This wasn't anobstacle, it was a monster!

He still charged at the terrifying behemoth head on, after unfreezing his legs left paralysed by fear and forcing them to move. Seeing what it did to that girl-he couldn't just stand back. In fact, the terrible sight only spurred him on because he couldn't let any of the other participants meet the same fate!

Without a second thought, he used the power bestowed on him by All Might to blow a hole straight through it's head, ripping through metal and wire alike like paper.

His arm broke. His legs, infused with the same destructive power, had broken as well, after he used them to reach the head of the colossal robot to begin with. It was through an incredible jump that he aimed for the terrifying and merciless robotic visage, which would prove to be his downfall. Quite literally, in this case.

He fell, and belatedly realized that he didn't know what to do! He never planned this far. In fact, he hadn't planned at all! It was just like back with Kacchan and the sludge incident; he moved before he could even think.

With a wet, sickening splat and crack of broken bones and soft flesh exploding in a rain of nauseating red that left his shattered body even more mangled than it already was, he hit the ground. He was dead before the pain even registered.

And then he was back, which left him running around the exam grounds in a frantic search for the girl. This time he had to reach her in time, he had to!

In his panic, he completely forgot why he even came here in the first place. The other robots were forgotten, unimportant in the scheme of things. Right now, he wasn't thinking about racking up enough points for U.A. to accept him; the only thing on his mind was the girl, because he knew his quirk had brought him back for a reason. And that reason was to save a life.

He found her, in the same spot as before, but this time she was still alive. There was still time. This time, he would save her.

Much like in the first timeline, he jumped. Perhaps he should have thought of a different approach, considering how last time ended, but nothing else popped into his mind at that moment. His priority was to make sure the girl was safe. What happened after wasn't important.

He punched. The hulking beast fell, and he along with it.

He only had a fraction of a second to relax, knowing that the girl would live to see another day, before panic took hold of him once more. He was going to die, again , and this time he wasn't sure if he would come back.

But like with All Might and the villain of sludge, Izuku's choices gave this future a different outcome.

With a sharp slap, he came to a sudden stop, but it wasn't because of the hard, unforgiving concrete ground. He was floating, and in the edges of his foggy vision (exhaustion, pain, fear, relief), he saw the kind girl, hand raised and teary eyed.

Ah... I was saved again... were his last thoughts, before darkness took over and he passed out.

He woke to a small and wrinkled lady standing over him, and though it took a few seconds, he soon identified her as Recovery Girl, U.A.'s own personal nurse and healer. She shook her head and tutted disapprovingly, scolding him for his reckless behavior, but Izuku couldn't find it in him to regret his decision. The girl was alive, and that's all he needed to know. His broken bones had been fixed and his swollen flesh returned to it's original shape and color, the burning ache in his body long gone.

Everything would be fine.

Whether he got into U.A. or not, which he sincerely doubted, that girl was alive, breathing, and so was he.

Everything would be fine.