family ties.

LIKE FATHER LIKE SON

Izuku is a bright child. Glowing eyes and colorful bandages and scraped knees dotted in star-burns.

He's smart - he knows too much too fast━never really a child in the ways everyone wants. He takes school too seriously and he knows how to keep up with people. How to make them trust him━to make them love him. He doesn't have anything they hate. Izuku had wide eyes and freckles and a chip between his teeth. Green as life itself, he knows how to corrupt and how to heal. He's a fox in sheepskin in a chicken coop and he wants to be a hero. Wants to save anyone, make them smile like the loud man on the computer. He's three-years-old and get want to make them smile.

He knows how to calm people down, how to sooth egos and make people feel safe. Make them feel special in his eyes.

There's nothing wrong with him.

Until there is.

He's not like everyone else. He's weak━he's a trouble maker that gets into too many fights with a creepy stare and a chipped tooth and bandages over his wounds. He never ties his tie right and he cheats on every test. He's stupid and useless and he's better off jumping off his middle school roof and praying that in his next life he isn't suck a freak. So he gives up━he looks at his best friends chin and he wants to cry.

He's got loose tears and a bruised face. Self-esteem so low he probably is better throwing his useless body off a roof. So he walks home holding his waterlogged dreams home through a burnt-wet notebook with all his brilliance in it. He's got a broken dream and a crumbling heart sitting black in his chest. Waiting for it to shrivel and die one day. His hands are covered in smudged ink and graphite and waterstained hope. Or despare (dip him in melancholy maybe then he'll be pretty).

But to his best friend it's water under the bridge, right? Not like he (useless, stupid, worthless, creepy━) could mean anything if he did die. So it's water under the bridge, he thinks, walking home, under the bridge.

He choked on something━slime. He's suffocating and he thinks it's ironic that he's dying from an unrelated accident. An attach━waterlogged and heavy with burns. He's like his notebook, isn't he? Brilliance covered in ash and tears of catharsis. Drown him 'til he's ineligible; lines blurred an vision black as his dying dreams strapped to his rotting heart.

Then━then he wakes up. The man he's looked up to for so long. The best - number one. Holding the world on his broad shoulders for so long and Izuku wants so badly to ask. So badly to know that he's wrong. To think he's not what he really is under his inundated grin.

So he flies.

He's told to let go (of life itself) but then he points out his inevitable demise should he do so, and his hero decides it's better to drop onto a building (it's perfect really, he can jump off if thing go south). The man, his hero, shiny and golden, scolds him. Izuku━Izuku still has his question. Can someone like him, useless and weak and deformed to his toes, become a hero too?

No. Breaks through his bones. Tears him apart and breaks through his skin. He thinks that he's better off jumping. That the asphalt seems like a better embrace than his mother (kind as she is, she's not enough━maybe it's genetic). Even though she isn't enough, he can bear to make he sad. Pull her over with worry, shatter her world, because that's what he is. He's her world, something she's lost everything for; and he can't take it away.

Izuku walks the long way home. It passes through the city (where something's on fire). He smells nitroglycerin and freezes and runs toward it, because danger is his calling. Maybe this time the next friendly reminder leaves him with a gouge in his chest so empty that something had to have been there. So when he looks at blood eyes and fearstained lips he runs. Because there is nothing his best friend hates more than being weak. And that's what he is right now (choked on something like slime).