The sound was all wrong.
It wasn't the laughter Izuku heard in his head—that sharp, broken thing that had escaped him on the overpass. This was a raw, animal thing, a noise being torn from a man's throat against his will. It was the sound of a dam breaking.
The man in the suit, Mr. Quarterly Report, was on his knees, his face a ruined mask of snot and tears. He wasn't just crying; he was disintegrating. His expensive watch scraped against the concrete as he clawed at the ground, his body convulsing with the force of his sobs.
"...my fault... all my fault..."
The words were a choked litany, each one a hammer blow to the fragile silence of the night. They were meant for a wife named Martha, for children whose college funds were now a line on a spreadsheet under "cost-saving measures." They were not meant for Izuku.
But Izuku heard them. He heard every ragged, guilt-soaked syllable. He stood frozen, a statue of shock, five feet from the epicenter of the devastation he had unleashed. The cold metal of the railing was still a phantom sensation against his back. The entire event had taken less than ten seconds.
A car sped by on the road below, its headlights slicing through the darkness, oblivious.
The mundanity of it was the most horrifying part. The world kept moving. The city breathed. And a man was being psychologically vivisected on a dirty walkway.
What did I do?
The thought was a pinprick of light in a rushing, dark tunnel. It was followed immediately by a colder, more analytical one, a habit forged in a thousand lonely hours of hero analysis.
How did I do it?
His eyes dropped to his right hand. He flexed his fingers. They were just fingers. Pale, slightly calloused from writing, with a faint smudge of graphite near the knuckle. There was no glow. No residue. No physical sign of the cataclysm they had delivered.
A Quirk.
The word echoed in his mind, hollow and mocking. After a lifetime of X-rays and blood tests and desperate, silent prayers, it had arrived not as a gift, but as a curse. It had not burst forth in a doctor's office under smiling eyes. It had festered in the dark, in the silence of his home, and ripened on a diet of despair until it had finally ruptured.
It wasn't All Might's brilliant, world-saving power. It was... this. A violation. A theft. He hadn't thrown a punch or generated energy. He had reached inside that man and twisted the dial on his pain all the way to eleven.
The man's weeping hit a new, shuddering peak. He was curled into a fetal position now, his briefcase abandoned beside him, its contents—neatly organized reports—spilled across the ground and fluttering in the slight breeze like dying moths.
Izuku took an involuntary step forward, his body moving on some instinctual urge to help, to fix what he had broken. His shoe scuffed against the pavement.
The man flinched violently at the sound, his head snapping up. His eyes, red-rimmed and wide with a terror that was miles beyond any fear of physical harm, locked onto Izuku.
For a single, suspended moment, they saw each other. The monster and his victim.
The man didn't see a teenager. He didn't see a face. He saw the source of the agony. He saw the embodiment of every failure that had just been weaponized against him.
"Stay away!" he shrieked, the words tearing his throat. He scrambled backward like a crab, his fine suit jacket scraping against the concrete. "Don't touch me! Get away from me!"
The raw, primal fear in his voice was a physical blow. Izuku stumbled back, his own breath catching in his chest. His heart wasn't hammering anymore; it was a trapped bird, flinging itself against the bars of his ribs.
He turned and ran.
He didn't plan a direction. He just moved, his legs carrying him away from the sound, away from the proof of what he was. He plunged down the nearest alleyway, the shadows swallowing him whole. He ran until the sound of the man's sobs was replaced by the sound of his own ragged panting and the frantic slap of his shoes against wet pavement.
He didn't stop until a sharp, cramping pain in his side forced him to. He collapsed against a grimy brick wall, sliding down into a crouch, his head buried in his knees. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image was burned onto the back of his eyelids: the man's face, twisted in a pain so absolute it transcended the physical.
What is my Quirk?
The analyst in him, the part that had always been his refuge, stirred despite the terror. It was a desperate grab for control, for understanding in a world that had just tilted off its axis.
He replayed the moment. The building vibration in his chest. The touch. The... feedback. It wasn't just that he'd hurt the man. He'd felt it. In that instant of contact, it was as if a circuit had been completed. He hadn't just unleashed his own pain; he'd tapped into the man's. He'd felt the crushing weight of the quarterly report, the ghost of Martha's disappointed sigh, the acid taste of fear for his children's future. He had experienced the man's breaking point as if it were his own, and then he had amplified it and reflected it back at him.
It was empathy made into a weapon.
A hysterical laugh bubbled in his throat, choked and wet. All his life, he'd been told he was too sensitive. Too weak. He felt too much. Kacchan sneered at him for it. His mother sighed over it.
And now it was his power.
He stayed in that alley for a long time, listening to the distant sounds of the city. A siren wailed somewhere, miles away. It sounded like a scream. Everything sounded like a scream now.
He finally pushed himself to his feet, his body aching with a fatigue that went deeper than muscle. He felt hollowed out. Empty. The vibration was gone, leaving a cavernous silence in its wake.
He had to go home.
The thought was a lead weight in his stomach. The silent apartment. The clicking teacup. The museum of his failure. It was the last place he wanted to be, but he had nowhere else to go.
The walk back was a nightmare of heightened senses. Every person he passed was a potential trigger. A woman laughing on her phone—was it a real laugh, or a mask? A businessman barking orders—was he another Mr. Quarterly Report, hiding a universe of pain behind a sharp suit? Izuku kept his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, making himself small. He was terrified of brushing against anyone.
He was a bomb, and he didn't know how to defuse himself.
He reached his apartment building and climbed the stairs, each step feeling like a mile. He paused outside the door, his key hovering in the lock. He took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to school his features into something neutral, something that wouldn't invite comment or, worse, more silence.
He turned the key and pushed the door open.
The silence was different.
It wasn't the heavy, punishing silence from before. It was... waiting.
Inko was still at the kotatsu. The tea was gone. She was just sitting there, her hands folded in her lap. She looked up as he entered, and her eyes... they were different, too. They weren't flat or dismissive. They were sharp. Calculating. She looked at him the way a seismologist looks at a needle jumping on a graph.
She'd heard him leave. She'd heard the broken, breathy sound he'd made. She'd been waiting for him to return.
Izuku stood frozen in the genkan, one shoe on, one shoe off.
"You're late," she said. Her voice was quiet, but it had a new edge to it. A wire of tension running through it.
"The... the trash," Izuku stammered, his mind scrambling for the excuse he'd given hours ago. "It took a while to... tie the bags."
Inko's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. She didn't call him on the lie. She just continued to watch him. It was worse than any accusation.
"Your face is pale," she observed, her head tilting. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
Izuku said nothing. He couldn't. His throat was sealed shut. He felt like a specimen under a microscope. She was looking for cracks. And he was full of them.
He finally finished taking off his shoes and moved to hurry past her, toward the sanctuary of his room.
"Izuku."
He stopped. The sound of his name in her mouth was a trap snapping shut.
"Look at me."
He turned, slowly, forcing himself to meet her gaze. Her expression was unreadable, a calm mask over a deep, still ocean. But her eyes were alive with a terrible, dawning curiosity.
"That sound you made when you left," she said, her voice dropping to a near whisper. "It didn't sound like you."
Izuku's heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. She knows. She can see it. She can see the monster. "I... I just... tripped. On the stairs. It startled me."
It was a pathetic lie. They both knew it.
Inko was silent for a long moment, her eyes tracing the lines of his face, the way he held his arms tight to his body, the slight tremor in his hands that he couldn't still.
"Did something happen out there?" she asked. It wasn't a question of concern. It was a probe.
Yes. I broke a man. I have a Quirk. I'm a monster.
"No," he whispered. "Nothing happened."
A slow, knowing smile touched Inko's lips. It was a cold, thin thing, devoid of warmth. It was the smile of a poker player who knows they've just been dealt the winning hand.
"I see," she said softly. She unfolded her hands and picked up her cold teacup. Click.The sound echoed in the terrible, waiting silence. "Well. Don't forget to take the trash out. For real this time."
She dismissed him, turning her attention to the blank screen of the television as if it held more interest than her shattered son.
Izuku fled to his room, closing the door behind him and leaning against it, his entire body trembling. He slid down to the floor, drawing his knees to his chest.
He was home. He was in his room, surrounded by his All Might posters, his hero notebooks, the artifacts of a dead dream.
The man's screams echoed in his memory. His mother's cold, curious smile burned in his vision.
He had spent his life wanting to be a hero who saved people with a smile.
He had instead become something that weaponized the sound of a breaking heart.
And his mother, the architect of so much of his silence, had heard its first, terrible note. And she had smiled.
The vibration in his chest, the hollow emptiness, began to hum again. Softly. Waiting.
He had a Quirk.
And the world had just become a much more terrifying place.
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A/N: Like I said before, if you DON'T want to read up to chapter 18 then DON'T go to @ Person_Cat0 on Wattpad.
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