Work Text:
The class was starting their emergency field medicine unit that day. Every hero had to have at least an Emergency Medical Responder certification before getting their full hero license, so UA had all their second year hero course students take a month-long course right before their summer break. Izuku, well… Izuku jumped the gun. By several years.
Like most things in his life, it had started with a villain attack. Izuku had been only six, full of wonder and dreams and other sweet things just beginning to be dampened by the bruises on his sternum and the burns on his arms. Not affected so badly as to lose his cheery demeanor, but enough that he carried a first aid kit with him at all times.
Usually he only ever had to use it on himself, for things like burns from Kacchan’s quirk or bruises or sprains when someone pushed him, but that was fine. He was fragile, he knew, because he was quirkless, and the teachers didn’t want him to waste the nurse’s time.
This was a different situation.
The man next to him must’ve gotten caught up in the fight, as he was staggering away with a hand over a gash on his arm. Izuku knew how to treat a wound like that; he’d gotten one just the other day from when Tanaka-kun in year 4 had used his quirk to make his binder sharp! He went up to the man, now sitting on a curb outside of the disaster zone, and spoke.
“Hi! I’m Izuku! It looks like you hurt your arm a little bit, could I please put some ant-i-bi-otic cream and a bandage on it?” His mom had taught him to always say please, after all.
The man, a little bewildered from the question and more than a little shocked from the attack, let the boy do so.
Wrapping that man’s arm led to wrapping someone else’s ankle four days later, icing a sprained wrist in another two weeks, splinting a finger and treating a cut on a cheekbone a few days after that… Somebody was bound to take notice, and eventually someone did.
A year later, after the hero field medics had realized the young boy wasn’t going to stop running into villain fights to drag the injured out, they had signed parental permission to teach first aid to their youngest ever volunteer: seven-year-old Midoriya Izuku.
He made his way up through the ranks of emergency medicine slowly but surely. At his eighth birthday party, surrounded by his only friends in the medical team, he opened a box to find a certificate and a card: his EMR license. On his tenth birthday, his EMT was delivered in a similar fashion, and his AEMT on his thirteenth.
(The Hero Commission’s medical board would sign pretty much any EMS license application they came across, as not many people wanted the risks of heroics without any of the glory. It wasn’t hard to ignore the fact that the applicant was quirkless, between him passing the necessary tests and the little bit of money that found its way into a board member’s wallet. The being-a-minor thing wasn’t all that important, either; hero students got licenses younger than eighteen, anyway, and a year or nine wouldn’t be all that different. He was quirkless, after all, so there wouldn’t be any public outcry if he were to be hurt or killed on the job).
Izuku was hurt on the job, many times. Mostly it was scrapes and bruises from the odd piece of rubble kicked up during a villain fight, but sometimes it was worse: a concussion from taking a hit when trying to get a civilian away from the fight or a quirk accidentally going off. The latter was fairly common, but never a forgettable experience when it did happen.
Izuku remembered the first time he was hit by a civilian’s quirk while treating them. It was the first time he’d been to a quirkless clinic, after all, when he was eleven.
He was trying to get the patient onto a gurney to lift them into the ambulance when they’d started seizing: a sure-fire sign of an electric quirk going off while the patient was in shock. Unfortunately for Izuku, the quirk was called Arrhythmia, which caused a malfunction in the electrical system of the heart of whoever it was used on, usually leading to cardiac arrest. Izuku found it fascinating after the fact, but in the moment he collapsed, seeing as he was, well, going into cardiac arrest.
Working with other EMS professionals was a boon, as they were able to start CPR on Izuku almost as soon as his body had fallen to the ground, but they had another issue: being quirkless, the boy wasn’t allowed access to government hospitals or doctors, and the closest private hospital without a policy against treating the quirkless was two prefectures away. At the time, they hadn’t even known what the quirk had been, much less what effects it could have on him.
Izuku was their first priority, both as a member of their family and someone who had been quite literally dead on the ground, so Akemi, the strongest member of their group of paramedics and EMTs, picked up the too-light boy and carried him in her arms the eight blocks to the secret clinic with the red awning.
Akemi slammed open the door, the red shoes on the unconscious boy’s feet and the red cross on the paramedic’s uniform telling the nurse manning the desk all she needed to know as the two of them rushed the boy back to a room to stabilize him as best as they could. When he was finally resting (just asleep, not dead, texted Akemi to the group chat along with a photo of the kid), the clinic’s nurse gave her a weak smile.
“Is the boy yours?” She asked.
Akemi smiled softly. “Spiritually, yes. Legally, he’s an EMT on the same team as me.”
“D’you think we could steal him from you when he recovers?” Joked the nurse.
“Oh no, don’t even ask him that,” replied the paramedic. “He’ll take you up on that and then we’ll lose our favorite green bean.”
He did, in fact, take the quirkless clinic up on their offer when he got better, but he still stuck with his EMS group, too, all the way up too the fateful day when he met All Might and revitalized his dream to be a licensed Pro Hero rather than the everyday hero to the public that he already was.
Not even a few months later he had to say goodbye (not ‘goodbye’, just ‘see you later’) to the quirkless clinic as the dorms were implemented and students weren’t allowed out without express permission, much less on a regular basis. He lamented the loss of his friends outside of UA, but at least they wouldn’t be targeted because of him.
The next time he was able to return to the clinic was in the early spring of his second year. Hero Student Deku, praised nationally for the takedown of Shigaraki Tomura and his League of Villains, walked into the clinic, donned scrubs, and promptly began to set the broken wrist of an eight-year-old.
“Glad to have you back,” smiled a coworker, one Todoroki Natsuo.
“Glad to be back,” responded Izuku, honestly.
Izuku resumed working regular shifts at the clinic. He worked three-hour shifts three days a week after school, and on every Sunday when UA let students go home and visit their families, he'd take his mom to brunch and then work from 1:00 PM all the way until curfew at 10:00.
This led Izuku to where he was now: awkwardly raising his hand when his teacher asked if any students had any form of emergency medical certification.
Izuku froze at the questioning looks from everyone. He was the only one with his hand up. Oops.
He had just begun to lower his hand sheepishly when Aizawa called on him.
“Midoriya.”
“Yes?”
“What sort of emergency medical certification do you have? And why?”
“I have my, uh, AEMT license, Sensei, and I’m about a third of the way through my hours for my paramedic’s license. I volunteered for a while with the Hero EMS.”
“A while?” The teacher asked.
“From 20XX to 20XX. I got my AEMT in 20XX.”
“Shouldn’t it be expired by now, then?”
“Oh!” Izuku exclaimed. “I renewed it in February.”
Aizawa blinked at him. “You got out of a year-long war in the winter and immediately went to renew your EMS license?”
“Uh,” responded Izuku. “Yeah.”
His teacher looked as close to bewildered as he ever got, so he seemed about ten seconds from slamming his head onto the desk in front of him. “If you stopped volunteering two years ago, then why did you renew your license? It would’ve been far easier to do through this class.”
“I stopped volunteering with the Hero EMS but I’ve still been volunteering otherwise…”
“Who with? I’m going to need to speak to whoever’s been supervising you.”
“There’s not really…” Izuku looked up to make sure his teacher understood what he was saying. “You know the clinic with the red awning? In chome 2, block 14?”
Aizawa knew what that meant, of course he would. Even if Izuku hadn’t seen him bringing red-shoe-clad people into the clinic before, he would still know because he was an underground hero. Heroes like him saw the scum of society; not just the flashy media fights, but the real gross parts of life that took place in dark alleys or on the edges of rooftops. They knew a red-shoe couldn’t just go to the closest hospital with a healer, but they also knew the quirkless stuck together.
So Aizawa looked at his student in a new light, his student, who, for whatever reason, risked his goal of becoming a hero to illegally treat quirkless patients. And Izuku waited for the moment he’d notice.
“Why w—” Aizawa froze.
A wry grin began to creep out onto Izuku’s face as his teacher’s eyes locked onto his shoes, his red, thick-soled shoes, his quirkless shoes.
“Midoriya, stay behind after class so we can discuss what you’ll be doing during this unit. You can take a free period now and head back to the dorms to grab all your paperwork.”
Izuku’s classmates, startled by not only the complete non-sequitur but the conversation as a whole, just watched as he gathered his things and left the classroom.
He didn’t go back to his dorm. As soon as he left the classroom, he flew up the stairs and down hallways until he got to the teachers’ lounge. He knocked and smiled at Midnight when she opened the door.
“Hi, Midnight-sensei! Could I speak to All Might-sensei, please?”
Midnight, operating like most people Izuku knew, had decided in his first year that he was All Might’s illegitimate love child. This played out to his advantage (for once) as she let him in with no arguing, just a conspiratorial smile.
Izuku sat down next to Yagi on the sofa where he was tapping something out on his laptop. He leaned closer to the man, pressing their arms together, and definitely didn’t melt into the touch because Yagi was not his dad. He leaned in so he could speak quieter with no chance of anyone overhearing, that’s all.
“Aizawa-sensei recognized my shoes earlier. He wanted to speak with me after class.”
Izuku had been trying not to let his anxiety peek through in his words, but apparently it didn’t work as well as he thought, since Yagi wrapped his arm around the boy and squeezed him into a side hug. Izuku did not melt, no matter what the picture that Midnight sent to the faculty group chat looked like.
Izuku cuddled with sat next to Yagi for the rest of the period, watching the former-Pro send off emails and stewing in his anxiety, until the older man turned to him.
“Do you want to tell Aizawa?”
“I—I don’t know,” stuttered Izuku. “Do you want to tell Aizawa?”
“It’s your choice, my boy. Do you think he’s trustworthy?
Izuku remembered all the times in the past year that Aizawa had been willing to lay down his life to protect his students, even in just the first week of school, and peeked out at Yagi from under his fringe. “Yeah, I think so. Yeah. But… Could you explain it?”
“Of course, my boy.”
Izuku was sure Aizawa wasn’t expecting to be told a two-hundred-year-old story only vaguely hinted to in the underground while just trying to gauge if his students had medical training, and he was sure Yagi wasn’t expecting to be punched in the face by his not-son’s homeroom teacher, but Izuku’s happy with how the day turned out overall.
OMAKE 1: THREE MONTHS LATER
Aizawa pushed open the door in front of him, nodding to the nurse at the desk as he carried a blue-haired, red-shoed pre-teen into one of the back rooms at the clinic. Passing the kid off to a set of nurses, he sat down in a chair up front next to his student, who barely even noticed that he entered the room.
“Hey, Problem Child,” said Aizawa, spooking the teen.
“Oh! Aizawa-sensei!” Exclaimed Izuku. “Uh, funny seeing you here!”
Not that they hadn’t seen each other there on multiple occasions.
“You finished your essay for Mic’s class tomorrow?” asked the teacher.
Izuku’s eyes grew wide. “Oh no…”
Aizawa’s eyebrows raised. “Better get on that, then.”
“But I have to remove an appendix in, like,” he checked his watch, “Seven minutes. Can you pretty please ask Mic-sensei if I could get an extension?”
The puppy eyes were killer on Aizawa, who had to hide a soft smile in his capture scarf. He had a reputation to keep, after all. “Fine.”
Izuku gave the man a grateful smile, and turned in his essay two days later.
OMAKE 2: TWO MONTHS EARLIER
“Hey, Natsuo-san,” said Izuku one evening when they were taking inventory, “Your family name is Todoroki, yeah?”
Then he saw Natsuo flinch, so he backtracked. “You’re—you’re Shouto-kun’s brother, right?”
Natsuo smirked a little bit, back in his comfort zone. “Shouto-kun, huh?”
Izuku waved his hands in front of his face wildly, nearly taking Natsuo’s eye out with the scalpel he held. “It’s not like that! I just—he’s mentioned that his dead brother had a fire quirk and his living one had a cold quirk, but you’re here and although your shoes aren’t red—” They both peered down at Natsuo’s shoes. “—They’re still custom-made for the toe joint, yeah? And you’re in med school, but you can’t apply to higher education without a quirk, so…”
Natsuo grinned. “You’re observant. I bet if you’re close enough to Shouto to call him by his name, you know about our dumpster-fire sperm donor?” Izuku giggled, which Natsuo took as confirmation. “I bet you can guess that he wouldn’t want a quirkless son, then. So… he bribed the doctor to say I didn’t have the toe joint and here I am: Todoroki Natsuo with the minor cold hands quirk that’s actually just Raynaud’s syndrome I got from my mother.”
Izuku snorted out a bitter laugh. “That’s just one more reason to steal all his ligaments.”
Natsuo cackled.
OMAKE 3: TEN YEARS LATER
Being the Number One Hero was to have his every move broadcasted. Izuku wouldn’t give it up for a second—it gave him the ability to save as many people as he could, whether through his work or his activism—but his private life hadn’t been his own since he earned the moniker at twenty-three.
The only thing he was able to completely keep under wraps was the clinic.
Of course, the people knew about his escapades as a young boy in the EMS because the legal documents were publicly accessible and he had the red cross of a paramedic emblazoned on the shoulder of his hero costume, and they knew about his “misdiagnosed” quirklessness from his activism (not to mention the millions of yen he donated to both medical and quirkless charities), but nobody had ever connected the two, and that’s how it would stay.
So after a battle in a crowded shopping plaza, he used Smokescreen to mask his disappearance from the scene as he lifted a young girl from the ground, red fabric on her feet and red blood on her forehead, and carried her several blocks to a building with a red awning. He set her down in one of the back rooms and worked with a nurse to get her settled, mimicking how he had once been helped years before.
And if he was asked a question he had once asked someone else years before, and he responded that yes, yes, she could be a hero, quirkless though she was? Well, there was a reason he was the Symbol of Hope.
And if he’d wrapped her in a hug and gotten a little wet-eyed, those Midoriya tears spilling as much as ever? Well, it would be a breach of patient-doctor confidentiality to say so, wouldn’t it?