Midoriya Izuku was having, by all measurable standards, a terrible day.
This was not, in itself, unusual. Terrible days were something of a specialty for him. He collected them the way other boys his age collected hero trading cards or AllMight memorabilia. Kacchan had been in particularly fine form this morning, demonstrating a new application of his Quirk that involved micro-explosions detonated approximately two centimeters from Izuku's left ear during lunch period. His hearing was still ringing slightly, a high-pitched whine that made the world sound like it was being broadcast through a broken television set.
His latest hero analysis notebook—Number Twelve—was currently residing at the bottom of the koi pond behind the school gymnasium, because apparently Kacchan had decided that the classic "throw it out the window" routine was getting stale and needed a creative update. Izuku had fished it out, of course, because four months of detailed Quirk analysis and tactical observations didn't just grow on trees, but the ink had already begun to bleed and run, turning his meticulous handwriting into abstract watercolor art.
So: terrible day. Ringing ear. Ruined notebook. The usual assortment of bruises in places that his mother wouldn't see unless she looked carefully, which she sometimes did, which was why he'd gotten very good at creative layering of clothing.
He was walking home the long way—the very long way, the way that added twenty-three minutes to his commute but had the advantage of not intersecting with any of the routes Kacchan typically took—when he found the shop.
Which was strange, because Izuku had walked this route at least a hundred and forty-seven times (he counted; he counted everything, it was a habit that fell somewhere between "endearing" and "concerning" depending on who you asked), and he had never once noticed a comic book shop wedged between the laundromat and the closed-down tonkatsu restaurant on Nikaido Street.
It was not a large shop. It was, in fact, the kind of shop that seemed to exist in a state of quantum uncertainty about whether it was a shop at all or merely a very ambitious closet. The storefront was narrow—barely wider than Izuku's arm span—and the window display was so cluttered with faded posters, stacked longboxes, and what appeared to be a life-size cardboard cutout of someone Izuku didn't recognize (a man in a red-and-blue suit with web patterns, posed in a dynamic crouch) that it was impossible to see inside.
The sign above the door read, in hand-painted letters that had seen better decades:
EXCELSIOR COMICS & CURIOSITIES
Est. ????
Below that, in smaller text:
"'Nuff Said."
And below that, on a piece of notebook paper taped to the glass door:
"OPEN (probably)"
Izuku stood on the sidewalk and stared at the shop for approximately ninety seconds. He knew this because he counted. Ninety seconds during which several things happened inside his brain in rapid succession:
I've never seen this shop before.
How have I never seen this shop before?
I've walked this route one hundred and forty-seven times.
One hundred and forty-eight, counting today.
Am I losing my mind?
Probably not. If I were losing my mind, I'd probably be less aware of the possibility of losing my mind.
Unless that's exactly what a person losing their mind would think.
The sign says "Est. Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark." That's unusual.
Should I go in?
I have no money.
You don't need money to look.
That's how they get you.
Who's "they"?
The comic book shop owners.
I don't even know what kind of comics they sell.
That's why you go in and look.
This internal dialogue—which Izuku would later recognize as the most consequential ninety seconds of his entire life, more consequential than the day he'd been diagnosed as Quirkless, more consequential than any day before or after, the fulcrum upon which the entire rest of his existence would pivot—concluded with the simple action of his hand pushing open the door.
A bell jingled. It was a cheerful sound, completely at odds with the general aesthetic of the shop, which could best be described as "organized chaos" if one were feeling generous and "absolute pandemonium" if one were feeling honest.
The interior was bigger than the exterior suggested. Significantly bigger. Izuku's analytical brain—the same brain that could calculate the approximate force vectors of Kacchan's explosions in real-time, the same brain that had filled twelve notebooks with Quirk analysis so detailed that professional hero analysts would weep—that brain immediately flagged this as geometrically impossible. The shop was at least three times deeper than the building it occupied should have allowed, and the ceiling was higher than a single-story structure had any right to possess.
He decided not to think about this too hard.
Shelves lined every wall from floor to ceiling, stuffed with longboxes, trade paperbacks, hardcover omnibuses, and loose issues in plastic sleeves. More shelves ran in parallel rows down the center of the shop, creating narrow aisles that Izuku had to turn sideways to navigate. There were spinner racks—actual spinner racks, the kind that hadn't been common in decades—placed at seemingly random intervals, loaded with comics in no discernible organizational system. Action figures, still in their packaging, hung from hooks on every available surface. Posters covered the walls wherever the shelves left gaps, depicting characters Izuku had never seen before in costumes that were simultaneously ridiculous and deeply, fundamentally cool.
A man in a red cape, fist extended forward, flying through a sky of impossible blue.
A woman with a golden lasso, standing on what appeared to be a battlefield, looking like she had personally offended the concept of defeat and was waiting for it to apologize.
A figure in black, crouched on a gargoyle overlooking a dark city, cape spreading behind him like wings.
A kid—he couldn't be much older than Izuku—in red and blue, swinging between buildings on what looked like... ropes? Webs?
Izuku's mouth was slightly open. He was not aware of this.
"Well, don't just stand there with your mouth open, kid. You'll catch flies."
Izuku's mouth closed with an audible click.
The voice had come from behind a counter at the back of the shop—a counter so buried under stacks of comics, empty coffee cups, and what appeared to be a half-assembled model of a building labeled "DAILY BUGLE" that Izuku hadn't initially registered it as a counter at all. He'd assumed it was just another shelf that had given up on life and gone horizontal.
Behind this counter sat a man.
He was old. That was the first thing Izuku noticed. Old in the way that mountains are old, in the way that suggested he had always been old and would continue to be old long after the concept of age had given up and retired. He had white hair, large glasses that magnified his eyes to an almost comical degree, and a mustache that looked like it had been grown with deliberate, loving care over the course of several decades. He was wearing a button-up shirt with an outrageous pattern—some kind of tropical print, all bright reds and yellows—and he was grinning.
It was a very specific kind of grin. Izuku had seen it before on the faces of people who knew something you didn't and were enjoying the anticipation of the moment you'd figure it out.
"Uh," said Izuku, because his social skills had never been his strong suit. "Hi. Hello. I'm sorry, I was just—I was walking by, and I saw the shop, and I've never noticed it before, which is strange because I walk this way a lot, and—"
"Kid," the old man said, holding up a hand. "You're mumbling."
"—sorry! Sorry. I do that. I mumble. People tell me I mumble. I'm working on it. Sort of. Not really. Sorry."
The old man's grin widened. He leaned forward, and his magnified eyes fixed on Izuku with an intensity that was startling.
"You a comics fan?"
Izuku blinked. "I—well, I like hero analysis? I write about heroes? The real ones, I mean. The Pro Heroes. I do Quirk analysis and tactical breakdowns and—" He cut himself off, because the old man's expression had shifted into something that Izuku could only describe as politely disappointed.
"No, no, no," the old man said, waving a hand dismissively. "Not those heroes. These heroes." He gestured broadly at the shop around them. "Comics. Graphic novels. Sequential art. The good stuff."
"I... don't actually know any of these characters," Izuku admitted, and felt strangely ashamed about it, as though he'd just confessed to a priest that he'd never heard of God.
The old man stared at him.
Then he stared some more.
Then he took off his glasses, cleaned them on his tropical shirt, put them back on, and stared at Izuku a third time, as though hoping that the cleaning process had somehow altered the reality of what he was seeing.
"You don't know any of—" He stopped. He placed both hands flat on the counter. "Kid. You're telling me you've never heard of Superman."
"...no?"
"Spider-Man."
"No."
"Batman. The X-Men. Wonder Woman. The Fantastic Four. Captain America. The Flash. Green Lantern." Each name was delivered with increasing incredulity, as though the old man were listing fundamental constants of the universe and Izuku was claiming ignorance of gravity. "The Justice League? The Avengers? Any of this ringing a bell?"
Izuku shook his head mutely after each name, feeling more and more like he was failing an exam he hadn't known he was taking.
The old man sat back in his chair. He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, very softly, almost to himself:
"A blank slate. An honest-to-God blank slate."
He looked up at Izuku, and his grin returned—but different now. Bigger. Almost manic. The grin of a man who had just been handed the rarest opportunity in the universe and intended to seize it with both hands.
"What's your name, kid?"
"M-Midoriya Izuku."
"Izuku." The old man rolled the name around in his mouth like he was tasting it. "Good name. Strong name. Got a heroic ring to it." He stood up from behind the counter, and Izuku noticed that despite his age, he moved with surprising energy—not spry, exactly, but enthusiastic, as though his body had long since gotten the memo about being old but his spirit had binned the message unread.
"My name's—well, most people just call me Stan."
He extended a hand. Izuku shook it. Stan's grip was warm and firm.
"Now then, Izuku," Stan said, coming around the counter and throwing an arm around Izuku's shoulders with the casual familiarity of an uncle who'd known him since birth, despite having met him approximately forty-five seconds ago. "I think you and I need to have a little talk about what a hero really is."
"I know what a hero is," Izuku said, a little defensively. "I've been studying Pro Heroes since I was four. I have twelve notebooks—well, eleven and a half, since one of them got thrown in a—"
"Pro Heroes," Stan repeated, and the way he said it made it sound like a medical diagnosis for a condition he found mildly distasteful. "Kid, let me ask you something. These Pro Heroes of yours—they need a license to do what they do, right?"
"Well, yes, of course. It's the law. You can't use your Quirk for hero work without a Provisional Hero License at minimum, and—"
"And without that license, even if you see someone in trouble, you're supposed to, what? Stand there? Watch? Call someone with the right paperwork?"
Izuku opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he opened it again.
"It's... more complicated than that," he said weakly.
"It's really not," Stan said cheerfully. "But we'll get to that. First—" He steered Izuku toward the back of the shop, past shelves and spinner racks and a display case containing what appeared to be a pair of red boots and a small card that read Property of B. Allen—DO NOT TOUCH. "I want to show you something."
They reached a door at the very back of the shop. It was a plain door, wooden, unremarkable except for a sign that read:
BACK ROOM
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
(That means you, kid. Go on in.)
"That sign wasn't there a second ago," Izuku said.
"Sure it was," Stan said, in the tone of someone who was absolutely lying and didn't care if you knew it. "Go on. Take a look."
He pushed the door open.
The back room was—
Izuku's brain stalled.
The back room was enormous. Cathedral enormous. Library-of-Alexandria enormous. It stretched back farther than should have been physically possible—farther than the block should have allowed—and it was filled, floor to distant ceiling, with boxes. Longboxes. Short boxes. Cardboard boxes with hand-written labels. Plastic bins. Wooden crates. Filing cabinets. Shelves upon shelves upon shelves.
And every single one of them was full of comic books.
Not the comics that were sold in the front of the shop, whatever those were. These were different. These were—Izuku reached out and touched the nearest box with trembling fingers—these were old. Some of them felt old in a way that went beyond the yellowing of paper or the fading of ink. They felt old the way myths are old. The way stories themselves are old.
The box nearest to him was labeled, in faded marker:
ACTION COMICS #1 — AND FORWARD
He pulled it open.
Inside, nestled in pristine bags and boards as though they'd been placed there by someone who understood that they were handling sacred objects, were comic books. The one on top showed a man—the same man from the poster in the front of the shop, the one with the red cape—lifting a car over his head while terrified people scattered around him. The title read ACTION COMICS and the number in the corner was 1.
"Go ahead," Stan said from behind him. "Read it."
Izuku looked at him. "I can't read English."
Stan blinked. Then he laughed—a full-body laugh that shook his shoulders and made his glasses slide down his nose.
"Kid, just open the book."
Izuku opened the book.
The words were in Japanese.
"That's... that's not..."
"Don't worry about it," Stan said, waving a hand. "The stories want to be read. They'll meet you halfway. Now—" He pulled up a folding chair from somewhere (Izuku had not seen a folding chair in the room a moment ago) and set it down next to a reading lamp that had similarly materialized from nothing. "Sit. Read. I'll bring you something to drink. You're going to be here a while."
"I should really get home, my mom will—"
"Time's funny in here," Stan said. "Don't worry about it."
"That's the second thing you've told me not to worry about."
"Then you should be getting the hang of it by now." Stan patted him on the shoulder. "Read, Izuku. Start with the big guy in the cape. You'll know when to move on."
Then he left, closing the door behind him, and Izuku was alone in a room full of more stories than he could read in a lifetime.
He sat down in the folding chair.
He opened Action Comics #1.
He read.
Superman.
The first one. The original. The template.
Izuku read Action Comics #1, and then #2, and then he lost count, and then he found the collections—the trades, the omnibuses, the thick hardcover volumes that collected entire runs into single books—and he kept reading.
Kal-El. The last son of Krypton. Sent to Earth as a baby by parents who loved him enough to let him go. Found by Jonathan and Martha Kent in the middle of Kansas—a place Izuku had never heard of but could see so clearly in his mind's eye that it felt like a memory. Raised on a farm. Raised with values. Raised to believe that power—unimaginable, world-breaking, godlike power—meant nothing if it wasn't used to help people.
Izuku's hands were shaking by issue ten. Not from fear. From something he couldn't name yet. Something that felt like recognition.
Here was a man who could move planets. Who could fly faster than light. Who could stand at the center of a nuclear explosion and walk out with his cape slightly singed. And what did he do with all of that power?
He helped people.
Not because someone gave him a license. Not because a government agency approved his application. Not because he'd passed a standardized exam and received a laminated card that authorized him to use his abilities in sanctioned hero work within designated operational zones during approved hours subject to regulatory oversight and annual review.
He helped people because people needed help.
That was it. That was the whole thing. Someone was in trouble, and Superman showed up. Not because it was his job. Not because he was getting paid. Not because a camera crew was there to broadcast his ranking to a society that tracked heroes like sports statistics.
He showed up because it was the right thing to do.
Izuku read the early stories—the Golden Age ones, Stan had called them, and the name felt appropriate because they glowed—where Superman wasn't just fighting supervillains. He was fighting corrupt politicians. Slumlords. War profiteers. Domestic abusers. He was picking up the car of a man who was beating his wife and shaking him out of it like crumbs from a tablecloth. He was demolishing substandard housing projects so the government would be forced to build better ones. He was—
"He's fighting systems," Izuku whispered to the empty room. "He's not just punching villains. He's fighting the things that create villains."
He kept reading.
He read All-Star Superman, and when Superman sat with the girl on the ledge—the girl who was going to jump, and he didn't punch anything, he didn't use his heat vision, he just held her and told her that her doctor really was on the way and that he was there and that she was stronger than she thought—Izuku had to stop reading because he couldn't see the pages through his tears.
He read Superman: Birthright, and Superman: Secret Identity, and Kingdom Come, and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and For the Man Who Has Everything, and each one added another layer to his understanding of what this character was, what he meant.
Superman wasn't a power fantasy. He was an ideal. He was the answer to the question: What would the best of us do with the power of a god? And the answer was so simple it hurt: The same things that the best of us do without it. Just... more.
There was a cup of tea on the table next to him. He didn't remember it appearing. He drank it. It was exactly the right temperature.
He kept reading.
Spider-Man.
Peter Parker hit Izuku like a freight train.
Because Peter Parker was him.
Not literally, of course. Peter Parker was from Queens, not Musutafu. Peter Parker had brown hair, not green. Peter Parker was American and had been bitten by a radioactive spider and had proportional spider-strength and could cling to walls and had a danger-sensing ability that warned him of threats.
But in every way that mattered—in every way that counted—Peter Parker was Izuku Midoriya.
Bullied. Overlooked. Underestimated. Smart in ways that people didn't value because they were too busy valuing other things—strength, popularity, the right look, the right background, the right Quirk—
No. Peter Parker didn't have a Quirk. Nobody in these comics had Quirks. That word didn't appear anywhere in any of these stories. These people had powers, or they didn't, and either way they still—
Izuku's hands were shaking again.
Peter Parker was a nerdy kid from Queens who got bullied by a guy named Flash Thompson, and he got powers by accident, and the first thing he did with those powers was try to make money, because he was a teenager and teenagers are idiots, and then his uncle died because Peter had the power to stop a criminal and chose not to, and—
"With great power comes great responsibility."
Izuku read that line.
He read it again.
He read it a third time.
He set the comic down and pressed his palms against his eyes and breathed very carefully for approximately three minutes, because something was happening inside his chest that felt like an earthquake, like tectonic plates that had been grinding against each other his entire life were finally shifting, and the pressure that was being released was so enormous that he wasn't sure his ribs could contain it.
With great power comes great responsibility.
He thought about All Might. He thought about the Number One Hero's gleaming smile, his booming laugh, his catch phrases, his merchandise deals, his rankings. He thought about how All Might was the Symbol of Peace not because he'd chosen to be but because society had appointed him—had taken one extraordinarily powerful man and placed the entire burden of public safety and national morale on his shoulders like a crown that was also a cage.
He thought about Spider-Man, who wore a mask and got called a menace by the newspaper and was wanted by the police half the time and couldn't pay his rent and still—still—showed up. Every single time. Not because anyone asked him to. Not because anyone thanked him. Not because it was his job.
Because it was right.
Because someone had to.
Because with great power comes great responsibility, and that didn't just apply to people with powers, it applied to everyone, every person who had the power to do something and chose not to, every person who looked away, every person who said "it's not my problem" or "someone else will handle it" or "I don't have the right license."
Izuku read Amazing Fantasy #15. He read The Amazing Spider-Man from the beginning—Ditko and Lee, the original run, every issue—and then the Romita era, and the Conway era, and he read The Night Gwen Stacy Died and had to set the comic down again because his hands wouldn't stop shaking.
He read Kraven's Last Hunt. He read The Death of Jean DeWolff. He read Spider-Man: Blue and Spider-Man: Life Story. He read Ultimate Spider-Man—all of it, the Peter Parker run and then the Miles Morales run—and when he got to the issue where Peter died saving his family and his neighbors and everyone he could reach, Izuku was openly sobbing in the folding chair in the back room of a comic shop that shouldn't exist, and he didn't care.
He read about Miles Morales—a kid who didn't want to be Spider-Man, who thought he wasn't ready, who thought he wasn't good enough, who put on the mask anyway because someone had to—and he thought about himself standing at the edge of every disaster he'd ever witnessed, frozen, told by society and by law and by every authority figure in his life that he couldn't help, that he wasn't allowed to help, that helping without a license was illegal—
"That's insane," he said out loud. His voice was hoarse. "That's actually insane."
He kept reading.
Batman.
Bruce Wayne was different.
Bruce Wayne didn't have powers. Not a single one. No super-strength. No spider-sense. No heat vision. No flight. No Quirk. Nothing. He was a man. A human being. Flesh and blood and bone and a will that could bend steel.
His parents were murdered in front of him when he was eight years old.
And instead of breaking—instead of giving up, instead of becoming a villain, instead of letting the darkness swallow him—he looked at the darkness and said: No. Not one more. Not if I can help it. Not while I'm still breathing.
And then he spent every day of the rest of his life making himself into someone who could help it.
Izuku read Batman: Year One. He read The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. He read Hush and Under the Red Hood and Court of Owls. He read the Morrison run and the Snyder run and the King run. He read The Dark Knight Returns—didn't love it, actually, because that Batman had become something that Bruce Wayne would have hated, something hard and cruel and more interested in the war than the people the war was supposed to protect—and then he read Batman: The Animated Series tie-in comics and fell in love with a version of Batman who was terrifying to criminals and gentle with children and who once sat with a suicidal man on a rooftop and talked him down not with threats but with empathy.
Batman was not a hero because he was strong. Batman was a hero because he was stubborn. Because he refused—absolutely, categorically, stubbornly refused—to accept that the world had to be the way it was. Every night he put on that cape was an act of defiance against the idea that one man couldn't make a difference. Every criminal he stopped was a statement: I don't accept this. I don't accept a world where people hurt each other and no one does anything about it. I don't accept that this is just how things are.
He didn't have a license.
He didn't have permission.
He was, technically, a criminal.
And he was the greatest hero Izuku had ever encountered in his life.
Izuku thought about his notebooks. His twelve—eleven and a half—notebooks full of Quirk analysis. He thought about how he had analyzed the powers of Pro Heroes without ever once analyzing whether those heroes were actually heroic. Whether they were doing what they did because it was right or because it was profitable. Whether the system that created and regulated them was producing heroes or soldiers or celebrities or some horrible hybrid of all three.
He kept reading.
Wonder Woman.
Diana of Themyscira walked off the page and into Izuku's heart and stayed there.
She was a warrior. She was a diplomat. She was a princess and a goddess and a philosopher and a friend. She could fight anyone in the DC Universe to a standstill—Superman included, if she had to—and her first instinct was never to fight. Her first instinct was to understand. To reach out. To find the pain beneath the anger and address it.
She carried a sword and a shield and a lasso that compelled truth, and the most powerful weapon in her arsenal was compassion.
Izuku read George Pérez's run—the post-Crisis reboot, where Diana arrived in Man's World as an ambassador of peace and learned about ice cream and politics and human cruelty and human kindness, and loved humanity not because it was easy but because it was worthy—and he understood something that he hadn't understood before.
Strength without compassion was just violence. Power without empathy was just tyranny. And a hero who fought for justice without understanding mercy was just a bully with better press.
He thought about Endeavor. He thought about the Number Two Hero's burning face and burning ambition and the way he treated heroism like a competition to be won rather than a calling to be answered.
He thought about the hero rankings.
He thought about how deeply, fundamentally wrong it was to rank heroes. To take the act of saving lives and reducing suffering and assign it a numerical value and broadcast it on television like a sports leaderboard.
"What the hell is wrong with my world?" Izuku said to the empty room.
The empty room did not answer, but a fresh cup of tea appeared on the table next to him.
He read the X-Men.
He read about a world where people with extraordinary abilities were feared and hated and hunted. Where the government passed laws to register them, control them, contain them. Where society looked at people who were different and decided that different meant dangerous.
And he thought about his world. His world, where eighty percent of the population had Quirks and twenty percent didn't. His world, where the twenty percent were treated as defective. As lesser. As Quirkless.
The parallels hit him so hard he nearly fell out of his chair.
The X-Men's world hated people with powers. His world pitied—no, despised—people without them. But the underlying mechanism was the same: society had decided that your worth as a human being was determined by what you could do rather than who you were. And in both cases, that decision was monstrous.
He read about Professor X and Magneto. Two men who had experienced the same injustice and responded in opposite ways—one with hope, one with fury—and the tragedy was that they were both right. Magneto was right that the world was cruel and that cruelty required strength to survive. Xavier was right that strength without hope was just a slower form of surrender.
He read God Loves, Man Kills. He read Days of Future Past. He read the entire Claremont run, all seventeen years of it, and when he got to the Dark Phoenix Saga he had to stop and pace around the room for ten minutes because the emotional weight of it was making it hard to sit still.
He read about Kitty Pryde. A teenage girl, not much older than him, who joined the X-Men terrified and uncertain and small—and who refused to let any of that stop her. Who phased through walls and through expectations and through every limitation anyone tried to place on her.
He read about Nightcrawler. A man who looked like a demon and had the soul of a saint. Who was kind in a world that gave him every reason not to be.
He read about Wolverine, who was a mess, who was angry and violent and haunted—and who kept trying. Who kept showing up. Who kept choosing to be better than his worst instincts even when every fiber of his being was screaming at him to give in.
"These aren't just stories," Izuku said. He was standing now, pacing, hands in his hair, the way he did when his brain was moving faster than his body could contain. "These are blueprints. These are—someone wrote these. Someone sat down and thought about what heroism actually means and they—they put it on paper and they gave it to the world and—"
He stopped pacing.
"And no one in my world has ever read them."
The thought was so staggering that he had to sit down again.
He read the Avengers.
Not just the big events—though he read those too—but the team dynamics. The interpersonal conflicts. The moments of friction and failure and forgiveness that turned a group of extraordinary individuals into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Captain America. Steve Rogers. A man who was literally chosen because he was good. Not because he was strong—he was a ninety-pound asthmatic kid from Brooklyn before the serum—but because a scientist looked at him and saw someone who understood what strength was for. Who would fall on a grenade not because he could survive it but because he couldn't stand the thought of someone else being hurt.
Izuku read the scene where Steve Rogers threw himself on the grenade in basic training—before the serum, when he was just a small, sick, stubborn kid who refused to stay down—and he thought about every time he'd run toward danger instead of away from it and been told he was stupid for doing so.
He didn't feel stupid anymore.
He felt seen.
He read about Tony Stark—genius, billionaire, recovering alcoholic, man who carried the weight of his own worst impulses like a suit of armor he couldn't take off—and understood that heroism wasn't the absence of flaws. It was the presence of effort. The daily, grinding, unglamorous choice to be better than you were yesterday.
He read about Thor, who was a god and chose to be a man. About Hawkeye, who was a man and chose to stand beside gods. About Black Widow, who was made into a weapon and chose to become a person.
He read Under Siege. He read The Kree-Skrull War. He read Avengers Forever.
Then he read Civil War.
And the bottom dropped out of his world.
Civil War was about superhero registration.
A disaster—a fight between superheroes and supervillains in a small town called Stamford—killed six hundred people, including sixty children. In response, the government passed the Superhuman Registration Act, requiring all superhumans to register their identities and submit to government oversight. To get licensed.
Tony Stark supported registration. He believed that accountability was necessary. That the government had a right to regulate the use of superhuman power. That heroes needed oversight.
Steve Rogers opposed it. He believed that the right to do good shouldn't require government permission. That the moment you needed a license to help someone, you'd created a system where people would stand by and watch others suffer because they didn't have the right paperwork.
The comic didn't take sides. Not really. Both men had valid arguments. Both men did terrible things in service of their beliefs. The story was a tragedy—a story about friends who loved each other and couldn't bridge an ideological gap and tore each other apart trying.
But Izuku took a side.
He took Steve's side.
Not because he thought accountability was bad. Not because he thought heroes shouldn't be responsible for their actions. But because he had spent his entire life living in a world that had answered this question, and the answer his world had chosen was wrong.
His world had chosen Tony's side. His world had chosen registration. Licensing. Government oversight. And the result was—
Hero rankings based on popularity and arrest records rather than lives saved.
A system where the act of helping someone was illegal if you didn't have the right credentials.
A society where children were told from birth that their value was determined by their Quirk, and children without Quirks were told they were worthless.
A culture that had commodified heroism so thoroughly that being a hero was a career path with salary negotiations and brand deals and merchandise rights.
A world where Izuku Midoriya, a fourteen-year-old boy who wanted nothing more than to help people, had been told by every single person in his life that he couldn't. That he wasn't allowed. That he wasn't enough.
"Steve was right," Izuku said. His voice was very quiet. His eyes were very bright. "Steve was right, and my entire world is built on the idea that Tony was right, and it's killing people."
He thought about the villains. Not the big ones—not All For One or whatever loomed in the shadows of his world's criminal underworld—but the small ones. The petty criminals. The desperate people who turned to crime not because they were evil but because the system had failed them. Because they had Quirks that were deemed "villainous" by a society that judged people by their abilities rather than their actions. Because they had been marginalized and abandoned and pushed to the breaking point by a world that valued what you could do over who you were.
The X-Men comics had shown him that pattern. Civil War had shown him its logical endpoint.
His world was a powder keg, and the licensing system was the fuse.
He read the cosmic stuff.
He read about the Green Lantern Corps—an intergalactic peacekeeping force powered by willpower, the idea that the strongest force in the universe was the refusal to give up—and about Hal Jordan and John Stewart and Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner, ordinary people given extraordinary power and told: You were chosen because you can overcome great fear. Not because you're fearless. Because you're afraid and you do it anyway.
He read about the Flash—Barry Allen and Wally West—and about the Speed Force and the idea that the fastest man alive chose to slow down, to be present, to be there for the people who needed him. Not in a blur. Not as a spectacle. But as a friend.
He read about Aquaman—a king who chose duty over comfort, who stood between the surface world and Atlantis and refused to let either side's prejudices destroy the other.
He read about the Martian Manhunter—the last of his kind, alone on a world that was not his, who chose to protect it anyway because it was there and it needed protecting and that was enough.
He read about the Teen Titans—children, teenagers, who looked at the adult heroes and said: We can do this too. We can be part of this. You don't get to tell us we're too young to make a difference. And he thought about his own world, where teenagers were funneled into hero academies and told to compete against each other for limited spots and ranked and evaluated and tested, and the ones who didn't make the cut were told to find another career path, as though the impulse to help people was something that could be denied by a rejection letter.
"Imagine telling Dick Grayson he couldn't be Robin because he didn't score high enough on the entrance exam," Izuku muttered, and laughed—a sharp, bitter laugh that didn't sound like him at all.
He read the events.
He read Crisis on Infinite Earths—the story that unmade and remade the DC Universe, the story where Supergirl and the Flash died saving reality itself, not for glory or recognition but because someone had to and they were the ones who could—and he cried again. He cried for Barry Allen running so fast he dissolved into the Speed Force, running beyond death, beyond existence, still running, still trying to save everyone, even at the cost of everything he was.
He read Secret Wars—the original one, the Beyonder's experiment, heroes and villains thrown together on a patchwork world—and watched Spider-Man hold up a building. An entire building, collapsing on top of him, and he held it up. Not because he was strong enough—he shouldn't have been strong enough—but because the people he loved were underneath it and he would not let them die. His muscles tearing. His bones cracking. Holding up a building through sheer, stubborn, irrational refusal to quit.
He read Infinity Gauntlet, where half the universe was erased with a snap of Thanos's fingers and the heroes who remained—battered, outmatched, facing a god with the power of creation itself—attacked anyway. Not because they could win. Because they had to try.
He read DC: The New Frontier, Darwyn Cooke's love letter to the Silver Age, the story that said: The measure of a hero is not their power. It's their heart. It's the moment they stand up and say "I will not look away."
He read Marvels, and saw the Marvel Universe through the eyes of an ordinary man—a photographer named Phil Sheldon, no powers, no costume, just a camera and a front-row seat to miracles—and understood that these stories were never really about the people with the powers. They were about everyone else. About the world they were trying to save. About the everyday, ordinary, beautiful, terrible, human world that was worth saving not because it was perfect but because it was real.
He read things he'd never heard of. Things that he suspected no one outside a very small, very dedicated community of readers had heard of.
He read Astro City, Kurt Busiek's masterpiece, which asked: What does a world with superheroes actually look like from the ground? What does it feel like to live in a city where gods walk among you? And the answer was: It feels like hope. Complicated, messy, sometimes terrifying hope—but hope nonetheless.
He read Starman, James Robinson's seventy-issue opus about legacy and responsibility and what it means to inherit a name that's bigger than you are.
He read Hitman, Garth Ennis's profane, hilarious, heartbreaking story about a contract killer in Gotham City who somehow, despite everything, despite himself, kept doing the right thing.
He read The Omega Men by Tom King, a story about insurgency and terrorism and the impossible moral calculus of revolution, and he thought about Stain—the Hero Killer, the man who murdered Pro Heroes because he believed they were false—and he realized that Stain was right about the problem and catastrophically wrong about the solution.
He read Irredeemable, Mark Waid's horror story about what happens when Superman goes wrong—when the most powerful being on the planet decides that humanity isn't worth saving—and he understood with crystal clarity why the Symbol of Peace model was a ticking time bomb. Because when you build your entire society around one person, you've created a single point of failure. And when that person breaks—and everyone breaks eventually—everything they held up comes crashing down.
He read Planetary, Warren Ellis's archaeology of superhero fiction, which argued that the stories we tell about heroes shape the world as powerfully as any Quirk.
He read Supreme Power. He read Rising Stars. He read Invincible—all one hundred and forty-four issues—and watched Mark Grayson get beaten to a pulp over and over again and keep getting up, keep fighting, keep choosing to be a hero even when every rational analysis suggested that the cost wasn't worth it.
He read Miracleman, and stared at the final arc—the Olympus arc—in which a superhero conquered the world and rebuilt it as a utopia and the story asked: Is this heroism? Is this tyranny? Is there a difference when the one making the decisions is the one with the most power? And he thought about All Might and felt cold.
He read Watchmen.
Watchmen took a long time.
Not because it was long—it was only twelve issues—but because every page required him to stop and think. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had constructed a world where superheroes were real, and then they had asked: What would that actually mean? What kind of person puts on a costume and goes out at night to fight crime? What does that do to them? What does that do to society?
The answers were not comforting.
Rorschach was a lunatic. The Comedian was a monster. Ozymandias was a utilitarian nightmare. Dr. Manhattan was a god who had forgotten what it meant to be human. Nite Owl was a good man in a bad system who had given up because the system told him to.
And Silk Spectre—Laurie Juspeczyk—was a woman who had been pushed into heroism by her mother and had never been asked what she wanted.
Izuku read Watchmen and understood that it was not an attack on superheroes. It was an attack on the systems that superheroes existed within. It was a warning: This is what happens when you institutionalize heroism. This is what happens when you let governments control the people who are supposed to hold governments accountable. This is what happens when you take the beautiful, irrational, fundamentally human impulse to help others and bury it under bureaucracy and politics and power.
His world had done exactly that.
His world was Watchmen.
Not the dark, gritty, cynical version of Watchmen that edgy readers took as an instruction manual. The real Watchmen. The version that was a warning. The version that said: Don't let this happen. Don't let the beautifully absurd dream of heroism become this.
Too late, Izuku thought. It already has.
He read Kingdom Come last.
He didn't know why he saved it for last. Something told him to—some instinct, some narrative sense that had developed over the course of however many hours he'd spent in this room reading stories that were not from his world but were, somehow, more true than anything his world had ever produced.
Kingdom Come was about Superman coming back.
Superman had retired. The world had moved on. A new generation of "heroes" had risen—violent, reckless, more interested in fighting each other than saving people—and the world was tearing itself apart. And Superman, who had retreated to his farm in Kansas because the world had told him he wasn't needed anymore, looked at the devastation and said:
No.
Not this.
Not while I'm still here.
And he came back. Not perfectly. Not without mistakes—the book was full of mistakes, full of good intentions gone wrong, full of the terrible arithmetic of trying to save a world that wasn't sure it wanted to be saved. But he came back because someone had to, and he was Superman, and that meant something. It meant something even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.
The final pages—Norman McCay and the Spectre watching Clark Kent at a diner, holding his newborn child, the next generation, the hope—
Izuku closed the book.
He sat in the folding chair in the back room of Excelsior Comics & Curiosities and pressed the book against his chest and breathed.
He breathed for a very long time.
When he opened the door and walked back into the front of the shop, Stan was behind the counter, exactly where he'd been when Izuku had gone into the back room. The light coming through the front window hadn't changed. The clock on the wall—a novelty clock with Spider-Man's arms as the hands—showed the same time it had shown when he'd entered.
"Told you," Stan said. "Time's funny in there."
Izuku stood in the middle of the shop. He was different. He could feel it in the way he held himself, in the set of his shoulders, in the way his eyes tracked the room—not with the nervous, flinching alertness of a bullied kid but with the calm assessment of someone who had read a thousand stories about people who refused to be afraid.
"Why?" Izuku asked.
"Why what?"
"Why don't these exist in my world? These stories. These characters. Why has no one ever—why haven't I ever—"
Stan took off his glasses and polished them again. When he put them back on, his eyes were kind.
"Every world gets the stories it needs, kid. Some worlds get them early. Some worlds get them late." He shrugged. "Your world got Quirks instead. Powers, abilities, mutations—the real thing, right there in the flesh. And everyone was so dazzled by the reality of superhumans that they never stopped to ask what a superhuman should be. They never needed the stories because they had the real thing." He paused. "Except the real thing, without the stories... it's just power. Just people with abilities and no framework for what those abilities should mean."
"No Uncle Ben," Izuku said quietly. "No Jonathan Kent. No Thomas Wayne. No one to say with great power comes great responsibility. No one to teach them."
Stan pointed a finger at him like a gun. "Now you're getting it."
"But these are fictional characters. They're not real."
"Kid." Stan leaned forward. His magnified eyes were intense behind his glasses. "Let me tell you something about fictional characters. Superman has inspired more acts of genuine heroism than any real person who ever lived. Spider-Man has talked more kids out of suicide than most therapists. Batman has taught more people about the value of perseverance than any self-help book ever written. These characters aren't real?" He shook his head. "They're the most real things that have ever existed. Because they're not limited by the flaws of a single human being. They're ideas. They're ideals. And ideals don't die, kid. They don't get tired. They don't get corrupted. They just keep going, as long as someone's there to carry them."
Izuku was quiet for a long time.
Then he said: "I'm Quirkless."
"I know."
"Everyone says I can't be a hero."
"I heard."
"They're wrong."
Stan's grin spread across his face like sunrise.
"Yeah," he said. "They are."
Izuku looked down at his hands. His Quirkless, ordinary, powerless hands. Hands that had written twelve notebooks full of Quirk analysis. Hands that had reached out toward danger every time he'd seen someone in trouble, only to be pulled back by a society that said he didn't have the right.
Bruce Wayne didn't have powers.
Peter Parker was a bullied kid from Queens.
Steve Rogers was a ninety-pound asthmatic who threw himself on a grenade.
Hal Jordan was chosen not for strength but for the ability to overcome great fear.
Superman—the most powerful being in fiction—was defined not by what he could do but by what he chose to do.
None of them had licenses.
None of them had asked for permission.
None of them had filled out an application or passed a standardized test or received a laminated card from a government bureaucracy authorizing them to do what was right.
They just did what was right.
That was it. That was the whole thing. The entire philosophy of heroism, distilled to its purest form: See someone in trouble. Help them. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait for someone else. Don't worry about whether it's your job or your responsibility or your legal obligation. Help them because they need help and you can provide it and there is no force in the universe—not law, not convention, not fear, not a world that tells you you're not enough—that can make that wrong.
"I'm going to be a hero," Izuku said.
Not I want to be a hero. Not I wish I could be a hero. Not Do you think I could be a hero?
I'm going to be a hero.
Present tense. Statement of fact. Immutable. Unqualified. As certain as gravity.
"Not a Pro Hero," he continued. His voice was steady now—steadier than it had ever been. "Not a licensed, regulated, ranked, merchandised hero. A real hero. Like them." He gestured at the posters on the walls, at the longboxes and the spinner racks and the life-size cardboard cutout of Spider-Man in his dynamic crouch. "Like Superman. Like Spider-Man. Like Batman and Wonder Woman and Captain America and all of them. I'm going to help people because people need help. I'm not going to ask for a license. I'm not going to wait for permission. I'm not going to let anyone tell me I can't."
Stan was beaming. Actually beaming, like a flashlight with a face.
"Kid," he said, "I was hoping you'd say that."
He reached under the counter and produced a bag—a large paper bag, the kind you'd get at a bookstore, stuffed full. He placed it on the counter and pushed it toward Izuku.
"What's this?"
"Homework."
Izuku opened the bag. Inside were trade paperbacks. Dozens of them. Superman. Spider-Man. Batman. X-Men. Avengers. Justice League. And others—titles he hadn't read yet, stories he hadn't discovered, characters he hadn't met.
"I can't afford—"
"Did I ask for money?" Stan said, sounding offended. "These are gifts. From me to you. Consider it an investment." He winked. "I've always had an eye for talent."
Izuku picked up the bag. It was heavy. It was the best kind of heavy.
"Thank you," he said. "I don't—thank you."
"Don't thank me, kid. Thank the people who wrote those stories. They put a piece of their souls on the page so that someone like you, in a world like this, could find it." He paused. "And then go out there and do something about it."
Izuku nodded. He turned toward the door.
"Hey, kid."
He looked back.
Stan was leaning on the counter, grinning that grin—the one that said he knew something you didn't. The one that said the future was going to be very interesting.
"One more thing." He held up a finger. "Remember—it's not about the powers. It never was. Batman doesn't beat Superman because he's stronger. He beats him because he's prepared. Spider-Man doesn't save the city because he can lift ten tons. He saves it because he won't stop trying. And Superman—" Stan's voice softened. "Superman isn't the greatest hero ever because of what he can do. He's the greatest hero ever because of what he chooses not to do. He could conquer the world before breakfast. Instead, he saves a cat from a tree and writes an article about municipal corruption. That's heroism, kid. Choice. Not power. Choice."
Izuku felt the words land in his chest like seeds.
"I understand," he said.
"I know you do," Stan said. "That's why I showed you the back room."
Izuku walked to the door. He pushed it open. The bell jingled.
He stepped out onto Nikaido Street. The sun was exactly where it had been when he'd entered. His phone showed the same time. His mother wouldn't be worried. No time had passed.
But everything had changed.
He looked at the world around him. At the buildings and the streets and the people walking past, some with visible mutations—tails, extra arms, unusual skin colors—and some without. A world of Quirks. A world that had sorted humanity into categories based on what their bodies could do and had built an entire civilization on the assumption that power was the same as worth.
A world without Superman.
A world without Spider-Man.
A world that had never heard the words with great power comes great responsibility and desperately, desperately needed to.
Izuku Midoriya adjusted the strap of his bag—heavy with stories, heavy with ideals—and started walking home.
He had a lot of work to do.
He had to learn to fight—not with a Quirk, because he didn't have one, but with his body and his mind and his refusal to stop. Like Batman. Like Captain America before the serum. Like every hero who had looked at impossible odds and said: Yeah, and?
He had to study. Not just hero analysis—real study. Forensics. Engineering. First aid. Psychology. Everything Batman knew. Everything Spider-Man had learned. The thousand skills that didn't require superpowers and that no hero course in his world bothered to teach because they were too busy training students to punch harder.
He had to be better. Not better than everyone else—better than himself. Every day. Every hour. The relentless, unglamorous, exhausting work of becoming the person the world needed him to be.
And he had to do it without a license. Without permission. Without the blessing of a system that would rather let people die than allow an unlicensed civilian to save them.
He was going to break the law.
He was going to break it every single day.
And he was going to do it with a smile on his face, because that's what Superman would do. Because that's what All Might—the real All Might, the one beneath the brand and the rankings and the merchandise—would do if he remembered why he'd started.
Izuku walked home through the streets of Musutafu, and for the first time in his life, he wasn't afraid.
Behind him, on Nikaido Street, the bell of Excelsior Comics & Curiosities jingled one final time as the door swung shut on its own.
By the next morning, the shop would be gone—vanished as though it had never existed, leaving behind a blank storefront between the laundromat and the closed-down tonkatsu restaurant. No sign. No door. No impossible back room full of stories from a world that had never existed.
Just a gap. A space where something important had been.
But the stories remained. In a bag, in a bedroom, in the hands and the heart and the unbreakable will of a Quirkless boy who had read about heroes—real heroes, fictional heroes, heroes who were more real than anything his world had ever produced—and decided to become one.
No license required.
Stan, wherever he was (and he was somewhere; men like Stan are always somewhere), leaned back and smiled.
"'Nuff said," he murmured to no one in particular.
And the story began.
END OF CHAPTER 1
Next time: Izuku begins training. A certain underground hero notices something strange happening in the back alleys of Musutafu. And Bakugo Katsuki, for the first time in his life, finds himself genuinely confused by Midoriya Izuku—because the boy who used to flinch when Katsuki raised his hand now looks at him with something that isn't fear.
It's pity.
That's way more unsettling.