Chapter Text
Izuku Midoriya didn’t have the best childhood. Being a quirkless kid was hard, his teachers graded him more harshly than the rest of his class, and his childhood friend harassed him constantly. He spent most of the last year of middle school hiding. Squeezed into closets or lockers, or on the roof once he figured out how to get up there.
Kacchan didn’t go out of his way to find him, but sometimes his lackeys did, so he hid places they wouldn’t go looking for him. Spending all that time alone gave him lots of time to think. Some of it was spent writing in his journal, but a lot of it was spent thinking about his future, specifically, where he was going to go for High School.
He knew Kacchan was planning on going to Aldera High for their hero prep course, and he considered going there too, for the same reason, but after some extensive research online he discovered that, while the school *claimed* to accept quirkless students, they had never actually accepted one, so that was out.
So, he knew he wanted to go to UA for college, but that was still a ways off. He thought about what the best way to do that would be, and decided a bit of research on the University was in order.
As he scrolled through the school’s website, his eye was caught by a banner lauding an award the school had earned this past year. He’d seen several for the heroics department before, but this one was highlighting their Analysis program. Analysis, like his hero analysis for the future, maybe he should look into that, even if he didn’t end up pursuing it, could be interesting to learn more. He clicked the link to the program and started reading.
Department of Analysis
The Analysis Department at UA is a program that runs parallel to and interacts heavily with many other departments revolving around heroics. However, the department is not simply a service for the quirk theory curricula of these other departments. The Analysis Department offers one of the best programs in the country for developing skills for quirk analysis for a variety of careers. Analysis majors often choose to pursue dual degrees in Business, Engineering (often with an emphasis on Support), or even Heroics if they are able to sufficiently prove their skills.
That’s interesting, He’d never considered that Analysis was that important of a skill. Izuku paused his scrolling to look down at his notebook, flipping through a few pages and finally pausing on his analysis of Death Arms. He pulled up a forum post that someone had made compiling all of the publicly known information on him, as well as the most common speculations, and compared them.
Death Arms had talked extensively about his quirk, it was a simple strength quirk that only affected his arms, so it was simple and he didn’t worry that much about it’s weaknesses since any villain smart enough to exploit them could figure them out without his help. However, when he compared his notes to the ones on the forum, he found that his contained more than twice as much information.
Midoriya flipped through a few other heroes with simple quirks, comparing public information with his notes, and quickly realized his were always much longer than the others. Maybe I should look for a high school with good analysis classes then.
He started looking at them, but was startled when his alarm rang, warning him of his next class. Guess I’ll look more at home. Izuku thought as he readied himself for class, slipping into the room moments before it started. The rest of the day passed by uneventfully, with Izuku barely avoiding Kacchan.
When Izuku got home, he dug himself into research, looking at schools in the area with any level of analysis courses, as well as their rules about quirkless students. He briefly went down a rabbit hole about the treatment of quirkless people at those schools that did accept them, and was looking into online highschools when he heard his mom shout “Dinner’s ready!” from the kitchen.
He kept mumbling to himself about the things he’d learned as he went down to dinner.
“You seem excited today,” Inko stated as he entered the room, “do you want to tell me about it?”
“Oh, was I mumbling? Sorry, sure, I can tell you about it.” He said quickly, barely pausing between the words. “I was just thinking about next year, since I need to decide where I want to go soon. I know I want to go to UA for college, so I started there and worked backwards.”
“You’re still trying to be a hero?” she questioned with a bittersweet smile.
“Maybe, but they don’t just teach heroes at UA mom. I saw that their analysis program won an award recently, so I started looking into that.”
Her smile this time was more genuine. “Like your notebooks?”
“Exactly! So I started looking at high schools with good programs for that! How would you feel if I did high school online?”
Inko couldn’t hold back the tears as they kept discussing Izuku’s new path for the future.