The rooftop door clicked shut, and with it, the entire world seemed to go silent.
Izuku Midoriya stood frozen, his red sneakers scuffing the concrete. The wind on the rooftop was biting, carrying the scent of the city—exhaust, ramen, dust—but Izuku couldn't smell any of it. All he could sense was the phantom echo of the words that had just dismantled his soul.
"I cannot simply say 'you can become a hero even without power.'"
It wasn't the malicious mockery of Katsuki Bakugo. It wasn't the dismissive apologetics of the doctor who diagnosed him at age four. It was worse. It was pity. It was a realistic, logical, heartfelt dismantlement of his existence by the one man who represented the impossible.
All Might, the God of their society, had looked at Izuku's desperate, trembling hands and essentially said: You are broken, and you cannot be fixed.
Izuku walked to the railing. He looked down at the streets of Musutafu. People looked like ants. Heroes looked like specks of color. For a terrifying second, the thought crossed his mind—the suggestion Kacchan had given him earlier that day. Take a swan dive.
"No," Izuku whispered, his voice cracking. "No."
He pulled back from the edge, but something inside him had already fallen. The Izuku Midoriya who believed in miracles died on that roof. The boy who walked down the stairs was a hollow shell, filled only with a cold, suffocating grief.
The walk home was a blur. Explosions rumbled in the distance—the Tatoin shopping district. Smoke billowed into the sky. Usually, Izuku would have been sprinting toward the chaos, notebook in hand, eyes wide with wonder.
Today, he stopped at the intersection. He saw the crowd gathering. He heard the screams. Through a gap in the onlookers, he saw a flash of ash-blond hair being consumed by sludge.
Kacchan.
His feet twitched. The instinct to run, to save, flared up—a dying ember. But then, All Might's skeletal face flashed in his mind. You should consider reality.
Reality, Izuku thought, his eyes deadening. Reality is that a quirkless nobody only gets in the way. If I go in there, I'll just die. And All Might said that's not heroism. That's just suicide.
He turned his back on the explosions. He turned his back on his childhood friend suffocating in the muck. He ignored the guilt that clawed at his throat like jagged glass and kept walking.
When he arrived at his apartment, his mother, Inko, wasn't home. The silence of the house was oppressive. Izuku walked into his bedroom and didn't bother turning on the lights. The dusk filtered through the blinds, illuminating the shrine.
Hundreds of All Might faces smiled at him. Posters. Figures. Bedspreads. A clock that laughed, "I am here!"
Izuku stood in the center of the room, his breathing becoming ragged. The smiles looked different now. They didn't look reassuring. They looked condescending. They were mocking him. You thought you could be like me? You?
"Liar," Izuku whispered.
He grabbed the 1/6th scale Golden Age statue from his desk.
"You said... anyone could be a hero."
His grip tightened until the plastic creaked. Tears finally spilled over, hot and stinging, but they weren't tears of sadness anymore. They were tears of humiliation.
"LIAR!"
He hurled the figure at the wall. It shattered into jagged yellow shards.
The dam broke. Izuku screamed, a raw, guttural sound of thirteen years of repressed agony. He tore the posters from the walls, ripping the smiling paper faces in half. He swept his collection of limited-edition memorabilia off the shelves, stomping on them, crushing the plastic under his red shoes. He destroyed the shrine. He destroyed the idolatry.
Panting, surrounded by the wreckage of his fanaticism, he fell to his knees. He reached for a notebook lying amidst the debris. Hero Analysis for the Future, Vol. 13.
He opened it to the autograph All Might had signed just hours ago. It felt like a brand. A signature on his death warrant as a dreamer.
He went to rip the page out, to burn it, but he stopped. His eyes drifted to the notes on the adjacent page. Theories. Quirks. Biology.
"It's not bad to have a dream, young man. But you have to consider reality."
"Reality," Izuku muttered, wiping snot from his nose. "Reality is physics. Reality is biology."
His mind, usually scattered and anxious, sharpened into a singular, razor-like point. Why couldn't he be a hero? Because he lacked a Quirk. What was a Quirk? A biological mutation allowing for the manipulation of energy or matter.
"If biology failed me," he hissed, his eyes narrowing in the dark room, "then I will force physics to obey me."
He crawled over to his computer. He didn't search for hero news. He went deeper. He went to the archives he had stumbled upon years ago—files from the Pre-Quirk era. The Golden Age of Comics. The legends of men who weren't born special, but made themselves gods through science.
He pulled up a corrupted file on a theoretical energy source.
The Speed Force.
In the comic books, it was fantasy. But looking at the equations, looking at the theoretical physics of dimensional breaching and kinetic energy buildup... Izuku began to see a pattern. A possibility.
"Energy cannot be created or destroyed," he mumbled, typing furiously. "Only transferred. If I can become a conductor... if I can turn my body into a lightning rod for kinetic energy..."
He looked at the shattered face of All Might on the floor.
The heroes of this world were born. They were given power by a genetic lottery. They didn't earn it. They didn't suffer for it.
"I will not be given power," Izuku said, a terrifying resolve settling in his chest. "I will take it."
Five Months Later
The smell of Dagobah Municipal Beach Park was usually garbage and rot. Tonight, it smelled of ozone, sulfur, and volatile chemicals.
For five months, Izuku had vanished from the social world. He went to school, kept his head down, and said nothing. He stopped stuttering because he stopped speaking. At night, he scavenged.
He had built a laboratory in the hollowed-out hull of a rusted truck deep within the trash heaps of the beach. It was a coffin of technology. Car batteries, stolen industrial capacitors, copper wiring stripped from abandoned appliances, and a specific cocktail of chemicals he had spent his savings and sanity acquiring.
Izuku stood shirtless in the center of the metal hull. He was thinner than before, his muscles lean and wired tight. His skin was pale, circles dark under his eyes. He looked like a ghost haunting a junkyard.
On the table next to him sat a beaker of glowing, viscous liquid.
Heavy water. Hydrochloric acid. Methyl. Electrified serum derived from synthesized quirk-factor boosters he'd bought on the black market.
It was a poison. It should kill him.
"The simulation says there's a 98% chance of cardiac arrest," Izuku said to the empty air. "And a 2% chance of cellular acceleration."
He looked up through a hole in the truck's roof. The storm he had predicted was here. Heavy, black clouds churned above, violent and angry.
Izuku strapped himself into the metal chair he had bolted to the floor. He connected the leads—thick copper cables running from the lightning rod he had erected on top of the trash pile, straight into the chair, and straight into the capacitors behind him.
He wasn't trying to access the Speed Force of the heroes. That force was described as pure, benevolent, fueled by hope.
Izuku didn't have hope. He had spite. He had a cold, burning need to prove them all wrong. He was tapping into something else. He was looking for the negative space between the seconds.
He picked up the beaker. His hand didn't shake.
"For reality," he toasted.
He downed the mixture.
It tasted like battery acid and fire. Izuku gagged, his throat seizing as the chemicals burned their way down. He convulsed, dropping the beaker. It shattered.
"Come on," he wheezed, looking up at the sky.
CRACK-BOOM.
Nature answered.
A bolt of lightning, jagged and white, struck the rod above.
The world turned white.
The electricity didn't just hit him; it erased him. The surge slammed into the capacitors, amplified by the stolen tech, and funneled directly into Izuku's chemically saturated body.
He didn't scream. He couldn't. His vocal cords locked as thousands of volts cooked his insides. He felt his skin blistering, his blood boiling in his veins. His heart stopped instantly.
I'm dying, his mind registered with detached clarity. I failed.
Darkness took him.
But in the darkness, there was a sound. A vibration. A low, angry hum.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
It wasn't his heart. It was the universe vibrating.
The chemicals in his blood, catalyzed by the lightning, began to react. They didn't just heal him; they rewrote him. His cells broke down and rebuilt themselves millions of times in a microsecond. The kinetic energy of the lightning trapped inside his body had nowhere to go, so it tore a hole in the dimensional barrier.
It found the Negative Speed Force. And the Negative Speed Force found a host drowning in rejection and rage.
BOOM.
A shockwave blasted outward from the truck, sending tires, fridges, and scrap metal flying into the ocean. The storm clouds above spiraled open, pushed back by a red updraft.
In the center of the smoking crater where the truck used to be, a figure stood up.
Steam hissed off his skin. Small arcs of electricity danced across his body—but they weren't yellow or blue. They were crimson red, dark and violent like open wounds in reality.
Izuku looked at his hands. They were vibrating. He looked at the world, and the world was... frozen.
A seagull hung suspended in the air above him, motionless. The rain falling from the sky had stopped, droplets hanging like diamonds.
Izuku took a step.
He didn't walk. He occurred at the next location.
He was ten feet away instantly. He looked back, and saw the afterimage of himself fading, a red blur ghosting behind his movement.
He felt it. The power. It wasn't a quirk. It was an endless, screaming engine of kinetic energy churning in his gut. It felt like he could run until his legs disintegrated. It felt like he could tear the world apart just by vibrating his hand.
He laughed.
The sound was distorted, deepening into a demonic growl as his vocal cords vibrated at superspeed.
"All Might..."
Izuku looked at the frozen rain droplet in front of his face. He flicked it. The droplet vaporized with the force of a bullet.
"You said I couldn't be a hero."
Red lightning arced from his eyes, shattering the glass of a nearby abandoned car.
"You were right. I'm going to be something much, much worse."
Izuku Midoriya vanished, leaving only a trail of scorched sand and the smell of burning ozone. The Reverse-Flash was born