[MHA Characters are test subjects in a secret, underground lab, because for some unknown reason they were born with strange and mysterious powers. They were all brought there against their will, nineteen because they had powers, and one to see if those powers could be given to, or awakened in a regular person (part four) Midoriya is feels out of place among the rest of the kids, as they get a little older they realize they're all stuck in the same boat, and he's stuck there with them.]

Subject 20, Izuku Midoriya, had been born on January 1, at the dawn of the year which followed the births of the other subjects, 354 days after the birth of the first subject, Todoroki. His mother was the head of the lab, so of course, she was one of the first to know about the strange children that were being born. After the fourth child was born in early March, she decided to contribute to the experiments in a more hands-on way, and have a child in the cursed room herself.

She had her subordinate Hizashi Yamada, with whom she had worked for years, introduce her to one of his friends, a pediatrician by the name of Hisashi Midoriya, and before the end of the month, she had managed to conceive a child with him. Once she was pregnant, she broke things off with the man, and planned to never see him again.

Things did not go as planned.

Hisashi Midoriya found out about the pregnancy, which Miss Inko suspected was the fault of Yamada, though he had always had a way of evading her many eyes and ears, so she had no evidence to prove it. Hisashi, unfortunately, turned out to be a good, upstanding man, and offered to marry her. When she refused, he insisted on taking responsibility and helping her raise the child. She tried to tell him off, but he was adamant that he would not be an absent father.

He gave her no other choice than to let him take care of her throughout the pregnancy, and even telling him that the child only existed to become an experiment would not deter the man. When finally, the child was born, a day late, and exhibiting no immediate signs of supernatural mutations, Inko was overwhelmed with disappointment, and Hisashi insisting on naming the boy was the last straw. 

She did what she had done to the parents of all the other children and altered his memories, turning herself and her son into shadows, ghosts, and leaving Hisashi Midoriya with nothing as she carried their son off to the lab, never to be seen again. 

Midoriya was always the odd one out among the many children in the lab. He was the youngest, for one, but furthermore, he possessed no uncanny ability as the other children did. He was powerless in that sense, and that did not go unnoticed.

For the first few years, it didn't matter. The children had little choice but to bond together thanks to their shared experience and situation. That all changed in the sixth year, when Bakugo said something insensitive, as he often did, and set off Midoriya's nervous disposition in a seemingly endless downward spiral.

"Why is Deku even here?" Bakugo asked, jeering at him as he returned from the experimentation ward, sector 1A, with the same solemn silence that they all carried when they left that awful place. "He doesn't have any powers! He's basically normal, not like the rest of us. He could be living large on the outside with no problems, so what's he doing down here?"

"It's not like he chose it," Uraraka said, placing a comforting hand on Midoriya's shoulder. "None of us did."

"Yeah, but we're only down here because of our powers," Bakugo argued. "We know twinkles and new girl and them only got dragged down here after they got their powers, but Deku's only down here 'cause his mommy invited him."

"I hate to say it, but Kacchan has a point," Yaoyorozu said thoughtfully. She had only been there for a few months by that point, and in that little time, she'd given Bakugo a nickname to make him seem a little less threatening to her. "I've been kind of wondering the same thing since I got here. I thought maybe you were only here because of your mom's work, and weren't actually part of the experiments, but I know now that's not it. What do the scientists get out of testing someone normal?"

Her pondering was met with some general agreement and hushed questions and statements of a similar nature. Why was Midoriya there? Even Midoriya himself began to wonder, and that was how it all began. A few questions, and some innocent wonderings, and all of the sudden Midoriya was no longer one of them as he had been, he became an outsider, not feeling like he belonged anymore.

The following year, when Mister Enji retired, he was replaced a few weeks later by a white haired foreigner called Mister Vlad. Mister Vlad was nicer than Mister Enji had been, more hands on and less militant in his methods. Kendo took a shine to him almost immediately, Todoroki didn't dislike him, but, though he couldn't explain why, he mentioned several times that he wished Mister Enji had stayed. 

Midoriya wasn't sure how to feel about him when the hulking man first arrived, but as soon as they made their introductions, that changed. 

"And what do you do, Izuku?" a smiling Mister Vlad asked Midoriya in lightly accented Japanese. It was an obvious question. He had asked all the other kids the same thing, so Midoriya should have expected it, but it only took a few seconds after the question was asked for Midoriya to tear up. "Did I scare him? I say something wrong?" 

"Izuku doesn't have an ability like the rest of them," Mister Shota explained to him quietly, but Midoriya heard anyway, and it only made him cry harder. 

Among the children of the lab, the only thing Midoriya was the best at was crying. Most learned to stop crying after a few years. It never got them anything good, and only served as a distraction they couldn't afford. Some cried only under immense physical duress, others when their psyche suffered unbearable stress. Of those that still cried, most only broke down during the experiments, but Midoriya had no such restrictions on his tears. 

Midoriya had nothing else but tears. He wasn't good with words, or fighting. He wasn't the most durable, or the fastest, or the strongest, and he didn't even have an ability to compete with on that front, but Midoriya could cry. He could cry for hours without running out of tears. He could cry loudly, or quietly, with light tears or heavy ones. As he cried that day, Midoriya whimpered like a wounded animal, every shallow, wavering breath came out like a breeze from the abyss of utter hopelessness, anxiety, inadequacy, and despair. 

The other children dared not try to comfort him. They dared not break out of the line. Uraraka, standing at his side, offered him a gentle nudge and a concerned glance, but could give him nothing more. 

Midoriya didn't do training with the other children so much as at the same time as them. While they practiced with their abilities, Midoriya would exchange blows with a blue punching bag and lift weights. When he participated in sparring with the others, it resulted in major injuries more often than not, and he broke more than a few bones over the years. 

Except for Bakugo, they would always apologize for hurting him, once they were back in sector 1C, which was where they slept and self-studied and held free time. These apologies didn't serve to bring him closer to them. 

There were twenty children in the lab. None of them were ever allowed to be alone. Midoriya still got lonely. 

Another day, another experiment. Midoriya went to sector 1A, hands trembling, eyes already stinging with tears as one of the scientists escorted him down the corridor. They strapped him to a table. He could see the holes near the foot of the table where the ankle straps had originally been bolted in, but they had been moved up. Midoriya would have been much too small for his ankles to reach them otherwise, and it wouldn't do to have Midoriya kicking during the procedure. 

Most of the experiments were an attempt to awaken latent abilities in Midoriya, through the use of serums and therapies, sometimes blood transfusions from the other children, sometimes incompatible blood transfusions from the other children which caused his blood to attack itself and his body to go into shock while he spent days on life support, unable to leave the dreaded sector 1A. 

Midoriya endured it. He counted the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days. He spent more time in sector 1A than any of the others did. He kept that to himself. He had more scars from healed over injections and surgeries than from sparring sessions. He kept that to himself as well. 

It wasn't a contest of who had it worse. Besides, wasn't it his mother who had dragged them all into this nightmare? Who had taken away their chances at freedom? Who had abducted them from their loving families, all for the advancement of her corrupt science? Midoriya carried so much guilt over that. Just keeping his mouth shut wasn't penance enough. 

The combination of a sinister serum and jarring electroshock therapy added another six days to Midoriya's time in the experimentation ward. He couldn't do anything. He had no power to protect himself with. He was afraid. He was always afraid.

He was afraid of being trapped in ice and freezing to death, afraid of being burned alive. He was afraid of being drowned. He was afraid of being constricted. He was afraid of being eaten. He was afraid of being blown up. He was afraid of being tossed around, of having a hole burned through him, of disappearing. He was afraid of being electrocuted, of being made to kill himself, or being torn apart. He was afraid of being strangled. He was afraid of being soaked in acid. He was afraid of being smothered. He was afraid of being shot, or stabbed, or killed in any way by any number of weapons. 

He was afraid of being crushed, or bludgeoned. He was afraid of floating away forever and ever. He was afraid of being scared to death. He was afraid of being poisoned. He was afraid of getting sick. He was afraid of his mother, of the scientists, of the trainers, of the teachers. He was afraid of the other children, and the lab itself. 

He was afraid. He was afraid. He was afraid. 

There was nothing he could do about it. 

He returned to sector 1C after just under a week of being in a medically induced coma with the occasional life-threatening seizure interspersed throughout. He was fine. The doctors told him he was fine. He wasn't fine. 

Kaminari greeted him with a light-hearted zap to his shoulder. This was normal. Midoriya immediately collapsed into convulsions on the floor. This was normal. Midoriya was carried, wriggling and shuddering, by struggling scientists, back to sector 1A the experimentation ward. This was normal. 

It was a common occurrence to see Midoriya suffering after-effects of experimentation. It happened to the others too, but not nearly as often. Not even Bakugo thought to laugh when it happened. None of them wanted to ask about it either. They knew they wouldn't want to talk about it in his shoes. 

Midoriya would have liked to talk to them about anything. 

In the twelfth year. Midoriya collapsed during a training session a day after experimentation, not seizing, but foggy-eyed and foaming at the mouth. Mister Shota alerted the scientists immediately. Mister Vlad had heard of it happening before, but had somehow never seen it. He stared in horror as scientists carried Midoriya's limp body out, muttering something about a lower dosage. 

The other children stared at the floor in silence for the most part. A few chose a wall to look at. The rest chose to focus on their training and pretend that nothing had happened. Once Midoriya was gone, the others joined them. It was easier to drill martial arts moves than to think. 

"That boy goes through the wringer, doesn't he?" Over the years, Mister Vlad's Japanese had gotten clearer, and only the faintest trace of his accent could be heard, and only to those who listened very closely. Few did. But all ears were trained on him just then. "They all do, but as the runt, he seems to get the worst of it." 

"You say that as if there's something that can be remotely considered 'the best of it'," Mister Shota said with a sigh. "Those sadists in the experimental ward think they can awaken some latent power in him that just isn't there, and they're making the kid suffer for it. At least, if you ask me." 

"Is that what they do there?" Mister Vlad asked. "How do you know this? I don't get any information outside of our area." 

"That's what they do to him, at least. It's different for the others, but I can't tell you how I know without endangering my informant." 

"I see. Poor Izuku," Mister Vlad lamented. "It hardly needs to be said in a place like this, but... if it weren't for his heartless mother, he could have lived a safe, ordinary life, but instead—"

"I wouldn't go making comments about his mother so lightly, if you want to keep your job..." and your life, and your memories, was left unsaid, but not unheard. 

They got back to working with the children that remained, but the kids had heard their conversation. They revisited it that night during their free hour.

"I never really thought of it that way, but wasn't Mister Vlad right about Deku?" Asui said, putting a large finger to her chin, thoughtfully. "I mean, just because he has his mom down here, it's not like he's getting special treatment." 

"Tsu's right," Uraraka agreed. "He's stuck down here just like the rest of us. He didn't chose it, and life down here's not easier just because he's normal." 

"It could easily be argued that without a quirk like ours, it's more difficult for him," Todoroki added. 

"I mean he does collapse pretty routinely, sometimes for no discernible reason." Kirishima nodded. He was leaning against a wall. Bakugo stood beside him looking betrayed. "I mean it happens to the best of us, but it happens to Izuku a lot more. Sorry, bro, but it's true." 

"Point is, we're all in the same, stinking, rotting boat, and Deku's in here with us." Uraraka looked directly at Bakugo, her stare making it clear that she had every intention of winning this dispute. "I, for one, never understood why we turned our backs on him in the first place. Maybe we weren't all assholes like Kacchan, but we should be acting more like... like..." 

"Like a community?" Togata offered. 

"Yeah!" Uraraka continued. "In our situation, the only way to make the best of it is by forming a community, and Deku has to be a part of it as much as anybody. We need to support each other, not just tolerate each other." 

"We all carry a shared darkness, as deep and unyielding as the cold, unforgiving void, and if that cannot bind us together then there is no hope at all," Tokoyami said. This statement was met with a brief silence as the others tried to process the words. 

"I think Fumikkun is talking about shared trauma," Yaoyorozu said. Fumikkun was another nickname she'd come up with to ease her discomfort around her bird-headed companion, though unlike with 'Kacchan', she was the only one who used it. "Remember that lesson a while back? Nothing brings people together like shared experiences, especially when those experiences are unusual and psychologically damaging. I know none of us have all that much experience with the outside, not even me, but I can say for certain that all our experiences down here count as unusual and psychologically damaging, including Izuku's." 

"I quite agree." Everyone looked toward the voice in surprise. Shoji wasn't much of a talker. He almost never opened his monstrous mouth, which stretched too wide, and had too many teeth. If their own gentle giant actually spoke up for something, no one was going to argue. 

"If you're all fucking gonna go falling over yourselves for fucking Deku, I could not give less of a fuck about any of that shit," Bakugo scoffed. "Do whatever the fucking hell you want, ass-weasels. None of this means I gotta fucking like that shitty lettuce-headed son of a bitch." 

"Nobody fucking cares, Kacchan," Uraraka rolled her eyes. She and Bakugo had not gotten along exceptionally well for a very long time, and that did not look to be changing soon. 

When Midoriya returned from the experimentation ward the following day, Shoji met him at the door the moment the scientists escorting him left, six muscular arms spread, waiting. Midoriya stepped into the hug, and immediately started to do what he was best at. Tears welled up in his eyes, trickled down his face, and burst on Shoji's clothes. The same clothes they all wore, modified to accommodate his ability, as they all were, all except Midoriya's. 

All at once, the other children offered Deku their apologies for how they treated him, for excluding him, for ignoring him. They offered half-hearted explanations and insincere reasons. But mostly they asked for forgiveness, and for perhaps the first time, they comforted him as he cried, and for the first time in a long time, Midoriya truly felt accepted once again. That night, and it was only one night, but for that one night, Midoriya slept soundly. 

Years later, Midoriya would not sleep soundly. In a bed in his father's house, rather than a pod in an underground lab, Midoriya thought he could finally get some rest. Unfortunately for him, survivor's guilt is louder than a jet-engine, and carries more pressure than the bottom of the sea. 

[For some reason this took like a month to finish, even though I wrote the other parts in, like, a few hours. I mentioned before about that nasty writers block, and let me tell you, it was a bitch, but here ya go. Experiments AU part four! Love y'all.

<3 Raaor!]