Chapter Text
Interlude: Phone Call #01
Izuku: Hi, dad!
Hisashi: Izuku! I heard from your mother you got into UA? Is that true – is my boy going to be a hero?
Izuku: Yeah! I, you know, I was really worried I wouldn’t make it ‘cuz there were robots and I didn’t think I could take on robots but then there was this girl who was trapped – ohmygoddadItalkedtoagirl! – and, and! I saved her! I got a quirk, dad! And I blasted a gigantic robot away – it was AWESOME... Ibrokemybonesthoughoops
Hisashi: You... got a quirk?
Izuku: Uh, yeah! It just, haha, you wouldn’t believe me but it just manifested out of nowhere in the middle of the exam. Kinda crazy haha haaa... yeah...
Hisashi: Say, son, what kind of quirk is it?
Izuku: It’s, um, an emitter-type strength augmentation, I think. It was probably too powerful to handle for me previously so it... manifested late?
Hisashi: Hm.
Izuku: Oh man, I’m glad it didn’t come in earlier. I mean would you believehowbadthatwouldvebeenonmybodyhaha?!
Hisashi: Hm... yes, indeed, that would have been bad. Very bad. Listen, Izuku, you can tell your old man everything. You know that, right?
Izuku: ...Right
Hisashi: Mhm, good. I won’t ask how you got a quirk but if you ever want to talk about it, just give me a call. Okay?
Izuku: ...okay, dad. Sorry
Hisashi: What for? C’mon, I was young too... once. I know how it is with parents and secrets. As long as you don’t go around creating a second M.A.E.S. you’re alright.
Izuku: Maes?
Hisashi: Capitalized letters, stood for Meta Ability Extermination Squad... ah, meta ability just means quirk. I always forget with you youngsters.
Izuku: Oh! Uh, no, I’m not going to terrorize eighty percent of the population. That’d be too much work.
Hisashi: It’s the amount of work that’s keeping you from doing it?
Izuku: Quirkless discrimination is really severe and if you’re not jealous of other people having quirks, then you’re angry about it. I’d have maybe terrorized Aldera a bit, though, nothing big.
Hisashi: Aldera, hm? Inko never told me what middle school you went to. I will... look into this... Aldera.
Izuku: ‘Kay? It’s a normal school I guess. Anyways, yeah, thanks for not being super weirded out by me suddenly having a quirk.
Hisashi: Well, that’d be a bit hypocritical on my end.
Izuku: Huh?
Hisashi: Hehe, nothing, son. I will hear from you if anything major happens, right?
Izuku: Right! Hear you soon!
6 – Eraserhead
It’s absolutely no surprise Hizashi came into his office with an incredibly haunted look and demanded from him to teach The Child.
Midoriya looks like something straight out of a nightmare. Shouta isn’t scared per se but at least uneasy and it’s not just because of the boy’s unearthly appearance.
Midoriya knows who he is and he’s mumbled about his fighting style. Which means Midoriya really knows who he is.
He can count the amount of people who recognized him on one hand.
So, yes, Shouta isn’t scared (being scared of a fifteen year old teenager would be extremely illogical) but, all the same, he maybe hopes just a little bit that Midoriya will give him enough reason to expel him (and let him reenrol in Kan’s class). Firstly, Shouta tells them he’ll kick out the last place in his yearly quirk assessment – he can always call it a logical ruse if Midoriya doesn’t place last –, then he continues by erasing the boy’s quirk just as he’s about to throw the softball (Erasure can be disorienting if you aren’t used to it) and says he won’t tolerate any more bone breaking, point blank.
Which he wouldn’t usually do, since bone breaking indicates a dissonance between the quirk and the user – a thing that’s rather easily solved by bringing a support item into the equation – and if he were serious about it, he’d give Kaminari, Aoyama and Uraraka the same talk down since their quirk drawbacks are extremely debilitating as well.
Aoyama even has an item and still has extreme stomach pains if he uses his quirk for too long... and too long seems to be a couple of seconds at a time.
Shouta isn’t scared of Midoriya and yet his brain is screaming at him to either fight or flee.
Shouta really doesn’t do well with being told to flee.
So, fight it is.
“...Eh?!” The kid’s eyes widen – what the hell, they definitely widen too much – and he gulps. “O-Okay, sensei, may I... have a minute? To strategize?”
Strategy, huh? Shouta doesn’t see an issue with it, since Midoriya can’t tell him he didn’t give him a fair chance when, inevitably, the boy fails to come up with something on the fly. He had more than enough time, more than an entire decade, to ponder about how to use his quirk without hurting himself. Another minute won’t change that.
At the same time, he isn’t going to be too lenient. Midoriya asked for a single minute and that’s all he’s going to get.
“A minute? Right, let’s see what you make of it.” Hopefully nothing. Shouta shows him the timer – sixty seconds exactly – and says with a grin that barely reaches Midoriya’s levels of creepiness (even though people literally recoil when they see it): “Your time starts now.”
He presses start.
The first three seconds, Midoriya stares into nothingness. Then he starts fidgeting with his bottom lip, deeply in thought.
And then it begins. The mumbling. Shouta slowly blinks as, second by second, Midoriya increases the speed of his musings until they’re completely incomprehensible by the twentieth second.
By second thirty-seven, Midoriya gains a frantic, manic look in his eyes.
It’s the fifty-second second when the kid yells out: “Oh, I’m an egg!” like that makes any sense at all.
The timer sounds. Shouta isn’t sure what kind of five stages the boy went through but he’s now looking at him with so much conviction Shouta finds himself stumped a little. Maybe... maybe he’s been too harsh on Midoriya? It’s not the kid’s fault he looks like an abomination and has the social grace of someone who has never in his life talked to another human being before.
“You... are an egg?”
“Ah! Uh!” Midoriya’s hands are flying wildly, trying to... well, Shouta doesn’t exactly know what they’re trying to achieve but they are fast. So fast, in fact, Shouta can barely see them as they whir through the air. “I, I mean, I! U-Uh... I... I’m now ready, sensei.” he finishes lamely and pink-cheeked.
Shouta nods and throws him the ball. “Then do us the honours.”
Midoriya takes a deep breath.
Green lighting all of a sudden spans over the entirety of Midoriya’s body – a wince, then it’s toned down to a steady fizz – and between the dark, menacing green Shouta sees even meaner black static. Violently glowing red veins criss-cross on the boy’s skin. His hair goes up, not unlike when Shouta uses his own quirk, and the green and white flutter in a wind that wasn’t here a second prior. The air smells of ozone, tastes of TV static and the colour green, and all Shouta can think is that Midoriya somehow looks a lot less intimidating when he’s using his quirk, which is a paradox in and of itself.
“Full Cowl, three percent” Midoriya says.
Three percent? This is merely three percent of his quirk?
(No wonder he is breaking his bones left and right.)
“DETROIT SMASH!”
Shouta watches, flabbergasted, as the ball is sent flying. The device in his hand informs him that Midoriya’s thrown the ball 222 metres (and he resolutely ignores that three times 222 equals 666 – he doesn’t have time to ponder about such nonsense).
None of Midoriya’s bones are broken.
“If you could figure that out in a minute, why didn’t you do so before? You’ve had this quirk for ten years now.”
“Uh, about that...” Midoriya scratches his neck, “I was quirkless up until the entrance exam.”
That is literally impossible. However, that kid doesn’t strike him as the type who’d lie about easily disprovable things. So, Midoriya’s truly done the impossible and manifested a quirk at age fifteen.
Shouta sighs. “Well, I guess you do have potential.” (Unfortunately.) “The expulsion threat was a logical ruse.” (It really wasn’t but he can’t expel someone who went Plus Ultra on him.)
The rest of the class whines behind him. They, too, had hoped to get rid of their classmate.
“Sucks to be you.” Shouta thinks as he comes up with a hundred plans to get himself acclimated to Midoriya’s horror – all of which he’ll decidedly keep to himself.
Midoriya’s presence in this class will be a long-term exercise on how to deal with fear-inducing quirks. Not that Midoriya has one of those.
(That’d be simply too normal for that kid.)
7 – Minoru
“...Where do you think they’ll hide the bomb?” Minoru asks the absolute babe, Uraraka, who happens to be his partner for the exercise. Every time he eyes her skin-tight suit, he has to stop himself from letting his eyes wander to her nether regions. To him, this is much more of an exercise in restraint than a battle trial.
A slight grimace on her face tells him he isn’t succeeding in keeping his perverted aura down entirely but that doesn’t matter right now. As long as Minoru doesn’t outright slap her ass, it’ll be alright.
“Midoriya’s pretty tactical.” she says after a moment, “He figured out his bone breaking problem pretty quickly. Bakugou also doesn’t seem too hindered by his... thing.”
Ah, yes, the thing. The thing that’s the reason why Minoru can’t put more weight into ogling the beautiful girl at his side rather than focusing on All Might’s trial. Bakugou as an opponent would’ve already absolutely overpowered them but with Midoriya, it becomes something else entirely.
If Minoru doesn’t get his shit together this exercise, Midoriya will kill him.
Ugh, his knees are shaking again and his eyes are tearing up just thinking about the abhorrent monster’s words.
“Uraraka-san is a dear friend to me.” Midoriya whispered into his ear without even being anywhere near Minoru and yet he felt the other’s breath against the side of his head, “If you don’t treat her adequately and put up your best possible performance, there will be consequences...”
Having someone like Midoriya, who puts the fear into seasoned professionals (Minoru saw how Present Mic’s fingers trembled every time he called Midoriya to read for the class. Although Minoru'll give it to him: Midoriya has a nice reading voice. It’d definitely be nicer if it didn’t occasionally come from inside one’s own head, though.), whispering thinly veiled murderous threats into your ear does wonders for keeping your more prevalent urges at bay.
His lesser urges have been replaced by pure terror.
Minoru shakily smiles, meeting Uraraka’s eyes rather than her sizeable bust. “That means they will work together, huh? Haha...”
“Yeah. Midoriya also for sure figured out we can attack from the bottom and the top.”
“You have a huge bottom I’d love to top!” Minoru doesn’t say. Instead, he coughs and ponders: “The bomb’s most likely in the middle, then. There has to be a windowless room somewhere. Or at least one that doesn’t have much exposure.” unlike your hero costume, Ura-rack-A+.
The girl nods. “We could split, I fly up to the roof and you go in through the base entrance, alright? We’ll meet in the middle. Let’s keep up our communication throughout and we should be fine.”
Minoru really doesn’t want to split up, since encountering either one of their opponents would mean an instant loss for them. But, well... Uraraka’s eying him with barely concealed contempt and he definitely couldn’t be tempted when his teammate isn’t even with him. So, he gives her a thumbs up. “Let’s do this!” he says, conveying way more confidence than he is actually feeling right now.
Two minutes later, Minoru regrets having taken the UA entrance exam.
A bell rings, signalling the start of the exercise, and Uraraka leaves him almost immediately. Minoru hesitantly heads into the building and as soon as he sets foot into the entrance hall, a gust of wind blows the door shut behind him.
Okay. He’ll just... open the door again. It’s way too dark in here to see clearly.
The door doesn’t budge.
(Why is it dark anyways? The windows should let enough daylight in. They don’t. Everything’s way too dark, unnaturally dim in a way that speeds up his heartbeat.)
Oh god. What if this is a trap and when he passes by a corner, Midoriya’s going to jump out and... and... No. No, he has to stay calm. He has a teammate who’s relying on him. Yes, Uraraka will know what to do. Minoru swallows down his anxiety and walks slowly past a few desolate offices. This city is way too realistic. It truly looks like an abandoned building.
Now that his eyes have had time to adjust to the absence of light, Minoru searches for a safe spot to contact his partner. He finds himself cowering underneath an office desk.
(Was that a shadow? No, it's absolutely silent. There's nothing.)
He clicks the send button with twitchy fingers. “Uraraka?”
A moment passes in silence. There’s not a single sound coming through, not even white noise. Minoru swallows and leans further back against the backboard of the desk. He tries again and again but nothing happens. Radio silence, literally. If Uraraka were already captured, All Might would have declared it over the speakers, so that’s probably not the case. Is the headset malfunctioning?
Minoru freezes. He holds his breath and listens.
(It can’t be. That’s... that’s impossible.)
His heart turns to ice as the telltale sounds of breathing continue.
Right behind him.
Minoru turns around slowly, shudders wrecking his tiny body as he tries to maintain calm despite his growing horror. The wooden board doesn’t entirely cover the backside of the desk. There are approximately twenty-five centimetres from the floor up that are not covered by anything at all.
And there’s.
There’s definitely enough space for someone to poke their face through that space if one were to lie down sideways.
Minoru sobs.
Midoriya’s wide eyes unblinkingly stare up at him. He’s grinning from ear to ear.
“Found you!”
Minoru screams.
“Villain team wins!”
Minoru sits far away from the Thing. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees it – that face, that disturbing smile – and the taste of its presence still lingers on his tongue. Colours should not taste of anything and yet... yet he knows that forest green fizzes like pop rocks in the back of his throat and reminds him of rainy days. In truth, it’s indescribable but he knows exactly what that damned colour tastes like.
“So, who is the MVP?” All Might asks like Minoru hadn’t just lived through a traumatizing experience. Like everything that’s happened was absolutely normal. (It’s not. It’s absolutely not.)
Minoru trembles as Midoriya lets his eyes roam over the room. A few brave ones like Kirishima barely flinch at his attention but Minoru spots the telltale signs of discomfort. They must all be so glad to have escaped the Other’s scorn.
Yaoyorozu (and Minoru is too shaken to think about her revealing costume) raises her hand and elaborates after All Might motions for her to give it a go: “I think it should be both Bakugou-san and Midoriya-san. They worked together perfectly – Bakugou protected the bomb against Uraraka and Midoriya went to find and incapacitate Mineta. I... don’t know what kind of commands Mineta gave Uraraka but since they led her into Bakugou’s grasp, I cannot in good conscience say Mineta’s the MVP. However, the hero team did work on a plan beforehand.”
Minoru’s blood turns to ice. “What? No! My headset didn’t work! I never talked with Uraraka!” he cries, eyes wide as he stares at his teammate, who drastically pales.
Uraraka whips around to All Might. “Sir? Could... could we listen to what Mineta supposedly said? At the time... I already found it a bit weird but his voice sounded off. I’m sure of it!”
The hero blinks at her request but nods. “Well, yes, we can do that, young Uraraka.” He then presses some buttons on the console and one of the TVs flickers on to show a recording of Minoru’s teammate landing on the roof – as they planned – and after getting her nausea under control, she pressed the communication button. “Mineta, can you hear me? Did you meet any of them already?”
What comes next will forever haunt Minoru. He knows he’ll never get rid of it for as long as he’ll live.
Because his voice answers when he didn’t.
But his voice sounds dead and creaky, like it has risen from the beyond. There’s no crackle, no background noises as he says, no, whispers sinisterly: “Urara...ka... come to me... come to me... come... to see me... I am here... here... downstairs... just go down the stairs twice and to your right... that’s where I... will be.”
“Holy shit. Nah, man, that’s not Mineta.” Kaminari mumbles into the silence of the room.
Bakugou clicks his tongue and flicks his hand at Midoriya’s head.
“Kacchan!” the Thing whines.
“Don’t Kacchan me, Deku! What the fuck was that shit, eh?!”
“I don’t know what you mean! I didn’t do anything!”
That puts a stop to Bakugou. “Cool, now it does that stuff on its own or what?”
“What?”
“Urgh, forget it, nerd!” Bakugou shoves Midoriya, “And stay the hell away from me. Your colour shit makes me sick, you freak.”
“Young Bakugou!” All Might intervenes, “Stop name-calling young Midoriya. As for the recorded audio... it is what it is! Whether it was young Mineta or not, it doesn’t matter! In the end, what counts is that you all had a learning experience and didn’t go overboard – which is superb for your first battle! Young Yaoyorozu is right in her assessments, so the title of MVP goes to both young Midoriya and Bakugou this round! Now, let’s-”
But Minoru isn’t listening anymore.
Because there’s a tendril of static green-black coming out of Midoriya’s shadow.
And it’s waving at him.
8 – Tomura
Tomura doesn’t know exactly why but one day, Sensei stopped seeing his family.
He was vaguely aware of the Midoriyas – Sensei’s wife Inko and his son Izuku – because he was raised as if he were a kid from an affair that nobody had previously known about. (His existence being the unknown factor, not the affair itself. Would be kind of weird if one forgot about their own affair, unless drugs were included in the process. But in that case, Sensei's anti-drug effect quirk would've stopped that from happening.)
And thus, Tomura grew up knowing that somewhere out there, he has a civilian sort-of half brother and stepmom who would both probably never meet him, since he was to be Sensei’s villain business successor. Sensei kept his villain business firmly away from his family business.
He was to be Sensei’s villain business successor. Past tense.
That all changed about two years before All Might bashed Sensei’s head in.
One day, the man came to the bar, sat down and ordered a drink from Kurogiri. He was pale in the face, as if he’d seen a ghost or something even more disturbing than that, and he kept going from absolute silence to mumbling up a storm, then back again to quietly nursing his drink. Tomura didn’t know what was up with him but he also didn’t want to ask, in case this wasn’t the sort of thing Tomura could know about. (He didn’t want to embarrass himself.)
So, Tomura sat down next to Sensei and drank the cola Kurogiri automatically prepared for him.
“Tomura” Sensei then finally said out loud, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
That had, of course, seriously messed with his brain back then. What he wants to do? That had never been the question. The questions always were: Can you do what I order you to do, Tomura? Can you serve? Can you grow into a worthy successor? Can you kill for me, Tomura?
All to which he’d had to say yes or else be replaced by some other kid whose name could’ve easily been changed to Shigaraki Tomura.
Sensei’s question, therefore, would’ve made him scratch his neck raw...
...had the man not intervened.
All for One had never cared about Tomura’s self-harm. His eyes had been cold whenever Tomura scratched, scratched, scratched until he was bleeding and crying like a pathetic child right in front of him. (Embarrassing, everything so very embarrassing.)
His eyes weren’t cold when he held Tomura’s smaller fists in his own, then.
They were frightened.
(As if the man had realized something. Or something had been put into perspective for him.
In any case.
The boogieman that’s All for One, that two centuries old hardened villain, was put out for some reason or another.)
Sensei, as he gently held Tomura’s hands in his, whispered yet another oh so very forbidden question: “Do you want to keep your quirk, Tomura?”
and then,
“Do you even want to be a villain, kid?”
Tomura still remembers how scared he was because Sensei had never called him kid before.
To be honest, Tomura thought he was about to die. Or that Sensei was about to die. Or Kurogiri. Or at least someone was going to die because Sensei wouldn’t drastically change like that if nobody were about to keel over.
So, Tomura had steeled himself, ignored his stinging eyes (which really fucking stung due to his eczema) and looked up at the man who saved him when nobody else had. “Am I going to die, Sensei?” he tried to maturely demand but ended up sobbing it out.
Sensei, for some reason, hugged him. “No, nobody’s dying. I’m just. I’ve done it all wrong. I need to change it. I need to... no, don't worry about.”
“Huh?!”
But the man didn’t explain.
In the end, Tomura never really found out why exactly Sensei changed. Only that he did and completely stopped modelling him into a successor, instead focussing on raising him since he – yet again for inexplicable reasons – pretended to have migrated to the USA and had a lot of time on his hands without needing to go back home to his actual family.
This led to exactly three things:
Firstly, Tomura got therapy. From a villain therapist, of course, since All for One couldn’t exactly send his former successor to a normal therapist. It turned out that Tomura truly was fucked up in the head because of Sensei. (Good to know.)
Secondly, Tomura got himself a new quirk. Decay was cool and all but it was tedious as hell, messed with his therapy progress (he couldn’t bring himself to touch people, no matter how hard he tried) and since Sensei offered... Well, who the hell wants to have Decay when they can have Game Inventory, which is a fully customizable portable inventory with over three hundred slots in Tomura’s forearm? Like, the hell was he going to pass on that. He can even store food and as long as it remains in there, it’s non-perishable! How OP is that?
Thirdly, Tomura became... maybe... a tiny bit enamoured with being cared for. By the time he should’ve chosen his career path, all he had going for himself was his small gaming channel on YouTube and an additional twenty kilos on his formerly severely skinny body. Sensei – or, as Tomura nowadays is allowed to call him – dad doesn’t particularly care for any of that. As long as Tomura is decently okay-ish, not thinking about ending it all or ending himself (there’s a difference), his dad’s cool with him being a loser for the most part.
Now, if only his dad could stop trying to help him conquer his anxiety...
At age twenty, Tomura’s fallen into the age old social anxiety trap. As soon as an introvert stops needing to go outside and insert themselves in various social settings, they essentially become a hermit and all kinds of contact to the outside world that hasn’t been previously established will cause major problems – in Tomura’s case extreme anxiety, over-thinking, self-harming, more anxiety, panic and, not to mention, social awkwardness if it ever comes to a meeting.
Long story short: Tomura would rather actually die than to leave the comfort of his room.
His dad, of course, knows this.
Which is why Tomura feels just the tiniest bit betrayed when the man presses an envelope into his hands, calls the whole thing a “super important mission” and throws him into the cold water by telling him it’ll entail interrupting a heroics rescue class with three heroes – one of them Thirteen (super cool quirk, is basically his former self's pro hero equivalent), one of them fucking All Might (great idea! The Symbol of Peace will surely not mind his students being put into potential danger) and... and the last one is Eraserhead.
Eraserhead.
“You’re a sadist.” Tomura says. Not out loud, since he’s a bit of an over-obedient kid (the type who’d, you know, blindly agree to follow his adoptive father into villainy) and, more importantly, doesn’t want Sensei to know he’s aware of BDSM. That’d probably lead to a whole second sex talk with him and Tomura’s still mentally wounded from the first one, which included All for One preparing a whole Gen Z humoured PowerPoint presentation and Kurogiri demonstrating how to use condoms and tampons. Tampons. Like Tomura didn’t have a dick and weren’t gay as fuck.
To avoid this fate he, instead, says out loud: “Alright.” and thus finds himself clutching his emotional support corgi plush whilst standing next to his emotional support black mist bartender three days later.
He’s wearing his... “villain costume”, which consists of his cleanest oversized black hoodie, a pair of black skinny jeans that barely fit over his stupidly thick ass (the zone where most of his gained fat seems to have gone) and his red sneakers. He already feels like an idiot and hasn’t even arrived at his destination yet. Superb.
“Shigaraki Tomura, are you ready?” Kurogiri asks for the third consecutive time.
Tomura shakes his head. “Nope.”
“We need to go now.”
“I don’t wanna.” Oh god, he’s starting to sound like a whiny brat. (Maybe he is.)
Kurogiri fucking clicks his tongue – since when is he even allowed to be sassy?! – and apparently doesn’t have any patience left for Tomura’s bullshit. “I am opening the gate.”
Tomura’s neck starts to itch. It’s gotten easier to ignore but he nonetheless has to gnaw on the inside of his cheek to keep away his fingers. Wouldn’t be a great first impression if the guy who broke into the USJ were such a nervous wreck that he’d scratch himself raw right in front of his idol, his dad’s nemesis, a cool rescue hero and twenty fifteen year olds.
Kurogiri nonchalantly shoves him through the gate. Asshole. Not emotional support worthy at all.
Oh shit, Tomura forgot to store away his corgi plush.
And everyone’s already looking at him. At least All Might doesn’t seem to be here.
They’re off to an amazing start.
“Who are you?” Eraserhead asks him. Oh, fuck, it’s really him. His hair is just as long as Tomura’s – such a coincidence... haha – and his eyes are glowing yellow, cutting off Tomura’s access to his own quirk. He wanted to quickly stuff the plushie into his inventory but guess what’s sure as hell not going to work now? Right. As previously established: Amazing start.
“Uh. I. I am. Well, first of all, hello.” Tomura greets. In this mangled sentence alone he had to clear his throat two times. “I’m Shigaraki Tomura. I... am searching for one Midoriya Izuku?”
Just like that, the plaza is silenced. The kids turn to one of them, the one who’s social distancing as he’s at least two metres away from everyone else, and Tomura can all at once see why.
He finds himself smiling in the face of danger. It’s not a nice smile, no, it’s the one he’d worn all those years ago when he’d still been Sensei’s apprentice. It’s the one Sensei subconsciously taught him.
Midoriya looks exactly like Sensei when he’s about to steal a quirk.
Only permanently and Sensei’s presence has nothing on his own son’s.
Tomura feels the air shift. Midoriya’s coming closer but his movements aren’t human. He knows exactly where he knows them from. For you see, Tomura’s a huge fan of horror games. He loves the thrill, the sneaking around and picking up items one needs to either redirect the monster’s attention or to kill it off. Midoriya is a jumpscare waiting to happen, a PNG picture that’s diving towards you when you’ve done something wrong, without or with only little discernible animation. (And Tomura finds himself thinking, involuntarily: “Somebody didn’t have the budget to properly animate the end boss.”)
As the boy nears, Tomura smells rain first. A quick glance at the sky has his smile widening until it crackles his dry lips.
Cloudless as can be.
“I’m Izuku, hi! Uh, what did you want from me?” The meek tone makes it only more interesting.
(Oh, Tomura now knows why Sensei left his child.)
“Ah, yes. Your – our – dad sends me. I should give you this.” With the one hand that’s not hugging the corgi to his side, he procures the letter from his hoodie pocket. Midoriya takes it slowly or, well, as slow as one can be when they’re glitching all over the place, and in the brief moment when the boy’s so very close to Tomura he can pick up on his scent, he learns what colours taste like. Or, rather, one colour but that one’s already more than enough.
Before Midoriya can retreat, four fingers of Tomura’s now empty hand land on his bi-coloured hair and give it a quick pat. He’s automatically let his pinky hover, something he hasn’t done in literal years.
“Is that all?” Eraser now asks, sounding like he’s aged ten whole years during the quick exchange.
Tomura’s confidence is through the roof at the moment. No wonder that, as he’s been catapulted into his villainy mode – a mindset he’s left behind a long time ago – and grabs a piece of nice paper and a pen out of his inventory. “Ah, actually, Eraserhead and Thirteen, could I get your autograph? I’m a big fan of yours!” He grins. Feels it widen a bit too much, opening a wound and letting blood drip down his chin.
Oh, he’s somehow missed this; the bloodcurdling terror sitting tightly underneath his pulse.
(Tomura now knows why Sensei chose to leave his child.
He wouldn’t have thought there’d be a being that can induce an insanity status effect on a villain of All for One’s calibre.
But it’s only fitting that if there were such a being it’d be the man’s own son.)
9 – Vlad King
After a long day of work, Kan likes to sit down on the couch in the teachers’ lounge and lean back with a drawn out sigh, close his eyes and hope he won’t make the same mistake of thinking he’d like being a teacher again in his next life.
Alas, this day, he finds his fellow heroics first grade homeroom teacher Aizawa already sprawled across the soft leather, looking like he’s trying to replicate the effects of a dissociative episode without actually dissociating.
Or Kan’s reading the room wrong and Shouta is dissociating.
In which case whatever it is that has the man taking up the entirety of the couch has to be at least three pay grades above Shouta’s, which are at least eight above Kan’s.
Kan gets himself and his colleague coffee, sets the cups down on the couch table and, because he has a death wish, he gently grabs Shouta by his armpits and sits him up so that he can slide on the now free spot on the couch.
But Shouta doesn’t brutally claw out his eyes like a Bengalese tiger, which means he’s actually honest-to-god done with the world.
Well, shit.
Kan presses the man’s cat-themed cup into his open hands before taking his own dog-themed one and taking a gulp. The following conversation is going to be too harrowing for a simple sip.
“So...” Kan begins and doesn’t even have to say any more, since Shouta immediately takes him up on the offer to rant at him.
“Fucking Midoriya.” Shouta hisses and exes half of his coffee, “Fu.Cking.Mi.Do.Ri.Ya” he enunciates sharply. “The kid? A nightmare. Absolute nightmare. I thought I’d have problems with Bakugou because of his aggressiveness. I thought I’d have problems with Mineta because he’s a perverted little asshole. Midoriya, though? Takes the cake. He looks deranged, his quirk is deranged, he attracts deranged situations and doesn’t even know about any of it. I’m pretty sure he’s unaware that he’s a horror monster but you know what? I could have lived with that. I could have lived with Midoriya traumatizing Mineta so bad the asshole’s now a monk practising abstinence. Really, I actually love that. But today? No, Kan, that shit’s fucked.”
Kan raises his eyebrows. “Mineta is practising what now?”
“Sexual abstinence. Hasn’t even breathed wrongly at a girl since All Might’s stupid battle trial. No wonder, Midoriya’s psychologically terrorized the fucker. Which I’m glad for because Mineta was salivating over the girls.”
“What? Like, literally salivating?”
“Literally salivating.”
“Ew” Kan scrunches up his nose. Takes another gulp. “And the Midoriya kid? What’s he done today?”
Shouta serenely smiles. Exes the rest of his cup, then slams it on the table.
“Kid’s done nothing at all.”
Kan blinks. “Nothing?” he repeats confusedly.
“Nothing at all. Nada. Was just standing there ominously.”
“Oookay?”
“And then – out of fucking nowhere, Kan. You have to imagine it. You’re pissed already because All Idiocy wasted his entire time before school. Three whole hours. How do you even spend three hours doing hero work when you stand up at six, shower, eat and need to be at school like maximum an hour later? How did he press three hours into one? I don’t understand it and he wouldn’t tell me when I asked. Anyways. Imagine you’re me, pissed off because of All Might, having a headache because Bakugou tries to blow up everything and everyone, and then a portal opens up in the middle of the USJ.”
“A portal?”
“A motherfucking portal. Purple-black mist and all and you’re thinking: Nice, just what I wanted. A villain attack on the first class trip! So, you’re getting ready to throw some punches when you notice it’s one person.”
“One?”
Shouta nods. “Well, I guess technically two since the warper’s there too. And then you notice the person is a teenager with a plush animal under his arm.”
Kan is rendered speechless.
“Yes, that’s what I thought too. Was anxious as hell, introduced himself as Shigaraki Tomura. What kind of name is that?! If that’s his civvie name then that’s even worse than Shinsou Hitoshi, Mr Mind Manipulator People User. I swear to god. Shigaraki Tomura. Turns out he’s not only an Eraserhead fanboy but also Midoriya’s secret half brother. And with ‘secret’, I mean secret to Midoriya too. Kid didn’t know him. Shigaraki gave him a letter from their shared father. I gave Shigaraki an autograph and then he left via warp gate to wherever.”
Kan finally gets his voice back. “Huh? What the hell?”
The other man snorts. “No, please, that’s not it. So, I tell Midoriya to give me the letter since it could be anything and I’d rather not have a kid explode on my watch because of a letter bomb, right?”
“Right”
“You know what was in there? Golden Mastercard on the kid’s name and a short note. Congratulations on entering UA. Love, dad. P.S.: I’ve found Tomura on the streets a couple of years ago. Don’t worry, I’m not raising him for super-villainy anymore! I know your aura doesn’t like that. Haha, just kidding! Hope I can visit soon – I love mental health quirks! What. Is that even supposed to mean?”
A short breather. A pause for thought. Kan sighs and opens his arms. “Hug?” he inquires quietly.
Shouta practically throws himself on his lap and burrows his face in Kan’s cleavage. Understandable.
Kan leans back and pats the frizzy mess Shouta calls his hair.
Man, he’s so glad he doesn’t have Midoriya in his class.
10 – Kyouka
Yeah, yeah. Midoriya’s scary, a monster, an otherworldly thing, yadda yadda.
She honestly doesn’t give a fuck.
Everyone’s overreacting, in her opinion.
Or maybe she’s just too much of a horror enthusiast to really care? It’s probably that. Kyouka needs to be. She can’t afford to let herself be moved too much by something like a little eldritch-ness. (If that’s even a word.)
Otherwise, she’d have lost her shit years ago.
Her hearing’s always been so much better than her mom’s.
Ghosts don’t exist. Not really.
However, fragments of people do.
Kyouka can pick them up. She hates visiting hospitals for that reason. There’s always someone dying and when they do – in the exact moment their energy leaves their mortal vessels – she hears the Whisper. Whether it’d be one last wish, a curse or a confession, she hears it all. She can’t exactly shut down her hearing, which is why she most of the time carries bulky noise-cancelling headphones with her. The Whisper is inherently otherworldly, since it’s caught somewhere between material and immaterial realms.
Which is exactly why she doesn’t really mind Midoriya.
Multi-tongued mumbles in her head about how to successfully seriously harm their classmates? Are you kidding? That’s nothing. No, actually, that is something... but something good. At least for Kyouka, who can actually decipher what they’re about.
And how to use them.
Midoriya is an endless well of information. His mumbles aren’t only extremely interesting but also helpful. Whenever the hiss starts, Kyouka is sure to listen carefully. In literally every subject, Midoriya’s guiding her through difficult concepts with the ease of a seasoned college professor. He’s sometimes daydreaming, caught up in his own mind and letting his thoughts wander to other stuff. Thermodynamics, American history, the state of today’s hero society and so, so much more.
Kyouka loves listening to him. She takes avid notes when topics catch her interest and absolutely despises Bakugou because the blond’s basically interrupting Midoriya’s podcasts.
Luckily, most of the time, nobody’s able to hear them. They’re too low, for the most part on a frequency normal people can’t perceive, and she feels privileged as hell to be the only one to pick up on them.
Not even Shouji can. His hearing might be a lot better than the others’ but his ears are built like a human’s. Kyouka’s aren’t. Hers are more advanced than any human’s or animal’s will ever be. This is the true power of her quirk – the earphone jacks are nice for attacks and to catch miniscule sounds through metre thick brick walls but her actual hearing is where her real strength lies.
Too low for others? No problem. Too loud for others? No problem either. Maybe a little overdrive but that’s it.
And now there’s Midoriya and Midoriya’s made of otherworldly whispers.
(It’s scary. It’s gripping. It’s thrilling.)
It’s like his presence is a gift handmade for Kyouka and Kyouka alone.
Sadly, that means everyone else is freaked the hell out and isolates the boy. She sees how he visibly deflates every time Uraraka finds an excuse to flee from his attempts at befriending her. Sees how Aizawa ignores his genius because he just can’t hear. Sees how everyone inches away from Midoriya because his vibe is too hard to handle, since they’re unable to adjust to it because it’s never standing still long enough to settle and become a constant in their lives.
Sees how, day by day, Midoriya’s eyes lose their unnatural shine.
And she thinks, one day after the whole USJ thing: Fuck that.
Kyouka’s tired of being like everyone else. She’s tired of being too shy (and, she admits, also a bit too scared) to approach Midoriya. Simply tired of giving any fucks she doesn’t even have in the first place.
So, at lunch, she sits down opposite of Midoriya, ignores his small flinch and demands with more confidence than she has: “What’s your favourite genre of music?”
The smile he gives her is blindingly bright.
(Also horrific but when is it not?)
And Kyouka smiles back.