Chapter Text
Izuku stepped lightly, careful not to let the floorboards creak as he made his way down the carpeted stairs. The basement was an open plan--one large, doughnut shaped room. The greenette flicked on the lights. The walls were lined at regular intervals with polished oak shelves… and those shelves were completely covered in snow globes. Oh god, there must be literally hundreds of them. They could all be animals, maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked--no, there were animals and plants but there were also humans. The tiny figure of an elderly man stared up at Izuku through an eternity of glass. It was just possible to make out the expression on his face--abject terror. Some of the prisoners had been forced into elaborate poses, dressed up festively like holiday spirits, dusted with snow and set before a background of conifer trees. There were plenty of scantily clad women on make believe beaches, too. Here were hundred foot pines imprisoned… He hadn’t realized it was possible for this quirk to capture something that size. This was… impressive. It was also one of the most horrifying things he had ever seen.
Sick. Absolutely sick. Perverted. Demented. He couldn’t come up with enough insulting adjectives for this… depraved display of psychopathic contempt for sapient life and freedom. There was a little girl in that one--a little girl who couldn’t have been more than three. At least she hadn’t been forced into a role in any twisted fantasy for what little that was worth.
Izuku couldn’t get an immediate count given how many variables there were--he couldn’t begin to guess the number of individuals per globe, the number of globes containing animals only, or the number of globes whose inhabitants were mortally wounded or dead… but there must be upwards of a hundred living people imprisoned here… If it were just one or two he’d take care of it himself, free them and set them up with trusted help, but this was much too big a job for one lone commando no matter how skilled. He’d have to call Isomorph… just as soon as he’d dealt with the madman behind this atrocity. How dare he. How dare All For One hand this power off to a monster like this? If that psychopath had just kept the ability for himself quietly… Izuku had seen no reason to disturb the balance of the universe but no, the Soulstealer had gone ahead and given it away and now at the end of the trail Izuku found this. This was unforgivable. Izuku wasn’t just here to make Hirano pay, he was going to make All For One regret this. He couldn’t kill the man, no, didn’t even have the power to set the Soulstealer’s plans back without assuring mutual destruction, but Izuku could already think of a beautiful way to get back at All For One for this… something humiliating but not so humiliating as to provoke retaliation and invite escalation.
Somewhere on the second floor a board creaked. His blood boiling with fury, Izuku turned off the lights, concealed himself, and waited.
Hirano Niko appeared at the top of the stairs, a tall silhouette. Izuku, hidden beneath the stairs themselves, held position like a calculating predator. The man eventually turned on the lights and made his way down.
The greenette pounced. Hirano cried out in alarm, flailing as his legs were swept from beneath him. The enemy fell clumsily. Clearly he had not been purely a desk employee at the HPSC, however, because the silver-haired elder rolled with the impact and swung a punch at Izuku’s face. The greenette ducked and then head butted the man in the chest, knocking him flat on his back before kicking him savagely between the legs.
“You absolute monster!” Izuku snarled, tackling the prone and stunned man and pressing hands against Hirano’s throat. This was an extremely inefficient means of strangling someone. That was the point, of course. “I don’t know why you did this and I don’t care! Nothing, nothing could justify it! Mad man!”
He felt the enemy’s pulse beneath his fingers. He felt Hirano gasp for breath and flail his arms and attempt a throw that knocked Izuku away long enough for the enemy to catch a breath. All that did was convince the greenette to use a more efficient sleeper hold, cutting blood flow as he pressed the man’s neck down into the crook of his elbow, hand behind his enemy’s head…
Rage burned through him like the corona of a newborn star, wild, unfettered, a force of nature that executes the commands of physics without regard for mortal concepts like “right” and “wrong.” This was the kind of deathless fury that had burned a million years and would burn millions more. There was not enough ice in the universe to douse even a fraction of the flames. Rasping breath in his ears… fluttering pulse against his skin… a shallow grave waiting hungrily in a quiet place… ashes for ashes. Blood for blood.
Izuku was thirty minutes late to homeroom on account of being violently ill upon waking. It was the nightmare he’d been dreading… and it answered a lot of questions although he didn’t want to think about which questions it answered. Hirano got Kuma’s quirk from All For One, exactly as Izuku had surmised, and the body thief killed the man for abusing it, also exactly as Izuku had surmised. The student couldn’t force himself to pen down the details of that dream, couldn’t force himself to pick it apart looking for clues.
“Are you okay, Izuku?” Kacchan asked him discreetly as they walked across campus after school. Katsuki must be really worried; he didn’t say “nerd.” The blonde probably had reason to be worried. Izuku had sleepwalked through classes like a zombie, barely recalling anything although his notes seemed… decent. Apparently he didn’t need to be conscious to copy the board.
“No,” Izuku whispered, too tired to lie. Besides, this was the one person he trusted with the truth.
“What happened, nerd?”
“I can’t… I don’t… I should tell someone. I should tell Aizawa, but I don’t want to.”
Katsuki gave him a searching look. “Either tell me or tell Aizawa.”
“But I--”
“Now,” the blonde said with a tone Izuku had never heard before, a tone that said, “enough of this nonsense, I am putting my foot down.” “Either turn around and go back to school and tell Aizawa or tell me. Those are your choices and so help me nerd, I will drag you back and throw you in the teacher’s lounge and make you talk, I will. You’ve looked like hell all week.”
“I’m on work-study--”
“That’s not it. You don’t look tired, you look terrified. I don’t know what’s going on with you, more crazy,” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “Meta Liberation Army memories or missing time or False Flag being an asshole or what, but enough is enough.”
“O-okay,” Izuku mumbled, but didn’t turn around, didn’t return to Aizawa. He should. This was important information about his disappearance. It could shed so much light on the investigation and he ought to reveal it immediately but if he did… what else might come to light? “I killed someone.”
“You--w-wait what?”
“When I was missing for a week. He was horrible.” Just thinking the name “Hirano Niko” sent prickles of anger through him like porcupine quills. “He was the scum of the earth. He probably deserved to die. But someone else took my hands and strangled him to death in his own basement. I remember it. Intimately, I remember it, exactly how it felt to kill him, to be the weapon someone else used to kill him.” He bowed his head so the tears dripped from his cheek bones rather than running down his face. “I remember wanting to do it. I remember being so angry I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Even now, I still hate him,” the greenette cried. “How could I do that, Kacchan?”
Izuku couldn’t stop sobbing and slowly sank to his knees, all thoughts of walking banished from his mind. A hand began to pat his hair. “So freakin’ fluffy, even with that weird ass dye,” Katsuki growled. Izuku might have been shocked into a laugh by such conduct on any other day but it would take something truly remarkable to pull him out of this rut. “That didn’t work?” No. No it didn’t. “Look, look nerd,” Katsuki said, “ you didn’t do anything. That wasn’t you, and you know that better than I do.”
“Felt like me,” Izuku whispered between sobs.
“Well it wasn’t,” the blonde snapped.
“How do you--”
“Because you wouldn’t. That’s why! I’ve known you all my goddamned life and I’d believe me murdering someone in cold blood before I’d believe you doing it. I know you and you would never! Now come on. You’re going to come back with me and tell Aizawa about this, even though you don’t want to, and then he’ll send you to… Hound Dog or something.”
“W-why are you…?” Izuku wasn’t entirely sure what was happening.
“I’m sick and tired of watching you drive yourself crazy,” Katsuki muttered. “Not gonna’ enable it anymore.” Enable it?
“Please don’t tell anyone about--” the MLA bunker, or the notebook or--
“I’m not going to tell anyone anything. I’m no snitch. You, however, are going to explain to Aizawa what’s going on with you today.”
Izuku could only nod dumbly.
Izuku sipped tea in the staff room as he waited for Tsukauchi to arrive. As Aizawa said, “there’s no point in making anyone tell a story like that twice.”
The human lie detector strode into the room. “Sorry for the delay.” The hero and the detective sat opposite Izuku, a table between them. Both had notepads. Aizawa had his recorder. “Will you please tell us what happened in this vision, Midoriya?”
He had already cried his eyes out and now spoke as tonelessly as a robot. “Hirano Niko was his name,” Izuku began. Tsukauchi’s eyebrows rose. Was this another of his cases?
“Had you heard that name before?” The detective inquired. Izuku would have preferred he hadn’t asked that.
“Yes,” Izuku nodded. “I once had… a weird dream about being angry at snow globes. It was a while ago now. I ended up searching for some pretty strange key words on the internet and his name came up, but I don’t know anything else about him.”
Tsukauchi nodded. “So, what happened?”
“I walked into his basement and turned on the lights. I saw all of his snow globes and I was furious,” Izuku continued tonelessly, “because I knew that they were real people, not knickknacks. I knew that was his quirk. I mean… it wasn’t me. It just… in the dream it’s first person, feels like me--”
“We understand,” Aizawa said. “Continue.”
“I turned off the lights. I waited for him to come down the stairs and when he did I tackled him. I told him I didn’t care why he did it, that it was unforgivable. He fought me. He was… decent. I tried to strangle him and he threw me off once, then I got him in a sleeper hold and… I don’t think I remember him actually dying, it fades out, but I’ve no doubt that I didn’t let him go, not until he stopped breathing.”
“The snow globes,” Aizawa stared at him. “Had people in them? Real, live people?”
“Yes,” Izuku repeated. The detective and underground hero exchanged glances overflowing with unguarded horror.
“Oh...” Tsukauchi mouthed a curse and shook his head, then his brow furrowed. “How did you know, Midoriya? You say you don't remember breaking any of the snow globes. How did you know that Hirano had imprisoned people within them?”
“I just…” What should he say here? There was an easy way out, wasn’t there, a truth that didn’t give away the game. “The person who was possessing me knew, so I knew.”
The detective nodded. “Midoriya, do you have any idea how many people were in those globes?”
“My possessor thought there were at least a hundred,” he admitted.
“Hell,” Aizawa rubbed the bridge of his nose. “And this suddenly turned into a case of one hundred missing people. Do you have any idea what happened to those people, Midoriya?”
“There was plenty of broken glass on site,” the detective muttered under his breath as if thinking aloud, “enough that a theft was ruled out. So some of them were likely released immediately, presuming that breaking the globes does release the prisoners… that’s likely a good sign.”
What had his possessor been thinking about? “I remember thinking “there’s too many of them for me to deal with them all,”” Izuku replied, trying to dredge up details of those fleeting brain patterns he could barely recall through the general haze of murderous fury, trauma and self-loathing. “Isomorph,” he said dizzily, “I remember thinking I would have to call Isomorph.”
Tsukauchi and Aizawa exchanged another set of glances, this time with eyebrows raised nearly to the ceiling in borderline disbelief. “Who’s Isomorph?” Izuku asked.
“You don’t know that?” the detective asked.
Izuku was about to shake his head, but he wasn’t sure if the detective’s quirk worked on non-verbal answers and he didn’t want to appear as if he were trying to thwart the man. “No, I have no idea who Isomorph is. I don’t… I mean if I knew everything my possessor knew then I would know who they were… Sometimes I know things that they knew but not always.” Tsukauchi nodded in understanding.
“Isomorph isn’t a person,” Aizawa began.
“It’s an organization,” the lie detector picked up the thread. “A hybrid between a legitimate multinational corporation, a private military contractor, and a ring of vigilantes. They manage to keep a cover of legitimacy, operating in gray areas, though often off the books…”
“What do they do?” Izuku asked, dread settling in his stomach. What had he done to all those people? He’d almost been expecting something good given how his body thief typically reacted to these sorts of crimes--
“Isomorph is most famous for rescuing and repatriating victims of quirk trafficking, especially those kept as battle slaves,” Tsukauchi told him. Oh. Well. That was… surprising for a number of reasons. “Although they, in fact, do far more work fighting against sex trafficking, domestic servitude, kidnappings by paramilitary groups, and governments “disappearing” people. Isomorph barely operates within Japan. Our government and especially the HPSC takes a very hard line against them for obvious reasons. I’m surprised that they had enough agents and influence in our country to handle an influx of freed prisoners that large… Maybe they moved most or all the snow globes out of country intact and released the prisoners on one of their carriers where they’re equipped to handle the volume. Isomorph could have broken some conventional snow globes on site to avoid the appearance of a theft. I doubt the initial investigation would have noticed the substitution.”
Aizawa hummed. “Also, how would someone… Midoriya this doesn’t really make sense. Why would someone who was literally using you as a battle slave… contact an organization infamous for freeing battle slaves--often by any means necessary--to help with this situation? That just…” He threw up his hands.
Izuku shrugged. “I… have no idea? Maybe… maybe they called Isomorph after they left? So Isomorph never saw me but they did see all those people… presuming that Isomorph was actually called at all?” They had no way of confirming that.
“Nighteye might know,” Tsukauchi mused.
“Hm?” Eraserhead raised an eyebrow.
“Sir Nighteye has contacts with Isomorph. Signalman Australius, one of the only agents who we know is active regularly in Japan, although we can’t prove it, is actually a personal friend of Nighteye. If the organization took custody of those trafficked people, Nighteye should be able to find out about it.”
“But what if they didn’t?” Aizawa muttered darkly. “Isomorph taking them is by far the best thing that could possibly have happened to those people… If not, where are they now? Even if Isomorph did take them, what happened then?”
Wait. They were missing something obvious. “I bet… whoever was possessing me must have had some sort of contact with Isomorph, right? If the organization doesn’t really operate in Japan then they would have had to, I don’t know, pull some strings in order to make something this big happen… so…”
“So we ask Nighteye to find out from the Signalman who it was that phoned Isomorph about one hundred plus kidnapped people in a former HPSC official’s basement,” Tsukauchi nodded. “Excellent idea, Midoriya.”
“I’m not sure if you understand how huge this is, problem child,” Aizawa shook his head. “I just… it’s almost above my paygrade.”
The adrenaline of theorizing, the promise of some answers at last, wore off abruptly. “I killed him,” Izuku whispered. “Maybe he deserved it but… I know it wasn’t really me, but… I remember it like it was. It’s so vivid.” He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image, the fury, the murderous intent, wouldn’t let him be. “Do you need anything more from me?”
“Is there anything you think is relevant?” the detective asked.
“I… maybe?” It was hard to concentrate when he wanted nothing more than to forget about all of this, when all he could think of was the fading of a frantic pulse against his skin. “I remember that one of the snow globes had a little girl, maybe three years old, and another was an older man but I don’t remember enough about what they look like to try to help identify anyone… and who knows how long they’ve been missing?”
“That’s all then,” Tsukauchi snapped his notebook shut.
“We haven’t found you an outside therapist yet, have we?” Aizawa asked him. Izuku sniffed and shook his head. His eyes ached from tears. “Come on, then. Hound Dog should still be in his office. If you can’t make it to classes tomorrow, consider yourself excused.”
Aizawa patted him on the head much like Kacchan had earlier and well, Izuku was not a cat but he could see the appeal (the appeal of head pats, and also the appeal of being a cat). Hound Dog got him to talk for two hours and afterwards Izuku actually felt better, or at least like he saw a path to feeling better in the future. They really cared, all his teachers and friend at UA. Would they still care… if they knew the truth? Or perhaps it was best to wonder if they would still care when they learned the truth. Whatever the truth was… Would Sir Nighteye’s contact at Isomorph be the keystone? Would they know in a matter of days or weeks exactly what Izuku had been up to and under whose orders? What then? Or would this be just another dead end? Did he want it to be a dead end? Maybe… he sometimes felt as if he were racing against Aizawa and Tsukauchi, trying to figure everything out before they did so that he would be in a position to defend himself against accusations or at least know what those accusations might be.
He hadn’t even begun to process the information about Hirano’s victims. The man had more than one hundred people in his basement, and Izuku’s body snatcher had--at least intended--to see them to freedom. That was… amazingly admirable. Had the rescue been successful? Had Izuku’s kidnapper managed to un-kidnap a hundred other people or failed and sent them to their doom or, a fate worse than death, cold storage in a forgotten basement somewhere? Izuku would likely know the answer to those questions soon enough; Sir Nighteye would almost certainly be able to learn that much at least.
On top of the guilt-shock-horror-anxiety-pride--he would have liked to deny that last bit and wasn't interested in identifying where it came from--the rage remained, burning in much the same way as it had for his kidnapper. He was furious with Hirano. What the man had done was despicable… but on top of that Izuku was furious that Hirano had used Kuma’s quirk, defiled her memory with such a sin… and then there was the rage at All For One for facilitating this. Given how similar their emotions were, it was hard to draw a line between Izuku and his possessor in that basement, decide where one started and the other ended… and that was a whole new kind of terror.
He went to class the next day because he had nothing better to do. Shouji and Ojiro had no idea what was wrong with him, but they picked up on his mood and, working with Kacchan, tried as best they could to distract him. For some reason, a lot of these efforts involved making fun of Izuku’s hair. As Shouji put it, “it’s low hanging fruit.”