Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Izuku ducked into the classroom--a full two minutes late and panting from the sprint--and was immediately blown backwards into the hallway by explosive shouting.

“Where have you been?” Kacchan screamed above the general din. Their teacher tried to control the chaos but didn't have much luck.

Izuku was only two minutes late; it wasn’t as if this hadn’t happened before multiple times, it wasn’t as if Kacchan hadn’t been five minutes late last Tuesday. What was happening?

Izuku stared at the rest of his class in utter bewilderment, trying to pick out a thread of conversation amidst the hubbub.

"Where have you been?” shouted Abe, her face contorted in fear and confusion.

"I’m only two minutes late!” Izuku protested. Had he missed the start of an important test? None of the national, standardized tests were supposed to happen this month and even being two minutes late to one of those wouldn’t elicit this sort of reaction. They were discussing their career interest forms today, but that was it . Nothing time-critical was supposed to be happening.

"Two minutes late, Deku! Two minutes? Are you insane?” Kacchan screeched shrilly, eyes wide with fury and… something else. Fear? Or was it relief?

"What’s going on?” Izuku asked softly, his confused question lost beneath a new round of shouting.

"Be. QUIET!” Mr. Kondo, their homeroom teacher, roared. The cacophony died down to a murmur. “Midoriya, where have you been for the last week?”

Izuku’s jaw fell slack in bewilderment. “I-I- I’ve been in class and once I was at a school club and I went to the grocery store on Saturday and my mother and I went to a movie at the theater but mostly I was at home?” He couldn’t help but phrase it as a question, the cold suspicion that everyone here knew something he didn’t sending chills through his blood.

Mr. Kondo narrowed his dark eyes and continued carefully. “Midoriya, you were reported missing a week ago. No one has seen you for eight days. The police have been combing the city for you.”

"I’m sorry. What?”

Thirty minutes after arriving late to class, Izuku found himself sipping tea in a comfortable interview room at the city’s central police precinct. It was good tea. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was, or how cold. His clothes--which weren’t camouflage but did look like something a mercenary would wear--were ripped and caked with dirt and blood. Some of that blood was definitely Izuku’s. Was all of it Izuku’s? That was hard to say.

He had no recollection of putting these garments on. He had no recollection of hiding a switchblade in his boot, no recollection of arranging the throwing knives in holsters beneath his sleeves. He had handed the throwing knives over when asked to disarm--those knives were hard to miss once Izuku started paying attention to what he was wearing--but he hadn’t noticed the hidden switchblade until now.

A detective stepped into the room, closing the heavy door behind him with a click. “Good morning, Midoriya. I’m glad to see you unharmed.”

"Sir,” Izuku said, “I didn’t notice until just a minute ago but I had that other knife in my shoe,” he pointed to the weapon which he had set on a side table near the door, several meters away and definitely out of reach.

The raven haired man looked Izuku over critically. “Do you not remember getting those weapons?”
Izuku shook his head. “I… don’t remember anything .”

"Anything? What do you mean by that?”
“I… I d-don’t know where I’ve been for the last week. I don’t remember a thing,” Izuku said, trying not to panic as he admitted this terrifying truth aloud. “I don’t k-know where I got these clothes or where I got those knives. I don't know who cut my hair but it should be way longer than this. I don’t remember how I got these cuts,” he pulled up his sleeve to reveal the still healing scabs. It looked like a bite mark. “I don’t know how I got the scars on my chest that look like I’ve had them for years but I know I didn’t have last time I looked. I don’t remember… I don’t remember anything!” He was practically screaming and, at some point, had stood up and thrown his chair to the side. “Please, you have to believe me, I don’t--”

"Calm down, Midoriya, calm down. I believe you. I know you’re telling me the truth. Take a deep breath.” The student did. “Now sit down and have some tea. It’s good for you.”

Fingers shaking, the greenette clutched his cup and took a few sips. “My quirk,” the detective explained, “is called Human Lie Detector. I can tell if someone is misleading me. You’re not.”

"Does my mother know I’m alright?” Izuku mumbled.

"We sent someone to fetch her from work,” the detective soothed. “She’ll be here soon. We have a lot to discuss but, if you like, we can wait until she arrives.”

Izuku shook his head. “I d-don’t w-want to… I don’t want to talk about this with her watching. It’ll upset her more…”

"Alright. Midoriya, can you tell me what you remember from… what you consider to be this morning? Monday the fourteenth?”

What did he remember? “I-I got up… I stayed up late watching an All Might smash compilation last night,” he cringed in embarrassment. He shouldn’t have admitted that. “I was r-really tired, so I almost slept through my alarm. I was running late, so I grabbed just… granola for breakfast as I was running out the door but I don’t actually remember eating much of it. I was halfway to school and I started feeling sick, n-nauseous… maybe from eating fast and running, so I sat down on a bench, at the 223 Route bus stop, the one by the park that’s a triangle,” he couldn’t remember the park’s name, but “the triangle park” was what most people called it anyway, “to rest for a minute and I guess I fell asleep there?” The detective nodded, encouraging Izuku to continue. “I woke up and I… I wasn’t on the bench, b-but I didn’t really notice that was weird? I-it’s… it doesn’t make sense but it didn’t seem s-strange at the time. It was just… well, “here I am.” I realized that it was almost time for school,” he glanced at his watch. “This isn’t my watch. I don’t know where I got it, but it’s not mine.” This looked like some kind of expensive thing that military personnel relying on down to the second timing would wear. “A-anyway, I got up and ran to school because I didn’t want to be late. I didn’t notice I wasn’t in my uniform. I didn’t notice that I didn’t have my backpack, either… I got to school and I was like t-two minutes late? And everyone started shouting at me and screaming and I g-got really confused… and then Mr. Kondo took me to the front desk and the principal called the police and… then I ended up h-here…”

"Hm,” the detective nodded, closing the book where he had carefully taken notes on Izuku’s testimony. “You went to school on the fourteenth. You arrived on time.”

"I did?”

"You don’t remember anything about going to school? You had a pop quiz in mathematics. You got a perfect score on it. Physical education played dodgeball. You turned in your career interest forms and discussed them.”

Izuku shook his head, straining against nothing because there was nothing there , no wall blocking out memories, no fog oppressing some part of his brain, just nothing . “There’s n-nothing there,” he said. “I thought… I thought today was Monday. I d-don’t… are you sure I went to school?” Of course the detective was sure, but nothing made any sense right now.

"Yes,” Tsukauchi nodded. “You also met All Might that day after school. He captured a villain that was chasing you and you asked him if he thought a quirkless person could become an underground hero. He told you something along the lines of, “I’m not sure, possibly.” Are you sure you don’t remember that?”

Izuku gaped at Tsukauchi, unable to close his mouth. Eventually he managed to find the presence of mind to rage against the heavens. “I. Met. All Might . And. I don’t even remember it? No! This can’t be happening!”

Tsukauchi’s mouth quirked into the barest hint of a smile. “He said you were a bit of a fanboy.” Izuku felt the blood drain from his face and liquid mortification take its place. “All Might and I are well acquainted." That was really cool. "He was quite interested in your case seeing as he was quite possibly the last person to see you before your disappearance.”

"I’m so embarrassed,” Izuku mumbled, hiding his face behind his dirty sleeves. “And what am I even wearing? Why is it so loose?” That was a good question.

"It’s an outer layer designed to be worn over body armor; it’s loose because you are not wearing anything beneath it now, although I presume you were earlier.” Izuku choked. “I also presume from your reaction that you have never owned clothes like this previously? Or any of the knives you had?” The detective opened his notebook again.

"N-no,” Izuku mumbled. “And I certainly don’t know how to use them…”

"You said you weren’t on the bus stop bench when you woke up this morning. Where were you and what time was it?”

"Uh… it was eighteen minutes until the late bell." His memory of waking up was fuzzy. Where had he been? “I was… I was leaning against a dumpster behind a convenience store, uh, Lawson, the one across from the preschool . I was behind Lawson.”

"It didn’t occur to you at the time that this was strange.”

Izuku shook his head. “No. The only thing I thought was that I needed to get to school or I was going to be late.”

The detective nodded. “Has anything even vaguely like this ever happened to you before? Have you ever lost track of where you were and turned up somewhere unexpected? Any gaps in your memory? Is there anything at all strange that occurred in the last few weeks to you or, in fact, to anyone you know?”

Izuku pawed through his memories carefully. “I m-mean sometimes I zone out when I’m w-walking to school and I’m surprised that I’m already there but I think everyone does that? Just daydreaming? It’s not… I’ve done that all my l-life, I think.”

Tsukauchi agreed with him. “Any unusual strangers? Did you receive strange phone calls or texts or interact with anyone online who was in any way “off?””

Izuku shook his head again. “I spend some time on hero forums but no, n-nothing weird happened there, no weirder than the typical, internet flame wars, anyway.”

"Alright.” The detective put his notebook away again. “I think that is all the information I can get from you right now. I expect your mother is probably here already. I’m going to go let her in, then all of us can talk.”

Izuku winced. “She must be frantic,” he mumbled.

"She was very, very worried about you.” Tsukauchi left, taking Izuku’s mysterious switchblade with him.

Izuku sat alone trying to ward off intrusive, disturbing thoughts. Hopefully the detective would get back soon. The student finished his tea and winced at a pang of hunger. How long had it been since he’d eaten anything? He must have had food during his missing week…probably? He could have eaten anything or nothing. He could have done nothing or anything. Whose blood was caked onto his knees? He could have killed someone and he would have no idea.

It seemed fairly obvious what had happened to him. The detective hadn’t spelled out the conclusion but he didn’t need to. Izuku might be young but he was not a fool. He’d been possessed. Someone with a mind control or possession or memory alteration quirk had stolen him for a week and used him for… who knew what purpose. Theft? Assassination? Get away driving? It looked like he had been used for something violent rather than something sexual, and he wasn’t sure whether that should make him feel better or worse.

Why give him back, though? They stole him away from his mother and from school without a shred of care for the impact this would have on him or his community… and then they gave him back? He didn’t really want to think it, not when it was his own life he was considering the end of, but it probably would have made more sense to just kill him. Erase the evidence. Had Izuku escaped his captor somehow? Did the quirk used on him have some limitation that was arrived at unexpectedly? Had someone shown him mercy and released him after he served his purpose? Was the individual who captured him just… a horrible person but not willing to murder a child?

The door opened. Three people entered the interview room. One was the detective, one was Izuku’s mother, and one was a scruffy, long-haired man with a huge, off-white scarf.

Izuku expected sobbing. The look in his mother’s dry eyes was almost worse than that. She looked as if she had just seen a miracle. She had clearly hoped to see her son again but not really expected to. Midoriya Inko stepped forward slowly, gingerly, as if she could shatter the illusion by walking too quickly. She threw her arms about Izuku’s neck and clutched him close. “I hadn’t dared to hope too much,” she whispered hoarsely in his ear. “Where have you been?” Izuku winced.

"He doesn’t know,” the detective broke in. “He has no memory of the last week.”

The scruffy man raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”

"Are you a lie detector, Aizawa? I didn’t think so. Let’s all have a seat.”

The four of them sat around the table, Izuku’s mother close enough to cling to the child’s shoulders. “My name is Aizawa Shouta,” the scruffy man introduced himself. “I’m an underground hero. I was working on your case.”

"Thank you,” Izuku said, not sure if that was appropriate but feeling that he had to say something. “What… happens now?”

Aizawa and Tsukauchi exchanged glances. “We need to keep you under observation for a few days,” the hero said. “To make sure that there’s no chronic problem and run some tests. Has anyone taken a blood sample from you yet?” Izuku shook his head. “We should get that soon then, check to make sure you weren’t just drugged. It was probably a quirk, but it pays to be sure.”

"What happened to him?” Izuku’s mother demanded icily.

Tsukauchi began after another round of glances exchanged with Aizawa. “What we know for sure is this: Midoriya Izuku left for school last Monday, stopped to rest on a bench and woke up this morning in a back alleyway, disoriented and dressed in combat gear. He went to school without realizing anything was amiss and promptly wound up here.

"The day Midoriya Izuku went missing, he attended class as usual and, besides being perhaps a bit quiet and distant, did not behave strangely. He had a brief altercation with another student, Bakugou Katsuki, after both revealed an intention to take the entrance exam for UA High School. Bakugou reportedly damaged Midoriya’s property, burned Midoriya with his quirk and told Midoriya that the world would be better off without him in it, although no one has reported on the exact phrasing of what was said.” Izuku blinked in astonishment. Kacchan… said something like that to him? His mother growled ferociously, an almost feral gleam in her eyes. Clearly she had never heard these details before. “You are within your rights to press charges against him for, at a minimum, destruction of property and assault.”

"I-I don’t want to press charges,” Izuku shook his head. “I-I don’t even remember and… he’s not really like that… he was just mad.” The underground hero raised an eyebrow. “Besides, I don’t want to ruin his life over this… he might not be able to get into hero school with something like that on his record.”

Aizawa cocked his head. “One might think that someone who behaves that way doesn’t deserve to get into hero school, Midoriya.”

"If my son doesn’t want to press charges we won’t press charges,” Inko said, “but heaven help that boy when I tell Mitsuki about this…”

Tsukauchi nodded in acknowledgement. He did that a lot, preferring that non-verbal cue to an “okay.” “Continuing, we know that Midoriya left school promptly and we know the route he took home, because All Might encountered him that afternoon. Midoriya was running from a villain we have taken to referring to as “Slimer.” All Might captured this villain. Midoriya inquired of All Might if he could have an autograph and also asked whether or not it might be possible for a very motivated quirkless individual to become an underground hero because, and I quote, “most of that is intelligence gathering and ambush hunting where powerful quirks are unnecessary.”” Aizawa cocked his head and “hmphed.” Had Izuku really said that? He must have, right? “All Might said that it, “might, perhaps, be possible, although it would be very dangerous for someone without a quirk to pursue that path.” Midoriya seemed pleased with this answer, thanked All Might and departed, apparently heading towards his own home. Midoriya never arrived. Midoriya Inko called to report him missing at midnight. Despite the fact that he had not been missing for twenty-four hours, his age led to him being declared missing and a search was organized. Despite the best efforts of police and underground heroes, Midoriya was not seen again until this morning.

"We have checked surveillance footage from the Lawson where Midoriya woke up,” that was fast. Izuku had only mentioned that a few minutes ago. “They were happy to send us a copy of their recordings . Midoriya arrived in the alleyway at 1:57 am last night, leaned against a locked dumpster and fell asleep promptly. The only thing of note is that he leapt effortlessly over a very tall chain link fence when he arrived.”

Izuku’s mother sighed deeply. “What does all this mean?”

Aizawa took over. “It seems fairly clear that Midoriya was under the effects of a mind control or possession quirk. I have seen this a number of times in my career, although this is the only time that I have seen someone returned entirely intact after such a kidnapping. I’m curious, though… Are you capable of leaping over a four meter chain link fence like a cat, Midoriya?” Izuku shook his head. The hero nodded. “Get up, then. I want to try something.”

"O-okay?”

"Stop stuttering, I’m not going to hurt you.” Izuku followed the hero to the center of the room. Aizawa lunged at him, snatching his wrist in a powerful grip. Before he even knew what he was doing, Izuku had stepped forward, rotating his arm as he did so, using his entire body to wrench his hand out of the underground hero’s grip and readying himself to carry out a counter attack. Izuku blinked in shock and stood there dumbly, wondering what kind of martial discipline he had just used.

"That was a hapkido move, I believe, a basic one but perfectly executed. Have you ever studied martial arts of any kind, Midoriya?”

The shocked student shook his head dumbly. “Too expensive…” he said vaguely. He would have loved to join a gym, but he and his mother barely got by as it was. He had tried to learn some things from internet instructional videos, but actually attending lessons wasn’t an option.

"I’ve never heard of a possession quirk transferring muscle memory, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Typically, when we find the victims of such abductions, they’re not survivors if you catch my unfortunate drift. It’s ugly, but there’s no point in pretending it isn’t true.” Izuku’s mother glowered at Aizawa but remained silent. Izuku could see where the hero was coming from, but really wished the man wouldn’t talk that way, not in front of Inko at least. There was no need to be cruel like that.

"I wonder…” Tsukauchi pulled one of the throwing daggers Izuku had carried out of a satchel. “Would you take this and see whether you can hit that dartboard, Midoriya?”

There was a dartboard? There was a dartboard. Why was there a dartboard in this room? “I don’t…” Izuku said, taking the weapon by the blade, “I d-don’t want to wreck your things!”

"That dartboard is at least fifty years old. Humor us,” Aizawa broke in.

Standing across the room, Izuku fixed his eyes upon the target and hurled his weapon. It landed in the center red with a satisfying “shunk.” The student shook his head slowly side to side, not sure what else to do.

"Very impressive,” Aizawa said, “I mean, very impressive. I only know a few people who are that good and one of them’s Snipe.” Snipe was really cool… he worked at UA. Maybe Izuku would still have a chance to go there after all of this... maddness blew over.

Izuku sat down on the floor. “I’m really hungry,” he said without much feeling. “And I want to go home.” But he couldn’t. He had to go be “under observation,” whatever that meant.

"Well, we can at least feed you,” Aizawa declared.

Chapter Text

Being under “observation” meant that Izuku had to stay in a safe house for the week. This “safe house” was actually a hotel. The police took a blood sample from him (among other things, like his clothes) before providing him with a hefty serving of curry for lunch and leaving him and his mother alone in the small room. This was no luxury hotel but it was clearly not a cheap place, either. Everything was well cleaned and well maintained. There was a microwave and a refrigerator and two beds that were just close enough to tempt one to leap between them . Yes, Izuku was going to do just that after his mother went home, regardless of the fact that he knew there were cameras in the main room. He had been promised that there were no cameras in the bathroom, so he considered the arrangement acceptable.

The two Midoriyas ate together at a tiny table in the corner by the window. The chipboard table was barely large enough for both of them to set down their takeout bowls, but it was better than eating on the floor. “Do you think you can get my homework from school? Because I have to stay here all week?” Izuku asked, eating ravenously despite the sick anxiety that stalked him like an unrelenting predator. He was going to feel sick and anxious probably for the rest of his life, he would have to get used to eating and working and living despite that feeling.

"Of course,” his mother told him, voice wobbling slightly. He was surprised she hadn’t started crying yet. It had to happen sometime to one or both of them. It was a defining family characteristic. If they didn’t burst into tears, they weren’t Midoriyas.

"I’m kind of glad I don’t remember,” Izuku said. “I don’t know what there was to forget, but I can’t imagine it was good. Still… I suppose I’ll have to spend my whole life wondering…”

"The detective and Mr. Aizawa will do their best to find out what happened to you,” his mother said gently.

Izuku shook his head. “They didn’t find me . I can’t imagine they’ll find the people that took me.” Tears, at long last, dripped down his cheeks.

"Are… are you…?” she trailed off, not finishing the thought. Was Izuku okay? That was what she had meant to ask, wasn’t it? It was hard to say. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him physically, nothing serious anyway. The scars on his chest were quite obviously the aftermath of bullet wounds. The still healing marks on his arm were, indeed, a bite wound from something big with a weird mouth design, probably a person with a mutation quirk. The doctor who took his blood informed him of that… and told him that his other arm had been recently broken, although the speed healing was nearly perfect. He didn’t remember any of that pain . It was… the greenette didn’t even know how he was supposed to feel about that let alone what he actually felt. What would be socially acceptable to feel in these circumstances? If he could at least figure out how society expected him to feel, maybe he could piece together what his emotions were in practice. Did Izuku know of any fictional characters or public figures who had gone through something like this? He couldn’t think of any.

"I’m going to wonder until the day I die,” Izuku mumbled, “see those scars in the mirror and wonder who shot me and why, whether I deserved it.”

His mother pulled him into a hug and held him there for nearly ten minutes. She wasn’t allowed to stay the night. They ought to make the best of the time they had.

Eventually, Inko asked him, “the things that I heard about from the detective, has Katsuki said things like that to you before?”

"W-well,” Izuku stuttered, “not exactly like that.”

"Izuku… why didn’t you tell someone?”

The student shrugged. “No one ever seemed to care,” he mumbled, and "tattling" about it might have made everything worse.

"I care! Mitsuki will care! She didn’t raise her son to behave like that.”

"It’s… well, he’s going to be a hero… and everyone wants him to be a hero so he should get…” what was Izuku trying to say?

"Are you saying he should get more privileges just because he has a powerful quirk and wild ambitions?” his mother demanded. “That we shouldn’t hold heroes or future heroes to the same standards as the rest of society? I thought it was quite the opposite, that heroes were supposed to set an example for the rest of us, to be better than us. Isn’t that what All Might does? Isn’t that why you look up to him?”

She was right. She was always right. “Yeah… I can’t believe I met him. Can’t believe I don’t remember.”

"I’m sorry Izuku…”

"Me too. What… what could I have done to deserve this?” he asked. “I--what’s so wrong with me that things like this keep happening to me?”

"Things like this?”

"I’m quirkless and that’s really rare, so horrible luck, and I was probably just used as a living weapon for a week and it’s not like that happens very often, either! What did I do to deserve this?” he demanded of no one.

"You didn’t do anything wrong, Izuku,” his mother told him firmly. “This isn’t your fault.” She still hadn’t cried, although her eyes watered now.

"Did someone coach you?” Izuku wondered, a strange suspicion taking hold, “on what to say to me?”

She paused, considering. “I made myself believe we would find you,” she began, “even though the police told me you were probably gone I… I think they thought you… I think they thought you took your own life.” Izuku started, shaking his head violently. He would never. Never. That would be giving up and that wasn’t something Izuku would ever do. “I suppose that was because of what Katsuki said to you. They didn’t tell me about that. I made myself believe I would see you again and I prepared myself for when we would find you. I read a few books about how to handle my emotions, about how to help kidnapping victims and victims of mind control face the aftermath.”

She was doing a really good job so far. Those must be good books. “Oh. Thank you, mom. You’re always the best to me.”

Izuku had never had a lucid dream before, not that he remembered anyway. It was very odd to be distinctly aware that he was asleep yet be so invested in the dream world through which he walked.

He was in a basement, maybe, moonlight shining through a handful of windows placed so high on the wall that they almost reached the arching ceiling. Dim electric torches and a handful of candles illuminated table after table of the mess hall. Izuku didn’t recognize any of these people and yet… he knew them. They were friends, companions. One of them, a woman with talons and fangs made of ice, waved to him and winked. He waved back playfully, moving between the rows quickly. He wanted to get his meal before all the good food was gone, after all, and there was quite a line already. Everyone was in uniform, as they should be. They were an army, they needed to look the part of a united force…

Izuku blinked the sleep form his eyes. It took him a few minutes to remember why he was in a hotel and not in his bed at home. He sighed and forced himself to get up and dress in the generic sweatpants and t-shirt provided to him by the police force. His mother would bring him more clothes when she came by with his homework. For now he would have to make do.

A few minutes later, a knock sounded on the door and Aizawa entered at Izuku’s greeting. “Good morning, Midoriya,” the hero said, placing a bag of pastries and a cup of tea on the tiny table. “I brought you breakfast.”

"T-thank you, sir,” Izuku said.

"You don’t have to call me sir,” Aizawa sniffed.

Izuku nodded. “Okay.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“I guess? Weird dream…”

Aizawa pulled one of the chairs away from the table and took a seat. Izuku sat down in front of his tea. “What kind of “weird dream?””

“I-I’ve never been a lucid dreamer before,” Izuku said.

The underground hero raised an eyebrow. “You realize that’s almost certainly a side effect of the quirk that erased your memory .”

“Yeah,” he understood that. “But my brain chemistry probably got totally scrambled so there’s no reason to think that it actually means anything. Probably just gobbledygook.”

Aizawa snorted, presumably at the word “gobbledygook.” “What happened in this dream, Midoriya?”

“Not much, really. I was walking through a mess hall. There were a lot of people there in military uniforms but I couldn’t see any details, so I don’t know if it was a real country’s service or not.”

“Hm,” the hero narrowed his eyes in suspicion but said nothing more.

“Thank you, by the way,” Izuku said, “for looking for me. Did I already thank you for that?”

The hero nodded slowly. “Yes, and it’s my job. You don’t have to thank me for it.”

Izuku shrugged, rubbing the back of his head nervously, “w-well, it doesn’t have to be your job, right? You chose to become a hero so…”

“Indeed. You want to be an underground hero, Midoriya?”

This was going to be hard to explain. “ A-aizawa, I don’t r-remember that conversation with All Might.”

“I know.”

“But I didn’t think I wanted to be an underground hero, I d-don’t think I’d ever even considered it… I, as in me, u-uninfluenced by whatever it was happened to me, I wouldn’t have asked All Might that question. I always wanted to be a hero but I always… I always dreamed of being frontline.”

Aizawa raised an eyebrow. He seemed to do that a lot. “A quirkless individual would be terribly ill-suited to that. Even most quirked individuals are ill-suited to that. In fact, something like half of the current frontline would be better as rescue heroes or in the underground or joining the EMTs or firefighters instead. Frontline is all about hitting heavy hitters harder than the heavy hitters hit you. What you, or your shadow, said to All Might about why quirkless individuals can make it in the underground, that’s all true. It’s good thinking.”

Izuku, having finished half of his tea, finally turned his attention to his pastries. “W-why are you telling me this?”

“I think you have potential,” the hero said simply. Izuku stared at him, waiting for an elaboration. Instead, the hero pulled a blade--a wooden training knife, but Izuku didn’t realize that until after he lunged to his feet and disarmed the pro with a technique that was probably from a martial art Izuku had never even heard of. Izuku stared at the knife for a moment before handing it back. “I have no reason to think those reflexes are going to go away. You’re smart. You’re motivated. You are now in possession of fighting skills that take decades to master. I teach the heroics course at UA. I know potential when I see it.”

“Y-you teach at UA?”

“I do. The detective said you wanted to apply. Was that real? I mean, do you remember filling out your career interest form like that?”

Izuku nodded. “Yeah. I’ve always wanted to go to UA, though… I really expected to get into general education if anything.” Even when optimistic parts of his brain dreamed of reaching for the stars, some more realistic parts of his brain kept putting things in perspective.

“I don’t see any reason why you can’t make it into the hero course, providing you work on your strength and endurance, make sure you have the physical prowess to use those new skills properly,” Aizawa said, arms crossed. “Weapons are allowed on the practical portion of the entrance exam, reasonable weapons anyway. Someone did try to bring in an artillery piece, once, and the teachers decided that shouldn’t be allowed. Form 21-T is what you probably need,” the teacher continued, pulling out a folder with the UA logo in white on a blue background which he set on the table next to Izuku’s breakfast. “It’s a request to rent support equipment from UA for the test. You can borrow knives, axes, staves, ropes, certain pieces of protective equipment like helmets, and a few more specialized things. I suggest you arrange to borrow a knife, maybe two if you have the skills to dual wield.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Izuku mumbled, taking a bite of his pastry for the first time. It was delicious, flaky and filled with soft chocolate.

Aizawa nodded. “I’m really sorry about this, kid,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m encouraging you to make the best of it but, damn--sorry, I know teachers shouldn’t swear--” Izuku couldn’t help but smile at that, “I cannot imagine how disorienting this must be. I would be terrified.”

“I mean, yes I’m terrified.” Apparently he hid it well. “I’m terrified that they’ll realize I did something horrible, that I hurt someone or killed someone and… and there’s nothing I can do about it. Probably nothing I could have done about it. I’ll probably never even know whether I had a choice in hurting that person or not. Maybe the quirk forced me to act and I wasn’t even conscious, maybe it was just an insistent suggestion and I should really be held responsible and charged for assault or m-murder… or maybe I didn’t do anything wrong at all and was just kidnapped to take part in some underground cage matches or something and nobody was really hurt because it was all a show… I think I like that last option the best, even thought it’s super creepy and really unlikely.”

Aizawa watched him carefully. “Given what I learned about you during this investigation, I can say with near total confidence that you would never hurt anyone if you had any other option.” How did Aizawa know that? What had he learned and where had he learned it? Had he just talked to Izuku’s classmates or was there more to it? “People do not simply throw away a decade worth of ingrained morals and behaviors on a whim. Whatever your hands may have done last week, you have done nothing wrong.” Aizawa couldn’t know that for sure, but it was nice to hear him say it.

“Thank you. Again, thank you.”

The hero gave him the barest hint of a smile. “A number of people have been asking to see you.”

“Really?” Who could that be? He had already seen his mother. Who else would care enough to want to come talk to him?

“Bakugou Mitsuki, Bakugou Masaru, and Bakugou Katsuki would all like to speak with you. A few other classmates have asked after you as well, as has your teacher, Mr. Kondo.”

“I’d b-be happy to see the Bakugous. You can tell the others I’m fine… I’ll see them in school next week, but I d-don’t really know any of them that well and I don’t want to talk to them right now.” He didn't have many friends at school, any friends, really.

“Alright. The Bakugou family will probably come by tomorrow. Are you sure you want to see their kid, though? I understand your mother and his mother are friends, but…?”

Izuku nodded firmly. “He’s not really as bad as all that.”

“If you say so, kid.”

Aizawa left. The underground operative was presumably teaching as well as carrying out hero duties. Aizawa didn’t say whether he would have the chance to come check back in that week. He must be incredibly busy, so Izuku didn’t expect to see him again.

Around noon, Izuku’s mother arrived with lunch , reading, and homework for him. Catching up was going to be a chore, but Izuku could handle it. He was always among the best of the class academically. “This is creepy,” he muttered, filling out another work sheet with hardly any effort.

“What?” asked his mother. She was still finishing her own lunch.

“I’m fluent in English now, and I’m pretty sure I know things about math and science that I didn’t before.” That was even more disturbing, really, than learning he was a terror with throwing knives. Throwing was a reflex, something his muscles knew to do. This was actual information imprinted in his brain with no discernible origin.

It was useful. It was violating. Someone had shoved all these things in his head as if Izuku’s brain were their property. He clenched his fingers around his pencil until it snapped. “I wonder what else I know now.”

Chapter Text

It was on the evening of Izuku’s third day of “observation” that the Bakguous came to visit. Inko and Izuku sat on one of the beds. Mitsuki took a seat on the opposite bed. Katsuki and Masaru each pulled up a chair.

“I believe this brat has something to say to you,” Mitsuki glowered at her child.

Had Kacchan ever looked like this before? Defeated and miserable, ringed eyes downcast and without a single ember of their usual defiance. “I’m sorry for being a little bitch to you, Izuku.” He called him Izuku? Not Deku?

“Close enough,” Mitsuki sighed. “And I’m sorry, too, for letting him get away with this. I put my foot down about all the wrong things.” Masaru said something similar. Kacchan cringed, burning with the humiliation of having both of his parents apologize on his behalf.

“What in the name of gods happened to you, Izuku? Are you alright?” Mitsuki asked as her husband finished speaking. She hadn’t waited to hear if the apology was accepted. Maybe she just assumed it wasn’t.

“I don’t know,” Izuku shook his head. He was going to have to give variations of this speech a lot, wasn’t he?

“What do you mean you don’t know?” asked Kacchan sharply. Mitsuki hissed at him like an angry cat.

“I don’t remember anything since the very start of the day on Monday the fourteenth,” Izuku rapped on the side of his head with a knuckle. “There’s nothing there and the police don’t know anything either.”

“Or if they know they’re not telling,” Inko said, arms crossed and a dark haze in her eyes. Of course they would tell, wouldn’t they?

“That’s fucking terrifying,” Kacchan said. Masaru and Mitsuki both berated him for that.

“It’s alright,” Izuku shook his had. “He’s right, in any case. I know how to do a bunch of things that I didn’t know before and I have scars and a bite mark that I don’t remember getting.”

The temperature in the room noticeably dropped at the word “scars.” “You’re not actually hurt, though, Izuku. You’re not, right?” Kacchan asked him.

“Not anymore. The doctor said that I’d had a bunch of injuries speed healed but, like I said, I don’t know anything about that.”

Mitsuki closed her eyes and Masaru took a deep breath, running his fingers through his hair repeatedly. “I can’t figure out if you’re unbelievably unlucky or unbelievably lucky,” Kacchan said.

“Both, I think,” Izuku replied. “The underground hero who was looking for me pointed out that they don’t usually find people alive after kidnappings like this.” That got a wince from everyone in the room except for Izuku who had already become desensitized to that particular ugly truth.

“Can I talk to you alone?” Kacchan demanded suddenly, still refusing to look up.

“Katsuki…” Mitsuki began to growl.

“That’s fine,” Izuku intervened. “Yeah. Let’s let the adults talk for a few minutes.” The parents--somewhat reluctantly--stepped out into the hallway.

Silence. After a minute of awkward waiting, Kacchan met Izuku’s eyes for the first time. “I thought I fucking killed you,” he said. Izuku blinked. What was he supposed to say to that? “I told you to kill yourself and then you disappeared. I thought you were dead. And it was my damn fault.”

“You didn’t--it wasn’t--nothing--I--I don’t know what I’m trying to say!” Izuku rubbed his short hair, missing his curls. “I don’t remember that, Kacchan.”

“You don’t? I thought--”

“I told you, I don’t remember anything that happened that day other than getting up and going to school. I sat down on a bench on my way because I was feeling sick and then I woke up in a back alleyway half way across town a week later.”

“You don’t remember me telling you to jump off the roof, hoping you’d get a quirk in your next life?”

“W-what?”

“Because that’s what I said. I fucking said that to you!” Kacchan snarled. “And then you did--I mean I thought you did!”

“I didn’t,” Izuku whispered. “I never would.”

Kacchan hissed, leaning backwards with his eyes closed and rubbing at his face with the heel of his palm. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Izuku whispered. There was never any doubt about that.

“I never meant it, any of it, I just… I don’t know. I wanted you to get mad. I wanted you to yell at me and tell me off like the hag does and fight me like you thought I was worth it and I didn’t know what to do when you wouldn’t. I don’t understand you and…”

Izuku sighed. “I don’t understand you, either, Kacchan.”

“I spent the whole week,” he said, sounding as if he hadn’t slept in days, “wondering what the hell made me say something like that when I knew it was fucking disgusting. If I ever caught someone else saying something like that I would beat them to a bloody pulp, but for some reason I said it to you anyway and I couldn’t take it back--I thought you were dead and I’d never have the chance to take it back and I’d have to live with it for the rest of my life, live with blood on my hands that I could never wash off!” Katsuki took a deep breath, noticeably calming himself. Izuku hadn’t realized that was something Kacchan was capable of doing. “That could have been my life. I don’t want it. I don’t want to be that bitch anymore.”

The two old friends stared at each other in silence. “You don’t have to be,” Izuku said softly.

“Don’t really know how not to be that bitch, though,” Katsuki muttered.

Did he actually want a suggestion? “Just… hang out with people who aren’t like that and it will rub off, or s-so I’ve heard.”

Katsuki sighed again, but the tiniest hint of a smile graced his face for a moment. “Is that an invitation, Izuku? Could I start following you around now like you used to follow me?”

“Sure.”

“You really mean that, don’t you? You don’t hold any of it against me. You are too pure for this fucked up world, Izuku.”

“I don’t even remember it…”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!” Katsuki snarled. “The way I’ve felt this week… I didn’t even know it was possible to feel this horrible.” He raked his fingernails through his hair. They came away bloody.

“Sorry, Kacchan.”

“Don’t apologize to me you--you--what’s wrong with you? You’re apologizing to me because I was an asshole? I don’t--why are you like this?”

“I d-don’t know?”

Kacchan got up, walked over to Izuku and pulled him off the bed to hug him. The greenette allowed himself to be manipulated like a rag doll. He was far too shocked for any other response. He couldn’t remember the last time Kacchan had willingly touched him in a way that wasn’t intended to cause pain. Without another word, Izuku’s old friend turned on his heel and slunk out of the room.

Later that night as he lay awake staring at the popcorn ceiling of his lonely realm of exile, Izuku would question whether the hug had happened at all.

Each day of his “observation week” seemed to last forever, but when the ordeal was finally over Izuku felt almost as if it had never occurred, as if time had just flown by.

Izuku returned to school and did his best to pretend that nothing at all strange had happened. That attempt lasted less than five minutes. Mr. Kondo outright asked Izuku what had happened to him. It was a bit surprising that the story hadn’t made it into the local news. Well, maybe it wasn’t surprising given how forgettable Izuku seemed to be.

It was probably for the best that the teacher demanded an answer from him publicly like that, because it saved the student from being asked separately by every single member of the class. He gave a quick, edited version. “I don’t remember anything that happened that week. They presume I was kidnapped by a villain with a mind control quirk but nobody knows anything more than that.”

Izuku’s unwanted status as a subject of gossip and intrigue lasted for about a week and then there was a fight across the street between Miruko and a villain who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator was a truly ancient cult-classic from which Izuku had only ever seen a few clips). The story of the disappearing-reappearing Aldera student was forgotten.

At school, Izuku never mentioned any of the mysterious new skills he had obtained, except to his English teacher; the student didn’t want to be accused of cheating when he became fluent in the language overnight. A single conversation with the man was enough to assure the older gentleman (anyone who dressed like that so religiously everyday counted as a gentleman) that Izuku was not lying about this. “Bizarre,” was the only thing Mr. Sano said. “Do you want to be moved out of the class? There’s no point in you being here anymore.”

“I-I don’t really want people to know,” Izuku explained, fidgeting.

The man nodded knowingly. “I can well understand that. Just keep your head down. I won’t call on you in class. You can pretend nothing changed.”

In school for a few hours a day, sure. That worked. He couldn’t pretend all the time, though, because everything was different.

Izuku even walked differently. His posture had changed. It was subtle, but it made a huge difference. His footsteps were soft and sure. Every movement seemed to be planned so as to waste the least momentum. It was hard to forget what had happened to him with those constant reminders.

After their confrontation at the hotel, Kacchan avoided Izuku like… not like the plague. Kacchan was avoiding him in the way an embarrassed young girl would avoid the gaze of the boy she had a crush on--not that Katsuki had a crush on Izuku. That would be too weird--they’d known each other too long for that.

Izuku filled out form 21-T in preparation for the UA entrance exam. He tried to take Aizawa’s advice about conditioning. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t run to (and from) school many times in his life racing the clock, but now he did it every day racing only himself.

Kacchan stared at him, one eye twitching. “What in the world do you think you’re doing?” the Explosion wielder demanded.

Was Izuku actually supposed to answer that question. “Um… leaping across rooftops?” The rooftops in question belonged to second story buildings and were no more than ten feet apart.

“W-what?” the blonde demanded, looking as if his head might implode. “You are--yes, but why?"

“I wanted to see if I could? I mean, I came back from my missing week a bit stronger and faster than before, but it wasn’t anything drastic and I wasn’t sure if just “knowing how to leap over fences and between rooftops” was good enough or if I needed to be stronger than I am.”

Katsuki sank to the ground, rubbing his eyes. “So, yes, apparently it’s enough. It’s not like you were ever in rotten shape. So once you found the answer to your little question why the hell did you keep on doing it?”

“Well… it’s fun.” It seemed a rather poor excuse when put that way.

Katsuki assessed him critically, eyes crawling up from his ankles to the tips of his fledgling curls (they were just starting to grow back).

"If the police weren’t one hundred percent sure you were actually Izuku I wouldn’t know what to think,” his old friend said.

No. Don’t say that. “Don’t--please, don’t say things like that. Let me at least be me still, whatever else I may have been.”

It appeared to take Katsuki several second to figure out what Izuku was talking about. “Oh,” he said at last, then his eyes widened abruptly. “And you really just... came back knowing how to do all this insane ninja shit?”

"Yeah.”

“That… that sounds crazy, you know that?”

“Yeah.”

“So you know how to jump across rooftops and over fences.”

“Yeah.” At some point, Izuku was going to have to come up with something else to say. He couldn't just reply "yeah" for the rest of his life.

Kacchan shook his head. “What the hell did you do that week?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever know,” Izuku said softly.

“What else can you do?”

“Fight.”

Kacchan cocked his head. “Wanna’ show me?”

“We should walk someplace softer, with grass I mean,” Izuku replied. There was no point in continuing this conversation in a dusty alleyway.

The two approached a quiet portion of the triangle park. The squeals of young children on the playground were barely audible at this distance. No one was liable to disturb them in this little grove of conifers. Kacchan lunged for Izuku, starting off with a right hook--the usual. Izuku sidestepped and threw Katsuki over his shoulder. His old friend stared up at him with wide eyes. “I kinda' thought you were just crazy,” Kacchan admitted before leaping to his feet and trying to attack again.

They grappled and wrestled and tossed each other around for perhaps the better part of an hour. Neither of them really knew what they were trying to do--Izuku was just following instinct and Katsuki might be doing the same but to a less radical extent--and there were no explicit rules. Katsuki kept his quirk to himself. Izuku consciously fought against the nagging urges to fight dirty, to throw dirt in an enemy’s eyes or pick up an improvised weapon. It was difficult, though, because he had almost no conscious control over “how” he did something. He could decide to attack or retreat in a given situation, but didn’t know enough about the memories his body followed to predict exactly what he was about to do. It was disorienting, like being a marionette dragged through these motions, frightening as it reminded him of all that missing time when he hadn’t been himself.

Both Katsuki and Izuku were thoroughly worn out by the time the sun began to set. “We should… do this again,” Katsuki panted. “You’re freakin’… scary all the sudden.”

Izuku waited for his breathing to slow before he replied. “I need to get used to the way I move now. Just reflexively doing things isn’t going to work, I have to understand what those reflexes are so… yeah. I’d appreciate sparring with you again.”

The blonde grunted. “We’ll need to… rope some other people in. Just sparring with one person breeds bad habits. I’ll see if I can find someone worth your time.”

“Thank you,” Izuku said as the two students got to their feet. Both were covered in a dirt and numerous blooming bruises. Two older women walking through the park had, apparently, been watching the fighting for some time. They gave the students judgmental looks. The students departed swiftly. Sparring in public certainly wasn't illegal as long as quirks weren't involved, but it might be disreputable.

It wasn’t until after he arrived home that Izuku realized “I’ll see if I can find someone worth your time” was by far the nicest thing Kacchan had ever said to him.

Another one of these dreams. Weird. It was a brisk fall day, the sun low in the south-west. He stood on the stone arch bridge, leaning heavily on the railing, humming under his breath. The roar of the water flowing over the dam a hundred meters upriver was nearly enough to drown out his cheery tune even for his own ears. The spray kicked up by the artificial falls created a semi-permanent rainbow. A bald eagle skimmed the air, moving far too quickly to be called “drifting” but too slowly to be called “diving.” The birds had a nest around here somewhere. Any chicks from spring would be up on their training feathers by now.

Behind Izuku, a number of people walking or riding bicycles shouted excitedly about the bird. The locals humored them, but were quite accustomed to seeing the raptors flying across the river here. “Beautiful creature,” someone said with a heavy Japanese accent. Izuku turned to his left and noted a young man with long, ruby-tinted hair tied back in a ponytail and a shirt with a conspicuous school logo. Fierce eyes and sharp features added a hint of danger to his casual demeanor. Normally, Izuku wouldn’t have bothered introducing himself to a stranger in a situation like this, but in this case he couldn’t help himself… because the stranger was humming the same song as Izuku.

“Freshman or exchange student?” he asked.

“Oh, uh freshman,” the student replied.

“You’ve probably come a long way,” Izuku nodded. “There’s an advantage there.” If you ran far enough, no one would remember who you were or what you might or might not have. You could start over. “And a disadvantage. I miss home sometimes.”

The freshman nodded. “I see. It’s the same here. I’m Chris, by the way.” Presumably that was an English name adopted to avoid hearing his real name mangled repeatedly. “What is yours?”

“I know him,” Izuku woke muttering to himself. “I know him, I know him. I’ve seen him before… Chris…”

Chapter Text

Izuku spent a very long time sitting on his bed with an open notebook, staring at three pages of details he had noted down about the two dreams. It might just be gobbledygook like he told Aizawa… or maybe it wasn’t. He couldn’t remember much about the first dream. It had been short and, in retrospect, blurry although it had felt crystal clear at the time. He had a lot more notes written for the second.

“Freshman (at a university? I don’t think he was in high school). I recognized the school colors and logo, but I can’t remember what the logo was. The school color was red and… white? Silver? Can’t tell on the second one. Could have been yellow. The bridge I was on was a pedestrian bridge only, no cars, and it looked very old. There was the dam, of course, and there was another bridge visible, a suspension bridge, and this one did have cars on it.” He had sketched a loose map of the breeding range of bald eagles, so the northern US and Canada. How did you tell the difference between Americans and Canadians? How did you tell if you were a Canadian?

An internet search informed Izuku that “Canadians, unlike Americans, will insist that curling is a real sport.” Izuku was pretty sure that was supposed to be a joke. He looked up videos of curling. It seemed like a real sport. Apparently Izuku was a Canadian.

Were these dreams actually repressed memories? Were they his memories or were they borrowed from another? Izuku felt like he knew this Chris, but was that because Izuku actually knew him? If so, did he meet the man before or after his disappearance? When he stood by the bridge railing, Izuku was talking and thinking as if he had been away from home for a long time, so if these were actually the greenette’s memories... had he really been gone just a week? Izuku had heard that time-travel quirks existed, but he didn’t know what rules they followed, whether whatever you changed in the past would be how things happened anyway, whether parallel timelines could be created or whether it was possible to erase yourself with a paradox.

There wasn’t enough information. There were no answers to be had. It was enough to make him pull on his (still too short) hair. It was a good thing it was Sunday… or he would have been so late for school.

Izuku and Katsuki took a day off from running and walked home together from class on Wednesday for the first time in years. They didn’t decide to walk together. It just happened. Conversation was still somewhat stilted, but it wasn’t really awkward.

As the two of them passed by a grocery store, a teen with a blonde tail stepped out into the street carrying several heavy, cloth bags on his shoulder and apparently consulting his phone for GPS directions. The monotonic voice informed him to take a left. His school must get out earlier than theirs and be some distance away because Izuku didn’t recognize the uniform. The student looked up, his eyes widened and he dropped two of his bags with a clatter. “You!” he yelled, pointing at Izuku.

What in the world? “Me?” Izuku pointed at Izuku.

“It’s you!” He didn’t sound particularly angry

“Who the hell is this, Izuku?” Kacchan asked.

Izuku shook his head. “I t-think you have me m-mistaken for someone else,” the greenette stuttered out.

“I do not!”

“Alright, calm the fuck down, extra,” Kacchan stepped in front of Izuku, crossing his arms. “Who are you and what’s your problem? He sure as hell doesn’t know you.”

“You jumped into the middle of a mugging and knocked the attacker senseless right in front of me,” the unknown student said more calmly. “You weren’t even wearing a mask. You expect me not to remember you?”

Izuku blinked. “I did what?”

“When was this?” Kacchan demanded.

“I don’t remember the date, like two months ago. It was on a Tuesday.”

Tuesday the fifteenth. One of the days Izuku didn’t remember. “What’s your name?” Kacchan demanded of the other student.

“Ojiro Mashirao,” he replied, now looking abashed, perhaps by his outburst.

“Alright. I’m Bakugou Katsuki, that’s Midoriya Izuku, and he has no idea where he was that day or any other day in that goddamned hell week, so you’re going to come with us and sit down at the park down the block and you’re going to explain to us everything you know about where this guy was that day, alright?” Ojiro did not seem to think it was “alright.”

“Please,” Izuku begged. “You’re the first person I know of who saw me at all that week. I have no idea where I was or why.”

Ojiro looked like this was all well above his usual pay grade, but picked up his fallen groceries with a sigh and motioned for Bakugou to lead the way down the street.

The trio seated themselves at a rundown picnic table well in sight of two dozen witnesses. Izuku pulled out the notebook where he had written out the details of his dreams. “Could you tell me exactly what happened please? And when?”

“Only if you promise me a full explanation of what is going on here.”

Katsuki took over. “He showed up as normal for school on the Monday before you saw him, apparently escaped from a villain on his way home, met All Might and then vanished off the face of the planet for a week. He turned up in a back alley without even realizing a week had passed and, of course, ran to school ‘cause he thought he was going to be late for class and didn’t even notice anything was up until we all had a fit when he showed. That’s all. Police don’t know anything. He doesn’t know anything. Nobody knows anything, except maybe you.”

Ojiro glanced uncertainly between the two of them. “This is for real?”

“Yeah,” Izuku sighed. “Yeah, it’s for real. I don’t think it made the papers anywhere…” so it wouldn’t be easy for them to prove everything if Ojiro was convinced they were lying.

“Alright. Sure. I’ll believe you for now. It’s not as if I have much to say. I was on my way to school, taking a short cut which I no longer take.” Izuku interrupted to get the exact address--it was more than sixty kilometers away--and time from Ojiro--apparently this happened at exactly 7:43 am. “From the timestamp on a text I sent out a few seconds before hand.

“There was an older man walking in front of me. A heavy-set figure in a hoodie and a medical mask reached out of a doorway and pulled a knife on the man. I… was mostly petrified, not sure if I should intervene or not. I’m great at knife defense--been practicing a decade--but I was pretty far away, still… and I couldn’t remember in the heat of the moment what self-defense laws would permit me to do. There’s this sudden movement on the neighboring roof and this black blur jumps down into the alley from the top of a second story building,” Izuku was surprised he hadn’t broken an ankle; maybe Ojiro was exaggerating or maybe Izuku had been wearing some kind of specialized footwear. Impact-absorbing boots did exist… if you had the money, but a lot of them were considered “combat support items” and the trade was very carefully regulated by the Cage Match Act (yes, that was the law's real name). “The blur is on the mugger in an instant, grabs his wrist and disarms him just like I’ve been taught to do, maybe better. The mugger tries to punch the blur and the blur dodges then kicks him in the leg. The mugger goes down and then the blur elbow-whips him in the head. The blur looks up at me and the blur is you. You wave at me, toss the knife onto a dumpster across the street and take off.”

“Was my hair this length?” Izuku asked.

“What?”

“My hair used to be much longer. I cut off my curls during that missing week. Did I still have them?”

“No, your hair was short.”

“What was I wearing?”

“Black,” Ojiro repeated. “I couldn’t see any details.”

“Boots or tennis shoes?” Izuku asked.

“Combat boots,” Ojiro nodded. “Those were noticeable. They might have been support equipment of some kind. That would explain how you managed to land without breaking a foot after leaping from that height.” It seemed their trains of thought were arriving at the same station.

“It might,” Izuku nodded.

“The police already know about this, then? I don’t need to make a report? I mean, I did at the time but I didn’t know who you were.”

Izuku shook his head, then considered. “It might be helpful if you could call…” he fished for a business card In his backpack, copying down Tsukauchi’s number and name onto a small piece of paper. “The detective from my case would want to know, I’m sure.”

“Where did you learn to fight like that? To move like that? I’ve been practicing most of my life and I don’t think I could have done that… not in practice anyway. It’s easier in, well, actual practice if you know what I mean.”

Izuku shook his head. “I didn’t know any of that stuff before I disappeared.”

“Wait. What? That’s not… that’s not possible.”

Kacchan snorted. “Pretty much anything is possible with quirks.”

Ojiro considered this. “Can you still fight like that?” Izuku nodded, carefully scribbling down a few more details in his notebook. “But you don’t remember learning?” The greenette shook his head. “Would you show me?”

“This ought to be good,” Katsuki smiled, leaning back and clasping his hands.

Given that they just met, it was more than a little odd, but Kacchan had been looking for new sparing partners. “Uh, sure? Don’t… actually try to hurt each other or anything.”

Ojiro was an incredibly skilled fighter. Izuku knew that from the way the other student moved (although Izuku didn’t know exactly what tipped him off). Izuku--this new version of him--was every bit as good.

“Any chance you’d be interested in sparring again?” the tailed boy asked after calling a halt. “I’m trying to apply to UA and it’s good practice… and plenty of fun.”

“Huh. What are the odds?” Kacchan mused.

“Odds of what?”

“Of all three of us planning to apply to UA,” Izuku answered.

“Huh. Hero course I presume?”

“Hell yes,” Katsuki smirked.

The three exchanged phone numbers. Ojiro looked at the time. “Oh, I’m so late! My cousin is going to kill me! I promised her I’d bring ingredients for dessert!” Ojiro took off in a panic down the street, shopping bags streaming behind him.

Katsuki stared after the other student for a moment. “Well, that was weird.”

“On many levels,” Izuku agreed.

“What are the odds we run into someone who saw you?”

Izuku snorted. “The real weird thing is that I wasn’t seen. Though it’s a bit of a coincidence that he’s planning to apply to UA, it’s not that unusual; UA receives five times more applications every year than any other school in the country.”

“Still weird,” Katsuki declared.

“Less weird than everything else happening to me right now, but still weird, sure,” Izuku sighed.

“So you got brainwashed into being a vigilante for a week and then forgot about it, that’s old news.” Izuku couldn’t tell if Katsuki was joking or not.

“The Nakayma Act on Public Quirk Use defines vigilantism as using a quirk to attack villains without a license; civilians are permitted to use their quirks in public to save oneself or another from injury, death or kidnapping provided the quirk is not intentionally used to injure another person in any way or cause any kind of property damage. I don’t have a quirk, so I wasn’t a vigilante.”

“Yeah, I know… but would Ojiro have been guilty of vigilantism if he had attacked the guy with the knife? I mean, his quirk doesn’t turn off.”

“The rules for mutation and companion quirks are subtle,” Izuku replied. “As long as he did not use his quirk in an “intentional and instinctually controllable way” he wouldn’t have been doing anything wrong.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you have all that stuff memorized.”

They walked in silence for a time. Brainwashed vigilante… well, there were many, many worse things he could have been doing. This seemed to suggest that whoever had a hold of him wasn’t a complete monster, though who knew what Izuku’s shadow had been thinking when he rescued the old man? This was all so… he needed to get something off his chest. “I keep having weird dreams,” Izuku said, admitting it to another for the first time. He didn’t want to worry my mother. “Lucid dreams. I never had those before. I had another one last night.”

Katsuki gave him an incredulous look. “You think they’re your lost memories or something?”

“I don’t know what to think. The one last night… I was at an anime club.”

Katsuki coughed. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I was at an anime club with this exchange student who calls himself Chris and our other friend Kuma and Kuma was complaining about not having enough popcorn even though she still had half a bowl and we were watching a really old anime, I knew the series but I can’t quite place it now. It was mecha anime. There were other people there--it was a big club… twenty or thirty people at least?”

“You have weird ass dreams.”

“I already said that,” Izuku replied.

“What others have you had?”

“There was one where I was in a military mess hall and one where I was on a bridge meeting Chris and watching a bald eagle…”

Katsuki raised an eyebrow. “So just those three so far?”

“Just those that I remember anyway.”

“Those don’t sound like they could possibly be your memories, unless you time traveled or went to an alternate dimension or some crazy shit like that. Did you ever see your face in a mirror or something?” Izuku shook his head. He had never been that lucky.

Once upon a time, Izuku had dreaded dodgeball. It had been his least favorite part of physical education, not that he really liked any part of physical education. He was small and he was quirkless and it was a prime time for people to point that out. Now, however, dodgeball dreaded him. He didn’t want to show off how he had changed, didn’t want people to know, but suddenly revealing himself to be good at dodgeball was unlikely to raise many questions.

Izuku caught the first ball thrown at him effortlessly with one hand, the second ball with the other. Katsuki--standing on the opposite side of the gym--stared at Izuku with wide eyes. “You’d better be afraid,” the greenette preened, throwing first one ball and then the other--because he was suddenly cool and ambidextrous like that--striking Ono and Ishida on the ankles. They stared at him in disbelief, as did a number of others. “We’re doomed, aren’t we?” Katsuki said in the relative quiet between barrages.

“Doomed,” Izuku replied, grinning wildly. He dodged two projectiles and nailed Kacchan in the shin.

This must be what it was like to have a quirk, to suddenly realize there was something you could do that no one else could, not quite like you anyway. It was joyous.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t until three weeks later that Katsuki and Izuku organized a time to meet with Ojiro. Ojiro had a pass (with a certain number of guest allowances per month) to the Murata Quirk Gym, so Katsuki and Izuku took the train forty kilometers to the south to meet their acquaintance. It was, conveniently, one of the few gyms Izuku had heard of that didn’t ask for any quirk information on the liability waivers. In theory it was illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of a quirk… in practice it happened all the time in one way or another, and Izuku had been worried that he would have to reveal he was quirkless and would then be denied access to the gym on some technicality…

The building in question was a single story, warehouse style, but quite modern with a sleek, neon sign and broad, well-washed windows. The tailed boy waited for them outside with another friend, a tall, many-armed boy by the name of Shouji. They had known to expect him.

“Nice to finally meet you, Midoriya, Bakugou,” the masked student said.

“Likewise!” Izuku smiled. Kacchan made some sort of reasonably friendly noise.

“Let’s head in,” Ojiro said, holding the door open for them.

Katsuki and Izuku handed in their “first time” liability waivers on the front desk to the attendant--who was probably related to Ojiro going off the very similar mutation. The four proceeded to the third of the practice rooms on the left. There were, similarly, three rooms on the right and a broad area between with weights and equipment. “The big quirk gym with the weird stuff and the pool is in the basement,” Shouji told them as Izuku looked about in wonder.

Two middle aged women practiced grab escapes and arm bars in one corner of the room, using the line of mirrors across the wall to check each other’s form.

The mats in the opposite corner were unoccupied. Izuku began a routine of warm-ups and stretches which he knew by heart despite no one having ever taught him. The others performed similar pre- combat rituals.

“So, what’s your quirk?” Shouji asked Izuku.

“I'm quirkless,” he replied.

Shouji narrowed his eyes in confusion. “He’s very good,” Ojiro said. “You’ll see.”

Shouji and Izuku paired off. Katsuki faced Ojiro. “No quirks on the first round. We can slowly work them in,” the tailed boy said.

Shouji was fast and immensely strong compared to Izuku even without working in his extra arms, but Izuku knew exactly how to deal with that situation, how to use his opponents momentum for throws, how to press all the strength of his own body against the weakest finger of the grip to escape Shouji’s hold on a slender wrist. He was steadily getting used to the way he moved, learning to understand what he was doing, not just do it. He didn’t surprise himself so much anymore. Just as he thought that, Izuku discovered himself doing some kind of bizarre throw that defied his current comprehension. There were still some surprises to be found, evidently.

“You are very good,” Shouji admitted after Ojiro called a halt. “Where did you learn?”

Izuku shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a long story, a complicated, weird one.” A story he was getting tired of telling.

“He is an amnesiac vigilante,” said Ojiro blandly.

“Wait, really?” Shouji asked, glancing rapidly between the two boys.

Izuku shrugged again. “W-well, I disappeared for a week almost three months ago now. I don’t remember anything, but Ojiro apparently saw me take down a mugger in a back alleyway.”

Shouji considered this, apparently decided that it was irrelevant, and changed the subject. “I hear both of you are also UA hopefuls?”

“I don’t need to hope,” Kacchan said. “Just need to not slack off.”

“We’ll see about that,” Shouji replied cheerfully, beckoning. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Katsuki growled, accepting the challenge, and the sparring pairs swapped. It was like cutting in at a dance. Did Izuku know how to dance now? That was something to check.

The last few rounds of the day allowed quirks. Ojiro had been running sparring sessions for years, and everyone trusted his judgment as to when they knew enough about one another for quirk sparring to be safe, or more serious quirk sparing for Ojiro and Shouji who hadn’t been so much not using their quirks as not using their quirks to great effect.

Izuku collapsed into an exhausted heap before any of the other three. “No sense fighting when you’re tired; we don’t want anyone making a mistake and getting hurt,” Ojiro told him.

“’Course not,” Izuku agreed with a yawn. “Does this place have showers?”

“Downstairs, take a left and then another left,” Shouji told him.

By the time Izuku had removed his layer of sweat and grime, the other three were calling it quits for the day. “Would you two be interested in meeting regularly? Every other Sunday?” Ojiro proposed.

“Don’t you think you practice enough?” Shouji pointed out, clearly amused. “You’re in class every weekday evening.”

“Well… but I know everyone in class…” Ojiro pointed out, “and Midoriya and Bakugou can do things I’ve never seen before.”

Shouji chuckled . “I swear… you’d spend your whole life fighting if it were an option.”

“I mean, it is an option? It’s called “going to hero school?””

The taller boy cocked his head then nodded. “Fair point I suppose.” It was.

“I’m game, and I know Izuku is, too,” Kacchan said, rubbing his wrists. He hadn’t been using his quirk enough to strain those muscles; he must have hurt himself some other way. “I’m gonna’ hit the showers.”

“I’m going to go to that shop across the street and get some ice cream,” Izuku decided. “Meet me there?”

“Get me a cup of the darkest chocolate they have, huh?” Kacchan asked.

“Sure.” They’d settle their debts later.

“Thank you guys so much. This was really neat and good practice,” Izuku told Shouji and Ojiro.

“For next time, they open an archery range downstairs between four and five every day, and you can check out quarter staves if you like… and prove you know what you’re doing. You know how to use weapons, Midoriya?” Ojiro inquired.

“Knives,” Izuku answered. “At least knives, anyway. I’ve never had the chance to see whether I know bows or staves… but I’d love to find out.”

“Sounds good. I look forward to it.”

“See you guys later,” Izuku waved as the group split.

It turned out that Izuku did know his way around bows--ranging from short to compound to cross--and staves. He was not as skilled at archery as he was at knife throwing (which was something he could practice on his own at home with a hefty piece of plywood if he were very careful). Ojiro described Izuku as “absolutely lethal with a quarterstaff.”

It was flattering but also so wrong . These weren’t his skills. He didn’t work to learn to fight this way as Ojiro or Kacchan or Shouji had. He had just suddenly woken up knowing it.

“That’s so cool,” Ojiro said to him as Izuku knocked the tailed boy down for the fourth time that afternoon. “You’re awesome, Midoriya.” He looked absolutely elated to have lost this round, which was typical for him. Unlike Kacchan who always wanted to win and Shouji who seemed neutral towards the whole affair, Ojiro was thrilled when he lost and always came back smarter and stronger for the next round.

“I’m not.”

“What?”

“Awesome it’s all… it’s not me. I didn’t earn this. It’s all fraud, like if… like if you barely graduated high school but then inherited a huge biotech company and everyone thought you must be a genius… but you’re not.”

Ojiro considered this. “I--I can see what you mean. I would… I would feel that way, too, I think. It would feel like cheating.” He considered this. “But it’s not like you’re squandering it? And it’s not like you’re really that different from the rest of us.”

“What?”

“Well… I mean it’s not like I did anything to earn my tail. It’s, I mean if you weren’t sure you were quirkless this might just pass for a latent quirk emerging. There are people who have quirks that allow them to fight like an expert with any weapon they pick up; my old sensei when I was learning Taekwondo was like that. He didn’t have the… complete combat mastery you do, but there are people that do. So, when I tell you you’re awesome, it’s the same as telling Bakugou I think his quirk is really cool.”

“I… well, I guess,” Izuku sighed. “It just feels wrong.”

“Yeah. But I don’t think it is, though.”

The two of them had acquired enough bruises for one day. Shouji and Kacchan were still busy pummeling each other. “It’s crazy that the UA entrance exam is only two months away,” Izuku sighed. “It feels like I just met you.”

“Time flies,” Ojiro agreed. “You’ve gotten much more confident. I could tell, when we first spared, that you were surprised to know what you were doing, that every movement startled you but you were… going with the flow I guess. It was one of the things that made me really start to believe you about what happened to you.”

Izuku nodded. “It was… shocking . Like waking up in someone else’s body.” Long hours of practice had started to erase that foreign feeling, as had the handful of lucid dreams Izuku had experienced in the past few weeks, all of which involved learning and practicing martial arts, street fighting and… using assault weapons. North America was a crazy place. All of the visions had been rather blurry, but the conscious information conveyed had meshed well with the unconscious reflexes in his muscles.

“That must have been terrifying.”

“It’s still terrifying,” Izuku whispered as Shouji managed to pin a snarling Kacchan to the mats. “I still wonder what happened to me when I was gone. I could have done anything. Anything could have been done to me. I’ll probably never know.”

The tailed boy was silent as Shouji let Kacchan get up. The two were back at it a moment later. “I’m sorry, Midoriya,” Ojiro said eventually. “I’m sorry I didn’t try to follow you that day. I should have.”

“I don’t think it would have made a difference if you had… you might have just got hurt, but... thank you.”

Spring had passed. In other words, it had finally stopped snowing now and it was time for finals. Chris stumbled out of his last class of the day with an imposing pile of textbooks in his arms. He was planning on a economics major, maybe a double with psychology, and, as such, was overloaded with texts despite only being a freshman.

“I can barely see you behind that stack of books,” Izuku laughed. “Want a hand?”

“Sure,” Chris thanked him. Izuku took the top two from the stack, “Principles of Statistics” and “Multivariable Calculus.”

“I still don’t understand how you managed to come in with so many credits,” Izuku grumbled. Well, he did. He understood how the IB diploma worked. “You should be plowing your way through the liberal education requirements right now and enjoying your freshman year like a normal person.”

Chris shrugged. “I am enjoying my freshman year, and it’s not like I don’t have any free time at all.” His accent was much less pronounced now. Izuku kind of missed his old manner of speech sometimes, which was admittedly kind of strange.

The pair of them began to zigzag towards the international house and honors dorms, dodging the crowds of finals-frazzled students rushing between classes. They turned a corner--

“What do we want?” shouted a voice from a bullhorn.

“Freedom!”

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

“Who do we want it for?”

“Everyone!”

“Oh, wow,” Chris stared wide-eyed at the rally accumulating in front of the law school. Several people had signs, one saying “Daren McCarthy Out Now” referring to the current Director of Homeland Security who was constantly antagonistic towards metahumans. Another had a sign showing the logo that appeared on metahuman identification patches--it was like the radiation symbol but with five blades and an enclosing circle--followed by an equals sign and… oh. Well, that was offensive, but not untrue. Another had a similar sign reading “Metahuman Registration = ” followed by a red swastika.

Some people in the crowd were obviously metahumans. It was obvious either because they were wearing-- or holding the tattered remains of-- the identifying patch required by law or because they had obvious metaabilities. One of them had cat ears which he proudly (shamelessly) showed off. Another had broad, bat-like wings. The woman with wings stood on a bench in front of the crowd holding up her registration papers and her metahuman identification patch. A small young man who probably wasn’t a metahuman (but it was impossible to say, really, especially in that crowd) struck a lighter and set the papers and patch alight.

“This is America! We do not brand our citizens with pest-ban marks because of an accident of their birth, do we?”

“No!” the crowd yelled, and Izuku found himself yelling with them, the passion in the air infectious as more students began to accumulate. It looked like there might be a counter-protest forming behind the library… that probably wouldn’t go anywhere given the current campus climate; Izuku was quite certain that the majority of metahumans on campus weren’t wearing their patches and the administration mostly pretended not to notice.

It looked like a lot of the protesters had shirts from one of the campus organizations, “Students for Equal Justice.” The rally couldn’t be organized by the SEJ itself, though, because they were law-abiding and burning your papers was illegal; not wearing your patch was illegal; burning your patch was really illegal, but the fact that it wasn’t an SEJ event didn’t mean that many of the SEJ members wouldn’t show up.

Campus and city police began to arrive, but the officers kept their distance, not interested in starting something ; no one wanted a repeat of last summer’s LA Metahuman Riots that ended with fifteen people dead and hundreds arrested.

“How can they do this in public?” asked Chris, voice frightened and hollow.

“What?”

“They… in Japan, if someone didn’t wear their identifying patch or burned their papers or even… failed to register they would be taken to prison for a decade.” Izuku hadn’t kept up with the current Japanese attitudes towards metahumans. He knew it was… bad.

“Hallow v. Nebraska is going to the Supreme Court next week,” Izuku said, “and there’s no possible way it won’t be struck down. Forcing people to register with the government just for existing the way they do is blatantly unconstitutional. All similar state laws are going to go out the window with Nebraska’s Metaability Control Act.”

“You… know a lot about this,” Chris whispered, a strange, far away look in his eyes.

“Well, I’m invested in the situation,” Izuku admitted.

“Me, too, I suppose,” Chris whispered. “Do you know… who the woman calling, I mean leading, is?”

Who was the woman organizing the chants? Izuku squinted. “No idea.”

Another three people stepped into the center of the crowd to burn their identification patches.

Hallow v. Nebraska was overturned seven to two by the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago, years before Izuku’s mother was even born. That reduced the explanations for Izuku’s dreams to “time travel” or “not my memories.” This also ruled out “weird hallucination” because Izuku had certainly never heard of that court case or the L.A. Metahuman Riots and the five bladed logo on the registration patches was definitely something Izuku hadn’t seen before his disappearance, either.

“So it’s real, it’s the past, at an American university,” Izuku muttered to himself. “Is it me in the past? Still up in the air… it feels like me? But… I don’t know. The timeline spanned a full year at least from meeting Chris in the fall to finals in the spring, so if it is me something really, really weird is going on, probably a lot weirder than… well, I think I’ll assume they’re someone else’s memories. That makes more sense… but why do I have someone else’s memories? I know there are quirks that can tamper with minds that way… but why bother? There’s no point? Kidnap me for a week, turn me into a vigilante, wipe my memories and leave me with a bunch that belong to another person? Why?”

Some instinctual part of him didn’t want to tell Detective Tsukauchi. It wasn’t instantly clear why he just… didn’t feel like it was a good idea. The more rational part of his brain, though, insisted that he absolutely needed to call and explain what was happening. He would do that tomorrow afternoon. He had a block of time free at a reasonable hour for a phone conversation.

Tomorrow came and went and Izuku talked himself out of making the call. It wasn’t like this was important or really helpful to investigators. Izuku’s case was cold by now; no one was looking into it anymore and, honestly, maybe they didn’t need to. The only person who really seemed to care anymore was Izuku… so why waste the time of heroes and police?

He was just barely self-aware enough, lying awake in bed that night, to understand the underlying force behind his decision. On some level, he just didn’t believe that the adults would do… anything. They might pat him on the head and say “it’s wonderful that you’re remembering something,” but they were unlikely to take action beyond that. They never really cared about him. In his first year at Aldera, Izuku told the assistant principal, Mr. Hasegawa, that one of the third years had pushed him down the stairs and he had a sprained wrist to show for it. Mr. Hasegawa told him “I’ll take care of it” and Izuku never heard another word on the matter. It wasn’t as if that reaction were an exception, it was the rule. Adults didn’t care. Aizawa and Tsukauchi had seemed different… but knowing something was likely to be true was different from believing something to be true. He couldn’t convince himself to trust them.

The conclusion was this: the dream visions probably weren’t important to anyone except Izuku and the adults wouldn’t do anything if he did told them, anyway…

So why bother?

Chapter Text

“Stop vibrating, Izuku,” Kacchan groused at him.

“I can’t,” Izuku replied.

“Seriously. Calm down.”

“But I’m nervous.”

“Me, too, but you don’t see me making the whole train car shake,” Kacchan hmphed.

They were on their way home from the Shiketsu entrance examination. Upon learning Ojiro and Shouji were applying to Ketsubutsu and Shiketsu as well as UA, the two had decided not to put all their eggs in one basket. Only forty people in the country were admitted to UA hero courses each year, after all. Some of it had to come down to luck… and Izuku didn’t want to leave his entire future up to luck. His luck was weird… a sinusoidal function of time or something. Kacchan was quite sure he was a shoo-in at UA. It was unclear why he had decided to take the Shiketsu and Ketsubutsu exams. Maybe he had just come as Izuku’s moral support?

“How do they figure out who to admit from those trials?” Kacchan wondered. “It’s got to be favoritism, right?” The Shiketsu exam had involved a written portion, of course, followed by a six section obstacle course completed individually. Each section of the course provided examinees with three “obstacles” to choose from. There was always one obstacle that required essentially no skill to complete but took forever when compared to the other options.

“I think they just choose the students with the lowest overall completion times or something,” Izuku said, “or maybe they just use completion time to rule some people out and look at the others more individually? I don’t know.”

Izuku had chosen to swing over the crevasse on a rope for his first obstacle. Kacchan had probably propelled himself over the crevasse with explosions.

“What obstacles did you choose?” Kacchan asked.

“Rope swing, climbing wall, carrying the dummy down the hallway, walking on and leaping between the balance beams, completing the puzzle to open the central door, crawling under the slabs.”

“I flew over the chasm with explosions, propelled myself through the rings, carried the dummy same as you, jumped between the stepping stones, blasted my way through the set of wooden doors, and crawled under the slabs same as you.”

“What was your time?” Izuku asked.

“Five minutes and twenty three seconds. You?”

“Five minutes and thirty three seconds.” Izuku had not expected his score to be so close to Katsuki’s.

“Wait? How did you… let’s face it you can’t be as fast as me on a lot of this stuff. How are you that close? How long did it take you to get that puzzle done and the door open?”

“Like… thirteen seconds? It wasn’t very hard.”

“Damn. I spent a full minute blowing up all those doors.”

“Really? How many were there?”

“Twelve and they got stronger as I went along. If I’d known that I’d have tried the damn puzzle…”

“Sorry, Kacchan.”

“Whatever. I’ve heard Ketsubutsu has some sort of scavenger hunt instead of an obstacle course.”

“I heard you have to fight a teacher,” Izuku said.

“I’m pretty sure that’s only for the recommendation students. It would take forever to get the exams done if it were for everyone.”

“Oh, yeah…” Izuku had stopped vibrating sometime during the conversation. He hadn’t noticed.

Ketsubutsu’s exam was two weeks away, and then UA’s was the week after that.

He was going to be really tired and done with exams by the time this month was over.

Kuma thought she was so sneaky. Chris on the other hand, was really sneaky. Izuku--now covered in the remains of fifteen fluffy snowballs--stared at Chris’s in awe. How… where did he even get that outfit? It must be intentionally designed to look like a snowman. Izuku, hunting down Kuma with powdery ammunition, hadn’t lent a glance towards the lumpy, iced-over sculpture standing in the center of the playing field.

Kuma would not stop laughing. She had collapsed backwards into one of the heaping banks of snow created by the busy plows. Only the occasional glimpse of her blue coat was visible. “He was gonna’ get me and then the snowman starts moving! You should have seen the look on your face!”

“Well, you’ve used up all your tricks now,” Izuku said, crossing his puffy-sleeved arms. “I’m going to destroy you.”

“You can try,” Chris was probably grinning, but you couldn’t see his face given his outfit and the amount of snow he had covered himself with. Izuku formed a hasty projectile between his gloves and pelted Chris on the side of the head. “Ow! Good shot!”

“You’d better be afraid!” Izuku yelled. “Wait… where’s Kuma?”

Chris looked up. “Oh you’re in trouble,” Kuma’s voice drifted down from the tree.

“How did she even get up there?” Izuku wailed as he narrowly dodged a barrage.

“We are in so much trouble,” Chris said.

“Duck and cover!” Izuku agreed, lunging for the nearest snowbank.

Kuma was always pleased by snow in any form, even the idea of it. She gave Chris and Izuku snow globes as winter holiday presents. The little bird in the globe was startlingly realistic. Izuku stared at it and wondered if it might come alive and fly away should the nick-knack break.

He didn’t really think too much of it at the time, the realism of the snow globes… Why would he when he had a winter-themed sneak attack of his own to plan?

Izuku woke laughing. The laughter died in his throat after mere moments. It was the day of the UA entrance exam. That was no laughing matter. He could think about the dream later.

“Where are my shoes?” Izuku moaned, looking everywhere. Why? Why was this the day he couldn’t find them? What was wrong with him? Wait. They were in front of his nose, staring right at him incredulously. Alright. Shoes check. Pencils check. Cellphone left at home check. Backpack check. ID check. Getting breakfast and saying goodbye to mother, check. Train pass, check. Catching the train? That required a bit of running.

Kacchan tore into the station, backpack held by one strap and streaming out behind him. “You, too, huh?” Izuku asked.

“Stupid alarm didn’t go off,” Kacchan said. Izuku was pretty sure that wasn’t the real reason his friend was late but he didn’t pry.

Arriving at UA for the exam was a different experience than arriving for either of the other two heroics course entrance exams just because the volume of applicants was so much larger. The crowd was not tightly packed but the concentration of people walking purposefully in a certain direction increased exponentially as they approached the gates of UA.

In the entrance hall there were ten registration lines organized by family name. Izuku wished Katsuki luck and found the appropriate line. After perhaps ten minutes of waiting, Izuku gave his name and showed his ID to a frazzled looking clerk who handed him a hefty packet of information and pointed him towards one of the examination halls for the written test. There was an actual map in his packet showing him how to find his seat.

The written exam appeared in front of him. Who had set it there? Ah. A number of attendants were busily passing them out. “You have three hours to complete the written portion of the entrance exam,” called a high voice. “Please take the next five minutes to follow the instructions on the front of your testing booklet. Make sure all of your information is correct and legible. Make sure your ID is face-up on your desk. Attendants will come by during the test to check that your name matches your face.” Presumably the cameras also ran facial recognition software… but electronics could be hacked. “Stow any and all possessions in the tray beneath your desk. You are not permitted to access any of them during the exam. If you need to leave the room for any reason, raise your hand. If you finish before time is up, you are free to check your work but you may not leave the room.”

Izuku had a wild moment of panic as he fumbled through his backpack looking for his ID. Okay. Okay, there it was. He placed it on the corner of his desk, stowed his bag, and began the solemn process of bubbling, initialing, and signing his name in half a dozen different boxes.

“Is there anyone still working on their information?” Nobody raised a hand. “You may break the seals on your books and begin.”

Izuku nearly ripped the cover off his book in his haste to get it open, but once he actually began to answer the questions, the manic terror faded. He was in his element, now. He just had to remember not to mutter under his breath as he worked. He never noticed an attendant coming by to check that his “name matched his face” but presumably it happened.

It seemed both an eternity and no time at all before the announcer called, “close you books, put down your pens. No one may speak until all books have been collected and verified. Afterwards, Present Mic will come to explain the hero course admissions test.” Ah. So everyone in this room was a hero course hopeful.

There was nothing to do in the silence but reflect on all the mistakes that Izuku might have made on the written portion.

Abruptly, Present Mic swept into the room like a hurricane. No one was quite sure how to react and no one responded to him as he began to explain the rules of the entrance exam.

They would be facing off against three types of robots, apparently, each worth as many victory points as noted by its name. There was also a robot worth zero points that flattened everything in its path. “But where will I…” Izuku muttered under his breath. Someone glared at him. Izuku fell silent and put his hand in the air.

“Yes, listener?” Mic called on him.

“If we arranged to rent weapons or support equipment, where do we pick those up?”

“An excellent question! Those of you who filled out the proper forms and got them approved can follow Snipe, say hello Snipe,” (“Hello.”) “and he’ll get you set up and out to the appropriate training ground on time. We won’t start until he confirms that all of you got where you need to be. Any other questions?” Nobody spoke up. “Alright! Leave your bags where they are. Feel free to grab a snack now, though.” Izuku pulled a granola bar out of an outer pocket. “You’ll come get your things after the practical. This room will be locked, so no worries. Let’s get out there!”

Izuku and a half dozen other students, one of whom was Ojiro, followed Snipe to a supply closet. Snipe was really cool. Supply closets were not very cool. The dissonance was dizzying. “Midoriya Izuku?” Snipe called.

Izuku raised his hand and received two hefty combat knives. They were right on the border of being short swords. Izuku thanked Snipe as the hero checked him off on the list. Izuku waited as Ojiro took a staff and a two-headed girl received an honest to god broadsword… the last three students were all after knives same as Izuku, but each examinee only took one blade.

Snipe escorted them to their respective training grounds. Apparently there were three different testing locations that day; there were rules about not allowing students from the same school to test together and a rule requiring all practicals to take place simultaneously.

Izuku found his way to the starting line and had the time for a few deep breaths. “Start!” yelled Present Mic. “What are you waiting for?” Izuku had begun to run towards the false city training ground as Present Mic finished saying “what” and was one of the first to enter.

Izuku took off down the first street on the left. A shabby looking robot with a white “1” painted on its chest trundled towards him. Izuku took both of his knives in hand, leapt to the side, whirled and stabbed through the thing’s thin, defensive plating. It collapsed forward in a pathetic heap and Izuku felt briefly bad about it… It was almost cute and he’d killed it.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Izuku,” he told himself. Other students were flooding the street. The greenette ran deeper into the city to avoid the crowd. The realism was a little disconcerting at times. It was clear that many battles had occurred here, but the details of each building made it seem like people might have lived in the place. A fake apartment building had flowers growing in a planter on a balcony. Posters advertising the weekly special were plastered in a grocery store window.

The two point robots had lasers, not particularly dangerous lasers, but lasers none the less. Izuku killed his first two pointer in front of a fake cafe. The robot collapsed and crushed a mailbox flat. Izuku couldn’t help but feel a bit bad about that, too. It was a pretty mailbox.

There were convenient ledges on these buildings, obviously made just for Izuku to leap on them. The student skipped his way to the rooftops and discovered there were a number of the big, three pointers lurking above street level, prowling around on the flat roofs.

The three pointers were much faster than their weaker cousins. Izuku, though, instinctively knew where the next laser blasts would land and easily circumvented them. The armor on the three pointers was too thick for him to stab straight through it, but Izuku knew what to do about that, too. He sheathed and stowed one knife beside a skylight and leapt up on the first robot’s back as if climbing death machines were the most natural thing in the world. The student plunged his single remaining knife into the joint where the robot’s neck met its shoulders and wrenched. Sparks sputtered around him and the enemy collapsed. The greenette managed to kill four of the three pointers before other examinees began to make their way to the roofs.

Izuku retrieved his second knife and set off deeper into the city. He ran along closely spaced rooftops for two blocks, but as the gaps between buildings increased the student reluctantly returned to the ground.

He found a small gaggle of one and two pointers in a dead end and was half through with them when he noticed a furious purple haired student hiding in a cranny. That was why all the robots had gathered here. They were chasing this boy. Izuku dispatched the last two pointer. “You alright?” Izuku asked.

“Sure,” the student sighed, looking at Izuku’s weapons. “I didn’t know you were allowed to bring daggers.”

“It seems most people don’t,” Izuku acknowledged. “Sorry about that.”

“Why’d it have to be robots?” the other student wondered miserably. “I can’t do anything about robots.”

“Sorry,” Izuku said. There was nothing else to say. “Good luck?”

“With what time? Fifteen minutes is up.”

“Oh.” Izuku had thirty-two points. That might be enough to get in… or it might not. Oh, well. At least he had Shiketsu and Ketsubutsu, too.

Present Mic’s voice echoed through the training grounds. “Alright folks! That’s time! If you need medical attention stay where you are. Otherwise, head back to the entrance.”

“I am… so lost,” Izuku admitted. How could he be lost? He’d just been so… frenzied he hadn’t paid attention to where he was going.

“Here, let me show you,” the purple haired student gestured. Izuku followed him. “What’s your name?”

“Midoriya Izuku. What’s yours?”

“Shinsou Hitoshi. Your quirk tied up with those knives of yours?”

“Not exactly… I’m quirkless, actually.”

Shinsou blinked. “Oh. That’s… so you’ve been training all your life for this?”

Izuku sighed. “I wish. It’s… a really weird story and you probably wouldn’t believe me without proof.” The two students joined a steady stream of people heading for the exit. “I’ve got to find Snipe to return the knives. They’re rented.” Shinsou raised an eyebrow at that. “Thanks for showing me out. Maybe I’ll see you around?”

“I highly doubt that,” Shinsou sighed.

“Well, you never know?”

“You do know sometimes. I know sometimes,” Shinsou disagreed before vanishing into the crowd.

Izuku located the cowboy themed hero and handed his blades back. The man seemed rather frazzled. “Are you alright, sir?” Izuku asked.

“Yeah, everythin’s fine. I’m sure the rumors will reach you, soon enough.”

“Rumors?” Izuku asked.

“You didn’t see?” a student with engines on his legs asked Izuku as the greenette stepped away from Snipe.

“No. What?”

“A girl was pinned under rubble in one of the main avenues and the zero pointer nearly ran over her. The teachers had to activate the emergency stop,” he explained, “or, we presume that is what happened given that she was not injured.”

“Oh.” Izuku said dumbly. Had he even noticed the zero point robot? He must have been busy freeing Shinsou from his crevice at that time.

The huge mob of tired, adrenaline-crashing applicants returned to their original testing rooms to fetch their backpacks. Izuku tried to find Kacchan as he vacated the UA campus, but… there were too many people here. He wasn’t going to find Katsuki, or Ojiro or Shouji for that matter. He had never even seen Shouji although he must have been there somewhere. Izuku would just have to ask them how they did later.

Chapter Text

Shiketsu rejected him. Izuku wasn’t too surprised, not really… he’d hoped. Some unceasingly optimistic part of him was surprised but, really, it was par for the course and nothing to get upset about. Ketsubutsu had made their decisions already, too, and that letter lay on his desk as well. It was about the same size as Shiketsu’s rejection, so presumably it, too, was a rejection. He might as well get it over with.

Izuku ripped the envelope open and pulled out the letter. “Dear Mr. Midoriya, we are pleased to inform you that…” A tentative smile spread across his face. He’d been accepted to the hero course at Ketsubutsu. Ketsubutsu might not be on the same level as UA or Shiketsu but it was a well respected academy and Izuku would get a fine education there.

It would be a while still before UA sent out letters. If Izuku didn’t make the cut for Shiketsu, he couldn’t imagine he would make the cut for UA. He would be a Ketsubutsu student, then. It was enough. It wasn’t what he’d hoped for but it was more than he had really expected. Perhaps Ojiro or Shouji might join him there? Chances were Kacchan had made it into one of the better schools… chances were Ojiro and Shouji had, too, but you could never say for sure.

Izuku hopped down the stairs and cheerfully informed his mother, “I got in to Ketsubutsu!”

She gave him an enthusiastic hug. “Congratulations! I knew you could do it.”

“You had more confidence than me, then,” Izuku admitted.

Izuku exchanged texts with Kacchan, Ojiro, and Shouji. Shouji and Kacchan had both been admitted to Shiketsu. Ojiro and Shouji had been admitted to Ketsubutsu. The idea of Kacchan not getting into a school that admitted Izuku was… bizarre. Maybe his old friend hadn’t cared enough to try his best on the exam? Maybe it was just bad luck? Izuku would never ask because that would also be asking to be punched… not that Kacchan could land a punch on him anymore.

UA’s letter arrived promptly, several days earlier than expected. Izuku had waited for its arrival merely as a formality, quite sure he would be a Ketsubutsu student the next year. As he ripped the envelope open, a metal disk clattered onto his desk. “What are you?” Izuku asked it.

A hologram fluttered into existence in front of him. “Good morning, Midoriya!” chirped a cheerful voice. Principal Nedzu stared at him with beady, bright eyes. What was going on? “Some of the teachers like to ratchet up the tension and perform a dramatic reveal. I am not one of them. You passed the heroics course entrance exam! Congratulations!” Really? “Enclosed in your envelope you will find all the information necessary for you to accept your enrolment and prepare for the new year, or not, of course, if you have other opportunities you wish to pursue.” Principal Nedzu sounded ever so slightly sarcastic, as if he, too, could not imagine Izuku doing any such thing.

“I suppose we should go over some highlights of the exam. Here we have you slaying some one pointers in excellent form, here some three pointers are defeated on a roof, and here we find you driving off a large force in order to rescue another applicant from a most unpleasant predicament.” Izuku watched himself move like… like… he didn’t have words. He had accustomed himself to the reflexes his body now possessed but he had never seen a video of himself using them and it was… spooky… like watching a ninja weasel in an Izuku suit run wild over the testing grounds. “You received thirty-two villain points and twenty-five rescue points for your efforts. We score well those who wade through hordes of laser-wielding automatons in an effort to protect others. Congratulations and welcome. We hope to see you at UA this term!”

The holographic principal vanished and Izuku let out a jittery giggle. He pulled out his phone and texted his three fellow applicants, “UA LET ME IN!!!” A few minutes later, Ojiro confirmed his acceptance, then Kacchan replied with “You know I’m in, too,” followed by Shouji's response of, “I have also been accepted to the UA hero course.” All of them. All of them were going to go to UA together. Izuku was going to high school, to hero school at the top school in the nation, and he was going to have friends there. It was… it had to be the best day of his life. Nothing this wonderful had ever happened to him before.

Izuku whirled down the stairs yelling a vaguely comprehensible celebratory noise. “I got in mom!” he shouted, throwing himself into her arms. “It’s the best day of my life!”

“Grab your things,” she smiled, “we’re going out to celebrate!”

“A-are you sure?” Eating out was expensive.

“Of course I’m sure,” she replied. “It’s the best day of your life, after all,” there was only a hint of trepidation in her words. She had the right to worry about him, after all. His dream career wasn’t exactly a safe one and after everything that happened to him this year… she had nearly lost him once. He would have to be careful to never put her through something like that again… He should join a team. Committed hero teams--those who ranked together on the billboard--typically had much lower casualty rates than heroes who worked solo or with long-term sidekicks, but Izuku might be getting ahead of himself. He hadn’t even had his first day of school yet and he was already thinking about options that wouldn’t materialize until his third year at least.

A day before the start of term, Izuku dreamed about snow globes again. Well, again might be a misnomer. The day of the UA entrance exam he had barely dreamed about snow globes; they had been an after thought, there at the conclusion, but somehow important. This time Izuku dreamed about staring at shelf after shelf of snow globes and somehow… looking at all of them made him so furious he couldn’t think straight. His fingers curled into fists and he grit his teeth. It was one of his lucid dreams; he knew it was unreal even as he experienced it first hand.

Izuku woke with a start. “Why snow globes?” he asked his empty room. Of all the things… this had to be important somehow, right? But what could it possibly mean?

It was eight o’clock in the morning the day before the start of term and Izuku, rather than preparing for the school year, was googling “snow globe collections.” That didn’t get him anywhere. He didn’t even know what he would be searching for, but it definitely wasn’t this. Apparently some antique globes went for incredibly steep prices. Who would pay for something that old and ugly? It was a weird, weird world.

On a whim the greenette googled “snow globe crimes.” That mostly turned up “wicked deals” on snow globes and similar advertisements. His browser history was going to be a sight to behold after this. On the middle of the second page of results, however, something caught his eye.

“The search is still on for Hirano Niko, retired, formerly of the Hero Public Safety Commission. Police suspect foul play and report that his well-known and well-loved snow globe collection was completely destroyed, not a single item intact. A spokesperson for the police said, “this seems to rule out an attempted theft by a rival collector, but we are investigating all possibilities at this point. We, as yet, have no evidence leading us to believe that Hirano Niko himself has come to harm, and as such continue with the search for a missing person.””

That article was from three weeks after Izuku’s disappearance. Hirano himself had vanished… they didn’t know exactly when given that he was retired and lived alone. He had disappeared somewhere between two days before Izuku resurfaced and one day after Izuku resurfaced.

Should he--was this really anything to worry about? Anything to think about? It was definitely a bizarre coincidence, but that was likely all it was, right? Just because an avid snow globe collector disappeared during Izuku’s lost time and now Izuku was dreaming about snow globes, that didn’t mean the student had met Hirano or had anything to do with that disappearance. Still, though… this was pretty disturbing.

“So if I did have something to do with it, if I was the tool,” he grimaced, “that made Hirano disappear, why? He was an old, retired man who maybe used to do something for the HPSC. Could it have been a villain with a grudge against him? Would there be any reason for someone to have a grudge against Hirano at all? What job did he do at the HPSC?”

It was impossible to find information on Hirano Niko’s employment history beyond “worked for the HPSC” and “manager.” Manager of what? Was he some kind of spy handler? Given how little information about the man was forthcoming, it seemed… not likely but possible that he had some sort of secret job no one could talk about, in which case there were all sorts of reasons a villain might want him dead. It was also possible, of course, that Hirano Niko’s job had been so utterly boring that no explanation of the work was forthcoming beyond “manager” in the same way some jobs could only be described as “paper-pusher.”

There wasn’t enough information to make anything beyond a wild guess. Izuku sighed. “An HPSC employee, snow globes, US protests… Are they even related? What is this all about?”

Shouji and Ojiro were already waiting at the UA gates when Kacchan and Izuku arrived. “Train was a bit late,” the explosive student grumbled.

The four of them set off to find class 1-A together. “You’re vibrating again, Izuku.”

“Well, in his defense, so is Shouji,” Ojiro pointed out.

“It’s exciting,” the taller boy defended.

“Yes, but you don’t need to be so damn jittery about it,” Katsuki muttered. A door labeled 1-A appeared to their right. “Why is this door so damn high?”

“Presumably there are students taller than me sometimes,” Shouji provided as the four of them stepped into the room and sought out their seats.

Izuku recognized a number of their classmates from the entrance exam. The student with engines on his legs glared menacingly at Kacchan’s sorry excuse for a tie (Katsuki liked to act as if his rebellious nature chaffed at the idea of wearing one properly, but the truth was the blonde couldn’t get the knot right to save his life).

A low murmur of conversation picked up as the twenty seats slowly filled in and students awaited the arrival of their teacher. Izuku found himself chatting idly with a young man with a bird’s head, Tokoyami Fumikage apparently. “I think we must have been in different testing arenas,” Izuku said, “I think I would have remembered you.”

“My shadow is quite memorable,” Tokoyami agreed, the familiar in question creeping over his shoulders and giving Izuku an appraising once-over.

“Nice to meet you both.” Izuku looked up to find a yellow sleeping bag slithering into the room. Tokoyami jolted when he noticed, as did several others. A young man with red hair actually yelped in surprise. Izuku… found himself utterly untroubled… for some reason.

The yellow sleeping bag revealed itself to be the underground hero Aizawa. Huh. What were the odds of that? Well, probably fairly good. Izuku knew the man taught at UA and there were only so many teachers here. Was Izuku mumbling? No. He was not mumbling. No one was glaring at him. He was just overthinking things, not overspeaking things.

“Now then,” said their teacher without preamble, “orientation is a waste of time. You came her to learn to be heroes and we don’t have a single day to waste. Get your gym uniforms on and meet me on the training ground,” he gestured out the windows to specify their general location. “Go.” That tone brokered no argument. Izuku had wondered what the underground hero would be like as a teacher. He had presumed “strict” and he was correct.

Izuku scrambled to his feet and followed the rest of the boys out of the classroom. Fortunately, it seemed someone at the head of the herd knew where the changing rooms were.

Uniforms were donned in a flurry of fabric, no one wishing to be the last to arrive. Class 1-A approached the indicated training field in one large clump (minus a few stragglers). Aizawa waited for them stoically.

“Today we’re going to do a quirk assessment test,” he said, indicating some trials set up behind him on the track. “Uraraka?”

“Yes, Mr. Aizawa?” answered a brown haired girl who lingered nervously at the back of the class, as if not quite sure if she had the right to be there at all.

“How far could you throw a softball in middle school?”

“Uh… I don’t remember… about to that white line on the track I think?”

“This time use your quirk,” the teacher tossed her the ball. Uraraka threw the sphere into the air and it kept going… and going… and going… and disappeared from UA’s campus. That was incredible. She had just… negated gravity? That was a terrifying quirk.

“You may have been training your bodies in physical education classes,” Shouta continued, “but without working in your quirks that doesn’t mean much. Today, we’ll see where you are and where you need to be.”

“Oh, man, this is going to be so fun!” someone said.

Aizawa’s head whipped around. “Fun? I would hope aspiring heroes would take this more seriously. In that case, the student with the lowest score will be expelled. Show me you belong here,” Aizawa said, voice ice cold. A hush fell over the class. Really? It… it didn’t make sense to throw someone out on the first day based on a single test, but the hero sure sounded like he meant to carry out his threat. “Show me you belong here…” so maybe he would only throw someone out if that someone didn’t seem to be trying? Aizawa knew Izuku was quirkless and hadn’t seemed to care before, so why was it called a quirk assessment test? What did that actually mean for someone like Izuku? Aizawa had encouraged Izuku to apply in the first place. What would be the point of doing something like this that seemed designed to toss him out immediately? Stop. This was no time to psychoanalyze his teacher!

“First is the standing long jump,” Aizawa said.

Izuku was somewhere near the thirtieth percentile for the jump. He was one of the better distance runners, thirtieth percentile on the sprint. It became immediately apparent that Izuku, Hagakure, Jirou, Kaminari, Kirishima, and Aoyoama, whose quirks either didn’t exist or weren’t very helpful for most trials, were waging a private little war to see which of them would take last place. The others had quirks very well suited to at least one of the challenges and were in no danger.

In the end, Kaminari took last. Hagakure took nineteenth and Izuku eighteenth.

Expelling someone like this really didn’t seem fair, but there was nothing Izuku could do about it. He ducked his head but didn’t look away from the scene unfolding. Kaminari held his head high, stoically meeting their teacher’s gaze. It was impressive. Izuku wouldn’t have been able to do that. The greenette would have been crying in despair and anger.

Aizawa met Kaminari’s stare, seemed to find something he liked, gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head and said, “it was a logical ruse. No one is being expelled. I just wanted to make sure you took this exam seriously so I know what I’m working with. Take note, though, that I have no tolerance whatsoever for those who squander their potential. If you don’t take this course seriously, you will not stay in my class. Alright. Back to school.”

“Yes, Mr. Aizawa,” the students chorused, the lot of them trundling back towards their classroom.

“That was badass, pikachu,” Kacchan said to Kaminari.

“W-what?” the lightning-summoner said, perhaps reacting to the compliment or perhaps to the abrupt nicknaming.

“It wasn’t a damn ruse,” Kacchan continued. Apparently he had come to the same supposition as Izuku. “If you’d begged or made excuses he would have thrown you out.”

“You convinced him you belong here with your powerful stare,” Uraraka said, clearly impressed herself.

It was something of a trying first day, but a promising one, and over before Izuku knew it. “Bakugou,” Aizawa called as the bell sounded to release them. “I need to speak with you for a few minutes.”

Kacchan and Izuku exchanged a bewildered glance. “I’ll wait for you by the gates, alright?” Izuku said.

Katsuki nodded. “See you in a minute, Izuku.”

What was that about?

Chapter Text

Kacchan strode rapidly towards the gates, pointedly not meeting Izuku’s gaze. He’d been delayed barely fifteen minutes by his conversation with Mr. Aizawa, but it must have been an intense fifteen minutes.

“Kacchan?” Izuku asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said vehemently, not quite snapping.

“Oh…” The temptation to demand “are you okay” was overwhelming. Izuku quashed it and the pair set off together to the train.

The silence lasted for two blocks before Katsuki apparently couldn’t take it anymore. “I am different, aren’t I?” he demanded.

Izuku blinked at him dumbly. “Uh… different?”

“From middle school.”

“Like… you’re taller now?” He was. “And I think maybe your hair is spikier than it used to be and--”

“Not like that! The… the shit I used to do to you in middle school, and not just you, and the shit I used to say to you.” Izuku still didn’t understand what was being asked of him. “If I tried to pull that crap on you now, you would be shocked, wouldn’t you? You would… you wouldn’t expect it of me.”

Pawing back over recent months’ memories, Izuku couldn’t find a single example of Kacchan attacking someone--physically or verbally--without significant provocation. If Kacchan told Izuku to jump off a roof or slammed someone into a locker, once upon a time that would have been status quo, now it would stun Izuku speechless. “Or,” a traitorous part of his brain whispered, “it would just be the end of this phase and back to business as usual. What’s a few months of good behavior in the face of years of cruelty? What should you really expect?” That wasn’t what Izuku said. “N-no. I wouldn’t expect that of you. I… would be shocked.”

Katsuki folded his arms protectively over his chest. “It’s… I knew in middle school everyone expected that of me, even after I stopped being the bully I didn’t really stop being the bully . What other role would I have? And I thought at UA, finally, no one would know me ‘cept for you and you forgive like a saint so…” He paused as if considering leaving it there. Izuku had a good idea of what this was about now, but couldn’t be sure, not unless Kacchan finished that sentence. “But Aizawa knows me from when he was looking for you, and he knows what I did and what I said.”

“Oh,” Izuku said, realizing at last exactly what conversation had occurred between student and teacher. Most likely, Aizawa had given Katsuki the “thin ice” speech. Aizawa had said, that first time Izuku met the underground operative, that someone like Katsuki didn’t deserve to go to hero school, that if he was the sort to suicide-bait his classmate he ought not be given a license.

“He said that he’s giving me the benefit of the doubt, that was what he said when I read between the lines, anyway,” Katsuki said with his head bowed. “That he won’t look for a reason to throw me out, not more than anyone else, but if he sees me doing things like that again I’ll be sent home and blacklisted from every reputable school.”

That had to hurt, having it all dragged out in the open like that when he was trying to change. “But it doesn’t matter because you won’t do anything like that,” Izuku said, putting every bit of faith and confidence he could dredge up into those words. “I would be shocked.”

Kacchan blinked at him and, ever so slowly, the hint of a grin spread across his face. “Thanks, nerd,” he said. “You don’t mind me calling you nerd, right?” he added hurriedly.

“’Course not. Nerds get straight A’s. Why would I object to a complement on my academic prowess?” he said with a playful grin.

Kacchan really had changed, not to the point of seeming like a different person entirely, but something fundamental had shifted. If Izuku hadn’t disappeared, Kacchan would have come to UA acting the way he did in middle school. Would Aizawa have tolerated that or expelled him for it? Hard to say… Maybe Izuku’s disappearing act really had been the best thing for everyone... but what would Katsuki’s fate have been if Izuku had never returned? If the greenette had vanished from the face of the earth with Katsuki’s murderous taunt forefront of everyone’s memories? There weren’t any neat words to describe the look Kacchan gave Izuku when they met in the hotel room, when the blonde told him “I thought I fucking killed you.” Izuku took a moment to thank the anonymous powers that ran the universe for sparing them all the pain of that timeline.

For all Kacchan made fun of Izuku’s fidgeting when nervous or excited, the blonde did a fair amount of it himself. Ojirou, Shouji, Katsuki and Izuku lingered together in the upper right hand corner of the blob that constituted class 1-A and not one of them could claim any moral high ground on the fidgeting front. “What do you think we’ll do for our first heroics course?” Shouji wondered.

“W-well,” Izuku began after Kacchan just shrugged, “some people have probably never sparred with another person before, not with quirk use anyway, so probably something really simple? They don’t want us hurting each other on the first day.”

Izuku’s comment had, apparently, been overheard by Yaoyorozu and Asui (call me “Tsu”) who nodded in agreement with him. “Or maybe we’ll jump right into it, plus ultra and all that,” Kirishima suggested. “We all took the entrance exam at least and that required plenty of fighting.”

“But no restraint,” Ojiro pointed out. “Fighting another person for practice is not at all the same thing as destroying a robot.” Kaminari nodded his agreement as more people were swept into the rushing torrent of the conversation.

“Who is even teaching this class, kero?” asked Asui.

“I’m…” Iida turned the syllabus over twice. “I am not sure, but the course description suggests that we will begin doing battle simulations immediately.”

“That does seem a bit much for the very first class,” Yaoyorozu said.

“I am coming through the door like a normal person!” exclaimed a very familiar voice.

Well, first off: no. Normal people do not enter rooms like that. Second off: that’s All Might. Oh my god that’s All Might. Izuku hadn’t even realized he’d been hired at UA. When had that happened? Clearly some of his classmates had known but hadn’t expected to actually see the number one pro teaching classes.

“Don’t pass out, nerd,” Kacchan muttered in Izuku’s ear, although it was clear the blonde was plenty excited himself.

“Welcome to your first heroics course!” All Might said. “This is my first time teaching a full class, as you may have guessed, so please do not hesitate to ask questions as they arise!

“Now, UA likes to jump right into the thick of things, but it seems the traditional first exercise is a scavenger hunt of sorts!”

It was? Like on the Ketsubutsu entrance exam? “Four of your classmates will be chosen as “villains” and will be given ten minutes to hide this “bomb,”” he showed the prop, “somewhere in your sectioned off area of training ground beta. Groups of four will then attempt to find the villain and weapon. The weapon must be placed upright whenever it is stationary but moving it is legal. Four heroes will seek each “bomb.” The goal is to find the weapon as quickly as possible and claim it by touching it. There is not to be any fighting in this first exercise, with quirks or otherwise,” he continued, “but you may use your abilities as you see fit. There is no rule whatsoever about how heroes search for the bomb or how villains hide it save that no one behave in a way liable to cause injury to anyone involved or excessive property damage. Villains may attempt to obstruct heroes with quirks or otherwise, but again, no direct attacks, nothing liable to cause injury or excessive damage. I will keep an eye on all of you from here and after the exercises we will return here to analyze the outcomes.”

A few hands shot up. The first was Iida wanting to know, “how is this exercise assessed?”

“All other things being equal, the first heroes to locate the weapon can expect the highest scores, as can the villain who avoids heroes for the longest period of time,” he laughed, “of course, all things are not equal. Creativity, responsibility, efficiency, all of these things will be assessed. However, this being the first day, there are many things you cannot be expected to know.” Izuku hadn’t known what to expect from All Might as a teacher… he seemed about the same in person as on TV, so optimistic that the sun seemed to shine more brightly in his presence. All Might handled the other questions fairly well, better than Izuku would have expected from a teacher on his first day.

“Alright. Villains, as randomly selected, will be Todoroki, Ashido, Uraraka, and Midoriya.” Oh. He hadn’t planned on that… how was he going to do this? He’d been silently scheming about how to find the weapon, somehow sure he would be a hero. “Todoroki will be pursued by Jiro, Kirishima, Bakugou and Mineta. Ashido will be pursued by Asui, Yaoyorozu, Kaminari, and Ojiro. Uraraka will be pursued by Shouji, Sato, Tokoyami and Hagakure. Midoriya will be pursued by Aoyama, Iida, Sero and Koda.

“Now, the support department has a surprise for you!” All Might gestured behind him to a long row of briefcases. “Your costumes are ready today. Change and have heroes return here. I’ll meet villains out on the training grounds to give them their props and show them to their sections.”

When Izuku filled in the costume request form two weeks previously, he’d discovered--much to his consternation--that not only did he know exactly what materials he wanted for his outfit, he had preferred -brand names. SILVR was the company he wanted to do business with for body armor and knives. ACMX was the vendor from which he wished to purchase impact-absorbing combat boots. Izuku had long known about SILVR--they were a Japanese company despite the odd name and quite prominent in hero circles. To the best of his knowledge, however, the student had never heard of the Amercian support company ACMX before he asked UA to acquire boots from them. Izuku was well and truly accustomed to that kind of bull--sorry, that kind of thing by now and it didn’t even seem worth mentioning.

Izuku’s work outfit--for some reason calling it a costume seemed silly--had a grey-blue-black camouflage pattern. Completely black clothing wasn’t that useful for staying unseen at night. The goal was to be the color of the city, so mostly gray. Black in the dark looks different from gray in the dark. Izuku wore a layer of flexible body armor beneath the camouflage. Thicker plates guarded his torso. Izuku had not asked for anything special as far as gloves were concerned, but immediately recognized the ACMX mascot, a checkered whiptail, on their packaging. These were “gecko gloves,” apparently, perhaps a package deal with the boots. They wouldn’t actually allow Izuku to climb on glass, but they would provide a firm grip on even the smoothest of surfaces while protecting his hands from heat, cold and “moderately forceful stabs.” They also provided wrist support with a similar impact absorbing design to the company’s boots. When falling from a great height, then, Izuku should try to land on all fours. He would be most likely to avoid injury that way by spreading the force of the impact.

Sleeve sheaths provided easy access to an octet of thin throwing knives. Other weapons, including the two quazi-short swords he had requested, could be holstered on his belt. The staff would be more cumbersome as it didn’t collapse ; it wouldn’t be an easy weapon to stow , but it should be possible to secure it to his back if he needed both hands free. He would keep this in mind for future modification requests. Izuku checked all of his weapons before putting the blade guards back on and returning all knives to the case. There wasn’t to be any real fighting today so he didn’t need or want them.

“You look… scary,” Kacchan told him as Izuku headed out to meet All Might.

“Thanks! You look… intense?”

“You do look intense,” Sero agreed before Katsuki had a chance to respond.

“The hell does that even mean?” Kacchan wondered.

“Lots of… like loud colors,” Kaminari tried to explain as Izuku stepped into the hallway and let the door to the changing room drift closed.

By the time Izuku arrived on the training ground, there were only two prop bombs left. Well, Izuku had several layers to don, so it took him longer to dress than some of the others.

“Good morning, young Midoriya. This “bomb” is for you,” the hero gestured. Izuku squeaked an acknowledgement. It was all he could manage above the din of several trains of thought yelling “oh my god All Might is talking to you! Oh my god it’s All Might!” The fanboy wondered, briefly, if All Might remembered their first meeting, remembered the day Izuku had forgotten. Probably not. The number one hero was constantly busy after all.

Izuku got a grip and forced himself to listen carefully. The “bomb” was almost as big as Izuku but light enough for him to lift easily with one hand. “This is your section,” the hero showed him a map and pointed out the corresponding locations above ground.

“There’s a sewer system,” Izuku realized with a start as the brief information session came to a close.

“There is indeed,” All Might agreed with a chuckle. “I believe you are the first to notice that. Your section will be marked off below ground by yellow tape.”

“Koda’s quirk is going to be a lot of trouble,” Izuku mused, “he has all those eyes helping him…” Did Anivoice allow Koda to have intelligent conversations with animals or was it just a form of mind control? The former would be far more difficult to overcome, as certainly some animal would see where Izuku was going.

“Indeed. Good luck Midoriya! Ah, young Ashido! There you are. Let me show you your section...”

Izuku hefted the bomb in one arm and took off running down streets at random, circling back and taking wrong turns intentionally, attempting to confound any animals that might see. Izuku checked his watch--he had five minutes left. Alright. That was enough running aimlessly, then.

The student slid into one of the larger faux-buildings through the front door, exited through the side door, yanked up a manhole cover and dropped into the underground, sealing the path behind him.

The “sewer system” was merely a network of huge, concrete pipes with a bit of murky water flowing through them. Izuku had hoped for something like this.

The student set off running again. Four minutes left… he needed to find a good place to leave the bomb and then he needed to get above ground and find a decent building to make his hiding place. Hopefully the other students would search for Izuku rather than the bomb. After all, it didn’t matter if Izuku were caught.

Izuku came across a significant hole in the pipe wall. It did not appear planned; something (or someone) had been thrown through the concrete here during a previous battle simulation. This was as good a place as any. Izuku stowed the bomb in the hole. It was not hidden in the sense that someone walking past would not notice it, but it was hidden in the sense that if someone standing at either neighboring junction glanced down this section of sewer, the prop would not be visible.

Alright… three minutes left. Izuku took off again, running for another forty seconds and taking several turns at random before choosing a manhole and ascending into the city. The sprinting was starting to take its toll. He'd be glad to find a hiding spot and rest a while.

Dragging the cover back into place, the student chose a five story building across the street and leapt through the shattered window in its side. He would have liked to run further from the manhole he had exited, but time was running out. The greenette sprinted up the stairs to the top floor and, discovering a coat closet with a legitimate door and actual coats inside, hid himself.

Hiding in a coat closet… it felt like a child’s game of hide and seek. Another dose of adrenaline surged through his veins and Izuku bounced up and down on his toes . This was so exciting and maybe a little frightening but mostly just exciting! There was no pressure, nothing to fear, no consequence when Izuku was caught, no reason for the nerve and yet… the static fizzing in his blood refused to fade.

A few minutes later, Izuku heard Sero shouting, although he could not make out what his classmate said.

Izuku took measured breaths, trying to get rid of some of the electric energy. It didn’t work. He really wanted to have a good, long fight with Ojiro right now. That would get rid of this feeling…

The door flew open and Koda threw the coats aside. The tension evaporated because the ruse was over but it had worked , hadn’t it?

Izuku’s capturing classmate wore a look of profound amusement--and, well, yes, Izuku was in the closet but come on , grow up--and triumph which rapidly turned to confusion. The small bird on Koda’s shoulder chirped happily and Izuku allowed himself to grin.

“Nope, bomb’s not in the closet with me, good luck,” Izuku waved, taking a seat on the floor.

Sero had seen Koda’s approach and arrived about a minute later. Koda was long since gone, following other animals in an attempt to retrace Izuku’s steps. “Where is it, villain scum?” demanded Sero.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, hero,” Izuku could play this game, too. “Mwahahaha!” Sero jerked back. “Too much?”

“Your evil laugh is… I don’t know, just wrong. Now where is it?”

“I’ll never talk,” Izuku said just as Iida finally joined them.

“Oh, I see,” the speedster said, “you thought to waste our time by having us seek you out when your weapon was concealed elsewhere? What a dastardly scheme! How truly villainous! But rest assured, the heroes shall be victorious! Sero?”

“Yeah?” Sero asked.

“If we work together, we can clear the zone more quickly. I can search the streets and lower floors, you can search the rooftops and upper floors!”

“Well… I guess that’s allowed? You’ll call me if you find the bomb and wait to claim it so we tie?”

“Of course!”

“Alright, let’s go!” the two took off and the greenette walked to the nearest window to keep an eye on their progress. It was good to see them cooperating. Really, they would have been best off working together form the start.

Huh. “Well, this all went rather well,” Izuku decided.

Fortunately for the heroes, their assigned training ground section wasn’t that large. It only contained a few dozen buildings and most of those were only a single story and completely unfurnished. Still, it took Sero and Iida more than ten minutes to complete their search even with such useful mobility quirks.

“Koda’s probably found it by now,” Izuku mused. At that moment, Koda emerged from a manhole, a brown mouse perched upon his shoulder.

Iida, who had zoomed around a nearby corner moments before, stared at Koda in consternation then began to yell for Sero.

Five minutes later, All Might’s voice crackled over Izuku’s communicator. “All the heroes have at last located the weapon! Please return to the viewing room now!”

Izuku couldn’t help but feel tempted . He could walk down the stairs… or he could jump to that neighboring balcony and then to the ground… he really wanted to, but that would just be pointlessly reckless. If he were only on the second story it would be alright, but Kacchan would glare at him later if Izuku jumped from a window this high, even with a plan to get down safely.

Fine then. Izuku took the stairs.

Chapter Text

By the time Izuku—feeling rather tired from all the sprinting earlier--returned to the viewing room, it seemed nearly everyone else had already arrived. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. It was probably a good thing.

“Let us start with a review of the quest to apprehend Todoroki.” Izuku wondered idly who had compiled the highlights reel shown to the class. Nedzu maybe?

Todoroki took the bomb, walked immediately to the tallest structure in his sector, climbed to the highest floor and froze the entire building into a solid block of ice. Holy--that was incredible, terrifying power. There, in a nutshell, was the difference between an underground and a frontline hero; an underground hero would make use of existing obstacles, a frontline hero would make obstacles of their own.

Safe within his ice palace, Todoroki waited. Jiro, Kirishima and Katsuki arrived and immediately began trying to break through the ice at three different locations. They were not working together, but making some progress nonetheless. Mineta began to frenetically climb all over the icy building using his quirk, probably looking for a weak spot . He didn’t find one. Jiro found a frequency that allowed her to shatter great chunks of Todoroki’s ice and Kacchan began to use more and more devastating attacks to knock his way through a sealed window. Todoroki had to continually renew his protections and, after only five minutes, began to shiver uncontrollably. At this point Kirishima--who had been mostly ignored as a lesser threat--burst through the lair’s defenses and made his way to the bomb before Todoroki could react. Jiro and Kacchan burst through immediately after and touched the bomb at virtually the same time. Mineta joined them shortly.

“Alright. First off, what did the villain do well?”

“His choice to forswear subtlety in favor of force was probably a good one given the power he can bring to bear,” Yaoyorozu provided.

“That ice was crazy tough to break through,” Kirishima agreed. “He planned that out really well.”

“And what could he have done better?” asked All Might.

“He could have sealed the bomb in a solid layer of ice so that anyone breaking through his initial defenses could not reach it immediately,” Izuku offered. On some level, given how quickly the glacier-summoner became hypothermic after encasing himself in ice with his charge, choosing to rely on force rather than subtlety might not have been the best decision.

“Now the heroes. What did they do well?”

“Their determination and relentlessness was admirable,” Todoroki himself provided somewhat grudgingly.

The heroes did a decent job, and it wasn’t clear that team work would have served them better than the three-pronged assault they carried out independently. Izuku offered no suggestions to this group.

They moved on to an analysis of Ashido’s attempt at villainy. The acidic student had chosen to conceal herself and her weapon in the dark basement of a randomly selected building. She proceeded to assemble the cardboard boxes in the room into a visual barrier to hide her bomb and positioned herself in an ambush-ready alcove near the bottom of the stairs.

It was six minutes before someone came to check the basement--Ojiro. He narrowed his eyes at the suspicious pile of boxes and carefully made his way down the stairs. Ashido sent a plume of very weak acid splashing across the floor. Ojiro did not fall but rather slid to the other side of the room as if ice skating. Ashido made a rude face at him before running up the stairs, but she had not fooled him. Ojiro made his way to the boxes and tapped the bomb, claiming it for himself before nodding to Ashido and departing. Ashido sighed and returned to her alcove. Asui was the next to arrive followed by Yaoyorozu and then Kaminari. Ashido played the same game with the other three, but none of them seemed fooled. The pile of boxes was just too suspicious.

Ashido had done a good job. It was a fine hiding spot and she had done her best to implement a backup plan. The heroes, however, could have done much better.

“The heroes should have worked as a team to search,” Izuku said simply as the time for suggestions rolled around. “They could have found her much more quickly.”

“Were we allowed to do that, kero?” asked Asui.

“Of course you were!” All Might replied. It seemed collaboration hadn’t occurred to most of the group.

Uraraka chose to hide on the top floor of a building with a pre-shattered skylight. The reason for this became apparent when Hagakure, the first to search that building, finally arrived. Uraraka tapped the bomb and sent it floating up to the roof and beyond. The other student heroes, attracted by the flying prop, arrived shortly, but Uraraka didn’t care; what did it matter to her whether it was one or four heroes who touched the bomb?

That match ended with a waiting game. Eventually Uraraka became so nauseous she could no longer use her quirk and the bomb sailed back down to the building’s roof. All four heroes captured it together.

The critique was quick for all of them. Uraraka had come up with a creative solution which likely couldn’t have been significantly improved upon. Well, hanging the bomb from a high ceiling by a rope might have thwarted Hagakure without requiring Uraraka to exhaust herself with her quirk, but it would not have thwarted Tokoyami and Dark Shadow. Again, the heroes really should have worked together to sweep the area.

“And now for Midoriya.” Izuku watched himself run pell-mell through the faux-city before finally descending into the sewers.

“We were allowed to do that, kero?” asked Tsu.

“Nothing was forbidden!” All Might replied.

The cameras in the dimly lit sewer system caught Izuku stowing his bomb and running. “You didn’t stay with it?” Uraraka asked.

“W-why would I?” Izuku asked a bit nervously. “I couldn’t do anything to defend it, not without attacking someone.”

“Your quirk no good for that?” she asked, seemingly perfectly sincere, but Izuku couldn’t help but be wary.

“Something like that,” Izuku replied. Three people here, maybe four if All Might happened to remember his kidnapping case, knew Izuku was quirkless. The greenette wasn’t sure he wanted that number to increase.

The Izuku on screen proceeded to his closet. “I always new there was something about you, Izuku,” Kacchan told him. Really Kacchan?

“Oh, grow up!” Izuku sniped back. Kaminari chuckled awkwardly. Izuku felt his cheeks burning, but fortunately All Might was narrating events on the screen rather than paying attention to the conversation at the back of the class.

“There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” Mineta of all people said. Izuku already knew that the guy was a pervert hyped-up on teenage hormones and angst, so it wasn’t something he expected to hear. “Lots of the really hot guys are gay and that’s great because I don’t have to compete with them for girls.” Shouji took a deep breath, apparently trying not to laugh. Kacchan, Ojiro, and Kirishima unanimously decided this would be a good time to face palm. Hopefully Katsuki was regretting his life choices. This was his fault, after all. Asui cocked her head as if considering Mineta’s point. Todoroki blushed furiously and Kaminari valiantly pretended to have heard nothing. The rest of the class really had heard nothing, or else they were much better at faking ignorance.

The onscreen Koda began to consult with a number of birds. Due to Izuku’s mad romp through the training grounds, the student searched the wrong building first. The birds were not infallible.

Koda found Izuku, realized Izuku didn’t have the bomb, and raced back to the ground to find another guide, eventually happening upon the mouse who led him through the sewers. Meanwhile, Iida and Sero searched the city in tandem, Aoyoama joining them after a brief consultation with Iida. Izuku hadn’t seen that at the time, vision limited by his vantage point. The three of them made their way to the bomb, eventually, and all claimed it at approximately the same time.

Izuku was, by far, the most successful of the villains. His time to first capture was about twice that of Uraraka who was in second place.

“Well! What did the villain do well in this scenario?” All Might asked.

“Everything,” said Kaminari and Izuku blushed, ducking his head.

“He took into account the quirks of the people who would be tracking him and made a concerted effort to confound them,” Yaoyorozu said.

“Leaving the bomb behind was probably the best choice and quite possibly something we all should have done,” Ashido contributed.

Uraraka shook his head. “It only worked for him because he had a really good hiding spot and figured that everyone would look for the villain rather than the villain’s weapon.”

“And he figured correctly, kero,” Asui said.

Kacchan whispered, “good job, nerd,” in Izuku’s ear.

“That was very impressive, Midoriya,” Shouji agreed and Ojiro also gave him a “well done.” It was a conspiracy to make him blush as much as possible. He didn’t know how to handle this kind of concentrated praise!

“What could he have done better?” All Might inquired.

“It might have been possible to mislead Koda into believing Midoriya had hidden the bomb nearby,” Yaoyorozu suggested, “with words or with body language. This could have delayed him further.” No one seemed to have much more to contribute.

“What did the heroes do well?” Koda’s quirk was used to terrifying effect. Iida and Sero had worked together, as they should have. Aoyama had joined them in the ground search after running into Iida, as he should have. Koda had little motivation to work with the other three heroes, although it would have helped Iida, Aoyama and Sero significantly to have access to some animal-sourced intelligence.

Really, everyone had performed remarkably well given that this was the very first exercise. No one had made any catastrophic mistakes. No one had been injured. No serious damage had been done--Todoroki’s frozen building had thawed long since as had the frosty student himself.

“Excellent work today!” All Might praised them. “This concludes our first class. Have an excellent afternoon!” The number one pro vanished in a burst of wind.

He was having a lucid dream again, but… the emotions had never been this intense before. Were the dreams becoming more powerful or was this just an especially traumatic event? He felt… lost, miserable, furious as if his blood were boiling, affronted like a crusader about to make his last stand on the steps of a doomed cathedral.

“They killed her,” Chris said, his head pillowed on his arms as he sobbed on someone’s dining room table. Across the room, a lanky young man, probably Latino, with shaggy, coal-black hair lay on his side, apparently asleep... or perhaps unconscious given his impressive black eye. Izuku had no idea who that was. He’d expected Kuma. Where was she?

“We… we don’t know that for sure,” Izuku replied carefully, setting his hand on the red-head’s shoulder, trying to control his own emotions so that he might help his friend.

“I do know, okay? Here,” the man thrust a stack of freshly printed papers into Izuku’s hands. Izuku couldn’t make sense of what they said, not a single word, but his memory-self could and they were damning.

“How did you get this?” Izuku asked, strangled.

“You brought it to me,” Chris replied softly, “those documents you lifted?”

“Oh. I… I didn’t know any of this was in there…”

“I know you didn’t. It’s not… not your fault, either of you. But they killed her, and they’re going to get away with it, with everything.”

“No they aren’t,” Izuku said.

“No one would ever believe us; this may be proof to you but no one else would believe it,” Chris coughed.

“I believe. People like us will believe,” Izuku said, “and that’s all you need for a rallying cry.”

The fierce emotions faded away as the greenette woke, well, most of them anyway. “Did Kuma die?” Izuku wondered as he copied down all the details he could remember from the vision. “Was she murdered? Is that what was going on there? Why, though? It sounded almost like the government had her killed or… someone’s government? The Japanese government or the United States Government or… who? Those documents were in English weren’t they?” He wasn’t sure. They could have been in Japanese. “I stole those documents… what in the world were these people involved in? It has to have something to do with the societal upheaval when meta-humans started to become more common so was Kuma killed by radical anti-meta-human protesters, or an anti-meta-human faction in the government? I don’t even know for sure that she was a meta-human or even sympathetic to them. And now I’m using the word meta-human instead of quirked… whatever. I was clearly a meta-human supporter given my reaction to the protest on campus and Chris was, too, so probably Kuma was as well? But were Chris and Kuma meta-humans or not? And if these aren’t my memories and I’m pretty sure they’re not, does the person whose perspective I share have a quirk? Whose side were they really on? How many sides are there and what even are they?”

Through all the largely fruitless analysis, Izuku found himself feeling… terribly sad. It didn’t make sense. He knew, he knew, that if the people in his dreams were real in the traditional sense then they were all long since dead, but the thought of Kuma being murdered so young… ached as if Izuku had lost a friend. He didn’t even know the woman that well! He’d only seen her in a half-dozen dreams and yes, he liked her but… she shouldn’t be any more dear to him than a character in a historical documentary so why did it suddenly hurt to think about what happened to her?

Izuku took a deep breath, checked his clock--1:39 am--and tried, fruitlessly, to turn his brain off and return to sleep.

Predictably, Izuku was dead on his feet the next day.

“You alright Izuku?” Katsuki asked him as Izuku nearly walked into a pillar at the train station.

“Weird dream,” he mumbled.

Kacchan raised a questioning eyebrow. “You’re still having those?”

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t… think you should tell someone?”

Izuku shrugged. “Who would care?”

“I might,” Kacchan muttered. “Auntie might. Ojiro might. Shouji might. Hell, the detective that looked for you might, or Aizawa for that matter.”

Point taken but… “I think it would be in my best interest,” Izuku said very, very carefully, “to keep quiet about this,” and he should really start writing all the details of his dreams in code.

“Wha… why?”

“I… may be seeing things that people don’t want seen,” Izuku said even more carefully. A government conspiracy to murder a young woman? It might have happened decades ago, but it would likely still be something Izuku would better off knowing nothing about. Well, no, that wasn’t exactly it. Izuku wanted to know and he wanted other people to know, too. He wanted justice for his slain friend (if that was indeed what had occurred, he still couldn’t be sure.) No, it wasn’t that he’d rather not know about this, but that if he let on to other people that he knew and the wrong person overheard… Izuku could be in danger of sharing Kuma’s fate.

“What the hell is this mess?” Katsuki muttered, staring at an enormous gaggle of people standing between them and the UA gates. The obstacles had cameras. And notebooks.

“Oh dear,” Izuku said. Reporters.

“Hey! You go to UA! What’s All Might like as a teacher?” someone shoved a microphone in Izuku’s face. The greenette neatly ducked and began dancing through the crowd, easily avoiding every haphazard attempt to stop him.

“Oh you cheating nerd!” Kacchan yelled as Izuku sidestepped a final camera and slid through the UA gates.

“Sorry, Kacchan.” Izuku’s friend tried to make his way through the crowd by shouting a lot. It wasn’t working very well.

Aizawa appeared in Izuku’s peripheral vision, walking along the outer wall of UA . The underground pro ducked into the sea of reporters, fished Kacchan out of the flood, and returned to UA grounds proper just in time for a barrier to fly up and force the reporters back. “Head to class,” Aizawa told his students before returning his attention to the reporters. Izuku heard him yelling something about “official statements” and “trespassing” and “lawsuits.”

“Well, this is going to be an interesting day,” Katsuki muttered.

Chapter Text

Izuku had just barely avoided being elected class president. Iida had taken that job and Yaoyorozu had earned her place as vice president .

“Why would anyone vote for me?” Izuku wondered as he sat down to eat with Ojiro, Shouji, and Katsuki. Kaminari, Kirishima and Ashido had settled into orbit about their group but were caught up in a conversation of their own.

“Well, you seem responsible,” Ojiro said.

Izuku considered this assessment and found it ridiculous. “How would anyone know? We haven’t even had a real homework assignment yet. We barely know each other.”

“You just… seem responsible,” Shouji said with a helpless shrug.

“You do, and I ought to know given how long I’ve been your neighbor,” Kacchan said. Izuku gave him a half-hearted glower.

“Well…” he certainly didn’t feel worthy of being class president, “even if I were, I’ve got way too many problems of my own. I wouldn’t have the time to do a good job.” He really did have enough problems already.

“It’s not like it matters anymore, right?” Ojiro pointed out carefully, correctly surmising that Izuku was referring to the aftershocks of past kidnapping. “You’re back and you’re here to stay and nobody even knows about any of that except the four of us.” And Aizawa.

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t take up a lot of my time and energy,” Izuku sighed.

Shouji nodded understandingly. “I wouldn’t just get over something like that, either.”

“Seriously, they would have been much better off electing Shouji than me,” Izuku said.

“Wha--me?” the other boy responded, jerking back.

“Yeah. You’re really nice and you always seem to know what you’re doing, and what everyone else should be doing for that matter.”

Shouji furrowed his brow. “I do not know exactly how you got this impression of me. I am… absolutely clueless and lots of people find me intimidating.”

Katsuki snorted. “That’s just ‘cause you’re tall.”

“I think it’s because I have a lot of arms and this funny mask,” Shouji replied.

“Nuh-uh. It’s ‘cause you’re tall,” Kacchan insisted. Ojiro glanced between them, evidently unsure whether he should take this discussion at all seriously. Izuku wasn’t sure, either.

An alarm abruptly blared from the ceiling demanding all students evacuate the building . Izuku found himself crouching on the floor, scanning every direction for threats. Shouji groaned, “god why is that so loud?” Well, the volume made the idea of ignoring the alarm and remaining in the building completely untenable… but exit seemed to be untenable, too, because the hallways were jam-packed with people already.

“Window,” Izuku said, making his way to the nearest one. Katsuki raised a hand--”Don’t blow it up! We can open it without destroying it!” Izuku protested hurriedly.

The greenette tripped the latches and Shouji pulled the window open. Izuku, as the smallest and most agile, swung himself out of the building and began to spider-climb down the bricks. He was going to have to drop most of the way, though-- there simply weren’t enough handholds. Izuku tucked and log rolled as he hit the grass then jumped to his feet and cleared out of the landing zone .

Katsuki lunged out the window and broke his fall with Explosion. Shouji and Ojiro achieved egress in much the same way Izuku had, then Shouji caught three panicking general education students who had jumped out after them with no plan whatsoever to avoid injury .

“This may be getting out of hand,” Ojiro said as Shouji dived to catch a fourth student who had attempted to climb down the wall and failed dramatically.

As quickly as the flow of fleeing students began, it ceased. “Huh. Wonder what happened?” Kacchan asked.

The alarm itself fell silent perhaps thirty seconds later. “Should we… go back in?” Ojiro wondered.

“Dunno.” Katsuki launched himself into the air with Explosion, catching the edge of the windowsill and blinking. “Looks like everybody’s going back to lunch? What the hell’s going on?” The last question was addressed to someone inside the building. Kacchan turned back to the students outside, “it was a false alarm ‘cause the press were trying to sneak on campus. Everything’s good I guess. You can come back inside.”

Kacchan climbed back through the window. The other students exchanged glances and, as one, decided to reenter the building through a door and take the stairs like normal people.

Katsuki was waiting impatiently for them when they finally made their way back to the cafeteria. “Took you long enough.”

“Well, not all of us are living rockets,” Shouji retorted, taking back his seat.

“You said it was the press that triggered the alarm?” Izuku asked his old friend.

“Apparently, that’s what people were saying. Or, what people said Iida said I guess.”

“I wonder how much money they’re going to have to pay to UA for breaking through the security,” Izuku mused.

“Probably a good deal,” Ojiro volunteered. “I’ve heard that Nedzu is a practicing attorney.”

“That is… extremely frightening,” Izuku decided. His brief encounter with Nedzu’s hologram combined with what he already knew about UA’s principal suggested one would not wish to be in a lawsuit with Nedzu representing the opposition. “Though I’ve heard that an attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client.” That probably didn’t apply to people like Nedzu, though.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Ojiro as they packed up from lunch and headed for English class. “Why aren’t you with us for English, Midoriya?”

“Oh, I’m fluent. I tested out.” He wasn’t trying to keep that ability a secret at UA. In middle school sudden fluency in English would have drawn unpleasant attention to the greenette equivalent to setting off a truckload of fireworks in the halls. At UA, everyone would just assume he had lived abroad for a year or done an optional, accelerated class… and he really didn’t want to sit through three years of useless course work. “I have a study period for now, but I’ll probably find something more useful to do with the time later.”

“Cool.”

Iida had been a sheep dog in a previous life, there was no doubt about it. The fact that the seating style on the bus didn’t accommodate the organization the class president was trying to impose caused Iida to visibly wilt. What kind of sheep dog wilted ? Not a border collie… Izuku wasn’t really a dog person and apparently a supernatural knowledge of dog breeds was not part of the repertoire of random information that someone had shoved into his brain.

Izuku took a seat in the back corner of the bus as the vehicle began a slow, steady drive towards one of the peripheral buildings on the UA campus. Kaminari and Kirishima argued with Sero about a video game Izuku knew nothing about and whether a certain cheat code was “evil” or not. Sero insisted a cheat code could not be “evil” whereas Kaminari and Kirishima were convinced otherwise. “Midoriya, kero?” asked Asui, leaning over the back of the seat in front of him.

“Yeah?”

“I was really impressed with your performance during our first heroics class, kero, and I hear you escaped from the cafeteria before everyone else, too.”

“W-well… sort of? Y-yeah, thanks.”

“I was wondering… do you have an intelligence enhancing quirk like Nedzu?”

No. No he did not. That was… not at all what he expected classmates to think his nonexistent quirk might be. He wasn't sure exactly what he had expected, but it definitely wasn't this. Izuku opened his mouth once or twice, closing it promptly like a confused fish. “N-no. I’m… flattered? But no.”

“Just because someone’s really smart doesn’t mean it’s a quirk,” Jiro, who sat beside Asui, pointed out.

“Sorry for assuming, kero.” Izuku sat there, dreading the followup questions where he would have to tell everyone he was quirkless, but they didn’t come. Asui turned back to Jiro and the two of them began to discuss a genre of music the greenette had never heard of before. Why were all of his classmates such interesting people? Not that he was complaining, but Izuku had thought he was up to date on most aspects of popculture and yet he had no idea what anyone was talking about.

The class disembarked in front of a towering dome with broad doors. They stepped inside and Izuku felt his mouth drop open. The place was an enormous disaster simulator with a setup for every calamity imaginable.

“Welcome to the Unforseen Simulation Joint!” a clear voice said. The Space Hero: Thirteen stepped to the front of the class. Huh. It was just like Universal Studios Japan… Thirteen began to explain what sorts of skills students learned in the USJ as Uraraka jumped up and down, apparently overwhelmed by the excitement of meeting a favorite hero.

“Now, which of you know what my quirk is?” Thirteen asked the students. Uraraka, still bouncing on the balls of her feet, eagerly volunteered a description of Black Hole, a quirk that turned things to dust. Izuku, of course, knew all about Thirteen’s quirk but had no interest in stealing Uraraka’s thunder. “That’s correct. It’s an incredibly useful quirk for removing debris and freeing trapped people, but it can also be used to kill.” Izuku blinked at the sudden change in tone. “Nearly all the quirks you see in heroics are dangerous, capable of being used for good or for evil.” Izuku might not have a quirk, but he had skills and he had weapons and, at the end of the day, there was little practical difference. A quirk could kill, a knife could kill. “Now, All Might should be joining us in twenty minutes or so. He accidentally got caught up in thwarting a bank robbery this morning on his way in and nobody could cover for him.” Aizawa rolled his eyes. Apparently there was no love lost between Eraserhead and All Might.

Izuku was the first to notice the dark circle forming in the center of the plaza. Aizawa, apparently, noticed only moments after him. “Well, that’s probably not good,” Izuku said, then blinked and exchanged a shocked glance with Aizawa. The two had spoken almost precisely the same line at precisely the same time (Aizawa had said “well, that’s probably bad.”)

“Is this part of the test?” asked Kaminari nervously as people began to step out of the dark portal.

“No! Get back to the door, those are villains,” Aizawa growled.

The door had sealed. Even Shouji and a sugar-high Sato working together couldn’t get it to budge. Every attempt to get a signal out of the building failed. “Thirteen, protect the students,” Aiazawa said, lunging down the stairs towards the oncoming swarm of villains.

Swarm… of villains… Izuku hadn’t found the chance to be frightened yet. Now seemed like a good time to start. He expected himself to panic any moment, but for some reason panic wouldn’t come to him .

Izuku had thought long and hard about whether he should bring his full costume--including knives and staff--for the field trip. He hadn’t known where they were going or exactly what they would be doing so he had elected to take the whole shebang. His staff was secured diagonally across his back so as to be out of the way for running . Izuku pulled the velcro clasps free and held the most useful of his weapons at the ready. Thirteen certainly intended to defend the class to the best of their ability, but there were dozens of villains coming up the stairs and--Aizawa took out three of them like a whirlwind. Were all of their enemies poor fighters, then?

“Wow,” said Kirishima.

“Small time crooks don’t know how to adapt when their quirks suddenly fail to activate,” Thirteen said smugly.

“Good morning everyone,” a villain of sickly mist, like toxic ash rising from a refinery, teleported into the middle of the students and Izuku quashed the reflex to draw one of his throwing knives and aim for the villain’s bow tie. The man was incorporeal. It wouldn’t do any good. “My duty is to--” Izuku didn’t hear the end of the speech because things rapidly devolved into chaos with Thirteen attempting to attack the villain, Kirishima and Bakugou lunging at the man, and everyone else scattering. Izuku followed some nameless instinct that demanded he dodge sideways--and was abruptly in midair. His heart leapt into his throat at the revelation that he was at least three stories up.

Flipping himself over like a cat, Izuku landed on all fours, the shock of the impact largely absorbed by the combined efforts of his gloves and boots. ACMX made good stuff. The student didn’t even have a sprain. He gasped in a few desperate breaths, the terror of the fall not fading with his escape because if he had landed badly he would be dead right now . There were few revelations more terrifying than that.

“Where am I?” Izuku muttered, slowly standing. The patter of rain on his hair answered that immediately: the storm zone, still in the USJ.

“Argh! Oof.” The greenette jerked and pulled one of the daggers from his wrist sheath. “Hi, Midoriya,” Ojiro groaned from the remains of the bush he had just smashed.

“Are you okay?” Izuku demanded, stowing his dagger and running to his friend’s side.

“Yeah, I’m alright… shocked a bit.”

“You shouldn’t be okay!” Izuku muttered. “I was more than three stories up and I--”

“I was only a few meters up,” Ojiro said, dusting himself off. “Just wasn’t expecting it or I could have avoided killing this poor bush.” The tailed boy looked at the shredded plant sadly.

“Priorities, Ojiro,” Izuku pointed out nervously, scanning rooftops and windows of the faux-building surrounding them. There were too many places to hide. There could be villains anywhere. “We need to get out of the open.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

“Don’t run. Walk quickly,” Izuku said. “Running catches people’s attention immediately, and if there are a lot of villains around and someone sees us at a distance, they might just assume we’re other villains if we act like we’re not in a hurry.” Izuku wasn’t sure if this was unaided logical reasoning or one of his mysterious combat instincts. Regardless, it made sense. The pair set off at a brisk walk towards a heavily wooded area, pausing for Izuku to pick up his staff from beneath the bench where it had rolled. Neither student wanted to risk being cornered in an alleyway or worse guess which building might be safe to enter, so the nearby parklet seemed a good destination.

“Should we climb trees?” Ojiro wondered. “There’s no better cover.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else,” Izuku said--and ducked by reflex as someone stepped out from behind a tree and a huge paw swiped at his head. The tapered talons missed the greenette by centimeters, cutting the end from one of his curls. Izuku jumped backwards, staff held in front of him and ready to deflect the next blow. Ojiro stood at Izuku’s back. They had only practiced fighting two versus two against Katsuki and Shouji a handful of times. They should have done that more often, but at least they had some experience.

There were five villains that Izuku could see, and probably a few he couldn’t. He chanced a glance upwards to confirm that no one was waiting to pounce from any of the nearby trees then returned his full attention to the woman with the bear mutation attempting to take his head off. She was strong but slow and unskilled. The man on her flank whose hands transformed into scissors was more of a threat. The villain to the right didn’t really know what he was doing and stood about awkwardly as if searching for an opening but unsure of what an opening was actually supposed to look like.

“Duck!” Ojiro called. Izuku fell into a low crouch and took the opportunity to slam his staff into scissor-hands’ knee joint with enough force to crunch something sickeningly. The man went down with a strangled cry and Izuku used the momentum as he stood to full height to stab the end of his weapon into the soft underside of bear-mutation’s chin. She reeled back, choking, and Izuku shuddered with cold dread at the revelation of just how serious such an injury could be as he seemed to have overestimated how heavily armored she was. No time for that now.

Ojiro had sent two of his opponents to the ground already. The remaining three, none of whom had obvious quirks, circled the students like wary sharks. “Make a run for it?” Ojiro asked, panting. Izuku was breathing hard, too, partially from exertion and partially from creeping fear .

“Yeah.” Ojiro launched himself towards the shortest of the circling villains, barrelling the man over. Izuku chased after his battle partner. The pair of them sprinted out of the muddy park, splashed through a flooded street and set off down a main thoroughfare. The sound of pounding feet behind them urged the students to run faster still despite the treacherously slick asphalt.

Izuku tried to take a corner too quickly and nearly skidded into a piece of dilapidated public art that Cementoss had probably made as some kind of joke . The greenette didn’t, however, lose his footing or more than a second’s time, which was really good seeing as he had perhaps a two second lead on the villains . The group chasing Ojiro and Midoriya screamed insults and threats over the roar of the storm . It wasn’t possible to make out entire phrases but plenty of the individual words were comprehensible and those alone were bloodcurdlingly disturbing.

“We’re not going to loose them,” Ojiro gasped out between pants.

“Take a corner fast, stop and ambush them!” Izuku replied. Ojiro gestured to an upcoming alleyway and the pair dashed into it, skidding to a halt (it was really hard to keep balance out here) and situating themselves against the wall ready to strike.

The three pursuing villains were not very clever and the ambush went over without a hitch . Ojiro and Izuku never even found out what the villains’ quicks were, leaving the three of them in groaning heaps within seconds . “Let’s get out of this place ,” Ojiro said, voice quavering a bit.

“No protests here,” Izuku agreed and the two set off, once again at a swift walk, down the soaked streets. The cold was starting to bite as the initial burst of adrenaline wore off. Izuku's clothes were water resistant, but far from water proof and he was soaked to the bone long since. Ojiro was similarly bedraggled.

“That was terrifying,” Ojiro said a few blocks later. “I mean, we’re here to become heroes but… we just got here like… days ago and I don’t know what I’m doing and wait--oh god, we’re like, the most competent students in class because we’ve sparred a lot before with quirks and I bet Todoroki will be fine too but what about the others? Oh my god, they’ve never been in even a fake fight before and now they’re all over the USJ having real fights what if--what if--what if--”

Izuku had not expected Ojiro to freak out. Izuku had expected Izuku to freak out and assumed that Ojiro would be the one to calm him down. “Hey! Hey! Don’t pull your hair out, it’s okay! There are teachers here and All Might is going to be here in less than twenty minutes. It’s fine! Everyone is going to be fine!” Izuku wasn’t sure about that but it seemed like the thing to say.

Ojiro didn’t look convinced but he stopped repeating “what if” over and over which was an improvement. A few blocks later, as the pair finally saw the end of the storm zone approaching, Ojiro finally said, “sorry, Midoriya. I… don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Midoriya protested. “I’m terrified, too. I got dropped from three stories up and if I’d landed on my head I’d be dead. We are first semester hero students; I’m entitled to freak out and so are you!”

Ojiro nodded. “Thanks. Still, sorry.”

“Should we leave the storm zone? There’s going to be much better visibility out there, which could be a good thing…” or could be a bad thing if there were still lots of villains at large in the USJ.

“We’ve got to try to find our classmates,” Ojiro said, a cold bite of determination smothering any remnants of fear in his voice. “They could be in trouble.”

He was right of course. They were going to be heroes. Just surviving wasn’t good enough and it wasn't what they were here to learn. “Alright. Let's go.”

Chapter Text

Izuku and Ojiro walked furtively towards the central plaza and arrived into the middle of absolute chaos. The bodies of minor villains lay about like leaves fallen from a maple in a typhoon. Shards of shattered ice covered everything and everyone . Kacchan was swearing fiercely somewhere nearby, but Izuku couldn’t spot him.

A black portal opened in front of Izuku’s face and a pale hand reached towards him--Izuku put one of his throwing knives through the limb before he even comprehended what he was doing and, somewhere in the distance, the owner of the displaced hand screamed in agony, pulling away.

Izuku was going to go through a lot of knives this year, wasn’t he? There went one already. “Watch out!” someone yelled, maybe Todoroki. Watch out for what?

“Holy shit!” Ojiro leapt away--a reflex matched by Izuku--as some sort of four meter tall beaked monstrosity appeared in front of him by magic. Izuku wasn’t sure if he was the one who had sworn or if it had been Ojiro or someone else entirely, but it seemed an appropriate reaction. The thing was so fast, there was no way anyone without a speed enhancement could dodge the next blow--the roar of Todoroki’s quirk filled the air and the villain thing tripped as ice assaulted its legs.

Izuku and Ojiro, without prompting, split up and sprinted in opposite directions, hoping to confound the villain (or was it an animal? Or some kind of machine? It was impossible to tell).

Izuku skidded to a halt as the misty villain who opened warp gates appeared in front of him. Behind him, Izuku heard ice shattering and Kacchan yelling--he must be trying to fight the monster. Staff held firmly in hand as he assessed his options, Izuku scanned the warper for potential weaknesses. “You!” The villain said.

“Me?” Izuku was having a flashback to his first encounter with Ojiro so many months ago.

“Kurogiri!” a raspy voice cried and the warper abruptly vanished into one of his portals.

A terrified scream--Izuku pivoted to see the monster thing looming over a mostly incapacitated Katsuki. Todoroki was on the ground, too, but whether that was due to injury or hypothermia was unclear. The greenette sprinted towards his friend without a moment’s thought, a knife in each hand. He was too far away and didn’t have the strength to land the first throw straight on target--the blade cut through the thing’s shoulder but didn’t do more than cause it to pause for a moment, the wound sealing and ejecting the knife to the ground. That was an insane healing factor. The second throw went through an eye and Izuku had to fight against a surge of nausea because he had just stabbed something in the eye , he had just stabbed something in the eye on purpose . It wasn’t clear whether the beast felt anything at all, but the knife in the eye was enough of a distraction to allow Katsuki to collect himself and get clear. The next blade landed in the attacker’s exposed brain. It screeched but still didn’t seem to be incapacitated.

Izuku had enough time to recognize that every last person who engaged this creature was going to die, right here right now, because it was relentless and unbreakable and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it-- when it vanished in a burst of wind. It took Izuku much longer than he would have liked to comprehend that the monster had disappeared not under its own power or as a result of a warp gate but because All Might had punched it.

Huh. Maybe they weren’t all going to die? Where was Ojiro? “Ojiro?” Izuku called.

“Here!” the tailed boy replied instantly. Oh. He was right there, kneeling beside Todoroki, trying to help the other boy up. Todoroki did not look pleased by this development.

“Kacchan?” Izuku asked, running towards his old friend.

The blonde was already on his feet, or on all fours, really. “Excuse me,” Katsuki said before tactfully hiding behind a bush to wretch. The brave blonde probably had a concussion. Izuku grimaced and turned his attention to the battle between All Might, the monster thing, the warper and a man wearing hands like they were going out of style--he really should have avoided that metaphor . The man covered in hands was the one who had tried to grab Izuku through the portal; it was obvious given the makeshift bandage on his palm. All Might continued to beat on the monster, but… didn’t seem to be making much of a dent.

“It can hold its own against All Might,” Ojiro said in horror.

“How are you guys not dead?” Izuku wondered, voice shaking. The idea of the greenette and Ojiro surviving a minute or so in combat involving that thing with support from the heavy hitters was plausible. Todoroki and Bakugou holding out before their arrival… that was incredible.

A gunshot rang out followed by a scream. Snipe… The other teachers had arrived, or at least some of them were here and more would shortly follow. The hand-wearing villain dived for the ground and, immediately, the warper removed the two of them from the battlefield. Teachers’ voices echoed across the USJ and moments later All Might sent the last monster flying through the ceiling like a canon ball.

A puppet with the strings slashed, Izuku sank to the ground. “I’m so glad I brought all my weapons,” he heard himself say nonchalantly. “Does anyone have a shock blanket? Well, two because Todoroki needs one first and then I want the second one, or maybe Kacchan should get it.” He still looked green.

“Here,” said Midnight, crouching down to wrap a blanket around his shoulders. That was nice of her. When did she get here, though?

“Ah, thanks,” Izuku said. “I’m not hurt, just kind of freaked out, so I’m a green triage tag. Go help the red and yellow tags.”

“If you can, head back to the entrance, alright?”

“On my way,” Izuku nodded. “Oh, I’m missing a bunch of daggers…”

“I’ll keep an eye out for them.” Midnight gave him a wry half-smile.

Izuku wandered up the steps. He didn’t see any sign of Aizawa or Thirteen… and the fact that there were students fighting against those heavy hitting villains didn’t bode well for the condition of either teacher. Izuku couldn’t imagine any member of UA’s staff would have allowed Todoroki and Bakugou to fight some kind of immortal monstrosity if they could have prevented it. The phrase “over my dead body” came to mind. Izuku stomped on it. It had no business here. Izuku had no reason to think that anyone was dead. Everyone could be fine. Everything might be fine.

Several ambulances and police cars, and vehicles likely from hero agencies not associated with UA crowded the USJ’s small parking lot. Most of Izuku’s class seemed to be here huddled on the grass just outside the entrance to the building . He spotted Shouji, Uraraka, Sero, Asui, Iida… Maybe he should just count… twelve students out here. He knew where three others were… where were the rest? Izuku sat down heavily on a low landscaping barrier.

Snipe was speaking with Uraraka who had also chosen the landscaping barrier as a seat. “All the students are accounted for now,” the cowboy hero told her. “Everyone’s gonna' be fine, nothing Recovery Girl can’t fix up no problem.”

“What about Mr. Aizawa and Thirteen?” Uraraka asked plaintively, hugging her own blanket close.

“Both of them have been hospitalized,” he said. “Don’t think either of them’s gonna’ be permanently injured, but it’s too soon t’say for sure.”

“Oh,” whispered Uraraka.

“Well, that’s better than I expected,” Izuku said. “I want to go home and sleep… for a really long time.”

“Y’all will get that chance. School’s canceled tomorrow while we find a way to keep that teleporting varmint out.” Snipe sounded really put out, but “varmint” was a funny word and Izuku didn't know how to feel about this.

“Is there a way to block that kind of teleportation?” Izuku mused.

“At the very least we will be able to detect it,” Powerloader pitched in. “You are Midoriya, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother is going to be be here within thirty minutes. She will be taking you and Bakugou home.”

“Do I need to give a statement?” Izuku asked. This seemed like the kind of incident he would need to give a statement about.

“A detective will come by your house tomorrow to ask you some questions,” Powerloader said.

“That makes sense,” Izuku nodded. At that moment, Midnight stepped out of the USJ with a mostly unconscious Kacchan in a bridal carry. Recovery Girl's quirk must have taken a lot out of him. She set him down gingerly on the grass. Mineta, who was sitting with Asui and Kaminari, shot Katsuki a look of pure, 200-proof jealousy.

“Really, kero?” Asui said quietly to their shortest classmate.

“Like you don’t have a crush on any pro heroes,” Mineta muttered back.

“That’s beside the point, kero.”

Izuku barely remembered the car ride home, the fussing and assurances. His mother forced him to eat something and shower before he trudged to bed. That was probably for the best.

He’d killed people before. It didn’t feel quite like it had the first time he took a life, that cold-fire feeling of destroying part of his soul, but it was always horrible. A knife between an assailant’s ribs--she was the only one of her apartment-mates who remembered to water the geraniums in the window box--a bullet through a skull--he called his mother every night at eight o’clock to tell her about his day, the parts he was allowed to talk about anyway --a body thrown from a balcony into traffic--his border collie waited patiently by the door for him to arrive home for dinner.

Izuku staggered to his feet, gagging against the sharp scent of iron in the air, against the crusty feeling of blood drying on his clothes and skin. “Arch?” he slurred out, jaw still smarting from a punch.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Arch responded, staggering to his feet. “You are a terror.”

“Thanks I guess. Now we need to get the hell out of here before they send more people to kill us.”

“I feel kind of bad,” Arch said, pulling his brief case out from beneath the bed. “This was a really nice hotel room.” The case was, thankfully, undamaged. The hotel room wasn’t that nice; Arch just had low standards, and the property damage wasn’t really what Izuku was concerned about.

“Should we head back? We can’t complete our mission, not now that everyone knows we’re here.”

Arch helped Izuku heave a fallen cabinet aside so that he could retrieve his own briefcase. “Maybe we can make them think we aborted the mission and carry through with it anyway. Doesn’t matter now. Let’s get out of here.”

Izuku couldn’t quite place where he was--it was almost as if he didn’t have a body at all in this vision. It didn’t matter much. There wasn’t much to see at first--a concrete barrier riddled with holes and indents and smeared with dark stains. Four people marched solemnly to stand before the wall. Izuku couldn’t see enough detail to determine if he knew any of them, couldn’t even have said for certain if he was one of them . The last of the four, noticeably shorter than the others, was bawling--a young teen. Another was begging, “she’s only fourteen. She didn’t do anything wrong. She’s not one of us. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Please! Let her go at least. Please! She’s not one of us.” The third was shaking violently and the fourth defiantly staring at the firing squad, head held high.

Please, please don’t make him watch this. Please . He couldn’t close his eyes, couldn’t turn away. The image faded and Izuku nearly drowned in relief…

The third vision-- or perhaps it was a continuation of one of the others-- was even vaguer, bloody and horrific and terrifying, saturated with the penetrating stench of death, pierced with steely, banshee screams. “No need to be shy. Let me see your pretty face. There we are. The fear of death becomes you.”

Izuku woke hyperventilating, nauseous and exhausted and utterly uninterested in recording any of the details of those dreams; he would write down Arch's name and description but that was it. It was worse than if he hadn’t slept at all.

Why the hell had that happened? He’d never… there had been some vaguely violent visions before but nothing like that. Nothing even vaguely like that . Assassinating assassins, firing squads, that voice… the fear of death becomes you . God he was not looking forward to sleeping ever again. Was this because of the USJ? All the built up fear and the echoes of violence calling to similar memories buried in his mind?

Izuku stumbled out of bed and wandered down the stairs. Breakfast… his mother had prepared his favorite and he forced himself to eat. He was not successful in hiding the occasional gag. “Sorry mom,” he whispered to her. “I had really awful dreams last night,” he whispered.

She hugged him lightly. “If you don’t feel up to it, you don’t have to eat for my sake,” she told him softly.

“I was really worried about everyone,” he said. “Ojiro and I, we took care of ourselves. I only have a few scratches… he fell on a bush, so he probably had some bruises and things…” Izuku felt one side of his mouth quirk upwards. “In retrospect, now that I know we were all okay, Ojiro flattening that poor bush is pretty funny.” He didn’t laugh outright, but felt the barest hint of a chuckle bubble through his voice. “And me almost flying into Cementoss’s weird art is pretty funny, too, I guess.”

“Laughter can be the best medicine sometimes,” his mom told him, ruffling his hair. “I know… that you’re going into a dangerous profession where this sort of thing happens, but I really wish it hadn’t happened quite so soon.”

“Yeah, me too,” Izuku said hoarsely. “I think we’re supposed to talk about these things before we actually have to deal with them.”

“You should.” She further mussed his disastrous hair. “Don’t feel like you have to pretend for me, alright? You’re allowed to be upset and frightened. I won’t judge you for it.”

“Thanks, mom,” Izuku nuzzled against her shoulder.

It wasn’t until that afternoon as Izuku tried to force himself to nap before the detective arrived to question him (praying he wouldn’t be haunted by blood and gunfire) that he recalled Kurogiri shouting “you!”

“It was the same tone that Ojiro used when we first met,” he mumbled to the ceiling, now wide awake. He’d have to give up on the nap. “He knew me, or rather he recognized me. He didn’t know me by name and he sure didn’t seem happy to see me… When I was missing I was out being a vigilante, apparently, or that was what Ojiro saw so did I fight Kurogiri before?” That seemed the logical conclusion.

“Great. So there’s someone who might be able to tell me more about where I was and what I was doing but he’s a villain. Who I will hopefully never see again… but the police might see him?” There, at least, was some hope.

Chapter Text

It felt like mere moments before Izuku’s mom called for him. The detective waiting in the living room had a familiar face. “Hello, Detective Tsukauchi,” Izuku greeted the man.

The three of them took seats in the living room and Izuku went through the entire story of the USJ, how they arrived, how he saw the black portal opening, how Aizawa went down to fight and Thirteen stayed behind to protect the students, how the teleporter slipped past their defenses, how Izuku fell from a great height but landed without injury… how Ojiro flattened a bush in a vaguely amusing way. “We were ambushed in the park,” Izuku continued, “by seven villains. One had a bear mutation. One could turn his hands into knives. I’m not sure what the rest of them had for quirks. Ojiro and I took down four of them and then we ran. We couldn’t lose the other three so we took a corner sharply and then ambushed them when they followed us. We left the storm zone and… It’s hard to say what was actually happening on the main plaza. There was this monster thing? Or was it a person? Someone reached out of a portal and tried to grab me and I stabbed the hand by reflex.” He winced. That had kind of been a nasty thing to do.

Tsukauchi nodded slowly. “The beast is apparently called a nomu, as I am sure your classmates will inform you, and it is a very good thing that you reacted quickly and decisively to the hand reaching for you through the portal. That villain, he calls himself Shigaraki Tomura, has a five-point disintegration quirk.” Oh. Reflexes were life-saving, then.

“I guess I won’t feel bad about that, then, since he was trying to kill me.” What a strange thing to say. His mother began to stroke Izuku’s hair. “Ojiro and I were attacked by the nomu but Todoroki managed to slow it down. I got some distance and I ran into the teleporter, Kurogiri, but he was called away and then I realized that the nomu,” what a weird name, “had caught Kacchan--Bakugou Katsuki--so I ran back towards it and threw knives at vulnerable places to try to distract it.” His mother squeezed his hand. Izuku shuddered at the thought that his old friend might have been killed if those daggers had missed. “It worked, but the nomu healed really quickly and I realized that there was no way we could beat it and just then All Might showed up. I went to check on Kacchan and by the time I was through with that, the fight was over. Kurogiri and Shigaraki left after Snipe started shooting at them.”

The detective nodded and asked a few clarifying questions, details about where in the storm zone he had been (Izuku wasn’t really sure) and descriptions of the villains he and Ojiro had fought (those he could provide) . “Oh, I almost forgot,” Izuku said as Tsukauchi was preparing to leave. How could he have forgotten to say this earlier? “I think Kurogiri recognized me.” He might not want to tell anyone about his dreams, but Kurogiri’s recognition was not something Izuku had any reason to keep to himself and it could be important.

“What do you mean, Midoriya?” the detective asked.

“When he saw me he said “you” as if he recognized me but didn’t know my name. I think… maybe I fought him before, during the week when I was missing.” It was convenient that Tsukauchi was involved in both investigations.

“You do not remember ever seeing him before this day?” Izuku shook his head. “Alright. Thank you, Midoriya. You have been a tremendous help. I am sorry this happened to you and I wish you better luck for the rest of your school year.”

“Thank you,” Izuku said, stifling a yawn. That had been draining and he hadn’t had much energy to begin with. If he had another set of nightmares that night, he was going to be useless the next day.

Fortunately, his sleep that night was black and dreamless as the void between stars.

“Hey nerd,” Bakugou greeted him at the train station.

“Hey Kacchan,” Izuku returned the greeting. The ride to school passed by in silence. Back on the street, away from prying eyes, Izuku asked, “what happened to you? How did you… end up fighting that nomu thing? Or do you not want to talk about it, sorry, I…”

Katsuki took a deep breath than began talking in one, long, unbroken sentence as if desperate to get it off his chest. He must have talked to a detective, too, right? Maybe he was just dying to tell a friend rather than relive it before a stranger? “I got tossed in the ruin zone with Kirishima and Hagakure. Kirishima broke his ankle and maybe a wrist, too, in the fall, so after Hagakure and I totaled the assholes who were beating on Kirishima--don’t wince, he was fine, his quirk protected him from that part--she helped Kirishima head towards the entrance hoping Thirteen would be there still… I think Thirteen was too hurt to help by that point but we hoped.

“I saw Aizawa get pinned by the nomu and the other villain trying to kill Asui--she was in the lake with Mineta and Kaminari. It looked like Todoroki saw the same thing. I don’t know where Todoroki was or with who, but he showed up to help Aizawa at the same time I did. Kaminari had fried his brains with his quirk and Mineta was totally freaked out, not that I really blame him because it looked like he’d had his arm chewed on by a shark--it was bleeding a bit through the bandage. Anyway, Asui’s got her group’s act together enough to grab Aizawa and head for the entrance. Todoroki and I were trying to keep that nomu from chasing anyone else, ‘cause let’s face it: there aren’t many people in the class that have the kind of offensive power we do. I figured if hand creep decided to sic it on anyone else they… they wouldn’t stand a chance and I guess Todoroki thought the same. We were only fighting it for a couple minutes before you and Ojiro showed up, and then All Might showed right after you…”

Izuku nudged Kacchan with his shoulder. “Thanks for saving me. Ojiro and I fought off about seven of the minor villains before we came out to meet you, but we… nothing could have prepared us for that. I… just, thank you.”

“You, too, nerd. If you hadn’t put a knife in its face I think it might’ve killed me,” he said bluntly, returning the shoulder bump. It was… eight months ago Izuku could not have conceived of Bakugou Katsuki openly admitting that he had needed help from Izuku Midoriya of all people and here… well, the future can be rewritten on a dime, apparently. Izuku felt inexplicably warm. Katsuki took a slow breath through his nose. “I don’t know what happened to anyone else, but everyone’s going to be fine they said… except, well, have you heard about Thirteen or Aizawa?”

Izuku shook his head. “Only that they’ve been hospitalized.”

“League of Villains… fancy name for a bunch of assholes and canon fodder,” Kacchan groused.

“What were they even trying to do? Were they just… just after the shock value of killing hero students?” That would certainly have been the sort of headline news that attracted all kinds of attention to a fledgling villain organization.

Katsuki shook his head. “No, check this, they wanted to kill All Might.”

Izuku blinked in incomprehension. “All Might. They… with that nomu thing?”

Kacchan nodded. “That was their big plan. They started attacking us ‘cause he wasn’t there. I don’t have any idea how the hell they knew he was supposed to be there in the first place or why they didn’t realize he was running late…”

“I’m not sure whether to be utterly terrified or amused. Honestly, no one can beat All Might.” Although everyone retired eventually, even people like All Might, and he had been the number one hero for a very long time. In fact, taking a position at UA… that seemed like a clear sign that All Might was thinking of retiring from active duty soon. Becoming a teacher was likely just a step along that path, a way to gradually accustom everyone to the change--and it would be a huge change. It was hard to think of the Hero Billboard without All Might at number one.

“Well, not now, but you just watch. Someday I’m going to be the number one hero,” Katsuki said.

“You sure have your work cut out for you.”

Kacchan snorted. “ You just watch. I’ll get there .”

“Watch I will.” Could Explosion ever match whatever All Might’s quirk was? Hard to say, but if it were possible Kacchan would probably find a way to do it. Izuku would like to see that. He would be happy to watch from his workplace in the shadows as his frontline friend climbed the charts.

The pair of them took their usual seats in the classroom. Most of 1-A had arrived already. Asui was chatting with Uraraka and Iida about something that happened on the news last night. Mineta and Kaminari seemed to be discussing some bizarre form of wrestling. No one mentioned the USJ.

“I wonder who our substitute is going to be,” Izuku mused.

“No idea,” Ojiro sighed. Dark circles beneath the tailed boy’s eyes indicated that Izuku was not the only one who had experienced some trouble sleeping.

A mummy walked into the room. What--oh. It was Mr. Aizawa, covered head to toe in bandages. “Sir?” Izuku squeaked. This just was not a good idea!

“Excuse me, Mr. Aizawa,” Iida spoke up, “I mean no disrespect, but given the severity of your injuries are you sure it is conducive to your continued health to come to work today?” Iida must know Aizawa personally. Izuku couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was in the class president’s tone, but the greenette was absolutely sure that the two of them knew each other from outside of class.

“I’m fine,” Aizawa said, voice somewhat muffled. “Just some cuts left, really.” He paused, thinking. “I am glad to see that all of you are well and choosing to continue in heroics. I know something like this would be enough to convince many people to reconsider their career goals.” Huh. That hadn’t ever crossed Izuku’s mind. “Our profession has a dark side, though I would have greatly preferred you were better prepared for your first introduction to it. Regardless, you have overcome a significant trial.” He gave them a moment to think this over and feel a hum of pride.

“This is no time to be complacent, however. The UA Sports Festival is rapidly approaching. It’s your only chance as first years to show off your prowess to pros and network for internships and, eventually, job offers. Take this seriously. We’ll start training immediately.”

Aizawa wasn’t kidding about that “immediately” part. Their heroics class that day began early and ended late. They paired off and sparred with quirks (or with weapons for Izuku--he left the blade guards on all knives and pulled the blows with his staff). Snipe, Present Mic, Aizawa and All Might were all present, keeping a careful eye on the proceedings. Izuku, Ojiro, Shouji, Katsuki, Todoroki, Yaoyorozu and Asui seemed to know what they were doing, or at least know how to fake it. The rest of the class stumbled through the exercise. They’d all survived the USJ, so they were all capable of fighting for their lives, but that wasn’t at all the same thing as a practice bout. Teachers frequently had to step in to prevent injuries.

“That was fun,” Izuku said as heroics finally came to a close.

“Speak for yourself,” muttered Sero who had been clobbered by Shouji, Sato, and Koda in short succession before Izuku had run circles around him. Izuku hadn’t realized Koda was strong enough to clobber anyone, but he was.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Izuku encouraged.

“Maybe,” the human tape-dispenser groused. “You’ve been doing this for years, I guess?”

“Something like that,” Izuku admitted. “Shouji, Katsuki, Ojiro and I sparred a lot when we were getting ready for the entrance exam.”

“Huh. You all made it to UA?”

“Yeah. I was really surprised to get in, honestly. I didn’t get into Shiketsu, so I figured UA wouldn’t want me.”

Sero raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t get into Shiketsu? But… you’re terrifying!”

Izuku blinked. “Uh… thanks? But their entrance exam is an obstacle course and I just wasn’t that fast.”

Sero nodded. “I suppose… seems like a kind of silly entrance exam if it’d turn you away.”

“The UA entrance exam is biased, too,” Izuku shrugged. “I don’t think you really can have an unbiased exam unless you have teachers evaluate every single student one to one, but even that would result in favoritism and it’s not clear how assessments could be carried out and, of course, it’s not feasible with the number of people who apply to big name schools--I’m rambling. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sero sniffed. “You’ve got good points.”

“I wonder if we’re ever going to get to train at the USJ now,” Uraraka sighed, mostly to herself but Izuku and Sero were happy to merge her into their conversation, “not that I mind sparring… but I was really looking forward to rescue training.”

Sero shuddered. “I’m not sure I want to go back to the USJ just yet…”

“Were you two together?” Izuku asked.

“Yeah. We were both in the conflagration zone,” Uraraka said. “It was… not pleasant.”

“Some creepy guy who looked kind of like an alligator bit me,” Sero shuddered. “That’s just… so rude!” Izuku resisted the urge to laugh at the incongruity. “Rude” wasn’t how he would typically describe attempted murder but, sure, if that was how Sero wanted to think about it, fine.

“I dropped a bench on someone,” Uraraka said. “And I’m pretty sure he deserved it.”

“Ojiro and I ended up having to fight off seven of them,” Izuku offered, “but they weren’t very good so we managed to handle it.”

“Let’s talk about something else, huh? I just… I’d like to forget about it for now, until it doesn’t seem so recent,” Uraraka said.

“Sure, sorry,” Izuku winced.

“No need to be sorry just let’s find something happier to discuss for now,” Sero suggested. “I’m kind of looking forward to the Sports Festival. I’ve watched it a bunch before. It looks like fun, really.”

“I’m kind of surprised we’re still having it given the security breach,” Uraraka shrugged.

“Well, they updated security and I guess UA wants to show that everything is business as usual,” Izuku supposed.

Their next class was modern history (a bit of an oxymoron) which covered World War I to the present day. Izuku flipped through the textbook idly as he waited for Midnight to begin the lecture. The text was, of course, heavily focused on Japan but some world-wide context was included. Would the US Supreme Court cases and LA Metahuman Riots Izuku had heard about in his dreams be in this book?

Flipping through the index of the text, Izuku found a chapter labeled, “Rise of Quirks: Social Upheaval” which seemed promising. Izuku turned to page 243 and began to flip through the section reading headings and glancing at photographs. Really, he should have done this long ago. There was only so much information one could gain by searching specific (and somewhat bizarre) terms on the internet; a well-written text could provide so much more context and depth, and this being UA the assigned book was certainly a well-written text.

Izuku flipped to page 257 and stopped. Midnight had begun her lecture but Izuku couldn’t make sense of a single word . He was keenly aware of the blood draining from his face as if sucked out by a siphon. He snapped the book closed and then opened it again, staring at the photograph in abject disbelief. No. It just… no. It couldn’t be it just couldn’t be .

The greenette took notes, but most of what he wrote had nothing to do with Midnight’s lecture and everything to do with “no way, no way, no way.”

“You alright, nerd?” Kacchan asked him as they made their way towards the train that afternoon. “You’ve been acting really freakin’ weird since history class.”

“Yeah,” Izuku whispered. Should he tell--no. He absolutely should not tell anyone about this. Nothing made sense and until something started making sense he needed to make sure no one had this information but him because… because what might they think? Izuku didn’t even know what to think! People certainly wouldn’t think anything good. “Everything’s fine just… I guess the USJ psyched me out more than I thought.” It wasn’t a lie, not really.

Katsuki winced. “Sorry. I… I was freaked out a bit, too. Kinda’ thought that thing was going to kill me, honestly. Thanks again for saving my ass, by the way.”

“You saved me first. I’ll always have your back.”

Katsuki’s face quirked into a grin. “And I’ll have yours, then we’ll hardly need to worry about anything.” Izuku forced himself to smile tentatively, but his heart wasn’t in it and he wasn’t fooling anyone.

Chapter Text

Apparently snowball fights were one of their favorite pastimes or something, because here was another one. This one was better organized than the last Izuku had participated in and there were more people involved, maybe a dozen, but in the end the only three players that really mattered were Izuku, Kuma, and Chris. They were the masters here.

Izuku had built up a fort out of snow blocks--well, most of a fort. He had two walls and that was enough (or so he fervently hoped.) Kuma had slipped behind him once already and only been driven off when another faction began to bombard her. Chris had taken advantage of some abandoned chairs--used for outdoor studying in fairer weather--for shielding. Kuma, being some kind of ninja, needed no fort.

Speaking of Kuma, where was she? Behind him again? In a tree again? Chris peeked out of his chair castle. “Do you see Kuma?” he yelled. Izuku shook his head. Chris’s eyes flew wide and two snowballs pelted Izuku in the back of the head.

“Slippery,” Izuku grumbled, ducking to the ground. Kuma had managed to surreptitiously join a group of innocent bystanders, using them for cover before launching her ambush. That was probably against the Geneva Convention.

Kuma won the fight. She always won, but this time it was a slaughter. Izuku, having long since given up, watched with cold (literally) dispassion as Chris surrendered.

He stood there in the gently falling snow, arms crossed, fantasizing about hot chocolate and marshmallows, as Kuma reached out a hand to help Destro, the honest to god leader of the Meta Liberation Army, out of a snow bank.

“I’m such an idiot,” Izuku mumbled, staring straight up at the ceiling. How could he have missed this? How? It wasn’t as if photos of Destro were particularly hard to come by; he'd seen plenty before, all be it not for a good long time. So Chris dyed his hair and covered his facial markings with concealer and was a bit young and cheery, so what? He just shouldn’t be that hard to recognize. Why hadn’t Izuku thought--well, what had he thought? He’d assumed that Chris couldn’t be important like that, or, rather, assumed that Izuku couldn’t be important like that so no one Izuku interacted with in these visions could be important like that, either. “I’m such an idiot,” he repeated for lack of anything else to say.

Everyone knew Destro was a ruthless killer, unwavering in faith to his beliefs and unwilling to compromise on any front or spare anyone who disagreed with him. Perhaps that sort of devotion to an ideal might have been admirable, if the ideal hadn’t boiled down to murderous anarchy. Destro had been a cold, calculating, psychopath who cared nothing for anyone, maybe not even himself. Everything and everyone was expendable to him as long as his army’s goals could be achieved. Everyone knew that. He was a boogeyman, dead but immortalized as a legend of blood and terror.

Except… what Izuku had seen didn’t match up with that at all. Chris had seemed, for all intents and purposes, like a… like a nice guy. Izuku couldn’t make himself start thinking of Chirs as Destro, not yet anyway, although he’d have to at some point. Anyway, Chris had lost to Kuma in snowball fights with good grace; he seemed to care about his friends quite deeply. Hell, Izuku had seen him sobbing over the death of one of his companions that… just didn’t square with the official stories. And why should it? History was written by the victors and what did Izuku really know about the original Meta Liberation Army or its leaders? Gossip, essentially, and what good was gossip? Aldera students might have talked about the MLA for two history classes in their first year but certainly no more than that and those lessons had mostly just said "these were bad people doing bad things."

Izuku sighed. If he didn’t have class, he would have loved to dive into some serious research that morning. He would have started the night before except for some reason doing homework and pretending nothing was wrong had been really appealing. As it was, he would have to wait until the next night to begin his search.

“You alright?” Shouji asked. Izuku started back to reality to find himself poking his food as if it were some kind of exotic plant specimen and he an avid collector.

“I-it’s… I r-realized I did something really stupid a while ago,” he said, not wanting to keep up the USJ excuse. This was the truth, after all. “There was something obvious and I didn’t understand it… It’s really embarrassing and I just can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Ah,” said Shouji nodding. “I know that feeling very well.”

Ojiro sniffed. “I once accidentally insulted my grandmother in a casual conversation. I didn’t even realize how offensive it was until three hours later and I was… I still can’t think about it without wanting to tear my hair out.”

“You guys have issues,” Katsuki said, munching on his lunch without concern.

“Thanks, Kacchan,” Izuku said dryly.

Uraraka and Asui appeared to be having some kind of argument. Uraraka stood up, scrubbed her face, and fled. “I hope everything’s alright,” Izuku said.

“Ah, yes,” Tokoyami, who had seated himself nearby, entered the conversation. “I heard them talking earlier. Uraraka is very nervous about the Sport’s Festival. The two of them are not really arguing. Tsu is merely trying to calm our nervous classmate.”

“Makes sense I guess,” Izuku acknowledged. He wasn’t really nervous about the Sports Festival because he was so nervous about other things, but maybe he should be nervous. It was a nationally televised event. He had already run into two people, Ojiro and Kurogiri, who recognized Izuku from his missing week. How many people viewing the Sports Festival might recognize him? What if some of them had grudges? What if they tried to come after him or his mother? Suddenly Izuku was feeling very nervous about the Sports Festival himself. “Do you think I can keep them from using my name in the Sports Festival?” Izuku asked suddenly.

Tokoyami gave him a bewildered look. “Why would you want that? Even if you wish to become an underground hero, this is probably not a time to be hiding your achievements.”

“Oh. Fuck,” Katsuki clearly understood, as did Ojiro. Tokoyami just looked more confused and Shouji didn’t seem to get it yet, either.

“It’s… complicated,” was all Izuku said, not wanting to reveal any secrets to another classmate just yet. “I’m… maybe I can talk to Aizawa about it?” Feeling the need to get this sorted immediately so he could sleep the next night, Izuku packed up his lunch and went to look for his teacher.

Izuku ran into Snipe first. “Excuse me?” he asked hurriedly. “Do you know where Aizawa is?”

“Resting,” the hero replied. “Everythin’ alright with you?”

“It’s… well, I realized that I m-might, w-well, it’s about the Sports Festival and it’s complicated…”

“Hm. Well, why don’t I take you to talk to Nedzu instead, let Aizawa rest?”

“Eeep!” Izuku put a hand over his mouth, mortified by the squeak that had escaped. “I c-can’t disturb the principal not over something like this it’--I just can’t.”

“Sure ya’ can. Nedzu already told me ta’ bring ya’ by.”

“W-what?”

Snipe waved his phone. It wasn’t clear if Snipe had texted Nedzu the question or if Nedzu had somehow already known and sent Snipe a message without prompting. “Apparently he’s got some time on hand between plottin’ sessions at the moment.” Plotting? Plotting what? That wasn’t disturbing at all.

Snipe relentlessly led Izuku onward to the principal’s office. “Ah! Come in, Midoriya!” called a terrifyingly cheerful voice.

“Thank you, Snipe,” Izuku said hollowly. The teacher tipped his hat and Izuku stepped into Nedzu’s lair.

“Good afternoon, Midoriya,” Nedzu greeted him from behind an elegant, ebony desk covered in stacks of controlled chaos and many unlabeled buttons. “Tea?” Had that teapot been there the whole time or had it just… appeared there somehow while Izuku was thinking about other things?

“Uh… yes, thank you?” Izuku said as it became clear that he was going to get a cup no matter what he said.

“So,” Nedzu sipped his drink, “I hear you have some concerns about the Sports Festival?”

Izuku shifted nervously beneath the principal’s penetrating stare. “I… do y-you know what happened to me last year?”

Nedzu nodded. “I am aware of all the details regarding the circumstances of your disappearance and reappearance, including Ojiro’s report and the development involving Kurogiri at the USJ.”

Oh. That was… that was good. “I’m worried that… I mean, if Kurogiri recognizes me… who else might?”

“Ah. I see. I, too, had been considering this,” the principal acknowledged. “You do wish to participate in the festival, correct?”

“Yes, of course.” Going to UA and not participating in the Sports Festival would be like going to eat at a junky fast-food restaurant and ordering a salad. That metaphor wasn’t really flattering, but it got the idea across.

“Well, one thing we can do is refer to you by an alternate name. This would obscure your identity more effectively than referring to you as “student I” as it would not give anyone particular reason to dig into your background. Would you be amenable to this?”

Yeah. That would be a good thing to do. “Yes, please.”

“I will make a similar offer to the other participants. I suspect that you will not be the only one who takes me up on it. I believe we have a number of aspiring underground heroes this year. Keep in mind that others, perhaps former school mates, may recognize you and post accurate information about you online.”

Right. That was something he hadn’t really considered. “Maybe I shouldn’t participate at all,” Izuku mumbled. “Or maybe I should compete with a bag over my head or something.” At the very least, he could use some temporary hair dye and tie his locks back in an unusual style.

“At the end of the day,” Nedzu said, paws steepled, “your status as a UA student and your identity simply cannot be hidden completely. I understand that this can be very nerve-wracking, especially in your situation as the risk is completely unknown. Kurogiri recognized you, but for all you know he may only know you as a common customer at his civilian place of work… or you might have been his mortal enemy.

“Now, it has been a very long time since anyone carried out a successful attack on a UA student or a UA student’s family outside of school or work hours. The reason for that is not so much secrecy as security, including intelligence and counterintelligence operations which I lead, and,” Nedzu bared his teeth, “the threat of overwhelming and vicious retaliation from all of our staff and alumni. Those who escaped the USJ will not be forgiven or forgotten. I will find them.” There was a promise of terrible death in those words.

“T-thank you, Principal Nedzu,” Izuku said shakily, because the mammal was scary when he was making that face and flattening his ears just so.

“I will make a note to teachers to announce the option for alternate names this afternoon. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Midoriya. Do stop by if you ever need to talk about anything. I can often offer unique insights.” Nedzu’s eyes glittered like black diamonds and for a moment Izuku was convinced the mammal knew every last one of his secrets--but how could he unless he could read minds? Could he read minds? Izuku nodded, thanked the principal again, and returned to class.

As school came to a close that afternoon, Aizawa announced, “I have a message to pass on from Principal Nedzu.” The restless class, all eager for the end of the day, settled immediately. “Given the attack on the USJ, anyone who would like to be referred to by a pseudonym during the Sports Festival to avoid calling attention to themselves or their families can fill out one of these forms,” he handed the stack to Iida who began to pass them out to the class. “This should not affect your ability to find or accept internships following the Sports Festival. If you’re thinking of becoming an underground hero, I would recommend considering this course of action.”

Asui took a form, looking thoughtful. “Holy shit,” Kacchan said. What? Oh. Todoroki was smiling . Not just smiling , but grinning . Maniacally. The usually stoic glacier-summoner snatched the form like a ravenous dog lunging for a bone and began to scribble down information immediately. But… people would know he was Endeavour’s son. They would know , regardless of what he was called during the Sports Festival… Well, whatever made him happy was fine, probably?

Izuku took his form deftly and passed the pile on. Katsuki shook his head and handed the pile to Tokoyami who inspected it carefully before plucking one sheet from the top. In the end, close to half of the class was at least considering using a fake name for the Sports Festival.

“So, changing your name, nerd?” Katsuki asked Izuku as they made their way home.

“At the USJ Kurogiri recognized me,” he said glumly. “Who knows who else might? I… it’s best if I can keep my name out of the news.”

Katsuki grimaced. “ Oh. Yeah, fair that,” he muttered. “What’re you gonna’ call yourself?”

“I haven’t thought about it much yet,” Izuku admitted. “I figured I would just choose a really common name like Yamamoto Akira or something.”

“Yamamoto Akira,” Kacchan sniffed. “Sure, I can see that.”

“I guess I’ll use that one?”

“Go wild. You’re still nerd to me, though. Did you see Todoroki?”

“Yeah. That was… weird.”

“What the hell do you think is up with him?”

Izuku didn’t know much about the ice-mancer. “Maybe…” there were some emotions that were nearly universal, “he wants to make a name for himself, like by himself , and doesn’t want to stand in Endeavour’s shadow? So being able to… not be known as the son of the number two hero might appeal to him? I don’t know, you’ve spent more time with him than me.”

“We were fighting for our lives, not much time to chat,” Kacchan pointed out. “It would make sense, though, if that were why he was grinning like a nutcase.”

“I wonder how many people in 1-B are going to use fake names,” Izuku mused.

“’Suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” the blonde replied.

Izuku managed to finish his homework with plenty of time to spare, then spent the remainder of the evening hunting for information on the MLA--real, unbiased information.

“Desto’s generals” was the first thing he searched, and it paid off immediately. The second result showed him a very familiar picture.

“Tamiya Kuma,” Izuku read, “aka Tripswitch, Japanese citizen. Quirk unknown. One of Destro’s best generals and closest confidants, a skilled tactician. Fate unknown… but she stood by him for the majority of the war, and… it sounded like the scene I saw at the dining room table where Chris was sobbing was before the start of the MLA war. In retrospect it’s like I was actually, literally seeing the start of the MLA war, or the conception of the Meta Liberation Army at least.” There could be no doubt anymore that these weren’t Izuku’s memories, because otherwise Izuku had started the MLA and clearly that couldn’t be the case; he would never. “So it wasn’t Kuma who died, because she lived at least until the midway point of the war before she disappeared. Kuma probably died then, but maybe she left? Escaped? Changed her mind about her side?” Why was he so relieved by that thought? By the thought that this woman, this infamous villain who stood by Destro, probably the most infamous villain ever to live, had not been assassinated at a painfully young age?

“So who was Chris crying over? His mother maybe?” that would… that would actually make a lot of sense. Destro’s mother, the so called Mother of Quirks was a figurehead, the one who invented the word “quirk” in the first place and put forward the idea that quirks should be accepted as just another part of someone. Supposedly, she was murdered by anti-meta-human protesters and that was one of the events that led to Destro forming the MLA and waging open war against a dozen governments for years.

Digging a bit deeper, Chris--Destro’s--mother, Yotsubashi Shynah, had been a prominent political activist and possibly a social worker when she was younger. Her son had been driven from Japan by prejudice and had gone to study economics and psychology overseas, apparently in Minnesota (so Izuku had likely met Chris on a bridge over the Mississippi river). Yotsubashi Shynah had been a founding member of Citizens for Equality, a large group advocating for meta-human rights. The Meta Separation Movement had been founded at about the same time as CfE, and Yotsubashi might have had something to do with that, too. The MSM was a far less radical version of the MLA. It advocated allowing meta-humans to establish their own homelands apart from quirkless individuals. Huh. Izuku would be living in a country all by himself if that had actually happened. Anyway, Yotsuabshi Shynah had been a prominent activist and certain documents suggested that she had been assassinated while in witness seclusion, and if that were the case then maybe Chris’s assertion that the government had her killed made sense… if, again, she was actually the one who Chris had been mourning at the table.

Ugh. This was all so complicated… too many moving parts and Izuku still couldn’t quite wrap his head around the idea that he had seen Destro sobbing. That was just… hard to integrate into his world view.

Returning to his original search for “Destro’s generals” Izuku had two more grand successes. First, he identified the lanky, silver haired man he had called Arch as Alexey Osinov, Russian citizen, one of Destro’s most trusted strategists and assassins. Arch’s quirk allowed him to fashion living ice sculptures off a sort, but could only be used on snow already in existence. He wasn’t like Todoroki; he couldn’t freeze water in the air.

Arch was killed in the MLA war. Izuku couldn’t find any source that could give him any details, or rather he found too many sources with too many details. Someone suggested that Arch was executed, others that he committed suicide in the custody of the Russian, Chinese, or Japanese government, and some asserted that he had died leading a mission to break detained meta-humans out of a Siberian labor camp in the final days of the war.

Izuku also recognized the man who had been asleep or unconscious on the couch when Chris was crying. He was American citizen Rafael Leon, aka Switcher, one of Destro’s oldest friends and his most reliable spy. Switcher was a changeling who could, possibly, copy people’s quirks as well as their forms. Switcher might also be immortal. That was… terrifying. Little was known about his quirk or how it worked. The website just said “changeling, possibly capable of copying quirks, possibly ageless.”

Continuing on with his search , Izuku was nearly stunned speechless to learn that Switcher was still alive . He had escaped at the end of the war to help create the Rebel Isles and, to this day, ruled Black Forest (also called “the City of Masks”) the only place in the Rebel Isles that was safe and stable enough for people who were not career criminals to occasionally visit.

As one (completely insane) “tourist” wrote: “There are certain crimes for which Switcher has no tolerance whatsoever and some which phase him not in the least. Smuggling, arms deals, and the sale of illicit goods goes on day and night in the streets and cafes, with a few notable exceptions: living creatures, especially sentient ones, are not to be traded (save as pets in some cases) nor are things like ivory or shark fins, things derived from the bodies of rare or sentient creatures. For a small offense, trading old ivory perhaps, you will be run out of Black Forest. For a grave offense such as human trafficking you will be marched to the center square and shot. The later is also the fate of those who deal in quirk suppressing drugs or otherwise attempt to take free use of quirks from their fellows.” Apparently there was little tolerance for outright murder in Black Forest, either, and, of course, kidnapping or taking hostages for any reason was a capital offense as it was considered equivalent to human trafficking.

“I’m really glad I was born in Japan,” Izuku mused. He wouldn’t want to live in a place like that, a place where blood was constantly and literally running in the streets.

Izuku sighed, closing his laptop for the night. “All of that is well and good,” he muttered, “but doesn't help answer the question of whose point of view am I seeing ? And why?” Izuku must be viewing the past through the eyes of one of Destro’s close confidants, likely one of his generals; Izuku hadn’t researched them all yet. His memory donor must be in there somewhere. Maybe he would be lucky and see himself in a mirror sometime, hear himself called by name, or manage to rule out all possibilities save one. Even that wouldn't help him answer why or how… but at least he now had some idea of what. The mystery didn’t seem quite so hopeless anymore.

After all, there was now a clear avenue to having at least most of those questions answered ( all be it a drastic one. ) Izuku could go to Black Forest, arrange an audience and ask Switcher. Presumably the changeling would know who else had been in the room when the MLA was invented, even if he hadn't been conscious for the entire thing. “I’ll leave that option off the table until its been, like, five years at least with no leads,” Izuku decided.

Chapter Text

“Wait. What?” demanded Shouji.

“It’s tomorrow,” Ojiro repeated.

“How can it be tomorrow?” Shouji waved his arms about dramatically.

“The passage of time…” the tailed boy replied. Izuku made no comment but he, too, had kind of sort of maybe forgotten that the Sports Festival was tomorrow. In his defense, some pretty distracting things had been going on in his life. For one, his current theory was that he had many hours of memories of being a girl. The greenette had thought long and hard about whether anyone in his dream vision things had ever referred to Izuku as a “he” or a “she” and couldn’t for the life of him recall. It was, of course, possible that his brain would automatically edit any female pronouns into male pronouns to fit with Izuku’s worldview.

Anyway, his current theory was that his memory donor was a tele-technopath by the name of Miranda Dorman aka Bit Weasel. Either an American or Australian citizen (or maybe both somehow--it wasn’t clear) who was known to have attended college with Destro, she may have survived the war. It wasn’t known for sure whether she escaped to the Rebel Isles or died in the last stand of the MLA at Utapa. A few sources, including eyewitness accounts from prisoners of war, described Bit Weasel using her quirk both to read and manipulate thoughts and memories, sometimes turning loyal soldiers into traitorous assassins and siccing them on their commanders, but not much detail was available otherwise. The MLA had one high ranking officer with an immortality quirk of some kind, so perhaps it had two, but it was more likely that Izuku’s dreams were Dorman’s memories passed on to a third party, maybe a descendant, and then later to the greenette. There was no reason to believe Bit Weasel’s quirk or a derivative thereof would be capable of altering Izuku’s neural pathways to give him muscle memory for skills he had never heard of, but no reason not to believe it, either. The memory transfer was probably an unintentional side effect. Why would anyone do that purposefully? There wasn’t any point.

Izuku’s other leading memory donor candidate was Xavier Verwey, aka Fractal, a South African who had definitely studied internationally although it was unclear if he attended school in the USA, let alone with Destro. Izuku considered Verwey because no one had any idea at all what the man’s quirk was (there were only a handful of photos of him and little other information) so potentially Fractal’s meta-ability could involve some kind of possession, mind control or memory alteration. Verwey’s fate was every bit as mysterious as Kuma’s although the man only vanished in the final week of the conflict. It was disconcerting to realize there were far more of Destro’s generals unaccounted for in the aftermath of the MLA War than arrested or confirmed dead. In fact, of Destro's inner-ish circle there were only four individuals (including Destro himself) whose fates were completely clear.

Izuku couldn’t perform further analysis on these suppositions, however, because he hadn’t had any lucid dreams recently. He’d had no chance to listen for a name, search for a mirror, or try to rule out options. There was also the problem presented by Switcher; seeing someone didn’t necessarily rule that individual out as Izuku’s memory donor because the changeling might be impersonating anyone. The greenette could rule out Kuma, Chris, Switcher himself , and probably Osinov (because if that had been Switcher impersonating Arch during that bloody fight, the changeling would probably have shifted to a form with a more useful quirk for indoor combat). Other than those anyone was a possibility.

“I’m not worried,” Kacchan said with a yawn, showing off his pointy canines. Right. In the real world they were talking about the Sports Festival. However, if Katsuki really weren’t worried he wouldn’t need to posture like that.

“Sure, Kacchan,” Izuku said soothingly. The blonde glowered at him.

“I’m kind of looking forward,” Ojiro grinned, “to seeing what kind of fake name Todoroki decides to use.”

“Me too, honestly,” Izuku admitted. “Should be interesting.”

“You know,” Todoroki appeared from an alcove in the locker room, “I was going to declare war on someone today like the general education student and Monoma.” That had been weird. A group of random people they didn’t know had come to their classroom as 1-A was preparing to head to lunch and started explaining how they were going to crush them in the Sports Festival. Most of 1-A had just stared in bewilderment at the other students boxing them in until Izuku pointed out that they could just leave via the windows, after which the students boxing them in had watched in bewilderment as half of class 1-A abandoned ship (well, abandoned school).

Todoroki continued, “I was going to say something about how I must prove my prowess in combat with out my father’s quirk," what was he even talking about? "But I’m in such a good mood… I don’t think I will. Good luck everyone.” Todoroki practically skipped out into the hallway.

“O-okay then,” said Sero. “That was… weird, right?”

“Yup, that was weird,” Mineta agreed.

“Well, I am pleased to see our classmate in such high spirits?” Iida said, sounding more than a bit concerned.

"This is going to be really interesting, I think,” Shouji departed and Izuku followed shortly, joining the growing crowd of 1-A students waiting to be released into the stadium.

Hoping his slicked back hair dyed black would serve sufficiently to obscure his identity, the (usually) greenette stepped into the center of UA’s stadium. There were… a lot of people in the stands. They seemed a world away, like the heralds gazing down from the cloudy domain of a distant sky god. Izuku felt the weight of all those eyes pressing on him and tried to ignore them in favor of focusing on his classmates.

“And here we have class 1-A!” Present Mic called out cheerfully. “These students have been through quite a trial already and they’re eager to prove themselves today!” A long, rolling cheer erupted from the stands. Uraraka and Ojiro began to smile tentatively at the welcome. Izuku, on the other hand, ducked his head and hid in the wakes of Shouji and Iida.

Midnight prowled up onto a dais, the huge screens at either end of the stadium focusing in on her as she spun a wheel to determine the first exercise. “We’re starting out with an obstacle course, listeners!” Present Mic announced. “The first forty contestants to finish will advance to the second round! Everyone to the starting line!”

Izuku was separated from his friends as shoulders jostled and students migrated towards the designated location. For the life of him, Izuku couldn’t remember if the starting line had been there before Midnight spun the wheel… Had it suddenly appeared out of thin air? The greenette found himself standing at the edge of a group of 1-B and general education students. “On your mark, get set, go!” Apparently just saying “start” as Present Mic had at the entrance exam wasn’t dramatic enough for a televised event.

The mob (and it really was a mob) of students moved out with a storm of flying elbows and an avalanche of shouting. The mob thinned quite quickly, though, Izuku finding himself in the middle of the pack. He didn’t want to tire himself out by sprinting just yet.

Todoroki flew past like some kind of demonic snowboarder riding on a thin ribbon of ice. He quickly overtook even Iida. “And there he goes, Shimizu Zuko pulling into the lead!” Izuku choked. There was no time to laugh… Shimizu meant “water” and then apparently the glacier-summoner decided to make a reference to a fictional character with a similar scar… Izuku was a bit surprised that stoic Todoroki knew about that series, even given the recent reboot … and this whole situation didn’t seem like Todoroki Shouto wanted to branch out and make a name for himself. It seemed like he had specifically chosen a pseudonym with the express intent of snubbing his father as much as possible.

Perhaps Izuku should think about all that later, sometime when the stakes were lower, sometime when he wasn't in danger of embarrassing himself on national television.

Zero pointer robots emerged from hiding and trundled towards the contestants. They didn’t actively attack, but the crowd scattered, diving for the meager cover provided by the lumpy terrain near the edge of the course. Izuku, confident in his ability to predict the robots movements, dodged between the two behemoths and continued on his way. It was more the shock factor than actual danger that sent most of the students scattering like a flurry of snowflakes. Many members of 1-A and some members of 1-B were no more intimidated than Izuku and passed this tria,l without much difficulty.

Izuku saw the next obstacle from a significant distance. Huge pits were hard to miss, after all. Plenty of students, including Kacchan, a girl with a jet pack and Todoroki, had not been phased in the slightest by the crevasse, propelling themselves easily over the gap. It looked like there was a way to jump across on widely spaced tree stumps, but Izuku didn’t think he would be able to make the longest leap required.

There were also cables across the gap… and a slackline. Izuku could work with that. If he lost his balance on the line he would catch himself as he fell and continue hand over hand to the other side, but hopefully he could just walk all the way; it would be much faster.

The greenette hopped up on the slackline and began to stride across with ease. Looking down--why was he doing that, that was a terrible idea--Izuku spotted safety nets awaiting in the bottom of the trench in case someone ran afoul of bad luck--and there went a 1-B student already, losing his grip on one of the cables and tumbling into the pit. Izuku hissed under his breath as an incredibly impolite and impatient individual jumped up behind him on the slackline. The line jiggled and nearly threw him off as the impatient and impolite individual made a mistake and went tumbling into the pit with a high pitched shriek. She (or he) probably deserved that. The obstacle safely traversed, Izuku hopped off the line and broke back into a run.

A few small obstacles followed, but none were nearly so memorable as the robots or the pit.

How many people were in front of Izuku now? He hadn’t tired to keep track. It didn’t matter, really. He was doing his best and whether or not he was in the top forty wouldn’t change the best he could do.

The crowd had thinned away to almost nothing. Izuku could only see one student ahead of him--Asui--and couldn’t hear anyone behind him.

The finish line came into view, as did a large number of students moving slowly across a minefield. Izuku wasn’t quite sure what let him know at a glance that the the landmines were there, but he knew.

Izuku slowed to a swift walk and began to navigate by instinct. Of all the super bizarre skills that he had inherited, the ability to spot the tell-tale evidence of shallowly buried explosives at a glance and avoid them with little effort might be the most concerning. Izuku overtook a number of other students, although he didn’t pay attention to who they were as he needed to keep his eyes on the ground.

Wait. There were no more mines? Where did the--oh. He had passed the finish line. “Yamamoto Akira in seventeenth place!” called Present Mic. Seventeenth, huh? Well, that wasn’t spectacular but Izuku hadn’t expected to do spectacular and he was in the top half of the people who passed. Izuku allowed himself a small smile as a short cheer rose from the crowd. It was impressive that they still had some enthusiasm left for him after celebrating for sixteen others.

“Hey, nerd,” Katsuki greeted him.

“Are you in first place or second place?” Izuku asked, because he couldn’t imagine Kacchan in a rank lower than second.

Kacchan growled unhappily. “Second, but I’m gonna’ show that “Shimizu Zuko” next round.”

Izuku couldn’t keep a straight face despite the blonde’s menacing tone. Something about Todoroki calling himself Zuko was just too funny. “Oh my god,” he choked. Kacchan glared at him.

The final student to finish the obstacle course, a dark haired girl from gen ed who wore a look that said “I am here because my parents forced me to participate, but they can’t force me to smile much as they might like to,” finally shuffled across the finish line. The crowd cheered for her, too, even more enthusiastically than for Izuku. Perhaps they loved their underdog stories? The gen ed girl scowled and stalked away towards the locker rooms.

Midnight spun the wheel again to choose the next event. “Cavalry battle!” Present Mic announced. They were, apparently, going to form teams of four with one individual riding on the others’ shoulders. The rider would try to steal headbands from other riders. Each headband was worth a certain number of victory points; Todoroki’s reward for coming in first in the obstacle course was a headband worth more than all the other bands combined, also known as a huge target on his back. As teams began to form, however, Todoroki had no trouble recruiting “horses.” It must be because his quirk was so powerful that those allying with him believed the glacier-summoner would be able to defend himself effectively from any and all attacks.

“Come along with me, nerd?”

“Sure,” Izuku agreed. “We need someone for ranged combat…” Kacchan “hmed” in reply. “Tokoyami!” Izuku called to the bird headed classmate. “Join us?”

Tokoyami and his familiar considered this for a moment before accepting the offer. “We need one more,” Katsuki scanned the crowd.

“Let’s grab Yaoyorozu,” Izuku said, noticing that she was yet to join a team. “She’s very smart and good at adapting in unforeseen situations. We could use that.”

“I’ll see if I can get her,” Kacchan swept through the crowd and, after a brief discussion, returned with Yaoyorozu.

“Who’s the rider?” Yaoyorozu asked.

“Not me,” Izuku and Tokoyami said together. Katsuki, capable of huge leaps, devastating medium range attacks, and brief flight would be ideal. Yaoyorozu would likely serve the rider role well, too, because it would give her the opportunity to quickly create weapons and armor in response to the rapidly changing tide of battle.

“It’s probably best if Bakugou is the rider,” Yaoyorozu said.

It took them several tries to assemble into a reasonable formation. Yaoyorozu, Tokoyami and Izuku had very different builds and were not at all the same height. It made arrangements a bit awkward. Eventually, Yaoyorozu created over the shoulder harnesses for the team which greatly relieved the strain on the joints. The greenette took the opportunity to approach Midnight and make sure they weren’t violating any rules with that and then preparation time was up.

The event began with Katsuki blowing up Sero and Todoroki’s team blasting off into the sky with the help of Uraraka and a support student’s jet pack. “Alright then,” Izuku said. It was a solid strategy. Todoroki and company didn’t stay in the air long, though, touching down half way across the stadium and stealing a headband off a team led by a 1-B student. There was absolutely no need forthem to steal headbands and it might not be the best strategy. Getting close enough to steal a band from another team meant that other team was close enough to steal a band from you, and the million victory point bandana wasn’t something to risk.

The chaos intensified. Throwing himself into the air and raiding other teams like some kind of swashbuckling pirate, a cackling Kacchan brought back headbands from four stunned contestants. When other teams attempted to steal points back, they were met by Dark Shadow’s claws and Yaoyorozu’s freshly manufactured can of mace. Meanwhile, Todoroki carried out vicious raids on half a dozen other teams, often freezing their feet to the ground before approaching. The glacier-summoner tried that on Izuku’s team once, but the combined attack power of Dark Shadow and Katsuki (as well as Yaoyorozu’s not so idle threat to build a flamethrower) convinced the attackers that it wasn’t worth it. Katsuki made one attempt to steal Todoroki’s million point headband and was dissuaded when the entire enemy team launched itself skyward again. Kacchan and Todoroki’s groups kept their grudging distance after that.

Someone on Izuku’s team--and he wasn’t quite sure who the guilty party was but suspected Dark Shadow--had started singing a song with lyrics about “being a pirate” after Kacchan made the mistake of growling “arr” when returning from his first successful raid. Before long they all had the tune stuck in their heads. Katsuki kept shouting at them to “stop singing that god damned song or so help me you won’t live to see final round,” but as the three-quarters mark ticked by, Izuku heard the blonde humming along.

The buzzer roared and the competition ended. Riders jumped down from their perches and horses stretched their sore shoulders.

Hearing, again, “Shimizu Zuko” take first place had a good half of the remaining contestants struggling to hold back some form of laughter. Kacchan just grumbled about second place and promised to “kick that Zuko’s ass” next round. Typically the Sports Festival ended with some sort of battle royale, so Katsuki and Todoroki would probably have a chance to fight each other again.

“Shimizu Zuko…” Yaoyorozu shook her head. “People have to know, right? They just have to know Todoroki Shouto is Todoroki Shouto, not Shimizu Zuko. What must the media be making of this?”

“Good question.” There would likely be confusion and rampant speculation and, of course, Endeavour had public relations people whose sole purpose in life was to spin chaos like this into positive light. “It’s must look odd.”

“You, Midoriya and I are also employing pseudonyms,” Tokoyami pointed out. Izuku hadn’t been paying enough attention to get an exact number, but close to half of class 1-A had chosen to obscure their identities for the Sports Festival, many feeling paranoid after the USJ attack and hoping to keep their family members out of danger.

“Yes,” Yaoyorozu argued, “but we’re not recognizable. My family is, well, rich and somewhat famous but people don’t know what we look like and certainly no one will question your alternate choices, either of you, but if, say, Iida had chosen to change his last name, everyone would still know who he was and they’d wonder what was going on.”

“You have fair points,” Tokoyami acknowledged. “I have been wondering, Midoriya,” he admitted, “why you have gone to such extreme lengths to obscure your identity?” He must mean the hair style. “Is this because you are interested in becoming an underground hero?”

“Yes,” Izuku answered quickly. They weren't his main reasons, but Izuku's career ambitions were certainly a part of his motivation.

“He just wants to be all mysterious,” said Dark Shadow, nosing over Tokoyami’s shoulder.

“Be polite,” the bird headed boy told his familiar.

“There’s nothing wrong with being mysterioussss… but he is, don’t deny it,” Dark Shadow said as Izuku shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “No one knows what his quirk is, no one even has a clue, he knows all kinds of things no one else in class does, and he’s now being so careful to hide in plain sight. It’s like he has a… Dark Shadowy past.”

Izuku had no idea how to respond to any of that, not the (probably correct) assessment of his conduct in school, not the horrible and completely unexpected pun, not Tokoyami’s long-suffering expression, not Yaoyorozu’s valiant attempts not to laugh.

“I’m going to go see Ojiro,” Izuku decided squeakily, because sometimes running from a conversation was the best option. “It looks like he was in one of the teams that's going to advance…”

Ojiro stood stiffly in the center of the arena, eyes wide and lips thin. “Hey?” Izuku called. “Is… everything alright?”

The tailed boy turned to stare at Izuku and said, “How do you stand this?”

“What?”

“It’s been only fifteen minutes while you missed a whole week, how do you stand this?”

“What?” Izuku repeated, flailing to grab at the context of their conversation.

Ojiro shook his head, tail lashing. “I don’t have the slightest idea what just happened. The whole round. I don’t remember a thing.”

Chapter Text

Ojiro’s declaration of missing memory led to a somewhat bizarre reaction on Izuku’s part. He wouldn’t call it a panic attack; that would be an insult to people who had real panic attacks, it was just… really hard to breathe all of the sudden, like he were really allergic to something and he couldn’t stop thinking about waking up in that alleyway, the insidious disorientation, the nameless loss, the violation. Then his mind turned to the moments before he had disappeared, the exhaustion, the twisting nausea, the intense and, he was sure, foreign desire to sit down and rest his head, expose himself helplessly to foreign influence. Someone had taken his body, his mind, and paraded it through Aldera Junior High like nothing at all was wrong. People had talked to it like it was Izuku. No one had even noticed the theft. An invisible hand had snatched him right out of his life as easily as a farmer plucking a tomato from a vine and done god only knows what to him for a week with total impunity. He had no idea who or why other than they were somehow associated with the MLA and they could do it again. They only gave him back because they wanted to. They could snatch him anytime just like that and if they weren’t feeling generous this time no one would ever see him again and there was no one who could stop them.

“Izuku?” the tailed boy called to him, resting a hand tentatively on his shoulder. “Izuku?”

The greenette pulled at the loose threads of his psyche. Come on. He was fine. Everything was fine. There was no reason to believe that what happened to him could happen again and even if it could there was no point worrying about it like this. He just needed to calm the hell down. “Nerd?” Kacchan called for him, shaking his shoulder. “What happened?”

Somewhere in the fog, Ojiro answered. “I… I told him that I can’t remember what happened this round…”

“Let’s get him out of here. Get to lunch,” Kacchan muttered and Izuku found himself firmly steered out of the stadium.

It was some time later, how much later he couldn’t have said, that Izuku registered the presence of a steaming bowl of noodles and a tall glass of sparkling cranberry cider sitting on a table in front of him. He was in the stadium’s cafeteria, a cheery room with floor to ceiling windows. Right. Lunch. “You back with us nerd?” Kacchan asked.

“Oh. Yeah…” Izuku cringed in embarrassment. God, he’d done that on national television. Hopefully the cameras hadn’t caught any of it. “I’m so sorry, Ojiro,” Izuku blurted out. The tailed boy blinked. “You were asking for help and I just…” couldn’t offer help and, in fact, immediately needed help himself, “lost it.”

“What actually happened here?” asked Shouji. The four of them were sequestered at a small, round table in a back corner, well isolated from other students.

“One of the general education students, Shinsou Hitosh, has… some kind of mind control quirk,” Ojiro explained, “which he used to recruit and control his team during the cavalry battle.”

Shouji grimaced. “That’s… a really creepy thing to do. I suppose it’s not against the rules, maybe, since we were allowed to use our quirks to prepare for the exercise but… he’s sure not going to make or keep any friends acting like that.”

“That’s a dick move,” Katsuki snarled. “Cool quirk, totally fucked up way to use it.”

“If he’d asked me like a normal person to be on his team I would have said yes,” Ojiro grumbled, “and Midoriya and I would be able to enjoy lunch… I think Shinsou’s quirk is a verbal trigger, like you have to talk to him before he can do something to you.”

“I don’t remember talking to anyone before I disappeared,” Izuku said. Shinsou’s quirk was probably just a coincidence. It likely had absolutely nothing to do with Izuku’s kidnappers.

Ojiro shook his head. “His hold on me broke at the end of the round when someone bumped me, so I can’t imagine a quirk like his would have been able to effectively kidnap someone for a whole week.”

“Sorry again for freaking out,” Izuku said, the embarrassment rearing its head.

“Ya’ know,” Kacchan pitched in, “I was always kind of freaked out that you weren’t freaked out. I mean, the day you showed up in class after being gone for a week, you were hands down the calmest person there, even after we explained what the hell was going on. It was… well, I just kind of assumed that you’d freaked out later when no one could see you.”

Had he? Izuku had certainly been upset, cried, raged against the universe but… maybe he’d never really processed things properly and this borderline meltdown was inevitable. The greenette just shrugged in reply. By that point, he felt up to some food and began to tentatively nibble noodles from his bowl. “Thanks for getting me lunch,” he said to the anonymous individual who had done so.

Ojiro stood up suddenly. “I’m going to go withdraw from the tournament,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right. I didn’t earn the victory, I was just used. It’s… it makes a mockery of everything I stand for.”

“I sometimes feel that way about UA,” Izuku admitted drearily.

“Your situation is not like mine,” Ojiro snapped his tail side to side. “We’ve had this conversation before. You pretty much got a quirk late and then worked very hard to pass the entrance exam. If you didn’t remember taking the entrance exam, if you’d been possessed during that week, that would be a different situation entirely, something like what’s happened to me.”

“He’s got a point, nerd,” Katsuki said.

“I’ll be back as soon as I catch up with a teacher,” Ojiro strode away stiffly.

“What’s the final round going to be, anyway?” Izuku asked. He had been so out of it he hadn’t heard the announcement.

“Single elimination combat,” Shouji replied. “The bracket’s been announced already.” He whipped out his phone. “You’re against Shinsou first, Midoriya.” The greenette couldn’t stifle his wince.

“This is fine,” Izuku told himself. “There’s nothing wrong here.”

“Kick his ass, nerd,” Kacchan told him. “And don’t give ‘im a chance to rile you up so you slip up and say something to him.”

“Bakugou is fighting against… it would have been Ojiro? Whoever takes his place, then.”

“Hope it’s someone good,” the blonde growled. “I’ll be pissed if I get someone useless because Ojiro dropped out.”

“There will be plenty of fights, Kacchan,” Izuku sighed.

“If any of you want to participate in the little games before the final round, they’ll be starting in a few minutes,” Shouji explained.

“Nah,” Kacchan glanced meaningfully down at his lunch. “You can go if you want.” Shouji considered this then shook his head. Izuku had no interest in doing… anything at all at the moment. He was going to force himself to eat, but he didn’t have the willpower for more than that.

Ojiro rejoined them for the tail end of lunch and then the quartet ascended to the students’ section of the bleachers, all save Kacchan who was “on deck” for the next fight thus needed to head for the locker rooms.

On any normal day, Izuku would be frantically taking notes about quirks and strategies as he watched a competition like this, but the leftover anxiety nibbled through him like a worm, draining motivation. In just a handful of rounds he was going to have to fight against Shinsou and he was… utterly unprepared to deal with that. He was just barely aware of Katsuki curb stomping his opponent, a 1-B student Izuku didn’t know well.

“Hey, you’re on deck,” Ojiro nudged the greenette.

“Oh crap!” Izuku squeaked, fleeing from the stands into the maze of tunnels beneath the stadium. He wasn’t even sure who was fighting at the moment? Tokoyami and Yaoyorozu maybe?

“Alright,” Hound Dog greeted him at the entrance to the arena. “They’re through already so you’re up. You understand the rules?”

“Yes, sir,” that much, at least, Izuku had managed to comprehend.

Hound Dog gave him a look. “You alright kid?”

“I… fine,” Izuku said. “It’s nothing.”

“Alright, if you’re sure. Good luck.”

Izuku stepped out into the arena to cheers and a symphony of distant camera shutters, many accompanied by flashes. Shinsou stood across from him. Huh. It somehow hadn’t clicked for Izuku that this was the same kid he’d rescued during the entrance exam… The name had slipped his mind.

“Begin!”

Izuku circled towards his opponent warily. He wasn’t completely sure, after all, if Shinsou had other tricks up his sleeve. He didn’t know for sure that the brainwashing was triggered by a verbal response. “You’re the kid from the entrance exam,” the purple haired boy said, squinting. “What have you done to your hair?”

Alright. So they were almost certainly correct about the verbal trigger, then. Izuku wasn’t going to mess around here, too risky. The greenette charged forward, ducked a punch, swept his opponent’s legs out from under him and pinned the other student in an arm bar within seconds. Shinsou hissed and swore at him, saying all manner of insulting things to try to get a response, but Izuku’s brain was working in panic mode again and he didn’t really hear any of the taunts. He twisted the captured hand, putting pressure on the joints. “Fine! Fine! I yield!” Shinsou snarled.

Izuku let his furious enemy stand. Shinsou’s eyes blazed like dark coals. It certainly wasn’t this student’s quirk that had led to Izuku’s situation, but it was likely a similar quirk had been involved… What might Shinsou know? “Come find me after the festival, please. At school at lunch or w-whatever. Whatever works,” Izuku told the general education student, “I think I need to talk to you.” Shinsou made no promises, stalking away into the locker rooms. He probably felt cheated, assuming correctly that Izuku had been forewarned about what Shinsou’s quirk could do. Yeah, that really wasn’t fair to the purple haired student but, then again, having given away the secret of his powers like that in an earlier round, Shinsou had to realize that rumors would circulate and reach the ears of his future opponents. That was just the unfairness of life. Izuku turned and took his leave, finally breathing normally again. The relief was tangible.

Apparently Izuku’s next opponent would be Todoroki. That was bad luck, or, as Izuku had so recently put it, “the unfairness of life.” In an open arena setting like this with no cover and no resources, the greenette didn’t stand a chance. Todoroki could just smash him with a glacier and there would be nothing Izuku could do about it. Oh well. Izuku hadn’t expected to make it to the semifinals, not really, and he didn’t need or want that kind of attention anyway.

It would be a while yet before his next match. He had best make his way to the stands. Unfortunately, still being distracted, Izuku took a wrong turn. “Alright,” he muttered, “where am I?”

“...get over this little temper tantrum!” Izuku started at the fury in the vaguely familiar voice.

“Temper tantrum, father? I’ve no idea what you mean,” Todoroki Shouto replied smoothly. Oh. Todoroki was talking to his father, to Endeavour, the number two hero. Well, not talking precisely... Todoroki Shouto was having a shouting match with Endeavour. This was a family matter and Izuku had best get out of here promptly. He had no business eavesdropping on this. “What are you--wait, stop it!”

A lurid glow of blue-hot flames reflected around the corner and the situation rapidly changed from “family matter Izuku had best avoid” to “potential assault that Izuku would run from if he were smart, but would bear witness to if he were noble.”

“Shouto,” growled the furious voice of the second ranked pro hero in the country.

Izuku made peace with his potentially idiotic decision to intervene, took a deep breath and strolled around the corner casually. “Hi Todoroki. I think I got lost trying to get back to the stands! Can you help me? Oh, Endeavour! Hello sir! It’s an honor to meet you!” He had to shout to be heard over the crackling roar of Endeavour’s built-up flames. The fire died down as the greenette spoke, however, the hero gaining back some modicum of composure. Shouto had his back to the wall, shoulder’s hunched and hands in front of him protectively as his father leered down at him. Izuku continued to cheerfully pretend that he had not noticed the tension in the air. “I’d ask for an autograph but I think it would be rude under the circumstances. Could you help me find my way back to the stands though, please, either of you?”

“Sure, I’ll show you the way,” Todoroki snatched Izuku’s hand and pulled him rapidly down a cross corridor.

“Shouto!” Endeavour called after them, but apparently he wasn’t going to give chase. It was hard to wrap his head around the fact that, for a good ten seconds there, Izuku had been utterly terrified that the second ranked pro hero in the country, his classmate’s father, was going to kill him. That was… he must have been overreacting. Endeavour was always intimidating, and the fury in place of his typical, collected stoicism was a shock. Surely, though, the man wouldn’t have physically assaulted anyone, certainly not on UA property. There were security cameras for heaven’s sake! People would know!

The classmates walked rapidly, not quite breaking into a jog. Eventually Todoroki Shouto released his death grip on Izuku’s hand. “He wasn’t really going to hurt me, not like that,” the glacier-summoner blurted abruptly, “I don’t think… I don’t think he was.” Apparently they were thinking along similar lines.

Izuku was in no way qualified to speak about matters of emotional abuse or domestic violence. He didn’t really know what was going on, whether this was some kind of one time loss of control brought on by the “Zuko” thing or whether… Todoroki had said “he wasn’t going to hurt me like that” which had implied that he was going to hurt him in some other way, and these were all ugly, horrible things to have to consider--and still, at the end of the day Izuku had no idea what was going on. There was only so much one could infer from a tiny snapshot of someone else’s life. What should he think? What should he say? Maybe encouraging Todoroki to seek out someone more qualified would be the best option. “You might want to think about telling Aizawa,” Izuku said. “He helped me with my… special circumstances.”

Todoroki gave Izuku a calculating look. “Special circumstances?”

“Something really weird and, let’s face it, pretty awful happened to me last year,” Izuku replied, not caring to elaborate further. “Aizawa helped me get over it and get on with my life. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.” That was likely true. Without Aizawa’s encouragement, Izuku likely wouldn’t have even tried to pursue his dreams.

Todoroki nodded shortly. “You’re my next match.” The pair of them had intentionally slowed down as they approached the stairs to the stands, claiming extra time to speak in private.

“Should be a short one,” Izuku replied.

The taller boy blinked. “You’re quite good.”

“There’s a reason I’m not going to be frontline,” Izuku shrugged. “I might be a match for you in indoor combat or if I could stage an ambush or if I had my weapons on me and some cover, but in an open ring like this there are only a handful of people in the school who stand a chance against you. I’m not one of them.”

“You take your impending loss rather well,” Todoroki said.

“It’s just the way things are and… the rest of today has been so trying,” the obstacle course, the cavalry battle, Shinsou, thinking Endeavour was going to kill him… “I really just want to go home and sleep now. I don’t think I really care who wins.”

Izuku stepped out into the stands to booing. He blinked in confusion. “Who are they booing?” Izuku asked. Apparently he was asking Mineta because Mineta was the closest.

“Bakugou.”

What? “Why?”

“They think he’s being mean to Uraraka by treating her like a serious opponent.” Izuku glanced down at the match. Uraraka was putting her quirk to good use, attacking Kacchan with floating projectiles. He was not pulling his punches, nor could he afford to if he wanted to win.

“That is really rather rude of them,” said Todoroki crossing his arms.

“Yeah. I mean, it’s hot when a lady can kick my ass,” Mineta began, “but I would never let a lady kick my ass. Come on! It’s not sexy to fake things like that. Bakugou’s really strong but Uraraka’s been doing pretty well so far and it’s definitely super hot.”

Izuku was way too tired to get into this weird conversation. Thankfully, at that exact moment Aizawa’s voice came over the loud speaker and began to systematically shred all the individuals who were booing. Izuku nodded to Mineta and wove his way back to his friends. Todoroki tagged along.

Izuku didn’t get to sit down long, however. Uraraka sent a meteor shower of debris hurtling towards Kacchan, but the Explosive student managed to escape with minimal injury and, perhaps thirty seconds later, the match ended with Uraraka pinned to the ground.

Katsuki helped his opponent up and they shook hands amicably. Izuku couldn’t help but grin. A year ago, Izuku couldn’t have imagined Kacchan behaving so… what word was he looking for, nobly? Respectfully? Some word along those lines. He was a different person now, certainly kinder, and he seemed to be happier, too.

“I suppose we have to go back downstairs already,” Todoroki said.

“Yeah,” he just got here. What had been the point of coming upstairs in the first place?

“Good luck, Midoriya, Todoroki,” Shouji waved to them as they departed.

Izuku stepped out into the arena to face Todoroki. He expected combat to last about ten seconds, if that. The greenette simply had no defense against being sealed inside a glacier.

Todoroki began with one of his less devastating attacks, throwing a ribbon of ice towards Izuku’s chest. The smaller combatant dodged and sprinted forward. His only chance would be in hand to hand. Todoroki understood that, too, and blocked Izuku’s approach with a wall of frigid crystal. His opponent had not caught Izuku yet, however, and now he wouldn’t be able to see properly.

Izuku hopped on top of the ice wall--careful not to slip--and launched himself at Todoroki. Ugh, he was higher than he expected. This landing was going to hurt without his usual support equipment, regardless of whether he managed to land a flying tackle on his opponent.

Izuku was actually going to catch Todoroki, wasn’t he? At the last possible moment the glacier summoner whirled to face him and launched an explosive comet of ice in his direction--

The dream was vague, blurry, but became clearer as it progressed. Izuku didn’t recognize the ward. He didn’t recognize the city, either, but he was definitely in Japan. He managed to read the block number--18--off a sign on a cross street, and got the city name as well, Mandar. Izuku set off towards the edge of town. Civilization vanished suddenly, as if Izuku had stepped off a cliff into the wilderness, mountains rising rapidly in his vision. A few birds chirped in the fading red of twilight. Leaves and branches crunched beneath Izuku’s feet, crackling like brittle bones.

He didn’t follow the path for long but peeled off into the wild, making his way through dense underbrush, over haphazardly stacked boulders, and up a dry creek bed to a clearing. Was this the place? It had been so long… he wasn’t quite sure anymore.

Izuku pulled out a switchblade and sank to the ground, methodically stabbing into the dirt as he shuffled across the clearing. Ah. He did have the right place. Here was the metal hatch. It took perhaps thirty minutes to uncover the entrance. The hinges were rusty and uncooperative. It took a good deal of tugging and complaining to swing the panel open.

Pulling the electric lantern from his bag, Izuku hung it about his neck on a string. He then tied a rope to a nearby tree and tossed it down into the darkness--always provide an alternative means of egress when climbing ancient ladders into pits. Slowly, cautiously the greenette clambered down the entrance rungs, dropping the last half meter to the ground.

Stale air and rampant dust burned his nostrils. Ancient spiderwebs--their weavers long since dead--clung to the corners of the bunker. The final occupants of this forgotten place had cleaned it well, knowing they were never to return. The chairs about the card table had been pushed in. Spare weapons had been placed in racks on the wall or disassembled and stacked in their cases in a book shelf. Sensitive documents would have been shredded or burned. Non-sensitive documents had been placed in neat piles on the desk in the corner.

Some of the weapons here might still be in working order. The kin of the AK-47 never went out of style, after all. Izuku bit his lip and pushed open the door to the rest of the bunker. The room beyond was about the same size but partitioned in half by fabric walls. The table where battle plans would have been discussed stood on the right of the barrier. Desks where command staff would have worked stood on the left. He ignored the smaller two doors leaving the central room--no need to see that stuff--and stepped through the larger portal to the bunks.

There were sixteen beds in total, although four were rather haphazard affairs on the floor. All had been neatly made, sheets tucked in and pillows fluffed. Foot lockers had been carefully sealed and stacked.

Why was he doing this? There was no need to torture himself like this. What was the point of coming here?

Izuku groggily blinked his eyes open. He was on his back in the dirt… people were cheering. “Hey, can you hear me?” Midnight was asking him gently. Huh. What happened?

“Yeah,” Izuku mumbled. “My head hurts…”

“Yeah, I bet. Todoroki hit you in the face with a high speed glacier,” Midnight explained. “You’ve only been out thirty seconds or so, but I was starting to really worry. Recovery Girl should be out here in another minute.”

“Thanks,” Izuku mumbled, closing his eyes against the searing sunlight. Recovery Girl demanded he open his eyes and Izuku did so. He was immediately declared to have a concussion and less than a minute later found himself on a stretcher bound for Recovery Girl’s office.

“Today mostly sucked,” Izuku said to no one in particular. “And I just had a really weird dream…” even by Izuku’s usual standards that had been really weird. He'd think about it tomorrow.

Chapter Text

“I’m really not a fan of that game,” replied his conversation partner, an amused shine in her hazel eyes. Her hair, blonde with grey streaks, was neatly cut to the shoulder, the emblem of an MLA general proudly displayed on her shoulder. Apparently Izuku was joining this conversation already in progress. “First person shooters aren’t all that interesting, now that I’ve actually, you know, shot people… in first person.” She grimaced. “But, you know, they were going to shoot me if I didn’t shoot them. That should make it better, right?”

“Something like that,” Izuku sighed. “I… every time we try to deescalate things, everything only gets worse. Every time we escalate things, everything only gets worse. It doesn’t seem to matter what we do...”

“Not always,” the general replied. “There was open combat on the streets of Switzerland a month ago, and now the laws are all settled and the streets are being rebuilt and metas are happily helping out with their shiny, legal abilities. There’s still some violence, of course, but it’s decreasing steadily and it looks like something similar is going to happen in Costa Rica, too. At the end of the day, just agreeing to not oppress people isn’t that much of a sacrifice. Don’t give up hope. We can win.”

“Hm,” Izuku considered, taking a sip of coffee. “It’s not like I’ve lost hope. It’s just… hard. I miss not being afraid for my friends’ lives. I miss the days where my choices weren’t “accept the oppression of people like me in the good countries and the mass murder of people like me in the bad countries” or “run an international terrorist organization.””

““Terrorist organization” is a loaded phrase,” the general pointed out. “Is that really what we are?”

“Yeah, I think that much is pretty clear cut,” Izuku replied dryly. ““Revolutionary” is another word for “traitor” just like “freedom fighter” is another word for “terrorist.” Do we have a point? Are we justified in most of our actions? I’d say so, yeah.”

The general nodded thoughtfully. “Did you ever read V for Vendetta?”

“I did. It was interesting. Sad, too. I think I cried.”

“Like you said, there’s a subtlety. At what point does “terrorist hiding in the crowd” become less accurate than “freedom fighter standing against the oppressive tyranny of a dystopia?””

“Yeah, good question,” Izuku sighed. “All I know is I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I stopped fighting now.”

“Fair, that.”

Chris turned the corner to the small sitting room where Izuku and his conversation partner were sipping hot drinks. He stared at them for a moment, brow furrowing. “Huh. You two actually getting along for once?” He shook his head in exasperation. “Which one of you is Rafael?”

“I am,” Izuku declared at the same moment the general opposite him said, “me.” They exchanged glances, then pointed to each other and said in perfect synchrony, “she is.”

Chris face palmed, turned on his heel, and walked away.

Izuku and his companion burst out laughing.

“Alright then,” Izuku groaned. Two dreams in one day. Apparently getting hit in the head had jarred some things loose, like knocking books down from a dusty shelf. He hadn’t recognized the woman when he was… asleep? Unconscious? One of those, but upon awaking he immediately knew that the MLA general he’d been speaking with was, or rather looked like, Bit Weasel. And Chris walked into the room and demanded to know which one of them was Rafael, Switcher. So, if he had this straight, Destro had walked around a corner and found two identical copies of one of his generals, asked which one of them was a changeling and accidentally offered up a grand opportunity for teasing. Teasing Destro… they… even having lived through it he could not wrap his head around what he had just seen. He couldn’t wrap his head around the moral debate the MLA generals had been having, either. They didn’t have a point, did they? Killing someone for your cause was never justified, with perhaps the exception of actual, organized warfare between nations, but then who got to decide what constituted a “nation?” What was war and what was terrorism? They called it the MLA War, after all...He didn't want to think about this. It was too disturbing, made him feel like he was sympathizing with murderers. Regardless, it was hard to believe that the two generals actually… cared anything about subtleties of morality, hard to believe the conversation he had participated in.

Ignoring the cognitive dissonance, the long and short of it was that Izuku could now be quite sure that his memory donor was Bit Weasel. He could have misinterpreted the situation, maybe. He was pretty confident he had it right. So, apparently Bit Weasel and Switcher didn’t usually get along, so much so that Chris was surprised to find them having a civil conversation. Interesting.

As if finally confirming that he remembered being a girl wasn’t distracting enough, there was the bunker from Izuku’s earlier dream. He could probably find it if he were careful. Should he, though? That memory had been… different. Small details, hidden cues, and his gut instinct said that this memory was of modern Japan, not something from the era of the MLA War, so… it was quite possibly the first of his real memories, in the sense that it might well depict something Izuku had done “himself” during his missing week.

Should he go back to the bunker? Should he tell someone more qualified where to find it? He would do it anonymously, of course. He couldn’t admit how he knew, couldn’t even hint at it by “stumbling” upon the location. Izuku had every reason to expect the--presumably old MLA--bunker was exactly where he remembered it to be, but in order to give directions to it he would have to go there himself first and that didn’t sound like a great idea. Maybe he should just forget about it. It had lain there undisturbed and unobtrusive year after year; why change the status quo?

He really, really, wanted to go there, though. It was… ridiculous, but he was so curious he could barely think straight. This was the first memory that had resurfaced that might be from Japan, from the time when Izuku was missing. He might now know whose memories he had obtained, but he still had no idea what he had done during his missing week or how or why. Going back to the bunker might reveal something or jar his memories more.

Was he… kidnapped by some modern MLA cell and used as a disposable pawn in a covert operation? That… that made a lot of sense, actually. Of all the possibilities… that was probably what had happened to him. Was he going to remember all of it at some point? It had taken like, a year, to see even that brief glimpse of his missing days… but would it all come back if he waited long enough? Or did he have to get hit in the head repeatedly in order to gain any new insight?

“Good evening, Midoriya,” Aizawa said, walking into the room slowly.

“Evening?” Indeed, upon glancing out the window he discovered that it was sunset already. “Huh.” Well, at least his head didn’t hurt anymore.

“Todoroki was quite upset about injuring you so seriously,” the teacher took a seat beside his bed. “He… may have accidentally said a lot of things he would not normally have let slip.” Izuku blinked dumbly. What was this about? “Could you tell me what happened with Endeavour before your match?”

Oh. Izuku had not expected Todoroki to say anything to Aizawa in the immediate future. Izuku, in Todoroki’s position, would have agonized for weeks over whether he should tell his teacher anything. The greenette answered, relaying exactly what he had heard, seen and done. Aizawa listened stoically. “Thank you, Midoriya,” he nodded. After a few moments of silence he added, “you did very well, by the way, in the Sports Festival. I was quite impressed.”

Really? He had thought his performance mediocre. “I didn’t stand a chance against Todoroki and with Shinsou…” he shook his head. He shouldn’t talk about that in front of Aizawa, it was--

“I expect his quirk must have been extremely disturbing to you,” the teacher said, not a hint of judgment.

Izuku considered not answering, then shrugged, “it wasn’t fair for him, really. He’s not--I m-mean, I’m sure people have been awful about his quirk his whole life, and it’s not his fault someone else with a similar ability did something nasty to me and I shouldn’t feel this way about it but I…” he sighed, unable to put his thoughts into words.

“Can’t help it,” Aizawa filled in. “It’s not your fault any more than it is Shinsou’s, you know. The most anyone could expect from you is conscious recognition that you aversion isn’t logical.”

Was that really all they could expect? Izuku had expected better from himself. “Thanks I suppose?”

“Mhm. Your mother should be here to pick you up shortly. I have a few disasters to attend to before I go home.”

“Sorry…” Somehow he was sure this was his fault.

As if reading his mind, Aizawa told him, “very few of my problems are your fault. Only one of these is even remotely related to you,” before departing.

Recovery Girl came to check on Izuku ten minutes later and cleared him to leave when his mother arrived. The greenette got out of bed and dressed to depart. He felt dizzy and exhausted, but other than that little worse for the wear.

“Hey nerd,” Kacchan called, trotting into the nurse’s office. Izuku’s mother walked in behind him.

“Hi, Kacchan,” Izuku said. “Hey, mom.”

His mother hugged him fiercely. “I was really worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” Izuku assured them. “Did you win, Kacchan?”

“Yeah,” he replied with a sharp-toothed grin. “Todoroki gave me a really good fight for it, but you know his quirk makes him hypothermic after a while. I wore ‘im down. Iida and Tokoyami are third and fourth. Iida took off right after the award ceremony, though. Family emergency or something.”

His family all worked in heroics, didn’t they? That didn’t sound good at all. “I hope nobody’s really hurt.”

“I didn’t see anything on the news,” Katsuki replied, “if one of Iida’s family got killed it would probably be on the news.” That was something at least. “Now let’s get out of here. I’m starving and I’m sure you are, too.”

“Now that you mention it…”

“I arranged to pick up some takeout on the way home,” Izuku’s mom said. “I figured you would all want to eat promptly.” Implied was that the Bakugou and Midoriya families would dine together that night.

Izuku found himself increasingly distracted as dinner progressed. The food was good and he was ravenous, but there was so much on his mind. Shinsou. Bunker. Bit Weasel. Todoroki. Kurogiri. Iida… It was too much. Everything felt completely out of control. There was nothing he could do about most of these things; he couldn’t even put into words exactly what the problem was in most cases. In the case of those few problems that he could actually articulate, there either wasn’t anything he could do about them or were far too many things he could do about them, none of which sounded like particularly good ideas.

Mechanically, Izuku answered a few questions about the Sports Festival from Mitsuki and from his mother. When they asked him if something was wrong he told them he was just, “drained and tired.”

Izuku couldn’t go on like this. He had to take charge of at least one thing, put his foot down and solve one of these problems, or he was going to lose it for real. He pulled Katsuki aside that evening as their parents talked over dessert. “I need you to come to Mandar with me this weekend.” His phone had informed him that the ward in question was about two hours away by train and bus.

Kacchan blinked. “Uh… why?”

“I told you I keep having weird dreams,” he started, “that might be memories.”

Katsuki raised an eyebrow. “Izuku…”

“I’m pretty sure that this was a memory from when I was missing, and it was in Mandar,” he blurted.

“And you’re not telling, like, Aizawa or the detective because…?”

Izuku gulped. “I…” Why wasn’t he telling anyone? Because he was afraid that they might doubt his loyalty? Afraid they might think him damaged and demand his expulsion from UA? Afraid they might decide he was useful and lock him away to interrogate or, worse, bring some secret, government agent with a different mind manipulation quirk to read him like a book and try to get information about the MLA (ancient or modern) from his brain? Afraid that he might remember something no one was meant to know, something that might get him or his companions killed? Yes. It was all of those things that forced him into silence. How many were rational fears? That was hard to say. “You’ll understand when we get there,” Izuku said instead. “Please?” He could go alone, but that would be incredibly reckless.

Kacchan took a deep breath through his nose and exhaled sharply. “Alright, nerd, but you are going to explain to me what’s going on, got it? All of it.”

He nodded. “I promise to explain if you promise not to tell anyone.”

Katsuki’s face twisted as if he had just swallowed a lemon. “Izuku.” He took a moment to collect his thoughts. “I’m really freakin’ worried about you. If… I can’t promise to keep quiet if I don’t know what I’m promising about ‘cause… let’s face it, there’s weird shit going on in your life and it might be time to consider, say, telling someone who can do something about it.”

It was hard to believe that he was talking to Kacchan, that his old friend had just said those words to him. Bakugou Katsuki being the voice of reason, arguing for Izuku to tell a “responsible adult” about his problems? It was borderline unbelievable… and it meant that Kacchan must be really, really worried. But there were so many things… Izuku couldn’t risk people finding out what was going on, what kinds of things he was seeing.

Some of his fears were definitely irrational, but some of them definitely were not. If Tsukauchi with his lie detecting quirk were to sit him down and say, “now, Midoriya, have these dreams influenced your attitudes towards the villains of the original MLA? Perhaps made you sympathetic to their cause?” and Izuku would have to say “maybe,” and who knew what would happen to him then? Was he going to go off and join some modern wanna be MLA cell, like some bizarre case of post-kidnapping Stockholm Syndrome? Of course not. Was he going to let someone get away with breaking the law just because Izuku remembered being an integral part of the MLA and thinking that law was immoral? Of course not. Would the detective, would UA, would his friends, teachers, the Hero Public Safety Commission, believe Izuku when he made those assertions? Maybe, maybe not.

“Maybe” wasn’t enough for him to risk all of his dreams. Izuku’d managed to make it into the hero course against the odds and he wasn’t about to lose his place now, no matter what. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a contrary little voice pointed out that the longer Izuku waited to reveal what he knew, the more suspicion would be cast upon his allegiances when the truth eventually came out (for inconvenient truths were wont to surface at the worst times). The contrary voice cast its ballot for “tell Kacchan everything.” Izuku soundly outvoted this rebellious part of his personality.

Sighing, Izuku said, “never mind, Kacchan. It wasn’t that important, anyway.”

“Hey, nerd, don’t be like that!” Katsuki growled.

“N-no. Really, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. It’s just weird dreams, after all.”

“Izuku! Don’t you fucking dare. Mandar. What happened to you in Mandar? Why do you want me to go with you?”

Perhaps a half truth would suffice, get Kacchan to stop asking questions. God, he shouldn’t have said anything at all. “I just saw that that’s the city I was in. I wanted to see if the place I remember walking actually exists, but, well, satellite maps are a thing so I guess I don’t really need to go there, anyway.” He did need to go there, though. He would have to go alone, and he would have to be really careful to make sure Katsuki didn’t follow him...

The blonde growled, sparking his palms. “God damn it, nerd! I know you’re lying! Argh! You suck for putting me in this position. Fine! I’d rather promise not to tell even if it’s totally screwed up and an adult really needs to know. Better that than worry about you going it alone up against who the hell knows what kind of odds. You hear me? I won’t tell, promise, but when you go to Mandar, you’re going to take me with you. Understand?”

That deescalated quickly. “Uh. Y-yeah. This Sunday.”

Katsuki nodded, growling grudgingly. “Promising not to tell doesn’t mean I won’t nag you to tell someone yourself, though.”

Well, fair enough.

Chapter Text

Aizawa began writing names and numbers on the board. “These are the number of internship offers each of you have received,” he told the class. Bakugou had several thousand. Todoroki, “keep calling me “Zuko,” please,” Shouto had a similarly large number of offers. Iida and Tokoyami had several hundred each. The rest of them had a few dozen at most, and some students didn’t have any at all. Ojiro and Shouji had a few, not as many as Izuku, though. He had twenty-seven.

The greenette wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Some pessimistic part of his mind had, perhaps, expected no offers whatsoever whereas the realistic part of his mind had assured him he would have at least a handful given that he made it to the second round of the final tournament and did not hopelessly embarrass himself in his fight against Todoroki; he lost, true, as he was destined to, but demonstrated some degree both of agility and persistence. There was the issue that, more likely than not, those who had put forth offers to Izuku hadn’t the slightest idea he was quirkless. That could be… problematic. He would have to be very careful about who he chose to work with. He should probably ask Aizawa for advice about which heroes would tolerate a quirkless student.

“The rest of you will have to pick from the master list of agencies that agree to take students from UA,” Aizawa told them. “Choose carefully. This isn’t an opportunity you’ll get again. I know third years who sorely regret their first year internship decisions to this very day.”

“No pressure,” Kirishima muttered under his breath. Kacchan snorted.

Lunch saw the entirety of class 1-A and 1-B absently nibbling on their food while flipping through their offer packets. “I can’t believe they printed out all six thousand offers for you,” Izuku ribbed Katsuki, looking at the ridiculously thick packet.

“Check the font size,” Kacchan held up the paper with an unamused glower. Izuku squinted, trying to read the tiny type.

“Why didn’t they just email these to us?” Ojiro wondered. “It’s not like I have many offers but still, why did they do this? Why?”

“Yeah. I could have at least searched for names in a god damned PDF,” Katsuki groused. “I know I shouldn’t be complaining about my good luck--”

“Then don’t,” Ojiro, Shouji and Izuku interrupted in tandem. The Sports Festival victor fell silent.

“I don’t think I know many of these heroes,” Izuku hummed, flipping through his packet. That was saying something. He was, as Kacchan so often said, a nerd.

“Underground?” Shouji asked.

“And undercover,” Izuku nodded. “In fact, a lot of them are undercover heroes… I’d never really considered that as a career but now that someone mentions it… it would probably be a good move for me.”

“Why?” asked Ojiro, confused.

“Because it’s not so difficult to pretend to have a useless quirk, like natural immunity to certain diseases, slowed or accelerated aging, even something ridiculous like feeling confident no matter how over or under dressed you are, but it can be hard to pretend not to have a quirk you do have because people use them instinctively.”

Kacchan considered this. “Yeah, fair points. I would really prefer it if you chose a safer career path, nerd, not because you’re going to be bad at your job or anything but because undercover work is really dangerous, even compared to frontline and I…” he trailed off before being forced to admit he cared about someone.

“I’ve heard that, too,” Ojiro said, also looking a bit nervous.

“Depends on the kind of missions you accept,” Izuku replied, “what kind of groups you work to infiltrate. It’s not like there’s any kind of heroics that’s really safe. Even rescue heroes lead hazardous lives.”

It was at that point that the four of them realized they had spent most of lunch reading their offers instead of eating and they had better pick up the pace or go hungry to afternoon lessons. Izuku shoveled food into his mouth.

As they arrived back in class, Izuku finally caught up with Iida and then realized he wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Hey, uh, Iida? I don’t want to… to overstep but I just wanted to say I’m really glad to hear your brother’s going to be alright.”

The class president nodded gravely. “Thank you, Midoriya. He was incredibly lucky. Stain… apparently lost interest and left without dealing the final blow he intended. I had planned to intern with my brother,” he continued, “but it will be several weeks before he is recovered enough to return to work. I will have to find…” a spark of vengeful fire glittered in the student’s eyes, “alternative arrangements.”

“Sorry about that, Iida,” Izuku said cautiously. “Be safe, alright? And wish your brother well for me?”

“Of course.” The hollow tone made Izuku incredibly nervous.

“Uh… I-ida? Are you…” At that moment Aizawa called the class to order and Izuku scrambled for his chair. They never managed to finish their conversation.

Shinsou did not seek Izuku out. The greenette didn’t see the general education student again until after internships.

“Okay, nerd, this is just getting creepy,” Katsuki was whispering, like he was legitimately freaked out… and maybe he was. The two of them hadn’t spoken much on the ride to Mandar. There were too many ears on the train, fewer on the bus, but still enough to make talking freely inadvisable. “How do you… where are we going?”

“I’m not totally sure,” Izuku said. His memory of the dream, though, was vivid enough to guide him between the trees. Things had changed a bit in the past year and the seasons weren’t a perfect match either, but he was confident he knew the way.

Here it was, the clearing. “We’re looking for a hatch in the ground,” the greenette said. He couldn’t tell exactly where it had been… Izuku pulled out a knife (not a switchblade, a blunt kitchen knife) and began stabbing the dirt, trying to imitate the actions he had taken during his possession.

The click of metal on metal heralded success. “Here it is,” Izuku and a rather pale Katsuki worked to unveil the trapdoor hidden beneath the dirt. They heaved and the hinges creaked in annoyance before inching open. They should have brought some WD-40.

“What in the world is this?” Kacchan hissed, eyes wide.

Izuku had promised to tell him, hadn’t he? “It’s a bunker,” he said, “from the Meta Liberation Army War. Here. I brought an electric lantern on a string for you to wear around your neck. I’m going to tie a rope around that tree,” he set about doing so, “just in case there’s a problem with the ladder when we try to climb back out.”

“Why are we going into an old MLA bunker?” Kacchan asked, sounding only marginally less freaked out as he gazed down into the pitch darkness of the slim hole they had uncovered.

Why was he doing this? “I want to see if I can figure out what I was doing here the first time, or jog my memory or something,” Izuku said eventually. “And I don’t want to admit to anyone at UA or in the police that I remember being here, because… well…”

“Well what, nerd?” Katsuki asked as Izuku switched on his lantern and began to clamber down into the darkness, the meager light he brought with him chasing the ancient shadows back. The intense scent of aging dust and cold earth was nearly overwhelming. Yes… he remembered this. He felt as if he could take a casual step in a fourth dimension and find himself a year in the past, descending this ladder for the first time. It was all right here, so close!

“I’ve been having dreams,” Izuku began at last.

“Yeah, that I know, you’ve said before that you didn’t want to talk about them beca--good god that is a hell of a lot of guns!”

“Well. Yes?” Of course there were a lot of guns. This was the bunker of a group that carried out a successful guerrilla war against dozens of countries for years. The history books never said as much, but Izuku’s own research had made it evident that the MLA had won for all intents in purposes in a number of countries, not just Costa Rica and Switzerland where the MLA ceased hostilities when an acceptable compromise was reached about the treatment of meta humans but also in Russia in the sense that the government was at least forced to stop sending bus loads of meta humans that annoyed them off to labor camps in Siberia to die. That was beside the point, though; the point was Izuku would have been surprised if there were any fewer guns.

“This place looks like it’s been abandoned since the end of the war, ‘Zuku. Check the spiderwebs.” Katsuki’s train of thought had been quite thoroughly derailed and that was probably for the best.

“Yeah,” Izuku agreed. “I remember knowing that… they were going to the last stand, to Utapa. They knew they were never going to make it back… it was our Shiroyama, five hundred samurai against thousands of the imperial forces…”

““Our?”” Katsuki demanded.

“Oh god why did I say that?” Izuku pulled at his hair, trying to stifle the panic. Why? He wasn’t… he hadn’t been there. He didn’t even remember being there, at Utapa, although chances were he was going to see the last stand in a memory at some point. Was his personality being overwritten? Was this “our” the first sign or was he just… starting to think of himself as a member of the old MLA? He’d spent so much time with these people. He couldn’t help but think of Chris as a friend, not just a friend of Bit Weasel but as a friend of Izuku. God, what was happening to him?

“Calm down, nerd,” Katsuki said, clearly far from calm himself but doing his best. “I couldn’t understand half of that. Why are you so freaked out about saying “our?” I mean it was weird, but not like lose your freakin’ mind weird.”

It was time to come out and say it. He couldn’t keep doing… he couldn’t do this anymore. He had to come clean. “I’ve been having dreams where I am Bit Weasel, one of Destro’s generals from the Meta Liberation Army. They’re so vivid it’s like I was there and I… Chris was the name I knew him by first and I got to know him before I had any idea who he was and we were having snowball fights and he wasn’t acting like a megalomaniac terrorist at all and then Bit Weasel and Switcher were pranking him and it was… it was… I like Destro, Kacchan, I… I like a lot of them and I can’t like them! They’re supposed to be monsters but they weren’t but even though they weren’t monsters they were still awful! They still fought against the government, still killed people and carried out terrorist attacks and were against everything that modern heroics stands for and I… and I-- if anyone finds out I feel this way they’ll throw me out of UA at best and maybe lock me in some kind of brain eating dungeon at worst and I don’t know what to do Kacchan! I don’t know what they used me for but it must have been bad and it was probably a modern MLA wannabe cell that did it if they knew about this place and the memories are all from Bit Weasel and I should tell someone what I know but I--but I can’t! I can’t! They’ll take everything from me.” He gasped a breath at last, tears streaming down his face. He threw his arms around Kacchan’s neck and sobbed brokenly into his old friend-turned-tormentor-turned-best friend’s shirt.

Katsuki--apparently stunned speechless and stony--eventually leaned forward, wrapping his arms around Izuku’s shoulders. “You have all the luck, nerd,” he whispered. Izuku focused on sobbing, hoping some of the emotions would drain away with the tears. It wasn’t working. “I don’t know what to do nerd. If I were you, I wouldn’t know what to do, either but… I’m not sure I would have told me and I think it’s a damn good thing you decided to do that. At least I get it now.” That twisted up set of sentences was a bit difficult to understand, but the sentiment was appreciated.

Izuku slowly caught his breath, eyes stinging from the tears shed. “Sorry, Kacchan,” he muttered, letting his friend go. Katsuki never much liked being touched.

“You’ve got more important things to worry about than my general objection to being hugged,” Katsuki grumbled, reaching forward to ruffle the greenette’s hair. “Alright. We came here to look around. Let’s look. What’s this way?”

They stepped into the second room, the one with the partition. Katsuki rubbed his finger across the table where battle plans would have been discussed, skin coming away dusty. “Three more doors huh?” The blonde opened the first. “Huh. Generator closet… doesn’t look like even that crazy support student would be able to get this thing working, though.”

“I bet she could,” Izuku said, realizing with a start that Izuku had a small chance of being able to get the generator running. It had been sealed away, safe from the elements, and it was well made in its day. There shouldn’t be too much corrosion. The fuel would have all long since gone bad, but it wouldn’t be hard to get more. Apparently some basic knowledge of heavy machinery was granted to him by Bit Weasel’s memories, or however that skill transfer thing worked. This particular skill set wasn’t that surprising. “I wonder if I would know how to program computers,” Izuku mused, closing the generator closet and opening the second, small door. “Huh. Privy.” He closed that closet immediately.

The third and final door led to the bunks. All the foot lockers were neatly arranged at the foot of the pristine beds with one exception. Izuku walked to the far right bottom bunk, the light of his lantern casting long, dangling shadows in an eerie forest on the unfinished walls. All the other bunk beds were covered in decades of cobwebs, but not this one, and something about it… somehow Izuku was sure. “I slept here,” he said, taking a seat on the blue, cotton blanket and leaning back, laying his head down on the pillow and staring up at the slats that supported the mattress above him.

What had he thought about when he lay here? The greenette closed his eyes and drifted slowly away in the silence. All he could hear was his own breathing--cold. Quiet. His heart ached so fiercely he couldn’t help but think there was something physically broken within his chest. Tears pricked in his eyes… He longed desperately for the good days, for the war. They had always thought the days of the war were the worst days, the worst times they would ever experience in their lives and then, someday, the battles would end--whether the MLA won or lost--and the death and the violence and crying and worrying sick over friends gone away to battle would be over and there would be at least some havens on this god forsaken planet because look, if New Zealand could have a meta prime minister and peace and equality in the streets, a lovely balance even more stable than that Costa Rica or Switzerland had achieved, then there would be at least some happy societies rising in the aftermath.

“We thought the war would be the bad days,” he murmured. Was he dreaming? He… was, wasn’t he? Sort of? He was barely asleep, in some kind of half-conscious trance. Was he speaking aloud? Could Kacchan hear all of this? “But nothing good came afterwards, and everyone bought it when they said “committed suicide in prison” as if we didn’t have the will, as if we weren’t going to break them out and whisk them away to the Isles… as if there were a reason for suicide. That god damned book, too… what kind of drugs they must have pumped into him to get the “Book of Destro.” They made a monster and now they reap the rewards… the sharp teeth of those who worship a monster rather than honoring a flawed human who hoped to free other flawed humans… none of us managed to get through the war without being twisted a bit.” Tears continued to stream down his face. “They were the good days when at least we had each other if only to shed blood side by side. There’s no one anymore, no one I love left… but they can’t have her. You can’t keep her any longer, Soul Stealer. I’ll make you give her back.”

Izuku woke groggily. He had, apparently, been “asleep” in the most general sense of the word. Katsuki was staring at him, a piece of ragged paper and pen in his hand. “I wrote down all the stuff you said, nerd,” he muttered, handing the note over.

“So I was actually talking?” Izuku asked, nervously.

“Yeah but it… It was really damn clear that it wasn’t you talking that you were… just reciting something you’d heard someone else say? If that makes sense? It was like hearing a teacher read some famous nutcase’s speech out of a textbook.”

“Oh.” Izuku scanned the transcript. “That was… I mean, that was why I came here in the first place. I was hoping something like this might happen but…”

“That was creepy as fuck and I hope I never see you do it again,” the blonde said dead pan.

“Soul Stealer,” Izuku muttered. “Soul Stealer? I could hear the capitals, so it’s a name, or a title. Who… what does that mean? And I’ll make you give her back? Is she--it sounds like “she” is dead, which doesn’t narrow down the options much. All the MLA leadership are dead, I think, except Switcher and Switcher’s a he and in the Rebel Isles, and there’s no guarantee “she” was in the MLA at all… So who’s the Soul Stealer and who is “she?””

“I have no clue, ‘Zuku,” Katsuki sighed. “That… that was rough to hear. You sounded kind of creepily heartbroken when you were talking about the war being the good days and about,” he paused, shifting uncomfortably, “everyone you love being dead. I can’t… you’re this general Bit Weasel? Or that’s who was talking to me? Who you were quoting?”

“Maybe,” Izuku whispered. “Maybe not. I know that my memories belong to Bit Weasel, or at least I’m nearly certain they do, but even if she survived the war, and that is an “if,” unless she has some kind of longevity aspect to her quirk or something similar she’s dead by now but…”

“Sure sounded like you were speaking from the perspective of someone who actually lived through the war,” Katsuki said.

“It looks that way,” the greenette agreed. “But it’s possible that I was just seeing another memory from decades ago of Bit Weasel being miserable about how the war ended and missing her friends.”

Cold silence settled over the two for a time as Izuku mulled over each and every word of his recited message. “I hope I’m not going to start talking in my sleep all the time,” he mumbled.

“Yeah. Let’s hope not. We might… if that’s all you think you’re going to get we might want to get out of here now. It’s a long walk and ride home.”

“Yeah. One moment,” Izuku said, walking to the end of the bed. This footlocker, too… someone had opened this and not bothered to close the lock again. Presumably “someone” was Izuku. He pulled the latch, opened the case…

Three sets of clothes (two civilian sets and one set of fatigues with the MLA generals’ insignia) flashlights, knives, handguns, toiletries, a battered copy of The Art of War, an even more battered copy of The Silmarillion, a still more battered copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a collection of charcoals… Izuku picked up the accompanying sketchbook with trembling hands. In the harsh, false daylight of his lantern, he regarded the very first image: a roughly cross hatched tree frog. Izuku thought of Asui and smiled. The next image was much more carefully done; he might call it museum quality. Izuku found himself crying yet again and leaned back quickly to prevent any tears from falling on the precious, yellowing paper. “Who is that, nerd?” Katsuki asked quietly.

“That’s Chris,” Izuku whispered, pointing to the unamused man. “And the excitable girl hanging over his shoulder, trying to get him to loosen up and have a drink,” it was quiet evident from the handful of carefully chosen background details that this was what was going on, “is Kuma. I’m taking this notebook with me. This is mine now.”

“Alright then. Let’s get out of here. This place is really freakin’ creepy and it’s getting late already.”

“I wonder whose footlocker this was,” Izuku said, snapping the lock closed. “Someone of significant rank, certainly, to have seen those two together, and a general’s insignia. I suppose… this might well have been Bit Weasel’s sketchbook. She was a native English speaker so the reading material would make sense…” There was no way to know for sure, but it would fit with the rest of his suppositions.

He had so many piece to the puzzle, dozens of them now and yet he just couldn’t seem to make them fit together. “There’s something I haven’t seen yet,” he muttered as he made his way back to the ladder, Kacchan encouraging him to hurry up, as if demons might pursue them if they lingered too long below ground. “There’s something huge, a gaping chasm at the heart of it that I can’t fill because there’s some piece of information that I can’t even begin to guess at…” He was going to find out. One of these days, either in a dream or in research, he was going to stumble upon one of the pieces that lay within that black hole and it was all going to come crashing together and then… finally he would know who he was again.

Chapter Text

“Who’s this?” Kacchan asked, pointing vaguely to the next page of the sketchbook. Izuku, sitting on his bedroom floor with the blonde to his right, had been flipping through the drawings reverently for about fifteen minutes now. He was going to have to find an appropriate place in his room to hide it. Perhaps under his bed somewhere? Disguised among boxes of hero merchandise?

“That’s Arch, Alexey Osinov,” Izuku provided. This was a quick sketch and the man was somewhat difficult to recognize. “He died in the war. No one really knows details. I think that the stories saying he was raiding a Siberian labor camp are probably false? Russia had been forced to stop doing those kinds of things by then and conflict with the MLA was deescalating, but it’s possible there was a black site…”

“Who’s this?” Kacchan asked immediately as Izuku turned the page.

The greenette shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Huh? Don’t ya’ know everyone? I mean, you were sort of one of their commanders, right?”

“N-no, Kacchan. It’s not like that at all. I told you I have dreams but I only know what I see in them. There’s no broader context. It took me forever to even figure out that I was Bit Weasel, especially since there’s the changeling Switcher so even if I saw someone’s face I couldn’t be sure it was actually them.”

“Huh. Okay… sure?” the blonde threw his hands up. “What the hell happened to you nerd?”

Izuku sighed, shaking his head. “I’m going to find out. It’s just a matter of time at this point. I’m remembering more and more.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to at least tell Aizawa? You trust the guy, right?”

“I mean… yeah but… I--he’ll--maybe he wouldn’t tell if I asked him not to? But he sort of has to, right, if it seems like I might be... you know what I mean and I don’t want to put him in that position and I don’t want to give someone the chance--I can’t. I just can’t.”

Kacchan sighed. “What was he like?”

“Uh… who?”

“Destro.”

How to put that into words… “He was a good sport when Kuma destroyed us both in snowball fights.”

The blonde blinked. “Go on.”

“Chris was a hard worker, studying constantly for a pair of demanding majors and excelling. He was pretending to be quirkless when I met him. So was I--I mean Bit Weasel, for that matter, and Kuma, too. No one seems to know what Kuma’s quirk was, but she definitely had one. Uh… Chris, yeah. He was realistic. He understood that the world was unfair and he tried to live with it until it killed someone he loved and he cried his eyes out and then got angry enough to fight. He was blunt, had a dry sense of humor, took most things in stride and didn’t mind being the butt of a joke so long as it was a good one. He liked mecha anime but he would yell at the characters “don’t be an idiot” and things like that and we would have to “shush” him. You couldn’t take him to a movie because he’d constantly whisper in your ear about how stupid the characters were being or how something was inaccurate.” Izuku had witnessed, many months ago, an attempt to take Destro to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers and mostly forgotten about it because it had been so vague. “He had no patience for fools, in fantasy or in real life.” The greenette felt a familiar ache in his chest return and tried to ignore it.

Kacchan considered all of this. “That’s… got nothing in common with anything I have ever heard or thought.”

“No. The victors write history, you know. I wonder… if I were to go to New Zealand, Switzerland, Costa Rica, the US, or Canada whether it would be easier to find accurate information about the MLA. The war either ended at a negotiating table in all those places or never happened at all. The MLA never fought Canada or the US; there was too much internal political turmoil going on for America to pay much attention to the MLA War and quirk regulation was declared unconstitutional there so the MLA had no reason to be angry with the US, not that anyone in their right mind would try to fight America. That’s like getting involved in a land war in Asia…” Katsuki snorted. “Sorry, I’m rambling again.”

Kacchan shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. It’s… interesting, and given what’s going on in your life right now I need to know about it.”

“W-why?”

The blonde gave him an exasperated look. “So I can help you, you idiot. Can’t do much if I don’t know anything about what the hell’s going on.”

“Oh.”

“Did you not expect help? Clearly you did or you wouldn’t have asked me to come with you in the first place, or was I just your least bad option?”

“U-uhh…” Izuku had expected help, but he had expected minimum help. He’d figured Kacchan would run away from him as fast as possible at the first opportunity although he had trusted his old friend to keep his silence.

His face must have been easy to read because Katsuki raised an eyebrow then said, “have a little faith, nerd. So. What now?”

“I… guess we go to internships and try to forget about this for the moment?” Izuku was getting very good at putting aside his ongoing personal crises to focus on immediate necessities.

“What about that bunker? Should we… no, there’s no way to say where it is without explaining how we found the damn thing…”

Izuku shook his head. “I don’t think there’s reason to tell anyone. It’s stood alone for decades. Why disturb it now?”

“’Cause there’s a hell of a lot of guns down there and if you knew where it was when you were possessed then someone else knows, too.”

“They could have taken those weapons at any time,” Izuku pointed out. “I don’t think anyone ever plans to go back down there, Kacchan and… it’s like a tomb, almost. That’s how it feels. I don’t want to disturb the silence.” The ghosts deserved their peace.

Katsuki blinked, considering this. “Fair points I suppose. Not like people can’t get illegal weapons other places, anyway. Fine. On to worrying about internships I guess.”

“Still haven’t chosen a mentor?”

“I’m working on it, nerd. What about you?”

“Not quite sure yet. Kesagiri Man, maybe, or perhaps False Flag or Undermine,” Izuku replied.

“Don’t think I’ve heard of them.”

“They mostly do underground and undercover work. Sometimes Kesagiri Man joins teams of frontliners, but not often. Undermine does some underground and undercover work. False Flag is exclusively an undercover hero. No one seems to have any idea what she looks like or what her quirk is.”

“Sounds like some interesting choices. I’m thinking of interning with Best Jeanist.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. The offer letter was really weird, though.”

“In what sense?”

“Well, at the bottom there’s a post script where it informs me that, should I accept this offer, I acknowledge the “clear and very present risk of being tied to a chair while Best Jeanist styles your hair for the better part of an hour every day.””

Izuku blinked. “Who… wrote that?”

“I think it was probably the man himself, which makes it extra weird? Maybe he’s just tired of interns complaining when he ties them to chairs and gives them Mohawks or whatever and wants to make sure the next victim can’t bitch at him?”

“Kacchan,” Izuku said, trying not to burst into guffaws, “I think you have to take that offer just to figure out what’s going on with that.”

Katsuki sighed. “Maybe, but I don’t like being tied to chairs.”

“When have you ever been tied to a chair?”

“You don’t know everything about me, nerd.”

The last order of business before internships was picking hero names. Midnight was running the class because Aizawa was “patently terrible at this.” Izuku had spent a good long time thinking about his code name even though monikers didn’t matter so much for underground and undercover operatives. Eraserhead was in the minority in that his name actually reflected his power; typically underground names were intentionally chosen so as to have nothing to do with one’s abilities. Code names were used to identify operatives but not meant to provide any information either to fans or foes. Izuku had received internship offers from a few heroes whose names reflected their abilities and fighting styles such as Kesagiri Man and Mirrorist. He had more offers from people with names like False Flag, Agent 57, Shuffleboard, Ratatoskr (whose powers were in no ways related to squirrels or climbing the World Tree) and Dr. Noble.

Anyway, there was far less pressure on Izuku than on his classmates destined for frontline and rescue work. “I totally forgot about this,” Kacchan swore profusely under his breath. “I haven’t thought about this in like, a whole year!” Kirishima, who had overheard this, attempted to stifle his laughter. “Oh, shut up,” the blonde groused at the red head. Meanwhile, Ashido named herself “Alien Queen.” Apparently Aoyama was going to be “Cannot Stop Twinkling” and Izuku had a premonition about the unfavorable way that was going to be abbreviated in years to come.

“Want to be Thundercracker?” Izuku asked Kacchan, not because he thought that was a particularly fitting name but because sometimes it was necessary to prime the pump of another’s creative process.

“Hm… no, doesn’t…” Kacchan worried his lip, staring at his whiteboard.

“Midoriya?” Midnight called him up.

“Fossa,” he answered, showing his whiteboard. Underground and undercover heroes usually did not have associated titles like “The Martial Arts Hero” or “The Many Limbed Hero” and Izuku didn’t feel the need to come up with one. He had spent a long time thinking about all the relatives of mongooses and weasels--small but agile and startlingly efficient creatures much as Izuku strove to be--trying to decide which name to borrow. Eventually, he decided that the largest and most ferocious predator of Madagascar would serve him well.

Midnight considered this. “You’re going to be underground or undercover, correct?”

“I am.”

“This will be perfect, then. Bakugou?”

Kacchan held up a whiteboard that read, “C4.”

“Hmmm…” Midnight considered. “I guess it’s alright? I think you could probably find something catchier and more fitting for a quirk like yours. You plan to be frontline, I believe?”

“Yeah I… I just forgot to think about it.” Kacchan actually blushed.

A few more classmates settled on their names. Iida was using his first name for now. Given that the “Ingenium” name was passed down through the family (Iida’s grandfather had taken it first) perhaps the class president was next in line for that or another heritable title and intended to wait on naming. Todoroki had decided to be “The Frosty Hero: Zuko.” Midnight had gently tried to talk him out of it, but Todoroki was not to be deterred. The grin on his face made it evident he was convinced all future pain caused by such a name would be well worth it for the absolute conniption fit his father would have.

Kacchan came back to the front of the class with a sign that read, “The Dynamite Hero: Crater” and this time Midnight approved. It would be a good name. Crater was a sharp, powerful, catchy phrase that would serve a frontliner well.

“Wish I’d known to start thinking about that yesterday,” Kacchan sighed as they went to lunch. “And now internships are practically here…”

“Did you decide on your mentor?” Izuku asked.

“I figured I’ll go with Best Jeanist… I can survive being tied to a chair for an hour each day. I’ll just bring a book or something.”

Izuku snorted. “I decided to intern with Kesagiri Man. Aizawa said that he was most likely to be tolerant of a quirkless individual, or, well, Aizawa doesn’t know most of the other people who made me offers but he knows Kesagiri Man wouldn’t care.”

“Good for you, nerd. Keep in touch alright?”

“Of course. I imagine Ojiro and Shouji will want to keep track of us, too.”

“There’s going to be a lot of text messages flying around next week.”

Indeed.

Fighting with a full fledged sword was not at all the same as fighting with a long knife. Izuku did not, apparently, instinctually know how to use a katana, but Kesagiri said he was picking it up startlingly quickly, “likely due to your previous training.”

Izuku had arrived at the nondescript building on the first day of internships, stared at the address on “Cherry Blossom Calligraphy School” then at the identical address on his offer letter and wondered where it had all gone wrong. A moment later a moderately tall, raven haired and hook nosed man in plain clothes had stepped out, greeted him, pulled him inside and handed him a sword. Izuku had not managed to even introduce himself before he was busy with drills. Presumably the man who had greeted him was Kesagiri himself. The man didn’t actually have sidekicks, did he?

The practicing went on with minimal commentary for a full two hours. Izuku, not accustomed to carrying such a heavy weapon for such spans of time, felt his arms shaking and faltering. His de facto drill sergeant noticed as well and called for training to end.

“You really know your footwork,” the man said, nodding. “You are accustomed to smaller blades, I presume?”

“Yes, uh…”

“I am Kesagiri Man. You can call me Konno. Let’s adjourn to the kitchenette for now.” The kitchenette looked a lot like Izuku’s kitchen at home, all be it more modern and so clean it sparkled. Everything was sparkly and modern. The underground hero’s agency didn’t much look like a hero agency and that was the point. The windows were one-way, so anyone regarding the “Calligraphy School” from the outside would not be able to see the large, open practice room, the storage closets full of equipment or the spiral stairs descending into the basement. Izuku imagined there was probably a panic room downstairs as well as an office and perhaps a records closet.

“So,” said the hero, passing Izuku a bottle of water retrieved from a small refrigerator, “where did you train originally?”

“Ah.” Somehow Izuku had assumed his mentor would know already, but of course he didn’t. How could he? “T-that’s a w-weird story.” There was nothing for it but to be honest. “In my senior year of junior high I disappeared for a week. When I came back I had no memory of anything that occurred, but I suddenly knew how to fight and use weapons.” Konno blinked. “The police never figured out what happened to me, other than I was possessed and used as some sort of... vigilante commando. I-I can get detective Tsukauchi to tell you if you don’t believe me, I--”

Konno held up a hand. “No need. I remember hearing about your case. I wasn’t directly involved, but the rumor mill grinds quickly in the underground and undercover circles. I have , in fact, heard of possession quirks that can transfer skills. One villain I fought, Lady Violet Eyes, had that ability. It didn’t work on the scale that you have experienced, but it was the same general ideas.”

“I’ve never heard of her,” Izuku mumbled. “I’ve spent a lot of time,” he admitted, “trying to figure out what happened to me but I never found mention of a quirk that could transfer muscle memory permanently like this.”

“What is your quirk?” Konno asked. “I would have mistaken the weapon mastery for your ability had you not told me otherwise.”

“I don’t have one,” Izuku replied. Aizawa had said Kesagiri Man was unlikely to care, but it was still a bitter sentence to speak. The greenette fidgeted, chewing on his lip.

Konno nodded. “Well, that makes things easy in some ways. Do you know what mine is?”

“Combat Calculation,” Izuku recited. He had managed to dig up the information from an… admittedly very sketchy chatroom. “You instinctively know what the best attack or defense is when in close combat.”

“More or less,” Konno nodded. “I know instinctively the overall odds that I, or my opponent, wins the fight and have a similar instinct for how likely the attack or defense I am about to make is to succeed, but I don’t necessarily know what the best action would be. Just like you, I depend on training that has nothing to do with a quirk in order to do my job.”

Aizawa had been correct; this was a perfect internship for Izuku. “So, our plan for the week,” Kesagiri began, “is going to depend on what you want to experience. You are aware that I mostly work underground or undercover. Occasionally you’ll see me working frontline. I always wear a bag over my head.” Izuku stifled his snort. Kesagiri Man’s actual hero costume could be described that way, but the greenette hadn’t expected to hear that from the outfit’s owner, let alone in that perfectly humorless tone.

“I considered wearing a bag over my head at the Sports Festival,” Izuku admitted. “I don’t know what happened to me during my missing week. I hoped no one would recognize me…”

“It is a valid strategy,” Konno agreed. “Lottery winners in the middle east often wear bags over their heads to protect their identities.” Alright… sure. It was impossible to tell when this man was joking. “I presume you do not plan to work frontline. It would be a poor fit. Are you interested in underground work or undercover work?”

“Both, but I have had more exposure to underground work because Eraserhead is my homeroom teacher this year.”

“So it would be fitting to give you some insight into how the undercover world works,” the hero nodded, considering carefully. “Today we will just get to know each other. We can practice some more this afternoon after you have a chance to rest. I will also tell you about how a solo hero manages an agency of one. Tomorrow evening, if you agree, I will take you to the Hosu Cage Matches. It is an excellent place to gather information about what is going on in the underworld. There will be many petty villains there. More intelligent and capable villains stay away because they realize that such venues are also frequented by undercover heroes.” Izuku needed a notebook now. This was so much information and he had nothing to write on! “There are going to be a large number of rules that you will have to follow while we are in the thick of things. I will go over them with you tomorrow. You will need to obey them to the letter, no questions asked, understand?” Izuku nodded. “Alright. Now, I need to make a purchase from a support company. There is a good deal of paperwork and a few phone calls involved. You will doubtless need to do things like this yourself someday, so I will show you the process.”

“Let me get my notebook,” Izuku said. Where had his bag ended up?

Chapter Text

“Your current costume is great for underground work,” Konno said, assessing the material, “but where we will be going tonight we need to not look like heroes.” Izuku nodded. “It appears that the light armored layer will fit under civilian clothes as long as those clothes are reasonably loose.”

Izuku nodded. “I brought a few things with me for the purpose.”

“The leather jacket might be a bit much,” Kesagiri Man decided. “Try the black jean jacket. I think that will do.” Izuku nodded. “You dyed your hair black at the Sports Festival, so a different color will serve best here. A deep blue might be appropriate. After that, we will see about concealing weapons for you with this outfit.”

Once both had selected their wardrobe for the evening, Izuku was sent back to his hotel room to nap until seven in the evening at which point he would meet Konno at the train station to ride to Hosu. “A tired operative is a sloppy operative. Always remember to take care of yourself first in these kinds of missions, or you may well doom yourself and numerous others around you.” It was sobering advice and it seemed that, sometimes, being selfless in undercover work required one to be incredibly selfish.

The hero and intern met up at the station without mishap and took the train in silence until Hosu approached. “What is your name?” Konno asked him.

“Mihara Izuho, but I will only give my first name.”

“And who am I?”

“Crane.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“That is personal information.”

“What is my job?”

“You are a “shipping director.”” Izuku answered.

“How do we know each other?”

“A family member of mine is a business associate of yours.”

“You remember the rules?”

“Stay with you, speak to no one unless I am addressed or you introduce me. Never throw the first punch. Never respond to an insult. Do not raise any objection to violence I may witness. Muffle my reactions as much as possible. Be polite; sir and ma’am should be used for everyone unless I am informed otherwise.” Izuku had been assured that the Hosu Cage Fights were rather tame as far as underworld events went and, on the handful of occasions that heroes or police had been identified in their midst in the past, the crowds had merely thrown the individuals out and moved the fight locations. Furthermore, to Kesagiri’s knowledge no one had ever been killed in the pits at Hosu. “Never, ever say “that’s illegal” or anything along those lines. If someone attacks me, fight back decisively but do not draw a weapon unless the attacker draws one first. If we are separated, immediately return to the door where we entered and stay within sight of the bouncer there until you come find me. In case of absolute disaster, run for the nearest train station and do not look back.”

“Good. This is our stop. Let’s go.”

After a thirty minute walk, Izuku found himself in the heart of the warehouse district. Konno approached a nondescript side door and rapped on it twice, then another three times, then four times. Slowly, the heavy door creaked open and a man with a truly impressive grizzly bear mutation looked them over. Yelling and a sickening cracking sound echoed out from the musty interior. Konno flashed a significant wad of cash. “Looking to lay some stakes, if you know what I mean.” He passed a few bills to the bouncer who nodded and admitted them.

Izuku followed his mentor inside. Funny, he hadn’t been nervous on the way here but now, a mongoose stepping into a den of vipers, he was terrified. Some of it must show on his face. Hopefully it wasn’t so much as to arouse suspicion… and it wasn’t only terror, was it? There was a good portion of excitement mixed in. He decided not to analyze that too closely.

The greenette had tacitly expected the whole building to be dark and full of cigarette smoke that further obscured one’s sight but, in fact, the building was well lit by industrial floodlights. There was plenty of cigarette smoke and the unfinished floor was stained with many years worth of spilled alcoholic drinks. A dozen tables and associated chairs were strewn about the room, most of them occupied. A (most definitely) illegal bar was doing brisk business and a locked metal cage about half the size of Izuku’s homeroom at UA stood in the center of the room. Two middle aged women who might have been twins were busy beating each other to a pulp in the ring while the surrounding crowd cheered, waved bills in the air, and shouted jeers or encouragement. There must have been a hundred spectators. This was huge.

“How’s you’re evenin’ going sugar?” asked a sultry voice, the scantily clad woman responsible sidling up to Konno.

“Fine, ma’am,” he said, “not looking to improve it further tonight, sorry. Here on business.”

“That’s a real shame,” she said, but walked off to check other marks. Izuku kept his mouth firmly shut and face blank. It wasn’t as if he were surprised to see that going on here… sex and violence were often a package deal.

“Well if it isn’t Crane,” a man with silvery hair and a number of fire arms visible on his person (as well as an obscene amount of leather which he was mostly pulling off) approached.

“Flint,” Konno greeted. “Good to see you.”

“You too, you old hound,” Flint chuckled. “We’ve got some good drama in the cage today, a few fights with nasty quirks coming up. You interested in a turn tonight?” Konno fought here sometimes?

“I think not,” Konno shook his head. “You know how things go wrong when you have a guest along to watch.”

“Ah. And who are you, young man?”

“Izuho,” Izuku answered.

“Family member of a business associate, if you know what I mean,” Konno smirked. The acting ability was staggering. It was like he had become a different person entirely, just stepped into another personality, this one smug and crooked with ruthlessness lurking just below the skin, as easily as one might step into a new pair of shoes.

“I know how it is,” Flint chuckled. Izuku wasn’t sure Izuku knew how it was. There was a lot of nuance in these conversations that he couldn’t pick up on yet. “Well, come see me if you decide there’s a match worth betting on, huh?”

“Of course. You are the man with the ledger.”

“Yeah, don’t I know it!”

Flint sauntered away into the crowd. “He runs the place?” Izuku surmised.

“Yes, although not everyone realizes that. He is much more intelligent and dangerous than he appears,” Konno whispered to the greenette.

The match between the two women had ended and now three teenagers were attempting to destroy one another with… some kind of blunt object. Izuku wasn’t totally sure what those were. Chair legs maybe?

Izuku had survived his first conversation in undercover work. True, he had only said a single word, but only a single word had been necessary, so he’d done his job well so far. The two of them drifted closer to the ring. A group of young men were gossiping… It soon became clear that they were talking about recent events in a gang war in south Hosu. Konno and Izuku pretended to watch the fight, cheering at the right moments, but in fact listened to the kids--and they were kids, all about Izuku’s age--in front of them discuss yet another retaliatory strike in an ever escalating cycle of violence.

The gang war conversation was rather demoralizing. What a pointless waste of potential. The three men beating each other with chair legs concluded their show (it was a show; clearly they hadn’t been trying to seriously injure each other or seriously injured they would all be) and a woman with an electricity quirk began to fight an older man with an ice quirk. They were both decently skilled.

“Well, well, well,” said a voice that sent chills through Izuku’s blood. The greenette turned slowly to his left to find the speaker and felt his chilled circulatory system freeze solid like a block of ice. There weren’t many good pictures of the man, nothing more than silhouettes and blurry half-photos but still Izuku knew who this was. “You.”

“Me?” Izuku asked--mostly out of habit at this point--as he grappled with an intense wave of deja vu.

Konno spoke immediately while Izuku tried to reign in his terror. “Is there a problem, sir?”

“You tell me,” the Hero Killer: Stain folded his arms, regarding them with the confounding expression of a tiger feigning boredom while contemplating the best moment to pounce.