Chapter Text
Midoriya’s cause of death is a hole through the heart; there are significant amounts of water across the laundry room’s floor. Kaminari claims he woke up there, in the darkness, and saw nothing as he made his way to the common room; it is not implausible, Aizawa thinks, that he missed seeing the body entirely.
The question of what killed Midoriya is quickly answered; a blade of ice. So, Todoroki.
It’s easy enough to determine the series of events that had happened; first, that Todoroki took Kaminari down to the laundry room, for whatever he had been planning. Second, that Midoriya had found them there; third, that Kaminari had overused his quirk. Fourth, that there were signs of a struggle, and it was here that Midoriya and Todoroki impaled each other through their respective hearts. Here, where Midoriya fell.
Todoroki’s body was found in the kitchen. There is no trail of blood connecting the areas.
And, most pertinently, there remains the fact that Midoriya remains alive.
Well. One thing was clear, at least; whatever had been going on with Todoroki, it had a lot to do with his family. And judging by things Aizawa’s heard before…he doesn’t have the best opinions of Todoroki’s family. To say the least.
“Another body was discovered.” Aizawa says, to the assembled class. Everyone looks around, glancing at everyone else, making sure everyone is there; surprised, when all are seemingly accounted for. Aizawa activates his quirk, glancing over all of them. No drastic changes in appearance occur.
“Midoriya. Come here.”
“What do you mean, it’s me?” Midoriya asks, horrified.
“Looks exactly like you—DNA is a hundred percent match.” Aizawa explains. The two of them are alone in a side room.
“A clone…” Midoriya says.
“A clone?” Aizawa asks. Midoriya shifts in his seat.
“Well…if it’s relevant to the investigation…”
An hour later, Aizawa’s face is in his hands.
“Why,” he asks, rapidly connecting multiple dots in his head and becoming increasingly concerned with the picture they are painting, “did you never feel the need to tell me that you are a clone of All for One?”
“I told All Might after Kamino…because Kacchan said there was another clone in the League…and I had no idea I was All for One’s clone until after all that stuff… ”
“Right. And this clone of you, excuse me, this clone of All for One, who appears to have not managed to escape, like you did, and get himself adopted—“
“I didn’t know that another one existed! I swear!”
“—strolled into UA, and got himself killed while killing Todoroki.”
Silence, for a moment. And then; from back in the main room, someone screams.
“What’s happening?” Midoriya asks.
More screaming.
Aizawa gets up and runs.
He’s not ready for what he finds. But few would be.
Todoroki Shouto
“In my defense,” Todoroki says, “I didn’t intend for anyone to find my body.”
“You traumatized the entire class.” Aizawa says. And me, he doesn’t say.
“Sorry.” Todoroki says, poking around the straw in his iced tea. Aizawa glares at it.
“I stopped to get it on the way back to UA.” he explains. This isn’t the explanation that Aizawa desires.
“I’m a clone. Half with DNA from Endeavor, half from the scientist who created us. I call her my mother, but…it was just perfect luck for Father, that she had the exact counter quirk to his own, and all of the intelligence and none of the morals enough to make him the creation he wanted.” Todoroki says.
Aizawa is getting the impression that Todoroki’s family problems are far worse that he’d originally assumed.
“It took them four tries to get the right quirk. Touya was mostly Father with some of Mother’s genes added, Fuyumi is mostly Mother with some of Father’s genes, and Natsuo is half and half, just like me. He obtained a different quirk than I, though…Father has some morals, which is the only reason my siblings are still alive past their creation.”
A pause.
“Well, not all of them anymore, but that’s a different story. Um. Anyway. I was just…I was tired, of being half and half. Of being them instead of myself, but this myself, that’s all I’ve known. So I decided to fix that.”
“How, exactly, were you going to fix the DNA composition of your body?”
Todoroki shrugs. “Make a new one.”
Aizawa probably should have expected that.
“Natsuo and Fuyumi helped me. We were keeping the project secret from Mother…an inert clone of myself, just completely recalibrated. Missing the scar I got from a mishap with a burning chemical a few years ago. It was going to be me, except…not made by them. Made by us. My quirk, my body, it could all truly be my own. It is, now. But the problem was—how to get the part of me that isn’t my body, out of one and into the other?”
How indeed.
“We were researching this, and came across the fact that Mother had gotten paid to make two clones of a villain, some years ago—made so he could transfer himself into them, and keep living on in a new body. So I looked into that, and found out…a lot of interesting things…and then I ran into Not-Midoriya.”
And that would explain things, wouldn’t it?
“He didn’t like people trying to figure out All for One’s secrets. Promised to come after us. I didn’t doubt he would; and thankfully, I’d figured out how to start the transference.”
The answer, Aizawa assumes, was killing oneself.
“That is part of it. Why I asked Yaoyorozu for the poison—it would let me die quickly and quietly. The other part, though, is getting enough energy to actually send myself off…that’s what I was doing with Kaminari, with Iida’s engines, with the generator in the laundry room. It actually worked—the reason I took so long to come back to school this morning was because I was reorienting myself, in this new body. As well as sneaking out of the laboratory, with my siblings’ help.”
And then, Aizawa guesses, Not-Midoriya showed up.
“He’d come to kill me for stealing his creator’s secrets. Kaminari had knocked himself out with his quirk, and I knew the generator was going to work in a few moments; Not-Midoriya had Tokoyami’s sword, and he stabbed me through with it at the same time as I shot ice at him.”
Todoroki looks up at Aizawa; it was a bit odd to see those mismatched eyes without a scar surrounding one of them. But he supposes he’ll get used to it.
“He’s not dead. I’ve killed him before, and he always shows up in a new body. He’s perfected the transference between clones, where I have to improvise it.”
“Is that it, then?” Aizawa asks. Two bodies, no deaths, and a cloning conspiracy? (Also, Todoroki and his siblings needed to get away from their “parents” as quickly as possible.)
“I think the reason my body was in the kitchen was due to the feedback of the generator activating in tandem with water from the melted ice that I attacked Not-Midoriya with; the energy released was enough to fling me up the stairs and into the next room over.”
Aizawa is inflicted with the mental image of Todoroki’s lifeless body being thrown through the air due to an electrical explosion, and wishes that he could erase his brain. Todoroki has Midoriya and Sero and Uraraka and Iida and the entire class, pretty much, all hugging him at once, and Aizawa supposes that though everything isn’t quite solved, the situation could have been far, far worse; it’s afternoon on a Saturday, and Todoroki Shouto isn’t dead.
Aizawa would have preferred not to deal with Dabi attacking UA later that day and screeching about killstealing, never mind the subsequent identity reveal, but hey, you can’t get everything you want.
THE END