Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“So, what are we going to do with them?”

Hitoshi keeps his head lowered, but he thinks the speaker is the Stain cosplayer who looks like a lizard. He has only just woken up and he doesn’t want to alert the people around him right away.

“Tomura wants to try bringing Explodo-Boy on our side,” the cheerful voice of the green-haired Shigaraki kid explains, “but I say that he’s too stubborn for that. We have a bet. I mean, it’s not like it matters that much if he doesn’t want to join us, so I guess that we’ll see!”

Scrunching his eyes against the usual wrong wrong wrong feeling that comes to him every time he hears that specific villain talk or looks at him, Hitoshi tries to keep his breath slow and steady. So they want to recruit Bakugou. That is absolutely going to end well for everyone involved.

At the same time, the green boy isn’t exactly wrong: they are not really in a position to refuse. The villains will probably just kill them and dump their bodies in a ditch.

“And Eyebags over there?”

This time, it’s the brother that is covered in hands who answers. “Izuku likes his quirk.”

“Come on! With a quirk like that, he can’t not know about how prejudiced society is!” the younger brother – Izuku, presumably – interjects. “Plus I’m super curious about how it works. I couldn’t get the trigger from the Sport Festival videos and apparently he made Compress forget. Mind-altering quirks are so fascinating… I wonder if he can...” His rambles turn to indistinct muttering.

“He’s always like that,” Hands Guy interrupts, annoyed but… fond? “I told you, it’s physical contact for sure. Anyway, if you can’t convince him, I know that Sensei will want to see him.”

Welp, that doesn’t sound good.

He opens his eyes a sliver and almost jumps out of his skin. The green brat is crouching in front of him, his face inches from Hitoshi's.

"Ah, I thought you were awake," he smiles, chipper. He has forgone his usual mask, revealing freckled round cheeks and a friendly expression. Hitoshi wants to punch him.

His own face must betray his thoughts, because Greenie's smile grows to a smirk, and the boy stands up and takes a step back.

Now that everyone knows that he is no longer unconscious, he raises his head and takes stock of his situation. He is strapped into a chair with his hands shackled in front of him; the restraints are not too uncomfortable (for now at least), and someone with a strength quirk could probably easily get out of them, but not him, not without help. But to his relief he is not muzzled in any way  —  probably because, according to the smaller creep, they don’t know how his quirk works.

Across from him, in a similar set-up, Bakugou is still down for the count. The only visible difference is that his hands are fully encased in metal instead of the simple handcuffs around Hitoshi’s wrists: he may be able to blast out of that, but not without destroying his hands. It’s an ingenious way of stopping him from using his quirk. His right forearm is purplish in color: still broken, then.

The room itself is… pretty barren, actually. The walls are naked bricks, the floor plain wood, and the only furniture, apart from the students’ seats, are a wooden bar with some stools and a large blank TV screen. There is a door, but no windows, and they are not alone.

Both Shigaraki brothers are obviously here, as he had heard before opening his eyes. The smaller one has backed out of Hitoshi’s space, at least, but he is still in front of him and looking at him with interest. The taller one is sitting on a stool and leaning back on the bar. He only has one embalmed hand on him, covering his face, which is slightly better than the fourteen he usually sports but still one too many, because the only acceptable amount of embalmed hands to have on oneself is zero, what the hell.

Okay, Hitoshi needs to calm down, but in his defense anyone would be getting a bit hysterical in his place.

The freak who trapped him in a marble is leaning against a wall, still wearing a mask and top hat (do they all have an allergy to uncovering their face? how do these people eat?). Next to him, the lizard man looks extremely bored; he is also masked but at least his only covers the top half of his face, like some sort of villainous ninja turtle. The tall woman who fought Tiger is standing with her hands on her hips, and while she doesn’t have a mask, she is wearing sunglasses indoors, which makes her choice of accessories no better than the other asshole weirdos’.

Yes, these guys may have done worse than dressing badly  —  though they really do: the Stain fan has big blue polka dots on his top, which goes great with his green scales, big red scarf and purple hair  —  but Hitoshi is trying not to think about the fact that he is currently tied to a chair in a room full of probable murderers.

The student breathes in and out slowly in an attempt to center himself and continues his survey of the room.

The blond girl who stabbed Uraraka is sprawling lazily on the bar top, and she would look like a normal highschooler if she could stop grinning so creepily. Close to her, a man that he doesn’t remember seeing in the forest is looking at her like he wants to talk to her but doesn’t know what to say; it would be funny how much this villain look like a lovestruck teenager if he wasn’t covered head to toes in a skintight bodysuit. Seriously, the only visible openings are for the eyes.

The last people in the room are Kurogiri, still in his usual formal wear, who is drying glasses behind the bar, and Dabi, the fire wielder with extensive scars. He is standing right next to Hitoshi’s chair, and as such he feels like the most threatening presence in the room. He looks… bored.

“So what, you’re going to offer them a place in the League?” Dabi drawls. “And then what? They’re not stupid, they’re going to say yes no matter what they actually think. How will you know if you can trust them?”

Hitoshi casts a glance at his still unconscious classmate. While he doesn’t know the other student very well, he does know that Bakugou is deeply admirative of All Might, and would in all probability never consider becoming a villain. However, he also has the subtlety of a sack of bricks, so, him playing along? Not likely.

Oh god, they are both going to die.

“Oh, don’t worry, I think that I’d know if he is lying,” Shigaraki Izuku smiles. “Not that I think that he would do it. Kacchan has never been one for deception, he’s a very honest person. It would be admirable if his default emotion wasn’t rage.”

Kacchan?! Is that… a cutesy nickname for Bakugou? What the hell?

The other faces in the room  —  except Shigaraki Tomura’s  —  reflect Hitoshi’s surprise.

“You know that kid?” the tall woman asks. “Didn’t take you for the type to hang out with baby heroes.”

The boy shrugs. “He wasn’t a baby hero when we knew each other, but I don’t think that he’s changed that much since then. His behavior at the sports festival was very… familiar.”

“Were you friends?” the creepy girl grins. “Do you think he’ll be happy to see you?”

“Happy? Probably not,” the boy smirks. “I don’t think that he would say we were friends. But he’ll recognize me, that’s certain. I can’t wait to see his face when he does.”

So Bakugou knows  —  or knew ?  —  this guy. And the same guy apparently thinks that he has crossed paths with Hitoshi at some point. Wait, now that he can see his face… He still cannot answer the question he was asked at the mall, but he is sure that he has met Shigaraki Izuku before. Even the name is familiar, in an undefined, maddening way.

Is this one of those premonition things? The longer it goes, the less it makes sense.

“Anyway! That can wait until he wakes up,” the green-haired villain says. “I have a question for the other hero in training here.”

The attention of the room turns to Hitoshi, who stiffens.

“If this is the same thing you asked at the mall, I don’t have a better answer today,” he forces himself to say from behind his gritted teeth.

The villain frowns, visibly puzzled. “The mall? What mall?”

Hitoshi’s eyebrows rise towards his hairline. “Are you kidding me? A week ago? Kiyashi Ward? You and your brother held me hostage and asked weird questions?”

“Oh, you were the student they attacked!” the man in a skintight suit exclaims delightedly. Then his tone shifts briefly to something darker. “They should have killed you. It was all over the news!” he ends, back to enthusiasm.

“Wow, you have an impressive judgemental face, kid,” Dabi laughs at Hitoshi, who tries to school his expression back to something more neutral. “He’s right though. Do you guys threaten highschoolers so often that you can’t remember that specific incident?”

Hitoshi catches the Shigaraki brothers exchanging an uncertain look before the younger one puts back a fake smile on.

“That’s not what I wanted to ask you, anyway,” he  —  very subtly  —  changes the subject. “Your quirk. What’s the trigger?”

Hitoshi gulps. While he is certainly not going to use his quirk right now, with so many enemies around, it is their best bet to escape at some point, since the villains have taken precautions against Bakugou’s explosions. Giving them the answer would put him at a significant disadvantage. They would be much more cautious around him, or worse, do something to physically stop him from speaking.

He forcefully shoves back memories of that time in middle school when some other students decided that he shouldn’t be allowed to talk anymore. They are not helpful right now.

On the other hand, can he really refuse to answer?

As if in reaction to that thought, Dabi puts an unnaturally warm hand on Hitoshi’s shoulder.

“Answer the question, kid,” he orders boredly.

Wait, what did the older Shigaraki brother say just after Hitoshi woke up?

“... It’s skin contact,” he says finally, hoping like hell that his bluff will work.

At least Dabi lets go of him hastily.

Shigaraki Izuku narrows his eyes, but before he can say anything, his brother butts in.

“Ha! See, I was right!” the blue-haired villain crows.

“I’m not sure…” his brother starts.

“Don’t be a sore loser,” the other interrupts. “You’re just too used to being right about quirks. But I’m not dumb, you know.”

“How did he even catch Mr. Compress, then?” the younger one retorts, annoyed.

Fortunately, that is easy enough to justify. “He tried to use his quirk on me but mine worked first,” Hitoshi shrugs, faking nonchalance.

That seems to mollify the small creep, though he still eyes Hitoshi suspiciously. Now, to hope that neither Dabi nor Compress think it’s weird that the magician was still in his tree when he was freed from his control.

Luckily, Bakugou chooses this moment to groan and open his eyes, diverting everyone’s attention to himself.

“Ha, the guest of honor is waking up,” the older Shigaraki smirks. “He took his time. Did you have to knock him out so hard?”

“I know that he’s not to be underestimated,” his brother answers calmly, a strange half-smile on his lips. “Hello, Kacchan, it’s been a while.”

Said student stiffens violently and snaps his eyes up.

“... Deku?” he blurts out.

That… is a surprise. The fact that he is answering with an insult is common enough for this specific teenager, but his tone… Hitoshi doesn’t think that he has ever heard his classmate be so uncertain, so vulnerable.

“Aha, that’s not my name,” the villain says with a reproving tilt of his head. He doesn’t lose his almost wistful expression, though. “But it’s nice to see that you didn’t forget me, I guess.”

“Forget you?” Bakugou’s face turns thunderous. “ Forget you?! Where the hell have you been, you shitty nerd?! All these years, and you where, what, fucking around with villains?!”

The target of his anger shrugs. “I found my place in the world. You spent so much time saying that I could never become a hero… It must feel good to see that you were right all along, doesn’t it?”

The student answers with an inarticulate cry of pure rage. “Shut the fuck up! I can’t believe that you were here! You think I’d forget you when my parents invite Auntie Inko for lunch every Sunday?” He shakes his head in disgust. “I didn’t think you’d take after your father that way.”

That seems to get a reaction from the villain: he flinches and hides it with a frown. It’s unclear whether the part that made him respond is this “Auntie Inko” or the comparison with his father.

Most other League members seem to be fascinated by the scene unfolding in front of them, leaning forward to catch everything. It’s true that the drama is incredible, but Hitoshi is a bit too puzzled to enjoy it.

Clearly, the villain didn’t lie: he and Bakugou knew each other at some point. From a young age, presumably, if the childish nickname is any indication. They haven’t seen each other in years, but the student’s reaction hints to a separation that was unplanned, at the very least. If he had to guess, Hitoshi would even say that Bakugou was surprised to see his… acquaintance? old friend? alive.

And on that note, what was their relationship before that? Bakugou wouldn’t react so strongly if they hadn’t been at least somewhat close, and his reference to the villain’s father  —  and, presumably, mother, or at least that’s who Inko seems to be  —  shows a familiarity stronger than if they were mere acquaintances.

But the villain’s reference to Bakugou’s old words, combined to the insulting name he was called, does not imply a good relationship. So… who were they to each other?

“First,” the villain answers in a light tone that seems forced, “do not speak of my father like that again if you want to keep breathing. Second, I did not leave my mother willingly, and you have no idea what I went through before landing here. Third, how dare you ask me why I didn’t go back to my old life, when you went so far to make it as unlivable as possible?”

Bakugou recoils as if he had been struck, but doesn’t answer.

Welp, that clarifies some things. Hitoshi has never liked the other boy, and for a while he imputed that to a mismatch of personalities (not that many people are compatible with his explosive classmate, except maybe Kirishima), but now that he heard the villain’s accusations, and the student’s damning lack of protest, they paint a different picture.

Hitoshi is familiar with bullies, and just because Bakugou never attacked anyone in class 1-A doesn’t mean that the purple-haired boy didn’t pick up on hints in his general attitude. It makes sense, too: his propensity to insult everyone, his view of strength as the only measure of people’s worth as human beings, his surprised or angry reaction to any kind of opposition…

Hitoshi cannot help the distaste on his face when he looks at his classmate. No wonder the villains targeted him, then.

Though he does resent the fact that he was apparently painted with the same brush. He may have a “villainous” quirk, but his experiences with bullying were always from the side of the victims.

“You didn’t tell me about all that,” Shigaraki Tomura sulks. “I would have put him on the kill list instead.”

His younger brother shrugs. “You weren”t wrong that he is a powerful asset, and it’s not as if his character is incompatible with villainy. And the kill part can wait until after he refuses your offer, if he doesn’t want to join us. I have to say that having him as a subordinate would be at least as satisfying as killing him.”

“No fucking way I’d ever take order from you, you shitty loser,” Bakugou snarls, though he has lost some of his usual confidence. “And I won’t just let you kill me either. I’m going to get out of here and become the best hero!”

Will you shut the fuck up and stop antagonizing the villains holding us hostage, Hitoshi thinks desperately. They are clearly not going anywhere unless they get rescued or their kidnappers untie them.

It’s true that Hitoshi’s quirk makes that last option slightly more likely, but they have to survive until he gets an occasion to use it.

Fortunately, Bakugou’s defiance seems to amuse Shigaraki Izuku.

“It’s funny that you think that you could be a hero even if we let you go right now,” the green-haired villain smirks. “Do you really think that your temperament is suitable for that kind of work? Or maybe you will get your licence and become the same kind of hero as Endeavor. Disliked by everyone, always raging after someone they can never surpass… You sure have the right attitude, at least.”

That seems to shut Bakugou up.

Hitoshi breathes in deeply and tries to shove down his disgust for his classmate's past actions. The villain may not be lying about them, but those last sentences were deliberately chosen to hurt and make the boy doubt himself.

No, worse: this whole conversation was also for Hitoshi's sake. It would be basically impossible for either of them to escape by themselves, and this kind of revelation was sure to put a rift between them. Divide and conquer, one of the very first manipulation techniques Ms. Joke had taught him.

They can talk about how much of an ass Bakugou was in primary school once they are free and back somewhere safe. For now, neither of them should take criticism from someone who sent a bunch of villains on a group of kids with a freaking kill list.

He needs to convey that to his classmate, but he won't get a chance while the whole League is around.

“That’s enough for you!” Shigaraki Izuku declares suddenly in the silence that follows. He turns away from Bakugou and towards Hitoshi. “What about you? I’ve seen your file, you know. How come that you want to be a hero, after everything society has done to you?”

Hitoshi gulps and tries to keep his face blank. “What file?” he asks as boredly as he can.

“Well, everything?” the villain answers as if it is obvious. “Except for the one at UA, their cyber-security was made by Nedzu, we’re going to need a few more months to hack it. But your previous school and your doctor office really need to hire a security expert.”

If they have his old school records, then the boy is probably referring to his… complicated relationship with his various former classmates. Or maybe not: he doesn’t know what ended up written down, but probably not that much, given that most of his teachers didn’t exactly like him. According to them, he was a creepy child.

“You’ll have to be more precise,” Hitoshi says. “I’m a student at the most prestigious hero school in the country, I feel pretty good about what society did to me.”

“We both know that this is a lie,” the villain sighs. “My own records looked a lot like yours, actually, that’s how I know what happened. A lot of fights with other students, with you marked as the instigator, correlated with dress code violations and destroyed school books. Weird injuries, too, as if people had used their quirks on you. Which is not possible, since it’s illegal and teachers would have intervened, huh?”

That’s… frighteningly accurate, actually. Then again, if the boy was bullied by Bakugou for years, it makes sense. Maybe he also has a “villainous” quirk. Though if anyone actually deserves that word, it’s certainly a member of the League of Villains.

“You may be right, but this is all in the past,” Hitoshi answers calmly. Don’t let him know that he struck a chord. “Like I said, I’m fine with my place now.”

“Really? Because it looks to me like you are in a school where the entrance exam is designed to keep people like you out, where you were not allowed to take part in the most prestigious part of the sports festival despite earning it, and where the teachers failed to protect you against villains several times,” Shigaraki Izuku smiles coldly. “How many times could I have killed you since the beginning of the year? And for what, a hero license that will only bring you a little conditional freedom and a lot of scrutiny? The Hero Commission has never been very good at dealing with… unconventional heroes. Join us and you’ll get the freedom and respect that you deserve. You are smart and powerful; it would be a pity to waste it on people who will never properly appreciate you.”

It’s lucky that the villain misinterpreted his withdrawal from the sports festival, because everything else is hitting Hitoshi’s fears and insecurities dead on, and the green-haired boy is scarily charismatic when he wants to be. He knows about the HPSC reputation; they prefer dealing with spotlight, marketable heroes, and people with suspicious quirks always need to prove themselves again and again.

He has heard that Vlad King, with his weird blood quirk, specifically joined the staff at UA because he wanted the weight of the prestigious institution behind him in case they tried to remove his hero license.

And yet, none of this is enough to make him consider the offer. The first reason for that is spite: if he becomes a villain, then everyone who immediately doubted his morals when finding out about his quirk would have been right, and that’s out of the question. Shigaraki Izuku may be fine with saying that his own former bully was correct about him, but Hitoshi is not. The other reasons are more heroic, but no less true: he doesn’t actually want to hurt people, which would probably become a problem at some point if he joined the League of Villains, and he doesn’t want to disappoint the few people who actually believed in him. His friends, his classmates, Eraserhead, Ms. Joke… They deserve better than him betraying them.

The last thing is that he’s pretty sure that accepting this offer would only mean exchanging a set of chains  —  law and the expectations society puts on its heroes  —  for another  —  the authority of whoever is actually leading the League of Villains. And in terms of friends, he would lose his amazing group of fellow students and gain what? A bunch of criminals, half of which are probably clinically insane, and all of them ready to attack a bunch of highschoolers with the intent to kill? No thanks.

All in all, he doesn’t actually need to think about his answer, because it’s definitely a resounding no. But he also wants to stay alive, so he’ll have to tread carefully.

He settles on refusing but pretending to agree with some of their arguments. “I won’t betray my friend for people who tried to kill us,” he says, averting his eyes in the hope that it will be taken for indecisiveness. “Society is not perfect, but there are people trying to make it better, and I can’t let them down.”

“I can respect loyalty,” Shigaraki Izuku shrugs. “Just think about it. I’m sure that you like some of your classmates, but all those kids with great heroic quirks will never really understand what you went through. But here? We do.”

Around him, several of the assembled villains nod, including the stabby girl and Shigaraki Tomura.

Hitoshi stays silent and doesn’t point out that they would be less likely to be seen as villainous if they didn’t try to kidnap and kill teenagers. This would probably not be taken as constructive criticism.

“Let’s stop here for tonight,” the green-haired boy says, turning to Kurogiri. “I believe you prepared some food for our colleagues?” he asks.

“Of course,” the warper answers. “I have set the table in the dining room. Would you like me to show them in? I have taken into account the dietary requirements of everyone.”

The crazy schoolgirl stands up enthusiastically. “Even me?” she says hopefully.

“Yes, miss Toga,” he confirms with a bow of his head.

She squeals in delight and follows the mist-covered villain.

“You can go with him, Tomura and I will stay with our guests,” Shigaraki Izuku dismisses the other villains with a casual shrug. “It would be better if there are at least two people with them most of the time, in case someone gets caught in our friend Shinsou’s quirk, but since both of us already ate, we’ll take the first shift.”

They all file out, leaving only the Shigaraki brothers with the two highschoolers.

“We should report to Sensei,” the older one says once the door of the room is closed.

“Yes, that was my intention,” the younger one answers. “Do it, you were the one who organized the raid. It was an amazing success!”

“We still lost three party members,” the first one frowns.

“Muscular and Moonfish were powerful but uncontrollable in the long run,” his brother shrugs. “They creeped me out. I’m glad that we got rid of them. And we lost Mustard, but we gained those two, so that’s a net positive.”

“You think that they’ll join us?” Shigaraki Tomura asks.

Hitoshi would protest the fact that he is talked about as if he wasn’t here, but their attention isn’t exactly what he is looking for right now, and the conversation is interesting. He would like to know who this Sensei is, for once. The older brother had already mentioned them right after the student woke up but before they realized that he was conscious, implying that this mysterious person might be interested in him, which is bad news.

“No idea,” the other says with a shrug. “I’d like them to. They have cool quirks and they are proficient with them. But you know very well that even if we cannot convince them, we will gain something from this.”

“About that,” the blue-haired one says. “Wouldn’t it be safer for you to, you know, take care of that one’s quirk for now?”

He gestures to Hitoshi, who lowers his eyes, hiding his defiance.

“If you want to convince them at some point, it’s best to wait for that,” the smaller one shakes his head. “Stop stalling and call father, he’ll be happy to hear from you.”

What on earth does “take care of his quirk” means? Now that he is thinking about it, Hitoshi has no idea what the younger brother’s quirk is. He had thought that it was linked to that weird unsettling feeling he inspires, but maybe that’s just Hitoshi’s instincts or something? Can he deactivate someone’s quirk for a time? That seems insanely overpowered, and presumably he would have used it at some point at the USJ or at the mall, if that was the case.

Hm, but Shigaraki Tomura did say that he was the one who knocked Bakugou out —  and probably Hitoshi too, then. And his vague memories of being brought to the villain base involve a hand on his neck but no overt violence. So the older brother may have been suggesting that he keeps Hitoshi unconscious, which is consistent with the boy’s rebuffal: it’s hard to talk to someone who is sleeping.

The other thing that struck him as weird is that Shigaraki Izuku’s father  —  presumably the one who abandoned his mother, according to Bakugou  —  seems to be the person that Shigaraki Tomura is calling Sensei. It is an unusual way of talking about a parent, which the man should be since the two villains are supposed to be brothers.

Unless they are half-brothers on their mother’s side, but somehow this hypothesis doesn’t sound very likely.

His thinking is interrupted by the slight buzz of the TV screen on the bar being turned on. No image appears; the device only shows static. But a deep, scratchy voice rings out.

“How did the mission go, Tomura?” it asks silkily.

That voice feels bad. Much, much worse than anything Shigaraki Izuku ever evoked. It feels like Hitoshi’s brain wants to run and hide; unfortunately, his body is very much stuck here.

“It went well, Sensei,” the blue-haired villain answers respectfully. “We lost three pawns, but our allies were able to retrieve the two targets.”

“Very nice,” the voice says approvingly. “Did you make your offer to the students?”

“We did, but I thought that it would be better to wait a little bit for their answer,” the green-haired villain intervenes. “Let them spend the night thinking about it…”

“You are right, of course, Izuku,” the voice sighs. “Patience is a virtue. But do not hesitate to call for me if you need any help; after all, everything that I do is for you, my boys. ”

Hitoshi’s head explodes in pain. He lets out a low keening sound and squeezes his eyes shut. The world fades away, and he remembers.

He remembers everything.

Entering UA in the General Education department, because his quirk is useless in the entrance exam.

Studying and training by himself, hoping to be noticed during the sports festival.

Clearing the first and second rounds. The first fight in the final round. A kind freckled face. The first occurrence of someone escaping his quirk.

Being mentored by Aizawa. Training with the capture weapon.

The joint training battles. Being given a chance to prove himself. Fighting that weird friendly green-haired student again. A quirk acting out in ways nobody could have predicted.

The war against the Paranormal Liberation Front, watched from behind a TV screen, praying for his future classmates’ well-being.

The awful weeks that followed, with the country being thrown into turmoil.

His slow integration in class 2-A, at the start of the new school year.

The attack.

It was so sudden.

They’d been at the grocery store. The fridge and cupboards of the dorms needed refilling, and Izuku had offered to go. Iida had immediately suggested that they make it a group trip, and as usual when those two went anywhere, Uraraka and Todoroki had been right behind. For reasons known only to himself, Bakugou had decided to come with them; if Hitoshi had to guess, he was probably still unhappy to let Izuku out of his sight since Shigaraki had publicly declared him a target, but who actually knew what was going on in the blond’s head? Not Hitoshi, that’s for sure.

And Hitoshi himself had been bored, so he had come too. Not because all his friends were going, of course. That would be ridiculous. He had no friends. Only tolerable classmates.

Anyway, they’d been at the grocery store, All Might with them as a chaperone  —  while there hadn’t been a big attack since the Paranormal Liberation War more than a month earlier, with All For One and many other convicts escaped from Tartarus and Shigaraki still at large, it felt like the calm before the storm and nobody wanted the students to be out by themselves  —  and everything had been fine until they’d made their way back toward UA. 

Izuku and Bakugou were having a friendly (well, as friendly as anything got between those two, at least) competition about who could carry more bags, Todoroki was needling them on from the sidelines (Hitoshi suspected that he had started the whole thing because he didn’t want to carry anything), Iida was urging them to be careful with the vegetables, and Uraraka was laughing at them, her own charges floating at her side. All Might was smiling softly, and Hitoshi couldn’t help thinking that they all looked so happy and hoping that they could keep having fun like that in the future.

And then the street exploded.

There wasn’t even a fight. Two figures stepped out of the smoke, and Hitoshi recognized them both before he jumped for cover behind a parked car.

Shigaraki, with his now pure white hair, was crouching, no sign of his usual disembodied hands anywhere on his body. And at his side, a respirator affixed to his face, was a man who could only be All For One.

There wasn’t a fight, because in the position he was in, with four fingers on the ground and only one in the air, Shigaraki made very clear what the consequences of any of them moving would be. They were in the middle of a busy street, in the center of Musutafu, and the last time this particular villain had been out in public, he had made his destructive potential very, very clear.

Honestly, unless Eraserhead just happened to drop by in the next thirty seconds with half of the top ten heroes behind him, Hitoshi couldn’t think of a single way they could win there. Sure, now that Izuku had a better handle on his numerous quirks, he could probably save his friends from being disintegrated immediately, but he wouldn’t be able to protect the civilians around, and even if that was a sacrifice he was willing to make  —  which it clearly wasn’t  —  they wouldn’t last more than a minute against the two villains. They didn’t even have any of their costumes with them.

They could try to stall, maybe, but for how long?

“I’ve been looking for you, Izuku,” said All For One.

Izuku? Since when was he on a first name basis with a villain?

Izuku’s recoil at those words showed that he wasn’t expecting it either, though him being singled out wasn’t surprising.

“Well, yes,” he answered bravely from where he was crouched on the sidewalk, “you made your intentions clear last time. I know you want my quirk.”

“Oh, no,” All For One replied smoothly, “while I’d love to take it, I’ve been looking for you. I realized that I made a mistake twelve years ago, you see. You’ve clearly grown up to be a very interesting young man, and I have missed that.”

Twelve years ago? What the hell was he talking about?

Hitoshi glanced around him. As expected, all their friends looked as perplexed as he was, but even Izuku and All Might, who knew the most about their opponent, seemed at a loss for words.

What is he talking about? Hitoshi mouthed in their direction.

I have no idea, Uraraka shrugged.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Izuku said, echoing their interrogations out loud. “Twelve years ago? I was a kid then, and I’m pretty sure that I had never met anyone like you.”

“You are still a child, you know,” All For One mused, “but I know that as a hero in training, you had to grow up too fast…”

“And whose fault is that?” Izuku growled.

“Ah, of course, I understand why you resent me. But I’d like to try again with you. Would you give me another chance?”

“… Are you crazy? I mean, did you hit your head and forget about everything that happened? Is this some form of amnesia? Why would you think I’d give you any chance at all? You’ve been a criminal for two hundred years! You had your disciple attack my friends, threaten me, kidnap my friend, you tried to kill my mentor, the League of Villains destroyed a city six months ago and killed so many heroes, and you want a SECOND CHANCE? What is wrong with you?!”

Izuku’s voice had taken a slightly hysterical tinge that Hitoshi understood perfectly. Was this a fever dream? Nothing about this made any sense.

All For One sighed.

“I see. I feared this would come to this. Fortunately, I found this fantastic quirk last month…”

At these words, Izuku and Bakugou launched themselves at him. Hitoshi understood why: even if they didn’t know exactly what he wanted, there was no way they could let the man use this “fantastic quirk”. But that didn’t change the fact that they were hopelessly outmatched; with a gesture that was too fast for Hitoshi to understand, both students went flying back, Bakugou hitting the nearest building with a sickening crash and Izuku the car Hitoshi had taken refuge behind. With a sinking feeling, the purple-haired boy knelt beside his friend and put a hand on his neck. Well, there was still a pulse, at least.

All For One strolled toward them. Behind him, Shigaraki stayed motionless, his eyes vacant. At least he hadn’t started disintegrating the city yet, but Hitoshi didn’t feel any relief, too concentrated on the threat that was coming toward them.

Said threat crouched in front of them, his attention focused on Izuku. It was hard to say with the absence of eyes that he could follow, but Hitoshi knew he was being ignored. Not that he could use that for much anyway.

“I hope you know that everything I’m doing is for you, my boy”, All For One said sweetly, his hand coming to cup Izuku’s cheek, inches from Hitoshi’s hand.

And then everything went black.

Hitoshi comes back to himself  —  this slightly younger, more naive version of himself  —  gasping for breath and with a splitting headache.

Okay. First thing first, he needs to make sense of the two distinct sets of memories that he apparently has.

He keeps his eyes screwed shut and sifts through the last thing he remembers, namely, the attack by All For One and Shigaraki (Tomura, but in this memory there was only one Shigaraki).

The strangest thing in it is clearly the presence of Izuku. His mind stutters every time he thinks about him. Midoriya Izuku, his first and best friend in class 2-A, who dragged him kicking and screaming into friendship. Shigaraki Izuku, the villain who had him kidnapped, and who has threatened his and his friends’ lives several times.

So that’s why everything about him felt so wrong. If the other boy had the same confusing intuitions as Hitoshi did, it’s no wonder that he came to ask him weird questions at the mall.

The next obvious question is of course: what happened? What did All For One “fantastic quirk” actually do?

It probably didn’t create an entire world of illusions in which they all lived for the last six years. That’s when the divergence happened between the two timeline, presumably: the “psychotic break” and weird dreams certainly never happened the first time around. The illusion hypothesis would be much more likely if All For One had ever shown any interest in Hitoshi, which is not the case: the first time around, the purple-haired student was never involved in any of the League attacks. Before that last one, at least. The only UA student he seemed to care about was Izuku.

And even if Hitoshi is only here by accident, what would be the point? Apparently, what All For One wanted was Izuku’s… cooperation? Or something like that, anyway. If this is an illusion, then the villain got what he wanted, but only inside of it; clearly, their memories are locked away but not destroyed, so Izuku would go back to being his enemy as soon as he lets them out.

Unless of course it’s not an illusion.

It would explain the fact that All For One, while he managed to get Izuku on his side, doesn’t seem to have that much control on the world around them. From what Hitoshi knows of him, the first order of business for the villain should have been All Might death, and their teacher is still very much alive.

The other argument against that first explanation is actually not much of an argument and more of an impression: the last six years do not feel like a dream. Hitoshi is no stranger to lucid dreaming and has read about illusion quirks, and as such, he knows what to look for: distorted writing, wrong number of fingers, inability to look at himself in a mirror… None of those apply here.

So what are the other options, assuming that this is not a convoluted dreamscape?

One of Hitoshi’s first lessons in hero studies, in the two weeks he spent as a student of class 2-A, was about time quirks. They are excessively rare, but they happen; Eri, Aizawa’s and Yamada’s adopted little girl, was a powerful example. Hitoshi had talked a bit with his teacher about her power and limitations, and the paradoxes that could result from it. For example, could she regenerate an organ donor so that they would grow back the donated organ, or would it affect the original organ in the receiver? If the second part is true, it would mean that the organ has remained somewhat linked to its origin, and in that case, if she rewound someone who has received a donated kidney, would they end up with three functioning kidneys?

Of course, those questions are merely theoretical for now, because experiences of that kind would be horrendously unethical. Especially considering Eri’s age.

But Eri’s quirk is still pretty tame in terms of potential paradoxes. The lesson also covered the case of time loops and people being temporarily sent back in time, with the general message being: if you suspect that time quirks are involved, call the experts and don’t fuck with the timeline. The issue is considered so important and thorny that the only organization habilitated to deal with it is under the authority of the UN, and it is the only UN agency whose prerogatives are never contested.

So. If it’s time travel, it’s a little bit too late to respect the original timeline. Not that All For One cares.

On the other hand, if it is time travel, it looks like it was a one way trip, which means that the risks of “unraveling the time-space continuum” or whatever are low. They would probably all be already dead if that could happen. Unless All For One has the ability to come back in time several years anytime he wants, in which case they are still alive but they have an unstoppable villain on their hands. Amazing.

Wait, All For One said that the mistake he was trying to correct was made twelve years ago, and his terrible fight with All Might, the one that left them both so badly injured, was around seven years before that grocery store ambush. If his ability to rewind time was limitless, he would presumably have started with changing one of those two events. So he probably couldn’t go further back than about six years, and he may not be able to do it again. Hopefully.

God, it would be so much easier if Izuku wasn’t currently a villain. He was always better at quirk analysis.

Now, the last question is why Hitoshi remembers the other timeline. Clearly, the trigger was All For One using the same words that he said just before using the mysterious quirk, but Hitoshi already had remnants of memories of before, at least in those dreams he could never remember. Wait, is that where his friends’ premonitions came from? That would actually make sense, and explain why he didn’t have them, since he didn’t live most of the events around class 1-A the first time.

So, what is the common factor between the people affected? Iida, Uraraka, Todoroki… Bakugou…

All of them present during the grocery store attack.

All of them close to All For One when he activated his quirk.

It would also be consistent with the quirk creating some sort of dream world, if it is effective on an area and not just on a person. But, well… Either this world is fake, and they need to find how to get out, but Hitoshi is not going to be able to do that while he is held hostage by villains, or it is real, which means that anything he does would have long term consequences.

He will have time to assess the real or virtual nature of the world around him later; for now, he needs to act as if him or anyone else dying here would be permanent.

And no matter which theory is true, he needs Izuku on his side. The good news is that since his friend was even closer to All For One than Hitoshi himself when the quirk was activated, his memories should be as accessible as Hitoshi’s. The fact that Izuku told him explicitly that he somewhat recognized him should help.

The bad news is that he didn’t react to the thing that triggered Hitoshi’s recollection, so it’s not going to be as simple as replicating it.

Mind made up, Hitoshi opens his eyes slowly. His head is still throbbing but the pain is down to a manageable level.

He is of course still strapped in the same chair, and the room, while it is now empty, has not changed. Across from him, in his own restraints, Bakugou glares.

“They left us alone?” Hitoshi whispers.

“The stabby bitch and crazy spandex man were supposed to watch us, but since you were out of it and I pretended to fall asleep, they got bored and fucked off,” Bakugou answers in a low voice. “What happened to you? You were down for at least an hour after Hand-Face and Deku made their stupid report.”

Hitoshi hesitates. Bakugou has shown signs of remembering some things from the other timeline, and since he was there for the attack, he might be able to get his full memories back. But how does he explain what happened? Preferably without sounding like he has completely lost the plot?

Yeah, no. For now, a half-truth will do.

“It was the voice of the villain they were talking to, it messed with my head,” he evades. “Maybe it’s his quirk. We should think about how we are going to escape while we are alone, I don’t know if we’ll have another occasion like that anytime soon.”

“Ugh, fine,” Bakugou grumbles. “I can’t use my quirk with this thing on my hands, and even if I get out of them, I’m going to be limited to my left hand.”

Right, explosions with a broken arm sound like a bad idea.

“I can use mine, especially since they still don’t know the real trigger,” Hitoshi says, “but since I can only control one person at a time we need to wait for someone to be alone with us. And once I do, we’ll have to be very quick. If we fail, there won’t be a second chance.”

“We need to be sure that the person you control has a key for the restraints, too,” Bakugou adds. “They’ll have to untie us at least partially at some point, but they’ll be on guard when they do, and they might use the one still bound as a hostage so that the other will behave. The best time to strike would be right before or after that.”

“But we don’t know if there will be a good occasion at those times,” Hitoshi frowns.

“At least brainwash someone who has a chance to hold a key,” his classmate rolls his eyes. “Some of them are fucking crazy, nobody would trust them with anything important.”

“You mean little miss vampire?” Hitoshi says. Toga is a very dangerous opponent and her designation as an A-rank villain in the other timeline was well-deserved, but from what he heard from his friends, she has never been especially stable.

“Yeah, or her best friend who keeps arguing with himself,” Bakugou shrugs.

“They all became allies recently, from what they said, right?” Hitoshi thinks aloud. “Then our best bet is probably to only target a… founding member or whatever. So, one of the Shigaraki brothers or the warper. They may not trust the others yet.”

In truth, what he wants to do is to restore Izuku’s memory, because if he does his (former?) friend should be consciously on their side. From a tactical stand-point, it would be a game-changer.

And of course he really wants his friend to stop looking like a villain. Seeing him like that… It’s painful. It makes him wonder how much he went through to end up at Shigaraki’s side.

There is also the question of whether All For One is truly his father. Hopefully the villain just “adopted” Izuku in the last few years, but on the other hand if it’s true it would explain why he went to such lengths just to get the hero student on his side.

Maybe he can get some answers from Bakugou?

“By the way, what happened between you and greenie?” Hitoshi asks. “Where do you know each other from?”

Bakugou adverts his eyes. “Our mothers are best friends,” he scowls. “We grew together. Sort of. I was a piece of shit to him.”

Well, at least he admits it. “Why?” Hitoshi insists. “And how did he become a villain?”

The other boy shrugs. “He’s quirkless and my quirk was amazing; I thought that it made me better than him. He disappeared a few years ago. Snatched off the street, according to the police. They never found him or his body. From what Auntie Inko said, they didn’t search all that long… But after a few months, nobody really thought that he was still alive. I can’t believe that dumb fucking nerd was fine all along!”

Quirkless? Weird, but in the other timeline, Izuku did mention at some point that his quirk had come in very late. “And that villain we heard, is that really his father?”

Bakugou growls wordlessly. “I‘m not sure, but he could be. I’ve only met Deku’s father once or twice and it was more than ten years ago. He’s supposed to be working overseas, and he still sends money, I think, but he never even calls his wife. My mom was pissed when he didn’t come home after Deku disappeared. But I guess it makes sense if he was busy here.” He lifts his head, showing off a bloody split lip. “Deku sure reacted when I said that.”

Hitoshi winces and they lapse into an uncomfortable silence. After a while, Bakugou starts fidgeting, looking everywhere but at his classmate.

The blond breaks first. “You’re not gonna say anything about me being a shithead?” he grits out.

Hitoshi shrugs. After all, in the other timeline, Izuku himself had clearly forgiven Bakugou a long time ago, and Bakugou had made significant efforts to become less of an asshole in the time he spent at UA. The boy who went with them to the grocery store was a very different person from the one who had insulted everybody during his opening speech for the sports festival.

“We’ll have time to go back to that later,” he answers instead of saying all that. “Once we’re not prisoners. Neither of us can get out of here alone, after all.”

The other boy frowns and looks like he wants to say something, but he freezes when Hitoshi snaps his head up. He can hear footsteps from beyond the door: someone is coming.

They both drop their head and close their eyes in an attempt to feign sleep, and the door opens forcefully. The newcomer enters and slam it closed.

“Of fucking course they left them alone, I should have known they can’t be trusted…”

The angry mumbling is definitely Izuku’s; looks like he didn’t shake the habit in this timeline either. Hitoshi carefully doesn’t flinch when his former friend and current captor kick one of the barstools right next to him.

“Stop pretending to sleep, you’re both bad at it,” the boy snarls.

They open their eyes guiltily. Gone is the villain's careful composure and apparent good mood; he is scowling, his hair is even messier than usual, and if Hitoshi is still able to read him now, he looks shaken.

Izuku marches up to Hitoshi and grabs him by the front of his shirt. The student has to swallow back a spike of fear: this is not his friend, this is an angry villain. He needs to focus; falling back into the snarky banter they got used to in the other timeline would be a bad idea.

He feels the front feet of the heavy seat he is strapped to leave the ground, and Izuku doesn’t even seem to notice. Looks like his enhanced strength is there. It lacks the green sparks Hitoshi expected, though. He distantly notices that the hand holding him is gloved, certainly to prevent him from using his quirk.

“What do you want?” Hitoshi stammers.

The villain exhales noisily through his nose and closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them again, the worst of his agitation is gone. He still doesn’t release Hitoshi, but his voice is steady when he asks, “What happened at the mall?”

“Seriously?” Hitoshi exclaims. “How do you not know?!”

The look he gets is very cold. “I don’t know, but I would like to understand,” Izuku answers. “Don’t make me repeat myself again. What happened at the mall? ”

Wow, great, the villain holding their fate in his hands has dementia.

“You cornered me with your… brother,” the student answers, “and you asked me if we knew each other from somewhere. I said that I had no idea. One of my classmates saw us, and you decided to leave before she raised the alarm.”

Behind Izuku, Bakugou is making weird faces. He’s probably wondering why Hitoshi hasn’t activated his quirk yet. It’s true that the three of them are currently alone, that since it’s the middle of the night the rest of the League should be mostly sleeping, and that Izuku is one of their best bets for someone who has the keys to their restraints. After a moment of thinking, Hitoshi decides to risk it.

“So you don’t remember asking me for a date? I was disappointed when you didn’t show up,” he says with his best poker-face.

Twin expressions of astonishment stare back.

“What?-” Izuku gets out, before the quirk takes effect and his gaze turns vacant.

“What the hell, asshole,” Bakugou growls. “Why would you say something like that?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Hitoshi shrugs. His sense of shame regarding the weird stuff he says to get other people to answer him died a long time ago.

“I guess,” Bakugou concedes. “So what’s the plan?”

“Put me back on the floor and let go of me,” he instructs instead of answering. Izuku obeys quickly. “Good, now remove those restraints from me,” he adds.

Izuku stays motionless for a beat, then bends down and rips the chain between Hitoshi’s cuffs apart.

Well, that’s a way of doing it.

The boy then starts pulling at the straps tying him to the seat, but they are apparently sturdier than the manacle, and don’t move an inch. That’s disappointing: it looks like his strength, while higher than a baseline human, is still much lower than it was when he attended UA.

On the other hand, Izuku’s quirk and Hitoshi’s brainwashing have always interacted weirdly, so maybe it’s a good thing.

“Give me the key to the restraints,” he tries instead. When the other boy just stops trying to rip the strap, he sighs. “I don’t think he has a key.”

“Fuck,” Bakugou says forcefully. Hitoshi agrees with the feeling. If Izuku wakes up now… it’s not going to end well for them. Sure, now his hands are untied, but even then he can’t squirm out of the seat, and Bakugou is still stuck anyway.

They stay silent for a full minute, trying desperately to come up with a new plan.

“Izu? Where are you, Izu? Spinner is down for a game of Smash Bros!”

… Aaaaand that’s Shigaraki coming for his “brother”. Fantastic.

In a bout of panic, Hitoshi calls the only command he can think of, putting all his desperation behind it.

“Remember.”

Izuku reels back like he has been punched.

Just as he lets out a heartfelt “What the fuck,” the door opens to show Shigaraki, looking mildly annoyed.

“What are you doing here? Are they causing problems?” the blue-haired villain asks.

“No, no,” Izuku says quickly, “I was just checking on them since Twice and Toga left them alone.”

“What? I’m gonna kill them,” Shigaraki grumbles. “You okay? You look weird.”

“Yes, sorry, I just asked a stupid question and got a stupid answer,” the green-haired boy answers with a forced smile. He glances at Hitoshi, mouthing what the fuck? once more, and then turns fully towards the other villain. “We should send Dabi and Magne to keep an eye on them, I’ll come with you once they are here.”

Shigaraki shrugs. “I’ll get them,” he declares.

A few moments later, they are both gone, leaving the students with two new villains, and Hitoshi to his uncertainty. Did it work? It sure seemed to do something, and Izuku did not rat him out for using his quirk, so it’s possible that it did, but for all he knows the boy just remembered the mall incident, or something else that is not an entire other life in which he was a hero student.

Well, he won’t know until the green-haired boy comes back; until then, he hides his broken handcuffs and settles for an uncomfortable, nerve-wracking wait.

At some point, he dozes. He wakes up after an unpleasant dream about the Paranormal Liberation War, that alternates between true memories and realistic recreations of the hundreds of ways in which his friends could have died. He does not feel well-rested and ready to face the coming day.

According to Spinner’s griping  —  who is now on guard duty with Mr. Compress  —  it’s around 6am when Izuku comes into the room. The boy dismisses the two of them with a smile, staying alone with the UA students.

Izuku stands in front of Hitoshi, staring at him in silence, for an uncomfortably long time before lowering his head and sighing.

“This is a mess, uh?” he says wryly. His smile is slightly wobbly.

“... You can say that again,” Hitoshi sighs back. “How much do you remember?”

“Everything, I think. We’re both talking about the other timeline, right? Not just the thing at the mall?” Izuku answers hesitantly. “Sorry about that, by the way. And, you know… everything else.”

Hitoshi closes his eyes in relief. He was expecting it from the other boy’s demeanor, but it’s good to have it confirmed: he has his friend back.

“What the fuck are you playing at, Deku?” Bakugou snarls suddenly. “Did you mess with Purple Nerd’s mind? Why are you all chummy with him, dumbass?!”

That last part is directed at Hitoshi, who winces. Him suddenly becoming friendly towards the guy who has been tormenting them since they were captured must not look good.

“Do you think he’ll be able to remember too?” Izuku asks.

“Probably, him and some others have been having premonitions since the beginning of the school year at least,” Hitoshi says. “Hey, Bakugou? Shut up,” he adds to his classmate.

Said classmate’s expression turns to rage. “I’ll kill y-!” he yells before the mind control takes over.

“Did training with you teach him not to react every time?” Izuku wonders aloud.

“Absolutely not,” Hitoshi replies drolly. “It’s hilarious. Okay, let me try this: remember. ”

He tries putting as much weight behind it as he did for Izuku, but maybe because he lacks the desperation of the previous time, or maybe because he doesn’t know Bakugou as well and doesn’t miss the other version of him as much, it’s not enough. The blond’s eyes stay blank.

“That would have been too easy,” Izuku grumbles. He goes to Bakugou and slaps him on the top of his head, breaking Hitoshi’s hold on his mind.

“I could have just released him, you know,” Hitoshi deadpans.

“Maybe I wanted to hit him,” Izuku grins. “I have another idea, but I need to get something first… I’ll be back in a few minutes. We’ll explain then, Kacchan,” he adds to Bakugou, who is sputtering and cursing at the both of them.

And then he just disappears suddenly, like he teleported away.

Bakugou is… flabbergasted. Hitoshi is surprised too, but Izuku’s quirk has always been weird, so honestly an invisibility or teleportation component wouldn’t be completely out of left field. And there is the fact that he was working for All For One, who can steal and bestow quirks to people. All in all, compared to the possibility of time travel, it’s not that odd.

“... How did he do that?!” Bakugou yells.

Hitoshi shrugs. “He’ll probably tell us once he comes back.”

“And you! What the hell do you think you’re doing! Have you always been on their side?”

The other student is actually shaking. His usual rage is obvious, but there is fear under it, visible  now that Hitoshi has a little more experience reading his emotions.

The purple-haired boy tries to be soothing, something that he is very inexperienced in. “I swear that I am not on the League’s side,” he says. “I… remembered some important information, and they helped me get Izuku on our side.” Faced with Bakugou’s obvious disbelief, he adds, “It’s related to the weird premonitions you, Iida, Uraraka and Todoroki have been having, like before the USJ or at the beginning of the test of courage. If we can get you to remember too it will be easier than explaining everything.”

Also the whole story is bonker, and Hitoshi cannot think of a way of telling it that would not make it sound crazy and fake.

“I’m not letting either of you do shit to me before I have an explanation,” Bakugou retorts.

“You don’t really have a choice,” Izuku says from where he has just appeared, right behind the blond’s seat.

Bakugou nearly jumps out of his skin. “What-?”

The green-haired boy doesn’t let him speak and puts a hand on his childhood friend’s forehead. Bakugou stiffens, eyes wide, and then slumps.

“What did you do?” Hitoshi asks nervously. He mostly trusts Izuku, but the boy did apparently spend the last few years raised by a villain, so who knows.

“I used a quirk that allows me to make him relive a shared memory,” Izuku explains. “I got it from my father… I told him that I wanted to remind Kacchan of our past. It’s more powerful the more emotional the event was, and we had a lot of very emotional moments in the other timeline.”

Hitoshi raises his eyebrows. “Really? I didn’t take Bakugou for the touchy-feely type.”

Izuku shrugs and grins. “Well, rage is an emotion. Actually, I brought up the rescue at Kamino. We got him out of the middle of the fight by propelling ourselves in the air with Iida and Kirishima from an ice ramp and catching him from there.”

“You... what?” Hitoshi asks flatly. He hadn’t even known that his friends were at Kamino, let alone that they did something so stupid! And Iida went along with it? Todoroki too, probably, if ice was involved…

“That was the dumbest shit I had ever seen any of you do, and I’ve seen Eijirou try to grate cheese on his abs,” Bakugou interrupts in an annoyed voice, straightening from his slouch. “Damn, that was a lot. You weren’t kidding about it being hard to explain.”

Hitoshi and Izuku sigh in relief. They are finally all on the same page.

“So. What the fuck was that whole thing about?” the blond asks. “How come that we all have two different sets of memories for the past five years?”

“My best guesses are that we are either in a very complex illusion, or that there was time travel involved,” Hitoshi says.

“I’m pretty sure it’s time travel,” Izuku adds. “My father keeps notes about all the quirks he has stolen, and I found a page on one that can make the bearer go back six years or so in time once. It was marked as already used.”

“Couldn’t he add that kind of shit inside the illusion if it was one?” Bakugou remarks. “Also, he’s not actually your father, right? That would be…”

“Incredibly ironic and awful?” Izuku completes with a pained face. “Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that he is. And yes, it could all be a very complex illusion, including that part, but it would take an enormous amount of energy to maintain something that complicated for that long, and I don’t really see the point.”

“No way, Auntie Inko has better taste than that!” Bakugou protests.

Izuku winces. “All For One is very good at deception and manipulation. I love my mom, but she had no way to know who he really was. I… I haven’t talked to her since when I was kidnapped, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she really thought that he was just a normal office worker working in America.”

“What happened to you, anyway?” Hitoshi frowns. “Couldn’t he have just, I don’t know, taken custody of you?”

The boy’s face turns thunderous. “Ah but you see, that would have meant having normal human interaction with actual people,” he spits. “I would have been ecstatic if he had just called me, but no, the great All For One cannot just talk to someone without at least two levels of manipulation involved. I was kidnapped by random thugs, apparently for ransom, and he rescued me.”

“That never happened in the other timeline,” Bakugou says slowly. “Not just the rescue, the kidnapping too.”

“Yep,” Izuku confirms. “And the kidnapping happened barely two weeks after we all went back in time; I guess that’s the time it takes for a crime lord to arrange that kind of thing.”

“... Wow, that’s fucked up,” Hitoshi says. “Are you sure that he was the one who organized it?”

“I don’t see what else could have caused it when nothing like that ever happened the first time around,” Izuku answers. “And I can see why he did, too: he had more or less abandoned my mom and me when I was four, so she would have been suspicious if he just came back like that. And you know what his face looks like, that would have been hard to explain. But with the kidnapping, and convincing me that nobody cared about looking for me… I was happy to just stay with him without asking questions.”

“You know that was a fucking lie, right?” Bakugou asks. “Auntie Inko never really stopped trying to find you. The police weren't great, but even now I don’t think that she really believes that you are dead.”

“I… Yes, I know that now,” the green-haired boy sighs. “But at the time, he told me that the kidnappers had asked for a ransom and that nobody tried to pay it. He even had some fake newsreels made, apparently. I’ve been combing the internet to try and separate the lies from the truth in everything he told me; it’s not easy. He had also erased my memories of the mall incident, that’s why I asked about it.”

“He can do that?” Hitoshi exclaims.

“He can do a lot of things,” Izuku says. “I think he kept messing with my head, because now that I’m remembering everything, there were a lot of times where memories of the previous timeline tried to surface. Almost any time I saw someone from our class, or even All Might… And even with him squashing everything he could, I was still feeling it strongly enough that I went to talk to you at the mall without warning him. He was livid.”

“I think that memories from the other timeline are stronger in people who were close to him when he activated the quirk,” Hitoshi muses. “And he was touching you, so it makes sense that he’d have to repress them all the time. I guess that we’re lucky he didn’t just use the quirk from his evil lair, far away from any of us.”

“Yes, but that would require him to refrain from gloating in front of All Might, and I think that he is physically unable to do that,” Izuku huffs. “He’s smart and powerful, but he is also over-confident and thinks that he can control everything. And I think that he has an addiction to complicated plots.”

“Wow, I haven’t seen you this nasty to someone since that time I got you to rant about Stain,” Bakugou smirks. “What did he do to piss you off that much?”

“You mean apart from… everything?” Izuku shrugs helplessly. “I just keep remembering moments that show that he was always manipulating me. I was so convinced that he loved me… Did you know that I was never actually quirkless?”

Bakugou looks surprised. “I thought you had a diagnosis and everything.”

Izuku smiles humorlessly. “Well, apparently my childhood doctor was the asshole who makes the noumus, so I don’t even know if that X-ray was legit. But even if it was, the rules are different for second generation quirk users… Which I wasn’t supposed to be, since nobody expected my father to be two hundred years old.”

“Wait, you were diagnosed quirkless?” Hitoshi interrupts. “But you always had a quirk, even if it manifested late?”

Both other boys wince with a guilty expression.

“Hum, that’s actually a pretty long story, and I really don’t want to tell it here. I’ll explain later, I promise… I just need to get you out first,” Izuku pleads.

Hitoshi narrows his eyes. “... I’m going to hold you to that,” he threatens. “So, what were you saying about not being quirkless?”

“I had a quirk,” Izuku says. “Not the one you saw me with at UA. I had my father’s quirk. When he realized that, he took it. That was right before he left.”

“What, you had All For One?” Bakugou exclaims. “Is that why you were so obsessed with quirks?”

“Maybe,” Izuku shrugs. “And… I have All For One. He gave it back to me after I ended up with him. He told me some bullshit about that quirk being a heavy burden and wanting to wait for me to be thirteen before he told me about it. Except that in the other timeline he just kept it, so I’m pretty sure that it was a complete lie, like everything else.”

“And what about…” Bakugou starts. Hitoshi waits for him to end his sentence, but the other boy just stares at Izuku expectantly.

“Well, there is no reason for me to still have it,” Izuku says hesitantly. He raises his hand slowly. It’s weird, seeing him without the terrible scars he got at the sports festival… but now that Hitoshi is looking, there are still scars, a complex network of thin white lines, they are just less visible.

And then his whole arm lights up in green sparks, and the boy jumps.

Bakugou and Izuku stare at each other, eyes wide.

“I did not expect that,” the green-haired boy says haltingly.

“How the hell did that happen?” Bakugou yelps.

“I have no idea,” Izuku admits. “I need to ask the previous- Hitoshi, can you brainwash me for a minute?”

Hitoshi scowls. “First, I’m not touching your freaky quirk  —  your second freaky quirk, apparently  —  with a ten-foot pole before I have an explanation,” he says. “Second, I’m not brainwashing you here anymore, because if any of the villains running around here find us like that, I’m dead. So no, I’m not doing this. Maybe you should learn to meditate, instead of using my quirk to have revelations about yours.”

Izuku wilts. “That’s fair, sorry about that,” he sighs. “And you’re right, the others are going to come in at some point. Listen, I have some things to do to help you get out, so I need to leave you here for now, but if you don’t do anything stupid, none of them will hurt you.”

He walks up to Hitoshi and takes his hands. “I’m going to cuff you again, because they will see that something is wrong when they come to feed you if I don’t, but I’m giving you the keys. Just don’t use them for now.”

“Why do you have spare pairs of handcuffs lying around?” the purple-haired boy grumbles.

Izuku’s answering smile is strained. “You’re in a villain’s lair. Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to hear the answer to.”

Hitoshi lets him remove the broken shackles and replace them with new ones, and keeps the small ring of keys hidden between his fingers.

It does make him feel better when his friend has to leave them with Toga and Kurogiri. Not by a lot, but it helps.

Being kidnapped is… tedious, once the terror has lessened. Hitoshi can’t really communicate with Bakugou while they are being watched, which is all the time, and Izuku does not come back until late in the evening.

In the meantime, they get to eat breakfast —  just rice, soup and some fish, but the quality isn’t too bad  —  which involves Hitoshi being uncuffed to eat first, then being tied again, and then Shigaraki standing behind him with both hands minus the pinkies on his shoulders while they untie Bakugou so that he can eat too. Hitoshi mostly trusts his classmate to not be an idiot, but it’s still not fun playing hostage.

After that, they are taken to use the bathroom, using the same system of keeping one of them under threat while the other is free, and then it’s just a long wait until the next meal.

At some point, Hitoshi succumbs to boredom and tries to strike up some conversations. He avoids Toga, who seems like she is always two seconds away from stabbing someone, and Shigaraki, who has the social skills of, well, someone whose only human contacts were a terrifying villain and online gamers (and which one is worse, Hitoshi doesn’t know), but while Dabi is utterly uninterested in humoring him (they could probably make him react by mentioning his true identity, but then he would kill them, so... maybe not a great idea), he gets Mr. Compress to show him a bunch of magic tricks, so it passes the time.

Still, when their friend comes back around 11pm, Hitoshi is very happy to see him.

“We need to plan how we’re going to play this,” Izuku says bluntly as soon as they are alone. “Things went well in the other timeline, but we can’t count on it in this one.”

“Oh shit,” Bakugou breathes. “The asshole also knows what’s going to happen…”

“Yep, my father will be much better prepared than last time,” Izuku scowls. “I don’t think that he intends to let himself be imprisoned this time. If everything goes like before, the heroes should call for a press conference in two days, and act then. That means that by then, everything important will be moved to another location. I’m pretty sure that you guys will be gone too. Or worse.”

“Worse?” Hitoshi asks with dread.

Izuku winces. “If you don’t look like you want to join the League, he’ll just take your quirks and dump you somewhere. Or kill you. He already took Ragdoll’s, unfortunately. I’ll see if I can give it back to her, but… I can’t guarantee anything.”

Bakugou swears. “She got caught this time too?”

“Yes,” Izuku confirms. “He won’t kill her because he is still playing the merciful act to me. As for you two, he’ll want your quirk for himself, Hitoshi, but I think that his plan is to make me take Kacchan’s, as a sort of… rite of passage, I guess? I’ve never taken anyone’s quirk against their will yet, I trained with noumus and my father’s collection.”

“You’d better stay away from my quirk,” Bakugou snarls.

Izuku sighs. “Come on, you know that I won’t touch it,” he says. “It’s not like I need it, and you’re much better with it than I would be.”

Bakugou calms down. “So, how do we avoid your asshole father killing All Might and skipping off to wherever?”

Izuku pulls out a flip phone. “I’m destroying this phone soon, but this should help.”

He shows them the screen, where a text conversation with an unregistered number is open.

All For One is at the warehouse; that’s where you’ll find your students and Ragdoll. Some members of the League are at the bar. He is expecting you to organize a press conference in two days and to strike then. You can surprise him by showing up earlier.

He won’t pull his punches against you, so you should evacuate the area too.

Who are you?

How did you get this number?

Are the students alive?

They are alive and mostly unharmed, I’m doing my best to keep them that way. Please attack as soon as you can: any time you waste lets him be more prepared.

This is all that I can tell you. Do not try to contact me further.

“Who did you text?” Hitoshi asks curiously.

“All Might,” Izuku says.

Bakugou squints. “How did you get his personal number? Don’t tell me All For One has it?”

The green-haired boy blushes. “Listen, you can’t expect me to have had All Might’s phone number and not learn it by heart…”

Hitoshi grins, ignoring Bakugou muttered “nerd”. “So you had his personal number? I hope that you know that Todoroki is going to take this as a confirmation of his theory.”

Izuku reddens further. “Didn’t he say that you were Aizawa-sensei’s secret child too? And I wish that All Might was my dad, it would have saved us so much nonsense…”

Oh, yeah, that theory is a bit insensitive now with the information they have. Still.

“He may not be your biological dad, but at this point he has as good as adopted you. You deserve a better father figure than no-eyes man,” Hitoshi says earnestly.

It does get a smile out of his friend, at least. It doesn’t last, though: soon, Izuku is back at frowning.

“He doesn’t even remember me,” he sighs. “To him, I’m just a member of the League of Villains, now…”

“If I was close enough when the shithead went back in time to get my memories back, then All Might will remember too,” Bakugou interjects, as reassuring as he knows to be. “We’ll have to try your weird memory quirk on other people to see what the range is, but him, Four-Eyes, Round-Cheeks and the red and white bastard will be fine.”

“... I hope that you are right,” Izuku says softly. “Anyway, that’s not important for now. I know that the police have our location because I saw informants hanging around today. I think that they learned about the bar because of Dabi, but they also know about the noumus warehouse, so Yaoyorozu must have managed to stick her tracker on Chainsaw. Which means that she and some other students might come along with the heroes like we did last time. If my father sees them, he’ll either kill them or use them as hostages.”

“Shitty-Hair will definitely try to come,” Bakugou sighs. “Who else was there last time? Ponytail, Glasses, Icyhot and you, right?”

“The lineup could be different this time, but let’s presume that we have at least four other people that we need to protect,” Izuku frowns. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I don’t think that I can avoid being present during the fight, if we want a good outcome. The good news is that if I say that I want to fight All Might, I’m pretty sure that my father will be ecstatic and accept.”

“I remember how crazy strong All For One was last time,” Bakugou scowls. “Maybe if you’re there you can play human shield for the dumbass gang, but you can’t beat him, right?”

The green-haired boy shakes his head. “No, even with All For One, the quirks he gave me, and One- my quirk from the other timeline, I don’t think that I can take him head on. Especially since the percentage that I can control is probably lower than after the Paranormal Liberation War, and it was clearly not enough then. But… I might not need to.”

The expression on his face is strange; there is resolution, which Hitoshi is used to, but there is something else that the purple-haired boy cannot read.

“You’re not planning to do something dumb and sacrificial, are you?” Bakugou asks threateningly.

Izuku smiles oddly, staring into space. “No, on the contrary, I’m going to play it safe. If I do it right, I might not even need to fight at all.”

“And what about us? I’m not gonna let you do all the work and just wait to be rescued,” the blond frowns.

Hitoshi blinks. “Wait, why did you tell All Might that we are at the warehouse? This is the bar, right?”

“He said that we would be there,” Bakugou corrects. “Shithead number one has a weird warping quirk. Last time, he brought me and the other assholes to him as soon as the heroes showed up, and sent a bunch of noumus in our place, so there need to be some heroes here to deal with them, but it’s better if All Might is at the warehouse from the beginning.”

“Yes, if he hasn’t dealt with the two of you by the time of the attack, he’ll bring you to him to serve as hostages,” Izuku confirms.

“So, what’s the plan for us then? Mindfucker has the key, we can escape easily.”

Izuku winces. “If I say stay out of the fight and run away with any of our classmates who show up, you’re not going to be happy, are you?”

“Not especially, no,” Hitoshi says drily. Bakugou just swears.

Their friend sighs. “I have the bare bones of a plan. I can do something to weaken All For One enough that All Might should be able to finish him, and I can probably convince him to give me some combat-oriented quirks just in case it’s not enough, so between me and All Might, we should have my father managed. You guys need a way to get away from the League, and I need the other heroes present to not just blast me on sight. Do you have ideas?”

“Which heroes should be here?” Hitoshi asks.

“Last time, it was Best Jeanist, Tiger, Gang Orca and Mt. Lady,” Bakugou explains. “All Might, Endeavor, Edgeshot and Kamui Wood were at the bar. And that flying old man, too.”

“With the information I gave them, I’m pretty sure that All Might, Gran Torino and Tiger will be at the warehouse,” Izuku adds. “I don’t know if anything else will change: apart from All Might, none of the heroes are any kind of good match against All For One anyway. But they’ll expect noumus too, and they’ll want people to coordinate evacuating the civilians.” He wrinkles his nose. “Oh shit, I hope Endeavor isn’t there, I don’t want to deal with him.”

“Yeah, he’s the “shoot first, ask questions later” type,” Hitoshi agrees. “Oh, and Dabi is here too. That could get messy fast.”

They all wince at the reminder.

“I can probably get Best Jeanist to leave you alone,” Bakugou changes the subject. “I still did my internship with him, so he knows me and I know that he understands sign language. If he is the highest ranked present except for All Might, that should buy you time with all the other heroes.”

“Oh, that’s great!” Izuku grins. “And I’ll deal with All Might and Gran Torino. It’s not going to be easy but if I can just focus on them I should be fine.”

“You think you’ll do better than at our final exam?” Bakugou asks, eyebrows raised. “You’re confident.”

“We didn’t use psychological warfare then,” Izuku says calmly. “I have a couple of tricks that should slow them down.”

Hitoshi watches them strategize, feeling lost and inadequate. His friends are both trying to figure out how to work against  —  or with  —  several high-level heroes and villains to get the outcome they want; he is probably just going to freeze up and be dead weight.

“Are you alright, Hitoshi?” Izuku asks suddenly. “You look… uncertain.”

“I just don’t know how you do it,” he admits. “You’re going against both All Might and All For One, and you’re not panicking.The first time I had to deal with villains, I fainted!”

Izuku smiles sheepishly. “Uh, that may have been my fault, actually… You remember when I touched your head after threatening Tsuyu? I have a contact poison quirk. It can kill, but a lower dose just knocks you out. That’s how we got the two of you unconscious to tie you to those chairs, too. I’ll give you the chemical formula once you’re out, by the way, the doctors will want to know when they check you up.”

That is… actually reassuring, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is terrified about the battle to come.

“I still don’t think that I can deal with the pressure,” he says. “I’ll just slow you down.”

“Bullshit, you were fine in the forest,” Bakugou snaps. “Don’t use excuses, you can take care of yourself.”

Hitoshi raises his brow in surprise: that’s probably the closest to a compliment that his classmate is able to give.

“We’re going to have to improvise a lot anyway,” Izuku adds. “I know my father so I can anticipate his thought process a little, but he’s still miles ahead of me in terms of strategy. When things will start going against him, I can’t predict how he’ll react. But it’s still good to have a plan, even if it doesn’t survive contact with the enemy and all that. Especially if you’re afraid to freeze up! It’s easier to follow a plan than to make one up on the spot.”

Hitoshi sighs. It makes sense; hopefully he can at least do his part, once they have determined what “his part” is.

“Okay,” he says, “I’ll do my best. But my quirk is not great for fights against several people, it’s useless against noumus, and since you and Stain managed to break out of it, I wouldn’t bet on it against All For One. But I’m not just letting you deal with everyone alone,” he directs to Izuku. “You can’t deal with your father, several top heroes, and try to protect us and a bunch of our classmates all by yourself.”

“Well, for once, you’re probably the best choice to get you and Kacchan out of your restraints,” his friend thinks aloud. “Like you said, I’ll be busy with other things, and with his hands trapped like that Kacchan couldn’t use the keyring. But you need to wait before my father is busy with something else: he’s blind now, but between his echolocation quirk and his enhanced hearing, he’d notice if you tried anything while he is next to you. He won’t notice hand signs or facial expressions, though.”

“Shit, that’s nice but I can’t sign with those fucking cuffs,” Bakugou exclaims. “I wanted to tell Best Jeanist to leave your dumb ass alone, but there’s no way he’ll understand me like that…”

“I can sign a little,” Hitoshi says slowly. “Well, I know yubimoji, at least. It’ll be slow as hell, but I should be able to get the meaning across if I only need to convey a few sentences.”

“... Yeah, that should work,” Bakugou concedes, clearly unhappy. “But you’d better get me out as soon as possible! I’m not playing damsel in distress this time.”

“You can’t use your quirk fully anyway, with your arm like that,” Hitoshi frowns.

“Oh, I can help with that!” Izuku smiles. “I’ve got a healing quirk that is great for broken bones.”

He demonstrates it immediately by placing his hand on Bakugou’s swollen forearm. It glows blue for a few seconds, and Bakugou raises his eyebrows and barks a laugh.

“You’ve got a quirk to deal with broken limbs now?” he grins. “Recovery Girl is going to retire when she hears that…”

Izuku takes a full breath in, then exhales slowly. He has managed to get a few hours of sleep during the night, but his nerves are still frayed.

It’s now late in the evening, two days since the Vanguard Action Squad came back with their two prisoners. U.A. has just announced that they would be holding their press conference in twenty-four hours, and so, if they decided to trust Izuku’s message, now would be a great time to strike.

Izuku doesn’t feel ready, but he also wants things to happen soon, because waiting blindly like that is wearing him out emotionally.

Right now, he’s sitting with his father in the latter’s command room, which looks mostly like a hospital room with a bunch of screens stuck on the walls. One of them is connected to the screen in the bar; another is a link to the League doctor, who is currently moving some of his more delicate experiments from inside of the noumus warehouse (on the floor below them) to another base with Kurogiri’s help. One is always displaying a news channel. The others are currently turned off; Izuku isn’t sure what his father uses them for.

All For One is so needlessly dramatic: why on earth does he use a pair of screens to communicate with Tomura, when the one in the bar only ever displays statics and the one in his room is completely useless to him, a blind man? Echolocation and infrared sight are useless on flat surfaces. You’d think a centuries old man would have heard of phone calls.

… Izuku may be a bit snarkier than usual, but his patience for his father’s antics has been severely compromised by the fact that said father had apparently paid thugs to kidnap him (and beat him every day for a week, he hasn’t forgotten that part) just for the opportunity to play savior to his son. What an asshole.

It’s not his father’s only crime  —  and it’s far from his worst  —  but it’s the one that makes Izuku the angriest right now. He still has the physical and emotional scars from that ordeal, not to mention the part where his father convinced him that his mom was happy to be rid of him. And to think that he had believed this monster to be capable of love.

Anyway, Izuku has done what he needed to do to prepare for the coming confrontation with the heroes, so… he will have his revenge. All For One won’t walk away from this one.

Now, he needs to make sure that none of the people he wants to protect will be hurt. Which is especially hard, considering that it is everyone else involved.

He hasn’t talked to his friends about the rest of the League yet, because he knows that they won’t be happy with what he has to say. But the truth is this: for the last five years, he has lived alongside Shigaraki Tomura. His father has been fostering a brotherly relationship between them. And it worked.

Izuku doesn’t want his brother to die.

What All For One has not taken into account, of course, is that Izuku also doesn’t want his brother to become a puppet who has lost the control of his body. Honestly, how does his father think that Izuku is going to react when they get to that part of his plan? Either he hasn’t thought that far ahead  —  unlikely  —  or he is simply unable to realize that the bond between the “Shigaraki brothers” will affect Izuku’s feeling towards him.

It’s possible that All For One simply believes that his son is an extension of him, and so would react the same as him in a similar situation, which means that he wouldn’t care, since All For One himself is unable to feel empathy for anyone else. Narcissistic bastard.

Izuku’s train of thought is interrupted by the doctor’s screen flickering on.

“Master… They’re coming!” the panicked voice of the old man filters through. Behind him, the sound of a building facade being kicked in can be heard.

Izuku smiles. Mt. Lady is limited in urban settings by the fear of collateral damage, but when she is given free range, she sure packs quite the punch.

All For One face  —  what is left of it  —  twists in irritation.

“Already?” he grumbles. “These heroes are obnoxious. Izuku, my boy, will you help me dress up? It seems that the battle is coming to us earlier than planned.”

As he speaks, the stench of his warping black goo fills the air, and Hitoshi and Kacchan appear in the next room, still tied to their chairs.

The boy holds back a shudder at the address that seems now like a mockery of the way All Might used to call him, and forces out a cheery affirmative. He starts delicately removing the numerous tubes affixed to his father.

“I can still fight All Might, right, father?” he asks with as much enthusiasm as he can fake.

“Of course, Izuku,” the man smiles. “But don’t forget to use what I have told you about him.”

“I know,” Izuku answers. “Aim for his left side, taunt him about Tomura… I’ll be fine, with all the quirks that you’ve given me, he won’t be able to touch me anyway!”

“Don’t be too cocky,” All For One scolds him. “Despite his weakened state, he’s not to be underestimated. If I feel that you are struggling, I will intervene.”

“Yes, father,” Izuku says, playing the chastised teenager.

He finishes unplugging his father from the medical equipment surrounding him by removing his tracheal tube, and replaces it by the mouthpiece containing All For One’s respirator.

The villain’s costume is completed by a dark mask hiding his ruined face and giving it the aspect of a skull, a black suit jacket, and two small oxygen bottles at the back of his neck made to provide him with two hours of easy breathing.

Once they are done, Izuku and his father come out of the command room. They don’t pause outside the door: All For One just grabs the chairs in which their hostages are sitting, one in each hand, and lifts them as if they weighted nothing. Kacchan swears and protests are ignored; Hitoshi does not make a sound, his face pale and drawn.

Izuku risks a reassuring smile in his direction. If everything goes according to plan, they just need him to free himself and his classmate with the keys hidden in his sleeve. Hopefully, neither of them will have to fight.

They stop in the long, shadowy corridor leading to the noumus warehouse. From there, they can see the heroes busying themselves with neutralizing the monsters, but they have not been noticed yet. Izuku squints at the scene. The lineup is close to what they predicted: Gang Orca is missing  —  probably replacing All Might at the bar  —  but he can see Tiger cradling Ragdoll’s naked body, Mountain Lady and Best Jeanist emptying the vats of their unresponsive contents, and All Might and Gran Torino standing to the side, overseeing the operation.

The sight of them makes Izuku’s heart clench. He knows that his mentors are going to see him as an enemy, at least at the beginning of the battle. He has a reasonable argument that may make them hesitate, but at some point they’re going to have to fight.

It’s not going to be fun, especially considering that All Might is still much stronger than him.

“What did they do to you, Ragdoll!” Tiger cries out at his unresponsive teammate.

In front of Izuku, his father noisily drops the chairs (and the students sitting in them) that he was carrying.

The activity in the warehouse stops suddenly, and everyone turns towards them.

“I’m sorry, Tiger,” All For One lies silkily. “I have always thought that she had a useful quirk. I couldn’t stop myself from taking it… After my injuries, I needed to refill my stock.”

All Might steps forward, interposing himself between the villain and his colleagues.

“All For One,” he growls, his grin devoid of any joy. “I was hoping to find you here. You wanted a rematch, I believe?”

“Not quite,” All For One laughs. “While I would love to grind you to dust myself, there is someone who has been dying for a chance to fight you.”

Behind the number one hero, Best Jeanist moves sharply, tightening the villain’s suit around his ribs. “We are not here to humor you,” the fiber hero says tersely.

“Really?” All For One tuts. “I thought that since young Bakugou has been your intern, you would value his life more…”

The hero’s control on Izuku’s father’s clothes is released suddenly.

The light above them turns on dramatically, activated by minor technopathy, one of the hundreds of quirks accumulated by All For One during his long career. Izuku steps forward, showing himself clearly at his father’s side. Their hostages are on each side of them and All For One is holding both students by a shoulder.

They must make for an impressive picture.

Izuku’s costume for the occasion is pretty different from his father’s formal suit or his usual dumb t-shirts: he has tried to recreate something as close to his Deku hero suit as he can, while using only materials that Best Jeanist won’t be able to use against him. That mostly means a lot of leather, and durable plastic and metal for the belt and knee pads. The colors are all accurate, though: anyone who remembers the previous timeline, even subconsciously, should be strongly reminded of it.

If his father wasn’t blind, it would tip him off to the fact that his son definitely knows more than he should.

But he is, so hopefully Izuku can use the slight disorientation this should cause for All Might.

… He really doesn’t want to fight his mentor, but he doesn’t have much of a choice.

Said mentor is watching all of them more angrily than Izuku has ever seen him. His face during the USJ attack has nothing on the sheer hatred radiating from him now. Izuku puts his hands in his pockets, closing his fingers around the one thing that may buy him time to get close enough from All Might to use the memory quirk.

“Oh, you changed your mind?” All For One laughs. “Very well. I have an offer for you heroes, a chance to save those children. My son has been waiting for an occasion to prove himself to me, and what better way than a fair fight against All Might? If All Might beats him, I release your precious students. If he loses, I leave with them. Does that sound fine to you?”

It is a lie, of course: All For One has never participated in a fair fight in his whole life, and there’s no way he would let go of such great hostages like that, especially without taking their quirks. If Izuku is about to lose, his father will interfere, as he threatened. He might even expect to have to, and all of this could be an elaborate way of bringing Izuku further under his thumb.

But that’s not important right now. For now, Izuku has a part to play.

He steps forward again, this time stopping in front of All Might, a confident smirk plastered on his face. “I’ll be your opponent!” he proclaims.

In front of him, out of range of his father’s radar, he takes the flip phone out of his pocket and opens it one-handedly. The screen is still showing the text conversation from earlier.

It was a risk, keeping the device intact, but it was his only way of showing some good faith to the assembled heroes.

All Might squints at him, then his eyes widen. Before he can react, Izuku brings a finger in front of his mouth, eyes pleading for the hero to stay silent. All Might frowns, but it turns to understanding when Izuku taps his own eyes, trying to hint at his father’s blindness.

“... I don’t fight children,” All Might finally says a beat later. He now looks suspicious of Izuku, but that’s better than outright hostility. “You’re sending a teenager against me? It seems like your morals haven’t improved since last time.”

“Oh, believe me, nothing would bring me more joy than killing you myself,” All For One answers smoothly. “But it is a parent’s duty to put their child’s wishes first, and he hates you so much that he begged for a chance to have a go at you. Of course, you are free to refuse the fight, but then your students' lives are forfeit. I don’t doubt that you are a terrible teacher, but that is probably not the kind of bad publicity that you can afford.”

All Might clenches his teeth. “Very well, you leave me no choice. But I hope that you realize that I will make you pay for it.”

He steps towards Izuku, and they start circling each other. All Might is undoubtedly the strongest here, but he’s wary: he knows that anyone associated with All For One must not be underestimated.

“So, you’ve met my brother, right?” Izuku says lightly. He hates doing this, but he needs his opponent destabilized. “Tomura, blue hair, decay quirk… Does that ring a bell?”

“The one who tried to murder my students?” All Might answers flatly. “I believe that you were present as well.”

“Hm, it’s true, but we didn’t speak much that time”, Izuku shrugs. “That’s too bad, I heard that you knew his grandmother, maybe you could have told him about her.”

The hero frowns. “What are you talking about?”

Izuku activates all his speed and agility enhancing quirks before answering. He can feel the thrum of energy of One For All just under his skin, low enough that no green sparks are visible, but ready to answer his call.

“You don’t know who Tomura is? He is Shimura Nana's grandson,” he finally reveals, bracing himself for All Might’s reaction.

It comes immediately. The hero leaps at him, ready to punch. It’s fast and strong, but sloppy: that’s why Izuku manages to dodge and isn’t flattened right away.

“You liar!” All Might yells.

Izuku doesn’t answer: he needs to be completely concentrated on the fight. He dodges the second punch by darting along the inside of All Might’s arm, and then has to drop down fast to avoid being caught by the man’s other hand. He gets a hit in on a knee, but what he really needs is skin contact, so that means targeting All Might’s face or hands.

And his face is… kind of too high for Izuku. He loves his mom and his father is a monster, but at this point, if his paternal genes had taken over in terms of height, that would have been convenient.

So he needs to touch All Might’s hands. Preferably not by taking a punch to the face, too.

Izuku is forced to leap back by a sweeping kick, and attempts to go far enough to give himself a moment to think. He tries to keep his back to the other heroes: with All For One threatening Hitoshi and Kacchan, they shouldn’t attack him, and that way All Might is forced to somewhat reign in his strength. Even then, this is starting to feel a lot like that horrible practical exam where he and Kacchan had to fight the number one hero. Izuku is stronger than he was then  —  he can’t use full-cowl at more than five percent once again, but the various enhancement quirks his father gave him do help a little  —  but All Might isn’t wearing weights and more importantly isn’t restraining himself at all.

Izuku really doesn’t want to break his back again.

They trade blows for a while. Izuku is mostly on the defensive and only manages to attack when All Might is distracted by All For One heckling him from the side. They are basically having a conversation about Nana while Izuku is still fighting for his life: it would be annoying if the boy didn’t feel so completely out of his depth. But he needs to catch All Might, damn it!

Unfortunately, he ends up taking a glancing blow to the ribs. He falls backward, and watches helplessly as All Might ready his arm for a finishing smash.

But the hero hesitates.

Is it because Izuku is still sixteen years old, and even enraged, All Might cannot bring himself to hurt him too badly? Is it because Izuku’s costume is resonating with buried memories of the previous timeline?

In any case, it’s just enough that the boy twists out of the way of All Might’s fist. It rams into the ground right next to his ear.

Izuku raises his hand and grabs it.

He has thought long and hard about which memory he should use. He has considered their first meeting, when Izuku discovered his mentor’s secret, or later in the same day when he got offered his quirk. The entrance exam, where he used One For All for the first time. The sports festival, his debut in the eyes of the public.

But in the end, he settled on the night after the original battle of Kamino, when they met on the beach and All Might punched him for his recklessness. He couldn’t think of any time where either of them were more emotional.

It makes All Might drop like a sack of bricks.

“Toshinori!” Gran Torino cries out. “What did you do?!”

“Contact poison,” Izuku lies through his teeth. “So useful.”

He pushes All Might from where he has fallen across Izuku’s legs and stands up slowly. Across from him, the heroes are looking at him in horror.

“I’m proud of you, Izuku,” his father says from behind him. If he didn't know the man as well as he does, Izuku would have missed the note of incredulity in his voice.

It smarts, but he reminds himself forcefully that his father underestimating him is working for him now. He isn't done yet.

During his fight with All Might, he has caught Hitoshi signing towards the other heroes. Hopefully they have seen it. He looks straight at Best Jeanist and starts moving his hands.

Get ready to yank your allies behind me, he conveys. The hero's eyes widen but he nods slightly.

"Well, as promised, since my son won, I’ll be leaving with our prizes,” All For One declares.

A putrid smell fills the warehouse, and black goo starts appearing out of thin air. It expands and turns into the members of the League who were still at the bar. Kurogiri and Dabi are unconscious, but the others are only disoriented.

“We were ambushed, Sensei!” Tomura exclaims. “Those cheaters were early!”

“Do not fret, Tomura,” All For One answers. “We are still winning. Izuku vanquished All Might. I will wrap up with the heroes here and join you shortly.”

The other villains look impressed. “Damn, kid, I didn’t know you had it in you,” Magne whistles.

All For One creates a portal by using rivet stab and forced quirk activation, and the villains file through it. Gran Torino tries launching himself at them, but he is batted out of the way like an oversized mosquito by a hypertrophied arm. The heroes are not happy to see the villains go, but they haven’t noticed that it means that the man is no longer touching his hostages.

Izuku signals Hitoshi discreetly, and the student takes advantage of the distraction to start unlocking his restraints. They don’t have much time: if All For One warp the students away, it will make things much more complicated.

Once the rest of the League have left, All For One turns back towards Izuku.

“Take the boys with you and go with Tomura,” the villain orders.

Izuku glances at his friend. Hitoshi is still sitting in his chair, but he is free. Kacchan is still bound.

Here we go.

“No,” he says.

It makes his father stop short. “I’m sorry?” the man asks slowly.

“I said no,” Izuku says louder.

“... What is the meaning of this?” All For One hisses.

Next to Izuku’s feet, All Might stirs. “Midoriya, my boy… This is a surprise,” he groans.

He gets up slowly, and All For One’s aura turns murderous. “What did you do?” the villains growls.

Izuku shrugs. “What do you think?” he asks. “I’m betraying you. It’s not like I’m the first one in the family to turn against a relative, right?”

“You little… Why?! After all I did for you!”

Izuku barks a laugh. “All you did? Are you sure that you want to get into this in front of everyone here? You’ve been nothing but manipulative since the day you came back in my life. But you know what? All Might was always a better father figure than you, even before we met in person.”

All For One takes a step back. He’s smart enough to join the dots; at this point, between All Might’s words and Izuku’s accusations, it’s clear that they know about the other timeline.

His tone turns venomous.

“You are foolish if you think that any of the quirks that I gave you are any match for me. I’m going to crush you, and all you little hero friends here with you.”

“You’re right,” Izuku grins ferally. “Well, about the first part at least. For the second part… Why don’t you try?”

He sees his father’s arm swell in preparation for a strike. All Might moves beside him; before the blow can come, he feels Best Jeanist use his quirk to pull the other heroes closer to him. Satisfied that they are taken care of, Izuku reaches inside of One For All’s warm glow and extends Blackwhip, catching Hitoshi around the waist, Kacchan’s whole chair, and groping around blindly in the alley running along the warehouse until he feels his tendrils catch on the five people hiding there.

“What the hell are you fuckers doing here?!” Bakugou yells when he sees the shadowy appendages drop Shouto, Tenya, Ochako, Kirishima and Yaoyorozu with everyone else.

Before they can answer, All For One strikes. Izuku concentrates every drop of power he can use without breaking himself in a counter punch, and thanks his lucky star that All Might is at his side, because there’s no way that he could have survived that in one piece alone.

It’s devastating. Izuku really hopes that the heroes heeded his warning and evacuated the surroundings: there isn’t much left of the warehouse walls behind them, or of the next buildings beyond.

“See?” Izuku pants. “You’re not the only one who can give quirks.”

Behind him, Hitoshi is freeing Bakugou, and their classmates are being scolded by Tiger and Gran Torino. From what he can hear, nobody is hurt. All Might doesn’t look pristine anymore, but he isn’t smoking as if he was about to shrink back to his true form either.

“Let me take this fight, my boy,” the hero says. “He’s my responsibility.”

“I want to help,” Izuku retorts. “Be careful: he has more quirks than the last time you fought him here, and he’s prepared specifically for you. But he won’t be able to use them all.”

As if on cue, All For One seems to blur for a moment, though he stays in place. It looks like he tried to move extremely fast but stopped immediately.

“What did you do to me?” the villain snarls and falls to one knee.

“Was that overclock?” Izuku asks. “Oh, the brain drain must be unpleasant.” At All Might questioning look, he elaborates: “It’s a quirk that allows the bearer to go several times faster than normal, but you need a lot of oxygen or it can cause brain damage. And he doesn’t have enough… Maybe next time you shouldn’t leave your oxygen bottles where people whose life you ruined can reach them,” he adds towards his father.

“You back-stabber,” the man seethes. “You prefer All Might? Fine. You can die with your mentor, then!”

The Noumus still in their vats start moving, and All For One’s arm changes again, this time sprouting out blades and screws. In answer, All Might and Izuku move into a fighting stance. Behind them, Mountain Lady, Tiger and Gran Torino step forward, while Best Jeanist forms a barrier out of denim fibers to protect the police officers behind him.

A second before the villain attacks, Izuku’s danger sense is triggered and he jumps, narrowly escaping the wave of ice aiming for his feet.

“What the- Shou- Todoroki, now is not the time!” he yelps, keeping himself floating in midair to stay out of range. Ugh, that’s right, his classmates only know him as a villain right now, and they did see him take down All Might, even if the hero got back up after… The pros on the scene have clearly decided to trust All Might judgment of him, but apparently that’s not enough for the students. He did not need another thing to worry about!

Fortunately, Gran Torino has sprung to All Might’s help, so his mentor is not alone in battling his father. Still, he should be working with them, not dodging darts from the gun Yaoyorozu has just created.

“Hey, stop that!” Shinsou snaps. “He’s on our side!”

“How do you know?” Shouto grits out. “Isn’t he the one who attacked you at the mall?”

“I said I was sorry!” Izuku yells. “And I didn’t attack him, I just wanted to have a chat! If I had wanted to hurt him, he’d be dead.”

“You’re not really helping right now,” Shinsou sighs. “No, really, guys, it’s complicated but I swear that we can trust him.”

“Mindfuck is right, you dumbasses should be fighting the noumus instead of him,” Kacchan adds, visibly annoyed. “Or better, you could get out of the way of the pros! What the fuck were you thinking, coming here?!”

Izuku takes a moment to survey the scene. All For One is busy dealing with his two old enemies, and while Izuku doesn’t feel great about dropping the reveal of Tomura’s birth name on them, it does mean that the villain’s psychological ammunitions are decreased. And All Might has already digested that piece of news long ago in the other timeline, so he should be able to power through the painful reminders. Mountain Lady and Tiger are dealing with the noumus: for now, they are only facing low-level ones. Now and then, one manages to sneak past them, but they are all intercepted by Best Jeanist and restrained.

Seeing that his former classmates have stopped trying to shoot him out of the air, Izuku drops down cautiously. He is about to say something  —  maybe to try and explain himself  —  when something big moves in the shadows along what is left of the far wall.

The thing steps into the light. It’s a fully black noumu, like the one they brought at the USJ, but it is at least three times as big as that one: it reaches half of Mountain Lady’s full size. Its muscles are bulging, a pair of black bat wings hangs from its back, and a mismatched bundle of pointy teeth protrudes out of its mouth, reminiscent of an anglerfish maw.

Please let it not have Moonfish’s quirk, Izuku thinks wildly.

It’s hideous, and when it roars, it makes the ground quakes. It must be very recent, because Izuku has never seen it before.

He doesn’t know what quirks it has, but when he sees the thing take a deep breath in, Izuku yells in warning. Best Jeanist reacts by extending his denim shield to also cover the students around him.

It catches the huge plume of fire directed at them, but the threads are burnt to ashes in the process. Best Jeanist is left with his arms bare, short sleeves only covering his shoulders. With a flick of his hands, he unravels them further until he has no sleeves left at all.

The fire-breathing Noumu growls in frustration at its attack being deflected and punches the wall behind him, one of the two still standing after the heroes’ entrance and All For One’s devastating strike. The whole building shakes and a web of cracks start to form, going higher and higher.

“The ceiling!” Izuku yells.

Best Jeanist raises every fiber he has above their head, creating a roof that shields them from the concrete rubble that falls down on them, while Mountain Lady and Tiger leap at the new enemy. That leaves the students to take care of the smaller noumus. Kacchan, Kirishima and Shouto jump in enthusiastically, followed closely by Iida, Uraraka and Yaoyorozu with a newly created bo staff. Shinsou hangs back wisely, considering that he’s missing his usual equipment and that his quirk isn’t useful against most noumus. Instead, he’s carrying Ragdoll, who is now wrapped in a blanket.

The situation seems to be well in hands, so Izuku turns around and charges at his father.

He hasn’t really had an occasion to fight along his mentor before, and especially not against an enemy as vicious as All For One.  The villain may be limited in how many quirks he can juggle at once and slowed by the progressive suffocation he is experiencing, but he’s still dealing blow after powerful blow, forcing All Might to counter them to protect himself and his allies. Gran Torino is darting in and out of All For One range, taking advantage of the breaks between his attacks to strike and retreating behind his former student when the villain recovers. The duo works like a well-oiled machine, but who knows how long it will take to bring down their enemy that way? Gran Torino is strong, but nowhere near All Might or even Izuku in terms of power.

Izuku manages to catch his father in the ribs with his first attack, mostly because the man was so focused on his two other opponents, but he has to jump back right after that to avoid being backhanded into the stratosphere. He knows that All For One still outclasses him in every way. But the lack of oxygen should take him down soon, if they manage to keep him from destroying the city  —  and them with it  —  before that happens.

They play this dangerous game of tag team for a while (it feels like hours but it’s probably just a few minutes) and Izuku is starting to believe that they might just win, because All For One’s moves are starting to become sluggish, when it goes wrong.

It starts with Shouto yelling in pain behind them. Kacchan swears and calls for Best Jeanist to take his injured classmate out of the fight. It doesn’t last long, but it’s enough to distract them for an instant; that’s all that All For One needs to strike. Gran Torino goes flying next, hitting the last standing wall of the warehouse with a thud. Izuku refrains himself from glancing at him or back towards his friends: now that it’s just him and All Might against the villain, he can’t afford to take his eyes away from him.

But all his focus is not enough. While he gets another two blows in, he slips up once, and All For One catches him by the collar. Izuku struggles fruitlessly for a few seconds before the villain readjusts his grip to hold him by the jaw and brings Izuku’s back against his chest. With their height difference, the boy’s feet are no longer touching the floor.

“I will kill you for what you did to me, Izuku,” his father promises darkly. “But first, you get to see those fools die.”

While All Might is visibly trying to find a way around his enemy using his successor as a shield, said enemy flick his fingers towards where Mountain Lady and Tiger are still fighting the huge noumu. Izuku manages to elbow him in the ribs. It earns him the searing pain of having his lower jaw broken by his father’s crushing grip, but it’s worth it when it makes the shot go wild, which means that instead of being critically wounded like Best Jeanist was in the other timeline, the two heroes are just thrown backward by the shockwave.

Unfortunately, it means that the noumu they were holding down is now free.

The thing leaps forward, inhales, and breathes out a torrent of fire that encompasses and hides from Izuku’s view all the hero students, Best Jeanist, and the police officers that Jeanist was protecting.

Izuku screams in horror, raising the power of Full Cowl to a level that is definitely not safe, but he is too panicked to register the way his bones and tendons ache. He grabs at his father’s arm will all his strength, pouring poison through their skin contact and instinctively activating Blackwhip at the same time. He only realizes what he has done when All For One collapses and his feet are back on the ground.

He turns to his enemy and stares uncomprehendingly at the black tendrils squeezed around the man’s neck.

Behind him, the sound of fire is interrupted by a gurgle.

He turns around unsteadily again, and sees the big noumu topple over. Its brain is skewered by a long red feather.

“Thank you for the save, Hawks,” Best Jeanist says from behind the thing’s prone body. “Have you been here for long?”

Hawks? What on earth is he doing here?! Isn’t he supposed to be in Fukuoka?

“From the beginning,” the winged hero answers calmly. “You seemed to have things well in hands, but I stuck around just in case. Is everyone alright?”

Now that Izuku’s eyes are readjusting to the ambient darkness after being blinded by the fire attack, he can see numerous dark forms around Best Jeanist and Hawks. They resolve into his friends and the police agents.

The relief is overwhelming: Izuku’s legs give out from under him and he lets out a choked sob.

A rasp reminds him of the very dangerous villain that is still next to him. He turns back to him, and sees that All For One has not moved from the heap he fell into on the floor.

“I think we won, my boy,” All Might says softly.

Izuku closes his eyes. “You’re right,” he articulates painfully through his broken jaw. “There is just one last thing that I need to do…”

He lays his palm on his father’s scarred head and activates his  —  their  —  quirk.

All For One’s collection of quirks is enormous. He has been stealing them for more than a hundred years, even if he lost some of them during his previous fight against All Might; there is no way for Izuku to take them all, as his control of his own version of the quirk only lets him take a dozen quirks at once before he starts feeling the backlash. It doesn’t matter that much, because there are many quirks here that he wants nothing to do with. But he does need some of them.

He starts with search, which he wants to give back to its original owner soon, and overclock, whose original owner he knows about and might be able to find. He passes over the various strength and speed enhancement that don’t hold a candle to the power of One For All, but he does nab the two resilience enhancement quirks that he can find: they might help to up the percentage that he can use. He takes everything that feels like a healing quirk  —  three are for self-healing and two for healing others  —  and sighs in relief as his jaw knit itself back together. He finishes with the disgusting warping black goo quirk that is nonetheless extremely useful, and quirk reading, which should allow him to analyse the quirks of anyone he can see (he’s been begging for a copy of this one for years, after all).

The last one he yanks out is super-regeneration. He saved it for the end because predictably, as soon as it is in his possession, search warns him that his father’s heart has stopped.

Izuku allows himself a few seconds to mourn his father. He doesn’t regret killing him: the man is impossible to contain in the long run, as they were able to see in the last timeline, and he did and was planning to do so many terrible things that he deserved anything coming to him. Even his affection towards Izuku was at best shallow and at worst a complete lie.

But he has still acted as Izuku’s parent for the last five years. Losing him… It’s a shock.

He eventually lets go of the man’s head and stands up shakily. The battle was exhausting both physically and mentally, and he hasn’t taken so many quirks at once since the last time his father made him test his limit. Fortunately, All Might is there to support him.

They hobble towards Gran Torino, who is only suffering from a concussion, two cracked ribs, and a lot of bruising, according to search, so Izuku decides to keep what is left of his strength and doesn’t try to heal him.

“He’ll be fine once he gets to a hospital,” Izuku says to his mentor. “No internal bleeding or deadly hidden injuries. Just be careful with him”

“How do you know?” All Might asks curiously, lifting Gran Torino in his arms.

“I’ve got something that I need to give back to Ragdoll,” he answers tiredly.

“You have- Wait, you have his quirk?” the hero yelps.

Izuku shrugs. “I mean, I’m his son, it wasn’t that unlikely. He had stolen it from me when I was small, so I didn’t have it when we met in the other timeline, but he gave it back when he took me in this one.”

“How did that happen, by the way?”

“It’s a long story,” Izuku winces. “I don’t want to tell it here. Let me deal with Ragdoll first, please?”

“Of course, my boy,” All Might relents. He smiles then, small and sincere. “I must say, it’s good to have you back.”

When they reach the other heroes, Izuku finds himself on the receiving end of several guarded stares.

“You helped us,” Best Jeanist says. “But you are also the green-haired villain that attacked those students before, aren’t you?”

Izuku grins awkwardly. “Yes, that was me. I’m All For One’s son, but… he wasn’t a good father. It’s a long story, but All Might knows about it and he can vouch for me. Can I see Ragdoll now? I know what my father did to her and I can reverse it.”

They all hesitate, but at All Might’s nod they part for him. Hitoshi is still supporting the unconscious hero, and he at least is not afraid of Izuku, so he lets him cup Ragdoll’s cheek.

Giving back her quirk is like slotting in the last piece of a puzzle. It feels natural in a way he is not used to. Maybe because the quirk was hers, originally? In any case, almost as soon as he is done, she blinks her eyes open.

“What… What happened?” she asks blearily.

Everyone relaxes a bit, and Tiger takes her from Hitoshi, his eyes wet.

“Thank you,” he directs at Izuku, before focusing on his teammate.

“Hey, can I ask you for a favor? Uh, maybe two?” Izuku whispers at Hitoshi once everyone’s attention isn’t on him for a minute.

“Sure,” Hitoshi says. “What is it?”

“I need you to tell my mom that I’m alive and that I’ll come and see her as soon as it’s safe,” Izuku answers. “And I’m going to give you the memory quirk. It’s a psychological quirk like yours so it should be safe for you to keep both for a little while. Use it to remind our friends of the other timeline. Do it at least for those who were there when my father rewound time, but you should try with others too… At least Aizawa-sensei and the rest of class 1-A. Please.”

Hitoshi frowns. “Wait, you’re not coming with us?”

Izuku winces. “I can’t. I’d be treated like a villain until I can prove myself, and I don’t know how long that would take. And… I can’t leave Tomura alone.”

“That psycho?!” Shinsou keeps his voice down, but his incredulity is obvious. “Why do you care about him?”

Izuku sighs. “You don’t get it. He has been my brother for the last five years. You guys lived almost the same events in this timeline, but I didn’t, and… I understand why you hate him, but you don’t know how manipulative my father was. You’ve seen what he made me into in five years. He had Tomura for fifteen.”

Hitoshi’s face twists in displeasure, but he extends his hand and allows Izuku to push the memory quirk at him.

“Thank you,” Izuku breathes.

“Thank me by coming back soon,” Hitoshi retorts. “We’ll get you cleared. I doubt that All Might will accept anything else anyway.”

Izuku smiles wobblily and glances around to see that his friends are safe and sound one last time, before teleporting two streets away.

It’s a new quirk that his father gave him right after the mall fiasco. It’s not very precise and he can’t go further than a few hundred meters away, but it’s good for getting out of that kind of situation.

Izuku takes a deep breath and starts the long way towards the League rendez-vous point. He has a brother to save from himself.

The evening of the next day finds Hitoshi and Bakugou ringing on the bell marked “Midoriya”, at the bottom of a residential building in downtown Musutafu.

“Who’s there?” a tinny voice asks.

“Auntie Inko? It’s Katsuki,” Bakugou answers, his voice hesitant. “I’m with a classmate, there’s something that we need to tell you.”

They both decided that talking to Izuku’s mom would be their first stop after getting out of the hospital. The doctors kept them under observation for twelve hours after looking them over, and they dodged the police interrogation with the excuse of being too tired and wanting to reunite with their parents, but they (and All Might) need to decide what they are going to say soon. They also need to explain the time-rewind mess to their classmates, or at least to Izuku’s friends, which is going to be a whole ordeal, and also at some point report the use of a time quirk to the relevant authorities.

Ugh.

Anyway, right now, they are not dealing with the police, their friends, or the International Time Agency, but with Midoriya Inko. It’s not any less daunting.

The door buzzes open and they go up the stairs until they find a small plump woman with long green hair waiting for them. She leads them inside her apartment.

“What are you doing here, Katsuki?” she asks softly. “Shouldn’t you be with your parents? Mitsuki was so afraid for you… And who is your friend?”

“I’m Shinsou Hitoshi, and I’m a classmate of Bakugou,” Hitoshi introduces himself.

“Oh, you were the other student who was kidnapped! I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you with your cap…”

They have covered their hair to avoid being stared at in the streets, with the reports of their kidnapping still recent and their pictures being plastered everywhere, so it’s not surprising.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, it’s on purpose,” Bakugou waves her apology away. “We’re here because... “

He trails off, looking at a loss for words. He is uncharacteristically subdued: his voice is softer than Hitoshi has ever heard it and he hasn’t sworn once since they got there. Hitoshi takes pity on him and continues in his place.

“We’re here to tell you that Izuku is alive,” he says.

Inko pales and sits down abruptly on the couch.

“You- How? Where is he?!”

“I don’t know exactly, but he’s not in danger for now,” Hitoshi reassures her. It’s probably not a lie, even if her son is with the League of Villains. “He asked me to tell you that he would visit you once it’s safe.”

Her face turns resolute. “Tell me everything,” she orders.

Two days later, late in the afternoon, Hitoshi’s phone vibrates with a message from a number he doesn’t recognize.

Unknown number: Hey, thanks for talking to my mom.

Shinsou Hitoshi: Izuku?

Unknown number: How many moms did you visit recently?

Shinsou Hitoshi: How did you get my number?

He quickly enters his friend’s contact information in his phone.

Midoriya Izuku: You left it to my mom, she gave it to me.

Shinsou Hitoshi: You got to see her? That’s good.

Shinsou Hitoshi: We had to give your name to the police so they might visit her soon, sorry…

Shinsou Hitoshi: We talked with All Might and he said that at this point hiding things wouldn’t work. He is dealing with the time agency people by the way, and he said that he might find a way to get you cleared soon.

Midoriya Izuku: Don’t worry about the police, they won’t bother her.

Midoriya Izuku: I’m in contact with All Might too. He still has a lot of influence, esp. considering that he isn’t retired yet this time, but since he doesn’t have that many contacts out of the police force, it could be at least a year before my case is resolved.

Midoriya Izuku: That’s why I’m staying with the League for now.

Shinsou Hitoshi: Are you okay with them?

Midoriya Izuku: I’m fine. Since the details of the fight weren’t made public they don’t really know what happened.

Midoriya Izuku: They’re not too bad company if you ignore Toga’s stabbing attempts.

Midoriya Izuku: Most of them just really need a lot of therapy.

Shinsou Hitoshi: … Should you ignore Toga’s stabbing attempts?

Midoriya Izuku: With the number of healing quirks that I took from my father? I can.

Midoriya Izuku: Did you talk to the others yet?

Shinsou Hitoshi: Oh, yes, let me add you to our group chat.

He opens the chat named “All For One shitty Time Shenanigans” and enters Izuku’s number. Izuku reacts almost immediately by sending his first message there.

Midoriya Izuku
Did Kacchan choose the chat name?

King Explosion Murder
And what about it?

Floaty
He did! But now that you’re here we can change it!!
It’s good to speak to you, Deku! Without the murder threats this time :)

Midoriya Izuku
Yeaaaaaah, uh, sorry about that…
I don’t know how much Hitoshi told all of you?

Xanax
Everything you told us, basically.
The broad lines at least.

Speedy
We don’t blame you my friend! You did the right thing when it mattered!

Floaty
He’s right! You even protected Aizawa-sensei at the USJ when you didn’t remember him.

Floaty changed the chat name to Dekusquad+an asshole

Xanax
Wait, am I the asshole?

Floaty
You’re joking, right? After everything we went through together? You’re an official member of the Dekusquad!
Plus, you’re not the one who still doesn’t know his classmates' names after a year and a half.

King Explosion Murder
Fuck off, Round-Face!

Family Issues
Do not fight it, Shinsou. With them, friendship is not an option.

Midoriya Izuku
I can’t believe that Mr. I’m-Not-Here-To-Make-Friends 1) stole my friend group and 2) saved me with the power of friendship.
I’m so proud.
Also, “Family Issues”, Shouto? Really?
And why “Xanax”?

Xanax
That’s my back-up hero name.

Family Issues
Bakugou suggested “Daddy Issues” but I thought that it didn’t quite capture the whole situation.
You are living with my brother, you should understand.

Midoriya Izuku
You know what, that’s fair.
Wait, let me change my name.

Midoriya Izuku changed their name to Deku

Deku
Much better.
I didn’t think I’d ever miss that name so much…
So, you couldn’t bring back anyone else’s memories?

Xanax
I didn’t really have an occasion to try. I caught Iida, Uraraka and Todoroki while coming back from the battle, but since everyone is home now I can’t approach them without being super suspicious before the end of the holidays.
I’ve explained the situation to Aizawa-sensei, though, and he agreed to let me try once we confirm that all of this was because of time travel and not just you fucking with our minds.
Apparently the time travel people have ways to detect when it happened to someone.

Deku
I guess that’s fair… So he is aware of the situation?

Xanax
Yep.

Family Issues
Fair warning, so is Hawks.

Deku
Oh, I was wondering why he was at the battle!

Xanax
I don’t have the details, but I’m pretty sure it’s Todoroki’s fault.

Hitoshi reads with interest as his friends explain that after the night where Bakugou and him were kidnapped, Hawks had contacted Todoroki once again, and had apparently immediately guessed that he and his classmates were about to do something dumb. He had let them go on the condition that he came with them.

The explanation to Izuku of why Hawks has Todoroki’s phone number  —  and of what exactly happened in Hosu this time  —  is interrupted by Bakugou.

King Explosion Murder
Deku.

Deku
Yes Kacchan?

King Explosion Murder
Any idea why the police are saying that auntie Inko disappeared during the night?

Deku
… Maybe.

King Explosion Murder
Tell me she’s not staying with the psychos.

Deku
You know I don’t like lying to you, Kacchan.
She’s fine, Toga hasn’t even tried to stab her once! And she’s trying to adopt Tomura and he has no idea how to react, it’s hilarious.
The others have been very polite. I think they are afraid of her.

King Explosion Murder
Next time I see you I’m going to strangle you.

Deku
Mom said that if you do she’ll be very disappointed in you.

King Explosion Murder
Ugh, fine, but if she gets hurt I’ll kill every single one of those fucking assholes and you with them!

Floaty
This is fascinating. Deku, has your mom always been able to calm Bakugou down?

King Explosion Murder
Fuck off, I’ve spent the last five years worth of Sundays seeing her cry about her missing son, I don’t want to make her sadder.

Deku
… I’m sorry about that too, Kacchan.

King Explosion Murder
Ugh, shut up, moron. Just make sure that she’s fine. And don’t disappear again!

Floaty
Right, what Blasty said!

King Explosion Murder
Don’t call me that, Pink-Cheeks!

The conversation only devolves from there, but knowing that Izuku is once again talking to his friends makes Hitoshi feel like the world is, if not quite back to normal, at least a little more right than before.

Izuku crosses and uncrosses his arms for the third time in as many minutes. The message he has received from an unknown number only gave him a place and time, and Hitoshi’s confirmation that it was from someone he can trust doesn’t help his anxiety much. He’s pretty sure that his friend’s refusal to tell him who it is is payback for the kidnapping.

He takes in a slow breath. He is equipped to deal with almost any opponent, and he has all the quirks he needs to make a quick escape if needed. And he is on a roof, so a few jumps with Full Cowl at twenty percent would bring him to the back alley where Kurogiri is waiting for him.

His head snaps up when something moves on the next building. He relaxes when he spots the yellow goggles and grey capture weapon.

Now to hope that his former teacher remembers the other timeline.

Hitoshi would have warned him if he didn’t, right?

Aizawa leaps on Izuku’s roof and stops a few steps away. He stays silent for a few beats, sending Izuku’s anxiety sky high, before sighing.

“Problem child,” he says almost fondly. “Why is it always you?”

Izuku feels a relieved smile appear on his face. “Sensei, it’s good to-" he starts.

“No,” Eraserhead interrupts him flatly, sending his capture weapon to wrap around the teenager. “Seriously. Why is it always you?”

Izuku lets himself be reeled in and takes the slap on his head, but it turns into Aizawa ruffling his hair halfway through. The boy smiles sheepishly.

“It wasn’t actually my fault this once, though,” he protests without much heat. “You can’t expect me to fight off All Might’s archenemy when I was ten.”

“I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying that none of my other students have as many problems as you do,” Aizawa grumbles. “And your class is already unusually prone to villain encounters. Did you know that Ashido met Gigantomachia in the street once when she was in middle school?”

“I didn’t,” Izuku admits. “And technically I’m not one of your students, am I?”

“If you think that you can escape me like that, you’ve got another thing coming,” the teacher grins his usual unsettling smile. “Nedzu wants to meet up with you so that we can officially enroll you again.”

“What? Why?” Izuku asks, taken aback.

“So that when you inevitably stick your nose in something you shouldn’t, you can have UA’s legal department behind you. It will also speed up your case and help have your name cleared faster. And he wants you to pass the provisional licence exam so you don’t get arrested for illegal quirk use.”

“I can’t go back to UA,” Izuku says determinedly. “I need to stay with the League. I can stop them from becoming what they did in the other timeline. Tomura listens to me, and I’m pretty sure that I can get him to turn to vigilantism instead of straight up villainy. The others… I don’t know all of them super well, but Toga has stopped trying to stab people since my mother has added animal blood to her diet, Spinner had never actually done anything worse than get in some street fights before the summer camp, Compress is just a thief with Robin Hood ideals, Twice needs therapy more than anything else… I can deal with them.”

“You’re not thinking rationally,” Aizawa retorts. “You’re attached to them, god knows why. Will you be able to make the call if one of them turns bad? Assuming that they don’t all already deserve to rot in prison.”

“... I don’t know,” Izuku admits. “But I can’t not try.”

The teacher watches him for a minute, long enough that Izuku has to consciously stop himself from fidgeting, before the man finally sighs.  “I want a weekly report, and if I say that one of them needs to be taken down, you listen to me,” Aizawa says with steel in his voice. “We’ll meet at this address every Monday night; you can also use it to see your friends, the staff knows to be discreet.”

Izuku blinks and smiles widely when he realizes that this is as close to outright permission as he can get. “Yes sir!” he answers cheerfully. “What kind of place is it?”

“A cat cafe,” Aizawa deadpans. “Say that you’re sent by Eraserhead and you’ll get a discount, but treat the staff right or I’ll expel you.”

“You can’t expel me if I’m not enrolled!” Izuku protests, trying to wrap his mind around his teacher in a cat cafe.

“Tell that to Nedzu, you have a meeting with him tomorrow.” The teacher seems to notice Izuku paling. “What’s the problem? He likes you, he’s not going to eat you.”

“Excuse me for being anxious when he’s the only pro hero that my father was actually afraid of!” Izuku says with a grimace. “He hated All Might, but feared him? Not really. I think he had a hand in making Nedzu the principal of UA because it would make him too busy to intervene in investigations about All For One.”

Aizawa’s eyebrows raise towards his hairline. “Well, you can start by telling him that, he’ll be flattered. Just don’t try to outsmart him and you’ll be fine. You don’t have a choice, anyway: if you don’t go by yourself I’ll come and get you.”

Izuku grumbles an agreement, resigning himself to being treated like an unruly student. It’s better than being treated as a wanted criminal, at least…

“Now, what is your plan for the next few weeks? Do you have funds?” Aizawa asks curiously.

“I’ll be fine, me and my mom have trust funds to our names now that my father is officially dead,” Izuku shrugs. “Not all his assets were illegal, apparently. They’re not enough to fund a secret lab or a big villainous organization, but since I have no intention of doing that, we’ll be comfortable. Speaking of secret labs, did you catch the doctor? With All For One dead, he’s his most dangerous follower left.”

“We’re working on it, heroes are collecting proof against him as we speak,” Aizawa says. “We can’t arrest him just because some of us remember him making noumus in another timeline, but since we know his name and the location of his main lab, he should be dealt with in a few weeks at most. You didn’t answer me on what your plan was.”

“I want to rescue Eri,” Izuku admits. “I don’t have to take down Overhaul, I know that it would be too dangerous to go by myself, but I can’t leave her with him longer than absolutely necessary, and with the people in the League following me, I already have a plan… I’ll bring her to you as soon as we get her out, I promise!” he adds hastily when his teacher frowns.

Aizawa smiles. “Good idea. Let me tell you what I remember of Overhaul’s interactions with the League of Villains in the previous timeline…”