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There was a fucking invasive element in One for All and Second was not happy about it. Banjo wanted to ignore it, so they could discuss “the villain Nine and what just went down on Nabu Island”. Third and En wanted to ignore it indefinitely, on principle. Nana wanted to address their unusually direct intervention of giving One for All back to Ninth despite him having passed it along to a person Second was going to refer to solely as an invasive element, and possible repercussions of this.
Apart from Nana who kind of did have a point, none of those were the best course of action here clearly. They could discuss the battle later. Ninth wasn’t even awake yet. There was a problem here and now and they needed to focus on the right thing.
Yoichi voted for poking the invasive element, which would have been encouraging from literally anyone but him. Yoichi loved poking things. The moment he’d been let out of his vault he’d taken to screaming like a banshee and running after anything that remotely resembled his brother on his weak little legs-
“Hey!”
-which had included a random man with white hair, a random man with a voice that to this day Yoichi insisted sounded like his brother and on one memorable occasion, an alpaca.
There may have been alcohol involved.
Anyway.
Back to the invasive element.
Nana interjected to tell him to stop calling the invasive element an invasive element, a suggestion Second dutifully ignored.
“It’s a teenager, Second, for heaven’s sake,”
Invasive element. Specimen. Whatever you wanted to call it. This was a battle Nana was going to lose, not him.
Nana sighed.
Concurrently, Banjo was losing his own battle in another corner of the room against getting Yoichi to not poke the invasive element.
The invasive- fine, the blond teenager with whom Ninth had the most dysfunctional relationship known to man (not counting the one between Yoichi and his brother) and who did not fucking look like Second had appeared, still as a mannequin, as soon as One for All had been transferred back to Ninth, by their collective decision. It was a pretty standard rite of passage, as all of them had once lifelessly appeared and remained so in the period of time between having passed on their quirk and having died.
A period of time that was shorter for some than for others.
Yoichi had precisely none of Second’s qualms and walked around the teen, muttering under his breath. “Fascinating. Is it just me or is he more transparent than the others?”
Not transparent enough, in Second’s opinion.
Yoichi looked intrigued at that. “Do you think he should be more transparent?”
“I don’t want him to be here at all,”
“Ah. Well sucks, because he is. You’re just annoyed because we’re going to keep making jokes about you two looking alike, right?”
It wasn’t that. It was the fact that One for All had been passed on so carelessly. This was not a power to be taken lightly and the younger generation, aka Ninth, had just given it away like that. It was only by their intervention that he’d gotten it back.
Nobody looked convinced at that.
“You remind me of my brother’s rants about the good old days he’d do routinely when I was alive. Pre vault times,” Yoichi told him, and Second was so offended by that he had no comeback when En pointed out that Ninth didn’t need their permission to pass along the quirk, and it had all worked out in the end.
Banjo took advantage of Yoichi’s distractedness to try to coerce him into moving away from Bakugo, to which Yoichi hissed at him like a feral cat.
“What?” Yoichi snapped, looking annoyed. “It’s not like he’s a bomb waiting to go off,”
“I still think we should talk about the events that just transpired? One for All being passed on? The kid nearly dying?” Nana pressed, having allied herself with Third in the ‘We Need To Talk About What Happened’ party.
“Since when do you call Ninth the kid?”
“Once again focusing on the wrong thing here,”
Second and En, whose curiosity seemed to have overtaken his previously stated “Ignore Everything” stance had joined Yoichi around the teen, and Third threw his hands up in the air in defeat. “Or I guess we can all go poke Bakugo, sure,”
“To be fair, it's not like this happens often.” En defended.
Third gave up and grudgingly followed the rest of them to inspect the teen.
The first thing that was immediately evident was that Bakugo, well, looked solidly like shit. His arms were purple with bruises, spiky hair sticking straight up even more so than normal, hero costume torn and ruined.
“Yikes,” En said, which summed up the whole situation quite neatly.
Nana couldn’t help but wince. “I mean that's how he looked when he got the quirk, so it makes sense,”
Banjo looked him up and down. “Is he going to just look like that the whole time? Are we just going to have a half dead teenager chilling in the corner for all of eternity?”
He wasn’t even really in the corner really, he’d appeared right in front of Hikage’s chair, to which the man had shrieked, tried to pretend he hadn’t, then gone off to sulk.
Speaking of, he hadn’t made an appearance yet. “Is Hikage still embarrassed about how he reacted when Bakugo appeared?”
Third shrugged. “Probably,”
“Hold up,” Banjo said. “Did Second just call him by name?”
“He did say Bakugo, yea,”
“It took you forever to stop calling me Fifth, and now you’re immediately on name basis with this kid?” Banjo looked genuinely hurt at that.
“It's not like I’m calling him fucking Kacchan. It’s nothing personal. We didn’t know each other yet. What mattered more to me than your name was what number you were.”
Banjo announced he was feeling reduced to an object and let them all (Second) know that he did not appreciate it.
Second had absolutely no sympathy for him. “Anyway, it’s also because I have no idea what number this kid is, and Nana kept looking at me disappointedly when I called him an invasive specimen. Is he the Tenth?”
Nana wondered if that would make Ninth’s successor the Eleventh, or a second Tenth.
“Twelfth,” Yoichi corrected.
“What?”
“The quirk went from Ninth to Bakugo, making him the tenth, then back to Ninth, also making him the Eleventh. Therefore, his successor is the Twelfth,”
En said this was all unnecessarily complicated, so Yoichi helpfully made it even more complicated by proposing they average out Ninth’s role as both the ninth and eleventh (??) user of One for All by calling him the Tenth.
“We could also just call him by name,” Nana pointed out. “Does this all matter, anyway?”
“Absolutely not and absolutely yes,”
“I don’t think we’ve run into this problem before.”
Yoichi snapped his fingers. “I got it. Ninth and a half.”
“..”
“Sorry, no.”
“That’s too long to say,”
Yoichi looked indignant. “Well I don’t know what you want from me then,”
He experimentally tried to run a hand through Bakugo’s face, to everyone’s alarm.
Yoichi defended himself from everyone’s disapproval by claiming it didn’t matter since it wasn’t like Bakugo could feel it.
Banjo objected saying they didn’t know that.
Second was with Yoichi on this. It wasn’t like he was a fucking voodoo doll.
“Yea Banjo, what Second said. It’s like,” Yoichi paused for a second. “Passing on One for All is like discarding a shell you put on. And the shell becomes the empty figure here in One for All, until you die and then you come and...reinhabit it?”
What started as a statement became progressively more unsure the further Yoichi proceeded with his analogy.
“Literally what,”
“Okay, how about a snake shedding its skin. Or think of One for All as suit you put on and remove, and when you remove its taken the shape of your body,”
“You do see how these are getting progressively worse, right?”
Hikage finally emerged from his hideout, decked in a blanket.
He told them he had been lured by talk of snakes, and seemed quite disappointed to find out that the only snakes present in their discussion were solely available in the form of very poor analogies.
Yoichi took offense to his analogy being called a poor one.
Hikage stared at them for a second then asked if they could move Bakugo off to the side so he wasn’t in front of his fucking chair and like, sure they could do that.
Probably.
Bakugo was visibly more transparent than the rest of them, as if he hadn't had the time to fully form.
Hikage peered closer at him. "Oh wow, he really does look like shit,"
That had been established, yes.
"Do you know how freaky it is to have a constipated looking teenager covered in blood appear right in front of you like that in a place where nothing ever happens? You would have screamed too,"
"Keep telling yourself that,"
They opted to put something over Bakugo to cover his sorry state before attempting to move him, and Banjo volunteered his jacket, so they plopped it into his head, letting it hang awkwardly off his frame.
Bakugo now resembled a particularly pathetic clotheshanger.
"Since we're covering up Bakugo, would anyone also like to put a blanket over Second? So we don't have to look at his face either,"
Second told Hikage that if he kept that up it was his own face he'd have to worry about.
It took a bit of a group effort but eventually they got Bakugo out of the way and lined up next to where Eighth was.
Yoichi had taken the opportunity to tell Hikage about the snakes, and he seemed oddly interested in it. Apparently, to Hikage, snakes were okay in any form, even Yoichi’s shitty examples.
“I think we should try to punch Bakugo to put the voodoo doll theory to the test,” he announced.
“That seems morally questionable,” En told him.
Nana pinched the bridge of her nose.
"I'm honestly still surprised we were able to move him in the first place, honestly." Banjo commented. "At the very least, he's not completely intangible,"
"I'm still for the punching,"
"Hikage, what for? Do you just want to punch someone?"
"Science,"
"Third punched Yoichi once, remember?" En pointed out. "It wasn't particularly impressive,"
Well both were also dead at the time. Bakugo was still alive, as far as Second was concerned.
"So is Toshinori. Would you punch Toshinori?"
"…."
"Yoichi!"
"It's for research,"
"We are not punching anyone," Nana said firmly.
Now looking doubly disappointed, Hikage announced he was leaving again and went back to hideout to do…whatever it was he did whenever he decided he was allergic to human interaction and disappeared for a few days.
"Has this ever happened before? Our quirk being passed to a random person briefly?"
Certainly not with Second. They didn't pass One for All so lightly in his time.
"Hey cut the kid some slack. It was the only reason they made it,"
Second's personal misgivings aside though, it was objectively pretty weird to just have Bakugo around.
They'd never had not one, but two not yet sentient new vestiges hanging around.
Not to mention he was just a kid.
"Also Eighth doesn't look half dead. No offense," Banjo said.
"You sure about that? He's fucking skeletal,"
Nana winced. “Are they going to look like this for eternity?”
En shrugged. “I don't think so. I was beat to hell when I passed my quirk along, and now look at me,”
“Oh that doesn't bode well for Bakugo then,”
“Shut up,”
They still hadn't managed to figure out what determined the vestiges' appearance in One for All, whether that was the moment the quirk was passed on, when it was received, both, neither? Something else entirely?
Whatever it was, Second was pretty sure he’d be able to change the way he looked.
“Oh fuck,” Third said abruptly. “I think we’re all aware that once Bakugo dies he’ll come here, but I just realized something worse,”
En raised an eyebrow at him.
“Eventually, we're going to have to deal with both him and Ninth, constantly interacting,”
“...”
“Hmm.”
“Can’t be worse than having to deal with you lot,”
Second was feeling very appreciated right now.
“Well. They did say hell is other people,”