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Izuku briefly woke up to the sensation of motion under his back. He lay on his stomach with his head on someone’s lap. The car motor told him he was inside a vehicle. He could not move his body. He thought he had owl wings currently, but he could not tell. They were too heavy to be butterfly or ostrich wings, at least. His quirk came with eight different types of wings from the previous holders that he could cycle between. But One for All did not respond to his call. He could not see. What was against his face? Was it cloth?
A hand carded through his hair. The other hand touched the leather hood covering his head and forming two padded pouches over his eyes. Nimble fingers fastened the hood shut, completely sealing off his vision. This was the same type of hood that humans used to train hawks.
Too late, Izuku tried to struggle. A hand on his back held him in place. “Go back to sleep, owlet,” his father’s voice whispered.
“All for One,” Izuku mumbled.
The hand stopped moving.
Izuku had noticed something strange as soon as Hisashi Midoriya had returned from America. His father hadn’t been happy to see Izuku with a new quirk and the wings that came with it. In fact, Hisashi had fainted dead away when he’d first seen Izuku using the First’s snowy owl wings. Then Hisashi had tried to pretend to be glad for his son, but a simmering rage had shown in his eyes. Izuku’s feelings had been hurt. All his life, he’d longed to be able to fly like the quirked. Since the dawn of the age of quirks, stairs and elevators had fallen out of use. It hadn’t been easy for Izuku to get around in a city designed for people with wings. Izuku had been so happy to finally soar through the sky like everyone else. But his own father, a fellow snowy owl, had refused to teach him how to use his wings. Hisashi had claimed it brought back too many painful memories.
Izuku had become suspicious when he’d heard All for One speak on the battlefield for the first time. Even under that ugly helmet, Izuku knew his own father’s voice. Something of his shock and horror must have shown on his face, because All for One had abandoned everything else to grab Izuku. As soon as the giant hand had fastened over his face, his world went black. Then he woke up in this car, unable to move.
“You could have given me wings,” Izuku said. The All for One quirk came with the ability to give and take quirks, and all quirks had a set of wings attached. In other words, Izuku’s father could have given him a set of wings at any time in his childhood, from when he’d been crying about his destroyed dream at age four or when he’d skipped school at age six because Kacchan told him it was better to be dead than unable to fly. Or when he’d jumped off a roof at age ten—not to harm himself no matter what people thought later, but because he believed it might trigger a hidden quirk inside of him. “You could have granted me the ability to fly as easily as waving your wing.” Letting down his son was hardly All for One’s greatest crime. It didn’t matter compared to the decades of villainy. But in his hazy state, Izuku felt the personal betrayal most keenly. His father had watched him suffer for years, had been able to end his suffering at any time, and done nothing.
“It was too dangerous,” his father said.
So Hisashi had said many times about Izuku’s dream to become a hero. “Why? Because you’d kill me?” Izuku spat out the words sarcastically. “Like you killed the other One for All holders? Like you indirectly caused the First’s death? Wasn’t he your brother? But you clipped him. You’re a monster.”
“Sleep,” his father said more insistently, and this time a tingle ran from his touch into Izuku’s head.
Izuku howled in rage and desperation, but still the darkness seized him and dragged him down.
The next time Izuku woke up, he felt soft cotton sheets and a fluffy pillow. As he had slept since his wings came in, he lay on his stomach. He still could not see. The hood against his face felt maddingly suffocating. When he tried to yank it off, he found that his hands had been tied with leather cords to the bedposts. So had his feet. Izuku thrashed, rubbing the hood against the bed to try and get it off. It would not budge. His heartbeat came faster. He sucked in air desperately through an impossibly dry throat. The more his struggles rubbed the leather against his face, the more he panicked.
“Stop or you’ll hurt yourself,” his father ordered. The command was followed up by a grip on his hair. “Once you stop struggling, you should find the hood calming.”
White-hot rage rose up like a tsunami and smashed away his panic. “I’m not a bird.” No matter his type of wings, he was still a person, not a slave to the bird instincts. He most certainly did not find blindness to be calming. How dare his father hood him like an animal to be trained?
“You’re a snowy white owl, at the moment,” his father said. “You settled into that form as soon as you fell asleep. It seems to come most naturally to you.” His voice held an approving note.
Izuku felt fingers stroke his wings, pruning and realigning the feathers. It was an intimate act, one that his father no longer had the right to. He growled and tried to jerk away. What a relief that at least he could feel sensation through his wings, even if he couldn’t so much as twitch them. “Why can’t my wings move? What have you done to me?”
“It’s a quirk to make your wings unable to move,” his father said.
Izuku growled, low in the back of his throat. “Why not clip my wings, or even rip them off? I don’t believe for one second that you have moral qualms, All for One.” Or that his father cared about him at all, after leaving Izuku trapped on the ground for so long. “Is it because you killed your brother that way?”
A sharp intake of breath told him the hit had landed. His father said, “I don’t know what All Might told you, but I didn’t kill Yoichi.”
“You clipped his wings, and he died falling. Isn’t that the same thing?” Izuku had heard the story from All Might, but at the time he hadn’t made the connection that the First had been his uncle. He felt mean, full of an ocean of rage speckled with panic floating around like plastic bottles and other litter bobbing to the surface. From a thousand nostalgic remarks during his childhood, he knew what to say to hurt his father.
The hand withdrew. Izuku flinched, half-expecting a blow (he no longer knew what his father might be capable of doing to him.) Instead, his father only said, “I’ll be back when you’re in a better mood.” Owls could fly in perfect silence, but the slam of a door or window revealed that he’d departed.
Izuku was left alone in the darkness.
At first, Izuku tried everything he could think of to escape. The bonds on his limbs were too tight. One for All lay dormant and unable to be used. He would not be able to activate his quirk as long as he couldn’t move his wings. This had been tested many times. Wings and quirks were linked. Cut off someone’s wings, and they’d never be able to use their quirk again. People with their wings immobilized could sometimes access a thread of their power if they could twitch a single feather. But whatever All for One had done to Izuku had completely paralyzed him.
Izuku tried to shift to a different type of wings—it would be great if he could poison All for One in his butterfly form. Whatever power kept his wings from moving also kept him from shifting between them. When Izuku attempted to rub the hood against the bedpost, his old panic started to return. He stopped. He needed to think.
Tied-up and sightless, he had very few sensory clues. He felt a small breeze in the room. There was a window, if only he could reach it. He did not hear any other noise. Probably he was outside the city. Izuku knew his friends and teachers must be looking for him. It was disheartening to suspect that he might be in an isolated location. Given that All for One had access to a teleporter, he might be very far away indeed.
Izuku would have to save himself. That was nothing new to him.
His thoughts and plans kept him distracted at first. (And kept him from thinking too hard about his father’s horrific betrayal or his mother’s inevitable worry for him.) But eventually Izuku ran out of ideas. He did not currently have enough information or resources. Irritating though it was, he needed All for One to return. Then he could learn more.
Alone in this place, time inched by like a sloth crawling across the road. Izuku recited the names, quirks, and wings of every hero to distract himself. Whatever his father had done to knock him unconscious had left him dizzy and with a headache. The headache started out faint, but with no other sensation, Izuku had nothing to think about except the pain between his temples.
An unbearable heaviness came over Izuku’s limbs. It felt like his mind had been wrapped up in heavy gauze. He struggled to remembered the conditions and weaknesses of Mount Lady’s power. Normally he could recite the stats in his sleep. He felt hot—not feverish, but a little too hot to be comfortable. The pain in his head twisted and squeezed until he felt like his brain had been stuck in a blender. In contrast, the rest of his body was numb all over. When the sleep rose up, this time Izuku relaxed into it with a sob of relief.
“Wakeup, sleepyhead,” his father called.
Anger came back to Izuku even before the memories of how he’d came to this place. That gentle voice infuriated him. This man did not deserve to be considered his father, only All for One. Izuku tried to sit up, only to jerk against the bonds on his arms. Tear tracks stained his cheeks under the hood. He must have cried in his sleep.
All for One unfastened the bonds on his arms. The villain’s touch paralyzed Izuku’s arms like his wings, before he had time to even think about running away. “There, there, owlet,” All for One cooed. “You’ll feel better after you get some food in you.”
Izuku burned with humiliation. Once he’d liked it when his father called him owlet, but now it reminded him of all those years his father had deliberately left him unable to fly. After he’d nearly died when a poorly maintained set of stairs collapsed under him, his father had insisted he only visit ground floor buildings. In her anxiety, his mother had agreed. Izuku had purchased his climbing equipment in secret and stored it at school where his parents wouldn’t find it. Maybe his father hadn’t given him wings because he preferred to keep Izuku helpless.
A spoon brushed Izuku’s mouth. With his eyesight cut off, his sense of smell sharpened. The scent of soy sauce and pork roused a rumble from his stomach.
Barely opening his lips, Izuku growled, “How long do you plan to keep me here? Does Mom know where I am? Are my friends safe?”
All for One said, “I’ll answer one question for each meal you eat.”
Izuku ground his teeth. He hated to strike any deal with the villain, but in truth, he needed sustenance if he was to have any hope of escape. Without further struggle, Izuku let his father feed him the ramen and wipe off his face afterward. People tamed wild animals by feeding them. It reminded him uncomfortably of the hood. Izuku endured the hand carding through his hair and even a humiliated trip being carried to the bathroom.
All for One laid Izuku back down on his stomach on the bed, and refastened the bonds on his numb wrists. He started grooming feathers again. “I’ll let you out when you give me One for All.”
“That wasn’t my question! Don’t just answer the first one I asked!” Izuku cried, outraged. If he only got one, then he would have picked something to help him escape or news about his friends.
All for One chuckled, deftly slipping a feather on Izuku’s back into place. “Then you’d better speak more carefully next time I come.”
“Don’t pretend you did something clever,” Izuku growled. “It’s easy to win when you have all the power and make the rules. If you’re so smart, how did you completely fail to notice that I’d inherited One for All for months? That makes you a failure as a villain and a father.”
All for One did not respond to the jab. Instead, he left. It took Izuku a moment to notice. He heard the window open and close again. Then he was alone in the darkness with no sound except his breathing.
The wait was agonizing. The paralyzation quirk wore off quickly, but he still couldn’t move. An ache spread through his back, arms, and legs as he spent too long lying in the same position. The small pain was magnified by having absolutely nothing else to feel. Sweat soaked his clothing and sheets. He longed to bash his head against the hood, to rip his pillow apart with his teeth, to scream. How unbearable, to be unable to do anything. He’d yearned for wings for so long, and now he couldn’t do anything with them. Once again, he’d been reduced to useless ground-crawling Deku. He could have endured if he’d known when All for One would be coming back, but the uncertainty and helplessness drove him insane.
Izuku had a suspicion he was being trained to desire All for One’s company. Unfortunately, knowing did not stop it from working. When he heard the window open again, he felt a fierce joy and hated himself for it.
Like last time, All for One paralyzed his arms before sitting him up. Today’s meal was egg drop soup and a chicken cutlet. Izuku ate as quickly as possible, determined to get to his question.
“Slow down or you’ll choke, owlet,” All for One chided gently, holding a glass of water to his lips. The villain’s presence loomed like a large shadow in the darkness.
Izuku restrained what he wanted to say with great force of will. Instead, he asked, “What happened to my friends after you knocked me unconscious?” He’d considered asking about his location, but he wouldn’t trust All for One to tell the truth.
All for One said, “I withdrew from the battlefield after securing you. The heroes are all safe, and running around like headless chickens trying to explain their missing student to the press.”
Izuku breathed a sigh of relief. He did not entirely trust this answer either, but at least with All for One staying close to his prison the villain probably didn’t have time to cause other trouble. Not how Izuku wanted to help people, but he’d take it.
All for One said, “Lie down, and I’ll preen your wings and massage your back.”
As if Izuku had any choice when he couldn’t move. Izuku knew this was his reward for not being smart-mouthed today. It gave him a perverse desire to unload about All for One’s failures in everything from fatherhood to fashion sense. But despite feeling like a pet, he could not afford to turn down this particular treat. He needed his limbs to work if he ever managed to break free. Izuku bit his lip and endured in silence.
Afterward, All for One tied Izuku up again, kissed the top of his head, and said, “Sweet dreams, owlet.”
As the window closed again, Izuku felt like a toy his father had switched off for the night. Tears stung his eyes. He fantasized about crying hard enough to flood this room and sail away.
Izuku endured being fed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, then said, “Mom doesn’t know about your true identity.”
“Is that a question?”
“It’s a statement of fact.” Izuku breathed in deeply, letting the darkness wash all other thoughts from his mind as he formulated the correct words. “I’d like a request, not a question. Will you at least tell her that I’m alive?”
“I already have,” All for One said soothingly. “Your current survival is public knowledge. The heroes will divert more resources to finding you if they think you live. If you won’t give in for your own sake, think of your poor mother. She blames herself for letting you become a hero. And she blames your school for how miserably they failed you. She nearly brained All Might by throwing the waffle iron at him when he came to apologize.”
“You liar!” Izuku screamed. His entire body tensed as he tried with all his willpower to raise his limp fist and punch. In his fury, he lost all reason and kept trying to attack with a body that couldn’t move.
“I assure you that your mother is angry—”
“I believe that she’d throw something, but she wouldn’t miss! All Might would have let her hit him.” Izuku’s voice dropped to a low growl. “More importantly, we don’t have a waffle iron. Ours broke and Mom hasn’t replaced it yet. As you would know, if you came home on occasion. I knew you would lie to me!” This meant Izuku couldn’t trust the last answer, either. He burned with fury that he’d played along with All for One’s game and been cheated. He should have known better. Hatred made him light-headed. The rage pulsed futilely inside him, bouncing off his nerves, until it exploded from his throat in a crow’s caw.
All for One hissed, dropped Izuku, and leapt away with a flurry of feathers. “Izuku Midoriya! Do you know what you just did? I nearly ripped your head off!”
“Huh?” Izuku rasped, his head spinning. Although he still could not move his wings, he realized his back felt lighter. He had switched between types of wings. How had he done that?
“You triggered my instincts. It’s insanely dangerous for an owl to be surprised by a crow.” All for One stormed back over, grabbing Izuku’s arms and binding them again. “You could have died. This reckless and self-destructive behavior is precisely why I’ve been forced to keep you here, for your own good. I expect your wings to be in owl form by the time I return.” Or I won’t return, the threatening tone implied. The window slammed with extra force.
Lying on his stomach in the darkness, Izuku realized that his father would keep away for at least a few hours, as a punishment. In other words, he had a chance to escape.
Unfortunately, Izuku did not know how he’d switched between his wings. Before, he’d always switched by flapping his wings in a different pattern. Now that his wings wouldn’t move, he’d assumed he couldn’t change. His anger had inspired the crow wings to come out. What emotion might trigger the others?
Izuku’s hands tingled as the paralyzation wore off. It made him desperate. He could not waste this slim chance. No matter what insults Izuku had cast, All for One wasn’t stupid. After the villain calmed down, he’d come up with a new way to stop Izuku from shifting between forms.
Izuku pictured flying with his hummingbird wings. He recalled the day Ochaco had taught him how to use the smaller wings and the smile on her face when he’d hovered for the first time. Desperately, he clung to that memory of joy.
The wings on his back shrank. More importantly, Izuku’s molars sharpened. He had a hummingbird’s mouth full of serrated teeth.
Izuku bit through the leather bonds on his wrist. Grunting, he bent over far enough to sever the straps on his ankles. He sat up with a pop in his spine. Izuku’s fingers grabbed the hood covering his eyes. It refused to budge. The leather fastened too tightly to his face to get a finger in. He touched something that felt like hardened glue. This hood had been sealed to his face. It would not come off.
Urgency beat out a steady pulse under Izuku’s chest. He did not know when All for One might return or if this place had cameras. Gripping the wall, he explored his prison.
The room was round. Izuku felt brick under his fingers. His feet sank into cushions no matter where he walked. Pillows covered every inch of the floor, lying on top of a springy round mattress that filled the entire room. He tripped on his discarded blanket, slipping to his knees. His hand touched a stake sticking up from the cushions. Izuku had believed himself to be lying on a bed, but actually his limbs must have been fastened to these stakes. This entire room was one large bed. It reminded him of a nest.
No matter how Izuku groped around, the room had no doors. His fingers hit the edge of a windowsill. Scraping his nails along the glass, Izuku found the latch.
By some miracle, the window wasn’t locked. At first, Izuku assumed that All for One had forgotten in his hasty departure. But it was also possible the villain saw no reason to bother. Whatever All for One had done to Izuku’s wings had never once shown a sign of wearing off. Izuku couldn’t fly.
Izuku dropped a pillow out the window. From the time it took for him to hear the impact on the bottom, he was at least a couple stories off the ground. Even freed from his bonds, Izuku was trapped up this brick tower with no exit. Or so All for One would have assumed.
In Izuku’s experience, people with wings saw the world in terms of flight. Once, U.A. had held a training exercise, splitting the students up into teams to steal each other’s flag. While the enemy team had guarded the skies, Izuku had walked across the forest and climbed a tree. Not a single person had seen him coming. No one with wings ever looked down.
All Izuku’s life, people had pitied him and viewed him as less capable because he couldn’t fly. His mother had refused to sign him up for climbing classes because she didn’t want him on the second story at all. He’d taught himself how to climb. His father didn’t know.
More likely, All for One had never even considered climbing as a possible escape route. The First, All for One’s brother, had possessed the snowy owl wings that were Izuku’s favorite. (A clue in retrospect that the First had a hidden quirk.) Izuku would have been willing to bet that his uncle hadn’t known how to climb either and had never tried to escape that way.
Closing his eyes, Izuku tried to switch to butterfly wings. They would be the lightest on his back. He remembered the fear of being attacked by a villain that had triggered the first transformation. Insects had a deep-seated terror that fueled their flight. Izuku pictured Mina with her moth wings, showing him how to twist his body to push up air under his wings and take off.
A weight lifted off his back. For confirmation, Izuku reached over his shoulder to touch the thin butterfly wings.
Next, Izuku leaned out the window and ran his fingers on the bricks, finding handholes. A breeze tickled the part of his face exposed under the hood. Sunshine beat down on his already-sweaty head.
Izuku had once climbed up three stories of brick wall in order reach an auction for a limited edition All Might figurine. But then, he’d had his climbing equipment and his eyesight. Izuku couldn’t be sure how far down the wall descended. It could be three stories…or ten. If his strength failed him partway through the climb, he would die.
Clenching his jaw, Izuku squirmed backward through the window. His feet scrambled against the wall, finding toeholds in the cement-filled cracks between the bricks.
In the back of Izuku’s mind, he heard the very first advice All Might had given him on how to fly: Throw yourself at the ground and miss! The second piece of advice had been Don’t look down. At least there was no chance of that with the hood covering his eyes. Izuku hoped that someday the quirk freezing his wings would wear off. But even if he could never fly again for the rest of his life, he knew he’d be fine. At least he would escape this prison disguised as a nest and remove his hood. Then he would be able to see his mom, his friends, and his teachers with his own eyes.
With the wind buffeting him, completely blind, Izuku started climbing down.
As Hisashi flew toward his flawless safehouse, he spotted the tower window hanging open. That shouldn’t be possible. Izuku was tied down and unable to reach the window. Hisashi tried to convince himself that he had carelessly left the latch unfastened in his hasty departure, then the wind had flung it open.
It could be true. The wind was strong today. Hisashi used a quirk to manipulate the currents under his wings and let him fly faster.
As he swooped down toward the windowsill, something glinted in the sun. A leather hood adorned with a crest poked out of the bush below.
Hisashi’s world froze. He heard a roaring in the back of his ears. In his mind, he saw his only child lying crumpled and broken at the base of the tower. The images overlapped with distant memories of his younger brother’s corpse.
Yoichi’s body had been mostly intact, cushioned by his snowy white wings as he’d fallen to the base of the cliff. Only his green eyes staring glassily up at the sky had betrayed that he was not sleeping. Hisashi had slaughtered the perpetrators, then flown down. In defiance of the laws of physics, he’d convinced himself that Yoichi might still be alive. As soon as Hisashi had touched his little brother’s body, a hideous squelching had come from the smashed internal organs. Then the blood had flowed over his arms. He did not remember what had happened after that. Just that he’d woken up surrounded by even more bodies.
Now, once again, Hisashi dove from the sky, hoping against desperate hope that the bush had been enough to cushion Izuku’s fall. If there was even the smallest flicker of life in the body, then Hisashi would have a chance. He might at least create another Kurogiri from a corpse.
But there was no body. The hood lay empty, hanging off the nail that Izuku had used to rip it off his face. Izuku was gone.
