Work Text:
Is this freedom?
Izuku dismantles All For One’s operations.
He kills the budding Nomus in their tanks. He memorizes the doctor’s detailed notes on their creation then writes a program. The program spends six hours overwriting the files with binary nonsense, each cycle pushing the original files closer to the irrecoverable. Lastly, he takes the hard drives apart and melts them down to scrap.
One might say he is going overboard, but according to his predictions (which we know have a tendency to be correct), the misuse of Nomu would be devastating if they were recreated.
Kurogiri is killed.
Useful as he might have been, he was also a liability.
Izuku locates the nearest funeral home. He breaks in during the night and incinerates the body. He crushes down any leftover shards of bone to dust, then dumps the dust in the river.
Izuku vacuum packages Sensei’s body, as well as the doctor’s, in plastic (for preservation) and has them delivered to the authorities.
He burns down the house and the warehouse.
He finds Gigantomachia in the woods. Gigantomachia is not like Izuku; he is happy to die, if it his Master’s wish.
Izuku did not tell him his Master was already dead.
He leaves flowers at the Shimura family grave. Tomura, Tenko is not there, Sensei gave him to the doctor to use for his Nomu project, but the sentiment is…something.
He finds the Midoriya family grave. He places flowers there as well.
Is this freedom?
*
Izuku does not like the world.
It is a capitalistic hellscape painted as a popularity contest where no one deserving ever wins.
Nothing makes any logical sense.
Izuku feels…lost.
He did not particularly like or dislike Sensei or his plans; Izuku was taught by Sensei himself to always survive, so he did what needed to be done to survive. He does not regret it. It is just that…
There was direction.
Sensei gave him orders and Izuku complied because what else is there to do in the world?
But now that he is ostensibly free, he also has no direction. There are no orders to follow.
The most logical thing would be to find a new person who can give him orders, but it is not as simple as that, he knows. No matter the master he might choose, they will one day turn on him. Or rather, his best course of action for survival will one day become to kill his master.
It is not logical to go through that process again only to end up back exactly where he already is.
What is freedom?
Is freedom choosing your master? Is freedom having no master at all? Is freedom being his own master?
Yes. That one. That one is logical. Izuku cannot fight himself for his own survival. Giving himself orders is the only logical step.
Izuku has found a master and it is himself.
However, this changes little.
What, exactly, is Izuku supposed to do?
He is…ten years old. If he were any other child, he would be in school. He would…have meaning. A future.
But he does not.
The world thinks him dead; his mother, the only family he ever knew, is gone.
Izuku is a child only in body.
He does not think of himself as a child. He is…not a man either, though. He is simply…Taskmaster.
Izuku has so many questions, and he does not enjoy not knowing the answers.
He studies the world. If answers exist, they are out there. He must simply find them. They can be found. He must find them.
But the search is…disappointing.
The world at large is merely more of the same.
Disappointing.
Yet…
Izuku searches for purpose, meaning, and perhaps this is his purpose. Changing things. Making things better. Heroes are not doing it right.
He will be better.
Izuku is his own master and he issues a simple order.
Make it better.
This is freedom.