Chapter Text
Shouta only didn’t scream in shock when he opened his eyes to Yagi on Dagobah Beach because after what had happened the last time, he was not completely surprised when his Dad fucked up when using New Game Plus on him again. He had overshot to the wrong timeline completely.
Shouta was Deku again.
He was not quite sure what to think about that fact.
“You should kill him.”
Thankfully Shouta did not have to glare at the vestige of his Dad’s younger self as the new vestige of Hizashi smacked him for it. “Yeah because that would be so helpful if this is the other timeline. Even if Shou hunts down his Dad here and gives him back the memories he lost from the brain damage right this second, killing him would only speed up everything going downhill before he can do damage control.”
Thankfully, blissfully unaware of the vestiges, Yagi reached out to ruffle his hair. “I wish you the best of luck in your exam! You should probably head home and shower so you aren’t late.”
That jolted Shouta into action. “Ah! Right! I’ll see you later All Might!” He ran off with a wave to the man he had named his youngest son after as the loss clawed at him. As he blinked back Midoriya tears that he had not felt in his own eyes in decades, the fact that his baby that he had been trying to save in begging his Dad to use the Quirk on him was well and truly lost to him forever hit him. He ducked into an alleyway and curled up in a ball as he began to brokenly sob. After all, while Hitoshi was alive in a way in his counterpart as his brother’s son, Toshinori was well and truly lost. Between his brother not being polyamorous and there being a frankly absurd physical age gap between him and this version of Mirai now…
His elder husband’s newly created vestige sighed as he sat down next to him. “As much as I hate to say I told you so about this, I did warn you that with how far back the Quirk would send you, there was a good chance of things going wrong. While this is most certainly worse than I suspected, just giving up is hardly the answer.”
Shouta reached up to take Mirai’s ghostly hand to ground himself.
There was a chittery laugh. “Well, I for one think this is likely a better outcome than expected. After all, what now do you have to lose that you haven’t already lost? Perhaps it is better to think about what you can gain this time around.”
Shouta watched Daigoro cross his arms as he gave the chimera an odd look. “What? You think Shouta should just say fuck it and just do whatever?”
Nedzu shrugged. “Why not? Ten has always done his best work when he played into his more chaotic nature.”
Shouta watched a chaotic grin spread over Yoichi’s face. “Hey, Shouta. What do you think about the idea of manifesting a different Quirk for the entrance exam?”
---EI-EI-EI---
Shouta couldn’t believe he was doing this, but he did have to admit that this was far more cathartic than just Smashing the robots. Feeling the bots crumble into dust under his fingertips as he pumped up the power of Decay with his hatred of the situation he found himself in was doing him wonders. He was sticking in line of sight of Uraraka who he had yet to speak to (since he had not tripped in front of her this time around) with the knowledge that she inevitably would end up in the line of attack from the rogue Zero Pointer.
That decision made before he had gotten inside the testing site had of course provoked Iida’s ire as he had spotted Shouta trying to move close to her before the test could begin. As a result, Iida was clearly keeping tabs on Shouta from how close he was sticking as well.
Shouta heard Nedzu laugh behind him again. “Congratulations Ten! Assuming they award you the same 60 rescue points for taking down the malfunctioning Zero Pointer to save Uraraka that they did the first time and with your brother when he found himself in the same shoes, you just broke every single record for the UA entrance exam! Just 30 more points there though and you will beat out Young Bakugou's new record as well.”
Shouta snorted. He doubted he would find the 10 more Three Pointers he would need for that in just the few seconds remaining before the Zero Pointer turned up.
As if on cue, explosions rocked the test site as debris flew through the air. Shouta himself only just missed getting pinned himself in his close proximity to Uraraka by throwing up his hand in between himself and the bot.
He was caught off guard by the second unexpected scream of pain.
His gaze shifted to spot Iida pinned down to his other side, the boy clearly closer to the source than he had been the previous times thanks to the fact he had been clearly following Shouta.
Shouta cursed and darted forward to slap the rubble over his pinned leg. “Don’t move. I’m going to stop the robot. The last thing you need is to fuck up your ankle given your Quirk.”
“Language.” Shouta ignored the boy’s reflexive comment to dart over to slap Uraraka’s slab.
“Don’t worry, I’m stopping the robot.”
She gave him a panicked look even as the slab Decayed enough for her to move. “Thank you.”
He nodded and ran in.
---EI-EI-EI---
There was chaos in the control room as the emergency override for the Zero Pointer in Site B failed but Nedzu was not terribly worried as he watched All Might’s successor rush in. While the Quirk he was displaying had been a surprise, given that One for All had been known to favor powering up existing Quirks in the previous holders outside of All Might, it was not that surprising. In all likelihood, the boy’s own Quirk had been lacking in some way and One for All had merely unlocked it. Still, from what he had seen thus far of it, the boy would be able to destroy the Zero Pointer he was clearly set on breaking to stop it. He would have to make sure he was awarded the extra rescue points he deserved from how he had handled Young Iida’s injury, likely spotting that trying to move his crushed ankle would damage it further beyond what Recovery Girl would be able to mend with her Quirk without some form of surgery.
Aizawa pointed at the screen as the boy completely obliterated the Robot. “Put him in my class.”
“Oh? See something you like?”
Aizawa shook his head. “That kind of cocky behavior is going to get him killed in the field. Kid needs a wake-up call that his powerful destructive Quirk can’t always help him.”
Nedzu was about to correct Aizawa but forced himself to bite his tongue to keep the boy’s secret about his Quirk manifestation for now. It was the boy’s secret to tell after all. Besides, it was not like the boy didn’t seem to have a handle on things already with his new Quirk. If the stories that Yagi had been telling him about his successor were true, then the boy would more than rise to the occasion during Aizawa’s infamous Quirk Assessment test.
---EI-EI-EI---
Shouta ended up making Uraraka pin Iida in place to stop him from getting up while he ran to bring Recovery Girl to him. It was only after she clicked her tongue at the boy and told him point blank that Shouta had just saved him from having to go get surgery on his ankle that the boy finally stopped trying to brush the severity of the injury off.
“Honestly. A crushed leg bone would have been one thing but a crushed joint is beyond what I can fix on my own.” She gave Shouta an odd look after she planted a kiss on Iida’s forehead, knocking him out. “How did you know that anyways, Young Man?”
Shouta pointedly did not think about the fact he had learned it the hard way with his hands in the first timeline. He put on a sheepish smile. “Ah, well, I like to do Quirk Analysis as a hobby and Heroes are easy to find information on so I have a pretty good idea of how the Quirks work of most Heroes high in the rankings and in the nearby area since I don’t live far away from UA. Your Quirk just accelerates the natural healing process of the body so I figured if anything was not close to being in the right place, it would heal wrong. With his Quirk being so similar to Ingenium’s, I figured an ankle potentially healing wrong could end his career as a Hero before he even started it.”
She gave a firm nod. “You are right on the money with that. Honestly, it’s clear that most kids your age look at my Quirk and just assume I can fix anything without any issues and push yourselves farther than you should go with things thinking I can just magically fix anything without consequence.” After planting a kiss on Uraraka’s head as well, similarly making her fall asleep she pointedly looked at Shouta and spoke in a quiet voice. “You are Toshinori’s boy, right? Do you think you can come by sometime between now and the start of the next school year so I can give you a look over? Given that you were clearly using a different Quirk than just One for All, it is pretty clear you should not have been registered as Quirkless in the first place. Nedzu and I will help sort out your Quirk registration.”
Shouta hated the realization that had that happened on his first go around, that it would have likely saved him such a big headache since obviously the fact that One for All had All for One in its very genes probably would have been obvious. That and the extra Quirks would not have caught him so off guard.
“Yeah, I can do that. I’ll write something up for you to look over about how the Quirk is working over the next week after I do a bit of practice at home with it to figure it out.”
She nodded. “Normally I would advise against such a thing but given that you seem to already have a good handle on it, I will let it slide.”
Shouta shrugged. “It is just a 5-point Quirk. It was not like it was hard to figure out. So you next weekend then?”
“Next weekend.”
---EI-EI-EI---
Shouta was back in the safety of his original childhood bedroom before he really got a chance to talk with the vestiges again. They littered the room as he lay on his old All Might themed bedspread. Mirai was studying his collection of All Might memorabilia in fascination as Hizashi laughed to himself about the fact that Shouta used to deny he was the ultimate All Might superfan when this had been his childhood bedroom. Kai joined Nedzu scanning his bookshelves to snoop into what literature he had liked to read while Yoichi and Daigoro jokingly teased Hisashi about the fact his older counterpart had bought most of the stuff in the room for little Izuku. Hikage and En had climbed out the window to sit on the fire escape but were clearly still paying attention. Kurogiri…
Shouta flicked his eyes over at the figure made of darkness sitting in his desk chair clearly watching the others.
It wasn’t really him. Not Oboro at least. It was an amalgamation of his Quirks though that had been reanimated in a living form. With the ease that he could copy Quirks, over the years, he had amassed copies of all of the Quirks of the still working Heroes along with copies of the more useful Quirks that his father had stolen over the years. That included Tokoyami’s Dark Shadow. That though had been a mistake. One that had left him refusing to take copies of sentient Quirks for himself later on.
Kurogiri’s memories were fragmentary at best as a result of him being the combination of the broken mind of Oboro (that had been broken enough to not create a vestige) with the new spark of life of Dark Shadow.
He was so much like the Kurogiri of this timeline it was unnerving. Quiet and obedient. Little sign of his own free will.
Shouta forced his eyes off the true ghost among ghosts. “We should probably decide what we are doing as far as my Quirk registration goes. Are we just doing Decay or should we do something more than that? Yoichi? It was your idea in the first place.”
Yoichi perked up. “Well… If you are really going the ‘fuck it’ route, you could say that your Quirk randomly gives you a different Quirk each day. It would mean you could still pick and choose what Quirk you are using each day to mess with people more on days where it would matter and later you could figure out how to ‘reroll’ your Quirk for the day if it ever became a real issue and play it off as just a Quirk evolution. You could just keep the Quirks that you use as a Villain out of the pool to choose from, assuming you are going to do that again.”
Shouta found his eyes flicking over to Kai. “So Overhaul is out then.”
Kai gave him a questioning look. “Just Overhaul?”
Shouta shrugged. “As well as a few others but given your Quirk is sort of my Villain signature and my best multipurpose tool, it should stay out of the pot.”
Nedzu nodded. “Perhaps you should play it as Overhaul being your only Quirk as a Villain to hide your true power to keep them underestimating what you can do. Under a different name of course. The way you use Overhaul is far enough removed technique-wise from the other Chisaki that I doubt even he would realize it was his own Quirk.”
Kai sighed. “He has just had more practice using it for more advanced techniques than my alternate self since he has no issues touching things to use it. Still, I will admit he has taken my Quirk to heights beyond what I realized I could do. You could gain a decent reputation purely by acting as a healer in those circles to get your foot in some doors.”
Hizashi plopped down on the bed next to him. “So if that’s settled we kinda need to talk about what the plan is about us. That is me, Mirai and Nedzu. We only let you take our Quirks with the idea that you would give us back to our younger selves so you wouldn’t be alone here besides the whole ghost thing. Problem is, there are no younger us’s to give us back to, just alternates.”
Mirai sighed. “From what I know of this timeline’s version of me, I don’t think there would be any harm in returning me to myself. The issue lies purely with what we do about you Hizashi. After all, returning you to your alternate is hardly a viable option given this version of you is married to his brother.” He paused. “I just realized how confusing it is that now you are both Shouta.”
Ten sighed as he forced himself to make a mental readjustment. “Just use Ten for me. It is just as much my name as Shouta is at this point. It would be less confusing if he is just Shouta now and I am not.”
Daigoro perked up. “Oh! Maybe you could pick 10 Quirks to cycle through at random for your Quirk as a Hero? That way you could use it as your Hero name this time around.”
Shouta winced. “Just 10? That seems pretty limiting.”
Nedzu chittered. “How about 100 with uneven weighting? Still, I believe he can reclaim the nickname easily enough. After all, all he will have to do is win the first round of the Sports Festival again and he should have the Ten Million points. Correct me if I am wrong but Young Hatsume took to calling you Ten Mill in the other timeline as a result did she not?”
Ten blinked. “I am starting to regret giving you free access to my memories of the old version of this timeline already. Please don’t tell me you still want me to give you over to your alternate.”
Nedzu chittered again. “No, I am more than content to stay here if it means I can continue playing chess against myself without him knowing it is me!”
Ten gave him an odd look. “Is that why you wanted me to write e2 to e4 in the margins of my test?”
“The thought of leaving an English Opening in chess in the English section of your test for me to find later might have amused me slightly.”
Ten groaned at the realization that he was probably going to have to sit through chess games he wasn’t even getting to play himself in the near future. It was not that he was bad at chess and disliked it, it was just playing against Nedzu when he did not even get to do it himself would be a bit dull since he had never been much of one for watching other people play it. “What was this idea you had about weighting the Quirk pulls?”
Nedzu pulled out a set of dice from his pocket and held them up. “Are you at all familiar with the Wild Magic concept from Dungeons and Dragons? Basically, it works like this, anytime a Wild Magic user rolled a natural 1 on a d20, they would have to roll a set of percentage dice, that is two d10, and then consult a prewritten table to find the effect. I was thinking that you could hand pick a handful of Quirks to match up with one form of die best suited to the number in the pool but if you roll a 1 you reroll in the larger pool of Quirks. Of course, you would be able to overrule the roll if you wanted but it would also be a system you could use longer term and mean that you would be able to generally maintain a slight consistency with your Quirk. While a d20 for the primary Quirk pool would hold with the spirit of Wild Magic and keep similar odds, I think a pool of 19 Quirks of higher priority Quirks would make it take longer for the fact that was the case to become apparent from the outside as opposed to say a pool of 9 or 11.”
Ten felt a pang of sadness at hearing those numbers, the first so strongly associated with his brothers in the last timeline and the latter being one that eventually came to be associated with his son Hitoshi. As did 12 with his son Toshinori.
“Let’s use a d12. In Hitoshi’s and Toshinori’s honor.”
---EI-EI-EI---
The next day saw Ten visiting a few stores to pick up a set of dice and a new small pocket notebook before returning home to see about reviewing his class notes to figure out just what would be covered in class the next day. While there was no way he would fail his final exams for Junior High, it had still been decades since he had last walked the halls of Aldera Junior High. He would be lucky tomorrow to remember where his homeroom was. He thought he was in 3-A but he couldn’t be one hundred percent positive. On the bright side at least, he knew he could follow Kacchan to class, worse come to worse.
After a bit, while taking a short break from reading over his old notes, he fished out the set of dice and the small notebook. He looked over at Nedzu. “You finished figuring out the tables of Quirks right?”
Nedzu nodded. “Easily enough! Are you going to roll for the day?”
Ten shrugged. “I figured I could roll for the next week or so all at once to make it easier on myself.”
“Ah, perhaps not a bad idea! Doing it that way would mean if later on you need to evolve your Quirk to ‘reroll’ for a new one, you have another already lined up. Why don’t you roll 20 or so? That way we can build up a bit of a buffer of Quirk ‘rolls’ for you.”
Ten nodded and started rolling.
4, 11, 5, 10, another 10, 6, 2, 7, another 7, 4, 6, 10, 7, 5, 4, 7, 12, another 12, 12 again and finally 11.
There was a grumble of disappointment from a few of the vestiges, especially from Daigoro. “Damn, I was sort of hoping for a 1 in there.”
Ten shrugged. “I’m sure it will happen soon enough.” He looked to Nedzu. “So what have I had all day?”
“Hellflame or whatever you are going to choose to call it.”
Ten nodded and clicked the Quirk active, not that he really planned to use it for the day. He picked up his pen and started writing in the pocket notebook about Decay and Hellflame, putting lots of confused question marks on the pages for the second Quirk which he labeled as Dragon Fire in honor of his Dad’s favorite fire-breathing Quirk.
He was still writing when Hizashi slapped a hand down next to him. “Shou一 Ten, you really should talk with Inko about what is going on. Even if you want to leave out the whole different timeline thing, you should still probably tell her about the fact that you are a time traveler and what is going on with your Dad right now, even if you don’t plan on hunting him down right now.”
Ten sighed. “You're right. I’ll go talk to her. I was planning on waiting to track down Dad though given I have no clue where he would be right now but I’m sure I will be able to get his attention easily enough by showing off the right Quirks at the right time. I highly doubt Tomura wouldn’t immediately freak out and rant to him about it if I used Decay right in front of him during the USJ if I don’t run into him sooner.”
He rubbed his eyes. “I just really hope that once I get in contact with Dad and heal him, he can reign Tomura back in before he becomes a real issue.”
---EI-EI-EI---
Inko was worried about Izuku. The day before he had come back from his morning workout to change before the UA entrance exam looking like he had had a good cry but he had been in too much of a rush then to ask about what had happened. When he had gotten home after, he had sounded a bit sick so she had decided to hurry him to bed which he did not fight at all. After all, she could ask about how it had all gone today. Only, the problem was, Izuku had been clearly avoiding her today, waiting to do his workout a bit later in the morning and then locking himself up in his room to “study” for his finals at his current school. She didn’t quite believe him of course but she had left him be, trusting her son to talk to her when he was ready about what was clearly bothering him.
The fact that when he finally came out of his room, he looked just as dead inside as he had the previous day had been worrying. “Mom, there is something I need to talk to you about. It is about my Quirk and Dad.”
Inko blinked. “Your Quirk? Wait, are you saying you got a Quirk after all? Is that why you look all out of sorts? What does your father have to do with it?”
Izuku sighed. “Sort of. It is a long story but it has everything to do with Dad. I inherited his Quirk. His real one. One that lets the user give and take the Quirks of others. To be blunt, Dad is sort of a major Villain that is known by his Quirk’s name of All for One that has been around for a few centuries. Thanks to All Might, he is sometimes called the Symbol of Evil. He’s still the guy we know as my Dad but yeah, that is what he actually does for a living.”
“And how did you find all this out? Did something happen yesterday before the exam for you to learn all this?”
Another worrying sigh. “In a way.” Izuku looked up to meet her eyes. “I’m a time traveler. Dad used a Quirk in his collection to send my consciousness back into my younger body. Up until the day before yesterday morning, I was a 43-year-old man with two wonderful sons…” Izuku clenched his fists as he seemed to fight back his tears. “...That night I found the charred remains of my sons, burned beyond what I was capable of bringing them back from. I asked Dad to send me back in time to try and save them but he wildly overshot. Now I am stuck dealing with having lost my husbands too as well as having to get my Hero License back and hunting Dad down again to bring him back home.”
That was a knife straight to the chest since there was no faking that level of grief that her son was showing. Her grandbabies had died? “What were their names? Your sons and husbands?”
Izuku sighed. “My sons were Hitoshi and Toshinori. My husbands were Hizashi and Mirai.”
“How did you meet?”
Izuku gained a wistful look that Inko recognized as one she herself wore when thinking of how she and Hisashi had met. “Zashi and I were classmates. He was my first proper friend. My best friend. Mirai came later. He’s an older Pro Hero but he ended up fitting with me and Hizashi pretty perfectly.”
Inko gave him a soft look. “Well, there is something for you to look forward to at least.”
Izuku folded at her words. “But I can’t. This timeline is wrong. I’m not even me anymore.”
“Izuku what do you-”
“This isn’t the first time Dad used that Quirk on me and messed up. The first time one of my half-brother’s Dad doesn’t even know about in this timeline got our bodies switched with me when he sent us both back together after I was murdered in front of him. When I say Dad overshot, I mean he overshot to the wrong timeline completely. I haven’t been Izuku since I was 16 the first time and it had been 40 years since then. My husbands are either already married in this timeline to that half-brother or old enough that people could mistake him for being my father. My son Hitoshi isn’t even my son in this timeline and there is basically no chance of Toshinori even being born .”
Inko found herself holding her now violently sobbing son as he completely broke down. She bit her lip. “Izuku baby, is there something else you would rather I call you?”
“Ten. I can’t still be Shouta. Shouta is Shouta now. Even if he has no clue we’re family yet, I am not going to steal his name from him again, even if it was an accident the first time.”
“Ten?”
“Shouta is a clone of Dad. Sort of. It is an 80/20 split of Dad with his Ex Husband. The guy who made him was sort of doing the cloning behind Dad’s back so Dad is completely in the dark about it. All the clones only had numbers and not names in the experiment notes so people started using the number as my name when referring to me before my actual identity got around. Only two other clones survived the process, Six and Nine but I would only really consider Nine my brother too. He never actually got around to picking a name for himself beyond that. Given I never heard anything about Six on my first go around, I can only assume he died at some point in that timeline too but I will have to look into that.”
“So where are your brothers now?”
Izuku shrugged. “I am not sure about Nine but I think I should be able to find him easily enough after I find Dad’s info broker but Shouta is currently, working at UA.” Izuku gave a small smile. “If everything goes to plan. He should be my homeroom teacher actually.”
That caught Inko off guard. “You seem fairly certain you got in.”
Izuku laughed. A good sign. “Mom, I taught at UA for over a decade. I could have passed the entrance exam without even using a Quirk in my sleep. The only reason I did was because I knew there was going to be a major robot malfunction during the practical that would endanger the kids.”
That piqued Inko’s interest with a bit of worry. “You said that both you and your father’s Quirk can give and take other Quirks…”
Izuku nodded. “I only ever stole a couple of Quirks. Most of mine are copies of originals or came from already dead people who obviously wouldn’t be using them themselves anymore. The Quirk I used for the test was a copy of Tomura’s, a guy working for Dad as a Villain.”
Inko frowned. “But you did steal a few?”
Izuku shrugged. “A couple. Overhaul from a Yakuza who ended up much happier for me stealing it since he sort of hates Quirks anyways as well as Overclock from Six and Ray Trace from Mirko who didn’t even notice I took it since while she has some serious mutations, her Quirk factor isn’t linked to them at all. I also borrowed a couple without permission but did give them back fast enough. Real versions aren’t worth the trouble for me since all Quirks carry an echo of the original holder. As a result, I’m sort of haunted by like ten ghosts, some of which are of people who are still alive and well right now.”
“That is only three ghosts. The rest willingly gave their Quirks to you?”
Izuku shook his head. “No, only one of the ghosts was from that lot. Overhaul’s or Kai’s as I will probably refer to him if I bring him up. Dad’s brother has been haunting me for a while and is the main line of defense between me and upset ghosts that would attack me and is very good at removing hostile ghosts. The rest are mostly willing tagalongs. Three of them came from people right before Dad sent me back with the idea I would return their Quirks and hopefully their memories to their younger selves but that is obviously not happening now. Hizashi, Mirai and Nedzu.”
“So your husbands are not completely lost to you then?”
“No, but it still sucks that they are for all intents and purposes just as dead as the other ghosts in here now.”
“So who else is in that head of yours?”
“Uncle Yoichi’s boyfriend Daigoro, Blackwhip. Danger Sense’s Hikage. Smokescreen’s En. Kurogiri who is technically an amalgamation of a bunch of different Quirks and a sort of afterimage of a younger version of Dad who was left as an imprint on another Quirk. And when I say younger I mean he’s only 32. Uncle Yoichi really loves that detail since it means he is older if not by much. Ghosts are sort of stuck at the same age as when they are created.”
He shook his head. “Regardless, there is a chance I will give the copy of Dad to Dad later. The reason he hasn’t been home in a while is because when he lost a fight against All Might, he suffered a pretty bad brain injury. I think I should be able to fix the issue but on the off chance his memories don’t come back, I can at least give him some memories of us being family, even if all of them are from an outside perspective or built on my own.”
He sighed and leaned fully back into Inko’s arms. “Not that any of that really matters right now. I still have to find him.”
Inko rubbed his back. “Do you have any plans on how you are going to do that? You mentioned something about an info broker?”
He nodded. “Yeah, Giran is a decent enough guy. I’m going to try and find him before the next school year starts at UA but if I can’t find him until after, I know when Tomura will be making his first debut as a Villain so I can probably catch Dad’s attention that way so long as I use a blatantly ‘stolen’ Quirk that day. Before you ask, I plan on hiding my true Quirk by deciding what Quirk I am using from a selection of Quirks in my collection at random and playing my Quirk off as a randomizer Quirk of sorts…”