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To tell the story chronologically to what Izuku knew, you would have to say that it started at the Sludge Villain incident. Then you would go to the hospital room, then the vault, and being forced to help villains, heal villains until it hurt too much to stop.
The thick sludge was still forcing its way down his throat, muttering and moaning about him, him, him, him. It seemed panicked, Izuku thought as he strained to get air, it was erratic, and it was still forcing it’s way down his throat.
Then it stopped. Stopped moving, stopped writhing, and seemed to just settle. Sink into him, like a second skin. As soon as it had settled Izuku felt his limbs move out of his control.
All Might had been just too slow and the creature made of slime, and filth and mud had inhabited Izuku’s body completely.
For he had seen the boy’s photo in the underworld and knew not to touch him, but this was important. This is not something Izuku would have known. It was easier to inhabit someone alive, it was the thrill of suffocation and death that got him arrested both times the police had something or someone able to contain or defeat him.
So he just slipped in, throwing himself against the tunnel wall as if he were cowering, and pointing off in whatever direction he felt like after All Might burst from the sewers. Now, in the body he stole, he wandered down all the different streets he could remember and made it back to a bar he knew held people who might be sympathetic. The misty barman, as usual was behind the bar, and the shaggy haired young adult was sitting there, sipping a juice box.
The silence that the shattered dropped glass brought echoed through the room.
“What are yo”.
“Who are you.” A voice from, what he had thought was broken, TV spoke cutting through the silence with an authority of 200 years of quirk supremacy. “What are you doing in that body?”
To tell the true chronological story you would have to start three years after the glowing baby was taken from its mother’s arms and never seen again. It semi-rural Japan, and a young couple, an American mother with lovely snow white hair which she swears she spends hundreds of dollars on dyeing, and her Japanese husband.
They were a lovely couple, all the people of the nearby town loved them. They were sweet, and kind, and not suspicious at all. They did not have any quirks, and it’s insulting to them that you would ask that, and insulting to us that you would ask. We are good, loyal folk here.
The truth was she had a quirk that could give and take emotions, she stored them all up inside her and gave them away like tokens. He had an enhancement quirk, and with that meant they could control the emotional needs of the close group of people they surrounded themselves with.
She had made a good sum as a therapist and thus the large house they lived in was perfect in anyway.
They had two sons, perfect, perfect boys.
One was born with a rare disease, it effected his lungs and often made it that he could hardly breathe without help. The other was doting, loving and completely uninterested in his parents.
This was where the roads started to divulge. The mother loved her eldest son, he was so tall and strong, and he reminded her of childhood in America. Hisashi was the peak of physical health, strong, smart, and well built. Towering over both parents by the time he was 16. His mother loved him so much that it hurt her so much that he did not feel the same way.
She would feed him some of her love. Some of his father’s love, just so he would get a taste so he could recognise exactly what it meant to be a loving and good son. It worked, barely. It would often channel into his younger brother. Since he was the one mainly looking after him, with his mother’s therapy career, and his father’s now budding political scope, he was the one who would look after Yoichi. He was the one who always knew how to administer his medicine. He was the one who knew when he was starting to fall into a relapse.
The love he channelled went directly into that. Parental love, warping his own brotherly love until they were nearly interchangeable. But in some ways, it did work as she was trying to intend. He was reliant on her. All he knew was that he felt a rush of emotion when she held him, of love excitement and happiness it became a drug to him. Something so fundamentally needed that he would cling to her.
Again, the road would fork when he just reached his 16th year, only a few months after his birthday. A little tingling sensation in his hands. Like someone was pushing something tickly into the centre. As it grew more intense in his hands, he also could feel a hollow sensation in his chest.
Like a void waiting to be filled up. And it was hungry. He would look at his mother, and his father, and sometimes Yoichi like he wanted to tear them apart and rip from them something fundamental from inside them.
It was the same time his mother grew more and more distant. His emotions, only really regulated by her constant pressure and love and guidance, became more and more irregular. Strange things were happening all around him. The holes in his palms his mother and father and Yoichi had mistaken for moles were small little holes. Leading to somewhere he did not know.
He had to hide them, smile at people when they remarked on the strangely symmetrical moles on his hands. It was fairly easy, and even if people did see them and think meta-ability, holes in someone’s palms was easy to ignore.
And ignore them he did.
His father was a successful politician, and he was for the meta-humans. A rare priority for this generation. He was a forward thinker, he wanted a society where people with these meta-abilities could just live. They could live freely without having to hide who they were, without having to force neighbours to give neighbours into the police. He couldn’t be an obvious meta himself, it would de-credit him.
Hisashi was following his footsteps, and going to University was the first step. Even if he had to leave Yoichi behind, for now, he could go to University for both of them. And then he could look after him when their parents died.
He did believe in the world his father saw. He had always harboured a secret fascinations with Meta-abilities. He loved how widespread and incredible they were. Like they were magic from the comic books Yoichi would read. He desired one with all his heart. There was nothing he would have done more for than that absolute power, these holes in his hand and soul had to mean something else. He wouldn’t accept anything else.
When Izuku woke up, after the Slime had forced its way down his throat and into his muscles and behind his eyes, it was in a sterilized white room. Despite the lights dimmed to the lowest settings they could be, Izuku could see how white and clean it was.
A hospital, he thought in relief, as he moved to sit.
A nightmare, he though in fear, as the man sitting on the chair to his side did not have a face. He did not have any hair, or any eyes, a nose and barely a slip of a mouth. The scream that erupted from him echoed around the room until … it didn’t. Izuku could still feel himself expelling the air, even after his frantic movements drove him off the bed and onto the hard floor.
What he would have heard would have been a hard grunt of pain as he landed on the floor, cutting off the flow of his screaming. He would have also heard the squeaking of the chair as the man stood up, chuckling a little at the reaction.
He heard none of it, scrambling backwards to the wall as the man stood over him.
“Don’t worry, Izuku Midoriya, the quirk has a temporary effect. Don’t want to wake up the whole compound with your shouting now do you?” This laugh Izuku heard, even if he didn’t fully realise it, “Tomura especially gets cranky when woken. He was rather vexed when I took you here and not somewhere we dispose of little rats that crawl in.”
“Wah? Who? Where?” It took Izuku a moment to sort through all his thoughts, the shock of the cold floor and the impossibly large man standing over him, as well as how he got there had him scrambling for any little bit of coherency he had left. “Where am I? What do you want?”
“Ah look it already wore off. No screaming, I can’t stand screaming. Even from you.” He reached a handout, to do what, Izuku didn’t know but it covered his vision completely. His legs moved on their own, propelling him to the corner, crashing into a tray and spilling the little instruments on the floor in a clattering shower. Grabbing a fallen scalpel from the floor Izuku huddled into the corner brandishing the small blade pointed towards the large man.
“I see,” he hummed standing, towering over Izuku with his whole height, “we will speak more in the morning. I don’t think I have to tell you to go to sleep and don’t try to leave yes?”
Izuku did not have the mental capacity at that point to nod. He just stared at the man, the little blade in his hand shaking. The man strode out, the door clicking locked behind him. Izuku stayed curled up against the corner for a few moments, hands clenched on the little blade. The sewage smell was gone, the taste and feel of slime and sludge was gone.
Even if he could still feel the phantom slither inside him.
Shaking his head from the thought he slowly uncurled from his nest in the corner, surveying the room quickly. A small, but large enough to fit him through, widow was covered by curtain, next to a row of beds. With his being the only one on the side he was on. The small trey and it’s little metal holder.
With one last look around the room, and with one try at the handle of the door – it was definatly locked, he couldn’t see anything that properly looked like a camera and made his way to the window. Unsurprisingly it too was locked, the low light of the waning moon did nothing to illuminate the lock. He gently felt all around the seams of the window, tracing it with the scalpel until he got the angle just right to jimmy it and click it open.
On the day of the raid, the crossroads splitting once more, that he found out that his parents did in fact have these wonderful powers. He and Yoichi, who shouldn’t have been out of bed nor his room which was fitted with a special filtration system – he shouldn’t be in the ashy dirty air. He could smell the smoke, could see their gardens burning, were forced to their knees in the entrance to their home. The cold marble of the floor reflected their faces back at them as their knees burned in the cold.
Their hands were bound behind their backs and Hisashi was sure he had a black eye developing. The bleeding lip Yoichi was sporting was particularly worrying, he wasn’t sure if it was from a split lip or from his illness. Why a soldier would harm a sickly 14 year old was beyond him.
But the upholders of the suppression were known for their irrationality.
That night was when the car went off road completely. Hisashi saw his parents once after that night, where he never could quite remember how he got away other than the feeling of something ripping from something else. The feeling of fullness and warmth. The last time he saw his parents was when the government aired their execution. It was almost like he could feel his emotions cut off once he saw his mother drop, getting colder and colder as she moved less and less.
The TV store shooed him away quickly, he was blocking custom, he was a young tall thug like looking man, they didn’t like how he looked. Whatever it was he stumbled back to where he and Yoichi had been camping. Stumbling over the asleep form of his brother curled over him until he could pretend that he could feel again. That the mockery of love he felt die when his mother dropped to her death was still there.
It had warped, and he knew it.
The police and government, in a state of emergency (when have they not been it was one glowing baby not an army), were looking for the both of them. The pair of white haired brothers, low priority, but with a handsome reward. This was an easy fix, they stole hair dye from the shops they could get away with it in. Used coal and ash from sooty fires when they could not.
A month later, when Yoichi was finally, painfully, falling into a relapse Hisashi took the first quirk he could remember taking.
It was simple, a small mutation that let out flammable gas from the back of his throat that he worked out he could catch on fire with a mechanism just below his jaw.
Looking back on that incident and All for One had to be sure that one of the rioters that night had to have had a fire resistance quirk. The heat of those flames, even in his glorified memory, were enough to char someone’s flesh to their bone.
It was from there his reputation and power grew. People did them favours now, gave them somewhere to live without telling the authorities. Someone gave him medicine. He got a healing quirk, a debris clearing quirk that worked on the lungs. All for his quirkless little brother.
With his power, the money the government offered grew. It never wavered towards dead or alive and Hisashi Shigaraki sure did know why they wanted him alive. How useful to their agenda he would be. How good at suppression he could be.
More and more people tried to stop him, and more and more of his emotions exploded out of him. He couldn’t feel anything good anymore, pale imitations. Every time he tried to empathise with people, every time he tried to be kind like his brother, loving like his mother, it turned to ash in his mouth. It was much easier to call on the bad emotions. No one to rely on for his good ones anymore, so how could he feel them. They paled in comparison to his mother’s hugs.
And a year and a half after his family home burned, and all chance at a normal life burned with it, All for One stepped out of a broken, bleeding alleyway, loyal soldiers following him like rats to where he and Yoichi now stayed.
It stayed like that with society slowly creeping away from total bigots and hate into slow and painful acceptance. The people now had a new hope on the horizon with Heroes forming straight out of comic books, new laws were made, suppression now had a new name. Safety. The government no longer had one enemy; it was everyone the Public. The government had a new name, a Commission to keep everyone safe.
The Hero Public Safety Commission was built on the bones of people like his father and mother, and the rage that had built in his chest since he saw them swinging on the scaffolding had nowhere to go. It was hatred now that moved him.
Soon a hundred years passed, then two. Slowly moving onwards in the slow march of time. While he never committed fully to a relationship, nor promised anything, he did indulge in all of lives pleasures as he saw fit. It never was intimate for him, he struggled to keep things loving and soft how some partners liked. Only to fulfil a need, a desire.
Even despite his sexual activity, even if particularly low for a man of his age – it was something he often thought about, he was miles apart from all the men and women he slept with. He stopped for a long time when his age was creeping upwards, it felt off, sleeping with people so disconnected from him and his time. An old soul, they would call him.
Too mature, such a know it all, from different worlds, were all things he was told when his situationships ended. So it petered off, once or twice a decade he would find people who he could meld with, and then they would age and he wouldn’t, and he would move away.
To continue the cycle, again and again. They were distractions, he would tell himself, people not worth his time. It wasn’t as if he had ever come to love any of them. They never gave him the feeling of love and support and warmth his family did. They were disconnected and tiering. Often letting his anger and dark emotions clouding around him if he stayed passed casual hook ups.
He swore himself off them when one day he ran into a green haired lawyer, who was actually a thorn in the side of one of his legitimate business.
He hated her at first or was at least apathetic that the lack of emotions felt like something more. Like all of his relationships that involved love, it developed slowly. Seeping into his bones and warming his chest. The warmth he could feel, so similar to his mothers, his brothers, his families, it was addicting. Like he had to bottle and take slow long sips of the love just to keep it all to himself, to make sure he had it forever and ever and ever.
Once he felt that love he couldn’t stop, he would make excuse after excuse after excuse to meet her, she didn’t put up much of a fight, even at the beginning her blond friend only let out token excuses and threats. As if she knew what Inko did for him.
He kept getting warmer and warmer and finally, after so many years he could feel again. Whatever had happened to his heart after Yoichi’s death, whatever that did to him. It was reversing slowly, carefully and with the love of a women who did not know anything about his job, his history, his quirk.
She knew he hated the Commission, the heroes. Not that she was entirely taken by them either. But that was a hard thing to hide. It was consuming, with his sudden supply of love, it was easier to let it slip away.
As quickly as he could, and with the realisation that clothes had been changed and his shoes removed, he dangled his head out the widow of the ground floor room he was in. It all but confirmed that this building probably had a basement level to it, or some sort of other travelling system to move around. Shimmying out the window, and carefully easing it closed he bolted down the street in the opposite direction, searching for any hint of any sort of landmark that might identify where he was. Or tell him where a Hero or hero focused building was.
It was about 10 minutes later when he ran to a station, jumping over the empty and unguarded barriers and into the heart of it. Ducking behind whatever little amount of things in the station there was, just in case he was being pursued.
The train took him to a place that was about a 25 minute walk from his home, from his mum, and try as he might he could not do anything other than run it.
The first sign that something was wrong was the fact that the lights in the flat were off. Izuku knows his mother’s paranoia. Her hatred of him being far away from her, her not knowing where he is. She promised she would tell him why when he was old enough.
He thought he may not get the choice to know as he walked up the stairs to their flat, through the corridors of the dark, cold, fresh still dark morning. The open door.
The first thing he saw when he got into the small flat. Other than the wall opposite the door, and the only closed door in the flat. It was a jarring comparison to the openness of the front door and despite the warm air a chill rushed up and down his back. The door knob was cold when his hand rested on it, and the door opened smoothly when it squeaked open. The formless, soulless (his mother always used to say that eyes were the widow to a person’s soul. So what happened to a person’s soul when they had no eyes) figure stared up at him in only the way it could.
The creature he had convinced himself on the train over that did not exist anywhere else other than his nightmares, or in some dark cobweb filled part of his mind, was sitting in his mother’s favourite armchair. Finger steepled under its chin as if a statue forever caught thinking.
The second thing he saw was his mother’s body on the floor. Laying impossibly still, the pooling of blood under her head growing slower and slower.
It froze him to the spot, the vision of red and green. Even when the man started to speak, and the man started to move and the man started to do whatever the man was doing, Izuku could not move. Could not think, could not feel.
It was cold, in the flat. He could feel it, even while his skin dappled with sweat, and his face flooded with tears. He did not think he could ever get warm again, it was so cold. A sharpness to the cold stabbed into the back of his neck and the cold grew even further, settling into his bones until they were jelly, into his muscles until they were sand, and into his head until it was night. Just as the sun rose above the mountains and the hills, night fell behind Izuku’s eyes, and he fell into his father’s arms.
It was when Izuku was born that his love slipped. It grew harder to keep old hatreds and anger away from his heart and his family.
The outside wasn’t safe, their house wasn’t safe, it was never safe it would never be safe. Inko would refuse to live in a mansion that’s protected, away from her friend and their child. Hisashi at first, did not want to keep his son away from his friend. He liked Katsuki in the way he liked Mitsuki, they were protective and fierce, and as long as that fierceness did not turn into aggression he would allow it. He liked Katsuki especially, he was a small angry boy.
If a small child could turn his anger and forceful emotions into happiness and love then he could too. It was embarrassing to look at a child for emotional reference, but he hadn’t seen someone do it better.
Then the HPSC grew more and more into his mind again. Like a brain controlling rot that kept on creeping up on him. Izuku kept on babbling at the heroes on the tv, in person everywhere the memory of what the people in charge did to his family. Killing his parents live on TV, alienating his brother from him. Corrupting his son’s mind.
An idea that he had created when his brother was still alive was born back into his mind. The vault was a reincarnation in his mind. With the shifting of his resources into creating a luxury, large, with ability to hold plants and trees and an imitation of the outside was spread under Japan. And with its completion, while Izuku was at school, he told Inko what he was. Who he was and told her need for protection.
It wasn’t that she did not understand, he knew she did so perfectly. She understood very, very well what kind of man he was. What kind of man he had hidden from her throughout their marriage. It was disappointing how quickly she turned on him, turned away from him. How quickly it was that that the warmth in his chest dried up just a little bit. Cooling with every argued word, angered tongue and pointed compliment.
When Izuku came to live in the vault, he too seemed unsure. In a way that was far too like Yoichi when they had to flee to the streets, the 3 year old was inquisitively complacent. Unsure, but not throwing the fits like his mother was. Where she was protected, and Hisashi made sure that she had calmed down enough to bring her into the main room where she and Izuku would be living.
The separation from Izuku for a week did it, it hurt Hisashi to hurt his son like that his mother was a natural source of love and affection for the boy, even without her he exuded positive emotions, but even a boy as happy and loving as he was, he missed his mummy.
Hisashi understood what it was like being separated from a parent who so wholeheartedly represented love. His son loved him and Inko.
It was all going fine, his business was fine, his family were fine – if a bit distant, even that was manageable Inko wasn’t causing any troubles recently. Soon he couldn’t have them out of his sight, cameras would always be trained on them. Some of his men had to be in the vault at all times.
Soon enough his office was moved in there.
He wasn’t hiding who he was now.
When he woke, he was back in the hospital room. The man was there again and the soft light of the midday autumn sun was shining through the window. Izuku went to jolt back again but was stopped by what looked like Velcro attaching both his arms to the bed.
As soon as the man realised he was awake Izuku felt the whole of his presence descend onto him, like being deep, deep under water it pushed him down, down, down.
“I thought I told you to sleep. Izuku. I thought I told you especially not to escape.” Izuku’s eyes darted around before fixing on the window. The barred window. The man obviously, while lacking eyes and anything else that would help him see what Izuku was doing, caught his look at the window. “It was one of the things your mother hated the lack of the proper outside world. You should be grateful that that is all I am doing to it.”
“How do you know my mother?” Izuku whispered carefully, aware his precarious position had gone past a helpful civilian, past kidnapper and straight into a villainous situation. He could still see the flecks of blood on the floor, it pools under green hair. In response the villain strokes his hair back gently, taking a moment of silence.
“I don’t think you’ve earned that information Izuku. But I will give you this gift anyway, to keep you here with me. I need you Izuku. So, take it.”
It felt as if something were being drilled into his brain, as the hand resting in his hair heated up quickly. Burning his scalp, tearing the skin and hair apart in pain. There was nothing but pure unending pain for a handful of painful angry moments, and then nothing. A feeling of blessed fullness completed his being and Izuku feel into what he could have considered a peaceful, full slumber.
The healing quirks that All for One gave to Izuku did not keep him there. They did not convince him to stay in the infirmary room. Neither did the locked door, nor the barred window. He escaped twice more, each time he woke up more and more secured, when on the last time he woke up was to the jangling of chain and the utter darkness of the underground.
There was no light, no sound to accompany the jingling. Apart from a solid, cold metal cuff secured on his left leg, attaching to a metal pole in the centre of the circular room, and no shoes, or socks, only small cold clothing and an even smaller colder blanket. He saw it when All for One turned the lights on when he first visited after Izuku woke up.
The blinding white room burning his sensitive, dark black eyes. There was a door he could not get too, because the chain was too short, a cupboard that was too far out of reach, and his bed, which was moved when he woke to also being out of reach. Other beds lining the outside of the room, as well too far away for him to reach.
All for One informed him that he would be doing most of his healing here, but if space demanded he would be accompanied to the upstairs room. But now, he told Izuku solemnly boiling over with righteous anger, now he would fix him.
While Izuku refused, it did not matter. It did not matter he did not know enough about the healing quirks to have made a difference. It did not matter.
All for One had a special quirk, it was most useful and overcame most issues of having to rely on other people to use their quirks. While it did hurt the person, he used it on, it wasn’t damaging, or long lasting pain. Although he has heard that it could cause nightmares, he would have laughed at that statement, his son had far worse things to dream about.
Force quirk activation had never felt so sweet, as sweet as their first full breath of air he breathed in the last 5 years.
The car on the road crashed in a burning heap when his son stopped running to him. Stopped screeching in delight when he picked him up, when he pressed kissed on his big chubby cheeks.
When he would hide behind his mother, ducking behind her skirts when All for One would come to the vault.
“Hisashi,” Inko said without a single wobble, nor emotion in her voice, “If you let us out of here, I won’t tell them anything. If you let us out, I will make sure Izuku forgets about what happened down here. You can live knowing your son doesn’t hate or fear you. But you will not know him. You must understand why.”
He nodded, unshaken an off centre. Unsure what exactly he was agreeing too.
“Make sure he’s safe, if you don’t I will.”
They resumed life, and All for One did not. Inko kept her promise, and Izuku’s memory of the vault, of his dad imprisoning him underground was gone. He was not sure what Inko told him about him, why suddenly he left their life, he didn’t know what she told Mitsuki. While he kept a light surveillance on them, he never got close enough.
Inko was a smart woman, she knew when pictures went missing to ignore it.
It was a blessing, that they had left, got away from him and his life. Allowing his work to drag him back into the darkness was easy once he didn’t have any distractions around. All Might’s fight was drastically life changing, and even all the old memories of any emotion hot or cold, warm or cooling were distant. He only survived with his quirks keeping him warm and his mission to stop the HSPC, to be able to reunite with Izuku and Inko.
Then Izuku not Izuku there is something wrong, there is something IN HIS SON GET IT OUT NOW walked into a bar.
What do you get when a young teenager walks into a bar?