Chapter Text
Izuku hears faint whispering in his mind.
Then there is a strange pressure building up inside his body, clenching around his heart. It’s accompanied by a stabbing headache and a slight shiver of cold. The pain isn’t unbearable; he had worse at his old middle school, after all.
Izuku never liked to be unprepared and out of the loop. Although their society puts a lot of value on physical strength and powerful quirks, he is of the belief that knowledge has more value. After all, a lack of information can end up with deadly consequences. Knowledge is power.
“Young Midoriya,” All Might acknowledges him, a warm smile on his gangly face. Those radiant blue eyes gaze at him with pride and gentleness, “Once more, I’d like to congratulate you on passing the exam.”
It feels like someone is stabbing his heart with a knife.
“Y…Yagi-san,” he mutters, flinching slightly when the hero focuses on him.
Izuku values knowledge above anything else.
(On the night of the day, when he received the offer for a legacy quirk, Izuku went out to ask about it.
The informant’s Cheshire grin was nothing short of unsettling. Izuku never liked having to spend time with her, but she was skilled at gathering information from sources apparently no one else seemed to know or possess. If someone would have heard something about a transferable quirk, he had no doubt that it would be her.
“At the dawn of quirks,” she started talking, twirling a strand of her long hair, eyes boring into him, “there were two brothers.”
There were a lot of rumours swirling around about such a quirk, some clearly made up but others…)
“Yagi-san,” he repeats, his voice more steady now. “Could you, um, confirm something for me?”
Confusion settles in the hero’s eyes and his smile dims a little. “Of course, what is it you would like to clear up?”
Then the hero stills, furrowing his eyebrows. “Young Midoriya, have I ever told you my actual name? I can’t seem to remember?”
He closes his eyes for a moment, willing to gather his turbulent thoughts into order. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Izuku opens his eyes, dark green shimmering slightly.
“Yagi-san,” he repeats, lacing his quirk slightly into the accent of his voice, “you don’t know anyone named Midoriya Izuku nor do you remember ever having known someone by that name.”
He watches as the hero’s eyes glaze over as they lose their focus and it feels like that knife in his heart is being twisted around.
“Midoriya… Midoriya Izuku is someone you never had anything to do with, so… you don’t remember ever passing your quirk on,” Izuku finishes talking, frowning as he watches his quirk work its wonders.
As he can feel his quirk begin to settle down, Izuku puts his hood on to cover his hair. Then he turns around and walks away.
The whispers in his mind seem louder than they ever have been before.
(The informant’s grin deepened. “There is an interesting rumour going around about the bogeyman of the underworld.”
“The bogeyman?” Izuku inquires. He has heard one or two things about said bogeyman but never anything substantial. It left him wondering, how that old tale could be connected to the story of the two brothers.
She chuckled. “You see, it is told that he’s able to take and give quirks, just as the elder brother in that tale.”
His heart dropped down to his stomach.)
Hoax has always been a peculiar quirk.
In the beginning, when Izuku first discovered the quirk at the age of eight, it made no sense to him. There were no visible rules to it and genetically he wasn’t sure how he even got such a quirk in the first place. His father could breathe fire and his mother had a weak telekinesis quirk. In other words, it was an abnormal quirk, although not a completely impossible one. There were previous cases of people developing quirks that had not been affected by their genetics in any way.
Still, it was disconcerting and Izuku didn’t feel comfortable revealing its existence to anyone, not even his mother. Especially not his mother.
So, he kept quiet about it.
Unable to resist his love for analysis, he researched it and similar quirks as much as he could and tried to use it in small, unnoticeable ways.
The more he found out, the more certain he was that he had to keep it under wraps as much as he possibly could—he pretended to be quirkless. It wasn't as difficult as it should have been. As a false negative, he bore the biological body of a quirkless person. The nature of his quirk allowed him to keep quiet about it and to make anyone, who could by chance find out about it, forget the quirk.
After all, Hoax had the capability to affect and alter reality.
And that? That was the most frightening realisation Izuku has ever made.
Using Hoax, Izuku could make anyone believe anything he uttered, no matter if it was true or false. And to achieve that belief, the quirk was capable of altering factual and physical aspects in reality to fit Izuku’s statements.
Quirks affecting reality were very rare.
And greatly desired by many, many people.
Once he gets home, Izuku sits down with his phone and watches a clip of the sludge villain incident.
None of the clips shows a kid with a yellow backpack.
Soothed, he drops his phone on his bed and lays down.
‘It’s better like this.’
‘Is it though?’ His mind seems to whisper back.
Izuku closes his eyes.
“It is,” he speaks out loudly. “Nothing should be traced back to me.”
(One week after he visited the informant, he got wind of her death.
Her body has been found stuffed in a garbage can near the bar she used to meet her clients at. Her pinkie toes were cut off.
Her hair and skin used to be covered in leaves and vines, but they were all gone now.
The message was loud and clear to Izuku, so he came to a natural decision.
He had to become untraceable by all means.)
Yagi Toshinori walks into Naomasa’s office and shakes his head with a sigh.
“Thank you,” he mutters, after accepting a cup of tea. “I feel like my time is running out faster than before…”
Naomasa frowns. “Have you still not found a successor?”
Something feels off about that statement, but he cannot pinpoint what exactly.
“No, I’ve been searching… but no one seems right so far.”
True, his quirk whispers to him and yet Naomasa can’t help but feel like something doesn’t add. True, his quirk stresses once more.
A minor misconception is that people believe his quirk relies on the intent of the people he questions. That is not the case.
Even if someone wholeheartedly believes something, his quirk won’t take that into account and just focus on wherever that something is actually true or not.
His quirk has never been wrong before.
“I just can’t find anyone that I’d like to offer the quirk,” Toshinori whispers.
True, his quirk tells him. A quiet stagnant noise starts up.
True, his quirk repeats, as if it senses his doubts.
Naomasa nods his head.
His quirk has never been wrong before.
It wouldn’t start now.