Chapter Text
In a dusty drawer, under a fake panel at the bottom, Toshinori keeps a journal. A small, leatherbound thing wrapped thrice in twine, secured with a tiny padlock that doesn’t accompany any key. It doesn’t bear something so mundane as All Might’s average day, Toshinori scarcely associates his hero persona with it at all. It’s inherently ordinary, much like the boy who would receive sacred power.
He doesn’t write in it anymore, not since he fully shed the quirklessness that relentlessly dogged his steps well into adulthood. All Might finds his footing among the upper echelons of hero society and so the book remains hidden. Wrapped up tight, out of sight. All in order to muffle the oppressive loneliness it oozes from page to page, the outstretched hand of a walking oxymoron.
Toshinori, powerless and wholly ordinary, as he steps into the light. Where the world will chant the name he chose for himself but barely feels.
All Might, the strongest.
Yes, in a dusty drawer, under a fake panel at the bottom, Toshinori does keep a journal. Leatherbound, wrapped in twine, locked up tight. It contains all the information he could compile of the past users of One for All. Documents, articles, passing accounts, whispers from the underground, rumours and veritable fact. It is the culmination of Toshinori’s loneliness after Nana… well–
All Might doesn’t look at it, won’t think of it.
There isn’t any need to. Not really, anyway.
He continues to work hard, to smile in the face of adversity, to save as many people as he can. He becomes the facade, he’s content with that because he’s still saving people like he told Nana he would. It all works out just fine.
He isn’t that lonely boy anymore, see?
Not until the day he saves a boy from a monster made of viscous sludge. The day the lingering shroud of his own weakness begins to once again dig into his neck. You cannot be a hero without power, he whispers. It’s as condemning to the boy as it is to himself, familiar, unwelcome pain.
It’s a long way down.
All Might will chase the sound of burgeoning explosions down the stairs and out the building but Toshinori is willing to walk the ledge with the boy who dared to dream. He tries not to think about it, clutches the intrusive wound in his side and watches as hero after hero fails to take action.
And then, once again, the boy. Leaping from that ledge, bolstered by his dreams, there is purpose in his strides. The flames frame him in a golden light, he shines brighter than anything Toshinori has seen. He fights tooth and nail, clawing, biting, kicking and screaming. Every inch of those aspirations All Might bent and swept aside.
It’s in this moment that Toshinori allows himself to exist as more than a symbol, to breathe in his past, all that loneliness wrapped in twine. He leaps into the fray, clipping the heels of a boy braver than himself and he understands his master a little better. Toshinori hopes she’s smiling wherever she is, because Gran Torino certainly won’t be.
His grin is a horrifying smattering of blood against his teeth, it can’t be comforting at all and yet-
The boy stares through All Might and looks at Toshinori like he was the one to string up every star in the night sky. It’s adoration in its rawest, most pure form. This blood slides down Toshinori’s chin, drips onto the boy’s cheek and mixes with his tears. Amidst this chaos, to the cacophony of shouts of fear and encouragement, Toshinori sees the future.
A shot of green, the hearts of many beating as one, a fist caked in grime but victorious nonetheless. A clear sky, the beginnings of a rainbow following a storm. Even as it begins to rain in the present, All Might’s own doing, Toshinori knows what he needs to do.
The day ends in floods of topaz, the boy wails into the patchwork job of his broken dreams, stitched together by the one who tore it all apart in the first place. It must be awfully confusing, he knows it is.
You can be a hero, Toshinori, All Might, Nana’s boy says.
The boy continues to cry, Toshinori isn’t far behind.
The First is a black spot in history.
He is a memory of a memory, a whisper heard by four walls alone, a secret shared with the stars. There is, somewhere, a mound with no marker, posturing as a grave. It’s lonely, hidden, all for one man.
To Toshinori, One for All feels kind. The power that floods his veins is warm without fail, it smells like old comics, fresh bread and a lingering note of brandy. From such noble origins, what else could the quirk be?
On the first page of this journal; a single bullet point.
Good.
In every sense of the word.
Yoichi marvels at the sight of the setting sun, decades after he died at his brother's hand. It’s a novel feeling, the brightness causes his eyes to water but it doesn’t sting. He can smell the salt in the ocean but he finds himself unable to truly breathe it in. It’s.. incredible.
The setting sun paints a beautiful picture across the horizon, the ocean glimmers with the promise of something great. There’s sand in his shoes. He’s standing on a beach for the second time ever. It’s nothing like what he remembers, there’s no oppressive hand on his shoulder, no broken seashells in his hair.
Just a gentle breeze and the murmur of rolling waves.
It’s freedom.
In life, Yoichi grated against Zen’s twisted notion of love. Scratched at closed pathways until his nails turned blunt and bloody, forced to watch as something wicked took root in everything he’d ever known. His brother was never one for selflessness but to look back on how everything turned out…? It’s a bleak, depressing kind of thought, one that doesn’t bear thinking about.
Because in death, Yoichi Shigaraki is truly, finally, unequivocally free.
Knowing this, he lowers himself so that he is kneeling upon the sand and he weeps. For all those years spent in the dark, grasping for a single glimpse at the light. The sun shines fondly upon him as he cries, embraces him like a lost child returned home. Too late, perhaps, but home all the same.
He sobs and wails until all those ugly feelings that poisoned his life fade into something manageable and determination sets itself alight in his heart once more. The tide has crept in, the water nips his knees.
Then: a hand, piercing the darkness once again, once and for all.
“Hey,” Yoichi’s hero murmurs, kicking the sand, digging the toe of his boot into it. He looks rueful, his eyes gleaming with an emotion Yoichi can’t quite pinpoint. His brows knit together in thinly concealed surprise when Yoichi takes his hand without a thought. “I don’t–” he starts, stops, doesn’t quite finish, bites his lip hard enough to break the skin.
Yoichi stares at him in awe. “Thank you,” he breathes, filling the two words with as much gratitude he can muster. He wants to cry again at the sight of the stern looking man, whose kindness propelled Yoichi to take that first step towards liberation, futile as it was. Yoichi stands here today, on this beach at dawn, because of the man in front of him. How could he not be thankful?
“You-” he grumbles, forces his forehead into both palms and tugs at his reddish hair. “I got you killed, in the end. So don’t, don’t do that, Yoichi.”
Yoichi knows there’s nothing he can say, the scarred face before him speaks of a guilt that fortifies the heart, a poison that forces one foot in front of the other.
“Yet here we are, at the dawn of a new day,” he decides to say.
Kudo swallows harshly, like there's a ball of barbed wire lodged in his throat. His grip on Yoichi’s hand tightens before falling away completely. “Here we are,” he agrees. His presence is safety, the rush of trying something new, reckless abandon. Yoichi basks in it.
“Uhm-”
The tranquility ends right there.
Yoichi flinches and spins around, meeting the eyes of a teenager perched on the back of an older woman. His coat is big enough to cover his mouth but his eyes are narrowed in a wolfish sort of interest, arms resting upon the woman’s raven hair. The woman herself smiles pleasantly in Kudo’s direction.
“I couldn’t help but listen in,” the boy starts bluntly, “you mentioned something about getting that pale looking guy killed, sir. Yet here you stand? Isn’t that kind of weird?”
Kudo narrows his eyes dangerously while Yoichi ponders the translucency of his skin. By what measure is a ghost considered pallid anyway? Maybe it’s his sickly frame. Perpetuating a sort of on one's deathbed kind of look that followed him to the other side. Rotten luck, he consoles himself, can’t ask for too much beyond the pearly gates apparently.
(Well, at least he hopes the gates were pearly)
“You have quite a cheeky mouth on you, brat,” Kudo deadpans. He sends a flat look towards the woman. “You should teach your son to be less nosy, that’s the secret to a long life.”
“He came like that, I’m afraid,” the woman chortles, as if Kudo hadn’t just threatened her and her kid. She hikes the boy upwards, so he sits taller on her back. From this, Yoichi gets a clear look at the boy's disgusted expression.
“Son?” he scoffs, “I’m a year older than her, thanks.”
“Well,” she lifts her hand and makes a so-so gesture which only proves to offend the boy further. He slinks off her back and crosses his arms in a huff, he must be pouting, beneath that heavy duty collar of his coat. “It’s good to see them again, right? Your loved ones?”
Her tone is light, wistfully detached.
“You’re dead too,” Yoichi realises.
“As dead as you two,” the boy huffs, glaring at Kudo fiercely. “ So lecturing me about the secret of a long life was rather tactless. Insensitive, even. Hey, are you feeling ashamed?”
“Not at all, really.”
The boy waves his hand with an emphatic “Bah.”
Before a moment of calm can even think to settle, the tranquility shatters even further. In ways Yoichi, in all his years, had never thought possible. A strangled, wordless shout travels across the beach and within seconds the boy is, quite frankly, rugby tackled to the floor.
“En you shithead kid, the hell’re you doing here, huh!?”
The Second is, somehow, even harder to pinpoint than his predecessor.
His absence in history is anything but soft, the jagged edges of torn pages or a dulled butcher's knife. A wound that festered and ate away at itself, something painful and torrent. Demonstrating the violence that comes with being forgotten, forcefully erased.
While his name has been stricken from remembrance, his character has not. Off-handed mentions of a Leader emerge in old documents, yellowed and curling corners; they note him to be driven, cutthroat, stern, just, and above all, empathetic. Willing to extend a hand to those in need, the catalyst of a century long battle against cruelty.
Toshinori notes a single mention of blood red eyes and hair of a similar yet softer colour. It’s enough, to ensure someone so great does not go completely forgotten in death, at the very least.
(In truth, Toshitsugu Kudo’s name was never truly erased from the world. One man will always remember it, will spit out each syllable like a curse. It’s his fault, all of it)
It becomes increasingly obvious as to why they’re all here, alive-ish, on a beach nobody recognizes. Kudo figures it out the second he sees Bruce take a hesitant step over the pile of weeping man and complaining child, accompanied by a taller man with silver hair and a pretty gnarly scar.
(At least, he thinks it’s a scar, the jagged lines down his right eye. The lines are a void rather than the usual pale lines that usually indicate a healed wound. Kudo doesn’t know what to make of that just yet, so he leaves it)
These are the successors of the stockpiling meta ability, seven ghosts for seven failures. Just how persistent is Yoichi’s bastard brother, anyway? The ability should have become much stronger than it was when Kudo spat blood on the shoes of the man that would kill him. So then, why? Why are they here?
Why has One for All gained enough power to raise the souls of the dead but still not enough to complete its sole purpose?
“I truly hate your brother more than anything ever, I think,” Kudo sighs in Yoichi’s general direction, Bruce nods from the position he’s assumed at Kudo’s right, a step behind. All in all pretty standard, if they weren’t ghosts and both still had their positions in the resistance. He tries to tell Bruce this only for his words to fall upon deaf ears.
Sure, whatever. It’s a bit of familiarity if nothing else.
“At least drop the title,” Kudo sighs once again. Somehow, he isn’t really resting in peace. Funny that.
Bruce just stares at him like he’s grown a second head. “You have a name, Leader?” That’s that, Kudo thinks flatly, turning his attention to the overly emotional reunion happening at his feet.
It appears the latter few inheritors of the ability were rather close.
The younger boy, En, is kneeling with his head down as an older, boisterous man rants and raves. He’s waving his finger around and everything, a tried and true lecture that seems to be surprisingly effective. At a glance, anyway. Upon closer investigation, En’s body seems to shake with suppressed snickers rather than guilt.
The cause of this is, most likely, the woman who mirrors his position in the sand. Another receiver of the bald man’s tirade despite being, what looks to be, a fully grown woman who paid her taxes. Then again, she was young once too. Only really seeming to break away from her mature visage in En’s presence. Each time she meets the boy’s eyes, he shakes harder.
“I told you, I told you, that if you really wanted to help like you said, then you would take the quirk and hide in the woods like this damn weirdo behind me,” he sticks his thumb in the scarred man’s direction who looks disappointed but not at all surprised.
En tilts his head, the collar of his coat hides what Kudo is sure to be a smirk. “You always complained about how lame he was for doing that.”
“I didn’t miss your predictable disrespect, Daigoro,” the scarred man huffs, and Kudo really starts to relate to the expression on his fate. Yoichi makes a sound that suggests he’s rather enjoying the drama before them.
The bald man, or Daigoro perhaps, physically waves off the snarky comment. “Hell yeah it was lame! Except Hikage’s like 58 and you were 16, En!”
Well, that’s a little less funny.
“Fifty-eight?! I’m only forty.”
“Dai, I was sixteen then but I’m not now. Sure I didn't quite make it to my twenties but just know I was insanely close, okay? You probably think I marched straight to All for One for vengeance but I didn’t. Nana wouldn’t let me but let’s credit my emotional maturity instead.”
“Moot point, I am your emotional maturity,” The woman who must be Nana grins, “Seriously though, Dai, En managed to kickstart a whole resistance movement!”
All the seriousness is wiped from Daigoro’s face, replaced by a gawking pride. Yet, the slight tremble in his hands suggests this particular conversation is far from over. He laughs away his trepidation and picks En up by the scruff. “Charismatic little twerp, ain’t cha?”
En huffs but his usual smug look is replaced by something much more genuine. “Duh,” he says, voice just barely trembling.
Yoichi claps his hands together, smiling so wide Kudo’s convinced his face is about to split. The sound startles the latter wielders who had obviously completely forgotten about the presence of their predecessors. The disrespect of youth these days or whatever.
“What a truly wonderful group of people this power has brought together,” Yoichi laughs. “It’s been a long, hard fight but let’s just do our best, okay? Even in spite of all this coming back from the dead bit!”
“We’re calling Daigoro wonderful now? The horror,” Hikage mutters.
“Yeah! I think we glossed over the getting killed thing a bit too quickly,” Nana laughs.
“On everyone’s soul, nobody had a more brutal death than me!”
“Excuse me?” Daigoro hisses. It’s not entirely clear who he’s responding to, Hikage or En.
Kudo woodenly turns to Yoichi. “You jinxed it. This is a travesty, there’s nothing wonderful about any of these people.” The other simply laughs in his face.
Before anything can escalate further, Bruce – wonderful, straightlaced, rational Bruce – clears his throat. “What about those two?” he asks, pointing a little further up the beach.
A man, a boy and a shade stand crowned in the rising sun.
The Third is more of an actual person.
It doesn’t make his name any easier to find, scrubbed with just as much vitriol as his predecessor. However, he had a career, before superpowers became more than a rumour spread by the wary. It’s novel, to reconcile the image of a wielder of One for All with a regular man.
The man is mentioned to have had a foreign name and complexion, who learned to drive the year Japan began warring with it’s own rotten underbelly. They called him a scientist, made jokes about his too serious disposition and tendency to take everything at face value.
Toshinori tries to use these clues to piece together the man who would be the third. He underestimates the pure hatred of one man and so, the page remains crumpled and scarce, much like the ones preceding it.
He introduces himself as the Third and his successors take to it easy enough, shortening it to Three or inappropriate variations of the word in En’s case. He shrugs away the difficult questions, doing his best to remain stoic as Leader and Yoichi’s gaze seers his nape.
Here’s the thing: Bruce Lee died a tragically violent death at age 27. Pretty standard for someone of his profession in the era he lived and if he hadn’t fumbled his fight with Yoichi’s bastard brother, he wouldn’t actually be too mad. But he did. And now he’s staring at the consequences of that as they harp on about their lives to one another.
There’s the ghost of a kid here, pointing and laughing like there isn’t something severely wrong with this whole situation. Just down the beach, is another child; wide eyed and innocent. The Ninth.
All in all, it doesn’t really feel like he deserves a name. Not when Bruce Lee was a nationally renowned researcher in the science behind Meta Abilities, turned second in command of Japan’s most poignant resistance movement, a success story down to the marrow of his bones.
Not anymore.
So he’ll stay as Three for the time being, until he starts to win again.
“One, two, three, four, five six, seven,” En counts rather dramatically, his gaze slides over to the two living people on the beach, “eight, NINE?”
“And whatever that creepy ghost is, I suppose,” Daigoro, a creepy ghost himself, shivers.
“We’ve hit nine generations and no dice? First, your brother stinks,” Hikage sighs and Three is glad to note that he hasn’t changed at all. That he got to grow somewhat old and still remains as gentle and inconvenienced as always.
Yoichi huffs, “I know, I was there.”
Everyone begins to talk over one another again and Three can see quite clearly the role he must play in his own afterlife. He coughs loudly, wrangling the deficit attention of his fellow spectres. “I think we should do some tests. See how far we can take this ghost thing.”
Daigoro pumps his fist, his elbow unintentionally crashing into En’s skull. “Ghostly powers, Hell yeah!”
At the same time, Hikage nods and hums, “Supernatural abilities, I see.” Which causes them to glare at one another before turning pleading eyes at Three. Fools, he isn’t giving them an inch of acknowledgment.
“To begin, En,” the boy perks up, still rubbing his head. “You just took a blow to your head, did it hurt? You’re rubbing it which suggests a positive. However, we cannot disregard the notion of phantom pain-”
“Oooh spooky pun!” The Seventh whispers.
Three ignores her. “Does it truly hurt or are you simply used to similar hits hurting and acting out of muscle memory.”
This is familiar territory, Three thinks, it’s Bruce’s speciality. The push and pull of hypothesis and experiment, the itch to discover something new and take it apart just to reassemble it totally different. It has nothing to do with superpowers or big bad villains, really.
En blinks at him slowly, Three can practically see the cogs turning as the boy comprehends each word individually. “No,” he starts slowly, “that actually hurt, dumbass master!”
Incensed, En drives his steel toed boot into Daigoro’s shin.
A perfect second opinion, served on a silver platter.
The Fifth howls, hopping around on the sand with the injured leg held to his torso. Three hears Hikage mumble a bitter, “Brilliant, so I wasn’t imagining the migraine,” which confirms Three’s first theory.
- Pain receptors are still active
Perhaps then, they aren’t as dead as they thought. Not to say they’re alive by any means. Just… somewhere in the middle. Bruce’s sister would call that purgatory and throw a horseshoe in his lap. Three though, well he’ll just call it rotten luck for now.
Despite the chaos, the Seventh stands completely still, eyes locked on the older man and his boy. There’s the shade too, a wreath of golden light that hugs the younger boy protectively. That’ll be the Eighth’s placeholder, then? Another theory to test.
“That’s be your successor, yes?” Three decides to ask, breaking Nana out of her reverie with a start. She blinks tears out of her eyes and responds with a laugh. A choked up, breathless sound. He thinks of the latter three users, their closeness and their tears. “Your boy?” He amends.
“Indeed he is,” she says simply, grinning like a madwoman.
En slides up next to them and whistles. “Nana, that guy has no business fighting All For One, the Lakers need him.”
It seems to cheer her up, the Sixth seems to know the intricate pathways of her heart well. Their friendship is an interesting one, built on misfortune and rebellion. Did she follow him into the fire willingly? She must have.
And that’s that.
Until the Ninth leaves the beach and the rest of them are quite literally dragged along behind him. Three watches in real time as Leader falls into a dark pit of despair, echoing En’s shrieking as he tries to cling onto a signpost to no avail.
Nana and Daigoro’s laugh at the boy’s misfortune, Hikage looks like he’s trying to incinerate the Ninth with his eyes, Yoichi is acting like a tourist in his own country and Three? He finds himself lamenting the sweet release of death posthumously.
Mentally, he updates his list which is becoming more bleak by the minute.
- They’re connected to the Ninth by an invisible tether.
- The living cannot yet perceive them.
- This whole thing is utterly ridiculous.
That last one is a bit of conjecture, a bit of subjectivity and largely a means to vent his frustration at the situation without socking one of his rowdy successors in the gut. Restraint, love and peace, tranquility, fellowship.
“So like,” En starts as they walk through the bustle of the morning commute, Three feels his eye twitch. “Eye spy with my little eye—”
This is not a time for restraint, scientific finding number one comes into play once again as En wheezes out the rest of his sentence, undeterred.
“Dude,” Nana whispers, “that’s child abuse.”
Whatever.