Chapter Text
Yagi Toshinori raced down the roads of U.A., moving as fast as fast as he could thanks to the lingering embers of One For All still within his body. He should’ve listened to his gut instinct that there was something wrong. He should’ve excused himself from Principal Nezu’s rambling talk, insisting that he at least show up. And now he was paying the price.
‘To think villains would be so bold,’ he grimaced as his movement down the road caused trees to sway as he passed them from the sheer wind pressure he was creating. ‘That they would be so vain and cruel to attack students, even if I was likely the intended target.’
Ida had been in a state of near panic when Toshinori had come across the boy, listening as the class president told him about the invasion, how the majority of the class had been scattered across the facility, how Eraser Head and Thirteen were both putting their lives on the line to protect the students, and how Thirteen had fought and suffered despite having no combat experience. All of the boy’s words made Toshinori’s blood boil and his anger grow; not only at the heinous villains who made others suffer for their own sick amusement, but anger at himself too for not prioritising his students and his new position. If he hadn’t intervened earlier in the morning on his commute to work, then none of this would’ve happened.
‘I’m a failure of a teacher, of a colleague, of a mentor. But I can make up for that here and now. I just need to make it in time before anyone else is hurt. Just a little bit-’
The road that wound between the trees, the forest that flanked him on either side, and even the blue sky above all disappeared, replaced by a white, featureless void.
‘-further?’
Toshinori looked around in both shock and confusion, experiencing whiplash from the sudden change in scenery. There hadn’t been any audio cue, no rumbling of the ground, not even a flash of light. One moment he’d been on the U.A. campus, and the next he was here, wherever here was. There were no walls, no ceiling, no definable surface of any kind. Toshinori wasn’t even sure what he was standing on was a floor, as the colour, or lack thereof perhaps, was the exact same as everywhere else. It was truly an expanse that was completely empty.
Or rather, almost empty.
As Toshinori turned on the spot, trying to find anything that stood out, he stopped as he saw a figure looking about as well, appearing to be equally as lost as Toshinori. He wore a yellow suit jacket, a white shirt underneath, as well as a blue tie around his neck. Even though the clothing Toshinori wore was larger due to it needing to accommodate his muscle form, there was no denying that the clothing the stranger wore was an almost identical copy of Toshinori’s suit. But when the stranger turned around, Toshinori gasped as he got a good look at his face. The stranger was more muscular than Toshinori in his true form, and he didn’t look as emaciated, but his hair was still the same, as were his piercing blue eyes. Though the person looked different to Toshinori in his true form, he knew in his heart it was him; or rather, what he could have been.
‘Is this some villain’s quirk?’ Toshinori thought to himself.
“Where am I?” the altered copy of him spoke aloud, glancing around the featureless space. This confusion shifted into anger when his copy’s eyes fell on Toshinori, the man falling into a combat stance.
“A villain?” Toshinori’s altered reflection growled. “Where are the students?! What have you done to them?!”
I should be asking you that!” Toshinori replied, no smile on his face for he wasn’t in the mood for this disruption. “Is this some attempt at stopping me from reaching the U.S.J. in time, villain?!”
His reflection’s eyes blinked for a second, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion.
“You think I’m the villain?”
“Well I know I’m not the villain, and I certainly didn’t bring myself here,” Toshinori responded. “My students need me!”
You mentioned the U.S.J.,” his copy stated. “Was there an attack there?”
“What, are you not only a twisted version of my appearance, but also a twisted version of my memories?!” Toshinori scoffed.
“I’m not the warped reflection, you are!” the copy retorted. “Appearing as I once did to taunt me over my failures!”
The supposed copy’s words caused Toshinori to pause. “You think I am the copy?”
“Aren’t you?” the other version of him asked.
“A quirk would only be able to copy the appearance, not the memories,” Toshinori reasoned aloud. “Despite this, a villain wishing to sell the act would be able to do plenty of research beforehand to try and convince me. So ask me a question only All Might could know and I shall answer it to prove myself to you. I’ll then ask you a similar question so that you might prove yourself to me. Agreed?”
“I suppose,” the copy nodded slowly. He paused for a moment, mulling over which question to ask, before snapping his fingers. “An easy one, if you really are me. What is my name? My real name?”
Toshinori knew he was taking a risk that this was a villain, but something within his heart told him that it would all be okay. “Yagi. Yagi Toshinori.”
The copy nodded at his words, his defensive stance immediately lowering. “Alright, I suppose it’s my turn to convince you.”
Toshinori thought of a question only he could know the answer to, something that hadn’t been recorded, something he’d never said to anyone.
“What was my mother’s name?”
His copy’s breath stilled, a distant look passing over his face. “Yagi Toshie. She was always smiling, even when things were bad. She kept smiling even when she gave her life for me.”
“So you’re me,” Toshinori quietly said, the fact all but confirmed in his mind. “You look good.”
“Look who’s talking,” the other Toshinori grinned. “You look like you haven’t changed at all.”
“Ah, right,” Toshinori muttered, releasing the control over his quirk, the tension within his body disappearing as a cloud of smoke enveloped him as he abandoned his muscle form, his muscle mass all but evaporating, leaving him little more than skin and bones.
“What, you, how?” Toshinori’s copy, Yagi, he decided, gaped, his eyes wide with shock before they widened even further in understanding. “One For All. You use your, our, quirk to puff up your muscles, don’t you? But how did your muscles atrophy so much?”
“The various surgeries took their toll, as did my years of continuing to be the world’s Symbol of Peace,” Toshinori explained. “You seem to have come out of our battle with All For One relatively unscathed.”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” Yagi grimaced, untucking his suit before pulling the shirt up, revealing the red, ugly mass of scar tissue on the left side of his torso. “You’ve probably got a similar scar, but it seems the difference between us was that you continued to be a hero.”
“And you didn’t?” Toshinori couldn’t help but frown. “The world needs the Symbol of Peace!”
Yagi’s gaze lowered, his head hung in shame. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t continue as a hero, a Pro Hero, not after what the Safety Commission did to those children.”
“The Safety Commission?” Toshinori repeated. “What are you talking about?! What children?!”
“The children from the Pilot Program,” Yagi explained.
Toshinori lightly shook his head, the name of the program foreign and unknown to him.
“You weren’t told?” Yagi’s eyes widened. “The Safety Commission stole quirkless children to turn into cybernetically-enhanced super soldiers who were training not only in urban combat, but also in Titan piloting.”
“What’s a Titan?” Toshinori hesitantly asked, feeling as if he were an idiot for not knowing what that exactly was. A vehicle of some kind, he knew that much, but the only titans he knew of were creatures and beings of myth.
Yagi was silent, his mouth opening and closing slightly as understanding began to dawn upon him.
“Oh,” he blinked, his eyes wide and unfocused as if struggling to figure out where to begin explaining. “Well, it seems there’s a few larger differences between our worlds. Where to start…?”
-]l[-
Where the boundaries between realities were thin, souls of a near identical nature, two iterations of the same person in similar realities, had the chance of being drawn within the space between dimensions. It was a realm devoid of light and darkness, space and gravity, matter and substance. It wasn’t a physical place, but one of the mind and soul, where an individual’s essence was made manifest, allowing it to see and communicate with alternative versions of itself. One could not, however, interact with their counterpart, as the space within dimensions wasn’t physical, thus matter couldn’t exist within it. Any attempt at interacting with versions of oneself would see you phase through them, as if they were a ghost.
Though memories made within the realm were unable to be recalled within reality, the purpose of such a space was for dialogue to form between different versions of the same being. But in this particular patch of unreality, the dialogue between two versions of the same person was very brief.
“Die!”
“Not before you bite it, you fake!”
One version of Bakugo Katsuki, a fifteen-year-old teenager with a mutation within his biology that allowed him to secrete nitroglycerin from his palms as well as ignite it at will, threw a wild right hook, an explosion bursting forth from his palm. He wore a sleeveless black tank top, two gauntlets shaped like fragmentation grenades, green gloves with orange palms, baggy pants that had metal knee guards over them, knee-high combat boots, and a jagged black mask over his eyes connected to two black and orange-rimmed flares that stuck out behind his head.
The explosion, however, did nothing, merely passing through the second version of Bakugo Katsuki. Though they both had the same physical appearance, they had different costumes. This one’s was more militaristic, as instead of a tank top he wore a black bodysuit, with armour plates over his pectorals, his biceps as well as the front of his legs. And instead of gauntlets that resembled grenades, this version of Bakugo wore grenades on his forearms instead, six per arm lined lengthways in rows of two, with four additional grenades attached to his belt.
“Ha, that was weak!” the second Bakugo taunted, both hands snatching up a grenade from his belt before lobbing them towards the first Bakugo. The two grenades bounced across the ground twice, rolling to a stop underneath the first Bakugo before detonating, two bursts of fire consuming where he stood.
Again, the explosions did nothing, and again, the first Bakugo didn’t recognise this fact.
“At least mine’s a proper explosion, yours were no better than firecrackers!”
And what was the cause for this fight? What could prompt two versions of the same person to clash so fiercely?
“But what should I expect from someone who calls Deku their brother?!”
“You shut your mouth before I kill you, bastard!”
Indeed, while the two versions of Bakugo Katsuki had been cautious towards each other upon appearing in the space between reality, they hadn’t come to blows, instead eyeing each other wearily, even when they confirmed the other wasn’t some illusion or trick from a villain. What had set them off, however, was a remark from the first Bakugo about his world’s Midoriya Izuku, or Deku as he called him. The second Bakugo, upon learning just who this Deku was, flew into a rage at the insult towards his brother, and the first Bakugo, upon learning the second considered Midoriya his brother, flew into an equally explosive rage. So consumed in anger and disgust towards the other than neither realised their attacks were doing nothing to the other. Explosions didn’t send them flying? The target either dodged or the explosion was weak if they were facing it. Blows from their hands or feet didn’t land? Either they were too nimble to be hit or their opponent too much of a coward to stand and fight.
Thus what should have been a space for dialogue and comparing the differences between realities became a battleground, with the two boys fighting right up until the barriers between space thickened, ejecting their minds back into their real bodies, finally bringing peace to the nothingness.
-]l[-
Midoriya Izuku was confused. One moment he and his classmates, Asui and Mineta, had been walking through the shallows of the Flood Zone, having just escaped the ambush from a school of aquatic villains. They were heading towards the central plaza of the U.S.J., hoping they’d be able to not only see what was going on there, but also sneak their way around towards the entrance and hopefully escape, and maybe join up with any of their classmates that hadn’t been warped away. He was walking towards the edge of the water, only for him to find himself instantly transported somewhere else. It was an instant shift; one moment he was wading through water, and the next his shoes were wet in the air.
But while this was strange, and the sheer lack of almost anything within this strange place was noteworthy, what Izuku focused on was the exception to the nothingness, the lone figure within the empty expanse; an armoured figure.
The armour it wore covered its entire body, leaving no clues as to who was underneath. They were about Izuku’s height, rather than towering over him like All Might did or noticeably smaller than him like Mineta was. A body suit was barely visible underneath the various plates of armour that covered their chest, arms and legs, all of which were made of an unpainted metal. The only real colour on the figure was its helmet, as the visor on the front was a blue lens shaped in a Y. They had no weapons visibly on them, but in a world of quirks that was hardly a comfort. If anything the presence of weapons was more comforting than anything else, as it meant whoever was about to fight you needed them, compared to someone who could simply use their quirk.
‘They must be a villain,’ Izuku thought to himself, trying to not let the fear he felt show on his face. ‘Maybe his quirk robs me of my senses? If I use One For All at this distance it should blow him away, but will it stop his quirk from affecting me? Can I take that chance?’
But as he tried to strategise his next move in his head, the supposed villain raised their hands. Izuku immediately lowered his stance, his right hand pointing towards the villain. While his thumb and middle finger on his left hand were already broken thanks to the smash he made earlier, he felt he’d be able to make a slightly weaker version of that wind pressure if he only channelled One For All through his fingers on his right hand. While it would certainly hurt his thumb, it wouldn’t hurt nearly as much as his left thumb currently was feeling.
The villain, however, didn’t move to attack, but instead continued raising their hands towards their helmet, gripping the underside of it and pulling it up and off their head. And when they, no, he, did so, Izuku’s eyes widened in shock.
The villain’s face was young.
The villain’s face was pale.
The villain’s face was Izuku himself.
There were some changes to the reflection Izuku saw each morning in the bathroom mirror; his hair was cut short, for one, as while Izuku had a mop of fluffy dark-green hair on his head, the figure wearing his face had his cut short into a buzz. Silvery lines ran across their face in an unknown pattern, stretching from his hairline all the way down to where his skin was covered by his armour.
But his eyes were the same, as was his hair colour, and even the two diamonds of freckles on his cheeks. And fittingly, just as Izuku was shocked to see such an altered version of himself, the copy standing in front of him looked just as shocked.
“What is this?” the copy asked, glancing around briefly before narrowing his eyes at Izuku, his hands rising in front of his face in a boxer’s pose. “Who are you?!”
“I-I should be asking you that!” Izuku responded, gripping his right wrist with one hand while bracing his index finger against his thumb. “Are you one of the villains?! Did you see us defeat your allies in the Flood Zone?!”
That caused his copy to still, his head tilting to the side. “You were sent to the Flood Zone too?”
“Y-Yeah?” Izuku hesitantly answered. “Were, were you at the U.S.J. too?”
“Yep,” his copy sighed. “Not exactly a great lesson, if I’m being honest.”
“Yeah, having the lesson interrupted by an invasion of villains does tend to put a downer on things,” Izuku weakly joked, though it did earn him a small smirk from his copy.
“Hey, given how different your appearance is to me, I’m guessing you never went through the Program?” his copy asked.
“The program?” Izuku copied. “What’s that?”
“Nevermind,” the other Izuku sighed, shaking his head. “Just realising we’re probably two very different versions of each other.”
“Well, I’m sure we have some similarities,” Izuku said, trying to brighten the mood. “I mean, if you’re me, you’re also a fan of All Might, right?! He’s the coolest Pro Hero! What’s your favourite rescue of his?!”
“I mean, I was, when I was like, four,” his copy admitted. “But these days I’d have to say my favourite Pro is Ingenium.”
Izuku blinked owlishly. “Ingenium. Ida’s brother?”
“Well yeah, he was one of the Pros who saved me back then,” the other Izuku answered.
“N-Not All Might?”
Now it was his copy’s turn to blink owlishly. “All Might’s been dead for years.”
Izuku felt his face go pale. “What? Dead?”
“Yeah, about five years ago he fought some powerful villain, and even though he won he passed away from his injuries days later. They made a whole documentary about it since the five year anniversary was a few weeks ago.”
‘Five years,’ Izuku thought to himself. ‘All Might fought that villain that gave him his scar about five years ago, right? A little longer, I think. Did the fight go badly in this other timeline? A world without All Might; I can’t even imagine such a dark place.’
“W-Well what about food?” Izuku said, trying to find some common ground with his copy from a darker world. “What’s your favourite meal Mum makes?”
“Our mother?” his copy asked.
“Yeah! I love the katsudon she makes.”
“My mother is dead.”
“What?” Izuku squeaked.
“She was killed about ten years ago,” his copy neutrally explained. “I don’t really remember much of her.”
‘He truly comes from a dark and twisted reality,’ Izuku thought to himself. ‘Like he’s from a seinen manga.’
“O-Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Izuku grimaced. “But, if Mum’s gone, who’s looking after you?”
“Aunt Mitsuki and Uncle Masaru,” his copy explained.
“Aunt and Uncle?” Izuku parroted.
“Well yeah,” his copy nodded. “They adopted me, after all.”
“Adopted? So, you and Kacchan-?”
“You call him Kacchan too? Huh, how about that?” his copy mused to himself. “But yeah, we’re foster brothers, and he’s my best friend too.”
Izuku felt faint. He was brothers with Kacchan in that reality? And they were best friends? Truly it was a dark, twisted, insane reality.
-]l[-
As a Pro Hero, and an underground hero to boot, Aizawa Shota was used to being surprised or experiencing the unexpected in his role as the Erasure Hero: Eraser Head. One moment he had been fighting a group of scoundrels, with one of them coming right at him, and then the next he was in a featureless void. Shota lashed out where the villain would be, but he felt no impact on his foot, nor did he feel any pain from an unseen blow, so he doubted it was the quirk of the one of the villains he wasn’t currently erasing the quirk of.
He spun around on the spot, trying to get his bearings, only to pause as he saw an exact copy of himself, who had also turned around at the exact same moment. The Shota and his reflection stared at each other, their slightly different postures showing Shota wasn’t simply looking at a reflection, before both of their eyes flashed red as their hair levitated. This effect lasted only a second before Shota’s hair fell onto his face, his copy’s hair doing the same.
““Huh, so that’s what it feels like to have my quirk erased,”” Shota and his copy said at the same time, the two quickly looking confused at the other.
“So, what, you’re me from another reality?” Shota asked.
“Depends, do you somehow get problem children every year?” his copy asked.
“Had a whole class of them last year,” Shota answered. “You?”
“Same,” his copy nodded. “Did you expel them all on Opening Ceremony day?”
“Naturally,” Shota nodded back. “You know, it’s refreshing to meet someone rational for once.”
“I was just thinking the same,” the other Shota nodded. “Do you have Midoriya in your class this year?”
“Yep,” Shota sighed. “Let me guess, he’s a problem child for you as well?”
“He startled a few of his classmates when he threw the softball with enough force to dislocate his shoulder, but he hasn’t been too bad.”
“Huh. Does he have a quirk that gives him explosive power at the cost of breaking his body whenever he uses it?”
“No, holograms,” his copy answered. “Why, what’d he do in your test?”
“He didn’t use his quirk in any of the tests beforehand, then for the softball throw he tried throwing it with his full strength.”
“But with a quirk like that, he’d break his arm,” the other Shota frowned. “He’d become almost useless after one move.”
“Exactly,” Shota nodded, becoming increasingly glad at meeting this version of himself who understood how to look at things logically, as well as being grateful to whoever or whatever brought them face-to-face. “I erased his quirk, gave him a shakedown over how foolish he had just been, then let him try it again, fully expecting him to either not use his quirk and fail the test, or use his unwieldy quirk and show he couldn’t control it. Either option would end with me expelling him.”
“So what did he do?” the other Shota asked.
“He managed to contain the power of his quirk into his index finger alone,” Shota answered with a small smile, remembering the look of determination on the green-haired boy’s face. “He still came last, but it was enough of an improvement for me to not expel him on the spot.”
“Impressive,” the other Shota nodded, a small yawn sneaking its way out of his mouth. “I’m feeling tired, so if you promise not to attack me, I’m gonna have a nap right here.”
“I knew you seemed logical,” Shota nodded, a yawn of his own escaping his mouth. He didn’t have his prized sleeping bag with him, but Shota had slept in rougher places before, and his binding cloth was a surprisingly effective replacement for a pillow when folded up. So after arranging his scarf underneath his head and turning away from his copy, who was doing the same. The life of an underground hero meant a lot of patrolling at night, and the life of a teacher at a hero academy meant needing to be alert enough to stop your students from doing something they’d regret, so Shota had quickly learnt how to fall asleep almost instantly. And so safe in the knowledge that he wasn’t going to be attacked from his copy, Shota fell asleep almost the instant he settled down.