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Midoriya Izuku loved his friends dearly.
They were all amazing people in their own right, and he felt that he never appreciated them enough. His friends were kind and strong and loyal and fierce and so, so beautiful.
Of course their quirks were awesome as well, but that’s not what was important about them; Izuku loved them for their personalities.
He loved Iida Tenya for his ability to make hard decisions and for his wish to keep all those dear to him safe and protected.
He loved Uraraka Ochako because she was the first person to show him unconditional support and kindness with nothing wished for in return.
He loved Todoroki Shoto for his fumbling attempts at finally becoming human, for being able to withstand the darkest demons and spit in their face with his whole icy and fiery disposition.
He loved Asui Tsuyu for the way she never sugarcoated her words, but still lead with kindness nonetheless simply because she was not able to think or speak badly about a person.
He fell a little bit in love every day he spent with those closest to him. Izuku was open in that way. He had so much love to give out and he did so freely without prejudice.
He looked at people and saw little miracles. He saw their little habits and tics; he heard their voices and moods, and he recognized their flaws and shortcomings and loved them all the more for them.
Every day he fell in love with people.
Izuku looked at his classmates and teachers and saw them wholly. He was just like that; unable to look away when something fascinated him. He was never not curious about those around him.
So he was really no stranger to being in love. Izuku did that daily, even though he could never articulate properly what his friends meant to him.
His throat would close up and his lips would start to wobble, and his tear ducts would start the waterworks, simply because he was never able to grasp the concept that these wonderful people wanted to be friends with him- useless, stupid, worthless Deku.
Not that they ever called him that- they always made sure to tell him the opposite of that, actually. His friends were nice and kind and considerate like that.
Uraraka gave that spiteful name a completely new meaning on the first day he knew her and if that wasn’t a gift he would kill for and treasure forever. Thanks to her, he was somebody.
In the eyes of his friends, Izuku was a hero. What an idea. His greatest dream of an entire decade, and they gave him this title a month into knowing him.
What an idea.
Izuku loved his friends dearly.
So, so dearly.
Izuku felt that it was his personal mission to always make sure that they felt as loved with him as he did with them. He could not give back nearly enough. He owed them everything he was, because they accepted him the way he came prepackaged, even when he finally bit the bullet and told them that he used to be quirkless, worthless, a late bloomer (no matter how much he loved his friends and how much it hurt to lie to them about the actual origin of his bone shattering quirk, he owed Yagi Toshinori even more. He owed him for even being able to meet all the people he fell in love with, that would always rank supreme.)
He wanted to make sure that his friends always felt as loved with him as he did with them. Sacrifices he made for them weren’t sacrifices at all but proof of his love. He couldn’t say it out loud after all, so he acted instead. He was determined to a fault to never let them down, to never leave them lonely and to never leave them unsafe.
And oh, his friends worried about him when they felt he was going too far.
He saw that they loved him back in the way Iida would remind him of the impending curfew in the evening and the way he knocked on his door in the mornings, because he knew that Izuku had trouble getting up early with just an alarm sounding next to his head.
He saw it in the way Todoroki would sometimes quirk his lips up while staring fondly at Izuku during one of his hero rants, intently listening when others had long since tuned him out.
He saw it in the way Uraraka said her name for him- full of affection and adoration and childlike wonder.
His point was that he would willingly and without a second of hesitation trade his life for theirs. They had made his life worth living in the first place: without them it would go back to the way it had been before he knew what friendship and love and unconditional kindness from his peers felt like. Sometimes he was thankful for the stark contrast because it meant that he was able to properly see how much they did for him without getting complacent or taking their affection for granted.
He would trade his life for his friends.
Without a second of hesitation.
So, when it came down to it, it really hadn’t been that hard of a decision after all. It had taken him approximately ten minutes to think it through and to come to a conclusion.
It hadn’t been difficult.
If it meant protecting his first friends, his loved people, he would do anything. So when after the not-really-final battle with Shigaraki he had found himself in a hospital bed yet again, he was determined.
This fight had given him back a new-old love. His first and most brilliant love had finally acknowledged them as equal. Izuku had cried when he grasped the implication that somewhere, deep down, Bakugo Katsuki loved him as well. That he had looked at weak, useless, stupid Deku and decided that he wasn’t weak or useless or stupid anymore.
The complete trust that came with that shift was astounding and tear jerking and overall an entire miracle to Izuku, who had only ever wanted to be close to Kacchan, who shone so brightly whenever he looked in his direction. Izuku had done that a lot in his life.
And that said, Katsuki had taken a hit meant for him and nearly died.
They all had nearly died.
His friends had been hurt and injured and so many of them where bleeding red into stark white bandages even days after the fight had been over.
Izuku didn’t like seeing his friends like that. He only wanted to keep them safe, and he hadn't been strong enough.
And, oh, wasn’t that an idea.
He wasn’t strong enough even though he was the reason they all were in this situation in the first place. After all, the League of Villains had started attacking his class full of loved people that loved him in return to kill All Might.
They only kept doing it, because Izuku was the ninth holder of the antithesis to their boss in the shadows. Because All for One wanted him, and the quirk all his predecessors had died for, to die as well.
And oh, wasn’t that a thought. Izuku was the reason his people were continuously hurt and thrown around and weren’t able to have a normal childhood and instead had mandated therapy sessions twice a week each.
And when he thought about it rationally like that, there was no way it would have been a hard decision.
After all he fell in love every day.
Izuku left UA and his class full of people on a wednesday only slightly after having awoken from a coma in a hospital.
He hadn’t seen any of them before he went, because he knew that they would try to stop him. They didn’t understand the entire weight of responsibility he held on his broad and scarred shoulders and that was okay.
They didn’t need to know if it meant they could be safe for a little while longer. (The guilt about thinking like that sometimes kept him awake at night. He knew they wanted to help him as much as he did, and he loved having them around but not at the price of their laughter or smiles or happiness or lives.)
He left them letters. Izuku had always found that writing down his feelings was easier than speaking them aloud. And because he wouldn’t be around anymore to show them with his actions how much he cared for every one of them, he wanted them to have something else to remember him by.
Izuku was selfish that way. He wanted to be remembered and maybe, someday when he would come back after finally getting strong enough to protect them from any harm his mere presence might cause them, he wanted to be loved again. To be forgiven. He was selfish like that.
So he left letters he had been writing in his head during his coma in the dream sphere of his quirk together with the ex-holders of One for All who sat by in silence.
They all knew how hard it was to leave everything behind for an unfair fight where every odd was stacked against One for All.
They knew.
Izuku had left the hardest letters for last, so when he came to his mother and Toshinori, his predecessors held his hands when it became too hard to force his trembling fingers to clasp onto his pen.
Nana was his favorite for that. She was a calloused hero that pretended to be carefree and aloof to disguise the fact that she had lost her entire word and then some, only to get back up and continue to fight.
It had been a necessary sacrifice, but his heart still ached painfully whenever he thought of all she left behind unfinished.
Izuku always thought of Toshinori when he looked at her and saw what his own mentor had seen and fell a little bit in love in the process. He couldn’t help it, after all she was basically family the way all the holder of One for All were in some way, without ever meeting more than their direct predecessor and protegee.
All users died young, after all.
All Might had been the one exception to that trend.
When Izuku left, he took his new and improved hero suit- courtesy of one Hatsume Mei and several all-nighters spent in Power Loader’s labs against his orders- and the banana yellow cape that Gran Torino had left with him on a whim during one of his visits while Izuku was still sleeping.
He took food and water and his gear and a class photo they had taken before the summer training camp had gone to absolute shit and his Hero Analysis for the Future notebook No.15 where he had all the quirks of his predecessors recorded and encoded. He did not take his phone or house keys with him.
He left on a wednesday and completely ignored the way the rain would hide his crybaby tears. Izuku did not take a plane to his goal; he knew that they would be monitored as soon as the school and his mother found out about his disappearance; they would find out quickly after all, Aizawa was always paranoid about something happening to one of his students if not closely monitored.
(Historically he was right with that assumption and Izuku could not even challenge that belief in light of being the worst offender of causing his teacher to grey prematurely)
And Toshinori tended to check in on Izuku no less than three times a day and only left because Recovery Girl was adamant about him not skipping meals and getting a healthy amount of sleep into the retired Pro Hero.
Also, the ticket would have to be bought under his name, thus making him transparent and traceable.
Also also, plane tickets were expensive and even though he had quite a lot of money saved up from his internship under Nighteye and a lot of reward money for villains he had apprehended, he knew that wouldn’t last him forever. So Izuku took the train.
First, he went to Tokyo. It was easier getting lost in the big cities were no one was looking for him yet. He bought hair dye for his very recognizable curls. In a fit of nostalgia he chose the color closest to what Katsuki’s hair looked like, not that it turned out like that.
Izuku had forgotten about color theory and the fact that green wasn’t easy to remove. It turned out a greenish tinted yellow, but he decided he was fine with it. It just fit the cape better, not that he was particularly concerned with fashion. He took great care to alter his appearance, more than he ever did before. He would have probably even gotten colored contact lenses if the color of his eyes hadn’t been the only thing about his mother that he could afford to take with him.
From there on he took a different train that brought him to a port town called Shimonoseki. A ferry to Busan later and he was on mainland in Korea. By then a few days had passed and he had seen a few news reports with his face plastered to them.
“Missing,” they read, “possibly kidnapped.”
Izuku almost cried when he saw that last theory. He left of his own volition and for him to make his friends and mother think that he had been kidnapped was not what he wanted to achieve. That was the very reason he left those letters in the first place; as to not to worry them too much, though he knew it couldn’t be completely avoided.
(He didn’t want to remind them of the horror that had been Katsuki’s kidnapping only few months prior, he still woke up from nightmares of not being able to save him, of being just a tad too late, a tad too weak, a tad too useless. Izuku didn’t want his loved ones to feel like that because he knew he would be gone significantly longer than just a few days, even though he wouldn’t be in the custody of a crazed villain)
He spent his days in trains surrounded by voices speaking unknown languages, as he traveled across the continent of Asia towards Russia, where he found a person that could give him a ride to the USA on a motorboat. It was a rather funky situation and Izuku was only able to secure that particular deal with a lot of gesticulating, saving that man’s granddaughter from a robbery in a gas station and- frankly speaking- an insane amount of luck. The fact that he didn’t even injure himself was even more miraculous in his opinion.
Izuku arrived in New York city roughly a month after he first left his hospital bed; he had converted all his money to dollars and fed them onto a prepaid visa card. He needed a name and proof of identity to use it, but he found someone that could provide him with a fake ID in exchange for looking for her missing sister. The girls quirk reminded him of Yaomomo, which made him almost cry all over again.
He let her choose what name to call him on his new ID, which in hindsight may have been a mistake, because she chose an American name that Izuku almost couldn’t pronounce. But he had to learn the language sooner rather than later anyway, so he supposed it could have been worse (sometimes he thought about Present Mic and Kaminari as he spoke English and how proud both of them would be of him if they could hear his improved articulation in a language he was never fluent in)
The months on the streets forced Izuku to relearn everything Aizawa had ever taught their class about stealth and investigative hero work and helped polish his new quirk Danger Sense. He hated the constant nagging in the back of his head that told him something horrible was about to happen but gave him no indication as to where or how he could help. In a big city like New York where something bad was always happening everywhere, it was a nightmare.
So Izuku learnt to distinguish the little buzzing sounds by trial and error. It was different for murders at gun point or mass shootings then it was for a robbery where no one got harmed beside the emotional scars. He always prioritized the mass shootings. There was lot of them and Izuku left every body-and-blood-filled scene when he failed a little older and heavier. He never knew the phrase “you can’t save everybody all the time” as intimately as he did then. He loathed himself with a deep passion for not being enough, for not being able to do everything that needed to be done. Sleep never came easily anymore and he compromised by taking on extra patrols instead. It was better that way. He was supposed to learn and polish the potential All Might and his teachers had seen in him and not rest in the face of crisis.
A few months in, people started to recognize him when he showed up to the scene of a crime. They were people that didn’t matter; they were the homeless and the criminals themselves. People that spent a lot of time on the streets and in the dark. People that weren’t relevant to society, unable to give back for things they never received in the first place. He built a network like that. His reputation preceded him; they called him The Avenger after an old pre-quirk area superhero movie, because he was always at the center of a catastrophe and somehow turned the most hopeless of situations around. To the people of the streets he was a savior, swinging in when the dirtiest of crimes were being committed.
(There were cases where his mere presence was enough to deter the villain from going through with his crime and Izuku thought of the effect All Might had, when he was still able to be the Symbol of Peace every time that happened. There were even more cases where people died gruesome and nightmare inducing deaths that he couldn’t stop regardless of how hard he tried. He couldn’t save everybody and his only consolation in nights in which he woke up from his body-and-blood-filled dreams was, that at least it wasn’t his friends’ blood that stained his shoes and skin)
Sometimes people would give him hints. A teen, barely older than Izuku himself, told him about a guy that sometimes came by his alley to sell weapons to anyone who asked and paid the right price. An old lady, as Japanese as he was, told him about little children that went into the house she slept across from and never came back out. A girl worried for her friend told him about the drugs she would take to forget what she witnessed and where they came from.
He witnessed murder, poverty, rape, abuse of any substance, robberies, abuse, suicides. He witnessed the darkest side of humanity that transcended language barriers or country borders. He spoke to victims more often than he spoke to the police. Not for lack of trying on his part, but because most of the victims he dealt with were not part of society and therefore not protected by law enforcement. He vowed to be their protector instead, for as long as he remained in this crime infested city that never slept or let him sleep either. He knew it would come to an end at one point, even though he preferred not to think too hard about that least he would get even lonelier.
His weakness were children and teens his age. Izuku had seen what the streets did to minors that had no way of getting off of them without being returned to the very reasons they had run in the first place. Soon, he adopted the habit of always carrying an extra bag with medical supplies and food to hand out or stitch up the odd wound they couldn’t pay for to get treated at a hospital. He saw his friends’ haunted smiles in their faces and Eri’s trembling form when they clung to him. Izuku had almost a decade worth of experience with patching up injuries and he used that knowledge freely without ever asking for a name or story in return.
When the half year mark hit, the photo of his class started to fray around the edges and folds. The color in it faded with Izuku’s smile. He woke up in a different alley every day. He lost the last bit of baby fat clinging to his frame stubbornly. He grew almost ten centimeters, so after a while he had to get rid of Hatsume’s last work for him. The color of his hair changed every few months to avoid recognition, but at this point he was back to a dark brown reminiscent of Uraraka’s hair. Somehow, he always ended up with a friend’s hair color whenever he dyed it.
Izuku was tired. He had unlocked one more new quirk in his time in New York during a particularly bad hostage situation where three kids almost died. He didn’t know what user what it was from or understood completely how it worked, so he called it Particles. It reminded him a little of his mother’s quirk, as it enabled him to move particles and thus things around, so he cried the first few times he used it.
His frequent encounters with criminals of all kinds made it easy to practice his quirks in high stress situations and he set himself weekly goals to refine his control. Like “today I am only going to use Blackwhip to fight” or “today I can’t use Smokescreen to make escaping easier” it forced him to think outside the box and to analyze his opponent at the same time as his surroundings. Izuku was tired.
Sometimes he gave in to his loneliness and found an internet café. He never bothered to get a new phone as the only people he wanted to call either didn’t have a phone themselves or were halfway across the globe and couldn’t know about his whereabouts. But on bad days he found an internet café and looked up any and every bit of news concerning his friends and classmates.
This way he found out about Todoroki winning the second-year sports festival with his fire side and Bakugou hot on his heal in second place. He forbade himself from watching the clip for almost a full week before he gave in in order to study their moves and learn from their fights. Kirishima and Uraraka had paired up for their second internship and worked alongside Ryukyu once more, where they cracked down on a rather large drug cartel that sold the quirk boosting drug Trigger. He felt proud of their accomplishments as he read the long list of villains that were apprehended the day of the bust. Iida went with his recovered brother that time around. He had an entirely new hero costume that shed the bulk and protected him more. It had been a suggestion of Izuku’s, so to know that his friend still thought of him made him happy.
But the thing he most searched for was big attacks of the League of Villains. They still happened, of course, but never at UA anymore. It was as he had predicted: as soon as the vessel of One for All vanished, the threats did too. Quietly, he was thankful for that, Izuku didn’t know what he would have done if Shigaraki had attacked his friends anyway and while he was halfway across the globe and unable to help them in the slightest.
When he reached the ten months mark (as long as training with All Might had taken him) Izuku finally felt ready. He had mastered his quirk and was consistently able to hold Full Cowl at seventy-five percent for hours on end. By coming to this point he had gained a lot of new scars that marred his body like war paint and ripped his face apart in a way that made him look decades older than he actually was. He was never carded when he went undercover into clubs anymore.
So Izuku thought himself ready. He longed to see his friends and classmates and teachers and Toshinori and his mother. So he did his rounds on his turf across the city, said his farewell to all the people he had any sort of contact with that would miss him and booked a flight. He wasn’t worried about being traced anymore, after all he was on his way back. The last dye job had grown out considerably, so he just cut off all the colored parts to finally show his own green curls again. It felt a little like coming home.
His flight lasted almost thirty hours, but it took him closer to home than he had been in a long time, so he didn’t mind all that much. During that time he contemplated how he wanted to go about this. He could just call his mother as soon as he landed, but that would result in a lot of crying, and nothing would get done for at least a few days. She would also probably refuse to let him go back to UA, even if it was just to see his loved ones. She would probably never let him leave the house ever again, which didn’t sound like a good possibility to an almost eighteen-year-old Izuku who had spent the better part of a year on the streets. So he discarded that idea quickly.
(Something in the back of his mind told him that a few months ago he would have decided differently, would have put his mother above anything else. That he had changed drastically as a person and as a hero. Izuku just asked that little voice how he could have changed as a person when he didn’t allow himself to be anything other than a hero while in America. The voice that had sounded suspiciously like Nana didn’t answer his question)
There was also the possibility of just walking straight back onto campus or turning himself in at the nearest police station. Neither sounded appealing, as Izuku now had a deep-rooted disbelief towards the police and also wasn’t sure that Nedzu hadn’t rescinded his student identification that made it possible to cross those gigantic gates as soon as he had vanished or even when the next semester hit with no new signs of him. So he discarded those ideas as well.
Ultimately, the decision was made for him when his train back to Mustafu was hijacked by a group of villains that wanted leverage to force the police to release one of their friends from custody. The criminals live streamed the whole thing and Izuku was vaguely reminded of the attack on the cultural festival that Gentle Criminal and La Brava had launched. It felt like eons ago. He had been caught on camera by the criminals as he kicked all of their asses before any kind of reinforcement could arrive.
Due to the high stakes of the hostage situation, a few heroes were called on scene and he was asked to give his statement. (Izuku was only in this situation because his goal of the day was to “not run away with help of quirks” and he immensely underestimated his recognition value) One hero was Manual; the same one Iida had interned under in first year. Izuku knew his attempt at coming back in the cover of the shadows was thwarted as soon as he saw the other man.
He got away, but apparently the guy had called a somehow still active hotline that was linked to his missing person case for one and also Aizawa’s personal phone number for second. (Granted, Izuku only found out about that last part a few hours later)
So while Izuku was running away from heroes and other kinds of law enforcements like he had practiced so many times in New York (not that he thought that he would fall back into his habits of flight once he was back in Japan, he was supposed to be part of law enforcement here goddamnit) he wondered about how his coming home could have possibly gone worse. Which is never a thing Izuku should think about, because lo and behold, it got worse. Worse in form of known faces. Faces that knew him back. Faces that where not fond of him or all of his tendencies. Faces that screamed crime and villainy and hurt and red on white days after the fight had been over.
Apparently, they had been looking for him. He could run away again but what good would that do? He had mastered all his available quirks and could utilize full cowl at seventy five percent for hours on end. He wouldn’t get any better than that any time soon. That was the reason he had come back. The reason why he had left in the first place.
So when Shigaraki stepped forward, grinning maniacally behind the severed hand of his father on his face, Izuku switched into a fighting stance that was so deeply ingrained into his subconscious that he almost didn’t notice his body moving. This was the accumulation of all his efforts, and he wanted to be done with it, finally. He wanted to go home to his friends and classmates and teachers and his mother and Toshinori. He was tired.
How Shigaraki had found him in the first place wasn’t important. Nor where exactly they were. The only thing that mattered was that Izuku defeated his archnemesis and antithesis with as little civilian collateral damage as possible. Not that he could help it if a few people die- no, he would make it possible, somehow. This wasn’t America. He had a duty to all the civilians living in high rise buildings across streets from their pending fight. He had a duty as the successor of One for All, the opposite duty the deranged protégée of All for One across from him had.
Izuku knew that this would be the last time he would be facing Shigaraki. And because he hadn’t found a successor himself, he would have to make sure that it would be the last time anyone would face him.
So Izuku shifted into his fighting stance, Full Cowl in form of his signature neon green lightning coursing through his veins, muscles and flitting across his form.
“So you’ve finally come back, One for All holder Midoriya Izuku, also known as Deku. Where were you these last few months? We thought that you had finally abandoned your ideals and let me do my job, but apparently you have come to challenge me yet again.”
Shigaraki’s dry voice boomed across the soon to be battlefield. Out of the corner of his eyes, Izuku caught the imprint of vibrant blue flames surging closer to him. Danger sense was going haywire and if Izuku had been any less careful with cultivating his understanding of the quirk he wouldn’t have caught the warning it issued him. ‘duck’ it said ‘the flames are a distraction’ it buzzed. Not that the flames so hot they could cremate anything they licked at, do anything to him. After training with smokescreen as long as he had, he unlocked a secondary function that made him- along with the resistance he had inherited from his own fire breathing father (how else would Izuku have survived all those years of Kachan’s explosions pressed directly against his skin?)- basically immune to fire and its effects.
So he ducked, catching the brunt of the flames to his back, the knife that had been aimed at his heart by a hiding Toga sailing uselessly above his head. Behind him first sounded a victorious cheer before Dabi grunted in surprise at the sight of Izuku’s unharmed back.
Izuku reevaluated the situation he had found himself in. In front of him, only a few meters away but currently content with letting his subordinated do all the hard work, stood Shigaraki. He was watching the fight, but the hand and his pale blue hair hid any kind of expression that Izuku could have used to analyze his next move. He would have to rely on Danger Sense for this particular enemy then, not that that would be an inherent problem.
Behind him were Dabi and Toga, the only two left of Shigaraki’s vanguard squad that he had assembled so long ago to hunt him and Katsuki down. Izuku’s eye twitched at the memory. Those two had hurt his friends an exceptional amount. He would not be kind while taking them down.
Before he had gone to America, Izuku had only ever trained in honorable fighting methods. Now he had experienced how fights on the streets were conducted and knew every dirty trick in the books. Americans loved their knife fighting possibly even more then their guns, which would be Toga’s downfall as she would soon find out the hard way.
Izuku completely ignored the imposing figure of the Todoroki’s eldest sibling and instead lunged towards the blood quirk user, a combination of One for All and Float activated for his speed and Blackwhip spread around his body to deflect any blades she could throw at him. The young woman babbled incoherently about how much she would love to see him bleed, to lick, to suck, to be him and to replace him but he had heard worse over all these years. Her hand-to-hand combat was as sharp as ever. Her blades slicing through the air, nicking skin and flesh here and there.
He sacrificed the superficial cuts on himself in order to get bigger hits in on her. While she was distracted by a series of kicks he had perfected when he was involved in a close quarter gang war in the Bronx, the black tendrils of Blackwhip creeped around her. He knew it would take a lot to incarcerate her, to knock her out would not be enough; if any of the other two escaped they would take her with them. But he couldn’t kill her either or disable her quirk permanently so she would lose her use to the League. He would never wish quirklessness on anyone, not even the people that hurt his loved ones. So he had to make it quick.
Absentmindedly he wondered why nobody had noticed their fight yet; there had been heroes on scene, and he certainly hadn’t escaped that far. This brief moment of distraction was enough for his opponent to slam one of her knives into his defenses, his arm barely coming up in time to block a what would have been lethal attack. The white-hot red-cold pain traveled along all his nerves, amplified and simultaneously diluted by One for All still fortifying his body. Toga was laughing in the way only she ever could; the inherent dread creeping up on him, all his senses screaming wrong wrong wrong.
Izuku grit his teeth against the pain and used her delight at having so much of his blood out in the open to grab her arm and flip her onto the hard floor. The concrete cracked under the force of his takedown, her body going limp under his grip. With any other person he would stay to make sure that they weren’t just pretending, but this was Toga. Toga had never been able to pretend if it wasn’t in a different face than her own, even less so in a fight. She was definitely down for the count, for now at least.
The whole thing had taken mere minutes and Izuku marveled at the fact. Months prior he was only barely able to hold his own against her and now she was defeated in a matter of moments. It made the hardship of him leaving worth it all over again.
Dabi and Shigaraki were still on the loose, but with the oldest Todoroki unable to hurt him with his quirk, which was his biggest and possibly only weapon, made him not that much of a threat to Izuku. And Izuku was tired.
So he fired up his limbs and shot forward, his entire weight corralling into Dabi lithe form with a speed he had learnt from Gran Torino back in first year. The villain almost lost his balance, only years of training and battle honed instincts keeping him on his feet. Dabi’s hands found their way onto his skin, wherever they could reach and Izuku had no doubt in his mind that he would have burnt to ash in .3 seconds flat if he were anyone else besides himself. Cremation whispered and licked and nipped but couldn’t consume and Dabi was shocked and outraged by that. As if he couldn’t believe that his quirk failed him right now. As if he couldn’t believe that Izuku was fireproof without even having a fire quirk himself, while he still got burnt when using too much of his own. The irony wasn’t lost on Izuku either.
A punch to the head was all it took, in the end, and, oh, wasn’t that an idea. The villain Endeavor had personally created, the bane of the entire Todoroki family and hero commission, defeated by a singular punch. How anticlimactic. Izuku almost couldn’t believe how easy it was. Two of their greatest fears and adversaries since the attack of USJ, of Hosu, of everything else and the end all it took was a formerly quirkless teen and a few months of training. He wasn’t even a licensed hero yet. Probably wouldn’t ever become one, in the face of his blatant vigilantism, now and in the states.
He had found peace with that though a long time ago. The sky was blue, grass was green and Deku couldn’t be a hero. In the end, he only had himself to blame for that one, ironically. He would have been able to achieve his greatest dream if he had continued his path. But he had recognized that his dream wasn’t to be a Pro Hero, but to be a hero. And for that he didn’t need a license or a quirk. If he had realized that earlier he would have probably spared his mother a lot of grief and tears and pain, but he didn’t regret it either way.
Because he had to come this way to realize that. And that way had come with responsibilities he had to carry.
The last of his responsibilities stood a few meters away, obviously frazzled at the fact that his right-hand lieutenants had been taken out so quickly. Shigaraki was scratching his neck as he always did when panicked or thinking. Izuku could hear the sirens in the distance, the shouts of people witnessing their fight in broad daylight, the news helicopter chopping away above. They were surrounded. He hadn’t even realized that other heroes had arrived until one took Toga from where he had slammed her into the ground and put quirk suppressant cuffs on her wrists and ankles. Another one was creeping closer to Izuku who was still holding onto the passed out Dabi.
To make the job of the first responders easier, Izuku threw the villain in the vague direction of the hero, Mirko he now recognized, so he could be detained properly. His rough handling of the villain made her raise an eyebrow, but the streets had taught him a few things about criminals not staying down when they should and how they always deserved the bruises and pain they had to deal with later. (Not all of them, but Izuku differentiated between actual criminals and people that committed crimes out of desperation, so they might as well)
His learnt and hard acquired cruelty when it came to take downs aside, they had every right to judge him. He was acting on a provisional hero license that had probably been revoked ages ago without an order to engage, which made it doubly illegal quirk usage. Not that that would stop him at this point. If he was able to take down Shigaraki, the last one remaining of the league of villains, he could finally go home without regrets and see his family of classmates and teachers. He wanted that very badly.
Izuku again powered up his legs to bulldoze straight into his enemy with the equivalent force of several trucks. A plan that failed spectacularly when Shigaraki started to use a quirk that wasn’t Disintegration. Black tendrils similar to Izuku’s own forced their way out of Shigaraki’s torso, spear like and sharp. Izuku’s mind reeled, failing to catch up with the implication behind the scene he was witnessing. He had seen this quirk used in action before, but where?
Shigaraki continued to scratch his neck as if not at all bothered by the fact that two of his strongest allies had been taken out in a matter of seconds. He was solely focused on Izuku, staring him down with an expression of loathing behind his father’s hand. Another quirk reared its head as the tendril suddenly started to rotate with intimidating speed and precision, drill like. At that, it hit Izuku from where he knew it. But how was this possible?
He calculated and thought feverishly but the only thing that would have made this possible at all made him want to hack up bile and stomach acid in disgust. Because if he was right All for One had left the world a last option of apocalypse before he died in Tartarus. And even though he and Toshinori had speculated about All for One being able to force his very own quirk onto other people they hadn’t thought that he would actually do it. Assumed him to be too selfish, too self-assured and cocky to make such a decision so against his own nature.
Now Izuku wished desperately that he had been wrong when he said that it should be a strong possibility. Now he wished they hadn’t discarded that discussion so quickly. Because if All for One The Person and megalomaniac had been dangerous, what would an unstable Shigaraki with All for One The Quirk accomplish? He had to be taken out before another two centuries of hate and unnecessary deaths and quirk stealing could even begin. Izuku didn’t want to have to pass on One for All to another successor to leave them to their dangerous and doomed fate. He had promised that it would die with him and bring an end to this meaningless suffering of all its holders by finishing what it had been passed down for in the first place.
So Izuku called forth every quirk that was at his service, uncaring about what the media and bystanders were seeing while looking at him. This was so much more important than the secret of his quirk. All Might would understand if he made it out alive of this encounter to explain his thought process to him, he was sure.
Izuku mindlessly dodged blow after blow; the force of the hits nearly toppling him over every time he touched one of Shigaraki’s quirk induced appendages. He was focused on the fact that he felt vaguely disappointed by the way All for One’s inheritor fought.
He bodily dodged as if he didn’t have a thousand regenerative quirks in his possession whenever Izuku’s kicks were a little too close for comfort. He went into close quarter combat with him as if he wasn’t able to use thousands of long-range quirks and keeping Izuku on the defensive; of making his entire previously known fighting style completely useless. He reached out with his hands as if intent to touch and disintegrate everything in his way as if this was the only thing he could do at all.
Shigaraki wasn’t used to fighting with All for One at his beck and call, had probably no interest in quirks and how to apply them and thus simply didn’t. If Izuku had to guess, he only used the black tendrils because his much-revered sensei had used them a lot.
Izuku grinned. He could win this if he played his cards right, then. Close quarter hand to hand combat was his forte after all. He threw a flurry of punches and kicks at Shigaraki, feinting when it was necessary and hitting with power when possible. His opponent wasn’t all that intimidating without the possibility of lunatic back up. Even then, he lasted longer than Izuku would have liked or expected a few months prior. There were probably a few enhancer quirks in the vast masses of All for One The Quirk, that were permanently switched on without Shigaraki needing to do anything about it. Izuku would have loved to analyze every single one of the quirks stored in the void of the quirk and was saddened on a primal level that they had been stolen only to not even be used when it mattered.
Shigaraki was strong and fast and had an instinctual battle sense that was only ever rivaled by Katsuki, of all the people Izuku had met in his life. This together with his modified body made this the hardest fight Izuku had ever fought. Not even a point-blank smash by All Might compared to the strength behind Shigaraki’s attacks. But if he didn’t want to let all his struggles be in vain, Izuku’s only choice was to once again grit his teeth at the pain that pulsated and cursed through his entire body wherever Shigaraki’s hands or other limbs had come in contact with and subsequently decayed him.
They had fought for almost an hour before he got any substantial hits in. The buildings that used to surround their chosen fighting spot had all but crumbled down in a mocking imitation of Jaku hospital. There no longer were any bystanders, likely evacuated by the other heroes that had at some point tried to enter their fight. They hadn’t stood a chance. They were either unable to keep up with the insane speed Izuku and Shigaraki were conducting their fight at and were thus made to sit out per default or got hit in the crossfire from one of their respective blows. Mirko and Hawks belonged to that last category, Edgeshot and Best Jeanist to the former.
At one-point Izuku had idly wondered how it was possible that almost the entire top twenty was present, but a hit to his hip had forced him away from that string of thought fairly quickly. At least none of his classmates were here, even though that was surely not by their choice but under threats of expulsion and blacklisting from hero schools and agencies by Aizawa. Izuku was quietly thankful for that. He hadn’t gone missing for almost a year just to show back up again and drag all his friends down in the same fight he was supposed to protect them from.
His only saving grace was the fact that Shigaraki was appearing to get slower. Izuku knew that Shigaraki would never feign weakness to win; such an underhanded and cowardly tactic simply wasn’t the man’s style; weakness even if only fake wasn’t a word the villain had in his dictionary. He wanted to win, by all means necessary and to prove that he could dominate. All the years of knowing Kacchan made Izuku keenly aware of that particular personality trait. As soon as he recognized the similarities, he knew how to beat him.
Instead of continuing to fight Shigaraki with trades of punches and blocks to the torso and his vital spots, he dropped down low, grabbed his left calf and yanked hard. Shigaraki hadn’t expected that move, but still valiantly tried to fight for his balance and when that didn’t work, tried to kick Izuku with his other foot.
But he wasn’t letting go, instead used his opponents leg as a makeshift discus as he spun him around and around, before slamming him into the ground headfirst with as much force as Izuku could possibly call forth. He didn’t stop there either. Shigaraki was still struggling, the black limbs were still moving about, trying to stab Izuku at any vital parts of his body. He didn’t let their mild success stop him from heaving Shigaraki’s body above his head and crashing him against the ground a second and third time. By the sixth time he was finally unconscious.
Izuku felt the pain and blood loss catch up with him a soon as the adrenalin left his body. He felt faint, as if he was close to blacking out. When he did, after confirming that Shigaraki’s caved in and bloody face would make it impossible for him to get back up anytime soon, it wasn’t really a surprise.
The feint beeping to Izuku’s left made his sluggish brain aware of two things at once. One: he was alive and two: he was in a hospital or at least somewhere with a heart monitor. He had heard that sound enough times in his life to recognize it anywhere he went, regardless of the amount of pain killers he was on. And that had to be a ton, because Izuku couldn’t feel his body in the warm and fuzzy way that always came with use of Recovery Girl’s quirk. He identified the room as soon as he cracked open his eyes. The poster stuck to the opposite wall had the same two-centimeter tear at the upper left corner that he remembered from last time. He was in UA’s hospital room, the one that had his name permanently written at the door for when he ultimately came back with another broken limb or rib or two. His mother had personally hung up said poster when Recovery Girl had told them about his third home. It always made Izuku calm down when he woke up with something he recognized and after several traumatic kidnapping incidents and his violent response to waking up in unfamiliar places, they had deemed this precaution a necessity. He was finally home.
The weight of that realization came crashing down on Izuku all at once. It was finally over. His forced isolation, his training and the war. He had finally taken down Shigaraki. It was over. And all this without major casualties on their side barring any civilian ones he might have missed during his fight. By the time his violent sobbing and full body jerks had ceased to light shudders someone had come up to his door.
The knocking must have been a curtesy, as they surely didn’t expect him to be awake yet. He always tended to wake up way before his doctors predicted; it was how he had run from his last hospital bed after all.
His visitor didn’t notice his consciousness right away, she checked over his charts, compared something to what looked like to be his massive medical file in her other hand.
“Recovery Girl?” he managed to croak out behind the lump in his throat. The drawback to his fire resistance was that it left him severely dehydrated, with a mouth as dry as parchment and his throat unable to vocalize the words his tongue was too heavy to form anyway.
The woman swiveled around to look him in the eye. The stare off lasted several long seconds before she dignified him with a response. “If you leave that bed even a moment before I say that you can, I will personally hang up wanted posters with your face all over the country.”
After that declaration she continued on to ask him questions about his health, about several older wounds and scars that had badly healed. She tutted at the sight of them before she noted down how exactly they occurred. After explaining how he got them and making sure that there was no residual problems left, she wacked him with her cane. “That is for not seeking professional medical treatment when you should have.” Apparently even the knowledge of how often a bullet had grazed or directly hit him or how often he had knives puncture his organs, she wasn’t deterred from inflicting bodily harm to her most loyal patient. And that was that from Recovery Girl.
She was the only one Izuku saw for a week. She never pried, never asked where he had been and never wanted to know more than ‘was that a stab wound or a bullet hole at point blank?’ he relished in that silence and freedom. Izuku wasn’t used to talking to people long term anymore. Had been alone with his own thoughts and the occasional conversation with victims and other street dwellers for longer than was probably humanly healthy. So he appreciated the calm before the storm that was undoubtedly coming as soon as his first visitor would set foot in his little hospital room.
When he asked the hero why they weren’t already storming him with questions and police reports and his family, she only responded with something along the lines of ‘they will let you rest as long as I say so’ so yes, he was grateful to Recovery Girl.
The first person beside the grandmotherly doctor that talked to Izuku was Tsukauchi. The detective took his statement about what he had been up to in the months he had been on the run. Where he had gone and who he had met. When Izuku said that he had run to America, Tsukauchi raised a thin eyebrow in judgement. Izuku didn’t try to defend his logic. His plan had worked and that was all that mattered in the end.
The second person was Toshinori. Even though he was retired, the former Symbol of Peace still had high enough of a clearance level to be permitted into Izuku’s room regardless of the unfinished police investigation that still surrounded him. What followed was one of the most awkward heart to heart conversations they had ever had. Izuku explained his reasoning and-as he has suspected- his mentor understood.
He also told Izuku that he would most likely not be allowed to return to UA. While Izuku had speculated about that various times during his time in America, this admission still hit him hard. The first reason behind that possible decision was, that he had missed ten months of training and schooling, which he couldn’t possibly make up for in time for graduation. The second was said ongoing police investigation. His vigilantism was still a crime in the eyes of the law, even if it meant that the greatest crime lord or his successor had been taken down. If a judge found him guilty of those charges, he would firstly be blacklisted from ever receiving any kind of hero license and probably also land himself in jail or at the very least with a large fine.
Izuku had known all of that even before he had left all these months ago. He had been under no illusion that his normal life would be left on standstill and wait for his return. He had known that it wouldn’t be that easy. And it had been a price that he was willing to pay, even now that the consequences of his actions were staring him directly in the face.
Toshinori also talked about the changes that Izuku had missed during his absence. Apparently Aizawa had investigated Todoroki’s living conditions after Dabi had revealed his life story and hadn’t liked the picture it painted. His tip to principal Nedzu had started a formal investigation into the former number two hero that had been as public as possible. They had wanted to avoid giving Endeavor any kind of chance to get rid of evidence. His license had been suspended and his youngest son was currently under the care of his older siblings Fuyumi and Natsuo. They were applying for guardianship until he would be eighteen.
This investigation had sparked public outrage about the accountability of heroes and the Japanese hero commission for burying evidence of his misconduct and abuse. Izuku was honestly almost overwhelmed when Toshinori tried to explain the intricacies of new protection and restriction laws that were being drafted by the government to make other heroes unable to follow in endeavor’s flaming footsteps. Izuku hadn’t really cared all that much about the politics that came with being a hero; they were necessary, he knew, but he also knew that the law didn’t always have the best interest of the masses at heart. The laws that were currently on the verge of removing any kind of chance he had of being a pro hero were the best example for that.
But still, he was happy for Todoroki. It meant that he wouldn’t need to be afraid of having to return to his father anymore. Izuku only ever wanted for his friends to be happy, so he relished in that. Again, it meant his sacrifices had been worth it. Even though he would have liked to be there for him during these times, as, surely, it had been hard on the aloof teen.
Toshinori was the only person allowed to visit him; even his mother couldn’t. Apparently, he was a flight risk, which Izuku supposed with his history wasn’t so far from the truth. He had, after all, run away. Until his trial, he was to be isolated, because the authorities weren’t sure if he was a danger to himself or others. Due to his high profile standing as a former UA student and the sheer size of his missing person file and the rank of the villains he had taken down, his trial had to be conducted rather publicly in the wake of recent political movements. They wanted an example, and they had found one in his case. With a harsh sentencing, the commission could prove that it wouldn’t allow heroes to slip through the cracks of the law any longer.
Izuku and Toshinori had discussed what that would entail regarding One for All. They were sure that the judge would pull up his medical record that proclaimed Izuku to be quirkless till the age of fourteen and his subsequential registering of One for All as Superstrength just after the entrance exam two years prior. After a lot of discussion they had decided that Izuku would tell the truth. After all, All for One had been defeated so there really wasn’t any reason why they needed to keep it a secret any longer. All Might had left his mantle of the Symbol of Peace without the world shattering, so Izuku could tell this tale without disillusioning the world beyond repair, too. The way he had used his quirks during the violent takedown of the last member of the Paranormal Liberation Front made it impossible to keep quiet any longer, anyways. The only way to get access to multiple quirks had been swearing alliance to All for One to receive them directly from him and Izuku really didn’t want to be saddled with a felony charge of this size.
When the time for his first hearing came almost three weeks later, Izuku really wasn’t ready. His social anxiety had returned full force. He hadn’t been able to hold normal conversations with strangers for years, how in the world was he supposed to be able to just speak in front of a jury that would decide his entire future?
They asked questions. About his childhood, his teen years, how he got into UA. There were three independent judges with various truth quirks that sat by while Izuku was being interrogated by the attorney of the state. He answered truthfully, as he had no reason to lie. The back and forth took hours. With every new response Izuku gave, the attorney had three new questions that needed to be answered. It was exhausting.
The stands were full of reporters. The flashes of cameras going off had blinded him when he had stepped foot in the large room the first time. Izuku only noticed the section of chairs that housed his homeroom class when he was being escorted back after the interrogation was over. He wasn’t allowed to stay any longer than that. The cuffs that an officer had placed around his wrist a few weeks ago were quirk suppressant with a mechanism that allowed them to snap together behind his back. They hadn’t been taken off since Toshinori’s first visit. That was when he had been taken from the medical ward and into a detainment cell to await his trial.
His classmates looked solemn. Everyone was there, even Aizawa and his mother. She was seated directly next to Katsuki’s left and to Mitsuki’s right. The Bakugous were there as a full family to witness what would be Izuku’s sentencing. He couldn’t bring himself to care about that fact too much. While some part in him rejoiced in the fact that all of his friends had come to stand beside him, he was too far removed at the same time. It had been so long ago that he hadn’t fought all on his own that he really couldn’t remember how to act in a team. If Izuku ever got out of jail he would have to seriously relearn human interaction to be able to rejoin society as a functioning member of it.
The trial concluded surprisingly quick. After the whole outcry over the truth about One for All and his and All Might’s role in the fight against a two-hundred-year-old supervillain finally quieted, it really only boiled down to this: Izuku had violated every quirk related law he had ever studied in school. And not on the level his former bullies had done it, to torment him with their quirk, to stab him and to burn him; he had done it on a country wide level. At least they couldn’t convict him of the crimes he had committed in America as that wasn’t their jurisdiction.
At one-point Izuku had almost laughed at the thought that if he had remained quirkless instead they wouldn’t have been able to convict him of anything at all. Discrimination was funny that way, after mor than a decade of living it personally.
His sentence was only lightened by the fact that people sympathized with him and his story. That he had brought in criminals worse than him; that had murdered without a second thought. Izuku had been lucky in that regard. Of course, he would never be able to reapply for a hero license, that dream had died the day he had dropped out of UA. It still stung. It stung so much that when he heard about this fact he wasn’t able to hear anything else for a solid twenty hours. He had a mental breakdown in his cell before he was able to face the word again.
He was on strict house arrest for a year and had to be accompanied by a hero for that time. He couldn’t be in contact with his family in that time as well. Izuku supposed that it could have been worse. Facing his mother after his return hadn’t been on his list of priorities after all.
The house arrest was to be spent with the hero he was assigned to. So he moved in with whoever was unlucky enough to get saddled with the responsibility of looking after him. The judges had explained the reasoning as follows: he was a flight risk, highly trained and dangerous but ultimately not malicious and not guilty of more than vigilantism and property damage. They discarded the ‘bodily assault’ aspect of the charge pretty quickly.
The first hero he was assigned to was rather temporary. He lasted for an entirety of two weeks before he couldn’t deal with Izuku anymore. Izuku didn’t really know what he had done to make the hero so fed up with him to request a change, but he supposed this hadn’t been the first time someone had hated him for no discernible reason.
The second and third each lasted a little longer, but still not enough to completely cover his year of house arrest. So when the time to meet his fourth hero sitter came around, Izuku ultimately didn’t expect a lot. What he hadn’t accounted for was the fact that he still had friends in rather high places, even if the law forbade them from seeing him. The person that stepped into his temporary cell that he had been assigned to after the third one quit, came as a surprise.
“Am I a mouse, a dog or a bear?” said the principal of U.A..
This was the beginning of something great, as far as Izuku was concerned. Because principle Nedzu took his house arrest and turned it into something else. The first day after Izuku was transferred to a high security compound within the walls of his dearly missed school, they made a deal. He still couldn’t see his friends and former classmates and he would never be able to hold any kind of license that would allow him to use his quirk in public, but there was something he could do, according to Nedzu. The animal gave him a pencil and a notebook and told him to write. To analyze.
With Nedzu’s help, Izuku was able to finish his high school diploma, to enroll in a college course of his choice and to get a degree. After a few months, they appealed to the court for a different sentence. They offered to elongate Izuku’s house arrest for up to five years if the court would allow him in return to get a teachers and quirk studies license. After another few months of deliberation, the court took their plea.
Izuku used that time in arrest to actually get those degrees and licenses. Him and Nedzu had weekly exchanges to discuss students and their quirks and heroes, and the turns hero society had taken. Whenever they were together in a room, anyone else would leave, citing terrifying nightmares as the cause.
Izuku wasn’t too horribly concerned with his former family anymore. Sure, he still loved them dearly, but after years of no contact and being prohibited to look up information regarding to them even his love could take a back seat. And making plans with his former principal and enacting those preoccupied him so much, that it didn’t hurt as much anymore.
He had made a promise to himself, that day Nedzu had stepped into his cell, took his life and turned it around. If he wouldn’t be able to be a hero himself, then he would help other to become one. And when he stepped onto U.A. grounds six years after he had left that hospital bed as the new heroics teacher and first candidate as future principal, he finally felt that he had accomplished that goal.