The Hand That Feeds

by huunty

Summary:

Midoriya Izuku knows what it means to hurt. He knows what it means to lose everything and everyone you love and he knows the unfairness of life like a long-time friend. He knows the world has been crumbling beneath his feet for some time now. What he doesn’t know is how he ended up in All for One’s lair with no warning, or how he ended up reliving his life all over again.

Follow our hero as he navigates unforeseen complications, lives through puberty again, and walks for a really, really long time.

 

Updates on the 7th of each month! Time between updates will greatly lessen once I've finished writing out the story! <3

Chapter 1: Arc 1. Chapter 1. A Tale of Two Brothers

Notes:

I originally wasn’t going to post any of this story until I had the whole thing written, but I’m 20,000 words in and suffering major writer’s block, so I figured I would post one chapter a month and hopefully be able to get some good headway on the rest of the story. When I’m able to complete it, I’ll greatly shorten the time between updates because this is going to be a long, long fic. Our boy has a lot of work to do!!

ALSO: I had to delete some tags with warnings because of the 75 tag limit. I can put warnings at the beginning of chapters if needed, but proceed with caution! <3

Date written: 27.DEC.2024
Word count: 1,946

Izuku knows what it means to hurt. He knows how it feels to lose everyone you care about and turn to God because the world is too cruel, damn it, and if he can’t make it better himself, he’ll pray and let it go and wait for the End Times.

 

Izuku knows what it means to be confused. He knows what it’s like to be left behind by everything you know and be forced to learn how to live your truth with no one but that ol’ wandering wind at your back.

 

Izuku used to not know what fear felt like back when he was just a kid and words didn’t matter as much as they do now and actions didn’t speak as loud as they ought to. Nowadays, it feels like fear’s the only emotion he’s got the will left to feel within himself.

 

He shakes like a dog under an overhang for rain shelter, and feels just about as pathetic as a drowned rat on the best days.

 

The best question one could ask right now isn’t: “is he okay?” or “how can I help him?” like good, limelight heroes ought to do, but “how did he end up like this?”. How he got to where he’s at isn’t a long story at all, mostly because he isn’t quite sure how it came about himself.

 

The dawn of quirks is probably as good a place to start as any.

 

In the bygone age of budding technologies and the beginnings of medical advancements known as the end of the twenty-first century, a glowing baby was born in China. The nurses all fainted and the baby barely made it to an incubator in the NICU before his parents had bursted into tears of shock and fear, but that is neither here nor there.

 

These supernatural, metahuman abilities soon became known as “quirks”: alien powers given to a chosen few by a false deity, rat kings, secret government experimentation, or something equally as absurd to hear out loud. God’s honest truth is that nobody knew where these powers came from, but they’d’ve been damned if they didn’t use them for all the wrong reasons. Right off the bat, criminals with dangerous quirks were labelled “villains” and stored in neighborhood prisons and federal institutions for safe keeping.

 

It was like the asylums all over again.

 

People tried billions of things to rid their children and fellow humans of their sudden, magical abilities and mutations, from performing exorcisms to electroshock and cognitive-behavioral therapies to much, much worse. Let nobody forget the hell that those poor, confused people went through.

 

So, the quirked individuals went into hiding. Their abilities were called “nuisances” and “curses” and for many years, nobody was dumb enough to use their quirks in public for fear of imprisonment or public or government execution.

 

As well as the quirked’s useless persecution, let nobody forget the overshadowed Shigaraki family.

 

In Jaku City, a married couple by the names of Hana and Ken Shigaraki did live. They raised two healthy boys in the age of the world that would one day be known as “The Dawn of Quirks” and sheltered them from the dangers of the powered ones as best as two unassuming parents could.

 

One day, however, all of their lives changed for good.

 

The eldest Shigaraki brother by the name of “Neji” had come back home from his high school–a prestigious private school with a strict “no-quirked” acceptance policy–with a quirk of his very own. Hana had never cried so much as she did that night.

 

Neji brashly showed off his ability to his sickly brother and intimidated father by spitting out balls of fire from his mouth and spinning them around from palm to palm like he was a world-renowned juggler. Yoichi grinned up at his brother from his wheelchair and showered him with praise, demanding he be shown more tricks. Neji indulged him as every good brother should.

 

But, his father Ken, as many others from his generation, felt frightened and threatened by his son’s supernatural ability.

 

“You aren’t to use your curse ever again after this night,” Ken said. “If you disagree, you are more than welcome to move out.”

 

Yoichi looked heart-broken at his father’s words, but Neji’s jubilation and decisiveness held fast. He knew he was destined for more than this; it was a feeling long-ingrained into his bones from years of shunning the quirked of his time and wishing things could be different, that quirks would be normalized and he could show off his ability to his brother and anyone else who needed some joy in their life at such a tentative time in the world.

 

And so, Neji did what any good elder brother would do. As nighttime fell and the moon and stars glittered in the sky, he took his brother’s chair by the handles and walked him out of their burning childhood home and never looked back.

 

Yoichi was, of course, (reasonably so) disturbed by the fact that his parents had just been burnt alive in cold blood by his [now] only remaining blood relative. And even though Neji assured him everything would be fine, he wasn’t so sure.

 

Apparently, Neji had been planning to move out of home for quite some time to the point he had picked up a job at a neighborhood quirk institution, helping people who were sent there to die with their curses learn to use them and train them and grow them. His brother’s charitable heart made Yoichi feel a bit better about the circumstances of their escape from regular life, but his stomach remained twisted in knots nonetheless.

 

The stress of their move was hell on his immune system. His whole body felt as though it were on fire as he laid in his new bed, waiting for his brother to return home from work, and something within him was definitely infected, as he writhed in pain and practically burned from the inside out. 

 

Neji entered their home with a wide grin on his face. “Yoichi,” he called from the entryway or the kitchen or the living room. “You’re never going to believe what happened. Mr. Nakamura at the institution passed on today!”

 

Yoichi groaned and turned to his side, sweat beading and rolling down his forehead, neck, and back. “Why do you sound so excited that he died? I thought you liked Mr. Nakamura and his hair color-changing quirk.”

 

“Yeah, I did,” he said. “But now I won’t ever have to visit him to change my hair color again.”

 

Yoichi grimaced. “That’s grim.”

 

“Aw, I don’t mean it like that. What I meant is: I won’t have to visit him to change my hair color because I can do it myself now!” he elaborated, sounding quite too proud of himself.

 

“Yeah, dumbass. Box hair dyes have been a thing for, like, over one hundred years, brother.”

 

Neji laughed a little. “I have his quirk now. There, I said it! How cool is that?”

 

Yoichi tried not to be sick all over his bed. “You what?”

 

“I was wrong about my quirk, little brother. I thought it was fire-breathing, but it’s actually the ability to take someone’s quirk from them! Isn’t that just incredible? I might be able to save everybody at the institution from a life of hospice care with just a little touch!”

 

“I don’t know,” Yoichi said before coughing. “Wouldn’t you need their consent for that? Plus, the government would probably force you to enlist to experiment on you or make you do their bidding until you die of old age or overworking yourself until you’re not worth a red cent!”

 

“What does consent matter for a thing like this? I’m saving them, Yoichi. Nobody else can do this but me, so why shouldn’t I?” Neji said, sounding rightfully perturbed. “And the government can suck it.”

 

Yoichi sighed. “There really is no reasoning with you, is there?”

 

“For this, there’s no reason to reason with me. You’re wasting your breath, brother. But… But I know how to fix you now!”

 

“Neji?” Yoichi called, but he heard no answer but the resolute click of the front door swinging shut and the resounding chink of it being locked. Every step that echoed down the hall sounded like closing the lid of his own coffin. “Damn it.”

 

By the time Yoichi could steel his resolve and shakily slide himself to his feet on the hardwood floor, twenty minutes had passed since Neji left. His hand reached the doorframe of his bedroom after another twelve.

 

“I’m going to get nowhere at this rate,” Yoichi said to the still living room after another nine minutes of walking, trailing the wall.

 

He wouldn’t need to get any further, however, as the front door was unlocked and swung open swiftly. In the doorway stood Neji. He appeared somehow taller than he had been the last time Yoichi saw him, and his eyes seemed darker, his fists clenched and body full of tension. There was a bruise on his right cheek, blooming from a dark indigo to a tapered, sickly yellow by his jaw and under his eye. He looked chiseled. Older.  

 

It was as if many years had passed without him noticing.

 

“I found one for you, brother. You’ll never need to worry for your health again. You can live a normal life like you used to!”

 

Yoichi shook his head. “The ‘normal life’ I once dreamed of became unachievable the moment that glowing baby was born. Thank you, brother, really; thank you. But don’t do anything reckless. I don’t want to upset the balance of life any more than we already have.”

 

“‘Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes’,” Neji quoted. “The world had been ready–in waiting–for our supernatural abilities for hundreds of years. This progression was only natural, so don’t put this mess on me, jackass.”

 

Yoichi just shook his head.

 

“Now, I’m going to heal you,” Neji said. “I’m going to heal you and we’re going to live out our lives with the rest of the quirked and prove to the world that we aren’t the ones to be pushed around and stomped over.”

 

“But I was quirkless before you forced two on me,” Yoichi said, past events he had locked away for his own safety coming to the front of his mind after so long, “so I belong with the ‘villains’ or your story too. And I refuse to be healed by someone who thinks upsetting the natural order is something to be taken so… so lightly! You aren’t God, brother, you’re just another sinner like me and everyone else.”

 

Neji scowled, then smiled. “Ah, so you do remember. It was just a simple transference quirk and super strength to remember me by. And I may as well be God with my power.” He approached his brother. “It’s fine. I won’t heal you, you stubborn bastard. But, I will need to make sure you won’t get in the way of my plans.”

 

Yoichi fell to his butt, light eyes wide and frightened. “Br–Brother, what are you–?!”

 

“I’ll be courteous enough to not take back the quirks I gave you,” he said with a sickly-sweet smile. “Say ‘hello’ to mother and father for me, would you? Oh, and tell them I won’t be joining you fools any time soon. I found myself a lovely longevity quirk today, and I plan on testing its limits to the fullest.”

 

Yoichi shook.

 

“Goodbye, brother.”

 

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with Midoriya Izuku. Now that you have some background, I’m sure the reason will become clear here shortly.

Notes:

Booo! Don’t be like Neji. There’s only one God, and he’s not Him.

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 2: Arc 1. Chapter 2. Life-Long Conversations

Notes:

Here is a very early update for you. Happy Valentine's Day! <3

Note written around the time of the chapter: Is it obvious that I binge-watched a bunch of Konosuba before writing this chapter? LOL

Note from 2025-02-13: Let me tell you, I recently finished chapter 14 and the characters ran off without me again. I had a plan for a certain… subplot, we’ll say, and got an idea and ran with it! This has little to do with… uh, with you, I guess, but I wanted to let you know how excited I am to see how the rest of the story turns out! I may have to up the content rating to ‘M’ for violence and gore, but it hasn’t happened yet; it’s just an almost-sure thing. Anyway, sorry for keeping you! Please enjoy this chapter!

Date written: 27.DEC.2024
Word count: 1,447

The man is bald without even eyebrows or eyes below them. Atop his wildly-grinning mouth is a plastic mask seen in hospitals all across the world attached to a tank full of oxygen. His gums and the skin around his lips and mouth ripple at each intake of breath and the lapse between each exhale and inhale.

 

It would be a comedic sight were he not scared out of his freaking mind right now.

 

“Izuku,” the man says–and hearing his own name spoken by the very boogeyman of the underworld sends shivers down his spine–causing the dense, terrifying air about him to thicken and expand ten-fold.

 

The boy–just a fresh middle schooler at the age of twelve years-old–says with a stutter, “Uh. I’m Izuku.”

 

The boogeyman’s smile relaxes into something doubly dangerous–yet somehow more genuine–as he breathes. He says, “Come here, boy.”

 

And Izuku tries–oh, how he tries–but his knees shake like a newborn fawn’s and his hands are clenched together in front of him in a frightened, icy embrace too tight for him to catch himself if he were to lurch forward in an attempt to approach the man. All for One seems almost nostalgic at the sight of such fear. He sighs and reaches an out-stretched hand towards the boy.

 

Black and red things, thick like coiled telephone wires or rebar, stretch out from his fingertips and wrap gently around the boy frozen in his terror.

 

Izuku thought it would hurt more to touch them, what with how they spark with red electricity and all that, but they’re rubbery and stretchy like a Sticky-Hand or warm putty. His sudden attempt to not breathe too loudly in close proximity with the villain is squandered when the tentacles squeeze around him and he is forced to gasp for breath.

 

“Good,” says All for One. “There is nothing to be afraid of, son.”

 

Izuku really, really doubts that. If anything he remembers from The First Run is as true as it feels, there is nothing to be more afraid of than tentatively perching on the [surprisingly cushion-y] arm of a villain’s recliner-throne.

 

“Sorry,” he stutters out. Izuku pulls his elbows upwards and away from each other to try and unstick his clenched fists from one another in case he needs to safely climb down from the villain’s annoyingly-tall throne on his own (or fight for his life, probably).

 

When they finally give way, his hands slap away from each other. His left one makes contact with All for One’s smooth face. The boy meeps out a sharp “Sorry!” again and turns away from the villain, clutching his arm close to his chest and curling in on himself.

 

To his surprise, the villain just laughs good-heartedly and places a rough, heavy palm on his head. Green locks slide back and forth with the motion of All for One’s hand.

 

“It’s quite alright, my boy. These things do tend to happen.”

 

Izuku remains frozen in place, trying to catch his breath and his dignity in one fell swoop. The latter falls from his reach, but it matters less than actually being able to breathe right now.

 

“Uh, right. Still sorry.”

 

All for One is very strange in many ways. For one, he kidnapped Izuku, some random middle schooler, and decided to keep him as a pet? Or something? And for two, he keeps calling him “son” and “my boy”, things Izuku’s never been called by anyone ever for the better part of his life. Or, the life that he lived out most recently.

 

If that doesn’t confuse him, Izuku isn’t sure what will.

 

Midoriya Izuku–the pro hero “Deku” and high school teacher of Quirk Law and History at UA and teaching assistant for Eraserhead, teacher of Class 1-A–was twenty-two years of age when he got sent back in time to the day of his birth.

 

Who knew being born again and remembering it this time would be so traumatizing?

 

His current theory is that he bumped into a kid on the sidewalk who recently or just then had a quirk-awakening and had a time-travel quirk similar to Eri’s “rewind” sans the fact that your body isn’t reverted back to the smallest physical form you ever were until you’re back in Heaven, but rather you body is wholly sent back to the time of your birth.

 

Another theory is that the quirk was a dimension-travel quirk. He’s been keeping a look out for anything or anyone even slightly out of order or different from how he remembered in The First Run, but hasn’t had any luck up until now.

 

He did not remember All for One being so… touchy or impulsive, though, so maybe he was in a different dimension. Although, maybe he was both touchy and impulsive , but only around Shigaraki, his protege and probably mock-son. Izuku would have never gotten the chance to see him act this way in The First Run, never having been given the chance to.

 

What a quandary this is, Izuku thinks, quite calmly amidst the profoundly weighty gravity of his situation. 

 

All for One removes his hand from Izuku’s head, somehow sensing his mental turbulence. “What is it, my boy?” he asks.

 

Izuku tries to make pseudo eye-contact with All for One, but can’t even turn his head past the slight, distant sight of his left ear. “Why do you call me your boy?” he asks impulsively; it wasn’t as though he wasn’t reeling to know the answer, but it felt like the wrong thing to ask while practically sitting on the lap of his Number One Nemesis Forever.

 

“What else am I supposed to call my son?” he asks without effort.

 

Izuku gawks at him, now far too puzzled to indulge his anxiousness. “What? How am I your son? Aren’t you, like, three-hundred years old or something?”

 

All for One smiles. “Well, son. When an evil underlord and a breathtakingly-beautiful woman love each other very much–”

 

“Nope! Forget I asked!” Izuku shouts, his index fingers welled deep into his ears. “La, la, la!”

 

“I met Inko when I was out on a walk after verifying The Good Doctor’s work was going smoothly many, many years ago,” he says. “This was before my scuffle with All Might almost two years ago, you see, as you yourself are far older than two years of age. I was quite the looker back then, but your mother was miles above my league.” He smiles softly. “I didn’t deserve her.”

 

“Yeah, you’re right,” Izuku says without remorse. “Uh–I mean–oh. Please don’t eat me.” Okay… maybe a little remorse.

 

All for One laughs again. It’s like kitten nails on a fluffy chalkboard. As much as Izuku hates to admit it–especially since All for One is, like, the most evil dude in existence ever except for Hitler–he does have a nice laugh... And mom had always said she knew for a fact that his dad was the one for her when she heard how he laughed…

 

“Don’t worry, boy, I won’t eat you. I only eat bad little boys and girls when they don’t brush their teeth or if they behave badly for their parents.”

 

Izuku’s jaw drops open. “What…”

 

“That’s what I keep hearing, anyway,” All for One says. “None of that is true, of course.”

 

“Yeah, yeah. Of course,” Izuku says, not quite meaning it. “Would you mind if I… got down from here now?”

 

All for One sighs, but compiles. With tender care, the black and red wires wrap around his son again, reaching down and setting him onto his feet gently.

 

“Thanks.”

 

Wow. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. All for One (...who is his dad? Uh… no, probably not. Right?— Freak out later, Izuku!— Ugh.) feels a lot more imposing and all-powerful from way down here. 

 

“So,” Izuku says all sing-song-y, rocking back and forth from his toes to his heels. “Do I have a room somewhere here? I’m kinda tired now.”

 

All for One smiles. “Of course you do, my boy.” He snaps his fingers, and a dark purple mass of energy or chemicals or something more nefarious appears beside his head. “Kurogiri,” he calls into the abyss, “Please escort my son to his room for the time being.”

 

A similar-looking portal appears beneath Izuku’s feet and he falls through without his consent, screaming when the floor beneath him disappears and gravity starts acting like it’s supposed to when there’s nothing beneath his feet.

 

The last sight he sees before his head is below the floor is All for One’s gentle, smiling face.

Great, Izuku thinks as he plummets into the abyss. How the hell am I gonna get myself out of this one?

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 3: Arc 1. Chapter 3. Trying, Reaching, Grasping / Choking, Sinking, Failing

Notes:

Note from 2025-02-18: The ASL in this chapter is from only 2 years of online high school classes, so it may not be 100% accurate! Don’t learn ASL from fanfiction. LOL. Bill Vicars is an awesome resource if you want to learn ASL on YouTube, and there’s also the online ASL library lifeprint.com which has a bunch of his videos in an easily searchable platform. Anyway, please enjoy this chapter!

Note from 2025-02-28: Bro. Chapter 16 has been so hard to write I started writing two separate one-shots for the THTF universe that don’t become relevant until chapters 10 and 16 respectively in procrastination. I used to never write one-shots. This is crazy.

Dates written: 27.DEC.2024 - 30.DEC.2024
Word count: 1,685

At this point in time, Tomura is a lot more subdued than he was by the time Izuku was a first-year at UA in The First Run. He’s still on the controlling side and the same video game-obsessed kid that he always was and like many other neets were, are, and will be. But, he didn’t outright attack Izuku when he sat at the edge of the couch while he was gaming, sitting on the center cushion, and he didn’t even try to “dust” him for cheering when Shigaraki lost all his loot to a villain NPC, so he’s going to count this as a win.

 

While Tomura cusses out some rando online over his headset and chat at the same time– that’s gonna get you kicked, buddy –Izuku takes some time to take stock of his situation.

 

How am I supposed to get out of here? he wonders. If All for One went to the trouble of somehow getting me here, it’s pretty unlikely he’ll just let me walk out scott-free. And, despite the evident age-appropriate company I’m supplying Tomura with, he’s probably been asked to babysit me or something. The thought of his biggest nemesis and his unhinged protege both closely watching over him while he’s powerless to do anything causes a shiver to spark down his spine. His hands ache with phantom quirk-overuse-pain as he wrings them together nervously.

 

Well, Izuku thinks. If I’m going to try and get out of here, an initial attempt wouldn’t be bad… just to test the boundaries or whatever. It’ll be a control variable.

 

He stands from the couch like he’s been living there for years on end and feigns some sense of at-homeness by scratching at the back of his head while stretching. He fakes a yawn for good measure and slumps down into that bone-tired stance he’s seen Eraser and Tomura in far too many times to be considered healthy, probably. Green eyes slink over towards the TV screen to ensure Tomura will remain distracted as he shimmies towards the front door of the bar; and really, what kind of place to raise a kid is a bar? And how come the league didn’t ever move home bases like, at all?

 

He makes it two feet from the door before Tomura pauses his game mid-solo mission.

 

“Where’re you headed, Izuku?”

 

Oh, Izuku thinks, he knows my name before I even told him it. That’s very discomforting; thanks, All for One.

 

“Uh, y’know,” he says smartly. “Just looking for the bathroom.”

 

Tomura raises a brow. “It’s that way,” he says, pointing towards the doorway across the room from the front door to the left of the TV from Izuku’s perspective. “You passed it on the way out to the living room.”

 

Izuku laughs some of his anxiety away and rubs the back of his neck again. “Oh, is that right? My bad! I must’ve overlooked it on my way out. Thanks for the… uh… the tip!”

 

When he doesn’t move, Tomura keeps staring at him.

 

“Alright, well, I’m just gonna stand here for a while,” he says. Izuku then jumps so his legs are wider than his shoulders and spreads his arms towards the ceiling. He brings his arms down and his legs together and then repeats the motion five times over. “I’ll just do some jumping-jacks before I head over there.”

 

Tomura rolls his eyes and scratches at his neck. “Whatever, weirdo.” He turns back to his game and resumes the battle.

 

Izuku has never been so pleased to see that the obliviousness most villains possess does, indeed, carry on into their personal lives. Or, rather, that their average, day-to-day obliviousness carries into their villain work. Villainy. 

 

And so, with Tomura somewhat subdued, Izuku bolts out the door, breaks into a dead sprint, and doesn’t look back once.

 

Of course, this is when a gross black ooze begins to leak from his nose. He struggles to hold in a cough as he continues running down the sidewalk. More than once he bumps into people who look after him in their fits of rage, fists bunched tightly and faces full of scorn, but their eyes do widen and their teeth grit in a somewhat-sympathetic grimace at the split-second look at bulging cheeks and the smudges of leaking ooze that roll down his chin.

 

Izuku’s head whips from side-to-side. This would be a lot easier if they were stationed in Musutafu, he thinks. I at least know I can depend on Detective Tsukauchi, but there’s no telling who’s under All for One’s thumb in the police force at this point in time, no matter their status or devout professionalism…

 

He gags and chokes back some of the blackness in his throat and runs faster. His lungs burn at the exertion, but running is the only thing keeping him alive at the moment, and he’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, so…

 

Izuku spots a harsh glint of ruby red down the street and to the left. He crosses traffic like some sick game of Crossy Road and barrels towards the red gleam. Thank God, he thinks. Maybe it’s a police cruiser or some pro with a fire quirk or something.

 

He skids around the corner where he saw the red and falls on his side from the lack of traction his worn sneakers provide him with. He slaps his hands over his mouth to prevent his lips from opening and winces as he stands.

 

He inches forward, suppressing his coughs with effort now, and his foot hits something hard. He looks down. Oh. That’s a body. The body’s chest moves. Oh. That’s a person sleeping on the sidewalk. He then takes note of the white rope-like material binding the person’s limbs close to their person. Oh. That’s a freshly-apprehended criminal.

 

White ropes… Eraserhead!

 

His head shoots upwards, his eyes wide as saucers. That red glint must have been ‘Erasure’ in action! Sure enough, the Erasure Hero stands before him, a puzzled look on his face.

 

“What are you doing here, kid?” he asks hesitantly. “You chase down crime often or something? Scram; I’ve gotta take care of this idiot.”

 

Izuku screams with his mouth closed and starts signing with shaking hands.

 

H-E-L-P, he finger-signs. He points to his throat. Q-U-I-R-K. Then, he makes a fist with his left hand and puts his right one around it slightly before separating them whilst wiggling his fingers. He follows the motion with two rounded fingers that push through his left hand that was left in a “c” shape. TELEPORT. He touches the tips of his pointer-fingers together at a diagonal in front of him and then pulls them apart; the rest of his fingers join the pointers in two flat palms facing each other that he then shoves straight down. VILLAIN.

 

Eraserhead nods and tightens his capture weapon around the villain he apprehended in the time it took Izuku to run down the street towards him. He tucks the ends of his scarf beneath his armpit in the funniest-looking deathgrip Izuku’s ever seen and looks into his eyes with purpose.

 

He points at him. YOU. His index-finger curls like he’d mimicking a pirate’s hook, which he drags downward by levering his wrist. NEED. He then flattens his left hand and points it upwards, placing his right hand in a “thumbs-up” atop it. The gesture is shoved from in front of his chest towards the boy. HELP. Eraserhead pinches both of his pointer-fingers and thumbs together for good measure. DO-YOU?

 

Izuku tries really hard not to roll his eyes or cough up his lungs. He definitely can’t hold in the muck in his throat for much longer, but he puts his hand in a fist and pretends to knock on a wooden table anyway. YES.

 

Eraserhead activates his quirk, dark eyes lighting up in the shade of whatever enormously-tall building they’re standing beside. “Well?” he says, as if remembering the boy has something clogging his throat and not his ears.

 

Izuku just shrugs. He pulls his pointer and middle finger together and smacks them against his thumb. NO.

 

“Huh,” Eraserhead says under his breath.

 

Izuku tucks his thumbs under his pointer-fingers and then brings his fists upwards whilst flicking his thumbs into a “thumbs-up”. QUICKLY.

 

“Sorry, kid, but my quirk isn’t working. Is the quirk preventing you from talking?”

 

That seems pretty obvious, he thinks. YES.

 

“Huh. Alright,” he says. “Alright,” he says again. “Alright,” he says a third time, like Matthew McConaughey.

 

Izuku flattens both of his hands and faces his left palm towards the sky. It holds his right hand by making contact with the side of his pinky as he flicks it forward like some sort of weird-backward knife-cutting impression. ALRIGHT, he signs after the hero.

 

Eraserhead rolls his eyes. “Let’s head to the police station,” he says, voice level. “I’ve gotta get this guy booked anyway, and maybe they have someone there that can help you.”

 

Izuku shrugs. It’s not the best plan, but nobody’s perfect, and he can’t think of anything better to try.

 

“What’s your name, kid?” Eraserhead finally asks as they’re walking towards the precinct in an uncontrollable silence.

 

I-Z-U-K-U, the kid signs.

 

“Nice to meet you, Izuku.”

 

Izuku sticks out his thumb and pinky and waves the sign in the space between them. SAME.

 

Eraserhead huffs out a breath of a laugh. Izuku’s going to count that as a win. It’s probably going to be the highlight of the rest of his life, if the day is about to go as he thinks it will.

 

They’re within two feet of the police precinct when Izuku can’t hold in his cough any longer. Eraserhead watches in helplessness and shock as the boy he was just getting to know disappears in a strange, wriggling goop of inky blackness. He leaves behind just a puddle of the gross liquid on the sidewalk like some sort of sick imitation of ‘SOS’ spelled out of driftwood on a sandy beach.

 

Safe to say, Eraserhead feels rightfully sick when he returns home that night.

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 4: Arc 1. Chapter 4. The Microwave, the Vault (Is that a Soft-Spot or a Rough-Patch?)

Notes:

Thank y'all so much for 550 hits! That's actually insane, especially so early on in the story. Thank you so, so much for reading. I really hope you continue to enjoy the story as it progresses! Happy reading!

Dates written: 30.DEC.2024 - 06.JAN.2025
Word count: 2,073

Izuku stands–feeling cowardly and trying his best to not look as frightened as he feels, damn it–before All for One once again. The dark basement teems with the shadows that are common occurrences in such places; but here beneath the ground, before the shadow lord of the underbelly of society, they appear more like the inky-blackness between stars on a Winter’s sullen night than just the result of a lack of light in the room.

 

“You made a valiant effort to escape,” the boogeyman says, about as calm as Izuku hopes he looks. His mouth twists about his words like a spinning top, and the boy just can’t find it within himself to look away. “Unfortunately, I now know I cannot afford to be so lenient with you.”

 

Wait, what…? What does that mean?

 

“I had hoped we would have been able to go about our lives like gentlemen, but that appears to be too tall an offer for you now.” He hums and twists his hands about each other much like Izuku tends to do when he worries and squirms beneath All for One’s sightless gaze.

 

The next moment, he says something Izuku’s much too far away–much too far below–to hear, and in the next, Izuku is in a white-padded room that feels more like the inside of a 21st-century microwave than he’s willing to admit.

 

Oh, shoot.

 

He walks about the room, trailing the firm, padded-looking walls with his hands. I genuinely thought they’d be softer than this, he thinks somewhat cheerfully. Not that this whole situation doesn’t suck. ‘Cause it does. It could just suck more. With soft walls I couldn’t break my hand and plead for medical attention to get myself an opening to escape.

 

He notes there’s not even a sight port for his captor to peer in at him through.

 

Izuku punches the wall just to see just how well his scheme will work outright, but comes up breathless when his hand starts glowing a warm green glow around the slowly-forming bruise.

 

What the– did that jerk force a quirk on me when I wasn’t looking? How the hell did he manage that?! Izuku almost laughs at himself. He’s been alive for over two centuries, so of course he’s crafty enough to do something like this.

 

He sighs and slumps against the wall until he’s fully committed to sitting on the floor. He presses his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them. His head follows the motion, dropping onto his arms without ceremony.

 

I feel sick.

 

A little ding! bounces around in his head for a while. As soon as it finishes ringing, he can clearly see that his hand looks the same as it did when he ran into Eraserhead. 

 

Great, he thinks. I’ve got the ominous, white walls. I’ve got the beep for when the clock hits zero. Give me a hand-warming quirk and call me Microwave Man.

 

He holds his palms out in front of him, facing them towards the ceiling, and wills them to heat up (just in case). Nothing happens. 

 

Wow, he thinks sarcastically, how am I supposed to make popcorn for the boogeyman himself now?

 

Izuku drops his head back down and lets out a long, long, long groan. “Is this hysteria? I think I’m hysterical. Who am I? …Oh, that’s right. Hysterical. Surely, I’m Hysterical. Can I call you ‘Shirley’?”

 

This sucks.

 

Izuku sits there and pouts for much longer than he’s willing to admit before a small, thin strip of darkness cuts through the starkness of his ‘new room’ or whatever. He peeks above his arms to see that the darkness entering his room comes from a thin opening across the room—where it looks like a door was supposed to go—and a tin tray has been slid through. 

 

Izuku stands and groans over the harsh clicking and cracking of his joints caused by their sudden lack and reacquisition of movement. The little door slides shut before he’s halfway across the room. He suppresses a sigh at the action that was, presumably, in accord with the archvillain’s overly-cautious instructions to not allow him a look at the outside world or be within arm’s reach of any gap in this sullen, white-padded room.

 

When he reaches the tray, he bends himself at the knees to inspect its contents closer. He isn’t expecting much, given with the barely-three inch height of the bean hole. 

 

There’s at least three foil-wrapped bars of mystery grain mixed with various nutritional powders and what smells like really, really dehydrated peanut butter. They’re probably too hard to bite straight into, Izuku thinks. He unwraps one bar and taps it against the tray to verify his suspicions. It’s like pilot bread!

 

He sulks and scans the rest of the tray, which is occupied by one transparent, oblong pouch full of angrily-sloshing water.

 

Well, he thinks glumly and quotes, at least ‘what you see is what you get’.

 

He grabs the remaining wrapped bars and the water pouch in his previously-unoccupied right hand before slowly walking into the corner furthest from the bean hole. Izuku laughs to himself. No point in moving too quickly, he thinks. It’s not like I’ll be going anywhere anytime soon.

 

He sits himself snugly in the corner and bangs his head on the wall to stare at the ceiling. It’s covered in fluorescent LEDs–the kinds with long, tube-like lights behind misty-looking glass covers–the kinds most public schools tend to use. There’s not a speck of white paint to be seen aside from the small ring of it around the black dome of a camera monitor on the ceiling across from the door.

 

Izuku resists the urge to roll his eyes. How am I supposed to use the bathroom in here; huh, big, tough, smart, Mr. I’m-gonna-call-you-’son’-and-keep-you-locked-up-in-my-basement? Riddle me this.

 

He jams the open nutrition bar in his mouth in its entirety and hopes he chips a tooth or something painful enough for All for One to send someone in to check on him.

 

Wow, he thinks. This is so, very incredibly boring. He tilts his head to the side and hums softly. His teeth slide and gnash against the rough nutri-bar. Is that grammatically correct? He almost laughs a little. No, it most certainly is not.

 

Izuku quickly realizes that there’s not much to do alone in a plain, unfurnished room with only rock-hard rations, a metal tray, and a funny-looking pouch of water. He takes his time measuring the walls, which appear to be 370 Izuku-fingers wide, and the floor, which is also about 370 Izuku-fingers wide.

 

Wow, he thinks again. This is a really square-shaped room. It’s mostly unrelated, but I wonder if All for One has OCD.

 

Izuku jumps to his feet as quickly as he can when the wall across from him begins to twist and shudder like a monitor with a frayed cable connection. Black and gray fizzle and crackle across the wall like the mirage of a projector screen against a white bed sheet waving on a clothes’ line on a dark and stormy night. The grainy image of not-quite-nothing focuses into view about two minutes later. There, projected against the wall of Izuku’s pseudo-prison, maybe-solitary-confinement-room, definitely-a-microwave-or-something, is All for One and his unceremonial throne of broken cable boxes and an absurd number of couch remnants.

 

Izuku isn’t sure how he didn’t notice the peculiar make of the villain’s seat when he was physically in the same room as it. He’ll chalk it up to the shock and fear he undoubtedly felt in the moment and call it a day.

 

“Izuku,” All for One says, and the camera zooms in on the villain’s dome with grim accuracy. “It’s so good to see you, my son.”

 

Izuku feels as though he should be offended for some reason. He wants to yell at All for One to tell the man off and where he can shove it, too. He wants to demand his freedom and go on a hunger strike until he’s released from wherever he is. He wants answers.

 

“Where am I supposed to go to the bathroom in this thing?” he asks instead, feeling suddenly embarrassed. Aw, jeez. Aw, shucks. I was not planning on asking him that. Damn. Weird, weird, weird.

 

All for One has the gull to laugh at the boy’s embarrassment. He snaps and just like that, a section in the far corner of the wall to the left of the projection spins around like some sort of Barbie-doll playhouse extension, and there sits a prison toilet-sink and a ring of toilet paper on a little wooden out-shoot on the wall.

 

Izuku scrunches up his nose and glares at the corner of the room with the bathroom with disdain and general disgust. He widely projects his movements to turn to the right and stare up at the black dome on the ceiling in the corner.

 

“Are you gonna watch me piss or something? That’s disgusting.”

 

“Oh, no,” says All for One. “That’s a horrid invasion of privacy, son, and even I’m not privy to that sort of crime.” He snaps again and the blinking red dot on the camera stills and fades away. “I’ll give you two minutes to relieve yourself upon request, and then the camera will automatically turn back on. That’s the best I can offer you, I’m afraid, after the stunt you pulled.”

 

Izuku squints harder and hums lowly in the back of his throat. “Are you gonna turn off the projector-wall-thing or am I gonna have to stare at your shiny face the whole time I’m going?”

 

All for One sighs and puts his head in his right hand, his elbow on the arm of his seat. “Well, it’s not as if I can see you, boy.” (Haha—) “The projector is one-way. I can only see you through the camera on the ceiling. So, there’s no reason for me to turn off the projector.”

 

“Yeah, except for the fact that it’s super freaking creepy,” Izuku mutters under his breath. “Whatever.”

 

When the two minutes are up, the camera lights back up to see Izuku huddled in the corner again, biting mindlessly into another nutri-bar. All for One cringes slightly at the harsh sound of the boy’s teeth grinding on the rock-hard thing.

 

“You’re supposed to soften it with your saliva like hardtack,” he says, “Otherwise you’ll chip a tooth, boy.”

 

Izuku rolls his eyes and then his shoulders and stares at the ceiling. With the bar between his teeth, he grits out, “Yeh, that’s kinda the point, so...”

 

“Why on Earth would you want to chip your tooth, boy?”

 

“Well, you’ve gotta have someone with a healing-calcium-bone-tooth-replacement-ish quirk or something, right? So if I chip a tooth, you’ll send them in and I’ll have an opening to escape,” Izuku says before he can think better of it.

 

He slaps both of his hands against his mouth, cringing when the nutri-bar jams itself painfully against his cheek. Woah. I did not mean to say that.

 

“Did you drug my nutri-bars?” he asks from behind his hands, unable to help himself. The thought of his food being drugged isn’t the most surprising thing he expected from the lord of the shadow realm, but it really wasn’t doing the man any favors, especially since he kept trying to convince Izuku he was his dad or something stupid like that.

 

All for One hums and says, almost with a little laugh, “No, boy, I didn’t drug your nutri-bars.”

 

Izuku somehow finds that hard to believe.

 

“I find that hard to believe,” he says, the words forcing themselves from behind his lips. Gosh dammit!

 

“I don’t blame you, I suppose.” All for One shoots out a black-and-red tentacle from his pointer finger and starts wiggling it up and down like an old-school pencil trick Izuku had never heard of before. “I only asked the Good Doctor to help you… loosen up, so to speak. I hoped to speak to you openly and without reserve, son. Really, it wasn’t the worst I could have done to get you to talk.”

 

“Wow. You threaten your son with those lips?” Izuku snarks.

 

All for One laughs. “Of course, son. Call it what you will, but this is what I call ‘tough love’.”

 

Izuku, again, somehow finds that hard to believe. “Really? ‘Cause I think you’re just a sadist.”

 

All for One shrugs.

 

What the hell, man.

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 5: Arc 1. Chapter 5. Nose Hairs and Thoughts of Drowning

Notes:

Note written around the time of the chapter: I wrote this chapter in one sitting and then was like: Woah! That's a lotta words! So, here you go.

Note from 2025-05-05: THANK YOU so, so much for 885 (now 894?! <3) hits! AND 31 kudos! AND 8 bookmarks! I really appreciate the blessing of your kindness. Thank you again! I hope the story stays up to or exceeds your expectations in the future. Happy reading!

Dates written: 06.JAN.2025 - 07.JAN.2025
Word count: 1,612

All for One keeps visiting Izuku on his weird kind-of-a-projector thing up to five times daily. Sometimes, when he’s really… bored, or whatever, the villain mastermind just leaves it on all day even as he goes about his business or literally leaves the room. Those times make Izuku feel like he’s in a one-sided relationship or a falling-apart-at-the-seams friendship having a somewhat-reconsolidating video chat on Discord or something. It’s almost more embarrassing than freshening up with that bald face staring at the wall next to him. Almost.  

 

But, in all honesty, almost-solitary-confinement isn’t all that bad. Sure, the food he gets is basically Bricks on Wheels, and the water supply doesn’t last him as long as it should–with one pack lasting him only a few hours rather than the whole day–so he still has some conservation skills to work on, and having his supposed-dad, actual-arch-nemesis, generally-pretty-bad-dude just be there (in digital format) almost all the time is just: the worst.

 

“And so I told Kacchan to ‘get a life’, and he told me to ‘jump off a bridge’, but I told him, ‘I did that already–to save you–don’t you remember–’ and then he got all up in my face and shot explosions up my nose and I’ve never had to shave my nose hairs since!”

 

All for One, for his part, looks slightly disturbed by the fact that his wife’s neighbor’s kid and his (supposed) kid hated each other so much they’d cause permanent bodily harm to one another. He scratches under his chin and swallows his spit like it’s the only thing he can digest anymore (oh, wait-).

 

“I’m… sorry about that, Izuku. When, uh… when was this?”

 

Izuku rolls his eyes. It looks a bit weirder from his position–with his back on the ground, the back of his legs against the wall, his toes alternating in their tapping against the wall, and his hands pushing up against his thighs in a position that looks more like an advanced yoga move than just a kid being bored–but All for One isn’t about to say anything about it. At least his son is comfortable and finally seems to be doing well adjusting to his new life in what he not-so-fondly called “The Microwave”. If he could get into his son’s head and dig around for a while, he would definitely find the source of the strange name he’d given the padded room.

 

“It hasn’t happened yet, obvi,” he says, most casually before mumbling, “Or it won’t happen. If the Before is a different timeline entirely… and if I change enough in the life I’m having now, maybe it won’t ever happen.”

 

“Ah, yes,” All for One says. “It hasn’t– wait, what?”

 

Izuku got used to the drugs in his nutri-bars about a week into his stay with dear-old dad, which, by the way, isn’t actually too hard to believe. His heritage wasn’t something he always cared about, but he did happen to call All for One ‘Hisashi’ to cut off one of the man’s tangents–which sounded a bit too much like his rambling for his liking–and the villain actually responded like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It was a bit more of a shock than Izuku expected to have been (Oh, who was he kidding? He was probably suppressing his surprise. He didn’t even have a panic attack or anything, and things never went that smoothly for him, so something was definitely amiss.), but that’s how most learning-your-dead-relative-is-actually-alive-and-a-horrible-person experiences tend to go.

 

So, yeah, he’d gotten pretty comfortable in the presence of his sworn enemy. Who could blame him? Hearing someone mumble and tumble on from tangent to tangent to anecdote to analysis like he used to do was surprisingly comforting in the otherwise-quiet room he had been forced to call “home”. It was like a sick-and-twisted lullaby for Villain Hostages Everywhere (patent pending) or something.

 

Plus, the bed he got was pretty nice. (What, did you think he slept on the floor? All for One is much too petty for that.) It turns out from the wall like the little bathroom does near the corner he’d practically holed-up in since Day One. It might have a plain, wooden frame bolted to the floor somehow, but the bedding was to die for. Definitely all-down pillows that scattered nicely about the room when he got frustrated enough to scream and All for One got concerned enough to make the pads on the walls even softer, because apparently that’s a thing, and an uber-soft cloud-like mattress that made him sleep like a baby no matter how hard he tried to stay awake.

 

“Son, what do you mean by ‘it hasn’t happened yet’?”

 

Izuku taps his toes against the wall some more and hums. He shrugs as best he can against the friction of the floor. “‘Cause it hasn’t. Seems simple enough to me.”

 

He’d put his shoes under the bed after All for One instructed someone to slip a pair of fresh socks and annoyingly-plain garments in the bean hole with his meal one day. The socks were soft like all-cotton sweatpants and his shirt and pants felt the same except… they covered more skin, so they were obviously better.

 

Izuku’s never been more glad his bathroom didn’t come with a mirror or a compact or something equally as silly to worry about. In retrospect, it was probably because of the hazard of having glass in a solitary confinement microwave with an emotionally unstable individual trapped in it, but that is neither here nor there. It just means he can’t see his face, which is wonderful! Watching his body turn into a more muscular, more toned, more slim, less Izuku version of himself is hard enough as it is.

 

What, you think he doesn’t get his exercises in just because he’s locked in a depressingly-boring room with nothing better to do? Tsk, tsk. It’s literally all he can do besides sleep and sit around and cry or something.

 

He’s got better things to do than sit around and gripe about his situation.

 

I wonder—if I can get strong enough—if I could punch a dent into All for One’s projection-face and get the damn thing to turn off already…

 

All for One holds back his sigh as best as he can, but some of it slips through. Izuku laughs out loud at the whining-whistling-whooshing sound and presses his thumbs into his thighs.

 

“Son, I need you to clarify what you meant by saying that your altercation with Katsuki hasn’t happened yet.”

 

Izuku hooks his pointer fingers under the rims of his nostrils and pulls them open wide. He twists in an uncomfortable-looking manner to show the camera on the ceiling what’s inside.

 

“Look, I still have my nose hairs,” he says instead of answering him outright. “Ain’t that a kick in the head?”

 

All for One presses a button and his face disappears from the wall across from him in an implosion of a million, fizzling pixels.

 

I wish his actual face would implode into a million, fizzling pixels, Izuku thinks. Then he laughs. Then he stands. He stretches his arms high above his head and jumps up and down a few times to shake the sleepies out of his feet and legs.

 

“I’ve gotta pee!” he yells into the now-otherwise silent room.

 

The red dot on the domed ceiling camera stops flashing in an instant, and Izuku is off like a Bell X-2 Starbuster. He dives under the bed and snatches his bland, white tennis shoes. He rips the long lace off of one of them and then holds it handily between his teeth. The shoes are tossed under the bed harshly, like a rebellious teen trying to forget about their left-over worksheets and homework after starting Summer break.

 

He sprints along the wall and harshly twists both the knobs on his sink once he reaches the toilet-sink in the corner. Water floods out from the nozzle like a jetstream, but the upkick doesn’t bother Izuku like it used to. He lashes out with his shoelace and wraps it around both knobs as many times as he can with half the string still ready for use. His hands dip into the sink with the lace. It’s immediately drenched and a little slick and hard to work with, but he sticks out his tongue in concentration and sweats out his nerves. The lace wraps once, twice, three times around the plug in the metal basin. He keeps wrapping it as many times as he can manage with what little string is left.

 

By the time he’s done working with his lace, water cascades like a really-tiny, really sad-looking waterfall down the outer containment metal of the sink and over and under the rim of the toilet. Izuku hops back a few feet to save his feet in his socks from a sad, sad sensory-death for as long as he can.

 

The camera blinks back to life and the toilet-sink twists away from him. It disappears into the wall like it was never there, and Izuku can’t help but let out a heavy sigh of relief.

 

Well, if one thing’s gotta give… he thinks, trailing off.

 

All for One’s face returns to the wall. Izuku marches back to his bed-alcove and flops onto the mattress face-down.

 

“Oh, don’t be like that, son,” All for One says, voice smooth and somehow fatherly amidst the hissing whir of his oxygen mask and the overall unnerving look of his Face Without a Face.

 

“Mrgh,” Izuku groans into his mattress.

 

They spend the rest of the… day? afternoon? morning? night? whenever in a regular state of growing-angsty-teen-with-an-annoying-helicopter-parent silence.

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 6: Arc 1. Chapter 6. No One Could Change his Mind / but Eraserhead Tried

Notes:

Note written around the time of the chapter: This chapter chewed me up and spit me out when I started writing it. Sometimes exposition makes me cringe. (But then, when I got going, I just couldn’t stop! How fun.)

OH MY DAYS!!! Thank you all for the support. Wow! I'm truly grateful. Please enjoy this chapter!
Also! This chapter's title kind of references "Mama Tried" by Merle Haggard! Classic.

Date written: 07.JAN.2025
Word count: 2,615

Eraserhead probably shouldn’t have to feel as bad as he does about losing that kid—Izuku, he had signed—to some dark, ominous, oobleck-grossness on a public sidewalk, but that thought alone doesn’t stop guilt from eating away at him night after night after his patrols. 

 

He lays in bed now, the time somewhere between 23:00 when he first laid down to sleep and 4:00 the next day when he usually falls asleep without interruption. He could curse at the coffee that undoubtedly contributes to his insomnia, but he had insisted on only downing three cups today as opposed to his usual five-to-seven, so it’s unlikely overconsumption of caffeine is what keeps him awake tonight.

 

It’s probably because of that boy. He just can’t get the resigned look he held as he choked and then faded away out of his mind. There are five stages of grief and, unsurprising to many, Aizawa Shouta is no stranger to any of them.

 

He falls into a state of denial after the boy leaves, examining the strange puddle after the criminal he had obtained was left at the police station to become someone else’s problem. A few officers leaving or coming to the station do him the courtesy of examining the scene once he explains the root of his apparently exasperated expression.

 

Anger comes later that night as he paces and traces the outline of his apartment with his palm, tripping over cat toys and over his Persian, Coco, and the furniture he can’t make out clearly in the dark. His mind whirs alongside his mouth as he argues with the walls and digs out the image of Izuku’s fading face in his head with his nails to drag it to the forefront of his mind and ponder over the circumstances for a while.

 

Anger returns again when, a day later, he visits the police station and there’s been no news on a missing quirkless boy with a bush of ivy-green hair and a face full of constellations darkened by the sun.

 

Bargaining comes in the form of pleas and long-winded conversations with Detective Tsukauchi over text and over phone calls about ‘protocol’ and ‘waiting 48 hours’ and ‘nobody having reported him missing anyway, so what can he legally do-, so Aizawa files the report himself. He recounts the way things played out, from the villain he chased down to the black puddle of grossness on the pavement. He recalls near-fluent ASL and he recalls the resignation–the acceptance–in Izuku’s eyes.

 

He doesn’t have time to face depression head-on–not when there’s a missing kid out there, damn it–so he pools his patrol time into talks with the detective and the people he can track down from CCTV cameras that were present near the scene of the boy’s disappearance–kidnapping?–and he does his best, no thanks to the worryingly unhelpful people around him. (He almost considers talking to some of his coworkers about this. Y’know, since nobody else is going to be any help to him in the near future.) 

 

He makes no room for acceptance in his life. He won’t allow the memory of this poor, missing boy to go by the wayside. He won’t let another missing person’s case go cold or deeper-buried because of a quirkless stature. Not if he can help it, anyway.

 

He’s been working himself to the bone. The kid needs his help; that’s how he sees it. Call it a hero-complex or a backwards-version of the bystander effect or whatever you must. All Shouta knows is that he’s going to find this kid and bring him home if it’s the last thing he does.

 

And so, tonight, as rain batters his window and shakes the panes almost like a hurricane would, Eraserhead lays silently and stares at the ceiling of his bedroom and thinks and thinks and thinks and hopes and hopes and prays that Izuku is somewhere warm and dry and safe. It’s all he can do to keep himself from jumping up and calling all of the schools in the area to see if one of their students has gone missing in the past week.

 

He knows it’s illogical and he knows the search would be fruitless. Therefore, he stares and stares into the flickering darkness of night and of lightning strikes and tries to get some sleep.

 

The next morning, he awakes to not one but two cat butts in his face. Coco squints back at him jovially and whips his oh-so fluffy tail across his face. The brown and white of him wriggles like a hypnotic spiral right before his eyes. Aizawa grunts out a laugh and strokes his hand gently down the cat’s back.

 

The beady eyes of Lady twitch from watching his nose to his eyes to his mouth to his nose again and again until trying to track the mixed-breed’s gaze starts to make him dizzy. He shoves black fur back from her face with his hands and smiles softly at the funny looking, slightly annoyed expression she makes at his action. Lady jumps from his bed to escape his playing, and Coco follows her down.

 

Aizawa sighs and throws an arm over his eyes. Stay strong, kid, he thinks and sends a little prayer to the Man Upstairs to keep Izuku safe and secure until he can locate and–if he needs to–rescue the boy from wherever the sludge took him to.

 

I’ve got a bad feeling about today, he thinks as he stands from his mattress and tugs the sheet and duvet up to meet his pillow. Which isn’t great, but isn’t new, so I don’t have much to complain about.

 

He only hopes he can find him in time. He also knows, logically, that there isn't anything he can do for the boy without knowing his full, legal name. There are only so many legal and ethical ways to search for someone half his age without making people wonder and whisper. That, in the end, could be a worse-case scenario. If people end up thinking he’s some sort of creeper or undiscovered-pedophile or something equally as horrible, he’ll probably get pulled from the case he built up with his own two hands and be given a watch patrol or a bug or a tag or something, none of which he would be particularly fond of.

 

So, he goes to the police station again and doesn’t gag when he sees the same twenty-ish faces for the seventh day in a row (a new record of his). Aizawa sets his ass down in a too-short plastic chair in the front corridor of the station and swings his right leg over his knee and taps his foot on the floor like he has places to be. (Luckily for him, underground heroes are basically freelancers, and only take jobs from the HN that they want to aside from ones they directly request for or operations that arise from a casual night-patrol.) He could do this all day.

 

Tamagawa sighs from across the room. The officer treks around desks and haphazardly placed stacks of papers and filing cabinets that don’t like to shut properly until he reaches the front desk of the department. His whiskers twitch while he talks to the receptionist, eyes jutting to Eraserhead every few words. She says something back to him that makes his ears flick and press lightly to the top of his head, and when his eyes flick to Aizawa after that, there’s something mournful in them.

 

I knew I got that bad feeling this morning for a reason, the hero thinks, eyes squinting as Tamagawa jaunts over in all his bipedal-cat glory despite the fact that he did not, really, think his bad feeling was anything to be swayed by.

 

“Listen, Eraser,” Tamagawa says when he reaches the hero, paw-like hands (or hand-like paws?) clenching and unclenching by his sides like he’s mocking the biscuit-making business or something. “Tsukauchi’s not scheduled to come in today–”

 

“–Like that’ll stop him,” he interrupts, quite rudely.

 

Tamagawa sighs. “Yeah, fair. But, on the off chance he doesn’t come in today, you can’t stay here all… mopey and stuff. It’s really off-putting the newbies, and they’re already tense as it is. Maybe you can get the HPSC to help you if you beg on your knees or promise them your first-born child or something, but unless the detective comes in today, you’re not gonna find much help here. Sorry.”

 

Aizawa hums, but it sounds more like a growl in the back of his throat. “Does that mean you won’t help me, Cat-Boy?”

 

Tamagawa’s ears flick and his nose twitches like he smells something foul. “You can’t just call me that, Eraser; that’s basically a slur. You know that.”

 

Eraserhead just shrugs and looks to the side. His face is impassive and clear of regret though, so Tamagawa feels less bad when his tail whips to the side and nicks the hero’s knee. He scoffs to hide a wince (probably) and Tamagawa almost lets a laugh slide out.

 

“Seriously. I would help you if I could, sure, but my work pile is… hm, we’ll say yea high and wider than seven Cocos,” he says, placing a flat paw-hand in the air by his chest and glaring at Aizawa with about all the venom of a garter snake.

 

Aizawa rolls his eyes and slaps his hands on his knees like he’s about to give the officer the most long-winded, story-filled-to-the-brim, “oh-yeh”, “and-what-about” midwestern goodbye he’s ever laid ears on. Tamagawa steps back at the thought of such an awkward encounter.

 

“Hey, Eraser,” the soft, tired voice of an angel calls from the entrance of the department to Tamagawa’s left.

 

Thank God, he thinks. “Tsukauchi!” he says. “You’re just in time. Seriously. Your hero is crazy. Thank you for saving me from his xenophobia.”

 

Aizawa rolls his eyes again and lunges towards Tamagawa with a flat palm like he’s either about to tase him in the abdomen or pet him like an actual cat. Tamagawa shrieks and turns tail and runs back to his desk and his pile of unfinished work.

 

Detective Tsukauchi sighs as he approaches the hero. “Please stop being an instigator.”

 

Aizawa just shrugs and says, face about as serious as a rock, “It’s hereditary.”

 

“I don’t even want to know,” says the detective. He grabs Eraserhead by the elbow and tugs him behind him through the workstations of his fellow detectives, officers, and lieutenants to the back wall where his office resides, purposefully avoiding the row Tamagawa’s desk is stationed in. Aizawa sticks his tongue out at the cat-man as he passes, but the officer only rolls his eyes and continues typing.

 

“Alright, look,” Tsukauchi says the moment they step foot in his office, just after he closes the door shut behind him. He shuts the cascading blinds and sits in his rolling-office-chair with a groan. “If you don’t know the kid’s name, I can’t help you. You know this.”

 

Aizawa opens his mouth to speak.

 

“And,” Tsukauchi interrupts, “I know for a fact you don’t know the kid’s name because if you did you would have run in here as soon as you found it.”

 

Aizawa shuts his mouth. Then he opens it again. “What if that’s what’s happening right now, hm?” he asks smartly. “Maybe I found the kid’s full name and even made contact with his family and only came to tell you as a courtesy.”

 

Tsukauchi hums. “Sure, that could have been the case, but, unluckily for me, you’ve spent so much time here recently that I can tell when you’re just trying to get a rise out of me. This,” he says, gesturing towards Eraserhead in his entirety, “is how you act when you’re B.S.ing your way out of an annoying apology or you’re frustrated enough to try and pull a stunt like you did with Tamagawa.”

 

Aizawa finds a chair to slump into and shoves it against the wall by pushing at the cheap carpet in the detective’s office with his work shoes. They slip and slide like a magnet on a flat, non-magnetic wall, and the back legs of the chair catch on the panels more times than not. All in all, it’s a very pathetic sight. It almost makes Tsukauchi laugh.

 

“Right. So, now that you’ve got that out of your system,” Tsukauchi says, “did you have any luck with the people from the CCTV feeds?”

 

“No,” Aizawa says and pouts outright. “Not a-one.”

 

“Great,” Tsukauchi says with a very cheery, very out-of-place smile on his uber-tired face and in the uber-uncomfortable silence in the office. “Then I can’t help you. Have a nice day,” he says and gestures towards his office door, his head turning towards one of the monitors on his desk to feign the look of a very busy man.

 

Aizawa lets his neck bend and his head loll backwards. He counts ceiling tiles and groans. “C’mon, Tsukauchi,” he says. “There’s gotta be something we can do. What if the kid is dying in a ditch somewhere? 

 

“Then you should head out now and check all the ditches from here to Fukuoka.” He types something and then jams his finger onto the backspace button for a while before typing again.

 

“You wouldn’t want to see your own kid dying in a ditch somewhere, would you?”

 

“No, of course not,” Tsukauchi says. “I’m not a monster, Aizawa. That’s why I don’t have children.”

 

“...Because you wouldn’t want to find them dead in a ditch somewhere?”

 

The detective shrugs, typing and typing some more. “Well, it’s pretty up there in bad-places-to-find-your-kids-after-asking-them-to-be-home-before-midnight after a school gathering or something to that effect.”

 

Aizawa scrunches up his nose and curls his lip like he’s more offended than he thinks he is. “Are you even human?”

 

“I would cry if I found a kid in a ditch regardless of whether they were mine or not, Aizawa.”

 

Aizawa hums. “Likely story…”

 

“Look. Are you going to keep wasting my time or are you gonna go out and search for your kid?” Tsukauchi asks with a sigh, generally feeling done with this conversation. He grabs a pen from the metal pen-cup on his desk and clicks it with fervor.

 

“But I don't have any leads.” Eraser almost whines it out.

 

Tsukauchi groans. “Right. Uh…” He types some more. Then, an astounded look overtakes his face. “Well I’ll be damned.”

 

“What is it?” Aizawa asks, moving quickly to the backside of Tsukauchi’s desk to get eyes on the detective’s monitor for himself.

 

On the screen is an obituary for one Midoriya Izuku, a quirkless boy from Musutafu–how convenient–that the HPSC just registered as a legitimate document. Next to it is the boy’s death certificate, dated to just two days prior.

 

“No,” Aizawa whispers, voice breathy and rough, throat burning.

 

Tsukauchi gives him a sympathetic pat on the back; a quick one-two. “I guess they found your boy. Sorry, Eraser,” he says, genuinely feeling bad for the guy.

 

“But- but I saw him.” He turns to Tsukauchi. “I saw him, Tsukauchi, just a week ago. This boy was fine–albeit in potentially mortal danger–but alive and breathing… kinda.”

 

“Sometimes,” Tsukauchi says quietly, “death happens quickly. Sometimes it sneaks up on you. And, most times, it’s out of our control and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

 

It might be time for acceptance to rear its ugly head.

 

Tsukauchi sighs deeply and closes the tab. The clicking sound sounds like the dropping of a guillotine in the silence, a sharp drop-off of screaming bloody murder and the drop-and-roll of a severed head. It sounds like a death sentence.

 

“Coffee?” the detective offers.

 

Aizawa almost cries. “Please.”

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 7: Arc 1. Chapter 7. Goodbye / Mad World

Notes:

Sorry for all the suspense! XD

Second part of the chapter title references “Mad World” by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews ^^!

Date written: 07.JAN.2025
Word count: 1,138

A month into his stay with All for One, Izuku begins to feel the first stages of Stockholm syndrome take root.

 

It starts with simple things–not feeling too wrong about All for One’s face being stationed across from him while he eats and sleeps and breathes–and quickly delves into feelings of possessiveness and even a back-and-forth battle between the heart on his sleeve and his common sense. The nights are quiet somehow, then, when he argues with the wall and with himself and All for One chimes in at just the right moments every time and everything feels just a little better–a little more okay–at least for the night and into the next morning.

 

The days following such conversations–such stints of losing it (but losing what; if he never had it to begin with? Marbles and mesh bags and tossing coins through grates and into gutters)–are usually full of screaming and pillow-throwing and soft-wall-punching and the tearing of hair and of nails.

 

Izuku’s new healing quirk really does come in handy on those days. All for One makes sure to say so each time his knuckles knit themselves back together and the hunger in his stomach glues itself to his ribs and disappears with the fizzle-tick-ding! of his microwave quirk working around his digestive track and filling in the gaps he can’t patch up on his own.

 

“I know he’s a bad guy–All for One, that is–but he’s so nice,” Izuku muses to himself one night, laying on his bed and facing the wall, full-clad in the pyjamas his dad had supplied for him (the ones that felt like sweatpants all over and oh-so comfortable). Light flickers from behind him, illuminating his bedroom-area with a soft glow akin to a really big nightlight or the world’s biggest moth’s biggest dream come true.

 

“Ugh, I know who I’m talking about. I don’t need to clarify he’s the one I’m referring to. He’s just good at presenting himself how I want to see him,” he replies to himself, growl-like. “He is not a good person and, even if he is my dad, he is not worth the effort of… of trying to change him or anything stupid like that.”

 

“I would change for you,” All for One says from his projected-image against the wall. He places his chin on his palm like Izuku has seen him do countless times before and leans forward slightly. The tube connected to his oxygen mask crinkles and curls on and above the seat-back behind him.

 

Izuku turns and looks at him like he’s the mayor of Liarsville. “Sure you would,” he says sarcastically, but part of him just feels so sure and hopeful hearing the words out loud. He kind of hates that part of him. He kind of wants to rip half of his hairs out of his head and stuff them in his pillow case for safe keeping. He kind of wants to bash his head against the soft-padded walls until All for One comes in to check up on him himself so he can get… head pats or a hug or something equally as offendable.

 

He’s almost thirteen. Mentally, he’s over thirty. He can take care of himself. He doesn’t need daddy to comfort him after a long day of sitting and staring at a wall and doing nothing because that’s stupid and he’s not stupid, he’s not.

 

“No, of course you’re not,” All for One says even though Izuku made sure not to say anything he was thinking out loud. “If you feel so inclined to welcome me, I would gladly console you, my son. I don’t mean to cause you any distress. I just want you to stay safe.”

 

Izuku sniffs, turns back around, and tightens his grip on his knees despite the way the action pulls at his back and twists the sheets of his bed against his skin like a rug-burn. “How am I supposed to stay safe when I don’t get any chances to be un safe? What’s the point in keeping me locked up here when it’s just me and you and this Microwave I live in? I miss mom. Hell, I even miss Kacchan. I need more human interaction than this, and you would know that if you actually knew me and cared about me, dad,” he says, truly venting, his expression squeezed tight when he refers to his arch-nemesis as his dad.

 

All for One’s face softens as it can–although Izuku cannot see it from his position facing the wall–without his prominent features and he hums. “What if you and I… made a deal?”

 

Izuku scoffs. “Parents are supposed to make sacrifices for their children, not ask for compensation.”

 

“You and I both know I’m not a run-of-the-mill parent, Izuku,” All for One says wistfully. “Therefore, we must both compensate for my shortcomings, and for that I truly do apologize.”

 

Izuku just scoffs again and curls into himself further. “I’m not interested in making any deals with you.”

 

The projection of All for One clicks away in an instant, washing the room in a lightless darkness save for the soft, red flashing on the camera on the ceiling in the corner. Without All for One’s respirator humming and whirring in the background, Izuku’s ears pick up the slightest sound of rushing water across the room.

 

He almost grins at the thought of water coating the floor and flooding about his ankles. 

 

Well, he thinks hopefully, the second time’s the charm. I hope.

 

His original plan was to flood the bathroom and hope the water would leak into the main area of his microwave-looking room, but All for One caught onto his plan before any headway could be made. That stunt earned him two days without any nutri-bars, and by the end of his impromptu hunger-strike, the Stockholm syndrome led him to believe that escaping the villain’s lair was less amicable than jumping out of an in-transit plane without a parachute.

 

Earlier that day, when he began to be able to keep his symptoms reasonably at bay, Izuku completed his plan again. This time, however, he worked his magic later in the day. It would make all the difference, he was sure. He planned to upset All for One into turning off his projection a while after lights-out, and apparently being unwilling to make any (what would be blatantly) one-sided deals with the lord of the underbelly of society would do the trick. Now that the man’s projection can’t cast any light on Izuku’s dirty little secret, the room will, presumably, be able to fill with water in peace.

 

If he’s lucky, in the morning he will wake up to enough flooding to drown himself in or demand his imminent release from the Microwave. Izuku falls asleep with a knowing smile on his face.

Notes:

" 'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts'. " Isaiah 55:8-9.

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 8: Arc 1. Chapter 8. A Sinking Feeling / Open Your Eyes and Look at Me; Feel Something

Notes:

Surprise! Here's a double update for y'all! ;) Enjoy this while writer’s block eats me alive T_T please pray that I overcome it quickly.

Dates written: 07.JAN.2025 – 08.JAN.2025
Word count: 1,829

Izuku awakes to a lot less water than he thought he would. As it is, two-inch waves crest against his ankles and the legs of his bed frame. At this rate, the room would be filled in about fifty years or so.

 

He stands from his mattress and steps down into the main section of his room and kicks at the water with socked feet and groans and runs his hands down his face. His beady eyed, red-rimmed, freckle-barren, sweat-stickled-hair reflection pleads up at him from the watery floor below, and a shiver runs down his spine.

 

Well, that’s an unexpected consequence if I’ve ever seen one, he thinks, his eyes shooting towards the ceiling quick like a whip-crack.

 

All for One’s projection doesn’t appear on the wall across from him at the sight of the water, but there’s no doubt in Izuku’s mind that the man is well aware of the condition of his room. Izuku almost has the gall to smirk.

 

Maybe this’ll cause enough water damage that he has to have me change rooms, he thinks hopefully. Alright, then. If that is the case, I’ll just have to take out whoever he sends in to move me and then sprint as quickly as I can. Hmm… I wonder if the corridors outside my room are a maze? Probably… I can stick to one wall, but that’ll take more time than I’ve probably got. But it’s also probably the only logical option I’ve got, so…

 

“Izuku.” All for One’s voice crackles and bounces about the room like a 3x speed game of Pong. Izuku’s head spins about the room to try and locate where his father’s voice is coming from. His search ends up fruitless, but none of that matters anymore when the door to his room slides into the wall and he’s given a no-questions-asked chance to escape.

 

Izuku bolts towards the opening as quickly as he can amidst the few-inches of water that beat against his soggy socks and his ankles. He runs through the threshold of the room he’s called “home” since a month or so prior and suddenly feels like crying.

 

Maybe I shouldn’t… he thinks, trailing off. He pauses his running mid-step and looks back at his room and whines low in his throat. Why do I… What? I’m free! I should run!

 

He moves to take another step, but the spin-lean-reach of his torso and leg sends his balance out of whack and he falls to the ground in a miserable heap. Tears lodge themselves in the back of his throat and his eyes burn as they beg to tread down his dirty cheeks, but they just won’t and that alone feels worse than falling to the ground had.

 

The palms of his hands slap onto his face to muffle his whines and to subtly wipe away any stray tears that manage to break free and run down his face, and before he can do anything else but feel sorry for himself, one of those dark, misty portals opens up beneath him and he’s swallowed up into the ground, sorrow and all.

 

A moment later, Izuku appears once again before his father–before All for One–in his trademark-basement-throne-room-patent-pending. It’s still as dark as it always was, but now it smells more like home–erm, more like his room–more like his Microwave–than it did the first few times he was pulled there. The dirt and dust grit like sand and rubble beneath his soaking feet, but he isn’t all that bothered by it which, in and of itself, is quite concerning.

 

“I’ve seen how you struggle, my boy,” All for One says, something in his voice mimicking the grief and the struggles of a single father or a mother after losing her only son. He lifts a hand and the black and red tendrils from before curl gently–defensively–around his son. “I’d like to propose an ultimatum,” he says, pulling Izuku closer. “I hate to see you decline as you do.”

 

Izuku sniffles and pushes his feet against the man’s abdomen to get any more distance between them that he can manage from his indefensible position. All for One just smiles and shakes his head and pulls his son closer still.

 

“You can leave this place,” he whispers, and it sounds like a Hail Mary–something necessary and amazing and way too good to be true–but Izuku will take what he can get, so he cracks open an eye and mentally prods the villain to continue.

 

All for One smiles. “You can leave this place,” he says again, “on two conditions.”

 

Figures, Izuku thinks, quite cynically. He resists the urge to roll his eyes and, instead, just sniffles again, soft and wet and abnormally loud in the cave of a basement he once again finds himself in.

 

All for One’s smile holds, even when it strains as he speaks and the skin around his teeth rips and wavers. The oxygen from his tank pushes waves across his skin and causes cracks and crevices to become caverns, dark and deep upon the man’s mauled face.

 

“One: you will accept a quirk or two now, before you depart, as I see fit.” Izuku’s eyes widen at the man’s words and his mind is thrown back to nights of sleepless rest and a wandering hunger in his head that once wanted –begged– to know who the power his father had given to him had belonged to first; whose power it really was.

 

All for One continues, “And two: you will not reveal your face nor your identity to anyone of importance until I tell you the timing is right.”

 

Izuku grits his teeth and holds tight the leash on his immediate instinct to growl. “And how will I know who to avoid and when to reveal myself exactly?”

 

All for One just smiles. “You’ll know.”

 

It’s a tough decision, like whether he should put a dog down to save it from the sharp-health-decline of old age and sickness and in health and allowing his–man’s–best friend to live on and age like the rest of them and die when he must, but suffer all the way there. On one hand, there could be a dark side to the offer that Izuku just isn’t seeing in his fragile state. On the other hand, there’s definitely a dark side, but he’s too tired and hell-bent on getting out of here to care much about any repercussions that might come from accepting the hand of a man-made Cerberus and the darkness that he harbors.

 

Izuku swallows his grit alongside his pride and chokes back the tears that threaten to fall in an encore of ultimate possession. He reaches up and grasps hard onto the tentacle-thing that holds him in place and glares into his father’s eyes with a dark and steely expression.

 

All for One grins, and he knows. That’s the expression of a man who’s seen too much and lived to tell the tale; the expression of a man who knows he has nothing left to lose and has looked death in the eyes and said “I don’t have time for you” time and time again.

 

All for One knows this, yet he tenses. To see such an expression on his own young boy, his own flesh and blood… Well, he supposes, another quirk may be needed–a preventative measure–to keep his son happy and safe.

 

“I’ll accept your deal and your conditions,” Izuku says, and All for One teems with pride as the boy reaches out to shake his hand with no tremor or shake to be seen.

 

Another tentacle slides from his shoulder and down his sleeve and gently escapes its confines within All for One’s suit by the cuff and without a second thought, it plunges deep and transparent through Izuku’s chest, heaving and intangible. No holes or rips are left in its wake.

 

Izuku’s eyes roll in the back of his head as he spasms there, lifted in the air by his father’s own hand (tentacle, technically), impaled somehow indistinguishably by the second type of tentacle he’s ever seen his father produce from himself. A deep purple glow covers every inch of his body and his veins press against his skin and bleed the color in images of cross-hairs and tree roots across his entire self, royal and near-ink-like beneath his flesh.

 

His blood lightens and lightens until it becomes something different and new entirely. The glow turns blue. The same change occurs, his blood like the sky and lovely, and then it fades from green to yellow and pulses like a dandelion spreading its petals. Yellow fades back to reds and light blues and greens as his veins return to normal and sink lower beneath his skin where they rightly belong.

 

And then, Izuku opens his eyes.

 

At least, he thinks his eyes are open. But the air in his father’s oxygen tank swirls and swooshes and the machine itself whirs and he’s staring straight at All for One’s grody face but he can feel his eyelashes pressed to his cheeks in that dripping-wet, soaking-up-melancholy way they do after and during a really good cry–the kind he’s been having a troubling amount of recently–but he can still see.

 

Izuku flinches at the sound of All for One breathing and each creak that emits from his respirator and the garbage-throne beneath him and truly, painstakingly, purposefully opens his eyes. It is not until his eyelids have left his vision, only his eyelashes curling at the tip of his sight as they ought to, that Izuku notices a few things.

 

For one, everything is much brighter in the basement. Despite the general lack of light sources and windows, he can see All for One’s face like he could on the projected image in his Microwave-room or like he could see Shigaraki’s in that dimly lit bar in Kamino. He can feel things, too, like small ants crawling lightly across his cheeks and nose and down towards his chin and up towards his hairline. He wipes his hand against his face to take them off and feels as though he’s been punched there.

 

It isn’t ants, he figures out then, that he had felt on his face. It was dust.

 

For two, All for One’s red and black tentacle’s grip is much more slack than it had been previously when it pressed into his ribs and carved sonnenblumes into his skin like Kacchan used to, but he isn’t slipping or tumbling towards the ground as he probably should have been. He teases his toes towards the edge of the arm of his father’s throne and tips himself forward to no avail. The tentacles tighten their grip and pull him in closer.

 

“I thought you said I could leave,” he says with a snarl, voice tight and hot as all get-out.

 

All for One hums and snaps by his head. Izuku just sighs as he falls through another portal.

 

“I did say that, now didn’t I?”

Notes:

"Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you." Colossians 3:13.

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 9: Arc 2. Chapter 9. To Traverse the Darkest Path / To Find a Future in the Black

Notes:

Dates written: 08.JAN.2025 – 09.JAN.2025
Word count: 2,186

Izuku exits the dark and shockingly now-tingly warp gate and steps onto a dark street he is sure he’s never seen before, obscured rightfully by the transition of dusk-to-night and the lack of street lamps that lay in wait for the darkness so they can light his path. But he finds he doesn’t quite mind the utter-darkness about him; with whatever quirks All for One had given him, the lack of light doesn’t dampen his senses as it used to.

 

He tries not to think about it, instead opting to step forward and try to find some sense of direction in his now-directionless world, shrouded in darkness.

 

The road ahead him is bleak and barren, queuing him into a couple things; one of which being the fact that even though there are countless towering buildings around him, lining the street, boxing him in, he is somewhere near the countryside. The thought consoles him like a forlorn pillow or a good night’s sleep. It lulls him in.

 

He feels safe here. It makes his skin crawl.

 

I need to get moving, Izuku thinks, and begins his trek down the night-trodden street. The tall lamps, as though hearing his thoughts of paranoia and weariness beneath the sky’s overwhelming, weighted blanket of darkness, come to life, stark and bright, as he passes by. He almost smiles.

 

They lost power about two months into the apocalypse in The First Run. That’s what Izuku remembers, anyway. He doesn’t remember everything about The First Run–erm–he thinks he doesn’t remember everything. There are blank patches of snow-crested meadows and dewey mornings under soil or in the Microwave that obscure his sight of the life he has lived and begun again.

 

Unlike his memory of The First Run, his vision is very clear. In fact, it’s never been clearer. And, somehow unfortunately, he can’t stop seeing. He blinks, blinks again, and still sees the world around him with perfect–or acutely improved–clarity. He waves his hand in front of his face and the outline of his fingers is all he can make out. The world past his fingertips is still clear as day.

 

The revelation causes him to heave out a sigh as he walks down the sidewalk now–he’s a hero-hopeful who’s been through tough shit, not a jay-walker– and he wonders how many other “gifts” his father gave him before letting him leave to this… place… wherever this is. He grits his teeth and decides that wracking his brain can wait until he’s found some additional layers to fight off the frigid chill of the night and obscure his form from those who do not [or might as well] know him.

 

He spots the soft glow of an open-air ramen or takoyaki stand still open late in the night down the road on the right side which he himself walks on. If my luck will only hold out…

 

And it does. Accompanying the market stall is an entire collection of stalls lining either side of the road, some even blocking it in the middle, half over each side of the dotted yellow line that splits the lanes. Izuku feels like crying.

 

He continues walking, noticing more and more people are present at the various stalls than he had predicted from farther away. They hold hands and dance down the alleys between stalls, grasping each other and various game prizes and street food items in clenched fists, teeth chattering against the cold but true smiles gracing their faces all the while in spite of the chill.

 

That explains why there were so few people down the road, he thinks. Maybe this place isn’t as close to the countryside as I thought it was…

 

Izuku approaches the first stand he had noticed as he walked and is pleased to see his guess of it being a takoyaki stand is correct. He eyes the menu and drools at the thought of crab, bacon, and cheese all wrapped together within a warm, golden ball of dough.

 

After a month of nutri-bars and plastic pouches of somewhat-stale water, Izuku could eat just about anything. He gazes at the stand and the steaming molds on the front counter with longing. Without his knowing it, the owner of the stand approaches the nearest corner of his booth to speak to him.

 

“You want anything?” he asks, voice husky and twinged with a slight country twang. The man isn’t much to look at; just a minutely-scarred face and black hair thoroughly peppered and salted with age and a dip in his lip that speaks of chewing wheat strands and snoring in his sleep. On his head is a hachimaki with the word “FIRE!!” scabbed on with squiggly lines of hand-sewn work.

 

Izuku bites his lip and contemplates. He doesn’t have any money, but… “I don’t have any money, but I would literally kill for a crab, bacon, and cheese takoyaki.”

 

He bites his lip and furrows his brows. From an outsider’s perspective, he probably looks like he’s contemplating whether or not to jump into the booth and ransack it. I didn’t mean to say that out loud, Izuku thinks. I guess the nutri-bars haven’t worn off yet…

 

The booth owner’s eyes widen and he steps back slightly, looking quite taken aback. “Woah!” he says. “No need for that, son–” Izuku cringes. “–just get me three more customers and you can have two servings for yourself, free of charge.”

 

Izuku squints but nods regardless. As far as too-good-to-be-true deals go, he thinks, this one isn’t half bad. I would know.

 

He shakes the phantom touch of tentacles–an ache in his chest and the sensation of lightning thrumming through his veins, thunder rolling over his skin, hairs rising, voice dying–off and turns away from the booth. Three people, he thinks. I can handle that. I think.

 

The first person Izuku lays eyes on upon turning from the man’s takoyaki booth is a woman just slightly taller than himself with a baby on her hip. The child looks around himself in awe as if he can’t quite believe all of the foreign sights he’s seeing. He gasps at a booth selling windchimes and other assorted hanging glass work and nearly causes his mother to drop him in his attempt to closer inspect the handiwork.

 

Izuku approaches the woman and smiles softly. She smiles back at him and hefts her son from her right hip to her left.

 

“I was asked to get customers for the takoyaki stand across the way,” he explains quietly. “I don’t suppose you and your boy are hungry?”

 

The woman says, “Well, I haven’t had dinner yet, so I could go for it.” She looks at her son. “What do you think, Kotaro?”

 

When the child’s ears brighten with a soft purple glow, Izuku suppresses a shudder. He looks Izuku up and down and does a little wiggly thing with his hands like he wants to reach up and tug at the boy’s curls.

 

“Are you homeless?” he asks Izuku in lieu of answering his mother.

 

The woman gasps. “Kotaro! That’s not a very nice thing to ask, son. What caused you to say such a thing?”

 

The kid does a little half-shrug like toddlers often do when they don’t know how to answer the complex questions their parents ask them. But then he answers anyway with simply, “His clothes look like Bechan’s.”

 

Izuku feels his own ears burn and redden, but not as the result of a quirk as the boy’s had (he hopes). He looks down at his garments and realizes the kid might be sharper than he first appeared to be. The socks on his feet are still soaked from the sink water he used to try and flood his room, and the dust and rubble from inside All for One’s basement and the dirt alongside the road and on the sidewalk have turned them a sad shade of brown under the soft glow of lanterns and streetlights.

 

And while his shirt and pants are in much better condition than his socks, they too have become the baseplates for a myriad of mud patches and a medium wash of dust. All in all, he does look worse for wear. That’s all on top of whatever the state of his face is, which he hasn’t properly examined since before his capture and subsequent time in the Microwave.

 

“I’m sorry for my son,” the woman says before sending a soft, disappointed gaze to the back of Kotaro’s head as he further attempts to examine the various hanging ornaments of the booth by which they stand. “Takoyaki sounds lovely. I’ll be sure to head over there right now and tell the booth owner you sent us over.”

 

Izuku gives her a shallow bow. “Thank you.”

 

One down, he thinks. Two to go.

 

The next person Izuku spots and contends could become a customer of the takoyaki stand with the right prodding is a boy about his age with jagged-cut black hair that reaches down to the middle of his back. But Izuku is hard-pressed not to talk to anyone his own age for the moment, so he keeps walking down the aisles of the market and weaving between stalls and searching for someone else to convince.

 

He finds a man appearing to be in his mid-to-late thirties with a wicked blue mohawk and a black leather biker jacket and ripped blue jeans. He isn’t the kind of person Izuku usually finds himself interacting with, but the man is more than welcome to the idea of takoyaki. Izuku presumes his overly cheerful nature and utter insistence on getting takoyaki now–ow, that’s an elbow to the nose–and his lack of understanding just what is “personal space” is also related to the pink dusting of a flush across his cheeks and down his neck. Either way, he’s more than happy to return the man’s thumbs-up upon seeing the four servings of takoyaki he leaves the stand with.

 

Izuku finds his third encounter in the form of a person with a clock for a face. They whisper to Izuku “It’s not the right time yet” and leave him to purchase their takoyaki.

 

He tries not to look at the clock face that passes him when he returns to the booth himself. The booth owner hands him two cardboard boats each with two skewers of crab, cheese, and bacon takoyaki and smiles at him, sad and soft.

 

“Here’s your takoyaki,” he says. “Thanks for getting me more business, kid. I wasn’t expecting you to get me to sell so many orders, but that just makes your work more impressive!”

 

Izuku isn’t really listening to the man, too busy biting into the hot balls of dough and filling and regretting it with sensitive, stinging teeth and a burnt tongue. The booth owner just laughs at him and pours him a cup of water from the plastic jug at the back of his booth. Izuku takes it when it’s offered and chugs it, taking down the rest of his first takoyaki like he would a pill.

 

“Call me Inoue,” the man says after Izuku takes the cardboard water cup from him. “Feel free to take a seat and finish your food there.” 

 

He gestures towards a metal folding chair that leans against the left side of the booth near its front. Izuku grabs the seatback with one hand–his boats of takoyaki stacked all nicely and adjacently in his other–and pops open the folding chair with his foot. For the rest of the night he sits there, eating his food and, on occasion, scouting out customers for Mr. Inoue in return for more takoyaki.

 

He sits and eats and works and sits and eats and stands and eats until the booths down the street begin to close up shop and his stomach gurgles within him in protest.

 

I mighta overdone it, he thinks with a groan.

 

Mr. Inoue laughs at him when he has to brace himself on the wooden, fence-like trim of his booth and lean over, trying not to barf. “You’re alright, kid,” he says with a mirth in his eyes and a laughing grin on his face. Izuku rolls his eyes and regrets it when the spinning motion sends another wave of nausea down his back.

 

He starts to sweat. And then, the skin around his core emits a soft, green glow through his shirt and the pain and nausea he had felt before is instantly replaced by feeling just-fine. Izuku wilts despite his newfound goodness.

 

How many other quirks did he… he wonders listlessly, trailing off.

 

“Tell you what, kid,” Mr. Inoue says, clearly uninterested in Izuku’s internal blight. “If you help me take my booth down, you can stay the night at my place.”

 

Izuku scrunches up his nose. Then he looks around at the world around him–the darkness; the cold wind that tears through him like a hurricane gust; the booths closing down and the people heading home and the unnerving ambiance of the street with less and less people taking up space and living happily there–and shrugs. 

 

As far as too-good-to-be-true deals go…

Notes:

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." Matthew 7:13-14. <3

Thank you very much for reading! See you next month!

Chapter 10: Arc 2. Chapter 10. A Certain Nuance

Notes:

TW: suicide mention

Date written: 09.JAN.2025
Word count: 1,453

It’s been a month and a half since Midoriya Izuku disappeared in a puddle of goop. Little-to-no information has been upturned that can aid Eraser or Tsukauchi or any other competent member of the hero and police forces in their search for the boy, which is honestly just plain rude. It makes the rest of the situation feel so much worse.

 

It’s been two weeks since Midoriya Inko hung herself in the closet of her bedroom. She was found by a black and white during a health check asked for by her neighbors who were concerned by the sight of her dying houseplants by the front door. Ever since Inko and Izuku moved into their apartment in Musutafu nearly 11 years ago, the plants had never gone a week without being watered and pruned. It appeared–to their neighbors at least–that Inko had been preparing to become an empty-nester once her only son inevitably moved away from home for years now.

 

Just as she would never get a chance to water her plants again, she too would never get to see her son again. Unless, of course, the boy is already dead. The odds keep getting higher and higher in favor of nobody being able to see him ever again.

 

Eraserhead is just about at his wit’s end. 

 

Tsukauchi rolls a pencil back and forth on his desk with an index finger and leans back in his rolling chair. Its sideways angle allows him to view his monitors whilst he fiddles with the pencil. The only things clearly visible on one display are the obituary, death certificate, birth certificate, and school records of Midoriya Izuku.

 

The other one displays the case files for Midoriya Inko’s death and wellness checkup.

 

Eraserhead can see the gears turning–the invisible red string being strung; the pins being placed and the sticky notes being crumpled and then smoothed and then placed in a mis-matching overlay of something mourning and contemplative on the monitors (or their mental, cork board alternatives)–from his seat in the short, metal chair he usually has the misfortune of occupying when in the detective’s office. Tsukauchi groans and picks up his pencil, placing it back in the round, metal cup at the top of his desk.

 

“I don’t know what to do, Eraser,” he says in that sort-of-pleading tone the man is known to use when he can’t think of anything apart from worst-case-scenarios and what-ifs and whether or not the case he’s working on will become a cold case or a government secret.

 

Eraserhead blows a strand of long, ebony hair off of his own face and leans forward against the back of the seat which he straddles. “You have his full name now,” he says–helpfully, albeit glumly–with a sigh. “Maybe you can track him down.”

 

“What if there’s no Midoriya Izuku to track down, though?” Tsukauchi says, asking the Big Questions. “What if a search only leads us to his dead body? That’ll just lead to more questions than it does answers. And then we’ll have to look into this being a potential serial killer case… the HPSC will definitely want in on that.”

 

Aizawa scrunches his nose. “Is this even within their jurisdiction? Also, it’s your whole job to find the missing people in your cases regardless of the state you find them in. I will admit it’d be a huge relief and is, ultimately, preferable to find the kid alive, but… leave no stone unturned and all that.”

 

“It is,” the detective says, answering the underground hero’s inquiry about the Hero Public Safety Commission. “They have jurisdiction over all missing, dead, and displaced persons’ cases. And I know what my job description is, you dingbat.” He sighs and grumbles, “Every day I feel more and more like quitting, I swear.” 

 

“That’s gross,” Aizawa replies. “Why is the HPSC so gross? What do they even want with practically just cold and closed cases?”

 

“They’re probably covering their trail,” Tsukauchi says, wholly unhelpful.

 

Eraserhead doesn’t question the man’s inexplicit ambiguity. That’s a can of worms I’d rather not open, he thinks. Too high above my paygrade.

 

“Look on the bright side,” he says instead of asking Tsukauchi what he means by “covering their trail”. “At least we won’t have to tell a single mother her only son is missing.”

 

“Yeah,” Tsukauchi says, not missing a beat, “because she already knew, dumbass. He’s been missing for over a month. It’s hard to go from seeing someone everyday to not seeing a speck of them for six weeks without noticing something amiss. And she arranged the funeral. And wrote the obituary.”

 

“Oh,” Aizawa says, because it’s frankly all he can think of replying with at the moment. This is probably what Hizashi and Nemuri meant by my needing to learn how to ‘read the room’ and ‘approach delicate situations with a certain nuance’. Oh, well.

 

“So,” Tsukauchi says to break the awkward silence, “there are a few things we can do now.”

 

Aizawa scoots his chair across the carpet and around the width of the detective’s desk to sit beside him and get a view of the monitors. Tsukauchi grimaces at each scrrr! and eeieih! sound the chair makes in its struggle to both support the pro hero’s weight and slide across decade-old carpet panels and whatever smash-and-grab remnants of the detective’s thoughts on paper have made themselves comfortable on the floor around the perimeter of his desk.

 

“Hit me with ‘em,” Aizawa says, now comfortably lounged in his chair, the toes of his patrol boots curved against the bottom-most file-drawer of the desk.

 

“Midoriya Inko’s case looks open and shut,” Tsukauchi says, pointing at the open file on his monitor, the one with the woman’s demographic information and the report filled out by the black and white after returning from the scene of the crime and calling in her body and the condition of her apartment. “Suicide. Her motive was likely due to the mourning of her only, young son, although we’ll never know for sure. As we speak, the coroner is examining the body and will report on any out-of-the-ordinary findings.”

 

Eraserhead nods.

 

“So, our first option is to put out a search for Midoriya Izuku. The only caveat with this plan is that he’s been legally declared dead, and therefore it’ll take a lot more than pleading and pulling at heartstrings to get my superiors to agree to it.”

 

Eraserhead doesn’t like the sound of that one bit.

 

“The second option is to continue to search for him ourselves. This plan isn’t optimal as there are only so many places two adults with other work to do can survey across the whole country. Additionally, while not common, there have been a few cases of both quirkless and quirked individuals being smuggled out of the country. We have a few starting spots to begin searching more effectively–the kid’s old apartment; his school; the homes of any of his classmates or friends–but much of the searching we do will be for naught if he isn’t even in the country anymore.”

 

“You make a good point,” Eraserhead says. “I’m willing to bet he’s still in the country, though.”

 

Tsukauchi lifts a brow. “How do you figure?”

 

“How many teleportation quirks do you know of that work across that sort of distance?” he asks with a deadpan expression.

 

Tsukauchi hums. “Sure, you make a valid point. Although, are you completely certain the kid was transported using a teleportation quirk? The ‘goo’ as you described it could have been the side effect of another quirk–a size-changing or transformation or transversal ability–or a latent manifestation of the kid’s own quirk. There’s just too many compounding variables to give up the idea of transnational travel; to give up on any idea, really.”

 

Aizawa huffs. “I get your point; he could be anywhere and searching for him is probably the best option, but it’ll take a hell of a long time and we’ve gotta be in it for the long run if we’re ever hoping to find him.”

 

Tsuukauchi nods. “And then, there’s the third option: we drop the case, accept the boy is probably dead somewhere, and move on with our lives.”

 

“You know that’s not an option for me,” Aizawa says, leaving no room for question.

 

“You’re attached to him already,” Tsukauchi questions, but it sounds more like a statement. It sounds more like a key being turned and a lock clicking into place. It sounds like a vault door cranking closed and a soft rushing of air in the vents and the imminent feeling of thinning oxygen and light-headedness despite oneself.

 

“I never said that.”

 

Tsukauchi huffs out a soft laugh and smiles. “You didn’t have to.”

Notes:

"'Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

'Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.

'Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn

‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

'Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

'Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.” Matthew 10:29-42. Love y'all! (Not as much as Jesus, though ;>)
Thank you for reading and see you next chapter! God bless!!

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 7 of Midoriya Izuku (& Friends) Have a Great Time! (Alternatively: Various Fics in which Midoriya Izuku is My Favorite Punching Bag)
• Part 1 of The Hand That Feeds Extended Universe
• Part 4 of huunty’s collection of favorites