Chapter Text
Izuku rushes through the house that can only be Shimura Tenko’s, followed by Shimura Nana’s glowing vestige, ignoring the sting in his shoulder from where the illusion of Stain stabbed him. He hears voices out in the garden, and quickly crosses the living room, ignoring the faint sounds of unseen people shuffling around the house with him. They’re too ill-defined to be an actual part of his mind. If I checked in the rooms where they’re located, I'm sure I'd only find blurry shapes at most.
As soon as he steps into the yard he freezes, Nana gasping in horror. Sure enough, the boy who would eventually become Shigaraki Tomura is there, cowering in fear from his father, who stands over the boy with his hand raised.
Izuku’s body moves before he can think. Nana’s words are completely drowned out by the scene of a father beating his child.
So, Izuku does the thing he knows how to do best. He steps in the way of the danger, tackling who can only be Shimura Tenko out of the way of his father’s raised hand, embracing the blue-haired child in a crushing hug. “You’re safe, Tenko! Because I am here!”
“Hero!” the boy hisses, trying to claw at the ground to decay Izuku and Nana. “Why are you here!? How did you break through!?”
He hears what the villain can’t bring himself to say. ‘Why are you still trying to save me’
“Because you never got a first chance, let alone a second one,” he answers without hesitation, grabbing the boy’s hand in his own and instantly feeling decay eat away at his arm. This is a place where memory becomes reality! I just have to keep acknowledging the existence of my own body, and I won’t turn to dust.
With determination written on his face, he locks eyes with the red-eyed boy, grabbing his other hand and asserting his existence with all the willpower he has. “I’m going to become the greatest hero. That means I have to save everyone in need, everyone crying out for help! You’re one of those people, Tenko, you always have been!”
“You’re wrong,” the boy hisses, his face flickering between Shigaraki Tomura’s desiccated, white-haired appearance and the crying Shimura Tenko. “Sensei already saved me! I don’t need some two-bit hero trying to take me away from danger that isn’t even there.”
“You don’t believe that,” he gambles, staking Tenko’s emotional state on him intuiting correctly. “Because if you really believe that All for One saved you, you wouldn’t have bothered resisting when he took over your body.”
He continues, “You’re me, Tenko, you’d be willing to do anything for those who showed you kindness, even if you’re too angry to show it sometimes,” Izuku growls, feeling his left arm start to crumble.
“No I’m not!” The villain shrieks, suddenly changing to the appearance he had at the USJ, tackling the much smaller boy to the ground and laying a hand on his face, the pain of decay almost causing Izuku to black out, but he can’t now. Not when he’s so close, not when losing consciousness means losing his life.
“You think you know me, but you don’t,” Tenko hisses, pressing down on Izuku’s left arm and reducing it to little more than atoms. “I’m not Tenko, I’m not a crying child in need of saving, dammit! I am destruction incarnate!”
“Tenko, don’t!” Nana screams, pulling the supervillain off Izuku and allowing him time enough to focus, fully halting decay on his own face, leaving a purple handprint where Tenko’s hand once was.
The villain roars with anger, lashing out at his grandmother with an outstretched hand, but she carefully evades her grandson’s blow, luring him away from Izuku and giving him just enough space to think. This place… it’s not just memory becoming reality, it’s our personalities, our states of mind, our quirk factors building this place. Whoever’s force of personality wins out has ultimate influence over this vestige world.
Izuku clenches his fist, watching the supervillain shift between his appearance at the USJ and the one he’s only seen during their memory’s being spliced together, during the period after Izuku fought Overhaul.
Tenko repeatedly lunges at Nana in a fury, seeing her gracefully evade with her float quirk now ambiguously missing from his collection of powers. I’ll never win in a battle of wills with Tenko. He proved that when he stole the fourth’s gift from me, but I might be able to get away with some things I couldn’t before with my broken body.
“I just have to change the stage,” he mutters to himself, dusting himself off with his sole remaining and feeling his appearance shift from child to teen, to what he wore to the USJ incident before rushing the young man down, grabbing his wrists and throwing him into the side of the building, watching the architecture morph from backyard to deck as the environment changes to the boat in the shipwreck zone.
It actually seems to give Tenko pause, judging by the small stutter in his movement and the look of surprise, but it isn’t long before the man jumps at him with hands outstretched. “Come at me, Tenko.”
Izuku weaves around one of the villain’s hands, grabbing the other at the wrist and slamming it into the side of the boat, watching it decay. I was right. Our state of mind here dictates our power in this place.
“You bastard,” Tenko hisses, landing a hand on Izuku’s side and causing him to cry out in pain, his midsection starting to crumble.
Focusing as best as he can through the agony as Nana pulls the supervillain off of him, he shifts his appearance to the disguise he wore at the Kamino Ward incident, watching the scene shift again as they materialize in the crater formed from All for One’s initial clash. It stalls decay, just like I thought. This might be possible.
“Tenko!” Izuku screams, feeling the decay on his torso shift under the weight of the supervillain’s rage. “Let me save you! Let me be your second chance! It doesn’t have to end like this!”
“This is how it works, hero, this is why we’re heroes and villains,” Tenko spits, briefly shifting appearances to the outfit he wore during the hospital raid. “You reject everyone that doesn’t fit the mold, pushing them out of society and letting them develop into dailies for your comrades to farm for prestige. That’s how the machine of the heroics industry has worked since All Might.”
Looking more like Shigaraki than ever, he demands, “What did I get these hands for, if not to destroy!? What could I possibly do but turn things to dust!?”
Nana tackles him away before he can place his hand on the ground and kill Izuku, but he knows it won’t last. I have to get through to him, and soon.
“You don’t have to do anything, get it?” Izuku shouts, reconstituting his left arm from memory. It looks a little blurry, but that at least confirms that he can, and as long as he’s able to fight, he’ll keep battling to save Tenko from himself. “You are not your quirk, no one is. You ask me what you can do besides destroy, well I’m turning it around on you, why do you have to destroy!?”
Tenko overpowers Nana with a scream, the scene around them changing from the Kamino Ward clearing to Deika city in ruins, hero and villain changing to reflect their mindsets at the time. My gamma costume? And Shigaraki’s hair is bleached white, plus, he’s missing a few fingers like he was during the hospital raid. This must be where Decay awakened.
Izuku sparks One for All, leaping into the air away from the wave of decay Tenko sets loose, letting Nana catch him.
“I destroy, because it’s what sensei showed me how to do!” Tenko shouts, memories flying into all three of the combatant’s minds of the day Tenko was taken in by All for One. “He taught me everything! He saved me from that house! He-”
Izuku’s eyes widen in horror as in one terrifying moment, he understands. “He manipulated you, Tenko! He gave you that quirk! He killed your family, and I'd be willing to bet that he is the reason your father hurt you too!”
The entire world goes quiet for a moment, the crater in Deika barely seeming to move as even Nana’s sobs over the injustice her grandson faced seem distant.
Then, the ground explodes, All for One’s eyeless face emerging from it, mouth already poised to clamp over Tenko.
“Tenko, no!” Nana screams, grabbing the villain by the hand and throwing him out of All for One’s mouth, allowing herself to be consumed in his place.
All for One growls in anger. “How dare she! Get back here, Tomura; give me back my body!”
I can’t let him, Izuku thinks to himself, taking advantage of Tenko’s surprise and distraction to manifest an improvised version of blackwhip, grabbing onto the man and pulling him away from All for One’s vestige.
The look of pure shock on Tenko’s face will be seared into Izuku’s mind for the rest of time. “You… Midoriya, why?”
“Because you needed help,” he answers without missing a beat. “You needed someone to save you, so I did. It doesn’t matter how many times I've been hurt, I’ll always be there to save those in need.”
“There’s more to it than that, Midoriya,” the villain says, sounding almost numb as All for One readily admits to his crimes, describing in detail exactly how he’s manipulated Tenko’s life since before the day he was born, raving about how he’s given the man everything in life, how he deserves everything from him too. “You should have let me die there. That was the way to save everyone. If All for One takes over my body, he won’t cause destruction on the same scale I would. You saved me for more than that.”
Now it’s Izuku’s turn to adopt a look of shock as he floats the two of them away from the titanic avatar of All for One’s vestige, watching as the ground beneath them crumbles, giving way to a vast void not unlike the inner world of One for All.
“You’re right, Tenko,” he admits, adopting a soft smile as he releases the supervillain from the chains of blackwhip, allowing him to activate his flight quirks to fly alongside him. “It probably would have saved more people if I just… let you die there.”
“But more than I want to reject you, more than I want to be a hero, even more than I want to live,” Izuku begins, his eyes hardening as he stares down the eyeless man reaching out a massive hand towards the two of them. “I hate All for One.”
With that declaration, he drives a fist forward, filling it with as much of One for All as he can, more than his body in the real world could dream of handling, and smashes the offending limb apart. “I hate everything about him. I hate his actions, how he hurts people, both that I care about and that I don’t even know. I hate how he uses a quirk that could improve the lives of so many people to manipulate and influence others. I hate how because of his actions and his actions alone, I’ve been made to fight in a war against some of the people I should be saving.”
Absently, he realizes that his face has twisted into a rage-filled snarl, whereas Tenko’s has formed into a gleeful grin. “You feel it too, Midoriya!?”
“I guess I do,” Izuku readily admits, regenerating his arms with the memetic powers of the vestige world before readying another punch. “Because I hate everything about you, Shigaraki Zen!”
A punch to the chest. “I hate your stupid evil lawyer getup.”
A kick to the head. “I hate that smug tone of voice you use that makes you sound like you know something!”
A full-on body-slam. “I hate that I can understand exactly why you are the way that you are!”
“I hate,” he declares, charging up Fa Jin with Blackwhip as he winds up a dropkick, “That you’re just a sad, lonely man who decided to take it out on everyone weaker than you!”
All for One screams in pain, but finds room to counterattack, swatting him away like a fly. For a moment, Izuku thinks it’s all over, but at the last moment before he’s sent hurtling into the void, Tenko catches him, sending a pulse of decay across the void to stall All for One longer. He caught me?
“Midoriya,” Tenko growls, flying upwards with the help of the propulsion quirk he used during their battle, away from the reconstituting All for One. “You were right in the end, hero. I am you. I’d give anything, everything to the person who reaches out their hand to me, who saves me.”
The villain’s hair goes from bleached white to brilliant green, his eyes shading themself in Izuku’s own forest color as an ominous red energy seeps from the palm of his hand, siphoning in and out of Izuku as agony wracks the hero’s body.
Izuku coughs, suddenly feeling stretched as he catches a hint of white hair flicking into his field of view. “Tenko? What are you doing?”
“What I've always done,” he responds, charging up an impure beam and firing it at All for One’s vestige, slowing him down only slightly. “Destroying what annoys me.”
The demon lord is gaining on them. He’s clearly more experienced than both of them, and this is his vestige world. They don’t even have anywhere to run to, but Tenko seems to have a plan, and for whatever reason, Izuku wants to trust him. “If he’s still alive, tell Spinner that Shigaraki Tomura fought to destroy until the bitter end. It’ll mean more coming from me.”
For some reason, Tenko laughs maniacally at that. Does he have a way out for us?
Tenko shoots Izuku a final crooked grin as he hurls him skyward, away from All for One, whose gigantified hand promptly wraps around Tenko’s waist, raising him up to the demon lord’s mouth. “Izuku? You thought I could be a hero, yeah?”
“You still can, Tenko,” the boy responds, his voice coming out incredibly scratchy and quiet, but still somehow audible to all three vestiges.
Tenko’s final words before All for One’s lips close around his vestige–burying him forever–are a simple, “Then show me how it’s done, Deku.”
And
Everything
Fades
To
White
Izuku wakes up, already standing among the dust and ruins of their battle, immediately noting that he’s taller than he remembers as he stumbles over his new lanky height. What? How did I get taller?
He brings a hand up to his face, only to see an ominous black hole in the center, with forearms too long for it to be his.
“No…” he mutters to himself, hearing Tenko’s scratchy voice come from his mouth. “He didn’t!” Wait, does that mean that?
“Take… One for All,” he hears his voice say somewhere in front of him. Oh no.
The dust clears, revealing his own broken, limbless body, slowly turning to dust. His(?) head turns to look up at him, revealing a sluggishly bleeding handprint on its face, and completely empty white eyes. All for One’s eyes. The damage transferred from the vestige world. Tenko saved me. He saved me, and he killed All for One.
“You… Nine… Give me Yoichi,” the demon lord sobs, tears running down what once was Izuku’s face. “I have to be the demon lord. I have to have Yoichi. Take Tomura’s body, take his anger, take Yoichi.”
Izuku touches his right eye, noting the rough skin from the scar on it as he walks towards All for One. Is he even fully present? Or did the second transfer damage his mind beyond saving?
“Yoichi’s gone, All for One,” he proclaims, crouching down in front of the slowly decaying man and carefully lifting Gran Torino’s cape from his(?) shoulders, placing it across his own. “He’s gone. Gone, because you killed him.”
All for One’s eyes slip closed and the man collapses forward, muttering, “I love you, Yoichi,” before decay reaches his brain, ending the demon lord's reign permanently.
Izuku falls to his knees, shutting his eyes as he feels tears well up in them and wails. He’s not sure how long he screams, but eventually, he hears the telltale sound of one of Kurogiri’s portals opening, and the crushing feeling of Aizawa-sensei’s capture weapon wrapping around him.
“Shigaraki,” his sensei grits out. “What did you do to Midoriya!?”