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All for One didn’t actually know where the Quirk came from. He had taken it so long ago, back when he was less meticulous about recording his actions. Still, it was of use to him. He sat in Izuku’s soft, dim bedroom and poured healing into his tiny son.
Bruised skin faded back into glossy wholeness, and Izuku let out a little exhale in his sleep. He wouldn’t wake; Hisashi had seen to that.
Healing done with, Hisashi tucked Izuku’s sprawled arms and legs back under the covers. The four-year-old was limp and heavy with sleep, and Hisashi intended to keep it that way. There would be too many questions if Izuku woke to a father who was supposed to be away on a business trip for the next two days yet.
His hands lingered in Izuku’s cloud-soft hair, drinking in the warmth of the child he had brought into this world. Until Inko and Izuku, no one but his brother had loved him unconditionally.
How quickly things changed; how quickly his brother had turned his back on him. Yet, he lingered at Izuku’s side. He understood the mistakes he made with his brother; they wouldn’t happen again.
Izuku stirred, mumbling. Hisashi sank his fingers deeper into his son’s hair, pressing against the tiny scalp, and reactivated the sleep Quirk. Izuku stilled.
He sat there for a small eternity, drinking in the night air—so gentle and sweet in Izuku’s room, nothing like the harsh invisibility of how he used midnight in his other affairs. Izuku’s small chest rose and fell in time to his dreams, and he stirred often, wriggling like a tadpole.
Finally, Hisashi turned away.
There was still work to be done tonight.
He kept coming back. Even when key operations pivoted on a breath of fate, even when he was no longer welcome through the front door, even when All Might drew close, he kept returning to that dim bedroom full of his sleeping child.
He had his reasons. He always had his reasons. He just—wasn’t completely certain what his reasons were.
Izuku’s walls were now painted in the gore of red, white, and blue—homage to his greatest enemy. It was easy enough to avert his eyes; Hisashi had only come to watch his child. Nothing else in this room really mattered.
Tonight, Izuku’s wrist painted itself with a large burn. That wouldn’t do. Hisashi’s fingers wrapped easily around the child’s bird-fragile wrist. Izuku whispered at the contact, but Hisashi’s hand was already dripping healing power, smoothing clear the burnt tissue in waves.
Only then, Izuku asleep and unburnt, did Hisashi tug the All Might plushie from his child’s arms and set it, with tight gentleness, at the end of the bed.
Izuku slept on, oblivious.
All for One investigated the burns and found a child with flames and arrogance leading the abuse. That child was the center of attention. People would, unfortunately, notice if he went missing.
The others that tormented his son, not so much. Children started to disappear.
He listened from the shadows as Inko told Izuku to “stay close to Bakugo for protection, okay?”
Izuku nodded dutifully, and walked to school alone. Not that he needed protection. Izuku was the prince of the underworld, for all he didn’t know it. Hisashi would handle Izuku’s safety himself.
This included the near-weekly wielding of the healing Quirk. This would have been more of a problem if Izuku hadn’t meticulously hidden all his burns from his mother. As it stood, Izuku appeared to simply accept that third-degree burns were a thing that sometimes healed overnight, and no suspicion was raised.
There wasn’t a problem with this system until Izuku was eight, and Hisashi arrived to find fresh burns already well on their way to healing. It was as if Hisashi had already applied the Quirk.
At the time, he thought it was a problem. Izuku was beginning to self-heal at an accelerated rate, which might raise questions.
Now, he considered it a blessing. Hisashi stood over his nine-year-old son, silhouetted against the window, and poured excess healing into Izuku. Tonight, Hisashi would face All Might, and he would likely be too busy to visit for a few months, what with the death of the Number One. Izuku would need to heal himself, for a while.
Five years later, he took up his old position at Izuku’s side. “I’ll destroy All Might,” he whispered to his fourteen-year-old son as he washed burn upon burn upon scar away from his son’s skin. “Then, I can come back to you forever.”
Izuku mumbled something in his sleep, which was as close to agreement as Hisashi was going to get. Pressing a kiss to Izuku’s forehead, which scrunched up at the contact, Hisashi let himself melt back into the shadows.
Izuku belonged to Hisashi. Tomura belonged to All for One. It was therefore surreal and sickening to hear Tomura describe a green-haired child with an impossible Quirk to All for One. These were two worlds that never should have crossed.
Izuku was badly hurt, after the USJ. When Hisashi let himself into Izuku’s bedroom that night, he found his child with a Quirk he could not take and bones that were well beyond broken. By all rights, Izuku should be nearly unable to walk.
He sat there, unmoving, for most of the night, hand tangled in Izuku’s hair.
As morning broke, Hisashi left Izuku to wake up with mostly-healed bones and an uneasy sense of being watched.
He didn’t want to do this, Hisashi thought, energy draining out his hands as he poured power kings would kill to have into Izuku’s frail body. Healing Izuku after his increasingly self-destructive stunts would only encourage his child to keep at it. Still, there were few options. Anything less than the full blast of this Quirk would leave Izuku paralyzed in short order. It was a miracle that Izuku had even managed to stagger home from the Sports Festival without collapsing.
A million miracles would never come close to repaying the horror of finding his own child with One for All screaming through his veins.
Izuku had been forced into the mould of a weapon primed to destroy. At this rate, the only thing he would destroy would be himself.
Hisashi ignored the problems that he could not ignore for much longer, and poured even more healing into Izuku’s bones. The effort was exhausting; by the end, he was leaning his full weight on a wavering arm braced against the edge of the bed. The other hand lay steady against Izuku’s forehead, filling Izuku to the brim with clean wholeness.
Izuku groaned, too deep in sleep to consciously register the pain of molecular healing, and pressed his sweaty forehead into Hisashi’s hand.
He was used to the warm, familiar quarters of Izuku’s bedroom. A floor full of teenagers in sleeping bags was not ideal, but it would have to do. This was Hisashi’s last chance to reach Izuku before committing himself to long months of Tartarus, and if that meant he had to force twenty teenagers in a training camp to sleep through his presence, he would.
Hisashi held Izuku’s hand, channeling every ounce of healing from the Quirk into Izuku. “You’ll have to make do with this much power for a while,” he said, smoothing back Izuku’s hair to keep it out of his child’s eyes. He ached to see his son’s face, but All Might had taken that from him years ago. Quirks could approximate sight, but nothing could replace having eyes to drink in the sight of Izuku.
His grip tightened on Izuku’s hand. “He’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll keep Toshinori Yagi alive, to please you and humiliate him. I‘ll make sure he regrets it, hmm?”
Footsteps echoed from outside. Someone was coming.
Hisashi allowed himself two more breaths of holding Izuku’s hand before he dissolved away.
Tartarus was approximately as bad as he imagined. This was unfortunate, as his imagination was rather vivid. When he was young, he channeled it into reading comic books and dreaming of a better world. Now, he used it to plan for contingencies.
He shifted his bound weight away from the tight knot of muscle in his back, exhaling as the click of a dozen machine guns followed the movement.
Even his patience had limits, and he suspected he would be testing the edges of it here. Still. It’s not like he had anything else to do with his time, and eternity was a long time to fill.
He let his attention drift away, remembering Inko’s laugh, Izuku’s baby babblings. Soon , he promised himself, leaning against his restraints, trying to ignore his body throbbing from the pain of sitting strapped to a chair for months on end. Soon .
Izuku destroyed his body, over and over. Hisashi witnessed it all through Search. If he hadn’t poured so much power into Izuku, if he hadn’t come that last time before Kamino, if, if, if—
Izuku survived, though. Everything else was fixable.
Of all the things he had destroyed, Tartarus had been the most satisfying. Better yet, it was night, meaning Izuku was sleeping soundly on.
He entered Izuku’s room, only to find a very awake Izuku watching him, shoulders tight.
“I thought you would come here,” Izuku said without preamble, voice only a little wobbly. “The teachers said you wouldn’t be able to pass UA’s defenses without raising an alarm.”
His child laughed then, bleak and hopeless. “I thought otherwise. Guess I was right.”
“And why did I come for you, Izuku?” Hisashi asked, carefully neutral. There was a chance Izuku thought he was here to take out the next One For All user.
Izuku stared back at him, eyes empty. “Toshinori thinks it’s because you still love me. I’m not sure about that.”
Ah.
“They did blood testing on the two of us a few weeks ago,” Izuku continued, still not moving. “It’s been pretty awful since. Thanks for that.”
Hisashi absorbed this. “The law has never wanted people like us,” he said, moving to sit at the foot of Izuku’s bed.
“They seemed okay with me until you came up,” Izuku said, short but distant.
Hisashi hummed, wondering which way to answer the accusation, but Izuku kept on going. “I should be reporting this, by the way. They gave me a panic button and everything.”
“And yet, you aren’t,” Hisashi said, pleased even though he suspected the reason why.
“You’d just kill anyone who came in now,” Izuku said flatly, confirming Hisashi’s suspicions. “I’m not doing that, especially when you can’t kill me.”
“I never would have,” Hisashi said, keeping his voice level. “I’ve been caring for you since you were a young child.”
“I didn’t say won’t kill me,” Izuku said, still so unnaturally still. Even in sleep, he moved more. “I said can’t. What did you do to me?”
“What do you mean?” Hisashi asked, letting just a shadow of All for One seep into his voice. “I’ve only ever healed you.”
Izuku barked out a laugh. “You did more than that. I can’t die.”
“And how did you find that out? Hisashi murmured, gearing up to kill a good many someones.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Izuku breathed. “You gonna go away yet?”
Hisashi considered the stillness of his son, the emptiness. Izuku needed help.
Izuku wasn’t going to accept it from Hisashi.
“For now,” he said, standing. “I’ll see you again, Izuku.”
“How about you not,” Izuku mumbled.
Hisashi paused. “You won’t see me again unless you initiate contact.”
Izuku slid a tired gaze across Hisashi, picking apart all the loopholes in that promise.
“Fine,” Izuku said at last. “Go.”
Hisashi went. He was a patient man.
He visited Izuku weekly, from then on, talking to the sleeping child as if he were awake. “You’ll come to me, eventually,” he told Izuku one night, tucking Izuku’s arms under blankets as if Izuku were four again. “I’ll wait for you.”
Izuku caught on, eventually. The new locks weren’t an issue. Neither were the admittedly creative traps. Izuku couldn’t ask for help, because he couldn’t actually confess he had continuing contact with his father without losing his very tenuous hold as a hero. The Hero Commission hated Izuku, naturally, but a few senior members found the irony of using All for One’s son for their own purposes just pleasing enough to keep Izuku if he didn’t stir up too much trouble.
Contact with All for One was, in every sense, trouble, so Izuku said nothing.
His child started writing, though. Since you apparently have free time, go be useful and take out the new yakuza, read one note. Were you the reason Kacchan never scarred me? read another.
Hisashi fished around for a pen on Izuku’s desk. Yes, he wrote in response to the question about scarring. Do you think I cared nothing for you?
There were no more notes, for a while.
Things came to a head a few months later. Izuku had too much righteous fury boiling under his skin, carefully repressed, to stand for what the Hero Commission was doing forever. There was a revolution. Several, actually.
And things changed.
About halfway through, All for One realized that governments were temporary, but Izuku was forever. It would do Hisashi no favors to meddle overmuch in his son’s revolutions.
If you insist on staying over, then lend a hand with the assassins. They’re making it hard to get enough sleep, Izuku wrote in an annoyed scrawl one night, and Hisashi complied.
It was Izuku’s class who dragged Japan toward better horizons, in the end, with Izuku at their head. For a time, Izuku was content.
Then Izuku’s friends started growing old, and Izuku didn’t.
Do you ever get lonely? tonight’s note read.
All for One was powerful, feared, untouchable. Hisashi was out of practice being vulnerable.
Why do you think I protected you so fiercely? he wrote at last, and left Izuku to read between the lines.
He stayed longer than usual, that night, and when he got home, he dragged out a faded photo album instead of going straight to bed.
Three-year-old Izuku beamed up at him through the picture, confident that he loved the world and that it loved him back.
For a long time, Hisashi cradled the pages holding the last traces of that boy.
Children grew up.
Why did you have me? read Izuku’s next note. You knew I would die.
Because Inko wanted it. But he had known Inko would die, too, so why—
(Because the world never seemed as bright as when his brother was in it, and he had gone on too long in darkness.)
He hesitated.
Meet me at Endo Park tomorrow at 10, he wrote in lieu of an answer, then fled from the presence of the young immortal he had brought into this world.
Ten o’clock passed. Ten thirty. Ten forty-five. Hisashi sat silent on the bench, watching the world turn, careful to not feel too much. Beyond him, fathers swung their young children around and around in giggling circles.
(Children grew up.)
Footsteps behind him.
“How do you keep going?” Izuku said, looking past him at the children laughing in the park. “Without giving up, I mean.”
Hisashi didn’t have the heart to tell him he had given up a long time ago, and that the only reason he had started properly caring again was the idea of Izuku being around forever. “You find people to love,” he said instead.
Izuku nodded, once, like he had expected this answer.
They stayed there in silence for a long time, watching time roll through the world like the tide.
Slowly, Izuku sat. Slowly, Izuku scooted closer, cautious as a child with a stranger they were told was family.
Slowly, Izuku leaned his head against Hisashi’s shoulder and closed his eyes.
Hisashi held his son as Izuku slept.