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Midoriya Izuku, more commonly known as Hero Deku, graduated from UA High School at the rank of sixth on the leaderboard, and rapidly climbing. It made sense to the public; after all, Deku was always saving people with a smile. He walked out of the final battle with Shigaraki beaten and bloodied, but still grinning.
He’d been a media darling since his debut in his first year taking down the Shie Hassakai. There was merch being made of him before any companies or agencies had even begun thinking about licensing his image. He was, all in all, a peoples’ hero.
In the industry, he was praised to his face and cursed behind his back. Far behind his back. Hero Deku had ears everywhere, didn’t you know?
It wasn’t a secret that he knew the tea on everyone. Villains, heroes, politicians, even reporters weren’t safe.
It was a little known fact that he’d started his gossiping ways even before his time at UA. The quirkless had to keep their eyes peeled and ears open constantly, and he picked up things that he wrote down in his notebook or seared into his mind. Just in case.
The skill came in handy later.
Izuku had developed a habit of talking to the vestiges of One for All while doing his homework (once he got over his fear of being caught “cheating” because it wasn’t like he could just turn off the ghosts in his brain, no matter how much he wished he could), and chatter filled his head while he was mindlessly scrawling definitions onto his paper for biology.
“The Quirk Singularity Theory…” he muttered. “That’s when a quirk passed through multiple generations builds on other combinations of quirk DNA in the gene pool and becomes too strong for the user’s body…”
Yoichi’s voice played in his mind. “That’s why your bones broke so often before you got a handle on One for All.”
En’s was next. “Presumably it’s why you can talk to all of us, too.”
Izuku took a moment to ponder. “I think… I think it might be related to how I can talk to you all, due to your quirk DNA being stored in One for All, but I don’t know if One for All has hit singularity, actually. Or maybe it’s just that singularity will be a phenomenon known only to One for All?”
Nana’s voice rang out. “What do you mean by that, dear?”
Izuku continued. “One for All was too strong for my body because I don’t have any caps or limits on the power, and there’s no genetic material cushioning me from it being too strong. Take my classmate Ashido. She can make acids corrosive enough to melt through nearly anything, and her body has mutated in order to combat that, because it’s written in her parents’ quirk DNA that passed down to her. If I had her quirk in my body without any of the accompanying mutations in the same way that I have One for All in my body now, I would burn or melt myself all the time!
“Therefore I, having no quirk connected to my quirk factor before the insertion of One for All, haven’t developed any of the checks and balances that a person inheriting the entire set of mutated genes related to their quirk would have. When One for All hit singularity, assuming that it did so with me, it was because my body didn’t have the correct genetic coding to give me a safety net that anyone who got their quirk from their parents would have.
“This means that I have my mom’s ability to stay balanced by having a notable presence in the telekinetic vector field, and I have the green hair from my mom’s grandpa who had a photosynthesis quirk, but I can’t use either of those as checks and balances for a strength stockpile. I’ve never noticed any significant mutations on my dad’s side, but there’s always a chance that there’s just something I haven’t thought of.”
Banjo broke in. “So how does this theory relate to your ability to use all of our quirks?”
Izuku shook his head, in full Nerd Mode now. “That doesn’t have anything to do with singularity. I think that it might have something to do with my checks and balances theory, though. One for All is able to carry quirks in its quirk DNA, but these extra quirks have been unavailable since they haven’t been able to connect to the quirk factor until now. Having more than two quirks connected to a quirk factor makes the body increasingly unstable as quirks are added, as we see in the Nomus. An unstable quirk factor quickly leads to brain death, but All for One has found his way around that issue through mind and body control quirks. This also explains why those of you with quirks who held One for All began to die so quickly: your quirk factor was destabilized since One for All connected to both the original quirk and the quirk facto, but it only absorbed an afterimage of the original quirk into the stockpile rather than the whole thing.
“This means that somewhere in my DNA, I have a mutation that would allow me to carry an unspecified amount of quirks in my quirk factor without causing destabilization. Since I have the toe joint, it wouldn’t be possible for it to be an invisible quirk of my own, no, it would have to be vestigial and fairly recent in my genetic history as to not have been denatured by now. I don’t recall anyone on my mom’s side of the family having a quirk like this or an invisible quirk in the past few generations. On my dad’s side I’ve only ever known of him, and fire-breathing wouldn’t have that type of mutation unless my dad… actually… had multiple quirks… holy shit. Holy shit.”
His mental peanut gallery had come to the same conclusion as him, and were definitely agreeing that, holy shit, Midoriya Hisashi may or may not be All for One.
First spoke up meekly. “While this is certainly… exciting, Nine, do you have a photo of your father you could pull up to show me?”
Izuku scrambled for the photo he kept on the shelf above his desk. It was facedown, due to him having a moment of rage at his father - for leaving him, not for being a super villain, since that still hadn’t been confirmed - but he flipped it right up.
“Holy shit,” whispered Banjo in Izuku’s mind.
“Holy shit,” Izuku echoed.
Ten days later, Izuku saw Shigaraki at the cat café a few blocks away from UA. He normally wouldn’t let the other man go, but they were in a cat café, for fuck’s sake, and he wasn’t about to risk stepping on Matcha’s tail when he had finally gotten the Maine Coon to like him.
He did, however, lean over Shigaraki’s table when he went up to the front to pay.
“Tell All for One to pay his fucking child support.”
“I,” Shouto said, blank-faced and pointing at the evidence on his surprisingly neat board, “Believe that No. 2 Pro Hero Hawks is fucking two to four members of my family.”
“F-four?” Izuku asked, not certain he wanted to know. “Your dad, Fuyumi, Natsuo, and… your mom? Wait. Shouto. Please tell me you aren’t fucking No. 2 Pro Hero Hawks.”
Shouto shook his head, solemn as ever. “I can tell you with 98% certainty that neither my mother nor I are fucking No. 2 Pro Hero Hawks.”
“98%,” breathed Izuku, who then decided to ignore it. “So… Who’s Hawks fucking?”
“My dead brother, Touya,” explained Shouto, deadpan.
Izuku choked. “I’m sorry, he’s dead?”
“Touya died around ten years ago. I’m fairly certain he’s the villain Dabi.”
Heaving out a deep sigh, Izuku was reminded why he didn’t ask his friend for help on anything that needed a logical thought process. “Your dead brother - who is not actually dead and may or may not be fucking No. 2 Pro Hero Hawks - is the villain Dabi. And you know this… how?”
Shouto blinked. “He is one of the two that is definitely fucking Hawks. I know he’s my brother because of the sibling connection in our souls. Also he was the one who taught me how to call Endeavor a trick ass bitch, and I recognize the way he said it and his tone of voice. That memory is a defining milestone of my life.”
Izuku took a moment to process, scribbling down notes in his gossip journal that he’d definitely have to go through and fix later, because Shouto had no definition of a linear thought process in his head. “So. Who’s the other one that’s definitely fucking Hawks?”
“Oh,” said Shouto. “My father.”
Izuku thought this bone-tired weariness must be what Aizawa felt whenever Izuku got into a Situation™.
Shouto continued without prompting, gesturing to the next few subjects on the corkboard. Izuku couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not. “Hawks and Endeavor are definitely boning because I’ve unfortunately walked in on them. Multiple times. There are some things you can’t unsee. I know Hawks is fucking Dabi because once Endeavor gave me the keys to Hawks’ apartment because he left part of his costume there, and I walked in on them. Fuyumi definitely has something going on with Miruko, but I’m pretty sure it’s been open to Hawks every once in a while, because I’ve unfortunately been familiarized with what he sounds like. Natsuo’s a whole other mess…”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Izuku, pencil flying across the page. “That was a lot. Let me get it down before you get to Natsuo.”
Todoroki paused until the pencil stopped moving, then started again. “Natsuo is involved with the League, Shigaraki in particular-”
“Wait. Hold on. What?”
“Let me finish. Natsuo is boning Shigaraki-”
“Sorry, I’m going to need to take a second to process that. Both the fact that your brother is fucking Japan’s most wanted villain and the fact that Shigaraki is apparently a bottom-”
“We’re never going to finish if you continue to interrupt. Natsuo is boning Shigaraki, and since Hawks is part of the League, or maybe just infiltrating it-”
Izuku whacked himself in the face with his notebook. “Sorry, continue.”
“Hawks sees Natsuo at the League of Villains base, probably fucking Shigaraki, and proposes a threesome, according to what Toga told Dabi who then told Fuyumi who told me, and I don’t know if they actually ended up fucking or not but considering his track record with my family, it’s more than likely.”
Izuku, finished with writing and presumably also thinking for the night, slammed his notebook shut. “Alright. I’m going to make hot chocolate and we’re going to sit in the common room and watch Spy Kids 2 and pretend this conversation never happened.”
Todoroki nodded, and wheeled his conspiracy board back towards the closet.
“This,” said Izuku, slamming a paper down onto the table with a loud thud, “is a non-exhaustive list of villains that have strange, semi-pedophilic pseudocrushes on me and why I don’t like it.”
The poor boy looked like he hadn't been able to sleep in a week.
“Explain,” demanded Kaminari, one of several classmates sitting in the common room when Izuku walked in.
“One. Toga Himiko. I don’t think this one is pedophilic, however she carries a vial of my blood around her neck everywhere she goes with a heart charm attached to it, and I feel like that’s really creepy, especially considering the fact that it’s probably very expired by now.”
The class shivered at the mention of the girl, but nobody made a motion to contradict him. Almost all of them had ended up with a knife and an extremely cutesy stalker note under their pillow at some point regardless of how much the UA security was shored up. She never tried to actively hurt them, but it was creepy as hell.
“Two. Shigaraki Tomura. He carries a fucking photo of me in his wallet! Like, what the fuck! Apparently he takes it out and stares at it and occasionally shows it to other villains and it makes me extremely uncomfortable!”
“Midoriya-kun, ribbit, how do you know about this?”
Izuku froze. “No comment.”
The rest of the class sent nervous glances around, but nobody tried to make him explain further.
“And three! Stain. He sends me fan mail, guys, I mean, come on. Really. I thought my first fan letter was going to be from Kota but then I get one backdated three weeks before the summer camp from the fucking Hero Killer: Stain and I just have to live with the fact that that’s going to be my first piece of fan mail ever. I can’t change it. Do you all see how I’m suffering, here?”
The Gossip Coalition was formed of Hagakure, Jirou, and Shouji. They all had quirks that meant they had seen and heard things that should never have been seen or heard.
They’d never really talked about the things they’d overheard, just gave each other glances when something big had happened. The rest would know by the end of the day.
One day early in their second year, the three of them decided to meet up, because there was simply too much shit going on that they needed to talk about. Hagakure said that Present Mic said that Midnight said that All Might said that Mirio Toogata was planning on proposing to Tamaki Amajiki, and Jirou had overheard that Sero’s supplier had laced some edibles with Trigger. They didn’t know what Shouji was bringing to the table that week, but it had to be something good with the looks he was giving them.
They walked together to Hagakure’s favorite café, only a few blocks from the dorm. When they got there, a familiar figure stood and walked towards them, like he had been waiting for them to show.
“Is this the Gossip Coalition meeting?” Asked Midoriya Izuku, causing the three others to exchange glances.
Jirou spoke first. “Are you even a part of the Gossip Coalition?”
Izuku’s eyes widened. “Am I not?”
Tooru was confused and possibly concerned about where Izuku got most of his gossip from, but you don’t gossip about other members of the Gossip Coalition. They’ll know, and their group doesn’t forget easily.
She’s not going to stop him, either, even if she’ll never be able to look Present Mic in the eye again. At least he can’t tell that she’s avoiding eye contact.
Midoriya knew Kyouka was dating Yaoyorozu before even Kyouka herself knew. She had to be told by him to realize.
However, he said he wouldn’t snitch to Kaminari if she told him what was going on between Uraraka and Tsuyu, so she was fine with it. Maybe it wasn’t a traditional friendship, but a relationship built on mutual respect and a healthy dose of blackmail worked for them, and they had both in spades.
The so-called Dekusquad, according to Mina, was lying in a heap on the common room sofa. They’d taken to doing it a lot, considering they were all mildly touch-starved, at the very least. Izuku was tracing the deep scar on Tenya’s arm when he suddenly jolted upwards as if shocked.
“Deku?” Asked Ochako.
“Now hold on one fucking second,” Izuku said, patting the sofa around him. He found what he was looking for and held it up, tapping his passcode into his phone like a man on a mission.
Izuku put the phone on speaker and it rang twice before it was picked up, and Izuku didn’t even say hello, just went into his tirade. “You fucking mutilated him because he found out who you were and broke up with you?!”
“Izuku, it’s been over a year. Do we have to talk about it?”
“Is that Stain?” Asked Shouto.
“You have Stain’s phone number?” Asked Ochako.
“Stain calls you Izuku?” Asked Tenya.
Izuku barely stopped to placate his friends. “He is doing a lot better now that he’s getting psychiatric help, so I had some friends sneak a phone into his cell. Now,” he turned to the phone, “you have some explaining to do. I’d bet he thought he was dating former vigilante Stendhal and got pissed when he found out you were a serial killer so you paralyzed him? It makes more sense now why he isn’t dead, but, like… really?”
“Wait. My brother?” Asked Tenya.
“Oh, really, Izuku? We’re going to have this conversation with his brother in the room?”
“You’re the one who gave him permanent nerve damage.”
“Now we’re pulling out the big guns, huh. I’ll tell your friends about the time the Musutafu Police Department had their coffee laced with LSD-“
“We agreed that wasn’t my fault, and you don’t want to pull that card with me because I’ll tell them and Iida Tensei-san about the All Might prison doujinshi-“
Tenya whispered a quiet “what the fuck” as their bickering continued in the background, and despite the novelty of him swearing, it wasn’t even the weirdest part of the whole shebang.
Once the call ended, Izuku turned to the group. “Ochako, please tell me you don’t have any relatives who had torrid love affairs with villains. Or heroes.”
“Hey,” Ochako said one day, while looking at a photo on the shelf above Izuku’s desk. It sat next to a photo of Izuku’s mom holding him while standing next to a man whose face had been torn out. “Who is this lady? I feel like I know her.”
“Her? Oh, that’s Nana Shimura. She used to be a Pro, but she died. She’s an, uh, inspiration for me as a hero.”
“Huh. She kinda looks like my mom’s cousin Kotaro, but he died a while ago. Mom said he didn’t like heroes, either, so it’s probably just a coincidence.”
Izuku laid down on the carpet in his dorm room and did not move.
There’s a big “Congratulations!” balloon tied to Hitoshi’s desk when he walked in, which is concerning because the adoption is definitely not common knowledge.
“Wow, Shinsou, what’s the big event?” Asked Mina.
Hitoshi didn’t respond, just looked around until he caught someone’s eye. Midoriya gave him a big grin and a thumbs up, but Hitoshi only narrowed his eyes.
He had to sit in the seat with the balloon until lunch, through both of his dads’ classes. They gave him questioning looks, and he pointed his chin at Midoriya.
Hizashi asked if the both of them would please stay for the first few minutes of lunch, so they stayed sitting. Shouta walked in when the room emptied out, and turned to the green-haired boy.
“How did you know?”
“About the adoption?” Midoriya had the gall to look confused. “Shinsou has the room next to me and he sleep-talks. The vents are really echoey. Also, I saw Mic-sensei talking to his parents about it when I was in the teachers’ lounge.”
Hizashi blinked. “My parents are deaf. We speak in sign language.”
Midoriya did not blink. “I’m very dedicated.”
The room was silent for a moment before Hizashi spoke again, his voice wavering just the slightest bit. “Dedicated to what?”
Midoriya finally broke off his solitare game of a staring contest. “All Might, of course. In his July eighth, 2XXX interview with HeroNEWS Today, he said how much of a good life skill it is to know how to speak sign language, especially for prospective h-“
Shouta got up and left the room.
The ghosts in his head certainly helped, but a lot of it was Izuku himself. En was the one who warned him about the reporter talking shit about him on the sidelines of his debut (he winked directly into her camera in response), but Izuku had been the one that sat in a dingy bar for nights in a row waiting for the villain that a source had said would be there. Nana was the one that connected that All for One must’ve given Shigaraki Decay, but Izuku was the one that noticed his red high-tops in the first place. Yoichi was the one that devised the outline of the plan on how to defeat All for One permanently, but Izuku was the one that called him a shitty absent father to his face.
Keeping an ear (and the other, and those that belonged to the ghosts in his head) to the ground came in handy, whether it was an earthshaking revelation about a villain or Tooru telling him that Mezou overheard Tsuyu and Ochako talking about how his mom said that his fiancé had asked for her permission to propose to him, or even just learning who took the last of the cookies that Rikido had delivered to the hero agency. It was nice to know things, and he used it for good. Usually.