Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts the day Izuku’s great-great-great-insert more greats here-grandfather starts talking in his ear.

Hinokami Kagura, says the voice in Izuku’s head.

“Okay,” says Izuku, taking this new development in stride. Kacchan always said it was a miracle he wasn’t insane.

I’d highly recommend learning it before more people turn into demons, and before demons eat more people, because that’s what they do, and we should probably stop them, says the voice in Izuku’s head.

Demons aren’t real. That’s what Izuku would normally say, except the news has been absolutely wonderful recently, what with reports of man-eating villains snacking on civilians like people come a dime a dozen. Which, according to Izuku’s sense of morality, isn’t the case.

So Izuku wraps up his homework for the day, picks up his bag, and asks the voice in his head, “What now?”

There’s a long silence.

Then, the voice in Izuku’s head says, People call it ‘parkour’ these days, don’t they?

---

The resident expert on amateur parkour, Tokage Setsuna, is all too happy to indulge in Izuku’s lack of self-preservation.

“I’ve heard of Hinokami Kagura before,” Setsuna tells Izuku, to the surprise of both Izuku and the new resident in Izuku’s head.

“That’s cool,” says Izuku. “What is it?”

“It’s a style of swordsmanship, I think,” says Setsuna. She shoves the remaining half of her custard bun in her mouth and adds, “My trainer used to say she had a few swordsmen in her family. Along with entomologists and botanists, apparently.”

Izuku contemplates this. So does the voice in his head.

“I’m not a swordsman,” is what Izuku decides to say. “Or an entomologist. Or a botanist.”

Or a pharmacist, the voice in Izuku’s head provides.

“No, but you can sure as hell become one, can’t you?” says Setsuna.

Her smile is, as most people would put it, extremely unnerving and borderline unhinged.

---

Sneaking into the restricted section of the Musutafu University Library wasn’t the first thing Izuku would’ve thought of to, you know, become a swordsman, but Setsuna seems to think it’s a great idea, and two hours later, they’re camped out behind old shelves that smell like warm wood and bad ideas.

“Look here,” Setsuna says, breaking a half-hour silence. She spreads an old, laminated newspaper over the table, pointing to an old, laminated photo.

Izuku leans over to have a peak.

It’s a boy with a scar on his forehead and a blade on his hip. He looks awfully surprised, like he just discovered the existence of cameras, and the first pieces of oh no, I’m immortalized in the annals of history are beginning to fall together.

“It’s a boy,” Izuku says helpfully.

“It’s Kamado Tanjirou,” Setsuna elaborates. “A vigilante notorious for being ridiculously kind and empathetic. People said he’d cry as he cut heads off. And when he did anything else. Basically, he was always crying.”

The voice in Izuku’s head makes a sound of protest. Izuku translates.

“Kamado-san says that he’s sorry for freaking people out, but demons are hard to kill unless you cut their heads off,” Izuku tells Setsuna.

“Tell Kamado-san that he’s a grandpa, and he’s very irresponsible for throwing kids at man-eating monsters,” says Setsuna.

I’m really sorry, Kamado-san says sadly.

“Kamado-san says he’s sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” says Setsuna. “So, do we get swords now or something?”

---

“Not yet,” says Hatsume Mei, the resident nichirin bladesmith.

Setsuna makes a show of whining and draping over one of the many bean bag chairs in the lab. “Why not?” she asks, trying very hard to keep her hands to herself and failing.

“Because I need to take your measurements, of course!” says Mei, pulling a measuring tape from the depths of sleeves she doesn’t have. “Keep your hands to yourself, skippy girl, or your fingers will come right off,” she tells Setsuna, who appears to be preoccupied jabbing some sort of blade-in-a-box contraption.

“How do you even know how to make nichirin blades?” asks Izuku.

Hatsume grabs his arm and twists it in a way it shouldn’t be twisted. “Why, bloodline secrets, of course,” she declares proudly.

“Bloodline?”

“My aunt knows more than I do,” says Hatsume. “But I believe it has something to do with a swordsmith with a very bad temper and a penchant for threatening to stab his clients with kitchen knives!”

Oh no, Kamado-san mutters, and doesn’t elaborate.

“Runs in the family?” Setsuna asks casually.

“Things are more explosive these days,” is Hatsume’s chipper answer.

She stretches the measuring tape over Izuku’s torso. Izuku thinks it’s about time to ask why Hatsume is quartering him.

“Come back in two weeks,” Hatsume tells Izuku and Setsuna, gently hurling them out of her lab. “Then we can really get to business!”

---

Unsurprisingly, nobody in the current era has any idea how to perform any of the so-called breath techniques that Setsuna and Izuku painstakingly dug up from the restricted section.

“We’ll just have to figure it out ourselves,” Izuku declares.

“I’m still alive, you know,” Zing, Setsuna's personal trainer, shouts from across the gym.

Setsuna hits the mat with a resounding thud. “Ow,” she says. Then, “Maybe I’m way ahead of myself, but last time I checked, breathing doesn’t take too much practice.”

“Free diving,” Zing says blandly.

Setsuna thinks for a bit. “Point taken,” she relents.

“I’m sure I could dig something out of the old family records,” Zing tells Izuku once she’s done throwing Setsuna into a pit of foam blocks. “My great-great grandmother was trained by hell of an apothecary.”

“That sounds neat,” says Izuku.

Zing nods. “Shame she got herself melted into a flesh patty,” she sighs.

“The... apothecary, or your great-great-grandmother?”

“My great-great-grandmother couldn’t be killed by anything,” says Zing.

Kamado-san makes a sad sound.

Izuku decides it’s probably best not to ask.

As promised, Zing shows up the next day and hands Izuku a half-inch binder—one of those nice ones with the rubber corners—and says, “There you go. Six hundred years’ worth of Flower Breathing and its derivative forms.”

The binder is suspiciously light. “This is it?” Izuku asks, trying to be polite.

“Think of it as the physical embodiment of ‘easier said than done’,” Zing says cheerfully.

Setsuna slinks an arm around Izuku’s shoulder. Her smile is only slightly less maniacal than Zing’s. “It’s just breathing,” she says. “How hard could it be?”

---

“I have a few regrets,” says Setsuna. It comes out as a strangled half-wheeze, half-gasp.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” says Izuku, equally as winded.

“Those two people are weird,” says an innocent three year-old who wants to use the public park for its intended purpose.

“Don’t look at them,” her mother says quickly. “Let’s hurry home away from the scary people, alright?”

The two flee the scene quickly. It must be some kind of sign, now that they’re terrifying civilians and whatnot.

Izuku and Setsuna lie on the grass. It takes all of five minutes for them to wrangle their lungs into functioning somewhat normally.

“I,” Setsuna begins. Her voice collapses like a squeaky toy. “I think. I think. I’m thinking.”

Under normal circumstances, Izuku would have something snarky to say. Unfortunately, he’s too busy trying not to choke on air to implement any higher cognitive functions.

“I think,” Setsuna finally manages, “that this is harder than it seems.”

Izuku nods sadly.

A heave and a flop later, Setsuna is on her side and grinning at Izuku. “Well,” she says, “want to ask the old man for some tricks?”

Kamado-san doesn’t have a corporeal face, but Izuku swears he’s smiling as he says, Train to death.

---

Hatsume is maybe two seconds away from hot-gluing Izuku’s fingers to the hilt of his shiny new sword. It’s kind of terrifying, so Izuku takes a few steps back to move behind Setsuna.

“Nice colour,” Setsuna says happily. She admires her own sword with the joy of a four year-old with a pair of shears. “I’ve always liked blue.”

Hatsume’s head turns in a horrible way. “Water,” she says eagerly. Her voice isn’t layered in the whispers from the sixth dimension, but something about her evil genius aura gives that tangible feeling.

“Breath of Water, you mean?”

“Or a derivative form!”

“Taking the leap to step two is always more interesting than step one,” says Setsuna. She winks at Izuku. “Go big or go home, right?”

She gives her nichirin blade a cheerful twirl. The segments snap apart violently and clatter to the ground in a gravity-driven thunk-thunk-thunk.

Setsuna smiles. Izuku isn’t sure he likes that smile. He also isn’t sure if Setsuna has realized that the glorified stick in her hands is a weapon created to remove one’s head from their shoulders and, failing that, horribly disfigure and maim.

“No, no, that’s like building the roof before the foundations,” Izuku says quickly. “You can’t go home if your home is a floating roof.”

“Of course you can,” says Setsuna. “It’s just a special home.” Turning to the only person in the room with less common sense than herself, Setsuna asks Hatsume, “Am I right, or am I right?”

“You are so very right,” says Hatsume, in the same tone she would say, I revel in the fires of chaos.

Izuku sighs.

At the very least, the red of his own blade is a pretty colour.

Kamado-san adds a grumpy, Why is it so obvious now?

---

As much as Kamado-san wants to help, it’s kind of difficult to teach someone and be a voice in someone’s head at the same time.

You’ve got to put more oomph behind it, urges Kamado-san. You know, like wham! Boosh! Fwoosh! Ha-whoom! You know?

“He’s not helping, is he?” asks Setsuna.

Izuku sighs.

It’s not as difficult to manage once you get the image in your head, Kamado-san says desperately.

Izuku relays this information to Setsuna.

Setsuna looks very unimpressed from where she’s perched on top of the boulder, which, notably, is about twice Izuku’s height.

“Kamado-san is very sweet, and I appreciate his help, but I think we’re on our own here,” she says.

I’m sorry, mumbles Kamado-san.

“We love you very much,” Izuku makes sure to say.

“Couldn’t do anything without our old man,” says Setsuna.

Then they stare at the boulder that apparently has the ability to decide their fate, to make them into respectable potential demon slayers, all that fun stuff.

It’s the fault of the public education system, Izuku thinks, refusing to teach them trade skills like splitting giant rocks open with a sword and trying to cram fourteen ways to solve the intersection of two lines in his head instead.

Setsuna looks at Izuku.

“Have you tried taking a deep breath?” she says.

Izuku hurls his sheath at her.

---

It’s a small victory, but the day Setsuna sprints up to Izuku’s apartment with a fistful of loose papers and screeches, “Breath of the Serpent!” also happens to be the day Izuku gets a foot ahead in their efforts of becoming half-decent at Breath of the Flower, and it’s because Setsuna drops that botanical nonsense like she’s been allergic to it all along.

So Setsuna’s having a wonderful time twisting her arms in ways that definitely aren’t healthy, and Izuku almost knocks out his front teeth trying to pull off Sixth Form: Whirling Peach.

He gets to know a lot of trees that day on a more personal level than he’d like.

“You know,” Setsuna says one day, sat comfortably atop a boulder that still isn’t bisected, “maybe we’re missing that kick of adrenaline. You know?”

“This train of thought is chugging steadily into a ravine,” Izuku says carefully.

“It’s a ravine that ends in a split boulder.”

“And split skulls.”

“Maybe the real One Piece was the people we beat the shit out of along the way,” Setsuna says cheerfully.

She unsheaths her blade. It takes a half-flick of the wrist to send the segments clean through a tree, and the tree behind that one.

Izuku sighs and lets Kamado-san do his spiel of Wait, hang on, I thought you said brutalizing minors was looked down upon in this age! Then he unsheathes his own weapon and points all one of its pointy edges toward Setsuna.

“Here-a-we-go,” Izuku says, and hurls his sheath at Setsuna.

---

Kamado-san still won’t tell Izuku what Hinokami Kagura is.

He kindly explains that if Izuku were to try it out unprepared, every bone in his body would snap and his lungs would pop like sad little balloons. Which is basically what lungs are.

Oh well. Breath of the Flower is sure to warm up to Izuku sooner or later.

In the meantime, he’ll take that information and tuck it in his pocket for a bad day, when his lungs can be popped for a good cause.

---

It takes eight months of suffering and activities of questionable legality, but by the end of it all, Izuku and Setsuna have two split boulders under their belts.

They can’t even be smug about it, because a pair of mildly plastered demons wander into Their Clearing, which has been theirs for the better part of the aforementioned eight months and has thereby earned it the ability to instill the endowment effect on two very specific people.

“Okay, first of all, fuck off,” Setsuna says, and puts all eight of the segments of her sword through Demon A’s neck.

Demon B does his best to sober up. And by that, Izuku means he looks down at his decapitated friend.

“He wasn’t crumbling to ash last time I checked,” says Demon B.

“Funny how things work out,” says Izuku, replacing Demon B’s head with one of his cleaner executions of Fourth Form: Safflower Robe.

“You think it counts as murder if they’re demons?” asks Setsuna.

“Yes, but we have the moral high ground,” says Izuku.

“The moral high ground on the moral slippery slope, you mean.”

“I think we’re past the point of debating right and wrong,” says Izuku. He glances meaningfully down at the crumbling bodies.

That went so much better than it could’ve gone, Kamado-san says nervously.

Setsuna hops down from her bisected boulder. “Well,” she declares, “the city is plenty big, and there’s more than enough room for all of us, but as good, respectable, law-abiding citizens who generally frown upon murder and subsequent consumption of the corpses, we should go do our job and mop up the crowd.”

“That sounds unnervingly similar to ‘cull the herd’,” Izuku points out.

Please don’t be careless, begs Kamado-san. There aren’t any Hashira in this era, and if you two die, I’d cry miserably forever.

Setsuna’s reaction is to laugh. Which is rude, but also very in-character.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ve got Hatsume watching our backs, everywhere, always, my god is it terrifying, and pro heroes trying to slap cuffs on our little wrists at every other turn. What could go wrong?”

I don’t like that question, says Kamado-san.

“I don’t either,” Izuku agrees, “but here we are anyway.”

---

While Izuku enjoys his new uniform very much, he discovers quickly into their first official outing that he doesn’t like the prospect of his face on the Internet or on a mugshot.

Izuku whispers a quick apology and robs some innocent late night shopper of their bike helmet.

---

While "Headhunters" is an accurate nickname for a very literal job, Izuku can think of at least four alternatives that are less murdery.

“They couldn’t have gone with ‘Blooming Blade’?” grumbles Izuku. “And after all those anonymous tips. I sent fifteen anonymous tips. I pulled out every form that wouldn’t cause permanent damage to my eyes. I danced in front of—” Izuku checks the view count “—three point four million people. I danced,” he stresses.

Setsuna can’t meet his eyes.

Izuku stares.

“Setsuna,” he begins slowly, “you didn’t.”

Setsuna seems to have found some incredible revelation pertaining to her nails.

“Headhunters. We’re the Headhunters now. We might as well be called the I’ll Surgically Remove Your Head From Your Shoulders, Free of Charge duo, except not surgically, because neither of us have M.Ds.”

“Yet,” corrects Setsuna.

“The day either of us swear upon the Hippocratic Oath is the day we make a marching band out of the seven trumpets.”

“I like trumpets,” Setsuna says thoughtfully.

“Never mind,” says Izuku.

He sighs, folds the newspaper (actual print, something of a rarity these days, one out of every fifty bookstores carry them and nobody can remember how much the Musutafu Sun costs on weekends) and paper airplanes it into the recycling.

What’s wrong with ‘demon slayers’? Kamado-san asks helplessly.

“Absolutely nothing,” says Izuku.

“It sounds stupid!” cries Setsuna. “We’re demon slayers, but we’re demon slayers!” She makes a series of appalling ninja impressions, then says, “You know?”

It doesn’t sound stupid, says Kamado-san, horrified.

“You’ve hurt Kamado-san’s feelings,” Izuku tells Setsuna. “Now he’ll never forgive you.”

“You and I both know that Kamado-san’s crippling yet startlingly mature sense of empathy is above that,” says Setsuna.

My what?

“Don’t worry about it,” says Izuku, and that’s where they leave the conversation, because of course Demon A and Demon B wouldn’t get plastered without their drive home.

Izuku and Setsuna stare at Izuku’s window. Specifically, at the hairy thing with too many eyes and legs outside his window.

“Dude,” begins Setsuna, “you’re, like, five weeks late.”

“I get lost very easily,” Demon C says petulantly through the window. “And now I’m going to eat you brats, so sit still and die like, uh... good brats,” he finishes lamely.

Izuku hurls his sheath at the window.

---

“Do you think my insurance would cover window damages?”

“How about you stop throwing your dumb sheath at everything, and then we’ll talk?”

---

Of all pro heroes to support their cause, Izuku didn’t expect Eraserhead to be one of them.

He is unfortunately and fortunately correct.

“It’s not a quirk,” Izuku tells the poor sod, who looks like he needs to catch up on four years of sleep and has been combating that fact with caffeine pills and spite alone. “It’s breathing. I’m literally just breathing. Do you want me to stop breathing?” he demands. When Eraserhead glares at him like he’s murdered someone (which he has, technically, but what is someone, really), Izuku sniffs righteously and says, “Stop glaring at me!”

Eraserhead takes a deep breath.

“Breathing, yes, like that,” Izuku says eagerly. “Want to see me do it too?”

“No,” says Eraserhead.

The wraps around Izuku tighten. He grumbles.

“Okay,” Izuku relents. “But can you give my sword back? It was a custom commission.”

“There is no way in hell you’re getting your weapon back, you crazy, horrible murderkid,” Eraserhead says with disappointing finality.

Izuku huffs. Setsuna, damn her sneaky genius, snorts into her sleeve from the roof above.

Eraserhead looks up. Then he looks at Izuku.

With a single finger directed upward, he says, “Is that your friend?”

“Not right now, hell no,” says Izuku.

“Oh, fuck,” says Setsuna.

It’s great how Breath of the Flower is a derivative style of Breath of Water, which Kamado-san is awful at teaching. But this awful teacher happens to be a great person, and that’s how Izuku fanagles a shoddy but passable Fourth Form: Striking Tide out of hopes and dreams, or maybe just adrenaline.

Despite what poets might think, the magic of a sword isn’t the fact that a sharp knife cuts well regardless of who’s doing the cutting.

Sometimes magic swords are magic because the hands behind it are 1) extremely stressed, 2) startling young to be this competent at vigilantism, 3) specially trained in the long-lost forms of demon slaying, 4) still confused as to how “representations of skill” can materialize as actual flowers and water and goddamn snakes, 5) and hungry and broke, but not hungry or broke enough to get thrown in front of a bowl of cheap ramen and a handful of legal authorities.

The Third Form: Cruel Fangs that Setsuna drops on poor Eraserhead’s, uh, head, is an abrupt but effective way of introducing his chin to the pavement.

Eraserhead glares at Izuku like he just cut someone else’s head off again. The accusation in that look really is unfair.

“Run!” screeches Izuku.

“Yup, way ahead of you, running now,” Setsuna screeches back.

Oh no, Kamado-san says sadly.

---

“We should recruit some more minions to our cause,” Hatsume declares one bright and sunny day.

“That sounds like a horrible idea,” says Izuku from the couch.

“Aye,” voices Setsuna from the Gamer Chair. “There isn’t a single competent teacher in our jolly brigade. We’d end up getting some unlucky kid made into a demon’s liver paté.”

“Liver paté sucks,” says Izuku.

Aye, agrees Kamado-san. Not that I’ve ever had liver paté.

“Not this unlucky kid,” Hatsume says decisively.

She pulls up a startlingly high-quality image of a boy who reminds Izuku of Eraserhead, what with the nine rings of hell for eyebags and the spite.

“Have you been stalking him?” asks Izuku. Then he says, “Never mind. Don’t answer that. Why him?”

“My instincts told me so,” is Hatsume’s proud answer.

That somehow makes things even more horrifying.

---

“Don’t worry,” Izuku tells a wide-eyed Shinsou Hitoshi. “This is all covered by insurance. I checked.”

“Just get in,” Shinsou says miserably.

Izuku clambers in through the remnants of Shinsou’s bedroom window.

---

Hitoshi’s defense of common sense lasts about half a minute before Midoriya Izuku says, “Great. How do you feel about cutting off heads?”

It’s fuck-all in the morning. It could be fuck-all in the afternoon and it’d still be too early for this.

“What,” says Hitoshi.

“Hold this,” says Midoriya, shoving a sword in Hitoshi’s hands like the psycho he is.

Then he takes a few steps back, narrows his eyes, and scrutinizes Hitoshi like he’s contemplating where to hide the body.

“I don’t like that look,” Hitoshi says warrily.

“Mist,” Midoriya suddenly declares.

The unhelpful fairy in Midoriya’s ear is way too happy too add, “Oh! That would be exciting, considering the last one was bisected!”

“The last one was what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Midoriya fucking Izuku, with A Look in his eye.

---

Nothing beats someone into shape like a good, old-fashioned demon slayer training regimen. Except there’s nothing good or old-fashioned about the mess of a plan they’ve come up with, partly due to the fact that the surviving records all say something akin to train to death, and mostly because nobody in their merry band has any self-preservation.

It takes a full year to kick Shinsou into high gear. He isn’t very happy about it, but he seems marginally happier putting his sword through necks than he seems wasting away at home.

Whatever that says about him, it means he’s a damn fine demon slayer. Headhunter. Whatever.

The statistics of prospective heroes becoming vigilantes go up by one.

The police aren’t happy about it.

Izuku thinks they need to lighten up a bit.

Finding demons is a joke. And not those tasteful, late night stand-up comedy acts: no, finding demons is the metaphorical equivalent to that one man with an ego like a tumour who took philosophy in his first year of college for the sole purpose of playing devil’s advocate, and in doing so believes himself an authority on ethics, which makes for a bad night for everyone. You know, with the slurs and all.

Fighting demons is less of a joke. It would be like if that one man grew knives on every one of his six new arms and learned how to turn invisible.

Anyway.

You’d think that evil creatures who stalk the night and feast on human flesh would learn to be more subtle. If you turn around and the legacy behind you is that of classy vampires, suspiciously attractive were-beasts, and a whole assortment of refined supernatural entities, then you, as the successor, should, at the very least, aim to do your laundry once a week and iron out all the wrinkles.

The Vampire is not a vampire. She is a demon. And she certainly doesn’t do her laundry once a week, much less iron it.

Izuku takes care to avoid the blood puddles. He also takes care to avoid the Vampire’s knife hands.

“If you could please stop eating people,” says Izuku, “I would greatly appreciate that. We would all appreciate that.”

“But I like eating people,” the Vampire whines. “I’m hungry!”

“Ah, but the people who get eaten don’t appreciate that,” says Setsuna, nursing two broken ribs, a sprained ankle, but no dismembered limbs.

“Well, it’s not my fault that I eat people now,” the Vampire says defensively. She huffs, and the two groups split apart: demon slayers on one end of the alley, demon on the other.

Izuku stops to process her words.

“That’s curious,” he says. “Could you elaborate?”

“Well,” begins the Vampire, “imagine you’re minding your business, having a wonderful time draining the blood out of lovely folks, and then some shady guy comes up behind you and goes, wham!” She makes the gesture of a finger being inserted into somewhere it doesn’t belong, like a sternum. “You’re a demon now! Isn’t that annoying?”

“Why were you draining the blood out of lovely folks?” demands Shinsou.

“Because it’s fun,” the Vampire says brightly.

“I think the more relevant question is who the shady guy was,” says Setsuna.

Oh no, Kamado-san says, and not in his usual sad, worried tone.

This oh no directly translates into oh shit, this is bad, this is so bad, this is extremely bad.

Izuku translates. “Do you happen to know anyone by the name of Kibutsuji Muzan?” he asks.

The Vampire stares blankly. “Is he pretty?” she says. “More importantly, is his blood pretty?”

“That’s a big no,” Izuku tells Kamado-san.

Kamado-san sighs a big, deep breath of relief.

There’s a moral argument to be made in the fact that the Vampire seems more than happy to put their differences aside and discuss this in further detail. There’s an even bigger argument to be made in the fact that Izuku, Setsuna, and Shinsou are willing to slip that man-eating trait under the rug for the sake of progress. Which, really, all for the sake of progress, right?

It’ll come up eventually, says Kamado-san.

Izuku knows. He walks the four of them into the nearest convenience store anyway.

“So,” says the Vampire, equally pleased to be enjoying a wholesome meal of convenience store fried chicken and green tea as any human corpse, “you want to kill the big, bad mastermind, do you? I can help, you know. I’ve got a very sharp nose. And knife hands!”

“We’ve established that,” Shinsou says sadly to his own hands, because his face is buried in them.

“Taking out the root of our problems would be nice,” says Setsuna.

“Make life easier for all of us,” Izuku continues.

“Right,” the Vampire agrees. “Then I can go back to just nabbing blood and not the nasty bits that come with it.”

“You mean the body?” Izuku suggests helpfully.

“It doesn’t even taste good,” huffs the Vampire.

“Before we get all buddy-buddy,” says Setsuna, “can you promise to stop nabbing people off the street to, you know, eat?”

“But that’s what I have to do when I’m hungry,” the Vampire whines.

The three humans in the room glance at the empty box of chicken beneath the Vampire’s knife-hands.

“You’re sure about that?” asks Shinsou, in a tone of voice that implies he already has an answer.

The Vampire looks down. She ponders over her chicken bones for a moment.

“Huh,” she says thoughtfully.

Shinsou’s face sinks deeper into his hands.

The Vampire wipes her hands on a napkin. Then she brightens, turns to face Izuku with all of her pointy canines, and declares, “If you keep buying chicken for me every day, I’ll stop eating people, and I’ll also help you rip the head off the evil mastermind’s shoulders because I hate him.”

It’s as good as a deal they’re going to get. “Okay,” says Izuku, as they shake hands.

They send the Vampire off without asking her name. That would breach an emotional barrier, which is sort of awkward when you haven’t had the whole redemption-for-murdering-civilians talk yet.

That, begins Kamado-san, was... weird.

“Mm,” Izuku agrees easily.

“Have a nice night,” says the cashier in a tone of very tired.

---

There’s a day where Izuku decides to take a detour back home. There’s construction on the road, and as sketchy as the underpass looks, it would take all the devils in Hell and half of all the ones in Heaven to faze Izuku.

It isn’t a demon that pops out of the sewers. It’s an old-fashioned villain.

Izuku puts him in his place with a round of Fifth Form: Peonies of Futility. Then he scoops the sludge into his water bottle and delivers it to the police station.

He makes it home without any trouble.

---

Shinsou decides to apply for UA. Izuku and Setsuna don’t. They cheer him on anyway.

“You can do it!” says Izuku, throwing up a brilliant thumbs-up.

“How the hell did you get in here,” yells Shinsou.

Then Shinsou puts his whip-blade through three robots. Izuku and Setsuna duck out of the way of the explosion.

“Good luck!” Setsuna adds brightly, and Izuku pulls her behind a wall as a camera swings around to peer incredulously at Shinsou.

---

In a darkened room not so far away, two curious individuals will catch something strange while scrubbing through the footage.

Their thoughts, in order, will be as follows:

That boy is absolutely terrifying with a sword, and last time I checked, mist shouldn’t be able to make scraps out of the finest training bots on this side of the planet.

And, of course:

Those haoris look awfully similar to the ones worn by a few Headhunters I know.

The following thoughts will proceed in this order:

I need more coffee, on Aizawa Shouta’s part.

I have a few questions, on Headmaster Nedzu’s part.

---

With Shinsou sitting comfortably in Class 1-A, Izuku and Setsuna can comfortably weave in and out of UA and take full advantage of all those shiny facilities.

“No you can’t,” protests Shinsou. “They’ll figure you out and then we’re all screwed!”

“Nobody will be able to tell,” says Setsuna.

“The katsudon here is really good,” Izuku adds.

“Please stop eating when I’m trying to yell at you,” Shinsou begs.

Izuku shovels another mouthful of katsudon into his cheeks.

It isn’t exactly despair that hangs over Shinsou’s face, but it’s something impressively close.

Bakugou Katsuki chooses that exact moment to wander furiously past their table. There’s no particular reason that he’s angry, Izuku thinks as their eyes meet. It’s not that Kacchan likes being angry—he just likes to be bigger and better than everyone else, and being angry all the time gives you the winning hand in being louder than everyone else.

“Deku?” Kacchan says disbelievingly. And also furiously.

By the time Kacchan blinks again, Izuku and Setsuna are happily relocated on the floor above.

---

Senior high is underwhelming. Izuku and Setsuna end up in a school across the city from UA, where they consistently compete for everything from the highest grades to the best time in the 100 meter sprint.

If the labs are ever on fire, it’s because of Midoriya Izuku and Tokage Setsuna. Without fail. Always. It’s always them. Why is it always them?

The entire school population is rightly terrified of both of them.

The kendo club gets a major revamp when Setsuna takes over as president. They are no longer allowed to participate in regional tournaments for fear of someone getting dismembered. The school council expresses its disappointment, then quickly falls silent when each of the club members land internships at notable heroics agencies.

Izuku takes the reigns of the After-School Science Society. By the time two weeks have passed, they’re being interviewed by six different news outlets about the applications of wisteria poison in nutritional science.

Baffling, is all anyone can say about Midoriya Izuku and Tokage Setsuna.

Nobody asks any questions when Izuku and Setsuna join the Journalism Club. It’s better to let the machinations of higher beings go undisturbed, or so the logic goes.

Later on, the Journalism Club will earn commendations from the mayor, the Head of Police, and some of the most respected heroics agencies in the country for its work into the developing Man-Eating Villains case.

When asked how they came across such compelling information into these elusive (and soon to be dead) criminals, each and every member of the club will refuse to look their interviewer in the eye, wring their hands nervously, radiate the energy of someone who is deeply terrified, and clear their throat.

“Well,” they’ll say, “it’s just good journalism.”

Izuku and Setsuna are never interviewed.

---

“We’re heading to USJ for a training exercise,” Shinsou tells Izuku, Setsuna, and Hatsume, because confidentiality among vigilantes doesn’t exist when it’s the confidentiality of others you’re breaching.

Normally, this sort of important information is best relayed at a time that isn’t three in the morning. For the current inhabitants of the lab, however, common sense is just as lacking no matter how early or late it is.

The existence of energy drinks is a curse for everyone in the room. One can make the argument that something without a conscience cannot, by itself, be an executor of ill will; Izuku would disagree and say that temptation exists in all shapes and forms, with energy drinks ranking somewhere near the ten cruelest ones.

“What?” says Izuku. “You—USJ, training exercise... what was that?” He tries to sit up and falls off the couch.

Shinsou sighs.

“Ooh, USJ,” says Setsuna, from somewhere across the room. She doesn’t sound very coherent. “Zing mentioned it before. Real cool place. Lots of fire. Lots of water. Lots of—” she tries to wave her hand dismissively and smacks Hatsume in the face “—lots of, I don’t know, everything. Anything.”

“Sounds like Disneyland,” Hatsume grumbles.

“My point is,” says Shinsou, “my point is. My point. I had a point. What was my point?”

“Disneyland?” suggests Setsuna.

“No, no, it was something smart. Something big-brain.”

“Disneyland is big-brain,” insists Setsuna. “It’s got—it has trivia. Trivia games.”

Shinsou’s eyes narrow in deep thought. “Does it?”

“Sure it does. About all the princesses and everything. Worldbuilding. Even the sequels,” Setsuna adds with disgust. “Sequels. Who needs them? We should just... I dunno. Watch Moana again.”

“I like Moana,” says Izuku.

“Me too,” Shinsou agrees. Then he smacks his hand on an empty Red Bull can and says, “USJ! I was talking about USJ.”

Setsuna brightens. “Disneyland,” she says dreamily.

“No, I mean, you should come with,” says Shinsou. He immediately processes the ramifications of this suggestion and puts his head in his hands.

There’s a moment of sleep-deprived silence.

“I like it,” Hatsume declares. She raises her fist in the air. “Invasion of privacy is always fun!”

“We aren’t invading anyone’s privacy,” says Izuku. “We’re just invading USJ’s privacy. That doesn’t count. Does it?”

“Sure it does, but we don’t care,” says Setsuna.

“So it’s all Shinsou’s fault then.”

“Why is it my fault?” demands Shinsou. “Why are we assuming that something’s going to go horribly wrong already?”

“Because it’s you,” says Setsuna.

“Because it’s us,” Izuku adds helpfully.

“Why am I in a computer,” says a voice that is approximately half an octave higher than usual and is italicized to demonstrate shock and not immateriality.

All four corporeal beings in the room turn to the nearest monitor in the room.

Kamado Tanjirou’s face stares back at them helplessly in crisp, 8K resolution.

“Oh my god,” says Shinsou.

His eyes roll back into his head. Whether it was the shock or the exhaustion that did it, God's work is being done. There’s a quote there about determinism and whatnot. Izuku can’t knock his head right to remember it.

Hatsume bolts over to the monitor. Kamado-san lets out a loud scream.

“How did you become an AI,” demands Hatsume, more eager than furious. “How did you get in my invincible servers? Which filthy ones and ohs did you crawl through to get into my files?”

“I have no idea what ones and ohs you’re talking about,” cries Kamado-san.

Izuku stumbles his way over to the monitor.

Kamado-san stares helplessly at him. He stares back.

Izuku says, “Do you think we could put him in a robot?”

Hatsume’s eyes do a terrible backflip.

Kamado-san shrinks back, trips over three windows, and closes two tabs.

---

By the time the villains have crawled through their godforsaken portals, Izuku has removed three heads from their respective shoulders.

“Don’t mind me, demon slayer coming through,” shouts Izuku.

“It’s a Headhunter!” a good portion of the students screech. “Oh my god, he’s going to cut our heads off!”

Izuku doesn’t have the time or the energy to correct that misconception. He listens very, very carefully every time a villain tries to put their fist through his face, and if Kamado-san says, “That’s it! That’s the sound!” then it’s curtains down, Second Form: Plum Spirit, and onto the next sorry demon waiting in line.

It turns out that the hero kids are more capable than Izuku anticipated. They scream a whole bunch, but that means they’re not dead.

“Handy guy seems like he hasn’t showered in two years,” Setsuna says brightly. “Should we beat him up?”

Then the Noumu makes a great big show of roaring and smashing the ground and being generally more intimidating than crusty hand man.

“Okay, never mind, walnut brain comes first,” says Setsuna.

---

It’s the first time Izuku has actually, really, truly seen his life flash before his eyes.

Setsuna and Shinsou have most certainly seen better days. Eraserhead’s shouting something. It goes in through one ruptured eardrum and out the other.

Kamado-san no longer lives in Izuku’s head.

It sure sounds that way, though.

“Breathe, Izuku!”

---

In a world not unlike this one, Izuku would say that it only makes sense that power is passed on and stockpiled. Memories and power are practically hot-glued together anyway, so if a few slip through every now and then, there’s nothing to worry about.

---

If nothing else, make sure this kagura and these earrings are passed down to you uninterrupted.

That’s what I promised.

---

Izuku still doesn’t know what Hinokami Kagura is.

Well, he thinks as he sets his blade and his heart ablaze, I’m always up for a spot of interpretive dancing.

---

It’s not exactly a success, but it’s a victory, and that counts for something.

“Let’s count,” says Izuku. The ceiling spins above him. “Okay,” he repeats, trying not to throw up. “Okay. Let’s start with ribs.”

“Two ribs,” wheezes Setsuna.

“Three,” says Shinsou.

“Izuku has four,” says Kamado-san, who sounds like he’s two minutes away from a nervous breakdown.

“Fingers?”

“Just a pinky, I think.”

“Left hand’s out of the equation.”

“I can’t feel any of mine,” Izuku says, mildly concerned.

“Your fingers are alright,” provides Kamado-san.

“Oh. What’s next?”

“Toes?” suggests Setsuna.

“If you can feel anything from your torso down, you’re more of a monster than the one we just took out,” Shinsou says flatly.

They all try wiggling their toes. Nobody can offer any conclusive feedback.

It takes all of five minutes for the baby heroes to waddle over to where they’re collapsed on the ground.

“Are you alive?” asks a frog girl.

Izuku breathes in a bit too deep. He coughs, and a bit of blood insists on coming with it.

The baby heroes immediately react like he’s dying, which he kind of is, but not to a degree that justifies that much panic.

“Go stand over there,” Setsuna eventually says, gesturing toward the entrance. “Let a couple of critically injured vigilantes breathe, will you?”

“Your lung is punctured,” screeches a pink-haired alien girl.

“Yes, yes,” Setsuna says dismissively. “I’ll deal with it. Now shoo! Away you go! And for the love of god, someone go make sure that Eraserhead’s neck isn’t broken.”

The panic circle shifts over to Eraserhead. The poor man’s unconscious and Izuku can feel his annoyance shift into something embarrassing, like worry, or pride.

So there they are, three vigilantes and the ghost-slash-spirit of one of Izuku’s distant ancestors.

“I wonder where those earrings went,” says Izuku.

“What earrings?” asks Shinsou.

“Those hanafuda ones,” says Izuku. He tries to point to his ears and remembers that his body has been on strike for the past ten minutes. “The ones Kamado-san has,” he tries instead.

“Maybe your dad ate them,” Setsuna says with a grin. “He has a fire quirk, right? Imagine he just... got hungry one day—”

“And ate his bloodline’s century-old heirlooms?” Shinsou finishes blandly.

“It was just a funny idea.”

Kamado-san is strangely silent. If there’s something he’s not saying, Izuku isn’t going to grill him about it. Talking kind of hurts.

By the time all three of them are unconscious, the pro heroes are breaking down the door and All Might’s tripping over the beginning of his whole I am here thing.

---

Kamado Tanjirou certainly isn’t young, not in this era, and the last time he was helpless, he was thirteen, cold from frostbite and warm from blood that wasn’t his.

That’s what he tells himself, at least.

---

Midoriya Izuku wakes up to a room occupied by himself, a disembodied spirit, and a detective.

Needless to say, the first thing Izuku does when he wakes up is sigh into his hands.

“Good morning,” says the detective.

“Good morning,” says Izuku.

“And good morning to you as well, Kamado-san.”

Izuku sighs louder.

“Good morning,” says Kamado-san. He takes a deep breath and sighs using it. It’s just one of those days. “We... have a lot to talk about. Don’t we?”

“You could say that,” answers the detective.

Izuku rolls his shoulders.

“Then let’s get it going,” he says. “And you had better not have scrapped my sword. That was a commission piece, you know?”