Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise."
-The Beatles

Chapter One

He spins on his heal, kicking the villain’s knee with a sickening crunch. The first villain hasn’t even hit the ground before he’s punching another one in the face. The scent of rotten garbage permeates the air as one man takes on ten in a fight that has lasted three times as long as it should’ve.

His muscles ache as he dips and dodges. He takes blows gracelessly and barely manages to get back up again. At least two bones in his body are broken and Izuku knows he’s not going to last much longer.

“You’re a feisty one,” a tall man with pale skin and a hideous teal top hat remarks from where he stands back watching the fight like the ringmaster at a circus. “He told me this would be an easy fight.”

Izuku doesn’t respond, he wouldn’t even if he was capable. His breaths are sharp and panicked and he’s slowing down. He’s down to his last two support items, backup isn’t coming, and…

He’s going to die here.

He’s going to die in an alleyway, three hours from home, and surrounded by villains. He’s going to die because he’s alone and there is no backup coming because his backup is already dead. The realization doesn’t come as a surprise, really, he knew he was going to die at some point. It still hurts though. It aches, but he hopes this means he’ll finally get to see his family again.

“Ah, I see you’ve realized what’s going to happen,” The man laughs, a cruel sounding thing that sends a shiver down Izuku’s spine. It makes him feel like a bug. “Good, then. This will be so. Much. Easier.”

The man steps forward and Izuku tries to dodge. He steps to the side, but his foot slips and he falls to the ground with a harsh cry as his head connects with the pavement. The last thing he sees before his vision fades to black is a pale bony hand reaching for his face.

He didn’t stand a chance against this guy. No one did.

***
Izuku wakes up slowly, blinking his eyes at the light streaming in from a window to find himself in his childhood bedroom. It takes a minute for the realization to sink in before his eyes start to water and he has to force himself to hold back his tears.

He can’t cry. Crying is dangerous, it could lead the enemy to his location and then he’d end up dead. He’s spent too long surviving to die because he couldn’t stop himself from crying at the sight of an All Might poster on beige walls.

Except… he’s already dead, isn’t he?

He wonders if this is heaven. Would his heaven be his childhood bedroom?

He’s not sure.

His childhood hadn’t been great, in fact, no point in his life could even be considered good ever since he turned four and was diagnosed quirkless as if it was some kind of a disease. It may as well have been, considering the way people treated him.

He had coasted through life—barely—until the rise of the League of Villains during his final year of high school. Izuku had been stupid-lucky to survive as long as he had. There had been a steep learning curve once he realized he had done himself no favors by wallowing in self-pity while heroes were dying in the streets every day.

The past ten years had consisted of one devastating day after another with no break in between. He’d watched his own mother die and had buried every person who had ever supported him. He’d watched cities fall and had been unable to do anything to save the people who lived there.

Izuku had survived like a cockroach just to watch society fall.

He’d fought alongside former Pro Heroes and watched them die one by one. Too insistent on relying on their quirks to realize that they would be their downfalls.

“Fuck.”

Izuku sits up in bed, his eyes finally dry and his body suspiciously ache free. “Where the fuck am I?”

That isn’t his voice.

“What the fuck?” He sounds like a child. He’s not supposed to sound like a child. His shoulder should be tight with pain, and he shouldn’t be able to move his mouth without the familiar tug of the scar that runs from his left ear to his chin.

There isn’t a mirror in his room, so Izuku stands from the bed and slowly makes his way to the door. He isn’t sure what’s happening, but Izuku has never let that stop him before.

He opens the door to his room slowly, peering into the hallway to find it empty. He’s not sure if he’s alone in the apartment but he doesn’t want to risk running into anyone if he isn’t alone.

The layout is exactly as he remembers it, thankfully. The bathroom is across the hallway from his room so Izuku darts across the hall and closes the door, careful to not let the old hinges creak.

He doesn’t turn immediately, dreading what he’s going to see when he does. Izuku is fairly certain he knows what’s going on but sometimes having confirmation is worse than guessing the truth.

Izuku takes a deep breath. Then another. And a third before he turns to the mirror and finds his fourteen-year-old self staring back. It’s strange to say the least.

He runs his hands down his face and grimaces. He kind of misses the stubble that he’d struggle to grow in his early twenties. He’s still got baby fat on his cheeks and his arms are so thin Izuku’s pretty sure a strong gust of wind could break them.

“This is… I don’t like this,” Izuku whispers to himself, reaching out to the mirror cautiously, like he expects his reflection to jump out at him.

It doesn’t, the mirror simply feels cool on his fingertips and no ripples magically appear, distorting his image.

He’s still his fourteen-year-old self. No longer the twenty-eight-year-old man that he had been.

“Izuku?”

The familiar and haunting voice of his mom—his mom—breaks Izuku out of his thoughts and back into reality, whatever that means for him now. Maybe, if his mom is here, that means that this is his heaven, and Izuku can finally rest now.

He thinks that he deserves it after all he's been through.

“Honey, you okay?” Two short raps on the door and then it swings open slowly revealing a kind chubby face with familiar worried green eyes.

“Mom,” Izuku whispers and then he’s moving before his mind can catch up with his body and throwing his arms around his mom’s waist.

“Izuku, love, what’s wrong?” Inko asks, shakily wrapping her arms around Izuku’s shoulders. “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”

Izuku shakes his head, burrowing deeper into his mom’s embrace. He may be a not-so-grown adult, but he would never be too old for a hug from his mother.

“Was it a nightmare?” Inko gently rubs Izuku’s back for another moment before pulling back to look Izuku in the eyes.

Izuku missed those eyes more than he could say. The last time he’d seen Inko, his mom had been covered in scars and fighting for her life. She’d died years ago but now she’s standing right in front of him, exactly like he remembers her from his childhood.

“Not a nightmare,” Izuku says, his voice strained. “Just missed you.”

Inko regards him carefully for a moment before shaking her head softly.

“Silly goose,” Inko says, her voice light with laughter. “Breakfast is ready when you are.”

“Thanks mom,” Izuku says, though he doesn’t want to let her walk away. He wants to hold her close and never let her go again because the last time he let her walk away he never saw her alive again. “Wait mom!”

“What is it?” Inko asks, startled as she turns around.

“Can we… Can we do a movie night tonight?”

“Of course, darling,” Inko agrees easily before she heads to her own room to get ready for the day.

Izuku doesn’t know what’s happening right now, but he’s going to have a movie night with his mom, so he’s not sure it really matters.

***

It’s not until a few weeks later that he finally processes that he’s not only alive, but nearly fifteen years in the past.

He cries that night, sobs into his pillow loud enough and long enough that his mom calls off work without telling him and they get to have a nice little spa day while watching all the All Might anime Izuku used to love as a child.

He still loves it. In fact, he’s pretty sure he loves it more now that he can appreciate what it’s like to not have ready access to his favorite things.

The future had been… rough to say the least.

It was a place where things like crying would get you dead—either from the sound or the smell attracting unwanted visitors. Now he gets to sob his heart out and the only consequence is a headache and a mound of tissues that he now has to clean up. (and his mom is there to give him hugs after. It’s nice).

A small part of Izuku wants to continue as though nothing has changed. As though he’s still a regular fourteen year old and not full-grown man with enough PTSD to keep a therapist in business for life.

That part of him is very small though. He watched the end of civilization and died. He watched his family die. There is no way he can ignore this second chance.

This chance to get it right.

Not that he knows what to do. How are you supposed to go about changing the future when to the rest of the world your a quirkless child—a burden on society?

Izuku doesn’t know the answer to that question but he’s not about to let that stop him. He’s faced tougher odds than this and lived to tell the tale. Now he’s got a roof over his head, warm food for three meals a day, and his mom is still alive.

Who cares that he doesn’t have a quirk? It’s not like having one did anyone else any good.

***
He starts a new routine—well, an old new routine. In the future that Izuku refuses to let happen, Izuku turned Dagobah beach into a salvation for the hunted and the hungry. Since the community was mostly made up of other quirkless rejects like him, the villains hadn’t cared enough to do anything.

That changed when Izuku started making powerful allies, but that’s neither here nor there (and it never will be anywhere if Izuku has anything to say about it).

His new routine has him running to Dagobah every morning to clean up the beach. He figures that not only is it good strength training, but it’s also a testament to his resolve to change the future. Afterall, if the beach isn’t filled with trash then that mean’s it’s not going to be The Beach which also means it’s not going to get decimated by the league.

It’s a win in Izuku’s books.

So he runs to the beach every morning and he cleans and he maybe sets aside a few valuable pieces of technology to turn into the support items he’d built in the future. (Afterall, he wouldn’t have survived without them. At this point the fact that he felt more secure with a small taser in his pocket was irrelevant. He’d been through hell, he deserved this small piece of comfort).

The summer passes and soon Izuku is suppose to be returning to school except… he really doesn’t want to. He’d been to school already—been there, done that, not even his mom could make him go back.

Except, Midoriya Inko is a force to be reckoned with and so they came to a compromise: Izuku could take classes online only if he also took self defense classes. (A win/win for his mom, since she was already constantly worried about her baby’s safety).

They end up deciding on a dojo run by a friend of his mom’s coworker who teaches anyone who can pay—regardless of quirk or age—how to fight with Escrima rods. He apparently studied the Balintawak Cuentada System of Arnis in the Philipines (despite being American) and had decided on Japan since he thought the heroes here were cool.

Izuku couldn’t disagree with that, even if a lot of his hero worship had faded.

Eliot Kane was a simple man with a simple life, except he apparently held an unfathomable amount of knowledge, considering his quirk allowed him to immediately memorize every book he touched.

Eliot—“Mr. Kane makes me feel old, kid”—is someone that Izuku would have liked to grab a beer with (if he were still legally allowed to do so). He doesn’t care that Izuku is quirkless. He’s as hard on him as he is on all of his students.

“My quirk gives me the ability to memorize a book by touching it,” Eliot had laughed when Izuku questioned his decision (the cost of insurance involved when training quirkless people was the reason most gyms had banned them in the first place). “It's useless in a fight but I can recommend some good reads for you. As long as you’re here to train hard and your mom keeps paying, I don’t give a damn about quirks. I’m just legally required to ask.”

So Izuku had started training with Eliot and kept up his running and beach cleaning routine on the days that he wasn’t training. It wasn’t easy work, far from it as muscles that Izuku forgot he had ached and his body groaned every time he tried to move.

But it was worth it.

It was so worth it.

***

Bakugou Katsuki is, was, and always will be an important part of Izuku’s life. Even when Izuku hated him he still admired him. It was annoying at times, how much of an impact that one reckless kid had on Izuku.

It wasn’t like Kacchan didn’t make his hatred for Izuku well known.

Except it wasn’t really hatred for Izuku.

It was a lot of things that teenaged Bakugou didn’t know how to express until he was twenty and his mother had been targeted by the league for the third and final time and he realised that the people he loved wouldn’t be around forever.

Not that he loved Izuku, more tolerated than anything. But the point stands. Bakugou realized he was a shithead and he’d tracked Izuku down, fought a villain with him, and apologized.

It was sweet in the way that black licorice is considered a candy even though it’s bitter as fuck.

But it meant a lot to Izuku and he cherishes the memory, even if that Kacchan is not the same one that Izuku runs into when he’s almost fifteen (for the second time—ugh).

Ever since he started training with Eliot, Izuku’s mom has allowed him more and more freedom. She’d never been controlling, just concerned. But now Izuku gets to wander through the city during the day (when his homework is done) and watch hero fights. All he has to do is check in with her every couple hours and make it home for dinner at six.

It’s nice to be a kid again. To not have to worry about the impending doom of the world (in the immediate, he’s still concerned but he’s biding his time—after all, who’s going to trust a fourteen year old nobody yelling about the inevitable death of the country if one teenaged gamer that doesn’t legally exist isn’t taken down—there’s probably something to be said about the moral dilemma of putting someone in jail who hasn’t committed a crime yet).

So he watches hero fights and takes notes in a code that he’d developed in the future after a villain had discovered one of his notebooks and used it to kill a pro hero. Izuku still has nightmares about it but as with everything else in his life he’s just kept moving forward.

He starts to develop a fighting style that even Eliot approves of and with that comes a confidence that even twenty-eight year old Izuku never had.

And it’s with this newfound confidence that he runs into Kacchan.

Quite literally.

***

He’s walking home from a hero fight, organizing his thoughts so that he can write his observations down in his notebook later. He’s got ideas on how he could have taken down the villain (a purse snatching gone wrong leading to the villain losing control of their quirk—it would have been a routine takedown for an older Izuku but he’s not nearly at his older-self’s strength yet).

So he’s not paying attention where he’s going at all when he bumps into something warm and solid—not a pole—and falls flat on his ass with a wince.

It would have been more embarrassing if the person he ran into hadn’t also fallen.

“You wanna fight?” the voice is familiar but Izuku can’t quite place it until he looks up into familiar red eyes.

“Kacchan?”

“Fucking, Deku,” Kacchan snarls, standing up to tower over Izuku. “Of course it is. You disappear from school but now you’re fucking here to ruin everything as soon as I start thinking I’m never going to see your sorry ass anymore.”

“You’ve been looking at my ass?” Izuku asks dumbly, startling both Kacchan and himself with his response. He’s still sitting on the ground and at this point he doesn’t really want to move.

He doesn’t take it back, though. Even when Kacchan lets off a warning blast.

“What the actual fuck?”

“You’re the one who said it,” Izuku protests, ignoring both the quirk use and the righteous fury in Kacchan’s tone. He takes a deep breath and then repeats with an almost perfect impression. “I’m never going to see your sorry ass anymore.”

“That’s not what I fucking meant and you fucking know it.”

“Well, what did you mean?”

“Why the fuck are you here?”

Izuku glances over at the building next to them, the one they used to both live in before the Bakugou’s had bought a house nearby. He glances back at Kacchan with a small smile.

“I live here, Kacchan.”

“I know that, dumbass. Where the fuck have you been?”

“Why?” Izuku asks. “Did you miss me?”

Kacchan aims a blast at Izuku’s head which he easily dodges, rolling to the side and jumping into a crouch that makes it easier to run if he needs to.

This Kacchan hasn’t figured out that he’s an asshole yet.

Izuku has to dodge another blast, which places him with his back against a wall and no where to run.

Not that he’s planning on it. Not yet.

No, Izuku waits for Kacchan to try again and instead of dodging he steps toward Kacchan and slips his shoulder under his arm. He has the satisfaction of watching Kacchan’s eyes widen as he twists his body to toss his childhood friend over his shoulder.

“I’ve been learning how to do that,” Izuku says before he spins on his heals and sprints into his apartment building, leaving a pissed off Kacchan behind.

Chapter Text

The thing about being fourteen again is that even if you have the memories of an extra fourteen years of life, you still have to deal with fourteen-year-old drama. (Which he’s sure his mom is super happy with. It’s not his fault his body and his brain can’t agree on a sleep schedule and he’s perpetually grouchy as a result).

Not to say that he doesn’t act mature for his age but well, he’s always been “mature for his age” —a therapist would probably conclude that it’s because of the trauma that he’s been through, but that’s not relevant right now.

Now he’s impulsive and stupid and he may have the memories of a twenty-eight year old, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.

For the most part, he feels like a kid again.

It’s weird and he doesn’t like the juxtaposition between knowing what’s going to happen and worrying about mundane things like finishing his homework on time or remembering to take the trash out before his mom gets home.

It’s fine though, he’d rather be here than anywhere or anytime else.

But then there are time that being impulsive comes back to bite him in the ass.

He doesn’t even realize he’s a vigilante at first. It happens on accident after many sleepless nights (if he did a study, he’s pretty sure he’d find that most vigilantes become vigilantes on accident, at least at first).

For years now, Izuku would walk around at night when he couldn’t sleep. At first it started as a patrol, a reassurance that The Beach was safe while everyone slept, but over time it grew to be a comfort.

So after tossing and turning for the third night in a row, Izuku decides to keep that habit.

He throws on an oversized hoody, grabs his phone, and goes on a walk only to be interrupted by an attempted mugging.

***

The alleyway is dark, reminding him of the one he’d been in when Shigaraki’s henchman had taken him down. Izuku quickly pushes that thought away before picking up a discarded PVC pipe and knocking the criminal over the head. Not enough to take him down, but enough to distract him from the victim.

“Run!” Izuku commands as the criminal, a stocky man with rotting teeth and a grotesque smile, turns to face him. He drops the pipe, falling into a defensive fighting stance as he waits for the man to make the first move.

He doesn’t know his opponents quirk so he has to play it safe. Keep his distance until he can get the drop on Rotty or until someone else notices and calls the police or steps in. He’s not an idiot, he knows he’s at a disadvantage here.

In the future, Izuku fought with support items. Rarely—especially after the two years at Dagobah—did he get caught without something to defend himself with. He’d just have to continue doing the same thing here.

Luckily, he was already working on a few items from the scavenged parts at the beach.

Now, however, he needs to focus on the fight or he’s going to die before anything really gets fixed, which would be a tragedy he doesn’t even want to think about. To survive all that he had, only to fall here against a man who clearly doesn’t know how to fight properly.

He dodges each hastily thrown punch, keeping Rotty off balance and using the man’s bulk to his advantage. He doesn’t fight back, he only runs. Izuku is very well versed in the laws, he knows that since he’s not using a quirk he couldn’t be charged with anything but he still doesn’t want to fight until he at least knows what the other man’s quirk is.

And hey, getting the wanna be thug arrested for public quirk use on top of attempted assault? That would definitely be nice.

“You fucking pipsqueak!” the man snaps when he accidentally punches the wall of the alley instead of Izuku. “I’m gonna kill you!”

“Oh, you’re going to add attempted murder to your list of charges, huh?” Izuku taunts, stepping closer to the street. He doesn’t want to take this fight to the road since there are still too many people about and if this man has an offensive quirk then all of them are in danger. “Sounds a bit risky there, Rotty-san.”

Izuku has already figured that the man has an emitter type quirk, seeing as there are no mutations and the man clearly doesn’t have a mental quirk. The only question is what is it. He hasn’t been able to find any hints on the man’s body or in his fighting style, if the way the man punches can even be called fighting.

The man also has some type of control, considering he hasn’t used his quirk yet.

“Fucker,” The man grunts before suddenly pulling back and oh shit.

He has an explosive emitter type quirk.

Damn.

Izuku dodges the attack and uses the destruction to cover his escape onto the street. Keeping a quirk like that contained in the alley is going to bring down buildings. At least on the streets it will—hopefully—alert a hero or the police to an altercation in the area.

Though, to be fair, not many heroes or police patrol the area.

Huh. Izuku might want to think about that later.

“Hey Rotty-Mc-Rotterface!” Izuku calls once he’s situated on the street.

The man roars and runs after him. Izuku dodges another attack—a ball that explodes on contact—before darting under the man’s defenses and socking him in the jaw.

He misses his adult body.

After a growth spurt in his last year of high school Izuku finally reached the height of his dad at two meters tall. Later, once the war started, he had put on more muscle and a single punch was enough to knock out most of his non-mutation type opponents.

Now, it barely affected Rotty. Instead, the man looked angrier as he attempted to land a punch on Izuku again. Izuku ducks under the punch and backs away from Rotty, looking for something he could use to augment his lack of strength—Sure, he’s gotten stronger in the last year but he is still only fourteen.

There! On the ground a few meters from the alley is a pipe that must have been dislodged from the building in the blast.

Izuku sprints towards it and manages to scoop the pipe up right before the man attacks again, this time catching Izuku in the blast. He keeps a tight grip on the pipe and uses his left arm to roll, ignoring the pain as loose debris scrapes his skin.

“Yo, Rotty!” Izuku yells, settling into an offensive stance that he learned from Eliot. “You gonna fight me like a man, or what?”

With that, Izuku charges, he doesn’t give the man a chance to react as he swings the pipe, hitting the back of his knees as he runs past before spinning and hitting the side of the man’s neck, where a pressure point lies, and downing him.

Quickly, Izuku checks the man’s pulse, relieved to find one. He’d really rather not become a murderer before he even reaches high school, thank you very much.

After confirming that the man will—most likely—live, Izuku tears a strip from Rotty’s shirt before using it to tie the man’s hands behind his back. Then, he finds the man’s phone and uses it to call into the police before leaving the scene.

It doesn’t slip his notice that no heroes had shown up.

It was only supposed to be a one time thing. Except he keeps going out. And he keeps getting involved in incidents.

And then he starts to do it intentionally.

And now he’s a vigilante.

***
For the past month, Izuku has gone out three nights a week on a pseudo-patrol of his neighborhood. Occasionally, he ventures further away so that he’s not getting attached to a specific area.

He has a costume of sorts now—a red and dark gray hoody that he found at a thrift store, a fanny pack, and dark blue joggers. He buys a new pair of shoes—his regular red ones are too recognizable and he doesn’t want to stop wearing them during the day.

Izuku continues to use the metal pipe that he had used in that first encounter. He hadn’t even realized he was still holding it until he was climbing back through his apartment window.

The sweatshirt has the wings of a crow embroidered on the back, so that becomes his moniker as he gains some type of notoriety in his neighborhood.

He doesn’t mind the name, in fact he quite likes it. He almost wishes he knew who gave him the name so he could thank them for not giving him a stupid one

Crow patrols the street three nights a week, though those nights vary. He keeps the town safe(r) and does it all with a metal pole and his fanny pack full of small support items.

Izuku also wears a face mask with his hood up but he’s working on revamping a motorcycle helmet he found at the dump (and cleaned!) so that he can hide his identity better. He hasn’t run into any heroes yet but he’s not counting on his luck to continue.

Most nights are quiet, but he does stop the occasional attempted robbery or assault.
It’s nothing like the days he used to spend fighting against villains who had been enhanced by trigger.

And he sleeps better on the nights that he does go out, which is a bonus that he hadn’t been expecting either.

His mom comments on the difference in his attitude lately and Izuku lets her think that it’s because he’s finally settled into a new routine, which is true but not in the way she thinks.

Eliot has also moved Izuku into a more advanced class, considering how quickly he has improved, and Izuku is now sparring regularly with some high school students from the neighborhood. They also know that Izuku is quirkless and don’t seem to care.

It’s stupid how much this upsets him. Izuku had to go through literal hell to find people—five of them!—who didn’t care if he was quirkless. He had to literally die for this and they’d been in his neighborhood the whole time.

“Zuku!” One of his dojo-mates calls out to him at the end of their lesson. That’s another new thing, the name. His mom had picked him up from practice once, called him Zuku, and the next day everyone, even Eliot, was calling him that.

He still wasn’t sure if he liked it.

“Merri,” Izuku smiles. Merri is a second-year in high school and has always been kind to Izuku. He likes talking to her and they have even exchanged numbers when a debate about a hero went on too long to continue in person.

“You wanna get some ice cream today?” Merri asks jovially. She has the kind of energy that Izuku had when he was young and innocent.

Anyone hearing his thoughts right now would be laughing at him, he’s sure.

“Sure!” Izuku agrees. He loves ice cream and enjoys having talks about heroes with Merri. She is smart and kind, someone who wants to help people but doesn't want to be a hero. Izuku remembers her mentioning wanting to go into education.

She’d be better at it than any of Izuku’s previous teachers. Hell, she’d be better at it than all of them combined.

The ice cream parlor is a few blocks from the dojo and the walk there is pleasant in the lingering summer heat. The seasons are changing and Izuku is looking forward to the fall and cooler weather. It’s difficult to be a vigilante in a sweatshirt when the temps were reaching 30 degrees even at dusk.

“Two scoops of strawberry in a cake cone, please,” Izuku orders when they get to the front of the line. Their conversation about Edgeshot had lasted the entire walk and he’s excited to continue it when they find somewhere to sit.

“You know,” Merri says, interrupting Izuku’s tirade on support items. “I think you’d get along with my cousin.”

“Yeah?” Izuku prompts.

“She’s your age, a complete genius, and is planning to go into support tech. My uncle runs a Support company that Mei-Chan is going to take over when she graduates.”

Izuku perks up, sitting straighter in his seat. “Tell me more.”

***

Hatsume Industries is an imposing building. It’s large and industrial and vaguely familiar. He wonders if he’s been there before, some time in the future. He shakes it off though. Right now, his focus is on making things better not getting distracted by might have beens.

Next to the building, there’s a small house. Izuku walks up to it and knocks on the door. Once upon a past life, the knock would have been hesitant and Izuku would have stuttered when a girl his age opened the door and pulled him inside.

Now, he had to push down the instinct telling him to fight back. He’d talked to Hatsume “call me Mei” Mei on the phone a couple days ago. Izuku needed some help with a couple support items and he figures someone Merri called a genius would be good enough to talk to about it.

“Izuku!” Mei cheers, bright and bubbly and entirely in his face. “Tell me more about your ideas!”

Izuku is not at all used to personalities like this. He’s used to being ignored, the outcast, not the center of anyone’s attention.

“Mei,” An older woman, clearly Mei’s mother, chides, stepping into the hall. “Let your guest take his shoes off and at least offer some tea.”

“Oh right!” Mei yells, stepping back with no signs of embarrassment or guilt. “We have oolong and green tea, Izuku. Which would you like?”

And then she’s gone, slipping into what must be the kitchen not even waiting for a response.

“Uh, green tea is fine,” Izuku calls after her.

“You’ll have to excuse Mei,” the woman says. “She takes after her father. They both love inventing and anyone even willing to lend half an ear to their ideas is automatically accepted and expected to already know how to deal with them.” She holds out a pale hand. “I’m Hatsume Miri, it’s nice to meet you, Izuku-Kun.”

“Nice to meet you, Hatsume-San,” Izuku says, shaking the offered hand.

“Just Miri is fine. We don’t really care for formalities in the house,” Miri laughs, a hearty sound that contrasts with her almost delicate features. “You go ahead into the kitchen, I’ll give you and Mei some space to talk about whatever brought you here.”

“Thank you, Miri-San.”

Miri huffs in amusement before heading up the stairs, giving Izuku and Mei their promised space. Izuku goes through the same door and finds a dining room kitchen combination with a cluttered table and what looks like half-finished projects littering the floor.

It reminds Izuku of Steampunk, one of the few inventors to survive the first five years of the war and—oh. No wonder Hatsume Industries had been familiar. Izuku had literally watched Mei die here. And wow, that certainly puts a damper on this meeting, huh.

He shakes his head, ignoring the concerned look from the jittery inventor sitting at the counter like meeting random teenagers at her house was normal.

“Tell me more about your ideas!” Mei demands when Izuku has been quiet for too long. He remembers Steampunk never being able to stand the silence except when silence was the line between life and death, as it often was.

“I want to build a screen that can fit in a helmet,” Izuku says, lifting a book off a chair and taking a seat at the table, teacup in hand. “Something that can display messages. With infrared and night vision. Suitable for an underground hero.”

“Are you going into heroics, Izuku-kun?” Mei asks, delight evident in the sparkles in her eyes. She leans forward eagerly.

“That’s the plan,” Izuku says, leaning forward as well. He smiles a small vicious smile. One that makes Mei even more excited. “I have the device for the display screen finished, Mei-Chan. But I can’t show it to you yet. Not until I get into UA.”

“But you want it done before that, don’t you?” Mei says with a knowing smile.

“The longer I have to work with it, the better,” Izuku explains. “And besides, if it’s not being used to fight villains it’s not technically a support item so it’d be fine for me to have.”

Never mind that Izuku is planning to use it to fight villains. Mei doesn’t need to know that yet.

“And what’s in it for me?” Mei asks, ever the business woman.

“You have a sight based quirk, right Mei?” Izuku counters, even though he already knows. “I can tell by your eyes, they’re super cool. Usually there’s a tell for someone’s quirk. Mutant quirks are obvious and with transformation quirks there’s usually a sign like leftover scales on a patch of skin for a reptilian transformation. Emitter quirks and even mental quirks usually have some sort of physical tell. Can you guess what my quirk is?”

Mei scrutinizes him for a moment before shaking her head.

“That’s because I don’t have a quirk, Mei-Chan,” Izuku says, grinning as Mei’s eyes widen at what this means. “Which means that, when I become a hero, I’m going to be relying on support gear to do my job. Can you imagine what it’d be like to be the personal inventor of the first quirkless hero?”

Mei laughs, loud and boisterous and so similar to her mom’s laugh. “I look forward to working with you, Izuku-Kun.”

Chapter Text

Two months into his gig as a vigilante Izuku removes the mask and the hood from his costume and adds a motorbike helmet. It’s fitted with a prototype of Mei’s screen and a few other gadgets he was able to make on his own.

He’d managed a rudimentary voice changer that distorts his voice just enough to make it seem like he’s not going through puberty for a second cursed time. He also added a couple sound amplifiers so he doesn’t have to worry about not picking up footsteps behind or beside him. Afterall, he had to forgo some of his peripheral vision in favor of protecting his skull and his identity.

The screen Mei made is beyond what Izuku had asked for. Not only did it have a better version of everything he wanted, it also had a beta version of an AI that operated much like the first version of Apple’s Siri. And it was untraceable.

It’s clear that Mei knows more about Izuku's extracurricular activities if she’s going this far for a prototype that Izuku technically wouldn’t be using for heroics until next April. Even then he’s planning to have a more streamlined version that won’t give him away as a wanted vigilante.

That’s a new thing too, Crow having an open case with heroes involved. He’d seen a couple, usually when he’s out as Crow in the day—rare as those times may be. People are less likely to think he’s a middle-school-aged vigilante if he’s out during the day.

It helps that his mom is at work during the day, too. He loves his mom, adores spending time with her, especially after years of having to live without her, but it is much easier to keep a secret from her when she’s not actually home to ask where he’s going.

Though, it’s not like he doesn’t go out even when she is home. He just has to be a lot more careful about it when he does.

“Alright, BB,” Izuku says after fitting his helmet into place, addressing the AI Mei had programmed for him. “What’ve you got for me?”

“Nothing different than usual, Crow,” BB says in lilted English. Izuku had been a little intrigued to find out that the AI was programmed to only speak English. He still wants to know why Mei decided to give her a Scottish accent.

Izuku nods before he sets off on his Lower Musutafu patrol, as far away from UA as he can get without leaving the city. When BB doesn’t have any urgent business for him—like last week when she’d found an attempted mugging two blocks over after hacking the security cameras nearby—Izuku would pick an area and go on a little patrol.

More often than not, Izuku found a fight and captured a criminal, saving the would-be victim. His fights end quickly, his longest and most destructive still being the first fight against Rotty.

Tonight, he waits on the rooftops, jumping from building to building and finding nothing. It’s unusual in this part of the neighborhood. Lower Musutafu has the highest petty crime rates of the city with the second highest assault rates.

For nothing to be happening means there has been a hero in the neighborhood recently. He’s heard no reports of a limelight hero in LM so it must be an underground hero. The most dangerous kind to run into for a vigilante like Izuku.

Limelight heroes were likely to draw out a fight, make it flashy and gain the attention they needed in order to keep their rankings. This made limelight heroes easy to avoid—they were easy to spot.

Underground heroes, on the other hand, were too similar to Izuku. They fought fast and dirty and while their quirks weren’t flashy, underground heroes didn’t have an insufferable need to rely on quirks in a fight.

Which, in turn, made it harder for Izuku to avoid them.

So, having an underground hero in the neighborhood he was patrolling, even if it wasn’t on the same day, was not good. Not good at all.

“Can you figure out who it is?” Izuku asks BB as he jumps to another roof. He’s reaching the edge of Lower Musutafu and there’s still nothing happening.

“Do I have your permission to look through police files?” BB asks. He’s grateful that Mei programmed in the permission feature, he can’t imagine what mischief BB would get up to if she didn’t have to ask permission to hack into anything.

“Only for any bookings past five pm tonight,” Izuku allows. It really does help that he won’t have to look into it on his own.

While BB looks into it, Izuku continues his patrol. He has an hour left before he should be heading back home to get a decent amount of sleep for training tomorrow. He’s about to head to ground level when he hears the sounds of a fight two blocks away.

Izuku doesn’t even hesitate as he runs in that direction, pulling out one of his escrima rods and adjusting his grip on it. The fight is in the alley next to a bookstore that Izuku likes to visit during the day. It sells used books at half price and the owner is really nice and will hold anything he thinks Izuku will be interested in.

He finds the fire escape and starts climbing down to get closer to the fight.

The fight itself is two on one. Izuku doesn’t recognize the attackers but the victim is Ista-San. The owner of the bakery two blocks down. Izuku doesn’t know why she’s out at one in the morning but he’s not going to question it since right now his only job is to save her.

“Fucking bitch,” One of the men cusses, throwing a punch that Ista-San manages to dodge. She’s almost sixty but Izuku knows that she was a martial arts champion in her younger years.

He also knows that she’s not going to last against two grown men.

“Yo,” Izuku says, jumping down from the fire escape and landing on the bigger man’s shoulders. The man grunts at the added weight but doesn’t go down and Izuku uses his momentary confusion to drop down and jab an elbow into the man’s neck, incapacitating him for long enough to take down the other man.

“Crow,” the other criminal growls and now that Izuku is on the ground he recognizes Sledgehammer. They hadn’t crossed paths yet but Izuku had been giving the police tips on how to find him. Tips that they’d obviously ignored, if Sledgehammer was still free.

He’d been one of Izuku’s first real adversaries in the future. They’d faced off multiple times in the future and Izuku had almost died each time until he’d teamed up with Shouta to take the villain down.

Which is why Izuku hadn’t wanted to face Sledgehammer now. He’s a man in a fifteen-year-old body against an A-rank villain. In all honesty, Izuku is screwed.

“You’ve heard of me, then,” Izuku says, pulling out his second rod and dropping into a fighting stance. He doesn’t have the chance to tell Ista-San to run before Sledgehammer is charging at him with transformed hands.

“You’ve been making a name for yourself in these parts,” Sledgehammer says as Izuku barely manages to avoid a swing. “Been taking down a lot of petty criminals cause you can’t fight the big guys on your own, huh? That should make this easy.”

“BB,” Izuku grunts as he hits the wall and has to throw himself out of the way of a hammer. “Alert the police and any nearby heroes. I can’t take this guy on my own.”

“Done, Crow,” BB says, in a tone that really doesn’t match the mood of the moment. Maybe he should talk to Mei about that. It’s a little uncanny for his AI to sound cheerful all the time.

With that taken care of, Izuku turns his full attention to the villain trying to smash his head in. He dodges the blows and notes, gratefully, that Sledgehammer’s accomplice is still on the ground and Ista-San is nowhere in sight.

He definitely wouldn’t have survived if he had to protect someone as well.

“Shit,” Izuku curses when one of the hummers hits his arm in a glancing blow. He’s thankful for the braces he built that lie below the material of the sweatshirt. He’s pretty sure the metal is the only reason his arm isn’t shattered, even if it is surely broken.

The escrima rod in that hand clatters to the ground.

“You’re good, I’ll give you that Crow,” Sledgehammer taunts. He looks as sadistic as Izuku remembers with a sharp toothed smile and glowing red eyes that remind him a little of Bakugou on the kid’s worst days. “But you’re not going to last much longer, are you?”

“Eraserhead, incoming,” BB warns just before the underground hero jumps from a nearby roof and suddenly the attacks trying to hit him are coming from hands and not tools that have cause Izuku more blunt force trauma than he’d care to remember.

Sledgehammer looks confused for a second and Izuku uses that moment to swipe the man’s legs out from under him and pin him to the ground on his stomach. He doesn’t weigh much but it’s enough to keep the man there while Izuku presses the pressure points on the man’s neck and knocks him out.

“Crow,” Eraserhead says and the voice is so familiar that Izuku jumps away before anything can even happen.

Standing in front of him is Shouta. The man Izuku had fought alongside for years. Otherwise known as Eraserhead, one of the lead heroes in the case against Crow.

Why Izuku hadn’t made that connection before, he’ll never know. They hadn’t really talked about who they were before the whole End-Of-The-World thing. Izuku didn’t want to talk about what it was like to be quirkless and Shouta hadn’t wanted to talk about the people he’d lost.

“Earserhead,” Izuku manages to say. He’s lucky that the voice modulator cuts out the way his voice squeaks. “Thanks for the help there.”

He’s backing away from the scene, getting ready to run, when he sees Sledgehammer’s accomplice stand. He doesn’t recognize the man but he does see the signs of an emitter quirk, something long range that has him pushing Shouta aside and not a moment too soon as a thistle embeds itself in Izuku’s shoulder.

Eraserhead immediately turns on the other villain and activates his quirk before using his capture weapon to catch him and knock his head against the cement wall of the alley.

Izuku watches the man, his old friend who has never met him before, bring the accomplice over to Sledgehammer and tie the two together using his support item. It makes Izuku want something similar for long range attacks and capture when the criminal could easily break out of zip ties.

“Your shoulder,” Eraserhead says detachedly when he looks over at Izuku.

Izuku looks down and sees the thistle still stuck in his sweatshirt. It hadn’t pierced through the kevlar that protected his shoulders, though, so Izuku wasn’t hurt.

“Oh,” Izuku says before pulling the thistle out. “I’m fine, Sh—Eraserhead.”

Eraserhead… he needed to remember that name. The man in front of him was not his Shouta. He would never be his Shouta.

“If you say so,” Eraserhead sighs. “Look, Crow, I can’t capture a vigilante and an A-rank villain today so if you don’t want to get caught you should get out of here.”

“Technically,” Izuku says, because he’s been meaning to say something about this but hasn’t had the chance due to, y’know, not meeting any heroes before today. “I’m not a vigilante.”

To his credit, Eraserhead doesn’t look confused. He merely blinks slowly like the cats Izuku knows he loves.

“Can’t be a vigilante if you don’t use a quirk, Eraserhead,” Izuku says, registering the distant sound of sirens, his cue to skedaddle.

***

He can feel the blankets of his bed surrounding him, he knows he’s at home, safe in a world that hasn’t known destruction yet. But he still feels like he’s stuck, in the future where he watched so many people die.

In front of his eyes, Izuku can see the rubble of yet another destroyed building. The destruction of this one, though, is more devastating than most of the others.

UA, the last stronghold against the League of Villains in Musutafu. Izuku had never gone to the school but he’d relied on the remaining staff and students to keep him updated on what they knew.

There weren’t many people left.

Now, there were even fewer.

The attack had been two weeks ago so Izuku was pretty sure most of the villains had left. Now, he steps through the gates of the school where he’d failed the most important test of his life. He keeps a taser in one hand and a refurbished crossbow in the other, prepared for an attack.

The attack that comes, though, is not what he expected. Instead of meeting villains Izuku is bombarded by purple balls and nearly hit by a white laser, just barely managing to duck out of the way.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Izuku shouts, still cowering on the ground. “It’s Izuku!”

He’s pretty sure the ones attacking him are students but even they should recognize his name at this point. Communication between UA and The Beach had started early and had continued even past The Beach’s downfall three years ago. The only reason Izuku hadn’t moved to UA himself, like most of the city who had remained, was because he was a better ally on the outside.

Since he didn’t have a quirk, he wasn’t seen as a threat, even now after felling several of the League’s allies. He also wasn’t able to be detected by the quirk detectors placed throughout the city and as such he could get close enough to take them out.

“Izuku?” Someone asks, stepping into his view.

He recognizes them, having watched this hero compete in the Sports Festival for two years before it was canceled due to a villain attack that required every hero with a license, even a provisional license, in the area.

“You’re Aoyama, right?” Izuku asks, just to clarify. “The Twinkling Hero: I Can’t Stop Sparkling.”

“Yes,” Aoyama replies hesitantly. “Are you really Izuku?”

“The quirkless wonder,” Izuku says. That code name used to annoy him. It felt like a dig against his existence. He knew there were people who disliked the fact that Izuku was still alive, especially since so many heroes with strong quirks had died. “Are you really Aoyama? This isn’t like Toga’s quirk or anything?”

“Aizawa-sensei is here,” Aoyama says instead of answering. Which doesn’t exactly make Izuku feel better, if he’s being honest.

“How exactly do I get out of this?” Izuku asks, pointing to the balls keeping him trapped in place.

“Minoru,” Aoyama calls back. A short purple man with an eye-patch and purple balls on his head comes out from behind a slab of stone and walks up to Izuku. He picks up the purple balls and puts them in a bag. When Izuku is released he follows them towards what was once the main building, and is now a foundation rising barely a foot off the ground.

They enter through a trap door in the ground and lead Izuku to a cellar that looks set to survive a nuclear bomb. And he guesses it survived the equivalent of such, considering the damage he’d seen outside.

“Yuuga, Minoru,” someone cheers when they walk in the room, only to fall into a defensive stance when Izuku enters.

“Ochako,” Yuuga laughs. “No worries. This is Izuku.”

Izuku waves hesitantly. He’s not quite comfortable being underground. Being trapped in enclosed spaces has never really ended well for him.

“No way!” Ochako shouts. “We thought you were dead!”

“Uh, really?” Izuku wonders because it’s only been two weeks, Izuku has gone longer without contacting UA before.

“Yeah,” Ochako says and Izuku has literally just met the woman but even he can tell that the smile she’s wearing is fake. A mask used to hide the pain that everyone in the room knows so well. “We haven’t been able to leave UA because of the quirk detectors. And without contact since the attack we just kind of assumed…”

She trails off and Izuku understands why. Five years in and talking about death is still difficult, even if it is a constant thing. Like an old friend that you don’t want to talk about but calls every day.

“Izuku,” A voice says from behind him, one that Izuku has only heard over the phone and suddenly some things that Izuku has never been able to make sense of come together.

“Shouta,” Izuku says, turning to face the man. He has to hold back from running into his arms. He’s never met Shouta in person but he’s been a constant in Izuku’s life for the last two years. “It’s really good to see you’re alive.”

Chapter Text

Izuku doesn’t jolt awake. He wasn’t sleeping, just letting his mind play through the memory. It’s a good one. The first time he’d met Shouta in person had been one of the best things to happen to him in that hellhole known as the apocalypse.

Now, though, meeting Shouta in the current timeline felt like a vine squeezing his lungs. There had been no recognition, no warmth. No shared trauma—which was probably a good thing but being traumatized one his own was a little lonely.

Though he does have BB to talk to now. Though she is an AI and not a licensed therapist. Izuku’s pretty sure no therapist would believe his trauma anyway so he’s been making do.

Izuku tries sitting up, but his entire body protests the movement, especially his left arm. The arm that Sledgehammer hit last night. The arm that Izuku left without any treatment.

Like an idiot.

“Shit,” Izuku curses, grabbing his injured arm at the elbow so he doesn’t jostle it anymore than he has to as he swings his legs over the edge of the bed and pushes himself into a standing position.

Physically, Izuku isn’t even fifteen but at this moment he feels ancient in body and soul. His arm aches fiercely and while Izuku has been forced to work through debilitating pain before, the nerves in his body now are not as used to it as he’d like, considering he finds himself injured more often than not these days, even if they were usually minor scratches he could take care of himself.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Izuku curses. He needs medical treatment but he’s not sure how to tell his mom that. His left arm is swollen and a deep purple that tells him he might be needing a surgery to set it properly.

Maybe he could say he fell off his bed? Is that a way children hurt themselves?

“‘Zuku?” The door opens and he knows he needs an explanation fast.

Izuku opens his mouth to give an excuse and instead bursts into tears. His mom comes running in, hand covering her mouth and empathetic tears forming in her eyes. She, thankfully, doesn’t pull him into a hug, but he still feels confined. He’s a grown man with the hormones of a teenager with a tendency to cry his feelings away.

“Oh honey,” Inko soothes, her hand hovering over the injury as she runs a gentle hand through his hair. “Why didn’t you come get me?”

“I- I- I,” Izuku sobs trying to get the words out. He hates hormones, seriously. “I didn’t think it was this bad?”

“What happened?”

“I fell,” Izuku lies. Like a liar. “On the way h-home yesterday I decided to practice climbing a t-tree and f-fell.”

“Oh honey,” Inko repeats before gently urging Izuku to stand. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

***

He doesn’t need surgery, thankfully. Instead, Izuku’s arm is put in a cast and then a sling that holds it against his chest. It’s his left arm so he’s still able to take notes for his online lessons. Though he has to tell Eliot that he’s an idiot and can’t practice for the next six to eight weeks while his arm heals.

And he won’t be able to go out as Crow.

Shit.

He tries not to dwell on it because he knows he’ll just panic if he does.

***

Mido: Did a dumb

Mei: How SO?

Mido: Broke my arm…

Mei: That is dumb. How?

Mido: Uhh… fell off a tree?

Mei: I have watched you jump from one roof to another over a ten foot distance and not die.

Mido: ANd YET

Mido: I told you it was dumb

Mido: So this means no testing for six to eight weeks :C

Mei: WHAT???

Mido: What did you think it meant?

Mei: IDK! NOT THAT!

Mido: Lol.

Izuku sets his phone down with a laugh before turning back to his homework. It’s a Wednesday and he has a test tomorrow so he’s doing some last minute revisions while he waits for his mom to get home. They’re planning to go grocery shopping together and Izuku’s honestly a little excited.

He hasn’t had the chance to do anything with his mom in a couple weeks and it’ll be nice to get out of the house with her, even if they’re not doing anything special.

Every moment spent with his mom is special.

She gets home at five and they have a snack together before Izuku grabs the reusable bags and they head out.

“Do you want katsudon for dinner?” Inko asks, glancing at Izuku like she expected his answer, which is fair. But really, she should know better.

“I would eat katsudon every day if you let me,” Izuku replies honestly, delighting in his mother’s laugh.

They’re just about to enter the dairy aisle when there’s a crash and the sound of screams from the front of the store. Izuku is instantly on alert, stepping in front of his mom despite her still being an inch taller than him.

“Down on the floor!” A deep voice shouts and Izuku makes sure to slip his phone out of his pocket as he complies, urging his mom to get down as well.

He’s been in a hostage situation like this before.

Back before the League took over and Izuku was an ordinary quirkless high school kid and not fighting for the survival of humanity. That situation had ended poorly for the villain when Endeavor arrived but Izuku is hoping to avoid a similar unfortunate incident.

He calls Mei and sets his phone on silent. He hopes she’ll get the message and use his location to guide the police his way. If not, he’ll have to talk with her about these situations soon.

“Give me all your money,” the man demands, waving his gun at the cashier.

Huh, a gun in the time of quirks. Izuku wonders briefly if it has anything to do with the man’s quirk. Then he sees the gills. Three little slits with a distorted blue color on the man’s neck.

So not a gun related quirk.

“Only fifty-thousand yen?” the man hisses after the cashier complies. “What about the money in the safe?”

“W-we don’t keep money in the s-safe,” the cashier informs, her voice getting shakier the longer the situation goes on.

“Open it.”

“I don’t have the c-code.”

“Well, figure it out!”

Izuku knows it’s going to happen as soon as the man starts yelling. His finger is itching towards the trigger and the safety was turned off at the start of the event. He’s already moving, despite his mom’s desperate cry of protest as he army-crawls away, grateful to be behind the man already.

Quickly, Izuku has his hand around the man’s ankle. His broken arm is protesting but it’s worth it as he pulls the man’s leg out from him, sending him crashing to the ground as he discharges the gun. Thankfully, he only hits the window, instead of the woman he had been aiming at.

“You fucking brat,” the man hisses glaring at Izuku. He’s got a knot on his forehead the size of a golf ball and the gun is sitting on the floor five feet from them. The man glances from Izuku to the gun but Izuku is already aiming a strike at the man’s neck, hitting the gills with enough force to stun.

There are sirens in the distance, rapidly growing closer.

Another well placed chop knocks the man out. Izuku grabs the gun and expertly disarms it before checking on the cashier, ensuring she’s really okay.

“Thank you,” the cashier, Ami her nametag reads, says gratefully. “That was terrifying.”

He doesn’t get the chance to respond before Izuku is being pulled into a hug by his mom. She’s pulling back just as quickly to look him over.

“Of all the reckless things you could have done,” Inko starts berating. There are tears in her eyes and the fear there sends a jolt of guilt down Izuku’s spine. “Is this what Kane-sensei is teaching you?”

“No!” Izuku protests because he doesn’t want to risk his lessons being taken away. He hangs his head in shame, knowing he worried his mother. “I didn’t even think before I acted. I just knew something needed to be done.”

“Don’t scare me like that again, Izuku,” Inko demands before pulling him for another hug. The walls are starting to light up with the approaching sirens. Izuku doesn’t pull away until he hears the door open.

The would-be burglar is still unconscious on the floor when the first policeman, a man with a cat mutation, enters, gun drawn. He takes in the scene before relaying a message to the rest of his unit.

“We’re gonna need an EMT,” The officer says before holstering his gun and checking the man’s pulse. When he finds one he quickly checks on the rest of the people in the store. Which is just Inko, Izuku, and the cashier.

Huh, Izuku hadn’t even noticed earlier. He shudders to think about what might’ve happened if they hadn’t been here. Had this played out differently in the future-that-never-will-be?

“What happened?”

“This man tried to rob the store,” Inko says, glaring at the unconscious man. “And my son managed to disarm him and knock him out before he could shoot this poor young lady.”

“Okay,” The officer says as other officers enter the store to collect the man and the gun. “We’ll need the three of you to come down to the station and give a statement. Since none of you were injured it won’t have to be tonight but we will need to take down your names. I’m Offices Sansa, by the way.”

“Midoriya Inko,” Inko supplies when Sansa is ready to write their names down. “This is my son, Izuku.”

Izuku nods, remaining silent. He’d met Sansa only once in the previous timeline, a week before the officer had been killed in a large-scale Nomu attack. Izuku’s trying not to let the memories playing through his head show up on his face.

“And your name, ma’am?” Sansa asks, turning to the cashier.

“Jones Ami, sir,” Ami says with a small, shaky smile. “I can come down in the morning, but I do need to call my boss about this.”

“Of course,” Sansa says gently.

Izuku watches as they place the man on a stretcher to carry him to the ambulance and bag the gun.

“Oh,” Izuku says suddenly, getting Sansa’s attention. “I’m not sure if you’ll be checking the gun for prints since it’s a highly regulated object but I did disarm it after it was fired so you’ll be finding my prints if you check.”

“How?”

“I was bored once,” Izuku offers with a helpless shrug. “I looked it up. Luckily I remembered how because there was a chance he could have woken up before y’all arrived.”

“We were called by a young woman about ten minutes ago,” Sansa tells him. “She said her friend called and wouldn’t respond so she tracked his location to here.”

“Mei!” Izuku yells, startling everyone as he runs to his phone. Quickly turning it off silent. “Mei?”

“IZUKU!” Mei yells, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You’re alive!”

“I’m alive,” Izuku assures with a laugh. “I’ll call you back and tell you what happened later. No one was injured and the police are here now.”

“Thank goodness,” Mei says, before teasing good naturedly. “Now I won’t have to find another test subject.”

“Oh hush,” Izuku chuckles softly. “I need to go now but I’ll call you later.”

“Bye.”

“Bye,” Izuku parrots before hanging up his phone and putting it back in his pocket.

“Izuku, do you want to head to the police station tonight or in the morning?” Inko asks after a quick conversation with the officer

“Katsudon,” Izuku says. The three—now four since Sansa’s partner has returned—occupants of the building are staring at him blankly. “We didn’t get the things for katsudon.”

“We’ll stop by in the morning, officer,” Inko assures as she shakes her head at her son. “Pretty sure my boy will starve if he doesn’t get his katsudon.”

“I understand,” Sansa responds with a laugh. “We’ll see the three of you tomorrow. Would you like an escort home tonight?”

Inko shakes her head, wrapping an arm around Izuku’s shoulder. “We don’t live that far from here, Officer. We’ll be okay.”

“Alright,” Sansa nods at his men. “Stay safe.”

“You as well.

***
Tomorrow comes sooner than Izuku wants. He hasn't been sleeping well the last few nights and last night had been the same story. His mind had been racing with everything that could have gone wrong and the realization that his mom had been there. His mom could have died.

Ami could have died.

(He could have died, too, but he's done that before so it's not as much of a concern for him).

With a sigh, Izuku sits up in his bed and throws his legs over the edge, stretching his right arm over his head and his left arm as much as he could with the way it was casted. He doesn't want to give his statement today. There had been danger and he'd reacted. No quirks were used and no one was injured so he doesn't see why he has to.

Unfortunately, his mom does not agree. Soon after eating the two of them are on their way to the police station, both nervous for different reasons. Inko is nervous because they were involved in an armed robbery the previous night and her baby boy could have been hurt.

Izuku is nervous because he'll have to tell the officers that he's Quirkless and he knows that's going to change how they view the case. It’s happened before and he knows it’ll happen again.

It’s one of the many downsides of being who he is.

“Good morning,” the receptionist greets when Inko and Izuku enter the station. “What can I help you with.”

“We’re here to give our statements about the attempted robbery on 11th last night,” Inko says. The woman nods, types something into the computer, and gestures for them to have a seat in the lobby while they wait.

Izuku wrings his hands nervously, gaze darting around the station as he takes in details. He feels like all eyes are on him, like they know his secrets, but a glance at the front desk tells him no one is watching.

He wants to go home.

He’s an adult! Well, mentally. He’s been through more trauma in ten years than most people see in their entire lives. He shouldn’t be this nervous just because he’s sitting in a police station about to give a statement on an incident that he wasn’t at fault for!

“Midoriya,” A gentle voice calls into the lobby and Izuku looks up to see Tsukauchi gesturing at them with a kind, tired smile.

Izuku wonders why he’s involved in the case but quickly shakes it off.

“Come this way,” Tsukauchi says before leading them to a cozy office. “Go ahead and have a seat.”

Inko and Izuku take their seats across the desk from where Tsukauchi sits.

“Before we get started, I’m required to inform you that my quirk, lie detection, is always active,” Tsukauchi says. “This shouldn’t take too long though.”

“Okay,” Inko says with a shaky smile.

“First let’s start with your names.”

“Midoriya Inko,” Inko responds.

“Midoriya Izuku,” Izuku says.

“That… that pinged as false,” Tsukauchi says, a furrow appearing between his brow.

“B-but,” Inko says with a frown. “This is my son, Midoriya Izuku.”

“That was true?” Tsukauchi says, leaning forward.

“I… What?” Izuku frowns because… that’s who he was in this timeline and… oh no.

He may be Midoriya Izuku now but he hasn’t been for the last five years.

“I’m Izuku,” Izuku tries again because he really wants to get past this. “Midoriya Inko’s son.”

“True,” Tsukauchi nods. “That’s weird but since we know who you are we can move past it. Now, let’s get started on your statements.”

Chapter Text

“What’s on your mind?” Toshinori asks him with a concerned frown.

Naomasa continues to stare into his tea like it’s going to give him the answers to everything confusing about the universe. He shakes his head to clear it and looks up at his oldest friend.

“I can’t get this kid I had to get a statement from yesterday out of my head,” Naomasa explains, trying to convey to Toshinori how vexing he finds this situation. “When I asked his name his reply pinged as a lie but when he restated his answer it came up as true, but fundamentally his reply didn’t change. That's never happened before!”

“That is strange indeed, my friend,” Toshi affirms. “What are you going to do?”

“There’s nothing I can do, unfortunately” Naomasa says with a sigh. “The boy is a minor living with his mom and it’s not like there are any signs of abuse. The boy actually saved his mom and another person from a robbery.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, two nights ago. A man was trying to rob a store that he and his mom were shopping at. The boy grabbed the man’s legs and knocked him down as he fired a gun, which we still don’t know where he got the gun from.”

“That could have gone badly,” Toshi says with a frown.

“The man was aiming the gun at the cashier with his finger on the trigger and the safety off; the boy saved her life,” Naomasa defends because the boy's actions were heroic and he’s not going to let the other man say differently, number one hero or not.

There isn’t a large age gap between himself and Toshi, but their upbringings were clearly different. Naomasa knows that Toshi was quirkless growing up, and that he was told multiple times before receiving one for all that he couldn’t possibly be a hero (and that that’s colored the hero’s view of quirks no matter what he might think). It’s usually not a big deal, except in cases like this where a random civilian does what Toshi considers “hero work”.

“Did anything else about him ping your radar?” Toshi asks, graciously steering the conversation away from their differing opinions.

“Nothing in particular, no. But what kind of child doesn’t believe his family name is his own?”

***

Izuku is still trying to figure out how that man had a gun. He was just a civilian, not even able to commit his first crime because Izuku had intervened. Guns like that had been outlawed for decades except for specific members of law enforcement and heroes like Snipe who needed a (specially modified) gun for their quirk to work. They should be hard enough to get that a random man wouldn’t use one to rob a convenience store.

“Just another thing to worry about,” Izuku grumbles, tapping his pencil against his notebook. “At least I’m nearly done with middle school… again.”

He’s been working diligently on his coursework as his arm heals. His mom thinks he should be able to get his cast off in a week and Izuku is ready for it.

Even though he hasn’t been able to go out and fight Izuku has been using BB to monitor police feeds and track any crime in the areas he usually patrols. He’s trying to get a sense of where heroes are more active again so he can avoid them as much as possible.

He doesn’t want to get caught. He has too many plans for that to happen.

The entire future may ride on whether or not Izuku gets into UA. He won’t be able to do that from whatever prison cell or rehabilitation program they put time-traveling vigilantes in.

“A squared plus B squared equals C squared,” Izuku repeats under his breath, a basic equation that means little to him now. He’s been learning college level science and math since the first time he was fifteen. His classes are boring and his days drag on as he waits until he can finally go out and make a physical difference again.

“Where did that man get his gun?” Izuku grumbles under his breath, switching from math to english and plowing through his readings. “If there’s someone selling guns to civilians then the heroes need to know about it which means that I need proof.”

Proof that Izuku won’t have unless he hits the streets.

“Fuck,” Izuku curses, pushing away from his desk. He grabs a sweatshirt and throws it on over his tank top in order to combat the chilling weather as summer slips into spring. He grabs his phone, keys, and wallet and steps out of his room.

“Where are you going, honey?” His mom asks, wringing her hands together.

She’s been nervous since the robbery two days ago, hesitating to let Izuku out of her sight even if he’s just working on his homework in his own room.

He can’t wait until she goes back to work on Monday. He loves his mom, absolutely adores her and is so grateful she’s alive and here with him but… he needs his space. He’s a twenty-nine-year old man (technically, though he doesn’t feel like it much anymore). He’s been through an apocalypse. He can walk to the park without dying, he’s pretty sure.

“For a walk,” Izuku says, none of his frustration bleeding into his tone or expression. His mom doesn’t deserve that from him. “I have my phone on me and I’ll be back soon, I just need to do something before I throw my notebook at the wall… again.”

“Okay, Izu. Be safe, I love you.”

“Love you too, mom!” Izuku yells as he shuts the door, eager to be out of their cramped apartment.

He really needs to go outside more. Even if he can’t fight crime right now, the least he could be doing is going on walks to get some sort of physical activity in.

Eliot is going to kill him when he gets back to training. Not because he got hurt (maybe a little because he got hurt) but because he let himself wallow instead of doing what he can to improve himself.

Maybe he should start meditating.

Izuku walks down to Dagobah beach, taking in the sight of the cleaned up sand and relishing in his sense of accomplishment. He’d finished the task ten months after starting it and what he hadn’t given to Mei to work with he’d made sure it went to the appropriate disposal facility.

“Oh, I haven’t been here in years, it looks clean, exactly like I remember it from when I was a kid.” someone says behind him.

Izuku turns to see a tell emaciated man with blond hair who looks like a light breeze will knock him over. He’s wearing a shirt and pants that are two sizes too large and Izuku immediately recognizes him.

All Might. In his civilian form. A form that Izuku shouldn’t know about, at least not for another two years.

“I cleaned it,” Izuku says to distract himself (and keep from blurting out a secret that would definitely get him in trouble if anyone knew he knows it).

“Really?” All Might asks—Yagi? He thinks his name is Yagi but really Izuku never had the chance to meet the hero in his past before he’d had to retire because of the League. He’d passed in his sleep before the war had really started.

Izuku nods. “I did.”

“Huh. May I ask why, young man?”

“It felt wrong to leave it that way,” Izuku says because that’s as close to the truth as he can get. “Like a disservice to the planet or the community or something.”

“Interesting,” Yagi remarks, his voice odd. “Did you do it on your own?”

“Yeah,” Izuku says, glancing over the horizon before turning back to Yagi. “I’m training for the UA entrance exam and I thought this would help.”

“Did it?”

Izuku grins before gesturing to his broken arm. “I’d offer to show you but I’m not supposed to do anything strenuous.”

“What happened?”

“I fell out of a tree and fractured my arm in two places,” Izuku lies sheepishly. He’s not about to tell the number one hero that he’s a wanted vigilante.

“Oh my, young man. That must have been quite the experience.”

“It hasn’t been fun, I miss training,” Izuku admits. “I’m finishing middle school online and so exercise is really the only chance I have to get out of the house right now. That and—ah sorry! I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It must be boring!”

“When does your cast come off?” Yagi asks curiously.

“Next week.”

“What are you doing for training, young man?”

Izuku side eyes the number one hero, wondering why he’s showing so much interest in Izuku and his training. If he remembers correctly, Yagi should be choosing Lemillion as his successor soon and passing on his quirk—yet another thing Izuku isn’t supposed to know about, but it was common knowledge in the future.

“Ah, sorry! My name is Yagi Toshinori. I’m a secretary of All Might’s and, well, I thought that maybe I could help out a little. This is, of course, if you need it! I’m not trying to impose or be creepy or anything!” Yagi reaches into his pocket and pulls out a business card, handing it to Izuku.

“Yagi Toshinori. PA All Might Agency,” Izuku reads off the card before looking up at the hero-in-disguise.

“I don’t have a quirk,” Izuku says bluntly. He narrows his eyes slightly, waiting for the man’s reaction. (He knows this isn’t supposed to happen. All Might needs to give Lemillion his quirk. Lemillion is vital to Izuku’s plans to defeat the League. But he can’t resist this. A hero wanting to train him? Or at least give him pointers? Izuku isn’t a fanboy anymore, not by any means, but he still respects the number one hero.)

“Neither do I,” Yagi says and that shocks Izuku. He doesn’t have a quirk? Is this actually All Might or is Izuku’s mind playing tricks on him now? He’s noticed that he doesn’t remember as many details (the sound of his family’s voices, the look of fond exasperation on Shouta’s face when Izuku would say something stupid to make them laugh, the taste of Yuuga’s cooking) but he didn’t think he’d forget something as important as this.

“Really?” Izuku asks, shocked. If this is true then Izuku has officially met the second quirkless person other than himself in all thirty years of his life. Izuku knows that One For All was a transferable quirk, does this mean that the All Might was quirkless growing up? Just like him? “That’s—I—You? You still want to help me?”

“I really think I do, young man—”

“Izuku,” he interrupts.

“Young Izuku,” Yagi corrects immediately. “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but you’ve already made a positive impact on people. Heroics isn’t just about physically saving people in a time of crisis. It’s also about—”

“Saving their hearts when they’re safe again.”

“An All Might fan, I see,” Yagi teases.

Izuku smiles, a small genuine thing that he hasn’t worn in a while. “He’s my second favorite hero, Yagi-san.”

“Oh! Who’s your first?”

“Eraserhead, sir,” Izuku tells him. He’s surprised at how easy it is to talk with Yagi. To share parts of him that he doesn’t usually get to share.

To be so comfortable in the presence of someone he’s only just met.

“Not an answer I usually hear but a respectable hero indeed!”

A message chime comes through on Yagi’s phone and he jumps, pulling it out of his pocket.

“Oh! I’m late for a meeting, young Izuku,” Yagi says apologetically. “You have my number, just text me with what you’ve done for training so far and I’ll let you know when I come up with a plan.”

And as suddenly as he had appeared behind Izuku, Yagi is gone. Izuku is left standing alone on the steps leading to Dagobah beach, questioning whether or not he’s dreaming.

Mido: Why do weird things keep happening to me?

Mido: I just want one week, one week is all I’m asking, where I don’t have an encounter with someone that leaves me reeling!

Mei: What happened?

Mido: I met All Might’s secretary? On a beach? And he OFFERED to help me TRAIN??? AND HE EVEN KNOWS I’M QUIRKLESSSSSS???? MEI WHAT IS HAPPENING???

Mido: He’s quirkless too?

Mido: I have never met another quirkless person in my life, Mei.

Mido: I’m having a crisis.

Mei: Are you sure he’s not just some creep pretending to work for All Might?

Mei: I mean, that’s pretty sus tbh

Mido: He gave me his card which was official btw. There are ways to tell.

Mido: He’s also listed on the agencies website soooo

Mido: I am confident in my abilities, I really am. I’ve been training for two years now in more than one fighting style and I can design and build my own support gear from literal garbage.

Mido: So why is this affecting me so much, mei?

Mido: I asked BB but she’s not ready for that kind of philosophical question yet.

Mei: everyone needs support, Izukkun.

Mido: I have support! You’re my support!

Mei: Yeah, and how many adults have told you that you could be a hero before?

Mido: He never actually said I could be a hero, Mei.

Mei: So ask him! And if you do end up training with him you’ll probably meet All Might so you can ask him as well!

Mei: And if either of them say you can’t be a hero I’ve got just the baby to kick their asses with.

Mido: *snorts* Thanks Mei.

Mei: Come test my latest baby if you really wanna thank me.

Mido: I’m still in a cast.

Mei: Come anyways

Mido: OMW, just need to tell my mom.

Chapter Text

“Young Izuku,” Yagi greets with a shadowy grin. He’s not sure how the man manages to never catch the light when he smiles in this form but Izuku finds himself grateful that he’s not meeting the hero in some dark alley right now.

Instead they’re on the spotless beach that Izuku had cleared. Yagi has a stack of papers in his hands and Izuku feels a shot of nerves go through him.

“This is a meal plan and a workout plan that I put together for you,” Yagi explains, handing Izuku the stack of papers. It’s heavier than it looks. “If we’re going to do this then I need you to follow that plan. I took into account your age, recent injury, and your training with Mr. Eliot Kane.”

“He just goes by Eliot, Yagi-san,” Izuku informs him. He knows that Eliot would hate to be called “Mr.” anything.”

“With Eliot,” Yagi corrects immediately.

“I have a question,” Izuku says, thinking back to his conversation with Mei on the day he’d met Yagi.

“Go ahead.”

“Do you actually think I could be a hero?”

Yagi takes a moment—and Izuku appreciates that. He’s used to people answering immediately without even taking the time to think it over.

“Why do you want to be a hero, Young Izuku?”

“To save people,” Izuku says simply, because that’s the gist of it. There are secrets to his real answer now. Things he doesn’t think he can tell anyone until he’s sure they’re not going to come to fruition.

Knowledge of the future is a dangerous thing.

“You could save people as a doctor,” Yagi points out, not unkindly.

“Physically, sure, but I don’t think a doctor is what I need to be to save people when they’re safe,” Izuku tells the hero. “I wanted to be like All Might when I was younger. Saving people with a smile.”

“What changed?”

“Other than not getting a quirk?”

“Yes.”

“I learned that some things are too serious for a smile,” Izuku replies honestly. “And not every hero needs to be an All Might.”

“Whether or not you become a hero is up to you and the actions you choose,” Yagi says kindly. “I don’t know if you’ll succeed, Young Izuku, but I’m willing to try if you are.”

Izuku smiles. He’s glad for whatever it was that brought him and Yagi together this time.

His life would have been completely different if he had this kind of support the last time through.

***

Training with All Might is a strange experience. Mostly due to the fact that Izuku has to keep the fact that he knows his mentor is All Might a secret.

His arm has been out of the cast for a few weeks now and he’s been slowly getting back into his rhythm. He cuts down his sessions with Eliot to twice a week, explaining that he has found another mentor and needs to branch out.

He hasn’t started up as Crow again. Since All Might has met him as a civilian and is in the area he doesn’t want to draw too much attention to his vigilante persona. He’s still gathering intel and looking into things when he can but he’s not fighting criminals yet.

He’s no closer to figuring out how the would-be-robber go his hands on a gun. But that’s not really his priority at the moment.

Izuku has been thinking about the future that he wants to prevent more and more recently. As he gets closer to the UA entrance exam he can feel a growing sense of unease in the pit of his stomach. He knows that he needs to get into UA. Everything centers around the school, he just isn’t sure he can do it without a quirk.

It’s not really about whether or not Izuku thinks he’s capable of it, it’s about if the people judging him think he’s capable of it. He knows the test is fighting robots. He had gone through the test the first time and had failed epically, not getting a single villain point or one of the elusive rescue points.

He survived ten years of the apocalypse. He has nightmares about it almost daily but he’d survived where others had failed. They’d relied too heavily on their quirks and that had been their downfall.

But even so, he knows the test is biased, knows he needs something more to give him a leg up.

He’s just not sure what, yet, but he knows he’ll figure it out.

He has to.

***

On the nights he can’t sleep; Izuku writes. Not about quirks and heroes like he used to, but about the future. A journal of his life that no one else would ever get to read. Proof that Izuku has lived more than what other’s know about him.

Often, these sessions are prompted by a dream but sometimes they’re prompted by a random event in his new life.

For example: meeting Yagi and beginning a new training regime with the number one hero.

Izuku has almost thirty years of experience, ten of them in an apocalypse, and he’s still excited about this in a way he hasn’t been excited in a long time. But meeting All Might brings back memories, so Izuku is writing them down so he doesn’t forget why he’s doing what he does.

So he doesn’t give up.

Izuku is sitting at the table with Shouta, talking about their food supply and if he’ll have to do another run sooner rather than later, when a stranger walks in. Shouta doesn’t react other than to nod at the person, and Izuku follows his cue. The rest of the crew are working on dinner or catching some rest so it’s just the three of them for now.

“Who’s this?” The blond asks cheerfully as he gestures to Izuku. Like Izuku is the one who just walked into the room and not the blonde.

He does look like someone Izuku should know. There’s a vague recognition but Izuku can’t place where it’s coming from.

“That’s Izuku,” Shouta says blandly. “Izuku this is Mirio.”

“Ah!” Izuku pounds a fist into his palm. “All Might’s successor, right?”

“Yeah,” Mirio agrees, his smile looking strained even as he offers a hand to Izuku. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Izuku.”

“Mostly good, right?” Izuku jokes because there is tension in the air and he caused it and things are shitty enough without them being awkward.

“All good, really,” Mirio assures. “There are many people who wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you and The Beach.”

“Ah, I just found the place, my friends there did most of the work until…” He trails off because it hurts to think about his friends from the hideout even four years later. He misses them every day.

It was because of that event, though, that Izuku first got into contact with Shouta. Izuku has gotten decently good at finding a little smidgen of good in all the bad that is their collective lives.

“Mirio has been operating mostly in the south until recently,” Izuku’s pseudo-father explains. “We’ve tried to keep in contact but without Steampunk around it’s been increasingly difficult to go undetected. He arrived earlier but you were sleeping.”

“What about Anima?” Izuku wonders because they’d been using Kouda’s ability to communicate with animals for a couple years now. If Mirio had to come all the way here from the south then something must be wrong.

“He’s gone,” Shouta says, face carefully blank. Izuku closes his eyes to hold back the tears. He can’t cry. If he cries now then he’s going to cry when he really can’t and he’s not risking that.

Dead. Another hero was dead and there was nothing Izuku could do to change that.

They move on, though, because there’s nothing else they can do about it. Izuku takes another moment to just breathe before opening his eyes.

“What’s happening in the south, Lemillion?” Izuku asks. He knows that the hero wouldn’t have come back unless it was something drastic that he needed more help for.

“Kumamoto has fallen,” Lemillion says—he’s not Mirio right now. He’s the successor of All Might, as little as that means when the world is ending.

“Shit,” Izuku curses. Kumamoto was the last strong hold in Southern Japan. There was another base south of Osaka still but not one that could receive help from other countries like Kumamoto could. Though, at this point there was little help to receive considering the Nomu had spread out of Japan and were a nearly worldwide danger. “Wait, how’d you get past the quirk sensors?”

Mirio looks down, clearly ashamed. Izuku feels his breath catch in his throat. He’d heard about it before, the time that Mirio lost his quirk in the hero’s third year of high school—this was before he’d been named All Might’s successor. He was able to get it back due to a girl with a rewind quirk that he had been part of rescuing but… fuck. To have a quirk, to have two quirks, and to lose them both?

Izuku can’t imagine.

“Fuck,” Izuku grinds his teeth together. He barely catches Mirio hiding a wince. “It’s not your fault—“

“Yes it—“

“No it's not!” Izuku shouts, surprising everyone in the room, himself included. “I don’t even care what happened. As long as you didn’t give fucking Shigaraki Tomura your quirk then I. Don’t. Care.”

“I didn’t,” Mirio confirms. “I was hit by another quirk stealing bullet.”

There’s a gasp behind him. One that sounds young.

“Eri,” Shouta says quickly. They all spin to see the girl, just barely in her teens, covering her mouth with tears in her eyes.

“T-they used m-my q-quirk.”

“It’s not your—“

“That doesn’t matter!” Eri protests. “They used my quirk to hurt you! Again! If I hadn’t let Shigaraki take it then—“

“Then you’d be dead,” Izuku says, his voice gentle as he kneels in front of the girl. “And we’d rather have you here and quirkless then dead. Remember we’re in this together, Eri.”

“I- I know I just-“ Eri breaks out into sobs and Izuku gently pulls her into his arms. He had heard about Eri from Shouta for years but he only officially met her when he finally came to UA—or the remains of it— himself.

“It’s okay,” Izuku reassures her, running his hands gently through her hair. “You’re allowed to be upset about this. But it’s still not your fault.”

Mirio quickly joins them, putting his arms around both of them as he murmurs reassurances to the red eyed girl.

They give Eri a few minutes to cry and calm down before pulling away with gentle smiles. She gives each of them a brief hug before running over to Shouta for a hug from the usually composed man (although no one’s really composed anymore, not when the world is ending and all of their friends and family are dying).

“What do we do now?” Izuku asks the question no one else seems to want to ask.

“I’ll be heading north to connect with Denki and Hanta,” Mirio explains with a sigh. “They’re in Hakkodate. If things are looking good there we’ll find a way to get everyone out of UA and to Hokkaido. It’s the last strong hold we’ve got in a defensible position.”

“Okay,” Izuku agrees. He considers this information for a moment before nodding. “I’m coming with you.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Izuku I—”

“You’re not fucking doing this alone,” Izuku snaps. “We don’t need a martyr, we don’t need a hero, we need you to make smart choices and that means I’m going with you.”

“It’s for the best, Mirio,” Shouta says firmly but kindly. “Izuku’s been making the trip for years. He knows how to get around the league and he’s stupid-lucky. He’s your best bet for actually making it to Hakkodate.”

“Fine.”

“Alright,” Shouta nods. “For now, though, sit down and get ready for dinner. Yugga and Ochacko are cooking tonight.”

“Hell yeah!” Izuku cheers, grateful for this spot of warmth in a torrent of uncertainty.

"As long as we don't have to eat your cooking, Aizawa, I'm willing to stay for food."

"Brats," Shouta grunts. "All Three of you."

Chapter Text

Being a small-time vigilante in a city like Musutafu isn’t easy. People talk and stories spread like wildfire and soon Izuku isn’t a small-time vigilante but a recognizable one. People are sharing stories about him on the internet and now he’s getting recognized by both villains and civilians on patrol.

It’s not every time but it’s often enough that Izuku is concerned. If he wants to get into UA then he needs to not get caught. But he also doesn’t want to stop. He’s saving lives, making a difference, something that he hadn’t been able to do in his past life.

So, of course, he goes to Mei with his problems.

Mido: I don’t want to get rid of the helmet

Mei: they recognize you bc of the helmet

Mido: but it’s comfy

Mei: you’re ridiculous

Mido: yes

Mei: what are you willing to change

Mei: cause it’s almost time for upgrades anyways.

Mei: my babies need some lovin

Mido: you’re so weird

Mei: yes

Mido: fine. I’m willing to be recognized as a vigilante and the helmet really does help me keep from you know… dying of head trauma.

Mei: but…

Mido: change the color scheme. Dark blue and grays. Blend in with the night.

Mei: really embracing the crow motif here, huh.

Mido: I must become one with the night, mei. It’s the only way I can show how angsty I am.

Mei: a real Edgar Alan Po.

Mido: ☆～w(눈-눈)w～☆

Mido: how bout Edgar Alan No.

Mei: whatever. I’ll have my new babies done by tonight

Mido: you’re the best.

Mei: yes

Izuku never explicitly told Mei that he is the vigilante Crow. She pieced it together herself (not that Izuku was very secretive about it with her). At the start, Izuku had wanted to keep her out of it as much as possible.

He wanted to keep her safe but, while the Mei of now isn’t the Mei of the future (like with all of his friends he’s yet to meet again) Izuku trusts her to keep herself safe.

It’s nice to have someone to talk to about it. Someone who isn’t an AI built into his helmet, that is. Izuku adores BB, and is proud of how far his robot-child has come in the past few months. But having Mei has been a lifesaver, especially since she just doesn’t care that there are things Izuku refuses to talk about.

She’s a fantastic inventor and an even better friend.

***

“You’re alive.”

Izuku jumps at the unexpected voice behind him. He nearly slips from where he’s leaning against a roof access door but manages to catch himself on the door handle.

“Fuck,” Izuku curses, clutching his chest as he spins to face the speaker, body tensing for an attack.

“Didn’t think someone could sneak up on you,” Eraserhead remarks, his tone betraying his smugness even if his expression remains neutral.

“I think you’re the only one who can,” Izuku says, relaxing slightly (he’s choosing to ignore the fact that he is a wanted vigilante and Eraserhead is the hero charged with capturing him right now).

“Where'd you go?” Eraserhead questions.

"Nowhere,” Izuku answers with a shrug. "I was around, just not as physically involved. Had to let my arm heal before I could start taking on villains again. "

"Well,” Eraserhead sighs dryly, “at least you seem to have some type of self-preservation."

Izuku chuckles, “not really Eraserhead. Though that’s to be expected considering I've already died—”

Izuku covers his mouth ignoring the pain of his palm hitting his nose as he stares at Eraserhead in horror. The only thing giving away that Eraserhead had heard him is a slight widening of the hero’s eyes.

"You what?" Eraserhead whispers in shock at the new information.

"Hahaha," Izuku laughs nervously. "Could you just forget that you heard that?”

Eraserhead sighs and sits next to Izuku on the roof. He doesn’t say anything, instead choosing to look out at the lights of the city.

While present Shouta is different from Izuku’s Shouta, he’s also not. He's tired for sure, but not the same bone-deep exhaustion that comes from watching the world end. He doesn't know Izuku, he doesn't know the trauma Izuku has been through, but that’s okay. He is still Aizawa Shouta and Aizawa Shouta is fundamentally a kind person. Izuku is pretty sure nothing would change that.

"You don't have to explain it, kid,“ Eraserhead says gruffly after a few minutes. "But are you safe? "

"I mean other than fighting villains with no physical backup I'm safe, yeah. "

"You want to tell me why you're doing all this? You seemed to think it was... necessary.”

“I can't, not yet at least. And it's not because I don't trust you! It's because you don't trust me yet!” Izuku quickly elaborates. “I'm not a liar, Eraserhead. I hope you can believe me when I say I'll tell you when it's time. "

"You said you weren't planning on doing this for long.”

“I'm not. In fact see, I'll tell you in April. but until then I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing, and if you try to arrest me, you won't see me again until that time.”

"I won't try to capture you, but I can't speak for other heroes."

“That's all I ask,” Izuku says, standing up and brushing invisible dirt off his pants. "With that dealt with, I'll be seeing you, Eraserhead."

***

Training with Eliot is like running through a fire in the Sahara after living through a drought. Especially since he’s only at classes once a week now. By the end of his lesson, Izuku always feels like he is going to drop dead. The man, while not technically a sadist, does not care if Izuku is in pain or not. This seems even more true since he has returned from breaking his arm.

"You're getting better, but you're holding back against the others, aren't you?" Eliot says at the end of one of these lessons while Izuku is laying on the floor, chest heaving and muscles screaming at him for putting them through this pain. Izuku doesn’t even have the energy to respond. Eilot scoffs. "Stay after so we can talk."

Izuku feels anxious as he cleans up his things and prepares to leave. He waves at Merri and the rest of his friends but stays sitting cross-legged on the sparring mat. Izuku watches Eliot clean up the rest of the equipment that he doesn't trust his students to put away.

"Why are you holding back?" Eliot asks as he finishes cleaning.

"The rest of the students in my group are inexperienced and if I wasn't holding back I feel like I might actually hurt them." Izuku tells his teacher with a shrug.

"Well, thank you for taking care of the rest of the class Izuku," Eliot responds as he sits next to Izuku with a huff. "Do you still need these lessons or are you coming here for something to do? "

"Uhhh, more something to do at this point. It's not like I'm not learning things! It's more that I can’t do some of this on my own. It's so much easier to spar with another person."

"Have you ever considered teaching? "

"Teaching? Eliot I'm 15. I haven't even thought about what I'm going to have for dinner tonight. "

Eliott laughs, "I'm thinking of starting a class for beginners on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I think it would be a good opportunity for you to teach people. You could help with that instead of your regular lessons."

"I thought you already had a beginner's class? "

"Technically I do, but that's a weekend course and I have found that many families are only able to do a weeknight course because their weekends are booked with family activities.” Eliot explains. "If you don't want to do it though, don't worry about it I got it covered. It's just an idea "

“ I— "

“—I would pay you. "

"I'm in."

Being a time-traveling vigilante does not pay, and Izuku needs to start saving up if he’s going to go to UA in a few months' time.

Chapter Text

In the final month before the UA entrance exam, things start to change. They're not bad changes, but Izuku isn’t entirely sure if they're good changes, either. He's starting to recognize more of the villains that he takes down—his encounter with Sledgehammer is no longer unique.

It’s disconcerting to say the least, some of these villains he’d only heard of—most of them weren’t even villains, just petty criminals who were trying to survive to the end of the week. But Izuku wasn’t in a position to argue semantics when they were trying to stab him with a kitchen knife.

If this was like in the build up to the USJ attack last time, Izuku’s a little disappointed that no one knew something was going to happen.

He’s been hearing whispers of some big job coming up for days now. And if he was hearing whispers, that means the heroes were surely hearing them as well.

Unfortunately, he’d had no more run ins with Eraserhead where he could confirm anything. It seemed that the underground hero had moved his patrol the majority of nights. The last time Izuku had run into him had been in the middle ofa fight where Shouta had nearly been stabbed and Izuku had needed to run before the cops showed up.

But with the UA exam happening as soon as it was, Izuku couldn’t do much more than leave his findings in notes outside the Musutafu precinct. He’s pretty sure they weren’t even looking at them at this point, considering Izuku had left a way to get in contact.

He’s also pretty sure they’re not looking at his notes because there wasn’t even anyone staking out the drop point Izuku had designated for exchanging information (or even confirming that Izuku was who he said he was).

Outside of his time as a vigilante, Izuku made sure to have regular movie nights with his mom. They would watch old pre-quirk classics and critique them. Izuku particularly liked watching classic superhero movies. It was nice to see heroes who fought without quirks. It was like living proof that Izuku could do it too.

The real shocker came two days before the UA entrance exam.

***

“You’re who?”

“I am here! As All Might to offer you my quirk.”

“You’re what?”

Izuku felt like he was going to pass out or puke or both at the same time. There was no way this was happening.

This was not supposed to happen.

All Might was supposed to offer his quirk to Lemillion after his third year sports festival.

He was not supposed to offer it to quirkless, useless, Izuku.

The hero in front of him started coughing and then steam enveloped him before he shrunk down to the skinny form that Izuku was far more comfortable with these days.

“You said you were quirkless,” Izuku breathes. It feels like his lungs are constricting and constricting and constricting. Like he never be able to get them to expand again.

He’d always known. Of course he’d known that Yagi and All Might were the same person. But he wasn’t supposed to know.

His mind felt blank.

“I—”

“I have to go,” Izuku gasps out and then grabs his bag and sprints away from All Might, from the hero who had just offered his quirk to the wrong person without even knowing it.

***

“Hey, Izuku?” Mirio asks quietly, staring up at the stars through the gaps in their shelter. There are so many more of them that are visible since the power grid was dismantled in the region. They’re a days journey away from Hakkodate and despite the warmth of the night, Izuku can’t help but feel small and cold.

“Yeah?” His response is just as quiet as Mirio’s question. They can’t risk alerting anyone to their presence.

“If you were offered a quirk, would you take it?”

“Depends on who’s offering.”

“All Might.”

“I don’t know,” Izuku answers honestly, cause he really doesn’t. “My whole life I was put down and beat up for not having a quirk. It wasn’t until this shitshow started that I got my act together. Honestly, I’m only here because of pure dumbluck. Sure, it would be easier if I had a quirk like One For All, but I don’t think I need it.”

“I regret accepting it.”

“W-What?” Izuku whisper-shouts before covering his suddenly ragged breaths.

They couldn’t risk getting caught by a nomu because Izuku couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“All Might’s quirk. I’ve been thinking about this for years, since before things went to hell. I just… the quirk doesn’t feel like it accepts me. It never has. Even after all these years. Like I wasn’t the one it was meant to go to,” Mirio sighs, rubbing at his tired eyes. “I had been training for half a decade before this all started with this quirk and I can—could only use a fraction of the power. If I had just had permeation to worry about I could have been a much more effective hero.”

“What was it like, training with One For All?”

“I broke my bones the first five times I used it because I was trying to use it like my All Might does, or like I thought he did,” Mirio says with a snort. “Took Gran Torino coming to UA to hit me on the head for me to figure out that I had to use it over my whole body or it wouldn’t work. Even then, I could never get it stable.”

“If you could go back in time, would you accept his quirk?”

“No,” Mirio says. “I’d rather he give it to someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Someone who could use it as a tool to save lives, instead of letting it become a burden.”

“Mirio,”

“No, I mean it,” Mirio says, reaching out blindly to grab Izuku’s hand. “If I could go back in time I’d tell All Might no. I’d tell him to find you and offer you the quirk instead.”

Izuku grips Mirio’s hand tightly, his head reeling. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I need you to promise me something.”

“What?”

“If you go back in time, and All Might Offers you his quirk, promise me you’ll accept.”

“What the hell, Mirio,” Izuku snorts quietly. “There’s no such thing as time travel quirks.”

“So it shouldn’t be a problem to promise me this,” Mirio whispers cheerfully as he brings Izuku’s hand up to lean his cheek against.

It’s a quiet kind of intimacy that is so hard to find these days, what exists between them. It’s not love, not the romantic kind anyways. But it’s soft and pleasant and Izuku cherishes it with his whole being.

“Fine, I promise.”

Izuku would promise this man the sky and the stars if he could.

***

Izuku: Sorry for running off earlier.

Izuku: Can we talk?

Yagi: Of course.

Yagi: I apologize for dumping that on you.

Yagi: That was my mistake.

Izuku: Meet me at Dagobah?

****

Izuku could think of ten million ways this could go wrong.

All Might could arrest him.

He could rescind his offer.

Throw Izuku in a mental hospital.

Izuku couldn’t wrap his mind around all the possibilities, let alone let himself consider the ways that it might go right.

All Might could accept him exactly as messed up as he is.

He could be proud of Izuku.

“Izuku, my boy,” the voice of his mentor draws Izuku out of his increasingly darker and frantic thoughts. It sounds like it’s probably not the first time Yagi had called his name.

“What did you want to discuss, my boy? Other than the obvious.”

“I’m from the future.”

Chapter Text

Shit. Well. That’s not how Izuku expected to start this conversation.

He wants to backtrack but he’s really not sure how to do that. The truth hangs awkwardly between them and for a moment Izuku hopes that maybe Yagi didn’t hear him.

“My boy—”

“Wait I mean—well that’s the truth but that’s not what I meant to say or not how I meant to say it but it is true and I know it’s hard to believe but I—“

“—Izuku—“

“Needed to tell someone because bad things are going to happen and you’re the number one hero and you offered me your quirk and it’s not su—“

“Izuku,” Yagi repeats louder this time, getting Izuku’s full attention.

“Yes?” Izuku responds hesitantly from behind his hands. He’s not even sure when he covered his face.

“Can you slow down and explain? This seems… outlandish… but I’ve been training you for a few months now and I don’t think you’d lie about this.”

He sounds like he’s talking to a spooked animal, like he’s afraid Izuku might bolt or try to bite him. It’s not the most promising but he hasn’t told Izuku to stop wasting his time, so there’s that.

Izuku glances around and sees a couple walking towards the pier a few hundred meters away. He looks back at Yagi with a frown.

“This might not be a conversation for right here,” Izuku says. “Maybe we should find somewhere quieter.”

“Sure,” Yagi agrees and they move to a more secluded part of the beach.

Things are not going how Izuku expected. He feels on edge with the fact that nothing has blown up in his face yet.

They find a secluded spot on the beach and Izuku tells All Might everything, from the first attack on UA to the moment that Izuku woke up in the past and decided to make some changes. He told All Might about becoming Crow and how he planned on telling Nedzu and some other heroes later, once he’d gotten into UA.

He told him how Mirio had gotten One For All and how he’d been an amazing hero and had saved so many lives. It wouldn’t be fair to take that away from him, no matter what Izuku had promised the other man.

They hadn’t even thought time travel was real.

“So you see, you need to give Mirio your quirk,” Izuku ends his story like this is the most important call to action he’s ever going to make in his life.

“That may have been how it went last time, but right now, I think you are the perfect candidate for my quirk.”

“I—you—what?” Izuku stammers. “You believe me?”

“I don’t see why you would lie about this, my boy,” Yagi says with a gentle smile. “I am a practical man, Izuku. If somethings looks like the truth, and sounds like the truth, then it must be the truth.”

“How do you know that I don’t just think it’s true? How do you know I’m not insane?”

“My arch nemesis can steal quirks, he’s been alive for over two-hundred years. I have been the number one hero for nearly two decades. In my time I have seen many things that no one would believe. Quirks are capable of more than we think they are.”

“So now what?”

“So now you make a decision. Once that decision is made, no matter what it is, I will keep training you, my boy,” Yagi wraps an arm around Izuku’s shoulders. “Its clear that you have been through a lot, Midoriya Izuku, and no matter what you decide, I am proud of you.”

“What the fuck?” Izuku mutters, tears running down his cheeks. “This isn’t—what? What kind of person just accepts a story like that?”

Why is he crying? All Might believes him! Shouldn’t that be a good thing?

Yagi chuckles. “I am not without my doubts or questions, my boy. I just know that there are some truths too farfetched to be anything but the truth. Besides, you had no reason to tell me. Even if I suspected anything, it would not have been that.”

“Do you really think I’m the best choice?”

“I know it,” Yagi assures. “From what you told me, while this Togata-kun might be capable, the quirk was too much for him to handle. But you, my boy, are possessing of a greater ability than any quirk.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have hope.”

“What?”

“You have fought through the horrible and the impossible and you have not given up. I do not think my quirk will be too much for you once it has become yours.”

“Fuck,” Izuku says quietly, forcefully. There is a weight on his shoulders that presses down the more he sits next to Yagi without saying anything.

The weight of a promise made to a man that Izuku knew a lifetime ago. A man that wouldn’t know Izuku if he saw him in a crowd.

“Okay,” Izuku says, almost reluctantly. “I’ll do it. I’ll take One For All.”

***

Yagi: wait… did you say that you’re Crow?

Izuku: aowieghoaiwehgoi

Izuku: uhm

Izuku: not if it’ll get me arrested?

Yagi: my boy

Yagi: you have caused quite the stir

Izuku: well. It’s not like I was using a quirk

Yagi: Once you have the thing you wont be able to do that anymore.

Izuku: I wasn’t planning to keep it up anyways.

Izuku: there’s not much more I can do as a vigilante. I need to be a hero to save the fucking world and all that jazz

Yagi: hmm. I’m not sure if I should scold you for the language or not.

Izuku: please do not

Izuku: i need somewhere I don’t have to censor myself

Izuku:... uhm, is this chat secure on your end?

Yagi: yes. Approved by Nedzu himself

Izuku: good

Izuku: wouldn’t want to get arrested bc the HPSC was reading your texts

Izuku: how do you pass “the thing” on

Yagi: DNA

Izuku: …

Yagi: the easiest way is through ingesting a hair

Izuku: like the whole hair or just the root?

Yagi: just the root

Izuku: when will i be doing this?

Izuku: just so I can mentally prepare for this absolute horror you are putting me through

Yagi: I was hoping we could have a meeting with Nedzu and Naomasa first

Izuku: Who is Naomasa?

Yagi: Oh, a detective I’ve known for years with a truth-detecting quirk.

Yagi: its not that I do not believe you, my boy

Yagi: its just that you have vital information and you told me yourself that some of the details are getting hazy

Yagi: I would like to make sure someone who can do something has the information

Yagi: especially since it involves AFO not actually being dead

Izuku: and when will htis meeitng be?

Yagi: tonight if possible. The exam is next week and it’s too late for recommendations so I want to give you as much time to prepare as possible

Izuku: Okay, yeah. Just uh, tell me the time so I can talk to my mom.

Yagi: Nedzu is free at 7 if that works for you. We’ll meet at UA.

Izuku: okay. I’ll be there.

***

Yagi Toshinori is many things.

A hero. A fighter. A man. A husband. A son. A friend.

He is also old and worn and tired and he wants, more than anything, for Izuku to be telling some fabrication of some sort. For there not to be a future somewhere, somehow, where he fails and All For One’s protege takes over Japan and decimates the world’s population except for a few final holdouts.

He wants it to not be the truth that he chose the wrong successor. Not because the other choice wasn’t capable, but because the quirk was too much for his body.

He worries that the same might be true for Izuku. That something might go wrong when Izuku takes his quirk.

Despite his fears, Toshinori still wants to give Izuku his quirk. There is something urging him to. Something telling him that this is the right move, the necessary move. If he didn’t know better, he’d think it was the quirk telling him to that this was the right choice.

He wonders if his own mentor felt this way when she passed One for All on to him. If she felt the pull telling her “this is the one” every time he was near.

Even as he watches Izuku approach the front gates of UA, Toshinori can feel the pull grow stronger.

“Sorry I’m late,” Izuku says after pausing to catch his breath. “I missed the train so I had to run here. It took a bit longer than I thought it would.”

“You ran from Dagobah to here?” Toshinori asks, eyes wide. “You ran fifteen kilometers to be here?”

Izuku looks up at him with a raised eyebrow. “I used to run from mutated monsters that wanted to smash my brains into the ground. Fifteen kilometers is nothing compared to that.”

“I suppose so,” Toshinori responds nonplussed. “Anyways, Nedzu knows we’re here to that gate should open, ah, right on time.”

Toshinori doesn’t even finish his sentence before the gate to UA opens just enough for Izuku and him to enter. Nao is already waiting inside with Nedzu, having gone in so that Toshinor could be the one to greet his protege.

“So, um, what exactly do they know already?” Izuku asks as they make their way to Nedzu’s office on the third floor.

“Only that I want to meet with them before passing off my quirk. They both know the secret of One for All and I think they could help you with your, uh, dilemma as well.”

“Are you doing this because you don’t believe me?”

The question is posed so stoically that Toshinori chokes on his own spit and starts to cough. He can’t seem to get it under control and digs in his pockets for a handkerchief. He pulls it out and uses it to cover his cough, wincing at the specks of blood he finds.

It’s only been getting worse since he started training Izuku.

“Not at all, my boy,” Toshinori assures him when he can breathe properly again. “As I said in my texts, I only want to ensure that we are able to use what information you have to prevent the future you came from.”

“Then why a truth-detecting quirk?”

“Naomasa is also my husband,” Toshinori says, his cheeks heating up. “I trust him with my life.”

“Oh,” Izuku says and then louder. “Oh! Okay, yeah, that’s… All Might is married… to a man.”

“Is that a problem?” Toshinori really hopes its not.

“NO! Not at all. That’s honestly really cool!” Izuku waves his hands in front of his face. They’re stopped outside Nedzu’s office but the door stays shut, unlike usual when he approaches. “I just never knew!”

“I don’t speak of it in public,” Toshinori explains. “Especially not as All Might. I would never risk him like that.”

“Of course not,” Izuku says with a smile. “No one would want to put their person in danger.”

The door opens at the natural lull in their conversation and Toshinori watches as Izuku’s expression shifts, becoming guarded in a way that Toshinori didn’t even realize it wasn’t before it changes.

“Welcome,” Nedzu greets with a grin slightly more feral than Toshinori is used to seeing on the man. He really hopes that he hasn’t made a mistake introducing Izuku to Nedzu.

Watching the two introduce themselves, Toshinori can’t help but feel that he has.