Chapter Text
“I’ve had a weird idea,” Izuku explained to Camie, as he led the way to the gyms on campus that their aerial silks hung from. “I’m not actually sure if it’ll work, though.”
“What is this weird idea?” Camie asked lightly. There was the sound of her blowing a bubble with her gum and then popping it, and he turned to look at her, shooting her a brilliant grin over his shoulder.
“You know Blackwhip?”
“Your totally weird sub-Quirk?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
“That’s the one.”
“What about it?”
“I think,” Izuku said grandly, “that I’m going to try and use it like I would silks, for training.”
She hummed, her eyebrows drawn closely together. It wasn’t often that Camie wore her anxiety on her face. Usually, she hid it behind vapid eyelash flutters and intentionally blank looks. Now it was different, though. Now it was more real . It occurred to Izuku, in a distant, vague sort of way, that he was seeing a lot less of everyone’s masks lately, not just hers. He wondered if they were thinking the same about him.
“Is your arm back in shape yet?” she asked.
Izuku flexed for her, placing his left hand over his right bicep, and she laughed. “I’ve been keeping up with my physical therapy exercises,” he said. “This is supposed to help with that too.”
“Cool,” Camie said, her vowels drawn out more than usual, as she blew and popped a bubble with her gum again. “What am I here for?”
“Supervision,” Izuku said easily, as he opened the door to the gym and led the way inside. He checked and double checked the door to make sure she had her hand on it and was prepared to catch it before he dropped it on her. “There is a very good chance that the first time I attempt this I will fall flat on my ass.”
“Bummer,” she said lightly, though there was another crack in her mask that wouldn’t normally be there. “You have such a nice ass, too.”
“I know, right?” Izuku said, laughing. It was easier now than it used to be, but it was still odd for him to be in a position where others actually found him attractive—both physically and personality-wise. And experience with Camie allowed him to discern that she both meant this as a genuine compliment even as she joked about it, which was…well, he wasn’t sure what it was. Something good, though. Something nice.
“Alright,” Camie said, spitting her gum out in the trash can. “Guess we should set up a lot of mats for you.”
“Probably a good idea,” Izuku agreed, already heading for where the mats were lined up on the wall and grabbing several of them. Camie did the same, and then they laid them out underneath the empty spot on the ceiling where one of the silk sets had been taken down for repairs a week ago. This was probably a highly illegal activity Izuku was about to do, but. He was fairly confident he could talk himself out of most trouble he got into.
Which was also very odd, when juxtaposed to what his life was like prior to high school.
“You should probably warm up with actual silks first though,” Camie said, as they worked through their stretches, increasingly more complex as time went on.
“Hm, yeah,” Izuku agreed, eyeing the silks as he did. “I probably should.”
They both boarded the silks together. Izuku laughed as he noticed Camie was doing part of their routine at the school festival to warm up, and then he joined her. They both stopped before they got to the interactive parts though, and Izuku slid down his silks until his feet touched softly on the floor.
“I guess that’s it,” Camie said, unwrapping herself as she did. “Are you totally ready to do this thing, babe?”
“As ready as I can be.”
Izuku studied the blank space next to him, inviting and open. He tested Blackwhip within him—it was quieter than usual, at peace, but it didn’t tend to stay that way for long once he started using it. He had a feeling that this had something to do with the previous wielders of One for All, but he hadn’t voiced this feeling out loud yet to Yagi. He hadn’t seen any of them since his stay at the hospital, and that worried him, even though there was no logical reason it should. He had always gone months between vestige sightings in the past.
“Will you watch my form?” Izuku asked Camie. “If I start getting too shaky, I need to take a break.”
“You got it, babe.”
“Thanks.”
Izuku called to Blackwhip, feeling it rage and simmer inside him before finally flaring outwards from his arms. He wrapped the beams in snaking tendrils of black energy, then used them to pull himself up. He rotated slowly. He didn’t feel any particular strain yet, but then again, he’d only been doing this for a few minutes.
Izuku folded his body, lifting his legs and then stretching them out so that he could spin while suspended horizontally. He altered Blackwhip so that a tendril came out of his waist instead, providing additional support. It removed some of the strain from his arms, too, even if it did require more concentration. He caught a glimpse of Camie below him, watching intently as he spun, forgetting to look ditzy once she was concentrating on something.
Izuku took a deep breath. He would be fine.
Izuku twisted, Blackwhip twisting with him as he lifted his legs over his head and folded himself in half and then unfolded himself to twist some more. It required a lot of concentration, because he had to create new tendrils on some parts of his body and release others as he moved, since these weren’t really silks and couldn’t be treated as such. He spun around again, lifting himself into a vertical position, once again making it so the tendrils came out of his arms. He hung suspended, drifting.
There was a flash. Blood red eyes swam into his vision, white hair, curling at temples and the nape of a neck, a sickly sweet smile and a confident tilt of the head. Look at you, a voice said directly into his ear, surrounding him, filling his body with anger and regret as if it were being pumped into him. You tried so hard, and for what reason? You could never defeat me, not with that weak little body of yours.
“Izuku!”
Blackwhip flared, tendrils bursting out of him and around him, raging, out of control, reaching to the walls of the room and bouncing off of them. Izuku was no longer being suspended in the air by any of the ones he’d attached to the beam above him previously. Instead he was being suspended only by the force of the ones below him.
He had to get Blackwhip back under control.
Izuku had a lot of experience putting a cap on his anger, tucking everything behind a smile and a wave, and that’s what he tried to do now. Except, something was wrong, something was not quite right, something else was angry and it was not him. He struggled, Blackwhip flailing all the while, as he played an invisible game of tug-of-war with himself. It took longer than it should, the world whiting out at the edges until all that was left was him, his Quirk, and the expanses of nothingness between them. Then, he finally pulled himself together and snuffed out every candle burning at both ends in the recesses of his mind.
Izuku dropped onto the mats they’d stacked beneath him, hissing in pain as Blackwhip swirled and drew back into him, calmer than it had been a moment ago. He rolled onto his side, muscles twitching and skin drenched in sweat, and held his right arm to his chest. It was throbbing .
There were hands on his shoulder, turning him around, grounding him to this world and this reality. “Izuku?” Camie asked, her voice quiet and fearful, the emotions unmasked by anything else.
“It’s fine,” Izuku said, trying to sit up but not succeeding. His voice was unexpectedly hoarse. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t—you don’t seem fine.”
He finally succeeded in sitting up. The pain in his right arm had gone away, almost like it had never been there in the first place, but still it shook as he held it out in front of himself and flexed it. “I’m okay, I promise.” This was true. He was okay, at least physically.
“What was that?” Camie asked.
Izuku looked back up at the beams above him, at the disarray of the gym around him where Blackwhip had knocked equipment to the side and scuffed the floors up.
It was a good question. Izuku thought there was probably a better one though.
“I don’t know,” he told Camie. This was true. He didn’t know, but he thought…
He thought he might.
The better question was: Who was that? Whoever they were, they weren’t someone that Izuku knew. That hadn’t been one of his memories. And that meant…
The memory had to belong to someone else.
“ All for One.”
Izuku rubbed the back of his neck with a towel, collecting droplets of water as they fell from his hair and collected there, and he sat down heavily in his desk chair. “I…was afraid you would say that.”
“ The description…it matches perfectly,” Yagi said. “ You said you had the vision while using Blackwhip?”
“Yeah,” Izuku confessed quietly. He pulled his legs up onto his chair with him, and he wrapped them tightly with his arms. He knew what he was feeling but he didn’t know if he had the courage to say it out loud. “Yagi-sensei…I’m terrified.”
Several beats passed. “Of Blackwhip?” Yagi asked hesitantly.
“Of the vision,” Izuku said, though he was a little bit afraid of Blackwhip now too, and judging by how Yagi exhaled softly, he could hear it in Izuku’s voice. “In the past, whenever I saw the Vestiges, they were signs of danger. First the USJ Incident, where you were injured, then after the Hosu, where that hero died. I saw them after you fought All for One this year too, and then again at the Shie Hassaikai raid. Sometimes they spoke to me, but other times they didn’t. What I’m trying to say is…as they were happening, they seemed like they weren’t connected. But with hindsight, I think All for One might have been moving in the shadows at each juncture.”
“ …I think you are most likely correct,” Yagi said, with a soft, contemplative hum. “ We know for certain he was involved in the USJ Incident, because of the Noumu, and at Kamino, because he was there in the flesh. Considering the League of Villains’ presence at Hosu and the Shie Hassaikai’s base, however, it’s also fair to assume that All for One himself might have been involved then, too.”
“If I’m seeing them again…” Izuku said leadingly.
“ It’s likely that All for One might be moving again,” Yagi finished. Uncomfortable silence settled between them now that the words were out.
“I don’t know what to do,” Izuku whispered.
Yagi sighed heavily. “ Oh, my boy. How I wish I had my old strength, how I wish I could still carry One for All, how I wish my burdens had not been passed so abruptly to you when I thought they were nothing to worry about anyway…”
Izuku said nothing in response to this, because there was nothing he could say. He knew well enough by now to know self-hatred was a quality he shared with Yagi. He also knew that when it got bad, it was best to just let it out. Oftentimes, real solutions came at the tail end of a pity party.
“ Alright,” Yagi said, and Izuku could hear the way he drew himself together and picked himself up in the weight of his voice. “ This is what we’ll do. I will call Gran Torino about your Quirk and see if he has any insights about what is happening to you. You will inform your hero mentor that you’re having trouble controlling Black Whip. Then, all of us will put our heads together and think of something for this Quirk of ours.”
“Okay,” Izuku said, his voice uneven, because this was a good plan. He wasn’t entirely sure how Gran Torino factored into it, but this was a good plan.
“ After that, I’ll make a trip to Tartarus,” Yagi continued. “ I’ve been meaning to go for a while, now.”
“To…Tartarus?” Izuku asked, unpleasantness trickling through him like it had been shot directly into his veins. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“ Not any more dangerous than having him locked up in there in the first place,” Yagi said, with an big sigh, like he disagreed with keeping him contained in Tartarus altogether.
Izuku allowed this, because it was undeniably true. “Alright,” he whispered. “Okay, that sounds good.”
“ It’ll be alright,” Yagi told him. He was not quite whispering, but he was close. “ At the very least, you don’t have to go it alone, young Izuku. We’ll be with you every step of the way.”
Izuku sighed, an invisible weight lifting off of his shoulders as he did. “Thank you, Yagi-sensei.”
“After this,” Eraserhead said, as he let Izuku into the gym, “I need to show you how to do a very specific kind of paperwork.”
That was certainly cryptic. Izuku was used to Eraserhead by now, so he knew asking what he meant would get him nowhere. He simply nodded, and then blinked when he spotted first Yagi—who rolled his wheelchair back slightly so he could look at Izuku—and then Gran Torino, looking somehow older and frailer than Izuku remembered him looking. He leaned heavily on his staff, expression turned downwards into a frown, as he made eye contact with Izuku.
“Young Izuku,” Yagi greeted him warmly, as Izuku approached. “You remember Gran Torino.”
“Yes,” Izuku said immediately, bowing to the elderly hero. “I do. It’s good to see you again, Gran Torino, sir.”
“Enough of that,” Gran Torino said. He sounded gruff, but not genuinely upset. “This better be worth my time, Toshinori. I’m a busy man, you know. Not that you would, considering you never call.”
A bit of sweat beaded almost instantaneously and comically on Yagi’s forehead. “I’m terribly sorry, I keep meaning—”
“Midoriya has started to develop Quirks from the previous wielders of his Quirk,” Eraserhead said, cutting over Yagi’s apology. Gran Torino flicked his eyes over to Eraserhead sharply as he continued. “Those Quirks are out of control. Yagi thought you might have some insights about that.”
“I’ve talked to some of the Vestiges of previous wielders,” Izuku said hurriedly, fumbling his words slightly in his haste to get them out. “The Quirks have been inside of One for All, so they’ve been growing with it. They’re stronger than they used to be. I…I only have one now, and I can’t control it as well as I’d like to. That’s why I need help.”
Gran Torino made a contemplative hum. “It hardly seems believable, doesn’t it? A bunch of half-ghosts in your Quirk, talking to you.”
He squinted at Izuku, who could only offer him a half-shrug in response. To be fair to Torino, he wouldn’t believe it either, if he wasn’t living through it.
“Anyway,” Gran Torino said, evidently deciding to move on. “All of them? You’re going to get Quirks for every wielder before you?"
“That’s what Yoichi said when he told me to be ready.”
“And you only have one right now, but you struggle to control it?”
“Yes.”
“He gets nightmares and visions, too, of a sort,” Yagi said, his voice quiet. “They seem to be visions from previous wielders. One that he told me about—” At this, Yagi glanced at him, seeking permission, and Izuku nodded. “—featured All for One before I smashed his face in, saying something he never said to me.”
“Alright, alright,” Gran Torino said, waving his cane sourly. “It’s very important, I get it. Well…here’s the upshot. Whatever the League is doing right now, they’re doing it quietly. I could probably give the kid a training session every now and then, since you’re too All Might to do it yourself.” This last part was said with a derisive glare towards Yagi, who winced.
“Help how?” Izuku asked.
“By training,” he said. “You’ve been pretty good at figuring things out on your own, I hear, but the bottom line is you just need to use that Quirk so often that it feels like your own appendage.”
“We’re just…going to fight?” Izuku asked, blinking at Gran Torino. Not that he doubted the man that had trained All Might was competent, but…
Gran Torino scowled at him. “What, you underestimating me, you zygote? Hey, Eraserhead. Keep an eye on the kid. If he goes overboard, cancel his Quirk.”
This was all moving alarmingly fast for Izuku. “Wait a minute, are we going to spar? Just like that?”
“I’m sorry, young Izuku,” Yagi said, wincing.
Gran Torino grinned. “Just like that. Only use the new Quirk to fight me for now. We’ll work on combining the two later, I reckon.”
And just like that, he launched towards Izuku in a yellow blur.
Afterwards, when he was black and blue and frustrated—old men shouldn’t be as nimble as Gran Torino, and Izuku hadn’t landed a hit on him once—he left with Eraserhead, who put in eye drops as they walked. Yagi and Gran Torino stayed behind, arguing about something or another.
Eraserhead had to use Erasure four times. Four .
“What’s this paperwork we’re going to do?” Izuku asked, because he had to think about something other than his failures with Blackwhip or he was going to combust.
Eraserhead sighed heavily. “I’m showing you how to file paperwork for a special sort of case.”
Izuku raised an eyebrow.
“A private case,” he added, tucking his eye drops into a pocket. “One that other heroes can’t access in a database.”
“ Oh ,” Izuku said. “Oh, are we…?”
“Yeah. It’s time to meet the Todorokis.”