Chapter Text
"Eri, I want you to be my successor."
Eri sighed as she turned towards the man who said those words.
"That makes the tenth time you told me that. Are you going senile already? Is it really that hard to find yourself a worthy successor?"
"I‘m not that old, I‘m barely middle aged. Besides, not everyone can stay young forever." the man huffed.
"You know just as well as me that I offered to help you out with that plenty of times. All you need to do is say the word and I will give you your youth back." she rebuffed.
"And you know I told you that I wouldn‘t take you up on that offer. Aging is part of life. Anyway you are dodging the question. Besides, finding worthy candidates isn‘t the issue. The problem is none of them are capable of receiving this power. They would die within the year. You are the only candidate I can trust. Your quirk makes you the perfect successor." he argued.
Eri knew he was right. Her quirk would allow her to counter the negative effects anyone else would be powerless against. So why was she so hesitant? It would allow her to save so many people. Was it because she knew it meant the old man infront of her was going to retire? No, he had told her he would still be able to perform hero work for multiple years before his power ran out. So why?
"Are you really that scared of how your quirk will react to it?" the man asked.
Eri didn‘t respond.
"You know, I really think you are overreacting with this. It won‘t be as bad as you think."
„How do you know that?" she snapped. "You didn‘t have a quirk when you got it and neither did your predecessor. The power has grown so much since then that there is no telling what will happen. And my quirk is already hard to control at times, I don‘t think I‘m overreacting when I am worried about what will happen if we add the strongest power source in the world to it."
The man deflated after that statement.
"I know. But there really isn‘t another candidate. There hasn‘t been a quirkless kid born in over a decade and the only one I found in the last 10 years turned out to be a spy sent to trick me into giving it up. I really don‘t know what to do."
"But why now? You don‘t intend to retire anytime soon. Surely there will be another candidate who can handle the side effects if we just wait a bit longer." she argued.
"But what if there isn‘t. We haven‘t found another regeneration or healing quirk powerful enough to overcome the overload and even if we did, the chances of the user also being a candidate is just too low. At this point I need to start preparing for retirement and that includes passing the torch. My predecessor waited too long and it almost ended badly. I won‘t repeat that mistake." he explained.
Eri looked down at those words. It wasn’t like she hadn’t heard those arguments a million times before. She knew how hard he had worked when looking for a successor. All that work when the perfect successor was right in front of him but refused to do it. How could she do this to him. He had done so much for her and she was causing him so many problems just because she was scared of her own quirk. She wasn‘t a traumatized kid anymore. Her quirk wasn‘t a curse. It had saved hundreds of lives. Surely it wouldn‘t be as bad as she feared, right?
"Fine"
"Huh"
"I said fine, I‘ll take that stupid quirk."
"Wait, you don‘t have to. I didn‘t mean to force you to …"
"Oh just shut it, I said it was fine, you geezer. I‘ll take One for All from you."
He still looked hesitant, but Eri could see a smile slowly forming on Deku’s face.
It had been a few days since then. Eri was now sitting in a wood cabin out in the middle of nowhere. She was alone.
She had already received the quirk from Deku. The method was rather disgusting, but according to Deku it was a tradition at this point. If she ever got to pick a successor she would just do a blood transfusion, it just seemed more rational that way. Then again, her reaction was probably hilarious from Deku‘s perspective so maybe there was something to this tradition after all. She grinned at that thought.
After deciding she would take it, the two of them started talking about what precautions should be taken when passing on the quirk. The quirk hadn’t been passed to another quirked individual in almost 100 years. Neither of them had any idea how her quirk would react so the first step was to isolate her. That way no matter what happened she at least wouldn‘t hurt anyone else.
The second precaution was Deku having one of her hair at hand in case she couldn‘t control the quirk. They were unsure if it would work with hair she gave him before the quirk manifested. Just in case they also had a few Hatsume Industries drones outside the cabin which she could use to send a fresh strand of hair.
She also agreed with Deku as a last resort she could rewind herself to before she got the quirk. Both knew that this could potentially erase One for All from existence but they would prefer that outcome over someone dying from an uncontrollable quirk.
So here she was waiting for the quirk to kick in. While waiting she started focusing on her own quirk. She could feel the energy in her horn like water inside a tub. She could feel the mental ‘faucet’ that turned her quirk on and off.
She was wondering how OFA would feel for her. Deku described it as a microwave, whatever he meant by that. It reminded her of the time he had been rampling about her quirk being like a toaster back when she was still afraid of her quirk. Apparently All Might had imagined it like a flame burning deep in his soul. That seemed a bit clearer but it still didn’t help her. She would just have to wait and figure this out for herself.
As she kept focusing on her own quirk, she suddenly began feeling a tingle in her stomach. She figured this was it and began focusing on that feeling. What started as a small tingle slowly expanded throughout her body. It began with her legs quickly followed by her arms.
Then it started spreading up her neck. She shivered slightly at the odd sensation but didn’t try to resist as it filled the rest of her body. Then it finally reached her horn. The moment whatever was spreading throughout her body touched her horn however, it started to get sucked in. Instead of spreading itself evenly throughout her body the entire flow of … energy? … was now directed straight into her horn.
She could definitely feel the new energy mixing together with the energy that was already stored in her horn beforehand. It felt wrong and the sensation was making her slightly nauseous. She couldn’t get hung up on this feeling of wrongness however.
Eri noticed that her mental tub was filling up at an alarming rate. She began to focus on suppressing the flow and separating the new energy to no avail. The flow couldn‘t be slowed down or redirected. In fact it grew stronger as time went on.
She did already start to feel the itchiness in her horn that came with it being filled up completely. All she could do at this point was to try to keep it contained and hope the flow would stop soon.
It did not stop.
The horn was already completely full at this point and Eri was entirely focused on somehow compressing the energy to keep it from overflowing. She also had to consciously keep the faucet closed since her body instinctively wanted to get rid of this overflow. She tried her best to keep it in, straining at the effort. She felt her control slip more and more with every heartbeat. Absent-mindedly she noticed colorful sparks coming off her horn. And then, for the first time in over a decade, she lost control of her quirk and it activated with a flash of light.
The first thing Eri noticed after opening her eyes again was that her horn wasn’t emitting the golden light she was used to. Instead it was glowing in all colors of the rainbow. Before she was able to continue that line of thought a brilliant white light erupted from her horn. Then the world went dark.
When she opened her eyes, all Eri could see was darkness. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust, but as soon as they did she was shocked. She wasn’t in the wood cabin she had just been at. She was in an empty dark room surrounded by gray walls. She was lying on a very large but uncomfortable bed. It looked familiar but in her half-asleep state she couldn’t tell where she knew it from.
"Where am I?" she muttered.
Her mind felt groggy as if she just woke up after a long sleep. The last thing she remembered was waiting for One for All to kick and her quirk activating. That should have meant some collateral damage to the surroundings at most. But looking around something definitely had happened. Was she kidnapped while she was unconscious? That seemed unlikely considering only very few people knew where they went to transfer the quirk and all of them were trusted friends. It was, however, not impossible.
She tried to get up to assess the situation more closely but she felt odd. Her body didn’t move like she wanted to, it felt too weak. That wasn’t a good sign. Did her kidnappers do something to her while she was knocked out? Her arms and legs stung a bit but it didn’t seem like enough to cause this feeling of weakness. When she looked down she got alarmed. Her arms and legs were covered in bandages. What had they done to her? Was Deku alright? He would have been close enough to arrive at her destination within seconds so any kidnappers would have likely had to go through him. They couldn’t have beaten him, could they? Maybe some warp quirk? As she kept speculating, Eri continued to inspect herself and noticed she was wearing a worn out oversized dress and nothing else.
Next, she noticed how thin her arms were underneath the bandages. These weren’t the arms she was used to. All the muscles she built up over the years were gone leaving them practically just skin and bones. Just how long was she knocked out? It had to have been a long time for her muscles to atrophy to this extent. Or did her kidnappers do something to her. It seemed likely judging from the bandages.
Then she finally noticed something she should have noticed earlier. She was tiny. It wasn’t that her bed was large, actually looking at the door it was on the smaller side. She had just shrunk to the size of a toddler. Her body was no longer that of a young adult, but instead that of a malnourished little girl. Did she accidentally rewind herself or did they do something to her while she was knocked out? This was bad, unless they used some other quirk to do this there was no way for her to undo these changes. Rewind was powerful but she could not undo any of the changes that she herself made with her quirk. To experiment she tried activating her quirk but it felt off, too weak. Like using a muscle that hadn’t been used in months. She stopped trying to use her quirk for now, deciding to figure out her general situation first.
As she looked around, something else bothered her. When she woke up she felt the room looked familiar but put that thought aside when she noticed the other alarming changes. But now, as she was looking more closely, she noticed more and more things she remembered. The large bed with a metal frame, the small wood table with 3 chairs around it and the big locked door were all very familiar to her. She hadn’t seen it in years but she still remembered the room she spent most of her early childhood in. It was a place she often saw in her nightmares. A place she was rescued from decades ago. A place that should no longer exist.
The more she looked, the more disturbed she got. She noticed small details that no one else should know about. She was desperately hoping this was some sort of dream. But it felt far too realistic. Her breathing started getting erratic as she started to panic and she began to sob.
But this clearly wasn’t a dream. She was never able to think so clearly during her nightmares. This was real even if it didn’t make any sense.
As she kept crying she almost didn’t hear as the door was unlocked and opened. She looked up and saw a familiar bald figure had entered the room and looked around for any abnormalities. After confirming the room was empty outside of the young girl crying on the bed he carefully moved over. He looked her over cautiously from a distance but as he moved closer Eri’s already pale skin turned ghost white and she tried to back away from the man. This resulted in her going back a bit too far and falling off the bed onto the cold concrete floor. He simply picked her up and after putting her in the bed again left the room without saying a word.
After a few more minutes of crying Eri finally managed to somewhat compose herself. When she was finally calm enough, she was able to think again. After she saw that man her fears were all but confirmed. It was one of Chisaki’s men, Yu Hojo. She was back in the same basement under Overhaul’s compound.
Now that she had time to think more clearly about the situation she noticed that there was still a chance she was wrong. She had never been under an illusion quirk before so she had no idea what it was like, but considering the situation it was possible she was locked in her own memories or placed in a nightmare created from her memories. But considering how detailed everything around her was, with a quirk this powerful, how was she able to be conscious? And what was the purpose of this, if they wanted to keep her sedated they didn’t need some elaborate illusion and if their goal was to break her mind somehow there were many better approaches.
The second option she could think of was starting to seem far more likely as she kept on thinking. As impossible as traveling to the past seemed, it would explain everything that was going on.
But how was this possible? Even after hundreds of years of quirks being around, there was never any quirk that could achieve anything even close to this. Sure, temporal quirks existed but they were never this powerful. Even her own quirk was never powerful enough to …
ONE FOR ALL
How could she have forgotten about that detail? She had just received One for All before all of this happened. And the last thing she remembered was her quirk activating and going out of control. Of course her quirk would somehow merge with one for all and do something absurd. Wasn’t that exactly why she refused to take it for all those years.
Eri couldn’t help but laugh. “We are ready for anything," he said. Sure. I’m sure he just meant her wiping out a few acres of forest from her quirk being powered up by One for All. She desperately wanted to find him and scream “I told you so” in Deku’s face, but he didn’t exist anymore did he. None of her friends and family did. Or at least none of the ones she knew, all of them were just going about their lives with no idea what just happened. Well, she could just look for the current Deku and tell him. It would make her feel a little bit better at least. Now then, what was she supposed to do? Stay put and follow the script or use her future knowledge to hopefully improve this timeline.
She could try to escape and try to warn people about the future. But what warnings could she give to the heroes that they didn’t already know. She didn’t know much about the criminals that were currently active. She knew about the Shie Hassaikai, of course. She lived with or at least under them for years and even as a prisoner for the most part learned a lot of information that could be used to bring them down quicker. She was also a valuable witness since human experiments aren’t exactly legal.
But outside of that there wasn’t much. The biggest piece of information at this point in time was probably the survival of All for One and how he has been rebuilding his empire in the shadows. Or did they already know that? She wasn’t quite sure how far she jumped back in time.
What else did she remember? ‘Think Eri, think!’ she grumbled to herself. She didn’t know nearly as much as she thought she did. In her defense, she was 6 or 7 years old when most of the relevant events took place and she was never part of it and instead a distant observer. All she knew came from the stories 1-A would tell her, which in hindsight was a very child-friendly and watered down version of what probably took place, and whatever she learned in history class when she attended U.A. She really should have paid more attention in that particular class.
She remembered almost none of the names. There was some doctor who worked with All for One and was able to create living weapons called Nomu. There was some revolutionary army who joined together with the league of villains under Tomura Shigaraki but they weren’t even covered in class since their existence was covered up. There was …
As Eri kept thinking about what she knew the door opened again and a very familiar figure entered. And when he looked at her she could not stop her mind from completely freezing. Because at that moment she couldn’t refuse to acknowledge it anymore. The man who tormented her was standing in front of her, eyes as cold as she remembered.
Overhaul was back.