Chapter Text
Aizawa was surprised that this was the first time he was seeing it. He had certainly heard about it. Bakugou had made fun of his obsessive stalker nature, Uraraka and Iida had mentioned it in passing, and even All Might had spoken about how impressive it was. Midoriya had brought it up shyly like it was embarrassing, but Aizawa had never actually seen it.
Midoriya’s quirk analysis notebook.
It had apparently fallen out of his bag in his haste to get home. Today was one of the rare scattered weekends where Midoriya would get to go home to visit his mother. Since they built the dorms, they were rather careful about watching their students outside of the school. They staggered when different kids were allowed to leave. They had a pro hero escort them out and patrol the area the kid would be. The kid would have to check in with the hero at least twice a day. As far as Aizawa was concerned, they were treating the kids like prisoners, but multiple encounters with the league outside the school seemed to be compelling enough evidence that these protections were necessary.
It was foolish on Midoriya’s part to let an accident like this happen. Now Aizawa would have to wait three days to return the thing to him and, knowing Midoriya, it would be sorely missed. What an idiot. He shouldn’t be so careless with his things.
The notebook wasn’t much to look at.
For something so highly talked about, you’d think the kid would take better care of it. The cover and pages were burned. The entire thing was water damaged and it smelled slightly of sewage. Midoriya had clearly attempted to cover that with some sort of perfume, though, so the end result had it smelling more like peppermint sewage.
Aizawa couldn’t help but roll his eyes when he picked it up. On the cover was the words Hero Analysis for the Future Vol. 13. Of course the troublemaker had thirteen of these. He supposed the amount of trivia Midoriya had about heroes at any given moment made more sense now.
With a resigned wariness, Aizawa slipped the notebook into his own bag, content to forget about the wretched thing until Monday.
Boredom was a rare enemy in a hero's life, but when it chose to hunt him down, Aizawa was unfortunately weak against it. One of the reasons he filled his days with hero work and babysitting children was because he needed to keep himself busy. He loved and valued both of his jobs, but he was more than aware of how reckless and exhausting it was. He was always tired and it was noticeable to everyone, enemies and fellow heroes and civilians alike, to the point where he’s long since stopped bothering to try and hide it. He always did his job, and he liked to think that people underestimating him because of the bags under his eyes gave him an upper hand. But regardless, the people in his life refused to let him burn out. So on every other weekend, Hisashi and Recovery Girl forced him to take a few days off.
The first day of his forced weekends were inevitably spent sleeping for twelve hours, or as long as it took for him to feel alive again. The second day was spent feeling bored and anxious and out of his mind.
Aizawa never would admit it out loud, but he tended to be a worrier. He didn’t think it was irrational. Everyone in his life seemed to be in constant peril, and it seemed that every time he took his eyes off them, a new threat would emerge or someone would get hurt. The worry was what he considered the most exhausting thing in his life. He lived a life among pro heroes and children training to be them. Peril was a given part of the job, he knew that when he took it. But he also knew that he worried less when he knew that the people he cared about could take care of themselves. He taught people to take care of themselves. That made it easier.
But the worry never went away.
And when he was left bored on a Sunday with nothing to break him out of his thoughts, the worry was overwhelming.
He tried his best to push it down, to distract himself with other things, but there was only so many entertaining things to do when you had orders to sit at home and rest. He’d tried to go to the gym on one Sunday, tried to go out and just be normal, but found out the hard way that one, a hero can’t avoid trouble, and two, you do not disobey direct orders from Recovery Girl. He was basically put under house arrest from then on.
To his credit, Aizawa lasted most of the day until he lost the argument he’d been having with himself over reading the notebook. On a day like Friday, invading his student’s privacy hadn’t even crossed his mind as a possibility. On a Sunday, with his skin itching like it’s crawling with ants and the voice at the back of his head insisting that knowing more information about Midoriya would help him teach him better, help him better handle the students stubborn recklessness, that he’d be doing something productive, Aizawa caved. With adrenaline pumping through his veins or the weight of exhaustion on his shoulders, Aizawa would have done better. But with nothing but worry to occupy his busy mind, he became his own worst enemy.
He’d regret it, but he opened Midoriya’s dirty notebook.
On the first page was an analysis of Death Arms. Despite the damage, it seemed that Midoriya had gone through the trouble of rewriting the words clearly where they had smudged. The pages weren’t stuck together at all, implying that Midoriya had carefully blow dried and separated them. Aizawa silently admonished himself for thinking Midoriya didn’t care about the notebook. Obviously the damage wasn’t something he intended to happen.
Aizawa flipped through the pages, impressed by the drawings and even more impressed by the surprisingly insightful entries. He laughed out loud when he came across a bit on weaponized sexuality. The page was on Mt. Lady, but he could easily see it applying to Kayama. He could actually hear her making the same arguments in the back of his head. Midoriya’s clinically worded sidebar about it being particularly effective against the sexually inexperienced or those who were easily embarrassed was also worth a laugh because the kid was obviously both of those things.
Skipping ahead a bit, he looked for a page on someone he knew.
Midway through, in large letters, was All Might’s signature. Aizawa sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. That explained why the kid kept the notebook instead of copying his notes into a different one. Knowing those two, Midoriya could have gotten All Might to sign the next notebook without hesitation. Midoriya could have gotten All Might to sign everything he owned. But that wouldn’t have stopped Midoriya from keeping this thing anyway. As far as he was concerned, everything related to All Might was worth keeping.
The next couple pages were filled with an uncomfortable, borderline stalkerish amount of information about All Might. Some parts seemed to be written in code. Aizawa didn’t recognize the code, and that was fairly impressive, because code-breaking was among his Sunday hobbies, in case it became useful at work(it has). Aizawa shrugged, figuring those parts were about All Might’s secret. It seemed nice of the kid to go to such lengths to hide All Might’s secrets. Though the challenge might well tempt villains to try harder to solve it.
Aizawa quickly moved past that section, having already read a few notes about things he really didn’t want to know about his colleague.
The next few pages were on some low time pro-hero fights, strangely not up to standard against the rest of his entries and then an entire section on his observations of people he’d seen during the enrollment test. Uraraka made a up a pretty significant chunk of that section and the boy’s admiration for her was pretty obvious. It would have been cute if there hadn’t been an entire section about her weaknesses and how to potentially beat her in a fight.
That… was slightly new. Not entirely out of the blue. Every entry had a list of some of the hero’s weaknesses and potential downfalls. The villain entrees he had were significantly more focused on fighting them. But that was the thing. This seemed to be the first entry where he turned that thought process was towards someone who would be considered a hero.
It was a practical decision. After all, Midoriya would be fighting his classmates in school and there was a definite moral gray when it came to most pro-heroes. You never know when another hero is going to turn against you. Having their weaknesses thought out was wise for any hero, but reading the notes Midoriya made on damaging his friend’s hands made his skin crawl.
Aizawa decided to move on from that section. He could talk to Midoriya about it later. A few pages later he found the section on himself. He smirked a little. He could imagine Midoriya’s reaction to finding out he’d read it.
The notes were as detailed as the rest. More so, even. It quite suddenly clicked in Aizawa’s head that most of Midoriya’s notes were based on brief glimpses of a hero fight, what could be found on the news or the internet. Now that Midoriya could interact with heroes in person…
Well, it seems like All Might wasn’t the only person he was obsessively observing after all.
Aizawa’s fingers traced the lines of his hero costume. Stared at the detailed drawing of his face and felt… nervous. Nervous wasn’t quite the right word for the feeling settling in his gut, but it was close. The more he read the section on himself, the more nervous he became.
Midoriya, it turned out, was more observant than he had ever guessed. It was easy to overlook when the kid blindly rushed into danger without a plan or a second thought, but that wasn’t entirely true. Midoriya had a sacrificial streak, but his plans, even if they had a great cost to himself, seemed to work. Oftentimes the only people hurt in his mad plans were him. Sometimes things went wrong, and unpredictable elements threw things into chaos. But the plans themselves weren’t entirely bad. Or at very least, they were better than a kid his age should be able to put together, more detailed and thought out than he’d expect of most students. Such a skill should be cultivated.
The pages on his weaknesses did not make him feel better. It was one thing for Midoriya to write similar observations to the ones Aizawa had made on his own about other heroes. It was another thing altogether to see his own weaknesses laid out in ink. It was another thing to find them all to be so scarily accurate.
Some of his weaknesses were obvious. Admittedly, he had never made the connection that he was fighting essentially quirkless before, but it was obvious all the same. Actually, the phrasing made Aizawa wonder about some of the assumptions he had about quirkless people. It was obviously foolish to underestimate them. Especially since, according to Midoriya, his powers would do nothing against them. Most of his fights come down to training and weapons. To make it in a world of heroes and villains, a quirkless person would have to be better at both of those just to survive. He wanted to believe that quirkless people lived outside the hero world, but that would be stupid. Quirkless people were human and part of this hero-based society as much as anyone else. They wouldn’t be able to escape it if they tried. It was something he would have to consider more at length later.
The longer-than-it-should-be section about attacking his eyes made him feel nauseous. It wasn’t exactly news to him that his eyes were one of his vulnerabilities. The main reason he wore his googles was for protection. Midoriya, in turn, wrote an entire paragraph about his goggles, wondering how fragile they were but concluding that the support department likely made them with a very resilient material. A correct conclusion, though Midoriya wisely noted that attempting to break them, especially if resources were in his favor, was a worthwhile venture anyway, because correct or not, it was still an assumption, and if a hero shouldn’t put absolute trust in their equipment, why should a villain?
The thing that concerned him was that once again Midoriya had proven himself capable of making brutal judgement calls if put into a corner. It almost seemed like his first instinct was the quickest most brutal route. Those options were written first before the more carefully thought out plans. It wasn’t something he’d expect out of the timid boy. He couldn’t fault the logic, sometimes violence was the only answer that stood between you and death, but... the dangerous thing about first instincts is that you often act on them.
Aizawa shook the thought out of his head. Actions speak louder than words, and Midoriya’s real-life action spoke of an innate heroic instinct.
That still didn’t stop him from frowning as his weakness page continued on. Midoriya noticed how he favored his right arm because of a previous injury. Midoriya made several plans on how to separate him from his capture weapon. Midoriya… Aizawa frowned. Midoriya wrote a psychological breakdown of him.
It wasn’t at a professional level, obviously. Aizawa would argue that the section carried heavier notes of cynicism than the rest of his writings… but it was accurate. It was accurate enough that Aizawa was bothered that Midoriya could glean this much information from their brief interactions.
The boy had detected his anxiety, knew he had nightmares, pointed out the symptoms of PTSD he had. Midoriya wrote out what he loved and what his moral values were. Midoriya made bullet points on things that seemed to trigger his anger or irritation and stress and fear. And then Midoriya wrote plans on how to use that. Plans on how to manipulate him or plans on how to fly under Aizawa’s radar.
Aizawa found, that at very least, Midoriya clearly didn’t know how to actually manipulate people. he had a long way to go before he could just talk his way out of any situation. But Aizawa knew the kid had charisma and this was a start of something dangerous.
It all seemed dangerous, Aizawa decided.
There was too much information here. Aizawa knew that the journal would only get more detailed and better thought out the deeper he read, because Midoriya had grown significantly as a hero since he first wrote this entry on Aizawa. Aizawa knew that firsthand experience would make a hell of a difference on Midoriya’s analytical skills. Which was a problem. Because in the hands of a villain, this notebook was an extremely powerful weapon.
If he had dropped the notebook in the street instead of class, his writing could easily be used to kill every hero in here.
This was bigger than him, he decided.
Aizawa waited as Principal Nedzu flipped silently through the notebook the next morning. He had read through as much as he could stand of the analysis notebook the night before and he felt sure that this was the right decision. Midoriya’s ideas were dark but realistically effective. Some of his ideas for villain take-downs were ingenious. His ideas for improving school security were fantastic. But Aizawa kept catching hints of something more dangerous lurking within. Midoriya, in all his reckless, borderline suicidal glory, had an utterly ruthless side.
So Aizawa went to the principal and hoped that this could be settled. Whether for getting Midoriya counselling or establishing better security, Nedzu would have the answers. Finally, the principal gently closed the notebook and smiled at Aizawa. Aizawa felt ice spread through his veins faster than even Todoroki could manage.
Nedzu’s eyes were lit with the gleam of a madman. It was a look of hunger, the kind of look the principal only got when he had a plan forming, when he was solving a puzzle or countering a chess move. It was the kind of look he got when there was information he didn’t know and someone was keeping it from him. It was a look that said he would do everything it took to win. It was enough to make Aizawa regret even looking at the notebook.
“I’m very glad you brought this to my attention, Aizawa. If you don’t mind, I will be more than happy to return this to young Midoriya. I would like to talk to him anyway. Please send him to my office the next time you see him.”
Aizawa’s gut instinct was screaming at him over how bad this was. He felt like he was feeding Midoriya to a lion. He trusted Nedzu, but he also knew the man was dangerous. If Midoriya’s notebook had gotten his attention enough to put that look in the creature’s eyes…
Aizawa had no idea what would happen.
“Yes, sir,” Aizawa said, keeping his face carefully blank. He didn’t know what was going to happen… but he trusted Nedzu. He had to remind himself of that almost like a mantra. He trusted Nedzu. It would work out.
A few hours later, a pale-looking Midoriya returned from the principal’s office looking as though he was going to puke. Aizawa didn’t entirely blame him.
“Are you okay, Midori-?”
Midoriya bowed and held out a piece of paper, still looking as though he’d just gotten off a bad roller coaster ride. “He told me to give this to you.”
Aizawa took it, figuring it was a pass, and sent Midoriya to his seat. After setting an assignment, Aizawa glanced back at the note. It read:
Aizawa,
On Tuesdays and Thursdays Midoriya Izuku will be excused from History of Heroics to take personal lessons with me on analysis. I’d appreciate if you only talked about this with the relevant teachers. Thank you again for letting me know of his potential!
Principal Nedzu
Suddenly, the sick look on Midoriya’s face made sense. Aizawa felt like he was going to vomit too. This… this was worse than bad. Principal Nedzu had decided to take on Midoriya as a personal student. That meant Nedzu thought Midoriya had the potential to equal him in intelligence. That meant Nedzu was going to train Midoriya to be more ruthless, to be even more of a manipulative genius.
It meant that Midoriya Izuku, a boy with the power of All Might, was also going to have the intelligence of the super-genius Nedzu.
That meant that Midoriya Izuku had the potential to become completely unstoppable.
Aizawa looked at the student, who at the moment was whispering to his friends. Uraraka gasped and began shaking him back and forth in excitement. Iida was doing his patented hand chopping motions trying to get them back on task. This motion seemed to push Midoriya over the edge and he puked down his front, much to his friends concern and his own embarrassment.
As Aizawa excused him to go to Recovery Girl (again), he tried to convince himself that there was no way that a boy as innocent and clumsy as this could turn to the dark side.
He had too much heroic potential, after all.