Chapter Text
"Yagi-san, there's an underground hero on call for you."
"I'll pass it on to All Might," Toshinori said into the receiver.
"She's not calling for All Might, Yagi-san. She's asking for you. "
A thousand thoughts flew through his head. Yagi Toshinori, the quirkless secretary, and All Might, the Symbol of Peace, were two separate entities. It may be old-fashioned, but a secret identity had given him a layer of privacy and personal protection that he wouldn’t have otherwise. If someone finally saw through the deception….
"Have you run her hero license through the hero network yet?" he asked.
There was shuffling on the other end as Ebina, his agency's hero respondent, found papers on her desk, "Results just came back. Hero name: Madam Nighteye. She's underground, so info on past cases and correspondence are limited, but she doesn't have any reprimands or complaints. Graduated from Ketsubutsu five years ago, hit the ground running, and signed on with the IUCA immediately, oh, I just found her peer reviews. No signs of corruption, remarks about her hard work and dedication are the most reappearing, and she has one note from the IUCA head claiming, and I quote, 'Nighteye is the one bitch who not only turns in her paperwork on time but also helps others stay on top of it. If some spotlight agency poaches her, I will personally blacklist every hero within the prefecture.' "
Okay. Not a villain or vigilante posing as an underground hero. Just a fellow hero. But what would a fellow hero want with Yagi Toshinori?
"Put her through, Ebina," he said, deciding to hear the woman out. There was a pause and then a click as the phone changed lines.
"Is this Yagi Toshinori?" came a calm voice on the other end.
"This is he," Toshinori answered, "How might I help you?"
"I was hoping I could meet up with you, Yagi-san? I'm having trouble with a case, and you are the only avenue of investigation left."
Toshinori sighed. Great, another fan who thought All Might was their only hope. The agency had a hero referral and review office for a reason.
"Ma'am, if this is because you want to work with All Might, then I must insist that you--"
"Shimura Kotaro is dead."
Toshinori's brain shut down.
"The Shimura family was killed in an accident on March 6th. As the sole hero handling the case, I currently hold custody of Shimura Tenko, the only survivor. I was hoping to break the news in person, but I've already exhausted two weeks trying to find a suitable guardian. I wasn't about to let the only sane candidate hang up."
“What--” Toshinori swallowed the growing lump in his throat. His master’s son, entire family, dead, “What happened?”
“Officially? Young Tenko’s quirk came in late. It’s extremely destructive and he lost control, killing first his dog, then his sister, then the rest of his family.”
There was something more there, Toshinori had been working in the hero business long enough to tell, “And unofficially?”
“How safe is this line, Yagi-san?”
“Safe enough for you to say what you must, I assure you.”
“Would you bet your life on it? Mine? Young Tenko-kun’s?” Toshinori was about to answer, but the woman cut him off, “Personally, I wouldn’t. Of course, that could be me being paranoid, but I find paranoia very, very helpful in this line of work. I’m going to be honest, Yagi-san. I dug up a lot of information on the Shimura family while researching this case. And if the dots I’m connecting are true, then this could lead to villains even your boss would hesitate to Detroit Smash without backup.”
“This is what’s going to happen,” she continued, “You are going to send me a meeting time and place for some time this Saturday afternoon. I am going to arrive with Tenko-kun and a suitcase load of files. You and Tenko will spend the day getting to know each other while I supervise. Once Tenko tires himself out and inevitably falls asleep, I will tuck him in and spend the rest of the night breaking down everything I know about the case and starting the first steps of the adoption process if you choose to go that route.”
“I’ll email you with the details?” the blonde man asked into the phone.
A sigh was heard on the other side, “Good. Good. Yes, an email would be appreciated. Oh, and Yagi-san?”
“Yes?”
“If the old coot’s still mentally sane and he was just fucking with me when I tracked him down earlier, bring Gran Torino into the fold. I attempted contacting him twice before, once as a civilian and once with his hero identity, and both times he acted like a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient.”
“....I’ll get on it,” after hanging up, Yagi Toshinori collapsed back into his desk chair and covered his eyes.
“Fuck,” he said to an empty room after a few moments of silence.
The blonde reached for the phone and punched in a number, “Torino. Sir, we need to talk.”
This was going to be a long week.
*****
Sorahiko watched as Toshinori nervously scampered around his apartment, trying to make it as neat as possible. Normally, he would try to calm down his student when he got like this, but normally, Toshinori’s nerves weren’t completely justified.
The truth was, Sorahiko was nervous himself. As per Nana’s wishes, neither he nor Toshinori had contact with Kotaro after she had officially entered him into the foster system for his own protection. He had thought of the boy often, imagining what the kid would have been like had he still been a part of his life. Sorahiko filled in a lot of blanks with his own imagination: the kid’s hobbies, aspirations, first romance. Everything. In a kinder world, he would have known it all.
But this was not that world.
He had been gutted when Toshinori had given him the call. His best friend’s kid was dead. He was with his mother now, probably getting reunited and making up for lost time. But the Shimuras apparently had a family curse, and Kotaro had unintentionally repeated his mother’s actions and left a son behind.
“If I hadn’t hung up on that heroine, this all would have been done with by now,” Sorahiko thought to himself.
His old man defense was an awfully strong deterrent against telemarketers and annoying UA kids who wanted to be taught by All Might’s homeroom teacher. He hadn’t thought twice about using it against a woman claiming that she needed to get in contact with Sorahiko Torino, and again when she tried to ask the same thing of his hero identity.
Sorahiko was cursing himself out for it now. He’d looked at the background check Toshinori’s employee had run when the heroine made contact. Madam Nighteye had a history he could respect. A history that kind of looked straight out of one of Nana or Toshi’s old comics, tragic childhood and all, but a respectable history nonetheless.
Nighteye had overcome deadbeat parents abandoning her into the foster system with the maturity and grace he knew most adults lacked. Hellbent on making the best of a shitty situation, she had quickly and efficiently taken up the role of caretaker amongst the foster home she had been placed in. She proved herself to be a perfect angel in school and then used that reputation to put her foster parents behind bars when she went down to the police office one day and showed them a video of her foster father beating the shit out of one of her foster siblings.
The cops had taken one look at the video, Nighteye’s spotless reputation, and the foster father’s history of public intoxication charges, and promptly transferred custody over to Nighteye’s oldest foster sibling.
Sorahiko was impressed with the girl’s scheme and how well it worked out. There were plenty of places for things to have gone wrong, but the fact that an eleven-year-old could successfully map out and then pull off such a tricky plan of action boded well for how she’d turn out as a hero.
Records of Nighteye tapered off a bit from there. She completed her education, consistently landing in the top five of her class. After graduating middle school, she enrolled in a then unknown, but currently up-and-coming, hero school by the name of Ketsubutsu Academy. Her first-year hero internships were for a hero named Brass Dragonfly, but her second-year and third-year were all spent with the International Underground Crimefighting Association. Underground work apparently suited her much more than spotlight, as she signed on with the IUCA immediately, and there she stayed for five straight years without complaint. Now, at twenty-three, Madam Nighteye was the darling of the IUCA. Paperwork was turned in on time and correctly, villains were arrested quickly and without undue harm or property damage, she was well-respected by the police, and her fellow underground heroes would constantly sing her praises because she can, will, and has done their paperwork for them when they were in dire states.
“And,” thought Sorahiko, looking at where Toshinori was frantically dusting the TV stand, “She must be a pretty good information gatherer if she was able to connect the dots between us and the Shimuras.”
As much as Sorahiko respected his best friend’s wishes, he still worried about the little tyke that called him Uncle Torino. So over the years when he felt particularly nostalgic or worried, he would attempt to track down Kotaro and make sure he was okay.
He’d never found him. Whatever precautions Nana had taken were good. Maybe even foolproof.
But not foolproof enough to throw this Madam Nighteye off the trail.
She had hunted down Toshinori after two weeks of searching, but she had found him after less than five days. If a single underground hero could piece together the story with enough time and dedication, then who else could? Toshi had told him about the heroine’s phone call, and how she suspected there was something more to the Shimuras’ deaths than what first met the eye. What if….
What if he was behind this?
What if all of the grief Nana had been put through, all of the precautions she had taken, all of the sacrifices she had made….was it all for nothing?
A sharp knock at the door shocked Sorahiko out of his musings. Toshinori squeaked and hastily threw the duster out of sight between the TV and the wall. He brushed himself off, plastered an extremely stressed smile to his face, and threw open the door.
“Yagi Toshinori?” asked a grave voice.
Sorahiko looked past his old student, and the first thought in his mind was, ‘fuck me, this is so unfair.’
Because the woman at the door was tall. Sorahiko had already accepted that he would forever be shorter than Toshinori. The kid was a giant, standing at seven-foot-two. But was everyone he would ever meet be a giant?
The woman was six-foot-seven if he got her profile right, and she was wearing three-inch heels as if she looked herself in the mirror one day and decided that God hadn’t stretched her taffy-esc body long enough. And taffy-like was honestly the best way to describe her. What she had in height, she completely lacked in width. Oh, there was a fair bit of muscle on her frame, don’t get him wrong, but the woman was all straight, sharp lines and awkwardly long limbs. There wasn’t a hint of curves anywhere on her, and her face was all chiseled cheeks and solid jaw.
But beyond her height, she looked like your average salary woman with a good workout routine. Her white dress shirt, dark gray suit jacket, and matching gray pencil skirt wouldn’t look too out of place in a law office, or the middle of an executive’s meeting. The glasses she wore suited her face and didn’t appear to have any obvious function besides helping her see in twenty-twenty vision. The suitcase she had grasped in her hand was just a normal suitcase made of black leather and with two little latches by the handle.
“When people say underground heroes don’t stand out, they really mean it,” thought Sorahiko, “If I passed her on the streets, I wouldn’t give her a second glance. Are all underground pros this nondescript?”
“Yes, that’s me,” said Toshinori, shuffling from side to side, “Are you Madam Nighteye?”
Nighteye reached into a pocket and pulled out a hero license. It, like all licenses belonging to underground heroes, had violet accents instead of the traditional scarlet.
Toshinori grasped the license, examined it, and then stepped out of the doorway, “Come in, Madam Nighteye. Make yourself at home.”
The heroine, however, didn’t step into the apartment. Instead, she turned around and whispered a question behind her, “Do you want to meet these men, Tenko-kun?”
Sorahiko kicked himself up using his quirk to take a look at who she was talking to. Behind her was a small boy barely five inches shorter than him. He had frosted blue hair that was black at the tips. Dry skin cracked around his eyes, neck, and lips, and his ruby-red eyes blinked up at Nighteye. The boy played with his hands, which were covered by a small pair of animator gloves, and nodded.
Once he stepped into the light of the apartment, Sorahiko’s breath caught. He took in the finer details of the boy’s face and compared it to the memories of his best friend. The mouth shape, the nose, the slant of his red eyes, the point of his jaw. It was all Nana’s.
“Hel-- hello,” the boy stuttered out, intimidated by the pure bulk of Toshinori.
Sorahiko hovered himself back down to the ground, “Hey squirt,” he said lightly, trying to break the tension, “Have you ever heard that you look just like your grandmother?”
*****
I gently pulled the covers up to Tenko’s chin and sat at the foot of his bed. The kid had worn himself out looking at scrapbooks with Gran Torino and All Might all day. Tenko, at this point, still loved heroes and had been absolutely fascinated with the stories the two had told him about his brave, valiant grandma. He had even lit up like a Christmas tree when Torino said he was a hero too and had asked the old geezer a million questions.
“Well, he ain’t an old geezer right now,” I thought, and wasn’t that a shock. Gran Torino, while still tiny and still gray-haired, had a lot fewer wrinkles than I imagined he’d have. That might have to do with how he was fifteen years younger than he was in the anime, and a real person, not just a cartoon.
My phone lit up with a buzz. I checked the notifications to see that I was getting a call. Glancing up at the still-closed guest room door, I hit accept and brought the phone to my ear.
“Well, Mirai, how’s the home visit going?” asked the cheery voice of Nedzu on the other end of the line. He was speaking in English, and by the sounds going on in the background, making a cup of tea.
“It’s perfect, if you ignore my anxiety over second-guessing my every action,” I snorted.
“Don’t you do that all the time anyway?”
“This is different.”
“I can’t imagine why. You’ve done home visits before as part of investigations. Considering that you haven’t bolted, made someone cry, or arrested anybody yet, I’d say it’s a success so far.”
“But all of those home visits haven’t been with canon characters!” I hissed in frustration, “The added layer of stress is unfathomable. I’ve been stuck in Stone-Cold Professional mode the entire time worried that one misstep would completely destroy the canon timeline.”
“Aren’t you destroying the canon timeline already by delivering one of the main villains into the hands of the number one hero?”
“Yeah,” I whined, “But I didn’t exactly know that it was Shigaraki. I just heard a crying kid and went, ‘oh fuck, my day off just got ruined. Time to go be a hero.’ And then he just clung to me like a barnacle because he’d already been surrounded by the remains of his family for over three hours at that point. By the time I got him back to the nearest agency and connected the dots, the case had been assigned to me and I couldn’t back out of it.”
“Fair enough,” Nedzu took a sip of tea and continued, “But why are you so worried about talking to Gran Torino and All Might. I’m a ‘canon’ character, aren’t I?”
“You, sir, are a vengeful God in the body of a genetically modified albino badger. You would have discovered all of my secrets as soon as you looked at me. Telling you about my past life and the future I know of via reincarnation shenanigans was an act of self-preservation. You would have chewed me up and spat me out otherwise, so I figured I should use every trick in the book to get you on my side first.”
Nedzu laughed, “Mirai, you flatter me. You overestimate my influence in the world. I couldn’t destroy you.”
“Yes you could,” I said, “You’re going to be the principal of UA one day. I have every confidence that you could take over the world if you really put your mind to it, All for One be damned.”
“Your faith in me is appreciated. But back to the reason I called. Have you decided what to do with your two problems?”
“Tenko isn’t a problem, Nedzu.”
“Tenko isn’t, but his custody is. And so is the lengthy conversation you’re putting off by talking to me on the phone. So again, have you decided what to do yet?”
I looked at Tenko sleeping peacefully on the bed and then turned back to the phone, “I’m going to tell them everything we’ve collected on All for One. All Might’s the holder of One for All. He should know what’s coming. As for Tenko….I’ll crash on the couch and stay for breakfast. Tenko should be able to decide who he wants to stay with. If it’s All Might or Gran Torino, fine. But if it’s me--” I cut myself off before I could finish that sentence.
“If it’s you, I know you’ll make an amazing mother, and I, your siblings, and your coworkers will be there every step of the way to help.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and shook out my tight bun, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted kids in my last life, and I still want them in this one. At least this way I won’t have to put myself out of a job for a year just to do it.”
“Good, we’re on the same page. Now go out there and give the Symbol of Peace a heart attack.”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up. Putting my glasses in place, I grabbed my suitcase and opened the guest room door.
Time to bite the bullet, I guess. Here’s hoping I don’t accidentally kill All Might sooner than my canon counterpart.