Chapter Text
"Raising me as a hero who could exceed All Might, just to fulfill his own ambitions. I hate it! Being no more than a tool for that human garbage.”
Izuku, sitting on the bed in his darkened room, solemnly contemplated what Todoroki had said at the Sports Festival a month ago. With the chaos of the Sports Festival, then the internships and subsequent fight with Stain, there had barely been enough hours in the day to get everything done, let alone think about what Todoroki had revealed to him. It chafed at Izuku, knowing that his friend was suffering and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He could tell All Might what Todoroki had said, but given that Todoroki had been “raised as a hero who could exceed All Might”, that would be akin to mixing two different explosives and expecting them to cancel out. He could tell the police, but who would ever believe that Endeavor, the second highest ranking hero in all of Japan, was abusive? Especially considering Izuku had no evidence. If Todoroki himself went to the police, they might believe him, but he probably didn’t want to tell all of his worst childhood memories to a stranger as a gamble. Even if everything went well and they were able to successfully accuse and possibly even convict Endeavor, that would cause a media scandal of epic proportions; Todoroki and his siblings and mother definitely wouldn’t want their abuse story publicized on the news like a sordid affair.
Still, as a hero, there was no way Izuku could ever possibly just stand back while his friend was suffering. Obviously, he couldn’t legally take Endeavor to task, but he also wasn’t strong enough to kick his ass. Yet. The time it would take to become strong enough to beat the fear of God into Endeavor was too long.
Theoretically, he could collect approximately eight milliliters of liquid nitroglycerin from Kacchan’s gauntlets, freeze it into ice cubes, and put it in some sweet alcohol like rum (both to make the nitroglycerin work better because it would be diluted from the other components of Kacchan’s sweat, and to mask the sweet and burning taste). From there, he could serve both Endeavor and himself drinks with ice cubes in them just in case Endeavor was paranoid enough to be wary of poison. If Izuku drank his fast enough that the ice cubes didn’t have time to melt, he would be fine, whereas Endeavor, not knowing that he should knock it back, would drink it slowly. Endeavor most likely would not pass out and die from his heart slowing to the point of stopping until after leaving (given nitroglycerin’s LD50 of two milliliters, but also the dilution), thereby giving Izuku plausible deniability.
However, murder was wrong, so Izuku wasn’t going to do that.
Endeavor was already the subject of much controversy. Given his unappealing personality and penchant for destruction, hero fans were divided on whether or not to support him despite his personal achievements. It would be much easier to remove Endeavor from his position as a widely respected hero-- which he treasured over all else-- than to take him on legally or physically. But how?
His unappealing personality wasn’t enough to bring him down. Perhaps the destruction rate? Hm, people care about their money, but destruction alone isn’t enough to truly outrage people. Civilian injuries and casualties, maybe? That would impact people on a personal level. A sort of “that could be me” response.
Inspired, Izuku leaped off his bed and booted up his computer. “The government’s annual damage reports are the most reliable and have the most information, but they don’t have the specific location of the incident, just the prefecture; they don’t have the names of the heroes, villains, and vigilantes involved either…” He mumbled to himself. “But if I cross-reference a crisis mapping database of villain fights, I can match the date, time, and prefecture from the government records to the hero fights detailed in the database.”
He spent half the night assimilating the government’s annual damage report into his own spreadsheet, entering in all the heroes, villains, and vigilantes involved in each individual fight with gratuitous help from Professor Google. He used the “sort by” tool several times to rank heroes by the totals of each category-- money lost in damages to public property, money lost in damages to private property, heroes injured while working in teams, heroes killed while working in teams, villains injured, villains killed, villains apprehended, civilians injured, and civilians killed.
The worst statistic on Endeavor’s part was the money lost in damages to public property, but he was still ranked first in civilian casualties so Izuku set that as the default instead.
Izuku had a thought: even with all this evidence that Endeavor was literal Satan and probably kicked puppies in his spare time (Izuku might have been going a little insane at this point), fans might dismiss the evidence claiming that this year could have just been a bad year for the #2 hero. Izuku sighed and cracked his knuckles. Plus ultra.
Several hours later, he had not only added the information of several past years to his Spreadsheet of Doom but had also used Excel’s chart function to generate a scatter plot of Endeavor’s failings. The graph was linear with a positive slope, meaning that in future years Endeavor was likely to get even worse.
It’s not enough, Izuku’s last two brain cells protested, so he also threw in an image of Endeavor’s hero record. A hero record was a record that a hero could have, stating all their successful and unsuccessful missions, as well as the types of missions. While optional for most, the top ten heroes were required to release their hero record. Izuku highlighted the stats for fighting missions (which comprised most of Endeavor’s record) and rescue missions (of which he had taken almost none).
Saving the file with shaking hands, Izuku exulted in the completion of his masterpiece until realized he had no clue where to post this information. Sighing, he accessed the top ten hero forums and ran an algorithm to calculate the times of day that they got the most web traffic. As he was queueing The Spreadsheet to be posted on the next day, he realized he was being inconsiderate. Without a second thought, he picked up his phone and called Todoroki. After four rings, he picked up.
“Midoriya? It’s half past four in the morning, what the hell do you want?”
“Oh, is it really? I hadn’t noticed. Anyway, if I told you I had a way to majorly fuck up your dad in the public eye, would you be okay with it?”
He paused in shock that Izuku had sworn. “...Yeah, sure, whatever. Go nuts.” Todoroki hung up.
Now with his friend’s permission, Izuku gleefully scheduled his baby (as he had taken to calling The Spreadsheet) to post on the top ten hero forums at the time during which they would receive the maximum amount of exposure. Just to go the extra measure, he scheduled it on fifteen other websites because plus ultra and also he was very proud of his baby.
As soon as he finalized the last post, all the energy left him and he passed out on top of the covers of his bed at five in the morning. The alarm for his morning jog went off an hour later, and he slept through it. He slept through his mother making breakfast, and then lunch as well. Izuku finally woke up at four in the afternoon. Over a late lunch, he checked his phone to find a ridiculous amount of notifications, as well as several missed calls from Todoroki.
Whoops, he thought. Guess I’ll die then. He hit the “call back” button.
“Midoriya, what the fuck did you do? ” Todoroki said in lieu of a greeting.
“I’m so so sorry I missed your calls, I was asleep because I stayed up super late!”
“Yeah, I guessed as much considering you called me at four in the morning.”
“Ah, sorry!”
“Back to the point, what the fuck did you do? ”
“Oh no, I should have told you more, and you were tired so that probably didn’t count as real permission, sorry so sorry!”
“Quit apologizing. To be honest, I’m not even mad, just confused. How did you manage to get every single person on the Internet to talk about how much they hate Endeavor overnight?”
“Well, uh… Your dad’s a bitch.”
Todoroki snorted. “Understatement of the year.”
Izuku laughed nervously. “I haven’t had the time to do anything until now, but as a hero-- or, well, a hero-in-training-- I couldn’t just let him get away with being… Like That. But I would never tell anyone what you told me! It would be horrible of me to break that trust! So I went after him for something else.”
“Wait, you mean you wrote that document thing? How long have you been working on it? And why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I spent about ten hours straight making it yesterday,” Izuku admitted.
The phone went silent. “Todoroki? Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m going to… do something else for a while. I think my brain needs to reboot.” he hung up.
After staring at the “call ended” screen for a few moments, Izuku checked the myriad notifications he had received overnight, then choked on his food. Coughing, he stared at the numbers on his screen. Thirty thousand retweets on Twitter, forty thousand views on Reddit, and counting! His baby was trending. There were even news articles about it! His plan may have worked… a bit better than expected.
Izuku’s mother came home from the store to find her one and only son sitting at the kitchen table while staring into space. His day continued like that for the most part, functioning on autopilot, although he did manage to remain mostly sentient as Todoroki grilled him for details over the phone a few hours later. He went to bed early and barely remembered to set his alarm for school the next morning.
When he woke up, he felt a little bit less like a zombie. However, the nervousness he felt the whole way to school was nearly overwhelming-- and righteously so, he thought as his homeroom teacher pulled him into an empty classroom before school had even started.
“I already talked to Todoroki,” Aizawa said. “Just… let me get this straight. You compiled massive amounts of data, performed numerous calculations, arranged them in exactly the right order to show just how bad Endeavor is, and then decided that wasn’t enough and accessed his hero record too.”
“Mhm,” said Izuku, who was so nervous that he had looped right back around to being calm.
“Then you released this information to the public, calculating which popular forums and even the specific time of day to post it at to get the most views.”
“Yep.”
Aizawa dragged his hand down his face. “You completely ruined this man's career and dragged his name through the mud. You did this to the number two hero . I thought you loved heroes?”
“He was a dick to me once and also I don’t like the way he talks to Todoroki,” Izuku blurted.
Aizawa stared at his Problem Child for several seconds. Softly, but with feeling, he said, “ What the fuck. ”