Chapter Text
Izuku muttered nervously as the boys made their way to UA. Today they were moving into the newly built dorms. Their luggage was being delivered to their rooms by robots, but Aizawa called a class meeting on the front steps before they were allowed to start unpacking.
The moment the class caught sight of Izuku and Kacchan, no one was paying attention to their teacher anymore.
“Bros!” Kirishima wailed as he slung an arm around each of them, gathering them into a very manly hug.
“We heard you two were rescued, but we weren’t allowed to visit!” Ashido complained from behind the redhead.
“The authorities were serious about it,” Sato added. “None of us were allowed anywhere near you guys.”
Momo smiled softly. “It’s good to see you both alive and well.”
“You have no idea how worried we were, Deku-kun!” Tears welled up in Uraraka’s eyes. She flung herself at Izuku, nearly bowling him over and jostling him loose from under Kirishima’s arm. “Some of us went on a secret mission to try and rescue you,” she whispered in his ear, “but nobody could find out where you were!”
“Heh, thanks everyone.” Izuku scratched the back of his head with the arm that wasn’t wrapped around Uraraka’s waist. “I’m sorry we worried you so much.”
“Our texts to your number were rejected, Izuku. Am I right to infer that the villains destroyed your phone?” Momo asked from behind Uraraka.
“Yeah. I got a new one, though. I’ll give you guys the number as soon as I can.” He set his friend back on her feet and took a step backward, scanning the class.
Now that he had a chance to look around, Izuku spotted a new face, one that he hadn’t seen in months.
Standing behind Aizawa, visibly apart from the rest of the class, a fluffy head of purple hair and a tired expression observed the rest of 1-A silently.
“Shinsou-kun?” Izuku asked, beginning to approach the other boy.
Aizawa cleared his throat. “Listen up, class.”
The teacher went on to explain the layout of the building. Everything went smoothly until the room assignments were handed out.
The girls’ side was unremarkable, and Aizawa read out the assigned rooms uninterrupted.
“Now for the boys’ side of the building.” He droned, still sounding bored, but there was an undercurrent of tension in his posture.
“Floor two – Mineta, Sato, Aoyama, Tokoyami
Floor three – Koda, Kaminari, Sero, Ojirou
Floor four – Shoji, Kirishima, Todoroki, Shinsou”
The class erupted into chatter yet again.
“Who?”
“Shinsou, I’ve heard that name…”
“He’s the brainwashing guy from the Sports Festival.”
“Wait, that guy? He looked weak!”
“Excuse me, I’m standing right here.”
“Silence, class,” Aizawa intoned. The class quieted down. “There was an opening in our program after the death of your classmate. Shinsou was judged to have heroic potential. I expect you all to treat him as one of your own.”
He looked back to the papers in his hand, a tic under one eye as he read the final assignment, grinding out the words with pure reluctance.
“Bakugou, Midoriya, the two of you have a suite that covers the top floor.”
There was a beat of silence.
“WHAAA-?” The entire class gasped dramatically. Heads turned, and suddenly every widened eye was fixed on the two of them. Nobody was thinking about Shinsou anymore.
Izuku’s sweat glands started working double-time under the scrutiny. He could feel his face dampen and his uniform stick to his skin.
“What is going on, you guys?” Sero asked what the others were all thinking.
Kacchan casually reached up to the side of his neck. “I didn’t tell anyone over text because I only wanted to say it once.” He scraped at the scent-blocking patch, peeling it off his skin to reveal his clearly marked mating gland. “Deku and I are mated. I’m not answering questions about it. Any of you extras pester me, and I’ll pull your intestines out through your dick – that includes the girls.”
The class was silent. Most of their mouths hung open. Then they processed the threat and switched their gazes from Kacchan, zeroing in on Izuku with keen intensity. The more gossip-prone classmates had an especially mad gleam in their eyes. Ashido actually licked her lips.
Cold sweat stuck Izuku’s mesh collar to the skin of his neck and dripped down his back, leaving ticklish, clammy trails down his spine from the predatory stares fixed on him.
He was not looking forward to their inquisition.
Aizawa dismissed the class, and Izuku bolted for the door, shamelessly using his quirk to boost his speed, and heaving a sigh of relief only when he escaped to the top floor of the 1A dorms.
***
Their room was vast compared to the ordinary accommodations for the other students. Izuku tried not to feel guilty about all the extra space he and Kacchan had compared to the dorms he’d passed by on his way to the top floor.
The suite contained a small bathroom, two desks with chairs, a massive western-style bed, a kotatsu, a sofa, dressers and wardrobes, Kacchan’s drum set, and some shelving.
“See? There’s plenty of room for my merch, Kacchan,” Izuku whined, eyeing the floor-to-ceiling shelves.
“It’s not about having enough space, Deku. I’m not going to have ten million pairs of All Might eyes watching me while I fuck you. One or two I can handle, but I’m not gonna risk stage fright, here.”
Izuku felt his face heat. “Well, who said you’d always be the one topping?” he asked because he felt like being sassy.
The attempt backfired. Kacchan gave him a look that clearly declared he couldn’t believe his mate’s stupidity. “I didn’t say anything like that. Tell ya what, if you want to rail my ass with a hundred copies of your mentor watching, that shit’s between you and your conscience.”
Izuku pouted but couldn’t think of a comeback as they continued unpacking.
***
It took hours, but by mid-afternoon their suite was finally ready to be lived in.
The mated pair were making their way down the hall to the common room when Aizawa appeared out of thin air to intercept them.
“Midoriya,” the teacher droned menacingly, “Recovery Girl wishes to meet with you immediately. She is expecting you in the infirmary as soon as you have finished unpacking.”
“A-ah, right!” Izuku nodded at his teacher before shooting a sheepish smile at Kacchan and casually leaving his alpha to face their class’s curiosity alone.
Izuku mused as he approached the school infirmary that this was the first time he had been sent here uninjured. Through a window he could see Recovery Girl standing on her chair to reach the computer keyboard, and knocked twice on the door frame before interrupting.
“Hello, Recovery Girl. It’s good to see you again.”
“Hello, and welcome back, young man,” the heroine greeted him politely. “If you don’t mind, I want to get straight to business.”
She sat Izuku on an exam table and took his vitals as she began to speak.
“The hospital sent over the records from your stay, but I wish to redo the tests and questioning myself, since I am aware of certain aspects of your case the hospital was not.”
Izuku paused, a bit lost for a moment before he remembered: right – Recovery Girl was one of the six people in the world who knew the truth about One for All.
The healing heroine made him give a urine sample, then asked thorough questions about his captivity. Izuku nearly died of embarrassment several times over while describing his heat and mating, giving as few details as he thought he could get away with. But Recovery Girl’s dry and clinical manner made the situation less awkward than it could have been.
She seemed especially interested in the injection the League’s doctor had given him, and drew vials of blood for a battery of tests.
“Your class is scheduled to resume quirk training tomorrow, and I need to make sure you are safe for such strenuous activity,” she explained when he asked what she was doing.
“Alright, then.” She sat Izuku down about twenty minutes later with the results. “The tests show no residue of anything unusual in your blood. That is good. Also, as you already knew, you are not pregnant.”
Izuku nodded. Both of those things were good, at least in the short term.
“I looked closely at the scan from the hospital records, as well. Your omega reproductive system has been developing at the expected rate, and should reach maturity during your third year at UA.”
“It’s still growing?” Izuku gasped. He’d considered the possibility, but hadn’t dared to let himself hope.
“Yes, all quirkless persons present as betas, so that means your omega reproductive system did not begin development until after Toshinori passed his quirk to you in February. It will be more than a year before you can successfully conceive a litter. However, since you have a mate, I would still like to give you a birth control implant right away. An underdeveloped system may still ovulate on rare occasions, and we do not want any ectopic implantation.”
Izuku wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded bad. “I’ll do whatever you think is best, Recovery Girl.”
“That is good to hear, young hero. You might not be the worst patient I’ve had after all.”
***
After being dismissed from the infirmary, Izuku returned to the dorms to discover that he’d missed a class-wide room inspection competition. He was sad that he hadn’t gotten to see everyone’s rooms but felt better when he learned that Kacchan had also skipped out on the activity.
“We didn’t even get to see your guys’ suite!” Hagakure lamented, her empty sleeves waving up and down as she flailed invisible arms. Then her posture abruptly turned sly as she leaned in. “Or should I call it a love nest?” If the invisible girl had eyebrows, they were definitely wiggling. After finishing the innuendo, she immediately pivoted back to outrage. “That dumpster goblin shut himself inside and locked it! Your alpha has no sense of fun, Mido – take responsibility!”
“Guh- ah, what do you want me to do?” he garbled out helplessly, leaning away from his classmate.
“To start making it up to us, tell every juicy detail about how you two got mated! Start at the beginning!” she demanded, triumphantly.
Well, he’d walked right into that one.
The members of class 1-A currently in the common room all leaned forward or even took a step in his direction. The hair on Izuku’s neck would have stood on end had they not been forcibly flattened inside his mesh collar. There were a whole lot of very powerful individuals eyeing him like he was lunch.
Izuku suddenly remembered the adage that panicking was the better part of valor – or something like that – squeaking out, “Hey, I just remembered I have to walk my cactus!” before turning tail and fleeing to the top floor.
Sprinting up four flights of stairs only winded the omega slightly, but it did give his prey instincts a minute to settle.
He sighed as he fished through his pockets for the dorm key, trying to come up with a plan for dealing with their classmates. Kacchan might be content avoiding the “extras” forever, but Izuku wanted to interact with them eventually.
He opened the door to find his mate reclining on their bed, his face as serious as Izuku had ever seen it.
Holy shit, he was so handsome.
“Sit down, Deku. We need to talk.”
Izuku blinked, trying to reground himself, sobering up after the wacky hijinks of their class’s more excitable members. “What’s going on, Kacchan?” he asked curiously.
The alpha silently patted the bed beside him, and Izuku slid in with all the grace he could muster. He was grabbed in strong arms and drawn against a firm chest. The omega let himself relax into the embrace, rubbing his cheek against a plush pectoral and enjoying his mate’s smoky-sweet scent as the alpha began to speak.
“I couldn’t speak freely before, because it was impossible know for sure whether we were being surveilled ‘for our own protection,’ but now that we’re here and I’ve examined every inch of this room, I can talk to you for real.”
Izuku stopped rubbing his cheek against his mate’s chest and craned to look up into his face.
“I’ve wanted to be a hero my whole life. It started as a child’s dream – heroes won, All Might won, and I wanted to win.” The alpha smirked self-deprecatingly and scoffed.
“Tch. Looking back, it seems so juvenile.”
Izuku stopped breathing. Kacchan’s drive to be the number one hero was his most prominent trait. He never, in a million years, would have believed his childhood friend would say something like that.
Izuku went so far as to reach down and pinch himself to make sure he was awake and actually hearing this.
“Kacchan… What are you saying?” he asked.
“The world is broken, Deku. I’m saying I won’t work to keep things the way they are just so I can ‘win.’ I want to win a different kind of victory, now, something more important.”
Izuku was still baffled. What could possibly be more important to Kacchan than heroics?
“How much do you know about the Revolutionaries?” the blond asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Revolutionaries? You mean like camp abolitionists?” Izuku only knew a little about them.
There were people all throughout Japan who opposed the existence of the breeding camps. They considered the camps to be too inhumane to be justified even by the population collapse. Most of those people expressed their opposition through legal means, voting for abolitionist candidates, opposing the building of camps in their jurisdiction, and boycotting businesses who supplied the camps.
But some of them took it further.
It was true that some of the abolitionists turned to petty terrorism, doing things like vandalizing the camps and disrupting supply lines, but others had gone a different route and started a kind of underground railroad.
The vast majority of omegas in Japan were willing to sacrifice that part of their lives and bodies for the chance to live a normal life once they retired from the camps. They wanted to return to their families and friends and resume their former lives. Those omegas were left alone.
There were others, however, who were willing to throw away everything if it meant they could avoid the camps. They would give up contact with their families, move to another country, and assume a new identity if that was what it took. Those were the omegas the Revolutionaries focused on. They were smuggled out of Japan and provided with a new identity, job, and home somewhere else in the world.
But there was a complication, one even more serious than the illegality of what the abolitionists were doing. Multiple human trafficking rings posed as Revolutionaries to try and trick young, desperate omegas, and a whole covert war raged underground between the camp abolitionists and the traffickers.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” Kacchan affirmed, and Izuku realized he had been muttering out loud. “That’s where my head’s at, so it’s your choice whether you want to join me or continue to follow in All Might’s footsteps.”
“Give up on being a hero…” Izuku mused out loud. It was hard to even fathom.
“Not necessarily,” Kacchan corrected. “I still want to be a hero, and maybe I can be. Heroes can be well placed for Revolutionary work. But if it turns out I can make more progress as a villain, I’ll do that. And if you choose to join me, maybe one of us can go villain and the other become a hero to maximize our reach and resources.”
The alpha looked contemplative for a moment and added, “One thing I know for sure – we’re going to need the skills we’ll learn at UA.”
Izuku nodded. He could see that. UA taught more than just fighting.
In fact, direct combat was a surprisingly small part of their curriculum.
A huge part of heroics lessons were the rules of engagement – how to approach any imaginable scene, and what to prioritize. There were so many potential variables that it seemed impossible to learn and remember the correct protocol for each situation.
In modern, cooperative heroics, another important skill was coordinating a team response. You didn’t want to accidentally have Kaminari in charge of strategy, Kacchan dealing with PR, or Mineta doing crowd control.
In heroics class, UA could set up countless scenarios, testing the students’ application of the theory they learned in the classroom.
It was a large task. Heroes had to be fully trained as first responders, EMTs, and disaster relief. They needed the ability to effectively lead civilians or other heroes alike, concoct strategy for any conceivable situation, and work with whoever was on hand. They needed the skills of battlefield medicine, search and rescue, and group psychology. They needed to be proficient in suspect interrogation, hostage negotiation, and sweeping an area for traps, explosives, and surveillance devices. Underground heroes needed stealth and the ability to build confidential information networks.
Some of a hero’s strategizing, much of the legal navigation, and most PR could be outsourced, but any and every skill that might be needed on the ground fell to the individual.
Many of these skills were transferrable to other walks of life. That was why former heroes made the most dangerous villains.
Those skills would be highly useful for Revolutionaries as well.
“Now you’re gettin’ it, nerd.” Kacchan declared, and Izuku realized he’d been thinking out loud again. He would have to break that habit if he was going to become a covert operative.
“We don’t have to make a final decision just yet,” Kacchan continued, “but I know that for now, my choice of electives is going to change a bit.”
Izuku tried to bring this new information into focus, to comprehend the idea of altering the trajectory of his life.
“We can do anything Deku. You and me,” Kacchan stated with quiet certainty.
“From now on, we can do anything.”
***
EPILOGUE
***
The following day, when class 1-A was working on their ultimate moves at Gym Gamma, Izuku was approached by Momo on one of their ten-minute breaks.
“Hello, Izuku,” she greeted her fellow omega. There was a glint in her eyes Izuku was not used to seeing.
“Momo-san, how are your ultimate moves coming along?” He smiled at his friend.
“Well, my quirk isn’t exactly suited to developing ‘ultimate moves,’ which is rather frustrating. All I can really do is learn how to create and use new and different objects. But that is not what I came over here to talk to you about.” The dark-haired girl lowered herself gracefully to the ground beside him, tucking her legs under her body in her usual prim manner.
“Oh? Is there something I can do for you, Momo-san?” Izuku had caught on that this was not an ordinary conversation.
“Izuku, I’m not sure what exactly happened while you were kidnapped, but my close association with you combined with my own analytical skills led me to make a few inferences.”
Izuku opened his mouth to speak, but Momo rushed to cut him off.
“Don’t worry – I’m not going to ask any questions, but I want you to listen to me. Can you do that? You don’t have to say anything. Just let me speak.”
Izuku closed his mouth and nodded. He would hear her out.
“Since the beginning of humanity, our species has had two primary sexes, plus a small scattering of people who fell outside the bimodal clusters. In that paradigm, it was natural to break off into pairs, with the average pair having a few children and raising them with the help of older generations.
“Things have changed since the rise of quirks. Today, most people are very nearly sterile, and in some places the secondary genders have given rise to an appalling system of oppression. Omegas in Japan are all but enslaved until we retire from the camps, and even then, we are required to wear collars in public like pets. Alphas, on the other hand, are treated as unstable meatheads, and the strongest ones are branded after presentation to warn everyone around them about the danger they pose.
“Betas, though, face their own oppression. They are seen as interchangeable and disposable, and are used as our society’s workhorses. They aren’t given any paid leave at all, ostensibly to make up for the productivity that’s lost during their coworkers’ ruts and heats.”
Momo fell silent for a minute, but Izuku could tell she wasn’t done speaking, and so remained silent.
“Things can’t go on the way they have been, Izuku. I have an idea, a vision of a new world for our new species.
“Humanity is eighty percent beta, fifteen percent alpha, and five percent omega. This means that for every omega, there are three alphas and sixteen betas. This, to me, is the perfect pack size.
“In my dream, packs form around individual omegas. Every person will grow up and leave the pack of their birth to form their own as adult members. Twenty people is the right number to take care of all the children an omega might have over their lifetime. Plus, the betas will create a handful of children among themselves as well, maintaining diversity in the gene pool. All children born in the pack will be raised by the pack as a whole. If irreconcilable conflicts arise, a few members can come and go now and then without disrupting the integrity of the pack itself. Extended networks in densely populated areas will form large “super packs,” but the base unit of society will always be the one omega with about three alphas and sixteen or so betas.
“The way I see it, this is how society can progress. This is how omegas can be free and can have the help needed to raise their children. This is how alphas won’t have to settle for marrying betas unless that is what they truly want. The old paradigm of monogamous pair bonding is over. It is time to do something new.”
The dark-haired girl stood up, turning to face away from Izuku before speaking one final time.
“That’s my dream, Izuku. I know that, whatever you and Bakugou-san decide to do next, you’ll help change the world.”
THE END