Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

One world ends as another begins.

Welcome to StarOS (GNU/Linux 45.9.0-5-generic riscv128)

 * Documentation:  https://help.star.os
 * Ecosystem:      https://cloud.star.os

  System load:  0.0                Processes:        74
  Usage of /:   0.2% of 4.83ZB     Users logged in:  1
  Memory usage: 0.5% of 151.11EB   Swap usage:       0%

 * Learn how SKS can scale to even the biggest universes at https://cloud.star.os/sks.

No pending notifications.

“Mommy! Mommy! I got my quirk! I got my quirk!”

“Oh?” His mom walked into the living room. “What is it?”

“I dunno. It just said, uhh, umm…” Izuku faced his first big hurdle: those were some big words, and he was only four years old. And he had no idea how to pronounce ‘://’. Or ’*’.

This was going to take a while.

A few days later found Izuku in a room with his mom and a completely flummoxed quirk specialist.

“I tried taking a look at some of the words your son mentioned, and we think his quirk is either related to some old computing tech or some form of astronomical phenomena. Unfortunately, nearly all information about the former was destroyed in the Final Wars of 2035 and we haven’t been able to find anything that might be related to his quirk. But,” the doctor perked up a little, “I was able to find quite a few instances of quirks related to the latter and documented their effects and activation methods. If we’re lucky, your son’s quirk may be similar.”

Izuku glanced at the bulging folder and wondered if a binder wouldn’t have been a better option.

“One of the things he mentioned, ‘cloud.star.os’, looks like a web site, but I tried accessing it from multiple computers and none of them worked. Now, what I want to focus on is you, Little Midoriya.” The doctor addressed Izuku. “Do you remember what you were doing before your quirk turned on?”

“I dunno, thinking about…” Izuku, the scatter-brained child he was, had to piece together what was in his head then. “Ooh! The stars! Um, no, kinda?” Izuku took a deep breath. “I saw on TV that space just keeps going, and I was thinking, stars are this”—he stretched his arms out—“big, and space is this”—he stretched his arms out even further—“big, but then we’re so”—he collapsed his arms—“small. I dunno, wouldn’t it be cool to be a star?”

“That is… quite interesting.”

Did Izuku do something wrong? Kacchan was always telling him to stop being so weird; why did he keep on making the same mistake?!

“Did you feel anything else?”

Izuku immediately forgot his worries and pondered the question. “Um, yeah. It was something, like, inside me.” Izuku couldn’t describe it much better than that.

“Okay. Now, please raise your left hand.”

Izuku did as he was told.

“When you raised your hand, did you think about raising your hand, or did you just do it?”

Izuku took a moment to think. “I just did it, I guess.”

“Exactly! Quirks work the same way. You don’t think about using it; you just use it. So, try to remember the feeling you had then, and just do it again.”

Izuku didn’t really understand, but he tried to remember how he felt, and then:

izuku@quirk:~$

“Ooh! It worked! It says ‘Izuku’ and ‘quirk.’”

“Great,” the doctor exclaimed, “can you show us?”

Izuku, bless his heart, really wanted to show it off. There was just one small problem with that. “Uh, I don’t know how.” He looked at the doctor with wide eyes. “What do I do?”

The doctor released his breath but maintained his smile. “Don’t worry, kiddo. Some people don’t know what their quirk does from the start. I’m sure we’ll be able to figure it out together, alright?”

“Yay!” Izuku cheered. He couldn’t wait to get a quirk like Kacchan’s!

Seven years later, and Izuku could summarize their progress on understanding his quirk with a big fat zero. The meetings with the quirk doctor had gotten more and more scarce, since every session started and ended the same way: he’d turn on his quirk, do what the doctor told him, and observe literally nothing different.

He tried electrolyzing water. He tried huffing helium. He tried doing headstands. He tried focusing sunlight on various parts of his body. He tried reciting Shakespeare. He tried touching a plasma bulb. He tried dancing in the rain. He tried running until he couldn’t stand up.

And.

Nothing.

Happened.

That dumb stupid static block of text was the only thing had figured out to do in all this time. His reputation at school dropped as quickly as his doctor’s expectations. Turns out the ability to create popups that only existed in his head was both entirely uninteresting and unconvincing.

There was only so much sadness he could hide from his mom. (Not because he was scared, but because he knew how much it broke her heart.) Eventually, he slipped, and one thing led to another, and another thing led to here.

‘Here’ being the local science fair. And no matter how much school and quirk matters may depress him, Van de Graaff generators and wave simulators lit him right up (sometimes quite literally).

Currently, Izuku was shouting in the reverberation room and listening to his voice echoing back. “Echo!” Reply. “Echo!” Reply. “Echo!” Reply. He had been studying English religiously since his quirk diagnosis, and he had recently learned that the word ‘echo’ was a loanword from English. To his slight amusement, this meant that he was technically speaking both English and Japanese at the same time. A small part of him also found it a little bit empowering—when he shouted, it was like he was commanding the sound waves to bounce back to him.

One of the other habits he picked up from quirk counseling sessions was to activate his quirk throughout the day. He tried keeping his quirk on continuously, but it gave him a headache after a while.

So, he just activated it sporadically. Like right now. “echo!”

izuku@quirk:~$ echo

“Ah!” This was the first time his quirk did something different. Before he got his hopes up, he had to make sure he could do it again. “Echo!” Nothing happened. “Echo!” Nothing happened. Nonono, this can’t be happening. Izuku was so so sure that he had done something with his quirk, and for that to have not been the case would have destroyed him.

Now, Izuku was desparate and angry. He was not going to this close to finally controlling his quirk, only to have it ripped away because his quirk was no longer cooperating. It was his quirk and he was going to make it work. “echo!”

izuku@quirk:~$ echo

He breathed a sigh of relief. It worked. It worked. But now he had to understand why. What had he done differently the first and last time? Clearly his quirk wasn’t purely verbally activated, otherwise it would have worked the second and third time. Maybe there was a mental component to it? Looking back, it only worked when he resolved to make it work, so maybe he had to give his quirk an order, he supposed, a—

—a command. “echo.”

izuku@quirk:~$ echo

“MOM! I DID SOMETHING WITH MY QUIRK!”

After Izuku’s revelation, his standing at school remained… entirely unchanged. No one appreciated his newfound ability to change the text in only a single way on a popup that no one else could see.

It did motivate his quirk doctor, who moved on to a radical new idea: saying random English words and hoping one of them would produce a similar effect. Two weeks later, that method had resulted in Izuku finding a few more more Power Words (as he’s been calling them).

izuku@quirk:~$ sleep
usage: sleep seconds

Unlike ‘echo’, this was the first Word to actually give Izuku a response. Neither he nor his doctor knew how to parse the response, though. He tried saying the word then trying to sleep, but that didn’t do anything.

izuku@quirk:~$ date
Tue Sep 14 20:24:39 UTC 2224

This Word just seemed to tell Izuku the date and time. He wasn’t sure how he could use this for hero work, but at least he’d never need a watch again.

izuku@quirk:~$ cat
^C

The last Word was weird. Using the other Words would shoot a message into his head and that would be that, but with ‘cat’, the popup stayed open. He had to forcibly turn off his quirk to make the popup go away.

But none of this was occupying Izuku’s mind. No, he was thinking about time. There were around 500,000 words in the English alphabet and he could currently run his quirk for about 5 hours a day. 18,000 seconds. Assuming it took him 2 seconds per word, that meant 9,000 words a day. And because this is all under ideal assumptions, he rounded it down to a neat 6,000 words a day.

He had only covered about half that so far, but even if he spent literally all of his available time doing nothing but trying out random new words, it would still take him almost three months to exhaust the English lexicon. And there was no guarantee that all the Power Words would only be in English.

There had to be a better way than this. There had to be some rhyme or reason that dictated which words were Words and which were just words. And unfortunately, Izuku was starting to come to the conclusion that his quirk doctor may not be able to figure this one out. Since Izuku was also stumped, he needed another source.

Which was why he was unsuccessfully trying to convince his mom to let him ask the web for help.

“Izuku, sweetie, we’ve talked about this. I already put in a request for another quirk doctor. Let’s give them a chance, and if that doesn’t work, then we can ask on the forums.”

“That was a week ago! I just—I just—” Izuku’s voice dropped. “I don’t have anyone else to ask. They—at school, they still don’t believe me.” And, boy, did that hurt deep down.

His mom was silent for a moment. “I know it hurts, and I’m so sorry you have to go through this, but we will figure this out, I promise you.” She stopped, then frowned. Izuku recognized that look on her. “Your quirk responds to commands, right?”

Izuku nodded cautiously.

“Have you tried asking it for help?”

Izuku thought for a second. Surely he had tried such a simple thing before. Surely at least one of him or his quirk doctor thought about it. Just in case, he asked for “help.”

GNU bash, version 6.9.42(0)-release (riscv128-pc-linux-gnu)
These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to see this list.
Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list.

A star (*) next to a name means that the command is disabled.
 job_spec [&]
 (( expression ))
 . filename [arguments]
 :
 [ arg... ]
 [[ expression ]]
 alias [-p] [name[=value] ... ]
 bg [job_spec ...]
 bind [-lpsvPSVX] [-m keymap] [-f filename] [-q name] [-u na>
 break [n]
 builtin [shell-builtin [arg ...]]
 caller [expr]
 case WORD in [PATTERN [| PATTERN]...) COMMANDS ;;]... esac
 cd [-L|[-P [-e]] [-@]] [dir]
:

And received enlightenment.

The enlightenment was utter nonsense. What the heck were all those brackets for? What did ‘lpsvPSVX’ mean? How do I even pronounce that? He tried info bash afterwards, and while that at least gave him a manual with complete sentences, the sentences usually read something like, “A shell function is an object that is called like a simple command and executes a compound command with a new set of positional parameters.”

Not even his English teacher could understand that. (Which may have said more about the school than the manual.)

But, after about a week (and the power of web translators), he was able to gather a few basic facts:

• Bash is a thing called a shell that lets him execute commands that do a bunch of different things.
• Most commands come from things called files, which themselves are grouped into folders.
• To run commands from a file, Bash will look at a special thing called ‘$PATH’, which is a list of folders.
• He usually could learn more about a command by doing ‘info’ plus the command.
• One of these commands is called ‘ls’, which lists the files in a folder.

Listing all the folders in his $PATH, Izuku found a lot of commands. On one hand, there were so many things he could do with his quirk! On the other hand, figuring them all out going to take a long while.

And many many notebooks.

Chapter Text

Izuku had always heard that quirks were like a muscle, and training them through constant use was the key to making them stronger. This idea was why Izuku used his quirk as much as he could every single day since his diagnosis.

Unfortunately, the advice was ever so slightly off. Quirks were not like a muscle, but rather like a complex system of muscles, and each one required training. And all Izuku had done for the past seven years was turn his quirk on and off.

Or, for another physical exercise analogy, Izuku had skipped leg day for the past seven years.

Sure, using basic commands was easy enough, but sometimes commands had weird characters in them, such as ‘-’. Pronouncing them made his tongue feel ticklish at best and was outright painful at worst.

Interacting with the commands was another matter entirely. They expected all sorts of inputs—ones which, luckily, generally mirrored a standard keyboard, except for a few extra keys. Those had stymied him for a while, until he found those keys existed on really old pre-Quirk-era keyboards, and those keys worked usually by pressing them in conjunction with other keys.

Now, how they worked in real life was one thing, but how they worked in Izuku Quirk Land was a whole other story. His quirk did seem to give him some basic intuition on this, but being able to speak these inputs reliably and quickly took weeks. Pronouncing ‘-’ may have required stretching his tongue in odd ways, but pronouncing [Ctrl+X] had his tongue making somersaults in his mouth.

But, even that wasn’t the limit to his quirk, though. It was purely by accident that he had discovered that he could use his quirk without speaking. Getting good at that, though, took months.

In those months, he’d learned a lot about quite a few commands.

For one, he could do math! There was this wonderful command called ‘bc’, which could compute basically any arithmetic expression involving numbers less than, like, a trillion trillion.

He could also store notes in his quirk! There’s a command called ‘nano’ that lets him interactively edit a file and write his own text inside of them. Using it took some getting used to, as the interface seemed like it was expecting a keypad, but his quirk was able to translate his intent to the appropriate action without much issue.

And last, but certainly not least, his quirk might actually kill him.

When Izuku had first discovered nano, he spent hours both pouring over the instructions and experimenting with the command. The first fun gotcha was that some commands had both info pages and man pages and they were different. He had to amend a lot of his notes after figuring that out.

The second gotcha was, as usual, the instructions were written a little something like this:

-E, --tabstospaces
      Convert each typed tab to spaces -- to the number of spaces that a tab at that position would take up.

-F, --multibuffer
      Read a file into a new buffer by default.

-G, --locking
      Use vim-style file locking when editing files.

Izuku understood some of those words, and occasionally he’d be able to look up some of them, such as ‘buffer’. For other words, like vim, he’d try to first guess what they meant from context.

There wasn’t any useful context here, so he moved to step two, ask his quirk. info vim.

NAME
       vim - Vi IMproved, a programmer's text editor

SYNOPSIS
       vim [options] [file ..]
       vim [options] -
       vim [options] -t tag
       vim [options] -q [errorfile]

       ex
       view
       gvim gview evim eview
       rvim rview rgvim rgview

DESCRIPTION
       Vim is a text editor that is upwards compatible to Vi. It can be used to edit all kinds of plain text. It is especially useful for editing programs.

Oh, cool! It was apparently another editor. Was it like nano, too? Was it better? Well, Izuku thought, there’s only one way to find out. vim vim-test-file.

█
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
"vim-test-file" [New]                         0,0-1         All

Well, it looks like nano, but with more squigglies. Izuku experimentally tried writing something. Hello, world! The screen updated, but not in the way he expected.

, world!█
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
~ 
-- INSERT --                                 2,9           All

Clearly, Izuku had no idea what he was doing, so he decided to close the program and go back to the documentation. The way he quit the other editor was by thinking [Ctrl+X].

[Ctrl+X]. That didn’t do what he hoped. Instead, the bottom line got replaced with “– ^X mode (^]^D^E^F^I^K^L^N^O^Ps^U^V^Y)”, whatever that meant.

That was a little concerning, but he knew some other programs needed other inputs to quit. [Esc]. That also didn’t work, but it did clear the last line, so he tried it again. [Esc]. This time nothing changed. [Q]? That also didn’t get him out of the command.

Izuku didn’t panic yet. Instead, he forcibly turned the quirk off, the same way he did after using ‘cat’.

—Except the quirk didn’t turn off. He tried again, but the not-window of text hung there in his brain unchanged, its cursor blinking without a care in the world.

Now, he started to panic. What do I do, what do I do?! If he couldn’t turn off his quirk in a few hours, he was going to be in for a very bad time.

Or… or maybe, if he just waited a hours, would it go away on its own? Yeah, let’s try that.

(A very small, very rational part of his brain thought this was a very bad idea.)

A few hours passed, and the only thing that was changing was his growing headache. Eventually, that small part of his brain the other 90% that maybe Izuku was too far out of his depth here.

He finally mustered up the will to stumble against the pain into the living room. “Hey, Mom?” Izuku weakly asked.

“Yes, honey?” His mom turned around. The smile she had been wearing dropped away quickly after seeing him, replaced by a look of concern. “What happened?”

“My, uh, my quirk.” Izuku gulped. “It won’t turn off.”

They took fifteen minutes to get to the hospital. For Izuku, it felt like fifteen hours. Interspersed were moments were reality was too much, where the evening sky was blinding—and he’d shut his eyes, as if that would make those stupid stupid stupid squigglies go away.

They did not.

Izuku wasn’t really sure what time it was. Hell, he could hardly even think about what time was, let alone how much time had passed since getting to the hospital, but he could think about something else. It was one of those silly ideas, one that required either a significant amount of drugs or pain to consider reasonable, but it was also one of the few coherent ideas he was able to string together in his current condition.

The idea was simple: if he stopped being conscious, he’d stop feeling the pain, and all he needed to do was to hold his breath.

So, he did, and he counted the seconds until the pain went away.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine—

Nothing. No more pain. It was there one moment, and gone the next.

His plan worked! Wait, no, I’m still conscious. He tentatively opened his eyes. To his left was his mom, to his right was a doctor, and in front of him was a homeless man.

Wait, no, not homeless. Izuku took a closer look at the man. Tall, long, black hair, scarf, red eyes—Eraserhead! Izuku couldn’t believe he had the chance to meet him. His quirk was so cool!

“You feeling better, kid?” It wasn’t until the hero talked that Izuku realized the hero wasn’t there for a meet-and-greet.

Izuku dumbly nodded, and the hero’s eyes shifted back to black.

Welcome to StarOS (GNU/Linux 45.9.0-5-generic riscv128)

 * Documentation:  https://help.star.os
 * Ecosystem:      https://cloud.star.os

  System load:  0.0                Processes:        72
  Usage of /:   0.2% of 4.83ZB     Users logged in:  1
  Memory usage: 0.3% of 151.11EB   Swap usage:       0%

 * Learn how SKS can scale to even the biggest universes at https://cloud.star.os/sks.

186 updates can be applied immediately.
To see these additional updates run: apt list --upgradable

“We occasionally have Pro Heroes on duty that can use their quirks to help treat patients. Luckily, your son came in right before Eraserhead started his patrol,” the doctor explained to Inko.

Izuku breathed in, then out. In, then out. He tried to collect his thoughts, but he only really had two: gratitude, at his mom for rushing him to the hospital and at Eraserhead for saving him, and something else.

All he ever wanted was to be a hero. All he ever wanted was to be something more than a worthless, quirkless, Deku.

Instead, he got a quirk that could kill him.

He hated his quirk.

After that incident, he realized he couldn’t just run commands willy-nilly to see what they did. Unfortunately, half the commands didn’t have any instructions, and the rest usually had documentation that verged on incomprehensible.

So, what this really ended up meaning for him was that, by the time his last year of middle school rolled around, he had only tried a handful of new commands.

But that wasn’t the biggest problem.

Izuku gave a small sigh as he took his seat in class. Homeroom was a short affair, mainly just reiterating how now was the time to thinking seriously about their futures.

Starting with their high school choices.

And because Izuku didn’t deal with enough crap in life already, his teacher, Mr. Kazuki, chose to announce his choices to the class.

“U.A. Heroics? Seriously?” One his classmates muttered.

And no, it wasn’t a joke, thank you very much. He knew what Mr. Kazuki was doing. He thought Izuku would be much better suited towards support or research. Maybe he even had a point.

But Izuku had grown up effectively quirkless, and if that didn’t stop him from his dream, Mr. Kazuki wouldn’t either. So, he gave a nod. Class continued, but Izuku caught Kacchan making a face that clearly said that the conversation wasn’t over. (As if he had been a part of the conversation in the first place.)

There were quite a few perks to his quirk, though. While everyone furiously scribbled notes, Izuku just… didn’t.

He wrote those notes straight into his head. He still drew diagrams and more complex things in a notebook when necessary, but that was only for the few classes which demanded it.

And, while he still studied meticulously, nobody could stop him from using his quirk whenever he pleased (or even tell that he was using it). That included times such as during his third period history test.

The last time he got below a 100% on any test was last year. Nobody came close to his academic performance, not even Kacchan.

When the school day came to an end, everybody grouped up with their friends and chatted their troubles away. Izuku did, too. All zero of them. Sure, his classmates were nicer to him after it stopped looking like he was faking a quirk, but Izuku found it hard to even pretend to want to be friends with the same people that used to treat him like gum stuck on their shoe.

That didn’t mean he was alone, though. Instead of having friends, Izuku had Kacchan. And he had things to say. “So, what’s this I hear about you applying to U.A.’s Hero course?”

This was really not a conversation that Izuku wanted to have. “Why do you care?”

That turned out to be the wrong answer, and Kacchan pushed him into the wall as punishment. “You, with your quirk? In heroics? What are you going to do, math them to death?” He set off a small explosion for emphasis.

Izuku noticed he left his notebook behind, but Kacchan beat him to it, grabbing it off his desk before he had the chance.

“You still taking your bullshit hero notes?” He chucked the notebook out the window. “Well, if you wanna be a hero so bad, here’s my advice: make like your notebook and hope for a better quirk in your next life.”

He left, and Izuku let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. Izuku would never admit it to himself, but he did have a brief moment where he wondered if, in a world where he had a good quirk, if Kacchan would still be friends with him today.

Because, well, there was some truth to what he said. And that was the biggest problem with his quirk.

He had spent two years trying to find a command that did something to the outside world, and he hadn’t found anything. He couldn’t even show the quirk to anyone else.

The biggest problem was that his quirk was utterly useless for heroics and he knew it.

The evening sun was warm that day, a nice change from the windy and rainy monsoons of yesterday. Izuku could smell the still-damp grass and feel the gentle breeze roll through his hair as he walked home.

His notebook had luckily missed the Koi pond at the school’s entrance, but it did get banged up by the concrete. Luckily for him, it hadn’t even been one of his hero notebooks, but the one from his last period literature class, which he barely used. (And even if it had been, he only kept the drawings in his physical notebooks, anyway, so not too much would be lost.)

He didn’t have much homework for tonight, so he considered taking an extended walk to clear his head. But, on second thought…

izuku@quirk:~$ date
Tue Aug 29 01:24:39 UTC 2226

Darn. It was almost half past 4, and his mom would be expecting him home soon.

Just like in every other universe, he figured there would be nothing wrong with cutting through the underpass to get home. And, just like in every other universe, that decision led him to discovering the taste of slime.

“Calm down. This will all be over in a minute.”

Izuku tried to put up a fight, but somewhere between the pain and the loss of air, he passed out.

Welcome to StarOS (GNU/Linux 45.9.0-5-generic riscv128)

 * Documentation:  https://help.star.os
 * Ecosystem:      https://cloud.star.os

  System load:  0.0                Processes:        74
  Usage of /:   0.2% of 4.83ZB     Users logged in:  1
  Memory usage: 0.4% of 151.11EB   Swap usage:       0%

 * Learn how SKS can scale to even the biggest universes at https://cloud.star.os/sks.

204 updates can be applied immediately.
To see these additional updates run: apt list --upgradable

Izuku blearily woke up to the feeling of someone slapping him. Then he remembered nobody should be slapping him and shot up with a rush of adrenaline.

The slime was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by a large man with two blonde tufts. “Are you alright, young man?”

Oh, God, he recognized those tufts. “A-All Might!” Izuku had never felt more unprepared for a conversation in his entire life. Here was the man he had idolized for basically as long as he could remember, and the only thing Izuku could coordinate himself to do was trip over himself trying to grab his notebook. “C-Could you please sign—”

“Already done!” The boisterous man boomed. Izuku opened up the book to the last page, where, lo and behold, All Might’s signature was splayed out across two pages.

His life was almost complete. Almost. To complete it, he needed an answer to one question.

All Might turned around and reared himself to jump. “Until next time—” And Izuku quickly realized his only opportunity to get an answer was about to disappear.

So, he did something that, with later hindsight, he would conclude was rather… stupid. One moment he was on the ground, and the next, he was a hundred meters above it, latched onto All Might’s leg like his life depended on it. (Which, in this case, was an exceedingly accurate assessment.)

Toshinori was in a bit of a pickle. He was a hundred meters in the air, had a kid latched onto his leg like his life depended on it, and his All Might timer was about to expire.

Now, he had to solve those problems, hopefully in that order.

First, the chastisement. “Young man, what are you thinking?!”

Second, the landing. He scanned the skyline and found a nearby building that would give a safe landing space for both him and his cargo. With a small flick, he redirected them towards it and made the least bad landing he could muster.

Third, detaching the cargo. Luckily, the cargo detached all by itself.

Fourth, using his last remaining energy for today to get away. He reared his legs to jump and—

“Wait! Can someone with a useless quirk become a hero like you?”

—and, suddenly, he remembered himself some 40 years ago, asking Nana much the same question. And in that moment, All Might burned away, leaving Toshinori Yagi behind.

All in all, Toshinori wasn’t too mad at the situation. He’d managed to keep the secret for the past five years, but he always knew that eventually he’d slip. The only thing he’d hoped was that it didn’t happen in a crowd or in front of a reporter, and, thankfully, it seems that his prayers were answered. (Unless the kid was a reporter in disguise. One could never predict their dastardly schemes.)

Speaking of the kid, he did not seem to take the reveal as well. “Who-who are you? An impostor?!”

No, I’m just the shriveled up husk of a man that gave almost everything for vengeance. “No, I am All Might.” He sat down against the fence. “Well, at least, the real me.”

“W-what does that mean?”

Toshinori lifted up his shirt. The kid seemed horrified to see what was underneath. “This happened five years ago. Now, I can only be a hero for about three hours a day.” He dropped his shirt. “So, can you be a hero like me without power? No, I’m afraid not.”

The kid quivered, struggling to keep his composure. Nana was always far better with kids than Toshinori was, and if he didn’t turn this conversation around soon, he might be in the running for ‘worst pep-talk ever’.

Which is why Toshinori had to continue quickly. “But, that doesn’t mean you can’t be a hero! I have seen many young aspiring heroes be told that their quirk is useless. But, with the right guidance, one often finds their so-called ‘useless’ quirk to be more than meets the eye.” He got up. “So, what’s your quirk, kid?”

“W-well,” the kid stammered, struggling to put a description together, “it’s kinda like a computer in my head? It doesn’t really work like one, though, and also it has a bunch of weird names for itself.” The kid got more animated, finding his groove. “Like, sometimes it calls itself ‘star oh ess’ and other times it calls itself ‘gee enn you slash lii nuuks’, but anyway, basically—”

Toshinori stopped being able to listen. A pounding headache replaced everything in his head, blurring his vision and making him stumble. It was like a voice was shouting inside his head.

“All Might?! All Might?!!” The kid panicked, scrambling to help. Or maybe scrambling for his phone. Or maybe doing something else entirely. Toshinori couldn’t tell. The voice turned into a cacophony, and the stumble turned into a fall.

Distantly, Toshinori heard a faint explosion.

Then, he heard nothing.

Inside One for All, there was a castle. Or it was a mansion. Or it was a field, depending on who was looking.

This place was divided into 8 rooms.

The eighth room was still under construction. There were some mementos scattered around, such as an old sports car and photos of those long lost. But there was no bed and one of the walls still didn’t exist yet.

The seventh room was, by many respects, the homeliest. There was an empty cot in the corner next to the bed and the walls were painted bright yellow.

The sixth room was spartan.

The fifth room was chaotic. The walls were lined with movie posters and album covers. An electric guitar sat on top of an amp next to the disheveled bed.

The fourth room was meditative and traditional. The floor was made of tatami mats and the windows were always open, bringing in fresh air. (Or some imagination of it, considering this place didn’t really exist.)

The third room was more like 50% of a room. It was also attached to the second room.

Now, all of those rooms were currently empty, because all of their residents were in the first room.

The first room was pristine. The walls were lined with old comic book collections, all without a speck of dust on them. Several posters hung throughout the room, and there was a litany of retro game consoles set up against the far wall, arranged in an ornate cabinet.

The resident of this room had a name: Yoichi Shigaraki. And said resident was currently being thoroughly cowed by the other six residents in the castle/mansion/<whatever>.

In fairness, he had overreacted a bit. A lot, actually. But, here’s the thing: before quirks screwed up the world, Yoichi and his brother had spent over three decades in a regular world, where they were regular adults with regular jobs.

His brother was full of charisma and strength, and upper management came naturally for him. Yoichi, who spent his life burdened with frailty, chose a different path.

Where his brother chose to talk to people, he chose to talk to computers.

And, about three minutes ago, he had just heard the wildest shit.

Chapter Text

The end of the world was a slow rolling wave.

For Izuku Midoriya, it began with a phone call.

Back at the rooftop, All Might had luckily been able to catch himself before collapsing.

“All Might?!” Izuku was still a bit panicky.

The hero brought his signature smile back to full force. “Nothing to worry about, my boy!” Even though only a few seconds had passed, All Might already seemed to be right as rain.

Izuku was suspicious. “Are you sure?”

Because, beyond Izuku being a decent human being, for all of his life, All Might’s smile had been his north star. But, right after he came to, Izuku saw, just for a moment, something more than All Might the number one hero.

Izuku saw All Might the human, who could be just as scared as the rest of them.

But that sight lasted for all the blink of an eye, and now All Might had returned back to his full heroic spirit (if not his form). “Of course!” He started walking towards the door before stopping a few feet away. “You mentioned wanting to be a hero, right? U.A. has the best quirk counselors in the country, and they’re available for all courses, not just the hero course. If there is more to your quirk, they’ll figure it out.” All Might paused, choosing his words carefully. “I can’t tell you if you can be a hero.”

Izuku’s world dropped out from under him.

“But I can tell you to give it your best shot.”

Izuku pieced his world back together as All Might left the rooftop.

He didn’t know how long he stayed there, just thinking about what he said, what he didn’t say, what he heard, what he didn’t hear. He did know that by the time he left the rooftop, the sun had started to cross the horizon. He checked his phone and saw many missed calls from his mom.

Abnormally many, even for her. Izuku called her back, and the call connected before the first dial tone.

“Izuku?! Honey, where are you?” His mom’s voice was frazzled and her shallow breaths were coming clearly through Izuku’s phone.

Something was deeply, deeply wrong. “I’m-I’m on my way home. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to take so long.” For a second, Izuku considered not asking. If he didn’t know, he could just pretend everything was okay. “Is everything all right?”

A sob broke through the phone. “Auntie Mitsuki called, and–and”—another sob, even louder—“there was a villain. Katsuki, he—” The rest of the sentence was eaten up by her wails.

“Mom?”

A deep breath echoed across the line, in then out, and then two words. “Katsuki’s dead.”

And his world, the one that he just pieced back together, shattered into dust.

For Toshinori Yagi, it began with a message.

After he left the rooftop, he let out a shaky breath. That had never happened to him before. He had no idea what caused it or if it could happen again. As he got down, he thumbed over the contact for Tsukauchi, but decided against it. He needed to drop the slime villain off at the police station anyway.

As an absent-minded gesture, he reached for the bottle. When he grabbed nothing but air, he realized something was wrong. He remembered something, something important, right around when he passed out…

—An explosion. He looked out a nearby window and saw a column of smoke. Even if One for All couldn’t get him there in a single leap anymore, his legs still functioned, and he was moving before he could think.

One block passed, then another, then another. The commotion and heat increased, distracting him from his already frazzled thoughts. What were his options here? What could he even do?

The answer was nothing. As he rounded the corner, the villain was already gone, leaving only police tape and remnants of a fight. Within the rubble, he saw first responders tending to the injured and circling around something that vaguely looked like a body.

A bit further, and he saw Endeavor patrolling the scene alongside a few other heroes he didn’t recognize.

There was nothing left for Toshinori to do except listen and, after catching the word ‘slime’ in the commotion, regret. The was his responsibility, and he failed.

He had noticed Tsukauchi in the scene and resolved to talk to him after he was done with his interviews. He wasn’t really sure what for, but he needed someone. Before that, though, he had a message to send.

He opened his phone to Nedzu’s contact. [If the position for heroics teacher is still open, I’d be honored to accept.]

He’d been the Symbol of Peace for too long. It was time for someone else to inherit the mantle.

For Yoichi Shigaraki, it began with a plan.

After his little outburst, he took about an hour to calm down. (That this was mandated by his flatmates was an implementation detail.)

In that time, he got his thoughts in order and an explanation ready. Despite their… tumultuous… relationship in life, Yoichi had picked up quite a few habits from his brother, one of which was a near-constant awareness and analysis of quirks. He kept up with this habit, vicariously monitoring the progression of quirks through the various hosts of One for All and paying attention to the little details that came up in their discussions.

(Now, there were other ways to obtain information, but there were rules about them. Very very strict rules, only to be used in times of absolute necessity.)

He could distill his findings into three facts.

The first was that quirks were largerly dictated by genetics and environmental influences, but the latter usually had a lag of at least one generation. Not just that, but environmental influences were based on perceptions of the environment. For example, an earphone jack quirk would resemble the original article in both form and (to some degree) behavior, but the actual mechanisms would be completely different.

The second was that changes in the environment can suppress quirks that were originally brought out by the environment. As an (somewhat depressing) example, the number of ice-related quirks had gone down throughout the centuries as global warming heated the planet.

The third and most important to Yoichi’s case was Menjen’s law. It was very simple: the minimum power level of a quirk was proportional to its complexity.

To explain, a basic strength augmentation quirk can be so weak as to not be noticable at all or as strong as All Might, but it can be used with little to no thought whatsoever. Meanwhile, a telekinesis quirk usually requires strong geospatial awareness and focus, so those usually have a minimum ability to move around a few kilograms. An electricity quirk usually requires a baseline understanding of electricity and magnetism to use effectively, so almost everybody with one has the strength to become a pro hero.

And then there was Linux, a quirk that seemed to, at first glance, spit on all of these rules. Maybe the world was lucky and there was nothing more to the quirk, an outlier would be forever contained within the confines of the kid’s mind.

But, when Yoichi was learning about computers and programming, he did it over the course of decades and with more external resources than he could remember. Maybe he was underestimating the kid (or overestimating himself), but there was a real chance they hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of their quirk.

And if there was more to the quirk, the fact that it wasn’t immediately obvious how such it would interact with the real world was already terrifying enough.

So, he pled his case to a council of 6 and received a unanimous verdict: he was to talk to Toshinori. Nothing more.

Nana Shimura patiently listened to Yoichi’s spiel. It was very well-spoken and referenced quite a few scientific studies that went way above her head.

All these statements may have even been true, and they probably were, since Yoichi tended to be the brains of the house, and maybe this is how he justified it to himself, but that didn’t matter, because the whole spiel was complete bullcrap.

None of this was why Yoichi wanted to help the kid. No, he wanted to do it for two reasons: helping people is what heroes do, and he was so, so, so, so curious about the quirk.

But, rules were rules, and she wished him the best of luck trying to communicate any of this to Toshinori.

Dinner was quiet. Izuku wasn’t sure why his mom hadn’t said anything, but he deeply appreciated it.

For his part, he wasn’t sure what to say. “This sucks, but I might finally be able to go to school without getting viciously bullied?” It may have maybe been his honest feelings, but Izuku had the grace to not say it to his grieving mother.

As far as she knew, she lost her closest friend’s son and her son’s closest friend. Izuku never told her about how his relationship with Kacchan changed over the years.

Kacchan. Kacchan. An old nickname from a bygone time when they were best friends. Why did he still use it? Why? Kacchan’s nickname for him was so much crueler, so then why?

He lost Kacchan, and he was free from Kacchan, and that ate him up inside.

That night should have been the worst of it. He trudged through what little homework he had left and made a vague attempt at sleeping that was more just restlessly laying in bed.

By the next morning, Izuku wasn’t sure if he got any sleep at all. He drowsily made it to his homeroom desk and was already waiting for the day to end. Izuku noticed the classroom was quieter than usual and wondered who knew about Kacchan’s passing and who didn’t.

At the end of roll call, the teacher made a simple announcement. “I regret to inform you that a villain attack yesterday has claimed the life of one of your classmates, Katsuki Bakugou.”

The classroom went silent.

“Classes will continue as normal, but please know that the guidance counselor will be available an extra two hours after classes every day for the rest of the week.”

In the two minutes between the homeroom teacher leaving and the math teacher coming in, nobody said a word.

To their credit, the math teacher was doing a pretty good job of carrying classes on as normal. At least, as far as Izuku could tell, they sounded the same, but he wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying. The next two classes went about the same.

The whispers started around lunchtime. Izuku may have been friendless, but he wasn’t clueless, and it was obvious what everyone was talking about.

As he ate his lunch, the class got louder and louder, to the point where he could start making out individual words. Izuku had thus far paid about as much attention to his classmates as he did his teachers, right up until he overheard the word ‘slime’.

Then, he started actually paying attention.

“—apparently, the villain was gonna wear him like a—”

For a moment, all Izuku could hear was his own heavy breathing. He took a few deep breaths, in, then out, then in, then out, and regained a semblance of composure. He looked up at the speaker. Tamaka? Tamoka? It took a moment for Izuku to remember his name. “T-Tomoya?”

The kid stopped his prattling and turned around. “Oh, hey, Midoriya.”

“What-what’d you say happened to Kacchan?”

Tomoya gave him a look of confusion. “You don’t know? It was all over the news yesterday. Apparently, Mister Future Number One Hero lost to a slime. It sucks, but you know what, it kinda serves him—”

Izuku stopped listening. He stopped feeling. He didn’t stop thinking—quite the opposite, actually—but all he could get out was a weak, “oh.” He needed to be anywhere but where he was right now. He grabbed his phone and stumbled out of the classroom. He didn’t know where exactly he went, but he eventually stopped against a wall, pulled out his phone, shakily typed in 3 words into the search bar, musutafu villain attack, and clicked on the first article.

VILLAIN ATTACK IN MUSUTAFU: 1 DEAD, 7 INJURED

[…]

Endeavor apprehended the villain, but not before they took the life of a local resident and injured seven others.

Out of respect for the victims’ families, we will not be disclosing their identities.

[…]

Endeavor? All Might captured the villain, not Endeavor, unless…

Izuku ran to the bathroom, barreled into a stall, and let his lunch out. When there was no more lunch to come out, he kept dry heaving on top of the toilet.

Izuku knew All Might had stuffed the villain into a bottle, but he couldn’t remember for the life of him if the hero still had the bottle when he left the roof.

Who was Izuku kidding? This was his fault. If he hadn’t latched onto All Might’s leg like a dumbass, if he hadn’t distracted the hero with his stupid questions, Kacchan might still be alive.

This was his fault his fault his fault his fault—

Toshinori woke up with a headache. He was pretty sure dreams weren’t supposed to be as vivid as the one he just had.

He could still remember most of it clearly. He was in a room, or at least something along those lines. It was… missing things. He wasn’t sure what things were supposed to be in the room, but somehow he knew it wasn’t enough.

There was somebody talking to him. Toshinori could almost recognize the man. At this point, he decided to grab some paper and write down what he could remember:

• green-haired boy (same one as yesterday?)
• quirk called lii-nuuks (again? what is this?)
• bash in terminal (???)
• gooey windows (is this about slime villain? where do the windows come in?)
• update packages (with what?)

Toshinori had received cryptic messages from One for All before, as had Nana, and listening to them had proved crucial to staying on this side of the pearly gates.

He really couldn’t make heads or tails of this one, though, so he phoned a friend.

“Yagi?”

Toshinori paused and, instead of talking about the message, addressed something else first. “I’m sorry.”

“What? Hold on, is this about yesterday?” Tsukauchi sighed. “Look, you’ve got nothing to apologize for. Didn’t I say I agreed with your choice?”

“Yes, but you were right about me being rash, and I should’ve taken it better. There’s something else, though. I had a dream last night and, um, think it might be a message.”

“From, uh…?”

One for All? “Maybe. That young man I ran into, the one that saw my other form? Do you think you could find him?”

“Uh,” Tsukauchi gave an aborted chuckle, “the only thing I got from you yesterday was ‘green hair’ and ‘strange quirk’. That doesn’t exactly narrow it down much.”

“Oh, I didn’t mention?” When Toshinori signed the kid’s notebook, he glanced at their name. After the rooftop incident, he committed it to memory. “His name’s Midoriya.” (Well, at least their last name, anyway.)

“That I can work with. Let’s meet for lunch around noon?”

“Works for me.”

“Do you think this might be connected to, uh…?”

All for One? Toshinori hadn’t considered the angle, but what else would his quirk warn him about? “It’s possible.”

He got a brief pang of pain in his head and wondered if it was confirmation.

“Oh, come on.”

Izuku couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever.

He still had his mom and he still had a dream.

(“Give it your best shot.”)

He’d give it his best damn shot. He picked himself up, cleaned himself up, and got back to class. The next set of classes didn’t go by as quickly, because Izuku was taking notes. He wasn’t getting into U.A. without top marks.

After school finished for the day, he got home quickly, did his homework quickly, and made some plans. He had roughly ten months before U.A. entrance exams and a lot of ground to cover. His plans were roughly the following:

• Get fit. He decided on a basic daily regimen of exercises he could do from his room and a run. With his newfound motivation, he decided to start the same day… and found out exactly how woefully out of shape he was. His daily run ended after 15 minutes out of exhaustion and he could barely do 20 push-ups.
• Get fighting. Even in the most optimistic world, there would be plenty of situations his quirk wouldn’t be able to get him out of, so he found an MMA gym that was on his route home from school. It was too late for him to go today, but there was a beginner’s class tomorrow.
• Get a good understanding of his quirk. (Actually.) (Finally.) (For the love of god.) If he didn’t succeed at this, his only real other option was getting into the gen ed course and praying that what All Might said was true. Which, if he was being honest with himself, was something he really, really, really didn’t wanna do. He was aware that it was technically possible to transfer into the heroics course from the other courses, but it had only happened a handful of times.
• Get some visitors.

Well, that last one wasn’t initially part of his plan, but,—

“Izuku, honey, there’s some detectives here to see you.”

Izuku poked his head out of his bedroom and found three people waiting for him in the living room: his mom, a detective he’d never met before…

…and All Might.