Chapter Text
It was a bright, clear evening in Musutafu Japan. The sky was mostly empty of clouds, with only a few tattered stragglers drifting across the horizon. The weather was unusually balmy for this time of the year, with a gentle, cool breeze winding its way through darkening streets and shaded alleys.
Midoriya Izuku was not currently enjoying it, however, because he was stuck inside the bathroom of his parent’s apartment, being forced to hold still while an old man doodled on his face with a makeup pencil.
“Heroics wasn’t always the way it is today,” Torino explained, as he carefully drew subtle lines on the teenager’s cheeks. “As a hero fanboy, I’m sure you already know that. There are fads for costumes and hero personas, and beyond that are deeper trends, like equipment choices or body armor, which are usually ruled by the laws and regulations at the time.”
“A lot of heroes used to have guns, about a century ago,” Izuku supplied.
“Try not to move your mouth. But yeah, that’s right. Back in my day, almost everybody had a gun on their belt. Plenty of people carried swords, too. And so many pouches. I saw some gorillas who looked more pouch than human. It used to be nobody would be caught dead without a grappling hook, now you hardly see them at all.”
The elderly pro pushed the pencil in slightly, deliberately making a darker smudge, then he flipped it around to the reverse side and began smearing it slightly, blending it into Izuku’s jawline. “But anyway, the point is that things changed. One of the biggest changes is the introduction of the concept of day-and-night heroics. Limelight heroes who operate during the day, and the pros who operate after dark, in the so-called Underground.”
The old man leaned back, squinted at the teenager’s face critically, and then nodded. He snapped a clamshell makeup case shut, and stood up before opening the door to the bathroom. “It’s done, but it needs a bit of time to set. Let’s finish this talk in your room.”
The two made their way down the hall, and Izuku only realized after opening his door that he had what most would consider a, socially unacceptable amount of All Might merch filling his otherwise fairly standard room.
Izuku flushed, but Torino made no comment. Unknown to the teen, Gran Torino had years of experience dealing with someone who owned a far more absurd and embarrassing collection of All Might memorabilia. This room, while nothing to sneeze at, didn’t even hold a candle to Sir Nighteye’s horde.
No, it wasn’t the things related to All Might that Torino was interested in, but the things that weren’t. He spied more than a few, and filed the information away for later.
Torino took the chair by Izuku’s computer desk, while the teen delicately sat down on the edge of his bed, doing his best to not look directly at any of his own collectables.
“In brief, summarize for me what day and night heroics are, and why the divide exists,” Torino asked.
Izuku nodded slightly, trying not to move his head too much and disturb the makeup he wasn’t used to wearing. “That’s easy, everybody who follows heroes knows that. Daylight heroes operate during the day, as the name implies. They’re also sometimes called limelight or sunshine heroes. Their job is to patrol during day hours, and to stop any crimes or assist anyone who needs help. Underground heroes are the opposite. I’ve seen them referred to by a lot of names, it usually changes depending on the country. But they’re active after dark.”
“Good. And the reason for the divide?”
“Practicality,” Izuku replied immediately. “Daylight heroes are essentially celebrities. A big part of their job is to remain visible and be seen. They dissuade crime by existing, and make people feel safe by going around in public. That’s why they’re sometimes called limelight heroes. All Might is a limelight hero, he’s the greatest one in history. Endeavor is another, and Best Jeanist is a third. Ms. Star would also be one.”
“Only because she’s a buffoon who sneaks like a rhinoceros looking for a toothbrush,” Torino grunted under his breath.
The green-haired teen stifled a laugh, his own memories flicking back to the American pro following them around on I-Island.
“Underground heroes, on the other hand, prosper by not being seen or recognized,” Izuku continued. “They work with the police and with other heroes, tracking down criminals and infiltrating illegal operations. If they were openly known, they couldn’t do their jobs.”
“Correct,” Torino said. “Which is why their hero licenses are sealed by the government, and why most of them go very far out of their way to not be known. They also work hard to keep their quirks a secret, unlike the daylighters who show off. It gives them an edge.”
Izuku smiled. “I’m a member of an internet forum that follows Underground heroes!” the teen chimed in cheerfully. “It’s pretty fun to speculate on identities and quirks. There are also some underground heroes whose identities are public for one reason or another, like Sir Nighteye!”
The old pro nodded. He wasn’t shocked, fanboy speculation about the Underground had existed for as long as the Underground had. He’d have been more surprised if the kid wasn’t involved in that sort of thing.
“Pop quiz, kiddo. Which do you think I was?”
Izuku frowned for a minute. “Um. I think you could have been either, actually. But I’d probably lean on the Daylight side.”
Torino nodded. “Interesting. Explain your reasoning.”
“Well,” Izuku said, slipping into his fanboy analysis mode, “You’re cunning and you like playing tricks on people. Faking your own death, and stuff like that. Normally, I’d say that would point towards Underground, but your costume just doesn’t work for it. You’ve got big yellow boots that go all the way up to your knees, and bright yellow gloves. You’ve even got a cape! It really wouldn’t blend well at night. Most older Underground heroes favored street clothes, or something more subdued. Armored spandex in bright colors is pretty exclusively a Daylight Hero thing.”
Torino nodded. “Fair. And if I was an Underground hero, how would you argue for it?”
“Your attitude,” Izuku said immediately. “Your willingness to use weapons like knives and guns. Those fell out of favor with most Daylight Heroes ages ago, the trends in heroics see it as a bad look for most pro heroes if they need a weapon.”
“True,” Torino grunted. “There was a span of about two generations when it was in vogue, right after the end of the Dawn at the beginning of the Age of Heroes. It fell out of favor pretty quick, though. Most folks didn’t want to see their superheroes as a bunch of armed mercenaries loitering on street corners, loaded up with guns and katanas. And the government agreed.”
“They made great action figures, though!” Izuku insisted.
The old man snorted in spite of himself. “I’ll bet they did. Anything else on the Underground front?”
Izuku frowned. “Not- not really? The only other thing I would add, is that I know for a long time, it was a trend for smaller hero agencies to have a hero that operated in the limelight, and then they would have a partner that worked underground. I don’t know much about your former partner beyond her connection to One For All, but Ms. Shimura definitely sounds like a daylight hero. If that’s true, then you could have been her underground partner.”
Torino hummed slightly, then nodded. “Not bad, kid. Unfortunately, this was a trick question from the start. My career actually predates the division entirely; there were no daylight or underground heroes in my day. Though I did only just miss the cutoff.”
Izuku was taken aback. He hadn’t known the exact date the split had started, but knew it was around Gran Torino’s generation. “It was after your time?”
“I’m older than dirt, kid,” Torino replied. “But yeah, it was. I will give you a gold star for that last guess, though, because that’s pretty much how Nana and I ran the agency, more or less. She smiled and pulled kids out of burning buildings. I shoved punks into dumpsters in the back alley and worked the interrogation rooms with the detectives to make breakthroughs in cases.”
The old man cracked his wizened knuckles. “Which brings us to the reason we’re having this talk.” He pointed at the mirror on the other wall of Izuku’s room. “Look there, and tell me what you see. Is it yourself?”
Izuku turned to look.
It wasn’t.
Izuku knew what his own face looked like. Boyish, with rounder cheeks than he probably would have liked. Two small clusters of freckles just below each of his green eyes. A normal, unobtrusive nose. A messy mop of fluffy, untameable dark green hair, that he hoped one day would either straighten out like his mothers or become wavy like his fathers.
He didn’t really like how he looked, but he didn’t hate it, either. He counted himself lucky. Given some of the other people living in their neighborhood, he could have ended up looking like a literal brick wall.
But that face he knew, wasn’t the face that was looking back at him in the mirror.
The boy who looked back at him had a sharper, more defined jawline, with higher cheekbones and a more mature look. His nose seemed to protrude slightly more, although it wasn’t ugly. His freckles were gone. His skin was a slightly darker tone, almost like he was tanned, making him look like he was from Amami or Okinawa. Most surprising of all, his hair and eye color had changed. His soft, unmanageable green hair had become dark teal, straight and slicked back. And his once green eyes were now a slightly muted but clear purple.
Izuku blinked. So did the stranger. “What-”
“Meet Sage,” Torino said. “Your new alter-ego for whenever you’re out doing work or attending anything in an official capacity.”
Several questions were fighting their way out of Izuku. Instead of forming an orderly line, they tripped over one another. “Why-? And how-? We were only in there for- for a couple of minutes!”
Torino snorted.
“The how is the easy part. I’m pretty decent with disguises. There’s tons of cosmetics out there. You don’t even need to contact a support company as a hero. They sell the good stuff to anybody, these days.”
“I-I know a bit about makeup,” Izuku admitted. “But isn’t- you made me look completely different!”
Torino wasn’t surprised at that revelation. The kid’s aunt was a fashion model, if he recalled correctly. And there were a few suspicious relics lurking around the edges of the bedroom as well.
“What heroes do is different from what musicians and artists do,” he explained. “Like I said, I’m pretty good with disguises, and there’s loads of stuff out there now.”
He pointed a gnarled finger. “Consider yourself. Green and blue makes teal, your hair was just a colored conditioning oil that darkens and tints. It’ll wash out in a shower with soap. A bit of foundation hid your freckles and darkened your skin, and some penciling highlighted key parts of your face while downplaying others, drawing out your nose and making it look like your skull is a different shape. And the eyes were the easiest, they literally make color drops these days. Don’t ask me how they work, I’m not a beautician, but those little blips of water I had you hold your eyes open for did that. It lasts for about 48 hours, or until you wash your eyes with warm water.”
Izuku blinked again, taking in his new appearance. It wasn’t really what the old man had done, so much as it was how quickly it had been done, and how total the transformation seemed.
“...that’s amazing,” Izuku said softly. “I know a little bit about cosmetic makeup, but this is something else entirely. I look totally different.”
Torino took that comment as a confirmation of his suspicions, and filed it away for later. “I did it for you the first time, but you’ll be learning how to do this yourself soon,” the old man said.
“Really?” Izuku asked, looking somewhat excited. “Will you be teaching me?”
But the old man shook his head. “Nah, there’s somebody way better than me that will be showing you how be sneaky and use disguises. But that comes later.”
Izuku couldn’t wait to meet whoever it was that would teach him how to do this. In his imagination, he had always wanted to be a hero that could make people smile like All Might, so he never really considered going Underground. But he was still a teenage boy, and spy stuff with disguises was really cool!
The old man shifted in Izuku’s swivel chair. “As to the why, that’s the longer answer to give. I’m sure you’ve heard Toshinori mention what inspired him to try being a vigilante, right?”
Izuku slowly nodded. “He, um. He brought it up a few times. He said there were gunshots every night.”
Torino nodded. “Yeah, society had gone to the dogs back then. You won’t really hear this in any of your own research, but the heroes were losing. The very concept of daylight and underground heroics was a luxury we couldn’t afford back then. The fact that it’s here now is a sign of how peaceful and prosperous this era really is. We can thank All Might for that. He’s the one who turned the tide.”
“The heroes were losing?” Izuku asked, curiosity and trepidation in his voice. “How?”
“The criminal element back then was stronger, and a hell of a lot more organized. It was a golden age of villainy. The yakuza were at their peak, the triads were doing a roaring trade in drugs and quirks all across the Pacific. Human trafficking, gunrunners, piracy, you name it and it was a problem. There were crime families everywhere, fighting each other for control. It was all the heroes could do to hold their ground. That was the environment that created All Might, and inspired his dream of a Symbol of Peace.”
“All Might ended that? That’s incredible! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it!”
Torino snorted. “You’ve never heard of it because it makes the government look bad. It’s a fantastic story if you’re an All Might fanboy; not so much if you’re a career politician. They gloss over how close the war with Destro really was for the same reason.”
The old man waved a gnarled hand. “But anyway, the point is, times were bad. The villains had bigger balls back then, they did stuff they would never have the nerve to do today. Among that being targeting the families and friends of anyone who tried to oppose them.”
Izuku’s eyes went wide, and he swallowed. “Are- are you serious?”
“Deadly serious,” Torino replied. “Cops got a little too successful in their cases? They’d go home to find their own apartments and houses had become crime scenes. A hero gets a little too lax with a secret identity? Their kids just vanish on the way to school one day. The bodies are never found. If you’d turn dirty and go on their payroll, they’d reward you. If you resisted, you’d lose something precious. Silver or blood, your choice. That’s the offer they used to make. Our silver, or your family’s blood.”
The old man folded his hands together in his lap. “And that’s why we invented the Protocols. Simply put, a favorite target for villains back in the day was the hero hopefuls themselves. Kill heroes when they’re still embryos, smash the eggs before they can hatch and become a threat. The bigger crime families and cartels would target heroes-in-training specifically. It was a frighteningly effective policy, so we created a counter policy for the industry.”
Izuku licked his lips slightly, and leaned forwards. This was nerve-wracking to hear, but also fascinating. He had never known about this side of hero history. “What do these protocols entail?”
“As of this morning, you now have a secret identity. You are not a licensed superhero, nor are you a sidekick. But your identity is now being protected as though you were, and had submitted the paperwork for an underground hero license. Simply put, the fact that Midoriya Izuku is Sage is now a state secret, known only to us and a tiny number of stringently screened bureaucrats working for the government.”
He paused for a moment. “And Nezu.”
“B-But that can’t be! How would I qualify for something like that? They can’t just hand those out to anyone! I’ve been training with you for- for, what? A m-month?”
Torino raised an eyebrow. The kid was a veritable water fountain of facts and trivia when it came to quirks and superheroes, but it looked like his expertise elsewhere was limited. “It takes between four to six months for someone to transition from random passer-by on the street to a fully qualified law enforcement officer. It takes longer to become an inspector or something more specialized, but for a beat cop, that’s all you need. That paper test I gave you for fun before we went to I-Island, the one I told you not to take seriously? That was the Destar Police Academy’s final exam. You passed with a 93%, well above their cutoff of 75%.”
There was another pause. “Also, I really think you’re underestimating how desperate they were for bodies back then, kid. They kind of did just hand it out to anyone who was willing.”
Izuku’s mouth was gaping. “That- that can’t be all there is to it!”
Torino snorted. “Of course it isn’t. You also need a minimum of 4 months worth of range time, learning from a licensed firearm instructor. Right now, you only have a month, but that’s more than enough to get you qualified as an intern with the police. Congratulations, kid. They’ve got your badge waiting for you downtown.”
“I’m a police officer now!?”
“An intern with the police,” Torino clarified. “That’s the purpose of the Protocols. They were made to allow prospective heroes who were not yet part of the system to shadow the police, as well as licensed heroes who were willing. It gave them hands-on experience with heroics while granting them the full legal privileges of a secret identity.”
Izuku was still tilted from learning that he was some sort of police officer now, even if it wasn’t quite a real one. But he was not so shocked that he didn’t notice the similarities.
“That… kind of sounds like what the hero schools do now, with internships.”
“It is,” Torino confirmed. “The Protocols are the precursor to that system. When I was your age, there were only two hero schools in Japan: UA, which sucked because they didn’t know what they were doing, and Shiketsu, which sucked because all they knew how to be was a military academy, so that’s how they ran things. The military police wasn’t really my cup of tea, so I went UA, which is where I met Nana.”
“Then All Might happened.”
“Then All Might and Nezu happened,” Torino corrected. “The two of them completely reshaped the face of the heroics industry. They redefined it into what we know today. All Might single-handedly ended the golden age of organized villainy, and whether they can admit it or not, every hero school in the world is scrambling after the trail Nezu blazed with UA when he took over. They’ve been aping UA for years. Only now are a few of the biggest competitors finally starting to catch up.”
The old man folded his hands in his lap. “It’s also the reason why All Might always likes to say things like ‘injustice gives birth to the justice that destroys it’ in interviews. A lot of the younger crowd doesn’t really get it, but anyone who is old enough does.”
“He’s referring to his own origin,” Izuku whispered. “The golden age of villainy created the golden age of heroes.”
“More or less. He’s always been a real sucker for stuff like that. Sounds great as a soundbite.” Torino stood up out of the chair and started heading towards the door. “Come on, kid. We’ve talked enough. Tonight’s your first night, we don’t want to be late.”
Izuku grabbed his bag and a fresh notebook with no name on the cover, and scrambled after the old hero. They left his room and began walking down the stairs to the apartment’s living room. “Okay, um. But why am I on the Protocols, then? I’m sorry if it’s a stupid question! I just, I don’t really get it…?”
“It’s not a stupid question, kid. You’re on the Protocols because they’re proven to work. You’ve got a sharp mind, and it would be a waste to dress you up like a Christmas tree and throw you face-first at purse snatchers all day. In your own writeup for your dream hero agency, you described a hybrid office. Part daylight, part underground. You’ll learn plenty of daylight skills at UA, but if you want a leg up with the flip-side, the Protocols is an express ticket for it. You’ll be learning how the system really works directly from the detectives and underground heroes who keep the wheels of justice turning.”
Izuku was, unfortunately, unable to escape the apartment without being waylaid by his mother. She made over him for several minutes, fussing with his clothes and calling him handsome, before loudly wondering if he should be wearing a tie or not.
“Oh Izuku, honey! You look so mature now! Do you need a suit? Oh no, I should have gotten you one earlier!”
“Mom!”
Finally, they were able to escape by trading their freedom for a series of pictures of Izuku’s new look. And with a beleaguered ‘stay safe!’ from Inko, which Torino halfheartedly countered with ‘don’t post those on social media!’, they were out the door.
“If the Protocols work for teaching hero students how to deal with criminal cases, why isn’t it used anymore?” Izuku asked.
It was a fair question in the teen’s mind, because there was a whole industry surrounding the idea of prepping to get into a hero school. Martial arts dojos offered courses for it, and there were summer camps for legacy kids who had familial connections to the hero industry. Half the physical games in Silver Mountain’s arcade complex were at least partially based around the idea of teaching something superficially useful to a prospective hero, to entice teens and young adults to come. And every sports club put together by normal schools was built with heroic assumptions in mind. Track and field, gymnastics and kendo, boxing and karate. All of those groups were run with the implicit understanding that the top students were there to hone themselves for a run at the big superhero schools.
Getting into the industry was an industry unto itself. So Izuku genuinely didn’t understand why, if something like the Protocols still existed, it wasn’t used.
“Simple, kid,” Torino grunted, as he opened the driver-side door of Toshinori’s pickup truck and hopped inside. “Nobody respects the police anymore. It’s not seen anywhere near as equal to being a superhero. Hell, your own story is proof of that, isn’t it? When Toshinori told you no on that rooftop, and said you should join the police instead, did you think ‘I’ll join the police and get experience there to be a pro?’ Or was your first thought that cops were losers, and it’s a bum job about standing in the corner with a mop and bucket, holding water for the heroes?”
Izuku froze while holding his door of the truck open, then swallowed. He knew what the answer to that question was, but the way Gran Torino had phrased it made it seem so much worse.
The old man seemed to read his mind, because he snorted and rolled his eyes. “Don’t blame yourself for something society teaches you to believe, kid. Weren’t you just telling Melissa that a few days ago? The Protocols still exist on the books, but nobody uses them much anymore because the only real reason would be to try and get an internship with an underground hero. And realistically, nobody from the underground is going to waste their time with an intern that isn’t even part of a hero school yet. Not these days. The Protocols are outdated. The industry has simply moved past the need for them.”
“But you’ve put me on them,” Izuku said.
“Yes. Because I believe there’s a lot of value for you in experiencing that. I don’t think it will be a waste of your time. You’re dreaming big, with your hero agency. Winners don’t do what everyone else does, zygote! They live differently! That’s why they’re winners! Now close the damn door and buckle up, we’ve got to go.”
The truck door slammed shut, and Izuku’s buckle clicked home.
There was a beat.
“Wait! ALL MIGHT IS A LICENSED GUN INSTRUCTOR!?”
The old hero roared with laughter, and the old pickup pulled away down the twilit road.
Torino had been forced to reassess the situation with the Midoriyas more than once. Perhaps that said something about the family. Or it said something about him. Maybe he really was slipping.
He had walked out onto that beach with a double fistful of notions about the kid Toshinori had called him to teach. At this point, almost every single one of them had been thrown in the garbage. Several more than once.
Torino still wasn’t sure who was more interesting between the two elder Midoriyas. Hisashi was far spookier than he had first imagined, in more ways than one. But the man at least made sense in Torino’s head. Even if he was very convinced the frosty-eyed businessman had lied to them about more than one thing in the back of that car.
But Inko. Hero lawyer Midoriya Inko simply didn’t make any sense at all. And Torino couldn’t quite get over it.
The enigmatic Midoriya senior had all but confirmed that his wife was under witness protection to keep tabs on her, not to keep her safe from any external threat.
That at least answered the question of why she wasn’t hiding. But it answered one question and begged a dozen more.
Why would the government risk doing something so sketchy to a lawyer from a high-profile firm? They were practically begging for a massive lawsuit, so what made it worth the risk?
What had she done? Her husband had insinuated it was something to do with the circumstances of her birth, not any deed of hers. But that just begged the ‘why’ once again. What could possibly matter so much?
And then there was Hisashi’s own testimony to consider. King Beast, the legacy of the Harima name, and the Mist People. Torino was no fool: he had seen the cup game before. It didn’t escape him that perhaps the real answer was none of the above, and Hisashi had kept the proverbial ball in his palm the whole time.
But there was something about the teasing glint in the other man’s eye. Hisashi had been toying with them, Torino was sure of it. Hisashi knew something, something obvious. Something that made the whole situation amusing to him in a way that escaped the elderly pro.
No. ‘I’ am not the descendant of a villain. It would be stranger if I were, all things considered.
Those had been his exact words, emphasis on the ‘I.’
What the hell had that meant? Was it confirmation that his wife was?
But then, why did he say his circumstances were similar to his wife’s?
For a wild moment, Torino wondered if this could possibly have something to do with All For One. It was a plausible, if widely angled, guess at what the ‘fourth ball’ in the hypothetical cup game might be. But he dismissed the notion as quickly as it had appeared.
However much of Hisashi may be fake, his anger and disdain when he spoke of the ancient villain were very real. Shigaraki was old enough to have descendents running around, certainly. But anyone related to him would be in just as much trouble as someone tangled up with the Mist People. It couldn’t be Inko, and if Hisashi’s own words were to be believed, it couldn’t be him, either.
I am not related to a villain. It would be stranger if I were, all things considered.
Torino also doubted anyone who had anything to do with that ancient monster would be so viscerally upset at the plight of the quirkless. Hisashi took the problems his son faced more than personally. If anything, the businessman had been kinder to Toshinori than him. That was a far cry from the ‘only the strong deserve quirks, and I decide who is strong’ rhetoric All For One was known for.
The two elder Midoriya’s weren’t the only thing being re-evaluated, either. Torino had been wrong about the kid, too. And nothing put that in perspective more than meeting his father.
He had assumed he was dealing with a purely raw talent.
He should have known better the moment Garaki’s name came out of that kid’s mouth.
Midoriya Hisashi could deflect and waffle all he wanted. He could deny his son being his replacement. But what the man admitted to encouraging in his son told a very different story.
The number of jobs a professional quirk analyst could hold, the old man could count on the fingers of one hand. And every single one of those fingers wouldn’t be needed, if you axed the hero support industry out of the picture. Many jobs may need some knowledge of quirks as an addition to what they did, such as doctors or criminal lawyers. But dedicated analysts? That was different. As a career, it was a solution in desperate search of a problem.
Ultimately, the only job Izuku would have been fit for in the end was Hisashi’s own.
And that did change some things.
On the one hand, it meant the teen wasn’t quite the genius he had first assumed him to be.
But on the other hand, it also meant he was already being trained. Already being honed and taught, possibly without even knowing it himself. And that did make Torino’s life easier.
How far along would the kid be, without his ghost of a father putting a hand on his shoulder and guiding him along?
The old man could imagine. Scribbles in a notebook, sharp but incoherent. Insightful but unrefined. Something useful in a lesser way, especially for the kid, but not anything to look twice at. The ramblings of a clever fanboy.
Torino had been a teacher for twenty years, so he knew how things worked. Talent was like a raw gem, crude and embedded in rock. It needed to be cut down and shaped, polished and cleaned up. It took WORK, years and years worth, to turn a knack or innate ability into something useful. Hard work versus genius was a false dichotomy; either you had both, or you were a loser. It was just a question of what kind of loser you were.
Torino and Toshinori hadn’t met Izuku at the beginning of his own youthful journey. He was already halfway down a road less traveled, destined for parts unknown.
Maybe it was better this way. Maybe it was better, that instead of a blazing raw genius they had found something quieter and more focused. Already being refined.
Torino wasn’t above hypocrisy. Talent versus work was a false dichotomy, but if he had to only pick one, he knew which he would take. A lazy, complacent genius was just dead-weight.
If old theories don’t hold water, throw them out and start over. Getting emotionally involved with your hypothesis was a rookie detective mistake.
Reassess. Reposition. Reanalyze.
So the question now was, if the kid was a 2.0 prototype to his father’s finished product, what would a Midoriya Hisashi with One For All look like? What would he use it to do?
Quite frankly, the old man didn’t have the faintest clue.
Somehow, Toshinori had picked one kid out of millions, and managed to trip over the only family in Japan with as many secrets and issues as their own eclectic, family-adjacent gaggle of ne'er-do-wells.
At least the kid knew how to take notes.
Torino snorted as he pulled the truck into the parking lot across from the police station. The old man stood by his personal assessment of the frosty businessman. Whatever the hell it was the WHA was using the elder Midoriya for, he had missed his calling. Anyone that good at being an infuriating bastard belonged in an interrogation room, cooking criminals with a tape recorder.
Either that, or he should have joined his wife’s law firm.
A man in Hisashi’s position, working on an international level as a liaison for heroes. An employee of an entity so large it was practically a government itself. Why would he sound so spiteful and resentful of governments? There was being jaded by the bureaucracy, Torino certainly was. But Hisashi’s attitude reeked of the sort of radical stance most often assumed by vigilantes and the more well-spoken villains.
Somehow, the man seemed to have zero faith in the world or the system… but absolute and unshakable faith in his shivering, stuttering little quirkless son.
Why? Why would that be? Hisashi almost made sense. Almost. But that one detail simply didn’t fit anywhere. Torino’s picture of the man was essentially complete, but this detail infuriatingly refused to slot in. And that meant his picture was wrong. That he had missed something.
The old man pulled the truck towards a parking space, and began backing into it. Next to him, the disguised teenager was almost vibrating with excitement.
What would a Midoriya Hisashi with One For All look like? And which was worse: Midoriya Inko, who didn’t make any sense at all… or her husband Midoriya Hisashi, who made perfect sense, except for that one puzzle piece that fit nowhere in his completed picture?
Torino supposed if he wanted answers, he would just have to wait and see.
Time always told, in the end.
On the other side of the world, there was a sound like a person falling over themselves and at least one trashcan, possibly more. Then with a bang, a disheveled and mildly deranged looking office worker slammed open a door, panting.
“CATHY! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!?"
Cathleen Bates was in the middle of her lunch break. Several stacks of paperwork and a very nice, thin-screened computer were each pushed off to the side of her desk, making room for a truly heroic looking sub sandwich that had been cut into eight smaller pieces. A very large sports bottle filled with water and ice sat next to it, covered in a sheen of chilled condensation.
The space was fairly normal as far as hero offices went. Only a giant seal of an American eagle on the wall behind the desk really set it apart. The walls were lined with photographs and various awards she had received in her career. There was a filing cabinet with locked drawers sitting in the corner, and a wooden coat stand that currently held her cape, her diamond-patterned domino mask, and both of her metallic eagle pauldrons. The most elaborate parts of the room were the ornate wooden desk, which looked like an antique, and the entire left-hand wall, which was made of glass and looked out over a spectacular skyscraper view of a sprawling American city. There was also a large glass door in the window wall leading out onto a balcony, which offered a more expedient way to enter and exit, provided you could fly.
“Wazzat?” the hulking blonde woman asked, her mouth full of sandwich.
“THIS!” the man said, shaking a stapled-together stack of documents about the same thickness as a magazine. “What the hell is this? Who did this?”
Cathy swallowed. “Oh, that’s the new analysis I commissioned. I told you about it earlier.”
Her manager, because that’s who the man was, looked like he was about to have an aneurysm.
“You told me you had met a fan!” the man half shouted, half screamed. “You said you were humoring a fanboy! You described him like he was some little kid or something!”
The amazonian woman blinked, then took a sip of water from her bottle. “I mean, yeah. That’s what happened.”
The man took several slow, deep breaths. They did not appear to calm him down. His wild birds-nest hair likely contributed to that. He looked like he had galloped up several flights of stairs in under a minute.
“Your entire support department is in an uproar,” he said, articulating each word like he was afraid mispronouncing one would cause an explosion. “You got the WHA involved, God knows how, and maybe even more amazingly, they somehow signed off on this in, what was it? A day? In a day, you got the WHA to facilitate a meeting.”
Cathy, who had not stopped eating, because her lunch break time was limited, swallowed what she was chewing before replying. “I mean, I didn’t really get the WHA involved. I got Hisashi Midoriya involved.”
What would it look like, if you forced open the mouth of an emotionally compromised and hysterical man, and pushed a live scorpion into it?
Probably something similar to what Star and Stripe’s manager looked like then. His eyes had bugged so far they appeared to be in danger of falling out.
“You-” he said, choking on the words as he tried to speak them. “You got Hisashi Midoriya involved? The team-up coordinator guy? Disaster response? The one who hangs out at the Pentagon?”
There was a long beat, where he looked like he was expecting Cathy to answer.
She picked up another slice of her sandwich and took a bite.
“WHY?” he finally hissed.
Cathy swallowed and grinned. “It’s a secret.”
The man put his free hand over his face, and dragged it down like he was hoping he could force the whole situation to vanish if he scrubbed hard enough.
“Your support crew pitched a fit when they saw this. When I left, McGwire was crying and the armor tech had been screaming ‘I told you so’ for about ten minutes.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty great, isn’t it? I like the idea about hiring an agency psychiatrist for quirks. And there were some great suggestions in there about experiments we could try with different Orders.”
The exhausted, deadpan expression that statement was met with could have chased the heat out of a boiling pot of water.
“You’re not experimenting with shit for shit from that writeup, not unless we rent out half the Sonoran Desert and bribe the government to look away from the explosion.”
Cathy chewed, and remained unmoved. Probably because she was not a boiling pot of water.
The man heaved a sigh. “Just- is this what that huge charge was for, a couple of days ago? You wired a huge sum of money overseas.”
Cathy looked as indignant as she could, with cheeks full of sub sandwich. “It was a business expense!”
“YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO DISCUSS EXPENSES WITH ME! I NEED TO BE TOLD, THAT IS LITERALLY MY JOB!”
“Buh I thid,” she protested around her sandwich, before swallowing. “I texted you about the kid. You said it was fine.”
Never before in his life had her manager prayed so hard for God to give him the strength to endure.
Or for a lightning bolt to strike him down. He’d take either.
“Are you saying it wasn’t worth the money?” Cathy asked, taking another sip of her drink. “I probably could have paid less for it, but I didn’t really want to, after seeing it. I thought it was pretty good. At least worth the standard rate.”
It looked pretty good, she said.
It was three times the content of the last two analyses of her quirk, and thorough enough that it made her manager wonder if maybe the first firm they employed hadn’t ripped them off. It had her support techs practically swinging from the light fixtures. They were yelling at each other about a plethora of pet theories he could barely understand, that they had allegedly held for years, and which others had apparently dismissed or mocked at some point in the past. These people were superstars of the industry, the best that money could buy on the North American continent. And they had been reduced to schoolyard antics by a magazine’s worth of speculation and what was, apparently, a few hours of hands-on requests where Cathy had obliged.
It was pretty good , she said.
She had texted him about an analysis being done, by someone she described as ‘practically a baby.’ He said sure, because what’s the harm in some publicity with kids? Then a consultancy fee bigger than his annual salary gets wired overseas, and a bomb made out of 56 pages of printer paper materializes out of thin air and gets dropped unceremoniously on the entire support staff.
It was. Pretty good. She said.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to burn the damn thing, frame it on the wall, or use it as Exhibit A in a lawsuit against the Big MT’s consultancy division. All of the above wasn’t wholly off the table, either.
He breathed in through his nose, in a long deep pull. And then slowly breathed out through his mouth.
“Can you, at least, tell me who this ‘Sage’ person is? I have an entire gaggle of professionals demanding answers from me, and I apparently know even less about it than they do. I had to double-check with accounting to be sure that the missing money hadn’t been embezzled or stolen somehow!”
There was a flick of movement his eyes couldn’t follow, and the huge manicured hand that wasn’t holding a sub sandwich suddenly held a crisp, clean business card held between it’s fingers.
Her manager never would understand how such a large and unsubtle woman managed to pick up slight-of-hand tricks like that. He wasn’t even sure where she had pulled the card from. Who taught her that? And why had she listened!?
He reached out across the desk to take the green card.
On the other side of the world from Japan, a butterfly flapped it’s wings.
And a soft and gentle wind, that was never intended by fate’s plan, began to blow across the Pacific. Swelling in strength as it went.
Slowly but surely… destiny was changing.
The man standing in the parking lot to meet Torino and Izuku had about as forgettable a face as it was possible to own. Even cheeks, dark eyes, and clean black hair cut short enough that the fedora in his hands would cover it all, if he was wearing it. His tan greatcoat matched his hat, and he wore simple white police gloves paired with black, practical shoes.
The driver-side door of Toshinori’s battered truck slammed shut. “Tsukauchi!” Torino called out.
The plain looking man turned and nodded at the old hero. “Gran Torino,” he said, his voice deep and even. “It’s been a long time.”
“This is Detective Tsukauchi Naomasa,” Torino said, jerking a thumb at the detective as Izuku scrambled out of the truck. “He’s an old friend of Toshinori’s.”
Izuku sketched a hasty bow. “H-Hello! I’m Sage. It’s nice to meet you!”
Tsukauchi returned the gesture, tucking his hat under his arm. “Likewise, young man. I’ve heard a bit about you already.”
“Tsukauchi is in a privileged position,” Torino explained. “He knows a lot of secrets. Including Toshinori’s two big ones. He’s part of our circle, kid, so you can trust him. If something goes wrong and you can’t contact any of us, go to Tsukauchi. You understand?”
Izuku swallowed, then nodded.
“Tsukauchi, you already know most of the details of why we’re here,” Torino said.
The detective nodded slowly, then narrowed his eyes slightly. “Mentioning Toshinori’s secrets in the open… what connection does this young man have?”
Torino cocked a slightly judgemental eyebrow. “This is the one Toshinori picked. The kid is his successor.”
Tsukauchi’s own dark eyes widened slightly, and he breathed out a huff of understanding. “I see. So that’s why you’re here, of all people. This makes a lot more sense, now.” He tilted his head slightly to the side. “Was this your doing, Gran Torino? Training with the police isn’t exactly the standard curriculum.”
“Kid’s brighter than a fistful of fresh change,” the older man grumped. “It would be a waste to dress him up like a carnival attraction and throw him head first into fires. That would only be half of his worth at best.”
The detective turned an appraising eye on the disguised teen, and Izuku swallowed nervously. But Tsukauchi smiled kindly.
“Don’t worry, young man. All Might has always worked closely with the police, and I’m… familiar, with how eccentric his secretary can be. If Gran Torino says it’s worth your time to be here, I’m inclined to believe him. We’re happy to have you on board.”
He held out a white-gloved hand, and Izuku only hesitated a moment before shaking it.
“Please take care of me!” he squeaked out, managing not to stutter. Tsukauchi smiled before nodding.
The three of them began walking towards the main building. Before they got too close, a white gloved hand fell down on Izuku’s shoulder. “For your information, I am the only person on the police force who knows all of your mentor’s secrets,” Tsukauchi murmured, just loud enough to be heard by the teen.
“A few people very high up the chain are aware of his injuries limiting how much time he can spend on active duty. But his transformation, and One For All, are unheard of outside of the few of us. I know you have a lot on your plate, young man, but don’t forget; Toshinori and All Might are two separate people. Toshinori is All Might’s secretary, and if anyone asks, it was Toshinori that sponsored you for this, with his boss’s blessing.”
Izuku nodded once before swallowing. Right, of course. He wasn’t the only person with secrets here.
“I’ll let you have him in a minute,” Torino said as they walked through the double doors into the lobby of the station. “But before I do, there’s some stuff I need to check. Where’s the armory in this place?”
“Through here,” Tsukauchi said, leading them down a hallway and through another set of doors.
Izuku wasn’t entirely sure what he had been expecting the inside of a police station to look like, but the first word that came to mind was… old. It was an old building, and dirty in the peculiar way that only an old building truly gets. It reminded him a great deal of Aldera Middle School; ancient concrete and rubber, covered over with tired wood and scuffed linoleum. It was like someone had converted a gymnasium or an old courthouse into a police office, instead of bothering to make a new building. A halfhearted effort had been made to cover up what had once been here, but now even the coverings were worn out and faded.
It was as though the entire police department was nothing more than an afterthought. A relic of a bygone era, clinging to existence as a mere formality.
Just like him. Just like all the quirkless.
Tsukauchi lead their group down a short flight of stairs to some location in the building’s basement, then through a final set of doors. The armory was small and old, but to it’s credit, the equipment looked clean, if well used. A heavy steel cage embedded in the corner contained crated stacks of ammunition, and a row of ballistic vests hung from metal hooks near the door. One near the end in particular looked almost cartoonish in how large it was compared to the rest, clearly intended for someone much larger than a standard human. There was a tiny gun range set up against the far wall, just a single lane that aimed into a dense breakwall. A stack of cheap paper targets were hung off to the side. There were benches, rows of lockers, and a drain set in the floor, though what that could have been used for, Izuku didn’t know.
More evidence, perhaps, that the building had originally once been something else entirely.
“Knife,” Torino enunciated clearly, without preamble.
There was a flicker of movement, and Izuku was holding a knife in his hand. Tsukauchi blinked in surprise. He had seen where the teenager had drawn it from, but only just.
The elderly hero nodded once. “Good. Tsukauchi, you got any fake guns in here? Rubber trainers? Stuff for demonstrations?”
The detective frowned before moving off to the side, towards the near wall. “I think we do? There should be a couple in a box for takedown practice- ah. Yes.”
The plain looking man pulled a ribbed plastic crate out of the corner, next to a rack of real guns, and pulled several brightly colored and clearly fake props out of it.
“Show me an Isosceles,” Gran said, and Izuku nodded. Without hesitation, he picked one of the rubber guns out of the detective’s hands, and took up a shooting stance with the gun held out in front of him, his arms forming a triangle with his chest.
Gran nodded shortly. “Now a bladed.” Izuku dutifully switched stances, shifting his body to the side to show a smaller profile, and keeping his knees loose. “Good. Now tell me, which hand do you hold the gun in for a rescue stance?”
“Your weaker hand, sir,” Izuku replied.
“Why?”
“So your dominant arm is free to carry or drag the other person to safety.”
The elderly man hummed. “I see. Knife.”
Once again, the knife flicked out, though Tsukauchi noticed the draw was slower, since the teen was already holding the gun in his dominant hand.
The knife came up smoothly, and Izuku held it sideways under the rubber pistol, using it to steady his aim but still keeping the blade ready to use.
Torino tilted his head to the side critically. Meanwhile, Tsukauchi felt tilted.
What on earth was the elderly pro teaching this kid?
“Alright, you pass,” Torino said after a moment. Izuku almost smiled brightly, but managed to strangle it back. His disguise wouldn’t work if he acted just like he normally did! Should he try and be cold and aloof? Or maybe strictly professional?
Torino plucked the rubber gun out of the muttering teen’s hand, and tossed it back to Tsukauchi, who returned it to the crate.
“Good. I only have one thing left I need, and that’s a picture. Your mother wanted one of you wearing your new badge, and I’m pretty sure my promise to get it for her is about half the reason she agreed to this in the first place. So let’s go do that, and then I’m done.”
The trio retraced their steps, and in just a few moments, Izuku was holding a plain manilla envelope with something small and heavy in it. Tsukauchi had retrieved it from somewhere in an office behind the reception desk.
“Go on, kid,” Torino encouraged. “You passed the test. Scored pretty good, too. It’s yours.”
With a thumb that he swore wasn’t shaking, Izuku pulled the flap open, and a nickel-plated badge slid out into his hand. It was smaller than the one Tsukauchi wore, less like a kite shield and more of an oval. Like Tsukauchi’s, the background bore the crinkled, five-pointed flower blossom that was the symbol of the Japanese police, but it lacked the upward-pointing wings that bordered the detective’s badge. It had a serial number, a brief slogan in both Latin and traditional Kanji about protection and service on the bottom edge, and the huge bold letters of TMPD at the top; the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
Careful not to prick himself on the heavy pin, the teen attached the badge to the front corner of his own shirt. It was heavy enough to feel, but not awkward.
There was a muted flash of light, and the artificial click of a digital camera going off as Torino held out his phone.
“Alright, that’s it for me,” the old man said. “I’m going back home to get some sleep. Take it easy for tonight, alright kid? Just shadow Tsukauchi and do what he tells you.”
Izuku numbly agreed, still somewhat distracted by his new badge, and the retired superhero vanished through the worn double doors at the front of the station.
Tsukauchi breathed out a sigh. “Come on then, young man. You have a desk next to mine upstairs in the offices. Let's go get you settled in.”
They had barely even started the evening, and this was already not what Tsukauchi had been expecting at all.
Gran Torino really knew how to throw people for a loop.
Apparently, ‘shadowing a detective’ meant filing paperwork.
Not that Izuku was complaining. He didn’t have to sign any of the forms, or even read the documents. All he had to do was match colors. Folders with red stickers go in the red sticker drawer, things with blue stickers go in the blue drawer. Everything was color coded, and whatever Tsukauchi handed him, he would put away in it’s proper place.
The room was a series of open desks with waist-high cubicle walls separating them, and the stack of paperwork they were sifting through had been piled up on a central table that was situated next to several whiteboards and a corkboard. The whiteboards had lists of addresses and random scribblings of information written in a dozen different hands, while the corkboard held a series of square polaroid pictures that had been printed off of some ancient handheld camera. Shots of crime scenes, pictures of locations, all arranged in loose clusters, stuck to the board on migratory flocks of thumbtacks.
This was clearly the aftermath of some sort of debriefing about a criminal case, but whatever it was, Tsukauchi hadn’t elaborated. The man had his own office off to the side, complete with a door and a nameplate. Given what Tsukauchi mentioned earlier about them sharing space, Izuku assumed he had his own smaller desk next to the detective’s inside that room. But once Tsukauchi saw the mess that had been left out on the tables, he had rolled his eyes, hung his trenchcoat on a nearby hat stand, and begun cleaning up.
It was a little boring, but a part of Izuku had expected that. He may have been a hero fanboy to the marrow of his bones, but he wasn’t an idiot. Superheroes had to do stuff like this, too. Obviously the police would as well.
As much as Kacchan might want to believe otherwise, heroics wasn’t just beating up the bad guys.
The door to the sprawling cubicle office opened, then shut with a loud click. The man who had just walked in was dressed like a detective as well, though unlike Tsukauchi, his heavy coat was unbuttoned, and his hat, if he had one, was nowhere to be seen.
The man was a mutant, and Izuku couldn’t help but stare for a moment, because quite frankly, he looked like a cartoon character.
He was a dog man, but certainly not a traditional one. Parts of his skin around his eyes and lips were a peach-hued tan, while the rest was an inky pitch black. It was hard to tell if he had fur or not. His mouth was long and flat, an elongated doggy snout, and sported a round black nose perched on the end like a fat black olive. He had huge expressive eyes with black irises that took up most of his face, which contributed to the cartoonish look, and a pair of long, thin, floppy dog ears that started from the top of his head and hung down past his shoulders. Currently, he had them slung back behind his head, almost treating them like combed back hair. A small triangular tuft stood up on the top of his head between the roots of his ears, but given it’s black-on-black nature, whether it was human hair or a patch of longer fur was anyone’s guess.
The man was tall and lanky, almost a head taller than Tsukauchi, but the cut of the uniform he wore under his coat showed that he was far from out of shape. He also wore the same clean white police gloves Tsukauchi did. Which didn’t look bad on either man, but given this new detective’s appearance… it certainly didn’t make him look less like a living cartoon character.
Quite frankly, he looked a little… goofy.
But there was nothing goofy about his presence, or the slightly sly, laid-back cunning that glinted in his big eyes. He had the air of someone who was very good at casual smiles and pretending to be your friend, but Izuku couldn’t quite get a read on his true intentions.
“Tsukauchi!” the new man called. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”
“So am I,” Tsukauchi replied, before brandishing a manilla folder of evidence. “But some people seem averse to cleaning up after themselves.”
The dog man whistled slightly in admonition. “Man, they’re just outright disrespecting us, now. The dayshift boys are getting nervy.”
Tsukauchi shrugged. “It is what it is. Given our new intern is here, I’m not as mad as I could be. He needed to see our filing system anyway. Sage, this is Detective Ryoken, part of our permanent night shift roster in Musutafu. Itachi, this is Sage, our new intern. He’s training to become a superhero, and is shadowing us to learn how the system works.”
“Ryoken Itachi, at your service,” the cartoonish dog-man said, sketching a brief half-bow. He had a laid-back charisma about him that reminded Izuku briefly of Sero. “Just call me Itachi, everyone does. Welcome to the skeleton crew, kiddo. We’re the night watch of the Musutafu ward, or at least what exists of it. I heard about you from Tsukachi here. You’ll be interning with us for a few months, right?”
“Yes sir!” Izuku said, doing his best to suppress his stutter and hesitation. A secret identity wouldn’t work if he couldn’t at least act the part.
The dog detective grinned, an action that showed a mouth full of flat, molar-like teeth. “That’s pretty wild. I didn’t know we could even have those, I had to look up the paperwork myself. Your mentor must be really old-school.”
He flicked his eyes to the other detective in the room. “Tsukauchi, I just came up here to see if anyone else was in the building. I’ve gotta head out. We’ve already got some calls.”
“I understand,” Tsukauchi replied. “I’ll get our new co-worker settled in, and then we’ll be leaving on patrol ourselves. He’ll be shadowing me.”
“Good luck, kiddo!” Itachi called out over his shoulder as he walked out the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”
Finishing the filing didn’t take very long, and in what felt like just a few minutes, Izuku was walking downstairs with Tsukauchi. Several doors later, and they were standing in a somewhat dingey underground garage, which was full of row upon row of police vehicles. They all sported the same lacquered black and white colors Izuku had expected to see, along with a golden print of the five-pointed Tokyo Metro Police flower on their hoods and doors.
“Sage, this is Tamakawa Sansa, my patrol partner when I work the night shift here. He’s a senior officer and a Corporal. Sansa, this is Sage.”
Sansa saluted crisply, the very picture of a perfect police officer, before relaxing slightly and shooting Izuku a wink and a grin.
For the second time that night, Izuku found himself face-to-face with a mutant in uniform, though Sansa looked far more normal compared to Itachi. If anyone with a quirk could ever be considered normal.
Sansa was a cat man. He appeared to have a normal human body, though Izuku couldn’t be completely certain of that. But above the neck, he had a head that was identical to a stereotypical Japanese cat. He had clean white fur and large, bright yellow eyes, along with a pair of short triangular cat ears sitting on top of his skull. Sansa had a darker grey stripe running down the middle of his head like a wedge between his ears, and several smaller tiger stripes of the same hue high up on his jaw, where his human ears would have been if he’d had them.
The man’s uniform looked completely average, a pale blue collared police shirt with long sleeves, darker blue slacks, and a black police vest with a radio and firearm slung across it. The only thing unusual about his clothing was that instead of sporting a tucked in tie, Sansa had a tiny golden cat bell on a collar that he wore over his shirt, tucked in exactly like a bow tie.
Izuku wasn’t certain if that was a fashion choice or some sort of inside joke, but he was too nervous to ask.
“Good evening,” Sansa said, a soft smile on his cat lips. He seemed more formal than Itachi, but it wasn’t stiff. He also felt a bit more genuine. Like he wasn’t putting on airs or some kind of front.
Izuku sketched a hasty bow. “Hello, sir! My name is Sage. Please take care of me!”
The cat man laughed. “It’s been a minute since I’ve seen someone as sincere as you. It feels like I’m back at the academy.” He turned to look at Tsukauchi. “Not that I’m complaining, because it let me finish my cup of noodles, but it isn’t like you to be late. What’s up?”
Tsukauchi walked across the parking lot towards a larger police van, and opened the driver-side door. Izuku and Sansa dutifully piled in after him, with Sansa choosing to sit in the back row of seats with the teen instead of up front like Izuku had been expecting. It was a surprisingly thoughtful gesture.
“The day shift decided to not clean up after themselves,” Tsukauchi explained, as he fished a set of keys out of his coat and started up the van. “They were reviewing the serial killer case by the looks of it, the one with all the kidnappings. But no one bothered to put anything away when they left.”
Sansa made a sound halfway between a ‘tch’ and a hiss. “That’s rude, even by their standards.”
“And against protocol,” Tsukauchi replied lightly, as he maneuvered the van out of it’s parking space.
“Detective Itachi said the same thing,” Izuku supplied without thinking, then choked as he realized he probably shouldn’t have said that.
Sansa snorted, a decidedly un-catlike sound. “So you met Itachi? I didn’t know he was in tonight. He’s quite the character. Probably why he’s stuck on the dead shift with us.”
“He seemed friendly,” Izuku admitted softly. “But I’m not sure how much of it was real.” He flushed slightly, hearing himself and suddenly realizing how insulting that could be.
But Sansa laughed. “Ha! So you noticed, huh? Not bad. Itachi is our interrogations specialist, he gets people to talk. He’s almost always the ‘good’ cop, in the good cop bad cop routine. He’s got that slyness in him, a real smooth operator.”
“Itachi has a lot on his plate,” Tsukauchi commented from up front. “Most people don’t want the night shift position. I doubt he’s here voluntarily. It’s probably true that a lot of his friendliness is fake, but as long as he does his job, I don’t have a problem with it.”
“Why, um. Why wouldn’t someone want this shift?” Izuku asked. Several times now, the people around him had alluded to their station and shift being something of a joke.
“Because we’re the bottom of the barrel, and everyone knows it,” Sansa replied. “Night shifts are shunned, because police who assist with public takedowns of villains get bonus pay. Those don’t usually happen at night. It’s also bad timing in general, because it’s the night shift. Work enough of those, and the rest of your life evaporates. And the Musutafu police have been understaffed for years, because UA is here. We’re the first budget to be cut, and the last in line to be refitted or updated.”
“The Tokyo Metropolitan office has a lot on their plate,” Tsukauchi noted. “They’re doing the best that they can with what they have.”
“They ditched us!” Sansa replied cheerfully, not seeming the least bit put-out about it. “We’re a dump!”
“It’s not that bad,” Tsukauchi shot back, arguing for the sake of their teenage audience. “The whole precinct gets training, education credits, priority healthcare, and a pension. There are scholarship programs available for anyone who wants them.”
“Our secretary uses a rotary phone,” Sansa stage-whispered to Izuku, loud enough that Tsukauchi definitely still heard it. “If we fail our next annual review, we’ll need to call for backup using smoke signals.” The teen struggled to choke back a laugh.
The detective driving the police van sighed, and the vehicle slowed to a stop as they came up on a red light. “It’s not ideal, and yes, our precinct is last in line for most things. But again, the Tokyo office has a lot on their plate. More people live in this city than in some smaller countries. Tokyo has one of the highest densities of hero agencies in the world. A lot of crime happens here, and even with an army of superheroes, there’s only so much we can do. There’s a reason the Tokyo police are considered a separate organization from the rest of Japanese law enforcement. We’re nearly half the national enforcement budget by ourselves.”
Tsukauchi leaned over and flipped the radio of the police scanner on, creating a distant murmur of background static and quiet voices. The light turned green, and Tsukauchi began driving again.
“Defending the law as an institution has always been an uphill fight, young man,” the detective continued. “Hero, officer, either way it’s the same. If you want to join the profession, you need to understand that we rarely get to choose our cases, and we don’t often work in ideal conditions either. Sometimes a beat-up patrol car and a list of suspects to visit is all we have. You need to be able to make that work. You have to. Not everyone is cut out for it.”
“We’d sugarcoat it for you, but the sugar budget was cut last year!” Sansa replied cheerfully. Once again, the teen choked back a laugh.
“ Corporal Sansa is exaggerating the issue,” Tsukauchi replied tersely.
“Rotary phone!” the cat man chanted in a sing-song voice.
“-but setting his attempts at black comedy aside, the sentiment remains true. A lot of people try to get into heroics because they’re chasing fame and fortune. Nearly all of those people wash out.”
“Only nearly isn’t nearly enough,” Sansa muttered darkly. The cat man clearly carried a grudge against glory seekers.
“I-I just want to help people!” Izuku insists, cursing himself mentally as he stuttered. “I don’t really care about being famous or anything, honest!”
Sansa laughed and lightly punched the teen in the shoulder. “Ha! Look at this boyscout! He’s so clean and shiny! I’ll need to wear sunglasses on the night patrol at this rate!”
Then the amused grin faded to something softer and less joking. “That’s good though, kid. Good on you. Don’t lose that.”
“I would agree,” Tsukauchi commented from up front. “That’s a rare sentiment to have. Do your best to hold on to that ideal, Sage. The world needs more good officers. And good heroes.”
“That’s kind of expected though, isn’t it?” Sansa asked. “Didn’t you say the kid’s been promoted up by the Might Agency? That’s wild. Surely anyone All Might would sign off on has to be some kind of super boyscout.”
Izuku opened his mouth to comment, but Tsukauchi spoke first. “Sage met All Might by coincidence. I can’t share the details, because it would compromise his identity, but the young man impressed him enough that he passed on his information to his secretary, with a recommendation for further training.”
“Right, Toshinori, your drinking buddy.”
Tsukauchi sighed. “Don’t give the young man any strange ideas, Sansa. Toshinori doesn’t drink, he was injured years ago by a villain and required extensive surgery on his liver. We meet every weekend at a diner to share a meal and talk.”
“About having to babysit All Might, I’d imagine,” Sansa said, raising his arms up and folding his gloved hands behind his head. “Couldn’t be me, I don’t have a quirk that interests the fat cats upstairs.”
Sansa paused for a moment, then tilted his head slightly to the side in a decidedly catlike gesture. The movement caused the bell on his neck to jingle softly.
“What villain was dumb enough to attack All Might’s secretary?”
“One that’s no longer around to talk about it,” Tsukauchi said neutrally.
Sansa laughed again. “Oh I’ll bet! Endeavor cooked the last guy who tried to hunt his sidekicks! Probably the reason why that freak Stain hasn’t targeted anyone from his agency yet. I’ll bet our Number 1 can be real scary when he wants to be!”
The sass that aggravated Bakugo so much slipped out before Izuku could stop it. “I saw him get pretty angry when I first met him. It was like two people were fighting that villain, not just one.”
Tsukauchi let out an extremely suspicious-sounding cough, while Sansa barked out a laugh. “With as fast as he can go? I believe it! All Might’s a one-man army when he wants to be!”
Deciding not to linger on his momentary slip, Izuku rushed to ask a question.
“What, um. What is your quirk, Mr. Tsukauchi? Detective? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oooh!” Sansa said, grinning. “Are you gonna tell him? Come on! Do it!”
Tsukauchi sighed. “First of all, you can just call me Tsukauchi, young man. I don’t mind.”
He paused. “And secondly, no. My quirk isn’t exactly a secret, but it is… strategically important.”
“He’s got high level government clearances and everything!” Sansa loudly stage whispered. “A special use quirk license that legalizes his superpower. He gets to sit in on all kinds of important meetings us plebs never even get to go near! Wherever the big fish gather, our Tsukauchi is there in the wings!”
“It’s not as important a job as the Corporal makes it out to be,” the detective replied stiffly. “I have special circumstances because of my quirk, but they certainly could manage their affairs without me. I’m simply a layer of insurance.”
Sansa scoffed. “Yeah, sure. Unimportant insurance meets with All Might’s secretary every Saturday for coffee and waffles.”
Of course, no matter what disguise he wore or how hard he tried to change his habits and behaviors to fit a new persona, Izuku would always be Izuku.
He leaned forwards slightly in his seat, all attempts at pretending to be ‘aloof and professional Sage’ abandoned.
Ironically, it made him a lot less like his normal timid self, and thus served fairly well as a disguise on it’s own.
“But what is it, though?” He insisted. “You were given a special use license? That’s so rare! Those aren’t even given out to people with teleportation abilities! At least not normally. Can’t you tell me something? At least a hint?”
Sansa cackled. “Yeah detective! Can’t you give the kid a hint? How could you be so cruel?”
A set of white gloved fingers drummed against the steering wheel of the police van.
“... it’s not an ability that is suitable for work as a pro hero,” Tsukauchi finally said. “I think even an unconventional hero with unusual skills would struggle to find steady work with my ability.”
Sansa slumped his head back in exaggerated disbelief against his shoulders, his mouth open. “Really? That’s all you’ll give him? Lame! Come on! Nobody’s guessing anything with that!”
“Do you already know what it is?” Izuku asked the cat man.
Sansa blew air out from between his lips dismissively. “Psh, me? Of course I know. I’ve worked with him too long not to. But that’s not the point! I’m not saying anything. Come on, play the guessing game with the kid! We’re supposed to teach him things, aren’t we? This is deductive reasoning! That’s important for police work! Following a trail, eliminating the impossible in search of the implausible truth, all that jazz. Give him some more clues!”
Tsukauchi heaved a longsuffering sigh.
“I also have an older sister, she was born a few years before I was. She lives in America right now, and is married to one of their top pro heroes. She also has a special use license, issued to her by the Department of Homeland Heroics. Her quirk is called Polygraph. It makes her a living lie detector, and an infinitely more accurate one than the machines her power is named after. If she focuses her attention on you, and you tell a lie, she’ll know. That’s why they gave her the exemption. Her ability is simply too useful for interrogating criminals. She’s been swamped with requests for pretty much her entire life.”
Sasa held out both of his hands in an exaggerated fashion in front of him. “Finally! Something to work with!”
But Izuku wasn’t paying attention to the antics of Tsukauchi’s feline partner, because he was already deep in thought. Cataloguing what he’d been told and making a list of questions.
“Are your parents the same for both of you?” Izuku asked.
His face wasn’t visible, but Tsukauchi’s head nodded approvingly from up front. “That’s a good question. Yes, they are. Both of our quirks come from the same family of superpowers.”
Izuku absently tapped a finger against the seatbelt across his waist.
“...Do you have the same quirk she does? Or a variation of it, with minor details changed?”
There was a brief pause.
“No,” Tsukauchi answered after a moment. “Our quirks have some similarities, but I only say that because I’m very familiar with what they both are. I don’t believe an outside observer would call them a variation of each other.”
Izuku hummed.
“What were your parent’s quirks? If I’m allowed to ask, I mean.”
“It is a good question, and something you’d need to ask if this was a real case, so I’ll allow it. My mother was an empath who could sense other people’s emotions in a limited field around her. My father’s quirk was a form of astral projection, he could go for a ‘walk’ outside of his body. That also had a range limit.”
“Do you have one of your parent’s quirks? Are you an astral projector or an empath?”
“A fair guess, but no. My quirk is a combination of my parent’s quirks, just like my sister.”
Izuku frowned in consternation.
“I… have some ideas,” he admitted slowly. “But you said it wasn’t a quirk that was suitable for hero work. You really mean that, right?”
Tsukauchi nodded. “A good thing to consider. For the sake of this test interrogation? Yes. I’m telling the truth. I am not underselling my quirk; it is genuinely not suited for being a hero at all.”
“I don’t know, there are some pros out there with pretty lame duck powers,” Sansa commented. “If somebody can make glowing soap bubbles into a thing, I bet we could put a cape on you.”
“Please don’t confuse the intern,” the detective deadpanned. “No, Sage, my power would not be useful to a professional superhero. It does not give me strength, or enhance me in any way. It does not allow me to do anything a normal human wouldn’t be able to do. For all practical purposes, I’m quirkless.”
“Harsh,” Sansa noted.
“So it’s something niche,” the teen muttered. “Not anything a pro hero would want, not even a weaker one. But it’s still somehow useful enough that you’re seen as insurance? You got an exemption license for it. They really, really don’t want to hand those out. Even people with crazy useful powers struggle to get them, the only group that’s really a shoe-in for it is healing quirks.”
He tilted his head slightly, eyes distant. “Astral projection and empathy… did they combine to make some kind of mental healing quirk? Can you heal psychological trauma?”
“Another good guess, given what you know about the exemption process. But no.”
“Super Therapy would be a pretty weird power for a detective,” Sansa commented. “I’m also not sure that would have the ‘oompf’ factor to warrant one of those fancy licenses.”
Izuku nodded absently, half listening and not really disagreeing.
Astral projection and empathy. Astral projection and empathy.
“I… don’t know,” the disguised teen admitted after a long moment. “You’ve given me some good information, but I feel like I’m missing what I need. There’s a lot of things it could be, but there’s contradictory criteria, isn’t there? It’s something useful enough you were exempted, but not anything a superhero would ever want or could use.”
“Do you have a guess?” Tsukauchi encouraged. “Even if it’s a long shot or something strange. There’s no punishment for getting it wrong.”
Izuku slowly blew out a breath. “I mean, yes? But I know it’s wrong. It has to be. Astral projection, I don’t know much about, but it’s centered around your mind leaving your body and interacting with the world around you, right? And empathy is something that exists in the same realm, it’s not a physical thing. It’s mental, emotional. You’re reading the people around you. Your sister’s power makes sense, she’s reading something in the people near her, I’m almost certain that’s how her Polygraph quirk works. I’d love to know if she can detect a lie if the person believes it to be true. Given your mother’s quirk I’m betting she can’t-”
“You would be correct, she cannot,” Tsukauchi interjected. “My sister’s quirk is extremely powerful, but it can be fooled. However, that’s only if a person’s conscious and subconscious are both changed. She was tested extensively by quirk counselors in both America and Australia; for a person to lie to her, even their own subconscious memories need to be falsified. If any part of you knows that you’re lying, even your dormant mind and subconscious memories, you’ll trip her quirk. But if you can change or mask that, you can trick her power.”
“That’s so cool,” Izuku whispered. He paused for a moment, distracted, then shook his head, bringing himself back to the present.
“Sorry, anyway. My only guess would be that you’re a mind reader of some sort. It would fit with almost everything you’ve said. Mind reading could definitely evolve out of astral projection and empathy, and depending on how it worked, I could see why important people might want you hanging around as insurance. If it’s a field that passively detects, like both of your parent’s quirks, that would make you a living failsafe for danger and hostile intent.”
Sansa was looking at the teen with a neutral expression, his cat face giving away nothing. Tsukauchi’s own face couldn’t be seen from the back seat.
“But?” The detective driving the vehicle asked.
“But that can’t be correct,” Izuku continued. “Because a mind reader like that would make an amazing hero. It fits everything, except that criteria. So I have to be wrong.”
Izuku swallowed slightly. “No one knows what Sir Nighteye’s quirk is, he has an Underground license. But the two best guesses I’ve seen are either situational mind reading or some kind of precognition. I agree with the internet on that, I’m certain it’s one of the two. If you had a mind reading quirk that works like your parent’s quirks, you’d be at least as strong as Sir Nighteye. And you would know that. He’s based out of here, in Musutafu! Even if you’ve never worked with him, you would have heard of him! Someone with a quirk like that could absolutely be a hero!”
Slowly, Tsukauchi nodded.
“I agree,” he said simply. “Someone with a quirk like that certainly could have become an excellent hero.” There was another brief pause, as though Tsukauchi was considering his words carefully. “And you would be correct in saying that is not my quirk.”
Unseen by either in the back, Tsukauchi’s lips twitched upwards in a wry smile. “However, I certainly think you’re on the right track. Those were some very good guesses. I can see why your mentors sent you to us. And seeing how we’re both familiar with a certain pushy old man, how about this? Consider figuring out what my quirk is to be a freeform homework assignment.”
Sansa chuffed in laughter. Tsukauchi held up a finger.
“The rules are, you can’t ask anyone who already knows, you need to observe things and look up information yourself. A few people around the precinct know what my quirk is, including Toshinori, so you’re on the honor system for that. Can I trust you to follow those guidelines?”
Izuku drew a short breath, then nodded eagerly. “Yes, sir! I’ll do my best, detective!”
The dark-haired man driving the van chuckled. “I’m sure you will. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.”
There was a short pause. The van slowed as it pulled up to a train crossing, the striped metal arms of the safety bars slowly lowering themselves down as a train approached.
“Think you could give the kid one more hint for the road?” Sansa asked. “I’m sure I couldn’t guess it with what you’ve said so far.”
Tsukauchi hummed. Then smiled.
“Actually, yes. I think I can give you one more hint. It’s a big one, though, so you don’t get any more after this. Are you ready?”
“Yes!” the teen said eagerly, leaning forwards in his seat.
“Everyone who is issued an exemption license is given a code name in the police database. It helps them track and identify the few people who are allowed to use their quirks in public. My code name and the name of my quirk are both the same: True Man.”
‘True Man,’ Izuku mouthed silently to himself, his eyes a million miles away. “So… it has something to do with truth and lies too? Just like your sister’s?”
“I don’t know,” Tsukauchi said noncommittally. “Does it?”
Izuku bit the side of his lip slightly.
Useful enough to warrant an exemption license. Weak enough, or perhaps niche enough, that it wouldn’t help a pro hero. Not a variation of his mother’s, his father’s, or his sister’s quirks. And it was called True Man?
“...surely it’s not that you yourself can’t tell lies, right?”
“The sky is green, and this van is made of cheese,” the detective replied stoically.
Sansa coughed violently before dissolving into laughter.
The cat man patted the teen’s shoulder reassuringly, even as he still chuckled. “Sorry, sorry kid. Not laughing at you. That worrywart just doesn’t make jokes very often, is all. That caught me off guard.”
Izuku smiled shakily back. “No, it’s fine. I get it. I didn’t think that would be right, either. I mean, if he couldn’t tell lies, I guess that would be useful in it’s own way, right? You could fish for information by process of elimination, confirming negatives. But I don’t know how that would even work. What kind of quirk could do that?”
“I am allowed to lie, and people can lie in my presence as well,” Tsukauchi said, a note of amusement in his own voice. “Don’t worry young man, there’s no rush. I don’t need an answer tonight, or anytime soon. Take your time with figuring this out. You don’t have everything you need, and I-”
The police radio crackled, it’s message heard clearly throughout the van.
‘All units be advised, we have a five-oh-five and a two-one-four at district 12, block 8, Cherry Fields apartment complex. I repeat, we have a five-oh-five and two-one-four at the Cherry Field’s apartment complex. All units please respond.’
Tsukauchi reached over and pushed a button on the radio. “This is Detective Tsukauchi, we’re on our way.”
“It’s him again,” Sansa said. All the mirth and levity was gone from his voice. His face was stoic and serious.
“We don’t know that yet, but given the timing, it seems likely,” Tsukauchi replied, reaching up to the ceiling and flipping a switch. A set of flashing lights on top of the van turned on, and Tsukauchi began accelerating and ignoring stop signs as the van’s siren wailed.
“What was that?” Izuku asked quietly, doing his best to be brave and professional. “What do those numbers mean?”
It was the cat-man who answered, and he looked grim. “Five-oh-five is the code for a kidnapping. Two-one-four is for murder or suspected murder. It’s him. The serial killer.”
“Who, Stain?” Izuku asked nervously, namedropping the infamous villain who hunted ‘unworthy’ heroes.
“No,” Tsukauchi replied grimly, as his hands gripped the wheel.
"The other one.”
It was fully night out when the squad van pulled up to the scene. It was a small apartment building, only two stories tall, and shaped like a horseshoe with a courtyard in the middle. Several trees and some flower beds were scattered around the courtyard, along with a set of benches and a metal table. A wind chime was hung somewhere nearby, unseen but still heard, and in the alley next to them, steam poured from the holes in a heavy manhole cover.
They weren’t the first responders on the scene. Several other police cars were present, their sirens off but the lights still flashing. The flickering pattern of artificial illumination and the slow, muted sound of the chimes on the night wind felt deeply eerie to Izuku.
The teen and his two minders piled out. “Stay close to me,” Tsukauchi instructed, “And don’t wander off. If this is who I think it is, they’re already long gone, but your safety is my responsibility, and I take that seriously. Do you have your sidearm?”
Izuku absently patted his side to check, and nodded.
“Good,” Tsukauchi said. “Do not draw it unless I tell you to, or unless someone attacks you. Stay close to me, and just observe.”
The plain looking detective turned to his patrol partner. “Sansa, you know what to do.”
The cat man snapped a clean, professional salute. “Yes sir!” He drew his own pistol out briefly and checked it before returning it to it’s holster. Then he walked off with purpose, heading around the back of the building towards the far alley.
“Can- can I ask questions?” Izuku whispered quietly.
Tsukauchi paused for a moment, considering. Then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “You’re here to learn, so I’ll teach you. But quietly, and not in front of the civilians.”
The detective pointed after where Sansa had gone. “First lesson; using your people properly. We don’t have a traditional dog mutant on roster right now; I imagine dispatch is trying to get a hold of somebody. At this time of night, it won’t be easy. But until we can get someone here who might be able to track a scent, Sansa is our best bet. That’s why he’s checking the perimeter now, to see if he can find anything before the trail gets too cold.”
Izuku nodded slowly, understanding gleaming brightly in his eyes.
Then Tsukauchi tugged his gloves more firmly onto his fingers, doffed his detective hat, and walked towards the apartment. The open door of the lobby was distantly visible, with blurred movement and faint sounds within. The flashing lights of the police cruisers strobed mutely, and the chimes crooned an eerie tune. The bottom edges of Tsukauchi’s greatcoat dragged through the steam hanging low on the street, sending eddies and whorls of it spinning off into the darkness.
And Sage the police intern followed after him, a quiet and inquisitive shadow.
Crime scenes, Izuku realized, were not peaceful places. They were not neat or organized, like some movies and television shows depicted. There was also a lot more noise than he was expecting.
Though considering someone’s spouse had apparently been spirited away from standing right next to them, perhaps the wailing sobs in the other room were to be expected.
For the third time that night, Izuku found himself face-to-face with a heteromorph in police uniform.
Of the three of them, this officer was easily the farthest along the complex side of the ‘complex mutant’ scale. And considering Itachi had looked like an animated drawing given life, that was saying something.
He wore a greatcoat similar to Tsukauchi’s and Itachi’s, though his had a slightly different badge on the front. The greatcoat was also very nearly the only clothes he was wearing.
Itachi looked like a cartoon mascot had stepped out of a television screen. This detective looked like a fully grown saltwater crocodile had stood up one day, slid on a pair of pants, and decided to make the rest of the world regret forcing it to learn how to speak and use opposable thumbs.
He looked like he would be at least a head taller than All Might, but it was hard to tell, since he was hunched in over himself, scribbling away on an oversized notepad with a pencil thick enough it could be used to stake a vampire in a pinch. He was at least twice as wide as the blonde superhero, and Izuku could only guess at how heavy he was. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tent-sized coat and his pants were the only clothes he wore. Izuku doubted the police department had a budget that could keep up with the wear and tear his claws would put gloves and shoes through, and the teen knew from conversations online that people with heavy scales and spines were usually more comfortable going shirtless. A long, bulky tail, which probably weighed twice as much as Izuku himself did, emerged from the bottom of the coat, and rested on the clean carpeted floor of the hallway. The double row of spines going down the back of it looked tough enough to crush concrete.
Itachi was certainly a complex mutant, but he still looked, if not human, then at least human adjacent. There was almost nothing human at all about this detective. Only his eyes, currently angrily squinting, gave him away as something other than an animal. He had longer back limbs, to help facilitate a bipedal stance, and longer arms as well, giving him a build more akin to that of a chimpanzee or gorilla. All four of his limbs were thicker and more heavily muscled than a crocodile's would ever be. But quite frankly, that didn’t make him look half crocodile, half human. It just made him look prehistoric.
There was a dinosaur in the apartment complex, taking notes. Izuku had seen stranger things.
The crocodile man turned to gaze at the two newcomers, and a guttural growl could be heard, like a diesel engine turning over before starting up.
“What the fuck is this, Tsukauchi?” the hulking officer asked in a deep, raspy voice. “Is it bring your kid to work day, or something? Get that brat out of here.”
Tsukauchi remained nonplussed at the open hostility and contempt dripping from the words of the other man.
“No, Detective. This is our new intern, Sage. He’ll be working with us at the precinct from now on. Sage, this is our lead criminal investigator, Detective Hagahaeru Yamori.”
“We don’t have interns, Tsukauchi,” Hagahaeru snarled. “And if we did, we sure as fuck woudn’t be bringing them around crime scenes . Not when there’s a mountain of paperwork back at the office that needs filing. Get him out of here.”
“We do now,” Tsukauchi replied blandly. “And no. He is here to learn, not pour coffee.”
That guttural growl shifted to something deeper, an angry reptilian thrum. Izuku felt the vibration inside his chest. He wouldn’t have been surprised if made ripples in the puddles outside.
“This is serious business. Not a playground for kids. Get him out of here, or I’ll escort him out myself.”
Tsukauchi raised an eyebrow. His utterly unbothered expression was the only reason Izuku wasn’t openly panicking right now.
He was still sort of panicking.
“The laws for police interns have been on the books since before either of us were born, Detective,” Tsukauchi replied. The tone of his voice was so even and bland, it was like he was participating in a completely different conversation that had nothing to do with this one. “You agreed to abide by them when you accepted your promotion. And I’m certain you’ll recognize the signature on Sage’s internship forms, since it is the same signature on your own paperwork as well. The district manager is very invested in cultivating the new generation of law enforcement. A generation that you are both a part of.”
Scaly lips peeled back to reveal conical teeth the size of a grown man’s fingers. It was an unfriendly smile that wouldn’t lose to anything on display at a natural history museum.
“Politics,” Hagahaeru spat, the contempt in his voice palpable. “That’s all you are, Tsukauchi, and that’s all this is, too. Someone is dead, and you’re playing games.”
Slowly, a white gloved hand came down on Izuku’s shoulder, and held it reassuringly. “Yes, someone is very likely dead,” Tsukauchi agreed evenly. “Which makes this a particularly strange moment for you to decide to start posturing.”
The white glove gave a subtle, reassuring squeeze. “I would suggest that you don’t.”
There was a long, deeply uncomfortable pause, while Hagahaeru and Tsukauchi stared each other down. One seething with a cold fury, the other as placid and still as a mountain pond.
“Do whatever the fuck you want,” Hagahaeru finally said. “But keep him out of my crime scene. I mean it. If he contaminates any evidence, I’ll make certain it comes back to you.”
“I was not planning on letting him inside of it,” Tsukauchi replied evenly. “But it is nice to hear that you approve of my plan.”
That bassy, guttural growl thrummed like someone had strummed a chord on the strings of a primordial musical instrument. Hagahaeru narrowed his eyes.
Tsukauchi ignored him completely, and began to walk away, deeper into the apartment complex and towards the crime scene.
“I’m not going to teach your little pet shit, Tsukauchi,” Hagahaeru said as they left. He didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard, as it was so deep it felt like it could carry through walls.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Tsukauchi said evenly, not bothering to raise his own. There was a pause.
“But I would expect you to remember that politics is the only reason that you have a job to begin with, Detective.”
If Hagahaeru responded, it wasn’t audible to them. Tsukauchi had rounded the corner and was headed towards a flight of stairs, still pulling Izuku along by the shoulder.
Izuku’s hands were shaking slightly, but before he could speak, Tsukauchi had turned around to face him in the stairwell, and knelt down in front of the teen.
“Are you okay?” the detective asked.
Izuku swallowed, steeling his nerves. “I- yes. Yes sir. I’m fine.”
There was worry, concern, and more than a little disbelief in Tsukauchi’s dark eyes.
He gave another firm squeeze of the teen’s shoulder. “You deserve to be here, Sage. I want you to know that. Even if you’re planning on being a superhero later. You’re not a bother. Not to me.”
Izuku opened his mouth, then closed it again. He didn’t know what to say.
“I, ah. T-Thank you. Detective Tsukauchi. Sir.”
The older man smiled gently. “Just Tsukauchi is fine.”
He paused for a moment, like he was debating what to say. “I could make excuses for Hagahaeru, and to be kind, I probably should. He hasn’t had it easy.”
There was another, shorter pause. “But, to be honest, at least half of his problems are his own fault. And I don’t particularly feel like defending him tonight.”
Izuku fought to stifle a laugh.
Tsukauchi smiled at that before standing up again. He resumed walking up the stairs to the second floor, and Izuku dutifully scrambled after him.
They reached the second floor, and the long hallway stretched out in both directions. It wasn’t hard to guess where the crime scene was, since there were several other officers standing next to one of the doors, as well as a line of yellow police tape stretched across the doorframe at shoulder height.
Tsukauchi began walking towards it, talking as he went.
“As I said to Hagahaeru, I’m not planning on letting you into the crime scene. It’s not a good idea for a lot of reasons. His concerns were valid, even if his manners left something to be desired. But you can stand there and watch me take some witness accounts. It will be good for you to see the process first-hand, and hopefully-”
Whatever Tsukauchi had been about to say was cut off by the return of Sansa, who walked up to them with urgency in his step. He looked grim.
“Bad news, sir.”
"It’s him?”
Sansa’s scowl said it all. “My sense of smell isn’t as good as a dog’s, but it didn’t have to be. Even a normal person would have been able to follow the path they took out of here. Rotten meat, ammonia, and wet copper the whole way. Whoever Metro sends in after us will say the same.”
Tsukauchi’s lips twisted, and his eyes darkened. He shot a glance at Izuku, then gestured to Sansa before whispering in the cat-man’s ear.
Sansa nodded once, then put his own gloved hand on the teen’s shoulder and began steering him away, while Tsukauchi stepped back towards the room with the crime scene.
The cat man leaned over slightly towards Izuku while they walked, and lowered his voice. “Tsukauchi is going to start helping collect evidence and wrap up the crime scene, and he wanted me to explain to you what’s going on. Come over here, out of the way, and let’s talk.”
They stopped in a dead end alcove of the second floor hallway, which housed an ice machine, a fuse box, and a window with a beautiful view of the concrete wall directly opposite their building. The feline police officer peeked back down the hall, before clearing his throat.
“Right. So. I’m, uh. Not very good, at the whole mentor thing. So ask your questions, I guess?”
Izuku swallowed. For once in his life, he wasn’t entirely sure what to ask.
“Is- is someone dead? Is there a dead body in there?”
Sansa blew a breath out of his nose, and rubbed the back of his head with a gloved hand.
“Right, I guess that’s as good a place to start as any. No, or at least, not technically. We don’t know.”
Izuku blinked in surprise. “You don’t know?”
Sansa’s huge yellow cat eyes flicked to the side nervously, then centered back on the teen. “No. The thing is, these cases started about six months ago. We think. It’s hard to tell, we can’t be certain. But people in a large area around this part of Tokyo just started… disappearing. And I don’t mean like they got lost or something. I mean, vanished into thin air disappearing. Like you’re talking to somebody, you turn around to do something like wash your hands, or go into another room, and then ten seconds later, you look back and they’re… gone.”
Izuku felt a chill crawl down his spine. “Just… just gone?” He whispered. “Just like that?”
The cat headed man nodded, the bell on his neck jingling slightly. “Just like that.”
“So. So that’s kidnapping, then. But…”
“But why the murder?” Sansa asked, finishing Izuku’s sentence. The teen nodded hesitantly.
“Because none of them have ever been recovered,” the older man elaborated. “There’s no ransom notes, no demands. No calling cards or marks. Nobody’s tried to claim credit. With kidnappings, the kidnapper is always after something. There’s something they want. But with these? Nothing.”
Izuku swallowed. “So you think they’re dead,” he said. It wasn’t phrased as a question.
“That’s the current theory. There’s no hard and fast rules, but generally speaking, if someone’s been missing for long enough, especially if they were kidnapped, they’re just written off. We stop looking for a living person, and start looking for remains. It’s a bit grim, but that’s the way it goes. It’s part of the job,” Sansa said.
“But the problem is, we don’t even think they’re kidnappings anymore. Just murders. Someone is appearing out of nowhere, obviously using some kind of quirk, and just… nabbing people. Dragging them off somewhere, presumably to kill them. Because it has to be murder. What kind of kidnapper abducts so many people, but doesn’t have a single demand? They wouldn’t, right? So everyone on the case believes it’s murder, now.”
“Is- is there a pattern?” Izuku asked. “A theme to the people who get taken?”
Sansa let out a short, bitter laugh. It sounded very different from his casual, friendly laughter earlier in the van.
“No,” he said. “Not that we know of. There are guys way above my pay grade who have been running themselves ragged trying to figure out if there’s some sort of connection. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing. The taken people don’t have similar quirks, aren’t similar ages. Male or female, young or old, it seems random. They’re not all taken from the same places, and there doesn’t seem to be an area or primary location they all went to before vanishing.”
He cleared his throat quietly, which made a sound like a raspy purr. “Some of the boys at the top were convinced it was politically or ideologically motivated, but that fell through, too. No crimes of hatred or revenge here, at least not as far as we can tell.”
Izuku frowned, a chill settling in his stomach. “I, ah. I don’t know much about serial killers,” the teen admitted. “I’m, well. I’m more of a hero watcher.”
Sansa smirked slightly, in spite of the dire mood. The teen continued.
“But I do know that there’s not supposed to be any such thing as a truly random killer, right? At least that’s what I’ve heard.”
Sansa tilted his head back and forth slightly, like he was weighing the words. “Kind of,” he replied. “I’m not the best to field that question, Tsukauchi has more experience because he’s an actual detective. But generally yeah, there’s always some sort of pattern, at least with people who plan out their killings. Even if they’re just doing it for the thrill, and they try to be random, there’s still often some kind of commonality. Crimes with truly no evidence are rare, especially with quirks at our disposal.”
There was a sound of distant shouting back the way they had come, near the open door of the crime scene. The words were muffled, but quickly escalated into screaming. It was not the noise of a crime in progress, but rather the sound of someone threatening to commit several crimes in progress if they didn’t get their way. It went on for a long indeterminate moment, the words incomprehensible but the emotions perfectly clear. Then the noise dropped back down.
“Right after you left, Detective Tsukauchi, he said that using your people correctly is important,” Izuku mentioned. “He said you were going to check for a trail.”
Sansa nodded in confirmation.
“Then you came back, and said it was him, because of the smell. What was that about?”
“Ha, right. Of course. Well, that’s the reason why we know it’s the same guy every time. Why we know it’s a serial killer, and not just a bunch of random kidnappings or something. He stinks.”
Izuku blinked in shock. “He… stinks?”
Sansa raised a gloved hand to his face, and unconsciously rubbed a finger under his triangular cat nose.
“Yeah. If anything, saying he stinks is underselling it. He freaking reeks. You haven’t smelled it yet, or you’d know. I have better senses than baseline because of my quirk, but I don’t need it to know if he’s been around or not. It’s like something died and was left to rot in the sun, then somebody came by and dumped a gallon of chemicals on the carcass. It smells like ammonia, rotten meat, and something weird and metallic, all mixed together. You’ll know immediately what it is if you catch a whiff, it’s foul.”
Izuku blinked slowly. “So he smells. I wonder if that’s because of his quirk? Could using his quirk cause that smell? Or is it actually him?” Izuku’s thoughts shifted back to the sludge villain incident months ago, when he first met All Might. “Maybe he’s a mutant with some complex mutation, and the smell is a side-effect of what he is.”
Sansa shrugged. “I have no clue, nobody’s ever seen the guy. The trail’s cold every time we get there. But there’s a beagle and german shepard mutant that have been pulled in from the daytime shifts. I’ve never met them, but I heard the beagle guy lost his lunch when he got a good sniff of it. And considering how many bad smells there are lingering around a big city like Tokyo, that’s really saying something. Whatever this guy is, he’s objectively worse than raw sewage or hot dumpsters in the rain.”
Izuku frowned, slowly shaking his head. “I don’t understand. You say this has been going on for months, for half a year. Why haven’t I heard about this before now? Shouldn’t it be on the news?”
“After tonight, it will be,” a new voice replied, and both Izuku and Sansa jumped.
Leaning up against the wall was the tall, cartoonish detective from earlier that evening. Ryoken Itachi.
“Holy shit Itachi, don’t do that!” Sansa hissed. “This is an active crime scene!”
The detective raised an eyebrow at that, which Izuku noted with utter fascination seemed to be almost totally detached from his face. He really was like a living cartoon character.
“Shouldn’t you be more embarrassed that you got snuck up on?” he drawled. “You’re a cat.”
“They misdiagnosed you as a kid,” Sansa grumbled. “You’re half man, half asshole.”
Itachi grinned, showing his mouth of flat molar teeth again. “Is that so? Shame. Here I thought I was half asshole, half bigger asshole. Guess I’ll have to try harder.”
Those huge, cartoonish eyes with their black pupils glanced over at Izuku, who unconsciously stood up straighter.
“To answer your question kid, it’s politics,” Itachi said. “Tokyo Metropolitan is already furious about Stain. That clown has been running around for years, ranting openly on unlisted websites and sockpuppet social accounts about how unworthy heroes, who don’t live up to the title, should be killed. He’s ambushed over three dozen pros, almost one victim every month, and either maimed or outright killed them. And he still hasn’t been caught. He’s evaded the police, the daylight heroes, the safety commission, the underground. It’s an utter disaster.”
The detective tilted his head to the side, still looking at the teen. “Think it through, kid. Use your brain. Do you really believe they’d want to publicly admit that there’s another guy out here now, snatching people right out of their kitchens, right off the sidewalks in broad daylight? And that they can’t do a thing about it? That nobody’s ever even seen the guy in the act, not even once?”
Izuku swallowed. “I- I mean. Yes? Y-Yes. They should admit it. They have to.”
Itachi looked at Izuku for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then the corner of his lips twitched.
“...You’re all right, kid,” he said. Then as quick as it had appeared, that spark of genuine emotion was smoothed over. Replaced by the veneer Izuku had seen at the station.
“It’s a bad look, and everyone knows it. Stain was enough of an insult, but at least we have a profile on him. This, though? We couldn’t even put together a wanted poster. Is it a man, a woman? A martian? Is it their quirk that stinks, or just their brilliant personality? We’ve got nothing. If you thought our reputation was rock bottom before, you’d better get ready, because lady Fortuna just handed out shovels.”
“They can’t possibly blame this on us!” Sansa snapped back. “Half the people handling the case are from the day shift, they’re pulling people from outside Musutafu! Most of the kidnappings didn’t even happen in our district!”
Itachi shrugged, his broad, thin shoulders flexing in a slightly impossible way. “Blame rolls downhill, Corporal, that’s one of the constants of life. And you know where our precinct stands. But if you want to believe in miracles, I won’t stop you.”
The cartoon dog-man stuck his gloved hands into the pockets of his own detective’s coat.
“Either way, it doesn’t matter anymore. The shit’s really hit the fan now. The guy who was taken? His wife is a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly.”
“The city council?” Sansa asked, his voice on the verge of a hiss.
“Ay-yup,” Itachi said, nodding. “And after she stopped crying, she nearly bit Hagahaeru’s head off. She’s beyond pissed. That’s the screaming match you probably heard about a minute ago. Any chance of the Metro Police Department keeping this under wraps just died a fiery death. Heads are going to roll at the next assembly meeting.”
“Shit,” Sansa swore.
“We’ve got a week at best before the news breaks,” Itachi drawled. “Even if Tsukauchi can calm down her majesty, this will make the papers by the weekend, and it’ll hit the internet sooner than that. Then all our asses are cooked. Fish way bigger than us are going to start asking questions, and guess what? We don't have answers. No name, no face, no quirk, nothing. All that blame, rolling right down the mountain like an avalanche.”
Those huge cartoon eyes tracked back over to Izuku. “Maybe we should give the kid some crayons and ask him to do a wanted poster for us. It won’t be any less accurate than whatever the ‘experts’ at Tokyo Central push out.”
The words were scathing, but Izuku could tell there was no heat in them. It was a nervous tick, something the other man did to mask a deeper, simmering emotion. Worry, mixed with doubt and self-recrimination. The teen saw it now, he had caught a glimpse beneath the mask. Itachi wasn’t upset that Izuku was here. He was upset that they had nothing. They were empty-handed, and Itachi was blaming himself. Even as Sansa bristled at what the detective had said, Izuku, without thinking, reached out and patted the cartoon man’s arm.
“It will be okay,” Izuku said. “We’ll catch whoever did this. I know we will.”
Itachi froze in shock, and Sansa’s mouth fell open.
The gangly detective blinked rapidly, then deliberately turned his face away to look out the window.
“Yeah kid,” he said, sounding distracted. “Yeah. Of course we’ll get them.”
Sansa had put a hand over his mouth, doing his best to not laugh.
Izuku just looked sincere.
A quiet pair of footsteps could be heard coming up the hall, and then Tsukauchi rounded the corner. His hat was in his hands, and his face was calm, but there was a tension around the corners of his eyes.
“The evidence has been collected, and the statements of the witnesses have been taken. It’s time for us to head back. The cleanup team will be here any minute.”
And slowly, one by one, the group made their way out of the building, back into the darkness of the night.
They walked across the parking lot, Itachi veering off towards his own squad car. Tsukauchi gestured Sansa closer to him, and began rapidly talking to him in a low voice, while Izuku made his way back to the van.
And unnoticed by any of them, two shiny black balls, each about the size of a grapefruit, sat on top of the dumpster in the alley across the way. Glinting wetly in the dim, strobing illumination of the emergency vehicle lights.
“Can- Can you please explain why I’m doing this, again? Sir?” Izuku asked.
It was mid-morning on the Takoba Municipal Beach Park. Izuku had worked through his allotted time for cleaning, and was now supposed to be cooling off with some cardio and light exercises.
Instead, Torino had thrust a wooden sword, a bokken, into the teen’s hands, and was currently using his own walking stick to correct Izuku’s posture and foot placement.
“It’s to help you get used to not thinking,” the retired hero said, moving Izuku’s left foot slightly to the side. “You and Toshi have opposite problems. He never thought at all when crap hit the fan, his head was empty. I had to teach him how to think in problem situations. To actually use his brain.”
The old man took a step back, examining the pose the teen held. “You’re the other way around. You think constantly, it’s natural to you. You need to learn how to not think. To trust your instincts.”
The old man lifted up his walking stick, and pushed the teen’s wrists up about an inch. Izuku swallowed. “Is- Is it bad, that I do that?”
“No,” the old man replied. “But leaning too far either way isn’t a good idea. You need to strike a balance. Toshinori was at risk of being bamboozled. You’re at risk of overthinking or freezing up. Opposite ends of the spectrum. I dragged him into the middle ground, and that’s what this will do for you, too.”
“Will I be using a sword?”
The old man snorted. “Kid, if you inherit even 1% of Toshinori’s power, you’ll never need another weapon besides your fists and feet. Hell, I’m not even sure they’d be able to make a sword that would survive being swung like that. This isn’t about the sword, it’s about the state of mind.”
Izuku swallowed as Torino continued to adjust his posture slightly. “And. And if it doesn’t work out? Like you were afraid it might. What then?”
“Then we get you a gun, some smoke bombs, a grappling hook, and maybe a telescoping baton, and work from there. I understand that swords are cool, but they fell out of style for a reason. A few heroes still run with the gimmick, but it’s hard to fight nonlethally with one. We’re supposed to arrest villains, not turn them into sashimi.”
“I don’t really see how guns are less lethal,” Izuku snarked, then flushed when he realized what he had said.
The old man grinned at the sass. Slowly but surely, they were getting there. Baby steps. “The list of exotic crap we can load into a gun these days is longer than Santa’s itinerary. A hero’s gun is less a weapon and more a delivery mechanism for whatever pull-my-finger nonsense the support staff have cooked up. And you don’t have to watch the news for very long to cotton on that a lot of modern mutants are bulletproof, or at least bullet resistant. I remember watching Toshinori’s American debut in Las Vegas, the cops made a firing line to try and stop those bank robbers. It didn’t even slow them down. And that was forty years ago.”
Izuku frowned. “Doesn’t all that apply to swords, too?”
The elderly pro shook his head. “In my experience, the damage a sharpened bit of metal can do when held by somebody with an enhancement quirk is leagues beyond the damage most guns are capable of. You could bridge that gap with explosives or chemicals, but we’re heroes, not crackpot demolitionists in some deranged locker room measuring contest.”
Izuku choked back a laugh, and Torino smirked slightly. “Don’t worry too much about weapons, kiddo. If One For All is a dud, there’s better things for you to use than a blunted katana. Push comes to shove, you may not need a gun all that much, either.”
“I feel like you’ve had this argument a lot,” Izuku said softly, adjusting his grip.
“I taught overeager wannabe superheroes for twenty years,” Torino replied. “You’d laugh yourself sick if you knew all the crap some of them wanted to try. Also, if you think I’m preaching, wait until you meet O’Clock. I’m just a crotchety pragmatist. He treats the old school like it’s a religion with only evangelist left on this earth; him.”
The old man took a step back, then held his own walking stick out horizontally. “Raise your hands slowly above your head until I say stop.” Izuku complied. “Good. Now, slowly bring the sword down until it touches my stick.”
Izuku did as he was told, and the two lengths of wood clicked softly as they touched.
“That’s your range of movement. Keep repeating that, over and over again. Go slow. Proper form is more important than speed. I’ll be watching.”
Izuku nodded slowly. “Will, um. Will this replace all of my cooldowns?”
“No. When you’re with Toshinori, you won’t do this. He doesn’t know enough to correct your form. You won’t always do this with me, either. I’m just having you do this until I’m satisfied. Don’t worry about results right away. Feel free to let your mind wander if it wants to, just as long as you keep the form properly.”
And with that, Torino walked back up the beach towards the parking lot. He sat down on a row of grimy benches that overlooked the wooden deck and railing. Before the shoreline had been turned into a dump, it would have offered a beautiful view. Now it just highlighted what an utter dungheap the place had become. The ocean horizon was even physically blocked in some places. Only the kid was clearly visible, sweating in the middle of a clearing as he slowly swung a stick, the ocean sunrise glittering behind him.
If it weren’t for the literal hills of trash, the shot would have been pretty iconic.
There was a faint rustling sound that most people wouldn’t have thought twice about, and then a pair of paws grabbed the side of Torino’s neck as Nezu hauled himself up onto the elderly man’s shoulder.
“Looking forward to your playdate with the kid?” Torino asked. He didn’t sound surprised, and didn’t bother to look at the anthropomorphic creature sitting on him.
“I am!” Nezu admitted, sounding excited but keeping his voice low.
“I had wondered when you were going to turn up. I had considered keeping his training location a secret.”
The animal man grinned. “It certainly would have been fun to see you try!”
“Don’t you have a school to run?”
Nezu laughed, and waved a paw dismissively. “I finished all of the paperwork hours ago. It isn’t very hard if you just stay on top of things.”
Torino hummed. There was a moment of silence, where the two educators, one current and one retired, watched Izuku diligently train in the distance.
“So. What question did you want to ask me?” Torino murmured. He had been an employee of Nezu’s for ten years, he knew how the sentient animal operated. If Nezu had just wanted to watch Izuku, he would have never bothered to reveal himself.
For all that he understood human mannerisms on an intellectual level, Nezu had a fairly predictable habit of only talking to someone if he had an actual reason to do so.
“I was curious about the young man,” the talking animal admitted. “I was hoping you would share some of your observations.”
Of course. Torino should have guessed. The rat wanted information .
Many people didn’t trust Nezu. Torino couldn’t entirely blame them. There were times where there was something subtly unsettling about the animal man. But having worked with him for so long, and having gotten to know Nezu for who he truly was, Torino had formed an appreciation for the HPSC’s number one most undesirable pro hero.
Nezu was an absolutely massive threat, for a list of reasons that rivaled the length of Saint Peter’s notes at the pearly gates. But if he was going to carry any of that out, he would have done it a long, long time ago. Whatever else could be said about him, Nezu was trying harder than just about anyone to be good. To do the right thing. To be a hero.
Everyone who was worried about Nezu turning villain was kidding themselves. He had better reasons to be one than any of the two-bit clowns the cops and pros bagged for their day in court. The fact that any of his naysayers were still breathing was proof of Nezu’s good intentions. None of his detractors would have survived Nezu’s coronation as a villain. Most of Japan probably wouldn’t.
Torino also knew, for a fact, that the anthropomorph would defend any of his students to the death. That Nezu would do it with a smile. The true last line of defense for UA’s security was none other than the principal himself.
Which is why, when Nezu asked, Torino simply nodded, and told the truth.
“I misjudged him from the start. I’ve misjudged him several times, actually. I had thought Toshinori had called me to teach someone similar to himself. Then after meeting the kid, I thought he had picked out a genius.”
“He hasn’t?” Nezu asked quietly.
Torino slowly shook his head. “I had thought so, until I met the father. The kid’s analysis, I had assumed it was all him. But Midoriya Hisashi works with the World Heroes Association. He’s some kind of Chief Spook of whatever spook division they run. He works in disaster assessment, arranging international hero team-ups and directing resources in response to threats. I don’t know what else they have him handling, but it smells fishier than the Toyosu Meat Market to me.”
The principal of UA wasn’t considered the greatest genius in the world for no reason.
“You mistook him as being self-taught, when he was already being honed by someone else.”
“Essentially,” Torino admitted.
Nezu was quiet for a long moment. “Quirks are attached to bodies, and bodies are possessed by people,” the animal said quietly, his tone thoughtful. “And while superpowers are all well and good, there are certain… qualities. Particular characteristics that can surpass those of a quirk. And such traits are rarer than the equivalent quirks themselves. Often far rarer. Quirks have made some aspects of human extremes commonplace, so people tend to forget. But the truth remains; there are things more valuable than a good quirk.”
“Potential,” Torino replied. “The kid’s not a genius, at least compared to what the world today considers geniuses to be. He’s not like you, or my grandniece. If you ranked him in the global tapestry of intellects, I’m not sure he’d even make the list.”
“But he has potential,” murmured Nezu.
“The elder Midoriya, when we spoke with him, called heroes and villains fragile. Because they were legal entities, their existence governed by legislation. But he said that his son was beyond that system. Called the kid invincible.”
Nezu’s jet-black eyes glinted, looking for all the world like the obsidian marbles embedded in a teddy bear’s face. “Interesting. Have you noted anything unusual?”
“He learns things quick. You usually only have to show or explain something to him once. That doesn’t sound like much, but you and I both know what a difference it can make. The few times I’ve had him practice throwing punches or doing some legwork, I can see the movements of other heroes in him. Stuff that looks like Toshinori’s boxing stance, or some of the moves I’ve seen the local daylight heroes show off on the news.”
“He’s learning by watching,” Nezu clarified.
“I think so, yeah. It’s a blessing and a curse. It means he’ll learn fast, but he could pick up stuff that isn’t well suited to him. He needs to be taught to be more discerning in that.”
“How good is the mimicry?” Nezu asked, unable to fully suppress the fascination and excitement in his voice. “Would you classify him as a technique thief?”
Torino’s lips thinned.
Nezu wasn’t wrong to say that there were certain talents that could be said to match those of a good quirk. Torino had seen it all during his twenty years of teaching kids. He’d seen people with the natural grit to just shrug off pain. They could take an absolutely unholy beating and just grunt through it, trying to batter them down was like trying to gum your way through a ten yen steak. You couldn’t teach or train that kind of toughness, either someone had it or they didn’t.
He’d seen teenagers who could memorize anything at a glance. Kids who never bothered to try on their written tests because they had eidetic or photographic memories. They had perfect grades, every time. He’d seen kids who could pick up another language just by reading a few books. Kids who didn’t need calculators or long-form math, because they could just solve the problems in their heads.
And he’d seen copycats, too. It wasn’t quite the same as a photographic memory, it was more physical, more hands-on. A sort of kinesthetic memory. But he had taught kids before, maybe about thirty or forty in his whole career, who only needed to see a move once. That was all it took, then they could do it too.
He knew what Nezu was asking.
“...honestly, yes,” he admitted after a moment. “With some of the stuff I’ve seen him do, I’d say he qualifies as a technique thief.”
Nezu grinned. It was just slightly too wide to look completely normal or comfortable, the edges of his lips just barely peeling back to show very, very sharp teeth.
“Fascinating,” Nezu murmured. “It will be quite entertaining to seek confirmation on that.”
“It shouldn’t be too hard,” Torino replied. Izuku swung his wooden sword down, and it didn’t escape either set of watching eyes that his form hadn’t deviated at all from what Torino had first shown him.
“Oh?”
“I’ve been in the kid’s bedroom. He was embarrassed, probably because of the huge pile of All Might merch. But I was paying attention to the stuff that wasn’t merch. Art supplies in a small wooden crate, which tracks with his habit of sketching out drawings of the heroes and villains he makes notes about. A telescope, which isn’t unusual, but a journal about the moon and stars is. It’s more than just a prop or some forgotten gift, he actually uses it. A keyboard and a guitar in the corner, which suggests a musical phase. Some posters of some bands I didn’t recognize, but looked up later. They’re locals, most of their gigs are within walking distance of his house.”
“All hobbies that require skills,” Nezu commented.
Torino grunted. “I’m not sure how to manage it just yet, but I’d give a lot to get the kid to pull out the guitar and play. If he can hold a tune on an instrument even without much practice, it will tell us a lot.”
“You think he’s picked up the skills for his hobbies by observation?”
“He’s quirkless,” Torino said, like that explained everything. To him, it did. “There’s not a lot of prospects for quirkless kids, these days. As far as free time is concerned, he’s only really got two choices; either be a shut-in, or go far enough away from your home area that you aren’t recognized and can blend in.”
“I see. And the room didn’t suggest the lifestyle of a shut-in, I take it?”
“Not even close,” Torino murmured. “Toshinori is a shut-in, I know what that looks like. The kid didn’t have a television in his room, or any video games I could see. Hell, Toshinori met him outside, storm chasing after hero fights. From what I can tell, that’s a regular activity for him, and it’s not surprising. It takes him closer to the things he loves, and farther away from the stigma. He’s never anywhere without a pencil and something to write on, but he chases after what he wants. For all his geeky exterior, he’s surprisingly active. The kid also seemed passingly familiar with makeup basics, but not their uses in hero disguises. An odd contradiction for a hero hopeful-”
“-Unless he learned it in some other application,” Nezu finished.
“Like taking the train to the other side of Musutafu Ward and helping out with local bands putting on shows,” Torino elaborated. “Ignorant of makeup for it’s use in disguises, but I suspect less so when it comes to dressing up a person’s face for a stage. It would be a decent way to earn pocket money for notebooks and art supplies. A hobby to fuel another hobby closer to his heart.”
“And a possible explanation for him possessing a guitar of his own. Was it autographed?”
“Not that I could see,” Torino admitted. “If I end up back in his room again, I’ll try and snap a picture of it. Any signatures might tell us more.”
“You don’t have to bother with that,” Nezu replied cheerfully. “I think I have a pretty decent profile of the young man already.”
“Oh?”
Beady black eyes watched the teenager training on the beach. “Quirkless, and bullied as a matter of course. He dreamed of being a hero, but no one in his life supported that dream. His parents, one present and one overseas, encouraged other hobbies. Pushing him towards things that kept him active and outside, instead of becoming a shut-in. He complied, but always found a way to turn those activities back towards his true obsession. Shaving the edges off of the squares he was given, to fit them into the round hole. Every bit of trivia absorbed and repurposed towards trying to understand quirks and superheroes just a little bit better. Data correlation, aggressive correlation. Finding ways to make what he learned count towards his true goals. Forcing a generalist skill set into the shape of a knife, carving a path where one did not exist naturally. He refused to give up.”
“And then Toshinori found him.”
“And then All Might encountered him, yes.”
Nezu’s smile grew a little wider, and became that much more unsettling as additional sharp teeth were exposed. “What a fascinating origin story for our future number 1.”
“That’s not set in stone,” Torino rebutted quickly.
“Having read his analysis on All Might and myself? I beg to disagree. Was this young man born a genius? No. And by the standards of society today, that means he isn’t one; on that we agree. Modernity has little use for talents that do not emerge fully formed and ready to use. But he certainly has the potential to grow intellectually, far beyond the limitations of his peers.”
Torino’s eyes flicked down, and lying on the pavement was a ruined comic book. It had been soaked through with saltwater grime, then dried out and bleached by the seaside sun. A faded, crumpled husk.
But even though the title and much of the details were illegible, the cover spread was still visible. A dark figure in a swirling cape loomed large, dominating the shot. He was featureless, surrounded by shadows, but he had burning white eyes and a cowl with two upright spikes on either side of his head, almost like ears.
The old man bent over slightly to pick it up, his nonhuman guest also glancing at it as he did.
“More of a Batman, then,” Torino said, wiggling the comic. “A Bruce Wayne. I haven’t cared about that crap for ages, but I remember collecting these when I was his age. Wayne wasn’t anyone special until his parents died, or at least that’s how I remember it. Nobody would have called him a genius when he was a kid. It’s what he made himself into that mattered. In all the versions of him they ever wrote, his was a story about fulfilled potential. Of a superficially normal man turning himself into something extraordinary.”
“I would agree!” Nezu chimed in cheerfully. “Some talents can be stronger than quirks if properly nurtured! As educators, isn’t it our job to foster them? The Support and Business Courses of our schools stand as a testament to that!”
There was a pause. Then Torino made a call. Since Nezu had asked him some questions, he decided to ask a few of his own.
“What exactly do you intend to teach the kid, when he spends time with you? You’re not just going to play random games with him all day or something, right?”
Nezu grinned brightly and threw both of his hands up in the air enthusiastically. “We will be playing games! Educational ones!”
Torino snorted. “I certainly hope so. We have less than a year to get him ready, and ideally I’d want at least double that. He doesn’t have the time to waste.”
“An optimal education is important!” Nezu cheerfully agreed. “But truthfully, I don’t really think he needs much more than he already has! He’s applying to learn how to be a hero, after all. He isn’t trying to jump directly there.”
Something glinted in Nezu’s black, inky eyes. “Which is why I was planning on some things that would be more useful in the long term.”
Torino rolled his eyes and tossed the ruined comic onto the table next to them. “It’s not like anyone can stop you from doing whatever you want. I’m just hoping for some clarity.”
There was a pause. “You weren’t my first choice for this, you know,” the old man said.
“Oh my?” Nezu said, not sounding the slightest bit offended. “It isn’t often that I’m relegated to second place! Who was your first pick, then?”
“Sasaki Mirai,” Torino replied without missing a beat. “Nighteye. He would have been my preferred tutor for the kid.”
Nezu tilted his head to the side slightly, in a gesture that was neither entirely human nor wholly animal. “Sir Nighteye? He is an excellent investigative hero, so I suppose I can see that. His track record with hero interns is immaculate.”
“Only because he can compartmentalize himself well enough to do his job without spraying his issues all over the place,” Torino quipped. “On paper, he’s the perfect mentor for the kid.”
Torino held out a hand and started counting off on his fingers. “I want him to get better at thinking his way through problems. That’s Mirai’s entire strategy.”
He held out another finger. “I’d like for the kid to hone his talent for deduction and investigative work, the crime-solving half of the law enforcement equation. Mirai is the premiere detective hero in Japan, he’s probably a contender for the best in the world. No one knows that job better than him.”
He unfurled a third finger and tapped it. “He and the kid are in similar situations and have similar hurdles to overcome. Both of them are conventionally intelligent but lack any sort of intelligence boosting quirk. So by society’s standards, they aren’t geniuses. But Mirai trained and honed his own mind until he became one of the smartest people in the business. He earned the title of genius, and now people call him one of Japan’s greatest minds in spite of his lack of a relevant quirk. That’s the same path I’d like the kid to walk. Mirai is a self-made genius. The kid will have to become one, too. There is no one better to teach him how to do it.”
Torino held out a fourth finger. “Mirai’s fortune telling is also a psychic ability, it’s entirely mental. Meaning he has no physical mutations at all, his body is quirkless. But he still trained himself to the point that he could fight on the front lines as All Might’s sidekick if push came to shove. He’s freakishly strong, and it was all hard work on his part. If the kid is going to use One For All, he needs intense physical training to condition himself for it. And if he can’t use One For All, if the quirk is simply worthless now, then he’ll need the conditioning even more. Mirai can offer him the training he really needs; he walked that path himself.”
Then the old man unfurled his thumb. “And finally, he knows all of our secrets already. He’s Toshinori’s former sidekick, he’s helped look for a successor to One For All in the past. He knows the truth, and what’s at stake. He’s aware of the risks. Theoretically, he should be someone we could trust to do everything that needs to be done.”
“Then we should get him involved!” Nezu cheered.
“Not a chance in hell,” Torino shot back dryly.
“Is this one of those interhuman issues again?” Nezu asked, tilting his head slightly. “Sir Nighteye has admittedly shown mixed judgment in the past, during his falling out with All Might. But he is a trusted member of UA’s mentorship program. His track record is excellent! He has handled nearly a hundred internships over the years from the school without issue. Few others can boast such a success record.”
Torino’s lips thinned, as he quietly considered his former boss.
Nezu was the smartest living thing on the planet. Even other geniuses with superintelligence quirks didn’t dispute that, and many of them were quite prideful of their abilities. High Spec was the strongest intelligence boosting superpower in the world, and it was all the more frightening to know that it had manifested in an animal.
Torino wasn’t sure the world could have handled it manifesting in a human.
He wasn’t fully certain how High Spec functioned, but he’d worked with Nezu long enough to have made some educated guesses. He knew the rat could ‘invoke’ the ability at will to become smarter. He also knew that Nezu possessing the quirk in the first place is what made him an intelligent creature capable of being integrated into human society.
But if Nezu had a weakness, it was that he sometimes misinterpreted or misunderstood the humans around him. Because Nezu wasn’t human, had never been human, and never would be human.
He was a person, yes. Depending on how you defined personhood. But he was not human.
Nezu understood human emotions on an intellectual level. The rat wasn’t stupid, or selectively blind. UA’s principal had probably read every textbook on human psychology that had ever been written. And his inhuman perspective made him a master of reading people, of looking from the outside-in. He could pick up on subtle hints and cues that others missed, because he had learned the grammar of human interactions from the ground up, as an outsider.
But that altered perspective also meant there was a dimension of the human experience Nezu would never know. He could only look from the outside in. He knew everything there was to know about human thinking, but he’d never thought a human thought himself. There was a disconnect there, a gap that could never quite be bridged.
Nezu understood the human mind the same way some turn-of-the-century armchair biologist understood exotic birds from far-off locales, by reading the reports sent back by explorers and merchants. The animal man was fascinated by these second-hand experiences and accounts, but that is as close to the subject as he would ever get.
Even the most poorly trained professional of the mental sciences still benefited from their own first-hand emotional experiences. But Nezu could only read about them. Nezu was like a man lost in a library full of books on an alien civilization, whose thoughts never quite aligned with his own, who he could never completely grasp or understand because he simply wasn’t one of them.
Nezu was correct in thinking that Nighteye would be a natural choice. After all, Nezu had a hand in the original search for a successor, he had worked closely with Sir Nighteye on that. Torino was sure that eventually, Nezu would have made the suggestion that Izuku learn from the man on his own, if Torino hadn’t brought it up first.
Once he’d had time to calm down and get his gleeful exuberance out of his system, that is.
But Torino understood something that Nezu didn’t. Because Torino was human.
“In a perfect world, neither you nor I would have been needed in the kid’s education,” the old hero said, in answer to Nezu’s hanging question. “Maybe I would have offered him an internship or something later down the line, and you could have had tea with him in your office. But Mirai would have done all the heavy lifting.”
Torino frowned. “But this isn’t a perfect world. And the kid’s similarities to Mirai are what would ironically ensure that the man would never agree to teaching him. At least not sincerely or correctly.”
Nezu tilted his furry head in confusion. “I do believe you, old friend, but why? Sir Nighteye has a long track record of flawless hero internships, and his agency has played host to just about every type of student, including ones rather similar to himself. So much so that he is one of the 20 agencies that we use for students who have received no personal offers from other heroes during events like the Sports Festival. He is trusted enough to be a default internship choice. I won’t dispute that he may have personal hangups. Everyone does. But he is clearly capable of putting whatever those issues are aside for the sake of educating young heroes.”
“You think that because you’re lacking a key piece of information,” Torino replied. “Namely, that Mirai never considered himself worthy of One For All, and would have fought back violently if Toshinori had ever sincerely tried to give it to him. He never would have accepted it.”
The words weren’t even entirely out of Torino’s mouth before the light of comprehension flickered in Nezu’s black eyes.
Nezu was not human, and thus lacked certain aspects of human intuition. But he was not stupid.
“Ah. I see. You believe that Sir Nighteye would be perfectly willing to train someone similar to himself. Just not to inherit One For All.”
“I don’t believe it,” Torino stated firmly. “I know it. Mirai put Toshinori on a pedestal so tall even the immaculate reputation of All Might can’t fully live up to it. Rose-tinted glasses are the only reason they didn’t have their falling out sooner. It’s a long fall to the ground, when you’ve got your head that high up in the clouds.”
Nezu frowned slightly, looking disheartened for the first time since he had appeared. “I see. How unfortunate. Perhaps I bear some of the blame for this, then. I did assist Sir Nighteye in his search for a successor as well.”
“None of this is your fault, not even a little,” Torino snorted. “Most kids grow out of having unreasonable expectations by the time they’re five or six, and Santa doesn’t bring them a fighter jet or a puppy made of chocolate. Being All Might robbed Toshinori of his life, his privacy, his health, and nearly got him killed. Mirai wants another All Might, exactly like the first one, but even better. That’s not going to happen, and he needs to get over it. He’s too damned old to be throwing tantrums about crap like this. It’s a wonder he can catch a glimpse of the future at all, with his own ego blocking the view.”
Torino paused for a moment and breathed out. Just talking about the younger man raised his blood pressure. “That’s why I want to know what you’re planning on teaching the kid. I’m trying to make up the difference that’s caused by Mirai not being here to help. And I can’t do that alone.”
Nezu curled a paw under his snout in a gesture identical to a human tapping their own chin. Slowly, his eager smile returned.
“I see. I see! Well, honestly I would like some of what I have planned to be a surprise! I think most of it will be very helpful to him later in his career! But I am certainly willing to take requests, if there’s something specific you wanted me to work into the schedule!”
Torino gave the bespoke rat on his shoulder a brief side-eye at the insistence of keeping most of what he had planned ‘a surprise.’
Typical Nezu. The rat had only barely gotten involved, and he was already hijacking half the process. This was the price one paid for invoking him.
"If the kid can’t learn how to nurture his talent from another self-taught genius, the next best thing would be for him to grow intellectually by osmosis. I was hoping you’d introduce him to your little Illuminati club.”
Nezu looked like Christmas had been announced for every month of the year. “Oh my! That’s a wonderful idea! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that immediately!”
The tiny animal man began to shake, his shoulders heaving. Most people who didn’t know Nezu would think he was shivering with nerves, or trying to tamp down on some sort of panic attack.
But something Gran Torino had in common with Aizawa Shota is that they both knew better.
The rat was doing his best to not break out into a bout of cackling, maniacal laughter in public.
Well. At least he had the self-awareness to know it would be a bad look.
‘The Illuminati’ was a wildly misleading name. Torino would have never picked it, but then, he wasn’t in the group. The name invoked a sense of ominous control or domineering oversight, being loosely based off of the ancient pre-Dawn conspiracy of some shadowy ruling group that controlled the world.
That was an extraordinarily pretentious name, for what was in essence a little old lady’s bridge club full of super geniuses.
The bane of every supergenius was boredom. Even if most of them worked for their governments, and were kept busy by it, boredom was a universal plague for their kind. Although most people would never consider it to be a problem, Torino knew it was. Hell, he knew about Nezu’s little group. He’d worked too long at UA not to.
How could you have fun playing chess, if you can just look at a board and instantly solve the scenario? How can you play a strategy game, when understanding the math is so intuitive to you that you only have to glance at a sheet of numbers to understand how to win? How could anything like a conventional video game satisfy you, when your nervous system is mutated to have perception and reflexes ten times better than that of a normal human?
For the quirked intellects of the world, seeking entertainment through normal means was like being an adult stuck in a room with toddlers. Having to play peek-a-boo or tic-tac-toe with them, day in and day out. Every single day, for your entire life.
It was no wonder they would long to have something for stimulation. For them to crave a distraction.
And Nezu provided.
Because Nezu wasn’t the “leader” of the Illuminati. They didn’t have one.
No, he was their bookie. Their bank. The event runner. The house. The dealer who sat at the table and handled their cards.
Society probably wasn’t ready to accept the fact that their revered supergenius intellects were all gambling addicts who spent most of their free time in private chat rooms participating in card games or contrived events organized by a talking rodent that ran a superhero school in Japan.
But whether society could accept it or not, it was the truth.
The Illuminati weren’t controlling society or manipulating the government. They weren’t even trying to. Hence why the name was so absurd to Gran Torino.
The Illuminati were a bunch of middle aged men from around the world, playing private games of Cheat and Liar's Dice, or absurd variations of poker with fifty decks in play and enough house rules to befuddle a lawyer. They craved games and scenarios that their intellects could not immediately solve, be that through complexity, randomness, or social mechanics. They were VIP members of an exclusive digital casino, where counting cards was not only permitted, but one of the bare minimum requirements to be allowed through the door. If you couldn’t keep track of twenty simultaneous decks of cards in your head, you shouldn’t be sitting at the table.
It wasn’t a group, or an organization. It was a damn bridge club. They gossiped like little old ladies, too, Torino knew that for a fact .
And all of it was organized by none other than Nezu himself. The biggest brainiac of them all. Because nobody craved entertainment more than Nezu. And ironically, his status as a feared nonhuman agent who was distrusted by his own government, made him more trustworthy to his ‘friends’ online. Because with Nezu, there would be no politics or underhanded dealings. The political sphere didn’t want him, they violently rejected him. So with the rat, there was no fear of an agenda, no worry about being double-crossed or frozen out because Russia was having some trade dispute with China again.
Nezu was Nezu, a thing unto himself. So the table he set up for his own amusement gathered together all sorts.
The world of politics and big business hadn’t wanted him. So the animal man had laughed, and built himself an empire out of Ivy League education and dealing cards to other megaminds.
So much for not getting high off your own supply.
It was a weird world.
“I want to make my intentions clear. I’m not suggesting the kid play with your… friends . Quite frankly, I’m not sure he even could. It would be cruel to expect him to.”
“But if Sir Nighteye is off the table, we are your second best choice!” Nezu said, sounding delighted. “Oh my, what an amusing turn of events! I can’t imagine how most of them would react to knowing they weren’t the first choice in something, for once!”
“Please do not ruin the kid’s career for a joke before it even gets started.”
“No promises!” Nezu cheered gleefully. The old man sighed.
This was exactly why he had turned down Nezu’s offers to keep him at the school, and chose retirement instead.
Wrangling the antics of the animal man was a job that simply could not ever pay enough. If you believed otherwise, you didn’t know Nezu.
Absently, the old hero stood up from his seat on the bench, and grabbed the ruined comic. He walked over to a nearby trashcan, and made to toss the piece of flotsam out. But he paused before he did. Torino’s eyes were stuck on the cowled figure dominating the cover.
Heroes and villains are fragile things, All Might. My son is invincible.
As you say, Detective Yagi.
“Nuyen for your thoughts?” Nezu chirped.
Torino shook his head, and tossed the ruined comic into the trash. “Just something the kid’s father said. He seemed to like Toshinori more than me, which didn’t really surprise me. But he called him ‘detective.’ Detective Yagi. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call Toshi that before.”
The old man frowned. “Do you know anything about Midoriya Hisashi? Have you ever heard of him?”
“Unfortunately, I have not!” Nezu said, sounding unusually pleased to be announcing that. “But, I do believe I know something about the organization he belongs to!”
For the first time, Torino turned his head to look at the animal man sitting on his shoulder. “You do? Really?”
“Oh yes!” Nezu said. “I am almost completely certain I know who he works for, given your descriptions of him.”
Nezu pointed one of his furry paws out towards the sun rising up into the sky. “The World Heroes Association is an international non-profit organization associated with the League of Nations. They operate as an NGO, and their funding primarily comes from the governments that house their offices, as well as a stipend paid to them by the hero agencies that operate in their jurisdictions. Giving money to the WHA is a write-off program, at least in Japan and America, so it’s a way for agencies to pay less taxes. Quite a clever scheme!”
Nezu grinned, and then flipped his paw over, spreading wide each of the five digits on it. “There are five divisions inside the WHA that manage it’s various affairs, such as the Medical division which coordinates international health and emergency services. Each division is represented in the WHA’s logo, which is a five-pointed star, where each of the star’s arms is a different color: red, green, yellow, black, and white!”
Nezu’s furry paw-hand closed, and he grinned a little wider. “However, there are rumors in certain circles of a supposed sixth division of the WHA, the so-called ‘Division Zero.’ There is also a rather large amount of circumstantial evidence to support their existence, if you pay close enough attention!”
Torino raised an eyebrow. “What evidence is that?”
“Money primarily! As well as superficially nonsensical logistics, and unusually concentrated security and resources being sent to various locations in the middle of nowhere. There is no direct evidence of Division Zero’s existence, but a shadow organization still needs real money and real people to operate, and that leaves a trail! Either Division Zero does exist, or huge amounts of WHA resources are vanishing into thin air, while highly trained professionals get paid to stand in the middle of nowhere and guard nothing!”
“Hisashi knew secrets he shouldn’t have,” Torino admitted. “He knew about the instability of King Beast’s bloodline, which I also was aware of. Did you know they’re keeping a list of everyone related to him?”
“I did!” Nezu replied cheerfully. “Though the list they have isn’t nearly as complete as they would probably like! They’ve made mistakes in the past with it, and people have slipped through the cracks.”
This time, both of Torino’s eyebrows raised. “Do you know who they missed?”
“I haven’t a clue!” Nezu replied brightly, looking thrilled to admit that.
“Of course not,” Torino muttered. “He also claimed that Harima Oji wasn’t real. That he was some fictional character created by a troupe of thieves that were using him as a figurehead.”
“I’ve heard that conspiracy theory!” Nezu replied happily, kicking his feet back and forth on his human perch. His tiny shoes were bright red, and still slightly too large for him, like something halfway between a dress shoe and a sneaker. “It’s interesting!”
“I hadn’t,” Torino said, “But obsessing over conspiracy theories isn’t really my cup of tea.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“He also knew about the Mist People.”
Slowly, the bright smile and exuberant attitude of Nezu faded away, leaving him with a neutral expression.
“Did he, now?” Nezu said quietly. His voice was subdued. “I suppose we will have to take him more seriously, then.”
“Toshinori didn’t know about any of this,” Torino admitted. “I’m surprised the HPSC never told him about King Beast’s blood. I guess they were hoping he would just clean up their mess for them if a problem ever came up. He’s interested in the Mist People now, but I’m doing what I can to dissuade him from looking into it. That’s not a line of questioning that will end well, for anyone.”
“No. It won’t,” Nezu said simply, his black eyes fixed on the young man across the beach.
Internationally renowned Pro Hero All Might asking the HPSC and the Japanese Diet questions about the Mist People Incident was going to end in murder. His or theirs, but somebody was going to die.
Nezu knew better than most people alive, there were some questions that were better off unasked. Knowledge had consequences.
Nezu blinked, but his gaze did not waver from the teen across the beach. The young man wasn’t much older than the Harima child that had allegedly been killed, if that particular story was to be believed.
“Hisashi makes sense in my head, but he’s… not what I had expected,” Torino admitted. “Not at all. He implied all of this had something to do with his wife, but he wouldn’t explain what. I feel like I know even less about him than before we played 20 questions. What are your thoughts on this?”
Dark, beady eyes followed the rise and fall of that carved wooden stick. It hadn’t deviated at all from the path it had been set on. A teenager without a superpower stood on the sand, huffing as his stamina was tested even during his cool-downs, sweat pouring from his face.
For a flickering instant, Nezu’s imagination ascribed the dark cowl of the bat-themed fictional vigilante to the young man. A mind, not of this new world of the fantastically impossible, but something older and more subtle. A mind no one today would have called a genius… that became one of the greatest criminal investigators in fiction. Bruce Wayne, the logical final destination of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. The modern iteration of the archetype, a man of singular will and determination, who was devoted to fighting crime and rooting out the truth, no matter what.
It was filtered through the lens of superherodom, yes. But even stripped of that, it was a perennial idea. Not a detective. The detective. The world’s greatest detective.
Nezu saw the silhouette of Sir Nighteye, tall and thin with his back turned. The besuited man’s neck twisted to look behind him, and a piercing yellow eye became visible over the man’s glasses as his specter peered back across Nezu’s imagination.
He saw that towering stack of papers, copied off of the original, which he had returned. Bearing one of the few autographs Nezu had ever given out as a pro hero.
Heroes and villains are fragile things, All Might. My son is invincible.
As you say, Detective Yagi.
“I think… that these secrets were Midoriya Hisashi showing us his credentials, so to speak,” Nezu said after a brief pause. “There is no longer any doubt in my mind, he is an agent of the so-called Division Zero.”
“But what does that mean?” Torino asked. “What the hell are they? What do they even do?”
“They’re saving the world, or so say the rumors,” Nezu said quietly.
Torino scoffed. “From what? Heroes save the world! That’s literally our jobs! We fight villains, monsters, natural disasters, quirks. What could they possibly be saving the world from?”
“That does seem to be the question,” Nezu whispered, a glint of inhuman fascination and glee in his inky black eyes.
What was the one thing they knew for certain about young Midoriya Izuku, that they could credit to his father directly?
The only thing that obviously leapt to mind was his hobby of quirk analysis.
What did it say about what Division Zero did, and what Midoriya Hisashi truly feared? That the only activity he directly tutored and encouraged in his son was pulling apart quirks?
“Perhaps the difference between us and them,” Nezu said quietly, “Is they are trying to save the world from quirks, instead of saving the world with them.”
A tall, gangly man with hooded eyes and a five o’clock shadow pulled a styrofoam coffee cup off of a rack, before putting it under the spigot of a hot drinks vending machine. His messy, shoulder-length black hair rippled slightly as he punched in the order for hot water, and waited while his cup filled. He was dressed in plain, grey-black clothes, and had a long, stiff looking off-white scarf wrapped around his neck.
He would have preferred coffee, all things considered. But he knew better than to court the gastronomical consequences of that while on hero patrol. Tea dehydrated, and coffee was, well, coffee. Hot water would have to do.
Aizawa Shota slowly looked over the kid that was standing in the breakroom of the Musutafu Police Station.
Teenage male on the older end of the scale, somewhere around nineteen he would guess. A little on the short side, but still growing. Dark hair that was slicked back and slightly messy. It was nearly black depending on where you were standing, but the artificial lighting of the breakroom’s kitchen showed it as a deep, shaded turquoise. He had pale purple eyes that glimmered with curiosity, high cheekbones, and a slightly mature looking jaw.
So this was Sage. This was the kid who had wound Nezu up so badly.
Aizawa wasn’t the only person staring, because the kid was looking at him like he had seen a ghost. Not surprising, Aizawa appeared regularly as a co-host with Present Mic at nearly every public event UA had hosted. The two of them giving running commentary at the various festivals and sporting events the school held was a deliberately cultivated tradition that their rat of a principal had gleefully pushed into viral status on social media.
Shota could have done without all the extra attention, but Nezu was obsessed with entertainment first and foremost. There was simply no getting out of it.
The kid was probably wondering what the hell the UA announcer guy was doing at the Musutafu Police Station in the dead of night.
“I’m- I’m sorry to bother you sir-”
Yeah, he was right. The kid did recognize him.
“But are you- are you Eraserhead?”
For a fraction of a second, Aizawa froze.
“Eraserhead?” he replied. “Who is that, kid?”
Sage’s soft purple eyes narrowed. “You’re Present Mic’s co-host whenever UA broadcasts a public event.”
Aizawa quirked a tired, scruffy eyebrow. “And?” he drawled.
“And UA only hires heroes for their staff. They brag about it, it’s part of their advertising. Since you work for UA, you must be a pro hero, and if you’re a pro hero without a public identity… you must work Underground.”
Aizawa slowly picked up his steaming cup, and slipped at the scaldingly hot filtered water. “I’m just a contractor, kid. You’re barking up the wrong tree. It takes a lot of people to run a stadium event. Do you think the concession stand vendors are secret heroes, too?”
Sage’s head tilted to the side, and there was something about those pale purple eyes. It felt like the kid was looking right through him.
“... would the students call an event contractor sensei?” the teen asked.
Aizawa breathed out quietly. He had been prepared to defend his association with Yamada “Present Mic” Hizashi. There were cover stories prepared, that he was an employee of the other man’s radio station, that he was an old school friend doing an acquaintance a favor as co-host. Mic’s circle of buddies was near-infinite, he’d befriend a rabid bear if it would let him. What was one more scruffy middle-aged man tossed into the crowd?
He hadn’t considered that this kid would ignore Hizashi entirely and go straight for the throat.
“And what makes you think I’m this, what? Eraser guy?”
“Process of elimination,” the kid said in a rush, almost like he was stumbling over the words in his haste to speak them. He fumbled around in a backpack Aizawa hadn’t paid much attention to, before pulling out an ordinary looking notebook, like something any of UA’s students would use for their classes.
The kid flipped it around, and the notebook fell open onto a twinned pair of sketches. The subject was, very clearly, Aizawa himself. It was done in simple pencil, with almost no color. On the left page was something that was clearly drawn or traced from a still frame of some footage. It showed a very detailed shot of Aizawa’s face, every line of tiredness and exhaustion painstakingly captured. He was sitting in what appeared to be the UA’s announcer booth for the annual Sport’s Festival, his head turned 3/5ths of the way towards looking at a much cruder sketch of Yamada “Present Mic” Hizashi. Aizawa’s punk-rocker friend was poised mid-laugh, mouth open and shoulders thrown back.
The other picture, on the right-hand page, was very different. It couldn’t possibly have been made from footage, it was too raw, too dynamic. It was looking upwards from an alleyway, and showed a black, scarecrow-like figure with long dark hair flying in the wind. The image caught the person mid-leap from one rooftop to another, the long end of a heavy scarf trailing behind them. This picture also had the only true color on either page, because the kid had gone back with a yellow ink pen, and given the sketch a pair of golden glowing eyes.
“There’s all kinds of websites and forums that watch heroes,” the kid said. “But the people who watch Underground stuff have to piece together everything themselves, because they don’t have the luxury of even knowing what heroes they’re looking at.”
Sage tapped a finger on one of the sketches. “There’s basically no chance you aren’t the night patrol hero that’s been spotted around Musutafu. Everyone agrees on that. You work for UA, which is right here, and you’re almost never seen without your scarf. That’s practically a given. But that’s also only half the puzzle. The real question isn’t ‘are you an underground hero working Musutafu,’ but rather which one?”
Sage turned the book back around, and flipped over a few pages. “The popular theory is that you have a minor telekinesis ability, which helps you manipulate your scarf. But I’m not so sure about that.”
The kid breathed in, then out, suddenly looking nervous. Aizawa slowly sipped his hot water. “There’s rumors of a- of a crypid, in Musutafu. A hero or sidekick that only comes out at night, with a superpower that can nullify the quirks of other people just by looking at them. The one thing every story about it has in common, is the glowing golden eyes. The few people who claim to have encountered that person, say their name is Eraserhead.”
Sage slowly looked up, meeting Aizawa’s gaze with his own. The purple eyes faltered slightly, but then became more sure. “There aren’t many underground heroes in our area. There’s only two agencies, and both of them are hybrids: Edgeshot and Sir Nighteye. They are both Underground pros, but they have a Daylight presence. And all of Sir Nighteye’s sidekicks are Daylight heroes.”
The teen licked his lips, then froze, like he realized it was something he shouldn’t be doing. “Most- most people attribute the cryptid to Edgeshot’s agency. He has a lot of sidekicks, and most of them are unknown. Which is fitting, given his theme as a master of a ninja temple. Eraserhead could be one of them. That’s probably the simple solution, but-”
“But you disagree,” Aizawa said.
Sage swallowed. “I- I’m quirkless,” he said, and Aizawa didn’t react. He had known from the start that the boy who had caught Nezu’s eye had no superpower of his own.
“And because I’m quirkless, I- I know. I know what is and isn’t possible without a quirk.”
Purple eyes flicked down from the man’s face to the stiff scarf around his neck, then back up again. “Everyone… everyone online thinks your quirk is telekinesis or cloth manipulation. There’s sketchy footage out there of the Musutafu night patrol hero taking down villains, he fights with a scarf. The way he uses it, it’s like a grappling hook, armor, and a third limb, all in one. They see those feats, they ascribe that to a quirk, and call it case closed.”
For perhaps the first time, Aizawa lamented the need to wear his scarf in public during UA events. It would be irrational in the extreme to attend without having his primary weapon and tool on-hand, in case something happened. But he had never considered it could be a security risk to his own identity.
“But you don’t think it’s a quirk?” the older man asked. “Why not? That seems logical to me.”
Sage swallowed, giving the impression that he was deeply regretting saying this much, but was afraid to back out.
Aizawa Shota wasn’t sure if he wanted the kid to stop or not.
“UA… it’s more than just a hero school. All the hero schools are more than just hero schools. Every one of them offers courses that help people get jobs in the industries around heroics, too. Business, advertising, criminal law. And part of UA’s Support Program is a special copyright status. The school can hold a copyright in trust. The person who invented it, and anyone associated with UA, can use that patent for as long as they wish, and UA will defend it for them. But the original inventor retains the rights, and can withdraw their patent from the trust at any time. Patents can also be donated to the trust, which gives UA, and other hero schools that copy that program, a big advantage as far as equipment development is concerned.”
“That’s not common knowledge,” Aizawa said, sounding dismissive. “But I also don’t see how it’s relevant. Is this going somewhere?”
For all that he sounded dismissive and bored, the lanky man was anything but. He was laser-focused on the teen in front of him. He knew the kid had caught Nezu’s eye, he had been there for the document Nezu had turned into a presentation. But none of what the kid had written down seemed all that special to him. It was a battle plan and tactical analysis, not much different from the few others Aizawa had seen in his lifetime. Impressive for a kid, yes, absolutely, but impressive overall? In the grand scheme of things? He wasn’t so sure.
Then again, maybe the feeling was different, when that dissecting eye was turned on you specifically. Was this what Nezu had felt, when he had read all of that the first time?
This talk of patents. Surely, the kid hadn’t…
“The patent trust is public knowledge,” Sage said, his voice sounding more sure. “Along with it’s contents. And one of the patents in it is for a memory metal thread. The base material is as hard as steel, and when force is applied to the threads in specific ways, they snap into certain predefined shapes and configurations. There’s a lot of possible uses for something like that, especially in costumes and capes.”
He paused. “Or scarves.”
Aizawa said nothing. He wasn’t pretending to be disinterested anymore.
Because he knew the person who had invented that thread.
Aizawa Shota had watched it’s inventor, and one of his oldest friends, die. Shirakumo Oboro had died during their hero internships, because of Aizawa. That patent would never leave UA’s hands, because of him.
His scarf, made to match Oboro’s own, and using the material Oboro invented, was his way of keeping a memory of his friend alive. And reminding himself of his greatest failure.
And the kid had noticed.
He had gone through the patents UA had, just for the sake of… what? Chasing down a hunch? Following a lead no one else thought twice about?
“That’s why I think you’re the cryptid of Musutafu,” Izuku said. “There’s nothing you’ve done with your scarf that can’t be explained away with quirkless tech. On it’s own, that would mean nothing. It could still be a quirk, and probably would be.”
Sage’s lavender eyes narrowed. “But the school you work at holds the patent that would make your scarf possible. And that patent was filed around the same time I think you would have been in UA yourself as a student. Which means you might have even known the person who invented it. The date on the patent lines up with your generation of heroes. And Eraserhead’s quirk, it would be ideal for a teacher at a hero academy like UA. It would make sense for Eraserhead to work for a school. That’s three coincidences too many. You’re not just the Musutafu night patrol hero. You’re Eraserhead, the golden eyed cryptid. Your real quirk is that you can cancel other people’s quirks, presumably as some sort of activated Emitter.”
Aizawa slowly sat his cup of hot water down on the counter next to him. Tired eyes looked over the teen, really looked at him from head to toe.
“That’s still a stretch kid, don’t you think? This cryptid of yours might not even be real, and you’re ascribing it to me?”
“If it’s a stretch, then why are you wearing goggles?” the teen countered, pointing a finger at the heavy yellow eyewear that was currently resting above Aizawa’s messy hairline.
“Protection?” the man replied, raising an eyebrow.
“They don’t have lenses,” the teen countered. “They’re shutter goggles. What are they protecting your eyes from? Dust and debris could still get in.”
Sage’s own eyes narrowed. “And why would they be yellow? Yellow stands out in the dark. If you’re primarily patrolling at night, and trying to ambush or sneak up on people, wouldn’t you want dark goggles with nonreflective lenses?”
No, Aizawa was beginning to understand what the rat had seen in this kid. His analysis of Nezu didn’t seem that great to Aizawa, or at least, not amazing enough to warrant Nezu’s completely unhinged reaction to it. The analysis was good, it might even be seen as exceptional since it came from a child. But the way his boss had treated it… it was irrational, from Aizawa’s perspective. Just give the kid a scholarship and be done with it.
But the feeling was very different when the knife was pointed at his own throat. He preferred ambush tactics whenever possible, but if they weren’t, he was prepared. He wore the goggles to hide the flash of his eyes, so if a fight did break out, his enemies wouldn’t know if he was using his quirk or not. Or who he was using it on, if he was up against a group. That’s why they were shutter goggles. That’s why they were yellow shutter goggles.
And he had a terrible, sinking suspicion that the kid had walked into this room already knowing that. No one else had ever picked him apart like this. Aizawa “Eraserhead” Shota had prided himself on his forgettable appearance, his spartan gear. He needed nothing more than his scarf, his goggles, a standard issue earpiece, and a pair of pants to do his job. His loadout was minimalistic, simple. Logical.
Somehow, Sage made him feel like his scarf and goggles were a glowing neon sign hung around his neck, announcing his identity to the world.
This is what Nezu had seen, wasn’t it? This is how Nezu had felt, he was sure of it.
Suddenly, the rat’s reaction made far more sense.
Slowly, Aizawa Shota breathed out, feeling the heat from the hot water he had drunk pass between his lips. “What is this about, kid?” he asked tiredly. “What’s your goal here?”
The teen’s hands shook slightly, and he swallowed. For a moment, Aizawa was worried he had caused some sort of panic attack, and was about to reach out and say something, to reassure the teen.
Then Sage bowed his head down, thrust the notebook forwards, and stuttered “C-Can I please have your autograph!? I won’t tell anyone, I s-swear!”
Aizawa froze, taken completely off-guard. His mouth fell open slightly. For a long, awkward moment, the teen and adult both stood there in shock, saying nothing.
Then Aizawa tilted his head back and laughed .
It was a deep, raspy sound, of a laugh not often used. It came from somewhere below his chest, and sounded like it hurt, almost like a hard cough.
But still, he laughed.
All of that, chasing down leads, researching UA patents, looking up who patrolled Musutafu and when… just for an autograph ?
This kid was crazy.
Aizawa liked that.
Aizawa smiled, and it was the grin of a man who rarely used the expression. All exposed teeth and tight lips, it looked more than a little unhinged.
“Ha, yeah kid. I’ll give you an autograph.” He paused for a moment. “But first, I have a question for you.”
Sage blinked. “A question for me?” he asked, tilting his head to the side.
Aizawa smirked slightly, an action that was mostly hidden by his scarf. “Who is your minder here at the precinct? You’re shadowing somebody, right? Who is it?”
Izuku frowned. “Um, it’s Detective Tsukauchi?”
“Figures,” Aizawa snorted. “It would be Tsukauchi, wouldn’t it?” He pulled a thin reinforced phone out of a pocket, and rapidly typed something on it with one hand. A few seconds later, his phone dinged back, signaling a reply.
His dark, tired eyes glanced at it, then he nodded. “Good, we have the go-ahead.” He slipped his phone back into his pocket.
“You want my autograph? All right. But you have to earn it first. Tonight, you’ll be shadowing me, not Tsukauchi. Impress me, and I’ll sign whatever you want.”
Sage looked thunderstruck.
“Are- are you serious? You w-want me to go with you?”
Aizawa raised an eyebrow. “You’re here to learn how to be a hero, aren’t you? That’s what you’re aiming for?”
The teen seemed to rally himself. “Yes!”
“Then you need hands-on experience at being a hero, which isn’t something the police can give you.”
Sage swallowed slightly. “Are you saying you think I could do it, sir? That I could be a hero?”
Aizawa gazed at the teen for a long, quiet moment, Nezu’s parting words from that meeting still echoing in his ears.
Isn’t it wonderful? He’s quirkless!
“Kid. Look at me.”
Nervously, the young man looked up.
Aizawa blinked, and when his dark eyes opened, they were burning a bright yellow-gold. Emitting light that cut through the natural color of his irises like a lighthouse beam burning away mist.
They were the eyes of the Musutafu Cryptid. Proof that the UA Announcer’s quirk had nothing to do with his scarf.
Sage’s breath caught in his throat. “... Eraserhead,” he whispered.
“Yes, kid,” the Underground pro said. “You can become a hero.” He smirked. “You found me, didn’t you? You’ve got potential. More potential than most of the brats I’ve had to teach.”
Shota Aizawa turned off his quirk before it dried out his eyes, and drank the rest of his cup of water in a single pull before tossing it in the trash.
“Come on, kid,” he said, walking towards the door. “You said you wanted to learn how to be a hero? I’ll show you. If you pay attention and listen, I’ll give you that autograph at the end. Just as long as you promise to keep it a secret.”
Sage snapped to attention. “Y-Yes sir!”
The teen fumbled his notebook back into his bag, and hurried after the scruffy scarecrow of a man.
About nineteen. Dark cyan hair, pale purple eyes. High cheekbones. A slightly darker skintone, like someone from Okinawa. A complexion that spoke of long hours in the sun, of a lifetime growing up on the beaches and boardwalks of Southern Japan. And perhaps most distinctive of all, no quirk.
Rock Lock was based out of that area. He’d have to ask the other hero if he knew any local kid that might fit that description.
Aizawa grinned.
Sage, huh? He got it, now. What Nezu had seen. The potential.
That was a face worth remembering.
