37

Chapter Text

Midoriya frowned as he stood in the operating theater. Uraraka had seemed so insistent, so certain before he had put her under. Staring into him as if she had known the things he'd done, the things he was capable of. Her request of taking the augments as far as he could with her body rang in his ears, even as he synced his nervous system with the robotics that he would be using during the operation. The tools of the trade that would allow Midoriya to piece together the mess that had been made of her lower spine, that would allow Midoriya to give the girl the ability to once again walk.

The silence of the theater was broken only by the beep of machines and whir of servos, the air system filtering the air and sterilizing it long before it ever reached the room. He could go further than he'd planned. Could make her better, faster. Could make sure that something like this would never occur again. I could turn her into the monster I've become.

Midoriya shook the thought from his head, even as he decided that the most he would do was reinforce the poor girl's bones and muscles. What's stopping you? You know you need a new generation. A new guard. A new shield against tyranny. You see it, too, don't you? She could be that. She could be the first of a new breed. She could be our first. You know so much more now.

Midoriya sucked in a breath from beneath his mask as he made the first incision into Uraraka's skin. Information filled his vision, shuffling in and out of view as Midoriya needed it, three-dimensional overlays providing guidelines for Midoriya to follow. Overlays that Midoriya didn't need. Operations haunted his dreams, those of his own men, and those of less willing participants. Shut up. We aren't in a warzone anymore. We aren't fighting a gods damned doomed war. There isn't. We aren't. There aren't.

But there are, don't you see it? I see the same information you do. The things they do, the hypocrisy. I know you see it, too. We see the same-

Midoriya sucked in a breath, even as he hissed. "I said shut up." The only response he got was the steady pulse of the electrical grid practically humming underneath.

"Are you alright, Izuku? I detected a spike in vitals." Midoriya almost jolted at the sudden voice in the theater. He closed his eyes for only the briefest of moments to center himself.

"Yes. Thank you, Phoenix. Just having an argument with myself again. Status update?" Midoriya knew there wasn't anything pressing enough to pull his attention away from what he was doing. Phoenix would have alerted him. But if he were honest with himself, at the moment, being alone with his thoughts was more of a risk to Uraraka.

Phoenix was silent for a long moment before speaking again, concern evident in her voice. "Construction of all facilities is going well, as is the dispersal of IGA's. Spark reports construction of the automated facilities is currently meeting the deadline. Athena reports the LC-086-L's have finished the structures that will house bastion systems."

"And Shadow? Any news on All For One and Shigaraki?" Midoriya settled as he spoke to the overseer AI.

"Negative, though Shadow does report several leads as to where they might have disappeared to." Midoriya noted the jerk of movement across the room, beside the door.

"Put a notice up for all A-class operatives and above regarding information pertaining to either Shigaraki or Kurogiri. I don't like not knowing where they are. Doesn't bode well. As for you," Midoriya shifted his eyeline as he picked up the first of many electronics and metal disks that would be inserted into Uraraka before he was complete, "you've been quiet since the hospital. What's pressing on that great big heart of yours?"

"Toshinori lied to us." Midoriya had, admittedly, not been paying too much attention to Shimura when he had asked the question. Pleasantries that had been ingrained in him and had somehow survived despite everything. It was a question he had asked mostly due to the reappearance of his residential specter and not because he was expecting anything to actually come of it.

That is precisely why when Shimura not only spoke of the singular cause of most of his current issues, but also spoke in plural, Midoriya's mind stood at attention, fixating on the pale, gaunt figure leaning against the wall. Even as he threaded microscopic lattice through muscle and skin, he watched Shimura. Watched as the woman struggled with words before trying to slam her fist into the wall. She was met with no resistance, her fist merely passing through as if nothing at all were there.

"What do you mean, 'lied to us.' Is All Might capable of talking with the predecessors? The implications of all of this are already startling enough without that."

Shimura raked her hand through her hair over and over, strands pulling themselves out of their binding and flittering around with her gestures. "No, no. Well, no. Not really. We spoke with his, shade? Subconscious? He never really spoke with us, but we learned everything he learned. So I guess he wasn't lying to us, per se, but. God damn it."

Midoriya quirked an eyebrow at the woman. He hadn't known her long, but seeing a pro hero, especially one that had lived through the Urbans, this distressed was a sight to behold. "How about you start from the beginning?"

"At the hospital, that girl. Then again with your classmate. You heal and you care. But I saw what you did in that simulator. You kill with such ease."

"You think that the ability to kill is mutually exclusive with the ability to care?"

"No. No, god damn it. But this isn't how things were supposed to be. Toshi said that things were better. The war is over! Why can someone like you that's so young kill so easily? Things were supposed to be better! The commission was supposed to protect people, make sure someone like you never had to see what we saw…"

Midoriya sighed as he slotted another piece into place under his classmate's skin. "I see now. Of course, that's the issue. Your information is skewed."

Shimura's head whipped around so fast Midoriya was surprised she didn't break her neck. She stalked across the room until she was beside him, letting out a quiet, "What?"

Midoriya rolled his eyes before gesturing to a spot across the operating table. "First off, please move back into my field of view. Despite everything, I would prefer not to take my eyes off my patient." When Shimura had moved back to where he could see her, he continued. "I don't know why you're surprised by that, Shimura. Your only source of information for the last thirty-one years has been the man literally at the top of the field. The same man that is practically worshipped by the masses of two major countries and has countless fans outside of them."

"You're saying that he's only seeing the best, so obviously we would only know about the best."

"Something like that. Think about it this way, if you have a nuclear weapon capable of leveling an entire nation on its own, why use it on some random crime syndicate? It's not that All Might only sees the best, Shimura. It's that no one bothers to tell him anything else. He hears how his presence itself lowers the crime rate. He hears that crime rates are trending down in his area. Which is great! But it would be better if the area he'd just left wasn't trending up." Midoriya shifted his stance before pulling a hand away from the unconscious girl in front of him and, with a quick mental message to Phoenix, gestured the holographic systems to life in the operating room. On them data spanning the last decade, cycling at a speed slow enough for Shimura to peruse.

"He's a limelight hero. He stops crimes, absolutely, but when was the last time he fought an enemy that was indoors? When was the last time he came across something and didn't pass it off to his agency to investigate and delegate? Years ago, Shimura. How would he know if something's major? From what I can find, the last time was when he fought All For One. Years, Shimura. Years of the man soaking in his own radiance, and he's bought into his own damned propaganda."

"Toshi's not like that, Midoriya. He helps everyone, and the commission wouldn't just use him as some peacekeeping figurehead. If something was going on, then they would tell him! He'd know about anything major happening!" Once again, Midoriya couldn't help but sigh.

"I can't speak to the conditions in other countries, but the Japanese Hero Commission is one of the single biggest problems with how things are going. They aren't the same as when you were alive. Back then, it was a small group of well-meaning people with big ideas. Now? It's a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats. They don't care about morality or actually doing 'good works.' It's all about their image and the power they can obtain. They don't even care if a hero is breaking the law, as long as they don't get caught. They put up yearly popularity rankings where the only reason they include heroes who aren't associated with them is because of the backlash if they didn't."

Shimura was tapping her foot now, nervous energy only becoming worse as she read through the information provided during his rant on the HPSC. Even as she spoke, those nerves leached into her voice. "Oh come on, Midoriya, if things were as bad as that, surely people would be saying things! Besides, how do I even know this information is correct? You could have completely made up these crime statistics."

"Believe them or not, Shimura, I don't care. They aren't even my own statistics. Those were collected by the PSIA. Our number one is as dense as they come, number two abuses his family, and number three is a grown-up child soldier trained by the very institution you're defending. Think about that for a moment." Shimura gritted her teeth, fists clenched at her side. "You're also wrong that people aren't talking. You have a quirkless resistance movement because of how we've been treated all of our lives. You have protests from mutant quirk groups for their own treatment compared to emitters. The New MLA is rapidly gaining traction as a quirk supremacist group-"

Shimura jerked again at that, her face twisting into horror as she stepped back before sitting down on a stool. "But- that. That's completely against what the MLA stood for!"

Does she realize that she just interacted with a physical object? Her fist passed through the wall earlier, but now she can sit on the stool fine? Is it subconscious? Is it- Midoriya cut the thought off. He'd wonder about it later. "Not at all. It's just a bastardized extremist version of the original teachings. But this is the reality of things. I think it's time that you stopped thinking with the information you've learned, and start learning the information you've been given."

Midoriya turned back to his patient; he just needed to suture the girl up, give her the injection, and place her in the gel tank. He didn't particularly need to pay too much attention at this point, but she deserved it all the same. Besides, Shimura had some thinking to do.

…

Midoriya was reclining in his office when his computer beeped and he opened his eyes. He was tired, but after the last couple of days, nothing good was going to come of sleep. Not that anything good ever came of sleep. Uraraka was unconscious in her tank upstairs in the bio lab, and his employees were more than capable of overseeing her condition once they came into work in the morning.

Nedzu had been kind enough to excuse his personal student to do what needed to be done, but even still, Midoriya would have to go back to campus in the morning. As if he didn't have enough on his plate, he now had teaching duties to perform. It had been so long since he'd taught anyone anything, and besides that, would he be able to teach a class that wasn't made up of soldiers?

Why bother changing your teaching techniques? They need to know how to survive. Besides, it's not kindness that the rat is showing you. He is using us as an easy solution. He wants to see what we can do. He's a threat. We need to deal with him.

Midoriya ignored the thoughts scratching at his sanity and instead pulled up the reports that had just come through onto his terminal. One was his own lab work that he'd performed after Uraraka was safe in her tube. The other was Mei's report on the current status of the holographic screens. One that, admittedly, both of them felt was redundant. Mei had been working practically nonstop on the technology and had long since ironed out the kinks, but, much to her dismay, she still had to write the report, if only to adhere to the internal audit trail.

Midoriya skimmed through it but didn't need to read much before he signed off and forwarded the report to their legal and manufacturing departments. One would take care of the paperwork, and the other would begin their rollout of the technology onto the market. Midoriya let himself chuckle lightly at the thought. Hatsume was living her dream right now, changing the world one piece of technology at a time with free reign to work on whatever she wanted. The world just wasn't ready for the girl.

Pulling up the next report, Midoriya got to work reading through the full battery of results he'd received back from the machines and the bio suite's A.I., Sprite. Not that the employees knew that, of course. They'd been introduced to her as a Virtual Intelligence and Midoriya had no plans to disabuse them of that notion.

Most of Midoriya's results were, as he had expected, fucked practically beyond recognition. It wasn't until Midoriya reached his sequenced genome that he verbally groaned. It looked vaguely like someone had taken a sledgehammer to him. It would take weeks of gene therapy to get it all fixed. Midoriya continued to skim through it, though, making a full list of everything he would need to piece back together. Then, Midoriya stopped and grinned ear to ear. He knew every bit of his own genome like that back of his hand. He knew the genomes of each and every person he had ever manipulated, and what he was looking at matched nothing he'd ever seen. Midoriya whispered to himself, "Found you."

The knock at the door had Midoriya looking up from the report and calling out to come in. When Dabi stepped through the door, Midoriya's eyes flicked to the clock and his eyebrow arched up. "You need something? Usually you're napping in the back of the security bots housing bay right now."

Dabi sputtered, cheeks warming slightly. "You- you knew about that?"

"I know about everything that happens inside of this facility. If I had any problem with you taking a nap at two in the morning, I'd have told Athena to tase you instead of waking you up when there was an issue."

Now it was Dabi's turn to sigh. "Of course. I don't even know why I'm surprised anymore. Whatever, yes. The kid's out front again." Dabi pulled up the security footage on the office holo, even as he explained the situation.

On-screen, Nakayama Suto was, for the seventh time in the last two weeks, once again trying to bypass the security on their front door and get into the lobby. Midoriya let out a slight ah. "Want me to get rid of the kid? His mother went home hours ago."

Midoriya laughed. "Nah, let him keep trying. I've been watching him for weeks now, and I want to see if he'll manage it. The lobby security is weaker than the rest of the building's doors, so even if he gets in, he won't get anywhere."

"You want to be able to press charges when he gets in?"

Midoriya waved the idea away. "Again, nah. Mei likes his mother, Chou. Says the woman has a way with materials, which should be a given considering it's what we hired her for. But regardless, this is like a little game, don't you think? It's fun watching the kid struggle, knowing he'll get nowhere even if gets in."

Dabi sweatdropped and deadpanned his response. "Uh-huh. You want to recruit the kid, don't you?"

"He gets through that front door? Hell yes, I do. It's not the best security in the building, but it's still better than some private security institutions. Regardless, though, it won't be tonight." Dabi glanced back at the feed just in time to see the sleek black box in Nakayama's hand practically explode into smoke and sparks. The kid was clearly cursing while he stalked across the parking lot, and Dabi imagined that if the sound weren't off, they would be fairly creative swears.

"Riiight. Well then, since we've cleared up that you're toying with the kid, mind if I go back to my office?" Midoriya was about to tell him that he was good when he narrowed his eyes at him.

"You've not realized it yet, have you?"

"You're going to have to be a lot more specific than that."

"Let me guess at a few things. You've taken to liquid foods and seafood recently, and you have no idea why. When you shower, you've been taking longer showers than you used to, and you've had a weird urge to go swimming. Which is odd, because you've never been terribly fond of water. When you do sleep in your bed, you find yourself burrowing down into the covers and avoiding anything to do with the external world."

Dabi bristled before throwing one of his hands over his groin and his other arm across his chest like some kind of pure maiden. "Oh come on, man. You don't have to spy on me all the time! The showers are just weird."

Midoriya just snorted and rolled his eyes. "I'm not spying on you in the shower, jackass. I just guessed it based on experience. You've not even noticed your new instincts."

Dabi dropped his arms back to his sides before furrowing his brow. "My what?"

"I guess it makes sense that you haven't noticed. They're fairly benign changes, compared to what they could be. Did you think your abilities were the only things that changed from me altering the very literal fabric of who you are? Instincts, Dabi. Without even thinking about it, you've slipped into behavior fitting of someone with aquatic DNA."

Dabi pinched the bridge of his nose. "Are you telling me that I'm a fishman now, Midoriya? Wait. WAIT. Is that why this is like some kind of game to you? Just how much of your DNA is no longer human?!"

Midoriya just smiled at the question before ignoring it entirely. "I'm telling you that you may be slightly more quirky now than before. Heh. Quirky. Quirks."

Dabi just groaned and threw his hands in the air. "Fuck it. I'm going upstairs to get a drink instead of back to my office, unless there's anything else you need to tell me about any other baggage that comes with my new abilities."

"If you start hearing a voice talking to you, tell me about it."

"HA." Dabi laughed before taking in Midoriya's completely serious expression. "OH. Oh, fuck this."

Dabi spun on his heel before exiting the office, leaving a laughing Midoriya still sitting in his desk chair. I like that one. He knows hell but holds onto himself. For once, Midoriya could find that he agreed.