A World of Smiles, a my hero academia/僕のヒーローアカデミア fanfic

In Elseworlds, super-heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places - some that have existed, and others that can't, couldn't or shouldn't exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow.

She sits silent in her chair, idly drumming her fingers against her lap. One, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight. Nine, ten—no, wait, it was only nine now. What happened to ten? Did she lose it in a fight or tear it off as a show of force? It was hard to remember, partly because she was getting old, partly because there was only so much she could still care about.

Looking down at her hands brought attention to her clothes. She was still in her white and gold phase, apparently; white body with gold trimmings and accents. She liked how the cape pooled around her neck like a sort of puffy collar; David was a true master of his craft.

However, she didn't like how the gold accents converged into something so reminiscent of his old outfit. She'd have to kill her stylist for that.

"Um, maam, are you ready to start the interview?" She blinked twice before remembering that she was talking to someone. Brunette, ponytail, slightly above average appearance. Right. Shuju Tokugawa, the reporter from Hero News Association.

"Yes, I'm ready. Fire away," she said. It was a half-truth, but that was good enough.

"Okay, in three, two… Good morning, Japan! I'm Shuju Tokugawa with the Hero News Association, and I hope you're smiling as wide as I am!" It was forced, but it existed, so she didn't care. "Today marks the XX year anniversary of the day when Japan was fully unified into a country where everyone can smile every day, an ideal that quickly spread across the entire world! I'm here today to interview the incredible woman who made this all possible: the Symbol of Peace and the Woman of Tenka, Ms. Nana Shimura!"

She bit her tongue to stop herself from frowning.

"I'm sorry, but were you not briefed on the proper procedures?"

"O-Oh, right, sorry. I-I meant to say Inanna, of course I did! I just thought it'd be best to give your real-your original name for those who weren't familiar, but then again, who isn't familiar at this point, right? I mean—"

"That's enough. What's done is done, so let's move on," Inanna said, still smiling all the while.

"R-Right. So! Inanna! As I said, it's been XX years since you unified Japan into a country of smiles, and from then on, you kept going until you created a world of smiles. How do you think that was possible?"

"With corpses." The words came out of Inanna's mouth as naturally as air.

"C-Corpses?"

"You're surprised, I'm sure. I can't blame you for that. No one wants an answer like that. When people ask about how those in my position brought about big changes to society, they want to hear things like, 'I was able to do it friendship, hard work, and victory,' or, 'I couldn't have done it without the support of my friends and loved ones,' or some other idealistic crap, but that's no good. You people-my people deserve more honesty than that, and the honest truth is that a lot of people had to die for this world of smiles to be born."

"And what a great world it is!" Tokugawa let out a small, desperate laugh. Inanna hoped she wouldn't have to deal with that.

"The only thing I regret about it is that it wasn't just the corpses of my enemies. Most of them were, but too many were the corpses of dear… allies. Not a day goes by when I don't think about their sacrifices."

"That's very noble of—"

"And how utterly wasted they were." Tokugawa dropped her microphone. The speed at which she picked it back up just barely allowed it to be excusable.

"E-Excuse me?"

"So many of my allies died absolute nothing deaths, you know. They got shot in the face with bullets that should have been easy to block or avoid; they got blasted with beam attacks that should have been easy to deflect; they got skewered and impaled by bastards that they should have—"

The armrests on Inanna's chair started dissolving for a few seconds before she caught herself. This wasn't the place to lose your cool, she told herself. Not the place, at all.

"They got skewered and impaled by bastards that they should have… should have just ran away from. Then again, I'd be lying if I said that one of those times didn't work out for me in the end… even if it was all my fault."

Tokugawa was asking something, but Inanna didn't hear her. She felt the world melting away around her as her mind drifted back to a day far off in the past.

The day that Nana Shimura died.

As Nana kept crying out his name over and over, all she could think about was how it was all her fault. She tried to push him away, but when he grabbed her arm and stood his ground, she started to think, "If we work together, we can beat him." So she let him stay. And then he lost an arm and had his body blown to bits; his torso provided a basketball-shaped window to the bloodied ground beneath her feet.

As she kept crying out his name, the man who did it floated in the air and laughed. He gloated about how he won, chortled about how fun it was to see hope fade away into a pathetic pile of ash, and boasted about the inevitability of Doom as he teleported away with a smelly pool of sludge, vanishing seconds before Sorahiko could land a kick on him.

Sorahiko came back to the ground and said something to Nana. She had stopped yelling his name at that point, but she still didn't hear Sorahiko; all she could hear were her own thoughts cursing her for her own stupid bravado. It did a great job of getting her husband killed years ago, and now it was doing a great job of killing her son.

"M… Master…" Toshinori's voice broke through all of it. She didn't smile. She didn't pick him up and drag him to the hospital. She didn't let herself feel hope, for she knew he was going to die.

"Toshinori?" All she did was stay on her knees to listen to his last words; it was all she and Sorahiko could do.

"M… Master…" He coughed up splashes of blood as he spoke, only ever repeating that same line over and over again. Eventually, it was just quiet, incoherent mumbling, followed by a "Come closer" gesture from his one remaining arm. Nana had no choice but to oblige, so she leaned in close to hear what he had to say.

It was only two words: "Eat this."

"With his one good arm, All Might, he… he shoved a bloody hair into my mouth," Inanna said as reality reformed around her.

"I-Is that right?" Tokugawa asked. Tokugawa didn't say anything to prompt the statement from Inanna, but she didn't care, in all honesty.

"In an instant, I could feel One for All flooding back into my body, and then some. Not only did I regain the power I lost when I created All Might, but I gained all of the power he received upon becoming my successor. I was more than three times as strong as I was when I first met him, and all it took was for him to die. I failed the boy I saw as my own son, reaped rewards from his untimely death, and do you know what he did as the life faded from his eyes? He smiled. In spite of it all, the boy smiled at me. We're all idiots, aren't we?"

"Yes? Oh, but you're by far the smartest of the idiots, Inanna! I mean, if it weren't for you, then this great society that we're all just grateful to live in wouldn't exist, right? Of course it wouldn't!"

That one she brought upon herself, so she'd just let it be.

"Regardless, I decided then and there that I needed to be better than I was before, that I needed to become a true Hero. I spent years not only mastering the new power All Might gave me, but stopping every crime I could, no matter how big or how small it was. Before All Might died, I told myself that it would be better to keep myself out of the spotlight and focus solely on the goal established by my predecessors. What a fool I was, right?"

"I-I wouldn't know, honestly." She was lying, because of course she was. It was foolish, especially when one took into account the reasons for why she did it. It wasn't because of the death of her husband, nor was it because she gave her firstborn up for adoption; either one of those would still be an excuse, but they'd still be better excuses than the truth.

"Still, it worked out for the best, didn't it? Thanks to your worldwide endeavors of altruism, you were able to establish a legion of fans and allies that was spread across the entire world!" Really they were people she could have die instead of her, but that was splitting hairs. "Thanks to that, when it came time for you to finally overthrow All for One—"

"Seimei," Inanna cut in, a deep harshness to her tone of voice.

"What?"

"His name wasn't All for One, it was Seimei. When we called him All for One while he was alive, we bought into the idea that he was an unstoppable monster, and when we do it long after he's dead, we buy into the idea that he's a personification of Doom that transcends death, but that's wrong. He was never any of those things; he was a man who was just as capable of cruelty as anyone else, and as I proved, he was just as capable of dying as anyone else. He never should have become anything special, so that needs to be reflected by never referring to him by anything other than his actual name, understood?"

"Y-Y-Yes! Of course! Please forgive my mistake!" Tokugawa started bowing incessantly. "S-So! Like I was saying, thanks to your valiant efforts to spread peace across the world, when it came time for you to finally overthrow All for—I-I mean Seimei, you were able to come at him with an army the likes of which the world had never seen!"

Inanna wished she didn't need to have seen it, but there was a lot that you couldn't control in life. You couldn't control who followed you with blind, cultist faith; you couldn't control how people died for the sake of your cause; you couldn't control the words your enemies threw at your face as they were dragged down to hell.

You could certainly control how painfully they died, though.

Once again, the world melted around Inanna, and Nana Shimura was inside the Diet Building, leading the charge on her assault of Justice. Naturally, she received opposition from guards, the police, the JSDF, and whichever other people All for One had in his pocket, but most of them weren't around to deal with her. Most of them were outside on the streets dealing with the rioters protesting in her name; she didn't tell them to do that, of course, but it was working in her favor, so she didn't say anything.

A bullet from a human-shaped obstacle struck her in the stomach only to harmlessly bounce off. As she walked over and punched her would-be assailant in the face, she thanked the heaven for the new suits David Shield built for everyone—white was a good look on her, it turned out—and for how she got him to push himself beyond his limits to be able to do something like that.

"How's everyone doing?" Nana asked into her headpiece.

"Never better!" shouted Cow Lady; Nana could hear her headbutting guards in her transformed state.

"I could do this all day!" shouted Electoplant; Nana could hear him blasting people with electricity. They were among the Heroes she met abroad who decided to join her in her quest for peace. Good kids, especially since they had actual strength that could be relied upon. If they died, then at least it would take a while.

"Shimura, we've got trouble!" Sorahiko shouted. "There's reinforcements coming from everywhere. More police, more JSDF, even some Heroes!"

"How is that a problem? Just keep fighting them," Nana said as she kneed someone hard enough to knock them into three other people.

"The problem is that we need you to come back and help us! We've already lost six people—"

"And we'll lose more if we try and drag this out." Someone threw a grenade at Nana. She caught it with one hand, and the explosion did nothing. The person who threw it received a punch to the face; it felt good.

"Shimura!"

"I'm too close to him now. If I turn my back on him now, I'll never get back to him! I refuse to give up this chance!" She heard words of encouragement from everyone except Sorahiko.

"Shimura!" Nana took out her earpiece and crushed it. Every word coming out of his mouth was a distraction, and she didn't need it. Not now. Not ever.

Not anymore.

The door to his office blew apart like straw, and sure enough, there he stood, stuffing papers into a briefcase in a panic that made it look like the world was ending. The entire world obviously wasn't ending; only his.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Prime Minister," Nana said, the honey-laced tone of her voice masking deadly venom.

"You. Of course it's you," All for One said, barely turning to look at her. That wouldn't do. She wanted him to look her in the eye at the end of everything, so she flicked a bullet of air at him. The pain made him give her his full attention, just like she wanted.

"Even this wasn't enough for you, was it? You had to have it all! Now we're on the verge of a war that could destroy the whole planet!"

"It didn't have to be like this. It could have been perfect. It could have been paradise."

"A paradise built upon a mountain of corpses. A paradise that thrived off of Doom." Nana said that, but as of late, she felt like one of them wasn't the worst thing in the world. "And I let it get this far because of the law, and the will of the people."

All for One laughed. "The people? This is all their fault, and they're going to burn for it. Burn!"

"To think that my disciple lost his life to someone who's little more than a mad dog."

"Maybe so, but this old dog still has a few teeth!" All for One opened up a drawer at his desk that contained a large red button, one that his thumb hovered just a few centimeters above.

"What's that do? Release the toy you got from William Rudolph?"

"Oh, so you've heard of it, have you? I needed something to make up for losing Ujiko and Machia, after all, and once I threw enough money in their faces, the Americans were happy to oblige."

"Don't think you'll get the chance to take him off his leash. There are at least a dozen ways for me to stop you, after all."

"But none that don't involve deadly force. And you Heroes don't do that, right?" He looked and sounded so sure of himself, like there was no way for him to not be completely in the right on this.

She needed to fix that.

"Here's number five." Nana pointed her arm at All for One, and tendrils of dark energy shot out towards him. She loved that she could practically hear his eyes widening as he went for the button, but just in the nick of time, Blackwhip coiled around his arm, lifted it up into the air, and ripped it clean off of his body.

"It's not the same arm he lost, but it'll have to do." Nana's words were drowned out by his screaming, but she didn't care.

"You… You! That Quirk… How do you—"

"A funny thing happened when Toshinori gave me back One for All. You see, not only did I receive power that far eclipsed what I had when we first met, but I also gained the ability to activate the Quirks of my predecessors. The vestiges of them said that it had something to do with how powerful One for All became after I became the technical ninth user. They all had different opinions on how I should go about things, but in the end, I was able to get us all to agree on one thing: that you needed to go down, once and for all."

"Is that right?" All for One said with a laugh. "Still, who knew that I was giving my cute little brother such a powerful weapon in the making? I truly am too generous for my own good."

Nana flicked another bullet of air into his face, puncturing his eye and making it bleed. As he writhed in pain, she activated Blackwhip once more and wrapped it completely around his body, allowing her to pull him over his desk and slam him hard on the floor in front of her.

"Your reign of terror ends today, All for One. There's no bouncing back from this; no more strings to pull, no more cards to play, no more anything. You lost, and it's time everyone knew it."

"What? So… after all of that, you're just… you're just taking me to the authorities?"

"That's right. If Toshinori were here, he'd want you taken in by the book, so that's what we're doing." Nana headed for the door, dragging All for One behind her as she prepared to showcase her victory for all to see.

Then he started laughing. She had heard him laugh before, but unlike before, it wasn't out of cockiness or self-satisfaction. This kind of laughter was the kind you made simply because you thought something was funny; a perfectly normal reason to laugh.

It was so unsettling that it made Nana stop moving.

"I almost can't believe you, you know. I've spent countless decades trying to force this country under my thumb, destroyed the lives of an immeasurable amount of people, brutally murdered your disciple in front of your eyes, and yet you have the nerve, the gall, the audacity to say that you'll let the courts work everything out? How can I not laugh when faced with such ridiculous idealism? Of course, it's to be expected from someone like you, which is why I said that I almost can't believe it."

"Yeah, yeah, all us Heroes are idiots who live and die by our morality."

"Oh no, when I said, 'someone like you,' I didn't mean a Hero, I meant a user of One for All."

"What? What's that supposed to—"

"It never had to get this far, Shimura. After my cute little brother passed down One for All, every single one of you had the means of taking me out. Number Two through Number Five—can't even remember their names, anymore—they were strong enough to defeat me, what with how few Quirks I had during their lifetimes. You, All Might, and Number Six lacked the raw power, sure, but look at how you're making up for it, Shimura! You've got an army of nonessentials marching outside the Diet demanding my head on a pike, and you've got an army of Heroes inside doing whatever they can to make their wish come true. You didn't need to watch a teenager die before your eyes to do something like this. You could have done it at any time, yet you chose not to, and do you know why that is, Shimura? Do you know why you, All Might, and Number Six didn't do anything like this? Why Number Two through Number Five kept making so many mistakes in their fights against me? It's because you all needed to keep me around to feel better about yourselves!"