Plexiglass flexed slightly as Izuku laid in his bed, tapping the back of his skull against the walls of his cell rhythmically to kill off the silence while he flipped the coin given to him by his sham of a therapist. He didn't hate the woman, but even he had to admit she was bad at her job. Though she used to be a beat cop and he was likely her first case, so it's natural for her to suck at it. He had been down here, a month? No...maybe? He was losing track of the days and frankly he was losing a reason to care.

This place was likely to be his tomb. He was going to die in this hole with the world slowly rotting away while he aged into a feeble old corpse that couldn't even stand. He caught the coin as it fell, grasping it in his fist. This wasn't how it was supposed to end, he was meant to die fighting or by his own hands. Not locked away until time corrodes his body into dust.

Briefly he thought back to that night with Himiko and the revolver. God how lost were they both at that one moment? He could still hear the click of the hammer while she clung to him with tears running down her cheeks as a fatalism set deeply into her eyes, ready to go with him. What the hell was he thinking?

Izuku pondered this and realised he wasn't, he allowed his emotions to overrule his sense of logic and nearly paid a price for them both. Oddly he chuckled, it was like the old man said, women will make you do crazy things if you care enough. Again his mind drifted back to the topic of the Symbol of Evil and not for the first time that day.

Sensei was dead, truely dead. He couldn't come back from what happened, not even with all the quirks in the world. Izuku examined the coin once more, digging his thumb nail into the grooves of the copper. He didn't blame All Might for killing the old man, that was strictly business, especially given their past. Yet the longer he was down here, alone with no one even to talk with, he realised something.

He honestly missed the old bastard and in a strange way, he found himself feeling...vulnerable. It was an unusual relationship to be blunt, Sensei acted differently towards him and it showed. The only comparable instance he could think of would be Tomura, but even then Tomura had an air of...not fear so to speak, rather hesitation. Like he was worried about making a fool of himself in front of the man while Izuku couldn't really care less.

At first he thought it was because he got results for the old bastard, but then after a few weeks, it became, for lack of better word, personal. First it was just to talk about their plans for the future, then came the lessons on how to talk to people, and so on until one day, after three months, he started to ask about his mother of all things.

Again he examined the coin, running a finger over the engraving. How was Himiko doing right now? Was she huddled in the corner of some run down shack bawling her eyes out or murdering with a vengeance to get him back? Are the others keeping track of the phases of the moon for her or is she falling back into her old disorder?

A shudder went across his spine, god how he missed her, how he needed to hold her in his arms again, to feel her cry into his shoulder and bite into his skin and drink until the urges stopped. He wanted to have the weight of her crashing him down to the floor as he held her close, to feel her hands wrap softly around his neck while he dragged his nails over her back.

He blinked, suddenly realising the effects of his thoughts were having on him and sat up, ashamed of what was happening for the poor bastards forced to watch him.

Still that left just more thoughts, were they all even still a unit or did any of them desert the cause with Sensei's passing? Did Kurogiri pull something out from his back pocket like he always hinted at? Is Tomura able to cope with the loss well? God, that last one hurt him. He had mixed feelings about the guy, but even he saw the fragility of him, how one swift breeze or harsh word could utterly shatter him. Sensei was the only thing close to family that Tomura trusted and now…

Izuku slammed a fist into the plexiglass as fury built inside himself.

"God dammit to hell! I'm not supposed to be-"

His rant was cut short by the sound of the mechanism of the elevator twist and turn to life. Moments later, the duel doors slid open to reveal another new visitor to his personal slice of hell. The squat form of principal Nezu strolled inside with the stoic smile he always wore. The beast was alone with nothing save a briefcase that seemed to be the size of his torso.

"Good afternoon Mr. Midoriya, I trust I'm not interrupting anything too important at the moment?"

Izuku was about to tell the rodent to go fuck himself when he remember some of what Sensei taught him and how Tomura looked during his outbursts.

"No, I was just passing the time until my dinner. How have you been, sir?"

Nezu opened the case and pulled out a mini tea set along with a battery powered stove top and began to make a cup of tea for them both.

"Overworked and sleep deprived, but that's another story. How have you been taking to your situation thus far?"

"I bear with what I must. Besides, it's better than being dead."

A steaming cup was placed into the food slot by the animal which Izuku accepted and nodded in thanks as he took a sip while Nezu spoke.

"I agree wholeheartedly, yet I feel you may have a more...colorful way of putting it."

Izuku shrugged.

"I'd prefer this to be a pleasant experience for us both, god knows I could use the company down here."

The teacher studied him for a time, his black eyes unreadable much in the same way Moonfish's were. Setting his tea down to the floor as he sat cross legged from the teen, Nezu's tone became oddly serious.

"Are you lonely?"

The boy nearly flinched.

"What?"

"Are you lonely without your comrades around?"

He shrank back a bit at that.

"Of course, it's only natural. I was around them for over a year."

Nezu took a sip from his brew, a smile no longer resting on his face.

"But allow me to ask, why?"

Izuku thought to glare at his senior, but reconsidered, there would be nothing to gain from antagonizing the man who could send him into a worse place.

"They were my friends, my family, that should be enough of a reason."

Nezu's expression hardened deeply at this. His face bordering on animalistic from how his rodent like teeth peered out from his lips for a moment before he took another sip of tea.

"But didn't you miss your classmates and your teachers? What about your mother as well? Surely you must have felt loss from not being able to see any of them."

Izuku leaned back slightly in an effort to gain more space from the beast with his back now touching the wall.

"That's true, but I had to face the facts. I was a murderer without a quirk, I had nothing and they still wanted me. Without them things would have been so much worse for me. I was a freak, a monster and a bastard and they still valued me. It wouldn't have been right to do anything else."

The room suddenly felt colder from inside the cell. It was like the very act of speaking had brought a chill to the young man, one that caused goosebumps as soon as another question was asked, but if it was due to the former or the latter, he couldn't tell.

"But what if they hadn't? What if everything done thus far was a falsehood, a way to make you see things from their perspective? After all, didn't All For One claim to remove your ability to use your quirk, thereby putting you in that position to begin with?"

Izuku darted his eyes to one side as he tried to swallow one more sip of tea.

"Well...yes, he did, but that doesn't change the fact they still treated me better than most people would have."

Nezu took a moment to refill his cup, his coal black eyes never leaving Izuku's.

"Then why do you have all those scars on your body?"

A heavy blush came to the teen as he rubbed the back of his neck.

"My...I...Himiko had very unique tastes and well...I kinda got used to them."

The tea cup was lifted to the rodent's mouth and after a long sip, set it down to the floor with a thud.

"I see."

There was a long pause that seemed to suck in all the air around them.

"Mr. Midoriya, were you ever scared of your friends?"

Izuku gained more of his hesitation as he pursed his lips, silently thanking whatever power granted him this tea while he took an exaggerated drink to buy time.

"...At times, but that's just how they are, they're killers and worse, I would have to be insane to not be fearful at times."

"Why? From what I heard from you, you must have had no reason to be afraid at all."

Inhaling his anger, the teen moved towards the food slot in the door and set his cup down to be refilled.

"They...have issues, issues that make it hard for them to live in society as such, I tried to help them the best I could."

Nezu took the empty cup, placing it aside for now.

"And despite your best efforts, it didn't lessen the self destructive habits they had. Even though you sacrificed part of your soul for their sake, the damage was too great. So you abide by their whims, so long as it isn't too heinous of course, slowly watching these people you considered family wasting away in a pool of their own making. All the while you try to pull them up, but slowly start to see the rot take root in yourself and before you know it, you're in a bad place as they are. Still though you try in vain to save these people who you loved, giving more of your soul until at last you feel nothing but the pull of the others as they start to wish for it all to end. So you react and before you knew it-"

He pulled both of his paws together and struck himself in the belly as if he was stabbing himself.

"You end up putting a knife in your belly. Only that doesn't kill you, so you march ahead into the suffering to come, secure in the knowledge that they will always be with you, until the people you so treasured start to die themselves. Leaving you with nothing but ghosts of a passage through hell."

Izuku didn't know what to say to any of that. For a brief instance he knew he felt fear, actual soul rending fear when his former principal spoke so...casually about such awful things.

"What would you know about anything like that?"

Nezu said nothing, instead he stood up from his spot on the ground. His paws fumbled with the buttons of his suit and in seconds the fabric fell from his shoulders, revealing the bare fur to the teen, or what was left of it.

Red tissue was mixed into the patches of white hair that crossed the sea of scars of his torso. Along the lower part of his neck were what looked like puncture wounds of circular dots the size of Izuku's pinky digit, but it was what he saw along the rat's belly that nearly made him vomit.

Sitting near the very base of his torso was a stab wound the size of his hand.

"I know more than you could ever imagine young man. During the very start of my life I was little more than an animal, with no thought of anything other than my next meal, but quickly, oh so quickly, my mother and I were taken by a group of humans. These...monsters subjected us to experimentation in order to see if there could be profit in growing the intellect of animals and through much trial and error, I was made. They pumped me full of quirk stimulants and god knows what else until I grew self aware enough to communicate."

He reached for his tea, shifting the liquid in the cup as he drifted back to his "birth".

"I could read and follow patterns, but I couldn't speak. So they implanted vocal cords into me, and once that was also proven as a success...they did more procedures, growing my frontal cortex until I was smart enough to beat most of them at chess, adding new, strong limbs for me from other failed subjects until I could stand up right, always slicing me open to make me "better" as they put it."

More silence followed as Nezu grew quiet, looking up from his tea to the now horrified Midoriya.

"How many have you slayed? Fifty? One hundred? Two hundred?"

Izuku took the question with more terror than even when he first spoke to All For One, honestly dreading what was to come next.

"I...I don't know. Two thirty six?...Maybe. I stopped keeping count after a while. W-Why do you want to know?"

Nezu gripped his cup with such strength that cracks began to form in the ceramic, his ugly, ratish teeth showing in full.

"Have you heard of the Uzumaki Tragedy?"

It was like the wind was struck from the former hero as he heard the name.

"That...that was the single worst terrorist attack since the start of the emergence of quirks. The Tokyo rail system was bombed during the simultaneous collapse of the entire sewage system of the city and the resulting destruction made almost every building in a fifty mile radius collapse...four hundred thousand people died in less than five minutes."

Nezu stared at the boy, his expression utterly blank as the words came forward while Izuku looked at him like he was some demon.

"I was the one who crafted that plot, made every model and specification for the explosives, I even created a perfect plan for those whom I thought were my family to slip away without notice. The authorities would have never found us if one of my hairs hadn't somehow survived the blasts. They found the people who took me and battered them like dogs while I bit and clawed while the heroes carted me away. I had thought to kill them to escape, but by some divine act of mercy, one of the heroes managed to sedate me before that."

He approached the plexiglass, placing his paw to it, allowing his torso to be seen in full.

"I would have died with those people if that hadn't happened, because despite all the torment and pain, I was grateful to them. I thought they had saved me from my simple existence and did my best to repay them for that, but no matter how much I suffered for them, I knew as a mathematical certainty that if this went on, we'd all be dead in less then a decade. Still I followed because I had nowhere else, no one else."

The knuckles in his other paw popped as memories flooded back in droves.

"Then after I saw those thousands of silent faces staring back at me from my computer monitor, there came my escape from the madness. I was given a chance to see things as they were and cared for by the best of humanity. From there I eventually gave my testimony and decided that in my clarity to ensure that no one ever suffered from what happened to me, or those that took me or those that died because of me again. I vowed to ensure there would always be people that could save those that needed it, that those who had the ideals and the soul to guide the lost back into the light had the tools to do so."

Izuku suddenly felt as small and helpless as he had been as a child begging for his mother in the dark under Nezu's gaze.

"Why are you telling me this?"

The mutant turned back to his briefcase, pulling free a manila folder from a secondary compartment and slipped it into the food slot of the cell.

"Because I want you to know that you're far from the only one to be deceived into horror by fools."

The teen picked up the folder, opening it to find a single piece of paper. He read it. Then he read it again. And again and again.

He looked up at the fellow murderer in a mixture of fear and anger.

"This...this isn't true! You're lying! You're fucking lying to me! They would never do that to me!"

Nezu said nothing as he turned away without emotion towards his briefcase and dug deeper into the pocket, pulling a syringe filled with a neon blue fluid.

"Think, you know you quirk is senitent to a degree that has every reason to resist that ancient ghoul, yet in spite of it, he was able to seal it away for nearly a year without needing to batter it back down when your predecessors would fight tooth and nail to grant it back to full strength? If you doubt my claim, then inject yourself with this. It's an overhauled version of Trigger that would flush out any suppressants in your system."

Izuku clutched the needle in one hand, a feeling of disgust from the mere sight of the thing brought him to nearly double over while Nezu continued.

"If you regain use of your ability then I am correct and if not then your assumption was correct, you will know the truth with that syringe-"

Suddenly the mechanisms of the cell door twisted and in a split second, it opened. Nezu gestured to the elevator with a paw.

"-and regardless of what happens, you'll be allowed to walk freely from here. I offer that to you in return for you to humor me. My access card is the upper pocket of my jacket and all you need do is to take it."

Izuku stared at the opening like a trap was about to be sprung, but he had to take the opportunity to simply step out of the cage. His feet touched the stone floor of the basement, feeling like he was in some dream. Still the syringe seemed to weigh like an anvil in his hand, yet in his other there came the cool touch of metal as he reached into his pocket unintentionally.

"Amori Fati, Love Thy Fate."

He stared at the coin then shifted his focus to the elevator in front of him.

His freedom was in front of him, and all he needed to do was just take that plunge.

With a fumbling speed Izuku tore off the sleeve of his jumpsuit, baring his right arm to the world. He stabbed the needle into his skin before his fear could stop him. When the blue fluid entered his body, a violent chill found him which laid him low to all fours as he felt bile rise in his throat. Darkly pink matter fled from his mouth, staining the stone with it's foulness.

Then another sensation came, one that used to fill the young man with hope and joy, but as the crackle of blue energy came from deep within him and flooded out into his limbs, Izuku collapsed, unable to even support himself as he cried into his own vomit.

Tears flowed freely with all the despair he had towards the light, curling into the fetal position as the greatest power in the world swirled around him. He was unsure of how long his mind was lost in the sorrow before he felt something soft touch his shoulder.

Nezu smiled at the boy with every ounce of kindness he possessed. Slowly he waited for the light to return to his eyes.

"You feel as if the very world itself is crumbling right before you, aren't you Izuku? I've been there before."

He reached out to the animal, his grip made feeble by his emotions with a certain pain that none could grasp, none save for the person in front of him.

"W...What should I do? The League...they...they-"

Nezu knelt down to meet his eyes, his eyes blazing in such a way that even All Might lacked, silencing the youth.

"You move forward, for yourself and every other poor soul that you've seen suffer and made to suffer. If you believe the system to be corrupt, then fix it from within. Be an example to those that need it, instead of wasting your existence on hate and regret. You look to every sin you've made and move to make amends if only for the simple fact that you can. Grab what's left of your time and make it worth something, prove to those that both need you and think you're nothing that you're more than that."

The creature clutched both sides of the boy's head, his hold made unbreakable by his resolve.

"I can help you do that Izuku, but only you may choose what happens. Your potential isn't limited by that tragedy, as such I ask you once and only once more. Will you let me help you prove them wrong about you? Will you make a mark that will last long after you're gone to the hearts of countless generations that will follow your example to improve the world?"

Izuku stared back at the monster, unable to say anything due to even his panic and sorrow vanishing at the all consuming nature of what he heard. His body trembled, but his answer was made clear when he embraced his savior, dragging him into the muck as he sobbed out one word over and over again.

"Yes!"