That night Izuku seals the stolen sheet into an envelope and stops at the address scrawled on a piece of paper, he knows he'll probably have to do more for them to even consider him for talking to All For One and he wasn't actually sure if he could help or they were just bluffing, but he guessed it was worth a shot since he didn't have anything to loose.
He was willing to do pretty much anything they wanted him to do if it put him closer to his goal, put him closer to the black X on his calendar.
The address he's sent to is an old house, the windows are mostly boarded up and the ones that aren't are broken. He pushes the door open and it creaks as it moves, if he had been able to be harmed or killed he may have been a little creeped out at how desolate and empty it was- a good place to kill someone and not get caught.
He lingered on the thought as somebody else walked in, covered in a long coat and looking like someone who you'd avoid on the streets.
"You the UA kid?" his voice is a little raspy
"Yes"
"Got the information?"
Izuku hands him the white letter with nothing written on the front, the man slices it open and checks the contents
"The league thanks you"
It's a couple seconds and he's pulled a gun and shot Izuku in the chest, he falls to the ground and it's not long before the black in-between takes him.
Izuku comes to at 12am on the dot, it's a little annoying that he's going to have to go to another shady looking 24 tech shop in the part of town his mum has warned him about for years, and it's more annoying that he was killed and has to go through the next two hours again.
He seals the letter shut again, sneaks out of his window again, walks to the same tech shop and buys the same burner, walks through the run down part of town and arrives at the building a good ten minutes early and hears two voices, that was new.
One is over a phone line that he can't make out and the other is the man that shot him
"You want me to shoot the kid?"
"To injure or kill?"
"Make an example... got it"
The man clicks the line off-
"Did the league tell you to kill me"
he seems surprised that Izuku is there
"I guess you heard that" he begins to reach into his pocket
"Why do they want me dead, can I at least know that before you shoot me"
"How did you know I was going to-" he sakes his head lightly and pulls the same gun out of his pocket "- because you're a spy, now UA will know not to try and fuck with the league again because their kids will get killed"
"Ok"
"Ok?"
"You're going to shoot me whatever I say so is there a point to dragging this out? Just shoot me already"
"You crazy suicidal or something kid?" he shakes his head to himself and raises the gun, he doesn't hesitate in shooting him in the chest, though this time it's a little lower and he doesn't slip into the darkness after a short few seconds
"The kid you hired is fucking insane Shigaraki, pulled a gun and he said he 'wanted to get it over with'- yeah of course I got it" he says into some sort of transmitter on his sleeve, Izuku makes note of it before he departs.
Izuku wakes up at 12am on the dot and thinks he might just have a way to get out of being shot, it's risky but he supposes he can take as many risks as he wants, Katsuki has been asleep for too long to wake up and bother him.
He sets to work, wearing some old winter gloves to seal two letters- one holding information marked with a black X and the other plain and empty-, he grabs a little extra money and sneaks out of the window earlier than before , he thinks he could get away with leaving out of the front door but doesn't want to risk it just in case.
He stops at the tech store like he has twice before but instead of heading straight to the old rickety house he's died in twice he heads to an equally shady store and buys a small packet of lighters- whoever serves him barely looks at what he's buying in accordance his age and just takes his payment without a word.
Izuku arrives at the house half an hour early still wearing winter gloves he's sure he hasn't worn for at least two years. He opens the lighter packaging and stores it in another pocket, rolling the flint is unfamiliar but not difficult- if he's going to prove he's not a spy for UA the way he's suspecting he neds to he's going to need nothing traced to him.
He pulls both gloves off and puts them in his pocket, after removing them he rolls the lighter again and it illuminates a pocket of the night.
With almost a scrap of hesitation he holds the end of a thumb above the flame, it burns in a way it never has when he wasn't dying. It's a reflex to pull away from what's hurting and sending trickles of pain across his whole hand and making it feel a little numb, he fights the urge to flick the lighter off and call it a day.
By the third finger the urge to pull away has left, and by the fifth the pain is almost completely null as his hand grows number ever second it's under scorching flame.
It's an almost methodical process, roll the lighter and hold a finger under it until it starts to become unbearable and then flick it off and let the light quickly die out.
His fingertips sting and by the time he gets to the second hand and has to roll it with a freshly burned thumb he considers backing out but ultimately decides doing a half job is a waste. He finishes and has twenty minutes until he's meant to meet the guy who's killed him twice, and ten minutes until he actually shows up.
With tender fingertips Izuku removes the two letters and his knife from his pocket and lowers himself to the ground, it hurts to grip his knife and pry one of the loose boards of the floor up but he grits his teeth and shoves the letter marked with a small black X in the corner underneath it and lets it fall back on top of it. He wipes the blade off on his sleeve and sets to do his next course of action.
The man that kills him has a gun, and he's obviously not going to win a gun fight with a knife, so he has to find a way to get rid of it- the first thing that comes to mind is to just kill him but then he considers that the man is a good bit taller and stronger than him and he'd have to take him by surprise and kill him very quickly, the easier thing to do is to threaten to burn the fake letter.
Izuku switches his lighter for one he hasn't used yet and keeps it in the palm of his hand with the letter in the other, and then he waits.
It isn't long before he hears his voice again, he's saying the same as last time though he's a bit far away to hear it as clearly as the time before.
He enters the house and sees Izuku
"You the UA kid? You're early"
"I am"
"You got the info?"
Izuku holds the crisp white letter up and the man reaches for it, he pulls his hand back
"Take the gun out of your coat pocket and put it on the ground first, then kick it away"
"I ain't got a gun-"
Izuku rolls the lighter with protest from his sore thumb and holds it below the letter
"Take the gun out of your pocket or I will burn the information in this letter to ash"
"You're bluffing"
"You willing to find out?" he holds the flame a little closer, it's a slither away from licking at the paper and the man reaches into his pocket and points it at Izuku
"I'll just take it from your corpse"
"Except this isn't the real letter and the one that actually has the information in is hidden somewhere only I know- so shooting me means you have nothing and the one person who can tell you where you could have something is dead"
Izuku raises the flame to the letter and lets the flames eat at it greedily, he drops it to the ground where it continues to burn and illuminate the room with flickering light.
Reluctantly, he lowers his weapon
"Drop it, kick it away", with a glowering look in his eyes he does just that, it lands with a metallic clink and slides across the old wooden floor.
"Where's the real letter?"
Izuku points to the floorboard he pried up earlier and watches as the man strides over and crouches down, with his heart pumping a little Izuku silently moves closer to him
"It's under the floorboard", the man mutters something about him being a smartass but keeps on trying to pry the board up, he sees the glimpse of white and reaches for it. Izuku moves behind him and silently flicks open his knife
"This better be the real thing-"
Izuku presses the knife to his neck from behind him
"What the fuck-"
"Why does the league think I'm a spy"
"What? Because you're from UA obviosouly, you're not gonna help without a bullshit hero motive and you're not gonna hurt me cause you're too good" he sounds almost smug, Izuku presses hard enough to draw a little blood, he breathes in a little sharp
"You want to test that out?"
"You're not gonna kill me, you aint got it in you"
His overbearing confidence really makes Izuku want to just slice the knife across his neck to spite him, but he keeps his hand steady despite the protest his fingertips are giving
"It would prove I'm not a spy"
"You're bluffing, you go to that hero academy I bet there is not a chance you're gonna kill me"
Izuku almost smiles a little to himself, by himself with someone who's killed him twice he can almost justify lavishing in this, savouring the rushing feelings that happen in almost no other situation.
"You thinking that makes this so much better"
The man splutters and makes a sound akin to a gargle as he slumps to the ground with blood pouring from his neck, Izuku grabs the letter before it can be soaked and stands up straight, sparing but a glance to the dying body of a stranger.
He crouched down again and slowly took the coat off the man, he took the small device out of the mans ear and wiped it off on his sleeve before putting it into his own. He picked through the sleeve of the coat he'd seen him talk into and found a small wired microphone taped to the inside, he ripped the tape off and unthreaded the microphone from the inside of the sleeve and wrapped it around his own hand.
He pressed the small red button on the small microphone and held it in
"Kiyomori is it done?"
"Not quite, I think you should send someone else over- Kiyomori is a little dead"
He hears faint swearing from the other side
"Who killed him?"
"I did, if you want the information I'll give it to someone who won't shoot me"
He hears more swearing and the line is silent for a moment, he almost thinks they've hung up until
"Someone will be over in ten minutes" the person on the other end sounds annoyed and Izuku is a little glad
"Ok"
The line goes dead and he takes the earpiece out and drops the microphone on the floor next to Kiyomori's body- there's a rather large pool of blood surrounding him and it's splattered on his hands and clothes, he doesn't like how it feels and reminds himself to take of the jumper he's wearing and burn it before he leaves the house.
Ten minutes go by and the blood pool has stopped growing bigger and started getting a little darker- he wonders briefly what will happen, whenever he's killed someone he's always reset pretty much right after. He guesses that he's a villain and nobody is going to look much further than it just being a dispute among villains that turned fatal for one of them, nobody is going to stretch far enough that a fifteen year old attending UA did it.
Another man shows up in a shorter coat, he looks to the body and swallows a little
"You got the information?"
Izuku offers the hand that has the crisp white envelope splattered with a little blood and marked with a black X in the corner. Almost hesitantly it's taken from his hand
"The league thinks you've proved you're not a spy, no hero would endorse this and no straight laced hero kid would follow through- they'll be in contact"
And with that the other man puts the letter in his pocket and leaves, no gunshot and barely a second look at the corpse lying at Izukus feet and the bloodied knife he's still holding.
Izuku puts the knife in his pocket, strips his jumper off and lights it on fire with another roll of a lighter.
The flickering light illuminates the shining pool of blood by Izukus shoes as he watches the clothing burn and feels a weight of contentness sink into his chest and put him in a slightly better mood, not sparing a second glance to the man he killed.
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Sorry about the problems with chapter five, I had no idea it had repeated itself- I think I've fixed it now but sorry for not noticing for so long, I posted the first eight in one big chunk since I already had them out on other sites, I'll make sure I double check I haven't repeated the chapter by accident in the future x
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If this fic isn't for you and you want to review I only ask it's constructive, if it's mindless hate I will ignore. But if you don't like it why read this far?
