Fencer29 - Aye. Except for, it turns out, Kuroiro. Who takes a chad option in this chapter.
Starlight in the Night - Thank you :D Check my remaining fics, I have several long and fairly successful ones.
Shahryar - Nah, he doesn't have the beak in this continuity, no vestigial mutations due to being first gen. And yes, at the very least, Aiko tried. And let's just say that Geten's new-found respect DOES lead somewhere.
(***)
All for One escaped. But the mind control was gone, Aiko having destroyed all his quirks aside from his primary one, built too strongly for her to influence.
The war was over. Not exactly the one between Hisashi Shigaraki and the heroes (Izuku was almost certain that he was going to go back for a rematch eventually), but the one between the Moderates and the Radicals.
Nedzu - for his inexplicable rodent reasons - sent them a message a few days later, informing them that Six was dead, his mind control over what was left of Russia broken as a result.
Someone practically burned his dacha to the ground, massacring what was left from his security detail (only around ten people, but well-trained). Izuku had a certain degree of suspicion as to who was responsible for it.
In the Moderates' defense, they barely heard anything more from them in Japan. Like in the case of the remaining Radicals, most of them decided that it was time to do some more interesting things with their life.
Izuku could only wonder how many politicians, journalists and scientists that he met during the next decade were omitting the Council of Twelve in their CVs and general work history, doing their best to live a normal life while deciding to bury their past.
For a handful of them, the 'more interesting thing' was settling their grudges. At least a handful of high profile murders during the next few years were suspected (by those in the know) to be Moderates going after leftover Radicals, or Radicals going after leftover Moderates.
That was a marginal thing, though. A lot (most likely a majority, but with a cell structure they didn't have confirmed numbers) of Moderates ended up taking the deal Midoriya offered and jumped for an occasion to score an amnesty.
Chameleon wasn't among them. According to a few Moderates that Aizawa got to interrogate, she realized that even Midoriya can't randomly offer amnesty to someone who tried to assassinate the Prime Minister.
She dashed overseas.
If Izuku heard words on a grapevine a few years later about an underground hero in the United States with a suspiciously similar invisibility quirk, then, well. He wasn't interested in sharing that intel with anyone.
He, honestly, wanted the Moderates as a subject to be finally over.
The name of Council of Twelve ended up successfully buried, its former members not particularly interested in announcing that there was a massive conspiracy and that they were a part of it.
(***)
The first thing that Izuku did after returning from the United States was attending a wedding. His own, yeah.
Sure, from the legal point of view he only married Mei Hatsume. But the ceremony was for all four of them. And even Mei was going to officially stay with her old surname. Izuku… preferred it that way.
All for security reasons. No one but their old comrades knew Izuku's real face and surname. Even if some villains learned any of those, Izuku wanted to make sure that Tsuyu, Ochaco and Mei wouldn't be endangered as a result.
Midoriya wasn't THAT common of a surname.
The next ten years were… chaotic.
The hero approval rating went up and down. 1st gen quirk villains were born and then went for a rampage (some of them Aiko managed to 'fix' afterwards, but most were too far gone). Organized crime reorganized itself to take advantage of the new avenues that the meta-abilities opened.
Shihai Kuroiro was a menace. At its peak, his League of Villains was pretty much a Japan-wide empire of crime, taking full advantage of the fact that the combat heroes tended to be busy acting as political firefighters, trying to keep potential rebellions from exploding here and there.
It got especially nasty once the country finally went belly-up in terms of money, the economic crisis delayed long enough. But it was a crisis with its edge dulled by the slightly more optimistic forecasts of political stability and at least SOME growth in hero-adjacent fields.
It was bad, but not apocalyptically bad. It still made the miscreants and villains more daring for some time.
There were three more coups in the next ten years, but none of them succeeded. The civil war that everyone feared eventually didn't come.
The Meta-Liberation Army surrendered without bloodshed five years after Niigata Mountains.
Destro was a lot of things, but a hypocrite and an idiot weren't on the list. He saw that Japan had a serious shot at not going the same way as many other countries overseas that ended up embroiled by a serious quirkless versus quirked violence.
He just had to make sure that the MLA didn't antagonize the quirkless anymore. And even before the surrender, MLA was mostly busy recruiting and training people, plus launching a handful of attacks on more anti-metahuman groups out there.
Besides, he realized that the coup might go both ways and without it, the MLA didn't have a lot of big things to do.
Nedzu vanished beforehand, of course. No one saw him for a long, long time afterwards.
What the MLA was doing on the Gunga Mountain stayed buried as well, such was a part of the deal that Defiant struck with Destro. Izuku was never going to like that man and he honestly preferred him to stay out of sight over Gunga, but… revenge wasn't worth the problems it would cause.
Many of the former MLA members ended up becoming heroes afterwards. Others settled in more 'quirked' districts, where they acted as a pretty much armed militia to make sure that no one was going to do anything funny.
The government trying to arrest Destro would have probably caused an insurrection.
It was a much needed boost of manpower for the heroes, too. The first decade of the Dawn of Quirks was… hard.
Many heroes died, including some of Izuku's comrades from the Network, Kirishima's words about most of them not getting to die of old age coming to fruition. Others decided that they were tired of trying to save people, many of which still looked at them as some freaky aliens or worse.
Izuku understood all of that. Forcing people to do heroics was stupid from the start, so for as long as you didn't go villain, you could freely leave.
Almost no one from the old Musutafu Branch of the Network was among those that resigned. They built this house together, no one felt like leaving. The missing faces among them were caused by deaths.
Eri could fix pretty much everything else, after all.
(***)
The next decade had a modicum of stability returning to Japan. Tensions calmed down, the country began to experience some actual economic growth, worldwide trade and markets started to slightly stabilize after the Dawn of Quirks.
Slightly was the operative work.
They were still living in the middle of the worst period of societal upheaval in history. Chaos, hate crimes, local wars (this time including quirks, not a lot of people followed the UN ban on meta-abilities weaponization), civil wars and coups…
The list could go on and on.
But after ten years of backbreaking work, Izuku began to see Japan as a country with a future.
He barely noticed it when the 'Symbol of Peace' became his title. It started during the later half of the first decade, when people began to see him as the main reason why the country didn't dissolve into a civil war. Because, for as long as Defiant stood by the Government, so did the heroes.
And for as long as the heroes were there, overthrowing the Government was a tricky endeavor.
The government in question asked Izuku nicely to not speak publicly against the title, because with the situation they were in, the country needed someone to trust. Someone who seemed to be a guarantee of peace in the country.
Apparently, the degree of hope the public had influenced the markets, the countries' ability to take loans (because better atmosphere = better chance of the country being able to pay them off eventually) and kept the potential rebels quiet.
Izuku sighed painfully and agreed. If the public needed a hero, he was ready to be a hero. Besides, that was literally his job nowadays, wasn't it?
Thirteen years after Niigata Mountains, Uraraka Ochaco died during a failed rescue operation. Someone failed to realize that the place might explode… and it did, killing almost a dozen firefighters and Singularity, the country's most recognizable and popular Rescue Hero.
Part of Izuku died that day. Eventually, he persevered. Continued working after a period of mourning, Tsuyu and Mei helped him just as he was helping them. But it contributed to the decision that he was going to make two years later .
A year before that, the career of a great supervillain ended for reasons that the world was never going to learn.
(***)
It was one of the bigger banks in the country, one that just entered a period of financial problems and tried to keep itself afloat with some very questionable means that ended up endangering the assets of some of the people that trusted it with their money.
It was going to be one of their greatest heists!
Or so is Mr. Compress thinking. Then Defiant, the Number One Hero (for fourteen years straight) and the Symbol of Peace randomly shows up, just as the Peerless Thief himself was trying to marble his way into the vault.
Big oof moment. Thankfully, he's there as one of Bubaigawara's copies.
"Aha!" Mr. Compress stands up, deciding that the heist was a lost cause. "Once again, you show up to attempt arresting me, and once again I, the Peerless Thief, shall evade you like a …"
"You son of a bitch." Defiant lets out, fury in his voice.
Uhm, what? That's distinctly not like Defiant. They've fought multiple times, the Peerless Thief achieving the fame unmatched by any other thief in history as a result of being the only villain to manage to avoid being arrested by the Number One Hero during more than a single encounter.
Even Overhaul was out of the picture during his second direct clash with the Symbol of Peace.
"I'm sorry, what's going on?" Mr. Compress asks, maybe slightly freaking out on the inside.
"The wrench on your belt." Defiant replies. He knows he is facing a cloned quirk dummy, so he doesn't move in, him being there is enough to stop the heist from succeeding. So, he just floats menacingly a few meters away from Mr. Compress.
"Oh, this one?" Mr. Compress grabs it, because honestly, there is a history behind it. "Well, I borrowed it from my close friend. It belonged to his wife, whom I was a close friend of too. I decided to bring it with me for my greatest heist as a sort of memento and…"
"I KNOW IT!" Defiant yells. "IT'S MY DEAD WIFE'S FAVORITE WRENCH THAT I JUST LET MY NEIGHBOR BORROW FROM ME! AND ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF HER DEATH!"
Mr. Compress almost ends his participation in this talk by dropping said wrench on his foot. Thankfully, his boots are reinforced, so his bones aren't broken, and his double stays around.
It still hurts.
It hurts even more when he starts jumping around, holding his very pained feet, just to slip on the floor and have a very close meeting with it as a result.
Aiba Manami will have to edit the recording of this heist. Hell, it might be best to cut it out entirely.
"I-Izuku?!" Mr. Compress manages to say from the floor.
"Yes!" Defiant shouts angrily. "You have no idea how pissed off I am to discover that my neighbor was the Peerless Thief himself! I let you babysit my children! I've let you teach your magician tricks to Inasa and Itsuka! And then you do this to me?!"
Okay, now what has to be said is that Mr. Compress has a 1st gen quirk that DID influence his mind. It made him a kleptomaniac, simply enough. Him becoming a fabled gentlemanly thief was, in a way, Atsuhiro Sako finding himself a semi-positive outlet for his … needs.
The thing is, he is a generally decent person other than that, being a bloodless vigilante more than an actual villain.
And he was actually a close family friend of Izuku Midoriya and his three wives (which, by the way, is a big hats off moment in Atsuhiro's book, especially as they were so happy together, it's not an easy thing to pull off).
Plus a small army of children they had.
He actually felt horribly bad for what he did, and that was more pressing to him than the risk of being arrested.
"Look, give me, errr, a moment!" He shouts while standing up. "I'll figure something out to fix it!"
"How are you supposed to fix this?!" Defiant shouts back. That was actually a very good question, their present shouting match didn't feel like a very constructive working environment.
Then, suddenly, Atsuhiro Sako is overtaken by a blast of inspiration.
"I HAVE AN IDEA!" He shouts. "I'LL RETIRE AS A VILLAIN!"
"OF COURSE YOU'RE GOING TO RETIRE!" Izuku yells at him. "BECAUSE I'M GOING TO HAUL YOUR ASS TO TARTARUS!"
Now that was very negative. Then again, they were talking about Uraraka Ochaco, Izuku wasn't taking her death well. Everyone in his vicinity knew that.
"No, no, no, listen to this!" Atsuhiro decides to try to make the situation a tiny bit more… peaceful. "I'm already getting a bit too old for this, and I want my children to have a time to shine. So how about this: I'll escape today. Then I'll plan some really massive heist that will end with me apparently falling to my death or something like this. They'll never find my body and I will leave some cryptic message to the world about me leaving my ill-gotten treasures in some secret place, to make an impact and secure my legacy for the generations to come. How about this?"
Silence. Defiant is probably staring daggers at him from behind his mask.
"I'll also apologize on my knees to you, Tsuyu and Mei, give back the wrench, never borrow anything from you for a different reason than the one that I share with you and never commit a crime again." Atsuhiro corrects himself. "I'll even go to therapy with the kleptomania thing!"
"Your terms are acceptable." Defiant announces after a few seconds. "But if you break them, I'm going to break your kneecaps and hunt you and your comrades for sport."
Mr. Compress' farewell to the world included fireworks, a soundtrack played from several well-placed loudspeakers, a car chase and several hero vs villain fights. It ended up making him a legend to… well, he wasn't quite on the level of fame that Defiant had, but got as close to it as possible.
The next tea party at Midoriya's household was extremely awkward, though.
(***)
Two years after Uraraka's death, Izuku Midoriya decided to announce his retirement as a hero.
Not an instant one. He made it clear during the press conference that he is retiring from his position as the president of the Hero Association (Repulse, the longstanding Number Two Hero, was going to inherit it) and his regular patrol work. He was, however, going to be available for deployments in crisis situations against particularly powerful villains for at least the next five years.
He mentioned his wife dying recently (he didn't mention her name, that it was two years ago and that he technically had two more wives) and that he felt like he had to focus on his children.
Izuku did his best to make the transition to be as peaceful as possible. It was still kind of bumpy.
He also began to look for someone in the younger generation of the heroes to inherit the One For All. He treated it extremely seriously, and it took him almost four years to find a candidate that he felt was good enough in the moral department.
All for One returned to Japan in the meantime, engaging Shihai Kuroiro in a war for the control of the underworld that lasted for a decade. One of the fiercest gang wars in history, too.
All for One won, but it was an extremely narrow victory. He was gaining ground at a snail's pace, the League deeply entrenched and developing a capital R Reputation after keeping the heroes (even Defiant to a degree) at bay for years.
Kuroiro apparently died in a random gas explosion that enveloped his headquarters, together with most of the League's leadership.
Two weeks later the Hero Association headquarters got a package, addressed to Defiant - under his real name. Inside was a hard drive filled with data about All for One's operations, and a picture of Shihai Kuroiro in a Hawaiian shirt, drinking cocktails with Cloud and Mastermind, both Intelli and Oboro wearing rather skimpy swimsuits.
On a tropical beach, that the heroes never managed to identify.
Most of the League of Villains' budget evaporated with its executives.
The tale of the inception of One for All that Midoriya's successor got from him was significantly simplified and censored.
(***)
Izuku Midoriya retired from being a hero completely at the 20th anniversary of the Esuha Bridge battle.
His job was as complete as ever. The new society was still fragile, but much less than at the beginning. Things were slowly but steadily improving, even the world outside of Japan beginning to overcome the chaos that the Dawn of Quirks brought.
He still attended some official events. He also took some trips overseas (especially to the United States), mostly to give lectures about hero-related subjects and attend some more official events.
But his job as a hero was officially over. He left it to those who were younger and much more driven than he was at this point. He even left All for One for his successors to deal with, although with a pang or two of guilt over this.
He was, frankly, tired. Wanted to focus on his children full-time. Be a hero for them. Losing Uraraka, one of the three crucial pillars of support he had, was a bit of a breaking point to him.
He didn't want his children to grow up without a father simply because some two-bit villain got lucky.
The last public event he attended was four years later, around the time that Mirio Togata lived up to Mirai Sasaki's expectations and was elected as a prime minister.
Izuku died eleven years later, at the relatively young age of 54. The cause of death was a heart failure, probably caused by living in rather extreme stress for years.
His state funeral was one of the biggest public events in the history of Japan. But he was actually buried elsewhere, next to Uraraka.
(***)
The most surprising part of what Izuku believed to be his death was the fact that once it happened, he opened his eyes again. Feeling much, much better. And younger, too.
Not like the concept of afterlife existing was that much alien to him, Paladin's endless attempts to make him convert (although mostly by example and explanations of certain things rather than straight conversion talks) gained at least some ground.
So yes, something after the death wasn't that much of a surprise.
Izuku landing in the same afterlife as Yoichi Shigaraki - the man standing in front of him with a rather awkward look on his face - made much less sense.
"Look, I…" Yoichi tries to speak. Izuku interrupts him with a punch to the face, Shigaraki recoiling back. "I… I really had it coming, didn't I?" He sounds resigned more than anything.
"Yes, yes you did." Izuku replies dryly. "I have a lot of words to say to you, and probably some more physical violence to indulge into."
"I assure you that whatever words you want to share with me, I've already told them to myself." Yoichi replies, straightening himself up after a punch. "I had a lot of time to reflect while being, well, technically trapped here."
Izuku decides to postpone another punch for a moment.
"And where is 'here'?" He asks, looking around. It's… pretty much emptiness wherever he looks.
"It appears that I underestimated my own creation." Yoichi replies. "One For All stockpiles not just power, but also more. Including the egoes of their past Holders." Izuku blinks at him. "We're in a bit of an entrance space, which is why it's so empty. I figured out how to be able to shape it enough to make it livable and see the world through the eyes and ears of the present Holders in the meantime."
"So, you've seen it." Midoriya replies after a few seconds of digesting the news. "What your Moderates did, and…"
"Yes, yes I did." Yoichi replies, looking down. "Despite thinking about it for more than three decades, I still didn't find the appropriate words to apologize for what I did, and to thank you for cleaning up my mistakes."
Remorse wasn't something that Izuku expected.
"So you realized that you fucked up?" Izuku asks dryly.
"I've watched my family and the country suffer over what I did for years." Yoichi replies. "I've seen Ayako kill herself, I've heard what happened to Uraraka, I saw how Hosu looked like. Justifying what I did to stop my brother was much easier when the victims were numbers, not faces."
There is actual pain on his face. Actual, genuine pain. Unlike his brother, Yoichi was much more expressive.
"Worst of all, you've made me realize that all of this could have been avoided." Yoichi continues. "Do you remember the day when you and Aiko tried to convince Hisashi to give up?"
Izuku nods. He doesn't remember a lot of details of that day, it was more than thirty years ago, but… he knows that it happened.
"I know my brother." Yoichi says. "I can read him like no one else out there. For a few seconds, he actually considered it. I saw him as the epitome of evil the whole time, I stopped trying to convince him of anything years before the war, but… at that one moment, he had to choose between his family and his empire, and he would have chosen the former if not for the fact that losing everything to me traumatized him to the point where he couldn't stomach it anymore. Maybe, just maybe, if I had kept trying to talk with him, all of that wouldn't have happened." He looks at Izuku with sadness and resignation on his face. "Thank you for at least giving him the chance."
"It appears that…" Izuku replies. "... you've made a lot of mistakes." He then sighs. "You've at least realized that you've made them, and seeing how many former villains I helped to turn over a new leaf, trying to punch you again after you've shown genuine remorse would make me feel like a hypocrite. So, I won't."
Besides, they are supposed to spend who knows how many years here. He can't continue screaming at him all the time, right?
"I think that I'm going to start making up for what I did to you right now, even if it happened accidentally." Yoichi replies, Izuku giving him a questioning stare. "You see, when I gave the quirk to Inko, I didn't realize that she had a latent quirk, probably some form of telekinetic 'pull' too weak to manifest, judging from what you get."
"And?" Izuku asks.
"Well, with One for All being just born, it was slightly influenced by it." Yoichi continues. "Its 'pulling' capabilities were enhanced. In short, it doesn't stockpile just the users, even if I think it only stockpiles their quirks due to needing a DNA sample for it to work. It also draws the personalities and egoes of people that are very close to them. In, errr, mostly romantic sense."
Izuku is about to ask what Yoichi means by 'stockpiling quirks' but that's when he realizes the implications of the rest of his words.
"Ochaco." He lets out. "She is in One for All?!"
Yoichi nods.
"Tsuyu and Mei will inevitably join us too, the link already established." Yoichi then adds. "I don't know why it picked only romantic bonds, but I guess quirks are unpredictable in the end. She's waiting for you deeper inside, but, errr, I think you have someone else to meet first. And it's not even Inko."
Izuku is still trying to mentally process the realization that he was going to meet Ochako again. But he still manages to give Yoichi a questioning look.
"Well, the effect was amplified beyond just the romantic relationships while it was Inko herself who was holding One for All." Yoichi replies. "And I really think that it's time for you to meet your number one fan."
Someone materializes out of nowhere. Short brown hair. Glasses. Shy look on her face. The only thing that's not like he remembered is the fact that all her clothes are official Defiant merchandise.
"H-hi, Izuku." Ayako says, her voice trembling a little. "I-it's been a w…" He doesn't let her finish before grabbing her into a hug, tears streaming off their faces with an intensity that would make Inko proud.
The family is together again.
Izuku realizes how much when Yoichi tells him that Aiko figured One for All's underlying mechanisms with her quirk and didn't tell anyone to not ruin the surprise. Instead, she used One for All's quirk boosting mechanism to write herself and Asa into the quirk, meaning that they were going to pop up inside after their deaths, together with their love interests.
He is going to have a very serious talk with Aiko. But in the meantime, he has his long-dead sister, his long-dead mother and his long-dead wife to hug the daylights out.
(***)
A bit sweet, a bit sour.
In the end, the 'trio of great villains of the Japanese Dawn of Quirks' included Mr. Compress [the Peerless Thief], mythical quirk thief [All for One] and Shihai Kuroiro, the god of organized crime. Destro was, instead, a big point of a 'what if' historical theorizing. With some counting him among the Big Three [making it a Big Four] and some not.
The OFA working differently thanks to Inko's pull was heavily implied by Nedzu in the fic, so no, this wasn't taken out of nowhere :v
Yoichi and Hisashi were, at the end, both rather nasty people. But Yoichi was the one among them that realized it, which can't be said about Hisashi 'two centuries grudge' Shigaraki.