"Am I the only one in our group not getting adopted?" Hitoshi asked, throwing his lunch tray on the table and elbowing Shoto good naturedly. Shoto smiled, leaning against Hitoshi's shoulder as he sat down.

"You literally met my parents last week," Neito grumbled.

"Fair enough. But you and I are still less than half of our group. We're the minority."

Himiko looked up from her tray, her cheeks distended from all the food she had scarfed down. "Shoto isn't getting adopted. His brother is just becoming his guardian. That's different."

"Why are you guys ruining the joke?"

"Three of us will be in a single guardian household though," Shoto pointed out. "Izuku and Neito are the only ones with two parents. They're the minority now."

"Hold on, Neito and Hitoshi are the only ones with moms. They're the minority," Izuku said stubbornly.

Hitoshi perked up. "Wait, Neito's parents are the only ones in a straight relationship."

"Ew, heteros," Shoto said in a deadpan voice.

"Shut up, Hitoshi. Your mom is straight too."

"She's been single since my dad ran out on us, so who knows if she's straight or not."

Neito snorted. "You don't know if your mom is straight or not?"

"It's not like I've asked her."

"Okay, but how did she react to you being gay?"

Hitoshi gave a shrug. "She didn't care. I came out to her in early middle school. Told her that I was gay and that I thought girls were weird. She laughed, said she had known for a long time and that she still loved me."

"That's about how my mom reacted," Izuku laughed. "I think I was about 11 or 12 when she sat me down and pointblank asked me if I had a crush on Bakugou."

Shoto wrinkled his nose while both Hitoshi and Neito made matching gagging noises.

Himiko laughed loudly. "Bakugou? Seriously?"

"She couldn't figure out why I still tried to follow him around even though he was mean to me. Obviously, I told her no. I mean, he's… he was like family to me. That'd just be weird. But I admitted that I did like boys instead of girls and she just breathed a sigh of relief and said she just didn't want to see me get my heart broken."

"Aw, that's sweet," Himiko said with a grin. Her eyes slid to glance at Hitoshi and Shoto. "I wouldn't want to see you get heartbroken either."

Neito followed her gaze, his own eyes narrowing slightly. "No, I think none of us would."

"Oh, shit, just forgot I promised to give Sero some pages on their quirk to help with some new ultimate moves for them. I'll be right back," Izuku said, grabbing his backpack and hurrying across the cafeteria to find Sero.

As soon as he was gone, Neito and Himiko descended on the other two boys like a pack of wild dogs.

"Why the hell haven't you asked him out yet?" Himiko asked in a hiss.

"He's oblivious, we all know that," Neito said. "You're going to have to just tell him. We're sick of seeing all of you pining."

"Yeah, so just suck it up and ask him out."

"We're working on it," Hitoshi snapped.

Shoto nodded. "We're making plans. You can't rush these things."

"Well, you need to hurry it up. He's going to think you guys don't like him."

"If he doesn't think that already," Neito grumbled.

"We want to wait until his adoption is finalized and Shoto's custody gets settled."

Neito frowned. "Are you worried that if Shoto is dating Izuku, that the courts will be worried about Natsuo taking custody? Like, they'll think he's a bad guardian or a bad influence for letting you date a rehabilitated criminal?"

"No! No, not that," Shoto quickly said, his mismatched eyes looking almost panicked. "Things are just going to be crazy and we don't want to complicate things. His life is already stressful enough, we don't want to make it worse."

"I don't think two sweet and caring boyfriends is going to make his life worse," Himiko said, laughing.

Before anyone could respond, Izuku returned, his notebook open in hand. "I think Sero and Shoto could do a really cool move together. I was just talking to them and they were telling me about how they built up the strength in their tape and I think with Shoto's ice, they would be able to slingshot themselves at high enough speeds that it could rival Kacchan or Aoyama. I've been writing up the calculations. What do you guys think?"

The rest of the day was normal, up until just after class, when they were walking back to the dorms.

"Dek- I mean, Midoriya!" Kirishima called, chasing after Izuku, Hitoshi, and Shoto. The two taller boys closed ranks, blocking Kirishima from reaching him.

Izuku rolled his eyes. "Guys, it's fine. It's just Kirishima."

"It's fine! I get it!" Kirishima said easily, smiling. "I get the same way about Katsuki. Speaking of, I overheard you talking in class the other day and it sounded like you said you were getting adopted by Aizawa-sensei and Mic-sensei. Is that true? Because I thought Katsuki's family was adopting you."

"Oh. I thought Aizawa said he spoke to Auntie and Uncle. Yeah, Aizawa and Mic are adopting both me and Eri. We decided it was best for me to be in an environment that I've always seen as positive, or at the very least neutral. I have some… bad memories associated with Bakugou's house. And I mean, Auntie and Uncle are great but I don't think they'd give me the most stable home life. They're always having to travel and work late because of their fashion design business. With Aizawa and Mic, one of them is almost always home. If neither of them can be home, another hero or the Big Three are there. Plus, I'll be able to be with Eri, which I really, really like. She's family, you know?"

Kirishima nodded. "I totally respect that! It's so manly that you were able to look at the whole thing logically. I definitely wouldn't have been able to. Do you want me to say something to Katsuki about it?"

"I mean, if you think you should. It's possible his parents already told him and he just didn't say anything. He didn't want me living with him anyways, so he probably doesn't care much."

"I don't know about that," Kirishima said, rubbing at the back of his neck. "I'll talk to him. You guys have a good night!"

With that, Kirishima hurried off, likely in search of his friends.

Hitoshi, Shoto, and Izuku continued back to the dorms, talking quietly between the three of them.

"We were planning on watching a movie in Hitoshi's room tonight," Shoto said, glancing at Izuku. "Would you like to join us?"

"Oh," Izuku said with a slightly confused look on his face. "No, it's okay. Thank you though. I don't want to intrude on your alone time together."

"No, it's okay. We're happy to have you with us. That's why we invited you," Hitoshi said quickly.

"Thanks, but I'll still pass. I'm going to do some studying tonight. You can tell me about the movie later."

Izuku then scurried off, leaving Hitoshi and Shoto watching him, disappointed expressions on their faces.

"Maybe next time," Hitoshi said, taking Shoto's hand and giving it a squeeze.

Shoto nodded and allowed Hitoshi to pull him away to get snacks and get settled in to watch the movie.

Izuku had made a beeline for his own room, quickly shutting the door behind him. Searching for something, anything , to distract him from the combination of jealousy, guilt, and longing that was swirling inside of him, he pulled out the phone Nighteye had given him from the place he had hidden it. Powering it up, he saw that he had a new email from Nighteye.

The pair had been exchanging emails fairly regularly. Mirio was getting better control of his quirk, leading to less injuries and more applications. Yet, Nighteye still probed for more information, actually encouraging Izuku to read more about these past heroes who had had similar quirk evolutions. Occasionally, Nighteye would find and provide more documentation on them, but Izuku was finding most of his information from his own searches, which he hadn't told Nighteye about.

At this point, Izuku had a handful of connected theories, all of which he was almost positive were true.

Somehow, someway, all of these heroes had the same quirk. Not in the sense that they were related and inherited similar or identical quirks, but that they later in life gained the exact same quirk as the person who had trained them. They would go from having their own quirks, some of which were incredible all on their own, and then suddenly, as a teenager or young adult, they got a power up. They were suddenly stronger, faster, and their quirk was even more powerful than it had been before. And each of them had one physical similarity: the glow and lightning.

When they would go to activate their quirk and use their strength, a glow would appear around them. In some cases, there would be a flash of lightning across their body as well, just like Izuku had seen with Mirio. For each person, it was in a different color, and as time went on, the quirk being used by different people, the glow would get brighter.

The earliest recorded use of the quirk that Izuku could find only showed the user occasionally having a low level glow around them, almost like an aura. By the time All Might used the quirk, he regularly was showing up at villain fights basked in a golden glow, streaks of lightning following his fists as he threw punches. Mirio was a little different. He was completely covered in the lightning, his own being blue. It crackled and snapped around him, zinging out from his body occasionally as though it were on the verge of going wild any moment.

That led to the next theory Izuku had. This quirk, whatever it was, got stronger over time. And it had finally reached the point of no return. One wrong move, one slip of control, and Mirio could accidentally destroy himself or someone else. It was too much power inside his body. No wonder he had kept breaking bones! Luckily, with Izuku's advice, Mirio was now redirecting the energy in ways that kept him from hurting himself constantly. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best they were going to get. Mirio just had to continue practicing and finding ways to use the energy to boost his own permeation quirk.

During his digging, though, Izuku found something else that had him concerned. He'd found confidential files mentioning a mysterious, seemingly ancient, villain known only as All For One. The villain had been around for a long time, wreaking havoc from the shadows. With his quirk, he was able to permanently give or take quirks, rewriting a human's DNA.

With a little digging, Izuku was able to piece together that All For One was the one to injure All Might, causing the hero to have his time limit. All Might claimed that All For One was dead, but Izuku had serious doubts.

First off, there was no body. Unless you see a body, they aren't dead, in Izuku's opinion. Second, All For One had apparently killed Nana Shimura, All Might's mentor, and had also targeted and killed her husband.

But buried, deep in a hidden Commission file, was the mention of Nana Shimura's son, who she had to put up for adoption in order to keep him safe from All For One. The boy, Kotaro Shimura, was quickly adopted, but the Commission didn't keep track of him past that. A quick search of public records found his marriage license, along with the birth certificates of his two children, Hana and Tenko Shimura. What was also found were death records for the entire family. It was nearly impossible to find anything about Hana or Tenko past that though, almost as if they were wiped from the internet, but after some digging, Izuku found something.

A news article from a number of years ago, printed in limited quantity and from a newspaper that had since gone under from lack of sales, talked about a freak villain attack that completely killed the entire Shimura family in their home, leaving behind nothing but a pile of rubble and a little blood. Even the family dog, a cute little corgi named Mon, was dead. Pictures of the family were included in the article, one of which was a close up of Hana and Tenko.

Hana looked like a sweet little girl, with messy bangs and sleek pigtails. She was smiling idly at the camera, her arms wrapped tightly around her younger brother, Tenko. Tenko seemed shyer than his sister, a gentle smile on his round face. His black hair hung down into his brown eyes, which were rimmed with scratches and small scars. A mole dotted his chin, in the exact same place as Nana's was. Overall, Tenko was the spitting image of his grandmother.

In the same way that Tenko was the spitting image of Tomura Shigaraki.

Everything finally made sense. The reason that Shigaraki's quirk always seemed so weird to Izuku was because it wasn't really his quirk. All For One gave it to him. The red shoes Shigaraki wore that always looked so much like Izuku's were actually quirkless shoes, just like the ones that Tenko wore in the photo, so different from his sister's plain white shoes. Shigaraki's decay quirk was eating away at him. That was why, over the time that Izuku knew him, it seemed like his hair was getting paler.

Looking at the photo of Tenko, Izuku could see that the boy was a bit tanner than Shigaraki was now, as though the color had faded from his skin. Granted, that could have been because Shigaraki never goes out in the sun, but that didn't explain his eyes; brown as a child but red now.

There was only one possible answer.

Shigaraki's quirk was leeching the pigment from his body and turning him albino. Eyes were sensitive, and they were living tissue, meaning that pulling the pigment from them would have happened quickly, taking them from brown to red, leaving them the same color as other albino people's eyes. Hair, on the other hand, was made of non-living cells. The initial activation of Shigaraki's quirk appeared to have been forceful, judging by the state of his childhood home, so it was possible that his black hair could have been turned blue in a sudden burst of decay. But as time went on, Shigaraki's hair would have grown out paler and paler. Eventually, one day, his hair would be pure white. That is, if Shigaraki lived long enough. His genetically quirkless body was not built to handle the strength of such a powerful, and possibly tampered with, decay quirk.

The mysterious Sensei that Shigaraki always spoke of had to be All For One, tucked away and hidden from the world. Maybe he was weak from All Might's fight, or maybe he was gathering his strength for a new attack. For whatever reason, All For One was in hiding, puppeteering everything from the shadows and using Shigaraki as a pawn in his game.

Izuku was hesitant to bring this to anyone's attention. What good would it do? Obviously the reason that All For One gave Tenko a quirk and raised him to be a villain was to hurt All Might. But with Mirio now having All Might's power boosting quirk, then it was less likely that All Might was ever going to fight All For One again. No, Mirio was the one who was going to have to use it and hopefully kill All For One for good. So if Izuku brought it up now, he was risking hurting All Might and weakening an already weakened hero. They needed All Might in top shape to continue to train Mirio. It wasn't like this was knowledge that would help the heroes in any way, it would only make things worse.

Izuku thought about telling Aizawa and Mic, or maybe even Nezu during their one-on-one sessions, but decided against it. They were all only just starting to trust him, and admitting to having contact with Nighteye and a contraband phone, along with hacking the Commission again, was only going to get him in trouble. They'd lose all trust in him and he'd be back to having to be monitored 24/7. That, and if Aizawa and Mic were angry enough, they might cancel his adoption. Sure, they said they loved him and that they cared for him, but in the end, Izuku knew that love only went so far when it came to adults.

So for now, Izuku decided to keep quiet. That didn't mean he wasn't going to try to probe Nighteye for more information. Just yesterday, Izuku asked Nighteye where he had gotten all the files, including the ones on Nana Shimura.

Hidden away in his room, Izuku was finally able to get his answer. He opened the new email from Nighteye and frowned at the message.

' I keep track of anything that could potentially hurt All Might. It's my duty .'

Izuku quickly typed a response. ' So you can protect him? Are you doing the same for Mirio? '

Nighteye responded almost right away, which Izuku found odd. Opening the email , he saw perhaps Nighteye's shortest response yet.

' Of course. '

"What's that mean?" Izuku grumbled, powering down the phone and hiding it again. "Of course it's for protecting All Might or of course he's doing the same for Mirio? Or is it both? I still don't understand."