I do not own My Hero Academia nor these characters.

The option to add Yoichi and Second as individual characters was not an option on the settings while publishing this, so for clarification this is about the initial movement of One for All and focuses on the first two holders, but the Third and Fourth also make an appearance.

All for One was a crafty man. The different spy cells working against him had to be individualized cells for a very good reason. Little to no contact with their superiors. Passing information along in drop points that changed daily. Two spies could be working together undercover, be as close as coworkers or even lovers, and they will never know the extent of the other's involvement.

It was like this for a reason. All for One used a variety of trickery and business tactics to a whole new level. Pinning him for so much a parking ticket was next to impossible. Shell companies and offshore bank accounts. Lawyers that would take the fall. Witnesses that refused to testify.

So the resistance had to be trickier.

Plans weren't made in advance, not really. No one cell leader knew all the intel, even someone as high ranking as Ichi. That was too much of a risk if even one of them was captured. Often he fed false intel into his own men and his comrades, and he was sure that many false intel was given to him as well. His commands were given in the forms of cigarette paper under his standard issue cup, or spare change given to him with numbers just barely engraved on the side of a coin.

He never questioned his orders. He never failed a mission.

His cell was not as crafty as the other spy cells in the resistance. If a single man was a tripwire, then he and his men were IEDs. Perfectly crafted weapons of destruction. Silent until necessary. Powerful, quick, and near impossible to detect.

It was a last minute operation. A suspected cache of illegal weapons to be supplied to a particularly nasty hate group and the three armored vehicles guarding it. His men had prepared on a single overlook. Silent as the night, still as the sand, they waited. His cell was perfectly trained for this.

Ichi shot out the windshields with his meta ability, and the raid had begun.

All for One valued heavy hitters. He created powerful meta abilities, combining them and manipulating their strengths until they did what he asked without hesitation.

That power came at a cost. Heavy hitters fall the hardest.

Ichi put a silent dagger powered with his meta-ability to the head of one of the drivers while another comrade instantly filled the road with sand, burying the axles and wheels of the caravan. A third comrade, one with iron claws instead of nails, cut the locked doors effortlessly with her meta power.

One of the vehicles came to a full stop and the passengers jumped out, ready for an all-out brawl.

That was their mistake. The 15th regiment of the resistance didn't do brawls. The fourth member of their team, a non-meta human, was on them in less then a second, slashing away at their hamstrings and Achilles tendons, leaving the meta monsters lying on the ground, gasping for air.

He looked to Ichi for permission. Ichi only gave a sharp nod.

The monsters weren't gasping for air any longer.

"Leader," Claws called from the back of the van. "There are no weapons in these crates. Only bottles of alcohol."

"Allow me." The sand-user said. They opened a crate to find nothing but glass bottles stored carefully in styrofoam peanuts. Sand held one to the faint moonlight, swirling the contents. Then they popped open the bottle and gave it a faint whiff, before recoiling in disgust.

"Napalm."

Sure enough, the liquid inside was a gelatinous substance, the same consistency as sweet flan cake.

Ichi's brow furrowed. "Claws, get the driver's bodies and haul them back here so we don't draw attention with discarded bodies. We'll drop the vehicles at location AZED and send a scavenge team out later to pick over for parts."

Claws turned and lept out of the truck. Ichi pried open a few more crates to see if they contained anything other than the explosive substance.

Sand gestured to the napalm-filled crates. "What should we do with them?"

"Back to base. They could be useful in future missions. We'll have to inspect each one for tracking devices."

More likely, the napalm will just be detonated in a secure location to reduce the risk that stockpiled weapons come with. But it could never hurt to pad up their arsenal a bit.

"I can make the process easier. Instead of several hundred bottles of napalm, what about just one?" Sand grinned dangerously. "Glass is made of sand, after all."

Ichi considered it for a moment. "Do not explode us."

"Have faith, Leader."

It was that moment that a pawn in wait burst out of another crate, sending wood and straw everywhere. Her mouth was full of fangs, and pointy growths on her skin and teeth that looked damn near razor-sharp. Sand dodged a swing of her long tail and Ichi-

Ichi had a moment of uncharacteristic panic.

Shocked by the suddenness of it all, the dangerous substance around them, and the situation that called for stealth, he didn't try to use his meta ability. He had six bullets waiting to go at his max velocity, grinding in his gauntlets. A release of his mechanism is all he needed to end this pawn's manipulated life.

But that is not what he did. Instead, in an entirely uncharacteristic bout of panic, he entirely ignored the training he had put himself through for the mastery of his meta ability, and punched.

It felt like some sort of pressure behind his joints was released when his gloved fist made contact with the pawn's skin. Time slowed. It warped with the pressure in his joints, only stopping when he followed through, knocking her through the wall of the container and onto the gravel road. The truck slammed once, twice, before steadying itself. Sand quickly manipulated the particles around them to keep the cargo upright.

Slash was on the pawn in less then a second, a knife shoved into her trachea.

Sand only stared in shock, the glass still warped around them as the held the crates, suspended in the air. "Leader?"

Ichi stared at his arm. Angry red welts rose on his skin, conjoining at his joints and following the tendons under his skin. His lungs screamed for oxygen, but he forced himself to breathe deeply, inhaling and exhaling with the thunderous drumming of his heart in his ears.

He recognized this power immediately. He knew it all too well.

A soft kiss exchanged on their standard issue cots. Frail hands grasping at his sides. Soft and sweet lips pressed against his own. A bob of white hair that Ichi could recognize at any distance, a careful smile when they were alone.

Yoichi.

"Leader-" Sand said again, before Ichi cut them off with a sharp glare.

"Don't. This may be wiretapped." He shushed Sand before they could say any more. Their eyes widened. "Work quickly. This doesn't change anything."

He turned to Slash. Slash was eyeing him with a cold and analytical look, one that Ichi swore could see into his very soul. He glared back.

Driving back to their drop-off point was silent. It may have been the jar of napalm precariously balanced between Claw's legs and arms, or the proud silence of a job well done.

But for Ichi, it was a silence full of questions he couldn't quite answer.

The base was always an underground hum of activity, despite the secret nature of it all. Warded by meta abilities who could reveal truths and lies, guarded by soundwaves and old-war early detection systems, it was both a high command and a city shelter turned fortress, turned unyielding against the storm. It valued chaos as a deterrent to All for One's order, and to an untrained eye it seemed to hold nothing but disorganized and desperate people. It was cramped and crowded, bare electrical work and spray painted cement bricks. The lights flickered occasionally, privacy was devoted by makeshift walls of cloth or scraps of wood and hallways that seemed to loop back on each other, never ending.

To Ichi, it is a well crafted and oiled machine. Men and women darted about, rooms held no clear purpose, and the injured rested near anywhere, well cared for and well rested. With no central nervous system and no clear high command, the way to spread information was on a cell-to-cell basis, a whisper in the eternal busy work of their resistance.

An octopus has no brain, and instead stores information and memory in its tentacles. One could tear off a few of the tentacles and it would still live. It would grow back its arms with time and regain its strength with practice. It becomes craftier. Its skin is hardened with scar tissue. It becomes harder to kill. That principle of design was how the resistance functioned. It would be very difficult for a spy to infiltrate and gain proper information and intel in this manner. One could try, of course. Several times traitors have tried. All have failed.

One cannot gather information he is not privy to without alerting suspicion. Even with the natural gossipy and openness of the resistance, it was truly difficult to gather any meaningful intel for All for One.

It, of course, irritated All for One to no end. A man who could so effortlessly manipulate the hearts of people could not turn head in a place where the rules did not seem to be followed. This was by design.

More specifically, it was by Yoichi's design.

Ichi can see him now, a head of beautiful white hair bobbing up and down as he walked and talked with three different people at once, his hands sewing a patch on a uniform that he passed on to a fourth person.

Somehow, from across the general commotion of the day-to-day chaos of the base, Yoichi seemed to know Ichi was watching him and turned around with a smile, which quickly turned into a frown when he saw the look on Ichi's face.

He excused himself from his comrades, and ducked into the eternally-shifting crowd of strangers and brothers. Yoichi did the same, meeting him in the middle. People flowed around them easily, making room for the two to talk.

"You're injured," Is what Yoichi first said, touching his delicate hands to Ichi's cheek. Ichi blinked as Yoichi rubbed a spot under his eye with his thumb. Sure enough, it stung. A bruise perhaps? "Did you see Doctor?"

"There's something more important we need to discuss first," Ichi said instead, choosing to ignore the way his heart thudded in his chest when Yoichi touched his cheek ever-so tenderly. "Have you used your meta-ability recently?"

Yoichi's eyes scrunched up in confusion. "No, not for a while. I've been…" he trailed off.

"Retaining wall, one hour." Ichi whispered. He tried to duck back into the crowd to report to the scavenge team that there was some prime trucks for the taking at dropoff point-

Yoichi grabbed his sleeve, pulling off his gauntlets and shoving his sleeve up. Angry red welts dotted his joints. A few of them were bleeding, scabbed over with the time it took to return. His eyes went wide.

Ichi jerked his arm back, covering the bare skin with his sleeve and Yoichi's mouth with his free hand before he could say anything.

"Retaining wall." Yoichi said, muffled by Ichi's hand. "A hour."

And he slipped back into the crowd.

A particularly busy area was the retaining wall, the way-point between the mess hall and a few of the more filled dormitories. Ichi sat next to a woman who was disguised as a civilian with a nursing child, but in actuality was one of the several people who helped carry messages between the cells and slipped cigarette papers to other leaders. His report given, the maps drawn on the palm of her hand, her baby begun to cry and she stood up to comfort it, leaving Ichi alone in a sea of people.

Yoichi appeared next to him in what felt like seconds, brushing his fingers against the shell of Ichi's ear.

He turned to look at him. Not for the first time, Ichi noticed how pale he was, how his hands shook in his long sleeves, how his basic hakama sat too snug on his waist.

He was beautiful.

And he was angry.

"What happened," Yoichi hissed, once again shoving Ichi's sleeve up to reveal the welts on his skin. He traced them carefully with his thin hands, feather light and cool.

"Was this a new tactic by Ni-san?" he asked. "A poison? An electric attack? He has under-utilized those aspects lately. I wouldn't be surprised if he started to round out his traps again."

His words were almost swallowed up entirely by the mess of voices emitting and echoing off of the retaining wall, keeping them a secret in plain sight. By design, the best places for secrets was in a loud and busy place- swallowed up by the commotion, only heard by those who need to hear.

"It wasn't anything like that, love," Ichi said.

He told Yoichi the report, the full report, even in realizing that he was violating the very code that Yoichi insisted on being implemented. Ichi followed orders as easily as he gave them, but it was always around Yoichi that he let his perfectionism slip, even just a little.

He had never met All for One face to face, but he wondered if he would have that same charisma as his brother.

He understood why All for One was so successful in his control, if he and Yoichi had this trait in common. He always seemed to pour his heart out for Yoichi.

Even when they first met, thin and emancipated on the concrete floor of that bank vault, grasping his outstretched hand, he knew that he would never be able to keep any real secrets from him.

He finished his report, not omitting a single detail.

Yoichi clutched his hands tightly.

"I don't know," He whispered. "Ni-san.."

He inhaled, shoulders shaking. Ichi pressed his forehead to his.

To anyone watching, they would look like lovers sharing a private moment. That is what this started out as, a deflection of attention to keep onlookers away. But it turned more real, more hands touching in dark rooms and a press of lips even when no one was watching.

Ichi held Yoichi, and waited for him to gather his thoughts.

"He gave me this meta ability to… control me. To have me under his thumb. Not to be easily swayed by him, I rejected it entirely until I met you," Yoichi began. "But.. but what if I was born with another meta ability? One that couldn't be seen? That must be the case. It has to be. I cannot think of anything else. Because-" Yoichi closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. "I cannot use that meta ability anymore."

Ichi's eyes widened.

"I tried just now. I tried to call it back, tried to rip apart the air around me. But I can't. Whatever I did, I could not call it back."

"So it really is yours." he half whispered in fear, half in awe. "I thought it was, it felt so much like you."

"I'm sorry," Yoichi shook, fists clenching in Ichi's uniform. "I'm sorry I forced it on you. However I did it, I need to remove it. You don't deserve to be under my control. You don't-"

"Who says I don't? It was beautiful, and it hurt. God Yoichi, it hurt so bad," He whispered, shoving his forehead in the crook of Yoichi's neck. "But you should have seen it. I punched her through a metal wall, Yoichi, without even a sweat."

"Don't think like that," Yoichi pleaded. "I don't want to control you. I don't want to be him."

"Who says you're controlling me?" Ichi pulled back, grasping at Yoichi's forearms. "You aren't him. I'm not in debt to you. I didn't make a deal with you. You gave me a gift, Yoichi. One that we can use to defeat your brother once and for all."

Yoichi's eyes filled with tears. "That's not true."

"Hey, enough of that." Ichi wiped away his tears with a gentle thumb. "This power, Yoichi? We're going to turn it against him. We're going to destroy him with it."

He can picture it now. It was just too perfect. Yoichi, bright and sweet and kind Yoichi, so disgusted with All for One's actions that he took the very thing intended to control him and turned it into a weapon. A weapon against him, against everything he stands for.

And Ichi, the perfectly crafted weapon of destruction. The meta-ability that turned everything he touched into projectiles.

It'll be unstoppable.

"I'll hold it. I'll hold this power and I'll make it strong," he promises Yoichi, who's still looking at him with wonder and amazement, mouth slightly agape and eyes shining. "But can you do something for me as well? Just one thing, Yoichi, that's all I ask."

"Anything."

"Marry me?"