In the great stage play of life, Rat, played by Junichiro, played by Andrei, exits via a trapdoor. Off to star in other stories, to be reborn, to live, to die, and to be reborn once again. A cycle of Samsara so utterly ordinary it needs no description. But in the story he exits, the lights stay on, and the curtains refuse to drop. Its actors continue to spin across the stage.

Let's open the script, and read all the endings and beginnings.

If we skip towards the middle of the second act, we find that Todoroki has aged. He wears a mustache and an eyepatch. Hunched figures surround him as he points towards a map.

He's not planning an operation. Quite the opposite, really- he's planning a surrender.

Flip back, all the way towards the start.

"TODOROKI (YOUNG)" it says.

Todoroki watches his mother barely stop herself from throwing a pot of boiling water at him. She throws the pot of water away, picks up a kitchen knife, and thrusts it towards her neck. Todoroki stops the knife with his ice. But he can't stop his mother from being packed off towards a psychiatric institution, out of sight and out of mind.

Endeavor keeps his children out of the public eye. But he's not above showing off his heir at private events. Todoroki can tolerate the dinner-party conversations about internships and sidekick arrangements. He's not quite so ambivalent about his father talking arranged quirk marriages.

His father declines to mail his high school entrance application to Shiketsu, and notifies him that he'll be taking the Recommended Student UA high school. Todoroki sinks into despondency. A call to his mother, recently given visitation privileges, breaks him out of it. She tells him the two things she misses most are her children and her freedom, and that she spends every day regretting how she'd allowed both to be taken away.

Todoroki takes the train to Musutafu for his entrance exam, but never shows up to UA. Instead, he steps out at an earlier stop, enters a costume store, and buys a black-haired wig. And with that, he's indistinguishable from any other Japanese schoolboy.

He eats and sleeps at homeless shelters. It's a lonely existence. He tries to keep himself, fearing recognition. For being a runaway, and for being Endeavor's son.

He doesn't get into fights. He doesn't talk about politics. He nods with polite sympathy when people tell him they wouldn't be homeless if they were only allowed to use their quirk. When he hears people discuss the Meta Liberation Army- which begins to happen increasingly often- he stands up and walks away.

Then he meets a girl. The script marks her speaking parts with "SAIAI," though it takes Todoroki a while longer to discover that name.

She comes to the homeless shelter as part of one of the groups that brings in prepared meals. She wanders around the homeless shelter's cafeteria, handing out cups of water and lemonade from a platter. A redundant task, since there are coolers and plastic cups on a table, but one that allows her to engage groups and individuals in brief conversations. Everyone she talks to is smiling by the time they're done chatting. A few of them accept business cards.

When she gets to Todoroki, she asks him about his family. He reacts… poorly. She tries and fails to salvage the situation, then beats a retreat.

He asks around, after dinner, what the business cards are for. No one gives him a straight answer.

Eventually he manages to filch one of the cards from a sleeping woman's pocket. On the front is a "Feel Good Inc." logo, with their standard sales and customer service emails. On the back is a handwritten phone number.

The girl and her crew return for the next dinner, and the one after, too. He switches homeless shelters, careful not to stay in any one place for too long. On the first night, a church group feeds them. Then it's back to the girl and her accomplices. She canvasses the whole room each night. Todoroki, suspicious, tries to ignore her, but he's ill-prepared for her charm offensive. She talks about trivial things, about television shows and video game streamers. Things Todoroki had never been allowed to watch. She distracts him, if only for a few moments, from the grim reality of poverty and isolation.

He begins to look forward to seeing her.

She begins to talk about freedom, duty, honor, liberty, fate, free will, and dedication to a cause.

He asks about the business cards. She tells him she's part of an organization. An organization that's always looking for new recruits. She hands him a business card. "Call this number," she says. "Tell them Saiai sent you." She makes to leave, but Todoroki stops her. "This isn't a villainous organization, is it?" He asks. Saiai looks around the room. "A lot of what we do is illegal. But everything we do is heroic." And with that cryptic statement, she leaves.

The next day, Todoroki joins the Meta Liberation Army.

Flip through the pages. Past the months of growing in strength, confidence, and authority under the tutelage Saiai finangles for him from the MLA's most powerful combatants. Past the days where he works for Rat, that critical crossroads for so many lives. Past his forced return to the MLA; past his impassioned declaration of Re-Destro's betrayal; past his second-in-command role in Skeptic's faction of the MLA's civil war.

Resume reading as the organization fractures, tears into itself, and becomes moribund, reaching its second nadir of power so soon after its triumph had seemed inevitable.

Skeptic disappears, and Todoroki takes command.

"We have cured the MLA of its corruption and disease," he declares to an audience of people who were once villains, prisoners, and students. "Just as Rat planned."

There's a doodle in the margins. Of Rat, covering his face with one hand.

And yet, in keeping with the kind of unrealistic twists that give plays happy endings, there's a sort of… confluence.

The playbill calls for a montage.

Todoroki's loyalists are hardened veterans, and he is a legend in the flesh. He picks and chooses from Destro's philosophies and Rat's, crafting a renewed narrative of the MLA. A responsible version of Destro's plea for free quirk use combined with Rat's advocacy for heteromorphics, and recombined again with Todoroki's own rhetoric about the toxicity of hero culture and quirk marriages. And through it all, in speeches and in guerrilla interviews, he paraphrases a man he barely knew.

"Violence is an individual fighting alone. Justice is brothers in arms fighting together."

He confronts the last remnants of Curious's forces, and at last forces her to bend the knee. The MLA is tiny and pathetic, but finally, finally, it stops contracting and once more begins to expand.

Under his direction, the MLA operates underground homeless shelters and youth groups, ones that illegally allow quirk use. They free, through bribery, legal chicanery, and more illegal interventions, the unjustly imprisoned and unjustly betrothed. They liaise with Japan's vigilantes, providing a support network for those who would protect the peace without defending the law. They provide free, covert assistance to kids dreaming of passing hero school training exam. The kids that fail receive consolation. The kids that succeed receive a second, secret support network.

Saiai re-enters the story with a blocktext note in the script, that reads "BEGIN FLASHBACK."

No physical injuries afflict Saiai in the aftermath of the prison assault. But her behavior in the courtroom make obvious the depth of her mourning. She stumbles through her testimonies and cross-examination, giving mumbled, one-word answers. She comes almost to the point of allowing herself to go to juvie. A conversation with her parents snaps her out of it. They tell her that she doesn't want to end up like her brother, and the day after she breaks tradition and makes a closing argument in place of her lawyer. Her rhetoric is fit to hang the jury The prosecution, suspiciously, never moves to retry. A week later she applies to and is accepted into Shiketsu High School. It's no UA, but it is a boarding school.

Between a strenuous schedule and a variety of part-time jobs and internships to fill her vacations, she ends up with very little time to visit her parents indeed.

Three years out from a management-course education at Shiketsu, she's already uncommonly successful. Graduating with honors, she joins and then almost immediately takes over a small hero agency. Which in short order, becomes a mid-sized and then large hero agency, as she compels more and more heroes to sign contracts with her, by hook or crook.

Another blocktext note in the script, reading "END FLASHBACK," leaves her and Todoroki in the back room of an MLA-affilated karaoke bar, talking about an alliance and talking about old times.

Saiai's hero agency becomes the first to declare it won't pursue people innocently using their quirks as villains, and that it won't assist police districts prosecuting simple quirk use offenders, either.

Japan's licensing agencies threaten to disband her agency, and she's forced to recant her statements. But neither the heroes nor the police in her neighborhood ever seem to arrest anyone for simple public quirk use again. The government looks the other way, just like it looks the other way when construction workers wearing unsubtle Meta Liberation Army branding help heteromorphic homeowners break housing codes and renovate their homes into more accommodating dwellings.

Not everything Todoroki does is peaceful, or even savory. There's the shakedowns, protection rackets, and drug money. The hard discipline inflicted on unruly members, and the irreplaceable subordinates whose heinous deeds never get punished. There's no shortage of collateral damage or knockoff effects. Protests turn into riots, and riots turn into lynch mobs. Half the small construction outfits in the Mie Prefecture go broke trying to compete with an MLA-affilated construction crew centered around a hardworking teenager with an antigrav quirk. Dropout and suicide rates in the area rise by double digit percentage points. Todoroki's public perception never rises above "mixed," and the bounty on his head accrues zeroes.

But public pressure mounts, and mounts, and mounts, and eventually, with the prodding of the wealthy and influential best positioned to profit from the change, the government starts passing laws that recognize the reality on the ground. And eventually Todoroki has to comply with his side of the handshake agreement.

Todoroki doesn't yet have his law banning quirk marriages. But childrens gain protections against being coerced into a bethroal, and modest reform makes no-fault divorces easier to obtain. Free use of quirks in public is still illegal, but the Diet decriminalizes noncommercial, self-directed use. Even commercial use becomes theoretically feasible, if you know the right palms and can supply enough grease.

Reporting and transparency standards for heroes and cops alike improve. Licensing agencies put caps on ancillary revenue and publicity appearances. Paternalist politicians agree to increase funding for job and homelessness relief programs for the dramatically heteromorphic, and then an austerity movement almost manages to do away with them entirely. Private donations make most of the shortfall, and the programs limp on to fight another day.

Strong anti-discrimination laws pass, protecting those with heteromorphic quirks, dangerous quirks, and no quirks. Enforcement is… uneven.

Thus ends the second act. If you want to, you can skip the third. You can go straight past the epilogue and into the reference section.

Better if you don't. Better not to dwell on how reform slows to a trickle as people content themselves with an improved and gradually improving, but still imperfect status quo. Better to ignore the record of deaths and birthdays for the play's characters, and how all too many suggest lives cut short by external and internal trauma.

Look up, for a second. You'll notice the play has reached the point in the script you've read to.

The script describes Todoroki's expression as follows:

" At peace. "

The actor playing him has a different interpretation of the character. His expression might best be described as,

" Desperately unhappy. "

The Todoroki in the script and the Todoroki on the stage stamp their final orders.

The set designer has placed three picture frames on Todoroki's spartan desk. Inside the frames are photographs, photocopied from historical documents.

One is recent: a photograph of Todoroki's mother, spry and happy even at her advancing age, together with her living children and their spouses. One is ancient: a promotional photograph of Endeavor. A legacy of violence and idealism he has struggled against, but ultimately come to terms with. One is merely old: a slightly blurry selfie, taken by Toshiharu, of a planning meeting for what degenerated into the prison break.

No one smiles towards the camera, but there's an animating energy in each of the people in the shot. In Izuku, dictating into a cellphone. In Stendhal, pacing and ranting to an enraptured audience of minor villains. In Saiai, having a quick 'chat' with someone out of frame. In Rat, hastily copying a diagram of UA's grounds from his phone onto a blackboard.

And in Todoroki, who looks on in what might pass for amusement.

The set designer has also prepared a fourth prop- a phone, with a lockscreen picture of Todoroki's off again, on again girlfriend.

Todoroki's phone buzzes. He answers the phone, briefly speaks with the person on the other end, and then places it back down. He sighs, hands the papers out to subordinates to be distributed, sits still for Toshiharu to capture him in a somber photo for posterity, and then slumps into his armchair as soon as the room empties out.

"Was it enough?" He asks the air. "Was it worth it?"

As dialogue goes, it's a little hackneyed. It's hard to imagine a historical figure saying something so melodramatic.

The stage lights fade. Stage assistants move around props for a scene change. Back to the script.

It describes the following:

Todoroki and his top lieutenants surrendering to the police before a news crew.

Speedy show trails, and their judgements. Five years for Todoroki's lieutenants, seven for him. The lieutenants serve three years, and he serves four. The rest of the time they spend on parole, performing community service.

The script indicates that this should be narrated to the audience via a montage. The actors wheel out a projector onstage, and play clips from an educational cartoon, instead.

It's a long play, so it might be a good time to take a bathroom break. If you step outside the theater for some fresh air, you can even get some branded merchandise from vendor terminals- buttons with slogans on them, and T-shirts bearing the faces of Stendhal and Rat.

Not interested? Back to the script then.

The play's narrator summarizes five years of prison in five pages. Then there's the famous memorial scene.

Thousands of well-wishers surround Rat's grave. Todoroki, incognito, meets with Saiai. Bakugou crashes the party with a desperate look on his face. Act three begins. Blocktext, flashback.

The script says: "IZUKU (YOUNG)"

Izuku's quirk is too weak to show off on the playground, routinely extinguished by gusts of wind. A weak quirk isn't sufficient to attract bullies, but his heteromorphic mutation- his dog ears- make up the difference.

He still declares his aspirations for heroism anyways.

Bakugou, enamored with his own strength, distances himself from Izuku as a result.

Bakugou doesn't see the need to bully Izuku. Instead, a group of older students take Izuku's dog ears as an excuse to make him a gopher. They alternate between calling him "mutt" and "puppy" in sneering and cajoling tones as suits them. Izuku goes, finally, to Bakugou, and asks for help. Bakugou responds with a cutting dismissal. With words he comes to regret, and yet cannot bring himself to take them back. Not in time to change anything, anyways. Three words that dig at Izuku's psyche until he can take it no longer.

Izuku's careful to use his quirk only in what the law terms "legal self defense." The older boys leave him alone, from then on, but his dreams of becoming a hero drift only further away. Japan's culture can tolerate schoolboys using their quirks in moments of passion- teenagers are afforded some youthful delinquency. But the premeditated use of a quirk that could easily be all-too-lethal?

For entirely new reasons, people continue to tell him the same thing he's always heard: that he'll never be a hero.

Bakugou, of all people, views things differently. He sees an old friend take his advice and use his quirk to correct an injustice. In any other circumstance, he might have been proud. Instead, he's ashamed- and envious too. All the great heroes have stories about them from their middle school days.

Three words ring in his head.

He starts putting himself in situations that lead to fights. He punches out a few small-time villains, staying always on just the right side of the self-defense laws.

He bites off more than he can chew.

Izuku tries to rescue him. One schoolboy, against the might of the Shie Hassaikai. He fails. And yet providence intervenes to destroy the yakuza without their help, leaving Izuku and Bakugou alive to reconcile and ponder their mutual uselessness.

There's a brief moment of light: Izuku finds a cause he can contribute to, and Bakugou is admitted to UA with Izuku's help. For once, Izuku's quirk has nothing to do with his capacity for heroism.

The light intensifies to a blinding radiance when, by iterated coincidence, he meets All Might.

The UA teacher drops in to observe a promising student's training session and discovers Izuku in the process.

All Might doesn't commit to making Izuku his successor after the first training session he attends, or the fifth, but he still pushes Izuku to work on the fundamental strength he'd need to inherit One for All. Just in case.

Izuku meets Bakugou's classmates, and starts to form bonds with them. All Might talks to Nezu and Aizawa about the possibility of admitting a transfer student.

They talk, Izuku and All Might, about quirk inheritance.

And then…

It all falls apart.

All Might fights One for All. And wins.

The victory costs him his life.

Izuku receives the full measure of his mentor's power as All Might's ruined body expires in a hospital bed.

Circumstances afford him no time to grieve.

Re-Destro breaks the news of All Might's death before the heroes have a chance to. Japanese civil society buckles under the weight of the dual revelations: that the number one hero is gone, and that the Meta Liberation Army is back.

The heroes scramble to understand what they missed. Sir Nighteye confronts Izuku about a blind spot in his visions.

He's been tracing the common factor, he says, between all his false prophecies. Whatever agent has been warping the course of things.

He admits Izuku had been his chief suspect. That he'd been mentored by All Might in too many discarded futures for it to be merely coincidence. But when the MLA had 'liberated' Rat on live television, he'd finally found the culprit.

The heroes had to know- who Rat was, what he wanted, and what his capabilities were. And Izuku presented an opportunity to find out.

Despite Bakugou's objections, Izuku volunteers to infiltrate the MLA. To exonerate Rat, if he's innocent. To stop him, if he's not.

Written in black and white, it's easy to see where Rat and Izuku start to make mistakes. When fear, ambition, and anger override friendship and trust. When they pass the point of no return, damning them both.

The fight at Musutafu penitentiary leaves Izuku with significant injuries. Battlefield triage puts him low on the list of critical casualties, and by the time Recovery Girl gets to him it's impossible to save his finger. His arm is easier to heal, but that's cold comfort for a young man who's discovered that not just one, but both of his quirks are too dangerous to use.

He tortures himself with misplaced blame for the deaths of All Might and Rat. He speaks a poisonous monologue of inadequacy and self-hatred.

Bakugou works tirelessly to cheer up his friend. The belligerent, short-tempered boy buys a book of cheesy jokes and forces himself to smile.

Bakugou's classmates take an interest. Even though Izuku drops out of highschool, study sessions at his house still somehow become a common occurrence. The people who care about him see glimpses of the boy he used to be. He opens up to his therapist, and brainstorms ways to save people without becoming a hero.

And One for All, unused, continues to stockpile power within him. What contriviance will this play use to represent it? A backlight, growing brighter and brighter? An intensifying fugue, played by the pit orchestra? Costume changes? Interpretive dance?

Every director does things their own way.

Izuku and his family cycle through doctors, looking for a specialist to diagnose and fix an increasing variety of mysterious health problems. Principal Nezu and Sir Nighteye fund the search, out of guilt and obligation.

Finally, he gets referred to Doctor Kyudai Garaki.

The portly old doctor has immediate and surprising success at treating Izuku's maladies. A few exploratory sessions become a dedicated treatment regimen, and Izuku begins to spend more and more time in the doctor's presence.

The doctor feels Izuku out for his thoughts on heroism and villainy; strength, power, and duty. He establishes himself as a person Izuku likes and respects, and begins to sink in his hooks.

As Izuku transfers to UA and joins the support course, he begins to drift away from his friends in the UA hero course. They assume it's because he's found new friends in his new discipline. His classmates, meanwhile, assume he's distant and aloof because of his well-known association with the hero course students.

He takes internships two years in a row at Doctor Garaki's clinic, and accepts a job offer to work for him straight out of highschool.

Kyudai Garaki begins alluding to, and then directly referring to his true allegiances. Izuku's treatment plan morphs from one that suppresses his quirks into one that reinforces his body to tolerate them.

He rekindles, finally, his dream of changing the world. Of putting a smile on everyone's face. Only Bakugou seems to notice that anything is wrong.

Blocktext signals the end of the flashback. The rest of the third act needs no review.

There is, however, one other story worth checking on. Skip past the end. There- to the epilogue. The part no director bothers to adapt. To the endless digressions about tertiary characters, and their final fates. To the section marked, "Toshiharu."

Sparse, isn't it? Barely any dialogue. He spends a short stint in juvenile detention. On release, he enrolls in a lower-end high school, and then squeaks into a university in the United States.

He takes a job at an upstart news syndicate, that in turn ships him off to a war zone. He starts by working the camera. When his reporter is hospitalized by a hunk of shrapnel, he takes over her duties. By age 24, Toshiharu has his first Pulitzer. Two more follow in as many years.

He covers wars, resistance movements, rebellions, and revolutions, until an IED blows off one of his legs. While hospitalized, he falls in love with one of his nurses, who reciprocates his affections. Between his disability payments and ongoing royalties, he can afford to go into semi-retirement. He writes a few articles each year, and spends the rest of his time being a stay-at-home dad for his many children. One of whom he names "Rat."

FIN

/

This is the final, edited version of a story originally posted on SpaceBattles. You can find two alternate epilogues in the original thread- same content, different framing device. I expect this ending and epilogue to be controversial. Anyone interested in understanding why I went through with it anyways should read the afterword I put at the bottom of the original epilogue.