If he pretended hard enough that he wasn't having dreams about being the Entire Leadership of the MLA, maybe they would stop. Or maybe he would develop another useful psychosis, the kind that would allow him to deny everything to Tsukauchi's face and have his every word ring true. Either would do at this point. He would take refuge in insanity.
As it turned out, no. The more he tried to ignore the dreams, the more frequent and intense they became. Or... they had become more frequent and vivid with time. Perhaps this was merely the continuation of the trend.
Izuku pretended that he didn't remember learning to fly a helicopter--he was pretty sure he had been Arch at the time, although he could have been Cloud Viper. He pretended that he didn't remember blowing up a bridge in central Asia. He definitely had been Bit Weasel for that one; he had used his meta ability to manipulate one of the enemy into carrying out the destruction on his behalf. He was definitely Chris again for a break-neck duel to the death involving boiling asphalt, enormous artillery explosions, and a meta ability that turned his opponent into something that Chris called a Pit Fiend (like from Dungeons into Dragons). Arkady was the man's name... he'd ordered Arch's mother executed, raving against those who "bore meta humans into our midst" and then it turned out Arkady himself was one of the most powerful meta humans on the planet. Destro killed the fiend, nearly at the cost of his own life, and probably saved the entire city of Samara in the process. His generals were the only ones who thanked him for it. Arch galloped down on one of his icy constructs to pull Chris from his crater in the snow and they barely escaped the advance of the Russian army.
Despite his recent vow to pretend nothing bizarre was happening to him, Izuku woke smiling after the fight with Arkady. He couldn't help it. The emotions carried over, the pride of the leader of MLA at his victory over such a powerful opponent... and the pride of Chris at doing the noble
thing and saving hundreds of thousands of lives, meta and quirkless alike... even if the world would never thank him for it. "I'd thank you for it," Izuku whispered to nobody. It wasn't his fight. It wasn't his kill. Neither the guilt of taking a life nor the pride of saving countless lives should fall on Izuku himself... but "should" didn't apply to emotions. Trying to control these feelings with logic was like trying to redirect a flooding river with a "Left Turn Only" sign.
"Why don't you take a swan dive off the roof--how quickly the oppressed become the oppressor, forgetting everything they fought for, a little taste of power on their tongues turning them into the evil they deplore--you take all the credit, I'll take all the blame--no, not like me, Soulstealer. I kept my part of the deal. If you'd kept yours we would have gone our separate ways quietly--saved, that is your glory. Every life taken, that is my shame--Pray for a quirk in your next life--Ashes for ashes and blood for blood..."
Izuku jolted awake from a--completely unplanned but probably much needed--catnap on the couch in the common room to discover the entire class had assembled about him. The greenette scrabbled to make sense of the fading wisps of his vision while also trying to appear normal and figure out what everyone was doing there.
He couldn't place any of the voices in the dream, although that final phrase was familiar from another vision. There were two speakers, or maybe three. One of them was angry, voice abrasive. The other... cloying and sweet and vicious, a lullaby with wicked fangs hidden behind a pretty smile. Why couldn't he remember? This was important, he knew it, but the lucidity he so often dreaded was absent. He couldn't dredge up any further details. These scant few phrases were useless on their own; he wasn't even completely sure they were part of one of his visions and not some unrelated nightmare... except he still felt they were important somehow.
"The UA Cultural Festival is in two weeks! How did this happen? It snuck up on us like... some sort of really sneaky thing!" Kaminari exclaimed. Oh, that's what was going on. They were having a discussion about their class's role in the coming celebration.
"I told you that you should be thinking about what you wanted to do for the festival," Aizawa told them, ducking out of the common room.
"I have been thinking about it," Uraraka said. "I just..."
"Didn't come up with any ideas?" Jiro asked.
"Yeah," the gravity eraser admitted.
The entire class... was looking at Izuku. "Why are you looking at me?" he squeaked.
"Well... you're the most interesting person in the class," Todoroki said. "So maybe you have an interesting idea." Kacchan snorted as Izuku floundered.
"What? No I'm not! That's... totally not true!"
"You keep showing up to school with weird things on your head, sometimes that thing is your hair and sometimes it isn't," Ashido said. Did Izuku regret wearing the bag? No. No, he did not.
"You have a variety of very manly scars," Kirishima pointed out, "that you legally aren't allowed to talk about." Oh no. The bite scar must have made the rounds through the rumor mill after it was mentioned in truth or dare.
"You knew everything that was taught in our first aid training last week and looked like you have lots of practice," Yaoyorozu continued. She'd noticed? Izuku had tried to be subtle about that. Tried and failed, apparently.
"You keep disappearing from class without explanation and you don't take English for some reason," Aoyama put in.
"Monoma from 1-B has been telling everyone that you grew up in a war zone," Ojiro told Izuku sympathetically. "I tried to tell him he was wrong and I've been to your house and know your mother but..." Izuku put his face in his hands.
"He is clearly wrong," Todoroki disagreed. The chaotic teen was wearing a Fire Wheel t-shirt. And Fire Wheel shoes. And Fire Wheel earrings. Apparently he'd decided which of the other flaming heroes he liked the best. The clothing almost distracted Izuku from the bizarre sentences coming out of Todoroki's mouth "Midoriya is the child of Toxic Chainsaw and he has come to UA to make amends and overcome the legacy of his villainous father."
Izuku gaped at his anarchy-sewing classmate, unable to think of a reply. Katsuki started howling and nearly fell over backwards, so violently were the guffaws accosting him. All these crazy conspiracy theories... and none of them had even come close to the truth... well, probably anyway. "He doesn't even look... vaguely like Toxic Chainsaw," Shouji told the glacier summoner carefully. "If anything he looks like--" Ojiro slapped their many armed classmate with his tail, shaking his head.
"Nobody has any idea what your quirk is," Sero thankfully steered the conversation away from... that bizarre tangent.
"You intentionally keep many secrets, kero," having been part of the Hassaikai raid, Tsu was in on some of those secrets. She knew he had been undercover during work-study. "And you know more about the hero industry than anyone except maybe Iida." Did he, though? He knew lots of hero trivia that nobody else knew...
"And you have a Dark, Shadowy past," Dark Shadow crowed, effectively killing the list with this lethally bad pun. The familiar had made that joke at the Sports Festival, too, hadn't he?
Tokoyami gave his partner a look dry as the Sahara. "Why are you like this?"
The greenette picked up the tangled thread of the conversation and pointed out, "all of those might indicate that I am the most mysterious person in class, but mysterious and interesting are not the same thing. The biology of slime molds might seem mysterious but I don't think any of you would call it interesting."
Todoroki blinked at Izuku, eyes lighting up with understanding. "Are you a slime mold, Midoriya?"
Was he... he couldn't be serious, right? "No! No I am not a slime mold! Do you even know what a slime mold is?"
"What in the world have I walked in on?" Aizawa asked deadpan. How long had he been standing there?
Katsuki, the only one who might bail Izuku out in this situation, was too busy rolling on the floor laughing to consider doing so and probably wouldn't help even if he could. "It doesn't matter," Izuku said quickly, "the point is that I might be weird but that doesn't mean I have any good ideas for the Cultural Festival. I mean Zuko is also weird," Todoroki grinned, tipping his head back with pride, "but I doubt he has any ideas!"
"I do though," the glacier summoner protested. "I was thinking a mock game show where the contestants have to answer questions about the school and its staff and each round one unlucky loser gets imprisoned in a solid block of ice."
"Vetoed," Aizawa said, fetching himself another cup of coffee (he probably had a patrol that night). Todoroki seemed neither surprised nor upset by the death of his idea, shrugging and opening the floor to suggestions.
An hour of negotiations of varying aggressiveness later, the class settled on a pop concert and worked out who would play the various instruments. The most "aggressive" part of the negotiations involved the entire class mercilessly manipulating Kacchan into playing the drums. Sato had promised him homemade granola bars in return. Kaminari had threatened him with publication of various embarrassing photos.
"Huh. Midoriya can dance... another layer to the mystery," Sero said as Izuku discovered he was not going to need tutoring in order to serve his role as backup dancer at the concert. This was probably the strangest skill he had obtained from his missing week in the sense that the others seemed to at least be related. They were all things a frontline solider or military commander might know... this, not so much...
"I might not be able to dance, kero," Tsu explained to them. "I'm going to be chaperoning Eri, a little girl who's going to be staying at UA for a while." Oh, Eri was coming to live here? "Aizawa is fostering her, but if Aizawa is busy I'll need to watch her during the concert." Oh. My. God. Aizawa fostering Eri, that was... so cute.
"Ah, that's fine," Jiro spoke loudly to be heard over the class's collective cooing. Apparently Izuku wasn't the only one who found the idea of Aizawa taking in a kid to be lethally adorable. "We can work with that."
"Oh, Aizawa," Jiro called to him as he walked by with yet another cup of coffee, "is the Cultural Festival closed to the public this year?"
"No, although everyone entering or exiting has to go through airport style security and give a few answers to a contractor with a truth quirk," their teacher replied. "It was a difficult decision, but Nedzu suggested that closing the event to the public might be seen as a challenge to certain villains."
"Yeah, good point," Kirishima agreed, "this way it would be like "wow, look at you! You went through airport security! How infamous you are!"" Izuku grinned. A few others giggled.
"Anyway, I'm out on patrol tonight." Aizawa said before the class had a chance to bombard him with questions about his new foster daughter. "You know the numbers you need in case of emergency. Don't blow anything up."
"Hey! That's like... profiling or something," Kacchan groused. Aizawa shook his head and slipped out the front door like a cat departing for a late night hunt. A cat who now had a kitten to come home to...
"You're the subject of multiple conspiracy theories, nerd," Kacchan said nonchalantly. The blonde was a religious observer of early bed times, so it wasn't until the next afternoon that they spoke again, working on homework in Izuku's room where there was a bit of privacy.
"That's the last thing I need," the greenette sighed. "I mean, I am a conspiracy, just not the ones they're coming up with."
Katsuki gave him a narrow, sideways glance. "Are you still dreaming all the time about... you know..."
"Bit Weasel," Izuku replied quietly. "Not just her anymore... I was Destro in a few of the recent dreams." Katsuki was the one person he could confess to. Hopefully he didn't force the blonde to shoulder burdens he shouldn't have to.
"Are you like... but how?"
"I don't know. I have no idea how any of this happened. I was possessed by someone. I was looking for All For One because he stole Kuma's quirk..."
"Wait, what? Uh... is this all the closed police investigation crap that you're not supposed to tell me?"
"Um, maybe, I... I can't keep track any more of who's not supposed to know what," Izuku raked his fingers through his hair. "But no, you don't need... I shouldn't tell you any of this... what if it makes you a target somehow or--?"
"Shut up and tell me what you're thinking, nerd. I can keep my mouth closed but you really need to open yours."
Okay. Sure. He was right, although there were still things to steer clear of. "While I was looking
for All For One, I got mauled by War Dog whose bite is known to have psychotropic or mind control powers of its own... so I ended up in some sort of tug of war between two mental abilities. I really doubt the kidnapper meant for me to get any of these skills or memories, and I've been thinking for a while that it's got to just be... the original quirk having a bad reaction with War Dog's quirk, like pouring a bunch of baking soda in a cup full of vinegar and all those skills exploding all over my head but... that doesn't explain so many other things. Like why I remember being Bit Weasel and Influx and Destro."
"'Cause all of them are dead," Katsuki pointed out, "so who had those memories and why?"
"Almost all of them are dead. I have one memory... from the Rebel Isles," when Izuku watched Epona plant Servii, whose memories did he see? Were those Bit Weasel's or... "I have at least one memory that might belong to Switcher, and he's still alive. But that's not the point, Bit Weasel could read and write memories on human beings pretty much the same way as on a computer. It's possible she could have saved these like... mementos of her friends and then passed them on to someone else with a similar quirk, maybe a child of hers..." So maybe his original hypothesis
wasn't completely wrong, merely in need of revision. "But then why give them to me? That would have to be intentional right? Maybe... maybe not? Maybe I got those by accident as a result of War Dog's bite, too, I don't know."
"I mean the obvious point of giving you all their memories would be to try to win you over to their side by just giving you the good things, right?" Katsuki pointed out. "Manipulate you into joining them."
That was... a very good point, but... "It's not all good things. There are terrible things. But... you might be right. A few nights ago I was Destro when he killed Arkady. You probably don't know about that... it was covered up pretty thoroughly. I tried not to think about it but I couldn't stop myself from looking it up. It was at the very beginning of the MLA war, a fight like All For One and All Might at Kamino, so far beyond anything I've ever seen in person... and I was so... he killed Arkady and there are so many twisted feelings there but I was so proud. I don't just share Chris's pride in his victory and saving all the people Arkady threatened, I'm proud of him. Proud of him like I would be proud of you if you saved Tokyo from a triple-S villain, I..." have run out of words.
"Well." Katsuki clearly had no idea what to say to that. "It sounds like it was something to be proud of even if he were like... completely crazy and evil most of the time but... I mean, if they were trying to get you on their side, well..."
"It's working," Izuku sighed. "Why would they care about converting a little quirkless kid, though? That's... doesn't matter. I know they did terrible things. No one makes it through a war without doing terrible things... but generally the Japanese forces," who had bartered with All For One and were possibly still bartering with All For One if Hirano were a rule and not an exception, "and the Russian forces," who turned a blind eye to Arkady gleefully as long as he only tortured and murdered people they didn't like, "and plenty of others," he could think of a dozen examples, "did worse things. Some of them are still doing worse things."
Kacchan took a deep breath and expelled it forcefully. "Can you do your job impartially?" "Huh?"
"You're going to be a hero. If you run into some MLA sympathizer, are you going to be unable to arrest them because you're in their fan club now?"
Izuku shook his head. "Neo-MLA groups don't know anything. All they want to do is break things." The original... they wanted to build things.
"And if some old MLA general showed up having been in cryostasis for however long and demanded your help with carrying out a coup, what would you do?"
"Leave Japan," Izuku said without hesitation. Katsuki blinked at him. "I know I wouldn't be able to exercise anything approaching sound judgment in that situation, so I would remove myself from it." Where would he go? The United States maybe? New Zealand if he could get in? New Zealand's immigration laws were strict... and why did he know that?
"Then I suppose there's no problem, is there? You can be dream friends with Destro, or be dream Destro or whatever, all you like as long as you can keep your oath to uphold the law."
That was sound logic, and this discussion had helped him screw his head on straight much more than his careful talks with Hound Dog. He had to keep track of which things were still secrets during those sessions and it exhausted him quickly.
Of course, the question of the memories' origin and influence wasn't even the heaviest weight on his shoulders. "What if I am that MLA general who's been in cryostasis for however long?" he asked quietly, "or not even a general, some other changeling from the Rebel Isles? Or some secret... MLA nomu thing."
Katsuki cocked his head. "And why would you think that?"
"It's just... Me being a shapeshifting impostor might make more sense than me having decades of experience written into my brain overnight." False Flag didn't think they were related... but there were plenty of other shapeshifters in the world... and plenty of other possibilities.
"No. No it would not make more sense, because then you'd have to be a shapeshifting impostor capable of slurping out the entirety of someone's freakin' memories and perfectly imitating their entire personality and mannerisms down to a T. That sounds far less likely to me than some bad reaction to War Dog's bite."
"But what if--"
"Nerd. This is..." he huffed and actually laughed, "being anxious about this is so like you. If you are not Midoriya Izuku, then nobody on this whole damn planet is who they think they are, okay? Either you're Izuku or nobody's real, got it?" The greenette nodded mutely. This world... it wasn't exactly what he would want from a fantasy... but what if-- "Oh please don't tell me you're now worrying that you're not in the real world. I meant it as a joke nerd, like hyperbole for comic effect, oh my god you idiot..." Katsuki gave him a pat-smack on the top of his fluffy head. "Stop being neurotic and finish your damn homework. Everything is fine."
Katsuki repeated "everything is fine," a few more times that afternoon, muttering it under his breath, but it sounded as if he were trying to convince himself more than Izuku.