"You wanted to see me?" Izuku asked nervously, peeking into the principal's office. "Indeed," Nedzu replied. "Please, close the door and take a seat, Midoriya."

Izuku did so. "Monoma?" What was the blonde doing here? He looked... nervous, more than nervous, frightened almost.

"Monoma approached me recently with some... serious news," Nedzu decided. "He apparently attempted to speak with you about it earlier."

Izuku furrowed his brow. "Why would he go all the way to you with this?" That was... rude. And presumptuous. Of course Nedzu had always known Izuku was quirkless. Why hadn't the principal just sent Monoma on his way?

Nedzu cocked his head. "I believe that you have sorely misinterpreted the situation, Midoriya." "I... have?"

"Yes. It is your belief that Monoma approached me with concerns about your place as a quirkless individual in the hero course."

"Well, yes? Was that not...?" He turned to Monoma. "Was that not the issue? From the training exercise?"

Monoma shook his head side to side rapidly, almost as if he were shivering. "That's what you thought my problem was? I don't--both my parents are quirkless, Midoriya," he admitted uneasily. Really? That was... well, probably to be expected, sort of. If one of his parents were quirkless, the other probably was, too. Hadn't Izuku once mused that no one would want him as a husband due to his own accident of birth? "I don't--I'd never have bothered you... not about something like that."

Then what was going on here? "I'm sorry, Monoma, for presuming. What is the problem, Nedzu?" "If you would, Monoma?" the principal steepled his paws.

Monoma opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying to find the words. "It's like a jigsaw puzzle, with the piece not quite... the final piece doesn't quite fit. That's what it felt like. The piece is there, like it would be for anyone with a quirk but I can tell... I can tell that it's not... yours." His eyes darted from side to side uneasily.

"What... are you saying?"

Nedzu opened a drawer and set an air plant on the table, then opened another drawer and set out a large marble, an empty drinking glass, a bag of sand and a small bowl of glass shards besides the greenery in a scene very reminiscent of Izuku's dream with Kuma. Oh, this couldn't be going there--no. No. That didn't make any sense. "Uh, what are those for?" Izuku asked

"I expect we will see shortly," the principal said. "Midoriya, would you allow Monoma to copy your quirk?"

"But... I don't have one?" Izuku said even as he held out his wrist to the copycat.

"I believe that counts as a 'yes,' Monoma," the mammal instructed. The greenette allowed the blonde to grasp his hand briefly.

"Oh," Monoma hummed. "I get it." He took the air plant in one hand, the glass shards in the other. The glass glowed blue-white and flashed--the blonde set down a glass globe, the little green plant completely encased within it, shrunk down to fit.

Izuku stared, slack jawed. This didn't make sense. Not only did this not make sense, his entire life didn't make sense as a result of this nonsense. He was quirkless. That was... central. He couldn't be Izuku if he wasn't quirkless. "I don't understand, Nedzu," the greenette complained. His voice seemed distant, echoing, and his head felt as if it were somewhere in the cloud layer kilometers away. "But I'm quirkless, Nedzu," he protested without much force. "I can't have a quirk. Then I'm not... I'm not..."

Somewhere at the core of Izuku's identity lay quirklessness. It didn't define him but he defined himself by it, if that made sense? It was like... suddenly finding out everything he knew about himself was wrong. It was every bit as shocking as it would be to learn he weren't really Midoriya Izuku, that he were Switcher or Bit Weasel or someone else in disguise, because according to his previous definition of "Midoriya Izuku" he wasn't Midoriya Izuku because Midoriya Izuku was quirkless, always had been and always would be.

He could still be Fossa, though. Fossa was defined by being an undercover hero in training and that hadn't changed; an undercover hero in training he remained.

He should be happy right? Being quirkless was an awful thing, the word almost a slur in and of itself (and he'd heard plenty of real slurs, too: "neandertoe," "protohuman," "low rung," "generic boy") so shouldn't he be happy to no longer be quirkless? He wasn't, though, he was confused and angry and cheated. He'd been proud of the fact that, bizarre acts of god helping him or not, he'd managed to get this far, to prove everyone who'd ever called him "generic boy" dead-wrong by making it into UA, by becoming the one thing quirkless people were just never allowed to be. Suddenly the identity he had so much pride in, the obstacles he had overcome, the community he was a part of... just weren't there. Here he was, member of an oppressed minority group climbing the ladder despite the world pushing him down, and just as he started to make headway the world said "you're not a member of that oppressed minority group anymore."

There was also the matter of this being obviously Tripswitch's quirk. How many people would know that? Would anyone know? Would anyone care? How much did it really matter? On some

level it was an astoundingly useful quirk. On another level as far as being a hero went it didn't make much difference. He might as well not have it for all that it would help him in a fight... though he could think of dozens of other ways it could help him during missions--how many heroes could come upon someone dying in a combat zone, shoo death away with a handful of glass, and put the rescued party in their pocket--but would it be right to use it at all? It wasn't his for all he held it now. Would it be wrong to use a stolen quirk?

Stolen? Borrowed? That was the question that should have struck first. How the actual hell could this possibly have happened? Hirano had this quirk and then... He didn't have the words, even in his own mind, to phrase this desperate confusion into a coherent question.

"How did... how could you not know?" Monoma asked nervously. "Is it from All For One? Did he find you at the training camp? You were gone all day and they were saying you died--"

"It's from All For One," Izuku replied. "I guess. It has to be I suppose but... I'm pretty sure it happened way before the training camp." He was speaking without thinking, disconnected from his tongue, admitting things he never would have said in his right mind. "I'm, well, an amnesiac, believe it or not."

"Is... he for real?" the blonde turned to the principal for confirmation.

Nedzu nodded. "It is, unfortunately, more complicated and uglier than you are likely imagining. However, you do not need to know about that. You are plenty intelligent, Monoma."

The blonde mimed zipping his lips. "No one will hear about any of this from me, I swear. I haven't said a word to anyone but you."

"Good. You could make life very difficult for Midoriya by revealing this. Rest assured that I protect my students, all of them, even from each other."

Monoma gulped at the implied threat, turning away to stare out the window. "All For One scares me to death," the blonde admitted quietly. "Sometimes... I use certain quirks, and it feels so good and I wonder..." He clenched a fist. "It scares me to think who I could have become if my quirk mechanics were a bit different..." he shook his head, "doesn't matter. The point is I'm sorry, Midoriya. And I'd never tell anyone."

Somehow Izuku couldn't make his mouth move. Nedzu answered in his stead. "Thank you, Monoma. Your mature handling of this situation has been admirable. I need to speak to Izuku alone. After this I would like to speak with you again so please remain nearby."

The blonde nodded. "Of course," he said and fled.

Izuku sank lower in his chair, deflating like a punctured balloon and finally found some words. "Every time I think my life is complicated enough, it gets more complicated," the greenette whispered. "I don't... get it. Why would I end up with K-Hirano's quirk? Whoever was using me, they hated All For One and All For One hated them. How... just how, Nedzu?"

"We can only speculate," Nedzu hummed quietly. "And, of course, there is no guarantee that All For One is responsible, although it does seems most likely. Perhaps the explanation is trickery. It could also be blackmail."

"Someone... blackmailed All For One. Into giving me a quirk. Why...?" Well, it made a (very tiny) bit of sense on some level but how could you blackmail the most powerful villain in the world?

"It is possible," Nedzu began, "that your kidnapper threatened to reveal All For One, perhaps to All Might or the HPSC."

"Why didn't... why blackmail All For One instead of just doing that if they hated him so much?" Izuku grasped at the threads, trying to make sense of it.

Nedzu shrugged. "Mutually assured destruction perhaps? All For One and your kidnapper both held swords above each other's heads and, rather than annihilate each other, the two came to an agreement to deescalate hostilities. Part of that agreement involved handing over Hirano's quirk to you for safe keeping--you did not know of it and so it was effectively removed from the board."

"Why didn't All For One just... come back and take it from me?" Izuku muttered.

"Perhaps he simply did not care. Criminal masterminds are often rather busy. He may have had other marauding scheduled." Izuku could not tell if Nedzu was messing with him or not. "Or, presuming any of our previous suppositions are correct, your possessor survived and still held some kind of power over All For One. Attacking you would have reignited hostilities."

Removing the quirk from the board... was that really the reason he ended up with Kuma's meta ability? His body thief had promised him a handful of new skill and perhaps a new appreciation of life... but had still felt guilty about what they were doing. Perhaps they'd found a way to make the trade seem more even. "It was a gift," Izuku realized suddenly. "This wasn't... this wasn't just removing the quirk from the board... my kidnapper meant for me to have it as... payment. So they could feel less guilty about stealing me that week." And, honestly, at the time that he was kidnapped, he had been desperate for a quirk, hadn't he? That version of Izuku was so different from what he had become in the last year that it was hard to remember how his pre-kidnapping self felt but he was pretty sure that this would have been a splendid gift which past Izuku would have gladly sacrificed a week of his life for if he had even known about it. Was he really supposed to get a note, then? This definitely suggested that there had been an unintentional breakdown in communication.

"Are you sure of that?" Nedzu asked curiously.

"No, not certain... all of this is just supposition. It could have been an accident that neither party was more than vaguely aware of for all we know."

Nedzu waited for a time, paws steepled, head cocking from side to side as he considered the situation. "It should be a panacea, shouldn't it? Suddenly not being quirkless anymore, but it isn't at all, is it? It's an insult."

Nedzu understood. Nedzu understood probably better than Izuku himself. "It makes me angry," Izuku admitted, "that I came here and... the moment I was making my way, moving up through a world that didn't like me being quirkless, suddenly the world said, 'oh, you're a hero student? Well, you're not quirkless anymore then. There's no way a quirkless person could be a hero student, so if you're hero student then you must have a quirk.' It's..."

"I know this feeling well," Nedzu told him, nodding gravely, "though from a rather different circumstance. There have been, and still are, people who insist it is not possible for an animal, regardless of intelligence, to successfully run an institution such as UA, or really to succeed at any task in the human world." Of course there were. Izuku was at least human, so it seemed that the discrimination against him should be less egregious than that faced by the principal, but Nedzu was also one of a kind. It was hard to be prejudiced against someone so unique and exotic, although those two words opened up new cans of worms. "There are two subgroups of these prejudiced individuals. One group constantly circulates petitions trying to have me removed from my post or

worse because I am 'unsuitable for a task involving human children.'" Nedzu shrugged. "Nearly every successful individual will attract a group who vehemently want them gone for one reason or another. This did not surprise me. What surprised me was the equally vocal group who insist that I must be human and ought to be reclassified as an individual with a drastic mutation quirk." Izuku blinked and shook his head in surprise.

"But... you're genetically not human, obviously not human... do you even have twenty-three chromosome pairs?" Wow, that was way too forward. He shouldn't have asked, but he was still kind of out of it. It was surprising that he hadn't started stuttering and mumbling in the face of this shock.

Nedzu didn't seem to care in the slightest and informed him nonchalantly, "no, I have twenty-one and my dislike for the concept of the Turing Four Human Sapience Test, which we discussed when speaking about Isomorph, is less from my inability to pass it than from the fact that many people insist that I must be human despite my failure to pass it. Oppression comes in a variety of flavors. It infuriates me when people deny that I am a animal because of my successes every bit as much as it infuriates me when people deny me rights because I am an animal. I cannot even imagine how angry it would make me if I were abruptly transformed into a human. It would be the epitome of the former form of mistreatment." Izuku could only nod along as Nedzu explained to him exactly how the greenette himself felt and why.

"What now?" Izuku asked eventually.

Nedzu folded his paws, suddenly grave. "Do not tell anyone about this. If asked directly by someone with the proper authority do not lie, but do not volunteer this information to anyone."

"Not even Aizawa or Tsukauchi?"

"No. I think it is in everyone's best interest if this stays off the record... forever, if possible. On paper your possession of Hirano's quirk could look very bad. It is not bad, and I see no evidence that you have done anything wrong," Izuku saw such evidence, but he would take that to his grave, "but this situation could easily be made to look like collusion with All For One." Izuku felt his lip curl at the suggestion, but Nedzu was right. "If kept strictly secret, this power will afford you a great weapon. If made public it will present a grave vulnerability." Izuku nodded stiffly. Keeping quiet about the MLA dreams and about his willing participation in his kidnapping was definitely the right call then if Nedzu were advising him not to share even this.

"I understand that this is a drastic change for you. It will take time to make sense of it. I would advise you, as Hound Dog would were he privy to this information, not to rush the adaptation, not to make quirk or rash decisions, and to keep an eye on how feelings are affecting your thoughts." Izuku nodded again, mechanical. "Beyond that I cannot help you much. The way that I process intense emotional experiences is fundamentally different than the standard human approach."

Well then. "Thanks, Nedzu, for watching out for me."

The principal smiled in a way that made Izuku fear for someone else's safety. "I will always protect my students, staff, and school to the best of my considerable ability. Send Monoma in as you leave. I will arrange for the two of you to meet privately for quirk practice in the next two weeks if you are both amenable to the idea."

The greenette bit his lip. "I... um..." Izuku couldn't use this thing. It was... it wasn't just rewriting his entire identity. In the sense that it was a gift from All For One, it was as if he were accepting a weapon of mass destruction from a hated foe. In the sense that it was Kuma's meta ability it was as if he were digging up a friend's grave to steal the sword they had been buried with.

Nedzu considered this, flicking his ears. "You are not comfortable with the idea of using this power, are you?" Izuku shook his head. "Of course not," the principal almost sounded derisive, as if berating himself for his assumption. "I will not make such arrangements unless you approach me asking for them at a later date."

The greenette whispered another round of thanks then ducked out into the hallway, wiping at the stress tears budding in his eyes.