Yagi Toshinori was born a strange child. From his first night drawing breath, he seemed to wake crying more often than most babes and was incredibly fitful in his sleep. As he grew up, he also grew stranger. While most children played heroes and villains, he pretended to be a noble knight, using a cardboard tube as his sword. As he grows, he will have vague memories of reaching out to grasp at embers, laughing when they felt warm in friendly against his skin instead of burning and angry (I won't interfere, but you are yet young; where is the harm if you won't remember?).

One day, he would start taping pieces of cardboard boxes to one end, to make an axe, and he would draw trees and wolves on the axe head with crayons.

He drew odd pictures and told curious stories about knights who had guns. They were in his dreams, he would tell them all. Part of the boy's quirk, they would think. At least, until the doctor tugged on his pinky toes, drew his blood, and told him that no power would ever come to him. 'What about the dreams', the woman whom he called mother asked.

'His imagination', the cold and clinical doctor would dismiss.

But the boy persisted, with his strange games and strange stories, until one day he and the babysitter came home from the park, and mother was gone, along with the rest of them. Violence he thought had only lived in his dreams had taken them. Strangers take him in, but they don't like it when he talks about his dreams. They got angry, not just about his dream stories, but all his other 'oddities', but discovered they were unable to break him from his 'bad habits'. Screaming, always screaming, that he was a bad, awful boy for persisting in the notion that his dreams were more than dreams. For pretending to have a quirk, when he didn't.

Yagi Toshinori was a strange child. He likes wolves, knights, and fire, and was left at the doorstep of an orphanage at the age of five by a woman who looked halfway between anger and insanity.

"You're kind of crazy." He's been told that before, so it doesn't really sting. He's crazy Yagi, who told wild stories to the younger kids, liked to start fires in an attempt to beat steel into discernible shapes, and had grand ideals(delusions). He thought society needed a symbol to look up to, a pillar that held strong. He would be that hero, if he could. But evil power only broke against other power, and though he hoped he was good, he was quirkless(Lightless).

All he had going for him were his dreams. Every night, without fail, he sees life in another world, through the eyes of a stranger. The dreams don't always happen in order; last night, Lord Forge had been fighting a Warlord, but the night before, he had been the only Iron Lord left, far past the age of Warlords. Sometimes, Toshinori couldn't hear what was happening, or he would be able to hear but unable to see.

It had taught him things, yes; he knew more ways to kill hostile extraterrestrials than any teenager had a right to, for one. He knew what Mars smelled like, and what it felt like to walk on the moon. How to clean a gun or turn a misshapen lump of metal into a knife, plants that were safe to eat and how to lose an assassin (and how to kill them first if losing them was no longer possible).

He knew what it felt like to have fire flowing through his veins. How to channel paracausal energy through a weapon and set it alight. But hand in hand with knowing what raw power felt like, came knowing what death felt like, too. Many a night, he had woken, screaming, with the phantom pain of a gunshot, a collapsed lung, the catastrophic failure of Forge's molecular bonds as hostile Light vaporized him.

With great power, came great agony. It made him glad, sometimes, that he didn't have any, but it didn't stop him from desiring he did. If anything, it made him more certain of his goals. All his life, he'd gone to sleep and watched people light up with hope at the sight of the Iron Lords or Guardians. People who smiled because the moment they saw the Iron Banner flapping in the wind over an outpost, they knew they would be safe.

Lord Forge taught him the importance of symbols. The strength that they could bolster, the people and feelings they could inspire. Toshinori wanted to become something like that for his own world. He wanted to make a Japan where people could smile and live without fear that they would find their neighborhood on fire when they got home. Where teenagers like him could walk to and from school without worrying about whether or not today would be the day they got mugged, murdered, or sold to the quirk bogeyman (if such a thing exists).

Shimura Nana smiled like the sun (like Lady Jolder) and offered him power. In the interest of fulfilling his dreams, he accepts.

Lord Forge and Lady Efrideet have slain a dragon. Toshinori howls and cheers for them as best a bodyless teenage observer can. The two Iron Lords are panting, breathless, burnt and spent. They are just as euphoric as he is, though, even as they stumble to the ground, to sit and look out at the ancient, ruined city skyline. They sit like that for a long time, and Toshinori relaxes with them.

After a long while of Lord Forge observing the sunset, Toshinori eventually grows bored, and he feels his 'host' getting more somber the longer he stares at the ruins. Then, something happens that has never happened before; he hears what could only be Lord Forge's thoughts.

I wish I could see a world that was whole... maybe even that they could see this one, in turn. Perhaps it would better teach them to protect their own.

In the moment after, the sound of massive jaws snapping shut echoes from behind them. The Iron Lords turn, horrified, and Toshinori shared in their horror. The Ahamkara had still been alive. And Lord Forge had made a wish.

The dying beast had the last laugh as it consumed one more meal of the space between fantasy and reality. Lord Forge yelled, and threw his axe at the dying, laughing, feasting wish dragon.

Toshinori woke up. He blinked up at the bottom of the top bunk. An answer to his oldest question stared back each time he blinked, afterimages of a hewn dragon burned into the backs of his eyelids. Saladin Forge had wished unknowingly upon an Ahamkara, to look into a world where humanity was whole...

And that such a world might look back and learn from a humanity that was broken.

He got up and crept to the bathroom. Peered into the looking glass. The lights are off, for a moment his skin is dark instead of pale, hair short instead of a wild blond mane. It doesn't help that he's tall for his age, and the workout routine Shimura-san has him on has made his muscles more defined. He blinks away the false image of Lord Forge, stares at his own reflection, and as he's done since he was old enough to understand that his dreams were more, Toshinori whispers a question, even though he thinks he may now know the answer.

"Do you dream that you're me, Forge-san?"

(yes)

One for All. Power, unlike any other (that exists in this world). It feels like... energy. Pure, raw. The very definition of power. He had subconsciously been expecting something more similar to Lord Forge's Light, that hot, alive (fire is life) feeling, like he could live and run forever. This is... different.

But the first time he uses it, he can't help but imagine he's calling on the Light. He's new to power, so he treats it like the only power he's ever felt. It feels like it... swells within him, and he swells too; literally, as in he grows a few inches, his muscles expand, and he kisses his favorite jacket goodbye. The punching bag explodes and its remnants slam into the wall. Turns out, he's a natural with his new quirk. He almost tells oshishou that he had help, that he already had experience with what channeling such power felt like.

But Toshinori keeps his mouth shut. People didn't appreciate his tales and dreams. Oshishou was different than most, but he didn't want to risk turning her away.

He does show her the manga he's drawing of Lord Forge and Lady Efrideet's battle with the Ahamkara; he's seen a lot of Forge-san's fights, but that one had been the most epic, not to mention it was the answer to why he had the dreams in the first place. It feels right to commemorate it. He won't be drawing the moment Lord Forge made his wish, though(good). He didn't know if it would make the wish dragon's meal more filling, for someone from another world to pay homage to its last moment of power.

He thinks it's better not to risk it (so you do have a brain, boy). Oshishou likes the drawings, insists he has talent and should continue to nurture it. She tells him it's important to have a hobby, to keep the things he enjoys close, because he'll need something good to take his mind off the bad he would encounter.

Because One for All wasn't just a great power; it was a great power that came with a built-in nemesis.

He suspected that she had undersold All for One's evil in her explanation of the nearly two-hundred year history of One for All, and what the man had done to her, but he knows how to read between the lines; he was enlisting in a war, by accepting this quirk. A shadow war was still a war, and this one was for Japan's soul. According to her, he'd been pulling strings in the government for decades, running most of the underworld, and was constantly trying to reach into other countries.

She'd told him it was fine to back out if he wanted, after hearing all that. But how could he, knowing all that? Knowing evil, true evil, not just the everyday delinquency of a purse snatcher, was festering in his home? No. Sure, he was young, but Guardians often started fighting for the city within their first year of life (foolish boy, that's different, you're mortal).

And it's not like he'd start fighting right away. He still had to get through school. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized that Nana hadn't just chosen him for his 'heart'; it was a genius tactical decision. The other users had all been battlefield promotions, more or less; Nana had gotten it less than an hour after learning about it because she and Torino were the first heroes the fatally wounded sixth user had found.

A quirkless teenager, and orphan with no obvious connections to the shadow war, was the last person All for One would suspect as One for All's inheritor. Instead of a battlefield promotion, Nana would actually get to train her successor, and since he was young and had no original quirk to compare it to, he would be able to go full throttle with the quirk without any preconceptions about how it should work (aside from those dreams), and it would grow with him in a way it hadn't with the others.

If this was war, then Toshinori was in. For better or worse, he would give them war back.

(You ought to steel yourself)

He would say the UA was everything he had dreamt it would be, except the nights leading up to the entrance exam mostly featured Lord Forge overseeing the blockade on a haunted, fungus-infested, world-eating dreadnaught. He zoned out once or twice during the written exams as he pondered about this relatively unusual occurrence; his dreams rarely happened in order, but these ones had, and within the relatively same timeframe. By the time he's finished, there are doodles of egragore in the corner of one page that he hadn't realized he'd drawn until he was turning the paper in. Tomorrow morning, he might tell Lord Forge that Crow fellow would probably do better with therapy instead of that weird ghost confrontation plan.

He isn't sure how well he did on that test. But then he's grouped with the other kids outside Ground Beta, and a pro is setting them loose on robots.

When he comes across three upon rushing in, Toshinori's first thought is (ha, cute) that they're nothing compared to the Vex. He taps into One for All, launches himself forward, and cannons into the lead robot knee-first like he's seen Lady Jolder do. It crumples like paper.

It isn't the last (do us Titans proud).

Toshinori gets into UA on the Identity Protection track, going to Heroism classes as 'All Might' (for Light's sake, what are you, five?), but nothing really changes. He's still the weird idealist kid, except now he's the weird idealist kid with a quirk and the worsening habit of making creepy doodles on his homework. He tries to make friends, but if his overly friendly demeanor doesn't turn them away, hearing things they didn't want to hear did (if they arrived only hoping they had what it took, they obviously don't) did. His dreams were frightening, yes, but he learned a lot from Forge-san and those around him, it only seemed right to share some of that knowledge.

Unfortunately, people found it unsettling that he knew exactly how deep a knife had to go in order to sever someone's spine, what disintegration felt like, and exactly what happened to the human body when it was exposed to the vacuum of space. He was only making some hero suit suggestions and passing comments. And apparently since his cheerful attitude didn't match his penchant for belting out unsettling information (even though they asked) or the 'edgy' wolf sketches he tended to decorate his stuff with, some of them had him pegged as some sort of budding psychopath. The wolves on his notebook were adorable, thank you very much, he doesn't see what's so edgy about them.

He also doesn't see why The Art of War is seen as problematic for a hero to read. They weren't just hear to learn how to take down the common thugs; they were here to learn how to take down the vilest human beings in the world. Didn't they know how many heroes got called in by the police or military if the situation called for it? Sooner or later, they were all going to face down the kind of evil that guns usually got drawn for. Those kinds of people... he had to draw knowledge of all kinds into his mind if he wanted to face them and come out alive, let alone win. All for One, especially.

This combination, along with his late bloomer status, got him labeled as potentially unhinged, a villain timebomb. At least, that's the impression he got from the school counselor he was forced to see every weekend. He won't pretend to understand why (someday, you will). It hurts, though. Even Gran Torino seems to think he's a weirdo.

He tries his best to act different as Yagi Toshinori, the Gen Ed kid who liked to draw manga. Nana and Torino had originally wanted him to attend all his classes as All Might, but he had convinced them that it would be tactically sounder for his true self to attend the regular classes while All Might took them digitally as part of the Identity Protection track for students who weren't comfortable taking the hero course as themselves. It would give his true self a plausible reason to be involved in the hero world, as well; gen Ed kids usually still wound up working at hero agencies.

But the harder he tried, the 'weirder' he became, and it certainly didn't help that he was quirkless. He wound up spending a lot of time in the forge that the Support Hall had; the Support teacher was really nice and was more than happy to let a seemingly budding traditional blacksmith have some workshop time as long as he logged all the materials he used.

All Might was the unstable idealist with a ridiculous dream. Yagi Toshinori was the weird, quiet kid who had no friends and should just transfer into the Support course already, with how much time he spent practicing his blacksmithing.

At least he had oshishou.

He's seen Forge-san loose people. Felt the secondhand grief. He knows the Iron Lords will all die except him, though none of the dreams have given him many clues as to what happened (Rasputin). But it didn't prepare him for the real thing. He always thought, that through his dreams, he would better handle situations similar to the ones Lord Forge encountered.

"I leave it to you."

The words echo through his mind like church bells. They haunt his waking hours and muffle his dreaming ones. The phantom smell of smoke and burnt ozone hanging in the thick, humid air plagues him for weeks and returns periodically over the years to come. He's seen violent things happen. He barely remembers his family, but he remembers the exact shape of the crater left where their home used to be. He's helped oshishou and Torino-san with a lot of violent crimes during their internships and work studies.

But this was different, because he was and adult now and understood what was happening to him. And it was happening to him, not Forge.

She was gone (we all still die). And he had watched it happen. He'd seen the face of the enemy, now, and All for One had seen him. All Might's cover as a user of One for All was probably blown, now, and apparently Nana's contingency was to send him to America for the rest of his education, and to grow his quirk some more. He supposes that explains why she'd gone to such lengths to ensure he was fluent in English.

It feels like there's a black hole where she used to be in his life. She was the closest thing he had ever had to a mother since his own died, and it hurt. It hurt almost as much as Torino-san's training; without her reasonable presence as a buffer, the other hero no longer held back. It felt, at times, like Toshinori really was fighting for his life, there were moments where his hind brain truly went into 'mortal peril' mode, where he genuinely found himself thinking this is it. He knew Torino wouldn't kill him, but his brain didn't, and the man definitely had no reservations about hurting him.

At least until The Incident.

The man had blasted into his back hard enough that he vomited blood, and a moment later, before the follow-up blow he knew was coming could connect, Toshinori felt warm. When the blow connected, Torino screamed, and when he had finally caught his breath, Toshinori looked up to see that the older man's hand was burnt (he deserves it). It wasn't the last time, either; over the course of the next few sparing sessions, he got burned multiple times (don't worry, I'm simply 'training' him).

Eventually, he stopped taking it far enough that Forge intervened, but no amount of questions spewed at mirrors answered why the man was intervening, Guardian training was far more brutal (you are mortal), or how he could in the first place. Toshinori tired using Light, but only succeeded in summoning One for All. He was going to have to try using it in a dream and see if he could channel his quirk through Forge, like Forge was obviously channeling Light through him (don't you dare!).

Nana was gone. Torino was only helpful insofar as to sharpen his reflexes. Soon, he would be an entire ocean away from everything he'd ever known... but at least he finally had an answer to his question. Before he goes to bed on the night he intends to test his theory, he looks in the mirror.

"I know you dream you're me, Forge-san."

(I know you know, don't you dare break anything important)

So this is a weird one that's been in my head for a while now. I'm not particularly deep into the MHA fandom, just enough so that I had a fanfiction idea for it. I thought it would be pretty funny if Lord Saladin and All Might hitched rides in each others heads every night, and I think having Saladin and the Iron Lords as examples when he was a child would lead to some interesting changes in All Might's character.

I don't know how far this will go, but I'm listening to the Rise of Iron soundtrack while writing it and I forgot how hard that music hits. Shadow of the Walker especially. Let me know what you guys think of this so far!

Fare Thee Well!