Standard Disclaimer: I own nothing in regards to My Hero Academia. All properties therein are those of their creators. I am only a writer working on my skills with worlds and characters that I love.

Note: Apologies for the wait on this one. First, the muse went in another direction for a while. Then I decided that it would be a good idea to finish the manga since the final chapter had been posted, and boy am I glad I did. What they did with Dabi was perfection… even if they did Izuku dirty in the end.

Chapter Twelve - Revelations

"So that's why you didn't kill him." Izuku folded his hands across the surface of his desk and locked eyes with the scarred flame user that had at last returned to the fold. "While I can commiserate with your motives, this does change our plans going forward. I had everything set up within acceptable parameters and now the calculations and agents will need to be maneuvered to a new degree. You've just made a lot of new work for me."

Dabi shrugged and reclined further back in his chair. The warehouse he and Toga were sharing with Stain was sparse in many areas, but high class furniture was not one of them. Many months back, the green haired blackmailer had seen the lack of amenities his closest ally was living with and had seen fit to deliver a bunch of items to ease the man's downtime; he argued that a body not properly rested couldn't perform at peak capacity, and Stain had grudgingly acknowledged that that made sense.

Continuing where he'd left off, the newly silver-haired man noted, "You knew when I signed on with you that I wasn't a true believer like Stain and your little lady friends. I have my own goals, and they don't include letting my old man off so easy. A coward dies a thousand times before the end, and I want him to know true despair before I finally allow him to meet his maker. That said, my getting him there can still be made to suit your interests if we plan it right."

"And how does giving away your true identity do that? From where I'm sitting it looks as if you've sacrificed a massive advantage for temporary satisfaction."

Dabi smirked and pressed a noncommittal hand to the dead skin of his cheek, slowly pressing it into his jaw and adjusting the stitches that kept it in place. It was taking more and more work to keep his body held together, but he knew that he'd be able to keep going as long as his vengeance was well within sight. "Trust me, it'll change everything for him. My old pop is a man of singular belief. Everything in his world makes sense in its proper place, even if he doesn't much like his own place in it. Now, I've shown him that something he believed for years, that I was dead, is completely untrue. Right now he's probably wondering what else is wrong that he's convinced himself is right."

Smirking wide as the devil, he continued, "He'll start making changes; especially now that All Might is all but out for the count. Endeavor has always wanted to be the number one hero, but he's like a dog chasing a car. He won't know what to do with it now that he's actually caught it. Without me shattering his worldview he'd have likely swallowed his pride and asked All Might how to get it done. Now though, he'll be thinking about how he can be the best of his kind when he's created one of the worst of ours. It'll be a constant viper striking the darkest recesses of his mind every time he dares to give himself a moment of self reflection. It'll make him tense. It'll make him nervous. It'll make him vulnerable."

"And when he's vulnerable, mentally relapsing, and straining with all of his might against his nature to be a better person…" Izuku's brows raised with the deviousness of what he was starting to piece together.

"I'll shatter him all over again with a reminder of how the past doesn't just die because you want it to." Dabi threw his head back and burst out laughing. "Oh yes, despair heaped upon despair!" All at once the laughter died and Dabi shot forward in his chair until his face was halfway across his boss's desk to look him directly in the eyes. "I don't got long left, and you're planning a massive push soon. A push that will be a hell of a lot easier if Endeavor and the other major league players are primarily occupied elsewhere. Put my plan into motion with yours and both of our goals will get met."

Izuku acknowledged the depth of the planning his friend had enacted, but didn't let it throw him off track. "As I said, Endeavor living shatters my former plan of propping Best Jeanist up as the next number one. All Might was 'victorious' as far as the cameras were concerned in his battle with All For One, but in his reduced state he'd have needed to step away from the stage and let someone else hold his spot or risk the truth of his condition getting out. I imagine the world would think it a magnanimous act on his part."

"But now, until you deal with your father, the corruption of the Hero Commission won't allow anyone else to pass over their number two when they've invested so much money into his career. The PR backlash would bury them. It's a shame, though."

Dabi blinked warily. "Why? One hero is just as bad as another in my opinion. Whose to say that Jeanist wouldn't be just as big a dick as my old man?"

The greenette leveled a hard stare on Dabi and proclaimed, "Years ago I learned the hard way that not all people are created equal, and by that logic not all heroes are either. All Might was a muscle-brained-braggart that believed in his own legend too much to ever see the true harm his actions and very existence were creating in the world around him. Endeavor is a monstrous child abuser with a god complex. In contrast, Best Jeanist is the Common Ground. He's a hero that has actually served in his career as an example to others. He's calm, collected, compassionate, and he actually goes out of his way to avoid collateral damage. By Kami, he even volunteers in his free time at local juvenile halls to mentor troubled youth before they can go down the path of villainy after the justice system abandons them. Jeanist is an ideal of heroism! One that others would have emulated for the betterment of our society were he placed in his rightful position as number one!"

From the shadows of the raftors above, the harsh voice of Stain called down, "Damn straight." A swift shuffling sound announced the man's retreat to continue his parkour training but neither conversationalist doubted his keen ears would still be able to hear them.

Izuku unfolded his hands, began drumming the fingers of one on the desk and rested the other over his knee as he crossed one leg over the other. "But perhaps that can still work for us." His robotic eyes began to flash as he started working through virtual calculations and cross-referencing his vast databanks of information.

"Yes, Jeanist can hold the line for a while as the new number two, but in the meantime we can start paving the way for the next generation. Your goal of going out in the ultimate blaze of glory can be used to great effect in that regard if you manage to take enough of the old guard out with you."

"The next generation?" Dabi queried.

"Yes, the next generation. The propping up of a new number one can hold a populace over but, at the same time, the fall of a new number one can pave the way for something greater." A dark grin began to grow over the crime lord's face as he elaborated, "It's time for a new Symbol of Peace to rise. And I have the perfect candidate in mind."

"And how exactly are we going to do that?"

"By setting the stage perfectly for what both of us want, my friend. First, I was thinking about sending you out to meet with the Yakuza…."

Elsewhere

All Might hesitated outside the door to Enji Todoroki's hospital room. Though he often made every attempt to be cordial with his old classmate, he was far from blind to the angry envy that was often directed back at him for his efforts. All the same, he couldn't help himself from rushing over to the hospital as soon as he was able after learning of the number two's brush with death. The cause was still unclear, but early suppositions were that he'd been in such a hurry to come aid him in his battle that the man had accidentally lost control of his flames and his skin had caught fire as a result.

So worried was he that he didn't even stop to puff himself up into his hero form (for all of the one minute at a time he still had left after his battle with All For One) before yanking the door open and rushing inside. "Enji! I heard about what happened and-" He trailed off as the interior of the room came into focus. Enji was indeed in the only bed, absolutely covered head-to-toe in bandages that included huge wrappings that absolutely covered the lower half of his face, but it wasn't that that had halted him mid-heroic-greeting. No, that was the petite silver haired woman that was seated beside him.

All Might knew from UA's student file on young Shoto exactly who this was, and he was far from equipped to deal with whatever family-drama-bullshit was likely taking place in the wake of his closest competition's near-death experience.

Nervously, he grabbed the edge of the door and began slowly sliding it closed as he started backing out the way he'd come. "Sorry for the interruption. I'll just… come… back… later…" he slipped the door the rest of the way closed and took off running down the hall again. He'd verified Enji was at least on the mend, and there was still a lot of cleanup to be done now that the conflict was finally at an end.

Meanwhile

"Are you sure, Enji?" Rei Todoroki crossed her arms and held herself tight as her husband's words upon waking continued to echo within her mind. "You are absolutely sure that the man who attacked you was…"

"It was Toya, Rei." Enji stared down at his bandage wrapped hands. Not even the sudden arrival and subsequent departure of his rival could tear his eyes away from them. "He's alive… and he… he did all of this to me."

Rei still could only barely believe what she was hearing. "But how is that possible? Why didn't he just come home if he was alive? And why would he-"

"Would you come home if you were coming back to me?" Enji tasted bile as the words left his throat. The bile of hard-acknowledged truth. Though he'd always attempted to stay reserved with his children, a pillar for them to strive to be better than, rather than an active father, from the beginning he'd been unable to hide the truth that Toya was his favorite. The one child that could have overtaken him if not for the weakness of his skin… but unlike with the others, that weakness had not bothered him, or diminished the child in his eyes. Toya was the first child that he'd actually loved. The first one to show him that his heart was capable of such an emotion; and when Toya had been lost… his heart had been lost with him. But now….

"Have you told anyone yet?" Rei wanted to know.

"No." The scarred man shook his head in the negative. "I need some time first to… understand. But you deserved to know. If Toya has it out for me then he might have the same violent urges for you and the others as well. You can tell the kids what you want, but you need to be prepared for the worst."

"You really think he'd-"

"I don't know what to think, Rei." At last he tore his gaze away from his palms to stare into the woman's eyes. "I'm honestly floundering here. I'm doing the best I can with what little I know. But I promise you, whatever needs to happen, I'll be the one to do it. Toya's life now, and whatever fate he ends up facing, is on my conscience. Not yours."

Elsewhere

"Well, Mei, what did you find out?" Izuku asked as he exited the elevator into his first girlfriend's work space. He was far from surprised to find her sitting in her underwear with her eyes latched onto the purple gem sitting atop her incredibly long workbench.

"Eh?" The pinkette looked toward the sound of his voice, and her face scrunched up adorably as her eyes contracted back into a regular field of view. "Oh! Izuku!" The girl shot out of her chair and wrapped him in a pleasantly skin-filled hug. "I didn't know you were coming by."

The greenette nuzzled the girl's hair a bit before pulling back and gesturing back to where she'd been working. "I had a free twenty minutes in my schedule today and I wanted to see if you'd picked up on anything with… that."

"Funny you should ask." She led him over to her former seat where she pulled out a pink notebook filled to the brim with her untidy handwriting and endless lines of notes, calculations, and codes. "I've actually figured out quite a bit, which is terrifying when you consider how much I've been unable to understand."

"What do you mean?"

"Well…" She flipped through several pages before pointing to a line of calculations that had her boyfriend's eyes flying wide open with shock.

"Is this real?"

"Yeah, as crazy as it sounds. This rock has a definite presence on the physical spectrum, but it has no specific weight. It's on the visible spectrum as well, but no light penetrates it, no matter how focused. Finally, my instruments have categorized its atomic makeup as organic in nature, but none of them can tell me anything else about what it's made of."

Izuku raised a brow at that. "I've provided you with the forefront in military grade technology."

"Exactly. My tech is more than a match for anything on I-Island, and even I can't get a bead on what makes it tick."

"Do you have a theory?"

"Yeah. You were abso-fucking-lutely right not to try to mess with the thing when you got it. If I had to guess, that's One For All's last hoorah. He thought you'd guess it was a physical representation of his quirk, and be too intrigued not to try and take it for your own."

"But it being biological in nature could imply it's actually a piece of him." Izuku stated, following her train of logic. "With all of the decades he spent absorbing quirks from around the world it stands to reason that one of them could include transferring his consciousness at the moment of death. I imagine trying to use it would be like offering my body to him."

Mei shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. It's hard to say. But the more I think about it, the more I start to wonder…"

"I love it when your beautiful brain starts rolling." The Crime Lord leaned down to kiss her cheek lovingly. "What did you just figure out."

"Well…" Mei allowed herself a moment to purr at the feeling of her boyfriend's lips on her skin before elaborating, "All For One himself told you that the human body could only survive the addition of one extra quirk before breaking down. If this stone grants his quirk, and perhaps his consciousness as well, then you would not be the ideal host. You already have two quirks so it would effectively be your death sentence."

"And the cause of his death or not, All For One liked me." Izuku nodded. "So that begs the question, who is it really meant for?"

"The Doctor gave it to you."

"He did. So, is it a treacherous gift, or is it the ultimate weapon. If we hit someone with this at the perfect moment, the influx of a new quirk, or a new personality, would utterly incapacitate the target for at least a few seconds. A few pivotal seconds."

Mei was quick on the uptake as well, and she added, "And All For One would see it as a fascinating final challenge for you in particular. Can you kill your target before he takes control of it and repels you."

"So the target he thought I'd have must be someone that would be impossible to hit any other way, with any other amount of power." Izuku mused on that for a few moments before it finally hit him. "Son of a bitch. All For One is expecting me to go after Hawkes."

Now it was Mei's turn to raise a brow. "Why the hell would you go after Hawkes? He's not even number three on the charts."

"Yeah, but he's a government plant. Actually he's a double agent for the leadership of the Hero Commission, but both sides feed off of the dirt of the other so it's really a toss up who's dirtier. We've altered the Hero Commission leadership to be sure, but Hawkes is an agent of the old guard, one that still feeds the needs of his old masters. His vast maneuverability makes him nearly impossible to hit with conventional weaponry, so I was actually gonna let Kaina decide what to do about him in the short term, but if All For One was so certain he would be a primary target then maybe I should be digging even deeper into his dealings to figure out why… but that would include…. Could it be…. No that would be reductive…. It is more likely…."

Mei didn't like it when her boyfriend became so locked into his own thoughts and began mumbling to himself. He tended to spiral. It was much more preferable when he allowed others to share in his ideas and let the creativity flow. So she took hold of his chin to make him look at her again and stated, "There's also the possibility he just wanted you to think Hawkes was a bigger threat than he is so that you'd be tempted to use the rock sooner than later. It could all be one big mind fuck."

"Games within games."

"All For One's speciality."

"Hm." Izuu considered that a bit and then folded the towel the stone was sitting on over on itself, hiding it from view. "A worry for another time, perhaps." Gently wrapping an arm around Mei's waist, he pulled her up from her stool and asked, "What would you say to putting some clothes on and having lunch with me?"

"I thought you only had a spare twenty minutes?"

"For you, my dear, I'll always be able to move things around." He nearly purred as Mei's skin rested flush against his shirt. "And while we're eating we can start to think about how we'll approach the yakuza."

Elsewhere

Sir Nighteye was focused on the coffee table of his office where his co-conspirators were sharing in the practice of poring over the veritable mountain of information they'd printed off about the life of Izuku Midoriya… or what was supposed to be about his life.

"How can someone so famous have so little of a paper trail for the last couple of years?" All Might could hardly believe what he was seeing. Most of the documents they'd managed to find had come from paparazzi and fangirls posting online about seeing their favorite celebrity out in public. There had never even been a traffic photo of the lad's famed 'mobile office', something that was apparently patent pending for his company. The closest thing to a paper trail about activities he'd participated in were all official forms related to the running of his business.

Nezu, meanwhile, was stroking his jaw with one of his curled paws. "Are you sure about this, Mirai? Granted there is certainly something off about the boy, but to be our mystery criminal mastermind?"

"It's a hunch, Nezu." Mirah nodded without taking his eyes away from the page he was currently speed-reading. "However, I've grown to take my hunches seriously over the years. They tend to follow trails of data I have not yet come to understand, but eventually I always do. I can't prove it's an offshoot of my quirk, but experience has taught me that it might as well be. This boy is not what he seems. There is a malice buried beneath the surface and a cunning that might match even your own. And the more I look into him the shadier the waters become."

The investigator shuffled a few papers and brought out a page filled to the brim with numbers. "Take these." He handed them over to the intelligent bear and explained, "Over a dozen bets made by Midoriya against the market that paid out to insane levels. Every single one. Thanks to my contacts in the Hero Commission and the Government I've managed to scrounge up at least a dozen other pages just like that one, and more are on the way. The latter do not bear Midoriya's name as the fund claimant, but the sheer lack of losses fits his profile to a T, so it is likely he was using an alias or working through a middle man. Near as I can tell he has never lost money in the market. Not a single solitary yen. He's never made a bad investment. Every action he takes makes money. There's no possible way that happens. The natural laws of probability would forbid it… unless they were being tampered with."

Sitting next to the future-teller, Aizawa drawled, "If that's the case, why hasn't the National Financial Commission come after him with charges of fraud?"

"Nothing could be proved. You're looking at all the same documents I am and even with them this is all pure speculation; and even if it were more, the way we got them without a warrant or permission from the Hero Commission… would not make them admissible in court." Nighteye answered simply, quick eyes scanning everything before them at a rapid pace. "There have also apparently been several indications of intimidation from him to other Hero Support companies in the greater Tokyo area, but nothing was ever written down."

"Not written down?" Nezu stroked his furred chin thoughtfully. "I take it you didn't get that accusation from the police then?"

"Not at all." Mirai set the finished document down and steepled his hands beneath his chin. "The police have been remarkably tight-lipped about anything related to Izuku Midoriya or his company. No, I was curious how some of these 'rapid' acquisition companies were taking the hostile takeover of Brighter Horizons buying them out. I tracked down several members of their disbanded boards and each told roughly the same story. 'Representatives'" he raised his hands for finger quotes, "of Brighter Horizons came first to offer them a more than favorable price to buy them out. Business was good so of course they said no. Within a week, every time, the market turned against them and to avoid bankruptcy they signed a new deal with Brighter Horizons for less than a quarter of the previous offer."

Taking a moment to let that information set in, he finished with, "No set description of the 'representatives' has ever been corroborated. No report of suspected financial crime or intimidation has ever been filed or recorded at any precinct I visited. And though every previous owner of those businesses lost money, not a single one has been willing to say anything that could be remotely perceived as an accusation of wrongdoing on the part of Midoriya. Yet every one of those same companies ended up under the awning of Brighter Horizons one way or another."

"A lot of coincidences." Aizawa allowed slowly, his mind working over the things he had heard. "You think somehow Midoriya has enough sway with the market to do something that targeted?"

Mirai nodded. "The sheer amount of funds needed to do the things that Brighter Horizons has accomplished in such a short time frame is insane. There is no way a loan of that magnitude or a single investment capable of tipping the scales that heavily could have come onto the scene without making a massive splash with the Ministry of Finance. Yet no record of such an influx of cash has been reported there either, according to my contacts. Thus, if we follow the logic, Izuku's initial startup could not have been legal."

"But there is still no direct evidence to prove it was illegal either." All Might said. "Everything you are saying is based on supposition and your hunches." Everything he was hearing was getting more and more disturbing, but he still didn't want to believe that the young lad could be up to such villainy. Especially when the path to that road had no doubt been paved by his own regrettable words and actions. "None of this is corroborated by any other facts."

"We didn't have corroborating facts about the existence of All For One at first either, All Might. Yet we took you at your word when you said he was a world-ending threat." Nighteye didn't raise his voice for his rebuttal. He didn't need to. All present remembered how that horror had begun. Whispers in the dark. Accusations with no leads. Crimes that could not have possibly occurred, and yet still revealed their horrors in the light of day.

Nezu's hand at last ceased its ruminating motion on his chin as he leaned forward and stated the fact that had been sticking in his mind for the duration of their conversation. "Someone capable of this intricate level of financial manipulation, market weaponization, strongarm corporate takeover tactics, government collusion, and of hiding all of his actions from even the smallest local precinct… that kind of person would easily have a mind capable of influencing crime the way you suspect on a national level, Mirai." His eyes became sad as they looked down at the vast pile of pure conjecture laid out before their group. "It pains me more than I can say to think of a mind so bright being used for such villainy, but I believe you are right. Izuku Midoriya is the most likely candidate to be the shadow monarch you have been hunting. This… Moriarty. But the question remains, how are we going to prove it?"

In the end, it proved a question that no one was prepared to answer.

After a while Detective Tsukauchi, who had been watching the proceedings in silence for the most part, had a bit of a lightbulb moment. "Why don't we just go to the source?"

All Might blinked as he looked over at one of his oldest friends. "Whatever do you mean, Naomasa?"

The Detective shrugged. "Izuku isn't the only person we can look at. I was thinking I might stop by their home and have a chat with his mother. I wonder if she has any idea what her child has been up to…."