Izuku messed up, he had messed up bad.
You see, those villains that had kidnapped him yesterday turned out to be not regular villains, which was obvious considering that they were clearly well off if they could buy the expensive booze to serve people.
But Izuku didn't think that meant that they were working directly for All For One!
However, as the Vespas so kindly informed him the two villains, Kurogiri, indeed the misty one and Shigaraki Tomura was the one he had referred to as pale blue were very deep in All For One inner circle and the Vespas questioned Izuku how he encountered them since they rarely did anything that wasn't ordered by All For One.
So Izuku was justifiably very freaked out and didn't sleep that night because he kept getting up to double, triple check the locks on the doors and windows were secure, he couldn't sit still for long as his paranoia fully took hold and he kept a tight grip on the taser in one hand and his work phone in the other ready to call the Vespas if he saw anyone that shouldn't be outside.
He was tired when the sun rose but refused to let himself shirk his duties to his students over his mistakes and went on with his day eyes darting around in the same paranoia, the people of course noticed just how tense and tired he was, the South Side was his second home and the people there knew him the best.
But that wasn't Izuku's big mistake, no if it had just been that Izuku might be able to one day laugh this off as a life lesson to be more cautious in the future, if only it hadn't been for what he did next since he had subsequently dug himself deeper into this mess.
Because as he was reminded, he had foolishly given Kurogiri his work number and the man had texted him sometime after he finished with Dabi's lesson, Izuku knew his first reaction should have been to ditch the phone but all of his students had already associated the number with him and to undo that would take a long time since he'd need to get a new number and spread that to thousands.
And for a brief second Izuku considered ignoring the text and pretending that none of this was happening but from what the Vespas had told him of Tomura's temper such a thing would likely enrage the man and he'd retaliate against Izuku, either by going after him directly or attacking his students.
So probably dooming himself he texted Kurogiri back and against his better judgement set up a regular schedule for when he'd come by, what he would teach Tomura and for how long he'd be there per day.
Which was how he got himself into this very big mess, fully expecting to not come back when a purple-black portal of mist to appear in front of him and being surprised when he was just standing in the same bar they took him to the first time, with just Tomura and Kurogiri in the room with him.
Izuku was incredibly tense as he went about the math and geography lesson, but he didn't let it show since fear like that would've been dangerous in this situation, and Tomura seemed to be frustrated just trying to understand what Izuku was saying.
And having seen Tomura's obsession with games though it wasn't that hard for Izuku to adjust the lesson by using one of the games he knew, though it wasn't as popular as a pre-quirk game Tomura got pretty into it as Izuku continued to give him different goals outside of the real tasks of the game, the only hang up was that Tomura was having difficulty drawing up the real world version of the map since his quirk apparently turned things to dust.
After he destroyed the fifth pen he was given was what led Izuku to experience Tomura throwing a fit, it started fairly mild compared to how bad Kacchan's were and even though Izuku was worried about Tomura using his quirk on him the familiarness of the situation had set him at ease, he didn't even flinch when a bottle shot straight pass his head and shattered with such force a shard cut his cheek.
His lack of reaction to that was what finally brought Tomura out of the fit as he stared at Izuku confused, something that felt odd to Izuku as he was sure he would've been used to such a thing given Kurogiri wasn't reacting either, but then again that might be more unusual than he believed it.
Izuku hadn't even acknowledged the fit had happened as he placed a bandage on his cheek before he searched in his bag for a pair of gloves meant for five-point contact quirks then offered them to Tomura, the man slight riled up was very skeptical of the odd gloves working to stop his quirk but was elated when they did.
At the end of the session Kurogiri asked if he could let Tomura keep the gloves since he had an awful habit of his fits destroying a lot of things and they were cycling through ten new controllers a month, Izuku had no problem with that and understood Tomura's excitement over his new loot.
The following sessions were tense but for very different reasons than he originally thought it would, the idea originally being that he was being duped either into working for All For One or slowly led into a trap but he doubted that All For One would be so patient with a two-toes directly threatening his empire.
Instead, it was something he noticed in his second session with Tomura that caused most of his unease, because as old as they were Izuku would know primordial shoes anywhere and he knew Swiss shoes almost as well... like the ones Tomura was wearing.
The revelation that Tomura was once quirkless made a lot of sense given he had regular human fingertips, something that was near impossible, since most touch or hand-based quirks always caused the fingerprints to disappear at least if they didn't develop finger pads like Ochaco-Chan's.
And Tomura's body possibly wasn't compatible with the quirk either since he was constantly scratching himself and his skin looked so dry, flaking off large in patches, something that could get concerning fast but that wasn't the most upsetting part of it.
No, it was the why All For One kept a two-toes in his inner circle when everyone knew the man couldn't stand them that made him uneasy, namely because Tomura didn't seem to realize he or Izuku were quirkless since most two-toes would recognize each other on sight at their age.
So with caution Izuku would grow closer to Tomura during their sessions using co-op games to teach the man basic concepts and quickly suspected that Tomura never went to school or left the bar much with how unsocialized he was, it wasn't even that hard to get close to Tomura because after seeing the man four times a week and regularly gaming with him the man considered Izuku a decent DLC character to train with.
Tomura was also getting remarkably calmer compared to when they first met, Tomura was still throwing fits and would rage quit fairly regularly but he stopped destroying things with his quirk even if he was still throwing around the furniture and his stuff, but it was an improvement all the same according to Kurogiri.
A month was also long enough for Izuku to notice that for some reason, despite being in All For One's inner circle the two of them didn't do anything or that they knew much since Tomura would complain about that more often than not, something that made even less sense since he could maybe understand All For One making more powerful and loyal soldiers by giving two-toes quirks, but then why wouldn't he use them for anything?
Because both Tomura and Kurogiri were terrifyingly powerful with a bit of training but spent most of their day in this bar doing whatever they could to pass the time waiting for orders and occasionally vetting recruits when they wandered in, it just didn't make sense why All For One would waste the resources.
Tomura's power was obvious, as was Kurogiri's since Kurogiri had agreed to transport him everywhere he wanted so long as Izuku had a GPS location for him, the man had no limits that had been found as of yet but opening over twenty portals was mentally, complicated according to what Kurogiri was willing to tell Izuku.
Since All For One hadn't taken Kurogiri's quirk and didn't kill Tomura outright that must have meant the two men had some importance to All For One's plans, so Izuku decided to see if he could find either of their past lives before joining with All For One but came up with nothing, which was weird.
Tomura he could understand since he would've been a two-toes before All For One and wouldn't be publicly recorded if he did commit any crimes, but Kurogiri would have definitely had a record before now with how tightly regulated teleportation quirks were even if Kurogiri had been quick enough to not be noticed and smart enough to only use it in areas without cameras, there weren't even headlines about the odd mist child since such people were still quite rare.
He could ask the Vespas to dig for more information but that would only bring more attention to him and the Vespas if they started asking pointed questions about two apparently important people to All For One's plans, and getting more of All For One's attention was something he needed to avoid for as long as possible regardless of the reason.
So Izuku would have to try find who they were before they were criminals at all, he had no idea where to start looking for Kurogiri since he hadn't found any matching children in online yearbooks and the man hardly spoke at all outside of business, so he had no leads for him, Tomura on the other hand was an open book... relatively speaking.
Once Izuku had "boosted" his relationship with Tomura the man started commenting on things more freely around him and told Izuku more about himself, the main takeaway was that Tomura couldn't remember much clearly from before his seventh birthday, which was a massive red flag in his opinion.
There were bits and pieces from when he was six and All For One introduced him to Kurogiri for the first time, but anything before that was too hard to remember and Tomura wasn't invested in figuring it out, Tomura vaguely knew something bad happened when he was six but he couldn't recall anything at all other than it left him wandering the streets alone looking for help, but everyone would turn him away and All For One was the one who saved him.
There was a lot for Izuku to unpack there for another time but right now he was going to focus purely on the facts, Tomura, if what he did remember was correct then there was some kind of "accident" when he was six that left him homeless, and he was found by All For One.
From that Izuku started a search for family tragedies involving a young male with the matching initials S.T. in newspapers online going as far back as '59 since he didn't peg Tomura being any older than twenty-two, using the same initials of Tomura's alias was a stretch but it was all he had to go on and he could do another broader search later.
And after the first couple of hours dredging through thousands of papers Izuku felt kind of stupid but eventually he found the Shimura family massacre of '61.
A simple looking family that unfortunately had been targeted by some villain and all six members of the family and their beloved family pet had been found dead the following morning by a neighbor willing to be interviewed, one who described the bodies as rotting away before her eyes into ashy pulp.
There weren't any pictures in the papers naturally, but Izuku hazarded a guess that the bodies weren't that different from what would happen to someone that Tomura touched with all five fingers, a fact that first drew his attention but once he saw a picture of the family with their names attached, he knew this was the family he was looking for.
There were two children in the family, a young girl named Hana that could float as long as she held her breath, a name Izuku recognized as being spelt the same way Tomura did when he named the first female party members without fail, hell Izuku remembered how Tomura spent hours leveling up a Munna he named Hana just so he could keep it in his party and how Tomura stubbornly refused to part with the Pokémon transferring it over to his new games as soon as possible.
The boy Tenko was a near dead ringer for the man Tomura was now, namely the only major difference in appearance was that Tenko had the same black hair as his sister but that could be explained merely by dyeing hair or even a side effect of whatever number of quirks All For One used on him, however it was the fact the Tenko was biologically quirkless and that was all but confirmed Tenko and Tomura had to be the same person, the only hitch was Tenko's "body" was discovered at the house.
But for a man like All For One, getting a human cadaver that looked like Tenko would be laughably easy, he could probably make it himself with the right quirks, and the DNA database could be tempered with at any time, so that hardly proved anything to Izuku.
Two-toes weren't as uncommon as most people believed but it was true that the birth rates were lowered by hundred surviving infants at a high ball yearly number in Japan given how strong the quirk genes were in the local population due to All For One, in most places it was one in four but this small pool in Japan made it almost certainty that for the two boys being unrelated near impossible, especially since neither of their parents had any siblings or known family outside of their grandparents on the mothers side.
Unsurprisingly, this knowledge didn't give him much to work with. Izuku knew Tomura's real name and family now, but the knowledge wouldn't give him much wiggle room with the man, and looking into the family didn't show him much about why All For One would target this family and so thoroughly that he'd have them all killed, fake Tenko's death of all things and possibly almost completely erase Tenko's memory of who he was before he "rescued" him.
There were plenty of two-toes out there why did this family receive such a ruthless slaughter, regardless of whether it was directly by All For One's hands or not, and if it was by Tenko's unfortunate hands at six years old for whatever god forsaken reason only made Izuku more baffled and personally horrified.
The thought of a young child not understanding what was wrong with them as their body was changed by an unknown and unexpected quirk for who knows how long before they try to reach for a member of their family like any other day, only for them to start falling apart in front of them in a gruesome demise and when they run for help everyone else starts falling apart until they realize they were the ones killing their family was perfect for a short horror movie.
The sadistic part of Izuku's brain, that apparently loved torturing him, gleefully put him in that exact scenario with the only change that it was his students in the community center in the South Side. It was no surprise that he ended up emptying his stomach when he woke up this morning desperately trying to forget what the children looked like as they fell apart in his hands screaming.
It was likely due to the emotional whiplash of the nightmare that caused Izuku to do something so incredibly foolish and push his luck.
Izuku had bought a pair of primordial shoes and dyed them black then decorated them with silver ink that reflected rainbow colors and glowed in the dark, carefully painting patterns from the games he played with Tomura that related to the Shimura family and replaced the laces out right. This masterpiece was given to Tomura as a special loot reward the same day when Tomura managed to complete a task he gave the man when Izuku started teaching him a month ago.
Tomura grinned madly upon seeing them and cooed over the Yamper on one before slipping them on with no problems, meaning Tomura was without a doubt Shimura Tenko and thanked Izuku for coming up with a good cosmetic reward, questioning if he'd get even more if completed other hard quests and Izuku confirmed it with a smile despite how much his heart ached knowing that Tomura had to be some pawn in a plan by All For One.
The plan was very short-sighted and not at all thought through beyond proving Tomura was a two-toes, and one of the many things he hadn't considered was that Kurogiri would know what two-toes were, that he knew Tomura was one of them and that he'd knew exactly what Izuku had just pulled.
An oversight that became clear as soon Izuku turned back to ask Kurogiri something and his voice died in his throat upon locking eyes with the man, Kurogiri's face only had eyes and while most couldn't read solid eyes as well as he could Izuku was certain even the blind could feel the tension in Kurogiri's knowing gaze.
Izuku had all but accepted that he would be killed for his stupidity in that same moment and cursed himself for mistaking Kurogiri's silence for ignorance, and now it was going to get him killed and kick start a war that would get thousands killed.
Izuku remained pleasant throughout the rest of the session not hinting he was aware of his fate in order to not upset Tomura and when it came time for him to go Izuku was quite sure he'd be walking off a cliff rather than being put back in his hotel room, for a moment Izuku stood still and wondered if his perception was being altered by a quirk of some kind to lull him into a false sense of security.
Then his phone dinged with a text of Kurogiri, Izuku hesitated for a second then gave into temptation to look at the message.
[Kurogiri]
[Kurogiri: Deku-Sensei, I believe there is something we must discuss.]
Izuku took a deep breath and sat down on the bed, getting a strong feeling that he'd want to be sitting down for this conversation.
[Kurogiri]
[Deku-Sensei: Yes, we probably do.]
[Kurogiri: You know that Tomura was originally quirkless, much like yourself.]
[Deku-Sensei: Indeed.]
[Deku-Sensei: Are you going to turn me over to Sensei?]
Kurogiri didn't respond right away, something that was very unusual.
[Kurogiri]
[Kurogiri: No.]
[Deku-Sensei: Why?]
Kurogiri's chat bubble popped up once then disappeared before Kurogiri typed out what he would say.
[Kurogiri]
[Kurogiri: Because the only directives that Sensei has given me at this moment are to protect and watch after Tomura.]
[Deku-Sensei: Directives? Do you mean your orders?]
[Kurogiri: Correct, unless Sensei asks me directly of you, I shall not mention you to him.]
[Deku-Sensei: Why not? You know I'll just keep digging don't you?]
Kurogiri's text bubble popped up repeatedly before he finally answered.
[Kurogiri]
[Kurogiri: Yes.]
Izuku blinked staring at him phone, the same unsettling feeling returning as he re-thought over all of his time interacting with Kurogiri, and his heart sank to be right beside his stomach as he typed out his next message, suddenly having an idea for why he never found anything about Kurogiri's life before All For One.
[Kurogiri]
[Deku-Sensei: Kurogiri, Warp gate isn't your birth quirk is it?]
[Kurogiri: No, it is not.]
[Deku-Sensei: Did Sensei give you Warp gate?]
[Kurogiri: In a manner of speaking, yes, he technically is the one that is responsible for me possessing Warp gate.]
[Deku-Sensei: What do you mean by that?]
[Kurogiri: Warp gate is technically three quirks, not one Deku-Sensei.]
[Deku-Sensei: Three?]
[Kurogiri: Shadow pass, Cloud, and GPS.]
Izuku gasped softly as he recognized the second quirk mentioned, U.A. Student deaths were very, very rare once Nezu took over, so naturally when Shirakumo Oboro died in his second year there were dozens of articles on the tragedy.
[Kurogiri]
[Deku-Sensei: Kurogiri... isn't your name either is it?]
[Kurogiri: If I had any other name before Sensei gave me one, then I do not recall it.]
[Deku-Sensei: What do you remember before you worked for Sensei Kurogiri?]
[Kurogiri: Nothing, I have always worked for Sensei since the day I was created.]
"Created?" Izuku hissed, not only could All For One put multiple quirks in one person but had he found a way to make a person, or more likely create a separate personality from who knows what quirks?
[Kurogiri]
[Deku-Sensei: He made you? Why?]
[Kurogiri: To watch over Tomura since the one before me was not as obedient.]
[Deku-Sensei: Other? Do you mean there was someone before you that watched Tomura?]
[Kurogiri: Indeed Deku-Sensei, though he will occasionally try to regain control but Sensei's collar makes such a thing impossible.]
Izuku sucked in his breath through his teeth making a slight hiss sound.
[Kurogiri]
[Deku-Sensei: But he's still around?]
[Kurogiri: Yes, he is very much still around, and he is insistent that I refrain from telling Sensei about you.]
[Deku-Sensei: I, see.]
[Deku-Sensei: Can I perhaps speak with him the next time we meet?]
[Kurogiri: No, that would be against one of Sensei's directives.]
[Deku-Sensei: You can't speak freely?]
[Kurogiri: Correct.]
Izuku's heart twinged.
[Kurogiri]
[Deku-Sensei: But you can say whatever you want over text?]
[Kurogiri: Indeed Deku-Sensei.]
[Deku-Sensei: Then can you please answer some of my questions?]
[Kurogiri: I shall to the best of my ability.]
Izuku took a deep breath to organize his thoughts so he could figure out what to ask first because he had a lot of questions for Kurogiri and he didn't know where to start.
Eventually though he started typing out his first question, which would be the first of many he'd ask that night, knowing that regardless of the answer he would not be sleeping well.
[Kurogiri]
[Deku-Sensei: What does Sensei do with quirkless people?]
Author: I've connected the dots.
Canon: You've connected nothing.
Author: I've connected them.