#ficcing

So basically, Nighteye, handling all the paperwork for All Might's Hero agency, would find an odd mystery on his hands when the agency keeps getting faxed an expense report from a company they’ve never heard of.

The first time it happens, Nighteye just assumes someone punched in the destination fax number incorrectly.  He returns a brief notice to the sender to that effect on some non-letterhead stationery and gets back to work.

A week later, the same thing happens again.  This time, Nighteye gives the errant paperwork a longer look, scanning for contact information he can use to give the offending office a personal call and advise them to either tell their new office employee to double-check fax numbers or have their machine inspected.  However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get in touch with the company?

He starts trying to look them up online or in the Tokyo phone directory, but there are a lot of businesses in Tokyo.  He doesn’t immediately find a match, but that’s not so strange – maybe they’re not in the most recent phonebook, if they’re a new business or recently rebranded, and plenty of businesses, especially older ones, don’t maintain a consistent presence on the internet.  Newly minted businesspeople or older-aged ones who’re figuring out fax machines for the first time might explain the stray paperwork, too.  He has plenty of other, more pressing work to do, however—All Might is forever busy!—so hunting for the mystery company slips to the backburner somewhat.

Then it happens again a week later.  At this point, he takes a moment to consider that maybe someone is trying to tell him something, so he sits down and applies his Japanese Businessman mindset to combing through the report looking for anything that doesn’t fit.

What he finds is unsettling, to say the least.  The first issue is that the money doesn’t add up—the total is wrong, off by several thousand yen.  The second and more concerning oddity surfaces when he realizes exactly which line items have not been included in the total.

Crayons.  A case of baby wipes.  Children’s Benadryl.  A pair of child-sized quirk management gloves.

A handful of childcare products have been scattered in through an entirely normal list of supplies and other expenses for a business office; they add up precisely to the amount missing from the total.

He shares a long look with All Might.

“Should we…?” All Might asks him, uneasy but unsure what his sidekick suspects.

Nighteye himself hasn't settled on a single suspicion yet, but the confluence of factors makes it hard to convince himself of any benign explanation. “We should look into it,” he confirms.  “Quietly.”

And so it is that the two of them later find themselves carrying out a sting operation on what has turned out to be a cover for some sort of smuggling operation.  A fight breaks out, during which Nighteye’s keen observation skills and All Might’s well-honed sense for people in danger both notice the same thing: one of the workers-turned-combatants turns away from the battle and leaps at a man who appears to be the office manager (neatly attired, baseline physical features, and pressed against the wall as far away from the fight as he can get) with clear lethal intent.

All Might saves the man without breaking a sweat, of course, and that is how Nighteye and All Might—much to the latter’s horror—make the acquaintance of one Shimura Kotarou, who tells them that he was reluctantly working for a man named All For One, who is raising Kotarou’s son to be a Villain.

The cliffhanger would be as shameless as I could possibly make it.

The next story, then, would detail how Kotarou actually got to that point.

-

On the night of the massacre, one crucial thing goes differently: Kotarou successfully knocks Tenko out with the garden shears.  He’s too late to save the rest of his family, and the home has half-collapsed, the backyard in ruins and strewn with bodies in a condition he can’t even bear to focus on.  He also, though he hasn't noticed yet, has a bad injury—his foot has been gashed open clear to the muscle the same way the ground cracked and fragmented around the epicenter that was his son.

He should call the police, of course, or wait for Heroes to arrive, as they surely will.  But what will happen after?  Tenko just, apparently, killed four people with a late-blooming, highly destructive quirk that bears no resemblance anyone else’s in the family.  He was upset.  It was almost nighttime and he was locked out of the house; he hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. Just that afternoon, Kotarou had…

Kotarou has a massively unaddressed parental abandonment complex and the events of the night, predictably, trigger the hell out of that trauma.  There’s no way the state lets him keep custody of Tenko after this, he’s completely sure.  They’ll take his son away; drop Tenko—sensitive, stubborn Tenko!—into the alternative childcare system; he’ll grow up in the same kind of awful place Kotarou himself grew up.  It’ll be worse, even, because Kotarou never killed anyone before he was dropped in the system, while Tenko will be labelled with that stigma for the rest of his life!

Put simply, Kotarou panics.  He can’t stand the idea of being separated from Tenko by the state; it makes everything in him revolt.  And so he picks up Tenko, retrieves his wallet and shoes from the as-yet-intact front entrance of the house, and flees the scene before any emergency responders arrive.

The next few weeks are—rough.  They’re not hurting for money, at least not right away, as Kotarou had quite a lot available to withdraw in cash, but he doesn’t know what to do, where to go.  He gets them out of the city, of course, though I don’t know exactly where they go—somewhere small enough that it’s less patrolled by Heroes and very alert police, but large enough that they don’t stick out as obvious newcomers.  (A cheap motel in a mid-ranked tourist city?  A vacation cabin in some national park? It'd be something to that effect.)

Kotarou can’t sleep for more than a few hours without waking up from vivid nightmares or just the profound sense of terror that he’ll find his son in the middle of another catastrophe, or Heroes knocking down the door.  He’s also in a lot of pain, both emotional and physical.  The apocalyptic upending of his life and the loss of his family is the worst of it, of course, but the deep slice in his foot really needed stiches that he could hardly go to a hospital for even after the pain (and the soaked-through wetness in his left shoe) did finally sink in enough for him to notice.  Lacking proper medical care, it heals very poorly, such that Kotarou will walk with a noticeable limp for the rest of his life.

One small thing helps—it's not a blessing, because nothing in this situation is, but at least it makes things less difficult than they might otherwise be: because all this happens in August, at least Tenko doesn’t draw attention for not being in school.

…Not that Tenko doesn’t draw attention for other reasons.

After regaining consciousness, he’s delicate and temperamental, mixing spells of seeming catatonia with vomiting, crying jags, garbled apologies, or muted clinginess.  The nature of Decay made itself obvious very soon after he regained consciousness; Kotarou bought the first pair of gloves he could find to serve as a makeshift preventative against further accidents, then a more deft pair some days later.  He’s tried to apologize to Tenko—for hitting him, for shouting, for everything, but it’s hard to tell if it’s sinking in.

Tenko, for his part, did not experience the burst of cathartic rage he got in canon, which leaves him adrift.  He’s been removed from his normal surroundings, lost almost his entire family and his pet dog, and can easily pick up on his father’s pain, grief and fear—and while he knows a lot of that fear is of them being caught and separated, it’s obvious that his father is also afraid of him.

He feels the itch all the time now—it wasn’t something at the house, after all.  It’s worse because he has to wear the gloves day-in and day-out, and they make it hard to scratch.  He sometimes takes them off when Kotarou isn’t looking, but that’s rare, and his father always gets upset once he notices. Anyway, Tenko doesn’t want to hurt anyone else.

He doesn’t.

…He doesn’t, but…

Tenko has dreams of the house falling, too.  He sometimes wakes with the image of his father dying in his mind, and it gives him a sick feeling he can’t explain, something precarious and exposed, but very, very different from the nausea he feels when he remembers his other family members’ deaths.  He’ll be able to parse the sensation better in retrospect once he's older: a heady mix of longing, relief, vindication and guilt.

Tenko never develops amnesia in this AU.  Kotarou surviving means he has an ever-present reminder of his family and what happened to them.  He may not be able to articulate everything he felt and did, at least not to start with, but he does remember.

All For One lets this state of affairs drag out for a few weeks before he steps in.  I haven’t figured out the exact sequence of events here, but what makes sense to me in this moment is that he orchestrates a couple close scares or sudden crises—near encounters with Heroes or police, Kotarou’s stash of money getting stolen, Tenko being endangered, stuff like that—and then presents himself as a rescuer in some fashion.

Kotarou isn’t a stupid man—quite the opposite.  It’s obvious from the beginning that All For One is on the wrong side of the law—a Villain, a crime boss, someone dangerous to be indebted to.  But Kotarou and Tenko are also now on the wrong side of the law themselves, and Kotarou can’t see a way to get them back on the right side of it that wouldn’t lead to them being split up, which he still can’t stomach.  He himself is no kind of Villain; he has no idea how to live this life he’s dragged himself and Tenko into, and the recent problems have shown that he can’t afford to spend time on the learning curve.

Reluctantly, trepidatiously, he allows AFO to take himself and Tenko under his wing.

I should note at this point that this AU was created back before the endgame’s wretched reveals about the scope of AFO’s involvement with the Shimura family; ditto the possession plot.  It was always my preference, for reasons of thematic coherence, that AFO be as uninvolved as possible—I could barely stomach AFO giving Tenko Decay, and certainly no more than that!  I’m inclined to hold to that read for the purposes of this AU: Nana managed to slip her son into the system without All For One knowing/finding out about him.

(Quite frankly, given the reveals of the final data book about how Nana came to have One For All to begin with, it was absurd for her to even think that dropping her son into the system with her family name still attached would be safe for him.  Yes, Shimura is a common enough name, but we’re talking here about the child of a man who was in a group fighting AFO, who was murdered by AFO, and that man’s wife, who became the next bearer of OFA.  And this was in the pre-All Might era, when AFO’s influence was at its most terrifyingly unchecked.  Of fucking course he knew about Kotarou the whole time! But anyway.)

In this framework of serendipity for evil, Decay is a mutant quirk like Eri’s, which is why it surfaced later than usual but there was never a toe bone-related indicator of quirklessness.  AFO becomes aware of the family via pure coincidence, because a police contact reached out to him the night of the incident after recognizing the family name as one that had caused his boss some vexation in the past; the detective wanted to know if the slaughter and the house collapse were something AFO had a hand in and needed covered up, or if they should just investigate it like normal.  AFO tells him to definitely treat it like a cover-up situation and starts things moving on his end, having contacts of his track down the pair and spending some time remotely observing them before stepping in.

Incidentally, this is my default explanation for AFO’s discovery of Tenko.  I’ve always rationalized the howler of a coincidence by noting that it’s often regarded as acceptable to begin a story using coincidence as long as you don’t resolve the story using coincidence; see for example BNHA’s own inciting incident, wherein All Might and Deku have a similarly serendipitous pair of encounters.  AFO recognizes the “born twisted” Tenko as a potential heir, someone to be meticulously crafted to bring down the society All Might did so much to build, a way for AFO’s own ideals and his own malice to survive after he’s gone.  The potential heir would then become a presumptive heir following AFO’s defeat by All Might in the canon backstory, but this AU is set before that battle, and thus could potentially preempt that outcome.

With that established, AFO is, needless to say, completely beside himself with delight about Kotarou and Tenko.  His only regret is that he didn’t find out about Kotarou before he horribly killed Shimura Nana; he would have loved being able to twist the knife some more!  Still, though, knowing that this would have had the wretched woman twisting in agony if she’d been alive to see it is quite pleasurable in a vicarious way, and there are still a few thorns in his side who could potentially suffer quite a lot if he plays these two cards right.

And so AFO sets out to play!  He positions himself as someone who can help Tenko (who really does need some kind of alias, you know, for safety’s sake…I suggest Tomura) learn to control his dangerous quirk—he has the boy out of those cumbersome gloves in very short order.  The more time passes, the more he works on imparting the child with his own amorality, encouraging him to act however he wants to act rather than being tied down by others, sowing doubt about Heroes and Hero Society, cultivating Tenko’s resentment of Kotarou while also reminding Tenko that his father’s fears are ultimately grounded in how he was betrayed by all the things Tenko once wanted to become.

It becomes a sort of game for AFO to position himself as the Trustworthy Adult and Source of Paternal Approval/Affection in Tenko’s life, overriding and souring Kotarou and Tenko’s connection, which was of course in no great shape to begin with.  Tenko is initially resistant—despite everything that happened, it’s not so easy to shake his love for Kotarou and the desire for his father’s approval, nor to forget Kotarou’s desperate efforts to keep them together after the accident, the fear of what would happen to Tenko if someone else took him in instead.

But Kotarou still played his part in causing Tenko’s pain and resentment, both before and after the incident, and AFO is quite good at distorting the truth into a recognizable but warped reflection of reality.  Particularly once AFO taps into Tenko’s desire for adult affirmation, it’s really only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, in his relationship with Kotarou, AFO begins to come on stronger as the weeks and months pass, seducing him (first emotionally, then sexually) by means of alternating support and sympathy with cheerful insistence that Kotarou is not confident—or sometimes even permitted!—to refuse.

As AFO gets more confident in his sway over Tenko/Tomura, he gradually lets on more and more that he personally knew Kotarou’s mother, leaving the already conflicted, vulnerable man to agonize about how they knew each other and what ulterior motives AFO had with this whole arrangement that he’s kept from Kotarou up to this point.  Again, Kotarou knew AFO was bad news from the start!  What he did not suspect was that AFO had a personal stake in him.  The more Kotarou sees of the scope of AFO’s influence, though, the more he realizes just how deep he’s gotten himself and his son in trouble, and how dangerous both trying to escape or sinking deeper would be.

For his part, AFO quite likes Kotarou!  He’s handsome, resourceful, intelligent, has his mother’s eyes, and it’s beautiful to watch him unravel in all the ways AFO can arrange to pull him apart.  Still, he’s definitely more of a fun pastime toy than a dedicated project, someone AFO loosely imagines will one day be spent as a weapon against All Might but for whom he lacks a long-term plan.  He’s playing it by ear!

Accordingly, he eventually decides to put Kotarou to work.  He’s a great businessman, after all, and AFO has plenty of uses for such talents—and surely Kotarou knows that he can’t expect AFO to just shelter him and Tenko forever without eventually asking for something in return?  Naturally, this also serves as a way to further separate Tomura from his father’s influence as AFO moves his pupil’s education into ever more dangerous, illegal and anti-social directions.

Eventually, though it takes a number of years, Kotarou finds himself almost completely cut off from Tenko.  He’s doing mid-rank oversight work in AFO’s criminal empire, and even beginning to see less of AFO.  He’s growing more fearful by the day that at some point he’s just going to get killed in some one-off underworld deal gone bad, or arrested in a sting operation and then covertly murdered to keep AFO’s secrets.  It’s not so much that he’s afraid for his own life, but he knows the path AFO has set Tenko on cannot possibly lead to a happy end, and he wants his son to be happy—a happy family was all he ever wanted.  But is that even possible now, after all the mistakes and wrong turns his self-absorption led him to?

Just as the despair is truly beginning to set in for Kotarou, he catches wind of All Might’s new sidekick, Sir Nighteye.  With a persona styled after a Japanese businessman, he hardly looks like a Hero at all, yet since taking him on, All Might’s strikes against AFO’s empire have gained a terrifyingly prescient edge, more focused, more observant, and nearly impossible to midlead.

Kotarou hates Heroes, even still.  He especially hates All Might, for more reasons now than ever before.  Kotarou hasn’t cried out to be saved by a Hero since his mother abandoned him and never came back no matter how much he begged or screamed or wept for her return.  But now…

Everything Kotarou’s been doing for years (somewhere between six and nine years, specifically) has been for the purpose of keeping himself and his son together, but now he’s losing Tenko anyway, to a man who’s trying to turn him into something—someone—far worse than even the alternative childcare system would have made of him.

He can’t get Tenko out by himself—Tenko wouldn’t leave with him if he asked, not anymore.  He certainly can’t take down AFO on his own.  He doesn’t have a choice, not if he wants to help Tenko before it truly becomes too late.  He has to ask for help, and it has to be from someone who stands a chance against AFO—and who stands a better chance than AFO’s most hated enemy?

He’s being observed, though, Kotarou suspects—at least, the risk that he might be is far too great for him to just call an emergency line.  He has to find some way to ask for help that no one else will notice.  More specifically, that only the right person will notice.

And thus he forms a plan to do something only an equally astute, scrupulous Japanese businessman might notice.

That resolution—to try and overcome his hatred for his son's sake—would be the end of the second story; the third would return to where the first one left off.

-

The third story is by far the one I have the least of planned, alas.  But from what thought I’ve ever devoted to it, I can say that it would contain at least these aspects:

PLOT THREAD 1: Nighteye, All Might and Kotarou (and presumably Gran Torino too) planning how to find and deal with All For One without further endangering Tenko.

-The Challenge: AFO is a predictable problem; the less predictable problem is Tenko himself—or rather, Shigaraki Tomura.  He’s coming or just into his teen years, hates his father, hates Heroes, and is deeply conflicted on the prospect of being “saved.”  While there’s a childish part of him that wants it desperately (the kinds of things AFO has him training to do are not easy, and anyway he’s wished for someone to save him since he was five years old, even before his world started coming apart at the seams), years of AFO’s teachings combined with his own tumultuous feelings about his family’s deaths leave the larger part of him convinced it’s impossible, and uncertain whether he would deserve it even if it wasn’t.  Thus, while Tomura craves for someone to prove that the world he’s living in is the kind of world that could still want to save him, he would nonetheless actively work to make it harder on purpose, as a sort of moral challenge to his would-be rescuers, and likewise as an expression of his feelings of guilt.

PLOT THREAD 2: Trying to keep Kotarou alive once AFO realizes he did not just get arrested in that sting All Might just pulled.  Kotarou never became a true insider with AFO, certainly, but he’s a fast learner with a good memory and a keen eye for detail.  There’s a lot he can reveal about AFO’s operations even if he never e.g. knew where Ujiko’s lab was or heard where Gigantomachia was sent.

-The Challenge: AFO’s normal first response to an escape attempt would be amusement and some cruel reminders to convince the escapee to either take their own lives or come back of their own accord.  The fact that Kotarou went to All Might is more vexing—he’s spoiled the surprise!  This would normally make AFO even more vindictive, but of course the easiest card to play against Kotarou is Tomura, and Tomura is too promising and rare for AFO to spend him merely on ruining his father.  I don’t know exactly how things would play out, but it would be very Not Fun for Kotarou, and would probably be the handwave I’d use to force him to move temporarily into Might Tower (the Vigilantes name for All Might's agency building) for safety reasons.

PLOT THREAD 3: Navigating the incredibly painful and difficult relationship between Shimura Nana’s son and Shimura Nana’s protégé.

-The Challenge: It’s more accurate to ask what isn’t the challenge, here!  Even though he's resolved to try to overcome his distaste for Tenko's sake, Kotarou doesn’t want to understand All Might, and he doesn’t want to forgive anyone involved with the choice his mother made.  Will prolonged exposure and more information change his mind at all?  Given my feelings about stories that emotionally blackmail Hero-hating civilians by turning them into victims who need Heroes to save them, it definitely won’t be as simple as All Might valiantly saving the day!

As for Kotarou’s feelings about the man behind All Might, Yagi Toshinori, that’s up in the air.  However, he’s likely never to be able to tolerate Gran Torino, especially if the old codger is unwise enough to say anything judgemental about the Shimura family tragedy or the wisdom of prioritizing saving Tenko over dealing with AFO.  And when have we ever known Gran Torino to keep his opinions to himself?

Toshinori, for his part, just has no idea how to mend this bridge his mentor burned when he was a child.  He wants to believe in Nana, wants to defend her, but it’s hard to mount the argument that she made the right call when AFO wound up finding her son anyway.  Of course, maybe that wouldn’t have happened if not for the freak manifestation of Decay and Kotarou’s own issues leading to Tenko’s meltdown, but actually saying that to Kotarou’s face, when the man has been through so, so much?  That’s a bigger ask.  So he’s stuck, and thus focuses mainly on rescuing the youngest Shimura because at least that’s something he’s positive everyone involved wants.  (Tomura’s feelings on the matter are going to be an unpleasant surprise.)

Nighteye, then, is the wild card in this incredibly fraught dynamic revolving around the late Shimura Nana.  He believes fiercely in the value of All Might’s worth to the world, but he lacks All Might and Gran’s deep loyalty to All Might's predecessor.  He’s thus more open-minded to the idea that she may have made a bad judgement call, while also being more willing than the wounded, uncertain Yagi and the defensive, angry Gran to give Kotarou some Unvarnished Real Talk.  He’s also certainly the one of that trio most likely to find out that Kotarou was in a years-long psuedo-romantic-definitely-sexual situationship with AFO, either because they establish enough rapport that Kotarou eventually confides it or simply because he notices some tells in Kotarou’s behavior and connects the dots.

Re: that last point, I don’t put it at all past the hypothetical version of me who was actually going to write this fic to hook up Kotarou and Nighteye, if only as a rebound relationship that might or might not last long-term after the story ended. This summary doesn't detail it much, but Kotarou would be carting around a lot of baggage about his relationship with AFO: what it meant to him, what it meant to AFO, what his feelings about it say about him, how much Tenko knows or doesn't, what other people would say if they found out, whether it would jeopordize the help he's finally found, and so on. Nighteye is the only person in this story who stands a chance of getting that out of Kotarou absent AFO openly telling Kotarou's rescuers about it to punish him for leaving; while getting romantically entangled with Kotarou would not be very Professional on Mirai's part, that's not to say it mightn't happen anyway!

In any case, once all those problems have been navigated, how does the story end?  Well, that, too, has complicating factors, but in this case, The Challenge is more meta.  See, I have always been virulently against fix-it fic AUs that uncritically incorporate Shigaraki—or any members of the League of Villains!—into a system that hates and tries its level-best to get them killed in the canon.  I don’t want Pro Hero Tenko AUs because professional heroism is rotten at the core and needs to be abolished or at the very least drastically overhauled.  Making Tenko a Hero just so he can go around blithely beating up the Villains he wanted to be a Hero for in canon?  As has been said, you can miss me with that.

This makes it difficult for me to come up with an ending of this story, particularly given that Tomura is still too young to articulate much of his beef and hasn’t yet met the friends who he canonically solidify his ideals for.  That being the case, this is exactly the sort of story that should end with a nice feel-good rescue where AFO is killed and Tenko saved, Kotarou has the chance to come to terms with Nana’s decision, and they both find ways to heal, move forward, and reincorporate into Hero Society.

But I don’t want Hero Society to get that victory, especially in light of how much I fucking despise the canon ending, and so the story would need some twists, not so much from AFO, but from Tomura.

A fairly grounded option might be a fourth (and final?) story arc where the group has to deal with the actual legal repercussions of Kotarou helping a crime lord for half a decade, Tomura’s more flagrantly Villainous actions of the last few years, and someone filing manslaughter charges for the deaths of the other Shimuras.  All of Kotarou’s fears of the system must be faced, and frankly, his fears were completely valid, so facing them is a nightmarish prospect for everyone involved.  Also, Tomura is still not looking to make things easy for anyone, himself included.

I could see this becoming about All Might and company having to face problems in the system they've spent years defending but which now risk undoing all the work they’ve done to save the tattered remnants of this destroyed family—problems that are affecting so many others once you really start to look.  Make All Might actually do something with all that social capital he’s built up, end the third story with him getting the injury he got in canon and make it a plot point in the third that, on top of everything else, he also now has to wrestle with the question of who to bequeath OFA to (a major issue, when Midoriya Izuku is still in grade school and not on anyone’s radar).

Raising the OFA succession question would also serve to throw Nighteye for a loop, when he’s up to this point been the only reasonably rational actor in the whole AU! How does the dynamic he did so much to stabilize change if his relationship with All Might threatens to collapse?  And what does that collapse look like if they’re both also wrestling problems in this system neither of them really thought much about prior to actually having people they care about wind up in it?

There is another, much less grounded, option, too: Tomura attempts to step into AFO’s oversized shoes after All Might defeats(?) him.  It begs a lot of questions, of course, chief among them, “Is there any possible way that works when AFO was over a century old and Tomura is like 14, tops?”  But I can think of some fun possibilities all the same.  Maybe Gigantomachia rolls in, intend on protecting the heir until such time as the heir is old enough to prove himself worthy of Machia’s continued service.  Ujiko’s resources and Kurogiri’s warp might be enough combined help to keep Tomura ahead of his pursuit, especially if the Villain-aligned side is able to get a handle on how Foresight works.

Is that situation sustainable?  For how long?  And could I plausibly rope in some other League members to give Tomura an early start on his Become A Hero For Villains arc?  (CRISIS: Sir Nighteye exposed as a Fake Gamer by a young lizard heteromorph associate of Tomura’s who cares a lot more about Dark Soulful than that one yakuza cared about Preyure.)

I have even less idea where this version of a 4th story arc goes, or where it ends.  But making every Villain Shigaraki has to deal with in the series a solid six to nine years younger does appeal to me, for sure!  For example, while I don’t know how preteen!Shigaraki and just-hit-the-drinking-age!Chisaki cross paths, I do know it would be funny, especially with Pops still leading the gang.  I’m open to suggestions, the more inclusive of non-League Villains, the better.