Chapter Text
He was alive. Normally, this inconsequential stray thought would not even register. Of course he was alive. After all, he was thinking so being alive stood to reason.
The issue however was the fact that Izuku was fairly certain he had just died. That Shigaraki had won.
But here he was. Breathing. A pulse thundering in his ears.
But that is where it got even weirder because the hands he now held up in front of himself in wonder were not his own. They were far too small and unbroken. The scars from the UA Sports Festival gone and with them the constant background ache. The hands of a child.
“Ninth?”
Izuku looked up in the darkened bedroom (that he had never seen before but also could swear had been his room for as long as he could remember) that he had awoken in. Standing over his bed was the misty form of First looking at him in concern. “First…? What happened?”
First seemed to sag slightly in relief. “Your guess is as good as mine. I am just glad that whatever happened did not destroy your connection with One for All. Not to worry you but… you don’t exactly look much like you anymore.”
That had Izuku jolting to his feet and stumbling over to look in the mirror (that for some reason he just knew was hidden behind the closet door). Staring back at him was not his face. It was close but not a single feature he had shared with his mother stared back at him. None except his green eyes that glowed faintly from within. His hair was just as much a mess as always but the green that he had known was replaced with snow white.
…He kinda looked like a curly-haired version of First like this.
He met First's worried gaze reflected over his shoulder. “Do you think that when I died… we reincarnated as someone else?”
First looked like he had bit a lemon but gave a reluctant nod. “That is what seems to be the case. From how old you look currently, I think it is likely that we all woke up as a result of your new body possibly manifesting One for All for the first time. Do you have any memories of who the kid used to be or are we flying blind?”
Izuku had to think about that. Suddenly, memories that he had been glossing over jumped to the forefront of his mind. He jolted as his name suddenly clicked into place.
“I’m Aizawa Shouta. What the fuck?”
---EI-EI-EI---
The next couple days were a bit of a mess but Izuku learned a lot about his former homeroom teacher over those waking hours. First, he was now an orphan. His mother had died in childbirth and with no known father, he had ended up in the foster system from the start. His current fosters were not bad people but their relationship was tainted with the knowledge that they would not keep him after his Quirk “came in” since they dealt only with infants and toddlers. Once they knew what his Quirk was, he would be transferred to a home equipped to deal with it.
Second, he did in fact have Erasure and using it was as easy as breathing for him, unlike One for All. The first time he used it, he had not even meant to. He had just turned to glare at Fifth for distracting him and felt his hair swirl up and away from his scalp. That had earned him a panicked yelp from the man and a few of the other vestiges that had First later explaining that with his eyes glowing red like that, he was a spitting image of All for One. That was… concerning.
Enough so that he ended up asking his fosters if he could turn his hair black. They said no but that perhaps his future family would let him. When they asked why, Izuku had activated Erasure for them for the first time and stated that his white hair made him look creepy when his eyes changed color.
Third was the fact that evidently, his Quirk made him the spawn of Satan in his guardian’s eyes. Okay, sure, he could understand why, given he knew what it felt like being on the other end of Erasure. Your Quirk disappearing was bound to be jarring when you weren’t expecting it but it was not like he had hurt them even if they had acted like it.
That was how, less than 24 hours after waking up, he was bundled off to a “special” orphanage for kids with “Villainous” Quirks to receive the treatment they deserved. There, Izuku learned all about a new kind of Quirk discrimination as his new guardians treated him like an active threat. A treatment that most of the other kids in the shared home seemed to agree with after Izuku Erased another kid’s Quirk as they threatened to hurt another kid.
Izuku got his own room (it was frankly a broom closet) as a result.
Then, as he grew older, the blindfold came out.
As Izuku was forced to sit through the dullness that was Elementary school again, he found himself being forced to wear it even in some classes from the clear fear his teachers and classmates had of him. This gave Izuku a whole new level of respect for his former homeroom teacher. To go through all of this and still become a Hero spoke a lot about his personal character.
Especially given that the vestiges had started joking that they should hunt down All for One so that they really knew what it would be like to have their Quirks stolen like they accused him of doing instead of, you know, just temporarily switching off their connection to their Quirk factor. If that didn’t say just how bad things were that they were saying that Izuku should seek out the Symbol of Evil and the man at least in part responsible for all of their deaths, then Izuku was not sure what could.
Still, as a literal child, there was not much they could do about it. Not if Izuku was ever going to get into UA again.
---EI-EI-EI---
The years slowly crawled by with Izuku slowly becoming more and more Aizawa Shouta. After all, that is who he was now, as strange and slightly depressing as it was. The Aizawa-sensei that he knew and looked up to would never exist in this timeline. Not now that he had so thoroughly replaced him. So, to try and desensitize himself more about the name change, he asked the ghosts to start calling him Shouta.
That eventually rewarded him with actual names from the other dead Holders. While, yes, he had known the names of a few of them before, it had felt odd using their given names up until then. Especially with a few of them still being unknown to him. Now, however, they were not First through Seventh but Yoichi, Katsumi, Touyami, Hikage, Daigoro, En, and Nana.
They were a strange little broken family of the dead.
But it was not just internally that he was changing but externally too. The lack of positive attention lead to him starting to grow out his hair and eventually allowed him to dye it black like he had long wanted. Additionally, as more and more time passed, and he used his Erasure more, the darker his eyes became until one day he looked in the mirror and saw a child version of his former teacher staring back at him.
But it wasn’t Aizawa-sensei. It was just Shouta. Just him and the ghosts of his past both literal and figurative.
Still, the twisted familiarity was something to cling to. Proof that his previous life was real and not a fit of madness. More proof that the ghosts that made up the vast majority of positive human interaction were not just hallucinations. It help ground him in this new timeline as he made new memories and his old became fuzzier around the edges with the passage of time.
That spurred him to use all the pocket change he could scrounge up to buy a pocket notebook for a couple of hundred yen that he and the vestiges used to catalog every important detail of the other timeline they could think of.
Unfortunately, it wasn't until it was all written down on paper that he realized how many holes in information he had been dealing with when it came to his various Villains. Take Kurogiri for example. He knew that the man was actually a Nomu from what Aizawa-sensei had told him but who had been used to create him was a mystery to him. At the time, it had not mattered since there was little to be done about that fact by that point but now, likely before the first Nomu was even in the planning stages, he could have saved the man that fate if he could have found him.
But that was just one example of an issue. Another one was not even the vestiges were one hundred percent sure where and when the big fight between All for One and All Might had been 5 years before Izuku had met All Might. He knew vaguely when it happened since the incident had been covered up with his fight with Toxic Chainsaw likely earlier that day and the rough area in which it took place but he had no way of stopping the fight or being in the right place at the right time in his now future to help All Might without risking becoming collateral damage.
And it was not like he could warn him off from the fight either. After all, if Sir Nighteye, the man’s Sidekick and one of his best friends, could be so completely ignored despite the fact the man’s Quirk literally could show him the future, what chance did a complete stranger claiming to be his successor from the future have? If anything, Shouta found himself worried that he would get mistaken for a follower of All for One as it was because of his own multiple Quirks. As a result, he found himself resigned to only using Erasure and the imperceptible from the outside Danger Sense unless an emergency forced his hand.
Worse come to worse, he could develop a separate Vigilante persona to use all his Quirks later on down the road.
---EI-EI-EI---
One issue Shouta was quick to discover about his new life in his foster home was that he was generally better off if he just didn't go back unless the weather got really bad. Like major snowstorm or heatwave bad.
The issue was, he ate better if he didn't. Okay, sure it was safer to sleep locked up in his closet at night but he could easily catch up on his missed sleep at school since between the blindfold and lack of anything to actually learn, there was no reason not to sleep then.
So Shouta found himself developing his teacher's old nocturnal nature. Sleeping in class, happily undisturbed at his desk, only woken when the teacher was forced to remove his blindfold for testing. At night, he roamed the streets avoiding other people and scrounging up meals from wherever he could find them.
Of course, this inevitably led to very awkward run-ins with various heroes working the late shift. The most interesting of them being the young Hero in training Snipe during his first Internship who's mentor for the week probably had thought he could use the later patrol experience since he had been purely training for daylight patrols.
Snipe, he discovered was now only 5 years older than him, a fact that he had never really registered given that, well, he hadn’t known that his homeroom teacher had been only 15 years older than himself until he woke up in the past. The teen had been hanging back from his Hero mentor in an alley while he attempted to pop the lens from his mask since they had not been made with night vision in mind when Shouta had rounded the corner and froze at the sight of the unmasked future Pro and current UA student.
Snipe, to his credit, spotted him immediately and quickly gave chase to grab him before he could really get away. "Hold your horses, kid. What are you even doing outside alone this late? Where are your parents?"
Shouta, scruffed by his uniform shirt, went limp like a cat in the hopes that the sudden increase in weight would allow him to escape. It didn’t work, of course, since Shouta probably weighed half what a kid his age should weigh and was admittedly a bit on the small side from the lack of decent food for 6 of this body's 10 years. Resigned to his fate, he gave a pointless Quirked glare at Snipe before answering, slightly mortified that his future colleague in Heroics and teaching was seeing him like this.
"I was looking for dinner. The bakery you were behind sometimes tosses out their leftover pastries that are too stale to donate to the food bank."
It was about then when his mentor, Quickdraw, rounded the corner to investigate what was taking Snipe so long. She paused at the mouth of the alley at the sight of them. "Snipe, put the kid down. You don't grab little kids like you would a cat."
Snipe turned back to look at her. "If I let him go he is gonna bolt again."
Shouta flashed his Quirk in annoyance again. "I'm not a little kid. I'm nearly 11."
The Heroine hissed through her teeth at that. "Kid you really don't look like you are nearly ready to start Junior High in a little over a year."
Snipe obviously did not hesitate to repeat what little Shouta had told him. “The kid was planning on digging through the dumpster behind the bakery here for his dinner. From the sounds of things, he has done it before.”
She frowned and met Shouta’s glare. “So what’s your name kiddo? I’m Quickdraw and this guy with me tonight is my Hero in training Snipe.”
“Aizawa Shouta.”
“And why are you out so late like this?”
Shouta was not stupid, he knew what she really wanted to know. “My fosters don’t care what I do so long as I am not a ‘threat’ to them or the other kids with my ‘monstrous’ Quirk.” She winced at the words with the amount of sarcasm that Shouta was dripping with as he said them.
“What is your Quirk then?”
“Erasure. I can temporarily disable most Quirks by looking at someone that lasts only until I blink, after which I have to activate it again. Using it is reflexive when I am startled or upset.”
Snipe winced. “Is that what you were doing glaring at us? Hate to break it to ya but neither of us were ever gonna use our Quirks against you.”
Shouta huffed and squirmed in his grip slightly. “Obviously. I was pretty sure neither of you were going to shoot me.”
“Oh, does your Quirk tell you what the Quirk you are canceling does?”
Shouta blinked. “Don’t be ridiculous. I just already knew what your Quirks were. Your Quirk is public record as a Limelight Pro Hero and his was literally just broadcast all over the country thanks to the UA Sports Festival. Even if I hadn’t gotten the chance to see his face, I doubt there are any other guys his age walking around with guns here in Japan.”
Snipe snorted as he lowered Shouta so his feet were both resting on the ground. “He has a point there Quickdraw. I’m not exactly packing common support equipment.”
The Pro shrugged. “Hey, you can’t exactly blame me for wondering. Quirks that directly affect other Quirks are pretty rare. Come on, let’s get you down to the station.”
---EI-EI-EI---
Shouta ended up trading that set of shitty fosters for a new pair. Okay, sure his new ones at least fed him, gave him a proper bed and never blindfolded him like his last ones but they were hardly nice to him either. The indifference that he had grown used to was replaced with active aggression to enforce their rules. If he was late getting home, his foster father would drag him by his hair inside and he would be assigned tasks that really should have been reserved for someone that was at least a full teenager but whatever, if he had to obsessively scrub surfaces with dangerous chemicals every other night, well, at least it was him doing it and not one of the actual kids. So what if the man grabbed him hard enough to bruise? At least he never did it somewhere visible so Shouta was never at risk of losing his steady food source.
The vestiges did not agree with the sentiment. Especially Yoichi whose disgust with the man was somehow heightened by the fact that as bad as his own brother had gotten with him, he had never raised a hand to physically hurt him until the end.
Shouta was quick to point out that while Yoichi personally had been fine with starving himself, Shouta was not. Shouta could deal with pain but he could not really risk his health by continuing to starve. Plus, as already stated multiple times by that point, it was better him than the other real kids.
Another side effect of his new foster situation was the fact he was in a new school for his last year of Elementary. That was going just about as well as he had expected it to, though, with his blindfold now gone, he was now getting in trouble for nodding off at school.
Thankfully, the one other social pariah had latched onto him almost immediately and had seemingly decided to help Shouta, if not stay awake, at least not get caught sleeping as much. Shouta couldn’t exactly blame him for it even if he was largely indifferent to the kid. Yamada was mute and completely reliant on using JSL and with Shouta being the first other kid his age that knew it, well, Shouta was his first-ever friend. A fact that hurt slightly with the knowledge that had Shouta not had his memories or the vestiges, the boy probably would have been his in this life too.
It wasn’t even like Yamada was mute because he couldn’t handle social interactions like had been the case with Koda. The guy was a complete social butterfly trapped speaking a language that only a select few that he interacted with could understand. Shouta wondered if Aizawa-sensei had known Yamada in their past life and been friends. He hoped for Yamada’s sake that they had.
They had been loosely considered friends for a few months when Shouta asked about the boy’s silence. The boy shrugged. ~My Quirk is basically just my Voice. I can’t control how loud I am and well, I break eardrums when I talk. My parents are both deaf from my Quirk when I was an infant since I was born with it.~
Suddenly, Shouta realized he had already known Yamada the whole time. The cheerful blonde that had always glued himself to Aizawa-sensei in the form of Present Mic was who his new best friend had the full potential to become. Well, that answered the question of if their alternates had been friends didn’t it? “You want to try talking while I use my Quirk on you to turn it off?”
Yamada blinked before his hands flew up, stumbling through signs in clear excitement as he signed over himself in a mess of half-finished thoughts. ~You could- How do- That is what your Quirk does?~
Shouta laughed slightly before activating his Quirk. “Try talking”
Yamada gave him a suspicious look before taking a breath. “Okay?” He jolted when his voice came out at a normal speaking volume, his Quirk’s nature having shielded him from his vocal cords from becoming damaged from disuse. “Wha-? How are you doing that!?”
Shouta snickered and blinked. “So long as I maintain continuous eye contact, I can disrupt a person’s mental connection to their Quirk Factor and thus shut off their Quirk. It doesn’t work on mutations obviously but Emitters like your Voice are fair game.”
Yamada continued to speak, seeming to not realize Shouta had stopped using his Quirk. “But how did you even know that it would work? Wouldn’t it make more sense that with my Voice shut off I just wouldn’t be able to talk?”
To Shouta’s and the vestiges' collective amusement, Yamada stayed at a reasonable volume. “True but it was worth a shot. So you’ve never been able to talk at a normal level?”
“No! Never!”
Shouta gave the other boy an amused grin. “Ah, well congratulations then.”
“Congratulations? What for?”
“You seem to be talking at a reasonable level just fine.”
“Well yeah, but you are using your-” He cut himself off as he blinked and seemed to register that Shouta’s eyes had stopped glowing red at some point. “Holy shit.”
“And in other news, the placebo effect seems to have done your control wonders.” Shouta turned back to his homework that they had been working on together when he had asked. “Your control was bad because you thought it was bad so you raised your volume to high levels because you thought that you would.”
Yamada stared at him with wonder in his eyes before tackling Shouta in a tear-filled hug. From that moment forward, Shouta was really stuck with him, Yamada trusting him to use his Quirk when he got too excited but finally speaking normally, much to their teacher's seeming relief as the boy began to finally come into his own. Okay, sure, they were both hardly popular kids but some of the other kids in their class had apparently been slightly curious about what Yamada had always been saying even if they hadn’t cared enough to invest the time into learning sign to find out.
Still, they were a duo now so while his home life continued to get worse, his life outside of those walls only improved. That is why, after they started Junior High and Yamada had firmly become Hizashi, Shouta started to eat dinner at his friend’s place and just eventually stopped going home to his fosters again. Sure he hadn’t actually moved in with the Yamada’s but his parents were always more than happy to let him eat dinners with them after he had accidentally mentioned in front of Hizashi that dinners with them were vastly better than what he got from his fosters.
The only reason he never tried more than once in a blue moon to sleep over was because, well, he wouldn’t exactly be sleeping since he still really could only sleep in the relative safety of the school during daylight hours. It wasn’t that Hizashi’s place didn’t feel safe; it was the issue of nighttime always putting him on edge.
So he was pretending at least to them that he was still going back to his foster every night and that he just had a sleeping disorder that he had developed while living on the streets for a couple of years which was not exactly untrue. They never questioned it at least, even if Hizashi seemed to know he was lying from how he always tried still to get him to stay the night.
Why would they? Shouta always turned up to school in a clean uniform, looking tired sure, but always in good condition with all his homework done. Sure he dozed off in class a lot but the teachers had clearly decided a while ago he was likely just bored in class and would have bumped him up a couple of grades had Shouta not refused the offer pointing out that he couldn’t exactly get into the UA Hero course until he was 15 so that would have left him spinning his wheels outside of schooling for two whole years.
They had reluctantly dropped it. While they clearly were not confident in his ability to make it as a Hero, they did at least recognize that the written exam would be a cakewalk for him and he could easily get in on an academic scholarship to the other courses.
What really annoyed Shouta about that though was the fact that they did not think the same was true for Hizashi, despite the fact he was nearly as book smart as Shouta and he hadn’t cheated with future knowledge and helpful ghosts to get there. As they walked to his home for dinner after a day full of students getting career counseling, Shouta crumpled up the sheet of alternate career paths for himself and chucked it into a bin on their way past. “What a bunch of bull. Me an accountant? Really?”
Hizashi snorted. “Oh, God really? That was one of your recommendations?”
Shouta rolled his eyes. “I mean I get them saying teacher given that I was planning on that being my fallback when I retired from active Heroics as well as lawyer and cop for obvious reasons but what about me screams that I would make a good accountant?”
Hizashi turned to look at him and scratched his chin with a mock-serious expression. “Well, you certainly have a mind for numbers.” His expression cracked. “Ah well, if I really had to guess it would probably have to be how plain your face is. It makes you blend into the background a lot when you are trying to fly under the radar, Shou, and, well, an accountant is about as below the radar as you get.”
Shouta pulled a face as he had to admit the truth to that. It was an unfortunate side effect of basically being identical to Yoichi. While at the time he had been alive, he had stood out as fairly attractive, by current standards he was actually pretty plain looking.
“So what about you? Anything as stupid as that?”
Hizashi shrugged. “Sort of? I actually got recommended going into modeling, which, while flattering, plays into like zero of my actual skill sets? I mean seriously, I am a polyglot so if nothing else you would think they would suggest a form of language-based career but no I am obviously just a dumb airhead blonde. I could never be smart enough for that. All I am good for is standing around looking pretty.”
Shouta patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. “To be fair, I am pretty sure All Might has to put up with that crap too. People always seem so surprised when he breaks out into fluid English as if he didn’t live over in the States for the better part of a decade. Plus, in order to pull off some of his attacks without actually killing someone, he has to know how to do a lot of force calculations on the fly.”
Hizashi gave him an odd look. “You know, I always forget that you are some sort of All Might superfan and then you go and say stuff like that and remind me. It is like getting decked in the face.”
Shouta scratched the back of his head. “I mean my encyclopedic Hero knowledge is not just All Might exclusive, he is just easy to find information on since he has been number 1 for so long. The mystery of how his Quirk actually works was just a fun puzzle.” Plus there was the whole cheating from formerly being the man’s successor.
That piqued Hizashi’s interest. “Wait, was? You think you figured it out?”
“Maybe? I think it has to be a Transformative Quirk of some sort given that there are never any sightings of All Might in casual settings and despite it being common knowledge that he attended UA, there is no sign of him in any of the archived UA Sports Festivals but there is a skinnier blonde guy that looks a bit like him who won all three of his that is in the right ballpark for his age. A guy I was able to trace to being currently employed as All Might’s assistant. Either he has a brother or close cousin or I accidentally stumbled upon his secret identity. I’ll show you everything after dinner.”
A part of Shouta couldn’t wait for the chance to meet All Might in person if only because he wanted to know how he would react to someone having ‘accidentally’ discovered his actual identity in Junior High. He was hoping he could use that fact to get UA to maybe change how the UA Sports Festival was broadcast even if he likely couldn’t get them to stop given that the televised three-day festival brought in the bulk of UA’s income outside of the student fees.
He and the vestiges had long resigned themselves to the fact that there was little chance of ever being able to tell anyone about the truth of Shouta’s whole existence given that they had no explanation as to how it even happened. Well, Yoichi blamed his brother but given that was his go-to for everything, that was not terribly surprising.
Still, there was no reason he couldn’t have a little fun in how he acted upon his future knowledge. This was his second chance at life and he was going to live it.