Chapter Text
Midoriya first found him aimlessly wandering the streets of suburban Japan.
He didn’t pay the man much attention at first. As a fresh recruit of the Commission investigating a simple bank robbery, it wasn’t his place to interfere with matters irrelevant to his task, and the man standing on the other side of the street didn’t exactly seem suspicious anyways.
So Midoriya let him be.
Alas, the other didn’t seem to reciprocate.
Midoriya emerged from the bank, tossing the criminals through the sliding doors by the scruffs of their necks while the volatile energy of One For All crackled around him. However, it was only once the robbers were hauled away for prosecution and imprisonment that Midoriya noticed the man from earlier, watching the fledgling hero intently from a distance as he leaned against a wall.
I suppose it couldn’t hurt to talk to him…
Midoriya looked at the figure from across the street. “Can I help you?” he asked respectfully.
The man didn’t meet his gaze, simply staring at the remnants of Midoriya’s Quirk dancing around his arms.
Midoriya followed his glare and deactivated his Quirk, trying his best to not appear threatening. “Can I help you?” he repeated.
Midoriya took the momentary silence to scan the other’s features. The man’s face was shrouded in a mane of hair black as pitch that disappeared into a weathered gray scarf. Behind his fringe lay a pair of dull black eyes accented by concerningly dark shadows.
He looked tired.
A beat of silence.
Then Tired Man turned on his heel and disappeared.
The months passed, and Midoriya’s memories of the strange man all but vanished from his mind, just as the man himself had done on that day.
Until he arrived at the Commission one day to find his face plastered all over the walls, wanted for vigilantism.
Midoriya had scarcely read the details of the assignment before snatching the ticket for himself and bounding out of the building.
It was only once he was well on the way to tracking down his target that he deigned to truly read the details of the task he had just accepted without a second thought.
WANTED:
Former Pro Hero Eraserhead
Real name: ???
Quirk: ???
Wanted for vigilantism. Capture Eraserhead and return to the Commission. Do not kill.
Further identifying information about Eraserhead has been scrubbed from the Commission’s database by an unknown party. Caution advised.
Between the paragraphs sat a mugshot of the man in question, looking just as tired as he had when Midoriya first saw him.
Something unplaceable stirred within Midoriya. He looked eerily familiar.
But, then again, he had seen him before, hadn’t he?
Midoriya shook away the feeling and started on his new quest.
As it turned out, Midoriya wouldn’t have to search for this Eraserhead character for long, for it would be Eraserhead that approached Midoriya first.
Midoriya startled when a low voice behind him jolted him from his thoughts. He had just been questioning the civilians in the vicinity of Eraserhead’s last known location, desperate for information.
“Looking for someone, are you?”
Midoriya spun around on his heel and turned to find Eraserhead himself leaning against a wall, hair and scarf and eye bags and all.
Well, this is awkward.
“Uh—Yeah,” Midoriya blurted out. “You, in fact, unless you’ve got an evil identical twin running around.”
“I’m a vigilante , not evil . I thought you worked for the Commission; I’m surprised you can’t tell the difference.”
“That doesn’t excuse you from being a wanted man.”
“Has the Commission truly grown so desperate to catch me that they’ve resorted to employing children?”
“I’m not a child,” Midoriya pouted.
“Really.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to insinuate, but I’m twenty-two.”
“Child,” Eraserhead mocked.
Midoriya gritted his teeth, but didn’t give Eraserhead the pleasure of his retort.
“I’m going to give you a choice,” Midoriya warned. “You can either come quietly with me, and the Commission might be more lenient on you, or we can duke this out with our Quirks and you can try not to die.”
“Someone’s rather confident in himself.”
Midoriya ignored Eraserhead’s jabs. “You have ten seconds to decide.”
“Time is a myth.”
At seven seconds, the energy of One For All swirled around Midoriya’s hand threateningly.
“Do I seriously have to start counting down like you’re a child?” Midoriya sighed at five seconds, but to his surprise, Eraserhead seemed distracted.
“Hey. I’m talking to you,” Midoriya warned.
Eraserhead continued to stare unblinkingly at his Quirk.
Midoriya narrowed his eyes.
Finally, with one second left on Midoriya’s clock, Eraserhead sighed defeatedly, raising his hands in surrender.
“Good choice,” Midoriya hummed, and approached the vigilante, a pair of cuffs in his hand. “Now, hands behind your back, and I’m going to search you for weapons—”
Eraserhead snatched Midoriya tightly by his wrist.
Midoriya scowled. “You play dirty, Eraserhead,” he hissed.
“How about I make you a deal, Midoriya ,” Eraserhead growled, his voice low.
“How do you know my name?”
Eraserhead ignored him. “You follow the Commission’s orders blindly, never asking more than what they feed you. Slavish. Imperfect. ”
Where is this going?
“You don’t even know my real name, but I know who you are, Midoriya. Who you could be.”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Midoriya retorted coldly.
“Tell me… For whom do you fight?”
“What?”
“For the heroes, no? For the sake of humanity?”
Midoriya rolled his eyes, but indulged Eraserhead, if only because it would make him more likely to shut up faster. “I guess so.”
“But I daresay you do not know why I fight.”
“Are you about exposit your whole fucking tragic backstory? Now? Right here?”
Eraserhead chuckled darkly to himself. “Worry not, all will be revealed in time.”
Midoriya scowled. “You’ve been sowing chaos all across Japan as a vigilante for the last who knows how long. Do you expect me to believe that your objective has suddenly changed? That now, all you care about is letting the Commission know your story, why you fight, why you turned to vigilantism?”
“No, my objective is the same as it ever was—though I daresay you do not know my motive.”
Midoriya wrenched his hand from Eraserhead’s grip as the vigilante continued speaking.
“A war waged without knowledge of the enemy is no war—it is mere bloodletting. Just once… Might we not seek to find common ground?”
Midoriya’s breath caught in his chest. No, no… He’s got a point.
Eraserhead spun around theatrically and eyed Midoriya up and down. “I’m afraid it seems we’ve gotten off to something of a rough start. Shall we amend that?” he invited with an air of feigned generosity.
Midoriya’s hand, still holding the handcuffs, dropped limply to his side as he stepped away from Eraserhead, the better to scrutinize the vigilante carefully. Despite Eraserhead’s seemingly forced theatricalism, something within Midoriya told him that a part of him was being genuine. That he truly did want to understand what drove the Pro Hero of the Commission.
No, not merely a desire to understand for its own sake.
A desire born of desperation .
Who the hell are you?
“Eraserhead, wait,” Midoriya blurted out hastily. “What exactly are you proposing?”
“An alliance!” Eraserhead responded, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world, before his demeanor suddenly shifted again. Midoriya’s eyes narrowed at the man’s words, but he let Eraserhead continue.
“As a vigilante, I have no shortage of connections in places the Commission would never dare expose a neophyte hero like you to. Connections with quests—tasks that need fulfilling, crimes that need stopping. Assignments far beyond what the Commission would ever offer you. Assignments of excitement, adventure .
“ I , meanwhile, am offering you an opportunity to train your Quirk into something far greater. An opportunity to become the hero the Commission will never let you be.
“I will free you from the shackles the Commission binds you in. No longer will you be a slave to their whims. You will rise to something higher, the hero you were always destined to be with that godlike Quirk of yours—the song of hope to our people.
“You will be free .”
Midoriya’s blood was rushing in his ears, nearly drowning out the words that seemed to suck his breath from his lungs. Every fiber of his being screamed of danger, roaring as a raging storm in his mind, yet in spite of it all, Midoriya could not ignore the inexplicable pull within him that beseeched him to simply give Eraserhead a chance, the solitary thread that pulled him towards what he convinced himself to believe was the glow of truth even as both light and darkness faded in the rain.
“... And what do you want from me in return?”
“Simply a chance to see eye-to-eye,” Eraserhead answered whimsically.
The moments ticked by in suffocating silence as Eraserhead’s words embedded themselves deep within Midoriya’s core, bit by bit parting the clouds blinding his decisions and revealing but a single path open to the hero. The most obvious path, in spite of the way it was fraught with immeasurable danger, but, deep within, Midoriya knew it was the only path.
The only road to the truth he didn’t even know he sought.
Midoriya sucked in a deep breath, his future now unobscured by uncertainty.
“We have a deal.”
And Midoriya let himself be irreversibly swallowed by the formless light of Eraserhead’s promise.