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Our Hero Academia: Embers, Embers, Burning Bright
"Move it, losers!"
Civilians in Musutafu shouted in alarm and fear as a massive figure swollen with excess muscle under thick, leathery hide, and bearing a pair of large, antler-like horns that curled up and backward from his forehead, charged through the streets with a duffle bag of money clutched in one oversized hand. He was laughing with the thrill of it all, of tearing into an ATM with his bare hands and pouring stacks of yen bills into the bag before racing off without a shred of consequences.
This man, this villain, liked to call himself Cernunnos, a name picked up from a book on world folklore from the ancient Celtic horned god. Because with his insane muscle power that rivaled infamous villains such as Muscular and Rappa — and with the god-like strength of All Might lone gone, the League of Villains defeated years ago, and a certain successor reportedly on vacation according to the rotten grapevine — what else was he to be compared to?
Cernunnos had been an enforcer and bodyguard for most of his life, too afraid to strike out on his own and shoulder blame. But only days ago he'd had enough of his current boss's cruelty and beaten the man to death, ending with goring him on his horns, had he felt truly powerful. As if he'd finally stepped into his strength.
"No one can stop me now!" he shouted.
Unbeknownst to him, he had raced blindly past an open convenience store door, and a young man of average height and lean, strong musculature shown off by a short-sleeved white shirt watched him rush past in his excited rants. The young man sighed and rubbed at the grey beanie covering his head … as wisps and curls of translucent emerald flame began rising from his body.
"Out of the way!" Cernnunos shouted, knocking a man aside and leaping over a crosswalk. He laughed heartily, the sound almost unhinged, and landed to keep running as he caught the sound of police cars behind him. He didn't particularly want to fight … but if they caught up, he'd show them what he was made of.
He briefly glanced behind him to see if police were catching up, then looked forward again … to find a guy about his age standing solidly his way. "See ya, ya poor sap!" he laughed and barreled on, intending to trample this slow-headed idiot under his huge feet if he didn't move out of the way. The man didn't even flinch, but did raise a single hand as if to stop him.
"Ha, you think that can-?!" Cernunnos slammed into the figure … and was stopped in his tracks. He grunted as the open palm to his chest crushed the air from his lungs with a great and painful whoosh, followed by the crook himself rebounding off and falling onto his back, his sternum throbbing from the impact.
With a grunt of pain, he lifted his horned head to glower with rage at the figure that had dared make him look so foolish … and the heat of anger was immediately displaced by the chill of fear.
The slim, muscular figure was radiating with greenish wisps of ethereal power that resembled tongues of flame. He removed the beanie from his head, revealing a bush of soft curls of dark green that matched his emerald eyes.
"…Deku," Cernunnos whimpered, clutching his cash-filled duffel to his chest like a teddy bear.
"You have two options," Deku said, his voice calm even as it carried, and a soft, confident smile on his face. "You can surrender now and no harm will come to you. Or you can fight, lose, and deal with the consequences."
Cernunnos swallowed thickly and lifted a trembling hand, palm-up off his duffle bag. "I'd like to go to jail now, please."
After providing his statement to the police for the criminal to be processed, Izuku returned to the convenience store to collect his bags — graciously kept by the clerk for him — and returned to his apartment without any more surprises.
Well, the word "apartment" might have been misleading. It was really a penthouse at the top of an apartment building designed for pro heroes. Even with the decrease in crime with this new age of Quirk counseling, pros still favored places with good security to make reprisals difficult.
Izuku entered his home with a skyscraper-worthy leap to land with practiced ease upon his balcony and let himself in from there, as he tended to do. He sorted and stowed his groceries before taking to the extra-heavy punching bag in a corner of his living room complete with wraparound windows for walls, getting in a quick practice session in before he sat cross-legged in the center of his den and began to meditate.
He focused inward, seeking out a part of himself that remained after all these years as mysterious as it was familiar: the embers of One For All burning inside of him.
To his mind's eye, the embers more resembled a large, crackling green bonfire. It was a somewhat small thing compared to the raging inferno that One For All had been, but even with his use of them earlier in the day, he could feel them slowly regenerating. That little detail had been something no one could have expected.
After his climactic battle against Shigaraki and the sacrifice of One For All to defeat him once and for all, Izuku had expected for the remaining embers to weaken over time as they had for All Might. Yet even with his careful conservation, the embers within him had lasted far longer than expected. After two years, very close to his class's graduation from UA, Izuku had approached All Might about it. All Might, also unsure about the reason, had arranged for them both to fly out to I-Island to meet Melissa, who had placed Izuku in an upgraded model of the Quirk scanner that her father David had once used on All Might.
The results, gathered after testing over the course of a week, had been unexpected to say the least. While Izuku was indeed technically Quirkless again and simply tapping into the remnants of One For All's power just as All Might had after passing the power on to Izuku … the embers within Izuku seemed to slowly regenerate when not in use.
The implications of that had not been lost upon the two men. They had discussed how this was possible for hours on the flight back, observing a wrist-mounted monitor that Melissa had built to track and record the strength of the embers to gather long term data, and had come to a tenuous conclusion. That which Yoichi, the First, had called the Singularity Point. Crossing this threshold of One For All's growth had allowed access to the bolstered Quirks that had been stored inside the core of the One For All. Who was to say that was the only effect of crossing that threshold?
Over the six years since that discovery, Izuku had still tried his best to be cautious in overusing his new power. His power that was not a Quirk, but still gave him the strength to save those who were in need. Something utterly and completely unique, much as One For All had been amongst fellow Quirks.
It was three years ago that he had discovered one more thing about his power. In a vicious struggle against a cabal of villains, he had pushed the embers to the point of exhaustion, his strength evaporating as the stored energy was burned through. Backup from his friends had arrived just in time to save him, but it had seemed his power had finally reached its limit.
Then, upon waking the next morning, he had been mentally exhausted, his brain filled with fog … and the embers of One For All had flared again. Not as bright as their full strength, but far more so than he could have expected. A few more days of rest, and he had felt the embers back to normal. He had examined the data from his monitor and found that the readings had not gone completely flat, but rather had halted at a tiny decimal of a percentage that remained, like a spark that had refused to go out.
All Might had suggested that this remaining spark was tied to Izuku's life force, his essence, his spirit. In much the same way as a fragment of All Might's consciousness had been infused into the One For All during his forty years of its use, it seemed the remains inside Izuku had bonded to his heroic spirit, using it as fuel to restore itself and return his strength to him.
Izuku had commented that such a thing sounded almost magical. All Might had laughed and noted that normal Quirks tended to strain the laws of science to the point of the fantastical, and One For All had pushed that tendency even further. It therefore made a backwards kind of sense that whatever Izuku's power was would not follow the mundane laws of Quirks, such as they could be called "mundane."
Two more smaller revelations had occurred to him up to this point. One was that the embers would not grow stronger. One For All's very nature of stockpiling power had allowed its overall reserve of power to grow, like an ever-expanding tank of water. For these embers, they would only ever return to what they had been when Izuku had given up One For All instead of its limits growing further. Granted, that may have been a good thing. If it had grown any more powerful, Izuku might not have been able to ever safely use it.
Another was the obvious factor that these embers could not be passed on. One For All was gone for good, and so this remaining store of energy was for Izuku and Izuku alone, and would vanish upon his death. Granted, the poisoning effect of One For All upon those who naturally possessed a Quirk and the near-extinction of the Quirkless population, as well as the sheer destructive magnitude of One For All's growth, had meant Izuku would likely never have been able to safely pass on One For All even if it had survived.
So, in the end, nothing was really lost. Izuku still had what he had always wanted: the power to protect the helpless and to bring smiles to peoples' faces. That was more than enough for him.
"Knock, knock!" called a sweet, familiar voice.
Izuku smiled brightly and thought again, 'More than enough.'
Ochako, dressed in some workout clothes that he recognized as her after-work wear, entered his penthouse and turned her back to remove her shoes. She stretched in place, arms above her head … and the lithe movement was so feminine that Izuku felt himself flush red. Ochako looked over her shoulder at him and winked with a sly smile, her eyes half-lidded and a soft smile on her lips.
She knew exactly what she was doing to him.
"H-Hey," Izuku squeaked, and winced at the crack in his voice. Dammit, he was in his mid-twenties and the No. 1 Hero of Japan. How and why did his voice crack like he was still a teenager?!
"Hey, you," Ochako said, padding over and sitting on the couch, propping her chin in one hand. "Do anything fun on your day off?"
Alarm bells rang in Izuku's head. "Uh, you know," he shrugged. "Worked out some, got some groceries …"
"Groceries, huh?" Ochako mused, her expression innocent. "Sure that's all you bagged?" she continued, tapping her finger against her chin. "And not a bad guy?"
Izuku hung his head in shame. "You saw the news."
"Deku," Ochako sighed, in exasperation blended with fondness. "What are we gonna do with you?"
In the time since the founding of the 1-A Agency, the umbrella agency that comprised all of their class's smaller agencies and the Endeavor Agency that Shoto had inherited from his father and left the the management of Burnin, it had been apparent that Izuku carried the same benign workaholism that All Might had during his forty years as a hero.
As such, his classmates turned colleagues had banded together in something much like an intervention to make him promise to take actual days off. Days when he didn't chase after every single petty crime he came across. They impressed upon him that they and other heroes were still here and could handle things.
They had gone so far as to put it to a vote to pass as an agency-wide staff policy, applied to all of them and any sidekicks the agency took on.
"I'm sorry, Ochako," Izuku said. "The guy passed me on the street and I just-"
"Your body acted on its own," Ochako finished for him, suddenly standing in front of him and cupping his cheek in her palm, the pad of her pinkie delicately raised to keep Izuku's gravity right as it was. He lifted his face to look at her, and she seemed more amusedly exasperated than disappointed. She kissed his cheek and then the other. "You know the rules," she sing-songed.
Breaking this particular policy meant two days of mandatory office duty, a post generally disliked by heroes. Particularly those like Deku who lived and breathed for being out and about helping people.
"Dammit," he sighed.
"You'll survive, Love," Ochako giggled, resting her forehead against his as she slid her hands down his neck and over his chest.
"I know," Izuku sighed. Mentally, he added, 'Your love will get me through it.'
"Aww, that's so sweet!" Ochako squealed, rubbing their noses together in an Eskimo kiss.
"Lousy muttering," Izuku grumbled, though he couldn't stop smiling.
"It's cute to me," Ochako said, and finally kissed him fully.
What followed next certainly made up for being caught, in Izuku's opinion …
Two days later, Izuku was back at work. Having been relegated to desk duty the day before and for today, it took all of his resolve not to complain as Yaoyorozu — having kept her maiden name for business reasons even with her loving marriage to Shoto — handed out patrol routes for the day.
"Just one more day," Izuku muttered as he turned his attention to forms and paperwork that needed to be filled out. He may not enjoy desk duty, but he would never give anything less than his best at any part of his job!
It was around lunch when an alarm klaxon went off, and every hero and sidekick in the 1-A Agency looked up. Yaoyorozu got on the intercom and spoke with the heroes on patrol, her eyes widening as she listened.
"Listen up!" she called. "We've had an emergency-class Quirk manifest downtown." Everyone looked at each other in shock. Manifesting was a common term for when four-year-olds had their Quirks — usually emitter- or transformation-types — emerge for the first time. Most of the time, they ranged from harmless to annoying, or sometimes mildly dangerous to the child, as Kirishima had felt when he'd cut himself on his Hardening Quirk when it had first appeared.
But every now and then, truly powerful Quirks emerged in children who had no idea how to control their powers, leading to local events that could be classified as disasters. And as Quirks continued to grow in power and complexity, these types of manifestations were slowly becoming more common.
"Everyone is directed to converge on the location!" Yaoyorozu ordered, with everyone's agency-standard, wrist-mounted computers lighting up with the information update and real-time GPS location, and then looked squarely at Midoriya. "Including those relegated to desk duty, with no negative consequence."
Izuku took only a second to process these words before he was wreathed in the wisps of emerald fire of his non-Quirk and out the door so fast that papers started flying. He glanced down at his computer to orient himself and then jumped off one foot and soared into the sky. Had his GPS not been working, a column of black smoke would have alerted him anyway.
He kicked off another building and felt the air rake at his exposed face, silently berating himself for nor pulling up his cowl and mask. Why did he have it if he wouldn't use it? Not important, focus on the situation.
As he kicked off another building and downward, he caught flashes of light from around the corner, lining up with the GPS location. He landed and ducked behind a corner, barely dodging the line of a lightning bolt. Pulling up his cowl, nowadays equipped with a HUD system in the mask, he glazed back and let his analytical mind take over.
The street was wrapped in a swirling black cloud, flickers of light and streams of lightning dancing within and around it. Every now and then, lightning bolts would lash out at a random target. Small to large fires were everywhere, debris scattered from holes blasted in the buildings and pavement from the strikes. He distantly noted that the mechanics of the Quirk reminded him somewhat of Nine, way back during his class's time on Nabu island.
He pressed a button on his glove and his cowl's lenses shifted them to thermal vision mode. He hissed at the white flashes within the now-invisible cloud that indicated the lightning dancing within and blinded him to anything inside. He screwed his eyes shut and shifted back to regular vision.
He glanced around, trying to gauge the size and shape of the cloud. It really did look like a giant half-sphere and he theorized that the child was likely in the center of the formation. He had a flashback to All Might changing the weather with a single Detroit Smash and decided to try something.
He flicked one of his gloves to deploy the Air Force attachments and funneled a portion of his embers into his fingers, flicking a cannonball of air like he had done thousands of times before. His aim was true and hit the upper portion of the cloud. It disrupted the flow and a discharge of lightning burst at an angle.
He caught an update in his earpiece that reinforcements had arrived, but let it pass as information to consider later. He wondered briefly if Tokoyami could have handled this with his Black Abyssal Armor, the darkness within the thunderhead strengthening his resilience. Or if Kaminari's Electrification Quirk would serve as a lightning rod for such a great build-up of energy.
He shook off the thoughts and spoke into his earpiece. "Get everyone behind cover. I've got an idea." Before anyone could argue, he deployed his other glove and channeled more of his power. With some quick calculations, he fired off as many air bullets as he could, skimming the edge of the cloud to siphon off the charge in a flurry of lightning discharges. As soon as that was done, he bound forward, close to the ground and quick as a blink, and dove into the cloud.
He held out his hand, blindly reaching out while feeling the building charge crackle over his suit … and he caught a small shape from within the cloud. He clutched the shape close to his chest and raced out of the cloud. Wisps of dark cloud followed in his wake, trailing from the small trembling form of a young child in his arms, but a quick glance back found the main cloud staying and beginning to disperse.
Still running to keep the cloud from reforming, Izuku took a syringe from his belt and stuck it into the arm of the child he was holding. The child cried out but then began to relax as the contents of the needle, a fast-acting tranquilizer formulated specifically for young children, began to take effect. The wisps of cloud, sparking with potential lightning, began to ease and then stop entirely. Izuku landed from his low jump and took a few steps to slow before releasing a pent-up breath.
"Deku!"
Izuku looked up to find Ida and Bakugo descending upon him. Two of the fastest heroes in their agency, so it made sense.
"What the hell happened?!" Bakugo snapped.
"Dynamight, contain yourself!" Ida snapped right back.
"It's alright," Izuku said. "She's unconscious and her power's faded."
"Poor child," Ida said, removing his helmet to take a closer look. The four-year-old girl in Izuku's arms was covered in burn welts, her pale hair contrasting dark skin where it wasn't blackened in places.
"We need to find her parents or guardians," Izuku said, protocol reasserting itself with the main problem averted. "And get her to a hospital in the Quirk Emergence Unit." A part of Ochako's counseling programs had been support for children with such powerful Quirks that manifested so suddenly. By law, it was now considered no different in the eyes of insurance than a freak storm or unexpected earthquake. The wards for such occurrences kept the child on a low-level flow of anesthetics to regulate their Quirks until proper measures to help them learn control could be taken. "Call it in."
"Will do," Ida said, speaking into his ear piece.
"Nice job, dammit," Bakugo growled, looking away. Clearly he was sore at losing a chance to solve the crisis himself, warring with the fact that he was also relieved that it had been ended so quickly.
"Thanks," Izuku said.
That evening, Izuku landed on his balcony after his preferred skyscraper-leap. But as tired as he was from the workday, he stumbled a few steps. He caught himself and made his way into his apartment, rubbing his eyes against his fatigue. When he removed his hands, he caught the smell of freshly-cooked katsudon. On the heels of that realization came the sight of Ochako laying on his couch, dressed in a pink nightdress and her cheek propped on her hand.
"Hey," she said coyly.
"Hi," he chuckled, removing his shoes before slumping down to sit on his couch at her feet. Before he could lay back and prop the back of his head on the back of the couch, two small, strong hands caught his shoulders and began to knead the tension from them. Izuku groaned with relief and gratitude.
"Yaomomo told me what happened," Oxhako whispered in his ear, having had this particular day off. "About how you bravely charged into a stormcloud to save an emergent child."
"How mad are you?" he asked.
"Oh, Izuku," she whispered, and placed a smoldering kiss on the corner of his jaw from behind. "I'm not mad." She slid her hands from his shoulders and over his chest, propping her chin on his shoulder. "I'm proud of you." She touched his chin to tilt his head to the side and meet her waiting lips, kissing him slowly. "So," she said, brushing the pad of her finger over his lips, "you eat up and take a shower. And when you finish up …" She grinned as she walked her fingers up his chest. "We can cuddle for the rest of the night."
"You are perfect," Izuku sighed, leaning in to rub the tip of his nose against hers.
"I know," Ochako giggled.