Chapter Text
The applications for UA are due in less than a week and, somehow, All for One, the Mastermind of the Underworld, has not yet managed to find a single teenager willing to infiltrate a school run by a literal rat.
This development is not a good one, as all four of the League of Villains’ members—All for One, Tomura, Doctor Ujiko, and Kurogiri—are starting to stress. All for One has been monologuing more and more, his tone taking on an edge almost as bitter as his favorite drinks; Tomura has not left his room more than once a day this past week; and Ujiko has already made six separate requests for dead children to experiment on.
So, needless to say, tensions are high now that the four of them are all in the same room. Tomura and Ujiko sip on their drinks at the bar, while Kurogiri polishes a glass and hopes that All for One doesn’t find it offensive that Kurogiri is not making him a drink, regardless of the fact that he’s miles away, and on enough medication that throwing alcohol into the mix could spell nothing but trouble.
“No, Sensei, I can’t just–” Tomura gestures angrily at nothing. “I can’t just recruit random kids over VC on my games. That’ll get my account suspended!”
Ujiko throws the last of his (second) drink back and shakes his head. “It’s what I’ve been saying. We just gotta make a kid.”
Tomura chokes right then, presumably at the horrifying mental image of Ujiko and All for One doing… that.
Kurogiri warps a napkin over to Tomura. “I believe the Doctor meant ‘making a kid’ in the context of reanimation,” he explains.
“Oh,” Tomura says. Then his nose wrinkles and eyes widen. “Oh.”
Kurogiri agrees with that sentiment, but he’s long since learned to hide his personal opinions on Ujiko’s affairs.
“We don’t have time to make another kid,” All for One says, and although Kurogiri really wishes he would refer to the process as quite literally anything else, there is a small part of Kurogiri that takes a wicked, immature amusement at All for One and Ujiko’s horrible phrasing. “The first one took months,” All for One continues. “And that was over a decade ago.”
Tomura glances between All for One and Ujiko, eyes wide with a cocktail of repulsion and curiosity.
“‘M certain I could make one within, uh” Ujiko hiccups, “a week.” Cold dread washes over Kurogiri as he notes the drunken slur in the words. A drunk mad scientist is never a good thing. “‘S the perfect solution, y’know.” He begins to count on his fingers. “Follows orders, is a kid, we get to pick the quirk-”
“No,” All for One says, and the annoyance in his voice makes Kurogiri extremely grateful for his tendency to fade into the background. “A new one just isn’t feasible. However,” he smiles, “an old one could do.”
Ujiko’s eyes widen, skin cracking as his face stretches into a grin. He turns slowly, eyes falling on Kurogiri, looking at him in that way he used to back when Tomura was still a child. It’s the way a child stares at a large bug found under a log. His grin widens further as he leans over the bar into Kurogiri’s personal space.
His breath smells like rot.
“An old one could do.”
So much for fading into the background.
-
Kurogiri does not particularly know what is happening, and he’s fairly sure Tomura knows even less, if any of his “what the fuck”s are anything to go by.
“What the fuck?” Tomura says, for what must be the ninth time at least, as Ujiko ushers Kurogiri toward the lab. “What does Kurogiri have to do with any of this?”
“You will see, my boy!” Ujiko yells over his shoulder. His pace picks up, and Kurogiri realizes with horror that there is a skip in his step.
“Okay, but,” Tomura runs in front of them, spreading his gangly arms to block the hallway. “You do realize that by not telling me anything, you’re making it sound like Kurogiri is some Frankenstein’ed highschooler’s corpse, right?”
Ujiko honest-to-god giggles, and Kurogiri has never been more off-put by a sound in his life. “Bravo, Tomura! That is exactly the situation!”
“Wait,” Tomura says, arms dropping. Ujiko uses the opening to push past Tomura, pulling Kurogiri with him. “No. Shit. I didn’t mean–”
Ujiko all but throws himself and Kurogiri into the lab. In the second before the door clicks shut behind them, Kurogiri hears a final, resigned, “What the fuck.”
-
“Did you know that it actually is much easier to turn a mutant quirk into an emitter than it is to turn an emitter into a mutant?” Those are the first words Kurogiri hears when he wakes. He couldn’t even remember when or how he fell asleep. “Although,” Ujiko continues, “it could just be that your quirk was originally an emitter, so it’s simpler to turn it back to its original state.”
As Ujiko devolves into incoherent mumbling, Kurogiri blinks his eyes open, only to be hit with a wave of deja vu so strong that it’s almost painful. There is something about the fluorescent lights above him, the stiffness of the hospital bed, and the smell of formaldehyde that is painfully familiar. This familiarity is not nostalgic, though. It is more in the way one immediately recognizes, and intimately knows, a recurring nightmare.
He remembers scalpels and stitches and syringes and–
“Kids these days are just so difficult to reanimate,” Ujiko says with a sigh as he continues his ramble—he hasn’t stopped talking since Kurogiri woke up. “Kurogiri, though, you were the perfect subject–”
Kurogiri, normally, would’ve listened to whatever Ujiko had to say about him, but he gets distracted as he notices his hand in the corner of his vision—his bare, fleshy hand.
As Ujiko continues talking, Kurogiri swats at the air in front of his face, playing it off as absently swatting a fly.
To his horror, he feels nothing—a complete absence of mist.
“I mean, Kurogiri, your procedure only took, from the very start until now, a bit over 72 hours. Isn’t that incredible?” Ujiko actually goes quiet then, staring at Kurogiri as if he expects a response.
Kurogiri, who no longer has his mist, and really can’t move on from that—and wait what had Ujiko said earlier about the Frankenstein’ed high schooler thing—just blinks, feeling more emotions in that moment than he’s fairly sure he’s ever felt in the course of his existence.
“Ah, shit,” Ujiko mumbles under his breath. “Did I fuck up its consciousness? Goddamn I’m getting old.” He reaches for some sharp-looking tools, and that snaps Kurogiri back to himself.
“I’m awake,” he croaks out, and if it weren’t for the heavy feeling in all his bones, Kurogiri is fairly certain he would’ve slapped his hands over his mouth because that is not his voice. Kurogiri’s voice is deep, rich, almost echoing. It is fit for a stoic right-hand to the King of the Underworld, or for a mysterious bartender in an underground, dubiously legal bar. The voice that actually left his mouth, though, is more fit for a…
“Some sort of Frankenstein’ed high schooler’s corpse?” his mind supplies in Tomura’s voice.
This voice is fit for a high schooler.
Kurogiri thinks if it had not been 72 hours since his last meal, he would have emptied his stomach by now.
Instead of gagging on his own voice, which Kurogiri feels is the correct response to the situation, he shoves down the nausea and gasps out, “What did you do?”
Ujiko laughs. “I just reverted you to something more like your original state!”
“My original– what does that mean?” Kurogiri asks, the bile he had just felt rising up his throat leaving laced in the words.
“Oh, I’ll explain that soon,” Ujiko says with a wave of a dismissive hand. It’s so flippant that Kurogiri wants to take a page out of Tomura’s book and destroy the nearest thing in sight—which is, by chance, Ujiko himself.
However, Kurogiri has self control. So he does not do that.
Of course he doesn’t.
“I feel we should all discuss your situation, and what this means for the League, together,” Ujiko explains. “I’ve already let Tomura and All for One know that you’re awake. I’ll get All for One on the TV in a minute, and Kurogiri, could you please open up a warp to the bar so Tomura can join us? Once we’re all present I’ll explain everything.”
Kurogiri blinks, looking again to his fingers with actual flesh and bone. “As far as I’m aware,” he says carefully, trying to not let too much of the malice he feels drip into the words, “I no longer have my quirk.”
“Oh, Kurogiri,” Ujiko laughs—one would think Kurogiri a comedian the way almost everything he says earns a laugh from Ujiko—“I would never remove your quirk. Warp Gate took me a whole month and a half to perfect! It’s just like I said, it’s an emitter now.” He enunciates the last few words as if he were talking to a child. “Just summon a portal like you know how to—it can’t be that different.”
Reluctantly, Kurogiri pulls on his quirk inside himself, and it feels… different.
For as long as Kurogiri can remember, his quirk has felt as though it ran through his veins. He could picture mist under his skin, running alongside his blood. He could picture it curling around his heart, filling his lungs, expanding into even the folds of his brain.
Now, he simply feels it in his chest, like a tight ball of mist and energy resting in his ribcage.
Kurogiri attempts to tug on the ball like he would normally tug on the misty tendrils of his quirk, and when no warp appears, he looks Ujiko in the eye and deadpans, “Oh no.”
Ujiko hums. “Try again, Kurogiri.”
And that, Kurogiri can tell, is an order—something his body physically will not let him disobey. His whole existence, from the moment he fell under All for One’s care, has been defined by orders. Parameter stacked on parameter, with Kurogiri forced to worm his way through the cracks between them. Any attempt to defy an order left Kurogiri’s body well on its way to shutting down—that is, until he complied.
So, Kurogiri tries again.
He focuses, again, on his quirk, and instead of giving it a simple tug, he imagines unraveling it, taking the loose end and throwing it out into the room, connecting the lab to the bar.
And a warp swirls into existence.
“Bravo, Kurogiri!” Ujiko says. “I knew I could trust my handiwork!”
My handiwork—the words bring another wave of nausea crashing over Kurogiri.
“I’ll get All for One,” Ujiko says pleasantly, standing up to grab a laptop.
As Ujiko fiddles with the call software, Tomura steps through the warp. He is only halfway through when he makes eye contact with Kurogiri. Tomura stops, and Kurogiri can see his eyes widen behind Father’s fingers.
“No,” Tomura says, attempting to step right back through the portal, back to the bar. “Fuck this–”
“Tomura,” Kurogiri sighs, moving the portal back until Tomura is forced fully into the lab.
“Ah, Tomura!” Good afternoon!” Ujiko greets, looking up from the computer, now showing All for One. “Kurogiri, Tomura, say hello to Sensei!”
“Hello Sensei,” they echo like schoolchildren. And, like a schoolchild, Tomura is still staring at Kurogiri with that weird, wide-eyed look.
“Hello, Tomura, Kurogiri,” All for One says. He smiles. “I see the procedure was a success.”
“Of course,” Ujiko says, eyeing Kurogiri like a second wide-eyed schoolchild.
“I’m sorry,” Kurogiri says, “but what exactly was the procedure?”
“Ah, yes.” Ujiko laughs under his breath. “Like I was telling you earlier, I simply reverted you back to something more like your original state.”
“My original state being–”
“You are one of my creations—a Nomu.”
“Nomu?” Tomura echoes.
“I’ve been perfecting the craft for years.” Ujiko’s smile widens. “Kurogiri, actually, was one of my first truly successful ones. Essentially, Nomu are artificial life, created from the dead.”
Kurogiri feels something heavy settle in his stomach.
“They’re made of one or more bases,” Ujiko continues. “Kurogiri, here, is more simple. He only has one physical component. Though he, like all my Nomu, has secondary components that, with the help of All for One, contribute their quirks so I can create a new quirk myself.” Ujiko does that giggle he is much too old for again. “I’m particularly proud of your quirk, Kurogiri. It took– ah, Shigaraki, how many components did we need for Warp Gate?”
“At least seven.” Despite not having a face, All for One somehow manages to appear lost in nostalgia. “Though we tried out another few that didn’t make it into the final iteration. They didn’t work well with the others.” Something in his face seems to refocus on the present, his smile turning sharp. “I kept those ones for myself.”
“Kurogiri sure was a fun project,” Ujiko says, sighing wistfully.
“Very fun, indeed. We made some good memories creating Warp Gate.”
“Oh my– Shigaraki, do you remember that time at the ice cream parlor–”
“Of course. The pistachio–”
And the two worst men Kurogiri knows burst out laughing like young girls at a sleepover.
Tomura and Kurogiri make eye contact, united in confusion. “Wha–” Tomura starts.
“You just had to be there, Tomura.” Ujiko says with a flippant wave of his hand, leaving Tomura to sulk. “Anyways, Kurogiri, since you are one of my creations, it wasn’t too hard for me to simply go back and reverse a few of the properties in your quirk. I really just made it function more like your main component’s quirk—an emitter—as opposed to a mutant.”
And something seems to click in Tomura’s mind right then. Somehow, he turns a shade paler than usual. “So, Kurogiri’s main component is…” he gestures vaguely in Kurogiri’s direction.
“Yes,” Ujiko says. “It was unfortunate, really. He was young.” He looks Kurogiri up and down, and sighs. “He wasn’t meant to die.”
Kurogiri wonders, for a brief second, if any children are meant to die.
“Yes, Tomura.” All for One’s voice crackles with static. “You know how hero society facilitates these tragedies, leaving so many behind to fall through the cracks. Like Kurogiri’s main component. Like you.”
Tomura curls in on himself a little more than his terrible posture already causes him to. He hasn’t looked at Kurogiri for a while—since Ujiko made it clear Kurogiri is a dead body, he realizes. “It–” Tomura opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again. “It makes me so mad,” is what he settles on. “That’s why we need to destroy it all.”
“Exactly,” All for One says, something like pride in his voice. “This actually brings me to your mission, Kurogiri.”
Kurogiri swallows, just barely hiding a wince of pain at the burn in his throat.
“All Might, the epitome of this era of hero society, is teaching at UA this year. I know, Kurogiri, that it would’ve been simpler for someone else to have fulfilled this role, but it is up to you now.” All for One smiles, his teeth glinting like blades in the light. “You will infiltrate UA, acting as a first year student, and you will gather as much information as possible, allowing us to kill All Might and usher in a new era.”
Kurogiri can feel the orders seep through his skin, into his bloodstream, winding their way into the definition of his being—curling around his heart, filling his lungs, expanding into even the folds of his brain.
All for One continues, “I also have a little theory of my own, that All Might has chosen his successor. He is weak, and the embers of One for All inside him are beginning to die out. ” The space where All for One’s eyes should be crinkle with mirth. “If he wants to pass on my brother’s legacy, he must do it soon. His sudden decision to teach at UA suggests that his successor is likely among this year’s student body.”
On either side of Kurogiri, Ujiko and Tomura listen with visible anticipation. Kurogiri only feels an ice-cold dread.
“Kurogiri, it will be your mission to identify All Might’s weaknesses, as well as the identity of the next holder of One for All. While Tomura will usher in and lead our era of destruction, Kurogiri, you will be the catalyst.”
Next to Kurogiri, Tomura is practically kicking his feet in excitement. Kurogiri knows Tomura must think this is all so cool.
Kurogiri, though, just feels a dull sort of horror, a buzzing in his ears and a crawling over his skin. In the past, say, hour, his entire existence has been flipped on its head. What once was a modest—if not moral—life is no more. Or, at the very least, it is technically an afterlife. Because Kurogiri, is quite literally, some teen’s dead body. And he does not even know how much he is himself anymore, with a different face and a different quirk, and soon, an entirely different life. Now, he is no longer his own person. He is simply dead, the body of someone else. Either that, or he is not even a person, just a catalyst for All for One’s vision.
Tomura grins at him. “That last part was pretty cool.”
Maybe, Kurogiri thinks, already being a corpse explains his desire to be buried six feet under instead of doing this job.