Chapter Text
The folder hit the table with a slap that echoed longer than it should have. Paper edges fanned out like a broken wing, photographs spilling halfway free from their confines. One showed a blurry license plate. Another, the aftermath of a quirk-fueled break-in—glass shards, scorch marks, and blood.
The silence returned, thick and absolute. The only sound was the ticking of the old analog clock above the one-way mirror, clicking loud in its indifference.
Across the table, the man in cuffs didn't even blink. His lip was split, his jaw swollen, but the smirk on his face remained otherwise intact. The detective, on the other hand, looked about one pulled thread away from unraveling where he stood.
"You said, and I quote," the detective began, flipping open the top of the messy file with a flick, " I got the information from somebody else. Someone online. " He leaned forward, voice flat but sharp enough to cut through the toughest men's skin. "And unless you're looking for a longer sentence, Mr. Umemoto, why don't you tell us who this someone is?"
Umemoto gave a slow blink, accompanied with this look that told the detective he thinks he is dumb, before leaning back in his seat making the cuffs rattle like a dare. "Why should I? Another stint in prison isn't going to kill me. I've done worse. I'll be out before you know it. And when I am..." He shrugged. "You'll just toss me back in again. That's the cycle, isn't it? I'm a lost cause, detective… what did you say your name was again?"
The detective's brow twitched, and he rolled his eyes to go along with it. "Tsukauchi. Detective Tsukauchi. And we've got you on record saying, It's not like I owe the guy anything. I've already paid him. So, who is it?"
Umemoto laughed, dry and joyless. "Fine," he said, voice dropping down a register. "You want a name? It's HaVer . Some blogger—runs a dirty little site buried under far too many proxies. Claims he's just a guy with opinions and spare time. Truth is, he'll sell information like it's candy if you name the right price."
He leaned in, the dim light catching on his bruised eye as he drops his voice even lower, to a whisper. "He's got a hell of a quirk, too. Reads patterns like a psychic. Not the kind of guy who'd waste his time with cops like you. Shame, huh?"
Tsukauchi didn't respond. But the quiet, deliberate way he closed the folder said enough.
And behind the mirror, someone else was already tracing HaVer's name through a dozen encrypted archives—pulling threads that had long been buried in the deep net.
Late Night, Musutafu
The screen glowed green against the cracked plastic keys of his ancient laptop, lines of code scrolling like rain. Izuku sat hunched at his desk, the flickering light of the lamp at his bed side barely keeping the shadows at bay. His fingers moved fast, not because he had time, but rather because he never did.
School in five hours. Homework unfinished. Dinner untouched. Yet, he hasn't moved from his seat since he returned home from another tiring day of school where he could still feel the effects of the all-nighter he pulled the previous night.
He hadn't spoken a word to his mother all night.
Not because she'd done anything. She was trying, like always. But he couldn't bring himself to face her—not with how deep he'd fallen into this. HaVer wasn't supposed to become a real identity. Just a throwaway screen name. A bluff. A way to feel like he mattered in a world that had written him off before he could prove otherwise.
Yet here he was. Selling scraps of information to low-tier criminals and paranoid business execs who knew exactly where to look. Trading secrets for cash, and occasionally, just occasionally, leaking the truth about heroes who weren't as heroic as they looked on TV.
He stared at his latest blog post that was still live, which was surprising seeing as traffic was unusually high tonight. The headline glared back at him:
Commission Audit: 2.3 Million Yen Vanished. Hero "Backdraft" Involved?
He hadn't expected the story to spread. Usually when a story bashing a high-ranking hero, conspiracy or not, gets published the Hero Commission is all over it. Perhaps it was the late hour of night, or his well-hidden website that prevented that from happening like it did to many others. That's typically why he chose lower ranking heroes who already aren't well liked, it just makes his job easier.
A quiet ping and an exclamation mark by the messages for his website dragged his attention away from the post. His blood ran cold when he saw the Unknown Contact that messaged him. How ironic that the man behind it isn't actually unknown at all, at least to him. No handle. No icon. Just a dot in the dark.
Izuku's stomach sank even further as he read the first message.
Unknown Contact: "Umemoto's been caught."
How this contact knew he had sold info to Umemoto a few weeks back was beyond the teen, and he knew trying to find out wouldn't turn out well for him. Regardless, Umemoto wanted to know about some drug ring and how to get an "in", if you would. It didn't surprise him that the man got caught but he swore to himself as he thought about the idiot mentioning HaVer by name. It's bad enough, some of the names he's in contact with, he doesn't need to add cops and heroes to his plate right now.
Another message pings through his computer, even more vague than the last.
Unknown Contact: "We need to talk. In person. Tomorrow. Same time as before."
He freezes as he reads it. He doesn't meet with clients; he always insists on chatting through his website, for his own safety of course. It's too risky. Of course, he's met with a few before, on rare occasions—and even then, it was from across a café, hidden behind a mask. He's only met this one once before, he knows how the man operates, he's manipulative, he knows exactly how to get what he wants.
He hesitated, fingers hovering over the keyboard. He knows what he could be walking into, but he also knows what he could be walking into later on considering the man has seen him before, even if it was behind a mask.
Then he typed back:
Where?
The response came instantly:
Unknown Contact: "Bando Station. Platform 3. No cameras. 11:00 PM. Don't be late."
Izuku stared at the screen long after it had faded to his screen saver, his cursor blinking in the silence. He couldn't shake the feeling that this was the moment things started to spiral.
That this was the last night HaVer would be just a harmless mask. A ruse he'd concocted when he felt like he could've been doing more than just sitting around waiting for a quirk that was never going to come.
Izuku didn't move. His back ached. His fingers were still curled above the keys, cold and cramping from the hours of typing. He could hear his mother's soft snoring in the next room—one of the only constants in his life. She didn't know. She couldn't.
He dragged the mouse, making his screen flick back on, over to a folder hidden in the corner of his desktop and opened it. Inside: snippets. Screenshots. Logs. Payment traces. Three years worth of breadcrumbs, all gathered in secret.
Amongst it was one labeled simply:
"First Deal"
He hesitated... then clicked.
FLASHBACK — 3 Years Ago
He'd sold all of it months ago—his All Might notebooks, the wall posters, even the handmade model figures he used to treasure like sacred relics. Each item disappeared quietly, one by one, until all that remained was the outline of sun-faded posters on his yellow wall and an aching hollowness in his chest.
His mother hadn’t asked where the money came from. Or maybe she had, once, quietly, while folding laundry in the living room under the hum of static from their old TV. But when he told her it was just “old stuff he didn’t need anymore,” she nodded too quickly, too gratefully, and didn’t ask again.
He saw it in her hands—the way they trembled when she tried to open the gas bill, the barely-healed cut on her knuckle from trying to fix a broken light socket herself, the way she winced when she stood after too long sitting. She smiled like everything was fine, like the world hadn’t abandoned them, like her heart wasn’t breaking a little more every day watching her only child give up on his childhood dream.
She still thought he wanted to be a hero someday. That this was just a phase. That maybe he’d pick up another notebook and start scribbling again once the clouds passed.
But Izuku knew better now.
Dreams didn’t pay rent. Hero merch didn’t keep the water running. And the world didn’t need another hopeful kid waiting to be saved—it needed someone willing to bleed for the truth. Someone who could see past the bright costumes and photo ops. Someone who could dig where no one else would. Someone like HaVer.
He hadn’t planned on becoming him. Not really. He was just tired.
It was raining the night Izuku posted his first tip.
He remembered because their roof leaked. Water tapped rhythmically into a cast iron saucepan in the corner of his room, each drop a reminder of everything slipping through the cracks—money, stability, safety. His mother was asleep on the couch again, too exhausted to make it to her bed after her second shift in a row had ended. He sat in the dark, knees hugged to his chest, watching a HeroTube video play on low volume.
It was a simple comment under a video exposé. Just a few lines, buried deep.
How the hell is Edgeknight even allowed to operate?? He’s not licensed, he’s got blades, and no one’s regulating him! Are we seriously just letting randos with weapons play hero now? The Hero Commission is a damn joke if they’re turning a blind eye to this. He's a walking lawsuit waiting to happen.
Most people would’ve scrolled past it. Just another opinion. But something about it stuck with him. A loose thread.
He tugged.
For hours, he combed through old posts, buried footage, obscure forums, and public records. The deeper he dug, the worse it looked—timeline inconsistencies, police logs that didn’t line up, incident reports that had been wiped or altered. All of it pointed to one conclusion: the hero wasn’t just unlicensed, he was dangerous. Reckless. And someone had worked very hard to keep it buried.
It should have scared him.
Instead, it felt like gravity shifted. Like the world tilted just enough for a sliver of light to hit something he hadn’t seen before. A way out. Not of poverty, not yet—but of powerlessness.
So he made the blog. Just one post.
"Edgeknight: Underground Hero or Liability?"
No tags. No hashtags. Just a handle: HaVer.
It was a word he’d made up years ago, back when he would still fill notebooks with imagined hero names. Half-fake Latin, something that sounded important. Something that felt like it meant something. In his mind, it translated to sudden truth.
It sounded like someone who mattered.
He didn’t expect anyone to read it. But two days later, a crypto payment hit the wallet he’d set up anonymously. It was small—barely enough to buy a taiyaki—but it came with a note from an unknown contact that burned itself into his memory:
Hey, I need info on someone. Think you could get it for me? I’ll send more money if you do. I need eyes. And you see things others miss.
He stared at that message for hours. He wanted to say no. He should’ve said no.
He wasn’t a spy. He wasn’t a hacker. He was a kid. A scared, quirkless, lonely 12-year-old who missed his childhood bedroom covered in All Might posters and a world where being good meant something.
But when he closed the message, the saucepan in the corner was still catching rain. The gas bill still sat unopened on the kitchen table. His mother was still asleep on the couch, curled into herself like she was trying to disappear.
So he said yes.
And every day after, it got easier. He got better. Faster. Slipping deeper into encrypted networks, learning to read metadata like body language, understanding how to watch without being seen. He knew what to look for now. Knew how to make it matter.
The world had made its choice: people like him weren’t worth saving.
He didn’t have powers, but he had eyes. He had patterns. He saw the rot behind the smiles, the polished lies under bright studio lights. If no one else was going to call it out, he would.
And sometimes, he admitted, the attention felt good. Being useful felt good. When people messaged HaVer for help—real people, scared people—it gave him a reason to keep going. A reason to try.
He wasn’t planning on stepping into anything dangerous. Not then. He just wanted the truth to mean something again.
But truth has a way of getting you dirty.
And sometimes, the more you know, the harder it is to stand on the sidelines.
It started with tips. Then a warning. Then another post, just to protect someone. Then another. A pattern. A trail.
By the time he realized it, he was already in too deep.
Not a hero. Not yet.
But not just a kid anymore, either.
Just someone trying to make sense of the world the heroes stopped protecting. A shadow dragging light into places no one else dared look.
Not a villain.
Just a mistake that kept going.
Back to Present — 1:17 AM
Izuku closed the folder.
He didn’t cry, though his eyes burned like he had. He just pulled his hoodie over his head, shut the laptop, and collapsed onto the mattress without changing out of his uniform.
He stared at the ceiling in the dark for a long time, just listening to the echoes of rain that wasn’t there.
This time of night was never peaceful to him.
It felt like falling into something heavy and cold—like the kind of dream you didn’t wake up from until the sun had already moved on without you.
Izuku didn’t remember falling asleep. He remembered the glow of his light fading into nothing from across the room, and the weight in his chest that kept him from breathing too deep. But the next thing he knew, sunlight was spilling through his curtains, sharp and cold, and his alarm was flashing, blinking 7:42 AM.
School started in eighteen minutes.
He didn’t bother eating. Just splashed cold water on his face, tore off his hoodie revealing the worn uniform he hadn’t bothered removing, and slipped out the door before his mom could ask how he had slept. The guilt stung — he hadn’t looked her in the eye in days. Every time he tried, all he could see was how tired she was. How hard she worked. How little she had to show for it.
And here he was, lying to her daily, just so she didn’t have to work so hard. Selling information to people she would beg him to stay away from.
The walk to Aldera Middle School was a blur. Same cracked sidewalks. Same quiet pitying looks from adults who remembered him from his Quirk Appraisal Day — ”That poor Midoriya boy. Quirkless, you know. I don’t know what I’d do if it were my son.”
He got to class just as the bell rang. Most kids ignored him. Except the ones who didn’t.
“Look who finally showed up,” someone snorted from behind as he slipped into his seat.
Katsuki Bakugou didn’t bother whispering. After all, he wasn’t exactly known for being quiet.
“You know,” Bakugou started, stretching his legs out into the aisle with causal cruelty, “you might as well just drop out already. What’s the point of coming if you’re just gonna sit there like a useless lump?”
Izuku did not grace him with a response. He kept his eyes on his notebook, though the words were swimming through his head.
“Maybe he thinks he's gonna be a hero online now,” one of Bakugou’s lackeys added. “Post enough comments and maybe he’ll get a quirk in the mail.”
Laughter. A teacher’s voice droned somewhere in the background.
Izuku’s fingers twitched around his pen.
They didn’t know how close they were. How close they were to uncovering the truth and how close he was to pulling something real out from beneath them. How many names he already had saved — ones the Hero Commission would not want seen by the public. Names that could get him out of here quicker than Bakugou could be recruited at UA.
If he uploaded the file to the right forum, he could ruin careers, lives even. Flip the narrative. Make everybody else feel small for once.
But then what? It’s not like these nobodies even knew who HaVer was. What he was capable of.
He sighed, slowly, and let the fantasies slip back under the surface. He wasn’t that person. Not yet. And he hoped it never came to that.
After class, he slipped into the nurse’s office and asked for an ice pack, feigning a headache. He needed somewhere quiet. Somewhere the fluorescent lights didn’t feel like interrogation lamps. And if it meant he missed getting tortured during gym then that was just a plus.
When he opened his laptop during lunch, buried behind three VPNs and a cracked hotspot connection, his site analytics were still climbing.
HaVer was getting attention.
But Izuku Midoriya? Still invisible.
The lunchroom buzzed with dull noise — clattering trays, fake laughs, the scrape of chairs. It all felt far away, like he was underwater. Izuku sat in the farthest corner, his food untouched, eyes flickering between his laptop screen and the doors. He should really know better than to bring the thing to school considering what his classmates have done to far less important possessions of his, but with the trouble he’s in, he doesn’t have the time to worry about them.
He’d tunneled through enough layers of anonymity to keep himself safe. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. Still, the fact that he had contacted him directly last night left a sour taste in his throat.
Bando Station. Platform 3. No Cameras. 11:00 PM. Don’t be late.
He knew better than to show nerves. But his hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
His site had exploded in views after the Backdraft audit leak three years ago. Hundreds of people combing through his blog, old posts, timestamps. Someone had even tried tracing an IP — sloppy, lazy — but it meant someone was getting too curious.
It was the wrong kind of attention. And right now it wasn’t something he could not afford.
He shut the laptop and shoved it into his bag, right as someone’s tray slammed into the table across from him making him jump in his seat.
Izuku didn’t have to look up. He knew the weight behind that noise. Felt it in his chest before he even heard the voice.
“Yo, Deku,” Bakugou said, venom soft and casual, like they were old friends. “Didn’t see you in gym today. What’s the matter? Legs too weak to run with the rest of us?”
Izuku didn’t answer, he didn’t even look up. That only made it worse.
“You sick or just scared of gettin’ your ass kicked again?” Bakugou leaned in with oranges and whites popping in his hand. “People talk, you know. Hear you’ve been sneaking off during class. Maybe you got a secret after all. Shame it’s not a quirk.”
A few others laughed — Minami, Taku, the twins from 3-C — while the rest of the lunch room quieted down to watch. They didn’t care what he was doing. They just liked watching someone lower than them get picked on. And Izuku? He’d stopped fighting it months ago.
The bruise from last week hadn’t even faded.
He kept his head down.
“Hey,” Bakugou snapped, voice tightening. “You deaf now, too?”
Then, without warning, Bakugou grabbed Izuku’s still full lunch tray and flipped it. The cold, untouched rice spilled across his notes, luckily not all that important considering his memory, but annoying nonetheless.
Laughter again. A chorus of you gonna cry? , poor Deku , and pathetic , filled the space.
Izuku slowly gathered the soaked paper in shaking hands, feeling something splinter inside him. Not rage. Not even humiliation.
Just that awful, hollow knowing.
That if he disappeared tomorrow, the only thing that might make the world notice was a blog post with the name HaVer on it.
“Oi.”
The teacher finally appeared — too late, too lazy. “What is going on over here?”
“Dropped his tray,” Bakugou said, watching him with a smirk.
The teacher just sighed and waved it off.
Izuku stood, food still dripping from his sleeve, and left the cafeteria without a word.
He didn’t go back to class.
He hid in the second floor supply closet, curled up next to a stack of textbooks no one used anymore, and booted up his laptop with shaking hands.
If this was the world heroes built, one where no one like him has a place, then fine.
He’d keep watching from the cracks.
Keep digging.
Keep knowing.
And maybe someday, he’d find something big enough to crack the whole thing wide open.
When the bell rang through the halls, Izuku walked home with his hood up.
A weak drizzle had started sometime during the math class he didn’t attend, and by the time the final bell rang, the sky had sunk into a dull, gray blanket. The streets were slick. The air smelled like wet pavement and old oil. He didn’t mind. It meant fewer people looking his way. Fewer students who’d stick around just to give him a hard time.
He moved on autopilot — past the same broken vending machine, past the alley shortcut Katsuki had shoved him into two months ago, up the three flights of rusted stairs to their tiny, top floor, apartment tucked into a corner of Musutafu like someone had forgotten it existed.
He stopped outside the door, finger hovering over the handle.
Inside, he could hear his mother humming faintly. The clink of dishes. The scent of warm miso.
His throat tightened.
He hadn’t told her about the blog. Not about the money that he slipped to their landlord when she wasn’t looking. Not about the people messaging him in the dead of night or the way his nerves never really calmed down anymore.
She still thought he was holding out hope for a miracle.
He opened the door quietly.
“Welcome home, sweetie!” she called from the kitchen, too fast, too chipper. He could tell she was trying. She always did. “I made miso soup and picked up some croquettes on sale at the store earlier. You must be starving.”
Izuku kicked off his shoes and mumbled something that might’ve been “thanks.” He didn’t trust his voice to say much more than that right now.
He dropped his bag by the table and slipped into his chair, pulling his laptop onto his knees the second her back was turned away from him.
She didn’t notice at first. She was setting the table, humming again. Something from a commercial that he half-remembered.
Only when she sat down did she really look at him. Tutting at the computer hidden in his lap as she went to grab her chopsticks.
“You’re pale again,” she said softly, frowning. “Did something happen today?”
Izuku froze.
For a moment, he thought about telling her everything. The blog. The name HaVer. The payment requests. The message from last night. Bando Station. Platform 3.
He thought about saying, I’m scared, Mom.
Instead, he said, “Just tired. We ran in gym class today.”
A lie so practiced it didn’t even sting to say. He didn’t even go to gym class, if only she knew.
She smiled, but her eyes didn’t.
“I worry about you,” she said with her eyes on the table. “You don’t sleep enough, and I know school isn’t easy on you. You come home bruised and pretend it’s nothing. I… I just want to help, Izuku.”
He didn’t answer right away. The pit in his stomach grew the longer he stayed quiet. Just stared at the bowl of miso in front of him, the steam rising slowly, like smoke.
“You do help,” he said finally, so quiet he wasn’t sure she heard him.
But she nodded anyway, like it was enough.