Supernova

Chapter Eleven - The Rain is Coming

I did start working through Midoriya's hero notebook with him after recalibration. We'd stay in the training gym, lying on our stomachs, facing each other. He would look up at me, spew off a fact, and I'd either tell him the sure-fire correction or my best educated guess. It was extremely rare, and unsurprising, to me anyways, that anything he'd written down into it was truthful.

I took this time really trying to understand him. Which I still didn't. He was a completely different person when he was fighting. Desperate, monstrous, hungry. But you'd never know it once he was shaking his head, brow furrowed, mumbling and cursing himself for not having known better, frantically rubbing the eraser on the bottom of his pencil into the paper and scribbling anew into those spaces. Not an ounce of ego lived in this kid, almost to a fault. He was interesting, in a very strange way.

"What is a family heirloom quirk again?" He asked me one day. I didn't like where this was going, but I figured I could keep enough hold of the reins.

"A family heirloom quirk is one that's passed down through bloodlines, and it typically becomes more powerful in every generation. Sometimes the pattern is specific, like father to son only, but sometimes it can be passed to anyone who shares some blood relation."

He nodded a little, and it seemed have curbed his curiosity again.

"Are you lying about being related to All-Might?" I asked him.

"No," he said, looking up at me. His eyes were honest.

"I've never heard of a pass down quirk that you could give to just anyone," I told him honestly. "How'd you get it?"

"I ate a strand of his hair," Midoriya said quietly. From the way he kept his eyes down, I knew that was the truth too.

"That's so weird," I laughed, making the dust on the floor in front of my face flutter. He laughed a little too, but not much. "Does that mean All-Might is going to die soon?"

"What?" he asked frantically. His eyes were still honest, now filled to the brim with fear.

"Family heirloom quirk users typically die within a year of passing it on," I told him, shrugging as much as I could from where I was lying on the dusty gym floor. "Give or take. I know he's retired."

"I don't think so," he said, uncertainly and sadly. "I hope not."

"It might be different," I said, hoping that assured him. I wasn't sure if it worked. Probably not, I thought, because he was quiet for a while.

"Is your last recalibration student in here?" He asked me after some time, tapping on his notebook.

"No," I told him honestly.

"Do I know of them?"

"No."

"Will I ever?"

I sighed. "Probably not." I hoped not. Not if I could help it.

"What else can you tell me?"

Despite how nervous he'd been about signing and hanging over the NDA, his careful conversations showed me he grasped the parameters well. There were things I could tell him, because I knew it had been All-Might that had read the report and not him, but the thought of doing so invited some uneasiness into my head. I didn't know if it was his honest eyes or the contract or if he too was just catching me in a moment of weakness, but whatever it was, words came.

"You know you can't say anything about this part either, right?" I asked him.

"I understand," he nodded.

I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. "He was my sidekick. We worked together for a year and a half."

"You had your own sidekick?" He didn't make any attempt to hide the fact that that impressed him. "That's so cool!"