#this was also a nearly twenty thousand pixel long image before having to break it up

[viric-dreams]

The Ockham backstory.

[allmightyneed]

Villain!All Might (Smite)x reader. part 2/20

link to part 1  

You pass weeks in a distracted, miserable state. Two, three, a month. Longer. At first, you chalk it up to the huge secret you now have to keep. A secret that feels as big as All Might himself. By a complete accident of time and place, you’ve come into possession of valuable intel on the most wanted criminal in Japan, possibly the world. Every day, you consider spilling the details to your best friend, who you also happen to work with. But how would you possibly bring it up?

“Oh, hey Kiko, guess what, I met a guy! Yeah… he’s super hot, tall, bit of a dark side. His name? I’m not sure, but professionally he goes by All Might.”

You can only imagine the confusion and disgust that would elicit. Even from Kiko, who usually tries to support your decisions, no matter how bad. The knowledge itself needles at you too, day after day. This information about his quirk could be the key to capturing him or bringing him down— forget using it to advance your own career. You could go to the police with this, you could go to Endeavor’s hero agency. You could change things. You could save lives. To your shame, that guilt isn’t strong enough to betray All Might’s confidence. He had trusted you. The number one villain trusted you with his secret identity, and apparently still does, because he hasn’t hunted you down and executed you. (Yet.)

Maybe he can’t. Your analytical mind spins theories in the absence of more definitive information. Maybe that muscle form takes a lot out of him, energy-wise. Maybe it’s too hard to maintain for long, and that’s why he sometimes disappears for days and weeks on end. And what about that whole coughing up blood thing?

By the third week, you’re using what little spare time you can find at work cobbling together a timeline of every documented All Might incident, closing in on a thousand entries in a hidden spreadsheet on your computer, and you’re only up to what most subject matter experts would consider the midway point of his active period. You haven’t found any patterns yet, nothing definitive, though as a foreigner yourself, his mysterious stint in America raises so many questions. 

“Hey!” A chipper voice and a knock-knock on your cubicle divider make you close the spreadsheet. You turn and see Kiko there, smiling and curious. 

“Hey!” 

“Whatcha working on?” 

“Oh, you know.” You wave your hand airily. “Nothing, really, just some busywork for Mr. Shimada.”

“Well, come on! It’s team lunch today.”

“Aw, really?”

“Yes. And you can’t skip. You’re looking too skinny.” That couldn’t be true, but the accusation reminds you of All Might, how he looked like he never got enough to eat. At least, one version of him. Kiko is sweet to be worried about you. She’s always so kind and considerate, always making sure you don’t bury yourself in your work, inviting you to lunch and for midday walks to get some sunlight. 

“Okay, okay. I’m not trying to get out of it.” You lock your computer screen and collect your jacket from the back of your chair. It will be nice to get a break outside of the office for sure. Given the sensitive nature of your work, your building is a secure one, with no windows and checkpoints to get in and out. Other than a few cultural holdouts, the workplace bears little resemblance to a traditional Japanese office, having adopted some more western practices, like cubicles and excessive use of PowerPoint. “Have you heard back from the Licensing Bureau?”

Kiko heaves a big sigh, which tells you that she hasn’t. “I thought I would last week at the latest, but nothing.”

You follow her into the elevator. “That’s weird. Don’t they usually send confirmation or denial pretty promptly?”

“Most petitioners receive the news right after their test.” She shrugs, throwing you a little smile as she precedes you into the lobby. “Guess I’m special.”

“Of course you are,” you laugh, rolling your eyes a little, but you mean it. She has pure hearted intentions about becoming a part-time volunteer hero. Discussion about the intricacies of Licensing Bureau policies and mailing schedules continues all the way to the barbecue restaurant where together you conclude, that her unusual quirk must be holding up their decision. It makes sense. Reanimation, her ability to create a zombie from a dead body, is dangerous and powerful, and is rightfully quite closely controlled. It’s also very much at odds with her sunny, happy personality. She rarely brings it up, but you know she regrets not having a more standard type of quirk. She’s also one of the few people who know about your quirk and has been a steadfast guardian of the secret.

Nothing much happens at the team lunch. Office gossip, rehashing the latest news, etc. Though, you do find out from Mr. Kawada, your supervisor, that you are one of two analysts who have been selected to support and consult on a new account the firm is taking on. So exclusive that you aren’t even allowed to know who the client is yet. You act grateful, mustering as much enthusiasm as you can— it’s a great opportunity— but inwardly, you’re daydreaming about All Might. That’s been happening more and more. 

When you get back to the office after lunch, you’re roped into a meeting with Mr. Kawada, and Mr. Shimada and the rest of the team leads. You know you should be paying attention but you zone out through most of it, replaying that fateful night in your head. 

A couple days later, the obsession reaches a critical level. You have to find him. Not as an analyst, not to bring him to justice. You just have to see him, and you don’t quite understand why, but it’s a need, a hunger that grows sharper and more potent each day. 

Riding the train to work, you start searching in your web browser. ‘All Might’. Too much noise. News articles from twenty different sources all about the same recent attacks clog the entire first page of results. When you get into the office, you go through the motions, sitting down at your workstation, logging in, all on autopilot. 

The only thing you can think about is All Might. As time has passed, you try harder and harder to keep fresh that image in your mind of how he looked in his other form. The skinny one, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. He hadn’t been any less intense like that. 

You refine your searches, hitting wall after wall of no results or way too many. A passing coworker’s idol-themed lanyard catches your eye; you finally hit on an idea: ‘All Might fan club’. That gets you something. You navigate to the first result, an outdated page with a garish background and little animated pixel version of All Might in the corner of the screen. Dancing. you have to admit it’s kind of cute. Suddenly, loud sound plays through your computer’s speakers. 

“I am on a website! I am on a website!” It’s All Might’s voice— his villain voice, which has people in other cubicles peeking over the dividers at you to find the source of the noise. Panicking, you close the tab. Then, after making sure your computer’s volume is muted, you find your way back to that same page. Sure enough, there’s a link at the top titled I LOVE TO MEET MY FANS. Following it brings you to a listing of a mailing address and… yes. A phone number. 

Heart racing, you copy it down on a sticky note, tuck it in your purse and, before it can register in your mind as a bad idea, slip out of the office. 

The train back to your home stop is nearly empty in the middle of the day. A few tourists, old people, some kids playing hooky. 

You turn your phone over and over. It said he loves to meet his fans… what fans? Doesn’t everyone hate him? Maybe that’s how you should open the conversation. Hey Mr. All Might, I know you’re universally reviled but I thought I’d hit you up anyway. The idea makes you snort-laugh. No. Just keep it simple.

You: hi.

A few seconds later, during which you stare at your phone, the three ‘typing’ dots appear. Then go away, with no message coming through. Could this really be him? Or is it just some weirdo’s phone number? Some otaku impersonating All Might on the internet. Not like you are in any position to be accusing someone of obsession.

You: this is the girl you met in the alley. You pause for a second, thinking of how you could signal to him who you are. He might meet a lot of girls in alleys. 

You: I saw you shrink.

A moment later, he replies with your name. Shock hits you; you click the screen off, black then click it on again. Your name is still there.

Him: I tHOUT I told =you to standstill and bee silent. 

It’s him. With lots of typos, but it’s him.

Oh, god. What are you doing? 

You don’t reply again until you get inside your apartment. Standing just inside the front door, with your shoes still on, you write out three versions of a witty retort, and erase each one. Stupid. What are you even trying to get out of this? 

You: I think people deserve to know who you really are. 

Nothing. Nothing for an unbearable minute that feels like another week gone by.

You: I’m going to the media. 

You’re not. You don’t know why you just told him that.

The three dots appear and disappear, again, with no new text. You watch the screen for what seems like an eternity, still standing in your entryway with your purse on your shoulder. 

And then there’s a thundering knock on the door.

Link to part 3

[alchemine]

i refuse to give this fic a title

…because that will make it too official and I’ll have to commit to finishing it.

anyway here’s Danny trying with Dannylike earnestness to convince a very sceptical Jo that he’s going to be her researcher in another twenty-odd years. 

and here are the previous two parts to keep it all together:

part 1 | part 2

After parting from Jo outside the gates of St Margaret’s, Danny spent a miserable day trying to stay occupied and dry. A museum would have been perfect if there’d been one nearby, but he’d already walked so far to find Jo that he didn’t think his feet could bear any more of that just yet, and he didn’t want to spend his last bits of money on transport. He lingered in a bookshop for as long as he could, and then when there was a break in the rain, went out and walked along the paths on the green, past a half-flooded and deserted children’s playground and under trees that dripped down his neck. 

Along the way, he thought with a slowly growing sense of horror about what was going to happen when night fell, as it would all too soon. A few months ago, he’d done a massive amount of research on homelessness and written up a report on it for Jo—Future Jo, that was—so he knew more than he wanted to about the perils that awaited rough sleepers, ranging from being pissed on by passersby to being beaten and robbed to simply dying of exposure. He didn’t want any of that, but what other options did he have? Even if he was able to make Current Jo believe his situation, he didn’t think she was going to let him spend the night on her bedroom floor as if they were a pair of schoolmates having a sleepover. Maybe her parents had a garden shed and he could wedge himself in between the wheelbarrow and the hedge clippers. At least he’d be dry. 

Just before four, he doubled back, found the café Jo had mentioned, and discovered she was there ahead of him, seated at a table with an open packet of Marlboro Lights in front of her and the dead ends of three of them in an ashtray at her elbow. She also had a half-eaten croissant on a plate, and the sight of it made Danny’s stomach come to life and twist itself into gurgling knots. His last meal had been either eighteen hours or twenty-three years ago, depending on how you counted, and that was just too long. 

Not now, he thought, and approached the table. Jo was reading a book, wearing the same scrunched-forehead look of concentration she always had when reading anything, but as he got closer, she saw him coming and laid the book aside. Her expression was neutral, but he could see her whole body visibly tensing, ready to fight or flee if it came to that. 

“I thought you were only going to wait ten minutes,” he said. 

“Starting from four. I was early.” Jo looked at her watch. “All right, I promised we could talk, and here we are. What’s so important that you had to follow me like a stalker to tell me?”

“Can I sit down?” 

“Well, you’ll look silly just standing there, won’t you?” She gestured at the empty chair opposite her, and he pulled it out and sat. He’d had plenty of time during his long, dull day to think about how to break the news to her, and at last had decided just to tell her and then produce whatever proof he could. It was the sort of story that was equally unbelievable whether you crept up on it from behind or confronted it head-on. 

“Are you going to eat the rest of that?” He pointed to her croissant half. 

“No, why?”

“Do you mind if I have it?” 

“I suppose not,” Jo said warily, as if she thought he might be planning to take it home with him and add it to a creepy serial-killer collection of artefacts. She pushed the plate across the table to him, and he took the croissant and tried, not very successfully, to eat in small bites to make it last longer. 

“You could buy a whole one, you know,” Jo said, watching him. “They do sell them to anyone.” 

“It’s complicated.” Danny suppressed an urge to lick his finger and use it to wipe up the crumbs on the plate. “Thanks for that.” 

“You’re welcome. Now let’s have that story.” 

This was the moment Danny had been dreading, but there was nothing for it. He steeled himself and began. “This morning when I stopped you outside the school, I said that you knew me.” 

“Yes, and I said I didn’t, because I don’t.” 

“Well, you’re half right,” he said. “You don’t know me now, but…you do know me in the future. That’s where I’ve come from. I fell asleep last night in 2008, and I woke up here.” 

There was a long, long pause, and then without a word, Jo stood up and bent to collect her school bag from the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving. This is ridiculous. Do you think I’m some sort of idiot?” She stuffed her book down into the bag–it was Nineteen Eighty-Four, Danny saw–and buckled the front flap with an angry snap. “I don’t know what I expected from someone who followed me off a bus. Fuck off and goodbye.” 

“No, wait,” Danny said, feeling desperate. 

“Why should I do that?”

“You promised me five minutes and it hasn’t been that long yet,” he said. “And I’ve got proof. Let me show you.” 

“Oh Christ,” Jo said, but she sat down again, bag clasped against the front of her blazer. “What’s your proof?”   

“Here.” Danny pulled his remaining coins out of his pocket and spread them out on the hard tabletop, amongst the white rings left by a thousand cups of coffee and tea. “Look at the dates on these. Nothing from before 2001.” 

“So you’ve got some sham coins. That doesn’t prove a thing. And you can go to prison for counterfeiting, by the way.” 

“They’re real. And there’s more.” He opened his wallet and started laying out credit and cashpoint cards just above the scatter of coins. “See? This one expires in 2009. This one expires in 2012. What sort of bank issues a card that doesn’t expire for almost thirty years?” 

“If you can forge coins you can forge those too,” Jo said stubbornly. She looked at her watch again. “You’ve only got two minutes left.” 

“All right, here’s something else.” Danny looked around, but the café was in the midst of a lull and there were only a few other occupied tables. When he was sure no one was watching, he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his mobile and flipped it open, bringing the tiny screen to life. 

“What’s that?” Jo leant closer, genuinely curious for the first time in their conversation. Her hair fell forward over her shoulders, and she pushed it back in a gesture so familiar that Danny felt lightheaded with déjà vu. 

“It’s a mobile phone. They’re going to be huge in about…” He had to think about it. “Another ten years, maybe. It takes photos as well. Look at this.” He pressed buttons and brought up a shot of the two of them together at a reception for a visiting ambassador. “That’s you and me last year, in 2007.” 

Jo’s eyes narrowed as she bent over the small, slightly pixellated image of her future self wearing a dark blue dress and pearls, smirking crookedly at the camera with Danny’s arm draped round her shoulders. 

“It does look like me a bit, but…” She glanced up sharply. “You’re not going to try to tell me you’re my boyfriend or something, are you? Because you’re too old for me and definitely too young for the woman in this photo, so either way I’m not having it.” 

“No, that’s not it at all. I work for you. We’re colleagues.” 

“You work for me? Where?” 

“You’re a junior minister in the Home Secretary’s office,” Danny said. “I’m your researcher.”  

Jo still looked suspicious, but she sat back a bit in her chair and let her bag slide to the floor of the café. “All right, I admit that does sound like a job I’d want to do, but you still haven’t shown me any real proof it’s true. How do I know that’s really me in the photo? Or that your mobile phone thingy actually came from the future?” 

“Have you ever seen one before?” 

“No,” Jo said, “but new things are invented all the time, aren’t they? Maybe it’s from Japan and the shops will be full of them by Christmas.” 

Danny ground his teeth. He knew all about Jo’s penchant for poking holes in arguments—it was one of the traits that would make her a fearsome debate opponent in their own time—but at the moment it was just making things difficult. He cast about for some bit of information he could give her that she couldn’t refute, and suddenly remembered a story she had told him once when she was very drunk.

“Okay,” he said. “You do want to go into politics after you’ve got your degree, don’t you?”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“I know you have. You told me—or you will tell me, later—that you’d been interested in a political career ever since you were a teenager. But you also told me that before then, when you were nine or ten, your big dream was to ride horses in the Olympics. You’d seen the Montreal Games, and you thought the equestrian competition was amazing and wanted to do it too, but you knew your parents wouldn’t buy you a horse or let you have riding lessons, and you were afraid that people would laugh, so you never told anyone. Am I right?” 

Jo’s face went chalk-white, and Danny felt like a monster, but pressed his advantage. “I am right, aren’t I?” 

“You can’t possibly know that,” she said faintly. 

“But I do. I know because you told me.” He left out the bit about how she’d been so pissed at the time that he’d nearly had to pick her up and pour her into the waiting cab at the end of the evening. Asking her to accept that he’d come from the future seemed like enough without also mentioning the drink problem that awaited her there.  

“Oh my God,” Jo said. She propped her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands, as if she were worried it might fall off. Dusk was gathering fast outside the café’s windows, the lights from cars and shops casting long, bright streaks of red and white and yellow onto the wet black tarmac, and he wondered whether anyone would be missing Jo if he kept her here much longer. He didn’t know anything about her home life at this age; for all he knew, she was expected for a family meal at six sharp every evening. 

“Jo? You all right?”

“Not really, but let’s pretend I am to make things easier.” Jo straightened up and rubbed both hands over her face. “Okay. We’ll assume for a moment that I believe you, which I’m not entirely sure yet that I do. At some point in the future, I become a politician, and you’re a member of my staff.” 

“Yes.” 

“And how long have you known me?” 

“Erm…ten years I think? I met you when I was seventeen and I’m twenty-seven now. You hired me as your researcher five years ago.” 

“Fair enough, but you’re not just my researcher, are you? I mean we must know each other pretty well if I’ve told you about my secret childhood horsey fantasies.” 

“Well, yes,” Danny said, wondering where she was headed with this. “We’re friends too. We’ve been through a lot together.”    

“Right,” Jo said. “So consider this, Danny. When we met—meet—whatever, did I behave as if I’d met you before?”

“No,” Danny said. He thought back to that long-ago evening, to being uncomfortable in his white shirt and black waistcoat and irritable about being pressed into duty. “I was serving canapés at a party. I offered you some smoked salmon crostini and you said thanks. That’s all.” 

“And in all the years we’ve been friends and colleagues, I’ve never, ever said anything to make you think that when I was eighteen, you’d turned up outside my school raving like a madman and we’d had this conversation?” 

“No.” 

“Well, that’s strange,” Jo said. “Because if this is happening now, then in the future it’s already happened, hasn’t it? Now-me knows about it, so future-me must as well. Why wouldn’t she have told you?”