Chapter Text
When Hizashi opens his eyes, it’s to dark sky, not his bedroom ceiling. He’s lying on hard concrete, and his back and head hurt like lying down hadn’t been his choice. As he slowly sits up, he carefully assesses the rest of his body, and registers the fainter rawness of his throat, like he’s been using his quirk a lot.
When he reaches for his memories, how he got here, he finds nothing. That realization comes with a swoop of fear, along with the swirling disorientation, and he’s well on his way to start panicking when he hears the voice behind him. “Hizashi? Are you okay?”
Instantly, his heartrate slows, and the next breath he takes is easy. His best friend sounds as impassive as ever, and if he’s here, everything is fine.
Hizashi gets himself to his feet, but he has to grab his pants to stop them from falling down as he does. That’s—weird. He’s wearing his hero costume, and his pants are usually so tight. He vaguely thinks his belt must have broken, even though that doesn’t seem right either, before filing the thought with the other clues. “Shouta!” His voice doesn’t hold as much relief as he was feeling a moment ago. Things are adding up very wrong. “Where are we? What’s going on?”
He can’t see Shouta clearly in the low light, the streetlights from outside the alley only illuminating him from the back. It is Shouta, it is, but there’s something off about him too. He seems too tall, his shoulders too broad, even as little sense as that makes. His hair is longer, past his shoulders now, even though Hizashi saw him at school yesterday.
But it couldn’t have been yesterday. Shouta hasn’t said anything yet, just studying Hizashi carefully, but he doesn’t need to. Still, he’s not quite ready to handle more than an updated question. “What happened?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Shouta starts, and then pauses, like it’s something he doesn’t want to say, “you were hit with an age regression quirk.”
That snaps everything into place. Shouta isn’t older, Hizashi is younger. When Hizashi looks down at himself, he’s wearing his hero costume, but not, like someone had reconstructed it from a written description. Every part of it is loose.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Shouta still sounds mostly calm, and that’s good, is the only thing keeping Hizashi from panicking again, but he knows him well enough to hear the edge of tension and worry in his voice.
“Going to bed last night,” Hizashi answers, then realizes how unhelpful that was and follows it up with, “Yeah, there’s an amnesia component.” He has to take a moment to steady himself, and even though he’d look calm to anyone else, just like Shouta would in this moment, Shouta is one of the few people who know him well enough that he can probably tell he’s not exactly okay. Unless—what if he’s talking to a Shouta who hasn’t seen him in ten, fifteen years? What if they graduate and never talk again? The idea that they could have grown apart fills him with terror—even though Shouta hasn’t given any indication one way or another. He’s not ready to deal with that heartbreak all at once.
H izashi finally rallies himself to ask, and even sounds calm enough when he does, “How old am I supposed to be?”
Shouta is still just looking at him, in such a strange way, but he doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Thirty-one.” He does hesitate before asking his own question. “How old—”
He doesn’t get the whole question out before he’s drowned out by Hizashi’s yelp of surprise, his quirk slipping enough to bounce the sound around the walls of the buildings they’re standing between. Because—he just moved his hand, and felt a lump under his glove. When he yanks it off, holding his hand up to his face, there’s the faint gleam of a gold ring. On his ring finger. It’s the only one he’s wearing, and the meaning is undeniable.
“Oh my god,” Hizashi breathes, touching it with the fingertips of his other hand. Not only did he make it to thirty, he got married. Will get married. Is married. Has a spouse. “Who am I married to??”
It’s only after he’s asked that he realizes how terrified he is of the answer. He knows who he wants it to be, but how likely is that? It’s probably some woman he’s never met, and the idea of being married to someone he doesn’t know (it’s technically that he doesn’t remember, but it doesn’t feel like that) turns his stomach. Even though logically he’d like them, if he eventually marries them. Maybe he should be excited to meet them, but all that he can feel right now is anxiety.
Shouta is quiet, but when Hizashi chances a look up at him, he realizes that he is answering. Instead of saying anything, he’s just holding up his own hand, with its matching gold ring.
It feels like an eternity that he just stares, but soon he can’t anymore, and Hizashi is covering his face with his hands, sinking to the ground. The sound he lets out is somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “Oh my god,” he groans. That’s skipping so many steps. He confessed to Shouta. He dated Shouta. He grew up with Shouta, and at some point they had gotten married.
He doesn’t uncover his eyes, but he hears the scuff of boots on concrete as Shouta moves closer. He hears the slight rustle of fabric as he crouches down in front of him. He feels the hesitation before he reaches out to touch him, Shouta’s hand on his shoulder.
“Hopefully that’s not a bad thing,” Shouta says, and the dry joke startles a laugh out of Hizashi. He lets his hands drop to his lap to grin at Shouta.
“It’s not! It’s really not. I—” he stops. He has been about to say something like: Of course it’s not a bad thing, I really like you. I’ve had a crush on you for years. Maybe even: I love you. But he gets caught on the words, because it would be the first time he’s ever said them. Except that it’s not. In this future, he’s loved Shouta long enough to marry him. He’s definitely said it before. Hopefully he says it to him every day. “It’s just a lot.” Time is twisted—should he be looking forward to all these things, his first kiss with Shouta, their first date, their wedding, all the time they’ve had together? Or should he feel cheated that he doesn’t remember them now?
“I can imagine,” Shouta says. His hand is still, soothingly, on Hizashi’s shoulder. But there’s something off about that too, something wrong. Because Shouta touches him like someone he barely knows, not like his best friend, and definitely not like his husband.
Hizashi looks down at his hands, at his too-loose clothes, at the gold ring on his finger. “This is so weird,” he understates on a long sigh.
Shouta squeezes his shoulder and lets go. “Quirks like this usually only last a few days.”
Hizashi doesn’t answer. In a few days, he’ll be catapulted forward in time. Will it be like suddenly remembering all these things he’s missing or like living them for the first time?
“Do you...want to go home?” Shouta asks carefully, and it still kind of blindsides Hizashi that he means the home they share rather than Hizashi’s parents’ house.
He grins again, and it’s not that it’s fake, it’s just that the excitement is one of so many emotions he’s letting to the surface. He gets to his feet, and Shouta stands too. “Yeah! I want to see it!” He shoves away the thought that the home he went to bed in last night almost certainly doesn’t still exist. Then something else occurs to him, and he can’t help but ask. “How are my parents?” Even though that’s a terrifying question too—if it’s been fourteen years, anything could have happened.
“They’re fine,” Shouta answers, and that at least is an uncomplicated relief. “We had dinner with them last week.” There’s another awkward hesitation. “Do you want to stay with them?”
Hizashi shakes his head, even though the thought is tempting. “Nah. I really do want to see where we live!”
“Okay.” Shouta moves slightly, as if he’s going to start walking, then turns back. “Hizashi, how old are you now?”
There’s a weight to the question, and Hizashi thinks his answer might be significant. Even though Shouta has to be able to tell from looking at him approximately how old he is.
“Eighteen,” Hizashi answers, and hopefully it’s easy enough.
Hopefully it’s not obvious that he just lied.
To his husband.