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It had been a surreal few months for class 3-A, months of plans and priorities shifting and falling away without warning.
Izuku and his mom had been planning to go on a trip together after graduation. UA had been non-stop, attempting to establish his hero career after graduation would be non-stop, and Izuku wanted to take some time for his mother in between. Some time to celebrate that they were still here. That despite all the worry Izuku had put her through, they’d come out the other side.
They’d arranged a weekend for Izuku to come over so they could look at travel websites together. By the time that weekend rolled around, the League of Villains had such a grip over the city, and 3-A were so hopelessly entangled in the defense against them, more soldiers than students some days, that the parents of their entire class had been moved to safe houses. It had been all the class talked about for a couple of days; a week later, it had faded so far into the background of new injuries, new battles, new losses, that they almost forgot about it altogether.
That was what scared Izuku, more than any of the changes themselves. How fast something huge and life-changing could be dwarfed by the next thing. One day he’d been preoccupied thinking about how the apartment he and his mother had lived in their whole lives was empty for the first time in decades. A few days later, and he’d barely recognise the person who had room for those thoughts, like he was being pulled apart from himself. He’d think he was coping okay, and then he’d wake up in the middle of the night and shake until his joints ached.
It was the momentum of it that frightened him most. The recontextualising of their past. The dissolution of their future. Such a short time ago, that trip after graduation had been something he believed in. He’d believed he could set aside that time, choose where to be and who to be with. Now he had no idea if and when his class would get to graduate.
It’s during this time that Izuku wakes up after a battle he only half-remembers with a splitting headache, in one of the private medical facilities UA had set up (another transition lost in the chaos - the moment it became too much of a risk to let their students recover in regular hospitals). Other than his head, and the usual aches and bruises that come post-battle, Izuku feels almost suspiciously normal.
Aizawa is sitting by his bedside, watching over him - a little strange, given how much Aizawa has on his plate these days, but then his protectiveness has been one of the few constants in their lives.
“Everyone’s okay?” Izuku asks.
“Everyone’s okay,” Aizawa echoes, but there’s something off in the way he’s holding himself. A formality that should have disappeared long ago. “Could you do something for me?” Aizawa asks, voice just a little too quiet. A second ticks by in utter stillness. “Try and activate your quirk.”
Izuku runs the sentence over in his head three times, as panic rises in his throat. He shifts and flexes his hand, preparing, even though these days there’s no need. These days One For All is a part of him; activating it is like breathing.
Izuku slips outside of himself, in the moments that follow. He feels like he’s watching himself from above, as he calls for One For All and it doesn’t answer. As he looks at Aizawa to confirm what he already knows, making sure he hasn’t used Erasure. As he remembers, distantly, from the muddle of impressions he has leftover from the fight, a sharp pinprick at the base of his palm.
Izuku asks to be left alone, some time after. He finds himself slipping into the same formality that took Aizawa over, like the reality of things is so awful that the only language they can reach for is these tired scripts. He asks to be left alone, politely, and Aizawa leaves him alone.
He lies there for hours, going back and forth between a sense of unreality and a sense that reality is closing in around him, crushing him, like he’s imploding. During the first, his ears ring despite the quiet all around, and he thinks of nothing at all, brain taken over by a kind of all-encompassing static, dimly aware of an undercurrent of wild panic he can’t look too closely at.
During the second, he pulls out the worst thoughts and brings them close, trying to at least take in the shape of what’s happened to him. Quirkless, he thinks. Quirkless, again. The closest he gets to understanding is a rush of nausea that quickly tips him back into loud, petrified unthinking.
It’s the momentum that hurts most. The rewritten past. The dissolving future.
Aizawa comes back a while later, carrying two cups of vending machine coffee, and silently beckons him to follow. Izuku does, because the reflex to be a good student is still there - hero student, the part of him that wants him to feel it says: you were going to be a hero, and now-
He follows. They walk through the facility.
“It’ll be a few weeks, at least,” Aizawa says at last, voice still grave and quiet, “until Eri can try-”
Izuku nods quickly. Togata’s miracle was only a short time ago, and she’s still so young. “Make sure she doesn’t feel pressured, please,” he says. “She’s been doing so well.” With controlling her quirk, but also just with being a kid. She’d play long, involved imaginary games, and shyly ask her favourite people to play a part and join in. She’d do little things like fumbling whatever she was holding and only give one small apology, or none at all. She’d smile, sometimes, in a carefree way that suggested she hadn’t thought about how or why she was smiling. No matter what happens, Izuku can’t ruin that - not when he knows, deep down, that…
“It probably won’t work anyway,” Izuku adds softly. Aizawa takes a sip of coffee before he answers, and Izuku tries not to over-analyse this pause as evasion - Aizawa is straightforward, deliberately, and he doesn’t pull punches.
“It worked for Lemillion,” Aizawa replies. And it had. Better than anyone had hoped, or really understood - Eri’s successful use of Rewind to bring back Togata’s quirk had raised more questions about how her abilities worked than it answered.
Izuku looks down at his own plastic cup, the heat at his fingertips just a little painful, until Aizawa sighs and continues.
“You think it won’t work because of how you inherited One For All.”
Izuku swallows through the lump in his throat. One For All is like nothing else - was, he thinks: is it was, now? - and that means it can’t be expected to behave the way other quirks do, particularly one involving rewinding. Restoration implies something was yours to begin with. Izuku had a handful of borrowed years with One For All - Rewind was a long shot, regardless of what had happened with Togata.
“Do you think it will?” Izuku asks, head still bent, unable to look Aizawa in the eye. It’s strange to be talking to him while quirkless, like time has slipped out of joint. In Izuku’s quirkless life, he’d poured over internet footage of underground hero Eraserhead. The quirkless version of him never came this close to anything he admired.
“I honestly don’t know,” Aizawa answers, weary and patient all at once. “We’ve had two years with Eri now, but study of her quirk’s operation is limited by the dangers inherent in using it. We still don’t really understand why it worked for Togata.” He sighs. “It’s going to be hard, living without answers. But I know you can get through this.”
Izuku feels a wave of strangeness again, a sharp rise in the low current of panic underlying his every breath. This is the way Aizawa always talks to him - the way he talks to any of their class, blunt but careful, trying to draw out their potential and help them see the best of what they could be - and that’s wrong, when he’s not that person anymore. When he probably never will be again. He thinks of a question he isn’t sure he wants to know the answer to, and asks it anyway just to push this particular burst of panic into the background. “Does All Might know?”
Izuku has been calling him Toshinori, in private, for a long time now - but somehow he can’t bring himself to now. His successor , that voice says. You were-
“Not yet,” Aizawa answers. “He still needs to rest and recover, and if he finds out about this when you aren’t by his side, the first thing he’ll do is rush there regardless of the consequences.”
“He’s been getting better,” Izuku says, still uncomfortable with criticism of his hero even if he recognises the truth of Aizawa’s words.
“Not when it comes to you.”
They’re quiet for a minute. Izuku tries to imagine how this must feel for Aizawa. He’d witnessed Togata’s loss, but Togata wasn’t one of his own class, wasn’t someone he’d been training for almost three years. All that time, all that work, and it can just be snuffed out in an instant. Overhaul was long gone, but the things he’d created were powerful enough to still be destroying people years later. Destroyed, he thinks. Is that what I am?
“In the meantime,” Aizawa says eventually, “before Eri can try again - I don’t think you should just sit around.”
Izuku has to swallow around the lump in his throat before he can speak. “I’m sure there’s something I can do still,” he manages. “Information gathering, or...helping the support course, maybe?”
Aizawa gives him a searching look. “If that’s what you want, we can consider it. But that’s not where you’ll be most useful.” Izuku stares at him blankly until he continues. “You can do what we trained you to do. Fight.”
Izuku swallows down a bitter, hollow laugh. “Fight what? Small dogs?”
Aizawa stops, and swivels around to face him. “I know this is a lot to take in,” he says, slow and serious. “But I think you’re underestimating what years of intensive combat training will do for someone, quirk or no quirk.”
“You - you’re trying to be nice, comforting, I get it-” Izuku murmurs, looking at the floor.
“I’m telling you the truth,” Aizawa interrupts. “You’re spent three years in the best hero course in the country, learning-”
“To use my quirk to fight,” Izuku interrupts, in a way he never would have dared to do even a year ago. “To use my quirk to protect people. To - harness something that was never really mine, that used to break me into pieces, and - and-”
He hates that there are tears in his eyes, even as he’s more angry than sad. It isn’t fair. He’d never deserved One For All, not really, but to work for years and years to control and harness that power, and then to have it taken away? Did he really deserve that?
“You’ve lost something no one should ever have to lose,” Aizawa says softly. “But you haven’t lost your strength. You haven’t lost your instincts, your drive, your reflexes. All that time you spent working: it still exists. It still counts.”
Izuku looks at the floor. His coffee has gone lukewarm in his hands, lines of scar tissue muddling the feeling. “I know it’s hard,” Izuku says finally, still not able to look Aizawa in the eye. “When you invested so much time in me. But I’m not…”
Not that person. Not anymore. He’d used the momentum of the gifts he was given to build something, and at the centre was that first gift. One For All. The moment when All Might looked at him and deemed him worthy of continuing its legacy. Izuku doesn’t know how he’ll look All Might in the eye, either.
Aizawa assesses him for a long moment, then gives a small sigh. “Give me an hour,” he says, and turns and strides away without another word.
An hour or so later, Aizawa has taken him back to campus. He hasn’t mentioned anything more about whatever he was planning, so Izuku vainly hopes he might have decided to let it go.
They walk across the quiet campus. It’s still strange, seeing it so desolate. That was another change that had gotten lost in the endless weeks; the moment when it became clear that the safest place the majority of UA students could be was as far from the school as possible.
Izuku realises they aren’t heading for the dorms, and gives Aizawa a questioning look that he utterly ignores. Fine. Izuku hadn’t exactly been looking forward to curling up in his All Might-themed room for more alternating panic and blankness.
Aizawa leads him to one of the lesser-used training gyms, and they open the door to find it already occupied.
“Hey, Izuku,” Hitoshi says, giving him that familiar, crooked smile. “I’m here to kick your ass. Officially.”
“Uh, hi?” Izuku replies. There are gym mats spread out over the floor already. Hitoshi doesn’t have his costume or his capture weapon, but he’s dressed in light clothes that make it easy to maneuver.
Aizawa is already collapsing to lay with his back against the wall, eyes closing. “Standard sparring. First one to pin the other to the ground for five seconds wins. Try not to require medical attention.”
Izuku’s mind races, trying to figure out if the logic here is for Hitoshi to lose on purpose, noting Aizawa didn’t say anything about quirks - realising it won’t be relevant anyway, since he knows enough by now not to respond to Hitoshi’s questions in a combat situation.
“Come on,” Hitoshi says, beckoning him over to the mats. “If I were you, I’d really want to punch someone right now.”
Izuku is about to reply, to say he never wants to punch Hitoshi, despite his habit of stealing Izuku’s softest hoodies - and realises what he’s doing just in time. Damn it. It was embarrassing how often he’d lost matches because he’d been tripped up by Hitoshi’s quirk.
Silently, he drops his jacket by the door and steps onto the gym mats, mostly because it seems like the path of least resistance at this point. He feels familiar, broken-off reflexes fire up - the urge to call for One For All, weighing his chances against his opponent based on the speed it gives him, even if he’d avoid using too much power in a match like this.
Hitoshi circles around him, refusing to make the first move, raising his eyebrows when Izuku gives him a frustrated look. “What?” he asks, and Izuku lunges.
Hitoshi uses his height advantage to dodge with relative ease, countering with his own hit. Izuku blocks with one scarred arm, and just for a moment, even in this familiar place with these familiar people, a jolt of fear goes through him. He’s quirkless, helpless, in a place he doesn’t belong. Then Hitoshi darts in and tries to trip him, and Izuku counters without thinking about it at all, and then they’re whirling and exchanging blows too fast for anything but instinct to guide him.
Small bursts of analysis flicker in his mind between attacks - Hitoshi is fast and has excellent reach, but he still tends to over-rely on certain moves - the week after Hitoshi figured out he could suplex people was still vivid in a lot of class A’s minds - and Izuku knows him well enough that even subtly-choreographed moves provide a vital moment of warning.
There’s a burn in his lungs by the time he manages to pin Hitoshi, but Hitoshi bucks him off before the count can run down. He’s bruised and a little dizzy by the time Hitoshi manages to pin him, a blow to the side of his head keeping him off-kilter enough that he doesn’t quite manage to struggle out in time.
They sit and get their breath back for a minute or so, then Hitoshi looks over and asks, “again?” Izuku kicks him in answer, and they drop back into the fray, faster and just a little more vicious now that they’ve warned up.
“Don’t suppose you want to make this easy for me,” Hitoshi says, reeling back and breathing hard, “and tell me your favourite colour?”
Izuku smiles sweetly and tackles him.
The match goes on, similar to the last - long, exhausting, and very close - but Izuku just has a feeling that he’s heading for a win, split-second strategies singing forth and playing out in his movements. He’s so intent that he almost forgets where they are, why they’re fighting - and that realisation makes it click all over again. A dart in his palm. The end of everything he worked for. Quirkless.
He freezes in place, letting his guard drop, too late for Hitoshi to pull back from a vicious kick to the stomach. It knocks the wind out of him and lays him out on the mat.
He curls onto his side as Hitoshi crouches down next to him, worried voice murmuring something he can’t really hear over the heartbeat pounding in his ears. The sweat running down his back suddenly feels cold and sickening. Gone. Quirkless. Gone forever.
He feels more than hears Aizawa’s approach. He doesn’t quite slip outside of himself as he’d done in the hospital, but he becomes intensely aware of himself as a physical thing, aching, panting, collapsing in on himself. He’d held up buildings with his bare hands, and now he was immobilized by one kick. He isn’t even really winded after that initial loss of air; the point of impact just aches like a weight, like a distortion at the centre of him. Self-pity, that voice says.
“I’m fine,” Izuku murmurs, forcing his eyes open, uncurling and sitting up even as his stomach protests. Hitoshi is sitting on the mat next to him, worry and guilt lining his face. Aizawa is crouched a little way away, close enough to reassure without crowding. Izuku doesn’t understand why they’re doing this, why they still care.
“You don’t have to be fine,” Aizawa says, quiet and level.
Izuku shakes his head, unsure which part he’s denying. Even that tiny movement makes him dizzy and nauseous. The ground underneath him doesn’t feel reliable anymore. “I just - I can’t do it,” he says, arms wrapping around his knees, creating a small protective bubble - protected from what, that voice asks. You already lost.
Izuku glances up to catch the tail end of an exchange of looks between Hitoshi and Aizawa, doubt and reassurance respectively, a question and an answer he can only guess at.
“You’re entitled to some grief. Even if it might be preemptive,” Aizawa says, turning back to Izuku. “But don’t give up on yourself. One slip doesn’t mean you can’t fight.”
“You were winning right up until the end,” Hitoshi adds. “My aching ribs guarantee it.”
Stop being kind, Izuku wants to say, even as he knows it doesn’t make any sense. Didn’t he spend years longing for any kind of kindness, any kind of ally?
“Normally I’d be giving you more time,” Aizawa says, and something about the gravity in his voice makes Izuku look up again. “But this is a war. A war we aren’t winning.”
For a moment everything is quiet, just wind whistling through the rafters. Izuku had known that, he thinks, but being taught by pro heroes had never really lost all of its shine. He still gives Aizawa’s words more credence than his own, and his teacher’s tired eyes say that he means them.
“We need people,” Aizawa continues. “We need everyone with the willingness and ability to protect people from harm. Regardless of what happens with your quirk, you’re in that category. We taught you too well for it to be any other way.”
Izuku takes a moment and thinks about what’s being asked of him, about what else he could even do next if he doesn’t agree. Go to the safe house with his mother, hide away, don’t watch the news, until one day he catches a glimpse and it’s people he fought side by side with changing the world without him. The scales tipped back, leaving him behind.
It isn’t better. It would be the end of hope, and that isn’t better. Except that Izuku’s lived on nothing but hope before, and he doesn’t know if he has it in him to go back.
“Deku,” Hitoshi says, in a soft, sincere voice Izuku has only heard a handful of times before. “What this feels like...I can’t even imagine. But we need you. Quirk or no quirk, you’re the heart of that class. We need you.”
Part of Izuku wants to brush that off immediately as impossible. It’s the discomfort in Hitoshi’s posture that stops him; Hitoshi, who doesn’t give platitudes, and takes absolutely no pleasure in being this raw in front of other people. The set of his shoulders, the way he’s rubbing at his jaw, it’s because he’s doing something that’s hard for him. He’s doing something that’s hard for him for Izuku.
“I...you remember when I used to bolt a lot, after I first joined the hero course?” Hitoshi continues, mostly addressing his shoes. “I stopped, eventually, because someone finally got through to me that...whatever was going on, I could just come home and figure it out.” He’s pointedly avoiding looking at Aizawa, whose expression has softened just the tiniest bit. “You don’t have to pretend like everything’s okay, but...come home. Figure it out.”
Home. The word makes him realise that underneath the dread, he’s aching to be back at the dorms again. One of the few constants in this whole mess, a place where he and his friends have always been safe, even if the world outside of them seems to be falling apart. He wants to see the faces that have given him hope a thousand times, and have them look at him the same way too.
Being given One For All changed everything, but so did finally having friends. Even with all the dramatic, incredible events that have happened in his time at UA, one of his clearest memories is coming back to class after his first match against Kacchan, meeting smiling faces and eager questions and waiting, waiting, waiting for the trick.
It had been three years, and the trick never came. His friends got stronger, brighter, more confident, and they never pulled away from him. It was more of a miracle than a quirk that could be passed down by choice.
It would never have happened without One For All, that voice says. It would have never happened if you were quirkless. But it did. It did, and there’s no serum that can take that way. He won’t let anyone or anything take that away too.
“Alright,” Izuku says, looking up at his teacher and his friend, still waiting, still trying to help him, still demonstrating care in everything they do. “Alright, let’s go home.”