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It’s the knock at the door at two in the morning that makes Toshinori decide that it’s futile to try to get some sleep that night.
He’s been at it for hours, really, but he doesn’t want to keep count, and the empty teacup by his bedside is enough of an indicator that says he’s at least tried. He knows what Inko will say, what Recovery Girl will say, heck, even what Aizawa will say, but he can’t help it when his nightmares refuse to let him rest - not when his heart is broken, not when all he sees when he closes his eyes is the darkness and grief that had never left him since… no, he doesn't want to think about it.
He doesn’t have a choice.
Toshinori is familiar with death.
His life is sprinkled with the dark cloud of suffering and demise, colored with the bloody red of the lives he had failed to save despite being the Symbol of Peace the entirety of Japan had rested its hopes on. He knows the color of death and the distorted realities it places the one it had taken away from, one where there is never-ending fog, one filled with loneliness and regret - he had lived with it, through it, and had overcome it time and time again and he knows that Death will come for him, too, just as it had for everyone he had loved. Death had been an unwelcomed friend all his life, a stark reminder of the brevity of life, a phantom that reaches out ever so often, a prophecy once foretold, and a promise he had awaited.
A promise he still awaits.
Being the Number One Hero and the Symbol of Peace had given him close encounters - moments when he wondered if it was how he would go out -was it in a blaze of glory? A lung full of blood? A failing heart? A slumber he would never awake from? But regrettably, they were just... that. Encounters, close enough to touch, never enough to reach, close enough to take from him, never enough to take him. And he is left in the wake of loss and longing.
And there is something so surreal, so heartbreaking and gut-wrenching about it that he doesn’t understand if the life he’s living is a blessing or a curse. Of all the One for All users, he’s the only one who has lived far past his prime. Nana certainly didn’t. Her predecessors didn’t. And Young Izuku…
Young Izuku didn’t even make it past his seventeenth birthday. And here he is near his fiftieth.
When the final battle with Shigaraki happened about a year ago, he had been there to watch the fallout.
It was a massacre of blood, dust, and debris. There was screaming, there was the sound of pure unadulterated anger and fear that reverberated through the air. He remembers seeing Young Midoriya pushing a little girl out of harm’s way, remembers the way Shigaraki’s hand reach his boy’s chest, remembers the agony of the scream that left Midoriya's lips, remembers seeing him fighting still despite the undoubted pain - ever his destructive self, ever the hero that can do it - and Toshinori remembers the way his fist was raised, high up, held strong, and his heart breaks when he remembers the boy’s smile as the battle ended with Shigaraki's defeat.
He remembers standing up on his feet, his heart beating wildly against his chest, as Midoriya - as Izuku - crumpled to the ground. He doesn’t remember the memory that follows after. He doesn’t remember the trip to the hospital, nor the flashing lights, nor the crying and wailing of the kids of UA. Instead he finds himself hating the irony that where he lived against the battle with All for One, Izuku had lost his life against his.
And Death had taken from him again.
He hates it.
He hates that there is a future without Young Izuku in it.
He hates that the boy who took the name Deku to prove that it didn’t mean worthless had proven it and then ended it at that.
He hates that he lives long enough to go through this again.
The knock on his door repeats itself, quiet yet insistent, as if uncertain and afraid to wake him yet desperate enough to try.
Toshinori shakes his head and walks towards the sound.
There is no use thinking about the dead, not when his 2-A kids are as in need of comfort as he is. Time can never be enough to heal what has been lost. And he may have grown used to it, to the pain that Death brings, but his kids aren’t. And perhaps this is the only thing he can offer them, the only thing he can give - a listening ear and a smile as they talk about the boy who brought about sunshine wherever he went. Which is why it doesn’t surprises him that the visitor he has for tonight is Young Bakugou, who was standing in front of him, shoulders slouched, eyes bloodshot, and his overall mood looking pensive. Toshinori offers him a soft smile.
“Would you like some tea, Young Bakugou?” Toshinori asks as he moves to the side. This is one of the benefits of being All Might, Toshinori believes, when you have half an organ at your disposal, you’d live to find that most things were adjusted for you. He lived together with 2-A in Heights Alliance but unlike Aizawa who lived on the hallway of the ground floor with him, Toshinori had a kitchen to himself.
“I won’t be here for long,” Young Bakugou grumbles as he walks in, feet light and hands clenching.
“Never too short a period for tea,” he insists, and when the boy gave no complaint, Toshinori deemed it safe to continue on inside.
The silence that lapsed between them is comfortable.
Admittedly, Toshinori expected that there would’ve been more grumbling or cracking of explosions or just the usual venting that kids did with him. He remembers how Young Uraraka would come up to him during training and ask about this special move she was practicing, wondering of his thoughts in how she can apply her quirk in a way Deku-kun would do; or how Young Satou will ask him about his form, if he needs to square his shoulders more, if he can jump higher or run faster, do better without dumbing down; or how Young Todoroki would have tea with him in the common kitchen and sit in silence with him and say thank you afterwards as if they reveled in each other’s company, or how Young Kaminari will come up to him and show him the meme that’s just something kids love these days, and Young Midoriya when he — oh. Oh. Not that thought again. Toshinori takes a deep breath as he sits down in front of Young Bakugou, hands wrapped around his mug, and he wishes for the boy to speak. His mind has been a mess and he’s been having these… these flashbacks… and they hurt.
They hurt.
How he wishes they didn’t.
He hadn’t been prepared for this.
Nana didn’t him prepare for this. Gran didn’t. None of them did. They all taught him how to fight, how to live, how to take a punch, how to deliver one, how to survive one (and even one as massive as All for One’s fist), how to smile when things hurt, and what to do to bring peace and comfort to people… but never how to deal with losing them like this.
“Do you want to talk about it?” All Might finds himself asking - because right here, right now, he can’t be Toshinori. It hurts too much to be him.
Young Bakugou, on his end, decides to take a sip of the tea, frowns, then ever so gently tells him, “This tastes like shit.”
And All Might laughs, like he always does, because that’s what he was taught to do. To laugh despite the weariness, to smile despite the pain, because real heroes bring joy and comfort, real heroes don’t show their pain. “I’m afraid my tea brewing skills are not up to par with the Principal’s!” and if this makes the boy in front of him smirk, just for a bit, then he will take it. He is All Might. This is what he does. This is familiar. But when Young Bakugou puts down the cup, stares at his hand, and grows even more pensive, he wonders if All Might will be enough.
“I came to deliver a message,” Bakugou announces softly, quietly, perhaps more than All Might ever thought he is capable of. The boy has mellowed down, don’t get him wrong, the war has changed all of them, for better or for worse, but for Bakugou, it changed him the most. Bakugou had admitted to him, once upon a time in their training, that an apology will never be enough for Izuku, no matter how both of them knew that it will be. No, Bakugou’s apology was more than just an apology. It was supposed to be a life well-lived, a man to be looked up to, someone who can emulate what it means to be a hero, and it was to become someone who knew how to save in order to win.
“And you deemed it urgent enough to skip your sleep and come to me?” there was a slight teasing to his tone, the way he normally would to lift up a mood of a conversation, “Aizawa will not be-“
“The nerd would’ve wanted you to have it.” And there it is.
This is the line that forces All Might to separate from Toshinori.
Where All Might would laugh and say a joke, give a pat in the back, and smile that hundred-dollar smile, Toshinori finds his heart sinking further than he knows is physically possible, and he wants to kick Young Bakugou out for making him feel the way he’s been refusing to feel these past few nights, especially this night when nightmares plague him and haunt him and he doesn’t want to deal with that but he doesn’t say that, doesn’t show it, because all he’s able to mutter is a quiet, “What?”
Young Bakugou still refuses to look at him, as if his hands marred with scars are far more interesting than the way Toshinori’s face pales - and maybe it is, or maybe it’s just the boy’s way to give him as much privacy as he can when they’re sitting just across each other. “Deku would’ve wanted you to have it,” he says again. “One for All.”
It’s to the quiet sound of Young Jirou’s song and Recovery Girl’s prescribed sleeping pills that he finds himself falling asleep.
Over the course of a year, he had come to realize that not only did he care for his students, but that they cared as much for him. It was something that it had taken him so long to grasp - because All Might was what he had always been, never Toshinori, and when All Might had been taken out of the picture, it felt as if Toshinori would never be enough to fill that void. And it was such a funny thing to him, to be vastly different from he once was to who he is now all because of a quirk he had passed on. And yet these kids, his kids, still love him enough and care for him enough that he knows that they would have his back regardless of his quirk - and without it.
Toshinori had leaned so much to being the Symbol of Peace that he had forgotten what it was like to just be.
To just be alive, and to laugh, and to live.
It was Young Midoriya who had taught him that.
And it was his kids who had carried on the torch for him, to remind him that Toshinori didn’t need to be the Symbol of Peace to be the man they can trust and love and seek comfort from.
So All Might settles and steps back.
And Toshinori emerges.
And he breathes.
And he is.
And he asks.
And finally, Toshinori reaches back, and asks for the help he refused to ask for all those years back.
And he finds comfort in the presence of Inko as he eats dinner in her kitchen, he finds it with Aizawa as he pets the cats he fosters in his home, he finds with his quiet english conversations with Yamada, his tea with Nezu, his snowball fights with 1-A, in Recovery Girl’s silent nagging, in his sleep.
Nightmares still haunt his every hour.
But he asked for this. Begged for it. To fall asleep, to risk the plague, to feel the eyes that stare at him, to know the void is looking back, to know that death is always at his doorstep but that it never knocks, it only takes.
And it takes.
And it takes.
But Young Bakugou came bearing him a message.
And more than that, he came bearing a gift.
And it is a gift now, he knows, if not one that has been too late.
One for All.
And he remembers the question he was asked not too long ago, of a dream and of vestiges, of spirits that watch and listen, and wait.
“Hey, All Might? Did you ever get to see the people who came before you? The past wielders of One for All?”
So Toshinori sleeps.
He sleeps.
And he waits.
And he risks the nightmares and the plagues.
He listens to the music.
He takes the pills.
He drinks tea.
And he works.
And he talks.
And he laughs.
And he lives.
And he sleeps.
So he can drift.
And dream.
And see—
And sometimes he sees blood.
Sometimes he sees dust.
Sometimes he hears screams where there is none.
Sometimes he tenses for a punch.
But there's never the boy with the sunshine smile and the green hair.
Still, he waits.
And he drifts.
And he sees.
And he waits.
And still he waits.
For how long it would take.
Whatever it would take.
Until…
“Hey, All Might. I'm sorry I took a while."