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Midoriya Izuku is seven years and seventy days old when his quirk manifests, and he disappears into thin air. He’s seven years and seventy one days old when he returns.
At age four, all Izuku wanted was to have a quirk.
See this here, Mrs Midoriya? He lacks the extra toe bone that signifies medical quirklessness.
And—and what does that mean, Doctor?
To Izuku, there was nothing better, nothing more exciting, nothing more wonderful, than having a quirk. A power, one of his own—just like mummy or daddy’s!—that made him strong, made him unique, made him worthy.
As he sat and listened to his mother talk to the doctor, a short, shrivelled man with a moustache so bushy it looked like a hamster on his upper lip, spitting out anxious question after question, hands wringing together, Izuku wished deeply for a quirk of his own.
Anything, he begged to whoever, whatever, would listen. Anything was better than nothing.
A push, a shove. Grit and dirt stinging in the cuts on the palms of his hands, the bend of his elbow. Face twisted into sharp-toothed smiles and snarls, eyes narrowed and leering. The smell of nitroglycerin in the air, sweaty and sugary and familiar, like an old friend, but not anymore, not anymore.
Out of my way, quirkless Deku!
If Izuku could turn back time, if this stupid quirk had any use to it, he’d go back in time and change things. What exactly, he doesn’t know, because the problem isn’t anyone else, it isn’t anything fixable.
It’s him, it’s in him, this twisted and monstrous quirk.
The last thing Izuku remembers thinking is, I can’t get out of the way in time.
Katsuki’s hand pointed to him, palm aimed towards his face, while Izuku sprawls prone on the ground, hands and feet splayed out as he scrabbles uselessly in the dirt, in the grit, trying to retreat, to pull back, to run away, like a coward, cowardly Deku!
Red eyes, glowing with twisted joy and satisfaction. A mouth, thin lips curled into a smirk, lips that had once declared we’re going to be heroes, together, deku, best friends forever, lips that now spat hatred like poison.
A palm, that had once held his, held towards him not as an offering of friendship, but rejection, of the cruel careless violence that children are capable of.
The smell of nitroglycerin in the air, sparks on skin, fear in Izuku’s throat like a storm, sweltering and oppressive.
There isn’t enough time.
Kacchan, stop!
Then everything froze.
Izuku has read interviews with pro heroes who recounted their near-death experiences. They spoke of how time seemed to slow down, the world running in slow motion while their own heart still beat double speed, blood rushing in their ears with the ferocity of a typhoon, breaths coming in rapid shallow gasps.
He feels it now, the slowing of time, and knows what they mean.
At any other occasion, Izuku would have been excited at the opportunity to see Katsuki’s quirk at work in slow motion, to study it in detail.
It starts from the centre of his palm, he notices, in the same idle way that one might notice their own reflection in the knife that stabs them. A small drop of sweat, beaded along the crease of his head line, igniting with a single spark, expanding and enlarging rapidly into a golden sphere of light so bright that Izuku couldn’t stare at it head on.
From there, the sphere—the bubble, grows and grows until it’s almost cherry-sized, and then it pops. Like a pimple, like a balloon, the heat and fire and energy puffing outwards like a cloud, and then—
It all just seems to... stop.
Izuku can’t take his eyes off the explosion, paused midway.
He takes in a breath, then another.
Around him, the whole world is still unmoving. Jeering faces look down at him, cruelty frozen onto their features, like the world’s most fucked up tableau.
Centimetres from his face, Katsuki’s explosion remains, suspended in space and time.
Izuku takes a breath, and then another.
Nothing moves, nothing breathes.
The breeze is gone, and with it that too-familiar smell of nitroglycerin.
Izuku’s hand twitches on the ground, nails raking roughly through hard-packed dirt, and the unconscious motion causes his entire body to flinch violently, sure that any moment he’ll snap back to reality and feel blistering heat on his cheeks, burning and cloying smoke in his throat, bright light in his eyes, overtaking all of his senses and until all he knows is Katsuki, and the strength of Katsuki’s quirk.
Quirkless, useless Deku!
But nothing happens, everything stays suspended, still.
Izuku moves.
He scrambles back, out of the range of Katsuki’s explosion, out of range of any stray fists or feet, or elongated fingers, that might find their way towards him. He feels the ground beneath him, still just as solid as before, the pain in his wounds just as sharp as before.
But still, nothing moves.
It takes him a while, perhaps a few minutes, perhaps a few seconds, to realise that it’s the work of a quirk.
The work of his quirk.
When he realises, he laughs, and then covers his mouth, eyes darting towards the figures of his tormentors. But they can’t do anything to stop him, to force his mouth closed, and the laughter keeps on spilling out, more and more until he can’t hold himself up anymore, collapsing into a crouch.
Head between his knees, arms wrapped around skinny legs, Izuku smiles and smiles, full of elation.
His quirk.
Once he builds up the courage, he returns to Katsuki and the others, still in the same place.
Upon closer examination, he realises they’re not physically frozen; there’s no ice on them, no frost dusting their eyebrows and cheeks. They’re just frozen in time, stopped by the power of his quirk. A quick check of Katsuki’s watch, the one that was a gift for his sixth birthday, that he wouldn’t let Izuku touch, proves the truth. No matter how long he stares, the minute hand doesn’t move.
Izuku giggles, still drunk of elation.
His quirk—his quirk!—did this, stopped Katsuki and his mean friends in their tracks. It got him out of danger, gave him time to escape, time to poke and prod all their faces and pull their eyelids, to turn their bodies so they faced each other instead of the empty patch of dirt where he’d sprawled, ever the victim.
But not anymore, not now.
No longer a victim, but with this: a hero.
But first of all, a child, high on adrenaline and excitement, and unchecked and uncontrolled by any rules. Until this, whatever this was, wore off, Izuku was going to get ice cream from the school dining room.
(Perhaps if he’d been less excited then, if he hadn’t been wishing for this moment every night since that doctor's appointment, he would have been scared, been worried, but the allure of freedom was too strong.)
(Perhaps, if he’d been less excited then, he may have noticed the slight movement of Katsuki’s explosion, infinitesimal but noticeable.)
One hour passes, and Izuku returns to the scene of his bullying. It is the same, identical to his childlike eye.
Two, three, four, five hours pass without notice, but on the sixth hour Izuku begins to grow impatient, to grow restless. He wants his mother, wants to share the excitement with someone—anyone—but everyone he sees is just a puppet, suspended in position by invisible strings he cannot see.
In his seven year old mind, Izuku reasons that perhaps he needs to return to the location of the incident to reset everything, and he sets back towards the playground.
But it isn’t the same as before.
Katsuki’s explosion is gone, snuffed out from existence, and the palm that had once pointed at Izuku’s face and wished him violence is now staring into Katsuki’s own face, twisted not with glee but horror and fear.
It’s now that Izuku notices what he hadn’t before, the slow, almost non-existent motion of Katsuki’s mouth, lips parting in a scream of pure fear that Izuku cannot hear.
He bursts into tears.
Hours seven through nine pass with crying and pleading, begging for time to return to normal.
Hours ten through twelve pass with morbid curiosity, watching teachers turn, necks twisting so slowly that Izuku swears he can see every single cell moving, ears tuned into Katsuki’s silent scream for help.
From hour thirteen onwards, Izuku tries to sleep and finds that he can’t.
In the library, Izuku plucks a book from the unmoving hand of an older teenager, bespectacled face examining the cover closely. Thanks, Izuku mutters, even though he knows that they can’t hear him, can’t see him.
He retreats to his little corner of the library, hidden away in a stack of shelves no one ever frequents, to his growing pile of quirk theory books.
In the real world, a teenager hears a faint whisper in the air that his brain files away as background noise, and a librarian shakes in fear as she notes down another book that magically moved itself this evening.
The excitement Izuku felt at discovering his quirk has entirely faded by the end of the first twenty four hours, as he watches the teachers just reach Katsuki, concern written into every still line of their faces.
Izuku watches the tears beading in Katsuki’s eyes, and wonders why it took this happening for him to care.
Sometimes, when Izuku is careless, he’ll knock into a frozen figure on the street and send them toppling to the ground. The first few hundred times it happens, he picks them and puts them back where he found them, profuse apologies spilling from his lips. He straightens ties, fixes hair, brushes lint off suits.
By the thousandth, the hundred thousandth, he doesn’t bother.
Even with all the time in the world, it still takes Izuku a long time to figure out what’s going on. He watches the clock in his old classroom (his current classroom, because he’s only been gone for half a minute at most in the real world, it’s not like he’s died, even though it feels like he has) for an hour, eyes like a hawk waiting for the moment the second hand ticks over.
An hour, for one second.
It feels like an eternity.
Out in the playground, the teachers are just starting to understand what has happened, that Izuku has disappeared into thin air, as Izuku spends his second day here, watching it all unfold in slow motion.
Izuku is only seven, and he’s naive. He walks himself to the classroom, dodging all the staff and students blocking the hallway like badly posed mannequins. If time is travelling at an hour per second, then that means in two and a half days, a minute has passed.
Even if it takes him a while to figure out his quirk, if it takes him a few days, or even a week, barely a few minutes will have passed while he’s gone. It’ll be okay, he tells himself.
Izuku is fifteen, and he’s not okay.
Izuku is seventeen, going on eighteen and he's—
At first, he throws himself into it. He checks out books from the library, since the internet doesn’t work in this liminal, timeless place he’s in, and he reads and reads, until the words swim on the page in front of him.
Late quirk manifestation, catalysts, quirk control and trigger responses. Every book provides nothing of worth to him, except to widen his knowledge. There’s an irony in the situation, that Izuku had always wished for more free time to learn on his own, to explore his own interests, and now he’s got nothing but time.
It’s harder in the beginning. Izuku doesn’t understand what’s going on. He gets angry, he gets upset. He breaks things, he screams. None of it helps, and the hours drag on.
With time (of course, with time) comes acceptance, comes experience, comes the ability to sit and do nothing and let the hours and days flow past him like a river, there one second and gone the next. What else can he do, with so many hours to endure every day, all day, until he figures this out?
He’d thought before that he knew what it was like to be ignored, to be treated as if he wasn’t present even as he stood before those who were his friends, once, before his supposed quirklessness had driven them away. Now he stands, a real spectre in front of their eyes, invisible, because of his own quirk.
In the beginning, he talks. To himself, to others, to the mirror in the school bathroom. Anything to keep himself sane, to keep himself aware. He tracks the hours, the minutes, the days religiously. His throat is hoarse with how much he talks, little used vocal chords struggling to acclimatise to constant use.
By the time he gets free, Izuku won’t have spoken a word in three years.
It took Katsuki a mere four days to master his quirk, to get the basics of igniting his sweat under control, and to start exploring controlling the strength of the explosions. Tsubasa (with the wings) seemed to instinctively know how to use his quirk, like an extension of his own body. Izuku has confidence that he, with his quirk knowledge and the whole of Musutafu library at his fingertips and all the time in the world, can figure it out quicker.
But there’s a problem.
After the first month or two, Izuku becomes aware that his body, like everyone else’s, is in a state of stasis. Perhaps stasis isn’t the correct word, because there are changes. Minute ones, occurring on roughly the same scale as the rest of the world. With every hour, a second passes.
This first becomes apparent when Izuku realises he isn’t hungry. Two weeks in, and his body hasn’t wasted away from dehydration, or starvation, or sleep deprivation. Although Izuku himself is trapped, timeless, his body still adheres to the natural flow of time.
It took Katsuki four days to master his quirk, to work with his developing body to control it. Four days for his mind and body to sync up, adapting for each other.
Izuku does not want to spend forty years trapped here.
But what chance does he have to be better, to be smarter than Kacchan?
Midoriya Izuku is seven years and seventy days old when his quirk manifests, and he disappears into thin air. Nearly ten years later, he comes back.
It takes longer for the loneliness and isolation to set in than Izuku thinks it should. He’s used to being alone, after all. Used to being ignored, eyes passing over him as they don’t even see him. He knows this bone-deep ache of loneliness all too well,
but everyone has their limits.
The state of suspended animation his body is in, this stasis, is nothing more than a living death. Despite everything, he remains unchanged, forever seven and seventy days old. Living, but unable to die. Dead, yet able to live.
Eighteen years old, still in the same prepubescent body—Izuku finally understands his quirk. It’s anticlimactic, a revelation punctuated only by complete silence, and tired eyelids fluttering shut in tired joy, the smallest hint of a smile, the most emotion felt in years, curled onto cracked and dry lips.
He did it, he can go home.
But after so long away, can it really be called home?
The return to the normal world is overwhelming.
A decade of silence, a decade of no interaction with the living world. No smells, no sounds, no motion. Himself, and his thoughts, isolated together.
That would break even pro-heroes, Izuku thinks, as he takes in his first breath of real air, the musty smell of old books and damp filling his nostrils, before he passes out immediately.
They say he was gone for just under a day. A nurse with a friendly smile and slow, cautious movements tells him. The librarian found him in the library, passed out, with no idea how he got there. His mother is, understandably, hysterical. She cries and hugs him, and Izuku tries not to flinch at the overwhelming sensations.
Izuku, she sobs, mouth curling around the familiar name like an old friend, Izuku. His own lips mimic the unfamiliar shape of the word, the syllables that mean little to him now. It’s been so long since someone said his name.
It’s been so long since he was a person.
He should be happy, he knows. He did it, he figured it out, he got free.
He’s back, with his mother, and with classmates who stumble into his hospital room to look at him with grudging awe, now that he’s like them, that he has a cool quirk.
But he’s not like them, not anymore. He’s ten years of silence and nothingness and emptiness and knowledge far beyond his years trapped in a body that’s only lived seven years and seventy one days. He feels too much for his body, too old, too tired, too worn thin.
He may have left that endless silent landscape, but it didn’t leave him.
The doctors ask what happened, the quirk specialists ask what happened, but Izuku does not speak.
He doesn’t speak for a long time.
One day. Nine years and ten months. They’re the same.
They’re forced to leave his quirk name and description blank, because without his explanation they can’t understand it. One second he was gone, the next day he was back. Delayed teleportation, one specialist hypothesises.
He refuses to tell them anything, and resolves never to use it. Because being quirkless is better than being there again.
His mother worries about him, he knows. His teachers and doctors do too. Sometimes, he’ll sit motionless and still for hour upon hour, staring into absolute nothingness. He doesn’t get bored, unlike the other children. There’s a slowness to his movements, a measured pace to everything he does that begets familiarity with an excess of time.
They know he’s different now, know that he’s smarter than he should be, more tired than he should be, but Izuku’s lips stay sealed.
He’s afraid that if he opens his mouth, if he lets the words fall out and breaks the silence, that it’ll come crawling out of his body where he imprisoned it, and he’ll be there again.
It’s inside him, after all. He can’t get away, not now, not ever.
Sometimes, despite the ironclad grip that he has on his quirk, it slips out. When he’s in danger, or under stress, his heart starts to beat a staccato double rhythm, his blood rushes in his ears with the force of a typhoon, and the world slows to a halt.
Katsuki—Bakugou—sneering down at him, disdainful curl on his lips. What’s the point in a useless quirk you can’t use, he asks, and once the words might have hurt, but now all they mean to Izuku is that he’s been noticed, that he’s real, that he’s here. If you really still want to be a hero, then pray for a better quirk in your next life, and take a swan-dive off the roof.
Kacchan.
The world freezes, Bakugou’s cruelty immortalised in every line on his frozen face.
Izuku walks past him, and doesn’t release his quirk until he’s far from school, far from Bakugou and his vitriol, and his breath comes out of him in shuddering, wet gasps. Every time he uses his quirk, every time he returns to that still wasteland, he always ends up like this. Unable to breathe, unable to see, unable to feel anything except the nothingness that’s started to grow inside of him.
He hates it, hates his quirk that hurts him by trying to protect him, that makes him throw up and cry and want to screamwith every use. Each time, he tells himself it’ll be the last.
No more.
But even though he’s different now, he’s been aged and broken and worn down by a whole life that he lived alone, he’s still Izuku, still ever the hero.
And so when he sees Bakugou, gasping for breaths he can’t find, caught in the slimy grip of the villain who’d attacked him earlier, who’d been captured and trapped by All Might (except, perhaps not?), his lips fall open and the words flow out, unstoppable.
Kacchan!
Everything… stops.
Later, All Might will praise his tenacity, his courage, for saving Bakugou. For putting himself in danger to save another, even as quirkless as he is, and Izuku will not correct him.
He will accept the gift of a quirk All Might bestows on him, will be enamoured with the story of a quirk passed from user to user, a shared bond between them all.
Perhaps, he hopes, it will fill the silence and the stillness that lives inside of him. Will eradicate it and scourge him and birth him anew as Midoriya Izuku, just thirteen years old (no older), quirk: Superpower.
Nothing more, nothing less. Just like everyone else.