Archive of Our Own ^beta

Izuku thrusts his shovel into the mud one last time. Severed, wriggling halves of earthworms writhe on the closed casket, white under cold moonlight. Hands stiff and blistered beneath his gloves, Izuku brushes hardened clumps of dirt off the casket lid. The surface is intricately carved, expensive. This man's grieving family spared no expense. He takes one more moment to appreciate the text on the headstone above him and to pray a silent apology to the Asahi family. 

For a moment Izuku stands alone in the cold dark, his black hoodie damp in the mist that shrouds the cemetery. He's done this several times before, it should have been easier by now, but it's not. He's still terrified, jumping at shadows. Security had been increased at cemeteries throughout the country because of what he had done. It is all over the news. Any minute now and the night patrol would catch him, even under cover of this perfect weather. If he can't pull this off tonight, he will never get another chance. 

Izuku takes a deep breath and pries open the casket lid.

The cold air isn’t enough to mask the stench of rot, and Izuku stifles a gag, pressing his fabric mask against his mouth and nose. The bloated corpse of a well-dressed, elderly man lies in wait, eyeballs half-sunk into his skull. His skin is sloughing off his hands, tendon and bone flashing above a fitted black suit. His lips are peeling off his yellowed teeth in a permanent smile.

Izuku withdraws his scalpel from his belt and slices the old man’s suit down the center, revealing a gray belly bruised with rot. Without hesitation, Izuku pokes the tip of his scalpel through the outer layer of skin and drags it up from below the man’s navel to breastbone. Flesh unravels and purplish snakes spill from his gut, glinting with a wet shine. 

Izuku gathers up the unspooled intestines and slides them into a trash bag. He cuts away the threads of fat and muscle still clinging to dead tissue until the intestines are free. He ties off the bag. He rises up out of the pit, reaching for where he left his cooler, and drops the heavy bag on the ice inside.

Izuku closes the casket, and says goodbye to the old man’s smiling face. “Thank you for your donation, Mr. Asahi. I promise it’s for a good cause.”

Izuku crawls out of the pit and grabs his shovel. His shoulders ache with every thrust of wet soil as the forlorn casket is swallowed up by the dark earth a second time. His palms sting, blisters popping in his gloves, but he has to work fast. He's already been here far too long. 

Something brightens the night over Izuku's head. He gasps, head whipping over his shoulder. A flashlight beam darts in the dark cemetery in the parking lot through distant trees. Izuku hears raised voices. He drops his shovel. He grabs the handle of his cooler. He makes sure his mask and hoodie are secure. Cowled in the black of night, he dashes for the iron perimeter fence, scrambles up the slick bars one-handed, and jumps over the top of the spiked metal.

He hits the ground running. He doesn’t stop running until he’s sure he’s been swallowed up by the mist, until the church steeple behind him is but a fading memory.

Twelve years ago, Izuku Midoriya raised the dead for the first time.

His parents played with him on the sidewalk outside their apartment, enjoying a crisp autumn afternoon. His mother watched him wobble through the grass, picking up rocks and looking at all the little squirmy bugs beneath. She pointed them out to him and gave them names. 

"That's a worm, and that's a snail, and that's a little pillbug. Look at how many there are!" 

Izuku liked all those little squirming shapes. He picked up one of the pillbugs and watched it roll up in his palm. He giggled. He picked up another rock and put it on the sidewalk. That was when he noticed he had accidentally crushed a snail. 

"Why isn't it moving, Mommy?"

"Oh no… I'm sorry, Izuku," his mother said sadly, "he's squished. Poor Mr. Snail."

Izuku just wanted it to move again. He wailed for it, tears rolling down his chubby toddler cheeks. He dropped down to his scuffed knees so he could look at the poor smashed creature. He extended a small, chubby finger and touched its shattered shell and liquified remains. 

Then, goo and all, the creature moved. It slid out of its discarded bits of shell and continued to drag its slime-trail down the sidewalk, just as Izuku wanted it to. He smiled, triumphant, and pointed it out to his watching parents, unaware of their horrified faces.

They tried to convince themselves that they were seeing things, that the dead snail was probably still alive enough to move. It was a bug. Bugs did weird things in death with their twitchy nerves.

Weird, twitchy bugs became a regular occurrence in the Midoriya household. A spider smashed by his father's shoe would find Midoriya hands and start moving again, broken legs and all. A ladybug that had withered on the doorframe would land in Midoriya's palm and open it's shell to fly away again. A house centipede, withered in the corner of a pantry, flipped upright again at Izuku's wandering fingers when he searched for forgotten cookies.

When he turned five, he left no room for doubt anymore. 

The day began as many of his days did. Izuku walked home from the store in a crowded street, hand-in-hand with his mother, when he saw a smashed-up cat on the side of the road. It was very recent. It wasn't there earlier. It was his neighbor's orange tabby. 

His mother tried to shield his young eyes from the tragic sight. She gathered up her little boy and tried to redirect his attention, pointing out a blooming cherry tree, with all it's floating petals. 

 Izuku squirmed and broke free of her protective grasp. She snatched at him, but he was faster. 

"Izuku, come back!" His mother demanded, but Izuku just wanted the cat to move again. He dropped to his knees at the roadside curb and smoothed his fingers into cold, stiff fur.

The cat moved again. It rose to it's crooked legs, ribcage punched in a concave belly, and ran down the street, disappearing between suburban apartments. Izuku felt triumphant, and as he turned to point this out to his mother, he saw the look on her face. For the first time, he realized he had done something wrong. The jaw-dropped, frozen horror on her face etched itself in his memory.

His mother rushed to him and picked him up. Over her shoulder, he saw terror on everyone's faces, neighbors and the kids he went to school with, even Kacchan. Those faces branded him a monster as his mother slammed their apartment door shut and locked it behind her. He remembered her frantic breaths, the painful way her arms clutched him a little too tightly, and couldn't tell if she was scared for him, or scared of him.

The incident ended up on the news two days later, suburban moms screaming about a zombie cat that tried to get into their houses or eat their garbage. Journalists tried to write it off as an urban legend, or maybe the cat wasn’t as dead as it looked, diseased and beaten and unfortunate as it was.

But Inko Midoriya knew the truth. And so did everyone else on the street who saw it happen. At that point, everyone in Izuku’s life realized he had a problem.  

Everyone but Izuku himself.

When he turned six, he got gloves for his birthday. Outside his window, Kacchan and the other boys from his class were playing with brand new balls or hero action figures. Up in his bedroom, cramped in his tiny apartment, Izuku had gotten tight leather gloves that clasped uncomfortably around his wrists.

“These are very special, very important gloves.” His mother told him, her face far too serious for the occasion. “When you are around other people, never take them off.”

It was hard to take them off even if he tried. His parents made sure to clasp them so tight, the only way he could get them off was with his teeth. Scrambling at all the buttons and belts with his fingernails just hurt his wrists. But he did what he was told, and he did not take them off. Every time he left the house, which was not often enough, he wore those tight leather gloves.  

Windows shuttered shut when the Midoriyas were around. People spoke about them with harsh whispers and jabbing fingers. His dad left because of him, because he couldn’t bear the thought of raising a cursed freakshow. His mom fell into a deep depression. She felt like she couldn’t even leave the house. People would hide their kids from her. They would look at her like she was some kind of witch. Izuku couldn’t even play in his backyard. The other kids would throw rocks at him, call him names. But if he ever tried to talk to them, himself, they ran screaming.

“Don’t turn me into a zombie!”

“I don’t wanna die!”

“As soon as he touches you, he’ll eat your brains and control you!”

He didn’t know what was worse, the isolation or the hatred. They only saw a monster in him.

So he gave them exactly what they wanted.

When he was fourteen, he planned his revenge. Izuku piled up every single dead animal he found, hands guarded in thick gloves. He shovelled up every scrap of roadkill off the roads. He rounded up birds after they struck their necks on windows. He intervened before buzzards could finish scavenging their meals. And when all the animal corpses, bones and all, were gathered into a wheelbarrow, Izuku took off his gloves. He tossed them two-by-two into the street and cried havoc.

When he was sure Katsuki Bakugou would never be able to sleep again, haunted by the nightmares of the carcasses at his window, Izuku dropped out of middle school. He packed his bags and left home before his mother could stop him. He was never seen in that city again.

Tokyo was not kind to missing children, especially children who did not want to be found. His dirty clothes barely kept him warm. His face was smeared with filth. He hadn’t had an opportunity to shower in days. He didn’t want to steal, so he took discarded food out of the garbage when restaurants threw out their uneaten stock. It shocked him, how much perfectly good food was wasted.

He waited until it was dark, until the restaurant was closed and the last employee slipped out onto the street. Izuku dashed behind the brick building and opened the dumpster lid. It didn’t smell oppressively bad, which was a good sign.

As he scrambled over the top of the dumpster to throw himself into the trash, he heard raised voices and rushed footsteps.

“Are you sure the kid is here?”

“I could’ve sworn I saw him.”

“Might have just been a boy that looked like him. Who are we looking for, again?”

Izuku dropped into the dumpster and shut the lid over his head, just in time to see a blur of two shapes enter the alley.

“Fifteen year old. Dark, curly hair. Green eyes. Izuku Midoriya. The police can’t find him at this rate. Their numbers are pretty thin after what happened at Kamino-”

“Well, so are ours.”

Izuku’s heart lodged itself in his throat. He lowered himself down into the black trash bags, into the oppressive stench of his plastic coffin, and waited.

“Well, I don’t see anybody here. The reward money’s barely worth it, anyway.” Something heavy banged into the side of the dumpster, making Izuku jump.

“Come on, let’s go.”

Izuku waited until the voices and footsteps were long gone, and then he waited some more.

Of course. It was bound to happen, eventually. His mother might have filed a missing person report, so both police and small-time heroes were probably looking everywhere for him now. He needed a better place to hide. Somewhere far, far away from here. He didn’t have many ideas, but if he looked around long enough, he was bound to find something.

Carefully, he slid out of the dumpster, carrying a freshly-discarded cardboard box full of fried chicken.

But what were they saying about Kamino?

Izuku rushed back into the crowded streets until he found an old media store, its windows lined with TVs, displaying the news. Izuku drank it all in, word by word.

Yesterday, there was a terrorist attack in the Kamino district. Hundreds of people were reported dead. The morgues were overcrowded, so they needed to bring in freezers on wheels. All the dead had yet to be identified, and the heroes were still sifting through the wreckage of collapsed buildings to find more. The body count had risen by the hour. 

Today, however, the nation celebrated. As Izuku stood there in the cold, face illuminated by several TV screens shining through the glass, his heart nearly stopped at what he saw.

The reporter was saying that every single one of those people had gotten up and walked out of the freezers, morgues and rubble, completely whole. No missing organs, no jellied eyeballs, no snapped bones, no limbs hanging by threads of flesh. They were normal, functional human beings. The nation exploded with joy, reporting on all of the confused once-dead citizens and the tearful reunions that followed. It was described as a miracle, divine intervention, quirk or not.

And Izuku had nothing to do with it. For once in his life, there was a sign that people like him existed.

I have to find him. Where is Kamino District!? Ten miles by bus. I need a bus!

Izuku dropped his cardboard container of chicken and rushed down the streets to the nearest bus stop. He collided shoulders with a pedestrian, whirled around, and asked, “e-excuse me, sir!? Can I borrow some yen? I- I need to get on the bus!”

“Ugh, kid! You smell like shit!”

Frantic, Izuku grabbed at the arm of the nearest stranger. “M-ma’am! I need to get on the bus, I have no money--”

She jerked her arm out of his grip and ran away.

Izuku stood at the bus stop, desperate. “Somebody! I need to get on the bus!”

His words fell on deaf ears, his pleas lost to the noise of traffic, voices, and neon signs. So he leaned forward, tied his shoelaces, and started to run. 

Someone grabbed his shoulder. He stopped in his tracks. 

There was a woman there, with two small children clinging to the hem of her yellow coat.

"Young man, do you need money for the bus?" 

Izuku blinked wetness from his eyes and nodded frantically. "Y-yes ma'am, sorry ma'am." He didn't know why he was apologizing. Maybe it was because of how he smelled, how he looked, but the stranger did not seem revolted. She seemed worried.

She handed him a stack of yen bills. "Where are your parents?"

"I don't have any." Izuku bowed low, holding those precious stacks of yen. "Thank you so much. I'll pay you back some day."

"Don't worry about it. Just… take care, young man." 

It would be the last time he ever saw her. But that stack of yen served him well over the next six months. 

Similar resurrections occurred at the site of every tragedy, villain attack or terrorism event during that time. A family of four was killed in a car accident, pronounced dead at the hospital, only to walk out of the morgue alive. Five people were murdered at a bank robbery, only to get right back up out of their own puddles of blood. Seventeen people were crushed when a building collapsed due to a villain’s superpower, but they crawled out of the wreckage unharmed and whole.

Every time there was an attack, Izuku excitedly rushed to the scene as if death were something to celebrate. But he was always a little too early, or a little too late, barely missing the person responsible for the resurrections. It seemed impossible. The person with the resurrection quirk clearly didn’t want to be found. And they were far better at hiding than he was.

When dumpster diving couldn’t make ends meet, Izuku stole to survive, constantly running. His mother was always looking for him, sending police and investigators and heroes. Sometimes, he saw himself on missing child reports. 

He found a place to live. Out at the docks, there were ferries for companies to ship their products overseas, and ships for local fishers. One of the warehouses here was derelict. If he came late at night, when all the workers and fishers went home, no one noticed him sneaking inside that old, dusty building with the shattered windows. 

He made himself a nest there. Blankets and pillows stolen from the dump and reeking of cat pee, books he took from a display outside a thrift store, a few toys that someone had thrown out near their house. He missed his collection of pro hero action figures back home. These dolls with their broken joints and badly painted costumes couldn't compare, but it was something. Something that reminded him that he was still a kid who loved superheroes. 

Half-starved, dirty, and alone in the world, the boy's only hope was chasing the shadow of a miracle-worker no one has ever seen. It's a dark evening shrouded in mist and moonlight when he returns to that place, after yet another failed attempt to find him.

He sat on the edge of the wharf, looking out at the moonlight glittering on the water near the curved horizon, when a dead fish floated up to him from the brackish depths, bobbing in the lapping waves. He smelled it before he saw it, the sickly sweet stench of rot in water.

He reached down to poke it. The fish wriggles, flops its tail, and sinks back into the water with vacant eyes.

“You’ve got quite an amazing gift, kid.”

Izuku jumped out of his skin and whirled around. A skinny blond man in a white shirt, impossibly tall, was watching him from the other edge of the dock. His silhouette barely cut the mist. Under the moonlight, oversized shirt billowing in the salt air, he looked like a ghost.

“What gift?” Izuku asked, tense, thinking this man was sent by his mother to find him, and he had just given himself away.

“You brought that fish back to life. Didn’t you?” The man said, tilting his head a little.

“No.” Izuku said, and it was the truth. He wasn’t giving life back to anything. The things he made were still very dead. He glanced to his side and behind him. His only escape routes were the alley behind him and the ocean to his side. He'd jump in and swim if he had to, never mind the frozen autumn waters.

The man approached and Izuku jumped to his feet, ready to run. The man raised his hands, palms outward, and said, “don’t worry, kid. I’m not here to turn you in to the weird quirk police.” He chuckled, which devolved into a rattling cough. Blood glistened on his lips. Izuku shuddered, tensing like a coiled spring. “Truth is, I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

Izuku was five seconds away from bolting, but curiosity kept his feet rooted. “Why?”

“Because I know you’ve been following me.”

Izuku squinted. He’d never seen this man in his life. “No I haven’t.”

“You’ve shown up to every Ground Zero for the past 6 months. Ever since the Kamino Ward report.” The man spoke plainly. “Always alone, always desperate. You hang out way too late, after the crowds are already gone, and look all over the place. Kind of hard not to notice you. And, well, now I know why.” He gestured towards the dark water lapping at the edge of the dock. “We’re the same, kid.”

Izuku’s eyes widened. At that moment, the world stopped spinning. His breath gusted from his lungs. “You’re the one who’s been raising the dead!”

The other man closed the distance between them, arms folded, staring out at the water. Izuku didn't run. He stared up at this man in awe. Here he was, the blue-eyed shadow he had been chasing all this time.

“I can imagine what your life has been like,” the man said. “People think you’re a freak. They’re scared of you. You can probably raise the dead no matter what state they’re in. Am I right?”

Izuku nodded slowly, staring up at this man in awe.

“I’m Toshinori.” He said, extending a bony hand, “and if it’s alright with you… I’d like to teach you what I know. Maybe someday, the world will agree that your power is a gift.”

Izuku grabbed his hand like a drowning boy to a lifesaver.

Toshinori's first goal was to feed the poor boy. He had given him an oversized black hoodie and a mask so Izuku could follow him safely into the city, his green hair and freckled face concealed. They went to an izakaya and Toshinori bought him all the ramen he could eat. He devoured it like there was nothing left in the world. 

Toshinori took nothing for himself. In the hushed conversations that followed, their voices lost to the noise of city life, Izuku learned the cold, hard truth.

"This power we have… it has two paths. We can raise the dead and bring back a walking corpse, or we can slowly kill ourselves and bring back true life."

Izuku almost choked on his ramen. "Kill ourselves?"

"With every body I raise, I lose a little bit of my own. My quirk eats my organs and bones. Cell by cell. To reconstruct someone, I take my own body's cells, transplant them into the dead, and rapidly multiply them. Cells from my ribs rebuild bones. Cells from my organs rebuild theirs. For example, to restart the heart of a homicide victim, I use cells from my intestines to rebuild flesh." 

Izuku quickly lost interest in his food. "You mean… you're dying?"

Toshinori nodded solemnly. "It is the only ethical way. If I only did it a few times, I'm sure I would be fine. Cells in your body naturally die all the time. But I have been raising people faster than I can survive it. And I'm afraid I'm running out of time." He patted his own stomach. "I've raised almost four thousand people. My stomach and most of my intestines are gone. Lung and kidney, too. And a few ribs."

"Why? Why do this to yourself?"

Toshinori rolled his shoulders, sighed, and struggled to answer. "I guess… when people are in trouble, I can't help myself."

"Wh… what does this have to do with me?"

"You have the same quirk I have. I'm sure of it. This power is a tremendous blessing, but a tremendous responsibility. If there comes a time in your life where you feel you need to save someone. To raise the dead. I want to teach you how to do it the right way. And I want to give you the power to show the world that you're not a monster."

Izuku imagined his own stomach, filled for the first time in weeks, slowly evaporating away. Before he could respond, Toshinori reached over and grasped his shoulders. His bony fingers gave him a gentle squeeze.

“You must promise me two things, my boy,” his electric blue eyes pierced into his own. “Don’t do what I have done. Promise me that you won’t kill yourself using this power, and promise me you won’t take anyone else’s body either. If you can do this, I will teach you."

Izuku's head hurt. He feels like he's standing on the edge of an abyss. Life and death, love and hatred. But if he can prove to the world that he is good, if he can prove that his power is a blessing… 

What choice does he have? 

"Okay. I promise." He said seriously, and he meant it. "But… about the other thing you said. You can take the cells from someone else’s body instead of your own?”

Toshinori nodded gravely. “Even if I only took a few cells and multiplied them, it’s still not my body. To infringe on someone else’s autonomy is unethical.”

“I understand,” Izuku said. “I promise. I won’t take someone else’s body.”

"Good. Very good." Toshinori smiled, patting his shoulders. "I trust you, my boy."

Izuku smiled a little. My boy, he thought. My dad never called me that.

Their training began, some time later, back in the oppressive dark of Izuku's warehouse home.

They had gathered up dead rats out of garbage and city gutters, placed them in bins, and spread them out on the long, empty tables in one of the warehouse rooms. The lights in the place didn't work anymore, so Toshinori had rigged his cell phone flashlight up on a stack of books.

  Toshinori demonstrated the power of his resurrection quirk, explaining as he hovered his hands over a rat carcass. Its eyes were long gone, infested with maggots. "I focus the energy of my quirk from my core. I imagine the shape of the rat, the organs in its body, as analogous to my own. I visualize blood flowing through its veins with each of my heartbeats. And I don't even have to touch it."

The maggots are pushed out of the rat's eyesockets by some unseen force. The color drains from Toshinori's face as new eyeballs grow in the rat's skull, dark and beady. More insects expel from the creature orifices as it's bones visibly crack back in place. It's hollow stomach expands again, renewed with new life. 

The rat stands again, whole, twitchy nose and long whiskers poking around the confines of its bin. With scrambling pink paws it pulls itself away and vanishes into the warehouse. 

 Izuku struggled with Toshinori's explanation. It was one thing to listen to him speak and watch him do it. It was another thing to figure out how he was transplanting his own cells into the dead. 

He hovered his hands over his rat carcass. He tried to imagine all the things Toshinori imagined. He couldn't. When nothing happened for a very long time, he reached his hands down and touched the rat in desperation. 

The dead animal got up and walked around while still missing half its face. Izuku groaned and walked away from the mess he made, defeated.

“Don’t worry, my boy,” Toshinori said. “I know you can do it. This power is in you. We just have to keep trying."

“Our quirks are completely different!” Izuku replied, disheartened, sinking against the warehouse wall. “What if I wasn’t born with the power you have!? I’m just a freak!”

“I know because I was once exactly like you, Kid. Exactly .” Toshinori insisted, shaking his shoulders. “I don’t know how we ended up with quirks like this. I’m sorry we ended up with quirks like this. But we have to rise above it. We can make the world a better place. Just trust me.”

Izuku wanted someone to trust, someone to look up to. He was so young when his father left, he didn't even remember his face. Now, the only person in the world who cared about him at all was Toshinori. 

He wanted to make Toshinori proud, so he promised to keep trying. He promised to do it the right way.

The days went by like that. In the day, after Toshinori was done patrolling and looking for people to bring back from the dead, he would come to the warehouse with a fresh bento box or takeout. Sometimes, he would even bring candy or a gift. Then, in the night, they would look for dead animals and practice. He could walk around the city freely when he was with Toshinori. The cops and the heroes were looking for a boy who was alone. He wasn't alone anymore. 

But Izuku never got it right. Every dead animal he ever brought back was still dead, still rotting, still a puppet made of a corpse. The power seemed to come so naturally to Toshinori, who even admitted himself that he didn't have so much trouble figuring it out when he was Izuku's age. 

Izuku didn't know what was wrong with him, why he couldn't do it too. Toshinori seemed convinced that he had it in him, but maybe the older man was wrong. Maybe he just felt sorry for him. 

But Toshinori wasn't like everyone else. At least he didn't think Izuku was a freak. 

One thunderstruck night, a familiar face darkened Izuku’s doorway. Out in the wharf, soaked to his bones, Katsuki Bakugou stood with steam billowing from his hands. The rain wreathed him in a haze, dripping from his wild hair.

“I knew all I had to do was follow the stench of walking dead rats,” Bakugou called into the abandoned warehouse. “You’re in here. Aren’t you, punk?”

Izuku hid in a maze of abandoned shipment crates. He didn't dare speak. Bakugou’s muddy footsteps squelched onto the concrete floors. His half-panicked, half-furious face ignited in a dash of lightning through broken glass windows.

“Come out, dead rat boy! You think I’m just gonna forget that nightmare stunt you pulled on me?”

Bakugou entered the maze of crates and Izuku slipped deeper into the warehouse.

“Your mommy misses you! Don’t you wanna see mommy again? Let me take you to her! ”

His quirk-laced hands sent an explosion through the maze. A fireball burst between the metal crates, exploding through the gaps between them. It blasted Izuku backwards. His head cracked against the metal wall.

Everything spun. Up was down. Izuku scrambled to right himself, but his brain rattled in his skull.

“There you are!”

Bakugou descended upon him in seconds. Izuku kicked up his knee, trying to smash Bakugou’s nose in, but the stronger boy dodged and grabbed a fistful of Izuku’s black hoodie.

“I’m taking you back home!”

“No!” Izuku scrambled, grabbing Bakugou’s wrists and twisting them. When that didn’t work, he pitched forward and bit his arm.

Bakugou cried out and dropped him. In that split second, Izuku rushed to the shipment crates. He found a ladder and scrambled up. Bakugou followed close behind. Izuku could hear the telltale hiss of his nitroglycerin-fueled hands. Panic twisted his slick grip on the ladder. He slipped.

“Get back here!”

Izuku couldn’t climb the ladder fast enough. The explosion tore into his back and sent him flying into concrete. 

His head struck the cold ground.

He didn’t know where he went, or what woke him up.

He was on a cold warehouse floor. He heard voices. His brain flooded with fog, he barely knew up from down. He only knew he was breathing. Was he not breathing before?

“I didn’t mean to - I just wanted to stop him, I- I didn’t mean to kill him!”

“That’s enough. Go home, boy.”

“Is he--”

“Leave. Before I get the authorities involved.”

Izuku blinked the fog from his eyes. He rolled to his side. He saw Toshinori standing near the entrance of the warehouse, and Bakugou’s swift exit. Toshinori swayed and dropped to a knee, wheezing, his bony hands grabbing at his chest. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

Izuku scrambled to his feet and dashed to his mentor’s side. “Mr. Toshinori!” He dropped heavily to his knees, watching the color drain from Toshinori's face, raw panic building in his throat.

“My boy,” Toshinori wheezed, struggling to lift his hand, to grasp Midoriya’s shoulder as he did when he had something important to say. He squeezes, and Midoriya can feel strength fading from his grip. “My boy... “ He smiled, teeth stained with blood. “Please go back to your mother. Tell her… tell her your power is good, and you’ll… you’ll work on controlling it better. You’ll remember what I said? The promises you made?”

“Why- why are you talking like this? What are you saying?” Izuku begged.

But Toshinori never replied.

He crumpled boneless to the cold, hard ground, the last of his energy spent on bringing his boy back from the dead.

Izuku drags his cooler into the warehouse. He rushes into his makeshift morgue, where Toshinori’s prone figure is sprawled out on a long folding table. All of the ice Izuku had packed around Toshinori’s body is turning to slush, and soon the man will decompose. He doesn’t have any time left.

Izuku pushes aside the stolen medical journals and anatomy textbooks that were scattered over the nearby counter to make room for his cooler. The stolen organ joins the others. He had harvested a lung, a stomach, a kidney, a few ribs, and now intestines. These are all the parts he needs, based on what Toshinori had told him.

He hadn’t broken Toshinori’s promise. He hadn’t taken these body parts from anyone that was alive. He hadn’t infringed on anyone’s autonomy. And he won’t kill himself to bring Toshinori back, no matter how badly he wants to. The man had already traded his life to bring Izuku back. Even if Izuku doesn’t die in the process of using his quirk this way for the first time, he doesn’t want to risk his first human resurrection to end up like all those animal carcasses he had thrown towards Bakugou’s house. No, he has to do this the right way. He has to rebuild Toshinori. He has to get all the right parts back in all the right places. All it would take was plugging these organs in where they belonged, then touching his mentor with a gloveless hand. It’ll be just like restarting an old machine.

Right?

Izuku takes his scalpel and carves open Toshinori’s concave belly. As expected, he’s empty. The man’s quirk had eaten him away like maggots to a carcass, leaving a hollow place behind. Izuku takes a needle and sutures and opens the bag of stolen intestines. He carefully threads them into Toshinori’s corpse. He keeps his anatomy books open as reference. He ties down the intestines where he thinks they should go.

It looks like a child had done it. A flesh-and-blood version of a patchwork doll. There’s no time to unravel his handiwork and try again. There’s more work to be done, and the clock is ticking.

Izuku plugs in the kidney, and then the stomach. He slots these fleshy bits in place, attaching the stomach to the intestines, tying up blood vessels and nerves. He carves flesh away from Toshinori's chest, peeling away layers of skin and thin, shrivelled muscle.

He can’t fit the lung where it should go, not through the hard shell of Toshinori’s ribcage. So Izuku takes a hammer and swings it down, smashing open Toshinori’s ribs with a sickening crack. He moves aside pieces of bone until he can fit the lung in place, attaching it to his trachea. He takes surgical glue and puzzles the shattered bone shards back together.

When he stitches Toshinori’s chest and belly up again, he looks crooked. The sutures are messy. They’re not evenly spaced. Toshinori’s stomach is blue and mottled, bloated around the poorly fitted intestines. All his blood is pooling in his back and extremities, black like ink.

Izuku stands over the corpse, breathing heavily, contending with himself. He looks down at his own hands, still encased in those bloodied gloves.

Will this work? Am I going to bring back a monster? Or will all the cells in those bones and organs reconstitute themselves? Will my quirk work its magic and make him whole again?

He’s not thinking of the cops or heroes that are looking everywhere for the notorious graverobber. He’s not thinking of his own mother, who might have given up on finding him. He’s not worried if he’ll end up in juvenile prison for this, for desecrating the dead. He’s not worried that everyone out there thinks he’s a disturbed, disordered, broken child with a curse for a quirk who likes to play with dead bodies.

He just wants his dad to move again.

Izuku plunges both hands onto Toshinori’s chest, tears spilling from his green eyes.

“Please,” he begs that force inside of him that he can’t control, “please, for once in your life, please bring something back alive !”

For a very long time, Toshinori’s body remains cold and silent.

Then, his chest seizes. His limbs twitch. His belly floods with air as he takes a breath. Toshinori Yagi’s blue eyes snap open.

“He’s alive!” Izuku smiles a wild smile, teeth flashing in the dark. “He’s alive!”

Toshinori sits crookedly upright, breaths rattling in his chest, shoulders hanging at lopsided angles. His torso twists in Izuku’s direction, arms flopping limply at his side. His eyes are vacant. His lips part to a cascade of blood and drool. “My… boy…” He gurgles, twitching. “Izu… ku... “ The wrinkles on Toshinori’s face twist, halfway between comprehension and confusion.

A cold hand grips Izuku’s shoulder. Toshinori’s fingernails dig into Izuku’s skin.

Izuku stares into those hollow eyes with a maddened laugh, lips peeling back over his teeth, wild panic and bile boiling in his throat.

Not quite alive. Not quite dead. But he is here.

He is here .

“Welcome back… dad.”