Chapter Text
When Izuku woke up in the hospital, he didn’t know how or why he had ended up there.
The nurse explained that he had been caught up in a villain-related incident. His right leg and arm had been fractured, but he should still count himself lucky - it could have ended much worse for him if he hadn’t been saved by a hero.
Izuku’s head reeled. Heroes were a pretty big deal for him, but he never thought he would actually be so closely involved with one. When the nurse said the hero’s name, Izuku was instantly itching to learn more about them.
“Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight? That sure is an impressive name,” he laughed. “I’ve never heard of them, though. Are they a newcomer?”
The nurse looked at him blankly for a while.
“Uh...I’ll be back soon.”
She returned with printed photos of the top ten heroes in the country, asking Izuku if he recognized them. Izuku had no trouble rattling the names and Quirks of almost everyone on the list – he could have narrated the highlights of their entire careers if need be – but number four didn’t ring any kind of bell. Izuku couldn’t understand why, because the man was definitely not the type that would be easy to forget. His black and orange colour scheme was very memorable, and the cocksure smirk combined with the mask covering the upper half of his face made shivers run down Izuku’s smile just from looking at a still photo.
“See...that’s Dynamight,” the nurse pointed at the mysterious man in the photo. Izuku’s heart skipped a beat. He had been saved by this guy ? And not remember a thing?
What a terrible waste, really.
“And there’s one other thing,” she continued, taking something out from a plastic bag and handing it to Izuku. “This is yours.”
Izuku recognized that the object was a mobile phone – but more importantly, it had a custom cover that clearly had the same X-shaped motif as the hero Dynamight’s costume. Even the lockscreen was a photo of the guy.
He looked up at the nurse a bit sheepishly.
“It...it may be that I have heard about him after all.”
The doctor decided that it was best to keep Izuku in the hospital for a while, both to help with his physical injuries and to see whether his amnesia would go away on its own. The latter problem didn’t seem very serious: apart from the hero who he owed his life to, he didn’t have trouble remembering any of his friends and family who came to visit him. He could name everyone in the photos they showed him and no one seemed to find anything odd about the way he remembered different events.
There was just one thing that bothered Izuku.
“Who’s Kacchan?”
“Hm?”
Izuku’s mother looked up from the apple she was peeling for him to snack on (despite his insistence that he could just use his left hand to eat it normally).
“Kacchan,” Izuku repeated. “Do you know someone called that?”
She tilted her head and mouthed the name to herself a couple times.
“No, I don’t think I do,” she confessed eventually, starting to cut the apple into slices. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s the name of the only contact on my phone I can’t recognize,” Izuku explained as he tapped around the screen to find the correct person. “I don’t seem to have any message history with them, but we called each other...a lot.”
Izuku scrolled through his list of previous calls with Kacchan. They were almost daily, the most recent one being from the morning of the day when Izuku ended up in the hospital. A lot of them were quite late night calls, which together with the casual nickname would indicate that he and Kacchan were close, but that only made it seem more odd that he couldn’t remember them. And if his mother didn’t recognize the name...
The sound of the knife clattering to the floor made Izuku look up at his mother, whose eyes had gone wide.
“Izuku… Do you have a...a secret girlfriend or something…?”
It was like a slap in the face.
“O-of course not! Why- how does that even- no !”
When the initial shock passed, he did actually kind of see how she might think that. Someone who he called with a cutesy name and had lengthy evening chats with but didn’t introduce to his mother? But what kind of a person would it be that Izuku would feel the need to hide it?
...And why hadn’t Kacchan made any attempt to contact him since the incident?
Izuku had tried to call the number on numerous occasions, but it never connected. His messages weren’t being delivered either. He tried asking a contact service, but it turned out the number was protected.
There was one more thing. Izuku had browsed through his photo roll several times to see if he could find hints of ‘Kacchan’, but as far as he could tell, he knew everyone in the photos and no one he knew had a name that resembled the moniker. However, he did find a password-protected folder titled simply ‘K’ and nested deep within several folders with names like “misc” and “stuff” - very suspicious indeed. Izuku tried to solve the passcode a couple of times, but had to stop when the system warned that he only had one more try before the folder would self-destruct.
Not daring to risk it, Izuku tossed his phone on the bed with a deep sigh.
His mother had brought him his laptop and some books so he could work on his thesis in the hospital, but he found himself constantly distracted by news sites and social media. He was haunted by a need to learn everything he could about Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight, reading up on the hero’s exploits and studying them like it was his job.
He found footage of his recent run-in with the hero. It was grainy and shot from a distance, but he could still see the trajectory of events: Izuku jumping off a pedestrian bridge that was destroyed by a car flying at it mere seconds later. Him landing on the ground, probably breaking his arm and leg in the process, and apparently losing consciousness. Dynamight flying in and exploding the vehicle that would otherwise have crushed Izuku, then kneeling next to him and clearly saying something. A villain appearing from behind the hero and Dynamight collapsing next to Izuku’s unconscious body almost immediately after.
Izuku watched the clip over and over, taking in every little detail, but he still couldn’t find any memories of the actual event happening. He thought about the part where Dynamight talked to him – or yelled, rather, he could tell even from the crappy footage that the hero was agitated, but it was a high-stress situation in the first place.
He wished he knew what his saviour had been trying to say.
After a couple more days, Izuku’s leg was healed enough that he could try walking with only one crutch supported by his good hand. He was allowed to walk around so as to not lose too much strength from lying down all the time. As he got the hang of the technique, pacing the corridor back and forth got boring very quickly. He wanted to venture a bit further, but going to the other wards that were busy with staff walking around and patients trying to recover didn’t feel right. Sadly, the weather had taken a turn for the miserable, which ruled out going to the yard, too.
Eventually, Izuku discovered an old wing that was much quieter. The entire part of the building would be knocked down soon, so a lot of the rooms were quite bare and were only used when the newer area was completely full, such as when a large incident brought a temporary surge of patients in.
Now the old section was largely deserted. Izuku sat in a chair resting his leg, looking out from the large window at the end of the hallway and listening to the sounds of the downpour.
When he decided he had rested enough, he heaved himself up and began to make his way towards the door at the opposite end of the hall. To his surprise, he saw a nurse pushing a bed inside – it seemed that they were bringing a patient in after all.
As the bed passed Izuku in the corridor, he couldn’t help but to glance at the person on it instinctually, without really even meaning to. But what he saw almost made him drop his crutch then and there.
He scrambled to follow the nurse into the room where she had pushed the bed, catching himself against the door frame when his balance faltered.
“Is...is that…?”
He had to have seen wrong. It couldn’t be.
But it was.
The expression on the nurse’s face immediately confirmed that Izuku had been right. She looked at him with a troubled frown, biting bottom her lip as if she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t have.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said. “We moved him here so that there would be less unnecessary disturbance...the last thing we need is a bunch of fans or reporters flocking in.”
“O-of course,” Izuku nodded, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the man lying on the bed. The number four hero, Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight, lying completely still with his eyes closed.
“Is he okay?” Izuku asked next as he noticed the machines and IV drips that the hero was hooked up on. “He...he saved my life,” he added as the nurse opened her mouth, probably about to rightfully tell him that it was none of his business.
Well, him saying that didn’t really change anything about the situation – rescuees didn’t have any legal right to private information pertaining to the heroes who had saved them, and Izuku definitely knew this – but after a stretched out moment of silence, the nurse seemed to take pity on him.
“He doesn’t really have many injuries to speak of,” she said, adjusting the man’s pillow, “but he hasn’t woken up a single time since the two of you were rescued from the field. The scans show that he has more brain activity than a typical coma patient, but nothing seems to rouse him...so we’re looking after him until we can figure out what the problem is.”
She looked at Izuku sharply.
“That’s about three times the information I'm allowed to give you, so you’d better not make me regret it.”
Izuku had little choice but to acquiesce and return to his room, devastated by the new information he had just learned.
He had indeed wondered why Dynamight hadn’t made any new public appearances. Even his agency had stayed remarkably quiet about his return to the field even though the incident hadn’t seemed particularly serious.
Izuku would never have guessed that the hero had been there all the time, in the same hospital as him. And now Izuku knew exactly where.
...He didn’t mean that in a creepy way! He just needed closure, a chance to look into the eyes of the person he owed his life to and tell him thank you. And maybe get an autograph, if he was lucky. If he could get the number four hero to sign his cast, it would become a Midoriya family heirloom.
The quiet wing of the hospital became Izuku’s number one destination. As soon as he was done with breakfast and the doctor’s morning visit, he left his bed and painstakingly walked to check up on Dynamight. At first, he only allowed himself some discreet glances inside the room as he walked by, but soon enough he found himself sitting at the hero’s bedside, watching over him quietly until he absolutely had to head back to his room before the staff would start looking for him.
Dynamight looked so...different.
In a way, that seemed obvious. Izuku only knew the hero through television screens and glossy magazine photos, where he was all rippling muscles and bold gestures, face always in an intimidating scowl or a triumphant smirk. Of course he would be very different wearing a bland hospital gown, lost in a deep sleep and completely vulnerable. Still, Izuku couldn’t help but notice that the hero’s features were quite delicate. The black mask of his costume really didn’t do justice to the curve of his nose and his high cheekbones. His hair looked so soft, too.
Izuku only wished he could see Dynamight’s eyes, curious whether the crimson colour truly was that vibrant in real life or if the polished close-ups he was used to seeing were just heavily edited.
Watching the steady rise and fall of the man’s chest made Izuku tranquil in a way he couldn’t quite explain. On a couple occasions, he even dared to place his good hand on top of Dynamight’s chest and just enjoy the almost imperceptible rhythm of his heartbeat – but he made sure to pull away after a short while, afraid that someone would come in and question his actions.
When the doctor asked him if he felt ready to go home already, Izuku was genuinely taken aback, stammering something about being worried he would fall and hurt himself if he was alone in his apartment. Realistically, he definitely could have recruited someone to help him out, but the real reason for his reluctance to leave the hospital was Dynamight. The hero still hadn’t awakened, and Izuku felt a strange need to stay until he could be sure he was going to make a full recovery.
He got a suspicious look from his doctor, but was allowed to stay for a bit longer.
That day, something unexpected happened. Izuku was about to enter Dynamight’s room as was his habit, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw that someone was already inside. Based on the pencil skirt and lilac blouse, the woman sitting on Izuku’s usual chair wasn’t a member of the staff. She was sitting with her back towards the door, so she didn’t see Izuku hovering in the doorway, and the way her shoulders trembled slightly suggested that she was crying silently.
It didn’t feel right to intrude on such a delicate personal moment, so Izuku tried walking in the hall like he was supposed to in the first place. He took several rounds, but the woman showed no signs of leaving, and Izuku had to concede that he was getting a bit tired, so he returned to his room. He still couldn’t focus on his reading materials, because his mind kept coming back to the unfamiliar woman he had seen in Dynamight’s room.
He had never come across any visitors in the room before, so he had gotten strangely used to having Dynamight just to himself, even if that made absolutely no sense. Izuku was a nobody, just a random passerby in the hero’s life who was getting way ahead of himself just because he had learned his location by complete chance. Imagining anything more was nothing but ravings of a self-important fanboy who was taking his parasocial relationship with his idol much too seriously.
Izuku found himself thinking of Kacchan again. More from boredom than anything else, he dialed the number again and pressed his phone to his ear, only to hear the familiar spiel about the number not being available. He didn’t bother leaving a voice message – he had left several by now, and they were either not being listened to or Kacchan didn’t care.
Maybe they had just blocked Izuku’s number.