Chapter Text
Hitoshi
Hitoshi grips the cement ledge and swings himself up onto the roof, landing with a soft slap of his shoes. He rolls his shoulder and wipes his hands on his pants, breathing a little harder than he's used to, but his bad knee is as good as new and that more than makes up for it. Being young is great.
Izuku is staring out over the campus, his hair dancing in the breeze, a solemn look on his face. Hitoshi’s chest constricts at the sight of him. He's not over the close call of almost losing his friend yet — he could fucking hug the life out of him.
Izuku's body is fifteen year old Izuku now. He's on the smaller side for his age and too polite, so he gets mistaken for weak, but he's got the lines of muscles under his school uniform, if one looks closely enough. He's already started his training almost a year ago, so he's not at square one in the physical strength arena like Hitoshi.
There's a melancholy in his eyes, and Hitoshi knows what he's thinking.
Hitoshi leans on the railing next to Izuku and looks out over the grass dotted with different colors of hair but with matching gray UA uniforms. Somewhere down there are the baby versions of all of their friends.
Everyone is down there, but at the same time, none of them are down there. Their friends are gone, erased from time. Those people down there are not their friends and colleagues as they knew them in the future. They're just kids. All of their shared experiences, all of their shared memories — it's just him and Izuku that remember any of that stuff, now.
Aside from their memories, the lives they knew are gone. It feels like their whole reality, their homes and lives that they built, have just vanished.
"Fuck. Angel-chan," Izuku says, his face pained.
Hitoshi gives his arm a squeeze. Shoto's pain and grief have been erased, but it doesn't stop the feeling of sadness from the experience, and thought of what would have been, from lingering still. Izuku had been unconscious for a lot of it, but Hitoshi had seen Izuku’s husband, knees up to his chest and head hidden between them, like a child in the chair beside Izuku's hospital bed, crying. It had been chilling and painful right down to his bones to see the usually audacious and self-assured sex icon folded up and inconsolable. Knowing Izuku was dying had been unbearable, and seeing Angel-Chan suffering from it had been almost as painful, but Shoto is fine now. He's rewound and young and naive of such things, not even aware that All Might would have a successor, let alone the fact that there was a future where he had fallen in love with that successor and been spoiled into a high maintenance, petty little brat.
Izuku scrubs his face and when he pulls his hands away, his cheeks are pinker and his eyes are determined. "Look. We could try to keep it mostly the same. Some people would say it's safest to act like our old selves, to not take away experiences from loved ones that would change their lives too much — to not risk losing our foresight at the most crucial of times..." Izuku starts, but there's a 'but' in his tone.
"Yeah, some people are idiots," Hitoshi says.
Even if he could remember every choice he made two decades ago, trying to do everything the same would be a complete waste of his life experience and hard-won wisdom. To be honest, he wouldn't last five minutes restricting himself to making only decisions that a dumb teen would make.
And besides, he doesn't want to try to be someone he's not, even if that person is a past him — and why would he settle for a life he's already lived, when he can explore possibilities and improve things? He's spent the last decade and a half pining for a married woman, and now she's single.
A wisp of a smile stretches Izuku's mouth, gratitude tinting the sadness on his face.
"What are we, cowards?" Hitoshi says. "We’ve lived all of our lives without knowing the future. Piece of cake.”
Shoto
Shoto stands at the gate, turned towards UA, a hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he peers at the green poof of hair above the main building. He can identify that crumpled tie and that round head. The kid who sat a few seats up to Shoto's left, the one that broke bones every time he used his quirk. Seeing him on the roof is unexpected.
Midoriya stuttered if someone even looked at him, and apologized for breathing. Shoto wouldn't have thought he'd ever do anything the least bit deviant, let alone against the rules. And what reason would he have for being up there anyway.
Odd.