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The first impact of a body hitting the water is like falling into solid ground. Bones are breaking, skin tearing, blood spilling: the higher to fall, the higher to hurt. Muscles and cartilage fall apart under the pressure of the impact.
Something that was easily cured by Eri, but they didn’t have Eri anymore. The villains took her, but he was falling, no closer to finding her. The last thing he saw was Aizawa sensei’s face as the gunshot echoed through the plane, the villain who had supposedly taken Eri grinning maniacally as he burst through the door.
If the fall did not kill a person, the long time falling to the dark blue, the stretched time wondering when it would hit. The fear after falling, watching the plane he was on fly off, edged the seconds into hours.
Even for someone like Izuku, who had enhanced strength-based in his body, Izuku could feel the moment he hit the sea reverberate through his bones. His back, the first point of contact, felt like it had split in two, and his limbs that he just about managed to wrap around his head were leaden with the muscle relaxer, the one that made him fall out of the plane after it was administered, pulling his body into a statue-like stillness.
The moment before he hit the ocean, the last breath of air that he might ever be able to take was the freshest Izuku had ever taken. As soon as he felt the deepwater envelop his body, the breath was ripped out of him, the shock of hitting what felt like cement and the cold pulling the air from his lungs.
The moment after the impact, all he could see were bubbles, white and large, filtering around him as they blocked the view of the plane slowly moving away. The sun is blocked by the large white pockets of air. They followed him as he went down and moved away from him to the surface. Mocking him as he floated down into the dark blue.
For a moment – when the white cleared, he was floating in the blue, and it was almost a peaceful kind of death. The beauty of the sea was something that he had always appreciated. From when he had cleared the beach for All Might and had seen the first sparkle of emerald, sapphire, and the wide-open expanse of the sea, had he truly appreciated the view.
The light filtered down from above, highlighting the water’s stillness and just how close to the surface he was. Long and curly strand of green hair wrapped around the sun and framed his eyes as the salt of the sea started to sting them. Dipping down with his hands reading to the sun, the slow process of sinking wrapped around his middle and pulled.
The bubbles never really stopped after that large group burst from his impact. They just kept on coming, mocking him as he sunk into the sea and they rose to the surface. Izuku really started to hate them.
His lungs were starting to burn now. It was a nagging feeling – one he could easily ignore. His mouth almost felt dry. It was very salty.
The water hugged around him with a fuzzy feeling in his mind, and it was like what Izuku thought the womb was like. Solid, dark, and ineffable. It was like a quirk, powerful and always there in the back of his mind.
Izuku did not realise how much he loved the sea. It was sad that he was dying in it.
Possibly the drug that that guy shot him with, which gave enough force to shoot him out of the plane they were on, also had some mental aspect– the panic was there, but he did not care about it.
His back had stopped hurting so much. The deeper he went, the less it hurt and the less he cared. The darkening blue of the ocean and the cold was numbing – but also comforting and motherly like a womb.
One drop of salty water joined its brethren as Izuku realised he might never see his mother again.
Maybe his friends would find him first.
His lungs now felt like they were bursting.
It was getting too much, everything was pushing against him, pushing him down, pulling him up, and his legs were unfeeling in the cold of the ocean.
His lungs were spasming for air, and his vision was clouding with the lack of oxygen and was darkening the deeper he went.
He was too scared to turn One For All on in fear of creatures of the deep. Who knew what kind of creatures were attracted to heat and light, and considering the state of his back, he didn’t want to risk it. The power of that quirk might force him further into the deep. He still might be rescued. He just had to hold onto hope. His lungs wanted to expand, but he still kept holding on.
He remembers the stories of dragons from Nedzu and his time with the commission. He did not want to test to see if his memory of the time he was experimented on was accurate or if they were lies to scare his students into a lifelong mistrust of the Hero Commission.
His lungs were in agony now, overriding the pain in his back and limbs. It was all-consuming and total – the surface was so far away now. There was only a vague sense of what was above there now. It all seemed so far away and strange, so distant.
His lungs were burning, and he wondered where everyone was. What they were doing, and how their day was. Aizawa had invited him and Bakugou on the mission only, so Izuku hoped Kacchan was so.
But it was Kacchan, so he would be perfect – Izuku hoped he wouldn’t cry. If there was one thing he wouldn’t bear to see was Kacchan crying. That was his thing. Kacchan was too strong to cry anyway. Izuku hoped Shouto would find Touya and would get out from his father and help his mother, sister and brothers.
It would have been nice to officially be Eri’s brother.
His lungs were all-consuming now. His friends were forgotten after the attempt to distract himself. It didn’t work and just made him want to cry. To add to the salty wasteland of the ocean. His own watery grave, this part of the sea, was too deep to collect anything very easily from the bottom, and he wouldn’t want his loved ones to see the corpse that would come from the pressure and animals of the deep ocean.
As his vision was threatening to buckle with his consciousness, his lungs suddenly gave away, and as he slipped into the dark, something dark choked out of his mouth. It contrasted against the sudden movement from the surface, the tightening of the water, and the sudden breakthrough. The shape was large, and even from down where Izuku was, he could still recognise the shape.
But that black was edging around his vision again as he choked and choked and choked. Each time the black thing pulsed around his, the swimmer grew more and more agitated and tried to get closer – the diving gear on their back became clearer and clearer.
Izuku thought it was strange that angels wore diving gear.
Izuku did not imagine drowning to be so warm, especially when the dark thing eventually covered his whole body, the arm of the angel reaching out and just missing his own. He blinked, and the world grew darker around him. He blinked again and again and
It felt easier and easier to breathe between one blink and the next. Each breath was sweet, and the air was clean. It took him a moment to realise he wasn’t breathing in water, nor was his mouth salty. His lungs hurt. His throat hurt. Everything ached in various ways.
It was a miracle he was breathing.
His brain was fuzzy enough to not immediately notice that he was still floating. The pressure was less crushing than it was, less oppressive below and above him, and the light was not a soft blue glow. Not in the same way. It had a different quality to it.
Like a white glow underneath a thick liquid.
It was fuzzy enough not to taste the air, smelling of something quiet and painless. His back was hurting under a layer of cotton, it was so far away, and he didn’t have to think about it now, just about floating, floating while breathing in water. It wasn’t water, but he couldn’t pinpoint what exactly he was breathing in.
Each breath was deep, slow and painful. His lungs felt like they had holes in them. It was harder to breathe than normal as if his throat had closed up from the salt. Why could he not taste salt, the taste had ingrained itself into his memory, and it was a surprise that his mouth was empty of flavour.
The air he was breathing in was heavier than normal, and it wasn’t normal to breathe when floating. Maybe he force activated a water breathing quirk. Even if that is basically impossible, no one in his family had any quirks to do with water, especially with his father having a fire-based quirk and his mother an air-based.
He slowly pulled back a layer of cloth from his mind as the indentation of the breathing mask made its way into his consciousness. So, he wasn’t breathing water. He reached up, fingers gently gracing against the tube that was connected to the outside.
Like his mind, he slowly peeled his eyelids back, slow and cotton filled, still expecting the sting of salt on his eyeballs, but the thick, see-through blue-tinged liquid did not sting. See-through, but his eyes were blurry, and the shapes around him were vague. The room seemed relatively empty. He was obviously in the corner of what appeared to be an office. A large wooden desk with an oversized chair sat in the middle of the room.
A large monitor sat on the oppressive table, but it was blank. The walls were relatively empty, just a few picture frames, which Izuku couldn’t clearly make out, and there were no windows. The door was facing the desk, and Izuku was in the corner the furthest from the door. He couldn’t hear anything from the door. Not that he could listen to anything over the sound of his own breathing and the bubbles.
God, how Izuku hated bubbles now. Every time he looked at one, a tight feeling blocked his airways. They were the only clear thing he could remember seeing in the sea.
He was in a tank. And if the fact that he did not panic or try to thrash about told him that he was drugged, he might have worried that he could not feel most of his body. The greatest bit of movement he could make was moving his arm to the tank glass.
He must have fallen asleep again because between one moment and the next, the light was taken up by a prominent figure blocking the light and staring down at his floating figure. Startling slightly, which sent a bolt of pain down his back, he shot backwards – his arms coming up to protect him. His face screwed up in pain. It must have shown on his face because the large man held his hand against the glass lightly.
“Your awake.” He said simply, in a voice so recognisable but where Izuku could not quite pinpoint. “We were almost too late there.”
Izuku thought he meant the drowning, but he was not quite sure. The image of the angel swimming down to get him was fresh in his mind.
“You really took a hit, didn’t you? The doctor had to reconstruct your back almost entirely. It’s a shame that the drug you were shot with had quirk suppression. The 5ths quirks might have meant that you definitely would be able to walk. Now it’s just,” It was All for One, All for One had put him in a tank and was fiddling with a toggle on the side that made the world spin and his body limp again, “a possibility. Only time will tell, bunny.”
His face moved close to the glass, and Izuku could see the freckles that mirrored his own, the beginning of the growth of the curls. Could see himself in everything that he didn’t in his mum. Only his dad called him bunny.
Izuku opened his mouth, a gasping grating noise coming out with a questioning tone.
“Don’t speak now. Your throat was damaged very badly by the salt. Almost ruined your voice box. That should be sorted out if you stay here for a while. One of the quirks I got recently produces a healing salve in a jelly-like substance. Although it won’t fix bones or many internal things. So, we had to resort to other methods. Like that girl that you heroes seem to so care for.”
One of his hands pushed against the tank wall in poor intimidation of an angry punch. He was incredibly weak and was drugged out of his mind. But All for One took it as an invitation to place his own more giant hand on top of Izuku’s.
“Now, I will let that delightful girl, Eri wasn’t it, heal you. But only when you give me One for All. Can’t have you run around with that stolen quirk, even though,” his voice took a humorous quality, “I don’t think you will be running around anywhere for a very long time.” The lead-in his limbs squeezed tears out of his eyes. It had all been a trap, All for One had taken Eri, and that villain they had tracked to that plane had just been a pawn. “Come on, bunny, don’t cry, for I am here, and there will be no getting away.”