Chapter Text
It’s 7:51pm, in a puddle-shallow bathtub, when he feels himself beginning to die.
The harbinger isn’t the crushing ache in his bandaged side, or the hiss of breaths through his single remaining lung. Those have been present since Yagi awoke in that hospital bed, tubes spilling from his broken body, staring in an anesthetized haze right past his tear-stained sidekick. Even when Sir Nighteye had revealed the horrors of his Foresight—that Yagi’s injuries were too grievous, that an even more gruesome attack was on the horizon, that his body just couldn’t take being the Symbol of Peace much longer—Yagi couldn’t feel a single drop of death anywhere in his blood. All For One had been defeated. Meanwhile, All Might could still stand. He could still fight. He could still protect, alive and well and smiling, even with Nighteye’s betrayal stirring in his chest and the red wildfire of pain rampaging through his side.
But here, suds melting from warm to icy as Nighteye gently bathes him with a lathered-up washcloth, the air thick with honey-soap scent and wordless dread, is where Yagi feels the very first pinprick of death.
“Mirai,” It’s all he can manage, eyes low, murmured to a bubble-speckled bathtub rim.
“You won’t be able to process solid food for a while,” Nighteye’s response, distant and clinical, echoes in his ears, “if at all. I’ll be handling your meals until the doctor advises otherwise. Based on what I’ve researched, I predict…”
Nighteye’s voice fades, and Yagi’s focus drifts to the man’s hands. Blue veins wind across the bony hills of Nighteye’s knuckles, life flowing over every peak and valley. There’s a callus on his middle finger from his constant scrawling with a pen, two freckles on his left wrist nearly close enough to become one. The slender fingers set the washcloth aside and dip into the shallow bath, cupping handfuls of water as tenderly as one would a baby bird. Yagi misses him already. His sidekick’s right there, alive and well, but Yagi may as well already be six feet under. He misses Mirai so badly it hurts.
Touch so gentle but voice so frigid, Nighteye pours each handful in small waterfalls down Yagi’s body. Yagi watches each tiny river of suds trickle into the water below, melting into haze.
“…All Might.”
Yagi looks up. Nighteye stands, bath towel in hand, All Might’s own iconic smile beaming back at him from the fabric. Yagi’s tired eyes trail the visage printed across the cloth, comic-bold and only half-familiar. The last of the bathwater drains in a burbling spiral at Yagi’s feet, nearly beyond his notice.
The nude man suppresses a groan of pain as he stands. Suppresses a wince as Nighteye dabs lightly at his bandaged torso. Suppresses a morbid joke about mummification as his sidekick wraps his entire shivering frame in the towel; Nighteye loves nothing more than comedy, but now just isn’t the time.
“All Might,” Nighteye says again, and Yagi’s distracted gaze finds his partner. “I already know you’re going to lie to me—”
“Well, that’s not very nice!”
“—But are you alright?”
And he can’t help what follows, the reflexive grin that’s more prominently burned into him than death, his response to every comment, every question, every concern.
He’s dying, yet he smiles like a man who intends to live forever.
Nighteye sighs before Yagi can get a word out. Holds up a hand for pause.
“It’s late,” he says simply. “Let’s blend you something to eat, then get some sleep.”
And with that, Nighteye leaves, and Yagi’s smile falls, bundling himself a bit tighter in the warm design of his towel. Stray tears of bathwater trickle down his calves. Condensation weeps down the steam-clouded bathroom mirror. Every surface around him mourns—mourns the dying hero cradled in the soft buffer of his own persona, too anxious to wipe aside the fog of the mirror and see someone different staring back.
Yagi looks to the ground. Pulls a deep breath into his one remaining lung. A rough cough tears through his chest, and he yanks an arm from the towel to press a hand against his mouth, nearly dropping his own smiling image onto the ground. The sensation that hits his palm is warm and sticky, and Yagi’s brows knit in confusion.
His hand falls. He peers down.
A garden of blood blooms in speckles across his palm.
It’s 8:14pm, hand outstretched, trembling in a towel adorned with the man he’ll never be again, that Toshinori Yagi feels himself beginning to die.