Chapter Text
Izuku manifested his Quirk in- quite possibly- the dumbest way in the entire universe.
It could’ve been so cool. He could have gotten it while fighting an impossible villain, then suddenly conquering the foe because of it. It could have been when he was saving people from a collapsing building. But no. He had to be dumb and manifest it in the least cool way.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault but his. A combination of stubbornness, sleep deprivation, and unstable piles of trash at the dead of night is really not a good excuse. His own stupid teenage focus driven brain decided that it was time for unsupervised training at ass’o’clock in the morning and foolishly went to Dagobah Beach in search of those sweet sweet gains. Keep in mind, this was even after All Might had scolded him just the day before about pushing himself too hard after he had collapsed behind him on just a simple jog.
So, stupid as he was, he had decided to forgo All Might’s warning and started lugging trash around in the dead of morning, with barely any light to see by. To be fair, he would rather be doing something productive instead of just lying in bed, staring at the ceiling in hopes of catching even just a smidge of sleep. Alas, insomnia was a bitch. So, beach it was!
The sand in his shoes scratched at his feet as he ran down the steps in search of another heavy item to drag to the pavilion behind the beach. In the morning, All Might would come with his truck to take the trash and dispose of it properly. He’d probably have to load the junk into the bed of the truck as well. His breath came in short wheezes, lungs straining against the sudden midnight workout he imposed on them.
He knew he shouldn’t be out here. His body was screaming at him. But he just couldn’t bring himself to stop.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a fairly big appliance sticking out of the side of one of the more substantial piles of garbage. The pile itself was mostly bits of twisted metal and melted plastic, all formed together into a relatively structurally sound pillar.
That was his first mistake.
With the care of a toddler sticking a fork into an outlet or running straight into the road, Izuku approached the pile and yanked what looked like a microwave out with surprisingly little resistance.
And that was his second.
His only warning was the sound of groaning metal. Before he could even react, the pile of sharp metal collapsed. A gasp of surprise was all that left his mouth a split second before a dishwasher split open his skull. He didn’t even have time to feel the pain before everything went black.
The void was all that greeted him. There was nothing everywhere, on every side. He tried to look around to see, but he couldn’t even tell if his head was moving, the darkness stayed so absolute. In panic, he looked down at his body. Slight static in the black as he flapped his hands around was a minor comfort. It seemed that he still had a physical body in this strange, empty afterlife.
However, he was only aware of his body because of what his sight showed him. With increasing fear, he realized that he couldn’t feel his fingers, or the rest of his body for that matter. He tried to breathe but found nothing entering his non-existent lungs. No sounds or smells were present in the void, either that or he had also lost those senses as well. His sight was the only reminder of his existence whatsoever. Though it seemed futile given the nature of the all-encompassing black he found himself in.
As if to totally rebuke Izuku’s internal statement, a bright light started flickering from his left. He turned his face towards the light as it started growing larger.
Then, reminiscent of the rewinding of a super old film reel, the last few moments of Izuku’s life played out before him in reverse. Instead of being in first person perspective like he thought, interestingly, the film played from the third person. Which meant that the first thing he saw was his mutilated corpse crushed under a 200-pound dishwasher. Blood had been splattered everywhere across the sand- and oh my god, was that his brain?
Oh god.
All Might was supposed to meet him at the beach in the morning. All Might was going to wonder where he is and wander down those same steps and come across-
He’s going to- he going to see -
Desperately, he tried to grab at the film reel, his staticky hands grasping at the moment before he grabbed the microwave.
He jerked his hands away from the microwave with a gasp. Immediately, he fell down into the sand, every sense firing at once and causing pain to ricochet through his nerves. The waves of the ocean were deafening in his ears, the sand in his shoes rubbed against his skin, the light from the moon seared into his eyes, the taste of salt burned his tongue it pierced his nose his lungs it hurt it hurt it HURT-
He gasped for breath on the sand, trying to reign his senses back in from the overwhelming experience of just being able to feel again. Slowly, after what felt like hours but was probably just a few minutes, he finally regained control and was able to sit up.
He came face to face with the pile of metal, the microwave he had pulled out innocently sitting in the place it had been for all these years, ever since someone had dumped it in the first place. He raised his bleary eyes up to the top of the pile where he now realized a precariously balanced dishwasher sat, undisturbed.
The same dishwasher that had crushed him a few minutes earlier.
Although…it wasn’t earlier, was it? In fact, he mused, it technically didn’t even crush me at all.
With that revelation came another stunning realization that really should’ve come as soon as he had been basically resurrected.
“Oh my god,” Izuku gasped, standing up rapidly, making sand fly everywhere.
“Oh my god,” he repeated, staring down at his hands.
He remembered dying. He remembered standing in that void and seeing that reel show his last moments from the perspective of an outsider. He remembers grasping the reel the moment before he yanked the microwave, and then coming back to his body in that exact moment.
He stared at the dishwasher above him, mouth open. The very same dishwasher that he had seen crushing his body.
“I have a Quirk.”
And he got it because a dishwasher fell on him. So lame.
___O
The apartment was silent when he returned home, other than his mother’s soft snores. After thoroughly shaking out his shoes and pulling on his All Might slippers, Izuku retired to his room for the night. But before he went to sleep, he had one more thing to do.
He pulled out a blank notebook, the same kind that he wrote most of his hero analysis in. He clicked his pen (All Might themed of course) a couple times before deciding what to start with.
First, the basics.
Number One: his quirk activated after death. This was peculiar. In all of his time observing and learning about the quirks of heroes and other important people around the world, never once had the activation requirement for a quirk been literally dying. Surely such a quirk like that would be all over the news, even if it hadn’t been found out in Japan. He still remembers the story of that one kid from Singapore having his quirk activate after eating a pineapple of all things.
Unless, of course, someone hid it.
That thought made Izuku pause for a moment, his pen stilling on the page.
Everyone knew that he was quirkless. He had the toe joint to prove it. Kacchan, Mom, his teachers-
All Might.
When he met All Might for the first time, Izuku had explicitly told him that he was quirkless. But now, despite the medical proof that he was supposed to be quirkless, he miraculously had a quirk.
If he tells All Might about his quirk…what if the hero thinks that he was lying to him all along?
A shot of panic had Izuku’s heart racing, almost painfully so. He couldn’t let All Might know. He couldn’t let anybody know.
Besides, he tried to reason with his struggling heart, wouldn’t this kind of quirk be better if it was kept a secret anyways?
Taking a few deep breaths, he calmed the shaking in his hand and continued his analysis.
So, his quirk presumably activated on death, although it would be hard to test his theory without, y’know, dying. Hopefully he could activate it another way.
Number Two: the void place he found himself in.
When he had first registered his surroundings after dying, he had totally thought that he was in some sort of afterlife. And technically, he couldn’t rule that idea out quite yet until he had observed the place some more. For now, his working theory was that it was a sort of holding place for his consciousness while his quirk started to work.
In the void, he had no senses other than his sight. He could still move his strange, shadowy body, but he couldn’t feel the movement. It was pitch black until the moment the film reel started unspooling towards him.
That was his third point to consider. Obviously, the reel of film was the most prominent part of his quirk. The first thing to notice was the third person perspective that the film was in. It was almost as if his life was a movie or show being watched by an outsider, instead of just that first person view he knew. It was certainly weird, since the quirk was a part of him, so it should be only able to be seen from his perspective.
Next, the fact that the reel had shown his body after he had presumably died. A crushing death like the one he’d experienced is in most cases an instant death. So the fact that he was able to see his body quite a few seconds after made him wonder. Could he see into the future of the world where he died? Or is the tape only limited to the past and the next few seconds?
He wrote down his queries rapidly, hands flying across the page as he underlined the questions.
When he had grabbed the film, he had come back to the world in the exact moment that he had grabbed. This probably meant that whatever moment he grabbed in the void would bring him back to that exact moment. He wouldn’t be able to solidify the hypothesis without testing, though.
Lastly, he had to address the insurmountable pain he felt upon returning back to his body.
He honestly couldn’t think of a way to stop the pain from happening. The shock of it happening for the first time was definitely a factor into how bad it was, but the overwhelming feeling of all his nerves being shot back to life was definitely going to be a problem if Izuku was going to use this quirk in the future.
The only way he could think of preventing the pain from overwhelming him was to build up a tolerance.
Sighing in frustration, Izuku placed his pen down in the fold of his new notebook and rubbed at his weary eyes. He caught a glance of his alarm clock, the time shining a bright, red, 3:27 am.
He might as well sleep on it.
With one last glance at the words he had written, Izuku opened his desk drawer and gently placed the notebook inside. He quickly changed, then collapsed into his bed. Within moments, sleep pressed down on his eyes.
____O
Toshinori arrived at the cluttered beach a little earlier than usual, hoping to be there before his successor started his training for the day. Oftentimes, when Toshinori had got there, young Midoriya had already begun shifting the piles of trash. While the small boy’s eagerness to work and push himself was endearing, Toshinori was also worried about how much young Midoriya pushed himself. After the fiasco that was yesterday’s collapse, Toshinori had come early in order to give his successor the new workout regime he had brainstormed the night before.
So, he was disappointed, but certainly not surprised to see the substantial pile of wrecked appliances waiting for him at the top of the stairs leading to the beach.
With an exasperated sigh, he pulled his truck into park and stepped out to begin searching for green in the piles of twisting metal. A few minutes passed, but there was still no sign of young Midoriya, despite his shouts through the pillars of waste.
A glint of light reflected off of one of the piles, bringing Toshinori’s attention to the microwave half sticking out. A shiver of fear(?) made his shoulders shake, and he felt his eyes drag up to the dishwasher balanced precariously at the top of the pile. A weird sense of dread passed over him.
He changed into his muscle form and leapt before he could think twice about it. With swift hands, he plucked the dishwasher from the top and landed softly before placing it down near the base of the pillar.
With the way that was leaning, it could’ve fallen on young Midoriya when he started working on that pile! he thought.
But still, something unusual creeped down his spine.
The fear he had felt when first spotting the dishwasher was too pressing for it to be a simple concern of the dishwasher tipping. It was almost as if he had actually seen it fall. Or maybe the aftermath.
He walked back up the stairs after deflating and began to send a couple texts to young Midoriya asking where he was. After entering his truck once again, he gripped the steering wheel white knuckles.
Why had he felt déjà-vu?