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Izuku paces back and forth, back and forth, like a tiger kept in a too-small cage, wild and angry, with everything in him poised and ready to snap.
The walls are not closing in on him. He thinks that that might be less cruel than the way that they remain still, silent, and suffocating.
He's only been here for three days- he's guesstimating on that one, because there's no real way of checking the time due to a lack of clocks or sunlight- and already he feels like he's going insane. He's not used to staying in one place for so long, not even so much as going outside, and he certainly isn't used to being alone for so long, either. Even in middle school, the rock bottom of his life before he was thrown in here, he wasn't so isolated. He'd spoken to people, and sure, it hadn't been friendly most of the time, but there were still other people.
Now, there's no one. He's stuck, alone, in a place that looks disturbingly similar to the Vault from the inside of One for All. The vestiges haven't spoken to him, either, and though he can still feel One for All, it's a faint echo of its real power, like he's trying to call on it from several rooms over. He suspects that there's some kind of quirk suppressant built into the walls, or else being laced into the food here- not that he has much of a choice other than to eat it, because the only other option would be dying of starvation.
The only productive thing that he can do right now is try to remember how exactly he got here.
The last thing that he remembers before the Vault is going to visit his mom. She'd called him very excitedly a few days before to tell him that his dad had just come back from America- which is an entire other bomb that he will defuse when he escapes- and the two of them had rushed to get him last-minute permission to leave the dorms for the coming weekend. He remembers the train ride, he remembers calling his mom when he was almost at the house, and he remembers ringing the doorbell.
He doesn't have the slightest idea if anybody even answered, because the moment he heard the chime, everything went dark and he woke up here.
Izuku resists the urge to punch the wall. It won't do anything, he's already knocked his shoe against it to try and test how thick it is, and found that he's probably either stuck between the four most fortified walls in Japan, or he is very, very far underground.
He also resists the urge to punch the television screen in the corner. It looks like an old-fashioned cathode ray screen, the kind he's- ironically- only ever seen on TV. There's no remote for it, and investigating the set itself reveals a lack of buttons or any type of control over the screen. He doubts that he can get any signal here, and thinks that that screen will probably be used by his captor to communicate with him remotely.
The only things that Izuku can do are try to remember, and wait.
The screen has been blank for ages.
Izuku is starting to doubt that anyone's going to use it. He's starting to doubt that anyone will contact him at all.
He's got no real way of tracking the time. He gets meals, they materialize on the table by means of some kind of quirk, but the time between them isn't consistent- he knows, he's sat there and counted the minutes, a second at a time, between each meal delivery. What's most insulting is that sometimes there's katsudon that he could swear tastes just like Mom's.
If he were to guess, he'd say that he's been here for over a week. In that time, there's been no contact, no noises from outside the Vault, and nothing from the vestiges. He can hear his own breathing, and he is constantly aware of his own heart beating in his chest. His hands shake more than they should, and he keeps thinking that he hears voices only to turn and see no one there.
He's heard of the effects of solitary confinement as a torture method. It drives people insane, they say. The effects can be permanent, they say. Hallucinations, aggression, a loss of touch with reality. He's having a harder and harder time keeping himself from throwing a good punch to the wall, just one, it can't hurt that bad and he's just so fucking pissed that he let himself get trapped like this-
No. Stop. This isn't his fault, it can't be his fault, Aizawa and Shouto would both be so mad at him if they heard him blaming himself.
He meditates. He does his regular exercise, and he meditates. One for All feels a little closer, but that could easily just be his imagination. He hears the vestiges whisper sometimes, only a few words at a time, but as much as he hates to admit it, that's more likely to be imagined than not. He's still sane enough to know that. Sanity's something that he needs to cling onto, now, something that needs to be coveted and held close to his chest as much as humanly possible.
He needs to stay sane, so that when the opportunity arises to escape, he can take it.
Izuku is lying on his back on the floor.
He stares at the ceiling, hoping that it will give him the answers that the rest of the Vault cannot. The screen is still blank, and sometimes he hears electrical humming coming from that corner but he isn't sure if it's real or not. He'll assume that it's not, just to be safe, just so he doesn't give himself false hope.
He wonders when the last time he spoke was. He mutters to himself, sure, and he's pretty sure that his ability to suppress it is going to be right back at square one when he gets out of here, but that's all under his breath. That's not actually using his voice, he knows that because one time he got strep throat and he couldn't talk but he could mutter fine and fucking hell, Izuku, keep your fucking thoughts together for two minutes. Not that he knows how long two minutes are anymore.
He clears his throat, and he says aloud, to the room, "Hi." Nobody says anything in response, not that he was expecting one. Wouldn't it have been funny if the screen thought he was talking to it and actually finally turned on? That would be hilarious, especially after all this time waiting.
The Vault is so quiet. The silence feels like it stings, but not really. It stings his brain more than anything else. He should talk more to fill the silence, maybe. He's missed music, though, maybe he should try singing something? He isn't sure of any lyrics to anything, but there's an old English song he remembers first hearing a long time ago, he doesn't remember the context, but it was long enough ago that his dad was still around and he thought that he wouldn't wind up quirkless and useless. He looked it up again a while ago, and decided that he still liked it.
It went something like this- "Mom," long and drawn-out, his voice cracking with the volume that he's not used to reaching anymore. "I'm tired," he is, he's so tired of this, there's something that's making him so tired of everything. "Can I sleep in your house tonight?" Oh what he'd give to leave here, to ask somebody, anybody else if he could crash at theirs and be not here.
"Mom," and here he's a little shakier on the lyrics, because it was a long time ago that he last heard it. "Is it alright, if I stay for a year or two?" That would be his hell, to stay here for a matter of years. It's been a matter of weeks already, he's sure of it, and he's staring at the ceiling and singing a song he doesn't remember the lyrics to just because there's nothing else to do and no one else to fill the silence with. He's probably gone off the deep end already.
"Mom," he nearly screams, ramping up but never hitting the point where anguished song becomes a wild and desperate scream, just like the singer from so very long ago. "Can you please come back, this once? And then we can forget, and I- I- " He stutters and cuts himself off, having entirely forgotten what comes next.
He waits for a moment or two, before asking the empty air, "Am I still young? Can I dream just a little more?"
He's not sure if he got all the words right. He probably didn't. He keeps his gaze steadily on the ceiling as he hears the faint sound of applause.
It's not real, he tells himself.
Izuku does not sing again.
Izuku's hair is almost to his shoulders.
He was already in need of a haircut before he got here, it was long enough to put in the world's least stable ponytail, but now it's long enough that he could put it up without trouble if he had anything to tie it with. It's fluffy when it's short, curly when it's a bit longer, and a nightmare anywhere past his ears. There are knots every time he runs his fingers through it, and sometimes he feels a prickling on the back of his neck; sometimes it's imaginary, and sometimes it's a clump of knotted hair that's fallen out.
There is nothing sharp here with which to cut it. There are no hairbrushes or rubber bands. It's just basic furniture, all bolted to the walls and the floor. He tried unscrewing the bolts by hand a couple of sleep cycles ago, but his fingers kept slipping on them. He still kept at it, for hours on end, until his thumbs and index fingers were bleeding from it.
When he woke up the next day- and he uses the term loosely, but what else is there?- they were completely healed. There wasn't a trace of any injury. It makes him wonder if that was real at all.
That's when he started injuring himself on purpose. Not for any kind of gain, not because he wants to, but because it keeps him sane in some perverse way. if he breaks his wrist, then he knows he broke his wrist, and then when he wakes up and it's gone he knows that someone else was here. Something changed. He knows that something isn't staying consistent, something is breaking the rules of what is real and what is not real and maybe the self-harm is driving him further from sanity, actually.
"You're an idiot, I hope you know that."
Izuku glances dully over. "Hi, Kacchan. I know, you've told me a thousand times." He mutters it, keeping his voice below any reasonable volume, but Kacchan hears him perfectly. That's how he knows this isn't real, because Kacchan can't hear Izuku's muttering clearly even with his hearing aids at the highest volume.
Kacchan rolls his eyes and scoffs. "Hurting yourself ain't doing shit, 'cause either you're breaking your own sense of reality or someone's healing you and breaking that for you. No winning with that."
Izuku sighs. That concept occurred to him a few moments before Kacchan arrived, another point to the this-isn't-real theory. "At least tell me I'm asleep so I can pretend to be a little saner than I actually am."
Kacchan gives him a deadpan stare, and responds, "You know I don't lie, Deku."
Izuku shrugs. "Worth a shot."
With that, he closes his eyes and lays back down on the bed. May as well sleep, if Kacchan's here. Nothing productive can happen when other people are here, because they're not real and if he sees things that aren't real then he's not sane and if he's not sane then he can't make sane plans or sane escape attempts or sane decisions. He's putting himself on probation, or whatever the term is for mental health thin ice. When Kacchan goes away next time he wakes up, he'll be sane and rational again. That's how it works.
"Your hair fucking sucks. Worse than usual, I mean."
Izuku shoves his face into the pillow, and bites out, "Nothing I can do about that, is there?"
"Sure there is. Just yank it out."
Izuku sits up. That doesn't sound like a half-bad idea, actually, because his hair is pissing him off and it's falling out anyway and he pulls on it enough when he's trying to think clearly so if he just yanks it all out at once then it'll be like a hard reset button. Probably.
No, wait, that's stupid, and he berates himself for even thinking about it. Never take advice from Kacchan, that's what he learned in here, because it's always bad. He flops back down, face-first, and distantly hears a "Worth a shot" from Kacchan in a weird echo of his earlier words.
Izuku just tries his best to go back to sleep.
The screen is showing static now.
Izuku knows that it's real, because it keeps showing static every time he looks away and then glances back at it. He even took a nap, just to be sure, and the static didn't go away like all his other hallucinations.
He watches it. He stares, and stares, and stares, barely aware of the fact that he's pretty sure he isn't even blinking anymore.
He hopes someone talks to him. He doesn't care who. Anyone would be better than no one. He doesn't care that whoever's coming on the TV is probably the same person who put him here, because they're willing to talk to him now. He's missed other people, he's missed it so much. He would talk to fucking All for One, even, because at least All for One is a real person.
"Son," says the TV, "I apologize for going so long without speaking to you. I needed to take care of an urgent matter, and I didn't want anybody to continue corrupting your mind with those Heroic ideals."
Izuku stares at the TV. He waits a beat, waits a little longer, and then says, "Prove that you're real. You're probably not, so whatever you say is bound to be funny."
He could be imagining having a weird and possessive and definitely-a-villain dad. Or talking to a villain who wants to convince him that they're totally his dad, definitely, let's just disconnect you from reality before you examine that claim any further, son.
Izuku might not be all there in the head anymore, but he wasn't born yesterday.
The TV waits a moment, and then says, in a strangely mournful tone, "It seems that I've miscalculated again. You're much more fragile than I anticipated, but don't worry. I can fix it. I can fix you, I will put you back together."
"That doesn't sound like proof!" Izuku chirps back in a sing-song tone. Oh well. Talking to himself is still just as fun as it always was. It's fine. At least the static is real, at least he has that going for him.
"Give me a moment. I'm going to bring you to the lab, and the Doctor will make sure that you've never seen the Vault before."
Izuku scoffs. "You're gonna make me forget all this? Fix me and then break me again? You're just gonna stick me back in here, but not as long, right? I might not know what's real, but I'm not stupid. Plus, I'm pretty sure my brain's physically rewired. They do that, I learned it in class."
The TV hesitates, and then says, "The Doctor will fix that too."
Izuku rolls his eyes, but doesn't argue. He just gets up and stretches his legs, turning his back on the TV. He's grown bored of this conversation. He hopes his brain will bring Kacchan back, he wants to yell with him about how stupid his brain is being.
He glances back to the TV, to see that it's still just static. It's silent, though, so at least it'll be easy to go to sleep and tell his brain to shuffle the cast of the Vault Time Variety Show.
Izuku paces back and forth, back and forth, like a tiger kept in a too-small cage, wild and angry, with everything in him poised and ready to snap.
He's only been here for three days, by his estimate, and he's got cabin fever combined with his frustration over not being able to remember anything about how he got here. There was the train ride, getting off at the platform, and then dialing Mom's number, but nothing after that.