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Izuku didn't quite know why it started or what went through his head when he simply slid to the floor in the middle of his living room in the middle of a fairly normal day for little 11-year-old him.
He remembers being tired that day, painfully so. His shoulders ached and burned from the damaged flesh that Katsuki had left behind with his sparking palms. It had been dreadful outside and the downpour nearly threatened to sweep him away on his long walk home.
It was as he shut the front door and ripped off his soaking school clothes that he realized how little energy he truly had, gravity seemed to be dragging at his legs and just moving to put on dry clothes seemed to steal all the oxygen from his lungs.
Dragging himself back to the living room had been the chore and he had been halfway to the couch when he made the mistake of glancing down at the smooth clean wooden floors. Something weary pressed against his chest and invaded his ribs and briefly clouded his mind.
he was tired.
so instead of shuffling to the couch, which he knew held no comfort in its loneliness he simply wearily lowered himself to the floor and laid down.
It ached at first, his spine flattening out so his back lay flush against the floor. So different from his usual hunched-over posture which his mother always scolded him for, it burned and the contact made the tender skin of his shoulders twinge.
Then came relief.
The tingling in his spine lessened and the cold seemed to seep off the floor and into the burns and grounded him. The floor was solid underneath him all the way through, solid and cold and calming. It did not move when he moved, did not squish and condense under his weight like a couch might. It was unmoving, stable, and soothing.
Everything seemed a little better like this, staring up at the ceiling in the quiet of his house. allowing himself to simply exist like this, his lungs shuddered and he folded his hands over his stomach to feel himself breathe .
To feel himself exist.
His mother came home from work that evening to find him still lying on the floor. She had panicked at first, thinking he might've passed out or something terrible had happened, as was a mother's job to forever worry.
He squinted up at her as she stood over him, frowning but relieved to see him awake and responsive.
‘’Izuku, honey, why are you on the floor?’’ She questioned, which was quite a sensible question all things considered.
Izuku cleared his throat and breathed out a long suffering breath before willing words to form. ‘’Feels nice, I feel… better. now.’’ He whispered, voice cracking a bit from disuse and maybe the fact he might have been coming down with a cold from walking in the rain earlier.
her gaze softened, worried lines smoothing out pleasantly. He never did like to see her worried. ‘’Alright, if you say so, dear. Let me know if you need anything,’’ she said.
‘’okay...’’
‘’okay.’’
She never questioned it since.
-
He started doing it more often since that day, Midoriya Inko would come home from work to see her son lying unmoving on the floor every so often, besides the occasional blink and the deep rise and fall of his deep breathing.
She had never seen her son this relaxed before, so at peace with everything since he’d stopped bringing that Katsuki boy over. She had been worried about the things her son was not telling her as he started doing it more and more.
She had been home a few times when he’d decided to lay on the floor, she’d watched her son look at the smooth cheap wood flooring and sink as if the pressure of the world was crushing him. She saw the brief flash of pain and the twitch of his limbs before he settled down into that unnervingly calm stillness.
She watched as her son folded in on himself more and more.
Inko was conflicted, something was going on. It was a self-soothing behavior, a coping mechanism. She didn’t know for what , she knew her son had a hard time of it with his quirk status. Discrimination was not something she could fix, no matter how much she wished to.
But her son was a strong, bright boy and it hurt her seeing him like this. But she supposed there could have been worse ways for him to cope, she was glad he even was coping.
Even if she saw him on the floor more often than not, or how it became routine for her to carefully watch the floor as she came home to not accidentally step on Izuku.
And then it changed.
Her son had been 14 when he seemed to almost light up, he looked better, happier and walked less like gravity pulled at him harder than it did everyone else. He started requesting more food, special meals and he seemed to fill out better. He was still a gangly thing though, something the boy got from his father.
but despite being horridly gangly and admittedly short he did seem to be developing muscle, from what she suspected was training. and it was wonderful , her boy had something to do besides laying on the floor, he had an obvious goal and she hadn’t seen him this driven since he had been a little boy.
He had chatted about UA and a man named Toshi who trained him, showed her progress pictures of that one trash beach which he had apparently been cleaning up.
(she had been quick to buy him heavy duty gloves and a lot of disinfectant spray after that discovery)
Floor time, as they had dubbed it, seemed few and far between now. There had still been days when she found her son listlessly staring up at the ceiling but he seemed more… there now, as if it was just more of an old comfort than to really cope with anything. They had even gotten to the point of him occasionally having a conversation with her while he lay there.
Occasionally, when he was tired from a long day, frazzled or something seemed to have happened at school she watched her boy slide onto the floor and not move for a very… very long time. Like it was all briefly catching up to him.
But he was happy.
He was happy as he got into UA.
There was a slight hiccup with the USJ incident, but he bounced back. Nearly glowing with the fact that his sensei had felt well enough to attend classes again the next school day.
He was happy as he competed in the sports festival with that brilliant new quirk of his. He was happy.
And then the internships happened, that night he laid on the floor for hours after he had been discharged from the hospital.
The final exams had happened, she watched her son slink onto the floor bonelessly as she eyed the new bruise forming on his cheek.
The mall happened, her son lay down on the floor with a ring of morbid colours decorating the soft skin around his throat.
He was happy, as he went to summer camp.
She sat with him, in the hospital, and she held in her tears as she watched her son stare blankly at the cold linoleum floor with longing colouring every line of his body. The effort of holding himself back from sliding out of the bed, arms still broken and all and onto it had him nearly shaking.
Inko could do nothing to prevent her son from laying on the cold hard ground in the middle of the living room the day All Might retired.
She had never seen him cry when he laid down.
Today had seemed to be a first, a horrible, heartbreaking first.
Maybe Izuku was not happy, entirely, but UA seemed to lighten a load she never seemed to be able to. So she allowed her son to keep going to the school, and join his friends in the dorms.
It was only after she drove away from the UA campus and the new Heights Alliance dormitories did she realize she forgot to mention Izuku’s habit to anyone.
It’ll be fine.
-
Shouta Aizawa had been the partial guardian of these children for a total of two weeks and he was deeply regretting it. But no matter how grouchy or tired or irritated these children made him he still couldn’t help but feel his heart drop to the pit of his stomach when he got the message that something was wrong with Midoriya Izuku.
Now, this was nothing out of the ordinary usually. The kid was a trouble magnet through and through and Shouta had learned to take everything the universe throws at the kid in stride standing alongside him and his classmates to support them.
But considering that all 20 of his students should be safe and sound in the newly set up dorms nothing should be wrong. They should all be happy and healthy and under no threat whatsoever because that’s what the dorms were for .
So, with a worry that he will never admit to having he got up from where he sat in the teacher's lounge and calmly (read, hurriedly) strode out without a word to his fellow teachers who could practically feel the weird brand of calm worry Shouta seemed to possess ooze off of the man.
He kept his brisk pace all the way across campus, ignoring the quiet whirring of Nezu’s cameras following him. He had arrived at the dormitories not 5 minutes later, even taking his stupidly long legs in consideration, this was quite the feat.
He wasted no time knocking on the front door of the building, considering he also literally lived there and these were his students, and strode in. He took his shoes off at the ganken, because he remembers Midoriya having been weirdly insulted and disgusted at the man not having done that even if it was an emergency the first time Kaminari had set a toaster ablaze.
He doubted the boy wouldn’t be even now while having his own supposed emergency.
Shouta shuffled into the living space, eyes immediately spotting a few students either sitting on the couch or drifting around the space awkwardly. All of them having a disgruntled and worried expression on their face as they kept glancing at-
Midoriya.
He swore his heart nearly stopped in his ribcage, only to continue beating its normal rhythm upon rationalizing that the whole of his class would have been a lot more worried about the kid laying on the floor , if something was truly horribly wrong.
He stepped further into the space and towards where the green haired boy was laying in the middle of the room, back pressed firmly to the cold wooden planks and hands neatly folded over his stomach, said stomach rising evenly and deeply.
His expression was surprisingly relaxed and disconcertingly blank, the boy lay perfectly still, unnervingly so and stared at the ceiling blinking lazily up at it. This was not the boy Shouta had come to know in his classroom, Midoriya was like a constantly moving ball of energy and ideas, he tapped and twitched and was always moving and talking and muttering. His face was never not displaying something about what the boy was feeling.
The sight before him, compared to the image of the boy in his mind seemed to make something inside of him stir unpleasantly.
He glanced at the nearest classmate, Bakugo, who seemed to be hovering closest for some odd reason. ‘’What happened?’’ he asked, raising an expectant eyebrow at the perpetually angry boy.
‘’Fuck if i know, he’d been like this already when we came back from talking to Cementoss earlier. The damn nerd hasn’t said a thing.’’ The blonde explained, gesticulating wildly with the usual amount of petulance in his voice.
‘’Have you asked him anything?’’ As much as Shouta felt blessed by his class’ intelligence in tough situations, they were still teenagers with the social graces of a cat. They usually preferred leaving stuff like this, things that catch them off guard or didn’t seem too particularly urgent to him. Which was both a blessing and a curse.
Some of them shrugged, most of them shook their heads. ‘’We thought… he might just need some time. But it’s been two hours, and he hasn’t moved.’’
Two hours , Midoriya had been like this for two hours. And it was already getting quite late. Had he even eaten anything?
He frowned. The boy had no history with any sort of paralysis condition, and it can’t be a quirk since no one on campus had a paralysis quirk and Shinsou’s was more visible than this and he hasn’t been off campus because Nezu would have let him know.
So what–
focus .
He crouched down next to the kid, keeping his hands to himself. He didn’t know what this was, touching could just make it worse. He wouldn’t blame the kid if this was some sort of weird PTSD reaction, with the things they’d seen so far. Even if it did hurt his heart.
He cleared his throat, Midoriya didn’t react. ‘’Midoriya…’’ he tried his stern teacher voice, the kid always listened best when he did. The kid glanced at him finally. ‘’Why are you laying on the floor?’’
Let it be known that Shouta Aizawa was not the most tactful person.
The kid seemed to think that over for a few long moments, eventually dragging out a long sigh and a slow blink as he met his teacher's eyes. ‘’I’m tired.’’ The boy simply said before shrugging and continuing to stare back up at the ceiling.
Shouta blinked, and stood.
‘’Okay.’’ he breathed.
‘’Okay.’’ Midoriya echoed.
-
Midoriya had a weird sense of lingering deja vu as he blinked back to awareness, when the floor became a bit too stiff and cold and his muscles and bones started hurting in the way they never did before he went to UA. It was dark, the soft light of the night drifting through the windows of the common room as he sat up with a quiet groan.
He fought back the nausea of sitting up too suddenly, the way his head suddenly weighed a ton. He glanced at the clock, a sense of cold dread only making the nausea worse and he felt like he was going to throw up as he saw the fact that it was way past dorm curfew and Aizawa-sensei was going to kill him, and –
Someone cleared their throat and he jumped up, a brief flash of One for All’s brilliant lighting colouring the room in a sickly green light before his eyes landed on none other than his teacher himself, sitting gracefully on one of the common room couches with a mug of what he assumed to be coffee.
staring at him.
At where he had just been laying on the floor for god knows how long because it happened again and he was just so tired.
His mother had always seemed to just understand, since that first time. He had never had to explain himself to anyone because he was usually good at controlling the urge to simply slide down onto the floor but after two horribly overwhelming weeks at the dorms and the fact that he had been back earlier than his peers.
well-
he didn’t expect that he just… wouldn’t be able to get up when they did come back. His mom had never needed him to, he was just so used to being able to simply drift for as long as he needed. to have the ground comfort him.
He was staring at Aizawa, and Aizawa was staring back. They seemed to be locked in some sort of weird intimidating staring match. He had half the mind to just simply go back to laying on the floor and forgetting his problems but to his surprise the man seemed to blink first, slow and calm. Like a cat, a homeless looking, slightly sadistic cat.
The man simply patted the couch cushion beside him and Izuku had no choice but to awkwardly shuffle to sit where indicated, quietly shaking out his stiff limbs during the journey there. Aizawa had stood up the moment Izuku had sat down, muttering a quiet ‘stay’ before shuffling towards the kitchens.
Izuku tried not to let his thoughts run wild in the meantime, pulling on his fingers individually and massaging his wrecked and aching hands as his mother had showed him how to do. he wondered if he was in trouble, but Aizawa didn’t have that ‘you’re in trouble’ look in his eyes, and Izuku knew that look by heart at this point.
Not a moment too soon the man came back with two mugs clutched in his hands and a water bottle under one arm, sitting down not too far and not too close to Izuku before setting everything down and sliding a sweet smelling mug of tea and the water bottle over to the boy.
Izuku blinked, slightly perplexed before grabbing the bottle and nearly throwing the whole thing back in one go. Apparently he was thirsty. He grabbed the mug of tea next, leaning back and settling down similarly to how Aizawa does with his own bitter smelling mug.
The smell of coffee always did give Izuku a headache, but he could suck it up if it meant that Aizawa would be a tad more forgiving of him breaking the curfew so blatantly. He did recall hearing the others try and get him up and going, only to be shooed away.
By who-
He nearly groaned, a flush threatening to creep up and paint his skin a horrible red. Aizawa had told them to leave him alone, why.
why, why, why , why -
He wanted to just bash his head into the table now-
‘’--Midoriya?’’ He jerked, glancing at Aizawa who was blankly staring at him now. ‘’You with me, kid?’’
He wanted to squirm out of his skin at that, but nodded anyway.
‘’What was-’’
‘’I’m sorry’’ Izuku cut off his teacher, biting his tongue quite literally after he did. ‘’I'm so- just– ughhhhh’’ He had to put his mug on the table to cover his face in his hands and slid down the couch a bit, wanting to sink into it and hide from the world.
He glanced at Aizawa, who seemed slightly amused by his antics of all things and gosh- now Izuku really was blushing, hiding his face again and sinking even further down until nearly just his upper half was laying haphazardly on the couch while his legs bent awkwardly beneath him on the floor.
‘’Kid, you’re not in trouble over the curfew if that’s what all this is about. But you do have to understand I am kind of… concerned.’’ The man seemed to ponder his next words. ‘’You said you were tired, but you weren’t sleeping on the floor or anything. So what…’’ he trailed off, instead opting to lift an eyebrow at Izuku.
Izuku grimaced.
‘’I don’t know.’’
‘’You don’t know?’’
Izuku tried to open his mouth, to say something, excuse himself or maybe talk about it with his teacher but something gripped his throat painfully and stung at his eyes. He shot up on the couch sitting upright on the edge and making Aizawa shift back a bit, he grabbed his tea again.
.
He didn’t look back at his teacher, his throat aching and shame wriggling in his gut. He felt like if he did talk, hypothetically, he would cry. He didn’t know why though, all he was doing was laying on the floor, but he only really did it to cope, not confront whatever it is he was coping with.
Aizawa sighed, leaned back and sipped at his own mug for a bit, the only sound accompanying them the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall. Izuku could practically feel the mans black obsidian eyes rove over his skin, making it crawl and he had half the mind to ask him to stop looking at him -
‘’Talk it out’’ the man urged, and Izuku couldn’t help but scowl at the man who just rolled his eyes at him. ‘’Here, I'll start simple. I nearly had a heart attack finding you on the floor like that, your classmates nearly had heart attacks finding you on the floor like that. Not telling isn’t an option.’’
Well if that didn’t make Izuku feel guilty then he didn’t know what would, but words were hard, and he didn’t want to cry because he always cried. He hated crying, it always left him feeling light headed and sticky and sick and his eyes hurt and burned afterwards in a horribly unpleasant way. Plus, it was kind of embarrassing to start bawling in front of your teacher for lying on the floor.
‘’do you… do that often?’’ the man questioned, tilting his head and taking another sip. Izuku envied his teachers calm collectiveness, the way the man seemed to have a talent for neither provoking nor comforting and being endlessly patient when the situation called for it, even if the teacher did have a meanstreak.
Izuku nearly shuddered at the memory of the apprehension test, but instead he made a so-so motion to answer Aizawa's question only to be met with more expectant silence.
He sighed, ‘’I… It happens sometimes, since i was 11 or so i think. There isn’t– There’s nothing wrong . It doesn’t happen , I do it. It helps, y’know.’’ he lifted his gaze up towards Aizawa who stared at him with a light frown.
To Izuku’s great dismay, his teacher shook his head. ‘’I don’t think I do– know, I mean. I don’t know what you mean, Midoriya. Why does it help? With what does it help?’’ Izuku frowned at the man. ‘’Don’t give me that look, you’re being oddly cryptic with me and you know it.’’
‘’Alright, fine .’’ He tried not to choke on his words. ‘’I don’t really know, I just– it's nice. Sometimes I'm just… sad, and everything is so much at the same time and the floor is just. It doesn’t do anything, it's just a floor and it's cold and it's nice and it’s… grounding. I used to do it alot… before UA, when things were...’’ he paused, debating the amount of detail he should share. ‘’When things were more difficult for me. My mom always called it Floor time ‘n stuff and i can’t really… I need it. I can’t not do it, i’ve tried not to in open spaces but i though– and the others were still gone…’’
He sighed, taking a deep breath.
‘’Time just… kinda, goes away for a while. And then they came back and I just couldn’t move– or think! I was… I am still tired. So much has happened lately, The USJ, the sports festival– i mean just look at my hands!’’ He waved his crooked fingers in Aizawa’s face. ‘’Then there was Stain, and the final exams and Kacchan punched me which is so unfair! and then the summer camp and he was gone and All Might is gone . and now–’’
‘’I can’t even be at home… I can't just lay on the floor and people won’t just brush it off like my mom did that first time. And I'm sorry I scared you, I really am but gods I'm tired . I’m so, so, tired Aizawa-sensei. And if laying on the floor can give me any semblance of peace then… well– I’m not sorry for doing what I've always done to– to cope.’’
By the end of it he couldn’t help but be gasping for breath, face blotchy and eyes red and irritated with tears. His throat ached and his teeth buzzed and he was gripping his mug so tightly that it probably would’ve been shattered if Aizawa didn’t lean forwards to gently take it out of his hands then and there.
‘’I should’ve just gone to my room, but it felt like such a… chore. No one was around.’’
"Midoriya, listen to me.’’ The boy looked up through his bangs, wiping at his face with his sleeves and snuffling quietly. ‘’I know you and your classmates are struggling, in fact, there are multiple of your peers who see Hound Dog regularly. They’ve all got coping mechanisms, like how Sato cooks. But, coping isn’t solving. You’re not doing anything useful with the things you’re feeling while on the floor, and in all honesty you shouldn’t stop doing it, the problem is more… the fact that no one saw it coming. It isn’t really like you. But I suggest that maybe actually working through it might be a better strategy than literally stewing in it. All the things you’ve told me are concerning. ‘’
‘’The fact that you feel like this is concerning, Midoriya. The need to be on the floor just to deal with it so much that you can’t help it is concerning.’’
He says them as if those aren’t some kind of magical words.
Nobody ever really confronted why he was laying on the floor so much, his mother was simply content to let him stew in it all on his own. she never questioned it, she never called him out on it, and it festered. and no one– no one had acknowledged it before, Acknowledged him . acknowledged that there was something wrong , that there was a reason for everything he did.
‘’Wh-’’ He chokes, sniffs and coughs a couple of times. ‘’What do i do ?’’
‘’Well first of all- you’re going to tell your classmates to not mind it when you have your… Floor Time’’ it looked like it physically hurt the man to say and Izuku chuckled wetly. ‘’And secondly, you are most definitely going to be seeing a therapist. It doesn’t have to be hound dog, if you don’t want it to be you should speak to your mother about it considering it’d be outside school and get cleared for regular off-campus activities.’’
‘’But–’’
‘’No, I know you, kid. You’re smart enough to know this isn’t going to help forever, it's going to drag you down. It literally has been dragging you down, for a while at least. For gods’ sake kid you lie on the floor.’’ He scowls at Izuku, before the expression softened a bit. ‘’This’ll just happen more often if you don’t and it’ll spill out of you. and the next time it might be to your classmates and i know you don’t want that. It’s tough love, but you’ve dealt with far worse.’’
Silence.
Izuku sat there for a moment, he and his teacher simply sitting comfortably in the silence. He reached for his tea again and threw it back like it was something stronger. He winced at the overwhelming sweetness of the honey at the bottom of the mug before he stood and grabbed the mug Aizawa had set down on the table after finishing it.
he glanced at Aizawa, ‘’I– I’ll tell them. And I think… I'm gonna need some help. Soon. Maybe.’’
"definitely"
Izuku’s shoulders sagged and he rolled his eyes, padding off towards the kitchen to quickly put the dishes away before returning and walking past where Aizawa was still perched on the couch and towards the stairwell.
He paused.
‘’Thanks, Sensei.’’
‘’Just don’t scare me like that again and i’ll be happy, kid.’’
-
It happens more, definitely more times than he was proud of and he got rewarded for that fact with the occasional student accidentally stepping on him. He did talk with his mother about the therapy thing, she -predictably- cried and agreed to the therapy right away.
She also apologized , which had felt just as awful as it did the first time when he was 4 years old.
His classmates had been strangely okay with him just laying on the floor sometimes even if they did tend to chastise him afterwards about taking a shower because the floors aren’t that clean. Sometimes a few even joined him.
He’d talked with a therapist- not Hound Dog- and it felt… weird. He'd still rather just lay on the floor and sulk but the others seemed happy about him going and he couldn’t disappoint them. And sometimes it did feel nice, he had to admit.
And then he had met Eri, a wonderful little girl with big ruby red eyes that had seen too much and irritated skin that had felt agony unbefitting of a little girl as sweet as her. He’d thought of that when he had beat Chisaki five ways to Sunday with a grin on his face and when he had laid on the floor for hours afterwards with the knowledge that she was being cared for.
And now, as he sat on the grass on the UA campus, staring at her big smile as she recounted the dance he and his classmates had done for the festival. He felt no need to lay down, the ground did not attract his attention and it did not cling to his thoughts nor drag at his weary limbs. Instead he smiled with Eri and laughed with Mirio and bantered lightly with Aizawa who supervised a little ways off leaning against a tree.
He was happy.