Work Text:
The labyrinth was old and worn.
It was not old and worn the way that books were, like the feathering of well-loved pages, like the thinness of near-lace between thumb and forefinger. It was not old or worn the way that houses could be, full of floorboards that creaked under familiar footsteps, sun-warmed and dusty, and hinges that protested every turn.
It was old and worn the way that water was in the heat of summer, when it turned stagnant and black, when the murk grew thick and flies seethed over the heavy surface. It was old the way that the earth was old, the way that trees were old, their roots snaring deep in the thickness of soil. It was worn like the space between stars.
It was old and worn, and it still lived.
It had taken Izuku a little while to figure out that he was walking through a maze. He had, after all, been walking aimlessly through the park on his way home from work when his foot caught on some kind of root and sent him twisting down. And down, and down. There had been no reason to suspect a maze when he blinked away the fuzzy edges of shock and pain, the back of his head throbbing dully, only to find a cavern stretching up ahead of him.
No light to indicate where he fell through. Hard-packed earth at his back. And when he got gingerly to his feet and looked around, there were three twisting tunnels waiting for him, each one leading deeper into the dark.
He spent hours walking through dirt-walled tunnels, hours of feeling the floor shift loosely beneath his feet, keeping his hands on the walls only for them to move away from him like water. Every time he craned his neck to look behind him, the walls had moved again, blocking his view, offering him new tunnels, new pathways. He thought, at first, that he might have been misremembering, seeing things, making it all up in the confusion and panic, but it had gone on too long.
Eventually, he gave up on walking and slid down the nearest wall, sitting on the ground to catch his breath.
“Just a minute,” he said, although there was nobody around to hear him. “I just need a minute.”
What he needed was some answers.
“Think,” he said, pinching his eyes shut and rubbing his thumb over his bottom lip. “I was walking home from work. Nobody was acting suspiciously. I didn't see… but if they were using a Quirk, I might not have seen.”
Izuku had never quite mourned the loss of his Quirk as much as he did now. He loved his job, and his students, and the satisfaction that welled in his chest whenever they caught the spark of inspiration and did something truly brilliant with their training. He loved close dinners with Eri and Mirio and Aizawa, and the way the tension had eased from his mom’s shoulders over the years, the way her smiles came freely and warmly. And he loved that Yagi put his hand on Izuku’s shoulder every week, and squeezed it, and said how proud he was.
He didn't need a Quirk for any of that. It still ripped him apart some evenings, and he still turned the news off more frequently than he turned it on, and he still drifted away from his phone when all he wanted, really, was to talk to his friends. But he didn't need a Quirk to be content, to live a good life full of good people.
“It would be handy right now though,” he muttered.
His voice echoed back to him coldly.
Izuku snapped his eyes open and glanced around. It was hard to see in the dark, but something had changed. Every noise he made had a shadow that followed it; the wall at his back felt cold, harder than the rough earth he’d been leaning on. He touched his fingers to the surface and frowned.
Stone.
There was still dirt on his body from the fall, and his hair was a mess of dust and earth. But the walls of the maze had shifted impossibly, not just in size or location, but in density, in material, and before he knew it he was standing in a maze made of stone.
He inhaled sharply. It would have taken powerful Quirks to do something of this scale. He didn't know if he was being watched, if he had walked into a trap set specifically for him, but he didn't like the way the shadows shifted around. He thought he saw something flicker, like the brief shine of eyes in the dark.
He squared his shoulders and walked forward, and didn't talk for a little while.
The corridor he was in was only a foot taller than he was, and with both arms spread out beside him, he could easily touch both walls on either side. The stones were thick and heavy, all bonded together smoothly, with no cracks to pull at or gaps to reach through.
His fingernails were raw and aching from trying anyway.
Each step took him deeper and further into the maze, but there was no change in scenery. No blooming hedgerows or ears of corn to interrupt the endless, smooth stone, which was what he pictured when he thought of mazes.
Now, he was never going to imagine anything other than dark and stone.
The worst part was that there was no light. There was no sun peeking through cracks in the ceiling, no faint firelight to draw him further in.
But the walls themselves seemed to have a glow. A strangely earthy colour, like moonlight on freshly-dug soil. It gleamed faintly on every wall, giving them a slick look. It wasn’t enough light to properly see by, not enough to glimpse any further than a few steps ahead. But it stopped the panic from cresting in Izuku’s chest when each step he took simply led him further into the maze.
The battery on his phone was dead, but he kept it in his pocket, pressed loosely against his left thigh. It was unlikely he was going to find a charging point down here. His jacket was zipped tightly up to protect him from the sting of cold whenever a brisk, stale breeze came rushing up the corridors towards him, stirring his hair. He didn't know where the breeze was coming from, but it gave him hope that there was a way out down here, somewhere.
There were alcoves built into the ever-shifting walls. When the rumble of grinding stone filled the air and the floor began to tremble, the alcoves were the only safe space to stand. They were four feet high and curved at the top, and not nearly deep enough to provide the feeling of safety, only the fleeting reality of it. A bronze sconce was fitted to the wall inside every alcove; inside every alcove, the fire was dead, providing no light.
Izuku knelt in the alcove. His jeans were stiff and dark around his thighs and knees, old blood gluing the fibres to his torn skin. He was worried about infection. He was even more worried about surviving long enough for infection to set in.
The floor rippled. Cobblestones, each one the size of a fist and thick with moss, shuffled and turned in its place. Izuku squeezed his eyes shut, cramming himself further inside the alcove. The darkness behind his eyelids only made the noise of grinding stone and hollow banging louder.
And then it stopped.
Izuku didn't waste any time. He crawled out of the alcove and looked up. The ceiling was high enough to stand this time; he staggered upright and put his left hand out, feeling for the wall. It was slick with something wet and dark; darker than water, and warmer too. He didn't look. He kept his fingers pressed firmly to the wall and moved forward through the dark tunnels.
It felt like something was watching him, but he ignored that too.
He didn't feel hungry or thirsty and even though his body ached, even though his eyes were stinging with that gritty, sandpapered feeling, sleep refused to come. So he kept walking. He kept walking until that little ball of panic unfurled in his chest, and he had to sit on the cold stone floor again to keep it from breaking him.
He leaned against the wall again, closing his eyes. That stale, strange breeze crept up the corridor and stirred his hair. Izuku kept very still. He didn't want to think about why he kept still, but the question pulled at him, taunting him.
Because the truth was that it didn't feel like a cool summer breeze brushing over him, or a brisk wind playing with the ends of his scarf on his way to work. The air rose up to greet him and then ebbed away again, in a long, slow sweep, as though something very old and very worn had woken up, and was taking its very first breath in a long time.
As though it was breathing him in, inhaling his scent, savouring the very thought of him walking closer.
And he didn't want to think about that, so he closed his eyes and kept very still, and only walked on again when the very old, worn thing went back to sleep.
There was something in the next alcove. He almost didn’t see it, too busy cramming himself against the wall and preparing for the haze of shuffling stone, but a flash of white caught his eye before he could close it. He opened them again and stared. Hesitation was a constant friend down here, wariness close on its heels, but eventually he reached out and snatched the candle stub off the ledge it was melting against. It was barely bigger than his thumb. The wick was a curled hook, but it would still light. All he had to do was find something to light it with.
That was easier said than done. The tunnel, as though sensing that he’d gained some hope in the last few minutes, finished shifting.
When he opened his eyes, the world seemed darker, even lightless as it was. It took a moment to realise why, and when he did, a different sort of fear gripped him. His feet and hands felt cold.
The alcove had been partially blocked off; a sizable slab of stone covered the top two thirds of the entrance, almost sealing him inside it. There was a thin gap underneath it. It was just big enough for a body.
Izuku squeezed his eyes shut again and counted backwards in his head. It did nothing to ward off the panic, but it gave him time to think. It gave him time to put everything together in his head, to come to the only conclusion he could come to.
If he didn’t want to die in this alcove, with stone at his back and his sides, he was going to have to squeeze inside the gap.
“Only one way forward,” he whispered. Sometimes he thought that the only reason he was still moving through the labyrinth was because it wouldn’t ever let him turn around. It gave him options, crossroads, corners and stairs, but once he picked his path, he had no choice but to walk it.
Or crawl it.
Izuku jammed the candle stub inside his other jeans pocket. He shuffled forwards on his knees and put his hands flat against the stone slab blocking his path. It wasn’t a path; it was the ceiling of the labyrinth, come down to meet him. He crouched to peer through the gap underneath it. The ceiling sloped gently upwards, but so did the floor. The space between the two was about as thick as his body, with an inch or two left to breathe. His breath came short and fast, pulling painfully at his lungs. But he forced himself to slow down, to breathe deeper as he bent forward and crawled inside the tunnel.
Izuku wasn’t claustrophobic. But he didn’t think there was a person in the world who wouldn’t break when faced with this. The moment he shuffled forwards, the stone scraped against his back. He took a ragged breath. There was nothing ahead except more darkness, more space, more crushing stone. He shuffled forwards again, barely feeling the rough touch of stone against his knees, his knuckles.
At one point, the space narrowed so much that he found himself flat on his belly, dragging himself along like a snake, his fingers digging into rough stone. The press of stone all around him was heavy, like water, and the tightness in his chest refused to lift. He moved his elbow ever so slightly wrong; it clunked against the stone, and for a second, he froze. He was stuck. A horrible, awful, ragged whine came out of his mouth.
Izuku didn’t remember moving. He didn’t remember anything. All he knew was a great rushing sound in his ears, and before he knew it he was lying flat on his back on the floor, some distance away from the crawlspace. The echoes of his own panicked gasps knocked gently against the walls. Another whine wrenched itself from his throat. It twisted at the end, and turned into a strangled sob; eventually he let them out in ugly bursts of noise.
But he didn’t dare close his eyes, in case the walls came down to meet him when he did.
Izuku sat up slowly, taking stock. The floor had levelled out, and the ceiling arched away from him, barely visible in the gloom.
His hands were bleeding. One of his fingernails was broken, and the skin on his palms was raw, shredded. But he couldn’t feel it through the cloud of receding fear. He reached into his pocket and took out the candle stub, holding it at eye-level.
The tunnel had shrunk when he picked up the candle. Maybe that was how the maze worked. Maybe it waited until he had something good, and it twisted the whole world around him trying to take it away. Maybe it was a trade, a form of payment.
It wasn’t worth it, he decided. Not until it gave him light.
He got to his feet; in the corner of his eye, something flickered. Thicker than a shadow, almost as though part of the wall had moved. Or blinked. He swallowed around the lump in his throat and stumbled forward, always forward and down, where it was warmer and darker.
Izuku passed an alcove that had no back to it and stopped dead in his tracks. The wall had been eaten away by time, stone turning to dust at the edges of a large hole that ripped through the middle. He hesitated, and then stepped forward. He crouched down, hands flat against the stone, and peered through the moth-eaten gap.
At first, all he saw was darkness. But the darkness here was thinner; his eyes adjusted slowly, filling in the vast shape of the room, the wideness of it, the way it coned at the top into a delicate point. The scent of dust was thick and heavy, a blanket on the world that dampened all sound. Inside that thickness, there was a strange rattling sound.
Breathing.
Slow, laborious breathing. Izuku gripped the edge of the wall tightly and peered in, tilting his head up. The noise came from somewhere high in the room, strung up in the shadowy rafters. It hovered in the air, a vague shape, an impression of sound and space.
Back away, he thought. Go back down the corridor. Except the maze never let him turn back once he’d made a choice, and he’d chosen to look through the broken alcove; he slid his foot back a few inches, and the soft thunk of his heel hitting stone was like a match in the dark.
“Who are you?”
The voice was a rasp, a dry tongue against sandstone. It was a living thing. It was something that used to be alive. Izuku kept very silent and very still. The rattling noise grew deeper, more measured; long, careful breaths, taken by something that didn’t need to breathe any longer.
“What is your name?” the thing asked.
“Izuku,” he said, though it came out so quietly he might as well have not spoken. “I don’t know if I should… are you part of the labyrinth?”
Labyrinth. The word had come to him without meaning to, and it should have startled him. But instead it settled him; he could sense the rightness of it even as he registered his own confusion.
It wasn’t a maze. It was a labyrinth.
“Yes,” it said.
Izuku hesitated. He’d meant: are you another test, another crossroads, another choice that isn’t a choice? But the way the thing said the word gave him pause.
Are you part of the labyrinth? Yes.
Izuku looked over his shoulder. The corridor was dark and long and silent, as though it wanted to hear what the thing had to say. As though it, too, was curious.
“How did it happen?” Izuku asked, keeping his voice low. “How did you get like this?”
“I fell. I fell a long way. And then I walked for even longer.” The thing paused, as though it was thinking. “The more I walked, the more it ate at me. It kept eating, and eating, and eventually there was nothing left to eat, but I was still here.”
Izuku shuddered. He crouched a little lower in the alcove instinctively. A faint breeze touched the back of his neck: a sigh. This thing wasn’t a test or a trick; it was part of the labyrinth the way an organ was part of a body. It was a limb, half-severed, clinging on with vague twitches and spasms of usefulness. It was the breath left in the lungs, the blood left to stagnate and clot in still veins.
“Do you know a way out of here?” Izuku whispered. The answer seemed obvious, but he had to try. Maybe it knew, and had simply run out of time. “Can you tell me anything? Do you know how this place works?”
Another quiet, rattling breath. And then a soft click, as though something had unlocked. The hair prickled on the back of his neck, and Izuku tensed, shifting into a crouch.
“It can only eat one thing at a time,” the thing said dreamily.
Izuku didn't think. He whirled around, but the alcove had filled in silently while he spoke. Now there was nothing but a wall of stone waiting for him, and not even a crawlspace left to force himself through if he’d had the stomach for it. The rasping grew louder, and he knew he had no choice. He clambered through the broken alcove and darted across the room, clumsy with fear.
Above him, the strings and chains of stone holding the thing aloft snapped and unwound. It grew lower and lower, a spider descending from its web; he sprinted under it, and had a brief sensation of long, tangled limbs jerking senselessly above him, like fingers closing around him.
Bits of cloth and rock littered the ground. There were more candle stubs too. They littered the ground in circles, bits of wax spattering the dusty stone around them. He raced past them, climbing over degraded statues and strange misshapen bits of rock, weaving through it all as he combed the darkness for an exit.
There was nothing. The walls were smooth and unbroken. He scrambled for a handhold or a hinge, something that might help, but the room was as wide as it was tall, and there was nothing that indicated a door.
The thing in the rafters must have been sealed in. One way in, and one way out. It was almost to the ground now, still slithering through the air on one last tether. All Izuku could do was watch, hopelessly, as it touched the ground, and the tether slid away.
And then soft, amber light bloomed to life. The room filled with a warm, golden glow as one by one the candles sparked to life, each one housing a single shining flame. Circles upon circles of candles, all half-melted, some nothing but wick and some thick as pillars, all layered in dust and all fiercely glowing; all of them surrounding the monster.
And it was a monster. It let out a guttural sound and shied away as the light and warmth hit its skin, illuminating the awful shape of it. Its body was all wrong, elongated and thin, with long snarling fingers and a neck that drooped in a strange, stretched arch. One of the arms was entirely missing, but hanging from the socket were tendons and veins, each one grey as stone. Its flesh, too, was grey, and marbled all over with patches of rot and moss.
It didn't have a face. There was nothing but a smooth, strange oval of grey skin and mottled stone.
Izuku clamped a hand over his mouth and took a step back. The thing turned towards him and tried to walk forwards, but the candlelight grazed its skin, and it jerked back as though stung.
The thing hissed. It had no mouth, but it still bared its teeth like a struck cat. The light cast odd shadows over its smooth, featureless face. It was moth-eaten, degraded like the statues, but there was something distinctly flesh-and-bone about it.
It had been human. It lived, once. It lived, still.
“Think,” Izuku murmured to himself, crouching low. The thing stumbled about, backing away from the candles whenever the light touched its skin. It was trapped inside the circle.
But why did it need to be contained within the circle? It had been strung up. It had been sealed in. If there was only one alcove, if there truly was only one way in or out of this place, the candles posed no usefulness.
In a fit of strange desperation, Izuku fumbled in his pocket for the candle stub and tore it out. For a split second, nothing happened. And then the wick sputtered to life, casting a faint sphere of light over his pale hand.
The thing flinched. Izuku backed away slowly, his hand surprisingly steady. He felt strangely calm. His mind was working quickly, putting the pieces together.
The candles were there for the same reason the alcoves existed: to give someone else a feeling of safety.
Someone else had lined this room with candles. And then they knelt beside them and looked up at the monster strung up in the darkness. Izuku didn't have any other evidence, but he knew he was right. And most of the candles had melted, but some of them were new, standing tall beside their companions. They were all covered in dust, so likely whoever visited hadn’t done so since the alcove cracked open, but they still visited regularly enough to replace the candles.
And they must have had a way in. They must have had a way out.
The thing couldn’t leave the circle of candles. Izuku couldn’t bring himself to turn his back on it or drop the candle, but he shifted ever so slightly, keeping it in the corner of his eye as he walked across the room. He made careful progress, scanning each one, examining the floor intently, walking back and forth in rows until finally he stumbled across it.
There was a loose flagstone on the floor. Izuku knelt beside it and dug his fingers into the crevice; it pried loose easily, revealing a set of stone stairs. He had to put the candle down to heave it up. When he tossed the flagstone aside and looked back up, the monster was standing very still, its smooth face turned towards him.
It didn't speak. It only breathed harshly as he picked up the candle with cold, clumsy fingers, and dropped down into the stale darkness. Izuku cupped his hand around the guttering candle and tore down the staircase without looking back.
The staircase tumbled naturally into a stone passageway, and at the end of the passageway was another alcove. It pushed open when Izuku gave it a shove, sliding outwards on a silent hinge. It took all his effort to shove it closed again. When he finished forcing it shut, he came face to face with the thin, narrow shelf that he had found the candle stub on.
There was a ring of wax on the shelf, right where he had pried the candle loose the first time.
Izuku whipped around, heart in his throat, but the crawlspace was gone, and in its place was the same long corridor. He darted out of the alcove and sucked in a long, ragged breath. He didn't think he could stomach it a second time.
The candle in his grip sputtered, and he tensed. He wanted to keep the candle with him. The light it cast was minimal, but the thing in the alcove was still afraid of it. Once the candles died, there was nothing stopping it from following him.
But the labyrinth worked in odd ways. And there was always a price. He didn't think he would have been allowed to find the staircase at all if he wasn’t meant to put it back on the shelf.
“It was worth it,” he murmured.
The moment the candle touched the shelf, the light died. An ugly feeling bubbled up inside him, acidic and vile. He grit his teeth. But it had been so long down here in the dark, and now the first bit of light he’d had was gone. He sank to the floor and leaned back against the stone.
He’d let himself have a minute. Just a minute to feel the fear and the panic before he forced himself to keep moving.
“Worked it out yet?”
Izuku tensed. His face was buried in his knees, but he didn’t need to see; he knew that voice like the words were his own. But that wasn’t possible. Izuku had been walking alone when he fell into the labyrinth. He’d been on his way home to his mother’s cooking, bags laden with papers that needed grading, and his phone completely clear of notifications.
“Tch. Don’t ignore me.”
Izuku raised his head.
Katsuki looked real enough. His hair was a spiky mess, and his clothes were purposefully dishevelled, all of it artful and slovenly. There was a glint in his dark eyes. The gloom cast strange shadows over his face, over sharp cheekbones and soft, round ears.
Izuku knew better than to be relieved, but something welled up in his throat anyway.
“Kacchan,” he said, and then cleared his throat. “Figured out what?”
“Why you’re down here,” he said. “Why you can’t get out. Worked it out yet?”
Katsuki turned his head, and Izuku’s stomach rolled. The strange shadows on his face weren’t shadows at all; the darker patches of skin didn’t alter with the light when he turned his head. They stayed still and dark, as though the skin had turned to stone.
Either he was a hallucination, brought on by fear and stress and sleeplessness, or he was part of the labyrinth too. Izuku was willing to bet it was the latter. It accounted for the flickering shadows he’d seen, for the eyes he thought he’d seen peered out of the walls in the corner of his vision.
But he was the kindest thing in the world right now.
“That thing in the alcove,” Izuku said. “It said the labyrinth kept eating away at it. Is that it? Is it still… hungry?”
“Most things are,” Katsuki said, shrugging. “That’s how it was built. It had to be hungry, or it might’ve let the monster out.”
“What happens if there’s no monster?” Izuku asked. “If there’s nothing to feed off of, does the labyrinth stop working?”
Even the kindest thing in the world had its limits. Izuku flinched back as Katsuki melted into the stone floor, gone between one blink and the next. He heard something shift behind him in the walls, and scrambled to his feet. The long corridor stretched ahead of him, and at the end were two passages branching off.
He didn't think it mattered at this point which path he chose. But he still made himself walk forward.
It was only a matter of time until it found him. He didn't know how many hours it had been, but eventually, Izuku turned a corner and wasn’t terribly surprised when something turned around at the end of it. All the hair on his arms rose up.
It was the thing from the broken alcove. It was too dark to see most of its body, but its face had the same unearthly sheen as the walls.
“It can only eat one thing at a time,” the thing said.
It didn't have a mouth, but it was smiling. It didn't have eyes or a nose either, but he could feel its stare, and how it scented him out. Its face was smoothed over, mottled and chipped in places. It spoke in the same dry, rasping voice as before, but there was a little more hunger in it, a little more life.
“Wait!” Izuku stumbled backwards, scrambling to keep hold of the wall. “Like you said, it can only eat one thing at a time. If you kill me, it’ll go right back to eating you.”
“You go into my grave, and I go out into the world,” the thing said, with such longing it made him sick. “I will string you up like a puppet, and it will feast on you until it finally feels full.”
Izuku turned on his heel and ran. He didn't have his Quirk, but his mind still worked, ticking endlessly even as he sprinted down the corridor. He didn't care about the dark, or the blood-soaked stone, or the way his body burned. Rattling gasps followed him; the thing loped along behind him, enjoying the chase.
He wheeled around a corner, and through the gloom he saw two archways. Through one archway he glimpsed another long, dark stone corridor, lined with alcoves. And through the other archway, dimly lit by a single burning sconce, was a set of narrow stairs, leading up out of the dark.
Izuku’s heart turned over in his chest, but he didn't hesitate; he threw himself down the corridor lined with alcoves.
The thing behind him laughed, long and low, and slowed its pace. He had missed his chance to evade it, and the thing knew that. There was no need to hurry.
The corridor stretched on endlessly. Izuku had part of a plan, but he didn't want to think too hard about it in case the walls were listening. If his hunch was wrong, he was going to die, and there was no two ways about it. He raced through the darkness, dragging his hands along the walls. He didn't slow down. He couldn’t afford to. He needed enough distance between him and the thing prowling along behind him, enough time to get away when the inevitable happened, when the labyrinth did what it always did and…
Moved.
The labyrinth stirred. The stone beneath his feet began to rumble and grind, as though great gears were being wound and unwound under his feet. The first alcove was too close. The thing would follow him in and he’d be trapped there with it until the labyrinth finished changing.
Izuku fell into a dead sprint, his feet slamming against the ground so hard it sent shocks of pain rocketing up his shins. He could hear the thing behind him lumbering closer, faster, snarling and reaching for him, as though it sensed Izuku’s plan. He shot past alcove after alcove, panic thrumming in his chest, the world blurring at the edges.
He needed the right one. He needed to time it perfectly.
The foul, rattling breath touched the back of his neck.
He caught a flash of shadow in his peripheral vision; the stone version of Katsuki watched indifferently as he raced past, its eyes glinting strangely in the dark. Izuku’s heart slammed against his chest. He didn't hesitate. He dived towards the nearest alcove just as the walls around him began to ripple, the stones shifting like snakeskin under sunlight.
But the thing was faster than Izuku expected. It shot forward and snared his ankle as he dived forward. He pitched forward with a cry and landed hard on his elbows, brought down by the unexpected weight. Its grip was firm, like an iron manacle around his left foot, right above the tongue of his shoe. It laughed, loud and rasping, and said, “I am part of the labyrinth. And now you will be too.”
It began to drag him. Izuku groped desperately at the lip of the alcove, trying to get a grip on the wall. He tried to call out for Katsuki, but he was nothing but a figment of desperation and stone. He called out anyway. He scrabbled at the floor with bruised, bloodied fingers, still sore from days of abuse. The thing only had one hand, but it held on with all its might, pulling him lazily along the floor.
And it was the laziness, the assuredness that it would win, that Izuku would succumb, that gave him a last rush of spiteful energy. He kicked out wildly with his other foot. The floor beneath them trembled; ahead, like a steady rainfall approaching across fields, he could see the cobblestones rolling, undulating like a tide. It would sweep him away. Part of him wanted to let it. The rest of him kicked out again.
The thing’s grip slid a little.
Adrenaline surged through him. Sharp nails dug into his ankle bone. He kicked and writhed; the fingers slid even further down, grasping at his shoe. The thing turned, growling. Izuku twisted onto his back and kicked hard. His shoe jerked halfway off, and then came loose. The weight fell away. Izuku scrambled backwards into the alcove and pressed himself as tightly against the wall as he could.
All went black, and all went silent as the thing in the dark took one last rattling breath, and was lost to the stones.
The alcoves, he thought vaguely, were shaped like headstones. He wondered if there was something rotting behind each one.
“No,” Katsuki said. “That was the only monster.”
Izuku’s heart was still a stuttering mess, but whatever energy he’d been gifted in the last few minutes had fled entirely. He leaned against the wall of the alcove and looked up. Katsuki stood in the alcove with his hands in his pockets, watching him with vague interest.
“I’ve been trying to think about what I know about labyrinths,” Izuku whispered. “Labyrinths were originally designed with one way out, a complicated pathway that only the designer knew. And there was usually a monster in the middle. They were prisons, not mazes.”
Katsuki stilled. Then, like the very walls around them, his features flickered and shifted, changing form. He looked briefly like someone Izuku would never know. He had a narrow, sharp face, and a clever look in his eye, but sadness had settled in the thin lines there. There was something old and worn about him, like a sun-bleached photograph, or a smudged, faded drawing.
“Are you part of the labyrinth?” Izuku said.
The man shook his head, and then tilted it. “In a way. I built this labyrinth a long time ago. I designed it, as you say. I used my Quirk to shape the stone, to make a thousand passageways under the dirt where I lived. I had a monster, you see. He haunted my house. And I wanted to keep the world safe from him. I never, ever wanted him to leave this place.”
“Something went wrong,” Izuku guessed, trying to sit up. He gave up quickly, too tired to move. “Was it when you tried to leave here?”
The man became Katsuki again, with stone skin and an intense indifference.
“No, and yeah. I kept coming back. Kept coming back to look at the monster, make sure it was still here. Stupid, really. The labyrinth can only eat one thing at a time, but sometimes that thing is a feeling, and sometimes me and the monster felt the same thing. It fed off my anger, my hate, all the things I didn't think it could feel. And suddenly that’s all I was. It was my Quirk, I think. Stone keeps things it likes. Echoes and stuff. But some of it was just me.”
Even the voice had changed, the way it spoke. It no longer sounded like an ancient entity. Izuku let his exhausted mind accept the difference, and only thought of Katsuki when he looked at the man. He didn't fully understand the story, but he understood the grief there, the old regret.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“The old monster’s dead,” Katsuki said, crouching in front of him. “You killed it. You didn't take the way out.”
“There was never a way out,” Izuku said. The labyrinth didn't offer something like that without a price. He might have reached the top of the stairs, but there would have been something worse waiting for him there, he was sure of it. The world was turning to silt and snow, greying out around the edges. He thought he might finally be tired enough to sleep. He leaned his head against the alcove; the stone was cool to the touch, and soft like dirt.
Katsuki hummed. “So you’re going to be the new monster, are you?”
“I don't know yet,” Izuku said. And then, in a moment of weakness: “Will you stay with me?”
If Katsuki replied, he didn't hear it. His eyes drifted closed. But if he’d held on a moment longer, he might have seen the way Katsuki hesitated, and something old and worn flickered to life in his eyes.
The labyrinth was old and worn. The one who made it was even more so.
For now, he wasn’t the labyrinth or the one who made it. He was Katsuki, and he had been asked to stay. Izuku’s thoughts were loud even as he slept against the alcove, his temple pressed against the wall. Everything bled into the stone, and the stone kept what it liked. The labyrinth rifled through it gently, and Katsuki was privy to it all. He saw flickers of a life well-lived, of lost power and found friends. He saw the boy he was named after, the boy Izuku saw when he looked at him.
He settled into a cross-legged position, facing away from the man slumped against the alcove. The labyrinth had not been built to protect the things inside it. It was built to keep something monstrous in, to douse it in dirt and stone and darkness, keep it hidden away.
But the monster was gone now. Izuku had killed it.
And maybe more than the monster had died.
Katsuki tilted his head back. There was warmth on his skin and dirt beneath him.
He held a hand up, marvelling at the way light fell across his fingers for the first time in a long time. He could feel it. Not like rocks growing warm under the sun, but the warmth of life, earned and lived-in.
The labyrinth would never really die. He had made sure of that when he built it. And it always needed a monster. But the monster was gone, and Izuku had killed it, and there was a price for everything.
Katsuki couldn’t stay with him, but he would become the monster for him. He would be the monster and the labyrinth and the man who made it. That was what the boy in Izuku’s thoughts would do; the stone kept what it liked, and Katsuki liked that well enough.
He waited until the stone finished fading. He waited until the dirt cavern opened up around them, and sunlight fell through the cracks above, and the noise of a quiet morning in the park filtered in from above. He waited until Izuku began to stir weakly, calling out for someone to help him, and then he stood and walked back into the winding roots of the labyrinth.