Work Text:
There was a fly buzzing around the room somewhere.
Midoriya wished he could blame his lack of concentration on it, but he knew that would be a little unfair. What else was a fly supposed to do but buzz?
Several times he had thought about getting up and trying to catch it under a glass so he could release it outside, but somehow that felt like too much effort for now. It was strange actually, he noted to himself, how heavy his legs felt.
He tapped the end of his pen against the top of his desk and tried once again to tune out the perpetual buzzing.
What was he doing again? That's right, homework.
He squinted down at the blank paper in front of him. White like the rest of the room. Homework for which class?
He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving his palm pressed against his forehead. It was so hard to think around all that buzzing.
He thought for a moment that he was thirsty, and then that his side ached. There was something more important for him to be doing right now that wasn't homework, but his mind felt almost as blank as the paper in front of him.
He thought about getting up and stretching, but he couldn't bring himself to move.
Head in hand, he sat there, staring at the blank paper and trying to ignore the fly.
There was a knock on his door which startled him into sitting upright. It was Nana.
She smiled warmly as the door swung open into the blank white bedroom.
“Good morning, Midoriya.” She said.
“Good morning,” Midoriya replied. There was something odd about her being here, but he couldn't quite remember what it was.
As she walked up to his desk, the room seemed to remember its missing details. The carpet took shape under her feet as behind her the wall and his bed and the window colored themselves in like cleaning the smudges off of glass.
“What are you doing here?” Midoriya asked as she came to a stop directly in front of him.
She didn't respond with words, but bent down and took the pen from Midoriya’s hand. With it, she wrote across the blank paper in front of him in bold, strong letters:
“WAKE UP”
Midoriya opened his eyes.
It was dark here, much darker than the room he had left Nana in. His side ached, and he realized he had been holding his breath for some reason. With a gasp, he drew air in to fill his empty lungs and immediately regretted it as pain stabbed through his entire torso. He groaned and tried to move, but his legs did not want to cooperate.
After a moment of shallow breaths with eyes screwed shut, his mind became conscious of the sounds around him. The buzzing from his dream was still here, but somewhere nearby, he could hear a child crying.
Midoriya gritted his teeth and took stock of his surroundings. Maybe he couldn't recall where he was and what he was doing before, but he knew what he needed to do right now.
Large pieces of rubble were scattered all around and over him.
Was it from a villain fight or a structural collapse?
Pinned beneath several chunks of concrete, he was unable to manage sitting up just then. He craned his neck around to try and locate the child as he called out softly.
“Hello? It's going to be alright, I'm going to save you.”
The crying paused just long enough he was reasonably sure the child had heard him.
“Are you hurt?” He continued. “Can you stand?”
“My mommy-” the child replied in a quivering voice. “I want my mommy!”
She lost her composure and resumed wailing again.
Midoriya set his teeth together. Had he come here alone? Was his hero partner buried under the rubble?
“It's alright!” He called out again, trying to comfort the child and buy himself time to form a plan.
He was still having trouble thinking straight around the buzzing, but now he knew it wasn't a fly and was more likely a side effect of concussion. His right arm was uninjured and completely free from the rubble. He could use it to Smash himself free, but it was too dark to get a good glimpse of his surroundings to know if it would cause a chain reaction and hurt the child.
There had to be a way out of this, if he could just-
Full Cowling surged across his body, the burst of energy temporarily shutting out the pain. He was definitely going to reunite that child with her mother.
The slab over his left arm was easy enough to shift with his 40%, but the precarious pile over the rest of him would be easy to topple if he tried forcing his way out. Dark tendrils, pulsing with energy and crackling green lightning that traced out their edges shot out from his knuckles, wrapping around the pieces still pinning his abdomen and legs like some kind of eldritch kraken. They had a name, Midoriya knew, but he couldn't quite remember what it was.
The tendrils helped push him up to his feet.
His side ached, but the child still needed to be saved.
From somewhere deeper in the building the sounds of explosions broke through the buzzing in his ears. At first he thought it was a result of his actions shifting the rubble on top of him, but it was coming from too far away. There was something important he needed to remember about explosions, but he couldn't think about that right now. He needed to focus.
With the tendrils making up for the lack of cooperation in his right leg, he limped in the direction he had heard the child.
She had stopped crying now, and was hiccuping piteously into her fists.
“It's alright,” Midoriya said gently, settling into a crouch opposite her.
The girl looked up, startled.
He knew this was the point where he was supposed to introduce himself, tell the girl his hero name to comfort the fear that was still filling her eyes. But he couldn't remember what it was.
“Deku-” she choked, “I thought you died!”
He wasn't sure what to say back to that. His mind was getting thick again and the buzzing was getting hard to ignore. His side ached.
“Deku?” The girl asked.
That wasn't good, she looked like she was going to cry again. He held out his arms to her.
“It's okay,” the words sounded slightly slurred, even to his ears. “Let's go find your mommy.”
She climbed into his arms willingly enough, but standing back up proved to be more of a challenge than he had anticipated. Even the support of the tendrils was little help. The edges of his vision grew fuzzed along with the buzzing in his head. If it weren't for the weight of the child in his arms, he was worried he might have forgotten what he was doing all together and just laid down to sleep.
“Can we go back up through the ceiling?” The girl asked, her voice small. “My mommy was up there.”
Midoriya swallowed the fuzz that had built in his mouth. He couldn't sleep just yet. He nodded, and willed himself to stand.
Clutching the child in his arms and using the tendrils more for support than his own legs, he turned around.
There was a woman there, standing on top of the rubble that Midoriya had previously been trapped underneath. She seemed startlingly out of place in her surroundings dressed in a black gown that was draped in lace and roses, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. It would have been impossible to see her in the gloom if she hadn't been standing directly underneath the hole in the ceiling.
“Is that your mother?” Midoriya asked dubiously.
The girl whimpered and turned her face into Midoriya's shoulder.
The woman took a step towards them. He couldn't tell if she was terrified or furious.
Something caught her attention and she paused, looking into the space behind Midoriya as her face curled into a snarl.
The air grew cold as ice raced across the ground, sweeping around Midoriya and the child and growing up to the ceiling, completely blocking out his view of the livid dark woman. From the other side of the wall of ice he could hear the same explosions from earlier, but he wasn't worried. They were rhythmic and controlled, and somehow made him feel more confident that they would win for sure.
But the girl still needed to be reunited with her mother. He didn't feel like he had the strength to break the ice wall down. He would have to go around.
“It's alright,” he mumbled into the girl's hair as he mustered himself to turn around once again.
“Deku…?”
There was another girl standing there. He felt like he knew her, but he couldn't quite place it around the buzzing. She looked like she had frozen midrun, her brown bangs plastered to one side of her face over a wound that had not quite yet stopped bleeding.
“You're hurt,” Midoriya said. He'd have to save her too, after he found the child's mother. He attempted to take another step forward, but his leg finally gave out underneath him.
He sank forwards, using the tendrils to slow his fall and make sure the little girl didn't get hurt.
“Deku!”
The girl ran forwards, catching both him and the child before they could hit the ground.
The buzzing grew louder. All he could see and hear and feel was buzzing. It fuzzed the corners of his vision and flooded down from his head and into his teeth, making his mouth too heavy to move. He felt like he was choking on the buzzing. His side ached and his eyelids drooped in spite of himself.
The last sounds he could hear over the buzzing were the rhythmic explosions from the other side of the ice wall, until that too was swallowed up by the blinding white noise in his head.
Midoriya opened his eyes.
He was in his room again and the window was open. It was a little chilly, but he was too comfortable to move and pull his blanket over himself. He stared up at the white ceiling. Wasn't he forgetting something?
He decided he should probably check his calendar to be sure, but that would also involve getting up, and he was so tired. His body ached.
He really needed to close that window- by now his side was so cold he could hardly feel it. It felt as white and non-existent as the rest of the room around him. That numbness had spread across his back and chest and down into his thigh. He tried to turn over, so at least it would be facing away from the window, but found he couldn't move his arms or legs. He frowned up at the ceiling. Maybe he would just take a nap then. He was very tired.
Without any warning, the woman from earlier came into his room.
She didn't knock, and he couldn't even remember her opening the door. She was just suddenly there.
Her black dress stood out from the white walls and floors with such contrast it hurt his eyes to look at, but he couldn't look away. Her skin was pale, and her eyes and lips were as red as the fabric roses that adorned her gown. The way the rubies in her necklace hung against her throat reminded Midoriya sickeningly of blood oozing from a puncture wound.
He couldn't move away or say anything as she came up close to his bedside and leaned over him.
She pulled the blanket up from the foot of the bed and drew it up to his chin. It stayed just as white and void-like as the rest of the room, even as it settled itself over Midoriya's body. This blanket brought no warmth.
“There now,” she said in a voice too low and sweet to be comforting. “Doesn't that feel better.”
The ache was gone, but so was all other sensation. He felt colder now than he had without the blanket.
His mouth was too full of fuzz to respond.
With careful and practiced deliberance, she moved around the bed, tucking in the edges of the blanket until it was wrapped tightly around him.
I want to wake up.
The thought crossed his mind, leaving him confused. Wasn't he already awake? What was he doing in bed at this time of day anyway?
“Why are you still awake?” The woman muttered, tracing one painted fingernail around the outside of his face.
“Did I not give you enough?”
Midoriya shuddered in response.
She smiled at him, showing canines that were unusually sharp, and bent down to pull the blanket up over his face. For a brief moment before the world went completely white, he was able to see All Might standing in the room behind her, wreathed in flame.
There was nothing here. Nothing to see, hear, feel, or touch. Only a void of half suffocated thoughts. It wasn't at all like the space inside One for All.
Vaguely, he could remember what it felt like to have arms and legs, but there was nothing there, no tangible sense of self, not even a form of pulsing mist in place of a body. Only the whiteness that had swallowed him whole, mind and body.
There was something important he was forgetting, and now was as good a time as any to try and remember. The only alternate option was falling asleep and something was telling him now was a bad time for that.
He had just decided it was probably a good idea to start with remembering his name, when something unexpectedly grew into the whiteness.
Space distorted to make room for a blindingly bright golden star that drew him towards it like some kind of black hole as it stripped away the white from his skin like crumpling sheets of paper.
Midoriya stumbled forward on patchwork legs and pulled the star close to his chest. It was so warm it hurt, but he held onto it nonetheless.
It pulsed with such a fiery hot fierceness it forced him to remember that he was alive.
The last strips of white peeled away and Midoriya opened his eyes to All Might, solid and warm and real. He was leaning over him, rhythmically pressing his chest and breathing warm air down his throat. It hurt, but it felt so much better than feeling nothing at all.
In the back space of his mind he noted that he wasn't breathing. That would explain why All Might seemed to be performing CPR. He decided he should probably help him out and take a breath in.
It burned, and immediately left him coughing against the daggers left in his lungs.
“Oh, thank goodness,” All Might said, his voice quivering and tense. He bent over, putting his forehead against Midoriya's chest.
Midoriya remembered what he had been doing last. He forced his cotton-laced tongue to speak.
“The little girl-”
“She's safe.” All Might lifted his golden head and placed a gentle hand on Midoriya's forearm. “She's outside with the police. They've contacted her parents, and are taking her to the hospital to check for injuries. You kids saved her. Well done.”
A tension he hadn't realized was there loosened in his chest.
“Black Widow has also been captured,” All Might continued in a quieter, yet firmer tone. “Did she sting you?”
Midoriya's hand went to his side. It still ached.
“I don't remember,” he said. There was a lot he didn't remember, now that he thought about it, now that he knew the child was safe.
“Young man, look at me,” All Might said sternly. There was an edge of fear in his voice. He reached out and turned Midoriya's head to face him. “You can't sleep just yet.”
Midoriya hadn't realized he had closed his eyes until they fluttered open to the concerned grimace on his mentor's face.
That wasn't good, he didn't want to worry All Might.
Another face appeared, hovering anxiously in the space above him opposite All Might. She looked kind, her face framed by brown bangs with rosy cheeks and bright eyes. She was worried too.
They were discussing something, but he couldn't quite understand what it was. He needed to get up and show them he was okay.
This didn't go as well as he had planned.
“I'm okay,” he mumbled as he made a great effort to sit up.
“No you aren't,” the girl replied. She caught him in her arms just as his strength gave out.
The weight in his arms and legs was gone. That relief felt good, but now that he had moved away from All Might the aching cold had started to creep back into his side. He was losing the corners of his vision again along with the return of the buzzing noise he was just plain sick of.
“Don't worry, All Might,” she said in a firm, decisive voice as she got to her feet. “I'll get him to the ambulance right away.”
She must be a hero, Midoriya thought.
The fuzz from earlier was making his head so *heavy* despite the weightless feeling that had taken him when she had picked him up.
All Might was standing now. They were talking, but he couldn't hear what they were saying over the ringing in his ears.
He turned Midoriya’s head to rest in the crook of the girl's arm, his hand lingering a moment in the tangle of dark green curls.
“Stay with us, young man,” he commanded.
All Might gave a nod to the hero girl, and she was off. She looked so brave and determined, racing through the crumbling building and soaring over large gaps in the concrete floors. She was so cool, he forgot that he was the one she was rescuing.
He wasn't sure at what point exactly his eyes had closed.
Yoichi greeted him warmly from the other side of the room with a wave of his hand. He was saying something, but Midoriya couldn't quite hear the words over the buzzing that had become so loud it shook the air.
He tried asking him to repeat it, but in doing so he realized he didn't have a mouth. He didn't have anything, now that he thought about it, only a consciousness floating in the void.
Yoichi seemed to understand Midoriya's plight. He stood up from his formless seat and strode across the space between them. The air quivered with each step he took until he stopped directly in front of Midoriya.
The buzzing was absent in the space that surrounded him, the harsh white of the void softened by the subtle glow emanating from the first wielder's form.
His hair parted, blown aside by some unseen wind to reveal his smile, both mischievous and kind.
He reached out his hand, and pressed one finger against Midoriya's forehead. When he spoke his voice sounded louder and clearer in Midoriya’s ears than even his own thoughts.
“Midoriya,” he said like a command, “Good morning.”
Midoriya peeled his eyes open in the back of an ambulance.
His breath misted against the oxygen mask over his face. The buzzing had finally cleared, and in its place he could hear the hum of the engine and assorted medical equipment.
Uraraka was holding his hand. She was talking in a soft, comforting voice, a perfect imitation of how Thirteen had instructed them in their rescue class. It was indeed effective at making a patient calm, he noted drowsily. He couldn't parse out the meaning behind her words, but just her voice was enough to set the tone of safety, even here in the back of an emergency vehicle. She really was a great hero.
He was so tired. As hard as he tried, he could hardly keep himself awake.
All Might had assured him the rescue mission was a success, so there was no reason to keep pushing anymore.
He closed his eyes on warm, comforting darkness, he fell asleep for the first time that afternoon.
“You know, it's a miracle you're still alive,” Todoroki said in his usual flat tone of voice. “According to the report, you're the first person to break out of the Black Widow's hallucinogenic poison.”
Uraraka was perched on the chair next to his bed, her chin resting on her knees. “Mind control quirks don't seem to work well on you, just like with Shinso's brainwashing,” she observed.
Midoriya hummed in agreement. There was an awkward tension in the air, and it wasn't caused exclusively by Bakugo sulking in the corner.
Uraraka fiddled with the end of her shoelace.
“I'm just glad you're okay. I was worried.”
“You shouldn't have gone off alone like that, idiot,” Bakugo chimed in. The cast around his left arm seemed like a chunky mockery of his grenadier bracers.
“I thought the nurse told you not to get out of bed?” Todoroki asked.
“Shut up!”
He pushed off the wall where he had been leaning trying to look like he didn't care, and stalked over to join the group around the bed.
“You're lucky we all were there, Deku. What were you doing walking straight towards the villain?!”
“I don't remember,” Midoriya said, looking down at the bandages on his own arm. “I can't remember anything that happened while her quirk was active.”
“It was scary, when we got down there,” Uraraka said into her knees. “You were holding the little girl, but you were too beat up to stand and blackwhip was all over the place helping you to walk. Then you fell to the ground and stopped breathing.”
Midoriya's mouth parted in distress. It was hard seeing his friend so upset.
“All Might came in, along with the rest of the backup,” Uraraka continued. “He got you to wake up, but I couldn't even get you to the ambulance before you stopped breathing again.”
She turned her head to rest her cheek against her knee. Her fingers went still and the shoelace she had been messing with dropped limply against her shoe.
Bakugo interrupted before Midoriya could reply.
“Why'd you go thinking you could win on your own, eh?!” he roared, punching his fist into the bed next to Midoriya's leg.
“I'm sorry everyone.” His grip clenched around the edge of his blanket. “Thank you for saving me. I'm sorry I worried you.”
Bakugo looked away with a scoffing noise, and Midoriya took that as his own way of accepting the apology.
Todoroki met his gaze with a softer look in his eyes than his usual expression.
“Just don't do it again,” he said.
They all looked up as All Might opened the door. He had a shopping bag looped over his arm and a grin on his face.
“I thought you kids might be hungry,” he said with a wave as he stepped into the room.
“We can all get something to eat together before I drive you three home. Midoriya,” he paused at the foot of the bed, “The doctor is wanting to keep an eye on you a little longer, in case any lingering symptoms of the Widow's quirk shows. If all goes well they will release you in the morning.”
“Alright,” Midoriya agreed with a bob of his head.
All Might arranged the contents of his shopping bag onto a table made of Midoriya's bed, and the five of them shared a meal of supermarket rice balls and canned tea.
Midoriya was still tired, but nothing was better than seeing his friends smiles again.