Archive of Our Own ^beta

Life, thought Izuku, is going to be the death of me.

::

Truth be told, death had been circling him for years, edging closer with each season, and now Izuku could feel it pressing against the walls of his world. 

He could taste it in the grit-laden wind and smell it in the smoke-filled air. He could see it in the way he had to wipe the dirt off the table every time he wanted to sit down for a meal. The doors stayed closed, the windows too, but the dirt always found a way in. It trickled in, as insidious and relentless as time itself. It was telling them all that the great burial had begun, and a new slate of the planets crust was being wiped clean.

Izuku still brushed it off the table before he sat down to eat, and swept it off his porch with a broom every day. Rituals like these were what kept him alive. He sometimes wondered where he was finding the strength to go on. 

The year was 2097, and he had been alone for far too long.

The answer, he regularly concluded, lay in the force of habit. He’d gotten…used to living. Or maybe he’d fought too hard and too often when he was young, maybe he’d broken the gauge of his survival instinct. Maybe he’d pushed it too far and it remained stuck in the red, cranked up to max, even when the fight should have ended. 

He was a man who should have died with everyone else but hadn’t, not because of strength, but because he no longer knew how to stop surviving.

Izuku was different. Or maybe he wasn’t. His quirk was both his anchor and his poison. It had held him together through war and loss, saved him from wounds that should have ended him, granted him many scars that spoke of his battles, but denied him the slow mercy of age. Somehow, time had not touched him but spread to everything else in his life, and because it held him here, it would one day be the very thing that destroyed him.

That day was coming. Izuku could feel it in the air, as heavy and certain as the dust that covered the world. 

Death was near, and for him, it wouldn’t be kept waiting much longer.

The air smelled of iron.

Izuku was a stranger on this dying earth. The name of Hero Deku didn’t mean anything to anyone anymore. It was his own choice to drop from his pedestal as the next Symbol of Peace, and the most reasonable option too. The history books were now telling people the moon landing had never happened; so, heroes? Heroes were out of the question. If Izuku had stayed who he was, if he’d remained a living piece of Earth’s own history, he would’ve been terminated one way or the other. So he chose silence; he chose to retreat.

I know, I know, Izuku Midoriya never backs down!

But that was exactly the point…he wasn’t him anymore.

It was somewhat baffling how quickly people had forgotten him, when he used to feel like he could never shake off his shining, bigger-than-life persona, not in a million years.

But to tell the truth, he simply didn’t have any friends left. They were all gone, and he’d let Hero Deku tag along, so at least one little part of him could die, at least one little part of him could stay behind, with them.

​​Izuku had outlived all his friends. The ones who had once stood shoulder to shoulder with him, shouting their dreams into the storm, had been taken one by one.

Ochako died years down the road, her hands still reaching skyward as she held a collapsing city aloft long enough for the evacuees to escape. Shouto endured longer than most, his body aging but his fire burning stubbornly, until the strain of years finally silenced both flame and frost. Iida had disappeared soon afterwards, giving in to his instincts to run now that he wasn’t constantly being pestered into giving himself a break from work. Others went quietly, claimed not by villains but by time itself, smiling into the faces of grandchildren who would never know the wars their blood had fought.

Each loss carved into him until he was sure their absences went deeper than bone. He recited their names in the dark when the silence got that much louder. 

Everyone knew heroes rarely died in bed, and even when they did, it was only after carrying burdens that no ordinary soul could endure. 

Izuku alone had been denied that mercy.

Decade by decade, he remained, watching their monuments weather and crumble, their stories warp into half-remembered legends. And still, the world asked him to keep going.

Izuku sometimes wondered if his friends would’ve been able to curb the Earth’s slow decay. He could never know, but he could see that only a few years after the fall of heroes, the earth had begun to push humanity towards the exit, slowly but firmly, with all the sluggish stubbornness of a glacier ready to melt.  

The atmosphere was filling with nitrogen. Izuku’s crops were dying.

He was a farmer, like ninety percent of humanity now. It was still not enough. The food was lacking. The wheat had been the first to go, struck down by plagues that spread like wildfire; the corn would follow suit in a few years, undoubtedly. Izuku strove to keep his fields alive, so people could eat, so people could fight on for a bit longer. When Izuku felt lost and alone, he turned to the one thing that actually made him feel like he could still do something good for people. 

After his demotion as a hero, he’d gone back to the little town Class 1-A had been sent to one summer, Nabu Island. And like many of the people looking for peace, he decided that if he really was to tend crops till the day he died, this wouldn't be the worst place in the world. 

The first few months were tough, but after a while, even the memories learned to leave him alone.

Izuku had stayed friends with Tsuyu, Mirio, Eijiro, Denki, Mina, Sero, and everyone from class 1-A, till the day they all died. But he hadn’t married. He hadn’t had any kids. It was selfish, he supposed, and cowardly, but he couldn’t have imagined the thought of outliving them. He couldn’t have ever imagined having to watch them grow up and then grow old.

What he hadn’t imagined even more was…losing Kacchan first. 

Strangely, yet so predictably, it was Katsuki’s death that shattered him early in ways none of the others could. Out of everyone, Izuku thought Katsuki would be the one to survive, because hadn’t he always? Katsuki Bakugo was unstoppable. He was reckless and wild and untouchable, spitting in death’s face with every explosion, every challenge, and glorious roar of defiance that radiated from his very bones. Izuku thought he’d go on forever, burning until there was nothing left but smoke and ash, and still, somehow, he would rise from it. 

But…he didn’t.

On the battlefield against Shigaraki, Katsuki had given everything. In the middle of the intense chaos, when hope was slipping like sand through their fingers, Izuku finally saw him there. He heard the sickening silence where a heartbeat should have been. He saw the light flicker out of eyes that had always blazed hotter than any fire. And for a moment, he waited and waited for Katsuki to curse, to drag himself back up, to spit blood and snarl and prove the universe wrong again. 

But there was no roar this time, no clenched fists dragging him upright. Only stillness.

Izuku could still see it, too vividly to ever forget. Katsuki lying on the ground, his body twisted, his chest torn open, blood soaking the dirt beneath him. His one-of-a-kind All Might card, always kept in pristine condition and worn from years of being carried, lay beside him, smeared with blood, the image of their shared hero almost unrecognizable through the stains. 

Edgeshot had tried, god, he had tried, knitting himself into Katsuki’s broken chest, willing life back into him with every ounce of his own being. 

Izuku had clung to that desperate hope until the last second as the fight raged on, but even sacrifice wasn’t enough. 

By the time Izuku reached him, it was already too late.

And Shigaraki had laughed. Laughed as Izuku’s oldest friend, his fiercest rival, the light that had chased him forward since childhood, lay still and silent on the battlefield. The taunts cut deeper than the dust choking his lungs. Shigaraki said it was pointless, that even the brightest spark would gutter out eventually, that this was what came of clinging to the fragile idea of “heroes.” 

“How do you like my little present?”

Izuku wanted to tear Shiagaraki apart for that. He wanted to scream until the sound split the sky. 

Instead, he could only stare at the boy who had once pulled him up by the collar and told him to stop crying. The boy who had made him strong, simply by existing, and now he was gone.

Katsuki was the light. That was the truth Izuku realized as he knelt in the dirt, his hands trembling, blood and dust grinding into his palms. Katsuki had been the blazing fire that lit the path forward, the one he knew the others could follow until Izuku caught up. He had always trusted that no matter how dire things became, as long as Katsuki was there, there would be a way forward, a reason to keep fighting, because Katsuki Bakugo would never stop. It was his own determination that lit a spark in the rest of them. 

But this was the moment that light went out, and Izuku felt something inside him collapse with it.

He never got to see Kacchan grow old. That was the cruelest, most senseless wound of all. 

Katsuki would never have white hair, never sit across from him with softened edges and a laugh dulled by time. He would never live to see a quieter world, never allow himself the chance to be something other than fury and brilliance. Izuku had thought, foolishly, that they would grow into that future together. Even if it was messy. Even if they argued every step of the way. He thought there would be years, decades, of Katsuki beside him. Instead, all he had was the silence of a body that refused to move.

Now it was only Izuku who remained. 

Izuku, who could not die, was forced to carry the memory of the one person who had always been his mirror, his rival, his other half. 

It was bitter, unbearable irony that he, who had never asked for more time, was given eternity, while Katsuki, who burned with so much life, had it stolen. It was no surprise that immortality felt less like a gift and more like a punishment.

Each breath Izuku took after that day was weighted with the truth that he should not have been the one to keep breathing. Katsuki had always been more than his rival. He was his image of victory, the impossible standard Izuku’s been chasing since childhood. He was his oldest friend, even when friendship between them had been a jagged, broken thing. And most of all, Katsuki was his hero, the one who showed him, with every furious, inspiring act, what it meant to fight without fear. To lose him was to lose the center of it all.

Then when All Might fell…Izuku lost everything.

Now that he was truly alone, he stopped counting the seconds ticking away from his friends’ lives.

He was so tired of crying.

The years were blurring together. The days all looked the same. It made it easier. Izuku didn’t want to be near people, and didn’t want people to be near him. He was supposed to be dead and waited it out, patiently, like a person whose sun would simply not set.

One day it would, and on that day would come eternal night. Rest, maybe.

In the meantime, Izuku sat on his front porch and looked at his fields of dying corn that stretched out to the horizon. The messed-up atmosphere made for some pretty gorgeous sunsets. So much orange and yellow.

His mother had died of natural causes at the age of ninety-one years old. She had aged gracefully and kissed Izuku on the cheek before she passed, saying how proud of him she was. 

She’d left two words for him in her will, keep going. 

Izuku wanted to do her right by keeping his promise. But it was getting so much harder. 

He remembered her voice most of all these days, the gentle strength woven into every word she’d ever given him. His mother had always tried so hard to be brave for a boy who only wanted to save others, no matter the cost. Each battle scar he brought home had carved a new worry line into her face, yet she never once let him see her falter. She would smile through her fear, her hands trembling only when he wasn’t looking. Her tone was always soft, the way only a mother’s could be, carrying warmth even as her eyes brimmed with tears. She brushed his hair back, her hands lingering against his cheeks as if memorizing the shape of him.

“There will always be suffering in this world, Izuku. You can’t save everyone, but you can be the light that leads them forward. That is the gift of a true hero. It’s not just about the battle or glory, it’s the endless act of carrying others when they’ve lost the strength to stand. Even if your own legs shake, even if your heart is tired…you carry them. Because you can. And I know, my sweet boy, you will always find a way.”

Those words had lived in him for years, stitched carefully into the fabric of his long-forgotten childhood.

They’ve been his anchor, his compass, his reason to keep running even when his lungs burned and his body screamed for rest. They reminded him of the dream he once spent his entire life chasing, the one that shaped him into what he became. But now, Izuku wondered if those words hadn’t been a blessing at all, but a foreshadowing sentence.

Maybe this was his punishment to keep carrying, long after everyone else had fallen away, to stagger forward on legs that would never truly give out. 

Despite what anyone might say, immortality was no gift. It was the endless fulfillment of his mother’s lesson, twisted into something unbearably cruel.

Never did he think that the passing of time, the relief of eternal peace, would be the greatest gift for mankind…

Looking back at it now, he saw how the rising dawn of heroes in Japan had been frantic, desperate even, though none of them could truly ever predict such an outcome. They all had believed it eternal, because that’s what heroes did, they hoped for a better tomorrow and strived to make it so. Every news broadcast, every shining symbol painted across the skies, promised a forever kind of hope. But forever had burned itself out in a matter of years. The light they had built flickered, faltered, and then fell to ash at their feet.

The rise of more and more villains was probably the first sign.

It wasn’t just because of their their strength or numbers, but the way the world began listening to them. 

That was what unsettled Izuku the most; how their twisted voices had found fertile ground in the hearts of ordinary people. People like him, who once thought their dreams would amount to nothing. 

He knew, maybe better than anyone, that heroes have always been flawed, but there had been a time when their flaws made them human, forgivable, even relatable. Somewhere along the way, though, those cracks widened into chasms. Every mistake, failure, every life not saved became fuel for a fire that painted heroes as the enemy. And Izuku, despite everything he fought for, remained convinced to this day that it was his greatest failure. 

He could have stopped it, he told himself.

He should have seen it coming, the way minds were being poisoned and engineered, turned against them until even the innocent carried a hatred for heroes.

People died, one by one, not only to villains but to the erosion of hope.

With each grave filled, another piece of humanity’s faith in itself went with it. The last embers of belief in heroes sputtered out, leaving only cynicism and fear in their place.

But…maybe that was always the design of humanity, to create ideals so bright they seemed eternal, then abandon them once the shine faded. Heroes had once been their greatest symbol, a testament to what people could aspire to be. But in the end, even that was treated like something disposable, discarded not because it had failed, but simply because they could. What was once revered became suspect, mocked, and despised. Then with every passing year, the world seemed to lose more and more of its wonder, as though people themselves had grown weary of believing in anything at all.

Humanity simply couldn’t evolved with its world.

Quirks had rewritten the very fabric of existence, but the people wielding them clung to old fears and prejudices.

They stopped believing in themselves. 

The world of balance was shifting under their feet, demanding change, but humans had refused, and now they were paying the price.

When Izuku walked through the remnants of cities, he sometimes thought he could still hear the echo of what used to be. He could still imagine the cheers, the desperate cries for help, the promise that someone stronger would arrive in time. But the voices were long gone. The world stopped wanting heroes. No statues were built anymore, no capes fluttered against the skyline. Even the word itself had become bitter, spat out like a curse instead of a dream.

All that remained was silence, and the silence was louder than any villain’s laughter.

Much like the turning of the tide, Izuku wondered if the hollowness inside him was grief, or if grief had long since burned itself away, leaving nothing. Maybe it wasn’t emptiness at all. Maybe it was the absence of humanity itself, the void left behind when a world that once believed in hope decided it no longer needed it. He couldn’t tell if he was mourning or if he had simply forgotten how to feel at all.

The next day at the crack of dawn, he came back to the farm and got trapped in those dark thoughts.

Not today, something said in his mind.

He didn’t ask himself, why not? What the hell am I waiting for? because he’d been asking himself that same question for so long.

He was staying alive like this was purgatory, dragging his beating heart like a ball and chain, chasing the death his own hands wouldn’t grant him. Not today, as if there was still something to hold out for, when in truth death was already written all over the brown, dried-up earth. But he couldn’t kill himself. It would’ve been an insult to all the ones who’d died before their time, all the ones he hadn’t been able to save.

Izuku wished he could have been the next to go, but he knew he wouldn’t be. He knew the next would be the billions of people that remained on Earth, buried under the grit, choking on nitrogen, starved to death. 

Izuku’s only hope was that he could go with them. Be the last and close the door behind.

Surely, surely he’d earned that by now.

::

Izuku didn’t sleep much anymore, didn’t eat much either, selling almost the entirety of his production to the nearby town and people in need. Sometimes he wondered whether this wasn’t a subtle way of ending himself. He was slowly starving, he knew it; he looked gaunter every day, and his hunger was a constant, twisting ache in the pit of his stomach. But he still fed himself, regularly if not plentifully. He could still get by.

The sleepless nights, though, were piling up.

He wasn’t surprised to wake up in the middle of the night once again, but what surprised him was that something besides a nightmare had actually woken him up this time. There was a dull, thumping noise, like something falling down onto the hardwood floor. 

He listened, but there was nothing more.

Burglars? he wondered hazily, but it was a stupid thought. He had nothing of value except for the corn growing out front. Who even said burglars anymore? sheesh.

Izuku got up, lazily rubbing his eyes. Outside, the sky was gray and orange. The asthmatic wind had already wheezed a thin layer of dirt over the furniture again, and his shuffling feet left sweeping footprints across the floor when he walked to the stairs. 

He climbed down slowly, dragging his weight to the memorabilia room. He hadn’t been there in a while.

The shelves were full of books, old action figures, replicas, autographs, of proof that Izuku’s hero life had not been entirely imaginary. But it was more than that now.

The room had become a museum, a shrine to everything he had lost. There were uniforms folded with fraying seams, their colors dulled but still carrying the smell of smoke and sweat. His first hero costume was crumbled in a sad pile in the corner, patched and torn in places that told stories no one else remembered. His notebooks lined the shelves, thousands of pages covered in cramped handwriting, cataloging quirks and strategies for battles that no longer mattered.

Among the relics of his own career were the pieces of others.

Ochako’s wrist bracers, only half together, sat below the desk. Shouto’s white boots, torn and dirtied from the years, still smelled faintly of ash when Izuku picked them up, though he almost never let himself. A jagged, broken piece of Iida’s mask rested against a photo of Class 1-A, cracked right across his smiling face. He had Mina’s pink headphones. A sketch Tokoyami once drew of them all crammed together, shadows curling protectively around their group. Denki’s black and white jacket, still patched with electric burn marks. Eijiro’s tattered bandanna, folded neatly as if waiting for him to pick it up again. 

Izuku had pictures of everyone else, of their smiling faces and snapshots he captured when they thought he wasn’t looking; all souls now lost to time, all great heroes he once grew up beside. Little pieces of them, ordinary and extraordinary at once, were scattered around the room like fragments of a world that no longer existed.

Sitting on the highest shelf, wrapped carefully in a faded cloth, was Katsuki’s All Might card. 

It was the same one Izuku had found bloodied in the dirt beside his body, kept safe all these years despite every urge to bury it with him. 

Sometimes he hated himself for holding onto it. It felt like he had stolen something that should have gone into the ground, something that was never meant to be his. Other times, he stared at it for hours, daring it to give him something, anything, to remind him that Katsuki had been real, not just a pillar of strength on the battlefield or a scowling face trying to hide in their group pictures.

The weight of all their lives pressed down on him whenever he entered this room.

Izuku once thought that these objects were proof of their victories, of the lives they had built together. Now they were only proof of absence, proof that he had outlasted them all, and every memory worth treasuring had turned into a burden he could not put down.

At last, his gaze fell to a framed photograph tucked away at the back of the shelf, almost hidden by the clutter. It was old, edges yellowed and curling, the glass chipped at one corner. He reached for it carefully, as though afraid it might disintegrate in his hands. Two boys stared back at him from a summer long gone, it was himself and Katsuki, no more than six or seven, with dirt on their knees, sun in their hair, and sparks of ambition too big for their bodies. Katsuki’s grin was cocky even then, while Izuku’s smile was smaller, weaker but unguarded, his eyes fixed on the boy beside him.

Another place, another time…

Izuku stared at the picture for a long while, waiting for the rush of tears that used to come so easily. 

But nothing came.

His eyes were dry, his chest hollow. 

He already cried himself dry years ago, screamed himself hoarse in nights that never seemed to end. The ache hadn’t gone with the tears. It only sunk deeper, carving grooves into his heart like a river through stone, burying itself where no one could see but where he felt it every second of every day. The numbness was its own kind of agony; it was a silent echo of grief that never faded, only settled in layers, weight upon weight upon weight until he could hardly remember what it once felt like to breathe without it.

Looking at the old photograph, he couldn’t remember what it felt like to be that boy anymore, the one who believed in friendship, in dreams, in a future where they both stood tall as heroes side by side. 

He had lost that boy, just as surely as he had lost the one grinning at him from the picture. Still, he held the frame tighter, fingers trembling, because letting go of this last piece felt unthinkable. Katsuki had been his other half, his proof that he wasn’t alone. Without him, Izuku still walked forward, but the world had never been as bright.

Izuku stood there, still staring at the photo as he lost himself in the hollow silence of the room, until something new caught his eye. 

Across the mantle, above the fireplace he never used, the dust lay thick in an undisturbed sheet.

Or so he thought…

There, etched into the gray were numbers. Long, deliberate strokes, too clear to be accidents from his own passing hand. They cut across the mantle in a sequence of digits written by someone who had wanted them to be found when the time was right.

Izuku actually felt his eyes widen in surprise. He wished, for one desperate second, that they were meaningless scratches, the sort of marks time and dirt sometimes made by chance. But his mind wouldn’t let him pretend. His training had been carved into him too well to ignore.

Numbers like these only meant one thing.

Coordinates.

His pulse throbbed dully in his ears as he traced them with his eyes, committing them to memory before he could stop himself.

Slowly, as if afraid he might disturb whatever presence lingered in the room, Izuku looked up. His gaze swept the walls, the shelves of relics, the hollow helmets and tattered gloves, searching for something or someone. The old habits rose unbidden, the instinct to call out, to demand an answer. Katsuki’s name sat heavy on his tongue, but he clenched his teeth against it.

It was stupid. Katsuki was gone.

The mantle creaked faintly as the night wind rattled the old house. The picture frame above the fireplace wavered in the dim light. Two children grinned forever from inside that cracked glass, untouched by the years that had broken everything else.

Izuku’s throat tightened, making it hard to swallow. His body screamed at him to speak, to fill the suffocating silence, to call, to reach, to hope.

But the room was still, and cold, and empty.

There was no one here, there hasn’t been for almost thirty years.

His hand trembled as it curled into a fist. His eyes cut back towards the photograph one more time. The room seemed to lean in on him, shadows stretching longer with every breath he took, waiting. Slowly, he turned back to the numbers drawn in the dust. They hadn’t moved or faded. They just stared back at him, patient and merciless, as if daring him to look away.

Izuku swallowed hard and looked at the numbers again and again. 

::

He had to drive all night long, but all things considered, it was surprisingly not as far as he was expecting. The night sky was obscured by clouds of dust whistling through the air like banshees on the hunt. Izuku drove on through, hands gripping tightly to the steering wheel. 

For the first time in years, he could feel his own heart beating.

When the storm suddenly swelled and raged, Izuku had to park on the side of the road. There was more angry sand in the air now, pelting his windshield in a pouring rhythm, and he hoped the glass would hold; it was a very old truck. Maybe he should go back. This was never the plan, nothing more was supposed to happen before the end.

Suddenly, the radio turned on by itself, startling him. There was no music or announcers, just a cool, smooth voice Izuku thought he’d heard somewhere before.

“To smile in the face of danger,” it said, “is the greatest…”

The static cut out. 

His heart completely stopped before stumbling back into a regular pounding rhythm again. Izuku took a deep breath and carefully reached out to crank up the volume. There was only static in the midst of the storm.

“Who is this?” he asked in a shaky voice.

Then he thought to himself, wow, I’m really talking to my car.

Disbelief aside, only silence answered him, then another minute passed before he heard a ripple of sound as words began forming out of the static.

“To be a hero…is to endure. To endure when no one thanks you. To endure when no one even remembers you. To endure when the whole world has moved on without you.”

Izuku wasn’t sure he was breathing anymore. His hands clenched against the wheel until his knuckles whitened.

It suddenly occurred to him that he might simply be going crazy. But it felt unlikely. Why now? Why not twenty-three years earlier, when he had stumbled home from his friend’s funerals and stared at himself in the mirror before turning it against the wall? Why not in the dead quiet years when he had begged for any sound but his own breathing?

The voice went on, low and steady, threading into the storm like it had been waiting there all along. “You carry them still, don’t you? Their memory and voice. That is the burden. That is the gift. That is the price of your survival.”

Static swelled, swallowing the voice, then the radio died with a final crackle, and he watched as the dial needle fell limp.

Izuku frantically looked out the window, heart pounding; the sandstorm was still flaring at times, vivid and angry, lashing the road with dust and fire-colored light. But the words were echoing in his ears, louder than the wind, heavier than the dark.

He clenched his jaw, swerved the wheel, and got back on the road.

He drove for another hour, through swirling dirt and howling wind. It was his stubbornness against the storm’s, and eventually it all began to die out, coughing up blood-red bursts of sand at him before finally deflating and calming down. The skies themselves had cleared and Izuku could see a few stars twinkling in the darkness. He drove straight through the calmer night until he came across a huge dark shape that made him skid the car to a halt.

What he finally reached was a ten-foot-tall barbed wire fence, and a flat building outlined against the blackness of the night.

Izuku parked the truck and got out, slamming the door shut. The air tasted of iron like always. Gravel crunched under his feet when he walked towards the fence. It was tall and solid, but the very thought that this could be enough to stop him was almost laughable. He gathered his strength, and using blackwhip, latched onto the fence and propelled himself right up and over the top. He landed gracefully on his tiptoes, stayed in a crouch for a few moments, then got up without stumbling. 

For a second, nothing moved; then a violent light exploded in his face.

::

Izuku didn’t put up any resistance. He didn’t even know who or what he was dealing with, and this person hadn’t even put handcuffs on him or threatened him with anything more dangerous than a flashlight.

He realized, distantly, that he didn’t try to run or flee from this stranger because he no longer feared death. The thought didn’t scare him. It hadn’t for years. Death had stopped being a threat long ago; it was a promise denied to him, a door forever closed, no matter how many times he prayed to any gods that would listen. 

What could this stranger possibly take from him that time hadn’t already been stripped away?

The flashlight dipped, throwing the man into dim half-shadow.

He stood with a weary slouch, as if gravity clung harder to him than to anyone else. His shoulders were rounded forward, the thick coat hanging from them, heavy with use. The coat itself was a shapeless, ragged thing, mottled with stains, its seams unraveling and cuffs frayed into strands.

What little light reached his face carved him into angles, with high cheekbones drawn sharp under sallow skin. His jaw sagged with loose flesh, yet there was still a suggestion of strength in its shape, a remnant of a man who had once stood straighter. His hair, if it could still be called that, was a thinning gray, wiry tufts plastered to his scalp in uneven patches, some sticking up like brittle grass.

In the shifting glow of the flashlight, the contours of his features blurred between human and skeletal, the skin clinging too tightly in some places, too loose in others, as if time hadn’t decided which way to finish eroding him.

His hands, gripping the flashlight, were knotted and veined, the fingers bent slightly inward from age or old injury. They trembled faintly, with the restless energy of something that never stopped moving, even when the body begged to.

He looked as worn as Izuku felt, like someone who had outlived not just people, but entire worlds.

He didn’t speak either.

He simply turned, one leg dragging faintly behind the other, and began to walk. His gait was lopsided, uneven, but deliberate, the limp almost a rhythm in itself.

There was nothing hurried about him, no fear. Only inevitability.

Izuku followed without question. Curiosity alone was a leash.

The building swallowed them in damp darkness. The air inside reeked of rust and mold, tinged with that metallic taste that clung everywhere, like old blood leeching through stone. Water dripped from the ceiling in a steady rhythm, the sound echoing hollowly down the corridor. Stains tracked the walls in strange patterns, dark blooms spreading from pipes that had long since given up the fight against decay.

The floorboards and tiles beneath his boots groaned and cracked in protest with each step.

The flashlight cut through rooms of broken machinery and collapsed ceilings. Rusted metal hunched in the corners like forgotten sentinels, the smell of oxidized iron thick around them. Posters clung to the walls in scraps, peeling and illegible, but Izuku could just make out fragments of faded lettering, slogans of a world long dead.

And still, the man kept walking.

The deeper they went, the colder it became. Izuku could feel the chill sinking into his bones, and yet it stirred nothing but sharper awareness. His footsteps echoed softly, a counterpoint to the dragging shuffle ahead of him.

It struck him that the man hadn’t once looked back to check if he was being followed. 

It was almost as if he knew Izuku would. As if he’d been expecting him all along.

The man’s uneven shuffle carried them deeper into the bowels of the building. The flashlight beam wavered across peeling walls, over doors swollen shut with rot, across the skeletal frames of forgotten machines that hunched in corners like rusted carcasses. Each drip of water struck the floor with a hollow echo; each step forward felt like descending further into a place time itself had abandoned.

Finally, the darkness shifted.

Warmth bled along the floor ahead of them, a glow that moved as if alive, crawling over cracked tiles and damp concrete like a timid creature desperate to escape the shadows.

Izuku slowed, staring at where the light traced back to a large jagged hole in the wall, rough-edged and unnatural, probably cut open by hand. Beyond it, more lights flickered.

The man didn’t wait for him.

He passed through the opening with the same inevitability he had carried from the beginning, swallowed by the amber glow.

Izuku hesitated, because he still had some preservation left, then he followed suit and ducked through anyway.

Almost as quickly, he felt his steps pause as his chest swelled in shock. 

The room on the other side was small, but it radiated life. The walls had been patched together with uneven boards, nailed and sanded in a haphazard, stubborn care, forming a tiny apartment in the midst of an abandoned warehouse. Every surface bore the weight of time, with splintered edges, peeling varnish, fabric worn to threads. Bright carpet, threadbare but thick, covered the cold floor, soft underfoot. Strings of orange bulbs hung in loose, tangled lines from wall to wall, climbing toward the high rafters. Their light flickered across every surface, bathing the room in amber and turning dust motes into drifting stars.

Izuku’s eyes swept over the details. There was a stack of books sagging against the wall, their spines cracked but carefully aligned. A chipped mug sat perched on a shelf as though waiting for use; curtains stitched from mismatched cloth hanging over a doorway, frayed yet sturdy. 

It struck him harder than he expected.

For all his immortality, for all the time he had endured alone, he hasn’t felt this pang in years, the ache of watching a fragile light exist, purely, defiantly. His chest ached with a longing he didn’t know he still had. 

The man shuffled toward a small couch pressed against the far wall. Dust exploded as he lowered himself into the cushions, the fabric sighing in protest. He sank into it with practiced ritual, eyes lifting briefly to meet Izuku’s. He nodded, faint but insistent.

Izuku stepped closer to sit, almost sure his heart was hammering loud enough to hear. 

He realized, quietly, that even for someone who no longer feared death, there was still a hunger in him for life, and for the first time in decades, it seemed he had found it here, in this small, stubborn corner of a dying world with a stranger he hadn’t even spoken to.

The old man settled into the couch further after Izuku took a seat across from him, letting the glow of the orange bulbs wash over his worn features.

“My name is Katsuma Shimano,” he said finally, as if stating something simple and undeniable.

Izuku froze for a moment in surprise, and then, slowly, he offered the faintest nod.

“I—uh…I’m Izuku Midoriya,” he managed weakly. The words sounded foreign in the quiet room, and he thought to himself, this is the first stranger I’ve talked to in twenty-three years.

It’s true that Izuku spoke to a lot of people when it came to selling his corn, but it wasn’t the same. This felt too out of place, too real. It demanded a focus he simply didn’t have anymore. He was already beginning to feel overwhelmed, but he remembered the coordinates, remembered the smooth voice on the radio, and he took a deep breath.

The man suddenly sighed, a low, weary sound, and shook his head. “I’m well aware of who you are. Why do you think I invited you in?”

Izuku blinked at him, stunned, and the sentence hung between them like smoke no one dared to unsettle.

The man’s eyes softened, and he offered a small, sad smile.

Izuku hesitated, unsure of what that meant, but then the man’s expression shifted, an almost imperceptible sharpness cutting through the sadness. His gaze lingered on Izuku in a way that was heavy with recollection.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” 

Izuku’s brow furrowed in confusion. “I…don’t. Sorry.”

The man shook his head again, almost like he already knew, and leaned back into the cushions. “I was the little boy you saved on Nabu Island.”

Instantly, Izuku felt himself sit up straighter as the world around him seemed to tilt. “W-What?”

“It was so long ago, but sometimes I can still picture it as if it were yesterday. You remember the safety work program,” the man continued, “when UA Class 1-A was there. You protected the townspeople and my sister and me from the villain who tried to steal my quirk.”

Memories rushed back in an overwhelming tide. The sound of explosions echoes across the island. The flash of Kacchan charging into battle right beside him, fiery and reckless. The terrified faces of villagers huddled behind the shattered walls of a cave. And there, at the center of it all, the small boy, this old man now, clinging to his sister, eyes wide with fear and hope alike.

Izuku gasped and the world narrowed to the sensations of that long-ago day. 

He could feel the sting of sweat and blood, hear the frantic shouts of his classmates, smell the smoke and salt of the ocean. He remembered the way he had pressed himself forward, moving to shield them, to fight, to survive.

The memory pressed close to his heart, and he felt it piercing through the calm he’d built over decades. His knees weakened, his vision blurred. Without even realizing it, he began to cry. Silent at first, then with a shuddering gasp, as all the years of isolation, loss, and unyielding immortality poured out in one crushing release without his permission.

“I-I’m so sorry,” he stammered between sobs, words barely coherent, “I didn’t even recognize you…I…I can’t believe—”

The man’s smile never faltered. “It’s really no problem. You look exactly how I remembered you, Deku.”

The use of his hero name felt a lot like being stabbed in the chest. Izuku stared at him with watery eyes, so very lost. Deku. The name he had carried since his earliest, most innocent dreams, the name Kacchan had mocked him with, the name that had once meant hope, determination, and everything he had lost.

He never expected to hear it again. Not after twenty-three years alone, not after decades of silence, after surviving without anyone to remember him as he had once been. Now here it was, spoken by a stranger who lived through the same past, who survived the same storms, who actually remembered him.

The words should have been comforting.

Maybe to someone else, they could have been a lifeline, but for Izuku, they hurt more than any wound he ever suffered. Somehow, seeing this man alive and whole after all these years, realizing that the boy he once saved still lived, all of it came crashing down on him. Everything he had buried, everything he had tried to survive, all the losses he had stoically carried, the friends who had died, the endless, merciless march of time, all folded over him at once, suffocating and unbearable.

Izuku hung his head, letting the tears fall freely. 

Each sob tore through him like a fracture in time itself, echoing the loneliness of decades spent outliving everyone he loved.

The tears soaked his hands, dripping onto his knees. His chest heaved with the weight of memory, of laughter that had turned to silence, of faces that had vanished, of a world that had moved on while he remained.

Somewhere deep in him, a small, fragile spark stirred; one that remembered hope and the pursuit of life. But it was buried beneath the ache of what he had lost, the reminder that he had survived when so many had not. For the first time in a long time, Izuku allowed himself to collapse into it again, to let the grief wash over him in place of the cold numbness he’d been living with.

The man shifted slightly on the couch, his presence steady and unintrusive. He didn’t speak or rush him, but the quiet weight of acknowledgement wrapped around Izuku like a fragile cloak.

“I’m so sorry,” Izuku whispered again, broken and trembling. “How-how could I ever forget?”

“It’s alright,” the man said gently. “You’ve been through a lot, I’m sure. Honestly, I think I’m just glad I get to see you again.”

Izuku’s next breath was shaky as his hands curled into fists at his sides. The glow of the orange bulbs seemed impossibly bright, washing over him in a way that made him burn from the inside out with longing and relief at the same time. He finally lifted his gaze, seeing the man, this living memory of a past he had nearly buried, smile with quiet reassurance. Then Izuku finally saw him, that same boy who ran across the dock with his sister, yelling a promise to him that he would get strong and be a cool hero like them one day. 

“I want to be a hero who can save by winning, but you could be a hero who wins by saving people!"

Izuku remembered saying those exact words to the young boy who had looked at him with so much hope in his eyes. 

“God,” Izuku chuckled wetly, furiously wiping his eyes, “you’ve really grown up, huh?”

The man, Katsuma, shifted slightly on the couch, his own stooped shoulders trembling ever so subtly. He reached a hand across the small space between them, resting it gently on Izuku’s arm. The touch was light, almost fragile.

Izuku flinched slightly at the contact, his instincts screaming to pull back, to armor himself, but he didn’t. Instead, he willed himself not to break, willed himself to be strong, just as he had been all those years ago. 

But it was hard. God, it was so hard. Every ounce of control he had clung to for decades threatened to slip through his fingers. The warmth of the room, the familiarity of the voice he once forgot, the simple, human connection, the very thing he had been starved of for so long, suffocated him.

Izuku finally forced his body to straighten, willing the tears back.

“So, h-how have you been?” he asked, plastering on a smile that felt foreign on his own face. “And your sister, how is she?”

For a moment, Katsuma said nothing. Izuku noticed the way his shoulders tensed, how he retreated slightly, sinking into the opposite couch as if the weight of the years pressed down heavier than the cushions could hold. His posture folded inward, his hands gripping the edges as though bracing himself. Suddenly, he seemed a hundred years older, not the boy Izuku had once known, not even the worn man he had just shared memories with, but someone etched by sorrow far deeper than the decades should allow.

“My sister…Mahoro…passed away many years ago,” Katsuma said quietly, almost a whisper that barely carried across the room.

Another weight settled onto Izuku’s shoulders.

Grief layered atop grief, decades of isolation and loss now joined by the quiet passing of someone he hadn’t even met but had known through memory. He nodded slowly, wordless, understanding fully that anything he could say would be meaningless. 

There were no words for death anymore, only acknowledgment.

Katsuma shifted, righting himself, blinking away the faraway look in his eyes. The light of the bulbs caught the moisture there, but the movement was deliberate, controlled. He leaned forward slightly, curiosity and concern mixing in the lines of his face.

“Deku, how did you find this place?” he asked.

Izuku exhaled slowly, rubbing the back of his neck. “Someone…something…wrote the coordinates in the dust. In my own house.” He hesitated, knowing how it sounded. “I know it sounds crazy, but I also heard…” He closed his eyes for a second, feeling a strange, almost electrical sensation in his skin, restless, antsy, like the room itself pulsed against him. People weren’t good for him anymore; they made him feel too alive, reminded him of everything he had lost. “Something on the radio about…enduring as a hero, and carrying that burden.”

When he opened his eyes, Katsuma was staring at him, expression unreadable, until it flickered between awe and disbelief.

“Is something the matter?” Izuku asked cautiously.

“I-I ever thought…I didn’t think it would actually work,” Katsuma muttered, almost to himself. His hand flexed in his lap, then relaxed. He opened his mouth, paused, closed it again, the words catching somewhere in the decades between them. Finally, he looked at Izuku, face settling into the certainty of someone who had waited too long for this moment.

“Deku. Do you know why you’re here?”

Izuku shook his head slowly, feeling uncertainty coil in his gut.

Katsuma’s warm brown eyes bore into him. The amber glow of the lights flickered over the contours of his face, turning shadow to gold, and for a moment, the room seemed to be still entirely. Every sound, from the soft hum of bulbs to the faint creak of the floor and the distant drip of water outside, faded into insignificance.

Suddenly, Katsuma leaned forward, looked right at him, and said, “We’re here to send you home.”

::

Time was a cruel, cruel thing. 

It was a river that refused to follow any course he wished, a tide that pulled with equal force in every direction, leaving him stranded and utterly alone. It raced faster than light when he begged it to stop, moving in a relentless blur of moments he could neither hold nor savor, each one slipping past like smoke through his fingers. And yet, when he willed life to pass him by, when he begged for the numbness of nothingness, it crawled with the weight of decades, dragging its unseen feet through endless days and nights, stretching every second into an eternity of waiting.

Izuku had come to understand that time was not merely indifferent; it was his greatest adversary, tormentor, teacher, and executioner. 

It detained him, pinned him, kept him forever alive to watch the world unfold and decay while he remained unchanged. It mocked him with every heartbeat, every sunrise he could not age into, every friend whose life flickered and died before his own eyes.

After long enough, he couldn’t bear to attend any more funerals. 

The cruel joke that had become his life was inescapable. The years he had endured, the grief he had carried, were all lessons in futility. Time was his rival and he was bound to it, chained by the very essence of his quirk that he once begged the stars and moon for.

But, in nearly the exact same way, time was also his advisor, whispering lessons of patience and endurance, of strategy and foresight. It had given him clarity few could ever hope to claim, taught him the shape of loss and the intricate anatomy of sorrow.

Turns out, sadness had an imagination and every time he thought he’d hit the bottom, it went and built him a new basement.

Izuku’s lived long enough to see villains rise and fall, witness the fleeting brilliance of heroes and the quiet deaths of innocents, feel the agony of survival when everyone he loved had crumbled into dust. And through it all, time remained constant, unyielding, and merciless to him. It was a mirror reflecting not just what he had lost, but the unbroken, impossible thread of himself that endured beyond it all.

Sometimes Izuku really hated his own stubbornness and will to endure. Sometimes he wished he was weaker. Sometimes he wished he didn’t care at all. 

It was a paradox of never ending pain he couldn’t untangle or let go of.

Time was his enemy, but it was all he had. 

It mocked him, it educated him, it tormented him, it sustained him, and in that infinite, merciless expanse of nothingness, Izuku Midoriya realized what many would give their own lives to know. So here it is, the truth…immortality was complete bullshit. It was eternal damnation. It was the limit for how long the human mind could endure this pain of living before it eventually cracked. Izuku was almost certain he was nearing that limit. 

Right now, though, time was definitely messing with him. 

We’re here to send you home.

The room seemed to compress around him in an unkind way. The warm glow of the orange light bulbs no longer offered comfort; they shone against his skin, searing through the decades of numbness he had built around himself. His chest constricted enough that he felt like the air itself had thickened, refusing to enter his lungs.

Izuku blinked, then blinked some more, and the world blurred. Dust motes drifted lazily in the light, but they felt suspended, frozen, caught in the gravity of those strange words. He could hear his own heartbeat, loud and frantic, as though it had been waiting for this moment to freak out all his endless years.

Katsuma’s kind gaze didn’t waver. It held him in place, steady and unwavering, yet not without empathy. There was no mockery or condescension in his expression either. 

It was the same look that same little boy had given him all those years ago on Nabu Island, when Izuku had promised he would protect him.

Only now, he realized, the roles were reversed, and the promise was no longer a question of courage but of inevitability.

Izuku’s tired old knees ached, weak under him, despite the fact that he wasn’t even standing. He could suddenly feel every year like it was a physical thing laid about before him, those twenty-three endless, bleeding, immortal years, compressing him all at once. Every memory, loss, friend, and failure crowded in. Katsuki’s victorious roar, the haunting silence after his explosions, the faces of classmates and innocents Izuku could not save, their hope fading as they were lowered into the ground where the sun would never reach them again…all of it hammered against his skull.

His hands clenched into fists at his sides. He willed himself not to fall apart. 

Not now. Not here. Not in front of him. 

He could feel the tremor in his scarred fingers, the quiver in his jaw, but he held it back, digging deep into the same determination that had kept him alive for so long. 

Be strong. Be the hero you promised.

Katsuma shifted slightly on the couch, just enough for Izuku to see the faintest tremor along his jawline, the subtle sag of shoulders worn down by the years. He didn’t flinch away from Izuku’s intense gaze. Instead, he leaned back, relaxed fractionally, letting the weight of the moment pull tight between them. It was clear he’d been waiting for this. He prepared for this, and now he offered Izuku no false comforts.

But it didn’t seem real. 

Izuku tried to swallow, to speak, tried to anchor himself with words, but nothing came. The lump in his throat was heavier than he had ever known.

“You…you actually…” His voice cracked, each word tearing from him. “…you mean it, really?”

Katsuma’s lips curved slightly, sadly. “Yes.”

Izuku’s body threatened to buckle, his vision sharpened, then blurred again, and the past and present collided.

More tears spilled down his face, hot and bitter, dripping onto his ragged coat. He wanted to scream, to cry out all the years, all the losses, all the unshed grief, but there was no sound in the room except the faint hum of the light bulbs. Katsuma’s hand reached across once more, brushing against Izuku’s arm. The contact was gentle and grounding. The warmth of it, the reality of a human touch, was enough to startle him back to reality.

Home. 

The word echoed in his skull, foreign, as if it belonged to someone else.

Izuku hasn’t thought of home in years, not really. After all he had endured and all the people he had lost, after endless years of watching life continue while he remained unchanged, home became make believe.

Except, Katsuma had just spoken it aloud.

We’re here to send you home.

Home…home…

What the hell did that mean? It’s been so long, it almost didn’t sound like a real word anymore. Izuku shook his head, muscles tightening as if trying to hold the flood of emotion back, but it was useless. He’s already been a crybaby all his life, why was now any different? 

Izuku took a shuddering breath and forced himself to meet Katsuma’s eyes again. Be strong. You’ve survived everything. You can survive this, surely.

The light in the room flickered against the lines of the older man’s face. 

“Katsuma–” Izuku’s voice caught in his throat. He swallowed hard, tasting the salt of his own tears. “Please…please don’t mess with me right now. I’m not sure I can handle it.” 

Katsuma’s gaze didn’t waver. His hand, resting lightly on Izuku’s arm, was steady. “Deku, I would never lie to you. Certainly not now, not about this. I know it’s hard to wrap your head around, but you’ve endured long enough. You’ve literally survived everything, and you deserve to have a life beyond this endless waiting. I can help.”

A laugh escaped Izuku, hollow and bitter, though it quickly dissolved into another shuddering breath. “A life…?” he repeated. “I’ve outlived everyone I cared about. I’ve watched friends die, watched the world move on while I stayed the same. How can I go back? How can I—how can I live after all that?”

“Because you’re not meant to stay behind forever. Because the burden you’ve carried, the loneliness and grief are the essence of being a hero, but they’re not everything. They don’t have to define you. You’ve done what you had to do to survive, but surviving isn’t living. You’re tired, I can see it. So please, please let us help you.”

Izuku’s body trembled violently. The words were both balm and fire. 

Hope clawed at the edges of the armor he had built around his heart, making it hurt to feel so deeply again, making it terrifying. He wanted to resist, wanted to retreat into the safety of solitude, wanted to let the world remain distant and muted, where grief could be compartmentalized and controlled. But the thought of continuing like that, living forever untethered in a hopeless world, was just as unbearable too.

He clenched his fists tighter, pressing them to his knees, jaw tight, forcing himself to stay upright. He willed his heart to settle, willed the tremor in his hands to still, but it was just another impossible thing to conquer. 

“Deku…it’s time. You don’t deserve to live like this.”

But didn’t he? Was this not his punishment? 

Every death he had endured, every fragment of a life he had been forced to watch decay around him, was that not the price of his immortality? Had he not already carried the weight of eternity, the unending witness to a world that moved forward while he remained as someone to be left behind? He was a human gifted with a quirk he was not born with, was this not fate deciding to take retribution against his greed? 

A bitter, hollow part of him whispered that maybe this was justice.

Maybe this was the penalty for being different, for surviving when others could not. Izuku never asked for this, never wanted this cruel extension of existence, but it had been given to him nonetheless, and now…the idea that he might escape it, that he might be allowed something resembling peace, felt alien, almost wrong.

His chest ached as he wrestled with the paradox.

To survive had meant isolation, to endure had meant carrying grief like armor that would one day chip and fail, yet this same endurance, this endless, brutal gift of life, had also kept him tethered to the thought that this really was it. This was all life had to offer.

Now, to be told he didn’t deserve this life he was currently surviving was entirely laughable in its implication.

He deserved nothing, and this was it. 

Izuku shook his head slightly, letting a tear slide down his cheek. “Deserve?” he muttered, rough with disbelief. “Isn’t…isn’t this all I’ve had?”

The room remained silent except for the hum of the lights, the dust drifting lazily in the amber hues, and the unwavering presence of Katsuma. There was only an unwavering uncertainty and a strange, almost fragile hope that Izuku could not yet grasp. In fact, he was doing everything in his power to squash that feeling down, down, down. It had no place in his heart anymore. 

In that suspended stillness, he thought to himself that maybe the cruelest part of his punishment was never knowing if he deserved to live, or if life had simply demanded it of him and he had no choice but to obey.

“Wait…you said ‘we’?” Izuku stared at him. “What does that mean?”

Katsuma smiled. 

::

Time passed, though Izuku hardly noticed it anymore.

Katsuma led him through another section of the old building, through another hallway that was dark and dripping with age. The doors they passed groaned and squeaked under the weight of their hinges, echoes stretching down the corridor.

Izuku followed without resistance, his steps mechanical, as if his body had long since learned to move on its own while his mind drowned in its own storm of messy thoughts.

He saw so much change in the world around him, in the cruel symmetry of time that spared no other mortal.

Katsuma walked on ahead, bowed by the years he had earned through survival. His back was hunched, his hair shining silver, his every motion carrying the frailty and wisdom of a life well spent. The lines etched into his face told a story of laughter, grief, and battles fought quietly in the passing days of this once hopeful world.

Izuku’s reflection beside him was a distortion of that story. He stayed in similar shape, but the bulk of his once-honed muscle had thinned with disuse, leaving him lean rather than strong. His face, however, was exactly the same. His skin showed no furrows of age or the withering touch of time. His hands were unmarked by the decades he had endured, though some days they ached in a way that made him want to believe he was actually aging. The scars were the same, but they felt more like a reminder he’d rather forget, back to a time when he used to move mountains and cradle the hope of humanity in his palm.

Now he was frozen in a body that no longer matched the years inside him.

Time is so cruel, Izuku thought sadly. It drags the world forward, aging the good and kind until they falter, while he remained here as an unwilling witness, nothing more than a ghost tethered to the present, unable to step into the past and unable to belong to the future.

He was a nobody doomed to drift into the endless void. 

Still, after all of that, fate had brought him here for a reason.

As they moved further, the hall opened into a larger room, one that made him pause for a brief second. 

The space had the cold, sterile precision of a laboratory, though the shadows and peeling paint betrayed the building’s age. Instruments lay scattered across tables, along with a bunch of half-empty jars and containers. Papers, blueprints, and scribbled notes littered the floor and tabletops. Across the room, a person sat at a cluttered desk, headphones covering their ears. Even from where Izuku stood, he could hear the faint pulse of the music vibrating through the air in a rhythm that seemed impossibly cheerful. 

He didn’t even know people still listened to music anymore. 

Katsuma glanced back over his shoulder at Izuku, and his smile was subtle but unmistakable as if to say, wait here.

He then sauntered forward and tapped the person on the shoulder. The response was instantaneous. 

The figure squealed, spinning around wildly in the chair to face him.

“Did I not tell you to clean up around here?” Katsuma said, sounding like a disappointed parent.

The girl bristled and pointed a finger at him. “Suma, you old crow! You scared me half to death!” Her hands flew up, emphasizing her indignation, though her grin betrayed the thrill of being caught. “You think just because you’ve been around for eons, you can sneak up on me like some creeper?”

She was a girl with bright orange hair pulled into two pigtails, streaked with dirt and dust, giving her an unkempt but energetic air. Stray hairs fell across her forehead, softening her sharp, freckled features. Her clothes were ragged, with an oversized hoodie, patched trousers, and sneakers that had seen better days. She had a faint smear of grease on one cheek, and her hands were streaked with ink or some unknown substance, yet there was a meticulousness to the chaos. 

Even in her disheveled state, she exuded a sense of intelligence and determination, a spark of life that seemed irrepressible. 

It reminded him a lot of someone he once knew. 

Katsuma just shook his head. “I’ve been around for nearly a century, not eons, and I still have reflexes, believe it or not. What have I told you about mistaking age for weakness?”

“Oh, please,” the girl scoffed, twirling in her chair. “Your reflexes are all stiff joints and grumbling. I swear, sometimes you get upset when the sun isn’t out for long enough. I think of you more as a delicate flower—”

“Alright, enough!” Katsuma held up a hand, sighing heavily as if he regretted even opening his mouth. “I survived long enough to see your brilliance, not to be lectured by it. Now sit and behave, brat.”

She pouted dramatically, but the mischievous spark never left her eyes. “Behave? Me? Never! You better watch yourself, fossil. One day, the breeze through here might be strong enough to finally blow you off your feet!”

“And one day, I’ll be ready,” Katsuma replied easily. The corner of his lips quirked upward, the faintest glimmer of happiness showing through.

Izuku watched, frozen in awe as he stared at the two of them, feeling like an intruder that should have snuck out the back a long time ago. The rhythm of their exchange, the easy rapport, the playful back-and-forth, was unlike anything he’d felt in decades. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had laughed. Was it possible he had forgotten? The sound of other human voices mingling made a part of him ache with an intense longing. 

He remembered, distantly, how laughter used to bubble up in him without effort at stupid jokes, or the simple fact that joy came easy to him, especially when he was trying to make other people feel better.

Now, even the memory of those brighter days felt like it belonged to someone else, some other soul who hadn’t lived long enough to rot with this lonely sickness. Hearing laughter again felt like he was staring up at sunlight from the bottom of the ocean. It was so very dark and cold in this pit. 

“…Be sure to smile. After all, without joy and laughter to balance the sorrow, the world can never hope to have a bright future…” 

Thinking back to Sir Nighteye’s parting words, Izuku couldn’t help but think that the man would be so very sad at the state of the world now.

Around here, there was nothing but sorrow. 

He really wanted to join them, to step into that warmth of simple happiness for even a moment, but he knew if he tried, his voice would crack, his smile would falter, and the spell would break. So Izuku stood there instead, watching, starving on the edges of light he could never touch again.

Then, before he even realized the talking had stopped, an orange blur was shooting across the room. 

In a heartbeat, the girl had closed the distance, suddenly standing right in front of him. Her green eyes sparked with mischief and a restless curiosity that seemed impossible to contain. She seized Izuku’s scarred hand in both of hers, shaking it with such force he almost stumbled.

“I’m Riyo Hatsume!” she blurted, practically bouncing on her toes. “I can’t believe I’m actually meeting you, hero Deku! This is… wow, this is insane. I’ve heard so many stories about you! And now you’re right here, in front of me, holy crap!” Her words tumbled out too fast for her mouth to keep up. She barely seemed to breathe between them. “You’ve really been hiding away all this time like a total hermit, huh? Dude, I’m pretty sure everyone thought you were dead, but seriously, you’re exactly like they said you’d be! Although I could have sworn you were taller…”

Izuku blinked at her dumbly, helpless but to stand there with his hand still trapped in hers. 

Hatsume? The name finally hit him. Like Mei Hatsume? The support hero from UA, the genius with the wild pink hair and unpredictable inventions, the girl whose chaotic brilliance and inventions had left an indelible mark on every training exercise. 

He looked at this girl, and it finally clicked. The wild energy in her eyes, the brilliant chaotic gleam, the restless curiosity, the sheer force of personality, it all definitely screamed “Hatsume.” She was smaller, yes, younger, more unpolished, with bright orange hair instead of pink, dirt-smudged clothing, and hands streaked with ink instead of grease. But the genius spark, the untamable fire of invention, that was unmistakable. 

And she was still shaking his hand, still chattering on as if she had decades of excitement to pour into the span of a single conversation. 

“I just have to know what kind of gadgets you’ve seen in action firsthand! I’ve been studying heroes for years, analyzing tactics, durability, support tech, you name it! And now you’re right here! Wow! Just…woweeee! Hero Deku, it’s really such an honor, and I promise I’ll be helpful! Let me just start by telling ya that I have got some ideas, big ideas, huge ideas! And you, wow, your hair is a lot darker than I imagined. The books say it was more of a spring grassy color, but I’m thinking more of a cool sage. Oh! I’ll need to change that observation in my book, there shall be no inaccuracies in this household!” 

Izuku couldn’t help it. A soft smile tugged at the corners of his lips. 

Yep, he thought to himself, she’s definitely related to Hatsume.

Strangely, he let himself linger in that sheer vitality and unpredictability of another human being. She pulled him into her orbit completely, words spilling like a waterfall, and all he could do was watch in awe, heart lifting just enough to remember what it felt like to be part of a living, breathing world again. The laboratory around them hummed with life and chatter, the shadows softened by the flickering bulbs, and for a moment, Izuku allowed himself to believe that maybe it was okay not to be alone all the time.

Almost as quickly, Katsuma was forcefully peeling Riyo away before she could ramble to death, holding her at arm’s length like she was a deadly explosive that might go off. 

Izuku stared down at his hand where it was still tingling from where she had shaken it for nearly a full minute.

“Heh, apologies for her,” Katsuma grinned, reaching over to pat Riyo’s head. She screeched and swatted his hand away. “She was really excited to finally meet you.”

Izuku let out a small, nervous chuckle, scratching the back of his neck as he tried to steady himself. “It’s not a problem,” he said quietly. Wow, he thought to himself grimly, when did I become so awkward?

Feeling embarrassed and a little shy from the attention, he looked away from Katsuma, letting his eyes scan the cluttered laboratory, machinery, papers, and the odd array of tools.

“So…what exactly am I doing here?” 

Katsuma and Riyo exchanged a conspiratorial, almost mischievous look. Izuku raised an eyebrow, getting the strange sense that he was missing something vitally important. 

Suddenly, Riyo broke into a wide, almost infectious grin. She turned to Izuku, eyes sparkling with that unmistakable spark of chaotic genius, and asked, “Wanna see something cool?”

::

The back of the laboratory felt darker somehow, the fluorescent hum of aging bulbs faded into the heavy shadows that clung to the corners of the room. Riyo led them carefully through the cluttered chaos, a wide grin still plastered across her freckled face. At the far end, she stopped abruptly, spinning in place to face them, and gestured grandly toward a chair with a large, circular contraption suspended above it. The machine hummed faintly, wires snaking down like vines, intertwined with pulsing lights and whirring gears.

“Behold!” Riyo exclaimed, her excitement filling the room. She bounced on the balls of her feet, fists planted firmly on her hips. “This bad boy, my beloved pride and joy I thought about dismantling a hundred times, is finally complete!” She sighed and shook her head, “And let me tell ya, these past five years have not been a walk in the park, don’t let this old fossil fool you with his woeful wisdom.” 

“She’s right.” Katsuma leaned against a nearby workbench, letting out a jaded sigh. “I almost thought we’d never get it finished,” he muttered dryly. 

Riyo didn’t miss a beat, nodding furiously. “Oh, for sure! But nothing beats good old trial and error, lots of errors, a few unplanned explosions that nearly took off my arms, and an entire generation of rats later. I can finally say it was totally worth it! There were definitely a few, erm, hiccups along the way. Especially as I got better at using my quirk. And, well…” She shivered slightly, mock solemn, “We did lose a few of the test subjects somewhere…in time.”

Izuku’s eyes snapped between her and Katsuma. Test subjects? Lost in time?

“What are you talking about?”

Katsuma’s lips twitched into the faintest smile. He inclined his head toward Riyo, silently giving her permission to continue.

Riyo’s grin returned tenfold. “It’s a Time Machine!” she announced, voice bouncing off the grimy walls. “Well, if you wanna get technical, it’s actually a temporal displacement interface, but Time Machine sounds way cooler, right?”

“A…Time Machine?”

“Yep!” she said, staring proudly at the contraption. “See, my quirk normally lets me transport people back in time to anywhere of my choosing, but only for three minutes exactly, and it’s exhausting to coordinate multiple subjects all at once. Not to mention it gives me a killer headache. But this beauty? This baby’s designed to bypass the natural limitations of my quirk.” She gestured to the circular device overhead. “It uses a combination of quantum entanglement loops, localized chrono-spatial anchoring, and a feedback matrix tied to my quirk’s energy signature. Essentially, I can stabilize a person’s timeline and anchor it indefinitely.”

Izuku actually felt like an idiot. He was honestly so lost trying to follow her rapid-fire explanation.

“Wait…wait, anchor…timeline? Feedback matrix…quirk energy?”

Riyo smirked like she was genuinely pleased with his confusion. “See here?” She pointed again. “The entanglement loops let us connect this timeline to a fixed point. The chrono-spatial anchor ensures you don’t drift through time uncontrollably, ‘cause, I mean, talk about a bad day. And the feedback matrix? That keeps the energy from my quirk from overloading the system, which was the tricky part, honestly. It’s kind of like threading a needle across centuries and hoping you don’t royally screw something up.”

Izuku’s gaze flicked between Riyo and Katsuma, and he was sure the shock on his face was almost comical. The implications of what she was saying were staggering. Could it mean…? No way.

Katsuma folded his arms over his chest as he gave Izuku a serious look. “There’s another thing you should know…the process is…very hard on the body. Extremely hard. We’ve only successfully transported a few rats across timelines. This is the kind of stress that could shred any sized person apart at the cellular level if we tried it without any precaution.”

Izuku’s brows knitted together. He really didn’t like the sound of this. “Shred…?”

Katsuma nodded grimly. “That’s why I have to use my quirk in tandem with Riyo’s device. My regeneration allows me to transfer a large quantity of cellular repair energy directly into the subject. Essentially, it reinforces the body so it doesn’t disintegrate under the temporal stress.”

“Yeah! Imagine watching someone turn into string cheese,” Riyo said brightly, like this was somehow the funniest part. “You’d be like, Whoa, hey, gross! But I honestly wouldn’t worry, Suma’s cell regeneration quirk keeps you from literally becoming a noodle. Uh, mostly.”

“String…cheese?” he echoed weakly.

Katsuma rolled his eyes at her theatrics but kept his gaze on Izuku. “It’s not that dramatic. The forces involved in temporal displacement are immense. The human body isn’t designed to handle that sudden detachment from its own current time. Without cellular reinforcement, you’d, well…you’d tear yourself apart. Hypothetically.”

Riyo clapped her hands together as if to erase the grim imagery. “But that’s the beauty of it! With my quirk, I can transport someone anywhere I want, to any point in the past, and with Katsuma’s cell regeneration feeding into the system, the machine stores the energy, keeps the body intact, and stabilizes the subject through the displacement.”

She pointed back at the circular contraption again, practically vibrating with excitement. “So, voilà! Infinite temporal displacement! You get sent wherever you want in the past, for however long, all without ending up a shredded blob.” 

Izuku stared at them, still trying to digest this with no luck. His mouth was slightly open, his heart hammering, and a strange mixture of disbelief, awe, and terror churned in his stomach. So…he thought slowly. They’ve actually done it. They’ve really done it…

“It’s risky,” Katsuma reminded. “The calculations have to be precise, and Riyo’s quirk has to remain perfectly synchronized with my energy output. One misalignment…” 

Riyo nodded. “One misalignment, and it’s like watching spaghetti fight back against physics. But otherwise? Perfect. Totally perfect. The cell regeneration stabilizes, my quirk transports, and you—” She pointed directly at Izuku, eyes wide, sparkling with excitement—“can get sent anywhere you want. No limits! Huh, wait…how did it go again? Oh, oh, Plus Ultra!”

Somehow, when she kept saying ‘you’, it never really clicked in Izuku’s mind. 

“So this thing could help transport someone back in time?”

“Not just back, hero Deku. Indefinitely. As long as the machine holds for those few second, as long as my calculations stay stable, you could go anywhere.”

Katsuma’s eyes met his. “It’s not always so simple,” he added softly. “Nothing worth changing time ever is. But yes, it could be done. We’re sure now.”

Izuku stared at the machine, then back at the two of them, stunned. The room felt impossibly small and impossibly full at the same time, the stale air crackling with anticipation. The two of them really spent five years creating this?

Izuku swallowed past the hard lump in his throat, the buzzing in his chest growing louder as he finally found his voice again. “And I’m here because…?”

Riyo’s grin spread impossibly wide. “You’re our next test subject, obviously!”

The words hit him with the gentleness of a Detroit Smash. Color instantly drained from his face, and he stumbled back, eyes wide as saucers. He could feel the weight of their eagerness (mostly Riyo’s) pressing down on him, the odd concern lurking behind their smiles, and it made the panic rise hotter and faster than anything he’d felt in years.

Katsuma stepped forward cautiously, hands outstretched like he was trying to calm a spooked animal. “Deku. What did you think I meant when I said we’d help you get home?” 

Izuku shook his head, breath coming in rapid, uneven bursts. “I-I don’t know…not–not this! There’s no way—”

“Ohhh, there’s a way,” Riyo cut in smugly, crossing her arms. “I tested it exactly 2,495 times! And, uh, I’m sure we don’t need to talk about the other unsuccessful times.” 

Izuku’s eyes darted between them, his mind reeling. That many? The image of “human string cheese” flashed in his mind, and he felt his stomach twist. He wanted to laugh, or scream, or maybe curl up on the cold floor and disappear forever. But he didn’t. He just couldn’t process it.

Izuku shook his head again. “I think…I need a minute,” he muttered, stepping back toward the dim corridor. Without another word from them, he turned and left, the echo of his footsteps mingling with the faint electronic whirs and clicks behind him.

Riyo called after him, “Take all the time you need, hero! I’m sure another few years won’t matter too much.”

Katsuma stayed a step behind, silent, eyes following Izuku’s retreating figure. He knew that this was going to take time, patience, and for someone like Izuku…every second counted, even the ones he took for himself.

::

Izuku wasn’t sure what was real anymore. 

Which was a strange thing to say, because he woke up every day wishing this wasn’t real, only to be met with the same grim realization that he was trapped here indefinitely. Years upon years stretched out like an endless desert of damnation, each day blurring into the next until the edges of past and present began to fray. 

If enough time passed, Izuku would soon become a stranger even to himself, nothing but a nameless face wandering a world that could no longer recognize him. And if even more time passed, maybe he would finally find rest somewhere beyond the stars, drifting among constellations, invisible and forgotten.

But never in all the centuries of waking to loneliness, never in all the days he had trudged through empty streets and silent apartments, did he imagine a day like this would come. A day when someone would tell him there was a way out, a way to go back. A way to undo the slow cycle of life continuing without him, a way to step into a moment before the losses, before the destruction, before fate had demanded his endurance. Right now he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t sad either. He wasn’t afraid. He simply didn’t feel anything. 

The words that should have ignited hope inside him, the impossible possibility that the universe might bend to allow him to escape, felt unreal, like smoke slipping through his fingers. It was an idea he couldn’t grasp.

Needing time to think, Izuku had made his way to the roof without much thought, almost on autopilot. The silence curled against him like an old friend he’d grown accustomed to welcoming. 

For once, there was no wind or clouds. A thin silver lining hovered at the edge of the horizon, hinting at dawn, but the stars were still scattered above him, cold and distant. 

They looked the same as they had for decades, indifferent to his suffering.

This was the desolate and unforgiving land he had come to know. It was as cruel and indifferent as time itself. The fact that he might finally get to leave it, finally step outside the grasp of his immortality, didn’t change much. It was strange. Maybe he felt nothing because he’d been numb for so long. Maybe he could never feel ordinary emotions again, certainly not anything besides the crushing grief that had lodged itself inside him as a permanent fixture of his being. 

After years of isolation, of watching those he cared for wither and die while he remained untouched, the first glimmer of hope seemed like a sick joke, a trick of the mind. 

It couldn’t be real. It simply couldn’t be.

The curse of his quirk had made him a spectator to life and he stopped trying to escape it along ago. 

If he could laugh about it, he would. It was ironic and so fucking sad.

Honestly, it was scary to feel this hopeless. It was scary to finally be pushed past the point of caring, but he had nothing left anymore. Why even bother?

After this long, Izuku stopped hoping for anything good. He stopped believing in joy or beauty. He no longer noticed the small wonders that had once been so powerful, like the way sunlight filtered through leaves, the subtle scent of rain on asphalt, the sound of laughter that didn’t carry sorrow beneath it. Watching the sun rise and fall day after day after day after day had become monotonous. Watching himself endure the passage of time while everything else decayed had aged him more than years will ever show. He may not have grown old in body, but his heart and soul had cracked and worn away. He aged past the memory of his own youth.

He felt older than the earth, older than time itself.

For months, for years, he was unsure how much longer he could continue existing like this. 

The thoughts came in an endless, looping tide. They twisted and clawed at him in a constant reminder of the emptiness that stretched behind and ahead of him.

But even in the darkest moments, he found himself thinking, as if by habit…what would Kacchan say?

Obviously, Katsuki would kick his ass for moping and letting the world push him down. He would yell, he would scowl, he would make him feel human again just by being there, and for a fraction of a second, that memory flared. But then, Izuku realized even that was slipping from his grasp. He didn’t want it to. He wanted to cling to it like a stubborn child and hide it from the world. Truth is, he could no longer remember the exact timbre of Katsuki’s voice, the sharpness of his laugh, the bite of his insults, or the way he always looked so pretty when he got that small, sweet smile. 

It had simply been too long. The memories fractured, and then the darkness closed back in.

Izuku felt detached from everything, even his own body. His hands, his chest, the very beating of his heart felt like someone else’s. 

He could see himself moving through the motions of life, but it was as if he were observing a stranger, a hollow vessel carrying the weight of an eternity he had never wanted. Time had stripped him bare, and in its place had left only emptiness. The world had continued to move on without him, indifferent, unfeeling, leaving him as the last witness to everything he could never change. He was stuck with this guilt and the constant thoughts of, why couldn’t I do more? Why couldn’t I have more time with them?

The stars above offered no comfort. 

The dawn creeping at the horizon offered no promise. 

Izuku wondered if he even remembered how to hope at all.

He sat on the roof for a long time. He distantly realized that wishing to see something was not enough. You had to want it, and Izuku couldn’t control the longings of his heart. But he was human; he had no destiny. He was held here by no one. His life was a line plunging straight into the unknown, and he didn’t know what lay ahead. He would have to find out by himself, to carry on, because that’s what heroes do. 

“Nothing lasts forever,” said Ochako, looking out at their laughing classmates. “But this, right now?” She smiled at him. “It’s something to enjoy.”

Another place, another time.

All Might turned to him, looking larger than life. “I smile to show the pressure of heroes and to trick the fear inside of me!” 

Another place, another time.

“You can’t help the thing you long for,” Hitoshi said to him with tired eyes. 

Another place, another time.

“Hey, Izuku…can I…still catch up to you?”

Another place, another time.

"I'll get stronger!” Katsuma yelled as he ran. “I promise you I will! I'll get strong so that I can protect Daddy and Mahoro! And then I'll be a cool hero like you and Bakugo! One who always wins no matter the odds!"

Another place, another time.

“I wanted to save everyone,” whispered Iida, his glasses cracked and lenses fogged with tears. “Even if it meant losing myself.”

Another place, another time.

“Midoriya, you always rush ahead,” said Shouto quietly, flames fading from one side, frost dissolving from the other. “But somehow, you always stop to pull the rest of us with you.”

Another place, another time.

Inko gripped his shoulders, her voice trembling. “No matter what, Izuku…you are my whole world.”

Another place, another time.

“Midoriya looks up to your strength, Bakugo. And Midoriya, Bakugo fears your spirit. If you can learn to respect each other and lift each other up…you can become the ultimate heroes, who save by winning, and win by saving.”

Another place, another time.

Izuku’s eyes abruptly filled with tears. His throat closed, and he thought the memories would stop there, but they kept going back, further and further into a childhood his mind had locked away because it was entwined too intrinsically with—

“Katsuki Bakugo,” said the kid, smirking down at him as the sun shone around his hair like a halo. “If you wanna be a hero like me, you can’t let those dumb extras kick you down.” 

Another place, another time.

“This whole time, I looked down on you.” Katsuki hung his head, letting the rain cascade down his face. “That’s why I bullied you, but not matter how I look at it, it was wrong. I’m sorry…for everything. I know that won’t change a thing, but it’s how I feel.”

Another place, another time.

“I'm the guy that steps in when the nerd can't handle it on his own!”

Another place, another time.

“C’mon…” Katsuki held his hand out for Izuku to take. “Let’s go, Deku.”

Another place, another time.

“You can’t just watch the heroes, nerd,” Katsuki declared, chin tilted high. “You gotta be one. Like me! I’m gonna be the best, better than All Might!”

Izuku blinked up at him, wide-eyed, dirt smudged across his cheek. His knees stung from the fall, but his voice was steady when he answered. “Then…I’ll be right there with you. Even if I can’t be strong like you, Kacchan, I’ll still try. I’ll help people too!”

Katsuki snorted, but there was no real bite to it. He crouched down and poked Izuku’s notebook with one finger. “Tch. You and your dumb scribbles. Fine, you can write down how awesome I am when I save everyone.”

Izuku grinned, small and shining, clutching his notebook tighter. “Okay! But one day, I’ll save someone too. You’ll see, Kacchan.”

For a moment, Katsuki just looked at him. Then he smiled. “You better keep up, Deku.”

Izuku nodded fiercely, and for that fleeting afternoon, they were just two kids under the wide summer sky, dreaming of the same impossible future together.

Another place, another time…

Izuku couldn’t see anything through the veil of his tears. Some days it felt like he’s spent his entire life crying and wishing for a better future. One that didn’t turn out this bleak, one where he didn’t have to feel so unbearably alone. 

Was he meant to choose? To take one of these broken moments scattered through the years and stitch it back together?

He knew the truth. Grief was simply the weight of his love, stretched across the empty spaces where voices used to be. It was proof that the moments he clung to had been real, that they had mattered enough to leave scars. Without grief, the laughter would be nothing more than noise, the faces nothing more than shadows.

He closed his eyes, the hurt tightening in his chest. To grieve meant he had loved. And if it hurt this much…then maybe that love had been everything.

It was sorrow that gave him direction, regret that steadied his steps, and love that lit the path like a compass pointing him forward. Through endlessness, those were the only guides he had ever trusted. With them, he could almost believe he might do anything.

Almost.

But not this, not the one thing that mattered.

He couldn’t reach for his own future, and he couldn’t truly touch his own past. Not like this. Not with these broken hands.

So he let the moments scatter back into the hands of time like sand slipping through his fingers. He didn’t want to remember anymore, not the faces or voices, not the thousands of yesterdays he had already lost.

For a fleeting instant, the quiet and cruel thought crept in. He could honestly just leave. He could go back to the dust-covered house that had become his prison, back to his dying field of corn and failure, and let the silence cradle him until it swallowed him whole, let the world bury him until he was just another lump in the dirt. Maybe that was his best choice. Maybe it was his only choice. Maybe it was stupid of him to ever hope for something so impossible…

“It’s not bad to dream,” All Might once told him. “Sometimes all you need is to believe in yourself. Then you too can become a hero.”

Then maybe. Maybemaybemaybe…

So Izuku sat. And he thought.

Hours bled into one another as he lingered on the roof, shoulders bowed and tired. His eyes traced the far horizon where night surrendered, slowly and unwillingly, to the pale light of morning. The silver lining at the edge of the world seemed fragile, almost imperceptible, as if the light itself were tentative and scared, unsure it really belonged here. 

He breathed in shallowly, taking a big gulp of poisonous air, heavy and metallic.

He considered turning back, retreating to the safety of solitude that had been both prison and shield for so long.

But even in his numbness, there was a flicker, a faint, almost imperceptible pull that drew him toward the laboratory again, toward the contraption Riyo and Katsuma had built for this very day, toward the impossible dream that had been dangled in front of him. His body moved as though guided by instinct, dragging his mind along reluctantly. The stars still clung stubbornly overhead, indifferent witnesses to the years of his mindless wandering, but even they seemed to dim in comparison to the pulsating hum of the machine waiting a few stories below.

As he slowly descended the stairs, feeling like he was edging closer to the end of his rope, the reality of what this meant began to settle slowly into him. 

This was a choice. For the first time in years, he wasn’t simply surviving. He could act. He could decide. The sensation was foreign and frightening, and it pressed into his chest with the same force as grief, but for an entirely different reason. 

The laboratory smelled of dust, metal, and ozone. The wires hanging from the ceiling seemed to jerk with anticipation, a rhythm that matched the pounding of his own heart. 

Katsuma and Riyo stood at the ready, their eyes trained on him, waiting. There was no judgment in their expressions, only understanding and an urgency tempered by care for a complete and utter stranger. The contrast was almost painful and he had to look away. All this time, Izuku’s been alone, unseen, and unneeded. Now they were offering him something so fragile and human, a chance to change, to step outside the boundaries that had defined his existence for years. Forgive him, if he seemed a little wary. 

Izuku stepped closer to the chair, to the circular device suspended above it, and his stomach clenched.

It looked impossibly complex, with its tangled web of wires, glowing nodes, and metal that seemed alive in its purpose. He felt small in its shadow, like a a single insignificant speck in a world of billions, and yet the machine seemed to beckon him forward, whispering that this was a path, a possibility, a crack in the unyielding wall that had surrounded him for so long.

Katsuma’s concern cut through the silence. “Are you sure about this?”

Izuku took a moment to find a true answer in himself. Was he sure? Could he spend the rest of his life miserable and alone, or could he be brave and take this literal once-in-a-lifetime chance he’s been silently and foolishly waiting decades for? Was he even capable of being ‘himself’ anymore and making these decisions a younger version of him would find utterly insane. But despite everything he was thinking, the words wouldn’t form. 

Instead, he stepped closer to the chair, to the hum of potential wrapped in metal and light.

It was intimidating, to say the least. 

Riyo tilted her head, eyes glinting with excitement and reassurance. “You don’t have to think about it too hard,” she said softly. “Just sit and trust the machine. Trust us. That’s it.”

Izuku hesitated, one foot hovering over the threshold of the chair, chest tight with panic he refused to show. Memories, grief, loss, days and days of watching the world move on without him, all weighed him down, making it harder to move, but beneath it, a fragile thread of something he hadn’t felt in years stirred as if rising from a deep sleep.

Ah, that’s what it was.

Pure and genuine hope, more delicate than a wisp of air.

He allowed himself to reach for it. Step by trembling step, he lowered himself into the chair, hands gripping the armrests as though holding onto the only thing keeping him tethered to the present. But not this one. He thinks he’s more than done with this one. 

Izuku’s hands lingered on the sides of the chair, knuckles white, as a quiet, almost fragile question escaped him. “Why are you guys doing this for me?”

Riyo and Katsuma exchanged a glance, and Riyo nodded subtly and stepped back a few paces, giving them the space to speak without distraction. Her bright energy dimmed slightly, a small, almost reverent smile tugging at her lips.

Katsuma eased himself into a nearby chair, his older body shaky and tired. But when he looked at Izuku, the fatigue seemed to vanish, replaced by that calm, patient presence that had always struck Izuku as impossible. That same gentle smile, the kind he had almost stopped believing existed in this world, settled on Katsuma’s face.

“Izuku,” Katsuma began, “ever since that day on the island, when you came and saved me as a young boy, I’ve always looked up to you. Always. From then on, you were the greatest hero I’ve ever known. Not because of your skill or quirk, but because of the way you fought for others. Even when it wasn’t easy, even when you didn’t think anyone cared, you stood up. You saved people. You saved me and gave me something to believe in.”

Katsuma continued, voice cracking slightly despite his best efforts. “When the world slowly forgot about you, when your name faded and the people you saved moved on…I never forgot. I never stopped trying to be the hero you told me I could be. And when it came my turn to help, when I had the chance to return the favor…I knew I’d do anything in my power to make it happen. Because you saved me, Deku. And the world needs more heroes like you again.”

Izuku’s lips parted, he felt tears prick at the edges of his eyes, and a strange warmth was pooling in the spaces he had long thought empty.

Katsuma’s voice softened, threaded with the gravity of years and the stubborn ember of hope that had never gone out. 

“Heroes are human. They break, they bleed, they doubt…but even then, they burn brighter than anything else in a world that’s forgotten how to hope. Our generation…we lost sight of that. We let the world slip further into the dark. But you never stopped being that light. You carried it alone when the rest of us couldn’t. And now, if all I can do is give you the chance to carry it again…then that’s not a burden to me. That’s an honor. Truly…it’s the least I could ever give back to you.”

Izuku realized, almost painfully, that the care, the love and willingness to give so much for someone else, was the essence of being a hero he had always dreamed of. He was never in it for the fame or recognition, but for the act of helping, of lifting someone else from their darkness, of standing in the way of harm so that others could live. 

He wanted to be the person who gave people hope, the person who could be a pillar for them when they thought they could no longer go on.  

Even after so much pain and endless solitude, the simple fact that he could still inspire someone to be better, to carry out the smallest act of courage, gave him purpose. Gave him meaning. Gave him a reason to exist that had nothing to do with immortality, or survival, or witnessing everything crumble. And for what felt like the first time in his life, Izuku felt the weight in his chest ease, just slightly, replaced by a fragile ember of hope and humanity he thought he’d lost forever. 

He lifted his head, blinking rapidly to clear the sting of tears, and met Katsuma’s gaze.

That smile remained, proving that even in the darkest corners of the world, light could endure.

Even the broken, the scarred, the lost…they could still shine.

Izuku inhaled deeply. He felt a tentative strength return, the kind that had once carried him through impossible battles, the kind that had always made him a hero not because he wanted to be, but because he couldn’t do anything else.

No matter how alone he had felt, no matter how heavy the grief, he could still help. He could still carry a spark into the darkness, for someone else. And that was more than enough to do this.

Izuku smiled, small and fragile, but real.

He was ready to go home. 

The circular contraption above him started humming softly, vibrating through the floor and into his bones. 

Katsuma stood and stepped forward, one hand resting lightly on Izuku’s shoulder. His presence was grounding, but Izuku could still feel the faint tremor in his own chest, the old, familiar jolt of fear that he had long thought was buried beneath the numbness.

“Remember,” Katsuma said to him, “I’ll be using my cell regeneration quirk to you. It’s going to feel…strange and intense, but trust me.”

Riyo’s hands moved over the console in front of the machine, eyes bright and focused. “And I’ll guide you,” she added, clear with excitement. “My quirk will control your trajectory, keep you anchored. It’s like– okay, imagine being flung through time, like a noodle, and I’m the fork making sure you don’t completely unravel. Easy, right?”

Izuku’s stomach lurched painfully.

The mental image of himself as string cheese made his skin crawl, but he had no choice but to trust them. He nodded stiffly, forcing himself to inhale slowly, trying to steady the storm inside him. His entire body screamed to retreat, to flee from this impossible, terrifying leap.

“Ready?” Katsuma asked.

Izuku could only nod again, every nerve ending alight with fear and anticipation.

Riyo leaned closer. “Before we get to the good stuff, I need you to think carefully. When exactly do you want to go back to?”

To be honest, part of him recoiled from the thought of choosing, but another part, buried deep beneath decades of guilt, knew immediately. 

Izuku closed his eyes and let the memory come alive.

He visualized the battlefield, the chaos around them. He felt the sting of blood and sweat, the trembling fear in his hands as he reached for Katsuki. Shigaraki loomed, a monstrous blur of hands and destruction, and Izuku remembered the desperation, the surge of power, the promise he had made to himself; he would not let his friend die. He remembered diving, blocking, striking, risking everything. Every scream, every punch, every fragment of the battle replayed like a film in his mind.

He saw Katsuki, battered and bleeding, clinging to his last moments of life.

He saw himself shielding him, pushing through exhaustion, determination burning brighter than any fear. He focused on that precise instant, the moment he had turned the tide of the fight, the moment he had truly become the hero he had always strived to be.

I won’t be late this time. 

I promise you, Kacchan.

Riyo’s eyes softened as she watched him focus, her hands pausing over the controls. “Good,” she said. “You picked a good one.” She straightened and a small, triumphant smile tugged at her lips. “Now let’s get you home, hero.”

The machine activated and that low, grinding hum grew into a resonance that shook the room, making the lights flicker. The circular contraption above began to spin slowly at first, then faster, in a blur of metal and glowing nodes. Then a warm, strange energy coursed through the chair, into Izuku’s body, and he gasped as a sensation unlike anything he had experienced before flooded him.

The visualization he had clung to, the moment he had imagined and feared, was now the anchor pulling him forward. It shimmered in his mind like a beacon, steady and certain amidst the chaos of displacement. 

Every nerve, every cell, seemed to recognize it, reaching toward it even as the machine strained against the limits of reality.

It began in his limbs, a prickling, almost painful awareness of his cells stretching, shifting, being reinforced. Then it moved inward, to his chest, his heart, his lungs, a gnawing, stretching, wrenching feeling like his body was being pulled apart and stitched back together at the same time. His vision blurred, the walls of the lab dissolving into streaks of light, the hum of the machine drowning out every other sound.

Riyo’s voice cut through the storm, high-pitched and frantic, “Hold on, Deku! Don’t fight it!”

A shiver ran down his spine as the “string cheese” fear, exactly as she had joked, hit him. 

It was the sensation of his body stretching impossibly thin, of everything vibrating, almost losing cohesion, as if he were unraveling thread by thread. He clenched his jaw, the taste of blood rising in his throat. Panic clawed at him, but Katsuma’s quirk intervened like a shield, a flood of regenerative energy pouring into him, knitting him whole even as the machine tore at the very fabric of his being.

“Almost there!” Riyo shouted, her hands flying over the controls, eyes locked on the glowing display above his head. The energy around him pulsed, rippling, bending the air like heatwaves. The sensation was unbearable and euphoric all at once, like being untethered from reality and thrown into a current that had no beginning or end.

Izuku closed his eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath. 

He felt Katsuma’s quirk coursing through him, steadying him, reinforcing him from the inside. The gnawing fear ebbed slightly, replaced by a surreal, disorienting calm. His body wasn’t just surviving the displacement; it was being guided, protected, held together by trust and care he never allowed himself to feel.

“Anchor set!” Riyo shouted over the noise. “Destination locked. Temporal window stabilized. Now!”

The world tore apart violently, not in flashes of light, but in a slow, stretching, bending sensation that made Izuku feel simultaneously weightless and impossibly heavy. The lab, the ceiling, the walls, Katsuma, Riyo, all melted into streaks of silver, gold, and deep blue, like molten stars dissolving into the night sky. He felt every year of his endless life press into him at once.

Time became a tangible thing. He could feel it slipping past him in layers, every heartbeat and memory twisting in an impossible spiral. Then, just as suddenly as it began, the sensation eased. 

His body floated, weightless, suspended in a strange liminal space, neither here nor there.

Izuku’s thoughts scattered and his vision was blank. He was flying through tyears.

Flashes assaulted him, shards of memory too fast to hold; his mother’s laugh, the smell of her home cooked katsudon, the crack of Katsuki’s explosions, his friends’ laughter, All Might calling him “young Midoriya.” Each one stabbed him, fleeting and painful, then vanished into the dark.

He tried to reach for them, but they dissolved between his fingers.

The faces of everyone he couldn’t save filled the void around him, endless. He saw Iida, Shouto, Ochako, faces he hadn’t seen in decades, faces that he’d nearly forgotten. He saw them blaming him, though he knew it was only his own mind whispering pathetic lies. He felt the grief press down, heavier than any physical weight, threatening to drag him out of the stream of time itself.

He clawed his way back to the memory he had chosen. He fixed on it like a drowning man clutching driftwood. 

The current pulled harder, faster. Time screamed past him, a tunnel of stars and void, too bright, too dark, too loud. His chest burned. His body shook. He thought for certain this was it, that even with Katsuma’s quirk, even with Riyo’s machine, he would be torn apart in the endless spiral of years.

Until suddenly, the void broke.

Izuku slammed back into himself with the force of a soul colliding with flesh.

His lungs seized, then dragged in air so quickly it burned all the way down to the pit of his stomach. His heart thrashed inside his chest, not a steady rhythm but the frantic beating after being long trapped in darkness and suddenly released. For one terrifying instant, he thought his body might fail him, thought the sheer violence of return might tear him apart. He almost wasn’t sure it worked.

The world tilted, threatening to collapse under his feet, yet somehow it held. Somehow, he held.

And then, like a miracle, he was standing in the middle of the battlefield.

The ground beneath him trembled with the weight of distant detonations, but the chaos felt strange, altered. The smoke moved in sluggish curls, bending and twisting as if caught in some invisible tide. It didn’t feel real. Sparks from a recent explosion hung suspended in the air, frozen for just long enough to dazzle his eyes. Every tense second stretched, every breath opened like an eternity, time itself seeming to bow, to grant him one impossible gift. 

After decades of being hunted by the endless march of years, for the first time, Izuku felt time slow down in mercy, finally offering him a moment to breathe.

In that moment, when the dust and numbness around his heart finally drifted away, he heard it.

“Deku!”

The sound cracked through him, making every cell in his body ignite. It tore the breath from his chest, rooted him to the scorched earth, and in a single instant unraveled the crushing silence that had bound him for so long. His head snapped toward the voice, terrified it might not be real, that it was nothing more than a cruel trick of memory or some sort of hallucination. 

But it was real, it felt too real, and then he was there.

Katsuki. Alive.

As if the very hands in the clock of life stilled, Izuku could only stare, floored, unable to reconcile the truth before his eyes with the endless days of absence he lived through. 

Katsuki stood framed by the gray sky, his gauntlets smoked, the acrid tang of gunpowder clinging to the air around him. His wild hair caught the glow of the flames until it seemed to burn brighter than the battlefield itself. His eyes blazed with that ferocity that had once terrified Izuku and later became the brightest thing he had ever known.

He was everything Izuku had spent a lifetime chasing.

Katsuki was the sole star he had never stopped reaching for, the one light in a universe that had grown cold and empty without him. Izuku had spent so many years alone in the dark, clawing for scraps of memory, clinging to the faint echo of a voice he could never quite remember, no matter how hard he tried. There were nights when he would whisper Katsuki’s name to himself, desperate just to hear it, and still it was never enough. 

He hated himself for failing, for always being too late, for watching helplessly as the one person he could never lose was torn from him. That failure had become the marrow of his life, a regret so painful it hollowed him from the inside out.

But now he finally got the chance to fix it.

The machine worked.

He was really back.

And there Katsuki stood, looking a little worse for wear, charged in the midst of battle, with blood on his temple and fire in his palms. But he was alive. Izuku’s heart cracked open and bled with relief. 

This was not a dream, not a memory. This was real. Katsuki was real.

“Kacchan.” Izuku felt himself gasp, his ribs straining against the impossible swell of relief. For too long, he had lived in a world shaped by what came after his failure. He had carried the weight of that history, bore the grief of it until it nearly crushed him, and now, by some miracle of fate and two geniuses, he had been given the chance to rewrite it. To set his hands against the turning of time itself and force it into a different shape. He would this time. There was no doubt in his mind. 

Whatever the future held, whatever came next, would not be like before. 

Katsuki’s mouth opened, and salvation came with sound.

“Deku, get your ass in gear! What the hell are you standing around for?!”

The words were rough and biting, everything he remembered.

God, Kacchan…your voice. How could I ever forget? 

Holy shit, this was real. The relief struck Izuku like thunder, shaking loose the weeks and weeks of silence that had imprisoned him. Ironically, in that moment, there was no greater gift than being yelled at. It was everything. 

His lips split into a trembling smile, and then the weight of it all broke. Laughter burst out of him, wild and unrestrained, tearing its way from his chest like it had been waiting there for eons. Izuku laughed until it hurt, until the battlefield blurred with tears and fire and light and everyone probably thought he’d gone mad. He laughed because he was no longer too late. He laughed because Katsuki was alive, he was standing right in front of him, and there was no greater thing in the world.

It was in that laughter that Izuku felt a familiar strength return, one he had long thought left his wearied body.

The strength to defy fate itself. The strength to fight. 

He lived through decades of ruin, drowned in the demise of his own failure, but he knew with absolute certainty that he would not let the same mistakes be written again. Not this time. He would protect his friends. He would see them grow, see them live, and he would grow old with them this time. Maybe it was a strange wish to dream of something as fragile and ordinary as age and peace.

But then again, Izuku thought, my life has never been anything but strange.

Through every timeline, every fracture of destiny, every cruel eternity of punishment, it would always bring him here. Back to Katsuki. Back to the beginning. Back to the one thing that tethered him when the universe tried to tear him apart.

With a clarity that burned brighter than the dying sun, Izuku knew… 

Even if the stars themselves were to fall, he would rise, and he would always find his way home again.