Chapter Text
Izuku came back to himself on a breath he didn’t remember taking.
Cold air. City air—thin, winter-lean, carrying exhaust and metal and the faint sweetness of something fried from a stall somewhere nearby. The soundscape hit next: tyres over wet asphalt, a distant crosswalk chirp, the layered murmur of pedestrians passing too close for comfort. He opened his eyes to a grey sky and the underside of a pedestrian overpass he knew he shouldn’t know anymore.
For a single, disorienting heartbeat, he thought he’d been knocked out.
Then his body told him the truth.
Everything was… smaller.
Not in the sense of shrinking—his limbs were still his limbs—but in the way the world sat on him. His shoulders didn’t carry the same hardened ache. His thighs didn’t feel like they’d been carved out by months of deadlifts and sprints.
His hands looked the same, but when he flexed his fingers, the joints felt clean, uncomplaining. No lingering pain.
No stiffness. No scars.
Izuku sat up too quickly and the motion nearly tipped him over.
His backpack slid forward across his lap, lighter than it should have been. He stared at it as if it might explain itself.
The strap was frayed in the same spot he remembered from middle school.
There was a faint ink stain near the zipper pull. A keychain—All Might in his “muscle form”—bobbed against the fabric, worn from obsessive fidgeting.
He hadn’t seen that keychain in years.
His stomach dropped.
He pushed a shaky hand to his forearm and dragged his sleeve up. Pale skin.
Smooth. No old bandage marks. No thin white lines where the doctors had warned him—so gently, so firmly—that he couldn’t keep breaking himself like that.
He turned his arm over, searching for proof he was wrong.
There was none.
Izuku’s breath hitched. His pulse spiked hard enough to make his ears ring.
This is before.
The thought came without softness. It slammed into him like a door kicked open.
Before U.A.
Before the Sports Festival.
Before the internships.
Before the night fights and morning bruises.
Before he learned how to hold himself together when everything wanted to pull him apart.
He pressed his palm to the concrete beside him as if the ground might anchor him. The grit scraped faintly against his skin. Real. Not a dream. Not a training simulation. Not Shinso’s brainwashing, not a quirk-induced hallucination.
There were people around him, and none of them were screaming.
No one was evacuating.
No one was calling for heroes.
Just ordinary life, moving at ordinary speed.
Izuku swallowed and forced his breathing to slow. In through the nose.
Out through the mouth. Like Recovery Girl had taught him when panic made his lungs lock up. Like Aizawa had scolded him into learning: panic was useless; data was everything.
Okay. Assess.
He was on a walkway near a station.
The advertisements on the far wall were for things he remembered seeing in old recordings—old models, old campaigns.
The train timetable display looked slightly different. The commuters’ phones were a half-step behind the ones he’d grown used to. Fashion too. Subtle shifts. Enough that his brain, desperate for normality, tried to ignore them.
But his body didn’t ignore anything.
He stood, testing his legs. No soreness from yesterday’s training. No heavy fatigue in his calves. His centre of gravity felt… wrong, like he was wearing someone else’s balance. He rolled his shoulders back and a sharp pinch of old tension didn’t answer. He was lighter than he’d been. Weaker.
And yet
It was there.
Under his skin, coiled like a sleeping storm.
One For All.
Izuku froze.
He hadn’t felt it until he looked for it, but the moment he did, it surged into awareness with frightening immediacy.
It was not quiet. It was not obedient. It hummed through his bones with familiar warmth, a living current that made his teeth ache if he focused too hard.
He clenched his fists, knuckles whitening, and the power responded.
Not with control.
With eagerness.
The pressure built, uninvited, in the spaces between muscle fibres. It wanted to move. It wanted to explode outward in the simplest, most catastrophic way: a punch, a kick, a leap—anything that would turn restraint into release.
Izuku’s throat went dry.
No. Not now.
His mind flashed back in sharp, involuntary snapshots: his first full-powered punch, bones turning to glass; All Might’s grim face; Recovery Girl’s sigh; his own tears of frustration in a hospital bed because being chosen hadn’t made him ready.
He could do that again. He could destroy himself in one thoughtless second.
The power didn’t care. It was his responsibility to care.
Izuku forced his hands open. He shook them at his sides like he could fling the impulse away. His arms trembled—part adrenaline, part the sheer effort of not letting One For All answer the reflexes that had become instinct over years.
Years that, apparently, no longer existed for his body.
His heart hammered harder.
Someone rewound time.
A villain. A quirk. An attack. He couldn’t remember the impact, but he didn’t need to. The evidence was everywhere: the body reset, the city reset, the calendar reset.
But the power was still in him.
Which meant—
His gaze snapped up, scanning the crowd with sudden desperation.
If time had rewound to before U.A., then he should not have One For All at all.
Unless the rewind hadn’t touched certain things. Unless it had brought his quirk state back with him but stripped away the physical progress—the muscle and training he’d earned through pain and repetition.
Or unless the quirk had rewritten the rules and he was now an anomaly the timeline didn’t know how to correct.
Izuku’s mouth went dry again.
He reached for his phone with hands that weren’t steady. The screen lit up. Old interface. Old layout. Old wallpaper: a low-res All Might poster he’d saved from some fan site years ago.
The date in the corner punched him in the chest.
Weeks before the U.A. entrance exam.
Izuku stared at it until the numbers blurred.
He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t exist like this.
He dragged in another breath and tried to think like a hero, not like a terrified kid.
Okay.
If the rewind was recent, the villain might still be nearby. If it was targeted, there might be a radius, a zone of effect. If it was global—
His thoughts cut off sharply.
If it was global, then everyone was here.
Everyone.
His mother. Still fretting over him in their small apartment. Bakugo, arrogant and untouchable and not yet forced to confront the reality that the world didn’t revolve around him. Todoroki, still locked behind his own walls. Iida, still unbroken by grief. So many people who would go on to be hurt, changed, scarred.
And—
His chest tightened so suddenly he nearly doubled over.
Her.
Ochaco Uraraka.
He had no right to assume she’d be safe in this new-old world. If the timeline had been pulled back, then she was out there somewhere, walking toward U.A. with coin-counting determination and a hopeful smile that had once… changed everything for him.
He couldn’t remember the first time they’d met without also remembering what came after. She was woven into every version of him that mattered: the boy who tried too hard, the boy who broke himself, the boy who learned to accept help. The girl who saw him—not as a symbol, not as a legacy, but as a person doing his best.
If this was a second chance at a first meeting…
He swallowed hard.
Would she meet him the same way?
Would she look at him with that open kindness again?
Or had the rewind stolen that too?
A sharp gust of wind slapped his hair into his eyes. Izuku blinked hard, forcing the sting away. He looked around for something—anything—that would tell him where to go.
He couldn’t run at full speed; his stamina wasn’t what he remembered. He couldn’t leap rooftops. He couldn’t punch through walls. Not without breaking himself apart and drawing attention like a flare.
But he could move.
He could observe.
He could plan.
Izuku adjusted his backpack strap and stepped off the walkway into the flow of pedestrians. The crowd pressed around him, indifferent, and it took effort not to flinch at the sheer normality of it.
He kept his breathing even.
He kept his eyes sharp.
He kept One For All quiet, like holding a wild animal by a thin leash and praying it didn’t decide to bolt.
As he walked, he tried to pick out patterns. He mapped the streets automatically, overlaying old knowledge onto the present. Where he was, where U.A. lay, where the exam venues would be. Where trouble tended to gather.
Where villain activity had spiked in the early days of his first timeline.
But the city felt subtly wrong, like a song played half a beat off.
At the edge of his vision, he saw it: a ripple, like heat distortion, running across the glass of a nearby office building. A shimmer that made the reflections warp for a fraction of a second.
Izuku stopped so abruptly someone bumped his shoulder and muttered an apology without looking.
He stared at the building.
The ripple was gone.
His pulse kicked up again.
That wasn’t normal. It wasn’t exhaustion. It wasn’t his imagination.
Time—space—something had been bent. And it was still bending.
He turned slowly in place, scanning for more distortions. There—above a traffic light, the red lens flickered, not in brightness but in position, as if it had jumped an inch to the left and then snapped back. A woman’s ponytail swayed in a breeze that didn’t touch anyone else. A child’s balloon hesitated, floating upward, then dropped as if the string had suddenly gained weight.
Small things. Wrong things.
Like reality was trying to re-seat itself and failing.
Izuku’s mind began slotting the observations into place.
The rewind wasn’t clean.
It was messy, threaded with errors—glitches.
Which meant the villain’s control was imperfect, or the quirk itself was unstable, or there was resistance.
Resistance like… One For All persisting in his body when it shouldn’t.
He swallowed, mouth dry.
If the rewind was unstable, it might snap back. Or collapse further. Or fracture into something worse.
He needed to find the source.
But he also needed to do something more urgent, something that wasn’t tactical but felt just as necessary.
He needed to find Ochaco before the world did something cruel to them both.
The thought was irrational—fate didn’t work like that—but it settled in him with the same certainty as a plan.
The city noise swelled and receded around him. Somewhere, a train announced its arrival. Somewhere, someone laughed. Somewhere, a siren wailed briefly, then cut off.
Izuku’s steps slowed as he neared the station entrance. People streamed in and out. He could take the train toward U.A., scout the area around the exam venue. He could aim for the places where distortions seemed thickest.
His hands curled around his backpack straps. He forced himself to look at the commuters’ faces, searching for something he couldn’t name.
Then, as he descended the steps, his vision caught on a small detail—one that made his chest tighten again.
A coin purse dropped on the tiled floor.
It fell with a soft clack that somehow carried through the station noise.
A girl, a few meters ahead, froze mid-step.
She turned, startled, eyes widening as she looked down at the fallen purse as if it had betrayed her. She moved quickly to pick it up, fingers a little clumsy with urgency. Her shoulders were tense beneath her jacket, like the world had been pressing on them all day.
Izuku stopped dead.
He couldn’t see her face clearly yet—only her profile as she bent, the curve of her cheek, the way her hair fell forward.
But something inside him knew.
Not memory. Not logic. Something older than both.
One For All pulsed beneath his skin, and for a moment it didn’t feel wild.
It felt like it was pointing.
Izuku’s breath caught.
The girl straightened with the coin purse in hand. She exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath for far too long.
And then—maybe because she sensed his stare, maybe because fate had decided to be merciless—she looked up.
Their eyes met across the stream of
commuters.
Her expression flickered: confusion, then something like recognition that didn’t have a reason to exist. Her hand tightened around the purse. She took a small, unconscious step toward him.
Izuku’s throat closed.
He should not say her name.
He should not.
But the syllables rose anyway, aching to be spoken.
“Ocha—”
He stopped himself so hard it hurt, like biting down on a scream.
Her brows knit. “What did you say?”
His mouth opened, then closed. His
heart thudded against his ribs like it was trying to break out.
“I—sorry,” he managed, voice rougher than he intended. “I thought you… never mind. Are you okay? You dropped that.”
She glanced down at the coin purse, then back at him, and the confusion softened into something warmer, more careful.
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yeah, I’m okay. Thank you.”
It should have been ordinary.
A simple exchange between strangers in a station.
But neither of them moved.
The crowd flowed around them like water around stones, and in the brief stillness between footsteps, Izuku felt the world tilt.
Not physically.
Not like her quirk.
Emotionally. Like the universe had leaned closer to listen.
The girl—Ochaco, even if she didn’t know it yet—shifted her weight and gave him a small, uncertain smile.
“This is going to sound weird,” she said, voice quiet as if embarrassed by the thought, “but… do I know you?”
Izuku’s breath left him in a slow, careful exhale.
No. Not yet.
Yes. In every way that mattered.
He managed a smile that felt like it might crack his face in half.
“No,” he said gently, and then, because he couldn’t stop himself from reaching for the only honest thing he could give her: “But I’m… really glad you’re here.”
Her eyes widened again, and for a heartbeat her expression looked almost… relieved.
Like she’d been waiting all day for something she couldn’t name.
Around them, the station announcements continued. The trains kept arriving and leaving. Time kept pretending it was stable.
And in the middle of it, fate nudged them closer—quietly, insistently—toward a beginning that had already been written once.
Izuku swallowed, forcing his voice to steady.
“My name is Izuku Midoriya,” he said, as if he were introducing himself for the first time.
The girl blinked, then smiled properly this time, warmth settling in her face like sunrise.
“I’m Ochaco,” she said, and the way she spoke it felt like a promise the universe had failed to keep the first time.
Then, with a faint laugh that sounded like nerves and hope at the same time, she added, “I’m heading to… well, it’s stupid, but I’m heading to U.A. soon. For the exam.”
Izuku’s chest tightened.
He nodded once, slow and careful.
“So am I,” he said.
And the words hung between them, simple and enormous.
Because this time, he thought—this time he would do it differently.
This time he would not let power make him reckless.
This time he would not let fear make him alone.
This time, even if the world rewound itself a thousand times, he would still find her in every version.
Ochaco shifted again, clutching her coin purse with both hands. “Do you want to—um—” She glanced toward the ticket gates, then back at him. “Do you want to walk together? Just until… wherever you’re going?”
Izuku’s throat tightened painfully.
He forced himself to answer like a boy who hadn’t lived a lifetime already.
He forced himself to be normal.
He didn’t quite manage it.
“Yeah,” he said, voice soft. “I’d like that.”
And as they fell into step side by side, the strange ripples in the air seemed to quiet, just a fraction—as if reality itself approved of the correction.