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1.
Izuku woke up in his bed with a start, sitting straight up and checking the time with urgency.
What had happened?
The last thing he could remember was that he had walked into his round against Todoroki at the sports festival only to be violently thrown out of the arena by a sudden glacier when he didn’t move to defend himself immediately, intending to talk with the boy instead.
Izuku shook his head.
Had he gone to the infirmary and been moved home without his knowledge?
That didn’t seem particularly reasonable given Recovery Girl’s abilities.
He grabbed his phone, intending to see if he’d gotten any texts, only to pause at the date flashing at the top of the screen.
Friday, May 6th.
That was the day of the sports festival.
That was yesterday.
The time on his phone read 2 A.M.. If he’d truly fought Todoroki and been transported home, wouldn’t it have been the next day?
He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. Maybe it was just all an odd dream. He’d been stressed about the sports festival approaching, after all. Maybe he’d just dreamed up the whole thing.
An incredibly vivid dream detailing Todoroki’s tragic backstory would certainly be odd as a dream, but not completely unheard of.
Izuku just shook his head again, opting to go back to sleep and worry about it in the morning.
He had a big day ahead, after all.
The morning started out as all of his mornings at home with his mother did, a small breakfast and some rapid homework before heading straight to U.A..
None of the events following were odd from there, daily, regular things which would have been completely normal for his brain to make up. The same people took the commuter train into Musutafu every single day, him having a dream that featured them wasn’t odd.
Izuku was really able to justify and brush everything off until he was standing outside under the bright stadium lights and he listened to Midnight give the exact speech she’d given in his dream. Even Kacchan’s words were the exact same.
It only got worse when the obstacle race was chosen as the first event.
Unease kept churning inside of him as they were directed to the same dark tunnel he went through in his dream. His dream, which was repeating itself in real life.
Izuku searched for Todoroki and found him at the front of the pack. Taking a shaky breath, Izuku positioned himself to Todoroki’s right, counted to 9 and leapt seconds before Mic-sensei yelled out the start.
Todoroki snarled and Kacchan yelled as Izuku moved, hopping and using the walls to build momentum as he almost flew over countless heads.
The hissing of ice and the heat of Kacchan’s explosions chased Izuku as he took the lead right out the gate. However, it was also followed by the stampeding of the other students.
Unlike in his dream, though, Izuku was in the lead when the Zero Pointers roared to life. His limbs locked up as the robots loomed over him despite him suspecting they would appear and Izuku knew -
From behind Izuku, ice crackled and bloomed beneath his feet. When the Zero Pointers swung, Izuku slipped and -
Black.
2.
Izuku woke up in his bed, head pounding and bones burning.
His ribs ached and for one moment he could have sworn red lightning was illuminating his veins before it petered out.
Yet Izuku wasn't waking up in a hospital bed - being flattened by a Zero Pointer or cracking his head open on ice would have surely required a hospital stay - or on the ground being watched by hundreds of people
He reached out to his phone - his fingers were trembling - same day, same time. It was the morning of the Sport Festival.
Something was going on. And his previous attempts at completing the Sports Festival couldn't have been dreams.
Unless…unless he'd had one of these dreams within a dream situations happening. And, come to think of it, hadn't his mother been watching the pre-quirk movie Inception. Maybe Izuku’s brain had decided that using that movie to feed his dreams was the best way of coping with the stress and fear of failing and of disappointing All Might.
That had to be it, right? It made way more sense than repeating the same day three times in a row.
His mother looked concerned as he ate his breakfast. Did he really look that bad? The homework went even faster because all the answers were the same. He took a slightly earlier train to campus but the fresh faces did nothing to settle his nerves.
He was the first one to the holding room, this time. Even Iida wasn’t there yet.
It took about twenty minutes for Todoroki to walk through the door. He raised his eyebrow when his eyes fell on Izuku, but said nothing. He chose a bench on the far side of the room and started reading something on his phone.
Izuku should say something, right? Small talk? He was never good at that, but Todoroki and his ice featured pretty prominently in those dreams. That was an interesting conversation starter, right?
“Hey, classmate I’ve never talked to before, I keep dreaming about you beating me in the sports festival. Weird, right?”
… Yeah, no.
Thankfully Iida arrived to save him from the awkwardness.
“Midoriya! It’s good to see you so bright and early,” he says. “Let’s begin our stretches together!”
“But it’s still over two hours until the festival begins!”
“The more warmed up we are, the stronger our performances will be!”
— - -
This time, Izuku refused to falter at the Zero Pointers. He made it through the course much like the first time, towards the front but not in first place. The minefield was somehow more terrifying the second time. His shaking hands threatened to set them off early as he dug them up, but he made it. First place!
He forgot about the ten million point target on his head.
Todoroki froze Uraraka’s jet boot to the ground, and they were thrown so off balance that Izuku went tumbling into the grass. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was Todoroki’s glare. It almost felt disappointed.
3.
The third time he woke up, Izuku dropped the pretenses with pretending to be normal, instead just focusing on trying to remember all the possible details from his very first attempt at that day.
What had gone differently?
Why had he made it so much further the first loop and now struggled to get to the third round?
It wasn’t experience or skill alone, both of those had only improved via his repetition of the day, not worsened. Rather, it almost felt like there was something else preventing him from making it to the last round again.
Izuku just shook his head and made his way to class, trying to keep note of the possibility of even minute changes occurring.
Nothing was different of course. He hadn’t noticed anything the past few loops so why would he notice anything now.
His mother gave him the same odd look as the previous morning, but he brushed it off the same as before and instead focused on his process for the sports festival.
The obstacle course was once again fairly clearable using his strategy from the first day. It was somehow slightly less stressful to dig up the explosives in the minefield during his attempt, but that may have been more so from his idea that an unexpected ending could be the way out of the loop.
Winning the sports festival seemed like the most obvious solution to actually get out of the loop but there could really be an infinite number of small conditions or possibilities which would determine if he managed to escape and make it to the next day.
He also managed to avoid being in first place at the end of the obstacle course by taking his time with the explosives instead of being in a rush while digging them up.
Third place behind Todoroki and Kacchan.
Izuku hadn’t considered that not being first place meant that the Support Course student - Hatsume, was it? - held no interest in him or being part of his team for the Cavalry Battle. Which destroyed half of the strategies he’d been coming up with while waiting for the Obstacle Course to wind up.
He cried when Uraraka still approached him. Somehow, he also convinced Tokoyami to team up.
Chaos reigned as soon as the Battle kicked off. Explosions rattled through his skeleton as Kacchan and his team immediately targeted Izuku’s.
This time there wasn’t a wave of teams aiming to get Izuku’s headband and impeding Kacchan. This time Kacchan had an almost unobstructed way to crush Izuku and Dark Shadow wasn’t an insurmountable wall here.
The Cavalry Battle ended with not enough points, burnt bodies and darkness encroaching.
Izuku didn’t sit up in his bed. His ceiling had two cracks and glue residues from when he was 8 and had the brilliant idea to tape up All Might posters directly above his head. They kept falling down and Izuku kept taping them - or rather asking his mother to - until a poster tore right down the middle while falling down.
Izuku was that poster.
Ten minutes. He’d give himself ten minutes and then it was time to get up and plan. And not casually or on the fly.
By now he’d be stupid not to get that he was stuck in a time loop. Whether it was the effect of another person’s quirk or some kind of punishment the world was inflicting on him for being too blessed (attending his dream school, meeting and having a mentorship with All Might, obtaining a quirk) he didn’t know but he wanted out.
First off, he’d have to consider all his action and the consequences that spiraled from them. No blindly remembering his first go and assuming it would happen again.
The Obstacle Course happened, Izuku still went for 3rd but this time as soon as the preparation for the Cavalry Battle began he snapped up Hatsume.
(“Oh? I think Ten Million would give me more exposure?”
“Not a dark horse?”
“.... I like the way you think, Greenie.”)
As well as Uraraka and Tokoyami.
And scrapped by the skin of his teeth, eking out Shinso’s team. Admittedly, the crushed glare on Shinso’s face hurt Izuku more than he expected. On the other hand, he was one more step towards escaping the loop.
It was possible and Izuku would -
His first opponent was Kacchan.
Oh god, he was going to die.
As they both approached the ring, Kacchan did the “finger across the neck” thing. Great. Lovely. Absolutely reassuring, thanks Kacchan.
Midnight starts the match. Kacchan doesn’t even hesitate for a second.
“DIE.”
And he did.
5.
That was embarrassing. It was a good thing that only Izuku would ever remember that.
Unless, of course, the timelines continued on after his “failures” and he just didn’t know because he moved on to the next one. He always wondered about that with time loop plots. That would probably haunt him long after he escaped, which would hopefully be soon.
Anyway.
Izuku dodged Kacchan’s enormous first attack, if only barely. It was kind of like their fight during the battle trials, after that, except he wasn’t playing a distraction or buying time. He was fighting to win.
That had to be the key, right? He had to win the Sports Festival in its entirety. For some reason, the universe—or maybe someone who was secretly using their quirk on him— wanted him to win. Or maybe it just liked tormenting him. Either-Or.
He led Kacchan to the edge of the ring. His back was to the edge, but Kacchan was getting frustrated, and if he was frustrated enough, he got sloppy. That’s what Izuku was counting on.
He dodged around to Kacchan’s back and-
FLICK
Kacchan tumbles outside of the ring and several feet beyond, into the grass.
“Bakugou is out of bounds. Midoriya wins the match!”
Kacchan sat there for a long moment in disbelief. He turned and stared at Izuku, clearly trying to explode him with his mind instead of his hands. He looked one second away from launching himself into another attack, match ending be damned.
Then he got up and stomped back to his holding room, shoving away the medical robots and anyone who tried to check on him.
Izuku looked down. His middle finger was broken and swelling. Well, he didn’t do that on purpose, but…
The crowd was deafening. Izuku’s friends were cheering from the stands. Even Present Mic was excited, and All Might was beaming at him from the tunnel.
He just beat Kacchan.
Surely this put him on track to ending the loop, right?
Todoroki froze Sero into an iceberg, just like the first time. Izuku had to face him again.
They met in the tunnel, just like before. Izuku had to pretend he didn’t already know Todoroki’s entire history. It wasn’t any easier to listen to, the second time.
Izuku wanted so badly to help him, to force him to use his full quirk, but he had a festival to win.
And win he did.
He really did it.
After Todoroki, the others weren’t as difficult. He beat them all. He finally won.
So why did it feel so empty?
Standing up on the podium, All Might placing a medal around his neck, Izuku figured he should have felt some sort of sense of accomplishment. Or perhaps a feeling that he was free.
And yet, he didn’t feel anything like that.
By the time he went to bed, Izuku really wasn’t surprised to wake up in the middle of the night once again on the morning of the sports festival.
1+.
If winning the event wasn’t the condition for him to make it out, he really wasn’t sure what to do.
Izuku tried. He really tried.
He went through it all time and time again.
He tried hitting the exact same situations as his first loop, he tried telling people, hell he even tried purposefully failing at various points of the loop, but nothing worked.
He was genuinely at a loss.
He did have one last shot, one final resort. If the loop wasn’t about him winning, maybe it was about someone else winning?
And so he tried, person after person straight down the list of his classmates until he reached Todoroki.
Something about that loop felt different even from the start.
He redid the entire sports festival the same as the very first loop all the way until he was about to fight with Todoroki.
He cared about Todoroki, he really did, the boy seemed kind under his cold exterior and in a few loops they’d even become something close to friends, so his grand plan for this particular loop was to get Todoroki to use his fire in hopes that Todoroki would then be able to win the entire sports festival without freezing himself like Izuku had seen a few loops previous.
“It’s your power, Todoroki!”
Izuku woke up the day after the sports festival for the first time with a mangled hand and memories of too many failures to count, but he couldn’t stop grinning.
He’d finally won and he’d helped Todoroki all the while.