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Izuku woke slowly on the day that he died.
Light sliced through the blinds, thin and sharp as claws, catching dust in its path and turning it aimless and golden where it hung suspended in the still air of his room. Izuku blinked against it, once and then again, but the world remained muffled and soft around the edges, as though morning itself had not quite decided whether it was ready to begin.
He didn't know it yet—how could he?—that everything was already beginning to end. For Izuku, it was only another terrible day, one among so many that they had begun to blur together. All of them were terrible now. Kacchan made sure of it.
School passed in shades of gray and humiliation. Whispers clung to him, cruel and cloying, following him through the halls and into the classroom where spitballs struck his back and carefully placed feet caught his ankles whenever he passed between the desks. Someone had defaced his desk again, the black ink sinking deep into the wood like a bruise, and somehow Izuku still ended up being the one reprimanded for it. Through all of it, those narrow red eyes found him from across the room, never allowing him to forget what years of experience had already taught him: Izuku wasn't supposed to want things.
So when their teacher mentioned U.A., the laughter broke like glass around him.
Kacchan's was the loudest. It always was, bright and cutting above the others, sharp enough that Izuku could pick it out no matter how many voices joined in.
Do you remember when we used to play together, Kacchan?
The memory came without permission: tiny fists clenched around golden trading cards, bell-like laughter carrying across a playground, two children so certain of the triumph waiting somewhere in their futures that it had never occurred to either of them to doubt it. We were going to be heroes together. The greatest heroes that ever lived.
By the end of the day, that dream followed his notebook out the window.
The tattered remains of its pages fluttered frantically in the wind, a flightless bird trying desperately to remember what wings were for, before dropping toward the fountain below.
"You want a quirk, Deku?"
Kacchan's voice hit harder than the push that had sent Izuku stumbling backward. He stood over him, all burning red eyes and curling smoke, and for one dizzying moment Izuku felt like some puny mortal cowering in the shadow of a vengeful god.
"Take a swan dive off the roof and hope for a quirk in the next life."
For a long moment, Izuku could only stare.
The words didn't feel real. They sank into him like cold rain instead, soaking through layer after layer until nothing inside him felt dry anymore. His vision blurred as his heart pounded painfully against his ribs, and his shoulders still burned where Kacchan's fingers had dug into him, sparks catching against cloth and skin.
Still, Izuku lifted his eyes.
Just once.
His throat ached as he met Kacchan's gaze, the room seeming to tilt sideways around them until he could almost imagine water rising where there shouldn't have been any.
Something bright and hopeful went very still.
Katsuki's teeth clenched at the look. His red eyes blazed, furious at the impudence of Deku even daring to stare at him that way, as though he had any right to silently ask why. Sparks danced between Katsuki's fingers as he stepped forward, and whatever he found in Deku's expression must not have satisfied him, because the tension in his shoulders only eased when Izuku finally flinched and scrambled backward.
"Tch." Katsuki smirked down at him. That was better. That would teach Deku to assume he was worthy of U.A. when he wasn't even worthy of Katsuki's time. He shoved his hands into his pockets as he walked away, never sparing another glance at the boy he used to know.
Izuku watched him go until the tears had made it halfway down his cheeks. He wiped them away with his sleeve before they could fall any farther; they weren't worth anything to anyone anyway.
Outside the window, his notebook was sinking.
Ink bled slowly into the blue water of the fountain, and for a while Izuku simply watched it disappear.
He almost let it.
Some small, exhausted part of him almost wanted to.
Yet eventually he found himself standing at the fountain's edge anyway, sleeves pushed back as he reached into the cold water and pulled the dripping remains free. The pages sagged heavily between his fingers, swollen and ruined, the ink bleeding onto his skin as he shoved the whole sloppy mess into his bag without looking at it any longer.
Mourning could come later. He could already picture himself hunched over his keyboard while All Might's debut played on HeroTube, that booming laugh bursting through the tiny speakers, bright and boundless and impossibly alive. It would fill his room and, for a little while, fill the cracks inside him too, just enough to keep him upright.
The thought of that laugh was enough to lighten his shoulders as he walked.
His footsteps echoed through the tunnel on his way home, bouncing between the concrete walls until Izuku added his own voice to them, trying under his breath to imitate that ridiculous, comforting sound. It came out nothing like All Might's, but that only made him try again, the laugh following him deeper into the tunnel and covering the quiet rumble beginning somewhere beneath his feet.
The manhole cover burst upward before he ever heard it.
Sludge poured into the tunnel at an alarming rate, flooding the narrow space and surrounding him before Izuku could so much as draw enough breath to scream.
"Don't worry, kid. This'll only take a minute." The voice gurgled around him, thick and wet. "It'll all be over soon... You're a real hero, kid."
The slime burned as it forced its way into his nose and mouth, down his throat and into his lungs. Izuku kicked blindly, clawing at the tar-thick body enveloping him, but every frantic movement only seemed to drag him farther into it. The tunnel disappeared. There was no concrete beneath his shoes, no daylight waiting at the end, no world beyond the sour chemical stink coating his tongue and the crushing pressure bearing down on his chest.
This is it, he thought dimly as his struggling began to weaken. This is how I die—pathetic and useless, before I even got the chance to try.
His chest arched in one final, futile search for air, every muscle drawing painfully tight around the breath that wasn't there. Then, little by little, the tension left him.
The noise of the world went with it.
What remained was something vast and soft and black, not peace so much as absence, a silence deep enough that it seemed to hum around him as even the memory of pain began to loosen its grip. Izuku drifted somewhere inside it, beyond breath and heartbeat and the body that had failed him, until something buried far beneath all that darkness stirred.
A fracture.
A spark.
Then light spilled violently through the cracks.
The jolt ripped through his body hard enough to arch his spine. His heart lurched back into motion, one brutal beat followed by another, while his fingers twitched and curled against the sludge surrounding him. His body moved before thought returned to it, muscles surging against the pressure with a strength that had not been there moments before. The sludge buckled around him. Ragged fissures tore through its surface beneath his hands, widening as Izuku fought toward something he couldn't see but suddenly knew was there.
His eyes flew open.
Bright green caught what little light reached the tunnel, gleaming strangely in the dark as his lungs dragged in a breath so sharp it hurt. Izuku tore free and collapsed forward, choking and hacking as strings of slime poured from his hair and uniform onto the pavement beneath him.
By the time All Might landed with a booming SMASH only seconds later, Izuku was already on his knees.
Alive.
He couldn't seem to understand that.
All Might's frown deepened as he scanned the street, but the sludge villain had already disappeared, leaving behind only its reeking residue and the chemical stench hanging heavily in the air. The hero's attention finally settled on the boy slumped nearby, trembling violently in a uniform soaked through with slime.
"Young man," All Might said, his voice booming more from habit than confidence, "you're... all right? That was a close call."
Izuku didn't answer. His wide eyes tracked the hero's movements without quite focusing on him, as though he were still trying to decide whether anything in front of him was real.
All Might rubbed the back of his neck, the gesture unexpectedly human coming from someone Izuku had only ever seen larger than life. "You, ah... must've been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don't blame yourself." His grin returned after a moment, weaker than the one Izuku knew from television but still unmistakably his. "Still, good to see you in one piece! Guess you've got luck on your side, huh?"
Izuku blinked up at him.
I should be dead.
The thought arrived with startling clarity.
I should be dead. I should be dead. I should be dead.
"You survived. That's good," All Might continued, apparently taking Izuku's silence for shock. "But you should head straight to a hospital and get checked for any internal injuries."
A hospital.
Izuku almost laughed.
Sure, he thought distantly. If they even let me through the door this time.
His fingers twitched weakly against the pavement, skin still slick with sludge, while All Might turned away and muttered something about pursuit. Izuku watched the broad line of his back shift as the hero prepared to leap, enormous muscles gathering beneath his costume, and somewhere through the haze he understood that All Might was leaving.
His hand closed around the hero's leg before the thought had fully formed.
The pavement disappeared.
Wind tore the breath from Izuku's already abused lungs as the city dropped beneath him, buildings blurring into streaks of concrete and glass before his mind could catch up with what his body had done. He barely had time to tighten his grip before the world rushed upward again and All Might landed hard enough to send the impact cracking through the rooftop beneath them.
For a moment, the hero didn't seem to notice the extra weight clinging desperately to his leg.
Then he looked down.
"You—what?!" His voice pitched upward, somewhere between alarm and disbelief. "Young man! You can't just—!"
Izuku's fingers finally slipped free. His knees struck the rooftop, the slap of skin against concrete strangely small after the roar of wind in his ears, and he remained there with his head bowed as his breathing scraped painfully through his throat.
All Might's shadow shifted over him.
"You—ah—you really shouldn't have done that," he tried again, the reprimand losing some of its force when Izuku didn't move. "You've had quite a shock. You need medical attention."
Izuku could barely hear him.
The world had become too much and not enough all at once. The edges of the rooftop seemed unnaturally sharp, every color painfully distinct beneath the afternoon light, while his own body felt simultaneously weightless and impossibly heavy.
Eventually, he forced himself to look up.
"All Might."
The name scraped out of his throat, sounding far more like a plea than he had meant it to.
Something in the hero's expression softened before being tucked quickly behind the brisk professionalism of his smile. "Yes, that's me! But you should rest, young man. You're lucky to be alive."
"Lucky..."
Izuku stared at his hands.
They were trembling. Filthy. Entirely ordinary.
All Might was already turning away again.
"Wait—"
The word barely made it past Izuku's lips.
He blinked as the rooftop tipped slightly beneath him and wondered, with distant confusion, whether some part of him was still underwater.
He wasn't sure how long he remained crouched there. The city sprawled endlessly below, cars threading through streets that looked impossibly narrow from this height, people reduced to distant movement too small to distinguish from one another. Eventually Izuku pushed himself upright, his knees trembling beneath him, and found that All Might had only made it a few paces away.
"Um..." His throat hurt when he spoke. "I just—I wanted to say thank you. For saving me."
All Might turned toward him with that bright golden smile Izuku had loved for as long as he could remember. "Of course, young man! Just doing my job."
Izuku stared at him.
He had imagined this moment before.
Not this exact moment, obviously. He had never fantasized about nearly suffocating inside a villain before meeting his idol. But he had imagined meeting All Might thousands of times, had rehearsed every possible word until entire conversations existed inside his notebooks and his head. He had imagined the smile directed at him, imagined that voice answering him, imagined what it would feel like to finally stand in front of the person who had made him believe that saving people could be the simplest and greatest thing in the world.
Now that it was happening, the words seemed to reach him through layers of interference.
"All Might..." Izuku tried again. "Can I—can I ask you something?"
The hero blinked. "Hm? Oh! Certainly, but make it quick. I've got to get this villain contained before he—"
"Can someone without a quirk still be a hero?"
There.
The question he had carried for years hung trembling between them.
Izuku had thought there would be more to it. He had thought he would explain everything: how long he had studied, how hard he was willing to work, how badly he wanted to help people. He had imagined laying all of it at All Might's feet and finally, finally being told what he had been waiting his entire life to hear.
Instead, he could barely breathe.
All Might's smile faltered.
"I... I mean," Izuku hurried on, because silence had suddenly become unbearable, "even if they don't have power, if they just want to help people, isn't that what being a hero is about?"
All Might hesitated.
His towering frame shifted, and when he spoke again, his voice was no longer the one that shook buildings through Izuku's computer speakers.
"Listen, young man. It's good to dream, but you have to be realistic. Without a quirk, being a hero would only get you killed. You can still help people in other ways. Maybe... maybe as a police officer."
Izuku listened.
A strange little sound escaped him.
It took him a moment to realize it had been a laugh.
"Right," he said softly. "Right. That makes sense."
Relief touched All Might's smile, subtle enough that perhaps Izuku would not have noticed it on any other day. "Good lad. Now, stay safe and get yourself checked out!"
Then he leapt.
The force of his departure whipped Izuku's hair across his face, snapping his damp sleeves against his arms as the hero disappeared over the neighboring buildings.
Izuku watched the empty space where he'd been.
The rejection didn't arrive all at once. It seeped gradually into the haze instead, winding through everything that had already happened until All Might's voice became difficult to separate from the pressure that had filled Izuku's lungs, from the blackness, from that terrible moment when struggling had stopped making any difference.
He wandered toward the edge of the rooftop.
The streets stretched far below him, headlights blurred by distance and the gathering haze, and Izuku couldn't remember deciding to come this close. The air felt thin. His lungs still caught strangely on every breath.
Kacchan's voice drifted through his memory.
Hope for a quirk in the next life.
The first drops of rain struck the concrete.
A swan dive...
More followed, gathering in Izuku's hair and running cold along his temples. Within minutes the mist had become a steady downpour, soaking through his already filthy uniform until sludge and rainwater ran together from his sleeves and fingertips. Thunder rolled somewhere beyond the skyline, distant at first, then closer, until each low vibration seemed to pass through the rooftop and settle somewhere deep in his bones.
Izuku watched water gather at his shoes.
It ran toward the ledge in thin streams and disappeared.
His gaze followed it.
The rain grew heavier.
He stood there until he could no longer tell whether minutes had passed or only seconds, his body swaying faintly whenever the wind pressed against him. The city below blurred behind a curtain of water, lights bleeding together until there seemed to be nothing beneath him but color and distance.
Another crack of thunder rolled overhead.
Izuku blinked.
His feet turned.
He crossed the rooftop without looking back, rainwater following him toward the stairwell and gathering beneath his shoes as he pulled open the heavy metal door.
The streets home passed in fragments: a cracked sidewalk beneath his feet, the pulse of a flashing sign against wet pavement, city lights smeared across puddles and broken apart whenever his shoes disturbed the surface. He couldn't remember choosing which streets to take, only that his body seemed to know the route without him.
At some point, he must have reached home.
He knew because he was peeling off his clothes, the fabric stiff with drying slime and clinging unpleasantly to his skin before he dropped it somewhere he couldn't later remember. He must have showered too. There was water again, hot at first and then hotter, steam gathering thickly around him while he stood beneath the spray long after the sludge had disappeared down the drain. His skin turned pink beneath the heat, but he didn't move away. He let the water strike his face and shoulders until the pressure against his ribs became harder to remember.
Later, there was his bed.
Izuku couldn't recall climbing into it. One moment there had been water and steam, and sometime afterward he was beneath his blankets with his knees drawn toward his chest, curling tighter whenever his muscles twitched restlessly beneath his skin. He shifted once, then again, searching without knowing what he was searching for until his body finally settled into a position that eased the ache enough for him to breathe.
The ceiling blurred above him.
Every small sound seemed determined to find him in the dark: the faint electrical hum from somewhere beyond his bedroom wall, a car passing outside, water moving through pipes, something tapping lightly against the window. Izuku squeezed his eyes shut.
It didn't help.
Behind his eyelids waited black water and suffocating silence, Kacchan's voice dissolving into All Might's until he could no longer tell which one hurt more.
His body trembled once beneath the blankets.
Eventually, exhaustion pulled him under.