1,535'The appearance of All Might as a symbol of Justice ushered in a new era of peace amongst the citizenry. All Might is the fabled superman of this modern era, a man with uncompromising morals and the strength to uphold those ideals. We must be thankful that he is truly a man of honour who will not use his powers to enforce his personal ethics upon the citizenry as a benevolent overlord...'
-Excerpt from 'Questioning the Modern Age of Heroes,' by Andile Sithole.
Izuku spends the next day training at the beach. He doesn't move anything. Instead, All Might has him swim partway through the inlet and back to the beach, then up the stairs and down again. He only stops once his limbs seize out in the water and All Might rescues him from drowning.
He coughs water out of his lungs, doing his best to ignore the burning sensation in his throat and nostrils. A gaunt hand keeps him steady.
"Forgive me, my boy," All Might says. "It seems I will have to change all swimming courses to indoor pools."
Izuku agrees completely. The wind had been picking up steadily since the morning and the still water had soon become choppy with waves. A particularly violent series of waves had sent Izuku below the surface. It was only All Might diving in that has stopped him from dying.
Dying again, a part of his mind whispered.
His eyes water badly and he coughs again. Izuku collapses on the ground and breathes out harshly. And then inhaled deeply. He repeats the exercise until he has calmed down enough to talk.
"Good. Keeping calm is always important for a hero."
Izuku looks to his hero. "Ononoki Hinata disagreed," Izuku says, not snidely. "She argued that following the letter of the law was the most important trait for a hero to have and sublimating one's ego for the sake of following the people's laws."
All Might tilts his head to the side. "I haven't read her work in quite a while, but I do remember some of my arguments against her. Tell me, Young Midoriya, do you believe in her works?"
"I think her argument has validity. Without the law heroes enforce their own brand of morality, don't they? And whilst I do think I would trust you if you were held accountable only to yourself, I'm not certain I'd like to live in a world where Best Jeanist had total power."
"He's the number four hero."
"And he deserves to be there," Izuku says strongly, "but I don't think I could live up to his rigid standards of comportment. Have you seen my hair? There's no helping this."
All Might chuckles, ruffling his damp hair. "I suppose he can be a bit extreme in that regard."
"And that's how conformist states start. You must aspire to one ideal or else. It starts with the head of state decrying certain things and soon enough your neighbours are lynching you for being different. I would hope he would never do that, but can you say you've never had days where you wanted people to have the same moral character as you?"
All Might says nothing to that, instead staring at Izuku. It takes him a moment to realise why. He has just criticised All Might and taken a knife to his personal ethics. Izuku swallows.
"I didn't mean..." He trails off at All Might's hand, lifted in the universal gesture of 'stop'.
"You are right, Young Midoriya. Don't look so shocked. There are days where I find the system convoluted and unnecessary. Days where rules and regulations have allowed absolute monsters to walk free are the one's where I most want to tear down the system and build it again." All Might smiles and it looks so shallow on that thin form.
"But I don't because I have faith in people. My issue with Ononoki Hinata is that she completely disregards compassion and human decency barring her twilight work. Under her view, we would be nothing but drones enforcing the word of the law, and not its spirit. So many are imprisoned because their Quirk manifested and they harmed another, but I disagree with this practice. It does nothing but breed resentment to the system and in turn create more villains."
"But you're arguing that we should do what we believe is right regardless of the consequences."
"In a way my words could be taken like that," All Might says. "But I believe more that we should do what is right even should the consequences be dangerous to oneself. All it takes for injustice to occur is to stand aside and hope another will deal with it."
"But not everyone has the power to save others."
"And did you not try to save your friend when you had no powers yourself. Can you espouse Hinata's argument in the face of your own actions without being a hypocrite." Izuku looks away. "Hold your head high, Young Midoriya. It is good that you question your own actions. I wonder often, if I would have left your friend to his fate if not for your intervention. What you did that day, you did out of compassion and selflessness. And whilst Kamui Woods reprimanded your actions, it was that same tenacity that made you worthy of being my successor."
All Might throws him the towel on his shoulder. "Continue to question, Young Midoriya. Ask me as much as you would. As your teacher, it is my duty to see you mature."
And that, is the end of that particular line of inquiry. His hero guides him through a series of stretches before his muscles cramp and reminds him to do them after waking and before sleeping each day no matter what. Izuku has no issue with that.
He spends the rest of the afternoon carrying smaller items to a pile near the road for when the truck comes tomorrow. The pile he is dealing with is tall but there's just enough mass there that it looks steady. Hopefully. He digs through and reaches for some loose pipes, grabbing at them. The first two come out easily and he throws them to the side. The last, though, requires him to prop his legs against what might have generously been called a car and pull with every ounce of strength his fledgling body has.
It came free with a metallic pop and Izuku stumbles onto the sand, falling flat on his back. He sighes and raises the metal pipe high to look at it.
And the fridge falling down the pile. "Fu—"
TDB
TDB
Do the creatures you clothe yourself as understand their true nature? I have wondered this question often. They all harbour one form yet it is impossible to generalise the creatures. The abyss is constant, steady, and chaotic. It mirrors this plane that you choose to exist within, changing forms the closer to light that it comes.
Your humans are not steady and their powers are erratic at best, following neither rhyme nor reason. Human strengths rarely pass down by genetic lineage. I wonder then, what will become of this abyss now that you have returned.
Wake up, Midoriya Izuku, and come home to your people.
TDB
TDB
His curse is loud and prolific when he wakes. Izuku gasps when he is done, looking around and finding himself in his room. No, not my room, he thinks, taking in the hole dripping black sludge from the ceiling and the dark smears across the walls.
"This again," he mumbles softly as he stood, avoiding the weird liquid travelling at odd angles. "I'm very likely not hallucinating this. There was no reason for me to have that hallucination the first time and no reason for it to repeat.
He swallows and takes a deep breath.
"Hypothesis One: This is a long-form nightmare. The only issue with that is there is no way of proving this is but a dream I'm experiencing. Ignore that one. Hypothesis two: I'm insane but I again can't prove that. Hypothesis three: I have some form of Warp quirk that only activates when I've been injured severely."
Or dead, a voice in his mind whispers but Izuku ignores it because why on earth would a Quirk develop that brought you back from the dead? It makes no sense and there was no precedent for it. Regeneration, yes, but coming back from the dead was a complete reversal of causality.
But that makes him think of Regression who could return plant life to a state of health no matter how far gone it was. The study conducted on his powers by the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Harvard University had concluded it to be a form of limited reversal of causality. His power was the only reason South America still had healthy jungles and why wood products had seen a resurgence in popularity.
It is probably why Kamui Woods was so popular in Brazil. That and the four-year stint he had spent there working with their state-sanctioned hero team in the final years of the third war against drugs following the repeal on recreational drugs in Canada six years ago.
Izuku shakes his head and pulls away from those tangential thoughts. They weren't relevant at this moment. He walks to his window and pulls back the curtain.
And froze.
Because as far as he could tell he is looking at clouds, thick and stormy and pregnant with rain. A long platform of darkness engulfed everything below that he could see. He rubs at his eyes and pokes his head out of the window. He can breathe normally—which considering the altitude is impossible and why did I think it was a good idea to stick my head out?—and looks down.
It takes him almost a moment to realise the darkness wasn't uniform. It writhes and roils, almost like a snake pit but not because calling it that implied normality. Realism. Sanity even. And nothing that hurts so much to look at could be normal.
The ground lurches. Izuku grabs hold of the window sill as the room tilts slowly, almost as inevitable as a lava flow. He can't hear his ragged breathing over the blood rushing through his head as his room turns. He closes his eyes and curses every bad word he ever heard Kacchan say because this was madness.
He loses his grip and falls to the ceiling, bracing for everything to hit him. Except nothing does. Hesitantly, he opens his eyes. Izuku's crouched on the ceiling—ground now because gravity says this is down—but he is the only thing that has moved. His bed and desk are still in the same position and even the stream of dark liquid falls upwards.
Izuku has maybe a second to pay attention to this before the sensation of being watched consumes his senses. He turns, slowly, because a part of him knew, just knew that if he looked he would never be able to unsee what is coming.
He looks.
It is an eye in the same way describing lava as hot is accurate. It's true but it couldn't describe the absolute intensity. Lava isn't simply hot, it burned hot enough to melt through rock and metal with ease. You couldn't compare a matchstick to a volcano. Nor can you compare that giant orb that deigned to pay attention to Izuku to something so mundane as an eye.
It is green at the same time that it is yellow and blue and the more he looked the more colours he sees and some aren't natural, they aren't colours he is supposed to be able to see and there's ultra-violet streaking by and there is gamma radiation in starburst fractals and there are things that went past simple electromagnetism and into realms science has no words for and the more he looked the more he sees within the eye within the eye within the eye ad infinitum that shows him everything and a part of his mind is breaking under the strain and the lizard brain screams at him to run but the rest is staring at this moment of impossibility but the knee jerk reaction that comes from his spine forces his arm to move and shut the curtains and
Izuku falls to the ground—ceiling, no, higher thought for later—and violently expels everything in his stomach, which falls down before falling up to the spot right above his head.
He rubs the steady stream of tears. Stares at his blood-soaked sleeve. Forces down the rising panic because bleeding from the eyes is nothing compared to that nightmare creature. In the back of his mind, he knows he is likely having a panic attack, but he doesn't care. What was a mere mortal panic attack to a thing that should.
Not.
Be.
He stumbles to his feet and lurches drunkenly to the door. Even if he was in the highest parts of the atmosphere, the fall to the ground—and was there a ground in this place? —was preferable to riding on what he assumes to be the back of a nightmare creature. Izuku shut his eyes tight and slams through the door.
And falls.
Maybe this wasn't the best idea, Izuku thinks a moment before landing.
It didn't hurt. And felt oddly familiar. He opens his eyes to sand. Green sand. He stares at it before raking his fingers along its surface. It fels like sand. He lets the sand in his hand trickle to the ground. It behaves like sand. But the more he looks the more he sees how it reflects the light, granting it an almost red glow.
He looks towards the source of light. It is a sun or whatever passed for a sun here. It is blood red and not bright enough to cast the world in anything lighter than the earl hours of twilight. He blinks. Looks again. Sees the smaller suns orbiting the larger one as though they were electrons to the large sun's nucleus.
Izuku stands and brushes off the odd crystal sand from his clothes. He notices the pier extending deep across the ocean, far further than any pier had a right to. It looks familiar. No, he thinks as dread mounts in his very pores and he turns. There are piles of glowing shells and he knows the patterns those mounds form, has spent hours tracing the most efficient route to remove the trash from the beach.
He runs through the piles of shells, avoiding the long translucent tendrils reach out to him. He scans every hidden place until he makes it to the other side. All Might isn't there. It calms him because this nightmare belonged to him alone.
And that thought almost brings him to his knees.
No one wants to truly be alone. No one wants to be a stranger in a truly strange land where nothing makes sense and he has to pay specific attention to forget—never ignore for that brought attention to—the songthatmustneverbesungforlifetocontinue. How barren did a life have to be to yearn for true isolation? And maybe that was why Izuku can stare at the beached whales—
Wait, what? Izuku thinks before truly focusing on the large mounds of rotting flesh on the beach. They were whales, he knew because he could tell what a humpback whale looked like in his sleep. Except these aren't the smooth-skinned creatures he knew off. These things are bloated, their flesh torn to shreds in the places where the gases within them had forced their way out. The lack of stench from dozens of rotting whales worries him in a peripheral sort of way. There are other more pertinent things to worry over.
Such as the contractions racking the whale closest to him. Its mass stretches and squeezes and—oh lord—that is a head poking out of the larger whale in a sick parody of birth. The calf is drenched in blood and the fluids of a rotting womb as it pushes out of its progenitor—because calling it a mother implies there is something natural about this—to flop helplessly on the ground beside it. It makes a crooning sound...
No, the progenitor makes that sound. The same progenitor that turns a massive head to stare at Izuku. There is nothing in that gaze he can read. It might have been malice or empathy or maybe a feeling Izuku has no words for. It may be a creature saying 'I am and you are' but that is all conjecture running through the higher thought processes of a human brain whilst the more basic instincts have already sent Izuku running in blind panic anywhere away from those monstrosities.
He speeds up the stairs and past the cracked and ruined road. A glance upward reveals a forest he knows isn't supposed to be there. He doesn't particularly care. Dead creatures are not meant to give birth. So, he runs.
Izuku curses, skids to a halt because somewhere between running from the beach and entering the forest he has lost a portion of his life. He checks his watch. About an hour since All Might left. And it has hardly taken more than ten minutes to run from the beach.
It is dark, not pitch black, but there are gradations in the shadows that stand out starkly to his senses. And he doesn't want to know why he can instantly tell there are thirty-two shades of shadow in a or why some of the shadows are moving.
Izuku's thought processes slams to a halt. He is in a forest of trees not any larger than ones he had seen before. There are dark shapes—not shadows for they cast none and he shoved that thought down with the rest of the worrying ones—flitting in the tree branches. But why does it feel like something large is moving.
He focuses on the odd spot, seeing only a tree and its roots dragging against the ground.
Oh, he thought, that tree's sinking. Actually, now that I have a moment to look and not scream my head off quite a few of the trees are moving. Is this what they call shock? Or am I too numb to feel any shock? Wait, no, that's panic and whilst I still have a moment of calm I should face that pocket of shadow that feels familiar.
His legs spring into motion. Izuku ducks beneath swiping claws and low branches jumps over roots that might have tripped him. There, that patch of shadow in an alcove is different, safe, and Izuku slides right through it and fell.
He lands on a bed. Izuku takes in his room, not daring to look at the window. Take me home, he pleads as he walked to the door. Take me home. Please, just take me back home.
Izuku opens the door.
TDB
TDB
His throat is dry. The sun sears his eyelids. Sand clings to his limbs uncomfortably.
Izuku opens his eyes slowly and sees a blue sky. Looking further, he sees the sun setting, casting the world in vibrant and warm—but more importantly, natural—reds and oranges. Yellow sand coats one arm. He sighs, and stands, wiping down the gritty material off his body. The only thing wrong with the sun is that it hadn't set enough. A quick glance at his watch confirmed that guess.
He pauses at the sight of a blood smear on the sand, vaguely the size of a human body and still damp. Izuku gulps, noticing the dryness in his throat all the more acutely. Around that smear of blood are bits and pieces of rusted metal all torn to shreds and littered carelessly on the beach. Sticking out the sand and standing erect is a stainless-steel handle. A fridge handle.
Izuku feels his gorge rise because he knows, just fucking knows exactly where that handle came from. He knows exactly what those pieces of rusted and flaking metal would have been were they still whole. There are things Izuku never wants to admit out loud. He never wants to admit his fear that All Might is stringing him along in some perverse joke or maybe that he would never be worthy of All Might's power.
But this, this is one thing he had to admit.
"I died," Izuku whispers, "and I came back. A fridge crushed me. And yesterday, and yesterday Kac—"
No! There are still things he couldn't admit. "Yesterday I cracked my skull on a pole."
The sound that escapes his lips can hardly be called human. In some ways, it is more horrifying than the creatures that he has seen because this was him, this was a sound simply from understanding a truth so perverse and fundamental that it encompasses his entire being. The keening wail of one mourning a death was similar to the sound Izuku made. Except, it could never match the despair that laced Izuku's heart and soul.
Because who can stand over the place they died and mourn.
It could have been hours or seconds before Izuku falls silent. In this barren place where the only company were silent pillars of discarded memories, uncaring of the grief of a mortal child, —and how accurate could that description be for one who had walked outside the mortal coil unscathed— time is an object with no meaning, a transitory illusion made manifest only by the acknowledgement of an observer. Without one to watch the sand trickle through the hourglass, one moment would always stretch out into infinity with neither regard no interest for those trapped within its embrace.
Izuku shuts off the part of his mind that thinks too much, locking it tight with the long overdue panic attack and a thousand feelings of horror and revulsion. Calmly, he walks to his bag and retrieves a bottle of water and returns to the place he died—no, that required thought and thought would only crush him. It was easy to pour it over that red patch. He watches the sand greedily suck the moisture. And some of the red.
Three trips to the sea and back are all it takes till the red has vanished beneath the mud. He smiles. Then pauses. No, hiding this sort of evidence was not something worth smiling about. Izuku shoulders his bag and makes the long trip home, carefully keeping his mind blank of the events of the last two days.
He greets his mother. Ate with her. Takes a shower.
When he is certain his mother is asleep, Izuku switches on the light, boots up his PC for the illumination it would provide and flicks on a lamp. He collapses onto his bed and places a pillow over his mouth. Slowly, he unlocks the vault keeping all of his pent-up emotions, but the moment one escaped the rest followed suit with no regard for his feelings.
It is a long time before his screams pass into sobs. A longer time still before exhaustion took him.