#(i remember years ago the Read More function broke on mobile and i hope thats NOT the case now) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

phantomrose96 · 5 years ago

Text

Origin of a Non-Hero

Pro Hero Deku is not that tall of a man… In a simple white t-shirt and khakis, he’s not imposing at all. His 14 year old son, though much scrawnier in frame, is only an inch or two shorter than him.

Pro Hero Deku is not a cruel man. To the contrary, he cares too much, about all things at all times, about everyone and everything he can save if only it could come within his reach. The family counselor knows this. The counselor is surprised that, of all the world’s burdens Deku carries, it would be his family that slipped through his grasp.

Pro Hero Deku’s arms are gnarled and scarred, endlessly broken and re-broken in his youth from trying too much, and caring too much, and fighting too much for the sake of others. So why do they seem so awkward, so unpracticed, so unused to being wrapped in a hug around his son? Why was this boy the last thing for Pro Hero Deku’s arms to reach?

The counselor asks. The raw hurt of the session starts anew.

(This fic is long, heed the Read More)

...

11 people shared the same rigid wooden bench as Shikinori Midoriya. From the glances he stole, all 11 of them were handcuffed. An equal number of armed guards stood at the ready, crowding a waiting area meant to accommodate no more than 10 people. Shoulders rubbed shoulders. Sweat trickled from necks and hairlines. Dampness clung to skin and scales and fur and whatever other quirk-manifested coverings the 11 handcuffed men, and 11 guards, and Shiki bore.

A puttering fan spun in the corner, sad and wheezing and ineffective against the body heat of so many. Shiki kind of resented the fan for all the nothing it was accomplishing.

He leaned his weight into the sturdy bench arm to his left, opting to crush his guts into the furniture rather than lean on the man beside him, who was more knotted muscle and snake tattoos than he was man. Shiki looked again and concluded the man may even be more snake than man. Two sharp fangs stuck out from his mouth and tented his upper lip. His unmarked skin shimmered, a rippling repeated pattern of flesh-covered scales. His tongue shot out and licked the air, forked. Slit-pupiled eyes made momentary, awkward eye-contact with Shiki, and Shiki quickly pretended to be staring elsewhere.

The man seemed familiar. Some villain from some news headline. But Shiki couldn’t place a name, so he didn’t bother thinking about it more. He stared ahead, eyes drifting out of focus, hot. Uncomfortable and hot. Damp and stick-to-his-clothes-sweaty. Just…hot. Unnecessarily so. Maybe he shouldn’t be here. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. Maybe he’d been impulsive, and foolish, and should leave before he gets in any deeper.

The door beside Shiki creaked open. A wizened man with tiny, deep-set, watery eyes motioned him in. Shiki all but jumped to his feet. He tugged at the spots of his shirt that clung sweaty to his back, and he followed. The temperature dropped at least 20 degrees once he crossed the threshold into this new room. The door clicked shut behind Shiki. He startled, and felt a ripple of disquiet shiver down his spine, but Shiki chose not to dwell on it. He was more drawn to investigating the new room, which, he quickly discovered, came with its own kind of sensory-terrible-silence.

The waiting room had been terribly silent – chatterless and buffed with the sounds of breathing, wheezing, throat-clearing, shifting, shuffling, and the tinkering tangle of chains. This time it was an ambient buzz that blanketed the new room, thick and oppressive and syncopated, like a fly trapped in a jar. Shiki traced it to the fluorescent lights overhead. Under their pallor, the watery-eyed man looked half like death. He sat, and motioned for Shiki to sit too in the wooden chair directly across. A table separated them. On Shiki’s side, there was a set of iron cuffs drilled into the table-top, the sort where, if Shiki threaded his arms forward, he could be bolt-locked in place.

Shiki did not acknowledge the cuffs, and neither did the watery-eyed man. They made eye contact, and Shiki instantly understood: this man did not care about him. This man did not care about any of the other people in that waiting room. What gave it away was unclear – maybe the stiffness in his jaw, or the piercing deadness to his horrible ice-blue eyes, or the sterile too-large lab coat crumpling the man’s figure, or maybe none of that. Maybe it was pure human intuition, an instinct honed for survival, that one feels when encountering another human so bereft of empathy that it sticks along every individual neck-hair.

“Sit,” the man said. His tone was sharp, as though he’d been forced to repeat himself. That was somewhat true. He’d already motioned for Shiki to sit. Shiki had been too distracted by the cuffs on the table to comply. He was still distracted now, but he sat this time.

“I’m Dr. Matsuyama,” the man like death continued. He pulled a loose clipboard from the shelf just beneath his side of the table, and he dragged a slightly-trembling hand from his pocket, gray and liver-spotted, trailing an uncapped pen. His eyes became more like pits in this light, but Shiki could see a blue in them that was definitely inhuman. Which wasn’t saying much, since most of the population walked around in definitely inhuman ways. It was quirk-related, no doubt, but endlessly eerie to stare at.

There came a shuffle from the shadows, a shift in the back-left corner of the room that startled Shiki. He looked, and now locked eyes with a man dressed to the nines in an ill-fitting suit. The man pulled at his own lapel, straightening it, as though reading Shiki’s mind about the ill-fitting suit detail.

“Don’t mind Dr. Himura,” Matsuyama continued. “He’s leading the study, so he is observing. I’m conducting this session.” Matsuyama set pen to paper. “What is your name?”

“Shikinori Midoriya,” Shiki answered. “I go by Shiki, among friends.”

“Is there a reason for that?” Matsuyama’s voice had a papery tremble to it, like air whistling through the slit of a barely-cracked window. Listening to it was uncomfortable. Shiki could feel it like a shortness of breath in his own throat.

“Just preference.”

Matsuyama wrote something down.

“How old are you?”

“22.”

“Your quirk?”

“Gravity nullification.” Shiki raised his hands up, palms spread toward Matsuyama. “I can negate the gravity of anything I touch with my fingers, palms, or pads of my toes. Basically any part of my body that has this ridged skin.” He wiggled his wide-spread fingers. The weird fluorescent lighting threw the ridges into stark contrast, valleys of blackness ribbing his fingers, engulfed like Matsuyama’s eyes. “The quirk works on any sized object, but the time limit is shorter for bigger objects.”

Matsuyama let the silence linger as he wrote. His writings filled several lines this time, as Shiki had little else to do than watch the trail of the pen.

“Is your quirk patrilineal, matrilineal, or both?”

“Matrilineal.”

“How does it influence or impede your daily life?”

“It doesn’t much, really. I don’t need it. I don’t really use it. It’s forgettable.”

“What are the negatives to living with your quirk?”

Shiki shrugged. “None much, really, since I don’t use it.”

“Then what brings you here?”

“I mean, just that. I don’t need it. Does it have to be deeper than that?”

Matsuyama wrote. And he wrote for longer than before. Silence draped them again, and it amplified the buzzing from the lights. It was hot again, Shiki realized with agitation. His seat placed him right below the lights, a veritable stage light, targeting him to bake. His neck prickled with sweat. Buzzing. Like a fly in the jar. Fly in a jar, fly in a jar, that flies against the walls each which way and can’t get out, because there is no out, because the jar is sealed, and being unyielding to gravity is no help when the walls close on every side.

“…here?”

“Huh?” There’d been a question. Shiki had zoned out for--

“Did anyone offer you money to come here?”

“Not beyond the 1,500 yen per day,” Shiki responded, collecting himself. “You know, that you guys offered, that 1,500 yen, to cover transport and lunch. But nothing else. No.”

“Did anyone blackmail you to come here?”

“No.”

“Are there any extenuating circumstances to explain why you’re here?”

“None.”

Matsuyama stopped writing. A bead of sweat rolled down the back of Shiki’s neck, lost somewhere between his shoulder blades. He shifted, and rolled his shoulders a little, and edged his hands away from the wrist restraints on the table.

“Do you have any thoughts of self-harm?”

“No.”

“A history of violence?”

“No.”

“Do you consider yourself to be a danger to yourself or others?”

“No.”

“Any history of drug abuse?”

“No.”

“Alcoholism?”

“No.”

“Anxiety or depression?”

Shiki faltered. “I saw a therapist for a bit, a while ago, back when I was a teenager. But it wasn’t anything, like, extreme. You know? Just, stuff.”

“And how do you define ‘stuff’?”

“It—he was a family therapist. My parents are divorced so like, you know, I was a kid – well, a teenager – but that’s still a kid. I mean we saw the therapist when I was a teenager, but my parents divorced when I was 10 before I was a teenager so – the therapist – he was just for, you know, typical stuff. Typical divorced kid stuff.”

Matsuyama wrote, and wrote more, and at length, Shiki said nothing.

“How’s your relationship with your mother?”

“Fine.”

“How does she feel about your participation in this?”

“I dunno, really. I mentioned it to her like once but like, a while ago, before I decided on whether I wanted to do it but like… I dunno. That shouldn’t matter, right? I’m an adult.”

“How’s your relationship with your father?”

“You know, fine.”

“And how does he feel about your participation in this?”

“Like I said, does it matter?” Shiki pressed. He leaned forward, because he could feel his shirt sticking again in back. Under his arms, too. He was grateful for the dark color of his clothing, since Shiki knew from a glance to frumpy Himura that the harsh lighting was unforgiving on sweat stains.

“Is he against it?”

“He doesn’t know about it. Like, he’s busy. And I’m an adult. And it’s not like it’s his quirk or anything since I inherited it from my mom, and it’s my body so I think I should be the one who gets the final say in whether I do this or not don’t you think so?”

Matsuyama left the challenge unmet. It rung through the room around them and petered out to silence. Just an echo left dancing in Shiki’s head. Matsuyama wrote. He only wrote, and Shiki’s heart beat in his own ears.

“My job is to make sure you are of sound mind… uncoerced… unhindered by any self-destructive motivations...” Matsuyama’s pen did not break pace while he spoke, like an automaton. Like a puppet. Endlessly forward, unholy eyes shuffling along line by line. “The Quirk Ethics Board is strict. Dr. Himura has spent the better part of five years at odds with them to get this study off the ground. Be grateful to him, and be patient with me.” And his horrible eyes flickered up, pinning Shiki to the spot. “I can disqualify you, if I think you’re lying to me. So please, some patience, and some cooperation.”

Shiki’s whole body flushed with a shiver, and he realized that perhaps Himura was not the man he should be suspecting of a mind reading quirk.

He leaned back in his spotlight chair, and took a few deep breaths, and wondered how heated his cheeks were. Embarrassment always spiked a blush in them, and Shiki was ashamed to have let his composure slip.

“Your father… wouldn’t you like to tell him, first? There’s no reversing this. We encourage everyone who comes through this room to inform all family, all loved-ones first.”

“No. I don’t want to tell him. Because I know it’ll make him cry. And if I lose my nerve, and back out, I’ll probably never have this opportunity again. I need this decision to be my own.”

Shiki averted his eyes, away from Matsuyama, glancing left and finding himself staring back. A mirror spanned the length of the left wall. A few feet worth of cinderblock stretched from the floor-up, and the ceiling-down, meeting at a mirror that lobbed Shiki’s own reflection back at him. Freckles and green eyes and tousled chestnut hair and cheeks heated with shame and embarrassment.

A one-way mirror. Shiki wondered if there was anyone standing on the other side of it, watching, judging.

The silence lingered, heavier, denser somehow. It took Shiki a few moments to process what had changed.

The scratch of Matsuyama’s pen had vanished. He was not writing. He was staring, instead, at Shiki. Plain to see in the mirror. Waiting for Shiki to face him again. Reluctantly, Shiki looked.

“Your father… is a busy man, you said. He must be very very busy… Shikinori Midoriya.” Matsuyama shuffled his papers into place, and set the clipboard down on the interrogation desk. “If your name, and your appearance, and the leagues and leagues of advertisements, and news headlines, and television specials I see every day paint an accurate picture of who, I suspect, your father is.”

Shiki breathed out, jaw clenched, feeling that familiar dread settle in. He heard a noise from Himura, like a tiny pip, a single note of recognition that Shiki had become well attuned to: that sound of someone putting the dots together, the look in their eyes as they roved over Shiki’s face, as though suddenly giddy to understand his freckles and green eyes and curly hair.

“Midoriya?” Himura leaned forward, pushing himself off the back wall and shuffling a bit forward. His eyes were wide and probing, mutedly eager. “Oh I see – yeah – I see it – you look just like him – but – pardon my interruption, son, but – why would you ever consider participating – here in my study – why I can’t dream of – I don’t think I could be responsible for -“

“Don’t,” Shiki shot back. He braced his back against the chair once more, letting the wave of dread pass. “Don’t�� Don’t finish what you’re going to say.”

“The boy is right, Himura,” Matsuyama said, and he did not look at his colleague. “This is my interview. And you are only here to observe. You are out of line.”

“R-right,” Himura breathed, flushing red, yet still clearly riding out his confusion, his giddiness. He pulled a small kerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the sweat along his receding hairline. “My apologies, M-Mr. Midoriya.”

“Just call me Shiki…”

“Yes, Shiki, we should get back on track,” Matsuyama proceeded. He picked his clipboard up once more and flipped another page. Shiki tried counting the number of sheets that wrapped spiral-like over top. More than he had realized – 10 or maybe 12 pages thick, at this point. Matsuyama’s pen tip tapped to paper once more. “I want to be clear: you are entitled to have your own reason for following through with this. But you may not hide it from me and expect to participate. I am the deciding factor here. Do not lie.”

With that, Shiki felt the last of the vigor in his spine drain away. He slumped forward some, and avoided eye contact with Matsuyama, and Himura, and his own reflection in the mirror which he resented so strongly at this very moment.

“So tell me, boy,” Matsuyama paused to pull in a rattling breath, “why do you want us to erase your quirk?”

“It’s complicated,” Shiki muttered.

“I’m quite good at complicated,” Matsuyama countered.

“It’s… My dad… You figured it out already, right? Izuku Midoriya… He’s the #1 Hero.” The words felt plastic, leaving Shiki’s throat. Artificial. Manufactured. A thing repeated en-masse by television hosts and podcasts and commercials and fan events and—

Shiki breathed.

“He wasn’t always. …Well, duh, I guess, of course… That sounds obvious to say but I mean it as – as in that – back when I was born, Dad was the #361 Hero. At least in the one ranking suite that stretched all the way to the top 500 heroes. Most ranking organizations only did top-250 at best. And the National Rankings only do top-75. He was a still a sidekick then. So was my mom. She didn’t even appear in the top 500. And I think being pregnant with me, and me being born, and taking care of me – I think that set her back even more.”

Shiki leaned forward, elbows set to the table, eyes boring deep into the scratched and stained wood. There were deeper gouges near the sharp corners of the arm restraints.

“When I was old enough to start remembering things is around when I got my quirk, because most of my oldest memories are of my mom playing gravity games with me in our apartment. She’d make my toys float and I’d make them float too and she’d bop them, like with her head, bop them all around and I thought that was the funniest thing. I used to think everyone could cancel gravity because that was so much of my world, just me and my mom.”

Ochaco Midoriya was just barely 23, and her hair had grown long enough to wear in a bun every day. Her off-the-shoulder white shirt spelled out URAVITY in bubble letters across the front. A short release. Only 100 shirts sold, half of them to friends and family. Her son Shiki lay on the carpet, small pudgy hands grabbing at fistfuls of air above him, reaching for her, his footy-jammied feet kicking. His fingers were ridged. He’d have her quirk someday. She pulled out the stuffed frog from behind her back (FROPPY logo emblazoned on the tummy) and papped it gently forward. Into the air. Where it hung and spun, lazily adrift. Shiki let out a shriek of joy. Ochaco smiled, and cupped Shiki’s hands in hers, and kissed them.

“My dad… um… he was out most of the day, almost the whole day, on weekdays at least, when I was young. And I was proud of him for that especially when I got old enough to understand what heroes and villains were because like, that was my dad, out there every single day putting in more effort than anyone else, you know? It never even seemed that weird, to like, that I didn’t have him around. I had Mom, and Dad was a hero.”

The little leaguers were all 5 or 6 years old, adorned in fluorescent pinnies and tiny little soccer cleats. They ran the way little kids run – with too much force in every stilted step, no grace, all fierce concentration, feet slamming heavy into grass and balled fists swinging. The ball came above their knees, and they kicked by running into it full-force.

Tatsuya bodied the ball into the opposing goal, and he was met with a chorus of applause from his mother and father on the sidelines. It was the first time Shikinori Midoriya noticed – Tatsuya had a dad. He looked, and saw so many dads. And it was strange. Weren’t they heroes? Weren’t they busy?

Ochaco stood alone. She waved a big wide sweeping wave when she noticed Shiki looking. She whistled for him. The ball knocked into Shiki. He forgot to wave back.

“I remember… Most of my memories of him, from when I was little, were on weekends. But not always, I mean not all weekends. He patrolled through weekends too. But if we got a weekend off, then we’d do some activity with him. Me, Mom, all of us together. It was my favorite. But weekdays, I never saw him. He left before I woke up and came home after I was in bed. I stayed up sometimes, in secret, to listen for him at the door. But a lot of nights I fell asleep first, or some nights he never even came home. I actually, I think I started to see him more on television, from news reporters, than I did in person…”

A head-to-toe child’s onesie which was a flannel plushy mock-up of Pro Hero Deku’s uniform. Shiki wore it, bunny ears and all, sitting in his mother’s lap in front of the television. Ochaco sat with her back against the couch, on the floor. The sun had set around them. The news had trickled on to its fourth recap of Deku’s apartment arson rescue.

~”A civilian recording that is SURE to capture a nation’s heart! As Pro Hero Deku emerges from the blazing building with three tenants, mother father and child, slung across his back – look – there! Oh what a winning smile that boy’s got, hasn’t he? Saving people with a smile! It makes me nostalgic for the age of All Might, to our viewers old enough to remember the Symbol of Peace before his retirement. Maybe Deku is someone who can spark that hope back into the new generation, what do you think, folks?”~

“15 more minutes, Shikinori, then it’s time for bed,” Ochaco told Shiki, bouncing him on her leg.

“But I wanna stay up for Dad! I wanna tell him we watched him on the news!” Shiki pointed a stubby finger to the freeze-frame of his father on the television, all tousled hair and sweat, bearing the weight of three others on his back, a veritable Atlas, smiling. Smiling smiling. Shiki gave the same smile as his dad, beaming at his mom.

“You’ll see him tomorrow; you can tell him then.”

The smile dropped from Shiki’s face. He looked forward to the television again. “I’m not gonna see him tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Tuesday and I don’t ever see Dad on Tuesday.”

~”I hear we’ve got an interview with a civilian who was on-site during the disaster. We’re cutting to him now!”~

“…30 more minutes, okay then, Honey?” Ochaco said. “We’ll wait up 30 more minutes for Dad.”

Shiki’s hand twitched. His eyes were locked on the shackles, and slowly, experimentally, he rested his wrists in the cuffs. Could the table hold him down with his quirk?

“And by the time I was 7, he broke into the top-100 heroes. Within another three years, he was top-50. Newspapers called it mind-blowing to see someone like that jump the ranks so quickly. He blew past Ground Zero and Ice Razer, who you know are like, #2 and #3 now. It was crazy. Like, he got way more attention for how quickly he was jumping than for his actual rank. The papers said he was working inhuman hours. That even heroes with time quirks and clone quirks couldn’t be as everywhere as he was… I have clippings saved. Or I did. I might have gotten rid of them when Mom and Dad divorced.”

Shiki clinked his wrists against the shackles, metal wrist watch ringing hollow against the cuffs.

“Which is, that was something I found out on my 10th birthday. They didn’t mean for me to know but I was staying up past my bed time to play the new Hero Smash game they got me – the one Dad was finally in -- and I heard them arguing just a bit too loud about something, and them arguing was kinda common at that point, so I paused the game to listen and… yeah… divorce… It was, you know, a pretty tame divorce, I think. Like, I can’t really complain about it, compared to some of the stuff other kids go through. Cuz Mom and Dad still acted friendly and tried to settle things on good terms but, you know, it showed. I’d go into Mom’s room and hold her, some nights, when I heard her crying. And she’d sob and say ‘I still love him’ and I never knew what to say back, but, I’m –that’s, anyway. Anyway.”

Ochaco Midoriya, 32 years old. She kept the last name. It would be easier, in terms of legal hassle, and it would be easier on her son, who she had full custody of.

Her empty bed had been the norm for years, now. Deku had gotten into the habit of working through the nights, stealing naps on his cot at the agency. But now it was the cold reminder, the knowledge, that he wasn’t ever coming back to this bed that stole Ochaco’s breath and made it short. Made her heart squeeze. Forced noises past her lips that she tried to keep in.

“Mom?” Shiki’s eyes, wide with concern, at the side of her bed. He held his hands together, ridged fingers, ridged palms, the little fingers she used to kiss.

He reached a hand out, and patted her shoulder, tip toes, leaning over the bed. He should be crying too.

Shiki pulled his hands back, rubbing at his wrists. His cheeks were flushed, embarrassment creeping through his system as his own words echoed back at him. Those things he’d rarely told anyone. “Am I… is this too much detail? I can dial it back. It’s just, um, I feel like the context is important for you to like… know why I’m—not write me off as—”

“This is fine, continue. If you say anything unnecessary, I can simply not write it down,” Matsuyama waved his free hand dismissively. The pen in his other hand danced, still, across the page.

Shiki cleared his throat. “Anyway, I lived with Mom after that. And when I was a little older she told me more about it and basically just. ‘He loves All Might more than he loves me,’ she said. Not the person, but the… idea. Like the concept of All Might. It’s who my Dad was so driven to be since the very beginning and… My mom couldn’t take being secondary anymore… And I realized then that, I was part of that too. I didn’t need saving, so I came second. My mom put her hero career on hold to raise me but he, um, he just couldn’t do that. Who he was as a person was so, unfixably tangled up in becoming that All Might in his mind that, he couldn’t sacrifice that. Not for me. Not for my mom.

“And when they finally divorced, and he moved out and into this just… terrible tiny unfurnished apartment, which I only saw twice – two years apart – and both times it looked the same. Nothing in there. Almost like no one was really living there. A futon and a closet and a rice cooker in the corner and boxes and All Might merch on the wall.”

Shiki was 11, sitting on a packed cardboard box against the red-brick wall of his dad’s apartment. Still-packed boxes lined most of the walls, like a misshapen and dull lego construction. Red brick, brown cardboard, All Might smiling from every wall. It was an apartment unlived-in, and that aspect was nearly unfathomable to Shiki. His dad had been moved out for over four months.

“Pretty great, huh?” Deku said, gloved finger pointing to the wall of All Mights. Deku’s smile was bright, his excitement genuine. “The one on the far left was a limited release from 50 years ago. One of my super-fans tracked it down for me and mailed it. Can you believe it?”

Shiki nodded. All the posters looked the same to him.

“But um, after the divorce is when he really skyrocketed. Everything before was child’s play. I was… dizzy. I was 11, and starting middle school, and had just lost my dad only to have him be everywhere but… not my dad. Not there for me. But everywhere, on billboards, in newspapers, on television. Kids at school would hear my last name and they’d ask ‘Midoriya – Like Izuku Midoriya? Like Deku?!’ and I’d have to just say yeah while they applauded or like, even smacked me on the back sometimes like I had any choice in that, and would ask questions about him that, I couldn’t answer, cuz he wasn’t my dad anymore. His fans in my class knew things about him that I didn’t. Sometimes little things like favorite color but sometimes big things, whole things from his childhood that I never heard about. They’d ask me things about him and that’s when I realized I didn’t know my dad at all.”

Shiki glanced up, and saw Himura look away in embarrassment.

“He’d been kidnapped, as a kid, had saved Ground Zero twice, took down a murderer with Ice Razer and Ingenium, had his mentor die during a rescue mission. I had to hear these things from people I didn’t know. And I felt just, selfish, every time I learned something new. Especially the things that happened after I was born. Because how do you sit and hear someone tell you a story about the time your dad saved their grandma from a collapsed bridge and just… how can you justify feeling resentful about that? How selfish do you have to be to think, ‘he should have been spending that night at home with me and my mom, and not saving your grandma.’ I hated it. I started to hate hearing about him.”

His hands were shaking now, slightly, Shiki realized. His breathing too came in too fast and too raspy. He set his wrists back in the open restraints, and breathed out.

“And just… by the time I was 12, Dad made Top 20. And then when I was 13, he was Top 10. …And I think at that point he really, truly didn’t feel like my dad anymore. Because he was just, some God to the world. Someone people fawned over by the millions and, just, that was better, actually. Because I could really just act like he wasn’t my dad, had nothing to do with me. Maybe I was at peace with that. I could do the 20-minute phone calls once a week and be courteous with him and answer questions about school and just, move on…”

Shiki walked the same street every day to school, the same route with the same turns, the same backpack slung over one shoulder. But the scenery changed. New advertisements. New billboards. New screens projecting, dancing, twirling, screening, screaming. Deku brand hand cream. Deku brand baby clothes. Deku brand clutch purses. Headlines with stills of Pro Hero Deku printed on the front page. Upcoming: interview with Pro Hero Deku! Everywhere. Growing like mushrooms. The likeness almost like the one in Shiki’s mirror every morning. The likeness of a man quickly fading from memory, quickly replaced by advertisements and stills over flesh and blood. Shiki felt eyes on him, every day, from people who saw the resemblance. Or maybe not. Maybe he imagined it. Maybe no one was looking at him at all.

The wrist restraints were cold.

“And I started to see Mom less and less, around that time. I was old enough to take care of myself mostly so she, she took up patrolling again. Started rising the ranks quickly too… Mostly because the tabloids loved her, and circulated her name as much as they could, as the ex-wife of Deku… They said horrible things that I—still I—even thinking about them just. Vile horrible things about her and Dad, and why Dad left her, and why she left Dad, and ‘Deku fans’ piling on her calling her trash and filth and whore and, insulted her for keeping his last name until, eventually, she did change it back and… I stopped reading those but… that’s how hero work works. Whatever gets your name out there, and gets you recognized, so that your rescues get camera time and screen time and … She at least got to make her own name, once she got recognized. Her own rescue efforts spoke for themselves. Saved over 75 people from the rubble of a collapsed building and, s-she broke top-100 that same year. I wanted to be happy for her. I wanted to… but the house was so empty.”

13 year old Shiki unlocked the front door. He flicked the lights, and they blazed through the pitch blackness beyond the foyer. There was a sterile cleanliness inside, the subtle sting of lemon in the back of his throat. Between his mom’s new notoriety and his dad’s hefty child support, they could afford a personal cleaner now. Twice a week. She must have come. The apartment was spotless.

Shiki turned on the television and rooted through the cabinet and emerged with a box of cereal. He didn’t bother with a bowl. He sat on the couch instead, scrolling his phone with one hand, grabbing fistfuls of cereal with the other. The news mentioned ‘Uravity’ and Shiki turned it up. He listened to the reporters until they spiraled into her failed marriage with Pro Hero Deku, and Shiki listened no further.

He focused on his phone instead, cereal crunching. Most of the forums he followed were Uravity forums. He paused on a particular cross-posting, shared by someone irate over the click-bait bottom-feeding publications that drew readership with manufactured drama. Shiki read the headline. ~”‘She took our son!’ Pro Hero Deku sobs in a raw tell-all about the woman who broke his heart and tore apart his family to launch her own career.”~

There was a boy pictured in the article. The boy wasn’t even Shiki.

“I was 13 still, and we were moving from the apartment into a nice house, because Mom’s salary and Dad’s child support were now more than enough for a proper place. A nice place. And I did most of the house cleaning and packing myself since Mom was now so so busy… And I found, in the attic, my old box of toys, the gravity ball toys the—the ones where—me and Mom used to bop them back and forth and I… think I just… I threw them away. And the old newspaper clippings I kept about Dad. Threw them all away. Never made it to the new house. I hated them. I hated them.”

Shiki pressed his back against the attic wall, suddenly short of breath, static suddenly in his legs and rippling down his spine. He slid down, slowly, streaking the layer of dust along the wall, just like his hands had streaked away the dust on the boxes, gray lint filling the ridges on his finger tips. He stared at the layer of yellowed newsprint, the top article boasting ~”No Longer Just A Side-Kick? ‘Deku’ Makes His Agency Debut!”~

It filled him with revulsion, with a choking hurt in the ways that modern news headlines didn’t. He had forgotten the feeling associated with these old headlines. That old forgotten excitement of knowing that news outlets had come to acknowledge his dad’s existence.

Not his dad anymore. Not his. Izuku Midoriya lived in newsprint now. The media owned him, had stolen him slowly. A superhuman. A god. Not a husband. Not a father. Not Shiki’s.

“He called on the phone once a week. Just once a week, to talk about nothing. Until I was 14, that is. Once I turned 14, suddenly Dad was eager to be on the phone with me. And he’d act like he was interested in talking to me about normal stuff, but it always came back to U.A. Always U.A. Asking if I wanted to. Asking if I’d thought about it. Asking if I had any questions that he or Mom could answer about the school.”

Shiki’s voice caught.

“…Still… still makes me angry. And he just didn’t realize. I realized he had no idea. At all. Whatsoever. That what he’d done was… might have been wrong. I realized and it blew my mind. That nothing he did was ever, ever malicious. He was, is, thought he was a good person. Working so hard to save everyone. Absolute strangers. As many, as much, as endlessly eternally as he could. And he… thought I idolized that. That I looked at him and Mom and wanted to… do them proud and follow in their footsteps. And I saw him through… his own eyes I guess… and he was the world’s hero and the next All Might and the rising Symbol of Peace and he didn’t think he’d abandoned me, or Mom, he thought he’d just left us to catch up… I think he talked my mom back into heroing. Because they stayed friends, or ‘friends’, whatever you call two people who get along great so long as they ignore all the hurt between them. And… he… wanted me to enroll in U.A… THAT… was when I finally snapped at him, and we got family counseling.”

Silently, Matsuyama set his pen down, and he slid across the table a box of tissues Shiki had not noticed him take out. And Shiki took one, shocked to pad it against the stream of tears he hadn’t noticed rolling down his cheek. He stole one more glance into the mirror, ashamed of the puffy-eyed and blotchy-cheeked reflection. His dad’s freckles. His mom’s chestnut hair. He was designed piece-meal from them. No part his own. No part himself. The buzzing, overhead. Fly in the jar. Uncaring of gravity. Eternally confined to the jar’s unseeable walls.

“I saw Dad in person, for the first time in 2 years, when we went to that counselor.” Shiki let out a strained laugh. “I had literally… misremembered things about him. I had remembered him being taller but, the media just loved to prop him up at certain angles that made him taller. In street clothes, in person, he almost didn’t look like Pro Hero Deku. …And even smaller, when he cried. Because he did cry, during counseling, like honestly cried. And he apologized. I’d never – I didn’t think I would ever get an apology from him. Or like I couldn’t ask for one, didn’t deserve one, because that would be selfish. But he owned up to it… Dad cared. Dad was sorry. Dad had no idea I was this hurt. Dad thought I idolized heroes too and that he was making me proud. And I thought it would work. I thought we would finally fix this all.”

The counselor asks. The raw hurt of the session starts anew.

“I was finally able to tell him just, how invisible I felt to him. How selfish it made me feel. He listened. He cared. He stopped shilling for U.A. I went into a normal high school, one without a hero track. And the first weekend of the school year, Mom, me, and him went to an aquarium, and dinner at a fancy restaurant, and a play in the evening. I don’t like plays but, I liked that play. A lot.”

Shiki crumpled the used tissue in his hand, and then hid it beneath the table. It was wet and tainted and felt unclean in his hand, but there was no garbage can in sight, and he had nothing else he could do with it.

“And that was when Dad slipped a rank, that next month. From #7 to #8. It shouldn’t have mattered so much but, it did. He’d never fallen rank before… No actually, even worse, he’d never even stayed the same rank from one ranking release to the next. He was always climbing. For almost 20 straight years, always climbing, and this was the first time, the very first time he… Dad didn’t mention it. I didn’t mention it. But in my mind I’ve always blamed this as the like, as the turning point, toward turning back down. In reality I don’t know that for sure. Maybe our whole family was just, always destined to slip back on old habits, right from the start. It’s not like he or Mom ever went back on any promises or anything. But more like… Dad slowly stopped proposing weekend activities, and so did Mom. Until it was just me putting in that effort, and I couldn’t be the cause of him falling rank anymore. I couldn’t be the bad guy.”

Shikinori Midoriya’s blood ran cold. Red. The name, the arrow, downward-pointing, -1. Red. Red where there had only ever been green. “#8” in red, which bore no value and no merit beyond the unsightly embarrassment of being below #7.

There were sharks in the water.

Shiki knew it would be only hours until the most predatory, the most inflammatory think-piece writers pounced. Until hero forums buckled under every single anonymous layperson’s expert opinion on where, and how, and why Deku had stumbled. Was his rescue count down? Was his collateral coefficient up? Were merch sales dropping? Had his new figurine bombed? Had a hostage died? Had he yelled at a reporter? Was it the joint rescue with his money-grubbing ex-wife? His incident resolution was abnormally low two Saturdays back. Why? Where had he been? What was he thinking?

Shiki read the theories. He told himself to stop, but the scroll loaded endlessly. Some fans honed in on that weekend – the aquarium trip – fascinated by the dip in resolved incidents, circling like vultures, pecking, tearing, probing. They found an Instagram post from a fan spotting Deku in the crowd of the hammerhead exhibit, and the link got passed around like an electric current.

Had this happened a month ago, a year ago, Shiki might have just watched it unfold disaffected. Shiki’s chest ached now. He hurt for the man his mind had reconciled as his father, for the man who mimicked the guppies and pressed against the glass in the aquatic tunnel, cheeks puffed and scarred hands flapping by his ears. Shiki ached for the genuine laughter from his mother, who still loved this man and his guppy imitation. He ached for the reminder of what his family was, and what it wasn’t, and what it was punished for even trying to be.

“His agency and Mom’s started collaborating a lot. They were good together. Like really good. The two of them together, I saw a new story almost every week. Maybe I was even a little jealous but… it wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of, anyway. So I was fine with that. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t – and don’t – want to be a hero.

“I just kind of… tried to figure myself out as a person, by myself, during high school. I kept a low profile. Joined a math club. Only really talked to a few people most days. Had like, two people I sort of saw as friends. I started going by my mom’s name, Uraraka. Never told people who my parents were. And I think that was for the best, because I was still in school – I was 17 – when Dad claimed the #1 spot. …and I swear I would have had to transfer schools if my classmates knew I was Deku’s kid.”

“Front Page” did not begin to describe the explosion, the eruption, the maelstrom of obsession that gripped an entire nation’s heart and soul when Pro Hero Deku unseated the previous #1. The new report came just days after Deku performed his 10,000th recorded civilian rescue. In honor, dedicated fans had gone and compiled every drop of video coverage that ever graced Deku’s career. It was chronological, starting with grainy film 20 years’ outdated of a still-scrawny U.A. sidekick pulling a man out of rubble, and progressed like a time-lapse from there. A rescue counter sat super-imposed on the bottom-right, documenting the rescues as Deku grew taller, broader, more confident, more practiced, faster and stronger and beaming – always beaming – with a smile to instill hope in an entire nation. The whole montage was two hours in length, and it skyrocketed to the #1 trending.

A half-dozen other videos followed in its wake: a clip of Deku shaking hands with the President who pinned a simple, proper, dignified medal to the front of his costume. A shaking, trembling, sobbing hug with the skeletal and spindly public figure of Toshinori Yagi – previously known as All Might – who teared up along with Deku on stage. Chants of “Symbol”. Chants of “Peace”. Chants, louder than all others, of “Deku”.

Everywhere. Everywhere. Replaying. Tagged. Suggested. Trending. Featured. A kiss with Uravity, tender and subtle and full of passion. A handshake with Shota Aizawa, his first teacher, his long-time peer. Endless interviews with rescued victims. Tear-jerkers. A man named Kota recalling how Deku, at 15, saved him from a certain violent death. A woman named Eri detailing how Deku had taken her in his arms and rescued her from the depths of Hell.

Thousands others followed. Spine-tingling recounts from voices, with breath and warmth and life, who wouldn’t be alive without Deku. They heaped their praises on a man so endlessly driven, forward forward forward, that he could save 10,000 people, and 10,000 more, and everyone, and everything he could touch.

Shiki skipped school the whole next week. Hardly anyone noticed.

“So I got away. Far away. I figured out college all by myself, and got accepted to my top choice 1,000 kilometers away from Tokyo, and it was perfect for me, because maybe then I could figure myself out for a bit, away from everything. Mom asked me to reconsider when I finally saw her in person four days after I’d accepted. She’d been on a sting mission for two straight weeks. They saved fifty people. It earned her her spot as the #15 Hero. My dad had saved twice as many people in that time. Not that I heard it from him. I heard it on the news. I didn’t speak to him again until after I graduated.”

Shiki breathed. “College… was good. It was far away enough that I stopped being afraid of people recognizing me at a glance. I made real friends. I had real relationships. Got to know my professors. Took up tutoring and loved it. I… did things on the weekends, like with friends, went places, saw things, I was happy. Genuinely happy. All these things I never realized I was missing as a kid because I never realized I could have an identity outside of being just… Deku’s reject son. I stopped fearing that and started to be me. I traveled during school breaks. Took some pottery classes. Just… breathed.” Shiki’s hands fidgeted. “At least… until I graduated. And I realized there was a whole cliff I was standing over that I was just avoiding. I didn’t have a job lined up. I tried. For absolute certain. I lost count around the 75 application mark. Nothing. My college friends moved away. My funds were drying up. …I moved back home.”

One duffle bag, slung across his right shoulder, was all Shikinori Midoriya brought home with him. This big house from his teenage years was empty. Endless untouched rooms. Pristine duvets across the beds in all 5 bedrooms, including master. Empty dressers. Empty drawers. Not so much as fingerprints on the front doorknob. Only his mom lived here now, and Shiki fought with the blooming certainty he felt in his gut that she spent almost no time here at all.

Uravity was now the #7 hero. Her merch sales were particularly popular with girls ages 5-12. The money she raked it was enough to put her parents up permanently in a beach house in Hawaii. Money would likely never be a worry for her for as long as she lived. She likely never sold this home because it simply wasn’t worth the hassle.

Shiki set his bag down in his old room, bigger and cleaner and newer and nicer than his college apartment, and so much more a cage than it had ever been before.

Fly in a jar.

“Moving home was… a rough choice. I thought a lot, before that, about just asking Mom and Dad for money. They could definitely afford it. But I couldn’t… be that again, the reject son, some unwanted parasite, pilfering money. I just needed enough stability to get back into the job hunt and get back on my feet. I told Mom that much. I didn’t tell Dad. Didn’t even tell him I’d moved back home but, he found out from Mom. He wanted to see me. Wanted to talk to me. I’d ignored all his calls in college… I decided to bite the bullet and just, go into his office and see him. Let him lay eyes on his failure son. Get it over with. I told him about college, and about my job hunt, and just needing enough time to get back on my feet. And you know what he said?”

Matsuyama glanced up. His pen still trailed. “What did he say?”

“’I could use another accountant at the agency, even a receptionist, if you don’t want to deal with crunching numbers. Given some time and training… I could even use another side kick.’” Shiki looked up, locking eyes with Matsuyama, and blinked away the tears blurring his vision. “Math… was my best subject in school. I want… to be a math teacher. I’ve been sending out a hundred applications for teaching positions. Dad doesn’t know that. Dad… is still living in this world where everything is heroes. And of course he is! He’s lived there his whole life! He never left it! And he’s still waiting for me to join. Waiting for me to change my mind. Like time is the only factor. That world stole my parents and he… and he still thinks that, things can be fine, he can get his way. He thinks, I’ll do what my mom did, and play catch up to him. That I’ll come into my own. That I’ll join him in his hero world. Him and Mom both. That I would want anything to do with heroes. He won’t believe otherwise.”

Shiki struck an open palm against his chest. “Well he’s not getting that. He’s NOT getting this quirk! Not now! Not ever! I’m GETTING RID OF IT. I want to be part of Dr. Himura’s Quirk-Erasure study because, until I’m fully stripped of my Quirk, my Dad and my Mom won’t get it. I know – all those guys out in the waiting room? I know they’re all villains. Probably this whole study is villains, yeah?! They’re all people who’ve been offered reduced sentences if they willingly give up their quirk in this study. Maybe you have a few normal people with dangerous quirks who want to be rid of it but me. My quirk. I stand out, I know, I get it. Because gravity control is cool. And it’s harmless. So why would I want to get rid of it, permanently? This is why. Because everything I’ve spouted off, it, all that probably sounds like some villain-origin-story, yeah?? ‘My hero father never loved me so now he will pay.’ No. No heroes and no villains I’m sick of all of them. This ends here. This ends with me! No more heroes, no more villains. No more POWERS in the Midoriya blood line! This is a non-origin story. This is the origin of me! This is the start of me taking back what heroes took from me!”

Shiki’s breath caught in his throat. He felt the tears wetting his cheeks and knew he had no power to stop them this time, not with the mangled tightness in his chest, not with the hurt bubbling long-repressed to the surface. So he wiped hastily at his eyes, and he stared down at the desk below him.

“I’ve thought this through. I know what I want. I’m not being coerced. I’m of a sound mind and body. I just… want a normal, happy, powerless life. I want to be normal. And I need this final leap, to prove to my family once and for all they can’t have me. I need this control. I need this trump card. I need this final, unchangeable, irreversible option to make them get it. That they can accept me quirkless… or they can not accept me at all.” Shiki lowered himself, and set his eyes to his lap. “Please… Please, I’m begging you.”

Matsuyama let the pen clink to the table. Shiki could not get an accurate count, but at least 40 pages had been flipped over the clipboard’s spiraled top. Matsuyama unfurled these pages, and steadied their alignment, and tucked the board beneath his arm. His chair scraped back with an unholy shriek, and he stood.

“Thank you. We will let you know in due time about your candidacy in the study.”

Matsuyama motioned for the door.

“Wait…” Shiki swallowed. His mouth had gone dry. His ears were ringing slightly. “Can’t you tell me now?”

“The decisions have not been made. How can I tell you now?”

“What about just me then? Y-yes or no?”

“You will be informed in due time.”

“When? How soon?”

Matsuyama motioned again.

“Yes or no? Please. Can you let me be part of this or not?”

“The next patient is coming in, Shiki. See yourself out.”

…

Inko Midoriya’s apartment was small, and it was stayed, and it was comfortable. Her son had offered her time and time again to move her into a nicer place, but she always declined. This apartment was where she’d raised her family. These walls had memories. This was her home.

It felt almost like a memory, just now. Out of the corner of Inko’s eye, seeing the young man with curly hair and green eyes seated at her kitchen table was achingly familiar, the ghost of family dinners with her son.

10 minutes had passed since Inko pulled the rack of cookies from the oven, a warm miasma of buttery sweetness, and laid them out to cool. She grabbed one now, quick touches, experimentally, until the heat didn’t quite burn her fingers, and placed it on a plate. She did the same with a second cookie, and carried them like a server to the table where she took the seat opposite Shiki. He watched her, and accepted the cookie with a quiet ‘thank you’, and merely stared at it. He let the warmth wash across his face.

“I’m happy to have you back around Tokyo, you know,” Inko said quietly. She looked down at her own cookie, smiling slightly, and picked it up. “Happy to have someone to bake for.”

“I’m happy to see you too, Grandma. It’s been a while.” Shiki bit into his cookie. It was warm, and soft, and achingly comforting. Shiki wasn’t used to the taste of homecooked anything. It squeezed something in his ribcage, made him hurt in a gentle way. “It’s delicious,” he whispered, and raised the heel of his palm to wipe the wetness there.

“You can… you know you can stay with me, Shiki. I’d be happy. I want you to. I know it’s not as big a place as Ochaco’s home, but, Izuku’s old room is still here. There’s still… You could still…”

Shiki shook his head. “If I stay with you, it’ll be so much harder to leave. I’m still job hunting. No guarantees I’ll end up anywhere near here.”

The silence spread between them. The warmth of Shiki’s cookie wafted away, sapping off, like steam curling from a lake.

“…You don’t want to end up living around here, do you, Shiki?”

“Not if I can help it,” Shiki answered.

Inko turned in her chair, and motioned her hand toward the rest of the cookies cooling on the rack. Quirk activated, she pulled them each closer, and let them each fall onto the empty plate that sat between her and Shiki. Still gooey, they seemed to melt into each other, taking form of those beneath them. Inko nudged the plate closer to Shiki, encouraging him to take another.

He did. He bit the cookie. Warm.

“…I’m sorry, Shiki, about the study. I know you had your heart set on it.”

Shiki shrugged. “Matsuyama said there weren’t enough slots. He said he needed to prioritize better candidates. People who would really benefit from losing their quirk.”

Silence, again.

“It wouldn’t have changed things, you know. If it makes you feel any better, Shiki. You having a quirk was never the problem."

Shiki paused mid-bite. The lump in his throat made it too hard to swallow.

“How do you deal with it, Grandma? You’ve been dealing with it so much longer, right? Because I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”

Inko gave him a small smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes. “You’re right, but… I don’t think I have a good answer for you, Shiki. It’s lonely here. I miss him. I’m afraid for him. But maybe I’m just, maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. It’s been like this ever since he enrolled in U.A. Since he was little. It was what made him happy. I’m his mother, and I’m supposed to set aside my own feelings for my child.” Inko nudged the cookies toward Shiki again. “But you, that burden should never have been on you. Especially not as a child. I’m sorry, Shiki, I’m so sorry.”

“So he’s… always been like this, is what you’re saying, yeah? It wasn’t—it’s not just me he doesn’t want—”

“No. Not you. Definitely not you, Shiki,” Inko insisted. “It’s who he is. Who he’s always been. …Who he’ll always be, I think. Even when he was 3 or 4 years old, so small he fit in my lap… He’s… so incredibly kind, and so incredibly driven, and it’s a combination that breaks a mother’s heart. Because it meant he was always sacrificing himself for others in danger. Doing what All Might would do. But All Might doesn’t have a family; he doesn’t have children. I wonder, sometimes, who All Might left behind, to become who he was. If that’s who we are.”

Shiki put his cookie down. His hands curled in, and he looked at them, ridged fingertips, ridged palms, obligated to use them heroically or not at all. Marks he never asked for.

“But why did he have to be All Might? Why him? Why us? Ice Razer and Creati have a daughter. They dote on her. They love her so much it’s embarrassing. I’ve met her, once, at a reunion thing that Mom and Dad had. And I was angry at her. How much she smiled. How you can just see how proud Ice Razer is, in his eyes, every time he looks at her. Ice Razer was on track to be the #1 hero, ahead of Dad, and he’s said publicly that he no longer cares about his ranking if it means being there for his family, because his dad never was. Dad didn’t… Dad never… He was putting in 120 hour weeks, at the time Ice Razer’s daughter was born, when I was sitting home waiting up for him, because old news headlines estimated that All Might put in 119 hour weeks in his prime, and Dad had to be that. Ice Razer visits his mother! When was the last time Dad came to see you, Grandma?”

Inko Midoriya responded with only a sad smile. “It’s been a while.”

“Ground Zero and Red Riot. Their adopted son, I’ve met him too. You wouldn’t think Ground Zero of all people would be any kind of good father but… he is… apparently… And that’s… fuck, you know what? That’s all I want to be. A good dad. That’s all! I want to teach math, and I want to fall in love with a girl, and marry her, and I want to be there. Just be there. For my kid. I want to spend every weekend with my family. I want to be around for every dinner. I want to help with homework. And I want no one – no villains and no heroes – to ever know my name. Is that too much, Grandma? Is it selfish of me to want that�� and to want Mom and Dad to still love me too?”

Shiki’s voice cracked. He hadn’t meant for it to. He hadn’t meant for his composure to slip, or for those final words to come out. He hadn’t meant to open up that hollow ache in his chest, where that fear sat deep and rotten.

His next words were wet. “Is it too selfish of me to just want them to be proud of me?”

“Oh, oh Shiki…” Inko shoved her chair back. Hands extended, she rounded the table, and she wrapped her arms around Shiki. Kind hands, kind like Shiki was not used to. His vision blurred, and he pulled a hand up to wrap around Inko’s arm, and he leaned into her.

“I told him, Grandma…” he muttered, voice still wet. “…I told Dad that I got accepted to Matsuyama’s study. I told him I already went through with it.”

“What?”

Shiki shook his head. “I know it was wrong. I just… I hoped. I don’t know. I just wanted him, maybe, for once… I don’t know…”

“What did he say?”

Shiki shrugged, his movement muted under Inko’s hug. “I don’t know. I hung up. I just hung up.”

…

The beach air was cold, and it was briny. Wind curled off the lapping waves, spritzing All Might’s face with a spray of ocean water that was not wholly unpleasant. It reminded him of a time long-since passed.

The sound of footsteps met his ears. He did not turn, not immediately. All Might breathed in the ocean air a little longer.

“How… how have you been?” The voice – the man beside him – asked.

“Oh, you know. Same old same old. I’ve got this pesky ache in my knee that’s catching up to me. Recovery Girl recommends I start doing some swimming exercises. I’ve been considering it. It might suit these old bones.”

“Oh! I know a few gyms nearby with pool facilities. I-I can get you into them, you know, for free. I’m sure I could—”

All Might held a hand up. “What, do you think I don’t still have connections of my own, Young Midoriya?”

“S-sorry.”

All Might turned properly now, catching sight of Izuku Midoriya, a man so accomplished in the public eye looking familiarly helpless at his side. This beach held memories. Izuku was hardly recognizable from the first day All Might had brought him here for training, and in other ways, he looked exactly the same.

“You called me here to talk about Shikinori, right?” All Might continued. He stared back out at the sea, dark and getting darker. The sun has set 10 minutes prior. “You said he lost his quirk.”

Izuku remained quiet.

“He… had it taken away. He chose to do it, he said.”

“Why?”

Again, silence settled between them. All Might looked back, scanning Izuku’s face, taking in a look mangled with confusion and concern, unsettled and helpless. Not the beaming face on television. Not the endless smile to instill fear in the hearts of villains.

“…I think it was because of me,” Izuku finally answered.

Waves, lapping to shore. All Might found himself watching them again. “A quirkless life is not so bad. These past 30 years have been peaceful for me.”

Static settled in the air around them. Rolling ocean. Gentle wind.

All Might let out a small sigh. “What advice are you looking for, from me, Young Midoriya?”

“I… need to know if this is okay with you. If my plan is okay with you,” Izuku answered.

“As your concerned mentor, I’ve found I don’t like most of your plans,” All Might answered. “What is your plan?”

“Shikinori lost his quirk because of me… I wasn’t there for him. I wasn’t… I wasn’t a good father to him, I think. I was waiting for him to come to me but. I messed up. I need to go to him now. I can think of only one way I have to make it up to him.” Izuku looked up. Conflict pulled at his pained expression, and his fist curled. “Maybe, if I give him One for All, I can fix this.”

Another spritz of ocean spray hit the shore. All Might could feel the salt crystalizing on his face.

“I was right. I don’t like your plan.” All Might turned, and took a step toward Izuku, and laid a hand on his shoulder. “No. That’s my answer. No, I do not approve.”

Izuku seemed to buckle, just a little. He curled one hand in and rested it on All Might’s, still on his shoulder. The shadows of nightfall hid his eyes, but not his mouth, pained and strained at the corners. “Then what can I do to fix this?”

“Why do you think that giving Shikinori One for All would fix this in the first place? Do you really believe that his quirk is the root of the problem? Do you?”

Izuku’s hand trailed down. He shook his head, slowly. The words that came out were pained. “Ochaco and I… are back together again. We’re making this work. We’re… we’re putting the pieces of our family back together. We just need Shikinori. I just want him back with us…”

“…I told you this 20 years ago, Young Midoriya, and I’ll tell you it again. And it will hurt worse now to hear it, because you didn’t follow my advice the first time--”

“I thought I could do both.”

“—You cannot be the Symbol of Peace and have a family. There aren’t enough hours in a lifetime. …I left people behind—”

“I know.”

“—people I cared about. People who cared about me. I hurt them, and I knew I hurt them—”

“I know.”

“And that was my choice. I made that decision. Because protecting the peace of the whole world… that was more important to me than the people I hurt. I carry the burden of that decision every day. …I told you, 20 years ago, that you had to make that decision too.”

“I know, I just thought maybe, with both Ochaco and me—”

“And you did. You did make that decision. You’re the Symbol of Peace, and I’m proud of you for that, …and you’ll have to carry that same burden, too, of that decision you made.”

Izuku’s hand was curled around All Might’s sleeve now. He was smaller now than the man who first arrived at the beach, and so, so much smaller than the Symbol of Peace lauded in headlines across the nation. His shoulders trembled. Tears dripped down the curvature of his nose, lost to the briny sand below.

All Might continued. “This is one piece of advice I can give you… Stop saddling Shiki with that same burden… Don’t give him that weight to bear. Don’t trap him in the world of heroes. Let him go.”

Izuku pulled in a shuddering breath, and he steadied his shoulders.

“…I failed him, didn’t I, All Might…?”

Another lap of waves at the shore, forging eternally onward. There was an ache in All Might’s knees, a rattle to his old bones, a pain that never ceased throbbing in his side. He wondered how long ago it had been, exactly, since he first made this decision himself. How many pulls of the tide since he last saw his mother. How many moons since the earth had reclaimed her. How many breaths of wind had passed since the very last time she thought of him.

He wondered, not for the first time, if it had been selfish of him to trade her, and everyone else away for the protection of all the people he’d never known or loved.

All Might reached down, and he pulled Izuku into a hug. Come daylight, Izuku would have to smile again, on every television and every billboard and every broadcast and every rescue. For now, All Might figured, it was fine to let him cry.

“…Yes. I’m sorry. I’m to blame for this too. I pulled you down this path. But… yes. You failed him.”

All Might ran a hand over Izuku’s hair as his cries grew louder. All Might wondered if Izuku had ever held Shiki like this. He wouldn’t know. All Might wasn’t a father. All Might had no son. Whether that was selfish or selfless, he still did not know.

The wind picked up to a howl, and it swept into shore, and it drowned Izuku’s cries beneath it.

By tomorrow, Izuku would be smiling on the news.

By tomorrow, Shiki would be on a train to an interview far north in Akita.

By tomorrow, Inko would be alone again.

#boku no hero academia #bnha #my hero academia #mha #bnha fanfiction #long post #so ive been writing this fic since OCTOBER #its transcended all emotional relation to me and now simply IS #(i remember years ago the Read More function broke on mobile and i hope thats NOT the case now)#if so: my sincere apologies

765 notes · View notes