Quirk: Saving Grace
Relationship: Gen
Genre: Midoriya Izuku has a quirk, Immortal Midoriya Izuku, Repeated Time Travel, Death and Respawning
Length: 1.6k
[Warnings: Descriptions of violence and death. Suicidal thoughts that are acted upon, twice. Izuku jumps off a building and then again when it doesn’t work. He dies the first time. Every time Izuku dies, he is given a quirk that would let him survive (I.e. if he burned to death he’d become fire proof) and resets him in time to before it happened. This is, by necessity, understandably traumatic.
Note— this is an EOD fic and subject to change at any moment, but here is a brief continuation.]
Part 1
–
There is the building weight of the body in his arms, heavy despite the drop of One-for-All storming through him. He is wreathed in lightning, setting Aizawa down and turning to face the villain– Shigaraki Tomura.
Knowledge sits heavy like blood down his throat, things he hasn’t consciously acknowledge but that drive his every action. He can die, but he will not stay dead. He will live, over and over again until they all make it through alive.
Resolve pounds, as steady as the pulses of pain around a bruise, as rhythmic as the throb at his temples heralding the now-familiar migraine.
Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. He looks up, sparks reflected in green, green eyes; whatever expression is on his face gives the villain a bare second of pause.
Lightning dances along his skin. Izuku prepares to move in any direction– or to die, if he has to.
Either way, they won’t be getting Eraserhead while he’s here.
They won’t be killing anyone at all.
The doors bust open, the trumpet of All Might’s arrival, and Izuku jerks awake in bed, gasping. His breath echoes against the darkness, heart frantic in his chest.
His eyes burn, but his head doesn’t hurt. His chest is tight, but there’s no danger.
It was just a dream.
Izuku eventually gets his breathing under control, until the ragged sound of his own gasping breath doesn’t fill the room. He picks up his phone and cups it between his hands, curling his legs up and arms inward to match.
I am here, All Might had said, like a threat and a promise. Izuku’s legs had gone absolutely weak with relief. Like a cut string, all the raw determination and distilled purpose had fled from him, and he’d found that need had been all that was holding him upright.
The rest was a blur. Adrenaline and instinct had tugged him, briefly, into the middle of the frey towards the end, when the Nomu almost overwhelmed the number one hero, but Izuku had danced away from most of its blows. It was faster than him, even with One for All, so he had to keep out of close quarters and give himself room to dodge.
The distraction had worked; Kacchan and Todoroki had intervened, buying precious time, and in the end All Might had reached deep and pulled something more from the embers of their shared quirk.
Izuku felt it in his center, the pull that made fire jump to his throat, a lump of worry lodged there. All Might pulled so hard on the dregs of power that Izuku felt it; which meant he’d been utterly scraping the bottom of the barrel of his own reserves.
The other heroes arrived at the climactic finish; the Nomu went through the roof, the smoke obscured All Might’s diminished form, and Izuku rose shakily to his feet to keep the others away.
He doesn’t remember what excuses he used; he thinks he might have done something silly to buy those last few seconds of cover. All he remembers for sure is that when they clearly didn’t believe whatever he made up to keep them away from All Might’s rapidly diminishing cloud of obscuring dust, his mind switched tracks hard and he went with ‘distraction’ instead.
‘Distraction’ wasn’t hard to achieve. At that point, Izuku knew he had died several times, two of them in the last half hour. He focused on memories; the sucking pain in his chest, the crawling horror of decay, the acrid burn of sludge down his throat.
He let every bit of that fill his eyes, which he widened purposefully. Exhaustion was already dragging on him, the headache pounding behind his skull.
“Katsuki.” He’d said, blurting out the word for the first time in his entire life, and watched every single thought of All Might leave the other boy’s face in favor of sheer panic as Izuku fell.
Even Todoroki rushed over, and Izuku had never exchanged a single word with him. Then he discovered the downsides to a fake collapse; his body didn’t know it was fake. He did actually pass out for a minute– or several.
The adrenaline, the panic, the exhaustion and the headache all combined into real shock, and he was taken to the hospital along with the other injured. He almost felt guilty, until he caught sight of the equipment reading his vitals, whereupon his brain clicked back online and started giving him the numbers.
You couldn’t fake a sudden drop in blood pressure; Izuku was in real shock, and that meant he was in real danger of dying. Again.
He couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled out of him, panicked and overwhelmed, causing the paramedic attending him to give him a concerned look.
That had been yesterday. Eventually, after treating him and holding him for observation beyond that, he was free to go.
Unfortunately, they’d called his mom. He’d spent far too long reassuring her, though by that point he really was too tired to keep his eyes open, so he was able to beg off to sleep.
That had been only a short while ago, a mere handful of hours; sleep crusted his eyes and he was still so tired.
Izuku curled around his phone and hovered over All Might’s contact information. He had no intention of hitting ‘call’ or even texting. I am here echoed in his mind.
He felt safer just knowing All Might was on the other end of the phone, just a call away. Izuku remembered the tug on his core, the tangible connection to a hero more legend than man– to everyone else.
Izuku had spent the last year seeing him every single day, and until that I am here, had almost managed to forget that the person who talked him through a run was the All Might, that All Might, the one he’d watched on TV for as long as he could remember.
Almost.
It wasn’t that he forgot; it was that the hero had become a part of Izuku’s life.
A part of him.
He bit his lip and reached deep, remembering what he’d learned in the last forty-eight hours; using what he’d discovered under fire.
Just a bit, he thought, and urged up a kernel of wild power. Lightning lit up the dark, a beacon around him. All Might’s power.
My power, Izuku thought, seeing soft shadows chased by vivid green. He could feel it, so deep down it shouldn’t be possible; a legacy reaching back through the ages, through the dark of space and time; through the veil of death, which he had seen beyond.
All Might’s phone number looked back at him from his phone, clutched tight in his hands; the contact read Sensei and had a picture of his skinny form, in case it ended up in the wrong hands.
But All Might’s quirk lit up the night around him, and it was Izuku’s, now, and he wondered if the hero could feel it, wherever he was; if a tether stretched real and true between the old embers and the new, fledgeling sparks.
As Izuku fell back asleep, the current died down to a low hum, and then nothing. His phone slipped out of a slack grip.
His thumb brushed the call button. Without being on speaker, the sound was too faint to wake him.
On the other side of town, Yagi Toshinori was already awake, dressed in a robe and looking at the stars. Sleep eluded him; he answered the call with more fondness than concern, the latter only bubbling up when there was no answer, and fading once he registered the soft, familiar cadence of Midoriya Izuku’s sleeping exhales.
It was good, knowing the boy was safe–that he slept soundly. Toshinori wouldn’t admit that the sound calmed his mounting anxieties about the future; the future was on the other end of his phone, resting while he could, and unaware of the dangers waiting for them.
Toshinori could give him that; he could stand as a shield for a little longer, giving the next symbol the time he needed to grow.
He let the call go on for much longer than he should have, smiling; the physical proof that the young hero was alive and well, unbothered– if only for now– made his worries seem small and far away, and the assurance let him call down enough to fall asleep, himself.
–
When he woke up, Izuku did not notice the receipts for a call he didn’t remember making. He was too busy pleading with his mother to let him go to school; she categorically refused him.
When he protested, she pulled out her phone and started reading off information about shock and treatment, speaking over him when he tried to refute some of it.
“Most of that is from other types of shock.” He tried.
She switched gears readily.
“Post-Traumatic Shock or Traumatic Shock,” Inko continued, reading all the things that could go wrong or the consequences of literal organ failure from the lack of blood to tissue, until he put the pillow over his head and groaned.
She basked in her victory for only a little bit, before politely informing him that he would drink all the sports drinks she had piled next to his desk, and not get out of bed except to use the restroom, and if she didn’t get hourly check-in texts from him she was going to call an ambulance, and then leave work early to accompany the ambulance right back to the hospital.
“Yes, mom.” Izuku said, with his mouth, as he was obviously intended to. She had cut off every other avenue of escape.
–
That morning, Inko left the apartment. She’d be back at lunch to hopefully-not-literally spoon feed him chicken soup.
Izuku waited until he knew she was for sure, really gone before darting out of bed to get something he absolutely needed. He pulled a fresh notebook from his horde of them and climbed back into bed.
He took a deep breath before flipping open the cover, pen in hand.
01 April, XXX0:
Asphyxiation.
He started to write.