Couple notes:
For fans of the original, throw everything about it out of the metaphorical window.
Also: as usual, names used are based on perspective.
chapter one
event horizon
"So it's back, huh?"
The voice is wet, raspy, a slick death-rattle, and Izuku can't keep his eyes off the man's face, white teeth grinning in the melted remains. He's shocked the other can even open his mouth; his eyelids have fused with the skin on his cheekbones, and even though it must be agony to move at all, the man goes on, scorched tongue flopping thickly between burnt lips.
"Fuck me...if I knew you were the Phoenix, kid, I'd have kept my distance." A wet cough, and hot, sticky blood mingles with the tears pouring down his cheeks. They're splashing onto the man below him, but the burns are far too severe for his healing to fix, and all he can do is stare, stare through the mess of a human being below him, painfully aware of his hands and arms smouldering to either side of the man's head.
A crowd is gathering. So is the blackness at the edges of his vision.
"Not gonna say anything to someone you've just burned?" Izuku can feel his consciousness slipping, slipping, but even as everything goes dark, he catches these last words, and they'll haunt him in the empty slumber that follows. "Last one was a nasty piece of work, so I was expecting you to gloat. Maybe you're just in shock...something tells me you're new to burning people."
He wants to respond - of course he's never burned anyone to death! - but his mouth won't work, gapes like a fish out of water, and the last thing Midoriya Izuku sees before he slips away is those teeth, painfully white against the mass of burned flesh that was once a man.
Izuku blinked.
There was no gradual waking-up; one moment he'd been asleep, his damaged body attempting to repair itself, and the next he was awake, studying the pale ceiling overhead. It wasn't his ceiling, that much was obvious - there were no All Might posters, after all.
He registered a soft beep to his right, but when he tried to turn his head to look for the source, he found his neck wrapped in stiff bandaging that chafed uncomfortably against his skin and stopped, biting his lip.
Just what happened to me?
Something rustled softly to his other side. He choked back a scream when he realised it was a mass of light-brown hair - someone had fallen asleep on the side of his bed! Izuku couldn't imagine who would have done that, aside from his mother; he wasn't an outcast, but he was often overlooked the moment people heard that he knew Bakugou Katsuki. His friend was something of a celebrity at their middle school, with Izuku himself regarded as nothing more than a groupie.
He didn't exactly want to wake them up - especially considering that they wore a girl's white sailor-style uniform, and he was terrible at talking to girls - but at the same time, Izuku had no clue why anyone would fall asleep at his bedside, waiting on him to wake up (why else would she be there?). Had he done something? There was something, a blurry memory swimming in the hazy recesses of his mind, but he couldn't grasp it.
Teeth. He remembered teeth. But -
"Yo."
Izuku jumped. Think of the devil, and he shall come ran through his mind at the sight of his friend, a shock of dirty-blonde hair perched atop his usual half-lidded scowl. "You could have knocked," Izuku scolded weakly.
A snort from Katsuki. "You could have mentioned you were gonna burn down a bus station."
"I did what!?"
"Calm down, dumbass. You didn't go that far." Katsuki tossed his bag haphazardly onto one of the chairs to Izuku's right, then flopped carelessly down into the other. He still wore his uniform as well; Izuku suspected he'd come running the moment he heard the news. "Who the hell is that?" the blonde added, jabbing a finger at the sleeping girl.
"I don't know," Izuku admitted, reaching up to scratch his head and finding his arms and hands bandaged with tight gauze. "She was here when I woke up."
There was a moment of silence, which was strange for Katsuki. Then, without warning -
"Oi, wake up!"
"Kacchan!" Izuku snapped, mortified, but it was too late. The girl stirred, then jumped, raising her head and staring between the two of them for a solid five seconds before she settled on Izuku.
"You're awake?" Her voice was still groggy with sleep, but it suited her soft, roundish face well; two bangs framed her face on either side, complementing her bob-cut.
"Yeah, I'm...I'm awake," Izuku squeaked. Katsuki snorted.
"Deku here wants to know what you were doing sleeping on his bed."
Katsuki made it sound considerably more intimate than it had been, and Izuku found himself flushing, failing to get out even a stammered excuse for his friend's behaviour. "I - um, I - "
The girl stared blankly at Katsuki for a moment, then returned her gaze to Izuku. "Um...I'm sorry," she told him, bowing her head. "You got hurt saving me, so I wanted to be around to thank you when you woke up...but I guess I fell asleep."
"No, no, it's fine!" Izuku rushed to console her, waving his bandaged hands as frantically as he could manage. "Really, it's okay! I just - wasn't expecting it, that's all."
Wait - saving you!?
The girl glanced back up at him and spoke before he could ask what she meant. "Well...I'm glad you're okay," she blurted out, a grin breaking out on her face. "I'm Uraraka Ochako. Thanks for helping me out back there, you were awesome!" - and, as the icing on the cake, she made a vague hand gesture that Izuku took to mean some sort of explosion.
He was pleasantly surprised; in just a couple of sentences, her attitude had changed completely, cheeks growing rosy with her smile. "I'm, ah...I'm Midoriya Izuku." He paused, mostly to steady his pounding heart (a common occurrence when speaking to girls), but also to consider his next words. Then: "And this is Bakugou Katsuki."
"Ah, um...I already heard your name from the nurses," Uraraka admitted. "But I'm glad you told me anyway! And, um, it's nice to meet your friend, too." She sounded slightly less enthusiastic about Katsuki, who'd crossed his arms and scowled upon introduction, and Izuku cracked a small smile of his own.
"Kacchan has that effect on people."
"Hmph" was the blonde's only response.
A silence, not uncomfortable, settled on the three of them. Uraraka checked her phone, the pink-backed screen flipping open as she typed out a text message; as she typed, the clock struck seven, and Katsuki grabbed the television remote without asking.
"Kacchan, what are you - ?"
"You don't remember what happened, right? It's gonna be on the news," his friend cut in, stabbing at the power button and flipping to one of Shizuoka's local news stations. "Look."
Izuku looked.
The story they were waiting on didn't actually come on for a solid fifteen minutes. Opening the news's hour-long time slot was a story about large-scale villain attack in Nagano, where thirty-four people had seemingly been turned to stone, and -
"That's awful!" Uraraka squeaked. "Are they, y'know, still alive, or…?"
"Listen!" Katsuki shot back.
"The victims were rushed to a district hospital, where doctors confirmed that they still possess low-level vital signs. The Quirk and means of attack remain unknown, and security footage remains inconclusive."
The security footage itself was not shown, and Izuku had to wonder what exactly it contained. Had the people simply stopped moving, petrifying in place? Had the process been painful? Did they still feel that pain?
...Could my Quirk heal them?
Not that he'd get a chance to find out - he doubted he'd be let into any of the victims' rooms, and he couldn't imagine strolling into a Nagano hospital and asking the receptionist if he could cry on someone who'd been turned to stone.
Izuku sighed and settled back into his pillows.
At the age of five, Katsuki had beaten up a kid on the playground, and Izuku, whose Quirk hadn't manifested yet, had comforted the battered boy, crying all the while. It wasn't until one of his tears splashed the other's skin and the purple bruise disappeared that he realised that he was not, in fact, Quirkless.
The first time he registered his Quirk, it was under the name "healing tears"; Izuku distinctly recalled his father being nervous about something while they were filling out the form, but it was nothing compared to the way the man had blanched when five-year-old Izuku's palms burst into golden fire, flickering like candlelight in the evening gloam. At the time, he'd taken it as his father being afraid he'd burn himself and reassured Midoriya Hisashi that he'd be careful, but in retrospect, Hisashi had a fire Quirk himself - shouldn't he have known that fire Quirk users were generally immune to their own flames…?
His next Quirk registration, then, was a little more vague. They couldn't think of a name that time around, and so settled on simply describing what it did: healing tears, fire creation. Around that time, Hisashi received a job offer to work on the west coast of the United States and, after a teary separation, boarded a plane to Los Angeles, where he video called his wife and son twice a week.
Still, Izuku's Quirk progression didn't stop. His flame-conjuring ability grew, extending slowly up his arms with each passing year. At age eight, his healing tears - which he'd grown used to using on his classmates after Katsuki had decided he had a bone to pick with them - grew more potent, able to heal injuries more quickly. When he was ten, around the time Katsuki started figuring out how to use his explosions for mobility (because only Bakugou Katsuki would look at an explosion and try to use it to fly), Izuku learned that he had a limited degree of control over his flames, though they were still weak, only able to fly around five feet or so before fizzling out. He'd been excited nonetheless; plenty of heroes had Quirks that seemed weak at first but that they'd made powerful. Kamui Woods was one such example, having once explained in an interview that as a kid he'd only been able to make his fingers and toes grow a few inches.
At age fourteen, then, Izuku was able to ignite his entire arm up to the shoulder and sling fire up to ten feet...or so he thought, until the next story came on.
"The attempted abduction of a middle-school girl by a villain in Shizuoka today resulted in the death of the villain in question. Uraraka Ochako, age fourteen, stated that she was waiting at a bus stop in the central metropolis this afternoon when a man threatened her with his Quirk and was promptly intercepted by one Midoriya Izuku. The attacker turned his attention to Midoriya-san, but in the ensuing scuffle, the attacker caught fire and was pronounced dead on the scene by paramedics. He has not been identified, but police are currently not pressing charges against Midoriya-san."
"...I did that?" Izuku whispered. The footage from the bus station's security cameras was slightly grainy, but there was no mistaking that hair colour - he was definitely seeing himself tackled to the ground, the man lunging for his throat, and he was definitely seeing himself light up like a torch, flames swirling up his arms before he thrust both hands forward and sent the fire slamming hard enough into the man to throw him backwards into the station wall.
The footage cut off early.
"Yeah, you did." Katsuki fixed him with as close to a sympathetic look as he could muster, though his next words weren't quite as kind. "Just had to go overboard with it, huh?"
"Bakugou-kun!" Uraraka snapped, surprising both boys with her sudden ferocity. "Midoriya-kun saved me and protected himself - that guy's Quirk was super scary!"
"What was it, anyway?" Izuku asked her, quietly. He couldn't quite meet her eyes; even though nobody had said it, he felt as if it was the elephant in the room. He'd killed someone, even if he hadn't meant to - his Quirk, which he'd used to comfort people before now, had displayed a lethal side….
"I dunno, he smelled really bad," Uraraka mused. "His skin was all grey and he was covered in these, like, peeling sores - oh, and his nails were super sharp, too. Look at this." She held out her wrist, pulling back her sleeve to reveal several long scores in her pale skin. "If I didn't know any better, I would have said he was a zombie or somethin'."
"Zombies burn, right?" Katsuki put in. "Probably why the bastard lit up like that. Fucker had it coming." Uraraka stared at him, surprised by Katsuki's sudden vitriol, but he went on: "Anyone who tries to prey on a girl at a bus stop like that is a weak little shit. Who the hell knows what he had going through his stupid skull?"
He had a point, but it didn't make Izuku feel any better. In his opinion, nobody had the right to take a life unless it was absolutely necessary to prevent another from doing so. He'd been pinned, sure, but he could have simply used his Quirk to force the man off of him...
Those teeth flashed through his mind's eye again, and he shuddered.
On the screen, the footage now showed three ambulances and several more police cars positioned outside the bus station as the anchor continued to speak, but her voice became background noise the moment Izuku spotted them.
"They were there?" He couldn't help whispering it aloud, and both Uraraka and Katsuki whipped around to fix him with baffled and concerned looks, respectively (or at least the closest thing Katsuki could manage to concern, which was essentially a glare but with thirty percent less eyelid); Uraraka was understandably confused, but Izuku could tell that his friend knew exactly what he meant.
"I wasn't gonna say anything," Katsuki admitted. "You don't fuckin' need that on top of this shit."
Izuku shook his head. "No, I get it. I'm just…." A hard swallow. "Why?"
His friend looked away. "Couldn't tell you."
Uraraka was baffled. "What - who are ya talkin' about?" she blurted out, and in that instant, Izuku caught a sliver of a Kansai accent - well-hidden, but definitely there. He was, however, in no mood to address it.
"None of your business, round face," Katsuki growled, but Izuku shook his head.
"No, it's...Kacchan, I think she should know. What if she starts seeing them, too?"
"What? Start seeing who?" the girl demanded, and Izuku bit his lip again, hard enough to bleed this time.
How do I tell her? How do I explain?
"Uraraka-san," he began, slowly, "why were you in Shizuoka today?"
"Um, you might laugh, but I was checkin' out Yuuei," she admitted. "I've been thinking about the entrance exam...so I figured I might take the weekend to head up to Tokyo. I'm from Mie," she added. "So Shizuoka is the quickest way to Tokyo."
"Yuuei? The hero school?" Katsuki cut in. "You're planning on going?"
"Well...yeah, if I can. I really just wanna help my parents out. Why does that matter?"
"Kacchan," Izuku warned him. His friend, with his flashy Quirk, was planning on attending Yuuei himself, and while he'd eventually come to accept Izuku, he remained fiercely competitive with anyone else who might dare interfere with his dreams.
Personally, Izuku was certain Katsuki would score in the top ten; his Quirk was perfectly suited for it. Katsuki, however, would not accept top ten - he had to be number one.
The blonde snorted, but let Izuku continue.
"Well...as you've probably figured, Kacchan and I live around here. And, um, my entire life, I've been seeing the same person. Or multiple people, I don't know. It's only ever one at a time."
He felt a little silly saying it, but plowed on in spite of Uraraka's perplexed expression.
"Only my mom ever believed me...when I was six, she told the police and we were kept under surveillance for a while...except whenever they were around, this person wouldn't show up. Eventually they put in a recommendation for psychotherapy for the two of us, but it didn't change anything. Kacchan didn't believe me either, until we were...ten? Or eleven?"
"Eleven," Katsuki confirmed.
"Yeah. We were out super late one night, and we spotted something in the alley along the street we were walking on - Kacchan wanted to check it out, but I could see the silhouette and told him not to...there's not really a way to stop him once he gets an idea into his head, though."
"I would believe that," Uraraka deadpanned. Katsuki snorted violently.
"Well, of course he went after it...and it was just...right there in the alley," Izuku continued. "Black robe, black hood, couldn't see their face. It - they - just...stared. Didn't move. Didn't react to anything he did. Eventually we just ran for it, and they didn't budge an inch...just stood there, watching us. We didn't look back."
"That sounds kinda…." Uraraka chewed her bottom lip, choosing her next words carefully. "Hard...to believe? Like, you guys aren't just...messing with me, are you?"
"I knew you'd say that," Izuku sighed. "I'm sorry. I know it sounds really dumb - "
"Here!"
Katsuki shoved his phone across the hospital bed. On the opposite wall, the news went on, but none of them were paying attention anymore.
"Isn't this the video we just saw?" Uraraka asked. "Outside the bus station?"
"Yeah. Take another look at the top left of the crowd."
Izuku watched her expression shift from baffled to horrified in the space of ten seconds. It would have been a little funny if the situation hadn't been so serious.
"Kacchan's seen them on his own a few times since it happened," he explained quietly. "So, if you happen to start seeing them too...well, now you know why. I'm really sorry, Uraraka-san."
She was silent for a moment, not quite looking at him, and he could feel tears starting to well up in the corners of his eyes. Then -
"Hnk!"
He let out a strangled sort of yelp as she threw her arms around his neck, and to his complete bewilderment, she was - laughing?
"If I had to pick between gettin' eaten in a subway tunnel and havin' to see some guy in a robe every once in a while, I know which one I'm pickin'." Her voice was much closer, around his shoulder, and her hair tickled his ear; it would have been embarrassing enough on its own, but Katsuki couldn't resist a jab of his own:
"Depends what kind of eaten you're talking about."
"Kacchan!"
Uraraka let go very quickly, and neither of them could look at one another for several minutes afterward.
Izuku was discharged two days later.
His temperature had always run pretty high - doctors had concluded years ago that it was a side effect of his Quirk, being a fire Quirk user - but with the burns covering half his upper body, the hospital staff decided it was a good idea to make sure he hadn't contracted some sort of infection, festering in the burned skin of his chest and shoulders.
He hadn't, and so after a few changes of bandaging he was set free. His mother had insisted on picking him up, but he'd managed to shake her off, claiming that he was fine, that he could pick up some groceries on the way back.
What Izuku didn't tell her was that he intended to return to the bus station. He didn't really know why; he was acting purely on a hunch that could be completely wrong, but something told him he should head back there, to the spot where he'd
burned a man to death
saved Uraraka from a would-be kidnapper and dominated headlines for a solid afternoon, before the media moved on to their next buzz.
Speaking of Uraraka, she'd given him both her number and a very warm hug before she left that evening, and he hadn't seen her since (nor had the guts to text her). He dearly hoped that everything was okay, but what if he texted her and it was? What if they ended up just chatting? Would she expect him to be funny? Or talkative? As far as he knew, he was neither; Katsuki had once told him he was about as personable as a slug, and their classmates seemed to agree.
In spite of that, though, Katsuki had stayed by his side through thick and thin, and for whatever reason, Uraraka seemed very impressed by him, enough to want to stay in contact with him.
Perhaps it was something in the air.
When he reached the bus station, which was more or less back in service barring the boarded-off alcove where the man had approached Uraraka -
Wait a second. These alcoves only have benches in them. Where was he before he came after her?
He supposed it wasn't improbable that the camera was angled so that it hadn't caught the man sitting on the end of the bench. On the security footage, however - and here he pulled out his phone to rewatch it for the nineteenth time, though this time for a reason other than to remind himself that it had actually happened - there wasn't anything on the bench at all until very suddenly their assailant emerged, already standing. He hadn't risen from a sitting position, but rather stepped straight out from the wall….
Ignoring the way people were looking at him, he studied the adjacent alcove; the wall of the bus station was punctuated with them, each one the width of the wall segment between them to stagger the benches by depth rather than simply spacing them apart (and wasting space). They weren't particularly deep, perhaps a foot more than the benches themselves, and even as he looked up and down the row of benches, he noticed the toes of boots sticking out from beyond the wall of each alcove.
There was no doubt about it. Even if the camera hadn't caught his full form, the man's shoes would have at least made it into the shot, and as the video played on Izuku's phone for the twentieth time, there was definitely absolutely nobody in the alcove next to where Uraraka had been sitting.
So where exactly did he come from…?
He forgot to pick up the groceries and inevitably faced his mother's ire.
Midoriya Izuku had never been a troublemaker or a problem child, but he supposed it was never too late to start. Inko, expecting him to bring back the vegetables she needed for their dinner, had already started to sautee the meat and was understandably confounded when he came home empty handed.
In spite of his bandages, which had been trimmed down to cover his more damaged chest, he found himself running for the store the moment he realized his mistake. He needed the exercise, anyway.
By the time Izuku reached the supermarket, the sun was sinking in the sky, dyeing the world in its dying light; he stepped in through the sliding glass doors as they parted for him and grabbed a basket, making the rounds as quickly as he could. Within five minutes, he'd piled the basket high with all the vegetables they'd need - he knew the recipe offhand at this point, and even if he didn't, it wasn't like the dishes they made used anything he was unfamiliar with.
Rushing for the cashier, Izuku didn't notice her until they'd collided with one another.
They both dropped their baskets at once, but only Izuku's tumbled to the supermarket floor; both he and the girl fell on their backsides, but even as he rushed to apologize, she burst into laughter.
"I thought I might run into ya again, Midoriya-kun, but I didn' think it'd be literal!"
"Uraraka-san!? What are you still doing in Shizuoka?" he blurted out, unthinking, but she didn't seem bothered by the question.
"I told ya I was gonna take the Yuuei entrance exam, didn't I? I'm stayin' here for a little while, and if I get into Yuuei, I'll be livin' here while I go. It's lots cheaper 'n Tokyo." She grinned, and Izuku found his gaze drawn to her teeth.
flashing white in black flesh
He had to tear his eyes away.
Suddenly feeling uncomfortable, Izuku cleared his throat, but thankfully Uraraka chose that exact moment to notice that he'd dropped his basket. They were drawing stares, still sitting on the floor amidst the spilled cabbages and asparagus, and she flushed, leaning forward to help him gather the scattered vegetables. When they'd packed every last one neatly back into Izuku's basket, they stood together, Uraraka taking the handle of hers like it hadn't simply been floating there, as if waiting for her.
"Is, um, is that your Quirk?" he asked, nodding at the basket, and she brightened.
"Oh! Yeah, it's called Zero Gravity! I might not look too strong, but I can float about three tons so far! I'm really hopin' it gets me through the entrance exam at least, I hear it's super focused on combat…."
Combat.
Izuku clenched his fists, nails digging crescent half-moons into his palms. He'd been practicing with his Quirk, and though Katsuki remained faster and stronger, more agile and more creative with his Quirk, Izuku had been starting to feel as if he might at least have a chance of getting into Yuuei.
That was, until a few days ago...
"Do you, uh - do you know how you're going to get through it?" he asked, Uraraka walking with him to the nearest open cashier; he let her go in first, and as she checked out, she nodded at him, gesturing wildly and nearly knocking over the magazine stand to her right.
"Yeah! I've been practicing lots - when you don't really have a Quirk that's super good for fightin', you have to get creative. As far as I know, we're not goin' up against real people, so I'm thinkin' I can make my clothes super light and get in close to touch whatever it is - I read online that they use robots as fake villains, so I figure I can jus' use how heavy they are against 'em."
Izuku didn't respond right away, using the ringing-up of his purchases as a way to give himself some breathing room. He had the distinct feeling Uraraka was quite the chatterbox, which he didn't mind, but what she'd said had given him pause.
He hadn't even tried to use his Quirk since the incident. It definitely hadn't been that strong before, even in his self assigned practice sessions the previous week. Truthfully, he'd no memory of the events at the bus station, but after seeing that tape...he was scared.
What if my Quirk goes off like that again? What if someone gets hurt?
"How about you?" Uraraka went on, skipping a few paces ahead of him to do a little twirl on the sidewalk, leaving her basket to float in the air where she'd been standing. "Hahh, it's such a nice day out! I feel like the last couple of days were just like a bad dream, don'tcha think?"
her pale skin charred black and the white bones
"Yeah," Izuku mumbled. "A bad dream."
"Mou, Midoriya-kun. You okay?"
"Yeah, I'm - I'm fine. I just - don't really have anything interesting to say most of the time, that's all."
"Hmm." She paused, turning back to face him, finger on her lips. "I don' think that's true. You hang around Bakugou-kun a lot, don't you?"
"We grew up together," Izuku shrugged; around them, evening sunlight gilded the spring blossoms, and a few long-dead leaves trundled by, following the breeze. "Why?"
"Well," she mused, turning to stare up at the sky, "he seems like the kinda guy who's popular in school, and if you're always around someone everyone thinks is great, you might stop seein' the good things in yourself."
Izuku blinked.
Nobody's ever told me that before. They've never singled me out, especially when Kacchan's been involved.
"So, how're ya feelin' about the entrance exam?" she repeated, and there was a little smile on her lips.
"I…" His mouth had suddenly gone dry; taking a moment to give a hard swallow and collect himself, he spoke, honestly. "I don't know. I - I practiced...I've been studying heroes for a really long time, since I was a little kid, and I always hoped I'd end up being able to turn my Quirk into something fit for a hero - did you know Kamui Woods could only grow his fingers and toes a few inches when he was ten? - but it's just not really getting any stronger, it feels like it's just time that does it - makes it stronger, I mean - and no matter how hard I work I can't seem to make it do more than what it does, even while Kacchan's getting stronger all the time - "
"Midoriya-kun."
Uraraka's soft voice cut through his nervous rambling.
"Relax. I get if you're excited - I am! - but you're probably overthinkin' it. Yuuei's gonna teach us how to make our Quirks really strong, and I'm sure if you get in, they'll know what to do for you! So jus' work on what you can do for now, and do your best with it! I've jus' been tryin' to increase my weight limit, since I know that's what I can do."
Mortified by his nerve-fueled tirade, Izuku nodded mutely, and Uraraka giggled.
"The exam's in about a month, but I'm expectin' an update before then, 'kay?"
Another mute nod.
"Awesome! I gotta turn at this next intersection, but I'll be waitin' - you still have my number, right?"
"Y-yeah…"
"Alright! See ya, Midoriya-kun!"
And with a last wave and a final laugh, her spark danced out of view. Izuku stared blankly after her until he remembered his mother was still waiting on the vegetables.
In spite of Uraraka's pep talk, he found himself reluctant to push his Quirk's limits. The flames still wouldn't move further than his shoulders - how had his whole body gone up like that? - and he still couldn't cast them further than ten feet.
He'd moved his practice area to the Dagobah municipal beach; it was less a beach than a trash heap where people illegally dumped unwanted furniture and appliances, and he focused on the latter, seeking to determine if his Quirk could destroy a metal robot. Several refrigerators proved surprisingly durable, but for the most part, he felt that his flames were hot enough to do the damage needed. The problem was that he could only generate them from part of his body, and his control was severely limited - that, and despite his isolation, there was still that lingering fear of hurting someone.
Izuku supposed it would be worse if he could actually remember the event in question. He still had flashes of what must have been his last moments before passing out, and that charred Cheshire grin haunted his nightmares, but the horror he'd almost certainly felt during the incident itself wasn't there. There was simply no memory of it.
He had a feeling that his inability to draw out the level of power he'd seen before had to do with his reluctance to go all-out, and once again, he found himself envying Katsuki's ability to do exactly that.
Why is it I can't get stronger like everyone else? Izuku grit his teeth, thrusting his palm forward and glaring at the washing machine in front of him as if his gaze alone could melt it; fire swept down his arm and bored into the side of the rusty drum, blasting a hole in it; he let up a moment later, huffing as the flames on his body flickered out.
The exam was in a month, and he'd made no progress whatsoever. He knew he wasn't going to get stronger just by performing the same exercises; he might have refined his technique, but he wasn't any more powerful than he'd been.
wake up
Frustration drove him to send another jet of fire into the drum of the washing machine. It leaked out of the hole he'd made in the back, and for a moment, he watched the flames spin around and around in the metal drum, churning with - determination? Irritation? Excitement? Izuku knew it was just fire, but he couldn't help it; more than once, the flames from his Quirk had felt alive, from the way they moved to the way they lingered on the ground…
He launched a third torrent into the drum and slammed the glass door shut, watching the machine roil with the living heat as it vented puffs of flame from the hole in the back.
The machine, Izuku reflected, was like himself - full of fire, but with no way to use it other than the limited means it had been provided with. Uraraka had told him to use what he knew he could do, but Izuku's strong suit had always been his sharp wit, not his raw combat ability...so instead of focusing on becoming a better fighter…
I should fight smarter, not harder.
He felt a little silly - why hadn't he realized this earlier? Then again, his mother had told him more than once to think outside the box, so perhaps he'd simply tunnel-visioned again. In addition, if he was honest, having Katsuki for a best friend didn't help when it came to working out a fighting style, considering Katsuki's approach was always to blast straight through and rely on his guts and instinct to get him where he needed.
Staring back at the washing machine, the flames inside refusing to go out, he pressed his hand to the hot glass, willing them to guide him, to give him some flash of inspiration.
"Come on," he whispered aloud. "Come on."
Heat crept up his back, his arms, and he felt his hair stand on end as the washing machine exploded and he scrambled backwards across the sand.
wake up
It didn't break apart - no, fire poured from every crack and every seam in the machine, its internal inferno raging and growing on its own now, spinning into a red-gold vortex that rose high above the tops of the highest garbage heaps. Izuku rose and, standing on the edge, took a single step forward, arms out to either side; he didn't know what this meant, didn't know what he was supposed to do, but this just felt so natural, so right, that he couldn't imagine doing anything else.
He took a deep breath, letting the flames swallow him up, letting them consume him; his clothes weren't burning, his skin stayed pale and unmarked, but for those precious seconds, Midoriya Izuku became an avatar of flame, golden fire erupting from his body as he took another step towards the washing machine, now the epicenter of whatever phenomenon he'd wrought.
it's time
Unguided, he wrenched open the door he'd closed, and the fire reached out to greet him, to reunite with its creator. For the first time in his life, his Quirk wasn't frustrating him; he wasn't lamenting its weakness, wasn't feeling impotent or inflexible, and something told Izuku that perhaps he'd needed to come to terms with what he was capable of before he could grow.
rise, child
He knelt, feeling the flames' heat welcome him as he jammed his arm into the drum up to the elbow and pulled, closing his fingers around some intangible core and extracting the whirling fire from the machine, where it seethed and burned in his hands.
What's happening? What does it mean?
As if in response, the fire snaked up from his hands to his wrists to his elbows to his shoulders, then settled somewhere on his back; he felt a rush of heat to either side of him, and when he turned to look, a pair of burning wings had spread from his shoulder blades, their golden light flickering off of the hundreds of metal bits and pieces scattered around him.
What...what is this!?
Then the flames died, the light went out, and Izuku was left standing in front of the burned-out shell of a washing machine.
When he'd "powered up" before, it had been just as sudden as this; one day he'd been struggling to do more than just burn his palms and the next he'd been able to ignite his wrists as well, with absolutely no change in routine. It was definitely abnormal, but when he'd visited a doctor about it as a child, the conclusion had been that Izuku simply needed time for his body to adjust before it could use more power. Izuku had spent a long time following this line of thinking, telling himself the lack of results from exercising his Quirk would pay off as he grew, but by the time they were around thirteen and Katsuki's arms could handle the percussive force of a shotgun blast without any kind of brace, he had started to doubt what he'd been told.
Still, there wasn't much else to go on, if that wasn't the case.
He sat down cross-legged on the warm sand, sighing. This was the second time in a week that his Quirk had output considerably more power than he'd been able to for the past couple of years, but there was more to whatever had just happened than simply an adrenaline rush, which is what he'd written off the incident of a few days ago as.
Izuku stared down at his hands and thought.
"The fuck you wanna go to that old shithole for?"
"Kacchan, just come, alright? There's something I want you to see."
An angry huff. "Fine. Better not be wasting my fucking time."
Click.
Izuku pocketed his phone, biting his lip. He'd asked Katsuki to head to Dagobah after his detention was over; the blonde was top of their class, with Izuku not far behind, but his temper had gotten him punished not a few times, so Izuku was left to walk home alone.
That was fine by him. He needed a few minutes to prepare.
It had been a week since the incident with the washing machine, and Izuku had definitely noticed a difference in his abilities. He felt more in tune somehow, as if he'd been asleep all this time and only just woken up to something greater than himself…
After dropping his stuff off and grabbing a bite to eat, Izuku headed back out; he hardly noticed where his feet were taking him until he actually got to the beach, afternoon sunlight glaring off the appliances as usual. If his watch was correct, Katsuki would be here within ten minutes, so for the time being, he ran over the techniques he'd spent the past few days refining. They were nothing compared to the ones Katsuki had been working on for years - his friend's self-styled Howitzer Impact was something he'd have expected to see from a pro hero, not a sixteen-year-old going into his first year of high school - but Izuku had done what he could in the time he had. There were only three weeks left until the entrance exam - he needed to do something that would let him stand out if he wanted to get into Yuuei.
It felt a little more achievable now that he'd gotten the issue of his output out of the way; coming to terms with his power and whatever that had led him to was a good first step, but all the power in the world was useless if he didn't know how to use it.
That, then, was why he intended to use this opportunity to work out his weak points.
Even though they had no way of knowing their competition, Izuku had the distinct impression that Bakugou's technique was a cut above the typical applicant. He specialized in taking advantage of an opponent's vulnerabilities, and if he knocked you off balance or into a vulnerable position, that was game over. They'd sparred before, and each time Izuku had been staggered, Katsuki had launched himself into the offensive with reckless abandon, pushing the other out of the ring they'd drawn in the dirt in an instant.
The sound of a blast reached his ears, and he immediately stopped moving, leaving golden embers flickering on the sand underfoot.
"Oi, Deku! Where the hell are you?"
"Kacchan!" he called back, jogging around a trash heap to meet up with his friend; the blonde wore his usual sour expression, and he seemed about to give Izuku an earful for dragging him out to a run-down municipal beach right after school when Izuku continued.
"Let's spar."
Katsuki grinned.