Right. I have no business trying to write a new fic when I have 5 to work on, but I've been watching a whole lot of isekai anime, and god damn it, Re:Zero turned out to be the one of the best shows I've ever seen. So here I am with my own take on 'Izuku but he has Return by Death'. I promise you, it's gonna be quite the ride.
I. My Name
"Do it again!"
"'kay."
"Inko! Get over here! Izuku's Quirk came in!"
"Hm?" From the kitchen, Midoriya Inko continued her task of chopping the vegetables for another moment, before her friend's words finally registered in her brain. "Wait, really?!" She rushed to the living room, where she was met by the sight of Bakugō Katsuki clapping and laughing at something: a toy figure of All MIght being suspended in the air, and her son Izuku with his arm outstretched and an apparent grin on his face.
'Oh gosh, he has my Quirk!' was her first reaction, but as she continued to watch what was happening, Inko realized that what Izuku was doing was in fact quite the step up from her Small Object Magnetism—Izuku had free control over what he was doing with the toy. She put a hand to her mouth as tears welled up in her eyes from the sheer amount of pride she was feeling at the moment.
'Are you seeing this, Hisashi...?'
"Why are you crying, mommy?"
Inko looked down and saw that Izuku was now tugging at her apron, to which she smiled and wrapped her arms around her son. "It's nothing," she said. "I'm just so proud of you. Say—what do you think about having katsudon tonight?"
"Okay!" her son chirped, and he went back to the other side of the living room, entertaining Katsuki with moving around toys with his Quirk. Making a mental note to schedule an appointment with a Quirk doctor, Inko went back to the kitchen with a skip in her step.
A genius like her baby boy was gonna need a lot of food after getting his Quirk early, after all.
Subaru could already tell it was gonna get old really quick once word got out to the kids at the preschool, but seeing little Katsuki's face light up every time it looked like he was using telekinesis made it worth it, to an extent.
He didn't actually know if he was still able to use Invisible Providence until just now, and the fact that no one seemed to react to the giant black arm coming out of his midsection was evidence that no one here could see it, either. Moreover, he didn't feel any pain flare up from using it, either. Maybe it had to do with the fact that the Witches didn't exist here, but he wasn't about to complain (not like all the other things, at least).
Still, he'd need to discreetly figure out if he could also still use Cor Leonis, but that was a problem for another time. Right now, even with this accidental display of his 'Quirk', he needed to keep a lid on showing what exactly he was capable of.
The original plan had been to try to pass off as a normal kid staying under the radar until high school, but all it took was a single slip-up one day for the teachers and all the 'other' adults to think he was this child prodigy and expect him to do even more work than he wanted. At least Inko had the common sense to have him just do supplemental work that was only a few years ahead of his age group. He still remembered the horror stories of child prodigies being pushed too hard to the point where they ended up turning to delinquency or running away from home.
But still—accidentally showing off his 'intelligence' was better than Inko or someone else accidentally finding out Midoriya Izuku was running around with more than twenty years of life experience.
(Never having been separated from his friends and the women he loved were infinitely more preferable than both.)
Subaru had always thought that his being summoned to Lugunica had something to do with the Witch of Envy, but it never crossed his mind that he would ever be removed from that world...until he woke up one day to find himself in an unknown room and surrounded by white, cage-like bars. His reaction at first was that he had been kidnapped, but when he looked down and saw that his arms were now chubby and stub-like, his thoughts shifted to anxiety and fear.
It took several minutes for him to calm down before he realized that his body was now that of an infant's, and that the room he was in was a modern-looking nursery room. He eventually mustered up the courage to cry for help, but his physical state obviously meant any and all words he tried to form were expressed only as unintelligible and high-pitched crying.
After some time, a woman came into the room and picked up, cooing at him and calling him Izuku. Taking a look at her facial structure and the clothes she was wearing, alongside the overall technological state of the room they were in, led to the impossible conclusion that he had somehow been isekai'd again.
Subaru had no idea what to do, but the moment he felt the shift of his clothes and the diaper he was wearing, he realized that he had soiled himself.
The next few months passed by excruciatingly slowly. Having to wait for this body to get to an age where he was able to move about on his own, as well as the woman known as Midoriya Inko constantly keeping an eye on him, left Subaru with the ability to do absolutely nothing but think. And so dozens upon dozens of theories went through his head on every reason he could think of as to how and why this had happened to him, and what he could have possibly done to deserve it.
But more importantly, how Emilia and all the others were faring without him. He could no longer remember what he was doing right before he woke up as Izuku, but he missed her and Rem terribly, enough so that his cries of anguish left Inko constantly perplexed no matter what she did to try to soothe him.
As if to taunt him even further, that wasn't nearly the end of it. It was extremely shameful for him, having the mind of a grown adult, to be completely unable to control their bowels and be entirely dependent on someone else having to wipe them down every time he soiled himself, and then there was the fact that he often found himself laughing for some odd reason or another.
He didn't even know if it was because an infant's brain wasn't big enough to handle an adult's personality and mindset or if he was finally starting to lose himself from being in almost-constant isolation.
TL;DR—it fucking sucked.
He didn't want this. He never asked for this. All he ever wanted was to help make sure Rem finally wake up, Emilia became the queen, and free Satella from the Witch of Envy, but now it was impossible to do anything, when everyone he knew and loved were now worlds away. Did he overstep and finally piss off whatever god actually summoned him in the first place? Or was he finally noticed because he was never supposed to be summoned?
He didn't know. He could never know.
The only saving grace about this situation was the fact that he still remembered who he was, but even then, it still took years before he was able to actually do something with it, and by then, he was starting to forget what certain people looked like.
Isekai novels like Jobless Reincarnation and Overlord had millions of people jumping at the chance to be hit by a truck and having their souls whisked away to a fantasy world to live out power fantasies, with Subaru even being one of them up until he found himself in Lugunica. Even now, when he was finally back in Japan and surrounded by technology and luxuries he sorely missed, what he lost severely outweighed anything he could ever gain here.
By the time he was finally at an age where he could move around on his own, Subaru already had dozens upon dozens of theories running through his head.
Was anyone looking for him, or did their memories of him get erased like with what happened to Rem?
Was there any chance of anyone he knew being in this world, too?
Was Emilia going to be okay?
There were moments where he found himself filled with anger jealousy at the thought of another Natsuki Subaru running around with his friends and eventually marrying Emilia and Rem, but every time he also found himself filled with shame when his (mostly) common sense pulled him back because he had never felt so possessive of them until now.
As long as his goals would be fulfilled by that other Subaru, then that was all that mattered, right?
There was no way to prove if any of these were true, so he had to assume that they were essentially dead to him, just as he was most likely the same to them. He didn't want to live in any world where he couldn't be with Emilia and Rem, but he couldn't resort to suicide when there was still so much he didn't know—even if he still had Return by Death, the chances of him ending up in his old body and somehow reversing this entire situation seemed astronomically low.
Not to mention, it would be extremely unfair to Inko, who did nothing but try her best at raising who she thought was her son. As much as he missed his real parents, he found solace in her embrace and soothing voice whenever she tried to comfort him during his depressive episodes.
He probably needed to tell her the truth at some point, but for now, he was okay with letting her think her son was just talented and a bit odd.
It was very disorienting trying to utilize muscle memory when only the memory part actually worked, which was something Subaru found out in the first few weeks of his second (third, technically) life. Relearning how to stand upright and walk seemed simple enough since all he had to do was wait until his legs were developed enough to support his weight, but relearning how to speak? That was another matter entirely.
After weeks of struggling to retrain his tongue to move the way he wanted, Subaru was finally able to form basic words again, and spent as much time as he could to progress to more complex ones whenever he knew Inko wouldn't hear him. By the end of the second month, he was finally able to completely speak in full, coherent sentences in Japanese and whatever English he could still remember.
(But he didn't want to give Inko a heart attack and think he was possessed, so he waited another month before he started pretending to roughly sound out kā-chan.)
He didn't end up actually trying to figure out the time period he was in until he overheard a newscaster mention the date one day while Inko was making breakfast. For months, he just assumed that it was still the same year (with a bit of hope that he could one day track down Natsuki Kenichi and Naoko), but in reality, more than a hundred-and-fifty years had already passed.
(He was only able to mourn his parents after Inko had already gone to sleep.)
And then there was the whole Quirk thing. When he first heard Inko use the word, he didn't really give it too much thought, but after he was finally allowed to use her phone, he used the opportunity to discreetly look up what exactly it was. Apparently around the time he was summoned to Lugunica, some random kid in China was born with her skin glowing brightly, and then more people around the world started spontaneously developing odd superpowers out of nowhere.
It didn't take a genius to guess how well that went with the rest of the world.
Back when he was still a NEET who refused to go to school, the general consensus when it came to World War III was that it would never happen because everyone nuking each other was enough of a deterrent. Here, it obviously didn't look like it ever got to that level, but there had been several conflicts the world superpowers had with each other over trying to monopolize Quirks (which everyone called the 'Quirk Wars', but come on, it was still a global conflict, so it kind of counted).
At first, Subaru thought he was in an Earth different from the one he was actually born from, but an eventual internet search that led to a missing persons report for Natsuki Subaru showed otherwise. So the real question was: did him being summoned to Lugunica have anything to do with that?
It wasn't until after his display of 'getting his Quirk', that Subaru was finally able to do something. He managed to convince Inko to start buying him notebooks under the pretext of 'really wanting his letters to look like hers did', but the truth was that he wanted to write down what he could still remember about his time in Lugunica.
He couldn't draw, and he definitely wasn't able to sell his soul to be reunited with them, so his only option now was to write down and immortalize who they were.
One notebook was spent detailing everything he went through, from the moment he first found himself in front of an appa stall, to every single time Return by Death was used. Another was filled with nothing but theories on how his soul got removed from the other world and why his Authorities tagged along, and if there was any possibility of a Quirk that could somehow get him back.
The third notebook was dedicated to writing mock letters. It was apparently extremely common for people to write letters to lost loved ones, something Subaru immediately recognized as a coping mechanism.
But that was okay. By this point, having to spend the last half-decade living as Izuku took its toll on his mind to the point where he was now forgetting what even Emilia and Rem looked like. Learning how to draw would end up taking too long, so he opted for every single word he could think of to describe their appearances, personalities, and what they meant to him.
Countless nights were spent filling page after page in a combination of Japanese and Lugunican script—undecipherable to whoever else came across this, but completely legible to him. (Years later, he eventually got the idea to disguise these notebooks with the title Hero Analysis for the Future, just in case Inko found out.)
When he finally finished, there was only a single page left, which he used to write down a message for himself. My name right now is Midoriya Izuku, he wrote. But before that, it was Natsuki Subaru. I know I'll probably never see anyone again, but I can't give up. I have to live on for their memory.
He would use this life as a chance to better who he once was before his life changed forever, and try to be the kind of hero Emilia and Rem would be proud of.
Forgetting their faces was inevitable. Forgetting them entirely was unacceptable.
Most, if not all reincarnation isekai have the protagonists accepting of their new lives willy-nilly. But what happens when the main character isn't nearly as willing to forget their past life? That's what a good chunk of this fic will be dealing with, as I try to get into showcasing Subaru's psychology as he learns to move on.
I know what goes on in the Web/light novel(s), but I intentionally left it ambiguous when exactly Subaru's soul was booted to MHA, but I personally like to think it happened sometime during Arc 6. Either way, the only thing that matters is that it happened after Arc 5.
So will any other Re:Zero characters be reincarnated into other MHA characters like I did with the JJBA fic? Nah. Sorry. That would almost completely invalidate the angst I'm trying to show here, not to mention there wouldn't be much I could do with Rem or Emilia being Ochako, for example.
Anyway, catch ya later.
