Hello all, how're y'all doing? Hopefully great. So! I've been reading MHA fanfic these past few weeks, and all of a sudden yesterday (or well, technically today at like 2:30 AM, but you know what I mean) I got an idea and a LOT of motivation to make a fic of my own. Izuku has a quirk, and it's one that's essentially like a save after when you sleep in a game. Think like... Skyrim sleeping, where it makes an autosave when you wake up. Basically that, except a lot less of what happens in Skyrim afterward.

Just as a little bit of a warning, this fic is going to have Izuku kicking the bucket a few times, and this first chapter is going to have a heavier section than the rest of this fic. I won't be trying to really get gory or gritty with the subject matter; I want this first and foremost to be a comedy. And maybe some more stuff later, I'll have to see, because this is all very spur of the moment.

OK, OK, that's enough of my ramblings. I hope you enjoy the first chapter of this fic!

You know, when most people awaken to their quirks, it's normally a pretty happy time. Finally! My cool power that all of us humans just started randomly getting a few hundred years ago appeared, now I can use my (hopefully actually useful) quirk and become a hero! Of course, we're also going to ignore the endless paperwork, heightened chance of injury or death, and if you get too famous, the lack of a personal life, because… society says that being a hero is awesome. Yay.

But do you know what's not a fun way to awaken to your quirk? Mine.

I died.

Oh, yeah, it came as a big shock to me when it happened too. There I was, little 6 year old Izuku Midoriya, bravely protecting another kid in my class from Kacchan and his goons on the playground. I step in front of the kid, Kacchan makes sparks his hands in front of me, I shiver in fear but hold my ground, because All Might wouldn't run away, now would he? So in what was clearly a poor decision on one of his goon's part, that chubby kid with little wings whose name I couldn't bother to remember, he pushed me.

Which is quite normal playground bully behavior, except normally, the kid that got pushed isn't standing too close to the sandbox, and also that kid that got pushed probably didn't get redirected by the child he was trying to protect. Combine the two, and what would've been a painful landing on the edge of the sandbox on my lower back turned into slamming my temple into the edge of the wood. I can feel pain immediately locking every single joint in my body, and in my rapidly blackening vision I can see my sprawled-out hand twitching madly.

Now, you may be asking yourself: "Izuku, how does dying feel like?" The answer is a predictable, uh, "Terrible." Pain consumes my brain, and my body pulses in waves of cold and hot that makes me sweat bullets, especially near the site of impact. There is an all-consuming, high-pitched ringing in my ears that only is abated by the muffled and unintelligible screaming and panicking of the boys around me.

Thankfully, I can't even turn my head away from where I landed and that I was quickly losing my ability to see, or else I imagine seeing a stomach-churning amount of your own blood painting the wood of the sandbox red would be… rough. Then again, the nightmares came anyways, so I apparently didn't need any help on that front.

Everything began to fade out even more than they were before, as all noise began to fade, all sights turned to black, and all pain began to abate to a dull, oozing throb until it too became nothing. It's just… nothing, at the end. And it's terrifying, it's sickening, it's rapturous, it's hopeful, it's enlightening, it's –

I woke up.

Scared eyes slam open, shaking desperately in the darkness of the early morning. Within seconds, a terrified, piercing scream tears through my throat as I all but leap from my bed, chest heaving with panicked breath. Tears begin to leak from my eyes faster than it takes for my mom, my wonderful mother, to burst through the door of my room with a look of sheer terror on her face.

I died. I died. I died. I died.

"IZUKU! HONEY WHAT'S WRONG?" the worried voice of Inko Midoriya yells as she quickly approaches my bed and wraps me in a loving hug to calm me down.

I died. I died. I died. I died.

Nothing she does get's through, trapped in my own head as I am. On repeat is a video of what had just happened, and the instinctual knowledge of what had just happened sears the recording into my brain. There was nothing after death. He could feel it all fade to nothing. But then… there wasn't. Or well, better to say there was. I'm back.

While my mind eats itself, my body sobs with all it has, and tears flow completely unabated as my arms fail to even register my mother enough to return the embrace. Breath is hard to come by as a suffocating need for air chokes my throat, as even with all of my heaving breathing, it's almost like my lungs are bottomless, and I need a bottom to sooth the burning in my chest.

I DIED I DIED I DIED I DIED I DIE-

Self-preservation knocks my brain out of reflective overdrive and begins to school my body into actually working correctly, and after the next ten or so minutes, I feel like I can actually hold air in my lungs again, but the sobbing and tears remain. Now more of a stuttering heaving and steadily falling droplets, but still.

It's now when I can feel the hands of my mother rubbing calming circles into my back and I feel her own tear's wetness staining the shoulder of my shirt as she clutches herself against me. Within moments, my arms latch themselves around her torso, and we embrace in relative silence as my sobs and sniffling die down.

Now I have to wonder of how I explain myself to my mom? How can I explain myself when even I don't really know what happened?

"Mom…" I began, untangling myself a little from the embrace enough to look at each other, but her gaze on mine sends it back downwards in nervousness. "I think I have a quirk. And-and-and… I don't like it."

Mom's eyes widen to almost comical levels and her mouth gapes open in shock. She's seen the results given by the doctor, I've seen them. Extra joint in the pinkie toe, a death sentence for what is supposedly 80% of the population, but it seems like that number is a gross underestimation of those without quirks.

"Well… what is it honey? And how do you know, I mean," she begins, shuffling around to release her arms and tilts my head up to her so I have to face her. "People don't just… get quirks when they had none."

Even in this moment, my face goes into a deadpan expression. The gears turn in her head before she shoots me a slightly exasperated look.

"…OK, besides that fact that most quirks literally just randomly manifest and quirks themselves randomly happened. That's not the point, Izuku, and you know it."

I at least have the decency to look sheepish at her as one of my hands reaches up and begins idly scratching the back of my head.

"I know. But… this quirk seems to be different. I don't know how it works yet, but I can understand how it was missed," I say. "All I know is that it appears to…" Oh, no, I can't look her in the eye when I say this!

"Bring me back to life when I… die."

Color drains from mom's face faster than I thought possible at the revelation.

"Wh-wh-wh-what?" she stutters, her face once again contorting into one of panic. "What do you mean?! Izuku! You died?!"

My neck muscles tense in involuntary guilt at the tone in her voice.

"It was a freak accident, I promise, but…" the words die in my throat temporarily as I continue to scan her face for reactions. "I think I died. No, I… know I did. After everything went to nothing, I knew what happened and then… I woke up screaming."

Unbidden, the words flow from my mouth now that I began to confess, "I remember it, mom. It was so cold and dark. I felt everything go… and then suddenly it's all back. I-I-I…I'm scared. Why did this have to happen?"

The tears start flowing again, except this time I'm still looking at my mom's appalled face.

Even in all of her wisdom, I know that she doesn't have an answer for me.

I don't think anyone can.

Yeouch. Heavy stuff. Look, I still remember that vividly, and it drags my mood down when I think about it, but most importantly, I've… mostly found an answer to my question. That answer?

It doesn't matter, just go with it.

Not very satisfying, I know. I mean, I can bet that most people's revelation that there is probably no afterlife would be… quite literally world changing. But when I'm the only person effected, I have no real way to prove it because in order to do so I go back to before the question was asked, and it kind of sucks having to die in order to do it in the first place? The luster of the question fades into indifference. I can't change that fact, so why bother?

So… the quirk. I'm officially quirkless, because, well, mom and I have already thought of the implications of trying to get my quirk registered.

'Hello, I'd like to change my records to the fact that I have a quirk now? What is it? Oh, just that whenever I die, I go back to the last time I slept, kind of like a respawn from a game, and why are you calling security?'

Yeah, no. So 'quirkless' I remain. But speaking of the quirk itself, I've learned a few things in the past 6 years. I've named it 'Respawn', and the specifics of the quirk are honestly super simple. Every time rest, I set that as my 'Respawn Point' for that day, and any time I would die during that day, I would go back to the 'Respawn Point' at the same time I had woken up originally to set the 'Respawn Point', retaining all information of the day before the 'Respawn'. I carry over no objects, injuries, or anything physical when I 'Respawn', so unfortunately no infinite money or duplicating materials.

A shame, too, because that'd be really helpful for my current hobby. See, what's very important to remember is that I retain all knowledge I have learned from the time before I 'Respawn', including any and all knowledge I get from studying, working, or getting taught. And while this does mean I can realistically learn… basically everything in the world with access to a good internet connection, that would involve dying a whole lot. Which is both unpleasant to experience and worrying to your wonderful mother to see your son sit down reading a book or a screen with a knife resting by him and knowing the intent of that knife being there.

Oh, the amount of times I've heard the 'Izuku, no dying on purpose even though we both know it doesn't really matter' speech. Hell, it was actually her that proposed to me the idea that every 'Respawn' is just me hopping into a basically perfectly identical alternate universe, and that the previous universe now has a distraught Inko Midoriya that also has to clean a lot of blood out of her carpet. A cute idea, but also probably not true.

…

…Probably.

…

Nope, still don't wanna think about it.

Where was I again? Oh right, my current hobby.

So, because of my ability to what is essentially infinitely make mistakes and learn from them in a day, it naturally leads to a hobby that would benefit from such an ability. Inventing and tinkering is just that. Starting from a year or so after the discovery of my quirk, I began to start making things with the materials I could find in and around the small district surrounding our home. Visiting junk stores, pawn shops, appliance stores that were going out of business, I began to grow a sizable amount of building materials for my gadgets.

With my room as my workshop, little (and current) Izuku would spend most of his days slaving away at his various creations, while occasionally taking breaks to partake in extensive research in… what have you. Robotics, coding, programming, physics, chemistry, science, quirk studies, hero debuts, old villains and vigilantes, the list goes on and on. Anything and everything that either sounded interesting or I felt was important to learn, I started to learn.

By the time I was 8, I had made a little mechanical spider that would move to a few rudimentary commands. By 9, it was now more than a dozen spiders, and they could now follow more complex commands. By 11, I was making my own pieces of armor and weapons from pieces of stronger metal and hydraulics I would find… with some more trial and error. Errors that often ended with a 'Respawn'.

See, what is probably the most… I wouldn't really fully call it a beneficial side effect, but it is fitting for my quirk: I have essentially lost all self-preservation instincts and safety concerns. See, after probably your… 5th? 8th? time getting electrocuted, and your first few shrapnel explosions and hydraulic skull cave-ins, they start to just become more of nuisance than anything else. Honestly, spending a good part of the day working on a project only to die to something so mundane is just a bummer because now I have to do it again. Probably faster, but still having to do the rest of the day, the going to school, socializing (read: getting bullied), the eating, and then working through the tedious bits… it gets annoying.

Eh, I can't really complain. I mean, I imagine that most people would want me in a straitjacket if I told them the worst part about dying is knowing that I have to sit through the same boring history lecture again. But, well, c'est la vie.

So… that's most of what you need to know beforehand, and we're basically caught up to where I am now. But a quick recap:

1. Died at 6, found out I have a quirk that lets me travel back to the last time I rested where I set a 'Respawn Point'.

2. Bawled my eyes out, told my mom I have a quirk, I had a very existential crisis while I probably made my mom rethink most of her life choices.

3. Keep on with life, learn a bunch of stuff that would serve me even a little bit in life.

4. Found out I love tinkering and making things, learned more things, died a few (lot) of times, made some neat gadgets and tiny robots, died more times…

5. And… yeah. That's mostly it.

And that's…

*ZAP* *BZZZAPT*

"…Hmm, that was almost bad," I mutter to myself, blinking the white spots out of my vision from the shower of sparks that the device in front of me vomited up. White-ish gray, acrid smoke wafts in the air above the smoking circuit board and makes my nose scrunch up.

"I almost had to explain all of this again for a third time," I say, thinking back to the first time I tried explaining this. Turns out, I should've looked over that code more, then maybe the exosuit protype I was testing wouldn't have suddenly spun my spine 180 degrees. Well, you live and you learn.

…Well, I didn't really live. I died. But I got better, and I did still learn… so still in the positives?

"Honey, are you still alive?" Mom shouts, presumably from the kitchen judging by how muffled it was.

"Yes mom, just almost electrocuted myself again," I call back, dragging my chair back from my workbench/desk and standing for the first time in a few hours. I leisurely stretch and roll my neck, making sure to flick off the power of the soldering tool before I make my way out of my room.

Standing in over the stove is Inko Midoriya, looking much the same as she had when he was 6. A little longer hair, the roots had grown a little darker similar to my own, and few more wrinkles from age… and well, having me as her son. When she hears me stop at the entrance of the kitchen, she turns around, a disapproving expression on her face perfected over this past half-decade.

"You know, I would really like to not have to think about my son dying, as much as you insist it doesn't matter," she huffs for what has got to be the several hundredth time. "Besides, what would Inko number…"

"136."

We were keeping track of my deaths anyways, but after that one eventful day of Mom watching the science channel episode on the multiverse theory, we decided to make it more fun.

"Right, Inko 136 think when she has to walk back and see your still smoking corpse, and that the katsudon she'd been cooking went to waste?" she posits to me, getting a thoughtful hum.

"Probably the same as Inko 56, Inko 68, Inko 90, Inko…"

"OK, I get your point, smartass," she scoffs with a wry grin on her face as she turns back to the stovetop. Leave it to the Midoriya family to smile at the joke of repeated familial death.

I feel bad for her. I imagine she was probably more sane before this whole 'son dies a few times a month and comes back' situation.

…

Oh well.

"So, I heard something about katsudon?"

Alright, so that was chapter 1, the set-up and background for the story to begin properly. I'll be thinking of ways to take this further, and I appreciate any input or guesswork on what'll be done in the future. I'm going to give one thing away though: this is going to be a OFA-less Izuku, but he will still be going to U.A. Just... probably not hero course.

So with that said and done, feel free to leave your feedback and await the next chapter with: probably the other character in the character tags!

I'll see you next time, sailors!