Work Text:
One for All first meets his latest successor in a hospital.
Technically, Izuku was off the clock and visiting a friend, but the staff is anxious and he’s a nurse intern known for his discretion and patience - anything is easy after a decade of practice, not that the new hires believe him when he looks like a teenager. Experience makes staying calm easy. When he’s asked to grab coffee for the on-call team when an S class emergency hits, it’s no worse than a hundred other emergencies he’s lived through. His supervisor promises overtime in writing.
Todoroki Rei is more than familiar with his need to help, help, help until he collapses from exhaustion. She doesn’t need long to convince him to go. Really, he's a little terrible at refusing when asked to lend a hand, so she hardly needs to push him towards the door. He'll check in with her before he leaves if it's not an unreasonable hour.
Izuku carries linens and medicine and supplies as needed. He sorts and reports and pushes cups of coffee in hands when the more licensed professionals run out of energy. It’s to be expected that they’d call in help for a 24-hour surgery like this. After all, a high-profile hero is critically injured. Izuku is smart enough to fill in missing pieces.
His successor, who he never met, is dying.
There’s only one person who could kill the Symbol of Peace, one person who has power to match his quirk – Midoriya’s quirk. His brother is back.
Izuku waits until a nurse leaves to find Dr. Kurosawa. She looks half-dead herself, quirk pushed to the limit, but still offers a smile when Izuku gently wraps her shaking hands around a steaming coffee cup. It looks more like a grimace. All Might won’t survive, then. Or if he does, it will be by miraculously slim chances.
“If anyone needs anything, I’m here,” Izuku reminds her, because it was his quirk long before it was All Might’s, and it’s his brother that punched a hole through the man. Izuku’s quirk. Izuku’s brother. Izuku’s responsibility.
“More caffeine,” Dr. Kurosawa grunts. “Not sure there’s much else you can do- actually, I take that back. Sachi is trying to keep the next of kin updated, but we need her here. I'll swear you in to review what we’re doing, so you two can swap."
“Understood,” he says, and ducks around her to stop another nurse from crashing into the wall.
Dr. Kurosawa watches him with tired eyes. "We are going to get this patient to reach morning alive, even if I have to call in an exorcism quirk."
Kurosawa Yama is tired, aching, and far too busy with the top hero to worry about the emotional side of things. She’ll deliver bad news to his kin as is her duty, but with the amount of monitoring she needs to do, she needs to call in help. She's brusque and blunt. This isn't always appreciated, to the extent that she usually finds a more emotionally competent nurse and tag teams that side of things, especially while patients are in the crisis zone. Anyone with the experience to be assigned is busy, except-
Well.
He’s supposed to be off the clock today, but it could work.
Midoriya is odd and older than he claims to be by at least half a century, but he’s unshakable and kind. Emotionally stable. Medical professionals with the extra license for heroic cases end up working in small teams for the sake of strict clearance protocols. Hospital budgets and closed cases force comradery. It's not unusual for them to call in help from each other if heroes fresh out of combat or trauma victims get paranoid about too many faces, and Yama is an old hand who knows all the other old faces. One told her he had a fully-fledged nurse with an immortality quirk, but Yama knows better than to pry. It's none of her business. Midoriya is good person with plenty of experience who she can point to when all the inevitable questions start rolling in. Really, all she needs is for him to pour his weirdly calming energy over the waiting room.
Midoriya is known as discreet and competent.
She'll call him to take over for Sachi and gets back to work.
Half an hour later sees her explaining what’s going on to a very stressed hero.
“So, these are the options,” Sir Nighteye clarifies as he shifts through the papers. He’s a hero Yama isn’t familiar with. Another – she caught the name Gran Torino – sits beside him, checking through the papers as well. There are very few packets, all detailing the quirks available.
Bioethics is a hard topic to broach – when is letting go a mercy? How much should they focus on limiting pain, on limiting risk, or any number of variables before they look to full-on healing? The emergency contacts are there to help decide where that balance between suffering and longevity lies, especially when heroes are required to keep updated forms detailing their wishes.
All Might, true to form, chose to fight.
Sir Nighteye pauses at a paper. “This is an intern?”
“Midoriya. He’s one of our best, and he’ll be in charge of keeping you updated.” Again: because everyone else is occupied with the Number One suddenly lacking a stomach. Yama can't leave his vicinity for more than five minutes at a time before her Restoration quirk starts breaking down. “Don’t let the young face fool you - he’s twenty-two.”
Probably more, but she's too tired to care. Always has been.
There’s a soft knock at the door and a man who looks like a boy in hospital scrubs peeks through. “Dr. Kurosawa?”
“Come on in,” she tells him, and waits for the door to shut behind Midoriya before running through introductions. Reiterating that Midoriya’s quirk is at fault for his appearance isn’t necessary, but she does it anyway because workplace discrimination is already bad enough for the man.
“We’re in your hands,” Sir Nighteye says, likely running on automatic manners. “Please take care of us.”
“I will do my best,” Midoriya says with his own bow. He’s swapped to the old accent he uses when talking to people he doesn’t know, but Yama is confident he’ll handle it.
Midoriya is good like that.
Kind.
She sweeps down the hallway, returning to her patient.
“Good morning,” a familiar voice says, and Mirai looks away from the city lights to see the intern approaching. There’s a bag over his shoulder - Midoriya must have just finished his shift. Dawn light paints the hospital light blue and pale gold.
“Morning,” Mirai manages. The nurse was blessedly patient with the constant questions and frustration Mirai had been unable to shake off right up until Toshinori woke up. Midoriya was an ocean of calm in contrast. He never snapped or returned the nervous energy, which makes Mirai suspicious that he was assigned to do nothing but essentially babysit a group of hair-trigger heroes.
That was probably smart of the hospital’s management, in retrospect.
“This is familiar,” Midoriya says under his breath. “May I sit with you, Sir Nighteye?”
He nods an affirmative, too tired to speak. Midoriya takes the unintentional snub gracefully, and hops up to sit on the bench. He’s short enough that when he sits back, his feet don’t quite touch the ground.
“I’m afraid I’m not a very good conversation partner at the moment."
“That’s alright.” Midoriya gives a laugh that pulls enough sadness into the misty air to not be disrespectful. “Nobody here expects you to be. All for One is good at causing grief.”
Ah, that would make sense for a place like this-
The hospital does not know the name of All Might’s opponent.
Mirai forces himself to actively not freeze. He carefully keeps his shoulders slumped and hands laced with elbows on his knees. The fidget of tapping a thumb against his palm is wholly manufactured to showcase fake distraction. “They read you in, then?”
Midoriya blinks at him slowly, like he’s running digital thoughts through a CPU that can’t quite handle it.
“No,” he says, so slow and quiet that it turns dangerous. “I was read in a long time ago. Do you know who Shimura Nana was?”
Mirai does know that name. The implication that she brought in a child is so very wrong, though. Timelines get jumbled up in his head. Midoriya is… twenty-two or so, right? He wouldn’t remember much of Shimura. Midoriya certainly shouldn’t know enough to get this involved.
“A good hero,” he says. “Help me up, will you? We’re not all advantaged with quirks like yours.”
Midoriya smiles politely as he stands to do exactly that. “I am trapped in near-eternal puberty and good friends with my assigned Child Protective Services agent, Sir Nighteye. Teenagers skipping school have fewer rights than you may remember. There is nothing advantaged about it.”
Mirai takes the offered hand-
Here is an important detail about Mirai’s quirk: it works much in the way one would look at a string and choose halfway or a three-quarters mark to look. The sum total time is taken into account automatically. In other words, Mirai moves forward in his search through time using hazily measured fractions, so when he looks forward through Midoriya’s future, he is careful to move proportionately the amount he would allot for villain about to check in on their boss.
He sees everything.
It’s just for a second, but it is all he needs.
Midoriya Izuku stands in a heroics costume at UA. He looks like an actual adult. The people Mirai recognize all have grey hair, the new-current heroes are unfamiliar, and All Might is a statue immortalized on the front lawn. Going back shows a student commuting to school, and further back still puts Midoriya standing just inside this hospital's doors. He has an umbrella at his side, but steps into the rain without opening it.
Mirai takes another breath, looks deeper, and finds a confirmation he didn’t know to look for.
“That wasn’t a very funny joke. Now I have to tell Toshinori you lied about knowing Shimura,” he tells Midoriya as they walk back towards the hospital. Wide green eyes blink up at him, empty and confused.
“Oh no, now you have a problem to unite against. I would never do that,” Midoriya says dryly.
“One for All,” Mirai says warningly before they can reach hospital doors that pour gold light over the blue night. Midoriya’s easy expression drops. Mirai has always pictured the first holder of that quirk as soft. Gentle. Midoriya certainly is, but he is also very clearly a man who had to be just as fierce as his brother. It seems One for All’s successors have drawn his narrative in pastels long enough that they’ve forgotten some of the bloody knuckles.
One for All snorts in what could be a laugh. “That’s not a smart name to say out loud.”
“Midoriya, then. Is this a game to you?”
“No. But it is to him.” Midoriya grins. It’s a small and brittle like an obsidian knife. Honest. Without his masks, One for All looks like a hurting, tired, ruthless man. “Are you willing to risk the world, Sir Nighteye?”
“No.”
Never.
“He’s been risking it for centuries,” Midoriya says calmly. “Now, what do you think All for One will do if he realizes his brother is alive? I would like nothing more than to live here and help in my small ways. Call it a coping mechanism. Your partner isn’t the first person with that quirk to nearly die, but he is the first with a chance to heal. Providing he allows himself to.”
“He won’t-?”
“Maybe.”
It is a chance.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Toshinori is a stubborn, brave, foolish man who Mirai knows he cannot stand to see destroyed by All for One again. Toshinori will fight. He will fall. Mirai is familiar with cutting his hands on the shattered pieces as he picks them up, but there are only so many ways to break before glue stops holding everything together.
“What will you do?” he asks instead. There is so much to see in Midoriya’s future that Mirai is not sure he could look for specific details and actually find them.
“What I have to,” Midoriya says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “My brother crossed a line in claiming the apprentice he did. Actions have consequences. If that requires a ghost to stand up, then I will place incense at the butsudan he keeps in my name and wait for him there.”
What.
Does he think All for One is still alive?
“Can I convince you to talk with Toshinori before you go?” Mirai tries.
Midoriya - One for All - fidgets with his nametag for a second before coming to a decision.
“I think he would convince me not to do it,” Midoriya says, almost to himself. “So… no. I don’t think you can.”
“I see.”
“Can I ask you to pass on a message?” Midoriya waits for Mirai to nod before continuing, “Tell him to live. A legacy people die for is a lonely one. It puts things in perspective. I’d rather he survive spitefully than die nobly.”
It would have been kinder if Midoriya had punched Mirai. The words impact similarly enough.
Mirai bows to him, mostly because he is desperately hanging onto formality to navigate this conversation, but also because it feels owed. Midoriya is a legend and spending his time in a hospital internship. This is an old man with a young face, who fought the greatest evil and tried to hide from his successors.
Coping mechanism, Midoriya said earlier in an explanation that was not an excuse. Maybe he’s trying to heal through others. Mirai is familiar with that sort of desperate attempt.
“Thank you,” Mirai says, and means it.
“Please don’t. I never asked anyone to sacrifice themself.”
“You told All for One he was wrong,” Mirai says as he straightens up. “At least let me thank you for that.”
Midoriya sighs in defeat. “You should talk to your partner, Sir Nighteye. We’ll meet again.”
Mirai wants to challenge that. He wants to ask Midoriya if he plans to disappear again, either at his own hand or his brother’s. He wants to ask Midoriya to let them help.
But more than anything else, he wants to save Toshinori.
Mirai is a hero.
“Be safe,” he says, and is wholly taken aback when Midoriya grins like the teenager he is not.
“I will. Good luck, Sir Nighteye. Live a long, happy life.”
Mirai stands at the entrance to the hospital long after a small teenager has been lost amongst early morning crowds. He feels empty inside. Like a future was curled up in his heart, and just slipped out between numb fingers and the spaces between his ribs. Missed opportunities disperse with peach-gold morning mist. It aches.
When he looks into Midoriya’s future, what he finds is similar. Shockingly so. It is different by the smallest of details, a single moment he skims across and nearly misses. One morning, All Might walks in a future-memory towards UA beside a student who looks suspiciously like Midoriya. Toshinori is rake-thin. Skeletal. Mirai finds is breath stollen in gratitude to the universe for that smallest chance. What his quirk sees has always been immovable, but this-
The future has shifted.
He turns around and seeks out Toshinori’s bedside like a compass arrow pulled north.