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Toshinori wakes up, hears the news, and decides to believe the stranger sitting at his bedside.
Not because what he hears is necessarily believable but because the man, Tsukauchi Naomosa, does not seem like one to lie.
He also seems like someone kind, patient, and capable. The exact kind of person Toshinori would want around. The kind of person who reminds him a little of Dave. But where Dave was worry Tsukachi-san is dark circles, deep sighs, and exasperation.
“We weren’t sure of the effects at first. Had to check the quirk registry when the perp refused to say anything,” Tsukauchi-san explains, “And even when we knew, the fact that you were out for so long…”
He doesn’t really finish, just drops his head into his hand with a shaky breath. It makes Toshinori feel like he should be apologizing, not just rubbing stiff hospital sheets between his fingers.
It’d been like that with Nighteye too. He’d slip up, overwork, forget a meeting, and find himself with an apology on the edge of his tongue.
Mirai never let him get it out though.
Not even in the end.
Though at that time, Toshinori had been too stubborn to say it. Too busy ignoring the way his remaining guts pushed nauseatingly against the stitches in his side.
Perhaps that’s why—as they move down the hallways after Toshinori’s discharged—he asks.
Tsukauchi-san’s face is out of view, pushing the wheelchair Toshinori had practically been forced into.
The hospital flooring is smooth, without a single bump. Yet it feels as though the chair has lurched and his stomach with it.
“No you…the two of you made up some time after your retirement.”
Tsukauchi-san’s hesitation is audible. The passage of time is visible. He’d seen it when Tsukauchi-san had handed him a mirror at his request and the doctor’s approval.
Half a decade is felt in the aches of his body, the grind of his bones, and the missing fire at his side, as much as it’d been reflected back at him. A sunken in face he can barely recognize and a single stranger at his bedside.
He never expected to change, to step off of this path he’d paved himself, but to see, to hear, the results of it all and not remember a lick of it…he almost wonders if…
Tsukauchi-san doesn’t seem like one to lie but his silence is telling.
As is Mirai’s absence.
As is One for All’s.
As is any trace of the hero All Might.
“U.A…?”
Settled into Tsukauchi-san’s passenger seat, forced to let his self-proclaimed friend buckle him in like he’s a child and not a fif- fifty-seven year old man.
The reminder of the hole in his memory washes down any fight he has.
“...You live on campus,” Tsukauchi-san says, after a moment, considering what Toshinori can only guess. He’s been keeping information about this future-present Toshinori’s found himself in close to the chest.
Toshinori huffs, “Hopefully not freeloading.”
Tsukauchi-san gives him a curious look.
“Unless you consider being a fulltime teacher freeloading, then no.”
A memory, one five months old for him, yet years old for this world, comes on. Of U.A.’s principal making an offer, one All Might wasn’t ready to take.
One for All’s absence is an empty plain of nothingness except ashes. The only evidence that there was once a fire within him that could only burn.
“Guess I surrendered, huh.”
Tsukauchi-san doesn’t hear those words that sigh out of him, too busy rounding the hood to climb into the driver’s seat.
Toshinori doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask anything as they set off, but he does wonder.
Even tries to rub his fingers in those ashes, to hold them up in the hopes that a breeze will come and blow them in the direction of the flame that has been passed on.
He feels nothing. Not even a lingering connection.
He remembers nothing of the last few years but he does remember himself. His start as well as the selfish wish that had come from it.
To find someone in the same way he’d been found all those years ago.
It's the first time he lets himself, now that the stark terror of waking up quirkless for the first time since then has lost its edge.
U.A. is as much the same as it is different.
How appropriate, that as its alumni, he’s much the same.
Tsukauchi-san doesn’t take him to the main building. Instead they drive through campus to a part that Toshinori remembers, quite distinctly, being one full of trees. A plot of land the school kept for future use.
The future use is here he supposes.
“Decided it was safer for the students to live on campus,” Tsukauchi-san explains, as the dormitories come into view. “Still is if I’m being honest.”
“Do they not anymore?”
Tsukauchi-san hums, “Most do. Not to say there’s not a few who have opted out. There’s some. Not to mention the kids can head home whenever they want…wasn’t like that before.”
“...I see.”
“It’s not a bad thing. Just. Makes me a little anxious.” Tsukauchi-san says with a laugh, before parking and adding, “Same’s true for you.”
He looks at him like he sees exactly what’s on Toshinori’s mind, and the prospect of that is terrifying.
“Not gonna ask?”
Toshinori plays a little dumb, sue him. “About what?”
Tsukauchi rolls his eyes, “God you’re stubborn. More than usual. Fine. Live with the mystery. Figured we could stop by to see his class anyway.”
His …so a young man then.
“Is that… really such a good idea?” Toshinori tries, pushing down his nerves while Tsukauchi ignores him, electing to get out of the car, and then help him out. There’s really no need for it, he’s fully recovered from the dizziness of the quirk. “I won’t recognize any of them…” He argues. “I’m sure that’ll be distressing for them…”
Tsukauchi… holds him by the crook of his arm like Toshinori’s not standing two feet taller than him.
“They know already. I contacted Ai…their homeroom teacher.”
“...Oh.”
Tsukauchi had stepped out of the hospital room to make a few calls after he woke, but he was apparently a detective. It hadn’t really occurred that those calls might be about Toshinori.
Tsukauchi levels him with a serious gaze.
“Toshi.” And to hear his name said with such familiarity makes him break out in a chill. “You don’t have to go see anyone if you don’t want to.”
He fails to respond.
“I’m sure this is all…beyond overwhelming.”
“It’s—”
He doesn’t get the chance to say that he’s floating through reality and consciousness right now. That whenever he catches his reflection it’s an out of body experience. That the doctors and surgeons had warned him of the toll so many operations would have on his body but to see it so suddenly instead of living its slow decline is like pulling the ground out from under him. That he can’t recognize a single person—hasn’t seen anyone because he knows he’s left them behind—let alone himself.
“Detective.”
A younger man, scruffy, in all black, and looking every bit as impatient and bored as someone can, appears out of nowhere. He’d blended a little too well into the dark of the evening.
“All Might.”
He looks at Toshinori with recognition but, if what Tsukauchi said is true, everyone in Japan recognizes him in this decrepit powerless form.
Well, everyone except the one person it matters to.
The man wastes no time. He introduces himself with a simple, “Eraserhead,” jabbing a thumb at himself.
“Ah…it’s, good to meet you?”
“Mmm.”
Toshinori starts to sweat under the man’s one eyed stare. How well can he see with all that hair in his face?
“Sorry, I suppose, we’ve already-”
“Save it. I already know the situation.” He directs his attention to Tsukauchi. “Class A is being contained in Heights, if you want to just head straight to the dorms you can.”
Tsukauchi chuckles, “Contained huh?”
Eraserhead huffs with a tired shrug.
Toshinori struggles to catch up. “They, the students?”
“They were worried,” Tsukauchi clarifies. “Are worried.”
“Some more than others,” Eraserhead grumbles.
Toshinori stands there, barely following the ping pong of conversation. If he thinks too hard about any of this…he’s not sure he even can.
He’s retired, a teacher, he’s… this…so why?
He tries to at least be the voice of reason.
“But it's just… a quirk…do they not know the effects will wear off?”
“‘Course they do—but you try telling this group of teenagers they can’t see All Might after all this.”
Tsukauchi chuckles but Toshinori can’t find much humor in it.
“But in the end it’s up to you.” Eraserhead, who’s been nothing but a harsh stare, suddenly seems less like a curled in black cat about to strike and instead, like he knows something Toshinori does not.
“If you’re not up for it, I’ll tell them. They’ll understand.”
Maybe there should be something relieving about that. The going back to his apparent home, dorm, where he can crawl into bed and sleep and sleep until he wakes as whoever it is he’s supposed to be.
Yet, there isn’t. At least, there can’t be, as long as Toshinori stands here and wonders.
About himself, about the present, about the students who’ve stayed up waiting for a single teacher’s safe return.
About whoever has continued walking in his stead.
“No,” he says, and somehow the two other men don’t look surprised. “I’ll go.”
He doesn’t say why.
He gets the feeling he doesn’t have to.
Eraserhead goes in first leaving Toshinori and Tsukauchi waiting on the stoop.
It leaves Toshinori to field a sudden wave of anxiety.
In this thin, skeleton-like excuse of a body he can’t hide the way he shakes with it, as if a cold wind has blown through him. There's no question as to how Tsukauchi notices.
“You sure you don’t wanna know?” he asks.
Toshinori shakes his head. This at least, he knows.
“I get it.” Toshinori raises a brow. Tsukauchi smiles, “You wanna figure it out for yourself.”
He might fluster. “I-”
The door opens, Eraserhead appearing once again in its sliver of light.
“Alright, come on in.”
The anxiety twists harder. A parasite in his guts—in whichever ones that remain—as Tsukauchi lets him enter first.
He slips off his shoes, follows Eraserhead round the corner, and stops, as he comes face to face with a crowd of young faces.
““All Might!”” ““Sensei!””
A few jump up from their seats on the couch, while some move to jump over it.
Toshinori prepares for impact until a stifling pressure goes shooting through the room.
“ What did I just say.”
The students freeze.
And then slink, as much as they sulk, back into place.
Toshinori can’t help but feel a little bad about it.
“It’s alright,” he says quietly to the hero at his side. “I can handle it.” He’s dealt with fans much more energetic than this over the years.
Eraserhead doesn’t look like he believes him, but he huffs and throws a hand towards the circle of teenagers. “Be my guest.”
Toshinori steps forward, almost hesitating when twenty sets of eyes fly up and stick to him, freezing him in place.
“All Might…” The rough voice of one young man begins. Toshinori finds him, bright dyed hair, fangs, and sitting between two other boys. One black hair and the other blonde, all three of them look distressed. “Do you really not remember us?”
His jaw feels tight, but he’s a professional, even without his memory, and so it moves as he wishes.
“I’m sorry,” he smiles. “I’m afraid, for me, this is our first time meeting.”
“Incredible.”
Toshinori finds another young man standing by the armrest of the other couch. He wears glasses that seem to suit how deep in thought he looks. “I’ve heard of memory alternating quirks but nothing like this…”
The blonde young man by the red haired boy jumps in. Toshinori can tell he’s one with a particularly energetic personality. “Right!? I’ve only heard of quirks that like, erase a day of memory, but Aizawa-sensei, said you can’t remember the last like five years?!”
“Eight.”
Toshinori had felt a presence at his back, but finding Tsukauchi as its source is a surprise. A pleasant one. Which…is a slightly unnerving admittance.
“Eight?!”
The children look so distressed at Tsukauchi’s correction. As if three more years makes that much of a difference.
Toshinori doesn’t have to remember living them to know for sure that much of those years are likely filled with surgeries, phantom pains, and the gradual decay of the strength he needs to serve as well as save. It took just shy of a decade for the wasting away of his body, as well as his dream. He’s sure those years hold memories that the him of the present would rather forget.
“Waking up must have been so scary,” offers the young girl who’s invisibility quirk offers nothing in terms of characteristics besides her high voice and lounge clothes.
Toshinori recalls waking up. The recognizable walls of a hospital closing in, the wires tangling around his limbs, his pulse racing along with the certainty through his blood that his entrails would once again be hanging off the bed.
Five months later and it’s still a sensation he can’t get out of his head.
He tries to keep his voice steady, “I have to admit it was disorienting. But thankfully the situation was explained to me right away.”
A round cheeked young lady with a short brown bob, tests the waters after the class’s responding silence. “Your memories are supposed to come back tomorrow…right?”
“Apparently so,” he says, “At least, that’s what was true for previous victims.” For whatever reason he looks back at Tsukauchi, who gives him a nod, and who, at some point, has taken a step closer to him.
“Twenty four hours on the dot,” Tsukauchi confirms, as he did in the hospital, hand wrapped around Toshinori’s trembling one. “Don’t see why All Might would be any different.”
The cloud of tension hovering over the room seems to ease.
“So… you’re alright?”
Curly green hair and wide matching eyes, the young man who asks looks like he’s doing everything in his power to hold himself back.
“Besides the gap in memories,” Toshinori taps his head, “Then, yes, I’m alright…..um,” he falters, as there’s no way to miss how the kid's face starts to splinter.
He recovers before Toshinori has the chance to apologize.
“M-Midoriya,” he introduces standing a little bit taller, “Midoriya Izuku.”
That cloud returns, dropping like a thick fog. It’d been this way too in the hospital, in the aftermath of Tsukauchi first introducing himself.
Because Toshinori doesn’t know this young man.
It’s obvious, to him, as it is to everyone in this room, that he very much should. He should know every single person here. But he doesn’t. He can’t. And even if there was even a smidge of strength remaining inside that he could call upon, it wouldn’t do any good. He can’t fight the effects of this quirk away. Can’t punch recollection back into his own skull.
He can only stand here and wait along with everyone else, until he’s no longer a stranger in his own skin.
One of the young ladies jumps up from the couch then, saving everyone—even himself—from what he cannot. “Y-You know that’s actually a great idea!” Her long black hair bounces with her words. “We should all introduce ourselves!” A few of her classmates gradually chime in with approval. “What do you think, Sensei?”
A groan, from behind, “Just make it quick, you’re all already past curfew.”
The children—or rather, these young men and women—take charge. They manage themselves in an orderly fashion, deciding who will go first, and taking cues from one another. They start on one end and go around the circle.
Bakugou, Sero, Kirishima, Kaminari, Mineta, Sato, Tokoyami, Shinsou, Ojiro, Shouji, Kota, Jirou, Yaoyorozu, Hagakure, Ashido, Asui, Uraraka, Iida, Midoriya once again, and finally the last name that makes Toshinori’s head flip.
“Todoroki Shoto.” Toshinori doesn’t get the chance to say anything before the boy confirms, “Endeavor’s my father.”
“I see…”
He takes the young man in, as he’s done for all of them. He catalogs their faces and names. Maybe for the unlikely chance that tomorrow comes and the memories that belong to each of them don’t return or maybe he simply wants to know these young people.
Either way, memories or not, he still has his own. Even if they are missing a gap of eight years. It’s quite clear that young Todoroki’s father is a sore subject. Or rather a burden, that the boy is saddled with. It weighs him the slightest bit down at the mere mention. Yet the truth is, if he hadn't mentioned his family name, Toshinori would have never known.
He simply sees a young hero, tall, proud, and brimming with a good soul.
“Well, young man,” he offers. “It seems you’re already a fine hero all your own.”
Toshinori pockets the small smile the boy wears at his words.
“In fact,” he finds himself saying, unable to stop. “I see that spark of heroics in each one of you.” All twenty faces brighten, some even getting a little teary eyed. “I may not remember but…it makes me proud…to know that I have the privilege of teaching such fine young heroes.”
Proud, as well as skeptical.
Here he is eight years later, quirkless and retired. A few of the students refer to him as All Might, but for the first time, his hero name almost stings, rather than ring true. It suits him about as well as the title of teacher.
What on earth could an old man like him be teaching these young people that they don’t already know?
The doctors had forbid him from using his smartphone. Tsukauchi had taken the outskirts of Mustafa on their way to U.A., avoiding the busiest parts of the city. In the dark of night there wasn’t much to see, wasn’t much to learn. He’d visited the area many times for herowork more recently, but not enough to notice changes from a car window.
Or maybe he’s just refusing to. Maybe a small part of him is afraid.
Eight years. There’s so much he doesn’t know.
But…
At the very least he knows heroes when he sees them. Heroes who’ve fought long and hard and come out on the other side. Heroes who sit before him, shoulder to shoulder, as close as they can, because they know there exists a world, a reality, where they aren’t so lucky. Their worry, near distress, over this silly quirk accident he’d gotten himself into, it makes quite a bit of sense.
The world has been rattled, and All Might wasn’t there to hold it together.
He sees that quite clearly in the scars—he’s caught some across the skin of a few. One boy, Bakugou, who’d complained loudly about starting off the introductions—and about doing introductions in general, “The hell’s the point if he’s gonna remember tomorrow” —wears one across his cheek. The same way he wears his heart on his sleeve, ducking from Toshinori’s eyes as he’d shared his name, hiding the bit of hurt that he even has to.
It’s one of the most visible scars yet certainly not the worse. There’s probably many more Toshinori can’t see. But out of those he can, he can’t help but notice one in particular. One that mirrors the location of Young Bakugou’s own.
Young Midoriya wears his tattered pink skin like a smear of tears as it travels from eye to jaw. It shatters the illusion of an otherwise youthful face. Ripping what must have been dusted freckles, like the ones on his other cheek. Toshinori can only imagine the wound that made such a thing. Can only assume, with how the tissue isn’t faded at all—not at all like Young Todoroki’s long since healed skin—that it’s recent.
A parting gift in the wake of All Might’s retirement.
It makes him sick, makes him want to look away, to get on his knees and apologize to these children who were forced to pick up the pieces left in All Might’s pitiful and likely abrupt end.
Mirai had warned him… hadn’t he?
He’s seen his present reality. He’s walked in it the last few hours. He’s felt its aches, endured its locking, and lifted his hospital gown to see the puckered lines of the crater that is now, an old scar. He knows now, how his journey ends.
Which is why he smiles all the brighter, for the sake of these children and their scarred up hands, who care too much about an old broken man like him.
He can’t decide if this—living to see it—is worse than Mirai’s original prediction.
In the end, Eraserhead kicks him and Tsukauchi out.
The students of Class 3-A wave them off at the entranceway, asking Toshinori to come by for breakfast in the morning, or to drop by the classroom. The quirk’s effects will last until the afternoon, end of the school day, the time he was apparently hit.
The alternative is laying in bed until then—which he’d been forced to do for a month, with tubes pressed down his throat and pulled through his ribs, that he can’t take another day of anything remotely close to it—so he agrees.
He can also admit that the prospect of seeing young heroes in action makes his heart ache. The good kind.
The hopeful kind.
The kids head off with goodbyes that are much lighter than their original, awkward hellos, and for Toshinori that’s enough. He can call this slightly exhausting experience worth it.
Perhaps that’s what teaching is all about.
“Um…”
He stops. A step away from following Tsukauchi outside.
It’s Young Midoriya.
“Midoriya,” Eraserhead says, clearly admonishing him. The kid winces, and Toshinori can’t help but feel it—maybe even mirror it—too.
The boy stands alone, his classmates having gone ahead without him. Though Toshinori thinks he catches a few lingering just around the corner.
“Sorry…I just…” He peeks up from under bangs that are slightly overgrown. It’s only thanks to the small part in his hair that Toshinori can see his eyes at all.
A part made by yet another scar.
And now that Toshinori’s looking he sees all the others. The worn and ruined knuckles the kid massages in his anxiousness. His hands are those of a survivor—one who fought and endured in this world All Might left behind.
“Young Midoriya.”
The kid perks up, expectantly. Toshinori wonders, what the him of today would say. What the young man before him wants him to.
He goes for all he can. A smile and reassurance.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Midoriya’s face poorly hides his disappointment.
It’s no surprise. The kind of smile he can offer right now isn’t quite enough.
Tsukauchi walks at his side, despite leading the way.
There’s a comfortable silence between them that Toshinori keeps expecting the other man to break. That he never does.
There’s an obviousness in how well Tsukauchi knows him, yet it’s really only occurring to him now. The reality that the man beside him, who had to have come into Toshinori’s life after his injury, after Mirai held true to his word, really and truly is a friend.
It’s…been a long time since he’s had that.
“So… you figure it out?”
Tsukauchi keeps looking straight ahead, hands in his pocket.
Toshinori tries not to look back at Heights Alliance.
“Figure out what.”
“Gonna play that game, huh?” Tsukauchi laughs. The early spring air puffs in a fog around his breath. “I know you. I’m sure you have an inclining or two.”
Toshinori’s trying very hard not to.
“They… all seem like good hearted kids.”
“Mmhm.”
“They’re sure to be wonderful heroes.”
“They already are,” Tsukauchi corrects, not unkindly. “But I think you already know that.
Toshinori barely hears that last part, his mind settling on the former.
“You didn’t have to walk me all the way here.”
Tsukauchi doesn’t spare him a glance as he opens the dorm room.
“No, I didn’t.” He walks in and hits the lights like he’s been here before. He probably has. “But I’m your friend, and I wanted to.”
Toshinori can’t work out any sort of reply as Tsukauchi clasps his shoulder.
“Make sure you remember that…even after your memories come back.”
Toshinori feels the clamminess of his hands, the weakness in his body. “I…I’ll try.”
“Call me if you need anything. I probably won’t be able to be by until noon, paperwork and all but...” He shakes Toshinori at the shoulder, already doing more than anyone ever should, more than Toshinori’s allowed anyone to do in the last five months. Though this is the limit and Tsukauchi must feel it too.
“...Don’t be a stranger,” he says, before he leaves the dorm as much as he leaves Toshinori speechless.
He hits the lights back off the moment he can bring himself to move.
A few details have already leaked into his awareness. A soft rug beneath his feet, potted plants scattered in the corners, a full bookshelf against a wall, and photos. So many. Some hung along the wall, others propped up between the books.
He doesn’t let himself take them in, can’t bring himself to. He’s seen too much and already that’s enough.
He keeps his head down as he makes his way through the foreign living space.
The dorm’s layout is straightforward; he finds the bedroom no problem, even with his eyes to his feet.
The closet is obvious enough too, he opens it up and shifts through the same organization system he’s always had.
Though there’s not a single piece of clothing he recognizes. Everything’s a perfect fit. It’s suffocating.
He digs through until he finds the loosest shirt and pants he can. They slip on, rather easily, no muscles to get in the way or to pop the stitching.
He climbs into his too large bed, and lays back.
Taking in a ceiling he’s never seen before.
He’d essentially lived in Might Tower after it was built. It had security from All for One’s men, a place for him to rest his head, and Mirai. Waiting with a stern, exasperated expression to manage what Toshinori couldn’t.
But after his injury…there’d been no choice. He’d needed an apartment.
One filled with bandages, post-op brochures, medications, heat pads, cold pads, almost everything he could try to make the pain stop.
Lying here, eight years later, it finally has.
Maybe that’s what finally breaks him.
The first possibility of a decent sleep in months and he can’t even take advantage.
Can only shudder, his insides bursting, as he cries for the first time in years.
The first time since Nana.
His eyes burn with it, his chest ruptures, his fingers dig into the thin fabric, just above his scar, in a desperate attempt to hold on.
There’s a picture at the bedside table. He feels the eyes within it hold him down, their very presence burning him alive.. He doesn’t know how many but he won’t look, he can’t. He doesn’t want to know who’s there.
Who isn’t.
Life has been nothing but recovery. Nothing but healing. Nothing but pushing himself to get back out there.
Nothing but Ignoring Mirai’s calls. Ignoring Gran’s.
And not being surprised when they stopped calling at all.
Loneliness is never a word he’d use, not when he had work, not when he had purpose.
But he hasn’t had it, not in a long time.
Not since a hole was punched through his stomach.
Not since his diagnosis was a countdown. Since Mirai’s prediction was much the same.
Is it a miracle that he’s here eight years past his expiration date?
A ruined young face flashes across his mind. A pitiful noise fills the quiet of the room in its aftermath.
It suits him.
Maybe he’s found happiness in this present, a way to be content. At the very least he’s found himself one single friend. But let’s be honest. That was never going to be enough for him.
Just existing and being happy on his own, that could never be enough.
Whoever it is, whoever he chose, he wonders if…even with this broken, helpless body that did nothing but make those who cared about him worry…
If he did right by them.
And, even though it’s selfish, he wonders if…he still has a place in their life, despite the world he’s left them with and the nothing he can do to help.
As he pushes his face into the pillow, he doesn’t get his hopes up, he just prays for sleep to win out so that it may bring him to tomorrow.
It should be obvious that it doesn’t.
He rests his eyes, enjoys the reprieve of blackness, and lets his body go limp. It’s possible he may even drift, but that’s about it.
He lies there and feels time pass with excruciating slowness, as his body tosses and turns with its restlessness. Each time he wakes he feels just as lost as the prior.
Until a click.
A shuffling.
A weight pressing against the edge of his bed.
There’s a haze over him. His head is thick with exhaustion and congestion around his salt smeared eyes and stuffed up nose. He doesn’t register the way that weight lies down beside him, slow and stiff, curled up as far from him as possible. Hiding its presence, so he won’t notice or wake.
But there’s some things you can’t hide—that you can’t muffle.
That you can’t forget.
There’s warmth. It inches closer and closer as if unable, or unwilling to keep its distance.
Toshinori doesn’t startle or jump at the presence, instead, his muscles go lax. As if they know better even when his head can’t.
There’s the feeling of a single hand clutching at his back, pressing impossibly close, with a quivering sigh, as if they’ve finally found relief—Toshinori can’t help but blink the drowsiness away.
He goes stiff with awareness and that’s enough. The timid little hand tears away with a gasp.
Toshinori wakes up, turns over, and finds a now familiar face staring back at him with wide guilty eyes.
One which sits above a ruined cheek.
“Young… Midoriya?” The kid ducks his head. In the dark, with only the nearby window to offer moonlight, Toshinori can barely see his pinched expression. “What’re you…doing here?”
It occurs to him that Midoriya is scooting towards the edge of the bed. “I- I was…”
He looks everywhere except Toshinori but he eventually runs out of shadows to watch. Their eyes catch. Everything is written so clearly there as Midoriya’s voice trembles, “I was just-” He can’t finish.
He slips off the bed, stumbling onto his feet. “Sorry,” he whispers, “This isn’t—I shouldn’t have…I didn’t mean to wake you. I— I’ll go.”
For some reason, Tsukauchi’s knowing grin comes to mind.
‘I’m sure you have an inclining or two.’
Toshinori actually had three.
All of which pointed to what’s now running away from him.
He reaches out and grabs said boy before he can flee.
“Wait,” he says, and then again, when the kid pulls against his grip. “Wait, kid it’s—”
“‘m sorry—” Toshinori hears it now, the hiccuping in place of breathing. The way the boy teeters on weeping. “I’m sorry. I’ll go—it’s fine, I can go.”
He barely knows what to do, this sobbing boy at his bedside. But as two tears slip over a freckled cheek and then a scarred one Toshinori can’t think, just does.
“Midoriya.”
It’s just his name, one Toshinori barely knows, yet he says it as softly and as firmly as he can. He’s rewarded with dark circles and watery green turning back towards him.
Uncertainty swirls there, along with the smallest bit of hope.
“It’s alright,” Toshinori promises, “Whatever’s wrong, you can tell me. You don’t have to go.”
Midoriya remains stubborn. “N-Nothing’s wrong…”
The spot against his back where his shirt had been bound in a tight, trembling fist practically burns against his skin. “I can’t help but doubt that.”
A whimper wobbles out of the boy in reply.
“I know I’m not—” His tongue goes dry but he presses on, keeping Midoriya’s wrist locked in his palm. “—that I don’t have…the full picture.” Midoriya shakes his head, but gets no sound out so Toshinori can continue. “But I want to help…so, please… let me…”
“There’s nothing to help with…”
So obstinate, perhaps this is how he’s made everyone else feel. “I’m fine, really.” And then Midoriya smiles. A half-hearted thing that squirms on his face as he says, “I’ll…see you tomorrow, sensei.”
No one could miss the insincerity of such a smile. Especially not him. Not when he’s seen such a thing every morning in the mirror for so, so many years.
Toshinori speaks before he can stop himself.
“It’s you, isn’t it.”
Midoriya’s breath stutters. “Wh… what?”
“It’s so clear, somehow” he says, taking in those scarred hands, that marred cheek, and the way the kid’s world seems to piece itself back together as he speaks. “Even if I can’t remember—you’re…there’s so much of myself in you.”
The kid goes almost limp, letting Toshinori lead him to sit back on the bed. Tears fall, only to plip plop on the mattress.
Toshinori wishes for something to wipe them away, but he’s empty handed. All he can do is smudge them off track with his thumb.
“...I suppose I should apologize for that…
“And for forgetting…”
Perhaps it’s those words that finally break through.
The young man—young boy—drops what remains of his wall. Toshinori sees it coming and gladly opens his arms.
From there it’s a muffled string of “not your faults” and “‘’m sorrys” and “All Might, All Might, All Might.” The last of which breaks Toshinori’s heart.
“I know that you—that you can’t- but I-“ The kid shakes as if a chill has blown through the room. He clings to Toshinori like he’s the only source of warmth. It’s enough to make him crumble. “I couldn’t sleep. A-And you said whenever I can’t sleep I can come here.” The sobs are almost violent. “But you didn’t remember and when I tried to—on my own—the nightmares were worse.”
Toshinori can do nothing but let the kid press his running eyes and nose against his shoulder.
It doesn’t feel like enough, he’s not sure how it could be.
When the crying goes quiet, and Midoriya deflates, his chest no longer buckling with each whimper, Toshinori almost expects him to let go.
But he doesn't.
The hands that clutch to Toshinori’s back—where his spine runs up against his skin and his ribs protrude—don’t loosen even a smidge.
It makes his throat stick.
“I-I know you don’t remember—and it’s probably weird?” Midoriya whispers, to which Toshinori bundles him even closer as to squash those ridiculous thoughts. Even if he barely has the strength to do so. “But could I stay here tonight? With you?”
“Would,” Toshinori asks, because he can’t help himself. Because he’s desperate to know. As desperate as Midoriya is to hold on. “Would that make it better?”
There’s not even a second of hesitation, the kid nods with a watery “Mmm.”
Toshinori nearly collapses with it.
He lets Midoriya take the blankets, while he lies between two of them. He expects to simply be a comforting presence but somehow he ends up with the kid cuddled up against him and with the bedside light clicked on.
The people—Tsukauchi-kun, his students, the other teachers, and the boy who’s currently at his side—accompany him in the pictures along the walls and nearby table. He can see them all clearly now and he finds that he’s not surprised at all.
Just a little guilty and undeserving with how happy he feels.
The kid’s breathing has calmed significantly along with most of Toshinori’s spiraling thoughts. There’s a thousand questions he wants to ask, but as the kid clings to him—pulls himself so tight against a body that’s nearly all bone as if it were actually the most comfortable thing in the world—he finds himself thinking of only one.
“I suppose… the two of us met at U.A.?”
Midoriya's voice is relaxed, answering easily and without much thought, “It was before that actually...” He mumbles.
“…Really?”
Midoriya nods, “The spring before the entrance exam. You, uh, saved me from a villain and I…” The kid exhales an almost snort. “Well, I sorta got in the way of your work.”
“...Oh…?”
A memory that sits locked inside as an ever present part of him flickers by. It’s no less than a vertebrae in his spine, a piece that holds him together.
A metal pipe left behind, dressed in only his middle school uniform, snow drifting softly toward the ground as the woman he knew could be no one except his teacher soared gracefully above it.
The boy at his side nuzzles into his shoulder and Toshinori thinks that even without the thread of One for All to lead him, he’d known from the beginning.
“Yeah… it worked out in the end though...”
If not known, then hoped.
“Seems it did," Toshinori agrees, "But…I can’t help but feel that you’re leaving out some important details…”
“I mean, a little bit. It's kinda a long story...”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
The nuzzling stops.
“But… you’re going to remember tomorrow? And…I might fall asleep half way through…”
Toshinori chuckles, ruffling a hand through curly hair, and finds himself filled with a sensation that might just be familiarity.
Might just be exactly what he’s always needed.
“Tell me anyway.”
And so he does.
It’s worth it.