Chapter Text
“No… No! I can’t, in good conscience, stand by and watch you throw yourself back into the fray after such a grievous injury!”
Pain.
…Yagi Toshinori was familiar with pain.
“The fact that you’re alive… Missing nearly everything below your heart…”
Pain came in many forms, and tended to last for many, many days.
Years.
A lifetime.
“It’s a miracle you’re even conscious enough to understand what I’m saying… and you just want to throw it all away!”
Darkness crept along the edges of his vision, and it took all of Toshinori’s lingering adrenaline to keep himself from blacking out.
Perhaps, for the last-
“-Time for rest – time for celebration!”
“We won, All Might! You. Won.”
“...Why can’t you accept that?”
Toshinori - no - All Might tugged on what errant strands of One For All he could find, and forced it upwards and outwards as he tripled in size and-
stabbingstabbingbleedingrustedmetalstabbing
-fell onto his knees, puking bile and blood onto fragmented concrete as his hands crept to his stomach, and scraped away flakes of rust from an old rebar pole… impaled through his stomach.
“...I don’t think you quite realise how bad a state you were in when we found you.”
Toshinori exhaled in a bleeding mockery of a laugh, and nearly lost his remaining lung in the coughing fit that followed.
“...I thought you were dead, Toshinori.”
All Might gripped the rusted rebar impaling his stomach, and almost wondered if it would begin to glow a deep crimson, oozing a dark ichor as black as the heart of his nemesis.
(It was almost poetic, that he nearly died to impalement then)
(Only to die from it now…)
“If you continue down this path… I fear all that awaits you is an unimaginably gruesome death.”
(Poetic indeed)
Toshinori felt his eyes begin to flutter, and let it happen.
He was going to die today.
(He’d long accepted that it would happen)
(He only wished it wasn’t so soon)
It was only when the panicked - yet resolute - voice of a boy reached his ears, that Toshinori pried his eyes open one last time.
And before him, wading amidst the wreckage of the collapsed building, was a boy with green hair and green eyes, narrowed with tears, both from the powdered rubble in the air… and, presumably, at the sight of such devastation.
Yet the boy soldiered on.
And Toshinori watched as the boy toiled with every breath to save a single life.
He watched, as despite the boy’s slight frame, he lifted what he could to free a little girl who was stuck. He watched, as despite the boy’s trembling arms, he pushed a chunk of rubble away for a young couple to reach safety. He watched, as despite the boy’s bleeding leg, he limped along shattered stone to help an elderly man from falling.
And as he watched, he whispered to himself, “This boy will make a fine hero…”
Toshinori shifted, his eyes turning glassy as echoes of his voice - and those of seven phantoms - left his bleeding lips, “This boy will make a fine successor.”
The boy turned, having heard the voice of One For All, and rushed to help.
Eight smiled - a gruesome thing, or so Mirai would say - and looked upon the boy as he spoke in rushed words and curses, reddened eyes going wide with dried tears at the sight of his injury-
And- and all Eight could think at that moment was that everything would be alright.
“Have no fear…” His words weighed heavy in his heart, and he saw the boy’s mouth open in horror as his body convulsed in its death throes-
And with one last surge of One For All…
He sunk his bloody fingers into the boy’s mouth-
And smiled, as he felt the last wisps of his Quirk fade away into the boy – and his life with it.