Chapter Text
He doesn't remember his mother; he's not even sure she nursed him when he was born. His earliest memories are of Yoichi's green eyes, his gentle voice singing him a simple song, and the ash-colored sky above their heads. the next thing he remembers is the warm hands of Zen pressing him against the steady beat of his heart in his chest, and the strange metallic smell around him, not yet understanding what fresh blood smells like.
Shigaraki Izuku only remembers growing up in the arms of his brothers.
Izuku is four years old, and Yoichi is fifteen when his brother hands him over to a gentle woman; she has kind eyes and the most loving smile he has ever seen; her name is Inko, she loves his older brother and wants to marry him; I will become part of your family, Izuku, Inko tells him, although he is not yet old enough to fully understand this. Pressing his cheek against her neck, he thinks she smells deliciously of fruits he does not recognize.
At that moment, he feels it, a thin, glowing thread; he cannot quite see it, but he knows it is there; and, like any child who does not know what he is allowed to do and what he is not, he tugs at it; nothing happens, nothing changes, he is held in their arms as before, but Izuku knows he has done something he shouldn't have, so he cries bitterly, causing his family to panic.
(Midoriya Inko lost her quirk, inevitably and irrevocably, without noticing it; it was not a time when she would have taken advantage of it to notice).
Izuku is eight years old, Zen-nii teaches him everything he can, instead of school, when Yoichi-nii can barely stand; his brother's health is deteriorating, Izuku is small, but he can understand that this is not normal; sometimes he wonders if it was a mistake when his brother gave him his portion of food, saying he wasn't hungry? Izuku doesn't know the answer to that question, and he's not sure he wants to know. On the almost broken TV, people are shown shouting about the death of everyone who looks like his family; Izuku feels the threads between the people in the crowd.
Izuku is eleven years old, Yoichi-nii gets better when they move, and Inko dyes all their hair black; the dye stings his nostrils, and Izuku tries not to sneeze, thinking that he liked his brothers' white hair, even though he himself never looked like them. He feels tension in the air when no one asks where Zen-nii got the money for a new house, new clothes, and so much food that he has only seen in old movies, which Yoichi-nii got somewhere on the street.
“I plan to make society better”, Zen-nii tells the three of them at lunch, his smile gentle but slightly wider than usual. Izuku notices how loudly Inko sighs and how tightly Yoichi-nii grips his chopsticks. Izuku looks, looks and looks, and it seems to him that there are more threads next to Zen-nii.
Izuku is thirteen years old, not quite a child, but not quite an adult, when his nephew is born; Mikumo, — Yoichi-nii whispers next to him with a smile that is forever burned into Izuku's memory, looking healthier than he has in the last decade, still fragile, but so happy that Izuku is grateful to the newborn for that alone; When the child grabs his finger, looking at him with the same green eyes as his and Yoichi-nii, Izuku can't find the thread — he rejoices; this child will be able to live in a world that hates everyone who has abilities.
He was wrong.
He was too stupid.
He was young, naive, and didn't know the world.
Izuku is fifteen years old when he arrives at their new home; a home that was supposed to be safer than the previous one; a home that Zen-nii presented to them with pride and a smile more like the brother Izuku always remembered; a home that was more suitable for a small child like Mikumo; a house that was smeared with blood, and the acrid smell of it clung to his skin, soaked into his clothes, when he fell to his knees in front of Inko, pressing on her stomach, from the wound of which he could see her organs, her body was cold, but he didn't notice it, didn't want to notice it, he turned his head, and there, right under the table where Mikumo loved to play with blocks and toy cars, large glassy green eyes, like those of a stuffed animal, were staring at him—
Izuku didn't remember much of what happened next; he didn't remember how a gun was held to his head, he didn't remember how he managed to escape, he didn't remember a single word that was thrown after him, he didn't even remember why he couldn't contact any of his brothers, and he wasn't sure where his phone was while he ran, ran and ran to the laboratory he was hiding from his brothers, knowing that none of them would allow him to do something like this; if the world had been more favorable, if he hadn't had green eyes and green hair, if he hadn't had the ability (he remembers the shock in Zen's red eyes during their quarrel when he grabbed the brightest thread from the hundreds around him and pulled it, destroying one of his abilities, which he had taken from someone else; he still remembers how his brother's pride mixed with fear; he remembers the one time Yoichi didn't come to reconcile them and didn't comfort either of them), he could have become an engineer. Our little scientist, Inko affectionately called him when he explained to her the airplane blueprints he had found at the age of five.
Izuku gets to the capsule, feeling sick and cold, holding his right side, hoping the bullet went through, while trying to enter the settings; he never tested it, wasn't even sure if anyone still studied cryogenic freezing or cell regeneration capsules these days. Izuku simply combined the two. He sets a deadline of two years; he needs time, he needs a break, he needs to heal himself. Then he'll come out, then he'll find Zen and Yoichi, then he'll apologize, hug them, and kill those who did this, if Zen doesn't get to them first (which Izuku doubts).
Izuku falls asleep hoping for a better future that awaits him when he wakes up.
(The capsule closes with an incorrect click when he loses consciousness; the number of days increases, rising higher and higher until it reaches its maximum value: seventy-five thousand days; two hundred years.
Shigaraki Izuku does not know what happened after his death disappearance, he does not know how his eldest brother went mad, how the deaths of his wife, son, and brother burned away what remained of his sanity, how it erased what little humanity he had left; Shigaraki Izuku did not see how one brother locked another in a vault, calling it protection, calling it love, calling them the only family they had left; Shigaraki Izuku did not see how the bond between his two brothers was distorted until one ran away and the other pursued him across the country, across years, across other people, destroying himself, their brother, and the whole world.
Shigaraki Izuku slept the peaceful sleep of a man who was born in the wrong era to live peacefully.
When he awoke, he did not recognize the world he had entered.)