Chapter Text
Izuku didn’t know how long he had been sitting there. Time stopped meaning much of anything somewhere around the part of the memory where a nine-year-old version of himself stood at a set of bike racks.
He wasn’t exactly sure how the stairwell had transitioned from now to then and back to now again. He had been staring at the same crack in the concrete wall the entire time. He had lost track of how long he had been hiding there until Mei came clattering down the stairs and pounced on him hard enough to knock the last memory clean out of his head.
“Freckles, where were you? I was late because of you. I had no idea where the new classroom even was!”
Izuku blinked at her, the stairwell swimming back into focus one detail at a time– cold concrete, fluorescent lighting, and Mei’s face six inches from his, furious in a way that meant she’d actually been worried and decided anger was easier to manage than that.
“... What?”
“What?” Mei mimicked back, unimpressed. “You bumped into someone, and one second you were there, and then I blinked, and you were just… gone. I had to tell Power Loader I took you to Recovery Girl. You should be thanking me; I covered both our asses for being late—”
Her mouth kept moving but Izuku’s brain, several steps behind, snagged hard on one word.
Gone.
That's impossible. He replayed it. I had to have stood there for at least thirty seconds before I even thought about moving. What does she mean I disappeared?
What do you mean I disappeared?” he said, cutting him off mid-sentence, sharp enough that Mei actually startled.
“Well.” She recovered fast, tilting her head like she was replaying footage in her own mind. “I think you bumped into some kid–Bakugo Katsuki, hero course. I made him a support item once, I think–and you two just kind of stared at each other for a second, and then you were gone. Like, actually gone, Midoriya, not ‘ran around the corner’ gone. One second there, next second not.” She snapped her fingers to make a point. “Then me and the Bakugo kid just kind of stood there staring at each other for what felt like a minute. It was so awkward. Never make me do that again.”
Izuku’s stomach dropped.
Gone. Not walked fast, just gone. She could've been exaggerating but–
He thought about the hallway. The exact second his shoulder had hit Bakugo’s, the world narrowing down to a single point of panic so total it had swallowed everything else, and then this stairwell, and no memory at all of the steps in between. Not blacking out, but more like some other part of him had taken the wheel, kind of like the way his hands had acted faster than his brain during the mugging.
What did I just–
He didn't finish the thought.
“I have to go,” he said, already on his feet.
“What? You can’t just leave!” Mei planted herself in front of the stairwell exit, hands on her hips. “I told Power Loader I’d bring you back! I’ve been gone fifteen minutes. I didn't even know this stairwell existed until today–”
She didn't get to finish. Izuku was already moving past her, out through the exit doors, backpack still slung half off one shoulder, Mei’s voice chasing him down the hall behind him.
“Midoriya, get back here!”
By the time she reached the door herself, he was already two streets away, his clothes half stuffed into his bag, green hoodie on, swinging toward the skyline with a question in his brain that he just had to test out.
This time, he decided, he wanted to be out in the open.
He took out his phone, pressed record, and webbed it to the nearest lamppost at an angle that would catch the whole sidewalk. If he was attempting this, he was going to get it on camera; data was data, whether he liked how ridiculous he looked collecting it or not.
People flooded the street around him; it was a direct contrast to the empty rooftop. It wasn't ideal, but it would have to do at this time of day, and he figured if the power was ever going to be useful for anything real, it needed to work with witnesses around, not just places conveniently empty of them.
“Okay,” he said out loud, to everyone and no one. Not a single person on the sidewalk so much as glanced his way. “Okay. Let’s just-- let’s just try it.”
He didn’t exactly have a method. That was a problem– With the webs and strength there had at least been something to push against like a muscle or trigger. This felt different. So he thought about the hallway instead. The specific, drowning panic of it. The desperate animal instinct to flee that had somehow gotten him halfway across the building without his permission.
He closed his eyes and chased the feeling down on purpose this time.
I need to not be seen.
What happened next was an eclectic feeling and then–
Crickets.
Well - not literally, because this was a city block at rush hour, so what he actually got was a stranger's elbow in his shoulder and a flat, “Hey, kid, can you move?”
He tried again. Closed his eyes and strained every muscle in his body.
Nothing.
Defeat, complete and thoroughly public. He sat down against the nearest shop wall, pulled a crumpled notebook page from his hoodie pocket, and wrote, a little more deflated than the entry deserved: Entry 19. Possible invisibility: Need to test more.
He sighed, folded the page back up, and stood up, walking over to retrieve his phone from the lamppost. Just then, so suddenly, a voice screamed directly into his right ear.
“BOO, BITCH!”
POP!
Izuku vanished so completely and instantaneously that the woman walking past him actually stopped mid-stride to stare at the empty patch of sidewalk where a Spiderman had once been standing a second earlier, mouthed something to herself that was probably Did I just imagine that, and kept walking, faster than before.
There was a long beat of silence from whoever had screamed.
“...Okay, hold on.” The voice was slower, genuinely thrown, none of the confidence left in it from a second ago. “Where’d you go? I just wanted to see if you’d jump–”
Izuku’s heart was still hammering, half from the scream and half from the fact that he could not, currently, see his own hands. He turned slowly toward the voice, and found himself face-to-face with someone he had never seen before in his life.
The suit ran close enough to a familiar shape that his brain reached automatically for comparison and came up short: form-fitting, stitched paneling, a sword hilt visible over one shoulder, the whole thing black with deep, aggressive orange running through the middle, bright enough to be visible blocks away even in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. The mask tilted, taking in the empty space where Izuku obviously still was and obviously wasn't there
A gloved hand waved experimentally through the air, missing him by a solid foot. “Spiderman? You still– are you still with us? Because this is either the coolest thing I've ever witnessed, or I finally lost it for real.”
Izuku, still invisible, said nothing, mostly because a stranger had just screamed directly into his ear on a public street and apparently hadn't decided on what came after that.
“Oh my god, you’re still here!” Whatever had been confusion morphed into delight, loud enough that a couple of pedestrians glanced over before deciding, wisely, to keep walking. “That's insane, actually insane. I've heard about you– swinging spider guy- but nobody said anything about this. You just went ghost in broad daylight.”
He’s heard about me. Izuku flickered back into visibility all at once, the effort of holding it clearly having run its course, causing him to stumble slightly. The masked stranger caught his arm to steady him, staring down with a sharp interest that felt a little too focused to just be casual.
“You… how do you even know about me?”
“You literally have a hashtag.” He said it like it should have been obvious, hands dropping to his hips, head cocked at an angle that made the eye-shapes stitched into his mask look almost soft. “I don’t usually go outta my way for internet stuff, but a quirkless-looking teenager swinging around on homemade webs catching bike thieves? That's got my attention. Sue me.”
“You’ve been looking for me?” That's not creepy at all.
“Nuh-uh-uh,” He wagged his finger, then, catching himself, paused and tried again in a slightly more measured tone. “... I've been following the story. Professionally. I do vigilante stuff. Sometimes for money. Sometimes ‘cause I’m bored. Mostly the second one, if we’re being honest, and don’t repeat that to anyone; it's bad for my brand.” One gloved hand came up to rub the back of his neck, a small, oddly self-conscious gesture that didn’t match the rest of his loud energy. “Anyway, was that invisible thing new? I haven't seen it on the hashtag yet.”
Izuku, still catching his breath and also still unsure whether he was in danger or just extremely confused, opted for the most honest answer available.
“It’s brand new. Like today-new, first time it actually worked.”
“Today?” The stranger’s whole frame lit up. “You’re telling me I just personally witnessed the debut. Live. That's… okay, that's kind of an honor; nobody's ever thanked me for existing before, and I'm choosing to interpret this as that.”
“I never thanked you, you literally screamed in my ear–”
“And it worked, didn't it? You’re welcome!” He dropped down to sit on the curb without further explanation, glancing up as though motioning for Izuku to join him. Izuku did not take the hint, so the stranger tried a different approach instead, drumming his fingers against his knee. “So– uh… how’s your day going?”
It was a dreadful attempt to make small talk.
“I was scared,” Izuku admitted slowly, sitting down a careful few feet away anyway, notebook already halfway out of his pocket. Old habit.
“Okay, wow, I did not expect that.” The masked individual held up both hands. “Look, I don’t have the bandwidth for a full therapy session today; I’ve got plenty of my own shit to unpack–”
“Fear response,” Izuku said, already writing, snapping his fingers at the same moment the thought clicked into place. “That’s actually a really solid theory.”
“Am I even here right now? Helloo…?” he waved both hands directly above Izuku’s bent head, entirely ignored. “You see this too, right? Well obviously you’re not seeing it unless you’re good at visualizing–”
“Sorry– I think it’s just, when I get scared enough, I disappear. It happened once before…” He shuddered slightly at the memory, then kept writing before it could fully surface. “It’s like a flinch, and then – poof.”
“You like to talk a lot, Spiderman.” The stranger propped his chin in one hand, watching him with a soft gaze; it would have been easy to miss if Izuku had been paying attention to anything other than his own notebook.
He wasn’t. Which meant he almost missed the other thing too– for half a second, the cuff of one glove rode up as the stranger shifted his weight, just enough to show a thin line of skin along the wrist that didn’t look quite right. Raised. Faintly pink at the edges, like a scar not fully formed. It vanished again before Izuku could be sure he’d actually seen it, tugged under fabric fast enough that he almost convinced himself he’d imagined the whole thing.
“So,” the stranger began, either oblivious or pretending not to notice, “webs, probably super strength, and now a vanishing act. That’s one hell of a starter pack for someone still trying things out on a public sidewalk.”
Izuku wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but one question kept nagging at him. “Do you really recognize me? From the videos?”
“Hard not to. You’re kind of impossible to look away from, damn nerd.” What. Something so familiar yet so far back into Izuku's mind. The stranger must have realized it too, as something shifted underneath his voice on those last words. It was almost gentle, maybe playful in a way. He looked away and cleared his throat again, louder, like volume alone might cover the gap. “Figured I’d check up on you. Purely professional reasons. Obviously.”
“...Obviously,” Izuku repeated, unconvinced, though he wasn't entirely sure what he wasn't convinced of.
“Anyway.” The stranger climbed back to his feet, brushing off his suit that had nothing on it to brush off, stretching until something popped audibly along his spine. “Consider this a professional courtesy visit. You should probably stop field testing brand-new superpowers on a public sidewalk before somebody puts you on the news, but hey– not my funeral if you do.”
“Wait, who even are you–”
“Deadpool.” He said over his shoulder, already walking backward down the sidewalk with an easy, loose-limbed swagger that didn't fully match the stillness Izuku swore he’d seen underneath it thirty seconds earlier. “You’ll hear the name around. Pretty popular with the UA staff, if I do say so myself.”
He was gone around the corner before Izuku could ask what that was supposed to mean– into an alley, somewhere Izuku’s senses failed to track him, leaving nothing behind but a faint ringing in his ear and the ghost of an orange blur at the edge of his vision.
Izuku got up off the curb and stared after the empty street for a long moment.
Weird guy, he thought, finally reaching up to unstick his phone from the lamp post, and pulled up a new text to Mei on his way back to UA.
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By the time he made it back to the support wing, all the students had cleared out and probably gone home. Mei was exactly where he expected her to be, hunched over her bench, goggles pushed up into her hair, a scrap of something thin and iridescent pinched between two pairs of tweezers.
“Finally.” She didn't look up. “Where were you? You smell like outside.”
“Long story.” He dropped his bag by the door and crossed to her bench, curiosity already winning out over exhaustion. “Show me.”
She held up the fiber to the light; it glowed strangely, not fabric nor metallic. “This is a single strand. One. It’ll take a bit to weave enough of it into something wearable, and don’t get me started on power delivery; we still haven't solved that part, but–” she set it down with a glint in her eyes, “-this is the part that was supposed to be impossible. We cracked the part that was supposed to be impossible, Izuku.”
He picked it up carefully, turning it between his fingers. It didn't look like much, and it felt like nothing at all.
“This could actually work,” he said, quiet, almost afraid saying it out loud might undo it.
“Obviously it could actually work; I made it.” Mei was already pulling a fresh page toward her, scribbling measurements. “Give me a month. Maybe less if you stop disappearing on me in the middle of school days.”
He winced. “About that–”
“Nope. Not tonight. I want one good night just to be excited about science.” She pointed the tweezers at him. “Tomorrow, I want a full debrief.”
He laughed, the first real one all day that didn't feel like it cost him anything to produce and let her drag him into hours of increasingly technical rambling about fiber tensile ratios that he understood maybe sixty percent of and enjoyed completely regardless.
The sun was turning orange by the time he left the workshop, backpack heavier with a spare notebook Mei had insisted he take, mind still tangled up in graphene lattices instead of anywhere it probably should have been.
Which was maybe why he didn’t notice Bakugo until he was already three steps past the front gate, and Bakugo was leaning against it like he’d been waiting there for a reason he hadn't decided how to explain yet.
Izuku froze.
The old familiar instinct rose up in him again. But this time it didn't fully take over. Some part of him wanted to hear what he had to say. So he kept his feet where they were instead of letting them carry him in a direction his brain hadn't chosen.
Bakugo wasn't looking at him the way he used to. There was no sneer waiting. No opening line already loaded. He just stood there, arms crossed, jaw working like he was chewing on something he didn't want to say out loud.
He looked different too, Izuku noticed, finally getting a real look at him for the first time all day, for the first time, really, in a few years. His once long, spiky hair had been buzzed down short. The old scar that used to cut across his eye had faded, dimmer than Izuku remembered it. He wore a long-sleeved shirt despite the warm evening, and a pair of gloves that looked a little odd–
“You ran off,” Bakugo said finally.
“...Yeah.” Izuku’s voice came out smaller than he wanted it to, but it still came out. That felt like something. “Sorry. I didn't feel great.”
“You had a panic attack, Deku.” He hadn't said it like an accusation. If anything, it sounded almost careful, like he’d chosen the words in advance and was still testing how they landed out loud. “Mei said you were fine. You weren't fine.”
Izuku didn't have an answer for that one that wouldn't require explaining several years he had no intention of explaining tonight, so he settled for the half-truth instead.
“No. I wasn’t fine.”
Something crossed Bakugo’s face, quick and then gone before Izuku could name it, not unlike a certain masked individual's voice cracking, hours earlier, over a sidewalk of full strangers. For a second, it looked like he was going to say something else. His jaw tightened instead, and whatever it was stayed unsaid.
“...Whatever,” Bakugo muttered, finally, pushing off the gate and shouldering past him toward the street. He was so close that Izuku caught the faint, chemical smell of something like sweat and ash that always seemed to cling to him after training. “Don’t run into me again.”
Izuku watched him go, the same way he had all those years ago.
This time, though, he didn’t expect him to come back