Chapter Text
People are not born equal.
That’s the hard truth I learned at age four.
My one mistake?
Letting myself forget.
There’s pros and cons to having a routine.
Con: you have to actually stick to it. Unfair, yes, the very definition of torture. Then again, if you’re going to wait for life to be fair, you might as well make yourself comfortable in a coffin.
Pro: it forces you to follow the tracks. Like a train, and we all know what happens to trains that end up derailed. Most of the time, they turn into crunched-up hearses. Like soda cans, but harder to recycle.
Which tracks? Theoretically, you decide. Less theoretically, whatever doesn’t make you want to kill yourself in the morning. Narrows it down, yes?
No?
Oh, well. You’ll get there eventually. Everybody does.
I thought I did, too.
Of course, that was before I met the body.
***
48 HOURS BEFORE THE BODY
“Aaand that’s it! Make sure you review and bring your homework. Next time, we’ll have a mock-test to check on your progress.”
The class of five disperses. Not an easy feat to achieve in a twelve-tatami apartment, but Izuku isn’t surprised anymore. He knows how quickly groups of students can break up the second there isn’t a bell to keep them together.
Alas, he does not keep a bell in the apartment. He thought about it: a cowbell, perhaps, or a fancy one like receptionists have. But in the end, he doesn’t have any cows, and the only receptionist he knows hasn’t talked to him in four years, so no-bell it is.
Maybe one day he’ll get a student with a bell quirk. That’d be nice.
The second his apartment empties—and again, it really doesn’t take that long—he slumps into his chair. Saturdays, man. Twelve hours of self-inflicted torture. He has no one to blame but himself: he’s the one who set it up as the day of back-to-back private lessons, from morning to evening, with a ten minute lunch break if he’s lucky.
Saturdays. They empty him out like nothing else.
Isn’t that the point?
He shakes his head and downs a glass of cool water. The August heat is always a force to be reckoned with, but this year, it’s merciless. Like the sun has decided to burn them all to ashes.
Izuku hopes it holds off until he gets his teaching degree. At least he’ll die an educated man. “Shower, shower,” he mutters to himself. He finds it helps, narrating. He doesn’t get lost in his head as much.
He peels off his clothes and steps under the spray. Cold as can be, cold like the gates of hell. Like that one time Kaminari talked Todoroki into pranking Kacchan, but they didn’t time it right and caught Izuku’s shower time instead. It seems to be a trend of his, doesn’t it? Wrong place, wrong time.
Wrong time, wrong person.
He kills the spray and dries himself off.
By the time he’s dressed again, it’s almost sundown. He’s got time for a quick run, he reckons. His homework’s all done, his students’ homework is no longer his business, and his weekend has finally begun. Come Monday, he’ll be back in the classroom, this time on the crowded side of the room. But until then…
“Konbini,” he murmurs as he slips on his running shoes. “Gotta stop by the konbini.”
Maybe they’ll have katsudon on sale.
He starts off with a light jog, taking in the city at twilight. There aren’t as many ruins nowadays—Uraraka’s work, no doubt—but he can still spot the cracks, sometimes, in the alleyways and abandoned construction sites. It’s where he prefers to jog. If he’s lucky, he gets to pet the alley cats. If he’s unlucky…
Well, you should see the other guy.
“Oh, Izuku-kun! I was starting to worry you wouldn’t let me feed you tonight.”
“And miss the best dinner in town?” Izuku flashes a grin. “Never, Murata-san.”
The old lady waves him off. “You flatterer, you. C’mere, I saved you some of your favorites.”
He dips his head in the bag: three tuna mayo onigiri, a veggie curry, and one perfect katsudon. “Murata-san, I am deeply envious of your husband.”
“Don’t be. He’s eaten the same miso ramen at every meal for the past thirty years—the one from the stall down the street. If I try to make it, he says it’s not right.”
“I’ll gladly take it off his hands.”
A chuckle. “Besides, Katsura-kun has a new boy slinging broth. I give him one month before either my husband chases him out or he chases out my husband.”
“Are we rooting for your husband or the broth boy?”
“My dear! Do you even have to ask?”
They laugh as Izuku pays—too little, he complains, but Murata-san insists that it’s the end of the day and anything she hasn’t sold by now will not get sold in the next five minutes—and then it’s time to head off again, back to his jog, back to the twilight and the cracks.
***
On his route back home, he stops by the bookstore.
“Let’s see…” he mumbles between the shelves, running his hand along the spines. New books, fresh-off-the-press books; famous books, award-winners and best-sellers; less well-received titles from last year, and the year before that, and the year before that; old books, secondhand, classics. Lately, he’s been reading a lot more than he used to.
“What are we feeling like tonight?” he asks out loud, but still not loud enough to be overheard. Otherwise, people will think he’s crazy. Who talks to himself in a bookstore? If he isn’t careful, he might get reported. Citizen activism has been on the rise—crazies are usually the first to get on a good Samaritan’s radar. That’s how you know they’re a good Samaritan: they weed out the bad, the ugly, and the uncomfortable.
Izuku lowers his voice to a whisper and disappears between the shelves.
He ends up in the Pre-Quirk Era section. Looking at it, you’d say PQE people didn’t sort books into genres at all: everything is lumped together under the generic label of old and irrelevant, a quirky— ha-ha —pastime for the curious and the nostalgic. Izuku can’t say he’s a nostalgic, having never lived in that era himself, but curious he has always been. Enough to give the cat a run for the knife.
There’s something refreshing about reading stories filled with people like him.
Lately, he’s been sorting the books while the clerks aren’t looking. Romance, fantasy, mystery—whatever he can gleam from blurbs and covers. It isn’t public service: he just likes to be prepared. Maybe he won’t be feeling like ghosts today, but tomorrow? That’s anybody’s guess. This way, he knows where the ghosts will be.
It’s always better to know where the ghosts will be.
He gravitates towards the speculative fiction corner. He’s just finished a Chinese sci-fi trilogy about suns and bodies and the end of the universe that would haunt him for the rest of his life, had he not better things to be haunted by, and he’d like to see if there’s a book out there that’s up to the challenge. Probably not, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
“Did you see that book on the counter?”
“It’s crazy. Who in their right mind would even publish that?”
“It’s shit is what it is. But I bet it’s selling like hotcakes.”
“That must be why…”
Izuku lends an ear to the noise. He doesn’t turn, pretending not to exist—a habit he’s perfected over the years. If there was a gold medal for fading into the background, they’d forget to give it to him.
He did see the book the counter. It’s been there for a month, climbing steadily on every chart, always in the place of honor on every display. The window’s filled with hardcover copies. Every bookstore’s window this side of the Sea of Japan is filled with them. He doubts the rest is far behind. The U.S. might not care—they still think they’re the ones who won the war; they don’t need to know what the war was about —but China’s gonna eat it up. It is, after all, the birthplace of Quirks.
Unless Spinner’s quoting All for One about it, which is going to make a lot of folks very mad, very quickly. Whatever sells, Izuku supposes.
He walks back around the counter. Picks up the offending book, turns it in his fingers. He’s already looked through it once. Bought his own copy.
He shut it before the introduction was over and tossed it under the bed.
The Past Never Dies. He trails his fingers over the embossed characters of the title, mouthing the words to himself. Like saying them could make them true.
But the past does die. It dies horribly, graphically, without a fair trial. It dies without ever breaking the chains, without ever proving the jailer wrong, without ever wiping the smug smirk off his melted face, without ever getting to live. It dies screaming.
Ask him how he knows.
He puts the book down, walks back into the PQE section, and picks a title at random.
At the register, the cashier gives him a bashful smile. “More research?” Habata quips.
“Sort of.”
It’s a lie. After his third PQE book haul, Habata got curious. She asked if it was for some kind of dissertation project. Izuku didn’t want her to get curious, so he said yes. She probably wouldn’t have sent the police to his door, but it’s better not to risk it. The truth, he’s come to learn, is often not worth the hassle.
It’s why Spinner’s book is best employed holding up table legs. It isn’t Spinner’s fault—he did the best he could. Like any good writer, he wrote what he knew.
He just didn’t know a whole lot.
Habata ties up her hair with a pencil as she scans and bags the book. The air conditioning isn’t great, and summer nights aren’t any cooler than summer days. Sweat beads at the back of her neck, catching the light as it rolls into her uniform shirt.
Izuku guesses she could be considered pretty.
“‘Metamorphosis,’” she whistles. “That’s an old one.”
“Is it?” Izuku smiles politely. “I hadn’t noticed.”
Habata giggles. Like he just made a joke. “You’re funny.”
Izuku lets her. It wouldn’t be tactful to tell her he just said the first words that popped into his head. That he had no idea what to answer. That, sometimes, his brain gets so crowded it turns empty. “I’ve been told.”
That’s not a lie. His students think he’s hilarious.
“Are you…” Habata’s eyes flicker back and forth, unsure of where to land. “Are you free tomorrow? From… classes and stuff?”
Say yes. Say yes and get out of the house. Out of your own damn head.
Izuku does not say yes. Instead, he asks, “Why?”
“I mean—would you like to, maybe… get cake together?” She strings together the last three words so that they come out as one. Getcaketogether. Like it’s a whole new verb. “The café down the street is having a promotion, so I thought…”
Her cheeks flush. She is pretty, Izuku realizes. If Jirou were here, she’d be shouldering his clueless ass out of the way, letting Habata know that she was free, thank you very much. That she loved cake.
But Jirou isn’t here. Izuku hasn’t seen her since graduation. For all he knows, she might have a girlfriend. She might be married, divorced, or dead.
Izuku hopes that’s not the case. He hopes that part of his past sticks around a little longer. Even if it’s happening somewhere else. “Thanks,” he says, and he means it. “But I’m not free.”
“Oh.” Habata deflates visibly.
“Work,” Izuku adds. “I’ve got work.”
It’s not, technically, a lie. Izuku does have a pile of his students’ homework waiting for his red pen. Whether they’ll get done tomorrow, he doesn’t quite know yet, but it’s a possibility.
He also can’t tell her the full truth. That he hasn’t been free for years. That he doubts he’ll ever remember what it feels like.
Coward.
“Oh!” Habata’s face brightens again. She’s drawing her own conclusions: it’s not that Izuku doesn’t want to. It’s just that he really can’t. “I… I see.”
“Sorry,” Izuku winces.
“No need to apologize!” she smiles encouragingly. “Some other time.”
“Hm.”
The card reader pings. “Thanks for your purchase!” she beams, back to her cheerful self. “Have a wonderful evening!”
“Thanks. You too.”
Izuku heads back out. The twilight has turned bluer, deeper. Closer to night than day. The cracks welcome Izuku like an old friend, letting him go back home by walking from shadow to shadow, like a kid jumping on stepping stones in a creek. He did that once, didn’t he? A long time ago.
A long, long time ago.
By the time he makes it back home, he’s got food and something new to read. That’s a win in his book. Get it? Book?
No?
Fine. Tough crowd.
He gingerly places his pre-packaged katsudon in the microwave. As whirring fills the room, he goes to fill the bathtub. He’s got the whole night to himself (again), and he’s planning to make the best of it. Bento, bath, book. Maybe a beer if he’s feeling adventurous.
Gee. What a loser.
He flicks something off by his ear, like there’s a fly there. Like the buzzing is coming from somewhere other than the microwave, other than the faucet, other than the crinkling paper of the bookstore bag.
He decides he’ll grab that beer after all.
Izuku eats with his eyes glued to the pages. It helps—to have something else to focus on. Something other than the buzzing.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin…
Okay, maybe not the best dinner read, but still.
He chows down big bites of his katsudon. The book, albeit slightly disgusting in the context of mealtime, keeps his mind anchored through it all. Keeps it from wandering off where he’ll have a hard time snatching it back again. This katsudon, while delicious, is nothing like what his mom used to make, but he only catches himself thinking that once.
Last year, it was all the time.
You should go, says the voice in his head. To the States. Back to her. Back to your family.
Yeah. He could.
You know she only moved in with your dad so you’d follow. So you’d get a fresh start somewhere else, away from your fucking misery.
Yeah. He does.
Then go.
He doesn’t.
Leave. Say goodbye to that shitty school and all your shitty friends that haven’t had a second to spare for you since graduation. Say goodbye to Murata the katsudon lady and Habata the bookseller you won’t fuck. Leave it all behind.
He won’t.
Leave me behind.
He can’t.
When the water’s scalding enough, Izuku sinks into the bath. He’s dripping with icy droplets from the cold shower he always gives himself before this—claims it’s like sauna. Good for your bones. Good for your everything.
He doesn’t say he likes the way it hurts.
Oh lord, here comes Rihanna.
“Oh, for fuck’s—do you ever just shut up?”
No.
“Right. Forget I asked.”
On the other side of the bathtub, the steam takes form, shape. Izuku has read about this: mirages. Illusions born out of weather and water.
There’s no better place than water for ghosts to roam.
“You look like shit,” the ghost tells him.
“Thanks.”
“I mean it. When's the last time you slept through the night?”
Izuku laughs. It comes out hot, bitter, like a coffee downed too soon. You know when.
The ghost doesn't say anything to that.
Izuku sinks a little deeper into the water. His joints pop and crack, muscles finding the tiniest bit of relaxation in the warmth and the steam. The old fractures in his bones never fully stop hurting, but the water makes it better.
He wonders what would happen if he sank under the surface. If he sank, and sank, and never came back up.
He wonders if that would make it better, too.
“Christ.” The ghost stretches his legs, fitting in the gaps left by Izuku. “Of all the brains to get stuck in. You realize emos died out three centuries ago?”
“Lucky them.”
“Fuck's sake.” He huffs, rolls his blood-red eyes all the way to the ceiling. The steam curls around him. For a moment, it looks like the dust of a battlefield. “You have to get over it.”
“I am over it.”
“Lie to your pretty bookseller if you want.” His teeth slice down his downturned lips. “You can't lie to me.”
Yeah. I know.
But he can still try.
White hair flips as his ghost scowls, his grimace turning vicious. Izuku's eyes fix on the scar on his lip, a fang out of place. He used to wonder how it came to be, in the darkness of his room, the privacy of his mind. Back then, he thought it looked like a wolf's kiss.
He had no idea how close to the truth that was.
“Midoriya.” His voice— his voice—cuts into Izuku's thoughts like a bloodied knife. God, what wouldn't he give to hear it again. To hear it for real. “You need to stop.”
“Bold words from the ghost haunting my mind.”
“Yeah, because you won't fucking let me go.” A scarred hand slaps the water, but no droplets spray him. “I mean it. You can't go on like this.”
“Watch me.”
“ Izuku. ”
He barks out a laugh that chills the water. It's almost adorable, really—the way his ghost thinks he's real. That he's an actual specter lingering on Earth, held back by some invisible thread tying Izuku to him. Romantic, almost. “You're not here.”
“Am, too.”
“You're a figment of my mind. A hallucination.”
“You've seen a guy with a sprayer for a head. You're really going to draw the line at ghosts?”
“You're not,” Izuku hisses through his teeth, clenched hard enough to hurt. “You can't be.”
“Why?”
Because I don't deserve it.
Izuku gets out of the water. He drips on the cold tiled floor, like a ghost of the drowned. But there are no ghosts here—not really.
All his ghosts are inside.
He dries off quickly, ignoring the other voice in his head until it fades. He busies himself with the motions: cleaning up, roaming the apartment, setting down to read.
He doesn’t make it past paragraph one.
“Alright,” he says, a bit too loudly to be talking to himself. “Time for bed.”
He sets the book aside. There will be time to read about Gregor Samsa and the worst morning of his life.
He walks into the kitchen for a glass of water and a vague remembrance. “Trash, trash,” he hums under his breath to nail the thought to his frontal lobe. “Gotta take out the trash.”
As he steps outside, the night feels crips, full of promise. Stars sprinkle the sky, brighter here, at the outskirts of Musutafu.
He sees no capes rippling with the breeze. No heroes.
Izuku dumps the bag in the communal can. Overnight, a truck will come to collect it. He’ll hear it zoom by at four in the morning, unable to sleep, eyes fixed on the ceiling and on the words of ghosts.
Or so he thinks.
“ De… ku… ”
Izuku’s head snaps to the side. He hasn’t been called that name in years. Hasn’t wanted to.
Slowly, he turns fully towards the sound, eyes narrowed and knuckles popping even though no sparks will come to light up his arms. Some habits, he’s found, are harder to break than others.
He immediately notices three things.
Three —the empty road coasting the residential area isn’t empty anymore. At the center of it is a man, wrapped in a battered cognac coat and loose-fitting black clothes. His face is covered by a half-torn balaclava mask, one that pulls at Izuku’s memory in agonizing tugs.
Two— he’s not walking. He’s dragging himself on the floor, one leg conspicuously absent, one arm cut off at the wrist. No, elbow. No—
One— he is disintegrating.
“You have to… help…”
Izuku forgets he’s no longer a hero. He forgets the school he nearly dropped out of, the suit he burned, the dreams he left behind in shards. He forgets all of it.
His feet move on their own.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” he tells the man as he kneels on the ground next to him. “Hold on, okay? They’ll be here—”
“No.”
The man grabs his phone and pushes it to the ground. It doesn’t break—just bounces off the asphalt unscathed with a half-dialed emergency number blinking on the screen—but something else does.
The man’s hand.
His fingertips go first. One knuckle, then two. Before Izuku’s eyes, the man’s remaining arm begins to crumble into ash, cold and gray and lifeless.
His heart starts racing.
He remembers the color of those ashes. The smell, the taste. Like it was yesterday and not four years of misery ago.
Then he remembers the man’s name. “Sako-san?”
The man stares at him for a second, then bursts into laughter. He probably wasn’t expecting Izuku to address him by a name he didn’t choose for himself. “You’re just… like he said.”
Izuku doesn’t get to ask who he is. Deep down, he knows the tense is wrong, just like he knows the answer.
Sako’s face starts to decay. Izuku feels it in his bones—the burning urge to do something. To help, even if he has no idea how.
But Sako does. “Help him,” he croaks around a crumbling throat. “Save… him…”
A marble rolls on the ground. Blue, pristine, shining like a jewel.
And then Sako Atsuhiro, formerly known as Mr. Compress of the League of Villains, turns to dust at Izuku’s feet.