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Toshinori is in his mid-thirties the first time he feels pain that does not belong to him. During one of his rare off-duty moments, when he’s reading a book to relax after a particularly stressful raid, pain shoots up his arms and blossoms across his knees, like he’s just tripped and fallen on hard concrete.
There will be no mark of it, but he looks anyways, checking the palms of his hands for scuff marks.
He’s greeted by only his own callouses, one wrist braced from tanking a particularly strong blow the day before. The sight of the brace and the memory of the injury sends guilt lancing through him—his soulmate must be young, if he’s just now feeling their pain. And yesterday, this child must have experienced the pain of his own injuries.
How terrible a gift, to be given a pro hero for a soulmate when one’s so young. If his guesses are right, then his soulmate is probably just learning to walk, and yet, they’ve already experienced the pain of breaking an arm.
…He’ll just have to be more careful, from now on. Something warm and fragile curls around his heart as he thinks of his young soulmate, so new to the world. He’s never met them, and yet… already he feels his own protective instinct rearing up. Inadvertently hurting them through his own injury…
He must be better.
He does better, for a while. A year and a half pass before his next major injury. In the in-between, he only sends the pains of minor sprains and strains and scuffs along the bond, and in return, he only receives the bumps and bruises of childhood. His soulmate is an active child, as evidenced by the collection of minor aches he collects on his elbows and knees and, occasionally, his chin.
Then the night comes when a fight goes wrong, and something sharp and shining pierces his side. He grunts in pain as it slides through, in through his back and poking out his front. Somewhere in the world, some child must have collapsed with unsourced pain, perhaps screaming and crying, or perhaps it was so strong they passed out.
As he’s in the hospital recovering, he hopes his soulmate has understanding parents. None of the minor pains he receives from them seem to indicate abuse, but the worry settles in at the back of his mind… what if he inadvertently harms his soulmate in other ways? What if their parents tire of the constant unexplained hurts, the pain of a highly active hero, the same way Toshinori’s own parents had?
It had taken Nana fourteen long, lonely years to meet him. Fear burns cold in his gut as he considers the possibility that his own soulmate might be subjected to that, too.
His fortieth birthday has just come and gone when he realizes the bumps and bruises of childhood have morphed into burns and abrasions. They come consistently, but not overly often… Sometimes, a week or two will pass between noticeable occurrences, and sometimes, they will happen twice in the same week.
Well, okay, maybe that’s not all that consistent, but it’s more consistent than it should be, considering his own estimations have his soulmate being around five to seven years of age. A heavy stone sits deep in his gut as the facts come together in his mind. Their bond is what people call high-maintenance, the kind of bond where one (or both) soulmates commonly experience high amounts of pain. He knows from experience how one’s parents can grow tired of how needy kids with high-maintenance bonds are. Often in pain, freaked out because they’re young and don’t know what’s going on…
Needless to say, he’s concerned.
Unfortunately, there’s not much he can do with so little information. People will talk of soulmate pulls, which Toshinori has experienced and does believe in, thank you very much, but they’re not very useful for figuring out who your soulmate is if they live in, say, another city or prefecture or even country away from you (there’s nothing saying his soulmate is Japanese, after all). All he knows is their approximate age and the fact they’re around someone who often uses heat as a weapon against them.
(The heat doesn’t even need to be a quirk. Cigarettes, irons, improvised brands… His soulmate could be getting hurt in so many ways, and there’s nothing Toshinori can do about it.)
This isn’t even taking into account the fact that the skinned knees and bruised elbows are still happening far, far too often for a child his soulmate’s age.
Time passes, and the burns fade away. The bruises remain, but at least no one is burning his soulmate anymore. Whether their abuser has left or just changed tactics is a question unanswered, but he’ll take what little comfort he can get.
Still, on occasion, Toshinori will feel the unmistakable ghost of fists against his skin, blossoming bruises unseeable. It comes mostly during the day, at least while he’s at home, in Japan, and he wonders… what sort of life does his soulmate live?
What sort of successor will he be finding?
(Because make no mistake: One For All has been passed from soulmate to soulmate since its conception. Toshinori’s time is running out, not that he knows exactly how long he has left. Years, at least, but how many?)
(Only time will tell.)
He is forty-three when his life changes, utterly and irreversibly. He fights All For One, kills him, and loses his stomach and lung as payment.
Midoriya Izuku is nine when he collapses in his room, a pain in his side so intense that he cannot breathe.
Toshinori is in and out of the hospital for weeks, months, doctors with healing quirks working as hard as they can to get him back in the field. He’s Japan’s Number One, their Symbol Of Peace—he can’t waver, or the villains win. He thinks of his soulmate, sometimes, as he stretches wrong and tweaks his side for the fifteenth time that day.
When he meets them, he will apologize for doing this to them, for subjecting them to this ever-present pain. It will last until the day he dies, and they will be free of the physical pain just to be granted the pain of loss in its place.
What a sorry soulmate he is, putting them through this, but he won’t—can’t—regret removing that evil from this world. They may share his pain for the rest of his life, but at least they’re safe from All For One.
He does look, once he has a moment to himself, for his soulmate. Surely with the severity of his injuries, something noteworthy happened with them… and then he thinks it through. The fight was at night. If they live in Japan, they were probably at home. And if they don’t live in Japan… he’s probably not finding them this way. There’s no point asking favors to find them, too, considering the dearth of information he’s working with, not to mention the innate danger of being All Might’s soulmate.
Although… they already have a high-maintenance bond. What if this is the thing that pushes their parents’ patience over the edge?
He almost puts more thought, more effort into the search.
Then Nighteye leaves.
Soul pain has no physical ill effects, other than the obvious experience of pain. The caveat is that no studies have been done on the long-term effect of chronic pain shared between soulmates.
Toshinori has scoured every single web archive he can find for that information, that data, and all he can find is the anecdotal evidence of soulmates sharing long-term chronic pain. Some case studies suggest that long-term soul pain can cause adverse physical effects in the partner receiving the pain, but nothing conclusive and nothing to the sheer extent of information Toshinori is looking for.
His soulmate is probably a middle schooler by now, and three years ago, he drastically changed their life. How does the pain across the bond affect them? To what extent can they feel it? To what extent does it impact their life? Can they still be a kid, do kid things like run and play and get into trouble?
Every time he begins to overextend himself, he thinks of them. Can he handle pushing himself?
Yes.
Can his soulmate?
He can’t answer that, but he finds himself lightening his load anyways, strains himself less. As a side effect, he does find himself coughing up blood less often, and hopefully sending less pain to his soulmate.
It has enough of an effect on his general, overall state-of-being that Naomasa and Recovery Girl both notice.
“I don’t want to hurt my soulmate more,” he tells Recovery Girl when she remarks on it, and she raises an eyebrow at him, prompting him to explain, “I’m pretty sure they’re going to be my successor… they’re pretty young, still. Middle school, I think.”
Recovery Girl raises both eyebrows this time. “Poor kid,” she says, and that’s all she needs to say.
Over the course of a week, eight thin, straight lines sting Toshinori’s upper thigh. His soulmate is… thirteen or fourteen, he guesses, a middle schooler with a high-maintenance soul bond and chronic pain that’s not their fault. He can empathize with what they must be feeling, and going through, to do something so…
To hurt both themself and their soulmate.
Something taboo.
Self-harm is whispered about when you think no one is listening, especially when the person doing it has a soulmate and an active soul bond. To deliberately cause harm to the person you are tied to is… taboo. Sacrilegious, in a way. Heretical.
All the stories that dare to touch on such a subject always write the receiver of the pain as… angry. Upset that their soulmate would dare hurt them in such a way. They’re enraged and screaming and yelling, completely hysterical, as they lash back against their soulmate for all the pain they were made to feel.
Toshinori does not feel rage when he thinks of those eight straight lines.
He just feels sad.
A year or so later, Toshinori chases a villain. Green and formed of noxious sludge, he’s fast, faster almost than Toshinori. It’s clear that he knows the city, too, in a way Toshinori does not. He dips and dives and ducks around corners like he’s been running here his whole life, and who knows, maybe he has?
In the depths of the sewers, underneath Musutafu, Toshinori’s chest begins to burn. He loses his grip on his muscle form, staggering to the wall to hold himself up as he coughs and hacks and tries to suck in air. He’s still breathing, obviously, he still is, but a rubber band is wrapped around his chest and he can’t breathe in.
No way can he count the seconds as he chokes, but it’s probably less than a minute before he can breathe again. An ache settles into his lung, a throbbing behind his eyes, and he takes deep breaths as he recenters himself.
What had just happened to his soulmate?
The aches don’t leave, just compound on top of his own ever-present pain. Fleetingly, he considers going to Naomasa to hunt down his soulmate right this second—
But he was chasing a villain.
He has an immediate duty, one he cannot let lapse.
His soulmate will just have to wait as he powers back up and returns to the pursuit.
He doesn’t catch the villain, who gained a significant lead on him while he was… briefly incapacitated because of his soulmate, and then vanished before Toshinori could catch up. The ache in his lungs, behind his eyes, it stays, settling into him like it’s always been there. It spreads, turning his limbs to lead and dragging him down alongside the weight of guilt.
A villain escaped because of his failure. Admittedly, the villain was a petty thief, but still.
Toshinori really is slipping. If he doesn’t find his soulmate soon…
Maybe one of the students Nedzu recommended will be his soulmate? He might get lucky.
Wait. No. Since when has he ever been that lucky? He blew all his good luck in one go when he met Nana.
“Chin up, Toshinori,” Naomasa says. They’re sequestered away in Toshinori’s apartment, doing paperwork together the day after the absolute waste of his limited time in muscle form. “Someone that prone to big actions is bound to show back up at some point.”
“That’s part of what I’m worried about,” Toshinori grumbles, shifting his weight. Not only does he have his own issues right now, but he has his soulmate’s pain, too, which makes it just a little hard to get comfortable. He can’t tell whether the pounding behind his eyes belongs to him or his soulmate.
“…What else are you worried about?”
Toshinori sighs. “My soulmate. Something happened to them while I was chasing that villain… It’s part of why I lost him.”
“I know we have limited information, but are you sure you don’t want me to—”
Pain sears through Toshinori’s head. His brain is being yanked out through his sinuses, something is pulling apart his skin and peeling out of his lung. In his forehead is an epicenter of pain, something cracking, breaking.
The sudden absence of the pain is just as startling as its sudden presence. Toshinori comes back to himself kneeling on his carpet, hands grasping his head. Naomasa murmurs, a steady stream of quiet comforts and worried whispers, but the words are amorphous shapes Toshinori struggles to understand. The intense and overwhelming soul pain is gone, leaving something behind in its place.
Something raw pulses in his chest.
The fresh wound of a severed soul bond is something he remembers well from the early days following Nana’s death.
They’re dead.
His soulmate is dead.
Naomasa tells him that he should take grief leave, at least a few days to collect himself.
Toshinori does not take any time off work.
Instead, he throws himself into the case of a man they have creatively dubbed “the Sludge Villain”. There’s not much information available on him, just what’s publicly available in the databases, and so far, none of the interviews with his personal connections have turned up any additional useful information.
Naomasa, despite his insistences that Toshinori “take some time off, for the love of all things good”, helps as much as he can. He’s no Nighteye, able to analytically look at the possibilities like the real world is just a complex math equation and he can figure out the answer, but Naomasa has a level of emotional intelligence and finely-honed investigative instincts Nighteye would be hard-pressed to meet.
Even with him, Toshinori makes no headway.
Six months after his soulmate’s death, he meets with Nighteye.
“I’m… glad you’ve come around,” Nighteye says. “Mirio is a very promising young hero, and I’m sure you will agree with me when you meet him.”
Nighteye’s right in that, at least. Mirio is a very promising young hero, all big smiles and bright eyes. He’s the very best of Nighteye: a keen mind, tempered by compassion and friendliness in a way Nighteye never managed.
Even though it eats at him, Toshinori agrees to make Mirio his successor.
There’s no use in waiting to find a dead soulmate, after all.
A year after he let the Sludge Villain get away, the villain pops back up…
In the USJ.
Class 1-A is attacked in a place they should be safe, both teachers and several students left in critical condition. One student dead.
Sickeningly, Toshinori now knows how the Sludge Villain got away that day.
Alongside Naomasa, he watches the footage of that wretched man as he catches one of the students… and proceeds to force himself down their throat and up their nose. They watch, bewitched, as the villain vanishes fully inside the student, stealing their body and puppeting it around.
Toshinori wants to vomit.
Naomasa does.
Only three villains escaped the USJ that day, and the Sludge Villain was one of them, taking with him that student’s body.
Just a petty thief, his ass. He asks a favor of Naomasa, and within days, all the missing persons reports from Musutafu in the week following the Sludge Villain’s first attack are on his desk. With sharp eyes and guilt in his gut, he combs through the case files, reads the reports. Naomasa helps more than Toshinori would ever ask him to, by visiting evidence lockers and spending hours upon hours watching security footage.
Nothing stands out.
He’s hit another wall.
The Sports Festival comes and goes. The Hero Commission representative tries to rush the ceremony, hurry through it, tries to make the call to have an irate Bakugou chained to the podium and muzzled receive his medal.
Toshinori steps in.
On the edge of retirement he may be, but he is the Number One Hero and the Symbol of Peace.
The ceremony is delayed. Bakugou goes up fuming but unchained, and he takes the medal with a glower in Toshinori’s direction.
“I didn’t need your help,” he snaps.
“Even the greatest of heroes need help sometimes,” Toshinori replies, something twisting in his chest.
He is assigned to face Bakugou and Todoroki during the final exams. He wonders often about his late soulmate, and he does so again as he prepares to face his two students. They might be in this class if they had lived. Would he be facing them in this final exam? What would they be like as a student, as his student?
These questions, unanswered, live in his chest and dig themselves into his flesh. In his soulmate’s honor, he swears he will be as diligent taking care of these students as he would be were they his own soulmates.
Halfway through the summer, Toshinori receives a call that fills him with more terror than he’s felt since… well, since his students were harmed at the USJ.
This time, their supposedly secret training camp has been attacked.
Five of them have been taken, Bakugou among them.
Three restless days are spent planning, and Toshinori makes a personal visit to Yaoyorozu. It was her quick-thinking, her brilliance, that gave them even a chance at rescuing them. She’s going to make for a brilliant hero someday, and he makes sure to tell her this.
He doesn’t spend the whole three days locked up in meeting rooms and bolstering Yaoyorozu’s self-worth. He follows Eraserhead to the homes of the students who were taken, offers his sincerest apologies, promises to do everything he can to return them safely. He travels to Nighteye’s office, bickers with his ex-sidekick, and caves on the third day, letting Lemillion join them for the raid.
In hindsight, he thanks every god he doesn’t believe in that he let Nighteye win. Without Lemillion, they never could have gotten the students out of there alive. Lemillion had darted in and out of the fight, pulling the students away and shooing them off to safety, letting Toshinori and Torino focus on All For One.
It’s only now, a shade of what he once was, his archrival jailed, that he finally breathes deep and accepts.
Mirio is his successor.
It’s time that Toshinori act like it.
Even with his new vigor for taking care of his successor, he still has two almost-whole classes of first-years to take care of.
(Almost-whole, because Class 1-A now has two empty slots: one for the student killed by the Sludge Villain at the USJ, and one for one of the now-quirkless kidnappees.)
One of those classes includes both Bakugou, who has been eyeing Toshinori with an unsettling intensity, and the second of the now-quirkless students. This second student has dug his heels in and grit his teeth, hanging onto his dream of being a hero with everything he has.
Eraserhead has… surprised Toshinori, with how vehemently he has been advocating for this student. And… well, Toshinori can’t say that he hasn’t been doing some advocating himself. This student is determined, smart, and cunning. For as long as Toshinori has been teaching him, he’s been a stellar student, sitting at the top of the class alongside the likes of Bakugou and Yaoyorozu. His sights are set on the realm of the underground; he’s already eschewed the limelight and daylight worlds.
If anyone could make it as a quirkless hero, it will be this kid, and Toshinori looks forward to the day he receives his license.
Of course, the day the students receive their provisional licenses is a day for celebration on its own. Everyone had passed…
Except for Bakugou.
Toshinori is circling the grounds on one final night-time walk before bed. Quirkless he may be, but he still takes the safety of his students personally. If keeping an eye out for suspicious things is the only way he can proactively protect them…
Well, then he’ll go on as many night-time walks as he needs to.
He’s passing by Ground Beta when he hears the explosions. Panicked heart beating in his chest, he’s calling Eraserhead as he sprints towards the source of the noise.
“False alarm,” he says as he catches sight of Bakugou, who is taking his rage out on the buildings around him. “It’s just a student. I’ll see that he’s properly chastised and escorted back to the dorms.”
“It’s Bakugou, isn’t it.”
“It’s Bakugou.”
“Tell him he’s on house arrest for three days. That’s my punishment for him.”
“Sure thing,” Toshinori says, and hangs up.
It takes several tries, yelling his name, to get Bakugou’s attention, and then he has it. Teary-eyed and full of rage, Bakugou turns to him, skewering him with a bright red glare.
“What has you out here tearing apart the training ground after curfew?”
Bakugou’s response is a snarl and the clenching of fists. He breathes, hard and heavy, and Toshinori waits.
If there’s anything this class has taught him, it’s patience.
Time ticks onward, as it’s wont to do, and the years pass by. Toshinori watches Mirio graduate, and is there to congratulate him after his bombastic debut. His first years move on, grow up, learn from different teachers, but every time one catches him in the hallway, they wave, and Bakugou still makes time to talk to him, to learn as much as possible from a weary old man like Toshinori. Eventually, he, too, graduates, and Mirio makes the choice to let him in on the secret of One For All.
Toshinori can’t argue with that decision, given the strange bond he and the newly-crowned Ground Zero have forged over the years. Mirio’s partners are both amazing heroes, but there’s no one better than Bakugou to watch Mirio’s back for him.
The years have been humbling for Bakugou, turning him from a snot-nosed arrogant brat into a serious, thoughtful hero. Toshinori has watched him go from loner to, well, maybe not a social butterfly, but four of his friends agree to follow him into the field, agree to build themselves an agency from the ground up, which is something he never would have expected from a fifteen-year-old Bakugou.
Thoughts of his soulmate, these days, are saved for the loneliest, most melancholy of nights, when Naomasa is working late at the office and Toshinori is left on his own. A few years after Bakugou’s graduation is one such night, when he pulls the missing person cases out of their box and wishes he could drink alcohol again. There is still a first victim out there, unnamed and unknown, but no matter what developments came of these cases, no one fit the profile of the Sludge Villain’s murders, or they were found alive and returned to their homes and families.
Talk about a cold case.
He’s sitting on the couch, casefiles strewn across the coffee table, when the door opens. For a moment, he thinks Naomasa finished work early, until he hears the stomping.
Only one person stomps like they want to piss off his downstairs neighbors.
“The captain asked me to—what are you looking at?” Bakugou leans over the coffee table, brow furrowing as he reads the files. “Missing person reports?”
“The Sludge Villain,” Toshinori replies, sighing. “You… are familiar with them.”
“The fucker’s impossible to catch,” Bakugou snaps. “Of course I am.”
“I… was the responding hero, the first time he popped up. And… he got away. We didn’t know, until after the USJ, just… how he managed that.”
Bakugou’s eyes widen and he pales. “There’s a victim before.”
“Yes.” Toshinori nods. “And… we have no idea who they are. Every single missing person reported in the correct timeframe has been found. If dead, they don’t match the profile of his other kills. If alive, well.”
Bakugou hums as he leafs through the files and finds Toshinori’s handwritten list. Some of the writing is old, faded, and all of the names are crossed off…
…But still legible. Bakugou’s eyes narrow as he reads. “Musutafu, the eighth of April, 2236… Is this the list of all the missing persons cases you found?”
“Yes.”
“You’re missing one.” Bakugou slaps the piece of paper back down and takes a deep breath. “I’m… not surprised. I think they shunted it off, buried it as deep as they could, or just ruled it a suicide and moved on.”
Toshinori’s head snaps up, his heart flitting about his chest. Could they have really missed one? Did someone in the police department bury that case? On purpose? Corrupt cops are… common, sadly common, could they have been paid off to bury it?
“Who,” he breathes.
“A… A kid I knew.” Bakugou sits down with a huge sigh. “His name was… Midoriya Izuku. And… well, no one put much effort into looking for a quirkless kid.”
Toshinori’s breath catches in his throat, and he’s calling Naomasa before the thought can really process in his head.
“It’s ridiculous,” Naomasa snaps, pacing angrily back and forth. “If it hadn’t been years, I would be after the heads of every officer involved in that.”
Midoriya Izuku’s death and disappearance is a true miscarriage of justice, one the likes Toshinori has rarely seen. There’s footage of him, placing him in the correct area, at the correct time, to be the Sludge Villain’s first victim, not to mention the two-minute period of time between when he walked under a bridge and walked out that he wasn’t on video at all—and, according to Bakugou, that bridge had a manhole under it, a manhole leading down to the same sewers Toshinori had been chasing the goddamn Sludge Villain through.
And the officers in charge of his file had just… called it a suicide and slapped it closed, unconcerned with looking for a runaway quirkless boy.
It makes Toshinori’s blood boil.
Two months pass from the night Bakugou blew the case wide-open before the boy—young man, really—returns to visit. When he does, he’s dressed down, smudged eyeliner still on his face from a long day at work.
“There’s—there’s something I need to tell you,” he says, voice shaking like Toshinori hasn’t heard it since UA. “And, you might hate me afterwards, but it’s okay. It’s okay. You need to know.”
Naomasa is working late again, hunting for the heads of everyone involved in the Midoriya case, despite the long years that have passed. Bakugou must know that, must have chosen this night to catch Toshinori alone.
“I don’t think there’s anything you could say that would make me hate you,” he replies, stepping aside to let Bakugou in.
Bakugou shakes his head, exchanges his boots for guest slippers. “I dunno. This might fucking do it.”
“I suppose I’ll just have to decide for myself,” Toshinori says. “Tea?”
“Yes, please.”
A few minutes later sees them situated in the living room, each cradling a cup of tea.
“In 2231,” Bakugou begins, “when I was nine. That was when All For One injured you. Punched through your stomach and damaged your lung so badly it had to be removed.”
“…Yes,” Toshinori nods. “That’s correct.”
Bakugou takes a deep breath and lifts his head, meets Toshinori’s eyes. “You had a soulmate. Don’t lie to me. I know you did. I know who they were, too. See, it matches, down to the very day you were injured, because that’s when he started experiencing chronic sympathetic pain, in his side, right where you were injured.”
He.
If Bakugou is correct, then… Toshinori will soon know who his soulmate was.
“You probably remember him getting burned… a lot, when he was young… young-er,” Bakugou continues, taking Toshinori’s silence as a cue to keep telling his tale. He snorts and shakes his head, a rueful smile on his face. “I was a nasty little shit as a kid, you know this, and I was fucking terrible to him.”
All the breath in Toshinori’s lung rushes out. “I had thought they—he—were being abused by his parents.”
“Nope.” Bakugou shakes his head. “Not that getting bullied is any better.”
No, it’s not, Toshinori has to agree, but it’s still a relief to know his soulmate wasn’t being hurt at home.
“What… what was he like?” his voice is barely a whisper as he asks. “What was his family like?”
Bakugou bites his lip and frowns, looking up at the ceiling as he searches for an answer. “…Persistent. Stubborn. Smart. Oh, fuck, was he smart. He could break down a quirk’s strengths and weaknesses and have a way to counter it in thirty seconds flat. And… good.” Bakugou’s gaze drops from the ceiling to stare Toshinori down. “He was good. Better than I’ll ever be able to be. His mom—his mom’s amazing, too, she took all his… everything. She took that all in stride. There’s a lot of shit out there about high-maintenance soulbonds, and, fuck, was his ever, but she just… dealt with it all. You could… you could meet her, if you wanted.”
Toshinori slumps back in his chair, boneless, and now he’s the one staring at the ceiling.
“What… what was his name?”
Bakugou sighs.
“His name…” He clicks his tongue. “Well. You… already know it. His name was Midoriya Izuku.”
Toshinori blinks.
Midoriya Izuku.
His soulmate.
Midoriya Izuku.
The first victim.
Midoriya Izuku, who he failed to save, who he felt die.
He doesn’t notice the tears until they’re already falling.
Ultimately, he cannot hate Bakugou. Even though he kept this knowledge from Toshinori for months, if not years, he cannot bring himself to be mad at him for that. At least… at least he knows.
There’s closure, now, even though his failure burns like it never has before.
He knows who his soulmate was.
He knows how they died.
Sometimes, he’ll pull out one of the pictures of Midoriya that Bakugou has given him, and he’ll look at those wide eyes and think, this could have been his successor.
He should have been his successor. If he hadn’t been too slow, then…
Then they would have met that day.
He doesn’t, cannot, regret having Mirio for a successor. He’s been brilliant, the Second Symbol, holding the League of Villains at bay alongside his partners and with the steady presence of Ground Zero watching his back. But the bitter sting of regret still plagues Toshinori, because… How brilliant would Midoriya, have been?
There’s no way for them to ever know.
Years pass. Bakugou remains a steady part of Toshinori’s life, dropping by and making sure he and Naomasa are taking care of themselves and being taken care of in turn.
It’s fitting, in many ways, that he’s there when Toshinori first feels it again.
The sting of pain, not his own, the smarting of an elbow whacked against a hard surface.
He hisses, cradles the joint, and… It dawns on him, what just happened.
“Soul pain,” he whispers. “That’s soul pain.”
“Huh.” Bakugou snorts. “Fated grandkid, or something?”
“Or something,” Toshinori whispers. Without One For All… What is this soulmate supposed to mean to him?
Six months later, he gets the first dream.
He’s small, and the world around him is bright, and he’s following someone with a head of spiky blond hair—Bakugou.
He follows a tiny Bakugou, all wide red eyes and clumsy feet. Toshinori is—he catches a glimpse of his hands, and they’re small and dark and freckled, and he’s too busy chasing butterflies with Bakugou to notice much else.
When he wakes, his heart thunders in his chest and he looks up reincarnate soulmates for the first time.
Sometimes, people who die… come back. Not as ghosts, but reborn into a new body, a new life. There’s not very many of them, and they prefer to stay… private, unknown, so no one knows how many there really are. Only a handful have come forward, publicly declaring themselves, and they get proven by a method Toshinori… is not quite sure the details of, but it involves contacting people they knew in their past life.
There’s no information out there about the possibility of one half of a soulbond reincarnating, and the soulbond remaining intact, but then… how else would Toshinori have dreamt such a clear memory?
Unless it was just that: a dream. Wishful thinking, on the part of an old man who bitterly regrets his life failings.
So he doesn’t mention it to anyone else. Even when he keeps dreaming, summer-bright childhood scenes filling his sleep, he doesn’t tell anyone.
The years pass, the wheel of time turning on, and Toshinori…
He gets hurt, far worse and far more often than he should be.
Well, it’s not him getting hurt, it’s his soulmate, which is worse, because his soulmate is tiny right about now, a very young child, and yet bruises and hits and kicks echo across the bond. Not many, but more than a very small child should have. It should still be all skinned knees and bumps from learning how to run, not…
Not whatever this is.
His dreams change, as well, shifting from saccharine-sweet scenes of vibrant life, into…
Well, he watches as Bakugou gets his quirk, and the soulmate he is dreaming of does not. He watches the world shift around him, watches him go from included to friendless, and dreams about him growing up.
He dreams about being shoved in the hallway, being picked on by Bakugou, dreams of teachers catching glimpses of the name-calling and insults just to turn away and act like they never saw a thing.
It’s not all bad: sometimes, he’ll dream of a woman, green-haired, who feels like safety and home.
Three years pass, and the Midoriya in his dreams goes from preschool, to elementary school, to middle school. He was fourteen when he died—maybe. Maybe Toshinori won’t dream of his death? Maybe he’ll dream about what could-have-been instead.
That would be… nice. It would be a break he’s not certain he deserves.
One afternoon, he experiences what it must feel like to have someone attempting to claw your skin off. He shivers at the feel of nails digging into his shoulder, shudders as they begin to drag down his arm, and takes leave to his room when they begin clawing deeper, scratching and scraping until they must be drawing blood. Pain paints trails up and down his arms, stinging following the leading points like sparks trailing off of sparklers.
Who would do such a thing to a child? He huddles on his bed, arms wrapped around his chest as the phantom fingernails finally fade away. His soulmate can’t be—can’t be any older than five, and… and someone would do that to them?
What kind of monster…?
(A little part of his brain tells him that the pain was oriented just right for his soulmate to be doing that to themself.)
(He doesn’t want to admit that’s what he felt: his own soulmate’s hands, trying to desperately rip their skin off for some reason he can never understand.)
After that one night, nails on skin are a semi-common pain. Never more than once a month, occasionally three or four months will pass before his soulmate… goes at themself again, and every time it happens, it reminds him of eight evenly-spaced lines and a taboo.
He’s closing in on his sixty-first birthday when the dream he’s been dreading finally happens. He finds himself, with the hands of Midoriya Izuku, fishing a beat-up notebook out of a koi pond, and hugging it to his chest as he walks home from school, head down. As he approaches the tunnel, Toshinori begs, pleads, prays, anything, he screams and wails and rages and wishes, but yet…
Midoriya keeps walking, his feet keep moving, and he passes under the bridge.
crash-clang: the sound of a manhole cover being thrown off its spot. Midoriya whips around, catches sight of the Sludge Villain, and runs, barely making it a few steps before foul green sludge overtakes him. It has the consistency of a puree, gritty against his hands where he claws uselessly against it. The sludge swamps his nose, forces his mouth open, shoves its way down his throat, and Toshinori’s seen enough, now, he doesn’t have to experience, doesn’t want to experience it—it was bad enough the first time, feeling only the pain, and now it’s made ten times worse with the smell and the feel and the sight.
For forty-five long seconds, he struggles, his motions growing slow and feeble, the sludge pouring into his body like an ocean into a glass. His vision begins to grow black, and Toshinori is relieved as it fades out—
No.
No, it’s not over, the world fades back in, and he wants to cough, but he can’t, and his nose hurts and his throat hurts and there’s something in his body, something moves around underneath his skin—
“This should do just fine,” someone rasps, someone uses his voice and it’s not him.
He’s forced to watch, helpless, as the body of his soulmate is piloted around, unnoticed by any authority figure. It all blurs together, and he knows this can’t be real because.
Because, even if somehow he is reliving his soulmate’s memories within his dreams, his soulmate had to be dead by now—
Except.
Except.
He had felt the pain of suffocation, and the severing hadn’t happened until hours after Midoriya’s body was stolen underneath the bridge.
Had he been alive the whole time? Was he aware, watching, as someone else used his body?
How long did it take him to finally, mercifully, die?
Toshinori finds his answer deep in a cave in the middle of a forest he doesn’t know the name of:
Fourteen hours.
It took fourteen hours for his soulmate to finally die.
Waking up, bolting out of bed, Toshinori gradually comes back to awareness sitting in a stream of scalding water.
He understands, now.
There are some things in the world that can drive you to claw your own skin off.
After that final, horrifying dream, Toshinori no longer dreams memories. His soul pain continues, bumps and bruises and the aftermath of what can only be schoolyard scuffles. He keeps his silence, doesn’t tell his partner or anyone else what he dreamed, even though Naomasa was the one who picked him up off the shower floor and put him back together.
A year passes, and he can’t keep quiet anymore: in the quiet darkness of their bedroom, he whispers secrets to his lover, and Naomasa listens to the end.
“There are rumors, you know,” Naomasa whispers back. “That if your soulmate dies and becomes a reincarnate… you dream their memories.”
“I’ve never heard them,” Toshinori whispers back, and feels Naomasa nod, his short hair scraping against Toshinori’s bare chest.
“Who knows if there’s any truth to them… But it’s nice to hope, isn’t it?”
Toshinori huffs and scoots down the bed so he can bury his face in Naomasa’s hair. He sniffs, the smell of his partner’s shampoo overpowering the lingering scent of sewage.
“I don’t want to hope that he was reincarnated,” he whispers. “Because that would mean he remembers that, and that’s not the kind of death I would wish on even All For One.”
Another year passes, and the unthinkable happens:
Mirio dies.
Killed, by a villain not even associated with the League. Their only hope? A stranger none of them have met, who may have been passed One For All before Mirio succumbed to his injuries.
Fifteen minutes after Mirio’s confirmed time of death, Toshinori’s hands sting, the familiar feeling of nails scraping away flesh reminding him that, somewhere out there, his soulmate still exists. His potentially reincarnated soulmate.
He meets him on a Monday, three days after Mirio’s death.
Him, referring to the kid Mirio passed One For All to.
Nejire and Tamaki bring him to Toshinori’s apartment, introduce him as the kid Mirio gave One For All to. For a minute, Toshinori has to raise his eyebrow at that, because the kid… doesn’t really look like a kid. Well, physically, he does, if Toshinori squints, but he carries himself with a restraint not shown by many teenagers.
They wait for Katsuki before commencing with introductions, and when the kid finally stands up and introduces himself, Toshinori’s breath catches in his throat.
Akatani Izuku.
The kid’s name is Izuku. Of all the names…
Except… it can’t be. He only just started feeling the soul pain again… seven years or so ago. His soulmate should be nine, at the absolute oldest.
This long-legged sharp-eyed teenager can’t be his soulmate, no matter what name he has.
Two days after meeting Akatani Izuku, Toshinori’s lip explodes in pain. His soulmate just got punched in the mouth.
The day after that, Akatani walks into their first training session together with a split lip. Toshinori… pays attention. It could just be a coincidence.
It’s not.
At one point, Akatani slams his elbow into a handrail, and the same pain explodes across Toshinori’s elbow. He can’t keep the wince off his face, and when he looks up, he meets Akatani’s eyes.
For a moment, he’s frozen as Akatani stares him down, sizes him up.
It passes as Akatani turns away.
Toshinori does not approach him that evening.
Instead, the next night, he receives a knock on his door. Naomasa stands up to get it, his confused “Akatani?” drawing Toshinori’s attention.
“I need to talk to Mr. Yagi,” his soulmate replies. “It’s… important.”
“…Sure.” Naomasa steps aside, lets Akatani in.
Toshinori stands. “I’ll put the kettle on,” he says, brushing past his partner and Akatani into the kitchen. He listens while he’s heating up the water and making the tea, as Akatani and Naomasa stagger through small talk.
He interrupts a conversation about one of Mirko’s recent takedowns when he walks out with the tea. Akatani is perfectly polite as he accepts his cup, and Toshinori sits down with Naomasa and looks at the kid on his couch.
The kid looks back at him.
Seconds tick by as they stare each other down, gazes sweeping up and down each other’s bodies, taking in every detail they can find.
Naomasa is the one to break the silence. “So, what is this about?”
Akatani glances at Naomasa, then back at Toshinori, and somehow, Toshinori understands the question he’s being asked.
“Naomasa is my partner,” he replies. “Anything I know, he knows.”
Akatani nods. “Twenty-nine years.”
“Twenty-nine years?” Naomasa asks, and Akatani nods.
“We’ve been soulmates for twenty-nine years, if my math is right. Minus the twelve or so months that my immortal soul was floating around in the void.”
Naomasa blinks. “So, the rumors about the soulmates of reincarnates dreaming about memories of their past lives are true.”
Akatani’s eyes widen, flicking back and forth from Naomasa to Toshinori, before his face crumples and he drops his head, letting his shoulder slump. “I’m sorry you had to experience that.”
“You… remember it,” Toshinori whispers.
Akatani nods. “I do.”
“Fourteen hours…”
Akatani lifts his head and raises an eyebrow. “Is that how long it took? I honestly lost track of the time.”
Toshinori’s eyes sting, his heart twisting in his chest. “I am… so sorry,” he gasps, pressing a fist to his mouth.
“What are you apologizing for? You’re not the one who killed me.”
“No… But, I was… I was too slow. I was chasing that, that exact villain, and I… I was too late.” The tears spill over, trailing down his cheeks, and Akatani clenches his fists in his lap.
“I… I know. I know you were chasing him. It was… well, my mom knew you were, and we’ve talked about this a lot over the years… you don’t… there’s nothing to forgive, you know?” He shrugs, and his eyes are bright with tears as well. “Shit happens.”
Toshinori stares up at this kid, this kid he failed so terribly, this kid who… Just…
This kid.
He blinks through the tears and sits up straighter.
“You know. Until Mirio, every mentor-successor pair in the chain of One For All were soulmates. I thought… I thought I missed my chance.”
Akatani listens, eyes wide, and they’re sharp and red differently shaped and there’s a darkness behind them, but, for a moment, they remind Toshinori of a picture and bright green eyes.
It makes sense: they’re the same soul, after all.
“And yet, here you are.”
“Here I am,” Akatani echoes. “You know, I didn’t used to believe in fate, or destiny, or anything like that.”
Toshinori waits, watches at Akatani looks at his hands and gathers his words. His first class—the class Akatani should have been with—taught him patience, and it’s served him well.
“And then I died… and came back to life,” Akatani continues, craning his neck to look up at the ceiling. “There are a lot of theories out there, about why reincarnates exist, about why we come back, and… Some of them make sense, some of them are weird, some of them are just… so far out there that they almost make sense themselves. I don’t know if you’re familiar with any of them, but…”
He swallows and closes his eyes. “I think there was something I was supposed to do, some calling I needed to follow, and I just didn’t quite get to it, you know? I don’t think it’s really fate, and I don’t think it’s a destiny set in stone, but…”
He opens his eyes and looks at Toshinori. “There was something missing in my first life, and I think I finally found it.”
Toshinori’s already crying, and now he’s crying harder, tears so thick they blur his vision. He hears more than sees Akatani stand up, move across the room, hesitate, before reaching out, kneeling in front of Toshinori to lean forward and wrap his arms around Toshinori’s shoulders.
His arms are strong, sure, and Akatani buries his face in Toshinori’s shoulder. This close, Toshinori can smell his shampoo, sweet and vaguely fruity, and the distant smell of vanilla on his clothes.
After twenty-nine years, he holds his soulmate for the first time, and they both soak the other’s shoulder with tears.