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Izuku’s ribs snap. Crunch, caving underneath the villain’s kick. He flies to the left and hits the ground, pine needles slipping and shifting underneath him as he rolls. His left side twinges in protest, the broken ends of his ribs grinding together.
He grits his teeth and shoves himself to his feet. One For All is a swell of heat within his skin as he calls it forth. The pain in his ribs subsides as green lightning sparks to life around him.
Movement from the corner of his eye sends him diving to the side. Something snags on the sleeve of his costume, ripping through it—a spike, Izuku sees, when he glances behind him. Telekinesis quirk? Hedgehog quirk? Spike-launching quirk? He whips his head to look where it came from just in time to dodge another handful of spikes.
Throwing himself forward, he tucks, rolls, and comes up on his feet. The villain has spikes sticking out of their knuckles, arms, and shoulders. A sleeveless black bodysuit leaves their arms open to attack with, while a mask obscures their facial features.
The spikes on their arms makes their upper body a no-go zone for Izuku, so he swings low and slams his foot into the side of their knee. Something crunches in that joint.
Crying out, face twisted in pain and rage, the villain lunges toward Izuku. He ducks beneath a spiked fist and uses their momentum to throw them over his shoulder. Shuffling to his left draws his attention, and he’s turning to dodge a fist as the spiked villain slams to the ground.
More footsteps behind him. He throws himself to the right, sprinting a few steps to put some distance between himself and the villains so he can get a look at what he’s dealing with.
Three villains in total: spike villain, punch villain, and the third villain, all facing Izuku. The footing is all slippery red pine needles, a blanket so thick he can’t see the dirt beneath them. Pine trees themselves scrape the sky over their heads.
He lifts his hand, pulling his middle finger back with his thumb to prepare an Air Force attack. The punch villain and third villain both charge him while the spike villain raises their hands. Izuku dives to the side, flicking his finger at the punch villain while dodging spikes. The punch villain grunts while Izuku dodges the third villain.
For a few minutes, he holds his own, dodging hits and spikes. No matter what he tries, the punch villain doesn’t slow down, and he can’t land a hit on the third villain because he always uses the punch villain as a human shield.
The punch villain must have some sort of fortification quirk, or shock absorption, or something of the sort.
It figures, that villains would attack while they’re all spread out for a survival exercise. Izuku and his classmates are scattered through the woods, each one with their own panic button slash tracker—
The panic button.
Fuck, Izuku is an idiot.
He reaches into his belt for it and wraps his fingers around it, presses the button—
Something slams into his arm. In surprise, he drops the panic button, and in the next moment he’s flung backwards by the punch villain’s kick connecting with his sternum.
Crunch goes the panic button, under the villain’s boots.
Crack go Izuku’s ribs, another one breaking under the force of their blow.
Heart pounding in his ears, he pushes himself off the ground and makes it to his knees, preparing to stand back up when the third villain, suddenly in front of him, bends down and punches him in the stomach.
The hit takes all the air out of Izuku. He folds in half around the villain’s fist. It keeps going, burying itself deep in his core, a burning pain cutting through him.
Gasping for air on the ground, pine needles jabbing into the soft skin of his cheek, Izuku watches through blurry vision as the third villain stands up.
No.
Izuku can’t just lay here. He shoves himself to his knees, choking around the pain in his gut as strings of saliva hang down from his mouth. The barest increase of power flowing through his body gives him the strength he needs to push past the pain and climb back onto his feet.
The third villain steps back, smirking, as the punch villain stalks forward.
Despite the broken ribs and the heavy ache in his gut, Izuku holds his own against the punch villain for the first few blows. Then his guard slips, and he’s thrown onto the ground again.
The punch villain is still unmarred.
Definitely some sort of resistance quirk. Izuku has landed several hits on this villain and they haven’t even flinched.
Something to do with their skin?
Izuku takes a deep breath and reaches for the second power within One For All: Blackwhip. His control is still shaky, but it comes for him, tendrils shooting out from his gloves and wrapping around the punch villain.
He gets his feet underneath himself to brace and yanks his arm, throwing the villain into a tree. The tree cracks and groans with impact.
When the villain falls to the ground, they just stand right back up.
Why can’t Izuku make a mark on this villain? No matter what he tries, with Blackwhip or Air Force, he can’t injure the villain.
Then he sees it (and he’s surprised he does): scratches, small ones, on the villain’s cheek. Raised and red against the pale skin of their face, they may be from pine needles or scraped up from bark.
Blunt force is what isn’t working—but what else does Izuku have?
Strangulation?
That could kill the villain. Izuku’s not that desperate, not yet.
He raises his hands to defend himself. He blocks and dodges blow from the villain, who rains them down on him without pause.
Something pulls his feet out from under him—the villain had hooked their own foot behind Izuku’s and unbalanced him. A shove from the villain helps send him down. He hits the ground hard, but the layer of needles cushions his head and elbows while the impact knocks his breath away.
Before he can recover, the villain stomps down on his leg with all their weight. Izuku’s leg armor takes the force of the blow and distributes it, protecting him and keeping the stomp from breaking bones.
The villain curses and pulls a knife from a hidden sheath.
Izuku’s eyes snap wide open and he scrambles backwards. He needs to put space between them—
Air Force could—
His back bumps into something solid just as he begins raising his hand for his Air Force technique.
“Aren’t you a tenacious little bastard,” the third villain murmurs as they wrap their arm around Izuku’s neck. His focus shifts completely from the punch villain to this one, reaching up to wrap his hand around the villain’s arm and yank.
Ligaments snap and pop in the villain’s elbow. They shout in pain, close enough and loud enough it makes Izuku’s ears ring.
Something sharp buries itself in Izuku’s side.
He glances down.
One of the spike villain’s spines sticks out from the fabric of his costume, brown and tan striations swimming in front of his eyes. His hands and feet begin to tingle.
“That’ll wear off in a little bit. I hope you enjoy what comes next.” The third villain pats Izuku’s shoulder before backing away, letting him drop bonelessly to the ground.
“Wh—wh’you wan’, ” Izuku slurs through lips that won’t cooperate.
The villain just hums and continues to walk away, letting their partner pick up the spike villain and carry them off.
Once the villains are completely out of earshot, Izuku releases One For All.
The pain hits him like a truck. A spine impaled in his side, who knows how many cracked ribs, and uncountable future bruises litter his body.
He lays there, gasping, trying to breathe through the pain. Wind hisses through the trees above him creating a rippling sea of green between the ground and the sky.
Is this a large-scale attack on his class? Are there more villains involved, fighting his friends right now? Or is it just the three who attacked him, making their way through all the students?
His gut twinges. Right—he took a hit there. And what a hit it was. It must have been that villain’s quirk, because no other hit he’s taken has felt like that before.
The forest, this far from the city, is unnervingly quiet. He cannot hear a thing other than his own breathing and heartbeat apart from the chatter of distant birds and the wind in the trees.
Were he more used to it, he would call it peaceful.
His gut twinges again. Damn, that hit must have really messed something up in there.
Gradually, control of his body returns to him. He rolls over and braces himself on his forearms. He’s hurt, and pretty badly, too, if that weird feeling in his gut and the throbbing all over his body is any indication.
… Maybe it would be a good idea for him to stay put. He’s still near where his panic button, and its tracker within it, last was before the villain broke it. Likely, he needs medical attention, and he’ll get it sooner if he stays where he’s at.
He clenches his teeth and grimaces. He should be getting to his feet and running after those villains, hunting them down before they can hurt his classmates. He knows what direction they went in—he could follow them, catch up to him quickly with the use of One For All.
Except, with how injured he is … would he really be able to catch up to them? Deep breaths tug at his broken ribs and—
Oh, yeah, that’s right, there’s some person’s spine stuck in his side.
How deep does it go? He glances down at it. The part of it sticking out of him is about as long as his forearm, and the spines weren’t much longer than that if he remembers correctly.
Before he can think too hard about it, he reaches down and pulls it out.
He was right—the puncture wound is less than an inch deep. He tosses the spine aside and ignores the way his side now slowly paints his costume dark.
Even with the spine gone, he probably still can’t catch up to them. They’re long gone, and they could have turned in any direction after they left his range of hearing.
He turns over and carefully lowers himself back down to the ground. The pine-needles are a prickly cushion underneath his back—at least he’s not laying on rocks .
His face twists in discomfort as his gut gives another jolt. What did that villain’s hit even do to him? If he’s perforated a kidney or shoved his liver out of place or anything like that ….
Izuku shudders and cringes. Hopefully, it’s just nausea, leftover from the punch.
Please just let it be nausea.
His gut twinges again—
Something shifts.
Izuku’s eyes snap open—when did he close them?—and he bolts upright.
The regret is immediate, his broken ribs grinding together and sending pain shooting through his side.
Something shifts in his gut. There is something in there taking up room that isn’t there for it to take up, pressing against his spine, pressing against his organs.
Do organs have nerve endings? Can they feel pain the same way his skin can? He doesn’t know the answer to that, but he can feel the pressure, grimaces as something shifts around inside there.
God, there’s something inside him. If he stops breathing and listens, it’s quiet enough around him that he can hear the squelch of it moving around between his organs.
Another twinge, but this time, it’s his stomach doing flips. He rolls over and props himself up on his forearms again. Opening his mouth releases all the saliva flooding it and strings of drool hang from his lips.
A moment later, he vomits. The force of his wretch is a tandem hit in synch with the crawling thing in his guts, and he wretches again just as soon as he’s done with the first. It leaves him shaking, ribs a sharp spot of pain in his side.
The thing moves again—
No, he can’t think about it, he can’t think about it right now or he’s going to lose it. What else, what else can he think about—his ribs? He should get those stabilized. The last thing he wants in this situation is to move wrong, break off the end of one, and puncture a lung. That would just be the icing on the cake.
The thing moves, pressure tracing a path from his spine, around his right side, towards his navel. Frozen, trembling, barely beathing, he shifts his weight onto one fore-arm and unzips the front of his bodysuit all the way to the belt. With his teeth, he strips off first one arm bracer and then the other.
In his abdomen, something presses against his skin.
He pulls up the hem of his undershirt and presses his fingers against the skin just above his hip. Nothing weird, it feels like it always does, the same give and softness. He shifts his hand upwards, towards the movement underneath his skin, probing gently until—
A lump, something hard, doesn’t give like it should. Izuku’s head snaps down to see a line of raised flesh, pencil-thick, curled around his navel.
As he watches, it moves.
“Oh my god,” he whispers. “Oh my—oh my god.”
He probes at it again, fingers pressing against it. It moves away from his touch, diving deeper into his gut faster than it’s moved yet. His stomach rolls. He lifts his head so he can wretch again. All he has left to send up is bile, sour and stringy as it drips from his mouth.
Panting, he stares unseeing at his own sick as the worm moves around inside him.
What is it even doing in there? What is it doing to him? What is it damaging?
… He needs to get it out. It can’t stay in there, moving around and causing problems; it might kill him. What if it eats part of his liver or bores a hole through his aorta? He’d die of internal bleeding before anyone could find him.
It would kill him, and proceed to eat through the rest of his innards until it breaks through his skin and leaves his body behind before hunting down his classmates and subjecting them to the same fate—
No.
Stop.
It hasn’t done anything yet, other than just … move around. He would notice if it did anything more than that, right?
Would he, though? Do organs have pain receptors like his skin does?
He doesn’t know the answer to that.
The worm squirms its way through back towards his skin. He shudders as it moves through him, curling around his left side and across his front before diving deep again.
“I need to get it out.” He barely breathes, entire body shaken and frozen in place. The only thing he can think about is that worm, and how much he needs to remove it from himself, now .
He needs to get it out before it kills him.
Vision swimming, head spinning, he rolls over onto his back again and takes a moment to try and breathe. How can he even begin to pull it out? He needs—shit, he needs scalpels and forceps and. Tools. Actual operation tools.
All he has right now are his own two hands and his quirk.
It presses against his navel. He groans through his teeth, eyes flicking back and forth in search of something to focus on other than the worm.
The trees above him are not interesting enough to think about.
It shifts and he reflexively tears his clothing away from his body, exposing his belly. He claws at his skin, blunt nails leaving raised red trails behind him.
The stinging of his nails dragging across his skin is enough that, for a moment, it drowns out the sensation of the worm moving around in him.
He’s watching, this time, as it comes to the surface. He’s watching when it distorts his skin, stretching it out, warping it.
Has it gotten bigger?
Is it growing?
Sweat drips down his face. His hands shake. He stares at his belly as the worm rests there, against his skin, just long enough for him the memorize the appearance of that curved ridge cutting across him before it sinks back into his gut.
He needs to get it out. He needs to get it out, right now. Urgency drives him as he claws at his skin and curses his short nails. Why couldn’t he keep them longer, long enough to help him pull this thing out?
What he wouldn’t give to have Yaoyorozu’s quirk.
If he had her quirk, he could make a scalpel, he could make forceps, he could cut this thing out before it kills him but no, no, he’s stuck with his hands and his blunt nails and—
He chokes. It’s climbed higher, now pressing against his lung. It squeezes up, up, up towards his collarbone, tracking a trail of fire behind it as it shoves his broken ribs. What happens if it reaches his heart? Will it stop it? Will Izuku die of cardiac arrest here, alone, only the worm for company?
It dodges his heart.
He won’t be finding that out, not right now.
Hopefully, not ever.
Because he will be getting this thing out of himself, thank you very much.
He grits his teeth and—maybe it would be easier if he didn’t have to hold himself up.
Maybe he can let one of the trees hold him up.
Pine needles poke at the palms of his hands as he shoves himself backward. They jab into the material of his pants and prick at his thighs. He only needs to go a meter or two before he can rest his back against the tree nearest tree trunk, but it feels like he’s crossed thousands of kilometers. Just that short distance leaves him gasping for breath against the catch of his ribs and the all-consuming wrongness in his gut.
After taking a few moments to breathe (or try to, at least), he leans his head forward and peers down. Beads of blood have been smeared across his skin and continue to well up from the tracks of his nails. Deep within him, the thing continues to move and twist.
With his mind focused on one thing, he lifts a hand and holds it just above his abdomen. Somehow, he must get through his skin. If he needs to tear it open with his own bare hands, then so be it.
The bones in his hand shift. An ever-present ache, deep in his marrow, heats and intensifies as from the tips of his index and middle fingers two off-white growths split the skin and protrude outwards. He bleeds sluggishly where skin meets growth.
Top edge straight, bottom edge curved, the growths are claw-like, reminding him of—
Scalpels.
They remind him of scalpels.
Is his luck going right, for once in his life?
He strips his right sleeve off, careful not to catch it on the blades on his fingers. Balling up the end of the sleeve, he sticks it in his mouth, his own discount gag.
With half the top of the bodysuit removed, he strips the other sleeve off, leaving him in just his blood-stained undershirt. That, he tears off, summoning Blackwhip to do so.
Torso now bare, he leans on one arm and the tree behind him. He clenches his teeth around his gag as he rests the bone blade against his skin, just above his belt.
Taking a deep breath in through his nose, he presses down and drags the blade from navel to sternum, splitting his skin open and leaving a line of bright-red blood behind him. As he slices through his skin, he draws a groan form his lungs. He watches as blood wells up and spills over, joining the previous streaks painted on his skin.
No matter—the only thing that matters is removing that worm. The pain and the blood … there’s not much to be done for them.
Well, actually, there’s a way around the pain at least. He summons One For All, pulling the power forward and letting it flood through him.
Immediately, the hurts fade. Everything but the movement of the worm falls away to background noise. Now he just needs to get in there, get to it, pull it out. But the cut’s not deep enough, the worm is all the way in there, down at his very core. He needs to be careful, so careful while he’s cutting it out, because one wrong move could end up with himself dead.
But the worm will kill him if he moves too slow.
He prods at the cut and slowly spreads the edges of it. The fingers of his left hand are soon sticky with blood and streams of red drip down his bare torso.
He tries to hold the cut open with his bare fingers but fails. He doesn’t have enough hands, enough tools—this is why surgeons work in teams.
What could he do to—
Blackwhip.
Normally, he would hesitate to use it in such a delicate situation. His control over it is tentative, at best, and he needs exacting precision right now. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, so he calls it forth.
His hands shake as he spreads the edges of the cut once more and uses needle-thin tendrils of Blackwhip to hold them in place.
The worm inside him inches higher, heading back up toward his lungs.
If it moves into his ribcage, and stays there, he’ll never be able to get it out on his own. There’s no way he can saw through his own bones.
He brings his hands back over the cut. He’s parted his skin, yes, but there’s still muscle, layers of it, between his hands and the worm within. If only he knew exactly where his veins and arteries were or could somehow prevent his own blood from clogging up the cut and obscuring his goal.
Taking as deep a breath as he can, he lowers his hands until the tip of his blade rests a hair above the present cut. A tremor runs through them, runs through his entire body, fingers shaking and trembling so hard he knicks himself with the other blade.
He can’t operate like this. Steady hands are a must—what happens if he knicks something important? What if he cuts his aortic artery open because his shaking hands shook a little too much?
His stomach rolls as the worm shifts again. He swallows down the bile rising in his throat, sour-mouthed and thankful he doesn’t have anything left in his stomach to come up.
Shaking hands, he needs to fix the shaking hands problem—Blackwhip. It will push the limits of his control over the quirk, but he could use it to steady his hands, hold his arms tight.
More black tendrils, silk-smooth and night-dark, bloom out from under his skin and wrap around his arms, spiraling down past his elbows and wrists and threading between his fingers. They anchor themselves in his shoulders, on his chest, sinking roots deep into his muscle.
He takes another breath to steady himself. Air rushes in and out of his lungs; his heart pounds in his ears and throbs in his chest. The world falls away around him, the only scent his blood and bile, the only sight his red-painted fingers, the only thing that matters being the removal of the thing within him.
Counting back from three, he prepares to cut.
Blade meets flesh. One For All chases away some of the pain, but not all of it. Sharp, biting, a trail of heat follows as he sinks his finger into the already-present cut. Blackwhip curls out from the skin around the slice and hovers, hesitant, above while the needle-thin tendrils spread the cut wider and wider.
The worm is too deep for him to see. Not that he would be able to see it, with all the blood—
No. Don’t think, just do. If he thinks too hard right now, he’ll freeze, and he can’t afford to stop moving.
Rather than continue shoving his hands into his abdomen, he gently sends the tendrils of Blackwhip that are hovering unused probing at the cut. They slide past layers of muscle and slip between his organs. He swallows around a lump in his throat as they move, so similar to the worm, curling around his stomach.
“ Hng !” He chokes as the worm shoves itself higher, slipping once more between his ribs and his lungs. His stomach seizes and he turns his head to spit bile out of his mouth, unable to swallow it down this time.
The first thought is to send Blackwhip up after it, but he quickly nixes it. What if too much pressure on his lung bursts it? Unlikely, but what if he can’t breathe? What if he somehow accidentally tears it?
No.
Get a grip.
He takes a breath—
He chokes on the pressure in his chest.
Head fuzzing out, unable to breathe, he tears his fingers across his skin, blades bumping against the bone ridges of his ribs and scraping across the surface of his sternum. Blackwhip follows, spreading the skin.
His ribs, how is he supposed to get through his ribs? He has no bone saw, he can’t snap them and pull them apart.
A heat sparks within his marrow and something else shifts in his chest.
Terror rips through his mind—a second worm? Is—did—is the first one reproducing? Can they do that? Is his entire body, bones, muscle, tendons and ligaments, are they all going to dissolve into worms? Will his head, his brain—
The bone blades, sticking out of the ends of his fingers, flash in his vision.
Okay. Maybe not a second worm. Maybe. Maybe quirk? He has no clue what any of the other One For All quirks, aside from Float, will be. Some form of bone manipulation ….
That’s exactly what he needs.
The heat in his ribs spreads, flowing through from one to the next, spreading like a glow through him. One motion, one jerk, one crack ; his ribs rip apart, deforming and reforming and curving the wrong way. They stick out through his skin, sharp and off-grey and he can’t stop staring at them. They’re wrong and malformed, jagged edges fused together like puzzle pieces that don’t match, forced together and glued into place.
Pressure on his lungs—the worm reminds him of its existence. It inches towards his heart and his all-too-shallow pants almost cease entirely as he holds his breath and digs in with Blackwhip and his fingers to find it. He’s so close, so close , if he can just get his hands on it—
One For All slips through his fingers. Every tendril of Blackwhip vanishes, and the pain slams into him like a freight train. He would scream, but he doesn’t have enough breath left to do so. All he has is the all-encompassing urge, the need, the drive, he needs to get that worm out, he can’t let it stay—
Scrabbling at the gaping hole in his chest, it’s there, it’s right there, he can get to it—
Hands on his wrists. He freezes, and they pull his hands away from his chest.
“That’s enough, young Midoriya.”
The alarm sounds while Shouta is making himself another cup of coffee. Of course, it does, that’s just his fucking luck at this point.
“I knew there was no possible way we could get through this training camp without some sort of attack,” he mutters as he joins the rest of the supervising teachers—Yagi, Kayama, and Hizashi—in the security room.
“We have a perimeter breach on both the south, north, and west sides,” Kayama says as he leans over her shoulder to stare at the hologram in front of them. A whole table is covered by a projected image of the camp’s terrain. Twenty-four markers, twenty for their students and four for the wilderness survival instructors, dot the landscape. Three sections of the map are lit up red, and as Shouta watches, two of the dots turn red, a ding ringing through the room.
Jirou and Uraraka have activated their emergency signals.
“We need to get out there.” Kayama shoves her chair backward, sending Shouta stumbling out of the way. “Most of the kids will be able to watch their own backs—and the south and east sides are where the instructors are. The scavenger hunt is in the northwest quadrant though, right? And those students are all individually split up.”
She’s right. Their students were split into five groups of four and set to rotate through activities, one for each instructor and a rest station.
“Then we’ll go to the northwest,” Shouta replies.
Hizashi, the only one not crowding the hologram, picks up one of the facility’s cellphones. “Catch!” he says, shaking the phone before tossing it at Shouta.
Shouta sandwiches it between his hands. “Don’t break them—”
Another ding. Someone else’s emergency signal going off. Shouta glances at the hologram—
Of course, it’s Midoriya. Why wouldn’t it be Midoriya? The student furthest away from the breach. Because that makes sense.
He glances at Yagi—yep. The man is already picking up one of the facility’s phone, that stupidly determined furrow in his brow.
“Yagi—”
“I know.” Yagi glares at Shouta, his voice steely. “I know that I’m retired. Injured. But I won’t slow you down.”
Shouta holds back a groan. “Fine. Okay. We’ll go get Midoriya. Mic, Midnight, you two have the other three.”
“Good for us, because it looks like Ashido and Shouji found each other,” Kayama is saying, but Shouta’s already dragging Yagi out of the room.
They don’t speak to each other as they drive through the forest, guiding one of the facility’s vehicles at reckless speed down narrow tree-shrouded roads. The other teachers and instructors radio back and forth, and even Kaminari radios in his location and situation. Distant explosions and crashes, the sound of fighting, reach their ears, but the direction they’re driving toward is silent aside from the whisper of the wind in the pines.
What does it mean, that there are no sounds of struggle from the woods in front of them?
Shouta takes a moment to check the facility phone—Midoriya’s tracker hasn’t moved.
He tries not to consider what that may mean.
They take the vehicle as far as they can, screeching to a halt and jumping out the doors as soon as it’s taken them as close as it can go. Shouta grabs the medical kit as he bails out, slinging it over one shoulder. The two of them dash through the trees, jumping over logs and stumbling over hidden branches, and the whole time, there are no distinctive sounds of fighting in front of them.
The training grounds are large, and Midoriya was close to the farthest edge. Urgency and panic press in at the edges of Shouta’s mind—why don’t they have more staff here? Why don’t they have someone with a mobility quirk, a teleportation quirk?
As they draw close to the location of Midoriya’s tracker, they begin seeing signs of a scuffle. Spots where needles have been disturbed and shoved around by feet, porcupine-like spines sticking out of tree trunks—
A green flicker.
Yagi spots it before Shouta, calling out and taking off at an even faster clip. Shouta sprints alongside him—
They skid to a stop as Midoriya comes into view.
At first, all Shouta sees is the bolt and flicker of green lightning over Midoriya’s form. The boy is the only one in the clearing, so Shouta wonders: why is his quirk active?
Both aspects of Midoriya’s quirk are active, Shouta realizes, his eyes catching onto the spiderweb of black threads in the air around Midoriya. They arc, first away from his body then back towards it where they—
Shouta’s heart drops out of his chest.
Those black tendrils are buried in Midoriya’s own flesh. Blood flows freely from a gash that spans navel to sternum. At first glance, it looks like the tendrils may be holding the injury shut, trying to sew it closed with their own thread-like quality, but the longer Shouta looks, the more he realizes the opposite is true.
They’re holding the wound open .
Why—
Why would—
He can’t wrap his brain around it, all he can see is blood and tendrils and—are those his ribs ? Almost-white spikes stick out of Midoriya’s chest, and those, are those actually his ribs?
Another gaping injury adorns Midoriya’s chest. His hands hover close to it, but he makes no move to close it. Rather, he digs his fingers into it, shoves his fingers into his chest like he’s searching for something.
Erasure snaps into place, activating with barely a thought. The black tendrils evaporate, the green lightning dissipates. Midoriya makes a choked-off noise but doesn’t relent, clawing at his chest and tearing at the injury until Yagi crouches down and pulls his hands away.
The tendrils and the lightning both vanish, but Midoriya’s ribs remain how they were, sticking out of his chest like sick fingers. Shouta can’t blink, doesn’t blink, what if Midoriya activates his quirk again, he’s still trying to drag his heart from his chest and the only thing keeping him from doing so is the fact Yagi is holding his wrists in an iron grip.
Shouta can barely breathe, can’t even think, he should be able to move, to act, his student is bleeding out in front of him, but he’s frozen, stiff as the trees around him save for the halo of hair floating around his head.
Yagi says something to Midoriya, too quiet for Shouta to make out over the roaring of blood in his ears.
There’s so much blood.
There’s so much blood, the smell of it thick, heavy, familiar. Its ever-present taste in the back of his throat is intensified by how strong the scent is around him. His own blood races through his veins. Will his heart beat out of his chest? It pounds, fast and hard, beating against his ribs.
Ribs—Izuku’s ribs, in front of him, are twisted, turned, protruding from his chest. They’ve broken away from his sternum and begun to curve the wrong way, exposing his heart and lungs to the air. Toshinori is almost mesmerized by the sight, frozen as he watches Izuku’s heart beat and Izuku’s lungs work before he remembers what, exactly , the situation is to make that a possibility.
Izuku tugs at Toshinori’s hands, keens below him, face twisted in pain and fear. His skin is sticky with sweat and blood and bile, drool crusted over on his chin and forehead shining with fresh sweat.
“Get it out, get it out, get it out ,” Izuku whines, breathless, wrecked.
Toshinori can barely hear his voice, struggles to make out his words.
“Shh, shh, just relax, just relax, please, we’re here, we’ve got you.” He responds with a litany of reassurances, adjusting his grip on Izuku’s wrists so that he is now holding both their hands palms up, thumb massaging circles in the cup of Izuku’s palm. He’s careful of the two sharp growths sticking out of the ends of Izuku’s index and middle fingers, setting those thoughts aside in his head to wonder over later.
Izuku whines and shudders. “ Please . Please, please, I need to get it out, please, All Might, please, get it out.”
Toshinori squeezes Izuku’s hands. “We’re here. We’ve got you. I am here. We’ll get it out for you, okay? Just please relax. Let us take care of it, now.”
Where the fuck is Aizawa? He hasn’t deactivated his quirk, thank fuck, or else Toshinori would be having a much more difficult time of this, but it would be nice to have a second pair of hands around to stem the flow of blood while Toshinori makes sure that Izuku can’t keep tearing himself open.
Izuku whines again, a high, thin sound that cuts straight to Toshinori’s heart. He’s barely breathing, only taking in shallow pants. His entire body shakes, trembling, vibrating, underneath Toshinori.
“We’ll take care of you,” Toshinori promises again, ignoring how it tastes like ash on his tongue. “Do you trust us to do that?”
Green eyes, glassy, bloodshot, blown wide by panic, stare back up at Toshinori. For seconds, heartbeats, the moments between breaths, they search, flicking back and forth across Toshinori’s face.
Toshinori tries not to look away, but for just a beat, the tear tracks cutting through streaks of blood on Izuku’s cheeks draw his attention.
“Okay.” Izuku’s voice cracks, and Toshinori’s gaze once against finds his. “Okay. I trust you. Please—please just get it out .”
“We will,” Toshinori promises, though he doesn’t know what exactly he is promising to remove. If there is something in Izuku, then he obviously can’t get to it on his own (especially if the self-made butcher job is anything to judge the situation by), and if there isn’t , then ….
Either way, he needs Izuku calm, and not struggling against him.
He turns over his shoulder and looks at where he left Aizawa. The younger man is still standing there, horrorstruck, eyes wide as he keeps his quirk trained on Izuku.
Toshinori snaps Aizawa’s name. Aizawa jerks, startled, but not dropping his quirk.
“Get over here,” Toshinori pumps every ounce of authority and presence he learned as a hero into his voice, “and help me. Help him .”
“Right.” Aizawa nods, all business-like now that he’s snapped out of it. He crosses the space between them in two easy strides and drops down by Izuku. “What do you need me to do?”
“Call the medic. Private line. Hands-free. And then you tell me—you have more relevant first-aid experience. How do we treat blood loss?”
“Elevate his legs and shoulders,” Aizawa rattles off as he hits the button to dial the medic. He turns on the speaker before setting the phone to the side. “You know what, just—make sure he’s not going to rip his intestines out, or something, and I’ll take care of it. Just stay out of my way.”
Aizawa blinks, his hair dropping back around his shoulders as he gets his hands underneath Izuku to shift him away from his tree backrest to lie on the ground. Toshinori holds his breath as he waits for a reaction from Izuku—nothing. He’s just staring at Toshinori, eyes unfocused as he pants.
“How are you not unconscious right now?” Toshinori murmurs, shifting so he has Izuku’s head and shoulders in his lap before turning to watch Aizawa pile pine needles underneath Izuku’s legs.
“It’s in my chest.” Izuku weakly tugs at his hands, half an attempt to return to clawing at the wound. “It’s—!”
He chokes, lips drawing back in a grimace as he clenches his teeth. The tugging on Toshinori’s hands grows more desperate as he twists, arching his back and pressing his shoulders into the ground underneath.
Is he about to activate his quirk? A quick glance at Aizawa shows that he’s had the same idea, his hair once more floating around his head as he stares down at Izuku.
“If it’s in your chest,” Toshinori begins, pulling Izuku’s hands up closer to his own chest, “then you don’t mind if Aizawa binds the injury on your stomach, to stop the bleeding.”
Izuku’s hands wrap, vise-like, around Toshinori’s thumbs. “It’s moving ,” he cries, eyes focusing on Toshinori’s face. His pupils seem to have swallowed almost the entirety of the iris, flat white voids flashing in Toshinori’s vision.
“It’s moving?”
“It’s moving!” Izuku’s hands uncurl, and he yanks on them again, trying to draw them back to his chest. Toshinori doesn’t let him, hanging onto them and tucking them to his own chest.
Aizawa, ignoring this, has set to wrapping his capture weapon around Izuku’s abdomen. He works quick, winding it tight and shoving it under Izuku’s back to keep winding, all the while speaking with the medic on the phone.
“Okay,” Aizawa says, once he’s finished wrapping his capture weapon around Izuku’s abdomen and secured it. He cuts it, leaving himself with a significantly shorter length hanging around his shoulders. “There’s been a chopper dispatched to our location. Our job is to keep him alive until they can get here. There’s saline and an IV kit, I’m going to get fluids in him. Yagi, your bloodtype?”
His heart sinks as he replies, “A”.
“Saline it is, then,” Aizawa grunts, opening the medical kit.
“Do you even know how to give an IV?”
“Academically.” He looks over the equipment, eyes narrowed, the corner of his mouth twisted. “No time like the present to figure it out.”
“Why, why are you—get it out .” Izuku is still conscious, somehow. He twitches, a whole-body jerk. “Why aren’t you getting it out?”
“You’ve already discussed hypovolemic shock with Recovery Girl, multiple times, I know you have,” Aizawa says, reaching over to take Izuku’s right hand from Toshinori. “You treat the shock first , and then the underlying cause. Remember, kid? I know you know that.”
Izuku moans, turning his head to the side to watch Aizawa. He lets his teacher take his arm and stick the needle in it, uncomplaining other than another whole-body shudder.
It probably doesn’t feel like much, that tiny little pinprick next to the gashes in his belly and chest.
Toshinori finds himself, now that the immediate concerns are dealt with and all they can do is wait for the helicopter, watching Izuku’s heart beat. Macabre, yes. Disturbing, also yes. But, in it’s own way, beautiful and comforting.
For the moment, Izuku is still alive, and here is the incontrovertible proof in front of him.
“All Might.”
Izuku’s voice is strained. He’s been breathless the entire time, but this is hardly more than a whisper.
Toshinori’s eyes flick down from his chest to his face to see Izuku staring straight up at him, an unreadable expression on his face.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
“What? No, no no no,” Toshinori shakes his head, squeezing Izuku’s hand with one hand and using the other to brush Izuku’s bangs back off his forehead leaving behind dark streaks of blood. “No, that’s not allowed. The helicopter is coming. You’ll have professional medical care soon, okay? They’ll take care of you.”
“No, I’m, I’m going to die, that’s—” Izuku’s expression twists in fear. “It’s going to kill me. It’s going to kill me .”
Toshinori’s heart seizes in his chest. He opens his mouth to speak, but below him, Izuku continues, growing more frantic.
“It’s going to kill me, and—I— All Might . One F’r, One F’r All, it, you, you have, you have to take it back .”
He makes to raise his free arm, the one the IV is attached to, but Aizawa clamps his hand down on it, pinning it to the forest floor while shooting Toshinori a glare that says they will be discussing this later.
“ Please ,” Izuku’s voice breaks, and Toshinori’s heart breaks alongside it, shattering into a million tiny pieces. Fresh tears well up and begin to spill over, tracing down to his temples and glittering in his hair. “Please, you need to, I, it, can’t, can’t die with me, you—”
“Goddamn it, problem child, we’re trying to put fluids in you, this is not the time to start crying,” Aizawa snaps.
Despite the harsh tone, it works , Izuku’s attention jerking over to the other man. The tears, for the moment, stop.
Aizawa sighs, closes his eyes for a moment, then continues after opening them. “Does it look pretty bad? Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. But the helicopter is close and, as far as I can tell, you didn’t hit any vital arteries. You’ve got a chance, kid, so don’t go giving up on us now.”
“I’m not, I’m—” Izuku shudders again, face screwing up as he squeezes Toshinori’s hand hard enough to shove his bones around.
The pain passes and Izuku opens eyes full of dismay.
“It’s still in there. It’s still in me.” He stares up at Toshinori, fingers keeping their death-grip around his hand while Aizawa continues to hold down his other arm. “It’s, it’s, it’s in there, we gotta, we gotta get it out !”
“No, no, no, no,” Toshinori murmurs, carding his fingers through Izuku’s hair. The blood on his hand has mostly dried, but he still leaves a trail of tackiness behind. “You just relax, alright? Just stay calm. The doctors will get it out after they’ve stabilized you.”
“No,” Izuku whines, shaking his head. “No, it’s, it’s going to kill me, it’s going to kill me , I don’t want to, Toshinori I don’t want to die .”
The last phrase comes out in a slurry of voice, so fast he almost doesn’t catch that Izuku called him by name. Heat builds behind his eyes, and when he blinks something wet spills down his cheeks.
“Oh, Izuku, my boy, my boy.” Almost-meaningless platitudes fall from Toshinori’s lips, except he means every one of them. How does he tell Izuku, his successor, his son in all but name, anything that he needs to tell him? For as much as he wants to deny it, there’s the distinct possibility—
Well.
There’s the distinct possibility these may be the last words he ever says to Izuku.
“I love you,” he whispers, the words rising unprompted to his lips. “I love you. Don’t you go dying on me.”
There’s no way he can cram everything he wants to say to Izuku into what little time they may have left. Izuku is flagging, eyelids fluttering as he begins to phase in and out of consciousness. All Toshinori can do is watch his heart and hold his hand, carding fingers through his hair and murmuring comfort when he’s more conscious.
Too soon and too late all at once, he begins to hear the beat of helicopter blades. Everything happens all at once after the EMTs touch the ground. Aizawa pulls Toshinori away, and he lets him, even though he wants nothing more than to cling to his boy and never let him go.
This is not a trip he can accompany Izuku on. This is a place he cannot go, a path he cannot follow.
Aizawa maintains a grip on his arm, and Toshinori grips back, the two of them watching the EMTs strap Izuku onto a backboard and then return to the helicopter, precious cargo in tow.
They watch as the helicopter leaves, eyes lingering on the sky through the tree branches until long after they can hear it no more.
It feels like they’ve taken Toshinori’s heart with them.
Awareness returns in bits and pieces. A few words here, a sensation or two there. Maybe he’s been awake before, longer chunks, but it’s fuzzy, he can’t hang on to his thoughts for more than a few seconds before they seep away back into the haze.
Some things stick with him: the relief in someone’s voice, large fingers wrapped tight around his hand, a dull ache in his abdomen and chest. Someone with soft hands cups his cheek; he might hear his mother speak.
His room is bright when he opens his eyes.
Immediately, he closes them, flinching away from the brilliant fluorescents above him.
Someone moves, chair scuffing against the floor. Izuku’s eyes snap back open, and he turns his head, All Might coming into focus. He’s reading something, not paying any attention to Izuku right now.
Izuku takes the moment to observe him, studying the lines around his mouth and the shadows under his eyes. He looks more tired than he has in quite some time, exhaustion written into the slump of his shoulders and the tangles in his hair.
For a few minutes, Izuku is content to just watch All Might. Something in the back of his mind tells him he should be drinking this in, to relish in the moment before he loses it forever. Where it comes from, he doesn’t know and couldn’t tell you, but he listens to it.
It feels important, somehow.
All Might briefly glances over then returns to whatever he’s reading. After a moment, his eyes widen, and he looks back over at Izuku.
Izuku can’t help it: a goofy grin breaks out across his face. “Hey.” His voice is weak, and his chest aches, but he’s pretty sure All Might hears.
“Hey yourself.” Yep, All Might heard. He reaches over and runs a hand through Izuku’s hair. Izuku finds himself leaning into the touch, eyes briefly closing as he considers melting into a puddle of Izuku-flavored goo.
After a few moments of luxuriating in the freely-given affection, Izuku opens his eyes again. “Why ’m I here this time?”
All Might frowns. “You don’t remember?”
“Nope.” Izuku shakes his head, the motion rubbing his hair back and forth between the crown of his head and All Might’s hand, reminding him that All Might’s hand is, indeed, still there. “Not—”
A brief flash, the vaguest impression of blood and something deep within him. It’s like flipping a switch, and a cascade of disjointed memories and sensations comes tumbling back into his head.
When he returns to himself, All Might is stroking his hair.
“Wh, I, is, is it—?” He lifts his hands from where they lay beside him, fingers drifting toward his chest. All Might’s hand moves from his hair to take one of his hands, lacing their fingers together and squeezing.
“I can explain everything,” he says, voice low and calm. “You’re safe. You’re well on your way to healing, and there’s nothing foreign in your body where it shouldn’t be, other than, I suppose, that IV in your hand.”
Izuku swallows and nods. His heart still races in his chest.
“It was a bit touch-and-go at first, admittedly, and the infection really didn’t help.” All Might begins to rub his thumb back and forth across the back of Izuku’s hand, and belatedly, Izuku realizes that the ends of his right-hand middle and index fingers are wrapped in thick gauze.
“What …. What happened? With the villains,” Izuku asks. “And my friends. Are they okay?”
“Everyone else is fine. You were the only one hospitalized following the attack, everyone else could be treated on-site.”
“Oh.” Izuku blinks. “I’m glad no one else was hurt bad.”
All Might hums and nods. “We caught the majority of the villains—it was an independent attack, a group of people who wanted to cash in on the fame of attacking the class so hounded by the League of Villains. We …. We did end up catching the villains who attacked you. Would you like to …. How much do you remember of what happened after the villains left you?”
“Bits and pieces. What was, what was that?” Looking back, it’s like a fever dream, like he was being driven by something that wasn’t originating in his own mind. “I did—I did something pretty bad, didn’t I?”
Squeezing Izuku’s hand, All Might sighs and nods. “One of the villains … has a very interesting quirk. Would you like to hear about it now, or wait until you’re a little steadier?”
Izuku considers. On the one hand, he needs to know, he burns to know. On the other …. Well, it can wait. He’s not going anywhere, after all.
Except he did do something pretty bad, and how All Might is talking, the villain’s quirk could explain it. “Now, please.”
“Alright.” All Might nods again. “The particular villain in question …. His quirk allows him to implant an organism into any animal, including humans. Now, the organism itself is … mostly benign. However, it somehow—we’re not completely sure of the mechanism by which it works—but somehow, it inspires in the host the incredible need to get it out, by any means necessary.”
Izuku shudders. “It—that—that makes sense.” It puts the flashes of memory together into some semblance of context. “Is it—did they—?”
“The surgeons operating on you when you were brought in found it and pulled it out while they were operating. They preserved it, partially for study, and partially in case you needed to … see it. For closure. There’s also a variety of medical scans and imaging available on request, if you need that to feel comfortable, too.”
Cringing, Izuku shakes his head. “No, I, I would rather not look at it, thanks.” Once the initial revulsion has passed, he sighs and looks back up at All Might. “And. If you say it’s gone, then …. I trust you. You wouldn’t lie to me about that.”
All Might looks like he wants to cry—
No, he is crying, those are tears rolling down his cheeks. He lifts their joined hands and presses the back of Izuku’s hand to his cheek, leaning his head into it and squishing the slender bones—
Nope.
He is not thinking about his bones.
Not yet. Not today. No, thank you. He will open that box later.
“I’m sorry, my boy, I just—I’ll try to get ahold of myself.” All Might clears his throat but that does little for the thickness in his voice. “I am just. It is so good to see you awake.”
“Glad to be awake?” Izuku replies, squeezing All Might’s hand. “I’m.” He presses his lips together, blinking rapidly. “Yeah.”
Without really thinking about it, he lifts his right hand, intending to reach over and pat All Might’s arm or something like that. Instead, he is blatantly reminded of his bones as he freezes mid-way, staring at his fingers.
“Yes, I … do believe you managed to manifest another of the past holders’ quirks,” All Might says, once he realizes what Izuku is staring at. “Luckily, the hospital has a member of staff who can manipulate other peoples’ bones by touching them, turns them malleable to herself. She usually only gets to use her quirk on dead bodies, but, well ….”
Izuku’s ribs, while achy underneath the pain meds, don’t feel much different than they did before everything. Maybe. He thinks. She must have done a good job.
“Who knew the answer to my bone-breaking problem was here the entire time?” he muses, and next to him, All Might snorts.
Izuku lets his hand drop back to the bed, his arm resting beside him. All Might retains his hold on Izuku’s other hand, and honestly, Izuku is quite alright with letting him monopolize it. The edges of his vision are beginning to fuzz out again, darkness that shouldn’t be there edging in on the well-lit room.
“Think ‘m goin’ back to sleep,” he says, glancing back up at All Might, who looks back down with a soft, fond expression. “Th’nks for being here, All Might.”
“Of course.” All Might takes a deep breath, squeezing Izuku’s hand. “And, if you would like, you may call me Toshinori. I wouldn’t mind.”
Izuku will likely lose his mind over being told to call All Might by his given name at a later point in time, when he’s not so tired and there aren’t so many pain meds in his system.
As it is, for now, he just smiles. “Alright. Toshinori.”
He misses what Toshinori says next, but the hand holding his is the last thing he’s aware of before he falls asleep.