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Toshinori wakes to piercing sunlight colouring the curtain of his eyelids a vivid orange. He stirs, groaning and trying to block it out with his hand.
“Mmm, just five more m’nutes…”
He turns to grab a pillow to bury his head in but his hands find only a hard, rubbery surface, warmed by the sun. He furrows his brows further and cracks his eyes open, blinking rapidly from the merciless brightness.
Linoleum. Smooth and grey, lukewarm from the rays of what seems to be the late afternoon sun coming in through large glass windows. Toshinori blinks some more, growing confused. Those windows seem familiar. The linoleum also seems familiar, it even feels familiar.
…UA?
He pushes himself upright, head still foggy, eyes crusty from sleep. He rubs at them, blinking away the blurriness and taking in his surroundings.
He is indeed, in his alma mater’s hallway, sprawled out in the middle of the floor. Is this another prank of Todoroki’s? He quickly looks down and exhales in relief. He still has his school uniform on. He glances around just to be sure, listening intensely for giggles muted by palms pressed against mouths.
But there is nothing but the distant ticking of the mounted clock at the end of the hall. It echoes across the corridor. The sun’s rays illuminate an ever-swirling cloud of particles in the stuffy air. It’s thick and ripe with the flavour of the minutes right before the end of school.
Toshinori remains seated for a few more seconds before getting on his feet, dusting his uniform off and making his way down the hall.
His sneakers clack loud against the linoleum. His breathing disturbs the fuzz in the air but the school is quiet, almost drowsy despite the intense light and warmth of a late spring day. Toshinori tries to figure out how he might have gotten here but doesn’t think too hard about it. He has passed out during training before, even sometimes on his way home so it’s not particularly surprising that he might have done so in the halls this time.
He looks at the clock, squinting to make out the thick black lines of the hour hands from the distance. It’s somewhere around five in the afternoon. That’s a normal time to be at school.
But then where is everybody else?
Toshinori does not rule out the possibility of a prank just yet so he doesn’t call out, just walks with his head held high, eyes scanning for a clue. Or maybe school ended early and they forgot to tell him about it? Toshinori knows he’s not always on top of things. He knows he’s a bit air-headed. He knows that he isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. He gets it. But this seems a bit too obvious even for him to gloss over.
His steps falter. He squints at the clock again. Something’s not right. It’s still at the end of the hall. He has been walking for a good five minutes and yet it’s still far away.
He looks back over his shoulder. The hall stretches, empty, filled with stale air and sunlight, inconspicuous. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about it. It’s almost hypnotic, how quiet and still everything is.
He decides to turn around and find the door to 1A instead. He walks and walks, steps getting just a bit tighter, just a bit more hurried as the corridor rolls on like an endless linoleum red carpet. The doors are all closed and so are the windows. Trying to open either results in no success.
Looking out, he sees the yard of UA, just as he should. No people there either, students or otherwise. The breeze gently blows the leaves bathed in tangerine. There are no sounds of birds or cars. There are no sounds of anything.
Just as he notes that, Toshinori hears a noise. A humanoid noise. He freezes. Listens. Intensely.
It’s quiet, little more than the gentle rustle of paper and muted shuffle of feet. It comes from the end of the hallway. Toshinori feels relief mix with wary. He starts walking again, towards the noise, hands by his side but now in fists.
The door to 1A is open. A ray of fat sunlight spills out like vaporised gold. It makes the swirling dust particles look similar to glitter in water. The air is heavy and warm, boring down on Toshinori’s lungs like a blanket. The sounds are definitely coming from inside.
“Hallo?” Toshinori calls out, “Is anyone there?”
The rustling stops.
Toshinori takes a tentative half-step forward.
“Torino?” he asks, hopeful.
No answer. No more noise. Toshinori does not step any closer. Then, the sound of footsteps.
They do not sound like Torino. They are way too heavy. Each one is accompanied by a creak or a pop like an old tree fighting a storm.
Toshinori thinks to call out again but before he can do so, a hand appears in the doorframe.
His voice catches in his throat.
That is not Torino’s hand.
It is way too high up.
Toshinori watches, petrified, as gnarly fingers wrap around the painted wood. They are crooked in a way only digits that have been broken one too many times are. The index is missing a chunk. Scars etch up the skin that’s wrapped so tightly around the bare bone as if it was vacuum sealed. Tendons pull taut as the body attached to that withered limb pulls itself through the gate of his homeroom.
Toshinori chokes down a bubbling scream.
The thing in the doorway turns its head to look at him. Toshinori can hear each individual vertebrae crank. A wet, ragged breath breaks out of it like a puss-filled cyst popping. Blood dribbles down its triangular chin in half-coagulated chunks between a grey and yellowed set of chipped and gapped teeth. Oily, matted, thinning grey hair hides most of its face. It is kept in shadow, especially the eyes. If it even has them.
“W-who a-are you?” Toshinori manages, raising both fists, more in defence than offence. “S-sir?” He tries to be polite, he always does. It’s not nice to call anyone a ‘thing’ even mentally. But he just can’t help it.
Whatever that is, it is unnatural.
The thing person doesn’t reply. It they wheeze again, exiting the classroom. Toshinori takes a step back. They hunch forward, hand now pressed against the wall as if they need any support they can get. From the looks of the rest of them, they do.
They have clothes on but they are thin and grungy, hanging on their bare-boned body like a veil over the diseased. Grey or maybe once white, formal only in the loosest sense of the word. Stained with what is exorbitant amounts of blood.
“Identify yourself!” Toshinori tries again, this time with a little more authority in his voice. “This is private ground, if you do not have permission—“
The intruder (??) doubles over, hacking and groaning like an old hinge in desperate need of oil. Something wet slops onto the floor. Toshinori only glances momentarily at it, seeing raw fleshy pink and deciding that enough is enough.
He raises his fists, not yet intending to use them, only for warning. He steps closer, calling on One for All as he speaks.
“Please let me escort you off the premises si—“
It does not come.
Toshinori falters, first confused. He shakes his hands a bit as if One for All was just a faulty flashlight needing a bit of persuasion. The being also ceases its aggressive breathing, as if it knows.
The power still doesn’t come.
Toshinori stares at his fists, confusion flickering into panic. He tries to feel that warm white light in the middle of his chest but it’s not there.
His breathing hitches once.
The stranger sucks in another breath, visibly fighting for each one of them. It reaches an arm forward. Toshinori sees crooked fingers extending his way, straightening as much as it’s possible with joints as fucked as those.
He smells decay.
He recoils.
The thing reaches more desperately.
Toshinori turns around and runs.
His feet slap slap slap harsh against the springy linoleum. Blood drums in his ears, louder and faster with each second that the power does not come. Windows pass by, a strobe of beam after beam of orange.
Where is it? Toshinori’s sure he had it yesterday and didn’t give it away. Not even accidentally. Come on. He thumps a fist against his chest, trying to channel the instinctual fear into anger. Come on! Nothing, just some air exiting his lungs. COME ON! Even through his own boiling blood, he hears the breathing. Right on the back of his neck.
COME ON!
Toshinori swats behind his back but his hands find nothing. But there’s still the feeling of warm, moist breaths on his nape so he chances a quick look back but what he sees, fills him with only more panic.
The hallway behind him is endless and empty.
He turns back just in time to avoid crashing into an intersection at full throttle. The base of his palm dents the ridged plastic covering. He pants and pushes himself back up straight, head whipping around to see hallways stretching out left and right, identical to the one behind him.
Only one of them has something standing in it.
No, not standing. Running. Clambering. Towards him.
Discarding all his training, Toshinori panics further and backs away. He knows he should stop and stand his ground. He’s a hero student for god’s sake! That thing looks like a leaky sack of bones. It needs to drag its hand against the wall, leaving a choppy streak of deep red blood just to stay upright. Its chest seems— wrong. Caving in instead of out.
But some deep, predominant instinct tells him that he should run. It’s stronger than Torino’s kicks or Nana’s encouraging words or even his own need to prove.
Toshinori knows with all his heart that if that creature reaches him, he’s doomed.
So he runs. He sprints around corners, crashes into walls, tries to wretch open doors, desperately calling on One for All again and again and again and again—
But there’s nothing there, no white light, no blue lighting, not even an ember. Just him and his quirkless body.
Comeoncomeoncomeon—
And that thing never stops. Its wheezing is near asthmatic now, chunks of entire organic somethings are produced when it hacks and coughs but it does not ease up, even if it’s practically dragging itself on all fours at this point. The smell of decay starts to permeate Toshinori’s nose. It’s sharp, like metal and blood but also rancid like rotting food, sprinkled with the eye-watering sting of disinfectant as if it wanted to hide the stench by pouring bleach all over itself.
Toshinori doesn’t know how long he’s been running. He doesn’t know where he is but it is not UA. He glances out a passing window, entertaining the thought of jumping through it. The sun is still up but the light seems deeper. More red than orange. It bleeds down the walls in sluggish trails. But the ground is so far below and he doesn’t know if he can survive a fall that big quirkless.
He starts to tire. The creature does not. Or maybe it’s long past some untold threshold of tiredness. If it even can get tired. Toshinori bites down on his tongue and sprints faster, ignoring the ache of his lungs with plenty of practice. He can do this all day. He can. He will. He must.
And then, the monotone maze of sterile, straight halls is broken up by a staircase. Toshinori nearly breezes past. He screeches to a stop and backs up, keeping the choppy movement of the thing in his periphery. It starts catching up alarmingly fast, scurrying on the floor like some sort of twig-like insect, limbs bending in all sorts of directions limbs are not supposed to bend.
The staircase is nested in a corner, spiralling and nonsensical like everything else in this godforsaken place. It continues both up and down and when Toshinori looks either way, he can see no difference. Both lead into thick, rusty red, mist-like dust. He hears crashing and sees crooked fingers digging into the angry beige paint at the corner.
He has no time to hesitate. Toshinori jumps on the railing and starts sliding down. It’s always faster to go down.
But he is well aware of what going down means. It means that he’ll eventually reach a bottom. And then he can only pray that there is a way back up.
The spiral seems endless, dizzying, coiling like a serpentine being made of concrete and rusting metal. The light gets deeper, more saturated but no less intense, even though there are no windows and the walls are bare, dirty white. Discolouration spreads on them like lentigines on elderly skin.
Toshinori looks back up to check and indeed, the thing follows. It doesn’t use the stairs properly either. Rather, it uses its impossibly long and awfully bent limbs to descend through the opening like a spider. A daddy long-legs hungry for prey.
Toshinori decides that it is better not to look.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been sliding down. Vertigo starts to set in but nothing he can’t handle due to his training. He hears the thing heaving, hacking, wheezing and wonders why it didn’t collapse from asphyxiation for how arduous breathing seems to be for it.
He tries to find a logical explanation. Maybe it’s an illusion or the work of some emitter-type quirk. But it feels too real. He knows it’s not but he doesn’t know how to break the spell so the best he can do is try to get out of the school and hope that the thing doesn’t follow him home.
Toshinori blinks and the staircase suddenly ends. He flies off the railing, stumbling but already searching for an escape route. There is but one door at the bottom of this staircase-well, a small, cast iron wicket with an old but sturdy padlock sealing the way. Toshinori runs up to it and tries to see if it’s miraculously open but of course, it’s not. He tries to yank it ajar with brute force. It doesn’t even budge. A few flakes of rust fall atop his head. He hears the painful creaking of metal or thing from above but he does not look up.
He takes a step back, breathes in and raises a foot to aim at the padlock, the weakest point. His teeth clank from the impact but it’s nothing without the backing of One for All. He swallows back something awfully like a sob and kicks again. The door dents. A thick chunk of greyish-pink goop schlops onto his shoulder. He yelps, flicking it off and kicking the door again, this time without thought or proper form but it does the job and the door swings open with an earsplitting metallic cry.
The inside is dark.
Toshinori debates only for but a moment before the breathing gets too loud and he decides that the dark is still better than the thing.
It’s not completely pitch black; rather, a stuffy, grim grey with the same particles even more abundant in the air, now appearing off-whiteish. Toshinori identifies it as chalk dust. It makes it hard to breathe. The chalk seems to stick to his mucosal membranes, dry, suffocating. He wonders if that’s why the thing’s having so much trouble. He pushes the door closed behind him but knows that it’s not much of a barrier.
The tunnel is tight, filled with benches, lockers and gym mats as if it was some kind of gymnasium storage basement. Toshinori knows that UA does not have a basement like this. The paint on the walls is layered on thick, all slightly different colours of green and grey, moulding in patches. As Toshinori hurries past, chunks of plaster fall off, revealing raw, red brick.
The boy’s head nearly brushes up against the ceiling. He hunches forward, hearing a clank behind him as the monster squeezes through. The clutter makes it hard to run but he does pick up a hockey stick even though deep down he knows it’s useless.
He’s useless without his quirk.
He sees movement in his peripheral and lashes out, breaking the hockey on a forearm already bent like a bow. The thing does not seem to make a noise of pain but it makes so much noise just by existing, that it’s hard to tell. It ever groans and creaks and slurps and clicks like an organic building about to collapse.
Toshinori eschews another hand, extending too far for it to be natural. He leaps over a balance beam, stumbling into a roll but managing to spring back up. He grabs the edge of a set of lockers and uses all his natural strength to hurl them in the way of the creature. The tunnel is so narrow now that he himself barely fits, let alone that wizened giant . The fluorescent lights above scarce give out any light from how covered in grime they are. Probably full of dead insects albeit Toshinori doesn’t know why he gets that motion.
The Thing creaks louder than the denting metal of the locker now wedged in its way. Toshinori sees those awful, knotted, twig-like fingers squeeze through the crack between the crumbling paint and the old iron. A fingernail gets caught and it flexes horribly before snapping off like the burnt crust of a pastry. Toshinori crabwalks until his back hits something solid.
It’s a wall.
He’s trapped between a wall and that— that—
The opening at the top widens and spindly limbs push themselves through, followed by a head. Toshinori presses against the wall, hoping that he somehow passages through but the uneven texture is as real as the thing squeezing itself through the basement to get him.
Fingers bent in all the wrong ways slowly, tentatively extend towards him like a feeler. Toshinori presses his palm against his mouth but a muffled noise of pure fear still escapes. He sobs, silent and still. He knows it hears him. He knows it knows even if he stays very, very still.
But Toshinori can do nothing else. He, for the first time, catches sight of what the ‘face’ of that monster is like. It’s wrinkled head to toe, not entirely like old, loose skin; more like if someone deeply ironed fold after fold into a thin, papery layer of worn sheets. Its mouth stretches wide, too wide, all too wide, not in a smile or a snarl more as if hooks were embedded into the corners of it, pulled mercilessly tight. It tears at the seams like used wrapping paper, the yellow set of gap-riddled teeth is almost black from the blood, gums a sickly, anaemic dirty white.
But its eyes pierce Toshinori like an insect to a board. They are back or just too shaded by the protruding hairless brows but even if there was something humanoid there, it no longer exists. There’s just an endless, deep darkness in the empty orbits of a skull.
It pushes itself closer, head pulling entire chunks of plastering and leaving behind clumps of frayed grey hair in turn. With every laborious breath comes another twitch, another push, another centimetre lost between them. Its chest -at least what’s visible of it- extends when it exhales and sucks the fabric to each individual outlined rib when it inhales, reminding Toshinori of a working iron lung. He has never seen an iron lung in person but somehow he knows how it feels. How badly that creature must fight for each handful of air. Yet it persists, like mould under the sink, slowly but unstoppably spreading closer.
Toshinori stares at its hands, trying to curl as small as he can so they do not reach him. Or maybe if they do, they think he’s but another lump of dirty gym bags on the ground.
There is horror in the way they shake, slightly but continuously. The way the elbow pokes through the skin. The way it sags on the upper arm as if there used to be more. Stretch marks tiger stripe the already pale flesh with their waxy, fatty white. There are angry reddish-purple needle marks on the underside of it, the only vivid colour on this creature besides the blood. Some seem to be oozing puss.
But it’s the smell that is the worst. It’s not rot, it’s not blood, it is decay.
It is the negligent, sour smell of sickness.
The tip of a middle finger, the one with no longer a nail, brushes up against Toshinori’s bangs and he screams. The entity seems to scream in return but it is soundless, just a futile exhale of air. Toshinori sees a hole in its throat, the skin flapping as air escapes before reaching its vocal cords. The skin around it is infected and inflamed.
He grasps at his throat in empathetic horror, making sure it’s not his throat that’s leaking, not his air that’s escaping, not his mouth that yearns to make a sound of anguish yet cannot. But his scream is dreadful and real.
He tries to get away, go somewhere, anywhere, but there is nowhere to go. The chalk covers the standing hairs on his arms, the walls somehow press against him on all sides and yet the monster, even as it breaks itself to get to him, manages to touch him.
Toshinori kicks a leg out but it’s fast and its grip is iron. He feels something indescribable where the bare skin of him and the thing meet. It spreads. He desperately wedges the broken half of the hockey stick underneath the monster’s palm and manages to pull his leg away. He does not look at it.
Above him, there’s light. A basement window, small, too small for him to squeeze through but Toshinori would rather break every single one of his ribs than stay here with the monster. He shouts again, this time in anger, and pins the hand to a mattress with the broken stick.
Toshinori turns around and up and punches the glass in with his bare hands. He does not care how the shards burrow into his fingers and palm when he pulls himself up. He does not care how horridly his clavicle cracks when he desperately wiggles to get free. He does not care how he feels something brush up against his calf again, he does not care that it could grab him and drag him back to the stale depths of that gymnastic hell, he does not care what he did to deserve this—
Glass rakes his skin and clothes, his ribs and collar bones creak and crack but Toshinori pushes through. He immediately drags himself away from the window, frantically looking for something to block it with. He does not foolishly think that the monster cannot squeeze through even that tiny opening.
There’s a gym mattress propped up by the wall and he scrambles for it to seal the gaping, back rectangle. He swears he catches a flash of blue before he does so. He watches the barrier, breath held back if it will hold but no sound or movement comes from behind.
It does not bring him much relief.
Toshinori slowly, carefully backs up and allows himself a glance to see where he is now. At first, he thinks he’s outside in the courtyard of UA but the rubber under his feet and the symmetrical white lines etching it up say otherwise. The ‘window’ is part of a giant, looming wall of what he recognises as gym Alpha only much, much bigger.
His eye follows the wall upwards as far as possible but the top of this gargantuan auditorium gets lost in the distance with only a few orderly rectangles of muffled lamplight signalling that there is; in fact, a ceiling. Wherever he looks, the same sight greets him. No other walls, no people, no sky or horizon, only a neutral, droning grey mist, cold and impersonal. But at least it isn’t dark. Distantly, he can hear the ventilators working but once again, the only other sound is his now entirely dishevelled breathing.
Toshinori does not call out. He learned his lesson. He takes a few moments to collect himself as much as one can and checks his leg where the monster’s iron grip marked him but he finds nothing, only smooth, blond-haired skin.
This must be a quirk. Or a dream. Or a dream quirk. Nightmare quirk, more appropriately.
Toshinori closes his eyes and pinches himself. When he opens them, he’s still in this inside-outside space, mist curling by his legs. He doesn’t feel cold, strangely. At least the smell is gone. He never wants to experience that stench again. Instead, the air is stale but not overwhelmingly so, filled with the familiar scents of a gym. Rubber, old sweat and chalk.
Toshinori hesitates for a second and then punches himself in the face. It hurts and he doesn’t wake which confirms that it’s not an ordinary dream but that is worse. His body is full of shards but none of them embedded that deep so he tenuously picks them out while he starts advancing by the only visible wall. He gently presses his collar bone, biting down a hiss and confirming that something is indeed cracked but it’s by far not the worst injury he had to keep pushing on with.
All in all, he’s alive and free of that monster for now. He tries to keep an optimistic outlook. Every nightmare has to end eventually. He’ll wake up eventually. Eventually, it’ll all go away.
He comes across discarded pieces of equipment, familiar equipment he used often while training but nothing that could tell him why he’s here. The wall stretches on endlessly, no sign of a door or even another window. The light seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. No breeze, no sun, nothing to orient himself by. It’s all just echoing air. His sneakers squeak on the polished plastic loud enough that if there is something someone here, they for sure know where he is by now.
Eventually, of course, Toshinori hears something. He immediately freezes, shimmying up against the wall. Coward. He ignores the inner voice that sounds almost like Torino. He holds his breath back, listening as intensely as humanly possible. Weasel. It’s distant and different from the sound he fears. Heroes have no fear, Toshinori. That doesn’t entirely sound like the voice of Torino. He swallows something bitter and listens harder.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Something heavy hitting something soft. Soft in the fleshy sort of way. Again and again and again.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Toshinori turns and starts retreating oppositely. Coward. Someone whimpers. It’s definitely coming from the direction of the rhythmic thudding. Toshinori pretends he doesn’t hear it. Pathetic. He pretends he doesn’t know what that sound is exactly.
Someone’s fist meeting someone’s face.
Even if it is what he knows it is, Toshinori can do nothing to help quirkless. He turns away. Useless. He starts walking. You wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway. He walks stiff and hasty but careful not to make more noise than he already does.
There’s a gurgle, almost like a plea. Toshinori’s leg stops. He didn’t order it to stop yet it does. Thud. Thud. Thud. Whoever’s making that awful rhythmic sound is relentless. They don’t care for the gurgles or the whimpers. Thud. Thump. Squelch. That last one sounds like an entire something squashing.
Toshinori is walking toward the noise. Not him, not his brain, but his body. His brain is screaming at him not to. But he’s a hero. His body might not be a hero’s but his heart is. And if there’s even a sliver of a chance that someone is in need of help, then he must help them.
The noise gets louder but no less repetitive. The poles and climbing ropes and basketballs give way to boxes and crates and sealed containers. One of them is broken and behind the jagged teeth of the burnt wood, something metallic peeks out. Handguns. Toshinori doesn’t question it. Nor does he question the bags of white taped shut or the heaps of glassy red vials with a needle at the end, filled with a viscous liquid. The thumping is so loud, he feels each travel up his feet and rattle the marrow in his spine. There’s a huge crate in the way, the biggest one yet and behind it—
That is not a human.
That is— that is meat. It bulges in every possible direction, pink flesh fused with what was once some sort of colourful covering, perhaps latex. Now it’s a deep, browning grey from either dirt or mud or blood. There’s no point in telling. The tears in the ridged coating cut into the flesh underneath. It bursts through them like a growth. It’s enormous, no, more than enormous. It is gargantuan.
It’s inhuman.
Each time the colossus reels its dinner plate hand back, the body of it groans heavily as if it could hardly take the weight of its own flesh.
And what that fist meets with—
It’s no more human than the thing ploughing it. It’s a mere assortment of slimy, black matter, almost like tentacles stacked in the shape of a human. As if someone from the fish market took all the rotten squid and mushed it together into this formless heap of mucous muck.
One of the appendages twitches in Toshinori’s direction. He jostles back, managing to stop the scream but that’s enough for the other to notice him.
The thud thud thud stops.
The plastic-fuzed skin squeals as the titan slowly turns its head to look at Toshinori, fist still raised, ready to continue pummelling whatever that other sordid thing might be. Or to start on Toshinori.
It’s all teeth. White this time. Lots of them. Lots and lots and lots. Its hair is slicked back, a bang standing up like an antennae. This one has eyes, almost proper eyes. They are blue, exactly like Toshinori’s. But other than that, they share nothing in common.
It arises, each movement felt through the tremble in the earth. Steam pushes out from its pores and wounds. When it has risen completely, towering over Toshinori twice as much as that sick, spidery thing did, he sees the wound.
Intestines ebb out from the gaping hole on the left side of its abdomen. They drape on the floor, between its legs. The hole extends up, jagged and uneven like when you punch a pen through paper. Ribs, broken and bent, tent the skin-latex outwards. With every, rumbling breath, the plastic gets sucked inwards. But there’s nothing behind it. Torn fibres of enormous chunks of muscle hang uselessly by its sides. They are thicker than Toshinori’s forearm yet look like mere strings on the giant. It looks similar to a gutted ragdoll.
It doesn’t bother with picking its guts up. They drag wetly on the floor as the titan takes a thunderous step towards Toshinori. Even the sound of that squelching feels angry.
Toshinori nearly pisses himself right then and there. He crashes against the big crate, wheezing from terror. The beast raises its arms, making half a squeezing motion.
There’s so much wrath in that one, tiny twitch of bloody fingers. Toshinori has never felt wrath like this before, scorching on his skin like a lick of flame.
This thing has killed.
It has killed and it enjoyed it.
The beast opens its oh-so-straight set of pearly whites. Blood pours out. Rivers of it. It mixes with the serosa of his abdomen and flows back inside just to trickle out somewhere else. There are more than enough holes to choose from. The intestines undulate on the ground, slowly drying out. One of them gets caught on some rubble and tears.
Toshinori feels the stench in the back of his throat. He retches, scrambling around the crate and running once more like his life depends on it. It very much does.
But this one is slow. It gets left behind soon. It has too much mass.
Not for long, Toshinori thinks for some reason.
Yet he runs, crying, barely able to see what’s in front of him. He thinks he calls out for Torino, maybe even for his mother but he’s not sure. The sounds of distress blur into one another.
The ground starts to become uneven. He trips, falling and getting up without caring to look at what he tripped on. It’s nothing good. The unevenness of the ground becomes worse, the gym floor making hoops and ripples that look almost like— roots.
Toshinori trips again, feeling the course yet warm bark under his fingers. It’s slick with some vicious crud that stays stuck to his hands even after he repeatedly wipes them on his uniform.
He doesn’t know when he got out of gym Alpha but not like he’s any smarter for it. The mist ever coils, near completely enveloping his legs, making it even harder to manoeuvre this rising forest of roots.
At least he finally seems to be outside. The sun is up, the most vicious blood red Toshinori has ever seen. In the distance, thunder roars, black and purple, all the colours a sky shouldn’t be. Distantly, he hears the sound of waves crashing against a shore but he sees no water anywhere. He ducks under a root that’s as thick as him. He relentlessly climbs upwards, the weave of barren bark too steep to see what’s ahead.
He sees something that looks like a pale grey leaf at first. It is not. It’s a hand, dead and fused to the bark. Toshinori takes extra effort not to touch it but there’s more. There’s always more. It’s never over.
Above him, something shades the angry crimson and indigo sky. Something big.
Toshinori heaves and drags his battered self up another hill of a root, witnessing a tree.
A cedar. He knows because it’s his favourite kind. He knows because that is what Nana calls him when there are just the two of them. Sugi. Cedar. Sunshine. Sunbeam. Toshi. Son.
Bodies hang on the tree. Toshinori counts six of them before he catches sight of a seventh. It’s not an entire body, just another hand, sticking out of the trunk at the base of the enormous plant.
It’s gloved in yellow.
He forgets his tiredness in a millisecond. Toshinori clambers through this sea of roots, not caring if he tramples a few hand-leaves in the process. They crunch and crack dry under his feet, exactly like real leaves would.
He runs up to the trunk, bigger and thicker than any other cedar he’s seen before. He couldn’t reach around it even with the help of fifteen of himself. Not that Toshinori cares. All he cares about is grabbing that hand and feeling its warmth.
He yanks, hesitant at first. Of course, the hand, her hand, doesn’t budge. He pulls harder, wedging a foot against the surface. It sinks into it somewhat, telling that this bark is soft. Rotten. From the inside.
Toshinori momentarily lets go of Nana’s hand and pries his broken fingernails into the wood. He pushes and strips this soft, malleable bark that reveals a stringy, pink, almost gum-like inner filling. It’s so awfully, horridly, unbearably lukewarm.
Yet Toshinori perseveres even with bile in his throat and tears in his eyes. He might not have been able to save all those other people but he can save this one. He can. He will. He must.
He reaches into the pink glob, trailing along Nana’s arm, finding the body attached to it. He grabs some piece of fabric and pulls, nearly climbing into the tree himself. It doesn’t retaliate but it seems to groan and pulse as he pulls his master out of it.
Toshinori grunts when he takes the full weight of Nana, turning around and laying her on a relatively level patch of roots. Above him, the bodies sway gently. The pink sap sticks to absolutely everything of his. It smells— Toshinori doesn’t want to describe it. It’s sweet but in a bad way.
But he doesn’t care about any of that, the sap, the bodies, the tree, this place, this nightmare. He has Nana. He shakes her shoulders, trying to rouse her. She’s breathing, he can see that much. But she doesn’t wake. Toshinori shakes harder. She doesn’t respond. Toshinori yells.
“Master! Shimura! Nana, please wake up, please, Nana p-please, I don’t know what’s happening, I-I don’t know where we are, what to do, how to make it A-A-Okay, I’m— I’m scared mom ple-a-se—“
Nana’s eyes snap open and an iron grip seizes Toshinori mid-plea. Steely grey meets desperate blue.
“N-Nana?…”
“As you should be.”
Toshinori gets confused. “A-as I s-should be?…”
She suddenly grabs both his shoulders, hold becoming oppressive. It stresses his broken breastbone further.
“Scared.”
Toshinori tries to squirm away but to no avail. He feels the spark of One for All in that relentless grip. Somehow, it brings dread instead of comfort.
“N-Nana please, you’re hurting m-me—“
One of her bangs, previously covering her left eye falls away to reveal a caveat. Pieces of dirt and hair cling to it, surrounding the empty orbit. The eye has long since popped and oozed out. Toshinori sees brain. He feels brain on his fingertips, mushy and malleable between the crisps of cranial bone.
“N-Nana! Your— y-yo-ur—“
“Look at what he did to me, Toshinori.”
“W-who—“
“Look at what you did. He did this because of you . If I didn’t have to protect you, he never would have found us.”
“I’m s-sorry Nana, I’m so sor-ry—“
“It’s not me who you should be sorry for.”
Toshinori watches, helpless, always helpless while his mother’s skin melts and transforms, becoming lighter, freckled, green curls instead of black locks, one large, juniper eye staring back at him, judging him. The hole remains.
“M-Midoriya?” he asks, voice suddenly deep and rasp. Roughened by years and years of laughing in the face of danger. And then years and years of laughing and coughing in the face of death.
The boy’s grip goes lax. His hands, white and gloved, just like Nana’s, fall by his sides. The hole in his face still doesn’t disappear. Toshinori distinctly remembers him not having a hole in the face.
He shakes his successor, far too panicked to be gentle.
“Midoriya, my boy, are you all right?”
Glassy eyes stare back at him somewhat. He grasps a hand and feels the lightest of twitches.
“A-all M—“
“Yes, it’s me my boy, my dear boy, it’s okay, I am here, we’ll get you help, okay my boy, okay Izuku, stay with me, I’ll get you out of here—”
“You can’t.”
Toshinori’s head snaps up, dreading that voice. He hears that voice in his worst nightmares. The ones he would take any medication to escape.
But where All for One should stand only stands him.
“You can’t help him,” All Might says. He’s young and imposing, bursting with power and life. His eyes are the coldest blue, like steel in the moonlight. “You did this to him.”
“I didn’t know— I-I didn’t know All for One was still…. I thought I— P-please you have to— you have to he—“
Toshinori’s voice cuts off. He grasps at his throat. There’s a hole in it and there’s a tube in that. He chokes and grabs the end, trying to pull it out. Midoriya is still under him, the only real colour on him is Toshinori’s fresh blood as he fervently tears the breathing tube out of his trachea.
He tosses it aside and tries to get up.
His past self just watches, arms crossed, expression unimpressed.
Toshinori tears a handful of IVs out of his arm but there always seems to be more. He rips dozens of electrodes off his chest, bringing inflamed, old skin with them. He’s covered in fentanyl patches, in suffusions and bruises from the needles, in bedsores from laying on a gurney for months and months. He becomes like the starched white sheets, brittle and crinkled from misuse. Soon they’ll mistake him for an empty bed and put somebody else in his place, suffocating him entirely.
Tubes are going in and out of everywhere. It’s painful and distressing and humiliating. There’s a thick bundle of them around his left side, disappearing inside him like the cables of a server room. As if all that kept him powered up, kept him alive, was being plugged into a wall like a machine.
Toshinori scowls and grabs a bunch of them, pulling on the ridged tubes to separate them from his body. They have no business being in there. He pulls and pulls but never seems to reach the end of them. Just more sterile plastic and metal covered in pinkish-yellow secretion. He tries to twist them off but they always bounce back. Toshinori sees something flowing inside the milky plastic but he can’t tell if it’s flowing in or out.
He waddles through the labyrinth of hospital curtains, always hearing whispers, seeing silhouettes behind them but never catching anyone on the other side.
He won’t make it.
Even if he does, he’ll be crippled for life.
Have you seen his results? That is a dead man walking.
He broke the CPAP machine again. We need to sedate him.
We should just put him out of his misery.
No.
Toshinori stumbles, waving a hand at the voices, warding away all that.
No.
He grasps his side, fingers digging into the sensitive flesh. Artificial skin bunches up underneath his bony, desperate fingers. Rerouted vessels pop like bloody cysts.
Not yet.
He digs in, trying to find that Thing. That disease. He’ll find it and rip it out and he’ll be A-Okay again. Midoriya will never have to face what he did. His boy will never be afraid like he was.
He sees an outline, a familiar one. There you are, he thinks fervently.
Toshinori wheezes and pops and groans and creaks as he drags himself through the mud and blood and sweat and tears to reach that light. That bright, white ember of youth he oh-so-desperately needs.
He reaches and reaches and the figure turns. Toshinori sees himself, young, eyes going wide, face paling, mouth opening in a scream—
Toshinori wakes up, nearly hitting Midoriya in the head as he jolts upright.
“A-All Might! I didn’t— I shouldn’t— I’m sorry I-I was just going to check if—“
He tries to grab his side but his hand is in a cast. His side is also in a cast. Everything is in a cast. Everything is there, held together by plaster and gauze except—
“It’s not here.”
“All Might?”
“I-It’s not here,” he repeats, voice cracking. “It’s n-not—“
Toshinori cannot finish that sentence. He looks at his other hand, also bandaged. He closes and opens his fist, grasping at nothing. He feels— empty.
No more embers, no more white light, no more blue lightning, no more power, no more purpose, no more—
There’s a hand in his. Small, riddled with scars despite the baby soft skin. A few green freckles stand out against the pale white. It grasps his palm, squeezing it, barely being able to reach around it.
Toshinori looks up, and through the film of his tears, he sees Midoriya crying too. But he’s also smiling.
“You did it A-All Might you— you lived.”
Toshinori squeezes his successor’s hand back and feels the touch of that bright, bright light.
Maybe it’s going to be A-Okay after all.