Chapter Text
For what feels like years, Izuku isn’t aware of anything but a smell.
He couldn’t say what it was, exactly. It came and went, bringing a warmth and comfort with it that was more important than the scent notes themselves. Maybe it’s musky, maybe it smells like coffee or leather or sweat or mint. It brings to mind a flower, once, but his mind is too cloudy and distant to think about it, or why he always recognizes it even when it changes. All Izuku knows is that it’s stronger at some times than others, and the only times he truly feels fear or confusion is when the smell is gone.
Eventually light enters the world, too, and that smell brings with it blurry shapes. There is no colour here yet, just lights and darks, but soon after there is a voice, and with the voice a massive, soft hand.
“Izuku, Izuku, I’m here.” The voice is rumbly and soft, full of love. Izuku yearns to turn towards it but he's too warm, too tired. He tries to respond but he is too weak to speak, managing only to make an odd gurgling sigh.
Through the fog, too far away for him to make out, he thinks he can sense a smile.
It’s only when his ears strengthen enough to notice other sounds that Izuku finally realises that he is dead.
In his defence, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been paying attention. It would be more accurate to say that he hadn’t really understood anything going on at all before then. In the strange half-aware space he inhabited there hadn’t really been room for thoughts, just as there wasn’t yet room for colours or depth. But suddenly there was a rhythmic thumping, an unfamiliar voice, a pattern.
Realising that it was music was one of the first tangible thoughts Izuku had formed in ages, followed closely by ‘how long has it been since i last heard this song?’.
And like a crack in a damn, a million other questions rush in.
Where am I?
Why can’t I see?
Who is holding me?
What is happening?
The answer came just as quickly, his wailing sobs shushed by a loving smile, massive hands wrapping gently around a head he couldn’t hold up by himself. His own hands are tiny and clumsy, out of his own control as he completely fails to wipe his tears away.
“Izuku, Izuku, It’s okay, don’t cry..!” the voice tells him, stress in the crack of their voice, long pale hair tickling Izuku’s ear as he is pressed cheek-to-cheek with a stranger. “It’s okay, I’ve got you, I’m right here!”
Dead.
Izuku had died.
Died and been born again as someone else– someone with a different mom, a different body, a whole different life.
He couldn’t remember dying– for a terrifying moment he thinks that he can’t remember anything at all, can’t even remember his own face, the face of his mother–
But then he remembers Kacchan, and all the rest follows.
- ´¯`•. ᶜ𝔲ᶜ𝐊σｏ .•´¯`•
Izuku is constantly assaulted by the almost-visible phantoms of the world around him, faces that will only momentarily come close enough to see, and what feels like an ocean of peasoup fog between him and everything else. Time slips between his stubby fingers, as difficult to grasp as his tenuous hold on consciousness . Sleep hits him suddenly and without warning, and he’s as likely to wake up somewhere unfamiliar as he is atop his mothers chest.
His new mother.
There was nothing else the stranger could be. Some unfortunate person that had birthed him and promised to raise him but who had no idea what they were holding. It felt voyeuristic to listen to her sing (loud, often and well) while she cooked. It felt borderline cruel to receive the loving words she meant to go to someone else, but Izuku could hardly lift his own head, let alone rebuff her.
There is nothing else that Izuku can do in this new life but worry and remember. In his mind he recites times tables and hero names, historical events and facts about every animal he can remember.
“Izuku-Izuku, breakfast time!”
There is a particular type of bird called the cuckoo bird.
They are obligate brood parasites— which means that they can't raise their own young, instead hiding their eggs in the nest of a host species. They do this many different ways, some by laying eggs that looked similar to the host eggs, others by laying dark eggs in a dark nest with the hope that the new mother won’t notice it there until it hatched.
“Izuku-Izuku— aren’t you hungry, baby?”
The cuckoo's egg is usually bigger than the others, with a thicker, harder shell. It is that way in case the host mother tried to damage it— though they rarely did, when the cuckoo parents could be waiting nearby to exact revenge. Most birds will raise the egg willingly to protect their own eggs from being destroyed— though that never turns out well for them in the end.
But really, the way that a cuckoo bird got away with its parasitism was the fact that most birds weren't smart enough to tell the difference.
“Izuku-Izuku— don’t you want to play?”
The woman worries for the child she believes is her own, reads to him, spends what feels like huge portions of her day trying to get him to eat, to move around, to look up. The world moves around Izuku in a blur, appearing and disappearing, but he knows that he is brought to see doctors. Laid on cold metal tables while men with surgical masks leaned over him and administered shots.
“He looks like a perfectly healthy twelve week old.”
Doctors shake toys in front of him, make loud noises and pinch at his toes, and Izuku cries but not from the pain.
“Physically healthy for a fifteen week old– but he’s a little bit behind developmentally.”
She worries that he’s sick, that he’s hungry, that he hurts and has no way to tell her. He hears her saying over the phone that she thinks Izuku might be deaf, and the next time she claps he makes some small effort to react. It’s the least he can do for her- the literal least, but it’s all he really has. He knows that she deserves more.
Unlike Inko, his new mother never cries in front of him, and he’s glad for that, but sometimes the concentric red circles of her eyes shine a little too much. Sometimes her melodious voice cracks in a way that breaks his heart. His new life had just started and already he was making another mother miserable.
(He can’t help but wonder if she was happier with Izuku finally gone. If she’d moved on with her life, if she breathed a sigh of relief.)
(He can’t help but wonder how he died.)
“For him to be this low-energy at eighteen weeks is unusual, Yamada-san. If he doesn't improve soon I may need to schedule a welfare visit…”
She starts doing exercises with him– taking his feet in her hands and pulling and pushing them in the air like he's running, making up a story about escaping villains, before switching to his hands and stretching them out to slap and punch at her palms, or theatrically bopping them against his toys. “Izu-punch!” she cries, making a silly sound effect as it flies through the air.
It's stupid, embarrassing and a little bit pathetic to be on the receiving end of, but her earnest acting pulls a laugh from him anyways. He doesn't realise that it's the first time he has laughed for her until she smiles and laughs too.
- ´¯`•. ᶜ𝔲ᶜ𝐊σｏ .•´¯`•
The exercises help.
His emotional state improves when he’s capable of sitting up on his own and looking at whatever interests him. Being more present in his body slows down the time skips as well, and though he has no desire to experience this life (a second life, a rebirth, a mistake) he does feel a little more sane when he can exist anywhere outside his own head. The next few doctors appointments go well, and when he can finally crawl around on his own the doctor declares him healthy.
‘Nothing to worry about after all– you're Izuku is just a late bloomer.’
(Will I always be hearing that?)
He can’t take joy in any of it, but at least there is distraction. Izuku finally has access to all his senses and some amount of bodily autonomy, and when opportunity presents itself he is eager to act.
Left alone in the living room in front of some terrible baby show, Izuku pulls the remote towards him with clumsy arms, jamming his fist against the buttons until he finds the Hero News Network.
“--rampage through downtown Tokyo, but fortunately Best Jeanist was on the scene!”
It's soft and quiet but he turns the sound down anyways, eyes shining as he absorbs the video. He had only hijacked the tv once before, a less suspicious feat he felt confident his mother wouldn’t notice. She was on the phone, after all, and Izuku had been itching for this all day. Some older people at the grocery store that morning had been talking about this attack, but when Izuku had turned to look at them they had stopped talking to gush over him instead.
Watching the Fiber Hero control the giant villain with threads so thin they didn't even show up on camera was so much more interesting than anything else he’d done since waking up here. Best Jeanist’s quirk was incredible, more specifically his ability to wield it. Izuku's hands itch to write, but he contented himself with simply absorbing for now, memorising each swing of his long and elegant arms and the way that he directed the impact of the villain with flicks of his fingers. He looked beautiful as he did it, powerful and in control. The impact left the villain bruised and bloodied but Jeanist himself didn’t have a hair out of place.
“Oh no, how did you do that!?” his mother strides in, long legs and long blonde hair, phone still clutched in her hand but the screen gone dark. Izuku only briefly glances her way, wondering if in this life he might too one day be built like that. On the screen the villain is being loaded into the back of the police van, snarling at the officers through a mouth of shark-like teeth and blood. “Did you roll over on the remote? I guess I’ll have to be careful about that– Let's get back to Mr. Fruitpie before this violent crap gives you nightmares.”
She reaches for the remote and Izuku panics.
There weren’t many options to redirect her, and if she put it somewhere too high he wouldn’t be able to get it again. He could handle not being able to watch television, but another afternoon of Mr. Fruitpie might really break him.
So with only a second to think, Izuku breaks out the bullet he had loaded into his chamber some days ago– the cutest thing he was capable of doing that would completely distract her from the television. He holds up his arms as she gets close, smiles as much as he’s capable of without any teeth, and cries out the word he was sure she most wanted to hear.
“Mama!”
He expected tears. He expected to be swept up into his mothers arms, to be kissed on the head and cradled and to spend the rest of the day being cajoled into a repeat performance. He imagines that she will associate the word with the Hero News Network playing, that she would maybe leave it on for the day to keep Izuku in a talkative mood.
He doesn't expect her stricken and horrified look, for her to immediately draw her hands back from him. “Mama!?” she says, like Izuku was a stranger on the street and not her own flesh and blood. “I’m not your Mama! Where did you even get that!?”
Shame immediately rushes through Izuku, hot and uncomfortable. The realities of his current body and limitations meant that Izuku had spent these last few months beyond a place where he could feel anything like embarrassment. Frustrated, miserable, scared, angry– those came up, often and overwhelmingly, but embarrassment hadn’t once reared its head.
His eyes prick with tears as she looks at him like the monster he is, as she denies him the only connection he’d had (since dying) since waking up here.
If a host species realized that a cuckoo had invaded their nest they most likely would reject it. If they noticed that the egg was too large, or its colour too dark— it could even happen after the egg had hatched, when they looked down at its red and demanding mouth and saw that it wasn’t like their own. After weeks spent carefully tending it they would push it over the side of the nest, allowing it to break its neck on the cold ground below.
His new mother does not reject him, but Izuku can’t help but cry as though she had.
She kneels in front of him, gathers him up in her arms, kisses his head. She rocks him back and forth, sings him a song, and when none of it works she tries to reason with his tears instead, telling him ‘Just because I’m not your mom doesn't mean I don’t love you! Izuku-Izuku, don't cry, don't cry! You can call me Hizashi if you want to, okay?
Izuku doesn’t even want her as a mom, he doesn’t love her at all. He misses his own mother so terribly and there wasn't a single person in the world that could replace her in his mind.
But he cries anyways, until there aren't any tears left to cry, until he's limp and exhausted and laid down on the floor again to rest. His mother walks away and he can hear her on the phone, can hear her cry just as he had cried. She tells the unseen person on the other end that Izuku would never speak again when she had reacted so poorly to his first words.
But she leaves The Hero News Network on, so at least there is distraction.
- ´¯`•. ᶜ𝔲ᶜ𝐊σｏ .•´¯`•
Izuku seriously considered never talking again.
It would be easier than carefully hitting growth milestones he was only halfway aware of. Easier than playing dumb for months or years– however long it took for the quirk or magic that was affecting him now to wear off, or for this body to grow into something that anyone would want to hold a conversation with.
It also felt like a fitting punishment for ‘Hizashi’, who spent the days after the incident trying to get him to talk again. Lifting items and naming them, repeating them, asking for Izuku to parrot them back while Izuku simply stared.
It’s as Hizashi is dropping him off at daycare (a weird and colourful building with weird and colourful attendants, none of which Izuku knew by name) that he realizes he might have been in the wrong.
“I’ll be back soon, baby,” his mother says as she hands him off. She seemed to keep an odd and irregular schedule, sometimes spending what felt like weeks without work and other times rushing away in the middle of the day or night. “Just a few hours, be good okay?”
“We’ll take him from here, Yamada-san!” The woman holds Izuku carefully as always, but this time she takes his wrist in her own, flapping it as though he were waving. “Izu-chan, say ‘bye bye’ to Daddy!”
Izuku doesn’t, of course, but the words stick with him, and when he is picked up a few hours later and brought back home he stares at the stranger he called his mother in thought. Big hands, big smile, tired eyes… He didn’t know much about Yamada-san, really. It occurs to him suddenly that she’s very young, maybe only 5 or 6 years older than Izuku had been before he ended up here. He notices, too, that the apartment he is carried up into is very small. The curtains are cheap and colourful, with loud tacky patterns, and the bed she collapses into at the end of the day is unmade, with mismatched sheets.
Yamada-san lays atop the wrinkled blankets, large glasses perched on her nose and Izuku sits beside her and really looks at her for the first time.
“...Dada?” he asks, forming the sound carefully for the first time.
His eyes pop open– because he is a man, isn’t he? Flat chested with stubble across his jaw, his body so tall that his boots hang off the edge of the bed– but he doesn't panic this time, his voice kept low and soothing. “I’m not your dad either, sweetheart,” he says, and this time it’s frustration bringing tears to the corner of Izuku’s eyes, and a little bit of disappointment. “Hey hey, don’t be upset! It’s just that name is reserved for your real dad, and I don’t want to take it from him! He’ll want it when he comes back, you know?”
Whoever his father was had never once come around in this life. They didn’t deserve the title of ‘dad’, especially compared to the man that had been caring for him all this time. Whoever Hizashi was to Izuku– to this new and unfamiliar, reborn version of Izuku– he deserved a name of his own.
(And if Izuku can’t stand to think about being abandoned once again by a second unseen father, another man he had only heard about and never met, he buries it.)
“Mama,” he says with finality. Whoever Hizashi was to him, he was acting as a new mother and deserved the title. There had been no arguments about ‘that name belongs to your real mother’ so there must not have been one in this life. Dead, abandoned or the result of a surrogate, whatever had brought this new version of Izuku into the world was a mystery, so he would have to make his own judgments.
Hizashi was acting as his mother, so he would call her- call him that until he was given a good reason to do otherwise.
- ´¯`•. ᶜ𝔲ᶜ𝐊σｏ .•´¯`•
To his credit Hizashi gets with the program pretty fast.
Within a week he is used to the new way of things. He stops protesting his new title, and even catches on to Izuku’s clear television preferences, strapping Izuku into his bouncy seat in front of the tv as soon as they walk through the door. “Hero News for Baby,” he says, dutifully turning the sound up just high enough for Izuku to hear before kicking off his boots. “Aaand a shower for Mama. God my back hurts…”
A minute later the sound of the water running fills the apartment. Hizashi kept the door open when he showered and cracked when he used the bathroom, despite the fact that Izuku never really managed to get into any trouble.
‘Maybe he’s afraid of kidnappers,’ Izuku mused, leaning forward in his seat to watch today's Takedown Top Ten. ‘Not like he could do anything about it, anyways.’
Today had been an unusually exciting day, apparently. While most days were filled with car chases and purse snatchers, this countdown is primarily all from the same singular raid on an underground fighting ring.
Izuku watches with wide, fascinated eyes as a dozen heroes, ones he knows as well as those that only seem vaguely familiar, let loose their signature moves. (Name several heroes)
The best part is the moment when Present Mic appears on screen. He is heralded by a burst of sound so loud that the camera recording it glitches out, barely managing to catch sight of his gigantic target collapsing to the ground with bleeding ears.
Izuku can’t help but get a little bit hyped. Present Mic had always been one of his personal favourite heroes and he didn’t get as much attention as he really deserved. Probably because of his overpowered quirk—- the sheer magnitude of what it could do was never able to be used at its full potential, both for the safety of the villain, whoever was holding the camera, and also the structural integrity of the surrounding area.
There were a few carefully controlled demonstrations of his quirk from early in his career that helped him get the attention he deserved. It was short lived, though, as he eventually got a job at UA that more or less put an end to the type of work that got you on the Top Ten Takedown.
Izuku had stars in his eyes as he watched the instant replay. They had an analyst doing commentary about how his quirk worked, and it was pretty basic info, the same stuff people had been saying for ages, so it’s easy to tune it out.
“Aww kicking your feet, little buddy?” Hizashi coos as he walks out of the bathroom in pink pajamas with his hair wrapped up in a towel. “It’s so cute how much you like the news. Gonna grow up to be a little journalist someday?”
“Mama! Mama!” Izuku waves his hands towards the tv in his best approximation of ‘cute baby movements’. Hizashi was going to miss the best part, and if Izuku had the chance to make a Present Mic fan out of him he would happily take it.
Hizashi looks at the tv, smiling as Present Mic flipped over a telekinetically controlled car the villains were using as a battering ram. “Yes yes I see,” he says placatingly, tugging Izuku out of his seat and pressing him against his side. His skin was overly warm and a little sticky with after-shower damp, but Izuku doesn’t mind it when they step closer to the television.
“Mama!” Izuku slaps his shoulder urgently, trying to make Hizashi watch the screen as Present Mic uses a howl that literally shakes apart the flying car before rushing through the hole to punch the villain in the face in a one-blow knockout.
Hizashi wasn’t paying the screen any mind though, just smiling at Izuku with a dopey sort of love. “That’s right, Izuku~, that’s Mama!”
..
..
What?
The report changes to the next hero almost as soon as those words leave Hizashi’s lips, so Izuku is left to process them alone.
It had to be true. There was no reason for Hizashi to lie to him, and his expression as he said it was painfully earnest. It also made sense, in a way— the daycare he attended was pretty clearly outside of Hizashi's single-parent budget, but Izuku had once read about heroes having a special all-hours service for childcare. Putting them somewhere normal would put the other children at risk if a villain decides to retaliate against a hero who arrested them, so the HPSC covered the bill.
It explained the odd hours Hizashi kept as well, and how tired he was when he came home. It explained the random bruising he sometimes wore, and maybe it was even a clue about the very odd custody arrangement that Izuku seemed to have been born into.
But…
But it didn’t make sense at all, actually! Hizashi was far too young to be Present Mic! By at least 10 years, if not more! Too poor by far, as even if the hero was frivolous with his money he’d been in the top 100 last Izuku had checked. He should have, at the very least, been comfortable.
Izuku finds the answer almost the exact minute he knows to look for it.
It had been all around him, written on cereal boxes and milk cartons, one screen away on Hizashi’s large, clunky phone, and even in the bottom corner of the screen of Izuku's precious Hero Report.
The date.
Just under a year from the day Izuku was born.
Thirteen years in the past.
When his birthday comes around (a party with only his mother and an oversized cupcake) Izuku is able to confirm it.
He had been born the same day as in his previous life, with the same first name, the same hair and freckles and all of his memories.
Izuku‘s soul had not been reincarnated, as he had resigned himself to accepting. He had not moved on to a new body after death. His real mother wasn’t out there somewhere mourning him, and there was no tombstone with his name waiting for Izuku to visit it.
Instead, when Izuku died, time had rewound entirely. His consciousness was reborn somewhere else, like a video game character respawning in a new safe location.
Izuku wasn’t quirkless after all— he never had been.
It was an immortality quirk.
It was the sort of thing he had always dreamed of, but somehow he didn’t feel all that lucky.