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There’s a beach. People throw their garbage there, old appliances and broken things, empty bottles, wrappers and trash. It piles up so high you can’t see the ocean.
Izuku stops there every day after school.
It’s not on his way home. It’s not even a detour, it’s in entirely the opposite direction.
He doesn’t want to go there, but he does.
He walks out of school, bag heavy with books and mind heavy with thoughts, intending to walk straight home, and his feet take him to the beach.
The first time it happens he’s… ten? Eleven? Wandering aimlessly, one arm burnt red and the sleeve of his uniform torn. He doesn’t want to see the face his mom will make at the sight.
The trash pile is just a trash pile to him, then.
Maybe there is something to it, under the surface, that makes him veer off the road and start climbing, but maybe he’s just tired and scared and wants to go somewhere he isn’t likely to meet people.
He climbs until he reaches the top, and then he climbs down until he reaches the ocean, stepping carefully on precariously balanced broken things.
It takes his mind off things, to climb the garbage pile. When he has to focus on his feet and his handholds every moment, so he won’t fall or cut himself, he can’t think about anything else. Not his mom’s worry. Not school. Not Kacchan, or his burning hands.
Izuku lets his mind fill with old appliances, the way they balance and set, and where it is and isn’t safe to step, and in the background, in the cracks between his thoughts, the sound of waves grows.
He climbs one slow, painstaking step at a time, until he isn’t thinking at all but for the next handhold, the next step, the even, hissing drone of the waves, and then it ends. He stands at the edge of the world, waves lapping at his toes and roaring in his ears, and he is entirely hidden by the pile of dead things at his back.
He stands there for a long time. The tide is slow, almost hesitant to touch him, but the water is up to his ankles by the time the sky flares red in sunset.
It jolts him back to reality, and he shakes the water out of his shoes and runs. Around the pile, this time, not over it, and then all the way home.
His mom is in hysterics when he finally gets there, crying so much her sleeves are almost as soaked as his shoes are. She nearly called the police, she says. Where has he been?
He isn’t sure. He doesn’t feel like he spent any time at all on the beach. It feels like he spent a lifetime there. He says something vague about getting lost, because he thinks he might have, and she cries so hard he starts crying too, in sympathy.
His tears taste like the ocean.
He eats a bite or two, because by all means he should be hungry, even if he doesn’t feel like it, and then he goes to bed.
He doesn’t dream.
It doesn’t take a week before he goes back.
The waves left something in his head. That’s the first thing he notices.
He wakes up, and his head is filled with white noise, crowding out his thoughts. He moves through his morning in a haze, putting his pants on backwards twice before he gets it right, almost forgetting to eat breakfast, and he’s halfway to school before he remembers that his sleeve is still torn.
He folds it up and hopes no one notices.
It gets better, through the day. The white noise stays, a faint noise in the back of his head he can’t quite touch, distracting, but not much else.
He takes his notes, watches hero news on his phone during class and tries to avoid Kacchan’s attention. It’s normal. Mundane, even. He’s not sure why he feels unsettled.
When the day is over, he gathers his things, walks out the door, and gets half a block before he realizes he’s walking in the wrong direction.
He shakes it off and goes home.
His mom has dinner ready for him when he gets there, and he eats, hungry again for the first time since the day before. She fixes his sleeve too.
He goes to bed that night and his dreams are dark, only touched by a distant hiss of waves.
Over the next three days, he starts getting annoyed with his feet. Every day, without fail, they take him in the wrong direction, and he has to stop and correct himself. The weekend comes and goes, and he’s restless, moving through his house aimlessly.
The white noise in his head doesn’t get any worse, but it doesn’t get any better either. It’s a constant hiss in the background, filling his dreams with something just out of his reach.
It’s there. It’s always there, though it slips from his grasp if he tries to focus on it, and it drives him to distraction.
The first day back at school, Kacchan notices him again. He flinches down and tries to make himself small, but it doesn’t help. It never does.
He isn’t hurt this time, and his uniform isn’t damaged, but he’s jumpy, so when he tries to correct himself from walking in the wrong direction and sees Kacchan walking there, on his way home, he turns right back around and follows his feet.
Once he does, breathing is easy. The hiss in his head stops being so dissonant, and his steps are light and quick, like walking takes less effort. In the blink of an eye and the breath of salty wind, he’s standing before the pile of trash again.
They’re all dead things, he thinks. Forgotten things. Unwanted things, left here to look out over the ocean so people don’t have to think about them.
Izuku wants to be forgotten. He wants not to be noticed. If he’s forgotten, they won’t hurt him anymore. Forgotten things get to breathe, to exist without being thought of.
He can faintly hear the waves on the other side of the pile, and he is so tired of that sound being distant and untouchable in the dark of his dreams. He also doesn’t want to be seen, standing on the curb so far away from home, and so climbing is natural.
The climb calms his mind. The dead things order his thoughts. The sound of waves gets closer and closer, and it fills up the cracks he would otherwise have filled with mutters and brooding.
Standing on the shore after the climb, on his own, with the cold ocean licking his toes, feels right. And it feels wrong.
Most of him doesn’t belong here. Living things don’t belong at this boundary between the world of broken things and he ocean, and Izuku is very much alive, but the waves wash through his mind and he needs to be here.
It’s like it’s drawing him in, flattening out his thoughts and removing everything that doesn’t belong, just so he can find his place here, among the waves.
The trash heap smells like trash heaps do, sharp rust and old rot, with the buzzing of flies in the sun to accentuate it. The ocean smells like salt and fish, and he takes deep breaths.
When the sky goes red and the water laps at his ankles, he shakes himself out of his stupor and jogs home. His head is entirely quiet, not even a hint of white noise present.
His mom is crying again, but she isn’t just scared now, she’s asking why with the faintest hint of anger in her voice. All he can offer her is an apology, because he has no explanation.
He doesn’t eat that night. Dinner has gone cold, and she asks him to reheat something, but he isn’t hungry and he can’t stand the thought of it. Not with the scent of the ocean still lingering in his nose, and not with his head so blessedly quiet.
He goes to bed, and once again he does not dream.
The white noise is back the next morning, and he wants to curse everything.
He looks up lists of curse words he could never bring himself to say out loud on his phone instead of getting up. There are five missed calls from his mom from last night, and he can’t remember getting a single one.
The list of curse words doesn’t help, even when he whispers them under his breath.
He gets up, gets dressed, and walks to school. Breakfast is forgotten. He doesn’t miss it.
He starts thinking around the noise in his head about an hour into the day. There’s a rhythm to it, like breathing, and if he synchs his own breaths to it he can almost pretend it doesn’t exist, that it’s just the sound of himself. It helps.
The fact that Kacchan doesn’t even look at him all day also helps. The worst he hears is the word creep muttered behind his back between classes.
Hero news keep him occupied. There are fewer All Might sightings the last couple years than there used to be, but there are still many enough that Izuku has something to analyse and write down in his notebook. He watches a video of a fight and he scrutinizes every frame, looking at every blow, noting every piece of collateral damage. He writes tallies of all the broken things the combatants leave behind.
Light pole, storefront, car wheel, fire hydrant, broken arm, stop light, street sign, wait, broken arm?
He closes the video and breathes deeply. It breaks his rhythm, and the noise is suddenly loud in his head again. He can’t get back into it. There’s a hint of fish and old rot in the air.
A double-spread page in his notebook in front of him is filled with sketches. One side is All Might and the villain he was fighting, with scattered notes on their showcased abilities and known facts. The other side is rough sketches, just outlines, really, of the trail of destruction. A light pole nearly bent in half. A fire hydrant caved in and spewing water like a broken fountain. Among them, drawn just as quickly and mindlessly as the rest, a human arm, bent the wrong way. Written at the top of the page in careless letters is Dead Things.
He closes the notebook, closes his eyes, takes deep breaths and tries to realign his breathing with the noise in his head. When he finally manages it, he brings the video back up to check.
The man with the broken arm isn’t dead, just badly injured. Izuku pushes the thought aside and tries to focus on school.
When school is over, he’s two blocks away towards the beach before he catches himself and walks home.
He’s not as hungry as he should be, after a day of not eating, but he still eats dinner and tries to talk to his mom at the table. She’s worried about him. He understands. He’s starting to get worried too.
He dreams that night of waves in the distance and a scent of rotting fish in the air. It’s dark, and the waves are too far away to touch, no matter how much he wants to walk towards them.
He wakes to the white noise blanking out his thoughts, and he doesn’t get up at all.
His mom comes into his room eventually.
Izuku? she asks.
Mom, he says. I think something’s wrong with me.
He doesn’t go to school that day. He doesn’t go anywhere. His mom gets a doctor’s appointment, and then puts on an old All Might movie and they sit on the couch eating chocolate ice cream.
Izuku breathes in time to the noise in his head and sings along to all the songs. He knows them by heart, so it doesn’t matter that he can’t focus on the words.
The doctor’s appointment is at the end of the week, and his mom keeps him out of school until then. He thinks she’s worried he’ll disappear again.
Seeing as, by the time they’re heading for the doctor’s, she’s caught him three times halfway out the door, heading for, he says, nowhere in particular, she has a point.
The doctor pokes and prods him and asks questions he can’t answer. He wants to tell, truly, he does. You’re supposed to tell your doctor everything, but he can’t.
He opens his mouth to talk about the beach, and the words are swallowed by the white noise. It rears up every time he tries to speak, standing out in stark clarity as he disturbs his breathing rhythm.
He talks about the white noise, the distraction, how his feet want him to wander. He doesn’t say where he goes. He can’t find the words to describe it, not the pile of dead, forgotten things, not the gaping abyss beyond the waves, and not the space that’s being carved for him between them.
He’s not sure he wants to put it into words. It doesn’t feel like he should.
The doctor hems and haws and takes a bit of blood, telling them the results will be back soon, and they go home.
Sunday morning he wakes up at dawn from dreams of chasing distant waves in the dark, to white noise blanketing his mind, and he needs to go.
He slips out the door before his mom notices he’s up and all but runs towards the beach.
He’s not aimless now. He’s anything but. The pile of broken things and the ocean it hides scare him, the way his feet lighten when he gives in and walks where they want to go frightens him to tears, but he goes. He goes because he goes because he has to.
The dead, broken things beneath his hands are already familiar, and he gives in. He climbs and breathes and lets the waves wash through his mind, carving his spot in them just a little wider.
He doesn’t know how long he has stood ankle-deep in water when a thought forms, slowly, from the waves in his mind.
He has a spot here, on the line between the broken and the sea. A spot was made for him. A spot was made for part of him, because the rest doesn’t belong, and unless he wants to fight it forever, he might have to make himself belong, among the dead, and the ocean waves.
He doesn’t want to be dead. That is the last thing he wants. He can’t be the ocean. Can he?
And that’s when the thought forms. They’re not dead, the broken things. They are never-living, thrown away but no less whole than they always were, and the ocean? The ocean isn’t dead either. The ocean has always been alive.
The ocean pulls at him, grinds his thoughts down and carves them out, and he is trapped on the line between the never-living and the never-dead.
The tide reaches the hem of his pants. The sun rises. His phone rings, and this time he hears it.
His mom wants him home, so he runs home. The white noise is gone again.
The blood tests come back inconclusive. More tests are made, more questions asked, and nothing comes of it. It’s just something he’ll have to grow out of, one doctor says. His mom cries the whole way home.
Izuku goes to the beach every day after school. He never decides to, he just stops fighting it.
A part of him wants to be there. The part that doesn’t is drowning, being ground away by wave after wave in his head.
He gets hours of silence in the evenings, dreamless sleep in the night on the days he comes home with his pants soaked through. The tide isn’t hesitant anymore. It laps at his knees and pulls at his calves every time.
The white noise isn’t white noise anymore, either. He wakes up to the sound of waves washing through his head and he breathes in time with them on reflex.
His hero notebooks fill with drawings of broken things, appliances, tools, machinery and miscellaneous. No people. Not anymore. People aren’t among the never-living.
The books are full of hero notes too, because he can, because he loves it, because someone has to take care of the broken places in the world.
Because he’s scared of what will be left of him if he stops.
Weekends are the worst. And the best. He doesn’t go to the beach on weekends.
He eats, then, a hint of the hunger he should be feeling coming back to him, and his mom feeds him everything he will take. He still loses weight.
On weekends, his head is filled with waves so strong his whole body rocks in time with them, his nose is filled with the smell of rot and sea so vivid he feels like he’s right there with it. At night he dreams, dreams of the ocean.
It’s still dark, but the waves are so close they’re almost touching his toes, and he can smell it as clearly as he does during the day. He doesn’t know what will happen when it reaches him. He thinks his mind will fall apart if he tries to fight it.
School has gotten better, somehow.
There’s the strong sense of waiting. In a way it’s just the hours he has to spend with the waves in his head before he can run off and pour them back into the ocean where they belong, and let them take a small piece of himself with them.
In other ways it’s still school. It’s still life.
He keeps up with the classes, does all the homework in the breaks to keep his mind off the waves, but the teachers never call on him anymore, even though he has all the right answers. They try not to meet his eyes, skipping over him and asking the next student in line whenever they can.
Kacchan? Kacchan doesn’t look at him anymore either. No one does, but it’s more obvious with Kacchan. He looks away whenever Izuku looks over his shoulder at him, almost flinching. It’s better that way.
Izuku wanted to be forgotten. This is almost as good.
Mom starts making fish for dinner. The kind that smells up the whole house. It’s the only thing Izuku consistently lets himself eat.
He’s thirteen the first time Kacchan follows him to the beach.
The water’s reached his thighs. Either he’s walked further into it than he used to or the tide rises to meet him. He leaves his shoes on the shore these days, grinding his toes into the cold, rough sand under the water.
He’s starting to think, through the waves, of carving a space for himself in the space they have carved for him. He could build tunnels through the pile of the never-living that would let him crawl through it from end to end.
It wouldn’t fall on him. He belongs here.
What the fuck, Deku, Kacchan says, and he’s standing there on the shore, footprints showing he’s walked around the pile, not over it like Izuku always does.
Kacchan? Izuku says, and he isn’t the least bit scared. He’s standing to his knees in water, with the never-dead washing through his mind, and Kacchan doesn’t scare him.
What the fuck, Kacchan says again. What are you doing?
Did you follow me? Izuku asks.
Of course I fucking did. Your mom came at our door crying this morning, said you didn’t come home ‘till two at fucking night and she never knows where you are, so they fucking made me follow you, didn’t they? Kacchan says. He looks angry. He always looks angry. Izuku looks down to make sure Kacchan’s feet are well clear of both the trash heap and the waves.
Won’t do to let them catch anyone else. Even Kacchan.
Kacchan huffs and looks away, arms crossed. You always come here?
Yes, Izuku says, because it’s the first question asked he can answer.
He shakes his head. He hasn’t been here close to as long as he usually is, but the tide might still be rising, and he can deal with the waves in his head for another evening if it means getting Kacchan out, now.
He wades out of the water and picks up his bag. When he looks up again, Kaccan is staring at his soaked pants.
Izuku isn’t scared. The water hugs his legs, tugging at them, pulling him back out from the shore. The pile of trash saturates the air with scents he’s never not smelling, rising as a barrier in his heart between the real world and the one that feels real. Kacchan stands in front of him and stares, and he’s not scared.
Someone is.
Kacchan looks angry, but Izuku knows him well enough to tell it’s superficial, floating like a fragile film on the surface. He’s not angry.
Someone is.
The waves are still there, in his head. He hasn’t gotten them all out yet, and the sand around the two of them is full of sharp, pointy things.
Izuku puts his shoes back on. His feet are wet and sandy.
Kacchan flinches back when he walks closer. Looks away, so not to let their eyes meet.
Izuku isn’t scared. He’s lost that.
It would be so easy, to reach out and breach the surface, grab onto Kacchan and pull, or push.
One small push to make up for dozens and dozens of pushes and punches and more than that. It feels natural. Here, hidden by the never-living, with the never-dead washing through his mind and holding onto this body, it’s easy.
He just has to reach out, fist a hand in the front of a shirt, grab, and pull.
DEKU!
The scream makes him blink.
It’s nothing he’s ever heard before.
He’s bent over, the front of Kacchan’s shirt clenched in one hand and his shoulder clasped in the other, pushing Kacchan down until his knees are bent and his feet scrabbling to stay on the sand, his head inches from the surface of the water.
Kacchan is grabbing back, at his arms and his shirt with desperate hands, palms smoking but not igniting. There’s a wild look of panic in his eyes and his teeth are bared, in terror, not anger. There isn’t a hint of anger left.
Deku, he says again, voice soaked with fear and pain and fear. Deku, stop.
Izuku breathes in time with the waves and draws back, pulling Kacchan into a standing position.
Sorry, he says. Didn’t want to. You should go.
Kacchan doesn’t wait a second. He stumbles back for the first couple steps before he turns around and sprints away across the thin strip of sand between the sea and the garbage. He’s careful not to touch either, so at least he has that much sense.
Izuku shivers. His pants are soaked and the wind is brisk, but those never bothered him, that’s not why he shivers.
There’s blood on his shirt where Kacchan clawed through his skin in panic. The sound of that terrified voice calling for him echoes in his mind almost as clearly as the waves.
It hits him that he doesn’t remember the last time he looked up hero news. He can’t remember the last time he did anything at all except wait for the ocean to fill him up and pour back out of him.
The push and pull of the waves beckons him to wade back in, but he doesn’t.
He growls and shakes himself like a wet dog, trying futilely to shake off the smell that’s gotten lodged so deeply into his body.
Then he screams until his throat is raw and his lungs burn, shouting anger and frustration and terror at the uncaring sky.
Then he goes home.
He hugs his mom. He changes into dry pants and a T-shirt without blood on it. He eats dinner, eating two portions even though he really isn’t hungry, out of spite. Spite of what, he isn’t sure, but spite.
His mom cries, and smiles more than he’s seen her do in a long time. Once he finally retreats to his room for the night, he hears her pick up the phone to call Kacchan’s mom, probably to thank him.
Izuku closes the door before he can hear what’s said.
He looks up hero news until the early hours of the morning. There is so much he’s missed. So much to get back into, he can’t make himself put it down.
There are still waves in his head, and he knows the dreams are waiting for when he goes to sleep.
Once he crawls into bed to catch the hour or two he can grab before he has to get up again, they drag him along the dark shore until the ice-cold waves touch the tips of his toes, and he feels nothing but fear.
He wakes up in a tangle of blankets and only barely makes it to the bathroom before he throws up.
The waves roar in his ears, and when he meets his own eyes in the mirror, he imagines he can see them too, washing around on the inside of his head.
He used to have green eyes. He wonders where that went.
Breakfast is a lost cause. He finds more hero news on his phone and he makes himself be excited for it. This is who he was, once. He’s not sure he can ever be that person again, but going through the motions keeps his mind off the waves.
Kacchan flinches at the sight of him, jumps every time he’s addressed, and doesn’t set off a single explosion all day.
It makes the day go smoothly and quietly, and it’s a constant, harsh reminder to Izuku about what he’s done. About the fear, the panicked grip on his arms, and the sea, reaching up to pull Kacchan down with him.
He doesn’t go to the beach that day. He watches Kacchan leave, unusually subdued between his companions, and he makes his feet follow in that direction.
For the first day in years, he goes straight home after school.
He sways in time to the rocking of the waves. He only hears half of his mom’s attempts to make conversation over dinner. He reads the same hero news in the evening three times without getting any decent notes out of it, and when he falls asleep, his dreams fill with fear, rot and the endless deep of the ocean at his feet.
He skips school after lunch the next day, too taken by the waves to stop, and he runs until he feels the jagged edges of broken things under his palms.
His head is quiet again that evening, and he tries to make himself eat, but he only gets down a few bites before he stops.
Things don’t quite go back to normal.
His dreams, when he has them, are still dark, but the ocean is lapping at his feet now, and where there once were waves, there is now only fear on ice-cold fear.
He starts going to the beach on weekend mornings. It makes it worse, he knows. He’s known from the beginning that he loses a piece of himself every time he goes there, and he lets a piece of them come in instead, but it’s the only thing that stops the dreams, so he goes.
He eats, when he’s reminded. Still out of spite. He watches the hero news. He gets out his old hero notes and starts writing again.
The pages still fill with never-living broken things, but the hero facts are there too. He writes around the sketches, makes them parts of his analyses, refuses to let them break up what he’s trying to make, and slowly, he gets back into an old dropped habit.
He doesn’t have the fire he used to. That’s fine, he still has this.
Kacchan comes back.
It takes a month before he stands on the beach again, shivering against the wind and clapping firecrackers to draw Izuku’s attention. Your mom wants you home, is all he says.
Izuku blinks and nods. Kacchan has walked away before he’s waded back out of the water.
It’s gone a couple hours this time, and his head is empty of waves. His mom smiles wide when he comes home before sunset.
Kacchan never told anyone where he went the first time, apparently. He hasn’t said a word to anyone about what happened on the beach, but he refused to talk to Izuku’s mom for over a week afterwards, even on the phone.
She asks him to go check on Izuku every once in a while because he’s the only one who knows where to go. Not often, but once every few months, he comes.
The fourth time it happens, they’re almost fourteen. Kacchan might be already. Izuku hasn’t kept track.
Kacchan waits for him, then, on the other side of the trash heap, growling under his breath and with his hands shoved in his pockets.
He flinches when Izuku gets close, so they keep at an arm’s length’s distance.
Why? Izuku asks.
Kacchan twitches violently. I ain’t fucking scared of you!
Izuku thinks about it. No, he says. You’re scared of that. He nods towards the trash heap, and the ocean behind it.
Kacchan says nothing, just hikes his shoulders higher up around his ears.
It’s okay, Izuku says. I am too.
Someone should clean up the whole bullshit pile, lay down pavement, Kacchan growls before he turns around and walks away.
It hurts, deeper than Izuku thought it would. The mere concept of cleaning this place up, of disturbing the never-living from their peaceful rest and exposing the never-dead to the world, or the world to the never-dead. It feels like a piece is removed from his heart at the thought.
He knows he’s trapped. He knows this feeling is the never-living wanting to stay in place, not his own need to keep them there, but he still feels it.
He tries to shake it off. He tries to forget, and go home, but the thought stays. It haunts him.
He can’t stop going to the beach. He knows that much.
The fear in him rises every day, in time with the tide rising higher up his legs every time. The never-dead ocean has tied him to itself too strongly for him to break. It’s taken his mind and starved his body, and he can’t fight by leaving it, but below the fear and the hopelessness, there’s anger too, and he fights in other ways.
He watches hero news obsessively. He erases his drawings of broken things and writes notes over them. He eats out of spite, and not just fish anymore. He rediscovers his old favourite dishes, and he can barely taste them through the smell of rot in his nose, but he’s determined to enjoy them nonetheless.
He writes UA on the top of his high school choices, even though he doesn’t think he can get in, nor that he should.
One day, the tide reaches his hips before his head is finally quiet, emptied of waves, and he hesitates before he leaves to walk home.
Someone should clean up the whole bullshit pile.
He can’t fight the sea. He can’t fight the waves that blanket his mind, and he can’t fight the tide.
He doesn’t want to give up.
Stooping down, he picks up two discarded bottles and a crushed soda can and walks.
It hurts, actual physical pain he is entirely unprepared for. The smell of rot and rust grows rapidly until his head spins, and the same force that makes his feet light when he walks to the beach now glues them to the ground.
Dead things should stay dead. Forgotten things forgotten. This is wrong in all the wrong ways.
He could build tunnels through the trash heap, hidden rooms where he could sleep, so he would never have to leave. The pile could be built up into even taller of a wall, cutting him off entirely from a world he only touches out of spite.
He could give in to the waves and the unwanted remnants of other people’s lives.
He shouts, and forces his feet to move. The edges of the bottles and the soda can dig into his hands as he clutches them, cutting into the skin and causing pain in a faint echo of the tearing in his heart.
He walks, slowly, painfully, until he reaches a trashcan, and then he tosses them in and breaks down crying.
It’s the first time he’s cried for as long as he remembers, and it’s a strange and alien feeling. The flow of tears down his cheeks as he sobs tastes like salt and sea, but it is free of waves.
Everything hurts when he makes it back home, and he doesn’t know why. He eats, his mom bandages his hands once she sees them, and then he goes to bed and is out like a light.
There are dreams, he thinks, but he doesn’t know of what.
A villain that can turn himself into sludge and sewage tries to escape from the nation’s greatest hero through an underpass, frantically looking for someone to hide in. He finds nothing.
Izuku is at the beach, soaking in water to the waist and trying to think between the waves that wash through him. He tries, almost every day, to take something away from the pile when he leaves. It’s a little easier every time, but it exhausts him, and the tide is rising faster than it was.
He’s never put his head below the water. At this rate it will happen long before he can put a dent in the pile between the sea and the road. It’s a lost cause, as surely as the abyss is staring at him from the water.
He’s at the brink of destruction, clawing helplessly at the straws of his old obsessions, of his small rebellions against the mountain keeping him locked in with the never-dead.
He won’t give up, but he knows it won’t help.
The UA practical exam comes and goes. He misses it.
That night is spent at the beach, water reaching his ribs where they strain against his skin. He tries to eat, but in the end it’s never enough. He barely has meat on his bones anymore.
The sun is high in the sky before he rouses himself, and he manages to bring an entire broken toaster out from the trash pile and to a recycling station, so in the end he still feels vaguely as if he’s accomplished something.
He misses the sports festival too, but his mom records it, and he watches it until he’s sure he can recognize every participant. Kacchan wins against a boy made of fire and ice, and neither of them look happy about the results.
The next time Kacchan comes to the beach, he isn’t alone.
The burst of firecrackers and the call of, oy, Deku! Your mom wants you home, is familiar, but the group of people waiting on the beach is not.
Kacchan usually leaves immediately, too scared and too angry to wait for Izuku to come up and walk home with him, but this group seems to want to wait.
Izuku recognizes them all from the sports festival. Bright red hair is Kirishima. Brown bowl cut is Uraraka. Sharp eyes and glasses is Iida. Pink skin is Ashido. Ponytail all over the place is Yaoyorozu.
They’re lined up on the strip of sand like dominoes, looking nervously around at the trash heap and keeping their feet well clear of the waves, so either they feel it or Kacchan’s warned them. Mostly they’re staring at Izuku.
Friends? Izuku asks.
Kacchan snorts. We were doing a fucking study group when your mom came by, he says. These assholes thought it was a good idea to come along.
Like dominoes, Izuku thinks. Pushing one would get them all. No one would ever know.
He takes a step towards them and Kacchan flinches back.
Uraraka puts a hand on his arm past Kirishima between them and looks Izuku straight in the eyes. It’s the first time in a long time anyone has done that, and it shakes him out of his unwanted thoughts.
Are you okay? She asks.
No, he says. You shouldn’t be here.
She nods, and then they all turn around and file back out around the trash pile and start walking towards home.
The group of them walk together, sometimes throwing wondering glances behind them at Izuku, who follows at a distance. Iida sends scandalized looks at the trash heap until it’s out of sight. Yaoyorozu looks like she’s holding her breath, and Ashido is laughing at her. Kirishima stays close to Kacchan’s side.
It’s Uraraka who first breaks the silence, walking up to Kacchan and whispering, what’s wrong with him?
Izuku isn’t meant to hear it, but his mind is currently empty of waves, and all other sounds are loud in comparison.
Something in the water, I think, Kacchan grunts in answer.
Why hasn’t anyone done anything? she asks.
Are you going to tell anyone where we just were? he snaps back.
They fall silent again as each of them realizes they don’t think they can, and they don’t know why.
They haven’t even touched the water, and the never-dead has them in its grip.
They’re supposed to be heroes, Izuku thinks.
He thinks a lot, in the silence of his mind. He thinks about his scribbled, hopeless notes. He thinks about rescue. He thinks about the fear that grips him every moment of the day. He thinks about a wall of garbage, and water over his head, pulling him under and hollowing him out, ready to be filled with something else.
He doesn’t know what that something else is.
He knows it isn’t him.
He stops.
Wait, he says, and they pause to look back at him. The words in his throat don’t want to come out, but he makes them form. He has to.
I need help, he says. Please.
He dreams that night of light. Of whispers. Of fire and ice, and voices he doesn’t know. They’re distant, just out of his reach, but they’re there.
A few days later, the bell rings the end of the day for the small, local high school he’s chosen to go to, and his feet lead him to the beach. He finds his pile of broken things crawling with people.
A couple dozen kids his age, most of which he recognizes, dismantle the pile piece by piece, loading it into trucks and gathering it in giant trash bags. Kacchan is among them, as is Uraraka, and Iida, and every other class member of his that Izuku knows of. They’re overseen by a scraggly man with long, dark hair.
Meter by meter, the wall of unwanted, forgotten things is taken apart before his eyes and driven away to become other things. Wanted things. Living things, in a way he isn’t sure the never-living have ever been.
Something inside him breaks.
Izuku falls to his knees and screams, crying out a pain that isn’t his, but is. He cries and sobs and shakes as the waves roll unsettled around in his head.
Someone throws a blanket over him. Someone sits down beside him and talks at him, sweet murmurs that give him something to anchor himself to.
Someone drives him home.
After years of spending hours every day soaking in ice-cold water, this is when he gets a fever.
He throws up what little’s in his stomach until there’s really nothing left. He tosses and turns, screaming and sobbing in equal amounts. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what’s real.
He’s swaddled in his blankets in his own bed, his mom whispering reassurances at his side. He’s floating in the ocean, waves inside and out and skin full of dead things. He’s climbing a mountain of corpses, and each and every one of them is someone he’s fed to the never-dead.
The ocean waves rage through his mind. He doesn’t know if he’s always speaking the right language. He doesn’t know what he says. All he hears is white noise and roaring.
It grasps at him, clings to him, crawls through his sweat to hug his body, claws at the inside of his mind for purchase, but it doesn’t get a proper hold.
Second by excruciating second, it drains away, losing power, losing its hold, until he’s told two days has gone by and he is left in blissful silence.
He dreams of light. Of hands holding his. Of heroes and villains and forests and mountains.
There is no darkness.
There are no waves.
Life… happens.
The eyes that meet him in the mirror when he finally gets up have spots of green in them. Maybe one day they will go all the way back to the solid emerald they once were, or maybe they will stay like this, a permanent scar.
He goes back to school. He talks to people. He makes friends.
He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life.
The dream of being a hero has long since passed. He can’t go back to being who he was Before. He doesn’t think he wants to, but there are other things to be enthusiastic about, and he throws himself into as many of them as he can.
He draws. Whole, unbroken things. Landscapes. People. Anything and everything except trash and ocean.
He eats more food than he ever has before, not caring when his weight eventually tips slightly above the average line. He likes being chubby. He never wants to see the outlines of his own ribs again.
A year after his fever broke and the waves disappeared, he goes back to the beach.
It’s just a beach now. It’s full of people. Happy, laughing people, eating watermelon and tossing beach balls around. The water is just water, and even the sound of the waves is just a sound, with no beckoning pull nor a press on his mind.
He still stays far away from the water, sitting down on the sand and watching the people in the sunlight instead.
He doesn’t know what it was that almost ate him at this beach. He doesn’t know how it worked, or how it could carve spaces into his very being that he is still working on filling today. He doesn’t know how a simple pile of trash could grow into something that could steal away years of his life and turn them into a bad dream.
He doesn’t need to know. All he needs to know is that it’s gone now.
The wind blows through his hair and makes him shudder for a moment, his skin breaking into goose bumps, and a smile pulls at his lips.
Not now, not yet, not in a long time, but some day. Some day he’ll break past this one last fear and take a swim. The water looks delightful.