Chapter Text
Izuku wakes to a haze of colour. He squints and it coalesces into a rainbow of bouquets and cards and stuffed animals. Twelve years after entering UA, waking up in the hospital doesn’t alarm him, but the emptiness of his room does. The vacant seats by his bed are more confusing than the blank space where his memory should be.
People don’t always flock to his bedside when he’s wounded. In his line of work, injuries are an occupational hazard, something most of friends and family face almost daily. But judging from the piles of gifts, the wilting flowers, Izuku has been in the hospital a while. Days. Maybe longer. He wasn’t just knocked around; whatever happened was serious.
The pain and wooziness keeps him from moving for a half hour, and then curiosity wins out.
Izuku expertly pulls out the IV and pushes himself off the bed. His right side—from his ankle up to his collarbone—is splotched with deep purple bruises. There’s a soft cast on his ankle. When he looks in the mirror later that afternoon, he’ll find two neat rows of stitches across his temple and jaw.
He limps into the corridor. He doesn’t make it far before a nurse stops him.
“Deku, sir,” she says, caught between flustered hero worship and professionalism. “You shouldn’t be up. You’ve been unconscious for several days and—”
“I’m sorry.” Izuku is polite, but he has no intention of placidly laying back down and going back to sleep. “Do you know where my phone is? I need to contact my agency.”
“I don’t know, but you really need to let a doctor examine you.”
“I’m alright” Izuku says. “I’m more worried about my friends and family. I need to speak with them.”
Izuku pulls out the toothy smile he wears in front of panicked civilians, reporters, and nervous fans. That famous smile that says, It’s okay now. If Todoroki were here, he would call Izuku manipulative.
But Todoroki isn’t here. There’s no evidence in his hospital room that Todoroki or his friends have been here at all. No stray jackets or shoes, no paper coffee cups or sandwich wrappers left in the bin, no spare pillows or blankets on the chairs. That’s not normal. That has Izuku worried.
“Oh,” the nurse says, like she’s been punched in the gut. She blinks rapidly. “Yes, of course. I’ll go have a look for you.”
If Izuku had tried to bluff with just a smile more than five years ago, back before he reached Number One, he’d be quickly manhandled back into bed. But he’s an old hat at this now.
Some of the sturdier medical staff won’t be swayed by his reassuring smile, though. If he runs into anyone like that, they will browbeat him back into bed like he is any other patient and not the Symbol of Peace.
The nurse returns with his phone. There’s a crack running down the middle of the screen, but it turns on. There are over fifty messages waiting for him—from his mum and All Might, from coworkers and other acquaintances in the hero industry, all of them wishing him a speedy recovery. Old emails. Polite enquiries from reporters who should know better than to contact him on his personal phone.
There are no messages from his friends. The group chat for the old Class 3-A is silent. The last message, a meme that features Kacchan squinting at Kirishima’s bright smile, sent by Kaminari, came over a week ago.
Something is very wrong.
He thinks about calling his mum, but he doesn’t like her seeing him when he is so injured, even after all these years. And if he calls his agency, they’ll tell him to stay where he is and recover fully, and that’s not an option.
He calls his sidekick instead.
Bubblegum Blitz pulls into the car-park in a sleek agency car. Izuku slides into the passenger seat and they speed off before anyone can try and follow up with his hasty discharge.
Bubblegum has worked with Izuku since they were eighteen, fresh out of UA and still harbouring a devastating crush on the newly minted Number One. Thankfully, the crush eroded over time, but their petulance for indulging all of Izuku’s whims stays. They’re the only sidekick willing to bust him out of the hospital instead of escorting him back to bed.
“Gum,” Izuku says, “what happened?”
“What do you mean?” Bubblegum says, pink fingers twitching around the steering wheel.
“I haven’t heard from my friends in weeks, Gum. That’s not normal.”
“They wouldn’t let me be involved,” Bubblegum says, pulling at their fringe. It bounces back when they let go, like rubber. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but I know they’re helping you, so I’ve been assisting on the outside. Helping them explain their absences. Stuff like that.”
“Involved in what?” Izuku asks, a pit growing in his stomach.
Bubblegum is quiet as they drive. They stop in front of an apartment building in a suburb that sits between the city centre and the outer suburbs. A place away from business districts and families and schools. A place heroes could come and go freely without being questioned.
Izuku peers up at the brick building. Some of the windows are lit. Some are boarded up with cardboard or thin wood sheets.
“Bubblegum?” Izuku asks.
Bubblegum lets out a deep breath. “I wasn’t there when you were attacked. I’m your sidekick--I’m supposed to help and protect you, but I wasn’t even there. I tried to help Mind Blank with the arrest after you were hospitalised, but some of the villains got away. And then your friends came here. I don’t know why.”
Class 3-A have been accused of being too insular before. The hero industry is small and self-contained, and their group of twenty are even more so. But to purposely shut out Izuku’s sidekick …
“I think,” Bubblegum says, an unreadable look on their face, “that they’re doing something they aren’t supposed to, something not exactly legal, and they didn’t know if they could trust me with that secret.”
“Something like?” Izuku presses. When Bubblegum just shrugs, Izuku leans forward, ignoring the pain in his ribs. “Gum, please.”
“They’re trying to protect you,” Bubblegum says. “I don’t know how, but I’m sure—I’m positive that what they’re doing is to save you.”
Izuku thinks Bubblegum knows more about what his ex-classmates are doing than they will admit, which doesn’t bode well. They would only pretend to be this ignorant if his friends were doing something very dangerous and very illegal.
Izuku opens the car-door and staggers out. He’s limping into the building before Bubblegum can stop him.
Izuku takes the elevator to the top floor. Shinsou would rent a room closer to the middle to be less conspicuous, but Yaoyorozu would take up the entire top floor without even thinking about it, and out of the two of them, Yaoyorozu is the more likely to find them a base as tactically perfect as this.
The elevator rattles to a stop. Izuku steps out.
He thinks he knows what this is. He knows where he’s arrived—when he’s arrived. He thinks he knew it instinctually the moment he opened his eyes and found himself alone in a flower-filled hospital room.
More than once, Izuku had thought he had reached the right time and had been disappointed. But everything about today has been odd—the strange, out of the way building; Bubblegum Blitz’s crypticism; and the silence surrounding this entire case, from the media in regards to the villains that escaped Mind Blank’s raid days after Izuku was hospitalised, to the lack of messages from his friends. Izuku knows that, when things stop adding up, it often means that his childhood friends are involved
Izuku takes a moment just to breathe, to brace himself, and then opens the only door not thinly coated in dust.
The large living room is unfurnished, aside from a handful of unmade futons, several messy duffle-bags that look as though people have been living out of them, and a garbage bag full of empty take-away containers.
A group of four are sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. Ingenium’s dirt-streaked armour is scattered in pieces. Iida is attacking the chest plate with a scrub brush. The helmet is balanced in Ashido’s lap and she’s trying to chip off dried mud from around the eyes. Kacchan and Sato sit on Iida’s left. Sato is half-way through a sandwich. Kacchan is eating healthy wheat chips by the handful.
It’s just after noon, but it looks like a scene plucked right out of his hero agency in the early hours of the morning, when everyone is dusty and bone-tired and starving, just coming off nighttime patrol.
Izuku leans against the door, biting down his smile, and thinks, It’s them.
“You already have a hero agency, Iida,” Izuku says lightly. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to set up a second one.”
They all look up. Sato drops his sandwich. Kacchan shoves another handful of chips into his mouth, unbothered.
“Midoriya!” Ashido scrambles to her feet. “What are you doing here?”
Iida drops his chest plate and leaps over the rest of his armour, almost tripping on a glove, and scoops Izuku into a hug. Izuku winces and Iida quickly lets go.
“Are you alright? You should still be in the hospital.”
“I’ll be okay,” Izuku says, letting Ashido give him a brief, careful hug. “Now, tell me: what happened? What is this place?”
Ashido’s eyes go wide. Iida stiffens up like he’s fifteen years old again and desperate to prove himself, and Sato finds the ceiling suddenly fascinating.
“Nothing,” Ashido says.
“You’re in an unfurnished apartment in your hero costumes in the middle of a weekday for no reason?”
“Uh,” Ashido says. “Well.”
They all look so tired and frantic, running on too little sleep and too much caffeine, and Izuku almost feels bad. And then he remembers a hundred fruitless google searches coming up with nothing; his friends vanishing around street corners as though they had never been there; the way they’d tussle his hair and laugh off his questions, plying him with ice-creams instead of answers.
“We did something,” Iida begins. “We did something we maybe shouldn’t have done, but I think I speak for everyone when I say we don’t regret it.”
“Something illegal?”
“We didn’t exactly go through the proper channels,” Sato says. “No one knows what we’re doing.”
“And what is it,” Izuku says, “that you’re doing?”
Kacchan crunches loudly on a wheat chip. The bag crinkles obnoxiously.
There’s another long silence as everyone tries to think about how to say what they’re about to say, before Ashido blurts, “We’re time travellers.”
“What,” Izuku says.
“We can explain,” Iida says quickly, shooting Ashido a look. “We did it to protect you.”
And now, the question Izuku has been waiting to ask: “Why did you need to protect me?”
“Shinsou was investigating a group of villains,” Iida starts, “with a serious grudge against the hero industry—but especially you, Midoriya, as our Symbol. One of them used to be a runner for the old League of Villains. He has a time quirk.”
Izuku remembers this vaguely. Not the middle-aged man with the time quirk, but the villains banded together by their individual hatred towards him.
“They attacked me,” Izuku recalls.
“You were kind of a boss, dude,” Sato says, like he thinks Izuku’s main concern is whether or not he looked cool while fighting the villains off. “You took most of them down, even if they did deal enough damage to land you in the hospital for a while.”
“Shinsou helped organise a raid a few days later, but we didn’t get them all. Redo—the runner with the time quirk—escaped but he left his plans behinds. Maps of your old neighbourhood, photos of you and Bakugou as children, your old elementary and middle school. We worked out fairly quickly that he was planning on sending people back in time to take you out and destabilise the entire hero industry.”
“But the villains aren’t the only ones who have a time quirk on their side,” Ashido says. “We knew we couldn’t find Redo before he started sending people back to hurt you, so we decided we’d meet them there and cut them off.”
“You were hurt. You hadn’t even woken up yet—there was no time to ask you what you thought of this or ask your permission,” Iida says in a rush. “But—we couldn’t just let him kill you, Midoriya.”
Ashido peers at him, trying to gauge his lack of reaction. “Shouldn’t you be more freaked out by this, Midoriya? We’re time travellers, now.”
“Yeah,” Izuku says, “I’ve always known that.”
They blink at him. Through a mouthful of chips, Kacchan says, “You’re fucking morons.”
“What do you mean you know?” Ashido demands.
“I mean I know,” Izuku says. “I’ve known my whole life, way before I met you at UA, before the villains even had the idea to go back in time. You’re my childhood heroes. Of course I know who you are.”
Ashido’s mouth opens and closes. Iida closes his eyes like he’s in pain. Sato puts his face in his hands and says, “Bakugou’s right. We’re morons.”
“How did we forget that time travel works both ways?” Iida asks no one in particular.
“I think everyone’s been too busy stressing over the thought of baby Midoriya getting murdered,” Sato says.
“I wasn’t a baby,” Izuku says indignantly, “I was about nine when I met you.”
Sato stares at him. “I haven’t been sent back yet. Nine, really?”
They’re not finished. Izuku hadn’t expected that when he finally caught up to his childhood friends they would only be half-way done saving him.
Izuku cocks his head to one side, remembering the way he’d launched himself at Sato and clung, koala-like, to his shoulders. “Nevermind, then. You’ll see soon enough.”
Iida puts a hand on his shoulder and they share a smile, something secret and strained like the smiles exchanged on the battlefield. Kacchan rolls his eyes and leaves, going deeper into the apartment.
Sato keeps staring at Izuku like he’s a math problem he can’t figure out, which makes Ashido laugh and rock back on her heels.
“Guess who’s back!” she calls, loud enough to echo through the closed side-rooms.
Kaminari comes out first, still in his pyjamas, his hair puffed out around his head like a dandelion. He sees Izuku and makes a choked noise, half-cough, half-scream, and throws himself at him. He scrambles to steady Kaminari before he topples over.
“Midoriya,” Kaminari says, “you were such a cute kid. My heart can’t take it.”
Hagakure and Ojirou come running out when they hear Kaminari’s scream. Hagakure is brandishing a live taser, but she drops it when she sees Izuku. She shoves past Ojirou and jumps on top of Izuku, almost smashing into Kaminari.
“Deku! Honey, you were so cute,” she says with a squeal. Izuku winces and readjusts his two friends so that there are no elbows shoved against his damaged ribs.
Ojirou stares at Izuku. “You got tall.”
“I’m really not that tall,” Izuku admits. He’s average. Barely. At red carpet events and official photo-shoots, he tries to duck away from the giants in their class like Shoji so he doesn’t look even smaller than he is.
“But you were so little,” Ojirou says with wonder.
“Midoriya, you used to be so small,” Kaminari says, and he sounds like he might start crying.
Aoyama comes into the room next, his hair spotted white where his dry shampoo wasn’t entirely brushed out, foundation shiny under the apartment’s lights. Aoyama is not normally one for physical affection—he prefers to exchange blinding smiles and over exaggerated poses from across the way—but he jogs across the unfurnished living area and jumps onto Izuku.
“Mon ami, you are so smart! So brave! A bright little star!”
Izuku tries to untangle himself from the three bodies. They reluctantly pull away, and step back to give him some room, but then another wave of friends burst into the living room.
Kirishima and Sero almost barrel him over with the force of their hug. In contrast, Todoroki’s hug is achingly gentle. His unwashed hair is fraying out of its braid, but Izuku can still smell the phantom-scent of his apple shampoo.
When Todoroki pulls away, Izuku glimpses Shinsou flipping him off in the doorway. Uraraka almost knocks Shinsou over when she sprints into the room, ink smudged down one side of her face from where she’d fallen asleep on her notes. She launches herself at Izuku. He catches her around the knees and she clings, legs wrapped around his waist, keening into his hair.
Everyone is staring at him like they can’t believe he’s real, like they’re seeing him for the first time, and the combined weight of their gazes makes his stomach swoop.
“I’m okay,” he says, even though he’s been struggling to walk without listing to one side since he woke up, and he thinks some of his stitches might be in danger of coming loose. “You guys are making sure I’m okay. Right?”
“I’m sorry you had to wake up in the hospital alone,” Todoroki says.
“You were pretty messed up after the attack,” Sero says. “We didn’t know if …”
“‘Course we knew.” Shinsou is eating Kacchan’s wheat chips, which he probably stole using his quirk. “You’ve been through worse. There’s no way you wouldn’t pull through.”
Uraraka jumps down and stumbles back. Her eyes are rimmed red. “Deku, oh no. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Izuku hugs her again. “I’m okay, Floaty Girl.”
She makes a little noise in the back of her throat and sags against him. He looks at the rest of them over the top of her head. Their pale, exhausted faces shine back at him, familiar and nostalgic all at once.
Izuku says, barely able to form the words, “Hello, again.”
Everyone. Hello.
They end up gathered on the floor. Izuku is slumped against the wall, a futon under him, in deference to his injuries. Everyone gathers around him in a circle, even Kacchan.
The person who has made all of this possible is asleep in a side-room. Izuku gets the sense that she’s not very old, and she has been working endlessly for days to send Izuku’s friends back in time. He desperately wants to meet her, but she deserves the chance to rest.
And it gives his classmates time to embarrass him without worrying about ruining her impression of him.
“You were adorable,” Hagakure gushes. He thinks she might be whacking Ojirou in her enthusiasm, but he can’t tell. “You had these big chubby cheeks and your hair was so curly and just—ah!”
“You were very cute,” Todoroki says. “Very pink.”
Todoroki laughs when Izuku blushes. He hopes Todoroki didn’t work out that he had a hopeless crush on him when he was little, a crush that never really went away. He should be safe, he thinks. Todoroki seems oblivious to the fact that half of Japan is in love with him. Surely, he hasn’t picked up on Izuku’s feelings.
“You were so small,” Uraraka says, “and you didn’t recognise me, and you didn’t even have a quirk to defend yourself. You were so trusting. It was …”
“Overwhelming,” Todoroki finishes. “It was overwhelming.”
“You thought it was overwhelming?” Izuku says. “The first time I walked into Class 1-A and saw you all, I thought I was losing my mind.”
“No wonder you were so sweaty and weird those first few months,” Kirishima says.
“Do you think we messed with the timeline?” Sero asks. “If we hadn’t time travelled, then Izuku wouldn’t have been a complete mess the first semester at UA.”
“It’s fine. I would have still been a mess even without having a class full of time travellers,” Izuku says. His friends all nod in agreement. He decides not to feel offended by this.
They don’t let him stay there for long. Iida calls Bubblegum Blitz to drive him back to the hospital, and Shinsou goes to wake the person sleeping in the next room. They can’t afford to take breaks for longer than a few hours.
“You haven’t been here, working non-stop, have you?” Izuku asks.
“We’re doing this in shifts,” Kirishima says, which explains the friends who are missing, off sleeping or patrolling or working to cover their upcoming absences. “It’s still pretty non-stop, and Iida tried to cover his agency’s paperwork while he was here and got so overwhelmed that he almost missed his turn a few times—”
“Kirishima, I believe you’re up next,” Iida cuts in loudly.
“He almost got sent back in his pyjamas,” Uraraka tells Izuku in a whisper.
Iida crosses his arms, petulant. “I managed to get my armour on.”
“Barely,” Izuku says, which makes Iida splutter. He keeps forgetting that adult Izuku has all of child Izuku’s memories.
Before they bustle him out of the door and into Bubblegum’s waiting car, Izuku snags Kacchan by the sleeve. He has a familiar helmet balanced under one arm.
“Shouldn’t I be here, too?” Izuku asks, low enough that only Kacchan hears him. “You’re also in danger.”
“We’re only here for you, you snowflake,” Kacchan says.
“Just me? But then …”
Kacchan shakes his head and shoves Izuku. He topples into Sato’s arms, who grabs him around the waist and starts to haul him to the door. Uraraka watches the manhandling from where she’s holding the door open.
“It’ll sort itself out,” Kacchan says. “The timeline always does. Don’t be such a fucking worrywart.”
“See you soon, Deku,” Uraraka says cheerily, before shutting the door in his face.
When Izuku had imagined catching up to his childhood friends, he hadn’t thought about the transitional period between then and now. In his mind, he had envisioned two separate versions of his friends: the young gaggle of students, brimming with potential, and the capable grown-up heroes who were skilled enough to travel through time and repeatedly save him.
But no sudden change has overcome his friends. They don’t look more grown up or skilled or serious than they had a few weeks ago. Izuku feels like he had when he woke up on his eighteenth birthday, finally an adult but feeling just as small and out of his depth as he had felt the day before.
His friends had undergone a slow and constant change, so gradual that Izuku hadn’t noticed it, because at the same time, he had been growing up alongside them.
Izuku goes back to the hospital, cooperative for once, and even lets Bubblegum confiscate his phone (on Iida’s orders). He couldn’t get any work done, anyway; he has too much to think about.
He stares up at the ceiling. Changing his own past would bring too many risks, but Izuku wishes he could go and visit that lonely quirkless boy who didn’t understand why his only friends kept leaving him behind.
He would hold his small hands, mottled with bruises, and say, You’ll be stronger than you could have ever imagined. They’ll make you strong; and you’ll make them strong.
You’re the missing piece, he will say. It was always you.
But he can’t interfere with his past. There’s a part of him that still grieves for that misguided kid, and he feels torn between a strange kind of protectiveness and forgiveness and hatred for how small and helplessness and ignorant he had been—but Izuku can’t meddle in his own history.
He has to let his friends do that for him.
For the first time in months, Izuku waits until his Doctor gives him the all clear before leaving the hospital. She almost seems surprised when she walks into his room a week after he had first woken up and finds him still there, waiting patiently for a check-up. Obviously, she’s dealt with pro heroes before.
He goes home after he’s discharged and showers. He sheds his mangled hero costume, the clothes he had arrived at the hospital in, for an All Might hoodie and soft sweatpants, and then walks right back out again.
He picks up a dozen hot drinks from a cafe a few blocks down from the rented apartment. The barista doesn’t complain about the large order or the way Izuku stuffs handfuls of sugar packets into his hoodie pocket.
After she has eased the trays of drinks into his arms, she pauses, caught between one moment and the next, and then blurts, “I’m glad you’re okay.”
Izuku is glad he forwent wearing a face mask. He smiles his Deku smile, and says, “Thank you.”
“We missed you,” she blurts, quickly turning red. “Japan misses you. Please know--our hopes are with you!”
Izuku remembers why he usually leaves the hospital as soon as he can. If he didn’t think they would turn him away the moment he stepped into the lobby, he would already be at his hero agency.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Izuku says. “I promise.”
He takes the rickety elevator up to the top floor. When he tries to walk into the apartment without knocking, Yaoyorozu almost decapitates him with her bo staff. Izuku ducks, the stack of trays clutched tightly to his chest. The bo staff whizzes through his curls.
“Oh, Midoriya!” Yaoyorozu drops the bo staff and helps him steady the drinks. “I’m so sorry. I thought you were an intruder.”
“No, it’s my fault. This is a secret base full of pro heroes; I should’ve known better than to walk in without letting you know I was coming.”
Yaoyorozu takes a few trays from him and lets him inside the apartment. Jirou is sitting in front of a sprawl of notes, holding a cup of cold coffee. She looks moments away from hurling it at Izuku’s head.
“You absolute bastard,” she tells him.
Yaoyorozu puts the drinks down. “Kyouka, you could have told me he was behind the door! I could have seriously hurt him.”
Jirou trades the cold coffee for a fresh cappuccino. “He deserves it after what he put us through. What were you thinking, Midoriya? Running at the villains as a weedy little preteen? You gave me a heart-attack.”
Izuku staggers and falls beside her, shakily placing the rest of the trays down. “But … do you mean … you were the hero I saw as a kid? You’re a time traveller?”
Jirou uncurls her legs and kicks him. Izuku topples over, laughing.
“Nice try. I know time travel works both ways, I’m not an idiot.”
Jirou pilfers the sugar satchels from Izuku’s pockets. She tears six open and pours them into her coffee while Yaoyorozu goes into the other room to tell everyone that he’s arrived.
Asui is there almost immediately, stepping over the drink trays and ducking under Izuku’s arm. She wraps herself around him, like a snake draped over sun-soaked rock. He laughs and returns her hug.
“Hey, Froppy.”
Shoji and Tokoyami come next. Shoji’s hug lifts him clear off the ground, and Dark Shadow seems just as—if not more—happy to see him as Tokoyami, curling around his neck and butting up against his ear like a cat. Todoroki hugs him, too, and says hello with such dazzling intensity that Izuku forgets what he was saying mid-sentence.
Asui selects one of the teas Izuku brought. She watches Izuku over the paper rim.
“Sato says he thought you were a scary child, ribbit,” she says abruptly.
Izuku splutters. “Scary?”
“He says you tackled him.”
“Well, I was a diehard hero fan that kept running into heroes that no one else seemed to know anything about—heroes who wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“What were we supposed to say?” Jirou says. “Hi, we’re your friends from the future, don’t worry we’re here to save you?”
“Honestly, that would have helped a lot. Saved me years of stressing over the mystery.” What they’ve done—time travelling without alerting the appropriate authorities, breaking the law to do so—is big, but for his friends, it’s happened in the span of a few weeks. They don’t understand. Izuku scrubs a hand through his hair, suddenly shy under the combined weight on their stares. “You guys were my childhood. I had All Might, sure, but you were my heroes. My friends—my only friends—for ten years.”
Asui puts her tea down and hugs him. Jirou’s frown wobbles and her whole face goes soft.
Yaoyorozu says, gently, “It was our pleasure, Midoriya.”
Izuku feels himself going red again. He flails a bit. “I didn’t come here to say something like that, even if it is true—I came here with a purpose.”
Tokoyami cocks his head to the side. “A purpose?”
Asui is still leant against his shoulder, sipping her tea, and Dark Shadow is wrapped around his arm, gnawing at his fingers like he isn’t incredibly powerful and could take off Izuku’s arm easily.
“I’m here to invite you all to dinner,” Izuku says.
Inko pours all her worry into preparing for the upcoming dinner. Izuku had thought she had adjusted to his semi-regular stints in the hospital over the years. He had been wrong. Even now, a few years shy of thirty, sitting unchallenged at the top of the Hero Charts, she worries about him like he’s six years old again, quirkless and rambling about imaginary heroes as if they were real.
At the end of the week, Shinsou and Bubblegum Blitz head another raid. They find Redo, burnt out from weeks of sending people hurtling through time, barely able to fight back. Two days after his arrest and the arrest of every other villain involved, Inko is sweeping Izuku’s ex-classmates into the living room, where an extra dining table has been fitted to accommodate them all.
Uraraka bursts through the front door, panting as if she had sprinted up the stairwell, and scans the growing crowd. Her eyes lock onto Izuku, and then she’s running again. Izuku scoops her up and lets her cling to him.
“I didn’t want to leave you,” she says into his hair. She’s crying. Izuku starts crying, too. “You were just a kid, and I knew about all the terrible villain attacks that were coming your way, and I had to leave you there to deal with them on your own.”
“I wasn’t alone,” Izuku reminds her. “I found you guys a few months after that.”
Uraraka isn’t the only one that cries that night. Inko tears up after every other introduction, and Aoyama ruins his mascara when she kisses him on both cheeks and thanks him sincerely for looking after her boy. He thinks Hagakure cries, too, but he can’t prove it.
Todoroki finds him in the kitchen. “Are you healed now?”
“Pretty much,” Izuku says. “I’m going back to work on Monday and—”
Todoroki pulls him into a crushing hug. One arm is around Izuku’s waist, clutching at his shirt, and the other presses Izuku’s head to his shoulder. Izuku can feel the shape of his slim fingers, buried in his curls.
“I could see you were hurting,” Todoroki says, “but I couldn’t do anything about it. I had to let you found me again, let you reach out to me at the sports festival. I wished I could have helped you the way you helped me.”
“You did,” Izuku says. “You saved me too, Shouto.”
Izuku doesn’t know how much time passes before one of them let's go and breaks the hug. A long while, he thinks.
Izuku is on the couch talking to Iida when Inko makes her way to Kacchan. He goes stiff and pink under her gaze. Kirishima stays by his side and charms Inko with his big smile and bigger muscles. He places a hand on Kacchan’s lower back, and Kacchan, somehow, finds the courage to apologise for everything he has done.
“You were one of them, weren’t you?” Inko says. “One of the heroes who saved Izuku?”
“He was,” Kirishima says.
Inko lays a hand on Kacchan’s cheek, and says, “You’ve been looking after my baby for years. You’re okay, Katsuki.”
Izuku has to look away from the open expression on Kacchan’s face. It’s too much.
After dinner, Shinsou, the unbelievable traitor, tells everyone not in the know about Izuku’s nicknames for them all, and then sits back and laughs when they demand answers.
Sato stares vacantly at the wall. “Yellow Might? Midoriya. Why.”
“This is why I just told him the truth, ribbit,” Asui says.
Kaminari points at Iida, who’s still trying to process Almost-Ingenium. “Iida gave us that big scary lecture about the sanctity of time travel!”
“That was rubbish,” Asui says. “No offence, Iida.”
“Almost-Ingenium,” Iida says to Izuku. “Do you not think …”
“You made the Ingenium legacy your own,” Izuku says quickly. “I just got confused when I was six and the only information I could find on you was your brother, who looked so much like you but was clearly not you. Do you know how stressful that was?”
“How come Momo got such a cool name, though?” Jirou demands. Yaoyorozu fiddles with her ponytail, visibly pleased.
“No,” Uraraka says, sing-song, “I think Todoroki definitely got the best name.”
“He was so taken with you when he was little,” Inko says. “He used to insist that his drawings weren’t an accurate representation of how pretty you were.”
Todoroki blinks and makes a sound like a computer rebooting itself. Uraraka slams her hands down on the table and demands, “Drawings?”
And that’s how Izuku ends up in his childhood room with nineteen of his once-childhood heroes vying for space. He pulls out journal after journal and lets them pass them around. He’s torn between an odd mix of horrified embarrassment and pride at seeing them get so excited about his childish scribbles and anecdotes and theories, touching the crayon drawings with something like relevance.
Todoroki slides up to Izuku while everyone is caught up in an argument about who has the best drawing.
“Midoriya,” he says, and then wets his lips, pulls on the sleeves of his sweater. “Izuku. Your drawings …”
Izuku flails a hand in the air. “Ah, sorry! I didn’t mean to embarrass you or make things weird. I guess I couldn’t help myself from drawing you all when I was little.”
“No,” Todoroki says. “I wanted to ask: can I have a copy of my pages? I want to frame them.”
“You want to what?”
Every time the journals make their way to Kacchan’s corner of the room, he quickly passes them on. He was the first person out of this group to see these pages. There are still gaps in the books, frayed edges left as evidence from where Kacchan tore out entire pages or threw the journals around, playing keep away with Izuku’s belongings.
Kacchan was the first person to see this journals later on, too, when Izuku confronted him in his dorm room. Izuku was the first person to see Kacchan’s drawings, too.
When Kacchan looks up and meets his eye, Izuku smirks. His eyes say: Wait until they realise that you have drawings, too.
Kacchan scowls. Don’t you fucking dare. I showed you that in confidence, you bastard.
And Izuku laughs because they both know that, after Izuku has gone back in time, he won’t hesitate before enthusiastically telling the entire class about Kacchan’s drawings.
The news doesn’t cover the jail break. Time travel quirks don’t get mentioned in the public sphere; Izuku would never have known that Redo existed, if he hadn’t spent his childhood chasing after heroes that everyone else thought were imaginary.
The text message comes Wednesday morning when it is still dark and Izuku is just sneaking back into his apartment after an easy nighttime patrol.
Group Chat: Aizawa’s Angels
Mind Black: Redo has escaped. We think he’s sending another group back.
Mind Black: Meet at my apartment in 20mins.
Mind Blank: We’re jumping.
Izuku brushes his teeth and changes out of his sweat-crusted suit. He grabs his spare suit and an older version of his mouth guard and mask, one that extends up past his forehead and into his curls, and runs back out the door. Sleep can wait.
Because it’s so early in the morning, only a handful of people arrive at Shinsou’s apartment. Most of his ex-classmates are either asleep, or working, or live too far away to make it to an impromptu meet up.
It’s been awhile since Izuku has been to Shinsou’s apartment. When a preteen with white hair and slitted pupils opens the door, Izuku thinks he has the wrong address.
“Sorry,” Izuku says, taking a step back, “I must have made a mistake—”
Shinsou peers over the top of the girl. “What did I say about opening the door on your own?” He shoos the kid out of the way and then opens the door wider to let Izuku in. “Sorry. She’s kind of a fan. I have no idea why, but—”
The girl glowers up at Shinsou, still-half hidden behind him. “Hitoshi, it’s Deku.”
Shinsou gently shoves her back into the living room. “He’s the Number One, I think he can take an old friend poking fun of him.”
“I’m honoured,” Izuku says, and smiles when Shinsou glares at him. Standing together like that, with their strangely coloured hair and matching scowls, they could be father and daughter.
Kirishima bounces through the open front door, ignoring both Shinsou and Izuku in favour of the kid. “Hey, T! How are you?”
The girl’s hard stare melts away. She turns shy and quiet under Izuku and Kirishima’s gaze.
“I’m fine,” she mumbles. She peeks at Izuku, as though checking to see if he’s still there, and then reddens and ducks into the hallway and out of sight.
“Did I scare her off?” Izuku asks.
“No, she’s just shy,” Shinsou says. “I told her she was invited to your dinner party a few weeks ago, but she didn’t want to come. It would’ve been too much for her, I think.”
“I was a shy kid, too,” Izuku says. “I understand.”
Shinsou snorts, like he doesn’t believe that. But then, Izuku had never really been shy around his heroes.
“It doesn’t help that she’s a big hero fan, or that you’re her favourite, Midoriya. It’s weird having posters of you in my apartment, even if it is just in her bedroom.”
“Her room?” Izuku repeats. “You adopted her?”
“No,” Shinsou says.
Jirou sticks his head out of the kitchen. “He totally did,” she says. “Hey, Midoriya, Kirishima. Where’s Bakugou?”
“Working,” Kirishima says. To Izuku, he says, “That was Traverse. Shinsou says he’s just looking after her until he can finalise her entry into UA, but really, he’s basically adopted the kid. It’s sweet.”
Shinsou opens and closes his mouth. Finally, he manages to choke out, “Her parents are vile, and she could be exploited if anyone finds out how strong her quirk is, and I’m not about to let a kid with that much potential slip through the cracks, let alone live on the streets.”
“Softie,” Jirou heckles.
Ashido slips through the front door. She’s wearing a denim jacket over her pyjamas, and holding her hero suit and something laminated rolled into a tube.
“Where’s my favourite little hero?” she says without saying hello to her old friends clustered in the entryway. She glances around and when she doesn’t see a head of white hair, she hollers, “Traverse, get in here. I’ve got presents!”
Shinsou tries to hush her and remind them all that he has neighbours, until Jirou snorts, and says, “Is that another Deku poster?”
“The biggest one I could find,” Ashido says.
“You didn’t,” Shinsou says flatly.
Ashido manoeuvres around them and jogs deeper into the apartment, Deku poster held aloft like a baton. “I absolutely did. I’m going to try and convince her to hang it up in the living room.”
Izuku makes a choked sound in the back of his throat, unable to form proper syllables. Shinsou says, “Don’t you fucking dare.”
Ashido disappears around the corner, and Shinsou runs after her. Jirou snickers and follows them.
Kirishima looks unbothered by this. He shuts the door, takes off his shoes, and asks Izuku, “Would you like coffee? I’m going to go make some for everyone. Maybe that will wake us all up.”
Standing in Shinsou’s cramped kitchen beside Kirishima, listening as Kaminari and Sero’s voices are added to the disaster going on in the living room, Izuku cannot help but wonder what it was like for his classmates going back the first time around.
Were they scared to time travel for the first time? Where did they first meet—here, in Shinsou’s small apartment, all twenty of them attempting to crowd into the living room; or was it in the dusty rented out apartment, their voices echoing through the unfurnished rooms; or was it somewhere else? A hero office? Somewhere secluded on the outskirts of town, like Izuku had always imagined?
“Everyone’s so relaxed,” Izuku wonders, as Ashido picks Traverse up and carries her through the apartment. She looks a lot smaller bracketed in Ashido’s muscled arms. When Ashido parades her through the kitchen, she gets overwhelmed by Izuku’s presence once more, and hides her face in Ashido’s shoulder.
“No,” Kirishima says, laying out mugs on the counter, “they’re not. Not really. Traverse is scared of her quirk. Shinsou says there hasn’t been a documented case of anyone having a time-related quirk anywhere near as strong as her’s. Most of the time, it’s too difficult to send people back a few months, let alone years, and Traverse can send us back over two decades.”
“But what about—” Izuku begins.
“Redo uses multiple quirk-boosting drugs. I think he’s just trying to send as many people back as he can before he overdoses.”
“God,” Izuku says.
“Yeah,” Kirishima says.
“Is she going to be okay to send us back?”
“She can do it without breaking a sweat,” Kirishima says. “Shinsou says that she once accidentally sent someone back fifty years. One day, she fought back against a bully and he just disappeared. A week later, the same kid tracked her down. He wasn’t ten anymore. He was an adult and almost sixty years old.”
Kirishima balances the mugs on a tray and takes them into the next room, leaving Izuku to his thoughts. Kirishima had seemed off all morning. While their friends were bounding around the apartment and playing with Traverse, Kirishima had been quiet. Reserved. It tells him just as much about why they’re here as Shinsou’s messages had.
Once enough people have arrived, they move into the office. The space has been transformed—all the furniture has been moved out, photos and notes taped to the wall, and in the middle of the room, a rug with pillows has been laid down. It looks like they’re preparing the space for a sleepover-cum-study session, not to travel back in time.
They settle down in a circle, cross-legged, and then Shinsou starts: “We don’t think they’re going after Midoriya again. That was a planned mission. This is spontaneous. And this time, they know that we’re monitoring Midoriya’s childhood. They know attacking him again won’t work.”
“Then why are we here?” Jirou asks.
“I said they weren’t targeted Midoriya,” Shinsou says. “I didn’t say they weren’t planning an attack at all.” Kirishima’s hold tightens on his mug. “We think they’re going after Bakugou.”
“Killing off the Number Two Hero would damage the timeline, too,” Traverse says shyly. “And maybe it would destabilise Deku’s role as the Symbol of Peace.”
“They grew up together,” Sero realises. “If Bakugou is killed as a kid, then it would seriously impact Midoriya emotionally.”
“There’s no maybe about it,” Izuku says. “If Kacchan is killed before I start at UA, I wouldn’t be a hero. I’d be a total stranger.”
“Yeah,” Kirishima says in that same flat tone he’s been using all morning, “me too.”
Izuku looks around the circle. The people here are the ones Kacchan had mentioned: Ashido with Traverse half on her lap, Kaminari trying valiantly to stay awake, and Sero, and Jirou, and Izuku, and Kirishima, glaring down at his mug like it has personally wronged him.
Izuku had imagined that, before they time travelled again, they would have held a class-wide meeting and the six of them would have volunteered to time travel again. They’re the six people who are closest to Kacchan, after all. It makes sense.
He never thought that the six of them would be chosen randomly, by fate. If Uraraka was awake, if her phone wasn’t on mute, she would be here, and Floaty Girl would have been a part of Kacchan’s childhood. If Iida didn’t work early in the morning, then Kacchan would have been squinting at the computer monitor, trying to rectify the differences between Ingenium and the hero who saved him, just like Izuku had.
If the text had come any earlier, when Izuku was still on patrol, then his phone would have stayed in his locker, unchecked, and Kacchan would never have met the green-suited hero who never gave up.
That thought horrifies Izuku.
A small, inexperienced Kacchan is somewhere out there—sometime out there—with no way of defending himself. Is this how his friends felt, going back, realising that the hero they had stood beside for years was now a vulnerable child? He understands why some of them were so rattled when they first met him.
“We’re not going to let anything happen to him,” Sero says, laying a hand on Kirishima’s shoulder.
“It’ll be alright,” Traverse says bravely, glancing from Kirishima to Izuku, “because you’ll be there.”
Kirishima blows out a breath. Izuku balls his hands into fists, and says, “We can do this.”
Traverse falls into a sleep-like trance, seeking out Kacchan and the disturbances in the timeline. Izuku wonders just how powerful she is. She’s still in middle school. How powerful will she become?
Shinsou looks around the circle. “Is there anything anyone needs to say before we go back?”
Izuku looks at Jirou and Kirishima. He almost opens his mouth to warn them about tumbling onto UA’s campus and getting caught. Don’t disrupt the timeline, Aizawa had said. Izuku closes his mouth.
When no one speaks up, Shinsou pulls out a tub of what looks like wristwatches—black with no clock face. He hands them out to the group. Everyone takes one silently. There is no teasing, now. The play-fighting from earlier is a thing of the past.
Izuku fastens the wristwatch. It hums against his skin as though it’s alive. The screen on the front lights up. It gives him information on disturbances in the timeline, and a direct feed with Shinsou, and the date, shining at the very top of the watch.
“Okay,” Shinsou says. “Who wants to go first?”
The jump is seamless. Traverse lays her hand on Izuku’s forehead like a baptism, and closes to her eyes. Her fingers warm against his skin. Static runs down his spine, and then the quiet chatter in Shinsou’s apartment gives way to the distant sound of traffic and children playing. Izuku opens his eyes. He recognises this street. He grew up here. He would take this path to school everyday when he was little.
He checks the date on the watch. He’s twenty-one years in the past.
Izuku follows the tracker in the watch until he reaches a familiar stretch of bushland. The villain half-hidden in the trees is drunk off the power of facing someone who can’t fight back, and doesn’t even realise the Symbol of Peace has broken out into a sprint behind him.
One for All propels him off the ground and he kicks the villain deeper into the bush. The villain gets back up. Izuku grabs him around the collar and flips them both through the air, landing with the villain pinned beneath him. He secures handcuffs around his wrists, and slots a muzzle loosely around his mouth to stop him from saying anything incriminating.
“Wow.”
Izuku touches his mask, reassuring himself that his freckled face is hidden by it’s outdated fit, and then turns around.
Kacchan is sprawled against overgrown tree roots. His face is scuffed with dirt and he’s holding his All Might backpack like a shield. From the date, from Izuku’s own faded memories, he knows that this Kacchan is six years old.
Kacchan scrambles to his feet. His small face shines up at Izuku. The wide, vague eyes, the open mouth—this is the way Kacchan used to look at All Might. Why is he looking at Izuku like that?
“Are you a pro hero?” Kacchan asks.
“I am.” And then, without even thinking about it, Izuku asks, “Would you like to be friends?”
Kacchan stares at him. He doesn’t blink. He barely breathes. For one moment, despite knowing what he does about the future, he thinks Kacchan can see right through him. He thinks, just for a second, that this tiny, inexperienced Kacchan will look him up and down and say, No.
“Yeah,” Kacchan says finally. He takes a deep breathe, and balls his hands into fists, and rocks forward, the way he always used to stand when confronting upperclassmen, and blurts, “Can I have your autograph?”
“You … you want my—”
“You took down that villain like it was nothing. He didn’t even know you were there before—bam! He was down.”
Kacchan laughs and jumps up and down, almost tripping on the uneven ground. It’s been so long since he’s has seen Kacchan’s unfiltered joy. Izuku can’t help the laugh that bubbles up his throat, the smile that spreads beneath the mask.
This is the same stretch of bushland where they used to go looking for beetles. This is where they first founded the Bakugou Katsuki Hero Agency. Here, through those stretch of trees, Froppy saved him from drowning. This is where Izuku say Floaty Girl and Ice Prince for the very last time.
The bushland is smaller than the remembers. But then, so is Kacchan.
“My name’s Bakugou Katsuki,” Kacchan declares. “I’m going to be a hero just like you when I grow up!”
Kacchan rifles through his backpack and pulls out an exercise book and a coloured pencil. He holds them up to Izuku expectedly.
Izuku takes the book and pencil like they’re made of finely spun glass. His hands look enormous next to Kacchan’s.
Carefully, Izuku writes out: Katsuki,
I look forward to working with you one day. You’ll be a better hero than you know.
Like Uraraka and Todoroki and the other heroes that have come before, Izuku signs it simply, Your friend.