Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

  Though Izuku didn’t really know how to put it into words when he was little, somewhere in the back of his mind he’d always felt like he was living next to a deep, dark ocean. It might have primarily been a source of fear for most, but this persistent sense of the unknown instead spurred on his spark of curiosity and wonder, at least at first.

When the doctor couldn’t find Izuku’s Quirk and gave him a Quirkless diagnosis, his boundless curiosity and need to Know was brushed off as simply unrelated to any possibility of him ever developing one, just as the strange dreams and his attempts to describe that impossibly large feeling were.

He was just ‘that weird Quirkless kid’…

But then, one day, the Waters proved to be more than a ‘feeling’.

  Childhood is one of the most common periods and contexts through which people experience or frame their explanations of a sense of the unknown, both wonder and fear at different aspects of the big wide world around us. Izuku had always skewed quite far towards wonder at the things he didn’t know yet, he loved learning new things.

  Well before his passion for analyzing Quirks and his dream of a career as a Pro Hero, he learned to walk and talk a bit earlier than normal for most toddlers, but not nearly so much as to approach the drastic outliers that are prodigies born with high-end Intelligence Quirks. Once he learned to walk, he would often wander and explore. Once he learned to talk, he would have a small yet nearly constant stream of questions about the world around him. Back then, he and Kacchan were thick as thieves and quite the handful for their parents in their particular way, what with all their energy.

  The irony of how the Green-haired sunshine child was mostly the one leading the blonde around would feel as if it was laid quite thick in the hindsight brought by even just a few more years.

  Izuku was the smarter one, the one who was always finding something new to play or talk about, or some new adventure to go on, that Katsuki thought was just The Absolute Best. Izuku was the one who first brought up the idea of the two of them becoming Heroes together after he first watched a rerun of All-Might’s debut.

  It was heartwarming for Inko and Mitsuki at the time, to see their boys trailing each other on trips to the park. Katsuki got more loud and brash to match his best friend’s kindness, smarts, and just- the things that made Izuku, Izuku.

  The way things played out was perhaps particularly cruel to both of them. Katsuki, being the physically oldest of the two, got his Quirk first just as expected. And it was a bit of a mess to get a handle on, which was less expected.

After all, many positive depictions of people actively using their Quirks being broadcasted to the public tended to involve combat situations and Pro Heroes, most of whom were highly trained to the point of absurdity and therefore perhaps a bad point of comparison for a small child with a dangerous and freshly manifested Quirk.

Then Izuku’s fourth birthday came and went, and they waited,

and waited.

  And then, during the week of one of Hisashi’s increasingly frequent business trips, Inko took Izuku to the doctor when nothing like her own minor attraction-telekinesis Quirk or Hisashi’s fire-breath had manifested, and nothing else immediately stuck out as unusual to her about Izuku except for the lack of anything that stuck out.

  The ‘diagnosis’ was done by a Quirkologist who happened to be the father-in-law of a friend-of-a-friend through Mitsuki, so even if Katsuki had been able to get his feelings and thoughts in order after the two boys both shattered in their own ways, he didn’t have the opportunity to cover for Izuku regardless of whether the idea had occurred to him. He had to fall in line or be cast aside for defending someone everyone else in school suddenly saw as a target.

A target he was feeling a sort of hurt by that was too complex for a child his age to really process.

How does someone just stand there and cope with a sudden wave of bigotry and general hostility towards a loved one, or a sense of having been failed by said loved one even if there’s no true blame to dole out for a perceived failing that’s not anyone’s fault?

A four year-old wouldn’t even know how to word that question to ask it.

Chapter Text

  The sound of the waves, or of rain, or of trees rustling in the wind has always been comforting to Izuku, more-so than just simply being relaxing.

He’s walking on volcanic black sand this time, it’s never quite the same from one dream to the next, but these dreams aren’t a constant either. The sand this time feels a little bit like the ash he had to scrub out of his uniform yesterday, but softer, less like clinging filth than something that could be easily rinsed off by lapping waves.

It’s always like this, walking along the beach, or sometimes letting the movement of the waves lap between his toes. The water is dark and without visible end, the beach stretches on as far as it needs to, and whatever lays inland is blurry, unimportant.

Whenever he’s there, the weight of things just… lifts. He simply walks, wanders, occasionally stoops down or sits, even. He’s never been to an actual beach while awake… as far as he can remember, the nearest one has long been used as an illegal dumping ground for garbage, and he and mama haven’t traveled hardly at all since Hisashi left.

Sometimes he finds things, beach glass, driftwood, a shell, a nice rock… once, on the night of a storm, he even found what he thought was a piece of branching coral buried upside down in pale sand, almost like roots.

…

  “Mama, is… Fulgurite a kind of Coral?” He asks one weekend. Izuku’s mother looks at him very oddly then.

“Sorry honey, can you repeat that?”

“Is Fulgurite a kind of coral?”

“I don’t know,” she smiles, though it hitches a little “why don’t we look it up on the computer once you finish eating?”

  Inko has always known her baby was smart. He was always a curious and inquisitive one, even before he started school, always full of questions. Sometimes it’s odd though, like this one, where he spoke a word in English first without realizing.

  She asked him once, when he asked one of those questions, where something in the phrasing or the wording was odd, if it was something he’d heard at school. He was perhaps unusually quiet, though honest, when he said no. She knows that something isn’t good at school for him, but not what exactly. She tried to speak up about it to the school a few times in meetings, at one point, only to be rebuffed and for nothing to happen, and Izuku doesn’t talk to her about whatever is happening nowadays.

Apparently, ‘Fulgurite’ is what happens when lightning strikes sand or other sediments and fuses it into glass.

Chapter Text

  One particular day when Izuku was eight years old was a major turning point, not only for Izuku himself but for a lot of people. Unlike most other people though, Izuku at least was given the luxury to know enough later on to recognize it as such. Two major events occurred that day, or perhaps they were one and only part of it made the news.

…

  Two gargantuan powers clash in an evacuated neighborhood, or more accurately, a crater that was recently an evacuated neighborhood. One For All and All For One clashing with nothing held back and full intent to kill.

The fight itself and its outcome is perhaps not the thing to pay attention to at the moment though.

  People don’t really think about what a Quirk like All Might’s does when he’s not holding back. The ground shaking, blasts of wind, shockwaves, sonic booms? It’s a matter of public record that the weather sometimes abruptly shifts when All Might is on camera, but people tend to get too wrapped up in the dramatics of the weather matching his arrival, departure, or presence to actually intellectually take in what it means. All Might shifts the weather to varying degrees even when drastically holding back and aiming to save civilians and apprehend rather than kill villains.

  On that day, when a missed shot from All For One’s Air Canon met the air pressure changes generated by the titanic force of a chambered full-powered ‘50 States Of SMASH’, it birthed a storm. Not directly overhead, and not quite immediately, it certainly rained a bit in the crater, but that was nothing compared to what blasted Mustafu and its surroundings later that afternoon.

_____

  It hadn’t exactly been a nice day for Izuku. Most days at school weren’t nice days, but this-

The bruises, the burns, the holes burned in his school uniform jacket, his phone is broken again, and he still had to take a long route home to avoid being subjected to anything more.

And then the rain started… soon less simply rain than it was an outright hurricane occurring drastically out of season. He tried to take shelter, but the nearest buildings when it kicked up were all private condos requiring a passcode and someone on the intercom inside pressing a button to even let him in. fat chance of that.

The next closest were shops that had all been closed, locked, or even barricaded in one case the moment the wind picked up and the rain started falling at an angle, and they were equally unhelpful.

So it was, that Midoriya Izuku huddled in the lower half of an entry stairwell for an upstairs dance studio on a small side street as the floodwaters rose.

He didn’t make it home that day.

Chapter Text

  He’s never been well and truly away from the shore before, perhaps wading up to his knees in the waves once or twice…

…but not like this.

He’s neither sinking nor drowning, nor is he swimming, simply being pulled along by the current. Maybe not a current exactly, that implies something far less… directed? Izuku knows what running water feels like, he knows what some variants of telekinesis and aerokinesis feel like when used on him, for that matter. None quite fit.

His shoulders brush silt, sand, and then wave-worn rounded pebbles, and then his eyes open as he stands up in the ankle-deep lapping waves. The rocks, almost all the size of his fist or smaller, shift and knock together almost musically with the water’s movement. There’s a breeze, but his soaked state doesn’t chill him. He’s in a small cove, this time, but there’s a path around the cliff at one end. At first, he simply sits just outside the reach of the waves, listening to the stones and watching the gently roiling twirl of the clouds above and waves below out into the horizon. These dreams have never really had any urgency to them. Perhaps they’ve never been quite so… lucid?… either.

  It’s a quiet thing, and it feels like minutes pass before he notices. The sound of the stones and the waves has something more to it. The burbling, whispering, tumbling rythm of it reminds him of a type of unburdened laughter he hasn’t heard nor experienced in years.

Those days in the park before… befo-

  Another sound catches on his attention like a bit of limp detritus against an anchor’s chain… subtly, not particularly forcefully, but nonetheless it’s there. Something metallic, or perhaps like waves echoing against metal instead of tumbling stones against one another? His curiosity is piqued, but he still doesn’t hesitate to slip a few nice rocks and seashells into his pockets before exploring the path around the cliffs.

The breeze picks up and abates in shuddering bursts as he nears the stony ledge the path beside the waves takes, and as he finally rounds the bend-

…

  -Izuku lays face up in brown seawater, late twilight giving way to a night sky mostly bereft of visible stars, given the levels of air pollution and light pollution inherent to Mustafu’s relatively urban environment.

He’s not floating so much as resting against the hood of a partially submerged car-

…

-his foot slips, the dark of the sea rising up to meet him, but he hasn’t fallen. A whisper of waves and wind urges, surges him on for a few moments, finally allowing him the chance to look up.

and up…

and up.

…or is it really?

  Something about that notion in regard to the ruin which his eyes say is there doesn’t quite fit. It gives off a feeling almost like a starfish or a barnacle, and those can cling to the sides and undersides of things just as easily. It’s… something, something that had surely been been intended to be beautiful once. A beacon of safety. At some point, it seems it was partly hollowed out…

in some places it bears more resemblance to the wounds of a mauling than a dismantling…

and left to crumble away. Izuku would find the gleaming wreck more sorrowful if not for the resilience of some of the things it resembles.

Starfish limbs, when cut off from the main body, are capable of outright regenerating into other new starfish after all,

so perhaps there’s hope here too.

~-=-=-=-~

  A sodden green-haired boy wakes up among partly waterlogged piles of garbage.

The muddled salty water is knee-deep, murky brown and treacherously opaque, but his steps would appear unhindered, if there were anyone watching him at the time.

It’s not that there are no dangers or obstacles in the water, he doesn’t need to see them to know where they are and how to avoid them. He’s not exactly in a position to contemplate how he knows at the moment.

  Left to avoid one jagged metal edge, circle around that mound of garbage on the right and step lightly,

take a right to avoid the washed up rubble of a nearby collapsed building.

Hang left to avoid the shards of a car’s windshield and a rusted piece of metal that resembles Endeavor’s face,

climb carefully up the heap with the dead fish and the broken neon-orange umbrella,

then, use it to hop part of the awkwardly half-collapsed fence unhindered.

  The nearest rescue Heroes and other disaster relief personnel are nearly a mile away. Perhaps, had the circumstances been different, Izuku would have immediately headed in their direction. He knows where they are. He knows they’d save him, but also how little it would change in the long run. He knows where to scavenge the most useful supplies he can safely access in the surrounding few blocks nearby.

He knows.

He knows.

H̸̢̨͎͔̞͔̩̼̖̞̩̬̠̞͕͕̰̠͓̯̩͓͇̙̰̲̭͆̏̀̃̌̊̎͆̂̕̚ͅě̵̡̧̢̦͎̪͙̜̬̰̳̼̘͔̦͈̬̻̺͎̍͗̀̈́̓͒̇̾͜͜͝͠ ̷̨͉͍͎͈͙̫̬͉͇͇͈̖̮̦̫̰̰̭̿̎͋̀͊̓̾̀͌͑͋́́̀̄̒̍͘͘͜k̸̻̹͉̩͚͇̣̰͙̠̬̫͕͚̰̠̆́̌͗̆͑̒̉̐̆͌̇͂̈́̇͘͘͜͠͠n̷̢̨̛̞̳̱͕̝̙̟͇̻͓̭̯̖̹̖͎̳͉̾̾̊͊̋̀̅͐̂͌͋͐̈́̊͐͗̿̔̔͛̑͌͝͠͝ö̷̡̧̤̩̮̞̟̤̹̬͔̥̘̪̯͔̬̲͈͇͔̝́̓͆̑̓̐͘̚͜͠w̶̢̧͈͉͓̱͕̥͚̠͎͎̐̾͌́̄s̶̡̛͖͔̮̦͙̩͔̱͕̗̎̊͒̽͂̆͋̎̊͂̑̋́̚-̴̛̯͖̈̎͒̓̇̐͆̉̒̕͝

Chapter Text

  Among the sparse passengers on a train line heading northeast through Shizuoka in the early hours of the morning is a green-haired child in an oversized off-yellow raincoat with a camping backpack. After nearly a full day the waves he was swept up in have finally begun to ebb.

The train pulls into one of the last stations before the border of Yamanashi prefecture and the bucktoothed businessman who first boarded with all the debatable Awareness of a coconut rushes smoothly out, his coffee fully emptied and rather obviously charting a course through his bloodstream.

It’s rather fortunate that Izuku is so practiced at fading into the periphery of others’ awareness, because almost anyone else suddenly left with the knowledge that he’s had thrust upon him would have begun visibly panicking several stops ago.

  There’s just so much to sort through, on top of the nature of the revelations themselves! it’s perhaps vaguely akin to the frustration he might feel finding someone else’s brilliant and fascinating Quirk Analysis notes… except that rather than being held in notebooks, the pages are all shuffled haphazardly and then further packed arbitrarily if neatly inside cardboard boxes. The only thing he doesn’t need to sift through mental sand grains to understand is that…

it seems he has a Quirk.

  In a certain respect it changes very little, because the evidence staring him in the face points to the notion that he’s always had it since age four, or perhaps even before then. On the other hand, the picture it paints with what it told him isn’t a particularly nice one.

Seemingly every step of his life he’s been living with barely a few degrees of separation from what some might describe as a shadow-war.

Though maybe calling it that has the wrong connotations. There’s far more raw power, fear, petty egotism, and malice involved than any clever gambits. If it was a web then the spider who made it had to have been impaired like those pre-quirk experiments where someone injected spiders with caffeine.

Where it starts and the edges of his life end are almost blurred in some places, like counting a school of fish through ripples on the water’s surface.

Ujiko, Garaki, Tsubasa…

The doctor who misdiagnosed him as Quirkless, the grandpa of one of his classmates, is also a particularly monstrous piece of work that’s just over a century old, and the disgraced creator of a fringe Quirk-apocalypse hypothesis that got just enough right to be even more wrong once it started its logical leaps and paranoid fear-mongering.

  If that was the full extent of it, it would have already been quite enough, in Izuku’s opinion, but no, of course not. There just had to be the obscenely petty two-hundred-and-fifty-eight year-old quirk stealing boogeyman.

The reason why his grandma on Mama’s side grew up in foster care, got separated from her little brother by the system and couldn’t find him again, and never knew her biological parents? The reason Izuku never met his cousins or even knew he had cousins?

AllO̸̢̖̰̞̖̜͚̻̦̣̠̍̇̄̒͒̄̏͗̒̍̂̂͘̕̚n̷̢̧͈̳͚̰͎̰̭͍͕̱͖̣̗̋͑̉̄̓͐̉̐͒̍̽͂͂̃̌̈́̇̀͘̕ͅe̸̛͕̮͖̬͈̥̹̪̤̟͍̊̉͑̾̌̓̓͒̀̏̄̅͑̉͘̚͘͝͝ For OneA̸͍̰̗̤̺͖̼̬͚̮̖̔̏̎͛̎̈́̄̋͝l̸̛̛̝̳̣͚̘̲̟̟̻̺͚̼̭̀͋͛̾̀͌́͆̎̆̈́̿̇͂̀ļ̴̨̢̧̠̳̖̣̗͕͈͕̮̙̹̱̞̄̉̅̀͒̈́͑̍

The initial source of the storm that hit Mustafu?

Á̷̢̦͎̝̲͇̖̰̤̼̺͙̭̫͕̭̪͙̑͌̆͜l̸͎̲͎̯̦͉͓̝̲̩̂̑͌͋͌̎͒͑̂͛͊̒̃̂̾͑͘̕͝ļ̴̬͔̠͖̩͉̐̓̄̑͊̃̑́̔̽̔̂̚̚͜͝͠One For Ò̵̢̳̘͎̲͔̠͕̻̱͖̝̹̪̐n̶̨̢̤͇̭̗̲̭̳̲̦̗͔͓̻͕̈́̇̉̄̊̾e̴̜̳͙̟̺̺̳̱̣̖͔̣̫̝̠͖̖̽̈́̈̍̿͒̚ͅAll

All Might’s part in it all is something Izuku doesn’t really know what to feel about at the moment… and even then there’s more to sift through.

Chapter Text

  The exact details of it are a little murky to Izuku when he first arrives, of why he chose Naruhata in particular. He got on the train out of Mustafu well before he came out of whatever fugue state his Quirk had put him in. If there’s one thing it’s useful for in the moment, when he can tamp down on its incessant splatterings of information triggered by an idle thought or momentary observation, it’s learning the unspoken rules on the streets.

knowing who, what, and where to avoid.

  The second floor of a mostly abandoned building, near the borders of Naruhata’s old town and its business district, and fallen into an obvious state of disrepair bar a vacant and dubiously-legal rooftop ‘penthouse’, becomes his roost within the first week.

It’s still largely intact, but it does take him some work to clean up a room by the back fire-escape enough that he’s sure he won’t get sick, a couple ceiling tiles of the former office space had collapsed at some point and he’d rather not fixate on what his Quirk told him was making up the strangely multicolored rot on the resulting debris. He’s just lucky the floor wasn’t carpeted or else the room wouldn’t have been within his means at this point to clean to a habitable level.

  Naruhata’s old town is a far more bustling place in some regards than Mustafu ever was. Far more winding networks of alleyways, which far more people take as casual shortcuts here. He used to do the same in Mustafu, if only because it made him less of an easy target than walking down the street in the open, but most normal civilians in Mustafu had considered it common sense to avoid the alleys whenever possible.

He Knows the bakery a few blocks east leave out their day-old stock for the homeless.

He Knows where to dumpster-dive for all manner of other supplies.

He Knows the local Hero patrol routes, but he could have figured that out anyway given a couple weeks.

He Knows that the legal owner of the building is looking to rent out the place on the roof.

He Knows the o̴c̵c̷u̶p̴a̵n̸t̷s̶,̸ ̸c̵o̸n̸t̸e̴n̴t̴s̶,̵ ̴a̵n̵d̵ ̷e̴x̷a̶c̶t̵ ̸c̸u̷s̴t̸o̶m̸ ̷m̴a̷k̷e̶ ̸o̴f̷ ̸t̵h̶e̴ ̸u̶n̷m̶a̵r̵k̶e̵d̴ ̸c̴a̵r̷ ̴h̸e̸ ̶h̷e̶a̶r̷s̷ ̶p̸a̸s̸s̶i̵n̵g̶ ̵i̴n̸ ̵t̷h̷e̶ ̵d̵i̸s̴t̴a̸n̵c̵e̵ ̵t̷h̶a̷t̸ ̵n̸i̷g̸h̸t̴ ̶t̴h̴r̷o̸u̴g̷h̷ ̶t̵h̶e̶ ̶c̶r̴a̴c̷k̵ ̴i̶n̶ ̸t̴h̴e̸ ̷r̸o̵o̶m̷’̵s̴ ̶w̸i̸n̵d̵o̶w̶ ̷a̶s̵ ̷h̴e̸ ̵f̷a̵l̶l̸s̶ ̵a̸s̸l̷e̸e̴p̴.̸

Ḩ̵̖̘͔͙̻͔́̎́̀ę̷̪̭̗̯͎͔̰̩̟̓͝ ̸̡̲̘̮̦̝͓̹͕̀͌̀́̀̾͘͝K̷̞̹̖͈͗͗̈́̉̕̚n̸̨̢̲̭̰̤͇̳͛̓͊́́͘ǒ̵̢̢̞̭̝͖̇ẅ̶̳̻̜͓̭̿̽́̽s̴̨̺̞̹̠̠̳͚̥̘̋̋̐͂̆.̸͖̠͉͈͌̌̔̔̍̚̚͠

-=-=-=-

  He’s not sure it’s ever been coastal mudflats before. The mud is a very distinct feeling compared to sand, or rocks.

As the wind picks up for a few moments carrying sea-spray, a distant rolling boom of thunder, then several.

rhythmic, almost. steady.

The light is that of an overcast drowsy twilight, though it doesn’t really block his view, only…set the tone of it?

The relative lack of much to look at on the surface of the mud only makes the small holes in it more obvious. He’s never seen anything distinctly alive sharing the beach with him when he’s here, so he’s hesitant to think they’re burrows… but…

With a squirm of some small, nagging feeling, he stoops and begins digging along the path of one of the holes with his bare hands. The mud holds shapes and imprints oddly well, even those that should have been disturbed by his scooping, clawing hands.

His movements meet that steady rhythm, and something slips into place.

By the time he stops digging, the hole is several feet deep, but the water in it is nearly that as well.

The imprints tell pieces of many different stories that are all loosely correlated-

c̴̺̅ó̷͇r̵̬̈́a̴̖̓l̷̮̅-̸̠̀a̶̪̓t̷͉̊ë̷̠́d̴̯̍?̴̜͐

The beach, as he walks it, is not of Life, but it is adjacent. The imprints, some are branching, almost lacelike if lace was woven in upon itself in many-faceted depths rather than upon a mostly flat plane of an ‘X’ and ‘Y’ axis. Paths, is what those ones are…

though the last few feet of the hole- not whole, never quite that -are obscured by the water.

It’s odd, now that he ponders it, tides in the waking rise and retreat over mudflats, submerge and reveal them in a cycle that grants them a bountiful variety of life.

The water rests here still, beneath the mud, soaked in to the point it’s a part of the place… but the imprints below the water’s surface aren’t washed away.

Izuku eases himself into the bottom of the burrow. Into the water.

Á̵̛̛̯͚̙̞̠͎̋͛̎̊͝n̵͍̱̟̫̽̔̂͜d̵͇̾ ̸̡̝̙͇̮͓̘̖̞̭͊̈͆̃̂͝Ķ̵̧̛̭͉̮̌̆́̆̂͑̾ń̵̦̪̭̀͒̈́́̽̀̚o̸̢̢̰͙͎͙͙̗̿͊̐̏̓̄̚͝ẇ̶̡͙̝̮̘̫̭̣̯̂s̵̡̮̮̝̎̈́͊…̵͇̦̼̗̬̫̅̆͒̏

For a time, anyway.

He’s not meant to simply wait for the rising tide, after all.

He’d rather not feel so aimless though, either…