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If Izuku traces his finger back through his life, he can feel one shining lie threading through the whole thing, the golden theme of his existence. It’s just two words.
“I’m fine,” he tells Aizawa, twisting his fingers in the hem of his shirt.
“Good to know,” Aizawa says. “That wasn’t the question.”
“Oh.” Izuku tries to remember. To be honest, he hadn’t been listening. His head had been back in that final fight with Shigaraki, puzzling through it, trying to find another way out. Trying to save everyone. He goes there probably ten times a day, and even half a year later he hasn’t been able to come up with anything. “Um.”
Aizawa sighs. “I asked how you were feeling about the upcoming field trip.”
“Oh.” Izuku thinks his answer did the job, then, but whatever. “Good. Fine.” He lifts a shoulder. “The League is gone, so…yeah. How about you?”
Aizawa returns a slow deadpan blink, and Izuku curls in on himself with a wince. To his surprise, Aizawa answers. “I can’t say I’m excited for it. But I do expect it to be be less eventful than previous excursions.”
Izuku nods. “Right, yeah, definitely that. Will be good. For sure.”
Aizawa’s gaze is piercing.
When Izuku was given a choice between doing his weekly mandated check-in with Hound Dog or Aizawa, he chose Aizawa for a few reasons, the first being that he trusted ever-practical Aizawa with any number of his secrets, and the second being that he thought Aizawa genuinely couldn’t stand him, and that therefore the check-ins would be brief and surface level.
He’d been right on the first count, and irrevocably wrong on the second.
“Just…” Izuku flops a hand through the air, hunting for an explanation. He doesn’t know what’s making him nervous. He knows they’re not going to get attacked, and that’s a good thing. But there’s something foreboding about the peace, something uncomfortable. He shakes his head. “I’m fine. Sorry. I’m excited to have a field trip where we don’t get interrupted by any villains.”
“It’ll be a change of pace,” Aizawa says.
Izuku likes that Aizawa doesn’t pretend. He calls things as they are; he doesn’t exaggerate. Most of the time. And he’s right—the pace will definitely change, for better or for worse.
“Well,” Izuku says, “I’ll try not to jinx it.”
“That’d be nice.”
When Eri draws, her tongue pokes out just a little bit from the corner of her mouth. Izuku thinks it’s the cutest thing in the entire world—well, Eri generally is the cutest thing—and he has so many sneaky pictures of it that he could fill a book.
She’s drawing now, her silver eyebrows furrowed, her crayon fisted. She’s only just learning the little, precise movements like writing and drawing—there hadn’t been time to teach her before everything, and before that she’d still been with Overhaul. But she’s a fast learner. She’ll catch up.
“Your thoughts are loud,” she says, switching crayons.
Izuku puts a hand over his mouth immediately, but he doesn’t think he’s been muttering. He’s been trying to get a handle on it. He’s been trying to get a handle on lots of things. “Was I talking to myself?”
She shakes her head and draws a clean red line across the page. Her hand only wobbles a little bit near the end. Izuku is so proud of her it hurts. “No.”
“Sorry,” Izuku says reflexively, then hunts backward for what he’s apologizing for. Unclear. “Um, I’ll think quieter?”
She looks up, then, frowning. “It’s okay. I could just tell you were thinking is all. And worrying. You always…” She tugs on her lip and then her hair. “Your hands talk a lot.”
“Sorry,” Izuku says again, and then kicks himself mentally for it.
“It’s okay. And you don’t need to worry.” She picks up an orange crayon. “Everyone says so.”
Izuku lifts his eyebrows. “Who’s everyone?”
Eri adds a sun to the corner of her picture, straight lines spearing out from it for the rays. “Aizawa-san, Mirio-kun…Yamada-san. And other people I can’t exactly remember right now. Nedzu-san. They say the adults do the worrying, and I do the, um, the sleeping and playing. And learning. And you’re also not an adult.” Her eyes flick back up, concerned. “Right?”
“Right,” he says, mostly because he is not going to be the one to break to Eri the concept of being a teenager, and a hero student at that, right after a war. Mirio can deal with that conversation, next time it’s his turn to babysit.
Eri concludes, “So you’re also supposed to just sleep and play and learn.”
“Right,” Izuku says. “Well, and I have to do some interviews.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
She’s been very interested in the concept of fairness recently. Everything needs to be equal. The very few playdates she’s had with Koda have been complete disasters on account of it—Koda is, unfortunately, not good at sharing, and Eri, who has spent her entire life sharing and only just learned how to put her foot down, doesn’t take well to his territoriality. Last time, Eri spent five minutes explaining—logically, calmly—to Koda the concept of splitting a packet of fruit snacks in half, and then the remaining five minutes of the aborted playdate in tears after Koda got fed up and dumped the entire packet out on the ground. Which is, when one really thinks about it, still fair because they both got the same amount of fruit snacks (zero), but obviously it didn’t go over well with either of them.
Mirio’s convinced they will be best friends by the time they both turn nine. Izuku is slightly less certain, but he thinks they could pull it off by high school, if he and Kacchan are any example.
“You should tell Aizawa-san,” Eri says. “He should do that for you.”
Izuku’s pretty sure Aizawa would rather roll over and die than do any number of interviews for Izuku. He does not enlighten Eri with this. “Good idea.”
The crayons scrabble against cardboard as Eri digs through the box. Izuku fights the urge to tug at his lip and/or hair. To keep his apparently talkative hands busy, he picks up his pencil and goes back to a particularly difficult math problem that he’s been avoiding for the past twenty minutes. By all rights it shouldn’t be hard—Izuku’s never struggled with math. But he’s been having trouble keeping his brain in one place.
“There’s no gray,” says Eri.
“Use black?” Izuku suggests. “But lightly?”
Eri shakes her head and goes into the box again. “That’s too dark. How am I supposed to draw clouds if there’s no gray?”
“Maybe it’s a clear-skies day,” Izuku says.
The look Eri gives him is so stern, so grave that Izuku pulls back slightly. “There are no clear-skies days.”
Rain splats against the big window over the sofa. It’s been pouring all afternoon and shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. Izuku is not looking forward to the trek back to Heights Alliance from Aizawa’s dorm—he’s only here at all because Aizawa and Yamada both had to go to an all-staff meeting in the school. Aizawa has given him very strict instructions that he is to sit at the coffee table with Eri and not move from that spot unless there is an actual, genuine emergency inside the building, because he “prefers his apartment in one piece.”
And Izuku can’t even be offended, because the apartment is still showing signs of the last time he babysat Eri: e.g. the new trim around the new window has not yet been painted to match the rest of the apartment, and the hardwood still features some claw marks. Amongst other things.
It’s not Izuku’s fault. Genuinely, it isn’t. He is so good at sitting still and doing nothing but watching Eri draw for an hour. It’s a primary skill of his, actually. But he’d recently asked Kaminari to patch his phone into the hero radio channels, and he’d been listening in, and he’d heard that one of the villains was passing near UA…
Anyway, he was responsible, and he had Hitoshi cover for him babysitting Eri while he dealt with the problem, and Hitoshi was a fantastic babysitter! Eri did not receive a single injury when Izuku and a guy who was unironically calling himself Eagle Man came crashing through Aizawa’s window. Eri even said it was the best day of her life, which made Hitoshi laugh, so Izuku feels no guilt at all.
Okay, a little guilt. For the apartment. And Aizawa’s ensuing migraine. And the legal troubles since Izuku technically is still underage and not supposed to fight villains unsupervised, even though he did not leave the grounds at any point during the whole debacle and really, if you squint, it could be considered self-defense.
“Now you are talking out loud,” Eri informs him.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. May I borrow your pencil?”
Izuku hands it over.
Eri draws a perfect little cloud under the rays of her sunlight. Izuku watches her do it, and wonders. But before he can follow the train of thought very far, the door opens and Aizawa and Yamada enter, Aizawa much more rushed than Yamada.
He looks around the apartment, assessing the state it’s in. He visibly notes Izuku’s position in the room and how it has not changed since he gave his parting orders. He checks Eri over, who ignores him, resolutely shading in the cloud with Izuku’s pencil, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
“The apartment’s still upright!” Yamada cheers.
Izuku ducks his head. “I’m not that bad,” he mumbles.
“You are,” Eri says, and returns his pencil. “It’s nice. Nothing would ever happen, otherwise.”
Izuku watches Aizawa process that statement in real time. Aizawa isn’t a particularly expressive person, but Izuku has watched him chew various levels of distress enough times to recognize the slight twist of his mouth when he sees it.
“So much happens!” Yamada insists. “I made you pancakes today!”
“You make me pancakes every day.”
“That is objectively not true.”
“Almost every day. Deku-kun, may I use your blue highlighter? It’s raining in my picture.”
Izuku passes it to her. She drowns the landscape in blue.
Izuku takes a notebook to a random corner of campus and folds himself crosslegged in the grass. He opens to the first clean spread and flattens it out. He spins his pencil around his index and thumb a couple times before putting the tip of it to the paper.
He waits.
This is usually the part where things start happening. This is usually when he writes stuff down and then more after that. He makes a bullet point list or draws a diagram. Something comes out of the pencil.
Sometimes, when he’s in the zone, it doesn’t feel conscious. He’s so focused the pencil moves on his own—his hand is just a channel. Straight from his mind to the page, no interference.
Today is not like that.
He blows air out through his teeth and leans back.
The campus unfolds still and serene around him. He’s on the hill by Ground Beta, and he can see almost everything in all four directions. The main building. Heights alliance. The other grounds. The front gate. It’s a rare sunny day in September, although clouds still wisp through the sky like shutters.
Students are milling around out there, in groups or alone. He can’t see them well from the distance, but he sees someone run to catch up to their friends. He sees someone crouch down and retie their shoelace.
It can’t be real, but it is. The campus is calm. Everyone’s gotten over it already. Izuku’s the one who can’t release the pressure. When he looks at the campus now, it’s hazy at the edges, like it’s smoked out. Like they’re just in another lull, and any second now a villain will crawl out of the floorboards and gobble them up.
He curls his knees up to his chest and pushes his head down, into the darkness. Only in there does he let his face crumple, his breathing stutter. He counts down from ten.
At zero, he emerges and puts his pencil to the paper again. He waits.
For the field trip, they visit the new HPSC headquarters, still fluttering with movement and reform. The whole thing feels ramshackle, like they’re building foundations up underneath a rickety old tower. Still, Hawks, who they run into in the lobby, seems pleased, if tired. Everyone seems tired.
The class is jumpy. Ashido keeps glancing over her shoulder, Kacchan’s suspiciously quiet, and they shuffle around as a tight group. Every movement is muted. They shift around each other with practiced ease, covering weak spots, keeping an eye out for any stragglers.
They walk through the HPSC headquarters, look into the rooms where people are hard at work, listen to the history they all know by heart. It’s boring, it’s educational. No one’s bleeding, no one’s screaming. Izuku braces on every turn through the building. He feels like he’s missing something, and he knows he isn’t. It’s haunting.
By the time the day ends, Izuku’s so high-strung he thinks the slightest noise would set him off. His shoulders are tensed up to his ears. Absolutely nothing has happened the entire trip.
“This is weird,” Sero mutters on the way out of the building.
A few people twist to look at Izuku—Kaminari in particular has his eyes narrowed. “Are you a pod person?” he asks. “What happened to our danger magnet?”
“Don’t joke about that,” says Uraraka.
“Sorry,” Izuku says automatically.
Kirishima punches him in the shoulder. “Only you would apologize for not causing problems. That was the calmest field trip in the history of ever.”
“Is anyone,” Aizawa’s voice cuts through, “going to get on the bus, or am I going to have to stand here for the rest of the week?”
It’s on the bus ride back that people start breaking down. At least two people are crying, maybe relieved, maybe something else. Izuku curls his fingers into fists on his knees and inhales through his nose. Exhales through his mouth.
There’s nothing wrong. Nobody’s hurt. Nobody needed help. The field trip went by without a hitch, and Aizawa’s asleep in the passenger seat.
Izuku’s skin is itching. He hunches over and presses his forehead into the cool back of the seat in front of him. He shuts his eyes.
Izuku hasn’t been completely honest.
Is he fine, objectively? Yes, of course. He’s keeping up with his schoolwork, he’s eating enough, he’s hanging out with his friends at every available opportunity.
But he hasn’t been sleeping. It isn’t even nightmares—when he does crash, it’s always to a blissful emptiness, the sort of sleep that feels more like a blip than a slumber; he blinks and it’s been hours. He feels jittery, especially at night, waiting for something that never comes.
He knows he’s not the only one struggling, if it can even be called that, because Uraraka has eyebags the size of twin meteors and when Izuku slips out of his room at night, he runs into Hitoshi downstairs nine times out of ten. Although, that might just be Hitoshi, and not the long-lasting post-war trauma.
This has led to the recurring event Izuku calls, in his mind, the four a.m. braindump.
“Is it bad I kinda miss when people were actively trying to kill us?” Izuku asks the ceiling on one such occasion.
Well, he asks Hitoshi, but he happens to be lying on his back staring at the ceiling when he poses the question, his legs draped over Hitoshi’s lap, and so that’s where he directs his words, mostly so he can pretend he didn’t mean to say them out loud if pressed.
Hitoshi doesn’t respond for long enough that Izuku might think he didn’t hear if it weren’t for the way he goes completely, reflexively still.
“It’s bad,” Izuku sighs. “I know it’s bad. But…”
“But you do,” Hitoshi says.
“Well, I didn’t say that out loud, technically, so there’s some plausible deniability if….” Izuku doesn’t know why he’s like this. “Um. Yeah. I do.”
“I get it.”
Izuku curls up so he can prop his weight on his elbows and look at Hitoshi properly. It doesn’t work particularly well—they’re on the sofa in the common room and the cushions squish under his forearms, but he does his best.
“It’s like…” Hitoshi pinches the fabric of Izuku’s sweatpants between his fingers. “It’s like there was so much noise, and now it’s weird that it’s so quiet. Right? And I didn’t even get the brunt of it like you guys did, and I still feel it. The campus is so still. It’s unnerving.”
“Sometimes,” Izuku says in a tortured whisper, and then he stops himself. He likes Hitoshi, really likes him, and he is not going to scare him away with his messed-up brain.
But Hitoshi is, if nothing else, an excellent listener.
He waits, eyes locked on Izuku, until Izuku huffs and flops back down on the sofa so he can tell the ceiling, “Sometimes, I think I’d give anything just to go through another attack.”
The common room ceiling is spotless. Izuku can’t be sure, but he thinks either Kacchan or Yaoyorozu goes on intense cleaning sprees in here in the early hours of the morning. Maybe even Uraraka. He hadn’t thought that courtesy extended to the ceiling as well, but it must—there’s not a speck of dust in sight.
Hitoshi says, “Why?”
Izuku blinks. He half-expected Hitoshi to flee the room and never speak to Izuku again.
“I don’t know. I didn’t like it, when it was happening. But it was so…” He can’t work his mouth around what he wants to say. It doesn’t make any sense. “It was so easy,” he manages, although that doesn’t sum it up at all.
Hitoshi taps his fingers into Izuku’s shin in a pattern, one two three four, one two three four. “Easy.”
“I don’t know.” Izuku rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I don’t know. I’m so tired. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”
“I’m here,” Hitoshi says, and Izuku snorts. “Held hostage by your legs.”
“Sorry.” Izuku moves them immediately, only for Hitoshi to drag them back up again.
“It’s okay to feel that way, I think,” he continues, fiddling with Izuku’s sweatpants as if there hadn’t been any interruption. “I feel that way sometimes. About other things. It’s like you had a rulebook, and now it’s gone.”
It isn’t fair. Hitoshi isn’t fair. He has no right to read Izuku’s mind like that, to put it all into one sentence. “Yes,” Izuku whispers. “I had focus.”
He doesn’t know who he is, is the thing. When he pulls back the curtain, he doesn’t know what he’s looking at, this boy with too much everything and somehow, always, too little. And it was easier, yes, when Shigaraki was coming after him every two seconds. He needed to get stronger, then. He needed to be better.
He doesn’t need to do anything anymore. There’s nothing left but open paths as far as the eye can see. He can do whatever he sets his mind to, he can be anyone. The sky’s the limit. Izuku has always wanted options, and now that he has them, he hates it.
“I guess the question is what you’re going to do about it.”
“That is the question,” Izuku agrees.
Hitoshi huffs a laugh.
The answer, it seems, is nothing, because weeks more pass by and Izuku keeps on the same way as always. Go to class, do homework, train (for what?). Go to his internship, do interviews, lay awake at night counting to a hundred again, again, again. It doesn’t stop feeling weird. He’s still guarding for an attack.
He would never admit this out loud to anyone, but sometimes he leaves himself open on purpose. Sometimes he lowers his defenses—ever so slightly—moves a little slower to make an opening, and waits for a villain to take it. When they do, he cuts them off, of course; no one’s getting hurt from it. But he’s messing with the pacing. And it worries him.
He’s researched this—the internet has always been his best companion—because he doesn’t understand his own actions at the best of times, let alone now. Google suggests therapy. Izuku bangs his head into his desk.
Testing, is what Hitoshi calls it when Izuku mentions it at four a.m. when he turns into a blabbermouth and all his secrets spill out unbidden.
Hitoshi’s got this wonderful way with words. Testing, he says, and Izuku thinks of Eri, not that long ago, when she started intentionally wrecking Aizawa’s apartment with increasing frequency and intensity. Aizawa, of course, is too good a guardian and teacher to share the details of this with Izuku, but Nejire witnessed a few of these episodes during babysitting duty, and she wasn’t nearly as cagey with the details.
“She’s testing Aizawa-sensei,” she explained. “She’s trying to see how far she can push before he snaps, probably because she’s been waiting for it and it hasn’t happened yet.”
“But he won’t snap,” Izuku said, confused.
“Well, yeah, we know that.” Nejire shrugged. “Eri hasn’t figured it out yet. It probably feels really scary to her right now, because Aizawa-sensei is still an unknown to her. She’s used to Overhaul, remember? So she’s trying to force the worst out of Aizawa-sensei to find her footing.”
That’s how Izuku feels now. Off-balance. The villains he fights in his internship aren’t any good. They go down easy, and when Izuku waits for them to get up again, to make the fight even harder, they don’t. They go to prison, and Izuku flounders, still fighting for his life when his life isn’t in any danger.
So he makes the danger for himself. Testing, indeed.
“What are we supposed to do?” he asked Nejire, back then. “How do we help her?”
She returned a tight smile. “This is something she has to figure out by herself. All we can do is keep reassuring her she’s safe, and we wait.”
Izuku’s sick of waiting. He’s getting desperate—concealer doesn’t cover for his sleeplessness as well as he’d like, despite expert-Hitoshi’s guidance. He’s tired of jumping at shadows. He’s tired of drifting, mindless, for hours at random. He’s tired enough to ask for help.
He tries All Might, of course, and All Might is empathetic, but he’s struggling with the same feelings, and Izuku gathers, over the course of the conversation, that All Might doesn’t know what to do about it anymore than Izuku does. Izuku can’t be as honest with All Might as he’d like, because he doesn’t want All Might blaming himself any more than he already does.
So he turns to the mandated weekly check-ins, which he supposes are there for a reason.
Aizawa’s a lot like Hitoshi. He listens first as Izuku rambles, trying to explain without making himself seem like a masochist, or worse, ungrateful. He backtracks over himself, stumbles through explanations and feelings he’s left tucked in the deep, dark caverns of his mind. And Aizawa just sits, sips his coffee, and nods every once in a while when Izuku asks if he’s making any sense at all.
He’s remarkably difficult to read. Izuku has always known this, but he’s never talked about himself for so long in Aizawa’s presence, and it’s particularly palpable under the bight lights of the teacher’s lounge. Izuku has a tea himself, but he hasn’t drunk any. He picks it up, puts it back down. His fingers fly through the air as he explains and defends himself.
Eventually he wears himself out and trails into an uneasy silence halfway through a sentence. He considers Aizawa warily.
When it’s clear he isn’t going to say anything else, Aizawa sighs and puts his mug down. Izuku braces just in time for Aizawa to say, “Everything you just told me is completely normal.”
Izuku’s jaw drops. “I said I miss getting attacked all the time.”
“And you aren’t the first person to say that to me,” Aizawa says, brushing it off like it’s nothing, like Izuku hasn’t been hating himself for months. “Here’s how I see it. You and your entire class have had an exceptionally unusual introduction to heroics. Ordinarily, there’s a ramp up. You start with small-time villains, work your way to the mediocre, and once you’re top thirty, you start dealing with S-tiers.”
That sounds very relaxing. Izuku’s life has never been so convenient.
“What your class is experiencing is the opposite. You’ve been fighting big-time villains since day, what, fifteen? And now that those are gone, we’re setting you back at zero again—not because you’re incapable, but because you’re sixteen. Of course it’s going to feel weird.”
Izuku has no words. He isn’t even searching for some, just staring at Aizawa, flummoxed.
Aizawa sighs again, because that’s his primary mode of emotional expression. “You’re unraveling. That’s all.”
“I hate it.” The words escape Izuku before he can stop his tongue, and he doesn’t regret them once they’re out. “I don’t understand, and I hate it.”
“I know,” Aizawa says.
“It isn’t fair.” Izuku’s eyes are stinging. He’s so angry, his hands shake. There’s nowhere for him to put it, this rage. The League of Villains is gone, All for One is gone. They came in; they wrecked Izuku’s life, his mind, his body; and they left, kicking and screaming. He feels like a shell of a person. He had dreams, once. He was going to be a hero. And now he is one, and all he feels is empty.
Aizawa agrees, “It isn’t, no.”
Izuku seizes his mug of tea and grips it so tight his fingers ache. Everything hurts, and he’s tired. He strangles his mug until his muscles slacken.
“It was just so simple,” Izuku says, so quietly he doesn’t think Aizawa would be able to hear him, were the room not dead silent. “I knew what to do all the time. Save everyone. Don’t die. And now…”
“It’ll get easier,” Aizawa says, which is maybe the most unhelpful thing Izuku’s ever heard from him.
“When?”
Aizawa’s lips purse. “I don’t know. But it will.”
Izuku is not, and never has been, a patient person. When there’s a problem, he fixes it. Immediately, and with extreme prejudice. It’s one of his primary similarities with Kacchan and maybe the reason they never got along growing up, maybe the reason they get along so well now. Izuku can’t keep waiting, listless. He just can’t.
“What do I do?” he asks, holding Aizawa’s heavy gaze. “How do I beat this?”
Aizawa doesn’t answer right away. He thinks about it, assessing Izuku, choosing his words. It’s only because of this, only because of his careful deliberation, that Izuku accepts it when he says, “You take one step forward. And then the next.”
And Izuku has never been good at following instructions, has never been good at the waiting game, but he tries. He fights the fog over his days, he refuses to bend to his own guilty temptations. It doesn’t always work—sometimes, he caves and breaks out of the school for slightly illegal, extremely dangerous missions, just to get his brain to quiet down. (Some would call it vigilantism. He doesn’t, because if anyone asks, he isn’t going out at all.) But transgressions aside, he’s doing his best.
He talks to Hitoshi at four in the morning and draws rain clouds with Eri in the afternoons. He meets Aizawa every Wednesday, and marvels at how patient Aizawa can be, how kind, underneath all the prickly masquerading. He puts his pen to his notebook, and writes one painstaking word. Another. Another, another.
It isn’t easy—Izuku’s never had it easy. But he tries, he slips, he tries again. And through his sheer, stubborn persistence, the haze starts to lift.
The gradient dissipates, one pixel at a time.