He woke up to fluorescent lights and the smell of antiseptic.
'I know this smell. Clinic. First day. Broken arm.'
Except this wasn't the local clinic. The ceiling was too high. The equipment was too expensive. And someone was sitting in a chair next to his bed breathing in the deliberate, controlled way of a person who'd been awake for a long time and was pretending they hadn't been.
Izuku turned his head.
Recovery Girl was at her desk across the room, writing on a chart without looking up. Short. Old. Radiating the energy of a medical professional who had run out of patience for people who broke themselves approximately thirty years ago.
He looked at his right arm.
It was on top of the blanket. The skin from fingertip to elbow was grey. Pale, bloodless grey, like something you'd find at the bottom of a lake. The veins were still visible. Dark lines under the surface. The fingers were curled inward slightly and when he tried to move them they responded about half a second late, like the signal was traveling through bad wiring.
'Okay. So that wasn't temporary.'
He flexed the fingers again. Slower this time. They moved. All five. But the sensation was wrong. Muted. Like wearing a thick glove.
"You've been out for four hours."
Recovery Girl hadn't looked up from her chart.
"The discoloration in your arm is unlike anything in my medical experience. It's not frostbite. It's not necrosis. The tissue is alive. The nerve function is present." She turned a page. "The cells are simply behaving as though they've forgotten what temperature they're supposed to be."
'Necrotic mana exposure. The cells are alive but the mana left a residue. Like staining wood — the wood's still wood, it's just a different color now.'
"Will it heal?" he asked.
"I don't know." She said it without emotion. "I've healed what I can. The bone density in your right forearm is reduced by approximately twelve percent. The nerve response time is delayed. The coloring may be permanent."
She looked at him for the first time.
"What did you do to yourself?"
'Pushed the power of a dead god through my arm and into a bioengineered corpse puppet while my shadow dog ran out of gas.'
"I'm not sure."
She stared at him for a long moment. The stare of a woman who had worked at U.A. for decades and had heard every possible version of "I'm not sure" and could rank them by how much bullshit was involved.
"Mm," she said. Then she went back to her chart.
***
The door opened twenty minutes later.
Izuku was sitting up, flexing the grey hand open and closed under the blanket, counting the delay between thought and motion. Half a second. Consistently. The mana reserve was starting to refill. Slowly. Like a well that had been drained to the aquifer and was seeping back one drop at a time.
The Hound wasn't back yet. He could feel the space where it should be. An absence at his feet. Cold storage with nothing stored in it.
He tried not to think about how much that bothered him.
The door opened and Uraraka walked in.
She stopped two steps past the threshold. Like she'd been planning to walk all the way to his bed and then suddenly wasn't sure if that was allowed.
"Hey," she said.
He looked at her.
"Hey."
A beat of silence. She was holding a juice box. She set it on the side table next to his bed with the careful precision of someone defusing a bomb.
"I didn't know if you — they said you might be thirsty when you woke up, so."
"Thanks."
More silence. She was looking at his arm under the blanket. He could tell she was trying not to look at it and failing.
"You lifted that concrete off me," she said. "During the exam."
"Yeah."
"And today you — with the big robot, the zero pointer, and the —" She stopped. Took a breath. "You keep showing up when things go wrong."
He didn't know what to say to that. It wasn't a question. It was an observation from someone who was trying to build a picture of him and kept finding pieces that didn't fit together.
"I was in the area," he said.
She looked at him. Then she laughed. Short. Surprised. The kind of laugh that escapes before you decide whether it's appropriate.
"You're weird," she said.
"Yeah."
"Okay." She nodded, mostly to herself. "Okay. I'm glad you're not dead."
She left.
Izuku looked at the juice box.
Apple. He opened it with his left hand, because his right still couldn't grip worth a damn, and drank it.
'That was the longest conversation I've had with a classmate since I got here.'
Something about that thought sat heavier than it should have.
***
The second visitor was worse.
All Might filled the doorway the way he filled everything — too big for the space, too bright for the lighting, the physical embodiment of a concept that was used to rooms rearranging themselves around it.
Except he looked tired.
Not just physically. The kind of tired that lives behind the eyes and doesn't go away with sleep.
He sat in the chair next to the bed. It creaked under him.
"How's the arm?"
"Functional. Mostly."
"Recovery Girl says the nerve delay may be permanent."
"She told me."
All Might looked at him. The same way he'd looked at him in the plaza. Searching for something. Trying to find a category that fit.
"The substance on the concrete. The black residue." His voice was quiet. Conversational. The voice underneath the performance. "I've seen it before. In an underpass. Months ago."
Izuku said nothing.
"A sludge villain, frozen solid in ice that evaporated like smoke. Black crystalline residue on every surface. No witnesses." A beat. "That was you."
It wasn't a question.
Izuku looked at the ceiling.
"Yeah," he said. "That was me."
"What is it? The power. Nezu's file says 'not biological.' Erasure can't touch it. It doesn't register as a quirk." All Might leaned forward slightly. "I've been a hero for a very long time. I've seen mutation quirks, emitter quirks, transformation quirks. I've seen things that didn't fit neatly into any category."
He paused.
"I've never seen anything like what you did today."
Izuku looked at him.
He was so tired. His arm was grey and his mana was empty and the Hound was gone and the silence where it should have been was louder than the conversation he was having.
He could lie. He'd been lying since the day he woke up in this body. One more wouldn't cost anything.
But All Might had just punched a Nomu through a ceiling because Izuku had eaten the foundation out from under it. They'd fought the same fight. Different methods, same enemy.
That earned something.
"It's not a quirk," Izuku said.
All Might waited.
"I don't know what it is. I don't have a name for it that would make sense in this world. It showed up when I did and it's been growing ever since."
He flexed his grey hand under the blanket. The fingers responded. Slow. But they responded.
"The shadows. The cold. The thing that came out of me during the exam and again today. It's mine. It does what I tell it." A pause. "Mostly."
All Might heard the mostly.
"Mostly?"
"It's getting bigger. Stronger. Sometimes it moves before I tell it to." He looked at the ceiling again. "I don't know if that's a feature or a bug."
The room was quiet.
All Might sat with that for a long time.
"The arm," he said finally. "Was that the cost?"
"Part of it."
"What's the rest?"
Izuku closed his eyes.
'The rest is that I'm twenty-two years old inside a fourteen-year-old body in a world that shouldn't exist, holding a power that belongs to a dead king from a story I used to read for fun, and every day the gap between what I can control and what I can't gets a little wider.'
"Ask me again when I figure it out."
All Might stood. The chair creaked again.
He put his hand on the doorframe.
"I'll be watching, Midoriya. Not as a threat. As someone who wants to understand."
"I know."
The door closed.
Izuku lay in the dark and listened to the silence where the Hound should have been.
Somewhere deep in his chest, so faint he almost missed it, the cold flickered.
Coming back.
Slowly.
He closed his eyes and let out a breath he'd been holding for longer than he realized.
'Still here, huh.'
No answer. But the cold flickered again. Faint. Patient.
Hungry.
'Yeah. Me too.'
He slept.
TO BE CONTINUED