Dagobah Beach smelled like salt water and forty years of municipal negligence.
He arrived ten minutes early, which meant he stood at the road's edge and looked at the debris field in the last of the evening light — towers of broken appliances, shipping containers rusting into interesting geometric shapes, a layer of smaller trash that had settled into a kind of false topography, the beach beneath it invisible under all the accumulated evidence of a city that had used this stretch of coastline as a very large bin. The sun was dropping into the water somewhere behind it all. The actual water was visible in thin strips between the junk piles, dark green and indifferent.
He spotted All Might from thirty meters out.
The man sitting on an upturned washing machine at the shoreline's edge bore no resemblance to the Symbol of Peace in any physical sense. He was thin in the way that suggested something had been taken from his body rather than never being there — all the muscle and mass of the world's greatest hero metabolized away, leaving bones and sinew wrapped in skin that hadn't fully adjusted to the new arrangement. Sunken cheeks. Eyes too large for the face around them, which gave everything he looked at a quality of intensity that probably wasn't intentional. He was wearing civilian clothes that fit him badly, everything too large at the shoulders and chest.
He also had blood on his lower lip. Not fresh — dried at the corner, the kind left behind after a coughing fit that had resolved itself an hour ago.
Yami walked toward him at a steady pace, hands in his pockets, and the man watched him come with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously.
"You're the boy from the intersection," the man said. Not a question.
"I'm the boy who woke up on the intersection," Yami said. "There's a difference."
All Might looked at him for a moment. "What are you?"
He'd practiced this on the walk from the apartment. Not word for word — that tended to come out wrong — but the architecture of it, the shape, what to include and what to cut. He sat down on the debris two meters from All Might and thought for exactly long enough to look like he was thinking.
"I die," he said. "And then I come back. That's — the clearest way to describe it. I'm not enhanced, I don't heal faster, I can't survive things that would kill a normal person. I go through the whole thing, all the way to the end, and then after some amount of time I wake up again."
"Some amount of time."
"Yesterday it was twenty-four hours." He paused. "First time it's ever happened, so I can't tell you if that's consistent."
All Might's hands, resting on his knees, were very still. "You ran into that creature knowing you would die."
"I ran in thinking I probably would die." He kept his voice level. "I've watched enough hero footage to know what a sludge body villain does to someone without a countering quirk. I did the math in about four seconds and the math said I was going to drown." A beat. "I just didn't factor in the coming-back part until it happened."
That wasn't quite true. He'd factored it in as the entire point. He held eye contact and didn't correct himself.
All Might exhaled through his nose. It came with a faint wheeze that he absorbed without expression, the practiced quiet of someone who had spent years managing symptoms in front of other people. "The other boy — the green-haired one. He ran in without thinking."
"I know." Yami's voice came out flatter than he intended. "I saw him go."
"You ran in after him."
"I ran in three seconds after him." He glanced at the water. "Does the order matter?"
"It might." All Might shifted his weight, and the washing machine creaked under him. "Two boys charged a villain that six pro heroes wouldn't engage. One ran on instinct. One ran on calculation." He looked at Yami with those too-large eyes. "I've been doing this for thirty years. Instinct is cheaper. Calculation means you knew what it cost."
The sound of the ocean. A gull somewhere above the junk piles making its case for the gull perspective.
Yami had planned to deflect here — to say something modest, something that didn't confirm the intelligence of it, because confirming intelligence opened a different set of questions. But the way All Might said calculation was not accusatory. It was assessing.
"I knew what it cost," he said. "I just thought it was worth it."
All Might was quiet for a while.
The dried blood on his lip caught the last of the light. Yami had known about the injury — a medical fact absorbed from a screen in Osaka while eating cold soba — and knowing it intellectually was not the same as sitting two meters from it, watching a dying man parse whether a stranger's resurrection was real. Something about the gap between known fact and person in front of me made the knowledge feel briefly stolen.
"Your quirk," All Might said. "How long have you had it?"
"I've known I was different since I was a kid." Smooth, prepared. "But you don't know a resurrection quirk is real until you actually die. I never had a reason to test it."
"And your parents?"
"Not around." True, in both the literal and original-body sense. He gestured at nothing. "I'm an orphan. Nobody to ask." Also true.
All Might nodded slowly. The nod had the quality of a man filing information into a column he'd been building before this conversation started. "A quirk with no ceiling tests." A pause that could have meant anything. "That changes how it would interact with certain kinds of power."
Yami let that sit without responding. All Might had said it to himself as much as to Yami — turning it over, running his own math. The conversation was moving toward something, and pushing it would be wrong. He'd spent enough of his previous life in meetings where the deal happened when you stopped talking.
The sun finished setting. The beach went grey.
"Come back tomorrow," All Might said. He stood, and the movement was careful in the way of someone managing pain as a constant background variable. "Same time. I have a decision I'm not ready to make tonight."
"About me?"
"About several things." He turned toward the road, then stopped without turning back. "The green-haired boy — he also came to see me."
Yami's stomach moved in a way that had nothing to do with hunger. "And?"
"And I'm being careful." All Might's voice was quiet and not unkind. "Don't mistake carefulness for indifference."
He walked away through the junk piles with his too-large jacket moving around him, and Yami sat on the debris and pressed his palm flat against the rusted side of the washing machine until the oxidized edge bit into the skin of his hand and the pain was clean and specific and present.
Deku had come to see him. They were both in the running. The thing Yami had treated as a foregone conclusion was not foregone. The competition was real, and the green-haired boy with the scraped hands and the reflexes that bypassed calculation was standing in the same doorway Yami was standing in, and neither of them knew the other was there.
He sat until the metal went cold under his palm, then walked home.
On the way back, he passed the convenience store at the corner near his apartment. Through the window, bent over the refrigerated drinks section with a basket looped over his arm, a green-haired boy with scraped knuckles was reading the ingredients on a bottle of sports drink with the focus of someone who genuinely cared what was in it.
Yami walked past without stopping and told himself he just hadn't wanted the detour.
He didn't check to see if that was true.
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