Work Text:
Izuku wakes with green lightning curling around his fingers and his ribcage pushing almost out of his chest. It’s a physical thing. He knows that his ribcage can’t actually push out of his own chest; has had the very real experience of a rib poking out of his chest and it doesn’t feel like this.
This being a desperate count, a one-two-three-four stopstopstop four-three-two-one that sounds ragged in his room. His mouth is open in a pant. The air stings when he breathes in again, stutters in holding it, and exhales. It’s only then that he’s able to slowly let his fingers uncurl. The thumb, hangnail sticking out of it. Crooked pointer finger, middle finger with a scar tying a ribbon between that one and the ring finger. His pinky.
Izuku breathes again, dragging it in through his teeth. When he opens his eyes, the room is dark. Green lightning still presses against his eyelids, and it singes. At least it is not red. His dreams have been bathed in red, recently.
Before UA they were still red – red with All Might’s cape, red like the laces on his shoes, red like the breaking news on the television as everyone’s faces smear in joy when the smoke clears and the villain is forced onto their knees.
Now, though, now they are red like Stain’s blade where he’d stabbed it into Iida, had sliced it across Todoroki’s cheek and pointed it straight at Izuku’s eye where he’d watched himself shrink, fists clenching and mouth agape, wanting not to die, never to die— or the red when All For One had slammed All Might’s face into the ground, like— like Kacchan’s fire when he’d shot it at Shiragaki and the terror that could never be anything else but terror when he stared up at Kirishima as they raced upward across the ice, it— it—
Izuku stumbles out of his bed, trips over his sheets, crawls toward the door, and tumbles out of it.
This, too, is routine.
It’ll probably take a toll on him. Iida probably has multiple diagrams prepared on brain health and how this is affecting his training. And, well, Izuku knows. He knows that if this keeps up past the three days it’s already been happening, that it’ll bleed over into their training.
And it’s something he doesn’t have time for, not when Professor Aizawa would have expelled them, or when they must fight tooth and nail to create something in time for the Provisional License Exam.
…Or when Izuku has so many people to make proud, because there are so many people he would not be here without.
Izuku walks on quiet feet to the elevator, catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror as the doors slide shut with a hiss. His hair is screwed beyond belief. The bags in his eyes are deeper than he’s ever seen him; and it’s only been three days. Three days of a relentless cycle of bloody nightmares that leave One For All zinging in the air around him as he wakes, panting like a dog until he can remember his own name past the fear. There’s something scared in his eyes, he thinks.
Kacchan had said that once when they were younger. Had pinned Izuku against a wall when he’d been distracted thinking, talking, mumbling. Had taken him right from the straps of his backpack and pushed him against the wall so hard something cracked, and said, you always scared, huh? Can see it in those wet eyes of yours, you coward.
Izuku stares at himself, with wide and wet eyes in the mirror, and thinks yes. Yes.
The elevator dings quietly, and the doors open with a second hiss.
The common room has become something of a respite, these nights. Sometimes it will be the girls who settle on the couches or the beanbags, and Izuku will excuse himself to go back to his room and stare unblinking at the ceiling with a record tape of all his mistakes running behind his eyes. Other times, the girls will urge him to sit, press a steaming mug of hojicha into his hands and talk until he feels more human.
Tsuyu and Yaoyorozu are good at it.They enjoy talking strategy almost as much as Izuku does, an awfully hard quirk (ha… ha-ha) to find in a person. Ashido and Hakagure make it fun; talk about senseless, outrageous things Izuku only has a passing awareness of but are so fantastical that they shock Izuku back into his brain with a snort of laughter.
Other times, most times, it is Izuku alone.
He cannot say he prefers it that way. He’s always liked people, has found himself at home with this little class and everyone’s idiosyncrasies. On the nights where he wakes with violence spitting in his blood, it’s soothing to have the noises of someone else existing in his periphery.
Tonight, there is no one here. Izuku pads on socked feet to the edge of the room where Yaoyorozu installed a fancy ambient lamp (there was a whole vote on it, and Iida was the only one who voted no because, apparently, connecting a lamp when there was already overhead lighting could cause a fuse). The ambient lamp won out, and Izuku finds himself absurdly grateful for it.
It flicks on, and Izuku stretches upward as the warm butter-yellow floods the room, stretching upward and coming back down on an exhale.
Maybe if he sits on the couch and flicks mindlessly through television channels, he’ll be able to sleep, or if he reaches for his phone and watches that one compilation of All Might he has saved, hmmm, what he needs is possibly to head to the cou—
“Hello,” Shouto Todoroki says as Izuku turns around, complete with an unblinking stare and matching silk pyjamas.
Izuku, as a rule, does not like to startle.
Izuku also, unfortunately, jumps so high that his quirk activates all over and propels him hard enough to the ceiling that his head cracks against it.
“Todoroki! Todoroki? Oh, you— God. Hi, hi. Good night. Evening. What…”
Todoroki blinks, slow. “Is your head alright?”
“Hm? Yeah, don’t worry about it. Just a scratch.”
“Technically, a scratch would have bled. That was a contusion.”
“Ah, now you sound like Iida.”
It’s that that makes the edges of Todoroki’s mouth pull up an inch. Izuku rubs his head contusion as he sits down on the other side of the couch, legs tucked up under him to face Todoroki.
He, too, looks bleary. Bleary in the regal sense, because there seems to be no universe in which Todoroki does not look composed. Even in silk pyjamas with little rabbits, the red side of his hair ruffled with a pillow imprint, and completely barefoot in the yellow light, he looks more put-together than Izuku has ever looked. In his life.
“I am sorry,” Todoroki says, eyes trained on the lamp. His chin dips slightly lower when he turns to Izuku, their eyes meeting. “For startling you.”
“It’s not your fault, please don’t worry!”
“Mm.”
They lapse into silence again, and Izuku, too, looks out at the lamp. It must have been awfully nerve-wracking to be sitting out here in the dark. He supposes Todoroki could have made a fire to combat it, but a flame wouldn’t last that long, even if it was a controlled burn. He’d last at most ten minutes before needing to ice it, and it would take significant focus to keep it a steady flame without it dwindling for that long.
Izuku is at heart a meddler. And it checks out that All Might is also a meddler at heart, because he’s only ever encouraged Izuku’s behavior (except when it came to saving Kacchan, hm). It is this meddling part of him that has him turn to Todoroki again, naturally solemn in the empty living room.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes,” Todoroki murmurs, almost before Izuku has finished asking. He frowns immediately after, teeth digging into his lower lip. “Mostly,” he amends. “I would like to think so.”
“Me, too. It’s, ah, been hard to sleep.”
“For me too,” he agrees, quiet enough that Izuku has to lean forward to catch it. It feels fragile; that is never a word that Izuku has used for Todoroki. For himself, perhaps. For his bones. But never for Todoroki, sitting straight-backed on their couch because he can’t sleep.
“If you ever need to talk about it, I—”
“Thank you,” Todoroki cuts in, dipping his head even further when he turns back to Izuku. It’s endearing, in a terrifying sort of way. Izuku doesn’t really know what to make of it. “...We are training to become Pros, yes, b—”
“Midoriya? Todoroki?”
Both of their heads snap to the side in a cra-cra-crack of joints as Iida stumbles into the living room himself, looking blearier than Izuku himself. He’s without his glasses. It makes him look younger, like the sixteen years of age he really is. That they all are.
“Iida,” Izuku says, putting up a hand into a friendly wave. Behind Iida, the clock’s hands are settled at a neat two-fifteen in the morning. Professor Aizawa is going to bang their three heads together in training tomorrow if they show up looking this exhausted. But honestly, if Izuku passes out from that, that has to count as sleep, right? Win-win scenario. Yup.
“Hello,” says Todoroki, both of them watching as Iida nods briefly at them both before settling onto the middle of the couch. It’s not his picture-perfect posture, but a true slouch. Izuku’s eyebrows go up, and his mouth moves again before he can think.
“Are you okay, Iida?”
“Yes,” he responds, automatic. Much like Todoroki, he frowns, and opens his mouth again. “I— well. I am very, very tired.”
It settles into the room around them, permeating the air. Izuku meets Todoroki’s eyes again from across, and knows that they are thinking the same thing.
Me, too.
“It’s been difficult to sleep,” Izuku starts slowly, turning again to the lamp that had Todoroki so fascinated. Yellow burns into his retinas, but he much prefers that over the red. Of Stain, of All For One, of death and of dying and of the inevitability of it. “I keep seeing our fights.”
“Which fights?” Todoroki asks, voice gone quiet again.
“All of them,” Izuku says, matching the tone of his voice. If he closes his eyes, he still sees it. Sees them, children naked in their fear and tucked behind a wall with Kirishima and Yaoyorozu, fingers clenched over their mouths to swallow down a shriek.
“I see Stain,” murmurs Iida, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. There’s a glassiness to his eyes that Izuku knows better than himself. “His fanatical desperation to defeat us, my brother… the way he stabbed his sword through my arm like it was nothing.”
Iida’s hand comes up to his own left shoulder, long fingers spreading across it. Izuku remembers. Izuku will never, ever be able to forget.
“I see All For One. The way he defeated Jeanist with that quirk, the way he floated and All Might’s—” almost, utter defeat, Izuku’s cheeks wet with his own tears in the middle of the road, hoping against hope that All Might could, because All Might can, he can, he could. “I see him.”
“I do, too,” Todoroki whispers, staring now at the floor. His hands are pressed together so hard his knuckles have gone pale. “It… it was a terror like nothing I have ever experienced.”
They all fall silent, then. The room feels stale; the faint scent of popcorn from their earlier movie night, the ticking of the clock, the evenness of their breaths. Izuku feels it, almost overwhelmingly— how grateful he is that the three of them, and Yaoyorozu and Kirishima, and their whole class, even, are still together and sleeping soundly in the same building.
It builds in his waterline as an aching sting, and he brings a rough hand up to his eyes to rub it away. Iida’s smiling at him, after, a soft thing that is nothing at all their Class Representative and all Tenya Iida.
“I should tell the whole class this, really, but for you both… we’ve already seen a lot. I can’t thank either of you enough for your support.”
“I can’t thank you enough for yours,” Iida cries, back snapping into a posture more reminiscent of Class-Rep-Iida. “If you had not come for me when Stain, I would have…”
“And if you would have not come with us to save Bakugo, there is a high probability that we would have done something foolish like engage in combat, Iida. Do not sell yourself short,” Todoroki cuts in, shaking his head. “We have all made mistakes. None of them are above the other— it is just fact. We have made mistakes, we will continue to make mistakes, and we will drag each other out of them.”
“Together,” says Izuku, feeling the way a smile splits his face in two. Todoroki huffs, getting as close to an eyeroll as Izuku has ever seen on him. It reminds him fiercely of Kacchan, an aching thing that settles in his chest.
“Yes, together,” Iida says, posture still ramrod straight as his smile grows. “Together, we can be plus ultra, can’t we?”
“Yes,” Izuku and Todoroki blurt out at the same time, and Izuku is helpless against the laughter that leaves him shuddering on the couch next to Iida, who is also laughing through slitted eyes.
“What? I’m really not that funny,” Todoroki blinks at them, watching as that sends Izuku into a worse fit. Iida snorts ungracefully.
He loves them both so much. He loves this whole class so much, and they really, truly, will be plus ultra. Of that, Izuku has no doubt.
“Plus ultra,” he says, through a gasping laughing, sticking his fist upwards. His smile feels like it will split him in two as Iida and Todoroki both pump a fist up in response.
They can. They will, because they are all destined to be heroes. They’ll be Plus Ultra, all of twenty of them together.