Chapter Text
I don't know how it began. The images, the pain, the fear, the cold... Sometimes I still think about those eyes, that hair, those voices, that touch, that laughter. It was so soft, so sweet, but was that truly its meaning?
The world around him seemed incomplete. The voices echoed from far away, as if rising from the bottom of a frozen lake. Everything was too soft, too warm, too gentle. Something inside him screamed that all of it was wrong.
In front of him, something blocks his movement, sending him face-first into a wooden wall. Hadn't he been watching where he was going? And besides, why did he feel so different? Maybe... a little smaller.
Two hands slide under his arms, wrapping around his chest. At first he tenses, unable to speak properly, only grunting at whatever was happening. Then, suddenly, he is lifted, and realizes that the wall was actually a table.
Looking across it, he sees treats he had never seen before, but that looked delicious. A dozen savory pastries, bottles of soda and juice, little party favors, and above all a small cupcakes. What was this place?
"Shoto, what are you waiting for? Just pick one and grab it already!" said a voice close to his ear, soft and sweet. He realizes that the voice came from the same person lifting him up to reach the table. When he looks to the side, he sees that it was his sister, Fuyumi.
But the sight didn't feel familiar.
Why was she lifting him? He was sure he was already too heavy for that. And why did she still seem taller than him? He clearly remembered having already grown past her.
Hesitant, he does what was asked and picks a turquoise-blue cupcake, decorated with several snowflakes made of icing. As he looks at it, he immediately remembers his quirk, but everything around him still felt strange. What was happening?
"Ooh! Good choice, Sho. That one looks delicious." said his sister behind him, while setting him down on the floor.
For some reason, the floor seemed far from his feet while he was still in Fuyumi's arms. Looking more carefully, he notices his sister looked different. The white hair with red streaks was held back in a delicate braid. She wore a soft pink dress, tights, ballet flats, and her trademark glasses rested on her face.
She looked pretty.
But... smaller.
She looked maybe ten or eleven years old.
But what most caught his attention was the genuine smile on her face. A smile meant for him. Something he never imagined being able to provoke in other people, after all, everything he carried with him was pain. Somehow it made him feel content, made him want to return the smile too, but even so, it didn't feel right.
Paying attention to himself, Shoto notices he was also visibly smaller. His hands, once calloused by constant training to become a hero, were now small and delicate. On his feet were tiny black shoes, and he wore a white shirt under a wine-colored romper, all sticky with sweets. It looked like he had eaten quite a lot.
He was no longer who he used to be.
Panic begins to rise inside him.
Quickly, he tries to escape the situation. He didn't understand any of this. Could it be some villain's attack?
Noticing the obvious despair in her brother's eyes, Fuyumi crouches to his height and gently touches him, which makes him recoil immediately. She didn't understand what was happening, nor why he was reacting like that. Maybe he had eaten something that didn't agree with him. "Sho, are you okay? Give me your treat, I'll save it so you can eat it later, and then we'll go to the bathroom, alright?"
Looking toward the source of the voice, Shoto realizes that his sister, if he could still call her that, was trying to speak to him, trying to guide him somewhere.
But he didn't understand a single word.
Frightened, he flees.
However, he quickly realizes that he couldn't run very fast. In the distance, he hears his "sister" running after him, calling his name.
Fear takes him completely.
Was this some villain's strategy? Weaken him by turning him into a small, fragile, broken child?
Still running, he notices that the footsteps behind him had doubled. It wasn't only Fuyumi. There was someone else, and they were also calling his name, but Shoto wouldn't allow himself to answer.
Without looking back, he searches desperately for an exit while his breathing turns ragged.
"Why am I tiring so quickly?", he thinks, panting.
While running, he finally pays attention to the crowd around him, something he had been unconsciously ignoring. Everyone was well dressed, but casually. He recognized none of them.
Was this some kind of event? He didn't have time to think.
The voices behind him called his name. One was clearly his sister's. The other... unknown.
When he finally finds something that looked like a door, he feels arms wrap around his body again.
"Stop, Shoto!" says the person behind him.
Realizing he had been caught, the real despair begins.
He starts thrashing violently, trying to use his quirk. But what should have been towering icebergs or hellish flames , which he had somehow tried to summon became only small frosts and insignificant sparks.
"What is happening? Why isn't it working?", he thinks in complete despair.
But the thought dies the moment the arms around him stiffen. It seemed that whoever held him had grown irritated.
"Sho, stop it! You're embarrassing us. Come on, buddy. FUYUMI, DO SOMETHING!" The voice was unfamiliar, but something in his words caught Shoto's attention.
"Sho?"
Only his sister called him that.
What was happening?
Slowly stopping his struggle, Shoto looks back.
He finds a head of white hair fading into red tips, and deep blue eyes staring at him with irritation though they carried an obvious flicker of concern.
He didn't know who it was.
But the once-rigid arms became softer, almost like an embrace.
"Toya! Thank god you caught him... I was so scared he'd run into the street and get hit by a car." said Fuyumi, clearly desperate as she caught her breath. "Please, Sho, what happened? Why did you run off like that? Was it because the cupcake fell? It's okay, we can get another one."
Her concern was real. He knew that feeling. He felt it from his sister constantly. But the question kept burning in his mind.
What was happening?
"You see, Shouto?" said the boy holding him, clearly embarrassed as he watched the murmurs around them. "Everyone's staring at us... Why the hell did you run off like that, knocking into everyone?"
Even trying, Shoto couldn't recognize him, though everything about him felt absurdly familiar.
"Now let's get back to the table and clean you up." said the boy while adjusting Shoto on his hip, though he kept grumbling under his breath: "Just what I needed... I didn't even want to be here. But something weird had to happen. Something weird always happens."
Fuyumi snaps back immediately: "Ugh, shut up, Toya. You know not everything is like that."
The sound of her voice takes a moment longer than it should to reach him.
Toya.
The word enters through his ears and doesn't fit anywhere. He searches for the name inside himself, where he usually keeps the few things he still remembers, and the place is empty. As if someone had taken the contents and left only the label.
The brother in the memorial.
The photo on the hallway wall that no one looks at.
The name his father doesn't pronounce.
But he's here. He's here and breathing close to his ear, and the warm air of his breath should be proof of something, but Shoto no longer knows of what.
"You shouldn't be here."
The sentence comes from no direction. It has no mouth of origin. No distance. It's inside his temple, as if someone had brought the voice so close to his skin that it stopped being sound and became thought.
He tries to look around.
The party continues.
But it continues wrong.
People still laugh, but the sound of the laughter arrives in pieces, as if syllables were missing in between. The colored lights strung above the table flicker at a frequency the eyes can't follow. Red-blue-red-blue so fast it looks like it's standing still.
The tablecloth had a flower pattern.
Now it doesn't.
He's sure it did.
"That isn't yours."
Shoto closes his eyes.
When he opens them, Fuyumi is still talking. Her words arrive with a delay he can no longer measure. Something about the birthday song. Something about cleaning him up.
He notices that the arms holding him the arms of the brother who is dead are at the wrong temperature. They aren't warm, the way a body should be. They aren't cold, the way a corpse would be. They're at exactly the temperature of the surrounding air. Precise. Identical to the air circulating around them. As if Toya didn't end where his skin ends.
As if he were part of the scenery.
Shoto looks at his own hands.
They're small, he already knows. But now he notices the fingers are too long. One extra knuckle each. It isn't his body. It's a body that looks like his body, with small discrepancies tucked into the places he wasn't looking.
The adults from the party begin to approach.
He sees a woman crouching down and reaching out.
The hand passes through his shoulder.
She doesn't notice. She keeps talking. A man comes up behind him and tries to grab Shoto by the elbow. The man's fingers pass into the elbow, come out the other side, return, try again. At no point does the man show any strangeness.
They aren't touching the void.
They're touching something that doesn't exist.
Shoto understands, without words, that this thing is him.
The party begins to fade.
Not darken. Fade.
First the sound the laughter shrinks in a wrong way, without moving away, just getting smaller in the same place, as if someone were lowering the volume of a recording.
Then the color. The red-blue lights lose saturation until they turn gray, and the gray loses gray until it becomes something without a name.
Last, the movement. Fuyumi, frozen with her mouth open mid-word. Toya, with his hand still on his back, expression suspended. The adult woman, frozen with her hand passing through his shoulder.
Everything stops.
Except him.
He continues existing at a speed the rest of the world can no longer match.
"I only wanted..."
The voice again. Closer. Almost at his ear. He can't tell whether it's a woman or something that remembers having been a woman.
The darkness begins from outside and starts coming in.
Not like a tide. Like absorption.
He realizes, with a calm worse than any panic, that he knows this darkness.
He knows where from.
From the dojo, when his father uses both hands.
But he also knows it from before the dojo.
From somewhere he isn't allowed to remember.
From a time when he didn't yet have a face.
The darkness reaches his knees.
The darkness reaches his waist.
He remembers a sentence he once heard without understanding, something about his brother having turned to ash at Sekoto Peak. About how fire can reduce an entire boy to the color of a burnt-out stone.
He thinks, without wanting to think, that maybe this is what is happening now.
Not fire.
The other thing.
His version.
The darkness reaches his chest.
And in his chest, something forms.
It doesn't hurt. It doesn't warm. It doesn't cool.
It just stays.
A point, the size of a seed, in the exact center of his sternum. A point that emits no light but doesn't absorb any either. As if the place where he existed most intensely had shrunk down until it could fit inside a single grain.
The darkness wraps around that grain, meets resistance, and stops.
It doesn't go any deeper.
He doesn't understand what happened. He has the vague impression that something inside him has just **chosen**.
"I never imagined..."
The voice, this time, is clear enough for Shoto to recognize it as a voice he has heard before. Not recently. Not with his ears. Somewhere else. Maybe in another body.
Maybe in another dream.
He tries to turn to look for her.
He can't.
There's no direction.
But for the first time in that darkness, he feels something he hadn't been feeling: a piece of himself that still decides.
A small piece.
A grain.
And the grain decides that it would rather wake up.
"I'm sorry."
He doesn't know when he woke, but when he tries to control his own breathing, he fails miserably startled by the explosion of sensations running through his body.
His futon, once soft and comfortable, had become a damp and suffocating mess. The fabric was soaked in some places and completely scorched in others. Small wisps of smoke escaped slowly from the burnt areas, mixing with the cold vapor rising from the mattress like a silent mist.
Heat and ice had met there during the night.
The surface of the futon was deformed part frozen and hardened beneath a thin layer of ice, while the other still radiated a stifled, almost feverish warmth. The smell of burnt fabric mixed with the icy moisture of the room, creating a strange, suffocating sensation.
And on his face, he felt something that no longer seemed to belong to him.
Tears.
On the left side, cold tears traced slowly down his skin, nearly freezing as they slid along his face.
On the right side, warm drops left hot trails over his sensitive skin.
It had been years since he had stopped crying. He had been taught that heroes don't cry. Heroes endure. Heroes contain. Heroes must remain firm before citizens in danger.
The tears, and the state of the mattress, were probably the consequence of his quirk acting uncontrolled during the dream.
But why?
Why had he had that dream?
None of it made sense.
Looking toward the small table beside the bed, more specifically, toward the alarm clock, he sees the hands marking 04h30 in the morning.
Soon another training session with his father would begin. Better to hurry, to avoid worse problems.
Heading toward the bathroom to clean up and prepare himself, he meets his own reflection in the mirror.
The trademark two-toned hair.
The enormous scar taking up part of his face.
Many times he had caught himself observing it all coldly, as if analyzing another person.
Why did he have to look like him?
And why did he also have to look like her?
None of it brought him any comfort.
When he focuses a little more and finally pulls himself out of his own thoughts, he notices a thin line of ice trickling down with the tears on the left side of his face, while a reddened, slightly scorched streak marked the right side.
His tears were different from the normal ones.
That had never happened before.
Maybe his quirk had been affected by the strange dream.
But this...
This shouldn't happen.
He wasn't supposed to be flawed.
"This is going to hurt.", he thinks.
When the time came to ask for another mattress, his progenitor would certainly be furious. Maybe he could sleep on the floor for a few days and only ask for a new one when the man was less stressed.
Though he knew moments like that were nearly impossible.
Inside, he knows his room will end up with a foul smell of burning, but that's something he's already used to mainly because his large windows were always closed.
On the table, something catches his attention. The alarm clock was vibrating relentlessly, signaling that it was already time to get up.
05h15.
Forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes had passed while he was lost inside his own mind.
Better to hurry up the day had already begun.
Even so, that feeling of wrongness remained heavy in his chest.
Maybe the darkness was growing even denser.