Chapter Text
the beer bottle sweats in his hand.
gold light catches in the condensation, fairy garden bulbs strung up through the courtyard of the izakaya, warm and soft and flattering to everyone below them. they turn the glass amber at the neck, honey-wet, dripping in slow tracks over his fingers. someone is laughing at the end of the table. someone else has knocked their knee against his under the bench and said sorry, midoriya.
izuku says it is fine.
it is fine.
he is twenty-three years old, and one for all sits in his veins like a second pulse, like an old storm that he has tamed to cadence of his bones and does not break them anymore. there are scars up his hands, thin white lightning, the history of every stupid thing he has survived written into the skin. he is a hero now. a real one, if there is such a thing. people know his name and children ask for photographs and villains sometimes go pale when he steps through smoke.
he has fought men with knives for teeth. he has held buildings apart with his shoulders. he has spat blood onto pavement and stood back up because there was still someone under the rubble crying for help.
the bottle sweats down his hand.
there had been, once—
no.
there is foam caught at the lip of kirishima’s glass, ridiculous and white, and uraraka is laughing into the sleeve of her jacket because iida has gone red from half a drink and is trying, with great sincerity, to explain responsible alcohol consumption to a table of professional heroes. todoroki watches him with solemn attention.
izuku laughs when the others do.
it comes out right. a little breathless, maybe, but right enough.
“you good?” kirishima asks, elbow loose against the table, his face flushed in the pretty gold light. “you’ve barely touched that.”
izuku looks down.
the beer is still full. the label has started to peel where his thumb rests against it, paper softening under the wet. he smooths it back down by instinct, careful, careful.
“yeah,” he says. “just tired.”
that is true enough that no one questions it.
heroes are always tired. it is one of those truths that sits politely in the room and never asks to be introduced. they sleep in hospital chairs, in agency locker rooms, with their boots still on and blood drying black at the cuff. tired is ordinary. tired can mean anything and nothing at all.
not like other words.
not like mentor.
not like counsellor.
not like sensei, said at fourteen with a mouth too eager to be useful.
the condensation rolls over the bottle neck, gathering at the curve before it slips down. sweat down someone’s throat in summer. sweat at the hollow where a collar sits open. a man leaning back in his chair, sleeves rolled to the elbow, saying, you’re very observant, izuku, has anyone told you that?
the courtyard noise thins, stretched, like sound if he was immersed in the drops of water, staring up at the golden galaxy of the beer garden.
izuku can still see the lights. gold, gold, gold in the glass. he can feel the bottle in his hand and the old power in his blood, patient and vast and useless for this, because there is no building to hold up, no villain to hit, no child to carry from the fire. there is only the memory of an office that smelled faintly of tea and printer ink, and a door left open the first time.
only a little open.
“midoriya?” uraraka says.
he looks up too fast.
her face changes. not much. she has become good at not letting fear show quickly, and he hates that they all have. her eyes flicker to his hand, to the bottle, to the label half-ruined under his thumb.
the glass has cracked.
just a thin line beneath his fingers, pressure just shy of shattering. beer leaks cold over his palm and drips to the table in a small, steady rhythm.
tap.
tap.
tap.
izuku smiles, because there are people watching.
“sorry,” he says, and his voice is very calm. “i think i held it too hard.”
“shit,” kirishima says, half rising already, the bench scraping loud over the decking.
“it’s fine,” izuku says.
it comes out too quick, too light, and so he laughs around it. a small thing, sheepish, the kind of laugh he has kept from childhood. harmless. sorry, sorry, don’t mind me. “i’m fine, really. i just—” he lifts his hand, beer dripping from the heel of his palm to the table, catching gold in every drop. “i still never know my own strength.”
it lands how he wants it to.
kaminari groans from two seats down, already reaching for the napkin holder. “bro, that is such a hero problem. oh no, my quirk is too cool and my hands are too powerful.”
“that is not what he said,” iida says, with great little dignity and the red face of a man losing even more of it to half a lemon sour.
“it is a little what i said,” izuku admits, because the table needs him to be normal and he can do normal. he has done normal with broken ribs and blood in his socks and a smile stretched over his face so long it began to feel like a second skin. normal is not the difficult part. normal is just a muscle.
kirishima makes a wounded noise, sitting back down when izuku does not bleed enough to justify the worry. “still manly, though, bottle didn’t stand a chance.”
“the bottle was innocent,” uraraka says, but she is watching his face still.
izuku turns his hand over before she can look too long.
there is no blood. a small shallow line crossing the crease below his thumb, red beading slow through beer and condensation, hardly worth the fuss. his skin has been opened worse by concrete dust. by his own bones. by childhood pencils snapped too hard in the grip of hands that did not yet know they would one day hold lightning.
he presses a napkin to it.
“see?” he says, and smiles at her. “barely anything.”
uraraka smiles back.
todoroki reaches across the table and takes the broken bottle from him. beer runs down the glass, over his fingers, and for a moment izuku wants to tell him to put it down. not because of the glass. not because he might cut himself.
because the wet shines at his wrist and the golden lights are caught in it, and there is a memory there with its mouth open.
a man.
no.
todoroki sets the bottle aside on an empty plate. “you should ask for a glass next time,” he says.
“statistically,” iida says, immediately recovering himself with desperate relief, “glassware is not necessarily safer if midoriya is exerting unconscious pressure.”
“iida,” ashido says, “are you victim blaming the bottle?”
“i am not victim blaming the bottle.”
“sounds like something a bottle victim blamer would say.”
the table breaks into noise again, easy and warm, laughter rolling out beneath the strings of fairy lights. izuku lets it pass over him. lets it take him with it, even, mouth moving where it should, shoulders loose, hand wrapped in a damp napkin under the table.
beer drips from the edge of the table to the decking below.
tap.
tap.
tap.
there had been a clock in the office.
not a digital one. analog, round, with a second hand that hit every mark with soft plastic certainty. it had been on the wall behind him, above the bookshelf, just high enough that izuku could look at it without looking like he was looking away. there were books on quirk grief. quirk dysphoria. adolescent adjustment. heroic risk fixation. heavy words, clean spines, arranged by colour and height.
he had liked the order of them.
of course he had.
“midoriya,” the man had said, amused, and izuku had looked back too quickly. “you’re allowed to look around. most people do.”
fourteen, then. fourteen and trying not to sit with his knees tucked together like a child.
“sorry,” izuku had said.
“don’t apologise for being curious.”
such an easy thing to say.
such a devastating thing, to a boy starving politely at a table of kindness. and he had been starving, though he had not known it then. hunger was only hunger when someone placed food in front of you.
“you really are tired,” kirishima says.
izuku blinks.
beer garden. summer air. the smell of fried chicken and salt and someone’s citrus drink sweating sticky on the table. one for all curls under his skin, green and gold and quiet. he is twenty-three. he is not in that office. he is not waiting for praise with his whole body leant forward like a dog too well trained not to jump.
he laughs again, softer this time. “yeah,” he says. “long patrol.”
“you should go home soon,” uraraka says.
it is kind.
still, something in him turns its head at the words. home, soon, said gently. said like permission. said like a hand at the back of his neck, not touching, never touching where someone could see it, just the idea of it.
his wrapped hand tightens under the table.
the napkin wets through.
“i will,” he says.
he does not. he sits beneath the gold garden lights with his friends around him and an untouched second beer sweating in front of him because kaminari ordered another before anyone could stop him. he lets the bottle sit there until the label wrinkles, until the condensation gathers and falls and gathers again.
he does not touch it.