Chapter Text
He bolts up with a start, a loud gasp falling out of his throat.
For the briefest moment, he looks around, confused, before clarity hits him with the force of a frying pan.
And confusion returns with a vengeance.
He is back in his bedroom, in the apartment that he shares with his mum.
Which doesn’t make a shred of sense.
The last he remembered, he was amidst the destroyed remnants of human civilisation fighting against Shigaraki and the epitome of evil and villainy. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint what had happened, but he remembered that things were going tits up, everything was falling apart, turning into literal dust, when suddenly, he woke up back in his childhood bedroom, a place he had not slept in for the better part of a year.
Immediately, with questions very rapidly overrunning any answers he may have, he immediately turns on his bedside table lamp, and looks to an All Might-themed calendar that he remembered being pinned to the wall opposite from his bed.
His heart, instantly, stops.
…
…
He is fourteen again.
He is a middle school student again.
Somehow, he is in the past, almost two years before the events that he last remembered.
It was at that moment, in his childhood bedroom several hours before he was due to wake up, Midoriya Izuku spoke three words that eloquently summed up the situation.
“What the fuck…?”
Seeing that sleep is no longer possible, Izuku leaps out of bed and paces around the room. With the hurricane of questions tearing through his head, Izuku tries to put everything into a workable order and piece together how and why he is in his current predicament.
First, the facts.
He is almost two years in the past, back as a fourteen-year-old attending his final year of middle school. The date on the calendar is the fateful day where he meets All Might after the slime villain nearly kills him in that underpass, has his dreams destroyed by said Symbol of Peace, realises that the slime villain had escaped and had taken Kacchan hostage, tries to rescue Kacchan when all of the responding heroes simply stand around and do fucking nothing while his childhood friend (read: bully and abuser) drowned in slime, gets rebuked by said (useless) heroes for acting recklessly after All Might saves the day, and then encounters All Might who retracts his soul-crushing advice to be “realistic” and declares him worthy to be his successor.
And, to top it all off, he is quirkless once more, because All Might has not transferred One for All to him as of yet -
Wait, no, that is not exactly true.
Izuku feels a hum within his body, his thin, scrawny, relatively unblemished body. He clenches his right fist, and a spark of green light dances across his fingers, bright enough to light up the room further for the briefest of seconds.
Somehow, One for All has travelled back with him.
Although, given how that single spark of green light was also accompanied by a slight jolt of pain, the stockpile quirk had been (conveniently, he might add) muted down, which is just as well, since Izuku had no intention of blowing himself up in a cloud of blood and liquified organic matter at this moment.
Izuku resumes pacing around the room. Assuming that he is really back at where it all started, and not some different, alternate universe, there is a chance to do things over. A chance to do things better. To stop the apocalyptic future from happening again.
And yes, there is that argument where if he takes a wrong step or move, he would irrevocably change the timeline in ways beyond all recognition, but also, even if it were the case, would it really matter in the long run?
Different universe or not, All for One is still out there, and he is currently grooming Shigaraki Tomura to wage war against heroes. He has Aoyama prepped to infiltrate U.A. to act as his primary spy within the hero school. And on a personal level, as a tiny voice inside his head whispers to him, Kacchan is still a massive dick (metaphorically, his actual manhood leaves plenty to be desired), and in the eyes of everyone who knows him, Midoriya Izuku is still a quirkless deku who won’t amount to anything, let alone be the last remaining hope against evil and villainy.
Even though having One for All with him is a huge blessing and solves a lot of his more short-term problems, the massive elephant in the room that is All for One still needs tackling, sooner rather than later. Izuku sits back down on his bed to think back. It was truly an accumulation of hubris and complacency that allowed the bogeyman to build up the League of Villains to their extreme, even from the confines of Tartarus, and come the prison’s destruction, contributed to the catalytic downward spiral into the shitshow he last remembered.
Of course, Izuku would be foolish and downright suicidal to go about confronting All for One right now (if his brief stint as a vigilante was any indication). If he wants to nip the problem in the bud before it could blossom into the eventual shitstorm, he will need allies, support, and friends, none of which he currently has.
(Thanks a lot, Kacchan, and the pervasive societal attitude towards the quirkless.)
But at the same time, Izuku realises that he can’t give much of a damn about anything that tries to obstruct him from saving the future from going down the toilet. He had already been burned by the unholy flames, he had experienced horrors no one (thus far) has gone through, and not even the mockery, insults, physical injuries and suicide-baiting can even begin to compare with what awaits everyone if nothing is done.
He knows, more or less, what will happen come morning, and subsequently once the final bell rings. But that won’t stop Izuku from grabbing the nearest chair and beating reality to death while he is at it.
And, since it is at least four hours before he has to head out for school, Izuku might as well make use of the time he has in his hands to test the limits of his quirk in his current physical state, and begin planning on building everything up once more.
Nodding to himself, Izuku goes to get changed. No time like the present to begin the process of rewriting fate, after all.
To Be Continued.