Chapter Text
June 30, 06:48am
It’s hard not to feel some sort of rush, being awake this early.
Izuku has always been a morning person, and even more so in the summertime, when the sun wakes with him – like today! The sun is up just moments after he is, peeking out from the shroud of the ocean it hid behind. Izuku is home today, his second night home after his latest trip (he’d gone to Norway, and of course taken photos of everything). He recovered from his jet lag – yesterday he slept in until nine in the morning and was disgusted with himself – and has his swim trunks and an unbuttoned Hawaiian tee on before the sun can even cast a glare on his floor.
He lives in Horiuchi, a small town with a beautiful beach. His apartment is small – mostly because he spends so little time in his actual apartment that it’s more of a postcard address than anything. It has a single bedroom, a kitchen with a dining table crammed in its center, and a living space about big enough for Izuku’s couch and a television mounted on the wall. And even then, Izuku often ends up vaulting the couch to get through.
But the balcony is beautiful, outstretching over his view of Morito Coast. The apartment isn’t as costly as some of the others with worse views, probably in part because this isn’t a vacation town but also because nobody wants to live in the shoebox Izuku lives in. Before him, there hadn’t been an inhabitant in the apartment in well over six months, and they gave Izuku a pretty hefty discount on the place even though Izuku said he’d take it full price.
Izuku throws back the curtains to his balcony door (after vaulting his couch) and allows the sunlight to wash over the ground. He opens the balcony door wide, letting the fresh sear air pour into his apartment, the breeze pushing his unruly curls into even more awkward angles than before. The air is still cool from the night, the sun having yet to warm it up – it almost makes him shiver, but he spreads his arms and welcomes it.
He pulls his phone from his pocket and snaps a picture, as he always does on mornings he’s home. Though he isn’t around much in the summer, the photos of the sun rising over Morito Coast always seem to be more popular than the rest, and Izuku supposes he will never truly know why. (He does suspect, though, that it’s because the view is just so perfect.)
He nearly forgets to eat breakfast before he starts his live stream. He seats himself out on the balcony in his little lawn chair and enjoys the wash of the summer sun slowly creeping up his bare legs. “Good morning!” he calls to the phone, waves to the camera as he’s joined by tens of thousands of people to watch his live stream. He constantly has to remind himself that not all of his fans are located in Japan – because if they were, he’d be more than surprised at how many people jump on at seven in the morning to watch him stream just talking through his day plans.
“Today I’ll be going off Morito Coast on my sailboat!” he announces brightly. He has had this on the calendar since he was back in Norway. His sailboat is nothing special, barely large enough to carry three people comfortably, but he hasn’t had a chance to sail since he left almost three weeks ago and he’s anxious to get back out on the water.
A few comments roll in telling him he should try surfing one of these days; he laughs it off and makes a note in the back of his brain to call Ochaco next week and have her teach him the basics.
It’s a normal stream, for the most part. Comments roll through, Izuku answers questions that reappear when he can and apologizes for the missed questions when he can’t. It’s shorter than most, and perhaps that is the most out-of-the-ordinary part of it, but otherwise, it isn’t anything noteworthy.
So, then, how does it become his last?
08:16am
The sun is hot now. On the brink of July is when summer becomes sweltering, enough even that it almost deters Izuku away from the heat. Truthfully, it’s why he went up to Norway – it’s much more temperate up there, less direct sunlight to try and inflict Izuku with skin cancer. He lathers up the sunscreen and heads down to the beach – perhaps a ten-minute walk – in his flip flops, his Hawaiian shirt (now buttoned, but only twice), and his dark green swim trunks.
A few of the locals are already on the beach, and they wave to Izuku, shout good-mornings and ask how he’s doing out of courtesy. Izuku recognizes Ivanka, a retired Russian woman who lives in the next apartment building over. Her Japanese is stilted, but she likes Izuku because Izuku knows Russian. (And English, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and a touch of French.) He recognizes the twin girls from downstairs, Kamiko and Hana, putting together a sandcastle with their mother, Rin, off to the side reading a book. Izuku’s sailboat is further down the beach, closer to the jagged rocks protruding from the water, roped there tightly to keep it from straying too far. Still, he has to yank it to shore by the rope, an activity that might have been impossible when he was scrawnier, but now barely makes him break a sweat.
The boat’s name is the S.S. All Might, a silly name perhaps, but Izuku doesn’t care. It’s named after Izuku’s favorite comic book character from when he was a child, a man he always looked up to because he saved everyone with a smile. And though comic book heroes don’t exist, Izuku has vowed to make a hero of himself as best he can in this modern age, by making people smile with his goofy, touristy photos and livestreams and videos. And though he probably should be past the comic book stage of his life by now, he keeps All Might’s spirit buried in his heart, and All Might’s vintage comic book collection buried in his closet.
He unties the anchoring rope and pushes off from the rocks. It takes a little bit to get past the waves trying to push Izuku back to shore, but they aren’t too rowdy yet today, and for that he’s thankful. Out on the water, there’s a decent breeze, and it brings with it a spray of seawater that tames the bubbling heat on Izuku’s skin. As he catches a drift his boat takes off, out to sea, while he pulls the sail taut the best way he knows.
Though it probably isn’t the safest place for his cell phone, Izuku pulls it out of his swimsuit trunk pocket and captures a photo of the sun’s steady ascent past the water. There is a full separation now of the sun and the water, but it still refracts brightly on the water below, making for a stunning stock image that will likely be the source of Izuku’s rent money this month. Perhaps next month, too. He doesn’t too much care about that, though; he flips the camera to selfie mode and holds it up, peace-signing with the sail in the corner and the sun behind him. His skin looks much tanner than he is in this angle, and his freckled shoulders are hidden underneath his Hawaiian shirt, but he plans to post it anyway – when he’s back somewhere with a cell tower, that is.
Izuku has sailed the space past Morito Coast many times. It isn’t a huge expanse of water, but it’s enough to feel like an adventure. It’s not too vast that Izuku gets lost, but vast enough that he can if he tries. But today, the wind carries him further, and he lets it. He lets it because he has a cooler secured to the floor of his boat, complete with four bottles of water and a few sandwiches in case he decides to stay out on the water longer than he’s expecting. And there’s more sunscreen, a portable charger for his phone, a change of clothes being kept dry below deck. What could another mile past his normal stopping point do?
The sunlight can only be kept at bay for so long by the spray of seawater, and Izuku is beginning to feel the heat going to his head. The sun is higher in the sky now, and Izuku can tell without even checking his phone that it’s nearing noon, with the sun beating directly onto him, thrumming like a drum. He can feel every pulse of his heart. His first three water bottles are gone and he’s nursing his fourth. Still, he smiles lazily. This is where he’s meant to be – underneath the sun. He sits on the deck of his sailboat and pulls his phone from his swim trunks again, snaps a few photos of himself with the hot sun overhead. His freckles are well-visible, and his Hawaiian shirt has been tossed aside in the heat, so his shoulders and chest (also dotted with freckles) are visible. He stretches out on the deck and holds the phone above, snapping a picture of himself lying on the sailboat deck. Considering the sunlight above casting rather harsh shadows from this angle, his abs look more defined than ever.
He knows he shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t, and he will kick himself every day for doing it, but he closes his eyes, lets the warm summer sun be his blanket as he takes a cat nap on the deck. He’s even so bold as to dip one of his legs off the edge of the boat and into the water, like kicking a foot out from underneath a blanket in the summer when it gets too hot. And he sleeps, he sleeps through the sunlight drawing behind a cloud and reappearing only to be drawn away again by angry gray storm clouds that he hadn’t expected today. But when has he ever been one to check the weather?
02:36pm
Izuku awakens to a spray of water that’s more than just the water around him. His sailboat is eerily still, not being pulled one way or the other, just rocking. He blinks awake, expecting the harsh summer sun but instead being met with clouds, dark enough to be night, and not just night – a winter night where darkness swallows sixty percent of the day. He panics, scrambles to his feet and searches frantically for shore. At this point, any shore will do, but he finds none. The raindrops that woke him had been barely above a mist before, but they swell with a vengeance, with a horrible ache to swallow Izuku whole.
And Izuku, poor Izuku, his first thought is:
I should have left my phone at home.
The worst of it begins abruptly, a sheet of rain spilling from above until Izuku can barely see past his own outstretched hand. One titan of a wave swells to Izuku’s left, and all he can do is watch. The wind is whipping now, but with the rain weighing heavy on his sail he’s finding it hard to get going – and plus, he’s caught between two of these monsters, he notices as he swivels his head around in panic. His phone is in his cooler now in an effort to save all the memories he’s made, but at this point, he’s beginning to doubt anyone will find those memories. He hasn’t seen shore almost since he left, definitely since he decided to nap on the deck. What kind of a stupid move was that?
Now isn’t the time for mental chastising, he reminds himself, as he pulls the sail as taut as it will go. It’s for naught, though; this mountain of water dumps on top of him, attempting to rip him from his little sailboat. Izuku clings to his boat, holding his breath and opening his eyes to see where he is. He sees nothing but dark water, feels the sting of saltwater in his eyes. And then he’s popping up, intaking one huge breath before he’s sucked underneath the surface again.
It’s after his fourth time gasping for any amount of air he can get that he realizes this is it. This is where his life ends, out at sea. And though perhaps he should be scared of drowning, he finds it’s a very fitting way to go for an adventurer such as himself.
The water around him swells white, and he almost thinks it a sort of joke. He’d always thought that seeing white before you die was a metaphor for something, perhaps a religious experience. Like the gates of heaven. But from what he can tell, no, it’s just white, it’s just color receding from his eyes, from his mind. It’s his senses being drained away, one by one. The ache of holding his breath slowly fades, he opens his mouth to try and taste the saltwater but finds nothing.
And like the movies, his life flashes before his eyes – the hundreds of trips he’s been on, the thousands of pictures he’s taken, the millions of followers he has on Instagram and Twitter just to see him do what they’re too scared to. And maybe twenty-two is too young to die, but he is content with the life he’s lived.
He closes his eyes – to sleep, to die, to vanish.
July 01, 12:03am
But he wakes up from his slumber. From what he presumed to be his last.
He wakes up with a headache, and the world around him is so dark that he wonders if he’s finally made it to Hell – if his body has been put through waves like a sock in the washing machine, thrown around weightlessly until he’s spit out onto this inky black ocean shore of the underworld. But when he opens his eyes all the way and blinks away the bleary remnants of saltwater, he’s met with a man – hair as dark as the new moon above – inches from his face.
Izuku immediately feels his lungs give way, and he rolls onto his side and coughs up lungful after lungful of seawater. It burns as it comes up, and it makes his entire body ache and tremble. Bile and saltwater spit collect in the corners of his mouth, dribbling down his chin, and it feels too surreal to be death. He can feel every last droplet ricocheting around his lungs, can feel the way the saltwater has made his lungs a home. It’s painful in a way death isn’t supposed to be – or, well, Izuku assumes it isn’t supposed to be – and as the last of the water claws its way out of him, he looks up, pitiful and aching. His body drags as though he’s still underwater as he stares up at this man, barely visible with the lack of moonlight on him.
“Who are you?” he asks, quiet, cold.
Izuku tries to respond, but his voice is gurgled, painfully dripping out of him. His throat is sore and dry despite the amount of water that just vacated his lungs, and his voice refuses to cooperate. He coughs again, tries to wake up his voice, but it does not come; it’s as though he’s attempting to speak underwater.
The man above grows impatient. “How did you find me?” he asks now, accusatory, and had Izuku any more mental capacity, he’d find himself more annoyed with the question. He has absolutely no idea where he even is, let alone how he found this man he certainly wasn’t looking for.
“Don’t know,” Izuku sputters finally, coughing, aching, trembling from the midnight chill. He’s drenched, he realizes, like he’s Jonah from the Bible and has just emerged from a giant fish’s mouth. He smells it, too – the scent of pure ocean on him, the hint of brine from sea creatures, the saltwater on his skin enough to make him feel like a shriveling slug. And this man sighs, though it’s almost lost under the sound of waves rolling up the beach Izuku lays on, calm and peaceful as if hours before he wasn’t trapped in a storm of them.
“Can you stand?” this man asks, continuing to barrage Izuku with questions that Izuku really doesn’t know the answer to. Izuku tries to push himself to his feet, but his limbs tremble underneath the weight. He grunts and tries harder, but his arms, pure muscle, feel like nothing but waterlogged twigs now. The man scoffs, though Izuku almost doesn’t hear it over the sound of waves crashing along the beach’s short shoreline. And before Izuku can attempt to stand again, the man’s arm loops underneath Izuku’s armpits, and he’s hoisted to his feet with little to no effort at all.
“Where…” Izuku attempts speech again, and though it stings his throat, it doesn’t force another wave of seawater vomit out of him this time. “Where am I?”
But this man just keeps walking, keeps dragging him along a path that parts from a canopy of trees at the edges of the sandy shore. Izuku can barely see still; the new moon is no help, providing him no light to see by. And Izuku’s legs drag helplessly in the sand, his entire body trembling with every breeze that rolls in from the ocean. His teeth chatter, too, and he tries to wrap in on himself but this man won’t let go of him.
“I don’t know how you got here,” the man says as they get through the thickest of the trees, as Izuku starts to see warm orange lights in the distance, “but you’re going home immediately. Got that?”
Izuku nods because honestly, home is where he wants to be. Who in their right mind would assume Izuku, who just washed up half-dead on this stupid shore, would want to be anywhere but his own home?
They step out of the trees entirely and into a small clearing. The orange glow of lights are small lanterns, directing a path up to a house. Before this path leads up to the porch steps of the house it diverges in two other directions. The house itself rather large, looks to be a hut of sorts, and the separate paths lead again to more trees, more forest. Izuku wonders, vaguely, if he’s stepped into some sort of fantasy.
“C’mon, I’ve got a futon somewhere you can sleep on,” the man says, and though his voice is gruff and his facial features rigid with shadows in this dim lighting, he almost sounds kind.
“Thanks?” Izuku offers; he doesn’t know that he should be thanking this man right now, doesn’t even know if this man will kill him in his sleep, or something. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps it’s like that short story he read in high school where a man on a secluded island hunted another man. Perhaps Izuku is already doomed, being pressed up against the guy’s side as he practically carries him up to the house.
“Up you go,” he says as they reach the porch steps, and Izuku wills his wavering limbs to listen to him as he takes the shaky two steps up to the door. He’s openly shivering now; though he’d partly dried off from the seawater on the walk here, his hair and clothing still cling to him like cold, wet blankets. The man slides the door open and immediately Izuku is met with the smell of something just finished cooking (cookies, maybe? He can’t tell; his nose is still recovering from the barrage of saltwater). They step into a small living area that connects to a kitchen, which has a single dim light on above the sink. There are large windows in the living area, each open to welcome the chilly breeze inside.
Izuku looks to his side to maybe say something, but the man has already stepped further into the house. The slam of a door makes Izuku jump, and he wraps in on himself now without the man at his side – he holds his arms around him like a protective coat, like they can do anything to quell his trembling body. His brain hasn’t fully woken up yet, hasn’t told him that this is a chance to run – to where, he doesn’t know – and neither have his limbs. He feels like a wrung-out dishtowel, draped over an open windowsill to dry. Another breeze rolls through, and somehow it feels colder in here. Izuku leans against the wall to take some of the edge off his shivering.
Before he can begin to contemplate going somewhere, perhaps sitting down on the sofa in front of him or going into the kitchen to explore the new terrain, the man is back. He’s walking down the short hall from the living space with a stack of towels, far more towels than Izuku needs. “Thank you,” Izuku says, holds out a hand to take the stack himself, but the man ignores him outright and drapes a towel over his shoulders, another over his head. He sets the other two on the edge of the nearby couch.
“Come on,” is all he says, and Izuku feels compelled to follow.
He leads him down the hall. Izuku peeks his head through open doors curiously, though most of the doors are shut aside from two – one, a linen closet (Izuku can tell by its emptied shelves it’s the one this man just raided for him), and the other a bathroom. Izuku can’t tell how large it is with the lights off and the quick peek he’d gotten. They turn a corner and the hallway stops abruptly, converting instead to a staircase. “Are you okay to walk up?” the man asks, and Izuku remembers the struggle of just getting onto the porch. Still, he nods, and the man quirks a brow at him. But he doesn’t say anything; he only leads the way.
The stairs lead up into something of an attic loft. The walls are slanted at the sides, and though Izuku is short, he still has to duck his head to get past the stair landing. It looks like a guest bedroom, though Izuku can’t imagine why this man would need one of those – considering Izuku hasn’t seen anyone else here yet, nor has he any reason to believe this man has guests, with how angry he seemed about Izuku’s unexpected company. “You can sleep here,” the man says. He doesn’t turn on the light, and Izuku doesn’t ask him to.
“Are you going to kill me?” Izuku asks without thinking. Honestly, the question has been weighing very heavily on his mind.
The man stills beside him like it’s an absurd question to ask. Izuku doesn’t think it is, all things considered. “No,” he says finally, and his hesitance is noted. “I just don’t usually have company.”
“Then why do you have a guest bedroom?” Izuku pries, lips pulled taut in a frown.
“This is my room,” he replies. “Whatever. Just sleep here for the night, and we can figure something out in the morning. Alright?”
“Alright,” Izuku says after a moment. There still isn’t any moonlight, though along the far wall past the bed is a window with its curtains parted. The window is open just enough to welcome the cool summer night, though not enough to have Izuku shaking from the cold again. The man’s footsteps are heavy on the staircase behind him, and Izuku steps a little further into the room, surprised at how neat it is. Had he woken the man? It must be late, especially considering how cold it is. Summer nights like these take ages to cool off, to separate themselves from the summer sun.
He pads across the room. His feet are sore from walking up that gravel path barefoot – he hadn’t even realized during the walk how painful it was – and his entire body aches. His head swims. Everything hurts, and not in a good way, not in the “I’ve just finished scuba diving” or “I just jumped from a moving train” kind of way. No, it hurts the way sitting on an airplane in the same spot for fourteen hours hurts. And even then, he prefers the travel aches to this. This is like that high-turbulence flight he faced travelling to Alaska during a snowstorm. This is aches and pains and nausea and migraines rolled into one person.
Is he dead?
No, he can’t be.
But… it’s dark. So far the only light he has seen are the lanterns outside, and as Izuku peers below through this window, he finds they’re off now. Has the man turned them off? Even wandering through the house, the only light Izuku saw was in the kitchen. The rest of it had been the dull night coloring of deep blues and purples flowing through the windows. And without the moonlight, his eyes had strained to see much more than the man in front of him.
Izuku supposes he doesn’t know what Hell is, but perhaps it’s this. Perhaps it’s the apprehension of something going wrong, the buildup that keeps building up until he’s sufficiently gone insane. Perhaps it’s a strange man hoisting him to his feet on a beach well past sundown. Perhaps it’s just another adventure gone terribly wrong.
He sighs, moving away from the window and towards the bed. His clothes are still soaked, his hair less so as he’d been toweling it while they walked through the house. Izuku wonders if he and this man are the same size, if he could put on a set of clean, dry clothing. If it’s Hell, what of making the most of it? Why should he sleep drenched? He’ll likely already catch a summer cold. Is there anything wrong with wanting to wake up to a sore throat and runny nose feeling dry and well-rested?
There’s a small wardrobe tucked as far as can go against one of the sloped walls. Izuku wanders over to it, straining his eyes to make sure he doesn’t trip over anything on his way. But the floor is clean, aside from a pair of slippers tucked next to the right side of the bed. Izuku can’t help but feel like this man was somehow expecting company. It’s eerily clean here.
Or perhaps he’s just not a messy person like Izuku is. Either way – it’s unnerving.
He tries to be quiet while he rifles through the drawers. He tells himself it’s because he’s trying to be mindful of the man, hoping he doesn’t keep him awake after all the trouble, but in reality, he’s just trying his best to not get caught snooping – and subsequently borrowing. Izuku ends up settling on a baggy sweatshirt with some ultra-faded print and a pair of boxers, and he makes sure there’s no noise downstairs before he strips off his soaked garments. He drapes them over the stair railing, hoping it will help them dry faster, and slips into the dry clothing. Immediately he feels warmer, and perhaps now he’ll be able to get some sleep in this godforsaken place.
The bed isn’t too comfortable, but Izuku’s exhausted limbs sink into it anyway, and Izuku hums and purrs like a kitten as he settles in. His body falls asleep first, shutting down until he can no longer move even his fingertips, but his mind stays awake. He doesn’t remember anything of what happened after he saw the wave, besides the words he thought: “this is it”. That was it, he thought, and he’d told himself he was ready to die. And yet, here he is, lying awake at midnight on some strange island in some strange bed.
He still isn’t entirely convinced this isn’t some obscure purgatory, though. Or maybe even heaven! No, no; there’s no way a guardian angel would sound so gruff and upset about Izuku being here. He’s never been one to believe in gods and heaven and Hell and purgatory before this moment, but he’s almost certain he died out there. He’s almost certain anyone would have died out there, going through what he did. His mind is blocking out the details now, waiting for his mind to finally succumb to sleep so he can dream of nothing but full lungs and empty seas, devoid of shores and rescue boats and everything.
And he does fall into a sleep, one far too restful considering what Izuku has been through in the last twelve hours. He sleeps dreamlessly, like his mind still isn’t quite ready to dredge up the memories of being locked underwater, of being more seawater than human.