Chapter Text
Izuku could now say he’d been fireman carried. Izuku wasn’t sure if he much liked the experience, but he was grateful that Present Mic didn’t touch his disintegrated leg. The trip back to UA was a blur of movement, people leaning over him, medical equipment, and Ekikyō’s mental reassurances.
Izuku felt kinda detached from his body again, not that he was really complaining. He just wished Ekikyō would let him sleep already. But any time he started to drift off, Ekikyō tugged him back. He couldn’t make sense of why Ekikyō was keeping him awake.
Until Recovery Girl kissed his forehead. Izuku nearly blacked out then from sheer exhaustion, but a new sense of urgency from Ekikyō shot a dose of adrenaline through Izuku’s veins. Everything snapped back into focus, and he struggled to sit up.
“Easy, sonny,” Recovery Girl said, trying to push him back down. “You need to sleep. My quirk takes a lot out of people, and I’ve used it on you two days in a row.”
“Bathroom,” was Izuku’s only explanation.
The school nurse sighed and unhooked him from the various pieces of equipment around his bed. Izuku looked around and realized that he was in one of the infirmary’s patient rooms…and not the one with the convenient window by the tree. Actually, this one had no windows at all. It seemed Recovery Girl had wised up to his tricks. But the room did have a small attached bathroom, and that was what mattered right now.
Recovery Girl handed him a pair of crutches and let him limp and stagger his way through the small doorway. Once the door had clicked shut behind them, Izuku turned on the fan, and Ekikyō hastily de-possessed him. Recovery Girl’s quirk had sped up Izuku’s healing, but it drained more than just Izuku’s stamina to do so. Both friends breathed a sigh of relief once they were separated. Then Izuku nearly collapsed. The mental separation was more jarring than usual—they must have still been overlapping a bit from the USJ—and it left Izuku disoriented for a minute on top of being exhausted.
Ekikyō propped Izuku up and paused to listen while the boy recovered. He grimaced at whatever he heard and flushed the toilet. Ah, that probably meant Recovery Girl was still waiting for him. Izuku got his left foot back under him and nodded toward the cabinet under the small bathroom’s sink. Ekikyō made a face at him before rolling his eyes and cramming himself into his temporary hiding spot. Once Ekikyō was fully out of sight, Izuku pushed the door open again and struggled back to bed. After he was hooked back up to everything, he promptly passed out.
When he woke next, he felt both better and worse. He wasn’t quite so exhausted now, but his right leg hurt, and his heart pounded from the dream that woke him. Not wanting to dwell on the images of blood and disintegration and too-quiet alleyways, Izuku attempted to move his leg, making the pain worse and revealing that a heavy bandage trailed from his knee to his waist. Izuku groaned and tossed off his blankets. It was too warm in here, and he’d started sweating in his sleep. That was probably from the nightmare.
Izuku blinked blearily and looked around until he spotted the nurse call button sitting on the edge of the bed. He pressed it and frowned at the throbbing in his leg. After setting the button back down he turned his hand over. It was bandaged. Oh, right, he’d burned that hand. It didn’t hurt, but his leg did. That worried him.
Thankfully, Recovery Girl arrived quickly. “Ah, good to see you awake, Midoriya. You’ve been out for eight hours, give or take. We went ahead and got you cleaned up and did a skin graft once we’d confidently stabilized your vitals.”
Skin graft? But where could she have taken enough skin from to cover that large an area? The wound had wrapped nearly halfway around his leg before Ekikyō had stopped the spread. Izuku couldn’t feel any other bandages or wounds, but he wasn’t completely confident in his self-assessment given he hadn’t felt his hand either.
As if reading his mind, Recovery Girl continued, “Since it was such a large area, we had to use a donor transplant. I contacted a friend of mine who called in a specialist with an anti-rejection quirk that works well for cases like this. We’ll change your bandages in the morning and do one more round of healing; then you should be good to go.”
A little alarm started going off in Izuku’s head at the word “anti-rejection,” but he couldn’t quite place his unease. Then he remembered what Cross had said about him and Ekikyō. He bit his lip to keep from cursing in front of the hero. His body may not be rejecting the graft, but Ekikyō’s slime was.
“Um, Recovery Girl? Could you unhook me so I can use the bathroom again before you leave?”
The school nurse (doctor?) eyed his IV bag a moment before nodding. “I suppose. I’ll have something brought up for you to eat too before you go back to sleep. You’ll need the energy for my quirk.”
“Thanks,” Izuku said, holding out his left arm for her to disconnect his IV and finger clip thing. (He knew it had something to do with measuring blood oxygen levels from hanging around the clinic, but he couldn’t remember the name of it.) Once free, he grabbed his crutches and hobble-hopped back to the bathroom without putting any weight on his right leg.
He locked himself in the bathroom, turned the fan on again, and rapped a knuckle on the cabinet while whispering, “Ekikyō, we have a problem. Do you think you’d be up for a possession again?”
Ekikyō opened the cabinet door and flowed out, taking up the majority of the space in the cramped bathroom as he stretched. “What’s going on kid? I heard them come and take you away for a little bit.”
Izuku winced and pointed as his leg. “They gave me a skin graft, but I think the slime is rejecting it. Kinda feels like it’s on fire, and I might be starting to run a fever.”
Ekikyō frowned and pressed some slime against the bandage until it seeped through to prod at the skin underneath. “Think you’re right. I’ll need to mess with your immune system to get the graft integrated. Is the old lady planning to use her quirk on you again?”
“Yeah, unfortunately, but not til the morning.”
“Well, we’ll deal with it when we get there. Unless you want that fancy graft to fall apart, the sooner we do this the better.”
Izuku grimaced, thinking about how awful he’d felt the first few hours after his first possession. Hopefully, it wasn’t going to be like that again since it was only a small piece of him rather than everything that needed to adjust. “Ready when you are, Ekikyō.”
This was the closest together they’d ever done two possessions, not counting that first visit to Cross. Ekikyō slid into place easily, except when his slime reached their right leg. Everything there felt inflamed, and Ekikyō took longer to work his way through the new tissue attached to the half-healed edges of the wound. At least, Izuku couldn’t really feel him working on the graft. So, none of the burning numbness he’d expected. Just a general feeling like he had a bad cold or maybe a case of flu which, after a year of not catching anything, sucked.
Once Ekikyō settled in and stretched their body in a parody of how he had after being crammed in the sink cabinet, he repeated whatever he’d done to their circulatory system before. It felt weird and not quite uncomfortable.
At a mental prod, Ekikyō explained, “Putting your blood pressure back at ‘normal’ for the machines out there.”
Izuku nodded, and they looked at themselves in the mirror. They didn’t appear flushed or feverish. So, as long as Recovery Girl didn’t take their temperature, there should be no way for her to tell there was a problem with the graft.
“This is much more comfortable than under the sink,” Ekikyō commented, poking at Izuku’s half of their mind.
“Yes, I’m practically the presidential suite,” Izuku joked, mentally leaning against his friend. Part of him just wanted to stay in here with Ekikyō for the rest of the night, but eventually, he sighed. The school must have called his mom by now, and she should be getting off shift soon. He should be out there when she arrived.
They picked up their crutches and made their way back to bed. They climbed in and held still for Recovery Girl to hook them back up to the room’s monitors. There was a moment of held breath while the numbers appeared on the display. When the hero only spared the device a glance before leaving them to their dinner, they relaxed more fully.
Now that that was out of the way, on to a more important matter: food. Izuku mentally thanked Cross for putting the notes about him having a “higher than average” metabolism in his medical file. Recovery Girl had gotten them a tray packed with enough food to make even Fat Gum smile.
As Izuku started in on the bowl of soba, he asked his bodymate, “Hey Ekikyō, you said you heard Recovery Girl take me away earlier. How does that work? I mean, your body has obvious eyes. Do you have ear bones floating around in there too?”
“No, I don’t have any bones, ear or otherwise. Unless we’re counting yours?”
Slime shifted in their body, sliding around bones and through joints. A series of pops traveled down their spine, and Izuku sighed. He hadn’t even noticed the discomfort there until it was gone. He did, however pick up on the smugness radiating off his friend. Izuku mentally shoved him.
Ekikyō chuckled. “But seriously, I don’t need ears. My whole body’s a great conductor for vibrations, and sounds are just vibrations in the air.”
“Wait, really? What’s that like?”
“Memory share after we finish eating?” Ekikyō offered.
Izuku grinned and shoveled another bite of soba into their mouth. They made quick work of everything Recovery Girl had brought them, and Izuku laid back in their bed. He closed his eyes and leaned on Ekikyō. Ekikyō leaned back for a moment, and a wordless exchange passed between them, confirming they were both good to go.
Then Ekikyō’s mind slid over, around, into Izuku’s, and they were in a memory. They could feel the soft passage of water through the tunnel and the distant, drowning rumble in the air where it joined one of the city’s mains a distance ahead. There was a hum of passing automobiles in the concrete under and around them. Then another set of vibrations, oddly patterned, tugged at their senses, and they paused to listen before following the new noise. They could tell which way the sound waves came from by where on their body picked up the vibrations first.
The sound grew until they recognized it as music, something classical. They found a storm drain and stretched up to put their eyes through the grate. They were outside a concert hall. They found a back door and oozed some of their mass into the lock, prodding at the mechanisms there until the lock sprung. From there they carefully found their way to the storage space under the stage. No one should find them here; they could afford to take a break and enjoy the rest of the show.
The music lingered in their mind as they returned to the present, smiling in recalled contentment. In no great hurry, they left their minds sift apart until they were mostly separate and distinct again. Izuku pressed a pulse of gratitude Ekikyō’s way and yawned. He didn’t have a headache after this memory share (though that might have been the meds he was on), but he was tired.
Apprehension buzzed through him at the thought of sleep. He didn’t want more nightmares. But like this, he could feel how exhausted Ekikyō was. Izuku remembered how Ekikyō lost his shape whenever he slept. To stay hidden the past eight hours in that small cabinet he must not have slept at all. Izuku mentally poked Ekikyō. “Hey, get some rest. I’ll figure out some way to wake you up when Recovery Girl arrives to use her quirk.”
“You could use some more sleep too, you know. It’s your body that’s healing.”
Izuku hummed quietly, nervously, as he fidgeted with his blankets. He blinked when Ekikyō’s mind reeled him back in, just enough for Izuku to be unable to ignore the other’s mental presence.
“I won’t let anything happen to you, and I’ll wake you up if you start to have a nightmare, ‘kay? I’ll be up until your immune system’s sorted anyway; I’ll join you in Snoozeville once that’s done.”
That helped. Izuku wasn’t perfectly relaxed, but he knew Ekikyō had him. He was safe. They were safe. With the murmur of his friend’s thoughts and the faint echoes of remembered music playing in their head, sleep came more easily than Izuku expected.
---
“The graft looks like it’s healing nicely,” Recovery Girl said, examining the edges of the (larger than Izuku expected) wound. There was a roughly 17 centimeter by 17 centimeter patch of skin a few shades darker than his normal skin tone wrapped around the outer half of his thigh. He couldn’t really feel it, but he could still pick up on pressure a little. The damage had been more superficial at the edges and deeper in the middle, where Shigaraki’s quirk had gotten a good centimeter down into the tissue under his skin, and some of that pitting remained under the skin graft, leaving a definite divot where the injury had been. Thankfully Shigaraki’s quirk hadn’t chewed through much muscle or any tendons before Ekikyō stopped it. Maybe his quirk had an easier time traveling in a tissue layer than jumping layers?
Izuku gently rubbed at the seam between normal and grafted skin. The color of the new skin reminded Izuku of how his blush looked when he was hosting Ekikyō. Curious, he pressed on the grafted skin, watching it blanch and return to tan with an underlying duskiness when he removed his finger. He wondered if it would look so dark when Ekikyō was off doing his own thing.
Recovery Girl swatted his hand away from the wound and proceeded to re-wrap his leg to protect the fragile skin while it continued to heal. “Leave it wrapped until tomorrow, Midoriya, and be gentle with it. No strenuous activities, no scratching, and sleep on your side with a few pillows between your knees to elevate it. It’ll help decrease swelling, though there’s honestly less of that than I was expecting. Your friend’s quirk is certainly something. They wouldn’t happen to be interested in going into medicine, would they?”
“Is she trying to scout me?” Ekikyō asked, incredulous.
Izuku snorted and slapped a hand over his mouth. He was still smiling when he shook his head and said, “I don’t think that would work out, Recovery Girl. The healing’s a side effect, not the main part of their quirk, and it takes several hours of unpleasant set up for the healing to kick in the first time.”
The elderly hero frowned. “Too bad. It seems to have very few drawbacks…aside from the odd coloring,” she noted, tapping her cane against his right calf.
“Huh?” Izuku leaned as far forward as he could without falling out of the bed. With the bandages restricting his movement, he couldn’t quite see his right calf. That was where he got stabbed with that glass shard, right? “What do you mean?”
Recovery Girl raised an eyebrow at him. “Haven’t you noticed? Your scars are tinted green.”
What.
The heroine shook her head and kissed Izuku’s cheek. “You can see for yourself next time you’re in front of a mirror. For now, rest. We couldn’t reach your mother, but your aunt should be here in a little while to pick you up.”
Izuku yawned and waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, that’s normal. She works weird hours and sometimes picks up double shifts.” She should have been off by now though. He’d been in the infirmary almost a whole day at this point. Izuku pushed that uncomfortable thought aside and snuggled down under his blanket. The usual discomfort/urgency of Ekikyō’s quirk time limit was absent, and Ekikyō wasn’t saying anything. So, they probably had time for a nap?
He leaned a bit more into Ekikyō as he thought the last. Ekikyō sent back a feeling of confirmation, and they both relaxed into a light doze. The drifted between sleep, disjointed thoughts, and pieces of memories until someone knocked on their door. Izuku yawned and called, “Come in.” He and Ekikyō sat up straighter when he saw Nezu walk into the room pushing a small cart with a tea tray. “Nezu-sensei!”
“Hello, Midoriya,” the principal chirped as he walked over to clamber up into the chair beside his bed. “I do hope you’re recovering well. I was quite concerned when I heard the condition you were admitted in.”
Izuku gave his teacher a shaky grin. “I’ll be okay, though I might not wear shorts as often as I used to,” he admitted, running a hand over the bandage on his leg. Recovery Girl had left the wrappings off his right hand at least. The burn was as healed as it was getting. An uneven stripe of shiny tissue ran across the back of his hand and his index and middle fingers. Now that Izuku really looked, he could kinda see the green Recovery Girl was talking about.
Izuku tucked his scarred hand under his blankets when he caught Nezu looking at it. He cleared his throat and looked away. “So…is everyone else okay? 1-A? Eraserhead? Thirteen? All Might?”
Nezu gave him a soft smile and poured them each a cup of tea. “Everyone’s being taken care of, I assure you. Thirteen and Eraserhead are expected to make a full recovery, though they’re both still at the hospital at this point in time.”
“That’s good.” A tension Izuku wasn’t aware he’d been carrying eased from his shoulders. He accepted a cup from Nezu and worried his lip for a few seconds before whispering, “Eraserhead l-looked pretty bad.”
“He was in rough shape, but he is awake, last I heard,” Nezu said before sipping his tea. “I saw the section on Eraserhead in your notebooks, and I must admit I was a bit surprised. Not many people know of underground heroes at all, let alone him. How did you hear of him?”
Izuku glanced away from Nezu and stared into his teacup. “It was an online support group, one for quirkless people. One of the members was caught by that trafficking ring…three years ago? And Eraserhead saved her and the others who were taken. She told us about him when she came back online. Of course, I was going to look into him after that. Even if I left the group later because I found out they were connected to Humarise.” That had been disappointing. He’d made friends there, but when he was dmed that first recruitment pitch…He’d never left a server so fast or blocked so many people at once before.
Nezu’s ear twitched at that, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he steered the conversation back to the events of the day before. “That was a smart move setting off the flare.”
“Ahhh, thanks,” Izuku mumbled, tilting his head down to hide any blush until Ekikyō could get it under control.
Nezu hopped off his chair briefly to pull something from the bottom of the tea cart: Izuku’s backpack. One of the teachers must have retrieved his things from the control room when they went to get the security camera footage. “I am curious as to why you had it and several other pieces of support equipment with you though.”
“Well, I got to school early yesterday. So, I went to talk to my f-friend, to tell her I might not be able to eat lunch with her and the others, but when she found out I was going to watch the hero course’s rescue training, she threw a bunch of ‘rescue applicable’ inventions at me. I…don’t think she got that I was observing, not participating. But she seemed so excited…So, I just kinda rolled with it,” Izuku explained.
“Ah, Hatsume Mei. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to hear how successful her ‘baby’ was,” Nezu said with a mischievous grin.
Izuku nodded. “It worked great. Still has a few kinks to iron out though,” he said, absently tracing the edges of his new burn scar.
Nezu followed the motion with a look in his eyes that Izuku couldn’t place. The principal seemed about to say something when the door opened.
Recovery Girl entered first, followed by his “aunt,” Cheshire. The woman was dressed in casual clothes, a far cry from the scrubs he almost always saw her in. Her blue eyes immediately locked on Izuku’s green, and she gave one of her not-quite smiles. She sidestepped the tea cart and principal to hug him. “I’m glad you’re okay, kiddo.”
“Me too, Auntie Yūku.” Izuku hugged her back. When they pulled apart, he apologized, “Sorry you had to come pick me up.”
“Oh, none of that. What are friends and family for?”
Izuku’s heart twinged, thinking about his only actual family. Why wasn’t she here? Surely her work wasn’t so heartless as to refuse her leave when her kid had been caught in a villain attack. Or maybe he wrote her phone number wrong on the contact sheet he turned in to the school? (She’d filled one out, but Izuku wrote a second one with Cheshire as an emergency contact instead of Bakugo Mitsuki before disposing of the original.)
Something heavy and unpleasant lapped at the edges of Izuku’s mind before Ekikyō pulled back, taking the emotion with him. It left Izuku’s heart with a phantom ache, whatever it was.
Chesh—Yūku’s face softened for a moment before she turned to face the teachers. “Will there be any permanent damage?”
“Aside from the scarring and skin graft, there was some muscle involvement. I’d recommend a few sessions with a physical therapist to build his leg’s strength back up,” Recovery Girl said, holding out a packet of papers.
“Which UA will pay for,” Nezu interjected.
Recovery Girl nodded at the papers once Yūku took them. “Those ones are well-reputed and often service local law enforcement and heroes. Midoriya and his privacy will be kept safe at any on the list.”
Yūku flipped through the pages before humming. “I’ll make sure he gets scheduled. Is there any paperwork I need to fill out or home care instructions I need to know about?”