Izuku has been living with Shouta and his family for a week, now. The days have simultaneously flown by and dragged on: on the one hand, it’s only Thursday!?, but on the other, it’s already Thursday!?. Part of this is, he will admit, due to the fact that moving into Shouta’s house has absolutely thrown his routine out a twelfth-story window. His sense of time always gets skewed whenever he messes around with his routine and habits, which means it is extra skewed lately.
Not that he’s gotten rid of his routine entirely. By the second day, he had started getting restless. Going from an incredibly active lifestyle to… well, he’s managed to keep most of his workout routine in place. There’s a room in the house dedicated to exercising, half of it filled with weights and weightlifting equipment and the other half covered in mats for sparring or yoga or whatever they ended up doing with it. The weights… aren’t quite what Izuku’s used to, but he sucks it up and maybe does a few more sets than he normally would.
He does, after all, have a lot more free time now than he’s used to.
Yuuki sends him his paperwork to do, at least, along with a few hours’ worth of recorded training sessions and fieldwork from his sidekicks and interns to look over, which he blasts through just about as soon as he can because he’s bored and he needs something to do.
At least he doesn’t have a huge team, not like Idaten. He has all of three sidekicks: Paladin, Black Ankh, and Ryuuzuki, and one intern: Izumi Kouta, UA third-year, currently going by the hero name Tidal Wave.
Guilt pricks his gut at the thought of Kouta. No, he’s not abandoning her or falling down on his responsibility as her work-study mentor, he reminds himself, but no matter how many times he tells himself that, his chest hollows out and the sting of remorse fills him. She had been one of the first people he saved, and he can’t help the fact that he feels an absurd amount of attachment towards her, almost as much as he feels towards Eri.
By the afternoon, everything’s done. He’s gone through every minute of footage sent, done all his paperwork, and spent a solid twenty minutes playing sudoku before he started getting bored of it. He could… go for a run or a walk or something, try and work off some of the restless energy, but the idea… It doesn’t sound particularly appealing to him, at the moment.
He wants to do something—no, no he doesn’t. He sits up, shoving his phone in his pocket and running his fingers through his hair. He doesn’t want to do something; he wants to accomplish something.
(A quiet part of himself whispers that he hasn’t accomplished anything in a long, long time, but he shakes his head and moves on. That can be unpacked later.)
So, if he wants to accomplish something… What are his options? It’s not like he can stress-clean: Shouta and Eri and Yamada keep on top of their household chores, unlike him. And it’s not like he can just… randomly start some project that will never be finished, he doesn’t even have any of his own things for doing that and. Well. They probably wouldn’t appreciate him making a mess.
There’s always quirk and hero analysis, his familiar old fallbacks, but the thought of spending even more time immersed in the hero world right now is… Tiring. He’s tired of it. He’s tired of heroics and the heroics industry and heroes in general.
Wow, who could have ever pictured him thinking that? Although… It kind of makes sense. He’s lived and breathed heroics for years. Burnout was bound to happen at some point.
Caught in the middle of all his indecisiveness, Izuku covers his face with his hand and groans, letting himself flop backwards on the couch. He lays there, hand covering half his face, and stares towards the ceiling, eyes unfocused and leaving everything fuzzy and indistinct.
Both Dr. Mori and Eijirou had mentioned hobbies, recently, and he’s come to realize that he doesn’t have any. It’s obvious, in hindsight, but his hobbies were all extensions of his hero work. His analysis, working out, even his dabbling in gymnastics and parkour and yoga were all at least tangentially related to improving his ability as a hero. And if he wasn’t doing hero-related things, then he was killing time playing sudoku or he was asleep.
Rather than let himself wallow in this for an extended period of time, he picks up his phone and opens his message notifications. There are a few—more than a few—that he hasn’t answered yet, from people asking after him or trying to express concern or just asking where the hell he’s gone.
Now’s not the time to answer those. Just because he wants to accomplish something doesn’t mean he wants to accomplish that (right now, at least. He’ll have to bite the bullet and answer eventually. Ghosting them eternally isn’t exactly the answer).
While he has several recent conversations he could open (Eijirou, Hanta, Tenya, the *hoedown intensifies* groupchat, Eri), he knows that most of them are busy. Eijirou and Hanta have work, Eri is in school, and Tenya is probably in the middle of his packing frenzy for the trip back to Japan. Someone might be online in the groupchat, but… No, he’s not ready to talk about this stuff in there, as much as he loves Mezou and Mina and Kyouka.
Instead, he finds himself scrolling further, down to a contact he hasn’t talked to in… months, apparently. There’s a few recent messages of concern from this contact, but nothing since the last short conversation they had in April.
(Okay, so maybe the time is better measured in weeks than months, but it still feels like it’s been longer than five weeks.)
[DMs between Midoriya Izuku and Toogata Mirio]
me
hey you busy?
The response is almost immediate.
Mirio-senpai
Nope! You wanna talk?
me
yeah, if you have time
Mirio-senpai
I already said I wasn’t busy! I can do call or text or we could meet up if you want
Would it be nice to see Mirio? …Yes, actually, it would be, but reluctance drags him down as he thinks of how much it would take to do so. He’d have to actually change into something he cares to go out in public in, and maybe actually run a comb through his hair, and figure out a place to meet up and how to get there and the mental energy required to figure all that out is beyond him at the moment. Another option is having Mirio come here, but he should probably ask one of the people who actually live here for permission and they’re all busy teaching or in class…
He hits the call button next to the contact name and puts the phone on speaker.
Mirio answers within two rings.
“Hey! It’s good to hear from you! How are you?”
“That’s a loaded question. Do you want the long answer or the short answer?”
A pause before Mirio replies. “Long answer, of course. What’s been going on in your life?”
“Well… Okay, before I really get going, I just want to say that I’m actually doing… pretty good? Comparatively, to how I’ve been doing for… I don’t know, the past two or whatever years. I’m good. I’m doing okay, for the moment.”
“That’s good to hear. Must be something pretty serious, though, if you’re prefacing it with that.”
Izuku takes a deep breath and bites his lip, anxiety chewing at his gut. It’s been getting easier to say, to explain what happened, but something about telling Mirio… He hesitates. Maybe it’s because this is Mirio, his senpai, his pseudo older brother…
But, well, he probably already knows. At least, Izuku’s fairly confident that Mirio is still one of Eri’s main confidants, although…
He’ll just have to find out.
“I almost killed myself a week ago,” Izuku says, mouth suddenly dry. He swallows, bites his lip again, waits for Mirio to reply.
Mirio does, after a few seconds of silence. “Well, no place left to go but up from there, right?”
“Right,” Izuku nods. “I’m, uh, I’m actually staying with Shouta and Yamada and Eri, have been since… well, I called Shouta. He picked me up.”
“Good. I’m glad he did.”
“Yeah. It’s, uh, it’s been nice, staying with them. Kinda hadn’t realized how lonely I had gotten.”
“I get that. So, you said you’re doing well, so… talk to me about that?”
Izuku chuckles. “Well, chiefly, I’m back in therapy, and I seem to be rebuilding some semblance of a social life. Actually went out to get coffee with a couple of my friends yesterday.”
“Oh? Which ones?”
“Hanta and Eijirou,” Izuku replies. While Mirio is familiar with most of Izuku’s class, he knows the handful who had been part of the Shie Hassaikai raid the best, and had heard a lot about Eijirou in particular from Tamaki over the years.
“How is Eijirou doing? He and Tamaki still talk occasionally, but nothing like they used to.”
“He’s doing well. Enjoying his classes and his job,” Izuku replies. “Actually, we talked about—well, we talked about a lot of things, but this was kinda one thing in specific… I don’t know. You have hobbies, right?”
“Uh… yeah? Most people do.”
“I don’t think I do. Or, I don’t know, I don’t have any that aren’t in some way related to hero work, which I’m trying to just… I don’t know. I think that… I kind of, maybe need to start… figuring out who I am outside of ‘being a hero’, and… I’m realizing that… that’s really all I am, you know?”
After a long pause, Mirio says, “I can see that. So… you’re wanting help? To figure out what you like?”
“…Maybe?” Izuku cringes at how tentative that sounds. “I… guess so.”
“Well, alright then. Um… Well, what are some things you remember that you used to do before… heroes?”
“Heroes have been my life-long special interest, so… pretty much nothing. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t in any clubs or did any sports or anything like that.”
“Okay, so… what are some things you did that don’t necessarily have to be hero-related?”
“Well, gymnastics, I guess.” He shrugs. “And I guess… quirk analysis doesn’t have to be hero-related. But I don’t think I want to work with four-year-olds. Could go into research, but… I don’t know. I learned how to analyze them specifically to help myself be a hero, and… That shows. And I’m not sure I really want to go into research.”
“That’s fair. Anything else you can think of?”
There’s not much. Really, quirk analysis has been his major hobby—
His notebooks.
While he had moved to mostly digital, he had spent years working on those notebooks, and the hero and villain profiles in there had always included illustrations. Even after he had moved digital, and could attach real pictures of the subjects to his files, he had still continued illustrating people up until… about half a year ago?
“Yeah, thanks, I’ve got it.” He bolts up off the couch and strides for his bedroom while Mirio laughs on the other end of the line.
“Glad I could help? Before you go, I’m thinking of seeing if I can invite myself over for dinner this weekend. You mind if I—”
“It’d be great to see you again, really,” Izuku replies, leaning his head to pin his phone between his shoulder and his ear so he can open his door. “And if you can’t, then we can arrange some time to meet up?”
“Alright! Sounds like a plan. It was great hearing from you, Izuku.”
“Uh, yeah, I’ll, uh, I’ll try to talk to you a bit more often.” He chuckles, a little self-deprecatingly in nature as Mirio hangs up, and slips his phone back into his pocket before kneeling down to dig in his backpack.
Despite not having been pulled out for a while, his sketchbook is an easy find, his pencils still hooked in the spiral binding. He was less than ten pages into it, and flipping back through the first few sketches in it, he sighs. Damn, but these are actually good. He’s never shared his art with anyone but his closest friends and family, but…
He wouldn’t feel bad about sharing these. Maybe anonymously, under a pseudonym…
That’s a decision for later, though. For now, he has something to do that’s not just endlessly whiling away the hours playing sudoku or scrolling through his social feeds.
Settling himself back on the couch, he finds himself faced with a new problem: what to actually draw? He could just keep drawing heroes and villains, but the idea was to distance himself from that, a bit, to find a hobby divorced from heroics…
Although, that’s going to be hard, considering how strongly their society orbits around the heroics industry.
Frowning, he shakes his head clear of that thought and turns to the first blank page. Something simple to just, warm back up with…
Loose motions and long strokes, he blocks out the basic form. With the base laid out, he starts detailing, and Ochako comes to life beneath his pencil, her hair flying around her face as she floats, carefree.
God, he misses her. It’s been… It’s been since March since he last talked to her, since she…
Well, since she left. Since she walked out of his life.
Since he chased her out.
He grimaces and flips the page, lets more renders of his friends come into being. The swoosh of Momo’s hair, Eijirou’s spikes and Hanta’s smile, a very detailed sketch of Tenya’s leg…
The front door opens while he’s in the middle of shading the ridges on Eri’s horn. He glances up, catching Yamada walking through the door alone.
“Hey! Shouta and Eri are both staying late at the school today, they had business to take care of.” Yamada walks over, head tilting as he approaches. “What do you have there?”
“Oh, uh,” Izuku pulls his hand away so Yamada can see. “My sketchbook. I… haven’t done anything with it, for a while, so…”
“Hot damn.” Yamada reaches for it but pauses. “May I?”
Izuku nods. “Yeah, sure.” He flips it to the first page and holds it up, lets Yamada take it from him. For a few minutes, he watches Yamada flip through the pages, the edges of the paper squeaking against the steel spiral, until Yamada catches up with the most recent sketch.
“Holy shit,” he says, handing the sketchbook back to Izuku. “I didn’t know you could draw. And with your off-hand, too!”
“Actually, my left has always been my drawing hand,” Izuku replies. “Perks of being ambidextrous.”
Yamada raises his eyebrows. “That so? How long have you been drawing for?”
“My whole life.” Izuku shrugs. “It was always rolled in as part of… hero analysis, I would do sketches of them in their costumes, and I just… kept at it, until recently.”
“No wonder you’re so good, huh. That much practice at it…” Yamada sits down on the couch, some space remaining between him and Izuku. “You know, Shou… talks to me. About… Well, recently he’s done a lot of talking about you.”
Izuku nods. That tracks: he’s kind of the big thing changing up their lives at the moment.
“He says that you’ve been thinking about what comes next for you, after hero work, and, well, that’s not something that a lot of heroes think about until they’re staring down the barrel of forced retirement,” Yamada continues, voice low and solemn, no trace of his Present Mic persona anywhere to be found. “So you’re already ahead of the curve.”
“Not really,” Izuku shrugs. “I was already looking at forced retirement. You know, if the job didn’t kill me first.”
Yamada snorts. “I know your team. There was no way they were going to let the job kill you.”
Izuku can’t help but agree. Chiwako, Seiko, and Hikaru are… the best back-up anyone could ask for. None of them have stereotypically overwhelming quirks, no Explosion or Creation or Cremation among them, but they are all highly-skilled and well-trained at working in a cohesive unit. With Izuku and Chiwako in the air, and Seiko and Hikaru on the ground…
He may look like the lone ranger All Might, Endeavor, and Hawks were, but without his sidekicks, he would be dead ten times over, at least.
Izuku shrugs, “That just means I was looking at a forced retirement. If it wasn’t my arm, then it would be something else. Even just… general wear-and-tear. I haven’t exactly been easy on my body.”
Yamada snorts. “I have distinct memories of having to commentate on a match where you systematically broke every finger you had, and then broke some of them twice over, in your first year.”
“Hey!” Izuku snorts and rolls his eyes. “That was—I don’t even have that arm anymore!”
“Yeah, but you still have the self-destructive tendencies,” Yamada retorts, and that shuts Izuku up, because there is no possible way for him to argue against that point. “Anyways… Where I was going was that I think you… Well. Have you thought about sharing your art?”
“A little bit,” Izuku replies. “Under a pseudonym, obviously, but… yeah.”
“Find the right niche, and I think you could do pretty well for yourself. A lot of your style is pretty realistic, but… there’s something unique about it. A lot of people would go for it, the way you do lines, the… the weight to everything. People would like it. I certainly do.”
Izuku looks over at Yamada, whose face is open, honest, sunglasses having slid down low on his nose. Heat rises to his cheeks, and he looks back down at the open page of his sketchbook, at a half-finished Eri, and nods.
“I… Yeah. I’ll think about it.”
If anything else, art is definitely a field with a much lower rate of catastrophic injury than heroics. And…
Well, it’s something he enjoys. He hadn’t realized just how much he was missing it until he had pulled his sketchbook back out and began filling up pages. Buzzing in his veins, a fizzing in his chest… he’s excited. No clue what he’s going to draw next, no clue where he’s going to go with this, but he’s excited about what comes next, and that…
That hasn’t happened in a long time.
Though still shrouded in mist, he can see the barest outlines of a way forward, out of this pit he’s dug for himself.
That’s more than he had for himself last week.