Fine Line

There was something crawling on the inside of his neck, the fluttering touches had turned into iron claws digging into the soft flesh of his throat sending excruciating pain through every nerve of his body. 

Midoriya Izuku had always been prone to injuries, whether they were attacks from Kacchan and his lackeys as children or the villains who seemed to have an odd affinity with him and his class. It was expected, being a hero meant feeling pain on the daily. And on any other day he'd be willing to bet that his pain tolerance was through the roof, the countless broken arms and fingers he had endured without ever cowering in the face of pain could guarantee that; however, what he felt in the initial few seconds of being plunged into consciousness was something he'd never want to experience again even if it meant giving up on being a hero. 

The agonizing feeling of something ripping off the muscles in your neck layer by layer paired with the lead filling his lungs, leaking out, and jabbing against his ribs had made him forget how to breathe. The very first thing one learned and the one function crucial to any living organism's existence. To suddenly be stripped of this ability warranted a blind panic, the sort which left an inexplicable ringing in his ears and allowed his limbs to move to their own accord. Any external contact was shoved into an ignored corner of his mind and anything his eyes saw would only be registered as bright white visions. Until that moment, Izuku had never felt the true absurdity of time. The few seconds before Aizawa sensei had managed to calm him down had stretched out to fill eternities. Even with the grounding arm on his shoulder and his steady words echoing in his head, Izuku had never felt so far away as he did at that moment. For at that moment, Izuku didn't exist in the universe all his friends, classmates and teacher did but, rather in a universe somewhere between light-years away and right parallel to theirs. He was on the outside looking in, not connected to any of them in any way but rather bound to the limbo and void which had sucked him in. 

"Midoriya?" 

He could hear Aizawa sensei's voice reach out to him from a place he could not see, but his brain screamed warning signs at him, Sensei's face was in front of him- why did his voice seem so far away? 

"...Problem child?"

Izuku had always found the nickname slightly confusing, was it Aizawa Sensei looking down at him like all those past teachers had looked down on their weak, quirkless student or was it something birthed from a tender fondness, a promise to accept him as he came and want nothing from him which would harm him? 

The screaming he had previously ignored when he was struggling to breathe was gone (it sounded oddly familiar, was it his own?), someone was moving his hands away from his neck (when had they got there?) and vertigo had slowly begun to fade. He could make out Kirishima and Iida's concerned faces, although the others were still a bit blurry. 

"I'm not here."

If you asked Izuku what he meant or why he said it, he would be just as clueless as the next person; but at that moment a sudden emotion had struck him, taking hold of every fiber of his being and screaming he was existing in two places at once, and existing nowhere at all- a place before time and a place at the end of time, the same place filled with blinding white light and the darkest vantablack of a void. 

A haunting feeling that he had floated away to a place between nowhere and everywhere seized his chest before he was sucked back into the universe his teacher was trying to ground him to. It wasn't until he crashed back into full awareness did he feel his lungs become lighter, filled with air and the pain in his throat dull into a gentle throbbing. His brain was back online, matching names to faces and desperately racing to fill in the blanks left by the moments he was drifting in the desolate vacuum. 

Aizawa sensei was crouching in front of him, similar to the time before the what he called 'overhaul raid and eri rescue mission'- except this time his face wasn't reassurance, it was of concern and fear. Confusion lidded his now wide eyes, lips parted open as he searched Izuku's face for any sign of pain. His hand on his shoulder had begun to rub soothing circles in an attempt to calm him down, thumb slowly wiping away the tears Izuku didn't even notice he had shed. 

"Sensei- what's...what's going on?" 

His throat felt raw and speaking hurt the slightest bit, in his peripheral mission he could make out Kaminari staring at him in shock mirroring the same expression Todoroki had, Tsuyu seemed to have paused in the middle of bandaging his torso and hip- looking at Izuku in fear. The slow realization that almost everyone was looking at him had allowed the radio silence to build up in the atmosphere. 

Only to be broken by Sensei's sigh. 

"What all do you remember?"

"I was sleeping, and then I was falling but before I could do anything, Sero crashed into me, and then I don't know, there was something. Something odd, I can't describe it, I felt it pull me into somewhere. Like a vast expanse of nothing, I don't know and then there was pain- a lot of it." 

"Could it be a concussion? or a hallucination?" 

Momo's whisper could be easily heard in the dead silence which followed his explanation, it sounded weird, the moment the words left his lip he regretted it yet they were the most accurate and true to his experience. 

"Momo, Iida, please get back to work. Tokoyami, do you feel fine enough to help out a little?" 

Izuku's head hurt too much to follow where sensei was looking, closing his eyes and pressing his the flesh of his palms against them. He could feel the dried tears on his cheeks and the pain in his throat had mostly faded, leaving behind a subtle itch. He had stopped listening to the words flying around, hearing them but never registering them. Izuku felt so tired, he wanted to sleep. The exhaustion was something he had never felt before, it had soaked into his bones and burrowed deep inside the muscles of his heart and the crevices of his soul. Like a relentless river, it washed over him, dulling his sense and drawing him into a helpless heap. So much so, that he couldn't even bring himself to react when dark shadow lifted him. In his mind, a voice crept up to him as he drifted off. 

Just a little nap, he told himself, just a small one. 

❑❑❑❑❑

When he woke up next, the very first thing he took note of was the soreness in his throat and the crick in his nape. Groaning slightly, he pushed away his bangs and allowed his eyes to flutter open. 

Almost as if in slow motion everything seemed to take a coherent shape, blurry figures and swirling colors seeming to sharpen and stop moving aimlessly. He blinked once, then twice, before he could understand what sensei was doing. The bus was floating, just barely hovering above the ground from what he could make out. Sensei was lifting it, his capture weapon barely wrapping around the roof of the bus as the teacher struggled slightly to manhandle it. Next to him, Uraraka sat, a concentrated look on her face. Her one-shoulder drooped, flinching whenever she moved it even slightly. 

"Sensei thinks her shoulder's broken."

Izuku could swear he heard his heart stop when he heard the voice so suddenly and so close to him. Whipping his head around, he made eye contact with Kaminari. 

The said boy was hunched over next to him, uncharacteristically somber and still. How Izuku had no noticed him at all was beyond him, but the sheer shock of seeing Kaminari look so broken and battered had shoved away those thoughts. Kaminari's bright blond hair draped over his eyes like a curtain, hiding away his soul from the world. His eyes were glazed and held a lost look to them as if Kaminari weren't really there with Izuku but rather somewhere lost in his own head. Denki wasn't much taller than him, yet in that moment he looked so impossibly small. His knees were folded as he wrapped an arm around them, his chin resting on the top of his knees. Fingering clutched at the fabric of the uniform as if attempting to remind his mind the location of his body, remind his consciousness of his physical existence. 

"I was lost somewhere... like I was floating somewhere. I could see everything around me, but my vision didn't seem like it was my own, like I was in the backseat of my own mind. I was so scared that I would be stuck like that forever, like my body would never be my own. I tried to talk but it all felt like I was underwater, but then you screamed. It wasn't like anything I'd ever heard, it was one of pure terror. The unfiltered kind you would let out before being mauled to death. It snapped me out of my state, jolted me right back to my senses," Kaminari's voice was shaky, if he were learning to speak for the first time, "Thanks, Midobro. You really helped me out there, once again."

The smile Denki gave him lacked the usual mischievous and cheeky excellence. This one was sadder; more melancholic, like he hadn't smiled for a long time. It didn't seem forced, but it wasn't happy either. And maybe Izuku would have done more about it, had the nightmarish chill not begun to grow in the pits of his chest. 

"What's- what's going on?"

Izuku's voice was much more hoarse then he expected, and every word seemed to be more torturous than another, but he needed answers and he needed them now. 

"The bus fell off the cliff and the supposedly dead driver disappeared. They found a handprint on the outside of the front window pane, apparently, it was too small to be of the driver- Sensei thinks it's a child but no one has a bloody hand amongst us. He's trying to remove the first aid kit, canned food, and our hero costumes from the bus storage compartment but he's gone need to make the bus upright first. Uraraka said she could manage it, but she's really struggled to get it off 5 inches from the ground. Her shoulder's broken, I think. Momo managed to produce 5 first aid kits so Tsuyu is trying to patch everyone up. Kiri's wrist dislocated so Iida was trying to pop it back in and Shinso got Todoroki brainwashed to cauterize everyone's open wounds. Most of everyone who woke up went back to sleep. The ones awake are mostly in pain or helping out. Bakubro's the only one who didn't wake up once."

Kaminari sounded distant, as if reading something off a script rather than a live update. His eyes were now trained on his dirty, mud crusted shoes. He swallowed a few times, his mouth opening and closing as if unsure of what to say next. Izuku would have said something to comfort the clearly distraught Kaminari had morbid thoughts not begun to take over his mind. Was Kacchan in a coma, then? What if it was internal bleeding, those could be really dangerous. Head trauma, if not treated, could also prove fatal- what if one of his lungs was punctured? He hadn't woken up once, which meant it was near impossible to know if any internal organs had been collateral damage; Kacchan was alive now but for how long-

"Katsuki's alive, Mido. You don't have to worry." 

Izuku didn't even notice when he had started to mumble or let worry leak into his face. Kaminari's reassuring smile was strained but a silent promise nonetheless. 

Izuku couldn't help but smile back, even in his own insecurity and worry plagued state Kaminari was still trying to comfort Izuku. And the moment two atypically dull smiles were exchanged, a sudden clarity hit Izuku. 

Now was not the time to worry, they were going to have to pull through and push past whatever sinister lurked in the forest. The targets on their backs were attached already, this was no longer a class trip gone wrong but a game of survival they were unwillingly and unknowingly plunged into. 

This time the heroes had to save their most important victims yet, themselves.