Fall & Feather (BNHA)
He hadn’t been intending to die, but then people so rarely did.
A bad choice to sit on a railing atop a roof has far reaching consequences when it breaks and takes a boy once named Midoriya Izuku plummeting to his untimely death. Yet death isn’t quite the end he thought it was.
There had been some merit in Kacchan’s advice, Izuku thought wryly, to take a swan dive off a roof and pray for a quirk in his next life – because he did have a quirk that time around, even if he wasn’t quite born into his next life in the normal sense.
Part I | The Death of Midoriya Izuku
Chapter One: The Life and Times of Midoriya Izuku
It began with a death.
In hindsight – ever a precarious thing – that was what had set off a chain of responses and reactions which led him to that very fate. A fate he couldn’t escape from, irreversible as the actions which had led to that final destination were.
His dream was crushed by his once best friend and idolised hero, and he could only stare blankly at the ground as Kacchan’s words echoed through his brain. “Take a swan dive off a roof, and pray for a quirk in your next life,” the words echoed in his mind, rattled about, a seed planted in his brain. A seed of an invasive plant which had taken root. It wouldn’t leave his brain alone. “Quite frankly, without a quirk, you can’t be a hero.” The words rang in the air, his shoulders sinking as he stared at the cracked concrete of the flat roof which he had been left atop.
Sometimes the thought had cropped up in his darkest moments, words whispered by classmates in the hallways cutting deep, but he had never truly considered throwing himself off the roof before. Suicide had never crossed his mind before, happy and determined as he had been to become a hero. One day, they’ll see, he had promised himself – clung to it, along with the words All Might had once spoken.
“Anyone can be a hero!”
Yet that only applied to anyone with a quirk it seemed, and the reality was settling in far too quickly for his liking. It was like there was a spark inside him which was flickering and sputtering before dying without a single sound. His eyes betrayed him, glancing at the metal railing that ran around the edge of the building, and the traitorous thought of what if rang in his brain. What if he jumped? A choked laugh escaped him as he wondered what it would be like to stand on the other side of that railing, ready to let go and fall down to the hard concrete below.
Unbidden, his legs carried him towards the edge, brain screaming the warning signals even as he stared at the ground that seemed so very far away. Why would someone throw themselves off a roof in a bid to end it all? Izuku felt as though, for the first time in his life, he might be beginning to truly understand what made someone leave their shoes on that side of the railing and leap off the other.
He wasn’t going to jump, he knew that with a certainty in his chest. He wasn’t at that point. Yet. He wasn’t about to add himself to another statistic – reduce himself to a number, a percentage. He just wanted to dangle his legs over the edge. He wanted to feel nothing but air under his feet. He didn’t understand why that felt like freedom to him, and a part of him hoped he never did.
“Anyone can be a hero,” he muttered, words which had once been a hand on his back, pushing him forth, sunk into him like chains, wrapping around him and dragging him down ever so slowly into a pit of misery and despair. “Why?” he asked the world, the word cracking on his lips sounding ever so broken as he sat on the railing looking at the ground below. A fall which would kill him. “Why do you hate me? Why can’t I achieve my dreams?” He stared at the ground, sighing deeply as he shifted his weight back, ready to hop back onto the right side of the railing.
Crack!
Izuku blinked, and time didn’t seem to slow down as he felt himself pitch forwards, a grating crack reverberating through his bones as his body found nothing but air beneath him. His lungs sucked in a breath, ready to scream for a hero to save him. Who would want to save a worthless Deku like you? A question Kacchan had never asked him echoed in the quiet which was his mind. Even All Might thinks you’re useless…
His mouth clicked shut, green hair seeming to flutter in the breeze, eyes staring up at the sky as he fell. It was quiet, almost peaceful as he fell to his death. A fitting end, some part of him thought hysterically. He had been born quirkless, someone destined to fade into the background. Wasn’t it only right that he died quietly and without sound? He didn’t hear the spinechilling crack of bone as he hit the ground. He didn’t hear the sickly thump as gravity inevitably dragged him down to earth. In fact, he didn’t hear anything much at all.
He was dead on impact.
::
It had been an accident.
It hadn’t been the last straw which broke the camel’s back. He hadn’t been planning to take his own life, rather it had been taken from him by an old, broken rail. Hardly a villain, unlike what he had been told he would be taken out by. There wasn't any need to worry about becoming injured as a quirkless hero. He hadn’t even been able to live long enough to try, and some, small, quiet part of him burned beneath the indignity of it all. Beneath the knowledge that his dreams and hopes had been pulled out from under his feet so swiftly. Izuku could only wonder if he was even allowed to dream. It hadn’t seemed that way.
Take a swan dive… Kacchan whispered to him, a ghost of the past he had never quite been able to forget as he waited there in an odd sense of limbo. Pray for a quirk in your next life…
Izuku wondered if there was a next life for him. He had never been particularly into the idea of religion, strange as the ideas of gods and deities was to him. He had never felt some kind of presence, as others had claimed to, preferring to root himself in truth and facts.
Yet he didn’t quite understand where he was just then and there. He had died – that much he knew with an ironclad certainty. Yet he still thought, even though he could feel the absence of a chest rising and falling. It was as if someone had taken away his need to breathe and left him somewhere warm and cosy. Izuku wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to leave. Because wouldn’t that mean bumping into people who despised him for being quirkless? Something he had no control over.
It wasn’t fair.
Just like it wasn’t fair that a railing had to break on him when he’d barely lived for fifteen years. Wasn’t the world just too cruel – to take that away? He didn’t understand. In fact, he didn’t want to understand, because that would mean acknowledging his death and whatever the hell was surrounding him right then and there.
Stars seemed to twinkle behind his eyes, part of him clueless to whether his eyes were open or shut. That place was so strange, neither there nor anywhere as it was. Truly, the words to describe it were beyond him. Or maybe it was alike the power called magic in the old fiction books written before quirks had become the only power concentrated on in fiction?
“Magical,” he murmured to the void. “I think that’s the right word to describe this…”
The void didn’t answer.
Silence engulfed them both.
::
Sometimes, he wondered if he was going mad. Sometimes he wondered if he had somehow survived the fall and was comatose in hospital. Maybe that would have explained the odd sense of feeling and awareness which was slowly trickling back to him bit by bit.
It was funny what dying and existing in a void did to one’s perception of time and feeling. Touch was ever so noticeable to him as he was.
He could feel something chaffing against his wrists and ankles. He could feel something cold against his skin. It was almost like jelly, if he thought about it. Not that he tried to think about it too often. It was a strange sensation. Something which felt wrong. Idly, he wondered about the instincts he had not for the last time. Why couldn’t they have warned him that the fence upon which he sat had been old and decrepit and about to fall down? If he’d had a face he would have scowled. He couldn’t even seem to die properly. Death was supposed to be the end.
Izuku wasn’t quite sure why it felt like the beginning instead.
::
There were shades of red – red like the colour of the petals of the spider lilies his classmates had once left on his desk as a joke. He wasn’t sure when they turned blue, like the bright skies he had once lived beneath, midnight to sky blue.
The colours and flowers left him.
He opened his eyes.
::
The gown was like paper on his skin, pale white and barely weighing a thing. He could feel the air against his body as he sat there, listening to peanut adult words passed about over his head. He wasn’t paying attention to them, despite the oddity of the situation. There was something else he was far more preoccupied with. How could he not be preoccupied with the stranger in the reflection of the nearest glass window?
A row of thick, cylindrical tanks lined one of the walls, the sole one empty of being and that greenish liquid being the one which had held him until only moments ago.
Fingers brushed against the hard glass, as if that could dispel the illusion. As if that could make the hair which fell to his shoulders grow out green once more. As if that would change the hands pawing at the glass back to those of a teenager rather than the pudgy digits of a toddler. It didn’t. Just like he couldn’t change the fact he had fallen from a rooftop.
Fine strands of white hair framed his face, no longer the untameable mop of green it had once been. Yet nestled within those white locks were a set of ears distinctly sticking up and out of his head. It was almost like he’d inherited All Might’s hairstyle somehow, except more spaced out. Yet they were actual bunny ears rather than two strands of hair he had looked up to and idolised. His eyes were a startling shade of gold, the pupils almost unnaturally elongated. More proof – if the bunny ears weren’t enough – that he had a mutation quirk. The mint green wings on his back were also something of a giveaway, an unfamiliar weight on his spine as he sat there, marvelling at the reflection he was seeing for the first time. Take a swan dive, the words echoed around in his brain, and pray for a quirk in your next life! Izuku giggled, a hopeless sound made from hysterics.
He didn’t really understand what was going on, brain racing a mile a minute, but there was one thing some tiny, miniscule part of his subconsciousness was telling him it was that he was alive. He was alive, and he could feel every inhale of cold air into his chest. He was alive, and yet there was a complete and utter stranger staring back at him in the mirror, and he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that.
He was supposed to be Midoriya Izuku, and yet he wasn’t really green anymore. He couldn’t see his freckles splayed across his cheeks when he looked at his reflection. He didn’t have his mother’s eyes anymore. Because you’re not ‘Midoriya’ Izuku anymore, part of his brain whispered, and Izuku wasn’t prepared for the denial and the crippling sense of loss which came with that much.
“What a successful subject,” an unfamiliar voice came, and Izuku blinked at the lady who came to hover over him, heedless of the shivers that sent rolling down his spine. “He has both the ears and the wings… It seems the genetic engineering this time around worked,” she said, and Izuku blinked once more. Because wasn’t genetic engineering illegal?
"Huh?" he grunted, no words really escaping his mouth, troublesome as his tongue was seemingly being.
“Take him to the other successful subjects,” the lady ordered, and Izuku could only watch in confusion as two men came over to escort him someplace else, lifting him up like a ragdoll. Didn’t that mean there were unsuccessful subjects too? He pondered on that thought, eyes wide and confused as he was ferried from one room, down an almost clinical, brightly lit corridor, and into a different room. Though in there he wasn’t alone anymore.
“This is Nine,” the man on his left spoke, pushing him forwards, and Izuku stumbled forwards, still entirely uncertain as to what was going on. “He will be living with you from now on.”
Somehow, Izuku knew he wouldn’t be getting any answers to his situation anytime soon, even as he plonked himself down on his backside, the hissing click telling of the fact that he had been left there alone with a bunch of children who couldn’t be that much older than him. Well, the age he appeared to be on the outside, that was.
His gaze travelled down to his chubby fingers, golden eyes watching in an odd fascination as the digits curled according to his will. Proof that it was his body. He was in control. He was inexplicably alive when everything he had once known told him he ought to be dead.
It didn’t make sense.
Then again, Izuku knew there was a lot which didn’t make sense in the world he had once lived in. Other people and their actions towards the person he had used to be most of all. In a world of quirks, was anything ever impossible? That was a question he had asked himself far too many times, back when he had still been wishing for a quirk. Wishing he could be normal. Yet just as he had been coming to terms with being quirkless, with being less than human, he had found that once-wish granted.
Yet wishes had a cost, it seemed, and never before had he wished he could go back and change things. Wishing he had never ever made such a wish if the scene unfolding before him was the result of it. He looked up from his hands, staring at the golden eyes which looked back at him from a nearby mirror. Unfamiliar gold eyes. Not his eyes – at least the ones he had been looking at for the past fourteen years.
Because you died, a voice reminded him in the back of his head, and Izuku could only tear his eyes away from the alien sight.
“Nine!” a cheery voice brough him out of his reverie, and he could only blink as he found himself accosted by seven other children. The oldest of them couldn’t have been older than ten, if he was halfway good at guessing ages. “Hi! Hi! I’m Seven!”
Izuku blinked, eyes wide and confused as the little girl named Seven plonked herself down beside him. She was wearing a paper-thin white gown the same as him, her hair a shade of grey not too dissimilar to the new stark white which was his new hair colour. He could still feel and see the silky white strands which tickled at his collarbone with every unthinking motion.
“Bunny!” A boy who couldn’t be too much older than his outward age pointed at him, blue eyes glistening as he clapped, appearing altogether too cheerful for the situation Izuku was slowly starting to suspect he was in.
Genetic engineering was illegal, after all, and there were a fair number of children in that room, including him, who had a visible quirk. Ones which were desirable.
“That’s right, Eight,” the eldest boy said, patting the red hair which fluffed up like a duckling’s feathers. “Hello, Nine,” the same boy greeted, his hair a darker shade of grey than Seven’s, and Izuku could only stare into those yellow eyes and wonder why he seemed oddly familiar. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Mn,” Izuku mumbled, tongue not able to keep up with what his brain wanted to say. Because that tongue had never been used before, never twisted around syllables, never cried out for his mother, never pleaded with his once best friend. Really, the reminders that he had died and come back never seemed to cease, and Izuku could only ponder on the nature of it all. He didn’t understand, and there was a part of him which was beginning to think he might never.
Take a swan dive, Kacchan whispered in the back of his head. Pray for a quirk in your next life.
Izuku giggled. You were right, he almost thought to himself, knowing if his mouth would move properly he would have whispered it aloud. There was hysteria, numbness, and dread swirling in his chest as he sat there amongst strange children, with the strange knowledge that he would never be considered quirkless again.
He didn’t understand it at all.
PREMISE: After accidentally falling from a roof, Izuku is reborn with a quirk that time. Admittedly, it's a quirk brought about by illegal genetic engineering in a den of criminals and neither of his bio parents are even aware of his existence. Survival. Slight horror themes - we're talking nomu here. Parental Hawks (eventually). Mildly Feral Izuku. Featuring a certain rabbit laughing her head off in the background. No pairings.