Just saw the ask about different versions of Izuku meeting and my first thought was Lizuku meeting YUTS Izuku, hearing about his quirk, and slowly having a breakdown bc the 32 and now I have too many emotions
fuck dude i actually wrote something for this a month or two ago
hold on
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“Who are you?” Izuku asks… himself. He doesn’t know where he is- he’d just been alone in a room, talking to Nana, and now he’s here, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. Nana and Rei are gone, but not in the way they disappeared when Aizawa erased his quirk oh so long ago. They’re simply not here. But where is here?
More concerning, however, is the other person in the room. Ahead of him stands a mirror image of himself, except… not. This Izuku’s eyes are darker, his hair wilder, and there’s a pale scar that runs across his face like someone tried to cleave it in half.
Izuku tries to focus on his doppelganger, but his focus quickly drifts onward to the rippling sea of ghosts behind him.
There are dozens of them, clustered around not-him and peering at him curiously. They’re of many different ages; some are young, with thick hair and youthful skin, and some are old, still bearing wrinkles and greyed hair. Izuku resists the urge to take a step back. Whoever this is, they have a lot of ghosts, and that never means anything good.
“I- Who are you?” Not-Izuku asks, looking him and down.
“I- This doesn’t make any sense,” he says, and Izuku rubs the back of his neck.
“No, it doesn’t,” he says. “...I’m guessing that’s your name, too.”
“Yes,” not-him says. “It is.”
Izuku’s eyes flit from him to the ghosts around him. Why does this… version of himself, whatever he is, have so many ghosts? What did this version of him do?
As he stares at the ghosts, his eyes fall on a single one who’s standing closer to not-him than the rest. She’s older, with dirty-blond hair pooling neatly around her face in a bob, and her pale eyes are fixed carefully on him. Her hands are resting over the space where not-him’s shoulder is- not touching, but almost.
He meets her eyes, and she gasps.
“You can see us?” She whispers, and Izuku gives the tiniest of nods. If he wants to know the answer, he’ll have to ask. He needs to know, whether he likes it or not.
“Can- can he see you, too?” He mouths, hoping not-him doesn’t catch it. The lady shakes her head, hair sliding around her face in a way only a ghost’s can.
“Wait,” she says suddenly, drifting away from not-him towards Izuku. “Could… Could you pass on a message? From all of us?”
“Of course,” he whispers, glancing at the ocean of ghosts behind her. There’s ten- twenty- fuck, more than that. What is this?
“Tell him… Tell him it wasn’t his fault,” she says, eyes crinkling with pain. “Tell him that we don’t blame him, please.”
“What did I- he do?” Izuku mouths, glancing at not-him, who’s looking at him strangely.
“His quirk is… Not something a young child should have to endure,” she answers, turning to look at not-him sadly. “He lost control of it, once, when he was very little. It wasn’t his fault. This… This was the result.”
Izuku stares, first at the drifting, white-eyed ghosts, and then at not-him. This version of him has a quirk- a quirk that killed this many people.
“M-Midoriya,” he says, and the word sounds strange on his lips. He’s never had to use it outside of introducing himself. It feels strange to say it directed at someone else.
“...Yes?” Not-him asks, looking… afraid, almost, like he’s been caught doing something wrong.
“Someone asked me to tell you something,” he says. He doesn’t elaborate. “She said... what happened wasn’t your fault.”
Not-him goes ramrod straight, eyes widening to a degree that’s almost frightening. Izuku watches in silent surprise as a pair of fan-like fins unfurl from the sides of not-him’s head and flatten themselves tightly like a scared animal. When not-him looks at him, his eyes are rimmed not with dusted freckles, but dark, glittering scales.
“What... What do you mean?” He asks, eyes darting to and fro.
“I mean what I said,” Izuku says calmly, watching the ghost woman out of the corner of his eye. “She says that you’re not to blame for... what your quirk did.”
Not-him looks like he might as well have been shot. He stumbles backwards, gasping like a fish out of water, while his fins ripple wildly. Something glitters at the edges of his eyes- not scales, Izuku realizes, but tears.
“Who- how did you- what-”
Izuku goes to respond, but he never gets the chance. As quickly as it happened before, the world flips on its axis and implodes with a burst of light, and when he blinks the spots out of his eyes, he’s exactly where he was before he left.
“Hey, kid? Kid, are you okay?” Nana is saying, waving a hand in front of his face while she leans over him. Her face is creased with concern. At his side, he feels a familiar, chilly presence, and cold fingers curl around his hand.
“You zoned out on us,” Nana answers, and Izuku frowns. That doesn’t seem right. He’d been- hadn’t he just-
Rei squeezes his hand, and his head stops spinning just a little bit. He pushes his confusion from his mind, carefully folding it up and storing it away to mull over later. He’s not over it, he knows, but now is not the time to wonder.
“Sorry,” he says. “Where were we?”
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YUTS Izuku feels very out-of-character here, but he isn’t mine, so what can I say? I did my best.
I fixed this up a little but otherwise i just pulled it out of my drafts
