The first thing he noticed was his hands.
Small. Too small. The fingers barely curled past his palm, and his palm was the size of nothing — a child's nothing, soft and unmarked and wrong in every way a hand could be wrong.
He turned them over.
No calluses. No scar across the left thumb from the knife accident in year seven of his previous... of his...
' Right. '
The ceiling above him was low. Pale. A water stain in the shape of something that wasn't anything. He lay on his back in a bed that smelled like fabric softener and was three sizes too small, and the memories arrived the way they always did when he woke from something heavy: in layers.
The real world first. The screens. The couch. The anime he had watched until 2 AM more nights than he could count.
Then the other one. The weight of a sword across his back at dawn. The training ground at Hage, frost on the grass, the smell of woodsmoke and sweat and the particular silence of a place that had seen too many people die.
He did not linger on either.
' Okay. So. '
He sat up.
The room was small and clean and thoroughly, unmistakably the room of a four-year-old. A mobile hung near the window, planets and stars turning half a degree in the draft from somewhere. Plastic crates stacked in the corner. A stuffed rabbit with one eye missing sat against the wall with the specific dignity of a toy that had seen things.
He looked at his hands again.
' Four years old. Christ. '
He said it in his head, because his mouth was too small to say anything the way he meant it. That was going to be a problem for years.
He swung his legs off the bed. His feet hit the floor and he stood, which took slightly longer than he expected because four-year-old legs worked on a different set of agreements than the ones he was accustomed to. He found the balance. It took three seconds.
The light outside the curtains was grey. Early morning, maybe six. The apartment was quiet in the way apartments were quiet when someone else was in them — the specific shape of another person's sleep pressing on the air.
He walked to the door and down the short hallway to the bathroom.
The mirror was at the wrong height. He stood on his toes.
Green hair. Thick, wild, pointing in several directions at once. Freckles scattered across his cheeks like someone had lost their grip on a pen. Green eyes, wide and bright and enormous in the way children's eyes were enormous before life got around to narrowing them.
He knew this face.
He had seen it on a screen, in a previous life, belonging to a boy who cried and worked himself apart and made something from nothing and saved everyone and asked for nothing. He had watched that boy cry more times than he had ever cried himself, and he had cried a fair amount, and he had mostly had good reasons.
He stood on his toes and looked at that face for a long time.
' Hm. '
Not horror. Not grief. The flat sound a person made when they opened the wrong door at the wrong time and had to recalibrate their route.
He catalogued the situation the way he had always catalogued situations: from the outside in. This was the body. These were the resources. This was the world.
He knew the world.
He had watched it play out on a screen in a Tokyo apartment with lukewarm tea and a bag of chips going stale. He knew the teachers and the villains and the arcs. He knew who won and who lost and who paid more than they should have for victories they should not have needed to earn. He knew which deaths were coming and in which order, and he knew which of them could be avoided and which ones were structural.
He knew what was coming eleven years from now.
The mirror fogged slightly with his breath.
The weight of the sword surfaced without invitation. Not a thought, not an image. A weight. Across his shoulders, between his shoulder blades, iron and leather and forty kilos of something he had carried through snow for six hours because Asta had said it would build something, and Asta had been right, and three months later he had split a demon's head open with it at the cost of two ribs and more blood than his body had good opinions about.
He flexed his right hand.
Small. Soft. Four years old.
' Fine. '
One word. The whole negotiation.
He turned and walked back to his room.
Somewhere in the apartment, a door opened. Footsteps, light and careful, the footsteps of a person trying not to wake someone. A sound from the kitchen, soft and indistinct, that was probably the kettle.
He lay back down on the bed that was too small.
The ceiling stared at him. He stared back.
He ran the math the way any reasonable person with his particular set of problems would run it.
Body: four years old. Physically useless for approximately another four years, degrading to merely limited for another three after that. Muscle memory present, capacity to execute it nonexistent until the architecture caught up. He was not going to overtrain a child's skeleton. He was patient in a way no four-year-old naturally was, and patience was free.
World: MHA, early period. Quirks existed. The Symbol of Peace existed, carrying a wound and a time limit behind a smile that could light stadiums. The villains existed, in the background, growing, building toward something large and structural and devastating.
Knowledge: complete. Already becoming a liability. Every decision he made was a stone in a pond. Ripples. He knew what the original pond looked like. He did not know what his pond would look like, and the difference between those two ponds was going to be the central problem of his life for the next several decades.
Time: approximately eleven years until UA's entrance exam, assuming the timeline held, which it would not hold for long after he arrived in it.
He let the math settle.
He was not behind. He had never been behind. He had thirty years of life in a world that ate the unprepared, and he had not been eaten. He had four-year-old hands and a child's body and zero physical advantages and a complete map of a future that had already started deviating the second he landed in it.
He had been in worse.
He ran through the list. The dojo: he would need that by thirteen, maybe twelve if he found the right place. The entrance exam format: memorized. Aizawa's philosophy: compatible with his own in ways that would be useful. The people he needed to leave alone, and the one or two he might be able to move into better positions before the real storm arrived.
' UA is eleven years away. '
He stared at the ceiling.
' That's enough. '
Not inspiration. Not a rallying cry to no one in particular. The practical assessment of a man who had crossed worse ground on less.
He closed his eyes.
The mobile turned by the window. The kettle sound stopped. The apartment settled into its early-morning silence, another person's warmth present somewhere beyond the wall, ordinary and continuous and, for reasons he did not examine closely, something he intended to protect.
He slept.
--
TO BE CONTINUED