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The me from the darkest depths

Summary:

After a small mishap during a fight with a villain, Izuku wakes up in a foreign forest, all alone.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter 1: Fall of the mighty

Chapter Text

Light shined through the green canopy in fluttering flashes. On the forest bed, Izuku laid unconscious among the shrubbery and various types of creeping plants. The soil was soft and moist yet unforgiving as it slowly chipped at the boy’s body heat, bit by bit. His breaths came out in puffs of white fog above his chapped lips. 

 

Bearing the cold no longer, Izuku jerked awake with a gasp and rose to frantically look around himself. Stiff joints popped loudly with each movement, sore muscles protested in agony and his head throbbed from the fight he remembered partaking before finding himself in an unfamiliar forest. 

 

Though not quite sure of what had happened, Izuku had a few ideas. 

 

The villain he’d been fighting against was said to have a mysterious, unregistered quirk that apparently made things vanish. He had been careful to stay out of his grasp but at the last minute found himself faltering for a split second due to the injuries caused by that man’s team mates. Five against one couldn’t be counted as fair but Izuku wasn’t one to back down in the face of hostages- and he’d been doing well holding his own while he waited for back up. He’d defeated three of them and guessed he’d win if he kept his energy up but then his knee creaked painfully and gave the villain a chance to grab him and activate his powers. 

 

Previous victims had never been found so it was believed that they’d died but seeing how Izuku was still alive and kicking, that couldn’t have been the case. Perhaps it was only a teleporting quirk, Izuku reckoned. He needed to find out where he was and go back.

 

‘I hope everything turned out ok with the villains.’ Izuku thought. ‘I saw Ida and Todoroki coming but I can’t help being worried for the hostages. I hope they’re all safe.’

 

With that wish in mind, Izuku rubbed his aching knee and got up, trying not to put too much strain on it. He faltered slightly and leaned on a nearby moss covered tree before he activated his float and drifted up in the chilly air until he rose above the treetops.  

 

Nothing but trees in all directions, with the occasional set of faded mountains far enough to be but mere miniatures decorating the blue horizon. 

 

Izuku panicked. He was completely alone, who knew where, with nothing but the gear he was wearing. Not even his cellphone had suffered the same, cruel fate. 

 

The sun was yet to be in its peak so the boy guessed it was still early, maybe 9 or 10 in the morning. He didn’t know how long he’d been in the forest already but if he used his powers to move quickly, he might find a town or city by the end of the day so he picked a direction and promptly set into motion, soaring through the sky. 

 

Hours passed and evening came but Izuku found nothing. He’d passed by mountains, valleys, rivers, plateaus- only to find himself in another forest with no sign of people anywhere. No indication of where he could be either, nothing he recognized. If it weren’t for the overwhelming exhaustion setting deep in his bones, Izuku would have lost himself to overwhelming nervousness and fear. 

 

Upon seeing the sun recede behind the horizon, the student gathered the last of his energy and attempted to build a small shelter beside a narrow stream with what little knowledge he had about survival in the wilderness. He collected sticks and logs for the structure as well as soft plants to use as a mattress. 

 

With the leftover materials, he made a campfire- not because he was cold, since judging by the moist, warm atmosphere he was most likely in a tropical rainforest. 

 

Rather, Izuku had made a campfire because he was afraid. Of being alone in the darkness of an unfamiliar environment. Of the untamed creatures surely living in it. 

 

He was strong and lately he’d been gaining confidence in his abilities as well, with all the training he’d been doing. Nonetheless, as strong as he’d gotten, he was still vulnerable during his sleep. Vulnerable, tired and way too sore. His stomach protested, he hadn’t eaten all day. He had figured he’d have time for that once he was back. Unfortunately, things hadn’t really gone the way Izuku had hoped for and now he regretted his decision to ignore his body’s natural needs for so long. 

 

Night fell and despite the tension gripping the student’s heart and mind, his body was worn out. He fell asleep. 

 

The next morning, Izuku spent some time gathering things that seemed edible. During his search, he found mostly fruit but they were rather strange. He’d never seen anything like them before. 

 

Adorned with bright colours and swirling patterns, the fruit had a semi-hard outer shell that could be cracked open to reveal a squishy inside. Izuku wasn’t sure if it was truly safe to eat the fruit but upon tasting it, he disregarded his doubts. The boy wasn’t well versed in botanics but fruit that tasted so sweet and delicious couldn’t be poisonous, right? Besides, he had to eat something. It was either the weird fruit or nothing.

 

After filling his stomach with fruit and water, Izuku was off. 

 

However, his efforts to get back home proved over and over again to be useless. He was fast and covered great terrain each hour, but it wasn’t enough somehow. There was no human soul to be seen at any point of his journey, the most he’d found was bizarre creatures he wasn’t sure were a catalogued and studied species. He opted to stay away from them.

 

Days passed and the boy fell into a monotonous routine that consisted of eating fruit, mushrooms, roots and sometimes nuts while searching for a way back, and then building a small shelter for the night. A shower every now and then, though it did little to rid him of the intense body odor he’d developed. His anxiety only grew with each passing moment. 

 

Izuku hardly slept anymore, the deteriorating condition of his body had become unbearable and it kept him awake against his will. There wasn’t much he could find to eat and he couldn’t find it in himself to chase, hunt and kill any animal with his own two hands, no matter how much he needed the nourishment nor how unusual they looked. He’d eaten fish twice, out of sheer desperation and strong pains stabbing his stomach, but that had been it. 

 

As a direct result, he’d lost a significant amount of muscle and constantly felt sluggish, tender and weak. He couldn’t travel as much anymore and often had dizzy spells that incapacitated him. Meanwhile, his wounds seemed to take forever to heal and resting was impossible. The stress from overworking himself when he was low on fuel made his body enter and stay in a flight-or-fight mode, which meant he was constantly on alert and couldn’t get a wink of sleep despite feeling his body chipping away piece by piece. He’d toss and turn but his mind refused to turn off. It only wore him down harder.

 

At the rate he was going, Izuku was afraid he’d actually die before ever getting anywhere.

 

It was with dread, misery and fearful loneliness that on the fifteenth night in the wilderness, he left his makeshift bed to gaze up at the moonless night sky in hopes of escaping his inner monologues. Painted on the veil of darkness, he saw among many a very bright star, too big to be normal. Izuku wondered briefly if he was hallucinating due to sleep deprivation, but as morning approached, the star didn’t disappear. It only got bigger and with it came the most breathtaking sunrise. 

 

That was when Izuku realized: there were two suns. One that had set, and another that had just rose. 

 

‘No, that’s not possible! How could…but- there’s no other explanation… Is there?’

 

Izuku’s mind raced with thoughts, disbelief, shock and faint terror. He’d been using the sun to guide him through his quest. If there were two with different trajectories on the sky, that means that this entire time Izuku had been running in circles , getting nowhere. For days on end, no less. 

 

And now he was too spent to go anywhere, to even use his powers. 

 

Izuku felt his skin crawl, liquid fire coursing inside his veis, as he sat under the gleaming rays of the sun. The itch on his neck was especially terrible so he dug his nails into the flesh for some relief. It didn’t come.

 

His body ached all over, joints too corroded and inflamed to move properly, muscles too sore. 

 

Around him, birds chirped and sang with all the joy they could muster. Plush vegetation dotted with colorful flowers danced in the gentle breeze and spread its refreshing fragrance. The jungle he’d settled in for the night was truly beautiful. 

 

Unfortunately, it did nothing to calm Izuku’s nerves when he came to the painful conclusion that he’d likely die there, wherever the place might be. Was he still on Earth, even? 

 

The hero student tried to stand but blood rushed to his head making it feel as if his skull would be split in two. His vision blurred and his legs buckled under him.

 

As he fell, Izuku heard rustling coming from a nearby shrub. He tensed in anticipation and scrambled the best he could to his shelter. It would hardly protect him, hide him at best. However, at the minute he really couldn’t bring himself to fight. He couldn’t even bear his own weight. If he entered a confrontation with a wild animal, he’d surely lose so he had to stay out of the animal’s sight. 

 

The sound of soft flapping echoed through the calm of the trees, coming closer to his position beneath the wooden structure he’d built near thick roots protruding from the soil. There was some space under them, enough for him to squeeze into, in case his shelter proved to be useless. 

 

Sweat dripped down Izuku’s temples as he fought against the growing panic. He looked intently at the vegetation in front of the entrance to his shelter, eyes wide open, unsure what to expect. 

 

Suddenly, a small head peeked from outside and the green haired boy went white and stiff in fear, too scared to even scream. He felt faint. 

 

The creature took a step forward and before Izuku could do anything, it tackled him and rubbed his snout against his cheeks. It was around the size of a basketball, covered in black scales and had a line of three small, round horns running along the sides of his skull. There were wings and a tail on his back, as well as claws in both its hands and feet. They were blunt at that moment but they’d surely grow sharper with age, as the creature matured. 

 

The oddest smell filled Izuku’s nose as he let the animal nuzzle, chirp and purr on top of him. It wasn’t a bad odor, it was simply intense and unfamiliar- he couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. In fact, he couldn’t pinpoint what animal it was either. It certainly resembled a lizard but lizards didn’t have wings. 

 

'Wait… Did I just come across a baby dinosaur?!’ Izuku thought, incredulous. ‘No, that can’t be it. They don’t exist! ...Right?’

 

The boy took a deep breath to calm himself and felt his body go completely limp in an instant. A strange haziness clouded his mind and left him staring at the ceiling with his jaw slack, unable to comprehend what was going on. He rolled his head to the side but couldn’t muster the strength to move any more. 

 

He absentmindedly felt the small tongue of the cub lapping at his neck, licking and nibbling the exact same spot he’d felt an itch on for the past couple of days. It sent tingles down his spine and provided Izuku with much needed relief from the persistent discomfort. 

 

In the back of his head, Izuku knew he was in danger. Cubs themselves were oftentimes inoffensive. However, they are always followed and protected by their mothers and those were ferocious. Aggressive and territorial, they’d do anything to secure the safety of their offspring. If he didn’t get away soon enough, he’d be killed. He knew that, yet he just couldn’t bring himself to move. He was so relaxed and warm and cozy that the mere thought of running away seemed ridiculous and unreasonable. 

 

Fuzzy in the best of ways, almost like he was high- though without the drugs. 

 

After so many sleepless nights, Izuku finally felt like he could rest again. All the combined weight of his previous injuries, anxiety, exhaustion, sleep deprivation and malnourishment came crashing down on top of him and, unaware, he drifted off into unconsciousness for the first time in those last twenty four hours. 

 

When he woke up, the cub greeted him with a cute, high-pitched cry. It was still nestled on his chest, like it hadn’t bothered to move. Izuku really didn’t know how he was still alive, but he didn’t want to waste his good luck and wait for the mother to come finish him off. She was probably searching for him with all her might at that moment. 

 

He still couldn’t figure out what kind of animal it was, but it wasn’t the time or place to waste effort trying to figure out something that should be left to actual scientists. 

 

On the other hand, the way he’d suddenly lost control over his body was quite alarming. The more Izuku ruminated over it, the more his memories seemed to fuzz out of his grasp, not allowing him to come up with any explanation. Had he eaten something rotten or poisonous and felt its delayed effect at roughly the same time the creature appeared? He remembered having smelled something strange, had that been the cause instead? Was it because his body was indeed dying? Did the cub have some sort form of venom that’d rubbed on him? He honestly didn’t know, nothing made much sense. 

 

The boy carefully wrapped his arms around the creature, held it close to him and rose to a seated position before putting the cub down on the moss flooring. For a brief moment, his regained mobility took him by surprise- he’d expected to be still a bit altered and maybe he was. He had no idea what had happened to him but he felt livelier and more energized than he had ever since coming to the foreign environment. For that reason alone, Izuku didn’t label the experience as a completely bad thing. A very tiny, twisted part of him even found the sudden high comforting , as if it were meant to shield him from the harsh reality and ease his worries. He’d been overridden by fretful uneasiness since long ago, after all. It’d been a nice change.

 

Izuku petted the cub and left the shelter. He needed food and water. Badly.

 

Evening was approaching but there was still time to gather edibles, if he opted to stay another night at his current shelter- which he would, he needed to recover and make a plan. 

 

After realizing he’d been running aimlessly,  Izuku intended to be a lot more careful with his trips as well as his energy output. Additionally, he wanted to confirm his hypothesis about the existence of two suns and then, if it had any truth to it, track their movements. He’d have to memorize the landscape too, so he wouldn’t roam lost again. He doubted he’d have enough fire in him to get back up if he failed to return to human society this time. 

 

That being said, there was another thing preoccupying Izuku. During his foraging, the cub never left the young hero’s side, much to his growing concern. All of his attempts to get away from it had been unsuccessful, it just kept following him for some unknown reason. Izuku theorized it could smell him when he took note of the quick sniffs coming from its rounded snout. 

 

If he used his quirk he’d be able to lose the creature from his tail but he was too weak to do that so soon and he really didn’t want to spend the last bit of his vitality just yet. He didn’t want to die. He was lucky he could walk at all, after what he’d put his body through.  

 

Plus, the cub was way too cute. The way it purred, meowled, huffed and squeaked went straight to his heart and melted him from the inside out. When it wasn’t up in the air, flapping its wings, it waddled and stumbled all the way to Izuku and nuzzled his leg. Sometimes it settled on his shoulders and wrapped his arms around his head or curled around his neck like a scarf. 

 

How was a man to resist?

 

Izuku guessed he’d use Float a short bit to get away in case the mother appeared unexpectedly, that wouldn’t be too damaging. 

 

Under the reddening sky saturated with warm-colored clouds of all shades and shapes, Izuku munched on berries, praying they were harmless. When he stood to get back to his shelter, he was startled by a fierce roar in the distance. It was somewhat muffled by the greenery but Izuku could tell the source was not too far away. Perhaps it was the mother, who’d finally decided to show up to take his cub home. 

 

'Yeah, I better not stay here for that.’ The boy mused as he increased his pace no matter the draining fatigue in his system. 

 

Meanwhile, the cub had stopped in its tracks and remained still, eyes focused on something among the trees. It whined but made no attempts to follow Izuku anymore, to his relief. 

 

Having returned without any incident, that night Izuku decided to sleep in the empty space under the roots of a colossal tree instead of his wooden shelter. He had to squeeze himself in but the interior was relatively spacious. Enough for Izuku. 

 

The thick ramifications served as bars that kept outside threats away and the spot was hidden away from sight to begin with, as all sides except one were covered with moss, vines and creeping plants. It made Izuku feel safe, even without his usual campfire. He’d been gripped by more uneasiness than usual after leaving the cub behind. Not that he was worried for it, Izuku was worried for himself (and the cub too, though it had its mother). Whenever his gaze ran over the shadows in the forest, it seemed like danger was looming close. Hopefully, any predators around wouldn’t find him inside his spot and if they did, they’d be too dumb, big or clumsy to get in to hurt him. 

 

As he was settling in his new bed, Izuku saw a familiar black spiky head peering into his safe spot from the only entrance there was, albeit a tight one. He immediately felt panic bloom and rushed to push the cub away. The mother was near, he’d be- 

 

A clawed hand gripped his wrist the moment he stuck it out from between the roots. Izuku struggled with everything he had to pull it back in, shocked and afraid, barely containing screams and tears. Nonetheless, he was still too weak to resist or escape the firm grasp so almost effortlessly he was dragged out of his temporary shelter, thrashing. 

 

He heard a low growl from above him as he was firmly pressed against the earth face down and his body stiffened in sheer terror. The tears finally flowed down his cheeks at the thought of his imminent death. 

 

Then, came the most mouth-watering scent he’d ever had the pleasure of smelling, wafting through the air and wrapping around him like a warm blanket. It was intense- sweet and thick, like caramel, and a bit toasted at the edges. Once again, Izuku’s mind fogged up and his body relaxed against his will. The distress bled out of his system as if it had never been there and Izuku just couldn’t remember why he’d been so afraid in the first place. The stranger didn’t feel dangerous, they felt like strength, comfort and security. Like they’d protect Izuku from anything and everything, take care of him, keep him happy and content and full

 

As he was rolled around onto his back, Izuku saw the stranger was a human male, though his vision was too blurred to note any detail to his face. 

 

‘A person!’ He somehow managed to realize amidst the mental fog. At last, he’d found someone. Finally. 

 

After that, he was picked up bridal style and made to have his head rest on the man’s broad shoulder, nose pressed against his neck. The boy’s mind immediately became incoherent again and he fell limp in the arms carrying him. It was fine, he reasoned unconsciously. He could let go now- he was safe. 

 

 


 

 

The scenery morphed, blurred and shifted across Izuku’s eyes. The vibrant green from the flora was seen nowhere anymore, having been replaced by the walls of a cavern lit by a couple of torches. In his half aware state, Izuku felt the press of soft fur on his back. He’d been placed in the center of a nest covered in animal pelts, woven blankets and pillows stuffed with hay, though they weren’t rough or prickly at all. Quite the contrary, they were very smooth and comfortable thanks to the surrounding textile case, to the point they made Izuku instinctively snuggle them. 

 

Caramel lingered on his tongue and nose. It was everywhere he turned to, filled his lungs and got to his head. He was still stuck in his high, overwhelmed by the urge to tilt his head back and stretch his neck, which he gladly obliged, fuzzy and warm. The two strange bumps that had silently formed over the past week in the junction of his collarbone with his neck were puffy and slightly moist with a substance unknown to Izuku. 

 

A hand came up to gently palm over his throat; its thumb massaged, kneaded and dug into one of the bumps. It alternated between firm, slippery drags and feather-light circular motions. Sometimes it traced his jaw while cradling his nape and pressed on a spot under it, where a steady pulsing of blood could be felt. Izuku sighed in bliss, the touches were delightful. 

 

In any other situation, the boy would be worried at having a stranger’s hold in his throat. In that moment, however, the man’s hand was so gentle and kind and comforting, he couldn’t bring himself to care, granted he didn’t really have a choice in the matter.  

 

Minutes passed and despite being incapable of comprehending the situation he was in, Izuku noted an insistent tugging at his hero gear, carefully being slipped off of him. His bare body shivered, both because of the chilly air as well as the man’s attentive gaze. He didn’t remember when, but at some point his hands had moved toward the forearm hovering above Izuku’s chest to wrap calloused fingers around the hard muscle. He made no attempt to pry it off, he’d just wanted something to hold on to. 

 

The stranger shifted to retrieve something from the floor beside the nest. The warm hand hadn’t left Izuku’s neck though so the boy didn’t grow restless, uncomfortable nor impatient, he just kept sinking into the furs. Within a heartbeat, a cold salve was rubbed into the skin of his knees and thighs. Upon feeling slight pressure on the bruises scattered throughout his body,  Izuku hissed and squirmed and let out small whimpers. It hurt, he didn’t like it.  

 

His dissatisfaction fell on deaf ears, however. The other continued his actions, thankfully in a more tender manner, and kept him in place by the neck the entire time. Once he finished, he released his hold, covered Izuku in blankets and tucked him in, moving to lay on top without resting all of his weight on the smaller frame, lest he was crushed- just the right amount to make him feel secure enough to settle down for the night. 

 

There were arms on each side of Izuku, they caged him but in a good way. It felt like he was being protected from the outside by a solid wall of muscles. Sun-kissed hands ran through his green locks, stroked his scalp and fondly squished his cheeks. They showered him with attention and Izuku couldn’t help but eat it all up and love it. 

 

Alongside the warmth of the person on him, he felt vibrations rippling through the cavern. They emerged from the man’s chest and echoed until they sank deep into Izuku’s bones. He didn’t know what the sound was, but it seemed like something akin to a purr. Regardless, it made his cheeks flush a pretty pink and his eyes flutter shut. He was lulled to sleep in no time.