The previous night, Izuku Midoriya had crawled out of his own grave and reunited with everyone. But something had shifted in him. He was shaken, afraid, and yet, beneath it all, quietly grateful to be still breathing. For the first time in what felt like forever, he was going to experience the world without his powers.
He had been walking the halls of the mansion when he overheard Logan and Beast talking about the Phoenix. They hadn't noticed him there. Shortly after, he ran into Laura. She could tell something was wrong, but she didn't press at first. She sat down with him, and then she told him everything. All of it. Every secret everyone had been keeping from him.
The anger came fast and hot. But learning that he might one day destroy the X-Men and every mutant in the world left him too numb to hold on to it. He didn't know how to process something that enormous. Laura didn't try to explain it away. She just told him the most honest thing she could: get out for a while. That's all. Just leave, clear your head, come back when you can breathe again.
She stole the keys to Logan's motorcycle.
Then she taught him how to ride it badly, but well enough, and sent him off into the night. Their goodbye was quiet and real. She shared a piece of her past with him, and he was grateful for it. Grateful that she'd trusted him enough to be honest, even when no one else had.
He didn't know where he was going. All he had was his phone, enough gas to get somewhere, and a vague memory of hearing about a place, a neighborhood, somewhere nearby, where mutants could just exist without hiding. He looked it up. It was the next city over. He went.
That was last night.
By morning, Logan had noticed his motorcycle was gone.
Midoriya arrived at the neighborhood just as the city was waking up. He walked the streets slowly, taking in the way people moved, the way some of them looked at him. He started asking around, mentioning what he'd heard about this place. Some doors closed in his face. Others stayed shut without even opening. A few people eyed him with open distrust.
Then he spotted a man in a wide-brimmed hat, sitting easy, like he had nowhere better to be and no particular hurry getting there.
Midoriya approached. The man glanced up from beneath the brim.
"Excuse me, is this really the place for mutants?"
The man studied him for a long moment. Then, almost lazily, he flicked the brim of his hat up so he could see Midoriya properly.
"Why, yes, it is, young man." His voice had a slow, unhurried drawl to it, the kind that suggested he already knew the end of the conversation. "And who might you be?"
"Nobody." Midoriya hesitated. "I'm nobody."
The man's mouth curved, just slightly. "That's not a very convincing lie."
"How do you know my name? Are you a telepath?"
"No, no." He waved a hand dismissively. "Can't read minds. Already tried, believe me." He tilted his head. "Call me Mr. M."
"...Mr. M?"
"That's right." He snapped his fingers.
The world shifted.
Not dramatically, no flash of light, no sound. Just a quiet rearrangement, like someone had shuffled the cards of the street they were standing on. The buildings were different. The noise of the city was gone. The alley, the corner, and the whole block were replaced.
Midoriya turned in a slow circle. "Where are we?"
"Relax. I just moved us a little way." Mr. M was already standing, brushing off his coat. "Shall we?"
"Wai, how? Is your mutation some kind of teleportation?"
"Nothing so crude as Kurt's trick." He gestured for Midoriya to follow. "I can move things. Rearrange things. People. Objects. The occasional neighborhood."
Midoriya blinked. "You know Nightcrawler?"
"I know of him. Come on, bring the bike."
Midoriya turned to Logan's motorcycle and instinctively reached for it the way he always had, trusting in the strength that was no longer there. But before his frustration could catch up with him, the bike began to rise. Slowly, steadily, it lifted off the ground like it weighed nothing at all.
He spun toward Mr. M.
"What did you just do?"
"Rearranged the molecules. Turned them over to something closer to helium, more or less." Mr. M shrugged. "Light as a feather, now. Just don't let go."
Midoriya grabbed the handlebars instinctively, and the bike settled gently in his grip, nearly weightless, almost comically easy to manage.
"Your abilities are like mine?" he asked quietly. "Reality manipulation?"
"In a broad sense." Mr. M glanced at him sidelong. "And before you say that's impossible, didn't you recently crawl out of your own grave?"
Midoriya had no answer for that.
They walked. As the bike drifted along beside him, Midoriya began to understand what Mr. M had built here. The neighborhood had been folded away from the rest of the city, tucked into a pocket of reality most people couldn't find, which was exactly the point. Most of the world still didn't trust mutants. This was somewhere they didn't have to worry about it.
It was its own small town. Gardens, tended carefully between repurposed buildings. A library. Workshops. Community spaces. People with visible mutations moving through their days without covering themselves up, without scanning exits. Mr. M used his power for small things; here, a missing ingredient was conjured for the kitchen, a broken fence post quietly straightened but lately, with the state of things beyond these hidden streets, he was doing a good deal more.
"You already knew I was coming," Midoriya said, watching a pair of teenagers chase each other between the garden rows, laughing.
"Before you'd even decided yourself." Mr. M kept walking. "Your room is in Apartment Building Four. There's a key waiting for you."
Midoriya looked at him for a moment. "Just like that?"
"Just like that."
The room was fully furnished. Neat, quiet, nothing extravagant. There was a charger already plugged into the wall he half expected his phone to be dead on contact, but it lit right up. On the desk, he found a laptop and a small collection of items he recognized from the mansion. A note explained they were copies, not originals. Blank, where they'd been filled.
He picked up the laptop and turned it over in his hands. This is what Mr. Stark gave me after New York.
He set it down. Opened it.
He wasn't sure what he was looking for. He just started reading.
He found Genosha first. Not only had Genosha hosted a public event the day after everything happened, but they'd been marking the anniversary every month since remembrance for the fifty thousand mutants lost in a single day. A memorial had been erected at the site. He stared at the photograph of it for a long time.
Then he found the footage.
Unfiltered, raw, pulled from a dozen different camera angles. Him fighting Ultron. Being stabbed. Electrocuted. Killed. He watched it the way you sometimes watch something you know you shouldn't be able to stop, needing to see it through.
He paused on a single frame. His arms in that footage weren't quite right. Neither was part of his chest, nor one side of his face; the flesh had shifted into something, and all that power had been released at once, and the camera recording it had simply fried.
The next footage came from a helicopter pilot struggling to hold his aircraft steady from the psychic backlash. Jean Grey was visible for a moment, airborne, flying away in obvious distress. The caption noted she'd been in a comatose state ever since.
Then the Avengers arrived. Iron Man. Captain America. He watched Iron Man crouch over the remains of Ultron's machine, which he would learn later was actually him placing a call while making it look like an analysis. Thor and the Hulk hauled the chassis away. Captain America walked toward the aftermath, toward him.
The frame caught Steve Rogers' face at just the right angle. One tear tracked down his cheek. The caption underneath quoted him directly: a soldier's eulogy for someone who'd fought until there was nothing left to give.
Midoriya closed the laptop.
He sat there with one hand pressed flat against his chest, feeling his heartbeat.
It's still there. Still going.
He exhaled, slow and shaky. "Why does it feel like it shouldn't be?"
A knock at the door.
He wiped his face, stood up, and answered it.
Mr. M stood in the hallway, unhurried as always.
"You alright, young man?"
"Fine. I was just catching up on things." Midoriya glanced away. "It's a lot to take in."
"I imagine." He didn't push further. "I'm not much for prying into other people's business. So I won't pretend to know exactly what you're carrying." A pause. "But I do know what it is to not like looking back at your own past."
Midoriya nodded, not quite trusting his voice.
"Starting tomorrow," Mr. M continued, "there'll be a short list waiting for you. Things you can help with, if you're up for it. If any of it doesn't suit, come find me. I'm usually in this building."
"What kind of things?"
"Well. You know Genoshan Sign Language, I'm told. Several of the younger kids here are still working on it." He almost smiled. "Young enough that they've got time to get good at it."
Midoriya looked up. "There are children here?"
"That's why we're so careful about keeping this place hidden." The older man's voice softened, just briefly. "Their time and what they do with it matter more than most people understand."
He left it there. Didn't explain. Just turned and walked back down the hall, leaving Midoriya in the doorway with the quiet weight of it sitting in his chest.
Midoriya stood there for a moment, then went back inside. Opened the laptop again. Pressed play.
The segment continued. Iron Man, combing through Ultron's source code. Security footage of the machine blasting its way through a facility, uploading itself to a line of inactive robots before they all took off together. Then Hank Pym, in an interview, explained that he had tried for years to find a shutdown method that the project was long abandoned, that he'd believed it dormant, and that he was deeply, genuinely sorry for what Genosha had endured.
He created a killer robot, and he's not in a jail cell for it.
The interviewer asked that same question, almost word for word. Pym explained: the project had been decommissioned, the AI had somehow achieved sentience on its own, and reactivated itself. He couldn't say exactly how.
Midoriya stared at the screen.
He knew, on some level, that Pym was choosing his words carefully. That there was more to the story than what was being offered to a camera. And that somewhere in the gap between what Pym was saying and what was true, fifty thousand people were dead.
He closed the laptop again.
This time, he stood up, grabbed his jacket, and went outside to walk.