Six months.
Midoriya had stopped counting the days somewhere around month two. That was also around the time he stopped waking up every morning and reaching for a power that wasn't there, stopped that instinctive, embarrassing grab at something that had gone quiet inside him. He'd hated it at first. Then, slowly, he hadn't. Now it was just the shape of his life, and the shape fit well enough.
Mutant Town had a way of doing that. It asked something of you every day, something small, something physical, something that had nothing to do with saving anyone, and in return, it gave you the closest thing to normal he'd felt since he was twelve years old.
He was seventeen today.
He stepped out of the building into the cool morning air and nearly walked into Irma.
"Happy birthday."
He blinked. "How did you know?"
She gave him a look that said really?
"Mr. M told me. He got it from your mom." A beat. "And before you say anythin, shh. You didn't hear it from me."
"I need to talk to him."
"He's literally right there."
Midoriya turned. Mr. M was leaning against the wall beside the front door with a cup of coffee and the expression of a man who had expected to be found.
"Morning, kid. Were you looking for me?"
"You called my mom."
"I did." He didn't sound remotely apologetic. "Walk with me."
They moved through the town as it came to life around them, vendors setting up, a couple of kids sprinting past chasing something that had apparently escaped from somewhere. Mr. M sipped his coffee. Midoriya kept pace beside him.
"You feel settled here," Mr. M said. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah. I do." He meant it. "I love this place."
"Good." A pause. "Are you ever planning to visit your parents?"
Midoriya was quiet for a moment. "I've talked to my mom."
"Talking on the phone and showing up are different things. You know that." He stopped walking and turned to look at him. "I'll open a way for you. Right into your neighborhood, if you want. All you'd need to do is ride."
"You can do that?"
"Son, what you're asking me is considerably easier than most things I do before breakfast." He tilted his head. "What's stopping you?"
Midoriya looked down the street. "I'm not sure the world remembers me. I'm not sure what I'm going back to."
Mr. M was quiet for a moment. Then: "Normal is relative, you know. It's how you perceive things. Everybody defines it differently." He started walking again. "Think about it like brewing coffee. There are a dozen ways to do it, pour-over, drip machine, press, but they all end at the same place. Grounds, water, time. The method changes. The result doesn't have to."
Midoriya frowned. "That analogy kind of falls apart in the middle."
"Most good ones do." Mr. M gestured down the road. "Portal's at the corner of this street. If you pass the old hardware building, you've gone too far."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that."
Midoriya found the motorcycle in the garage, right where he'd left it. He'd maintained it over the past six months, changed the oil, worked the engine over properly, and fixed a wiring issue that had been making the indicator lights flicker. It ran better now than when Laura had stolen it. Whether Logan would appreciate that or hold it against him was a question for another day.
He swung a leg over it, settled into the seat, and sat for a moment listening to the engine idle.
First time leaving Mutant Town, he thought. Great.
He didn't hear Irma coming until she grabbed his shoulder.
"What are you?
"I'm coming." She said it like it was obvious, already swinging onto the back.
"I'm coming back, Irma."
"I know. I just want to get out for a minute." She wrapped her arms loosely around him. "You were going to just sit there forever anyway. Go."
He went.
They came through the portal onto a quiet side street, the noise of the city arriving all at once after the strange soft silence of the crossing. Midoriya blinked in the daylight, true city daylight, with traffic sounds and distant sirens and the smell of someone's breakfast from an open window two floors up.
He looked around.
"Irma. Is this the street by UA?"
She leaned out to look at a sign. "I think so. Someone said the best hero school is around here."
"That's UA." He glanced toward the building visible above the rooftops. "I used to want to go there."
She was quiet.
"Anyways." He turned the bike. "My parents are this way."
The apartment was up three flights of stairs. He'd climbed them thousands of times. His legs remembered the count automatically. At the top, he stopped in front of the door and knocked, and for a few seconds, the hallway was just quiet.
Then he heard running.
The door opened.
Inko Midoriya took one look at her son and had him in her arms before he'd managed a word. He went stiff for a half second, the instinct of someone who'd been alone for six months, then let himself be held.
"Mom "
"Don't." Her voice was muffled against his shoulder. "Don't say anything yet."
He didn't.
After a moment, she pulled back, hands on his face, checking him over with the relentless thoroughness of someone who'd spent half a year with nothing to check.
Then she noticed Irma standing politely at the top of the stairs.
"O, " She straightened immediately, composure reassembling itself. "Who is waiting?" She turned to Midoriya. "Izuku. Where's Kitty?"
"I still need to talk to her. We're figuring things out."
"Figuring," She looked between them.
"Mom. This is Irma. She's a friend. We met in " He paused, glanced at Irma.
Irma smiled pleasantly at Inko. "It's nice to meet you. Izuku talks about you."
The word Mutant Town tried to leave his mouth and arrived as something completely unintelligible. Inko blinked. Irma blinked. He blinked. Inko looked at all three of them like she'd briefly lost the thread of reality.
"You know what, never mind where you met," Inko said after a moment. "Come inside. Both of you."
The visit was good. Quieter than Midoriya had expected, his mother had learned, somewhere in the past six months, to hold back the worst of her worry and ask questions instead. Hisashi was steadier about it, asking practical things: how was he eating, was he staying somewhere safe, did he have what he needed. They sat around the kitchen table the way families do, with tea going cold because everyone kept forgetting to drink it.
Irma helped with the dishes afterward without being asked, which immediately elevated her in Inko's estimation by about forty percent.
When they finally said goodbye, his mother held on a beat longer than the first hug. He let her.
"Come home soon," she said. Not a demand. Just the truth.
"I will," he said. And meant it this time.
They walked down the stairs. The blonde woman from the second floor was on her way up and gave them both a confused look as they passed Irma in particular, for reasons that were probably written all over her face.
Outside, Midoriya dropped the kickstand and looked up at the building for a moment.
"You okay?" Irma asked.
"Yeah." He thought about it. "Yeah, actually."
"Good. Xavier's next?"
He looked at her.
"You were going," she said. "Don't pretend you weren't."
He'd been thinking about it. He didn't know how to explain that yet, whether it was something he needed to do or something he was just ready to stop avoiding. Maybe both. He pulled on his jacket and swung back onto the bike.
"Hang on."
The Xavier Institute looked exactly as he remembered it. That was almost strange; six months felt like longer, and the place looked like it hadn't moved an inch. He pulled up to the gate and rang the bell, and they were let through.
He parked, stood the bike up, and just looked at it for a moment at the building, the grounds, the shape of the place that had been something like a home.
Then the front doors opened.
Kurt came out first, then Kitty, then Magik, and some of the New Mutants, and Laura, and Logan, who took one look at his motorcycle and then looked at Midoriya with an expression that had several things in it at once, none of them particularly readable.
Irma quietly raised her eyebrows at Midoriya.
You got this.
He walked to Kitty.
"Hey. Can we talk?"
"Sure." She searched his face. "What's going on?"
"Nothing urgent. I just " He gestured at the garden path. "Walk with me for a minute?"
The garden was quiet. It usually was. Midoriya had always liked that about it.
"You scared me," Kitty said. "Being gone that long."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"You can't just disappear, Izuku."
"I know." He meant it. "What was I supposed to do? Stay and what? I didn't have my powers, I didn't know what I was, everyone knew something I didn't."
"We were worried."
"I know you were." He stopped walking and turned toward her. "How are you? Honestly."
She exhaled. "I don't know. Everything's been complicated. Busy. We've all been stretched thin, " She shook her head. "It feels like we haven't had a real conversation in almost two years."
"Try two and a half."
She went quiet.
"We haven't exactly been on a date in over a year," he said. "Saving the world kept getting in the way. And then I was " He gestured vaguely at himself. "Dead. Which wasn't really my fault."
"I know." She almost laughed. "I know it wasn't."
He watched her. There was something else in her expression, something she was holding close to her chest. He recognized it because he'd been doing the same thing for months.
"Kitty." His voice was even. "You know why you're scared of me."
She went still.
"The Phoenix." His voice was steady. "I'm not going to pretend I didn't find out. I did." He looked at her. "But it hasn't shown up. And if it was ever there, whatever power was left burned out with everything else. I don't know what I am anymore. But I'm not that."
Kitty closed her eyes for a moment.
"Laura told you."
"Among other things." He waited. "I'm not angry. Not about that part."
She was quiet for a long time. The wind moved through the garden. Somewhere behind them, someone was laughing, probably the New Mutants giving Irma a harder time than she deserved.
"I'm sorry," Kitty said finally. "I should have just I should have told you. From the beginning."
"Yeah." He nodded slowly. "You should have."
Another silence.
"I think," she said carefully, "we need a break. I'm not saying forever. I'm just saying we've been trying to hold something together while everything else was falling apart, and maybe we need to figure out who we are on our own for a while first."
He'd known it was coming. Had felt the shape of it on the walk over. It still landed.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
"Happy birthday, Izuku." She stepped forward and pressed a brief kiss to his cheek. "I'll see you around."
She walked back toward the house.
He stood in the garden for a moment, hands in his pockets, and then followed.
Inside, Logan was in the kitchen working through a six-pack with the quiet efficiency of a man with a system. He popped a can, drank half of it in one motion, crushed the can against his forehead, and dropped it in the sink, then opened another without breaking pace.
He didn't look up when Midoriya came in. But he didn't leave either.
Laura was on a stool across the counter, eyes on her phone. She glanced up.
"How'd the breakup go?"
"We're not broken up. It's complicated."
"Sure."
"What?"
"Every time a girl says that, it means something." She shrugged. "Just saying."
Midoriya leaned against the counter and said nothing for a moment.
"She also mentioned," Laura continued, studying her nails, "that Kirk and Her have been getting pretty close since you've been gone."
Logan made a short noise that could have been a word.
"Don't take everything she says as gospel, kid," he said, setting down his second crushed can.
Laura looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had said what she said and would continue to let it sit there.
Midoriya took a breath and decided, consciously, to let it go. He knew Laura. She poked at things to see what moved. He wasn't going to let it move.
"Logan," he said. "I haven't scratched the bike."
That got a look.
"In fact," Midoriya continued, "I changed the oil. Worked on the engine. Fixed the indicator wiring; it was all messed up."
Logan stared at him.
"The tires are good, I checked them monthly, and I rode it regularly to keep the brake lines from going soft."
A very long pause.
"...Where'd you learn all that?"
"Mutant Town."
Logan set down his third can. Looked at Laura. Looked back at Midoriya.
"I told you," Laura said.
"I didn't want to look," Logan said flatly. He paused. "Mr. M still cheating at poker?"
"I don't know. I don't play poker."
"Smart." He picked up his fourth beer. "Good kid."
They didn't stay much longer. Charles had apparently heard Midoriya was on the grounds and was moving back from wherever he'd been. Midoriya caught sight of the Blackbird coming in low over the tree line from the kitchen window and made a quiet decision.
"Time to go," he said to Irma, who was in the hallway having what appeared to be a fairly heated exchange with her sisters, conducted mostly in silence, which was somehow worse.
She broke off mid-glare and fell into step beside him.
They passed through the front doors and down toward the bike. Behind them, he heard the familiar sound of Kurt appearing in a soft bamf and then Kitty's voice, quiet and close. He didn't look back. He just kept walking.
He swung onto the bike. Irma got on behind him.
He let himself glance in the mirror once.
Kurt had his arm around Kitty's shoulder. She was turned toward him, saying something. Neither of them were looking at the bike.
Midoriya's jaw set. He pressed the accelerator.
The front wheel came up off the ground.
"IZUKU "
"Sorry!" He brought it back down. "Got carried away."
"You almost LAUNCHED me "
"If that almost knocked you off," he said, already pulling onto the road, "you might want to hold on tighter."
"I swear to GOD "
He accelerated.
Her arms locked around him like a vice and she said several things that were entirely inappropriate given that she'd grown up in San Francisco and he was pretty sure she knew better. The wind took the rest of her complaints and scattered them behind them, and Midoriya found himself, somewhere around the second turn, genuinely laughing.
It wasn't the laugh of someone pretending to be fine.
It was just a laugh.
The road opened up ahead of them, and they rode.