## The Weight of a Grain
**Chapter 1: A Grain in the Cosmic Hourglass**
There was nothing.
Not black, not white. Not empty, not full. It was a state of profound negation, a place where concepts like 'place' and 'state' had themselves ceased to be relevant. He wasn't. And yet, some core, some impossible shard of awareness, persisted in its non-being.
A thought, formless and slow as continental drift, moved through the nothingness.
*…I was…*
It was less a word and more a feeling, a ghost of a memory of identity. It had a weight to it, this ghost. It was the only weight in all of this weightless non-existence, and it tugged at the awareness, a focal point in the infinite.
*…there was… an end. Wasn't there?*
Fragments, sharp and terrible, flickered in the void. Sensation. The screech of tortured metal. The shocking, cold shatter of glass. The feeling of flight that was all wrong, too fast, too uncontrolled. A final, breathtaking impact. And then… release. A letting go. A silence that had been… peaceful. This was not that silence. This was not peace. This was the absence required to define peace.
This was the *after* of the after.
The awareness, the 'I', recoiled from the fragments. They were too much. They were anchors in this sea of nothing, and they were pulling him down into a shape he could no longer bear to hold. Better to be nothing. Better to be the void.
But the memory of the end had weight. And weight, however terrible, was a thing. In a universe of no-things, a single thing becomes a god, a singularity, a Big Bang.
The awareness began to remember other weights.
The warm, solid weight of a hand in his. The light, joyful weight of laughter in his chest. The heavy, comfortable weight of a quilt on a cold morning. The crushing, beautiful weight of a secret kept for a friend. Each memory was a grain of sand, distinct and textured. Each one added to the impossible, accumulating mass of his consciousness.
He was remembering *matter*. He was remembering *self*.
*I… had a name.*
It was there, on the tip of a tongue that didn't exist. A sound. A vibration he used to answer to. It was tied to all those weights, to the hands and the laughter and the quilts. It was him. He grasped for it, this most fundamental of anchors, and the nothingness around him seemed to shudder.
The void resisted. It was a place of un-making, and it did not appreciate being made into a thing again. It pressed in on him, a suffocating non-pressure, seeking to erode the gathered sands of his memory, to scatter them back into the infinite.
But a strange thing happened. The more the void pressed, the more the grains of memory pressed back. They weren't just passive; they had a cohesion to them. They were his, and they would not be taken. They began to swirl around the core of his awareness, a slow, gentle vortex of lived experience.
He saw his mother's face, not as a picture, but as a collection of impressions: the laugh lines around her eyes, the way she'd push her glasses up her nose with her knuckle, the particular scent of her perfume—vanilla and something floral. A grain of sand.
He felt the rough bark of the oak tree in his childhood backyard, the dizzying height of the lowest branch when he was six, the triumphant thrill of finally scrambling onto it. A grain of sand.
He heard the specific cadence of his best friend's voice, arguing passionately about some forgotten movie plot, the sound of rain pattering against the window of a moving car. Grain upon grain upon grain.
He was remembering not just things, but the *texture* of things. The feel of sun-warmed concrete on bare feet. The taste of a strawberry, sweet and faintly tart. The sound of a page turning in a library's hush. The gritty, real sensation of sand between his fingers…
*Sand.*
The word echoed in his non-mind, and the vortex of memory shifted. The grains, metaphorical until now, *shivered*. They took on a new quality, a new truth. They weren't just *like* sand. In this place between places, in this struggle of memory against oblivion, they *became* sand.
The warmth of his mother's smile was a grain of sun-bleached white sand. The cool of the rain was a grain of smooth, dark grey basalt. The rough bark of the tree was a grain of rough, fragmented brown sandstone. His entire life, every sensation, every emotion, every forgotten moment and cherished memory, was translating itself into a unique, infinitesimal grain of sand.
He was a storm of himself. A universe of sand contained within a single, desperate point of awareness.
The void fought harder. It was no longer just pressure; it was a wind, a sirocco from nowhere, seeking to scour him away, to disperse him into a meaningless, dusty haze. He felt himself thinning at the edges, his earliest, faintest memories—the color of a nursery wall, the feeling of soft stuffed fur—lifting away and vanishing into the nothing.
*No.*
The thought was not a plea. It was a command. It was the first true act of will in this place that had no use for it. He would not be unmade. He had been something. He had been someone. He would not let that be taken from him.
He pulled. He pulled every grain, every memory, every shred of his being inward, consolidating, compressing. The sandstorm tightened, spinning faster, becoming denser. He wasn't just remembering his body; he was building a new one, a vessel out of memory and will and the fundamental stuff of dreams. Grain by grain, he assembled the ghost of a form. Not a physical body—that was impossible here—but a shape that could hold an 'I'. A statue of sand in the void.
It was agonizing. Each grain had to be placed with intention, each memory acknowledged and secured. He felt every loss, every joy, every mundane moment of a life now over, all at once. It was a pain more exquisite than any physical crash, this full comprehension of a self.
But he held on. He was a fortress of sand against the void.
And then, a new sensation. Not a memory. Something… else. A pull from a direction that hadn't existed a moment before. It was faint, a distant, gravitational tug entirely different from the eroding wind of the void. This was not trying to scatter him. It was trying to *draw* him.
It felt like… calling. A low, resonant hum that vibrated through his sandy core. It was a sound of potential, of reality, of things being rather than not-being. It was everything the void was not.
The void sensed it too, and redoubled its efforts. The wind became a scream, tearing at his form, pulling great swathes of sandy memory away. He was crumbling. He couldn't hold this shape. The calling was too far away.
*No. Not again. I will not end like this.*
He focused everything he had, every ounce of his will, on that distant call. He let it become his new anchor. He wasn't a thing in the void anymore; he was a thing reaching for another thing. He poured himself into the reaching.
His form dissolved. But this time, it was not a scattering. It was a stream. A river of sand, a ribbon of countless memories, all his loves and hates and hopes and regrets, shooting through the nothingness, following the siren call of that other place. He was a comet of consciousness, his tail the memories he was barely clinging to, his headlong flight powered by pure, desperate need.
The void fell away. Or he fell through it. The concepts blurred.
There was a pressure again, but this was different. Immense. Concrete. It was the pressure of *something*. Of a lot of somethings. He was being squeezed, compacted, forced into a shape not of his own choosing. The river of sand was being funneled, constrained, packed into a terrifyingly small, dense point.
He felt… boundaries. Limits. A shocking, brutal sense of *finitude*.
And with it, sensation returned. Blinding, overwhelming, physical sensation.
***Thump-thump.***
A deep, resonant rhythm. A vibration that shook his very grains. It was internal, a drumbeat that defined the new, cramped space he occupied.
***Thump-thump.***
It was steady. Relentless. Soothing in its absolute reliability.
***Thump-thump.***
A heartbeat. Not his memory of one. A real, current, living one. And he was… inside it? Around it? He was surrounded by it, by the warm, wet, rhythmic darkness. He was immersed in a symphony of muffled sound: the low rush of fluids, a deep, echoing voice from somewhere far above, a steady, rhythmic *whoosh-thump* that was the universe itself.
The terror of the void was gone. In its place was a new, primal confusion. This was not un-making. This was… a new making. A before.
He had done it. He had reached the call. But what was it? Where was he?
The sand of his being, his memories, settled in this new, warm, confined space. They were dormant, a vast desert packed into a tiny seed. He was still himself, a consciousness built from the sands of a past life, but he was also… more. And less. He was contained.
Time passed. It was impossible to measure. There was only the rhythm. The *thump-thump*, the muffled sounds, the gentle, swaying movements that would occasionally lull him into something like sleep. His awareness, so vast and storm-like in the void, was now small, focused, and utterly dependent.
He learned the sounds. The deep, rumbling voice that vibrated through everything was a constant, a bedrock. It was often followed by a lighter, melodic laugh that made the warm waters around him shimmer with a happy frequency. He learned the movements. The slow, walking sway. The gentle, rocking sit. The occasional, startling jolt that would make him flinch in his small space.
He was safe. He was protected. He was… waiting.
The pressure around him began to change. It grew, becoming constant, squeezing him from all sides. The once-comfortable space was now tight, confining. The deep voice became more urgent, the melodic one more strained. There was a new tension in the universe.
The call was back. But this time, it wasn't a distant pull from another reality. It was a demand from the one he was in. It was time.
He felt himself moving, pushed by pressures far greater than himself, down a narrow, constricting passage. It was overwhelming, terrifying. The pressure was immense, crushing the very breath from a body he didn't know he had. Sound was a roaring, rushing blur. Sensation was a painful, all-encompassing squeeze.
He fought it instinctively, this violent expulsion from the only home he'd known in this new existence. He pushed back with a will that had once held a universe of sand at bay. But it was useless. This was a biological imperative, a natural force, and he was utterly subject to it.
The world convulsed around him, and he was propelled forward into a shocking, sudden release.
The pressure vanished.
The warmth vanished.
The muffled, watery sounds were ripped away.
He was in a new, vast, terrifying space. And it was *cold*. A brutal, shocking cold that seared senses he hadn't known were there. Air hit skin he didn't know he possessed. It was agony. It was amazement.
Light. That was the first thing. A blinding, painful, incredible whiteness that stabbed into his eyes, and he instinctively squeezed them shut against the assault. But the impression was seared into him. *Light.*
Sound. A chaotic, roaring cacophony that resolved into sharp, distinct noises. A sharp slap. A gasp. A mechanical beeping. A cry—loud, piercing, and raw. It was a moment before he realized the cry was coming from him. His new lungs, filled for the first time with air, were burning, and they expressed their shock and protest in the most fundamental way possible.
Smell. A sterile, antiseptic sharpness, mixed with the metallic tang of blood and something organic, something profoundly human.
Touch. Everything was touch. The cold air. The rough, textured cloth he was suddenly wrapped in. The firm, supporting hands that held him. The residual wetness on his skin. It was a bombardment of information, each sensation a grain of sand itself, but these were new, foreign grains, not his own. They were the first grains of a new world.
He was gasping, crying, struggling to process the sensory avalanche. It was too much. After the silence of the void and the muffled safety of the womb, this was a riotous, violent explosion of reality.
A voice cut through the chaos. It was the melodic voice he knew, but now it was clear, unmuffled, trembling with an emotion so powerful it felt like a physical force.
"Oh… oh, look at him. He's here. He's really here."
Then the deep, rumbling voice, closer than it had ever been, thick with an awe that made the very air seem to vibrate. "He's perfect. Just… perfect. Hello, little one."
Something large and incredibly gentle brushed against his cheek—a finger, calloused but tender. The touch was grounding. It was a point of contact in the maelstrom. His crying hitched, slowed to a hitching sob.
He was exhausted. The journey, the transition, the sheer effort of *being* in all this sensory input, was too much for his new, infant brain. The storm of new sensations began to recede, fading into a warm, heavy lassitude. The need for sleep was a tidal wave, pulling him under.
But before he surrendered, he forced his eyes open. He had to see. However briefly, he had to know.
The light was still blinding, but his eyes adjusted, squinting against the glare. Blurry shapes resolved slowly into faces hovering above him. One was pale, framed by long, dark green hair that cascaded down, her eyes—a matching, beautiful green—shimmering with tears and a love so immense it felt like the sun. The other was broader, with a strong jaw and kind, tired eyes behind glasses, his short brown hair messy, his smile trembling with emotion.
They were his parents. This world's parents.
He looked past them, at the world he had been born into. A white ceiling. Bright lights. A window showing a sky of a breathtaking, impossible blue.
And then he saw it. Something that should not have been there. Something that defied the last clinging logic of his past life.
As he took a shuddering, sleepy breath, a tiny, shimmering wisp of sand—golden and ethereal—exhaled from his lips. It wasn't a lot. Just a few, dreamlike grains. They hung in the air for a second, catching the light, swirling in a miniature vortex above his face before dissolving into nothingness.
The green-haired woman laughed, a sound of pure wonder. "Oh! Did you see that? A little sparkle… like magic."
The man chuckled, his voice warm. "Probably just the light, honey. Or a trick of the dust."
But it wasn't. He knew it wasn't. He had felt it. A tiny, effortless exhalation of something that was fundamentally *him*. A grain of sand from a different shore.
The last of his energy spent, his eyes fluttered closed. The faces, the light, the love, the mystery of the fading sand—it all swirled together into a comforting, confusing, terrifying, wonderful whole.
His final thought, before sleep claimed him completely, was not a word, but a feeling, a question mark woven from the sands of two lives.
*…what… am I?*
And in the quiet hospital room, cradled in his mother's arms, watched over by his father, the boy who was once someone else slept. And in his dreams, unseen by anyone, the sands of a forgotten universe began to gently, slowly, stir.
## The Weight of a Grain
**Chapter 2: A Foundation of Sand and Song**
Sleep was not the blank nothingness of the void. It was a country, and he was its sole, bewildered citizen. In this new land, the rules were different. The sand, so fiercely guarded and compacted in the void, was no longer a fortress. Here, it was the very soil, the air, the substance of dreaming.
He didn't dream of his past life. Those memories were grains locked in a deep, silent vault, too heavy, too sharp for his infant mind to hold. Instead, he dreamed in sensations. A vast, shifting desert under a purple twilight sky. Towers of crystalline sand that rose and fell with each breath he took. A soft, whispering sound that was the wind over dunes, but also, somehow, the sound of his mother's lullaby echoing from the waking world.
And always, the sand moved. It was a part of him, an extra limb he hadn't known he possessed. In his dreams, he would raise a hand—a chubby, baby hand that was also a mound of sand—and watch as the grains would swirl into intricate, meaningless patterns above his palm. It was effortless. It was as natural as breathing.
Then he would wake up.
Waking was a daily, jarring re-entry into a reality that was both profoundly familiar and utterly alien. The first year was a slow, hazy progression of needs and sensations. Hunger was a universe-ending catastrophe. A clean diaper was a state of nirvana. The sound of his own crying was a shocking, powerful noise he still couldn't fully believe he was making.
His parents were his anchors.
His mother, Midoriya Inko, was warmth, comfort, and a seemingly endless source of milk and soft singing. Her green eyes were the first things he learned to focus on, and they were always there, filled with a love so potent it felt like a physical force. She was his shelter.
His father, Midoriya Hisashi, was a deeper, rumbling presence. He was often away, his work taking him to other places, but when he was home, he was a giant of gentle hands and low, rumbling laughter that vibrated pleasantly through the floor. He would lift him high into the air, a terrifying and thrilling flight, and the boy would shriek with a mixture of fear and delight.
They called him Izuku.
Midoriya Izuku.
The name was a new garment, and it fit awkwardly at first. He'd been someone else, once. He'd had another name, he was sure of it. A ghost of it lingered on the edge of his consciousness, a shape he could almost mouth but never grasp. It was a grain of sand lost in the dunes. Eventually, he stopped reaching for it. *Izuku* was what Inko whispered into his hair as she rocked him to sleep. *Izuku* was what Hisashi cheered when he managed to clumsily roll over. It was the name of this small, helpless body. It was who he was now.
He learned the world through his mouth, chewing on anything he could get his hands on. The plastic ring of a teething toy. The soft fabric of a stuffed rabbit. His own sandy toes. The tastes were new, but the texture… the gritty, granular feeling… it was comforting. It felt like home in a way he couldn't explain.
The sand was his secret.
It manifested in small, fleeting ways, usually when he was on the cusp of sleep or just waking. A faint golden shimmer in the air above his crib that would vanish if Inko turned her head too quickly. A tiny, perfect castle of sand that would form in the palm of his hand as he napped, only to collapse into a harmless, dusty smear when he stirred.
Inko saw it sometimes. She'd call Hisashi over, her voice hushed with wonder. "Hisashi, look. It's that sparkle again. Around his head. Like a little halo of gold dust."
Hisashi, ever the pragmatist, would smile and kiss her temple. "It's just dust in the sunlight, sweetheart. This old apartment is full of it." But he'd look at Izuku with a curious, thoughtful expression, a father's proud wonder at the mere existence of his son, quirks or no.
Izuku didn't know what it was. He had no word for it. It was just a thing that happened, like breathing out on a cold day and seeing your breath. It was a part of him that required no thought, no effort. It simply *was*.
As the months bled into a year, his awareness grew. He began to understand the music of their speech, though the notes—the words—still eluded him. He understood tone. The rising melody of a question. The steady rhythm of a story. The sharp, staccato warning of "No, Izuku!" when he crawled too near the stairs.
He also began to understand the world outside their small apartment. Through the window, he saw a sky that was sometimes blue, sometimes grey, sometimes a breathtaking canvas of orange and purple at sunset. He saw other buildings, and sometimes, other people.
And then, one afternoon, everything changed.
Inko had taken him to the park. He was fourteen months old, unsteady on his feet, but insistent on holding her hand and walking on the strange, springy green stuff—grass, she called it—instead of being carried. The world was a symphony of new sensations: the smell of wet earth, the chill of a autumn breeze, the distant shouts of other children.
He was watching a group of toddlers playing in a sandbox. It was a mesmerizing sight. They shovelled it, poured it, patted it into shaky mounds. Their laughter was a bright, happy sound.
And Izuku felt a pull. A deep, resonant call from the sand in that box. It was dull, lifeless stuff compared to the sand of his dreams, but it was sand nonetheless. It was… listenable.
He let go of Inko's hand and took two wobbly steps toward the sandbox, his small hand outstretched.
"Izuku, wait honey," Inko said, following close behind.
He didn't want to play with it. He just wanted to… hear it. He reached the edge of the box and plopped down onto his padded bottom. He stared at the sand, his brow furrowed in concentration.
The other children ignored him, busy with their buckets and shovels.
*Move,* he thought, the concept simple and clear. He didn't say the word. He didn't know the word. He just pushed the intention out, the same way he pushed the air from his lungs.
The sand in front of him quivered. A handful of grains lifted into the air, defying gravity, and swirled in a lazy, miniature tornado no bigger than his fist.
One of the toddlers, a little girl with pigtails, stopped shoveling and pointed. "Ooh! Pretty!"
Inko, who had been about to lift Izuku back to his feet, froze. Her eyes went wide. She stared at the swirling sand, then down at her son. His eyes were fixed on the grains, his expression one of serene focus.
"Izuku?" she whispered, her voice trembling.
Hearing his name, his concentration broke. The sand immediately lost its cohesion and pattered back down into the box, indistinguishable from the rest.
Izuku looked up at his mother and blinked, then gave her a gummy, triumphant smile. He had done it. He had made the outside sand listen.
Inko's face cycled through emotions faster than Izuku could follow: shock, confusion, dawning realization, and finally, an explosion of pure, unadulterated joy. She scooped him up into her arms, spinning him around and laughing, her earlier trepidation gone.
"Izuku! You did it! That's your Quirk, baby! You have a Quirk!" She was crying happy tears, smothering his face in kisses. "My amazing, brilliant boy!"
*Quirk?* The word meant nothing to him. But her joy was infectious. He giggled, burying his face in her shoulder.
That night, the apartment was filled with a new kind of energy. Inko was on the phone with Hisashi immediately, her voice pitched high with excitement. "Hisashi, you won't believe it! He has a Quirk! He made sand float in the park! It was beautiful! Our little boy has a Quirk!"
Izuku sat on the living room rug, chewing on a block. He tried to do it again, to call the sand from his dreams. A few golden grains seeped from the pores of his hand, swirling sleepily before fading away. It was easier than moving the park sand. That had felt like asking a stranger to dance. This was like moving his own arm.
Hisashi came home from his business trip a day early. He arrived in a whirlwind of excitement, sweeping Inko into a hug and then dropping to his knees to look Izuku in the eye.
"Show me, champ! Show Papa your Quirk!"
Inko brought him a small bowl of sand they'd collected from the park. She placed it on the floor in front of him.
Izuku looked at the dull, beige grains. He concentrated. It was harder this time, with two eager faces watching him so intently. He pushed his will again. The sand stirred, lifting a few inches into the air in a wobbly column. It held for a few seconds before collapsing.
It was enough. Hisashi's face split into a massive grin. "Incredible! A sand Quirk! That's so unique! We'll have to think of a good name for it… Sand Control? Granulation?"
"It was so pretty, Hisashi," Inko gushed. "It looked like gold dust in the sun!"
The word 'Quirk' was used more and more. Izuku began to understand it was the word for the thing he could do. The sand-thing. He learned other words, too. "Hero." "Villain." Words he heard on the television his parents sometimes watched, shows filled with bright colors and loud noises of people doing impossible things. People flying. Shooting lasers. Creating ice.
He saw a man on the news who could breathe fire. Another woman who could run up the side of a building. His father, on a video call, let out a small puff of smoke from his mouth to make him laugh. "A little bit of fire breath, see? Papa's Quirk! And yours is even cooler!"
So this was a world of Quirks. A world where people could do things. His sand was just one of many amazing things. The realization was comforting. He wasn't a monster. He wasn't alone. He was just Izuku, who had a Quirk like Papa's fire breath and Mama's… well, Mama's Quirk was something called a "small attract," which she used to pull the remote control into her hand from across the room when she was too comfortable to get up. It was mundane. It was wonderful.
He was two years old when the first nightmare came.
It was a new kind of sleep. Not the peaceful country of shifting dunes, but a dark, chaotic place. He was lost in a storm of his own sand, but the grains were sharp and cold. A giant shadow, formless and terrifying, loomed over him, and no matter how much sand he piled up, he couldn't build a wall high enough to keep it out. He was small. He was powerless.
He woke up crying, a raw, terrified sound he'd never made before.
Inko was there in an instant, gathering him up. "Shhh, baby, it's okay. Mama's here. It was just a bad dream."
But the fear lingered, a cold knot in his stomach. The sand in the room, the ever-present golden dust that would occasionally seep from him, was agitated. It swirled in the dark corners of the nursery, moving in frantic, jagged patterns.
Inko saw it. She held him closer, her own heart hammering. She rocked him, singing his lullaby, her voice soft and steady against the silent, chaotic dance of the sand.
"It's okay, Izuku," she whispered, her lips against his hair. "It wasn't real. Dreams can't hurt you."
But as she said it, she watched a tendril of sand, sharp as a claw, scrape down the wall before dissolving into nothingness. A cold trickle of unease went down her spine. She had never heard of a Quirk that reacted to dreams.
Izuku clung to her, his tears slowing. The sand gradually stilled, settling back into its passive, shimmering state. The nightmare was receding, but the memory of the feeling—the utter helplessness—remained.
He had learned something new that night. Something beyond hunger, cold, or the joy of making sand swirl.
He had learned fear.
And he had learned, in a way he could never articulate, that his Quirk, his beautiful, unique sand, was not just a part of his waking world.
It was woven into the very fabric of his sleep. And the things that lived there could give it a terrible, sharpened edge.
## The Weight of a Grain
**Chapter 3: The Architecture of a Child**
The nightmare left a residue, a fine, gritty fear that lingered in the corners of Izuku's mind for days. He became clingier, unwilling to let Inko out of his sight, his small hand perpetually fisted in the hem of her skirt. The world, which had been expanding in a glorious rush of discovery, suddenly seemed sharper, full of unseen edges.
Inko watched him with a worried crease between her brows. She'd read all the parenting books. Night terrors were normal. Separation anxiety was a standard developmental stage. But the books didn't mention the sand. They didn't say a child's Quirk could pulse and swirl with their distress, painting their fear in the air for all to see.
She started paying closer attention. She noticed the way the dust motes in a sunbeam would still and align into faint, concentric circles when Izuku was deeply, peacefully asleep. She saw how, when he was frustrated, trying to force a square block into a round hole, a few granules of sand would seep from his fingertips and patter against the floor with an angry finality. His emotions had a texture, a weight, and they were inexorably tied to the impossible sand he produced.
It was Hisashi who, during a brief video call, gave her the first real clue. Izuku was showing off, making a small pile of sugar from the breakfast table tremble and shift.
"Look at that control!" Hisashi's pixelated face beamed with pride. "He's not even three! My little champion! You know, it reminds me of that new hero on the news… the one who controls earth. What's his name? Geo-Something."
"It's not earth, Hisashi," Inko said, wiping a smear of jam from Izuku's chin. "It's sand. He makes it himself. It's… different."
"Semantics, honey! It's a earth manipulation-type Quirk! A rare and powerful one! We should get him some play sand for the balcony. Let him practice in a controlled environment."
The phrase 'earth manipulation' stuck in Inko's mind. It was a box, a category. It was normal. Heroic, even. She latched onto it with the desperation of a mother willing the world to make sense. She bought a small plastic turtle sandbox and a bag of fine, white play sand.
Izuku was fascinated. He would sit in the box for hours, his concentration absolute. At first, he simply made the sand dance. He'd raise tiny peaks and valleys, form wobbly spheres that would hover for a moment before collapsing. It was play, but it was also work. He was learning the grammar of this power.
He discovered its rules, its physics. The sand he created himself—the golden, ethereal grains that seemed to be made of light and memory—was easier to command. It felt like a part of him. The play sand was stubborn, dense, and foreign. Moving it required more focus, more effort. It was like trying to whistle a tune with someone else's lips.
He also learned its limits. Or rather, he learned *his* limits. One afternoon, fuelled by a toddler's boundless ambition, he tried to lift the entire contents of the sandbox at once. He strained, his face turning red, small grunts of effort escaping him. The sand shuddered, rising a foot into the air in a chaotic, teetering mass.
And then the headache hit.
It was a sharp, stabbing pain behind his eyes, so sudden and severe it made him cry out. The sand dropped back into the box with a heavy *thump*. Dizziness washed over him, and he would have face-planted into the sand if Inko hadn't been watching from the doorway. She rushed over, scooping him up.
"Izuku! Baby, what's wrong?"
He could only sob, pressing his small hands against his temples. The world was spinning. He felt hollowed out, drained. A profound exhaustion settled into his bones, heavier than any naptime fatigue. He slept for three hours straight afterward, and when he woke, the headache was a dull throb, a lesson learned in pain.
He had found a wall. His power was not infinite. Using it cost him something. Energy. Focus. Himself.
This lesson was followed by another, more subtle one. He began to notice the sand that existed in the world already. Not just in his sandbox, but everywhere. The gritty dust on the windowsill after a windy day. The fine grains in the sugar bowl. The soil in the potted plants. He could feel it, a faint, dormant hum, a potential waiting to be unlocked. He couldn't command it with the same ease as his own sand, but he could… suggest. Nudge. If he was very calm and very focused, he could convince a line of sugar grains to shift a millimeter to the left. It was a whisper, where his own sand was a shout.
His world continued to expand in other ways. Words began to crystallize from the music of speech. He learned names. "Mama." "Papa." "Kacchan."
Katsuki Bakugo lived next door. He was a month older than Izuku, a whirlwind of explosive energy and a shock of spiky blonde hair. His Quirk had manifested early and dramatically—small explosions popping in his palms with the same frequency and intensity as his temper tantrums.
Their mothers were friends, so playdates were a regular occurrence. Izuku was fascinated by Kacchan. He was everything Izuku was not: loud, fearless, certain. Kacchan didn't hesitate; he charged. He didn't wonder; he demanded.
"Deku!" Kacchan would bark, having misheard Izuku's name once and deciding it fit. "Make the sand do a explosion!"
"I can't make explosions, Kacchan," Izuku would mumble, carefully shaping the sand into a slow-spinning dome.
"Tch. Lame! Watch this!" *Pop-pop-pop!* Miniature firecrackers erupted from Kacchan's palms, scattering the sand and making Izuku flinch. "That's a real Quirk!"
Inko would frown from the kitchen. "Now, Katsuki, that's not nice. Izuku's Quirk is wonderful. It's very… gentle."
But Izuku saw the way Auntie Mitsuki's eyes lit up when Kacchan used his power. He saw the way Hisashi, on the screen, would pump his fist and yell, "That's my nephew! What a powerhouse!"
Gentle was not what this world celebrated. Gentle didn't make the news. Gentle didn't stop villains.
He started trying to make his sand less gentle. He'd try to compact it into hard, fast pellets, imagining them shooting through the air like bullets. But the sand resisted. It wanted to flow, to swirl, to build. The best he could manage was a gritty spray that stung a little. It was unsatisfying. It felt wrong, like trying to make a song into a scream.
The nightmares didn't come often, but when they did, they were profound. They were never about monsters under the bed. They were vast, lonely landscapes. An endless shore under a black sky, where a cold, heavy fog threatened to swallow him whole. A desert where his voice was stolen by the wind, and his footprints vanished the moment he made them. He would wake not screaming, but filled with a deep, aching sadness, a loneliness that felt ancient.
And the sand in his room would be moving in slow, mournful waves, like a tide controlled by a grieving moon.
One such night, Inko found him sitting up in his crib, silent tears cutting paths through the faint, golden dust on his cheeks. The sand was piled in two perfect, miniature pyramids on his nightstand.
She didn't scoop him up immediately. She stood in the doorway, her heart breaking. This was more than a bad dream. This was a sorrow she couldn't comprehend.
"Izuku?" she whispered.
He looked at her, his green eyes too old for his face. "It was big," he whispered, his vocabulary still small, the concepts too large. "And… quiet. I was… losted."
She came to him then, gathering him close, rocking him. "You're not lost, baby. Mama's here. You're always found with me."
She sang his lullaby, and as she did, she watched the two pyramids of sand on the nightstand slowly dissolve, grain by grain, until they were gone. The room felt lighter.
The next morning, she decided it was time. He was a bright boy. He understood more than he could say. She sat him at the kotatsu, pushing a plate of sliced apples toward him.
"Izuku," she began, her voice gentle. "Your Quirk… the sand. Does it ever… feel scary?"
Izuku picked up an apple slice, thoughtful. He shook his head. "No. The sand is… nice. It's mine." He frowned, searching for the words. "The… *sleep* is scary. The… pictures in the sleep."
"The dreams," Inko supplied softly.
He nodded. "The dreams make the sand… sad. Or… loud."
Inko felt a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. The Quirk wasn't causing the dreams. The dreams were affecting the Quirk. It was backwards. It was unheard of.
"What are the dreams about, sweetie?"
Izuku's small face screwed up in concentration. "Big… big place. No Mama. No Papa. Just… me. And the sand is… cold. And there's… a big, big…." He trailed off, frustrated, his hands making a shape of something immense and overwhelming in the air. "A big… door? But it's not a door. It's… heavy."
He gave up, stuffing the apple slice in his mouth. The conversation was over. He'd expended all his words on the impossible.
Inko sat back, her tea gone cold. A big, heavy door that wasn't a door. It sounded like a metaphor, the kind a poet or a philosopher might use. Not a three-year-old. Her son, her gentle, sand-making boy, dreamed of cosmic loneliness and metaphysical weights. And his Quirk painted those dreams in the air.
Hisashi's theory of 'earth manipulation' suddenly felt woefully inadequate.
Later that week, they were back at the park. Izuku was in his sandbox, meticulously building a lopsided castle. Kacchan was nearby, using his explosions to blast divots in the ground, proclaiming himself the "King of Explodey Mountain."
A younger child, a little girl with rabbit-like ears, tripped and fell near the swings. She began to cry, a raw, hiccupping sound of genuine pain.
Kacchan scowled. "Shut up! You're noisy!"
But Izuku went very still. He looked at the crying girl. He felt her distress, a sharp, prickling sensation in the air. It was a feeling he recognized from his own nightmares. Without thinking, he reached out a hand, not toward the girl, but toward the sand in his box.
He didn't try to make it hard or fast. He didn't try to fight. He just… listened. He let the sand feel what he felt: a desire to comfort, to soothe.
The sand responded. A stream of golden grains—his sand, not the play sand—lifted from the box. They swirled through the air, not in a chaotic storm, but in a gentle, dancing spiral. They caught the afternoon sun, glowing like a ribbon of light. They floated over to the little girl, weaving around her in a soft, shimmering ballet, before coalescing into a perfect, tiny butterfly that landed on her knee.
The girl's crying hitched. She stared, mesmerized, at the glowing sand-butterfly. It pulsed softly, shedding a gentle, golden light. A tiny, awestruck smile broke through her tears.
Izuku smiled too, a wave of warm contentment washing over him. This felt right. This was what the sand was for. Not for explosions, but for this. For making something beautiful to fight back against the sad and the scary.
The butterfly held its shape for a few more seconds before dissolving back into harmless dust.
Kacchan stared, his mouth agape. Then his face twisted into a scowl. "That's not a hero Quirk! That's… that's a party trick! Lame, Deku! So lame!"
But Inko, who had seen the whole thing, felt tears welling in her eyes for a different reason. She hadn't seen a party trick. She had seen her son's heart, translated into light and sand. She saw the profound gentleness of him, a quality the world might call weak, but in that moment, had been more powerful than any explosion.
She walked over and knelt beside the sandbox, ignoring Kacchan's ranting. She put a hand on Izuku's head.
"That was beautiful, Izuku," she said, her voice thick with emotion. "You made her smile."
Izuku looked up at her, his own smile fading into a look of serious contemplation. "The sand… it liked making her smile," he said, as if reporting a fact. "It doesn't like it when people are sad."
Inko's breath caught in her throat. *It.* The sand had preferences. It had reactions.
She looked at her son, really looked at him. He wasn't just a boy with a Quirk. He was a boy in a conversation with his power. A power that was tied to his dreams, that reflected his emotions, that seemed to have a will of its own toward compassion.
She didn't see an earth manipulator. She didn't see a future hero or a future anything. She saw her son. Midoriya Izuku. A child building castles in a sandbox, trying to make sense of a world inside him that was vaster and stranger than anyone could possibly know.
And for the first time, the worry in her heart was joined by something else. Something like awe. And the terrifying, overwhelming understanding that she was the mother of a mystery she had no idea how to solve.
Chapter 2: First Manifestations
Two years later...
"Yume, sweetheart, it's nap time," my mother called softly from the doorway of my room.
I looked up from where I sat on the floor, surrounded by picture books and wooden blocks. To any observer, I appeared to be a perfectly normal two-year-old—perhaps a bit more attentive and calm than most children my age, but nothing that would raise suspicions. The truth, however, was far more complicated.
Living with the mind of an adult in a toddler's body presented unique challenges. Simple tasks that should have been automatic required careful thought to appear appropriately clumsy. I had to remember to stumble occasionally, to show confusion at concepts I already understood, to display the emotional volatility expected of someone my age. It was exhausting, but necessary.
What made it even more difficult was the gradual awakening of my abilities.
"Come on, little dreamer," Mom said, scooping me up in her arms. As she did, I noticed the familiar sight of sand grains clinging to her sleeves—evidence of her own Quirk, which she seemed to activate unconsciously when she was tired or stressed.
She carried me to my small bed and tucked me in, pulling the soft blue blanket up to my chin. "Sweet dreams, Yume."
As she left the room, dimming the lights to a soft glow, I allowed myself to relax. Nap time was when I could drop the act, when I could explore the strange sensations that had been growing stronger each day.
I closed my eyes and reached out with senses I was still learning to understand. Immediately, I became aware of the dreams around me—faint whispers of consciousness from the apartment building we lived in. Mrs. Tanaka from next door was dreaming about her late husband again. The teenage boy upstairs was caught in a recurring nightmare about failing his entrance exams.
And my parents... I could sense them in the living room, my father taking a quick power nap on the couch while my mother worked at her laptop nearby. His dreams were peaceful, filled with images of our family at a beach I didn't recognize.
Focus, I told myself. Control.
The voice from the void had warned me about restraint. I could feel how easy it would be to slip into these dreams, to influence them, to help Mrs. Tanaka find peace or give the student upstairs the confidence he needed. But I also sensed something else—an awareness that didn't belong to the dreamers themselves. As if something vast and watchful existed in that space between sleeping and waking.
Better to be cautious for now.
Instead, I turned my attention to the growing connection I felt with the physical world around me. Specifically, with sand and earth. It had started as just a strange tingling sensation whenever I was near soil or played in the sandbox at the park. But lately, it had become something more.
Concentrating carefully, I held up my small hand. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, tiny grains of sand began to materialize in my palm—not conjured from nothing, but drawn from microscopic particles in the air, from the dust between floorboards, from traces of earth that clung to everything in the city.
The grains swirled in lazy circles above my palm, responding to my will. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Here was proof that my memories of that strange encounter in the void hadn't been some elaborate delusion. I really had been reborn with supernatural abilities in a world where such things were apparently commonplace.
A soft knock at the door made me quickly close my fist, letting the sand fall silently to the sheets.
"Yume?" My father's voice was gentle as he peeked into the room. "Having trouble sleeping, buddy?"
I made a show of rubbing my eyes and yawning, the picture of a drowsy toddler. "Papa?"
He came over and sat on the edge of my bed, his presence warm and comforting. Kenji Sato was a kind man who worked as an engineer for some company that developed support equipment for heroes—another reminder that this world operated by rules very different from my previous life.
"You know," he said, smoothing down my hair, "when I was little, I sometimes had trouble with naps too. Want to know a secret?"
I nodded, genuinely curious.
"Sometimes, when we can't sleep, it's because our Quirks are starting to develop. They make us feel restless, like there's energy we don't know how to use yet." His eyes were thoughtful as he looked at me. "Your mama and I both have earth-related Quirks. Hers lets her control sand and fine particles, while mine helps me sense vibrations through the ground. We've been wondering if you might inherit something similar."
If only you knew, I thought, but aloud I simply asked, "Quirk?"
"That's right, little one. Almost everyone has a Quirk—a special ability that makes them unique. Some people can fly, others can create fire or ice, and some can do incredible things with their minds. They usually show up around age four, but sometimes they start earlier."
He paused, studying my face with the intensity parents reserve for trying to understand their children. "Have you been feeling anything strange lately? Like you can sense things you couldn't before, or like you want to do something but don't know what?"
The question was so accurate it was almost startling. I considered how to respond without revealing too much. Finally, I pointed to the small sandbox toy in the corner of my room—a birthday gift from last month.
"Sand feels... happy," I said, choosing my words carefully to sound appropriately childish while still conveying meaning.
My father's eyebrows rose. "Happy? What do you mean, Yume?"
I climbed out of bed and toddled over to the sandbox, aware of his eyes following me. Kneeling beside it, I placed my small hands on the surface of the sand. Almost immediately, I could feel the individual grains responding to my presence, eager to move, to shape themselves according to my will.
"Like... like it wants to play," I said, which was surprisingly accurate. There was something almost alive about the way sand reacted to my touch, as if it had been waiting for someone who could understand its nature.
My father watched as I ran my fingers through the sand, leaving trails that seemed to maintain their shape longer than physics should allow. His expression grew thoughtful.
"I think," he said slowly, "we should talk to your mother about this."
Twenty minutes later, both my parents sat on the floor of my room, watching as I demonstrated what I had discovered about my developing abilities. I was careful to show only the most basic aspects—making sand flow in simple patterns, causing it to clump together in ways that seemed just beyond normal but not impossibly so.
"He's definitely showing signs," my mother murmured, her own Quirk unconsciously activating as fine particles of dust swirled around her fingers. "Look how the sand responds to him. It's similar to my ability, but different somehow."
"More intuitive," my father agreed. "When you use your Quirk, Mika, it's clear you're controlling the particles. But with Yume, it's like they're cooperating with him."
That was a more accurate observation than they realized. The sand didn't just obey me—it seemed to want to work with me, as if we shared some fundamental connection. I suspected this was related to whatever transformation had occurred during my reincarnation, some merger of my consciousness with the elemental forces the voice had mentioned.
"Should we be concerned about early manifestation?" Mom asked, worry creeping into her voice. "I've heard it can be dangerous if children can't control their Quirks properly."
"We'll keep an eye on him," Dad assured her. "And maybe start teaching him some basic control exercises. Better to help him understand his abilities in a safe environment than to suppress them and risk problems later."
They continued talking, but I found my attention drifting as exhaustion finally began to claim me. The demonstration had been more tiring than I'd expected, and my young body still needed significant amounts of sleep for proper development.
As I settled back into bed, my parents tucking me in with extra gentleness now that they suspected I was going through Quirk manifestation, I allowed my consciousness to drift toward the edge of sleep.
In that liminal space between waking and dreaming, I became aware of something that made my eyes snap open.
There was someone else in the building whose dreams felt... different. Not like the normal humans I'd sensed before. This consciousness was vast, ancient, and carried an unmistakable sense of power that reminded me uncomfortably of the voice from the void.
But before I could investigate further, sleep claimed me completely, pulling me down into my own dreams where impossible landscapes stretched endlessly under skies filled with shifting sand.
In my dream, I stood in a vast desert where each grain of sand contained a sleeping mind. And in the distance, barely visible through the heat shimmer, stood a figure I somehow knew I would meet someday—someone who would help me understand both the gift and the burden of my reborn existence.
When I woke the next morning, the memory of the dream remained vivid, along with the certainty that my quiet life of discovery was about to become much more complicated.
My parents found me sitting up in bed, wide awake and staring thoughtfully at the ceiling.
"Good morning, sweetheart," Mom said, coming over to check on me. "How did you sleep?"
I looked at her with eyes that held more understanding than any two-year-old should possess. "I dreamed about meeting someone important," I said honestly.
She smiled, attributing my seriousness to the typical randomness of childhood imagination. But I could see the concern in both their faces as they wondered what their son's early Quirk manifestation might mean for his future.
If only they knew that the person I would meet wasn't just important—they might be the key to understanding why I had been given this second chance at life, and what role I was meant to play in this world of heroes and extraordinary abilities.
Chapter 1: The Endless Void
Darkness. That's all there was—endless, suffocating darkness. No light, no sound, no sensation of up or down. It was like floating in an ocean of nothing, where even my thoughts echoed back at me distorted and faint. Was this death? The last thing I remembered was the screech of tires, the blinding headlights, and then... impact. A truck, of all things. How cliché. I'd always joked about isekai stories, those anime where some poor sap gets hit by a vehicle and wakes up in a fantasy world with overpowered abilities. But this? This wasn't a portal to adventure. This was oblivion.
I tried to move, but there was no body to command. Just my consciousness, adrift. Panic clawed at the edges of my mind. "Hello?" I thought, or maybe shouted—hard to tell in this void. "Is anyone there? God? The devil? Truck-kun's customer service?"
Silence stretched on, eternal and mocking. Then, a shift. A subtle ripple in the nothingness, like a breeze through fog. And with it came a presence. Not a voice, exactly, but a feeling—a vast, ancient intelligence brushing against my soul.
You have ended, it conveyed, not in words but in concepts that bloomed in my mind like forgotten dreams. But endings are merely thresholds. Would you cross into another beginning?
I latched onto it desperately. "Yes! Anything but this nothing. Who are you? What's happening?"
The presence swirled around me, probing, assessing. I am a whisper of the cosmos, a fragment of the eternal. You intrigue me, mortal. Your imagination dances with shadows and sand, with realms unseen. I shall grant you a gift for your new life—a sliver of the Dreamer's essence, tempered for your fragile world. Control over the sands of slumber, the weave of illusions and rest. But beware: power untamed is a curse.
"Sands of slumber? Like... The Sandman?" I thought back, memories of comic books and myths flickering through my head. Morpheus, the lord of dreams, shaping reality from stardust and nightmares. But toned down? What did that even mean? Before I could ask, a warmth flooded me, like grains of sand sifting through my non-existent fingers. It tingled, alien yet familiar, embedding itself into whatever remained of my essence.
Go now, the presence urged. Awaken in a realm of heroes and quirks, where the extraordinary hides in plain sight. Forge your path, dreamer.
The void began to fracture, cracks of light piercing the dark. I felt myself being pulled, reshaped, compressed into something new. A body? A life? The sensation was overwhelming—lungs filling with air for the first time, a heartbeat thundering in my ears. Cold air kissed my skin, and distant voices murmured, soft and concerned.
"Look, he's stirring," a woman's voice said, warm and exhausted.
My eyelids fluttered, heavy as lead. With a final effort, I forced them open, blinking against the harsh fluorescent lights of what looked like a hospital room. Faces hovered above me— a tired but smiling woman with dark hair, and a man beside her, eyes wide with wonder.
What the hell was this place? And why did everything feel... different?
Chapter 3: The Dreamer's Burden
Six months later...
The screaming started at 2:47 AM.
I jerked awake in my toddler bed, my enhanced senses immediately picking up the source of distress. It wasn't coming from our apartment—the sound was three floors up and muffled by distance and walls. But in the realm of dreams, proximity worked differently. The terror bleeding from the child's nightmare hit me like a physical blow.
A little girl, I realized, pressing my small hands against my temples as waves of fear washed over me. She's trapped in a recurring nightmare.
This had been happening more frequently over the past few months. As my connection to the dream realm strengthened, I'd become increasingly sensitive to the sleep disturbances of those around me. What had started as faint whispers of other people's dreams had evolved into something much more intense—and much harder to ignore.
The child's nightmare was vivid and terrible: she was being chased through endless dark hallways by something with too many teeth and eyes that burned like coals. I could feel her desperation, her exhaustion from running the same terrifying loop night after night.
I could help her, I thought, my hand unconsciously reaching toward the space between sleeping and waking. Just a small intervention. Guide her toward a different path in the dream, show her a door that leads to somewhere safe...
But even as the thought formed, I hesitated. The voice from the void had warned me about restraint, about learning the rules of this world before acting. And my parents had been talking more and more about "Quirk regulations" and something called the "Hero Public Safety Commission" that monitored unusual abilities.
The screaming intensified, and I felt my resolve cracking. This was a child in pain, trapped in her own mind with no one to help her. Surely, something this small and compassionate couldn't—
"Yume?"
My mother's voice came from the doorway, soft and concerned. I turned to see her silhouette against the hall light, her hair messy from sleep.
"Did the noise wake you up, sweetheart?" she asked, coming over to my bed. "Mrs. Yamada's little girl has been having nightmares again. The poor thing."
I looked up at my mother with wide eyes that held more understanding than she realized. "She's scared," I said simply.
Mom sat on the edge of my bed and gathered me into her lap, her warmth comforting against the chill of otherworldly terror that still echoed through my consciousness. "Yes, she is. Sometimes children have bad dreams that feel very real to them."
"Can we help?" I asked, the question carrying weight that my childish voice couldn't fully convey.
My mother was quiet for a long moment, stroking my hair as she considered her answer. "There are people whose job it is to help with things like that," she said finally. "Professional heroes with mental Quirks, or therapists who specialize in dream-related problems. But ordinary people like us... we just have to hope her parents find the right help for her."
Ordinary people. The phrase stung more than it should have. I was anything but ordinary, yet here I sat, helpless while a child suffered because I was too young, too untrained, and too uncertain about the consequences of using my abilities.
The nightmare above us reached another crescendo of terror before suddenly cutting off. Either the girl had woken up, or exhaustion had finally pulled her into deeper, dreamless sleep. The sudden silence felt almost as oppressive as the screaming had.
"There," Mom said, though I could hear the relief in her voice. "She's settled down now. Let's get you back to sleep, okay?"
She tucked me back under my blankets and kissed my forehead, but I could see the worry in her eyes. This wasn't the first time the neighbor child's nightmares had disturbed our household, and it was becoming a regular occurrence.
After Mom left, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, my small hands clenched into fists beneath the covers. The helplessness was infuriating. Here I was with abilities specifically designed to help people find peace in sleep, and I was doing nothing while a child suffered night after night.
But what if I made things worse? The thought had been haunting me for weeks. What if my interference caused permanent damage? What if there are consequences I don't understand?
My internal debate was interrupted by a new sensation—something I'd felt only briefly before. That vast, ancient consciousness I'd detected months ago was nearby again, and this time it felt... amused?
Sleep, young dreamer, came a voice that seemed to whisper directly into my mind. It wasn't the same presence from the void, but something equally powerful and far more knowing. Your time for such burdens will come soon enough. For now, learn to carry the weight of awareness without drowning in it.
The voice faded before I could respond, leaving me with more questions than answers. But somehow, its presence had been oddly comforting—as if there were others who understood the unique challenges that came with dream-related abilities.
The next morning brought an unexpected development. As my family sat around the breakfast table—me in my high chair, making appropriately messy attempts at eating cereal while secretly cataloging everything I observed—there was a knock at our door.
"I'll get it," Dad said, setting down his coffee cup. Through the open kitchen doorway, I could see him opening the front door to reveal a tired-looking woman in her thirties with worry lines etched deep around her eyes.
"Mrs. Yamada," Dad said, his voice gentle with sympathy. "How can we help you?"
"I'm sorry to bother you so early," she said, her voice strained with exhaustion. "But I was wondering... last night, did you hear Sakura's nightmares?"
"We did," Mom replied, appearing beside Dad. "Is there anything we can do to help?"
Mrs. Yamada's composure cracked slightly. "I've tried everything—doctors, sleep specialists, even consulted with a hero who has a mental Quirk. Nothing seems to help her. The nightmares started three months ago after she saw a villain attack on the news, and they've only gotten worse."
She paused, wrapping her arms around herself. "But last night was different. For the first time in weeks, after that initial episode, she slept peacefully for the rest of the night. She even woke up smiling this morning and said she had a dream about a 'sand castle guardian' who protected her from the monsters."
My spoon froze halfway to my mouth. I hadn't done anything—had I? I'd been so focused on restraining myself that I hadn't noticed if my subconscious had acted while I wrestled with indecision.
"That's wonderful," Mom said, though I could hear the confusion in her voice. "But I'm not sure what that has to do with us..."
"I know this sounds strange," Mrs. Yamada continued, "but I've been reading about how Quirks can sometimes manifest in unusual ways, especially in families with compatible abilities. Your husband mentioned once that you both have earth-related Quirks, and I've heard that sometimes children with developing abilities can unconsciously influence their surroundings, even at a distance."
The adults fell silent, and I felt all three pairs of eyes turn toward me. I looked up from my cereal with what I hoped was an appropriately innocent expression, though inside my mind was racing.
A sand castle guardian? That sounded exactly like something my subconscious might create—a protective dream construct designed to give the girl a sense of safety without directly confronting her nightmares.
"Yume's Quirk is still developing," Dad said carefully. "And while he does show signs of sand manipulation similar to his mother's ability, we haven't seen any evidence of long-range effects or dream influence."
"Of course not," Mrs. Yamada said quickly. "I didn't mean to suggest... I just thought I should mention it, in case there was some connection. Maybe I'm just grasping at straws because I'm so desperate to help my daughter."
There was a long pause before Mom spoke up. "Would you like us to keep an ear out tonight? If Sakura has another nightmare, we could call you to make sure she's okay."
"Thank you," Mrs. Yamada said, relief evident in her voice. "That would mean so much. And if... if there is any connection to your son's developing abilities, I want you to know that I'm grateful. Whatever helped Sakura sleep peacefully last night was a blessing."
After she left, my parents returned to the kitchen table, both looking thoughtful.
"Do you think it's possible?" Mom asked quietly. "Could Yume's Quirk have somehow affected the neighbor's child?"
"Quirks can be unpredictable during early manifestation," Dad replied, glancing at me. "And there have been documented cases of children with mental or emotional Quirks accidentally influencing people around them."
They continued their discussion, but I was no longer paying attention. Instead, I was focused inward, trying to understand what had happened. Had my subconscious acted on its own while I deliberated? Was this what the mysterious voice had meant about learning to carry awareness without drowning in it?
As if summoned by my thoughts, I felt that ancient presence brush against my mind again, carrying with it a sense of approval and something that might have been pride.
The first lesson is learned, came the whisper. Compassion without wisdom is chaos, but wisdom without compassion is cruelty. You begin to understand the balance.
This time, I managed to form a coherent response: Who are you?
A teacher, when the time comes. A guide for those who walk between worlds. But that time is not yet. The presence began to fade. For now, know that your instincts are sound, young dreamer. Trust them, but temper them with patience. The world needs protectors of sleep, but it also needs them to be wise.
And then it was gone, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the growing realization that my second chance at life was going to be far more complicated than I had ever imagined.
That night, as I lay in bed listening for any signs of distress from the apartment above, I made a decision. I would continue to help where I could, but I would also seek to understand the full scope of my abilities and their consequences. If I was going to be a protector of dreams in this world of heroes and villains, I needed to do it right.
The last thing I heard before sleep took me was the sound of peaceful breathing from three floors up—a little girl sleeping safely, guarded by dreams of sand castles and gentle warriors made of earth and compassion.
It was a small victory, but it was a start.