the wildest hath not such a heart as you

of things discovered in the deep (where only body's laid asleep)

Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind.

- William Butler Yeats, To Ireland in the Coming Times

-

Izuku finds himself in the sunflower field, laying face down in the trodden dirt road. Rather than a sunset with beautiful shades of colour and rain softly drizzling around him, the sun is high in the sky, a constant heat on the back of his neck. He turns his head so that his cheek is pressed to the dirt instead of his nose, and watches shimmering heatwaves dance around sunflowers with half-lidded eyes. The heatwaves settle around him too, but just like the rain, it doesn't touch him; all it does is remind him of the warmth of a quick hug and the fleeting brush of autumn.

The sun rises, and falls, and rises. Izuku stays there, unmoving, and the sunflowers watch him with a quiet sort of patience. Little Boy of Green, they whisper sadly. He opens his eyes to glance at them lazily, then closes them again when they say no more.

Izuku jolts into his body again, except this time it's less of a jolt and more like a wave, drifting in and out until he finally manages to reach the shore. Snippets of sensations reach him as he drifts, words and emotions he can't make out through the fuzziness in his head. The wave goes in; he feels something cool for a moment, another person's skin against his skin, more shouting, the wail of an ambulance siren. The wave goes out; he feels nothing.

When he comes back to awareness, he's lying down on a thin mattress with even thinner sheets. The smell of Isopropyl alcohol and medicine is thick in the air, and somewhere vaguely far away, he can hear the chatter of other people behind a wall and the sound of wheels rolling over the tiled floor; much closer, he can hear the beeping of a monitor. There's a slight prickle of pain on his arm, and when he manages to crack his eyes open, he sees an IV drip attached to his hand.

Then his gaze slides over slightly towards the side, and he sees his mom right next to his bed, perched on the edge of a plastic chair bound to be uncomfortable, staring listlessly into the distance. When he makes eye contact with her, she startles and nearly drops her phone before her hand darts out and clutches his arm like she can't believe he's here. "Thank god," she says. Her face nearly splits with the force of her smile even as tears start to trail down her cheeks. "Thank god."

"Mom?" he croaks out through the dryness of his throat, and another round of tears fall. He counts each thick drop as they dribble from her chin onto his forearm, leaving a familiar sticky feeling behind before evaporating; it gives him something to think about other than the pounding in his head and the afterimage of Eraserhead burned beneath his eyelids.

A doctor comes in after that, although Izuku has enough presence of mind to realise that he can't exactly remember when, nor does he have enough energy to worry about it. The doctor checks his temperature, then raises her eyebrow. "Guess your thermoregulation is workin' just fine now, kiddo. Dunno how you did it after the scare you gave us all yesterday, but you should be set to get outta here by tomorrow."

Izuku licks his lips; without a word, his mom hands him a glass of water with a paper straw sticking out, and he takes a sip gratefully. He sets the glass down on the bedside table. "Um. What exactly happened yesterday?"

"You don't remember?" The doctor tilts her head, then shrugs. "Well, you were pretty outta it, so I wouldn't be surprised. You were found with some pretty severe heat exhaustion and a fever in the middle of Musutafu National Park. You were rushed here—Musutafu General Hospital, by the way—and we managed to treat the minor infection from your scratches but couldn't wrestle your temperature down until a while later. You were lucky, kiddo. Any longer and you woulda got into some serious trouble."