Reset and Rewind

Chapter 34 - A day in the Nurse's Office

Izuku wasn't sure what he expected of his day off. He'd been staring up at the ceiling for hours now, his mind spiraling from one dreadful thought to another doom scenario. He didn't have his notebooks here with him to cope with the thoughts, nothing to distract himself with, and so he laid there. Staring at the ceiling. Suffering in silence. Recovery Girl was watching over him, sure, but he wasn't her only nor her biggest concern right now. No, she had a job to do, and he was more than capable of staying in bed after she hit him again this morning.

It wasn't until lunch rolled around that other people walked in. Izuku was happy to have visitors, to have a distraction, but they didn't seem particularly happy to see him... Well, that wasn't entirely true. But Ochako had this pity look in her eyes and Kacchan... Izuku couldn't read him at all.

"How are you holding up, Deku-kun?" Ochako asked, sitting down on the edge of his bed as he shuffled backwards, pushing his back against his pillow so he could sit up.

"Ah, okay, I guess?" Izuku shrugged, glancing to the ash blonde, who kept his distance. Kacchan was standing on the other side of the room, his arms crossed, his hair covering his eyes. Was he mad..? "Bored out of my mind, but otherwise I'm alright. Just a bit sore, you know? But that's what you get when you overexert your quirk."

Ochako snorted at that and Kacchan huffed, making it clear that they had other definitions of 'overexerting your quirk'.

"You lost control," Ochako corrected him. "So tell me, why did we have to hear from Kyoka that you're having trouble controlling One For All and not from you?"

"It was never so bad before, I swear!" Izuku told her, instantly defensive of the whole situation. "Just, you know, the usual quirk struggles. Blackwhip lashing out and pushing things over, Float acting up and making me dangle in the air for a while... Just tiny inconveniences."

"You call what happened during the joint training a tiny inconvenience?" Ochako asked, raising a brow. "They had to stop the exercise because of how hard you lashed out."

"Yeah... Uhm, guess our match ended in a tie, then?" Izuku chuckled, rubbing the back of his head.

"A tie? You-" Katsuki hissed, quickly railing himself back in. He was trying very hard to keep his emotions in check, Izuku could tell. "They cancelled everything, Izuku. There was too much fucking damage to even let the last teams start."

"Wait, what? I didn't- Was it really that bad? I don't- I remember Blackwhip a-and Float and after that there was the smoke and Second and-" Izuku rambled, trying to remember when and how he wrecked ground gamma. He was totally out of it at the time, and with the smokescreen forming around him at the end, he'd barely been able to see anything at all. And with the whole conversation with Second and Nana and Yoichi-

"Second?" Ochako asked, interrupting his train of thought.

"The vestiges came to me," Izuku explained. "Well, uhm, some of them did- We, uhm, we talked, in my head- my, uh, my dream, and they- They-"

They took away my quirk.

"They managed to calm me down," Izuku said. It wasn't a lie, not necessarily, but it wasn't the truth either. How was he supposed to tell them the vestiges had taken away his power? That he was practically quirkless? Again.

"What got you so upset in the first place?" Ochako asked, not asking any further questions about the vestiges. Over the course of the years it had been established that the vestiges were kind of a private thing. Not a lot of people knew how it worked and nobody really asked about it. It was weird, right? Having dead people inside your mind? It made people uncomfortable, so the subject was mostly avoided, even within his friend group.