The curse of immortality

[danzanelfuoco]

BNHA 

BakuDeku 

Ajin!AU (Ajin!Midoriya) 

Warnings: HEAVY ANGST, Major Character Death, mentions of killings and mutilations 

COW-T #12, w5, m2: Nessun lieto fine 

731 parole

The difficult part is watching him die. 

Katsuki had told him and Deku should have listened, should have prepared. 

It’s not like death doesn’t permeate every instant of his life, it’s not like death isn’t his constant companion. But one tends to be reckless when he knows whatever damage, whatever hurt, whatever pain could be solved by something so easy as dying and resurrecting and after all he wasn’t the one stuck with a dying partner so he didn’t really understand. 

After all it’s not really the same, not when Katsuki had explained that the difficult part was watching and waiting helplessly, wondering if this was actually his last life and if he would get back this time.

The difficult part was watching and craving to finish him off, because at this point it was just useless sufferance and it would be mercy to kill him, like a wounded animal. 

The difficult part was actually doing so - not that many times, but enough - and waiting and waiting and waiting and wondering, what if this time he doesn’t come back and it was my fault?

(The difficult part was laying awake in bed, eyes wide open in the dark, listening to his breath and asking himself if he was a murderer, if he was really a good person, if he still had a soul worth saving). 

But in the end, the difficult part was watching him die, and it shouldn’t have taken Izuku blindsided, but it does.  

*

He’s old, but not as old as he could have gotten. 

How many heroes do you know that retired with all their organs and limbs? How many do you know that get to old age and die peacefully in their beds? 

They knew what they were signing up for. All of them. 

(Well, all of them except Izuku.) 

Izuku has died so many times he has lost count, but for the first time he feels lifeless. 

They were kids together, Deku and Kacchan, two scrawny children playing and then fighting and then growing apart and then mending the bridge together. They were classmates and heroes and friends again and then so much more, but they were never alone, never without each other. 

Deku remembers their first kiss, right after his first death, at the end of the war when All for One was destroyed and Shigaraki captured but at what cost? And then Izuku had come back from the dead and Katsuki had hold onto him and had kissed him with tears in his eyes. 

Izuku had never feared death, not even when he didn’t know he couldn’t die - because some things are worth risking your life for. But now, as he hears Katsuki’s breath itch and his heart faltering and he knows there’s nothing anybody can do about it - he should have already retired, a man his age, almost sixty and still in the battlefield, what was he thinking, - Deku thinks this can’t be happening not to him, not to Kacchan. 

But it’s happening and when it’s over he finds out how to kill someone that can’t be killed. 

*

The first decade is awful. 

Damn, the first year is spent just crying. Ochaco visits, always an ice cream box in her prosthetic hands and Eijirou practically takes over the guest room to stay close to him. Sometimes along the way he knows he attends a funeral, but it takes him six month to ask whose it was. 

Mina cries, hides her wrinkled face behind her hand, a cascade of gray hair curtaining her tears. “Sero.”

Some time during the years, Denki stops coming and when he asks, Ochaco looks away and tells him he had to be hospitalized. 

Too many elettroshocks in his hero career and now he keeps mistaking his granddaughter for Kyoka and hardly knows anymore how to drink or eat or go to the toilet alone. Jirou takes him to visit her husband and Izuku thinks he’s glad Kacchan didn’t get to end like that at least, then proceeds to feel like a real shit about it. 

Time heals all wounds, they used to say, and maybe it’s true, maybe time will have him forget everyone. After all, Deku’s arm were scarred once and now they’re not anymore…