Chapter One: The Last Step
The roof top was quieter than Izuku Midoriya had expected.
He had imagined — in those spiraling, sleepless hours when dark thoughts wound themselves around his chest like wire — that it would feel dramatic somehow. That the wind would howl or the city below would roar. But there was only the low, indifferent hum of distant traffic, the faint smell of rain on concrete, and the cold metal railing pressing into his palms.
He stared down. The drop was considerable. The pavement below was a patchwork of wet shadow and orange lamplight, impossibly far and yet pulling at him like gravity had learned his name.
Hopeless. That was the only word for the feeling behind his eyes — not grief, not rage, just an exhausted, hollow hopelessness that had taken root in him so gradually he hadn't noticed until it was all there was.
All Might's words were still ringing in his ears.
You cannot become a hero.
The Symbol of Peace. The number one hero. The man Izuku had admired for as long as he could remember — posters on his walls, notebooks filled with observations, a dream built brick by brick in his image. He had thought, in his most private heart, that if he could just reach All Might — if he could just ask, just stand in front of him and show him how much he wanted it — then surely something would change. Surely the man who stood for hope would find some hope to offer him.
Instead, All Might had looked at him with those tired, honest eyes, and said the thing Izuku had always been most afraid was true. Quirkless. Ordinary. Not built for the world he had spent his entire life dreaming about. He could be a police officer, All Might had suggested. Something practical. Something safe.
He had said it kindly, which somehow made it worse.
Izuku had stood there on that rooftop with his notebook clutched to his chest, and something inside him had simply stopped.
He gritted his teeth now, jaw aching with the effort of holding back the sound that wanted to escape him. He didn't want to cry anymore. He was so tired of crying.
Slowly, mechanically, he reached down and untied his shoes — his battered, beloved red sneakers that his mother had bought two sizes too large because you'll grow into them, Izu — and set them neatly side by side on the pavement. He placed his bag beside them. Then he opened his notebook — the fourteenth one, Heroes Analysis for the Future, Vol. 13 — and uncapped his pen.
The note was short. He had never been good at being brief, had always been the boy who wrote too much, spoke too fast, thought in endless tangents. But there wasn't much left to say.
Mom. I'm sorry. I tried so hard. I love you. Please don't be sad for too long. You deserve to be happy.
He folded it once, twice, and placed it neatly on top of his bag. Weighted it down with his pen so it wouldn't blow away.
Then he turned back to the railing.
His hands were shaking as he climbed. The metal was cold and slick with the evening's mist, and his fingers fumbled more than he would have liked. He had always been clumsy. Even now, at the end of things, he couldn't manage to be graceful.
He sobbed once — a small, ugly sound, punched out of him without warning — and then he let go.
I'm sorry, Mom. I couldn't do this anymore.
The wind was very loud after all.
And then it wasn't.
And then there was nothing.
* * *
Consciousness returned in pieces.
First: pressure. Something dense and fluid pressing against every surface of him, filling the spaces between his fingers and the hollow of his throat, warm and thick in a way that water was not.
Second: sound. A muffled, underwater quality to everything — the distant hum of machinery, the soft tick and wheeze of equipment, his own heartbeat, impossibly loud, impossibly steady.
Third: the realization that he had a heartbeat at all.
Izuku's eyes snapped open.
The green liquid stung immediately, and he squeezed them shut again with a groan that came out wrong — too low, too resonant, vibrating in a chest that felt enormous around him. He blinked through the sting, squinting, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
Glass. He was looking at glass. A curved wall of it, close enough to touch, and beyond it—
His own reflection.
He stared at it for a long moment, completely still, the way he had sometimes frozen as a child when his brain simply refused to process what his eyes were showing him.
The face looking back at him was not his face.
It was a man's face — sharp-jawed, long-nosed, with the kind of bone structure that suggested generations of cold northern climates. The hair was dark brown with faint threads of green running through it like veins in stone, slightly wavy, long enough to fall past the shoulders. The eyes, hazel rather than green, had a watchful, angular quality to them. British. That was the word that floated up from somewhere in Izuku's scrambled memory. That face looked British.
He was in a test tube. He was in a test tube the size of a phone booth, submerged in viscous green fluid, wearing a breathing mask that covered the lower half of his face, and the body visible below the waterline in the curved glass reflection was broad and tall and absolutely, completely, inexplicably not his.
Something primitive and animal moved through him then — pure, instinctive panic — and his fists came up and slammed against the glass before rational thought could intervene.
Again. Again. His knuckles came back bloodless but the glass began to craze and crack in a spiderweb pattern radiating from each impact, and he kept going, kept hitting, the fluid churning around him and the machinery screaming some kind of alarm that he could barely hear over the roar of his own pulse.
The tube shattered.
The fluid hit the floor like a wave, carrying him with it, and he slammed down on his hands and knees on cold tile and simply stayed there for a moment, gasping, tearing the breathing mask from his face with fingers that felt like they belonged to someone else. Because they did. They were huge. He was huge. He had never been huge in his life.
"Never again," he wheezed, pressing his forehead to the floor, and his own voice scared him — that low, unfamiliar timbre, scraping up from somewhere deep in this vast chest.
He pushed himself upright. The world lurched. His center of gravity was entirely wrong, and he overcorrected twice before managing to stand — actually stand — and the ceiling was closer than it should have been and he was six foot two if he was an inch.
"What," he said carefully, to no one, "the bloody hell."
He had not expected the accent.
* * *
The door opened before he could take a single step toward it.
Three figures. The one in the center was a woman — perhaps fifty, perhaps ageless, with silver-streaked hair pulled severely back and the particular stillness of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by anything. She wore a deep charcoal suit and carried herself like a building carries weight: distributed evenly, completely without effort. To either side of her stood two bodyguards, large and identically expressionless.
Izuku glared at her from across the wreckage of broken glass and pooling green fluid.
"What the bloody hell did you do to me," he said. It came out as a growl.
"We saved you, Izuku Midoriya." The Madam President's voice was measured, precise. "What happened on that bridge was — in part — our failure to prevent. We take responsibility for that."
"You saved me." He let the words sit in the air between them. "I wanted to die. I made a choice. You — without my knowledge, without my consent — not only reversed that choice, but put me into a body that isn't mine—"
"Your original body sustained catastrophic trauma upon impact," she said. "There was nothing to return you to. What you are standing in now was constructed from your original DNA."
"Constructed." The word tasted strange. "You constructed a body."
"With my Quirk."
The voice came from behind her — quiet, flat, almost bored. A man stepped forward: average height, dark hair with an odd bluish cast to it, pale grey eyes that stared with the expression of someone who had found the world mildly disappointing for so long he'd simply stopped reacting to it. A white lab coat.
"Cellular reconstruction from base genetic material," he said, in the tone of someone reading from a manual. "Given an intact DNA sample and sufficient time, I can build a living body to specification. Yours took eleven days." He paused briefly. "You're welcome."
Izuku stared at him. "You built me like furniture."
"More like architecture," the scientist said. "Furniture is passive."
* * *
"What do you want from me."
It wasn't quite a question. Izuku had regained some control over his voice, though the accent remained a mystery he was filing away for later.
The Madam President met his eyes. "We want to make you into the hero you always wished to be."
The silence that followed was very long.
He thought of All Might. Of the rooftop. Of you cannot become a hero spoken with such tired, earnest certainty. He thought of fourteen notebooks and years of watching and dreaming and being told, in a hundred different ways, that the dream was not for him.
"Without punishment?" he asked. He hated how young his voice sounded under the accent. Still hopeful, even now.
"Without punishment," she confirmed.
Izuku looked at his new hands. At the green-tinged fluid still dripping from the ends of his too-long hair.
"What about my mum," he said quietly. "What am I supposed to tell her?"
Another glance passed between the President and her bodyguards. The one called S reached into his jacket and produced an envelope.
Izuku unfolded the letter inside.
The handwriting looked like his mother's. The words sounded like her. Izu, it said, I'm so sorry. You can trust them. They're going to give you what you always wanted. I love you. Your mom, Inko Midoriya.
His eyes burned. The tears came down quietly, dropping onto the paper.
He did not know, then, that the letter was a forgery. He would not know for a long time.
"Okay," he said, in a voice that barely held together. "I'll join you."
* * *
"One more thing."
Madam President paused at the door. She did not turn fully, only tilted her head — the way you might acknowledge something on the periphery of your vision.
"While you are here, your name is Simon Riley." A beat. "Your hero call sign is Ghost. Remember that, Riley."
She left. The bodyguards followed. All except S.
Izuku — Simon — stood in the wreckage of his test tube, soaking wet, wearing a body he hadn't been born in, holding a letter that said his mother was proud of him.
Simon Riley. Ghost.
"Huh," he said.
S shoved him between the shoulder blades — firm, impersonal, professional. "Keep up. We're losing time."
"Right, yes, sorry—"
He followed S into the corridor and immediately forgot to feel sorry for himself, because the corridor was extraordinary.
It was vast — a vaulted space that felt less like a hallway and more like the interior of a cathedral, if cathedrals were lit by panels of cool white light and smelled of ozone and cut grass. Heroes moved through it in ones and twos, carrying themselves with that particular alert looseness of people trained to be ready for anything. Through one archway he could see a training area with actual trees. Through another: a row of doors with colored indicator lights. His hand shot toward his pocket automatically, reaching for a notebook that wasn't there.
"Wow," he breathed.
"Quit with the questions," S said, without looking back.
"I haven't asked any yet."
"I could hear you winding up."
Izuku shut his mouth and went red and walked.
* * *
The handler's room was the size of a gymnasium, with the feeling of a space that had been lived in seriously by someone who took the work seriously: heavy equipment arranged with military precision, a weapons rack along one wall, punching bags hanging in a grid from the ceiling. And in the center of it all, a man.
He was enormous in the plain, worked-for way of someone who had been doing hard physical things for a very long time and had never stopped. Broad as a doorframe. Scars on his forearms and the left side of his face — one from jaw to cheekbone, pale and settled, clearly old. He stood with his arms crossed and watched them approach with the unhurried patience of someone who had learned not to waste energy on impatience.
"Thought I'd be waiting here all day," he said. His voice was gravel and low brass, accent solidly northern. English, Izuku thought. Northern English.
"Blame the sightseer," S said flatly, and left without ceremony, the door swinging shut behind him without a sound.
The handler looked at Izuku.
Izuku looked at the handler.
"I'm sorry I was slow," Izuku said, to his feet.
"No need," the man said. "Nothing wrong with wanting to understand where you are." He unfolded his arms and extended one hand. "Price. That's what you call me."
Izuku reached out and shook it. Price's grip was firm without being performative.
"Simon Riley," Izuku said. The name still felt like wearing someone else's coat. "I'm — I was Izuku Midoriya. I'm still getting used to that." He stopped. Swallowed. "I'm not sure what I am right now, to be honest."
Price studied him the way a good teacher studies a new student — not judging, just measuring. Then, with the plain calm of someone who had heard stranger things in harder places, he said: "That's fine. We'll figure it out."
He turned and walked toward the training equipment. "Come on then, Riley. Let's see what we're working with."
Izuku followed.
Behind his sternum — in this new chest, this constructed architecture of bone and muscle and eleven days of someone else's Quirk — something very small and very stubborn began, cautiously, to flicker.
Not hope. Not yet.
But the possibility of it.