Ho boy Anon this is a doozy of a prompt, very full of long fic potential. Also tragic as hell. I mean, I’m not gonna go for broke with the angst but I’m not going to shy away from it either. Hopefully this is something like what you were looking for. I’m sorry about this, by the way. It kinda meanders about and reads like a prologue.
Todoroki Shouto met Midoriya Izuku at the tail end of spring during the heart of the decade where magic became a myth. When they first met Shouto was older than Izuku. Not by a lot, just by a few years. That didn’t stop Shouto from falling for Izuku, for his smile and his bravery and his selflessness. For Shouto, Izuku is the brightest star.
Time, though, has no hold on witches. Izuku had understood from the beginning. The world of magic was dying out from public memory but Izuku accepted it as part of Shouto anyway. For a while, life was wonderful. Shouto would make sculptures of living ice in the summer for Izuku to marvel at and in the winter the fires would dance at his word. In their house the dishes do themselves, mirrors double as secret passageways, and the basement gives you whatever you ask for as long as you’re polite. Izuku never lost his childlike wonder at all things magical, at all things Shouto, even as his hair streaked gray and his freckles became harder to see thought the wrinkles.
Izuku grows old and Shouto stays a young man, forever twenty-three. Izuku calls him a miracle.
Magic is still as thick in the air as ever but with few and fewer people attuned to it Shouto finds himself unique where he was once one of many. Izuku’s right knee becomes weak, sometimes giving Izuku so much trouble he struggles to walk. Shouto watches Izuku deteriorate and he wishes that he had the skills to fix it, to make it painless. Shouto is not that kind of witch and once upon a time he knew someone who was but they were burned away. Izuku starts to age, starts to say things like “when I die you should get a pet so you’re not lonely”, and Shouto is gripped by fear. He starts looking for a witch that can turn back time on Izuku, that can make him young again.
He finds no such witch. He keeps looking away.
“Have you talked to your mortal about this?” Asks Nedzu when Shouto finds him. He’s an old man, tiny and wrinkled, but Shouto knows better. As old as he looks Nedzu is actually much older and much more powerful.
“I did,” Shouto admits.
“And what did he say?”
Shouto wrings his hands. “He said that he doesn’t want to live forever, that cheating death will do more harm than good to him in the long run.”
Nedzu chuckles. “He’s right, you know. Mortal bodies can’t take the strain.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Shouto demands.
Nedzu eyes him, tiny black eyes under large white eyebrows. “You could try letting him go.”
Shouto looks away. “That’s not possible.”
Nedzu sighs. “Young love is so earth-shattering. What are you, two hundred years old? You’ll fall in love many more times, young Todoroki.”
“I’d burn myself away without Izuku,” Shouto says and Nedzu falls quiet enough that Shouto looks back at him. The old man looks serious.
“There is a way. It’s not very wise, though, and completely irreversible.”
“Anything,” Shouto says.
“You’d even kill your mortal?” Nedzu asks and Shouto is taken aback.
“What?”
“The process will kill him,” Nedzu says, “but I can help you link his soul to yours. He will always return to you, across time and space and death itself. I cannot guarantee that he will love you, only that you will share your fate with him.”
Shouto hesitates, but only for a second. Killing Izuku once pales in comparison to the horror of existing in a universe without him. Shouto imagines Izuku, strong and passionate and kind, disappearing for good from the world and finds the strength to say, “Okay.”
Nedzu sighs. “Young love is so earth-shattering. Let me draw up a list of supplies and you can return to me when you’ve gathered them all, but you must return before your mortal dies. If he dies on his own there’s nothing I can do.”
Shouto nods, Nedzu grows a list from the bamboo plant in his living room, and then it’s a race against the clock. Some ingredients are easy, Shouto is a witch after all. His garden already has a lot of the herbs and his basement can conjure up some of the creature parts. Other things, though, are hard. Izuku’s blood is probably the hardest, not because it’s hard to get but because it’s hard to get without Izuku asking any questions. Shouto doesn’t want to tell him what he’s doing, doesn’t want to hear Izuku’s objections. He doesn’t want Izuku to change his mind.
Finally Shouto brings the ingredients to Nedzu and the old witch gets to work. Shouto hovers anxiously, doing everything he’s asked promptly. In the end, Shouto sits in Nedzu’s back yard in front of a dish of water, still and reflective as glass, within which Izuku sleeps. His hair is nearly white now and his chest rattles with snores he didn’t used to make. Shouto watches him, perfectly still as Nedzu paints a script on Shouto’s chest in Izuku’s blood and runs the herb mixture down from it to the wedding ring on Shouto’s finger. Shouto breathes slowly and Nedzu pulls a spike made of moonstone and jade from the earth. He positions the point of it carefully over Shouto’s heart.
“Ready?” Nedzu asks. “Once this is done we can’t take it back.”
Shouto breathes out and watches Izuku sleep in their bed through the scry. “Yeah.”
Nedzu starts the chant. Izuku blinks awake as though he can hear it.
“Forgive me,” Shouto whispers to him and Nedzu drives the spike into his heart.
It hurts, of course it hurts. It burns through his blood vessels, curling around inside him until he thinks he might die from it, and someone screams. It might be Shouto, it might be Izuku, and the sound of it knocks Shouto out.
He comes to only a few minutes later, slumped over on the grass. Nedzu drinks tea under the setting moon ten feet away, completely unconcerned.
“Did it work?” Shouto croaks.
“I would call it a success, yes,” Nedzu says, eyes falling to Shouto’s left hand.
Shouto looks down to his ring to see it sparkling unnaturally in the moonlight, as if it’s been dusted in a very fine glitter.
“Izuku?”
“Is being born again somewhere as we speak,” Nedzu says. “Congratulations.”
just moving along like everyone else 