Work Text:
Deep within the consciousness of the ninth holder of One For All there exists a space with eight chairs. Like thrones they stand tall on a crumbling floor, the room around them lined only with ruins of walls, making it hard to call it a room at all.
Both short-lived like a sudden thought and old enough to be a childhood memory at once, eight remnant minds reside in this room. As adversaries to evil they once stood in life to fight. Now in death they fill their seats to council the last of their kind, the child who will finish it all.
Like with any consciousness: when a thought occurs, most often time would start to hurry. Reality would pass by with barely a chance to register it all and a need to catch up afterwards. An idea, a daydream…
But every once in a while a forming thought, however long it may be, takes up no time at all. Not a second passes while it is being thought. Like a pocket within time itself, it exists on its own, not connected to reality at all.
And in a pocket such as this, Shimura Nana gets a chance to talk to the person she was most proud of in life and grew even prouder of in death. The spirit of a man who is still barely alive and only ever engaged with the rest of them as a brightly flaming echo of himself. A man who carried the world on his shoulders and deserves to rest. A man, a boy , who she was never able to properly say goodbye to.
A man who is dying.
Nana watches as Toshinori’s blazing form flickers. Like a campfire caught in a breeze, his flame rolls around and writhes, unable to defend itself. One last time it flares up, high and mighty, before it is finally blown out.
In its stead appears a man, just as tall but slouching, with an unkempt mane of hair and dressed in a torn up suit. He is gaunt and frail, skin pulled tight over bone and barely left muscle, and his cheeks a hollow, sunken mess. But his eyes…his eyes!
Nana has seen Toshinori through his successor before. She saw the shadows his eyes were hiding in no matter which form he took and the state of his mind.
But now? Toshinori’s eyes almost look like those of his younger self, the boy Nana had to leave behind. There are wrinkles around his eyes from age and from laughing, sure, but the light with which they shine even in the eternal darkness of One For All is unmistakable. Clear and piercing icy blue, like the reflection of a brilliant, frozen lake. They are as kind as Nana remembers them. Kind and…sad.
Until his eyes wander over to Nana and light up.
“Master!”
The inkling of a thought is all it takes for her to appear next to him. She stands tall and proud herself, but even with his bad posture she only reaches up to his chin. He has grown so much, and in more ways than just physical height.
“Don’t be silly, Toshinori. I haven’t been your master for the last forty years. And you have far surpassed me. I’d rather you just call me Nana.” She pauses. “Like family would.”
Toshinori’s eyes go wide and Nana doesn’t miss how his lips begin to tremble. “I—I would like that…Nana.”
She flashes him a brilliant grin and wraps her arms around his fragile form, trapping his arms and lifting him in the air. “Oh come here, kid! I've missed you!”
He yelps and laughs and with the little air that Nana hasn’t squeezed out of his lung he says, “I’m hardly a kid anymore.”
“Nonsense. You’ll always be my kid, Toshi!” Nana replies, squeezing some more. It’s been so long. So endlessly long.
She sets him down then and frowns when she sees his face. “Why are you crying?” she asks as she reaches up and cups his face in her hands.
“I've missed you too.”
“Oh, kid.” She wipes her thumbs across his bony cheeks to whisk away his tears. “I told you we’d be able to meet here again, remember?”
Toshinori nods.
“Then smile! You made your dream a reality! I can’t even put into words how proud of you I am.”
“But he’s still out there, Nana,” Toshinori says with a sigh while fidgeting with his bangs like he did in his teenage years.
“All the more reason to smile,” Nana says, pushing up the edges of her mouth with her index fingers. Almost automatically his mouth curls into a radiant grin of his own. He is going to face the evil out there with a smile. And he will defeat it. “Toshinori, I know you will win this fight. But even if you don’t, you still gave the world forty years of peace. You did so well. So so well. Don’t be so harsh on yourself.”
He huffs a laugh. “I feel like a fool. I thought you’d meant we could meet here while I held One For All. Except I was never able to experience the vestiges. All this time, I just had to finally kick the bucket to come here fully.”
“Don’t say that. It’s not true, you're not dead.”
“But close enough. The urge to stay here feels overwhelming. Like I am meant to be here.”
She shakes her head. “It’s final and peaceful, I agree. But you can’t stay, Toshi. You’re not done.”
“I know,” he says and smiles. “I have promises I intend to keep after all.”
For one last time Nana grabs Toshinori by his arms and pulls him into a hug. An embrace he reciprocates as though his life depended on it, so close and unyielding. “Go out there and live! Be part of the boy’s life like I was never able to in yours.”
“I will,” he says. And when he pulls away from her after a moment, still holding her shoulders to steady her, he is grinning. Grinning and ready. “Thank you, Nana, for everything. Farewell.”
And as he utters his final goodbye, time starts moving again. Crawling at first, soon walking, and finally running in unison with reality. Last Nana sees of Toshinori within One For All is a confident smile. He vanishes in a puff of steam and an inferno starts blazing where he stood once again, when his real counterpart is freed from his nemesis’ clutches.
And maybe, through his successor’s eyes, she can see the tiniest of smiles on Toshinori’s bruised face. Proof that he wasn’t just a brief thought that occurred to her, but real.