Neotory

  The wind howling across the rooftop of the forgotten office building felt sharper than usual, carrying with it the bitter chill of reality. Izuku Midoriya stood paralyzed, his worn red sneakers rooted to the concrete, his breath caught somewhere between his lungs and his throat. The sky above Musutafu was a bruised, indifferent violet, bleeding into the hazy twilight of late afternoon. 

  The world is not equal.   Izuku Midoriya learned this fundamental truth not at the age of four, but at the age of five, during a harsh, unforgiving winter.  

The world was ending, and Naruto Uzumaki felt strangely at peace with it.   He hung suspended in the crystalline space between life and death, his body battered beyond recognition. Blood dripped from countless wounds, each one a testament to the journey that had brought him here. The final battle had consumed everything—his chakra, his strength, his hope. But not his will. Never his will.  

The air in the Musutafu commercial district tasted heavily of pulverized concrete, ozone, and the distinct, metallic tang of blood.   Sirens wailed in the distance, a mournful, overlapping choir of police cruisers, fire engines, and ambulances rushing toward the devastation. Buildings that had stood proudly that morning now leaned at perilous angles, their glass facades shattered into millions of jagged diamonds that littered the asphalt.  

  The heat in the alleyway was suffocating, a localized inferno that tasted of burnt sugar, ozone, and sulfur.   Katsuki Bakugo was drowning. Not in water, but in a vile, sentient mass of sewage and malice. The Sludge Villain wrapped around him, forcing itself down his throat, into his nose, violating his lungs. Every instinct in Katsuki’s body screamed at him to detonate, to blow this filth to kingdom come, but his explosions only fed the flames trapping them in the narrow shopping district street.  

 All men are not created equal.   It was a harsh, immutable truth of the world, one that Izuku Midoriya learned at the tender age of four. Most children learned this lesson when they realized they couldn't breathe fire as brightly as their peers, or when their telekinesis could only lift a pebble while their classmate could levitate a desk. They learned it through playground hierarchies and the petty squabbles of kindergarten.  

  The air tasted like ozone and copper.   Izuku Midoriya ducked, the motion more instinct than conscious thought. A fraction of a second later, a jagged spike of concrete slammed into the space where his head had just been, shattering against the reinforced wall of the alleyway. Dust rained down on his shoulders, dusting the dark, muted green of his costume in a layer of pale grey ash.  

The autumn wind carried the scent of falling leaves through the open window of the Hokage's private chambers, a gentle whisper that seemed to mark the passage of time itself. Uzumaki Naruto, Seventh Hokage of Konohagakure, sat propped against thick pillows, his weathered face creased with the lines of seventy-eight years well-lived. The orange of his favorite color had long since faded from his wardrobe, replaced by the dignified robes of his office, though even now, a small orange flower sat in a vase by his bedside—a gift from Himawari.  

      The apartment was silent except for the sound of ragged breathing.   Naruto Uzumaki lay sprawled across his unmade bed, still wearing his dirt-stained orange jumpsuit from the mission to Wave Country. He hadn't bothered to change, hadn't bothered to shower, hadn't bothered to do anything except stumble home and collapse. The moonlight streaming through his window painted silver streaks across his face, illuminating the tracks of dried tears that stained his whiskered cheeks.  

  The smell of rain and ozone would forever be etched into Izuku’s earliest memories, inextricably linked to the scent of burnt sugar and the suffocating feeling of a home that was no longer his.   He was only three years old when the world tilted on its axis and never quite righted itself.  

  The world of a four-year-old is painted in broad, unambiguous strokes of primary colors. There is good, and there is evil. There are villains who skulk in the shadows, and there are heroes who stand in the sun, laughing away the fear. For Izuku Midoriya, the universe was a simple, beautiful equation, and the solution to every problem was a towering man with a blinding smile.   All Might.  

The world was not fair.   It was a lesson Izuku Midoriya had learned at the tender age of four, sitting in a sterile doctor’s office while a man in a white coat pointed at an x-ray of his foot. Two joints. A biological redundancy. A death sentence for his dreams. In a society where eighty percent of the global population possessed some kind of uncanny, superhuman ability—a Quirk—being part of the remaining twenty percent was a statistical anomaly. But statistics were cold and clinical. They didn't capture the reality of being Quirkless.  

The world, as Izuku Midoriya understood it at four years old, was a brilliantly simple place. It was a world illuminated by the bright, primary colors of comic books, scored by the booming, triumphant laughter of heroes, and governed by a singular, unshakeable law: all men are not created equal, but anyone with a brave heart and a strong Quirk could become a hero.  

        The first thing to register was the smell.   It wasn't the metallic tang of blood, nor the dusty, suffocating scent of pulverized concrete that usually accompanied the aftermath of a villain fight. It wasn't the sharp smell of ozone from Denki’s electricity, or the sweet, burnt-sugar scent of Katsuki’s explosions.   It was bleach. Ammonia. Antiseptic. The suffocating, aggressive sterility of a hospital operating theater, magnified a hundredfold.   Izuku Midoriya groaned, the sound vibrating in his own skull, and tried to pry his eyelids open. The light was blinding—a harsh, flickering, fluorescent white that stabbed directly into his retinas. He squeezed his eyes shut, turning his head to the side. His cheek rested against something smooth, freezing cold, and unforgivingly hard. Not asphalt. Metal.   Where am I?   The memories hit him in a disjointed, chaotic rush. A patrol in the Hosu district. A sudden dist...