MHA Unreal Undead: Chapter 1 test run

This is unfinalised, and a schedule will not be made till I have at least a dozen more chapters in the background, but this is to test the waters. Let me know what you think.

This chapter has been made in honor of Sami, my friend who died of cancer, who goes under the shortened moniker, Sam, in this chapter.

XXXXXX

Izuku’s eyes drifted, his vision fading, the cold touch of Anesthesia doing its duty to keep him from feeling, from thinking, and the monotonous beep beep beep of the electrocardiography machine trying to lull him to sleep.

He did not want to.

For this time, he was afraid that he would never wake up again.

At 9 years old, quirkless, and first diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer that formed on his leg, before his body wittered away as the cancer spread throughout other parts of his body. His lungs, his heart, his brain.

He’d overheard the doctors saying that it was a wonder he was still alive.

His body seemed to struggle for life at every instant, resistant as it was to chemotherapy, preventing the cancer-killing drugs from destroying his body. They’d tried everything, every treatment, every method, and nothing had worked.

He was forced to watch his mother run herself ragged, spending all their family savings on his condition. His father had left them mid-way, too bitter he was to have the fortune he garnered used up on what he knew was a hopeless cause.

One could say it was cruel of him. Hiashi would say he was being pragmatic. It wasn’t a surprise to Izuku as that was always who he had been to them. A father who never cared. A husband who didn’t love. Yet, his abandonment still stung.

Inko Midoriya never faltered, never wavered in her determination to get him back from the brink of death.

He did not want to tell her to let him go.

He didn’t have the courage to tell her to give up on him, to say that all her perseverance, all her faith, her hard work, was for nothing.

His heart sat heavy in his ribcage, barely beating to keep him alive, riddled with tumours as it was.

He knew it was the end.

He could feel it.

Did he have the bravery to speak to his mother one last time? After all that she’d done for him?

He had to.

He did not want to go without saying at least something to her.

“M-ma,” he got out.

Shifting from the corner of the room, having almost fallen asleep on the couch that became almost a second bed to her after his condition deteriorated overtime, she was by his side immediately.

She held his hand his both her own, leaning close, to hear what he was trying to say.

“Yes, honey?” she asked softly, “what is it?”

Izuku could only gaze in her direction, his eyelids drooping, his vision blackening to a point where he lost focus on what was real, and what was a dream.

Yet he tried his hardest to stay awake, to muster the energy to speak one last time.

With one final push, he willed himself back to lucidity, to command his brain to have one final moment of perfect clarity, such that he may string a few more words together.

His mother deserved nothing less.

His sight locked on to hers, and as if finally catching on to what he was trying to do, her kind expression froze, a terrible weight settling on her shoulders, making them shake with the grip of death trying to console her for taking her son.

“I love you,” he whispered, “and I’m sorry.”

He closed his eyes one final time, never expecting to wake again.

XXXXXX

As Inko heard the ECG machine let out a flat, even beep that did not blip, that did not move against her very hopes and dreams, as if scoffing at her for her prayers, the tears in her eyes could not be held back any longer.

She let out a wail, a cry for her son, a challenge to the gods above who let her child be taken away from her so early, to curse her son to such a fate so unbefitting to one so kind, so gentle, so…heroic, as she knew he’d been since the start.

She heard the doctor and nurses rush into the room behind her.

She did not care.

She would not let them take her baby away from her.

She latched on to him, holding him in her arms and cradling his head, rocking him almost as if he was an infant.

She briefly felt the doctor trying their best to comfort her, trying to pry her away, but no amount of encouragement could tear her from him.

She would not leave his side.

She would die with him if she had to.

For, without her son, what else did she live for in this world?

In the end, it took the doctor ten minutes to realise that Inko wasn’t going to move, and that they would have to let the single mother grieve.

They couldn’t even try and resuscitate him, for his heart was already compromised by its own cells, and he was far into the terminal stages of his illness.

It was a death that all of them foresaw coming.

The doctor and nurses spoke with one another, before eventually agreeing to leave the mother with her son for however long she needed before they cleaned the body of the boy and placed him in the mortuary.

Inko’s wailing rang throughout the hospital, the corridors echoing her cry of grief.

The doctor and nurses left, closing the doors behind them to block out the sound.

XXXXXX

It took Inko three hours for her tears to finally run dry, yet the sobs and shaking remained.

She felt her heart being ripped out of her chest.

She felt the soul crushing hopelessness of reality.

She felt…alone. Truly and utterly in her plight against the world.

She had her head buried on her son’s chest, and from her position, she did not notice the minute movement of Izuku’s fingers.

It was only when she realised that the slow beeping of the ECG making its impossible noise again that she got up off his chest and looked towards it, eyes widening.

She sat stiff and frozen in the face of something…something that couldn’t be possible.

Her son’s heart had stopped beating for three hours, why, why was it beating once more?

It must be the machine malfunctioning.

She looked towards her son, and to her shock, she…she could see the faint rising and falling of his chest as it took in the essence of life. Expanding, deflating.

She hit the nurses’ button, and soon the nurses and doctor came in once more to witness a miracle.

Izuku Midoriya was coming back to life.

At his side, several nurses monitored his condition, restarting the life support machines that kept him alive for so long.

Inko was going into shock, she didn’t dare hope against hope but…but it was happening.

Her wishes, her prayers…perhaps the gods hadn’t abandoned her after all.

Then, like belittling her thoughts, Izuku began to spasm, to tremble like a man possessed.

His veins started to bulge, his diminished muscles started to rot, and like a scene out of her worse nightmare, his skin began to bruise, to malform, to be invaded by the tumorous spores of his cancer.

She watched, in terror, in pain, as her son groaned as he came back to life.

Was this the wish against the monkey’s paw?

An exchange for her son’s resurrection only for him to live a life of suffering?

The doctors and nurses were frantic, all of them holding him down on each limb, lest he fall off his bed from the tremors. One of them activated his stitching quirk to prevent Izuku’s skin from tearing, but ultimately failed when blood began to leak out of every orifice of his body.

His pores, his mouth, nose, eyes, ears, everything.

Soon, the white sheets of the hospital bed were consumed by red…and disgusting chucks of dead flesh.

Inko felt lightheaded, like she was about to faint as more nurses rushed in behind her.

She prayed once more.

Prayed perhaps for the final time that her son would be okay, that she would have him back. She would never ask for anything again.

She just wanted her baby back.

Then, the spasms stopped, and Izuku went still.

The doctors and nurses panted, surprised at the effort it took to hold a malnourished, sick, nine-year-old down.

It was to their heaving breaths, that Izuku opened his eyes once more.

His skin, bruised, more bloodied than not, began to heal, his condition seeming to regress in time, if only the blood and flesh he excreted not returning to his body.

Just like that, within minutes of fright, he was…human again. Whole…well mostly whole—as whole as a kid can be without a left leg.

XXXXXX

In Izuku’s mind when he closed his eyes one final time, he did not experience the brief wonders of the afterlife. There was no heaven nor hell that he saw.

But a dream.

His mind had given him vision, a sight through the lens of someone so similar to him but also so different. For the three hours that he was gone, he was on another earth. One without quirks. One without heroes or villains.

He…he was a boy named Sam, and like him, Sam had cancer as well. Osteosarcoma on his knee, then once he had it amputated due to being resistant to chemo, the doctors discovered he had stage 4 lung cancer. He didn’t have everything else like Izuku had, where it spread everywhere throughout his body, but he suffered one and the same.

Izuku remembered Sam’s life through his eyes, experienced what he experienced.

Yet he did not feel as Sam did. It was as if he had a front row seat to view the up and downs of someone else’s life.

Izuku could not imagine why this was happening to him. Yet, as Sam’s life sped through his eyes, he could only watch. He cheered when Sam triumphed, sympathised when he was beat down, felt embarrassed when he kissed his first girlfriend, mortified when he slept with her. It was a kaleidoscope of emotions, memories, thoughts.

Izuku did not know whether he spent years there, or minutes.

When it all came to an abrupt end, where Sam was given his sentence of death, to leave his family and friends behind and go first to the lands beyond, that Izuku found himself on a beach shore.

Izuku jumped, confused, as he was no longer in the theatre of Sam’s mind, but in his own body once more…standing up with two legs…one of which he’d thought was lost to him forever.

He looked at the crashing waves and he thought that this was where the world ended…or where the end would greet him. He’d wondered why those memories of Sam had been shown to him in the first place.

“It’s because we are brethren souls,” a voice answered his thoughts from nearby.

Izuku’s head snapped to his side and there lay…Sam.

Unlike the withered man he saw on his death bed, Sam, too, was whole. He had hair, he had his legs, he had everything. A man in the prime of his life.

“Wh—what’s going on?” Izuku stuttered.

Sam turned to at him from watching over the crashing waves.

“I don’t know,” he simply said.

Izuku shook his head. “Am—am I dead?”

Sam smiled.

“Maybe,” he answered.

Izuku let out a breath, trying to calm himself. It didn’t work. He was panicking again, just as he used to when he was overwhelmed. Yet, when Sam put a hand on Izuku’s shoulder, he felt a wave of serenity fill him. Like wrestling a raging sea and turning it into a pond untouched by wind, Izuku’s emotions calmed.

“I’m just messing with you,” Sam said, chuckling, “Well, sort of. You are dead, technically, but unlike me, you have a second chance.”

Izuku blinked. “Wh—what?”

“You will live once more, Izuku,” Sam continued, “and you will be reunited with your mother.”

Izuku couldn’t believe it.

“H—How?” Izuku asked.

Sam chuckled. “Just as you’ve seen my life through my eyes, I’ve seen your life through yours. I…You’re so much younger than me, and I can’t believe how much more kind-hearted you are. Yet, you’ve suffered worse, and a fate you did not deserve was handed to you.”

Izuku’s lips shook as Sam’s grip tightened.

“I was given a choice, at the end,” Sam said, “to live longer, to buy a few more months to see my friends in person one last time, or to give you a second chance along with a few parting gifts.”

Sam’s smile grew wistful. “Of course, It wasn’t even a choice in the first place.”

He looked to Izuku and at that moment, Izuku had never seen an expression so brave as the one Sam had on his face.

“A few more months? For your life?” Sam scoffed, “of course I picked you. If I didn’t, I’d just die a few months later as a monster rather than as a man.”

Izuku shook with gratitude and let himself be pulled into a hug by this man he’d never met before, yet a man he knew like a brother he’d never had.

“but…” Sam continued, “I can’t give you everything.”

Izuku nodded, understanding.

“I need my memories back, Izuku,” Sam said, “All that you’ve seen through my eyes, they are precious to me. I wouldn’t be me without them…and wherever I go from here, I want to remain myself.”

Sam separated from him, and Izuku was too busy crying to do anything other than look at the ground.

“Hey, look at me,” Sam said.

Izuku did, eyes pouring down a fountain of tears as it was.

“You deserve even more than this, kiddo,” Sam said, smiling, “but this I all I can give you. You can have my knowledge that I’ve stockpiled throughout my life. You can have my skills of the few things I was good at. Most of all, you can have my experiences of what I discovered was right and wrong, so that you won’t have to make the mistakes I have, to learn the lessons I’ve learned. How this is all possible without memory, I do not know, but you may have it. You may have it all.”

Izuku tried his best to speak, to respond, but all he could do was give him a wobbly smile, one filled with gratitude, one filled with a million thank-yous.

Sam only smiled wider. “You won’t remember me after you leave this place, but I’ll be watching from afar…probably. Give ‘em hell, Izuku.”

Izuku awoke to pain unimaginable, aches everywhere, feeling like his body was doing its best to tear itself apart, reattach itself, tear itself apart, reattach itself, and on and on and on.

For minutes, he suffered, his body somehow unable to just cease in its functions and let him go to the dreamworld once more.

For minutes, pain was all that he knew. It was his best friend, his abusive lover.

Then…it all went away, and he was himself once more, collapsing.

XXXXXX

Izuku stared at the reflection of himself, almost unbelieving of what he saw in front of him.

He had no hair, not a single strand on his bald head, not even on his eyebrows.

But that didn’t matter.

He was alive, and as the sickly boy stared back at him, he felt like he was going to cry.

He was alive.

He was alive.

He was alive!

His mother’s efforts weren’t wasted, his battle against cancer wasn’t for naught.

He was alive.

That was more than many could say with his condition. More than many even with cancer far less severe.

His mother hadn’t left his side since he’d awoken, and this was one of the few moments he could be alone: in the bathroom when he asked for a short moment of privacy.

It was as if she thought that taking her eyes off him would make him disappear. From what he’d heard, from what he’d…felt, he understood why.

He had been dead.

There was no argument to be made against it.

His heart stopped beating. His lungs stopped pumping vital air.

He was gone from the world for approximately 192 minutes, so the doctors say. His death certificate was even filled out and everything.

Yet miraculously…he came back.

His skin, from which his mother described as being riddled with bruises when he awoke, was now strangely fair, blemish free, healthier than he ever remembered it being.

When the doctors whispered of it being a miracle, they equally whispered it being an impossibility.

No quirk could bring the dead back to life, even in this age where quirks were as abundant as grains of sand on a beach, and as diverse as very the number of humans on earth itself—for no two quirks were the same.

Defying death was…impossible.

So they came to their own conclusions. He couldn’t have been dead. His quirk, which had somehow awaked this late, right at the brink of death, had somehow put him into a hibernating state, where his heartbeat pumped so faintly that the ECG did not detect it.

He couldn’t believe it. His mother couldn’t believe it. The doctors were still scratching their heads as to how it was at all possible.

Izuku was alive.

It was to the bony, pale, malnourished kid staring at him back from the mirror, still sitting on his wheelchair, that he let out a laugh. A laugh of triumph and disbelief.

A laugh to celebrate his second chance.

Whether he was truly dead or not, like waking up from a fuzzy dream, he could not remember.

But he would not take it for granted.

He looked at his hands.

Apparently, they said he had a quirk now.

It wasn’t flashy, nor was it particularly cool. The doctors had told him he had Ultra regeneration, for it was one of the only possibilities for him to come back from his near-dead state.

Further testing needed to be done, but he believed them. For even his leg, which had been amputated over a year ago, was starting to itch unlike it had ever before, almost like it was beginning to grow back.

Izuku would have to wait to see what would happen then.

For now, he had a goal in mind.

Get back to where he was.

Crush his physiotherapy.

And as All Might said.

Go beyond.

Plus Ultra.