The mansion looked the same.
That was the first thing Midoriya noticed when he walked out of the grounds, the building, the familiar geometry of the place. The same trees. The same gravel path. The same light is falling at the same angle across the front steps.
He stood there and turned Charles's words over again, looking for the seam where the world had changed.
He couldn't find one.
This reality shifted, the void said, from somewhere below his thinking. Doesn't mean the surface looks different.
"Thanks," he said quietly. "That's deeply unhelpful."
"What?"
He turned. Irma was behind him, jacket on, clearly on her way somewhere.
"Nothing." He exhaled. "Are you heading back to Mutant Town?"
"In a bit." She studied his face. "Are you okay?"
"I need to check on my parents first." He looked at the sky, pale, overcast, the particular gray of a day that hadn't decided what it wanted to be. "If everything Charles said is real, if things are actually different now, my mom had telekinesis. My dad was " He stopped. Processed the fact of that. "This is going to be strange."
"Do you want company?"
He thought about it. "No. I need to do this one on my own." He paused. "Tell Mr. M I'll be back tonight."
He rose off the ground.
He got one block from the mansion before he heard the bamf.
Kurt materialized six feet in front of him, face wrapped in bandaging, one eye noticeably worse than the other. He held up both hands, not in a fighting posture. Something more like a petition.
"Izuku. Please. Just let me."
Midoriya looked at him.
"There's nothing you can say."
"It was a misunderstanding, I swear to you, if you'd just listen."
Irma appeared from behind Midoriya, reached around him, and smacked Kurt firmly across the side of the face.
Kurt winced. The bandaging shifted.
Midoriya was already flying.
His parents' apartment building looked the same from the outside.
He hovered in front of it for nearly a minute before landing, standing on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, running through what he intended to say. He was still running through it when the front door opened, and Mitsuki Bakugo stepped out, older than he remembered, something harder around the eyes, her hair pulled back with the efficiency of someone who'd stopped caring what it looked like.
She turned to lock her door, turned back around, and screamed.
He took a step back. She caught herself pressing a hand to her chest, breathed.
"Sorry," she said. Then: "You."
"Mitsuki." He blinked. "Hey. I was just."
"What are you doing here?"
"I came to see my mom. Is she "
"She doesn't want to see you." Her voice was flat. Not cruel. Just stated, the way you'd state a weather condition.
He stared at her. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Something shifted in her expression, not softening, exactly, but reorganizing around a new piece of information. She looked at him the way you look at someone who's said something that doesn't add up.
"You really don't know," she said.
"Know what?"
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Where's Katsuki?"
"Bakugo?" He frowned. "I don't isn't he here? Mitsuki, what's going on? You're acting."
"Different?" The word came out sharp and tired at the same time. "My son isn't mine anymore. Not really. Whatever happened, whatever you people did, with the world, the clouds, all of it, my baby is different now. So yes. I'm different." She took a breath. "You should leave."
"Mitsuki, I can explain."
"You're going to stand there and tell me you didn't do this. That it wasn't you and your kind."
"It was an accident." He kept his voice even. "The world changed by accident. This isn't how it was supposed to be."
She laughed short, humorless. "In a world of gods and monsters, I'm human. Don't waste your breath trying to make me understand."
He reached out with one hand, not touching her, just extending it, a question.
She flinched back.
He held still. "Let me show you. Just what I've seen. What I've been through. I won't go anywhere you don't want me to go."
She looked at his hand. Looked at his face.
"Fine," she said, after a long moment. "Make it quick."
He reached carefully, the way you'd handle something fragile, nd let her see. Not everything. Just enough. The parts that were real, regardless of which timeline you were standing in: the courtroom at fourteen, Genosha from the air, crawling out of the grave with dirt in his mouth and no understanding of why he'd come back.
She pulled away before he finished.
She stood there with her jaw set, looking at a point somewhere past his shoulder.
"That world," she said finally, very quietly. "It was better than this one."
She turned around and walked away fast, heels sharp on the pavement, and didn't look back.
He stood in front of his mother's door for a long time before knocking.
The person who answered was small, maybe six years old, dark-haired, wearing an expression of total unafraid curiosity.
"Hi," she said.
Midoriya looked at her. She looked at him.
"...Who are you?" he asked.
"I'm Yui. Who are you?"
"I'm. " He stopped. "I'm Izuku Midoriya."
Yui's face did something complicated. "Then wouldn't that make you my big brother?"
He opened his mouth.
Inko appeared behind her daughter, and the moment she saw Midoriya, her expression went through several things in rapid succession, none of them the ones he'd been hoping for. Not joy. Not relief. Something that started as shock and curdled quickly into fear.
She put herself between him and Yui in one smooth motion, guiding the little girl back through the door.
"Stay inside," she said. "Go to your room."
"Mom "
"Yui."
The girl went. Inko stepped out onto the landing and pulled the door most of the way closed behind her, and then she looked at her son with an expression he'd never seen on her face before or in any version of her face he'd ever known.
"How did you find us?" she asked. Low. Careful.
"What do you mean? Mom, this is where you live. I know where you live."
"You're not supposed to."
"I don't understand what."
"Why are you here?"
He stared at her. She was older, not dramatically, but he could see it around the eyes, in the set of her jaw, in the particular exhaustion that settles into a person who's been afraid of something for a long time. She was looking at him the way Mitsuki had looked at his extended hand.
"I wanted to make sure you were okay," he said. "That's all. After everything that happened with Jean, with the world."
"Where's father?" He asked it before he could think it through.
The question landed differently than he intended. He saw it happen, saw the fear in her face shift into something else, something that had no armor left on it.
She gave him an address. Her voice was very controlled.
"Don't come back here," she said.
He landed. He left. He told her he'd figure out how to fix it, how to explain it, how to help the words came out in the wrong order and she was already closing the door before he finished.
The address was a cemetery.
He found the grave in under two minutes. His father's name in stone, the dates carved clean and permanent.
He stood in front of it and did the math he'd been avoiding since Inko handed him the address, and the math resolved into a single fact: the date on the tombstone matched the day his powers had first manifested. He'd been ten years old. There had been an explosion the transcripts from Charles's memory had been hazy on details, but the shape of it was clear now. Something had gone wrong. Something had always gone wrong in every version of events, and this time the consequence had a name carved in granite.
He stood there until his knees gave.
He sat in the grass in front of his father's grave and cried, and no one was around to see it. After a while, he stopped and just sat there with his hands in the dirt and the wind moving through the cemetery around him.
Then he got up and flew to Mutant Town.
Mr. M's workshop had the same smell it always had: solder, coffee, the particular dustiness of old machines in various states of being understood. He was at his bench when Midoriya walked in, head down over something small and complicated, and he looked up with the expression of a man assessing an unfamiliar situation.
"Can I help you?"
Midoriya stopped. "You don't know me."
"I'm afraid not, son." Not unkind. Just honest. "You look like you've had a rough few days."
"We knew each other for six months." He kept his voice flat. "You gave me a room. You opened portals for me. You knew my name before I told you."
Mr. M studied him with that particular gaze, the one that looked sideways at things rather than straight at them.
"Powerhouse," Midoriya said.
Nothing.
"I can show you," Midoriya said. "Or could you just look? At my head? Something is wrong. I don't know how else to say it."
The old man was quiet for a long moment. Then he set down his tools, stood up slowly, and walked around the bench.
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
Mr. M placed his fingertips lightly on Midoriya's temples.
The silence stretched for about ten seconds.
Then Mr. M stepped back, and his expression had changed into something that was rarely there, something genuinely unsettled.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, that's not right at all."
"Can you fix it?"
"I," He paused. Sat back down on the edge of his bench. "Kid, I wasn't aware of any of this. The version of me you're describing he and you apparently built something together over six months, and I have none of that. None of it." He looked at his hands. "Parallel world, would be the short version. Or the same world with the floor taken out from under it."
"I don't have memories from this version." Midoriya sat down on a crate across from him. "I had to get them secondhand. Another mutant showed me what happened when my powers first came in, and I " He stopped. The grave. The date on the stone. "I found out things I didn't want to find out."
"Do you want me to?"
"No." Fast. Certain. "Don't show me more. I know enough." He looked at the floor of the workshop, the same scuffed concrete, the same oil stains in the same places. "My father died the day my powers came in. My mother signed away her parental rights because she was scared. Some version of me grew up in a facility somewhere, trying to learn how not to destroy things." He exhaled. "That's not my life. But it happened in this world, to my face, with my name."
Mr. M said nothing. He was good at the particular silence of a man who understood that some things needed air more than they needed a response.
"The Illuminati," Midoriya said. "Charles, Reed Richards, the rest of them. They had the Infinity Gauntlet. They used it to make a better world. Quirks, the hero system, all of it fabricated. Built from the top down." He looked up. "And when I fought Jean Grey, the two of us blew a hole in it."
"And now the world you were born into doesn't exist anymore."
"Correct."
Mr. M picked up his coffee mug, found it empty, and set it back down.
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"I don't know yet." He thought about Magneto flying to Genosha next, about the conversation he needed to have there. "Someone told me there might be a way to fix it. That the power that was used to build the old world is still out there somewhere, scattered." He stood. "I need to start from the beginning. Figure out what I actually am in this world, what's actually real, and then " He gestured at the space between them. "I'd like to start over. With you. If that's possible."
Mr. M looked at him for a long moment.
"Kid," he said slowly, "I don't know you. But I know what I can see when I look at someone." He studied Midoriya the way he studied broken machines with patience and without judgment. "You've been through a great deal."
"Yes."
"And you want to rebuild."
"Yes."
The old man nodded once.
"Then sit down," he said. "And start from the beginning."
Genosha was quieter than it had been.
The defense line was still being repaired. The memorials were still there. Magneto walked the grounds with the bearing of a man who had accepted that the work was never finished, only different.
He turned when he heard Midoriya land.
"So," he said. "You're back."
"You know me here."
"I do." Magneto folded his hands behind his back. "You look like you've been to see your family."
"My father's buried in a cemetery in Musutafu." He kept his voice steady. "The date on the stone is the day my powers came in."
Magneto's expression didn't change. He'd learned, over the course of a very long life, to hear terrible things without letting his face conduct them outward.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You did this." Not an accusation. Just a fact, laid on the table between them. "You and Charles and the others. You changed the world, and my parents weren't mutants in the old one; they had quirks, they had a life, and in this version, my father is dead, and my mother is afraid of me."
"Yes."
"Can you fix it?"
"We don't know where the power is. The ge hat was used when the reality was constructed. They're somewhere in this world, but finding them will take time." He met Midoriya's eyes. "There may be a way. It isn't fast. And it isn't certain."
Midoriya looked out at the ocean.
"I want in," he said. "Whatever the plan is. Whatever it takes."
"You understand what you're asking for."
"I don't have memories from this world. I have no life here. The version of me that grew up in this timeline is " He stopped. "Displaced. Lost. I can feel him in the edges of the memories Mr. M showed me." He looked back at Magneto. "I want to put things right. For him. For my father. For whatever reason, my mother isn't currently afraid to open her own door." He paused. "And if I can't do that, I want to at least do something useful while I'm figuring it out."
Magneto studied him. The same gaze he'd had in Genosha the first tim that first time, when Midoriya had been fifteen and bleeding and hadn't understood what he was being shown.
"There's a situation," Magneto said finally, "about forty miles east of here. Someone is causing problems. A mutant uncontrolled, I think, rather than malicious, but the distinction doesn't mean much to the people around them." He tilted his head. "I was going to send a team."
"I'll go."
"I know." He almost smiled. "That's why I mentioned it."
Midoriya turned east and left the ground.
Magneto stood on the shore and watched him diminish into the distance, a small shape against the gray sky, moving fast, trailing nothing.
He thought about Charles. About the careful architecture of secrets, the man was still maintaining. About the things that were going to surface eventually, whether any of them were ready or not, and the particular damage that came from deferred truths.
He breathed in. Breathed out.
Tread carefully, old friend, he thought. The boy is patient. But patience is not infinite.
He turned back toward the city and went to work.