I stand here looking over at this planet, and I wonder why I was sent away.
This place was made for people like me. Mutants. We can use what we have to build or to destroy, and nobody here pretends there's a difference. Back home, they called me a freak. A monster. Every name that wasn't my own. I tried to do good, and they turned their backs on me anyway.
But here? Her,e they look at me differently.
Here I'm something else entirely.
And I'm not the only one.
The first thing he was aware of was the blue.
Everything was blue: the light, the liquid, the curved glass surrounding him. He was floating. That registered slowly, the way things register when your brain is coming back online after being somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.
He tried to breathe.
His lungs seized. Something was in his throat tubing, he realized, medical tubing, running down into him, nd the panic hit before the thinking could catch up with it. He threw his right fist outward on pure instinct.
The glass tank exploded.
The liquid hit the floor of the room in a wave, alarms screamed into life, and Midoriya dropped to his knees and tore the mask from his face and pulled the tube from his throat, hand over hand, which was one of the more unpleasant physical experiences of his life, and that was saying something. He retched until his stomach had nothing left to give, then stayed on all fours for a moment with the alarm still blaring and looked down at his hands.
Black suit. Full coverage, material he didn't recognize. A room full of other tanks, some occupied, some shattered, liquid pooling across the metal floor.
"Charles," he said.
The word came out rough and wrong. He said it again, and it didn't get better.
Then the audio system activated.
"Izuku." The voice was composed, measured, deliberate, the voice of a man who had prepared this message carefully and recorded it without hesitation. "I'm sorry. Truly. But you've become something we can't manage, and I should have addressed this long before now. You're being sent somewhere you can settle. Someone is already there who understands what it is to carry more power than the world knows how to hold. I hope, in time, you'll see this was necessary."
The message ended.
Midoriya stayed on the floor for a moment.
Then he stood up.
The room lurched.
The ship was already in trouble; he could feel it through the deck plates, the irregular vibration of something catastrophic happening to the navigation systems. Something else was loose in the lower levels. Something very large and very angry, which he confirmed when the ceiling of the room buckled inward and a green fist the size of a refrigerator punched through it.
The Hulk dropped into the room, looked around at the wreckage, and hit the external wall hard enough to open a hole directly to space.
The ship began to come apart.
Midoriya grabbed the nearest stable structure, pushed his power out through his feet to anchor himself against the decompression, and looked at the pod beside him. Someone is still inside. He crossed the room in two steps, tore the door off its hinges, and stepped back as the containment liquid poured over his boots.
The woman inside pulled the mask off her own face, gasping, and looked at him with eyes that were still adjusting to the light.
"Don't touch me," she said immediately.
"Wasn't planning to." He held his hands up. "Are you hurt?"
"I don't," She blinked. Shook her head. Took stock. "No. I don't think so." She looked around the ruined room, at the hole in the ceiling, at the alarms that were still somehow active. "What happened?"
"Ship's going down. We need to move."
They moved.
The crash landing was not subtle.
He didn't remember the impact; there was a moment of extreme velocity and then a moment of lying face-down in alien soil with a ringing in his ears that gradually resolved into the sound of wreckage settling. He got up. His suit was torn at the shoulder. He was otherwise fine, which remained strange no matter how many times it happened.
The woman, whom he had given the name of Rogue, which he accepted without comment, was picking herself up twenty feet away, which meant she'd been thrown clear, which meant she was probably fine too.
The Hulk was already fighting.
The creatures coming over the ridge were organized, armed, in formations, with the particular efficiency of something that did this regularly. The Hulk was ignoring the formations and going through them anyway, which was working until one of them hit him with something that stuck to his neck and made him drop.
The Hulk went to his knees. He stared at the disc on his neck with an expression that was equal parts fury and confusion, and then looked up at the closest enemy, and then very slowly began to turn toward Midoriya.
"No," the Hulk said. Straining against it.
"Yeah," Midoriya said. "I figured."
The first blow caught him in the chest and sent him through a section of downed hull plating. He came through the other side and kept his footing and decided in the half-second he had before the Hulk reached him again that he was not going to hit back. Not because he couldn't. Because it wasn't the Hulk's fault, and because hitting him harder would just make him angrier.
So he held on instead. He grabbed the Hulk's arms and held, and took the hits that got through, and waited.
The disc found him two minutes later.
He went to his knees. The disc's signal ran through him and found the same thing it found in the Hulk, something too large for the technology to fully contain, and for a moment, the two of them were kneeling on the alien soil, both fighting the same thing, and neither of them winning entirely.
An alien stepped forward and looked down at them.
"Very lively," it said, in words that resolved into English somewhere between the alien's mouth and Midoriya's ears. "You will both do well."
"As what?" Midoriya said.
"As gladiators."
He looked around at the crashed ship, at the alien sky, at the creatures surrounding them, at Rogue being held at spear point thirty feet away, and thought, with the particular exhaustion of someone who had been through a great deal recently:
Of course.
They were marched into a city that looked like every civilization that had ever fallen and gotten back up and incorporated the rubble into the architecture. Towers of salvage rose alongside older stone. The streets were loud and smelled of something burning and something cooking and the particular funk of a large population that had been crowded together for a long time.
People stared.
Midoriya walked between two guards with his hands loose at his sides and looked at everything with the flat attention of someone cataloguing exits.
The Hulk walked beside him.
"Hulk," Midoriya said quietly. "Do you have any idea what's going on?"
"No." The Hulk's voice was like gravel shifting. "Friends trick Hulk. Send Hulk away."
"Yeah." He thought about Charles's message. The careful, composed, pre-recorded apology. "Same."
Rogue appeared at his other shoulder. The guards had given her slightly more space, which suggested they'd gotten a demonstration of why that was necessary. She looked at him sidelong.
"You know who's responsible for this," she said.
"Charles."
"You're sure."
"He implanted memories in my head once before. He's the only telepath with the range to wipe eight months of memory and make it stick." He watched a cart full of something unidentifiable roll past them on the street. "He said I was dangerous. That they should have done this a long time ago." He paused. "He wasn't wrong about the first part."
"That doesn't make it right."
"No," he agreed. "It doesn't."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "He did it to me too. Wiped it. I can feel the edges of it like a word you can't remember, somewhere it should be and isn't." Her jaw set. "What happened during those months? What did you do that scared him enough to?"
"I don't know. That's the problem."
She looked ahead. Her expression was controlled, but her eyes were doing a lot of work.
"I can try to jog it," she said. "Give me things. Events. Names. See what surfaces."
He thought. Reached back into the fog. "Hyperion. The Squadron Supreme."
Something moved in her face. "You fought him."
"Apparently. And the Juggernaut." He watched her reaction. "That one didn't go well."
"People died."
"A lot of them." He felt it not memory exactly, but the shape of memory, the weight of something he hadn't been present for but that had happened to him anyway. "What else?"
She hesitated.
The hesitation was long enough that he turned to look at her properly. She was looking at the ground in front of her feet.
"Rogue."
"Sixteen million," she said.
He stopped walking.
A guard prodded him from behind. He didn't move.
"What?"
"Sixteen million mutants." Her voice was very careful. Very even. "There was an event. It happened during those months. Sixteen million "
He grabbed her by both arms.
"Are you serious?"
"Let go of me."
"Are you serious?"
"Let go," she said, sharp and low, "because if you don't, I will make you, and you won't enjoy it."
He released her.
His hands were shaking.
She straightened her jacket. She didn't look at him for a moment, gave him the space of a few steps before she said, quietly: "Look at my memories if you don't believe me. I'm not lying to you."
He reached out carefully, the way Mr. M had once shown him, the way he'd done a handful of times since, and touched the surface of what she was offering.
He saw it.
He didn't see all of it. He didn't need to. What he saw was enough: the scale of it, the aftermath, the number spoken in a news report over footage that his brain refused to fully process. He pulled back. He was on his knees before he realized he'd gone down.
Power was leaking from somewhere. He could feel it at the corners of his eyes, the particular sensation of the void rising without being called, responding to something emotional rather than intentional, the way it had when he was a child and didn't know how to hold it back. He pressed his hands flat against the alien ground and breathed.
Rogue crouched in front of him.
She reached out and touched his face.
Nothing happened.
She blinked. He blinked. She pulled her hand back and looked at it, then looked at him.
"I can't copy you," she said.
"What?"
"When I touch someone, I take their power. Their life force." She was staring at her own hand like it had done something unexpected. "It hurts them. I can't always stop it." She looked back up at him. "I'm not taking anything from you."
He had no explanation for that. Neither did she.
She grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet.
"When we get out of this," she said, "we go back and find out why they did it. All of it."
"Yeah," he said. "We do."
"Move," said a guard, and they moved.
The arena was enormous.
He stood in the preparation chamber beneath it with the rest of what he was apparently now part of a group the guards called the Warbound, assembled from the planet's strongest survivors, serving the Red King's entertainment or dying in the attempt. The Hulk was there. Rogue. Others he didn't have names for yet, but who all had the look of people who had been through something and were still here.
Above them, through the grates, they could hear the crowd.
Midoriya looked at the weapon they'd given him. He tightened his grip on the handle and felt the metal begin to give slowly, the alloy compressing under the pressure he was applying without thinking about it. He let go and set it down.
He didn't need it.
He picked it up again and threw it casually at the far wall. The stone cracked.
"That's a lot of points," Rogue said from beside him.
"Yeah." He flexed his hand. Looked at the ceiling. "You ever think we're getting out of here?"
"Honestly? I don't know." She glanced at the Hulk, who was sitting with his forearms on his knees and his eyes half-closed, larger than when they'd arrived, Midoriya had noticed. Something about this planet was amplifying him. "But I think our best option is to fight our way to the top and see what the view looks like from there."
The Hulk opened one eye. "Fight to the top. Then leave. Simple."
"He's right," Midoriya said.
"Someone's going to point out that you can't just leave," Rogue said. "Apparently that's a thing here."
"With respect," Midoriya said, "they clearly don't know our history."
Above them, the Red King watched.
His box had the best sight lines in the arena; he'd had it built that way, had the previous box's occupant removed, and the sightlines adjusted to his specifications. He sat with his advisors around him and watched the new acquisitions with the careful attention of a man who collected valuable things and knew how to assess them.
The green one he'd had reports on. Remarkable creature with raw destructive capacity that exceeded anything currently in his stable, and it was growing. The planet itself seemed to feed it somehow, the gravity and atmosphere interacting with its biology in ways his scientists were still arguing about.
But the other one.
The one in the black suit.
He'd watched him take a direct hit from the ion cannon, the weapon that had ended three gladiatorial careers in the past month alone, and fall into the lava moat below the arena floor, and then get back up. Not immediately. There had been twenty seconds. But he'd watched the damage close. Watched the destroyed tissue rebuild itself in real time. Watched the gladiator stand up from the lava, somewhat on fire, and look at the ion cannon with the flat expression of someone filing information away.
And the things he could do. The power of multiple expressions of it, layered, some of them he'd seen before individually but never in combination. Strength that bent metal. Flight. Energy projection that came from the hands, from the eyes, sometimes from the entire body at once. And something else, something structural, something that changed the gladiator's form, not quite consistently enough to predict.
The Red King leaned back in his chair and considered.
What are you? He thought, watching the figure in the arena below dispatch another opponent with efficient, almost bored precision.
And how do I use you?
That night, in the preparation chamber, the Warbound sat together for the first time without guards in earshot.
The Hulk spoke first slowly, in the deliberate way he'd been speaking more lately, complete thoughts rather than fragments. "Hulk knows how it is. Not wanted. People run from Hulk. Call Hulk monster." He looked at the floor. "On this world, Hulk is strong. Not monster. Strongest one here."
"It's not so different for us," Rogue said.
"On your world, you are also the strongest?"
"Nomeanmen," She glanced at Midoriya. "We're not wanted either. Mutants. People are afraid of what they don't understand."
"I can kill someone just by touching them," Rogue said to the general group. Someone shifted uneasily. "I can't always stop it. I've learned to manage it, mostly. But it's always there."
One of the other Warbound looked at Midoriya.
He thought about what to say. He thought about sixteen million, which was still sitting in him like a weight he hadn't found a place to put down yet.
"I've never been able to use my full power back home," he said finally. "Every time I came close, something went wrong. People died. Buildings came down." He looked at his hands. "Here it's different. Here, some things can actually take a hit. I'm not going to pretend I haven't been that I haven't been enjoying it. More than I should probably admit."
"More fun than killing the Phoenix?" Rogue said, dry.
The chamber went quiet.
"You said that earlier," she added.
"Yeah." He looked at the ceiling. "I did. That probably sounded bad."
"It sounded honest," one of the Warbound said.
"It was." He thought about Jean, bout the way the Phoenix had sounded speaking through her, the way it had looked when it finally withdrew. "It wasn't fun. But it was the first time I ever used everything I had. The first time I stopped holding back." He turned his hand over. "There's something in me that's been waiting for permission to be what it is since I was ten years old. I spent years making myself smaller. And then " He gestured at the arena above them. "Sakaar didn't ask for my restraint."
The chamber was quiet again.
Rogue looked at him sidelong.
"When we get out," she said.
"When we get out," he agreed.
"You're really thinking about going back. After what they did."
"I need to know why." He leaned his head back against the wall. "The sixteen million. What happened to my father? What Charles chose not to tell me, and why." He closed his eyes. "I need the whole truth before I can decide anything. And I can't get it from here."
Rogue was quiet.
He could feel the void moving beneath his surface, restless, awake, aware of his emotional state, the way it always was now, the way it had been since it told him your fear is my fear in the dark water below the Phoenix battle.
"You're doing it again," Rogue said.
"What?"
"Disappearing."
He opened his eyes. He looked at his hand, translucent at the edges, the shadows of the chamber bleeding through his skin. He focused and pulled himself back to solid.
"Sorry," he said. "It does that when I'm thinking too hard."
"That's alarming."
"I know."
She looked at him for a moment, a particular look of someone reassessing a situation they thought they'd understood.
"You're a freak," she said. "You know that."
"I've been told."
"I mean it as " She paused. Seemed to decide something. "I've never met anyone my powers don't work on. Not once. Not in my whole life." She held his gaze. "I don't know what that means. But it means something."
He didn't have an answer for that.
She didn't seem to need one.
Above them, the arena was dark and quiet. Tomorrow it wouldn't be. Tomorrow, there would be opponents and crowds and the Red King watching from his box, trying to figure out how to use them.
They'd give him a show.
And then, eventually, they'd leave.
Midoriya closed his eyes and let the darkness of Sakaar settle around him, and somewhere in the quiet, the void settled to patiently waiting, his and for the first time since he'd woken up in the tank with Charles's voice in the air around him, he felt the shape of a plan beginning to form.
First: the top.
Then: home.
Then: the truth.
In that order. No matter what it costs.