He remembered exactly how to execute a BC-style wrist lock.
His hands were four years old.
The jar of pickles was winning.
'This is humiliating.'
He set the jar down. Looked at his hands. The muscle memory was all there — every angle, every weight shift, the six entry forms, the breathing that went with each one — and none of it could run on this hardware. Four-year-old wrists. Four-year-old grip strength. He had the software for a sixty-year-old warrior's body and a frame that still couldn't tie its own shoelaces reliably.
He asked Inko to open it.
She did it in one turn. Handed it back like it was nothing.
"Thank you," he said.
His expression was completely flat.
'The indignities of this are going to be ongoing.'
....
The months moved the way early years do. Slowly, then faster than expected.
He started what he could. Breath work first, because it cost nothing and looked like nothing from the outside — controlled cycles that pushed the diaphragm, built the foundation that didn't show up on any test but mattered in actual use. He ran them every morning in his room before she woke up. Inko caught him once and said he looked very focused. He said he was practicing for school. She accepted this because she wanted to and he let her.
Balance drills next. Standing still, to any observer. He did twenty minutes per session, single leg, eyes closed, surface variation where he could find it. The body adapted faster than expected. Four-year-old frames had no damage to undo — no old injuries, no compensations, no scar tissue that had healed slightly wrong. He made a note of this. Adjusted his projection forward by two months.
'The only advantage of starting small is you can build clean.'
Proprioception work after that. Coordination drills that looked like fidgeting. The kind of thing you could do at a dinner table and have your mother assume you were just being a strange child, which was accurate in a direction she wasn't considering.
He tracked everything in his head. No notes. Nothing that could be found.
Progress was slow. He logged it without celebration.
'Slow is fine. Slow compounds.'
....
The hero magazine was a monthly thing. Inko brought it home with the groceries and read him the good parts after dinner — big rescues, rankings, the interviews where heroes said something about determination that the journalist had cleaned up significantly from whatever they'd actually said.
The All Might feature was seventeen pages.
He sat and listened to all seventeen.
'I've read this man's full biography across two lifetimes. I know the wound. I know the timeline. I know what the smile is covering.'
Inko held up the centerfold spread — All Might punching through a reinforced concrete building mid-collapse to reach a hostage on the other side. The page had a watercolor tint. Very dramatic.
'That building is load-bearing. He's going to love the structural report.'
She pointed at the punch and said: wasn't that amazing? He said yes. She asked if he could imagine having a power like that. He said it was hard to imagine. She laughed and said he was so practical sometimes.
In the Clover Kingdom, the Wizard King had once leveled an entire ridgeline by accident. It was a demonstration that got away from him. The subsequent paperwork was a kingdom-level event. He'd been in the room when the junior clerks were still counting structural casualties three weeks later.
All Might's punch was a very clean punch.
'Genuinely tidy entry angle. I'll give him that.'
"Do you think you'll be a hero someday?" Inko asked.
He looked at the magazine.
"Maybe," he said.
She smiled. The smile that meant she was proud of him for not saying no.
What he meant was: I know exactly how complicated that question is, and I am choosing not to answer it in front of someone who is already worried about the answer.
....
The assessment ran every morning before the breath work. He'd started it the first week and hadn't missed a day.
Current body capability. Target body capability. Projected timeline. Acceptable behavioral deviation from a normal child his age.
Nine years. Maybe ten.
He'd run the math four different ways and landed in the same range every time. Not pessimism — math. Phase 1 was foundation work only. He was not going to overtrain a growing frame. He'd done that in the BC life and paid for it in three years of recurring injury at exactly the wrong juncture. Three years he'd spent recovering when he should have been moving.
Not again.
'Last time I had rage, a terrible methodology, and absolutely no plan.'
He thought about Asta's training. The pre-dawn fields. The specific, stupid, effective logic of pushing a body with no magic to lean on until the body built something magic couldn't replicate. He'd watched it happen once from the outside. Then he'd lived it himself for thirty years.
He knew what the end of that road looked like.
'This time I have the methodology and the patience. That's better. Marginally.'
Nine years.
'Fine.'
He started the breath work.
....
He heard her in the doorway and didn't open his eyes.
He was eleven minutes into the long cycle. Back straight, hands on knees, the breathing pattern that no child learned from YouTube and no four-year-old ran by default. He'd been calibrating how visible this was for the past three months. Timing the sessions around her schedule. He had a fifteen-minute window most mornings.
He'd miscalculated tonight.
She stood in the gap in the door.
He finished the cycle. Sat still for another ten seconds — breaking it early produced worse results than finishing, he'd confirmed this — then opened his eyes and turned his head.
She was in her pajamas. She had the expression she got when she didn't know how to start the question she was trying to ask.
"Breathing exercises," he said.
"Oh," she said.
A pause.
"They help me sleep."
"Okay." She looked at him another moment. "Goodnight, Izuku."
"Goodnight."
She left.
He tracked her footsteps. Kitchen. The soft sound of her phone screen waking up. The pause that meant she was typing.
'She's searching something.'
He sat in the dark and calculated. The session had been twelve minutes long. She'd had a clear sightline. The posture was the tell — the posture and the pattern, neither of which looked like anything a normal child did.
He added the incident to his calibration file.
Adjusted the window forward by thirty minutes.
Then he lay down on his back and looked at the ceiling and thought: nine years.
It had felt like nothing in the abstract.
In a four-year-old's body, running breath cycles and balance drills and proprioception work while his mother searched is my child a prodigy in the kitchen —
'This is going to be a long nine years.'
He closed his eyes.
'Worth it, though.'
He fell asleep.
--
TO BE CONTINUED