Chapter Text
All for One, the greatest supervillain in Japan - perhaps the world - was completely and utterly useless.
His fantasy was crumbling all around him. Reality settled on his shoulders, as heavy as his sins and as relentless as the many monitors beeping beside him. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was cold and sterile. The warm interior design did little to provide any relief.
There was no escape.
He sat with his head in his hands, a chair pulled as close as it possibly could be to the incubator next to him. The incubator that held his tiny, tiny son. Born after 26 weeks. Not even 1 kilogram. Almost 100 days too early.
He could fit in his hand.
If he was allowed to hold him.
But he couldn’t. Izuku was so underdeveloped that he wasn’t able to differentiate between touch and pain yet. He was medically unstable. His lungs weren’t ready to breathe. His eyes weren’t ready to see. His skin wasn’t ready to be out in the air, his digestive system wasn’t ready to eat, his heart wasn’t ready to work on its own. There were so many things Izuku couldn’t do.
He wasn’t supposed to be here yet.
It was April.
He was supposed to be born in July.
Izuku wasn’t supposed to be out yet .
He was supposed to be in Inko’s belly.
But Inko wasn’t even here. No, Inko, his lovely wife who had stolen his black heart, lay cold and still in the morgue.
The emergency room in Musutafu General Hospital, where they went first, couldn’t help her once it was clear things were going wrong. Then by the time she had been transferred to Tanima Memorial Hospital, it was too late.
Preeclampsia.
HELLP syndrome.
Hemorrhage.
And then she was gone.
He hadn’t been able to prevent that either.
It hurt.
All his experience, all his knowledge, all his quirks - all for nothing. There was nothing he could’ve done to ensure his wife’s survival. Now, there was nothing he could do to make sure his son survived his first day on this planet either.
Izuku’s heart monitor beeped next to him. He waited for each heartbeat with bated breath.
It felt incredibly unfair that he had lived for nearly two centuries while anyone he dared to call family dropped around him like flies.
All for One lifted his head to stare at Izuku under the blue glow of the light the staff had placed on him to help with his jaundice.
His son was painfully tiny. His diaper was delicately folded over him, to avoid excessive skin contact. He looked less like a newborn and more like a miniature elderly person - all thin limbs, wrinkly, delicate skin, and wispy, barely there green hair. There was an IV line going into his upper arm, a mask protecting his eyes, a blood pressure cuff around his other arm, and a pulse oximeter around his foot. H e was on a ventilator because he could not breathe on his own and there was a small tube going down his throat that delivered surfactant to his lungs - amongst far too many other wires and tubes he did not know the purpose of.
He nearly disappeared underneath his hat, diaper, and all the medical equipment.
He looked nothing like the chubby, healthy baby he and Inko had hoped for.
All for One put his head back in his hands.
The NICU was unbearably silent.
In all his life, All for One had never felt so lost and small.
He didn’t know what to do.