deercountry | 16 . spring catch-all

John, by this point, has been through a few swaps; he knows what's happening, and knows what to expect. Body for body, nothing of particular interest attached. Everything really useful seems to follow the soul. He could write papers about it, if he had any particular regard for the School of Mutter, or them for him.

So he's completely blindsided by this one.

His own body jolts forward in open horror, and John himself leans back, hands coming up so he can look at his borrowed palms. The ache and shudder of Midoriya's Corruption is new and dizzying, but it can only keep his attention for a moment. His gaze has already gone faraway, brow furrowed in fascination, as he takes stock of the jumbled not-quite-souls crowding in against his own.

"Alright," he says, slowly. "This one's a little new and different." And then, as if to himself: "Not my call, really."

Midoriya's palms are scarred, especially the right one, and squarish in proportion to his body. His body moves well despite the aches from not taking care of himself and promises the bounce-back of youth if only he'd take the time to stop.

("Yeah sure pal, you better--" "Wait just a minute!") Midoriya is unaware of the shouting voices (male-sounding except for one woman) and responds to John only.

"Listen, I don't know what's going on here if it's not your call, and I know it's really tempting to try out stuff, but please don't try to use my power. Your limbs would explode... that is, my limbs..."

Alarmed, Midoriya tries to turn on Danger Sense, but he's as Quirkless as the day he was born. Oh boy. If a supervillain ever wanted to permanently defeat him, all they'd have to do is mess up his body beyond repair. But the beef between Midoriya and John isn't kill-on-sight.

It's a hell of a contrast. John's body is just a body: in youngish middle age, not particularly athletic, not even fueled by Lyctoral might now that they've— somehow— decoupled the power source. He flexes Midoriya's fingers in baffled fascination, reflexively trying to feel out the edges of the power that is nothing like his own.

"I'm not going to explode your limbs," he says, almost absently. Like it's a sidenote, less pressing than the more important issues at hand. "I've sworn off exploding people, in whole or in part. By popular demand."

He follows this by finally looking up to meet Midoriya's eyes. "I'm more interested," he admits, and waves that scarred hand in a vague gesture beside his head, "in what I can only loosely describe as a haunting."

The voices go silent. Perhaps the vestiges see the quiet dread on John's face (as piloted by Midoriya) at the thought of his secrets getting out. There is a persistent feeling though, as if they are chomping at the bit to ruin John's day. The voices can intrude, but the power itself lies dormant until called on. Even in Midoriya's world, little is known about the Plus Alpha Elements that grant a human body a Quirk. Usually Quirks are genetic, but Midoriya's is not.

It's uncanny seeing his face (those eyes...) and gestures being so different. Like horror movies where the reflection in the mirror doesn't follow the character.

"It's really easy to use too much power, but the good news is it's not so easy to activate in the first place."

All Might said the trick was clenching one's buttocks and yelling SMASH!! Technically that worked...

"My Quirk appeared late," he half-lies more easily than someone of his honest disposition should, "so my body doesn't accidentally turn it on as a reflex like some people. I trained specifically so that wouldn't happen. You could have a regular day and not explode my limbs."

Please don't explode my limbs... Fine control over sending it coursing through him is like being a bottle just barely holding in its lightning. Midoriya likened it to an egg heated in a microwave moments before disaster.

"Quirks are physical abilities, so it's part of my body. Um... What Palamedes-san told me about necromancy sounds... different..."

He's in no hurry to try seeing if he has a power he doesn't understand. What if he accidentally turns himself inside out?

"My necromancy is something else."

He drops his hands, and seems to drop to some degree of resignation, too: his tone is weary, serious.

"Funny how power works, right? When a guy has too much, it's always too easy to use it... And the local atmosphere doesn't help." He tips his head to Trench, in the broad sense, around them. "Makes things erratic... unreliable. That has to be a hassle for everyone who can shoot lightning, bench press cars, the usual.

"You need the right kind of body and the right kind of soul, for necromancy. You're short on the second, and let's be glad for it. Rule of thumb, necromancers don't do lightning... we only deal in death."

When you hand someone the ability to stop every heart in a kilometre radius, no one can be that surprised at what a slip-up looks like.

It's strange watching his body speak to him in the way Mr. Aizawa does after a particularly grueling day of teaching class: old and tired in a relatively young body. (But he knows John isn't anywhere near young, and remembering how he learned this from Paul is sobering.)

"It's not really lightning. The energy just sort of needs to go somewhere, like a too-full cup. But I haven't shocked anyone... I'm a Warmblood, so whatever the 'blood weather' does isn't too bad."

That's what he's taken to calling it, the fluctuations month to month that make people anxious, affectionate, or just weird. But all this pales next to what Midoriya really worries about:

"So that's why you call it a... haunting." Does he think I killed a bunch of vengeful spirits?

He looks at the palm of his (John's) hand and remembers that empires are built with the deaths of others. He also remembers the origin of his Quirk. It was inadvertently created by a supervillain. Like Midoriya, he too accumulated power and granted multiple Quirks to his science experiments. This was why Midoriya was mistaken for a monster back home when he gave up trying to hide his extra powers.

He says in a small, quiet voice, "But isn't it that you also deal in life?"

Blood weather is a charming phrase for it, and John softens a little at that, amused. The moment is still and quiet as Midoriya frowns down at John's plain brown hands, and as John watches him, holding two sets of destructive power.

Handing his out doesn't bear thinking about. Maybe that means he should be ready for it, someday. Maybe he'd watch some other guy nearly dig their fingers to the soul of the planet and get slapped down for it. The concept feels very far away, and makes him so goddamn tired.

"Sometimes."

He touches Midoriya's fingertips to his temple, as though he can touch the spirits— the fragments?— imprinted on the body.

"We can heal. We can perceive the soul, the essence of a person... we can talk to them after they're gone."

No one responds to the gesture. In visual media characters use gestures as stances, or people to use them for concentration, but it doesn't affect the vestiges hovering at the edges of perception (one a bit less "solid" than the rest).

"You could be doing so much good, bringing life instead of death..." he murmurs. "We need to find a way to switch back."

Here's the tricky bit. Awkwardness of having a different body aside, does John want to give up having two sets of power? Granted, Midoriya's Quirk is difficult to use. He learned that the hard way. Furthermore, the vestiges would harry John every step of the way. But, Midoriya surmises, one doesn't rule an empire for ten thousand years without being persistent.

Midoriya counts on John's lack of knowledge about his Quirk to prevent himself from panicking. John isn't the only one who can hardly bear to think about a worst-case scenario.

John doesn't flinch at the implication he's been wasting his power on vengeance, much as the subject has hung so loudly unspoken these past few months. He does look up, his eyes two deep shadows in Midoriya's face, with an air of deep exhaustion.

"I've done that bit," he says, of bringing life. "I've sworn off resurrections."

Still. He drops his borrowed hands, and splays his palms again like a man giving up without a fight.

"I'm with you. Any cursebreaking ideas? I'll hear them."

("Hey, just what do you mean about resurrections? Are you messing around with corpses? Hoping to make bigger better humans, huh? Well, I got news for you--" "Shut up a minute!")

"Not undead, no..." Midoriya says, oblivious to the bickering going on inside John's head. He just thinks John is touching his own head to check that everything is where it's meant to be. He knows necromancy can sense bodily processes like that. "I meant healing. Which is why I thought you might have more ideas about how the body works than me. My Quirk doesn't heal or rewind or anything like that."

Just a bunch of odd comic book superpowers in addition to the voices he never talks about with anyone he's met in Trench. He gently and experimentally rolls his shoulders. He's technically a Darkblood now, isn't he...

"I don't know if our Omens switched too. Uh... your Omen... won't attack me, will they?"

He levels slightly wide eyes at John-in-his-body. The insectoid horror was a force to be reckoned with on the beach. Midoriya remembers aiming air blasts at her as covering fire for Paul's mad dash across the black sand.

16 . spring catch-all

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