⊱ ──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ────── ⊰

"Y/N ... COME HERE, IT'S OKAY."

Shoto held his arms out to the crying ghost, before remembering once again that she didn't have a corporeal form. Sometimes, when you cared for someone so much, it was hard to forgot they weren't "real", at least not in some senses.

Instead, he slid down the wall and patted the ground, letting her come to him when she was ready and sit next to him.

"It's okay," he hushed her, murmuring quietly in what he hoped was a comforting way, reaching out for her but never touching, hovering a hairbreadth away from her so he wouldn't go through her flickering image. "I promise, it's okay."

"He was there," Y/N spoke, her voice barely reaching a volume above a whisper, shaking. "It was just like ... I was dying all over again."

Shoto's heart broke to hear the words, the ones he'd so specifically feared. "Don't worry. I-it's okay."

It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. Shoto couldn't stop saying the words, over and over, like a broken cassette tape, knowing they wouldn't be enough despite the fact they were all he could say, to reassure her.

"I'm sorry." He found himself speaking his thoughts. "I'm sorry that's all I can say - all I can do."

"Sho ..." Y/N wiped her cheeks, turning to him and somehow mustering a weak smile. "Please. You- you do everything for me. You mean everything to me."

She looked away just as quickly as she'd said the words, pulling herself together. Collecting those broken shards of a shattered life, holding them so close to her chest they could draw blood, but she closed her eyes, and breathed, and exhaled, piecing herself back together.

It wasn't fair of her to put so much of her pain on Shoto's shoulders, she knew that.

"Midoriya ..."

Y/N flinched at the name.

"Midoriya wanted to see you," Shoto finished. "I left the choice to you - you don't need to do anything you don't want to."

Y/N truly, genuinely, considered it, but ...

"It's too painful to bring up memories of the past," she whispered, keeping her voice strong, struggling not to crack. "I can't die again."

Strangely, though he had thought those exact things before, now Shoto wanted her to talk to Midoriya, if only for the chance that he could lift the pain from her shoulders that she'd been weighed down by, all her good memories of being a kid hidden by trauma. 

But he'd let her make the choice, and if there was one code of honour for a Todoroki, it was that they never broke their word. 

So he simply nodded, standing, and said one word.

"Okay."

≻───── ⋆✩⋆ ─────≺ 

Y/N paced up and down the halls, staring at UA from the clean, clear windows, her thoughts no less destructive and chaotic within the boundaries of her mind than a cyclone, whirling around and around until she couldn't distinguish one question, one worry, from another.

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Too many memories of Midoriya flashed behind her eyelids, squeezed tightly shut, just flashes of a smile, a laugh, an extended hand, a hug. Y/N felt, not for the first time, trapped in her ghostly body, unable to escape the flood of reminders of when she was alive. Getting every child's wish to be able to fly was never worth dying for.

"I can't stand it," she said aloud, walking purposefully down the hall to follow a sign she'd read hundreds of times in a daze before Shoto had found her.

Shoto ... though Y/N's mind was already filled with confusing thoughts, there was somehow room for more as the image of the boy she knew so well came to the forefront of her mind.

Messy hair in red-and-white that had fallen into his vision so many times she'd begged him to cut it, heterochromatic eyes (one dark and grey, the other a vibrant turquoise) that saw the world, and her, so differently to anybody else, the scar on the left side of his face that just made him that much more beautiful.

Preoccupied, she accidentally ran through the wall, shaking her head with a sudden swirl of vertigo as she looked around.

Good - Y/N had found the library. Aisles upon aisles of books towering all the way to the ceiling, on every topic imaginable, from Quirk science to history.

Muttering under her breath, she ran for the far end of the library, where a spectral source had informed her would be a hidden nook of ghost-friendly (that is to say, tangible for ghosts) books just behind UA's section on science fiction.

Y/N ran her fingers over the covers of the books, almost crying when she felt the experience of touch for the first time in almost ten years - sure, she could hold things in the netherworld, but one could only feel in the world of the living.

She pulled a blue leather tome from the very left of the dusty shelf, opening it and flipping to the page number her source had instructed her to remember.

Three-seven-four, three-seven-four, three-seven-four ...

Excitedly, she stopped whipping the pages so abruptly she almost ripped the yellowed paper, eyes scanning the inky '374' in the bottom right-hand corner, before darting back up to the top.

The Anchor Method: A Spectral Study

The title was enough to make Y/N burst into tears, confirmation that all the whispers and rumours she'd been stocking up information on were all true, had led to this, this one vital discovery.

Clutching the book to her dress, nodding to herself and it shimmered, effectively concealing itself from living eyes as she held it, and Y/N began to run, calling a name at the top of her lungs.

"Shoto! Shoto! TODOROKI SHOTO!"

A faint yell came back to her, and Y/N immediately turned and jumped through the wall, emerging on the outside of UA's main building, five floors in the air, wind roaring in her ears as she plummeted down, landing on her back on the ground with no pain.

At least being dead had one perk.

However, when she flipped herself upwards to greet Shoto and tell him of her discovery, her smile slid off her face.

Ice pushed through her best friend's skin, his peppermint hair ruffling as cold wind surrounded him. 

Facing him was Midoriya, a murderous expression on the shorter boy's face, which melted to indignation as he turned to speak to Y/N.

"It's her choice, not yours!" Midoriya was crying furiously. "Y/N, tell him - tell him you want to see me!"

Y/N froze, the book falling from her arms and becoming corporeal again, her eyes flicking between her two best friends - one from each of her lives.

They were making her choose.

⊱ ──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ────── ⊰

thank you for reading this
book and i hope you enjoy it!
~ jazzi