No matter how strongly you feel, it won't tip a scale outside your control.

Todoroki Shouto had told him this, once, years ago. They'd been starting their hero careers, rookies fresh out of Yuuei, Shouto working with the father he'd reconciled with after nearly two decades and Izuku working with what remained of Toshinori Yagi's agency.

In the aftermath of a brutal, bloody catastrophe, the two had come upon a man who'd been skewered on some jagged broken piece of something, perhaps a pipe – not that Izuku had paid any attention to what it was. He'd been more concerned with the human being in his death-throes right before their eyes, and as Izuku struggled to save him, Todoroki had stepped forward, squeezing the shoulder of the other's dark-green hero costume.

"Midoriya."

"Todoroki-kun…"

"He's been dead for two minutes now."

"Ah, um, Deku?" Another voice broke into Todoroki's, and Izuku opened his eyes halfway, catching sight of a middle-aged man in a lab coat – a doctor. The man was nervous, but of course he was; he was talking to Deku, the number one hero, a quick thinker and tactician with an unstoppably powerful Quirk and a man whose endearingly plain visage struck fear into impure hearts. He was also talking to Midoriya Izuku, who – at the moment – was utterly unconcerned with his status as a hero.

"Eh?" he slurred, half-dozing in the waiting room armchair. "Ah, mm…Doctor-san. I'm sorry, I don't remember your name."

"Oh, don't worry about it. My name is Takahashi."

Takahashi. A fairly common family name. Easy enough to remember. "Takahashi-san," Izuku corrected himself, staggering to his feet. "What's the news?"

"I'm…it's best if you see for yourself."

A couple of months prior, Uraraka Ochako had been diagnosed with stage-three stomach cancer. She'd been having stomach problems for some time, but had always managed to write them off as something else, or a side effect of overusing her Quirk doing hero work that day, and it wasn't until she'd vomited blood one night that Izuku had forced her to go to the hospital.

They'd told her that her odds of survival were less than four percent. She hadn't let him see her cry.

And so it was that Izuku stood stunned in the brown-painted doorway of the hospital, staring at what was left of his girlfriend.

The cancer had metastasized – of course it had – and progressed too far to be operable. Ochako had opted not to be treated; even though never giving up had been part of her mantra as a hero, she'd told Izuku the night she was admitted that "sometimes, ya just gotta throw in the towel, y'know?"

They'd talked to a dozen or more doctors. The consensus had been that her Quirk had been slowly damaging the cells of her stomach each time she used it on herself or pushed its limits, and the cancer was something that had been developing since they were students at Yuuei Academy.

And here I was thinking that my Quirk was the one most likely to get me killed all this time.

His eyes traced the tubes sticking out of her body at irregular intervals, watched the slow rise and fall of her chest. She'd always been curvy, and that made her emaciation so much more tangible.

"It's…her parents have the legal right to this decision, and they've decided to let her go. I thought you might like to…to say goodbye," Takahashi murmured, quiet enough for only Izuku to hear, and he gave a stiff nod, swallowing past a hard lump in his throat that hadn't been there a minute past.

"Yeah, I'd…I'd like that very much. Thank you."

He approached her bed, gingerly, quietly. There was no response; her body had already destroyed itself past the point of no return, and it was doing all it could just to remain functioning, if comatose.

This was a slumber she wouldn't wake from.

Unbidden, a thousand memories flickered to mind, rays of sunshine in a twilight wood.

The two of them on a hilltop, watching the stars swirl above.

Izuku, awkward and teenaged, in a horrific brown tuxedo, blushing furiously as Ochako twirled gleefully around him in her pink dress, laughing like nothing could ever go wrong.

"Sorry for using my Quirk on you without asking…but it's bad luck to trip and fall on your first day!"

Ochako in an apron, bouncing to the beat of some pop song as they cooked dinner together in their apartment.

The raw determination on her face as she touched five fingers to a slab of rubble the size of a school bus and shoved it away from a dozen or more prone bodies, stemming a crimson tide before it even began.

The day they'd come up with their first special move together. "Special combo attack: Meteor Shower!"

Her fight with Bakugou Katsuki during their first sports festival tourney, where she'd refused to give up no matter how many times she was knocked down.

The way she shone like the stars.

"Hey, Izukkun! My application went through! I can start my own agency now, isn't that amazin'!?"

"Yeah, Occhan, that's incredible! I'm so proud of you!"

Dancing, slowly, awkwardly, under an oak tree, to music only they could hear.

The breathless whisper of his name from her lips as her bare skin shone like pearls under silver moonlight.

The agony of three broken limbs as he rushed to save her from the zero-point robot in their entrance exam, and how it had absolutely, one hundred percent been worth it.

The day they'd confessed, almost simultaneously, and fallen over in a fit of hysterical giggles.

The two of them, bruised and battered in a tent during rescue operations after a tsunami devastated half the eastern coastline. Izuku had given her his blanket.

Her asleep on the sofa in the evening, golden sunlight pouring down on her sleeping face and lighting it up in a glow so divine he could have sworn she was an angel.

The way she'd laughed when he'd brought her a simple leather sheath to cover her pinky with, so her Quirk wouldn't activate by accident.

The scent of her, vanilla and perfect.

Their first kiss.

Her eyes.

Her.

And now she was going to die, far sooner than anyone had ever been ready for, and there was nothing Izuku could do, no matter how many tears he shed, no matter the anguish he felt.

He'd given what must have been hundreds of speeches, but faced with the loss of the one person he'd ever loved, he found himself out of words, out of life.

"Goodbye, Occhan."

He knew she'd understand.

The world might mourn Uravity, but Midoriya Izuku would mourn Uraraka Ochako.