"...I don't know what you want me to say right now."

The inky blackness around me didn't see fit to reply. It never did. This place, that I'd managed to stumble into after a particularly bad day of being alive, had absolutely no character. In case you were wondering, that also included a voice.

Maybe there should have been a pearly gate. Maybe there should have been brimstone and hellfire. Maybe I shouldn't have walked through that alley in the dead of night looking for a shortcut. Maybe I shouldn't have seen too much. Maybe I shouldn't have tried to swim while wearing cement shoes.

Life is full of maybes. Death, as I've come to understand, is almost utterly devoid of them.

Sure, there was a void of nothingness surrounding me, so absolute and desolate that I sometimes had to wonder if I even had eyes anymore. But every now and then I would come across… something. I would never be able to fully understand what they were, beyond a colour that almost matched something that I'd seen before, and a shape that could have contained millions of edges, for all I could tell.

My first interaction with them had been as soon as I'd become aware of my surroundings. I would have said opened my eyes, but once again, I'd have to question myself. Whatever it had been, it'd been the only thing I've ever seen here have any sort of momentum other than myself. It would have slammed into me, directly over my heart, had the cement shoes not somehow followed me through the grave and dragged me down.

I was still on a downwards trend, movement-wise. I'd not managed to remove them, or really bend my body far enough to try. The full scope of my abilities seemed to stop at indistinct wriggling, which had somehow been enough so far for me to avoid the shapes and colours.

Maybe it was paranoia speaking, but there was a horrible feeling in my gut that something, anything would go terribly wrong if one of them touched me.

I hung my maybe-head in the silence. There wasn't much of anything I could do, beyond try to sleep, maybe even move on.

A glint caught my maybe-eye in the darkness. It was a fair ways away, closing the distance rapidly from beneath me. It had a circular shape, far more distinct than anything else I'd ever seen here.

I wouldn't be able to move out of the way in time for this one, not when it was matching my trajectory almost perfectly. It was rushing up to meet me, aimed at my face in a way that would only have been possible in a place of seemingly infinite room and possibility.

Oh well, I thought, as the ball punched into my nose and finally arrested my momentum, at least I like purple.

XxX

I woke up crying.

As far as I could tell, there wasn't really any good reason for this. My chest didn't hurt any, even though I'd taken what basically amounted to a cannonball to the heart. I wasn't all that sad about leaving that place behind, but I didn't think I was happy enough to weep in joy.

Come to think of it, it sounded higher pitched than I could remember. Not that I'd cried to this degree in quite some time, but it sounded… young. Infantile, even.

"Congratulations!" I heard someone above me say, his voice low and warm. I tried to stop crying, because who was this asshole to mock me like that, but the suddenness of his words only made me cry harder. "It's a boy!"

It's a what now?

Still sobbing uncontrollably, I tried to open my eyes. It may as well have been the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life, my muscles felt like putty and my eyelids may as well have been stitched together for all the progress it felt like I wasn't making.

Even so,one eye slowly cracked open. The lights surrounding me burned my retinas, but there was no chance I could stop now. The other eye followed, and I blinked a few times to get me back into the habit and clear the dots from my vision a little. The tears still streaming down my cheeks didn't help any in that regard.

A woman's face smiled down at me, tired and stressed and perhaps the happiest I'd ever seen another human being look. There was something strange about her, something a bit off, but that didn't stop the compulsion to reach out and touch her dimples.

Except my arm wasn't long enough. That definitely wasn't right, this woman's face was so close, I should have been able to reach it three times over.

That's when I actually saw my arm. My stubby, chubby, definitely little baby arm.

The cry died in my throat as I took it in. It was… tiny.

I was tiny.

Oh please no, I didn't sign up for this! Take me back!

The woman, who was apparently my new mother, nodded down to me, her eyes crinkling at the edges. It was a nice expression, strangely harmonic with the way her spherical hair bobbed with the movement- what the fuck?

"My little baby boy, we'll call you Minoru." She coed down at me, cuddling me close even as my blood ran cold. So, surely she couldn't have said what I think she said. I was just confused and hearing things incorrectly, that must be it-

"Mineta Minoru."

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO," I tried to scream.

"WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!" is what came out instead.

XxX

Being a baby is just a constant cycle of sleeping, eating, and shitting your pants. Aside from that last one, I was all about this brand new stage in life.

As you might suspect, this didn't give me much agency to do anything for the time being. I wasn't old enough to walk yet, and talking led to me babbling an incoherent mess that would tumble out of my mouth until I used up the tiny amount of energy I had and fell asleep again.

Being a baby was exhausting. As you can likely imagine, it was also more than a little brain-numbingly boring.

I wasn't old enough to justify parking my ass in front of the television for hours on end. My cardboard limbs couldn't move me around enough for any joy to be taken out of exercise. Hell, I couldn't even hold a conversation, what chance in hell did I have of holding a book?

All I had were my hours upon hours of dreams, and my own thoughts. Those weren't much help on the matter either.

The dreams were all fairly stock standard. I would be lying if I said I wasn't hoping to get something, anything out of them. Maybe some hint of how I'd really gotten here or where I'd come from, but there was nothing. I highly doubted me escaping the zombie apocalypse on the back of a dragon made of ivy vines had anything to do with the matter.

My own thoughts were even more worthless.

I'd led another life, once upon a time. There were too many memories, too many precise locations, and a whole language worth of evidence to that fact. Sometimes I could understand what was being said around me, and what I couldn't decipher I could at least interpret as Japanese. My knowledge of the language was lacking to say the least, but hearing the tirades of 'baka' usually rallied against my new father by my new mother was at least a proof of concept.

Either I'd been reborn into a bilingual family, or my new parents were weebs the likes of which I'd never comprehended yet before.

Oh, and then there were the Quirks.

The Quirks were something that I felt should have been talked about a lot more than they actually were. My beta parents weren't all that spectacular; my father could secrete some sort of substance from his scalp that was more or less inescapable once it touched you, and my mother could pull off and regrow the spheres that her hair had become like it was nothing.

In a world with demigods of ice and fire… it was underwhelming, to say the least. Even so, that's who they were, and I…well, as nice as it would have been to be reborn a titan of unparalleled power, I liked them well enough.

...Okay, that was a bold-faced lie. My mother was a raging bitch and my father was a less than pathetic excuse of a man. In all the times I'd ever seen him throughout this new existence, he'd only ever raised his head when he was looking at me. Otherwise, his eyes would be glue to the ground so completely that one would have to wonder if his hair wasn't somehow involved.

I didn't see my mother all that much. She didn't hold a job, that much was apparent from all the noises that would come her her study whenever my father was away, and it usually took until the hunger got the better of me and I started bawling for her to feed me. With a bottle, thankfully.

I could count on one hand the amount of times she'd seen fit to clean up after me. I learned fairly quickly to hold out for as long as I could, hopefully until my father got home. The man at least had enough backbone to make sure I didn't die again in my crib before being cowed under his wife's seemingly never ending tirade.

It was a relief, really, when she finally walked out a few days after my first birthday.

XxX

Walking and talking were privileges that I'd dearly missed.

Sometimes there was nothing more detrimental to your own mental health than yourself. Shit could happen in life; in my own experiences, it would happen more often than not. The breaks would get bigger and better if you did the right things, but for the most part, life would always find a way to fuck with you.

The biggest prank it could pull was turning your own thoughts against you, while making you do all the work. And damn if it wasn't very, very good at it. Eventually, the crib bars would start to look like the missing fourth wall of a prison.

Freedom came to me too slowly. Yes, if I was actually some potato masquerading as a human being, my development would have have been astronomical in its pace. As a grown-ass man, I could only feel embarrassment and regret. I don't know the exact time frame; the days really began to blur together despite my best efforts, but I can tell you it was way too damn slow.

Walking came first. I'm not sure if that was how it typically was for toddlers, but I had reason to be cautious. While out and about, my new parents had usually spoken English, behind closed doors they would always switch back to Japanese. Yeah, turns out we were actually living in America all this time. Who knew? I certainly didn't.

While the immense capacity for a child to grow and learn meant I was picking up the language faster than I probably had any right to, I still had to be careful with what came out of my mouth.

I'd always been a quiet person by nature, so it wasn't very difficult.

I wish there was a bit more to be said about my early life, but that was more or less it. My days as a toddler were filled with learning a new language, figuring out how to function while my father was away and the babysitter was running late, and patiently waiting for my Quirk to manifest itself. That last one was what I was more looking forward to in this life, because really, I was a fucking baby.

What else was there to report on, the progress of my teething? You don't give a shit. Hell, I didn't give a shit, and I was living it. Being a child again is pointless, the sky is blue, and teeth are bastards of the highest degree.

Months passed, as they typically did, bringing my second birthday closer and closer. Daddy-o came and went, usually working late to support us and returning home only to bathe and sleep. I spent the precious time that I could have been bonding with him and building connections in this strange alien world by sneaking onto his computer whenever he left it at home and browsing the internet for as long as humanly possible. Some things never changed.

In doing so I learned a few very important things.

For starters, I'd found out where the purple-headed fuck had gotten his habits from. Mineta's dad, because no matter how hard I tried I couldn't make myself see him as anything other than a familiar stranger, had a lot of porn sites bookmarked. I'm saying that those url's were proudly displayed at the top of the screen. If the man couldn't punch out a boulder with his right hand then I would be amazed.

His name, as I had to find through snooping, is Mineta Katsushika. I'm not sure if that's significant in any way but it's something I learned, so now you can learn it too.

Also, the date was off. By about… three centuries, give or take a handful of years.

I'd always figured the future would be full of fancy shit, like flying cars and food in the form of little pills. Maybe media had ruined the world for me somewhat, but I was expecting some form of progression.

Instead, I got… the exact same world. Except my neighbour's fucking head was a pumpkin. Could have had space travel, but no, instead I get babysat by a cereal mascot whenever papa dearest is running late from work.

In between all the browsing, and maybe clicking on some of those bookmarks because I was immensely curious about how Quirks had impacted the adult entertainment industry, I was also doing some other research.

See, Quirks were everywhere. Nearly every person had one, and the population had only managed to get bigger over the years. Even during all the new wars that had happened in between my midnight swim and now, the planet was now managing to hold upwards of ten billion people. Factoring in the mathematics when it came to Quirklessness, there had to have been somewhere within the realm of eight billion powers out there. Maybe they weren't unique and maybe the wouldn't ever be useful, but golly golly gosh, they fucking existed.

There were millions of people in my general area. According to the ads on the sides of the web pages, most of them were single, horny, Asian women. But surely, one of those single, horny, Asian women would have a Quirk that could help me out.

Because amazingly enough, when I grew up, I didn't want to be a three foot tall gremlin with an overbite and eyebrows that looked like they'd been inked on with a toothpick. No, I'd come from somewhere that I'd been relatively proud of, and I would go back even if I had to kick and scream and throw the biggest tantrum of my tiny life.

I'll do it. I'm fucking crazy.

And wouldn't you know it, halfway through the second week of my search, I got a hit.

XxX

I spent the next month eating like a child possessed.

As gluttonous and ungrateful for my new life as that made me sound, I did actually have quite a good reason for it. Sure, it was selfish, and would likely hurt my new parents if either of them ever found out, which they absolutely would as soon as they lay eyes upon me, but… meh.

Hey, they made Mineta. Far as I was concerned, I was doing them a favour.

The meeting I'd managed to set up was only plausible for the sole purpose that I'd found literally exactly what I was looking for. I'm not sure if it was the result of a Quirk or just supremely advanced programming, but the man I'd managed to establish contact with was what some people could call a hacker. He'd been the middle-man; the receptionist, if you would. The guy he'd put me through to had only two instructions to give.

Bring what he'd asked for with me when the time came, and stock up on body fat. I wouldn't like the results if I failed to do either, apparently.

It had been the first instance of homework in this life. Finding a brand new identity to use was quite easy, seeing as I already had one waiting in the wings. It'd been centuries of violence and cold cases since then, nobody would notice if a new old face and name popped up again after all this time.

They wouldn't get the chance. I'd taken care to find a guy that could take care of that.

As for the eating, well. Apparently recoding the DNA a person had been born with took a significant amount of effort on both parts. I'd need mass more than anything else if I wanted to ensure I would ever crack four feet of height. Even now, I was abnormally small for my age.

Yeah, nah, fuck that. I prepared most of my own food anyway, by pure necessity, so nobody would really notice anything if I started going back for a few more helpings each time.

Over the course of four weeks, I'd managed to nearly triple my weight. The Mineta patriarch was beginning to get concerned for me, I could tell, but after tonight it wouldn't matter anyway.

The clock was just striking eight when I bundled up for the cold and tucked a folder full of printed papers under my arm. I was so pathetically tiny that they almost dragged on the ground in my wake. I didn't dare let go of them, though, not after all the work I had to go through to get them.

This folder contained my life. My old life. The one I'd had before I ever came here, and the one I was determined to get another shot at.

The plan was fairly solid all around. I'd already explained most of all I needed and why I needed it on the phone, save for the fact that I'd apparently reincarnated. I still hadn't quite wrapped my head around that one myself, if I was being honest. I doubt I ever would.

Long story short, I'd compiled all I could find of my old life, scavenged from the ruins of social media that was now archaic. Medical records and tests would be on my new friends to take care of, and once everything was said and done, my old name and new appearance would be waiting in the wings to be used as an alias.

I'd decided to keep going on with Mineta Minoru. The name, that is, and also the Quirk. But absolutely nothing else. It was the least I could do in terms of birthrights, and Izuku was told to jump off a roof before he had his little superpower, so… yeah.

It occured to me, as I wandered into an alleyway much like the one I had died in the first time around, that I was effectively dooming all Mineta was and ever would be to a life of being nothing but a scapegoat that didn't technically exist. If I decided to go through with this, then whatever family he might have had, whatever achievements he might reach… whatever happiness he may have attained; all would be gone. In the blink of an eye.

Were my own childish, selfish desires really more important than one boy's life?

"Sup, fuckers?" I said as I hauled my fat ass through the first door on the left, taking a seat in the metal chair that had restraints and handing my file over to a dude wearing about three different pairs of gloves. "Let's do this shit."

They did this shit.

And nothing of value was lost.

XxX

"We're going to move back to Tokyo."

Katsushika had his eyes on his plate, his fork moving mechanically between the meal I'd cooked and his mouth. The vegetables hadn't been cut properly and the meat was unevenly heated at best, but it was all I could really do with arms this short. Besides that, it'd only been a few days since my dramatic weight loss, and I didn't want to look at another fatty food for as long as I lived. It was either cook, or die of starvation because damn it I refused to have fast food right now.

I pulled away the beanie concealing my sticky hair, the fabric sliding away with little obstruction. The balls on my head mostly stayed where they were; they jolted with the movement and one came free, but that was more or less it.

See, the effectiveness of Mineta's Quirk depended on how he felt, that was something I'd gone into this already knowing. The beanie was mostly to ensure that they didn't get in the way, especially after I'd figured out the trick to keeping them on my head and out of my clothing.

So, the better I felt, the stickier they became. Most of the time, the beanie would be effectively glued to my head. When I wanted to take it off, however, all I had to do was become horrifically depressed.

Usually I did this by reminding myself that I was born Mineta Minoru. It'd worked every time thus far.

I would still look like him for a while yet, unfortunately. The body still needed time to grow, after all.

"How come?" I asked in my broken, strangled Japanese. Katsushika glanced up for a moment, before sighing and letting his head drop once more.

"Your… your mother…" The man trailed off, outright refusing to meet my eyes again. That really didn't tell me all that much, all things considered. I couldn't remember all that much about my birth mother this time around, which if my past experience was anything to go by, probably meant the memories had been repressed or outright forgotten.

I had my doubts that you needed me to spell out why that was a bad thing.

"Cool." I shrugged, and struggled to force my teeth through the charcoal that had once been a piece of broccoli. You try to accomplish anything when a solid 40% of your body weight is your head. "When do we leave?"

The first time around, I'd lived in Australia. It hadn't been amazing, but I'd survived up until a point. This United States was likely wildly different from what I could have expected in my own time, but there wasn't really anything keeping me here.

I mean sure, there was a favour that a group of people who very well may have been the Mafia could and would cash in at some point, but I could deal with that when it came to it. If you're wondering why they even had dealings with me, well, I am too. I won't bother questioning it though. What's done is done, and if they kill me, then that's probably fine too.

Katsushiki gave me a queer look. He did that a lot, during the brief times when he was actually around to make eye contact with me. I stared back at him blankly, chewing my broccoli and awaiting my answer.

Then I screamed in pain, because the broccoli broke my tooth.