Going dark with a bang

Deku didn't want to open his eyes. He could sense the far too familiar faint blue-ish light of the hospital. He grunted. Sure, it had been a rough week with almost no time to rest, but his body should have held up, right? Or should he work out plus plus ultra? He focused 70% on his limbs, but he hadn't changed his routine since… Oh, he'd have to ask the doctor about…

As he was getting lost in his thoughts, Deku slowly regained sense of his body. He gasped for air when a sharp pain in his leg crept its way along his spine up to his neck. Now he remembered. He had gone Full Backflip Cowl on a group of drugged-up villains robbing a poor guy in an alley, but somehow his kick… provoked an explosion? But there hadn't been any sound of an explosion, it was more like a sonic boom, he reckoned. Either way, he was thrown up in the air and… that must have been when he passed out. He hadn't seen any of the villains attack him, though. They hadn't even seen him coming. So what happened?

And the pain continued to creep up his arms, throbbing the numbness away. No broken bones here, but a lot of bandages. He raised his left arm and looked at his hand, flexing his fingers as he gained back control of them. That noise… that squealing… that wasn't his knuckles gone hurt. That came from a slight bump in his palm, like something was there? A new medical device? But this seemed… alive. He ran a finger through the bandages and quickly fished out the intruder. A one-inch high and definitely human intruder.

Kwa didn't want to open his eyes. He could sense an unfamiliar bright blue-ish light. This surely meant he wasn't in prison, as he had thought, but in some sort of lab. After several hours trapped in complete darkness, unable to move a single inch of his body, he was fearing the worst. He definitely wasn't a guest in here. He grunted. Sure, he wasn't the lucky type, but this was a completely new level of misfortune. Who kidnapped him? What was waiting for him? Was he going to be drugged, dissected, harvested? Was he going to…

…hear the softest voice in the universe?!

"Who are you?" Deku whispered to the bug-sized stranger still coiled and frail in his palm. "How is this even possible?" he kept to himself. Size-changing wasn't that rare a quirk, but it couldn't go that extreme and couldn't work for that long. He couldn't feel any quirk energy around him anyway, this was his normal state. And how did he get in there, in his bandages? How did… wait. Let him explain.

Kwa sat up and opened his eyes with a mix of awe and terror. There stood his favorite hero. Right in front of him. Deku. Way bigger than him. He looked around. This wasn't a picture on a giant screen. This wasn't some sort of huge animatronic or whatever. This wasn't any remotely plausible scenario. This was a giant Deku. In a giant bed. Staring at him with his precious, giant green eyes. He just couldn't scream. In a giant room. With giant neon lights on the ceiling and giant tubes feeding into giant Deku's sinewy arm. Too many giant things. Nothing but giant things. Or…

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you!" Deku continued. "I'm Deku, a hero from UA. I won't harm you! But… who are you? And how come you're so small?"

"So small." There it was. Slightly less impossible. That was… different to take in. He was a small guy in Deku's… hand, he recognized the shapes now. The world around him was normal. But that meant he had been… altered. He pushed that thought away, took a deep breath and answered: "I'm Kwa. I'm not a hero. …I know you, Deku. I love you, Deku! You're so amazing and resourceful and combative and nothing ever stops you and you're so adorable with that hair! You're my favorite hero! I… I trust you!" He paused to breathe and calm down. Okay, focus. What could he remember? "So, I'm small, you say? I don't know why either. You came as I was being robbed, and you were about to do that rad move with the backflip and leg smash, so I tried to escape at the very last second using my air tunnel quirk, but somehow… it had just started when I felt compressed, and everything went dark with a bang."

Of course! His attention had been focused on the villains, but now that he squinted at him, Deku could see this was definitely the same man he was defending earlier! Air tunnel… sonic boom… two quirks at the same time… could that be...? He had to write down all of this, he had to research this new field of possibilities. He swiftly reached for his notebook on the table and shrieked. His back. He snapped back to the bed. It hurt too much to move a single inch. He'd have to think about this later. For now, he'd try to solve Kwa's probl… wait, where was Kwa?

Kwa barely had any time to scream before everything went dark with a splat. He had been thrown off Deku's hand, right into… this was both extremely scary and extremely intimate. He had passed Deku's lips and landed on his large, soft tongue. He threw his head back, out of the thin pool of saliva, and gasped for air. It… didn't feel gross. It felt warm. He slowly breathed out the fear. There was no danger being here. There was no danger being with Deku. There was no danger being… in Deku.

Deku stayed still. He needed to know where Kwa was before doing anything. At his size, one wrong move and he'd pop dead. Like a bug. He erased that last thought from his mind. Focus. He was still recovering, still finding out where his limbs and bones and muscles had gone. Focus. Squint. Wait.
"Kwa?" he carefully articulated.
The answer did come from inside his mouth. "I'm fine! I had a soft landing! I'll walk out, just catch me!"
Deku slightly opened his lips and put his hand on his chin. The feeling of a tiny man walking on his tongue, step after step on his tastebuds… that was new. That was… no, stop. Get him out safe.

Kwa was making good progress. He had only slipped and slid back a couple times. Now he knew better how to navigate in this… new environment. He was getting close to the teeth. Just keep looking straight ahead.
Keeping his mouth open and not swallowing for that long meant the saliva built up in Deku's mouth into a few strings. A drop hanging down from the palate was growing, just a bit ahead, and almost fell on him. He looked at it as it slid all the way down to the dark throat. He gulped with awe and carried on until he reached the shiny white teeth. Gotta keep that cheerful, charming smile sharp!… Climbing them was a piece of cake. Climbing the lip took longer; it was just as easy, but… he didn't want to get out right now. He felt he would somehow miss that moment.
Well, no time to get emotional over something that silly! He jumped over the lip and landed, again, with a splat.

Deku gently blew on Kwa to dry off the saliva. He couldn't believe that had just happened. There was no way that had happened. He raised his hand to his eyes and checked if Kwa was alright. "Sorry for all that! Hope that didn't scare you."
"Scare me?" Kwa jumped up and stuck out his chest, trying to look tough. "I'll have you know I'm not easily scared! I sure don't measure up to you, but you inspire me so much and I always keep a smile on my face!"
Deku beamed. "That's the spirit! You can be a hero too, with everything you went through. We need more people like you!"
Kwa sighed. "I mean, my quirk is useless in a fight. The only thing I can do is escape, and that's not what heroes do."
"Hey, don't sell yourself short! Quirks aren't about power, they're about knowing and using your environment to adapt to the situation. Being a hero isn't being the strongest or the bravest, it's doing the right thing at the right time when no one else wants to take that step forward. I will make you a hero! I'll train you, starting right now, but you have to promise to never give up! Deal?"
Kwa's eyes shined brighter than Deku's teeth. He was going to train! With Deku! He jumped to his feet, the coarse material beneath him slightly budging, and raised his hands. "Yes, Deku! I won't give up! You and I will send all those baddies into oblivion!" He started to punch the air and yell... well, squeal with might.
Deku looked at Kwa with perplexed eyes. He had suggested this as a way to protect the tiny man until they managed to grow him back, but seeing so much enthusiasm, such want of challenge... He had to make this Plus Ultra.
"It's going to be a tough training, you know. Villains aren't small fry, so you do need to master your quirk. How about we test your reflexes first?"
Before Kwa could even stop still, Deku gently flicked him with a finger. He saw the puny form lift slightly off his palm and glide over his hand, screaming. He watched as it crashed into his fingertip… and bounced off his hand. Oops. Too much.

Kwa's mind was blank. There was just too much going on. He didn't even feel the fall.
Two words popped into his mind. Quirk. Reflexes.
He focused and threw his hands forward. He hadn't even really seen where he was going to land; he had just sensed it would be somewhere safe.

Deku felt a cold breeze cut around his body and saw it shape into a tiny horizontal tornado… tunnel warp thing? He'd never seen that before. That was impressive. It caught Kwa in mid-air and spurted straight forward, towards the tray by his feet.
He shivered, and sneezed.

Kwa was still lurching forward. It didn't seem that bad, for a first time using his quirk in mid-air. It just meant his head was spinning a lot, everything was blurry, and he had nothing to hold onto. It was going to be fine. Mostly. Until he heard a deafening, high-pitched wave and was thrown off-course at a sharp angle. He landed with the grace of a dead bird into what he recognized as flesh.
He felt dizzy. His body begged to fall unconscious, but his mind focused on one thing: training. He strained himself up and rested on a tower of flesh. His eyes managed to make out the big toe in front of him. He needed a moment to take that in.
He had somehow landed between his favorite hero's toes. A perfectly normal event in anyone's life. And a massively perfect sight to behold.

Training!
He jerked straight, trying to ignore the pain, and stopped daydreaming. He was in training! He had to get back to Deku. He had to think this through like a hero, come up with a plan. He wasn't confident in air-tunneling in this narrow space; he needed to get down and find a better path. It would be too dangerous to sail straight to Deku's head; he had to go around and get himself in a safe place. This left him with one option.

Deku didn't dare move an inch. He couldn't make out where Kwa had landed. He feared the worst, but the only thing he could do to make sure he was safe was, well, to do nothing. He wouldn't hear anything back if he called for him. He couldn't assess the situation in such a strange scenario. He just had to wait and hope.
Then his foot tickled. He had to bite his tongue to resist the urge to twitch and scratch this itch of a tiny man away. He felt it slowly slide down his sole, and held his breath.

Kwa had just enough of a grip to slow his fall down to a reasonable speed, whatever "reasonable" could even mean in this situation. The sole had a slight layer of sweat, which helped guiding him around the ball of the monumental foot to a more gentle slope. His fingers dug deeper and deeper into the surface of the doughy skin, and in an instant and a scream, it was over. He dropped roughly on the hospital bed, laying on his back, light-headed, trying to catch his breath, numb from the pain. The blurry image of the soft sole standing impossibly tall above him crushed his mind into that single vision as his eyes closed.

Deku panicked. It had been a few minutes since the itch stopped, and no sign of Kwa. He had to do something. It couldn't get worse anyway, right? He gritted his teeth, gently sat up, trying to ignore the pain in his back, and checked his bed.
There he was, at the far end. He loomed over the frail, motionless body. No. No.
He scooped him up and put his hand to his ear. There it was. A quiet beat and a soft breath. He sighed and looked closely at his unconscious trainee. He didn't seem to have broken any limbs. He decided not to wake him up. There wasn't anything he could do but let him rest. He laid his open hand on the bed, and his thoughts drifted back to this strange combination of quirks.

Kwa was suddenly woken up by a voice booming a greeting way over him. He only had a vision of flesh and red, then everything went dark.

Before Deku could react, Kirishima reached to him and shook his hand with glee.