Rejected Stones

Walk Not Alone

Beta'd by kylekatarn77 and Poliamida

34. Walk Not Alone

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens:...A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.

-King Solomon, Ecclesiastes (Traditional attribution)

Working with Mei once more healed wounds in ways Izuku hadn't thought possible, but opened up new ones as well. It was cathartic and soothing to lose himself in the familiar routine of carefully examining systems, then designing and implementing improvements.

The pain came from realizing he couldn't get back what he'd lost so easily. Doing things one handed was tricky and tedious. Izuku had to use several specialized clamps and vices to be able to hold objects steady while he worked on them one handed. Worse, his right hand had been his dominant hand and he had to relearn things in a way that still felt unnatural. With the same bullheaded determination he'd always had though, Izuku pressed forward.

If he ever felt like giving up, he just looked to Mei, who had developed the habit of squinting at things, then frowning, shaking her head, and getting a magnifying glass or jewelers loop to carefully go over her work. She wasn't giving up, and neither was he.

The first order of business was rebuilding the Power Suit. While they could have salvaged their prior efforts, Izuku and Mei both agreed that they needed to rebuild with better, stronger materials from the ground up. A new skeleton made of more durable alloys Mei concocted became the basis for the new Power Suit, and it became larger and bulkier to support more powerful systems and higher grade weapons loadouts. They now knew that what Izuku had been packing before fell far short of what was needed to deal with the most deadly and dangerous foes.

At the same time though, they also realized that the increasing size and complexity of the Power Suit would dramatically add to the time needed to build and complete it, and that with less than two weeks to go until the licensing exam, they didn't have the capability to build it the way they wanted.

So instead, they went back to the very beginning, back to the original Power Suit MK1, which had been slimmer and less bulky than any design they'd created after.

"The Power Suit is great for the outdoors or large scale fights, but I need something that can fit in narrower spaces. Just going through those back alleys caused some damage because I could barely fit," Izuku observed as they catalogued the damage to the suit on the first day.

"What if we created an exoskeletal suit?" Mei suggested. "Maybe something that's weaker than the main power suit, but something you could use indoors or other tight places."

"Yeah, maybe we could make it light enough that it could actually fly too," Izuku suggested.

Mei frowned and shook her head. "If we did that, the jet pack would make it too bulky to fit through doors. I know! We can make it modular too! It could be able to hook up to various gear easily, and you could swap it out based on the mission. So you could mount the jet pack, or take it off."

"We could make the entire Power Suit a module!" Izuku said excitedly, seizing on the idea. "It could fit inside the main Power Suit, and I could jump in and out!"

"Yes, exactly, like the Hulk Buster Armor!" Mei declared.

Izuku glanced at her. "When did you learn about the Hulk Buster Armor? I thought you didn't like Iron Man."

Mei shrugged. "Hospitals are really boring and your mom only had your books to read while we waited for you to wake up. Besides, this isn't going to be Hulk Buster Armor. It will be Masked Buster Armor."