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take only what you need

Summary:

Izuku Midoriya, despite the medical impossibility and statistical improbability of it all, developed a quirk. Sadly, the dietary restrictions haven't made his life any easier.

Juggling a horrible secret and struggling with his dreams, Izuku will lie, steal, cheat, and frequently stress about his life choices on his way to give back what he can to the world.

DISCONTINUED

Notes:

monkey brain: ooooh fic idea
rational brain: please for the love of god finish literally anything
monkey brain: look at all that trauma
rational brain: for fucks sake

 

read the tags! this is a tokyo ghoul fic in some ways, but you don't really need to know much since i am beholden to no gods.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1: Fool 0

Chapter Text

All Might had never appreciated time management enough when he had his stomach. With his quirk, he had enough energy to keep going long past the usual restraints of human stamina. He had the same twenty-four hours as anyone else, but far less of those hours were needed for petty things like ‘sleep’ or ‘sitting down.’ At least, that was true. Now, he had three hours a day. And that number wasn’t increasing.

Now, as he ran through the sewers with less than ten minutes on the clock, he wished he’d taken a seminar or two. Maybe some enrichment training that occasionally got offered at hero conventions. It would have saved him the trouble of learning it the hard way.

Toshinori popped out of the sewer--eight minutes, he’s cutting it close today--and the slime villain was too preoccupied to notice. Toshinori bared his teeth at the display. Harming children was a special sort of low. At least this one had a quirk to protect himself.

Not that he should need to. All Might brought his fist back, quickly eyeing the height of the bridge, the breadth of the walls--and then he let loose.

“Destroit SMASH!”

Cleaning up took a few minutes of his time, but Toshinori always had time to meet fans. The boy, wide-eyed and shell-shocked, hadn’t been able to string together a sentence. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his quirk, a whipping sort of extra limb that extended from his lower spine. Shock tended to do that to kids. Toshinori knelt, conveying his most calming persona. “You’re alright, my boy.”

four minutes

Toshinori signed the kids journal. He smiled and ignored the shame that kept burning down his spine. He should be escorting him to the police. But his muscles burned, and his bones clicked in that dangerous way that meant time was up, and Toshinori ruffled the boy’s hair once more. “You were very brave,” he said, “but I am here. It’s ok now.”

And the boy nodded, still so wide-eyed and quiet. “All Might, I--”

“Farewell now!”

He didn’t have the same hours as everyone else now. He regretted it more than anything.

 

ooo

Izuku stood under that bridge for a solid five minutes before the enormity of what had happened hit him like a train. “I have. . . a quirk.” His eyes widened. He turned his head as if to see if anyone overheard. A short, startled laugh bubbled up from his chest. “I have a quirk!”

He turned and twisted, trying to see any sign of that strange limb that was his quirk. However, the only sign of it was his shredded shirt. That indicated a mutation quirk, but it might be invisible under most circumstances. Now that he focused, he could feel something under his skin. It bubbled and stirred with in sync with his racing pulse, but no matter how he focused, Izuku could not call it forward.

Adrenaline then? Or maybe a time-limit: Generating mass would likely require a lot of energy. That didn’t make sense, though, because he wasn’t exhausted. Izuku just felt alive. He was so close to death and now all he feels is electricity--he had a quirk and he met All Might.

And he met All Might! All Might saw his quirk and called him brave and signed his Quirk Analysis journal! That’s enough to make his head implode for a second time.

Izuku gathered his frantic thoughts around one rallying point--he needed to test this out immediately. His bedroom wouldn’t work. His new quirk left gouges in the concrete. It had cut that slime villain. A thread of guilt soured his happiness before he banished it. It hadn’t done much anyway.

Even without the flash of guilt, his frantic thoughts had calmed down with that sobering reminder. His quirk could be dangerous. He couldn’t safely try it out inside. With that in mind, he goes over the list of places where no one would think to look, where people purposefully look away. And then he sprinted there.

Izuku could have done without the piles of stinking garbage at Dagobah beach, but his first and second choices had been too populated. Izuku hopped in place, his cheer recovered by the run. It left him panting, but he was too excited to do much more than grin.

Despite the smell, this was probably the best choice. No one would care what he destroyed here.

. . .

And that ended up being entirely accurate, if only because Izuku didn’t destroy, gouge, scratch, or even move a single thing.

Frustration welling up, he flopped down into the sand. “What’s going on?” he murmured to himself. “Why won’t it work?” He refused to believe it was a fluke or a fever dream. He had felt it. He saw the evidence.

Then why wouldn’t it work?

Izuku bit at the inside of his cheek. The sky was turning dark overhead, a threatening sort of indigo that meant time was officially up. His mom would be worried. It was a long walk back and he no longer felt like running.

Izuku swallowed his disappointment and picked himself up off the ground. He brushed the sand from his clothes and navigated his way around piles of trash until he was back on the sea wall. The scent of rust and brine and rotting fabric clung to his clothes, the newest insult of a bad day.

He missed his chance to talk to All Might. His quirk refused to surface. He smelled like a dead fish. Izuku opened his journal as he trudged home and stared at the newest page:

My Quirk!

Everything below it was empty, and that just felt like the final indignity of a long day.

 

ooo

 

His mother hovered when he got home.

“You really need to let me know when you’re staying out so late, Izuku.” She looked over him as if to make sure everything is still in its place, and then tried to flatten down a particularly wild cowlick. “I get worried.”

Izuku ducked his head. His mom’s eyebrows had their own persona guilt-inducing quirk. “I’m sorry. I just lost track of time.”

Mom shook her head. “Text me. You’re growing up and that means you can go where you want, but let me know next time, ok?” She hugged him, and it chased away the scent of rot and salt.

Izuku opened his mouth to explain why he’d been gone so long--and then he shut it. He just hooked his chin over his mom’s shoulder and let the disappointment and frustration that had been stewing inside his chest leak out of him. Maybe he was no longer quirkless, but still useless. He was back at square one.

At least that didn’t feel like such a death sentence by the time he let go.

“I got attacked by a villain today.”

His mom stiffened in alarm, and Izuku hurried out, “I’m okay, though! All Might saved me!”

Mom pulled him over to the couch and got him water, fussing over him. It took several tries to keep her from needlessly getting the first aid kit. She sat back down eventually, and then Izuku had to digest just how scared he’d been. How helpless. How then suddenly he wasn’t. How, for a few minutes, he was nearly like everybody else.

He said a few words, because it felt worse to leave them unsaid. But for some reason, he couldn’t talk about that.

“I’m just so glad you’re safe,” His mom said, her eyes watery.

“I didn’t really talk to All Might because--” My quirk. I was too confused about my quirk. “I was in shock. I didn’t get to thank him.”

“I’m sure he knows,” Mom said soothingly. “I would want to thank him too. I’m so glad you’re home safe.” Her voice broke in the middle, but she smiled for him.

Izuku couldn’t bring himself to make things complicated. He didn’t want to answer all the inevitable questions that will come up if he fully talks about his day. So he gave his own tight smile, and said, “Me too.”

He went to bed early. Despite all his running, he wasn’t hungry.

 

ooo

 

Izuku woke up to sharp scent of brewing coffee. It filled the whole house like a blanket, comforting despite how overpowering it was. His clock let him know he was awake earlier than usual. He considered catching a few more minutes of sleep, but it was rare that he woke without feeling drowsy. He woke up to get ready, murmuring a quiet good morning to his mom as he passed her in the hall. Sometime in between showering (oh, why didn’t he do that immediately, his sheets smelled like fish now) and brushing his teeth, Izuku came to the conclusion he called it quits too soon.

“You haven’t had this quirk for ten years,” he sternly told his reflection. “You can’t expect it to work perfectly on the first try.” Nothing came easy for Izuku, and there’s no reason for that to change now. He worked in school and he spent hours researching heroes. Kacchan had his effortless brilliance, but Izuku knew better than to expect the same from himself. Wanting what you can’t have just leads to madness.

So he needed to do what he always did: put his head down and work.

He focused on remembering how he felt when he had his quirk active. He tried to draw that weight out from the base of his spine. It was unresponsive.

It stung that his body refused to work for him, but that was an old sting for Izuku. He funneled that frustration into dedication. By the end of the day, even his teachers had noticed that Izuku paid their instruction no mind. Kacchan yelled at him several times to stop muttering. One of those was during a test which Izuku barely read before turning in.

By lunch, Izuku hadn’t made any progress. The failure made his bento taste like glue, and he left it uneaten.

Strangely, all his food tasted awful that evening too. Awful enough that he had to spit it out when his mom wasn’t looking.

By the next day, when he still couldn’t bear to eat a bite of food, Izuku stopped thinking that his lack of appetite was psychosomatic.

Sitting in the cafeteria at school usually provoked a constant, low-grade nausea. Today was worse than that. “It’s just food. It’s pork. I like pork.” Izuku stared down at his lunch, his stomach preemptively declining the thought of cooperation. The longer he looked, the less it seemed like it was a good idea to argue. Maybe it was undercooked. The fumes wafting off the rice stung the back of his throat like he inhaled bleach. It screamed ‘bad idea.’

“. . . It’s not like I’m hungry.”

“Fucking hell, Deku, quit playing with your food,” Kaccahn snapped, shooting him a glare. Kacchan always glared whenever fate put the two of them at the same table, but it was raining, and their cafeteria was too crowded for him to sit anywhere else. “You’re making me sick.”

That made two of them, then. Izuku stared at his lunch for a moment longer before muttering an apology and throwing it away. He hated being wasteful, but if he ate any food, he was going to puke. He left for the library. If Kacchan stared at him as he left, what else was new?

ooo

Appetite suppressant quirks did exist. Usually they just were an ability to suppress painful hunger responses, and potentially to extend the amount of time required before the body would begin losing muscle mass. Neither of those ideas lined up with his initial impressions of his quirk. Creating extra mass required more energy, not less.

Izuku put a pin in that idea since there wasn’t really a way for him to prove or disprove it. As the week went by, he pretended to eat when his mom wasn’t looking. At school, he threw himself into theorizing.

Occasionally, there were plant physiology quirks that allowed people to photosynthesize their energy. Izuku spent hours looking at his skin for a faint hint of chlorophyll. He was paler than normal, but that was it. His hair took longer to disprove since it was already green, but he had managed to get access to the science class microscopes. His hair was plain keratin, the same as anyone else’s. Since purposefully avoiding sunlight didn’t affect his energy despite repeated trials, Izuku was forced to shelve that idea too.

After he got over the initial shock of not being able to enjoy his mom’s meals, it wasn’t that bad. Spending the weekend dodging his mom’s attempts to make him eat was the hardest part. He couldn’t explain that he was fine without talking about his quirk, and he had no way to prove his quirk existed.

The thought of trying to convince other people right now made him frantic. His peers already thought he was weird and hopeless. If he tried to change his quirk record without anything to show for it, then when his teachers inevitably commented on the change, he’d have to face everyone. They’d add delusional to the list of things that made Mudoriya Izuku a no-fly zone.

He didn’t need the attention.

He really didn’t need the attention.

 

ooo

 

“Hah! Read it and weep, losers,” Kacchan gloated serenely during math. He waved his 98 percent in front of his friend’s noses.

Some of them groaned, some just shrugged and congratulated him.

Izuku would congratulate him if it didn’t involve looking away from Heteromorphic Quirk Theory. As it is, he’s learning about hidden organs, and that’s really a lot more important to him than a math test.

“Midoriya-kun,” his teacher called out chidingly, for the second time. “Please come get your results.”

Izuku finished reading his sentence, and apparently that delay was long enough to spark Kacchan to grab it himself. “Ah, Kacchan, you really didn’t have to--"

 “God, Deku, just trying to be fucking courteous.” He rolled his eyes, flipping through Izuku’s test idly as he walked towards him.  “Oh, lotta red right there, moron--” Then Kacchan stopped dead, staring intently at the last page.

Izuku hesitantly stood and reached out. “Ah, thank you--"

“Is this some joke?”

Izuku blinked, and Kacchan’s face twisted into outrage. He slammed the paper down on Izuku’s desk, and a bloody “54%” and a smaller “please see me after school” stared up at him. “Uh?”

“Were you even fucking trying?” Kacchan glared at him, his mouth pressed into an annoyed line.

Considering that one of Izuku’s answers was a doodle of All Might, that wasn’t really a question that needed answering. Izuku fidgeted, unsure what to do. Kacchan came in two flavors when it came to tests: Thrilled or upset.

This is the first time Izuku saw him upset over winning.

“Ah, uh. . . Congratulations on your score. It-it was a hard test, yeah?” Izuku swallowed past the lump in his throat, suddenly very aware he wasn’t sure what was happening.

Kacchan’s eyes narrowed. “Oh fuck off, Deku.” He spun on his heel and stalked back to this desk.

Izuku watched him go, wide eyed. “Okay?” After another second, he sat down. He heard from snickers from the kids behind him. It buzzed in his ears, and he was hit with the uncomfortable realization that he’d been so focused on his quirk that he forgot.

Everyone found him hilarious. Midoriya Izuku was one big joke, after all.

Izuku bit the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t frown, and he returned to his reading. He wasn’t nearly as focused as he had been. Now he was alert, tuned into the noises around him, and he wished he wasn’t.

By the end of the day, he hadn’t finished his page.

Izuku sighed at the final bell and packed his bags. He had to talk to his teacher before he left, and now the itch of that failure was starting to hit his stomach. He ended up going against the flow of traffic, surrounded by the scent of sweat and the cloying feeling of perfume, hand sanitizer, and cleaning solution. It was a sharp enough combination to make him nauseated.

Or maybe that was just this conversation.

“Midoriya-kun,” his teacher said, eyebrows drawn up in concern. “You’re better than this. What happened?”

Izuku looked away. “It was a hard test.”

“Maybe for other students, but not for you. You’ve been scoring top marks in my class all year and you did perfectly on the preliminaries.” His teacher pinned him with a considering look. “Is there anything going on at home?”

“No.” All his problems came from outside his home. Except for the one in his body. But no teacher could help with that. They never had. “I just wasn’t prepared,” Izuku said dully.

“If you’re sure. . .”

Izuku was. His teacher tried to press, but Izuku had practice going in circles. He shrugged off suggestions for help with his studies and dodged even the idea of making an appointment with the guidance counselor. He didn’t want to help, and he didn’t want to be standing here. He just wanted to get back to his quirk because--

Just. The longer he went without seeing a sign, the more he started to think he’d made it up.

And as he bid farewell, that would have been the end of it.

“Oi, Deku!”

It would have.

Izuku jumped and whirled around. Kacchan leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, looking like he belonged wherever he wanted. What a power. To never feel out of place. Why couldn’t that be his?

“Don’t ignore me, asshole,” Kacchan snapped.

Izuku blinked, and realized he’d been staring. “Ah--I, uh, sorry.”

Kacchan rolled his eyes, a small break in the serious glint in his gaze. “Save it. Listen,” He said, expression sharpening once again. “You’re gonna go back in there and tell that dumbass you want a retake.”

“I-I am?” Izuku questioned, his voice rising in pitch.

“Yeah. Go.”

Izuku opened and closed his mouth a few times. “Ah, Kacchan, our teacher doesn’t allow--"

Kacchan scoffed, jutting his chin up. “Don’t give me that bullshit! What’s got you so high and mighty that you think you can just half-ass it when this is the only competition you can ever offer?” His palms popped and bubbled.

“Nothing!” Izuku defended. Only competition? True, the two of them were usually evenly tied in math. Sometimes, Izuku studied extra late just because he knew it made Kacchan furious to be second best. But only sometimes. And Izuku did just as well in his other classes. Even better in some.

. . . Classes which he had also been neglecting for the better part of a week.

While he was distracted, Kacchan grabbed his shoulder, and the shock of it doomed him. Kacchan steered him back towards the door despite Izuku’s frantic attempts to stall. “Then get back in there and prove it. I’m not winning on a fucking default because you were too fucking lazy!” Kacchan kicked the door open and shoved him through. He then slammed the door shut before Izuku could escape.

Izuku stared at the door handle with dread. The heavy weight of his teacher’s silence buzzed in his ears. Slowly, he turned around to find his teacher looking just as dumbfounded as him.

Izuku recovered his ability to speak first. It didn’t mean that he was eloquent with it. “So, uh, is there, uh, any chance I could--uh, try again? But please feel free to decline! I know your policies and I, ah. . .”

His teacher blinked in disbelief. He nodded. “Yes. That’s what I was trying to offer earlier, Midoriya-kun.”

Oh.

 

ooo

 

Kacchan stole his returned test the next day, and Izuku observed the way the sharp anticipation in his red eyes transformed into hot irritation after seeing the cheerful 98% decorating his page.

He always hated a tie even more than losing.

 

ooo

 

My Quirk!

Name:

Abilities: Heightened senses, particularly smell.

 

Izuku added at least one thing to his journal by the end of the week. He could only sit though so many classes mouth-breathing before he realized that no one else could smell bleach and mold and something really, really good quite like he could. But after he figured it out, it made his walk home a bit brighter. He could smell coffee from a mile away. He could also smell rotting things and blood, but Izuku tended to focus on the coffee since it was more common if he avoided the scenic route.

And his ears were better than ever. While it was a lot more useful for potential hero work, Izuku didn’t appreciate it quite the same. It distracted him until all he could focus on a jumble of heartbeats and breathing. Or worse, it made him hear people when they said his name, and then it was impossible not to listen.

Still, progress was progress, and repeated trials showed that Izuku’s sense of smell was more powerful. The proof was a lifesaver. He’d been so obsessive that he’d neglected everything else in his life. Now that he knew and could prove that something had happened, it made it a little easier to de-stress.

“You’ll be back by 9:30? You have your phone?”

Izuku nodded, reassuring his mom. “The announcement and merch drop at eight, but I’ll be first in line.”

Kamui Woods was finally getting his official merchandise debut. The agency had tried to keep it a surprise, but a few leaks to the deeper hero forums meant that Izuku knew exactly when and where to go. Hero Markets were temporary spectacles, but they always drew the most dedicated fans. The showcase would only last a few hours before disappearing. Everything there was bound to be limited edition, and Izuku was thrilled.

His mom smiled, warm and relieved. “I’m glad that you’re feeling better. I was getting worried.”

Izuku was getting worried too. He still hadn’t eaten, despite occasionally getting up to look in the fridge. But he’d gotten good at pretending he had. It hurt that he couldn’t eat meals with his mom, but he was researching quirks that required alternative diets, and it seemed to match his symptoms pretty well. Now all that was left to do would be find what he could eat. He would have to do it soon, because he was--

In all honesty, he was a bit freaked out. 

But he definitely was feeling better, and he had an event to go to, so he smiled in return. “Yeah! I’ll check in like usual.” Izuku checked his pockets and the time, satisfied with the former and horrified with the latter. “Ahh, I have to go! Bye!”

He ran in order to catch his train, but it was a close call. It was also too crowded for him to find a seat, and Izuku ended up squished between several people. Even the roar of the bullet train couldn’t drown out the overlapping beat of several dozen heartbeats. Halfway through his stomach began twisting in anticipation, and Izuku had to pull up some reading on his phone to avoid jumping in place.

The debate he’d been following on the Rising Star forum was picking up speed. Usually the mods were good about keeping things factual, but some footage analysis over the recent UA Sports Festival had people up in arms and out for blood. Izuku observed the match in question with interest, watching one student shoot and extend tentacles from his arms. He’d avoided watching the event this year. The older he got, the less likely it seemed that he would ever compete.

Izuku twitched, hope washing over him. Now he had a chance. Now, he had much more of a chance than he did before.

 

ooo

 

Now, Izuku clutched at his bags and his posters and his phone as sirens wailed and people screamed. Smoke and fear saturated the air, and dozens of bodies pressed up tight against him. People flooded towards the street, away from the fire and the fighting and the alarms, and Izuku got batted around in the current.

His pulse thundered in his ears and his gut twisted in an electric panic.

“HELLO LISTENERS!” Present Mic roared from his position on stage, grappling hand to hand with a tall woman with spikes of granite poking though her skin. He howled wordlessly, sending her skidding back a few meters, far enough for Kamui Woods to bind her to the columns dotting the improvised stage. “PLEASE HEAD CALMLY TO THE ENTRAN--” The hero cut himself off, whipping around to scream at another attacker.

Izuku’s hands whipped up to cover his ears, but it wasn’t enough. An explosion from the temporary market shattered any attempt to move carefully, and people slammed into him until he began to stumble with the rest of the crowd.

His heart tried to crawl up into his throat, and over all the smoke, Izuku smelled something that stabbed him with hunger. Something that made him feel so hollow he could die. Blue and red sirens flashed at the mouth of the park, and police directed civilians across the road, away from the fighting. Paramedics bustled in an impromptu screening station, pulling aside the injured.

Izuku ended up on front of one. She shined a light in his eyes. “Shock,” she called out, checking him over for other wounds. She wrapped a tin blanket around his shoulders, and then suddenly pushed him into the waiting arms of a volunteer. “Burns! Second to third degree, I need--”

And Izuku tuned her out somehow, because more than he could hear, suddenly he could smell--hot and warm, something like butter and comfort. His mouth watered, and despite the insistent hand on his shoulders, he looked back. Under the care of the paramedic was a man with blood streaming down his side, his shirt and skin charred black and blistered. His eyes were glassy and fluttering in the flashing light, soot smudged over his clammy skin.

Izuku stopped dead, his eyes fixed on the blood, on the muscle exposed to the open air. Horror hit him like a sledgehammer. But before that, before he knew anything so human as fear, he knew want. He knew how his teeth would sink into skin and how bone would rend under his hands. Then the world slipped out from under him, and the volunteer steered him forcefully to a resting area.

“Don’t look at it,” She said, her voice wavering. “You’re safe now. Do you have parents or friends?”

His mouth was still watering. He could feel a pulse though the hand on his shoulder, rabbit-quick. The warm air was soaked with that savory aroma, and Izuku thoughtlessly gripped the hand on his shoulder and turned around.

“Anyone with you? Do you have anyone you can call?” She was taller than him, with sharp horns poking up though her dark hair and wide, concerned eyes. Scrapes on her arms and knees were soaked with disinfectant, a sharp, caustic thing in his throat. Suddenly, she leaned down, bringing herself to eye level with him. “Please don’t cry. You’re safe now.”

Izuku blinked, and the only thing that jarred him out of taking a step closer and sinking his teeth into her shoulder was the idle, casual thought that passed through his mind:

You’re not.

Izuku shrieked and jerked away, releasing his grip like he’d been burned. He stumbled back unsteadily, his brain buzzing with static.

“Wait, no--”

Izuku fled, tearing down the side walk and darting into an alley with a death grip on his bag. Pounding feet and sharp breathing followed him, but Izuku had a livewire coursing through him, and he sprinted away, dodging though the unfamiliar back passages. He vaulted a fence, the chainlink top tearing though his jeans, and he didn’t stop until he left the shaky police barricade, and the crowds creeping up on the edge of it, far behind.

He crouched next to a dumpster, as isolated a place he could find with the city on red-alert, huffing the rank and putrid air to chase the hollow, hollow want from his throat. He scrubbed at his eyes, and they came away wet with salt, and that just sparked more sobs.

He heard the footsteps. He just tried so hard not to.

“See, dude? Told you it would be free pickings.”

Izuku kept his head low, but he knew exactly how close they were, and it was too close. His gut twisted, and yet he was rooted to the spot. “Please,” He whispered, “please, leave me alone.”

“Have fun at the big show?” A man asked conversationally, moving closer. Too close. Close enough to smell alcohol and the savory aroma of sweat. “Lotta expensive stuff out there. That’s all my friend and I want.”

“Dude,” The other boy said, hesitant. “Should we really--”

“Wallet and bag. Toss ‘em this way.”

Izuku was frozen through, his heart clawing its way up out his throat. “I--”

“Not that hard. Shouldn’t take three seconds. I’ll even count it for you.” The man snapped his fingers, and orange flame coated his hand. Izuku couldn’t tear his eyes away. The man was older than him, but not by much. Maybe still in high school. But his eyes were even and glinting and promising in a way that sent ice down Izuku's spine.

“Tanaka, chill the fuck out.”

The man ignored him. “One.” He clenched his fist and stepped forward. Izuku pressed further into the wall, his limbs shaking and shaking like he was about to fly apart at the seams. “Two.”

Izuku flinched, dropping his bag and patting frantically at his pockets. “W-wait,” he stuttered.

The other boy scrubbed a hand through his hair, cursing under his breath, but did nothing more.

The guy laughed shortly. “Three.” Then he kicked Izuku’s shoulder-bag and sent it skidding down the alleyway, hauling Izuku by the hoodie with flickering hand. Izuku yelped in alarm, heat washing over his face, only to be shoved back against the wall. “Oh, calm down.”

He reached for Izuku’s pockets. Panic surged through his skull.

With all the propriety of a joint cracking into place, something spilled out from his spine. It propelled Izuku a step forward, before it lashed forward and slammed into his attacker. He flew back, alarm causing the fire in his fist to flicker out.

Now what illuminated the alley was the shining, shifting scarlet-cyan emanating from Izuku’s quirk. The sight of it knocked the breath out of him. It twitched and flailed when he tries to shift it, throwing off his balance despite how thin it is--whip-like and flat and fluid and beautiful.

A second later, someone sprinted away. The next, the orange flare of fire returned with a vengeance. 

Izuku snappws back to reality.

Blood ran down the man’s face, and his eyes burned with anger as flames begin creeping up his arms. “If that’s how you want to try.” He raised his hand and heat jetted towards Izuku, singing his hair and clothes before he could throw himself out of the way. The weight tied to his spine threw him off his balance, and he careened into the concrete. He barely noticed.

“Wait,” Izuku croaked, pushing himself back to his feet with the help of the wall. He just wanted to leave. Money wasn't worth this. “You can have it, just wait.” He fumbled with the zipper to his jacket. His wallet was in the inner pocket. It wasn’t worth this.

It wasn’t worth the grip on his neck that wanted him to leap forward, sink down, and bite.

His attacker seemed to disagree, because he drop-kicked Izuku in the chest hard enough for him to go flying back.

Izuku yelped, his brain buzzing. He needed to get away. But the walls of the alley were close enough to suffocate, and his attacker stood between him and the closest exit.

The man slammed a kick into his side. It barely registered.

Izuku reared his foot back and smashed it into his attacker’s knee.

He cursed and jerked back, and Izuku took advantage of the space. He scrambled to his feet--the other person had left this way, but Izuku would have to take his chances. He tore himself away from the fight, shambling away. Away from the heat and tang of blood that burrowed into his skull. A pang of hunger shredded through his gut. Izuku flinched and stifled his sob by biting into his hand. The twitching limb of his quirk curled up and inward before it suddenly gave out.

The loss felt like a missing tooth.

The loss made him fall against the wall, his limbs leaden and his head dazed.

Searing hands grabbed him by his jacket, hauling him up and pinning him to the damp brick. The man cursed suddenly, and the fire licking at his arms died out, leaving his skin a steaming, livid red. He bared his teeth, wickedly satisfied. “Looks like you’re out of steam too.” He pulled back his fist.

The scent of Izuku’s charred jacket couldn’t hide the desire that spiked in his throat.

Like he’d done it a dozen times, Izuku gripped the wrist still pinning him to the wall, leaned forward on his tip-toes, and sank his teeth into the meat of the man’s arm.

If he tried to compare it to anything, he’d find words wanting. But in that moment, his brain rushes and rushes and rushes like blood-pulse and cicada-scream and livewire-hum and he wasn’t thinking in words. He was chasing and diving, his mouth singing like he bit into tinfoil, and when his prey shied back and cried out--

he surged forward.

Chapter 2: Magician I

Summary:

Izuku, by virtue of never wanting to share his problems, ends up commiting villainy.

Notes:

warnings for mild gore and a lot of gallows humor. I ended up writing a comedy somewhere near the end, rip

Chapter Text

 

He got home. His mom was worried. He told her he was fine. That he’d been ok. That he lost his phone, and he was very tired. And his mom saw his dry eyes and pinched expression, and she let him get ready for bed without too many questions.

Then he showered and showered and scrubbed at his face until the water ran clear of the blood hidden behind his ears and in his hair. He’d scrubbed his face with water from a public restroom. It hadn’t been thorough.

He managed to slip into his room without seeing his mom, and he pretended to sleep until the hallway light flicked out. Then he jumped up and turned on his desk lamp,

Izuku’s mouth was too dry. Water didn’t help. Instead, he carefully wrote down all his observations. All of them. Instead of extrapolating, or thinking a step further, or anything that required consideration, he recorded his symptoms in a precise list. Methodical. Clinical.

Extra limb extending from lower spine. Increased speed and durability. Sensitivity to taste. Irregular appetite. Fixations on blood.

Izuku heard his heart beat. And underneath that, he heard another beating lightly from across his home. Thinking about it made his mouth water until he was almost drooling. He gripped his desk and gritted his jaw until he stopped shaking, tears seeping down his face and splattering on the pages.

Wanting to eat people.

The words swam in front of him. Writing it down didn’t make it easier to digest.

                                                          

ooo

 

“It’s scary,” his mom murmured into the phone in the kitchen. “It’s supposed to be safe here.”

Izuku laid in bed staring up at the ceiling. It was early again. He had hoped he could use the weekend to stretch how long he could avoid facing life. Like most things recently, his body rudely declined.

“No,” His mom said in answer. “He didn’t really talk about it, but he was wearing different clothes than when he left. I’m not sure what happened.”

His ears were sharp, but not enough to hear the other person on the phone. He imagined it was Mitsuki-obasan. That’s who his mom usually called when she felt unsure or worried.

Izuku didn’t have a friend who could do the same.

“I feel like I should be doing more. This is the second time in a week.” Glass clattered in the sink, ear-splitting in the quiet of dawn. “Shoot--no. No, I would like it. It’s just. . . difficult.” She padded off to the living room before settling down on the creaking couch. “Izuku is very self-contained. I don’t want him to hide things from me because he’s afraid of what I’d think.”

Guilt ripped through him like a saw blade. Izuku rolled over, pulled his blankets over his head, and shoved fingers in his ears hard enough to hurt.

 

ooo

 

“Hello, Midoriya-kun. I’m Dr. Nara.”

The therapist had dark hair and horns. Instead of the smooth and curved bone of the volunteer he fled from, these were small and branched like deer. The similarity still made it hard to relax.

“I’m here to offer an open ear and advice for things you feel you can’t ask of your family. You have faced some adverse circumstances, and it sometimes helps to talk to a third party.” This was all delivered very factually, very calmly. It removed the burden of wanting to prevent sympathy. Or pity. “Is there anything you would like to talk about?”

Izuku’s throat was dry. “Someone tried to rob me.” Dr. Nara didn’t show any alarm. She tilted her head and her dark eyes seemed to x-ray him. Izuku swallowed past the lump of anxiety threatening to crawl up from his stomach. He was doing this for his mom. “After the villains attacked, I was afraid. I ran away and had a, uh, panic attack in an alley way. And this person tried to take my wallet.”

“Your mother didn’t mention that.”

Izuku shook his head. “I didn’t tell her. I got away. But it scared me. It really scared me.” His eyes stung, and he rubbed at them. “Just--how could you look at someone while their down and take advantage? How could you do that?”

“I told you it would be free pickings.”

“It’s hard to feel unsafe. It’s harder to understand how and why something bad could happen to you,” Dr. Nara said. She paused, before asking, “Do you want to report this to the police?”

“No.” Izuku bit at the inside of his cheek. “I don’t. Nothing happened. It’s fine.”

Izuku had ripped a mans arm open and gnawed down to the bone.

“I respect your choice,” She replied. “Anything you say here is confidential.”

Izuku knew that. It wasn’t his first time sitting in front of a therapist. It was just the first time he felt that he needed it. “. . . I hurt that person. I didn’t mean to, but I did.”

They had lost so much blood they were unconscious.

“You mentioned that you were having a panic attack when this took place?” At Izuku’s nod, she continued, “You had just gone through a very stressful event. If someone got hurt while you were trying to escape, it isn’t your fault.”

Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but it was still his teeth.

At Izuku’s silence, Dr. Nara dropped the subject. “Your mom mentioned a change in appetite?”

“Yes.” Izuku swallowed down his hesitance. “I felt sick when I tried to eat food. It got better--but after last night, it. . . came back.”

When he came back to himself, it wasn’t because of restraint or his better nature.

It was because someone had heard yelling, came to investigate, and began screaming. They shrieked loud enough that Izuku whipped his head up, face drenched with blood and teeth red with it--

And then they screamed louder.

Dr. Nara nodded and gave plain advice about sticking to meal replacement shakes until his appetite came back. “I know it might make you feel ill, but anything you can manage will be a step towards recovery.”

For some reason, Izuku didn’t think that would hold true for him.

 

o o o

 

He went to the beach a second time. Surrounded by rot and rust and piles of dead things, Izuku forced himself to think of hot blood. Like Pavlov’s dogs, his mouth flooded with saliva, and a flat tail spilled out from his spine. It twitched eagerly, and Izuku’s stomach shuddered with want. 

He threw up clear bile on an old microwave until he dry-heaved.

 

o o o

 

If you search people eating monster, the first thing that came up was vampires. The second was werewolves, closely behind which were zombies. None of them matched his symptoms, but they all had quirks named after them.

Cannibalism quirk returned lots of results. Izuku spent hours combing public directories and research journals. All of these quirks required ingesting a portion of a target to achieve an effect. None of them limited diets on their own. Even monstrous (literally) quirks only shifted the diets of their holders in the way that any carnivore-mutation quirk would.

Cannibalistic species gave him lots of horrifying information he never wanted to learn about rabbits.

He quit googling after that.

His mother gave him meal shakes, and he made an effort to drink them. After that made him vomit, he committed to flushing them down the toilet discretely. She seemed to buy it, and he learned to stomach the occasional sip in order to make it less obvious.

 At school, he couldn’t pay attention. His guidance counselor made all the perfunctory steps to make him commit to a plan for the future. It was just unfortunate that Izuku didn’t think he had much in the way of a future. By his math, which he had considered obsessively, he had anywhere between a week and a month before he would get hungry again. Or hungry enough. He was already hungry. He hadn’t ever stopped being hungry.

Izuku He could go to the police. The thought made him sick every time he circled back to it.

He’d attacked someone. He fled a crime scene. He hid information about changes to his quirk from the government, which was a felony. Maybe one of those things would be forgiven, but not all of them. There wasn’t a precedent for quirks that required their user to kill.

Surely violence like that would be evolutionarily disadvantageous? It didn’t make sense to reject all forms of nutrition besides people.

Were his organs even the same at this point?

Had he metamorphosed into something different?

“Midoriya-kun,” His history teacher snapped, “am I really so boring?”

His class laughed, jarring Izuku out of his thoughts. He glanced up, dazed, and half-heartedly considered the question.

Yeah. This class was boring on a good day.

Suddenly the snickers burst into full on laughter. Even Kacchan looked surprised and gleeful. The teacher was less amused, his expression sour. “Then by all means, please feel free to leave.” His teacher often extended this offer to inattentive students. Truancy rules meant that no one took him up on it.

Izuku blinked, and then felt dully surprised. Despite all eyes on him, he didn’t want to curl into a ball. His teacher’s stare and Kacchan’s mocking smile didn’t hit or sting. It didn’t register. Like the people around him weren’t even real.

Like the entire world around him was paper-thin.

“Ok.” Izuku swung his bag over his shoulder. “Have a good day.” He exited the classroom and picked up on the explosion of laughter and the sound of his teacher scrambling up from his desk. Izuku glanced out the window to the gentle sun. The park was nice this time of day.

“Midoriya-kun,” his teacher called from the doorway, recovered from his surprise. “Come back to class!”

He had a week or so. There wasn’t a point in spending it inside.

 

o o o

 

He had to deal with it eventually. His mom wasn’t happy when he got home.

“Do I need to schedule another meeting with Dr. Nara?”

His mom is also rarely angry. This was no exception. She looked at him with concern that made guilt run rampant though his head. And then it was all downhill.

At least his mom knew how to comfort tears.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he murmured from his cocoon of blankets on the couch. His eyes were dry now, but his voice still cracked. “I don’t know what to do.”

His mom leaned against him. “You’re young, Izuku. You don’t have to know.”

Izuku tensed as his mouth watered, and then he buried his face in his blankets.

 

ooo

 

His tail is about as long as him and half as wide. Izuku can’t move it carefully at first. It whips around like a container filled with water--sloshing and jerking before over-correcting. It’s sharp enough to gouge metal and fluid enough to curl up like a corkscrew.

Once he can get it to hold still--as still as it can be--he observes the way strange vein-like structures shift and spread across the cyanic surface. It almost glows in the half-light, like neon on wet pavement.

That could have been because of the mucus it produced. It grossed Izuku out before his curiosity overcame his disgust. Despite being viscous, it didn’t stain. The fluid itself evaporated quickly, and the residue appeared to be water soluble once dried. Or, salt-water soluble, at least. Since he hadn’t thought to bring drinking water to the privacy of the hidden beach, he only had the ocean to test out his theories.

He detailed his observations into his quirk journal despite how reading them made him grimace. As long as he was absorbed in figuring out where the extra mass in his body came and went, he could ignore his future in the hopes of figuring out his strange present.

Or at least he could, until he realized that even though his quirk made his body burn electric with energy and life and that he could move and hear like he never could when he kept it dormant, it also made him hungry every time he used it. It was an impermanent thing that rose up sharply and died down in the hours Izuku spent asleep.

Short spikes and sudden falls. Forever trending upwards.

And that’s how it hit him. Like he first read: He had a carnivore mutation quirk. And the tail that extended from his spine was a predatory organ.

Of course his body expected food when he utilized it.

ooo

 

The idea looked stupid on paper. It sounded stupid to Izuku every time he thought of it. But he kept thinking of it.

Instead of going to school, Izuku found himself lingering outside of Katsuki’s home, feeling incredibly out of place. He winced at the sounds of yelling coming from the Bakugou household and reconsidered his choices. The screaming--

“I’m not putting that shit on my skin!”

“I’m not letting you get skin cancer, brat! Get over here!”

--appeared to be fairly mundane, but Izuku had never had his mom yell at him. He was sweating, and it wasn’t due to the weather.

It might be best to just head to school after all.

The door slammed open before Izuku could escape. “Pull up your pants, you damn delinquent!” Aunt Mitsuki caught sight of him and her face brightened. “Izuku! Good to see you!”

Katsuki jerked, his eyes widening in surprise. Izuku blanched and waved shakily. “Ah, you too!”

Kacchan’s expression pinched, and he marched right past Izuku.

It wasn’t surprising, but Izuku had hoped for something better. He grimaced and turned to catch up.

“Have fun at school!”

Izuku jolted and called out, “You too!” Then horror overcame him. “Ah! I mean thank you!” Mitsuki laughed, loud and delighted. Izuku fled, trailing behind Katsuki with his stomach twisting and twisting.

Kacchan glanced back at him as he walked. The anger from earlier had come and gone, replaced by boredom. “What do you want, Deku?”

Izuku was sweating bullets. He was a moron. He should have gone to someone else. “I needed advice.”

“Ten bucks,” Kacchan said. He held out his hand, not slowing his pace.

Izuku blinked and then he began digging for his wallet. “Ah, I guess--”

“Fucking hell,” Kacchan said with a snort. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m not taking your money.”

Ah. A joke. Yeah. Izuku laughed shakily. He’d forgotten that Kasuki could be nearly neutral and quietly disdainful instead of just a blatant jerk.

“But I do wanna know what crawled up your ass and gave you a spine,” Katsuki said. “Fucking losers all lost their damn minds after your dumbass walkout.”

That sounded almost. . . appreciative?

Izuku ducked his head. That stunt had earned him suspension, and Izuku knew that was as unfair as it was typical. It still wasn’t his proudest moment. “Ah--I just--I just got tired of it. I already know quirk history front and back,” He muttered, glancing away from his ex-friend. “There wasn’t a point on spending time on something so basic.”

Katsuki’s expression shuttered closed, and he flipped Izuku off with a sneer. “And it’s a fucking record breaker.” He increased his stride and stomped ahead.

“Wait!” Izuku yelped, “I just--” he grabbed at Katsuki’s shoulder.

He spun Katsuki around.

“-- I need your help!”

Kacchan stopped. Slow as an iceberg, he dropped his gaze to the hand on his shoulder, staring poisonously. He made no move to push back, even as he clenched his fists.

When they were younger, he would have punched Izuku in the face. Izuku dropped his hand.  He didn’t to break their streak.

“What the fuck make you think I’m qualified for life advice?”

“You give it every day,” Izuku snapped, his voice rising to meet Katsuki’s.  “You never have a problem telling people how to live--why are you suddenly so concerned about ‘qualifications?’”

Katsuki didn’t care about Izuku. Or anyone really. He wouldn’t lose sleep over another’s troubles. Ironically, that made him the only person Izuku felt like he could ask. Despite how awful Katsuki acted, he never stopped knowing how to move forward. When the world pushed on him, he pushed back.

Katsuki bared his teeth--but instead of knocking Izuku away or brushing him off, he closed his eyes and draws in a deep breath through his clenched jaw. After a few seconds, his eyes snapped open, and he fixed Izuku with a hard stare.

“You got fifteen seconds. Spit it out.”

“Ah?!” Izuku’s eyes widened in surprise. All his careful phrasings and imagined conversations fled from his mind in a rush. He blurted out, “What do I do if I have to do something, but I can’t live with myself if I do?”

Katsuki looked unimpressed. He raised an eyebrow, the answer clearly evident to him. “Die.”

The simple delivery stunned Izuku to a standstill.

Katsuki tilted his head, oddly calm. “What are you waiting for?” He flicked his hands in a shooing motion. “Easy solution.”

Izuku stared, speechless. Katsuki told people to kill themselves over shoe choices and their taste in movies. Hell, he told Izuku to kill himself a few weeks ago. He said it often enough that teachers and other students either rolled their eyes or laughed. He said it with empty rage, with annoyed yelling, or with a gleeful smirk.

He didn’t say it like this. Two plus two is four. Two minus two is zero.

Katsuki scoffed, shattering the silence and empty pulse in Izuku’s ears. “Since you aren’t running into traffic, it looks like you don’t wanna die. And that means you’ve made a decision to live.” He resumed his steady walk to school, leaving Izuku behind.

Izuku raised a hand, unsure of what he intended to do with it.

Katsuki broke him out of his indecision with one derisive parting shot, annoyance creeping into his voice: “--So use whatever living braincells you’ve got hidden deep inside your skull and figure out a way to fucking live with it.”

o o o

 

That weekend, Izuku robbed a morgue.

 

o o o

 

That makes it sound simple--Like he didn’t spend hours at the library studying mortuary practices, local hospital infrastructure, and the rate of decay in corpses. Bodies begin to putrefy at around 36 hours. He wasn’t sure he wanted to cut it that close with something he was going to eat.

He waited until three in the morning, long after his mom fell asleep, to get ready. He wore plain tennis shoes his mother bought for him months ago, an old hoodie that had always been too big on him, and a face mask. He looked like the very definition of suspicious.

He padded to the bathroom and carefully searched through spare makeup. He wasn’t great at eyeliner, but he smudged some around the inside of his eyes and over his eyebrows. He stared in the mirror.

“I just look weirder than I already did!” he mourned. His shaking hands ruined any chance of subtly. “Maybe I should wait. . . I don’t really know enough to pull this off. I’m going to get caught and--"

Izuku cut himself off by slapping a hand over his mouth, which was getting too loud. He breathed deeply, calming the dread stirring in his stomach. When he opened his eyes again, he glared at himself in the mirror, his eyebrows deeply furrowed. 

“You’re finding a way to live with it.”

He paid for the train in cash and kept his head down to avoid security cameras. At his exit, he took a circuitous route to the hospital proper. He refused to breathe around dumpsters, quickening his pace through alleyways.

He approached through the east entrance, near the ER. The front desk attendant stared at him, and Izuku politely nodded and headed straight towards the elevator like he’d been here a dozen times before.

He had been here before. This was his hospital. And he had been to the ER very recently.

The second floor had all the overnight observations due to heart attacks. Izuku waited around upstairs, pretending to make a call.

Then he went back outside and reconsidered his life choices.

This was finding a way to live with it. It had sounded like such radical advice until two minutes ago.

“Come on,” Izuku told himself. He couldn’t check the time. He’d turned off his phone before he left the house. But he knew he was running late. “You have to.”

He couldn’t go home if he didn’t. Not with the hunger that hollowed him out from the inside. A few bites barely kept him functioning for a week. If he hurt someone else--if he hurt his mom--he couldn’t handle it.

Izuku consulted the map he burned into his memory. The loading center was close by. He could access the basement through there. However, it was restricted access. Only delivery trucks used it. Even if there were less people to notice Izuku, there might be security guards. There would definitely be locked doors that Izuku couldn’t avoid.

But he had a tail that cut through metal like it was nothing. He could handle it. Adrenaline burned sour in Izuku’s veins. He slunk around the outside of the building, his head ducked low and his ears strained to catch the barest bit of sound.

He had a tail that cut through metal like it was nothing. He handled it.

Izuku urged his tail to creep out at a snail’s pace, concentrating on keeping it small enough to hide in the bulk of his jacket. He blocked the view of the door from the side cameras with this body and punctured the area around the lock. The metal resisted, and his tail stung from the effort of fighting with the door--but he couldn’t afford to trip the sensors on the key card handle. For twenty strained, heart rending seconds, Izuku stood in place, chipping away at the building with increasingly frantic strikes from his quirk.

The bolt of the lock slid past the ruined doorway with barely a hairsbreadth of room, and Izuku slipped inside.

The hospital was taller than it was wide, but it still covered more ground than some of the more modern buildings. Izuku kept his head low and resisted the urge to sprint through the halls. Movement gets attention. Movement will get noticed.

He shot quick glances at the discreet signs that adorned the doors:

Chemical Storage.

Pharmacy.

Bathroom.

Security.

Izuku blanched, stress rising in a way that was frankly absurd. He slumped against a wall in the crossroads of two hallways, cradling his head. He was robbing a morgue. He was robbing a morgue. He snuck out of the house for the first time ever, and he did it to commit a felony.

His mom might really yell at him if she found out.

A beep came from a door down the hallway to his right. Izuku’s heart stopped, and he skidded around the corner just in time. Two people entered, the heavy tread of boots signifying either security or maintenance.

 “Yeah,” A gravely voice sighed, “the whole thing is just unfortunate for us. Best surgeon we had.”

Izuku’s looked frantically for a place to hide.

“Not even a notice?”

The supply closet was locked. He couldn’t break the lock without making noise. Izuku darted down the hallway to the bathrooms. He slipped inside and turned the lock, flinching at the automatic lights. He pressed his ear to the door, not daring to breathe as the two people turned and came his direction.

“Something about family issues. That’s what the nurses were saying, and they’re usually on top of the gossip.”

“Strange. Hey, go ahead, I’ll be along in a minute.”

One paused outside the door--And turned the door handle.

Izuku felt he was going to burst into flames. His quirk sprang from his spine, striking Izuku with a dizzying hunger. He fell back and clutched at the sink, sweating bullets.

The handle jostled again.

“O-occupied,” Izuku squeaked.

“Ah, sorry,” they called out.

Izuku gaped like a fish. “I--I’m sorry, but I’ll be i-in here for a while,” he stuttered as he forced his quirk calm.

The person sighed, but left with a less-than enthusiastic, “Feel better, then.” Izuku pressed his ear to the door until the sound of solid footsteps retreated.

That had just worked.

Izuku cracked open the door, peering down the hall. He took a tentative step forward. He strained to listen, his nose buzzing with the chemical covering of deodorant and the savory-heat of skin. Nothing.

That had just worked.

Izuku turned and sprinted through the hall, and he skidded to a stop outside the morgue. He didn’t know how much time he had anymore.

The room was clinical and larger than expected. A large silver refrigerated cabinet lined the back wall. Izuku breathed harshly, and then stumbled towards it. He was hollow from using his quirk, and it made it easy to just stop thinking.

He pulled the sleeves of his hoodie over his palms to avoid leaving fingerprints and began opening the units at random. There weren’t any signs to indicate what compartment would have--would be full. Izuku couldn’t smell past the chemical scent of disinfectant. At least, he couldn’t before he opened the twelfth compartment.

The muted smell of skin and blood surrounded him in a cloud, and Izuku yanked the rolling compartment out. On the metal slab was a person, his face discolored in death. His chest had metal staples holding his skin together.

Izuku barely paused to pull his disposable medical mask down before he sunk his teeth into an arm.

And then once he realized what he was doing, he wanted to throw up. His stomach didn’t cooperate.

Izuku sobbed once, hunger warring with his common sense. He had to leave--he had to take it with him so he wouldn’t get caught. Izuku extended his senses--not hearing anything suspicious, he urged his quirk out from his spine.

It spilled out, too large and heavy, and Izuku whipped it haphazardly at his meal. He could have used his hands. His blood buzzed electric with strength, and he could have torn his food limb from limb--and the thought of it made him want to cry.

Instead, Izuku dented metal and ruptured the abdominal cavity, leaving insides spilling out. He flipped his shit quietly. “No, oh shoot, dang it,” he hissed as he tried to prevent someone’s internal organs from spilling onto the floor. It worked marginally, despite Izuku gagging on his disgust.

Now he just needed to gather everything and leave and--

He had forgotten to bring a bag.

Izuku's frustration reared up, and his tail slammed into metal, the sound splitting the air of the morgue. This, of course, triggered an alarm and caused several pairs of footsteps to appear from down the hall.

And he was just going to have to live with it, wasn't he? 

Chapter 3: High Priestess I

Notes:

oof, i originally had more planned, but i wanted to post something soon, so ripppp

Chapter Text

Izuku never tempted fate by calling something the “worst.” It was just a bad idea, a hypothesis that would get proven wrong eventually--Usually with extreme prejudice, because fate hates qualifiers.

However, he could objectively say this was the worst month of his life.

Security almost had him in the first ten seconds with a paralysis quirk. Gold eyes froze him into place, helpless to even blink. And then his tail whipped out in an offensive burst, blocking line of sight. Izuku didn’t hesitate. He leapt with electricity thrumming though his blood and fled.

His quirk threw off his balance when standing. Izuku had tested that numerous times. It lashed out and shifted without his permission, making him constantly move to avoid stumbling. But when running--when sprinting--it flowed out behind him as a counterweight, flicking and adjusting to compensate for the hair-pin turns Izuku pushed himself to follow.

He outran his pursuers in a minute, but they pursued him for much longer--some kind of tracking quirk.

He had only lost them after a terrifying climb and a thirty second quick-change inside an half-empty dumpster. The smell of rotten food clung to his skin like a foul cloud, and Izuku felt immensely guilty about forcing people on his train to deal with it when he finally got to the station.

He also felt terrified of getting stopped for having a heavy-duty trashbag full of human flesh, but he’d spent most of the night being terrified, so that wasn’t debilitating.

Between his quick escape, hiding, and taking a circuitous route to the train station, he got home just before five. Izuku didn’t go inside immediately. The sky pulsed gas-flame blue with anticipation of the sun, and that meant he only had a little darkness left. He hid along the back end of his apartment complex in between the wall and the cover of a metal dumpster, on high alert for the slightest sound.

Finding none, he closed his eyes, forced himself not to think, and ate. Even the smell of rotting food couldn’t phase his hunger. He sank his teeth into skin and gnawed through bone. It tasted awful. Not in the way that normal food made him throw up in disgust, but like old fast-food. Overcooked. Over processed. Slightly stale.

It tasted normal.

He ate every last bite.

--

Izuku had a lot of room for improvement from his first outing.

Mostly, he hadn’t worn waterproof eyeliner. It added a whole new layer to the odd looks he got on his morning commute after his first outing. He only noticed when his mom had delicately brought up the topic over breakfast (which he had finally figured out how to struggle through).

Izuku immediately panicked and started rambling apologies about showers and stealing. His mom had been a bit alarmed, even as she levitated a washcloth over.

“You can’t leave make-up on overnight,” she advised slowly.

Izuku buried his face in his hands from mortification.

The next day, she came home with pencil eyeliner and an eyeshadow pallet and taught him how to apply them.

(His mom was the best.)

Secondly, he forgotten a bag. That might have been a blessing in disguise, because he would have gotten viscera in his backpack. Izuku learned from his attempts to do laundry that cold blood did not like to wash out.

He solved this by placing a large trash bag in the main compartment of a sports backpack. It didn’t hold much, especially since he left the secondary compartment free for a spare change of clothes and other essentials. He firmly decided that he needed wet wipes after his second outing, because it was getting ridiculous how often he needed to wash his face with varyingly clean amounts of water.

He also went out in the middle of the night the first time. Where there were no crowds to hide in and no businesses to disappear into. Yeah, the security had been lax due it being the grave yard shift, but Izuku doubted that would be the case again. Not after he had ended up on the evening news.

That had been a mini-heart attack, but thankfully his face-mask had done at least part of the job, because the picture in the report was only a grainy snap of his face. And at that low-res a picture, his makeup might actually have done something useful.

He still decided that running through the middle of the night wasn’t going to work a second time. He started hero watching in the early evening. It allowed him to dodge dinner and scope out his next target, and then helped him distract himself from the guilt of doing both those things.

His mom slowly loosened his curfew as the investigation surrounding the bombing on Kamui Woods wrapped up. Izuku celebrated by striking just as the day shift for security began to filter out, using a stolen ID, a wig, and a pair of nondescript scrubs to bypass security. He had practiced pickpocketing (and returning) wallets in the crowds of hero spectators for weeks until it was second nature. It paid off, because he was in and out of the hospital in less than ten minutes by his second attempt. And then three on his third.

Izuku still found it really hard to not return the ID on the spot. He found a way to deal with it, though, because when he returned home with a full stomach, he didn’t idly think about eating his mother and then want to bash his head in to make it stop.

 --

At school, life grinded on like a fork in the garbage disposal. His go-to response to people picking on him slowly shifted from “curl up into a ball and hope they lose interest” to a distinct kind of annoyance that made his skin buzz and his nose sting.

Izuku had to weld his jaw shut to make it through the day. Before, words just refused to form through the static of his head. Before, it was like fear wedged itself in his throat only allowed stilted apologies and awkward yelps. Now, he had to deal with a heat that thrummed over his skin and an acidic burn in his stomach--and he could think of a lot of things to say.

He refused to say them. He usually forgot by the time his heartrate returned to normal.

Besides, he had a lot of more pressing issues. Such as his school guidance consulor, who had started pushing him to consider his future and her paycheck.

“I’m serious, Midoriya-kun. You need to start considering your applications.” She clicked through his online file. “I know you mentioned UA, but I’d consider that a reach school. Have you thought of anything else?”

“N-not really,” Izuku mumbled. He’d been so busy trying to keep afloat. His future hadn’t been the top priority.

“Anything,” She prompted, a little desperately. “Anything at all?”

Izuku took pity on her. “Ah, I was thinking I could be--” Izuku scrambled for an answer, and he went for-- “A doctor! You know, help people get better?”

His guidance counselor lit up. “That’s brilliant, Midoriya! You don’t have a quirk that would interfere with a medical profession, and you certainly have the math and science grades to do well. What inspired this change?” And she said it kindly, but Izuku knows she meant what made you come to your senses?

 “Ah. I had an appendectomy a few months ago--it’s not really a common problem anymore,“ he explained at her look of confusion. And it really wasn’t. He hadn’t heard of the appendix until after he had it removed, because ninety percent of the population didn’t even have it in the first place.

And that meant almost no one knew what was wrong with him when he started rotting from the inside.

Izuku shook himself. “But my surgeon saved my life. If I could be the same,” he trailed off, staring at his hands in his lap. “. . . Then maybe that could make a difference.”

Izuku’s eyebrows furrowed. Somehow, he’d ended up telling the truth.

And so he actually started looking into it. His consoler gave him plenty of materials, and so Izuku combed through the list of medically-inclined high schools. There were about as many as there were hero schools, with the same varying levels of prestige.

One was even called the UA of medical prep schools. Hebikyuden. Seeing the comparison had made Izuku’s heart flutter in a confusing way. He read through the recruitment materials, and they boasted about high-tech facilities and hands on education. It was also the only institution to offer pre-occupation certification for medical quirk-usage. Not that that would benefit Izuku, but it seemed like a fascinating avenue of study.

The entrance exam had a reputation about as gruesome as UA’s too. He would have to start prepping, because his middle school definitely hadn’t offered the upper level math that he would need.

When he mentioned the idea to his mom, she almost dropped her chopsticks mid-bite.

Izuku back-tracked, eyes wide at the reaction. “I mean, I know I would have to apply to other schools--and I’m not too certain yet, because I haven’t ever really considered medicine that deeply, and--”

 “I think it would be wonderful,” His mom said firmly. “You would be an amazing doctor Izuku, and you have the work ethic to carry you far.” She reached out and squeezed his hand, and her smile lit up her face. “You don’t have to rush into anything, but I will certainly support you as much as I can.”

And Izuku teared up and smiled back.

--

His homeroom teacher had quickly become Izuku’s least favorite, if only because instead of not caring, he cared just enough to give the worst advice. As the year went on, he seemed to realize that most students didn't really know what they wanted to do, and he took it upon himself to inject a daily dose of realism before he clocked out.

“I mean, some of you should look into realistic careers. Midoriya is applying himself to become a surgeon. Bakugou is applying to UA.” His homeroom teacher listed those things off as if they were equivalent, ignoring the way his class exploded. He finished packing his bags just as the final bell rang. “Think on your futures,” he called as he hurried out the door.

This left Izuku to deal with Katsuki, who had looked sour the second his and Izukus’ names were in neighboring sentences. The blonde loomed, hands planted firmly over Izuku’s notes to keep him from leaving. “What’s this bullshit about being a doctor, Deku?”

Izuku clenched his fists under fists under his desk before he shifted his gaze somewhere over Katsuki’s shoulder. “It’s a respectable career,” he supplied neutrally. “You go to them when you’re sick? Stethoscope? White coat?”

Katsuki’s eyes narrowed. “You hate biology.”

“I wasn’t especially good at it,” Izuku corrected, taking the lack of screaming as a sign that he could at least partially pack up. “I don’t hate everything I don’t do well in. That would just be dumb.”

“You cry during dissections.”

Maybe it would be a bit different for a living body, but Izuku was fairly certain he’s grown a bit desensitized to the sight of gore. By necessity. “Your concern is kind,” Izuku said slowly as he stood, still studiously avoiding eye-contact. He really didn’t want to leave his notes behind. He tugged at them experimentally, but that just seemed to provoke Katsuki into baring his teeth.

Izuku resisted the urge to respond in kind. He took a slow breath to calm his nerves. “Is there a reason you care?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki snapped. “Because if you’re incompetent, you can fucking kill someone, nerd.”

The irony in that statement made Izuku cough. Violently.

Katsuki seemed to take that as an epiphany. He leaned back on his heels and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Didn’t think of that one, genius? If you’re a useless, quirkless loser, then maybe don’t go into a high-risk career.”

Izuku wanted to laugh, but he had a fifty/fifty chance of crying or screaming if he did. He’d take being quirkless and useless any day of the week. It was the better alternative to his current life. If he were quirkless, he could eat Katsudon with his mother. If he were useless, he would get caught and wouldn’t have to live with the fact that he was too much of a coward to do the right thing.

“Like, seriously? A surgeon?” Katsuki raised an eyebrow, derision draped over his words. “Brains ain’t worth shit if you can’t keep your hands still. You’re fucking shaking already, and I’m as fucking low stress as it gets.”

Izuku quickly shoved his things into his backpack, his face hot and his jaw clamped shut. He shouldered his things and marched towards the door.

Katsuki followed on his heels, matching his pace easily. “Just giving some fucking life advice,” he drawled. “I mean, you chose the one job you’d be worse at than hero work--”

Izuku stopped dead and didn’t budge an inch when Katsuki collided with him in the hallway. Poison burned on his tongue, and he swallowed it back and back until he could find a little kindness. When he turned around, it was with his most concerned expression that he could plaster on his face. “Are you alright, Kacchan?”

Katsuki’s expression twisted in confusion. “The fuck?”

“Is someone in the hospital? Or sick?” Izuku looked down and away, unable to keep eye contact. “You seem really preoccupied. I just wanted to make sure that you’re doing okay. Anything I could help with?”

But even without looking, Izuku could hear when Katsuki caught up with his non-sequitur. His teeth slammed shut, and he knocked shoulders with Izuku as he stalked past. “Fuck you and the condescension you rode in on, Deku,” he snarled.

Feeling brave, Izuku called out, “I’m here if you need me!”

Katsuki flipped him off over his shoulder.

Izuku eventually went to the library, both to study for his exams and his next heist. But if he took a few seconds to revel in Katsuki’s annoyance before he moved on. . .

Well, what else was new?

--

Izuku bolted upright out of sleep, heart racing and sweat beading up on his skin. Sour bile stung at the back of his throat, and he stumbled to the bathroom barely in time to puke into the toilet bowl. His violent retching slowly resolved itself into dry-heaving, and then just panting.

He slung himself against the wall, wiping furiously at the spit and tears on his face. The cold tile leeched the heat from his feverish skin. In the dark, he listened for any padding footsteps or shifting fabric, and found nothing. He hadn’t woken his mom.

Izuku tilted his head back and breathed a ragged sigh of relief. He picked himself off the ground.

This wasn’t an irregular occurrence. Izuku had learned how to stomach bites of food at least twice a week. He hadn’t learned how to keep them down for longer than a few minutes, but that was usually all he needed. He was intimately acquainted with nausea and how it turned him boneless and weak and fulling of seeping pain.

The problem was that he hadn’t eaten last night. Or the night before.

He was hungry. He was hungry enough to see it in his dreams, to have it buzz in the background of his thoughts. And that meant it was time to eat.

He ran the faucet and scrubbed roughly at his face with cold water, trying to drown out the frustration. When he glanced up, he froze. A blood-red iris burned in his hollow eye socket. “What?” Izuku breathed, Tentatively, he raised his hand to his eye and traced at the stark veins that pulsed under his skin.

His hands shook, and his head refused to quiet. It only got louder, and louder, and the noise was his mother’s quiet breathing, and the base of his spine stirred.

Izuku slammed his fist into the mirror, and it shattered in a burst of glass.

“Izuku?!” His mom called out, voice hoarse with fear and sleep.

Panic sunk its teeth in his neck. “Nothing!” He yelled back, brushing splinters out from his knuckles. “Just tripped--I’m fine.”

To his horror, he heard the sound of his mom getting up, felt the vibrations through the floor. And his heartrate skyrocketed--she couldn’t see him. Not with his face, not with his eye, not with his nightmares and his hunger and his foul, cursed, awful quirk.

Izuku sprinted down the hallway and right out the door, clumsy with panic. His mom called for him again, but he leapt down the stairwell and hit the cement at a roll. It knocked the breath out of him and made him see stars, but he ignored the pain in his ankles and ran.

The winter early morning raised bumps over his skin and the pavement froze his bare feet. His breath stung at his throat, but he ran, and he didn’t slow down until his chest felt like it was going to catch fire. He paused at an intersection empty intersection, gasping for air.

It was a Sunday, and it felt like the whole world was still sleeping. He should be sleeping.

Oh, his mom was going to flip.

Izuku hugged his arms over his chest trying to ward off the chill creeping through his skin. His sweat stained pajamas clung to him, cheery yellow and entirely unsuited to the dim, quiet dark that laid over the empty streets. Ugly hesitance wanted him to stop. Not move. Never make a choice. He didn't want to go home and he never wanted to leave.

He was such a crybaby. Kasuki would definitely laugh at him for being so choked up about walking. 

Izuku scrubbed at his face and muttered harshly, "Get over it." And then he walked.

He hadn’t been to the beach in weeks. Not since he realized that using his quirk made him hungry enough to slip. But he needed to be alone.

He was always going back to rotten places. Ugly places. The only kind of place where he could do ugly things and not be seen. What made that beach useful was that it was an eyesore. It was ugly and smelly, and it was also the only place Izuku could bring out his quirk without the fear of breaking something. Everything on that beach was already broken. No one wanted to spare a thought towards broken things. And that meant it was the one place he could exist without being afraid.

Except when he went to the beach, he wasn’t alone.

Someone was sprinting between the piles of garbage, hauling tires and and broken kitchen appliances to an old truck on the sea wall. Where there had once been an unbroken expanse of garbage, there was now a small hole where you could see the sand. Izuku paused on the sea-wall, struck dumb by the sound of panting and metal hitting metal. He caught a glimpse of light hair and a blue shirt dashing in between the towers of trash. 

Someone was cleaning the beach at five am on a Sunday.

Chapter 4: High Priestess II

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Izuku hesitated on the edge of the sea wall. The harsh tang of salt and rotting fish clouded his thoughts. Why was someone here? No one came to this beach. The city considered it a lost cause and stopped cleanup efforts six years ago. It was supposed to be his--it had been only Izuku's for those first few horrifying weeks where nothing made sense. 

The jarring sound of a broken appliance being tossed into metal knocked him out of his daze. He glanced behind to check that he was alone and called out, "Hello?" Distracted, he walked forward--

And then immediately crashed into the warm and forgiving piles of corroded metal six feet below. 

The impact knocked the wind out of him and made him see stars--the tang of metal cut through the sea breeze, and Izuku blinked furiously until he could see blood flowing down his arms. "Huh?"

That wasn't right. Izuku didn't get scrapes and bruises. He didn't. . . he had seen--

"Woah! Stay right there, alright?"

Izuku blinked again, and turned his aching neck towards the vibrations rattling through the sheets of rusted metal. Shifting his way over the unstable terrain was a tall man in work out clothes. "Hey, hey," he urged, strange blue eyes peering at him with concern. "Can you move? Is there anything broken?"

Was there? Izuku curled his fingers and shifted his numb limbs. His forearms stung and burned--this was so unsanitary, Izuku was going to bathe in alcohol and antiseptic when he got home--but he could move. The even bigger concern was the deep laceration on his left foot. Izuku had been learning anatomy to prep for his exams, but he really hadn't planned on using the inside of his heel as a reference. The sight made him turn slightly green. 

"Can you speak? Did you hit your head?"

Izuku forced his mouth to move. "Yes. To both. I didn't b-break anything."

"That's good. I'm Togata Mirio." The blonde said, by way of introductions, calm despite the blood and gore. "Let's get you moved back up, and I can get you first aid. Is that alright?"

Izuku nodded, the world returning to focus. He stiffened when Mirio moved closer and gently maneuvered him to his feet, the smell of blood already making it harder to keep calm. "I'm okay, I can walk," he said through gritted teeth. 

Mirio shook his head. "You'll get tetanus faster than you can blink if you try. Please let me help. For my peace of mind."

Izuku swallowed past the lump in his throat and took a deep breath of heavy sea-breeze before nodding tightly. He didn't eve dare to breath as Mirio carried him up the stairs and set him up on a bench. He promised to return with a first aid kit. Then he sunk through the pavement, leaving a pile of clothes and a pair of shoes. 

Izuku gasped partially in shock, but mostly in relief. It was easier to think when he didn't have a heartbeat to lure him into some mindless, calm state. The hunger carving though his stomach hurt almost as much as the gashes on his arms and foot--gashes that shouldn't be there. 

Izuku had ripped his jeans to shreds on chainlink fences the night of the Kamui Woods bombing, and he hadn't even nicked his skin. He had made a couple of poorly coordinated jumps during his circular routes home and didn't have any broken bones to show for it. His quirk made him durable--unless he was so hungry that it was ineffective?

He had gone longer without food before. He'd been hungrier than this, despite how his body screamed that it was on the verge of death and dying sometimes. And his eye and the mirror and his leap of faith--his quirk obviously was still working. Twenty minutes of walking shouldn't have changed that.

Izuku jerked out of his thoughts as Mirio came running up the stairs with a promised first aid kit and a towel precariously wrapped around his waist.

Izuku blanched and whipped his head to the side to give him some privacy. 

"Sorry about that," Mirio said with a laugh. "My quirk makes it hard to stay family friendly."

Izuku latched onto that, forcing himself to focus on something other than the warmth filling his mouth. "What is your quirk? Some kind of teleportation?" But a teleportation quirk that couldn't transport anything? Well, statistically, teleportation quirks were rare enough to be an anomaly and there wasn't nearly enough literature on them for Izuku to be certain, but they usually had some aura or functioned as an area-effect emitter. The inability to carry anything probably drastically limited its utility. 

Mirio shook his head, still barefoot, but no longer naked. He unzipped the small first aid kit and began to dress Izuku's injuries. "Nope, but good guess. My quirk is a little weird, but it allows me to turn my body permeable." He continued explaining the ins and outs of his quirk, and Izuku paid staunch attention so he could ignore the blood sinking into his clothes. Mirio obviously had some training in first aid, because he disinfected and dressed Izuku's cuts with startling efficiency. 

But then he wanted to call an ambulance, and that was where Izuku had to draw a line. "I'm fine, I swear!"

"Kid," Mirio said patiently, "I didn't want to alarm you, but you need stitches. Severely."

Except that Izuku couldn't afford to go to a hospital or freak his mom out like that. Not for something that shouldn't have even happened. His quirk was supposed to keep him--

Safe. It was supposed to protect him. And it could really only do that while it was active.

Izuku gritted his jaw, and slowly, carefully, urged the stirring in his spine to bubble up and boil over.

And things were sharp. Loud. Waves and breathing crested in his ears, His tail coiled and stirred around his back never fully forming, because Izuku didn't need it right now or the terrible energy drain that always followed. He just needed the electric buzz that ran through his veins to work--

And it did. His mucles and skin twitched where they snapped together and sealed into place. Izuku forced his quirk to linger in that liminal space where he was alive and incomplete. He ignored Mirio and his escalating concern because he had to concentrate. If he slipped up, if he faltered, it wouldn't be Izuku who paid for it.

And Izuku was furious and thankful that it was that way, because if it were only him who had to suffer, he wasn't sure he could bear it.

Izuku took a solid, heaving breath, faintly trembling with from some alien exertion. He finally looked up. Mirio flinched in surprise, and Izuku grimaced. "I'm sorry. I kinda wasted your time because I--forgot how my. . ." 

And it would be bullshit if anyone else said it, but Izuku really sometimes did forget that he wasn't quirkless anymore. He tugged at Mirio's perfectly tied bandages, pushing on despite the other's protests. Beneath the coagulated blood was skin, scabbed up with corse and dark ridges and lined with odd, pale scars. He showed it to Mirio, and he blinked his disconcertingly blue eyes in surprise.  

"I, uh, didn't mean to waste your time," Izuku mumbled. "But I just--Sorry--I usually don't. . ."

Mirio chuckled and then shook his head, waving off Izuku's hapless apology. "Ah, no bid deal. It helps to get some practice in. So, what brings you here--barefoot, I might add," He says with a little edge of good-natured scolding, "So early on a Sunday?"

Izuku gave a breathless laugh, still feeling incredibly guilty about making such a big deal out of nothing. "I was going to ask you the same question. I've never seen someone else on this beach."

"Well, it's about my second day here," Mirio shared. "And I can see why. I doubt the smell ever gets any nicer. But you like to brave the elements?"

Izuku toes were frozen solid, but his embarrassment kept him from admitting it. He had probably been a bit too hasty. He still needed to walk home at some point. Now that he had calmed down a little. "I come here. . . When I need to be alone, I guess. No one ever even looks this way."

"I can see why. It's easier to ignore a problem than to fix it." 

Izuku blinked, taken aback. "Uh--yeah. So you're cleaning it up?"

"Someone I admire sponsored a community service opportunity. My friends and I are cleaning up some public spaces, and I volunteered for the most daunting."

"That's really admirable," Izuku said, slightly in awe. The expanse of the beach wasn't just long--the thrash covered the sand all the way into the water front. To clean all of it? Izuku couldn't have done it.

Mirio flashed him a smile and a thumbs up. "It's a hero's job to help. It might take me a while, but I'm going to keep pushing--"

"You're a hero?!" Izuku blurted out, and then turned red in mortification. "I mean, you just looked my age, and I didn't recognize you, and I'm usually pretty good about--"

"Cool your jets," Mirio said kindly, taking pity on Izuku's frazzled nerves. "I'm a hero in training at UA." He flexed dramatically and posed, and Izuku might have died on the spot a few months ago.

"That's so cool," Izuku murmured, his eyes wide. Of course, from the way Mirio spoke about his quirk, Izuku had expected that he had some training. But Mirio was also really muscular, and it made him look older than he was--Izuku hadn't expected that he would be a student. Only a few years older than him, and nearly a hero. . .

"How about you? You want to be a hero?"

And that reminder was all it took to burst his bubble. 

He liked the idea of being a doctor. Of helping people. And his school supported him--his homeroom teacher even signed off on free access to the library during lunch. His teachers didn't say disparaging things about his plans for the future anymore. They thought it was great that someone had chosen a respectable, realistic career path. Realistic for Izuku.

His mom had cried when he told her. She had smiled warmly and told him how proud she was and that she would do everything to support him.

And his mom did support him--she wanted the best for him. She quizzed him and helped him review his work in the evenings. She dragged him out of his room when he needed to get outside on the weekends. She cheered him on every time he got a better score on a mock test. She spent a lot of time helping him review and study and cram. That had been their plan for today: Hot coffee and morning flashcards. His mom said she would do everything to support him, and she meant it.

She just never said the same when he wanted to be a hero. 

Izuku looked away, his throat tight. "I did. . . but I'm not very suited to it."

Mirio was quiet for a moment before he sat down next to Izuku on the bench overlooking the beach. "That's what you think," He stressed, encouragement bursting from him like sunlight. "What do you feel?"

Izuku felt a strong desire to eat people everyday. He laughed humorlessly, tying back up Mirio's redundant bandages.

"I feel like I would be a burden."

--

In the end, Izuku had to lie and convince Mirio that he lived close by. He even pretended to walk towards some of the condos near the beach front before doubling back down the nice streets. It was still barely the crack of dawn, which made it a lot easier on Izuku. No one gave him strange looks for his stained clothes and bare (heavily bandaged) feet. 

He limped home, gingerly avoiding putting too much stress on the wound on his foot. He could have push his quirk longer and avoided the pain, but then he wouldn't have enough energy to endure being around more people. It took him nearly twice as long to get home as it had to rush away, and even then he still got home within two hours. 

He wished he'd taken longer. Or stopped by a store of some sort. His formerly bright yellow pajamas were going to give his mom a heart attack--if he hadn't already done that by running off without his phone at four in the morning. 

He was the worst child, wasn't he?

Izuku smacked his cheeks lightly. He had to postpone the pity party for just a little longer, because he needed to make this as painless as possible. 

Front door was obviously a no-go. His mom would see and hear him immediately. Living room windows were similarly not a great idea. That pretty much left his bedroom window. His second story bedroom window. 

Izuku stared up at it from the slowly lightening street. His window seal mocked him from sixteen feet above. Even if he pulled over some garbage cans and didn't fall off and split his head open, that would be a six foot jump. And he definitely didn't have the upper body strength to pull himself up without his quirk. Could he use his quirk? He felt a lot more in control than when he woke up, but that could change in a heart beat if he over extended himself. 

And his mom might have locked the window. Oh, if she locked the window, he was doomed. He'd opened it last week to sneak out, but then chickened out. She hadn't gone in his room had she? She would still have to specifically look for it to even notice it was unlatched. So she probably hadn't locked it. 

This wasn't going to look good if anyone saw. They might call the police, and that would just cause so much trouble, especially if anyone had a scent quirk or a ESP quirk or--

Izuku had somehow bypassed his pity party for a panic party. He smacked his face again. Hard. Then he clenched his fists and began the laborious process of breaking into his home. 

It was a close call, and Izuku almost hurled himself back out the window when he heard his mom come pacing down the hall, but he managed to make it. He pulled his backpack out from under his bed and silently retreated into his closet. Izuku took a small moment to thank all that was holy for the divine being of wet-wipes. How he ever managed without them, he couldn't tell. 

Izuku covered his bandaged foot with a pair of socks and changed into clean clothes, and then he knew that it was time to face the music. Not because he felt particularly brave or ready, but rather because his mom started calling the police to file a missing persons report. 

Izuku flung himself out of his closet and ricocheted off the hallway walls into the living room. "Ahhh, I'm here! I'm sorry!" 

His mom dropped the phone in surprise and she gaped wordlessly at him--bright cheeks and bed-head and concealed injuries wrapped up in a lot of bug-eyed panic. "Izuku? Were you here the entire time?" His mom said in disbelief. Her shock gave way to outrage, her eyebrows furrowing and her eyes sharp. "Izuku!"

"No, no!" Izuku waved his arms frantically, aiming for placation. Oh, heck, he should have just--done something different. "I swear, I just came through the window!"

"The window?!"

--

Izuku got grounded. That he could have seen coming, but he considered the redness in his mom's eyes and her hoarse throat a worse punishment. He hated making her worry. He hated making her worry, but telling the truth would definitely be worse. 

Izuku bore his sentence without complaint. He had to come straight home after school. No hero watching. No staying out late.

Which meant he was constantly reminded of the fact that he was a danger to the person he loved the most.

Izuku had gotten better at extending the time between his visits to the local hospitals. He kept pushing, trying to hold out a little longer until he would be a danger. It felt like he was tearing his fingernails out as he clawed towards some awful finish line. The stress of his grounding and his efforts to heal his injuries took too much out of him.

He barely lasted the week, and that was because he decided on Wednesday to scrap his original plan. He couldn't go while his mom was awake, and that meant he needed to sneak out. Again.

He wished he could just spend his weekends reading about heroes, sleeping in, and doing his ever-mounting prep work for his future. Instead, he had to pretend to sleep until he heard the sounds of his mom getting ready for bed and then dozing into sleep. It happened early enough because work ran long and his mom was a morning bird. 

Izuku threw off his covers and silently dressed in the clothes he had picked out that morning: Long sleeves and pants in dark, muted colors. A winter raincoat and thrift store scarf which he wrapped up and over his hair until his bed-head was hidden. His plain face, which was already slightly forgettable, transformed when he added in makeup. 

Izuku stood in his darkened room and pulled the barest edges of his quirk to the surface. His right eye inked over and flared up, and suddenly the shadows in his room weren't as daunting. He stared at his burning eye, at the darkened veins that stained through the thin skin of his dark circles. Then he firmly placed a medical eye patch over it, and followed up with his usual medical mask perched beneath his chin for now.

He looked rather tired and rather strange. That was fine. He just needed to look unlike himself. 

Izuku gave one last listen for any indication that his mom was awake, but her soft snores remained constant. Shaking off the hunger pangs, Izuku slung his backpack over his shoulder and silently crept out the window and closed it behind him. His deep, steadying breath stung his nose with cold and transformed into pale smoke on the exhale. 

Izuku leaped from the window. He used another, stronger flash of his quirk to soften the blow to his joints, colliding gracelessly with the pavement. He dusted himself off, breath coming out in quiet puffs of mist.

He had the time, so he avoided taking the train line. He didn't have a new outfit, and the security system could potentially clock him if he went as is. Although it was late, there were still enough people out on the weekend for Izuku to fade into the crowd. At a brisk pace, his destination was only fifty minutes away. It was closer to home than Izuku preferred, but he couldn't afford to be selective. Hopefully the variation would slip under the radar. 

Ironically enough despite to his wariness, he enjoyed the chance to get out and stretch his legs. His gloves and heavy clothing kept him warm, and the city was lit up with strings of lights to celebrate upcoming cultural festivals. Being cooped up wasn't fun. Which, Izuku guessed, was the point his mom wanted to make: that he had a responsibility to be safe and let her know where he was. 

Izuku hadn't even made it a week before he betrayed his moms trust. It was becoming a little easier to deal with. Every time his mind strayed towards guilt, he snapped at himself to get over it. 

Two blocks from the hospital, Izuku pulled up his medical mask. The stark smell of fried food and garbage and emergency vehicle exhaust was replaced by the humid warmth of his own breath. 

Breaking into the hospital was the easy part. It took a bit of patience, but he successfully snagged an ID off an exhausted nurse. A quick jog around the block revealed that there was far too much activity around the back end of the hospital--some supply drop off that had multiple people hanging around. Normally Izuku could skirt past, but this hospital had the entrances to in plain sight from the loading zone. 

Heck, normally Izuku would turn around and go home if it was a bad time. Yet another reason why he preferred going in the evening. People weren't usually concerned with the back entrance when there was high-traffic in the ER. 

Still, Izuku braved going inside. He took the stairs furthest from the main reception hall, and sure enough there was a locked door to the basement. Izuku swiped in quickly and breezed through the halls. He didn't hear anything, which was a relief. His sense of smell was muffled by his breath, but he had to hold back a sneeze from the astringent cleaning supplies. It was like the hall was soaked in rubbing alcohol. 

He found the morgue, and he prayed there was someone inside. It would be typical for him to have to walk to another hospital--

Voices. 

Izuku stiffened and slipped into the darkened room. He pressed his ear to the door--two people. Far end of his hearing range. And getting further. 

He exhaled in relief, pulse loud in his ears, before shrugging off his backpack--if people were that close, he had to hurry. He didn't need a repeat of his fifth visit, where he had to hide on top of a filing cabinet for twenty minutes.  

Izuku searched through the cabinets and concentrated on pulling his quirk to the surface. His tail slowly slid out from his spine, skeletal and lazy. He guided it through the sleeve of his coat, encouraging it to curl around his arm and extend. 

When he found his meal ticket, he didn't waste time. He hacked and sliced and scooped, but instead of looking away in disgust like he sometimes had to, Izuku took note of the anatomy of his meals. It was kind of cool that all his studying was paying off. He could identify all the bones and organs he saw. Ironically, his quirk would probably end up giving him an edge in his entrance exam. Not everyone got the see a human heart up close and personal.

He got down to business and loaded his backpack. He still had another hour-long trek home, and he was too tired to be out so late. His pulse, which usually skyrocketed when he brought out his quirk, was oddly moderate. It helped him relax a bit. To just listen in and tune out for a happy second. It certainly made it easier to forget that all his meals had a face.

But then he knew that he must have dozed off and slipped into a nightmare. He could hear his heartbeat, and it was out of sync with the other above him.

Izuku froze, his body going tense. His quirk spasmed, cutting raggedly through flesh. He focused all his focus into listening. Above and behind him--in the ceiling. Steady pulse, nearly silent breathing. Quiet in a way that couldn't be anything but intentional. 

Someone was watching him. 

Izuku wanted nothing more than to run. Sprint. He could hide, and he could do it better than ever. 

But he didn't know anything about his opponent. They could have a speed quirk. A tracking quirk. Something that could trap him in place or put him to sleep. This could turn into a chase that Izuku would lose horribly. So Izuku forced his numb body to resume the motions. 

He had to play it smart. Check his exits, find a route, and get to it quickly. And if he wanted to keep his head on straight and his teeth clean, he couldn't do it while hungry.

He double checked his position to the cameras and his audience. Izuku quickly slid his mask aside and took a few subtle bites. Stale and cold and unbelievably wonderful. His tail shuddered gleefully, and Izuku called that familiar buzz to the surface, letting it build in his muscles.

If he left early, that could provoke retaliation. So Izuku refused to hurry. He worked quickly, quietly, his ears pricked for the slightest shift or motion. 

The game of chicken between him and his observer slowly approached ciritcal mass: Izuku was running out of space, and he had no excuse to linger. Anticipation burning a sick hole in his stomach, he banished his quirk and zipped his backpack shut. The sound felt absolutely thunderous in the dead quiet of the morgue.

And when it died down, Izuku heard the slightest puff of breath, and the heartbeat looming above him kicked into gear. 

Izuku turned tail and sprinted for the exit. Someone crashed to the floor behind him, but Izuku was already at the door--he slammed into the doors and pushed--

And stumbled back, his backpack flying off his arm, when the lock refused to budge. 

Faster than he could blink, something yanked him back by his neck. His attacker slammed an elbow into the side of his head, Izuku whirled around, trying to break free, but they leapt and spun and kicked until Izuku was suffocating and pinned. He yelped as he collided with the icy floor, stunned and blacking out for a split second.

There a subtle his of radio static, and his attacker speaks for the first time. Monotone and unworried. Dead. Like a ghost. "Target subdued. Come get us." The knee digging into his spine increased the pressure, and the unrelenting grip on his wrists shifted just enough to cuff him with clinking hand cuffs.

Dread and panic erupted in Izuku's stomach. His breath came in gasps. 

They got him. 

Red handed. 

He--he wasn't going home tonight. Maybe not ever.

"Did you think we wouldn't find a pattern?" The phantom ripped Izuku's hood back. His scarf stayed put, but Izuku craned his neck back to see--ghostly black hair and bone white bandages and yellow goggles. Recognition hit him like a freight train.

Eraserhead.

Izuku was back to being quirkless. He had wished and wished that it could be the case, and he would be over the moon under any other circumstance.

As it was, his eyes welled up in tears, and he reached for his ugly, monsterous, villainous quirk, because it was the only thing he had to his name--

It responded. With prejudice.

His tail whipped out from his spine and rammed into Eraserhead. The momentum caused the bonds around Izuku to constrict, forcing the air from his lungs. He pulled his thoughts back from the edge of panic, winding his quirk up around his torso beneath the bandages before flaring it up and out. He scrambled out of the loosened bonds and ran.

This time, when he hit the doors, he drop kicked them open with every ounce of live-wire energy coursing through his blood. He didn't look back.

--

He ended up eating on top of his apartment building at around three am. His coat had several rips and tears, mostly from his own quirk. Other than that. . . he was fine. Whole. Not on the brink of starvation anymore.

He kind of hated it. 

Izuku stared mulishly at his meal's left hand. He could see all the tendons and metatarsals, all stiff and gummy with death. He took another crunching bite. 

Finger foods. He was hilarious. Shame that literally any good person wouldn't find it funny.

Izuku finished off his meal and cleaned up. His right cheek pulsed with the pain of an oncoming bruise and he gazed at the light-pollution pale sky as he considered what it all meant. 

He began with the basics. Things that he could write out in little bullet points in his journals. He didn't have resistance to injury unless his quirk was active. He didn't heal quickly unless he purposefully tried--and even then it left him exhausted. The cuts on his arms and feet from a week prior were still healing, but injuries on his actual body healed at an accelerated rate.

He would need to test it, but his running hypothesis was that his tail had its own immune system. He could probably manipulate it, but Izuku wouldn't dare. Not with how he had to ration his life out. He couldn't afford it. 

Tonight threw a wrench in one of his earliest hypotheses: he had a transformation quirk.

While Izuku generally disagreed with the generalizations that came with government quirk typing--which were mostly concerned with enforcing laws and not any actual comprehensive taxonomy--he'd considered that would be his classification if he ever got around to changing his record. His tail only activated when he wanted. Same with his resistance to injury and his strange eye. His senses were the exception, but he could enhance them if he focused enough. 

All were classic transformation quirk characteristics. But Eraserhead--and Izuku was certain it was him--he could neutralize quirks. There wasn't much more information beyond that on the hero forums, but that much was confirmed. And Izuku hadn't had it taken away. Even the quirk suppressing cuffs, which Izuku had to pry off his wrists through a bit of creative quirk usage, hadn't stopped him. Which meant. . . that his quirk was always active? That he had a mutation quirk and he just needed to be stressed enough to get it to respond?

Izuku shivered on the roof top and rubbed his tired eyes. He'd worry about it in the morning. He stood and walked to the edge of his apartment building. He called his quirk forward, and it slipped out of his spine, vibrant and florescent with its recent meal. Izuku furrowed his brow in concentration and encouraged the limb to thin out and elongate, urged it to snake up his arm. Then he wound it around the metal railing and lowered himself to his window. 

It was getting easier. 

He crept inside, quiet as he could force his cold-numb hands to be. He couldn't wait to just go to bed and thaw out. 

"The front door was unlocked."

Izuku shrieked and fell to the floor in surprise. He whipped his head over, and sitting in the dark at his desk was his mom. In pajamas and bathrobe and all.

She set aside her tablet and stared at him, arms crossed. Her stony expression made Izuku wince. "And you didn't even take your phone. You had no way of getting help if you needed it."

Izuku ducked his head and began picking himself off the floor.

 "I can't believe you. It been only a week. How often do you--" His mom cut off, her eyes widening in concern. "Izuku, your face. Are you okay?"

"What? Oh." His bruise. It must look worse than he thought. "I just fell, mom. I'm fine."

She shook her head, frustration pinching her expression, but she let it go. "Good. That's. . . good." Then she sighed. "Izuku. You can't just--sneak out. You could get hurt--or lost, or any number of awful things."

Izuku's mouth twisted in regret, and he nodded. "I know. I'm sorry."

"No. I don't want an apology. I want you to stop." His mom stood and crossed the room, and Izuku could see the dark circles under her eyes. "I know its been rough and that you want to feel like there's something you can control, but what you're doing is not okay."

"I'm not doing drugs or meeting with anyone," Izuku explained haltingly. "I just can't sleep sometimes, so I-I walk."

"I didn't think you did. But that doesn't make it fine. We can go to the doctor and see if there's anything that could help you sleep, but you can't just wander around." 

There's something sad in how Izuku can't even say anything to make it better except to lie. So he did. He promised not to do it again. He swore it, and it came out sincerely, and he hated it.

He hated that he was too much of a coward to admit that there was something horribly wrong with him. Something that you couldn't fix. Something that no amount of pretending and lying and deception could smooth over.

"I'm sorry," He said for the tenth time, his voice cracking and splintering like glass. His eyes burned and bubbled until his tears began gushing down his cheeks. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry--"

"Izuku," His mom said, "Izuku, baby, it's okay. I'm not angry with you."

He wished she was. He wished he didn't have to deal with the burden of sympathy and that he could have just held himself together. He felt like an egg that cracked inside the carton, and by the time anyone ever looked, he rotted from the outside in. Or maybe that was just his future or a better alternative, because in that moment he was dissolving and slipping and his thin shell couldn't hold all his despair.

"I feel like a bad person. Like I-I shouldn't be here." He takes a shuddering breath, his head hung in shame. "All I do is take and take and I can't stand it. I can't stand that other people suffer and I get away with just existing."

“Izuku,” Mom said gently, a little worried, “In this world, everyone takes. We consume things to live. If we take something, another person cannot have it, and that is true for everyone.”

“How can that be okay?” Izuku’s eyes stung and he turned his head. “How can I steal something that another needs to live?” How can it be okay to live off of other people's suffering--to profit from death and violence, to see a corpse and feel happy because at least he won't feel like he's being torn apart from the inside out.

Mom stepped forward and pulled him into her arms, warm and safe. “Take only what you need,” she said, “and give back what you can. Sometimes that's all we can do.” She exhaled, squeezed him tighter, and Izuku hooked his chin over her shoulder. "I need to know why you keep sneaking out. I need you to not be purposefully putting yourself in danger. I need you to be safe."

Izuku swallowed, and he couldn't force himself to lie. Not tonight, not with all his emotions bubbling up and boiling open.

"I want to be a hero," he croaked. "I never ever quit wanting it."

He settled for medicine and Hebikyuden. He wanted to help people, and it would have benefited him. It was smart. The logical conclusion--he didn't need to sneak into a hospital if he worked there. He would slip under the radar. He wouldn't have to acknowledge his quirk.

But it also made him want to bash his head against a wall and cry because he wanted be something else. Because underneath his fear of Eraserhead, he felt admiration. Awe. It hit him like a sucker punch, how much Izuku wanted to be the one stopping villains. How he wanted people to feel safe around him, even if he was dangerous. 

"I know you don't think I can--no one does--but I. . . just want to try. Even if it's hopeless. Especially if its hopeless."

"Izuku. My baby." His mom sniffled, her hands firmly planted on his shoulders. She raised her chin, sadness hanging in her eyes. "You aren't going to try--"

And Izuku was four years old again, eyes stinging and chest cramping because--

"Because we are going to do it."

Izuku's blinks, so stunned that he nearly falls. "What?"

"I-I've been selfish," His mom admits. She squeezes his shoulder and rubs at her eyes. "I am so, so proud of you, Izuku. Everyday. You throw yourself into your goals. And I'm ashamed that I only supported you when it was something I approved of."

"I never said--I never said that I still wanted to." Izuku swallows past the reflexive guilt in his throat. "You couldn't of known. I never said so."

She shakes her head. "I was so relieved when I thought you changed your mind. And that wasn't fair. Quirk or no quirk, the world would be lucky to have someone like you!" His mom nods furiously, bull-dozing past Izuku's squeaky attempts to protest. "So from now on, I'm going to be in your corner. No matter where that is! Even if it scares me, I want to be there for you."

Izuku doesn't deserve this. 

"So we better get started," His mom declares. "We only have five months to blow them all away."

"You don't have to," Izuku breathes. "I know you. . ." 

I know you don't think I can.

"You shouldn't have to," Izuku repeats. 

"I don't," His mom agrees. "But I'm going to." She smiles, wide and pained and a little hopeful. "Do you know why?"

Izuku doesn't trust himself to speak. He shakes his head slowly, his vision swimming.

His mom reaches up and brushes away the tears on his cheek. Her hands are warm and gentle over his bruises, and she laughs softly.

"Because I love you, silly."

Notes:

hope yall enjoyed! who do yall want to see more of next chapter??

Chapter 5: Empress I.

Summary:

Izuku buckles down to prepare for his exams. Katsuki is back on his bullshit. Mirio can't understand why people enjoy coffee.

Notes:

so this is a bit unedited but its also LONG so have fun! featuring izuku getting some juice!!

(also, for those who haven't read the corrected chapters, Hebikyuden is the medical magnet high school that Izuku decided to apply to.)

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Aizawa Shouta needs more than the cup of cold coffee in his hands to get through this evening. 

"The nurses let you have that?" Naomasa settles into a chair to the right of Shouta's hospital bed, his clothing rumpled in the familiar manner of someone who hadn't bothered to change clothes from their previous all-nighter.

Shouta levels him a sour look, daring him to snitch. The caffeine would be gone in seconds. He's still on his pain drip and wouldn't face the repercussion for another day at least.  "Hisashi owed me a favor."

"You should let yourself rest. After I'm gone, of course," Naomasa corrects dryly. "I would never advocate someone to inconvenience me, but I could make a near exception for your case." Whether he is referring to Shouta's injuries or incompetence remains unclear.

"Kind of you." Shouta sipped loudly at his drink. "He got away?"

"Yeah. Slippery. Our officers couldn't keep up with him."

Shouta sighs, frustration burning in his stomach. "I had him. No combat experience, that much is obvious. His quirk. . ."

"Deadly. Doctors said that your injury wouldn't have been nearly as serious if it weren't for the enzymes and secretions we found at the scene. Lab theories were right about them being digestive."

"Did we get anything else?" Shouta needs there to be something else. It had taken far too long to crack the pattern and actually make contact. There wouldn't be another chance for a month. Hair. Blood. Skin cells. They had been inches from an arrest and if Shouta hadn't blinked--

Naomasa shakes his head. "Same RNA fragments. Potentially some new stuff. Still waiting on lab to see if the samples are viable. Whatever this quirk secretes, it's incredibly volatile in open air."

Aizawa reads in between the lines. "And inside a foreign body?" Inside his body. Four centimeters from a major artery.   

Naomasa grimaces. "Slightly less so. We still don't think it will turn anything up."

Shouta closes his dry eyes and rubs at them. "They're younger than we first assumed. I think that's a sign we're growing senile." At the very least, Shouta lost to someone ten years his junior, and he couldn't rule out them being younger. "Still no motive."

"I think we can chalk up the first two instances as coincidences," Naomasa agrees. "Bad luck. It left us chasing down some conspiratorial rabbit hole." 

By 'us,' Naomasa mostly meant him. Shouta hadn't extended his help until the last two months, and then only in his spare time. The first theory had been about obscuring evidence. The first two were suspected to be victims of foul play, which the autopsy later successfully confirmed. And then there was a theory about using the stolen body parts for transplants or just for a quick buck. That one still had a chance, even if any of the victim's missing parts had yet to turn up. 

"We can strike out a budding serial killer, I think." At Naomasa's raised eyebrow, Shouta elaborates. "That kind of quirk could kill in a second. They've never hurt any bystanders, even when it might have been convenient."

"That could be out of caution, not any good will."

"I'm well aware," Shouta says plainly. "However, they knew I was watching them. Instead of killing me or keeping their quirk drawn, they tried to escape. That points towards an aversion towards conflict."

Which means they were back to money or a sick fetish. Shouta would prefer it to be about money. He thinks back. Green eyes and swallow skin. Something fast enough to strike in the span of a blink. Something sharp enough to gut him like a fish.

Naomasa shrugs. "Either way, we can't let it slide. I'm going to tackle this before my office gets too flooded to deal with it."

Had he mentioned anything in the slightest vicinity of leniency? Shouta covers his annoyance with another long sip at his coffee. It's too acidic. Hisashi needed better taste. "I'm ready to make my statement at any time."

Naomasa nods professionally and withdraws a small notepad and pen from his rumpled suit pocket. There's blood on his right sleeve, just at the very bottom. It’s probably his.

Shouta doesn't mention it. He would have missed it too.

"Let’s start from the beginning."

--

Izuku's face scrunches up against his will as he strains to remember. "Pulmonary to. . . right atrium?"

His mom shakes her head sympathetically. "Left atrium, baby."

Izuku groans. He's gotten this one wrong twice, hasn't he? And a lot of the stories previous test-takers shared said that the cardiovascular system was more likely to show up in the anatomy portion. "Pulmonary to left atrium," He tries again, picturing it in his head. "Left atrium to ventricle via the. . . mitral valve? And then it leaves through the--aortic valve."

"You got it!" His mom checks the time, setting down the notes Izuku had been reviewing. "It's a bit early, but I have a case I need to look over. If you want to get your running for the day done right now, I can help again later."

Izuku smiles, wearied from his usual Sunday cram session. "Good idea. Thanks, mom." 

He changes into his thrift-store track suit and pulls on an All Might themed winter beanie. January had taken a turn for the violently cold, and the iced-up sidewalks forced him to walk carefully at some points. That wasn't too much of a damper. Despite the last month and a half, Izuku still didn't have much in the way of endurance. He could walk for hours but moving at anything above a jog winded him. 

However, he refuses to use the weather as an excuse to take it easy. He needs to get faster. He needs to get winded. "That's--the," Izuku pants to himself as he pushes himself to sprint, "point." The ball of his foot skids across the slick pavement, and Izuku flails for a split second before he forces his body into a front roll. He hits the ground all along his spine and scrapes his hand, but he ends up back on his feet. 

It's progress.

He's not giving up on UA or Hebikyuden. He's going to help people, one way or another. 

Until then, he just has to work twice as hard. 

Izuku veers towards the beach, a plan forming tentatively in his head. There's a chance it might be for nothing, but he wants to try. Or at least apologize to Mirio for inconveniencing him. Izuku stops by a convenience store for a peace offering and ends up grabbing a can of pomegranate tea from the outside vending machine. The colorful illustration on the can is familiar and painful, something vivid on a day where the wooly sky washed out the color from the world.

He misses eating. He misses it a lot. 

Izuku purses his lips and shoots his mom a quick text about where he's going.  Then he rubs at his cold nose and turns to leave. Something stops him. Just habit, almost. Izuku looks back to the cheery vending machine, and stares at a plain, dark can of espresso. It's not his mom's coffee. It promises a shot of bitterness.

Izuku shells out the money for it anyway. It would be awkward if he didn't bring something for himself.

He jogs the rest of the way to the beach, and sure enough he can hear Mirio moving around over the soft rush of waves. Izuku lingers on the sea wall (with a safe buffer between him and the edge), debating if he would be welcome. He had really inconvenienced Mirio last time, and also made him lose his clothing in the dead of winter. He might be imposing. Or unwelcome. 

Izuku raises his hand to his mouth before he can chicken out. "Hi, Mirio-san!" He yells.

The sounds coming from the dumping grounds pause, and Mirio sticks his head out from behind a large bedframe. He lights up and waves towards Izuku. Then he vanishes back behind the heap, leaving Izuku feeling incredbily awkward. It makes sense, because he's probably very busy with hero work and courses, and community service on top of that is--

Mirio jogs a zig-zag path across the clear sand and climbs the nearby stairs. "Howdy, Midoriya! It's good to see you wearing appropriate clothing," He jokes.

Izuku laughs hesitantly. "You too." Wait, no, definitely the wrong thing to say-- "I brought you tea," Izuku blurts out. Wait, what if Mirio doesn't like tea. Oh, this was a bad idea. He hands colorful can over with a forced smile, praying he chose right. "As a thank you. And an apology."

Mirio accepts it with a grin. "Don't even worry about it. I'm just glad I was there to help." He gestures towards the nearby bench where he treated Izuku's injuries at over a month ago. "Want to chill for a minute? We both are probably due for a break."

Izuku nods and sits, his hesitancy and anxiety slipping away. It was incredibly easy to breath around Mirio. Especially since the two of them are still strangers. "Thank you. The beach looks really good." It's clean enough in some spots to see the surf.

"It's taking a bit longer than I expected," Mirio admits, cracking open his can. "I'm working at it without my quirk, and my internship takes up a lot of my time. Not sure if I'm gonna get it done before the start of my third year."

"It's a large job for one person," Izuku agrees. Then he tries to think of more small talk, but it doesn't come. The seconds draw on, and Mirio doesn't say anything, so Izuku figures it's better now than later.

"I kind of wanted to say thank you for another thing." Izuku stares at his shoes so he won't chicken out. "I, uh, am going to try applying to UA. I let my thoughts and other people’s opinions determine my future. But it's my dream, and it always has been." Izuku forces himself to meet Mirio's eyes. "So thanks for that."

"Happy to help!" Mirio raises his can and says, "Especially if it gets more of these." Then he laughs at his own joke, and Izuku finds it easy to join in. It's nice. Not being the joke. 

"But I really am psyched for you. UA is a great place." Mirio glances off to the side, and Izuku leans forward to follow his gaze. "Actually, I should introduce you to sensei." 

'Sensei' is a gaunt and hollowed out figure strolling towards them from further down the sea wall. Bight blond hair and large clothes that hang in curtains off his bony shoulders. He's not slow exactly, but he measures his steps in the deliberate manner of someone in pain.

Mirio tilts his head as an indication for Izuku to follow, and he jogs over to the gaunt man.

And as he gets closer, Izuku hears his resting heartrate. Less than forty beats per minute.

For a second, Izuku thought he might not have one at all.

“Hey, Toshinori-sensei, remember the kid I mentioned a while ago? The one with no shoes?" Mirio makes quick and painless introductions. "This is Midoriya. Mirdoriya, this is the teacher sponsoring my community service."

Izuku bows politely, still slightly thrown off by how slow the man's heartrate is. Even Mirio, who is much better shape, is clocking in at a quicker resting pace. "Hello. It's nice to meet you."

"Likewise," Toshinori responds. He clears his throat (wet cough: Izuku's studying makes him immediately think of decongestant prescriptions) and then grins oddly. "You gave Togata-shounen here quite the scare. Glad to see you all in one piece."

Oh, shoot, Izuku had probably really freaked him out. It's a good thing he apologized then. . . Wait. Togata? Is that his last name? Had Izuku been addressing a stranger by his first name this whole time? Izuku's eyes widen before he jerks into an apology. "Ah, I'm sorry! It was super inconsiderate to waitsolongandIreally--"

Mirio cuts him off with a chop to the head. It's barely more than a tap, but it shuts Izuku's blabbermouth off. "No worries! It's all chill." 

Izuku needs to be better than this. 

Mirio peers at his forehead before his eye light up. "Nice cap," He compliments. "All Might gear, right?"

Now that is something Izuku can talk about for days. "Yeah! It's his silver age promotional cap. I had to hunt for weeks to find it." Izuku adjusts the hat so it covered his ears against the cold. "A lot of people aren't really fond of the Silver aesthetic, but it's my favorite. It's got some of the coolest history, symbology, and associated fights."

Toshinori blinks at how quickly that particular rant spilled out of Izuku's mouth, but then he grins. "Sliver age was fun."

"You’re a fan?" Izuku ventures. Despite his appearance, Toshinori was probably a hero at one point if his position at UA and Mirio's respect is any indication. However, being a hero and a fan probably aren't mutually exclusive occupations. Hopefully, they aren’t.

"Well, I certainly am," Mirio says. "I'm not very big on merchandise, but I used to be obsessed with All Might's newsfeed." He throws a few playful punches that are technically perfect. "GeoSwamp? Older cousin was there in person and I begged her to tell me about it every time I visited."

"Wow," Izuku says with stars in his eyes. "When I was little, I used to watch his Japanese debut for hours. I still do watch it whenever I need some motivation."

The three of them spend a few more polite minutes chatting about heroes before Izuku realizes his espresso is still in his pocket. On a whim, he offers it up to Toshinori.

The skeletal man seems a bit surprised. "You like cold brew, Midoriya-shounen?" 

Izuku examines the can. Black Hole Espresso: cold brew concentrate. The amount of caffeine it promises is scary. "I've never tried it. I just started liking coffee and it caught my eye."

Mirio shakes his head. "I can't do bitter things. I'm not sure how anyone likes it."

"It is an acquired taste," Toshinori admits. 

"Coffee is pretty much the only thing that I can drink," Izuku says in his defense. "Besides water, I guess. I used to hate it, but it's grown on me." 

Toshinori nods in agreement. "I miss it. Got me through a lot of long nights once upon a time." Then he waves a bony hand in refusal. "I appreciate it, but you should definitely try it.

Izuku pops the tab on the can and takes a hesitant swig. It slams into his mouth, as bitter as sin. “Woah.” He puts his hand over his mouth as he coughs. “That’s very strong.”

Toshinori cracks a smile. “I believe young Togata warned you.”

Mirio doesn’t respond to his name. He’s got a curious look in his eye as he stares at the beach.

Concern wells up in Izuku. “Mi--Togata-san, are you alright?”

“Huh?” Mirio looks surprised, and then sheepish. “You can call me ‘Mirio,’ Midoriya. And I’m fine. Just crunching the numbers. Clean up is going a lot slower than I hoped, and I was thinking about taking more hours on Wednesdays.”

"I'd hate to pull you away from Nighteye. Perhaps your friends could help?"

Mirio waves the offer away. "Nah, they're commited to their own projects. And I figured I could come after my internship hours, but transportation from there is kinda inconvenient."

"I could help," Izuku offers. And then he blanches in embarressment. "I mean, if that's welcome! I don't want to impose or anything, but if it's a matter of getting through a large amount of work quickly then I could definitely help out because I do think it's important to give back to the community and I think it's really admirable that you're working silently to help others and--"

Mirio pokes his forehead and Izuku short curcuits for a second. "I heard about half of that, Midoriya. And sure! I'd love the help if you think you're up for it." He turns to Toshinori and grins. "How about it?"

Toshinori smiles and gives the both of them a thumbs up.

And with that, Izuku started coming to the beach every Sunday. He witnesses how Mirio slowly chips away at the debris and trash. He works his butt off to try and keep the same pace. 

It's kind of funny. A month previous, Izuku felt like he lost one a place he claimed as his own. Now on his Sundays, he chats with Mirio and Toshinori, works until his arms feel like lead, and watches the sunsets ink the sky over in red and orange. Every day that he cleans the rotten beach, it feels less like a hiding spot and more like a safe space.

--

Of course, that can't happen uninterrupted. His school is a nightmare of security leaks and gossip--some of which he is privy to and, no, it isn't eavesdropping if you can't avoid it--

But, yeah, his homeroom teacher makes everyone fill out a basic form of applications: Where, when, requirements, a perfunctory statement on any materials that they need. 

Izuku is stupid enough to put UA as his first choice instead of sneaking it onto the very end. He was applying to eight schools, and if he hadn't done them in order of choice, he could have continued on in peace. And because his homeroom teacher apparently doesn't understand the meaning of discretion, which means he probably didn't make the form since it says at the very top that this is all private--

Well, he just says so conveniently, "Wow, another gunner for UA."

And since Izuku is the one who just handed in his paper, there isn't anyone else for it to be. 

People snicker. Laugh openly. It's funny if you have a cruel sense of humor, because Mirdoriya Izuku doesn't have a chance in hell of getting into UA, but it's cute that he tries. 

He wishes that it hurt less now that he had a quirk, but it doesn't. It hits him square in the stomach and leaves him feeling sick and shaky. Izuku ducks his head, walks stiffly back to his seat with acid creeping up the back of his throat. His classmates just need to mind their own business. It was his life. 

He wants to scream it, almost. That it's his life. Stop staring at him. He's not a freak anymore. Except for the fact that he is. Just a new kind.

He's knocked out of the growing buzz of his thoughts by a shadow looming over his desk. Katsuki has evidently taken a break from holding court with his "sidekicks" and decided to deign to talk to Izuku. "What's this UA bullshit, Deku?"

And that requires an answer. Izuku tries to calm the heat flashing over his skin, the lump in his throat. He picks at the heavy thing welding his jaw shut, and says, "Uh. I'm applying."

Katsuki rolls his eyes in disdain. "No you fucking aren't. I'm gonna be the only motherfucker from out of this shithole."

"Maybe," Izuku says with a stilted shrug. He tries for a placation, because he can't settle for less. He's too afraid to try for anything less. Even if it's the last thing his patience wants. "But there's no point in being the only one if no one else competes, yeah?"

"Who the fuck made you competition?" Katsuki sneers. "Because last time I checked, you had a snowball's chance in hell. So just fuck off and stick to something you might actually be good at."

"I still am," Izuku argues. "I'm applying to Hebikyuden. But I am applying to lots of schools, so I might as well try for UA."

And Katsuki starts going off on the same tangent that he stated spouting at the beginning of the year: the one about his origin story and his promised success at UA. It's probably true in some sense. Izuku would bet on Katsuki making it, and he would have made the same bet the day his quirk came in. It's bitter especially because it's true.

Because you won't be special if anyone else is.  Izuku stares dully at Katsuki going on with his rants and bullshit. Because you're the best and anyone who doesn't agree and fall down at your feet needs to fall in line. Be squashed down. Know their place--

Izuku keeps his mouth clenched shut, but his head is a blur and buzz of muttering. Ugly muttering, the type of anger that used to obediently cower until Izuku was alone and had no one to yell at. It's eating him. It's eating and eating at him until Izuku just wants to lung forward and knock all the teeth right out of Katsuki's skull so he'd just shut the hell up.

"Midoriya!" One of his classmates, Sai, covers her needle point teeth with her hand, shock plain on her face. She jerks and points towards her right cheek. "You--your. . . eye."

And that gets everyone's attention. Izuku reaches up and slams a hand over his right eye, his veins pulsing rabbit-quick. Black and crimson and horrifying. . . but only if you happened to know what it means. On any other person, it could just mean anything. On him, as far as anyone needs to know, it could just mean anything. 

So Izuku shrugs and drops his hand and fakes his way through a sentence without stuttering. 

"It's my quirk. What about it?"

Which, of course, sparks a big uproar.

His teacher hesitantly calls into the front office, because technically it's illegal to not have your quirk registered, and allowing illegal things threatens your job security. His mom gets called in. Izuku can hear people talking about him in the halls, because going from quirkless to having a quirk is about the most interesting thing that's happened in their school. 

It's a nightmare.

But if he'd known that Katsuki would make that kind of face, Izuku might have mentioned it sooner.

--

"You could have told me," Inko says on the way home from the doctors. The station had been packed, but the streets of their neighborhood are quiet and sleepy in the spring-noon warmth. It doesn't help her nervousness. Instead, it just makes her voice feel too loud. Too confrontational.

Izuku ducks his head, looking from his shoes to the street signs. He fiddles with the sleeve of his uniform, messing with the buttons. "I know. I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry," She says. "I'm really happy for you, Izuku." She'd got all choked up in the doctors office when her baby talked about his new quirk. He tentatively named it Sharp Sense, explaining that he didn't notice at first. That he'd only suspected for a week or so, but didn't want to get labeled as delusional. Or an attention seeker.

(That stung.)

But he hadn't seemed proud or excited. Just uncomfortable and nervous, his stutter resurfacing. Even now, he keeps his sentences short and soft, his mouth working like his chewing on his words.

". . . You don't have to say," Inko starts hesitantly, "But why didn't you tell me? We could get you quirk counseling. It would be a great advantage to have for your entrance exams." Why did she always seem to find out about problems last? When did her baby start keeping her out of the loop?

"You," Izuku begins, and then stops. He rubs his neck before drawing up, visibly giving himself a mental pep-talk. "You believed in me."

Inko blinks, prickles of guilt poking at her throat. "Of course I do." Not always. Not in the way she should have. She should have known better, but she always forgets her lessons and repeats her mistakes--

"No," Izuku says, "Because you believed in just me. Not a quirk. Me. And then I didn't want or need one anymore." He grins, his mouth stretched a little too wide, his eyebrows drawn up into furrows. "It felt like a hole for a long time, but I wouldn't mind being quirkless again."

And then he nods, and says with an edge of determination, "A quirk doesn't define me. I don't need it to be a good person."

Inko feels pride swell in chest. At her son being happy with who he is, at him overcoming the mistakes she made. But she remembers the morose and panicked edge to her son, and she can't just leave it be. "It doesn't define you, Izuku," She agrees, "It's a gift. And you would be a good person with or without it--but this is a gift that will help you do more." 

Izuku peeks at her in surprise. Slowly, he says, "Give back what you can?"

Inko might not always understand how he feels, and her son might not want to explain, but she's not going to stop trying to be better. She's going to give him a childhood that he wouldn't need to recover from.

She ruffles his hair. "Take only what you need."

--

Life rushes past Izuku at a dead sprint. His schedule is packed with cramming and running and practicing. And ever since his run in with Eraserhead, Izuku knew he had to get creative.

Did you think we wouldn't find a pattern?

He had been too predictable. Which was unfair, because he had tried his best to keep his visits random. However, Izuku is running out of hospitals to hit. Especially since he had been visiting more frequently and more carefully. He'd even broken his first rule and returned to his own crime scene. It was to easy to predict when he got too hungry to stand it, so he had to switch it up.

Hence why he skips his normal Sunday visit to help with the beach and has a big breakfast.

He's in and out in less than ten minutes, chows down in the bathroom of a coffee shop (which is gross, but incredibly secure), and strolls to a nearby park. It's warm and sunny and so many people are out and about. The cheer is infectious. It's kind of insane how much better he feels: His outings normally have a little more fear, and then some pity, and then a few hours of moping. 

But today? It's just really nice outside. Even the air is clean, early morning rain scrubbing exhaust from the sky. 

Izuku lounges on a park bench for a good half hour before he makes his way over to the train station and catches a ride home. He picks up some coffee at the cornerstone near his home. Their kitchen is running low since Izuku drinks the stuff by the pot at this point. Mom worries it will stunt his growth, but Izuku is so tired with the taste of water. It also has the fortunate side affect of curbing his hunger.

As he gets to his street, Izuku has to do a double take. Katsuki is lounging on the wall outside Izuku's apartment complex, his head buried in an. . . exam packet? Izuku debates going through the back route before he squashes it. Better to deal with it now rather than later. After his whole quirk fiasco, Katsuki had stayed quiet with all the ominousness of a building thunderstorm. It got old to Izuku after about a week. It's gotten hard to stay pinned with suspense. 

Especially right now. He's sedated with the comfort of not being hungry and weighed down with sun-warmth. He walks past Katsuki, who doesn't notice for a moment. Izuku hears the second his breath hitches and his book snaps shut. "Deku!" 

Izuku fights a small laugh. He almost got away with it. He turns and waves. "Howdy, Kacchan."

Katsuki gives him a sour look. "Piss off with the sunshine, nerd. I'm here on business." He steps up and slings his backpack over his shoulder, all delinquent slouch and disdain. "You need to step the fuck away from UA." 

This again? Katsuki's like a dog with a bone sometimes.

"There's no fucking chance for someone like you to--"

Ok, more like all the time. 

"--make it in."

"Nagging isn't going to make me quit." Izuku rubs the back of his neck and tires for a placating smile. "Sorry, but I've invested to much to not try. I'm sure you'll do great, though." Izuku turns on his heel and leaves. The sound of Katsuki's blood pressure spiking is both hilarious and priceless.

Katsuki growls and stalks in front of Izuku, cutting him off. His red eyes have lost their dismissive edge. "You think a quirk is all it takes to get in?" Katsuki asks. "That having some nose on you suddenly makes you better, crybaby? Get fucking real. It would take a miracle for you to make the cut."

A miracle or a curse. But Katsuki doesn't need to know that. He doesn't need or deserve to know a single thing about him. "It doesn't make me better," Izuku says with an unintended edge of challenge. "I was always good enough. It was only because I believed people like you that I wasn't."

"People like me," Katsuki scoffs. "You mean rational fucking people?"

Izuku swallows back a peach-pit full of poision, and it takes root in his stomach. "This is pointless."  He counts to ten and digs his nails into his palms. "You can think what you want."

"Sure," Katsuki agrees sharply. "Just stay out of my fucking way and quit looking at UA" 

Izuku bares his teeth, his skin buzzing. "Why don't you make me?" He then averts his eyes and shoves past Katsuki, daring him to try it. But he won't. He's got his record and his future, and he'd be stupid to tarnish either one of them. Maybe he could fool everyone else into believing that he actually had a bite behind his bark, but Izuku knew better.

Or at least he thought he did before Katsuki drop kicked him straight off his feet from behind.

Katsuki's hands shake, white-knuckled into fists that pop and smoke. His eyes are wild with anger. "Get the fuck up."

Izuku blinks, his stomach dropping out from under him. It's not--fear. Or it is, but that isn't what holds him still. Cold water sinks into the knees of his pants, and there's mud buried under Izuku's fingernails, and he's burned all the frozen-fear out of his body over the past few months. 

He stays there mostly because he's not sure what to do.

"Come on. Fight me." He rushes forward just a step, trying to make Izuku flinch into moving. "You got a quirk now. You've had it for more than a while. So. Get. Up."

Izuku stiffens. Katsuki shouldn't know that. As far as anyone knew, it came in a week ago. He draws himself to his feet, staring at the wet grass to calm down. "We shouldn't be doing this." But even though he says that, and he believes it, he sets backpack down and brings his fists up. Like he's four years old again, except he's got nothing to protect and everything to prove.

Something flickers over Katsuki's expression before he tilts his head and cracks his neck. "Someone’s gotta grind it into your thick skull. You're just another stepping stone. Some quirk ain't going to change that."

It isn't nearly as sure as it should be. There's no note of mockery, nothing dismissive about the laser focus of Katsuki's gaze. It's too sober to be anything but personal, and then the thought creeps up on Izuku like a snake.

"You don't know that I can't," Izuku says in realization. He stares at Katsuki, at the way he twitches in surprise. "You don't know anything about me or my chances. And that makes me a threat to your stupid origin sto--"

Katsuki launches himself forward. 

"Shut up with your fucking monologing!"

Izuku doesn't move out of the way.

They both end up covered in grass stains. Izuku's lip stings from a messy split. Katsuki limps away with heavy grip on his ribs, but not before Izuku surrenders. It hadn't even been false, because that hold on his wrist stung.

By the time his heart calms down from its rabbit-quick pace, he realizes that fighting Katsuki wasn't so. . . scary. 

In fact, as he slips into his home and furtively locks himself in his room, Izuku considers it educational and interesting. For one, it was good practice. For another, Katsuki didn't use his quirk the entire fight. 

 

--

Izuku spends every Sunday going to help with the beach. It's grueling, especially as the the season swings around to Summer again. The heat weighs on him and leaves him sweaty and exhausted. He keeps coming back though, because it's nice to be doing good. He spends so much of his week either studying or training--and that's important--but he likes helping. It's the one thing he does for other people.

It's also kind of nice to talk to Mirio.

Not that they see each other too often. Izuku keeps to his own area because he doesn't want to intrude or get distracted. But he brings more pomegranate tea for Mirio's lunch break. Most of the time, Mirio just talks about his friends and the things happening at UA and his internship. Izuku talks about studying and hero spotting and 'urban exploration.' It's the easiest way to explain all the weird places he's hidden during his meal-runs.

But as school lets out, Izuku has less and less free time. He starts bringing his headphones and cram lectures to the beach, trying to stuff information into his head by brute force. He still doesn't know enough about pathology, and that's surely going to be on one of his exams. And his understanding of the immune system is spotty at best. 

He commits the functions of T-cells and B-cells to memory while he struggles with an antique cabinet. The whole thing is ironhard wood and rotting out at the bottom and it refuses to budge. Frustration building, Izuku tugs at his quirk and slams his shoulder into the side. He plows through the sand for about a meter before he begins to shake and his control slips. 

Izuku slams down on his quirk and restrains it from sliding out from his spine. It's like holding in a sneeze or preventing a hiccup: annoyingly unsatisfying. Still, he got the job done. Now that the base is no longer buried into water-sealed sand, he can force it across the beach by brute force. 

Izuku reaches up and wipes at the sweat beading down his face, and then he hears Mirio along the sea-wall. He's waving a can and gesturing wildly. Izuku happily abandons the wooden cabinet and races across the beach. "You're my hero," He pants, chugging from his own water bottle. It's lukewarm and tastes like plastic, but Izuku's lips are cracked and dry enough that he suffers through.

"You look like you had it handled," Mirio says. He sits down on the stairwell, and Izuku follows suit. Then Mirio hands Izuku a can of shiny gold coffee. "I'm trying not to encourage your insane caffeine addiction, but I wanted to wish you luck. I probably won't see you before the entrance exam, so you'll just have to knock 'em dead and tell me about it later."

Izuku stares at the can, his chest heavy and strangely achy. "Oh, you really didn't have to--"

"Nah," Mirio says. "I just wanted to." Then he cracks open his own can of red tea and clinks it against Izuku's own. "You gotta open it and toast. Come on, I'm superstitious."

Izuku blinks against the glinting metal and cracks it open. It's hot from being out in the sun; smooth and heady and a little metallic. It blankets his mouth and washes out the salt and fish and rust of the beach.

Mirio laughs after a second. "That good, huh?"

Izuku realizes he's crying. "Nope," he jokes and gives a smile so wide it hurts his cheeks. "I'm just kind of a crybaby."

--

He takes the exam for Hebikyuden on Wednesday and walks out with a brain made of wet paper towels. He feels wearily confident on the anatomy portion. He should have focused on cellular biology a lot more. His mom greets him when he gets home in the evening. Izuku tells her about it as he helps with the dishes. She asks him what their victory dinner should be. He lies and says he ate after his exam. 

Mom purses her lips. "Do those shakes help? We can get more."

"It's not that," Izuku swears. Even if the meal replacement shakes were easier to deal with since he didn't have to chew. "It's just hard to--eat in front of people. I don't know why. I get queasy."

--

On Thursday, he eats. It was a close call, and he had to try three different targets. The first had security that left him too paranoid to try it. The second was empty, which was a pain since he spent so much effort to pick pocket an ID. The third required him to pull a fire alarm and climb up the side of an apartment building so he could make a clean get away.

He's getting better at this. It upsets him less than it should.

--

Friday, he spends resting and reviewing for the practical. Mostly, he just focuses on language and history. If he had to look at another chemistry diagram, he would gouge out his eyes because he is done with that. At least he knows his essay writing was still on par. Despite his frantic cramming, Izuku still posted on hero forums and his blog in his spare time. It was good academic practice. And practice at staying sane.

He had refrained from updating his small section on Eraserhead out of fear. He probably wouldn't touch it for another year or six. 

His mom pauses outside his door and knocks. Izuku exits out from reading the news of his own robberies on his desktop. "Come in!"

And his mom enters with a bowl of katsudon. She sets it on his bedside table despite her rules about not eating in his bedroom. She smiles with an edge of stress, but her words are as gentle as can be. "You absolutely don't have to. But it's here if you need it."

She leaves, and Izuku stares at the criminal bowl. He could toss it out the window or bag it up and no one would ever know. He could say it was great and move on and it would be fine.

Instead, he pads outside with the bowl and joins his mom at their table. She blinks in surprise, and Izuku grabs a pair of chopsticks and takes a heaping bite before he can think any better of it. It hits the back of throat like rot and pus and crunching scabs. His stomach revolts, but Izuku refuses to even flinch. 

Mom sniffles and grins before she starts her own meal.

It was the worst thing he had ever tasted and the best meal he had ever eaten. He eats every last bite.

Notes:

SO! last week I mentioned a poll in some comments. Here it is

This story has two potential routes: Izuku going to UA to be a hero, or going to Hebikyuden to train as a doctor. The UA route is a lot more planned out and follows cannon for a little bit. The doctor route has a few more OCs, vigilante/villain plots, and Izuku being a meddling kid. I'll probably do a less in depth fic/drabbles for the alternate route!

So its yalls choice! fully gonna say this upfront, but more indepth reviews get more points lmao see yall next week

Chapter 6: Empress II

Summary:

the UA entrance exam is here. Katsuki is less than happy with the results.

Notes:

no beta no reread no second glance we die like lemmings

THANKS SO MUCH FOR +3000 hits, +300 Kudos, +100 Bookmarks, & over 70 comment threads!!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Empress ii

Izuku drags himself to the shower in the morning and wonders if he should throw up again. He'd lasted for a few hours last night, sitting through the shaking and shuddering and sweating. He didn’t regret lying, and he didn’t regret eating. His mom made him dinner and refused to waste it, he refused to be kicked around by his body and his taste buds--not when it made her so happy to have dinner as a family again.

His resolution proved weaker than his stomach by about one in the morning.

"Bad idea," Izuku admits quietly as he looks in the fogged mirror. "Really, really bad idea." Still, there's nothing left in his stomach except an ugly sort of pressure, so he just towels off and gets dressed. He packs up his spare backpack with athletic clothes and his spare shoes. The practical exam changed frequently, but all Izuku's research pointed towards a lot running and free quirk usage.

It made him pause. Tight clothes didn't really like his quirk. Nor did light colors. Izuku shuffles over to his closet and stubs his toe against his desk. Cursing under his breath, Izuku digs through his clothes and then sinks to his recently packed bins of winter clothes. He digs and digs until he finds a raincoat he wore on an outing once or twice. Dark green and not too warm, it's voluminous sleeves and mid-thigh length hid his quirk if he stayed careful. It looks odd and out-of-season, but Izuku feels much more secure buried inside the soft cotton and stiff nylon. 

He packs it with the rest of his gear and gets dressed. His cue to leave fast approaching, Izuku leans up to his mirror and lightly draws on his eyeliner. It isn't much. But it helps him calm down. It's the smallest part of his mask that he can afford to take with him.

He also just kind of enjoys it. 

His mom stops him at the door with a grin and a quick hug. "You're gonna do great," She promises. "Just come home safe, alright?"

Izuku grins in reply and gives an eager thumbs up that he picked up from Toshinori. "Absolutely."

His mom sniffles and Izuku's own tear ducts respond in kind. It's silly. It’s reassuring. Izuku hugs his mom one last time, and he takes the security and determination with him like a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. 

--

Occhako Uraraka spends her long train ride studying, but it isn't much use. She's too excited to stay focused. She had left over an hour before with her parent's well wishes and blessing, and every mile closer that she got to UA only made them feel more like a promise. She had lots of anti-nausea medication in her bag and a light breakfast, so she is ready for anything the world can throw at her.

On the way in, she can't help but use her quirk. Just a quick burst of force to keep another examinee from tripping over his feet. It just seemed like a bad omen to allow it, and she says as much. He can't really get his words straight, but Occhako understands his implied thanks. But it's late, and she needs to get moving to score a good seat, so she doesn't stick around.

The paper test is a bit of a nighmare. There aren't nearly enough math and logic questions. There's a lot of history and law questions, which makes Occhako nervous. Her school definitely hadn't covered this material. 

Despite the queasy feeling in her stomach which she finishes her exam with, Occhako refuses to be daunted for long. It's her time to shine! The prospect of lifting so many robots is a bit intense, but she had spent her months discreetly floating construction equipment after school. She just had to float the robots, toss them into the air, and release. It's practically nothing, right?

She spots the nervous boy she helped out of the corner of her eye, but he's preoccupied with the tall and scary boy from the lecture earlier. Whatever they're discussing, it gets cut off by the eager announcement of Present Mic. His voice is louder than Occhako thought to expect, with a strange edge to it--Like a speaker that had the reverb boosted. It isn't that odd when she remembers his quirk, but somehow that alien quality never transferred over the airwaves the few times that Occhako tuned in to his radio show.

And then the race starts. Occhako is a little proud that she's one of the first to run through the gate at a dead sprint. She's got ten minutes, and a surge of adrenaline and recklessness pushes her to make the first attack. She leaps past a measly one-pointer and slaps it from above--her quirk sinks into her stomach and rolls in her ears, and the robot collides with the concrete before it careens into the air. 

Her next attack, she sweeps from below and deadlifts it, sending it flying towards a building. Taking half a second to calculate the flight path and check that no one was in danger, she released her quirk and let the piles of scrap crash into the concrete below. Two points. Not too shabby for fifteen seconds of work.

However, she's not going to settle. Already, she can see some students rushing forward and down the sides, ignoring the easy points in favor for more valuable targets. 

Occhako follows their example. . . With one key exception: She doesn't need to do much more than run past and swipe their metal hull to send the scrap heaps into the sky. It twists her insides to keep her quirk active for so long, while not paying attention, but she didn't have enough time to make the contact needed to get the proper impulse. So she left robots lightly bobbing in her wake and ignored her annoyance when those with long distance quirks shot them out of the air. 

After all, she thinks as she releases her strained hold on her quirk and faces off with a much bigger and sharper robot, there were bigger trees to fell.

--

Shouta considered it particularly rude that his cases had a nose for when it would be most inconvenient for him to get frisky. In the last three months, no one had managed to even get near the morgue robber. Combined with his new erratic attack pattern, it made dealing with Naomasa's department a nightmare. 

Shouta was used to playing the long game, but only with targets he could see. Instead, he only ever caught the after images. More annoyingly, their perpetrator had started getting subtle. Sometimes, they didn't learn about incidents immediately and had to comb through a weeks’ worth of footage to find even a glimpse.

That was what occurred at approximately six this morning. Some medical intern noticed a ripped suture before embalming and managed to put two and two together. Of course it was on the day Shouta had designating for sleeping in. His annoyance isn’t satisfied with Hizashi's slightly less shitty coffee, but it bridges the gap between his missing four hours of sleep and his state of consciousness.

In the UA observatory room, his colleagues were placing deals and bets, Nemuri egging people on. "Come on! Take me up on it! We get a zero-point disaster this year."

Ectoplasm raises an eyebrow, or at least makes a close approximation with his inhuman face. "There's something wrong with them every year."

"Nope." Nemuri says cheekily. "I'm talking fireworks. Big stuff. The last two exams were too quiet."

"You're delusional," Shouta reminds. That was rarely how probability played out. Even if those robots were a walking nightmare on a given day, they weren't too fast despite the false illusion of their stride. 

She shoots a shameless smirk his way as Cementoss takes her up on her bet over the teacher’s radio system. "Just fun," The R-Rated Hero corrects.

And since Shouta isn’t above shameless gambling, he isn't really in a position to criticize. "Two weeks detention duty for a high score of 74 or up."

"Three on eighty," Hizashi chimes in over the radio. "Cementoss has someone going buckwild in training ground B."

The door to the observatory opens, and in walks the latest addition to their staff. Shouta ignores him in favor of looking into Hizashi's report. It's fairly accurate. A blonde kid, Bakugou Katsuki, is kicking up a lot of dust and absolutely tearing his way across the field. Shouta might consider getting nervous on account of the pure combat skill, but judging from his disregard for his fellow competitors, he's not going to be earning rescue points. "Have fun covering my shift," He says dryly into his radio.

He marks down some of the flagged videos for training ground A and assigns points as needed. Ten minutes may seem like an incredibly short time to sort through potential students, but the sheer quantity of those who needed observing made UA's entrance exam far more grueling to grade than it first appeared. Shouta is once again struck by the inane urge to complain about his cases and their awful timing, but he settles for a double dose of eyedrops.

--

Toshinori settles into one of the designated couches and begins observing in earnest. The wall of screens shifts through the various perspectives of over a hundred drones, the basic facial/pattern recognition working to quickly identify any given examinee. It's almost nausea inducing, given Toshinori's lack of reference.

Nedzu is quick to engage him in conversation, hopping up on the couch to sit next to him. His squeaky voice bubbles with excitement. "So many interesting combinations this year." His beady eyes gleam with the force of his quirk, and he paws at his tablet, dolling out rescue points for training grounds H and J. "If you want your own, there's a spare tablet." 

Toshinori almost declines, content to get a wide view of the action--and there was quite a lot of it--but instead he quietly grabs the offered device. "Can you search by names?"

"Have a specific person in mind?" Nedzu asks. "Normally I'd say no to prevent bias, but since you're just an observer; top right icon. It can search by face, quirk, and name."

Toshinori types in 'Midoriya.' He pops up as the first result and Toshinori requests a video feed. There's several feeds to view from since he's in a concentrated area. The display lists his points: 20. It's not shabby, but incredibly average. It's not going to be enough if he keeps hesitating. He doesn't attack on sight, instead taking stock of the situation and the other participants. If someone is even near a target, he refuses to attack. That kind of politeness is commendable when at the supermarket, but not during an exam. 

Out of curiosity, Toshinori reads the basic applicant profile under his name. Quirk: Sharp Sense. Acute senses and durability. Awaiting further classification. 

That strikes him as odd. Mirio had mentioned a healing ability. And quirks rarely needed further analysis after first glance, unless they were invisible, or dealt with extremely complicated phenomena.

However, more strange than that is the startling efficacy with which he rips into the robots he stalks through the alleys. In the shadow of the fake city’s buildings, Izuku is more aggressive. He leaps onto their metal chaises, and seconds later the one and two pointers he manages to catch fall lifeless.

25.

That wasn't the sort of thing pure durability could account for.

Toshinori frowns in concentration. Midoriya, for all that he could ramble on quirks and heroes, had never asked for advice on UA or shared the same propensity for detail concerning his own quirk. It didn't seem malicious. He had a hard time believing that shy kid who offered up his willing free time had a malicious bone in his body. It's simply an odd thing in a world that had quit surprising Toshinori for a while.

Midoriya scores his first three pointer, but the clock is winding down and the concentration in his arena is rapidly decreasing. 

"I'll send in the 0-pointers," Nedzu says happily. "It's now or never for our examinees."

Midoriya whips around at a sound Toshinori can remember from years previous: the purely terrifying clamor of a Goliath coming to life. He darts out into the main street, running away in a panicked herd with the rest of the examinees. 

Toshinori checks his point breakdown once more: 8 rescue points and 20 villain points. It's not enough. While Izuku is in the top 100, he's nowhere near the cut. There aren't enough points remaining in the simulation for him to feasibly make it, and he's too hesitant to bring out his quirk around the other students. Toshinori resigns himself to the loss. General studies might accept him. 

"Oh!" Midnight shouts. She enlarges one specific video, which makes Eraserhead glare at her in annoyance. "We got a runner in G. I sense some chaos coming."

The screen Midnight gestures towards gleefully matches the one on Toshinor's own tablet: A drone swerving to compensate for a sudden change in direction. It has his full and undivided attention.

Midoriya sprints at a dead pace that puts all his earlier efforts to shame. And he sprints directly at the zero-pointer.

"Chaos is exactly what I hoped for," Nedzu cheers.

--

Izuku doesn't see it at first. He saw the shadow and heard the destruction, and that was all he needed to run away. But over that, the crashing calamity of metal hitting concrete and glass shattering, and the sweet, sharp scent of blood and sweat, he heard just the end of a word. Just a little muffled sound byte.

And on a whim, he glances over his shoulder. The girl who had helped him isn't running with the rest of the group. She's pinned under concrete, with blood streaming down the side of her face, and she's asking for help.

There isn't even a question.

Izuku flicks out his quirk and stabs it into the street. He redirects his momentum and hits the ground at a roll that still makes his shoulder ache no matter how much he practices. He runs against the panicked rush towards the exit, and he runs over to the crumpled form of Uraraka Occhako.

Her hairline is matted with blood. It runs down her cheek and drips onto the pavement.

"My ankle," She slurs, straining to move. It's not just her ankle. Her arms are trapped and her body pinned, and the only reason Occhako isn't a stain on the pavement is luck.

Izuku throws everything he has into his arms and lifts, shifting the sheets of concrete away. He drags Occhako out of the rubble, wincing at her hiss of pain, and slings her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. 

The zero-pointer's foot comes down close enough for Izuku to feel the wind along his back. He needs to move, but Occhako weighs him down and throws off his balance. His quirk flows out behind him as a counterweight, and Izuku rushes and labors forward. He's going to make it. He needs to make it. 

And he is making it. Until his quirk shudders and twitches and fails.

That's hollow feeling in his limbs that haunted him all morning has finally reared up with a vengeance. Izuku can't move with the pain that lurches in his stomach, and he cries oujt. He rolls blindly, letting his body take the blow and protecting Occhako. She hits the ground despite his efforts. She skids across the ground like a rag doll and leaves the phantom taste of guilt sparking in his mouth.

Izuku clenches his eyes shut and tries to drown out the cramping and violent pain of his stomach and his hunger. The zero-pointer draws closer, and Izuku feels like his will is sand slipping through a sieve. He struggles to look up--the terrifying robot takes another step, and it's close enough spit on. 

The sound of it's metal body grinds against Izuku's ears, too loud for him to even think, and the fear that he managed to ignore earlier rears up until he's breathing in short gasps. He was going to be crushed. He's going to die. 

He can't let that happen. He promised he would be safe. He had to go home. 

Izuku gets up on one knee and fights the pain and lethargy burrowing inside his body. He raises his eyes, one burning black and scarlet in his socket, to the towering robot.

And then he whips his head around to the shaking hand on his right shoulder. Occhako doesn't look at him as she struggles forward, limping and running on her twisted ankle. 

But he does hear her soft words:

"Thanks for the help."

She slaps both of her hands against the rising foot of the zero-pointer with a furious shriek. 

As though the world was tilting beyond it's own axis, it begins to rise. Just a fraction. It tilts, Just a few degrees.

Izuku stares in awe at Occhako, at her shaking determination and the steel set to her spine. She gasps and gasps for air as she does the impossible--the zero-pointer picks up momentum, centimeter by centimeter. It looked large enough to swallow the sun, and now bobbed between the wreckage of buildings, gracelessly rotating in the air.

Occhako crumples to the ground with one hand clamped over her face.

Izuku forces his strength to the surface and slams his body into the metal hull. He's got no excuse to stay still. Not with this girl giving it everything she can on his account. He pushes and lifts and strikes, and the robot flows into the air. And it hurts. It’s exhausting. It makes him want to lick blood off the concrete, so he could just quit starving.

But he keeps striking, keeps pushing, and pushing--

Because he couldn't live with himself if he did anything less. 

"And TIMES UP!" Present Mic's voice screams across the battle ground.

Occhako claps and then continues emptying her stomach. 

Izuku stumbles as the Zero-pointer careens into the Earth and begins shattering upon it's own weight. He flares his quirk out on instinct, a wide and flat shield between him and the wreckage. It buffers the rush of debris that results from the impact. With that final insult, his quirk breaks apart and sloughes off onto the ground like spoiled meat, leaving him with the acidic taste of bile.

He falls to his knees and bites his tongue hard enough to draw blood. When the static of hungry impulses and awful thoughts slowly dissolves and leaves his brain. Izuku stumbles over to Occhako. She's still gagging and dry-heaving. Izuku winces in empathy. That's a mood.

Then he startles in alarm when Occhako tilts off to the side and falls limp. "Hey! Hey, wake up." Izuku props her up on her side, but she doesn't respond. Her pupils don't dialate when he checks. Her heart is still beating, but it's an erratic pace that sets him on edge. "We need medical attention!" He shouts. But no one is nearby. No one can hear him.

Izuku rips off his jacket and uses it staunch Occhako's head wound, which is still dripping and oozing. She's breathing, so there's no need for CPR, but he shouldn't move now that they're out of immediate danger. Izuku's not sure if he can even walk without falling, and he can't afford to drop her again. 

Izuku pants through his mouth, ignoring the roaring in his stomach and the heat in his chest. He keeps talking, trying to get a response, and yelling at the top of his lungs for help every twenty seconds.

His voice is raw by the time he spots Recovery Girl and Present Mic hurrying his way with a stretcher.

The elderly woman takes a look at him and gives him a peck right on the forehead. He startles as a wave of exhaustion hits him, but the scrapes and aches in his muscles subside immediately. Present Mic puts a kind hand on his shoulder and draws him to his feet. Izuku almost trips, his limbs heavy and boneless.

"You did great, listener!" He whisper-shouts. "Let’s get you two to the medical center."

By the time Izuku blinks and refocuses, Ochako is on a hovering stretcher, her face pale and sweating and caked with red. Recovery Girl holds Ochako's hand carefully, her eyes narrowed in concentration. "Quirk shock," she murmurs under her breath, "Arrhythmia. . ." 

Arrhythmia: irregular and erratic heartbeat. Izuku can still hear it. It sends a flood of worry through him.

Izuku reaches out sluggishly, unwilling to leave them behind. "Wait. . ."

Present Mic hands him his coat and pulls him along. "We've got it handled, kid. Let's get you the nurses office, and the two of you can nap. Sound good?"

Izuku doesn't agree, but he does obey. Without remembering how he got there, he ends up inside the building again. Someone points him to a bathroom and tells him that he can get cleaned up inside. 

Izuku locks the door, and then leans against the freezing wall, breathing heavily. He slides down until he's sitting, and he stares at his hands, covered in blood and dust. He bangs his head against the tile in frustration and pain before he licks them clean.

It's really disgusting, and he feels a lot better afterwards.

--

Izuku takes his nap, too tired to be anything but obedient. They don't let him visit, even though the worry is eating Izuku up inside. If he hadn't stumbled, if he hadn't fallen, then that girl wouldn't have had to bear the burden of his incompetence. 

He gets sent home. He ends up home much later than intended, but his mom only seems a little worried instead of full-on panicked.

He gets his results for Hebikyuden first, exactly one week after he took his exam.

He placed 74th in a class of one-fifty and a pool of over a thousand. The admissions office praised his essays in the acceptance letter. The school was excited to accept him.

He celebrates by sneaking out at three in the morning, so he can just get away from that stupid letter. He goes to an all-night coffee shop and brings his backpack with him. He's practically the only person there besides the single barista texting behind the counter. The plain coffee is bland, but Izuku needs the wi-fi and the solitude.

He's free. He finally has some free time to do something besides studying, and he isn't going to waste it. 

Izuku drafts some posts for his neglected blog and reads up on all the recent action that he missed during his marathon cram session. All Might had kept up his activity in the area, which sent Izuku into a short melancholic spiral. He'd managed to miss all the action because he was so busy. He had so much to catch up on.

He spends a few hours browsing his phone and idly observing the occasional customer. When that gets old, he writes out his thoughts on some of the newer villain sightings in the area, and then tentatively notes down some of his thoughts on Eraserhead.  It's enough to wipe out the worst of the heavy feeling in his chest.

He is happy that he got in. Hebikyuden is a great opportunity. He could do a lot of good as a doctor, as a hero who heals. 

But it also feels like an awful obligation. Because he checked the general breakdown of reported scores this year (which wasn't something official or publicly available, but it paid to be well connected on the hero forms), and his score isn't going to cut it. Even if he got a perfect score on the multiple choice exam, 20 points isn't going to cut it. 

And he could have done better. He could have done a lot more if he wasn't so afraid of his quirk, this thing that could hurt people. 

It shouldn't feel like a death sentence to have Hebikyuden as an option. He's applying to other hero schools. And a high school isn't the only route for getting a certification, even if it did offer free training and streamlined learning opportunities. But it felt like it. UA had been his dream since he could walk. And it hurt to know that he wasn't going to make it.  

And then Toshinori walks through the door, and Izuku inhales his lukewarm coffee. Izuku breaks into a coughing fit that refuses to quiet. Grimacing, he waves to Toshinori as he tries to stop being so loud. 

Toshinori's expression blanks in surprise, and he returns Izuku's wave. He orders green tea and a day-old pastry, and then sinks into the booth across from Izuku.

"Midoriya, my boy, good to see you." There's unspoken hesitance that Izuku translates to mean what are you doing here?

Izuku smiles, the expression wobbly with embarrassment. "You too. I, uh, got some news and couldn't sleep." He scratches at his neck. "You?"

"Similar," Toshinori admits. "There's been some things relating to my work, and my co-workers keep odd hours, and--well, this probably boring to someone your age. H-how did your entrance exam go?"

The image of Ochako, blood running down the side of her face, stepping forward when all he could do was cower--of her sending the zero-pointer into the sky because he couldn't keep it together comes to mind. 

Izuku grimaces. "Not the best," he says. "I tried to help someone and I--I wasn't good enough. And this girl looked really sick, and I'm not sure if she's alright. I mean, obviously it's UA and they have Recovery Girl, but she mentioned quirk shock and that's not something healing quirks have a universal effect on, and if I just hadn't--"

Toshinori chops him on the forehead, mimicking Mirio's signature solution for when Izuku goes tumbling down the rabbit hole, but he looks guilty about it. "I'm sure the fact that you tired counts a great deal."

It's a nice reassurance, Izuku isn't so certain. He could have done better, and he knows it. Not just on the test itself, but with the zero-pointer too. He hadn't even gotten the chance to apologize for his failure. And he probably never would.

"In fact," Toshinori says suddenly, "I looked for you during the exam. And I think I know what you're talking about." Toshinori looks somber and skeletal, and he smells likes sickness and lightning. "Young Midoriya, you're the only one who risked helping. And you did it without a second thought. That bravery is commendable, moreso than any level of competence. Perhaps there were others who could have done better, but none of them tried." 

Izuku gapes wordlessly because--well, of course no one tried. They might have not seen that someone was trapped or heard her calling for help. Izuku hadn't even seen her at first. He only noticed because of his quirk, and he only failed so badly because of his quirk. He should have been able to keep it together. What's the point of having something like his quirk if he can't even--

His mother's voice echoed in the back of his mind. This is a gift that will help you do more.

Izuku sniffs and then ducks his head.

"My advice," Toshinori says into quiet of the coffee shop, "Is to quit fixating on the past. You did the best you could with the body you have."

Izuku scrubs at his nose with the back of his hand and nods. "Yeah. Yes, you're probably right. I'm just feeling very--weird today."

"I imagine. It's a stressful time for all of the youths of today. But if you wish to attend UA, you must remember our motto!" Toshinori grins with a sudden ferocity that leaves Izuku feeling off-balance. "Go Beyond! Plus Ultra!"

Izuku blinks, wide-eyed at the mood whiplash. 

And then Toshinori deflates into something a little more contained and recognizable, as if they had never deviated from calm small-talk. "I actually had a question about your quirk, if it's not too personal. The UA database for potential students had access to its federal listing, of course, and it mentioned something that caught my eye. The description was waiting on 'further classification.'"

Izuku's spine straightened, and he almost started coughing again. Just to alleviate the sudden tightness in his chest.

"I've never seen something like that."

Izuku is a horrible liar on the best of days, but he's slowly gotten better. The trick is to stick mostly to the truth, and to not stutter through every sentence. 

"Oh. That. Uh, so, I was. . . quirkless for a while. Or classified as such. Until very recently. And I listed the symptoms I noticed at first on the report." Izuku scratches at the back of his neck, feeling as though the barista is staring at him and possibly debating on arresting him. Which is stupid, like a lot of feelings that Izuku has, but no less persistent for it. "And that happens to be my senses. I'm due back for another check up where the quirk administration can, uh, get a better description."

Toshinori tilts his head, eyebrows drawn in confusion. "Quirkless for so long--and then, suddenly boom?"

People had asked this question a lot, and Izuku just shrugged. "I had a really stressful year. The doctors think something triggered it."

In fact, they really, really wanted him to participate on studies related to dormant quirk factors. He almost didn't have the guts to say no, but his mom ended up beating off the consent forms with a stick and the threat of a malpractice suit. 

"How odd," Toshinori says. Then he back-tracks. "But that is wonderful. And you wanted to be a hero since childhood, so it really is a gift."

Izuku zeroes in on the odd note of cheer in Toshinori's voice. Something about the way he said gift. The careful observance in his gaze. Then Izuku's brain kicks into high gear with an unexpected burst of adrenaline.

Toshinori one of the few people who might have the knowledge to discredit Izuku's timeline. He met Mirio nearly three months before he accidentally revealed his quirk. If UA's student quirk profiles included dates, Toshinori either had already seen the gap in his records, or would be able to at any time. And there was already a discrepancy in Izuku's quirk profile--he'd healed himself in front of Mirio the first time they met. So that missing detail couldn't be attributed to ignorance.

He kept his quirk hidden inside his jacket during the exam for the most part--except for that last bit. So Toshinori saw that too. Unless it was a bad angle, or the dust from the zero-pointer hid it--But Izuku couldn't rely upon hope for damage control. He could only rely upon logic. 

Facts:

He had a quirk listed. If there was anything concerning a timeline, Toshinori would see. In regards to his other traits, Mirio knew about his brute-force healing and the school saw bits of his tail despite his best efforts. So his report definitely needed to be updated sooner rather than later, and he needed to make some adjustments to the wording. Especially if he tries to be a hero.

With his pulse beating too loud in his ears and his entire life at risk, Izuku makes the impulse decision to go nuclear, because the only thing more disastrous than pity is suspicion. 

"Kids in my class used to make fun of me for it. For being quirkless mostly, but also for wanting to be a hero." Izuku averts his eyes, because this is a lie wrapped up in a truth and it shouldn't be so easy to say it to Toshinori's face. "And I was kind of afraid other people would treat me the same, so I kept quiet about it. Which is why I never really talked about it, I guess."

Toshinori seems interested, but not too compelled. That isn't good enough.

"I mean, I know you and Mirio wouldn't have treated me differently, but it's different to know something and to feel safe with it." 

There. Toshinori's expression twists slightly. Because people did treat you differently if they knew you were strange, and Toshinori wouldn't have been an exception. Especially as someone who worked at a school for heroes, he would be particularly biased towards those with quirks. Or maybe he took Izuku's words for trust. Guilt would honestly be preferable, but Izuku would make either one work.

So, Izuku had his silence covered. Now for step two.

"In fact," Izuku says slowly, like a confession. "It was bad enough that I didn't believe it at first. I thought it was just me being delusional. And even when I knew for certain that I actually had a quirk, I still couldn't figure out how to make it work, and I didn't want my peers to think I was delusional. So I just didn't talk about it. For months. Because it was almost easier to stay quirkless than to see if things would change because of it. If I would be treated better for something beyond my control." Izuku laughs into the pained silence that the overhead speakers can't drown out. Glancing up, he sees concern and pity and all sorts of emotions that Izuku normally refused to touch with a ten foot pole wafting off of Toshinori. 

Giving a shaky sigh, Izuku forces himself to make eye contact before smiling. "I--I haven't really talked about this with anyone before. Thanks. For listening."

Hook. Line. Sinker. 

"Of course, Mirdoriya-shounen." Toshinori hesitantly reaches across the table and pats Izuku on the shoulder. "Your situation isn't enviable, but your dedication will do you well in your efforts to become a hero." 

The reassurance and pity and praise in his voice is undeserved and it makes Izuku want to be sick. He's the worst. He wraps information in false vulnerability so that no one will want to look too closely. He doesn't deserve sympathy.

Izuku covers his feelings with an embarrassed laugh and a quick subject change. "Ah, I shouldn't have dumped all that on you." Despite the morbid curiosity itching at him, Izuku refuses to ask about how he scored on the exam. He had to lie, but he drew the line at exploiting Toshinori, someone who had only ever been kind and supportive. Instead he says, "I hope I'm not keeping you late from your co-workers."

"Not at all,” Toshinori assures. “In fact, they are meeting me here."

It made sense. The coffee shop is close to UA and has a nice atmosphere. Izuku had spotted it after the entrance exam, and some mix of longing and curiosity dragged him there. If he got in, he could do homework here. He might bring his own coffee, but the hero and band posters pasted onto the walls gave the place an infectious energy.

“How is UA?” Izuku asks suddenly. “As a teacher, I mean. Mirio talks about it a lot, but I haven’t really heard you mention it.”

Toshinori finishes his bite of food and washes it down with green tea before answering. “It’s very unique. I’m new and I mostly work an, er, administrative position. It’s full of surprises.”

It sounds nice.

Before Izuku can go further down that pointless rabbit-hole, a man dressed in a light grey suit, his police badge clearly visible on his belt, walks in. He scans the room calmly and then heads towards Izuku’s table. Izuku tenses in surprise.

Toshinori looks over and laughs. "You're right on time." He stands and gestures towards the man. "Midoriya, this is my long-time friend, Detective Naomasa Tsukauchi. I'm afraid I must take my leave, but I encourage you to get some rest and not worry so much."

"Fair," Izuku says, nervous with the prospect of the police just on principle. It’s early, which means he either needs to text his mom that he went out, or he needs to book it to the train station. "I guess I'll see you Sunday." He gathers his things, and the two adults head towards a door that leads into the back of the coffee shop. Izuku hadn't realized that there were private rooms. He might ask about it next time, if only so he didn't have to worry about being watched or muttering under his breath.

Izuku cleans up and looks up the weather forecast on his phone as he leaves. It's still dark outside, and rain is expected to hit at around 8. Distracted, he nearly runs into another customer in the doorway. Izuku jerks back with an apology and holds open the door for--

Long dark hair. Bone white bandages.

"Thanks," Eraserhead says shortly, moving past Izuku without a second glance.

Izuku feels his stomach drop somewhere to his knees, and the only thing that stops him from sprinting away is the numbness catching at his fingertips. He walks quietly out the door, sweat beading up on the back of his neck, and he doesn't turn around until he's out of sight from the coffeeshop.

His luck. No one else has his luck, Izuku decides.

--

Katsuki Bakugou waited for his letter with a remarkable amount of patience. It's mostly because he knew he got in. 

The written exam had been easy, with a few annoying curve balls on law and history. 

The practical exam was the most fun Katsuki had in months. Even a week later, remembering it sends adrenaline running through his system. During his runs, he sometimes forgot that he was back in the real world, where public quirk use is forbidden. It pissed him off that he was earthbound again, but he had waited a long time to apply to UA. He got through the week without a single incident, which made Dr. Nara happy. Not that Katsuki usually kept her happiness in mind, but it was a definite bonus.

The Sunday following Katsuki's exam, he goes on a short run and logs it on his calendar. It isn't a record-breaker. It's slower than he should be, which annoys him. It had already been a full week and he had no excuse to slack. Katsuki frowns before he adds cardio on top of weight-lifting for tomorrow. His body is going to fall into line whether it likes it or not. 

His mom screeches from the living room. "Katsuki, you've got mail!"

Katsuki practically vaults down the stairs and snatches the package right out of her hands. He ignores her usual sarcastic demands for manners, ripping it open. A small circular device falls out of the envelop, and his mom laughs in shock when a hologram of All Might himself appears, congratulating him on acceptance. 

His score pops up, and it makes him grin. 78 points of pure victory. 

"Not bad, brat," his mom says, using his head as an arm rest despite the fact that he's taller than her now. The hologram displays several clips of Katsuki's test, and his mom alternates between loud cheers of "Kill 'em! Hell yeah!" and melodramatic declarations. "My little baby Katsuki is all grown up," his mom teases with a nougie that he fends off. "All grown up and off to being a--Fuck! A building? You had to jump off a building?!" She bops him on the head. Repeatedly.

"Don't look at me like that," Katsuki yells without any heat, too thrilled to be annoyed. "You'll get wrinkles, you hag." 

"I'll give you wrinkles!" 

His dad peeks out over the staircase at the commotion. His eyes widen, and he hurries downstairs. "You got in?"

Katsuki flinches at the shock in his voice. "Obviously!" He snaps, gesturing towards his test. He ripped through those bots like they were tissue paper. It was barely a challenge

All Might returns to the screen. "Once again, congratulations on your performance!" He gestures to a screen which fills up with the top ten placements, with Katsuki's name in the very first spot. 

Katsuki points at it, his face splitting. 78 points. All of them from trashing robots.

All Might continues monologing: "As one of the first-place students, you blah blah blah. . ."

Katsuki tunes it out in favor of looking at the available scores. Tenth place was more than twenty points below him. His palms sting with excitement, and he can't restrain the minor explosions that run over his skin. He looks for second place. 

And looks again. 

There isn't a second place. 

Instead, under his own name, is an identical number one. 28 Villain points. 50 Rescue points. 

"And you will share your obligations at this year's sports festival with your fellow first place competitor!" All Might cheers.

"Oh, honey," his dad points out neutrally. "He tied."

Katsuki inelegantly flips his shit. 

 

Notes:

I'm considering setting up a discord server for this AU! it would mostly be me posting snippets of my work and talking about ideas/plot points. let me know if yall are interested!

Chapter 7: Emperor

Summary:

First Day at UA: Part One

Notes:

Merry Christmas! This chapter is much shorter than usual due to my holiday being very hectic, but I wanted to put something up for the holidays!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Izuku meets Mirio at the beach on Sunday, his eyes still red and nose runny. His mom had burst into tears, and then him, and then it was just a watery positive feedback loop of feelings.

“Is that a good cry or a bad one?” Mirio’s strange eyes hold mild alarm, but he knows Izuku well enough to ask.

“I got in. I really got in,” Izuku gasps, still breathless from his sprint to the beach. Despite his mistakes and exhaustion, he made it. All Might himself told Izuku that he made it. “I get to be a hero.”

Mirio claps him on the back, his grin brighter than the sun. “Glad to hear it! I heard some stuff from Toshinori-sensei. He was really amazed with you!”

Izuku blinks, his eyes wide with surprise. “Really?” Because Toshinori might have said something about it, but that didn’t mean he meant it. People say kind things out of pity, and Izuku had been plenty pitiful that morning in the coffee shop.

“Definitely.” Miro gestures to the edge of the sea wall, and both he and Izuku sit on the hot pavement. In front of them stretches a clear expanse of beach, the pale sand clear of debris. There’s piles and pieces of trash encircling the cleared site, but for now the wind gusts off the rough waves and brings the scent of old rain and salt.

Izuku yells over the sea breeze, explaining to Mirio what went on during the exam. Mirio asks dozens of questions. His curiosity occasionally sparks a wave of excitement and happiness that causes Izuku ramble and ramble--and soon they are talking about heroes and quirks and all the things Izuku has loved since he was old enough to speak.

Mirio never tells him to shut up about them.

It makes him happy enough that he starts crying again.

--

He didn’t eavesdrop on Eraserhead. It would have been the smart thing to do. It would have given him an edge--it would have helped him be a step ahead of the game.

But at half past five in the morning, with complicated emotions curled up in Izuku’s heart like a ball of thorns, he couldn’t. He let himself go home, washing his hands of the fear that buzzed and buzzed at the back of his skull. He woke his mom up with morning coffee. He took a nap. Considered the logistics of Hebikyuden; it was far enough away to justify an apartment.

He didn’t listen in, no matter how much it might have helped him.

He didn’t have the heart to know what Toshinori really thought of him.

--

His first day of school holds all the stereotypical nervousness. Izuku attempts to tame his hair, which quickly asserts itself as a lost battle. Then his tie won’t cooperate, and his eyes have dark circles, and he looks like a mess. Izuku smudges on some light eyeliner because it looks nice, and it’s also the only thing he can manage to calm down.

Eventually, his mom cuts him off. She calls him to the kitchen and sets a mug of coffee in front of him, clearly just as nervous for the day. “I know it’s no All Might, but. . . Izuku, I’m so proud of you. So remember to be careful and be yourself.”

The mug of coffee in his hands is brand new. In bold letters it says: First, Coffee. Then, Heroism.

It looks homemade.

Izuku tears up, and its almost enough to make him late. His mom pushes him out the door with words of encouragement and the assurance that his tie is fine.

The train is crowded, thick with the smell and sound of so many bodies in a compact space. Izuku considers walking in the future. If he could breathe easily, it might make the extra commute time worth it. Then there's the matter of finding his class, which doesn't go over easy considering how huge the campus is.

Then there's his nerves, which don't want him to walk through the (huge) classroom doors. So it's a steady cumulation of stress that ends up with Izuku steeling himself, and then walking in to see someone already yelling at Katsuki, who appears to be having the time of his life. 

“Please remove your feet from our desk! It’s immensely disrespectful to this academic institution and--"

It’s the scary boy from the entrance exam doing the yelling, and Izuku pities him. Katsuki knows neither shame nor respect, and he grins as he scuffs his heel over the top of his desk. “I don’t give a shit. Oi, where’d ya get that stick up your ass, you extra?”

The taller boy stiffens, before gesturing robotically. “I attended Somei Academy. My name is Iida Tenya.”

“Somei?” Katsuki mocks. “So you’re some elitist prick, I bet. I oughta blow you to bits.”

Iida rears back in shock, disturbed by Katsuki’s own brand of unwarranted violence. “Awful,” He says like he still can quite comprehend it. “Are you really trying to be a hero?!”

Katsuki just bares his teeth wider and wider--people had already gotten too used to him at middle school and it was rare that he got to mess around with anyone new. Izuku sighs. Hopefully the class will mellow out after a few days.

It becomes quickly apparent that sighing was a mistake, because scary boy--Iida--whips around and begins stalking his direction. “Hello! I am--”

“I heard!” Izuku blurts out. “Ah, I mean, nice to meet you. I’m Midoriya Izuku. It’s, ahh. . .” Izuku isn’t sure where to go with that. He tugs on his shirt collar. The room feels oddly warm.

“Midoriya-kun. . . I believe I misjudged you.” Iida goes on say how Izuku had perceived the true purpose of the exam and the value of rescue points. “You were clearly the superior candidate, and I must apologize for--”

And that is where Izuku feels compelled to cut him off. “Uh. I didn’t really know about all that. I just--moved?” Izuku shrugs, uncomfortable both with the praise and the implications. “I was as surprised as everyone else. I thought I wouldn’t get in for sure.”

Iida seems to short circuit for a split second before recovering. “Of course! I’m certain if I had more time, I would’ve gone back to assist.”

Izuku hears Katsuki mutter his nickname under his breath, but Izuku is unwilling to deal with him on his first day at a new school. There had been radio silence for weeks, and that’s how Izuku preferred it. Still, there’s something in Iida’s tone that Izuku can’t ignore. “Well. . . that’s kind of the point? To help even when it’s inconvenient or dangerous.”

Iida blinks in shock, before his face reddens. His bends sharply at the waist in a bow to straight for a human spine. “You are correct! I should endeavor to uphold heroic principles at all times.”

Izuku blanches. He really didn’t mean to embarrass Iida. He seemed nice, despite his initial. . . intensity.

The classroom door opens, and Izuku glances behind him to see brown hair and pink cheeks. Shock hits Izuku clean across the face, and all he can blurt out is, “It’s you!”

Which is funny, because that’s exactly what she says at the exact same time. Uraraka Ochako hurries over, clapping her hands together with excitement. “Hiya! I never got to thank you after the exam.”

Izuku gapes, almost off-balance from her lively energy. “Ah--me too! You were really amazing.”

“Oof, I didn’t feel so amazing afterwards,” She says, which sends a pang of guilt through Izuku, “but you were a life saver. I couldn’t have done it without you! So thanks!” Then she grins, and says, with equal intensity, “So what’s your name?”

“Uh,” Izuku says, blanking for half a second. “M-midoriya Izuku! It’s nice to meet you again.”

“Uraraka Ochako,” She says. “And same.”

“Woah,” A kid with bright red hair exclaims, “You’re the one who destroyed the zero-pointer during the exam. That’s super manly.” The boy grins with sharp teeth and points a thumb at himself. “Kirishima Ejirou!”

And suddenly Katsuki is standing behind Izuku. “So you’re the other number one, huh?”

Izuku stiffens, forcing himself to not jump clean into the air. Uraraka looks past him, her smile drooping a little. She laughs. “Hah. Yeah. Kinda crazy. You must be Bakugou Katsuki! Excited to work with you!”

Katsuki nods, his expression shockingly calm. “I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Izuku feels like he is going to grind through his teeth by the end of the year.

“You can’t just say that!” Iida barks out, his arms chopping through the air stiffly. “There is absolutely no reason for you to be so rude! Especially to a young lady and your fellow classmate.”

Uraraka’s eyes widen for a second, and Izuku almost speaks out in her defense too. But then she claps her hands together and grins, cheery as the moment she walked in. “Thanks for the warning, then! Very sporting!”

Katsuki gets visibly prickly, quiet popping coming from his fists. “Are you fucking with--”

“I’m so excited to make friends,” Uraraka says loudly, looking at Izuku in favor of the dangerously angry blond next to him. “And introductions! I wonder what orientation will be like? Or our teacher?”

Correction: Izuku’s teeth might last a month, tops. Even now, he can barely look at Uraraka, who is super energetic and possibly unaware that Katsuki meant everything he said, and kind of cute and--

Katsuki looks like he’s about to start his second fight of the day, but he pauses on account of the yellow, giant caterpillar that rolls to a stop outside the classroom door. The sound of zipper skirting down a few reluctant inches cuts through the air.

“It you’re here to socialize, you might as well get out.”

Iida stiffens, and Uraraka whips around with wide eyes. Even Katsuki sounds a little off balance with his quiet, “What the fuck?”

Izuku leans over to see Eraserhead drink an entire juice packet in one go, his eyes painfully red and dry. Then he can’t hear much else as a rush of panic roars through his ears.

Izuku had once though that his illicit activities burned all the deer-in-headlights, stock-still rabbit panic out of him. Now, he’s not sure he could move even a muscle. He doesn’t dare breathe or even blink, and Eraserhead’s eyes burn into him.

Then the pro-hero shoves a gym outfit into his face. “So go get changed. It’s time for your quirk assessment.”

Another correction: Izuku might, in fact, lose all his teeth today once Eraserhead realizes who his newest homeroom student is.

Notes:

thanks so much for your patience with me! next month will have a better update schedule, I hope! and i hope the cliffhanger isn't too awful!

Chapter 8: Emperor II

Notes:

theres a small adjustment to the UA timeline so that the students get more basic instruction and have time to settle into their classes.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Aizawa decides to start today’s lesson with a demonstration. Predictably, Bakugou puts on an impressive display with his toss. His temper might be worth the headache if he could continue to set such a good example. Effort is not a thing he lacks.

Aizawa addresses his class, explaining the parameters and expectations of the exam. “Your quirk is going to define your career as a hero. The Education Bureau has chosen to ignore the reality of differing accommodations by sweeping our differences under the rug. Today, we will get an understanding of where you stand with your quirks.”

His students break out into excited chatter.

“Wow! So exciting.” Ashido claps her hands, her blacked-out eyes gleeful.

“That’s just UA for you, huh?” Kaminari says mildly.

“With our quirks?” Midoriya squeaks out. His eyes dart around the sports field, and he begins muttering under his breath.

The whole atmosphere is saturated with a disgusting amount of complacency. There isn’t nearly enough drive or thought being put towards the exercise, though that could be considered an expected reaction. The newest batch of students, like many previous ones, think the hardest part was getting into the school. And now they believe there’s room to take it easy, to get lazy.

With the newest batch of students, like with every previous one, the promise of expulsion acts as a wonderful motivator.

Aizawa picks out several potential problems as the exercises progress. Iida is too stringent in his thinking to get truly creative, which means a hit to his ratings. Ashido is taking unnecessary risks to show off, and Kaminari is too busy panicking about his quirk’s lack of applicability to think ahead. Aizawa would need to be sure to put them in more situations that required thought and creativity.

Aizawa is also forced to reconsider how big of a problem Bakugou might be: the look on his face when Uraraka earns first place in the softball toss points towards trouble.

At least there are more mundane issues, with equally easy solutions to consider: Hagakure, despite her stunning efficiency in the entrance exam, lacks access to tools to supplement her raw physical ability. She’d probably need more physical conditioning, along with Kaminari, Jiro, and Sero.

Midoriya is making a decent showing, but he is far too unfocused. At first, Aizawa thinks that problem might resolve itself as the exercise went on. It doesn’t. Instead, Midoriya performs with the barest amount of adequacy, especially considering his work in the actual entrance exam.

Everyone else on the field is doing their absolute best. Everyone is giving Aizawa a clear indication of what he has to work with. Everyone is displaying the drive and desire to be a hero. Everyone except Midoriya.

He makes a fairly impressive bid for the standing long jump, breathing a small sigh of relief at his score. He’s been keeping track of everyone’s attempts, so he must know he’s in the middle of the road.

Aizawa cuts his relief short. “Is that really all you’re going to do?”

 The kid stiffens and whips around, his eyes filled with a barely covered anxiety. It the same fear that had been there ever since Aizawa saw him that morning, and it’s beginning to get annoying.

“Uh, yes, that’s my-my attempt for that particular. . .” Midoriya trails off.

Aizawa narrows his eyes. “Why are you not utilizing the full extent of your quirk?”

Midoriya flinches, which is an immediate red-flag.

He’d thought that Midoriya simply lacked the mental resilience to deal with stress, but this went beyond even that. Shouta takes a second glance at him. There’s no sign of bruises or poorly set bones, but that isn’t a catch all.

“Uh, it’s just--my quirk, it doesn’t--”

Either way, he would hand the problem to someone qualified to handle it. There isn’t room for a hero without the conviction to try.

“Give me a reason to let you stay,” Aizawa says plainly, cutting off Midoriya’s inaudible muttering. “Because right now, I see a kid with a lucky quirk who thinks he can coast by without any effort.”

The change that comes over Midoriya’s face is instantaneous. It’s like watching a piece of paper uncrumple itself until smooth. It’s as alien as watching entropy reverse. The look in his eyes is searching, intense, and then gone.

“My quirk isn’t suitable for vertical stresses,” Midoriya mutters quickly, eyes down cast. “While it helps with my mobility, it’s not strong or reliable enough to push me into the air, not without some unnecessary risk on my part. Since it is important to be able to complete all the tasks you laid out, I decided that it would be better to rely upon my usual methods of movement since there is less room for error.”

Aizawa blinks at the clearly laid out reasoning. It’s more verbose than he expected from Midoriya’s quietness. “You can’t be a hero if you don’t strive to push your limits,” he says, applying pressure out of curiosity. Midoriya’s nervousness needed to be addressed if it was severe enough to make him doubt himself.

“I also can’t be one if I get expelled due to a poorly thought-out risk.”

Aizawa raises an eyebrow. A thinker. Unexpected. Usually people with brute strength never had a need to think around their opponents. Before he can speak again, Midoriya resumes talking. Aizawa is curious enough to listen.

 “Furthermore, you established clear parameters for success and failure. Since you defined--” Midoriya’s mouth snaps shut for a split second before the recovers. “Since I understood this as an exercise to establish our strengths and weaknesses in reference to our quirk use, I chose to use the elements of my quirk that I felt confident in so as to not give the false impression that I am used to working with the full extent of my abilities, because I am not.

Aizawa tilts his head, examining the slightest edge of desperation around the statement. Not used to it. That warranted a second look. Not used to it because he had been cautioned against it? Or because it was a new aspect he hadn’t yet figured out?

Midoriya sucks in a breath. “I didn’t mean to imply that this exercise wasn’t worth my full attention, although I do understand why my actions undermine my intent. If given the option, I would like to take another attempt at the exercise.”

Aizawa weighs the idea for a split second. “No.” He turns to signal for Sato and Tokoyami to go, having already wasted too much time on this tangent. “Make a better showing in the next event.” Midoriya got the point and he isn’t in last place, but the potential hit to his score might act as a motivator none the less.

“. . . Understood.”

Aizawa begrudgingly puts Midoriya in the more complicated pile of problems to deal with.

--

The boys of class 1-A walk back to homeroom in various states of elation and tragedy.

“A logical ruse,” Iida repeats once more, like a broken record. “Of course. Obviously.”

It’s a bit painful to see him so thrown off track. Izuku tentatively pats his arm. “We all fell for it.” Well, everyone except for Yaoyoruzu. She had said it was obvious. Izuku could agree that it had been obviously unfair and obviously full of holes, but that had never stopped teachers in the past from doing what they wanted.

Dispite Izuku’s morbid thoughts, the sentiment seems to help. Iida shakes his head and draws himself back up into his perfectly stiff posture. “Indeed! Though it was unexpected and arguably unprofessional, UA would not be so esteemed without reason.”

Izuku kind of felt the same way, but he also was still reeling with the fact that he made it. Eraserhead didn’t recognize him. Of course, Izuku had kept the full extent of his quirk under wraps because seeing glimpses of something on video and seeing something in real life are two different things. But still. Too close for comfort. He’s going to need a long nap and a lot of coffee to even begin chewing on today.

“Hey! Wait up!” Uraraka jogs their way through the hallway. Her hair is still tangled from the exercise. “Good job on your results, Iida, Midoriya.” She claps her hands together, but it isn’t the same as when she releases the hold of her quirk. Her hands are flat and crossed such that her finger tips are far from each other. It’s an odd mannerism. Her quirk probably requires five points of contact.

“Likewise, Uraraka-kun!” Iida pushes his glasses higher and his face darkens a bit. “I do feel upset on your behalf that Bakugou keeps behaving aggressively towards you.”

Izuku blanches because--yeah. Katsuki is going out of his way to be rude. Or going further out of his way than normal. “Kacchan is just kinda like that,” Izuku says quietly. “Don’t take it personally.”

Katsuki had actually gotten reprimanded by Aizawa for being a distraction, which Izuku can’t remember happening in. . . Well. He can’t remember it happening, ever. And Katsuki looked pissed about it, but not enough to push his luck on the first day.

“You two know each other, right?” Uraraka tilts her head to indicate that they should keep walking, and the three of them continue on to homeroom. “He calls you a nickname too. Deku, right?”

“Uh.” Izuku ducks his head and scratches at his temple. “Yeah. From when we were kids.”

“So an insult,” Iida concludes gravely. His approximation of Katsuki has yet to hit bedrock, but judging by Iida’s expression, it’s getting close.

Uraraka raises her chin. “It reminds me kinda of ‘dekiru!’ But I doubt that’s the intention.” She glances at him with a considering expression. “Could I give you a nickname, too?”

Izuku barely manages to keep walking. He stares at her with wide eyes. “Sure? I mean--if you want to. You don’t have to,” He rushes to say. It would be worse to end up with two horrible nicknames--

But Uraraka wouldn’t do that. She’s only been nice to him. She has no reason to be mean.

She grins. “Give me a few days then! I want it to be a good one.”

Between his goals and his horrible quirk, Izuku had somehow forgotten that he wanted friends. And that he somehow might still be able to get them.

The three of them chat as they return to homeroom and collect their things to leave. Thankfully, it’s more mundane that Izuku and Katsukis’ ugly history. They just talk about how they will get home. Iida has a longer commute than Izuku, but Uraraka lives within walking distance. Both Izuku and Iida are surprised when Uraraka admits that she lives alone.

“I live so far away that it was kinda necessary,” She says with a shrug. “And the school offered a living stipend, so it would be a waste not to take it.”

Izuku sometimes wishes he lived alone, but he didn’t think he could actually do it. Laundry and dishes and chores wouldn’t be an issue. He keeps his room neat and knows how a washing-machine works. It’s the matter of having no one to go home to that scares him. “Does it get lonely?”

Uraraka hums. “Not yet, I guess. And I can visit when I want.” She zips up her backpack and waits for Izuku and Iida to pack their school books. “I actually get to decorate everything, which is kinda cool.”

“Hero posters?” Izuku says hopefully. That’s pretty much the only type of decoration Izuku owns.

“A few! Mostly of Thirteen and a couple less popular heroes.” Uraraka shows the two of them a little charm hanging from her phone, an old and chipped space helmet. “I really love space-themed heroes. That’s probably a lame reason to like them, but it’s all I got.”

“On the contrary,” Iida interjects with a frown, “aesthetic appreciation is just as good a reason as any.”

Izuku nods in agreement. “Heroes have defined presentations for a reason! It’s an important part of hero culture.”

“What about you two? Who are your favorites?”

Iida coughs, looking oddly embarrassed. “Ah. That would be Ingenium.”

Izuku blinks and the pieces fall into place almost instantly. “Are you related?” He blurts out with wide eyes.

Iida cautiously admits that, yes, his older brother is a pro-hero. And, yes, Iida’s older brother is his hero.

Uraraka’s smile goes all warm and bright at seeing Iida’s mild embarrassment.

Some of the more extroverted classmates chime in with their personal favorites before leaving: Crimson Riot for Kirishima and Ryukyu for Hagakure. Izuku mentions All Might, but that’s a basic answer. Everyone likes All Might, obviously.

Katsuki enters homeroom with a scowl. Not getting first place gave him a chip on his shoulder, and Izuku doesn’t feel like being the scapegoat for it. “Uh, I’m gonna head out I think. . .”

“Midoriya,” Aizawa says tersely. “Stay a moment.”

Uraraka looks back and forth between their teacher and Izuku. “We’ll wait for you!” She loops her arm into Iida’s and tugs him out the door, leaving Izuku to fend for himself. Katsuki leaves a second later, his backpack still precariously open.

It’s encouraging, even if Izuku wants to cry don’t leave me alone with him. Even Katsuki might be preferable. Afterall, Eraserhead probably wouldn’t want witnesses if he did try to arrest him. Too much potential for a hostage situation.

“Ah, sure. Sensei. What, uh, can I do for you?” Izuku wants to smack himself, if only so he could get his face to work. He’s in the clear. Eraserhead doesn’t know anything. He can’t. It had been months ago, and Izuku was so careful. There’s millions of body manipulation quirks, and as long as Izuku kept it subtle and worked delicately, no one would have to know.

No one needed to know.

“You applied to several other schools.” Aizawa states without preamble. “One of which is a fairly selective medical magnet school. You were granted placement in the surgical track.”

Hebikyuden. Had something there come up?

“Do you want to continue that course of study?”

Izuku blinks, and homeroom is dead silent. “A-are you expelling me?”

Aizawa glares at him with no small edge of annoyance. “UA is always concerned with diversifying the skills of it’s students. If you have the ability to act as a medical technician on the field, you are an invaluable resource to yourself and others.” He rubs at his eyes. “If you are interested, the Principle wants to discuss designing an alternative course load to accommodate your interests. You need to finalize your courses by the end of the week if you decide to follow up on it.”

Izuku forces himself to get over his fear, if only momentarily, so he can consider it. He had poured months of work into getting ahead in biology and chemistry. And knowing advanced first aid would be a great asset--it would a way to help, a way to give back.

But the first time, he had done it nearly entirely on a whim and ended up dreading even the thought of that being his future. He isn’t sure if he wants to do it again.

“Could I meet with him?” Izuku asks quietly.

Aizawa nods. “He’s free now at his office. There’s directions by the elevator.” With nothing left to say, he makes a shooing motion with his hands.

Izuku is only too eager to obey.

Outside the door, Uraraka and Iida are talking with a floating uniform, which happens to be Hagakure. They turn to Izuku, and Uraraka looks openly curious but she doesn’t mention anything.

Hagakure waves her colorful bracelets, practically bouncing in place. “Heya, Midoriya. We didn’t get to talk earlier, but I like your eye makeup!”

Uraraka’s eyes widen, and she leans in to stare at his face. “Wow, I didn’t notice.”

Izuku blanches and ducks his head. People weren’t supposed to notice. It was just a dumb habit that made him feel better and it’s definitely the kind of thing that would get him mocked. “Ah,” he croaks, not really sure how he could begin damage control on this one.

“It’s cute,” Uraraka suddenly declares, clapping him on the shoulder before pointing at her face. “I can’t do make up at all! I don’t like putting stuff near my eyes.”

“Kinda pointless in my case,” Hagakure chirps with a shrug. “Though I like to paint my face sometimes.”

Iida seems a bit thrown off, but he courageously gathers himself. “I have also never put on makeup.”

Uraraka claps a hand over her mouth, but that can’t stop her from bursting into giggles.

Hagakure throws her arms into the air. “No-makeup gang has got ya outnumbered, Midoriya,” She crows in victory.

Izuku glances warily between the three of them, but there’s nothing mean or cruel in their eyes. They aren’t laughing like theirs some joke that he isn’t a part of. It’s just. . . fun. Joking around.

The twisting in his stomach lessens, and Izuku cracks a sheepish smile of his own. “I guess I’ll--have to recruit more people to, uh, makeup gang?”

“Yep! Gotta pick up the pace,” Hagakure says, her voice taking on a strange rhythm. She then gestures towards the door. “By the way, was there anyone else in there?”

“Were you waiting for someone?” Uraraka says curiously.

“Nah, just gotta talk to Aizawa-sensei.”

Izuku tries not to grimace for her sake. Hagakure had come in last place. It made sense. Her quirk truly doesn’t give her any physical advantages, and she hadn’t struck Izuku as an athletic personality. If he hadn’t been consumed by trying to avoid Eraserhead’s attention, he might have protested.

Of course, it’s easy to think like that in hindsight. But he hadn’t said anything, and as such, she probably spent most of the exercise panicking. He didn’t envy her position.

Actually, on second thought, he kind of did, but it still felt awkward. On the positive side, Hagakure isn’t the only one having a rough day. (Izuku has to qualify this as a rough day, because the alternative is freezing in a place surrounded by pro-heroes and having a minor breakdown.)

Izuku nods to himself, shoving his anxiety in a box for later. “I’ve got to talk to the principle,” he admits, “and I probably should get moving.”

“Good luck,” Iida says severely. “I also have a train to catch.”

“Guess I’ll head out, too.” Uraraka waves goodbye to the both of them before heading down the hall.

Izuku mimics her, albeit with less confidence. Hagakure slips through the door, and Izuku is sure to stand out of sight until it closes. Then he sets off for the principle’s office. Sure enough, the room and floor number are listed at a directory next to the elevator.

Izuku heads to the top floor.

--

Ochako maintains the excitement that gripped her the first day at UA without any signs of it stopping. It’s still kind of weird to see Pro Heroes teaching mundane subjects--Present Mic especially so. His enthusiasm can’t make up for the fact that he’s teaching verb conjugations, and Ochako occasionally has to stop herself from giggling in class.

Hero studies is still her favorite class--there’s something fun in working out with friends, no matter how much Aizawa-sensei insists on being a killjoy. ‘Efficiency’ this and ‘focus’ that. Iida is fun to run with, despite how Ochako feels when she can’t breathe and Iida doesn’t seem to be doing more than a brisk walk. Midoriya is surprisingly knowledgeable about pro-heroes, and she’s been getting to hang out Hagakure and Asui more.

However, if she had to pick a second favorite? Lunch. Without question. The food is so damn good, it’s not even fair!

The only trouble came from getting everyone to sit down. Iida wants to address every behavior violation and student conduct infraction he witnesses, and Ochako has to pluck some shiny topic to keep his interest. Midoriya didn’t even show up to the cafeteria the first day, and Ochako had to plead and wheedle him to even try the crowds.

Manipulative? Kinda, but it was good for him! Socializing time, exposure therapy, whatever ya wanted to call it, Midoriya usually had a nice, if somewhat nervous time once he sat down. But he never bothered getting food. Iida had nagged about proper diet and nutrition the first few times, but Ochako figures that if Midoriya wants to eat at home, it’s his business. It’s his business, even if she completely does not understand it, because look at that pork!

But alas, Iida looks like he’s itching to go tell Sero and Kaminari to quiet down, so she picks out a new topic to keep his attention

“I’m sad we don’t have biology together.” Ochako pouts, and she’s well aware of how it’s pointless to complain and that she mentioned it mostly because they were stuck on food talk which always made Midoriya uncomfortable, but it still sucks!

Iida agrees, in his own funny way. “It throws off our ability to pair up conveniently. I fear the day I potentially have to get stuck in a group with Bakugou-kun.”

Ochako groans and props her chin up with her hand. “He’s so rude! All the time!” He keeps trying to pick on her, and it’s getting harder to not respond in kind. At least Aizawa tells him to knock off the more overt things.

Midoriya busies himself with his thermos. “I’ve got to take an alternative class,” Midoriya admits, avoiding the exploding elephant in the room. “I kind of wish that I could. Have class with you. Biology.”

His embarrassment means that it’s probably a remedial class, but who is Ochako to judge? She’s already starting to panic during language lessons, and no amount of humor from Mic-sensei can hide that her laughter occasionally borders on hysterical. “Oof. I’ll just have to update you on all the weird stuff we get into.”

Midoriya smiles, but despite it all, he’s still so hesitant. “That’s very nice of you.”

Midoriya has a face that isn’t really suited to smiling. He tries, but everything comes out as a grimace. He’s just a person with a wobbly mouth and eyebrows that are expressive enough that Occhako occasionally has to resist the absurd urge to reach out and force his forehead smooth. He's so much more jittery than he’d been during the exam.

For someone with such a powerful and versatile quirk, he shies back from conflict. Occhako found herself constantly adjusting her feet to ensure he got equal access to conversations. He hovers almost by habit, never inviting himself into groups. He always waits a moment before laughing.

Ochako understands two things about Midoriya very quickly: He’s very kind. And he didn’t have much experience with people being kind in return.

--

The following day, precisely one week after Izuku figured the worst had passed, All Might steps through the classroom door like a normal person.

Notes:

*owos sadly* this came out much later than intended, but I hopefully will have more time to write now! im also really excited to write the upcoming battles!

Chapter 9: The Hierophant I

Summary:

Izuku's costume and Part one of the battle trials!

Notes:

Thank you so much to everyone who commented last chapter! I haven't had a chance to respond to everyone yet, but I cherish everyones feedback and acknowledgements!! This chapter is a short one, but I figured it would be better to update sooner rather than later and not sit on a completed part for the sake of word count. Enjoy and happy February!

Also, there is an OC i created to replace Mineta. Her name is taken from tokyo ghoul, but otherwise there are no similarities (im just unoriginal and tired). Originally she wasnt going to have much screen time but now since mineta doesnt exist by law of equivalent exchange she just needs to show up occasionally for some respect women juice drinkin

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Izuku’s costume is another nightmare and a half, and if he weren’t still freaking out about being taught by All Might, he might have worried more. Actually, on second thought, he has time to worry about everything. Who is he kidding? His dark green costume looks far too similar to the things he wears on his ‘excursions.’

Well. Not the jumpsuit. That looks heroic, hopefully. But the outer coat he asked for goes down to his mid-thigh and has such wide and bulky sleeves that it looks practically identical to his favorite rain coat. The one Eraserhead had caught him in.

Which wouldn’t be an issue if he had decided to do anything else! If he had just buckled down and gone to Hebikyuden, or even a normal high school, or any other hero school, he’d be in the clear.

Izuku buries his hands in his face, trying to stave off his dread. It was a completely different color and a more tactical fabric, and Eraserhead didn’t even recognize him. It would be fine. He wasn’t even observing this exercise.

It would be fine. It had to be, because Izuku is running late. He jogs out of the locker room, trying to catch up to the rest of his class.

Iida notices, and with a pained moment of deliberation that Izuku can identify even through his helmet, slows down to wait for him. Iida’s shoulders tended to be more expressive than his face. “Midoriya-kun. Was something not to your satisfaction?”

Izuku shrugs, smiling awkwardly. “It’s what I wanted. Just a little. . . plain?” And a dead giveaway. And plain too. He went with something that had felt safe, and now it is neither comforting nor cool.

“I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities to modify it as the year goes on. I’m quite satisfied with my costume, but there are certain elements I want to work with the support department on.” The way Iida kicks his feet causes Izuku to wonder if maybe he needed more traction, or heat resistant material, or dynamic aerodynamic plating. There are definitely a lot of an enhancements his costume offers, and Iida seems very particular with what he wears.

Uraraka spots the two of them and veers over with a grin. “Nice armor, Iida! And, Midoriya, you look so. . . punk? Well, not quite, but I like it!”

Izuku tugs his hood down lower, hoping to disguise his embarrassment. Even his mouthguard looked a weird.

Uraraka’s love for space themed heroes shows through in her costume. The material, or at least the way it’s stitched, reminds him directly of Thirteen. The blue and pink coloration is both soothing and distinct. She and Iida both have very defined aesthetics, which reminds Izuku of how much he looks like a civilian making a quick errand run.

At least he’s not the only one? Tokoyami didn’t necessarily need a memorable costume considering how distinct his features were, but his outfit was slightly similar. And Jirou had an ensemble that looked to be deliberately casual.

“What do you think we will be doing?” Uraraka questions, clapping her hands together in excitement. “I hope its a teamed fight. Oh, I hope we can pick teams!”

Izuku figures that Uraraka’s guess is as good as his, except for her optimism. “If we do teams, it will probably be random or chosen for us. Bad matchups are a very common occurrence in the hero world.”

“No logic,” Uraraka chirps playfully, “Only fun!”

Before Iida can launch into a very important explanation as to why logic is a lot more vital than fun to a potential hero (with a power point and complimentary refreshments), All Might steps up to explain the parameters of their first simulation. It’s a team exercise, precisely as Uraraka hoped and Izuku had feared.

Izuku almost dies on the spot out of sheer hero worship when All Might flashes a winning smile and declares the teams. Instead, he forces himself to actually read their placements.

 

A Yaoyoruzu Momo and Mado Akira

B: Shouto Todoroki and Toru Hagakure

C: Iida Tenya and Koda Koji

D: Mina Ashido and Midoriya Izuku

E: Kaminari Denki and Tokoyami Fumikage

F: Asui Tsuyu and Mezo Shoji

G: Uraraka Ochako and Aoyama Yuga

H: Hanta Sero and Sato Rikido

I: Kirishima Ejirou and Bakugou Katsuki

J: Jiro Kyoka and Ojiro Mashirao

                 

“Damn,” Uraraka says mournfully.

Iida stiffens, his voice chiding. “Uraraka-kun, it’s really unbecoming to use such language at school.”

“Tell that to Bakugou,” She says with a sigh.

The aforementioned hellion flips the bird in their direction but is too busy fending off friendship and sunshine from Kirishima to do more.

Iida raises an imperious finger, poised to lecture, before slumping in defeat. “I have. I am starting to think there is no hope.”

Izuku can’t help but laugh. A small one, which he hides behind a hand, but a laugh all the same. It cracks through the anxiety coating his skin. Eraserhead is out for now. His costume is fine. Even the prospect of being so close to All Might doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

“And now I will draw the lots!” All Might booms. “Round one: Villains Kaminari Denki and Tokoyami Fumikage and Heroes Yaoyoruzu Momo and Mado Akira!”

--

Class 1A stares up at the observation screens in anticipation.

“Yaoyoruzu’s quirk is pretty cool,” Ashido says. “I’m less sure on what Mado is all about.”

“Telekinesis of some kind,” Kirishima wagers. “She levitated past me during the long jump.”

Izuku nods, thinking back to the previous week. He’d been too stressed to really focus, but he remembered bits and pieces from the day. “It appears to weaken as it gets further away. She also used a lot of movement during the ball toss, so I think there’s a motion-activated component.”

“Makes sense,” Uraraka says. “It’ll be an interesting matchup between her and Tokoyami.”

“Kaminari has a lot of area of affect potential,” Hagakure offers, sounding a little unsure with her own assessment.

Jiro snorts. “Yeah. It might be useful if it didn’t fry his brain like a banana.”

Izuku blinks. “A fried banana?”

“They’re good,” She says defensively.

Uraraka groans. “They sound good. Great, now I’m hungry.”

Izuku had been more curious about the limitations of Kaminari’s quirk, but Uraraka’s word remind him of the gaping hole in his stomach. Did he like bananas once? He tries to imagine what a fried banana would even begin to taste like, and he draws a blank. All he can think of is the stale, cold, tasteless meat he stuffs his face with.

Izuku mouth wobbles, and he’s so glad for his facemask. “Me too,” he admits quietly.

 

The battle progresses quickly and with little fanfare. Mado sneaks onto the top floor by scaling the side of the building, while Yaoyoruzu advanced through the halls from the ground up. The halls are darkened, with the ceiling lights haphazardly shattered. Tokoyami’s Dark Shadow swoops in from around a corner in a brutal ambush, but Yaoyoruzu forces him back with a glaring floodlight and her bo staff.

“Wise,” Iida says succinctly. “She noticed the environment acts as a limitation on his quirk.”

Izuku considered the move fairly cunning as well. She’d had the light at the ready long before she encountered Tokoyami, but she refused to use it upfront. She had been expecting an ambush.

“I wonder why Tokoyami didn’t break all the lights?” Izuku murmurs. “If we run with the assumption that his quirk is stronger in shade, then he could have overpowered her if he waited for better coverage. I wonder if his quirk grants him enhanced night vision--it would make since as a supplementary trait. But then if he actually has worse night vision, it would explain his reluctance. Do birds typically have night vision? And, somehow Dark Shadow seems to be an almost distinct entity from Tokoyami himself. It talks more in the dark, and even now it gave away Tokoyami’s position, which obviously isn’t something he would allow, unless. . . Maybe if it gets too dark, Tokoyami can’t limit it as much?”

“You’re going a mile a minute there,” Uraraka says with a nudge to his side. Izuku blanches when he realizes that his classmates are looking at him strangely. “But Tokoyami does speak a bit, uh, dramatically? Quirk angst makes sense if he loses control in the dark.”

Tokoyami retreats after nearly getting restrained. Yaoyoruzu follows in pursuit. Kaminari blasts the whole area once Yaoyoruzu gets onto the scene. Despite the rubber casing she made for her shoes, it puts her out of commission. Kaminari, as predicted, acts about as usefully as a fried banana. Tokoyami moves to capture Yaoyoruzu.

Sensing an opportunity, Mado descends from the rafters, only to be knocked off course by Tokoyami’s quirk. In the dim shade of the top floor, Dark Shadow gets aggressive, and Mado is forced back. However, in closer ranges, they’re an even match. It looks like a race to see which teammate will recover first to tip the balance.

Instead, what tips is Tokoyami. Right off his feet. He clutches at his feathered throat and breaks into violent coughs.

Izuku starts with recognition, his eyes wide. “She has multiple points of contact!”

Uraraka startles at his side, before nodding in deep thought. “Yeah. Grappling with his quirk, and she still had the concentration to hit him simultaneously.”

Mado flings herself over his head, her body rag dolled like it’s being pulled along for the ride. Dark Shadow clips her leg in a chaotic strike, and Kaminari fires off another indiscriminate blast, but momentum carries her through.

 Mado slaps her hand against bomb, her dark red hair levitating with static and her quirk. As All Might announces the winners, she slumps to the floor. Yaoyoruzu lumbers over and helps her to her feet, and the two of them share an elated, if jittery laugh.

All Might checks if anyone needs Recovery Girl, but all participants capable of speech say they are fine. “Hmm, Kaminari-shounen did insist that his quirk didn’t hurt him so much as affect his cognition. Tokoyami-shounen, will you assist him back to the briefing room? I wish for you all to hear your critiques.”

Tokoyami shoulders Kaminari’s weight, and by the time the four return for their critiques, everyone is walking more normally. Tokoyami uses Dark Shadow to make sure Kaminari doesn’t careen off to the side, but it’s the little victories that count.

All Might applauds them as they stumble through the door. “Excellent work! Now, class, what did you notice about this event?”

Immediately, Iida’s hand shoots into the air.

Ashido calls out, “Yaomomo’s moves were sick!” She mimes a few epic bo staff sweeps and strikes.

“Kaminari timed his quirk poorly,” Jiro drawls, twirling her earlobe around her finger, “And then wasn’t there to help his teammate.”

Hagakure waves her gloves above her head, thrilled. “Tokoyami caught Mado’s surprise attack like it was nothing!”

All Might doesn’t necessarily shrink, but he does try to temper the flood of voices from the class. “Now, now, these are wonderful! Iida, please, go ahead.”

Iida waits until the buzzing in the room subsides before stating plainly, “Mado failed assist her teammate both before and after she was incapacitated by Kaminari.” Mado blinks in surprise, her grin lessening somewhat. “While her dedication to the assignment is admirable, that kind of disregard for a fellow hero’s wellbeing is not condonable.”

Izuku stares at Iida, standing tall and straight and somber. Iida had sprinted past him in the entrance exam, away from Uraraka when she needed help. Iida had visibly looked ashamed when Izuku had confessed he knew nothing about rescue points. Iida, despite how calm and factual he sounded; his heart is racing in a nervous pulse that betrays his feelings.

“I should endeavor to uphold heroic principles at all times.”

He really did take himself seriously.

All Might nods. “That is a fair critique on conduct. Heroes, how do you respond to that?”

“That would be a valid point,” Yaoyoruzu agrees, “If we had not agreed that Mado would use my potential incapacitation as an opportunity to attack.”

Tokoyami blinks, his avian features clearly reflecting the feelings of the class.

Kaminari just says, “Huh?”

“It was part of the plan,” Mado agrees, scratching at her cheek. “I figured the number one student could handle herself without my help. I just jumped the gun a little too soon out of nerves.”

Well that’s. . . really ruthless. On both parts. Yaoyoruzu’s willingness to get hurt as a distraction, her ability to fearlessly walk into a known ambush--and Mado’s trust, her unwavering patience. Izuku had seen her break in, had watched her lie in wait, and he’d assumed it was to wait for Yaoyoruzu so they could fight together. Not for her to take the fall so they could win.

Iida nods, jerking into a severe bow. “I retract my statement and apologize for my assumptions.” His abrupt response reveals his embarrassment more than anything. Uraraka pats his shoulder and gives him a reassuring smile.

The critique continues, and Izuku eventually offers that while electricity did take out Yaoyoruzu’s appliances, it also wasn’t a realistic response with a bomb being nearby.

Round two has Hanta Sero and Sato Rikido try their best to hide the bomb, which immediately fails because Jiro can pinpoint their location. Jiro also manages to puncture her way through Sero’s many traps, but Ojiro shines during the battle. He captures Sato despite the intense difference in physical strength by using the villain team’s tape-traps against them, but he gets caught up in Sero’s tape in the end.

Jiro secures the win after sacrificing her jacket and several layers of skin on her earphone jacks. The wound looks ugly even over the cameras, and All Might sends her to Recovery Girl. She isn’t there to receive her MVP award.

All Might instead gives the losing team his best encouragement alongside his advice. “It was a good strategy! You just happened to face an opponent which negated your advantages.”

Ojiro agrees, good-natured despite all the fur he lost in the match. “If I were more pressured by the time limit, I certainly would have made more careless mistakes.”

Sero grins and pats an exhausted Sato on the back. “We’ll get you next time, so don’t sweat it.”

“This is exactly the heroic attitude I want to see!” All Might declares joyfully. “Good job to all!”

Uraraka laughs, a happy excited kind of giggle. “All Might is so pumped. I’m glad its not all logical ruse this and no fun allowed that.”

Izuku laughs a little, partially because of how stiff Iida’s shoulders went. Izuku hasn’t spoken to All Might beyond the barest stuttering--even the thought makes his throat swell up out of sheer excitement. But he can definitely agree with Uraraka. Aizawa’s gaze is a piercing thing, even in the most mundane situations, and it doesn’t help Izuku’s nervousness.

“I agree that everyone is showing tremendous sportsmanship,” Iida says. “Although I am certain Aizawa-sensei only has the highest expectations for us, and thus wants us to consider our actions with all due seriousness.”

“I get it, I get it.” Uraraka shrugs, her eyebrows furrowing. “It’s just--I mean, it feels like he wants us to play at being adults, and we aren’t. Obviously, we need to know how to behave, and to represent the school well, but shouldn’t we be happy to come here? Shouldn’t heroes be excited to help? To bring joy to other people?”

Izuku mulls her questions over for a moment. “I mean, it might be because he’s an underground hero. He doesn’t work publicly, and he hates media coverage--”

“Wait, how do you know this?” Uraraka looks openly curious, and even Iida’s head is tilted in consideration.

“Ahhhh,” Izuku says. “It’s just--his quirk. It matches an underground hero, and, well, I kinda did some research, and--“

“That’s really cool,” Uraraka whispers, like the three of them are conspiring spies. “What’s his hero name?”

“I’m not--it’s just--I think that’s why he’s so serious, you know? He doesn’t do rescue work or need to reassure civilians, so he has a, uh, gruff bedside manner.”

“But still, we aren’t trying be underground or solo heroes," Uraraka says. "We want to work together and be kind! Y'know, behave heroically?”

All Might cuts in with a vibrant shout: “Round Three: Uraraka Ochako and Aoyama Yuga versus Kirishima Ejirou and Bakugou Katsuki!”

Notes:

wow do i love simualted battles

Chapter 10: The Hierophant II

Notes:

this is an unedited, unbetaed disaster of a chapter, and i make no quality assurances.

THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO COMMENTED THE LAST TWO CHAPTERS! I haven't had the time to respond to everyone like I usually do, but please know that your words meant the world to me!

FAN ART WHICH MEANS THE WORLD TO ME

Io did this amazing piece here here and here

theobsessor coming in with this and this

TK with cute kittens

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“Round Three: Villains Uraraka Ochako and Aoyama Yuga versus Heroes Kirishima Ejirou and Bakugou Katsuki!”

Izuku chokes on air and glances between her and Katsuki. He looks dangerously excited. Uraraka does not.

Her pulse quickens and she presses her fingertips together like some kind of silent clapping. She grits her jaw and raises her chin. “Cheer me on?” She asks Iida and Izuku, but it’s far less playful than it should be.

“No fear, mademoiselle,” Aoyama says, tossing his hair and turning so that his ostentatious, glittery purple cape fans out behind him. “I will light the way to victory, oui?”

Uraraka shoots a sour look at his retreating back. “He’s going to get murdered,” She mentions to Izuku, and it’s unsure who is going to be doing the murder. Smart money is on Katsuki, and yet. . .

“Hell yeah,” Kirishima says, offering a fist bump to a dismissive Aoyama and then to Uraraka. “This is gonna be great.”

The tension in Uraraka’s shoulders lessens a bit, and she gives him a pinched smile and a solid fist bump.

“Shitty hair! Hurry the hell up!”

The red-haired boy rolls his eyes, but jogs over to catch up. “It’s Kirishima!” He calls out.

Uraraka trudges after them.

“Oh, boy,” Izuku murmurs, his eyebrows furrowed. His brain is racing with predictions and none of them are good. Katsuki can keep a grudge for years. He has before, on multiple occasions. Tying with Uraraka in the entrance exam was a stain on his pride, and, well--Uraraka didn’t exactly seem the fighting type.

That isn’t a mark against her: she has a nearly perfect quirk for rescue missions, and an insanely powerful counter measure in a lot of fights but--

Katsuki is damn good at fighting. He always has been, even at four years old facing off against bigger and older bullies; vicious and pragmatic in a way that always got results. He had tells, he had patterns and tricks, just like any hero or villain, but Uraraka didn’t know any of them.

Izuku should have told her. He should have mentioned it, in those few seconds, because now Uraraka is walking into a deathmatch. And Izuku cheering isn’t going to change the fact that Katsuki doesn’t lose.

“I wonder what strategy Uraraka-kun will employ,” Iida muses. “Kirishima-kun’s lack of mobility or long-range attacks means he’s very vulnerable. Perhaps Bakugou will attack at a longer range while his teammate acts as a shield?”

Yaoyoruzu nods from her spot next to them. “That would be a very sound strategy.”

Izuku looks up from his shoes, grim. “Not likely. Kacchan doesn’t work well with others. He’s probably going to try to fight Uraraka one to one and then go after the bomb.”

“That seems illogical.” Iida find illogical things about as useless as Eraserhead, so that’s a grave insult by his standards.

“Yeah.” Izuku rubs the back of his neck, watching the screen. Aoyama and Uraraka are taking their preparation time to examine the building, though Uraraka seems to be the more intense of the two. Aoyama fires off his quirk, leaving a mark on the stairwell. Uraraka nods in thought, before gesturing to her hands. “But--Well, if you’re strong, you don’t really need to do things logically.”

Or fairly. Or kindly. Katsuki had been the best all his life, and he never had to even break a sweat for it. He could do what he wanted, and he would get away with it. Not out of some cosmic order. Just because he could, and so he would.

“You seem very confident in him,” Yaoyoruzu says mildly, but there’s an undercurrent of judgement in her voice. “I’d find it hard to praise someone so brash.”

“It’s not really praise,” Izuku mumbles, looking away to stare at the back of All Might’s head. “I want Uraraka to win. I’m just not sure how it would play out.”

The optimal route would have her and Aoyama work together to take out Kirishima first, and then have Uraraka keep Katsuki busy as a decoy. Maybe they could work together to overpower him--although Izuku didn’t consider it especially likely. Katsuki would probably benefit from being hit with zero gravity.

He’d always liked flying. He and Izuku had been five or so, still in that weird zone of ugly friendship, when Izuku first suggested it. Katsuki had sprinted to the woods where they usually played, screeching at him to hurry up. Katsuki had wanted to fly everywhere after he figured out how to steer.

Izuku had wanted to fly too, because this is back when he still had hope.

“Oh,” Yaoyoruzu murmurs. “That’s interesting.”

 “I wouldn’t have considered it,” Iida says, surprise coloring his voice.

Izuku blinks himself out of his thoughts and old memories.

Uraraka and Aoyama are hiding the bomb in the rafters.

--

“Are you ready?”

“Oui!”

Ochako presses her fingertips together. The pressure building up in her stomach subsides. Above her, Aoyama flinches as gravity reinstates itself, but luckily doesn’t fall from his position among the light fixtures. The model nuclear weapon, which is barely a mass that registers, sinks into the the improvised net of cables and rope that Aoyama had tied into place. The rafters creak in threat, but it holds.

Ochako steps back, mindful of All Might’s warnings on their rapidly dwindling time. She lowers her eyes, and looks around, and sees nothing. Perfect. If the hero team peaked in, they would see a lot of open ground, but no bomb. Even if they walked further in and happened to look up, Aoyama has the perfect vantage point to snipe them.

Ochako tries to keep her anticipation contained. “Remember to save your attacks for Bakugou. He’s the one with the mobility, and Kirishima might not be affected because of his quirk.”

“I’m certain he will feel the sting,” Aoyama says grandly, “but I will gladly lie in wait if you think it best.”

Ochako’s eye twitches with annoyance. For someone who talked so big, he had agreed to hide with very little complaint. It’s not like Uraraka wanted to deal with a two-on-one fight, but she is somehow the better distraction over glittery Aoyama. “Let’s just keep the twinkling to a minimum while we’re aiming for stealth.”

Aoyama shoots her a pleasant, if somewhat empty smile.

“One minute,” All Might says. “And good luck!”

“Alright,” she mutters to herself, hurrying down the north stairwell to the bottom floor. “Keep them busy. Throw Kirishima out a window. Don’t die.”

Don’t die! Aoyama chimes in over the headset.

Oh, this is great. They should have just left the bomb alone and tackled the hero team together. There’s no way she can do this. Being bait sounded so manageable, but there’s so much that could go wrong. What if Bakugou didn’t fall for it?

Well, she might actually be fine with that. Aoyama can put his money where his mouth is--

Ochako smacks her cheeks. “Nope. No bad thoughts.” With a deep breath, she centers herself. The primary entrance is down the hall, next to the stairwell she had just used. She’s on the opposite end, and a quick sprint away to the south stairwell. With any luck, Bakugou would rush forward. Kirishima would follow. Aoyama’s quirk would be put to the test. It would work.

All Might announces the last few seconds to their preptime.

“In position,” Ochako says under her breath.

The hero team enters the building with little fan-fare: Bakugou explodes the door in, ignoring Kirishima’s protests. The metal steams and hisses, and Bakugou’s explosions shake the walls with their force.

Ochako’s stomach drops out from under her, but the two of them race away from her position. She grits her jaw and steels herself, stepping out around the corner. “Wow!” She cheers, “What an entrance!!!”

Kirishima’s head whips around, but Bakugou doesn’t pause.

Ochako’s eyes widen. Had she made a mistake? Did Bakugo--is he going to--is he not going to follow her?

She lunges their direction, just as Kirishima yells out, “Behind us!”

Bakugou glances over his shoulder, expression morphing from furious to thrilled. Without even slowing down, he lets lose a string of explosions to reorient himself and rockets toward Ochako.

Ochako’s heels skid as she turns tail and sprints, slamming into the wall and ricocheting down the hall. Not enough traction, not enough traction! Even with her head start, Bakugou is already gaining on her.

 

Ochako activates Zero Gravity on herself and leaps through the doorway. Her quirk lurches in her stomach. She ascends through the stairwell, indiscriminately swiping at the concrete. Every tap hits her like a knee to the gut. It sends her head spinning, and makes her legs shake.

But even then, it’s nothing compared to the zero-pointer. She could handle it.

Bakugou bursts into the stairwell, chasing after her. “GET BACK HERE, YOU FUCKING COWARD!”

The explosion directed at her blasts Ochako off her course. The stairwell cracks at the wall, spiderwebbing. She bites down on the pain and forces herself to avoid the next blow--it isn’t enough.

Bakugou bears down on her, grinning like a hyena. She pushes off against the wall, not careful enough, and feels the weight of the wall come under the domain of her quirk.

Panting with fear and exertion, she shouts, “Chill out!”  She needs space to think--she hadn’t timed it right! She just needs to make this work and get some room! Ochako avoids the next array of blasts and launches herself through the narrow open space up the center of the stairwell.

Bakugou screams and ricochets up and around, pinballing after her. He leaves craters in floor.

Ochako rises to the ceiling--the door to the sixth floor is right next to her. Aoyama. Bakugou would chase after her, and it would be two on one and--

It would ruin the plan. Bakugou could get to the bomb. He’s too good at moving through the air for Aoyama to hit him. If she went running for help now, the burns on her arms and pain gripping her gut would be for nothing.

She swallows back the acid washing the back of her throat. The plan. Incapacitate Kirishima. Keep Bakugou distracted.

She doesn’t have to win. She just needs to stall.

Ochako slams her hands together and plummets. The building falls with her.

--

“I knew it!” Mina screeches. She grins up at the screen. “Look at all that property damage!”

Sero winces. “Yeah, Bakugou really needs to be careful. Now Kirishima is gonna have to dig himself out of the rubble.” Quirk or not, the sheer weight of the stairs is dangerous.

“Not just Bakugou!” Mina keeps tapping frantically at Sero’s shoulder. “Remember the thing? The thing I mentioned? Come on, I totally called it.”

Izuku jerks his gaze between the screen and Mina, disoriented but unable to look away from Uraraka’s fight. “What? What did I miss?”

“Kero,” Asui interrupts calmly. “I think she means Aoyama’s work. He used his quirk to damage the stairwell during prep time.”

--

Gravity reasserts itself. Ochako falls. Her square heels aim for white-blond hair.

Bakugou’s eyes widen, and the building buckles as he dances out of the way, light and heat expanding in the narrow confines of the stairwell. The force shatters the windows.

Ochako snarls a curse. Frustration sinks into her skin like a wasps swarming. Without thought, she activates her quirk once more Bile crawls up the back of her throat and leeches into her nose. Chunks of building bounce off her visor.

Her momentum halts at chest height with Bakugou.

He swings arm forward, suspended in the air despite the rapidly crumbling architecture. His gloves glow in threat.

She plants her heel into his throat and draws up her other leg, with it’s bulky space age boots, as a shield. The explosion sends her slamming through the fourth-floor double doors, and she chokes on her own vomit as she hits the ground.

--

Kirishima groans from underneath the rubble. Man, what hit me? He blinks and paws at the stairwell railing.

Well, that answers that.

--

“This is too far,” Iida insists.

“Kirishima is recovering,” Izuku says with a rush of relief. The red-haired student bursts out from the rubble with a triumphant fist, which is immediately undercut by how he topples over and pants on the ground.

But he’s not who Iida is worried about. “Uraraka should not be facing such aggression from a fellow student! Bakugou is out of line.”

All Might turns to their group, his smile never wavering. “Young Uraraka has insisted on continuing. I’ve also instructed Bakugou to be mindful of his space.

“Still,” Iida says, caught between his respect for authority and his fear.

Izuku remains silent, biting down on his cheek. There’s this horrible pit in his stomach, watching Katsuki recover and go chasing after Uraraka again. He seems furious. He doesn’t stop to check on Kirishima. He--

He walks right past Uraraka’s hiding spot on the ceiling fan above his head.

Mina bursts into giggles, and Izuku can’t help but follow.

--

Ochako hadn’t imagined hiding above a light fixture with her mouth covered in vomit would be so degrading. She pants heavily, her back hot and burning from the circuitry. Her stomach is still revolting--even if she could lift more than before, lifting herself is an entirely different problem. She hadn’t expected to do it twice. Three times, counting the half-second she forced herself into so she could hide.

She hears the tell-tale sound of Bakugou’s explosions go quiet, and she risks whispering, “Aoyama. Time?”

Still a ways to go, mademoiselle, he says regretfully.

Perfect. Great. She had barely even slowed down Bakugou. Her leg sends a wave of pain through her body. Her boot is scorched black and bubbling. Her helmet hadn’t prevented her skull from cracking into the floor.

She winces at the acid gnawing away at the inside of her mouth. It’s like her teeth are turning to chalk. Like if she isn’t careful, her molars will break and crumble. Ochako shakes herself of the mental image.

She has to move. She strains her ears for any sign of Bakugou, but he’s suspiciously silent. She grimaces and weighs the risk of hitting the floor wrong versus another half-second of quirk use.

She holds on to her churning stomach as she lightly touches down. Then she sets off searching. If Bakugou went for the bomb, her effort would be for nothing. She needed to find him. He wouldn’t look for her forever.

She spends the next few minutes slinking through the halls, straining to find and not be found. Then Aoyama begins speaking frantically in her ear.

We have issues!

Ochako stops dead and presses harder on the speaker in her ear. “Aoyama? What is it? Bakugou?”

No! The other one. He is scaling the walls.

Ochako hurries towards the north stairwell, her heels clacking against the floor now that she isn’t sneaking. Kirishima shouldn’t be too hard to subdue.  “Just wait for me! I’ll be there in a moment. I can--”

“In a moment?”

Ochako skids to a stop.

Bakugou sneers, looming between her and the door. His eyes are bright red against his dark face mask. He takes a step forward and raises his grenade-encased arm at her. “Yeah, I don’t fucking think so.”

--

Ejirou doesn’t think he’s qualified enough to be climbing the walls, but it’s this or nothing. Bakugou said he would come after he got his fight. That’s manly and all, but, uh, the clock is ticking. He couldn’t just stand around and do nothing! Even if that risks cutting Bakugou’s fight short.

Judging by the noise that shudders through the building and the draught that whips at Ejrou’s gelled hair, that fight has entered round two.

Gritting his jaw, he strikes at the concrete pillar with his fingertips. Blood wells up in his nail beds, but he manages to chip away another hand hold.

Glitter-guy shoots a laser at the edge of the pillar, but he can’t hit Ejirou from his angle.

In fact, that chunk of missing concrete is just a perfect handhold. “Thanks, bro!”

“Would you please get down!” Aoyama fires another beam of light, just barely missing Ejirou’s hand.

“Not cool!” Ejirou isn’t willing to test if his quirk could hold up to that laser, so he proceeds with caution. The pillar shudders, and he tightens his grip. Bakugou needs to chill. “You sure you don’t just want to surrender?!”

Aoyama answers with a line of French. It sounds less that happy. Still, he refuses to shatter the pillar. It might bring the building down. It would send the bomb plummeting. Ejirou grins. The clock is ticking, and Aoyama can’t attack him decently from his perch. The adrenaline sends jitters though him and he scales as fast as he can.

“Uraraka,” Aoyama says. “He is getting closer! Come back if you can!”

Bakugou screeches over the headset, and a furious explosion rocks the building. He doesn’t even need the headset to hear him shouting, “Get back here!”

He pushes it to the back of his mind. Even as All Might issues a harsh warning, Ejirou focuses only on the strain in his bloody fingertips. He refuses to crumple. Not when he’s over half way to the top. And then three quarters of the way. He tunes out the threatening shudders that reverberate up his arms. He tunes out the yelling, electronic and actual, in his ears.

All that’s left is between him and the pillar. Him and just another few feet.

And then a rock hits slams into the back of his skull.

His feet slip, but he digs his nails into the rock and glances down to the floor below him. Uraraka meets his eyes just in time for Bakugou to swoop in with a shout and furious kick to her shoulder. He bounces from the impact and goes spinning off, blasting the air in every direction to regain his stability. His feet refuse to touch the ground.

Uraraka rolls and ducks behind a pillar. She hurls another rock his direction, but Ejirou bats it away. “I’m nearly there!” He shouts down to Bakugou. “Just keep her off my case!” The explosive boy gives no sign that he heard it, but Ejirou doesn’t have time to worry. The countdown is looming over him. He scrabbles for purchase, ignoring the throbbing pain in his shoulders and the sharp agony in his hands.

Aoyama fires pot shots at him and Bakugou, but they both manage to dodge or hide from the worst of it. The room is heating up. Afterimages speckle his vision. Ejirou takes a heaving breath and hauls himself the last few feet up onto suspended light fixture, the metal grating of the rafters unstable and shifting beneath his shoes.

Aoyama nearly doesn’t notice him, but then he whips around and fires a beam of light in his direction. Ejirou ducks behind his cover, teetering dangerously. Oh. Fuck. He’s really high up. Oh, he should have just let Bakugou handle this--he’s going to fall and bash his brains up against his thick skull.

But his watch--he’s got thirty seconds left. He can keep trying for another thirty. Ejirou grits his jaw and spreads his quirk up his arms and over his chest. But there’s one last thing. Ejirou presses on his mic and screams, “TWENTY SECONDS! WE NEED TO GO!”

Bakugou’s gaze whips between him and Uraraka, and he snarls. He releases a fire cracker stream of light from his palms and rockets to the ceiling. Weightless and in his element. He dances around bursts of panicked light, avoiding Aoyama’s quirk like it’s nothing.

Ejirou can’t help but feel a little fired up watching it. “Hey!” He shouts, rushing Aoyama from the opposite direction. Bits of debris bounces off his chest. Uraraka is shouting orders from the ground, orders that Ejirou can’t make out.

Bakugou rises up, hands braced above his head to swoop down on the bomb.

Uraraka screams the one thing Ejirou can understand:

“NOW!”

And she slams her hands together.

Bakugou plummets, shock over coming his features as gravity reasserts itself over him. He shouts, and reorients his arms, straining to rise back up again.

Aoyama blasts him out of the air.

Ejirou winces, but he’s so close to the bomb--just another foot before--

Before all the rocks and chips of concrete Uraraka threw up at him make a brutally sudden reappearance. It doesn’t hurt. It throws off his tentative, swinging balance, and he walks right off the edge of the light fixture.

Ejirou yells as he plummets, the ground rushing up at him. And barely five feet above the ground, Uraraka slaps him across the face, and his momentum cancels before he hits the ground. He nearly manages to thank her over the racing in his chest before she grabs him by the ankles and flings him back into the air.

Straight towards Bakugou.

“And the Villains win!” All Might announces, suddenly in the building. He snatches the two of them out of the air and sets them down gently on the floor.

Ejirou is alarmed by the blood gushing from Bakugou’s nose. He reaches out to pat the blonde on the shoulder, and he jerks away from the gesture, clutching at his face. Ejirou sighs and takes a well-deserved breather. The medical carts come, and he’s already ready for his nap.

--

Bakugou Katsuki short circuits.

He lost.

Every step of the plan was accounted for, and he walked right into it. He played into it and lost. It hits him like a sledgehammer. It leaves him speechless and compliant as All Might ushers him onto a medical cart, as he watches Shitty-hair’s skin return to human softness and his eyes not open again, as Round-face leans over the side of her own levitating cot to puke onto the ground.

He lost.

He lost. That’s all he can think of.

“You won on a fucking technicality.” That’s what he says. He twists his hands in the wet towel the shitty bots gave him. Matching broken noses. That’s what he has to show. He wipes at it roughly so he doesn’t have to say anything else, disregarding the pain that flashes through his face.

The two of them are alone in Recovery Girl’s ward. There’s a robot taking Round-face’s temperature, and she waits until her mouth is free to respond. And then a second more. Her expression shifts into something saccharine. “You and Kirishima were a lot to face! Good job on giving us a run for our money!”

The mocking look in her eyes sparks his anger. He latches onto it. It’s better than the fucking obsessive bullshit running rampant in his skull. “Will you quit fucking around?” Katsuki levels her with a glare. “That bomb was bullshit.”

“It was the exercise,” She says with a dismissive shrug. “We worked around it. It was really kind of funny, because Aoyama wouldn’t quit panicking in my ear. Kirishima gave him a scare. Really distracting, haha!”

Her stupid fucking giggle, the fakest shit he’s heard come out of her mouth, makes him bare his teeth. “Shut the fuck up. Scare? Good job? This isn’t fucking grade school.” He clenches his fists and repeats, “You won on a fucking technicality. I would have kicked your ass in a straight fight.”

Round-face’s eyes widen. Open anger flashes through them. “We won because you and Kirishima underestimated us! You could have captured me right off the bat, but instead you pursued some stupid grudge matc, and you lost because of it!” She glares at him with disgust from behind her bloody, bile covered face. “You lost. Get over it.”

He did. He lost, and he lost, and he lost. He lost to some no-name extra, and--

“I--”

“I don’t want to hear it!”

“You got no fucking clue what I have to say,” Katsuki snaps. And neither does he, really.

“Oh, that I’m not worth first place? That I got in here out of luck? That I took something from someone who deserved it more?” Round-face bares her teeth at him, her face bright red with fury. “I’ve already thought of everything insulting you can say to me, and I’m a lot more vicious about it. So get off my ass and deal with your emotional issues privately, you incoherent dipshit!”

Katsuki clenches his fists. She didn’t fucking deserve first place.

And neither did he.

“I don’t have fucking issues!”

“Yeah, you do.” She rolls her eyes. “You’re picking a fight because you feel inadequate. Here, let me help you.” She tilts her head and puts on a ditzy expression, her voice about as sweet and caustic as force-fed laundry detergent. “Wow, Kacchan, you’re so strong. You totally wiped the floor with that aspiring rescue hero. Don’t you feel so strong picking on someone? Doesn’t it make you feel so safe?

Katsuki can barely feel his skin. In it’s place is a buzzing, rushing thing, like nerves are exposed to the air. Anger burns a whole through his chest, tightens up his throat like barbed wire. He grabs Round-face by her shoulder. He shouldn’t. He needs to count to ten. He needs to step back.

“Oh, nooo,” she croons, looking him dead in the eye. “Are you going to hit me again? What ever shall I do?”

He flinches like she burned him. She slaps his hand off her shoulder.

Recovery Girl powerwalks into the room with a stern expression and plenty of gummies. “I said no arguments! Dear, dear, hold still!” She hustles Katsuki back to his bed and plants an aggressive smooch on his cheek. He furiously wipes at the wet spot the second she turns away.

The sharp pain in his forearm and the pressure built up behind his eyes fades away. The aches and bruises are replaced by a wave of exhaustion that Katsuki struggles to keep upright against. He blinks, and numbly eats some shitty gummies with barely more than a glare.

Round-face gets the same treatment and thanks the nurse, even though she barely looks conscious. There’s blood underneath her chin. She missed a spot.

“You still got shit on your face,” he mentions once Recovery Girl goes back to input their medical report.

Round face laughs; a loopy, mean kinda sound. “What’s your excuse?”

Katsuki shakes his head, trying to discern what the fuck she means when it hits him. He groans. “Are we still in fucking grade school?”

“Going by your behavior, yes.”

“Fuck off, shit head,” he says tiredly. He can’t manage more than that. Exhaustion and confusion have lessened the itch in his head, the one that picks and picks at everything until it’s bloody.

Round face stares at him, her expression turning oddly plain. No venom, no poison, no furrowed eyebrows or gritted jaw. From fight to calm in a heartbeat. From rage to control in a minute. Her fury leaves as suddenly as it came, without even a word of farewell.

“Y’know, I’d say you deserved first place in the entrance exam, but it wouldn’t satisfy you. I don’t think you can be happy in the real world. You’re only ever going feel good in some fantasy where you’re the indisputable best.” She hops off her examination bed and sways before steadying herself. “And I feel a bit sorry for you.”

Katsuki nearly starts another fight through his exhaustion.

“But mostly, you’re just a giant, egotistical prick. And I can’t really imagine anyone missing you when you go running off after some title.”

--

Izuku barely pays attention the battle between villains Asui Tsuyu and Mezo Shoji and heroes Iida Tenya and Koda Koji. On part, it’s out of worry for Uraraka and Katsuki. He’d been worried about Uraraka, and he predicted that Katsuki would want a one on one match. He just hadn’t expected it to get that brutal that fast.

The other half of him is busy trying subtly look at his opponents. Hagakure is not the best person to try and observe for obvious reasons, but her lively conversation also gives him nothing much to work with. Todoroki is also incredibly hard to read. His expression doesn’t change, and the expression itself is very blank.

Their quirks both present unique challanges, but the nature of them depends on their position. Hero or Villain. It’s a fifty-fifty chance, but Izuku would much prefer to be a hero. Defending against Hagakure would be a nightmare.

The villains win their match. During the critique Iida asks, “Midoriya-kun, what did you think?”

And Izuku stands there, mouth agape for a solid three seconds before he can manage, “I, uh. . .” His brain blanks on him, and he can’t form another word. Someone coughs, and Izuku ducks his head. “I’m sorry. I got distracted.”

Thankfully, he’s saved from melting into the floor by the door opening. Uraraka enters, with Katsuki slouching in behind her. He looks oddly blank as he stands by the door.

“Oof,” Uraraka greets, tired but cheerful. “What did I miss?”

“I’m afraid I lost my match,” Iida says, and he fills her in on the bare basics.

All Might gestures grandly. “And now that you two are back, we can host the previous match’s critique!”

Kaminari waves his hand wildy. “What about Kirishima?” He says it with such a tragic voice that Jiro bursts into coughs to disguise her laughter.

All Might pats his shoulder in sympathy. “Rcovery Girl has informed me that he overused his quirk and will require bed rest! But I am sure you will do you’re best to fill him in on whatever he misses.”

Uraraka blanches and says, “Yep. I’ll make sure he gets caught up.”

All Might smiles at her and then goes to ask for volunteers, but Yaoyoruzu’s hand is already high in the air. All Might nods at her to go. She raises her chin. “Firstly, I believe Kirishima is the only one who deserves the MVP award.”

“Not Uraraka?” Mina asks. “Come on, that bit with the staircase was amazing.”

“But the premise of the strategy undermines their position. It the bomb had been real, encouraging the destruction of the building could have spelled disaster. Even for the villains, it wouldn’t have been optimal. At first, I considered the strategy of lifting the bomb also a violation of the principles of the exercise, but that is far less serious than the potential of setting it off.”

All Might’s grin seems to strain slightly. Uraraka’s face falls more and more until Iida pats her shoulder to offer stilted comfort.

Yaoyoruzu continues, “Bakugou refused to work with his teammate. He actively jeopardized him by using his quirk indiscriminately. He thoughtlessly followed Uraraka’s lead, and even if he subdued her, it wasn’t enough. Uraraka did her best, but her strategy worked because of loopholes which allowed her a large margin of error. Aoyama didn’t participate until the end, and then he nearly failed due to not paying attention.”

Yaoyoruzu nods to herself, and no one moves to interrupt her. “Kirishima did his best to collaborate. Failing that, he focused on the mission. When faced with an obstacle, he thought of a creative solution that could have spelled success if he had more time.”

Yaoyoruzu elaborates on some of her finer observations, and the class is enthralled by her absolute confidence and eloquence. Izuku peaks over to Katsuki, but he doesn’t respond to any of the criticism leveled his way. He leans against the wall, arms crossed. His eyes flick over to meet Izuku’s in a hard glare.

Izuku watches him just a second more before he turns back to his friends. Other students are now calling out the things they liked and noticed, but it seems trivial compared Yaoyoruzu’s comprehensive analysis.

All Might lets them continue for another minute, before he pointedly glances to his comically fluorescent orange watch. “And finally,” he announces, “Villains Midoriya and Ashido will defend against the heroes Todoroki and Hagakure.”

-- 

“So, we haven’t really gotten a chance to hang,” Ashido says on the way over. “My quirk makes various kinds of acid. It’s pretty handy as a deterrent, and since we’re villains, I’m thinking I can trap the stairwells and hallways to slow them down.”

“That’s a good idea,” Izuku says eagerly, thankful that she had opened up the conversation. “My quirk--is a bit weird, but I think its main advantage is that I can hear really well, so Hagakure can’t sneak up on me.”

“Ooooooh,” Ashido cheers. “Like a reverse of Jiro’s battle! Awesome, so that’s one less thing to worry about. You also have some kind of extra limb, right? I saw part of it when Aizawa got on your case during the ball toss.”

Izuku grimaces behind his face mask. “It’s kind of sharp and difficult to control, but I feel better about using it for mobility. If push comes to shove, I can block access to the bomb.”

“So, how about we split it up? You on defense in case Hagakure tries something shifty, and me making it really difficult for Todoroki to move forward. His ice probably will make a good shield, but I’ll make sure he needs to take cover.”

The two of them enter the building, and Ashido treats the outside door handle with a viscous dose of acid. The metal begins to smoke, and an arcid scent leaks through Izuku’s facemask. It causes Izuku’s nose to itch with the threat of a sneeze. She locks the door behind her and shoots him an excited grin. “Oho, I’m gonna cause so much property damage. That’s alright, right, All Might?”

She’s taking a leaf out of Uraraka’s book, Izuku realizes. And she’s very excited about it.

Through their earbuds, All Might slowly replies, “For the purposes of the exercise, I believe that is acceptable. Good thinking, Ashido.”

Izuku tries to rub his nose, but only meets the metal mesh of his face mask. “Are you sure about splitting up?” Because, if Ashido didn’t find the heroes first, or if she did and got captured, then Izuku would be at a definite disadvantage. Hagakure would still be difficult to pinpoint, and Izuku didn’t have any long-range or area effective attacks to counter her. At least, he doesn’t have any that he’s willing to use.

“No worries. I’ll bail if I’m in over my head, but as long as I keep a good distance, I should be fine! Even if Todoroki ices the ground over, that just makes it easier for me to skate away.” For his benefit, she elegantly slides on her heels a few feet before resuming walking. “And I’m pretty certain Hagakure isn’t going to walk around barefoot over acid, so she can’t sneak up behind me. It’s a pretty good match up for us, as far as I’m concerned. This is gonna be great.”

Izuku hops forward to catch up, his head still breaking apart their match up and all the outcomes they aren’t prepared for. He can’t really find it in himself to offer it. Overthinking is just as dangerous as underthinking. “Let’s just be careful.”

--

“So who’s gonna win this round, huh?” Kaminari has finally recovered enough to speak in coherent sentences, but it’s undercut by how he pitches forward the second he tries to stand on his own.

All Might catches him by the jacket before sitting him back down. He pats the dizzy student on the shoulder in sympathy. “Indeed! Do we have any predictions or hypotheses?”

“Deku’s gonna fuck up,” Bakugou says, his already pointy expression pinched in annoyance. He misses it when Ochako flips him off, the both of them still drowsy from their mutual visit to Recovery Girl.

“Todoroki’s team,” Yaororuzu states, slightly bored. She glances over to All Might as he announces the beginning of the match to the participants.

Ochako resists the urge to frown at her. Midoriya isn’t a doormat, despite how nervous he is around people. He can do some cool things. “What makes you so sure--”

Several cameras blink and glitch into static at once. The entire building groans with the weight of all-encompassing ice. On the inside, Ashido is in the south stairwell, encased up to her shoulders and trapped. The panic is visible on her face.

Yaoyoruzu nods calmly at the class's collectively dumbfounded expressions. “That would be why.”

Notes:

izuku: wow katsuki is so calm. thats so weird.
katsuki: I have sleepy bitch disease u thot. and its INCURABLE

I will probably edit this at some point but in the meantime enjoy my mass quantities of words in a definitive order

COME OVER TO THE DISCORD! We have fanart, chapter updates, spoilers, theories, and memes.

Chapter 11: The Hierophant III

Notes:

ooooof i wanted to do some edits to the previous chapter but im LAZY and i want easy GRATIFICATION so heres a pile of WORDS

(haha thank you to everyone who commented and supported me through this hiatus! It means the world to me!)

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Shit! Midoriya, I can’t move!

Izuku’s breath condenses in the air, harsh and shocked. The sudden cold snap is so violent, even at the top of the building, that his shoes are iced over to the floor. The entire room glistens with frost, so picturesque. So calm.

Izuku calls forward his strength and kneels down. He frantically strikes at the floor with the heel of his palm until the ice cracks. He almost slips on the ice, barely righting himself in time.

Mina shouts, I’m iced over! Where are you?!

Izuku shakes his head, trying to keep up. “I can move. Where--where are you?”

Staiwell! Dude, can you bail me out? Do we have time to regroup?

They don’t. Ashido was near the bottom. If Izuku meets the hero team on the stairwell, he won’t have the room to maneuver. And he might not be able to get Ashido out in the first place, depending on how she got caught. There are too many things that can go wrong if he leaves.

Izuku wracks his brain, frozen in place. He can’t even respond to Ashido. His thoughts keep circling back to something. Something just on the edge of his memory, something he spent months drilling and memorizing, and like so many times before, it just refuses to come easily.

Acid. Ice.

Midoriya?!

Acid. Heat.

Heat.

“Exothermic.”

What?!

You have to add acid to water. It’s lab safety. Not the other way around. Strong acids dissociate completely, and hydration is an exothermic reaction. If you add too little water, it can boil on contact. The temperature of the water shouldn’t affect that. Right?

A plan springs into his skull.

“You have to play along,” Izuku says, his mouth running as fast as his thoughts. “Play along. Act defeated. Make it seem like it isn’t worth it to properly subdue you. Then, once the heroes have moved on, you need to make an acid that will produce heat when it mixes with water. Sulfuric, nitric, or something strong.”

I’m not Momo, dude! She whispers furiously. I don’t know what I’m making, I just can!

Izuku wants to scream. It’s science, but not rocket science! “Then test it! See if you feel heat, and then switch to the next one! Ashido? Ashido?!”

Damn, dude, go off I guess. Ashido audibly pouts, before crowing in an outright campy, villainous tone, But you still gotta find us! It won’t be so e-easy. Her voice shakes at the end, undercutting her bravado. Her acting is downright professional.

Izuku waits a few seconds, his stomach churning. “Are they still with you?” He asks with bated breath.

Toru, aren’t you going to go with him?

Shoot, okay, okay. That’s good? And bad.

“Can you get out?” Izuku presses.

Hagakure replies dryly from Ashido’s headset. I don’t really think so. But I guess you won’t really be able to know, will you?

Izuku grits his jaw, dread seeping into his stomach just as more ice begins creeping across the door frame of the south entrance.

It’s just a game. Izuku centers himself. It would be fine. With the barest thought of blood, his tail spills out from his spine and winds its way around his arm. The razor-edged point peaks out from beneath his bulky sleeve. His contingency plans begin race through his mind, and Izuku sharpens his senses until every creak in the building roars in his eardrums.

“You really have it out for makeup gang. It’s not very nice.” His eyes dart towards the pillars near the doorway, the same ones that Uraraka had hidden the bomb among. He calls to the electricity running through his blood and walks, quickly but calmly, to the pillar.

. . . Ok, so that is highlighter. I just though your skin did that, Mina. Wow.

The energy builds to a fever pitch, and Izuku launches himself up--in the same moment, his tail elongates and winds around the pillar. He uses it to pull himself up and up. The stone is ice-cold, but Izuku leans into it as a comfort. He hid on tall buildings, in small crevices, and all sorts of cold-stone pits. It was a second nature to still his breathing and settle into motionlessness, even though it went against the will of his live-wire quirk.

Todoroki’s metal cleats catch against ice in sharp pops. The noise pauses just outside the door.

Well, anyway, you have fun with Todoroki!

The bolted door politely opens inward.

--

“Woah,” Kaminari says in awe. “That’s some leap right there.”

“You’re looking at a jump instead of the giant fucking icicle?” Jirou asks incredulously. She pointedly ignores Iida when he censures her for language. “That building doesn’t even look stable anymore.”

“Well, we already talked about that!” Kaminari says. He and Jirou continue to snip at each other, but it’s quickly swallowed up in the rest of the classes’ discussions.

“What even is Midoriya’s quirk?” Sero rubs at his chin. “He’s got something weird going on with his eye, but that limb? Why didn’t we see it in the assessment test?”

Yaoyoruzu shakes her head, thinking back to the test. She hadn’t paid express attention to Midoriya, but his quirk had a glint and odd coloration which made it difficult to miss. “He used it sparingly. That must be what his sleeves are for--he can hide when he has his quirk active so enemies can’t discern it.”

Sero glances at his own elbows, wishing he could direct his tape like a prehensile weapon. “Feels like a bit of rip off,” he mutters.

Iida interjects, “Midoriya-kun also has very advanced senses. I believe that is why he stayed behind as a guard.”

“Kinda useless considering Hagakure is staying back to guard Mina,” Asui says bluntly. Then she tilts her head thoughtfully. “Kero. Am I the only one worried about hypothermia?”

“I’m worried,” Uraraka agrees. “All Might, are you sure Ashido is fine?” Despite her worry, she keeps glancing between Todoroki making his way through the building, and the way Izuku lies in wait. She can’t really see his face, but he’s so still. Her nervousness on his behalf grows the closer Todoroki gets to the top floor.

She can’t imagine him fighting against all that ice. Her doubt feels a bit like a betrayal, but she can’t help it. Todoroki just looks so. . . cold. Ruthless.

“I asked Ashido if she would like to quit, and she has declined,” All Might assures the class. “She is determined to remain until the end of the exercise.”

Few people would argue with that, although Kaminari shakes his head and mutters, “Ok, we get it, you have big di--”

Jirou whaps him upside the head, and they dissolve into another round of squabbles. Iida seems relieved for a moment, but then he stiffens as his gaze snaps back to the monitors. Uraraka presses her fingertips together to relieve the tension in her stomach.

As the door to the final floor opens, and Todoroki makes his entrance with a flair of fresh ice that fails ensnare Midoriya--

Katsuki Bakugou doesn’t say anything at all.

--

In all honesty, Izuku fell on Todoroki more than anything else. The boy pauses slightly at the threshold, scans the room with cold eyes, and upon seeing no one, simply walks in. Izuku kind of. . . hadn’t realized he’d hidden that well. Or perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he had hidden on the correct side. Todoroki’s costume covered his left eye. Though it possibly only looked opaque, Izuku had done a lot of things with one eye covered, and it was only due to his hearing that he caught most of the attacks. A limited field of vision, if Izuku’s hypothesis was correct, was something he could work with.

But now, without being confronted or cornered, he has to realize something kind of weird: he doesn’t really know how to fight someone. He knew how to run, and how to beat up robots, and how to lash out in panic. But staring down as Todoroki calmly walked through the iced over room, his cleats popping against the floor, Izuku had no clue how he would approach this. A person. Made of meat. The kind of thing his tail cut through like butter.

And since Todoroki was a fast walker in the face of the finish line, Izuku didn’t have time to consider it. Todoroki had powerful long-ranged attacks, and that meant Izuku had no choice but to get in close quarters.

Get in close. Attack on his blind side. Get the cuffs on. Win.

Easy enough. Yeah. Easy.

With an internal screech of fear, Izuku plummets from his perch in the rafters, his tail stretching long and thin to above him to slow his descent. He hurtles towards Todoroki, capture cuffs in hand.

Todoroki flinches just in time. He whips his arm around, pivoting and dropping into a couch. Ice flairs up into a protective dome of spikes.

Izuku’s eyes widen, and he jerks his right arm down, using his tail to slow his momentum and swing off to the side. The strain proves too much to handle. His tail shudders and quickly retracts midair. Izuku lands in a shabby roll and quickly darts forward.

Again, Todoroki sends up a burst of spikes, snaking jaggedly in his direction. Izuku dodges to the right, trying to keep his body between Todoroki and the objective, but his shoes can’t get enough traction. He whips his arm up, and his tail elongates, the thinnest it can, and it loops around the nearest thing--a spire of ice from Todorki’s very first attack. He balances precariously, slipping along the sheen of frost coating the floor.

But as he jets towards the spire, Izuku stops retracting. Instead, he holds his tail at a steady distance, and he uses it as a focal point in his arc--he slingshots around and redirects his momentum, flying wildly forward, off balance and uncontrolled.

Todoroki doesn’t react quickly enough to fend him off again, his head whipping around to search for a crucial half-second. The cage he had sent out, the one that would have caught Izuku if he flew forward instead of making a full 270 degree turn, had blocked his line of sight. Izuku pushes off the ground and retracts his tail, reaching for Todoroki’s raised arm.

Todoroki’s grey eye narrows, and he effortlessly evades, leaning back just out of reach from Izuku’s lunge. In the same motion, he slams his knee straight into Izuku’s defenseless stomach and grabs his wrist in a frozen, crushing grip.

With his quirk active, singing like electricity and euphoria, Izuku doesn’t even flinch.

Izuku loops his arm free under Todoroki’s knee and twists, bringing them both to the floor. His wrist twinges painfully, and Izuku wrenches it back. Todoroki tries to send up another flair of ice, but Izuku is too close--his skin crackles with freezer burn, but Izuku leverages his durability and wrestles Todoroki, refusing to back off.

It’s violent. Todoroki slams the back of his head into Izuku’s chin, and the force makes Izuku bite his own tongue. Iron floods his mouth, sweet and humming, and Izuku has to swallow back a sudden spike of hunger.

The cold and his mask smothered his sense of smell, but the sudden reminder of how easy it would be--to lean down and bite. To eat. Even the metal coating his face was nothing. It was a bandaid. It was a whitewash--a cheap veneer, a thing too chalking to hold up to the light. He could reach up, lightly run his nails over the walls, they would come away dusty with gore.

He could just reach up and undo the clasp at the back of his head. A single motion. He could rip it off his face. He could lean down, he could sink his teeth into the meat of Todoroki’s shoulder. His mouth waters with desire.

Instead, Izuku bites his tongue harder. He clamps his teeth into the wound, and digs. Through the lancing pain, he forces Todoroki’s wrists into the capture cuffs, and then rolls away as quickly as possible. His pulse thundering, Izuku swallows back the blood in his mouth and forces himself to stop shaking. He calms his quirk, pushes it down and down like a vice.

With his heart thundering, and his head screaming, and Todoroki’s pulse so loud that he could anticipate every beat--

He almost didn’t catch the quicksilver steps of Hagakure easing past him.

Izuku leaps to his feet, slipping and scrabbling against the ice. Hagakure’s white shoes, comically enough, pick up into a flurry of running without her managing to move that much. The two of them scramble over the frictionless floor, mutually locked in an intense race over

Suddenly, the temperature rises. Before Izuku can realize it, the ice melts as quickly as it materialized, steaming away in a way that leaves little water behind.

Heat quirk? Or just a release? Does actively maintaining the cold require active channeling? Does Todoroki’s ice have different properties from normal ice?

Izuku suddenly doesn’t have time to care, because Hagakure’s portion of the floor melted first, and that few second advantage has put him back on the defensive. She kicks off one of her shoes midrun, and Izuku has to catch her before she loses the other.

However, it’s kind of unfair. Izuku can be fast if he needs to be--he darts forward and closes the gap between the two of them. Since he can’t see her, he sends a wide, side kick in her direction, trying to push her back from the objective. He remembers to pull back his strength at the last second, forcing himself to slow down.

But mid-air, a quarter second after Izuku was absolutely sure he should have made contact, two things happen simultaneously:

His foot on the floor is slammed out from under him.

And his leg flying through the air suddenly rises far above his head, an invisible grip shoving his foot far above his head.

Hagakure had ducked, he realized.

Izuku falls, arms pinwheeling in a desperate attempt to maintain his balance. It doesn’t work. Gravity isn’t something that can be argued with, not without time to draft a statement.

Hagakure doesn’t even give him time to catch up--she follows up with a strike that whips his head to the side. One that Izuku is unfocused enough to feel. His back collides with the floor.

He feels a ring clamp around his knee, and a pressure on his throat, and before Izuku has time to call upon his strength or think things through, or plan, or reconsider his estimation of Hagakure’s quirk--

She nearly breaks his fingers as she twists his opposite hand over his stomach and captures him.

And then she sprints away, her breath loud and quick with exertion and adrenaline. Izuku, still reeling with the sudden turn of events, rolls over and props himself up with his free hand, watching Hagakure’s single shoe race towards the bomb.

When Ashido makes her entrance, skating forward on a wave of acid that stings his nose, she looks a bit haggard. Her skin is irritated and red instead of it’s normal cool pink. However, she flings her arms wide and a stream of acid splatters over the floor and starts smoking on contact. She makes a protective arc in front of the bomb, a trap that even Izuku wouldn’t want to touch with a pole.

“Hah! Don’t even try it, because this stuff will--”

Hagakure’s shoe goes flying forward and lands in the middle of the pool. Before it can fully dissolve, a half-foot print appears at the edge of the pool, and then the shoe vanishes with a sudden pressure, and Hagakure slams into the objective. The bomb wobbles, before falling over.

“Oh, shit,” Ashido breathes, her inverted eyes wide with fear.

Hagakure begins screaming, quietly, through her teeth, and Izuku breaks his cuffs in his haste to get over. He reaches into his tool belt for his first aid kit, and he ignores he smoky scent of flesh, frantically poking around for anything that might help. “Ashido! Do you have a base? Ashido!”

Ashido does not.

All of them end up being bustled to Recovery girl, but Hagakure has to be personally whisked away by All Might. Her plain shoe is left to dissolve into a little nest of gloopy fibers.

--

Sero forces his jaw to relax before he grinds his teeth away. “Fuck,” he says, and then he can’t really find something to follow up with.

“I’m gonna throw up,” Uraraka informs the stunned class, her face green and her hand clamped over her mouth. She makes no move for the trashcan, instead watching as Izuku fends off the robots and insists on walking

“Mina’s gonna feel horrible,” Jirou says. “Shit.”

Iida doesn’t move to correct their form.

“It wasn’t her fault.” Yaoyoruzu doesn’t seem so sure, but she insists, “She warned her. She left plenty of room for her opponent to stop. Hagakure just. . . didn’t.”

Kaminari scratches his temple, unable to look entirely unalarmed as he says, “So, anyone considering a career change?”

“Is that all it takes?” Bakugou finally spits. “A little blood, a few bubbles and suddenly all of ya want to run away? You can’t even see the blood. Fucking wannabes.”

“You saw what that acid did to the floor, dude. You saw how everyone reacted. Yeah, it’s scary,” Kirishima says resolutely.

“She wanted to win. So she did.” Bakugou rolls his eyes, but his expression tightened once he saw Izuku break out of the capture cuffs, and it hasn’t relaxed. His voice is dangerously calm when he says, “If you’re fine with losing, by all means, get lost.”

--

Aizawa Shouta considers being kind and not piling on All Might’s guilt, but then he disregards it. “You now hold the current record for most first years requiring medical attention in a single class period.”

All Might doesn’t look up, his head in his hands. His hero uniform hangs off his skeletal figure. Sitting alone, in the teacher’s lounge--it’s unexpected. Ironic. Little pocketbooks on how to teach weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and that appeared to be a painful realization.

It’s pathetic enough for Aizawa to draw in a breath and calm his rage. He needs to be logical. All Might isn’t his student, but he needed a lesson if he was going to be anywhere near them. “Hagakure is not your fault,” he states. “She made a decision that couldn’t have been foreseen unless you knew her circumstances. So get over that and listen.” The injuries would certainly scar, but

That manages to draw Toshinori Yagi’s strange eyes up. Hollow yet focused.

Aizawa wishes he had more eye drops. “Katsuki Bakugou’s fight should have been called. His violent behavior needed immediate reproach. While Uraraka needs to be more focused, that was not the situation she needed to improve that.”

“I considered it. But she insisted that she wanted to win.”

“What she wanted isn’t your concern. The safety of the exercise was your concern.” Considering the structural damage to the building, it could have been anyone underneath a pile of rubble. By some stroke of luck, only Kirishima had gotten caught. Sighing, Aizawa said, “You must set boundaries. The competition to get into UA means that usually students come in hypercompetitive. They need to learn to value their own safety as much as their scores.”

All Might’s expression grows clouded. “I will. . . try my best.”

“Yes. You will.” Aizawa forces his voice level. “Because you know what happens when students don’t learn to protect themselves?”

He nods. “They get hurt.”

Aizawa laughs shortly. “No. They die. They end up like you, if you were any weaker.” He observes the Symbol of Peace; the hero seems to get the message. “Set limits. Enforce them.” With that advice, Aizawa leaves and considers the pile of problems this exercise had revealed:

Yaoyoruzu’s use of her body as another tool. Bakugou’s anger and lack of limits. Hagakure’s willingness to sacrifice her health for nothing.

What a pile of headaches. At least rescue training would be a good place to correct them.

--

It’s by pure chance that Izuku finally sees Toshinori. His skeletal frame stuck out from the swarm of students in the hall as student body rushed to the cafeteria. He moved slowly--gingerly, nearly. But his eyes did widen in recognition when Izuku waved at him from across the way, and he did gesture for Izuku to wait. Izuku sends Iida and a curious Uraraka ahead of him with promises to catch up. “Hello, Toshinori-san. I was wondering when I would see you around.”

“Ah, likewise, Midoriya-shounen!” He grins, almost sheepish. “Would you be inclined to catch up?” Toshinori coughs, wet and harsh in his bony chest, but Izuku can’t detect the tell-tale scent of coughed up blood. That meant it’s probably safe enough.

Since Izuku had started attending, Mirio had gently insisted that he leave the remaining beach work up to him so he could ‘focus on his studies.’ Izuku admits that it was a good point considering that every exertion compounded how frequently he needed to eat, but that meant he hadn’t seen Toshinori or Mirio for a few weeks. The absence bothered him less now that he had friends and classwork to fill his time, but Izuku did miss the two of them. “Sure,” Izuku said. He would just have to explain his absence to Uraraka and Iida once class reconvened.

Toshinori waves him along, and the two of them just chat. Toshinori had been busy with administrative work--“Too boring to talk about,” he insisted--and so Izuku ended up talking more than he expected.

As they walk to what Izuku quickly realizes is the teacher’s lounge, he mentions how he nearly passed out at least three times because his teacher was the one and only All Might. “Did you know he would be teaching? I had no clue. Not even a whisper on any hero forum.”

Toshinori gives a bony grin and mimes zipping his mouth closed, but he does say, “And how did he measure up?”

That’s a subject Izuku could gush about, and he does ramble on for a good few minutes. Thankfully, lounge isn’t very crowded, and various instructors mostly microwave meals or grab food before leaving, so he isn’t bothering anyone. “I really wish I was brave enough to talk to him, but it’s still a bit beyond me,” he says.

“Fanboy,” Toshinori replies, but it’s more joking than derisive. “And beyond that? Any more troubles with your quirk registration?”

Izuku laughs, but it’s a bit nervous. “I got it cleared up before I attended, so I think it should be up to date. It’s really weird. It feels like I learn something new everyday.”

“Oh?”

Izuku shrugs, stalling so he could remember the details he gave Toshinori. “Like, uh, I kinda took a chance on using my quirk for mobility and it really paid off. I’ve gotten a lot better at handling it now that I can practice.”

Toshinori nods. “That is very good.”

“I got elected class president,” Izuku says suddenly, trying to steer towards topic that was less of a potential minefield. “Not sure how it happened.” Except he kind of did know--an unfortunate byproduct of excellent hearing. Ashido mentioned his name quietly, and it made it impossible not to hear how certain she was that he’d be a permissive class rep. Her rallying had paid off, it seems, because he ended up with three votes. Iida actually believed in him, so that made it less of a downer.

“I’m sure you will be excellent for the job.”

“I don’t think so. And I’m not really. . . interested? I’m flattered people want me to, really, but I don’t like telling people what to do.”

“Ah, I see. In that case, have you considered refusing?”

It turns out that despite that being an incredibly obvious solution, Izuku had not considered it in the slightest. “I, uh, could do that, I guess?”

Toshinori laughs. “Give that a go. I think it would solve your issues quite nicely.”

Izuku asks after Mirio, and Toshinori mentions that he actually finished up the project with the help of two of his classmates. “You really were a great help. I know he wanted to finish up before his last sports festival, and it certainly wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

“I think it’s really cool that you organize community service efforts.” The physical act of fixing something was incredibly rewarding, and Izuku had considered looking for more opportunities once he got into the swing of hero school. “Were you thinking about making it a thing for all students?”

“Only those who would volunteer. It doesn’t get extra credit or anything, so it’s really just a passion project. I’m hoping to help mentor heroes who truly wish to make a difference.”

Izuku hums, glancing out the window. He appreciated it. Meeting Mirio, having even the smallest way to do good when he felt like everything he did was selfish--it was a lifesaver. It made his guilt shrink away with every rotting thing he hauled out of the sand.

“Well, I don’t wish to keep you from your meal,” Toshinori says as he looks to the clock. “Can I offer you anything?”

Not unless the Vlad King had an altruistic streak. However, despite using his quirk so much, he’s gotten better at managing his hunger. And he had a heist planned for this weekend, with a lot of misdirection planned specifically to distract Eraserhead. If he pulled it off, it would provide him with an alibi and further distance himself from his previous quirk usage.

“Ah, it’s no trouble,” Izuku insists, but Toshinori seems unsatisfied with the answer. Well, he didn’t know why, and Izuku didn’t want a repeat of Iida’s good intentions. “My quirk makes it really hard to eat with friends,” Izuku admits, scratching at his cheek.

“Ah. Because of your senses?” Toshinori asks.

“Yes. Things don’t taste right, so there’s not much I can eat anymore. I kind of. . . really hate that,” Izuku says sheepishly. “I spent so much of my life dreaming of a quirk, but now I think I would prefer being quirkless.”

Toshinori’s eyes widen in surprise. Izuku realizes how bratty he sounds a second too late--sensory issues were really only scraping the surface of why he hated his quirk, but Toshinori had no context. “I mean, I know that’s really childish, and I wouldn’t trade being a hero for anything, and I am really grateful that I can help people and do a lot more, and it’s kinda really silly to be so hung up on something so small--I mean, in the grand scheme of things it’s not that--"

“No.” Toshinori’s gaze is somber, but his words are painfully kind and understanding and uncompromising. “It’s difficult. People connect over food, and you’ve had that taken from you. You had to reevaluate a lot of things, and it’s only right that you would resent that.”

Izuku tears up a bit, and Toshinori then bops him on the head with a resolute announcement of “No waterworks!” It doesn’t really work, and Toshinori doesn’t seem to mind that much, right up until a klaxon begins blaring so loudly that Izuku leaps several feet in the air out of instinct.

The intruder alarm. Uraraka and Iida.

However, before he can turn and run, Toshinori places a deceptively strong hand on his shoulder and pushes him back to his seat. “Stay here. Don’t add to the panic. I am here.”

Izuku clamps his hands over his ears--with his adrenaline sky-high, the last thing he needed was to be surrounded by hundreds of screaming, sweating people. It’s the best option, even if he wants to run towards trouble.

But as Toshinori leaves, and Izuku tries to calm down, he wonders why those words sounded so familiar.

--

At the end of the day, Uraraka told him in sweeping and grand detail about Iida’s heroic rescue from the evil dangers of news reporters. With his conversation with Toshinori in mind, Izuku announces he is transferring his status as class rep to Iida.

At first, Iida refuses on account of not being elected, but he compromises only on the basis that Yaoyoruzu acts as representative and himself as vice representative. The class easily agrees, with only a cursory insult from Katsuki that doesn’t warrant attention. Uraraka still calls him a brat, and the ensuing argument only stops when Eraserhead threatens immediate expulsion for any student that doesn’t shut up.

As class ends for the day, with everyone excited for the field trip tomorrow, Izuku thinks about Toshinori.

His quirk did take things from him. It took his normalcy. It took away his ability to be truthful. It took away a lot of things, but mostly because Izuku had allowed it.

It takes him a few minutes of mental preparation, but he finally works up the courage to broach the subject. He doesn’t really do so gracefully. “We should get--I was wondering if you would like to--“ Izuku wants, desperately, to still be wearing his hero mask. It would hide his red face. Finally, he weakly splutters out, “Coffee?”

Iida and Uraraka share a look, and before Izuku can apologize for asking on such short notice, or for presuming they would be free, or for existing, they agree wholeheartedly. Iida even invites Yaoyoruzu on account of wanting to talk more about their duties and expectations as representatives. She seems surprised by the offer, but not at all thrown off by his upfront manners.

Izuku leads them to the coffee shop, the one where he saw Toshinori and Eraserhead--but his quick scan of the tall booths showed no unexpected underground hero. Which was a weight off his chest. He didn’t know if he could deal with his teacher outside a classroom.

“Ohh,” Uraraka cheers, eagerly looking at the massive quantity of hero posters lining the walls. “This is so cool.” She spends her time looking around while Izuku and the other two wait to order, and she chooses the booth. Izuku isn’t surprised to see that the table she chose had a collage of futuristic space and tech themed heroes. Thirteen occupies a prominent position on the table, and Uraraka catches his eye with a conspiratorial smile--like her reasons were a secret, and it was a joke between just the two of them.

Izuku nearly wants to pull his uniform jacket over his head, because he’s so unbearably giddy. He had friends. He had people who liked to see him. Who wanted to be around him.

Iida and Yaoyoruzu chose the opposite side of the booth, so Izuku slides in next to Uraraka with his plain coffee. It isn’t very fragrant, but the caffeine and bitterness will wash away the remaining anxiety he felt from the alarm that day. They talk about class and Aizawa’s affinity for juice boxes and 

Uraraka makes no move to order anything. Iida finally mentions it, abruptly, after a very intense barrage of questions for Yaoyoruzu concerning who, exactly, would worry about  seating arrangements on the bus tomorrow: “Uraraka-kun, did you leave behind your wallet?”

Uraraka trails off mid-sentence, before shrugging. “Ah, I didn’t really want anything. And anyways, company is the best food for the soul!”

Izuku doesn’t have as much pocket change as normal since he began blowing his money on disguises and wigs along with hero merch, but he still has enough. “Are you sure? I have--”

“Yep! Absolutely positive, but thank you for the offer.” And without pause, she turns and says, “Actually, I’ve wanted to ask everyone this for a while, but what made you apply to UA?”

Although she’s absolutely curious and completely invested in the question, Izuku can still recognize it as a change in the subject. From Yaoyoruzu’s expression, she does as well.

Iida, however, has no qualms talking about his family dynasty and his respect for his older brother.

Yaoyoruzu mentions that her quirk had a lot of applications that wouldn’t be allowed due to quirk liscensing laws without a hero registration-- “But really, that’s the reason I told my parents. I enjoy the problem solving involved in heroism, and I believe strongly in keeping peace.”

Izuku owns up to his lifelong idolization of hero culture and nearly leaves it at that. It feels a bit lacking, so he adds, “And I want to give back, I guess. I’ve always had trouble, well, running away from trouble. And now I can actually be useful enough to help.”

“You’re all so noble,” Uraraka says, and although it’s joking, it isn’t mean spirited. “I want to give my parents a nice life!”

“I think that’s noble,” Izuku argues. He owed everything to his mom. If she ever needed help, he’d be the first in line.

“Well, yeah, but it’s not really a higher calling.” Uraraka shrugs, but then she turns to Izuku and says, “Although, I think I get it. What you said about running away from trouble? Hah, you pulled me out of the rubble during our entrance exam, and I was so exhausted. I thought I could never move again.”

Izuku can hear the way her heartbeat picks up at the memory, but the sound of her pulse sparks no pang of hunger. Strange.

“But then, even after falling, you didn’t quit! Even though you looked just as bad as I felt, you got back up again. And I realized that I wanted to save you, and that I didn’t care whether it was possible or not.”

Izuku blinks and he covers for his shock by taking a sip from his drink. When he thought back to his entrance exam, he remembers the overwhelming awe he had for Uraraka--not just the power to move the zero-pointer, but her willingness to do it despite how ill she appeared--It never occurred to him that maybe she thought just as highly of him.

“Well, I also gave myself one of the nastiest cases of quirk shock Recovery Girl has seen. So I might need to tone it down next time.”

--

The impromptu meeting winds down. Iida spent the last few minutes complaining about Katsuki, and that seemed to be the moodkiller everyone needed to call it a day. As they part ways--Uraraka and Izuku heading to the closest train station together--Izuku finally breaks the silence that sprung up from Uraraka. It wasn’t a bad silence, but it didn’t feel nice.

“Uh, is something wrong?”

Uraraka doesn’t flinch or look away, but her expression does freeze. Then it turns considering, and her heartrate quickens. “I just--I--ugh.” She shakes her head, like a dog trying to shed water. “I did something cruel. I was cruel. And I can’t really take it back, and I can’t say that I didn’t mean it, but. . . I told myself I was going to be better.”

Izuku stares at her in confusion. “Uh. . .”

Her mouth flattens, and she scratches at her cheek. There’s the barest sliver of a scar there, so old and faded that Izuku didn’t notice at first. “I told myself I was going to be better,” She repeats. “And I blew it yesterday. And today. I got angry and I got mean even though I didn’t want to.”

Izuku chews on the inside of his cheek. “Was it with Kacchan?”

“Yeah. And he deserved it. Someone should tell him off.” Her cheeks puff up, before she exhales violently. “I just wish I didn’t do it that way.”

“He’s,” Izuku starts, and then pauses. “He’s good at pushing buttons.” He’s good at sinking his teeth into weakness. He’s good at not feeling pity or shame. He’s good at saying exactly what he thinks, and what he thinks is normally derisive or hateful.

“Not really,” Uraraka says, with a hint of disdain. “He’s just so entitled that it drives me up the wall. I’m good at minding my business. But it’s shoved in my face every day. It makes me want to hurt him so he’ll just leave me alone.”

Izuku isn’t sure what to do this this strange, unsmiling Uraraka in front of him. There isn’t any kindness or understanding or cheer on her face. It’s blank and negative and vicious in a way that he hasn’t seen before.

He’s struck with the sudden realization that he doesn’t really know his friends, and that they don’t really know him. He’s a nervous person, and everyone in class has seen that. Uraraka is a kind person, he’s very certain of it--she’s just not always kind. Just like how he’s not always nervous. Sometimes he’s angry, and sometimes he’s coldly calculating. There’s a lot that he doesn’t know about her.

But that doesn’t make him a stranger.

Uraraka’s anger doesn’t make her a stranger, not matter how much he wants to shy away from it.

“If you feel bad about it,” Izuku begins slowly, “then I don’t mind dealing with him. I don’t mind that much--"

She shakes her head. “You don’t need to be his punching bag either. That’s just going to upset me more.”

Izuku blinks at that. She would feel upset? For him? He gapes, trying to think of another solution. “Maybe E--Aizawa-sensei could. . .” Do something? Like every other teacher Katsuki has had? Nope, Katsuki is more in his element than ever. A teacher concerned with raw potential wouldn’t care about a bad temper.

Ochako glances to him and then nudges his side with her elbow. “It’s alright, Midoriya. I know what I’m going to do already.” She takes a centering breath, pressing her finger tips together. “I’m gonna tell him off if he oversteps. I’m not gonna be a doormat. But I’m not going to do it in anger. It’s going to be under my control.”

Izuku stares as Uraraka visibly sheds her emotions, dropping them in the middle of the sidewalk like a backpack that weighed too much. Her expression smooths out. She raises her chin, and even begins to smile. It’s strained at first, but it flows into something natural--more determined than purposefully clueless.

“I’m not going to be kind for his sake,” She declares, almost to herself. Like her words in the coffee shop, there’s something resolute in it. “I’m gonna do it for mine. I love my parents, but I picked up their bad habits. I’m not going to spread hate around.” She turns to him, her brown eyes startling with the pure warmth held within them. “Remind me of it, if you can.”

“Y-yeah.” Izuku almost trips on the curb, but Uraraka brushes his sleeve and taps him back into a proper orientation for walking. She giggles and gives the food stand vendors a playful, fruitive glance, like someone might chastise her for quirk use. “Hah. Uh, thanks.”

“Thanks for listening,” she says. “Sometimes I just need a few minutes to vent.”

“I understand,” Izuku says, even though he really doesn’t. He hasn’t really shared his feelings with people. Ever, maybe. He’s shared his worries, but only when they are so encompassing it feels like he’s choking on them. Not his anger.

He chews on his words, staring at the pavement. I get angry at him too. Uraraka looks at him expectantly, like she can tell he has something to say. That one phrase circles like a shark behind his teeth. Faster and faster. I get angry at him. I am angry at him. I wish I could hurt him so he would leave me alone.

He coughs, and scratches at his itching nose. “I really liked the coffee back there.”

Uraraka tilts her head, her eyes oddly piercing. Then she closes them and smiles. “It was nice,” She agrees.

--

Toshinori is caught red-handed with cup ramen that is not truly digestible in the teacher’s lounge by Nedzu. It’s long past the school’s normal closing hours, but the alarm earlier that day meant that Toshinori hadn’t had time to eat, and his fridge back home was painfully bare. 

Rather than lecture him (as Toshinori had partially feared he would), the rodent just winks his unscarred eye at him. He then rummages under the sink, reaches inside a large box of borax, and withdraws a ziplock bag containing a jar of peanut butter and a cutesy, child’s spoon. Nedzu turns to Toshinori and smiles. “Recovery Girl insists I can’t metabolize this, but I find that spreadable food is one of the perks of opposable thumbs and free will.”

Toshinori groans and raises his lukewarm noodles, which he kept hidden with the disposable cutlery for the same reason. “I’ll drink to that.”

UA policy did forbid instructors from keeping food on their person, but considering the amount of juice boxes and meal replacement shakes Eraserhead kept hidden in his sleeping bag, it wasn’t the strictest rule. Nedzu certainly could have kept food in his office, but he probably enjoyed the game of hiding it.

Toshinori had fended off his fair share of mind games from the rodent since he had begun scouting students at the beginning of last semester. Nedzu meant well, certainly, but he also had the tendency to poke and prod further than polite. Today was no exception.

“You haven’t chosen a successor,” Nedzu remarks as he hops up to sit on the couch with his comically large container of peanut butter.

Toshinori takes a long sip of noodles, hiding his sigh in the steam. “I haven’t.”

“You know I’m above begging, but I will admit to being curious, Yagi.” Nedzu waves his spoon around, before glancing meaningfully at the jar. Toshinori politely opens the container. “You’ve been here months and spent so much time working with a lot of children. Did none of them click? No one from the new classes?”

Toshinori shrugs his bony shoulders. There were a few with a lot of potential. Kirishima struck his as someone with a great deal of confidence and kindness, and his durability would pair well with One for All. Midoriya’s willingness to run straight into danger for a stranger, as well as his helpful nature, were points in his favor. If only he didn’t grimace and seem so consistently despondent. Itsuka Kendo, with her level head, remarkable cheer, and instinctive combat prowess would easily make a wonderful successor.

The issue came down to something Nedzu would endlessly poke at: feelings. None of them clicked. None of them felt like someone he could endlessly trust, because Toshinori wasn’t Nana. He didn’t have the same. . . faith. He didn’t know how to find that faith, and he had no clue why she had placed her faith in him.

“Not even Mirio?”

Toshinori allows himself to agree, “Young Togata-kun did strike me as an individual with great potential.” Strong, resourceful, determined. He had a wonderful smile and an instinct for comfort. He reminds Toshinori of Nana in that way.

“You feel hesitant on account of his connection at Nighteye?”

Toshinori snorts, his mood souring slightly. “Not really. It’s a point in his favor; to know he has someone adept looking out for him.” Nighteye would teach him thoroughness and patience. Perhaps too much.

Nejire Hado was also a potential candidate. Enthusiastic, strong, and disarmingly charismatic. She worked tirelessly for the community service opportunity All Might had arranged, and even spared her time to help her two friends.

So many candidates. At this point, he wasn’t looking for a needle in a haystack. He was trying to divine who could carry the weight of the future, and he didn’t even have a foresight quirk to help.

Nedzu finally relents in the face of Toshinori’s stoic expression. “Of course, take as long as it takes. A legacy so heavy cannot be handed off lightly.”

Toshinori decides to level his own questions. “The culprit from today?”

“Unidentified.” Nedzu shrugs. “I do so hate blindspots. But we were very good about keeping our discretion for as long as we did. Openly teaching as All Might was bound to spark some form of backlash, so I accounted for something like this in the budget.”

Somehow, that didn’t seem absurd. “If you predicted it happening,” Toshinori says stiffly, “why did you allow it?” And why the hell didn’t he discuss the possibility with Toshinori? It wouldn’t have stopped him, but he certainly would have been more prepared--less shaken.

Nedzu shrugs. “Perhaps I like backlash? It makes for an excellent teaching tool.”

The rodent’s irreverence grated against Toshinori, but he didn’t comment on it. Nedzu’s perspective on life wasn’t human, and it was invariably preoccupied with different concerns. “Then I will just need to be fast enough to catch them, should any ‘backlash’ persist.”

Notes:

i still need to edit this eventually, but thats for another date! let me know what kinds of stuff u liked!

Chapter 12: Lovers I

Summary:

USJ. Now skipping all the begining bits because I'm impatient and weve seen it all before.

Notes:

*strums guitar* had a plan on how this battle was gonna go for monnnnths. now i changed it at the last seconds. *bridge* gonna rewrite this in like a weeeeeeek but its what i got.

also a huge thanks to Zyxyz for catching all my dumb typos! they are the reason this chapter is now a bit more coherent

Chapter Text

Kirishima Ejirou wishes he had taken greater advantage of the sauna at his gym. Maybe then his skin would quit trying to melt off his body.

As it turns out, his quirk doesn’t really affect his sweat glands, or his lungs, or his eyes, so he really is at a bit of a disadvantage as he pummels the villains who all seem to be specifically suited to the fiery environment. Their eyes aren’t stinging with sweat and fumes and heat. They don’t flinch from the heated draughts or avoid touching the steaming walls. Luckily, Ejirou doesn’t burn easily. That doesn’t mean that he is comfortable by any stretch of the term.

He catches up to Bakugou, who looks right at home in the burning building. His hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat, and his grin is downright feral as he kicks a villain in the head. Uraraka looks slightly less happy. Her face visor is slowly blackening around the edges with smoke, but she looks relieved when she notices him emerge from the hallway.

The three of them make short work of their remaining opponents. Bakugou tears into the villains with a glee that Ejirou hasn’t seen from him before. It’s unnerving, kinda, but also really cool.

Less cool is his proclamation to go back and start fighting again. Y'know, the one thing they were asked not to do?

“I want another shot at that warp-gate asshole,” Bakugou says.

Kirishima spots Uraraka roll her eyes, and he feels about the same way. “I don’t know, dude,” he tries. “This wouldn’t be happening if you hadn’t riled him up in the first place.”

“Not asking for permission,” Bakugou snaps. “Once I beat him, that means every other villain is shit outta luck. No escape route for them.” He tilts his head, and the sound of his neck cracking blends in with the popping explosions coming from his palms. “So get on board or get fucked.”

“But Aizawa-sensei--”

“No,” Uraraka interjects, even though she doesn’t look happy. “He’s got the right idea. Besides, if that guy is distracted, it means our classmates can make a break for it.” She taps her fingers together, a concentrated look on her face. “You’re sweaty, right?”

Bakugou sneers. “What kinda stupid question is that?”

“One that points out the obvious so you won’t dismiss my idea out of spite.”

Kirishima, despite the weight of the situation, can’t help but snort. He pretends it's cough from smoke inhalation, because the last thing they needed was to start an argument because Bakugou felt mocked.

Uraraka continues, “I can use my quirk, and we can all link hands to get out of here. That way you don’t have to waste your quirk as much. Bigger boom for the bad guy, right? You just need a few pops to push us in the right direction.”

Bakugou raises an eyebrow with a dismissive snort. “You’re gonna spew chunks if you try that.” However, he doesn’t immediately refute the offer.

Uraraka stiffens, her face flushing red. Well, redder. “I’ll aim for the villains, ok?! I’d rather throw up than be too slow to help.”

Kirishima thinks about it, lighting up with another option. “And if you don’t have to use as many explosions, we can drop in on top of them! Stealth mode and all that.”

Bakugou glances between the two of them, his red eyes narrowed in concentration. “Once I get the warp-gate guy, you need to float that handsy motherfucker. He seemed to calling the shots. Send him into the fucking atmosphere. If you can.”

Uraraka bites her lip, her face scrunching up in fear, but she merely walks to one of the shattered windows and judges how far away they are from the center of USJ. Then she turns back to them and extends her hands, palms up, to both of them. “I can make it. We just need to be fast.”

Ejirou grins, toothy and braver than he feels. He gives Uraraka a low-five and goes weightless. Before he can float up to the ceiling, she locks their elbows together and pins his foot to the floor with her heel. “Woah. Headrush.” It’s not the floating that’s disorienting--it’s how suddenly, nothing is the floor. Even with his feet on the ground, it feels like he’s sticking straight out of a wall.

Bakugou stares at them for a second longer before he lays a grenade bracer over her open hand. Then he elbows Kirishima as he slowly bobs off the ground. “Grab on. She needs a free hand.”

Ejirou figures that Bakugou would want his own hands free to maneuver, so he locks his free arm around Bakugou’s knee. The blonde stiffens, but he doesn’t say anything.  The three of them make a weird bunch. Uraraka guides them outside the building until Bakugou and Kirishima are floating in the air with nothing between them and the forty foot drop to the ground. Then she sucks in a deep breath through her teeth, jumps up and out into a skyline of burning false-city, and slaps her palm against her stomach.

They hang suspended. Bakugou levels his arm and lets off a single explosion. It sends them horribly spinning towards another firy skyscraper, and he has to correct with another half-dozen explosions before they level out. (Kirishima will freely admit that he screamed during the affair, but no one says anything about it.) The three of them rocket towards the center of the USJ, and Ejirou does his part. He holds them together. He keeps Bakugou behind him and presents his rocky torso as a shield. He smiles in the face of Uraraka’s sickly nausea and jokes, “Not too shabby for disaster training, right?”

And somehow, neither of them call him out on how quickly, how panicked his pulse is as they plummet through the air. Neither of them smell the blood welling up in his mouth as his sharklike teeth sink into the meat of his cheek.

Because Ejirou Kirishima made a promise once, that even if he could never be powerful, he would always be brave.

--

Tsuyu had some amazing control and Hagakure had some powerful lungs, and that’s pretty much the only reason the three of them made it onto the sinking cruise ship. Tsuyu plucked her out of the air with her tongue just by sound before the three of them hit the water. Izuku, in his desperate attempts to get out of the water, had put another puncture or several into the side of the ship, but he refuses to meditate on that for longer than necessary. The ship is already sinking.

Much more pressing is the danger for All Might. The villains were looking for a confrontation, and they knew he should have been here, which meant. . .

“The break in yesterday. That must have been them,” Izuku bites out. “I don’t know what they think can challenge All Might, but they must be confident in it.”

That’s unsettling for a number of reasons. Hagakure’s heartrate picks up. “We need to. . . I don’t know what! But we need to do it soon.”

“We need an escape,” Tsuyu croaks. Her eyes have a glassy, far-away quality that betrayed a hint of stress, but she didn’t look particularly fearful. Instead, she rallies the two of them to focus: “We don’t need to beat anyone right now. We just need to regroup.”

Izuku wished he could have such a level head, because he had been stressed out for the last forty minutes straight, and it was starting to make him dizzy. At least Tsuyu had a distinctly earthy pond-scum scent that was more than a little repulsive from a should I bite this? perspective. Hagakure must bathe in laundry detergent, and he would encourage her to continue to do so, because he would have lost his fragile grip on his cool if he had to deal with hunger pains on top of every other crisis.

Hagakure wrings out her gloves and gives an audible huff of despair as she tries to stamp the water out of her shoes. It’s not very effective. (Izuku is currently the proud owner of a heavy, soaking wet coat, so he can sympathize.) “I’m sure I don’t need to explain why I’m not gonna risk swimming for it.”

The villains below them seemed distinctly suited to the aquatic environment, and the person planning this attack would have to be foolish if they didn’t place at least one quirk to prohibit any sneaky escapes. Or any escape. They need to escape because, judging by the shaking and shuddering, they have minutes at most.

“I think I can make the leap,” Izuku says cautiously. The jump was further than he could attempt without his tail, especially if he wanted to ration his energy, but it would be doable.

“Great! Who’s my ride?”

Izuku shies back immediately. He didn’t want his quirk active anywhere near one of his classmates. Or anyone. Although he had improved by an unfathomable amount in controlling his quirk, that did not negate that fact that it was a particularly flexible razorblade that didn’t understand the concept of ‘gentle.’ “I’m sorry, but I don’t think--If there’s another way, I would prefer to. . . not.”

Tsuyu blinks at him. “Fine by me.” She drops her jaw even lower, and her tongue spills out. She’s remarkably good at talking around it. “Go first and draw attention if you can. I’ll get us two out.”

Izuku grimaced and nodded, guilty over the prospect of leaving his classmates. He agreed with Tsuyu’s logic. But the circumstances that necessitated such logic were awful. Either way, he wishes them luck; Hagakure gives him an exuberant thumbs up and Tsuyu pats him on the shoulder with a large palm.

Izuku scans the water and accounts for the closest bit of shoreline. He calls up the rampant energy in his quirk. It’s sluggish to respond, almost peeved--like it was offended with how quickly he had restrained and shoved it away once he scrambled onto the deck of the ship. But Izuku coaxes it out and winds his tail up his back and around his arm. Then, with one last look at his classmates, he leaps.

Flying through the air saps the warmth from his exposed skin, but the exhilarating feeling of clarity washes over him. The wind is singing, his limbs move naturally, and his tail extends out like a shot. Izuku had underestimated his jumps, and he barely needed his tail to pull him safely to shore. However, it made the crucial difference between landing up to his knees and a clean landing, so he didn’t regret calling it forward. There were a number of quirks that could create currents or acidify water or electrocute him, and Izuku didn’t look forward to that prospect.

He races away from the outraged faces of villains, and Tsuyu lands neatly in front of him with Hagakure in tow. They take off at a run towards the downpour zone, relying on the rocky terrain to act as cover. Izuku slows his pace to put a barrier between his classmates and the villains.

He hasn’t tried using his tail as a shield since the entrance exam, but Izuku remembers the sensation and he’s confident he could replicate it. He could, if his stomach didn’t strike with a sudden pang. Don’t get comfortable, his hunger seemed to say. You’re working on borrowed time.

Gritting his jaw, Izuku releases his quirk and scrambles to keep up as Tsuyu leaps around the back of the dome, choosing to take the long route and avoid the plaza entirely.

Hagakure sheds her gloves, moving slowly. “I want to check on Aizawa-sensei. We can reconnect at the stairs, but I need to see if he’s alright.”

“That’s a bad idea, kero.” Tsuyu shakes her head, her long hair falling out of its stylized bow. “We should stick together. If--”

Hagakure’s voice comes from a spot that no longer matches the position of her shoes. “They won’t see me. You guys need to give the leftovers a chase. I can monitor the situation.”

Izuku grimaces. “You might be our best chance for escape.”

“And I will! But I need to do this first.” Izuku picks up on the tell-tale sound of soft footsteps, and Hagakure is much further. “So be fast. Meet by the stairwell.” And then she’s gone, darting around the curve of the downpour dome to backtrack to the central plaza.

The villains behind them seem reluctant to leave the water at first.

Izuku isn’t sure how long that would last.

With no other choice, Tsuyu sighs, but she turns back to race around the dome. The two of them could both climb the walls and make it back to the entrance, but neither of them make a move to offer that idea. Izuku follows, feeling torn. He wanted to help his teacher--but if Aizawa saw his quirk too much, he could easily remember their previous encounters. If Izuku wanted to keep his life straight, he couldn’t jump straight into a dangerous situation and immediately get found out.

This day had been going so well, too. Izuku had planned to further cement his quirk’s differences in front of Aizawa in preparation for this weekend. It would leave him tired and exhausted, but that was nothing new to Izuku. He felt fatigued more often than not. It made using his quirk dangerously addictive, since it was often the only time he didn’t feel sick.

But that might no longer matter, since Aizawa might be dead by the end of the day. His quirk was combat oriented, yes, but not suited to large groups. Eraserhead is an ambush hero. Even technical perfection, even the obvious lack of teamwork from the villains he’s facing wouldn’t change that he could be easily overwhelmed.

It would have been so much better for Thirteen to take the villains. Eraserhead could have prevented the students from being separated and allowed someone to escape. Izuku gritted his teeth, overcome with worry and frantic thoughts about how things could have gone, even though it wouldn’t help. Thirteen could have easily. . .

“You each have quirks that could easily kill.”

Izuku doubted Thirteen when they first said that. Uraraka had looked queasy, Iida stiff behind his full helmet--but they couldn’t understand. Sure, if Uraraka accidentally touched someone and never noticed, they could feasibly float away and never come back down. But she wasn’t compelled to hurt people. She didn’t have to guard against it.

It nearly took his breath away when he heard the solemnity in Thirteen’s voice: a person who could easily kill when distracted, an unwilling party to a violent talent that they never asked for. It felt like a punch in the stomach. It made him feel less alone.

Thirteen could have easily turned many villains to dust.

Thirteen could easily be a murderer.

Of course Aizawa would never want to put a rescue Hero in that position. He made a sacrifice to ensure the safety of the most people possible, using the information he had on hand. He made a sacrifice with no concern to his own safety.

"Today, we will wield our quirks for the sake of human life! None of your quirks exist to hurt others.”

Izuku shuddered, even as he made sure to watch Tsuyu’s back. He would just have to do his best. He would protect his classmates, help them escape, help--

He would help. Do no harm. He would take his awful quirk, and he would use it to do good, because he would never be the kind of person who would do anything less.

“We need to help thin the crowd,” Izuku says to Tsuyu, frantically keeping an eye to see if the villains had tried to follow them yet. If not, they could engage selectively with stragglers and help Eraserhead. “We just need to--"

 Then Tsuyu uses her tongue to drag him behind the wall of the Downpour zone dome, and the smell hits him.

In the center of the plaza, Aizawa is a broken, bloody puppet with his joints pointed in all the wrong ways. Perched above him like a bird of prey is a monstrous thing of shark teeth and exposed grey matter. It makes Izuku’s mouth water and his right eye burn. His hearing is so sharp, tuned into every huff of pain and sharp snap.

A man with pale hair covered in disembodied hands laughs. “Kurogiri is still playing with his food. Nomu here is waiting. Where is All Might, Eraserhead?” Aizawa’s only sound is a quiet scream of pain as the Nomu snaps something else.

Then Iida drops from dozens of feet in the air to plummet into the ground. He tries to correct his roll, but the impact leaves him stunned. Kurogiri materializes. “Thirteen is thoroughly disabled. I bring a troublesome student for your discretion, Shigaraki.”

“Ohh,” Shigaraki says eagerly, “trying to speedrun through the level? Clip out of bounds?” He saunters over. Iida shakes with fear, the whites of his eyes so stark. “I wonder if All Might will make a showing if I start killing his precious students.”

Izuku can’t move.

When Shigaraki reaches to grab Iida by the face, his skin remains intact. Shigaraki whips around and eyes Eraserhead with a manic look of delight. “Nomu,” he sings.

The monster takes that as command to crush Aizawa’s head into the ground.

 “It could not drive him away,” Kurogiri agrees idly. His quirk begins swirling up in currents of purple fog. “He will come eventually. I will maintain the peri--”

“DIE!!!”

--

“So that’s your plan,” Todoroki says dispassionately to the villains he had frozen before him. “Idiots.” With that dismissal, he leaves the Rockslide zone, intent on following this battle to its conclusion. Hopefully this would be over soon. He really would hate to do something so ugly as leave a bunch of villains with deadening flesh, but he was too thorough to indulge the sentiment of releasing them.

What could he do? Make them promise to sit still and be good? It’s their own fault for getting involved with such a scheme.

“Killing All Might with a genetically modified fighter. . .” He shook his bangs out of his eye, hurrying back towards the plaza. “They must have thought that they had a chance.”

--

Kurogiri cuts off sharply as a cacophonous boom causes the ground to shake. Katsuki plummets out of the sky--no, Katsuki and Kirishima together--and the two of them slam into the warpgate villain. They skid across the plaza in a tangle of light and fury and Katsuki’s shrieks.

Shigaraki’s eyes widen behind the hand smothering his face. He scratches at his neck, his muttering slowly growing louder. “Why can’t NPCs just stay when put. Kurogiri. . . useless. . . he left the door wide open.” The scratching grows more frantic. “Nomu! Get them off--”

The Nomu moves to follow its master’s orders. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the only thing keeping it earthbound had been its grip on Eraserhead. Without that, it bobs in the air, trying to go through the motions. No understanding passes over its eyes.

Uraraka Ochako gives the monster the slightest nudge with her soot-stained space boots. The nomu floats away, pawing ineffectually at the air. She immediately drops to her knees to check over Aizawa, concern radiating even past her smoke-clouded visor.

Izuku is so relieved he could cry. The door to USJ is wide open. Backup had to be on the way. The monster hurting Aizawa-sensei is disabled. Katsuki and Kirishima were keeping Kurogiri thoroughly pinned. Aizawa needed medical attention, and that was something Izuku could provide.

Shigaraki bares his teeth in rage. “Cheating. Cheating,” he hisses.

Tsuyu tenses besides him. She sees the threat before he does.

“KILL THEM,” Shigaraki howls, before turning on Iida with an outstretched grip.

Izuku is too far away. He couldn’t make the jump, not quickly enough. He still tries. Uraraka screams as he flies by her.

And then, presumably, Hagakure breaks two of the fingers on Shigaraki’s left hand. That’s the only way Izuku can interpret his inability to move his hand correctly--the discontinuity, the way his fingers snap in a direction that they shouldn't--they have to be broken. Then Shigaraki’s nose bursts and busts into a stream of blood and he falls on his back--

“Get up!” Hagakure yells.

Iida’s eyes widen, but he scrambles up and then buckles as if from a sudden weight.

“Go, go, go!”

Iida doesn’t argue. He sprints past Shigaraki--narrowly dodging a strike from his other hand--and grabs Izuku by the hood of his coat, dragging him back. Izuku nearly bites through his tongue at the sudden change in momentum.

“Midoriya-kun, please. . . don’t go near him,” Iida warns hollowly. “He’s much faster than he appears.”

Iida skids to a stop in front of Uraraka. Her brown eyes are wide and filled up with tears that seem too stunned to fall. She looks bad. Shaky, pale, nearly green. She keeps her hands away from each other, although she twitches as if she wants nothing more than to press her fingertips together and release her quirk. 

Aizawa looks worse.

 

Chapter 13: Lovers II

Notes:

wow this needs uhhhhh editing. but i hope its fun enough.

content warning for injuries, gore, sickness, the usual, and suicidal thoughts. These are brief, but there.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“If you fuck up the timing on this,” Katsuki reminds, “we are all fucked.”

“I won’t mess up,” Round-face says. The sweat beading up on her forehead has nothing to do with the nerves and everything to do with the way she’s about to vomit on some villains head and get them shot out of the sky. Plan or not, Katsuki would leave them in the fucking dust if it came down to that.

Before he has time to point that out, however, Kirishima tightens his grip on Katsuki’s leg. “Kurogiri!” He shouts in warning.

Katsuki spots it instantly. The cloud of smoke surrounding the villain rolls and twists, just as it had when it teleported at the beginning of this clusterfuck. Oh, no. That asshole isn’t getting away. “Now!”

Round-face pushes away from the two of them, heading up to the ceiling and sending them to the floor at a respectable speed.

Katsuki does his job. He makes the biggest fucking boom there ever was, drawing attention with a furious shriek. Gravity reasserts itself a few seconds after he makes contact with the warp gate villain. He stumbles but catches himself before he can trip. He had gotten a lot of practice recovering from zero-gravity during the battle sims.

There’s no time to check if Round-face had made it, because Katsuki is too busy batting Kurogiri around with concussive force. ‘Trying to catch smoke’ would be the most accurate way to phrase it--he can’t get a grip on the body, even if he knows it must be there. He throws an explosive punch, fishing for the form in the darkness, but the villain evades--he evades and Kirishima gives him no room to breathe. The rocky boy tackles the villain’s metal collar. He gets shrugged off a second later, and that’s all the time Katsuki needs to whip forward with another attack.

They continue driving the villain into a corner. Katsuki can’t get a grip yet.

So he settles on hitting him with all the force he has.

After all, you can’t teleport if you’re too busy trying to figure out where the fucking floor is.

--

Ochako finally releases her quirk six feet above the ground, and she immediately vomits on Aizawa’s feet. Sputtering, she heaves another breath, labors to her feet with her aching legs, and lightly brushes her hand over the skin of the monster’s back. Her quirk impulsively spasms, and she nearly catches Aizawa in the field--the monster has such a tight grip on her teacher that it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.

Ochako can’t afford anything more than the bare minimum, and she corrects just in time. She has never used her quirk on herself for this long. If she passes out, her quirk will fail. She hadn’t known that until her entrance exam, if only because she never had a chance to test it.

She’s ready to pass out. The world blooms in odd colors as the Nomu releases her teacher. Numbly, she nudges it away with her foot before it can grab on to anything. It floats up and up and up. The landscape in front of her is a mess of red and dust and people, screaming and pain and fear, all smudged and blackened by the smoke that had distorted her visor.

Her legs give out at the same time she realizes what all the red is.

Ochako hadn’t understood just how badly Aizawa had been hurt--and it’s enough to cut through the black spots dancing over her vision. She takes a shuddering breath. “S-sensei?” And then, when he doesn’t respond, she gently lifts his head from the dirt. His breath whistles, shallow and ragged.

The only thing stronger than the smell of blood is the bile that caught on the edge of her visor, sour and acidic. She tries to help, but she has no idea how. She doesn’t have medical supplies. Nothing. She’s a rescue hero, and she doesn’t even have bandages or antiseptic. What kind of hero doesn’t even have the means to do anything?

Ochako swallows back the sickness creeping up her throat. “Aizawa-sensei,” she croaks, “can you. . . get up?”

Her teacher doesn’t move. He’s not conscious.

Killjoy.

That’s what Ochako thought about her homeroom teacher. Her heartbeat thuds in her ears. Hollow and heavy.

Uptight. Too serious, too intense, too determined to suck the fun out of any situation.

This isn’t fun. This isn’t fun at all.

And then Shigaraki screams in rage. Ochako flinches, and her eyes widen as the world blurs. It constricts down to a point. Crumpled on the floor in scuffed armor, is a boy shaking with fear.

Iida. Stuffy, well-intentioned, kind, unobservant Iida. The boy who worried after her; who wanted to set an example; who followed rules to a manic degree because he believed that they meant something.

She hadn’t seen Iida from above either--she hadn’t even checked--and now there’s nothing she can do but watch as Shigaraki rounds on him in fury. She isn’t fast enough. She isn’t fast enough to even begin to try. Her limbs are so heavy, and the thought of making them light is too sickening to stand.

She doesn’t try to move. She screams.

And even when the world rights itself seconds later, where Midoriya and Iida are beside her and safe--or at least safer--she can’t let go of the panic gripping her chest. She reaches out and grabs Iida’s knee. His metal armor is roughened. There’s dirt embedded in the gouges.

Iida reaches back. He carefully takes her hand by the palm, and she pretends that neither of them are shaking. He helps her to her feet and keeps her steady when the ground feels like it might slide out from under her feet. She winces headrush and spits out caustic bile into the dirt.

She doesn’t aim correctly, and most of it ends up dribbling down her chin.

--

Izuku’s head rings from the chaos around him, but one thing is certain: Aizawa needs medical attention. He needs an ambulance and an IV drip and potentially a blood transfusion, and all he has is Izuku.

So Izuku drops to his knees and fumbles among his pouches. He isn’t familiar enough with his costume, so he scrambles for bandages and gauze and disinfectant. He carefully identifies the worst injuries with a keen eye--his right eye burns and twitches at the sight of hot, open wounds. Izuku breathes through his mouth and tries to remember his lessons with Recovery Girl.

There hadn’t been many.

She was often busy, and a great deal of Izuku’s time was spent hovering over her shoulder while she pointed out the injuries of upperclassmen. She hadn’t exactly gotten into explaining how to fix the type of injuries before him. UA students didn’t normally get this hurt. The most he had done was patch scrapes and identify bruises and get lectured. Still, Izuku identifies broken bones from his months of anatomy practice. He can’t do anything to fix those. It isn’t advisable to even try. Instead, he douses the cuts on Aizawa’s scalp with anti-septic and presses gauze against the head wounds, winding bandages around his skull.

Aizawa’s elbow is a pure open wound of eroded muscle. Without thinking, Izuku leans forward to get a closer look--he has to jerk himself back before the metal of his facemask makes contact with the injury. Izuku shakes his head to keep his thoughts clear. That’s just begging for cross contamination.

“I can’t keep this up forever,” Uraraka pants. She’s leaning against Iida, swallowing every few seconds and blinking. She has several scrapes and her costume is singed, but the most pressing problem seems to be quirk overuse.

Izuku swallows back his hunger and his sickness as he binds Aizawa’s elbow. If she can’t maintain her quirk, they are all dead. Shigaraki is deadly, but he can be avoided. That monster is faster than any of them. As long as it’s out of commission, they have a chance.

“How long?” Iida presses. His glasses are cracked. It splits his left iris down the middle.

Tsuyu bounds up from her hiding spot, her tongue spilling out of her mouth and flicking around in agitation. A cut lines her forehead, and blood trickles down the side of her face. “We have to go now,” she croaks, urgency undercutting her normally placid tone. “The villains are hesitating, but it isn’t going to hold.”

Across the plaza, Shigaraki pushes himself up from the ground. The floor crumples and shifts at the touch. He looks around, searching frantically. Izuku doubts he would remain distracted for much longer. Even if Katsuki is keeping the Kurogiri busy, Shigaraki is a barrier between them and the exit.

The more immediately dangerous issue is creeping up behind them in a menacing line: the villains Izuku, Tsuyu, and Hagakure had left behind from the flood zone. Disorderly but still deadly. They weren’t ready to attack yet, but Izuku could hear barked orders and threats. Tsuyu had given them something to think about, it looked like.

“Aizawa isn’t stable,” Izuku warns. He runs a gloved hand lightly along his teacher’s spine. It’s riddled with contusions and bumps, and Izuku can’t tell how serious it is.  “We need to move him carefully.” Which means quick isn’t an option.

Hagakure steps forward. Even with Izuku’s mask, the smell of her blood is hot and sweet--better even that Aizawa’s, more powerful than Tsuyu’s--

She isn’t visibly bleeding, but that doesn’t change the fact that Izuku has to lock his muscles into place and hold his breath.

He’s hungry.

He hadn’t expected how intensely, desperately hungry he would be today. Izuku shoves bandages at her general direction.

“Uraraka, can you float him? Can you try?” Hagakure asks as she accepts the medical supplies. The bandages wind around her upper arm and immediately turn red.

Uraraka shakes her head dizzily. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I’m gonna be sick if I. . .” She turns to the side and coughs, wet and hacking. “No.” she concludes weakly. “Not if I need to keep that guy in the--wait, your. . . arm?”

“Handsy-guy got me,” Hagakure says with a note of strain. Her blood creeps across the bandage like a sunrise. “I wasn’t fast enough.”

Izuku stands suddenly, and his quirk nearly jumps from his spine before he restrains it. They don’t have time for this. Every second spent together is another second they don’t have. “Uraraka. You don’t have a distance barrier, right?” The girl shakes her head slowly, her eyes glassy and watery. “So that means you need to get out of here. Now.”

He feels himself muttering as he squeezes his hands into fists, his mouth voicing half-lost syllables that stream together. His mask tastes like metal, but not blood. It makes it easier to think. Iida would be best suited to getting Uraraka away quickly. As soon as Shigaraki pulled himself together, he would target her first and foremost.

Izuku glances to Tsuyu and Hagakure’s floating bandage before he averts his gaze. With Hagakure injured and not especially big, she couldn’t carry Aizawa to safety. She would be better suited to running interference or just escaping. Tsuyu had the best quirk to defend them with. She had a longer striking range and was more precise. She wouldn’t kill people on accident.

Which meant Izuku would have to carry Aizawa. Bloody, gory, sweat-spiced Aizawa. Aizawa with a spinal injury and a concussion and a ton of faults he can’t begin to fix.

Carefully calling forward the electric strength in his limbs, Izuku pries his teacher up from the floor. He carefully handles his neck, and nearly stumbles over the unsteady, unwieldy weight of a dead body.

No, Izuku corrects hastily. Not dead. Not yet. His limbs are too warm, too flexible. He isn’t dead yet. They could make it. They could get out of here.

“Us three will handle Aizawa,” Izuku says with a nod to Tsuyu and Hagakure. He flinches from a piercing shout from Katsuki’s fight, but it isn’t a scream of pain. Just fury. It’s a familiar sound. “Because if you cancel before we leave. . .”

Iida steps forward, his hands hovering as if he wants to take Aizawa, before he sucks in a breath through gritted teeth. “I can escort Uraraka-kun and run for help. Just--” He looks sick at the very prospect, but he steels himself. “Just be safe.” He kneels down and pats his shoulders. Uraraka clambers on his back, shivering and shuddering. He sets off at a run towards the door, his engines whirling with strain.

Shigaraki had finally found the thing he had been searching for--he clamps an anatomically correct hand over his face just in time for Iida to dart by him.

Shigaraki is fast, but speed is woven into the fabric of Iida’s being. Iida sprints past him and climbs the stairs at three steps per a stride. He dodges a long distance quirk--spikes that attempted to pierce him from behind. He makes it past the stairwell, and Shigaraki shrieks obscenities, yelling for the congregated villains.  

But they aren’t made for a battle on dry land, and Tsuyu grabs the single one who makes a leap for it out of the air with her tongue.  

Izuku’s heartbeat races with worry, but Iida and Uraraka are free. They could make it.

And then the air in front of Iida shimmers, twists, and warps with a dark smoke. Before Izuku can blink, a large gauntlet emerges from the gate in the air. Iida skids, trying desperately to get out of the way, to redirect his momentum without falling.

It’s not enough. A pin falls to the floor. As it hits the dirt, the world explodes with heat and light.

--

Katsuki Bakugou is used to winning. It was just a part of nature. From the time he was young, he was first in everything. That’s how he liked it. That’s how nature intended it to be. Some people were born winners, and he was one of them, and people just needed to get out of his fucking way and let him prove it.

People usually did. The extras that followed him around at school were like fucking moths. Drawn in and just as easily brushed off. The ones that didn’t like him still couldn’t hold a fucking candle to his power, even if they had the guts to get uppity about it. His teachers thought he hung the fucking moon and were always trying to induct him into some cultish club or another. They all saw it. Even if they didn’t like it.

Deku was the one that never accepted reality. The nerd got in the way, time and time again, as if he could change nature if he raised his chin and tried not to blubber.

If some were born winners, Deku was the opposite. He stumbled and tripped and cried over the smallest details as a child. Katsuki thought a quirk might make him less of a weakling, but the nerd had that fucking tragedy to his name. Quirkless. At first it seemed like a lie. Then it felt like a given.

Born losers. Of course Deku didn’t have a quirk. And even if he did, it wouldn’t change a single thing.

No quirk, no guts, no sense--always fucking chasing after him. Sometimes it felt like an excuse, and other times it felt like a spit in the fucking face. Always looking down on him. First by being too fucking stupid to realize that Katsuki would rather wring his own neck than be so weak as to need help; then by thinking he was a roadblock. Thinking he could stand in Katsuki’s way. Like a wall instead of a fucking steppingstone.

Then one day, Deku stared him straight in the eye. Black sclera and red iris burned from the nerd’s sickly face. He had the fucking audacity to call it his quirk. His quirk that he shouldn’t have owned. His quirk that he owned months before he had the guts to say so. Katsuki wasn’t fucking stupid. He noticed when Deku quit bringing food to school. He noticed how he breathed through his mouth when people got too close.

It shouldn’t have bothered him so much. It shouldn’t have made him fucking lose it, but it did. Deku had a quirk, and he was going to apply to UA, and Katsuki had no clue if the world had shifted. If it had, he was determined to put it back into place. Because if Deku could change--if he could be born a fucking loser, miles and miles behind the curve and then suddenly be right behind Katsuki. . .

It meant the reverse could happen, too.

It meant that Katsuki could tie with some fucking nobody in the entrance exam. It meant placing bronze on the first day. It meant he could lose to fucking Round-face, even if he had kicked her ass, even if he had more skill, just because the definition of winning had widened and changed. It meant he had to watch battles with players that could fill an entire building with ice and leave him basically fucking quirkless--and then watch Deku circumvent that power like it was nothing, and then witness the nerd lose to someone who got last fucking place in quirk placements.

It meant Katsuki wasn’t guaranteed to win. That he could be tricked, that he could falter, that other people could be better.

It meant that he could be baited. That he could leverage his strongest attack, look that misty-fucker in the eye knowing he was about to waste this villain, and grin. It meant that he could be so fucking pleased with himself, just in time to stare down his gauntlet and meet Round-face’s bleary eyes through a film of smoke. Too out of it to see oncoming disaster.

And when his arm passed through the portal, it was already too late to divert it.

Katsuki screams and lifts his feet with the blast. The force of the explosion pushes him back through the portal, away from being swallowed whole.

He doesn’t think about the other side of the gate. It disappears in a rush of fury that drowns out every other feeling pounding through his head.

Kurogiri is too surprised to react. He had waited and positioned himself, fucking toying with Katsuki, but his arrogance had the same results. He thought he had caught Katsuki.

He thought fucking wrong.

Katsuki rips through the air, spinning faster and faster, disorienting and explosive and brutal. His fist closes around something solid as he slams the villain into the fucking ground. Panting with exertion, coated in stinging dust, with sweat dripping down his forehead Katsuki swears, “You aren’t getting up again, you sleazy motherfucker.”

The villian blinks up at him as if Katsuki isn’t elbow deep in the nebulous space that qualifies as his chest. “I think I have done enough to find that agreeable.”

It’s nearly impossible to hear him, and he doesn’t have a mouth, but Katsuki is a master at taking scraps and making a whole out of them. He doesn’t like what he hears. Katsuki tightens his fist and hits the villain with a burst of sparks. He hopes it sears scars into whatever flesh exists under all that smoke. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

“But it is interesting,” the villain says. “It’s rare to meet a hero so willing to kill. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be--"

Katsuki shuts shit down with a flex of his hand that leaves the villain choking. “If I’m so willing to kill,” he reasons acidly, “then it’s in your best interest to shut the hell up.”

The villain takes the fucking hint.

A moment later, Kirishima skids up beside him, wary and relieved in equal measure. “Are you okay?”

“You have fucking eyes,” Katsuki snaps, his brain beginning to rush with the sudden knowledge of all the spots where he failed. His missteps and misjudged strikes and stupid mistakes. “And no thanks to you. How the hell did this asshole catch you?!”

Kirishima grimaces. It looks weird on his craggy face.  “I’m not as mobile as you.”

Katsuki rolls his eyes. No shit. He didn't think anyone was. 

A cold snap flashes through the building and saps the body heat Katsuki had carefully maintained for fighting. His bare arms break out into goosebumps. Giant shards of ice reach towards the domed roof of USJ from the main pavilion area. Fucking Candycane and his goddamn quirk.

Secondly, Katsuki reflexively lets off a firecracker pop of alarm. Not due to the temperature, or the circumstances, or even just to flex on Kurogiri for tricking him. No, he flinches because Deku flies through the air like a fucking ragdoll, following a blur of dark muscle. Despite the distance, the limb extending from Deku’s spine is bright and bloody and fast. It makes Katsuki sick, in a nearly abstract way, to watch it grab the Nomu out of the air. The two of them plummet as one. Gravity reigns supreme.

He’d been so sure Round-face would fuck up and kill them. The reverse hadn't crossed his mind.

Katsuki was a born winner. He didn’t lose twice. He didn’t walk away without a victory seared into someone’s skin. He was a winner. 

At least, he had been, once.

Ironically, watching quirkless-worthless-loser Deku plummet to his demise because Katsuki couldn’t handle his fight makes him want to press his palm against his ear and blow his brains out just so it would stop.

--

Notes:

ok i know what everyone is looking forward to and can i just say, emphatically, from the bottom of my heart: hell yeah, lunch time.

Chapter 14: Lovers III

Notes:

Rinstail helped edit this chapter! Thanks again!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The Nomu lands far too softly.  

That is what Izuku notices once he blinks the bright spots out of his vision. The explosion had thrown him off his feet, and he had reflexively shielded Aizawa from the concussive force.  Through the ringing in his head and the pure dread soaking through his chest, Izuku is able to watch.   

The monster limply falls on its exposed skull, and it makes no sound. The impact doesn’t shake the ground. Even from such a height, it lands softly. It simply rises to its feet. Unalarmed and unaware, its blank eyes scanning the field.  

Scanning for them, Izuku realizes. Because this monster, engineered and designed to destroy, only responded to orders. Shigaraki’s last order had been to kill them.  

Even though Shigaraki had been knocked into a bloody daze, it grins when it finally spots its prey. It takes a step towards Iida, his gleaming armor blackened and his head rolling at an odd angle to his neck.  

There is no thought. There’s nothing to even consider. Not in the way he yells at Tsuyu to take Aizawa, not in the way he shakes off Hagakure’s hand when she tries to hold him back. Izuku rushes forward, his quirk extending fully from his spine and stretching out behind him in a trail of flashing red. Its weight is immense and draining.  

He spent months learning how to shrink and hide his quirk. He curled it around his arm, underneath his sleeve, hoping to conceal the fact that it was pure violence.  Izuku  had never believed in villainous quirks. He had loved quirks too much to see any sort of aberration in them. That had been before he  had  gotten his own; before he understood that some things were intended only to destroy and rend.  

He didn’t want that. He never wanted to hurt people. Even in his angriest moments, when his whole chest burned with the desire to fight back, he never wanted to kill.  

His quirk always did. It made him so painfully aware of life. Every scent of a living body, every pulse-beat or heavy breath was a reminder that he was made to end their source. He was able to notice these things only to make him better at  taking  them.  

In front of the Nomu, he can’t bring himself to hide. It isn’t human. It can’t judge him. It doesn’t exist enough to think. Izuku doesn’t shy away from the parasitic capacity to harm. Aizawa had done everything to keep them safe. Uraraka had made herself sick to restrain the Nomu. Hagakure had jumped to defend Iida without a second thought. He couldn’t refrain out of fear--fear of being caught, fear of getting hurt, fear of hurting others. Not when he could help. Not when the ability to protect was the only thing that made what he was redeemable.  

They had all done terrifying, dangerous things today, and Izuku couldn’t live himself if he did anything less.  

His tail blooms. It circles the Nomu and flings it far away from Iida and Uraraka, away from Aizawa, away from anyone who could get hurt.  

It’s like putting your foot through a windowpane. There’s the sense that something has broken. And it’s not especially hard. It’s not a barrier that is difficult to obliterate. But it  is  monumental in some way. After all, you are so  polite  to windows. You understand why they exist. You value the way they keep things out. Even if they are physically flimsy, weak,  brittle  constructs, you aren’t supposed to break them.  

And that’s what it feels like to use his quirk so freely. Not difficult in the slightest, even though it should be a harder choice. Izuku has no time for niceties. He breaks through the window, and the world outside isn’t safe or kind or polite.  

His eye burns in his socket, and the Nomu plummets stupidly through the air, and Izuku doesn’t let his prey escape.  

--  

Shouto finds himself perpetually underestimating his classmates and frequently overestimating himself. Bakugou isn’t all bluster and arrogance. That single explosion could have leveled him from thirty paces. Even though he was far enough away to avoid the worst of it, his instinctive shield mitigated the wave of heat that caused steam to rise thick in the air. Most of his classmates could not say the same.  

Shouto steps forward, deciding that wasting ice on descending from the foothills of the rockslide zone would do more harm than good. He needs to warm up. He checks his extremities; numb but not deadened. He breaks into a run once he reaches level ground, and the effort alleviates some of the cold. At the very least, it gives his costume insulation something to work with after a glancing blow had disconnected his heater’s power supply.  

He traps those who mean harm. He clenches his hands to work feeling back into them.  

He runs into trouble, ignoring the villains clustered at the periphery of the plaza unless they attempt to attack. He focused in on the massive, exposed-brain creature that stood near the center, looking around with bulging eyes. This was the thing they promised could kill All Might.  

If Shouto won with nothing but his mother’s quirk, his father would be furious.   

He instinctively jerks back, his cleats skidding against stone as Midoriya  screams . It’s startling, but certainly not a type of shout that merits concern. Shouto is familiar with the fine-line difference between fear and desperation. Midoriya is just so timid that Shouto never felt the need to picture how that kind of fury would sound in his throat. It’s rather raspy.  

He’s not fast enough to interfere with Midoriya’s choice to attack the Nomu, so Shouto disregards the sound of bone cracking and bodies flying. The flash of disappointment is bitter, but it isn’t important. It’s taken out of his hands. And, judging by the blood spilled, Midoriya isn’t defenseless. Even if he were, it isn’t as if Shouto could move fast enough to make a difference.  

Really, though, he had wanted a rematch against Midoriya. He isn’t optimistic about those chances now.  

Shouto  reconsiders his options and turns. He can still fight. He’ll just leave another kind of mark on this attack.   Shouto  calmly raises a hand. His quirk swells,  arctic  and intent. Ice grows and spirals across the broken field of USJ, encasing more villains indiscriminately and forming into a barrier around his  disheveled  classmates. His breath congeals into mist in his mouth. The bitter cold sends pangs through his teeth. It flurries over his skin on the exhale, thick as smoke.  

He’s going to give many people frostbite before the day is done. His father would approve.  

Shigaraki Tomura ought to be one of them, Shouto thinks, at the very least. The villains he had interrogated said he was running the show. It wouldn’t hurt to go to the source.  

The man flies towards him with his hands extended--even though Shouto had certainly trapped him a mere second ago--and Shouto is too sluggish to dodge. His shield is slow to deploy and not adequate to endure any degree of real force.  

But, as Shouto quickly realizes, any amount of ice wouldn’t matter. Not when Shigaraki can shatter it with a swipe of his hand.  

It takes every ounce of focus to avoid the strike towards his head, towards his covered eye. He has nothing left to defend against the next attack, and a hand grips his shoulder before  Shouto  can leverage his quirk. The blood running down his arm feels  odd,  and then painful as it freezes.  

He can’t afford to look at it, but he does. Assessing the damage. Getting a sense of the injury. The curl of dread in his stomach, how  long  it takes to understand isn’t optimal. It’s a distraction. Shouto should be above those. He normally is.  

Shigaraki breaks through the ice, and Shouto’s bones ache with cold.  

His vision blurs, and he is wrenched back by a constraint around his middle. He blinks sluggishly. A tongue slowly retreats  back  into his classmate’s mouth. Her normally bulging eyes are hooded, and her breathing is shallow. “It’s too cold,” she mentions, lisping around a red freezer burn on her tongue. “Can you. . . stop that?”  

Shouto’s head rushes. It is hard to think. “Not without releasing everyone else.”  

“That might be better,” a voice says to his left.  

Shouto  flinches, but he only sees his teacher. It certainly wasn’t him who spoke. For one, he looks nearly dead. For another, he recognized the voice as one  other  classmate. The invisible one,  Hagakure .  

“No,” Shouto clips out. He pushes himself to stand. “Hold on a few more moments.”  

Shigaraki  is sprinting towards them. His face is   more gruesome without a dead hand clamped over it.  

It would be scarier if Shouto didn’t understand his quirk now. He forms a stream of ice against the ground, and it climbs Shigaraki’s form, freezing it into a statue. Shouto stops before it reaches the villain’s wrists and neck.  

“Five-point quirks aren’t very useful like this, are they?” Shouto reinforces the ice until Shigaraki is practically buried in it.  

Shigaraki spits at him. It’s nearly all he can do. His wrists aren’t flexible enough to reach any ice. He can’t seem to breathe properly.  

Shouto finds a dull sort of pleasure in that. He’s been denied a lot of things today. “You can answer a few questions. We have plenty of time now, don’t we?”  

An invisible hand clamps down over his uninjured shoulder. “No. Tsuyu fell asleep. You need to help carry Aizawa.”  

Shouto frowns, but he turns back to his classmate. Tsuyu isn’t asleep. She is unconscious. And that was fully Shouto’s fault, and thus now his problem. As much as he wanted to sate his dull curiosity, he wasn’t going to let his pride hurt people. Shouto nods after a second. “You’ll need to get her. My skin is too cold.”  

“KUROGIRI! GET BACK HERE YOU USELESS--” Shigaraki breaks into hacking coughs, unable to sputter more than a few sentences at a time. Shouto is starting to doubt this man knew anything about what he was doing.  

Hagakure  steps away, her movements a bit easier to discern now that  Shouto   knows  where to look. “You know, this is terrible.” She’s trying to sound somewhat calm, and  Tsuyu  begins to levitate. “All our rescue heroes are out of commission.  Tsuyu  asleep,  Midoriya  dead. We’re both really unsuited to this.”  

Shouto did think his low body temperature would help with Aizawa’s inflammation. Other than that, he would agree. He was a bit unsure about how to carry his teacher. It’s a good thing his teacher is--not thin, exactly, but compact. Shouto couldn’t have managed to carry Vlad King. “Midoriya isn’t dead yet,” he points out, calmly rearranging Aizawa’s limbs into something he could lift.  

They would have seen that monster again by now   if that were the case. Since they hadn’t,  Shouto  would assume  Midoriya  was at the very least keeping it occupied.  

“Yet,”  Hagakure  repeats. She isn’t crying, which is a relief.  Shouto  wouldn’t know how to handle that additional complication. She stumbles up the stairs, the burden of  Tsuyu ’s  weight  making her breath harsh.  Sho uto  can imagine the outline of her shoulders, the angle of her spine by the ghostly way  Tsuyu’s  long hair hangs in the air. “ Yet . Yeah. I can work with that.”    

--  

Izuku  stands stunned, enraptured by the alien appearance of limbs yearning to regrow. The bones lag behind, pearly yellow and red. Muscles bloom outward like a burst of jellyfish tendrils searching for a joint that doesn’t exist yet. Arteries are improvising their formation, counter-intuitively spraying scarlet mist into the air as they manifest.   

It’s like a flower rotting in reverse. Entropy denied. Pure magic.  

It’s oddly. . .  

It’s odd.  

The Nomu writhes on the ground, trying to do as commanded and yet to incapable to begin. It can’t stand. It isn’t smart enough to crawl with the single arm it has left.  

It doesn’t know to quit, to lay down and die.  

Izuku’s  arms are broken. In multiple places, he thinks. He hadn’t been fast enough to avoid the  Nomu’s  brutally powerful strikes. The pain is immense. But he can still walk. He stumbles forward, his breathing  labored  behind his mask. He can’t get it off. It requires two hands to unlatch and he has none.  

It’s choking him. The pressure on his face, the cloying scent of oiled me tal - -it  makes   hi s   stomach twist and roll with revulsion. He can’t escape it. There’s so much blood in the air, and all he has to prove it is his eyes. His strongest sense is muzzled. Why had he ever done this to himself?  

He wants it off.  

He drops to his knees, his breathing stiff and pained and sickly hot against his mouth.  

Before him, the Nomu has almost regrown his elbows. The muscle configurations are familiar. Deltoids slipping in at the top, biceps waiting eagerly to find the proper insertion.  

Izuku’s  quirk snakes through the air, feeble and gentle. It had given its all. There wasn’t anything left. Barely the dimensions of a coin, it  worms  its way into his hair and slips between his scalp and the leather straps of his  faceplate . With barely a flick, his mask shifts, loosens, and falls off of his face into the gore coating the floor.  

The air smells like home and hope.  

--  

Nedzu politely reprimands Toshinori for his early morning exploits in the teacher’s lounge. Toshinori would admit it was well deserved. Even with three hours left to his name, he could never figure out how to spend them without supplemented blood money. However, he drinks the tea the principle offered him without profuse apology. They chat amicably enough, though. Toshinori doesn’t want to have an issue with his employer and friend.  

He just wishes the rodent wouldn’t compile psychological profiles of promising students.  

“I even organized them by how frequently they smile,”  Nedzu  says.  

A few weeks ago, Toshinori might have considered that comment a manifestation of Nedzu’s presumptuous, but well-intentioned quirk. It is increasingly feeling like an intentional insult.  “You are a terrible meddler,” Toshinori chastises. He takes the files, though. Mirio is at the top of the list, of course.  

“I just thought you would want something to do, since you weren’t able to attend the full extent of USJ.”  

“Terrible,” Toshinori repeats, feeling mournful.  

“It isn’t a decision to be made lightly,” Nedzu says, referencing their last conversation as if it wasn’t yesterday. He sips from his child-sized teacup. “I will have you know that these are third-party evaluations. Free of bias. I actually did have a few samples of footage analyzed for smile duration. So, really, this is a great look at the students. Almost as good as class time, I think.”  

That jab is enough to push Toshinori out through the door. He was feeling well enough. He needs to actually talk to students before he could choose one.  

And, quite luckily, he speaks to at least one student before he arrives at USJ. Mina Ashido is covered in sweat and panting harshly when he exits the vehicle. It seems that she, and the few other students running down the road, had sprinted the whole way. And that they had been given extreme cause to do so.  

Toshinori calmly dials Nedzu, hands the phone off to Mina, and leaps. He enters the building and doesn’t even find a challenge.  

--  

Izuku has never felt better in his life. He feels whole. One year ago, he had swallowed a black hole, and all this time it had been pulling away at him from the inside. Like a parasite that was never satiated. The world is bright, hot and cold, scarlet and rust, spice and salt. His throat sings, so sweet and joyous that he could cry.  

He is crying.  

He had been so hungry for so long. A year. The need to eat had dulled down to a chronic pain, and only now did he remember what it meant to be whole. Full. Safe.  

Happy.  

As he tore into the twitching, feeble neck of the Nomu, his tail wreaking terrible violence against the monstrous body, everything was perfect.  

Except for the fact that he could eat.  

Izuku had tried everything under the sun. He had stuffed his face with poison and hoped he could stomach it. He had stolen raw pork from the fridge and vomited on the spot. He gnawed on leaves and branches and found them as caustic as bleach. He had tried everything before he accepted there was only one thing he could consume--and then he had tried again, because he hadn’t found a way to live with reality yet.  

Izuku knew this: He could only eat people.  

And right now, he is feasting. He’s drinking blood and biting through flesh and it is the softest, sweetest thing he has ever consumed.  

Which meant the monster in front of him, the one he speared through the brain and dismembered and is  eating . . .  

That monster is a human being.  

He is eating a human being.  

Before he can  fully  comprehend  this , before he can undo the damage, carefully separate himself and find a way to fix this, the doors to USJ slam open with a familiar cry. All Might enters with pure rage cloaking his form.  Izuku  goes still, and the  Nomu  feebly tries to kill him.  

All Might had gotten here. Izuku could stop. He could run away.  

He feels sick, and he can’t vomit. He ate so much, and he is just  starving  for more. He wrenches away from the Nomu, extracts his tail and tries not to give it more brain damage than absolutely necessary. He grapples with himself until he can think through the haze of blood and  

The air shimmers with blackened smoke. It covers the Nomu half-way through before Izuku’s tail strikes, reflexively, panicked. The smoke retreats and reforms meters away. “This is. . .” Kurogiri turns his yellow eyes to Izuku, taking in the blood covering his skin and the limbs strewn about. The Nomu is breathing but no longer healing. The ragged holes in its limbs don’t look like bite marks.  

Izuku’s quirk stirs in the air. The chaotic soundscape of USJ floods into his ears, and he feels focus running through him like a live wire. He can’t let Kurogiri take the Nomu. It--  

They  are a human being, and  Izuku  refuses to hesitate when  Kurogiri  begins forming another portal. His quirk extends, covering the distance to  Kurogiri  in a vicious swipe. It breaks the villain’s  concentration  and his heartrate pulses with stress.  

All Might is in the building. Izuku doesn’t need to win. He just needs to stall. He’s allowed this lack of hesitance. He’s allowed to defend people.  

‘You’re lying to yourself now? ’ A  faraway  part of himself thought with acidic sarcasm. The aftertaste of meat burns his mouth like a lump of rock salt.  

‘S uch a humanitarian.’  

Kurogiri laughs, somewhere between bitter and surprised. Smoke ceases to swirl in the air. “You’re all rather deadly children, aren’t you? You’re wasted on matters like this.”  

He leaves without taking the Nomu.  

That’s the only thought that keeps Izuku calm when help finally gets to him.

Notes:

what was your favorite moment? the best line?

Chapter 15: Chariot I

Notes:

super short but uhhhhhhh what can i say

Chapter Text

In the grand scheme of things, Recovery Girl has a lot to deal with. She makes sure Izuku is conscious, not in full blown injury-induced shock, and then cleans and disinfects his skin with water and isopropyl alcohol. The kiss is redundant. Izuku can’t remember all the injuries the Nomu gave him, but he knows his quirk took care of them. Still, he rides the wave of exhaustion and takes stock of his classmates. He counts their heartbeats and distinguishes them by breathing. He doesn’t see anyone dead.

Aizawa is alive. Emergency personnel load him into a silent ambulance, even as the emergency lights strobe red and white. Izuku watches the process. He watches more classmates appear as All Might darts around USJ. They are given a single kiss. They are given gummies. They stand strong.

“Midoriya?”

Izuku blinks. He feels boneless and lax as he turns to Vlad King. He is a teacher, but not one Izuku has had. “Hello.”

“You need to clean off.”

Izuku can agree. He does so. In the privacy of an emergency shower, he stands under the stream of water without bothering to take off his hero uniform.

He keeps his mouth firmly closed throughout the process.

--

Izuku spends his weekend in a strange cycle. He sleeps and stares at his ceiling and gnaws on his lip when guilt rushes over him. His mom brings him food. He bags it up in his closet and leaves the dishes on his bedside table so she won’t worry. She hugs him. He tells her he was scared.

She doesn’t smell like food. He’s not hungry. For the first time in months, he doesn’t feel afraid to hug his mom. She seems to think that means he will be okay.

He is okay, in some ways. His skin glows in the mirror. His thoughts are sharp. He fills a quarter of a notebook with analysis and details. Even with all his regret, he feels better than he has in months. He’s sated.

It makes getting up for school easy. It makes avoiding Katsuki on the way to class trivial. It makes facing his classmates hard.

Uraraka hugs him the second he walks into homeroom. She does a doubletake. Without his dark circles and swallow skin, he looks like a different person. Exhaustion was just another character trait of Izuku Midoriya, and without it he looks unassuming. “You’re okay,” Uraraka says, almost to herself. Her mouth tightens before she forces a grin. “That’s good. You look good.”

Hagakure sighs heavily. “You even have all of your fingers,” she jokes. It falls terribly flat when no one laughs.

Izuku glances between his classmates: Yaoyoruzu looked impeccable as always, with her wiry hair cut shorter than it had been. Kaminari and Mina sit on the same desk without their usual bickering. Hagakure places a hand over Tsuyu’s shoulder, and she ribbits. They all look too worried.

“Are you. . . okay?” Izuku tries. “What’s wrong?”

Uraraka coughs, shaking her head. “Midori-kun, you. . .”

“You were covered in blood, Midoriya.” Yaoyoruzu clenches her hands in front of her chest. “And we weren’t told any details.”

Izuku stiffens. He hadn’t checked his email or texts. He had just let himself be practically dead once his mom took him home. Of course people would worry. “I’m so sorry. None of it was mine,” Izuku stresses. “I’m fine. I slept all weekend. It was only some broken bones, and Recovery Girl fixed those. . .”

His classmates are staring at him with varying shades of alarm. Uraraka even bites her lip. “Uh, Midori-kun, what does that mean?”

“Who’s was it?” Kaminari asks. He glances to Mina, and her curiosity is equally apparent.

Tyusu catches his eye, and Hagakure coughs. Izuku blanches. He didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to explain. He stares at his shoes, the memories that he had tried to sleep away rolling over his skin. “Well, there was. . . I ended up needing to. . .”

“That is enough!”

Izuku startles. He glances up through his bangs to see Iida’s strong shoulders and bandages winding through his dark hair. This was the first time he’d ever been less than ten minutes early. “Midoriya has a right to privacy. Speculation is beneath us.” Iida chops his arm resolutely. “And we should be in our seats, not harassing our classmate.”

Kaminari snorts, his mouth a thin line. “Why bother? We don’t even know who our homeroom teacher is right now.”

“Kaminari,” Yaoyoruzu rebukes. Despite her sharp tone, she seems less than confident. She glances to the remaining students filing into homeroom. Upon seeing Jiro, she lets out a breath. “I’m sure they’ll. . . send someone.” She turns and begins checking in with others.

Uraraka’s mouth twists with something like guilt, and Izuku bumps his shoulder against hers. He forgets everything he could have possibly said. His classmates keep bickering, and all he can do is stare. The bags under Uraraka’s eyes are so deep. The skin over her left cheek is shiny and scar-speckled up close. “We can talk about it later,” he finally says. He didn’t know what else to offer. He just wants her to look bright again.

Iida nods firmly. “I have a lot to thank both of you for.”

“Fuck,” Katsuki hisses suddenly. “He’s like a fucking ghost.”

Aizawa had returned to class, and he had done so silently and covered in bandages. That doesn’t prevent him from getting his students under control. Where Yaoyoruzu and Iida had failed, it just took a ghoulish mask of bandages to send everyone scurrying to their seats.

“Now, with our unplanned long weekend,” Aizawa begins hoarsely, “we are behind in the curriculum--"

“What about that monster?” The class looks to Todoroki, who has never asked a question. He did not bother to raise his hand. “The Nomu. Did it escape?”

Aizawa blinks slowly. “It didn’t. Attempts at questioning proved it was not sapient. It will likely be euthanized.”

Izuku breath caught. He didn’t remember standing. But once he did, he found that he couldn’t sit down.

“Deku?” Katsuki hissed.

Izuku ignored him. “The nomu was--is a person. It--” he shakes his head, as if it would dislodge some clarity in the situation. “Cognitively, it--they--aren’t capable of. . . maliciousness. It--"

“Dude,” Kaminari said, “the villains all said it was engineered. Like, made to beat All Might.”

They are a person.” Izuku’s eye hurts.

“I was told the same thing.” Todoroki calmly interjects. “All of those villains believed it.”

“Well, it was a lie!”

“How would you know that?” Todoroki challenges.

Izuku didn’t know and he didn’t know and he didn’t know. “It’s musculature precisely matched human anatomy.”

“Comparative biology,” Yaoyoruzu interjects, “shows that anatomy isn’t a requirement for humanity. And thus it isn’t a qualifier. There are plenty of ways to engineer life. This is really--”

“Did they even sequence its genome?” Izuku can’t help the accusation in his voice. He isn’t going to budge. He knows what he knows. It would be easier to believe that he hadn’t hurt a person, but Izuku isn’t interested in what is easy. He can’t cross that line. He won’t. “It might match up to missing person’s cases. That could help give some insight--"

“We did. And we know who it is. We informed the family this morning.” Aizawa observes the varying degrees of shock, discomfort, and dawning horror rippling across the class. He stares directly at Izuku when he says, calmly and without compromise, “And we know there is no way to help beyond limiting suffering and preventing it from being abused again.”

Words congeal and clot over Izuku’s tongue.

Mina raises her hand. “But--”

“I didn’t want to discuss this,” Aizawa says, “but it is important to get this out of the way. As heroes, you will be tempted to dehumanize villains. Media does the legwork for you. However, they are nearly always people. You don’t need to empathize. But do not fall into the trap of assuming your enemies are not like you. It makes you a blunt instrument at best. Inhumane, if you allow yourself the indulgence.”

Izuku grits his jaw. He sits down and stares at his open notebook.

Aizawa waits for questions. There are none. “The sports festival is your next big event. We are going to discuss methods for identifying and targeting areas for improvement.”

--

Chapter 16: Chariot II

Notes:

dear god this chapter kicked my ass.

Chapter Text

As usual, Izuku reflects, Katsuki manages to piss off the majority of a crowd and fire up the rest. He walks away, completely unaffected, and leaves class 1-A to deal with the fall out: angry students and hungry competitors.

Shinsou Hitoshi matches Katsuki in a lot of ways: They both wear contempt as a mask of indifference. Even after Katsuki looks away, he sizes up the rest of the class. He doesn’t flinch from eye contact. He takes his time and then turns away.

Uraraka blinks, looking between Iida and Izuku. “I’m not really hungry today. Can we. . .”

“I’d like to discuss what happened,” Iida says.

So they do. The three of them head to the roof and speak candidly. Neither Uraraka or Iida suffered permanent injuries from Katsuki’s redirected explosion. Izuku admits to attacking the Nomu once the two of them were incapacitated. “It was--” Izuku bites around his words, searching for something to say that didn’t actually say much at all. “I stabbed it through the brain. It couldn’t really attack after that. So I just had to keep doing the damage until help came.”

Uraraka presses her fingertips together. She looks drained. “I want to just forget about it,” she admits. “I didn’t sleep much. I kept seeing dust. People turning into dust.”

“The attack was designed to terrify us,” Iida says. He is steadfast, but his speech sounds rehearsed. His logic is sound and perfectly abstracted from any emotion. Izuku uses the same tone to talk about unpleasant truths; it’s the tone he used when he lied to Toshinori’s face about his quirk. “We must refuse it any form of success. That is why UA is moving ahead with the festival.”

Uraraka sighs and nods. “You’re right, you’re right.”

Izuku realizes that, unlike Uraraka and Iida, he never had a sense of equilibrium at UA. His entire time had been defined by fear of discovery or failure. He was waiting for the second Aizawa’s eyes narrowed in recognition. He was waiting for the moment when his quirk went too far. The attack at USJ was threatening, but it was something he could move against. In robberies, he could run. As a hero, he could fight. At USJ, he saved people. Despite it being terrifying. . . Izuku preferred it. He’d spent so much of his life hoping that if he stayed still enough, people would leave him alone.

Which meant, ironically, he was probably the most qualified to be comforting in this situation.

“They didn’t succeed. All of us are alive. They were more harmed by the attack than anyone else.” Izuku scratches at his cheek and listens to the creak of chain-links in the wind. “I want to forget it, too. Let’s go to lunch. Before time is up.”

They do. Izuku brews coffee in the classroom while Iida and Uraraka stand in line, and they sit together and force themselves to discuss curriculum and jokes like everything is fine.

--

Ochako would admit that there were perks to living alone. She could fall asleep at eight and wake up at four in the morning. She could walk around in her threadbare pajamas and bang around in the kitchen. She could forget about the dishes and organize a hurricane of classwork and coupons across the floor of her living room. She only inconvenienced herself and answered to no one.

It was also incredibly lonely. She could tape magazines and stolen posters to the walls, but the space was too large and her belongings too sparse to look lived-in. Her apartment looked like a clean drug den; cheap, functional furniture, dim lighting, and empty cups spread over the industrial shelving unit disguised as a coffee table.

But it was paid for, a five-minute walk from school, and only hers.

So, when she wakes up due to crashing nose-first into her ceiling at some terrible time in the morning, it’s simple enough to tug on her workout clothes and head to the school-associated gym. The facility isn’t that impressive. It’s just a simple room on campus with the general exercise equipment and it is refreshingly non-ostentatious. The real money went towards hero-class education: However, Ochako didn’t need expensive. She just needed to get stronger. The weights lining the edge of the wall beckoned to her, but Ochako stretched and jogged around for a few minutes. Next time, she would just jog to school. Then she wouldn’t feel so impatient.

She didn’t want to stop using her quirk on herself. It was too useful to ignore, even if it made her puke. So, from what she gathered from Midoriya’s light-speed muttering about applications and work-arounds, the easiest solution would be to use it in short bursts. And that meant she needed to be fast. And that meant, since she would be in the air without outside forces to interrupt or assist her, she needed to be explosively strong.

And that had to start with just being a little strong, because Aizawa flatly told her that her first draft of her ‘Astronomical Improvement Plan’ would ruin her joints, even with all the cushioning in her costume. So, she stretches and works though conditioning. Even though she wants to bench press some super-impressive weight, and squat, and do whatever all the gym monkeys did, Ochako attacks her basics with a frenzy of motivation. She didn’t just want to scrape a decent showing. She wants to win. Even when the more logical part of her whispers how unlikely that is, she isn’t going to make it easy on her competitors.

Ironically, Uraraka isn’t that good at physics. She loves space and stars; but getting there take a lot of non-intuitive math. Academically, she isn’t impressive and never had been. Iida and Midoriya are both smart in that way a lot of isolated kids are. Iida is rich and had his family expectations, so he treats academic success as a point of pride. Midoriya probably never had friends to distract him from nerdier pursuits, and he’s pretty brilliant when he forgets to be self-conscious. She tries not to compare herself to them, but it’s difficult. Especially when the two of them start talking science over her head, or when Midoriya opens up about some quirk-theory and rattles off citations and data without pausing for breath.

So, she’s not smart. She can’t use her quirk on herself without puking. She got her place in UA because she had to be rescued. However, she has always been athletic. She likes to run around and climb things. She has an impeccable sense of balance and decent reaction time. And when it came down to it, if she could lay a hand on someone, she controlled whether they went into space. And she wants this. She wants it badly enough that she puts every ounce of energy into her jumps. When her legs burn, she does pushups. When her arms ache, she runs.

When Bakugou stalks into the first-year facility at six in the morning, she accidentally floats the stationary pull-up bar she had been using, and the entire machine tilted as she plummets towards the ground. She manages to stick the landing and prevent the metal from crashing into the mirror lining the back wall, but it is a close thing. She pretends that she didn’t hear Bakugou scoff as she pushes the machine back into place. Her face is red when she cancels her quirk, and she’s annoyed that the flush it isn’t from exertion.

Well, she isn’t leaving just because Bakugou showed up. Ochako forces her mouth to stop doing that weird puckering-thing it does whenever she’s upset. As far as derogatory nick-names go, she likes ‘Round-face’ just fine. She finishes up her workout, steadfastly ignores him, and appreciates that he does the same. He’s doing the weighted squat thing that she wants to do, and it pisses her off.

Sadly, it wasn’t some fluke. He’s there the next morning when she walks in. And he’s staring as she works. Yeah, he’s also minding his own business, but she keeps catching him looking through reflections in the mirror running along the back wall. It’s too early for this. She had chosen to be here this early to be alone.

“Stop staring at me,” she finally snaps, dropping her weights to the padded floor. She brushes her bangs away from her sweaty forehead and glares at him in the mirror. “You’re being creepy.”

Bakugou doesn’t not stop staring, and indeed appears to just stare harder. Finally he tilts his head and says, “Fight me.”

Ochako splutters. “Uh, what?” She shakes her head to clear it, and then parses the oddly sincere tone in Bakugou’s voice. She shakes her head harder to signal her refusal. It knocks her hair out of it’s tenuous ponytail. “Not happening. Go wrestle with Kirishima.”

Scoffing, Bakugou rolls his eyes. “Don’t be such a coward.” He pops his knuckles and flashes his quirk, and Ochako realizes she isn’t sure if there’s anyone in the building besides them. And then she is furious that the thought has to cross her mind.

She takes a single step back, towards the rack of weights lining the wall. One of them stabs reassuringly into the meat of her thigh. The thing about her quirk is that it never affects an object’s momentum. It just cancels out the force due to gravity. It makes it very easy to hurl three hundred pounds, and it would not make the impact any softer.

She would never, of course. But she could. And that’s all she needed. She wasn’t going to be pushed around in her own school. “If you weren’t so violent,” Ochako says, “I would. . . actually, no. If you weren’t such an unrepentant bully, I would gladly help with any polite request you had. But you’re an asshole and I have no reason to do anything to help.” She sticks her tongue out, adrenaline turning her face red and her mouth hot. “So mind your own business.”

“This is my fucking business. And yours. Last time I checked, four-eyes was the one who almost got disintegrated at USJ.” Bakugou raises his eyebrows, managing to look impatient. “So, really, you should be thanking me for graciously allowing you the honor of contributing to me killing that fuckhead villain.”

Ochako blinks. “You want to. . . fight me. . . to practice against the League of Villains?”

“Yeah. Keep up. Five-point contact quirk with an instant effect. That’s their nutso leader, right?” Bakugou raises his palms in mock surrender, waving his fingers. “Last I checked, you’ve got the same thing, so you’re the only way to simulate anything close.”

Ochako’s quirk was nothing like that man’s. She tramps down on the instinctive urge to refute, though. That would be ignoring the whole other part of why Bakugou’s request was insane. “They aren’t our responsibility.”

“Yeah, but they were sure as hell our problem.”

Ochako splutters again. “You--”

“And last time I checked, we fucking embarrassed them! Outclassed by a bunch of highschoolers--” Bakugou clucks his tongue-- “that’s gotta sting. They’ll be back.”

She honestly didn’t want to think about that, and it must have shown on her face. The smug pride slides off his face and is replaced with the far more familiar disgust. “Fuck, you’re all such cowards. Something doesn’t go away just because you stop seeing it and hide under a blanket.” He knocks on his temple, sneering. “You failed that psych test, but there’s this thing called object permanence. Maybe if you read about it, you could develop some.”

Ochako hasn’t been insulted like this in over a year. She’s not delighted by the deja vu. “Develop some--some humility! God, you’re so arrogant!” She mimics him, exaggeratingly knocking on her forehead. “Last time I checked you went chasing smoke, and then blew us up! Iida was more harmed by you than any villain because you can’t keep your nose--"

“Well, how the fuck was anyone else supposed to escape with him there?!”

“You didn’t care about your classmates!” Ochako snaps. “You wanted to trap the villains.”

“And it worked. Now they’re not around to try--”

“You still haven’t apologized!” Ochako whips her hands in the air. “Because of your ‘greatness,’ you single-handedly put all of us in danger. Midoriya fought that thing alone. If Todoroki hadn’t come in to clean up your mess, your stupid quirk would have killed us, and you still haven’t apologized!”

Bakugou didn’t flinch, and he didn’t look ashamed, but his gritted teeth betrayed a sore spot. “That was--”

Ochako digs her nail into it. “A mistake! A failure! A sign that you’re not ready to be a hero,” she spelled out, “much less go picking a fight!”

 Bakugou keeps his mouth shut, glaring at her for a long moment. There’s just the grim drone of the air conditioning filling the too-small gym. He averts his eyes. “I fucked up.” With a grace that betrayed how that admission was as painful as chewing through his own arm, he admits, “And that’s. . . Agh, that’s why I’m asking for this.”

Ochako isn’t moved. “Asking to beat me up? This time with my express consent?”

“Asking for a favor!” Bakugou flips her off, spins around to pace in a single circle, and then returns to the exact same spot. “Because I’m not going to fuck up the same way twice, and when I can’t use my gauntlets because everyone is in the fucking way, I want to be damn good at not dying!”

Ochako sighs, rubbing at her temples. She has a stomachache. “Or you could leave it to adults. Y’know,” she offers, “and focus whatever this crisis is into the sports festival like, oh, any other student.”

“I’m not worried about some stupid festival,” Bakugou dismisses, once again brandishing pride without an ounce of doubt. “Hah. If anything, I’m giving you a leg up with this. You’re welcome.”

Ochako’s mouth is doing that very unattractive wobbly thing. “You should be worried.” She really needs to cool off. “Because despite whatever delusions you’ve got in that caramelized rock you call a brain, there are plenty of people at this school who can beat you.” She has never wanted to win so badly. “And while I’m doing you a favor, you’re welcome to continue wasting your time for some fight you’ll probably never get.”

Bakugou stares at her. He scoffs, crossing his arms over his chest. “Caramelized rock? Really?”

Ochako gathers her hair back into a ponytail, not giving one iota of dignity. “Shut up and don’t burn me.”

He wants to spar with someone like Shigaraki? Sure. She can do that. She spends her nights watching him on the inside of her eyelids. How hard can it be to replicate?

Chapter 17: Chariot III

Notes:

READ THIS:

I am alive and want to give y'all a complete story. In that interest though, the quality and quantity of writing is about to take a drastic hit. I'm going to gloss over a lot and not expand on a few stories I once had planned--however I hope I can deliver a few more twists and gut punches before I lay this story to rest.

Chapter Text

There's spectacle, and then there is UA. There's spectacle, there's UA, and then there is the sports festival.

Bright, big, overwhelming. A testament to money and entertainment and the superhuman. Any friendly chatter between classmates melts under the glaring sun as the freshman class walks to the start. Child become performer. The aspirer now a star. The dissonance is abrupt and concussive. Scream-loud, shout-loud, whisper-loud; the open air arena is packed with people, and Izuku counts his breaths and quiets his thoughts.

He is full; and thus he cannot be hungry. Any indication of hunger is a lie.

Uraraka and Iida burn with adrenaline anticipation, and his quirk stirs in hind-brain mimicry of their stress. The three of them had clustered together tightly in the aftermath of USJ. They almost made for a matched set of ambition. Izuku knew what they wanted because they wore it plainly in the force of their exertion the previous week. They both want to win. And win. And win. For family and pride. For every shred of difference between Uraraka and Iida, they ironically want the same.

Izuku is full, and the only scenario in which he wins is that feeling surviving the afternoon.

It survives the first task.

He places in the middle--out of breath from limiting his quirk, but uninjured and there to console Iida for losing a footrace. "It's the final placements that really matter!" he argues, trying very hard to make Iida's utter embarrassment dissipate. "There's merit in making it to the end. Several of our classmates have already burnt through their quirks."

Uraraka stops combing her disheveled hair into place. In a motion that has become warmly common, she rotates so that the three of them are all facing each other and close enough that one would be hard pressed to eavesdrop. "Like who?"

Izuku rattles off a few observations. Hagakure is physically exhausted, along with Ojiro. They had exerted themselves to end up with higher placements, and they would probably need to take this round easy to advance. Likewise with Sato.

"And Bakugou?" Uraraka asks seriously. "Todoroki? They nearly ripped each other to pieces over first place. Could you, y'know, listen in?"

'Listening in' is Uraraka's polite phrase for spying. Normally, Izuku respected privacy as much as he was able. However, Uraraka's intense gaze undermines any desire to protest. He wants her to win. He wants Iida to win. And sometimes that means giving up some secrets that aren't his to give.

Izuku worried the inside of his lip before closing his eyes. He stretches his senses, tuning into his hearing in a way he normally tries to ignore. Snatches of conversation flow through his head with the grace of a freight train. Voices familiar and new ring with a strange, visceral awareness. He's gotten better at filtering breath and heartbeat from his perception, but focusing on conversation is still an unnatural task. He does so anyway.

"Kaminari is slurring his speech. Mina ran out of acid, so she has at least a half-hour before she returns to full capacity."

Iida sighs, his brow furrowing. "This really isn't sporting."

Uraraka shrugs. "I just want to know. It's not a crime to go in knowing what you're up against."

Izuku cringes a bit at Iida's disappointment. "Neither Todoroki or Bakugou are talking," he mutters. Uraraka lets it drop, but she keeps staring across the field towards Katsuki.

That changes about ten seconds later, when the exam proctor gleefully announces a chariot race. A test for a team.

Unbidden, izuku looks at his two friends. They look at him and each other, and Izuku remembers that he has one of the lowest scores in his class. He would contribute very few points to their baseline score. He spies Todoroki, white hair flashing in the sun as he makes a beeline towards Iida; hears Momo quickly listing off the devices that complement enhanced speed. Uraraka is pressing her fingertips together like she has bad news, and--almost unconsciously--she glances at Katsuki.

Iida begins to say, gravely, like a line in the sand, "I believe--"

"I know how we can get first place." Izuku forces himself to not flinch or cower. He claps his hands together, as if he has a plan. Almost instantly, one does spring to mind. After all, Uraraka and Iida's quirks are more familiar to Izuku than his own. He's fallen asleep running through battle simulations with the three of them. It takes a fraction of a second to realize how well-suited they are to this task. He just pretends that fractional second occurred before the lie. "But I'll need your help."

Izuku draws their triangle closer together. He stares down Todoroki over Uraraka's shoulder, a flare of annoyance drawing his face into hostility. Todoroki has never spared a glance towards Izuku's friends. He doesn't get to pick and choose stat combinations for an optimal outcome. He shakes his head once, and refuses to look away when Todoroki narrows his expressionless, mismatched eyes. 

Uraraka has to prompt him out of watching Todoroki smoothly turn to track down someone else. Izuku then articulates several dozen principles and steps to the plan as teams form spontaneously around them. It falls out of his mouth like a thesis. He hasn't argued with this much enthusiasm since USJ. The more he whispers, the more excited his friends grow. Izuku proves, step by tenuous step, how the three of them can win. In two minutes, that crisis of uncertainty is left to history.

Uraraka and Iida get their chance at first place. Sometimes that means taking a few risks. Sometimes it means making a few leaps in the interest of not being left behind.

--

For anyone who had ever wondered, Izuku does have the reaction speed to capitalize on Iida's full sprinting speed.

For anyone who has ever wondered, mid-air, zero gravity combat is quickly becoming one of Izuku's specialties.

They walk out of round two with a million points and minimal exertion to show for it. Izuku is not hungry.

--

"You really shouldn't bait Bakugou," Iida chides Ochako over their rushed and light lunch. "It's really beneath you."

Ochako makes a vague attempt at innocence that falls apart the moment she starts grinning. "When he gets all-compassionately pissed, his ears turn red. He looks so dumb."

"Language," Iida reminds. "Rescue heroes need to set a good example."

Ochako sticks her tongue out in defiance, but she acknowledges the point. She is marketing herself as a role-model. It would be really bad to develop a filthy vocabulary and then need to break away from the habit. Still, she didn't need to try to be the better person. That was such a high bar that she could stand on her tiptoes and clear it with a foot of head room.  "It's not my fault that he takes any attempt at reconciliation as an attack. I could be entirely sincere, and he'd find a reason to be mad." She had tried and tried being nice. Being nice is overrated. She would save it for people who deserve it and don't treat everyone around them like trash. "Besides, I meant it. He almost had us at the end!"

Iida does not smile when he adjusts his glasses, but the tilt of his chin betrays his pride. "I suppose," he agrees eventually. He had been working for a while on his super cool sprint technique for weeks. With anti-gravity, he didn't even hurt himself in the process. It was the kind of picture-perfect showing that got great visibility in these events. "It was an. . . 'admirable' attempt."

Ochako punches his shoulder, overflowing with excitement. The three of them had done amazing. Better than anyone expected from their initial scores. They were going to score so, so many cool opportunities. "So, you need to kick this Hitoshi guy's butt so you and Izuku can have a great match--and then I need to win," She says, "and the three of us sweep the competition."

Iida tries not to pause. "Is the baiting a, uh, warm up for your match?"

Ochako drinks her electrolytes and considers the question. "It can't hurt. Let him simmer. He's dumber when he's mad."

--

"You really shouldn't blow up at Uraraka," Kaminari complains. "She's unfairly nice. Like, I quit being nice to you months ago."

"You were ever nice?" Mina elbows Kaminari in the side. "First mistake. That's why you got fourth place."

"Not all of us get scouted by the dream team," Kaminari shot back. "It's Todoroki less smacky? I feel like he's less smacky than our resident shithead."

Katsuki grinds his teeth. "Round-face--"

"Ochako," Kirishima corrects.

"--is not 'nice.'"

Mina shrugs. "Up for debate. You're not a reliable character witness." She glances over to the million-point team--or at least the two that bothered to eat. "I mean, Midoriya is definitely the brains of the operation. Once he opens his mouth, he's got the tactics. Iida is solidly the most combat dangerous. Uraraka is, uh, just as fucking bonkers as anyone in this class, but she's, uh, not particularly skilled? Like, she can kick Bakugou's ass six ways to Sunday because he has some weird hangup, but--"

Katsuki left the room before he broke something.

--

Notes:

So there's a lot of fun mechanics and plot ideas that im pumped to explore for this fic. what scene/moment was your fave?? id love to know!

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