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Shinso Hitoshi is not a hero.
He is a lot of things: talented, driven, a hard worker. He’s clever and resourceful and creative when he needs to be. He’s not a great collaborator and sometimes an even worse communicator, but he thinks that’s probably fine, because it’s not like his Quirk requires collaboration anyway.
He’s intimidating, if you listen to his classmates. Creepy, if you listen to the people he crosses paths with on the street. Dangerous, if you listened to the doctors when they first figured out what, exactly, his Quirk would develop to be.
Keep an eye on that boy, they warned his parents in hushed voices. If he wanted to, he could burn this world to ash.
Shinso Hitoshi is a lot of things. He’s not a hero, though.
He’s just trying to be.
The most frustrating thing, Shinso thinks, is not the way people look at him when they find out about his Quirk, the way their expressions shutter and turn cautious, assessing - fearful, even. It’s not the confusion or contempt in their voices when they tell him that maybe, just maybe, he ought to consider an alternative career path. It’s not even the way they watch him when they think he’s not looking, like he’s a bomb about to detonante.
The most frustrating thing is how close he keeps coming to achieving something, to proving them all wrong.
Close, close, close.
But never there.
When he applies to Yuuei, he is accepted, but not into the hero course. When he fights Midoriya Izuku at the sports festival, he almost wins - almost, but not quite. He does well in classes, but not well enough for his classmates to forget that his Quirk makes him one well-delivered sentence away from world domination.
Shinso lives in a world of almosts and not-quites.
Maybe next time, maybe never.
Despite all that, though - despite everything - Shinso is still trying to be a hero.
And so, when Eraserhead knocks on his dressing room door in the aftermath of his match with Midoriya, Shinso lets him in, even though he’s still feeling off-kilter and unmoored. When Eraserhead sits down at the table opposite him, looks him directly in the eyes, Shinso looks back, even though he knows what that means for his ability to use his Quirk. And when Eraserhead offers to tutor him - to train him, if he’d be interested in the extra help…
Well.
Shinso is trying to be a hero. So he says yes.
The training is difficult, to say the least. Yuuei’s curriculum is rigorous even outside of the hero course, so it’s not like Shinso isn’t used to hard work and discipline. But Eraserhead - Aizawa-sensei, as Shinso slowly begins to think of him - doesn’t let Shinso get away with anything. No slacking, no slipping.
He works himself ragged. The after-school lessons aren’t as important as his actual classwork, his homeroom teacher keeps reminding him, but Shinso pours himself into both and ends up doing twice the work of the rest of his classmates in the general education course. Months pass like that, months of yelling instructions at targets until his throat is too raw for him to speak, months of mostly-sleepless nights and mostly-stressful days.
It pays off, though, when Aizawa asks him if he wants to join the training exercise with the hero classes. Once again, Shinso agrees without really thinking about it. He’s been dreaming about the hero course for years, after all. If he passed up a chance like this because of nerves, he’d never be able to forgive himself.
The training exercises aren’t what he’d expected them to be, though. He’d expected fierce competition and probably injuries, coupled with the painfully awkward kind of teamwork that comes from inserting forcibly yourself into a group that’s already been working together - surviving together - for months without you.
What he hadn’t expected was for them to welcome him.
When he’d lost to Midoriya Izuku at the sports festival, Shinso wasn’t necessarily surprised. It was more what he said to Midoriya that surprised him, the half-second of honesty he’d allowed himself. You can’t help what your heart longs for . It wasn’t something that he’d voiced out loud in a very long time, and sounded way too much like a confession even to his own ears. In hindsight, it’s obvious that Midoriya has a way of dragging people out of themselves; he’s done it with the notoriously icy Todoroki Shouto too, after all. Shinso sees them together in the hallways, sometimes, walking with their heads inclined towards each other and their shoulders bumping like they’d never fought at all.
What Shinso hadn’t known was that the rest of Class 1-A was like that, too.
“I like you, dude,” Kaminari Denki says to him, with the chaos of battle still settling like dust around them. He’s got dirt smudged on his cheek, scrapes on his hands and a bruise already forming like a shadow along his jaw, but his smile is bright-bright-bright. Almost blinding. “You’re a proper hero-hopeful, just like the rest of us.”
It’s weird, Shinso thinks. He doesn’t need friends. Doesn’t want them, even.
But he doesn’t think he would mind, necessarily, being Kaminari’s.
So, a couple weeks later, when Aizawa invites him to accompany his class on a weekend-long overnight training camp, he agrees again.
The training takes place in the forest outside the city, at a campsite that Shinso has never been to before. The day of the trip, Class 1-A - plus Shinso - board a school-provided bus at the gates of Yuuei. It’s Friday morning, just after sunrise; the sky is still bleeding gray along the horizon line. Not daytime yet, not quite.
Shinso sits in the back of the bus and lets his head tip sideways until it bumps against the cool glass of the window. Up front, Bakugou Katsuki is snapping at Midoriya about something while Kirishima Eijirou tugs on his arm with laughter on his face. Kaminari’s laughing too, saying something that can’t be heard above Bakugou’s tantrum. The scene looks unreal, somehow, in the early morning light. Like a half-dream.
Shinso lets his eyes fall shut.
The bus ride is long; Shinso sleeps for most of it. They finally arrive at the campsite with the sun scraping much higher in the sky. There’s warmth in the air - the promise of summer - but not enough to be uncomfortable. They pitch their tents around a clearing, grouping themselves off naturally. Kaminari glances Shinso’s way a couple times before letting Sero Hanata lead him away. Shinso pretends not to notice.
The trees are dense, light filtering through the leaves and staining the clearing vaguely golden. It’s pretty, Shinso thinks, idly. Peaceful.
The training itself is fine. It’s good, even; working with Class 1-A always has a way of pushing Shinso out of his comfort zone, a way of making him a better fighter and a better hero. It’s just that Shinso sort of feels… extraneous, like a flashy addition to a machine that doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not the whole thing actually works. So he works hard during the day, and then stays out of the way at night - sticking to himself, keeping up with the school work for his normal classes or just wandering through the trails that wind like veins through the woods around the campsite.
The last night of the trip, Shinso takes a little longer on his walk than usual. By the time he gets back to the campsite, it’s getting late. There’s movement in tents, some lanterns still lit beside a few of them, but the campsite is otherwise very, very quiet. The campfire Class 1-A had been sitting around when Shinso left has long since died down, leaving behind the dull orange glow of a few still-burning coals and the acrid smell of bonfire smoke.
Shinso hesitates, then crosses the clearing to sit on one of the long, low logs Class 1-A had set up as makeshift benches. The memory of heat still drifts up from the embers, carried skyward by the breeze.
Shinso tips his head back as far as it can go. Above him, the sky is painted the deepest purple-blue imaginable, splashed across the heavens in broad, uneven strokes. The darkness is dynamic, dimensional, like clouds. The stars look like glitter that’s been poured into water and stirred.
It’s pretty, Shinso thinks. He wonders why it makes him feel small.
He stays like that for awhile - longer, maybe, than he’d meant to. Just as his neck is starting to ache, though, there is a rustling in the trees to Shinso’s left. Before Shinso can think to go on the defensive, though, or raise the alarm, Kaminari Denki shuffles his way out of the underbrush, stumbling over a stray root as he passes out of the treeline and into the clearing.
Kaminari blinks, bleary-eyed, at him for a long second in the semi-darkness. Then he says, “Oh, Shinso-kun. Hey. I was wondering where you’d gotten off to. Sero said your tent was empty when he went to grab you for dinner.”
“Oh,” Shinso says, because he can’t really think of a better response to that. Because it never even occurred to him as a possibility, that people might be looking for him at all.
“Whatcha doing out here?” Kaminari says, and then - bizarrely, completely inexplicably - he crosses the clearing and settles at the fireside, an arm’s length from Shinso’s side. “Isn’t it kind of cold?”
“It’s not that cold,” Shinso says, only now that Kaminari pointed it out, it sort of is, and he can’t help a tiny shiver.
Kaminari snorts. “Okay, tough guy. You can restart the fire if you want. I don’t think anyone would mind, as long as you put it out before you left.”
“That’s okay,” Shinso tells him, and then, because it’s dark, and it’s late, and he thinks this small piece of honesty is probably something he can afford, he adds: “With the fire, you can’t really see the stars. It’s better like this.”
“Oh,” Kaminari says, and he sounds surprised. Shinso winces inwardly, and his brain fills in the rest of this conversation automatically: what does someone like you care about seeing the stars?
But Kaminari doesn’t say anything like that. Instead, he just tips his head back and looks upwards, his mouth falling slightly open.
“It doesn’t look like this in the city,” he says, his voice rounded out with awe.
Shinso bites back the sharp obviously that raises to his tongue automatically. Because Kaminari’s expression is open and unguarded - honest, the kind of expression that usually disappears behind a cautious mask the second Shinso walks into a room. And anyway, he thinks he knows what Kaminari means. The sky seems larger here than it did over the city. Boundaries don’t exist out here the way they did back there.
Which is why, maybe, Shinso hears himself say, “Why aren’t you afraid of me?”
Kaminari blinks, then tips his face back down to look Shinso in the eyes. There’s a half-second where he looks startled, or maybe just confused, before his expression settles into something like understanding.
“Should I be afraid of you?” he asks, a half-smile tugging at his mouth, and it almost feels like a challenge.
Shinso frowns. “No,” he mutters. “I’m trying to be a hero. That doesn’t usually stop people, though.”
“Heroes can be scary,” Kaminari points out, and then he giggles a little and lowers his voice. “Look at Aizawa-sensei. Look at Endeavor. He’s the top hero in the whole country now and he scares the living hell out of me. You’re allowed to be scary and still be a hero.” He hesitates for a second and shifts his gaze away from Shinso, back up towards the sky. “You can be scary and still be good.”
“Oh,” Shinso says.
Oh .
Before the competition, before they had to work together, Shinso had sort of assumed Kaminari was an idiot - someone who got into the hero course through a mixture of raw strength and luck and the kind of genetics that people like Shinso had missed out on. Kaminari isn’t stupid, though. Shinso thinks he maybe just walks through the world with a little more wonder than Shinso does.
When he’d first started at Yuuei, Shinso had looked at Class 1 and thought, what do they have that I don’t? He’d looked at Midoriya Izuku and seen incompetence, looked at Kaminari and seen idiocy.
He gets it, now, though.
He gets it.
“You walk kind of a weird line, dude,” Kaminari says, crooked smile firmly in place now. “Like, sure, your Quirk is nuts. Totally and completely whack. But it’s not about what you can do with it, it’s about what you choose to do with it, right?”
“I’ve been trying to tell people that for awhile, yeah,” Shinso says, and his tone is dry, but his chest is feeling weirdly tight and warm.
“Hero, villain, whatever,” Kaminari continues, and he waves a hand. “Are you a good person? That’s the shit that matters.”
Shinso stares at him. After a long moment, Kaminari shifts his gaze away from the sky and brings it down to meet Shinso’s again.
“I know you said you had no intention of making friends,” Kaminari says, more seriously than before. “But - and I don’t mean to alarm you - I think you ended up making some anyway.”
“I guess I did,” Shinso mumbles, barely louder than a breath, barely loud enough for him to hear it himself. But Kaminari huffs out another laugh and bumps Shinso’s arm with his shoulder.
“I really hope you get into the hero course,” he says. And then he gets to his feet, beating dust off his pants, and is gone before Shinso can think to call after him.
Above Shinso’s head, the stars spin.
His heart feels funny, full and off-balance.
I really hope you get into the hero course.
“Me, too,” Shinso says, in the direction of Kaminari’s back.
The trees do not respond.