Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Izuku knew he wasn't supposed to be out that late at night. It wasn't going to stop him anytime soon, but he knew he wasn't supposed to be wandering the alleyways so long after dark. Especially since he was only 12. His mind was buzzing with all the things that could go wrong, but somehow nothing he could think of was worse than going to school in the morning, so he kept walking.

He wasn't about to tell Kacchan that he was an excellent motivator to get over his fears. His childhood friend would never forget it, would probably use it as ammunition against him.

That wasn't the point, though. He wasn't out so late for his health or to prove anything. Well, he reflected, he might be trying to prove something, but it was only to himself. He was trying to find Eraserhead.

There had been a couple of notable arrests recently, brought in by an unnamed hero. The footage Izuku had seen online had Eraserhead's signature capture scarf as the sole identifying feature in the videos. Well, that and the image of an alley across from a bar. What was more, it was an area Izuku was familiar with. Which was why he was out on the streets trying to see if Eraserhead was still in the area.

Walking around late at night was unusual. He was the only one around and his footsteps echoed around him oddly. It was like someone else was walking behind him, but no one was there when he turned to look. And yet it still wasn't as scary as facing down an angry Kacchan.

Izuku found the alleyway almost too soon. He hadn't seen many people in the streets, though a couple stumbled out of the bar across the street and wandered in the vague direction of the nearest train station. He turned down the alley and let his eyes adjust to the lower light level.

It was almost disappointing how normal the alley looked. The smell of rotting garbage, stagnant water, and old vomit cluttered the atmosphere, but that was to be expected. Alleyways weren't clean, and they weren't usually a priority to be cleaned. A few large garbage and recycling bins were pushed up against one building, but whoever was supposed to be using them didn't seem to care much because there were bits of trash scattered about. Including, oddly, something that looked like a long compression bandage.

Izuku frowned. That wasn't exactly something people just threw away. They were reusable and useful. He wandered over to pick it up.

It was a lot heavier than he was expecting it to be and it rustled when he touched it. Frowning again, Izuku pulled his hand back. Whatever this was, it wasn't a compression bandage.

Realization slowly trickled over him as he reached to pick it up again and it moved in his fingers. He was holding a capture scarf. And not just any capture scarf, Eraserhead's.

Izuku's head shot up and he looked around suddenly. He was a hero fanboy, he knew this, but to just take it was a step too far in his mind. It was like stealing, even if it had been left behind for whatever reason. Maybe it was malfunctioning? Maybe the villain Eraserhead took down had somehow managed to break it? Eraserhead didn't strike him as the sort of person to leave his main weapon behind, but it had been a couple days since the fight, and it was still here.

As wrong as the idea of taking it was, Izuku's mind raced through all the worst-case scenarios he could think of. What if a villain got their hands on it, someone who encountered Eraserhead often? They could study it, maybe learn how to neutralize it. Although Izuku didn't doubt the man would adapt, it wasn't worth taking the risk. He gathered the scarf in his arms.

Well, he tried to gather it in his arms. It was like trying to hold a bunch of writhing snakes as the loops moved under his hands like it was trying to run away from him. Maybe that was why it was still in the alley. As he tried to settle it in some form of order, he felt a sharp pinch on his upper arm. Apparently, snakes were too accurate a metaphor. Fortunately, though, the scarf settled after causing him pain.

A dry voice in the back of his mind pointed out how much it was like everything else in his life, practically impossible until it causes him enough pain to be satisfied. Izuku pushed that voice back as far as he could. He was just projecting bad feelings on an inanimate object and that wasn't fair.

He took the scarf back home and managed to sneak back into the house without his mother noticing that he'd gone missing in the first place.

By the cold light of day, Izuku looked at the scarf again where he had deposited it just inside his closet. He reached to touch it and it reached back.

He panicked, flinging himself back and away from it. Just in time, apparently, as it started thrashing around again. He wasn't touching it, but it was freaking out almost as much as he was.

He froze, and so did the scarf.

As far as he was aware, the scarf wasn't actually alive. Was it? The very idea was terrifying. And weird. And a little bit funny when it wasn't freaking him out. Most people brought home stray dogs or cats, but Izuku, he had to bring home a potentially sentient capture scarf! He wasn't even sure why he was surprised by this new level of absurdity. At least it probably didn't need to eat. Probably.

Izuku crossed the hall to the bathroom just to do something to distract himself. It was only when he was staring at his reflection in the mirror that he remembered the strange pinch in his arm right before the scarf settled down. Pulling up his sleeve, there was a small scratch in the same general area.  One part of the scratch was deeper than the rest, almost like a puncture wound of some sort. How he would have gotten it from a scarf he didn't know, but it cemented in his mind the need for research. He needed to know everything he could find out about the capture scarf itself, be it speculation or something else.

Fortunately for Izuku, it was Sunday. He didn't think he'd be able to think about anything else other than this problem, and his distraction around Kacchan was a recipe for disaster and chemical burns, neither of which he welcomed at the best of times, least of all when he was unable to mitigate as much of the damage.

Once he was back in his room—the capture scarf rustling softly on the floor of his closet—he booted up his laptop and made his way to the underground hero pages. He knew it wouldn't be the best information and there was no guaranteeing it would be at all accurate, but he needed somewhere to start, and that was where most of the speculation about Eraserhead's capture scarf ended up.

There was a lot of speculation about it, more than he'd been expecting, and no one could quite agree what it was supposed to be. Someone suggested that Eraserhead's control of the scarf was his quirk, rather like Best Jeanist's ability to control certain fabrics. Others thought it was just a good support item, perhaps bound to the hero through some form of DNA link. One of the more obscure theories said that the scarf wasn't actually all that special at all and Eraserhead had learned to use it like a lasso. No one really believed that because the footage that could be found of some of Eraserhead's fights showed the scarf moving in ways that couldn't be replicated with rope.

All of that to say no one knew how it worked, but Izuku knew it somehow had a degree of independent movement with even a small amount of human contact. He had touched it, and suddenly it was moving. The longer he'd held it, the more it moved. Something had changed between then and now since it was reaching for him and moving or stopping when he did. Something had happened to what? Bind it to him? Was there some sort of sentience in it that decided it liked him? Did it have something to do with the scratch on his arm?

He sighed. None of his questions were going to be answered by the forums because Eraserhead wasn't about to tell people about his main weapon. Izuku had an advantage over all the theorists on the internet, though. He actually had access to a capture scarf.

It fluttered in his arms as he picked it up off the floor of his closet, less violent than the night before and he still wasn't sure why. It wrapped around his wrists like an affectionate cat twining around its owner's legs and Izuku just sighed. Whether it was sentient or not, he was probably going to have to get used to these sorts of movements. He was probably also going to start talking to it as if it were sentient, because you never know, and he wanted to be polite.

"Can you hold still please?" he asked as he set the scarf down on his desk. "I just want to look at you."

Instantly, it stilled under his fingers and Izuku put another mental check under 'possibly sentient' in his head. As gently as he could, he arranged the capture scarf in a loop so he could examine it inch by inch to figure out what had stabbed him in the arm. Now that he was paying attention to it, the strange fabric, though heavy, was softer than he was expecting it to be. It sort of glittered under the light, so it had to be reinforced in some way, and there was no doubt in his mind that some of this had to be micro technology that enabled the scarf to move on its own. But it was still soft and supple against his fingertips. It was like holding titanium lacework. For all he knew, it was actually made of titanium.

It wasn't until he reached the middle of the scarf that he found something that wasn't soft. He knew this was the part that had jabbed him because there was a little bit of blood on the fabric, but whatever jagged part had been there wasn't there anymore, leaving behind a slim, flexible capsule that looked like it was partially filled with liquid mercury. Well, he called it a capsule, but it was more like a small envelope that the scarf almost appeared to grow out of like the branches of a tree from the trunk. Though the trunk was a flat, translucent pouch of something semi-liquid. The contents flowed and swirled. Whatever was inside reacted to his touch, following his thumb as he swiped it across the surface instead of being pushed away. Then, while he was still holding it, part of the capsule distended slightly, forming a small point that jabbed his thumb. He pulled away quickly enough to watch the silvery substance disappear under his skin.

"I hope that's not poisonous," Izuku muttered, pressing a handkerchief against the small puncture wound as he looked back at the scarf. "Although, if it was, I'd probably be dead already from last night."

He couldn't completely discount the idea as it could be a safety feature to prevent someone else from using Eraserhead's scarf if they weren't him. But he didn't feel any the worse for wear and clearly whatever it had done had affected what it was able to do and how it reacted to him. Moreover, Izuku was pretty sure that if he were to try to put on the capture scarf the way Eraserhead did, the capsule would be sitting against his spine.

When he turned back to his examination, he found a small symbol printed on the capsule. It was a western-style dragon with the letters KSSI written in the open space between the body and the curve of the tail that looped around toward the head. Now that he had something of a direction, Izuku typed what he assumed was a company acronym into an online search engine to see what came up.

Kaplan-Stark Support Industries. The logo appeared on his screen next to the list of search results, all of which offered to take him to specific pages on the official site or waxed poetic about the sort of things they were capable of. The first thing that caught Izuku's attention was the fact that, unlike what he'd been expecting, Kaplan-Stark didn't typically make hero gear. They were better known for prosthesis, the best available on the market due to their innovative use of nanotechnology.

Of course, they wouldn't advertise that they were the company to make Eraserhead's capture scarf, as that could easily compromise the hero in the field. But now Izuku had the scarf and he knew they were responsible for it. The pieces made sense. The scarf was laced with nanotechnology, the capsule was probably full of a saline slurry full of nanobots, and some connection between that and him had been made.

Izuku scrolled down and selected one of the videos that claimed to explain what their nanotechnology did.

A mildly informative three hours later had Izuku sitting back in his chair, looking at the scarf with awe and more than a little trepidation. The videos described the use of nanobots in the average prosthetic as bridging the gap between the mechanical arm and the central nervous system. The nanobots were self-replicating to a certain point, using trace amounts of minerals and nutrients already found in the blood to create more bots to keep the system running. There was a threshold the nanobots weren't allowed to surpass, and the defunct bots were recycled by the body.

The difference between the normal prosthetic and the capture scarf, however, was that a prosthetic replaced a missing body part while the scarf was not technically part of the body at all. The videos didn't expound upon this as it wasn't something they advertised as a commercial product. It did explain that the prosthetic was not sentient regardless of whatever strange movements people had observed whether or not it was attached, as this was the brain trying to assimilate new or renewed input from the missing limb. The nanobots operated on a closed network with one another, and so contact was not required for them to receive signals for movement.

Privately, Izuku was still sure there was something about the scarf that wasn't exactly the same, so he would probably still talk to it like a person. It couldn't hurt his reputation more than it was already damaged by being quirkless. Having 20 meters worth of capture scarf that he talked to sometimes wasn't going to be any weirder than that.

It wasn't until that moment he realized he didn't intend to return it. While he didn't have a way of getting in contact with Eraserhead, it wasn't that hard to find someone who knew him or could get in contact with him. But no part of Izuku's plans had him tracking the man down to return the scarf.

This was probably exactly why people called him a creepy stalker. He had gone out actively looking for Eraserhead, had found his capture scarf instead, and decided to keep it instead of returning it like a normal person. Shame burned in his gut, but it wasn't enough to change his mind, especially as the scarf wound itself around him like a hug. He wanted to learn to use it, to train his brain to wield it like an extra limb the way Eraserhead used his. The man clearly had another one if he wasn't too concerned about losing it in the alleyway. It had been cast aside like him, and even if it didn't have feelings, he couldn't stop himself from drawing the connections between it and himself.

Besides, Eraserhead used his capture scarf as an equalizer against more physically powerful quirks. That was exactly what Izuku needed. He just hoped the hero wouldn't begrudge him taking the chance while it was in front of him.

Izuku tried to wear the scarf the same way as Eraserhead at first, but he quickly realized that he would either be written off as an idiot for wearing a scarf as big as it was when he didn't need one or someone would recognize it and get it taken away. Leaving it at home wasn't an option in his mind, so he managed to find a way to twine the scarf around his torso and arms under his gakuran so he would always have it.

After a couple months of practice with it, he managed to make wrapping it around him in the mornings second nature. He was constantly warm for the extra layer it offered, but he would sacrifice his physical comfort for the protection it offered. It was resistant to a lot of the damage Bakugou and others tended to do to him and Izuku started having less injuries to deal with after school.

He had begun exercising as well, realizing that if he wanted to get into UA on his own merits, he probably had to have some physical skills to back up the capture scarf and his analysis. He was already pretty quick on his feet, which was necessary if he wanted to escape bullies at the end of the day, or during lunch. He hadn't really found a reliable way to work on strength, but he was attending as many free self-defense classes as he could.

Working with the scarf itself was slow going as he needed to train himself to use it like another limb and he had no idea how to do that without focusing on every movement he needed it to make. His best idea was to use it as often as possible for little things as well as bigger things. More delicate movements were harder to do, and he spent a good portion of the first few months trying to pick up a pencil from the cup of writing utensils on his desk without knocking it over.

Larger things, however, were simple enough if he managed to get a grip. One of the first things he realized was that, barring his ability to focus on the action, there were few physical limits on what the scarf could lift. It wasn't an actual limb, so it wasn't gated by his physical strength. Moreover, he could use them to pull his body around, climbing trees and buildings with ease. The only physical limit he had encountered was whether he could brace himself well enough to leverage whatever he was trying to lift up. It was honestly easier to pull himself along until he had the strength to stand his ground.

No one at school had noticed Izuku's new accessory. It wasn't exactly surprising since he was actively trying to hide it and people only paid attention to him when they wanted to hurt or belittle him. He was glad his classmates didn't know him well enough to tell that he was hiding something. At one point in time, Kacchan might have been able to tell, but they hadn't been that close in years. Izuku knew him, but Kacchan didn't see enough of Izuku to be able to read his reactions and emotions anymore.

It was a bit harder to hide it from his mother, but he was managing. When he wore short sleeves, he explained that the bandages on his arms were for the training he was doing. It wasn't even a lie and she didn't question it, seeing how serious he had become about training recently. She had even offered to pay for lessons in something he wanted to learn to help out. Once he stopped crying about the unconditional show of support, he mentioned his shortlist of desired skills: parkour, martial arts, and gymnastics. All of them could help him as a hero in the future.

Parkour was for navigating through a city at speed, avoiding obstacles and minimizing injuries from a fall. Martial arts were something he was already pursuing, the need to be physically capable of fighting back against people regardless of their quirk at the forefront of his mind. Gymnastics was also in the vein of learning to tumble and fall, but he also wanted to be able to maneuver in the air, which was necessary with how he used the capture scarf to get around.

In the end, he elected to go with gymnastics. It was a sport with strength, speed, and agility as the main requirements, and he needed to learn to be more instinctual with his body and with the scarf. And since most gyms weren't equipped for quirk use, the focus wouldn't be on what people could do with them. Hopefully, the fact he was quirkless wouldn't come up at all.

Izuku had been practicing for almost three years with the capture scarf. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being Eraserhead's and started being his, though he couldn't be sure when that happened. He didn't have the right words to explain how comforting it was to have it sitting against his skin every day, but the knowledge that it was there was rooted deep enough in his soul to make even the bad days just a little brighter.

Which was a good thing because this was turning out to be one of the worst. Their homeroom teacher had career forms he was meant to pass out, but he threw them up in the air and said everyone obviously wanted to be heroes. Which wasn't wrong, but it seemed weird for him to come out and say that, ignoring what he was supposed to be doing in favor of indulging a class full of teenage egos.

Kacchan, of course, stated his intention to attend UA and become the best hero, better even than All Might. This led to the teacher revealing that Izuku had stated an interest in attending UA as well.

That was the moment Izuku knew the end of the day wasn't going to be pleasant for him. The entire room turned and laughed at him for his impossible dream. It hurt to see all their mocking faces even though he knew they would never believe in him. The look of murder in Kacchan's eyes cut deeper than any of the rest of it. Even though he knew they weren't friends anymore, nothing cemented it more in his mind than the clear and present danger radiating off Kacchan. Unseen by those around him, the capture scarf tightened around his rib cage in a sort of hug. He knew he was the one controlling it, but it was still nice to have something tactile to ground him.

In full view of the teacher and the rest of the class, Kacchan blasted his desk, the force of which threw him into the wall at the back of the classroom.

"You think you can get into UA? You're totally quirkless!" Kacchan laughed as though it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. So did the rest of the class.

"I just want to try," Izuku mumbled. "What's so wrong about that?"

"Try what? Try the entrance exam?" Kacchan barked another laugh. "What can you even do?"

Izuku stayed silent while the class hovered over him. He wouldn't provide them with more ammunition than they already had. They were already certain of the outcome, so sure that he was going to fail. Anything else he could have said was just another reason to mock him.

Izuku tried to leave quickly after class. He reached for his analysis notebook to put it away, only to have it ripped out of his hands.

"We aren't finished here, Deku," Kacchan purred, the dark tone sending a shiver down his spine. He glanced down at Izuku's notebook and scoffed. "'For My Future'? Are you for real?"

"Give it back." Izuku reached to grab it, only for Kacchan to put the notebook between his palms and set off an explosion.

He moved to the window to throw it out, where it would probably land in the koi pond below, damaging it more. It was instinct when the end of the capture scarf shot out of his sleeve to grab the book before it fell too far.

Silence stretched in the room as Kacchan and his friends stared at him. So much for keeping that a secret, Izuku thought.

He didn't bother to wait around for the moment of shock to wear off. He had his backpack, he had his notebook, and he had his capture scarf vibrating against his skin. He needed to get out of there and the window was right there. With a running leap, he shot out of the window, snagging the railing with his capture scarf on the way down. Using the excess momentum, he flung himself into a nearby tree and then slid carefully to the ground.

"DEKU!" Kacchan yelled out the window behind him, but Izuku didn't bother to look. He just ran.

Some things weren't worth sticking around to find out how bad they could be.

When he was far enough away he didn't think Kacchan would catch up to him, Izuku slowed down to catch his breath. His dreams had changed a bit over the years. Izuku had come to terms with the fact he couldn't be a hero like All Might, but he thought being like Eraserhead was mostly attainable.

Something large and heavy landed on his back and he pitched forward, flailing wildly. Whatever it was, it was slimy, and it moved, trying to dive down this throat.

"I'm just hijacking your body. Calm down," a watery voice murmured. "It'll be over in 45 seconds."

Izuku thrashed in the grasp of the slime villain, clawing at the junk pouring itself down his throat.

"No point in trying that," the slime chuckled, moving one eye to stare down at him. "I'm fluid, you see!"

Your eyes aren't. The capture scarf emerged from under his gakuran and wrapped around the eye he could see before pulling sharply. Suddenly the slime villain was thrashing too. He hadn't stopped trying to pour himself down Izuku's throat, but the pressure on one of his eyes was causing enough pain that Izuku was able to get a quick breath every now and then.

He was too preoccupied to hear the approach of someone else, so his only warning that he wasn't alone anymore was an eerily familiar voice shouting, "Texas Smash!"

A blast of wind knocked the slime villain away, and Izuku choked on the slime still in his throat, vomiting it up as best he could. All in all, not the best way to meet one of his heroes.

"Sorry you had to get caught up in that," All Might said. "I am a bit new to the area."

Izuku nodded, suddenly unable to find any words. He wanted to ask the hero if he could be a hero too, but the jeering voices of his classmates echoed in his mind.

"You seemed to be doing well yourself," the hero continued. "That's an excellent quirk you have."

Izuku jolted, but before he could correct him about the capture scarf, the man was gone. He looked down at his hands. The scarf had retreated back under his sleeves again as it usually did. It hadn't occurred to him that people would look at his use of the capture scarf and assume it was a quirk. But most people didn't know about Eraserhead, and for good reason. The more people knew about him, the less effective he could be.

Izuku hadn't intended to lie to the Number One Hero about having a quirk, but apparently that's what he had inadvertently done by failing to correct the misconception. Was that what Kacchan thought too? Was that why he and his friends had gone so silent when Izuku retrieved his notebook?

He started making his way home, trying to decide if he should pass off the capture weapon as a quirk. He could call it scarves, or something like that. If people assumed it was a quirk rather than a support item, would that change how they treated him? If he managed to convince them, he needed to prevent anyone from finding out anything different about it. He had learned through trial and error how to fix it. And through a lot of study. It was fortunate that the nanobots were largely self-replicating. Because of that, minor damage to the scarf was self-repairing, and he'd only needed to worry about a couple of times Kacchan had practically burned through a layer.

He had a theory that if he managed to remove some of the nanobots from the capsule and placed them with enough raw materials that he'd be able to let them replicate another scarf. The whole weapon seemed to grow out of the capsule, after all, and the nanobots were self-replicating provided enough material. What he had gleaned from the KSSI videos told him that their prostheses could repair themselves to their proper functionality in time if they were severely damaged. It only made sense that they would do the same for a capture weapon made for a hero. And would Eraserhead have left the scarf behind if he didn't have another one? Probably not. Whether he could get another one from the company or he managed to replicate one the way Izuku was planning didn't matter as much as the fact that it was possible.

There were ten months until the UA entrance exam, and he was going to see if he could manage to grow another scarf in that time. If he could, maybe he would try to pass off the capture weapon as his quirk. If not, well, he would figure that out if it came to that.

Chapter Text

The day of the entrance exam arrived sooner than Izuku had been expecting, though somehow not soon enough. He had been busy in the ten months since running into All Might and getting the idea of passing off his capture scarf as a quirk. It wasn't the best idea, but he found the choice was taken out of his hands almost immediately because of Kacchan and his friends. The entire school was convinced that he'd spontaneously developed a quirk out of nowhere, though no one could quite agree if it were tentacles, fabric manipulation, or some kind of weird spider mutation.

Naturally, he didn't demonstrate his 'quirk' for anyone short of using it to escape from Kacchan, but that didn't stop the teacher from slipping some paperwork to register his quirk on his desk the Monday after the rumors started. In a rare display of a magnanimous leader, Sensei even offered to turn the paperwork in for him. That he also made some remark about how it was about time he presented a quirk, Izuku decided not to correct him. Teachers had never helped him before, so he didn't see why he should help them.

If the paperwork was filled out and left on the teacher's desk at the end of the day, there was no evidence that Izuku had been the one to do it. Any issues that came from turning it in would reflect on his teacher rather than him. Oddly, Izuku decided he was okay with this potential outcome, if only because he could imagine the face Sensei would make when he realized he'd helped a quirkless student commit fraud. Of course, a quirk known only as Tendril wasn't going to rate very highly in people's minds, so Izuku figured that moment would never actually come to pass.

Replicating the scarf had become a bit of a priority after that. What saved him was a beach near his home that had become overrun with garbage. Or, from another perspective, it was filled with a wealth of raw materials just waiting to be broken down and used. He started cleaning up the beach, as it served several of his purposes. He could practice with the scarf, he had access to the materials, and all the lifting and moving was making him stronger. Add to that his habit of running from place to place, and his training was going well. He was getting stronger, faster, and building his endurance. Beyond that, he had developed his control over the scarf that he didn't need to focus on what it was doing at every moment to ensure it did what he wanted it to. Honestly, he needed to focus more to stop it from acting on his behalf.

The first experiment with growing a scarf was a success, though he'd had to sacrifice a small collection of his old clothes to it. With a pile of scrap metal from the beach and those clothes, his backup scarf grew to its full 20 meters in three weeks. Which was about how long it was taking Izuku to begin wondering what would happen if he supplied the nanobots with different materials. Like the rubber tires he was pulling out of the mounds of trash on the beach. If he could get a higher quality of metal as well, the scarf that came out of that would be formidable. And if he managed to craft a scarf out of Kevlar or something that afforded a similar level of protection, he might prefer to use that, provided he got into the hero course.

It was still surreal to him that getting into the hero course wasn't looking like a distant dream for someone else to achieve. According to what he had looked up, UA's entrance exam featured robots of varying values and prospective students were meant to destroy or disable as many as they could. There wasn't a lot to find on the robots themselves, but Izuku was fairly certain they would have a weak spot to exploit. If not, then the test was heavily geared toward people with destructive quirks, which was more than a little unfair. He was determined to do his best, but he also applied to the General Education department just in case. With that, he was fairly certain he could make it into UA with his test scores and potentially move up to the Heroics Department in the Sports Festival.

Even with that assurance, he was still a nervous wreck walking through the gates of UA. He was drifting, woefully off-kilter and still trying desperately to convince himself that everything was real. The familiar pressure of the capture scarf tightening around his ribs was grounding in a way little else was, and Izuku walked toward the building to take the written part of the test. Unfortunately, he tripped over his own feet shortly before the stairs. Fully expecting to land on his face, he was surprised when the impact never came.

"Sorry for using my quirk on you without asking," said a voice behind him as he opened his eyes to see the ground centimeters away from his face.

He was floating, flailing almost, without touching the ground. Izuku turned to look at the person who had spoken and locked eyes with a girl who stood beside him. She reached out to help pull him upright, then touched the tips of her fingers together. When she did, gravity reasserted itself and he landed on his feet, his wobbly knees protesting the renewed pressure of remaining upright.

"It's just, I think it's a bad omen to trip and fall." She smiled at him and Izuku tried to smile back through his nervous daze.

"Thank you," he whispered, unsure what else to do.

"Of course!" She glanced between him and the doors of the building. "Well, we better get going. Good luck on the test!"

"You too." He wasn't sure if she heard him or not, because she had already started moving to the building and Izuku couldn't manage anything louder than a whisper apparently.

Once the written test was over—and Izuku was glad it was, even though he knew the harder part was yet to come—those who intended to test for the Heroics department were collected in a large auditorium. Present Mic stepped out on stage and began running through the specifics of the test, most of which Izuku had looked up online. He was glad he'd done that, as it was difficult to focus on what was being said while sitting next to Kacchan.

Kacchan had tried cornering him at school, but Izuku used the school's rather blasé attitude regarding quirk use to swing out the window with the capture scarf every time Kacchan got too close. He could read his former friend's moods, and that was not a conversation he wanted to have alone. And since it was Kacchan, it probably wasn't a conversation he wanted to have at all. He still wasn't sure what he had done to anger him.

"This is how the test will go, my listeners," Present Mic was saying. "You'll be experiencing ten-minute-long mock cityscape maneuvers. Bring along whatever you want!"

Izuku let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. Even if it somehow came out that the capture scarf wasn't a quirk, they couldn't ignore him if he managed to make it into the hero course. They said he could bring anything he wanted. If he brought a capture scarf, then he was simply better prepared than the rest of the test-takers. Or more resourceful. Actually, it probably only counted as luck. He was lucky enough to find and figure out how to use a capture scarf, and there was nothing they could do about that right now. And if they took it away, he had more now, scarves that didn't originally belong to Eraserhead. If they tried to take them away, he would just grow more and hide them until they could never be sure they'd retrieved them all.

He hoped that wouldn't happen.

"Shut up," Kacchan growled.

A student closer to the stage stood up. "I have a question. There appears to be no less than four faux villains on this handout. Such a blatant error, if it is one, is highly unbecoming of an institute as prestigious as UA." Then the boy turned and glared directly at Izuku. "And you with the curly hair. You've been muttering this entire time and it's highly distracting. If you think this is some sort of game, then you should just leave."

Izuku shrunk in his seat. He much preferred it when attention sort of slid off him. Now the whole auditorium was looking at him, if only briefly. The capture scarf tightened against him again, practically constricting his ribs and limiting his breathing. He forced himself to calm down as Present Mic drew the attention of the room back to the front.

"Nice catch, Examinee 7111," the Voice Hero said, easily smoothing over the crowd. "The fourth type of faux villain is worth zero points. There is only one per testing ground, a gimmick that rampages around in close quarters."

Izuku stared down at the handout, at the pictures of each of the robots. There was no sense of scale to them as they stood against a white background, but he could already see a couple of places that might be weaknesses he could exploit. If not, he'd have to improvise more on the spot. Provided, of course, his anxiety didn't cause him to freeze up.

After changing into a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, he followed the instructions to find his testing ground and joined the crowd gathered there. Well, joined was perhaps not the right word. The testing ground was huge, as was the crowd, and he was terrified of dealing with either. He noticed the girl who had helped him at the gate. Before he could go over and thank her again, a heavy hand landed on his shoulder and he flinched.

"What do you think you're doing?" the boy who called him out in the auditorium demanded. "She's obviously going to do a meditation of some sort. Were you going to sabotage her?"

Izuku froze in the face of such animosity and he felt the eyes of the entire crowd turn to look at him again. Whispers raced through them, the familiar tone of mocking setting his stomach to tying itself in knots. He should have known nothing would really change. He should have known it was useless to try and reach out.

"And begin!"

There was a moment of silence as everyone, Izuku included, attempted to process what had just been said.

"What's wrong?" Present Mic demanded. "The test's started! The die is cast!"

Everyone started running at once, Izuku choosing to race down side streets away from the main crowd. He couldn't handle the eyes on him and being in the crush of the main battle wasn't going to do him any good. A robot appeared around one corner and Izuku froze for a second before the capture scarf lurched forward to find purchase on the machine and pull him into a flying kick at the one-pointer's main sensor array. It smashed under his shoes and he tore out a bundle of wires while swinging around to land on the ground again.

He was running again before the robot hit the ground. He managed to take out a couple of two-pointers by getting them to shoot each other, then aimed straight for the bundle of exposed wires on the next one-pointer he saw.

The first three-pointer was larger than he expected it to be, and someone with a laser in his stomach managed to take it out while it was focused on Izuku.

"Merci pour l'assistance, mon ami!" The boy called to him before moving on.

Izuku vowed to take on the next three-pointer on his own. As if summoned by his desire to prove himself, one crawled over a partially collapsed building to get to him. Directing his scarf to wrap around a nicely sized piece of rubble, Izuku swung the makeshift shot-put into the robot's sensor array before diving underneath to get at a conspicuously loose panel. He pried it open and ripped out as many wires as he could, burning his fingers in the process. He had to drag himself out from under it before it collapsed on top of him.

From the sound of things, the central plaza was where most of the fighting was taking place. Deciding to take the high road as he made his way over, he swung between the buildings and from the telephone poles. He dropped on top of a one-pointer that was aimed at one student's back, driving it into the ground. He was forced to dodge a two-pointer almost immediately that struck at him with its scorpion tail. Latching onto the tail with the scarf, he let himself be pulled toward the robot until he dropped on its back. There, he found another conveniently loose panel and pried out another set of wires. The robot dropped like a marionette with its strings cut.

Suddenly, a rumbling louder than anything Izuku had ever heard filled the mock city and a robot larger than the horizon appeared like everyone's worst nightmare. There was a moment of stillness as everyone stared up at the so-called gimmick of the test because what were they supposed to do against that?

Most people elected to run. Izuku was prepared to run himself when he heard a small cry of pain. He turned back to see the girl with the gravity quirk half buried in rubble near the foot of the approaching robot. There was no time to think, no time to dig her out before the robot was upon both of them. The only chance he had was to disable the robot where it stood. He was already running before he realized what he'd decided.

The scarf unwound more than it usually did, stretching to latch onto the forward reaching arm of the zero-pointer, then contracting like a rubber band to send him shooting towards the large head. A simple kick wasn't going to be enough to take it down, but there was exposed wiring around the joints. He aimed for the neck and started ripping as much out as he could, using his own body weight as leverage to knock the thicker cables loose.

The robot started and shuddered before finally going eerily silent, leaving him hanging like a spider on its web from the head. Now that the danger was over, the departure of adrenaline was causing his body to crash hard. Slowly, as he was suddenly aware of how much his shoulders and arms ached, he lowered himself to the ground and picked his way across the rubble to the girl. He didn't even particularly care when Present Mic announced that the exam was over.

He started shifting the rubble away from the girl's legs until she could sit up and start pushing the concrete away herself. It aggravated the pain in his arms, but he wasn’t about to make her wait for help when he was right there. 

"Are you okay?" he asked quietly, exhaustion folding over him like a blanket. He had practiced endurance, strength, and speed, but never in such a dangerous scenario. Somehow going to school with Kacchan had become less dangerous and more tedious, so an injection of real terror facing down a city full of rampaging robots was more than he'd been equipped to handle.

"I'm fine," she replied, but winced as she shifted one of her feet. It had gotten scraped up quite a bit and he wished he thought to carry around actual bandages rather than a scarf that resembled them rather strongly.

"That's good." Because, he reasoned, if her foot was the worst of her injuries, she had escaped rather well off for the ordeal.

An old woman hobbled her way through the crowd toward them, checking on the students she passed on her way. Even if Izuku hadn't been a hero fanboy, he would have known about Recovery Girl. She had one of the strongest healing quirks in the world and was frequently held up as the reason why the entrance exam could be as hectic as it was. When a member of staff had the ability to heal injuries almost instantaneously, there wasn't a lot to be afraid of.

"Now then," Recovery Girl said, settling in place and leaning on her cane. "Who's hurt and in need of healing?"

Izuku pushed himself to his feet and offered an arm to the girl with the gravity quirk. "Here, let me help you over."

"Thanks." The girl smiled. "I'm Uraraka Ochako, by the way."

He smiled back. "Midoriya Izuku. Nice to meet you. And thanks again for earlier."

Uraraka looked back at the looming form of the zero-pointer. "I think you've paid that back with a bit of interest."

Izuku blushed, unsure what to say or do.

"How do you think you did?" she asked when he didn't say anything.

"Terribly. I only had 12 points."

She winced. "Well, you saved me. That has to count for something, right?"

Izuku shrugged, then instantly regretted it as his shoulders reminded him that they were in pain. Through sheer effort, he suppressed the desire to flinch. It wasn't the worst thing he'd felt, after all, and it wasn't even the worst thing he'd done to himself.

"What have we here?" Recovery Girl asked as they approached. "I swear, these exams get more dangerous every year. Here, sit down on the sidewalk, both of you. It's against my vows as a hero to let anyone leave wounded." She caught Izuku's arm. "That includes you, young man. Don't think I don't recognize an injury when I see one."

Uraraka turned on him immediately. "You're hurt? And you were still helping me?"

"It's not that bad!" The blush was back, and if it hadn't hurt to raise his arms over his head, he would have covered his face as much as possible. "I just sort of pulled my arms a bit."

"I'll be the judge of what's bad and what's not, young man," Recovery Girl said, pushing him down next to Uraraka. "I highly doubt you are the one in this conversation with a nursing degree."

"Not yet," he quipped. Then actually started putting some thought into things. "But I think I could benefit from some first aid training."

Recovery Girl smiled. "Then perhaps I'll see you in my elective class, should you make it into UA. It's nice to see budding young heroes acknowledge that there are more skills out there than punching people." She kissed Uraraka first, then him, and the instant relief in his shoulders was balanced by the sudden wave of fatigue that washed over him. "There. Good as new! Take some gummy bears to get that energy back and sit here for as long as you need. I'm going to check on the other testing grounds."

Izuku sighed, popping two of the gummy bears into his mouth and resisting the urge to just lie back on the cluttered and damaged sidewalk. "I suppose if all else fails, I think I have a high enough written exam score to make it into Gen Ed."

"You shouldn't have to settle for that, though," Uraraka protested. "You are a hero! You saved me!"

"Then I suppose it depends entirely on what the exam board thinks." Izuku shrugged. "Whatever the case, I think I'll be okay."

"If you say so." A strange look crossed her face. "Look, it was nice meeting you, but I have something I need to go do." She stood up and waved. "Thanks again for saving me!"

He nodded and sat there for a few minutes more, his arms resting on his knees and his head resting on his arms. Twelve points. It was more than he would have gotten if he'd never found the capture scarf and never started training. He probably wouldn't have made it to the exam at all if he hadn't done things the way he had. And it was a nice dream to have, getting into UA through the Heroics entrance exam. Now that the dream was over, he'd have to work hard enough to potentially make his way into the Heroics department through the Sports Festival.

After a few moments of self-pity, he picked himself up and left the testing ground to make his way home.

"An interesting crop of students we have this year," Nezu remarked, sipping on a cup of tea.

Aizawa Shouta just sighed as he reviewed the footage. "A whole pack of problem children."

"Now, Shouta, pessimism is an admirable quality when exercised in moderation, but sometimes you take it too far." The diminutive principal smiled at him. "Besides, I know there were a fair few that impressed you out there. Midoriya, for example."

Shouta sighed again. Nezu made sure that was the moment the footage of Midoriya appeared back on his screen. "He can think on his feet, I'll give him that. And for someone whose quirk doesn't have a lot of functionality against robots, he seemed to do pretty well. But he's reckless."

"On the contrary, what I see is someone determined to succeed, someone aware of his advantages and disadvantages who is not afraid to twist things in his favor."

"And running at the zero-pointer? How was that in his favor?"

Nezu tsked. "You know as well as I do what that particular part of the test is for. When the danger appears insurmountable, it is the true measure of a hero to find a way to victory in the face of defeat, to stand and fight when the outlook appears most bleak."

Shouta blinked. Gods above, he was too tired for this shit. "You mean you're going to put him in my class." He frowned. "Is this punishment?"

"Look at it this way. You are the one best suited to take his raw potential and refine it into something outstanding."

"That wasn't a no." He bit back a groan because it wouldn't help. It would only make Nezu's stupid grin wider and push the headache he was nursing over into the vein of migraine.

Truth be told, Midoriya probably wasn't the worst person he could get in his class. Bakugou Katsuki was, and as the student who got first place in the exam, he was automatically going to be Shouta's problem. As were most of the top ten, in fact. Midoriya was strange, however. Something about him set Shouta's senses on edge, and he'd learned to trust his gut in these matters. He didn't know what was going on, but it didn't seem bad, just weird.

"I'll get your class list to you once it's been finalized. I believe you've spent enough time going over this with me." Nezu took another sip of his tea. "And I believe Yamada is waiting for you outside."

He didn't groan. His husband didn't deserve that this time around, but he wanted to go to bed and Hizashi was going to want to talk, and he wasn't sure he was mentally prepared to deal with any of that. Shouta got up anyway and moved to the door. As expected, Hizashi was on the other side and seized his arm immediately, pulling him along toward the front gates.

"Please tell me we're going home," Shouta moaned. "I want to sleep."

"You always want to sleep." Hizashi's tone was light and teasing. Which meant he had picked up on how much Shouta didn't want to be in public at the moment.

I love this man, he thought. God knows why he married me, but I love him.

"Interesting bunch of kids out there today," Hizashi murmured, keeping his voice low and even. "Any favorites?"

Shouta frowned. "I don't pick favorites."

"We both know that's not true."

Deciding to be the better person, he didn't hit Hizashi. "What about you? You always pick favorites."

"That Midoriya kid was good. Reminded me a bit of you, actually."

Shouta frowned. "No. You're not allowed to like the problem child." Then the last bit of what he said registered. "Wait, what do you mean he reminded you of me?"

Hizashi shrugged. "He's driven. And his quirk is a little bit like your capture scarf. He clearly trained with it for a long time in order to make everything look effortless and organic. He's a nervous little listener, though, like he doesn't have a lot of confidence in his ability to face others. Like how you first started out."

Shouta did groan this time and buried his face in his husband's shoulder. He'd been an awkward and desperate kid, so quick to lash out because that's what he'd had to do to protect himself that it took Hizashi and Oboro months to get through to him. Even after that, he didn't really place a lot of trust in anyone else. Which was why he still regularly worked himself to the bone or ended up in the hospital because he was too stubborn to call in backup for a situation he wasn't sure he could handle.

"You're going to jinx it," he moaned. "He's going to be worse than I ever was, and that will be entirely your fault because you jinxed it."

"Or he could be better," Hizashi suggested, ever the optimist. "You could teach him to be better."

"Bold of you to assume I know what I'm doing here." Shouta sighed. "You really like this kid?"

Hizashi nodded and it meant more that he didn't say anything else. With a quirk like his, Hizashi was loud more often than he wasn't. He was on and open and utterly exhausting, but that was part of who he was. But they had learned together that it was in the moments he wasn't saying anything that he was at his most sincere. At some point, saying something aloud lost all meaning, but the intense and meaningful silence of a situation held more gravity than anything else.

"Okay then." Shouta knew he was going to have to get over things eventually. And he did have a begrudging respect for the kid doing what few others were willing to do in something as simple as the entrance exam. "I suppose I can give the kid a chance."

He did not blush when Hizashi kissed him. If his husband claimed otherwise, he was a rotten liar.

Chapter Text

Izuku was waiting for the letter that would tell him how badly he had failed the entrance exam. It had been a week since he took it and he had spent every spare moment second-guessing the decisions he had made. The only thing he couldn't bring himself to regret was saving Uraraka. He would have done that again, even if he somehow managed to half kill himself in the process. Though upon reflection, he wondered if death hadn't been a real possibility. He probably looked like an idiot to the adjudicators, running at their gimmick and attempting to tear out as many wires as he could until something changed.

If there was one reason that could explain why he wasn't going to get into the hero course, it would be how reckless he'd been and would be. A bunch of pro-heroes would definitely have picked up on that particular peculiarity of his.

As the week had worn on, he was slowly coming to the realization that he wasn't as okay with the outcome as he tried to pretend he was. He had put in a lot of work to prepare for the entrance exam, he had gone in with some knowledge of what he was facing, and he still managed to freeze when it mattered. As much as he wanted to claim it was unfair, most of the other people in the exam hadn't let the situation stop them. Of course, they had actual quirks to back them up. They could trust in their abilities and didn't have to worry about accidentally exposing themselves as a fraud.

Maybe it was better this way. He had told himself that he would explain the situation with the scarf to his mother if he got into the hero course, but he wasn't ready to admit that he'd been hiding something so big from her for the past three years. It was rude of him to do so and he didn't even really have a good excuse for it. Not getting into the hero course would give him a little while longer to get used to the idea of telling her and potentially figure out how to mention it without getting in trouble or making her needlessly upset with his apparent lack of trust.

She patted his shoulder as she passed by him on the couch. "No matter what happens, I'm proud of you, Izuku," she said, clearly able to tell that the events of last week were weighing on his mind. "You've come so far in so little time, and I know you can go so much further."

He was really going to need to figure out a good way to explain everything. Just coming right out and saying it was sounding like a worse plan every time he thought of it.

"I just wish the letter would arrive already, so I know one way or the other." He looked down at his hands. "I don't like having the possibility hanging over my head like this."

"Well, it should be coming soon, shouldn't it? It's been almost a week since the exams."

Izuku nodded.

"Then it might be in today's mail," his mother continued. "Wait just a few more hours and then you'll know for sure."

A few hours spent just waiting sounded like the closest thing Izuku could conceive of as torture, so he went to his room and pulled up some of the latest footage of hero fights. He had figured out a while ago that his analysis was really the only real advantage he was going to have over his opponents. He couldn't assume he would always have his capture scarf on hand and if he lost it, he needed something to fall back on. His notes lately tended more towards how to neutralize quirks, to fight them with something that gave them the same disadvantage he always suffered from.

That wasn't to say he wasn't still figuring out ways people could use their quirks in creative ways. He usually started there, figuring out what the most effective method for using a quirk would be, then used that list to figure out how he could prevent each and every use with a method that was easy and accessible to use when he couldn't be sure of the materials he'd have access to. He couldn't assume he would always have access to water against a fire user, but he could probably find something to use as a large fan to manipulate the air currents and redirect the flames away from him. Most of his analysis pointed to shields being a useful tool to have and use in the field, as they could, depending on the material it’s made out of, block a fair number of quirks.

There was a reason he made notes about a durable shield of some sort to go with his hero costume, should he make it into the hero course. On his own, he intended to look up stronger, more cut resistant materials to use to grow another scarf. They wouldn't be as useful as a shield but given that he wore the scarf wrapped around his torso, he figured an extra layer of protection was nothing to belittle.

Izuku had moved on to the footage of a battle that had taken place in downtown Tokyo less than an hour ago when his mother knocked on his door. She opened it a moment later, her eyes bright and shining as she held out an envelope with the UA insignia on it.

Izuku suddenly couldn't breathe. The letter was here, and he would have his answer and he wasn't sure now he wanted to open it. Mechanically, he reached to take it from her, feeling the strange weight of it as it dropped into his hand. His mother pushed the door open further and stood behind him, her hand on his shoulder as he tore it open carefully. As he was pulling out the letter, a small metal disk dropped onto his desk. It rolled to a stop and fell flat. Then, after a moment of silence as Izuku just stared at it, a light in the middle suddenly sprang to life.

"HELLO, LISTENER!" came the voice of Present Mic shortly before an image of him resolved in the light. Izuku let out an undignified squeak at the sight. "You made a good showing out in the field and collected 12 villain points! However, I am afraid this is not enough to qualify you for the Hero Course."

Izuku's heart sank and he was glad his mother was there with him. He hadn't explained anything to her about the scarves yet, but now he had time to figure out how to explain things.

"If villain points were the only way of scoring in the test, that would be the end of our conversation. We had an interesting visitor in the observation booth shortly after the conclusion of the test, and I think you should see this!"

Behind Present Mic, a video appeared on a screen, showing a dimly lit room as the door opened. Uraraka appeared around it, looking at the faces on the other side of the camera.

"Um, excuse me?" she said, letting the door swing open the rest of the way. "Midoriya Izuku, the plain looking boy with green hair and the bandage tentacle things. He saved me but he didn't get a lot of points. He could have been chasing after more robots, but he saved me, and I wanted to know if I could maybe share some of my points with him? Because it isn't fair that he might not make it because of me." She frowned at them. "Heroes are supposed to save people, so he deserves to be in the Hero Course."

In the video, Present Mic stepped forward from behind the camera and patted Uraraka's head. "I'm afraid we can't give him any of your points. But don't worry too much about the kid. He'll be fine."

The other Present Mic in the projection turned back to face the camera. "Not only did you make a good showing for the adjudicators of the exam, you also impressed your fellow examinee with your selflessness. As she observed, being a hero isn't just about fighting villains, it's about saving people and standing up for what’s right, and we would be a poor institution if we didn't recognize that. As such, we have a secret system known as RESCUE POINTS! For your bravery and willingness to help save Uraraka-chan, you have been awarded 50 rescue points. This brings your total points up to 62 and puts you in SIXTH PLACE overall in the exam! Congratulations, you now have a place in Class 1-A! Welcome, Midoriya Izuku, to your hero academia!"

The projection shut off, but for several minutes Izuku could only gape at the disk. He had made it into UA. He had made it into the UA Hero Course. And he had done this while quirkless, not that anyone knew.

A pair of arms wrapped around his shoulders from behind and he jolted before melting into his mother's hug.

He was going to have to tell his mother about the scarves. There was no way around it at this point, and Uraraka had specifically mentioned them.

"Mom," he whispered. "There's something I have to tell you."

She pulled back enough that Izuku could turn his chair around to look at her. From her expression, he could tell she was concerned, which wasn't doing anything good for his anxiety. "What is it?"

"They think I have a quirk." He decided to start there. It was honest and to the point and served as enough of a jumping off point that he would be able to explain what he could. "They think I have a quirk and I'm going to let them continue thinking that."

His mother moved back to sit on his bed. "Why do they think you have a quirk?"

"It's sort of a long story."

She patted the bed beside her, and he moved to sit next to her before launching into the full explanation. He told her about going out at night when he shouldn't have and finding Eraserhead's capture scarf. He told her about the research he had done into how it worked and whether it was safe. He even told her about the bullying and how everyone at school was convinced it was a quirk because he used it to escape from Kacchan. This led into the admission that he'd let his teacher commit fraud for him since the man was so determined to register his quirk.

She didn't look particularly happy about that bit, but Izuku was quick to point out the man hadn't done anything to help him when he believed—rightly so—that he was quirkless. It was petty and vindictive, but he refused to feel sorry for the man should the truth ever come out.

Finally, he told her about the other scarves he had grown, opening his closet to show off the neatly folded finished varieties and the container that had yet another one in the process of growing.

"Izuku," she murmured, reaching out for him as though she thought he might disappear or pull away from him. "You've done all this just to be a hero?"

"I always wanted to be one, Mom. I never stopped wanting to be a hero. I intended to use the scarf in the entrance exam as soon as I figured out how to use it, but I never considered presenting it as my quirk until All Might mistook it for one. And then, because Kacchan and his friends saw me use it to get away from them, they all thought it was a quirk too and took the decision out of my hands. I just—" He clenched his fists and stared at the ground, trying to find the right words. "I just didn't want to be useless anymore. I knew I could do this. I knew I wanted to do this, and I knew I could figure out whatever I needed to make it work."

He tried to smile, but even he could feel that it was turning out more manic than reassuring. "Parkour, gymnastics, nanotechnology... I spent months researching and hypothesizing and trying to figure out how the scarf worked before I got around to trying this." He lifted up the still growing scarf. "If I could somehow alter the nanobots, I'd try other things, other configurations of scarves that would work a little differently."

"Izuku, I'm still proud of you." She stepped closer and wrapped him in a hug so tight it brought tears to his eyes. That was the only reason he was crying, honest. "More even, now that I know how much work you've put in for this. I don't think I can understand half of what you've managed to do, but I know it's incredible. And I'm sorry for not believing in you when you needed me. I'm sorry I couldn't have supported you more or protected you!"

"No, mom, it's fine! It's—" He choked on the words, unable to find a way to articulate how much even the slightest support she had offered had meant to him. She had never abandoned him for his lack of quirk, had never let her love for him become conditional, gated behind something so unattainable as manifesting a quirk out of the ether. She was the best part of his day for years because she cared for him more than anyone else dared to.

So instead of trying to use words, he just held her, crying into her shoulder as she hugged him back and cried into his. They stayed there for a while, until Izuku's head started to ache from the crying. He was glad he'd told her. Yes, it was necessary for her to know what to expect when people talked about his quirk, but it was also cathartic to have it out in the open, to admit to picking up Eraserhead's capture scarf and using it to join the hero course. It was such a big part of his life that lying to her for years had been difficult, even painful at times.

Now she knew and he felt like he could float away for lack of the weight of it. For the first time in longer than he cared to admit, he was finally free of the secrets he'd been holding back out of fear.

They celebrated his acceptance into Class 1-A with katsudon, and Izuku was willing to swear it was the best meal he'd eaten in years. His mother just smiled and took the compliment.

The first day of high school arrived and the thick knot of nerves in his gut had kept him awake most of the night. Part of his fears were irrational, he knew. No one knew that he was technically quirkless, no one but his mother. That didn't stop him from waking up from a nightmare where the faceless homeroom teacher stopped him at the door and demanded he leave because he was dragging down the reputation of the school with his very presence.

The nightmare had continued with his scarf strangling him, dragging him down into a deep pit filled with something thick and oozing. It was getting in his mouth and choking him, and people were just standing and watching as he struggled. His scarf had gone limp when he tried to use it, and All Might himself was standing nearby and loudly lamenting that such a promising young hero was really nothing but a fraud. The familiar chants started up from the crowd, everyone talking about how it was only right that he dies because wasn't that what quirkless people were supposed to do.

He woke up choking, hardly able to breathe and his capture scarf was lashing around on the end of the bed where he'd left it when he went to sleep. He reached for it and it reached back for him, slithering up under his pajamas and wrapping itself around him. The familiar feel of it against his skin was comforting, not like the dream scarf which had let him die. The ooze, he knew, was from the slime villain All Might had saved him from. Telling his mother about it had brought back the terror that had been so easily undercut by his shock at the hero's assumption of his scarf being part of a quirk. His mind had moved on in the moment, but apparently his subconscious hadn't.

He had heard a few things about imposter syndrome, but could he have that if he were actually an imposter? The capture scarf technically wasn't his, even though he had made it his own over the years, and he knew he wouldn't have made it into UA without it. What was to say his dream was going to become reality? All the teachers at UA were pro-heroes. They could probably look at him and be able to tell that he didn't actually have a quirk. Then he would get in trouble for faking it, for making out that he was something other than what he was.

Would he go to prison for faking a quirk? Or would it just go on some permanent record he'd never be able to expunge? Would people point and laugh at him, saying 'that's the worthless, quirkless kid who tried to be a hero and lied his way into UA'?

All he had ever wanted in his life was to be a hero. Now he had his chance, but it felt like it could be ripped away from him at any moment. Even knowing he was going to fight with everything he had to keep his dream alive, part of him insisted he be ready for the moment it all started to fall apart.

When his mother knocked on his door to wake him up, she found him already up and dressed and sitting at his desk with a new notebook filled with feverish writing.

"Izuku?"

His head shot up, glancing around for a moment before his eyes settled on her and he relaxed. "Yes?"

"It's time for breakfast." She looked between the notebook and him. "How long have you been up?"

Izuku rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "I'm not sure exactly. I couldn't sleep." He stood and stretched before following her out to the kitchen table.

"I suppose it's good you're up early," his mother said after a while. "I had something I wanted to talk to you about."

Izuku froze. In his experience—at least where other people were concerned—those words never meant anything good. He couldn't think of anything he'd forgotten to do around the house that would make his mom say them, but if he'd forgotten something, he couldn't exactly remember what he'd forgotten, could he? "Yes?"

"It's nothing bad. Well, it might be, but that's what I wanted to talk to you about." She set her chopsticks aside and looked at him. "Mitsuki called me the other day and said that Katsuki was going to be in class 1-A. Apparently, he was the top scorer for the exam. I didn't tell her you'd made it into the class, too, but all I could think about was what you told me about him."

Izuku frowned. It had honestly slipped his mind that Kacchan was going to be there, too. There had never really been any doubt in his mind that his childhood friend would pass the exam and be in the best class but knowing and understanding that were two vastly different things.

And then there was the fact that he had explained everything about how his relationship with his old friend had deteriorated almost instantly after they found out he was quirkless. That was yet another thing he had lied to his mother about over the years, and she hadn't been happy when she'd heard it. He'd barely managed to stop her from storming over to the Bakugou house to yell at him. This conversation was apparently the natural consequence of that.

"Izuku, I want you to avoid him as best you can. And if you can't, I want you to tell your teacher about the history between you two." There was no room for denial or questioning in her voice. And Izuku could appreciate that if he weren't on the worst side of it at the moment. "You told me that all the teachers there are pro-heroes. As such, they should take such a threat to the well-being of their students seriously. If that proves false, I want you to come to me and I will deal with it."

His mother had once mentioned she considered law school as a possible option for her future. She had decided to become a nurse instead, but there was a reason she considered it. For all their displays of emotions, both he and his mother were intelligent enough to understand and manipulate where they stood in the eyes of society. It was harder for Izuku to manage most of the time, but he had left school with no permanent marks on his disciplinary record in spite of what some teachers tried, and most of the time he didn't even need to call in his mother to manage it.

There was only so far educational authority stretched, and if nothing were going to be noted on the records of the others involved, they couldn't pin every incident on him. Kacchan was never present for the conversations that happened regarding how to spin things, but he would have blown up at the teachers instead if they tried to make out in their reports that he was the victim in that situation. Fortunately, they recognized the slippery slope they were on and backed off. Quirkless or not, fights had at least two sides to them, and pinning everything on Izuku simply wouldn't hold up. If anything, putting all his aggressors down as victims would have been a glowing recommendation for any combat-oriented position, as it would appear he could abuse his classmates in spite of their powers.

"He's probably going to try something," Izuku told her. "If for no other reason than he's used to getting his way. UA is a new environment, but he spent three years able to do whatever he wanted to me because no one was speaking up about it. More, if you add in elementary school. I don't think he knows how to not attack me, even though he's been pretty quiet since I escaped out the window using my scarf. He just ignored me then. I don't think he even considered that I might be able to get into UA on my own."

His mother huffed. "That's all the more reason to tell your teachers. And perhaps you should stop calling him by the name you used as a child. He doesn't deserve your familiarity as much as you don't deserve his abuse." She sat up straighter and fixed him with a look he rarely saw on her face. It pinned him in place like a moth in a lepidopterist's study. "I will be asking about your day this evening and you will answer me truthfully."

"Yes, mom," he said, ducking his head in acknowledgement. Truth be told, he didn't want to find out what would happen if he refused or lied. Probably nothing good.

"Good. Now, do you have everything you need? Your school ID, the campus map they sent, your supplies?"

He lifted his backpack, which had been leaning against the leg of his chair as he ate. "I've got everything."

She smiled, her eyes a little watery from the effort of holding back tears. "Excellent. Be safe."

"I'll do my best." And it did hurt just a little bit to know that was all he could promise her. But with Kacchan--Bakugou, he should get use to that. With Bakugou there, there wasn't much he could do. The whole experience hinged directly on whether or not their teacher was going to let his behavior go or deal with it.

She stood and followed him to the door, kissing him on the forehead while he put on his shoes. "I love you and I'm proud of you, Izuku. Never doubt that."

The warm feeling of validation, so foreign to him, welled up in his chest. He knew she would rather he pursue a safer career. She saw enough heroes brought into the hospital during her shifts, even though she didn't work down in emergency. She understood how dangerous the job was. But he knew it too, and he was still willing to take those risks. He also knew she would support him in that as she had in everything else.

With one last smile over his shoulder, he started out, mildly hopeful for the first time in a long time.

Chapter Text

Izuku stopped being quite as certain about things as soon as he stepped through the school gates. It wasn't crowded by any means, not in the same way it had been during the entrance exam, but there were a lot of people he didn't know around. What was more, he could feel them sizing him up with their eyes, categorizing all the little tics he displayed and evaluating whether he was worth their time or not.

So far, he could tell the answer was no. Which wasn't all that different from the entrance exam either, as everyone on the testing field had written him off with their eyes almost immediately.

He pulled out the campus map and used it to navigate his way towards Classroom 1-A. It wasn't long before he was standing in front of one of the largest doors he'd ever seen.

"I suppose that makes sense," he muttered to himself as he reached for the handle. "They need to accommodate for all sorts of quirks and body types."

He was greeted by noise the instant he opened the door. Half of it was Ka—Bakugou. The other person was the boy with glasses from the Entrance Exam who got upset with Izuku's mumbling. He must have murdered somebody important in a past life to be this unlucky now.

"Don't put your legs on the desk! Don't you think that's disrespectful to your classmates?" the boy with glasses demanded.

"No, I don't think so," Bakugou replied. "Which middle school are you from anyway, extra?"

Izuku couldn't help but think back on what he said to his mother before he left and how apparently he didn't even need to be there for Bakugou to try something straight out of middle school. That was exactly how Ka—Bakugou always sat at his desk and the teacher never said a word about it. Nor did anyone else. And the fact he was still calling people extras was a perfect example of how much respect he had for his classmates, most of whom took the exact same exam and got in on their own merits. He didn’t respect anyone who wasn’t him or hadn’t beaten him in a fight.

And since Izuku had never seen Bakugou lose a fight, he didn’t respect anyone.

He tried to skirt around the argument, spying his name on the desk directly behind Kacch—Bakugou. The motion, however, seemed to catch the eye of the boy with glasses, and he shuffled over.

"Hello. I am Iida Tenya from Somei Junior High School."

Izuku could feel every eye in the room turn to him like a persistent itch all over his body. One glance was particularly heated, and he knew that if looks could kill, he would be dead where he stood.

"The fuck are you doing here, Deku?" Bakugou demanded.

Izuku opened his mouth to answer, but he wasn't quite sure what to say. Bakugou would probably take any answer he gave as something snarky, and thus count it as a reason to attack him. He looked between Iida and Bakugou and decided on the lesser of two evils.

"I'm Midoriya Izuku," he said, bowing slightly to Iida. "Nice to meet you."

"Midoriya! Hi!" came a voice from behind him and he turned to see Uraraka grinning at him and waving. "I'm glad you got in."

"I'm glad you're here, too. Thank you for speaking to the adjudicators on my behalf." He reached up to rub the back of his neck. "They showed me a recording in my acceptance video."

Uraraka's cheeks turned bright red. "O-of course! Anything for a friend! And they gave me rescue points for doing that, too, which is how I got in."

"If you're only here to make friends, you might as well leave now."

Izuku jumped, as did about half the class, when a strange human-sized yellow caterpillar spoke. Everyone watched in morbid fascination as the thing crept over to the teacher's desk, stood, and turned so they saw its very human face. Then it unzipped itself from its cocoon and the breath caught in Izuku's throat as a person stepped out of it. He knew exactly who this was, if only for the scarf wrapped around the man's neck. Eraserhead.

The scarf around his chest and arms was suddenly feeling very stolen, in spite of the fact he'd found it abandoned in an alley. After three years, he was confident that none of the nanobots in his scarf were aligned with Eraserhead anymore and hadn't been since at least six months after he picked it up, but Izuku couldn't help feeling like everything was going to fall apart as soon as Eraserhead saw the scarf. The phrase "borrowed time" was jangling around in his head, and the only thing that was keeping him rooted in place was his anxiety. And the knowledge that he had more scarves if Eraserhead tried to take this one away.

This was not how he wanted to meet his hero. This was a nightmare scenario, worse than his mind had or could have conjured. Of course, that was how he knew he was unfortunately, unrepentantly awake. This wasn't something he knew he needed to be afraid of an hour ago, and suddenly it was the center of his world. He only hoped that the rest of the people in the room were managing to draw enough of Eraserhead's attention that he wouldn't notice the instant panic attack Izuku was experiencing

The underground hero cast his eyes across the room full of frozen and perplexed students. "It took you 8 seconds to quiet down. That's 8 seconds you and I won't get back. Out in the field, time like that is the difference between saving someone's life and retrieving their corpse."

The atmosphere in the room dimmed. Izuku slipped into the desk behind Bakugou, putting his backpack on the floor next to his chair and praying that this day wasn't going to go as horribly as he was expecting it to.

"My name is Aizawa Shouta, I am to be your homeroom teacher." He reached into his cocoon sleeping bag and produced a set of gym clothes. "Put these on and meet me out on the PE grounds."

Everyone seemed to have his words about time on the mind as they dressed as quickly as possible and raced out to the field. Aizawa-sensei watched as they approached, none of them running, but moving at something more than a leisurely stroll. He didn't pay a lot of attention to anyone in particular, but Izuku's heart still stopped when Aizawa's eyes paused on him.

"Good. You're here. Now you're going to do a quirk apprehension test."

Izuku felt the first bubble of nerves explode in his gut. A quirk apprehension test and he was only playing at having a quirk. At least Aizawa didn't say anything about the scarf. He didn't even appear to recognize it, despite having a copy wrapped around his own neck. Though maybe that had something to do with the differences in how they wore it openly. On Aizawa, the capture scarf looked a bit like an actual scarf. Around Izuku's arms, it looked like thick bandages, which neatly covered up the scars he had collected from the bullying he'd suffered over the years. That would have caused a lot of questions. More than the capture scarf perhaps, though not by much.

"Bakugou. You got first in the entrance exam. Come up here, please."

Bakugou slouched his way up to Aizawa, offering a disinterested stare at anyone and everyone, including the teacher. From the way Aizawa-sensei had stilled, he wasn't impressed with the attitude, but he wasn't going to say anything about it. Izuku wasn't liking the chances that things would be different from middle school. If their teacher wasn’t about to say anything about the obvious disrespect to his face, why would he do anything if Bakugou decided to fall back into attacking Izuku?

As much as he wanted to have faith in one of his favorite heroes, Eraserhead was a teacher here, and teachers had never offered him any sort of real help when Bakugou attacked.

"How far was your softball throw in middle school?"

Bakugou scoffed. "67 meters."

"Now try it with your quirk."

There was a sort of vindictive fire in Bakugou's eyes at the invitation to use his quirk in such a way. He grabbed the softball from Aizawa-sensei's hand and stepped into the circle.

He wound up, putting his whole body into the throw. He boosted it with an explosion as it left his hand with a scream of "DIE!"

Izuku, meanwhile, was having violent flashbacks to middle school and elementary school when he had been the softball, and part of him wasn't sure if Bakugou actually meant what he was saying. He never asked because he was afraid the answer would be yes.

Aizawa-sensei held up the sensor, which read 705.2 meters. "It's important for us to know our limits," he explained. "That's the first logical step to figuring out what sort of heroes you'll be."

Izuku was mentally running over the sort of tests they had done before, trying to figure out how he was supposed to be able to include the capture scarf in that. Especially how to use it in ways that didn't immediately out it as a capture scarf. Pretending it was a bunch of prehensile fabric he could control like an extra limb was all well and good, but it didn't change the fact that this was the exact function of a capture scarf. Attempting to use it in the same way around its original owner was going to get him caught. And he didn't have the nice loophole about bringing whatever he wanted to this test. Around him, he was vaguely aware of his classmates muttering excitedly about being able to utilize their quirks for the test.

"You think this is fun?" Aizawa said suddenly, pulling Izuku out of his thoughts. "You have three years to prove that you can be heroes and you think this is fun? All right then." He straightened and fixed them all with a serious look. "How about we make this a little more fun? The person who scores the lowest on these tests will be expelled." He grinned at them and Izuku was inclined to say the expression looked downright sadistic. "Welcome to UA's hero course."

"Expelled?" Uraraka exclaimed. "But that's not fair!"

"The world we live in is inherently unfair. Villain attacks, natural disasters, traffic accidents... It's our job as heroes to correct the unfairness." Aizawa-sensei brushed the hair out of his eyes. "If you can't do anything about that unfairness in a simple test, you probably shouldn't be a hero."

There were still a few grumbles from the group, people who weren't happy with the extra condition, but Izuku knew better than anyone how unfair the world could be. He was living proof that sometimes the world wasn't fair no matter what you tried to do about it. Everything he had done since picking up the capture scarf had been an attempt to make life just a little bit fairer for himself and he would probably fight harder than anyone else here to keep his position. Everyone else had quirks, after all. They didn't have nearly as much to lose.

And it wouldn't matter if he were in last place if Eraserhead figured out that Izuku was wearing and using one of his scarves. If he was figured out here, he was going to be expelled and there was no way around it. Which meant he wasn't allowed to fail here. He wasn't allowed to be found out, no matter what. The capture scarf didn't belong to Eraserhead anymore, and Izuku had put too much work into this to go home now. Determination burned in his gut alongside the constant quiver of desperation. He had thought the entrance exam was the biggest hurdle on the road to becoming a hero, but he was starting to see that it was only the first. It was going to be a long three years if threats of expulsion came with every exercise, but he refused to give up.

The first test was the 50-meter dash, which they were running in pairs. There wasn't anything nearby Izuku could grip to pull himself along, except perhaps Kac—Bakugou, and that wouldn't really end well for him. It could, however, get him in trouble like it would have back in middle school, so he wasn't willing to even try it. Instead, he went for a full-tilt sprint, imagining that he was being chased by bullies again. He was partially thwarted by Bakugou, who used his explosions to propel him forward. Izuku tripped as the explosion blinded him momentarily, and it was only with instincts honed by parkour and gymnastics that he turned his stumble into a forward roll before bouncing back up to his feet.

"6.47 seconds," the robot at the end of the track chirped.

He could be happy with that. It was a full second faster than he'd been in middle school.

The second test was grip strength, and the only test he really had any plan for. Part of the capture scarf slipped down his arm to wrap around the handle beside his hand. He clenched tighter and tighter, focusing the extent of his physical strength and the pressure of the capture scarf together. He knew the grip of the capture scarf was considerable, especially since it wasn't bound by physical limits and he used it to grip and climb all the time. His mastery of that simple task was the first thing he had pursued other than accuracy.

The device beeped, reading 262 kilograms. Not the best in the class, that went to a guy with multiple arms, but not the worst either.

He turned when he felt eyes on him and managed to catch Aizawa-sensei staring. Which wasn't unnerving at all! It only sent his heart into his throat at Mach 4.

Whatever Aizawa was thinking, though, he didn't say it. Izuku couldn't tell if that was good or bad yet. History said 'bad', but he was still hopeful that UA would be different. He'd probably still be hopeful up to the moment they kicked him through the gate and told him never to come back.

For the standing long jump, he tried something different, something that didn't seem like what a person could or should do with a capture scarf at all. Unwrapping the ends of the scarf from his arms, he let it coil underneath him in a rough sort of spring. He jumped and tried to use the scarf to throw himself that much further forward.

It wasn't as successful as he hoped it would be, but he got about half a meter further than he was expecting to go, which he counted as a win. He would need a lot more practice on the ground with it before he tried to incorporate the move in parkour, but he was starting to actually get somewhere with it. At the very least, maybe it would make Aizawa forget whatever he was thinking about the scarf.

The side-stepping test was exhausting, but he tried to do the same thing as the long jump. It was about as ineffective as before, but Izuku made a mental note to add that specific exercise with his practice as it forced him to try the spring coil over and over again. He'd need that if he were going to try and make it second nature.

The softball throw was next. He wasn't going to be able to throw as far as Bakugou but trying to beat his childhood friend and bully at anything was an exercise in futility or pain. Or both. Fortunately, he hadn't been anywhere nearby when Izuku reported the numbers for the grip test as he probably would have exploded in more ways than one.

Izuku lifted the ball and let the end of the capture scarf wrap around it. Then, swinging the now weighted down scarf around in circles beside him, he released the ball on an upswing when it would have the most lateral movement.

Aizawa held out the sensor so he could see the bright 139.4 meters it displayed. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but apparently decided against it.

The silence sent another frisson of anxiety shooting through Izuku's body. He wanted to scream in the man's face and demand to know what he wanted, but that would probably just get him expelled, so Izuku met Aizawa's silence with silence of his own. Eventually one of them would crack. It was probably going to be Izuku, but at least he could have the satisfaction of saying he'd been brought to his absolute breaking point in the process. He wasn't going to give the man anything less, if only to prove a point.

There wasn't much he could do with the scarf for the endurance running, but he definitely relied on it for upper body training exercises, taking over some of the weight during the pull-ups and the hanging bar crunches. Which wasn't demonstrate that he couldn't do them without the scarf, just that it was wonderful to fall back on it when he was starting to reach the limits of his physical body. Surely part of the test was proving how one's quirk could help them surpass those limits safely. Or, in his case, "quirk".

The last test was seated toe touches, and Izuku wrapped the ends of the capture scarf around the bottoms of his shoes to pull himself into a deeper stretch, being mindful of the limit between difficult and painful. He could feel Aizawa-sensei's eyes on him like a simmering burn on his back, and he wondered if the man had figured him out now. He hadn't said anything, but the man saw his capture scarf in action every single day. Wearing it differently or using it in non-traditional ways wasn't going to change what it was, not really.

This was it, wasn't it? Aizawa was going to expose him to the entire class for not having a quirk, turning everybody against him, and then he was going to be expelled, disgraced, and probably arrested. It probably wouldn't end with just expulsion because he lied about having a quirk and he had kept Eraserhead's capture scarf for more than three years at this point. There would be some kind of legal action for that, surely. That would ruin his chances of ever becoming a hero and would probably put him on some kind of list. There was probably also some law about faking a quirk or something that he hadn't known about before. It wasn't like he bothered to look up the legal matters of quirks and quirk registration before he filled out that sheet for his old homeroom teacher. The anxiety bubbled up in his gut until he felt his throat seize up. It took conscious effort not to throw up, and he hoped he didn't look as bad as he felt.

He was second-guessing every decision he had made on the field, every little thing he had done with the capture scarf. What if he had used it to latch onto Ka—onto Bakugou during the 50-meter dash? That would have been too much like how Eraserhead used it. What if he had practiced that spring before today or if he had attempted to bury the ends of the scarf in the sand pit to fling himself forward in the standing long jump? What if there was a more effective way of sling-shotting the softball for the throwing test that he hadn't thought of? Aizawa must have tried something like that before. That could be the moment he ruined everything for himself. That could be the moment he failed his dreams, and he only had himself to blame.

On the other hand, what if Izuku made Aizawa angry using the scarf in a way he'd never used it before? Teachers didn't like to be corrected in their own subject and wearing the capture scarf to school and using it as his quirk was like spitting in the man's face, wasn't it?

The scarf tightened around his ribs and he was grateful for the comfort, however fleeting that might be. He still had the scarves at home, so he could fall back on that if he were expelled. Maybe he could become a vigilante so he could still help people? There were programs that even legitimized vigilantes after a while. Ingenium had one of the more successful ones running out of his agency, IidaTen.

Izuku blinked, a connection forming in his mind and he glanced over at Iida. Who looked quite a bit like Ingenium and even shared a name with him. He was so shocked by this realization that he forgot momentarily the inevitability of his impending doom.

The anxiety came right back once Aizawa-sensei spoke.

"Your total scores represent your performance in each test," he told them, holding a small remote. "Don't ask me to explain the ranking process, as that would take far too much time and I believe I've made my feelings on that matter clear."

Izuku tensed, unsure where he would fall in the rankings. Probably at the bottom. Eraserhead could erase quirks, which meant he could probably tell whether or not someone was using a quirk. Which could mean he knew Izuku hadn’t used a quirk that whole time.

The bottom fell out of his stomach and he wished the ground would open up beneath him and swallow him whole.

"Oh," Aizawa said, "Mineta, you should be grateful I was lying about expelling the person who came last. Take this as a chance to be better. You have potential and you shouldn't waste it trying to chase things that don't matter right now."

Mineta, the short boy with the purple balls instead of hair, sobbed in relief. His name was at the very bottom of the list, not Izuku’s.

Izuku had forgotten how to breathe. There were twenty places on the rankings and twenty students in the class and somehow his name wasn’t at the bottom of the list. Working up from there, he found his own name comfortably placed at 16, right after the guy with the tape dispensers at his elbows. Unlike the capture scarf, he could actually adhere to surfaces to pull himself along, and he didn't seem to be constrained by a length limit.

Aizawa wasn't expelling him. He wasn't expelling anyone, to be fair, but he wasn't expelling Izuku and he apparently didn't recognize the scarf. Or he did and he just wasn't saying anything. The emotional whiplash he was experiencing was exhausting. He wanted to ride the euphoria of not getting discovered and expelled, but new and more troubling questions were starting to filter into his brain. How long until the next test that could get him discovered or thrown out? Was Aizawa aware that Izuku was using his capture scarf and, if so, did he care? Was he going to grab Izuku after school and demand answers? Was he giving Izuku just enough rope to hang himself with by not calling him out in front of everyone?

Was the rest of the world really so stupid that they thought someone capable of being a hero had to have a quirk? If he had faked a quirk years ago, would his life have been better? Was he going to have to keep up this faking his whole life?

The last question stopped him in his tracks. He added 'find a way to alter the scarf's base design' to his mental to-do list, because if he was going to try and keep this charade going his whole life, he was going to need to establish some variety in his future capture scarves. This moved programming and researching nanotechnology up the list as well. Considering he had to accomplish that on top of school, he was starting to wish he did have a quirk, one that could pause or bend time and give him more hours in the day to work with. He didn't doubt he could handle the level of work he had picked up for himself, but the hours of sleep he was going to lose over everything were... actually not as bad as what he normally lost to the hellish cocktail of insomnia, anxiety, panic, and pain.

He was still in a class with Bakugou and he was still going to keep up his intense workout routine that included a near daily run to and from Dagobah beach. Pain was not going away anytime soon. Anxiety was an old friend and Panic was its twin. Insomnia came for free, so everything was going to stay exactly the same while being completely different.

He was going to die.

"Anyway, we're done here," Aizawa-sensei said, turning away. "You'll find the syllabus for the course in the classroom."

Once Eraserhead was out of sight, Izuku felt some of the tension melt out of him. He really didn't recognize the capture scarf at all, did he? After so long, did he remember losing it? If he did, surely he wouldn't have expected a student to make it into the hero course with it. A quirkless student, no less. While he couldn't bring himself to be completely reassured by this possibility, Izuku could be cautiously optimistic and see where that got him from there.

As he was changing out of his gym clothes and back into the school uniform, he wondered if the records they had access to would note the change in his quirk registration. Did they know he only had his 'quirk' registered for about ten months or did they assume that it came in around the same time as everyone else's would have? Nothing had been said, and he earned his place in the class, so he assumed they thought he was no different from the other prospective heroes around him.

What would they think of him if they knew?

The rest of the day was normal by comparison, with the first session of regular classes just to get the syllabus and see what sort of work they had to look forward to for the rest of the semester. By the time the end of the day arrived, Izuku was more than ready to go home where the threat of discovery was far less immediate. Considering all of the teachers who worked with Eraserhead, it might only take one of them noticing how similar his 'quirk' was to the scarf around Eraserhead's neck. He was glad the scarf was easily and effectively hidden under his uniform. Just like it always was.

He was walking to the gate, intent on going home, when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. He flinched, expecting to turn around and see Kacchan or Aizawa behind him. Instead, it was Iida.

"You have excellent control of your quirk," he said. "Pardon my asking, but it was unclear. Is it a mutation or an emitter type quirk?"

"Oh, it's not a mutation," Izuku explained. "I can just control it."

Which wasn't a lie. He didn't say it was a quirk, but Iida was free to infer what he wished from that.

"And you have clearly spent a lot of time working to control it as you do."

Izuku nodded. "When I first started using it, I couldn't grip anything tightly. Except myself." He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "I kept getting tangled up in it and had to figure out how to get free on my own."

"Oh, hey! Midoriya!"

Izuku turned to see Uraraka running after the two of them.

Iida nodded to himself. "The infinity girl."

"Yeah, I'm Uraraka Ochako. You're Iida Tenya, right? I met Midoriya at the entrance exam when he saved me from the zero pointer."

"I was in that testing ground as well." Iida turned to look at Izuku. "I am ashamed that I did not suss out the hidden portion of the test until after it was concluded."

"Uh, no," Izuku said, waving his hands frantically. "I didn't know there were rescue points until after my letter came. I just... Someone needed to help, and I was right there. My feet moved on their own." He could remember the half-blind panic of the moment, throwing himself at the zero pointer with only the thought that if he tore out enough wires it would stop. "Until the letter arrived, I honestly thought I failed because I only got 12 points."

"What you did at the exam was still pretty brave, Midoriya." Uraraka sped up until they were all walking side by side. "No one else was going to fight it."

"I wasn't really fighting. I was trying to rip out as many important wires as I could find." He shrugged. "Honestly, it probably would have worked better if a lot of people got together to take it down. They have rescue points. Do you suppose they have cooperation points too?"

"Perhaps," Iida replied. "Being able to work with fellow heroes is an important part of becoming a hero. However, when focused on one's individual desire to pass the exam, I don't know whether anyone would listen. Especially since the target wasn't worth any points."

"Still, it would have been cool to see a whole exam site come together to take one down, wouldn't it?" Izuku tried to imagine it happening with the quirks he'd seen in the apprehension test. "All those interesting and useful quirks working to accomplish the same goal? If I were a teacher, especially a hero teacher, I'd want to see that in an exam."

"That would be cool," Uraraka agreed. "Maybe if we ever have to fight them again, we could try that. I think we could convince most of the class to help with that." She frowned suddenly. "Midoriya, why did that one boy call you Deku? I know you told me your name was Izuku."

"That's Kacchan. I mean, Bakugou Katsuki. We grew up together and 'Deku' is just a horrible name he always called me. He liked it because it means useless because he thought I was useless because of my quirk." Or lack thereof, he added mentally.

"Oh. I thought it sounded kind of like 'dekiru', but that's not very nice at all. Why do you call him Kacchan if he calls you that?"

Izuku shrugged. "Force of habit? I'm trying to stop. I promised my mom I would, but it's only been a day and I've been calling him that my entire life." He sighed. "Bakugou would probably rather die than compliment me at this point, and I don't think I would want him to. I wouldn't be able to believe he was sincere about it. I'm honestly surprised he hasn't tried to turn me into a charred and bloody smear on the pavement yet."

Uraraka winced. "It's that bad? Sounds a bit like some of the girls I knew at my middle school. Except for them it wasn't quirks. Well, it was kind of about quirks, but it was also about money. They never did anything directly, but if something happened, everyone knew they were somehow involved, and no one could do anything about it because the leader of their group was the principal's daughter."

"How shameful!" Iida exclaimed, gesticulating robotically. "As an educator, especially as the head educator of their school, they should have been treating the situation with the same level of gravity as if it were any other student!"

Izuku thought about all the teachers who looked the other way when someone was being hurt. He thought about Kirigaya-sensei, who never bothered to do anything until it seemed like Izuku had a quirk, and then he became the most helpful person, filing registration forms about a fake quirk Izuku definitely didn't have. "That's just the way the world works sometimes, Iida," he said, feeling more tired than the quirk assessment test had any right to make him. "Like Aizawa-sensei said, the world is unfair and it's up to us as heroes to make it a little fairer."

"Are heroes allowed to intervene in schools like that?" Uraraka wondered. "I mean, obviously the heroes are our teachers this time, but what about other schools, places that don't have heroes working for them? Can we go in and stop something if we know something is going wrong?"

"Perhaps this is something we should discuss with Aizawa-sensei tomorrow," Iida put in as they arrived at the station. "Of anyone we have access to, he would be in the best position to know."

"Right! We'll have to do that then!" Uraraka smiled and it lit up her whole face. "Now, could I get both of your phone numbers? I have to catch my train home, but I want to continue this conversation. And we're friends, aren't we?"

It was such a simple thing to tack onto the end of what she was saying, but Izuku couldn't ignore it. Part of him was guilty, a little voice whispering that they only wanted to be friends with him because they thought he had a quirk. But the rest of him was desperate to enjoy the feeling while he had it. He hadn't been friends with anyone since Kacch—Bakugou found out he was quirkless. No one would talk to him or listen to him without having some ulterior motive.

He didn't think Uraraka was just offering to be nice. She seemed like a genuine sort of person, someone who honestly wanted the best for the people she knew. So, he typed his number into her phone with a smile and pushed away some of the lingering doubts about whether or not she was doing this to pity him. He did the same for Iida, who was less terrifying when their futures weren't on the line.

And the bright sparking feeling deep in his gut, he thought that might just be hope. He couldn't wait to tell his mom about his day.

Chapter Text

Izuku was feeling better about going to school the next day, knowing that he would have Iida and Uraraka to talk to. They had spent a while texting back and forth about what life was like in middle school, though Izuku edited a lot of the stories he told about his school experiences, not sure how much he wanted to tell them about himself. The fact that most of the bullying was because he was quirkless didn't make the conversation, and neither Uraraka nor Iida asked about it.

He refused to tell them too much about Bakugou's involvement in everything, but he thought they were smart enough to guess a few things. Bakugou had made it clear from the very beginning that he didn't follow anyone or anything. He wasn't going to hop onto bullying one kid just because everyone else was doing it, but he was far more likely to be the instigator.

Izuku's mother was thrilled to hear that he'd made a couple of friends. He told her about his day, as promised, mentioning that other than when he first entered the classroom, he and Bakugou didn't even interact.

Honestly, he wished he would say or do something. Izuku was on edge waiting for the eventual explosion, and that was always worse than the explosion itself. Maybe Bakugou knew that Izuku was holding that history over him. Maybe he was biding his time, waiting for an opportunity where their new teachers—heroes who might actually care about his actions—weren't around to see.

He got to the classroom and made his way to his seat, distantly glad he was there earlier than the day before. Bakugou hadn't arrived yet and Izuku relished having the moment to settle and prepare himself for everything. It was the first actual day of classes, and he was both excited and nervous for everything. According to their schedules, they had normal classes in the morning and the afternoons were reserved for heroics classes.

He was a little disappointed that the regular schedule didn’t include science classes for the hero course as science had routinely been his best subject in school. There was something about science, about being able to observe and draw inferences that came easily to him. He had trained it alongside his analysis, and now he had much more knowledge to draw on, many more conclusions and hypotheses to test. It was just a shame he wouldn’t have that in a classroom setting this time around.

There were several clubs available though, and he was looking into the programming club to see if he could learn some of what he needed to know to modify the capture scarf design. That he would also be in the vicinity of the support labs and all the students studying there was just icing on the cake for him. Things finally seemed like they were coming together into something he could understand and plan for.

It all sort of hit him at once that he was in UA and the future he had dreamed of, the future he'd been ridiculed and abused for wanting his whole life, was actually within reach. He hadn't gotten expelled in the quirk apprehension test even though he didn't have a quirk to use and he had made friends for the first time since he was 4.

He didn't cry, but it was a near thing, the swell of emotion hitting him like one of Bakugou's explosions. Against the odds, in spite of everyone who told him to give up, he was sitting in Class 1-A at UA High School. He rode that feeling all the way through his morning classes, taking notes, and participating though he could hardly remember what he said or did later.

When the afternoon arrived, everyone was buzzing about their Foundations of Heroics class, wondering who would be teaching it and what they were going to be doing. Izuku was finally present enough to speculate with everyone else, suggesting that maybe they weren't doing anything too intense for the first day.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he heard a familiar voice. "I AM COMING THROUGH THE DOOR LIKE A NORMAL PERSON!"

Every head in the room snapped up to see All Might standing in the doorway to the classroom dressed in his silver age costume.

"I am teaching Hero Basic Training!" the hero announced, standing at the front of the room in his classic power pose. "The class that takes and molds you into the heroes you will become by the time you graduate. Today's activity will be battle training!"

Well, it seems I was wrong about starting things off slowly, Izuku thought. But after yesterday, I don't know why I expected anything different.

"And for that, you will need these!" All Might pressed a button and the wall opened up to reveal several cases stored in previously hidden alcoves. "In accordance with your quirk registry and the special forms you filled out before being accepted, your costumes! It is, after all, the image of a hero that takes care of half the battle."

The excitement in the room was palpable, a vibrating energy unlike anything Izuku had been in the middle of before. People were already out of their seats and moving toward the cases with their seat number on it.

"After you have changed, meet me on Ground Beta!" With that, All Might was gone, leaving behind the chaos of 20 elated hero students.

Izuku waited until the others had grabbed their cases before collecting his own, wondering what they had made of his requests. He couldn't exactly put down that he worked with a capture scarf, so he had asked for a durable but flexible material for the suit, reinforced against the most common types of damage. He hadn't really worked with any other weapons beyond the capture scarf, but he put into the request to work his way up to using smoke bombs and flash grenades, as well as other options for non-lethal take-downs, like a taser. He had no idea if any of that was going to make it into his costume.

In the locker rooms, he took over a secluded corner to change. The first thing he found in his case was a note he assumed came with every costume. It was from Power Loader, who was apparently the Support Class teacher, letting him know that if any changes or alterations needed to be made to his costume or gear that he should submit a request to the Support Department and schedule a meeting to figure out what he needed. He was grateful for the consideration, even if it was something everyone was given. He was glad to know that changes to costumes were possible, potentially encouraged, and that his rambling requests were not going to handicap him in the future with something he couldn't manage to use.

Under the note was the costume itself and something caught in Izuku's chest at the sight of it. Armed with the knowledge that his best option as a hero would be to go into underground heroics, he had asked for a color scheme suited for hiding in the shadows. This was exactly what he received. The suit wasn't quite black, but it was a shade of charcoal grey that would be easy to miss in the shadows. A dark matte helmet in the same color was with it, promising enough protection to stop a bullet if it came to it, though Izuku hoped he never had cause to test that.

The material of the suit did offer about as much protection as the capture scarf normally did, so he unraveled the scarf a bit to have more length to access on his arms before he pulled the suit on over it. The sleeves were loose enough that he wouldn't have trouble sending the ends of the scarf out to grab something. The pair of gloves that came with the suit didn't quite reach the ends of the sleeves, so the scarf had room to unravel from his arm without constricting it. To make up for this small chink in his armor, he wrapped the very ends of the scarf around his wrists. It was a small adjustment to how he normally wore it, but it accounted for the extra length he'd created unwinding some from around his chest.

He found another note with the utility belt that explained the contents of each of the pouches. For the convenience of less required space, one of the upper year support students had made and patented several pellets that worked the same as flash bangs, smoke bombs, and even small explosives. They were carefully sorted and none of them were particularly dangerous unless someone swallowed them. As they looked like colored marbles, Izuku didn't think the urge to eat them would be a factor to deal with. Besides those, there was also a small collection of disks made by another support student that would administer an electrical shock equivalent to a taser charge while taking up less than a fourth of the space of an actual taser.

Izuku decided he needed to meet more support students and pick their brains if they were able to build things like this. They could probably put him on the right path to figuring out his own problem with nano tech without too much trouble.

Once everything was in place, he raced to catch up with the others already headed to Ground Beta. It was a cityscape not unlike the fields used for the exam. Looking around, Izuku was fairly certain it had been one of the testing grounds. He could imagine it filled with robots, the buildings crumbling under the assault, though it had been fixed up between now and then.

He wasn't the only one to notice this as Iida raised his hand. "Sensei, this appears to be the same field used in the entrance exam. Will we once again be performing city-scape maneuvers?"

All Might grinned at them. "Nope! You'll be moving on to step two! Indoor anti-personnel battle training!" He started leading them deeper into the fake city. "You see, in spite of the outdoor battles that make up the majority of what you see in the news, the most insidious fights actually happen inside. Black market deals, hostage situations, these happen in contained spaces that villains can control far easier than they can control an outdoor situation. Which is why you will be split into hero and villain teams for this exercise and face off in two verses two battles!"

Izuku listened carefully to the explanation of the scenario as his mind whirled away with possibilities for both sides of the equation. It was a little disappointing that they wouldn't be able to pick their teammates, but no one could really predict who they were going to be working with in an emergency. And something like a bomb threat certainly counted as an emergency situation that would pull in whoever was closest to deal with it. Izuku just hoped he didn't have to team with Bakugou. He couldn't imagine that ending well at all. The bomb in the scenario might be fake, but Bakugou wasn't shy about using his own explosions in any situation, as Izuku's expanse of scar tissue proved.

Although he had all the nice pellets and taser disks to use, he decided that a mock battle was probably not the best place to test them. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the support students’ abilities, but he didn’t know the scope of what he had access to and didn’t want to potentially handicap himself or his teammate by introducing another unknown factor to the equation.

"Ah, team A?" Uraraka said, holding out the piece with a large letter 'A' on it that matched the one in Izuku's hand. "It's nice to be on a team with a friend."

"Yeah," he agreed, letting out the breath he'd been holding since Bakugou grabbed his piece. "Now we just need to know if we're on the villain team or the hero team and who we're up against."

Izuku was almost sure he knew what the outcome of that was going to be when All Might reached into the boxes. He wished he weren’t as sure as he was, but the universe always seemed to conspire to put Bakugou in his path or the other way around. If it weren’t for the fact that they hardly interacted at UA, he would think that something was arranged so the teams weren't as random as they were made out to be.

The lots All Might pulled out were team A as the heroes and team D, Bakugou and Iida, as the villains. As the villains needed time to set up, they disappeared into the building first while Izuku and Uraraka were pulled off to a safe distance to strategize, and the rest of the class disappeared off to a different location to view everything going down. Or, since it was Bakugou, to watch the inevitable fireworks.

"Okay," Uraraka said once they were alone. "Bakugou has those explosions and Iida is really fast. How are we going to handle this?"

"Bakugou is probably going to come straight for me." Izuku sighed. "He knows me, and I know him, so his first priority is going to be taking me out. And even beyond that, he's always looking to fight."

Uraraka frowned. "So, we should avoid him, then?"

"That would probably be best if we can manage it." Not to mention it was more or less what he had promised his mother he would do. He wasn't expecting to be thrown into a fight with him on the second day that made their confrontation more or less inevitable, but if everything went bad, there was still the other half of what he'd promised her. "How does your quirk work exactly? What are the limits you're dealing with?"

"I can make up to three tons float. Any more than that and I get sick. Same thing if I try to float myself."

"But you could float someone else without a problem?" His mind was spinning away, coming up with ways to avoid the confrontation he really didn't want to have now. "What if you floated something and rode on it?"

She paused. "It would have to be a lot bigger than me to make me float too and I don't think we have anything like that. But yes, I could float you, if that's what you're asking."

"With my tendrils, I’d have mobility, even weightless. Do you have enough control to float just me and not my clothes? Because I don't know how the fabric would react while weightless, or if I would have the same level of control over it and we don't really have the time to experiment now."

"Yes, I can float just you or I could float just your clothes. I did it with my shoes in the apprehension test."

A plan was starting to form in Izuku's mind. "Okay, so they are going to be expecting us to come through the door. We're not going to do that. This building has a lot of windows, so we can float up to one of the upper windows and enter through there. You can hold onto me and I'll pull us up. By negating my weight, I will be putting less weight on the tendrils trying to climb the building."

Uraraka nodded. "Maybe we could go in through the roof? There should be some sort of access there."

"We'll see. If not, an upper window should do just fine."

It wasn't long before they received the go-ahead to approach the building. They circled around to the far side, away from the entrance and any windows the villain team might have been watching from. Uraraka grabbed his hand and Izuku felt a strange sensation of vertigo settle into the pit of his stomach. Suddenly her nausea trying to float herself made more sense. He didn't think he was that bad off, but it was probably worse since it was her power that caused the floating and she was probably constantly aware of the weight of whatever she was floating. The sensation of weightlessness combined with the constant awareness of weight probably didn't agree with her. He wondered if it was more of a mental block, where her mind was rejecting the idea of both realities—weightless but possessing weight—and its only recourse was to make her instantly nauseous.

Perhaps that was something to test later.

"Get on my back," he told her, turning around slowly. He wasn't sure if weightlessness would also affect his normal inertia, but he didn't want to test that now either.

She scrambled onto his back, hooking her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Once he was reasonably sure she was secure, he sent out the capture scarf to grab onto the drainpipe. Uraraka was lighter than him when he actually had weight, so he nearly pulled them into the wall with his first retraction before he hastily sent out the other end of the scarf to grab the next handhold and redirect the motion.

It occurred to him as he was climbing that while he had done this sort of thing before, he had never done it with another person. There had never been anyone else to do it with, no one who would have listened or agreed to experiment with a quirkless Deku like him. He wouldn't always have access to someone with an anti-gravity quirk all the time, so he should see if his normal scarf configuration were able to support more than just him without unnecessarily crushing his ribs. He'd like to think the answer would be yes, but he couldn't be sure without experimentation. Yet another item to add to the list. Maybe if other exercises were different, he would be able to experiment with it in class.

He pulled the two of them up onto the roof to find that, yes, there was a hatch leading into the building.

"That thing you said about making your shoes lighter, do you think it would make your footsteps softer?" He asked. "We don't want them to know we're up here."

"It's worth a try," Uraraka said, reaching down to tap the boots of her costume. "Oh! I should have returned your gravity first!"

He waved her off. "It's fine. I have my tendrils. And it will be faster to slingshot around without weight. The pressure wave from Bakugou's explosions will make sure I don't take the full brunt of the explosion itself if he comes back."

As if summoned, there was an explosion from below, though Izuku wasn't sure if it was a tactic to draw them out or just plain frustration at not finding them.

"That's probably a good thing, then," Uraraka agreed, glancing down through the floors to wherever Bakugou seemed to be. "Hopefully, we can get this over with quickly."

She opened the hatch and Izuku pulled himself through first, glancing around carefully. Crates and furniture were stacked haphazardly throughout the room with no particular order or thought. Some were more organized than others, but those were closest to the door. It looked like they had stumbled on some sort of junk room.

Uraraka jumped down, landing softly beside him. "Huh. I guess that works."

Izuku was still floating, so he pulled himself along to the door with one end of the scarf. Well, there weren't really many doors, just open doorways for him to pull himself through before gliding up to the ceiling. He slithered along not unlike a snake, if the snake had its gravity inverted. Uraraka walked beneath and a bit behind him. They were both trying to be quiet and not draw attention to themselves.

Izuku winced as another explosion sounded somewhere below them. This one was louder, but still rather distant. As soon as Iida spotted them, he was sure to call Bakugou, but maybe they would be able to complete their objective before that happened.

They reached the end of the floor, where a staircase down waited for them. Apparently, the bomb wasn't on the topmost floor, which meant they might have accounted for the possibility of rooftop access and planned accordingly.

"Should we split up on the next floor?" Uraraka asked. "So, we can cover more ground?"

Izuku hesitated. "Maybe. How long do you think we have, seven minutes?"

"Probably about that."

"Okay. If the bomb isn't on this floor and we don't see either Iida or Bakugou, we meet at the staircase on the opposite end of the floor before going down further. We can't rule out the possibility of an ambush." As if to punctuate his point, there was another explosion, this one much closer.

They separated, Izuku wandering along the ceiling to the left while Uraraka tiptoed off to the right. He was almost to the stairs on the far side of the building when his comm crackled.

"Midoriya, I found Iida," Uraraka whispered. "He's with the bomb, fourth door from the stairs we came from."

"I copy. Headed your way. Any sign of Bakugou?"

"No. Iida's by himself." There was a weird huffing before she added, "I think he's monologuing."

Izuku turned back the way he came, only to freeze briefly as the sound of Bakugou's cursing came from the stairwell he'd been approaching. Like always, the cursing was accompanied by the little pops of explosions crackling on his palms. Izuku knew that if Bakugou found him right now, it would be very bad.

Sending out the scarf from both sleeves, he latched onto two doorways sitting across from another as a human slingshot and flung himself down toward the other end of the hall. He twisted in the air, grateful once again that he decided on gymnastics to build his skills. He caught the inner doorway at the end of the hall and swung himself around the corner until he was running sideways along the wall towards Uraraka.

"Bakugou's coming," he murmured into his comm by way of explanation when he caught the look of alarm on her face. "We need to end this quickly."

She nodded, pointing to the door she was hiding beside to indicate where Iida was at the moment. "What should we do?"

Izuku pulled himself to a stop above the doorway and glanced in quickly to take stock of the situation.

The bomb was sitting in the back of the room away from the door but near the windows. With Bakugou on his way and the exercise quickly counting down on them, they didn't have the time to maneuver outside to get in through the windows. The only thing saving them at the moment was the fact that Iida hadn't noticed them at the door yet as he was wrapped up in his speech about how the heroes were going to fail and the bomb was going to go off.

"Can you draw his attention away from the door?" Izuku whispered. "If you take him one way, I can swing around the other side. Be ready to cancel your quirk on me."

Uraraka nodded. "I can do that. I'll take him right, you go left?"

"It's a plan."

There was an explosion at the end of the building Izuku had run from. Apparently Bakugou had arrived on their floor. He wasn't stupid by any means, so he had to know they were going for the bomb while avoiding him. Now he was bringing the fight to them.

"Found you!" Uraraka shouted into the room, instantly drawing Iida's attention.

"You're out of luck, hero!" Iida replied. "I have removed everything you could have used from this room!"

"Darn. Guess I'll just have to take you out first." She dodged to the right in an attempt to outmaneuver him, at least from Iida's perspective. Instead, it was effective at what it was meant to do, distracting him from the doorway so Izuku could catapult into the room and around the pillars on the left.

He moved until he was situated against the wall near the bomb. "Uraraka, now!"

His weight returned almost instantly, accompanied by Iida's shocked exclamation, but Izuku was turning his fall into a tumble that brought him right up next to the bomb, where he slapped his hand on it before Iida could properly react to his presence. It was just in time, too, as Bakugou slid into the room with the smell of burnt sugar and a vicious growl.

All Might's voice came over the PA system in the building. "Hero team wins!"

Izuku released the breath he didn't realize he'd been holding and staggered back a couple steps as Uraraka ran up to hug him.

"We did it!" she squealed, dissolving into giggles probably caused by the sudden loss of adrenaline. Goodness knows Izuku felt like laughing too, but he couldn't bring himself to do more than smile weakly with Bakugou fuming in the doorway.

He spun on his heel and left the room, another explosion sounding before he was out of sight, this one strong enough to crack the walls. Izuku winced. Bakugou was probably most angry about not getting a proper fight out of the exercise, but the loss was also part of it.

With as powerful a quirk as Explosion, he probably anticipated that most of his fights would be head to head, something that neither Izuku nor Uraraka were made for. While a gravity quirk like Uraraka's could be used in combat, it wasn't suited for the kind of fighting Bakugou was used to as it would require a lot of preparation before fighting more directly became feasible. And Izuku with the capture scarf as his fake quirk was also more of a utility hero than a front-line fighter. The only way he and Uraraka would have won the exercise was by utilizing their skills to sneak around and cause misdirection, which was exactly what they did.

"Are you okay?" Uraraka asked. "I've never kept anyone up that long, and then you fell!"

Izuku shook his head, patting her shoulder. "It was a controlled fall. I knew what I was doing. I'm not going to lie, being weightless was weird, but I wouldn't mind doing that again sometime."

"Please return to the observation room," All Might called, drawing them out of their conversation.

Iida walked back with them. "I was not expecting both of you," he admitted. "I had assumed that you would split up to look."

"We did for a bit, but we came back together." Izuku rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "Neither of us wanted to run into Bakugou, especially not alone. And then we had to plan around whatever we found when we found the bomb."

"But where were you?" Iida asked. "I didn't see you in the hallway when Uraraka was there. That was why I assumed she was alone."

"He was floating above the door." Uraraka grinned. "Like he'd been doing for most of the exercise, actually."

"Ah. That was what you meant. I had wondered."

In the observation room, they were met by a chorus of cheers and Izuku felt his cheeks instantly start to burn.

"Now," All Might was saying as he hovered over them. "Who was the MVP for this round?"

"Midoriya was," Yaoyorozu replied. "He figured out how to take advantage of Uraraka's quirk in this scenario, and he made the plan to draw Iida's attention away from the door." She turned to look at Izuku. "Have you worked without gravity before?"

Unable to speak, Izuku just shook his head.

"What?" Kirishima exclaimed. "But you were so good at it!"

"Yeah," Kaminari agreed. "You had to have done something like that before!"

Izuku shrugged, trying unsuccessfully to disappear into the background. "Gymnastics."

Ashido slapped him on the back, almost knocking him over. "Either way, it was awesome! Especially that wall-running bit. It was like you stepped right out of a video game!"

"Yes, well, we should move on to the next team," All Might said. "Congratulations, hero team, for your win, but we need to move things along."

Now that the attention was off of him, Izuku slumped in his chair and let himself drift a bit while he watched the others. No one had figured out yet that his quirk didn't exist, and he hoped he managed to keep that streak up. It was only a matter of time before someone did realize he was actually quirkless, but maybe by then he would have proved he could stand beside everyone else who did have a quirk.

Although honestly, just the fact that he was sitting in a Foundational Heroics class having come out on top for the first exercise of the year meant that he was capable of doing exactly what he was doing.

Hopefully, the teachers would see it that way when they finally figured things out.

Chapter Text

Izuku didn't see Bakugou again the rest of that day, and he wasn't about to complain about that. Avoidance was the best method for dealing with him, but when he didn't have to actively run away, the world always seemed a little bit better.

That probably had something to do with the fact that he wasn't in pain, which was a bit of a novelty. He still felt stretched a little thin, but it wasn't terrible. Izuku had signed up for all of this, so he really had no space to complain about the workload he volunteered to take on.

The absence of Bakugou probably had something to do with the fact that he was searching out a part of the school most students avoided. The Support classes had a reputation for housing the more destructively insane geniuses UA collected. Which wasn't to say they didn't end up in other sections, just that Support classes with their focus on science and invention tended to collect the more eccentric variety known for blowing things up in a fit of inspiration.

He wondered what it said about him that he was seeking them out. One of the students he asked in the hallway looked at him like he had a death wish. They didn't ask it aloud, so Izuku didn't get the chance to find out what their reaction would have been to him answering, "Not anymore."

It probably would have been more horror. And pity. And discomfort.

But support students would have the sort of knowledge and resources he didn't currently have access to and would probably be willing to help him if he played the part of a guinea pig/sounding board.

He was starting to doubt his own sanity when he heard the explosion. Unlike Bakugou's, this explosion sounded heavier, like it had more substance and less flash. It was also helpful, as it identified the main support lab by the smoke leaking out around the edges of the large metal door. Even without the smoke, he would probably have been able to identify it, as there were marks burned into the wall around it and uneven patches of plaster where the door had likely been blown off its hinges and later repaired. There was a reinforced panel next to it, covered in a thin layer of soot, a few old scorch marks, and a plethora of dents and scratches from whatever abuse it had taken in its tenure as the support lab's doorbell.

Izuku moved until he wasn't standing in front of the door. Not only did it open out, it clearly had a history of being blasted off into the hallway, which would definitely crush him if he were standing in the way. And for all he knew, blowing the door off its hinges was a form of initiation, or a test to see if someone was smart enough to avoid obvious hazards.

Even if most people had to be crazy coming down this way at all.

He rang the doorbell and listened as there was a frantic scuffling inside before the door was opened by Power Loader.

"Yes?" the Support teacher asked. "You're a hero student, right? Is there a problem with your costume?"

"Uh, no." Izuku reached up to rub the back of his neck. "I was actually wondering if I could talk to you or one of the support students about a personal project of mine."

He could feel Power Loader staring down at him, even though he couldn't see his eyes in the helmet. "What sort of project?"

Izuku flinched under the gaze. He never had a lot of luck getting a teacher to let him do something non-standard, no matter how reasonable the request. And he wasn't honestly sure if his interest would be considered reasonable in the slightest. "Nanotech?"

"Are you asking or telling me?"

"Telling. I have an interest in constructing and building nanotech, and I wanted to know if there's any way I could talk to someone about it."

There was a moment of silence where Power Loader just looked at him. Then he groaned and tilted his head toward the ceiling. "It was only a matter of time. I should have known eventually that the Hero Course was going to have one of you."

Izuku winced. "I'm sorry?"

"No, no. Honestly, I think someone like you has been overdue in the Hero course."

A sudden thrill of panic shot through Izuku’s body. "Someone like me?"

"An all-arounder," Power Loader explained, apparently missing the obvious distress he had caused. "Someone who wants to pick up a lot of skills we teach here. Including invention. Have you made anything yet?"

Izuku shook his head, trying to force the panic out with the movement. "No, just a lot of theory. I've looked into KSSI a lot in the past, and the core of their prosthetics is nanotechnology. That's what got me interested in it in the first place." Which wasn't a total lie. But finding the capture scarf was the real catalyst for that vein of research, and that was a secret he wasn't going to provide even with all of the truths packed in around it. "Their nanobots are self-replicating, provided they have enough material they can use, and that's just fascinating to me, but it obviously needs precise programming otherwise it would consume and replicate like a virus and then you would have a really big problem on your hands because you wouldn't be able to stop it—"

Power Loader chuckled, cutting off his rambling. "You're definitely an all-arounder. 1-A or 1-B?"

"Uh, 1-A."

"Shit, how did Shouta get you? Never mind." He turned to go back into the lab and beckoned for Izuku to follow him. "Hero courses are always a little packed, so you definitely won't have time for all of the Support courses you need to be able to work on that on your own."

"Which is why I came to ask for help," Izuku admitted. "I know programming is going to be half the battle with this, making sure the bots know what to do and when to stop so I was going to join the programming club, but I know I need more of the mechanical knowledge."

"Who's this?"

Izuku jumped as a soot-covered girl with pink hair and yellow eyes appeared right in front of him.

"Hatsume, don't scare this one away!" Power Loader turned back to him. "Sorry about her. Hatsume is one of my best students this year."

"His very best student," Hatsume bragged. "Hatsume Mei, future CEO of Hatsume Industries. Nice to meet you, stranger-kun."

"I'm Midoriya Izuku." He bowed, feeling the scarf tighten slightly around his ribs.

"Did you come for one of my babies?"

Izuku's mind short-circuited in the face of her manic grin and enthusiastic offering of a child. "Uh..."

"Her inventions," Power Loader explained. "And no, Hatsume, he's here because he has an interest in support tech on his own."

Hatsume's gaze suddenly sharpened into something gleeful and calculating. Izuku shrank under it. That sort of expression never spelled good things for him. "Specific branch or something more general?"

"Nanotech," Izuku whispered, hoping the answer would satisfy her and she didn't get mad at him.

"Ooh! That's new!"

"Hatsume, don't drag him into your crazy, please." There was a sort of amused exasperation in Power Loader's voice, which could be either good or bad for him. "He might never come back. You don't know how long I've been waiting for an all-arounder to show up at this school." He led Izuku over to his desk and scribbled down a quick note. "Give that to Aizawa next time you see him, and we'll try to work something out. Even if it's just some time after school here in the labs or figuring out how to put a science class in your course schedule, we'll figure out a way to make this work."

"Thank you, sensei."

"If this works out, you can thank me by devoting as much effort to it as you would to your hero courses."

Izuku nodded vigorously. As though he would do anything less! He never wanted to disappoint the people who actually put time and effort into him and his interests. And when it came to making himself a better hero, he was willing to drive himself to exhaustion to meet his own expectations. He had done that more than once in the past, to the exasperation and worry of his mother, but everything paid off in the end.

He was in a far better place now than he'd ever been, and he was sure that most of it had to do with getting into the hero course. He wasn't about to jeopardize his place in UA by giving half of what he could do. The school motto was Plus Ultra, wasn't it? How could he in good conscience do anything else?

"Midoriya-kun!" He turned back to see Hatsume waving at him. "Next time you come I can introduce you to my babies! Maybe we could work together on something once you have the right foundation in place!"

In spite of himself, Izuku smiled. "I think I'd like that." Hatsume was the personification of mad science if he'd ever seen it, but he couldn't help but think of the sort of things they could accomplish together. She had all the answers, and Izuku was very good at asking the right questions.

Glancing back at Power Loader before he left, he wondered how quickly their collaboration would drive him to distraction. For all he seemed to be worried about her chasing him away, the man was ridiculously fond of her, explosions and all. If she and Izuku did start collaborating on projects, he would probably complain in public but start bragging once it was just the teachers around. Especially around Aizawa-sensei.

And it felt nice to be part of a non-hostile student-teacher relationship for the first time. With luck, this trend would continue. If not, well, he knew how to deal with that, too.

He honestly wasn't sure where Aizawa was on that spectrum at the moment, but he hoped he'd get some answers soon. The uncertainty piggybacking on his anxiety was trying to kill him.

Shouta would have preferred to be present for the first Foundational Heroics lesson, but apparently "not trusting All Might not to fuck that up" wasn't a good enough reason to lurk nearby. And probably exactly why Nezu had sent him out on an errand during his free period in that block.

So, it was the footage of their first exercise that he was coming back to, rather than the exercise itself.

It wasn't the worst situation. He was getting a good idea of what his students were capable of. That being said, he had put off the match-up with Midoriya and Bakugou until much later. He was willing to admit that Midoriya had some good instincts, especially with that flip he managed in the 50-meter dash while blinded, but Bakugou wore his rage and entitlement like a badge, and Shouta wasn't unaware that there was some kind of history between the two. They had gone to the same middle school and he had assumed that they’d applied together, but Midoriya avoided Bakugou wherever possible. Meanwhile, Bakugou was either oblivious to the backlash of his quirk on others or he didn't care, and Shouta was leaning toward the latter.

He couldn't say the kid was without potential, but if he didn't start thinking more about his actions beyond "attack", Shouta was more than willing to fast-track him through an expulsion. A lack of care for one's surroundings was deadly in the field, and not usually for the person who exercised that lack of care. Bakugou's was one attitude Shouta refused to graduate because it was a recipe for civilian casualties, and he didn't want that on his or Bakugou's conscience.

He made a note to talk to Todoroki about why he wouldn't use his fire. Given the burn on his face that wasn't explained in his file, it was entirely possible that portion of his quirk was trauma-locked, but asking the boy would be the fastest way to get that answer. He also didn't treat it like the team exercise it was supposed to be, so that was just another thing they would have to talk about. Endeavor might be able to get away with feeding his own ego, but the ratings he got and the amount of damage he caused were example enough for why that wasn't going to work for good heroes moving forward. Heroes sometimes needed to work with other heroes, no matter how powerful they were on their own.

The opposite view of that sort of thing could be seen between Yaoyorozu and Mineta. Yaoyorozu tried to get Mineta to work with her, but he kept making lewd comments about her costume and leering whenever he thought she wasn't looking. From the way she shivered, she knew he was looking at her every time.

Shouta made a note to keep an eye on him. He was already on thin ice from the Quirk Apprehension test, and he was already starting to look like a sexual assault charge in the making. If that sort of behavior continued, Shouta would have no qualms whatsoever kicking him to the curb. Especially since the two of them could have won if Mineta had just taken his head out of his ass and helped. Yaoyorozu's strategy of filling several rooms with things that made loud noises and creating a decoy bomb room were solid, but she only had time to set up about half of it, and Mineta could have laid some excellent traps for Kaminari and Jirou if he'd been focused on the exercise instead of his partner's cleavage.

The match-up between Tokoyami and Asui against Kirishima and Sero was actually fairly balanced. It wasn't that surprising, though, that Tokoyami and Asui came out on top, especially since Sero's strategy drastically lowered light levels in the room with the fake bomb. It prevented Asui from entering through the windows and nicely bottle-necked the area, but Dark Shadow had a lot more power and was easily able to pin Kirishima in place while Asui distracted Sero and Tokoyami got to the bomb.

In her match-up, Ashido proved that she was both versatile and adaptable, especially when separated from Aoyama. She managed to keep Koda's rats away with her acid, spread it on the floor to have the advantage of maneuverability over Sato, and even weakened a section of the floor in preparation for leading Sato into it. All in all, a simple but solid strategy.

Shouta made a note to recommend self-defense lessons for Koda, and maybe something to give him a bit more confidence. He could have helped overwhelm Ashido with Sato but stood back attempting to protect the bomb as though he didn't trust himself to actually help.

When he finally got around to Bakugou and Iida against Midoriya and Uraraka, he had a small list of things to look into with each of his students. As much as he hoped these ones would be unproblematic, the fact that Bakugou and Midoriya were involved killed the hope before it had time to grow. At least he had come into this knowing they would probably have the most issues.

And, by god, was he right.

The first thing he noticed was that Bakugou, like Todoroki, did not play well with others. As soon as they placed the bomb, he went off on his own without really consulting his partner, searching for the fight. Shouta had Bakugou's test scores to prove that the kid was intelligent and the results from the Quirk Apprehension test to prove that he could think strategically about how to deal with a problem, but it was like all of that got thrown out the window in favor of hunt-and-destroy. If Uraraka and Midoriya had entered the building normally, someone probably would have gotten badly hurt trying to get by.

That being said, the hero team hadn't gone the normal route to enter the building. They had circled around to the back and climbed up the building after Uraraka negated Midoriya's gravity. What was surprising was that she didn't release him once they were inside. Midoriya bobbed around like a balloon, using his tendrils to pull himself along.

There was something about those tendrils that Shouta couldn't put his finger on. He'd had the feeling that it was somehow familiar during the Quirk Apprehension tests and he was getting it again. They were familiar. Midoriya didn't produce the tendrils, he knew that much. He had the capacity to control them, but they weren't physically part of him.

Maybe that was what was screwing with his head? The kid was using them like extra limbs when Shouta knew they weren't. It was some type of telekinesis quirk that only worked with certain materials. And they were fairly basic materials too, a durable polyester reinforced with wires. It shouldn’t have been so unusual. Quirks were weird and didn’t always make sense. Why was he so hung up on Midoriya’s?

When he finally got the chance to read through the file on the kid, there was a note that his quirk was registered ludicrously late, less than a year ago. It set off all sorts of alarm bells in his head about why Midoriya would hide his quirk for so long. As much as he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, Shouta had a feeling he would need to talk to the kid about it at some point.

Actually, he knew he was going to have to talk to Midoriya about a few things. The logical ruse had forced the best out of everyone in the Quirk Apprehension test, but Midoriya attacked everything like it was the last thing he was going to do. He used his quirk in unusual ways in every single test besides the endurance run, and he always looked like he was on the edge of passing out. For something that seemed to be an emitter quirk, the kid used it like a mutation, like the tendrils were part of him. There was a fluidity to his movements in tandem with the tendrils that looked almost like a symbiotic relationship. It was more than he’d seen out of most aspiring hero students, so why exactly was Midoriya so desperate?

The thought was driven from his head as he watched Midoriya freeze near the stairwell down to the second floor, where Bakugou was letting off explosions. Then the problem child hooked a tendril in a couple of doorways across from one another and fired himself like a slingshot down the hall and back the way he'd come. If there had been any doubt in Shouta's mind that Midoriya was going to be a reckless pain in his ass, the boy managed to grind whatever remained of it into dust. Midoriya didn't even bother to slow himself down to take the corner, managing to catch the final doorway through skill or luck, still moving faster than Iida could probably run, and whipped himself around into the adjacent hallway Uraraka had taken.

The kid was going to get himself killed, and the one saving grace here was that he wasn't always going to have his gravity negated by a partner. Although Shouta had the sinking feeling that it wouldn't matter as much whether or not the kid was bound by the laws of gravity; he was going to break them either way.

He turned up the audio to listen to Midoriya and Uraraka's plan—although it was mostly Midoriya's idea. Again, Shouta was begrudgingly impressed by his good instincts. He was using the fact that most people don't look up or pay attention to the ceiling. Iida's thoughts regarding Uraraka's quirk were on her using inanimate objects as projectiles, and so had cleared the room. Clearly, he hadn't known or expected her to use it on her partner, especially as using one's quirk on their partner would, unless negotiated, be a form of assault. And who would want their gravity negated?

Midoriya, apparently.

The flip as the problem child pushed off the wall sent Shouta looking back through Midoriya's file, where he found that yes, the kid had taken gymnastics. Which was probably why he knew how to function in the air. He'd only been doing it for a few years. There was probably a reason for that. Most people he knew that were in gymnastics started early or got recruited through something else. From the bareness of Midoriya's file, he didn't imagine the kid was noticeable enough to be recruited for anything.

The footage continued just a bit beyond the capture of the bomb. Bakugou was definitely going to be a problem as well, and not a particularly good variety of trouble either. There was an excellent camera angle that managed to catch the incandescent rage and disbelief that bled onto Bakugou's face as he watched Midoriya secure the bomb. If All Might hadn't called the exercise there, the explosion he let off in the hallway probably would have been in Midoriya's face instead.

Shouta didn't understand the anger and frustration pouring off the kid. Yeah, Midoriya didn't have a quirk nearly as powerful as his, and he and Uraraka managed to secure the win, but there was something deeper to it, something he didn't have the perspective to figure out just yet. So, he dove back into their files, putting them side-by-side to compare them.

It wasn't just that they came from the same middle school. They were in the same class all the way back to when they first started school. And before that, the boys went to the same daycare facility. But there was nothing in their files to indicate that they really knew each other, beyond the fact that the parent or parents of one happened to be the emergency contact for the other. It shouldn't be a hostile relationship if their families were that close. At best, it should have been a rivalry, but something about that struck Shouta as false. Neither Bakugou nor Midoriya was mentioned in the other's reports from their teachers, which didn't track with the antagonism Shouta had observed from Bakugou. The boy wasn't particularly subtle about it—as he probably wasn't subtle about anything—but that sort of note should have been in one or the other's file.

However, the more Shouta read, the more muddled the picture became. For all that the files contained the summation of their achievements, the reports from their teachers on their character and behavior, the records of their academic abilities, they were remarkably sterile. The notes on Midoriya's file were so basic and unimpressive that Shouta had to wonder if they even knew who they were talking about.

Having spent less than a day observing him, he knew that Midoriya was driven, intelligent, resourceful, and constantly pushing his own boundaries of thought and body. While the recklessness was easier to see in a combat situation, Shouta found it hard to believe that the sheer desperation never spilled over into other aspects of his life. But to read the reports from his teachers, Midoriya was supposedly painfully average in all areas, an unremarkable but good student who could probably focus more on his classwork instead of whatever project he brought from home. There was no mention of what that project was, only that it was in a notebook and so should not have been particularly disruptive. That was the most specific thing Midoriya's teachers had mentioned.

Bakugou's file had a similarly distilled figure present. If distilled was the right word for someone described as "respectful, driven, a model student". Shouta had yet to see anything approaching tolerance out of Bakugou, much less respect. Driven he could believe, and Bakugou could be considered a model student from a purely academic point of view, but that wasn't what the file was for. It was meant to give an accurate picture of a student's character, based on interactions both in and out of the classroom. While there was the possibility that Bakugou spent the first fourteen years of his life pulling the wool over everyone's eyes regarding his own reckless disregard for people and property, that would again require subtlety he didn't have.

"Something wrong, Shouta?" Nemuri asked, leaning over his desk. "You've just been sitting there staring at your computer for the past fifteen minutes."

Shouta sighed. "I think I need to talk to Nezu."

"Why? Is there something wrong?"

"I'm not sure yet, but I think there might be. At least with whoever last had their hands on these files."

Nemuri shifted into his space to look at them. "Midoriya and Bakugou? Why do you think that?"

"They're too clean. Moreover, they're absolutely useless. Either their teachers didn't bother to pay any attention to them, which is unlikely, or someone has tampered with them." He let out another heavy sigh. "There's too much missing for me to believe anything but the most basic information in these files. And according to Midoriya's, his quirk was only registered last year, something that should have been on his teachers' radar considering it wouldn't have been in his file before."

Nemuri hummed. "There's only so many reasons why someone wouldn't have a registered quirk on file."

"Exactly. Which is why I think I need to talk to Nezu."

A message appeared in the corner of Shouta's computer screen. 'Available now, feel free to come on up. -Nezu ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ'.

It was Nemuri's turn to sigh. "Looks like he's bugged the office again."

"Or something." Considering their principal loved to lean into all of his eccentricities, Shouta wasn't about to discount the possibility of Nezu lurking in the vents and listening in. He'd be back in his office by the time Shouta got there, but it was a possibility. Just like the idea that all of the computers themselves were Nezu's bugs. It wasn't like he was about to start doing his paperwork on actual paper to avoid it. Being spied on was a fact of life with Nezu as their boss, and the sooner one learned to deal with it or ignore it, the better one's life became.

Provided they didn't do something to upset the almighty rat-bear. That would only make things worse.

Gathering the files, Shouta made his way up to Nezu's office. The door swung open as he arrived, meaning that either Nezu had been watching the cameras the whole time, or had known enough about Shouta's tendencies to time the opening of the door perfectly. With his quirk, it could be either.

Nezu turned around in his chair like a cinema supervillain trying to make a dramatic debut. "Aizawa. You always manage to bring me the most interesting problems."

Aizawa didn't bother to argue. They had a lot to talk about if he was reading into everything correctly, and he wanted to get home eventually. With a sigh, he handed over a copy of the paperwork he'd been going over and settled in. This was going to be a long night.

Chapter Text

Izuku arrived early the next day, which proved to be a good thing since several people with cameras and microphones were loitering around the gate. Reporters.

He didn’t like crowds at the best of times, or collections of people lying in wait for someone to come around. This was developing into both, and it likely had everything to do with the article that announced All Might having taken up a teaching position at UA. Reporters, especially those around heroes, didn’t let up or back off easily, and he didn’t imagine that any of these people would be different. And since they were camped at the main entrance, they were probably there to talk to students, not teachers. Teachers had ways to avoid the main entrance, he was sure. Students usually didn’t.

He stopped and pulled out the campus map to see if there was another entrance he could use, but the main gate was the easiest and best way into UA, so he was going to have to risk the attention. There was a collection of maybe a dozen people there, and from what he could hear, there were more coming. Which meant this was the best time to get in before the collection turned into a media mob.

Drawing on all of his skills from middle school to fade into the background, Izuku somehow managed to slip past the reporters with only a sharp call after him. It wouldn't have worked so well if they had acted more like a crowd and he didn't envy anyone who was going to encounter the burgeoning mob by coming later.

He needed to find Aizawa-sensei and hand over the note Power Loader had given him. Which meant he needed to find the teachers’ lounge or offices and hope he was in one or the other. Consulting the campus map yet again, he turned down the hallway that promised to have the teachers' lounge and hoped.

He didn't even make it down the hallway. Almost as soon as he turned down it, he saw Aizawa walking toward him.

"Ah, Midoriya. I was hoping to speak with you today. Are you free at the moment?"

Izuku had thought he was mentally prepared to talk to his teacher, but apparently only when he had been seeking Eraserhead, not the other way around. "Uh, yes?" He tried desperately to recollect his frazzled thoughts. "I mean, I was actually looking for you. I have a note to give you from Power Loader."

Aizawa frowned. "Did your costume need adjustments already?"

Izuku shook his head. "No, I went to the support labs because I had a few questions about what they did down there. I'm interested in support tech and what it would take to make my own." It was the simplest explanation for everything that wouldn't immediately incriminate him. What was more, it was true. Having support items made and provided by people in the support track was all well and good, but he wasn't always going to have access to the sort of resources UA had, so if he could figure out how to make his own, so much the better.

If he could reproduce them the same way he managed to grow scarves, he only ever needed to worry about finding raw materials.

"Oh. That would explain a few of the comments Maijima made yesterday. I'd wondered why he was acting so smug." Aizawa accepted the note from Izuku and led him back down the hall to one of the conference rooms. Once they were inside and sitting down, he pinned Izuku in place with an indecipherable look. "I was going over the footage from Battle Training yesterday and noticed a few discrepancies in your file."

Izuku's heart immediately leapt into his throat. This was the moment. This was where everything fell apart. "Discrepancies?" he choked out, hoping he'd be able to fight this, even though he doubted he'd be successful.

Maybe there really was a law somewhere about faking a quirk.

"Yes. Like the fact your quirk was registered less than a year ago." Aizawa shifted in his seat and suddenly he was Eraserhead the underground hero instead of Aizawa the tired teacher. "Why is that?"

"I got my quirk really late. Late enough that everyone already thought I was quirkless." It was a lie, and it tasted like ash on his tongue. He could only pray to whatever beings watched over him that Eraserhead wouldn't realize it. "At that point, I just wanted something for myself. It was already as bad as it could be, I didn't want it to get any worse by suddenly showing up with a quirk. There were kids that used to say I'd steal people's quirks if they got too close. I knew if I said anything, someone would suddenly remember that, and I'd be the quirkless freak who stole someone's quirk."

The best lies always had some truth to them. He'd managed to lie to his mother about the bullying in school by saying it wasn't that bad, which was true in that he could imagine all the ways it could be worse for him. Bakugou and the others were looking to cause pain, to humiliate them. He let them succeed in that, let them think they could break him down, and things at school were manageable. Kids had really thought he could steal their quirks. Whenever someone new transferred into the school, the first thing they learned was that he was quirkless, which meant he was obviously looking to steal someone's quirk.

Somehow the story had died when he never claimed the scarf as a quirk. When they came to the conclusion themselves, spurred on by the natural bias to consider anything particularly unusual the product of a quirk, everyone was suddenly so much nicer to him. He didn't let them get close enough to hurt him, and he thought they might have understood that.

"There was no mentioning of bullying in your records. Did you talk to your teachers about it?"

Izuku couldn't help the sour expression that twisted across his face. "I tried to at first, but they wouldn't do anything about it because I was quirkless. I'm pretty sure a couple of teachers tried to say I was instigating things. But I wasn't. Most of the time, I didn't even fight back because they would use that against me."

Eraserhead frowned. "None of that is in your file. How recently did your quirk develop? I assume it's been more than a year."

"I was 12." The scarf tightened around his chest, encouraging him to sit up a little straighter in his seat. "By that point, I didn't think I'd ever get a quirk, so I hid it from everyone. But I've been practicing almost constantly, whenever I could, to get it under control."

"That was when you took up gymnastics, then."

Izuku nodded. "And as many self-defense classes as I could manage. I always wanted to be a hero. That was when I finally figured out that I needed to do something about it." He didn't add that he came to this conclusion because that was when he realized it was pointless waiting for a quirk that would never come. He didn't expand on the broken dreams he had built upon, dragging himself out of the ruins of his childhood expectations to meet the future with a more realistic point of view.

He wondered if anyone would know that side of the story someday, how the life he was currently fighting to live started in a dark alley late at night with a capture scarf that didn't used to be his. He wondered if he'd ever be able to tell Eraserhead how much his very existence meant to him.

"If you were planning on keeping your quirk to yourself, why register it at all?"

Izuku shrugged. "Because people found out." He bit his lip, unsure how much he should share. Bakugou hadn't done anything to him at UA yet, technically, but the possibility was always there. At the same time, he didn't want to be the reason Bakugou didn't get to become a hero. The actions Bakugou took may be on him, but if Izuku was the one to set everything in motion, he could only see things getting worse between them. He had managed to convince his mother not to cut ties with Mitsuki over it or even mention it if it didn't become a problem again, but he was stuck holding his breath and hoping Bakugou wouldn't do anything stupid where people were actually paying attention.

Aizawa's eyes narrowed. "How exactly did they find out? Your reaction says there's a bit of a story there."

"The teacher had announced to the class that I intended to apply to UA and some of my classmates weren't happy with that." He looked away, hoping Aizawa wouldn't ask for names. "They took some of my things so I couldn't just leave, then tossed it out the window. The first thing I trained when I got my quirk was how to grab things until it was almost instinctual. And I didn't want to lose that notebook, so I just reached after it and the tendril grabbed it out of midair. Everyone was so shocked that it happened that I was able to get away. When I got to class the next day, everyone was congratulating me on how my quirk finally came in and the teacher handed me a registration form for it."

Eraserhead's gaze was heavy on him. Izuku didn't even need to look to know they were both aware that there was more to the story than just that.

Thankfully, the man didn't press the issue. "You trained on your own to do what you do?"

Izuku nodded. "Whenever and wherever I could, as long as no one was around. A lot of it happened in my room or on Dagobah beach, since no one in their right mind would go there."

"I hesitate to speculate what that means about you." Aizawa pulled the note from Power Loader out of his pocket and read it. "So, support tech. I'll have to talk with Maijima and figure out if there's something in your schedule that can be replaced with a science class or if this is all going to be after-school work, but I'll see what I can do. As for right now, you should head to class."

Nodding, Izuku stood. "Thank you, sensei. For listening." And maybe Aizawa could tell now how much that meant to him knowing even just some small pieces of his past. No one had listened to him before. When they did, they blamed the bad things on him. To have a teacher willing to listen and take his story at face value was more valuable than all the placating words previous teachers had thrown at him.

The natural bias against quirklessness was apparently working in his favor yet again, as Aizawa didn’t even question the unlikeliness of a quirk coming in that late. It was a bit frustrating that no one believed someone quirkless could be capable of the things he accomplished, but as long as it kept people unaware of what he actually did, he would hide his disappointment in their social blindness.

Izuku sat in his seat and let himself relax just a bit. His classmates were slowly trickling in, but he didn't put a lot of thought or effort into being mentally present at that moment. He was tired and stressed, but somehow okay at the same time. The conversation with Aizawa had settled him in a way, grounded all of the loose and panicked feelings. He wanted to trust the man, to believe that Bakugou wouldn't be the problem at UA that he'd been at Aldera because Eraserhead was looking into things.

Maybe it was selfish, but he wanted the teachers to be on his side this time.

Aizawa entered, calling the class to attention and announcing the need to select a class representative, before tucking himself into his yellow sleeping bag. For all appearances to the contrary, Izuku didn't think he actually went to sleep whenever he did that. Did he need the sleep? Probably. But he never relaxed enough for Izuku to believe he'd actually fallen asleep.

Izuku was still mostly stuck in his head when they agreed to put it to a vote. The ballots were hastily constructed and passed out, and he took the moment of silence while everyone was trying to make their decisions to look at the people in the classroom. He didn't know anyone other than Uraraka, Iida, and Bakugou all that well. He wasn't going to vote for Bakugou. Any ties of loyalty between them needed to be broken for his own peace of mind and health. He couldn't be sure if Iida or Uraraka would want the position. Someone had pointed out that most people would vote for themselves, but Iida at the very least didn't seem like that sort of person.

Thinking about it, Iida was also rule-conscious in the way a class rep should be, and rigidly responsible. Which was enough to make the decision for him. He wrote down Iida's name and passed it to the box where they were collecting the ballots.

Needless to say, it came as a complete surprise to him when his name had the most tally marks beside it. It was only four, but when most people only had one vote for them, it was still significant. Yaoyorozu came right behind him with three votes, and Asui after her with two.

He stared helplessly at the board at the front of the room for a minute before he forced himself to stand and address the class.

"I'm sorry, but I don't think I can take the position. I already have a lot of responsibilities and I recently took on another, so I don't think I'd have the time to do the position justice," he admitted. If the science class was going to happen after-school, his already tightly budgeted time was going to get even smaller and he really didn't want to upset the whole class by choosing his own education over any tasks he was meant to fulfill for them. "With the votes being what they are, I think Yaoyorozu and Asui should be the rep and vice rep."

"What are you doing?" Kaminari asked. "If you can't be the class rep."

Izuku shrugged. "I have my usual training, school obviously, homework, and I just asked to add science classes to my schedule, so that’s another commitment that will take a lot of time and energy." He sat back down. "I'm sorry, but I'd prioritize my education first over other responsibilities, and I don't want to let any of you down by forgetting something important if I were the class rep."

"That makes sense," Ashido chirped. "And I'm all for girl power!"

"If you've all decided then," Aizawa cut in, rising out of his sleeping bag like the walking dead, "your class rep is Yaoyorozu Momo and your vice rep is Asui Tsuyu. Congratulations. Now go to lunch."

Once they were crowded around a table in the lunchroom, Izuku let himself relax a little. Sitting behind Bakugou gave him the perfect angle to see how Bakugou's shoulders tensed when the votes were totaled. He didn't say anything, but Izuku had never needed Bakugou's words to help interpret his body language. That had become a matter of survival, one he neglected to dwell on the necessity of for a long time. The fact that nothing had happened yet between them was setting his nerves on edge because the explosion in the moment wasn't as bad as the anticipation. But when Bakugou waited, when he stored up all that rage, the resulting explosion--both in words and fire--was always terrible. The last time it happened, Izuku barely managed to avoid his mother finding out about it, and only because she came home late.

"So, science classes?" Uraraka remarked. "I had noticed they weren't really included in our schedules. Is there any reason why you wanted to put them back in?"

Izuku glanced up. "Oh. Um, it's more that the science classes are the basis for getting into support tech. You've got to know what you're doing before you try to make something, right?"

"You have an interest in support technology?" Iida asked. "Why would you not pursue a place in the support department in that case?"

"Because I want to be a hero?" He sighed. "Support tech, as I see it, is sort of an equalizer between people with different power levels. Take what Todoroki can do, for example. He iced over that whole building in the exercise, which made the floors slippery and blocked doors. You could combat the slipperiness of the ice with a number of things. Spikes on shoes, a bunch of gravel or sand, even a flamethrower. The flamethrower would work on the blocked doors too because it would melt the ice. Or you could just use an ice pick. And that's just fighting the effects of his quirk. Against Todoroki himself, you could use pretty much any ranged weapon, provided he didn't see it coming. And even if he did, you would effectively trap him in place or have him on the defensive. You could move and avoid whatever he attempts to throw at you, but he wouldn't be able to leave his protection without risking getting caught and taken down."

"You've put a lot of thought into this, haven't you, Midoriya-kun?" Uraraka mused. "I'm not sure I would have thought of that."

"Well, all you need to do to defeat Todoroki is get close enough to touch him. He always makes his ice from his right foot. If you managed to separate his connection to the ground, he wouldn't be able to send out those big ice attacks and he doesn't really have a way to propel himself in the air as far as I'm aware. Bakugou would be a little bit more trouble because I know he's tried flying with his explosions, but most people don't think they'll be flying, so most of your opponents would be disoriented if they suddenly didn't have any gravity. I don't have that kind of power, though, so I have to think of other ways. At the moment, my best strategies are distract, deflect, and outlast. With support items, I can give myself more options in a fight. Knowing how to make them means I don't have to go into a fight without something I need because I can make what I need."

"An admirable strategy. Although I have to wonder, have you--?"

Before Iida could finish his question, the sound of an alarm shattered the relatively calm atmosphere of lunch. The PA system crackled to life over the top of the din and announced, "Security level 3 has been broken. All students please evacuate in an orderly fashion."

"Level three?" Izuku glanced around at the mob of upperclassmen who apparently didn't hear the second part of the announcement considering how they converged on the doors in a distressed panic that would have put his middle school self to shame. There was nothing orderly about the crowd rapidly bottle-necking the door, trampling one another to get out.

"What is security level 3?" Iida demanded of a passing upperclassman.

"It means someone's infiltrated the building! This has never happened here!"

A chill traveled down Izuku's spine. It was only their third day, and already something had gone very, very wrong. And as much as he knew it couldn't be his fault, he couldn't shake the distant feeling of guilt he shouldn't have. Uraraka pulled him along to the crowd behind her, but he pulled away on the edge of it. The crush of bodies was too much. He didn't want to be touched and jostled and tossed between people until he inevitably ended up on the floor getting stepped on and kicked. It wouldn't even be on purpose this time, and that somehow made the idea of it worse.

There were more people behind him, all attempting to join the crowd pushing itself slowly through the much too narrow entrance to the lunchroom. Before he could pull out, he was trapped between them, being dragged along and under. He looked up, searching for something that might be able to carry his weight on the ceiling before throwing one end of the capture scarf to catch on one of the crossbeams.

When it was secure, he pulled himself up out of the crowd and as close to the ceiling as he could manage. The chaos continued below him, and he tried to search for his friends among the mob. He only found them when Iida shouted Uraraka's name, reaching across several people in order to get her to make him float. He lost his glasses as he floated upward. He didn't even seem to notice Izuku clinging to the ceiling beam like a limpet.

Izuku noticed him, however, and the out of control spin he sent himself into using his engines to propel him while he had his gravity negated. Lashing out with the capture scarf, he managed to snag Iida's ankle before he could careen painfully into the wall. He had enough experience to know how much it hurt to be blasted into a wall, regardless of the fact it was Iida's decision to do it.

Grabbing onto the pipe above the exit sign, Iida's eyes trailed up from the end of the capture scarf wrapped around his ankle until he noticed Izuku perched in the ceiling. Izuku waved sheepishly, and Iida nodded before turning his attention to the panicked mob.

"Calm down!" He shouted, pulling the attention of the room to him where he hung above the exit sign. "It's just the press! There's no actual danger and the teachers are taking care of it! Everything is fine!"

Izuku swung between beams until he was hanging nearby to catch Iida when Uraraka would eventually cancel her quirk on him. It was starting to become an interesting strategy, floating someone so they could get somewhere they couldn't otherwise reach. Now that the crowd and the frenetic energy of the room had calmed, he felt less like he needed to hide and lowered himself closer to the ground. When it thinned enough for Iida to safely land, Izuku wrapped one end of the scarf around Iida’s chest as Uraraka cancelled her quirk on him, following him down the rest of the way to the ground.

"Thank you for the assistance, Midoriya-kun," Iida said, bowing. "I overestimated how much power to use to boost myself."

"It's fine," Izuku said, trying to wave off the attention. "It's not really fun crashing into walls at speed and I didn't want you to get hurt. And it can be easy to lose control of yourself when you don't have any gravity to slow you down."

"Is that what you did in the battle trial?" Uraraka asked. "You came around that corner so quickly."

He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck. "I used my tendrils to turn myself into a slingshot and caught the last door on the corner to swing around. Probably not the smartest thing to do, but it worked."

Uraraka blinked at him. And stared. And opened her mouth, then closed it again. She shook herself. "Midoriya-kun, you are a whole brand of crazy I've never encountered before and I'm glad we're friends because I don't think I'd know how to handle that otherwise." She giggled. "I'm not sure I know how to handle that now. Just casually popping up to the ceiling because the crowd's getting pushy, throwing yourself down a hallway and hoping to catch yourself before you careen into a wall. The worst part is that it almost makes sense!"

"Uh..."

Uraraka threw an arm around his shoulders. "I mean, I knew you were a bit crazy after the entrance exam, but I don't think I fully understood. I'm pretty sure it's too late now. At the end of this, I'm going to be just as crazy as you!"

Izuku wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a compliment or not, but he decided not to question it too deeply. He was a little afraid of the answer.

Chapter Text

There was a note on Katsuki's desk after lunch. Not one of the sort that the extras at Aldera buzzed about all the time, which was actually sort of nice for a change. If he had to read one more note from someone who was convinced they were in love with them, he was going to track down whoever left it there and make them watch as he exploded it unopened. The notes usually all amounted to the same thing. Someone was watching him from a distance and decided leaving a note was better than talking to his face.

This note was from Aizawa-sensei telling him to stay after class at the end of the day. Growling, he shoved it into his pocket before anyone else could see it and ask about it. He didn't know anyone in the class all that well except for Deku, but he could already tell that some people didn't bother to mind their own business. Like that pink chick with the horns and weird eyes. She was a bit like Fingers back at Aldera, always had to be involved in every conversation, even if it didn't have anything to do with her.

Then there was the dumbass with the stupid hair that he intentionally made look shitty. The guy kept looking at him and Katsuki couldn't figure out why. It was starting to get on his nerves because it looked like another one of those notes in the making.

At least Deku had never left him any fucking desk notes. He was one of the few people to get that Katsuki preferred if people talked to him to his face or not at all. Although Deku was a whole issue on his own, so that didn't make it much better.

Like when the fuck did he develop a quirk? Deku never could shut up about how amazing he thought quirks were, so it would have made sense if he started mumbling about his own once it came in. But he hadn't. He hadn't said a damn thing, and everyone got to find out when he grabbed his stupid notebook out of the air, then threw himself out the window to get away.

He had practiced with it—a lot to have been able to do what he did—and he hadn't said a fucking word about any of it.

Katsuki hadn't known what to do about that. When he was honest with himself, he still didn't know what to do with it, so he was ignoring the issue wherever possible. Then the battle trial happened and ignoring him wasn't something he could do anymore, which left him right back where he started only twice as angry. Probably more than that because he didn't even get to fight. The whole point of the battle trial was the battle, wasn't it? But Deku and the round-faced girl decide to skip over him entirely, act like he wasn't even part of the exercise at all and go for the discount mecha robot masquerading as a human being.

It was some sneaky bullshit, and they shouldn't have won, but they did and he hated it. That ponytail girl that got voted as class rep even said it was all Deku's plan all along. He just wanted a proper fight. Deku wouldn't win, of course, but he needed to prove it because that stupid voice in his head kept telling him that Deku has been holding back on him their whole lives.

What if he'd never really been quirkless after all? What if this was part of some long con to make Katsuki look like a fool in front of everyone? Every time he thought he could dismiss the possibility, it came back into his brain, taunting him. Because what if it was right? What if Deku was trying to sabotage his chances to be a hero? What if everyone was laughing behind his back?

He hadn't dared do anything about it because Deku would find some way to make everything Katsuki's fault, and then he'd get kicked out of UA for nothing. For Deku.

The note felt like it was a burning weight in his pocket. A big part of him wanted to make half of that true.

He waited after class as everyone left the room. Shitty hair stopped and looked back at him and for a moment Katsuki wondered if now would be when he tried to speak to him, but then he was gone. Katsuki wasn't sure why a tiny part of him was upset by that. They hadn't spoken once.

"Bakugou," Aizawa said as soon as the last of the people were out of earshot. "Thank you for staying."

"You say that like I gotta choice in the matter."

"Somehow I doubt that any force of nature exists to keep you somewhere you don't want to be without the threat of serious repercussions, such as death or dismemberment." Aizawa sighed. "Neither of which are punishments UA employs." He stood. "I think this is a conversation we should have somewhere more private than across a classroom."

Katsuki stood and grabbed his things, already regretting having stayed. Sure, death and dismemberment may have been off the table in terms of punishments for walking out, but Aizawa had threatened the entire class with expulsion on the first day, and that wasn't above anyone at the school. What was more, they probably wouldn't even question it if he were expelled for not following a teacher's directions. Katsuki was willing to risk a lot of things, but his future wasn't one of them.

He followed behind Aizawa until they got to a part of the school he'd never been before. The administration halls, if he had to guess, which was a teachers-only zone. He wondered if Deku had already said something. They couldn't have any proof of anything, but the teachers at Aldera hadn't done much when they had seen something. It wasn't too much of a stretch to think that the teachers here would believe the words of one of the students without too much to back it up. At least enough to drag Katsuki into a meeting like this where it would be Deku's word against his with nothing to back up either of them.

In which case, it would come down to which of them the teachers liked more. At Aldera, the answer would have been him every time, mostly because all the teachers wanted the bragging rights to say that they taught the future Number One hero when he was still in middle school and milk that for their fifteen minutes of fame. Here, though, they were probably leaning toward Deku because he actually acted like he cared about things. Katsuki cared about things too, but his goal was set so far in the future he didn't really want to worry about anything in the moment other than proving himself capable of being a hero, and his training. Other people were a distraction he didn't need.

Like Deku. Deku was just a distraction, a pebble in his path that had suddenly transformed into an obstacle he hadn't seen coming. The fucker was probably laughing his ass off about it whenever Katsuki wasn't around to see it.

"Please sit," Aizawa said, leading him into a room off one of the hallways and gesturing to a chair at the table.

This was a setup of some kind. He could see his and Deku's folders already sitting on the table waiting for them, which meant Aizawa always intended to bring him here. It also confirmed that Deku had something to do with this.

Katsuki clenched his fists to keep from letting off tiny explosions in front of his teacher. That probably wouldn't help his case here, and he needed whatever goodwill he could muster to stay in UA and become a hero. Moving around the table, he dropped unceremoniously into the chair across from the files.

"I'm assuming you already have some idea what I want to talk to you about," Aizawa remarked, taking his own seat in front of those files. "At the very least, you think you know what's going on here. Am I right?"

"Deku said some shit and now I'm here talking to you. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out." Katsuki refused to look Aizawa in the eye, refused to let himself be that exposed because he knew he wouldn't be able to hide the rage or the desperation he was barely managing to choke down. This was his dream. He wanted to be a hero, he wanted to prove that he was the best, that his confidence and his quirk were worth something. He had wanted to be the only person from their shitty school to make it into UA, and then Deku had managed to scrape by somehow. He had gotten into the same class as Katsuki again and now everything that had worked so well before was falling apart around him.

"Deku?"

"Midoriya. Izuku can be read as Deku." He still refused to raise his head because he wasn't sure what he would find if he looked into his teacher's eyes right now and he was a little worried to find out. "Been calling him that since we were kids."

"And it has nothing to do with the fact that he was considered quirkless for a long time and 'deku' happens to mean 'useless'?"

Even Katsuki could tell that his silence was damning, but he couldn't really think of a response that would help the matter. It certainly hadn't started out that way. He'd called Izuku Deku when they were little, before quirks came into things, mostly because his mom thought it was cute that he tried to read Izuku's name and gotten it wrong. It just sort of stuck, and then all the extras at preschool picked it up after their teacher told them Deku was quirkless. Then Deku had meant useless and everyone was using it, even some of the teachers.

Given Aizawa's reaction to the name, they probably shouldn't have been. What was so different between those teachers and the ones they had here that this was the first time it was coming up? Was it just because everyone teaching at UA was a pro-hero?

"First of all, I have spoken to Midoriya, but you didn't really come up in that conversation. I think that's something we might touch on as there is definitely some history between you given the name, but I want to cover what I originally asked you here for." Aizawa shifted the files until Katsuki's was on top and open on the table between them. "In reviewing both of your files, I noted a number of disturbing discrepancies in them. Your file isn't particularly concerning on the surface, but it seemed like whoever compiled it never actually met you."

Katsuki dared to look up then and caught the weird smirk on Aizawa's face. His eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

Aizawa chuckled and it made him want to snatch the folder away and find out what was so fucking funny. "I think it would make more sense if I read one of the examples." He turned to a specific page in the file. "'Katsuki is a delight to have in the classroom. He is respectful and attentive. In group activities, he shows all the qualities of a good leader and coordinates well with other members of his group.'"

"What the fuck?" Without thinking, Katsuki tore the file away from him, half convinced this had to be someone's stupid idea of a joke because while the teachers at Aldera had favored him more than anyone else, he couldn't say any of them would have called him a fucking 'delight'.

That wasn't even the worst bit of it. It continued on for a couple of pages, his former teachers signing their names to lies so saccharine they were making him gag. They kept going on and on about how great he was like they always had. Even after he left the school behind, they were still trying to kiss his ass for bragging rights or some shit.

"Nice to see you're as concerned about this as I am," Aizawa said, and Katsuki winced, pushing the file back across the table.

"That's the biggest pile of bullshit I've ever seen." Even though he'd given it back, he stared at the file, hoping it would spontaneously catch fire and destroy the evidence of it ever existing. "They knew I was going to get into UA, and they all wanted to be able to say they helped me get here, but they didn't do shit for me. Everything I did to get in, I did without their help."

"Yes, well, the word I have used for this is 'sterilized'."

Katsuki's blood suddenly ran cold.

"Tell me, what do you know of the bullying that was going on at Aldera?" Aizawa closed the file and rested his elbows on the table. "Considering you were in a lot of the same classes as Midoriya growing up, I assume you had to have seen something."

He opened his mouth to answer, but his mind was reeling. Had Deku really said nothing about what Katsuki had done to him over the years or was this just another one of their teacher's tricks to make him out himself? What if it was both? He wouldn't put it past Deku to have kept his mouth shut about a lot of things where he was concerned because he was a fucking pushover who never stood up for himself.

Except that one time when you found out he did have a quirk, his mind whispered. He ran, but he acted first.

"The teachers looked the other way for a lot of shit. And when they couldn't, they made out that that was what everything was like in the real world and they were just preparing us for it early by letting whoever wanted to run the show." His palms were sweaty, but it was cold, and he wiped them on his pants before he gave into the urge to set off the explosion.

"And most of the time that was you, wasn't it?" Aizawa asked.

Katsuki stayed silent which, again, was answer enough.

"And the teachers didn't do anything about that?"

"Fuck no. They looked at Deku—at Midoriya—and thought he wasn't going to amount to much, so they didn't care what happened to him. And me..." He scowled at the folder again. "They wanted to say they taught a future hero, probably lie and say they were my favorite teacher. But most of the time they just didn't care. Kirigawa-sensei didn't do anything about me or De-Midoriya until he showed up with a quirk one day. He let people use their quirks in class, say whatever the fuck we wanted, and ignored everything else, even if it happened right in front of him."

It was only now, facing Aizawa, that Katsuki could even think of how bad that was. People weren't supposed to use their quirks in public technically speaking unless they had a hero license or had a special permit for it. He doubted a school like Aldera had a permit to let students use their quirks, but they ignored it anyway. It was technically a private school, so most people just looked the other way where quirks were concerned. And he hadn't cared about that before. It had never been even a shadow in his mind.

"You know that UA has a zero-tolerance policy regarding bullying, right?" Aizawa asked. "This is something included in every information packet about the school, it's in the student handbook. We don't want anyone to be able to say they didn't know."

“Aldera said that too,” he blurted out. “Didn’t stop anything there.”

He had seen the policy written out in the information packet every time he went through it, and it didn't matter to him because he was told that bullies were just weak people trying to pretend that they were strong. What did that make him? Everyone had told him he was strong, that his quirk was perfectly suited to heroics. It was! But if he was actually strong, why did that make him a bully?

A horrible realization struck him. He thought he had made it into UA on his own, that he didn't owe anything to any of the teachers who wrote that shit in his file, but if they had actually put down some of the things he had done, if that shit had been in his file instead, he wouldn't have been allowed to take the entrance exam. He wouldn't have been allowed through the gate.

"So, what the fuck is supposed to happen now?" he demanded. "Are you going to expel me?"

"That is the question, isn't it?" Aizawa muttered, and it made Katsuki want to explode something again. The urge was getting harder to shove down. "As it stands, I would be well within my rights to do so since you have more or less admitted to being a bully. However, I'm not convinced you would learn much from simply being expelled. All of the behaviors you brought in here, you learned them out there, after all."

"And?" Katsuki hissed.

"I think sending you back out into that would be detrimental to you and to everyone around you, so therapy is the next best thing in this case."

"What?" He didn't care that it came out as a roar. He didn't care that Aizawa had his future by the balls. All he could hear was that his teacher thought there was something wrong with his fucking head and thought going to some shrink was going to fix it. The sweat that had been collecting in his hands detonated with a sudden and violent POP that shook the table, and he didn't care that his self-control had gone out the window this room didn't have.

Aizawa stared him down. "Bakugou, I cannot in good conscience sit back and let you try to become a hero the way you are. People will die, and it may or may not be you who dies first. You don't place any value on anyone other than yourself, you don't listen when you are given instructions or advice, and from the Battle Trial, it doesn't look like you understand the concept of reasonable response to a threat or how to lose graciously."

Katsuki felt every point like a personal attack. Heroics was all about the fights! Everyone knew that! The fights were why people bothered to pay attention to heroes, and he was the best fighter in the class. Heroes fight and everybody else is supposed to stay out of the way.

It only occurred to him then that Aizawa wasn’t a fighter anyone saw on TV. Aizawa’s experience with heroics was probably different, so he wouldn’t see it the same way.

Aizawa straightened and Katsuki could feel real fear trickling down his spine as the atmosphere around them turned thick and focused. "My job as your teacher is to ensure that when you become a hero, you know how to adapt to a situation, to limit casualties, to work with other heroes to ensure that the villains of the hour don't get away and don't hurt people. As it stands, you are well on your way to being branded a villain yourself because you don't appear to care about any of the collateral damage, which is why I say people will die. Not everyone is as resilient to explosions as you, so it takes far less to hurt them than it takes to hurt you." He grabbed a blank piece of paper from under the files and started writing something down on it. "If therapy is what it takes for you to understand that other people in the world exist and matter, then you will go to therapy."

"I don't need a fucking shrink!"

"Then you don't need to be a hero, and your journey through the hero course ends here."

Katsuki reeled back, feeling as though he'd just been slapped. "B-but—"

"No," Aizawa said. "If you don't want to see a therapist, you clearly don't want to change your behavior, and that means I can't allow you to be a hero."

"I want to be a hero. I'm going to be the best hero! I'm going to be number one!" His palms popped and sizzled under the table and the smell of singed wood permeated the air. He refused to admit to the desperation welling up inside him. "There's nothing fucking wrong with me. I'm not fucking broken."

Aizawa blinked. "I wasn't saying you were. Therapy isn't about being broken most of the time. It's about perspective, something which I think all heroes and hero-hopefuls need. The reason I am saying this to you right now is because your perspective of how the world works has been warped by a school that built you up with an inflated image of who you are and what you could be. It's hurting your future because you don't seem to be able to work with anyone, and it's hurting any relationships you have or might have in the future. I'd like to think you're starting to see that."

"But therapy?" Katsuki frowned. "Isn't that for people who are too weak to get their shit together on their own?"

"I'm not sure I would call anyone who knows when to ask for help weak. I know people say you can't save anyone if you can't save yourself, but you don't need to do that on your own. And honestly, take it from someone who's been there, it's better to have people you can fall back on, who can support you when you can't support yourself. That's what my therapist is for me."

"What?" The tension in the atmosphere suddenly softened and Katsuki didn't know what to do with it. It felt like half the air had been evacuated from the room, like an earthquake had knocked everything off balance.

"I have a therapist and have been going to him for almost four years now. I don't meet with him as frequently as I did in the beginning, but I do meet with him regularly."

"Why?" He was fairly certain Aizawa wasn't going to say they were the same or some shit like that because they weren't. He wasn't even sure what Aizawa's quirk was supposed to be.

"Because I lost a friend a while ago and that screwed me up. I wasn't taking care of myself and it was hurting me and everyone around me. I got so stuck in my misery that going out and being a hero was going to get me killed in the end. I had someone I trust tell me that I needed to get some help, and that was my wake-up call."

Katsuki stared at him. No one he knew had ever admitted to going to a therapist. It was the sort of thing those extras in school whispered about behind their hands like it was a dirty secret. If he was supposed to be a teacher, why was Aizawa admitting to that kind of weakness?

"I'm still working on it, as you can probably tell. This..." He tapped the note he was sending home with Katsuki. "This isn't a punishment, as much as it might feel like it. The person who pushed me towards therapy framed it as a sort of ultimatum, so I know how it can feel like being told you aren't enough. That's not what I'm trying to say. As of right now, you have potential. You have drive and determination, and that's a good thing. I wouldn't have you in my class if you didn't. You show a lot of promise in combat, but that's not all there is to heroism. I need a different kind of effort from you moving forward. I need you to prove to me that you can be better than what your previous experiences have shaped you into. We forget that sometimes the first person we need to save is ourselves. So, let me be your wake-up call here."

Katsuki reached across the table for the note Aizawa had written, skimming over it. It didn't say that he was a failure. It didn't say that he needed to go to therapy or he would be kicked out of the hero program. It just said that therapy was highly recommended and gave a couple of numbers to call about that shit.

"I want you to give that to your parents this evening," Aizawa continued. "I can't force you, but I want you to try and convince them to do this for you because it can make a world of difference in the sort of person you are in three years."

"Therapy." He let every bit of doubt he was still feeling bleed into his tone.

"Yes."

Katsuki grimaced at the note. The terms of his refusal were already laid out in front of him. He had to do this or he would get kicked out. So it was a matter of convincing whatever fucking shrink the hag sent him to that he was fine and then Aizawa would leave him alone.

The thought of it still made him sick, though. He didn't do talking, didn't do any of that feelings crap. That's what therapists were all about, wasn't it? But for his future, for his dream of being the number one hero, he'd do it for as long as it took.

Shoving the note into his bag, he took the non-dismissal for what it was and left, trying not to think about how close everything was teetering to the edge, and all because of fucking Deku.

Nezu was not happy about the security breach. Although, being entirely serious, he wasn't aware of anyone who would be thrilled by the words 'security breach' that didn't have something to gain from a lack of security. UA had nothing to gain from their security being compromised and quite a bit to lose.

On the surface it wasn't horrible. Officially and most obviously, the media at the gates were responsible for the incident. Unofficially, however, no one at the gates had a registered quirk capable of the level of destruction caused. It was a wonder none of the reporters stopped to think about why the gate suddenly disintegrated. But it wasn't as though any of the 'vultures', as Aizawa called them, came from a truly reputable news outlet. Tabloid reporters to the last, with quirks that specialized mostly in information gathering or tracking down their latest scandal.

Fortunately, none of the reporters particularly enjoyed being the scandal they were reporting on, so the incident at the gates and the subsequent level three security breach they were all involved in would not be making the news. Editorials, perhaps, but not the news.

He wished that the incident was the only thing he was dealing with, but there were a number of other matters demanding his attention, official cases or not. All Might and the issue of his successor—as yet undecided—was one matter that stole a portion of his time without existing in any official sphere. The man had yet to decide on his successor and time was running rather short—in more ways than one. He was down to a mere three hours in his empowered form, and a good portion of that time was required for class. That didn't stop him from intervening when there was trouble, however, and Nezu knew that would cause moments of conflict with Aizawa, who took his duties as a teacher very seriously.

Beyond that, there was the matter of Aldera Middle School to deal with. Aizawa was gathering information on the situation from Bakugou and Midoriya, but there were avenues of information available to Nezu as both the principal of UA and a recognized information-gathering hero. His expertise was greatly sought after for a number of reasons, and so he held a special dispensation to investigate where and when he pleased. His efforts looking into Aldera was yielding a lot of information, most of it concerning.

It's said that nothing is ever truly deleted, which isn't entirely true. Yes, there are usually traces to find, but the information can be so thoroughly corrupted as to be unusable. Aldera didn't have someone on staff capable of such a feat, which meant that the originals of both Bakugou's and Midoriya's unaltered files were hidden away deep in the systems for Nezu to pluck like the rotten fruit it was. Interestingly, Bakugou's original file was nearly the same as his current file. The only missing pieces were incident reports written up by the janitor for attacking students in the hallways. That janitor was summarily fired sometime after the fourth reported incident and replaced with someone who didn't make any reports about anyone.

Nezu made a note to look into the current employment of Hamano Ryushi and extend a job offer if he was currently without work. His integrity and diligence should not have been so callously cast aside and Nezu was more than willing to help sue on his behalf.

Midoriya's file, on the other hand, was almost the opposite of Bakugou's in that it held practically none of the pieces that were in the file UA received. Truly, putting together Midoriya's file was the greatest work of fiction compiled by the people in charge of Aldera, made in a mad scramble for the glory of having a second alumnus of their school. The incidents Hamano reported involving Bakugou listed Midoriya as the student being attacked in every case, but these were edited after Hamano's firing to list Midoriya as the aggressor. In the other listed incidents, all of which ascribed blame to Midoriya rather than whoever it was truly causing the disturbance, the teachers did note that the boy often inserted himself into situations that didn't concern him. The way they noted it implied that he was asking for the abuse, but Nezu wasn't seeing the masochist they were making him out to be. Instead, he saw the beginnings of the sort of heroic instincts Yagi believed in: the willingness to meddle in affairs he had no stake in to save someone else.

Nezu made a note to mention this to Yagi during one of their next meetings.

The remarks on Midoriya's classroom habits were interesting as well. One teacher bothered to note, rather disparagingly Nezu thought, that the name on Midoriya's personal project was 'Hero Analysis'. Clearly more accurate information was needed on that front. There were also several accusations of cheating from students and teachers regarding Midoriya's work, but nothing that could be proven in any way. There was always a noticeable dip in Midoriya's grades after these accusations, which the teachers probably took as confirmation, but there were a number of anti-cheat methods in the academic half of the entrance exam and Midoriya had passed with a score within the top 5 percent of candidates. Such a performance would seem to indicate that the boy was exactly as intelligent as he seemed to be.

What was most disturbing to Nezu was the fact that he could pinpoint the exact day that all opinion of Midoriya changed. He had been half expecting it, given what Aizawa had told him about his interview with the boy, but seeing it confirm concretely in the records he examined was damning for the school and everyone in charge. The day Midoriya presented a quirk, suddenly the school became more accommodating and open to him. Previous incidents on his record disappeared into this hidden file, all suggestions of cheating were dropped—if Midoriya was as intelligent as his academic and heroics performances indicated, he couldn't miss the underlying message those so-called educators were planting in his head: he didn't have any value whatsoever unless he had a quirk. If the boy had any less strength of character than he did, Nezu shuddered to think how easily Aldera would have created a terrifying villain out of him.

Moving on from the boys' files, he started delving deeper into the school itself. While the most horrifying of their crimes was how they treated a quirkless student, that wasn't the end of it. Any teacher who attempted to police quirk use on campus was fired under dubious circumstances, often replaced with someone who had ties—however distant—to the Meta Liberation Army. This connection wasn't listed obviously, but it was present as he dug deeper into their individual files. The way they handled quirk use on campus, largely by ignoring it or blaming the person with the weaker quirk for causing the issue, was the best indication of where their loyalties truly lie. Considering how deeply the rot was in the school, it would probably be easier to inform other schools in the area to be prepared to accept the students once Nezu destroyed it.

It was only while looking through Aldera's records that he realized there was another connection to another one of his cases. Tsubasa Tanjiro had been reported missing by his parents. There was no evidence that he'd run away, as all of his things had been left behind; he simply disappeared without a trace, like a number of others across Japan. No one Nezu had spoken to thought the disappearances were connected to each other as they were spread across the country with no other connection than the overwhelming lack of evidence regarding their whereabouts, but High Specs was a quirk capable of recognizing even the most tenuous of patterns. Every one of the missing people had disappeared sometime after they entered a dead zone from which they never emerged. Most of the time, these dead zones were along their normal routes, but they simply didn't come out the other side of it one day.

Nezu wished someone would take him seriously when it came to the disappearances, but they looked at the lack of connection between the vanished people, the wide-spread and seemingly random pattern of disappearances, and simply chose to believe that it was mere coincidence. Seventy cases across the whole of Japan, and they called it coincidence. While he was willing to admit he didn't have all of the information he needed, he hated having his observations dismissed out of hand. Especially when his observations turned out to be correct more often than not.

Observations like the odd decrease in petty crime in recent months. The media attributed it to the presence of All Might in the area, but the true start of these lack of incidents was at least three months after All Might's first capture in the Musutafu area, not immediately. And while larger, more organized crime would attempt to virtually disappear, petty criminals possess a sort of hubris, seeing themselves as small-time enough not to draw the attention and ire of the Number One Hero in Japan. The vanishing of such criminals smacks closer to enemy action and potential organization than the boosted efficiency of patrolling heroes. Nezu didn't doubt that they would reappear soon as part of some grand action, but he was having trouble tracking any known or expected quantities on that front.

The robbery case he was collaborating with the police on was almost mundane by comparison to the rest of the things demanding his attention. It wasn't without intellectual merit, especially as there was little to no evidence of registered quirk use in the situations—and little enough evidence at all—but it didn't have the same depth of potential that Aldera, the disappearances, and the future of All Might promised. As a rule, Nezu didn't rank any of the things he worked on by any importance other than urgency, and only for the purposes of determining how soon each needed to be completed. The robberies, as they weren't a violent or particularly damaging crime, slipped down the list of priorities, but he was still looking forward to the quirk or quirks masterminding such interesting heists. At the moment, he was assuming there was an intelligence or stealth quirk involved, perhaps a disruption quirk since none of the security footage in the vicinity of the robbery was salvageable.

It really was a shame such useful quirks were underrated in the heroics community. Nezu was crafting yet another proposal for the Hero Public Safety Commission to allow for an alternative heroics course for those interested in the underground heroics scene. The current and long-standing bias towards physically powerful quirks had led to both the entrance exams for the Hero Courses and the Provisional Licensing Exam to be heavily biased towards obvious and marketable quirks. With such examples as Aizawa and himself, others were obviously capable of succeeding, but many students who were perfectly talented were left behind. Or placed at a disadvantage because the use of their quirk during the UA Sports Festival broadcast their ability to the world. The influence the Commission had over UA prevented Nezu from simply adding an underground course populated with students whose quirks didn't fit the parameters of the Entrance Exam but showed enough dedication and ingenuity to attempt something so against their nature anyway.

At this point, if they turned down his proposal for the seventh time, he was going to convert one of the General Education classes into that course and shuffle students accordingly. Humans had a wonderful phrase about forgiveness and permission after all, and Nezu was provably the most intelligent creature in the room every time. As the Commission was attempting to filibuster him into compliance, he would feel no remorse whatsoever doing the same to them while they attempted to prove that he had worked around them to create exactly the sort of course they wouldn't let him make.

For an organization that was purportedly most concerned with the safety of the public, it was interesting that they worked against the public good so often. Politics was a game that Nezu could and would play, and it didn't matter if he were going up against career politicians, corrupt feeder schools, or the entirety of daylight heroics—he would win.

First, though, UA's security was going to be tightened and Aldera Middle School was going to burn.

Chapter Text

Izuku woke up early the day they were going to have a field trip. Aizawa-sensei hadn't told them where they were going to go, but he had told them it was going to happen and that they were going to have a special instructor join them for the heroics lesson. Considering they already had All Might as a teacher, he wondered who else would be considered special, or did special just mean different? Aizawa was the one to say it and he excelled at subtle lies and misdirection, so it could be either.

He considered grabbing a different scarf for the field trip. Though the general design of them was more or less the same, every one of the scarves he had grown had come out distinctly different, whether that was in how they felt around him, what they were made of, or how they responded to him. The original scarf gave him the impression of a feral cat sometimes, though he was fairly certain that had to do with his first experiences with it. It had scratched him, after all. But once he figured out how to work with it and spent years wearing it all day every day, it seemed to like him, for lack of a better way to describe it. It was possessive and most in tune with his mental state, shifting or squeezing around him at the slightest thought to reassure him it was there.

The first scarf he had grown wasn't as soft as the original. There was a different mix of materials in it, a higher metal content from the scrap on the beach, and so it tended to be heavier and harsher against his skin. When it came down to it, that scarf was probably better for armor than the original, regardless of how itchy it would be. If he had to ascribe a personality to it, the second scarf was more like a guard dog. Or—and he was never going to mention this to anyone ever—a bit like Iida, with precise and decisive movements and actions. Izuku wasn't sure why a scarf was reminding him of his rules-conscious classmate or vice versa, but that was an observation he intended to take to his grave.

The second home-grown scarf was even softer than the original since he had sacrificed old clothes for it. He'd found it was a lot more subtle than the others and capable of more delicate movements. It looked the most like bandages when he was wearing it, and it ended up being the most passive of all his scarves. It was responsive, but not in the same way as the original as it didn't tighten around him at a thought unless he consciously wanted it to. It was the scarf he would reach for if he wanted to perfectly control everything his scarf did and have nothing extra happen. Other than the original, it was also the scarf he wore most around the house when he didn't intend to go out anywhere.

He hadn't had much time to work with his latest scarf, made from a couple of scavenged tires, some of the better scrap metal he'd found on the beach, yet another mound of ruined clothes, and part of the plastic bin he'd been keeping it in. He wasn't sure why the nanobots had eaten part of the bin and left some of the fabric and scrap metal untouched, but he wasn't going to argue with the results until he could actually alter the coding for the nanobots to tell them the ratios he wanted to incorporate. As it stood, the nanobots seemed to have built in ratios to keep the scarf in a manageable and wearable form. The itchiness of the first home-grown scarf was more like a wool sweater than a haphazard metal and fabric monstrosity, so he wasn't going to complain about a bit of eaten plastic.

With as much rubber as it had in it, he knew it was going to be good against electricity and electrical quirks even without testing it against them. The texture was a bit like leather against his skin, which was odd but not off-putting. Clearly it would be superior as armor compared to the first grown scarf and had slightly more utility uses than the more metal heavy scarf. Izuku could see himself relying on it a lot but taking a largely untested scarf on the field trip wasn't something he wanted to do. And he hadn't even had a chance to learn the personality of this one yet, which could be distracting and detrimental to his efforts depending on what they were doing.

In the end, he reached for the original scarf, which reached back for him like the possessive thing it was. Familiarity and function were far more useful to him than anything else in class, especially as this was going to be a heroics-specific field trip. He also didn't want to answer questions about why the material he was controlling looked subtly different if anyone was paying close enough attention to notice.

A trickle of anxiety he hadn't been consciously aware of settled the moment the scarf was wrapped around him and that, he figured, was just another reason to keep this scarf with him. It was only because of the original scarf that he was in the position he found himself in. The risk of getting caught by Eraserhead with his support item was worth it knowing he had done something people thought was impossible and gotten into the hero course without a quirk. No one else could say that and he was going to list it as his greatest achievement, if only in his head where no one else would see it.

His school bag was packed up with his homework already and he took it out to the table in the entryway so he could grab it on his way out the door.

Breakfast was a comfortably silent affair. His mom had been glad he talked to Aizawa about Aldera, especially given what they had found in his file, and he was glad, too. He hadn't mentioned Bakugou explicitly—he hadn't really mentioned any names—but it wasn't like it was going to stop the investigation. Part of him was afraid of what was going to happen now. He didn't honestly want Bakugou kicked out; he never had. He had taken a large step back from everything Bakugou had once represented in his life, had talked about his bullies with Uraraka and Iida, and they had talked about their experiences as well. Izuku liked to think he was getting over things, even though it was difficult to ignore what had happened to him. He had made it when everyone said he couldn't, that should mean he didn't have to listen to any of them.

Riding the train to UA was also a quiet affair. He was always careful to catch the train Bakugou wouldn't be on because even if they were trying not to associate with one another unless they had to, he didn't want to get stuck in a confined space with him. People would be around, people that would probably not want their train car exploded during their commute, but there was something suffocating about the atmosphere around Bakugou even when they weren't talking to one another. Sitting behind him in class was bad enough because his senses were still finely tuned to the slightest change in mood. He had always been able to tell when Bakugou was about to tip over the edge, and he would try to be better about not being in the way when that happened. At UA, he could get away with it as he'd never been able to before. At UA, no one was going to make him stay where he was clearly unsafe, and it shouldn't have been as earth-shattering as it was.

He arrived in class on time, working on his analysis notebook until Bakugou entered the room, then trading it out for his school supplies. He wasn't about to risk the notebook getting destroyed again even if things were a little better here. Not even Bakugou would go digging into his backpack for it, because it would be difficult to explain why he was doing it in any way that didn't seem bad.

The morning classes passed quickly, the anticipation for the afternoon field trip making everyone a little anxious and inattentive. Izuku knew his notes weren't going to be quite up to his usual standards because of how much his mind had been wandering. Still, there was an energy building in the room as it neared lunch that only got thicker once they got back.

Aizawa was waiting for them, slouched as usual at the front of the room as a clear sign that they should take their seats as soon as possible and cut off any conversations they were having. The lesson of don't waste time was firmly beaten into their brains, especially since they knew their teacher was willing to threaten them with expulsion. As they had discovered from a couple members of class 2-B, Aizawa had expelled his entire class the year before. The students had been utterly shocked that none of them had been expelled yet. Knowing it was a credible threat made everyone that much more nervous about everything they did. Izuku was trying to do his best to ensure that nothing was going to draw attention to him in a negative way.

"Now that you're all here," Aizawa said as soon as the last person was in their seat, "I'm sure you're aware that we're taking a bit of a field trip for this heroics lesson. Our focus is going to be on preparing you for disaster relief."

Izuku let out a sigh of relief. He wasn't sure he was up for another heroics class where he went up against his classmates. He and Uraraka had done well, but there was so much more to heroics than fighting villains. Disaster relief was the heart of rescue heroics, the same way information gathering tended to be the heart of underground heroics. But every hero needed to know how to handle disaster relief in the most basic of ways unless they wanted to become victims themselves. It composed a large part of the provisional licensing exam from everything Izuku had researched, even with its bent toward spotlight heroics and villain apprehension.

"It's up to each of you if you want to wear your costumes or your gym uniforms as some of them are ill-suited for the exercises we'll be doing," Aizawa continued. "Either way, get changed and meet at the bus in ten minutes."

Grabbing his case with his costume, Izuku dressed as quickly as he could, unraveling the scarf a bit so he would have more reach like before. Having trained with the capture scarf while cleaning up the beach, he knew both his suit and the scarf were well suited to a number of things that would fall under the vein of rescue operations.

He ran a quick inventory on all of the little pieces that he hadn't been able to use yet, ensuring that everything was properly secured and hadn't gone off in the costume case for whatever reason. Everything was fine. With everything in place, he dashed out to the bus well before the time limit.

Yaoyorozu and Asui were working together to organize people from a mingling crowd into a line running parallel to the bus. They had both elected to wear their costumes, as had the rest of the class. Aizawa had said some of the costumes would be a bit ill-suited to rescue work, but he wasn't sure which ones he was talking about. Depending on the scenario, different costumes could have different issues. If it were a water exercise, could Iida or Aoyama swim in armor? Having as much exposed skin as she did, Yaoyorozu might have trouble with a fire exercise, or trying to pick her way through rubble without getting hurt, but maybe she knew ways to mitigate that with something she could produce with her quirk.

"Midoriya," Asui said, as they were filing onto the bus. "You are mumbling."

Izuku winced. "Sorry, Asui." He rubbed the back of his neck even as the scarf tightened around him just a bit. "I didn't mean to irritate you."

"You did not," she assured him. "And call me Tsuyu. I just thought you would want to know that you were doing it. You don't seem to realize when you start."

He winced again. "No, I don't. It's a bit of a bad habit."

"I usually say what is on my mind. May I ask you a question?"

Confused, Izuku nodded as they settled into the seats near the front of the bus.

"Your quirk is similar to Sero's. Are you related?"

Izuku turned to look at Sero, who grinned at him. "I don't think so?" he replied. "I don't know anyone in my family with a quirk similar to Sero's and I'm a bit of an anomaly, anyway." He shrugged. "Besides, I don't naturally produce the tendrils like Sero does his tape. I can just control them."

"It's still pretty cool," Sero cut in. "I can only sort of control my tape. I can't make it do any of the fancy stuff you do!"

Izuku shrugged again. "I wouldn't call it fancy."

"It is, though." Kirishima offered him a grin full of sharp teeth that, unlike other such smiles he'd seen, wasn't menacing in the slightest. "My quirk isn't flashy or fancy at all. I can just harden my skin."

"But that doesn't mean it's not really useful! Hardening is really good for offense and defense at the same time! There's not many quirks out there that can say that," Izuku pointed out. "That's why people with more offensive quirks have to wear a lot of armor or try not to get hit. And why their strategy is to keep hitting it until it goes down." Like Bakugou, he thought bitterly.

"Like Bakugou!"

Izuku's head shot up, his gaze instantly looking for Bakugou, thinking he'd accidentally said what he'd been thinking out loud. Instead of glaring at him, Bakugou looked like he was trying to set Ashido on fire with his mind.

"What did you say about me, you fucking extra?" he roared, causing Jirou, who was unfortunate enough to be sitting next to him, to wince, cover her ears, and hide her ear jacks under her jacket.

"I mean, can you tell me it's wrong?" Ashido challenged. "We were in the same area for the entrance exam and your whole strategy seemed to be blowing up everything until it stops moving. I got a bunch of rescue points for sliding in to get someone out of the way of flying, flaming debris you caused."

Izuku knew he was probably horribly pale. He had never actually seen someone successfully talk back to Bakugou. Whenever he tried to stand up for himself or someone else, he tended to get blown up, and he had the scars to prove it. Aizawa was watching from the back of the bus and he wasn't intervening at all, which was both typical of teachers and, at the same time, not. Every teacher he'd known defended Bakugou regardless of what he'd done because they were so sure he was going to be a great hero.

Except this was Aizawa, and he'd made it clear the first day that no amount of influence would keep any of them in his class if he didn't think they had potential. That was the only reason Mineta was still part of their class.

He didn't have long to think about the implications of it all as they pulled up to a large glass dome that looked like a biosphere. As they got off the bus, he could see different environments inside it, small cities that looked to be crumbling apart, an expanse of open space that looked sort of like a small lake, the biggest fire pit he had ever seen, and even a mountain complete with snow.

"Welcome to the Unforeseen Simulation Joint!" Someone called to them as they gawked at the different environments inside. Izuku turned to see Thirteen, the rescue hero, walking toward them. "This is where we practice responding to real-world disasters in a simulated environment where we can control and change the variables. But you need to know that just because we have some control over the environment doesn't mean that it's not dangerous. The simulations are not the only variables in the field."

Aizawa slunk closer to Thirteen, a question in his posture. They tilted their head and surreptitiously held up three fingers, which caused Aizawa to sigh heavily and nod.

"Each and every one of you is a variable," Thirteen continued. "Your quirk is a variable that the simulations can't always account for, and certainly won't always benefit. My quirk is called Black Hole. I have the ability to suck objects in and tear them apart. If I were to use this ability without care, I am more than capable of killing someone. Many of you probably have the same experience. If you use your quirk irresponsibly, you can get someone killed."

Izuku went cold. He had never really thought about how most quirks had the capacity to kill. If Sero taped over someone's mouth and nose, they would suffocate. A hardened punch from Kirishima could probably kill someone as well. Someone Uraraka touched that was released from any significant height would suffer injury at the very least. If Iida dragged someone behind him at the speeds he was capable of, the resultant road rash could be bad enough to cause them to bleed out or get an infection they can't recover from. Even something as benign as Recovery Girl's quirk could kill if someone didn't have enough energy or stamina to be able to cope with the accelerated healing.

What did that mean for him, however? Since he was actually quirkless, he didn't have a power that could kill someone. Did that mean that he was safer to be around?

He scoffed to himself. Maybe safe enough to target. Most of his classmates went after him because he didn't fight back, overlooking or simply ignoring the fact that even if he did fight back, he would be the only one getting into trouble. Maybe that's why there were people who thought quirkless individuals were so fragile. They wrongly assumed that because they didn't fight back that they couldn't, completely missing how society would respond to someone without a quirk fighting back.

He'd been there before himself, wondering what the point of fighting back was when people were just going to turn on him anyway. He knew the statistics for quirkless deaths, how the majority of quirkless kids his age had committed suicide by now because nothing ever changed. He knew there had been a higher chance of him dying in a villain attack or in a back alley, of being denied medical attention in the name of a mercy killing. He knew that people didn't think someone without a quirk could amount to anything, much less do anything that would cause harm except be in the way.

But that didn't mean he had less of a capacity for harm than anyone else. Sure, accidents were more likely to happen with a powerful quirk like Bakugou's or Thirteen's or even Uraraka's, but any decision he could make, with or without the scarf to back him up, had the ability to harm other people. And just because he buried or redirected his anger didn't mean it wasn't there. He probably had more anger than most and using that could hurt people. With the capture scarves, he could do a lot of harm on accident, whether it was shifting the wrong piece of rubble—something he could do without the scarf—or trying to catch someone from falling without accounting for the change in momentum that would cause.

Perhaps instead of focusing simply on quirks, Thirteen should mention how costly mistakes and miscalculations can be in the field. That was what training was for, to mitigate the number of mistakes made in the real situation, but they needed to know what the cost of those mistakes might be before they learned how not to make them. Bakugou was one of the sorts of people who wouldn't do things differently from his usual methods until they stopped working, and Izuku was desperate (and a little vindictive) to see him in a situation where blowing something up accidentally cause far more harm than good.

"In the exercise All Might gave you, you should have seen the danger your quirks can pose to one another," Thirteen went on. "Rescue training is meant to offer a different perspective. Instead of focusing on capture and containment of a villain or villains, we will be working on how each of your quirks can be used to save people." They gestured for the class to follow them into the building. "Now this is a lesson we'll revisit many times during your time here at UA, but to start out with, let's focus on showing you the environments you're going to be working in today."

The interior of the USJ was set up sort of like a clock or a pie, where there were specifically divided sections that catered to a certain type of disaster, with concrete pathways in between them and a fountain at the central plaza. It was open and bright, and the glass ceiling of the dome was so high it hardly echoed as one would have expected from such a space.

But Izuku suddenly felt like he was being watched. Glancing around, none of his classmates were looking at him, but the feeling persisted. As he turned towards their teachers, both of whom were facing away from him, Aizawa straightened, grabbing his capture scarf, and turned toward the central plaza.

Izuku followed his gaze and watched as a figure emerged from a cloud of black mist. The person was slouching and covered in hands. Then, as though his presence was a catalyst, the mist expanded and more people were stepping out of it, spreading out to fill the plaza, all attention on the class.

"Is this another exercise?" someone whispered. "Like the robots at the entrance exam?"

Izuku couldn't find it in him to move, not even to shake his head. Aizawa wouldn't spring an exercise like that on them. He wouldn't go so far as to bring Thirteen in only to do something else.

"No," Aizawa told them, his voice far calmer than his stance. "Those are villains. Group up and stay together. Thirteen, you need to begin evacuating the students."

"Aren't there intruder sensors?" Yaoyorozu asked. "Shouldn't they be going off?"

"They must have some way of jamming the signal. This is definitely a coordinated attack. They knew there wouldn't be as many people here and it's a long way from the main campus. Which means they knew we were going to be here today." Izuku's blood ran cold as Aizawa turned to look at all of them. "Kaminari, you need to try signaling the school too."

Kaminari jolted. "Wha— Me? Yes, sir!"

Aizawa turned away again and started to step towards the plaza. "I'll hold them off."

A chill ran down Izuku's spine. "Sensei?"

Aizawa didn't turn back to look at him, but he halted. "What is it, Midoriya?"

Izuku looked between their teacher and the crowd of villains that only seemed to be getting bigger. "Be careful?"

He did turn his head to flash Izuku a grin that looked confident. "I'll do what I can."

As a group, they moved back towards the gate, Thirteen staying between them and the plaza full of villains. They were practically through it when some of the black mist that brought the villains appeared in their way and reformed into something like a human shape.

"Greetings," the mist person said. "We are the League of Villains. Please forgive our audacity, but we have come to UA, this bastion of heroism, to end the life of All Might, the Symbol of Peace." The villain made a show of looking back and forth. "We were given to understand that he would be here today, but it appears that is unfortunately not the case. No matter. My role in this remains the same."

The mist swelled suddenly, and then was sucked towards Thirteen, who had moved through the group while the villain had been talking.

"Iida, go," they shouted, attempting to wave them through the gate. "Run to the school and have them send help!"

"But—!"

Izuku caught Iida's arm. "You're the fastest! You need to! And take Kaminari with you! If he's out of range of the jammer, he can call for help sooner." To reinforce his point, he shoved Kaminari into Iida's arms. "Go!"

To his credit, Iida didn't hesitate. Kaminari squawked a bit when the taller boy threw him over his shoulder, but he didn't fight, and they were barely through the gate when the sound of familiar explosions popped in Izuku's ears. Apparently Bakugou didn't like sitting back and listening to their teachers. Hardly a new development, but Izuku would have hoped he'd have better sense than to throw himself into the middle of a fight with a villain who very clearly outclassed them.

But no, as he turned to look, Bakugou was throwing himself at the mist villain and Thirteen was forced to turn their quirk away before they hurt him. Kirishima had followed after him. The explosion had scattered a bit of the mist, but it was already coming back together as Thirteen tried to get them to back away.

A dry chuckle froze Izuku to his bones. "An admirable attempt, I congratulate you. But in the end, simply not enough. Begone."

The mist swelled again, surrounding Bakugou and Kirishima, as well as several others in the group. When the mist retreated again, the people it had surrounded were gone.

"What did you do to them?" Thirteen demanded. "Where are my students?"

"They're still in the facility," Shoji reported, ears formed on the ends of his extra arms. "They're scattered, but they're still here."

So, the mist villain could teleport a lot of people, but there was probably a distance limit, an entities limit, a destination limit, or some combination of the three. Considering the number of villains he'd brought in to one place from some unknown location or locations, he was betting on a destination limit and he didn't want too many people grouped together. There weren't enough zones in the USJ to separate them all into pairs and send them away.

"Iida and Kaminari are gone, at the very least," Izuku whispered, coming up beside Thirteen. "They should be able to bring help."

Thirteen tilted their head toward him. "Kaminari, too?"

"Once he's out of range of the jammer, he can get a message through to the campus like Aizawa was telling him to."

"Ah," the mist villain muttered. "A little strategist. How irksome."

Thirteen moved in front of Izuku. "Stay away from him!"

They turned their quirk on the villain again, but with an almost lazy gesture, he created a pair of portals that redirected the quirk towards Izuku. Several things happened at once. First, Thirteen shoved Izuku out of the way and he tripped. Second, the force of their own quirk tore into the side of their suit, ripping it open and leaving them exposed and injured. Third, another portal formed on the ground under Izuku and he started to fall through it, even as his classmates reached for him. Fourth, he was falling out the other end of the portal and landed hard on more concrete, with the gate of the USJ looming in the distance.

He shot to his feet, cold and warm at the same time as he realized he was beside the fountain at the center of the plaza, and he was not alone.

"Well," said a dry raspy voice.

Izuku turned to look at the man suddenly standing over him. The man was tall and thin, with shaggy pale hair that hung untidily around his face. Or what could be seen of it. He was covered in what looked like severed hands on his face, head, and arms. As Izuku watched warily, the man scratched at his neck with the jagged nails of one long-fingered hand and blood beaded up on his paper-white skin. Between the fingers of the severed hand on his face, Izuku could only see one red eye staring down at him. Behind the man, there was another lurking figure, dark and muscled and menacing with a strange beak and an exposed brain. The only comfort Izuku could draw from that image was that the person wasn't even looking at him.

"So," the tall man ventured, leaning close enough to make Izuku extremely uncomfortable even if the man weren't a villain. "What do we have here?"

Chapter Text

Izuku stumbled a few steps back from the villains in the center of the plaza. He was on the wrong side of the fighting, the wrong side of the USJ, and he had never felt more helpless than he did right then. The scarf tightened around his ribs, a silent but active reassurance that he was not technically alone in this, although he wasn't sure how much better it could be with a potentially semi-sentient scarf and no other help within reach. Half his class had been scattered to the far edges of the building from what Shoji had said. Kaminari and Iida were away, and he had to trust that they'd be able to get help quickly, but that wasn't going to do him a lot of good when he was standing right in front of the person who was probably leading the whole attack.

"I asked you a question, NPC," the man hissed. "Don't you have any dialogue to offer me?"

Izuku tried to back up again, but he felt his heel attempt to land on open air. If he backed up any further, he'd be going down the steps leading to the fountain and he didn't trust himself not to trip.

The black mist villain coalesced nearby, drawing the leader's attention away.

"Why did you bring me this one, Kurogiri?" the leader demanded. "He's useless!"

Indignation burned in Izuku’s gut. He knew this wasn't the place for it, but he had been called useless almost his entire life, and UA was finally different for him. He knew the tall man and the mist person were villains, but he was still angry that that particular adjective seemed to follow him everywhere he went no matter what he did.

"Two of the students escaped with the intent to summon the other teachers, Shigaraki Tomura," the mist person replied, his tone almost bored. "This is the one who ensured it."

The tall man—apparently Shigaraki Tomura, if that wasn't a fake name being fed to him because he was there—turned back to look at Izuku. "What a clever NPC. Not smart enough to get himself out, though." Shigaraki tilted his head with mock sadness. "Pity. Noumu, get rid of him."

The hulking beast of a person that hadn't move since he arrived suddenly blurred, and it was only luck and years of training by bullying that managed to keep him from getting squashed immediately. And the scarf, which had wrapped around the beast's reaching arm, allowing him to slide beneath the danger with a near instinctual dodge. He wasn't about to thank Bakugou for anything he'd put him through, but it was mostly his fault that Izuku could keep enough of his awareness under pressure to be able to act in defense of his own life.

The other end of the scarf wrapped around the center of the fountain, and he pulled himself away as quickly as possible. Whatever quirk Noumu had was probably more than enough to turn him into a smudge on the floor, and Aizawa was still distracted dealing with the horde of villains they had brought along.

It was just a higher stakes version of the battle trials. Except in this scenario, he was both the villain and the bomb. If Noumu managed to touch him, it was all over, so he needed to play to his strengths. Unfortunately, unlike the battle trial, he didn't know where Uraraka was since she had been scattered with most of the rest of the class. And perhaps not having gravity wouldn't be as helpful here as it was then. Considering Noumu had more than enough muscle to throw him around as he was, it was entirely likely his weightless body would crash into something at a high enough speed to liquefy his bones if she removed his gravity. Mobility was what he needed the most at the moment but being weightless, if it had been an option, came at a much higher risk now that they were in an actual combat situation.

Mobility wasn't the only trick up his sleeve, though. Misdirection and trickery were also skills he had cultivated over the years out of necessity. If he could turn people against each other, he would be in a far better place. And considering Noumu hadn't moved until he'd been given an order, it was entirely possible he wasn't intelligent enough to predict his actions.

Provided, of course, that he wasn't being predictable. The chaos gambit really only worked when you weren't expecting it, and he had three opponents in the central plaza who could possibly pick up on his plan before he managed to move forward with it. Not ideal, but it wasn't as though he had any other choice. If he managed to hold the three of them off long enough, he could probably count on Aizawa's help, but surviving was the first thing he needed to do.

He really wished he'd managed to figure out how to modify the scarves on his own. None of the ones he'd grown deviated drastically from the original design, so while he had some form of mobility, it relied on being able to wrap around something to grip. The only things he had to work with here were the fountain and people. The hedges that framed the central plaza probably wouldn't take his weight if he tried to pull himself toward them, and he couldn't try anything he wasn't reasonably sure would work. A mistake here wasn't going to end with a failing grade—it would get him killed.

Noumu plowed after him as he yanked himself out of reach. The single-minded determination of this particular villain went beyond normal limits, as he didn't seem to care about himself at all. Perhaps he had a juggernaut quirk of some kind? Something that would let him crash through things without hurting himself. In the interest of keeping his main pillar of mobility intact, Izuku hooked the other end of the scarf on the steps leading up to the fountain and pulled himself off center. As he expected, Noumu swerved to follow him.

If he was right about it being some kind of juggernaut quirk, mobility wasn't going to be a strong point for Noumu. Even regular speed quirks sometimes fell short when it came to turning, dodging, or otherwise changing direction. The weak points could be trained out of a person, but it took a lot of work, far more than any regular villain was willing to put time into. If Izuku wanted to make sure he could keep up—or rather keep away—he needed to stop thinking and just act.

Dodging beneath Noumu's arm, he didn't think about the wind that ruffled his hair. He didn't let his mind spin out trying to determine the endless possibilities of what was going to happen next. Arms as big as Noumu had come with a weight he didn't have, and that worked against speed, no matter what his quirk could do.

What followed was almost a dance. Izuku had been through so many fights, had been the victim in most of them, had taken up martial arts to learn to defend himself and how to read his opponent's body. The movements were ingrained in him, ducking and twisting away, playing a higher stakes game of keep away than he'd ever played in his life. His experimental palm strikes and knuckle jabs didn't seem to register, so brute force was not something that was going to work with this opponent. That was fine. He wasn't really made for brute force against something like this.

Trickery and precision, however, were exactly what he was made for. There were places on the human body that couldn't be as well protected no matter what people did, weaknesses that came part and parcel with being corporeal. They could be in different places on people with heteromorphic quirks, but they were always there. That being said, Izuku didn't have the space or the time to take advantage of many of them while he was ducking around within Noumu's guard.

He did, however, have a number of support items in his belt that he could palm while evading a heavy swing.

Noumu may have been built like a brick wall, but there was one glaring chink in his defenses. It could have been a trap of some kind, leaving his brain so exposed, which was why Izuku grabbed three of the taser disks from his belt instead of one. If he was right and Noumu had some natural defenses against attacks aimed at his brain, three disks should still be enough to give him a bit of breathing room. Izuku knew he couldn't keep up his evasion forever, and he needed the space to back off and attack from another angle.

Izuku was distantly glad Aizawa was too busy to see the very risky move he pulled as he flicked the two ends of the scarf between Noumu's legs, then sent them up to wrap around his shoulders. Izuku pulled himself after the scarf, throwing himself up into the air in a flip over Noumu's head. At the apex of his flip, he buried the taser disks as deep in Noumu's brain tissue as he could before attempting to land.

Noumu was too quick for him, however, or the flip too slow. One of Noumu's arms came up and batted at him before he touched down. It would have sent him flying, if not for the ends of the scarf still wrapped around the villain's shoulders. Gritting his teeth against the pain as it stole his breath, Izuku retracted the scarf and tried to curl around his now injured ribs. Bruised or broken, he wasn't sure, but he had enough presence of mind to tuck and roll before he hit the ground near Shigaraki Tomura and Kurogiri.

He couldn't afford to stay down and sprang up as soon as he finished his roll. He wouldn't wish his time at Aldera on anyone, but it was an excellent preparatory course for taking a hit and keeping in motion while in pain. It wasn't the best thing for him, but he couldn't afford to stop.

The tasers kicked in suddenly and Noumu screeched. The sound was inhuman and full of pain, and it kept going. Apparently, there weren't a lot of defenses on Noumu's brain, and introducing not one, but three external sources of electricity was screwing him up in a bad way. It hadn't killed him, but he certainly wasn't able to shake it off after a bit like Kaminari.

"What the fuck did you do to my Noumu?" Shigaraki fumed, charging toward him with one hand outstretched. "How is an NPC like you able to take out my party's tank?"

Izuku sent a loop around Shigaraki's wrist, hoping to pull him off balance. The outstretched hand paired with the severed hand motif he'd gone with for his costume was sign enough that letting him touch anyone was a bad plan, so avoiding and redirecting him was probably the best course of action. It was even working for a moment before Shigaraki grabbed the scarf with his other hand and it started disintegrating.

Pulling the scarf back reflexively, Izuku felt suddenly off balance knowing that the scarf, the original scarf, was damaged so badly. Not even Bakugou had managed to damage it this much. He knew what Shigaraki's quirk was now, but he wasn't sure if it was worth it.

In the meantime, Shigaraki took advantage of his shock to move in close enough to grab him by the throat, one finger carefully extended. Izuku froze, knowing that any of his struggling would be violently and permanently ended by adding that last finger.

"You really are a troublemaker, aren't you?" Shigaraki hissed. "A real glitch in the game. My Noumu was made to kill All Might. There's no way a regular NPC could break it just like that."

Izuku held his breath. Angry red eyes were too common in his life. Bakugou had them, this villain had them. There were probably a few other people at Aldera who also had red eyes and hated him, but he hadn't noticed while simply trying to survive the most obvious antagonist in his life. Survival didn't look like it was possible where he was standing now. His ribs ached, his scarf was partially disintegrated, and his life hinged on the insane whims of a villain apparently intent on killing All Might.

"Do you know what happens to glitches?" Shigaraki whispered, a touch of excitement in his voice that chilled Izuku to his bones. "They get removed."

The final finger pressed down against his neck and Izuku braced for the feeling of his skin disintegrating. Only for nothing to happen. Shigaraki's head jerked up and he turned to where Aizawa was staring at him from the center of the dwindling crowd of villains. Knowing better than to waste the chance he'd been given, Izuku ripped himself away from Shigaraki, tossing one of the flash-bang marbles on the floor between them, followed up by one of the small explosive marbles.

It was enough to put a bit of space between him and the villain, and he palmed a couple more taser disks, hoping he'd have a chance to use them.

"Noumu!"

Izuku turned toward the hulking villain that had been fighting off the effects of the taser. He had gone eerily silent, but Izuku hadn't noticed while he was preoccupied with Shigaraki himself. Now Noumu was upright again and didn't seem to be suffering any ill effects from the taser.

Made, Shigaraki had said. Noumu had been made to kill All Might, so he needed to be able to survive whatever All Might threw at him. He needed to throw off super-powered punches like they were nothing, and a juggernaut quirk wouldn't do that. Juggernauts built up momentum to bulldoze through everything, and until they got up to speed, they were just as vulnerable as someone else.

But 'made'. A tailor-made quirk that could stand up to All Might would have to be equal to All Might's quirk, and no one knew exactly how it worked. It seemed like a general strength enhancer, but a quirk like that would have degraded a bit with age. If anything, All Might had only gotten stronger as his hero career progressed. So, a quirk that stockpiled strength was more likely, and it compounded on itself over the years. Growing up with a quirk like that would help one's body adapt to the stresses of increasing strength gradually, but if the quirk or the person had been 'made' as Shigaraki said, there had to be some way to counteract the weaknesses, as many of them as they could.

The taser discs hadn't put Noumu down for long, so there had to be more than just a strength quirk in him. Of course, if you could engineer a person with a specific quirk, why would you stop at just one? Why not add regeneration to make sure they could always stand back up again.

"Noumu," Shigaraki called again, "kill the glitch."

Noumu blurred again, and Izuku only just managed to throw himself to the side. He wasn't situated to make Noumu careen into Shigaraki this time, but that would hopefully hide the fact that this was his goal. The whole time he'd been there, Shigaraki had hardly moved from where he first emerged, and Izuku fully intended to use that laziness or confidence against him at the earliest and most convenient opportunity.

But surviving to do that was first on his list of immediate priorities.

"Midoriya!"

He couldn't focus on who was shouting his name, not when breathing and moving were taking his full attention. He was vaguely aware of the collection of figures emerging from the depths of the USJ facility, but he couldn't pay enough attention to who they were unless they became a threat to him.

Instead, he dodged again, feeling the wind as Noumu blew past him before turning again. He made a decision in the next moment. It would take too long to position himself in such a way that Noumu would run into Shigaraki. Which meant that he either needed to abandon the plan and keep dodging until he couldn't anymore—a deadline that was fast approaching with a distinct emphasis on "dead"—or he needed to drag Shigaraki into Noumu's path.

The maneuver had to be quick, and he needed to plant his feet properly to make sure he had the proper leverage to move Shigaraki. And knowing what he did about Shigaraki's quirk, it was going to damage the scarf, but they needed just a little bit more time. Kaminari had to have gotten a signal through to the school, help had to be coming.

Dodging Noumu's next pass, Izuku placed himself where the undisintegrated side of the scarf would be able to reach Shigaraki as quickly as he could manage it. Which, since he used it to jump off of buildings and swing to safety, one of the main things he had trained was speed.

Noumu turned, and this time Izuku was the one making things happen quickly. The end of the scarf shot out and wrapped itself up Shigaraki's left arm while Izuku simultaneously pulled and twisted, trying to ignore the sudden and sharp stab of pain in his ribs as he spun out of Noumu's path, leaving Shigaraki where he'd been standing. Shigaraki, who had almost immediately attempted to disintegrate the scarf, was left with the end still tight around his arm when Noumu crashed into him and sent him flying.

Shigaraki's scream of outrage was cut short by a portal which opened in the air before he landed and dropped him in the fountain. Noumu had stopped briefly, turning towards where Shigaraki had been going before the portal, then slowly shifted until he was facing the fountain where the villain had splashed down. Apparently there was some in-built loyalty in Noumu that demanded he protect Shigaraki, so Izuku's maneuver was possibly the best and worst thing he could have done.

As soon as Shigaraki was up again, he was going to be out for blood more than before. And Izuku's ability to escape was rapidly dwindling.

A flash of black and pink appeared out of the corner of Izuku's vision and he tried to reorient, expecting a new threat, in time to see Uraraka launch herself at Noumu's back with both hands outstretched. She landed with a meaty slap that reverberated around them and tumbled to the ground. And Izuku... well, he wasn't going to ignore the golden opportunity that had just landed in his lap. Noumu without his gravity was much less of a threat.

Sending out one of the truncated ends of the scarf, Izuku grabbed Noumu around the waist and spun around, using the momentum he generated to fling the villain towards the ceiling far above them. Up there, it wouldn't be able to act on any of Shigaraki's orders, making everyone on the ground that much safer. Even with negated gravity, the quick spin sent another wave of pain shooting through Izuku's chest. He choked back a cough and tried to ignore the heavy taste of iron in the back of his throat.

Shigaraki screamed in frustration, stomping towards Izuku out of the fountain. He didn't make it very far before Aizawa intercepted him, using his capture scarf to pin Shigaraki's arms to his sides, effectively preventing him from being able to get out and attack Izuku. Naturally, this brought Kurogiri back into the fight, but Izuku flicked a couple of the taser discs at the metal collar that was the only physical part of the mist villain's body. They connected like magnets and delivered a charge that lit up the mist in dark blue and violet. Then, a definitely physical body dropped to the ground, dark mist still swirling around aimlessly.

"Problem child," Aizawa said, pulling Izuku's attention to him. He reached into a pouch on his belt and pulled out a set of handcuffs. "Get those on him before he recovers."

He tossed the cuffs up in the air and Izuku snatched them with his scarf before they could hit the ground. Before he could put them on the mist villain, the entrance of the USJ broke open, revealing All Might. Startled, Izuku accidentally dropped the cuffs.

There was a cry of pain behind him and Izuku turned to see that Shigaraki had used the momentary distraction to break free, disintegrating part of Aizawa's scarf as well, before latching onto Aizawa's arm and disintegrating part of it. Then an unseen force knocked into him, pushing him away from their teacher. Then a similarly unseen force started pulling Aizawa away from him. From the way the blood was getting onto a pair of invisible hands, making them decidedly less invisible, Izuku assumed it was Hagakure helping him.

Jirou was suddenly at Izuku's side. "Midoriya, the handcuffs!"

"Kurogiri!" Shigaraki shouted as All Might advanced on the central plaza. "Get us out of here!"

The mist sort of floated upward shakily, but he moved toward Shigaraki, expanding out the way he did before. When Izuku tried to throw another taser disc at the collar, a smaller portal sent it away to the fountain where it short-circuited and sank. Before All Might could grab either of them, they were gone, leaving the rest of the villains they'd brought with them, as well as the floating Noumu behind.

A moment of stillness descended on them, heavy and dark. Tsuyu and Mineta crept closer from the Flood zone, Todoroki and a slightly smoking Ojiro from the Conflagration zone. Tokoyami looked half-drowned, coming from the Downpour zone. The rest of the heroes from the school were coming through the broken entrance as Ashido and Sero made their way to the plaza from the landslide zone.

Explosions announced the arrival of Bakugou and Kirishima from the Ruins zone, and Izuku knew that everyone else had been left at the entrance with Thirteen, who he hoped was okay.

Now that the danger was past, the energy and lack of awareness of the pain he was in was trickling away. There was a sharp piercing ache in his side, and he couldn't seem to get enough air in his lungs. As he tried to breathe in, he could feel the rattle in his throat and taste the blood in his mouth.

"Midoriya, are you okay?" Aizawa asked, his eyes pinning Izuku in place where he was swaying on his feet.

For a fraction of a second, he considered lying, but the blood in his throat and the rattle in his breathing were not things he could treat himself. His mouth was too wet and completely filled with the taste of blood, even though he hadn't bitten himself, so he just shook his head.

He watched the rest of the teachers picking their way through the crowd of villains Aizawa had been fighting. They were clearly still on edge, ready to put down hard anyone else who made an aggressive move. The stance was only slightly relaxed at the sight of the floating Noumu up near the ceiling, and most of the class clustered together around Aizawa and All Might.

"I'm going to go coordinate the paramedics and police response," All Might said, pulling away from the crowd of students.

Perhaps it was a hallucination from the pain, but Izuku thought he could see wisps of steam pouring off All Might's arms and shoulders. It was starting to make everything look a bit fuzzy and he pushed his way over to the edge of the fountain to sit down.

That was the moment everything just seemed to crash into him. His vision got fuzzier until it abruptly winked out, taking his consciousness with it.

Shouta wasn't sure when or why Midoriya had ended up in the central plaza, but the sight of him standing frozen with the lead villain holding his throat with one finger deliberately raised chilled him to his bones. Although the villain's quirk was still unknown to him at that point, the raised finger was an obvious sign of a five-point touch-based quirk like Uraraka's. Somehow, he doubted the villain had anything so benign.

Of course, he had learned what the man's quirk was for himself the hard way.

But of all the students to end up facing the lead villain, why did it have to be Midoriya? Shouta didn't get the impression that he looked for trouble like that. In fact, his actions thus far showed a specific bent towards avoiding direct confrontation, the exact opposite of ending up in the central plaza where the most powerful villains had decided to take up residence. Sure, he'd been reckless in the entrance exam when he charged the Zero Pointer, but it was clear he had a bit of a plan in retrospect. Not a particularly good plan, but a plan nonetheless. And one really couldn’t argue with results, as it did put the Zero Pointer out of commission.

Still, he would have expected one of the other kids to draw the attention of the villain leader and his most immediate minions. Like Bakugou, who had yet to learn the meaning of restraint if it popped up and hit him in the face. At this point, the blond would be more likely to try and hit it right back. Todoroki was also a possibility to consider, as he was the son of the Number Two Hero and therefore a tempting target. Unlike Bakugou, he didn't think Todoroki would seek out the trouble, but he probably wouldn't have argued if put in the middle of things.

But Midoriya... He wasn't the type to throw himself headlong into danger without a reason. He would have expected him to end up in one of the zones with the other students. Instead, he had somehow gained the attention of the main villain enough to come under attack. He'd been doing well for himself, managing to dodge attacks and turn his opponent's energy against them. Shouta thought he was fine.

Now, though, as he barely managed to catch the kid before he tipped over into the fountain, he knew he had missed something important while he'd been forced to focus on the other villains. Continually dodging wasn't a feasible method of dealing with villains, as well he knew, and redirecting their attacks only worked if they couldn't overpower you anyway.

A bit of blood trickled out of the corner of Midoriya's mouth and Shouta felt a chill run down his spine. He hadn't seen the kid take a hit at all, but this wasn't like the main villain's quirk, and whatever internal bleeding he had wouldn't have been caused by a portal, which means that Midoriya had taken a hit from the mountain of muscle with the exposed brain. And then he'd kept going.

Shoving past the light-headedness of blood loss from his own injuries, he looked toward the entrance. "I need a stretcher and a couple of paramedics over here now!"

This was not how he wanted to lose a student. This wasn't how he was ever supposed to lose one. It was too soon, Midoriya was much too young to have been in the situation he was in.

He was also much too young to have the level of pain tolerance he had, but Shouta unfortunately knew exactly where that came from: growing up believing he was quirkless and having Bakugou as a constant bully over the years. But had he suffered enough that not even broken ribs could phase him? The kid hadn't even cried out, hadn't even really slowed down.

Adrenaline was probably the only thing that had been keeping Midoriya even remotely responsive. And Uraraka had probably saved his life by stealing the hulking villain's gravity. She and Midoriya really worked well together. He could see them possibly forming a hero agency together in the future if that's what they wanted. Even when they hardly knew each other, they threw in together as though they'd been doing it their whole lives.

At least the kid hadn't lied when Shouta asked him if he was okay. That was a distinct point in his favor. Most of the students he'd had to deal with over the years thought it was a smart idea to hide their injuries from him and pretend as though everything is fine. Midoriya, at the very least, had dropped the pretense once his life was no longer in danger.

Except, with injuries like that, his life was certainly, terrifyingly still in danger.

Two sets of paramedics arrived at the plaza with two stretchers, and it took him far longer than it should have to realize that one of them was for him. Hizashi was going to freak out later when the kids weren't there to see it, even though it wasn't as bad as some of his injuries over the years.

"Sir," one of the paramedics cut in, pulling him bodily away from Midoriya, who had been taken up by the other paramedics. "Sir, I need you to let us do our job and help you." She reached for his arm. "You're losing a lot of blood, and we need to make sure that your wound stays clean."

It was only then Shouta noticed all the pale faces of his students around him, all of them looking like they had been suddenly and violently robbed of their childhoods. Which they had, and one of their own was laid out on a stretcher and getting wheeled to an ambulance in front of them.

"I'll be fine," he assured them as he let the paramedics do what they needed to with his arm. "And so will Midoriya. We have Recovery Girl, and a number of other people with the expertise to deal with this sort of situation at hand." He glanced at Hagakure, whose normally invisible hands were stained into visibility with his blood. She had lost her gloves and boots somewhere, and he was sort of glad he wasn’t staining her hero costume because he didn’t want her to think of this moment every time she put it on. "I know this has been a traumatic situation, and I highly suggest talking to Hound Dog, the school counselor, if you're having any problems now or in the future. By that, I mean anything from nightmares to something more mundane, like test anxiety. The resources we have are there to help you, so you should take advantage of them as much as you can."

He could see Bakugou scoffing in the background, but the kid hadn't been particularly thrilled to get the therapy ultimatum before, so he was probably thinking this was more of the same. Still, there was a pale, haunted look in his eyes that never went away. As well as he thought he'd handled it, Bakugou was probably going to be one of those who needed to talk about what happened but didn't want to look weak.

God, there was always at least one of them. Telling him that needing to go to therapy wasn't the same as being weak wasn't going to mean anything unless he managed to come to that conclusion himself. Shouta made a mental note to have Hound Dog check in with him as he didn't doubt the kid was coming out of this with some sort of misplaced guilt.

He waved over Snipe and Midnight to gather the kids and get them on their way back to the school. They would need to give their statements to the police, but those could just as easily be gathered back on campus, where they were slightly more assured of the security. For now, that would have to be enough. Nezu was probably going to shut down the school for a couple of days to review and patch the security system that allowed such an intrusion. After that, Shouta would need to take the first couple of classes back to do damage control. He'd be healed by then, Recovery Girl willing, and so would Midoriya.

Although if they took both him and Midoriya to the hospital, that was one conversation he intended to have sooner. It would also give him the chance to talk to Midoriya's parents. Not a meeting he was looking forward to given the situation, but one he would have had to deal with anyway.

With his students out of the way, his arm carefully cleaned and wrapped, and the black starting to creep in at the edges of his vision, Shouta lay back on the stretcher.

"Just so you know," he whispered to the paramedic with a falsely conversational tone. "I'm about to pass out."

And then he did.

Chapter Text

There were certain words no mother wanted to hear and "your son has been taken to the hospital" was most definitely among them.

Inko ran a whole gamut of emotions in the space of a few seconds after she hung up the phone. First worry since something had happened to Izuku. After that was anger because this was supposed to be the third day of classes. What was supposed to happen on the third day of classes that was so bad?

She thought it was Katsuki. Since she and Izuku had sat down and had that conversation about what Katsuki had done to him in middle school, she'd been more or less prepared to hear that the trend had followed him into UA. Izuku had been cautiously optimistic, but Inko knew that truly good things seldom happen, regardless of how good someone was. It was a sad fact of life that good people often suffered more because they wanted to believe in the good of others. Izuku, who had wanted so desperately to believe that Katsuki was going to become a good hero, was definitely a victim of that way of thinking.

As much as she wanted to panic—as much as she was hardwired to be overcome with feelings until they all burst out—she knew that now wasn't the time for it. Her son needed her. Izuku had been hurt badly enough that he'd been taken to the hospital, and she was going to be there for him no matter what happened. She just hoped her coworkers didn't think she didn't trust them with her child's care.

She didn't, but that was beside the point. Plenty of them were just as distrustful of other medical professionals when their own loved ones were in the bed. And of anyone, Inko had far more cause to be concerned. Her son was going to UA to become a pro-hero, he attended class with his bully, and he was doing all this while lying about having a quirk. A trip to the hospital could very easily cause the whole house of cards they had constructed to come tumbling down.

That was something she was preparing for. Fraud was no laughing matter. Yes, Izuku had allowed his middle school homeroom teacher to file the paperwork for him, but at the end of the day, it was the letter of the law they were exploiting while they technically broke the spirit of it. She wanted to make sure she could shove the necessity for everything they did in people's faces if the matter ever came up, and she may not have decided to study law when she was in school, but she still knew people who had. They were willing to consult with her on a hypothetical basis, and she knew at least one who wouldn't mind terribly if the hypothetical became an actual job.

She hoped now was not the time to start that process, making sure her baby wasn't going to get in trouble for something the whole of society cornered him into.

Inko was so intent on getting to the hospital and seeing if Izuku was okay that it took half the commute for her to realize that people were talking about an incident at UA.

"It's supposed to be practically impenetrable, though, isn't it?" someone was saying. "I mean, it's UA. It's the hero school. What villain would be dumb enough to decide to attack it with all the heroes and heroes-in-training there?"

"Well, it wasn't at UA proper, was it?" Someone else put in. "It was at one of their satellite training facilities. Maybe it's hard to get into the main campus, but the villains didn't get into the main campus. They got into one building a couple miles away from the campus."

There was ice in Inko's veins suddenly. Izuku had said something about a field trip that morning, which meant he and his class were going away from the campus. Pulling out her phone, she tried to find out as much about the villain attack as she could.

None of the news sites really had much. They knew something had happened, that the police and paramedics were brought in, that a large number of villains were apprehended at the scene. Beyond that, they only had speculation. The pictures that had been captured showed several of the pro-heroes working at UA helping to gather the villains and turn them over to police custody. It showed the ambulances driving away, the students clustered together and being led back to the bus that brought them there, escorted by another of the teachers.

She didn't see Izuku's dark costume among them. Knowing that she had been called to the hospital for him, she didn't expect to. She prayed to whatever gods would listen to her that he was merely there for a precaution and not something serious.

Inko almost missed her stop because she was reading through what little news there was on the incident. More information kept coming out, but all hidden under the vagueness of a lack of information. UA had released a statement that didn't answer any of the more in-depth questions people were asking. They didn't say what the villains were after, they didn't say who had been hurt or the severity of their wounds. It was only muscle memory that had her leaving the train at the correct stop.

Somehow the walk from the train station to the hospital felt longer than it normally did. She knew it was all a matter of perspective, that she didn't have nearly as much at stake when she was just going to work. She wanted to trust that Izuku was fine, but all the things he had managed to survive on his own while in that awful middle school hadn't required hospitalization.

She was met at the door by Yoshiya Satoru, one of the nurses she worked with frequently. He was also one of the best people to call on if someone needed calmed down, which only made her that much more concerned.

"He's fine," Yoshiya said, holding up both hands like he was trying to calm a startled animal. "He's in room 336."

Even with the reassurance, Inko felt like she was going to vibrate apart with the stress of everything. Without stopping, she started making her way to the elevators. "What happened?"

"I don't know much," he admitted, falling into step beside her. "He was brought in with a broken rib that had punctured his lung. It didn't collapse, but it was starting to fill up with fluid. That's been drained and, since he's a UA student, they brought in Recovery Girl to handle the lion's share of the healing process."

Her knees faltered briefly at 'punctured his lung', but she kept moving. Once in the elevator, she leaned against the wall and held onto the railing for support. "But he's okay?"

"Yeah, he's okay."

Inko knew she wouldn't fully believe it until she saw him. She wasn't sure she would believe All Might himself at the moment.

The doors of the elevator opened onto the third floor and she stepped out, bee-lining for room 336 with an absent wave at the nurses' station.

She stopped at the door briefly, trying to grasp at the fraying strands of her composure. Then, knocking as she opened it, she peeked into the room.

The lights were turned a little low and the curtains were drawn over the window. Izuku looked so small in the bed with the oxygen mask on his face. He was asleep or unconscious and Inko had to resist the urge to check his chart to verify what she had already been told. The heart monitor was in silent mode, but it displayed a steady 62 beats per minute.

It was only after she categorized every bit of Izuku she could see that she noticed the dark figure sitting beside the bed. They shifted and stood up, facing her.

"Midoriya Inko, I presume?" The man asked. He was sort of scruffy in the way of those who don't care as much about their appearance because they've been running on a constant and not at all consecutive two hours of sleep for far longer than they can remember. This was a man who ran on coffee and power-naps and he knew it. Which meant this was Izuku's teacher, Aizawa.

"You're Aizawa Shouta?" she asked, just to be sure. "Eraserhead?"

The man nodded. "I'm sorry. This shouldn't have happened."

"No, it shouldn't have. I knew Izuku was going to face villains eventually, but this was too soon." Inko sighed. "But I know that the blame doesn't fall on you or any of the rest of UA. Sometimes patching holes in security is reactionary instead of proactive, and you can't fix what you don't know is a problem."

There was a part of her that did want to demand if they had any inkling something like this would happen, but she knew there wasn't much of a point to it. Sufficiently determined villains would have caused problems anyway, and at least Izuku would be okay.

She turned back to Izuku's bed. "What happened?"

Aizawa shifted. "I'm not sure how much you know, but my class was supposed to be attending Rescue Training in an off-campus facility. Shortly after we arrived and before any training had started, there was a distortion in the air at the central plaza. It grew into a portal with several dozen villains with a heavy bent towards those least suited for my quirk." He moved away from the chair, gesturing her towards it. "I think you'd be more comfortable if you sat down."

Frowning at the interruption, Inko sat, reaching out to grab Izuku's hand, careful of the pulse oximeter on his first finger. "Lots of villains?" she prompted when he didn't continue immediately.

"Yes. Besides the students, there was only me and the rescue hero Thirteen present. Thirteen isn't much of a fighter, so I had them attempt to get the students out of the building and to safety while I covered their escape." He sighed. "Unfortunately, the portal that brought them was the result of a quirk, and the villain apparently scattered students throughout the facility. I'm not sure why, but Midoriya ended up in the central plaza, where the leader of the group and his bodyguard were standing. I didn't see it happen, but I have to assume that his injuries were from the bodyguard, as they weren't consistent with the injuries I sustained from the leader or what Thirteen did from the teleporter."

A moment of silence stretched between them where Inko tried to find something to say that didn't sound like an accusation.

"Are you alright?" she finally asked.

Aizawa nodded. "Most of the injuries I sustained from fighting the villains were rather minor. The worst I had was from the leader, who disintegrated the skin on my arm."

Rolling back his sleeve, he showed her a bandage that was wrapped around his forearm, his elbow and continued up his bicep. It was a formidable amount of skin to have been stripped away and Inko was surprised he wasn't in a hospital bed himself.

"Oh," she muttered. "Right. I forgot. Eraserhead."

"What?"

She shook her head. "No, it's nothing. I just remembered who exactly you are." She sighed. "I may not work the night shift very often, but I've heard enough stories about you leaving AMA. I think I remember one of the other nurses saying your record for checking yourself out was ten minutes, before the doctor even had a chance to examine you?"

The silence that followed was different. Lighter, almost, even as Aizawa attempted not to look like a chastised child.

"I had a reason for this," he said finally. "A reason beyond apologizing for all of this. I wanted to know how much you knew about his experiences in middle school."

"If you'd asked me three months ago, I would have been confused." She paused. "I assume he's talked to you, then?"

"In minor details only. He never named any names, but Bakugou admitted on his own when I talked to him that he was part of those who tormented your son."

Inko straightened. "And it is only my respect for Izuku's choices that I haven't done anything about that. My son takes on far more than he should, both in regard to work and blame. I wanted him to talk to you at the beginning of the year about this, but he only promised to share if Katsuki continued to attack him. Izuku seemed to think there was a sort of truce between them, but I'm not sure."

"Regardless of whether or not they already have an arrangement, I have made therapy a requirement for Bakugou's continued enrollment in the Hero course." Aizawa sighed. "I wanted to suggest seeking out a therapist for Izuku as well." He held up a hand when Inko opened her mouth to protest. "Unlike Bakugou, I wouldn't require it for your son to remain in the course, but there are several concerning behaviors I've noted over the past couple of days that probably relate back to his experiences in middle school and earlier. Chief of which is that he doesn't seem to value his own safety."

Inko felt the blood drain from her face. She glanced down at Izuku's sleeping form. "Was that something that happened today?"

Aizawa shook his head. "No, from what I saw, he was doing his best to remain out of reach of the villains. He could have been trying to run away while I was trying to deal with the horde of villains the leader had brought with him, but as I said one of the more prominent and difficult villains was a teleporter, and Midoriya probably wouldn't have been able to go anywhere without being teleported right back to where he started." He sighed again. "In this instance, I don't think there's anything else he could have done, and he handled himself well for someone who hasn't had to face a villain before."

"Well, that's not entirely true." At Aizawa's puzzled look, she continued. "Izuku ran into a villain by himself several months back. He was on his way home from school and a villain with some kind of slime quirk tried to use him as a convenient body to possess and escape. All Might was the one to save him then, but he managed to use his tendrils to survive long enough for that help to arrive."

Inko was glad she remembered to use the fake name Izuku had given his use of the capture scarf. She didn’t talk about it a lot—at all, really—but finding out about it was recent enough for the right words to be in her brain.

Aizawa frowned. "I was not aware of that. Normally an incident like that would be mentioned in a student's file."

Inko shrugged. "He didn't even tell me about it for a while. Again, if you'd spoken to me three months ago, I wouldn't have known about it." She sighed. "And yes, I know he doesn't value himself very much. He said he told you about discovering his quirk far later than normal?"

"Yes. At twelve, but he didn't have it registered until he was 14."

"And you're aware that he was bullied. Whatever details he's told you, multiply it by four, and that might come close to what he actually dealt with on a good day. He didn't have many good days, and the day he ran into that slime villain was one of the worst from what I understand, though not because of the villain." A small part of Inko was vindictively pleased when her son's teacher swore under his breath. "I know he needs help. I know he needs to talk to someone. I was hoping to let him get settled into UA before I brought it up, but life doesn't seem to want to slow down enough for that. After this..."

"You would be well within your rights to withdraw him under the circumstances." The hero wasn't looking at her when she glanced his way. He had moved over to lean against the wall—probably exhausted from his injuries and the healing he'd been subjected to already. "Legally, we wouldn't be able to stop you."

"But it would hurt him far more than it would help." She knew that with absolute certainty. If she tried to take Izuku out of UA, she would probably lose him. With the evidence of the UA entrance exam to shove in the faces of the other schools, she had no doubt another hero school would take him, but if they ever found out he was still quirkless, they wouldn't let him stay. UA was the only chance he had if his true quirk status ever came out. He had made a couple friends there for the first time since he was diagnosed.

And then there was the fact that he actually trusted her at the moment. He had shared a lot of the things that had happened to him, though she wouldn't delude herself to think it was everything. They were talking to one another and having meaningful conversations about his future and what he wanted to do. She didn't want to lose that. She wanted to trust that Izuku would come to her if he needed something, but that relied on not betraying his trust on matters like this.

"I can't take him out of UA," she told Aizawa. "In spite of this incident, I think he feels safe there, and I wouldn't even consider making that decision without talking to him about it first." She glanced pointedly at his still unconscious body in the hospital bed, before turning back to Izuku’s teacher.

He pushed off from where he was leaning against the wall. "Thank you for your time. I'm sorry for intruding on it."

Inko shook her head. "No, this was probably a discussion that would have happened eventually." She glanced back down at Izuku. "I can't say I enjoy the circumstances, but we would have had to meet at some point. Perhaps it's better it happened sooner rather than later."

"Nevertheless, I'm sure you want some time alone."

With that, he was gone and Inko was by herself with Izuku in the dim light of the hospital room.

"Please," she whispered into the stillness. "Please be okay."

Izuku was alone when he woke up, annoyed into consciousness by the sound of voices and footsteps nearer than they should be. For a moment, he wasn't entirely certain where he was. Then the memories and the stiffness in his side flooded back. Noumu had hit him and he kept going, aggravating whatever that had done to his ribs. Aizawa-sensei needed to save him from getting disintegrated like the ends of the capture scarf.

His heart beat spiked. He was in a hospital bed, wearing one of the backless medical gowns instead of his clothes. Which meant the capture scarf was not around him where it had been. They would have taken it, possibly thrown it away if they didn't think it was important. A wave of anguish swept over him. He had the other scarves at home, but they weren't the same as the original. And it wasn't like he could ask Aizawa for another without explaining how and why he came to have the first one.

Izuku was half-startled out of his despondency by a rustling clatter from the direction of the bathroom. He tried to sit up, hampered by the soreness in his ribs and all of the wires attached to him. Glancing to the side, he noticed his mother's purse on the chair, so he had to assume she was the one in the bathroom.

Except the door didn't open and he didn't see a light coming from the room. Reaching for the controls on the bed this time, Izuku adjusted it so it would sit him up without trouble just in time to see something flash across the floor.

Suddenly there was a capture scarf climbing up the bed and into his arms. A capture scarf that was distinctly more intact and also darker than he remembered it being before. Reaching for the controls again, this time to adjust the lights, he hoped it was the lack of light that made it seem weird. Except, as he nudged the light level higher, the scarf stayed dark.

"Did you eat my costume?" he whispered, running the scarf through his fingers, and taking in the distinctly charcoal grey gradient the end of the scarf now had.

Now that he had enough light to see by, Izuku also noticed the shinier bits of metal that had been incorporated in the darker section.

He sighed. Even knowing he wouldn't get an answer, he still asked, "Do I want to know where you got the metal? Because you definitely haven't had access to scrap yet."

As much as he wanted to give in and let the scarf wrap around him until he felt safe and whole again, that would probably cause more questions than he was willing to answer. Secrets only stayed secret if you didn't talk about or draw attention to them. He was just glad the scarf hadn't been irreparably damaged.

The door opened a moment later and Izuku hastily shoved the scarf under the blanket, where it wrapped around his left leg. The feeling was entirely foreign, but something he was probably going to have to get used to if he wanted to use multiple scarves. Or even just modify a scarf to have tendrils wrapped around his legs.

"Izuku!" His mother rushed to his side and hugged him. "I swear I only stepped out for a few moments and now you're awake!"

"I'm sorry?" he offered for lack of anything else to say, hugging her back. "Do you know if Aizawa-sensei is alright? And Thirteen-sensei?"

His mom pulled back to look at him. "Of course, you're worried about everyone other than you." She sighed. "Your teacher was actually here earlier. We talked for a bit about what happened and about things we need to start thinking about. He looked mostly okay, but I know he checked himself out against the advice of his doctor. He's infamous for it here."

Izuku couldn't help the smile that pulled at the corners of his mouth. That did sound exactly like Aizawa, considering the lecture he gave on the first day about wasting time. Recovery time probably shouldn't be lumped in with continuing to talk when class has started, but it was probably more that Aizawa didn't want to hang out in a hospital bed when he could be doing something else related to his work that wasn't as labor intensive. Like grading, filling out paperwork, and other things that could be done while resting or sitting behind a desk.

Although Aizawa's injuries didn't seem to be that bad. Part of his arm had been disintegrated right at the end of the fight, but he didn't seem any worse for the wear otherwise—which was incredible considering the number of villains he needed to go through to get to Shigaraki in the first place.

"I don't know about Thirteen," his mom continued. "I was a bit more concerned about you since I was told you'd been taken to the hospital. I thought Bakugou had done something.”

"No, it was just one of the villains." Izuku rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "I wasn't fast enough to avoid getting hit. But I think I'm okay now?"

He didn't feel bad. Yeah, there was a stiffness in his side, but he wasn't really in pain and he was obviously awake and alert later the same day. He wasn't dead, he hadn't had any physical parts of him disintegrated, and he had managed to keep the attention on him long enough for help to arrive. Even better, he had the chance to see that his classmates seemed to be okay as well before he passed out from his injuries.

Okay, he was willing to admit that passing out was probably a bad thing, but adrenaline was the only thing holding him up there at the end, so it was to be expected that he would crash and crash hard.

"Yes, you're okay. That was the first thing I asked when I got here too." His mother hugged him again, not so tight that it hurt, but enough that she was assured he was solid and warm and present. "That being said, if you get sent here with another punctured lung before you graduate..." She huffed. "Well, I don't know what I'll do, but I'll think of something."

She pulled back again, moving around his bed to sit in the chair after she moved her coat and purse.

"Actually..." Izuku winced as she turned to look at him again. "Could you check the bathroom before you sit down? I think the scarf ate something it shouldn't have."

She blinked at him. "What?"

"The scarf. It's whole again." He reached under the blanket and pulled out one end of it. "I know it ate my hero costume—which probably isn't a huge loss since the paramedics would have had to cut it off of me. But it ate something else too. There wasn't enough metal in my costume to explain how complete the scarf is now, and I heard something clatter in the bathroom before the scarf crawled across the floor to me."

His mom frowned but went to check. There was no sound of burst pipes spilling water everywhere as he'd briefly feared would happen when the door was open. The tendril of the capture scarf wrapped itself securely around his wrist and he didn't bother pushing it back for now. The familiarity was comforting, especially given everything that had happened.

"I don't see anything out of place," his mother called. "But I'm sure that your costume should have been sitting on a cart in here and I don't see the cart."

Izuku winced again. "At least it didn't eat the pipes?"

She appeared back at the bathroom door, sighed, then closed it behind her. "Let's just hope no one thinks to ask what happened to it. I don't even think people would believe us if we could tell the truth. It's only been four hours. I thought your scarves took longer than that to grow."

"Yeah, but that was two weeks to grow an entirely new scarf. This is the original one." Izuku shrugged, looking down at the dark loop wrapped around his wrist. "I've never even had to repair it before. Or at least, not enough that it was obvious."

He was starting to think there were several things he didn't know about the primary scarf, things that Aizawa would know because he would have heard about them from KSSI when he got the scarf. None of that was something Izuku was going to learn unless he told Aizawa what he'd actually done or managed to talk to whoever developed the scarf for himself.

"Well, that's probably something to think about another day." His mom sat down in the chair and reached for his hand. "I'm glad you're okay. I don't know what I would have done if you weren't. I know this is what you want to do, I know you can do it, but this part, hearing that you've been sent to the hospital, this is terrifying."

Izuku could feel the way his mother's hand shook in his, even as the tension was bleeding out of her. "I know. I'm sorry. I tried to be careful, but this still happened."

She straightened. "That reminds me. There's a detective waiting to talk to you about what happened there. Now that you're awake, he's probably going to want to have that discussion soon."

Izuku nodded. He was actually sort of expecting someone to come talk to him soon. He wasn't sure when Aizawa first noticed he was at the central plaza, and Thirteen had been hurt by Kurogiri before he was taken, so there was a period of time where he was on his own and out of sight of his teachers.

About fifteen minutes later, a nurse appeared, followed by a tall man in a trench coat. The man nodded to Izuku's mother and waited patiently as the nurse checked him over, made sure he had everything he needed, and informed him that the doctor would be there in a little while to examine him as well.

After the nurse was gone, the man stepped forward. "Hello, Midoriya-kun. I'm Detective Tsukauchi. I just need to interview you and get your statement on the incident at the USJ earlier today. We understand most of what happened, but you were in the central plaza with the leaders, and we were hoping you could clarify the picture for us."

"I'll tell you what I can," Izuku promised, already feeling a little tremble of anxiety bursting to life in his gut. Did they think he was somehow involved with the villains? That they had said something to try and turn him against his class or the school? Having the most contact with them, more than Aizawa, Thirteen, and All Might combined, did seem a little suspect from an outside perspective he supposed.

Of course, Shigaraki had very quickly decided to just get rid of him. If he had been working with the villains, it would have been obvious from the attacks he narrowly avoided that he wasn't working with them anymore. Except he hadn't been working with them at all, so that was a line of thinking that went nowhere.

"I think the first question we need answered is why the villains decided to focus on you," Detective Tsukauchi said. "From the others' reports, they were after All Might."

Izuku winced. "The mist villain, Kurogiri, realized that I was the one to suggest Iida take Kaminari with him. Aizawa had told Kaminari to contact the school, but he couldn't because there was something jamming the signal. I figured that the jammer had to have a limited range, and Thirteen had told Iida to run and get help from the school, so if Iida took Kaminari, the signal would get to the school faster than if Iida just ran all the way back to the school himself." Izuku tried to steady his breathing as he remembered how the bright wispy yellow eyes focused on him before he was teleported away. "He called me a 'little strategist' and then dropped me in front of Shigaraki, the guy who had all the hands on him."

"Shigaraki was his name?"

Izuku nodded. "That's what Kurogiri said. Shigaraki Tomura. I thought it was a bit weird that he used his full name in the middle of everything." He shrugged. "It just felt kind of false, you know? Like he was an actor playing it up for the audience."

The detective made a note on the notepad Izuku hadn't noticed him holding before. "I think you're the only one who got his name. Were there any other distinguishing features you noticed about him? Anything that would help identify him without the hands?"

"Um, obviously the pale blue hair. He had red eyes from what I could see around the hand on his face. And I think he had delicate or thin skin because he kept scratching his neck and drawing a little bit of blood. He has a five-point disintegration quirk of some kind, and it works really quickly. I think if he managed to hold onto someone, he could turn their body to dust in under five minutes." Izuku shivered. He'd been fortunate enough to figure it out before Shigaraki managed to touch him, but Aizawa still ended up on the wrong end of his quirk with the distraction All Might accidentally provided.

"What happened after you were teleported to the plaza?"

"Shigaraki asked me why I was there, but I was too scared to even open my mouth. Kurogiri appeared and told him that I'd helped two students escape, so Shigaraki sent Noumu after me." Izuku winced at his mother's gasp beside him. She hadn't heard the full story either yet, and he regretted not being able to fill her in before talking to the detective. He knew she wasn't going to pull him from UA for this because he would beg her not to, but she wasn't going to be happy about it anytime soon. "I spent most of my time trying to dodge after that. I thought Noumu had some kind of juggernaut quirk at first."

Detective Tsukauchi hummed. "Why did that change?"

"Because Shigaraki bragged about Noumu being made and having multiple quirks. After I tossed a couple of taser disks into his brain, of course."

The detective stopped for a moment, blinked, then looked up at him. "I'm sorry, you did what?"

"I have these little taser disks in with my hero gear. Small, flat, supposed to grip onto someone and deliver a shock roughly equivalent to the standard taser. Dodging wasn't a viable long-term strategy with Noumu, so I buried three of them in his exposed brain. That's..." Izuku winced again. "That's actually when I got hurt. I had to jump in order to plant them, and Noumu batted at me when I was on the way down. Oh!" He perked up again. "I remembered something else about Shigaraki. He kept making these game references, like referring to me as an NPC. He called Noumu his tank. That's when he told me that Noumu was made to kill All Might."

"That's also when he attempted to disintegrate you and Eraserhead intervened?"

Izuku nodded, unable to look at his mother. Her grip on his hand had become crushing, the bones starting to grind against one another painfully, but he didn't dare say anything about it. If anything, her concern was warranted. He had almost died and was fully aware of that fact.

"Noumu had recovered—I think some kind of regeneration quirk was included in his design—and Shigaraki sent him after me again. I used the opportunity to make Noumu run into Shigaraki, which sent him flying, and Kurogiri sent a portal to drop him in the fountain instead of letting him land on the concrete at speed." As the events were replaying in his head, a smile spread across his face at the next memory. "That's when Uraraka ran in and stole Noumu's gravity and I threw him towards the ceiling so he wouldn't be as much of a threat."

Detective Tsukauchi nodded. "I think I have the rest of the story, but if you could tell it from your own perspective, that would be appreciated."

"I messed up," Izuku admitted. "I managed to get Kurogiri with a couple of taser disks and Aizawa-sensei threw me a pair of quirk suppressing cuffs to put on him, but I dropped them when All Might burst in and they managed to get away. Oh, and Kurogiri definitely has a body under all of that mist, but it's like he's keeping it out of phase using his quirk. The collar seems to cover the only part he can't keep protected, but because it's metal, the taser was really effective. I don't know what he looks like without all the mist, but the way the mist was still swirling while he was stunned from being tased makes me think that his quirk is almost always active." He blushed when he realized he’d started to devolve into mumbling. “Sorry.”

The detective waved him off. “It’s fine. That’s something that could be useful in finding or catching him. Can you think of anything else of importance that happened or that you noticed?"

Izuku took a moment to really think about it. He'd been actively trying to avoid overthinking in the fight, so a lot of observations were discarded as soon as they were made in the name of survival. But there were little things that added up to bigger things. Or could add up to bigger things, maybe.

"Obviously, they have some kind of person on their side capable of making something like Noumu. Shigaraki doesn't really seem the type to dabble in genetic science considering his game obsession, and Kurogiri just seemed like an over-powered minion. Both he and Noumu didn't do anything about me unless Shigaraki was in danger or told them to do something. If his quirk weren’t so obvious, I'd say it seemed like Shigaraki had some kind of compelled loyalty quirk. At the very least, Noumu stopped when he screamed. That's why Uraraka was able to get him with her quirk." Izuku didn't like the path his thoughts were wandering down. It seemed dangerous and fundamentally changed everything he knew about quirks, and that was exactly the sort of thing that would make people desperate. "But if Noumu can have more than one quirk, what about Kurogiri and Shigaraki? If someone has figured out a way to implant quirks in people artificially and Shigaraki knows them, it's possible they could do that to anyone, even Shigaraki and Kurogiri."

When he looked up, Izuku noticed that the detective's previously impassively pleasant expression had dropped away, and he was several shades paler than before. Apparently, he understood how bad that could be as well. The practice of quirk marriages had nothing on the possibility of artificially implanting multiple quirks in a person. If the procedure were viable—and it was currently known only to villains—then they could be looking at a future of criminals with multiple quirks causing massive problems for everyone.

"I think that's all I need," Detective Tsukauchi said faintly. He pulled a card from an inner pocket and held it out to Izuku. "If you can think of anything else or if you need help with something like this again, please feel free to call me."

There was a weight in the atmosphere between them, Izuku realized. It was almost like the detective was expecting him to run into something because of what he observed. Or because he had become a target in the USJ attack. Either way, he got the feeling that this was important, and privately vowed to add the number to his phone as soon as possible.

With a nod to both of them, the detective left the room and Izuku was alone with his mother and the full story of what happened to him at the USJ out in the open.

"So..." he ventured. "I really did try to stay out of things. Apparently, the villains don't like it if you're smart enough to put two and two together to get four."

"Clearly," she replied softly. Her grip on his hand was still crushing, as it had been since he started telling the story, but she was slowly easing off again. "You will tell me if you want to try a different school, right? With the fact that you made it into UA, other hero schools would be willing to take you, I'm sure."

"I will," Izuku promised, absently wishing there were some other reassurance he could give her. But he couldn't control the villains or predict anything that would happen in the future. "But for now, I want to stay at UA. I've made friends here and I don't want to abandon them."

"You're right. I'm proud of you for what you managed to accomplish, and happy that you have friends now." She sighed and released his hand with a final pat. "I just wish I didn't know that this was just the first in a lifetime of potential hospital visits. I know you don't want to be coddled, but I still wish I knew how to protect you from all of that."

He nodded. He wished he had some form of protection quirk. Or any quirk at all that would make his mother worry less. Unfortunately, that wasn't the hand Fate dealt him, so he was going to have to make do with his fabricated power. And he should stop making puns in his head where no one but him would be able to appreciate or groan at them.

"Do you think they'll let me out soon? I mean, other than a bit of soreness, I feel fine."

His mother shot him an exasperated look. "I know you admire Eraserhead—more now that he's your teacher—but that doesn't mean you can or should start emulating his worst habits. You will leave this hospital when the doctor discharges you, and not a moment sooner."

A small laugh bubbled up in Izuku's throat. He should have expected that since his mom was a nurse. There would be no checking himself out AMA while she was watching. And probably quite a few times when she wasn't because the other nurses would snitch. All in all, it was a small price to pay for his dreams.

And if it gave her peace of mind, so much the better.

Chapter Text

Nezu was not thrilled with the second considerably larger breach in security UA had just suffered that week, especially since it had sent two teachers and a student to the hospital and likely traumatized the whole of class 1-A, whether any of the students were willing to admit to that or not. And this issue, unlike the previous breach, could not be covered up or brushed aside by threatening the reputations of the trespassers. If anything, the villains captured at the Unforeseen Simulation Joint would gladly accept the boost in reputation being able to break into UA would give them.

Until it was rightly pointed out that their infiltration was neither effective nor under their own power. As satisfying as it was to have 167 villains in custody in a single day, the two most dangerous of the lot had escaped. And Nezu hadn't even had a chance to review the on-site recordings of the whole ordeal. Detective Tsukauchi was supposed to arrive from the hospital soon—according to his normal habits Aizawa would be along as well—and they would review the footage together.

If nothing else good came from the ordeal, at the very least class 1-A had proven themselves capable of protecting one another when it truly mattered. Every one of the sections of the USJ had a hostile presence, but the students managed to handle it despite this being their first brush with true villains. Of course, this meant that the current class was either going to be the strongest class UA had graduated in some time or there was going to be a rash of transfers requested in the near future. He would prepare for both and hope for the better outcome.

He dearly hoped they weren't about to lose Midoriya Izuku after all this. The boy had displayed remarkable resilience in regard to his past schooling from what he'd found out from Aldera's records so far. He had also sought out more technical classes, going far enough to brave the support labs to speak to Maijima about learning to make and repair his own gear. Nezu was already working on putting together a schedule to accommodate Midoriya's interests, and it was fascinating enough to see a student who managed to make it into the hero course choosing to turn himself into a generalist.

And then there were the notebooks Midoriya's former teachers had mentioned. There was still no reference in the files he'd accessed to indicate what they contained, but the possibilities were numerous and more than enough to make him salivate. A young and driven mind could conjure up many things that would be of interest to Nezu, and there was little indication among the resources he had access to what had captured Midoriya's interest. He wanted to solve the mystery of Midoriya Izuku, wanted the final pieces to settle into place. The boy had provided so many of them in his discussion with Aizawa—more than he probably wanted to, but the teachers of UA were all highly skilled at reading people out of necessity—but the contents of his notebooks hadn't entered the conversation.

The phone on his desk rang twice before he picked it up. "Nezu speaking. What do you need?"

"Nezu, this is Detective Tsukauchi Naomasa. I'm just coming from the hospital where I interviewed Midoriya about the attack."

"And?" The detective was not prone to reaching out immediately unless he had time sensitive, important, or otherwise relevant data to pass along. Nezu trusted that this would be no exception.

"This is a conversation that needs to happen in person, I'm afraid. I'm going to pick up Toshinori and come by the school." There was a quiet huff of breath—likely a sigh—before Tsukauchi continued. "We should be there in about twenty minutes."

The phone line could not be reasonably assumed to be secure, so Nezu refrained from asking if the issue had something to do with One for All. The presence of Yagi more or less confirmed that already. Which begged the question what Midoriya could have possibly said to make the detective so flustered. "I expect that Yamada and Aizawa will be back soon as well to debrief the situation. While Shouta is an excellent teacher of many aspects of heroics, following the orders of medical professionals is one matter where he employs the methods of 'do as I say, not as I do'. Should I put that meeting off until we've talked?"

"It's more or less connected to Midoriya's account of things, so they may need to be there anyway."

"I see." There really was something about Midoriya that defied explanation. On the surface, he seemed simple to understand, but the way he had been misrepresented in his academic files and how he acted around others or under stress were far outside of Nezu's expectations for someone like him. "I suppose I'll hear for myself what you mean once you arrive. Feel free to come straight to my office. There will likely be a meeting going on with the rest of the teachers at that point regarding how we move forward with this and your input as an outside perspective of authority might be useful."

"Of course. See you soon." The line disconnected and Nezu sighed as he placed the phone back in its cradle.

Why did so many things seem to circle back to that boy? Perhaps the only truly remarkable thing about him from the evidence Nezu had found was his determination to be a hero against the odds. He'd seen villains born from less abuse, which was testament enough to Midoriya's strength of character. The entrance exam highlighted his ingenuity and heart. Nezu was certain that the notebooks would reveal the boy's intelligence, which was why he was so desperate to see what they contained. If he could come up with a believable reason for it, he would simply summon the boy to his office, but Aizawa tended to get protective over any student Nezu showed an interest in, as though he expected Nezu to groom them in his own image.

Really, it would be more detrimental to a student's development if he tried to turn them into another version of himself. As interesting as such a thing would be, Nezu couldn't justify sacrificing the critical thinking skills such a student would need to have in order to create a copy of himself. Beyond that, he had been shaped by his environment and his experiences, and he certainly wouldn't wish that on any of his enemies, much less his students.

With the push of a button, the rather comfortable sitting area in the front part of his office shifted away in favor of a conference table and chairs for the soon to be arriving teachers. He remained at his desk for the time being, reviewing the security measures Maijima had sent him in the hours since the attack. With the help of the third-year support class, any of the items could be fabricated in about a day. On his own, it would only take Maijima until the end of the weekend to create, test, and install the system meant to prevent teleportation on campus. Creating exemption devices would take longer, but there weren't any students with registered teleportation quirks currently enrolled, so that was not an immediate issue.

Another part of the proposal was a secondary alert system for all of UA's facilities, one which constantly transmitted. A disruption in the alert systems had prevented help from being summoned as soon as the villains appeared, which had placed the onus of delivering that message on a couple of students. However, if a secondary alarm were triggered by the signal being interrupted, the message would be received instantly, ensuring that help would arrive as soon as possible.

Considering how useful such an alarm would have been in this incident, Nezu wasn't going to leave such a thing up to chance anymore. It would take a highly specialized quirk to spoof multiple types of alarms like that, which meant it was really in the school's best interest to create as many avenues of communication as possible between the satellite facilities and the main campus.

The teachers began to trickle in slowly. Kan Sekijiro was one of the first to put in an appearance, placing himself as close to the head of the table as he dared. It was a subtle sort of power play that Nezu was willing to allow until it became a problem. It was a little ridiculous that he thought being first to the table or having a position closer to Nezu's own made him more worthy of being listened to, but he could rest in his delusions while the rest of the teachers sat wherever they wanted and paid him no more or less respect than anyone else.

As expected, Snipe and Kayama arrived together. This was more because they were coming from the same side of the building and Snipe insisted upon escorting Kayama whenever they were called for a meeting. Ectoplasm arrived shortly after them, followed by Ishiyama and Shuzenji, who were apparently engrossed in a conversation about poetry. Maijima appeared with Inui, both of them looking distinctly singed. Nezu made a mental note to ask later, but it probably had something to do with a support student being unwilling to abandon the development studios in spite of the school closure.

There was a fine line between zealousness and belligerence, especially where students in the support course were concerned, and unfortunately dealing with either variety was a headache for all involved. Still, there could be a degree of fun if the student in question leaned more towards zealousness, as they tended to be some of the most unique thinkers in the entire school. Truly the support course was underrated for the number of people who came out of it with plans for some form of world domination. While Nezu wasn't exactly looking for partners in his own endeavors, making a note of his most competent competition was more than prudent.

Lunch Rush arrived right behind Yamada and Aizawa. Either they had stopped at home on their way to campus or Yamada had taken another copy of Aizawa's uniform with him to the hospital, as he was dressed as he normally was, with the only difference being the dark blue sling that held his wounded arm. Aizawa was paler than normal. It was to be expected since he should be resting. Shuzenji sent him a baleful look as he sat down across from Kan, but otherwise continued her conversation with Ishiyama. Yamada, fortunately, didn't look too concerned, which boded well for Aizawa's health. The man was nothing if not a worrier when it came to his husband's health.

Their third anniversary would be coming soon, so Nezu made a mental note to find something nice for them.

"Is this everyone?" Aizawa asked, looking for all the world like a man who very much wanted to be at home in bed. The fact that this differed little from his usual appearance went unremarked by all.

"We're just waiting on Yagi and Detective Tsukauchi, who promised to bring him," Nezu informed the room. "The detective managed to interview Midoriya about what happened, which I think will better inform whatever it is we see in the recordings. I haven't reviewed them myself yet, as I thought it would be better to do so together with context." He turned to the Support teacher. "I've reviewed your proposals, Maijima, and I think those measure should suit us nicely.  How long do you think it will take to install the secondary alarm system in all of our remote facilities?"

"Uh..." Maijima sighed. "In all of them? It would probably take me the next four days. Longer if you want me to prioritize the other device. If a couple of assistants were brought in, I could probably make that happen faster, but I assume we want to keep all of this in-house."

"Indeed, we do," Nezu replied. "Limiting the number of hands involved in all this is of the utmost priority. That being said, I trust in your work and if you so wish, you are free to leave now as you have a great deal of work to get done in not a lot of time. At best, I think I would only be able to justify one more day off next week to finalize the new security measures, but I'd like to have them in place before that where possible."

Maijima nodded and stood. "The footage is something I can review later. If I notice anything in them that might warrant a different method of surveillance, I will send another proposal."

After the man was gone, Nezu turned his attention to the rest of the room. "Now, I hope I speak for all of us when I say that I'm glad you are not more severely injured, Aizawa. I wish I could extend that same sentiment towards Thirteen, but they are unfortunately still receiving medical care when last I heard. Given the more nebulous body they possess—if you'll pardon the pun—they are expected to make a full recovery, but I think that they will require at least a week of medical leave before they are sufficiently healed to attend to their classes on campus." He turned to Ectoplasm. "Do you think you or one of your clones could stand in for their physics classes once school resumes?"

Ectoplasm nodded. "It's just a special kind of applied mathematics. I know I'm not qualified to teach it long-term, but a week of working off of Thirteen's lesson plans shouldn't be too difficult."

"Excellent."

As if on cue, Detective Tsukauchi arrived, followed closely by Yagi, who sort of slumped dejectedly. Probably because he had been in Nezu's office before the alert about the attack came through, and he'd been receiving a dressing-down about his inability to be present for the classes he was meant to teach. Naturally, the man seemed to default to a deep sense of guilt over every little thing that went wrong, though admittedly his presence in the school was the stated reason for the attack.

The only reason he had to be guilty today was the fact that he didn't allot himself enough time to do his job as a teacher and had instead spent all his time saving people on the way to UA. Yagi seemed blissfully unaware of the toxic nature of his hero complex. Though at this point it had gotten around to willful ignorance. They had told him to back off just a bit after the fight with All for One and he hadn't listened. Despite being a key factor in building the hero system up in the way it currently stood, he didn't seem to trust anyone else to do their damn jobs. His decisions were becoming yet more detrimental to his health. It was a miracle he still managed to have three hours with his quirk active per day. If today had gone any differently, he would have lost some of that time.

Hopefully, it would be enough to force Yagi to focus on the things that were more immediately necessary: being a teacher and choosing his successor.

"Ah, perfect. Welcome, Detective Tsukauchi, Yagi. Is there anything we need to discuss before we start going through the footage? Anything from Midoriya's testimony we should watch out for in the video?"

Tsukauchi frowned, paler than normal, but he shook his head. "Nothing that immediately comes to mind. I'm fairly certain he was in shock though because he was far too calm about the things he was recounting. And he was picking apart Shigaraki—that was the villain with the hands—and Kurogiri's quirks while he was describing the situation."

Nezu exchanged a glance with Aizawa. It was something to be tabled for a later discussion, but it wasn't something Nezu intended to forget. Midoriya had already made himself interesting by requesting to take some of the support courses and again when he told Aizawa about his status as one of the latest quirk activations on record. But to add quirk analysis on top of that—if Nezu were more feline, he would probably describe the boy as his own personal catnip.

"I believe we should move on to the footage from the incident." Nezu smiled, teeth covered. Even if showing one's teeth was not always necessarily a gesture of aggression among humans, his teeth tended to convey more of a threat than theirs, so he tried to be mindful of his expressions. "We don't want to be here all day, after all."

He pressed another button on his desk which simultaneously tinted the windows and brought down a screen from its compartment in the ceiling. The security footage from the USJ was already compiled into one video for the main conflict and several shorter videos for the battles the students fought in the various disaster areas around the building. The focus was naturally on the main fight, but Nezu was certain Aizawa would want to review how well his students did in their first—and unfortunately much too early—encounter with a real crisis situation.

There were three main points of focus in the footage. First was the situation at the gates, where the students were scattered. It was interesting to see Midoriya shove Kaminari at Iida while Thirteen provided a distraction for the person with the warp quirk. 'Kurogiri', from what the reports already said, which was a horribly unoriginal name considering the manifestation of his warp quirk.

The limitations of Kurogiri's quirk weren't clear. They had warped onto campus from an unknown location. Nezu made a mental note to check any large and abandoned spaces suddenly being visited in the recent days by any of the captured villains. While he didn't doubt that the main villains would be far more careful about being seen, the cannon fodder they had brought with them were rarely so bright as to avoid the extensive surveillance network of Japan. A network to which Nezu had a well-exercised lifetime pass. Surely there had to be some limitations to the man's warping ability, especially with such an extensive group, and Nezu was willing to bet that distance was sacrificed in the name of quantity when it came to it. Given that he didn't send all of the students away, there was probably also a limit to the number of portals he could make at a time, and how many different locations he could specify. The portals that warped the students away were considerably smaller than the portal he'd used to bring in the villains.

The moment where Midoriya accidentally drew Kurogiri's attention was clear. Even while fighting Thirteen, he was paying attention to the remaining students. His neck brace and glowing eyes tilted slightly when Midoriya was talking to the Space Hero, which was a clear enough sign that priorities were shifting around that new information.

"Apparently the warp villain called Midoriya a 'little strategist'," Tsukauchi put in, "because he was the one to suggest taking the kid with the electricity quirk out of the building in order to get a signal through."

Aizawa huffed. "He's not wrong." When the rest of the room turned to him, he sighed. "Kid hasn't been in my class all that long, but he quite clearly took every single observation he made in the quirk apprehension test and in classes into the battle trials. The fact that he was paired up against Bakugou was perhaps the best and worst way to showcase that, but he accurately guessed the behavior of his opponents and specifically built his strategy around the resources he knew he had. Which included Uraraka's quirk because he spent almost the entirety of the exercise weightless."

Although he knew that the battle trials had brought out some important information regarding Midoriya, his quirk, and his relationship with Bakugou, Nezu had never felt the need to review the footage of the matches. He was usually more concerned with the administrative side of running the school, as well as dealing with the Hero Public Safety Commission and any cases that piqued his interest. Watching the first years run their first battle exercise was usually not worth his time, but Nezu intended to watch at least that one match-up. Clearly it had impressed Aizawa, so it was definitely something worthy of his attention.

The USJ footage continued, with Aizawa's fight against the hoard of villains sharing the screen with the events at the central plaza.

"How the fuck does he know to move?" Kan demanded, watching as Midoriya pulls himself out of the path of the Noumu time and again, even when he wasn't directly looking at it.

"Instinct, I would imagine," Nezu chirped in reply. "What little I have managed to collect from Aldera Middle School indicates a severe abuse of power and quirks on campus. Midoriya, who was believed by the entirety of the school to be quirkless, was a favorite target of many, and his reflexes reflect how much he endured. While I doubt the stakes were ever so high, I wouldn't be willing to bet my reputation on such a thing. One of Thirteen's first lectures is on the dangers one's quirk can pose to oneself and others. Imagine a classroom full of students high on their own power, with none of the lessons in reasonable force or the proper restraint with their quirks that we have here."

"A classroom that would include Bakugou, who also hasn't been given those lessons and possesses a similar disregard for the laws on quirk use," Aizawa added.

The concern that settled on the room was almost funny, if the conversation hadn't been so serious and the content of the video they were reviewing less horrifying in the implications it presented. Midoriya Izuku ducked and dodged away from a being meant to be the antithesis of All Might, and he was only alive because this was not the only time his life depended on his ability to get away. Aizawa would be upset with the level of kinship Nezu felt with the boy, but that didn't make such feelings go away. Nor did it invalidate any of their experiences. Nezu knew what it was like to be used, abused, and ridiculed by the people who were supposed to protect him. He knew what it was to be exploited for what he was and receive no justice for it if he didn't demand it on his own.

Perhaps he should ensure the boy was capable of standing on his own after everything he had suffered. Instilling a bit of confidence in him probably wouldn't go amiss. And if it did, Aizawa was the only one that would likely have a problem with it.

Nezu's thoughts were interrupted by Kayama's exclamation of "Holy shit!"

He looked up just in time to see the Noumu bat a hand at Midoriya, who was mid-flip over the being's head.

"That would be where the broken ribs came from," Aizawa grumbled.

On the screen, the Noumu arched back, beak open in a scream only silenced by the lack of sound on the video.

"How did he manage that?" Yagi asked, speaking for the first time since he arrived.

"He said he had a support item he called taser disks with his costume," Tsukauchi explained. "Seeing what happened, I really don't think he should have been as calm as he was when he recounted it to me. But he knew that was where he broke his ribs."

"I'd ask why he already knew they were broken, but I already know the answer to that." Aizawa somehow managed to sink deeper into his chair. "That fucking school..."

Tsukauchi turned. "Should I ask?"

"I'm sure the information will come across your desk if and when it becomes relevant," Nezu replied. "For now, we still have a bit of footage to get through."

What followed was more or less what they expected. Kayama cheered when Midoriya took a chance on making the Noumu impact with Shigaraki. The impact and subsequent inaudible scream that must have followed caused the Noumu to halt for a bit. A blur of pink ran in from the direction of the Mountain zone as Uraraka launched herself at the Noumu's back.

"Oh my god, it's contagious," Aizawa moaned. "I'm going to have a whole class of reckless idiots by the end of term."

Yamada patted his back, but he looked more smug than sorry. "Says the man who ran into a one on fifty fight with no back-up, a single capture scarf, and a knife he never drew."

"You are making me regret agreeing to marry you. I'm sure divorce paperwork would go through before our anniversary."

The threat was a useless one, as everyone in the room with the possible exception of Yagi was aware. There had been money riding on their relationship since they graduated from UA. It was one of the few things Nezu had actually been wrong about, because he had expected them to get together much sooner. At least he had known they would end up together. Kan had put money on them never getting together at all. Of course, he was also the sort of person who would bet on them breaking up eventually, but no one was going to participate in that pool.

In the video, Midoriya sent one of his tendrils wrapping around the Noumu's waist and flung it up towards the ceiling. Which explained why that was where it was when they found it. It was also, Nezu noted, a move reminiscent of what Aizawa had been doing with the villains in his fight, though none of them had their gravity stolen by Uraraka and so served as ammunition against their fellows.

There was little left of the battle itself. The students were collecting in the plaza from the far-flung corners of the facility while Aizawa and Midoriya attempted to secure Shigaraki and Kurogiri. Nezu knew that the alarm had been well and truly sounded by then, and All Might was on his way, so it was slightly depressing to see how the entrance of the Number One Hero caused just enough of a distraction that the main villains managed to get away. Midoriya's movements were slowing down and becoming decidedly less fluid, probably because of his injuries, so he didn't manage to get suppressant cuffs on the warper before Shigaraki took advantage of All Might's appearance to injure Aizawa.

Everything else from there was the aftermath, which could be reviewed in more depth at a later date.

"Holy shit," Snipe whispered, reaching up to rub at his hairline before carding his fingers through his hair. "One more minute and they wouldn't have gotten away."

Nezu tried to crush the vindictive part of him that wanted to smile as Yagi squirmed in his seat. "Yes, we who have the benefit of hindsight can see how everything could have gone a little bit better, but we weren't operating on that information at the time. We knew there were villains in the facility, but Iida and Kaminari were out of the building before the students were separated to the different zones and before Midoriya managed to get the attention of the apparent leaders. As things stand, I would say this is the more favorable outcome. But that is not what we need to talk about." Nezu folded his paws politely on his desk. "The question we need to be concerned about is what, besides creating more security measures, are we going to do next? Specifically, what do we do about the Sports Festival?"

The room was silent. He knew several people would be of two minds on this, Aizawa most of all because of the current vulnerability of his class. They weren't supposed to encounter real villains until their internship week at the earliest, which was after the Sports Festival. And any villain action they encountered during their internships or work-study beyond what was expected of their year and skill level was meant to be followed up by a trip to the counseling department. Instead, they had come under threat of a major villain attack on the fourth day of school. The month they had until the Sports Festival was not enough to unpack things in anywhere near the degree most of them would need to.

And even if this incident weren’t an issue, they should probably have Midoriya in therapy anyway because his experience in middle school would have damaged the way he interacts with the people around him. Since he himself had come out of an environment where everyone was a threat to him, Nezu knew that such things didn't go away immediately or without help. Although Uraraka's actions to help him in the USJ would probably go a long way towards gaining his trust in a way that mattered, it wasn't going to be something the boy tested easily. It was far easier to maintain some distance and mistrust than throw in with someone who had proven helpful in a stressful and dangerous situation.

"As much as I'd like to say, 'let's push it back a bit'," Kayama finally put in, "I don't think we can afford to do that. While we could probably weather the criticism regarding our decision to ensure security was in the best possible place following the infiltration, there's a lot more tied into the Sports Festival than just our reputation. The vendors have been booked for months now, and we can't expect them to change their schedules for that. And most agencies build their schedules around the internship and work study periods for hero schools." She sighed, running her fingers through her hair. "I suppose what I'm saying is that, from a marketing standpoint, the UA Sports Festival is a lynch-pin we can't afford to upset because it will have ripple effects across the whole of the Heroism industry."

Yamada winced. "And that's not even touching on the social appearance of everything. Either way we're going to get dragged through the mud a bit because that's just how the media works, but any attempt to put the Festival off will bring up the issue of whether our security is so poor that we would need the extra time to reinforce it. If we mention anything about making sure those kids get the mental assistance I'm sure they need right now, we'd open them up to the ridicule of the public for needing that help and it would lend weight to the idea that the whole attack went far worse than it did."

Another awkward silence descended on the room. Nothing Yamada had said was wrong, which made it that much worse.

"Then I suppose our priority at this point is to keep the media far away from the students for the time being." Nezu reached for his tea and took a slow sip. “They need time to heal, and this is a blow our reputation can take. That being the case, however, I want a couple of teachers at the gates the first day back just in case the esteemed members of the press try another information blitz. I will not have them subjecting my students to more mental anguish than they have already caused with the incident yesterday. As much as I would like to believe they wouldn't chance the threats I gave them less than a week after they were issued, some networks and reporters are stupidly persistent."

"I'll be one of them," Aizawa said, holding up his good hand since the other was still wrapped in bandages and sitting in a sling. "Do I have permission to issue threats as well?"

"I'll allow it, as long as you don't get yourself recorded. I'm sure I can trust you with that." Once he had Aizawa's nod, Nezu turned to the rest of the room.

"I'll be the other one," Snipe volunteered. "Won't even have to open my mouth around them. The fact that I'm openly carrying is enough of a threat for most people. And for those who it isn't enough for, drawing it will work. And even if I am recorded, it's their interpretation of my actions as a threat, not an actual threat they'd be recording."

"Very good. You have a license for everything you carry, and another that gives you permission to use them at your discretion." Nezu smiled, and this one did have teeth. "If they try to turn it into a situation, we'll have the legal high ground." He glanced around the room. "I believe that's all we need to go over as a collected group, so I'll dismiss you here. I have some things to discuss with Aizawa, Yagi, and Detective Tsukauchi. Yamada, you're welcome to stay if you like."

The room cleared out. As expected, Yamada didn't even make a token move to follow anyone out. He and Aizawa were probably going to spend a lot of time together in the next couple of days, and Nezu didn't fault either of them for that. Things didn't come nearly as close as they could have, but sometimes seeing how close one could have come to death was more traumatic than an actual near-death experience.

Once they were the only ones left, Tsukauchi sighed and slumped in his chair. "Having seen the footage now, I think I get some of what Midoriya was saying about there being a performative aspect to everything."

"Yes, a lot of the gestures did seem overexaggerated." Nezu hummed. "Did the boy say that about anything in particular?"

"Well, he was specifically talking about how Kurogiri addressed Shigaraki. He found it weird that the villain would say Shigaraki's full name in the middle of everything. And I would have to agree. Considering how familiar they appeared to be with one another, it doesn't make sense to use his full name conversationally, and Shigaraki didn't care about keeping Midoriya alive to tell other people his name as well." Flipping absently through his notebook, Tsukauchi sighed again. "The kid might be right about it being a false name. I don't expect to find anything in the police database about him."

"If you're here," Aizawa ventured, "logically that means you have more than just that to say about what Midoriya told you."

The detective winced. "Uh, yeah. Midoriya recounted practically everything we saw in the recording. He undercut some things and had to backtrack a couple of times to explain what happened, but when I asked him if there were any other things he noticed that he thought might be important..."

It was interesting and slightly disturbing to watch Tsukauchi, a man who valued bluntness and clarity, struggle to find the words to describe what Midoriya had said. While they were becoming increasingly aware of just how intelligent Midoriya was, Nezu knew there was something important about this specific moment. This would be one of those deliciously scarce puzzle pieces he'd been searching for.

With visible effort, Tsukauchi collected his thoughts. "Apparently at some point in the fight in the central plaza, Shigaraki admitted that the Noumu possessed multiple quirks." Predictably, Yagi stiffened in his seat, straightening up in interest and no small amount of fear. "If you know anything about the circumstances of the injury that reduces Toshinori's ability to act as All Might, you know that a man with multiple quirks was involved. The reason he had multiple quirks was because he could take and give them using his own quirk."

Nezu saw the way Aizawa jolted in his seat. It didn't require someone with High Specs to realize that a villain with a quirk like that was what had labelled Erasure a villainous quirk while Aizawa was growing up. "How long has this villain been operating?" Aizawa demanded.

"He's dead," Yagi choked out, a little blood spilling out the corner of his mouth. "I killed him."

"Since the dawn of quirks practically," Nezu answered. He reached for his teacup again, needing the reassuring heat for this particular turn in the conversation. "I imagine Midoriya had something to say about a being possessed of multiple quirks."

Tsukauchi nodded. "He doesn't know about Yagi as far as I can tell, and he wouldn't know about All for One since most mention of him is obscure or buried deeper than any first year can legally access. But he suggested that someone had figured out a way to implant multiple quirks in a person by exploiting genetics or something. Especially since Shigaraki apparently stressed that the Noumu had been made. He mentioned the possibility of Kurogiri and Shigaraki also having multiple quirks since they apparently know someone who can implant the quirks in the Noumu." The man rubbed his face, looking far older and more tired than he had any right to be. "I think we need to entertain the possibility that someone who followed All for One has managed to replicate quirk theft and transfer or that All for One himself is not as dead as we believed."

"All for One?" Aizawa grimaced. "I thought that was some kind of cautionary tale in the underground community. Some bogeyman haunting heroes since the rise of heroes."

"'Bogeyman' would be an accurate enough term for what he was or is," Nezu admitted. "However, he is unfortunately very real. I am sure you yourself have felt the effect even the cultural memory of him has had on quirked society as a whole. He was a lot louder about his presence in the beginning, of course, when quirks were first appearing in the population. Nothing so accurate as to produce a name—I'm sure that getting rid of that was the first thing he did—but the stories are there. A godlike figure capable of granting power to the powerless and taking power from the powerful."

Truly, the mythos of All for One was almost more interesting than the actual accounts of his actions. Most of the current generation wouldn't have even heard of the man unless they ran in very specific circles, but the effect of his presence was clear in the discrimination of any quirk that shut down or copied other quirks or stole someone's autonomy. With how thoroughly entwined people's identities became with their quirks, even the ghost story of a man who could steal it away was terrifying.

And yet the scars his presence left on the cultural mindset was not nearly as impressive as what he had actually managed to accomplish, a whole underground hierarchy of villainy that was terrified of the man even in his absence or infirmity. Working on a time scale such as what he possessed, it can't have been difficult to amass that sort of power within the underground, but Nezu had never managed to suss out the sheer scope of his operations, which had to be worldwide by this point. All for One had merely started in Japan, but there were accounts of him or someone like him in every other major country on the globe. He ran a shadow government on a scale Nezu could only dream of.

"All for One is dead," Yagi repeated. "He has to be."

"Was the body destroyed in front of you?" Aizawa asked, a sharpness in his tone that brooked no arguments. "Was his head separated from the rest of his body? Did you check for any remaining signs of life? Because in the underground, no one is dead if you don't have confirmation that their body is destroyed, or their head is separated from their neck. You can’t afford to assume that an enemy is down unless there is no possible way they could get back up again."

The way Yagi slumped again was answer enough.

A flash of pity ripped through Nezu. Yagi had sacrificed a lot to try and put the man down. It only made sense that the idea of All for One surviving that encounter was, at the very least, traumatic. More so, since he hadn't chosen and trained a successor and now whoever he chose may come under threat if the man is indeed still alive.

"Midoriya puzzled this out on his own?" Nezu asked, turning back to Tsukauchi.

The detective nodded. "He said if his quirk weren't so obvious, he would have guessed that Shigaraki had some kind of compelled loyalty quirk based on how both Kurogiri and the Noumu didn't take any action unless under orders or Shigaraki himself came under threat."

It was all Nezu could do not to berate himself for failing to notice that in the footage. Granted, they had been focused on the active parts of the battle, but it should have been obvious that certain elements were inactive when their use would have turned the whole incident into a bloodbath in favor of the villains. There were many things a villain with a warp quirk could do that would damage, incapacitate, or kill an opponent, and they tended to lack the moral impetus to refrain from such tactics. And though there were gentleman criminals in the world of villainy, Nezu doubted that many existed in a group that elected to attack a school field trip. Kurogiri in particular had proven how capable he was of causing harm by turning Thirteen's quirk back on them, so why had he remained so passive for the rest of the battle?

"So, in summary, we have All for One or a disciple of his backing this League of Villains, providing them with creatures like the Noumu so they can attempt to kill All Might." Nezu sighed. "We do not know why they want to kill All Might, beyond the fact that his death would be a blow to our society as a whole and the hero system in general. We do not know how large this group is beyond those we have seen. We do not know what resources they have or how they have access to those resources. We do not know when or where they will attack again, but this was obviously their attempt at a debut. As it stands, we are fortunate that no one was killed or permanently injured. Moving forward, we need to be aware that they will likely try to attack the school again, as their only stated motivation is the death of All Might, and Yagi is far more vulnerable and visible here than anywhere else."

Tsukauchi rubbed at his forehead. "Because this is the first time Yagi has committed to something that requires him to stay in the city and in one location for a long period of time."

"Precisely. Were it not for how young this Shigaraki appears to be, I would think this group has been biding its time for a while," Nezu put in. "We cannot discard it as a possibility entirely, because there could be someone behind the scenes pulling the strings and setting Shigaraki up to appear to be the leader while actually running the show themselves." With a shrug, he added, "It's what I would do, anyway. Moreover, that theatricality Midoriya noticed could be part of everything. The essence of stage magic is a flashy and obvious distraction while the real trick is being set up. We just need to figure out what that trick is and how to mitigate whatever damage has already been done."

"What are we going to do about the fact that Midoriya has attracted this group's attention?" Aizawa asked. "We need something in place to make sure he doesn't get hurt."

And wasn't that just the crux of the matter? Midoriya had brought a number of things to their attention, things he had figured out while being targeted for his clear thinking under pressure and the strategy he suggested to produce the best effect. If the League of Villains knew that he had some guesses about what was happening behind the scenes, they would be desperate to destroy him. Again, it was exactly what Nezu would do in their place.

"I'm not sure yet, but I think it's about time I speak to him," Nezu replied, taking his small delight in Aizawa’s immediate disapproving frown. "I'll be sure to have his new schedule arranged for when the students return."

And perhaps having a chance to meet the boy would give Nezu a better idea of who and what he was. Now, at last, Nezu had an excuse.

Chapter Text

Izuku was glad to get home, glad not to have to spend the night in the hospital. The healing quirks had done their job and he wasn't hurting anymore, so there was really no reason to keep him.

He did ache a bit. Even though the damage was healed, his body remembered being hurt and it was determined to make him remember it. Which was a bit of a shame because it had ruined the longest period Izuku had gone without injury since elementary school. Of course, his body remembered pain better than it remembered wellness. He didn't have any other way of relating to the world.

It occurred to him that if he had attempted to go into a safer career, he would probably drive himself mad with paranoia. The constant expectation of pain and exertion could at least be excused in a more dangerous job. And for a hero, it wasn't actually paranoia because people were out to get him.

As much as he wanted to check his phone on the train ride home, Izuku felt like he needed to be mentally present for his mother, who had looked like she was one strong breeze away from vibrating apart since the detective interviewed him. He was prepared for the dangers of pursuing heroism as a career, but his mother was not, and he didn't want to put too much more pressure on her.

"I didn't go looking for the fight," he whispered, running the pad of his thumb gently across her knuckles.

His mother chuckled darkly. "That doesn't actually make it that much better. You didn't go looking for it, but it still found you."

"Well, you were the one who said I was too smart for my own good. And that was before you knew about all of the bullying going on at school." He winced. "Sorry, I just... It's going to be like this, whether we want it to be or not. And I'm honestly not sorry about that. At least at UA I'm not doing this on my own. Uraraka helped. And Iida listened when I told him to take Kaminari, so it's better this way."

"I know. I don't have to like it, and I don't, but you'd probably get yourself involved in things one way or another." She bit her lip and glanced away. "But I think you need to talk to someone. To a professional. About the bullying in middle school. It's not right that you had to go through that. It wasn't fair that you've had to do so much just to feel like you belong where you are."

He wasn't sure if she were talking about lying about having a quirk or the bullying or both, but he could feel that this was one conversation he wasn't going to get out of easily. And he did want to talk to someone. He had spilled everything to his mother because he needed to explain everything that had happened and why he was getting into the Hero Course when they both knew he didn't have a quirk. He had shared pieces of the truth with Aizawa when he asked about the white-washed version of his school files, but that was garnished with the necessary lies to keep the man from looking too deeply into things. Like his 'quirk'.

It wasn't until he visited the Support Course that Izuku realized how badly Bakugou and Aldera had hurt him. It wasn't until the moment he was realizing he didn't want to die that he understood how deeply he'd wanted it before. Yes, he'd been training the whole time to be a hero, but there was a weight to everything he had said and done before UA, a darkness that he hadn't noticed until it was starting to go away. The moment he got his acceptance letter for the Hero Course, he started becoming capable of imagining a future for himself. For all the lies he had been telling before that moment, his most prolific one was "I'm fine."

"But what about...?" He sent one of the ends of the scarf out from beneath his sleeve to tap her hand before letting it retreat.

"I suppose we'll need to look a few things up about that," his mother admitted. "Theoretically, it should be covered under patient confidentiality clauses, but we need to make sure it isn't something that would force them to break those agreements."

"If it is, lying to a therapist is still an option." His smile felt as off-color as it probably looked, and he let the expression drop from his face. "Seriously though, if it is something they would need to tell people about, I can figure out how to tell the truth without letting them know about it." He leaned back in his seat, glancing up at the reader that announced the next stop. "But it's presented as an emitter quirk with a very specific material requirement to function." A thought occurred to him and he grinned. "It has the appearance of a telekinesis quirk like yours, but the material is a flame retardant. Or," a sneakier smile stole across his face, "it is now anyway."

His mother smiled back at him. "You are incorrigible and I'm not entirely certain what I did to encourage this."

With the atmosphere now lighter between them and their imminent stop announced, Izuku felt like today was on the positive side of things overall. The early evening air was brisk as they walked from the train station to the apartment, but he really didn't feel the chill for once.

"I'm going to make dinner," his mom said as they stepped into the apartment and changed their shoes for house slippers. "You should probably contact your friends and let them know you're okay. Your phone was making a small racket in your backpack while you were still unconscious. I turned the sound down so you could rest as long as you needed to, and I'm not sure if we just haven't heard anything, or if they stopped sending messages because they knew you would get to them given time."

Izuku slipped the backpack off his shoulders and started fishing for his phone. He almost dropped it when it vibrated in his hand. "Looks like they're still coming in. I'll just..." He pointed towards his room. "Yeah, I'll just go to my room for this. Let me know when you need me?"

"Of course!"

His phone buzzed three more times before he got to his room and part of him was honestly concerned about why they kept messaging him. Dropping his backpack beside the bed, he sat down on it and unlocked his phone.

He had 76 new messages, most of them from numbers he didn't recognize. Iida was responsible for 4 of them, Uraraka for a further 12. Everyone in the class had sent him a text even, surprisingly Bakugou.

In true Bakugou fashion, the text read, "I'm gonna blow your ass up next time I see you, you shitty nerd." There was a very big part of Izuku that wanted to screenshot the text, blow the picture up to at least four times its size, print it out and frame it because that was the closest the boy had come to admitting he was concerned about anyone other than himself in more than ten years. Maybe in a couple days when the message had a proper time and date stamp.

Most of the messages were well-wishes for a speedy recovery and an explanation that they'd gotten his number from either Iida or Uraraka. Yaoyorozu asked if there was anything he or his family would need during his recovery, to which he replied that they were fine, but he appreciated the offer. Ashido had apparently created a class group chat where they could talk and share memes and things and kept spamming him with a new 'Join Us' meme at least once an hour with the invite link attached.

Only Iida and Uraraka insisted that he call as soon as he got home. After a small amount of debate, he elected to call Uraraka first. She was probably more worried about him since she was the one to jump into the fight and steal Noumu's gravity.

"Midoriya!" Uraraka cried as she answered the phone. "You're okay!"

"I lived," he replied, a grin she wouldn't see spreading on his face. "They didn't even keep me in the hospital overnight, but probably only because my mom is a nurse and would take me right back if something goes wrong while I'm home."

"That's good. Have you heard we've got the rest of the week off?"

"I hadn't yet, but that makes sense. They'd want to update security after something this big." Laying back completely on his bed, he made sure the speaker was on. "I'm glad everyone else was okay. Mom said she saw and talked to Aizawa-sensei, so he has to be alright, even if he wasn't supposed to leave the hospital yet."

"What?" Uraraka giggled. "Does that happen often or something? And your mom is a nurse? That’s cool!"

"Yeah, she is. And the nursing staff swap stories about particularly difficult patients. Mom knew I liked heroes, and there are lots of stories about Aizawa in the hospital." Izuku smiled up at his ceiling. "You can't tell anyone else, but my mom's friend once caught him trying to escape out the window when he had a bad concussion. She had to use her paralysis quirk on him to make him stay. The only reason it worked was because he had his back to her."

"What does it say about our teacher that I can actually see that?" There was a small pause from her end of the phone. "I'm glad you're okay. When I saw you up against that guy, I was so scared. I wasn't even sure what I was doing when I ran at him, but I'm glad it worked!"

"You and me both." He sighed. "Seriously, thank you. I'm pretty sure I owe you my life for that."

"We're friends, Midoriya! You don't owe me anything!"

"But I think you've earned the right to call me Izuku if you want. Near-death experiences seem like the sort of thing that entitles people to call others by their proper name."

"Then you have to call me Ochako, because we're not doing this by half measures!" Izuku could hear the grin in her voice. "Because we definitely all had near-death experiences. You didn't see what the mountain zone was like, but there were a lot of other people who got to enjoy zero gravity, or get trapped in an avalanche Jirou caused, or get judo flipped by Hagakure. I don't think you understand how awesome it is to watch someone go flying through the air for no apparent reason! I'm trying to convince her to teach me how to do that. Without the invisibility, of course."

Izuku smiled. "Of course. I think I heard something about her and Ojiro being in the same martial arts class or something. And there's probably a few other people that would be interested in learning some basic hand-to-hand combat. Considering there seems to be a group chat for the class, maybe it's worth reaching out to see if anyone is interested in setting up some form of practice in one of the gyms after school."

"I'll run it by Tsuyu and Yaomomo. They're probably the ones who are supposed to organize class meet-ups like that."

"You do that. In the meantime, I was going to call Iida and let him know I was okay. Like you, he wanted me to call when I got home."

"That's a good idea," Ura—Ochako said. "He was actually pretty worried when he heard you were taken to the hospital. I think he was blaming himself for not being there or something. He mumbled something about not being fast enough."

Izuku frowned. "My getting hurt wasn't on him. I'm the one who drew attention to myself. And honestly, he got the message out as fast as he could, so I don't see how that could have gone any differently. As it is, it probably went a lot better than it could have."

"I know that," Ochako replied with a giggle. "You need to tell him that."

"I will." He lay back on his bed with a huff. "Talk to you later!"

"Bye!"

As soon as the line disconnected, Izuku released a heavy sigh. He really wasn't used to talking on the phone. He'd done it a lot more since befriending Iida and Ura—Ochako, but that didn't mean he was comfortable doing it yet. Before UA, he hadn't had anyone but his mother to call with any degree of regularity, and even then, he didn't really need to since they saw one another every day. He was so used to being starved for friendly social interaction that even just having two friends was exhausting in a way he never expected.

Still, he needed to called Iida, so he raised his phone in front of his face and scrolled through his recently much expanded contact list until he got to the right one and punched the call button.

The line didn't even ring a full two times before Iida answered. "Midoriya?"

"Hey, Iida. Yeah, it's me." He smiled softly up at his ceiling, something warm expanding in his chest at the eager and almost desperate tone of Iida's voice. It was so weird to have people care. "I just got back from the hospital a little bit ago. I need to rest for the next couple of days, but I hear we have school off, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem."

"I sincerely apologize for leaving you and the rest of the class behind. Had I known what would happen—"

"It was my idea for you to go, remember?" Kicking off his slippers, Izuku shifted until he was curled up on his bed with his phone beside him. "Someone needed to get the word back to UA about the attack, and you and Kaminari were best suited for that. And you did. You brought help, and only a couple of people were injured enough to need hospitalization."

"And you were one of those people." Iida's tone was miserable, the toxic sort of self-blame Izuku was horribly familiar with.

"That wasn't your fault and keeping me safe wasn't your responsibility. I promise I'm fine. Besides," he added, "the only reason I got hurt was because I drew attention to myself. You'd think I'd know better at this point, right?"

He winced when his dry laugh was met with silence.

"You should not have to fear having some attention on you," Iida finally replied, his voice low and more serious than before. "You should not have been put in such a situation in the first place. UA is supposed to be different from the previous institutions you have attended."

"It is different." Izuku sighed, curling up just a little bit tighter. "I mean, at UA the teachers actually care about their students beyond some imagined hierarchy based on who has the best quirk. They actually do things to fix the problems they see. And Aizawa and Thirteen both got hurt trying to protect us, which is something I don't think any other teacher I've ever had would have been willing to do. There were a couple of them I was sure were going to just hand us over to villains if the opportunity came up, and I'm glad I managed to survive their classrooms."

Another awkward silence fell between them and Izuku belatedly realized that this was probably not the sort of thing Iida wanted to hear.

"That is not the way teachers should behave," Iida insisted, an edge of firm desperation creeping into his voice. "It should not be enough to merely survive one's class or teacher."

"That's just how it was," Izuku admitted. "Even if they didn't treat most of the students like that, I wasn't a particularly valuable addition to their classroom in their minds. As far as they knew, I was quirkless. And even when I developed my tendrils, it's not like I showed any of that off because I knew the only reason they would start treating me like a person was because suddenly I had a special ability, just like everybody else. When it did come out, that's exactly what happened." He sighed. "So yeah. UA's great compared to what I've had before, even with this attack."

"Those teachers should not be educators since they have failed their responsibilities to their students so completely. It is disgraceful that any institution would retain individuals who would treat any of their students in such a way!"

"Sometimes the institution is the problem, too," Izuku remarked, unable to stop himself. "UA is better because if you look at the staff and faculty, most of them have experienced discrimination in one form or another. Even if it's not obvious, I'm sure each and every one of them have had someone look at them at some point in their lives and tell them to give up." He swallowed down the memory of sitting in the office of that quirk specialist who told him in the worst possible way that nothing would ever work out for him. "Nezu is one of the smartest beings in the world, but he isn't human, so lots of people have underestimated or belittled him. Kayama-sensei plays up her sexy persona, but she's definitely had to deal with a lot of people telling a lot of lies about her or trying to make her feel ashamed or embarrassed about it. Aizawa-sensei erases people's quirks, and I know there were probably a lot of people who had problems with that when he was growing up because there were all sorts of rumors about my quirklessness being contagious. It had to be a lot worse if he could actually stop their quirks. And since you have a mutation quirk yourself, I'm sure you've encountered some of the same sort of things that Hound Dog or Ishiyama-sensei have heard throughout their lives."

It was quiet, but Izuku still heard Iida whisper, "Robot freak."

"My point," Izuku continued, softer than before, "is that UA is different because the people behind it are the same as people like us. They know what it's like to be hurt the way we've been hurt, and they have chosen to be kind instead of lashing out." He picked idly at a loose thread on his comforter. "My homeroom teacher last year recognized that everybody in my class wanted to be heroes. I'm sure at one point in his life, he wanted to be a hero, too. But I think the difference between wanting to be a hero and actually being one has everything to do with how you act when you hurt the most. This might just be me, but I think it's a lot more important to be kind when you're hurt than to inflict that hurt on someone else as if that would make it go away. Or—and I'm still guilty of this myself—hurting yourself more because you think you deserve to be hurt." Frowning up at his ceiling, he added, "That's probably why my mom and Aizawa-sensei think I need to go to therapy."

"Perhaps you are correct. It does make sense that heroes are supposed to stop people from hurting. That is the sort of hero I would want to be."

"Then it's a good thing you brought help to the USJ, isn't it? Because that stopped a lot of people from getting hurt." He hoped that would be enough for Iida. Considering he was one of the people who was hurt in the end, Izuku hoped he would understand that no one blamed Iida for any of the injuries caused. He knew too well what it was like to try and take all the blame for something that was ultimately someone else's fault entirely. And even when Izuku had managed to conceptualize that being the victim didn't make him responsible for the actions of others, his former teachers would still say he was trying to ruin the reputations of his bullies, Bakugou chief among them.

"I suppose I shall have to be satisfied with that." He didn't sound happy about it, but Izuku was willing to take his victories where he could get them. "And as I am sure you need more rest, I think it is best we end our conversation here. Thank you for calling me, Midoriya."

"Of course, Iida. You're my friend. If you want to talk more later, feel free to call."

"I'll be certain to keep that in mind." Which definitely meant he wasn't going to call later. "Goodbye, Midoriya."

"Bye." Before he could reach over and end the call, the line disconnected with a decisive click, leaving Izuku in the silence of his room again.

He knew he should do something, maybe hop into that group chat Mina was spamming him about and let everyone else know he was fine, but it was like all of the energy drained out of him. Moving sounded like more effort than it was worth, so he stared at the wall of his room covered in posters and hero merchandise.

He could have died. He was as close to death as he had ever been today, and it was probably only going to get worse from there. The thought wasn't enough to stop him, of course, but it was finally starting to hit him how truly lucky he had gotten through everything. Shigaraki had wanted him dead. Noumu, who was following Shigaraki's orders, had almost accomplished it so many times. If Izuku had been just a little bit slower, he would not have left the USJ. His mother would have been upset, as would his current classmates, and possibly his current teachers.

He had known that he wasn't really expected to live all that long, had understood that heroics was a career that people didn't usually retire from, but he hadn't expected to have his life truly threatened so soon. Especially not with how well things had been going. Aizawa had forced Bakugou to back off, none of his classmates knew he was quirkless, and it was school. A rescue training scenario should not have turned into a life and death situation, with him at the center of it. He didn't want to die before he became a hero in the first place. He didn't want to let down anyone who was relying on him.

It was weird to think there were so many people who would care what happened to him. Before, it was just his mom. And that had been fine. He knew heroics was dangerous. He knew the average life-expectancy of heroes, both spotlight and underground, almost as well as he knew the life-expectancy for quirkless people. The numbers were depressingly similar, which was probably why he fought so hard to get into UA in the first place. If chances were he wasn't going to live much past age thirty anyway, why shouldn't he try to do some good with the time he had?

That was not a statistic he shared with his mother. There was a small notebook hidden in his desk that held all of the research he'd done on quirklessness, suicide rates, any laws that didn't apply to him or couldn't be enforced for him because of the biased wording in them, and general information regarding the quality of life of quirkless individuals. None of it was particularly encouraging. A lot of the laws written or amended within the last hundred years or so specified protections for quirked individuals or referenced a quirk in some way in the wording. In a number of cases, the laws invalidated or overwrote previous ones from a time where there was a quirkless majority or no quirks at all. From a casual standpoint, it didn't mean much, but Izuku knew exactly how damaging it was from a legal standing. He had to.

Laws about hate crimes involving quirks didn't favor someone without a quirk. It was why Aldera had managed to let so much slide in his case. There were still laws on record for the protection of quirked individuals from the quirkless, which they liked to remind him of whenever he tried to speak up for himself. According to them, fighting back wasn't just bad for his school record, it could be prosecuted as an actual crime and there was nothing he could do about it.

Lately, he had added everything he could find on fraud and misrepresenting oneself to the government to that notebook. At best, faking a quirk on his records would give him a fine. At worst, he was looking at jail, possibly mitigated just a bit given he performed this fraud as a minor and filed it through his teacher, keeping his mother out of it. She knew about it now, of course, but they couldn't prove that. And while the notebook would seem like premeditation, his mother's surprise when she found out about it would be genuine.

If she found out about it, which he would do everything in his power to prevent. Some of his darkest moments involved filling out that notebook, and it was one thing he hadn't shown her before. One box that, if opened, couldn't be closed again. The inevitability of his own demise was fine. He knew what he was getting into with heroics, and because of this incident so did she. But he would give anything to make sure she never realized how unlikely it was for him to live a full and normal life.

Maybe that was something he should tell the therapist. His mother did say such things would probably be covered under confidentiality clauses. Which meant they wouldn't be able to tell even his mother without his consent. And he wanted someone to understand why he was willing to go to the lengths he had, to know all of the little things that drove him to do what he did. He wanted at least one person to know the full story.

Maybe if he didn't have to lie, he could finally see what sort of person he was under all of the masks he wore.

Katsuki wanted to blow some shit up, but apparently that wasn't an option right now. UA was currently closed to deal with all of the fuckery that went down with the USJ and the villain attack, and people were saying it wouldn't be back in session until Monday at the earliest. So, no Heroics class to practice his quirk in. And while he could usually get away with letting off a few sparks in the house, he wasn't at home at the moment. The old hag had decided now was the best time to start taking him to that shrink his hobo of a teacher demanded he see.

He was fine! Why did he have to deal with this bullshit?

Because of Deku. Izuku. Midoriya. What the fuck ever.

It took effort not to grind his teeth. He knew that wasn't good for them, but every little thing was pissing him off, from the pastel waiting room of the shrink's office to the stupid color-block art on the walls to the stack of magazines on the table with cover lines about yoga or handicrafts.

Aizawa had said this wasn't supposed to be a punishment, but it sure as shit felt like one. There were so many things in this room he wanted to set on fire, and he wasn't allowed to do any of that.

His mom elbowed him. "Hey, dumbass. That's you."

He turned to glare at her. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Last time I checked, your name was Bakugou Katsuki," she said dryly. "I think I'd know; I birthed you." She poked a finger towards the woman standing in the doorway across the room, a door that had been closed last he paid attention. "They're calling your name."

Katsuki bit back a growl. It wouldn't help, and he wasn't about to give the asshole shrink anymore ammunition against him by getting in a fight with the old hag right in front of her.

The woman gave him a look that immediately had him bristling. "Bakugou Katsuki?"

"Who the fuck else do you think it would be?" he demanded.

She smiled, and the desire to blow something up tripled inside him. "Well, if you weren't Bakugou, it would make dragging you back to my office a lot more awkward." Her smile turned into a grin and Katsuki could feel a deep exhaustion yawning under all of the frustration he felt. "But since you are Bakugou, that just makes it our appointment."

She pushed the door open wider, an obvious invitation to follow her. As if he had a fucking choice in the matter. He slouched after her, trying to convey his deep displeasure with every line of his body. It took far more effort than he liked not to set off an explosion with his hands deep in his pockets. The fabric was already damp with his sweat, and the pants wouldn't survive the explosion if he released even one tiny spark. At the same time, he wasn't about to admit defeat by taking his hands out of his pockets.

There was a whole fucking hallway past the door. He'd guessed as much, considering the receptionist had a door in the back of her area that probably didn't let her right into the shrink's office. There were more of those color-block paintings in the hallway, but at least he didn't have to sit for a half hour in the same place and stare at them. There were several doors along the hall, a couple with name plates on them to tell him who called that their office or what it was used for.

The door at the end of the hall, though, it looked like it was supposed to stand up to strength quirks or siege weapons or something.

Or explosions. Something cold settled in his gut the closer they got to it. He glanced at the shrink's back. She wouldn't... They wouldn't just shove him in a room he couldn't get out of, would they? That was illegal, wasn't it?

But then, so was public quirk use, and people did that all the time. Got away with it, too, as he well knew.

Katsuki hated the sick feeling of gratitude when she turned off into one of the other offices.

"This is it," she said, dropping into a stuffed chair near the desk. "You can sit anywhere you want or stay standing if that's what you prefer. For this next hour, the room is yours."

"You expect me to believe that shit?" He looked around at the room. One point in its favor was the fact that there were fewer pastels. The walls were painted pale grey, and the furniture was darker wood with grey or dark blue upholstery. The only think he could see on the wall was a framed copy of the shrink's diplomas. Other than the chair the shrink was sitting in, there were two more chairs and a couch long enough to lay down on. Not that he was going to do that. Why the fuck would anyone willingly lay down on a shrink's couch to be psychoanalyzed?

"Okay, so that's not exactly how it works," the shrink admitted. "But from a certain point of view, you're renting the room and me for the next hour so we can talk, sit and stare at each other in silence, or glare at the nothing on my walls." She gestured lazily at the room. "Hell, next time you could bring homework if you really don't want to talk to me. If it's something I can help with, I'll help if you decide that would be the best use of this time." Turning back to him with that stupid grin that just made him feel tired, she waved. "The name is Shimizu Mai. I will not be offended if you forget it. Normally this session would be about getting to know one another, but you don't really seem on board for that, so I'm not going to waste my time and yours trying to force these things."

"Why the hell are you so damn perky?"

"Masking." Her smile dimmed just a bit. "Which, if you didn't know, is the psychology buzzword for hiding all of your problems in a little box in your head and pretending like it doesn't exist."

Katsuki frowned. "And they let you be a shrink?"

"Yeah, the only thing I needed to get this job was a psychology degree. I didn't even go to medical school so I could prescribe medication, so you're out of luck if you want drugs out of me."

"Tch. I don't even want to be here. Why the fuck would I want to get any kind of drugs out of you?"

The shrink shrugged. "I've met a lot of people who don't want to be here. Some leave, looking for someone else they'd be willing to talk to, or because they were only required to go to one session. But I have had some people stay because they realize I don't do the 'and how does that make you feel?' shit."

"Isn't that the whole shtick though?" Deciding he'd had enough of standing just inside the door, he dropped into one of the chairs. Not the couch. Never the fucking couch.

"I mean, sort of, but there are better ways of approaching a problem than flinging myself at it directly." She sat up a bit, reaching over towards her desk.

He tensed, expecting the notebook and pen to come out. But all she grabbed was a stupid plastic fidget spinner. "What the fuck?"

"Do you want a fidget toy?" she asked. "I have a whole bunch in my desk. Rubik's cubes, fidget spinners, yo-yos, stress balls, those sheets that have the bubbles you can pop over and over again... Actually, just a sec." She stood and moved over to the desk proper, opened one of the drawers, and pulled out a decently sized cardboard box that didn't look like it was supposed to fit in the drawer. Turning back, she set the box down on a low table within reach of both of their chairs. "There. Feel free to look through it and see if you find anything you like. If you stick around for a couple of sessions, I could probably arrange a visit to the wreck room, but fidget toys are the quick and dirty boredom killer."

Katsuki wrinkled his nose as he shuffled through the toys in the box. There were a few he didn't realize were fidget toys because he always thought they were just toys. Toys he still had around the house because the old hag had given them to him, so they were stuck in a box somewhere. He could just hear her voice in the back of his head telling him to calm his shit. "'Rec room' as in recreational?"

The shrink laughed just a bit. "Uh, no. Well..." She paused, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling. "Actually, I think some people have done it for a bit of legal fun or catharsis, but I wouldn't call it a recreational room in that sense." She glanced back at him and the toy he'd started messing with. "Ah, the infinity cube. Good choice. The wreck room is just a soundproofed room full of junk where people can wreck the shit out of everything. We even have a quirk license for that room, so it really is just a place to blow off steam. Or nitroglycerin sweat."

"But I'm not allowed to use it until I've been here more than once?" No one had bothered to mention that blowing shit up in a shrink's office was an option. He definitely would have heard about it if they had. "What's the catch? I actually have to talk to you about stuff?"

"I mean, they'd probably prefer that, but I have to make sure that there's stuff in the room to wreck and make sure that no one else has booked the room. Other than that, I just specify that your session will be in the wreck room—I have to be there too, by the way—and everything's fine."

"That's not a catch," Katsuki accused. Things didn't happen like this. He was here because he wasn't good enough for Aizawa. Because he had failed at something he had been trying to achieve his whole life, and now that future he dreamed of was hanging in the balance.

This isn't a punishment, as much as it might feel like it. His teacher's words haunted him. Katsuki wasn't sure how it was supposed to feel any different from a punishment, how him being here meant anything less than he is not good enough for anyone at UA to want anything to do with him. It was frustrating walking out of school that day with that note, listening to his parents debate about where to take him and how soon, and why his teacher had singled him out for this over all of his classmates. The note had been horribly vague, and he wasn't about to tell them about everything that happened in middle school. He still wasn't sure why Deku—why Midoriya hadn't brought up any of that shit to anyone. He hadn't even told Aizawa in so many words, but everything since that meeting had gotten so much harder and Katsuki knew that things that seemed simple were rarely that easy to achieve.

"Maybe it doesn't seem like a catch, and maybe it isn't," the shrink said. "But you've told me that you don't want to be here. It's obvious you don't want to talk about why you've been referred here. I would even venture to guess that you don't think there's a problem with you." She held up a hand before he could protest. "I'm not saying there is, but when there's more than one person who thinks that there is a problem, maybe it's time to take a step back and look at things with a bit of a cooler head. And if that means we need to start having these sessions in the wreck room, that's something I'm willing to do. If it means that you spend the entire hour yelling at me about something or someone, that's an option. If you want to sit and brood in silence, that's also an option." She sighed, flicking the fidget spinner a couple of times until it was nothing but a blur of color between her fingers. "My point is that these sessions are about you and what you think you need. I'm not here to cater to your every desire, but I can be a sounding board while you figure your shit out. That's what a psychologist is when you leave all the buzzwords and technical terms at the door. I'm a convenient mirror for telling you what things look like from a more neutral perspective."

"Would you lie to me?" Katsuki pressed. "About anything?"

"I can think of no reason why I would or should lie to you about anything we might talk about." She shifted, leaning back into her seat. "But how about this? I will tell you if there is something I can't or don't want to tell you. Is that okay?"

He focused on the fidget cube in his hands for a bit, mulling over that response. "Would you tell me why?"

"I could do that, yeah."

"What about other people? Would you lie to other people?"

The shrink was quiet long enough for him to look up at her. And when he did, she was staring at him. "Do you mean about what we talk about in our sessions?" At his nod, she continued, "One of the things I make sure the parents of any of my patients know is that I will maintain my confidentiality agreements. What we talk about in our sessions is only their business if you tell them about it. The only exception to that agreement is if I have reason to believe you are an imminent threat to yourself or others. In that instance, I am obligated to involve your parents or guardians and either the police or the hospital. If I feel the need to do this, I will let you know that I'm involving other people, but you won't be able to stop me from involving them."

She had stopped the fidget spinner to say all that. Had gone so far as to set it down on the table as she talked in a tone far more serious than he'd heard her use since the beginning. Why the fuck did that make him feel just the tiniest bit better about all this shit? "Why?"

"What do you mean? Why do I need to involve them or why would your opinion fail to stop me in that instance?"

"No." He clacked the infinity cube a couple of times to calm down enough to say what he was trying to ask. "Why the hell would you go to that kind of trouble to keep stuff from my parents?"

"Because I'm not here for your parents, Katsuki." He wrinkled his nose at her use of his proper name but didn't comment. "I'm here for you. My job is to provide you with a safe enough space for you to focus on yourself and what you need."

He didn't want to believe her. He'd had so many people say they were on his side before, but they never did anything about it. They were always after what he could give them, how he could be useful to them. There were a lot of people in middle school who only acted like they liked him because all of the teachers agreed that he was the one person most likely to be a hero in the future. They wanted him to be grateful to them, to be able to brag about him after he became a hero.

But she wasn't after something from him. She could be lying about it, but she said she wouldn't lie to him. He didn't want to believe her, but there was a tiny part of him that was begrudgingly trusting of her.

Maybe another couple of sessions would be okay. If she did lie to him, however, he was out. He wasn't going to stick around for that shit, not when there were other places he could probably go.

"Fine," he muttered, clacking the cube a couple more times without looking at it. "I suppose spending an hour here isn't the worst way to spend my time."

The shrink grinned at him. "I'll take that as a compliment! But if you don't want to spend another hour playing with fidget toys, I do recommend bringing something to work on. Addicting as they are, they can get boring after a while."

Her words had less of an effect as she picked her fidget spinner back up and set it in motion again. But mentioning the time made him realize that the mostly bare walls didn't have a clock on them. "How would you know when an hour is up?"

"I have an alarm on my phone that I started the moment we stepped into the room. It hasn't gone off yet if that's what you're asking."

"How long until it does?"

She slipped the phone out of her pocket and unlocked it before turning it towards him. The timer was counting down, and there were only 12 minutes left on it.

"What the fuck?" He hadn't realized he'd been there for more than a half hour. They hadn't done anything but talk a bit and mess around with a couple of toys. She hadn't even bothered to ask why he was there, not that he would have told her.

"Yeah," the shrink laughed. "Time just disappears when you get sucked into some form of mindless entertainment." She lifted the fidget spinner just a bit before gesturing at the infinity cube he was still holding. "But it can be relaxing, right?"

He fixed her with a glare. "It's boring."

"It can be boring, yes. But it also splits your attention onto something that isn't emotionally charged, so it's easier to keep from getting overwhelmed. It won't always work, but sometimes doing something repetitive and simple is enough to make your mind slow down enough to actually work through what's bothering you." She sat up again. "I mean, since you started messing around with that cube, you haven't cursed at me much."

A really petty part of Katsuki wanted to start shouting and cursing just to prove a point, but he wasn't sure why he had stopped in the first place. He always cursed like that, and few people cared what he said because they didn't tell him to stop. Not even his mom told him to stop. The only thing she had a problem with was when he called her an old hag and annoying her was exactly why he did it in the first place. "Shut the fuck up."

"It was just an observation."

He didn't believe that for a second. That was probably the sort of thing any other shrink would have written down in their notebook and not told him about. At least she wasn't asking him why it was that he hadn't cursed. He didn't know how to answer that himself, and he didn't want to hear what her thoughts were on the matter.

"Do you want to keep the cube?" she asked. "I mean, of everything in the box you seemed to like it the best, and I buy these things in bulk, so I can afford to lose a few along the way."

There was going to be a catch to that. He just knew it. "And in exchange I have to actually talk to you next time?"

She frowned. "No. Remember, that's not how these sessions work. This hour is your time and we're working on your schedule. Your parents are the ones paying the bills, so how long you'll be with me depends a bit on them. But the only thing I would owe them in that respect is whether I think you still need the safe space here, and you'll be present for all of those to hear what I say and any reasons I have for that suggestion. At the end of it all, it is ultimately a suggestion I'm providing. My professional opinion."

Katsuki scoffed. "Not much professional about you from what I've seen."

The shrink shrugged. "Yeah, well I don't think you'd respond well to the stereotypical psychologist and their couch scenario." She jolted suddenly and pulled out her phone. "And that looks like it's the hour done. Is there anything you need or want from me during our next session?"

He actually stopped and thought about it, which was when he realized that he was thinking of coming back. The desire to kick the shit out of something or someone had never been stronger, but his own ass was on the list this time. "Could I maybe see that wreck room you were talking about?"

"I'll do what I can. And if I can't book time for you to actually use the room, I can probably take a few minutes to show you around and explain the ground rules."

"Fine." Katsuki wasn't sure what he expected the wreck room to look like. Probably not like the training grounds at UA, not unless the shrink's office had someone like Cementoss to constantly rebuild things, but that was the only thing he could picture. He stood up, weighing the cube in his hand. "I'm taking this with me."

He stalked out of the room, the shrink following behind him as a useless escort back to the waiting room. Slipping the cube into his pocket before he opened the door, he heaved a sigh and braced himself for the inevitable onslaught of questions from his mother. Which he summarily tuned out for the entire ride home.

It wasn't until he was back home in his room that Katsuki realized his school and class would have been in his records since they were referred to that office by the hobo teacher. Despite the fact that the shrink had definitely read his folder, she didn't say a single word about the USJ incident, despite it being the biggest bit of news since All Might arrived in Musutafu.

He'd wait and see how long it took her to bring it up, but for now he would give her the tiniest bit of respect for not asking about the one thing literally everyone was talking about right now. He clacked the cube a couple of times before setting it down on his desk and starting on his homework. Like hell was he going to give Aizawa another reason to try and kick him out of the class.

Chapter Text

Returning to UA after the attack on the USJ and the subsequent rapid overhaul in security was painful. Izuku knew that they had worked miracles to be able to bring the students back the following Monday, and he knew that Principal Nezu probably wouldn't have allowed such a thing if he weren’t certain that they would be able to manage whatever came next. But he wasn’t going to be able to forget what had happened anytime soon, and being back on campus would be a bit of an adjustment after everything. The extended weekend had been spent healing, looking up possible therapists with his mother, and talking with the other members of the class in the group chat.

The group chat, because it was frequented by such chaotic minds as Kaminari and Ashido, was inundated with memes. Kaminari especially was a connoisseur of pre-quirk and early-quirk era memes. Any links he sent to the chat were immediately suspect, though Sero was the one who had to explain the significance of the Rick Astley song to Iida, who had clicked on it because Kaminari managed to hide it under a bullshit facade about study aids. It was slightly less of a joke when Iida decided he liked the song.

Bakugou wasn't particularly active in the chat. He forgot to turn his account to invisible, so everyone who bothered to check the group list could tell that he was lurking, but he rarely added anything to the conversation. The silence was familiar, but slightly nerve-wracking, especially as he hadn't complained about the near constant swarm of notifications from the app about the chat. Izuku couldn't shake the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The biggest topic of conversation in the chat was the fact that an email had arrived in their inboxes saying that they would all need to attend at least once session with Hound Dog or a similarly qualified mental health professional before they were allowed to take part in internships following the Sports Festival. It was also where they learned that the school was moving ahead with the Sports Festival in spite of the recent security breech. There were assurances that the school would be better defended when the event arrived, and not just because most of the country's top heroes were in attendance to submit internship invitations. While they were unwilling to go into detail about the new precautions they were putting in place, they also intended to assign several more heroes to actively patrol the grounds during the Sports Festival itself, as well as a few added to the staff on a more permanent basis to serve as teaching assistants and added security.

Honestly, it seemed like more of his fellow students were concerned about the mandatory therapy than the Sports Festival. Izuku himself was a bit concerned about it, especially since he and his mom had made the decision for him to see someone who wasn't at UA for the sake of maintaining the illusion of his quirk. It was also going to be more of a long-term commitment for him, so it was better to find the therapist he worked well with now than try to deal with the various struggles he was facing under the stress of possibly sharing his secret with multiple people.

At the same time, he had known growing up that therapy would be part of his life. He had imagined it further in the future, after he had already managed his dream of becoming a hero and had been involved in several things that had messed with his mind. It was only at that point he could imagine opening up about what it was like to grow up without a quirk. This was too soon, too uncontrolled, too unexpected for him to be comfortable with it. The decision to make the capture scarf his quirk on paper was a little hasty, but he had imagined it as part of his future from the moment he found it, so it wasn't a step too far beyond what he'd already been planning.

He didn't have a contingency plan for this. He didn't know what to do if this went wrong. Of all of the plans he had made in the ten months since he registered the scarf as his quirk, none of them had covered what to do about talking about it in therapy. He had waited until the literal last second before telling his mother about it; he wasn't sure how he was supposed to even talk about something like that with a complete stranger. Therapy, from what he'd read online, was supposed to be a safe place, but Izuku couldn't remember a single day he'd felt safe since a quirk specialist loomed over him and told him to give up on all of his big dreams.

Paradoxically, he took some measure of security in the lack of safety in his life. He had existed on a low-level alertness for more than ten years now, long enough that he couldn't remember what it was like before he was diagnosed because all of the memories from before and after became jumbled over time. He knew that Kacchan was a bittersweet memory of a friend he used to have and Bakugou had taken his place at some point, but even knowing the exact date Bakugou had been told he was quirkless didn't help with finding that divide.

There were times he remembered feeling hurt that the others wouldn't let him play as anything other than the helpless civilian hostage, and he knew that some of these days were before it was confirmed that he would never get a quirk. He was starting to wonder if the other kids had just known there was something wrong with him when they looked at him. He wondered if there was something written on his face in something only someone with a quirk would see. Except, no, Bakugou seemed to believe that he had a quirk now, just like everyone else at Aldera. At the very least, he hadn't accused Izuku of being quirkless since then. He didn't think it amounted to the same thing exactly, but it was enough for him. Bakugou's silence on the matter meant Izuku was actually capable of making friends this time.

Was that something he had to mention to the therapist? Even knowing that it wasn't exactly his fault that no one wanted to be around the quirkless kid, he still felt ashamed of the emptiness in his life, of how pathetic his ability to socialize looked next to other people. He'd been lucky that he shared the drive and desire to become a hero with Uraraka and Iida, otherwise he wouldn't know how to talk to either of them. Even so, most of the conversations he'd had with them were about heroes or school, usually both. Surely there were other things friends were supposed to talk about, right?

Izuku paused at the door of the classroom and hesitated. He hadn't been entirely aware of his surroundings while he'd been walking, and his feet had still led him where he needed to go. Through the narrow window built into the door, he could see Iida already in his seat, as well as several others mingling around. Ashido, Kirishima, and Denki were all huddled around Kirishima's desk, and Sero had turned in his chair to face them as well. Bakugou was in his seat and the group was occasionally turning to include him in the conversation, but it didn't seem to be working very well. The group seemed reasonably persistent, and not for the usual reasons since none of them looked at all afraid of what Bakugou might do to them, so Izuku figured that only time would tell which would break first, the group's resolve to befriend Bakugou or Bakugou's determination to be a loner.

Hagakure was leaning against Ojiro's desk, and he was looking up at where her face would approximately be. He couldn't hear any of the conversations through the door, but the way her shoulders seemed unnaturally tense and Ojiro was acting a bit like he was trying to approach a feral cat made Izuku think that she wasn't doing well.

Deciding that he should probably stop lurking before someone else arrived, Izuku slipped into the room and around to his seat, using all of the methods he had learned at Aldera to go unnoticed as he went. It helped that most people were distracted and Uraraka, whose desk he needed to pass on the way to his seat around the back of the classroom, wasn't there yet. There would be plenty of time to talk at lunch, but he really didn't want to draw attention to himself after everything. Even though his classmates had asked every version of 'are you okay' in the group chat, he didn't doubt several of them would want to verify that fact in person.

He had never been more glad that his plainness and learned quietness meant that people overlooked him. It would be useful now and in the future once he became an underground hero. Uraraka arrived not long after he had, and she looked like she wanted nothing more than to come and check him over for herself, but there wasn't enough time before class started. Aizawa appeared almost as soon as she sat down in her seat, not a second wasted from the moment homeroom was supposed to start.

It was the first time Izuku had gotten to see Aizawa since the USJ—the first time any of them had seen him really—and it was clear that he was still recovering a bit. He hadn't been terribly wounded, but the shot Shigaraki had managed to get in before he escaped was considerable. Izuku remembered watching the blood soak into the capture scarf. It was also the first time Izuku had seen him use the scarf as anything more than a weapon, which was more shocking than it should have been. It wasn't as though he didn't know how versatile the capture scarf was. He had trained with his own for a long time, and Aizawa-sensei had been using his own for much, much longer. Most of the uses he had derived from the scarf were based entirely on things he had heard or seen Eraserhead do.

Aizawa's capture scarf had eaten the blood. Or Aizawa had washed it, but Izuku was pretty sure the scarf would have gotten to the ready supply of organic chemicals it could break down before the man had a chance to wash it considering how quickly his own scarf had eaten the hospital cart and his hero costume.

"Welcome back," Aizawa-sensei said, addressing the class. "You should have all received an email detailing how things are going to go in the immediate future. For those of you who failed to check or read your school emails, the Sports Festival is going to proceed as planned. If you want to know the reasons for it, read the email." He sighed. "On a related note, you and your parents have also been informed that you are expected to meet with either Hound Dog or a licensed mental health professional following the events at the USJ last Thursday before any of you will be allowed to participate in internships following the Sports Festival. This is standard procedure for villain encounters and would have come up following your internships and work-study assignments next term if not for the attack. Please take it seriously as your mental health is not something you should mess around with as a hero. There will be plenty of people in the world willing to do that for you without sabotaging yourself on accident or on purpose. As there is more than a month and a half between now and the Sports Festival, you should have plenty of time to attend a session or two as needed without it affecting your training."

A quiet murmuring filled the room. Most everyone had known about that stipulation because of how much it had been talked about in the chat, but Izuku couldn't recall whether the email had said they might be barred from internships if they didn't attend the mandatory therapy or if that was new information. It might have been a logical ruse like Aizawa had used during the Quirk Apprehension tests, but Izuku doubted it. He just didn't think therapy was something their teacher would lie about, especially since he's made the point of discussing the possibility of Izuku attending sessions long-term with his mother. He wasn't sure why Aizawa-sensei was adamant about therapy, but there was probably a reason for it, one that none of them should bother to question.

"One of the things you need to be aware of after everything that's happened is that more people will have their eyes on you. This can be both good and bad. The USJ attack and the subsequent media coverage has effectively placed a target on your backs, and some of your fellow classmates will be aiming for it in the Sports Festival. This is partly because they are trying to get some of the recognition you have received having lived through an attack while barely trained, and partly because they resent the spotlight you've been given for something they see as requiring no effort on your end. As they weren't there, they don't recognize that survival in the face of the odds against you is more effort than has been required of any of them yet. This unfortunately means that you will probably be challenged in the halls several times between now and the Sports Festival, and people will be paying attention to your reactions. I can't tell you how to react to that, just warn you that your response will be judged by everyone who hears about it. Try to keep that in mind when you receive your fourth declaration of war on the way to lunch."

Izuku wished he could say he was surprised, but there was part of him that knew he'd never leave some things behind. Being part of an ostracized group was just one of those things that would never leave him, and not just because he would always be quirkless. No, there was more to it than that. No matter what he did, Izuku always felt this deep sense of otherness around people, the knowledge that he didn't exactly slot into place neatly with them. He'd seen tight-knit friendships and hero groups, people who seemed able to read each other’s minds, who meshed well with one another, and even now he couldn't imagine himself being in that position. Uraraka and Iida were his friends, but there was still something that separated him from them. They had bonded over past bullying and heroic ideals, but he still couldn't be sure that he could fully trust them. They had only known him with a quirk. He didn't want to test what it would be like if they found out he'd been lying the whole time.

"The last thing I want to discuss in the wake of this attack is whether or not any of you want to continue in the hero course." Aizawa, who had never stopped speaking in a serious tone, sounded abruptly more grim now. "Normally, your first encounter with a villain would have happened during internships at the earliest, after you'd been better trained and prepared for the things you're meant to face. However, as this incident so clearly illustrated, villains don't fight fair. They don't wait for you to be prepared or trained for whatever you're supposed to do. Despite how it's depicted for the cameras, the truth of the matter is hardly glamorous, even for spotlight heroes. For every fight that gets recorded, there's at least another three that don't. This is either because they are too dangerous for civilians to be close enough to record, or because the story gets buried for the well-being of the general public. You may have noticed that the coverage on the USJ attack is remarkably slim. This isn't because the footage doesn't exist but because that is one such fight that's better to avoid telling the general public about as much as possible."

His gaze swept across the room, landing on each of them in turn. "If this is something you don't think you'll be able to handle moving forward, you are perfectly welcome to transfer out of the Hero Course. I will personally ensure that you are placed somewhere more comfortable, whether that's in another program here at UA or at another school. Your safety and security are one of my top priorities both as your teacher and as a pro-hero. If that's something you want to discuss, feel free to talk to me after class." He paused. "And before I forget, Midoriya, Principal Nezu would like to speak to you and has asked that I excuse you from homeroom to go meet with him."

Izuku felt the eyes of the entire room alight on him, the skittering sensation of anxiety welling up in his gut as he tried to think of what he might have done to bring the principal's attention to him after only a week.

This isn't because the footage doesn't exist, Aizawa had said. Meaning they had the local video feed for everything that happened in the USJ. He must have given himself away somehow, must have made it clear to the being with the strongest intelligence quirk on record—so strong it could almost masquerade as a minor foresight quirk—to tell that he was a fraud.

The weight of his classmates' attention was suffocating as he made his way toward the door. It felt like a death march, like he was back in middle school and facing the threat of expulsion again for something he hadn't done. At least this time no one was jeering about it. When he dared to glance back at the faces of his classmates once he reached the door, he saw more confusion and worry than gloating, and a tiny curl of warmth settled in the pit of his stomach. They may not know he's quirkless, but he's not worthless to them yet. They actually care.

Now he just needed to survive this meeting and get back to them.

The walk to Principal Nezu's office was both longer and shorter than Izuku wanted it to be. He had so much time to try and figure out what he had done wrong that he was ending up here in the second week of school, but it wasn't nearly long enough for him to definitively answer it. How exactly would someone measure the precise distance that would induce guilt with no time to come to terms with it? Because someone had managed it.

The main office of UA was strange mostly because it didn't have anyone else in it that he could see. There were strategically place cameras covering the area, almost well-hidden enough that Izuku didn't notice them, but he always tried to make sure he knew whether or not he was being recorded. Once he'd made other people aware of the cameras, they tended to back off in a hurry.

Here, they seemed to serve a bit of a different purpose, because as soon as he noticed the security cameras, the door to Principal Nezu's office swung open.

"Come in, Midoriya-kun," the principal called. "We have much to discuss."

Izuku tried to ignore the sudden flare of panic in his gut as he stepped into the large office. "Good morning," he greeted quietly, hoping that manners would make the whole meeting that much less painful. Principal Nezu didn't sound upset with him, but that didn't mean anything. Gyuudai-sensei had never sounded angry when he'd sent Izuku to the office, but the dark enthusiasm was a warning all its own.

"Please do sit down," Nezu said. "I don't bite, I promise. Would you like some tea?"

"No, thank you." The way his stomach was churning, Izuku didn't think he could ingest anything without it and his breakfast coming right back up. He sat down in one of the plush chairs in front of Principal Nezu's desk and tried not to think about how it felt like the chair was swallowing him.

His scarf suddenly tightened around his chest, and he felt a tiny burst of composure settle over him. Whatever happened here, he would deal with it. He and his mother would be able to manage it.

"To be completely transparent, I've been looking forward to meeting you since the Entrance exams. It's not often prospective students turn around and face the zero-pointer, but they normally have more destructive quirks suited to stopping or slowing it." Nezu offered him something that was probably supposed to be a smile. "Bakugou Katsuki was one such student, as I'm sure you guessed, and I'm sure you noticed that his score was absent any rescue points. Any of his fellow examinees he saved with his actions were clearly incidental and would have been negated by the number of times he put them in danger with his actions. You, however, turned to face the zero-pointer specifically to help Uraraka Ochako, who had become trapped by debris. Any student who stops to help another in the exams is noticed, of course, but few do so at the risk of their own place in the Hero Course. You didn't even stop to think about it."

There was a point to this, Izuku was certain. He had used the capture scarf heavily in the exam, more than he had used it any other time except at the USJ, and Nezu was one of the smartest beings in the world. But if he knew then that Izuku was a fraud, why wouldn't he just reveal him? Why let him into the Hero Course in the first place? Thinking back to what his whole mindset was during the exams, he nodded. "There wasn't really time to think. My feet just moved."

"An admirable quality in a hero student, especially since it gives us the time to refine and hone it in a controlled environment." It felt like a reproach coated in sugar, and Izuku barely kept himself from looking around to check and make sure the principal was talking to him and not someone else in the room. "Running into danger is better done with a bit of a plan, but that instinct, that bone-deep desire to help, isn't something we can teach students. What stood out to me was that the moment you started running, you didn't have a plan, but you had formulated several by the time you reached Uraraka-kun." Nezu paused and sipped his tea before adding, "Unless I miss my guess, attacking the zero-pointer directly was the last and most desperate of your plans when the others wouldn't work."

Izuku nodded faintly, uncomfortably seen despite the fact that his fake quirk hadn't yet come up. As much as he didn't want to tempt fate, he couldn't understand why that hadn't been mentioned yet.

As if he could read Izuku's mind, Nezu added, "I must say it's refreshing to see someone who has taken the time to train their mind as well as their quirk. And the fact that you've requested some basic support classes in addition to your hero training seems like you want to continue that trend. I have a copy of your new schedule here."

Izuku reached for the paperwork Principal Nezu had slid across his desk, glancing through it to cover the shock. '...as well as their quirk.' The phrase implied that Nezu believed the lie. He had somehow fooled the smartest known being in the world into thinking the capture scarf was a quirk.

The new schedule Nezu had given him replaced his regular math class with an advanced physics class, and there was an open period on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday where he was free to use the fabrication labs under the supervision of Powerloader or a senior Support Course student. There was also a list of possible or recommended online class blocks he could work his way through during study hall, and the first one that caught his attention was rather blatantly referred to as Introduction to Hacking and Coding. Izuku wasn't sure why hacking was listed first in the course title, but he'd probably find out when he went through the lessons.

The more he looked through the new schedule, the more excited he got. For the first time in his educational career, Izuku forgot that he was sitting in a principal's office momentarily. He forgot that he should be worried about his future in the Hero Course and at UA in general because someone had gone to the trouble of creating a special schedule for him based on his interests and the focus he wanted to pursue. For the first time, he didn't have to defend his dreams to people, and the moment felt that much more special for it. It was only a small packet of papers, but it was evidence that life was just a little bit better than it had been before.

The niggling voice in the back of his head reminded him that this only happened because they all thought he had a quirk, but Izuku didn't care. It was the first time he held proof that the things he asked for were achievable.

"I must confess there was another reason I wanted to meet you, Midoriya-kun," Nezu admitted, cutting into Izuku's thoughts. "Your insights into the attack on the USJ were quite useful. We will keep them in mind moving forward, and I wanted to apologize that a lack of security on our part placed you in harm's way, but I cannot help but think that your observations and perspective on the villains and the situation will be invaluable. You were, of course, the only one who truly had any significant contact with Shigaraki, Noumu, and Kurogiri. Without your recollections and statement, we would be far worse off than we are now."

There was a pause and Izuku ducked his head in thanks, still unsure how he was supposed to react to such positive things directed at him. Not many teachers had bothered to notice he was there, and those that had used his presence to turn his classmates more firmly against him. After he presented a 'quirk', they still largely ignored him, though he thought it was because they were trying to avoid drawing his attention to them. If he were a more vindictive person, he could have sued the school for discrimination. It wasn't like the security footage simply disappeared into the void. There was more than enough evidence of how poorly they had treated him before that it would have spelled the end of several careers among the faculty and staff.

It was more bewildering to receive such compliments than it was to figure out how the capture scarf worked.

"As I said before, UA is a place where we the teachers attempt to hone students' skills. You quite clearly have a prodigious number to address, and that is a wonderful thing. You have shown a dedication to the furthering of your education, and I just wanted to make you aware of some of your options moving forward." The principal took another sip of his tea before continuing. "You will eventually finish all of the online classes you are interested in. Or perhaps you’ll find that you want to work on some of your observation skills. When or if that happens, I would like you to consider spending one study period a week with me developing your talent for observation and on-the-spot planning." Nezu chuckled. "I have been told that much more exposure to me than that can be detrimental to world security, but I haven't taken over the world yet."

"You want me to be your student?" Izuku asked, trying not to choke on the words because he had to be misunderstanding something here.

"In essence, yes. Not right away because it's the beginning of the year, you need time to prepare for the Sports Festival in a few weeks, and you will also need time to acclimate to your new class schedule. But this is not an offer I am going to take back."

Izuku couldn't help but wonder if that assertion would change if Nezu knew he didn't actually have a quirk. Every opportunity he had been given was built on this lie, and everything would fall apart if that came out. "Thank you," he whispered. "I think I'd like that."

"Before you go, Midoriya, I'm curious." Izuku felt something in his gut freeze up as he looked back up from his new schedule. "Why did you come to the conclusions you did about Shigaraki and the others? What made you think there was someone else behind the scenes?"

"He said Noumu was made. Not born, not trained, made. He didn't seem like the sort of person who could do that, and Kurogiri always deferred to him, so he might or might not know how. It just made sense that there was someone else involved, someone we weren't seeing. As much as Shigaraki made it seem like he was in charge he didn't..." Izuku paused, looking for a kinder way of phrasing things. "He didn't seem like he was entirely stable. With all the video game terms he kept using, it's like he thought he was the main character and only real person acting in a game. And maybe that's just how he interacts with the world, but it gives the impression that he's partially or completely disconnected from reality."

A thought occurred to him. "Maybe it's because he can't really touch things? He has a five-point disintegration quirk of some kind, which means he always has to be careful of how he touches everything around him. If he isn't, it goes away, like it was never real in the first place." Looking back down at his schedule again, Izuku could feel his nose scrunching up. "That's sort of messed up when you think about it. If I'm right, there's someone manipulating him, making all of that worse, because becoming a villain and trying to kill All Might wouldn't be the first thing people think of to do if reality doesn't feel real. Anyone who honestly wanted to help would find a way to ground him, wouldn't they?"

"One would hope so," Nezu said, "but there are many unscrupulous people in the world willing to take advantage of vulnerable minds. What's worse is when they decide to masquerade as people on the side of the angels."

That scared Izuku, the thought that people who were supposed to be safe weren't. He knew it happened, often even when he was around and people knew he was quirkless, but he got the impression that Nezu was talking about people who would hurt anyone if given half a chance, simply for the power it would give them. He remembered the adage about power and corruption. He had written it over and over in the margins of Bakugou's pages in Volume 6 of his Hero Analysis journals, back when he was first starting to resent the pain Kacchan was putting him through. He was still Kacchan then, and Izuku had still considered him a friend, even if he was being a bad one. But Bakugou was really just a very small part of a very big world, and there was no way he was as bad as the people Nezu was thinking of.

"Well," Nezu said after a moment, clapping his paws together. "I should let you go back to class. Don't worry about your new schedule for today. It would be rude to give you less than two hours after you received it before you were thrown into the first session of your new class. Everything will be arranged for you to begin tomorrow. Is that acceptable?" Izuku nodded. "Excellent. Go ahead and go back to class. It was lovely to meet you, Midoriya-kun."

"It was nice to meet you too, Nezu-sensei." Izuku bowed and left the room, his mind reminding him that this was the easiest he had ever left a principal's office before. He wasn't suffering under the threat of expulsion, nor had he walked away with enough detentions to carry through to the end of the semester.

He was tentatively looking forward to those analysis lessons Nezu promised. Izuku didn't dare think of his notebooks as good. He had been writing them since childhood, so as much as his observations had developed and become more serious, he could never escape the feeling that he was somehow doing something childish and silly. But with someone as intelligent as Nezu to teach him, he was sure that everything he'd been working on by himself would be that much better after he received some instruction.

Of course, he would need to finish all of those online courses first. And that coding class was first on his list.