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When the first elevator of the morning goes down the 1-A dorm, no one is around to see it.
That normally doesn’t happen. Normally, a green-haired boy and a red-haired one might be up for an early morning jog. It’s also not uncommon to see a raven groggily making himself breakfast or a martial artist doing some stretches before starting the day. The creator might even be brewing tea to give her late riser friends a quick pick-me-up.
But things hadn’t been very normal in the last twenty-four hours. It wasn’t normal to have a villain be able to break into campus and not target their class. It wasn’t normal for all twenty and their English teacher to arrive on the scene only to find out that this “villain” was a child who had lost control of their quirk. It wasn’t normal for someone so inexperienced with their powers to be able to display hidden memories so vividly with just a single touch. And it certainly wasn’t normal to watch your classmate reaching out to this preschooler one second only to see another classmate tell him to kill himself the next.
How does one react? 18 students discovering more about their two friends than they ever wanted to know; how did they react? Some burnt with rage, some froze with horror (one boy did both). There were gasps of shock, screams of outrage, the silence of those who didn’t know what to say at all. It seemed like everyone had exploded except for the most explosive boy around, now as fragile as a dandelion, seeds threatening to blow away with the wind.
Eighteen students were forced to watch the scene over and over, and their freckled classmate remained oblivious, as expected when a little girl was in need of saving. But there were nineteen kids just like him in need of help too, yet the only person that could erase this vision from their minds had arrived too late. By the time his eyes stopped their laser-red glare, eighteen future heroes descended upon the two others who, before this point, seemed the closest to that goal. Mouths wide open to ask questions, fists clenched to force the answers out if necessary. But the childhood friends were wrapped up and taken away, and the rest were sent back to their rooms for the remainder of the day.
It was late at night when one boy arrived back at the dorms, and even later when the other one did. The order of their identities was unknown, for their homeroom teacher made it clear the students were not to leave their rooms for any form of confrontation. Unfortunately, as much as they may have wished for it, there was no sugarcoating (or glitter-coating, as one classmate may have preferred) what the class had seen. And knowing this, they had nothing to do but think and figure out what this meant for them.
But for people who saw the exact same vision, it seemed no two students had the same thoughts. One girl hadn’t felt this sick since the twists and turns of her entrance exam. One boy hadn’t felt this vengeful since a dark night in a back alley in Hosu. Doubt clouded another boy’s mind like static. Anger corroded another girl’s heart like acid. A purple-haired boy remembers things he said in a U.A. class before this one, doing whatever it took to get his quirk to work in order to succeed. He wonders if this is the same. An invisible girl remembers bruises she received in old school grounds, too easy to hide from adult eyes. She wonders if this is the same.
Regardless of these differences, the one thing their thoughts had in common was that they were too loud to fall asleep. It seemed like an eternity had passed before they found themselves in the present, the sun beginning to rise on a sleepless morning. The air is thick with tension, and no one has the courage to break it. Some don’t know if they have the strength to. Others are afraid of what else may break if they try. So when they hear the push of a button at five o’clock in the morning, they all know who it is.
But when Bakugou Katsuki takes the first elevator of the morning down the 1-A dorm, no one dares open their door to see it.