Work Text:
Shouta found himself crouching over the toilet of his teacher dorm just as the sun had decided to crest itself over the horizon. He wasn't going to be sick, he knew that he wasn't, but the swirling of nausea in his stomach kept saying otherwise and the cool porcelain of the seat was a blessing to the raging pain he felt in his forehead. Even if he was uncomfortable sitting on the floor with the torchlight of his phone the only thing keeping the room illuminated. He had one leg bent beneath himself and beginning to go staticky with lack of circulation, the other stretched out and crooked around the edge of the toilet so he was in a position where he could actually rest his forehead against the seat.
He wasn't comfortable, but it was probably the best he'd felt all night. Exhaustion was pertinent, but not a second of sleep had taken place.
It had all started as tiredness. Though a day with his eyes drooping and a headache blooming was more than his normal.
Then it had turned into a migraine.
He had migrated away from perching on the edge of his bed. His head between his legs and a bottle of water, still full and sealed, placed on the floor just next to his feet. The blinds had been pulled down to cut out the impending bright light of day because Shouta knew that it would just make everything worse; his phone had been screen down on his bedside table from before midnight since the harsh white glare just made his eyes burn even with the thing on the dimmest setting.
He was still in his nightshirt and pants, woollen socks gifted by Hizashi wrapped around his feet and defending him from the cold of the tiled flooring. Hands tangled loosely in his hair as he kept it pulled away from his face, just in case his stomach did actually try and revolt.
Shouta wasn't a stranger to headaches. There was one that always lingered, and in tandem with perpetual insomnia it was just a given that he would wake up in the morning as the night sky was barely bleeding into the dim light of morning, climb out of bed with bleary eyes and a half awake mind, edge into the kitchen which tended to still be basking in contrasting darkness and try and relieve the humming ache. Finding the kettle in the dark was easy, and making a drink was second nature. Then he'd down a couple painkillers whilst his morning brew was still scalding hot and get on with his day because if a headache could put him out of commission then he'd never get anything done.
Only there were worse days, rare days. Rare days that just seemed to be getting more and more frequent. Shouta hated them, and in a way he dreaded them too. Days, more even, where his mind just thrummed with a perpetual pain. Where the sun amped up the agony and pills didn't seem to want to sway away the onslaught. It faded eventually, the pain always faded and left him with a pile of work to get done due to the time he lost resting in his darkened room with the lights off, and Hizashi lighting up his phone with messages asking where he'd been.
Out of it, most likely, but he never remembered all that much. He just slept.
Debilitating migraines used to be rare. Unpredictable and few and far between.
Or had been, at least. Until the current Class 1-A of hellions had been put under his tutelage and care. Now they just seemed to be all the more frequent.
Crippling things that forced light and flares to dance in his vision, pressure to build up in his head. Shouta could work through those sometimes, if he managed to spend the day curled up in a fully zipped-up sleeping bag and his class kept the volume levels down low.
Sometimes they just got bad.
Sometimes he could barely remember how his day went, a blur of pain and blank vision, a fogged mind that only let up when he came to in his bed with the covers thrown back and for once, a head that was pain free.
The relief of temporarily feeling better after a bunch of lost time and pain didn't feel worth it.
Shouta didn't want to have to start trying to guess when his headache would get worse, all he knew was that this year he'd had more migraines than any other prior to it. Multiple before and after the USJ attack, so he couldn't even put down their increased frequency to the injuries he'd sustained.
Then just after the Sports Festival, when Nedzu had told him that the Wild, Wild Pussycats would be joining him with the training camp, even though that had been a month down the line.
Shouta didn't get why the mouse-creature seemed intent on planning so far ahead, but it is what it is.
He would have to tell Nedzu about this too, he needed to get his classes covered.
He needed…
Shouta turned his head, cracking his eyes open just barely at the light of his phone. It was beside him, and so bright that he didn't even know why he thought that the light had been a good idea. He should have just sat in darkness, let his touch guide him. It wasn't even pure darkness anymore, not with the washed out light of what would be a dreary day. He could see around himself, the sink on the far wall, the shower that was still dripping slowly, the towel that he'd pulled off it's rack so he could sit on it and not on the hard floor.
He reached over and reluctantly flipped it so he could see the screen, before working through squinted eyes as he went through his settings to turn the offending light off.
All that was left was to text Hizashi. Inevitably, that would lead to his friend immediately coming around to his flat and pestering him with worry as if his presence and instance that he should get into bed after changing clothes and drinking that water would make everything better.
Nothing that helped, only time did that.
He needed to… He needed…
Shouta pushed himself up off the floor, his movements slowed just barely. At least he'd kept his phone in his hand, though he could always collect up his towel when he was feeling better.
The pressure just kept on building, the pain kept on climbing.
A quiet groan forced itself out past his lips as he rested a cold hand against his forehead, to at least try and stave off the onslaught. Not that it did much. The walk out the bathroom was far too long, and his feet felt too unsteady. Pins and needles were a distant thought when his motor skills decided to not listen to the commands of his brain. His hands were loose, depth perception making even using the wall as a way to steady his gait a complicated feat. The lights that just kept on blaring due to a single crack in the curtains just served to worsen everything.
Shouta stopped at the entrance of the bathroom, a white knuckled grip on the doorframe and vision swimming, his stomach flipping and almost revolting. He wasn't going to be sick. This was a migraine, this was normal enough. He just needed sleep. He needed to go back to bed and sleep this all off.
He needed…
His vision flickered to black.
Just for a second.
Just barely for a second, not even enough time for his hand to unclasp from where it was situated. He felt his head rock forwards, his knees buckle just barely but he didn't hit the floor. Years of training made sure of that.
Shouta dragged in a heavy breath, and let it flow out shakily. This was fine, this was normal. He could go to the recovery ward at a better time, later that day probably, because God knows Chiyo would lecture him to no end if he showed up at the door of her office over a headache, when it wasn't even past six in the morning.
If he went just before lessons started, he'd just get a lecture then, as well as if he waited until lunch time to drop in. It was a lose lose situation.
Think, he needed to think. To calm down. The sudden cold clamminess of his hands didn't help the situation, the wobbling flow of his flared vision just made him feel even more uneasy. Get some sleep, there was a bottle of water next to his bed.
He needed a drink, the realisation was sudden. His mouth was bone dry, the burn of acid and something else. Something he couldn't place was tainting the back of his throat.
He needed to call-
God, he needed Hizashi. He needed someone else, someone to just be there. He wasn't a social person, far from it, but standing in the doorway of the bathroom and not being able to trust that his next step wasn't going to bring him down to the floor, Shouta needed that support.
He didn't want to be alone. It would take a text, or even a dropped call to get his friend around.
His phone was in his hand. All Shouta had to do was lift it.
Turn it on.
It was in his grip, screen dim and text barely legible. His vision flickered dangerously, and pressure and pain climbed simultaneously.
Flashes of light. A low pulsing buzz in his ear. The pain wouldn't stop growing, and growing.
Shouta grit his teeth around an agonised whine.
His sight blackened.
It was-
It was on the bedside table?
Shouta slowly glanced down with confusion, his brow furrowed as he took in the new placement of his phone. Face up on the wooden tabletop.
Then he looked down at himself. Standing upright, right beside his bed, meters away from where the bathroom door was. It was still hanging open, the light was still off but he didn't remember… Seconds ago he'd been buckled at the door and now- now he was easily standing right next to his bed, covers still as bunched up as they had been when he'd first gotten up. Bottle of water on its side on the floor, unopened and rocking lightly as the liquid sloshed inside.
There wasn't even nausea sitting in his stomach anymore. Sure, the disorientating hum in his mind was still there, still interrupting his thinking with a haze of static and fog, flashing lights still overtaking his vision, but he felt better.
He felt… No, he didn't feel better. There was considerably less pain, but that wasn't better. Confusion was set in like a stone, eyes loosely flicking from where he had been standing, and where he was now. He had been standing at the bathroom, and his mind had blanked, and now he was on the other side of the room.
Shouta hadn't walked there, he couldn't have. He would have dropped, succumbed to the past few hours of sickness and exhaustion and decided to sleep on the shag rug he had laid out on the floor.
He couldn't have… He had lost time.
Shouta felt himself pulled out of his minor building panic by a sudden chill that raked its way down his body. Ghosting over his shoulders like phantom fingers that picked and prodded and vied for attention.
Blurred eyes noted his pyjama shirt discarded in the middle of the floor, a lump of white fabric just left there. His chest was bare, arm hair prickling up with the cold.
Just beside his shirt were his pants, turned inside out.
Shouta spared a look down at himself and that only served to puzzle him further. Black slacks, held up by a leather belt that had never seen the light of day for years. One that was discarded at the top of his dresser since it wasn't as if his hero costume had belt loops.
They were creased properly, clearly ironed. Fitted too. Though his feet were still clearly bare.
Then his vision trailed up slowly to the fabric feel he had in his left hand. The one that had previously been holding the phone. A tie was in his grip, being crushed by a tense fist. Dangingling and swaying. Alternating lines of what seemed to be black and a deep greyish blue.
A single, heavy and dragging blink of his eyes, and he let his arm drop loosely to his side. Though his grip didn't seem to want to abate from the material.
The tie's movement in his periphery also pulled his eyes to a mirror he had propped up against the wall. There hadn't been the time, or even the motivation to get it hung up, but it was still long enough for Shouta to easily see his whole body in it.
The weird choice of clothing. Specifically, the weird choice of clothing that he didn't remember donning. His wardrobe wasn't hanging open, no drawers were left partially closed, but yet during that time where he'd blanked on the world, he'd decided to dress himself.
Weirder things had happened.
The sheer paleness of his skin was a shock though, since even though he felt warm he could see that his cheeks weren't flushed. A hand to the forehead confirmed a heightened temperature but visibly Shouta just seemed washed out. The bags that were always present under his eyes were smeared into what looked closer to bruising than markers of his perpetual insomnia, dark and purple, they just made him look so much worse than he actually felt.
It didn't help that his vision kept swimming.
It even looked like his hair was blurring. Loose and cascading down his shoulders, growing fuzzier and fuzzier as he reached the ends.
His hair was already dark, already so close to black, but it just seemed darker.
It looked like it was shifting, waving and puthering into the air around his head.
"I'm going to faint." Shouta mumbled quietly to himself, though the words still rang out through the empty room. It was a statement. He could barely focus, and the increasing light of the rising sun permitting the gaps in the blinds just made things worse.
He was going to faint, he needed to sit down. His hair was still flowing, swimming under his gaze.
Shouta raised a shaky hand and carved his fingers through the strands, lifting the draped hairs away from his forehead, the movement catching on the odd knot that he really should brush out before he went back to sleep again.
Then further down his hair, just past his ears, the top of his neck. Until his hand fell through the strands as if they were no longer there. His gaze caught the action in the mirror, fingers dropping through his hair even though there was clearly more left, half a foot at least.
Taking in what he was really seeing though, was another thing.
Shouta was moving his hand slowly through the strands, passing it seamlessly through the black space that was his hair, but the hair wasn't acting like it. It looked almost like a blackened cloud, intangible, but moving.
Flowing.
Almost acting like smoke.
Until with a waft of his hand, and his hair did just that. It rippled. Parts of it broke off even, floated through the air by a few inches before it dispersed. Like smoke.
Like mist.
Shouta felt the breath catch in his throat, but a blazing white light overtook everything. His body felt distant, his limbs felt far too weak, far too loose. Just absent, detached. Until he barely felt like he was anchored in his body anymore.
He tried to at least look around. If he could get his phone then he could call someone, get anyone. Only, his bedside table wasn't beside his bed anymore. And his bed wasn't there either. His vision was blurred, shapes foreign and barely distinguishable but Shouta could feel the old memories surfacing.
The fear that each second that passed provided him with. Glancing around from a laid down position, pure white walls surrounding him. Laying on something, a flat surface.
Touch told him that it was cold, that it was a metal table and not much else. He wasn't conscious enough to think properly, but he understood the gravity of the situation. No, he had understood. This wasn't happening now, no, he was still in his room. Still probably staring at the mirror, but wholly absent.
A flashback. A flashback to a memory he didn't even remember experiencing, not really.
Something that had taken place so long ago.
When he was younger, a lot younger. Training to be a hero, the future mapped out in front of him. Now, everything was grinding to a stop. Under the burning and blazing light of what he remembered now had been surgical lighting.
He remembered the prick of needles, the drag of scalpels through skin. The immobility that the drugs provided, the drive to fight back just dying with each day that passed by. He could almost see the fuzzy form of a man circling the operating table like a vulture. A mustache that clearly stood out on his face. Goggles, metal rimmed and almost that bit too large.
These memories, Shouta didn't recognise them, but they were his own.
He had been so much younger, trying to take in the experience of working under a pro hero in his Hero Work Studies.
The building falling, and his friend. Shirakumo hadn't even hesitated, he'd just ran in.
Shouta remembered the body, the bloodied cloth that had been used to cover him, but his visage was still just visible in the folds of material as it gradually became more and more soaked in crimson blood.
The smell had hit him, the sour tang of copper, the bite of dust in his eyes as it puthered and clouded around the building rescue effort. All he had been able to do was stare, eyes wide and body refusing to move as he took in the body of a friend that he'd never see move again. It should have been him, he should have ran in, he should have done more.
Shouta should be the one under the tarp.
All he'd been able to do was reach, too little too late, to the capture weapon around his neck. He had shouted for his friend, but the building had still fallen. The children under the cloud barrier had been fine but… The concrete had struck Shirakumo in the head. His eyes had blanked so quickly and his body had dropped even faster. He was dead before he'd hit the floor, and Shouta remembered the strangled sound that had escaped his throat.
No, no, he had screamed. His mouth had understood what had happened before his mind had caught up. It was just a villain, this wasn't meant to have happened.
A new scream pierced Shouta's ears, and even though it was a ringing echo from the past, it still snapped him back to reality. He was still staring in the mirror, eyes wide and just a little dulled over, reddened from dry-eye and the sheer emotion that was pooling and swirling dangerously in his chest.
"What-," He forced out around a large lump in his throat, dropping the tie to the ground as his hands came up to his head to tangle into his hair. Hair that was wispy, parts of it still falling apart and dissolving under his touch, only to reform and reappear all over again.
Like a cloud, or like a cloying mist.
Resounding panic was the next thing that tried to surface, but Shouta made sure to stomp that down before his laboured breathing could possibly get any worse. His mind was moving a mile a minute, sifting through the new memories that had just surfaced.
The operating table, the pain and the sedative fogging his mind.
After Shirakumo had passed.
That week, the week where he didn't remember anything. One that he'd put down to depression and the disassociation at the loss of someone close to him.
Hos… pital.
Shouta took a small stumbled step back, his eyes roving around his room in an instant. The walls weren't white, they were the grey that was his teacher dorm at UA. He was at UA and nowhere else, not in a surgical suite, not in the sterile rooms of a hospital with so many secrets hidden under the surface.
He was in his room, he wasn't feeling sick anymore but the pounding rage of the migraine was steadily increasing. Shouta let his eyes settle on his phone on the table, and started to make his way over to it. He wasn't going to look in the mirror, he wasn't going to get distracted, nor let the pressure in his head sway him off course.
He could send an emergency alert to Hizashi, to anyone really. They'd send someone, because this was so much more than a sickness. It was memories, repressed and tied down. There was something wrong, something internal and there was a fearful second when he was sure about what was going on.
The timeline, the way everything slotted together. All his lost time that he'd experienced over the years, and how it had only increased in recent times. That before every single instance, it had begun with a migraine. Then dizziness, unfounded sickness. The memories always surfaced, they always came back with an unending fervour. Horrible images that he couldn't understand how he'd forgotten them.
Or he could, he could understand. Shouta just didn't want to think about it.
He needed his phone.
He reached a hand down to the device, the blank screen staring up at him, as if taunting that there was a whole extra step to alerting someone. He had to turn it on, press the power button three times. Emergency broadcast.
The very tips of his fingers fizzled into a black haze as they brushed against the phone, and Shouta could only watch with wide eyes as a black void grew beneath it. Crackling and flowing as if the bedside table wasn't even there. The edges of it tinged with an all too identifiable purple and flicking like flames in an unseen wind.
It closed just as fast, but not before his phone had fallen into the gap in space and disappeared with it. Shouta dragged his hand back as if he'd been burned, lifting the limb to his face as he took into account the fizzed edges of his fingers, the way they danced precariously between the tone of his skin and the darkened void that was seemingly gradually encroaching on his body, from his hair to his hands. The warp gate, that's what it had been, flickering to life and stealing away the closest method he had to alerting someone of the situation.
Noise was the next best bet, make noise. Throw things around, knock over chairs and items, stamp on the floor. Anything to get someone's attention and make them come and investigate.
Shouta turned around to the direction of the door, to the hallway which led down to the small kitchen. There was a dining table in there, chairs he could break. Anything, anything…
His vision blackened.
Then flickered back to life just as fast.
He had moved again, lost time if the slightly increased light in the room was any indication. Standing in front of the mirror, though his attention was focused down at his hands, both of them deftly securing the buttons on a white dress shirt, the tie neatly fastened and flung over one shoulder to make sure it was kept out the way.
His hands were steady, far too steady; and working on some form of autopilot. They weren't shaking, just shifting from one button to the next as each one was looped and secured. Then, once that was finished and the shirt tucked into his pants, Shouta felt himself turn around, his feet moving over to the bed where a grey waistcoat now laid.
His mind was raging, the pain still present but on some level he knew his face wasn't showing the turmoil he was experiencing. It was carefully blank, beyond his own guidance, just like his hands. Just like the rest of his body. This wasn't himself, he wasn't in control. Yet with each passing second the sensation of detachment seemed to grow. The ache in his head was fading into the background, the panicked thoughts that continued to surface were masked under an involuntary visage of calm.
He managed to force a single, shaking and small breath from his mouth, and for an instant he felt his movements halt. One arm threaded through the waistcoat already, part way between resting on his shoulder and draping down by his elbow. Though all too soon the action resumed, and his body moved back to the mirror again.
His mind was getting far too clouded, his thoughts turning slow and sluggish. Like the times before, like every single other time before this. Every time he'd forgotten.
"Stop…" Shouta's tongue felt heavy, but he forced the word out through gritted teeth. He couldn't just let this happen, he couldn't let himself be pushed back. "I- I know what you've done. Stop." He wasn't talking to anyone in particular, but for some reason he had the feeling that someone could hear him. That there was a listener, a puppeteer who was the reason for everything that was happening.
Someone was pulling the strings, pulling his strings.
Making it harder for Shouta to think. Making it harder for him to take control of his own body. He remembered what he was, what had taken place, just as the final button was threaded.
Shouta felt his consciousness slip to black. No pain, or nausea, just the floating sense of nothing as the void claimed him again.
Though his body continued to move, hands straightening out a small crease in the white shirt. Hands, fingers, lifting and looping into his hair, watching in the mirror as each strand was shifting and listing into smoke. Lifting off his shoulders and flicking up into the air, exposing the back of his neck. Though not for long, because the purple hued darkness shifted, flowing down his body in waves. Latching onto bare skin, flooding under his clothing.
The face that was looking back at him in the mirror was Aizawa's, but that wasn't who was staring through the man's blank eyes.
The imposter went through a short process, checking that all of his clothes were in order. From the placement of the belt buckle, to the fold at the cuff of the dress shirt. Then to his hair, or what it was now. Smoke, undulating slowly in the open air. Then the darkness began to encroach on his face, his left ear first, and then his cheek. Covering the skin in a creeping void of black.
He held out one hand to his side, limb overtaken by wisps of black. Though it had volume, since when a warp gate flickered to life in the air and deposited his phone down into his palm, the object didn't fall through the smoke. It was there, suspended, the screen illuminated.
It was just a few buttons, and eventually after a flowing screen of encrypted texts appeared and disappeared, an outgoing phone call was put through.
The man turned back to the mirror, lifting the phone up to his ear, though he wasn't paying much attention to it. He was looking as the last bit of the body's face was visible. The scruff on his chin that he should have shaved at some point, the bruised bags on his skin and the resounding pale pallor. That single long scar.
He stared into his eyes, watching as a golden light flickered to life in the pupil and spread. Encompassing the whole eye in a sickening yellow glow. No defining features, no retina or sclera. Just gold light that shone through the cowl of black and purple smoke.
Someone picked up on the other end of the phone, and Kurogiri shifted his attention to the matter at hand. There was a situation he needed to tend to, he was being summoned after all.
"I'm on my way, my bar better not be a mess when I arrive, Tomura." The voice echoed just barely, tinny and deep through the receiver.
Kurogiri glanced in the mirror again, as a large portal bloomed in the air at his back. It was time to see what his Master required.
