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It’s the first day of class. Fumikage drums his fingers on the desk in front of him, watches his homeroom teacher, and thinks about how UA is already so very different from middle school. For instance, no one has made any unfunny bird jokes to his face, yet.
Dark Shadow pokes at the back of his mind, manifests as small as he is able, and rests his pointy little chin on Fumikage’s shoulder. He also looks to the front of the room.
‘Is that our teacher?’ Dark Shadow asks silently, because he absolutely hasn’t been paying attention until this moment.
‘Yes,’ says Fumikage, only a little bit exasperated, ‘that’s our teacher.’
Dark Shadow hums, ducks to hide entirely behind Fumikage’s shoulder, and then peeks over it like a kitten on the hunt.
‘He’s got a scarf,’ Dark Shadow states, and, oh, does Fumikage not like that tone of voice.
“Yes, he has a scarf,’ and if he sounds suspicious, it’s because he’s lived with this menace for nearly his entire life.
Dark Shadow stares fixedly at Aizawa. ‘...I want to bite it.’
Oh, no.
‘Pardon?’
‘I want to bite it!’ and, Darkness save him, his Quirk actually sounds excited about this. ‘Look at it, it looks so ribbony and soft. I bet it’s got a great mouth-feel.’
Fumikage would have put his head down on the table and groaned, but he is in his first day of homeroom, so he refrains.
‘Dark Shadow. You will not bite our teacher’s scarf.’
‘Yes, I will!’
‘No, you will not.’
‘You can’t stop me!’
‘I can literally stop you.’
Dark Shadow makes an angry little ‘mrrp’ sound, and pops out of existence. ‘Fumi’s no fun! Fumi is a dictator and a fun-squisher! Fumi doesn’t love me!’
Fumikage tunes him out with well-practiced ease, pays attention to said homeroom teacher’s instructions, and hopes that will be the end of it.
.
Of course, then they find out that the scarf is actually a weapon, and see how said weapon actually works, so it all gets worse instead.
‘I need to bite it, Fumi.’
‘You do not need to do anything.’
‘No, I need to, Fumi, look at it!’ Dark Shadow’s beady eyes are fixed on Aizawa’s capture scarf as it moves. ‘I bet it tastes like secrets.’
‘’What does that mean?’
‘You know what it means!’
‘I promise you I do not.’
Dark Shadow blows a raspberry at him, which should be impossible, as Dark Shadow does not have a tongue.
‘You will not bite Mr. Aizawa’s capture weapon.’
‘Says YOU.’
.
Because the universe hates Fumikage, deeply and personally, his Quirk decides that this is not a passing fancy. This is a mission.
He’s walking to one of the training grounds with Shouji, who seems very nice, when Mr. Aizawa passes them, walking in the other direction. Dark Shadow bursts out of him like a shot, beak open, sailing across the hallway as if Fumikage isn't going to notice.
Fumikage grabs his tether, wraps it twice around his wrist, and stuffs him down the front of his shirt.
“Um,” says Shouji, eyebrows raised, mouth twisted under his mask.
Dark Shadow squirms. Fumikage flicks him between the ears.
“Sorry,” says Fumikage, “it’s, uh. Nerves. He’s feeling restless.”
“Of course.” Shouji smiles. “That makes total sense. No need to be nervous, Tokoyami, it’s all going to go fine.”
Fumikage smiles at his classmate, and wishes his squirming Quirk could breathe, so that he might smother him.
.
‘He won’t even notice.’
Fumikage ignores Dark Shadow, instead focusing on Sato and Midoriya. They’ve been assigned together for a group presentation, about media relations in a technology age, and have been given time in class to work on it.
Of course, that time in class meant that Mr. Aizawa has gone to sleep in his sleeping bag behind his desk, which means he’s unaware, which means his capture scarf is unguarded.
‘He will notice, now knock it off,’ Fumikage thinks, maybe too aggressively, before tuning into his peer’s conversation just in time to chime in, “Well, yes, but are official Hero Twitter accounts too much like public relations to count for the topic?”
Sato taps his chin. “Oh, yeah, you might be right.”
Fumikage feels Dark Shadow manifest near his leg, and start to creep under the desk and towards the front of the classroom.
“Hmm,” says Midoriya, scribbling in his notebook as he does, “we could talk specifically about how Hero Twitter sometimes is used for crisis communication? Like, to let people know where dangerous battles are happening.”
“That seems more focused,” says Fumikage, as he steps his heel onto Dark Shadow’s tether to keep him from moving any more.
“Oh, hey, my cousin is working as an intern at a newspaper right now!” Sato perks up and grins. “Maybe we can interview her?”
Midoriya looks equally enthused. “That’s a great idea!”
Fumikage is about to add his own input, but then Dark Shadow sinks his beak into his achilles tendon like the awful, awful menace he is. Fumikage jumps in his seat from the unexpected pain, which slams his knee against the underside of his desk, which causes both a stack of notebooks to clatter from the desk to the floor, and his pin on Dark Shadow to release.
‘You little shit!’
Dark Shadow takes off across the room like a shot, as both of Fumikage’s classmates exclaim their concern.
“Oh, jeez, Tokoyami, are you alright?”
“Did something happen? Do you need to go to Recovery Girl?”
“What is going on here?”
Mr. Aizawa is sitting bolt upright in his sleeping bag, apparently jolted awake from the sounds of the falling notebooks. Erasure is activated and he looks fairly murderous. Dark Shadow de-manifests himself, like the god-damn coward he is. Fumikage is left alone and on the spot.
At this point, every person in Class 1-A is staring, and Fumikage wishes for the sweet embrace of death.
Midoriya, too pure for this cruel world, turns his worried eyes to their teacher. “Mr. Aizawa, I think something happened to Tokoyami!”
Mr. Aizawa turns to him, not unconcerned. “What happened, Tokoyami?”
“I, uh.” Fumikage’s beak clicks shut, and he struggles to think of a single word that exists in human language, “I. Tripped.”
There is a long, heavy beat of silence. Fumikage feels his feathers start to stand on end.
“Tokoyami,” says Mr. Aizawa, flat, “you’re sitting down.”
Ah. “So it seems,” says Fumikage.
Inside his head, Dark Shadow is howling with laughter.
‘I hate you, most ardently,' Fumikage assures him.
.
“Tokoyami, could you give me the answer to the first question on the board?”
‘Only if you let me chew on your delicious-looking scarf!’
“I think the question is referring to the first round of international Quirk reform, in XX14.”
‘Fumi, that isn’t what I said! Give him incentive! I wanna monch!’
“And about the struggle between national versus international laws for it.”
‘FUMI, NOOOOO!’
.
Their benchmark tests for Physical Hero Training are one-on-one spars with Aizawa. In their teacher’s own words, it allows him to see their strengths and weaknesses up close and in the most hands-on way possible, and give him the most information when devising lesson plans for everyone.
Fumikage has been doing pretty well so far, if he does say so himself.
The goal was to use Dark Shadow to keep Mr. Aizawa at a fair distance, and then strafe and dodge until there was enough of an opening to get a hit in. Simple, effective plan. No frills, no over-complications.
Somehow, even after a lifetime of having one, Fumikage always forgets to factor in that having a sentient Quirk is an over-complication in and of itself.
Which meant, of course, that just as Mr. Aizawa ducks in close, instead and forcing him back like he’s supposed to, Dark Shadow darts towards the capture weapon with an open mouth.
‘Oh, don’t you dare,’ thinks Fumikage, and uses their mental connection to tug him back as hard as he can.
This momentary hesitation is, of course, enough for Aizawa to sweep Fumikage’s legs out from under him and put him on his back.
Aizawa’s unsmiling face looms above him, and he’s offered a hand up. Fumikage doesn’t take it right away, raising a finger to indicate that he needs another second to breath.
“You were doing well, until that last moment,” says Aizawa, which is high praise, coming from him. “What happened at the end?”
“I,” pants Fumikage, “I got distracted.”
“By what?”
‘By my menace of a Quirk who’s decided that your scarf is the world’s best hypothetical chew toy,” Fumikage doesn’t say.
“By the infinite smallness of human life in comparison to the utter vastness of the universe,” is what he says out loud and, given the twitch that Aizawa’s face does, that is not what the kids call a “normal answer.”
And, honestly, he probably should have been seeing Hound Dog from the beginning of the school year, because it’s not like he isn’t a depressive-leaning disaster in a constant state of violent existential crisis, but this is a rather embarrassing reason for his first appointment to be scheduled.
.
“I will get you literally anything else to chew on.”
“I don’t want anything else, I want that.”
“But why?”
“I gotta, Fumi. I gotta know.”
“You’re the most obnoxious scientific anomaly that anyone could ever get stuck with.”
“I love you too, Fumi!”
.
In UA’s Hero course, it was considered something of a right of passage, to end up unconscious in training for the first time.
Which isn’t to say that it happened to everyone, but it did happen to most people, at least once. Teenagers with imperfect Quirk control, pushed to their limits, often in situations where they were fighting against each other — people collapsed from exhaustion, because no one in the Hero course was very good at knowing their limits at first, people crashed into walls in training areas, people got bonked on the head by a peer’s Quirk.
In Fumikage’s case, he’d taken a full dose of Ojiro’s tail to the face, and then tripped backwards over an obstacle Yaoyorozu created behind him without him noticing, and slammed his head against the ground. Which is to say, yes, he ended up very, very unconscious.
So Fumikage wakes up in the nurse’s office, head aching in a way that tells him he hasn’t been treated by Recovery Girl yet. He tries to blink the sleep and pain out of his eyes, feels that Dark Shadow is manifested, turns his head to find him.
Mr. Aizawa is sitting at his bedside, flipping through a book with a title Fumikage can’t make out. Dark Shadow is wrapped around his neck, looking like fairly distressed feather boa — that makes sense, he never likes it when his human is hurt — and gnawing at Aizawa's capture weapon like an anxious dog with a stick.
“Oh,” says Fumikage.
Mr. Aizawa peers at him from over his book. “Ah, good. You’re awake. That was a nasty hit you took,” he says.
Fumikage probably should be paying attention to him, but he isn't. His eyes are on Dark Shadow, and what he is chewing on, and his beak opens, and the words half-slur into existence —
“Were you right?” he asks, “Does it taste like secrets?”
Aizawa stares at him, eyebrows raised. Fumikage processes what he just said.
For once, the universe is merciful, and allows him to fall back into blessed unconsciousness. He hears Dark Shadow laughing at him the whole way down.