Work Text:
While no one was exactly sure what Izuku Midoriya was, everyone could agree that he was, at the very least, human shaped.
Most of the time.
If you didn't look at him too long. It became a little less clear if you did.
But nevertheless, he was at least vaguely human.
Present Mic had been the first teacher to lay eyes on him, during the instructions of the entrance exam. The boy had practically been glowing with excitement. (When he thinks back on it now, Mic couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t been glowing.)
During the entrance exam, he drew the gaze of all the teachers when he was able to destroy the Zero-pointer with one hit. No one could quite say how, exactly, he had done it. Remarkably, they had all been looking at other screens at the time.
Principal Nedzu smiled, and looked at Aizawa, who groaned. The boy would be placed in his class, Aizawa knew then. He would either have to learn how to control his quirk, or he would be expelled.
And that usually would have been the end of that.
Until the Quirk assessment test.
After Aizawa had given Midoriya his ultimatum- control your quirk, or be expelled- Midoriya had gotten an unusual glint in his eyes, and power seemed to crackle in the air around him.
Despite it being a beautiful sunny day, without a cloud in sight, the sky seemed to darken, the wind picked up, and Midoriya's silhouette seemed to grow fuzzy. When he threw the ball, Aizawa couldn’t be sure if it was an arm that threw it, or a tentacle.
When Midoriya turned to face Aizawa again, he shook himself off. He was obviously not getting enough sleep. None of that had actually happened. Midoriya had thrown the ball, and broken his finger, and that was it. He desperately tries to shake the odd images from his head.
If his name was mentioned in the break room, the teachers could come to an agreement that Midoriya was much like the other students. A little more determined than most, with never ending enthusiasm, and a seeming magnet for trouble, but he blended into the crowd of students nonetheless.
He acted much like the other students. He showed off his quirk, got into fights, (mostly with Bakugo) and occasionally made a fool of himself, as all teens do.
Sure, there were some strange things about him. He had a tendency to stare into nothing while muttering for minutes on end like he was talking to someone until he was broken out of it, and he seemed to know things he had no rightful place knowing. But in the age of quirks, it wasn’t really unusual for someone to be more sensitive to the world around them than others.
So when Midoriya went into a ‘trance,’ his teachers would brush past him, laying a hand on his shoulder, or ruffling his hair, and snapped him out of it. When he simply shrugged when asked how on earth he knew about Aizawa and Mic's marriage, he was told to keep that knowledge to himself, and the matter was left alone.
The real issues started innocently enough. Todoroki approached Aizawa after the Sports festival with inquiries after any new medical staff that had been hired. When questioned, he said that when he saw Midoriya again after their match, none of his fingers were broken. Recovery Girls’ quirk didn't work like that quickly, and Midoriya’s hand had looked near mangled, last Todoroki had seen it. So there must be a new healer on staff. Aizawa assured him that there were no new staff members, and dismissed the claims as Todoroki misremembering. Todoroki simply shrugged, and wandered off with a vaguely puzzled look on his face.
Then, things started going missing with no explanation. Lesson plans from the teacher’s lounge, books from the library, even a punching bag or two from the gyms. When enough complaints came in, Nedzu took a look at the security cameras. They were no help. The items were there one moment, then the camera would glitch out, just for a second, and then items were gone.
Then, with just as much explanation, which is to say none whatsoever, Midoriya was returning the lesson plans and book, sheepishly saying he found them in the courtyard, or under his desk. Nedzu even caught him sneaking the punching bags back into the gym in the middle of the night on the cameras a couple of times.
Even still, no one was too worried, it was a coincidence or just teenagers being teenagers and messing around. And it was not a thing to worry about, really. No one was being harmed, and all the items were returned undamaged, after all.
One day during class- a simple training exercise to learn how to fight in a city street without damaging any buildings- his opponent watched Midoriya duck into a nearby alleyway, and when they caught up, he was nowhere to be seen. Aizawa, who had been supervising, came to investigate. There was only one way out of the alley, and no one had seen Midoriya exit. All around the training area, Midoriya’s laugh could be heard from all the dark corners and crevices.
After that, there were whispers amongst the students. News of what had happened quickly spread from Class 1-A to Class 1-B, and from there to the rest of the school. People eyed Midoriya warily now. His friends stood by him, unwaveringly, as did most of Class 1-A, but others talked. Midoriya seemed not to notice.
Still, there was nothing to be done. No one had seen Midoriya do anything, so even if there should have been no way the teen could have teleported, and he quite obviously did, all Aizawa could do was congratulate him on his stealth.
From then on, students and teachers alike began to notice the little things about Midoriya that weren’t quite right.
He had a tendency to fill the entire classroom with his murmuring, which seemed both so loud that it was deafening and so quiet that no one could make out which he was saying.
His notebooks were filled to bursting with tightly packed writing. No one was ever quite able to make out what it said, and they got a splitting headache if they tried too hard
They also got a splitting headache when they looked too hard at Midoriya himself. Now that they knew something wasn’t quite right about the boy, they could see how the edge of his form flicked, how he crackled with lightning at all times, how his face seemed to shift from Midoriya’s to someone else’s and back again. His black-as-night hair was always moving, as if a playful wind was tousling the wild tufts constantly. (Black? Wasn’t his hair green? Or… white?)
Sometimes, when talking to one of his classmates, he would lock eyes with them, and stare at them with something more than ancient lurking in his eyes, as if he had seen all the world had to offer, and was displeased with the final picture.
The look would disappear the next time he remembered to blink his electric green eyes, (Weren’t his eyes yellow?) although no one would say for certain if he blinked with one set of eyes or eight.
And then.
And Then .
Then came the joint training exercise.
It seemed like an explosion of darkness, tentacles of inky black reaching out of his body, electricity sparking across his skin, which seemed to glow in unnatural colors. When he opened his mouth to cry out, no one could be sure if it was one voice that screamed, or many, layering on top of each other, growing louder and louder. The sun seemed to be snuffed out, like it was no more than a candle. The ground shook, and no one seemed to be able to move.
After it was said and done, nobody quite knew how to act. Here was the confirmation they were looking for.
Midoriya was something other.
No one knew what to make of it.
A creeping aurora of unease seemed to follow him wherever he went, and for once, it didn’t seem to be coming from Midoriya. He was never anything but kind. He was a nice boy, eager to please his teachers, eager to help his classmates, eager to excel as a hero. He was polite, his manners impeccable. He was the type of person who could calm a civilian in an instant, a smile that was so trustworthy it made everyone relaxed around him. There should be nothing about him that made anyone uncomfortable.
But his classmates and teachers knew better.
Midoriya seemed as confused by it as the others. He thought things were going well with his classmates, that he was making friends, unlike his middle school days. Even those he didn't really talk too much in the class, like Shoji and Jirou, were perfectly polite to him. But now, things had changed.
He wasn’t stupid, he knew that he gave off a strange aura, now that he had One for All, and that was intimidating to others. But now, people stopped talking when he walked into the room, and when they started up again, the conversation was stilted. He got strange looks in the hall. His teachers were even acting strange. Yamada-Sensei only laughed awkwardly and excused himself when Izuku tried to ask him questions about his quirk after class. Aizawa-Sensei wouldn’t meet his eyes. Ectoplasm never called on him when he put his hand up. Midnight never waved at him in the hall like she’d used to.
It seemed like everyone’s eyes were focused on him, but when he turned to look, no one would meet his gaze. Sometimes he wished he could blend into the background. He could hear the voices of the vestiges in his ears, assuring him that they would protect him, but when they made him actually slip into the shadows, it just made everyone more uncomfortable.
When Midoriya went intangible and seemed to fuse with the shadow in the commons or their classrooms, everyone would stiffen. His presence seemed even more oppressive. No one could tell what exactly he looked like, anymore, whether he was human shaped, or a withering black mass. Kaminari even swore up and down that he saw wings one time. Most of the time it was impossible to say exactly what they were seeing. They only knew for certain that it was Midoriya, and that he wasn’t a human anymore and might not have ever been one to begin with.
The only ones who were seemingly unaffected by Midoriya’s strangeness were Bakugo and All Might.
Bakugo seemed to notice the strangeness, the tendency to have extra limbs, or the rambles about events he should know nothing about, but elected to ignore them. He had known Midoriya for his entire life, and knew that just because the nerd acted a little weird sometimes, he was still the same kid who cried in middle school because All Might had left Japan to work abroad in China for a few months.
All Might seemed fine with it. However, everyone who had spent any time with him before he lost his powers in the battle with All for One knew he used to exhibit the same strange energy, even if he hid it better. The secret love child rumor was starting to look a lot more plausible.
Eventually, the rest of the school grew used to it as well. After all, Midoriya hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Class 1-A would be damned if, after all they’d been through, they shunned a member of their class- and one as important as Midoriya- for having a few oddities.
So when Mina looked around to locate her gossip partner, and found that the boy was across the room, hovering in the corner while his voice, absentmindedly humming and agreeing with her, sounded like it was but a few feet away, she just groaned, and picked herself up to move to the other couch next to him. She only gave a small grumble about how rude it was to not listen to people when they're talking to you.
No one mentions that his form shifts and blurs even when sitting still, or how occasionally, it seems like they're talking to someone entirely different, and not their friend. No one mentions the common occurrence of him phasing through walls, or turning into a dark cloud and humming in the corner when he's irritated. Honestly what could they even do at this point? Midoriya's quirk was just a little more complicated than ‘Super Strength,’ that was all.
(Monoma seemed to remain ever wary of him, but of course, the hostile boy had made the mistake of pissing Midoriya off on one of his more intangible days. That could hardly be seen as Midoriya’s fault.)