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Here’s the thing: when everything goes sideways and her life turns upside down, it’s not Momo’s fault. It’s not even close to being her fault; she’s just minding her own business, sitting in the food court of a mall with Jirou and Todoroki ( not one where she or any of her classmates have ever been attacked, thank you very much) and eating her lunch.
That’s when the villain attack comes, incidentally removing this mall from its prior designation. A wall of smoke and shadow springs up around the boundaries of the food court, and the people who immediately try to cross it yelp and recoil when they touch it, and don’t try again. There are four enemies that they can see near one of the hallways, dressed in gaudy colors and dark masks. Momo, Jirou, and Todoroki may not be in their costumes but they do have provisional licenses, so it only takes a moment’s glance between the three of them before they decide to intervene.
“This is a robbery,” says one of the villains idly, twirling a staff around her hand. She’s in a hot pink dress, so bright it almost burns Momo’s eyes. “Hand over all your valuables, and nobody has to get hurt!”
Without her costume, Jirou doesn’t have a speaker boost, but she does sneak one of her earphone jacks into the ground; they’re far enough from the villain group that they won’t be overheard if they whisper.
“It’s just these four,” Jirou murmurs. “No other accomplices, as far as I can tell.”
Todoroki pulls out his phone. “No signal,” he says, equally soft.
Momo sighs, almost imperceptibly soft. “So either they’ve got an accomplice out of Jirou’s range, or one of them has a signal-jamming quirk, or they’re doing it with tech.”
She eyes the villains again. None of them have obvious mutations, which is unfortunate; they’ll be going into this fight blind.
“Give over our valuables, or what?” asks one of the civilians in a sort of sneering, dubious tone, and Momo winces, turning to see that the speaker is a young woman whose skin and hair glitter like gemstones; maybe she has a reason to feel so invincible, then, but it doesn’t improve their situation if she’s openly provoking the villains.
“Or we fight,” says another villain, this one in neon green. He thrusts a hand forward, and a long narrow shimmer cuts through the air, scoring across the young woman’s arm with an audible screech and leaving a bloodless gash in her diamond-glitter skin.
She looks down at it, blinking like she doesn’t quite believe her eyes.
“Now,” says the green villain, “do you want to continue the fight? Or are you going to be polite about this?”
The three of them look at each other and exchange a brief nod; they know at least two, maybe three, of the quirks that they’re going up against, and they need to intervene soon if they’re going to head this off.
Jirou channels her heartbeat into the floor, setting it to trembling; Momo and Todoroki are accustomed enough to this to be able to stand as she does so.
“You’re ones to talk about being polite,” says Todoroki, deadpan, “given what you came here to do.”
“Oh, goody,” says the woman in pink, who’s regaining her balance even on the shaking floor—Jirou can’t go too far with it, not in the mall and surrounded by civilians. “Look! We’ve got little baby heroes here with us! I did always want to fight some.”
She launches herself forwards with her staff suddenly expanding in her hands, using it almost like a vaulting pole. Momo quickly pulls a staff from her arm, and blocks the downward stroke.
It would be folly to look away from her opponent, but she does notice the temperature drop as Todoroki sends a wall of ice towards the other villains. If he could manage it fast enough, this fight would be over; but he can’t go all out surrounded by civilians, and the green villain with the air-lance can probably break his ice too.
The pink villain drives Momo back, and Momo lets her. Her staff is wood, she thinks, and she can see how it’s changing under her hands; she’s got an idea of what to do here.
They reach a table, and Momo rolls back across it, jabbing the end of her staff into the villain’s stomach before letting it go, and takes the very brief reprieve to pull a pair of handcuffs out of her thankfully-exposed thigh. She thought about wearing long pants today, but right now she’s really glad she didn’t.
Her opponent lunges across the table to grab the front of Momo’s shirt with the hand that isn’t holding the staff, and Momo takes the opportunity to close the handcuff around her wrist and one of the metal table legs.
“Why, you—” the woman spits, and reaches for Momo with her other hand. She doesn’t let go of the staff, which is a shame, but not something Momo can’t handle.
She gives a sharp kick to the woman’s wrist, making her give a short yelp and reflexively let go of her staff. Momo kicks it away from her immediately, and cuffs her other hand to a different table leg. Conveniently, these are the kinds of tables where the legs are a loop and don’t actually end anywhere; she’ll need bolt-cutters or a key that doesn’t exist or a lockpick to get out of those cuffs.
As Momo hoped, away from its owner the staff has reverted to its ordinary self, and if the pink villain could be doing something to free herself Momo’s pretty sure she would be.
“Keep this away from her,” she tells the nearby wide-eyed civilians, kicking the staff a little further out of reach to ensure the woman won’t be able to get to it without help.
They nod hesitantly, and Momo looks back to where her friends are. Todoroki is mostly fighting the air-lance villain, and Jirou has left off causing tremors to fight a villain in fluorescent orange, who isn’t visibly using a quirk.
There’s one villain left, this one dressed in sparkling electric blue, and they’re standing quite still off to the side. Momo narrows her eyes; if they could help their friends, she’d expect them to just do it, which makes her think they’re either responsible for the shadow-barrier or the signal-blocking, and probably need to focus on it. That, or they’re no good in a fight. She collects her staff and moves forwards around the edge of the food court, hoping to not distract her friends nor draw the attention of the other villains; if she’s right, this one is probably the key to getting them all out.
Luckily, she doesn’t distract her friends or draw the attention of their opponents. Unluckily, the villain in blue does notice her, and scowls before making a sharp gesture at her.
A triangle of solid shadow-smoke comes her way, and Momo parries it with her staff, glad she reclaimed it. It means less work than making a new one, at least. The next shadow splits, and one hits her arm, but while it stings sharply on impact she’s pretty sure it won’t even leave a mark. On the other hand, she can see the villain’s trying to build a wall; this stuff might not injure, but she’s pretty sure she won’t be able to get through it once it’s built up, which is going to be a problem.
Looking over the forming wall, she notices something very interesting. There’s a tendril from the villain to the shadow-wall around the food court, and from them to the newly forming barrier, which means—no. No, not from them. The connections are to their shadow.
Momo smiles, and starts making a new object even as she knocks the new barrier apart as best as she can. She isn’t doing very well, but that’s okay. She just needs a little bit more time.
The flash grenade—it doesn’t need to be loud, just bright—finishes forming. She lobs it at the blue-clad villain’s feet over the still-low wall, and screws her eyes shut as it goes off, just long enough for the light to fade.
When she opens her eyes, the villain is reeling, and the shadow wall in front of her has gone up in smoke. The ones around the edges of the room are fading, and already people are moving towards the exits. She hits them over the head with her staff, then catches them before they can hit their head again on the floor and lowers them down, cuffing their hands behind their back with the low-grade quirk-suppressant cuffs that are the most effective ones she can remember how to make, without her book here for reference.
She steps back to catch her breath and look around. The hostages are hurrying towards the exits, which is understandable—most of them are heading away from the fight, but not all of them are quite that sensible, and unfortunately her flash grenade seems to have disrupted Todoroki’s fight—he’s still blinking a little. If it wouldn’t have been a dead giveaway of her plan, she’d have shouted a warning, but she couldn’t risk the blue villain figuring it out soon enough to counter her attack. His opponent has taken the opportunity to look away from him without losing immediately.
Momo follows the green villain’s line of sight to see a boy, maybe a little older than her, in his line of fire, scrambling away with his hands glowing a faint blue.
She realizes what’s going to happen a split second before the villain acts, with Jirou still absorbed in her fight and Todoroki still blinking her light out of his eyes. There isn’t time for her to get his attention and for him to do something, and she doesn’t have time to make anything useful so she doesn’t bother to try.
Rather than use any fancy tactics, she vaults over a table and tackles the guy out of the way. An air-lance cuts into the floor, right where he used to be.
She tries her best to avoid his glowing hands—that could mean anything, in the world they live in, and it might not mean anything at all but better safe than sorry—but she isn’t quite careful enough. As they roll across the floor, away from the villain—Todoroki’s fighting him again, that’s good—their hands brush.
Her body all but explodes in agony. Through the roaring in her ears, she hears a faint, unfamiliar voice.
“—oh, oh my god,” says the boy she saved. “—I am—dude I am so sorry—”
She doesn’t notice anything for a while after that.
The first thing Momo notices when she comes back to herself is how much she doesn’t hurt. There are fading phantom aches running across her skin, but nothing like the agony that preceded them, and even those are going away. The second thing that she notices is that she’s lying awkwardly on a hard surface, probably the mall floor, and it’s not very comfortable. The third thing she notices is that her clothes feel weird; they’re tight and loose in the wrong places, and her underwear feels much more restrictive than it usually does.
She opens her eyes to find the boy from earlier hovering over her, looking rather anxious. His hands have stopped glowing.
“Dude, I am so sorry,” he says. “My quirk tends to act up when I’m stressed, and, well—” He awkwardly rubs the back of his neck and gives a half-hearted laugh.
“Villain attacks are rather stressful,” says Momo as she pushes herself up to a sitting position with arms that feel as weird as her clothes, and then she freezes, because that’s not her voice. She knows what her voice sounds like inside her own head, and this isn’t it. This voice is lower than hers, for one, and it resonates oddly in her throat.
The boy winces. “I am so, so sorry about this,” he repeats for at least the third time.
“So, this was your quirk, then,” says Todoroki, and Momo turns her head to see him and Jirou standing there. They’re looking at her oddly, which is probably not great, to be honest, but does line up with how she feels.
“No one else got hurt,” Jirou chimes in to say, “and we’ve restrained the other villains and the police are on their way. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Good,” says Momo, and tries not to flinch at how different her voice is. She… isn’t sure she minds it, but it’s still going to be a lot to get used to. If she has to get used to it, that is.
Todoroki’s still studying her intently, but he turns to the boy when he says, “What is your quirk, then? Some kind of illusion quirk? Shape-changing?”
“Sort of,” says the boy slowly, and Momo’s never seen anyone look more like they wanted the floor to open and swallow them whole than he does right now. Which is rather impressive, considering she’s been Midoriya’s classmate for months now. “It… induces physical changes in other people if I touch them with my hands while it’s active.”
“Yeah, we noticed,” Jirou says dryly, gesturing vaguely in Momo’s direction. “What are the parameters?”
“It gives you your ideal body,” says the boy, “or something like it, anyway. So it’s not—it’s not all bad.” He pauses, then says all in a rush, “Iamsosorrybutit’salsopermanent.”
“…did you say permanent,” says Jirou, and the boy winces and nods.
Momo lies back down and puts her new hands over her new face. If she doesn’t want to deal with this drastic change—and its implications— just yet, she feels she’s well within her right to do so.
After they’ve talked to the police, and the villains are hauled away, and the boy offers her his name—Tanaka Makoto—and phone number in case she ever has any more questions—he can’t promise answers, but if he can give them then he will—Momo is left waiting with Todoroki and Jirou on a bench just outside the mall. She wants to protest, say she can get herself back to U.A. just fine, but her legs feel as odd as the rest of her does and her mind is racing almost as fast as Midoriya’s always seems to even as she tries to steer it away from the obvious paths and she wants to do all sorts of things, figure out what’s actually happened to her body. She has her suspicions but she doesn’t know; she can’t check with the others around, much less out in public, so she decides not to protest.
Aizawa-sensei pulls up in a car, takes one look at them, and sighs deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Does this need a hospital, or will Recovery Girl be sufficient?” he asks wearily.
Momo opens her mouth, then closes it again. Her voice is—well, it’s new, and she wants to figure out what it sounds like herself at least a little bit before she goes showing it to everyone else. Todoroki gives her a strangely knowing sidelong glance.
“I think Recovery Girl will be enough,” he says, and Aizawa nods.
“Then get in the car,” he tells them, and so they do, three across the back seat.
On the way back to U.A., the other two recount what happened at the mall in more detail, and Momo leans her head against the window, staring blankly out at the traffic and letting their voices wash over her, focusing on them just enough to prevent herself from thinking.
Recovery Girl shakes her head when she sees Momo standing there in a body that’s very different from the one she had this morning. Jirou stays to help her explain; Aizawa-sensei said there was no need for all of them to stay and sent Todoroki back to the dorms.
“Are you injured?” Recovery Girl asks.
Momo shakes her head, sitting on the edge of the bed; her ponytail brushes against her neck. That much, at least, hasn’t changed, and her arm bears no sign of the one hit she took, so it isn’t even a lie.
Recovery Girl hums thoughtfully, and does a basic physical exam on her before drawing three vials of blood. For other tests, she says, given that this is (allegedly) permanent.
She tells Momo to come back if anything changes, and reluctantly lets her leave for the dorms rather than insisting on keeping her overnight.
With Jirou’s help, Momo gets back to her room without anyone else seeing her—she’ll have to explain this to her classmates, eventually, but she really doesn’t want to do it right now—and flops facedown on her too-big bed, the door firmly shut behind her.
After a few hours, her body doesn’t feel as alien as it did at the start; her legs are steady again, and her hands don’t shake or even feel that different when she sits up to doodle in a notebook to check her fine motor control. She stretches out her legs out in front of her, and finds she still has no trouble bending to touch her toes, which is… good. That much is good.
And all of this—she’s still avoiding the real issue, isn’t she? Tanaka’s quirk gives people their ideal bodies, he said, so if it’s done to her what she thinks it has—what does that mean, for Momo?
It takes her a little while to work up to actually taking her clothes off. First her t-shirt, which is too tight across her shoulders even though it fit her perfectly this morning—dealing with it’s not quite as—well. And it’s probably good that she wore a sports bra today, or she would’ve spent the second half of the day with her bra sticking way out instead of only a little bit, because it’s like she thought. Her chest isn’t quite flat, not like a child’s would be, but all she has is mildly-defined pectoral muscles. No different from any of the boys in her class.
“Guess Mineta can’t creep on me for them anymore,” she says to herself, in her new low voice, and gives a half-hysterical giggle. No one will ever look at her in quite that way again, she realizes—they might still sexualize her, but it’s never going to be the same.
If nothing else, she’s not sorry about that. Momo’s never really minded having most of her skin showing—a good thing, with her quirk and her chosen career path, and back in the USJ she hadn’t even considered that she had her whole chest exposed to Kaminari, not that he was in any state to notice anything—but. She’s never liked the way people tend to look at her for it.
Then she sighs, and looks down at her shorts. Earlier today, they sat comfortably at her waist. Now they’ve slid down to her hips, which are a lot narrower than they used to be, though she still isn’t the kind of skinny that some people idealize; can’t afford to be, if she wants to use her quirk to its full potential. She knows, deep down, what the lower half of her body looks like under her clothes; but she won’t know until she looks.
“All right, then, Momo,” she mumbles under her breath. “Let’s check things out.”
So she rolls off her bed, and takes off her shorts, and then her underwear.
Well. That doesn’t feel quite so squished anymore, so that’s good. She looks down, and—yep. She’s got a dick now. And balls, too. She gives it an experimental poke.
“Huh,” she says. “So that’s what that feels like, then.” Sue her, she’s been idly curious for a while. Why wouldn’t she be?
She goes to look for clothes after that, realizing fairly quickly that most of them are not… going to work anymore. Which is really a shame. She likes her clothes! But they won’t fit as well on her new body, and she can’t change them on a whim.
Eventually she gives up finding anything in her closet, and measures herself before just making some new clothes with her quirk. They’re fairly soft and shapeless things—she could do something more complicated, but… she’s tired. All she wants to do is go to sleep.
At least in sleep she can keep putting off the impending identity crisis.
Aizawa-sensei comes knocking on her door the next morning, hands shoved in his pockets and looking even more tired than he usually does, as well as more than a little awkward.
“Yes?” she says, because her homeroom teacher doesn’t usually come knocking on student doors. She can guess what this is about, but—well. At least she’s gotten more comfortable with her voice now, though it still takes her off-guard every time she speaks.
“You can stay in today, if you want,” he says. “Or you can come to class.” He hesitates. “We know that Tanaka’s quirk is supposed to give you your ideal body,” he says, “but nothing in your treatment at U.A. in regards to gender will change unless you tell us you want it to.”
“…thank you,” says Momo softly. “I think… I want to come to class. It’s not going to get easier if I put it off.”
Aizawa-sensei nods. “Very well,” he says. “I’ll see you then.” He turns and walks back down the hall, and Momo closes the door and lies back on her bed.
In a few minutes, she’ll have to get up, get dressed for classes. In a few minutes, the rest of her classmates will see her like this. So the question remains: does she make herself a new uniform skirt? She’ll have to make it—her old ones are almost certainly not the right size, and there’s no time to get one for today through the usual channels—but. Does she make a new skirt alongside her new shirt, or does she make herself uniform pants, like all the boys wear?
She shakes her head, frustrated with her own indecision. It’s such a small thing, but—
Ideal body, Tanaka said. Momo, if asked, would’ve said she had a fairly nice body already. Now, everything’s different, and she still doesn’t want to think about the implications.
Eventually she grabs a coin off her desk to flip; if the number side comes up, she’ll wear a skirt. If the other side comes up, pants.
Momo flips the coin up in the air, catches it, slaps it over onto her other hand. A small metallic 100 glints up at her, and she nods.
Skirt it is, then.
Even after her talk with Aizawa-sensei and her indecision over her clothes, Momo is still up and about before most of her classmates; she takes full advantage of that, hurrying downstairs for an early breakfast before heading off to class before anyone else gets there. If she’s there first, she won’t have to walk in with everyone seeing her—she’s not exactly small enough to hide behind anyone, though she isn’t any taller than she was before, she doesn’t think.
Once she gets to her desk, she pulls out a book. It’ll be a while before even Iida gets here, so she’s got time to kill.
Iida is, as she expected, the first of her classmates to arrive after her, and does a double take when he sees her. Probably in part because she’s there at all, but partly, well.
“…Yaoyorozu?” he says after an awkward pause.
“That’s me,” says Momo. Before he can ask, she adds, “I got hit by a quirk yesterday. And I’d really rather not explain fifteen times over.”
“Right,” says Iida. “My apologies. I did not mean to be bothersome.”
“You weren’t,” she says. “But it probably will be, if I have to explain to everyone as they come in.”
“Of course,” he says, and goes to take his seat.
The rest of her classmates filter in, and either don’t notice—she’s still got her hair up in its spiky ponytail, after all, and she’s wearing the same uniform she always has—or accept that they’ll get an explanation later. That explanation, or at least the bones of it, comes when Aizawa-sensei arrives.
“Yaoyorozu was affected by a civilian’s quirk during a villain attack yesterday,” he says, sounding entirely disinterested. “That quirk affected the form her body takes, and can’t be undone the same way. Don’t pester her over it.” Then he launches into their lesson, and Momo can’t help but be grateful that he kept the exact details of Tanaka’s quirk to himself. Todoroki and Jirou already know the whole of it; the rest of their class doesn’t need to.
Not yet, at least.
The rest of the morning is fairly uneventful; 1-A gets used to her new appearance and voice, and the teachers all already know, so they don’t make a fuss over it. No attention is called to her new state until it’s time for their Heroics class in the afternoon; Aizawa-sensei intercepts her before she can make it to the locker rooms, and hands her a gym uniform.
“This will have to do for today,” he says. “You’re likely going to want a new costume, but that will take a little while to get. In the meantime, this should actually fit you, unlike your current gym uniform.”
Of course he noticed that her uniform was new. He’s always been observant; you don’t last long in Underground Heroics without that, or so she’s heard.
“Thank you,” she says, and takes the uniform, before turning back to the locker rooms.
Nothing changes unless she wants it to, and here she is, wearing a skirt with her uniform, thinking of herself like she always has, and yet—
Tsuyu sticks her head out of the locker room, back into the hall. “Come on, ribbit,” she says.
Momo goes.
All told, it takes a week for Momo to decide to contact Tanaka. One week of living in this new body, feeling more and more at home, unsettlingly so for how different it is from the old one. One week of avoiding phone calls from anyone who doesn’t already know—with such a different voice it would be impossible to sidestep the issue.
One week of growing confusion, and Momo, jaw set and nerves swallowed down, sends two texts, one right after the other on Sunday evening.
Me: This is Yaoyorozu, from the mall.
Me: Have you ever used your quirk on someone who was trans?
Tanaka Makoto: yes, when they asked
Tanaka Makoto: why?
Me: What did it do for them?
Tanaka Makoto: variable with enbies. for the binary trans people (all three of them lol, not a great sample size but it’s what i've got) it’s done a total overhaul to the other binary sex.
Momo lies back on the bed, hands over face, hair down and splayed out, for a long moment. Well. That’s… well. It’s just great, isn’t it.
It doesn’t—it isn’t even that it’s a bad thing, necessarily, but—well. Momo doesn’t know, exactly, where to go from here.
The phone vibrates again.
Tanaka Makoto: you don’t have to tell me if u don’t want to, but why?
Me: I was, as far as I knew, a girl before I grabbed you that day.
Tanaka Makoto: …oh. well. fuck.
(And if that doesn’t just about sum it up, Momo doesn’t know what would.)
Me: yeah. It’s been really weird. Not bad, but definitely weird.
Tanaka Makoto: yeah i can imagine. sorry(? if you want me to be?) that it ended up this way.
Me: It is what it is, and like I said, I don’t exactly dislike it. I’m not angry with you, at least. It’s not like you did it on purpose.
Tanaka Makoto: right.
Me: Thank you for explaining.
Tanaka Makoto: no problem, it’s the least I can do.
Momo goes to bed after that, and falling asleep is the easiest it’s been all this week.
Morning comes quickly. Momo’s alarm rings earlier than usual; it only takes a few minutes after that to get up, make new uniform pants, and get dressed. Then it’s down to the kitchen for an early breakfast, and, all too soon, over to the teachers’ building.
Three knocks on the door, and it’s a relief to see that it’s Aizawa-sensei who’s opened it. That’s one less person to talk to, one less chance to chicken out.
“Aizawa-sensei,” says Momo, “I’ve been thinking. About the… the whole. You know. Gender thing.”
He nods.
“I want to be—I mean, I’d like you to treat me as—a boy,” Momo says, and somehow all his words don’t come out in too much of a jumbled rush.
His teacher nods again. “All right,” he says. “I’ll update the staff. Do you want me to tell your classmates, or do you plan on doing that yourself?”
Momo frowns briefly. He hadn’t, actually, thought that far ahead. “I can do it,” he says after a moment. “Thank you.”
Aizawa-sensei gives him a rare, tired hint of a smile. “You’re welcome,” he says, and then he nods to Momo and turns to go back inside.
Momo returns to Heights Alliance with a spring in his step and a weight off his shoulders. His classmates have been remarkably un-weird about his situation so far; he can’t imagine that will change when he tells them they should treat him as a boy as well as him looking like one now. He doesn’t think his parents will mind either, though they’ll likely be surprised.
He thinks about the path ahead, everything that’s yet to come, and laughs lightly; he’s going to be the best hero he can be, with the power of creation on his side. Whenever he comes across the darkness, well—he can always make a light to see, can’t he.
For the first time in his life, Yaoyorozu Momo finds he can think of a future in the public eye that doesn’t make him shy away from acknowledging the inevitable reactions to his body, especially in a costume like his. For the first time, it feels like his body is truly his own—he never noticed before that his body seemed so alien to him, but now that he knows it’s impossible to un-notice how adrift he was from his old self.
Right before the door to 1-A’s building, where most of his classmates should be up and eating breakfast by now, he pulls out his phone to send Tanaka one more text.
Me: Thank you.
He slips his phone back into his pocket and opens the door.