Chapter Text
“Morning, Shinsou!”
Shinsou Hitoshi stood in the middle of the kitchen in the 1-A dorms, blinking heavily, still probably around sixty percent asleep, automatically seeking out coffee. Heading to the kitchen in the 1-C dorms had generally been a safe move; while the students there had been surprisingly amicable, none of them were really the kind of person who would ambush you first thing in the morning to ask you questions about your quirk.
In other words, none of them were Midoriya Izuku.
“So I was just going through my notes, and I was wondering… if you brainwashed Yaoyorozu, could she still make objects? Or is that too complex?” Midoriya was wearing a bright red t-shirt with All Might on it, flipping thoughtfully through a notebook that looked as if it had been battered, burned, submerged in water, barely saved from a wood chipper, and then burned again.
“…Midoriya, it’s way too early for this.” Shinsou opened the fridge, hoping for the sweet salvation of a can of coffee.
He frowned. He was sure he had a few left.
Midoriya seemed genuinely confused. “It’s noon.”
Shinsou located a coffee behind an enormous jug of protein powder that someone had shoved into the fridge. He didn’t even know you were supposed to refrigerate that. “Yeah, it’s noon and I haven’t had my coffee yet.” He popped open the can, barely tasting the bitter flavor. It was the routine that woke him up as much as the caffeine.
“Well, you have coffee now!” Midoriya pointed out cheerfully. “What are those like?”
“It tastes like canned coffee.”
“I’ve never had one! I always worried it would make me jumpy.”
Shinsou took a sip of coffee and regarded Midoriya, from his mess of green hair to his striped pajama bottoms to his thousand watt smile. “Yeah, you’re the last person who needs caffeine.” He rubbed at his eyes, willing himself to be more awake. “So… you were asking weirdly detailed hypotheticals about my quirk.”
“Yeah!” Midoriya’s face somehow lit up even more. Shinsou almost flinched away from the brightness. “I was just updating some of my notes and I was wondering about some of the specific limitations on…” He began rambling and muttering to himself, lost in his own little world.
Shinsou probably could have just left him and walked away, but he didn’t.
He wasn’t friends with Midoriya Izuku, mostly because he wasn’t friends with anyone. He wasn’t in high school to do anything as frivolous as making friends. He needed this career, needed to be a hero, more than anyone could ever know. It was his ticket out of his previous life and into a new one, one where he’d need to work underground, face down dangerous criminals and, in all likelihood, die alone in an alley. Somehow, all of that would be preferable to what he’d left behind.
The others in the hero course were different. For the most part, they’d all been born with quirks suitable for heroics — strong quirks, versatile quirks, flashy combat quirks, the kind that inspired confidence and got you noticed. People with quirks like Todoroki’s and Iida’s never got told that they couldn’t be a hero.
He burned with jealousy. He should hate them. He had expected that they’d hate him, expected them to reject the sudden intrusion of a guy with a villain quirk into their hero course. Instead, they’d been accepting, almost weirdly so, greeting him in the halls and talking to him freely. He found he couldn’t actually make himself hate them, so instead he hated himself, something he’d had plenty of practice at.
The one he had the most trouble hating was Midoriya, the boy with ridiculous strength he could barely control. He was different from the rest of them in a way that Shinsou hadn’t quite pinned down. Shinsou had to take careful notice of people, their strengths and weaknesses, to have any hope of besting them. It didn’t take much to notice that there was something off about Midoriya, his quirk, and the jittering unease that leaked out from behind his smile.
Midoriya was still quietly muttering as Shinsou chugged the rest of his coffee and tossed the can at the recycling bin, missing it entirely and bouncing it off the floor. “So, I was wondering how your quirk worked,” he said to Midoriya as he walked over to pick up the can. There was something bothering him, and he had a hunch he knew what it was.
“What? My quirk?” Midoriya seemed startled. “Well… it’s kind of complicated to activate, and, uh… it’s kind of a super strength quirk…? But I can do other things with it!”
“That’s it,” said Shinsou, realizing his hunch was correct. “I figured out one of the things that was bothering me.”
Midoriya looked around as if he could somehow locate the conversation that had gotten away from him. “Figured what out?”
“You have all this detailed information about other people’s quirks in that notebook. You’ve got like eight pages on me alone and we barely know each other. But when I ask you about how your quirk works, you get all evasive.” He glared at Midoriya, deciding to ask a direct question. “Why?”
“I really like studying quirks!” said Midoriya, almost apologetically. “I’ve taken notes on quirks as a hobby ever since I was little. I have a bunch of these notebooks. Now that I’m here at UA, I get to see all kinds of quirks, right up close, and ask people all sorts of questions. It’s been great!”
He beamed proudly.
It didn’t add up. Midoriya’s quirk was strong and versatile enough that he hardly needed to keep detailed records of things like which animals Koda was best at controlling or how long Aoyama could fire his laser.
“I want in on it,” said Shinsou.
“In…?”
“Your notes,” he said. “Everyone in the class already knows what my quirk is. I’m armed mostly with a scarf and sarcasm, and I’m trying to fight a guy who can make explosions with his hands. I need all the advantage I can possibly find. I assumed that’s why you keep those notes.”
Midoriya ran his hand over his notebook. “Well, not entirely, but… you really want to hear about them? You want to hear my analysis of our classmates’ quirks?”
“Yes,” he said, “all of it.”
Shinsou expected Midoriya to drop his facade of cheerfulness, to refuse to share even the smallest scrap of information, to laugh at Shinsou for even trying. Instead, the look on his face was a mix of surprise and delight, as if Shinsou had presented him with a basket full of puppies and told him All Might was adopting him.
Shinsou suddenly realized he had made a different mistake than the one he thought he was making.
“That’d be great!” Midoriya enthused. “Wanna go get some lunch? We can swap all our notes and theories on what everyone’s quirks do. I bet you have some really good insight from brainwashing people and getting them to do things!”
The way he said that last part so casually, as if it wasn’t a problem at all that Shinsou’s power was brainwashing, was disconcerting to him. The fact that he genuinely seemed to want to help Shinsou, and was currently dragging him out of the front door so he could spill all of his classmates’ combat weaknesses over lunch, was even more disconcerting.
He wasn’t friends with Midoriya, but Midoriya sure seemed to think he was.
“I’ve asked her before, and she won’t tell me,” said Midoriya, using his chopsticks to fish for something in his bowl of ramen. “But she has food preferences, so I think she can taste normally. Or else she can selectively turn it off and on.”
“So Asui has to taste all the criminals she catches,” said Shinsou. “Now I’m sorry I asked.”
“Haha, yeah, that’s pretty awful, isn’t it?”
Midoriya and Shinsou had gotten passes to leave the campus for lunch, heading out to a small ramen shop on the corner a couple blocks away. It was a bright, cold winter day without a cloud in the sky, a stark pale sun overhead keeping the temperature above freezing. Midoriya had chattered on about quirks, lunch preferences, and the care package he had gotten from his mom, while Shinsou watched his breath fog and wondered if this was the longest conversation he’d ever had with a classmate.
In fact, the conversation about their classmates’ quirks had gone on so long that Shinsou had long since forgotten about his own quirk, fluttering at the back of his mind whenever Midoriya responded to him. People tended to talk to him so infrequently that he was usually acutely aware of it. It wasn’t very often that he could push all of that to the side and just exist like a normal person.
“Asui’s actually pretty hard for me to fight,” Midoriya was saying between mouthfuls of ramen. “She doesn’t have a lot of strength compared to some of the other people in the class, but she’s very evasive. She’s good at using the terrain to her advantage.”
Shinsou nodded. “Evasiveness – that’s something I’ve been working on a lot with Aizawa. I might never be a match for villains with physical combat quirks, so the ability to dodge will probably save my life.”
“Does that ever bother you? Worrying about people with combat-oriented quirks.” Midoriya was fidgeting with his chopsticks.
“It’s something I’ve had to accept.” Shinsou took a sip of broth, looking up at Midoriya, suddenly aware of the differences between them again. Midoriya would rarely, if ever, have to worry about a villain matching him in strength or combat prowess. “It’s part of the risks every pro hero takes.”
The truth was that he usually tried not to think about it too hard, or else he might start losing his nerve entirely. He could tell himself all day long that he understood the risks of a hero career and that he was fine with the possibility of dying, but a private piece of him was still terrified. It was one of the many things that kept him up at night, the thought of encountering someone with a dangerous quirk he didn’t have a hope of beating. In his anxious nightmares, no one ever noticed he had gone missing until his body was recovered and identified, just another dead hero-hopeful in over his head.
Midoriya was nervously picking at a paper napkin. “I guess it’s not really the same thing, but I do kind of get it. I haven’t always had the best control of my quirk, and I sometimes I worry about it failing me when I really need it.” There was a troubled look in his eyes. “I don’t want to fail someone who really needs me.”
There it was again. Midoriya always acted way too jumpy and uncertain for someone who had a great quirk like his, even if he did have some trouble controlling it in the past. He wondered what Midoriya’s story was, but not enough to press.
Midoriya snapped out of his gloom. “Well, if you ever want to practice evading, I’d love to spar with you again!” His smile held a hint of mischief. “You said you’d fight with me again, right?”
“That’s right!” He was definitely eager to have a rematch with Midoriya, although… “I’m not entirely sure what you’d get out of it, though.” Shinsou scowled at the remnants of his ramen. He hated to admit it, but the truth was that as soon as his quirk was out of the picture, Midoriya had been able to effortlessly curb stomp him.
“Didn’t I just say that evasive opponents are the ones I have the hardest time with?”
Shinsou's bitterness was spoiling his earlier good mood. “You don’t need to spar with me out of pity, Midoriya.”
“What?” Midoriya seemed surprised. “That’s not it at all. Yeah, you haven’t had as much practice as the the people in the hero course to begin with, but you improved a ton between the sports festival and joint training.”
Now Shinsou was surprised. He hadn’t expected Midoriya to even notice.
“We both want to be heroes more than anything, right? I think it’d be lots of fun to spar with you and help each other improve.” His eyes were shining, his smile painfully sincere. “You know, I’ve studied heroes ever since I was a little kid, and I’ve never seen one with a quirk like yours. I actually really admire that you’re going for it even though people told you not to. I think you’re going to be an amazing hero!”
That was the moment that Shinsou Hitoshi’s heart stopped.
Hearing something like that from a peer – that’d he’d be a great hero with a cool quirk – was something he had dreamed about thousands of times. He’d thought the desire had been burned out of him for good in middle school, where his classmates rarely spoke with him unless it was to call him a villain in the making, and that his only hope for gaining that kind of respect would be to get his hero license and show them.
And yet, here was Izuku Midoriya, the pride of Class 1-A, just dropping this praise on him like it was nothing.
Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, he’d look back at this exact moment with some frequency. He’d think about it when he was fighting a particularly strong opponent, when he would lie awake at night doubting his life choices, when he and Midoriya would arrive home from patrolling, collapsing on the couch in a tangled pile of exhaustion. He’d think about the boy with the bright green eyes who, for some reason, decided to believe in him, and how that single decision pulled his life off the course he thought he was on forever.
One night, when he was feeling uncharacteristically sentimental (and more than slightly drunk), he’d tell Midoriya as much.
“Good thing I suggested we go for ramen, then,” he said, smiling as big as he did back then.
Shinsou drank the rest of his beer, slamming it down on the table and grinning at his partner. “What, you don’t regret it yet?”
Midoriya didn’t hesitate at all. “Never.”
That was still far in Shinsou’s future, though. At the time, he was still just a sixteen year old boy who had been completely blindsided by a flood of confusing emotions.
In a move that he found quite reasonable at the time, he decided to push them aside, chalking up his strong feelings to the fact that he was jealous of Midoriya and wanted to be his rival.
Because Shinsou Hitoshi was not friends with Midoriya Izuku.