Work Text:
Izuku frowns as he highlights yet another appearance of the word ‘pique’ spelled as ‘peak.’ “Can we make a drinking game out of this?”
“We can make a drinking game out of anything,” Ashido replies, hunched over her own laptop on the other end of the couch and poring over Izuku’s essay with a wide-toothed comb. “I’m willing to overlook the fact that we’re both severely underage and also don’t have access to alcohol if you are.” She glances over at Izuku’s screen. On it is her own essay rough draft, looking considerably more marked-up than Izuku’s on hers. “What’s the game for?”
“How many times you misspell ‘pique.’”
“And how do you spell it?”
“P-I-Q-U-E. You pique someone’s interest, with a Q, and a peak is, like, the top of a mountain. This is supposed to be a paper about Ella Minnow Pea, how did you even find yourself needing to say ‘pique’ so much?”
“Maybe it piqued my interest that he left in three ‘the’s and one ‘officer,’ but we still call it a lipogram.”
“You’re thinking of Gadsby, and that was just the 1939 first edition.”
“Oh, my mistake. It’s a dumb word, anyway, who even said to put a Q in there?”
“An idiot, probably.”
“Probably. We could just delete the letter from the universe entirely and everything would be exactly the same.”
“Exactly. Boom, pow, it’s gone, oh no. Anyway.” Izuku spins his laptop around to show her he’s finished. “I think I’ve salvaged as much as I can out of this.”
“That’s fair. Pretty much all I caught on yours was that you used ‘I’ and ‘my’ a couple times.”
“Shoot, I forgot about the third person thing. Thanks.” Shutting his laptop, Izuku wakes up his phone to check the time. “Wow, cutting it pretty close. Call it a night?”
“You were supposed to do my math homework.”
“Help with your math homework.”
“Whatever soothes your conscience.” Izuku glances around the common area, but most everyone else had already slipped off for the night. He can hear the microwave running in the kitchen, but that’s definitely the sound of popcorn beneath the hum, and Kaminari’s the only one that likes the dorm-provided food. Not really the place to drum up math help. “It doesn’t help you right now, but Kacchan gets up pretty early. If you can catch him right when he wakes up, you might convince him to help. He’s good at math.”
“Hunt down Bakugou and force him to do my homework, got it.” Ashido leans over to sock Izuku in the arm, then pushes up to her feet and heads to her room. Izuku isn’t long after her, delaying a couple minutes to pick up the odd wrapper here, a pen cap there. It had been a class-wide study night in the common room, which really isn’t that unusual anymore. Doing homework in your own dorm is fine for focus, but it gets boring fast. More people means more distractions, sure, but it also means getting direct explanations instead of turning to google.
It also also means that Izuku is becoming very familiar with the dorm’s strict adherence to the concept of ‘lights out.’ Every time he’s been out here late enough to see it, the lights have turned off at precisely midnight, and red beams along the walls kicked on with just enough power to see the way back to his room. It’s not that you have to go to bed at that time, since you could always turn on a lamp in your dorm, but if the lights think it’s bedtime, Izuku isn’t one to argue with them.
In his room, he flips his laptop back open and navigates to his essay doc as he climbs into bed. Ashido hadn’t been kidding about how few corrections she’d made. It hardly takes him a couple minutes to go through and accept all the suggestions, and after one more read-through, he deems it good enough to turn in. Should’ve just printed it while he was downstairs, but whatever, he can print it off tomorrow.
He wakes up to a sore throat and a wet spot on his pillow, never a good combination—it usually means he’d been snoring, which tends to leave him feeling gross for the first couple hours of the day. A knock on the wall tears his attention away from this issue, and he hurries over to knock back. It’s become something of a ritual between him and Aoyama, that whoever wakes up first makes sure the other is up, too. He doesn’t really remember how it started, and more than anything else, he hopes Aoyama gets around to learning morse code sometime soon. That’d be much more interesting. Not to mention, honestly? It wouldn’t be that hard, either. Twenty-five letters isn’t that much to learn.
Once he’s dressed and ready, Izuku heads out, his backpack slung over his shoulder and his laptop tucked under his arm. He just has to stop at the printer, so he’s not terribly behind. He’s never been the most punctual person either, though, so he makes his steps that much faster to compensate.
“Hey,” Uraraka says as she passes him walking out of the common room. Izuku waves back, knowing by her pace that she’s on a mission to something important. So is he, to be fair. He also waves at Kirishima and Sato, who are sprawled over a couple of the couches and looking like they’d rather be asleep. Makes sense—they were some of the last to turn in before Ashido and Izuku.
As he walks, he flips open his laptop and puts his essay in line to print. Only one job ahead of him, which is a good sign. First, he doesn’t have to wait long, and second, it means he’s not the only person waiting until the last minute. His relief is shortly explained away when he sees who it is that beat him to the printer.
“Thanks again,” Ashido says when she notices him sidling up next to her. “I wanted to get Yaoyorozu to do it, but she says reading my stuff makes her eyes hurt.”
“No worries, you caught me on that first person stuff, so call it even.”
“No way, you totally fixed more on mine. I, like, owe you a life debt now.”
“I’m never one to turn down free stuff, but it was just the same word a bunch of times. Not really hard work, once I figured out what you were trying to say.”
Ashido frowns, a sharp retort dissipating on the tip of her tongue. “It’s—what?”
“With—you know, with—huh.” Izuku frowns, trying to call up what he’d been talking about. “I don’t know, there was a word you spelled wrong a bunch of times, so I corrected it.”
“I don’t know about all that.” Giving him a mock-hard look, Ashido pulls the last pages out of the printer before it starts spitting out Izuku’s essay. “Anyway. Thanks.”
“No problem.” He says it more to the printer than to her, still stuck on figuring out what the word was. “Oh, duh.” He all but smacks his forehead at the realization of something so obvious. While the printer chugs along in the background, he opens up Ashido’s doc and reloads it to a version that had been typed before he started correcting it. At least, that’s what he’d meant to do. In actuality, he gets distracted by his keyboard, and specifically by how he’s pretty sure the tab key didn’t use to be that big.
The printer chirps to let him know it’s finished, kicking him back into gear. He can worry about that later, but if he’s late for class, he’ll have bigger problems than—than whatever this is.
Once he’s seated in homeroom, he pulls his laptop back out to frown more intently at the keyboard.
“What’d the poor thing do to you?” Sero asks, leaning over for a better look. “Is it broken? Mine’s broken, it doesn’t recognize when I click the letter N anymore. I have to copy and paste it every time.”
“Does the tab key look too big?” Izuku asks.
“No? That’s not—is it supposed to be?”
“I don’t know, that’s the problem. It feels like there’s something missing.”
“Like what?”
“Exactly!”
Jirou kicks her chair back onto its hind legs so she can prop her elbows on Sero’s desk and look at him upside-down. “I warned you not to talk to him this early in the morning, he never makes sense.”
“Usually it’s, like, an understandable level of weird, though.”
“Something’s missing,” Izuku repeats, feeling a little more assured of it this time. Saying something is missing versus saying it feels like that’s the case, like that could make such an astronomical difference.
“What would go there instead?” Jirou asks. At the look Sero gives her, she continues, “If you’re going to get trapped in this, you might as well humor him. So, what? Another function key? An alt option?”
Izuku buries his face in his hands and peeks through his fingers at the blurry space where the tab, A, and W meet. “What would go between them?”
“Shut up,” Bakugou suggests. “Have your weird meltdown in silence.”
“It’s not command, option, control, or function,” Izuku mumbles. “It’s not shift or caps, obviously not tab, not delete or return, I’ve got one through zero, I have the tilde, I have—”
“Do you have all the letters?”
Something sparks in the back of Izuku’s mind at that. “Actually—”
“He’s messing with you,” Jirou says. She pulls out her own laptop and passes it to Izuku, letting him see their identical keyboards. “If yours is missing something, everyone’s would be. You’re probably just tired.”
“A, B, C,” Izuku says under his breath, ticking off on his fingers one, two, three. When he reaches X, Y, Z, he finds himself counting twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. That’s—is that right? “Is—how many letters are in the alphabet?”
Jirou and Sero stare at him.
“Humor me.”
“Twenty-five,” Jirou says, likely wanting this to be over sooner than later.
“Twenty-six, if you count the ampersand, and per se and thing,” Sero adds.
“No one counts that.”
“No one counts your mom.”
Izuku wants to pursue this further, is desperate for it, but unfortunately, he attends a school that cares about its students paying attention.
“Let’s get this over with,” Aizawa sighs, appearing from under his desk and snapping a piece of paper straight. “Some announcements first.”
Izuku hears none of them. He knows, but nothing knows, that there should be twenty-six, because he always thought that was a weird number to settle on. Like, why not sacrifice W? It’s just two U’s pushed together. Twenty-five would be a much nicer, more round number, which is why he knows it’s not right.
He trips and fumbles through the school day in a daze, not bringing up the keyboard situation to anyone else. If it’s nothing, no sense getting anyone else riled up, and if it’s something, no sense mentioning it without also having a solution. This does mean, of course, that he catches the attention of some of the more astute observers in the class.
“You doing okay?” Iida asks. Izuku flinches back into reality, belatedly noticing how the room had emptied as everyone headed to lunch. “You’ve been kind of out of it today. I told you to go to bed sooner, how late were you—”
“Something’s wrong,” Izuku cuts in. “I don’t know if it’s a bad wrong, because it’s not like the world is ending or anything, but something’s different.”
Iida takes this in stride and drops into Sero’s seat. “What’s going on?”
“This is gonna sound stupid.”
“Say it anyway.”
“Can you sing the alphabet for me?”
To his credit, only a little bit of Iida’s expression makes it through before he schools his features into a careful neutral. He makes it about halfway through before Izuku’s mind snags on it.
“Repeat those last ones for me?”
More of his expression succeeds this time. “L, M, N, O, P, R, S—”
“It’s in there.” Izuku nods, growing more certain of it despite the doubt on Iida’s face. That doubt is what keeps him from pressing the issue, though, which is probably for the best. Iida isn’t the type to commit to a bit about misinformation, especially not with such gusto. He tends to be pretty obvious about this sort of thing, which has Izuku convinced that it’s got to be something else. Something that only he seems to feel the absence of. He resolves to take it up with everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist.
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“Well, that’s not helpful.”
“Well, I never claimed to be.”
Izuku huffs and sits up a few inches before throwing himself back down on Todoroki’s bed. He knows the guy can be difficult when you actually want something from him, but he didn’t know it was going to be this bad. Like, ‘you should’ve talked to Aoyama instead’ bad. “I agree that it’s stupid, but it’s bugging me, and you seem like the type that might know a thing or two about it.”
“A thing or two about the alphabet mysteriously shrinking, and you being the only one to notice.”
“Yes!” He throws his arms up for good measure, then lets them flop back down at his sides. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Do about the shrinking alphabet.”
“Repeating the phrase doesn’t make it funnier.”
Todoroki lifts a hand in a ‘hold on’ gesture and mimes holding a phone to his ear. “Yeah, hi, Moonlighter’s Newbie Stand-Up Night? I’m gonna have to cancel, it’s—yeah, he didn’t—he says I’m not funny. I know, I know. Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay, and we’re still on for improv group, right? Okay, see you then. Okay, buh-bye.”
Izuku fixes him with a flat look. “Dude.”
“Click,” Todoroki replies, pretending to hang up the phone on his other hand. “Look, what do you want me to do about it?”
“Provide answers, I don’t know! Put up a bunch of sticky notes and red string and stare at it with a scowl before suddenly bursting into my room at three in the morning because you had a breakthrough!”
“I see you’ve put some thought into this.”
“Shut up.”
Apparently assured that Izuku has been sufficiently bothered, Todoroki bites back his next retort and switches to pacing a small trail in front of his door. In the corner of his mind, Izuku wonders whether he should be so stricken with how Todoroki looks like a dog waiting to be let out.
“Is—”
“Shh, let me think.”
Izuku presses his lips shut and opts to survey Todoroki’s room instead. The walls are a worn yellow, with flecks of green implying the remnants of painted leaves. It’s impressive how weathered they appear, as if the paint were decades old and not, like, a year. Last semester, Yaoyorozu got on a decoration kick, creating all manner of interior design she could and sticking it wherever she could find space. The evidence of this is still scattered across various dorms—Izuku has a fancy side table that’s basically a glorified coaster next to his bed—but Todoroki’s room escaped almost scot-free. The only thing visibly not-Todoroki-implemented is a standing mirror trimmed in gold against the far wall, reflecting Izuku’s face back at him with a furrowed brow and a frown. Guess it shouldn’t have been such a surprise that Iida could tell something was up with him.
“What are you doing?” he asks when Todoroki cuts his pacing short to dig around in his desk.
Todoroki holds up a pad of yellow sticky notes and a pen. “Might as well go the whole nine yards, right? Start with the basics.” He poises the pen over the pad.
“It’s somewhere in the zone of O, P, R, S,” Izuku says. He’d narrowed it down over the course of the day, but it’s hard to notice a missing lyric in a song that everyone else, internet included, swears is complete. “It’s supposed to be between the tab, W, A, and 1 key on a Latin-script keyboard. It was definitely in Ashido’s essay a bunch, once I edited it.”
“Pause.” Todoroki points his pen at Izuku. “Have you seriously not just tried opening her essay? I feel like the words you claim were changed would show up as comic book curse words or something.”
“I’m not that stupid.” Izuku kicks his foot out, letting his heel knock against his backpack on the floor. “Laptop’s in there, already open to her essay. Whatever it was, it got magic mumbo jumbo changed to something else that didn’t use the letter.”
“Convenient.”
“Weird.”
“It can be both.”
“Name one time that’s been true.”
“You.”
“I don’t know how to begin arguing with that.”
“Because you can’t. Okay, what else?”
“You aren’t gonna check the essay?”
Todoroki lifts an eyebrow. “If I’m humoring you for this goof, you really think that buck stops at trusting an essay’s contents when I haven’t even seen the original?”
“Fair. But, like, that’s it. I don’t think anything else happened.”
“Put it on a timeline.” At Izuku’s dubious look, he clarifies, “We know it’s not around now, and we know it was around sometime before you guys went to bed, right? What happened between then and now?”
“Just editing.”
“Any random sparks of lightning or inexplicable earth tremors that happened during this alleged ‘editing?’” Todoroki puts bunny fingers around the word.
“No, just goofing off. She asked about math and I recommended Kacchan. We were the last ones done, besides Kaminari making popcorn. Um. She mentioned a few first person slips in mine, I commented on whatever the word was that’s gone now—”
“Pause. What was the comment?”
“Just that it came up a lot. I said we could make a drinking game out of it, and—” Izuku sits up to stare at Todoroki. “She said we should just erase the letter from existence, since it’s a stupid letter, and now it’s gone.”
“You think Ashido erased a letter because she’s a bad speller?”
“I don’t know! It’s the only thing I’ve said so far that doesn’t involve me losing some sum of my marbles!”
“I think the first indication that you’re losing it is that you said ‘some sum’ and pretended like it was a totally normal pair of words. Anyway, how would she even do that? It’s not like she’d have another power on top of her acid, right?”
Izuku’s mind snags on something in there. “Sorry, what did you just call it?”
“I took home first prize in my elementary school’s pronoun game tournament.”
“Ashido’s acid, you called it a power.”
“Sure did.”
“Why?”
A smile tugs at the corner of Todoroki’s mouth. “What, pray tell, do you suggest I call it instead?”
Not for the last time tonight, Izuku throws his hands in the air. “I don’t know! Whatever, just—never mind, I guess.”
“Sure. So, is there anything else, before we circle back to the foregone conclusion that I need to talk to resident mandatory reporter Aizawa?”
“I don’t think so? She said we should delete the letter, I agreed and said it’s good as gone, and we went to bed.” He shrugs. “Nothing.”
“It’s astonishing how little awareness you have.” Todoroki crosses the room to sit next to Izuku and grabs a pillow to run his fingernails along the seam. “Pretend I’m Ashido.”
“Done.”
“Gee, you know what’s a dumb letter? B. Who even uses it?”
“There’s a whole movie about it.”
“It’s important to me that you know that that movie was about honey and the American judiciary system and not the second grapheme of the alphabet, but I digress.”
“Also romance.”
“He was using her.”
“He was a bee!”
“Fine. J, then. No one uses J.”
At this exact instant, Izuku can name three separate people in 1A alone who would probably object to that, but fine. “Yeah, J’s worthless.”
“Except that one guy from the music school show. It’s his favorite letter.”
“Are you trying to help or not?”
“When have I ever been willing to help with no strings attached?”
“When you showed up to help Iida and me fight Stain.”
“Bettering my own self-image, but I see your point. Anyway. J sucks.”
“Sure.”
“I am trying to get you to say it’s gone.”
“Oh. Uh, sure, but one second first.” Izuku leans forward to fish a scrap of paper out of his backpack—a crumpled old history worksheet, but the back is blank. He scribbles out the alphabet as it is now, with an underline from O to S and a frowny face beneath it. “Okay, I’m gonna put this somewhere safe, just as a point of reference.”
“Because this is definitely going to work, and isn’t just an inexplicable flight of fancy you decided to drown in.”
“Actually, I’m really hoping this doesn't work, because I don’t know how I’m gonna handle not being able to say ‘just’ if it does.”
“It’ll be a massive tragedy. Just say ‘nur,’ it’s German for just.”
“I will take that into consideration.”
“Now say the line already, I have math homework to plagiarize.”
“J is a stupid letter, and it’s gone. Boom, pow, sis boom bah, rah rah rah.”
“Awesome. Get out of my room.”
Izuku didn’t have hopes in either direction for Todoroki’s idea. For some reason he couldn’t place, the instant Todoroki kicked him out of his room, Izuku was overcome with a wave of exhaustion, so pressing that he barely made it back to his own dorm before collapsing into a heap against his bed. Small miracles alone were responsible for his not sleeping straight through the time he needed to finish the day’s homework.
“Hello, Deku? You in there?”
Meet the small miracle at hand.
Izuku stretches his arms over his head and winces at the cracking bones in his ears, then rubs the sleep from his eyes and pretends not to be as bewildered as he is. Uraraka stands at his door, wearing a look of concern and holding a styrofoam container.
She lifts it in explanation and says, “You slept through dinner, so I snuck some off for you. Spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti,” Izuku echoes, trying to shake the fog from his mind. It’s an odd prickling sense that does most of the work, needling at the corners of his every thought as he tries to place words on his tongue. “Spaghetti,” he repeats.
“You good?” Uraraka nudges the door shut behind her and moves to sit at Izuku’s desk, putting the container on top of it. “You seemed sort of out of it today. Iida said he saw you disappear into Todoroki’s room, and he hasn’t heard from you since, which is never a good sign.”
“Never a good sign,” Izuku agrees. He grabs the blanket bunched up around him (he doesn't remember climbing under the covers) to steady himself.
“So, yes?”
“Yes?”
“You’re good? Or no? Because I can see if Aizawa—”
“Not Aizawa,” Izuku blurts. He’s not terribly sure why the idea is so debilitating, but the only clear thing he knows is that Aizawa does not need to be involved in whatever this is. If this is anything at all. His fingers wring their way down the blanket and toward the hem of his hoodie, then snake into the pocket, where they alight on a piece of paper.
“Um,” Uraraka says, watching Izuku bolt upright for no apparent reason as he treats this newfound treasure as if it were worth more than one of those fancy eggs from the movies. “I can leave to you it, if—”
Izuku cuts her off with a flippantly waved hand, already on his feet and hurrying to her side. He holds the paper in front of her face, watching her frown at it. “Tell me what you see.”
“The alphabet? What’s the game here?”
“Read it for me. Please.” Izuku forces all his willpower into holding still enough that the paper doesn’t tremble in his hands, wanting to eliminate every possible variable from the test. His heart plummets to his shoes when she nears the midpoint.
“H, I—oh, what? Hang on.” She frowns and leans closer to the paper, as if a careful inspection might explain away the weird doodle. “H, I, I’m skipping whatever that is, K, L—”
“That’s enough,” Izuku cuts in, folding the paper in half and booking it for his door. A lifetime of manners is all that reminds him to turn back and add, “Thanks for the food!”
“Sure?” Uraraka lifts a hand in farewell, left alone in the room of some dude who’s apparently making up new letters as a side hustle.
Out in the hall, Izuku races to the stairs and bolts up them two at a time, not bothering to notice how short his breath comes by the third flight. He practically flies down the fifth floor hallway on a beeline for Todoroki’s room, where he doesn’t bother with knocking before throwing open the door.
“What if I was having sex in here?” Todoroki asks.
To his credit, Izuku and, absurdly, lifts a hand to cover his eyes.
“Nope, it’s too late for that.”
As Izuku’s mind processes that he willingly decided to go interact with Todoroki once more, he lowers his hand and goes to take a seat on the edge of Todoroki’s bed. Todoroki takes the alphabet paper when offered it, his face expressionless as he reads.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“It’s the paper I wrote earlier. That was today, right?” Full disclosure, Izuku’s internal clock still hasn’t exactly caught up to actual time.
“I mean, yeah, but—”
“And Uraraka doesn’t recognize this letter.” Izuku points to the letter that falls between I and K, though frustratingly, he finds himself unable to recall how it sounds, much less how he might use it.
“Probably because that’s not a real letter. You made it up.”
“You watched me write this before.”
“Maybe you made a copy.”
“Who would go to that sort of length to trick everybody into thinking someone’s losing it? And rope Uraraka into it, no less?”
“Me. I would one hundred percent do that.”
“Well, that’s shitty.”
“Thank you.”
“Fine, whatever.” Izuku huffs and takes the paper back, like reading it might bring the letter back. Or keep the others from disappearing, who knows? Speaking of which– “So obviously it’s my fault somehow, right?”
“You think?”
“Both times this happened now, it’s because I said a letter didn’t exist anymore.”
“Sounds to me like a monkey’s paw sentence, and you erased the letter A on accident right then.”
“I did not erase the—nope, I’m not repeating it, either, this isn’t a ‘Coolsville sucks’ situation.”
“So you agree? You think Coolsville sucks?”
“I didn’t say—god, whatever, that’s not the point. What do we do now?”
“We should probably start with you not erasing any more letters, for one. Why would you do that on purpose, anyway?”
“It was your idea!”
“Haha. Yeah.”
“It’s not—never mind, shut up!” Izuku takes a deep breath, knowing little good comes of trying to argue with Todoroki. “So, okay. What now?”
“I say you delete the letter D.”
“Elaborate.”
“I think it would be funny to watch Bakugou struggle to come up with a different thing to call you. Deleting D knocks out Deku and bastard.”
“And my actual name.”
“And my name, so I think it’s a win-win all around.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Was it supposed to be?” At Izuku’s expression, Todoroki course-corrects. “The obvious thing is to stop deleting letters.”
“Enlightening.”
“Or you delete all of them at once, and bring humanity into a prosperous new age, free of the constraints of Latin script.”
“Or that.” Izuku scowls to himself, because he honestly doesn’t know what he expects Todoroki to say, so he can’t exactly get irritated when he doesn’t say whatever that is. His first shot with this sort of thing (like ‘this sort of thing’ is a common enough occurrence to have a tier list) would be to ask Iida, but it’s too ridiculous for him to entertain solutions. He might hit up All Might, but—well, but what? He doesn’t know. The same ‘but what’ that keeps him from turning to Aizawa, or his mom, or anyone else who’d probably have the proper authority on this sort of thing.
“What about Yaoyorozu?”
“What about her?” Izuku’s response comes out on its own, more surprised at Todoroki’s apparent telepathy than the suggestion he hadn’t bothered to think of himself.
“Think she could create the letter back into existence?”
“Letters, plural.”
“Still pretending the first one was real, huh?”
“I’m not taking the bait.”
“As long as you acknowledged it was there.”
“So, okay. Yaoyorozu. Think she could help?”
“Honestly, no, but I think it’d be funny if you tried to explain it to her in a way that didn’t make things worse.”
“I appreciate the support.” Using this as inspiration, Izuku gets to his feet and heads for the door.
Todoroki hurries after him, saying, “Wait up, I have to see this.”
They find Yaoyorozu down in the common room, her usual haunt if she can help it. Easier to let the flunkies come to her.
“If it’s math, you have to get in line,” she says before Izuku or Todoroki can get a word in. “I’m finishing up mine now, and I’m helping Kyouka next.”
“I wanted—” Izuku cuts himself off when he sees the girl Yaoyorozu indicated with a head tilt. Technically, yes, Kyouka, but isn’t she— “Kyouka?”
“That’s me,” she replies, idly twirling an earphone cord.
“Your first name?”
“What are we playing at here? Because if it’s improv, you legally have to tell me, or it’s entrapment.”
For the life of him, Izuku cannot figure out why it sounds so strange—after all, he and Bakugou use first names, sort of. Maybe Kyouka’s, like, a really good friend with everyone she meets, so— “Not the point,” he says more to himself than to the others. “Look, not to be rude, but do you mind, uh. Y’know?” He gestures toward the kitchen.
Rather than comply, she simply shrugs and pulls on a pair of headphones. The music from them is loud enough for Izuku to hear.
“What do we want, then?” Yaoyorozu asks.
Izuku glances at Todoroki, who holds his hands up and shakes his head. “Not my circus, only my entertainment.”
“Fine. This is gonna sound ridiculous, but I think letters are disappearing.”
Yaoyorozu looks between the two of them, clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop. “That’s it?”
Izuku pulls the paper from his pocket and thrusts it at her. “Read it.” She glances over it, only catching the error on the second time through.
“Here.” She points between the I and the K. “That’s the game, right?”
“Fast study, at least. Yeah, that was a letter up until, like, this morning. Then, bam, gone.”
“So, why are we telling me this?”
“Can you bring it back?”
“Can I bring back the concept of something that doesn’t exist?”
“Pretty much.”
“This is remarkably less funny than I was promised,” Todoroki pitches in.
“I didn’t promise it being funny at all.”
“And yet you managed to under-deliver.”
“Look, sorry, but I don’t think I can help you,” Yaoyorozu says as she passes back the paper. “I still don’t even get what you’re trying to have me do.”
“Bring a letter back from non-existence.”
“Can I assume it’s your fault the letter at hand left existence in the first place?”
“Pretty much.”
“How do you even do that?”
“Go on, show her,” Todoroki says.
“I’m not gonna delete a letter for proof.”
“Pick a letter,” Todoroki suggests to Yaoyorozu. “Write it in your notebook with your pen, so it’s obvious we didn’t forge it if and when it disappears—”
“You don’t need the ‘if,’ y’know.”
“How about C?”
“C works.” Yaoyorozu nods and writes it in her notebook.
“I would like to point out that there is no reason to get rid of another letter—”
“Do it anyway.”
Izuku glares at Todoroki. “Fine. Fine! Bam, C no longer exists. Yeehaw, goodbye forever.”
“Goodbye forever,” Todoroki agrees.
“So, how long until this works?”
“It happened over the span of, like, a few hours last time,” Izuku says.
It does not take a few hours this time. It barely takes more than ten minutes, and that number is only from Izuku having a vague idea of when the brain fog set in. It was a little less debilitating this time, now that he’s grown used to it after more than one round through the ringer.
It’s pure habit to deliver himself to Todoroki’s room by now, but this time, it’s at two in the morning, mouth stuffed with Uraraka’s dinner delivery from earlier that he forgot about. He still doesn’t bother with waiting at the door for a response, knowing Todoroki won’t be too mad either way. Probably.
“Good morning,” Todoroki says, seated at his desk and swiftly shutting his laptop before Izuku gets a look at whatever he was doing. “I’m guessing you’re here for a reason?”
Izuku gives him the paper. “It’s gone.”
“Woohoo, goodbye forever!”
“This is not a good thing.”
“And explain how it’s a bad thing? How has this remotely altered your life so far?”
“It’s not like I know yet, it’s only been, like, a day. I won’t know about the rippling new stuff that fast.”
“A day that you know of. It might’ve been happening longer. Maybe the alphabet used to be thirty letters. Or fifty.”
“You are not making me feel better.”
“Midoriya, from the bottom of my heart, making you feel better has never been my intention.” Todoroki returns the paper to him.
Izuku huffs and drops onto Todoroki’s bed. “We have to do something.”
“I thought the plan was to make Yaoyorozu do something.”
“Yeah, maybe, but I get the feeling she wouldn’t know where to start. We at least have the advantage of knowing what’s going on.”
“Do we?”
“I don’t know! More than her, at least, and that’s pretty rare.”
Todoroki frowns, an interesting new expression when he’s been solidly neutral through this whole situation, as far as Izuku’s seen. “Look. It’s very funny to see you try to sort through this stuff, but I don’t think you’re getting anything done, not like this, and definitely not at butt-freak early in the morning.”
Internally, Izuku wonders where Todoroki learned the sanitized version of the proper swear word.
“Go to bed, and tomorrow morning, we’ll get up early and talk to Aizawa. Don’t look so surprised, obviously I’m going to be behind you. Now go get some sleep. We'll deal with it in the morning.”
Left with no other option that’s immediately viable (and have faith, Izuku’s mind is sprinting through them at top speeds for an alternative), Izuku lets his head drop forward, weighing down the rest of his torso until his fingers dangle near his toes. “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” he tells his knees.
“I feel like I’ve been pretty up front about not worrying whether you want to hear what I have to say. Bye.”
In tandem with feeling Todoroki nudging his head, Izuku looks on as his feet shuffle themselves to the door, then out into the hall, where he straightens and sneaks a look around. No one leaps out to make fun of him, nor do streamers and balloons drop from the rafters to inform him he’s been summarily pranked. Well, fine. He returns to his own room.
The next morning, Izuku frowns at the gunk in his eyes and tries to remember why he ought to be so exhausted. Maybe the impatient rapping on his door knows.
“What?” he asks as he swings it open with one hand, the other wiping at his eyes.
“Morning,” Todoroki says. “Get dressed.”
Izuku frowns. “Good morning to you, too.”
“I said that.”
“You—never mind, give me a minute.” Izuku turns to his dresser, the brain fog taking its sweet time exiting his head. He hears the door sigh shut behind him. “Sure, wait in here.”
“Thanks.” Ignoring the sound of Todoroki prodding at the stuff on his desk, Izuku tugs on a fresh T-shirt and yesterday’s denim. They’ve been in the dorms and seen enough by now that no one bothers with modesty anymore. Todoroki’s no doubt too busy digging through Izuku’s things to pay any mind. “Hey, mind shutting your eyes for a minute?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Great, thanks.” Izuku runs his fingers over the side of the top drawer and grabs the paper. Aizawa might say it’s a forgery or something, that they wrote it after to add to the bit, but his heart seizes up far worse at the thought of not bringing it. Then, to put his mind at ease before they set out, his eyes skim over the graphite. He remembers removing that one, and there’s the one Todoroki said to do, and—
“What’s up?” Todoroki asks.
“You’re supposed to have your eyes shut.”
“And you’re supposed to pretend that nothing’s wrong, so I guess we’re both disappointments. What’s up?”
Instead of answering, Izuku turns the paper for Todoroki to see and points at the thing between the K and the M. “Do you remember this one?”
“Is this part of the bit?”
“I said this isn’t a bit.”
“Yeah, but it’s funny to see you get worked up trying to make me trust you.”
Izuku puts on the meanest expression he knows of.
“But yeah, no, I don’t know that one.”
“And we didn’t get rid of it.”
“Didn’t we? How do you think it’s gone if it wasn’t—”
“I mean, we didn’t. The first one was the Ashido thing, fine, then you said to get rid of the next one, and the third from Yaoyorozu—”
“We ought to find her today, too, after Aizawa.”
“But not this one. I know dinero to doughnuts that this one wasn’t me.”
“Okay. Is there anything that gets fixed if we stand around here trying to figure it out, instead of going to Aizawa?”
Izuku frowns. “I guess not.”
“Great. Now hurry up, I’m not in the habit of—I don’t know, being patient, I guess.”
This, Izuku agrees with. He hurries after Todoroki out of his dorm, down the stairs, outside, then over and into UA proper. To his immense surprise, Aizawa is in the room when they arrive—in the room and awake, mind.
As if knowing the surprise hitting Izuku, Todoroki says, “I asked him to be here before we start today, to ask about your thing.”
“You say that as if it isn’t your thing, too, now.”
“Keeping my fingerprints off soon-to-be issues is one of my hobbies.”
“You seem to have a profusion of those.”
“I’m made of droves.”
That sounds rather south of right, but Izuku has more pressing matters. “Mr. Aizawa,” he says, standing at the edge of the main desk, “I have a weird thing.”
“A thing that won’t be better suited to asking the nurse?”
His phrasing sets off sirens in Izuku’s head—anyone knows the nurse has a name, but for some reason, Izuku doesn’t find it when he goes to bring it up. Okay.
“I don’t know. I was hoping you might. Know, I mean.”
“The paper,” Todoroki reminds him. Good thing someone has their head on straight here. Izuku passes the paper to Aizawa, who reads over it a few times.
“What about it?”
“Are there any you don’t know?”
With an unimpressed eyebrow making its way up his forehead, Aizawa points at the same four Izuku had gone over in his dorm. “Is this the funny part?”
“Try to erase Midoriya’s power,” Todoroki suggests. “Then read it again at the same time.”
“His power doesn’t work if he isn’t seeing the target,” Izuku says, before Aizawa has time to point out that Izuku doesn’t have a power to erase.
“Shoot. Um—” Todoroki spins on one foot, his eyes stopping at a figure outside the room. He darts out, grabs them by an arm, and tugs them in at Izuku’s side.
“Hi, Kendo.”
“Hey.” She turns from Todoroki to Izuku, then to Aizawa. “Why am I here?”
“You’re going to read off this paper,” Todoroki says, taking it from Aizawa, “and say if there’s anything imaginary on it.” He nods at Aizawa as Kendo takes the paper. Izuku tries very hard to ignore the weirded-out sensation of Aizawa staring daggers at him, a shiver dripping down his fingertips.
Nowhere near soon enough, Kendo ahems, and Aizawa turns his gaze off of Izuku, who sags with the freedom.
“Yeah,” she says, “these four I don’t get.” To the utter dismay of Izuku, she points to the same four in turn. He wants to dig a pit and die in it. That’s an exaggeration. Maybe.
“Pardon me,” Izuku says to Aizawa. Then, turning toward the rest of the empty room, he buries his head in his hands and groans, “God damn it! God freaking—I don’t—shitting ass damn it!”
“Better?” Aizawa deadpans.
“Sorry. I—it’s not—there’s not even a way to whine about it, that’s how many are missing. There’s a stronger swear, I know there is, somewhere, and I don’t even have it!” Izuku shakes his head. “Never mind, this was stupid. I don’t know why I thought it might work.”
“Pretty absurd,” agrees the guy whose main hobby is making Izuku suffer. “That’s it,” he adds, nodding at Kendo. She shrugs and heads out, Izuku assumes to inform 1-B about how 1-A has no remaining grip on its summed sanity.
As she goes, Yaoyorozu enters with a happy greeting, one Izuku meets with an irritated groan.
“If you aren’t here to say you figured out how to fix it,” he says, “say so now. My heart won’t survive the suspense.”
“Fix what?”
“That there’s twenty-two bits in the standard grapheme,” Todoroki says.
“See? See! You hear it, right? You hear how dumb that sounds? There used to be a better way to say that sort of thing, I swear!”
“He got a bad grade on the essay,” Todoroki adds.
“I am going to give you harm.”
“Super bad.”
“I am going to remove the—” Izuku bites down on his threat, knowing the powers that be might think he means it and remove—nope, he won’t even think it, thank you kind.
The powers that be, however, do not give any shits about what Izuku does and does not think.
“Wait, this one too, now,” Todoroki says. This earns Izuku’s attention despite the sudden haze entering his brain, and he turns around to see Todoroki to point at the spot between E and G. Great, that’s—that’s very good. A synonym to very good.
“God damn it,” Izuku mutters.
“How did this start?” Yaoyorozu asks. Izuku bets it took but the tiniest guess to know that he’s bursting at the seams, and she’s treading with enough wariness to surprise a mouse. “Maybe we take your steps in reverse—”
“It did start with the essay,” Izuku admits. “Ashido and I were reviewing one another’s, and she had the same typo reappearing, and said, ‘Why not get erase bit that makes it be wrong?’ It was getting on in the hour, I was tired, I agreed, and now there’s three and one others missing in addition to that one.”
“The essay about the book?”
Izuku knows his manners proper enough not to bite out a mean retort at her. “Yeah.”
“So why not try what the book does?”
This prods at something in Izuku’s head, something that had been hesitant but persistent up to now. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t get paid enough to put up with this,” Aizawa mutters, dropping to his knees and wedging under his desk to wait out the trio.
“Someone had to make a shorter string than what the Nevin guy had, right?”
“Right, and?”
“Maybe you have to do the same, and the others stop being gone, too.”
“But that book was put out in oh-one. They’ve made other strings in the interim.”
“What about one word?” Todoroki suggests. “One word with the missing bits in it.”
“I’ve never been one to do those games,” Izuku admits. It’s worth a shot, though. He wants to get Iida’s input on it, but he worries that might negate his attempts, phoning a buddy.
Todoroki takes a pen out and writes down the missing bits toward the bottom on the paper. They’re uneven, given that he doesn’t know what they are, but they do what they need to. Izuku’s brows press together as he reads them over, trying to put them in a good order. Nothing.
“The one that went with Ashido’s essay isn’t here,” he points out.
“Maybe we don’t need that one. You didn’t seem to mind it being gone.”
“I mind now.”
“I’m not sure that word even exists,” Yaoyorozu says. “How do we even know it does?”
“Yeah,” Izuku sighs. “I don’t know.”
“Make one up,” Todoroki suggests.
“What?”
“You make things,” he says. “Why not make up this word, given we need it so bad?”
“Do we?” Yaoyorozu asks.
“We do,” Izuku says, his tone brooking no argument. He won’t make it more than a week without righting this wrong.
“So I’m going to point at the bits in turn,” Todoroki says, “and Izuku sounds it out, and Yaoyorozu makes it so.”
“That’s stupid,” Izuku says. “I’m down.”
Yaoyorozu shakes her head. “How are you going to sound it out without knowing how they sound to begin with?”
“That’s a good point.”
“Have Aizawa erase his power again? Kendo didn’t know them, but maybe you do when Aizawa erases them being gone.”
“No,” Aizawa says through the desk.
“Pretty pretty por ayudenos?”
“You speak—”
“Not important. Sir?”
Aizawa’s eyes pop up over the desk to stare at Izuku, his hair rising at the same time.
“Okay, thanks. Midoriya?”
Izuku shrugs. In truth, yeah, he hadn’t tried it with Kendo. Worth a shot.
“Promise I get to sit down and be done with this either way?” Yaoyorozu asks.
“Promise.” Todoroki extends a pinky, and Yaoyorozu shakes it with her entire hand. “Midoriya?”
“Uh. Yeah. Go, I guess.” As Todoroki moves his hand over the page, Izuku sounds out the bits. What he thinks they are, anyway—he’s not sure he has them right, despite it being but a day with them gone, and despite Aizawa’s erasing them being gone, repeating negative though it is. He repeats it with other noises, too, to make up the missing one he took with Ashido’s essay. At the end, he says, “Okay, now Yaoyorozu, you say it. Write it, too.”
Yaoyorozu raises her brows, but doesn’t protest, doesn’t mention that the bits haven’t returned to her memory with Izuku’s narration. “Quijcliff?”
“Quijcliff,” Izuku agrees, relief flooding him as he, resident teenage boy, remembers the curse word that had evaded him for so long. “Fuck, that was such a waste of time!”
“I feel like we could’ve come up with a better word to bring them back,” Todoroki notes.
“Next time, I’m stealing a letter from your name.”
“I’m terrified,” Shouto says.