Work Text:
Izuku's shadow leaps and twists, a dozen reaching hands and curls of hair.
He cuts quite an impressive figure, albeit in a slightly terrifying sort of way, as the darkness throbs and grows around him, all ivy and thorns except abyssal, reaching, tearing at the very air. (All the class can smell is ozone and the damp misery of forgotten corners-)
"Looks like one of the NPCs has some decent stats, or at least some buffs-" The words choke off, lost to a howl, one that is not the villain's own, a reverberating thing, wolves to the moon and a parent's grief, and the shadows arc, lance, spiking up and over and down again. They pierce at whatever they can strike, sharp in a way that should be impossible for mere shadows, but the way that they're moving already is unnatural, disconcerting, ineffable. It is wrong.
Wrong or not, the shadows-arcs-blades are working, in a sense, because they have punched straight through the villain, through shoulders and guts and arms, pinning him mid-air, a moth kept behind glass, mouth open, eyes wide akin to wings held out, vivid yet helpless.
Blood drips to the ground, slow, macabre.
Izuku does not laugh, because his mouth is still agape, head hanging back from the sheer force of the howl that tore from him only moments ago, and yet something seems to shudder through them all, through every student and villain and hero, something darkly amused, no matter that it settles bitter and acidic upon the back of their tongues. No matter that something feels like it doesn't belong (that something is still oh-so wrong, unnatural, somewhere caught between nails against a chalkboard and velvet pushed the wrong way except it is more ragged, more ugly, the visceral edges of fingertips burying around and beneath your ribs, scratching against your very lungs-). Because Izuku, all at once, is dragging his head back down, chin almost cracking back down against his own chest with how it sags forward, and he wavers, perhaps blood-drunk except it is hypnotic, a serpent's weave, head bobbing, the shadows shifting with him, around him, against him.
The shadows swell, bulge (there is a heavier gush of blood that floods the ground, staining the villain's shoes-), and retract, all in a blink, coming to halo their master-slave-sanctuary once more.
Izuku does laugh, then, except it is not a happy thing. It is despair-tainted victory, the blood upon a loved one's face, and it echoes through every single person there. (It ripples, the butterfly wings reaping their reward, their miniature tsunami beneath a black-lit sky-)
Shigaraki, nameless to the class though he may still be, falls to the ground. He does not get up.
Izuku does not turn away, however. No, his entire being continues to sway and throb, an abyss-wrought heart, at the top of the plaza stairs. He watches on, like this, with eyes that cannot be seen by the class (even those looking directly upon his face cannot see them, cannot hope to meet his gaze, not when there is some inexplicable cast of shadow and light leaving his face a thing of constellations thrown upon an oddly pale void, not when what makes him most human is lost-), as Kurogiri, his name, too, unknown to them all, swells himself, the indigo and violet shades to his shadows somehow so much flatter, so much less, when Izuku is right there.
Regardless, the villains, the monster and the body and the dozens of others, disappear all at once, swallowed whole.
The blood is left behind.
Izuku does not speak, no victory or break-down or disappointment to be found; no, he remains still, vigilante, an eye of the shadow-storm that has yet to subside in the slightest. For a minute, perhaps, or at least a count of twenty three breaths, nothing changes. He does not back down, and none of the rst of the class dare to move.
Finally, however, Aizawa-sensei takes a single step forwards, and the gravity upon them all seems to evaporate, at least in part, even though Izuku hasn't moved a single muscle.
"They're gone, Problem Child." Something, a hum, most likely, a soft little reverberation that seems to contradict the shifting bruise-swelling shadows that haven't settled yet, slips out, an acknowledgement of some sort. Izuku still hasn't moved. Not even in amongst the thrashing chaos of the darkness that seems to seep out of his very skin.
Safe to say, the class are very, very glad that Izuku is a part of their class, and that they will have him to grow beside, rather than fight against.
Doubly so when he turns back to them all with a bright, slightly lopsided smile, green eyes soft, before promptly collapsing... Aizawa-sensei calling him a Problem Child already makes far too much sense.