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It starts with a mirror.
At least, that’s where Shouta thinks it starts. His mind is fuzzy on the details now, the edges blurred and not so sharp as the world around him flickers and fades, misty dark clouds swallowing him whole.
A sudden, unexpected crack forms down the center. Clean, clear, crisp.
Red.
It echoes, bouncing off the walls of his mind in a cacophony of sound. Voices build at the edges, whispers that grab and tear and claw their way from the dark, tangible and whole only in the way that they are not.
He knows these voices. He knows he knows them. They rest intimately in his memories, and he thinks if only he could reach them, grasp them in his hands and pull them close, keep them safe and sound and whole, their light would spill forth and chase away the encroaching tide of fear-hate-anger-nothingness.
As that thought comes to pass, it’s as if another crack forms. Center to corner, bisecting the first in a small, splintering web of crumbling fractures. Not as clean. Not as crisp. Not as clear.
Just as red.
And then the mists swallow him whole.
“You know, if those bags get any deeper you could call them suitcases.”
Nemuri’s honeyed voice cuts through the early morning haze just a second before her perfectly manicured fingernail does, poking at his cheek and pulling at the skin beneath his eye without warning as he glares down at the malfunctioning coffee machine that has made it its own personal mission to slight him.
She’s lucky she’s one of the very few people permitted in his personal bubble, otherwise he might have snapped and damn well bitten her finger off.
Instead, Shouta chooses to ignore her poking and prodding, and asks, “Who’s looking to die today?”
Nemuri barks out a nervous sounding laugh, and he thinks he hears one or two of the other teachers sputter incoherently from the common room, “What?”
He sighs, and motions one hand toward the coffee pot, and she leans over his slumped shoulder to see for herself what he’s talking about.
A rumpled, half torn sticky note sticks to the side of the glass coffee pot. It’s clearly either been in someone’s pocket for far too long, or was already crumpled up and tossed, only to be pulled from the trash and reused for this purpose. Hastily scrawled lines that look to have been some sort of shopping list have been crossed out, and then beneath it, in red pen, something new has been written:
‘I broke it-will need replaced later.’
Of course, it’s unsigned.
“Oh no.” Nemuri sighs in a way that somehow manages to be empathetic and teasing all at the same time. She leans all her weight against his shoulder and sags, bringing one hand up to her forehead dramatically, “Sho Sho, whatever will you do?”
“Don’t call me that.”
Her snickers don’t die, even as he rolls her from his shoulder and she nearly brains herself on the counter. Serves her right.
While Shouta continues to question all his life choices, he hears another set of footfalls approach from behind, long in gait with the slight rub of leather dragging against itself, and he knows without having to look that his second partner has finally finished his criminally long morning routine.
“Sho! Nem!” Hizashi’s voice hovers on the edge of too loud, as always, but by the way his steps falter and his tone shifts to something softer, it’s evident he’s caught on to Shouta’s mood. He’s good at that, loathe as Shouta is to admit it, “Everything ok? You guys are usually up at the school already…”
Hizashi hooks his chin over Shouta’s shoulder and frowns, “Oh…”
Shouta sighs, and shrugs off partner two of two, then reaches up to rub the bridge of his nose, shifting a few seconds later to scratch an itch that’s formed beneath his right eye. Something suddenly feels off, as he does so, the skin too smooth, too wrong…
But the feeling fades as quickly as it arrived and he shakes his head and turns towards his partners, “I’ll be late coming back to the teacher’s dorms today. I have an extra training unit to guide for Class 1-A this afternoon, and then I have a meeting with Midoriya about the extra training for his quirks now that things are settling down again-“
Both Nemuri and Hizashi give him wide eyed stares before they turn to share a look with one another. The look that means they’re concerned over something he’s said but don’t know how to approach him about it.
He sighs. He’s really, really not in the mood for it this morning, “What is it?”
Hizashi clears his throat and takes a step forward, “Who are you meeting with for extra training?”
Shouta rolls his eyes, turning back to the counter to grab his unfortunately empty thermos, as well as the folders and notebooks he’ll need for his day, “The problem child.”
“Shouta… what? who?” Nemuri’s tone is downright incredulous, and it’s actually starting to piss him off.
“Midoriya Izu-“ He turns once again, spinning on his heel to face them. “-ku…?”
The kitchen is empty, Hizashi and Nemuri nowhere in sight. He hears nothing from the common room either, and that same, sudden off-ness from before strikes again, and with a vengeance. A stabbing pain prickles behind his right eye, and as he reaches up to cradle his head from the unexpected migraine, his knee throbs, and the nerves all along his leg light up in utter agony, as if it’s been branded and broken all flayed all at once.
He ultimately fails to bite back the cry that slips from between his teeth as the thermos and notebooks fall from his grasp, only moments before his legs buckle from beneath him. He tumbles forward and reaches out to grab the edge of a table, desperate to keep himself upright.
He does manage, but it’s a near enough thing that he has to stay hunched over for several long moments, grip tight enough to strain his knuckles white and chest refusing to expand as he tries to draw in several panicked breaths.
And then as soon as it had begun, the pain—both in his head, and leg—vanishes as if it had never existed.
“What the fuck?” Shouta hisses, reaching down to rub his knee without letting go of the table, “What was that?”
He lets his fingers kneed the flesh as his mind settles through its confusion, before slowly raising to stand straight once more. When no other strange phantom pains strike or linger, he takes a deep breath and lets it out, slow and controlled. “I know I’m getting old but this is ridiculous.”
Just as he crouches to retrieve his belongings his eye catches on an object left at the far end of the table, and he redirects his movement to reach for it instead.
Nemuri’s casual reading glasses. The fine, dainty frame is cold to the touch, with one hinge slightly bent enough that the screw has jostled loose. The temple is practically mangled, maybe even beyond repair.
The lens on the same side has a single crack bisecting it from upper corner to lower center.
Shouta gingerly drags the pad of one finger across the glass, surprised when it manages to be sharp enough to catch. A small bead of blood quickly seeps into the seam, staining it a macabre shade of red.
He curses, and glares, and for a brief moment catches his image in the curved surface of the lens, the offending, bloodstained crack slicing his reflection in two, right across his eye.
It sends a chill up his spine, it’s icy pull catching on each vertebrae one by one until it shifts to fill his chest with a sense of familiar foreboding. Why It’s familiar, and why it’s happening now he has no idea, he just knows that he doesn’t like the accompanying paranoia slowly taking root deep within the base of his skull.
He’s snapped from his daze when the phone in his pocket vibrates and dings.
Retrieving it and glancing down on the screen reveals one message from Nedzu, “You’re running late, Shouta. You need to hurry.”
“Shit!” And in his mad dash to gather his belongings and sprint out the door toward the school, that feeling of dread and off-ness subsides until he forgets it all together.
It starts with a mirror.
The mirror, he thinks, doesn’t belong. It’s foreign. An intruder in this space; this space that feels like it should be his own but at the same time is most certainly not.
There are more cracks now than before, he thinks. Where he gets that idea, he has no clue, but it’s there, and it’s not leaving him alone. Something about that fact is important his brain says. It shouts at him, pushing against the heavy cotton-like clouds blanketing his thoughts that promise to soothe, whispering sweet nothings and what could have beens and gentle reassurances that everything is going to be alright, Shouta. Flashes of gray and blue, bright and warm and so, so alive…
And for a brief moment, as his eyes inspect the unique shapes of the different mirror shards in front of him, he thinks he catches a glimpse of soft tanned skin, framed in wispy white.
He’s so enthralled by the sight and the pull of guilt-envy-love-hate, that when it splinters once again, courtesy of another jarring red crack that snaps loudly against his senses, he startles violently, scrambling back as he barks out a shout-blinks-
The shard he’d been so captivated by before—and what had been so interesting, he wonders? He thinks there had been something, someone—has split in two, small flecks of the reflective backing peeling away in spots to show the mirror’s wear, but not enough to distort the images within.
The smaller part, the part closer to the bottom edge of the mirror, is filled with a rich, grainy mix of purple and gold. He can’t really focus on the details, can’t tell exactly what he’s looking at but the colors shift and swirl together tauntingly, tantalizingly, teasing, as if to bleed forth from the bindings of the glass, curling around the contour of edges formed by the very cracks that seem to serve to keep it imprisoned. It threatens to invade. To twist and pervert something that should have always remained whole and healthy and pure.
It takes every ounce of willpower Shouta has, and maybe even some he doesn’t, some borrowed strength belonging to something else, some other entity housed within this... place to tear his gaze away and shift it to the other, newly formed shard.
It’s not as clear. Not as concise. At first it feels as if there’s nothing there, nothing to see, nothing to do.
Nothing worth caring for.
But something tugs at his core the moment those feeling bubble forth. Something that somehow feels both solid and ethereal pushes on him from behind and demands him to look, and so he does.
He sees green.
He sees untamable curls. He sees tears, and freckles and rounded cheeks and pain-pain-pain and writhing masses of black threatening to snuff out… to consume…
Flashes of bright, glowing teal light, tinted gold and blue at the edges, and smelling of ozone flood around him, overtake his thoughts, pull him forward and push him away all at once. They hide from him, but beg him to stay, plead and cry and shake.
‘Sensei.’
‘You’re running late, Shouta. You need to hurry.’
And all he knows is an overwhelming sense of terror, moments before the world around him collapses into a welcoming, nauseating shroud of darkness once more, and he’s dragged into the nothingness beyond.
Shouta leans over his desk to open the lowest drawer, so that he can retrieve the special packet he’d left within. With all of Midoriya’s new quirks, the teachers had come together over the course of several weeks to take the time to really sit down and hash out the specifics of how they can actually move forward with his training.
Even if Midoriya knows how each quirk works now, he’s hardly scratched the surface of his potential, and since they’re all finally in the loop and things at U.A. have settled into the new sort of normalcy they’ve adopted after… well, everything, it’s time to get to work. He won't fail any of these kids again, and he won't let the world fail Izuku Midoriya when so much has been shoved on his unprepared, inexperienced shoulders.
Now, if only this damn drawer would open.
He doesn’t know what it could be stuck on. He’s never had an issue with this drawer before, and he doesn’t keep much inside his desk in the classroom, typically preferring to keep all his things nice and neat and tidy in his personal office at the dorms.
He takes a small moment to just breathe through his annoyance, glancing up at his class to make sure they’re still behaving as normal—and they are, chatting amongst themselves. All nineteen of his students present and accounted for, and quietly discussing their upcoming weekend.
He leans back down and wraps his fingers around the handle of the drawer once again, and then braces himself to give it a more forceful tug.
And just as he does, just as he yanks on the handle, his thoughts stutter to a stop.
… Nineteen?
That… doesn’t seem right. That seems wrong. Why does that seem-
A loud crash forces him back to the present as the drawer is ripped from its track with a god-awful screech, clattering to the floor. He can’t help but snarl out a curse, “Fucking-“
“Sensei?” Someone asks, and his neck snaps up toward the speaker—Yaoyorozu has half risen from her chair and is leaning forward with a look of obvious concern on her features, Iida much the same. The rest of the class has gone silent, all of them watching with startled wide eyes and thinly drawn grimaces that don't belong on any of their faces, as far as he's concerned, “Is everything all right?”
He does his best to soothe his glare down into something softer. It’s not the kids' fault his desk decided to break, and it’s definitely not their fault he can’t seem to control his emotions today either, “Everything is fine. I apologize for startling you. You can all go back to-“
He pauses, lets his eyes dance across the familiar features of his students. Then does it once more for posterity, all while they continue to stare at him, awkwardly waiting for him to finish his sentence.
“Um… Sensei?” Yaoyorozu speaks again, straightening to her full height, “What’s-“
“Where is Midoriya?”
The students—nineteen of them—gawk and shift uncomfortably as they start to murmur and trade confused whispers and shrugs amongst themselves. Yaoyorozu and Iida glance over the heads of their peers to share that same damn look Nemuri and Hizashi like to share when they're concerned and don't know how to approach him, and Shouta swears he’s going to explode if things don’t start to make some goddamn sense around here-
“What is so difficult about that particular question?” He demands, “Where is Midoriya?”
Yaoyorozu makes to answer, but Bakugou, the skin of his face smooth and blemish free—and why in the world is that something to notice—beats her to it, “Who the fuck are you talking about old man?”
It’s Shouta’s turn to gape, and he does. He stares at the faces of each and every one of his students one by one, taking an especially long moment to glower down at Bakugou, who returns the look by nonchalantly leaning back in his chair and raising his brow at Shouta like he’s grown a second head.
“If this is some sort of prank, I swear to god I will make you all run quirkless laps until each and every one of you-“
The front of his boot catches the edge of the drawer with a soft thud, but the mind-numbing sensation of pain that accompanies the encounter is anything but equivalent, and he doubles over with a loud groan. His leg feels like it’s nothing more than a sack of skin filled with charcoal, burning itself to ash from within. The thought is so prevalent in his mind it’s almost as if he can smell the scent of sizzling, burning flesh, and the imagined sensation alone is nearly enough for him to lose his lunch right then and there, right at the front of his classroom, in front of nineteen of the top hero students in the country.
His eyes snap shut in a feeble attempt to combat the sudden cresting wave of dizziness. He nearly crumbles to the ground, but manages to lash out and snag the corner of his desk with one hand to steady himself at the last second.
He can’t open his eyes, can’t think, can barely breathe. He feels almost like he’s bleeding out, and now that the embers have crumbled away to dust, they’ve blown away on the wind and nothing remains of his leg but pins and needles and phantom aches that shouldn’t exist but somehow do.
It stinks obnoxiously of déjà vu, and wrong-wrong-wrongness. Everything feels so wrong.
So off.
“This isn’t right.” Shouta snarls to himself, “This isn’t right, something is wrong. What is going on?”
And then there is no pain at all. He’s simply hunched over, fingertips digging so hard into the laminated top of his desk that it’s quite possible they’ll bruise, eyes and teeth clenched so tightly together he threatens to give himself a tension headache, if he hasn't already chipped a damn tooth.
Slowly, oh so slowly, he opens his eyes.
The first thing he sees is the fucking drawer, sitting innocently on top of the classrooms scuffed white tiles.
Inside, nothing more than a stack of papers, as expected, topped by a thick manila folder.
A manila folder covered in thin, jagged lines, deep red and glistening, bisecting the surface in half, and then again into several smaller sections. Near the center sits one of his red marking pens, it’s inkwell an overflowing mess of clotted half-dried liquid. It must have exploded unexpectedly, painting this abstract rendition of a spiderweb across the folder’s front.
He leans over to retrieve the pen, and thankfully, he manages to do so without smearing the ink further. He can’t say his fingers are as lucky, they unfortunately come away stained, but it should be nothing a bit of soap and water won’t fix.
He takes another deep breath and uses his other hand to grab a clean corner of the folder, and as he does, his eyes catch on an old, crumbled sticky note he hadn’t noticed before. It’s stuck fast, right across the label tab at the top. Several lines of what appear to be someone’s old shopping list have been crossed out, and beneath them, in shakily scrawled kanji, in the very same shade of red streaked across the surface below:
‘Broken. Needs replaced.’
For some reason, it’s as if a monstrous cavern has opened up deep within Shouta’s core. Something twists and turns inside of him, as if his ribcage were a prison cell, and this thing inside him is desperately pulling the bars apart, trying to spread them far enough to break so that it can escape.
“Sensei, what’s going on? Do you need one of us to get recovery girl?” Iida’s voice cuts through his thoughts like a warm knife through butter, like a razorblade slicing open a box, like a custom made tanto slicing through flesh and muscle, cartilage and bone-
It startles him, and he glances up to see the boy standing ram-rod straight and eager right in front of his desk, “Class is just about to end, but I assure you…”
Normally, he wouldn’t actually tune any of his students out like this. He might act like he doesn’t hear them, like he ignores them and doesn’t know about the mischief they get up to… but he always listens.
This time, when he glances away from Iida and back down to the folder in his hands, he lets the cloying sounds around him fade away and retreats once more into his own head, his own thoughts, and he holds on tight.
Something is so, so wrong here. He just doesn’t know what. He doesn't know what, and he has a feeling that he's felt that quite frequently lately, even if he can't remember when.
But, he thinks… if he just-
His ink-stained fingers wrap gingerly around the edges of the sticky note, and he freezes.
He can’t remember why he wants to pull it away. What is so important about this folder? What is so important about this note?
He should just take care of it tomorrow. For now, he could go home and shuffle into bed with Hizashi and Nemuri and his cats. He could prop himself up against the pillows and do some grading, act annoyed when they join him and hog all the blankets, pretend he's not interested when one of them purrs sweetly in his ear-
The red lines form distinct, obscure shapes. Familiar shapes. Shapes he’s seen before but can’t place. They bring feelings he knows shouldn’t exist, but they do.
They exist, and they are important.
He just doesn’t know why.
There he goes feeling that feeling again.
‘You’re running late Shouta. You need to hurry.’
His fingers tighten on the crumpled paper, and with a shaky, stuttered exhale, he rips it off the folder.
It starts with a mirror.
A mirror that shouldn’t exist in this place, much like him. In fact, he’s not quite certain this place itself should exist at all, but it does.
It exists, and right at this very moment, that fact is important.
He reaches forward with shaking fingers, the tips of which are stained a deep scarlet red.
The same deep, foreboding red as the jagged, angry cracks that ruin the true reflection in the glass, breaking the image into separate shards that tell so many different intertwining stories.
Each and every one so very important.
Each story a unique experience of its own. Each story a single page, a single memory, a single detail. Each story a small sub-plot necessary to form an existence. A beginning. A middle. An end.
He brushes the surface of the mirror, and the world around him shudders in its existence. It breathes. It sobs. It exhales and then stills once more.
Anger-confusion-fear-love-hate-save him save him save him help him help him-
Carefully, he wraps his palms around the edge of the mirror and pulls it toward himself.
And when he looks up from its surface, the world splinters and cracks, vicious red lines slicing through the darkness like it’s a tangible thing—and here, in this place, maybe it is. The darkness reeks of malice and hope and ill-intent and despair and-
A swarming mass forms in the broken, twisted shards of the world around him. Black and writhing and all encompassing. It pleads to him, pushes him away, calls out to him, ignores him, lies to him, confesses.
It swarms and swells and retracts, billowing with azure-teal brilliance for a few frozen seconds in time, revealing wide, frantic, searing green eyes filled with tears. Dark curls that glow at the ends with a near neon level of brightness as he pours everything he has and then some into his fight. Freckles spanning across cheeks that still haven’t lost all their baby fat like stars across the night sky, too many to count. Deep, painful looking scars stretching across the skin belonging to someone far too young to carry such a cursed burden.
‘Sensei!’
And for a brief moment, before his thoughts begin to fade, the shadows dancing at the edges of both his vision and his mind, the voices calling out to him fading to a quite murmur… before it all drags him back down beneath the waves of misty darkness… he remembers.
‘I’m sorry I’m late Midoriya!’ He shouts, and hopes his voice isn’t being swallowed by this place. By this existence that shouldn’t exist, “I’m almost through. Hold on, just a bit longer!”