Chapter Text
Shouto wakes up, and he’s walking.
The fact registers in the back of his mind first, very nearly undetectable, his body almost seeming to move on its own. It takes a few seconds for him to fully process that he’s even awake, and when he does, he comes to an abrupt stop mid-step.
He begins thinking, then, really. The world around him becomes marginally clearer, fading into view in grainy blocks, only pieces of it fully decipherable like an online video game buffering on Wi-Fi that doesn’t actually work. He blinks. Two buildings on either side of him fade into view. The textures aren’t quite loaded yet, but the blocks are there nonetheless.
The sky above Shouto is cloudless and there’s sunlight on the asphalt roughly six or seven meters in front of him, but he remains in the dark. It occurs to him then, from that observation, that he’s in an alleyway. The naturally lit street is empty, which tells him that he’s currently in one of the simulation arenas on UA’s campus.
Shouto blinks again and looks around him. His surroundings have successfully loaded and his brain’s frame rate is finally up to speed. He’s alone, as he’d figured before the world was fully rendered. These artificial civilian areas are usually reserved for team exercises, so he would assume that’s what’s going on. Perhaps, he thinks, his team had split up to surround the opposing classmates. Divide-and-conquer could be the ideal strategy if he were grouped with and against the right people.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t know who his teammates even are, as he was physically there when they were assigned, but he was somewhere else entirely.
This is an unfortunately timed example of a rather perplexing phenomenon that occurs with Shouto that he’s come to call ‘powering off.’ At seemingly random and, in this case, extremely inopportune times, the proverbial Wi-Fi router keeping his brain attached to the world around him will malfunction, thus resulting in an abrupt disconnect. All awareness he has of his surroundings, his actions and his life in general vanishes. He still exists during these intervals, but his soul is nowhere to be found.
Frankly, not even he knows exactly where he goes when he’s in this state. He gave it the name ‘sleep mode,’ as if his mind were a closed laptop with the power still technically on, but not being used.
He’d been hoping, since before he’d even started going to UA, that something like this wouldn’t occur. It’s imperative to have all the information you can in times like this, but every time this happens, he doesn’t have any recollection of what happened between powering off and waking up.
The diversity of Quirks within his class tends to mean that each person’s role in each strategy and plan is both essential and highly specific or situational. He’s in trouble now because, since he doesn’t know which people are on his team or who he’s fighting, he doesn’t even know how to carry himself in this exercise, let alone whoever else is on his side.
He could stay in this alley and wait to encounter someone, but knowing his Quirk and its versatility, his teammates are likely depending on it for key aspects of whatever plan they came up with. He could leave the alley and look for people, guessing whether they’re on his team based on their initial reaction to his presence, but what then? How would his allies react if he told them he forgot the plan? That he wasn’t even conscious when and if he agreed to it?
There isn’t much of a choice here. If he stays in the shade, he will inevitably end up contributing nothing to the exercise whatsoever. Though he doesn’t know the plan, jumping in with no knowledge in this scenario is better than not jumping in at all. He’s been thinking for far too long anyway, he decides, taking tentative strides toward the light ahead of him.
At the mouth of the alley, he peers around the corner and scans the tall buildings surrounding him. There doesn’t seem to be anyone nearby, so he steps out into the sunlight, turns to the right and begins walking, keeping his eye out for anyone who may be hiding in the other alleys or on the rooftops.
He seems to forget to look directly above him, though, because before he even knows anything out of the ordinary had placed itself there, it’s already found him. His vision is obstructed with a shining red light from above his head, just behind him. Stopping in his tracks, he turns around and tilts his head back to see a giant spider-like robot poised on the side of the false office building. One of its thin mechanical legs is jutted out in Shouto’s direction, a small cylindrical device attached to the very end of it pointing at him and scanning him up and down.
This is not something he’d even entertained the thought of. UA loves using robots to assist in their curriculum; he’s seen those small ones carry injured students from Heroics class accidents over to Recovery Girl’s office more times than he could count, so it isn’t terribly shocking. However, Shouto had figured that sending groups of students to fight them in an arena was more or less an entrance exam or Sports Festival-exclusive ordeal, at least before they updated the guidelines for the sake of Quirk inclusivity. He’s proven wrong, though, by the droid hanging from the brick in front of him.
Looking up at it, his first instinct is to coat it in ice and let gravity take it from there while he makes an escape. Prepared to do just that, he dips into a stance, bringing his right hand back behind him and willing the air around it to cool.
Two short beeping noises sounding from his collarbone pulls his attention away from the robot. He drops his gaze to the source of the sound: a speaker roughly the size of a coin had been clipped to his suit, just below the collar on the right side. Present Mic’s voice bursts from it, “Todoroki! You’ve been found! Go ahead and make your way down to the control room, listener!”
Mic’s overly enthusiastic words imply that this is a stealth exercise, which would definitely explain why the sunny street is so hopelessly empty. That, coupled with the complete silence that had taken until just now to register in Shouto’s mind, honestly should have been a glaring red flag that his conclusion of the mission was wrong. They also imply that he lost, and against his better judgment, a bitter pang of frustration slices through his heart.
Perhaps he’s more disoriented than he’d thought - of course he wasn’t supposed to just walk out of that alley without a plan. He could’ve at least proceeded with more caution. Even if this were what he’d assumed it was, wandering aimlessly is not a good idea whatsoever.
Shouto’s tendency to assume circumstances and act on a whim is something he’s been chipping away at since the midterms, in which he was paired with Yaoyorozu and fighting against Mr. Aizawa. Evidently, there’s still ample room for improvement. He inwardly kicks himself for it as he pivots and heads in the general direction he thinks he’ll find the gates in.
It doesn’t take much time to find the exit, and familiarity helps him from there - this particular arena has a door near the entrance that leads to a surveillance room, displaying camera feed from various areas within its concrete walls. The room is dark when he opens the door, overhead lights having been dimmed, and the glow from the numerous screens are the main source of the room’s light. Upon his entry, the two people by the surveillance wall - Present Mic and Ashido Mina - turn to face him.
Ashido smiles when she sees him. “Didn’t think you’d be the one joining me this early!” she says, power-walking over to him.
Shouto thinks. “That bot is hard to spot in the moment. Caught me by surprise.”
He hears Present Mic pipe up from the opposite end of the room. “I did warn you listeners! It’s a formidable opponent in the stealth category! Quite the challenge, don’t ya’ think?”
From the corner of his eye, Ashido nods fervently in response. “I’m disappointed I got caught so early on,” Shouto says, “I’ve been trying to work on my approaches to certain challenges. This could’ve been a great opportunity.”
Ashido nudges him with her elbow. “I saw you get scanned. It almost felt unfair.” A giggle slips from her lips. “It was like you forgot what we were doing.”
She’s not wrong. She’s actually spot-on, if only for the basic explanation of it all. It makes him somewhat uneasy.
He suspects, maybe, that his classmates know about his tendency to power off. He sees it in their faces - in Ashido’s, now. Her eyes are searching his own, and her smiling mouth is open just a little, and he knows there’s a question poised just behind her teeth.
He’s done this song and dance before. There are always questions, when he reboots. He hopes every time, to the empty air, that nobody knew he was gone. Time and again, though, he’s proven wrong by their side-eyes in his peripheral vision. If he pays close attention, he can almost hear the questions they hold on their tongues.
It wouldn’t bother him as much if they didn’t swallow their inquiries, every time without fail, before they ever reached the air.
The minds of the curious and the throats of the hesitant are the two most prolific killers. Often, they hunt together. They are where the greatest mysteries, and their answers, go to die. Shouto knows this well, as his hands are by no means clean. Any questions his friends keep tucked away could be matched with answers Shouto doesn’t know how to find. Lost somewhere between his windpipe and his diaphragm, they find their final resting place. He’s aware this makes him complicit - nay, a murderer - like the rest of them.
He chooses, still, to ignore the ghosts of all the misplaced conclusions knocking on either side of his head in morse code. He covers his ears and wishes it away. The effort is futile, but he can fool himself until he powers off again.
“In the moment, I guess I slipped up,” he says, too carefully, “How did you get caught?”
“Tripped,” she points to a dusty scratch mark on the toe of her boot. “It was enough noise to get that thing running straight for me! I barely had time to react!”
Mic shrugs,“That’s what classes are for! You’ve got plenty of time to improve, listeners, so don’t be too hard on yourselves, okay? Give it your best next time!”
The teacher’s words did wonders for boosting morale, at least to Ashido, if seeing her begin to bounce in place was any indicator. “You got it! Plus Ultra, and all that jazz!”
Two short beeps - the same ones that rang out when Shouto was scanned - sounded from a speaker on the desk at the surveillance wall. Mic turned, read the name that popped up on the screen, and brought a small microphone up to his face. “Kirishima, good job, but you were found! Give yourself a pat on the back and head on down to the control room!”
Shouto hears a small snort from Ashido. “Kiri’s kinda clunky, isn’t he? With his strategies?” Her voice is quiet now. She faces him. “He isn’t built for stealth exercises. Don’t tell him I said that.” That last sentence is nearly a whisper, accompanied by her placing her index finger on her lip in a ‘shushing’ gesture.
The grin still steady on her face tells Shouto that she said that last bit in jest. He notices that she often insults her friends in a joking way - she says it’s meant to be endearing. It’s a strange show of affection, but those on the receiving end of the banter laugh along with it and even throw in their own light-hearted judgments, so Shouto decides it’s no cause for concern. He acknowledges her playfulness with a small smile. She beams ever-wider in response.
“Man, that thing’s tough,” Kirishima says, the sentence punctuated by the door shutting behind him, “Didn’t even know it was there before it got me! ‘S like a frickin’ ninja!”
Ashido hums in response. “That makes three of us,” she says, bumping Kirishima’s shoulder with a loose fist. “I dunno how such a huge hunk of metal is so quiet!”
“It’s got killer listening, too,” Kirishima adds.
“Like Jirou and Shouji!”
Shouto decides to join in. “I can imagine it wasn’t easy to make something like that. I wonder what kind of technology was required to build it.”
Kirishima responds, “It’s gotta have a whole slew of bona fide geniuses behind it, right?”
“Ooh! I just had a thought,” Ashido bounces in place again, “What if you could downsize it and make it a support item? Pocket-sized villain locator!”
“Not bad. It could scale large buildings and piles of rubble for rescue missions, too. That could be really useful.”
“Man, that’d cut the search time in half, wouldn’t it? If it’s small enough, it’d be able to fit into hard-to-reach places the heroes can’t get to yet!”
“Now that’s a breakthrough in the making, you three!” Mic chimes in, “There’s no shortage of people trapped in places we can’t see and not getting rescued because there isn’t a way to get to them. There are only so many reconnaissance and detection Quirks out there, too, so that’d be a big help for agencies that don’t have a contact on speed-dial for things like that.”
Shouto nods. “If the smaller robot has the same acute sense of hearing as the one being used for this exercise, it could locate people based on sound and scan their whereabouts. It’d be much easier to get through a rescue mission with no casualties.”
“Yeah! Throw in a thermal camera, and it’s a perfectly fine-tuned people-finding machine. That’d be the ultimate hot item for hero agencies everywhere! Everyone would want their hands on a few dozen of those bad boys.”
Two more short beeps turn Mic’s attention away from the trio’s back-and-forth. “Ah, Ojiro, almost there! Great job, but head on back to the control room!”
The conversation unfolds further as more students filter in and offer their own input on the support item idea. Shouto eventually stops talking and makes an attempt at just listening. At some point, though, the words of the group overlap and roll into one loud, droning buzz in his ear.
This happens. Shouto tends to drop conversations with his friends when he reaches his capacity for noise, when he can no longer get their words past his eardrum and into his brain. This seems to be an issue any time there are more than three people’s voices to filter at once. Should he try, he feels strangely similar to a shaken soda can - it’s a feeling he’s powered off from before.
With the frankly unwanted thought of powering off, Shouto elects to tune out of the conversation. Evidently, he hadn’t registered just how many people had been caught since the exchange began; only Hagakure, Satou and Jirou are left.
Jirou is perched atop a building, lone jack planted firmly in the concrete roof. Their eyes are closed, and their brow furrows as their focus intensifies. Hagakure stands on the opposite side of the street, near the mouth of an alley, pressing herself up against the wall just out of view of the spider-like robot. It’s in the background, crawling up the side of the building Satou is hiding in. He’d ducked under an open window on the third floor, just above where the robot is. Its front left leg lands above the window, the front right holding its scanner inching closer to the opening.
The robot is bathed in red light, the same that had covered Shouto earlier. A buzzer sounds over the speaker.
Hagakure had stepped out from the opening and scanned the robot.
It makes a whirring noise and powers down.
Shouto doesn’t even notice his classmates had stopped talking, that the air had stilled, until it springs to life again. The cheers echo from the walls of the surveillance room where there was silence not a second before, jump-starting Shouto’s heart. In spite of himself, he covers his right ear to quiet the noise as Present Mic holds down a yellow button.
“Hagakure has found the villain!” Present Mic announces over the loudspeakers, “Hagakure, Jirou and Satou, meet back with the rest of us in the control room, and we’ll all head back to class together!”
The excited chatter continues even upon the arrival of the remaining three classmates. They seem to have no trouble joining in as the class begins to walk back to the main school building. The sight of a group of students talking amongst themselves would seem normal to anyone else, but to Shouto, it’s utter cacophony. Every word he hears is a shake of the proverbial can, the pressure making his lungs feel small and painting his vision in grays.
There’s a knock amongst the chaos. He pushes it away. Not now.
The voices of his classmates are blending in a way they didn’t in the control room. Before, they’d at least sounded like voices - now it’s something like the droning of static. His limbs feel how it sounds.
It’s like his brain’s own low battery warning. He’s powering off again. There’s another knock, or a tap on his shoulder. He can’t tell which, but he shakes it off once more.
Stay awake .
Another knock. The door he’d kept barred and well-checked opens. The answer he’d lost lets itself in.
—
“...taste the same as pears? Those are, like, a solid ten on the gross scale, dude.”
“Pears only kind of suck, don’t be dramatic. Dragon fruit’s got a good texture, like a kiwi. And it looks sick to boot. It’s got the superior snack-ability over pears by a landslide.”
Shouto finds himself rebooting in the common room, the darkness outside the window indicating that it’s somewhat late. He glances around and sees Tokoyami and Bakugou on either side of him; Tokoyami’s jotting something down in a journal and Bakugou is laser-focused on a Rubix cube.
Behind him in the kitchen, Satou is absentmindedly stirring something on the stove, chatting with Midoriya and Yaoyorozu. He hears something about today’s English homework.
The rest of his classmates seem to be in the middle of a very heated debate about fruit. Almost everyone is sitting, but Sero is up and pacing in front of a whiteboard, dry erase marker in hand. The board has the same word he’d heard a few seconds ago, Snack-Ability, in bold lettering. It sits above a chart listing different fruits, including but not limited to ‘mangoes,’ ‘watermelon,’ and ‘tomatoes.’ There’s a varying amount of names under each one, mostly even with some outliers.
After a quick skim, Shouto finds that neither his given nor his family name are anywhere on the board. However, there’s one name that stands out from the rest, one that doesn’t belong to anyone in the class, written in Katakana rather than Kanji.
There’s a ‘Kristen’ under ‘raspberries.’
Something inexplicable is clawing at the back of his mind at that name, something like familiarity, and Shouto shifts uncomfortably in his spot on the couch at the feeling.
“So,” Sero begins, “It’s currently a tie between raspberries and apples. We need a tie breaker.”
“Bakugou? Wanna give us your precious input?” Uraraka asks from next to Sero, tone carrying a light-hearted lilt.
“Don’t like fruit,” Bakugou replies, ice in his voice, not bothering to look up from his Rubix cube.
“Yes he does!” Midoriya calls from the kitchen, “Don’t be a bummer, Kacchan. Tell them whether you like raspberries or apples more.”
The blonde grumbles, gaze still not budging from the cube in his hands.
“I could put in a vote,” Shouto speaks over Bakugou’s growl.
And, there it is: the same look he’s gotten every time he’s rebooted, from everybody, all at once. Even Bakugou’s hands have paused, red eyes burning holes into the right side of Shouto’s head.
His face and ears heat up despite his effort to use his Quirk to keep it neutral.
He watches Sero swallow and kill a question in real time.
“Sure, man,” they say, “What’s your vote for?”
Shouto’s eye falls once again on the name from before. Kristen.
It dawns on him, then, why that name had felt eerily familiar before. Kristen is the name of a character from a podcast he’d listened to back in middle school. She was his favorite character.
There are questions Shouto is holding for himself, now, too. Is he going by Kristen in sleep mode? Why is he saying raspberries are ‘snack-able?’ Whatever that means, it must imply that they’re good. Why is he going by a fictional character’s name while in sleep mode? Why are his friends going along with it?
Sero must have a keen eye from that far away, to know which name Shouto’s looking at. “An online friend of mine,” they say. “I called to ask for her opinion. Don’t worry about it.”
That’s a really good excuse. Shouto would believe it, if not for one crucial detail.
If that had been the case, and they didn’t know about sleep mode, they wouldn’t have had to remind him about why that name is on the board, surely. Had that been true, they would’ve assumed Shouto would remember, surely.
“You good?” he hears Shinsou say.
And, is there any point in trying to remain consistent in a situation that is anything but that?
“Apples,” Shouto says, finally, “I’ve never liked raspberries.”
He punctuates his sentence by pulling himself up off of the couch and turning toward the elevators. He can feel the entire class’s eyes following him as he walks away, and he doesn’t get any of what Satou is cooking, but it’s fine.
He’s fine.
He’s Shouto. He’s Shouto 100% of the time, even when he’s not. Sero may have been lying about ‘Kristen’ being their internet friend, but that doesn’t take away what’s true. He’s Shouto, even when he goes by Kristen.
Sleep mode is to blame for this, surely. People are unpredictable when they’re not really conscious, and he hadn’t really been conscious much at all today. It’s just an off day, he figures. The decision to ask his friends to call him by a different name was likely an impulsive one. It’s no big deal to try something new like that, all things considered. It doesn’t matter.
It’s never mattered before now, at least. It didn't matter that the only Kristen he knew anything about was a fictional character he liked when he was younger. It didn’t matter that, sometimes, he’d sleep while he was awake. It didn’t matter.
And, if he can tell himself enough times, it still doesn’t.
There’s knocking, once more, as he enters his room. The halls in his haunted mansion of a skull echo with each knock, and he pretends, hopes, prays it’s not there.
There’s nothing there. There isn’t a ghost trying endlessly to tell him its name. There isn’t an unmarked grave deep in his chest cavity begging to be unearthed. There isn’t an answer waiting to be ripped away from the mud and the filth, and there’s no question to serve as the shovel. There’s no barely-burning life beating on the walls in his head just to be taken care of, to be looked at. There’s nothing. It’s just Shouto.
Kristen isn’t real. She doesn’t exist. She has no power if she doesn’t exist. She-
No. Wait.
No.
Shouto’s sure, he’s certain, that Kristen isn’t real. So, then, why…?
When did he start thinking of her as separate from himself? When did that start? When did she gain enough of a sense of reality, of power, that Shouto has to convince himself that she didn’t?
Is he really Shouto, 100% of the time? Is he?
Swallow the questions. Dig them a grave. Lay them to rest. We can bury them. It’ll be like they never existed.
He’s screaming at himself not to acknowledge it. He desperately wants to leave it alone, but there’s something endlessly incriminating about that thought that he notices right away, and it’s stolen all of his attention.
His voice is small, weak, as he chokes out, “We?”
The knocking stops.
The response, or lack thereof, makes perfect sense. It all clicks into place.
The answer, rotten and grotesque, is unearthed, muddy, limp and cold in his trembling hands.
He wants to bury it again, ten thousand times more, but he's sure the ground beneath him has disappeared.
We.