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Midoriya Izuku had always been… jumpy.
Since he was little, he would jump at the smallest sounds, get distracted by seemingly nothing, and wander off as if he was following someone or something he had seen, only to not remember what he was chasing when someone asked while scolding him not to wander off.
When he got old enough to have a quirk, it got worse. He would stare at walls and random objects as if seeing something no-one else could, and only stop when someone snapped him out of it. Teachers thought it was some kind of attention issue or lack of interest in whatever the class was doing, his classmates just thought it was because he was weird and quirkless, and his mom thought it was just a part of what made him her son.
He didn’t know why he was like this. Why he was always chasing things that weren’t there, staring at empty space or jumping at sounds that didn't exist, but the doctor his mom had taken him to told him it was anxiety, and he decided that was probably right. It certainly wasn’t a quirk; quirks were useful, and this just made him stressed.
By the time he started middle school, Izuku had managed to rein in the staring and random distractions, at least outwardly so people would stop teasing him (his classmates), calling him out for not paying attention (his teachers) or being worried about him (his mom), but it didn’t fix the root issue; the feeling that there was something always just out of his line of sight, something that was nearly three but not quite visible, and the constant prickling sensation at the back of his neck that screamed that something was watching. Waiting.
The psychologist his mom kept taking him to assumed this was because of the medication, or the fact that he was ‘getting used to it finally’, but Izuku had a feeling that maybe she didn’t like him all that much, and just wanted to end his sessions so she could talk to someone else and he didn’t entirely blame her.
By the time he was about to enter high school, she said it was because of his ‘lack of social life’, and he thought maybe that might actually be true.
Then he nearly died, and then he met All Might, and then he had a quirk, and everything got worse.
—
It started small, with the increase in shadows in the corners of his eyes and the prickling on the back of his neck becoming more… prickly, and for a while Izuku could manage.
He had years of pretending he didn’t feel those things under his belt, and a new training regime where sometimes being ‘twitchy’ wasn’t always a bad thing (sometimes being constantly aware of your peripheral vision made it easy to avoid falling microwaves and dodge incoming trash landslides), and so mostly the changes didn’t even really register.
But the shadows at the edges of his vision lingered, and the invisible eyes kept watching, and eventually he couldn’t ignore them any more.
He was constantly aware of everything, jumping at the slightest breeze against the back of his neck or the smallest noise from twenty feet away, and whole at first he’d been able to play it off as a result of the Everything that was happening all the time now his time at UA had started, but as the sports festival approached, he found himself unable to hide things from the people around him. Both All Might and Aizawa-sensei had had to snap him out of staring at barely perceptible shadows dancing in the corners of the room that disappeared when he looked away, and his classmates were always gently poking him when he ‘spaced out’. At least in that arena he had Kacchan to redirect, telling everyone that ‘he's always been weird like that. Just ignore it or you’ll catch it too’.
It really came to a head when, in his match against Shinsou at the sports festival, he saw eight shadowy figures staring intently at him from the entry tunnel, eyes glowing and unblinking, and they didn’t disappear when he looked away.
—
After that, it was as if the floodgates had opened and now the shadows and lights that had always teased at the edge of his awareness were getting braver, more present, making themselves known in ways they never had before and watching him more obviously; with glowing eyes set in featureless voids that should have been faces.
Most of them were nothing more than wisps, and he thought it was just something he was going through because he was going a little stir-crazy, being cooped up in Gran Torino’s office until he could control Full Cowling, but then when he was searching frantically for Iida before he could get killed by Stain, he saw full figures standing at the ends of alleyways, peering t him from around corners before just… ceasing to exist when he turned down the alleys they were standing in, until he found him, on the ground, blood pooling on the ground with Stain standing over him, and a paralysed Native slumped against a nearby wall.
While he fought tooth and nail against the villain with Todoroki, the shadows stood guard at the street end of the alley, until Endeavour arrived and they seemed to be chased away by his flames.
When he was nearly carried off by the noumu, he saw seven shadows watching, and the thought came to him that they were… concerned, even though they had no facial expression and barely a form beyond a vaguely human outline.
–
He decided it might be time to tell someone.
He couldn’t tell his mom; she worried too much as it was, and given what he knew about her own history, he doubted she would even know where to begin, let alone help him figure out what was going on. She would try, definitely, but he knew that the whole… Thing with One For All was a lot (that she didn’t know about), and also that she didn’t know much about quirks, not in the way he was probably going to need.
He didn’t really want to tell Aizawa-sensei. He was cool, really cool, and he was probably the best teacher Izuku had ever had, and maybe someday he would ask for more help from the man (he kinda wanted to learn to run along telephone line because duh), but for now he was too new, not quite close enough, for him to trust with something that could so easily be taken the wrong way.
That left All Might. He was, of course, the obvious choice, but Izuku was worried. He didn’t know if the man had experienced what he was experiencing, or if he would even believe him, but he was the one he trusted most with something he was beginning to realise had always been there, lurking like the shadows in his vision, waiting for the right time to become known, and he had done so much for Izuku already.
And so, on a random tuesday not long before they were set to leave for the training camp, he found himself sitting across from All Might in a private teacher’s meeting room, fists clenched in his trousers on top of his knees and shoulders hunched close to his ear; a familiar nervous posture.
After a few moments of silence where neither of them quite knew what to say or where to start, Izuku started rambling, explaining what he was seeing and how it was starting to cause problems, to distract him, and kept his eyes down, focused on where he was picking at a loose thread on his uniform so he wouldn’t have to see All Might’s reaction. He didn’t want to chance seeing his idol mentor look at him like he was crazy. He ignored that might have to happen anyway.
When he was done, figuring he might as well go into the shadows that had always been at the edges of his vision while he was at it, he lapsed into silence, eyes locked on the thread, now longer and wound around his index finger, grey against the paleness of his skin where it was wound tight around it.
There was a moment of quiet, before All Might let out a shaky sight and Izuku heard the shifting of the sofa. He looked up involuntarily at the movement, and instead of the ‘you’re crazy’ look he had feared, he saw concern etched into his face, hand held at his chin in thought.
It turned out that All Might had never seen anything ‘freaky’ when he’d been the sole holder of One For All, but that he was still convinced the seven or eight shadows he continued to see were the past holders (the eighth one, he theorised, wasn’t there because he wasn’t dead yet, and that ‘yet’ made Izuku’s chest clench uncomfortably), and that maybe, just maybe, this was all Izuku’s own power.
They scheduled a session with Recovery Girl to see if there was anything going on medically, quirk or otherwise, and All Might assured him that whatever was happening, they would figure it out, together.
Izuku thought maybe seeing ghosts might not be so bad.
—
Later, after Kamino and licensing exams and Eri, Izuku walked through through the dorms, getting ready for his early morning run, nodding to the seven shadows as he passed each of them and smiling gently as the semi-transparent fox that stared at him from on top of the fridge as he retrieved his protein shake.
As he jogged around the school grounds, he made sure to focus his attention not only on his general surroundings, but also the smoke and shadows that flitted in and out of his vision, making sure he acknowledged they existed, and focused on the fact that they did.
When he got back, he took a shower and headed to his weekly session with his quirk counsellor, waving to the blob that hung out by Hound Dog’s office, notes on all the things he’d seen in the last week clutched in his hands and ready to understand exactly what he was seeing.
Maybe one day, he would stop jumping every time a shadow moved.