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Chapter Text

Salem would have gasped for air if she still needed to breathe, instinctively clawing the Grimmstuff around her into something passing for clothing. She would also have summoned a gown for herself, but her magic refused to respond, the part of her soul she drew power from alarmingly missing, replaced by some sort of empathic connection to –

She paused and flicked her eyes around the room.

No avenging huntresses with bright metallic eyes, no streaks of white or black or yellow executing the final legs of whatever Brothers-forsaken ritual they managed to dig up. Well, there was some white, white tiling beneath green countertops and silver appliances. She’d never been in one herself, but it matched what she saw when her Seers opened into kitchens built in the last few decades. Aside from the great puddle of Grimmstuff she just clawed her way out of and formed into a simple dress. And its occupants.

Salem focused her eyes on the two humans huddled against the wall, the mother pulling her wide-eyed child close. Their proportions were subtly wrong, but the mother, at least, was clearly human under her green hair and endless freckles. The child…

The child was like her.

He shared his mother’s freckles and slightly off proportions, and the tips of his hair were the same green. But his roots were Salem’s bleached white, his skin pale with sprawling black veins, his sclera her black to his mother’s white. And she could feel his emotions: fear and shock, mixed with uncertainty and an underlying analytical curiosity that faintly reminded her of time spent reading books while locked in a tower. Yet no hatred, or malice, or aggression.

For the first time since before the second, flawed human species walked the earth, Salem realized, she felt little of the three in herself.

“Peace,” Salem said, raising open palms to reflect her intentions. The two cringed back, looking at her clawlike nails, and she quietly frowned as she put her hands back down. “I know my appearance must be alarming, but I mean you no harm.” The mother stared back, and Salem cycled the message from Valish through Solitan, Vacuon, and ultimately Mistralian before the woman’s eyes finally lit up in recognition. She seemed to respond well to Salem’s pacifying tone and calm persistence, her shoulders relaxing and pulling away slightly from the child.

“I know this is rude,” the mother said hesitantly, “and I’m sorry, but I have to ask: what – who – are you?”

“… You may call me Salem.”

“Two weeks ago,” the mother said quickly, squeezing her child, “my son used his quirk for the first time and – and a big black wolf thing came out. It almost attacked some of Izuku’s friends,” Salem noted the child frowning and pulling closer to his mother at that, “before a passing hero stopped it, and now people keep calling him a villain. And now he throws up in our kitchen and you crawl out. I need to know who you are, and, and if you’re dangerous.”

“Again, I mean you no harm,” Salem said, “I promise you that. But I must admit some confusion. The use of the word ‘quirk’ in this context is unfamiliar to me. Could you explain what you mean?”

The child’s eyes went wide and he sat straight up. Something in his mother’s face went from frightened to long-suffering.

The child – Izuku – closed his mouth.

“Ah,” Salem said.

He had revealed more than he probably realized – a world without Grimm or aura, where semblances were replaced by more varied and universal quirks, where instead of hunters and their prey the most frequent conflict pitted establishment heroes against criminal villains, all expressed through the enthusiastic babblings of a five-year-old. Though she had to admit the boy was precocious to the extreme; even accounting for the meanderings, stumbles, and clear gaps in his understanding, she doubted most children three times his age could tell her as much about this new world.

This new world.

Perhaps this should have been obvious: the subtly different proportions of what must’ve been a third species of human, the utter absence of magic, and her anomalous mental state. Even in this unfamiliar environment, facing an unknown future with her oldest and most powerful weapon gone, she could not remember feeling this light. Her rage, her aggression, the urge to dominate, she could still feel them, but they were muted and easy to control. She supposed part of it must’ve been the absence of Grimmstuff to reinforce her mood, and maybe being a different environment than she’d seen in centuries. But the rest…

As she reflected, the boy took to muttering until he finally burst out, “sentient quirk!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sentient quirks: quirks that display self-awareness,” the boy muttered, “demonstrate full at-ato-autonomy, often have some sort of emotional bond with…”

Salem felt a tug in the part of her soul she once reached into for her magic. A mental probe brushed against another mind and her emotions settled even further.

Ah.

It was the child’s influence.

“You’re my quirk,” Izuku said with wonder. He stood up from his mother to walk over and embrace Salem’s leg. She reached down to stroke his hair, hands awkward showing affection not meant to manipulate, and the faces of four long-dead little girls seemed to superimpose themselves over his.

She thought back to Remnant. An eternity worth less than nothing to her with no option to escape it. A forlorn castle full of broken people where her only entertainment was breaking them further. A world beyond of no better appeal. A life where living was the most exquisite torture she could imagine.

Ozma’s last and most formidable round of puppets, come to avenge all their suffering on her. Divine magic even she couldn’t resist or counterspell wrapping like claws around her soul. The knowledge that even victory would bring nothing more than sweet oblivion.

A child’s simple but overwhelming happiness, felt only as a shadow of what it must truly be through the link but enough to make her happier than she she’d been since… Since before Ozma’s first death.

This. This might be worth a try.

Salem could not even imagine what expression showed on her face, but the sight seemed to steady the mother. “Well,” she said, still a little unsteady as she stood up, “I guess we have a new member of our family. Come on, sit down at the table. Do you… Is there anything you want to eat? Drink?”

“I don’t precisely need to eat,” Salem said as she glided towards the dining area, Izuku trailing after her, “but I would appreciate tea, if you have it.”

The mother – Inko, she said – bustled over to the counter and began preparing tea, babbling about their family and circumstances as she went. Apparently such was a family trait. Salem listed with half an ear, but her attention was riveted on the child that gazed up at her, so different from her and yet so clearly marked by the Brothers’ influence, a freshly-minted Prince of the Grimm to her ancient Queen. She broke out of her reverie when something in Inko’s stream of consciousness caught her attention.

“I appreciate the offer, but while I will need some assistance navigating this new world, I’m not new to the world in general. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“So you’re old?” The child said guilelessly.

“Izuku!!”

“I couldn’t tell you exactly; I lost count some time ago. But I would say at least 10,000 years.”

“Wow, that’s old!”

“IZUKU!”

Salem croaked out her first genuine laugh since before Valish and Vacuon split from their parent language.

“It is old! I’ve been the Queen of the Grimm for a very long time. And before you ask, child,” she cut him off, “the Grimm are the creatures I command, and I suspect you can command as well.”

“Oh. Like the wolf.” Izuku sagged, the light going out of his eyes. “I couldn’t make it do anything. And it just wanted to… Hurt people. Is that what my quirk does?”

“The Grimm are more than that. Come here, child,” she said firmly, patting her lap, and Izuku clambered up as his mother returned to the table, tea in hand. Salem noted she was still watching her closely, if with less hostility.

“In the place I come from, long before even I was born, there were two great brother gods who ruled all they surveyed. The God of Light created, and the sun, the mountains, and everything alive, large and small, were his children. The God of Darkness destroyed, and fires, earthquakes, diseases, and everything that causes pain and suffering were his. But they needed each other. When the God of Darkness walked alone, the God of Light needed to come to restore life to the dead earth. But when the God of Light walked alone, his children multiplied beyond control; his children ate everything that grew just to stay alive, and turned on each other when the food ran out. The God of Darkness needed to come to thin their numbers and keep them from destroying themselves. The world needed both creation and destruction, and as the brothers kept the two in balance, the world prospered.

“But the brothers grew lonely, and in time they realized they wanted something that could compare to them. They wanted something as capable of creation and destruction as they were. So for the first time, the brothers worked on something together. They made a thing capable of both creation and destruction, something that could both grow its own numbers and keep itself in check. They wanted themselves in miniature, and so they made the first humans. Humans build, and they tear down. Humans hurt, but also heal. They were a perfect mix of both gods.

“Or so the brothers thought. But they were wrong. Humans contained destruction, but they had significantly more creation in them. They prospered, but in time they still turned on each other as the things they needed to survive ran out, their ability to create only making the conflict worse. They created marvelous things to destroy each other, and eventually only one human – one woman – was left.

“The brothers decided to try again. They created humans once more, leaving them as they were. But this time they made something else. The God of Darkness created the Creatures of Grimm, pure embodiments of destruction, to keep the humans from repeating their mistakes. The God of Light took the one survivor and bound her to his service. The two brothers then combined the essences of the woman and the Grimm, creating a balance to humanity, something mostly destruction but more than a spark of creation. The Grimm would keep the humans in check, and the woman would keep them in check in turn, allowing humans to survive forever without exhausting the world around them. And so humans flourished, never comfortable, never without hardship or tragedy, but always able to survive, for hundreds of generations.”

A comfortable lie she’d fed her more gullible followers over the years, but the truth wouldn’t serve Izuku at the moment.

Salem shifted, the eyes of mother and child boring into her. “This is not that world, and there’s no need to have the Grimm take up that role. But you must remember that, frightening as they may be, commanding the Grimm was my birthright, and now it’s ours. If you have the will to control them, they must listen to your orders. They will not lay a hand on anyone you don’t want them to.”

Salem looked down and met Izuku’s eyes as that analytical curiosity she felt through the link came to the fore. “How do I make them not hurt anybody else?”

“We’ll need some space,” Salem said to Inko, and in moments they’d been bustled into the small apartment’s central living area. Salem and Inko stood at Izuku’s sides as he faced the center of the now-cleared room, Salem’s hand on his shoulder.

“First, you must be able to consciously summon the creatures. Do you know how?”

Izuku shook his head wordlessly.

Salem thought for a moment.

“Picture a tree. The most beautiful tree you’ve ever seen, full of ripe fruit and stretching into the sun.”

The child wrenched his eyes shut.

“Do you see it?”

He nodded.

“Reach your hands out.”

He did.

“Now crush it.”

He stopped.

“Squeeze it with your hands until it dies.”

He looked at her in dismay. “But it’s so pretty!”

“Do it, child,” Salem said firmly, reining in the part of her that promised pain for disobedience.

He let out a small noise of discontent, but he closed his eyes and faced forward.

“Watch its bark split, its fruit pop, and its leaves wither and fall off. Take something wonderful and ruin it for no reason.”

She could feel his unhappiness at his task, and sure enough, black liquid began flowing slowly between his shaking fingers.

“You have it, Izuku! Throw it to the center of the room, quickly!”

Izuku awkwardly pushed the Grimmstuff out and failed to make it further than his feet, but the liquid responded to his will and flowed to the center of the room. Over the next several seconds, it warped, then expanded, and gradually coalesced into a creature with two short but powerful legs, a muscular tail, and a head covered in bony plate. Breath hissed between white jaws as it turned to face them, eyes red and malicious.

It was a Creep, the weakest of the surface-based Grimm, as well as the smallest specimen of the breed she’d ever seen. It was still a Grimm in full, a clear success.

“Reach out to it as you reached out to me through our bond earlier, then assert your will over it. Make it stand still.”

Izuku wrenched his eyes shut once more. The Creep, smelling the nervousness and fear wafting off mother and child, began to advance on them, but within a few steps she could feel the boy’s will wrap around what passed for its mind and it aborted its charge. The Grimm took a few increasingly hesitant steps forward before stopping, stock-still and docile in front of its new master.

“Well done, child. It is yours.”

He slowly opened his eyes, only to realize the creature was less than a foot away from him. He started and scuttled back, his concentration broken, and the newly-freed Creeper refocused his eyes on him and lunged.

The side of Salem’s hand struck its head hard enough to fracture the faceplate. The Creeper reeled, its head almost torn apart by the force, and with a quick motion she swept her claws through the base of its neck, killing it. Straightening as the creature dissolved, she absorbed the Grimmstuff through her still-extended hand before turning to face the boy and his mother.

"Grimm are frightening, and they are attracted to fear,” Salem said. “You must have a strong enough will to conquer them if they are to listen to you.”

She looked Izuku in his wide eyes.

“But you do not need to be afraid of them. As long as I am here, you are under my protection.”

Four faces once again flashed across his.

“I will ensure no harm comes to you or your family. Ever.”

Chapter Text

THREE WEEKS AFTER SALEM’S ARRIVAL
 
Salem had just arrived at the school from yet another quirk counseling meeting when she straightened her back.
 
Quirk registration was a hassle at the best of times, but since Salem was a mental adult as demonstrated through endless psychological testing, the Ministry subjected her to another barrage of highly specialized tests to determine whether she qualified for citizenship independent from her human. It was, apparently, the sixth such case since Japan started formally tracking quirks, and she was beginning to empathize with her old Hounds - not to mention the tedium of endless hours of catch-up adult education. While Izuku went through many of the early tests with her, he’d been finally allowed to return to school that morning, and Inko had requested she drop by once her sessions were over to bring him home.
 
She had been waiting calmly for Izuku to walk out the front door, gracefully ignoring side-eyed glances from teachers, parents, and students, when something flashed down the link. She’d learned any distance past a few rooms away drastically dropped the sensitivity of their link, but extreme emotions still rang through.
 
The child was in pain.
 
She froze, then opened her senses as widely as possible: she could hear tiny pops and harsh voices and smell the faintest scent of blood, just subtle enough even those with enhanced senses wouldn’t immediately pick them up. Without hesitation she strode past several baffled parents and around a set of hedgerows to a secluded play area, taking note of a security camera on the way.
 
Izuku was curled up in a ball on the ground, surrounded by three slightly larger boys. Two were mostly laughing and jeering, but one, a hunched-over blond, was beating him. A moment’s observation as she stalked over revealed flashes on and off of his arms and fists – quirk use in public, one of the first things she’d been warned against at those interminable meetings. She easily suppressed her rage, processed the information at her disposal and formed a plan.
 
“What,” she said cold as the grave, the three boys turning to face her, “is going on here?”
 
The boys quailed at the sight, but the blond quickly rallied. “Deku is a villain! He was gonna summon a bunch of his monsters to attack people!”
 
Izuku mumbled something apologetic-sounding, but as the blond turned to snarl at his face, his eyes widened and he turned back to her. She could almost see the wheels spin in his head.
 
“You’re one of his monsters!” The boy said, and he lunged at her, lights popping from his extended arm.
 
As someone used to dealing with hunters, she could have sidestepped the charge with contemptuous ease. Instead, after a fraction of a second to evaluate the explosions’ subtle pattern, she reached out, then pulled on the Grimmstuff she was made off, shriveling and weakening her hand just enough.
 
When the boy’s fist collided with her fingers, it snapped the lower two off entirely, a well-timed pop making it look like the little detonation had caused the damage.
 
Two teachers had burst out the side door just in time to witness her injury. They split, the smaller one rushing over to the blonde (now frozen in shock) and the larger one coming to her. He put on friendly, sympathetic, horrified face, and promising her first aid, he reached out to take her by the shoulder.
 
His actions confirmed what Salem suspected. The four children were well within the camera’s field of vision, and if the camera was unmanned, she would have taken other measures. But judging from Izuku’s reticence to talk about school and the old bruises her trained eye to pick out, these beatings were nothing new. Izuku’s conviction his quirk was “villainous” – something that startled even testing officials who rushed to assure him otherwise – came from somewhere, and she deduced the child’s educators must have played a role. Her only error was believing it would take the teachers longer to arrive, but the timing happened to play in her favor.
 
Salem could guess these teachers’ playbook. One would quickly remove the children from the scene to come up with a story and browbeat them into playing along. The other would take her deep into the building to the nurses office, apply first-aid, then “comfort” her (try to calm her down while leaving her emotionally vulnerable) until the ambulance arrived. He would use every trick he knew to convince her it was all a tragic accident and there wouldn’t be any point in pressing charges, and, if necessary, get her to doubt her own memories to head off any trouble for the school.
 
As the taller teacher reached out for her shoulder, her hand whipped up, wrapped around the side of his arm, and brought it down hard enough to stagger her, positioning him just right so the details were concealed from the camera. From the perspective of anyone watching the footage, it would appear he’d attempted to get her guard down before striking or grabbing her. The school could erase the footage, certainly, but Salem knew for a fact there were technopathic quirks that could recover it. From the look on the teacher’s face, he realized it too.
 
“Get off me and let me take my child home,” she snarled, “or I will be pressing charges.”
 
The taller teacher backed off, hands raised. She stalked over to the other teacher, frozen in indecision, and swept Izuku into her arms before stalking off.
 
“You let him hurt you on purpose,” Izuku said when they were out of earshot.
 
“I did, child.”
 
“You’re gonna get Kacchan in trouble, aren’t you?”
 
“More than him, and this was the first step of many, but yes.”
 
“Please don’t, auntie.”
 
Salem stopped. “Child, why?”
 
“That’s not what heroes do. They don’t lie like that.”
 
“… We will be discussing this with your mother.”
 
Izuku made a vaguely affirmative notice, then snuggled deeper into her chest.
 
Salem sighed, but before she passed beyond the camera’s line of sight, she made sure to look directly into it. If she was fortunate, this would finally push the reason she knew of technopathic quirks into caving and contacting her.
 

 
FIVE YEARS AFTER SALEM’S ARRIVAL
 
When the Yaoyorozus opened their front door, Salem - Ren Sae now, thanks to the naming standards that came with Japanese citizenship - made sure to bow ever so slightly lower. While they technically had far more money and influence, it wouldn't do for her to show too much deference to those who hadn't earned her respect.

Her bodyguard bowed even lower, as was appropriate, though Salem noted she straightened more quickly than was proper, rigid and hypervigilant as ever despite the recent end of the crisis that brought her into her service in the first place. Izuku had made her promise to look after her employees after her tech expert let a little more loose on their mutual past than she should have, and the woman was going to burn out like a candle trying to run from her ghosts like this.

After all, committing your first unambiguous murder tends to leave a mark on your soul. Especially if it happens during something as dramatic as her long fall from grace... Perhaps she should browbeat the poor girl into therapy. Salem had been suspicious when Inko put her son through it, but it worked wonders for the child.

The Yaoyorozus failed to register her bodyguard's mildly inappropriate behavior, but Salem expected nothing less. The husband may have been exquisitely well-connected and the wife may have an unparalleled head for figures, but both spent too much time flattering their own egos to see when other people refused to do the same. Such a waste, spending good money on a dress for the occasion instead of weaving one out of Grimmstuff for free.

The presentation of Salem's gift, walk to the dining room, and bulk of the dinner were dominated by the Yaoyorozus trading off bloviating about mutual business opportunities, only pausing long enough to ask the occasional question. Yes, Four Maidens Ltd. had prospered from Yaoyorozu investment, especially during its dramatic expansion the previous year. Yes, it was the only sentient quirk-owned and operated company in Japan. Yes, Grimm can sense negative emotions, it's why they excel as assistants in rescue work. No, she won't tell them why she named her company Four Maidens, it's something personal, surely you understand.

By far the most interesting part of the dinner sat across the table from her: the Yaoyorozus' only child, a daughter around Izuku's age named Momo. Her mask of perfect-child obedience seemed to fool her parents, but Salem could see its cracks: a pinch to her face showing her boredom and wish to be anywhere else; an analytical intelligence that reminded her of Izuku studying her through ever-so-slightly narrowed eyes; a slight hunch indicating how uncomfortable she was with how much information her parents were sharing about her. The hunch deepened as the dinner went on and her parents extolled her academic accomplishments and the power of her quirk; impressive stuff, true, but they talked about Momo like a trained animal doing tricks, and Salem could see the light in her eyes dim as she realized it.

Suddenly, the wife interrupted the husband with a novel idea: Momo using her quirk to generate a gift for their guest, on the spot. The way Momo briefly froze showed Salem if they had planned this, they hadn't bothered to inform their daughter, and her wide eyes betrayed well-hidden panic. After a few minutes of visibly casting around for ideas (her parents' increasingly unhappy faces just making the flailing worse), Momo rolled up her sleeve, thought very hard for a few seconds, then reached into her arm and pulled something out.

It was a small but geometrically beautiful spider in black gemstone, perhaps onyx, attached to a necklace chain made of a dark reddish-brown metal. The cut was simple compared to what an expert might produce, but the fine and regular shape of the legs would have outfoxed all but the most skilled professionals.

Her parents, realizing their daughter had just gifted a business partner a giant bug, turned on her, but Salem quickly cut them off.

"This is an excellent gift, Momo. May I ask how you knew what to make?"

Momo glanced between her parents and settled on Salem's calmer face. "I'm pretty sure you like spiders, 'cause your dress has a web pattern and you always wear your hair in a bun that looks like it has spider legs, and whenever I see pictures of you you're wearing black, so I thought you liked black, so I made the spider black. The chain is shakudou, a bronze alloy that..." she visibly cut off a longer technical explanation, "it's a dark red color because your dress is red like that and I noticed you also seem to like red, so I thought you might like it..."

"I like it quite a bit," Salem said, appreciating the piece up close. The craftsmanship was almost childishly simple and unadorned, but the construction was machine-precise with a few imaginative touches to set it apart. It just barely met her criteria for adding pieces to her wardrobe, but it did meet them.

"Thank you again, darling," Salem said, inclining her head before donning the necklace. She then changed the subject, and the Yaoyorozus eagerly seized the opportunity, not noticing their daughter's wide-eyed look.

The rest of the dinner passed interminably outside the occasional comment Salem drew out of Momo. When it passed the three hour mark with no sign of stopping, Salem caught her bodyguard's eye and made a few quick gestures behind her back. She received a nearly imperceptable nod back and the woman rapidly typed something into her phone, turning her face to conceal her line of sight beneath loose purple hair. After a few more minutes of soul-numbing conversation, the wife checked her phone, paled, and all but dragged her husband away from the table, promising a quick return once a minor incident was brought under control, their apologies, you'll barely notice they left.

Momo shrank a little when she realized her parents had left her alone with a stranger, but Salem didn't let the silence rest.

"Momo, I realize I your parents never brought up something I wanted to hear: what do you want to be when you grow up?"

She began to say she wanted to inherit the family business, her lines clearly memorized and said by rote, but Salem cut her off sharply.

"You're lying to me, girl. What do you actually want?"

Momo floundered for a moment and stole a glance at the door her parents left through before straightening.

"I want to be a hero!"

"Why bother? It isn't like you need the money," Salem said dismissively.

Momo sputtered. "Miss Ren, that's not why you be a hero!"

"I work with heroes, girl," Salem said, her tone intentionally condescending. "When on rescue work, my Grimm spend half the time rescuing those trapped by villains and the rest saving those endangered by their 'protectors'."

"I watched all the interviews I could find of you before dinner," Momo revealed thoughtlessly, "and you always talk up rescue heroes. Were YOU lying?"

"The least of a bad lot," Salem waved away.

"Then I'm gonna change that!"

The sound of Momo slamming her hands on the dinner table as she stood up broke the spell. She paled and sunk back down, apologizing compulsively.

"And you were doing so well, darling," Salem said, shaking her head. "At least there is a little steel in that spine, I was starting to worry."

Now Momo looked more confused than anything.

Salem rubbed the spider at her neck. "You gave me an excellent gift, so it's only appropriate I give back something of equal value. Two things, really." She weaved a dark paper out of Grimmstuff, then gave it to her bodyguard. "This is the contact information for my nephew. He's a brilliant child, much like you, but after having to move schools, he's had some trouble making friends. I'd ask you reach out to him."

Momo gingerly took the paper from the bodyguard's hands. "I don't know if my parents would like that."

"Not if it's a connection with a valuable new business partner. Though do you really want them to make that decision for you?"

Momo paused, then secreted the paper away.

"As for the second..." Salem took a moment to weave something more complicated, listening carefully to the sounds of the manor and waiting to get her timing perfect.

A miniature Seer soon rested in her palm, small enough to disappear in a pocket. It floated lazily over to Momo.

"This creature is the mark of my favor. Keep it on you at all times. If you are ever in a position you cannot stand, whether you're in danger or you just can't bear your life as it is, lean into it, say the word 'Salem', then quickly describe your circumstances. Don't bother with your location, the creature will guide me. I can't guarantee I'll be there immediately, but I will come. And I'll be very cross if I find out you needed my aid but refused to ask for it."

Momo opened her mouth to respond, only for her parents to barge back into the dining room and cut her off. Salem took advantage of the disruption to maneuver them into saying their goodbyes, then left without looking back, not acknowledging Momo's stares.

As they came to the car, her bodyguard looked over, raised eyebrows slightly cracking her mask of professionalism. "Playing matchmaker?"

Salem thought about another little girl, blonde instead of black-haired, kept away from the rest of the world, turning her mind inward and studying the limits of her abilities because she had nothing else to do. How the girl responded when a valiant savior swept her away - the first other person she met was beautiful, kind, and wise, how could she not fall in love? How desperately fixated the girl became on the only person who came to rescue her, how badly she responded when she lost him and no one else stepped forward to support her, the many, many things that followed.

"Cultivating an asset," Salem said. "And if I'm not wrong, the child asked you to reach out to him, too."

Her bodyguard grunted and glanced down at her hands, looking through them as if she was seeing something else. Her mask slipped.

"I don't think he would benefit from talking to me," she said with a tiny shudder in her voice.

Salem sighed. "Kaina dear, we really must be getting you into therapy..."

Chapter Text

NINE YEARS AFTER SALEM'S ARRIVAL

THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE START OF THE SCHOOL YEAR

Momo listened to her parents and nodded like a good bobblehead.

She didn't need them to tell her to be on her best behavior around Ren Sae. As the years passed and Four Maidens grew and diversified, the company absorbed more and more Yaoyorozu investment until their livelihood was tied to it. Old money or not, the Yaoyorozus were now beholden to Miss Ren, and her father insisted she keep that in mind as the family limousine approached the Ren estate.

Had Momo not spent so much time with Miss Ren and her staff, she probably would have thought it was a good thing. Four Maidens was such a safe investment it seemed foolish to look for anything else, her family was wealthier than ever, and Miss Ren had connections even Momo's father was jealous of.

Momo used a trick Miss Ren had taught her to split her attention, passively agreeing with her parents as they passed the front gate while noting all the changes in security layout on the way.

But Momo met with her to work on whatever came to the older woman's mind once a month.

She doubted Miss Ren had this in mind, but she'd turned some of what she taught her on her family's financial situation. They were earning more than ever, sure, but ONLY through Four Maidens. Yaoyorozu holdings going back generations were quietly folding or coming under new, unfamiliar management, connection after connection politely stopped returning her father's calls, and just enough deals fell through unexpectedly to form a pattern to a paranoid eye. Momo didn't think her parents realized someone was making them rely on Four Maidens to survive.

Her parents' meandering lecture stopped as they got out and went through the broad front door, donning false smiles like steel helmets.

Except whoever was behind it (Miss Ren, it was obviously Miss Ren) avoided Momo's tiny slice of their kingdom with surgical precision. Somehow, every mishap her parents underwent managed not to impact any of the assets under her name. If anything, Miss Ren seemed to be making Momo independent of her influence, helping her diversify her holdings and making introductions to help her form her own network. She appreciated the help, genuinely. It didn't make her any less anxious about Ren's intentions, or power over her.

The Yaoyorozus followed all the traditions of a visit to a tee, presenting valuable mochi as their gift, before Miss Ren gave the signal that dinner was served.

At least she could count on Izuku. He had an understandable soft spot for his own quirk, but he was a realist. He'd given her a lot of insight into "Auntie Salem" over the years, and according to him this was just how she treated people she liked. As opposed to her parents, who were receiving the opposite.

Her parents attempted to engage Miss Ren in conversation. If Momo hadn't known Miss Ren like she did, she would have missed all the well-hidden slights the woman showered on them.

Izuku was her best friend. It didn't matter that they'd never met in person; he'd been the touchpoint she needed to stay sane in the Yaoyorozu household. But a part of her hated him. Every time he talked about his family, his mother making mistakes and teaching him how she moved past them, his aunt listening when he told her not to do something, she felt an ugly spurt of jealousy she had to suppress like every other strong feeling in her life. Because her parents loved her, too. In fact, they loved her so much, it slid in the other direction.

Dinner wrapped up, and she couldn't bring herself to stand up to follow Miss Ren until her parents gave their blessing.

Every time Izuku mentioned asserting himself and going against his parents' will, a part of Momo seethed at the fact that she just... couldn't. Too well-conditioned. They didn't need to raise a hand or a harsh word to maintain discipline, perish the thought. They could simply turn every conversation into a landmine, flooding her with perfectly civil doubts and questions and guesses and barbs until she skipped family meals just to get away. If that didn't work, they'd instruct her tutors to help them undo whatever her position was, then gradually remove social privileges until her only source of human interaction was her parents telling her she was in the wrong. For weeks. Or months. They knew better than her. And they could wait her out until she acknowledged that.

The grand hallway to Miss Ren's study felt more claustrophobic than usual. Momo had to keep herself from hurrying after the woman.

They rarely resorted to the full routine. They didn't need to. It only took a couple rounds for little Momo to learn contradicting her parents didn't work, so big Momo found the compulsion to stay a good little tin soldier almost irresistible. Getting a chance at being a hero took years of on-and-off heroic effort on her part, and really only succeeded at the last moment because they tried to cut off Miss Ren's access to her as part of the routine. Momo wasn't privy to that conversation, only that her parents looked like they were sucking lemons when they told her Miss Ren had secured her a place in the Recommendation Exams.

Too tense to think clearly, Momo rushed into the study and sat before Miss Ren, something her parents would have been aghast at.

But... Momo wanted to be a hero. Momo wanted to make the world a better and safer place so people like her and Izuku had more options. For all her parents' faults, they had taught her how the top of society worked, and Izuku's disturbingly casual attitude towards his early childhood taught her about the bottom. If she couldn't even push back against her parents, she couldn't hope to be a leader (no matter what Izuku and Miss Ren kept implying). But a hero? Saving lives, modeling good behavior, earning fame by use of her mind and her quirk and using that to promote what she believed in? That she could do.

Unruffled, Miss Ren took her seat and rested her black eyes on Momo. The girl barely noticed.

Which is why the Recommendation Exam so worried her. She understood it was rigorous in its own way, and a mixture of self-defense training and the occasional spar with Miss Ren had her confident she could handle it. But... she wouldn't have gotten in through standard admissions. She wouldn't have proven herself like so many other students. She would be just a rich kid in their eyes, handed a spot at the top school in the country in the same silver spoon in her mouth she'd been born with. And wasn't that true? She only got the chance because she was connected. Could she really keep up with students who had actually earned their places? And Izuku said he was going to take the regular exam, and the idea he might fail it was laughable. There was still no guarantee she wouldn't failm What would he think when -

"Spiralling again, darling?" Miss Ren said. "The stress must be getting to you."

Momo took a moment to force herself back into the present, suppressing her emotions as she always did. Then she took a closer look.

Miss Ren looked... worn. At dinner, she looked about the same as always, but now she slouched slightly, eyes a little wider and downcast, fingers tapping irregularly. Momo had never seen the woman anything less than completely controlled, and yet she looked listless.

"Miss Ren? Are... are you alright?"

"You're more perceptive than you give yourself credit for, darling." The older woman sighed. "A few weeks ago, I received a very unfortunate piece of news. It all worked out for the best, but it made me question things I had taken for granted for a very long time."

She sat up straighter and looked Momo in the eye.

"Do you think you can pass the Recommendation Exam?"

Momo wanted to say so, but she knew just how -

"The answer is yes, darling. Yes you can pass it. I know it, your parents know and hate it, and I wish you knew it as well, but it's too late to change that. The real question is whether you can handle what happens next.

"You don't live in the Age of Chaos, child, and I think we should both be grateful we didn't witness it. Even if it took longer than anyone would admit to stamp it out." A cloud passed over Miss Ren's face. "As far as I know, its legacy is completely dead. But there's more on the horizon.

"While the peak of organized crime is past, Japan has the highest violent crime rate of any post-industrial nation. I hope you appreciate I tell you this in confidence: the Hero Public Safety Commission is corrupt now and has a history of terrible decisions, and they aren't to be trusted." Momo blinked. What? "All Might might seem a buffoon, but his sheer power and ability to model behavior have kept Japan safe for decades - except his public appearances are sharply declining. I believe he's not long for retirement, and no one knows what will come out of the woodwork the moment he does. This is a difficult time to be a hero, and you'll need more than what you learn in class."

Miss Ren looked... lost, almost, as if in memory. She sometimes talked like someone who'd seen centuries pass instead of a sentient quirk technically no older than Momo.

"These things always bring you into contact with unambiguous enemies, but also people who might go either way. I learned a lot time ago that if you wish to conquer your foes, you must have the willpower to overcome your feelings and pick which ones to bring to your side. Sometimes, they really are your enemies, but their goals don't align with something far worse and they can be treated with. Sometimes they are dangerous and threatening but not actually opposed to you, and they can be won over.

"Do you still have the gift I gave you when we met?"

Momo pensively rubbed the choker she'd built herself, woven carbon nanotubes to protect her throat and a diamondoid amulet in the front containing the little Seer.

"I hope you know you can count on my support," Miss Ren said, unusually gentle. "And I did everything I could to make sure the next generation didn't have to deal with the ghosts of the last. But I ask you stay aware. You're growing up into a dangerous world full of dangerous people.

ONE WEEK BEFORE THE START OF THE SCHOOL YEAR

Katsuki nearly crushed the disk in his hands.

The ugly little creature calling itself a principal said all the right things when it announced his victory. Except for that "rescue points" bullshit, but he won anyway so it didnt matter. The real issue was in those goddamn rankings they included like they barely mattered.

Second place: Midoriya Izuku. Deku. In a hero school.

He blew up the disk.

After Aldera shut down, his parents had been told what he did to Deku. They'd been mad. Horrified.

Why?

Deku was a villain. He deserved to be forced back into line instead of stalking better people and picking their powers apart under his breath before siccing his monsters on them. Everyone at Aldera understood that. He thought it was obvious.

And that witch of a quirk had his whole school system shut down out of spite.

Katsuki tossed the smoldering hunk of metal into a garbage bin before stomping to his bed.

Anger management classes, new teachers either condescending, judgmental, or afraid, kids who wouldn't acknowledge his greatness because they cared more about the reputation of a closed school district than him being better than them. Disrespect. Distrust. His refusal to play along with their bullshit just made shit worse.

He picked up one of the old fuck's stress balls and tried (unsuccessfully) to crush it.

Katsuki never figured out how it got set up, but when he hit middle school, a man from the HPSC approached his family. He said Katsuki had issues, the asshole, but finally somebody understood his greatness and wanted to cultivate it. Sure, the old fuck sold it to his parents as something prettier, but Katsuki knew a boot camp when he saw it.

He stopped squeezing the ball gradually.

The old fuck was strong, Katsuki had to admit that. He was also smart, something Katsuki hated admitting even more. After enough beatdowns he'd caved and started listening to what the old man was preaching, and it infuriated him how much it made sense.

At first, Katsuki thought he was strong. He had a more powerful quirk than the quirkless loser who took charge of his education, and he wasn't shy saying so.

The old man shoved his face into the mat in seconds, just ignoring his attempts to blow his way out. Then he told Katsuki he was right. And that's why he'd never beat the asshole.

Strength, the old man said, was only partially inherent. Katsuki at the peak of his powers could probably kill the guy in seconds. Not as a middle schooler, definitely not as a baby or a doddering old man. Strength changed over time, and he said the duty of a hero was to make everyone stronger, prove their worth and their might by spreading it instead of just inflicting it.

It took a while, but eventually Katsuki came around. He was the strongest, he refused to accept otherwise, but there were plenty of stronger pro heroes out there. This was his solution to the paradox. They shared their strength with others, that's what made them strong. He could be the hero he always deserved to be and inspire others to follow in his footsteps, making the mark his strength left all the bigger.

Which is why he knew Deku was a villain.

Deku didn't fight back. Deku didn't use his power to inspire others. Deku called his mommy and made her destroy everything. Than Ren bitch ruined Aldera all because he was making the people there stronger.

He refused to think about why Aldera folded so fast the moment its actions came to light.

No, Deku was a villain that destroyed everything he touched. Katsuki forced people to be strong. Deku made people weaker. Katsuki understood the way the world worked, courtesy of his mentor. Deku refused to play along.

He didn't know whether UA let Deku in to keep an eye on him, get rid of him quietly, use him as an object lesson, or just because they failed to realize what they were dealing with.

It didn't matter. Deku wouldn't last the first week.

Katsuki could count on that.

THREE DAYS BEFORE THE START OF THE SCHOOL YEAR

Himiko took a bottle of blood out of the fridge and popped off the cap with a reverant air.

The last time she drank from a person was... a month and a half ago? Her memories were so blurry. Not as blurry as her time in school - she'd been told the blood deficiency was so bad it interfered with memory formation - but she still struggled to remember the details. She thought he was an older man, and that she wore his skin even though it didn't feel right. She knew she stabbed whoever it was. She thought they might have died from blood loss.

Himiko tried not to think about that.

But her uncle found her not too long afterwards, and then everything changed!

He understood. He was the first person who actually understood, who didn't hate her need for blood and even helped her acknowledge it was natural for her. He helped her find blood banks and talked his way past all the guards to get her as much blood as she needed. He made sure she understood why she couldn't stab people and use that to show her love, then comforted her when she realized what she'd been doing.

He'd even let her wear him whenever she wanted! She didn't think anyone would ever do that.

And he didn't try to isolate her, either. He took her to meet his scary older friend, and she showed she wasn't so scary when she gave Himiko a big sister! Everybody called her Sen, but that wasn't her real name; she'd been through a lot, just like Himiko. She couldn't be Sen because of what her new sister was, but she showed her little sister how to do it through action, and that was a lot more fun than she expected! Sen even promised she'd tell Himiko her actual name if she passed the UA exams, and she kept her promise! Himiko wasn't used to people keeping their promises.

She thought Sen's naming pun was very clever and told her so.

It took just a month to go from a creature in the streets to a good girl with a family: a scary aunt (?), a cool big sis, a cooler but scarier big sis, and a very cute cousin she hadn't seen much of yet, unfortunately. He was going to UA too, though, so she'd get her fill soon enough.

But she owed everything to her new uncle. He saved her from the street. He guided her to safety and gave her a family - a real family, not the Togas. He taught her how you should behave around others without forcing yourself to be normal. He forgave her for the people she probably murdered. He helped her figure out who she could wear and why. He reigned her in when her urge to love others crossed into the homicidal. He couldn't even abandon her!

"Even if I could leave here, I wouldn't," her uncle said in her head, calm and wry as always.

Himiko laughed merrily as she raised the bloodbag to her lips.

Chapter Text

Momo tightened her uniform's tie at the door to class 1-A.

Again.

She'd deliberately stopped counting how often she'd done so sometime after she entered the building, trying to reign in her emotions just enough to function. The moment she could actually do something, the anxiety would recede, she knew, it always did, but it made walking to her first class a bit of a nightmare.

Once she'd finally worked up the courage to enter, she discovered the classroom itself was... well, it was a classroom. Momo may have been tutored most of her life, but her parents had made sure she knew how to interact with kids her age, barely, and that included a few encounters with regular schooling. The rest of UA was grand, imposing, but the room itself was far less remarkable than its single occupant.

Sitting near the left rear corner of the room, just in front of Momo's assigned seat, was a girl whose body language read like TV static.

She was blonde, her hair tied in immaculate buns, and she wore her uniform with a comfortable ease that made Momo (used to wearing more formal clothes while learning) just a little jealous. She was excitedly kicking her legs under the desk, but gripping it so hard her fingers were turning white, and she smiled out the window the same way you'd look at a loved one. It looked like she was getting a pep talk from someone who wasn't there.

When Momo crossed some invisible line, the girl whipped around and bounded up to her, vertical slitted pupils on full display. Cat mutations? No, judging by the fangs in her broad grin, probably something serpentine.

"Hi, cutie!" The girl enthused. "I'm Himiko - Hori Himiko, call me Himiko. You're Momo, right?"

Momo nodded, assuming she'd seen the name on the seating chart posted near the front.

She was wrong. "Hori Sen is my big sister! She's said lots of good things about you, she said we both need friends!"

Momo didn't realize Hori Sen knew enough about her to say good things. Or know she needed friends. She learned a while ago Sen was the head of Miss Ren's IT department and had been since Four Maidens was founded. They'd spoken over the phone a few times (Momo appreciated her enthusiasm for math), but they'd never met in person.

That didn't seem to matter to Himiko. "She said I should ask you to talk about organic chemistry and - uh - ways to make safe explosives and projectile weapons! 'Cause you like to talk about that."

Maybe Sen did know Momo.

It didn't take long for her to start holding forth, and Himiko proved a surprisingly receptive audience, her body language resolving from whatever that was into more natural enthusiastic schoolgirl. In return, Momo tried to use every trick to hold a listener's attention she knew courtesy of Miss Ren to cover up her awkwardness.

And it worked! As various classmates walked in, some avoided her discussion of possible classwork with religious horror, but others joined in and expanded Momo's borderline lecture into an actual conversation. A girl with what looked like earphone jacks running from her earlobes - Jirou - seized on an opening and tried to wrench the conversation onto mathematical relationships and music, which Momo happily obliged. On hearing the change of topic, two of the avoiders - a girl with interesting pink and black mutations named Ashido ("call me Mina!") and a laid-back blond named Kaminari - changed their tune and joined in.

But good things never last. The conversation drifted from Momo's favored academics topics to bands she didn't know well enough to have an opinion of. As Momo began to run out of encouraging clichés to make it look like she was following the conversation, she spotted Todoroki Shouto slip into the classroom, giving her a nod and refusing to join in the conversation.

She kind of wished she could join him (what do you mean "noise" is a genre of music? Why do you all have opinions on it?), but starting the conversation left her trapped in its physical center to suffer for her sins. She knew she should be paying more attention to everyone, she'd be spending three years with these people, but she had less and less to say as the conversation drifted further.

Then someone very familiar-looking entered the classroom.

He was a bit short - half a dozen centimeters below most his age - which wasn't helped by a slight hunch. His skin was deathly pale, despite an overall healthy (even muscular) body shape, arteries and veins traced in black that looked all the more stark in contrast. His eyes were all black, sclera and iris just barely distinguishable enough to track his line of sight as he nervously glanced around the classroom. The only dash of color (aside from his uniform) was a shock of unruly green hair, and even then she could just barely see the white roots.

It would have been intimidating if the person in that body looked like he could hurt a fly. His eyes were wide and guileless even past his obvious nerves, his smile tentative but genuine, his body language non-confrontational but with just a hint of self-respect. It took something that would have looked frightening or alien and made it no more threatening than Mina, even exotically cute.

Like, really cute, but Momo was too busy maneuvering through the other students to think too hard about that.

He caught her eye when she finally popped out.

"Momo?"

She didn't bother responding. They ran up to each other and, after an awkward moment of indecision, embraced.

Momo only barely heard Mina's wolf whistle.

She asked him if he saw anyone he recognized in the exam rankings, he mentioned he hadn't even noticed them, she poked fun at him for being too busy worshipping All Might to miss something everyone else said came in the same package, he asked her if any pro heroes had proctored the Recommendation Exam, and they fell into conversation so naturally. It was just like talking over text, except now she could see his face and read his expressions - not that Izuku, so kind and passionate and genuine, was particularly hard to read in any fashion. Even Himiko sidling over and slipping her way into the conversation didn't slow things down, with her subtly encouraging the two to share stories about each other.

All that ended the moment the last classmate entered the room. Izuku froze, all humor dropping from his face the moment he saw the blond in the doorway.

"Deku," the boy hissed.

"Ka-Kacchan, I-"

"Shut the fuck up, villain."

The rest of the class abandoned their conversations and turned to spectate. Momo stiffened, unsure whether she should go on the aggressive. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Himiko dropping every trace of schoolgirl enthusiasm, her face a sort of blank she didn't know how to read but felt radiated the promise of violence.

"I don't know how you tricked your way into UA, but I'm here to make sure you end up where you belong so I can show these extras exactly what kind of a villain you are."

"That's nonsense!", the uptight boy with glasses - Iida - said with an emphatic chop. "If Midoriya here was a villain, an institution like UA would never have allowed him on campus. Actually, " he straightened, "I wanted to apologize to you for my behavior at the -"

"Don't apologize to Deku, you fucking idiot. He's a villain! Obviously, just look at him!"

Mina scanned Midoriya up and down. "You got a problem with mutations?" She asked the blond, uncharacteristically cold.

"I don't give a shit about mutations," he snarled. Then a cruel smile spread across his face. "Actually, you know what his quirk is?"

"I'm sure you'll let us know," Shoto said, almost too low to hear.

"He summons monsters - big black and red fucks with white masks. They hunt down everything they can sense and tear it apart. I saw it in school; he was so dangerous the the teachers gave the rest of us free reign to defend ourselves."

Momo said, "he's talking about teachers at the Aldera school system, the one that was shut down for quirkism and allowing students to attack each other."

Several faces lit up in recognition and the temperature in the room dropped further.

The froglike girl - Asui? - piped up. "I've seen those monsters. They're Grimm, his aunt also creates them. They work in construction and help rescue heroes find survivors. Every rescue hero has worked with them at some point."

A few students nodded, and one straightened up. "I sprained my ankle during the Exam," a girl with rosy cheeks (Momo hadn't caught her name) added. "The big zero-pointer was gonna step on me when one of those big gorilla things jumped in and carried me away. It was scary, but it probably saved my life."

"To embrace the darkness within you and see it leave such a bright mark up the world - that is true heroism," a crow-headed student intoned.

The blond looked around. "I can't believe you all fell for his bullshit already."

"I can't believe you keep spouting garbage that like we care," Jirou said.

"I can't believe potential heroes are wasting time with this nonsense," the man at the front of the room said.

The class jerked around. An extremely tired-looking man stood at the front of the class, staring balefully back at them through ratty black hair.

"I tried to enter this room quietly to test your situational awareness and I find students actively sabotaging each other. If I was a villain - a real villain - I could have slipped around the sides of the room and quietly taken out several of you before the rest figured out I was taking advantage of your argument. I expect better from potential heroes, on multiple levels."

He looked out over the class. "For the rest of you, if you encounter a situation like this, your first instinct should be looking for UA staff to intervene, not letting them drag you down to their level. And for you, Bakugo..."

The blond tried to say something, but the man cut him off.

"If you have actual, genuine concerns about another student's behavior or intentions, you will report them to a teacher. You will not attempt to confront them yourself, and under no circumstances will you attempt to publicly turn your class against them. Consider yourself on probation; if this behavior turns out to be part of a pattern, I will expel you. You will also visit Hound Dog, the school guidance counselor, by the end of the week, since you so clearly need it."

The class shuffled to their seats, slightly subdued. From her place two seats behind Izuku, she could see his hunch intensified, body language withdrawn and more than a little fearful. She would try to comfort him, but it wasn't like she could reach past Himiko.

For her part, the girl sitting in front of her barely resembled the enigma staring out the window or the friendly (if a little invasive) conversationalist from earlier. Her face was flat beyond her barely-visible fangs, and Momo could see eyebags she'd somehow missed when Himiko repeatedly glanced at Bakugo. She held her body tightly, her right hand at her side grasping empty space like she expected something there, and there was a tense air to her Momo recognized from Miss Kaina on the rare occasions the bodyguard expected something to go wrong. Himiko had responded to the confrontation worse than Momo, maybe even Izuku; she looked ready for a fight, not class.

And in his corner, Bakugo looked... lost. His face flickered between defiance and confusion as he traded glares with the rest of the class, with added indignation when he looked at the teacher. And fear, briefly, whenever he looked at Izuku.

The man at the front of the room sighed and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. "Faces forward, kiddos. My name is Aizawa. I will be your teacher this year, and I hope to whoever's listening this is the worst trouble you lot give me. I expect to be proven wrong."

Chapter Text

Momo couldn't say she approved of skipping the formal ceremony to kick off the year, but it wasn't like she had the option not to follow her teacher outside. It was her, Class 1-A, Aizawa, and an open exercise field. At least she could nibble on the eye candy whenever her eyes drifted over Izuku.

Not that she did that all too often. On the one hand, she didnt want to be too obvious. Or creepy. On the other, being caught staring was definitely creepy, and the last thing on earth Momo wanted was to make Izuku more uncomfortable.

On the third hand she didn't consciously acknowledge, she wouldn't know how to handle it if he was looking back.

But the sun was high, the skies were clear, and the teacher was giving them a gloomy look as the class shuffled out in their new gym uniforms.

"So. Quirk assessment tests. I assume all of you had the standard physical exams in school?"

Not as such, no, but Momo nodded along with the rest of the class like a regular person.

"They are illogical. Those tests are all attempts to measure your physical development against benchmarks that were too narrow to account for natural human variation even before the Age of Quirks and are comically obsolete now. The government likes its little boxes that constrict the strong and fail to support the weak.

"That ends today. Bakugo, stand in the circle. We're getting started."

Katsuki walked over to the little pitch, paying just enough attention to the teacher's ramblings to catch anything important.

In retrospect, he should've been more subtle. Given Deku enough time to reveal what he really was before bringing the rest of the class to his side. Show the kind of subtlety the old fuck wanted him to.

But that shouldn't have mattered! The extras in the various schools he'd bounced around in hadn't believed him, but they were extras among extras, practically scenery. These were potential heroes! And an actual hero, as pathetic as this Aizawa looked. He scored better than any of them, he was the best and they all knew it. Why?

Katsuki firmly ignored any doubts lingering on the edge of his consciousness. He was the best. His scores showed it. The Commission personally scouted him! He wasn't stupid enough to think they were only cultivating a talented young hero, but even though he hadn't fully figured out their agenda, the point stood.

"What was your best softball pitch in junior high?"

Katsuki didn't quite jump. "63 meters, I think?"

"How far can you throw with your quirk?"

Oh. Now he understood.

Dry-eyes tossed him a softball. "Anything goes as long as you don't leave the circle. Or throw it at another students. Don't waste our time."

Katsuki wouldn't, believe him. A few quick squeezes confirmed the "softball" was much harder than it should be, obviously intended for quirk testing. It probably wouldn't disintegrate.

Katsuki reared back, throwing arm extended as sweat gathered in his fists. He wasn't an idiot, he knew how to take advantage of the opportunity. The smart ones would figure out what he really was, follow in his lead, and wisen up. For the rest of these extras, at least in spirit...

"Die!"

Momo watched with wide eyes as the ball rocketed away, smoke and light trailing behind it. The class muttered in astonishment, but Aizawa's expression didn't change, focusing on the ball as it fell and the smartphone app tracking it.

"781 meters." The other students started jostling each other.

Aizawa turned back to the class.

"The government also shoves people in little boxes to keep them from hurting each other, keeping dangerous behavior away from day-to-day life. That reasoning no longer applies to you. You're not heroes yet, but if you complete your education at UA, you will be, and that means we need you to know just how far you can push your quirks."

He gestured to the training field.

"Today, you will all make free use of your quirks in your physical exams to get the highest scores possible. All of them, in every way you see fit, even if it invalidate the purpose of the test. Go Plus Ultra."

The class cheered. "Oh man, this sounds like fun!" Mina said. A bunch of the more excitable classmates agreed with her and started talking about what they might pull off.

"Fun?" Aizawa said, the subtle, sarcastic edge in his voice enough to catch every student's attention. "Did you kids come all the way to UA just to have fun?"

No one answered him.

"I have three years to turn every student in this class into a real hero. That's my mission as a teacher. I never succeed. There's always kids who can't cut it, who don't have the aptitude, who crumble under the pressure. Who are just here for fun.

"There are eight physical tests you all will be completing today. Your scores will reflect your physical, creative, and quirk-use capabilities, and those scores will be ranked. Whoever has the lowest total rank has the lowest aptitude for heroics and as such they will be expelled from this class before the rest of you leave for the day."

... Momo was really, really glad she'd done her homework.

The UA teacher list wasn't public knowledge, but every security system's biggest hole is the people who operate it, so Momo had gone on a merry safari through the social media of current and former UA students to figure out what she was in for. Aizawa had been one of the two first-year hero-course teachers for the past three years, so she put some time reading posts about him.

Everyone seemed to agree on the number 154 as the number of expulsions he'd ordered.

In three years he'd been teaching, best she could determine from her limited evidence, he could not have under any circumstances taught more than 95 students.

Aizawa could and had properly expelled students before. In the single digits. Instead, usually he'd "expel" a student into a short suspension before letting them back in, telling them the expulsion process had been overruled by the school. He did it to most of his students at some point, often more than once, and when former students asked him about it he told them it was a "logical ruse" to drive home how much effort they needed to put in to succeed.

At times he'd "expel" students from his class specifically, moving them down to the Gen Ed courses. Last year Aizawa had busted his entire course down in the first week due to something no one involved wanted to talk about but everyone involved agreed was deserved, and most (though not all) had made it right back during the sports festival.

The Gen Ed students, of course, were not exactly happy with Aizawa using their classrooms as a dumping ground, but every time the subject came up some of them pointed out it opened room for promotion when the sports festival or other events came around, and that meant Gen Ed students whose quirks floundered in the mass combats of the Entrance Exams had a chance to buff up and show themselves off properly.

Momo wasn't sure she approved, as a whole - as much as Miss Ren sold fear as a motivator, she couldn't think of a better way to make a toxic and inefficient learning environment - but at least Aizawa wouldn't just ruin future careers out of spite.

Everything was under control.

She couldn't see Himiko's face from where she was standing.

FOUR WEEKS BEFORE THE START OF THE SCHOOL YEAR

"I try not to think about it, but I'm a murderer, Miss Tsutsumi," Toga Himiko said, curled up on her easy chair. "Uncle said I should talk to you about it, but I still don't get it. I shouldn't be around other kids."

"How many?" The older woman asked.

"I don't know. I can't remember. The lack of blood and my memory... Three. I think. I stabbed a few times that but I don't think they all bled out."

"I killed over 120 targets while working for the Commission," Tsutsumi said, reclined on a couch in the Hori living room, with the matter-of-fact calm of the traumatized. "I'd say about 80% of them deserved it, though these days I wish I'd found some other way to get rid of them. The rest didn't. I have to not look directly at my hands when I'm near children or I see the blood of teenagers I was ordered to kill. I don't sleep on nights that I look."

"But," Toga said, "you don't do that any more. You don't want to hurt people."

"I try not to."

"I do. Want to, I mean," Toga said, feeling sick. She could feel her uncle sending her soothing feelings. "I want to see people covered in blood. I want to become people, drink them dry and wear their faces. It makes me happy. Nothing else does. I know it's wrong. If it wasn't for my uncle helping me get enough blood for once, I wouldn't care at all."

"Himiko," Tsustumi said, "you suffered through one of the most profound quirk backlashes in Japanese history. You're messed up in the head." Toga looked up. "I was too. Still am. But three things happened."

Toga stared at her.

"First, somebody pulled me out. They had their own agendas, ones I didn't - and don't - always approve of, but I had enough room to start making my own decisions, whether I thought they should let me or not. Second, I accepted help. Nobody fixed me. If they tried, I would have run away. Or reverted. But people offered me help and the chance to get better, and I trusted their judgment, not mine.

"Third, I was given a purpose. Well, two, but one of them is gone now, for good. I guard Miss Ren and offer her and her people advice, so they don't end up like me."

"I'm already like you," Toga said bitterly.

"And what would you do if you could change that?"

Toga started to snap at her, but Tsutsumi talked over it.

"It's too late to change yourself, not like that. If you knew others were going through what you went through - and other people are - what would you want to do?"

"... I'd want to stop them. Their parents, I mean - not, not kill them, just make it so their kids don't turn out like me."

"I think that's something to shoot for."

"I don't help people. I hurt people. And laugh."

"I still love shooting," Tsutsumi said quietly, "but I figured out how not to want to shoot people. It's hard. But it can be done."

She gestured around Hori Sen's living room. "Sen knows all this about you and chose to open her home to you anyway. If there's anything that girl understands, it's how not to be normal." Toga twitched. "Give her a chance. Let her get to know you. And... maybe, if you figure out how to live with yourself - and that's harder than it sounds, I know, - you can figure out how you stop what happened to you from ever happening again."

"Like a quirk counselor?" Toga said sarcastically. "Until I stab enough parents to find one worth turning into?"

"No."

Tsutsumi put forward a set of pamphlets with "UA" emblazoned on them in Romanji.

"There are heroes who avoid the spotlight. Mostly they're supposed to track down villains and criminals on a larger scale, but this is the sort of thing they're trained to spot as well. UA is the best school in the country for this, and knowing your skills, Miss Ren is confident you can get in. Even if you decide not to be a hero, I can't think of a better place to learn the skills you need to prevent you from happening again."

PRESENT

Hori Himiko felt the last drop of hope die.

It had started out so well! Momo had been... anxious? A little withdrawn? Himiko couldn't really tell, but she'd opened right up once Himiko got her going! Same nerdy charm as Izuku (though as her cousin (?) he was family and therefore off the menu, what a waste), and listening to such obviously old friends talk had helped her settle inside, like being normal without... having to be normal.

Then Spikes arrived and everything went south.

She remembered people like him. People so proud of their quirk, people who had such clear ideas about who did and didn't fit in. People who'd never had to eat a wild animal because quirk-driven malnutrition would have killed them otherwise and they didn't understand their starvation well enough to explain it. Her parents. And he wouldn't shut up.

Her uncle had to take control of her body; for a moment, she thought she was back on the street, staring down a potential threat and a potential meal.

Even after she came back to herself, the old urge for violence was still there. He must have been dangerous, she saw his ranking. But she doubted that he'd ever been in the kind of fight she'd bring to him. That he had the brutal experience even one year of predation on the street brought her. That he knew how to fight when injured, when scared, when looking at a grinning face covered in his own blood. Scarier men than him hadn't. And maybe he'd figure out how hilarious it was he though an innocent classmate was a monster when a real one sat one row back.

"I thought you didn't want to be that person any more, Himiko," her uncle said.

He was right. And she brought herself under control after a while. But she didn't miss that the teacher only gave Spikes a slap on the wrist.

And now it all came out in the open.

"But that's not fair!" One classmate said.

"Heroism isn't fair," the teacher shot back. "Fighting villains fair is a great way to end up dead. And after the circus I saw this morning, I have no faith..."

Himiko could barely pay attention to the rest of his little speech. This place was supposed to be better. This place was supposed to be better than the street, than the Toga household. Instead, it was the same. The strong got to pick on the weak, powerful quirks won out over anything else, and the people in charge got to take it out on worthless people like her and ruin their lives on a whim.

Why bother being a hero if this was what a hero looked like?

Her uncle did everything he could to reign her emotions in at the back of her head. She knew her emotions were out of control again. She definitely shouldn't be thinking about hurting teachers, she could admit that, and that realization helped bring herself back under control.

But she could feel her uncle's frustration too. He said he'd been a teacher once, after all. And since she frankly didnt care about pretending to be normal at this point, she took a different route to spite the man.

The ball toss came while she was still figuring out what to do, so she just wore her uncle and used his strength and expertise to get a respectable result. Thankfully turning into him didn't mess with her clothes - something to do with him being a later addition to her quirk? - but it always worked just fine. And the shocked looks she got were a little gratifying.

But she threw the rest of her tests. The grip strength was hard to tell, and you could mark her performance at the dash to not being able to cheat like half the class, but her insulting little bunny hop at the standing jump was something Aizawa couldn't ignore.

"Are you trying to fail every test?" He asked.

"Yes."

He blinked. "Explain your logic."

Himiko spoke, partly from concepts her uncle was feeding her but mostly from her heart. "You talked about shoving people in useless little boxes. That's what testing does, right? There's too many variables. Kicking someone out on their first day is 'illogical', because it doesn't account for how they might grow. So I'm calling your bluff. Either you're lying to us, or you really are going to expel a student for terrible reasons. So I'm doing the heroic thing and standing up to somebody abusing their power!"

Aizawa looked at her for a moment, then, to her surprise, grinned. "That's bold, kid, and I like your initiative. That's the kind of attitude that makes a good hero."

His smile fell. "The kind of hero that fails to understand the situation and gets themselves killed. I will not tolerate somebody undermining my class like this because they don't understand why it's important."

"Go home, Hori Himiko. You'll hear from the school administration by tomorrow if they decide against my decision. Otherwise, consider yourself expelled."

Chapter Text

SIX WEEKS AGO

"If you're going to get me all that blood without letting me love anybody, old man, you should probably hurry up!"

Toga Himiko practically skipped at the thought.

"Don't worry," he said firmly in her head, which should have been alarming, not that she cared. "Just get me to a phone booth and I'll get you all the blood you can imagine."

"A phone booth?" Toga giggled. "You really are old!"

She fished out a phone she took off the body of her last crush. Or, was it a body? She was still moving and Toga didn't take all that much blood from her. Probably not just a body then. Ooh, maybe she'd make a full recovery and Toga could show her her love again! Giggling at the thought, she briefly took the teenager's form long enough to get past the fingerprint lock.

"All right, old man, what's the plan? Don't keep me waiting now!"

He gave her several strict instructions and a phone number she quickly typed in.

"Who is this?" The woman on the other end sounded so harsh and powerful. Scary!

"The old man in my head said I should call you so he can get me my blood," she said with a little trill on the end. "He said to tell you... he knows who killed Gemini? And he's in my head now. And a bunch of other boring stuff I don't care about."

"... Ozma came back?" The woman sounded almost stricken.

"He says his name is Ozpin but whatever," Toga said impatiently. "He told me to tell you I need a lot of human blood a really lot quickly. He wants you to get me into a blood bank. Which is a good idea. You should probably do that!" Toga giggled. "I'm gonna have to make my way in anyway even if you say no. Can't be as good as fresh blood, but oh, there must be so much! Oh, and he thinks you won't believe me so he wants me to say 05112012. Is that a code? That's so lame."

After a quiet moment, the voice rattled off a street address and said it was the nearest bloodbank to Toga's location - when did she tell the scary lady where she was? No wait, it was right after she said that goofy code, she'd just had one of her little memory hiccups - plus info on how to get past the people there. So perfect!

The people at the blood bank didn't react well when she walked in, probably because she didn't look normal enough (what with the dirty school uniform and all the blood and everything). But she just repeated what the scary lady told her plus some stuff the old man said in her head and the guards let her into the back all easy-like. They didn't even supervise her! Wow, miss scary-voice-on-the-phone must be even scarier than she sounded in person. Not that Toga cared right now.

With an access card she'd plucked out of the hands of a very nervous-looking tech, Toga cracked open the nearest container to find rows of refrigerated bloodpacks. Her eyes practically sparkled! Throwing back pack after pack, Toga spent.. oh, an hour or more just gorging herself in hedonistic bliss. By the end she could have reached out and felt her slightly bloated stomach, not that she had the energy to do so.

Fully, truly sated for the first time she could remember, Toga's mind began to wander. Her head was slow, calm, but her train of thought felt smooth. Everything was so clear! It was like she wasn't so thirsty. Wasn't thirsty at all, even. So peaceful.

Her mind wandered. She thought about cherry blossoms and knives, how wonderful being in love was, her latest object of affection. So cute! Tall, very tall, with just the cutest animal mutations that made her look like a curvy stuffed animal! Toga had adored the look on her face when she drained her crush's blood. Now that her mind felt clearer than it had since... ever, maybe she could really appreciate the sight?

Toga tried to picture exactly how the cutie looked the moment she took her knife out the first time. With her head clear, her face looked different in her memories.

Toga saw naked fear and pain now. Like she didn't understand why something terrible was happening to her. It wasn't cute. Looking at it didn't feel good any more.

It looked kind of like what Himiko saw in the mirror that one time her parents hit her for confessing she wanted blood to her best friend.

Himiko wondered if Saiko was still moving after he gave her so much wonderful blood. She didn't remember.

Her thoughts started to race, and after about five minutes of further thought she turned on her side and vomited.

PRESENT

Ozpin walked into the Hori apartment that evening and found someone had already set out a nice cup of tea for Himiko. No blood, probably appropriate for her current mindset. Himiko watched as he sat down and sipped it from inside their head without feeling much of anything. Which was good. She didn't want to feel anything right now. She could let her uncle wear her for a while. That way she didn't have to be a person until she felt ready.

The tea was a nicer gesture for Himiko than her uncle. For all her virtues, Sen couldn't prepare a cup of tea if she wanted to, and neither she nor Himiko exactly had lots of friends. One of two people probably made that tea, and one rarely went far from the other. So her uncle was going to be stuck with somebody he spent so much time trying to avoid.

Aunt Salem walked calmly into the room, Big Sis Kaina trailing quietly with a pot and a few more cups. Salem took a seat in the easy chair Himiko had huddled in what felt like years ago, Kaina leaned casually against the wall, and the three drank tea in tense silence for so long Himiko's mind, already feeling untethered to reality, began to drift.

Himiko had seen... glimpses, when it came to her uncle's past. They still weren't sure how exactly the sharing worked, since her uncle's Eternal Man thing didn't work the same way as it did in Remnant, but she knew the basics. He'd shown her the fuzzy memories of how him and her aunt met and everything it lead to, plus a lot less fuzzy ones on everything she did before arriving here.

She'd even seen what happened to Sen. Maybe Aunt Salem hadn't done it directly, and of course things were different now, but it did make it way, way harder to trust her like her uncle.

There were a bunch of things he didn't want to show her, though - some of the big battles and massacres and stuff he'd seen, people close to him dying, stuff he'd lost and couldn't get back. She got that.

He also wouldn't show her much of what he got up to after arriving on earth, apparently because his last host died badly and he was still kind of in morning. Also, something big and scary happened a few years before that and he didn't want to think about it, so he just kept telling her it was in the past whenever it came up.

It was whatever. She'd seen more of him than he probably realized. She decided she didn't want to think about all the times he died, so she wouldn't.

After a while, her aunt spoke up. "Sen spoke to the teacher to receive some clarification. The expulsion papers for Himiko were improperly filed by Aizawa - likely deliberately - and as such she is to return to class tomorrow morning as usual. Apparently this is a standard way he exercises discipline."

"That seems... counterproductive," her uncle said.

"Sen said as much, but..."

TWO HOURS AGO

"Heroism is too dangerous for dilletants. If I don't make it abundantly clear there will be consequences, I will lose students the moment they face real villains."

"And how many promising students drop out because you broke their confidence?"

"That's their business -"

"It's everyone's business!"

"I've taught long enough to see what happens when innocent children run into people who want to kill them. Better a broken dream than a lost life.

"You've been teaching for three years and you keep expelling students before they get the chance to prove you wrong!"

PRESENT

"...She didn't make much progress. But this won't be going on Himeko's records, we verified that."

That sounded nice to Himiko, though she didn't fully register it.

Her uncle made a noncommital noise, and they settled into uncomfortable silence as Kaina poured some more tea.

"We just found Stain, by the way," her aunt said casually.

Her uncle straightened up, eyes boring into her.

"Just a day or two ago, not long enough for him to claim another life. Given what he did to Gemini, I thought you might want a chance to help decide his fate."

"And you haven't reported him to the police? Or our old hero contacts, the ones who can handle him?"

Her aunt's eyes narrowed. "I expected different, Ozma. Here's your chance at revenge. Will you just pass it up that easily?"

"We're not the ones who get to decide what happens here, Salem," her uncle fumed. Himiko tried to send comfortable feelings back to him, but she wasn't nearly as good at it; she couldn't feel them land home.

"This is a peace offering, Ozma," she hissed. "How many of these do I have to make until you realize I'm not the same Salem you had killed?"

"You know I'm never going to trust you again, Salem," her uncle said a little more calmly. "Not after everything."

"I suppose I don't need trust," her aunt said, her face tight. "Can you at least believe I didn't have any secret motives here?"

"You always have secret motives, Salem." He sighed and leaned back. "If you really are genuine, just bring your information to the police. They should know how to pursue it."

The woman nodded, and they fell back into a moderately less uncomfortable silence.

"I am sorry about Gemini," her aunt said after a moment, "truly."

Himiko could feel her uncle struggle with his past and prejudices.

"... He would have told us we had bigger things to worry about than sniping at each other," he said ruefully.

"And we did, back then," Kaina piped up unexpectedly.

The realization they had an audience shook the two ageless people out of their little world. Her aunt ostentatiously brushed nonexistent dust off her dress and stood.

"All else aside, I believe the trouble is past. Little Himiko - only if you're up to answering, of course - do you feel comfortable returning to class tomorrow?"

She stirred in her uncle's head, not ready to use language yet.

"She says she will be," her uncle said, and Himiko made the mental equivalent of a nod.

"And that is a pleasure to hear." Himiko's aunt and older sister walked quietly out of the apartment, and the room went quiet.

Some time later, the older man shuddered and fell apart in a curtain of gray slime, revealing a blonde teenager quietly reaching for cold tea.

Momo came to school the next day in a very bad mood.

She wasn't alone: after the disaster that had been yesterday, class morale was at a low ebb.

"The school overrode my attempt to have Miss Hori expelled because of otherwise respectable behavior and past hard work. I'm more than willing to accept this. However, children, keep in mind you are not immortal. I am here to teach how how to think like a hero, not just how to fight, and unless and until you demonstrate a full understanding of what I have to teach I will not tolerate failing to give your all. You are here to learn from the experts, and I expect you to act like it."

The class responded with silent hostility, and Aizawa soon retreated, replaced by Present Mic trying to get them excited about English grammar. If anything, that went over even worse.

Momo sat with Himeko at lunch, hoping to show her support, joined by Izuku and a gaggle of new friends drawn in by his charisma; the girl was visibly withdrawn, her responses muted, but at least she was mentally present. Part of Momk surpressed jealousy at the attention Izuku was getting, but the rest of her focus drew inward.

Momo hated thinking about her anger. She believed it an extention of her anxiety, maybe her frustration at how constrained and unhappy her life could be, but she hadn't spent much time thinking about it until Miss Ren brought the concept forward in their conversations. Momo hated how her parents made her feel. Momo hated how Izuku's social graces made her jealous of someone she liked so much. Momo hated the school she'd so looked forward to looked like it was run by petty tyrants happy to let people like Bakugo or Aizawa in instead of competent heroes. Her hate rarely sat at the top of her mind, but something about UA kept setting her off. She barely engaged jn lunchtime conversation that day.

In the past, she'd connected with Izuku over this. His anger was different, external; the more Grimmstuff he used, the more his personality subtly shifted, growing more confident, aggressive, and yes, angry. But now? With him surrounded by all these new friends, friends she was too awkward to properly connect to? Maybe it would change over time. For now, she was left to stew in her frustration alone.

She woke up a little when they reached the afternoon's heroism classes, though.

"I am here," All Might exclaimed, "walking through the door like a normal teacher!"

Momo had never seen the man in person. She'd heard of him before - who hadn't? - but he was at once less and more than she expected. She didn't expect the posturing, the goofy dialogue, his coming across almost like a buffoon. But he had a presence to him despite all that, a sort of physical pressure that didn't press one down, but uplift them, motivate them to do better.

Or maybe that was just him letting them see their costumes.

ONE WEEK AGO

Momo waited anxiously as Miss Ren looked over the preliminary costume design shed sent over in the video call. She'd put an immense amount of thought into it - it should be perfect!

Miss Ren put the paper down and sighed.

"Momo, darling, why does your costume leave you half-naked?"

She blinked. "I need as many places to use my quirk from as possible, so it only makes sense to leave a bunch of openings. Plus, I made sure it met all the laws around costume coverage!"

"You do know why those laws exist, darling?"

"To make sure heroes have great flexibility without completely sacrificing protection!"

Another sigh. "... Sometimes I forget how sheltered you are."

What was that supposed to mean?

"I would strongly advise something form fitting using DNA locked material instead - you can produce the materials the designers need with your quirk and it will offer you far more protection. In multiple ways."

"But doesn't DNA-locked material only work with transformation-type quirks? It only changes when those quirks activate."

Miss Ren shook her head. "It shifts whenever a person activates a quirk through a part of their body physically in contact with the material. Your quirk, from what I understand, temporarily alters your body at the point of creation, so you should be able to draw your creations through such a costume without issue. It's also rather expensive, but between your holdings and UA's resources, that shouldn't be an issue."

Momo nodded, but after a moment of pensive silence, she asked, "I'll defer to your experience, but I'm still not sure what's so wrong with my own design.

Miss Ren sighed again. "I would say your parents should handle this, but Brothers know what they'd tell you with how obsessed they are with image. We should begin with that people feel when they look at bare skin on someone they find attractive..."

PRESENT

Momo was pleased to note her costume provided full body coverage.

It had the same bold red color she'd so enjoyed putting in the sketch, as well as the toolbelt (chemistry dictionary included). But now it offered full-body coverage, the open parts filled in with deep blue marked by black accents. It... actually looked a bit like her gym uniform, just reinforced and made skin-tight to make activating her quirk easier. Momo wasn't sure how to feel about that.

Izuku, on the other hand, was wearing something she'd never seen before. It looked almost medieval, a red and black tunic marked with a white mask sigil on the chest flowing down over skintight black leggings and big stompy boots. Every lining, strap, and button was the same green as his hair, as was the scarf-like mask on his face with a cheerful grin decal offsetting any intimidation factor. The colors kind of clashed - Momo would have expected nothing less from a boy who spent years telling her he thought t-shirts with Kanji on them were acceptable fashion - but he looked like the kind of hero that marched into darkness and came out with rescued damsels in his arms. Which is a thought she chose not to pursue.

Of the other students, the one whose costume stood out the most was Hori, because at first glance she wasn't wearing one, just a beige school uniform. Closer inspection revealed discrete padding, a mask tucked into her collar, and long, thick cords concealed under her sleeves. Definitely the least heroic of the bunch; was she shooting for underground work?

"Welcome to the next step of your education, students," All Might bellowed. "Mock combat!"

Many of the students glanced at each other. "Aren't you going to cover, like, basic training?" Mina asked.

"Nonsense! Every student here proved their ability to hold their own in basic combat just by passing the Exam! However, as a combat teacher, I need to know how each of you fights in order to form a baseline!"

He brought up a slideshow on the board presenting a simple scenario: two teams of two students, one assigned to protect a "bomb" (the villains), one assigned to reach and "deactivate" it (the heroes). All four students were provided with capture tape and a student was "out" the moment they were immobilized on All Might's call, even if they could break their way free somehow; a team could also win by taking out both opponents.

"On the other hand," All Might said, his eyes (hidden as they were) roaming over his audience, "you are heroes in training, and I expect appropriate conduct. I'm not speaking of the same standards Mr. Aizawa holds," he said quickly, seeing several faces darken, "only that you behave honorably and graciously."

Momo noticed something odd in his look, something that didn't match the aura of "world's greatest hero" he was trying to project. Was he inspecting them? Trying to spot something? He was examining them too closely for a simple explanation of an exercise, but she just didn't know how to read him past that.

"For this first exercise," he continued, "I will be granting you a great deal more latitude than most teachers, or indeed I will in later classes. Our purpose here today is to discover not just how you fight, but why and where. You are - and I hope this is obvious - not to use lethal force against each other, not to mention follow the school's Code of Conduct, but you are to go Plus Ultra in every other respect. I will intervene to protect any students who I believe are in actual danger, but I will not break up fights or rescue you from traps or other hazards otherwise, even if their behavior disqualifies them."

... That sounded ominous.

He paused and turned to face the class as a whole.

"However, if I tell you to stop what you're doing, I expect you to stop. It doesn't matter what it is or whether you understand why I say it, you will disengage and move to a safe position."

He leaned forward slightly.

"I strongly doubt any of you kids can put each other in a situation I can't pull you out of, but I refuse to put you in more danger than necessary. If you don't listen to me, you will face punishment - proper, by the books punishment.

"But enough of that!" He straightened back up, producing a box from under the teacher's desk. "There's no way for me to accurately evaluate who works best with who without seeing you in action, so today, we'll be assigning teams at random. Everyone, come up and pick a ball!"

So they did, every student pulling a labeled ball out of the box.

Momo had hoped, so deeply hoped she'd pull Izuku.

To her horror, she was paired with Bakugo.

To her even greater horror, when All Might revealed the matches, they were to be against Himiko and Izuku, villains to heroes.

Momo looked to her side and saw Bakugo staring daggers at Izuku, a violent gleam in his eyes as her best friend quailed. She looked at All Might, standing proud and tall and authoritative, and felt all objections die in her throat as flashes of her parents' routine forced her to hold her tongue. She stewed on her anxiety, her inability to help anyone since walking into this school, and the silent fury she constantly suppressed. She looked around at her classmates, most of whom looked at her with sympathy and pity and didn't do anything to help her out of a situation where she had to work with someone she hated against someone she cared about.

Something inside Momo... not broke, exactly, but cracked. It wasn't something dramatic or all that important, and it didn't make her feel like a different person. But it shifted and coalesced into something cold and hard.

Miss Ren liked to talk about willpower; she told Momo once that victory was a thing of the will. Well, she had something to conquer now. And now she had a plan, and the will to follow through.

Chapter Text

A part of Momo understood there was something deeply off with her thinking.

Some of her - most of her - thought she was just leveraging all the lessons Miss Ren had taught her, intentionally or not. She'd spent years learning at the feet of a master manipulator, and it was finally time to put what she learned to good use.

Another part of her kept throwing up warnings that her judgment was compromised, she wasn't thinking things through, this isn't how she wanted to deal with other people. But she was tired of self doubt, too full of anger to succumb to her usual issues, so she managed to surpress that voice. Besides, the plan was simple and flexible and designed to build on itself without exposing her to that much risk. Exactly the sort of thing Miss Ren would be proud of.

Step one, as always, was information gathering.

All Might led the class into what looked like a reinforced bunker at the edge of one of the school's urban testing areas. Beyond it stood several squat concrete buildings with only a smattering of windows, presumably the trial arenas. The bunker itself had screens covering the far wall, only leaving a couple feet of space free at one end, and the lighting was low enough to draw focus to the viewing station.

He further explained several rules and quirks in the process - paired earpieces for teammates, cameras across the buildings, the appearance of the "bomb" and how to tap it to "disarm" it, and even how to use capture tape properly. Momo took mental notes.

Step two, as it always should be, was checking your information and verifying your understanding of the parties involved.

A quick survey of the room proved most of hers correct; Bakugo looked furious in general but especially mad that his trial was scheduled for last, and while Himiko was mostly focused on the screens, she kept shooting positively bloodthirsty looks at the blond when he wasn't looking. Izuku she wasn't so sure about, so she sidled over under the guise of asking him if he was okay. An easy gambit, since she legitimately wanted to know if he was okay.

Izuku, as it turned out, was worried but resolute. He'd noticed how the rest of the class was treating Bakugo, and while that part of his past still haunted him, it had been a long time since Izuku's only friend was the boy who tormented him. She already knew what she needed about his combat style - especially how durable his largely-Grimmstuff body was - so once she had a read on his mood she did what she could to encourage him, make him feel ready to shoulder whatever burdens were necessary. It would make him more predictable.

She hugged him. "I have confidence in you, Izuku."

Momo missed the confused look Izuku shot her as she walked away.

Step three was verifying your resources and their capabilities.

Momo knew her abilities, Izuku's abilities, and to a lesser extent Bakugo's abilities. She also knew how Izuku would react and felt Bakugo wasn't too hard to predict. Himiko was a wildcard, but she seemed to defer to Izuku a little bit and absolutely loath Bakugo, plus she radiated "stealth specialist" and that slotted her in perfectly. Her only issue was All Might. Reputation aside, Momo had no idea how far he'd enforce the rules he put forward. Too lax, and the plan would pose too much danger to those involved. Too strict, and it wouldn't work in the first place.

All Might didn't intervene in the first trial, only taking the time to go over the participants' performance in-depth with the rest of the class (Momo made sure to listen and participate). He didn't intervene in the second trial, either, in spite of what happened after Kyouka tricked Kaminari into electrifying himself, slipping past him and disabling the bomb.

"Nah, I'm not done yet!" Kirishima said when he heard All Might announce the end of the trial, before taking another swing at Ojiro.

"Ojiro my boy, do you need me to extract you?"

"No," he said, eyes narrowed as his tail deflected the blow. "I want to finish this."

All Might said nothing more.

It took several minutes for Ojiro to do just that. Kirishima fought fast and hard, but his opponent clearly had more experience sparring against a human opponent. Eventually, Ojiro was able to constrict him long enough to wrap capture tape around his wrists. All Might announced the fight over and ordered the two to return to the bunker, an order they obeyed.

During the debrief, Momo wasn't expecting All Might not to condemn Kirishima for ignoring the end of the scenario nor Ojiro for indulging him. Instead, he used their fight to illustrate several points on when continuing a fight might be necessary even when defeat seems certain, and how to tell when an aspiring hero should or should not do so.

In the third trial, Mina and Iida ended up facing each other down in a narrow hallway, the former the only thing standing between the latter from reaching the bomb. Mina broke out an acid so powerful it seemed to surprise her, and Iida lost his footing as it wore away at his boots, sliding off his feet before plunging face-first, fully accelerated, towards acid that bubbled as it slowly dissolved the concrete floor.

With an almighty bang, All Might disappeared from the bunker, the extra wallspace by the screens revealed as a door by him nearly blowing it off its hinges. In a split second, he had burst through the nearest wall in the test building (with every resulting wall fragment somehow missing both students), Iida landing heavily on his massive palm as he balanced it the hole he made.

All Might hopped down the hallway to an acid-free section, set the student down, and after clapping him on the shoulder burst back out. As he returned and pulled the door shut, Momo nodded to herself.

She couldn't have asked for better standards. They were perfect. Everything was perfect.

Momo finished another intentionally tedious status report to Bakugo and turned off the earpiece when she heard him growl at her. She sat down with her back to her wall, bo staff in hand for emergencies, bored out of her skull.

As per standard, her and Bakugo had started their rounds as the villains in the room with the "bomb", which certainly looked the part up close until you touched it and realized it was a hollow shell. As she suspected he would, he'd barely stuck around long enough to order her to stay put before stomping off, so Momo took her mission into her own hands.

Between the hallway entrance and the bomb sat a millimeter-thick carbon nanotube lattice, interwoven into a series of concrete bases she'd (extremely carefully) fused to the floor with a powerful acid. The only vents leading into the room were on her side of the barrier, and the room was positioned so there weren't any windows to worry about. It wouldn't stop Izuku or his Grimm - carbon nanotubes, tough as they were, were vulnerable to sheer force and could break if hit with enough force at the right angle - but if everything went to plan, Izuku would never even see it.

Himiko, once again, was a wildcard. The only quirk use Momo had seen out of her was the transformation she'd used to throw the softball, and last she checked, turning into an older man with little glasses (?) wasn't something that could break molecular bonds. Even if Himiko proved more dangerous than she looked (which, given her behavior, was entirely possible), the wall should stump her long enough to execute the next part of -

Some sixth sense screeched at Momo and she sprung to her left, barely dodging a falling Himiko.

Himiko met Momo's eyes as she backed up and put her staff protectively in front, verticle pupils narrow and fangs on full display. In her hand she spun a short steel baton, roughly the dimensions of a carving knife. "Hi Momo!" she said, and lunged.

Momo liked using a staff in part for the reach, but that didn't seem to matter to Himiko. She batted the nearer end of the staff out of the way with her baton, only to duck under the other end as Momo rolled with the momentum. Himiko jabbed her hard enough in the stomach she bent over, then cracked her in the face with her off hand so hard she saw stars.

Calling on every ounce of combat training Miss Kaina had put her through, Momo instinctively shifted to quarter-grip and swung, striking Himiko in the side hard enough she backed off with a hiss. Momo took advantage of the respite to create a simple square lattice shield and a shorter staff to match, tossing the old one aside before quickly checking to make sure her earpiece was off.

Despite still slightly favoring her side, Himiko was smiling like the sun. "I've been practicing my quirk with my uncle!" she said, and Momo didn't have time to puzzle out who that was before she lunged again. Momo positioned her shield at just the right angle to deflect the thrust and follow up with a strike of her own.

In a shower of gray slime, Himiko was suddenly older, maler, and considerably taller. The baton tip that would have impacted the center of Momo's shield instead squarely struck the top, forcing it back in her face. Momo ducked the following sideswipe, only for another shower of slime and height change to bring the baton in line with her shoulder, delivering a blow with numbing force that loosened her grip on her shield. A lightning-quick followup to her knee unbalanced Momo, and she toppled to the ground.

Himiko dropped after her, capture tape in hand.

"Wait! Wait," Momo said, just quietly enough any mics in the building wouldn't pick it up.

Himiko made an incongruously cheerful inquisitive noise.

"I think I know how to get Bakugo expelled."

The smile disappeared from Himiko's face and she leaned in.

"I'm listening."

Finally. Finally!

"What do I have to say to you, Kacchan?" Deku shouted, still standing on the open ground where he'd landed after getting blown through the outer wall. "What do you want to hear from me?!"

Katsuki grinned ferally as he blasted himself away from the snake monster's plunging head, following it up with a plume of fire straight into its eye. It screeched in pain (whatever pain a monster like it could feel, anyway) and pulled back, the second head rearing up for a followup strike.

"I apologized then! I apologized now! I didn't do anything to anyone! I did everything I could to help other people!"

"Doesn't matter how you dress it up, Deku, you can't change what you are!"

The second head darted forward, only to meet a plume of fire that nearly disintegrated it. The first head had just enough time for a perfunctory, easily-dodged bite before it disintegrated.

With a grunt, Deku slammed his hands into the ground again, the pool of black at his feet producing another one of those ugly ape things as those black veins crawled even higher on his face. Instead of attacking, it paused to beat its chest and roar a challenge. Which meant his plan was working.

People always assumed Katsuki was an idiot because he was impulsive. Sure, he was willing to admit he had a hair-trigger temper, but he'd always succeeded at anything he put his mind at (that wasn't beating the old fuck in a fight). His hero training. His schoolwork. Impressing the Commission enough to get just enough access to their systems to do his schoolwork without leaving the building. Fast-talking hapless tech support into granting him permissions for the files he needed. That dumbass should at least have been fired for caving under pressure and also being a colossal fuck-up in general, but Katsuki didn't live in a just world.

Of course, it only worked because, again, Katsuki wasn't an idiot. He hadn't asked for the sky. That would have been rejected out of hand. He wanted only to look at only the quirk files for only one class in only one middle school as part of an "ongoing investigation". Which wasn't even a lie, because he'd already done his homework and made sure Deku was in that class. He'd overheard multiple people at the Commission talk about how they kept files on everyone with a potent quirk in the country, even the kids. And they were all right, because Katsuki struck gold.

Fittingly for a coward, Deku wasn't much of a fighter himself. He needed to toss out enough of that creepy black shit and pull his monsters out of it to do any real damage. It had sucked to learn his body was mostly made of that black shit and regenerated practically anything done to it, which meant Katsuki couldn't put him down. But then, heroes weren't supposed to kill villains, were they? And he knew just how to make sure somebody else handled it for him.

See, the more Deku used his quirk, the more obvious it was that he was a villain. His behavior changed; he got less shy, more aggressive, more visibly unstable. He started to lose control of his monsters as those gross-looking veins took over his face. While he'd never reached that point before, the files speculated Deku would eventually snap under enough pressure and lose control completely.

Katsuki ducked under the ape as it swung at him, launching an explosion into its chest. It stumbled back, roared, and charged right into a second.

He had to be careful. Deku's monsters needed to be taken seriously. They had enough power to bring him down if he wasn't careful. Back when Deku was still able to focus, he'd only been able to come out on top through pure training and determination - he couldn't have managed it without the old fuck's training. But he was still sticking to his cover, so he kept trying to capture Katsuki instead of going for the kill, which made his life easier.

The second explosion stunned the ape thing enough for Katsuki to blow up its face with both hands. It dissolved on the spot.

Not that careful, though. Deku was now actively fighting his monsters for control, and that made him and them both weak.

If only his partner would stop whinging at him. She'd spoken against him yesterday, but her quirk was promising and she'd seemed willing to work with him. Except she'd been pestering him on and off the whole match and practically from the moment he engaged Deku she'd been whining through her earpiece about how Deku's creepy teammate was kicking her ass up and down the room. It was like ahe was deliberately trying to make him angry. He'd long since stopped listening to the details.

She called him again to babble in fear, but he cut her off.

"Shut the fuck up. It doesn't matter. I'm almost done here anyway."

Katsuki leaped forward before Deku could summon another monster, kicking his jaw hard enough to shatter it, then punched him hard enough to lay him flat. The wounds quickly healed, but that was the point. The black veins finally reached his eyes.

Like clockwork, All Might's voiced echoed across the training area. "The heroes have disabled the bomb and won the trial! Please disengage and return to the bunker for your debriefing."

Katsuki didn't bother answering.

"Young Bakugo? Young Midoriya? Do either of you wish to disengage?"

Katsuki scoffed. With a snarl, Deku jumped up and swung at Katsuki, too close to summon another freak of nature and too angry to think of clearing enough space to do so. Katsuki dodged with contemptuous ease and punished him with a cross-jab, then kicked him in the midsection hard enough to fold him over. And yet with another scream he stood up at swung at him again, and again, and again.

Katsuki didn't bother going on the offensive. He didn't have to. He didn't even need to use his quirk to beat him down, and Deku didn't deserve it. Just like the old fuck had taught him, all you needed to handle someone in a battle rage was to keep your cool and use their anger against them. And Deku was clearly furious. But he wasn't trying to summon anything. And those black veins weren't making much more progress.

As Katsuki slipped past a clumsy grab, elbowed Deku in the face, and broke his nose, he realized his mistake. He'd gotten a little too lost in making Deku angry. Deku was as angry as he was going to get. All these little injuries (he watched the nose fix itself without Deku seeming to notice) weren't enough to get him to summon something wild and uncontrollable. He needed something more dramatic. Something that Deku would have to give in to his villainous nature just to heal from.

Another kick to his midsection sent Deku sprawling, and as Katsuki raised his hand, he finally let himself loosen the leash on his anger. For once, the piece of shit didn't immediately get back up again, leaving him nice and open. Katsuki's palm crackled with the might of his quirk as he raised his hand. This was it. This was it! All these years, all his mistreatment, all the insults from every angle, and finally everyone could see what he saw!

"Young Bakugo, this fight is now over. Disengage from the fight and return to the bunker immediately! That is an order!"

Katsuki cursed. Now? After watching him beat Deku black and blue, now the asshole wanted him to back down? At the moment of victory?

He snarled. Not now! No. Absolutely not. Deku needed to pay. No one was going to stop him. He raised his hand higher.

Something slammed into his side.

Himiko thought it was a shame Momo ended their spar when they did. Sure, she'd basically already won, but Momo's quirk was so cute! Without Himiko pressing her too hard to react, she had all sorts of cute tricks - smoke bombs, jars of acid, drones that flew at her face, matryoshka dolls for some reason. She even pulled out a comically big gun at one point, but refused to fire it at her. Boo!

Himiko pouted as she jumped down from the hole in the wall. Whatever Momo planned to shoot from that thing, she bet she could dodge it!

Maybe in a spar later.

Either way, Momo had suddenly given the signal and Himiko kicked the lattice wall in just the right place, making it shudder and lean backwards. Faster than Momo could have stopped her even if she wanted to, Himiko bounded over and slapped the bomb. Victory!

Not far away from the hole, poor Izuku was sprawled out, Bakugo's hand up in the air above him. She could see the crackling energy gather.

"Young Bakugo, disengage from the fight and return to the bunker immediately! That is an order!"

Just like Momo said would happen, Bakugo ignored All Might. But the big so-called hero wasn't showing, at least not yet.

Izuku looked... she'd been working on not enjoying the sight of people rough and bloody, but if all that black stuff was his blood, it certainly helped the process. He looked awful.

Momo had sounded so confident he'd stop anything really bad from happening. But... he wasn't there. And Himiko liked Momo, but she lived in the world of rich and powerful people that heroes cared about. Himiko hadn't been important. Nobody had bothered to come and rescue her. Heroes weren't always reliable. She knew.

Bakugo began to lower his hand.

By the time Himiko realized the motion had reminded her of how her father used to hit her, she was already halfway to Bakugo. She slammed into him, but instead of falling over and releasing the blast harmlessly, he stumbled and turned to her. She had just enough time to process both his wild, furious eyes and the shear amount of igniting sweat gathered in the palm he was now thrusting towards her.

Oh.

Well, better her than anybody else. And hey, her getting murdered was probably poetic justice.

Maybe Uncle Ozpin could find a better host next time.

In a burst of wind that knocked her to the ground, All Might was there, the explosion washing harmlessly over his back.

"Why won't you all get out of my way!?" Bakugo screamed, and he launched several more explosions at All Might. It did little, and they cut off when All Might seized his hands.

"Bakugo, my boy," All Might said with, of all things, sadness in his voice, "that was a poor decision."

He responded by screaming wordlessly, flailing and kicking without much effect. With another jump, they were gone.

Himiko sat on the ground for an amount of time she couldn't really measure, processing. Her uncle was saying something in the background, but she couldn't really hear him, so he eventually trailed off.

As she started to come to, she realized Izuku had stood up and met Momo as she came through the hole to... confront her, apparently. It was a little while before she could focus enough to actually hear them.

"I - it was to -" she stuttered.

"I don't care why," Izuku fumed.

Himiko absently noticed he looked different; the liquid was gone (reabsorbed?), but there were black veins still all over his dramatically scowling face.

"It hurt. I was scared. It made me angry. I hate when it makes me angry. You knew that, and you did it anyway. But that's not the worst part, because this has my aunt at her worst written all over it."

He jabbed her in the chest - not very hard, but she still stepped back.

"You used me! You decided you knew what was best and did it over my head. Your plan got Bakugo in trouble, but what happens if the school finds out you set it up? You tried to get Bakugo expelled? Maybe they'll expel you instead. And then you'd have to go back to your fucking parents. And either way, you used up my trust in you, you used me and made me suffer, so you could satisfy your own need to - to -"

Izuku choked on his words.

"I don't even want to look at you right now," he ground out, and marched away, leaving Momo alone in silence.

Chapter Text

Momo was startled out of her daze when she slammed into a reporter.

The brown-haired, aggressively focused woman stuck a microphone in her face. "Now that we know All Might is teaching at UA, have you had any classes with him? How does he compare with other teachers? Is it true he had a student expelled his first day of teaching?!"

Momo shook herself awake enough to look around, belatedly realizing the front gate was teeming with more media figures than she'd ever seen in one place - and that she was late. After a moment of gaping, she let out the "no comment" every authority figure in her life had drilled into her and tried to slip by, only for the crowd to surge and knock the two into each other. Momo stumbled through the gate, the reporter almost following her before the campus defenses kicked in and nearly took the woman's nose off. Now awake, she hurried into the building.

THE PREVIOUS EVENING

Momo lay curled up in bed, staring at her phone.

IZUKUN: We're still friends

IZUKUN: But I don't want to look at you right now

IZUKUN: Call me after school tomorrow

IZUKUN: We'll work this out.

She thought about sending a response, but, after hesitating for what felt like forever, she turned it off.

PRESENT

As she walked into the classroom (making sure she visibly noticed Aizawa's sleeping bag behind the teacher's desk), she realized she was the last one there - except Bakugo, but she wasn't inclined to think about him if she didn't have to. Izuku saw her and gave her a wan smile, but he wouldn't meet her eyes and turned away rather quickly.

That... was a better reaction than she'd been afraid of.

The moment she sat down, Aizawa popped up, a sheaf of papers mysteriously appearing in his arms. He knocked it on the desk a couple of times before speaking.

"Good morning. I watched the tapes of your trials yesterday, and I'll admit, a better performance overall than I expected. Not perfect, or really anything better than "good", but still, everyone passed."

He then began working his way down the classroom, front to back, left to right, giving each student extensive feedback. She noticed he moved past Bakugo's seat without skipping a beat.

"Midoriya."

The boy looked up.

"Learn a martial art."

As Momo thought he would, Izuku stiffened and went to talk back.

"I don't care why you don't want to. This is the real world, and you can't rely on your Grimm to do all the fighting for you. You cannot afford to be that vulnerable up close, that'show villains take you out and keep after civilians. I'd strongly recommend starting - not stopping, starting - with aikido; any villain with combat training will tear you apart, but most villains you'll face early in your career don't have any and I suspect the way it emphasizes ending fights without injuring the other party will appeal to you. It'll also help you control your anger."

Izuku slumped over.

"You'll run into villains in the future who push your buttons even more than Bakugo, so you can't afford to lose your cool. Ever. You regenerate from injuries so fast the pain doesn't always have time to sink in, you should have been able to close with your opponent instantly, absorb his first attacks, and slap capture tape on him before he could wrestle you off. Instead you hung back, afraid of going berserk, and let Bakugo goad you into going berserk anyway."

Aizawa looked up from his papers.

"Your performance was lackluster, but you wouldn't be the first student who couldn't use their quirk to the fullest when they walked in the door. We'll work with your quirk in class, but visit the guidance counselor or the principal's office after class, both can direct you to aikido trainers approved by the school. I will be checking on this."

Aizawa flipped the page.

"Hori."

"Hmm?" Momo could hear just a trace of the false cheer she suspected was how Himiko showed malice.

"One of the best performances in the class overall. Good job."

The girl cocked her head.

"You're very aggressive on the attack, which can be used against you but usually works in your favor. Good quirk use using it to change lines of attack, just make sure you can roll with it if someone reads you well enough to predict it. However, you need to work on muscle tone. No matter how good you are with your weapon, there will always be someone who's fast enough to get in your guard or tough enough to ignore it, and you just aren't tough enough yourself to survive if that happens. I recommend learning a martial art as well, one with an emphasis on physical fitness; muay thai, maybe, or jeet kune do. You'd probably also do well with krav maga or escrima."

He narrowed his eyes.

"Also, don't play with your food. Anyone who knows how to read a fight could tell you won in the first fifteen seconds and everything else was you having fun. I don't know why or how Yaoyorozu distracted you when you had her dead to rights, but it doesn't matter. If you'd gone for the capture, you would have had the best grade in the class, not one of."

After a moment, he threw in, "oh, and putting yourself in harm's way to protect others is laudable. The way you do it suggests it's compulsive, and that is not. This time you didn't openly defy a teacher and undermine an important exercise," Himiko twitched, "so it won't affect your grade. But since this is becoming a pattern, I'm going to send you to Hound Dog for an evaluation." Himiko twitched again. "You will have that evaluation scheduled by the end of the week."

Himiko said nothing as he moved on.

"Yaoyorozu."

Momo straightened up.

"You had one of the worst performances in the class. You passed, but only barely."

She sank in her seat.

"Good work on that barrier and how you placed it, but everything else about your quirk use needs work. Your quirk rewards creativity that you aren't showing. For instance, you made the right call not shooting your classmate with the gun you created, but you could have loaded it with netting, bolas, or any number of nonlethal deterrents. I understand you're strictly limited by laws on drug and chemical manufacture, but have you ever actually sat down and compiled a list of relevant laws and how they limit you?"

She shook her head.

"You will spend this semester building that document so you can figure out what the boundaries are and how to safely and ethically push them. Like Midoriya and Kaminari and really half the class, you need to learn how to use your quirk, but that's a common issue."

He started gathering the papers on his desk with a sense of finality.

"What isn't is losing your first fight in seconds. If this was later in the semester, you'd have failed the exercise. As it is, you were surprised and defeated by a much more experienced opponent. It happens. It can't happen again.

"Going by the tapes, I assume you have a lot of theoretical knowledge but little practical experience, especially against people?"

Momo thought of once-a-month (if that) training with Miss Kaina and studying combat manuals when her parents weren't looking, then nodded.

"Fix that. UA has an entire buffet of aspiring heroes you can build combat experience with. I expect twice-weekly minimum visits to the on-site training facilities starting next week. If you haven't improved by the next time we hold a battle trial, you will do significantly worse in your assessment."

... That was more fair than she expected? Especially given what he did two days ago. Momo figured she'd have to start looking on the bright side eventually.

Aizawa paused and cocked his head, like he was going to add a final observation - the mics in the building were more sensitive than she thought? Asking her how she distracted Himiko?

Instead he went back to gathering his papers.

"Like I said, major issues with all of you, some more than others. However, I don't pass students to cater to their or their parents' feelings, so even the worst performers among you can trust they're fully meeting the expectations of this institution. So far."

He got up, grabbing his papers as he went. "These packets contain all my observations, recommendations, and the assignments I gave you during your review. Treat them as homework, because they are."

Aizawa went down the room, passing reports to students one by one. Momo couldn't bear to read hers quite yet, so she slipped it into her bag - only for it to jostle a loose strip of paper out into her hands. It read:

I'm sorry for harassing you and bumping you like this, it was the first thing I could think of to get close enough to slip you this message.

A lot of heroes hold the media in contempt for multiple reasons, and I won't say they don't have a point sometimes. But secrecy doesn’t benefit anybody, and sometimes a hero needs somebody to get their story out and fight slander or someone stealing credit.

It's entirely up to you whether you want to burn this paper. I wouldn't blame you if you did. But if you need somebody to help you figure out things powerful people are hiding from you or how to get your hands on counterspin, just reach out to the number or email on the back. Every hero needs a media contact and I'd be honored if you let me be yours.

- Hasegawa Makoto

Momo was considering whether or not to memorize the info she found on the back of the paper when Aizawa stopped at the door.

"Oh, forgot to mention. Bakugo Katsuki was suspended yesterday after attempting to use lethal force against a classmate and repeatedly attacking a teacher. That evening I stepped in and advised the administration expel him outright, which they agreed to. Consider his seat empty until somebody at the Sports Festival proves they have what it takes to fill it."

The class burst into rumors as he left.

History with Miss Nezumi went better than she had any right to expect, but Momo wasn't really in the mood to be around others for lunch. She slipped out to the roof to find a few others had beat her up there, all equally quiet and keeping to themselves. She felt she should have expected that.

She didn't expect Himiko to stride through the roof door and flop down just close enough to her Momo couldn't ignore her if she wanted to. She popped the lunchbox open, and Momo did a double-take at the interior.

While the box itself was wood, the lining was 3D-printed biodegradable plastics, each compartment shaped to precisely match its contents. Said contents were simple and straightforward, mostly rice and pickled vegetables, but with a few oddities standing out: a halved pomegranate just barely fitting its custom-made lining (Himiko's eyes lingered greedily on it), a small, complicated-looking red thermos, and three little octopus hot dogs with identical smiling faces. Momo had never seen one in person - the Yaoyorozu kitchens wouldn't deign to make such a thing - but the pictures she'd run into online always felt off to her; something about the uneven, empty features that looked more like parodies of emotion than the real thing. But Himiko's were perfectly regular, with parabolic smiles and eyes filled with mustard that vaguely invoked hers. The overall effect was odd, the whole thing executed with almost robotic precision yet carrying a subtle human touch.

"My sister made it for me," Himiko said proudly, then somehow swallowed an octopus hot dog whole.

Momo picked at her food for a moment before Himiko spoke up, just quietly enough the other students couldn't hear.

"Yesterday - you weren't trying to get me killed, right?"

If Momo was eating anything, she would have choked on it. "No," she said, feeling sick. "The fight was already supposed to be over. I..." She hung her head. "I'm sorry."

"Eh. I've been put through worse by worse people." She could hear the shrug in Himiko's voice, bizarre as the sentiment was. "And hey, it came off clean!"

"No, it didn't! I..."

Momo knew this was a terrible idea, not out here in public, not where someone might hear with the right quirks about a conspiracy that definitely broke school rules.

Momo felt very tired of suppressing her thoughts and feelings.

"Izuku... his body is mostly normal, but that Grimmstuff he uses - if concentrated, it's corrosive and destroys flesh. Even his, which is why he looks more Grimm as fights go on. But his quirk also uses it to heal him, so fast it doesn't even hurt sometimes. I don't think he can die violently. The problem is that Grimm are inherently aggressive towards others, so until his body converts the Grimmstuff into natural flesh, he gets angrier and more violent.

"There was a - a something that happened when he was a kid, about a year before we met, so bad his aunt scrubbed it from every record she could find. He doesn't like talking about it, but it made him not like fighting up close so he doesn't lose control. I keep telling him it's okay to be afraid, but... he was pushed a lot farther back then and still wasn't a danger to civilians. I was confident he wouldn't break school rules even at his worst.

"He also told me about Bakugo, and even if Izuku didn't want to admit it - they used to be best friends - it was pretty clear Bakugo hated him. So based on what he told me and what I was seeing, I thought I knew what he'd do. And I don't know why, exactly, but you seemed to hate Bakugo too..."

"Yup," Himiko said, crunching pomegranate seeds.

"...So I thought I could get you on board. I prepared for the match by bolstering Izuku's confidence to make absolutely sure he'd be all heroic like he always wanted to be and go face Bakugo alone, which meant you'd go after the bomb. Then, once the match started, I did what I could to make Bakugo angry and get violent enough for the teachers to step in - not enough to him suspicious, just too riled up to think straight.

"I had to time it right, though. I needed Bakugo to have enough time to let his anger get out of control, then end the match when he couldn't stop himself. So..."

THE PREVIOUS DAY

Momo stared Himiko down from beneath her.

"Don't take me out yet. Keep fighting me without capturing or disabling me and I'll show you where to hit the wall and break it. I set things up so
Bakugo will break the rules around treatment of classmates if I time it right, and Aizawa should expel him for that if the school doesn't."

"And Izuku?"

"He regenerates from anything, nothing Bakugo has could seriously hurt him."

Himiko thought for a moment and gave a nearly imperceptable shrug. "Eh, I'll give it a shot," she said, before Momo kneed her in the stomach.

PRESENT

"I believed Izuku would goad Bakugo into acting by refusing to surrender or stand down, but because he wouldn't lose control or take damage he couldn't heal from, plus me irritating Bakugo every time I called him up, eventually Bakugo would snap. At that point, I'd throw the match, right when he was too furious to listen to anyone telling him to back down. He'd break the rules until the teachers stepped in, then hopefully Aizawa would follow through on the sorts of things he keeps threatening and expel him. It was subtle and it wouldn't have gotten him in any trouble if Bakugo was a regular student instead of... him."

"Not seeing nothing going wrong," Himiko said through a mouth full of white rice.

"I wasn't expecting Bakugo to be that sadistic," Momo said. "He dragged it out, torturing Izuku and putting you in the line of fire when you went to help..."

Himiko suddenly swallowed and made an odd noise, so Momo looked up to see her body language shift. Her posture was subtly different, straighter, almost dignified.

"I could talk about the ups and downs of that plan, but I think my only question is simple," Himiko said, her voice slightly deeper than usual. "Do you regret it?"

"If I did it just to help the rest of the class," Momo said slowly, "I probably wouldn't. But I... just wanted to feel in control, I think. And that let people get hurt."

"If anyone would know what it's like risking your allies' trust to maintain control of a situation, only for it to backfire, it would be me," Himiko said, her voice drier than Momo thought possible. "I can't say I don't do that, even now. But I learned not too long ago that, while keeping secrets sometimes is necessary, taking the risk of letting others in can be even more important. You may need their perspective, and you may be surprised how willing they'd be to listen to you. No man is an island, Miss Yaoyorozu. Or woman, I suppose."

Momo blinked a few times at that, and Himiko relaxed suddenly.

"Yup, that's pretty much it," she said as she shook herself out, then popped open and started drinking down the thermos.