Chapter Text
“---shinkoku na eraa ga hassei shimashita--- ---shinkoku na eraa---”
The words crackled out of nowhere, half-swallowed by static, and then the world folded in on itself.
Miku didn't remember deciding to run. One second she'd been mid-note, arms raised for the last chorus, stage lights blinding and warm against her rendered skin. The next, the projection grid beneath her feet had started spitting error code in six different fonts, and she was falling through nothing at all.
—shinkoku na eraa—
She hit the ground hard enough to feel it, which was new. Grass. Actual grass, damp with dew, soaking into a uniform she hadn't been wearing a moment ago. Her hands were shaking. Her hands were shaking, and they weren't supposed to be able to do that, not like this, not with real nerves in them.
She didn't even get a full second to process any of it before the sky itself seemed to scream.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—
The alarm ripped across the entire campus, red light strobing off every window of the dorm building, and somewhere a mechanical voice began chanting the same line on a two-second loop: INTRUDER ALERT. ALL STUDENTS PROCEED TO DESIGNATED SAFE ZONES. INTRUDER ALERT.
Miku flinched so hard she nearly bit through her own tongue. Intruder. That word applied to her. She was fairly sure of that, in the same distant, buffering way she was sure of anything right now, standing on a lawn that should not exist in a body that should not be able to bleed.
She tried to stand. Her legs didn't answer properly—stuttered, glitched, sent her right back down into the grass on one knee.
That was when she heard the footsteps. Two sets, fast, closing in from the direction of the main building.
“Southwest corner, unregistered signature, ground level!” a woman's voice barked, and then a second voice, flatter, rougher, already closer than Miku expected—
“I see her.”
Miku's head snapped up in time to see a tall man in all black come tearing around the hedge line, scarf like fabric already unwinding from around his neck and throat as he ran, goggles down, hair lifting off his shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with wind.
She didn't even manage a full word before the capture weapon caught her—one loop around her wrist, another around her waist, cinching tight and yanking her clean off her knees and flat onto her back in the dirt.
“Don't move,” the man said, voice utterly without inflection, like he'd said the exact same sentence a thousand times before to a thousand things that were far more dangerous than she was.
“I—” Her voice fractured on the way out, three notes of song bleeding through the static before she managed actual words. “I wasn't—I don't want to hurt anyone, I don't even know where I am, or how I got here, or—”
“Shouta, wait—” The second figure arrived a beat behind him, a woman in a skin-tight hero costume, hand already raised, purple smoke curling faintly at her fingertips like she hadn't decided yet whether she'd need it. She slowed the moment she got a proper look at the girl pinned in the grass—glitching faintly at the edges, pixels smearing and resolving at her hairline like a television between channels, twin cyan pigtails fanned out in the dirt. “...Is that a quirk, or is she actually—”
“Don't know. Don't care yet.” Aizawa's eyes stayed locked on his target, red and glowing, hair drifting weightlessly around his head. Whatever this girl was, her body hadn't so much as twitched wrong since he'd caught her, no burst of power, no retaliation—just confusion, plain and total, written all over her face. “She's not fighting it.”
“I'm not fighting anything,” Miku said, and it came out less panicked than baffled, like she was still three steps behind everyone else in the conversation. She looked down at the scarf wound around her wrist, then up at the man holding the other end, then around at the school grounds, the alarm still strobing red off every window. “Where—what is this? Is this a hologram? Is this a stage?”
Aizawa's glowing eyes dimmed slightly, hair settling back down against his shoulders, thrown just enough by the question that he didn't immediately answer it.
“No,” he said eventually. “It's a school.”
---
By the time the alarm finally cut out, there were four more staff on scene, a very unimpressed detective on the phone with someone about paperwork, and one exceptionally interested rat?mouse?dog??????? watching from an upstairs window with his paws pressed to the glass, absolutely delighted with how his morning was going.
“She's not breathing right,” said a green-haired boy who'd slipped past the safe-zone perimeter specifically to get a better look, notebook already half out of his back pocket out of pure reflex. “Or—wait, is she breathing at all? Her skin's kind of—”
“Pixelated,” said the round faced girl beside him, squinting. “Like, actually pixelated. On the edges. Is that a quirk?”
“Everyone get back,” Aizawa said, without looking away from the girl still bound at his feet.
Miku tilted her head at the growing crowd of students with the mild, distant curiosity of someone watching a channel she hadn't meant to land on. “Are you all... real? This feels like a really elaborate loading screen.”
“She keeps saying stuff like that,” Aizawa said, mostly to himself, and hauled her up onto her feet by the scarf with rather less ceremony than the situation probably called for. “Come on. Someone upstairs is going to want to deal with this personally.”
---
The office smelled like tea and old paper, which Miku noted with the same flat, cataloguing attention she'd been giving everything else since she landed—like her brain hadn't quite caught up to deciding what was worth being alarmed about yet.
“Ah, there she is!” The voice came from behind a desk that was, as far as Miku could tell, entirely unoccupied, until a small white shape hopped up onto it and folded its paws neatly in front of itself. “Welcome, welcome. Please, sit—Aizawa-san, you can let go of the scarf now, I don't believe she's going anywhere.”
“That's a mouse,” Miku said.
“Principal,” Nezu corrected, entirely unbothered. “Though I understand the confusion. Please, sit.”
She sat. Aizawa unwound the scarf from her wrist with visible reluctance, like he wasn't fully convinced doing so was a good idea, and took up a position by the door instead, arms crossed.
“Now,” Nezu said, tail flicking once. “You appeared, quite suddenly, on our front lawn, glitching—your word, I believe, was hologram—and setting off every intruder sensor we have. So. Let's start simply. What is your name?”
The question landed somewhere old and automatic in her, worn smooth from more performances than she could count, and before she could stop herself the answer came out half-sung, three notes deep before she caught it and reeled it back into something closer to speech.
“Miku,” she said, blinking, faintly startled by her own voice. “Sorry. That's—it's a reflex thing. My name is Miku.”
Nezu's eyes gleamed with open delight. “A reflex. Fascinating. Do go on.”
“I don't really know what you want me to say.” She looked between him, Aizawa, and the door, where at least one green-haired boy was very obviously eavesdropping. “One minute I was performing, the next there was an error message, and then I was on your grass. I don't know how I got here. I don't know why I have—” she held up a hand, flexed her fingers, watched them not glitch this time, “—this. A body. That bleeds, apparently.”
“Performing,” Aizawa repeated flatly, from the door.
“I sing,” Miku said, like that was self-explanatory. “That's kind of my whole thing.”
“And where you're from,” Nezu said, leaning forward with the delighted focus of someone about to enjoy themselves enormously, “I take it nobody else has quirks either?”
“I don't know what a quirk is.”
“Oh,” Nezu said, practically glowing now. “Oh, this is going to take a while, isn't it.”
They let her settle, after that—a cup of tea pressed into her hands that she didn't drink, a cushion someone dragged over so she wasn't perched stiffly on the edge of the chair anymore. The alarm outside had long since gone quiet. Somewhere down the hall, the muffled chatter of a hundred students slowly filtering back into the building replaced it.
“Now,” Nezu said, once she'd stopped flinching at every noise from the hallway, “ordinarily, I would simply take you at your word. But you understand, I'm sure, why an unregistered individual appearing out of thin air on school grounds requires a little more diligence than that.”
“I get it,” Miku said, and mostly meant it. “I'd probably be suspicious of me too.”
“Excellent attitude.” Nezu tapped a paw against the desk, twice, like he was pressing an invisible button. “Aizawa-san, would you fetch Shinsou-kun for me?”
Aizawa's expression didn't change, exactly, but something in the set of his shoulders suggested he'd been braced for a much worse request. “He's got class.”
“He'll survive missing ten minutes of it.”
Miku looked between them. “Who's Shinsou-kun?”
“A very talented young man,” Nezu said, “with a quirk that makes lying rather difficult. I find it saves us all a great deal of time.”
Shinsou arrived looking like he'd been pulled out of homeroom mid-sentence, sleeves shoved up, hair sticking up on one side like he'd had his head down on the desk before someone came and got him. He took one look at the glitching girl in the chair and one look at Nezu, and sighed through his nose in a way that suggested he already knew exactly what was about to be asked of him.
“Ah, Shinsou-kun. Thank you for coming.” Nezu gestured vaguely between the two of them. “This is Miku. She appeared on our lawn this morning, sets off every sensor we have, and claims not to know what a quirk is. I'd like you to ask her a few questions.”
“You want me to activate on her.”
“I want you to ask her a few questions,” Nezu said, entirely too pleasantly. “Whether she chooses to answer is, as ever, entirely her own decision.”
Shinsou's tired, half lidded eyes slid over to Miku properly for the first time. She stared back at him with the same open, cataloguing curiosity she'd been giving everyone else in the building.
“Is that the mind control?” she asked. “Deku mentioned something like that. Sort of. Actually he didn't, I think I'm making that up—”
“Brainwashing,” Shinsou corrected, flat. “Technically. It only works if you respond to me.”
“Oh.” Miku considered this with visible interest, head tilting slightly. “What happens if I do?”
“You do whatever I say until I let go.”
“Huh.” She didn't look scared, exactly—more like she was filing the information away next to quirk and hero school and body that bleeds in whatever passed for her memory now. “That's a little concerning, but okay. Go ahead, I guess.”
Aizawa, from the doorway, made a small noise that might have been disbelief.
“You don't have to agree to that,” he said.
“I know.” Miku shrugged, small and easy. “But you all clearly need to know I'm not lying, and I don't really have anything to hide. So. Go ahead.”
Shinsou glanced at Nezu, who nodded once, and then back at Miku.
“...Answer me,” he said, and something in his voice dropped, flattened, went distant in a way that made the hair on the back of Miku's neck stand up even as her mouth opened without her permission.
“Okay,” she heard herself say.
The room went very quiet.
“What's your name,” Shinsou said, first, easy, testing the water.
“Miku.” Her voice came out level, stripped of the earlier hesitation, static-smooth. “Hatsune Miku.”
“Are you a threat to this school?”
“No.”
“Do you know how you got here?”
“No.”
Nezu leaned forward, eyes bright and sharp. “Ask her what she is.”
Shinsou's brow twitched—not quite a question, but close. “What are you?”
There was a pause. A longer one than the others, the kind of gap that made even Aizawa uncross his arms.
“I don't know anymore,” Miku said.
Shinsou let go almost immediately after that. The tension in Miku's shoulders dropped out all at once, like a puppet with its strings cut, and she blinked hard a few times, shaking her head as if trying to clear static off a screen.
“Sorry,” she said, a little dazed. “That was weird. I don't usually not know what I am.”
“That's a normal reaction,” Shinsou said, which was possibly the kindest thing anyone had heard him say all week, if his classmates' later accounts were anything to go by. He looked at Nezu. “She wasn't lying about any of it. Not that I could tell, anyway.”
“Wonderful.” Nezu clasped his paws together, entirely too pleased for the mood in the room. “Thank you, Shinsou-kun, that will be all. Do hurry back before Ectoplasm marks you truant.”
Shinsou left without another word, sparing Miku one last unreadable glance on his way out.
Nezu turned his attention back to her, tail curling once around his own feet. “Well! I think we have quite enough to work with. You are not, as far as anyone here can determine, a threat, a spy, or a particularly convincing liar—which, all things considered, is the best possible outcome for a Tuesday morning.”
“So what happens now?” Miku asked.
“Now,” Nezu said, “you stay here. Until we work out how you arrived, and whether it can be undone, UA is, frankly, the safest place in the country for someone in your situation. You'll attend classes with our first years, room in the dorms, and Aizawa-san will keep an eye on you, since he caught you and therefore gets the privilege.”
Aizawa's expression suggested this was news to him and he did not love it.
“I have a class to teach,” he said.
“You have a class to teach and a new student to supervise,” Nezu corrected. “I have complete faith in your ability to multitask.”