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This is how it could have gone.
A girl in a mask, smiling at nothing, at no one, at everyone. A girl who learned, early and thoroughly, that the only honest thing about her was the thing everyone told her to hide, and who eventually — quietly, almost gently, the way a rope finally gives after years of fraying — stopped trying to hide it. A girl who found out that the world had already decided what she was long before she decided anything for herself, and who chose, in the end, to stop arguing with the verdict.
There's a version of this where nobody catches it in time. Where the isolation compounds, year over year, until "different" curdles into "dangerous" not because it had to, but because nobody along the way thought she was worth the effort of a different ending.
That's how it could have gone.
Here's how it actually went.
Izuku Midoriya had been at his new school for exactly four days when he noticed that nobody sat within three seats of the girl with the sharp canines and the too-wide smile.
He noticed it the way he noticed most things — analytically, first, before he noticed it emotionally. He clocked the empty radius around her desk. He clocked that she didn't seem to be doing anything to earn it, besides the smile, and a habit of watching people a half-second longer than was comfortable. He clocked, on day four, a boy flinching away from her in the hallway for no reason Izuku could identify, and her expression not changing at all, like she'd stopped being surprised by that reaction a long time ago.
Izuku's notebook had, at that point, forty-two pages of hero quirk analysis and absolutely no pages about what to do when you noticed someone being quietly, thoroughly avoided by an entire school. He decided to start one.
He sat next to her at lunch on day five. Not near her — next to her, close enough that it was clearly a choice.
"Your quirk," he said, without preamble, because preamble had never really been his strong suit. "Is it a transformation type? I heard someone say you have to—" he lowered his voice, not out of squeamishness, just consideration, "—drink blood to use it. Is that right? How does the transformation actually work, does it copy physical traits only or does it copy quirk factors too, because if it's the latter that would actually be an incredibly versatile—"
"You're not scared of me," the girl said. It wasn't a question. It also wasn't quite a statement — more like she was trying the sentence out to see if it held weight.
"Should I be?" Izuku considered this seriously, the way he considered everything. "You haven't done anything scary. You've eaten a sandwich and you looked out the window twice."
"I like blood," she said, watching him carefully now, the smile sharpening at the edges like she expected this to be the line that finally sent him running. "Like, a lot. It's not just the quirk. I just — like it. Is that weird?"
"I have a notebook with forty-two pages of quirk analysis and I once cried because Ingenium's turning radius was so efficient," Izuku said. "I don't think either of us gets to use the word 'weird' about the other person."
She laughed — startled, short, like the sound had caught even her off guard.
"I'm Himiko," she said. "Toga. Himiko Toga."
"Izuku Midoriya. So — the transformation. Physical traits or quirk factors?"
She told him. In detail, actually, once she got going, with the specific relief of someone finally being asked a real question about herself instead of being handed a verdict.
It became a habit before either of them quite noticed it becoming one. Lunch, then the walk partway home, then an exchange of phone numbers that Himiko treated with a wariness that told Izuku, more clearly than anything she said, how rarely anyone had asked for it before.
She unmasked slowly — not the literal smile, which stayed constant, a little too wide, a permanent fixture — but the performance underneath it. The first few weeks she tested him. Said things designed to unsettle, watched for the flinch. I think about what your blood would look like sometimes. Don't worry, it's a compliment, I only think about people I like. Small grenades, lobbed and watched.
Izuku's response, every time, was the same: mild interest, a follow-up question, no flinch. It wasn't performance on his part. He genuinely found her fascinating in the specific way he found everything about quirks fascinating, and it apparently hadn't occurred to him yet that fascination and horror were supposed to travel together where Himiko was concerned.
By the third month, she'd stopped testing him. She just talked. About the shows she liked, about the way people's faces did a specific thing when they lied that she found more interesting than she probably should, about a home life that she mentioned only in careful, sideways fragments — a mother who flinched at the wrong moments, a father who'd stopped trying to understand what "wrong moments" even meant.
Izuku brought her up at home exactly once, with his own mother, in a fragment just as careful as Himiko's own fragments. There's a girl at school. Everyone's scared of her. I don't think she's scary, I think she's lonely. Inko Midoriya, who had spent thirteen years learning to hear the things her son didn't say directly, told him to invite her over for dinner sometime, and meant it.
The rest of the school hadn't caught up to any of this. Teachers still watched Himiko a beat too long when handing back tests. Kids still gave her a wide berth in the hallway, still whispered the word creepy like it was a settled fact instead of a rumor nobody had bothered to update. She'd learned to walk through all of it with the smile fixed in place, because the smile, at least, was hers — the one thing about her nobody could take credit for deciding.
It held, mostly. Until the day it almost didn't.
It started small, the way these things always do. A boy named Sato — not cruel by nature, just careless, the kind of careless that comes from never once being told to consider the cost of a joke — decided, in front of half the class, that it would be funny to ask Himiko if she wanted a bandage for her "little problem," and held up his own finger with an exaggerated, mocking flinch, like her existence was a wound he was protecting himself from.
The class laughed. Not everyone. Enough.
Izuku, watching from two desks away, saw something happen to Himiko's face that he'd never seen before — not the smile faltering, exactly, but something underneath it going very still and very far away, like a door quietly closing on a room nobody was ever invited back into.
This — Izuku understood later, much later, though he couldn't have named it in the moment — was the fork in the road. The version of this scene that existed in some other unlived timeline had her laughing it off in front of everyone and crying alone in a bathroom stall afterward, filing the moment away with all the others, one more brick in a wall that would eventually seal her off from ever being reachable again.
That's not what happened, because Izuku didn't let the moment finish on its own.
He didn't yell at Sato. He didn't perform outrage for the room, which would only have made Himiko the center of an even bigger spectacle. He just stood up, walked over, and sat down on the edge of her desk like it was the most unremarkable thing in the world, blocking most of the room's sightline to her without making it look like a rescue.
"Hey," he said, quiet, just for her. "Ignore him. He once tried to microwave a metal fork because he 'forgot the rule,' so his opinion on anyone else's quirk isn't exactly a peer-reviewed source."
It wasn't a joke that fixed anything. It wasn't supposed to be. It was just proof, delivered at the exact moment she needed proof, that someone in the room had chosen to stand with her instead of watching her take it alone.
Himiko didn't cry, not there, not in front of everyone. But her hands, Izuku noticed, had been curled tight enough to whiten the knuckles, and slowly, over the next several seconds, they unclenched.
"You're going to get made fun of for sitting with the creepy girl," she said, low, testing one more time, one last time, whether this was the moment he'd finally decide the cost was too high.
"I already get made fun of for having forty-two pages of hero notes and crying about turning radiuses and being quirkless," Izuku said. "I've got room in my reputation budget."
She laughed — really laughed, this time, loud enough that a few heads turned, and for once she didn't seem to mind being looked at.
After that, they trained together — which was Izuku's word for it, and which mostly consisted of him treating her quirk like a tool to refine instead of a shame to manage. They worked out how much blood she actually needed instead of how much she'd been taking out of anxious over-caution. They practiced control, precision, the difference between "impulse" and "intention," because Izuku had decided, with the same stubborn conviction he applied to everything, that Himiko Toga was going to be a hero, and heroes needed training, not management.
"Nobody's ever asked me to get better at it before," she told him once, turning a small vial over in her hands with something like wonder. "Everyone just asks me to use it less."
"Less isn't the same as better," Izuku said.
She didn't have an answer for that. She just smiled — the real one, the one that had started showing up more often than the performance ever did — and got back to practicing.
They decided to give the beach a cleanup as a sort of training to get stronger by lifting heav garbage. Izuku and Himiko worked on moving a heavy car piece together while talking about whether Native Quirks or Emitter Quirks made for more versatile hero work, when they found the girl at the far end of the beach who was, very clearly, not picking up trash at all.
She had a portable welding torch. On a beach. Surrounded by an alarming quantity of scavenged scrap metal, half of it clearly not beach debris, all of it arranged around what appeared to be the skeleton of some kind of grappling device.
"Hi!" she said, without looking up, goggles pushed onto her forehead, hair in two frizzy buns that seemed engineered — deliberately, Izuku suspected — to survive an explosion. "You're standing near my prototype's blast radius. Statistically it probably won't fail catastrophically, but if you want a hand or an eyebrow later, I'd take three steps back."
Izuku took three steps back immediately, delighted. Himiko took one step forward, delighted for entirely different reasons.
"Is that thermite," Himiko asked, with real interest.
"No! Well — a little. It's mostly a compressed-spring recoil mechanism, the thermite's just for the quick-release clasp, it's fine, it's totally fine, it's only failed explosively twice." The girl finally looked up, taking in both of them with the frank, unbothered curiosity of someone who had clearly never learned, or never bothered to learn, the social scripts about who you were and weren't supposed to approach. "Are you two supposed to be collecting trash? Because I've got some scrap I don't need if you want to pad your bag count."
"I'm Izuku. This is Himiko. What's your name?"
"Mei Hatsume! I make things! Nobody around here appreciates a good compressed-spring mechanism, everyone just wants me to 'follow the assignment,'" — this delivered with a withering look toward the distant knot of teachers — "but I figure if I invent something cool enough, eventually the grading system will catch up to me."
Himiko crouched down next to the scrap pile, entirely unbothered by the earlier blast-radius warning, and picked up a length of coiled wire with open fascination. "This is way more interesting than picking up cans and moving stuff around."
"Right?! Finally, someone gets it." Mei's whole face lit up, and Izuku recognized the expression, because he'd worn it himself more times than he could count — the specific, startled joy of someone used to being the "too much" one in every room, finding out that "too much" wasn't universal, that somewhere out there existed exactly the right amount of people to be too much with.
"You should meet Izuku's forty-two pages of hero notes," Himiko told her. "I think you two are going to ruin each other's lives in the best way."
"I have sixty-one pages," Mei said, entirely unprompted, digging a battered notebook out of her bag with the same reverence Izuku reserved for his own. "Support gear specs, mostly. Nobody reads them but me."
"I read mine to myself sometimes," Izuku admitted.
"Oh, we're going to be great friends," Mei said, with total, unshakeable confidence, and went back to her welding torch.
They spent the rest of the afternoon collecting less trash than any other group on the beach and having, by a wide margin, the best time.
They sat on the sand afterward while the sun went orange over the water, trash bags mostly forgotten, Mei's prototype disassembled and reassembled twice more for reasons that made sense only to her, Himiko trying and failing to convince Izuku that thermite was, actually, a reasonable quick-release mechanism for civilian use.
Somewhere in another version of this — a version with no lunch on day five, no boy on the edge of a desk at exactly the right moment, no forty-two pages of notes shared with someone who'd never had anyone ask a real question about her before — a girl with a too-wide smile was learning, slowly and irreversibly, that the world had already decided what she was.
That's not the version that happened.
This is: three kids on a beach, arguing about compressed springs and turning radiuses and whether blood made a good adhesive (it did not, Mei confirmed, after one memorable and largely unauthorized experiment), none of them scared of each other, none of them alone.
That's how it actually went.