Chapter Text
Bakugo's eyes are blazing with anger so fiercely Izuku doesn't notice him pulling the pin.
I want to be anywhere but here, Izuku thinks desperately, anywhere but here, and suddenly he is.
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Hitoshi releases his backpack straps from his death grip on them and stuffs them in his pockets, taking several deep breaths and trying desperately to look unaffected by the door looming in front of him.
He’s here. After all these years of hoping, wishing, and keeping his head down, he’s going to join Class 1-A, a heroics course student like any other. This is the moment his quirk stops being villainous and finally starts being an asset. It’s been a hard road, but he’s going to face every challenge and go beyond, Plus Ultra style!
...Yeah, right. His hands are still bandaged from the absolute train wreck that was the entrance exam. He’s ashamed to admit it, but the second he saw those robots, he knew he had lost. He took a few down, and yanked other kids just as unsuspecting as he was out of the way of the kids with flashy heroic quirks who didn’t care about the damage they did to their environment. The zero-pointer showed up and he froze in place before using his Brainwashing to control a few kids who were going to get themselves killed trying to fight the damn thing and walked back to the entrance to the cityscape. Coughing and nursing a headache, he sat on the curb outsi de UA for hours until Emi called him asking where the hell he’d been. He still remembers how gentle she had been, gentle enough that he hadn’t even noticed the static that obstructed her voice.
(I know this isn’t what you wanted, Shinsou—gentle, gentle, even as he feels himself flinching apart, rotten and hollow—but. Ketsubutsu would love to have you, you know that. UA was never the only option. And Hitoshi knows that, okay? But sometimes he thinks the only thing he’s been living for is the chance to prove everyone wrong. Even if it was unrealistic, he’s been thinking of UA as that chance—and it’s gone, all because he thought for once this quirked society would fucking play fair.)
He spent that week silently patching up his hands and his ego, and gracefully accepted his position in Gen Ed, throwing the circular envelope from the heroics department directly in the trash. Emi left his Ketsubetsu application packet on the kitchen table, but after two days of tactical ignorance, she took a hint and whisked it away somewhere, likely her home office, and instead replaced it with some informatics on student housing in Musutafu.
The rest of the summer was spent packing and was over before he knew it. Emi dropped him off at the bullet train, promised to finish mailing his boxes up by the end of the week, made a few cryptic jokes about saying hi to his future father-in-law, whoever the hell that’s supposed to be, and made a good showing at hiding her disappointment that he wouldn’t be in her class that year. Then he settled in for the mind-numbing month before the sports festival started, armed to the teeth with middle school coping mechanisms and resigned to blending in until then.
And then, because UA is fucking determined to demolish his expectations in the worst way possible, he was pulled out of class on the second day. Forget one monkey wrench in the works—that meeting was a fucked up, cosmic apotheosis of a monkey wrench glitching and multiplying right in the middle of his gear systems.
First, he had to sit there with Principal Nezu, who is fucking terrifying, for about twenty minutes of total and utter silence. Then Eraserhead— fucking Eraserhead– showed up, and Hitoshi started desperately wishing he had read that circular.
Turns out, the UA Heroics department doesn’t really... do pity mail. Turns out, Hitoshi wasn’t flat-out rejected but instead wait-listed and could have saved himself all the mental anguish and pity parties, because due to extenuating circumstances (and yeah, Hitoshi knows that sounds shady, but who cares now that “extenuating circumstances” have given him a chance at everything he’s ever wanted?) there’s an opening in the heroics course, and they want him in it, effective almost immediately. Turns out, the exam wasn’t as clear cut as he thought, and he ranked forty-first even though he only took out 4 one-pointer robots.
(He tries to stay excited, because if he stays excited, he can’t get bitter. He can’t get angry about how he was that fucking close and he still wasn’t fucking good enough, all because he gave up on himself.)
And that meeting is what got him here, after two days of thorough background checks and Emi explaining marks on his record and “sessions” with Hound Dog that were very unsubtle psych evals. He has been poked and prodded within an inch of his privacy, if not his life, but it’s worth it, because now he’s a step away from the only future he’s been able to see for himself, and bracing himself to knock on the door.
“I bet you’re new here.”
Hitoshi whirls around, pressing a hand to his chest and fighting to keep his breathing steady. There’s a boy behind him, so close it would be uncomfortable if they were the same height. As it is, the other kid is so short, it kind of just feels like there’s a curly haired lectern in front of him. “I bet you are. I know they’re trying to fill some spots, and you’re, well, you’re in the UA uniform, so it would make sense. It kind of took them a few days—that's kind of my fault, sorry about that--” And then the boy devolves into a mutter-storm so thick that it almost has a physical presence and Hitoshi feels almost like he’s suffocating.
“Yeah, I’m transferring. What about you?” The boy flinches backwards in an almost perfect mirror of Hitoshi a few seconds ago, except instead of calming down, he smiles incredulously and gets even closer.
“Y-you can--?” Hitoshi closes his mind over the boy’s like a steel trap, pushing down the guilt that comes whenever he uses his quirk.
“ Turn around and leave me alone.” The boy turns on his heel and dreamily waltzes down the hallway. It’s easy, just like always. ( It shouldn’t be.)
After a few moments, Shinsou releases his control with an exhale. Hopefully the other kid won’t be too late for class--the warning bell is about to go off. Still, 1-B isn’t that far and it’s the fourth day of school; no one’s going to breathe down the kid’s neck for being a few minutes late this early in the year.
Unfortunately, annoying as the boy may have been, he was Shinsou’s distraction from an anxiety spiral, and now he’s back where he started, trying desperately not to throw up. He takes deep breaths and leans his head against the metal doorframe, hoping the coolness will center him.
UA then decides it needs to continue its stellar track record for trying to send Hitoshi into cardiac arrest right fucking now, actually , because someone pulls the door inward and he almost trips into the classroom and by extension, Eraserhead, who has a hideous banana-yellow sleeping bag over his shoulders like a second skin. This might as well happen, Hitoshi thinks hysterically. Good impressions are overrated anyways.
Hitoshi looks around the classroom, blush rising on his face and only darkening further when he realizes none of the other students are here.
Ah. So now he looks egocentric in front of his favorite hero and homeroom teacher. This is just... peachy.
“Your situational awareness needs work,” Eraserhead notes dispassionately. “UA’s doors all have at least one squeak in the hinges, and hesitation cost you your original spot in the heroics course. You don’t have the luxury of making the same mistakes twice if you want to stick around.”
Shinsou doesn’t really know what to say, so instead settles for a stiff nod.
“If you’re wondering where the other students are, Present Mic has them in the real 1-A homeroom. Rule one of heroics? Check your intel—or at least a map.” Eraserhead grabs a gym uniform from the desk and tosses at him, leaving Shinsou to fumble the catch. “Put this on and meet me in Gym Gamma,” he says with a grin that has Shinsou’s hackles rising in unease. “You’ve got some makeup work to do.”
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Izuku is stuck next to his body again, which kind of fucking sucks in his opinion. He’s never had strong feelings about his looks in any direction, but breathing tubes, catheters, and intravenous fluids don’t do anyone favors in the fashion department. Honestly! You get locked out of your body for ten hours and suddenly everyone’s all what’s his emergency contact and do we move him to Musutafu General and what do we tell the board?
That last question is his least favorite. Putting aside the fact that he isn’t actually brain dead or... dead dead either, if he was, maybe the PR of it should be less of a priority than—actually, he can’t come up with a list of acceptable priorities in case he dies, but he’s pretty sure PR should be at the exact bottom of that theoretical list.
Anyways. Someone saw him and didn’t assume he was a hallucination, which is good, but also weird, because he’s pretty sure he has to be within about a baseball field of his body for whatever this is to let him be visible, and they were all the way over in the Business wing. But anyways— instead of being able to utilize a new avenue for support, he got...mind controlled. Which is such a cool quirk , but also a really inconvenient one, especially since whatever command he was given when he was under its influence is still in effect. It has to be, given that despite how much Izuku wants to track down that kid and demand answers, the second he gets up with the intention to find him, his legs won’t work. And it’s not like he can lie to his own brain about where he’s trying to go, so. He’s kind of stuck here for the time being, so he lets his mind go foggy to the soundtrack of Recovery Girl clacking away at some paperwork and the whir of the air filtration system.
At some point Uraraka comes in for some anti-nausea medication in preparation for heroics training. She lingers at his bedside while Recovery Girl signs her hall pass, biting her lip pensively. Izuku wants to try to comfort her, but everyone who sees him assumes he’s a manifestation of their guilty conscience and then starts crying when he tries to explain that he’s actually alive.
(Aizawa-sensei is a notable outlier, but when Izuku tells him he’s still alive, he gets this heartbroken look in his eyes that desperately wants to be anger instead, and that’s...worse, somehow.)
Izuku doesn’t know how long he floats after that. Every once in a while he’ll blink and come back to himself, or hear someone talking to his body, and the clock hands have moved a significant amount. The end-of-day bell rings, and Recovery Girl packs her bags, checks his vitals, and turns off the lights on her way out. Then there’s more time with nothing to do, and no one to care.