Chapter Text
The U.A. entrance exam doesn’t start with the ring of a bell, or the booming of a voice shouting, GO!
It starts with an exasperated, “There are no countdowns in a real battle! Jeez, what are you waiting for?” that prompts Hitoshi Shinsou–and all the other surrounding examinees, his competitors–to launch themselves toward the city as quickly as they can.
They’ve been tasked with destroying as many enemies as possible to score the points they need to make or break their hero career, and Hitoshi finds himself uniquely qualified to fail entirely. He should’ve expected something like this—he’s never seen a hero with a Quirk like his on the big screen, and it was probably stupid to keep trying when he’d learned the circumstances of the exam. Probably pointless, even, to keep pursuing his dream in the face of so many roadblocks.
Whatever. He’s never been the most optimistic of people, but he’s definitely one of the most stubborn, and damn it, he’s going to see this through.
His feet thud harshly against the pavement as he runs—he’s trying to come up with a plan, in the back of his head, work his way into scoring enough points to have a decent chance at making it into his dream school; if he uses Brainwash on someone, does he rob them of their points should they take a bot down, or would the points go to them instead, anyway? He’s not sure he even has a shot if he starts controlling someone else, apart from actively sabotaging them to give him better odds, but if he can’t get any points it won’t even matter in the first place.
Think, Hitoshi. Okay—he skids to a halt in front of one of the smaller bots and tries to scan its surface for any flaws. There’s a solid dent in its left side where it must’ve narrowly evaded someone with a hero’s Quirk, but it appears otherwise impervious to the kind of damage he could do unarmed. He takes a step back, intending to disengage and find some kind of debris to use to his advantage, but it matches him inch for inch and swoops dangerously close instead.
He throws a hand up in his own defense, as if that would do anything, and finds the scene in front of him suddenly split by a beam of light so bright he’s forced to squeeze his eyes shut the second it processes. He trips and lands flat on his ass as he keeps walking backward, and when his eyes open again, the pinched face of a blond boy pops into view, peering down from above him. Behind him, the robot smokes and whirs once before dying completely. He scowls in return.
“I didn’t need your help,” he bites. The boy laughs, tossing his hair over his shoulder.
“Of course not! It was I who needed yours. Thank you for the distraction, mon ami,” he tells Hitoshi smugly. He doesn’t offer a hand, which is unfortunate because it means Hitoshi can’t pull him down onto the ground next to him out of spite. “Well! This was a lot of fun, but I have to finish the exam. I would say we’ll meet again, but,” he gives Hitoshi a very pointed once-over, “I’m not sure that we will. Au revoir!”
“Oh, fuck off,” he mutters to his retreating back as he gets to his feet and dusts himself off. Fine. One of his very few chances being robbed from him, that’s to be expected—it’s a hero school, the most prestigious hero school in the country. He doesn’t doubt that everyone here wants this as badly as him—they just haven’t had to fight as hard to get it. He’s not sure anyone’s had to fight as hard to get this as he’s been forced to.
This line of education, getting into hero work—it’s cutthroat, and Hitoshi’s Quirk rests at the center of his vocal cords so he has to protect his throat above all else. No distractions, no hesitation, and most certainly no giving up. He circles the robot the other boy had demolished until he finds a loose bit of metal and tears it off–it’s a good weight in his hands, and he takes off further into the city to scan the area for a bot someone else already started in on. If other kids could use him as a jumping off point, he can’t scrape by without doing the same– there.
A robot wobbles uncertainly in front of two other examinees, its leg shaking and a puff of smoke escaping it. Hitoshi doesn’t think twice; he surges past one and slams the metal bit he’d pulled off the other villain bot into it, watching its unsteady leg buckle, and the entire thing collapses with a violent clang. Hitoshi grins.
“Kill-steal!” one examinee accuses.
“Should’ve been quicker than me,” he answers, his grin closer to a baring of teeth than a real smile. He turns to move onto the next and stops abruptly as a deafening crash reaches them, all the way down the street from where he can see a building topple like nothing, the ripples from its collapse shaking the ground beneath their feet.
“Shit,” a girl nearby curses, “the big one. Run!”
Each of the other examinees in the vicinity turns on their heel and starts sprinting away as the massive, imposing figure of the zero point robot comes rolling into view, almost silhouetted at its peak given its so incredibly big. Hitoshi swallows. Zero points—he just needs to clear out and take down a couple more of the little guys, get hanging on by the skin of his teeth like he always does. That’s the smart thing to do, and hadn’t he just resigned himself to do the smart thing, no distractions?
But all that comes to a screeching halt in his head as a very different instinct kicks in: inexplicably, half wedged beneath the remains of the building that had just come crashing down around the students unfortunate enough to be down that particular street, there is a girl. Her face is covered in the same dust that settles all around her, but her cheeks are bright pink and undeniably alive beneath the grime; her chestnut hair is frizzy and tangled and caught halfway under the bit of concrete pressing down on her body, and he takes it all in at a moment’s notice just like a hero is meant to, noting, lastly: she hasn’t gotten back up, yet.
It’s not necessarily that his body moves without thinking. That would be a little nobler, probably, than the way he freezes and takes two steps backward in the direction everyone else has started to run before she wrestles her head upright—her face reading panic, and hurt—he realizes he.. damn it, he can’t just leave her there.
Against his better judgment, Hitoshi gets a running start further into the crumbling, shaking scene of the city in front of him. It’s something about the expression twisted in her features that makes him think she’s actually in danger, and it flips the stupid little hero switch in his head that tells him she needs saving, and that Hitoshi is the only one dumb enough to save her.
“Can you get out?” he calls, but he’s already climbing over debris and making his way over to the girl where she struggles beneath a broken slab of concrete.
“I’m trying—!” she shouts back with an edge of panic entering her voice. He skids to a halt a few feet in front of her and scans the pile of rubble. He needs something to pry the concrete off of her, and quickly—a pipe, a bar, some sturdy piece of metal he can use to push it up enough she can slip out. His heartbeat races in his ears as the steps of the massive robot they’d unleashed moments before rattle his teeth in his skull where he stands—so close, too close, and every bone in his body screams its protest as his feet take him scrambling over the stack of shattered concrete to pry up a metal bar. He paws frantically at it and has to throw his weight back so hard he ends up falling on his ass when he frees it from the pile, scraping his elbows as he lands and rolls over to the girl.
“Help me get this under it,” he instructs in a rush, and she pauses where she’s scrabbling at the debris and reaches with her scratched up fingers to curl around the bar he’d fished out for them. The ground shakes again and he curses under his breath as he nearly fumbles and drops the metal pipe altogether where they’re shoving it beneath the slab—she gasps as the concrete finally gives and he crams the bar beneath it. Bent at the angle it is, it cracks with a resounding crunch , but the part they’d propped up holds. With the little bit of extra room, the girl claws her way out.
“Wow,” she breathes, as she rolls and struggles to her feet. “Holy crap, thanks.”
He’s barely paying attention to the gratitude she radiates beside him: Shinsou’s eyes are on the gargantuan robot where it rolls ruthlessly forward. He’s out of ideas—he didn’t think this far ahead, all he was thinking was, someone really should help her. That was nice, in theory, but now he’s watching a fifty meter tall machine plow incredibly, dangerously close to them, and he’s thinking, yeah, okay, maybe that someone shouldn’t have been me until the girl beside him reaches to take his hand.
“Hey,” she warns, and it’s a nervous smile she flashes but a smile nonetheless, “Just don’t die when it hits us, and I’ve got the landing covered. Okay?”
Hitoshi gulps. The idea of trusting her to land safely, of baring his throat instead of his teeth, even after he’d just helped her so clearly, it makes him incredibly anxious, but…
He’s kind of out of options.
“Sure,” he surrenders, because, really, he has no room to start running and get any kind of distance as the robot reaches with a massive metal hand and launches him and the other examinee into the air. He screams, he thinks, but it’s hard to hear over the whistling of wind in his ears and the adrenaline that surges through his veins as they’re suddenly airborne.
There’s a single, perfect moment in the air—when he can’t even remotely feel any of his limbs, even where the girl grips his hand in hers, when they’re flying so quickly through the sky his skin stings with the force of it—that the other kids all look like dots in the distance. He couldn’t make a face out if he tried, but he bets the two of them look fucking crazy as they tear a line across the blue and his stomach swoops as they start their arc downward.
Damn. What a way to go, he thinks. He steals a glance at the girl holding onto him, and finds she’s grinning, though it’s hard to tell given how the wind whips around them and stretches her face—he would almost guess she says something, as the concrete ground flies up to meet them, and—
Inches away from splattering across the ground, like magic, the two of them freeze midair. His guts take a second to get the memo and it feels like they all frantically rearrange themselves to stay put in his body where he skids impossibly to a halt floating half a foot over the concrete ground. He’s still trying to figure out what, exactly, just happened when she lets go of him to press her fingers all together.
The effect is immediate: Hitoshi shouts in surprise as he bumps his chin on the asphalt and groans as he rolls over to lay flat against the ground. As if to add insult to injury, the timer chooses now to ring obnoxiously out above them. He spares a glance aside to the girl when his head stops spinning—she pales, turns over as he had, and retches right there on the road.
Hitoshi finds himself laughing. The thrumming of his pulse has started to fade, and with it, a brutal ache starts to take root in his back. That robot had seriously clocked him—he struggles to suck a full breath in through his teeth as he snickers, wiping his sweaty face with the back of his hand. The girl flops down on the ground next to him, breathless laughter tumbling past her lips, too, until they’re both wheezing near hysterically, and they lay there just like that until help comes to fix them up.
Across the city, where another teenager has just hit the ground with a resounding thud, there is no laughter or mirth after his botched landing. After his fall, only a faint groan of pain dare break the silence, followed by an authoritative voice splitting it moments thereafter:
“Your report?” All for One questions impassively from where he sits on the sidelines.
Izuku Midoriya shoves himself back to his feet as he rubs the back of his head where he’d hit it, scratching it in thought. He hadn’t expected such issue with letting his mind wander—by virtue of his position as All for One’s tester of Quirks, so to speak, he gets distracted fairly often considering applications and drawbacks of each Quirk he’s permitted to use, and he scowls faintly at the idea this one discourages losing focus so completely. Still. His report.
“Uh, right,” he mutters, gathering all his thoughts on the Quirk Sensei has so graciously let him test out today. “Levitation. Um, it allows the user to—to float a few inches off the ground without problem, but once they g-get higher up it requires more and more concentration.” He gestures to himself. “Breaking concentration r-results in, uh—the levitation stopping, so it’s risky if you’re not completely focused. It can probably go higher than your current Levitation, but I-I’d bet at that height even speaking would break it. I think it’s a no-go. Sorry, Sensei.”
All for One hums in thought, and for a heart stopping second while he mulls it over, Izuku wonders if he’ll be angry that Izuku couldn’t find a better application for Levitation after Sensei went to all the work of stealing it. The weight of his expectations trap Izuku’s racing heart like the iron bars of a cage, pressed close enough around it he’s sure if he messes this up he’ll go into cardiac arrest.
But Sensei just shakes his head, sighs, and says, “Well. It can't be helped—they can’t all be winners, I suppose. Come here.”
Izuku dusts himself off and steps forward to meet him, ducking his head as he waits.
All for One reaches for him—Izuku leans slightly into the contact as he tilts his chin upward and the Quirk seeps from his being, taken back just as it’d been given to test not an hour before. Slipping through Sensei’s hands—a thread of something that Izuku will always liken to magic pulled from beneath his skin and woven back into the great tapestry at All for One’s disposal, as naturally as if it had been there all along. It leaves him feeling wholly empty, for a moment, until Sensei shifts to ruffle his hair and his heart and soul settle as he gets used to the familiar sensation of being Quirkless .
Sensei’s hand lingers a moment longer in his hair. He says, “Good work, little Izuku,” and then pulls back, and he only just manages not to protest at the loss of contact, ducking his head once more. His chest swells at the praise, though, and he can’t stop himself asking, “Er—are there any other Quirks for today—?”
“No, no. You’ve done well, but that is all the testing I had prepared for you, today. It’s just a shame that Levitation didn’t work as I’d hoped,” Sensei answers with a shake of his head and a wave of that same hand. “No matter. Run along, little Izuku. Oh—do tell Tomura I need to speak to him soon, when you see him. Tomorrow, if he can?”
Izuku bobs his head. “I-I’ll tell him!” he chirps, stepping back and casting a glance aside at Kurogiri where he waits. Hesitantly, he asks, “Um, am—am I dismissed?”
“You are.” All for One nods, and Izuku mirrors the motion in acknowledgment before he moves to join Kurogiri. He drags his feet a little—leaving Quirk training is always the worst part, because it means heading back to base and waiting for the fever to set in, his body’s rejection of possessing any kind of power for a period of time. If he weren’t built so uniquely weak, maybe he wouldn’t have to ride out a sickness that comes hand in hand with the only real utility he can offer his Sensei—but Izuku’s Quirklessness and weak constitution are just another couple setback they have to get around, and if he knows anything at all, it’s how to dig his heels in and fight despite the circumstances he finds himself in.
Sometimes, Izuku feels like no one in the world has had to fight quite as hard as he has to get where he is.
He casts that thought aside and steps through Kurogiri’s portal; it opens up into he and Shigaraki’s home base, at the moment, a long abandoned bar he’d spent a week cleaning up in preparation for their arrival. It’s innocuous, and they’re quiet enough he doesn’t figure anyone will notice its new inhabitants, certainly not past an idle thought. Izuku has kind of a knack for not being noticed, and he’s banking on that to keep them safe tucked away in this building while their plans draw them closer to the city.
“Is Tomura here?” he hums in thought, tilting his head.
“I believe he is in his room,” Kurogiri reports, and Izuku bobs his head before he ducks into the hall, calling back, “Thanks, K-Kurogiri!”
Izuku pauses outside the door of Shigaraki's room, giving himself a moment to calibrate. He always has to remember to keep his mentions of Quirk training light around his brother—there’s something about his work with Sensei that always rankles Shigaraki, and he suspects it’s rooted in a memory years old, at this point, an issue that stuck in his head from the one time out of hundreds that Izuku hurt himself using a Quirk borrowed from Sensei. It draws his eyes to the scar that marks his fingers—and his wrist, down the whole length of his right arm, actually—where he’s poised to knock on Shigaraki’s door, and he has to shake his head to clear it of the memory. He knocks and tugs his jacket’s sleeve down a little further to cover it before the door swings open.
Shigaraki blinks blearily at Izuku, rubbing his face and staring as if he’d just woken up and needs a moment to process what he’s looking at. After a second of silence, he grunts, “That’s my hoodie.”
“I get cold,” Izuku shrugs. “Oh, I’m supposed to tell you, um, Sensei is gonna call you tomorrow, he wanted to talk to you. I just g-got out of training, I was thinking of ordering pizza. What, uh—what do you want?”
“Ugh. I don’t know, I just woke up,” he mutters, stepping back and waving vaguely in Izuku’s direction. He shuffles in and stands awkwardly around the doorway while Shigaraki trudges around the room and idly tugs on his gloves. “Can it wait?”
“Umm, I guess so? But I-I’m hungry and if we wait too long I’ll be sick already, and that’ll, uh, suck,” he answers as he scratches the back of his head. “C-Come on, if we walk you’ll wake up a little by the time we pick it up. We can order, um, and call on the way, there’s a place not too far from here!”
“Oh my God, will you stop whining if I say yes?” Shigaraki asks. Izuku grins.
“I-I’ll stop whining if you start walking,” he answers, and, with a pause for Shigaraki to roll his eyes, they march.
After a solid dose of Recovery Girl’s Quirk, weaving health back into each of his wounds, Hitoshi walks home with the weight of certain failure on his shoulders. He can rest only slightly easier knowing he’s the reason that girl—Uraraka, she’d told him with a parting wave and a smile after their haphazard landing—didn’t wind up with a lot more to deal with than some bumps and bruises. Maybe he’s not making hero course, but he got to be sort of a hero for one person, which is, pathetically enough, almost enough to make him feel better about the whole thing.
He squares his shoulders and takes a second outside his door to school his expression back into some measure of unreadability. There’s a car in the driveway, which means one of his foster moms is home, and while their unflinching positivity and concern is nice in theory, he doesn’t want to go through recounting his entire day the second he steps inside. He runs a hand through his hair and slips inside.
True to his prediction, Kohaku calls a greeting as the door shuts behind Hitoshi, right as he kicks off his shoes. Just Kohaku, he thinks, given he can only see the flash of her bright green hair bobbing around the stove. He ducks into the kitchen where she’s stirring something steaming in a pan, but he doesn’t take off his bag, praying she gets the hint he’s not here for a lengthy conversation.
“Hey, kiddo,” Kohaku hums as he mumbles a greeting back, leaning on the counter. Whatever she’s making smells good—he tries to steal a glance around her when she spins to talk to him, peering over at the stove. As if specifically countering his maneuvers (or more likely, just moving around the kitchen while Hitoshi happens to be in a bad mood) she turns back to stir her pan and turn the heat down. “What’d you get up to today?”
Hitoshi pauses to shoot her an unimpressed look. “My entrance exam was today,” he offers at length. She pauses in her stirring and sets her spoon aside to look back at him in mild surprise.
“That was today?” she asks, groaning and smacking her forehead with the butt of her palm. “Shiiiit. Sorry, Shinsou, I totally forgot. Did you end up taking the bus?”
“I just walked,” he shrugs, not elaborating any further. He taps his foot impatiently. “When’s Mariko getting home?”
If she appears taken aback by his abrupt subject change, it only shows in the brief pause before she answers. “Any minute now, or so she tells me,” Kohaku responds with a dramatic roll of her eyes. “I swear, the train gets later every damn day around here. She swore she’d be home in time for dinner, so, ten minutes, if she’s to be believed?”
“Great.” He pushes himself upright off the counter again. “I’ll be back down then. See ya.”
“Oh—wait, one sec,” she calls just as he turns to go. He suppresses a groan of annoyance and pauses in his step to listen; Kohaku taps idly on the counter and he probably fails to keep a little irritation off his face as she asks, “Just—I hope your exam went well, okay? Maybe you can tell me and Mariko about it while we eat?”
He raises his eyebrows, a little taken aback at how direct she is about it. Kohaku’s always a little straightforward, lacking the kind of tact a lot of adults handle moody teenagers like himself with, and it manages to surprise him a good portion of the time what she won’t bother harping on versus what she’ll state explicitly she wants from him: where Mariko often carries herself with a degree of poise and an affection for politeness, Kohaku won’t even bother correcting him for cursing because she doesn’t really care how he speaks, as long as he’s communicating on some level.
It’s an effort, at least, one he didn’t see in a lot of the foster parents that came before her; still, he can’t be bothered to appreciate it given his sour mood. “Sure, maybe,” he mutters, with no real intention of carrying that out. “Can I go now, or what?”
She bites her lip. “Yeah,” she says, with a breath that’s almost a sigh and the aversion of her eyes as they turn dutifully back to the food. Bitterly, he wonders if she could’ve bothered to hide her disappointment in his quiet until he was at least up the stairs. “Yeah, uh, I’ll see you in a minute for dinner.”
Finally out of the scope of her scrutiny, Hitoshi lets out the scowl that’s been fighting to show on his face as he stomps up the stairs and into his room, tossing his bag across the room to rest carelessly against the wall. He grabs a pillow and flops onto his bed so he can scream into it until the swelling feeling of despair in his chest loosens and dissipates, leaving him breathless and empty.
He throws the pillow down by his headboard and flips over to stare at the single hero poster on his wall, frown twisting his features. It’s of the Rabbit Hero, Miruko, posed with a fist raised as if to strike and a grin wide on her face. It’s the only poster he owns—he’d picked it up when Kohaku and Mariko had taken him shopping a couple months ago when he first arrived, because they insisted he get some form of decor, and he just thought the smile on her face felt real, like she was a hero and would rather be here doing what she does than anywhere else in the world.
Hitoshi sighs. He’s always wanted to have something like that: a passion so genuine he can’t help but smile, pride that makes it so he can’t sit still. He wanted heroism to be that for him, too, for it to be the thing that gets him out of bed when he struggles to because he’s just so damn excited to be good at helping people.
God. If he weren’t such a fuckup, he’d still have that to look forward to. He makes a face at the poster and is unsurprised to find her expression remains exactly as cheery as ten seconds prior—she’s a picture, a projected idea of a hero he could say or do anything in front of and never have to bear the weight of her real judgment. She’s real in a way that’s not real, and that’s as comforting as it is pathetic, to someone like Hitsohi who’s so uniquely capable of disappointing anyone who has any kind of expectation for him.
He feels so trapped, in every direction—what, not only does he have to deal with his disappointment over most definitely bombing that exam, he takes two steps backward and finds he’s boxed in by the expectation of his foster moms? That he’s just as easily read as a failure in their eyes? There’s no way out of the kind of wrong Shinsou feels, sometimes, like he’s the only one who never got the manual on how to navigate the sort of life he wants to lead.
He shoves himself to his feet as he hears the front door again, announcing Mariko’s arrival louder than she ever might; he takes a deep breath and prepares himself to head back downstairs, cramming all that angst back in the corner of his mind where it can’t bother him.
He will say hello, and listen while she and Kohaku talk about their day, and he will offer the bare minimum to them in return to get them off his back, and he will do so without being an asshole just because he’s in a rotten mood. They’re real in a way his Miruko poster isn’t—in the perceptive, half-worried, half-disappointed way he realizes now that just about every parental figure that unfortunately gives a shit about him somehow falls into, and he’s going to have to navigate it as best he can, hero or not.
“Good morning, Shinsou,” Mariko greets as Hitoshi slips into the kitchen the very morning he receives his result.
He curses under his breath. He’d been hoping to go unnoticed. At least it’s just Mariko–if one of his foster moms has to find out about the U.A. results after he’d literally just gotten them, himself, he’d prefer it be Mariko, who he knows will have a relatively reserved reaction. He’s still fighting to believe he listened to the message right in the first place, he can’t handle a big show of celebration with how fragile his actual belief in the result is.
“Morning,” he offers, glancing over at her where she sits at the dining room table bent over her phone, her back to him. Her hair sits in a high bun, allowing the second set of eyes in the back of her head to blink owlishly back at him where he pours his coffee.
“Kohaku mentioned you may have received a response from U.A.,” she intones neutrally. He narrowly avoids rolling his eyes at the clumsy transition–knowing she can see his face, he just hums noncommittally and takes a sip from his mug. It’s not as dark of a roast as he usually likes to drink, but neither Kohaku nor Mariko drink coffee all that much to begin with, so he can’t exactly be ungrateful about what kind they buy. Still. He frowns into it.
“Was she correct?” Mariko adds in question, finally turning to look over at him and up from her phone. He shrugs.
“Yeah, I got a letter,” he relinquishes at length. He takes another slow, methodical sip of his bad coffee before he decides he’s earned a little messing around. He offers, “I’ll give you two whole guesses as to whether I got in.”
She frowns and tilts her head. “There are only two possibilities,” she points out, “I feel like you’re setting me up in some way.”
“There are no bad guesses,” he reassures her with as much false sincerity as he can pack into it without snickering. “I’m not really that easily offended. This is a safe space for all guesses regarding whether I made it into the hero course at U.A., fingers crossed. Just go for it.”
Relief crosses her sharp features as she answers, “Ah. I see.” She draws herself more upright and says, carefully, “Okay. My first guess is that you got in.”
He gives her a scandalized look, drawing a hand to his chest in immediate mock offense. “Do you know how fucked it would be if I didn’t get in and that was your first guess? Your second guess would be so sad, Mariko, come on, you’ve gotta budget shitty news.”
“Language!” she interrupts. He gasps.
“You wouldn’t let me say the f word if I didn’t get into U.A.? What kind of foster mom are you? Kohaku would,” he gets out, biting his lip to keep from grinning at her as she starts smiling over at him.
“Kohaku would let you say whatever, whenever, she doesn’t care if you curse,” Mariko points out, fairly. “And I have a sneaking suspicion… that I don’t have to worry about if you didn’t get into the hero course, Shinsou. Am I wrong?”
He scratches the back of his head and tries to act aloof. “Yeah,” he finally admits, “So maybe I got in, no big deal. I’m just that good.”
Mariko shoots up out of her chair and claps her hands quietly in excitement. “You got in?” she asks, cheering, softly, as he nods. “That’s amazing, Shinsou. Well done. Ah! We had full faith you would. I’m so glad.”
He ducks his head at the praise, focusing down at the shitty coffee in its chipped green mug. “Apparently I’m just super crazy heroic, you know? Doesn’t even matter how many robots I knocked out.” (One, he remembers, and not very heroically at all.) “Something about secret hero points for saving other contestants, and I helped this girl who got stuck under some rubble when a building came down, so. Like I said, no big deal."
“It certainly sounds like a big deal,” Mariko murmurs, smile still stuck on her face. “So what do you need to do now?”
He nods in the direction of his room where he knows a dozen sketches on an outfit he’s been conceptualizing for months, now, sit on his desk. “I have to send them a form about my hero costume, so I’ve been focusing on that for like an hour. I don’t need a lot of flash, I don’t think, just utility. God knows I’m not trying to be the next All Might or anything, I didn’t exactly get in on raw power.” He shrugs. “I have to send it by the end of today, but, after that, I mean..”
He’s not exactly optimistic that it’ll come easily to him. Hell, he barely managed to get through that entrance exam, even if he did rack up enough hero points in the end to squeak by. He can’t imagine any part of becoming a hero will be straightforward or simple, but all in all…
“You’re a hero student at U.A. high school,” Mariko repeats, the sentence still sounding almost too good to be true, out loud, until he can really sit with the idea. “You’re in.”
Izuku wakes nearly twelve hours after having slipped off into a feverish rest with a splitting headache and an ache in his bones. He grumbles as he shrugs the thin blanket off his shoulders and gets to his feet, stretching as he recounts the day prior. Right. Levitation Quirk test, pizza, and a race to fall asleep before the Quirk fever kicked in. He’s just glad he slept most of it off.
He’s not necessarily pleased with the space he’s taken to occupying since their arrival at the abandoned bar—it’s small, for one, and cold given his ‘room’ is most technically a storage space with bad air circulation. But the biggest problem with it by far is its door and outward facing wall; the door’s handle is tricky and requires a great deal of pushing to open, and it’s next to a wall of barred metal. It’s a barrier, of sorts—he suspects this used to be where the bar would’ve stored its alcohol, and the big metal partition that stretches from the ceiling all the way to the floor has a lock at the bottom as if it’s meant to be able to push back up and open.
They have no idea where the key to that lock is, though, and Izuku prefers his room actually have four walls, so he’s just taken to pretending the stupid half broken door is manageable to make sure Shigaraki doesn’t turn the creepy metal wall to dust and leave his room completely open. He figured he’ll get a curtain or bit of fabric to cover it from his side at some point and it’ll be a little less jarring waking up looking right at what’s eerily similar to a cage.
He bumps his elbow as he stretches the sleepiness from his limbs–cursing, he rubs faintly at it and scowls at the offending wall. The room is small enough it’s far from comfortable or welcoming, and he’s quick to duck outside in search of Shigaraki. He wants to hear about whatever Sensei needed him for, if he’s back, and he creeps into the main room to find his brother sitting at the bar.
“Hey,” he offers in greeting, softly, repeating it a bit louder when it doesn’t seem to get Shigaraki’s attention where he taps absentmindedly at a glass of water. He startles at Izuku’s voice.
“Jesus, what did I say about creeping up on me?” he laments, inclining his head toward Izuku where he offers a sheepish show of his hands in surrender.
“I said hi, uh, twice,” he defends as he slips into another chair at the bartop. “Be nice to me, my head still hurts.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Izuku’s glad Shigaraki hasn’t put his hands on, today–it means he can see that there’s no real irritation in the lines of his face even as he rolls his eyes at Izuku. “Did Kurogiri tell you the news?”
“News? Oh, th-that can’t be good,” he worries. Shigaraki breathes a laugh.
“It’s about as good as any of our news gets, actually. Sensei informs me we’ve hit a lucky streak,” Shigaraki reports, a half-smile gracing his chapped lips. “In three weeks, we’ll have All Might’s exact location, down to the room of the building and the minute, on the dot.”
“Huh?” Izuku scratches the back of his head. “Wh-what do you mean, we’ll know where, uh, where he is? What kind of schedule would have that? H-He’s not exactly big on patrols.”
All Might’s absence from patrols, in recent years, is more due to having a significant drop in stamina than it is any willful negligence. There had been a marked change six years ago when All for One was piecing himself back together after their battle, and Izuku finds it a tiny bit too convenient to believe it was due to Sensei’s absence alone. No, he suspects All Might and Sensei both took a piece of each other that day, which makes him predictable to a point that he’s a little harder to find than your traditional number one hero.
“He won’t be patrolling.” Shigaraki grins outright back at him. “He’s putting himself in a sort of public position, actually. Sensei suspects he’s searching for a protege. A… student.”
Izuku pauses where he’s rubbing his eye distractedly, gears turning in the back of his head at the phrasing. “A student,” he echoes thoughtfully. “Like an up and coming hero? H-How does that help us? What, um—does he have a name?”
“Yeah, he has a name,” his brother informs him, spreading his hands as if to say, tada. “U.A. High School.”
He blinks. “No way,” Izuku gapes, giving a disbelieving laugh. “He’s teaching? He’s looking for a, a hero student, then, that’s–he’s teaching? ”
“Apparently. Sensei has a contact he’s tasked with getting into U.A., so by the time the school year starts, I can only imagine we’ll have more information at our disposal to finally rid the world of that stupid puppet.”
Izuku pauses, again, and tilts his head. “With… getting into U.A.?” he wonders, frowning, “like a first year student? That’s…”
Shigaraki stares. Izuku bites his lip.
“I don’t know, that’s, that’s a little.. young,” he finishes lamely, drumming his fingers on the counter beside them in thought. It’s not just the idea of this link being fallible, given they’re so young, it’s also the worry at the back of his head that they couldn’t handle the kind of anger that comes hand in hand with disappointing Sensei. Hell, Izuku’s known him for almost nine years now, and even he’s afraid to mess up in front of him.
It just must be scary, he thinks, to have the weight of the entire mission level on such young shoulders. He knows that better than anyone.
He doesn’t say that, though, what he says is,“We’re relying on a fifteen year old to d-destroy the Symbol of Peace? Your average fifteen year old is worried about, like, acne. And dating. Not like, s-sensitive intel.”
Shigaraki scoffs. “I don’t think it really matters,” he offers, with a dismissive wave of one hand, “It’s Sensei. I’m sure he has his ways of making sure they don’t screw it all up.”
Yeah, that’s exactly what Izuku’s afraid of. Still. Not much he can do with no information on this supposed contact, so he tries to push it out of his mind and focus on the good news: a supposedly reliable source of information in the Symbol of Peace, the one hero Izuku has accepted as a casualty for their cause. That’s better than they’ve had in years. “Sure,” he hums. “His schedule—i-is that something this contact can get us, or is that another Izuku has to go incognito type deal?”
“Not sure yet,” he shrugs, “but knowing our luck, I doubt it’ll be easy. It’ll be nice for you to get out of the base for once, won’t it?”
“Ha, ha,” Izuku mutters at Shigaraki’s stupid smirk. “You know me, I love being put in anxiety-inducing s-situations. Maybe I’ll get caught and really, uh, shake things up.”
He scratches absently at his neck, starting to formulate a plan in his head. “So that’s, what, in a few weeks when school starts?” At Shigaraki’s nod, he hums, “Okay. Going to U.A. in, in.. less than a month. Okay, I can do that.”
That’s easy—Izuku has a knack for getting in and out of places unnoticed, and U.A. is as good a crowd as any to get lost in. He can slip in and get the information they need. He has to. Like it or not, he’s headed to U.A. high school.