Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Shota Aizawa is not typically a man to make assumptions.

It’s not in his nature, and it’s certainly not in his professional practice. He’s been doing this too long—too many years in too many classrooms, with too many students who’ve shattered his early notions of predictability. 

He learned quickly, painfully, that the surface never tells the whole story. The loudmouths with too much bravado who turned out to be the first to run in a crisis. The quiet ones—reserved, deferential—who became the strongest leaders.

There were the reckless, the impulsive—who, given time and hard lessons, learned the art of caution with a precision that rivaled strategy. The anxious, the overlooked, the stuttering and uncertain—they were often the ones who stepped forward when everything was burning down, who carried others when no one else could.

If there’s one lesson the job has carved deep into his bones, it’s that teenagers are not static. They’re volatile, shifting—caught in that agonizing, miraculous stage between who they’ve been and who they might become. A thousand versions of themselves flickering beneath the surface, changing from moment to moment, sometimes regressing before they leap forward.

Trying to define them too early, to pin them down, is not only a waste of time—it’s a betrayal of the very process they’re meant to go through.

So he doesn’t make assumptions. He doesn’t cling to first impressions, or put stock in easy narratives. He watches. He listens. He catalogues the small changes: posture, tone, hesitation, the moments when a student glances back at someone else before speaking. He adjusts. He intervenes when necessary and steps back when it’s better not to. 

He trusts the long game.  

And still—he’ll admit, if only to himself, in the quiet corners of his mind where honesty doesn’t accuse you of hypocrisy—that when he first saw the roster for Class 1-A and spotted that name… he wasn’t exactly thrilled.

Shouto Todoroki.

The youngest son of the Number Two Hero. Endeavor’s son. 

Not because of any personal history with the man, but because of everything Endeavor represented. Power without compassion. Discipline without kindness. A towering, smoldering figure who built his legacy brick by brick on raw strength. Shota had watched from the sidelines for years as Endeavor clawed his way up the ranks, always with that same grim determination.

And somewhere in the periphery of that rise was a child. Silent. Pale. Marked by ice and fire. Endeavor’s youngest had always been a bit of an enigma. An oddity. A child the public glimpsed only in curated fragments. He was rarely seen without Endeavor looming over him, and when he was, it was never for long. 

Shota had seen those old photos. The ones the media always carefully cropped. Shouto, small and expressionless, standing just behind his father’s broad frame, one side of his face hidden by a curtain of hair.

There were no interviews. No cheerful cameos at school festivals. No candid, smiling photographs tucked between the glossy pages of fan magazines, like so many other up-and-coming hero kids were granted. No charming childhood anecdotes for the public to cling to. When it came to Shouto Todoroki, there were only the bare bones of what could be considered fact—sterile, clinical, and carefully curated.

His quirk. That was the centerpiece. A rare dual manifestation—half-cold, half-hot. Ice and fire in perfect anatomical symmetry, split down the middle like a living metaphor. To some, it was a miracle of genetics, a once-in-a-generation gift. To others, it was something colder. A product of design. A calculated creation, born not from chance, but from purpose. From ambition. From obsession.

A person having more than one quirk was virtually unheard of—genetically improbable to the point of myth. Which made Shouto an anomaly. A scientific marvel. A child of two bloodlines known for strength and precision, fused into one body like a case study. The media latched onto that immediately. Not with warmth, or even curiosity, but with the detached fascination usually reserved for rare animals in captivity.

They speculated. They dissected. Without ever hearing him speak, without ever seeing him act, they labeled him prodigy, project, potential powerhouse. They referenced his lineage with clinical reverence, as though he were not a child at all but a pedigree. The culmination of years of calculated effort from the man who had chased All Might’s shadow his entire career.

And through it all, Shouto remained silent. Hidden behind carefully managed appearances, his expression perpetually unreadable. There was no warmth to him in those early glimpses. Just stillness. A strange, solemn kind of quiet that made it difficult to tell whether he was arrogant or just disinterested. 

But Shota hadn’t needed much to know—intuitively, instinctively—that Todoroki Shouto would not be a fun student to have. That knowledge didn’t come from anything specific in the boy’s file. Not from the neatly typed summaries of academic excellence or combat aptitude. Not even from the glaring surname. It was something quieter than that. Heavier. Less precise.

It wasn’t enthusiasm that stirred in him when he read the name. Not curiosity, not intrigue, not even the sharper edge of professional wariness he reserved for potential problem cases. What he felt was something far older, far more familiar.

Fatigue. The quiet kind. The kind that settled in the chest before anything had actually gone wrong. The kind that whispered, Here we go again, before the problem had even properly introduced itself. A slow, sinking weight. Like standing at the bottom of a hill and seeing the storm clouds forming overhead, knowing you’ll have to climb anyway—rain, wind, and all.

So he had braced himself. Quietly. Unconsciously. The way you might square your shoulders before a long night’s patrol. Before a meeting you know won’t end well. Before the kind of conversation that always leaves something sore behind.

He hadn’t expected much. Not hope. Not inspiration. Just the shape of a familiar story. Another legacy kid, handed too much too early. Someone raised not by values, but by expectations. Shaped like a blade. Sharpened before they were ever asked what they wanted to be.

Shota had seen that pattern more times than he cared to count. Children born into fame, dragged onto the stage before they could walk, groomed for greatness like livestock for show. They came through his doors polished and brittle, armored in ego and suffocating under the weight of their last names. Arrogance in their stride. Entitlement in their tone. The belief that they’d already made it—that being a hero was a birthright, not a responsibility.

And he’d had to break them. Not with cruelty, but with precision. With silence. With long hours and hard truths and the kind of challenges that stripped away the polish and forced them to reckon with who they actually were beneath the branding.

Some of them cracked. Others rebuilt. A few… surprised him. But most of them were just exhausting.

And given who Todoroki’s father was—given what Endeavor was—Shota had expected the worst. How could he not? That man didn’t raise children; he cultivated assets. He didn’t mentor; he commanded. A walking furnace of pride and pressure, all too eager to mold the next generation in his image, whether they wanted it or not.

And the son? The so-called perfect heir ?

Shota didn’t have time for that kind of ego. He didn’t have the energy to spar with another kid who thought he was above the rules, who believed his name was enough to get him through the door and into the spotlight.

So no—he had not been looking forward to meeting Endeavor’s infamous youngest son.

But he didn’t judge. Not aloud. Not officially.

Not in any way that would leave a trace in the record or echo in the staff meetings where the new first years were reviewed with too much optimism and too little caution. He kept his face neutral, his tone flat, his thoughts tucked away behind that practiced stillness that had become second nature after so many years on the job. He had learned—sometimes the hard way—that students didn’t benefit from their teachers’ preconceived notions. Even when those notions turned out to be right.

So he read the file. Thoroughly. Line by line.

He committed the numbers to memory—top percentile in every academic subject, quirk control evaluations well beyond his age group, combat scores that would make third-years raise an eyebrow. He scanned the glowing recommendations, the neat summaries from instructors who had clearly written them with care, or with fear, or both. He noted the precision. The performance. The complete absence of anything human between the lines.

There were no personal anecdotes. No scribbled remarks about temperament or team dynamics or growth areas. Nothing that hinted at who the boy was beneath the statistics. Just results. Perfect, polished, unyielding results.

And that told him more than the numbers ever could.

Still—he said nothing. He didn’t roll his eyes. Didn’t dismiss the file with a sigh. Didn’t voice the quiet thread of cynicism winding its way up his spine. Because that wasn’t how he worked. No matter how many times the story repeated itself, no matter how clearly the patterns aligned, Shota didn’t make judgments until he had proof . Until he had seen it with his own eyes. Until the student in question stood in front of him—not as a name, not as a legacy, but as a person.

So, like always, he waited. He waited to see who would walk through the door. Not the file. Not the son. Not the prodigy or the experiment or the media spectacle. But the boy himself.

But then he saw him. And everything was… off.

It wasn’t anything dramatic. There was no outburst, no awkward stumble, no glaring mistake that immediately marked him as different. If anything, Todoroki entered the room like a shadow—quiet, composed, attentive. There was no attitude in his stride, no hesitation in his movements. And yet, despite the unremarkable way he crossed the threshold, Shota felt something in him still. Something subtle and immediate.

Something in him panged with a type of wrongness. Not in the dangerous sense. Not in the way that set his hackles up. But in the quieter, more dissonant way that made you take a second look and wonder if what you were seeing matched what you were supposed to be seeing.

For one, he was small .

Well—no. Not exactly. Among his classmates, he looked decently average. Maybe a little thin, maybe a little pale, but nothing out of the ordinary for a kid that age. He wasn’t unusually short, didn’t carry himself like someone overly shy or frail. Just… standard. Unassuming. If he’d been the son of a local salaryman or a mid-tier pro hero, Shota probably wouldn’t have thought twice about his stature.

But that was the thing. He wasn’t the son of a local nobody. He was Endeavor’s son.

And compared to that hulking, fire-forged behemoth of a man—the walking furnace of raw aggression and suffocating dominance Todoroki Enji had spent years cultivating in the public eye—this kid looked… slight. Delicate, even. His limbs were too long and narrow, his shoulders not yet filled out. He didn’t radiate confidence or power or ambition. He didn’t radiate anything at all.

Where Endeavor was built like a battering ram, Todoroki stood like a placeholder. Not weak. Just… quiet. Undeclared.

It made Shota pause. Just for a moment.

He’d expected something else. Not flames, necessarily. Not a carbon copy. But something—presence, maybe. That oppressive weight that Endeavor carried with him everywhere, the kind that bent a room just by stepping into it. He thought, perhaps, that some of that might have rubbed off on the boy. A little arrogance. A little heat.

But Todoroki emitted nothing.

And then he listened. Or—tried to.

Because Todoroki barely spoke.

It wasn’t just that he was quiet. Plenty of students were quiet, especially in the first few weeks. Some were anxious. Some were reserved. Some just preferred to observe before jumping into the chaos of the group. Shota didn’t mind that—he often preferred it. He wasn’t the type to demand noise for the sake of performance. Silence could be honest, even productive.

​​But Todoroki’s silence wasn’t the ordinary kind. It didn’t feel like nervousness, or awkwardness, or shyness. It wasn’t the quiet of someone who didn’t know what to say. It was the quiet of someone who had already decided that speaking was a waste of energy. He was silent in a way that drew attention in its totality. 

Shota had met Endeavor a handful of times over the years, and while they were far from close, there were things about the man you didn’t forget. His volume , for one. Not just his literal voice—which was loud, commanding, as though every sentence were meant for an audience—but his presence. His heat. The way he filled up a space like a wildfire, demanding that people bend around him or burn. Even when he wasn’t talking, he seemed to declare himself. You never wondered where he stood on something. You never had to guess what he wanted.

And this boy? This boy was the opposite. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t volunteer. He didn’t assert anything. He simply existed, quietly. Polite, yes. Respectful, technically. But cold. Flat. Mechanical. Like someone playing a role they weren’t invested in.

Since arriving on campus, Todoroki hadn’t offered a single unnecessary word. Not one. No commentary, no jokes, no idle curiosity. When addressed, he responded with clipped, automatic precision—always just enough to satisfy protocol, never enough to invite continuation. His voice was soft, nearly monotone, and his gaze didn’t meet people so much as pass over them. As if they were part of the scenery. As if they didn’t matter.

His other students, for the most part, had already begun the slow, chaotic work of forming their early social structures. Small groups were starting to take shape—some obvious, some unexpected. It always happened quickly with first years. Shared quirks, shared class, shared nerves. A joke here, a laugh there, a spark of camaraderie forged through the unspoken relief of we made it. Some of them would drift apart over time, others would solidify into something lasting, but this early clustering was always a good sign. It meant they were finding their footing.

But Todoroki didn’t cluster.

He stood off to the side like a misplaced statue, half-shadowed by the edge of the room, posture neutral but not relaxed. Eyes tracking, but not really seeing. His gaze flicked from person to person like someone analyzing a battlefield rather than a group of classmates. Not curious. Not cautious. Detached. Almost bored.

Internally, Shota frowned. Just slightly. It wasn’t the distance that bothered him—some kids needed time, and he respected that. But there was something about the quality of Todoroki’s silence, the way he positioned himself just enough outside the perimeter of the group that it wasn’t accidental. The way his face remained perfectly still, unreadable, as if any visible reaction would cost him something.

It was the eyes, too. That strange, glass-flat glint. Not disdainful, but distant. Like he was surrounded by creatures he didn’t quite understand. Like these other students—laughing, chatting, colliding into one another with youthful clumsiness—were alien to him. Not threatening. 

Just irrelevant.

Shota watched, arms folded, saying nothing as the more extroverted kids—always the first to test new waters—drifted over toward him.

Ashido went first, all sunshine and swagger, bouncing up with a smile that could disarm a minefield. She greeted him like she already knew him, as if enthusiasm alone could bridge the gap. Behind her came Kirishima, whose sincerity preceded him like a spotlight. Open posture, easy grin, the kind of presence that invited warmth whether you wanted it or not. The two of them were good kids—approachable, resilient, unafraid of awkwardness. If anyone could get a shy classmate to relax, it would be them.

But Todoroki received them like a system error.

He didn’t flinch, didn’t step back, didn’t snap or scowl. But the rejection was written plainly in his body. His shoulders tensed fractionally inward, a subconscious effort to turn away. His arms remained tight against his sides, hands clenched just enough to register in Shota’s trained eyes. His stance was firm, not aggressive, but deeply guarded.

And his response—when it finally came—was short. Blunt. A few syllables, flatly delivered in that same quiet, emotionless voice. It wasn’t cruelty, not really. There was no heat to it. No sharpness. But that only made it worse. It wasn’t anger. It was indifference.

Dismissal. A quiet, efficient refusal to engage.

Ashido blinked, still smiling but visibly puzzled, her usual effervescence dimming just a little. Kirishima gave a small, polite chuckle and scratched the back of his neck, throwing out a friendly “Cool, man, see ya around,” before subtly nudging her toward the next group. They drifted off with a strange stiffness in their movements—two kids who were used to being liked and suddenly weren’t sure if they’d done something wrong.

Todoroki didn’t watch them go. He simply turned slightly, repositioning himself half a step closer to the window, as if to reestablish the perimeter.

And Shota, still watching from his spot across the room, let out a slow, silent exhale through his nose.

It’s not the arrogance that bothers him. Arrogance is common. Expected, even. Especially at this level. Kids who’ve coasted on natural talent. Kids who’ve been praised their whole lives, handed trophies before they’ve earned them, told again and again how special they are. Arrogance is loud. It postures. It seeks approval, even when it pretends not to. Arrogance, for all its teeth and noise, wants something. And that means you can work with it.

You can challenge arrogance. Apply pressure. Let it fail in a controlled environment and watch it squirm, recalibrate. With time—and patience and pain—you can bend it into something useful. Something real .

But what Todoroki has? It’s something colder. Quieter. More dangerous.

Apathy. Not the performative kind some teenagers use as a mask, a way to shield themselves from embarrassment or failure. Not the slouching, eye-rolling indifference of someone who thinks everything is beneath them. No—this is deeper. More internal. A type of detachment that doesn’t look like rebellion—it’s far too genuine for that. 

Like someone who’s already made up his mind that none of this matters. Like Todoroki isn’t here to learn, or grow, or strive. He’s just here because he has to be. Because this—U.A., hero training, the most prestigious hero course in the country—is not a dream. It’s a requirement . A roadblock to something he was always meant to have. Like it’s all just a list of tasks to complete, and once he checks the final box, he can be done with it all.

And that absence—it’s not harmless.

Because apathy? True, hollow-eyed apathy? That’s hard to reach. It doesn’t argue back. It doesn’t throw tantrums. It doesn’t give you anything to hold on to. It just drifts. And when a student drifts, unmoored from meaning, from desire, from purpose , they become dangerous—not just to themselves, but to the people around them.

Especially in a field like this.

Because being a hero isn’t about perfect scores or textbook quirk technique. It’s about presence . About clarity in chaos. It’s about making impossible choices under pressure and still choosing to care —again and again and again.

And someone like Todoroki—someone so capable, so precise, so frighteningly controlled —if there’s nothing beneath that? No passion, no conviction, no emotional center to ground him?

He’ll be the one others look to in a crisis. People will turn to him expecting strength. Expecting leadership. Expecting heart . And what will they find? Cold, brittle silence.

That’s what terrifies Shota more than any attitude problem ever could. Because that kind of emptiness? It can hold for a while. It can pass every test. But eventually, something will break. And when it does, someone else will be standing too close.

He keeps that thought in his mind—filed not with urgency, but with a careful, quiet tension—as he leads the students out to the training field for their first real test. A quirk assessment. Standard enough in structure, but not in tone. Not the way he runs it.

He keeps his expression impassive, clipboard in hand, scarf shifting faintly in the breeze. Around him, the students buzz with nervous energy, still unsure whether to treat this like a gym class or a battlefield. That’s exactly what he wants.

He delivers the rules with clipped precision. No friendly preamble. No welcome speech. Just instructions. And then—his usual threat.

Last place means expulsion.

The words fall like a hammer. He can see the shock ripple through the group—eyes widening, shoulders tightening, a few of them visibly faltering. It’s a lie, of course. Technically. He’s not in the business of destroying kids’ futures over one bad throw of a softball. But it’s an effective lie. And more importantly, a necessary one.

Because what he’s testing isn’t raw quirk strength. That would be easy. That’s what entrance exams are for. What this test reveals is something harder to teach—how they respond under pressure. Who adapts. Who panics. Who folds. Who rises. Who sees the challenge as a threat, and who sees it as an opportunity.

He watches them carefully—not just how they move, but how they think. The ones who size up the competition. The ones who make themselves small. The ones who glance at him too often, seeking reassurance. The ones who act like they’re alone on the field, even in a crowd.

And, privately, there are only two students he’s seriously considering cutting.

Midoriya . For obvious reasons.

The kid’s quirk is a ticking time bomb. A power he doesn’t seem capable of wielding without breaking himself in half. It’s reckless. Dangerous. If Midoriya can’t find a way to activate his quirk without catastrophic injury, then it doesn’t matter how strong it is. It’ll kill him. Or worse, it’ll get someone else hurt. Someone who trusts him in the middle of a crisis. Someone who assumes he knows his limits and tries to follow his lead. A hero who can’t control their own body is a liability, no matter how noble their intentions are.

And then there’s Todoroki .

Not for lack of skill. His quirk control is nearly flawless. His timing, his awareness, his execution—all impressive. He moves like someone who’s been trained since he could walk. Which, knowing Endeavor, is probably exactly the case.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Everything about him feels… manufactured. Todoroki is precise, powerful, and utterly detached. He’s not pushing himself to prove something. He’s not trying to connect, or inspire, or lead. He’s just executing. Performing. Checking off boxes. And when a hero operates like that—without emotional investment, without connection to the people around them—they become dangerous in a different way.

They don’t flinch when someone’s in danger, because danger is a problem to be solved, not a person to protect. They don’t ask for help when they need it, because needing help implies they’re not functioning at optimal capacity. They don’t trust . They operate alone. Because that’s how they were taught. Because that’s all they’ve ever known.

And a hero who isolates himself—who sees the people around him as obstacles, or worse, as irrelevant —will get people killed.

So no, Shota doesn’t expect Todoroki to come in last. Not with those scores. Not with that quirk. But privately—quietly—he kind of hopes he does.

As expected, Todoroki excels.

He moves through each segment of the assessment with a quiet, almost clinical grace, his actions precise and deliberate—as if following a set of internal instructions rather than reacting in the moment. There’s no hint of strain or hesitation in his movements; no sign that he’s pushing beyond his limits or wrestling with uncertainty. His control over his quirk is frighteningly good, almost unnervingly so.

His ice—when it blooms from his fingertips—is like a living thing, a natural extension of his body. Sharp and cold and swift, it carves through the air with an effortless elegance, freezing with a delicate yet unyielding touch. It’s the kind of mastery that looks practiced, honed by endless repetition, tempered by a will of iron.

If not for Bakugou’s sheer, relentless explosive determination—his wild, fierce, unyielding refusal to be overshadowed—it might have been a clean sweep. But Bakugou, for all his abrasive bravado and unpredictable temper, refuses to be pushed aside. 

The two of them trade blows on the leaderboard, one inching ahead, the other clawing back with unrelenting ferocity. It’s a contest of hot and cold, chaos and control, raw force meeting calculated precision. 

In the end, Todoroki still emerges on top, but Bakugou’s presence is a sharp reminder that strength isn’t just measured in flawless execution.

When the others, caught up in the excitement of the moment, reach out with smiles and words of congratulations, Todoroki’s response is muted to the point of invisibility. He shrugs them off with the same blank disinterest he’s worn like armor all day. He doesn’t even lift his head. Not to meet their eyes. Not to acknowledge their praise. Not to accept their approval.

Instead, he offers a nod—almost imperceptible, as if the gesture itself is an afterthought, a tick in a checklist—and then looks away. As though their admiration means nothing. As though he’s already decided he’s far beyond their reach. 

He carries himself with a quiet certainty, the kind that doesn’t invite questions or challenges. The kind that declares, without words, that he has already chosen the path he will walk. That he has already defined the kind of hero he intends to be. And that no one else’s opinion—no matter how enthusiastic or sincere—has any bearing on that choice.

No, Shota wouldn’t be expelling anyone today.

Midoriya—despite everything—had managed to rein himself in just enough to pass. The boy still had a long way to go, both physically and mentally, but at least he hadn’t self-destructed during the assessment. That was a start. A fragile one, but a start nonetheless.

And Todoroki… well. The boy was too capable to cut loose.

His skill was undeniable. His quirk control flawless. His instincts sharp. Even if his cold demeanor set Shota’s teeth on edge and his detachment made him wary, the raw potential Todoroki carried was impossible to ignore. He wasn’t some reckless wildcard who needed to be weeded out early; he was a weapon in the making.

But there was work to be done.

If Todoroki was going to stay in his class—and there was no doubt in Shota’s mind that he would—then his attitude had to change. Not because Shota expected the boy to become the life of the party or to suddenly pour his heart out in group discussions. But because heroism wasn’t just about power or technique. It was about trust, about connection, about seeing and valuing the people beside you, especially when the world was falling apart.

If Todoroki couldn’t see the value in his peers, then Shota would take it upon himself to help him do so. That was part of his job as an educator. Not just to teach them how to fight. Not just to prepare them for exams or practicals or hero licensing tests. But to reach the kids no one else could. To show them that they still had a chance. A chance to become something better . To become heroes not just by power, but by heart.

He’d done it before. With other kids who didn’t want to listen. Other kids who pushed back or shut down, or fought back. Other kids who didn’t see the value in anything outside of themselves. 

And he would do it again. Whether it took months or years. Whether Todoroki resisted or rebelled or retreated. He would get through to him.

Because Shota had a stubbornness bred from years of frustration. A stubbornness forged in the quiet battles that took place long after the classroom emptied and the training grounds fell silent. A stubbornness that refused to give up.

And he had a feeling that with Todoroki, that was exactly what it would take. 

Stubbornness. Effort. Patience. And that same relentless refusal to quit.

Good thing Shota was always good at all three.

Shota Aizawa is also not typically a man to make comments on his students’ first hero costumes.

He’s seen far too many variations over the years—spikes and capes, clunky armor and overcompensating helmets, glowing visors and more impractical footwear than he cares to count. Most of the time, he keeps his thoughts to himself. Let them figure it out, that’s always been his policy. Teenagers don’t respond well to criticism at the best of times, and especially not when they’re still riding the high of stepping into their own dream for the first time. They need space to make mistakes. To learn, on their own, what works and what doesn’t.

A heavy gauntlet will wear down a shoulder before long. A cape will snag on a piece of debris mid-fight. Loud colors will attract unnecessary attention in a covert operation. These things correct themselves over time. Reality teaches. Pain teaches. He’s never needed to say much.

But Todoroki…

Todoroki challenges that philosophy in ways that make Shota grit his teeth behind his scarf.

The kid’s costume is… baffling. In both function and form. The left side of the suit is completely encased in ice, built up like some kind of exoskeleton. Dense, brittle, cold. He’s encased himself in it like armor, like a wall. His left side is left useless, unaccessed, and unusable. Not even the faintest hint of flame is permitted. And that headpiece… an elaborate, unnecessary contraption that curves over the left side of his face, almost theatrical in its severity. Shota doubts he can see much of anything through it.

It's not just a bad design. It's self-sabotage.

And it grates.

Most students choose costumes that enhance their strengths or complement their fighting style. Todoroki has chosen one that limits him. He’s handicapping himself on purpose. Making a point to everyone watching that half of him is off-limits. 

And what’s worse—no one seems to be stopping him. The designers clearly honored his request. They filed the paperwork, made the adjustments, handed over the gear. No questions asked. Just another legacy student, allowed to call the shots before he’s even learned how to take a proper punch.

It had come to his attention during their first real training session. Shota watches him walk across the field in that ridiculous outfit—one eye half-covered, right side exposed and inert, ice crackling across the other like a prison—and his jaw tics behind the high collar of his capture weapon.

Todoroki performed well—exceptionally, even.

There was no denying the boy’s skill. He moved with a precision that rivaled seasoned pros: deliberate, calculating, efficient in every step. No wasted movement. No visible tells. Every decision he made had a purpose, every quirk activation timed down to the second. On paper, it was an ideal performance. The kind that would make a scout sit up straighter. The kind that should’ve impressed Shota.

But it didn’t. If anything, it left a sour taste in his mouth. Because something about it felt… off. Too precise. Too contained. Too controlled. Not once during the entire session did Todoroki use his fire. Not in offense. Not in defense. When the opportunity came to strike with flame, to retaliate or shield or overwhelm—he simply… didn’t. Not once did a flicker of heat rise from his left side.

It was glaring.

To a casual observer, it might have passed unnoticed. A stylistic choice, maybe. A preference for one side of his quirk. But Shota saw it for what it was: refusal . Deliberate and practiced. And it wasn’t the firepower—or lack thereof—that bothered Shota. It was the restraint .

There was a silence in it. A kind of stillness that didn’t feel natural. Like something had been hollowed out of the boy and filled with ice in its place. The absence of heat didn’t feel like a strategy. It felt like emptiness. And not just in battle. In how he stood. In how he moved. As if it was a part of himself he couldn’t—or wouldn’t —acknowledge, and every second of his performance was carefully constructed to avoid its emergence.

Then there was the way he acted toward his classmates. Not cruel. Not hostile. Just… detached. Dismissive.

He didn’t glare or mock or provoke. He didn’t argue. He didn’t even seem irritated. He simply wasn’t present in the way the others were. Like there was a pane of glass between him and everyone else in the room. His eyes never lingered on anyone for long. He answered questions with curt efficiency, never volunteering more than necessary. He kept a polite distance, both physically and emotionally, as if proximity alone might contaminate him with something he didn’t want.

It wasn’t arrogance in the traditional sense—no puffed-up chest or smug grin or self-aggrandizing speeches. But the effect was almost worse. He watched his classmates like they were strangers at a train station. People he had no interest in knowing. People he didn’t expect to stick around.

When Hagakure and Uraraka made a point of approaching him between drills—friendly, casual, nothing too pushy—Shota made sure to watch closely. Just in case. He always did, especially early on. Some students struggled with social integration. Some needed more time. But Todoroki shut the interaction down so smoothly it bordered on surgical.

He didn’t snap. He didn’t roll his eyes or walk away. He stood there, still and composed, and let them speak. Then he responded with a single, neutral comment. Something clipped. Something final. Something that left no room for follow-up. His expression didn’t shift, not even fractionally. His tone remained flat. Not unfriendly. Just… empty. Like the lights were on, but no one was coming to the door.

Hagakure offered an awkward laugh, then turned back to Uraraka, whose brows had drawn into a furrow. The two of them walked away together, a little quieter than they’d approached. And Todoroki? He didn’t even watch them leave. Just turned his head slightly, attention already elsewhere.

Shota exhaled slowly through his nose.

He’d seen this before. Too many times. Legacy kids. A few of them came in with inflated egos and swagger. Others, like Todoroki, arrived with something more insidious: the belief that they didn’t need anyone else. That their peers were obstacles, not allies. That teamwork was a crutch. That cooperation was optional.

And that kind of thinking didn’t just isolate them. It endangered everyone. In a classroom, it bred resentment. On the field, it bred risk. A student who can’t collaborate in a mock exercise might freeze in a real crisis. Might make decisions that prioritize efficiency over empathy. Might walk away from someone who needed help— or worse, might assume they didn’t need help at all.

Shota narrowed his eyes slightly behind his capture weapon, watching as Todoroki resumed his quiet vigil on the edge of the group, hands loose at his sides, eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the conversation happening around him.

Yes—he was becoming increasingly convinced of his initial assessment. The kid had an ego. Maybe not the loud kind. Not the kind that boasted or bragged or needed applause. But the kind that whispered just as loudly:

"I don’t need anyone."

And that was the kind of ego Shota had learned to watch very closely.

So, after class, Shota asked Todoroki to meet him in his office. He didn’t make a show of it—just a simple, quiet request as the students filtered out. No raised voice. No dramatic pause. Just a brief glance, a nod toward the hallway, and a softly spoken, “Stick around a minute, Todoroki.”

No one batted an eye. These little post-class conversations were routine in the early days. Sometimes it was praise. Sometimes it was feedback. Sometimes just clarification on a quirk observation. The other students didn’t even look back. Shota shut the door behind them with a soft click, then moved to his desk, posture casual, voice calm. He’d already decided on his approach.

Start with the harder subject—Todoroki’s attitude—while the events of the day were still fresh in both their minds. If he timed it right, he could pivot smoothly into discussing the hero costume. Ideally, that shift would soften the weight of the earlier criticism. 

The first part of the conversation would sting—he didn’t expect it not to—but kids usually responded better when they were given something creative to channel that sting into. Especially in the early days, when their identities as heroes were still forming in their heads. A rework of a costume could feel like control, like agency, like a fresh start. 

Most of them liked the chance to reimagine themselves. To play with the idea of who they wanted to be. He was counting on that.

But as Todoroki stood across from him, quiet and composed, hands resting respectfully at his sides, something in Shota’s gut tightened. The boy’s expression was unreadable. Not nervous. Not guarded. Just… blank. His gaze was direct but empty, lacking curiosity, lacking engagement. He didn’t shift on his feet. Didn’t glance around the office. Didn’t fidget or ask why he was there.

He simply stood there, silent and still, like he’d been summoned for a formality. Like he already expected to be spoken at, not with.

Shota watched him for a moment, then gestured toward the chair across from his desk.

“Have a seat.”

Todoroki obeyed without a word. No hesitation. No resistance. His movements were clean, quiet, mechanical. He sat with his back straight, hands folded in his lap, eyes fixed somewhere slightly left of Shota’s own—not in disrespect, but in a way that made it hard to tell if he was actually seeing him. There was something closed-off about the boy. Something practiced. A learned stillness that went beyond emotional control and landed squarely in the territory of self-erasure.

He was no stranger to tough conversations with difficult kids. He knew how to challenge egos, how to apply pressure where it would teach and not damage. But this wasn’t shaping arrogance. This was something colder. Something deeper.

Still, he pressed forward, voice low and even.

“I wanted to talk about today. About your behavior in group settings. The way you interact—or rather, don’t—with your classmates.”

Todoroki didn’t blink. Didn’t tense. Just nodded, once, like he was taking in a weather report. Shota continued, watching carefully for any flicker of reaction.

“You’re strong. No one’s questioning that. But strength alone isn’t enough in this line of work. Heroes don’t operate in a vacuum. You’re going to need people. Teammates. Partners. Support.”

Still no response. No protest. No flicker of defensiveness or guilt. Just that flat, unnervingly blank gaze. Shota leaned forward a fraction, tone quiet but pointed.

“You’re shutting people out. And if you keep doing that, it’s going to get someone hurt.”

Silence. A long one. Not the defensive kind. Not the sulky kind. Just emptiness . Then, finally, Todoroki spoke.

“I understand.”

Two words. Simple. Polite. Unarguable. But they landed like a steel door slamming shut. Not because they were wrong. But because they weren’t engaged . Because they felt less like understanding and more like compliance. A formality. And that’s when Shota knew—this conversation wasn’t going to go the way he hoped.

“Look, kid,” Shota finally said, the weight of the conversation wearing at the edges of his voice. He sighed, not out of frustration, but resignation—the kind that comes from knowing a truth you can’t make someone else accept. “I’m trying to help you.”

He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t lean forward to loom. Just sat still, elbows on the desk, fingers steepled, watching the boy across from him with that practiced, unreadable calm he reserved for delicate students and detonating situations.

“These students—your classmates—they’re not just background noise. They’re not temporary. They’ll be your allies in the field one day. Your backup. Your eyes when yours can’t see. The ones pulling you out when you’re pinned under rubble or bleeding out or worse.”

Todoroki’s eyes didn’t move. But his jaw tensed, almost imperceptibly.

“If you make it to the pro level,” Shota continued, “and I’m betting you will—you’ve got the control, the discipline, the raw power—you’re still going to need them. You won’t last long if you insist on doing everything alone. That’s not how this works.”

He let the words hang there, suspended in the stillness between them like a wire strung tight.

“Do you understand?”

It was a soft question. Not a challenge. Not a rebuke. Just an invitation— engage with me. Meet me here.

Todoroki nodded again. Slower, this time. His shoulders shifted, a slight hitch in the otherwise perfect posture. A hesitation, maybe. A crack. And in his eyes—just for a moment—there was something. Not anger. Not defiance. Shota knew those when he saw them. And not the blank detachment he’d been watching all day. No, this was different.

There was a flicker, like static behind glass. A shiver of something raw and unprotected surfacing before being shoved back down. It passed so fast it could have been imagined. But Shota had trained himself to notice details most people missed. He made a living off catching flickers before they turned into flames.

It wasn’t fear, not exactly. But it was close. Something fragile. Something too brittle to name.

The hairs on Shota’s arms rose, his instincts sharpening. He didn’t know what he’d touched—but it was there. Deep beneath the surface. Buried under all that ice and silence. And despite himself, he felt the faintest pull of grim satisfaction. Not because the boy looked shaken—Shota didn’t take pleasure in unsettling his students—but because something had been unsettled.

Maybe—just maybe—he’d gotten through. Maybe this was a first crack in the armor. Maybe the kid wasn’t unreachable after all.

It was when he brought up the kid’s costume that things really started to go downhill. Up until that point, the conversation had been uncomfortable, sure—but manageable. Todoroki had remained polite, if distant. Guarded, but not combative. He’d nodded in the right places, hadn’t raised his voice or rolled his eyes. Just sat there with his hands neatly folded in his lap, expression unreadable, posture rigid. The kind of quiet compliance that often passed for respect, but was more likely just a learned habit.

But the moment Shota pivoted toward the topic of the hero costume, something shifted. Todoroki didn’t scowl or lash out. He didn’t flinch. But the change was there—subtle and sudden, like the drop in air pressure before a storm. His shoulders went straighter. His eyes sharpened—not with interest, but with wariness. A wall slid into place behind them. Not obvious, not theatrical, just… present. Guarded.

Shota didn’t let it throw him. He’s yet to meet a fifteen-year-old who takes well to having their fashion sense criticized, especially when it’s tied to the first real public image of their would-be hero persona. Most of them have been dreaming about their costume since they were old enough to scribble in crayon. And even the ones who hadn’t—well, even they wanted to feel like someone when they stepped into it. Bigger. Sharper. Real.

So he softened his tone, let the weight of the earlier talk drain from his voice.

“I’m just worried about the practicality,” he said, keeping it light, almost offhand. “That’s all.”

Todoroki didn’t respond.

“I’ve got some concerns,” Shota continued, leaning back slightly in his chair, giving the illusion of ease. “Not about how it looks—though, honestly, the headgear’s a little much—but about how it’s functioning with your quirk.”

Still nothing from the boy.

“It should help you,” Shota said. “Not limit you.”

He waited, gave space for a reaction. Todoroki’s jaw shifted. Barely.

“Right now,” he pressed gently, “it’s keeping you from using half your potential. That kind of imbalance isn’t going to fly in the field.”

There it was again—that flicker of tension, like a muscle pulled taut. Shota could almost hear the quiet click of something locking into place behind Todoroki’s eyes.

“If you’re going to be a hero,” he said, carefully now, deliberately, “you need to be able to function at one hundred percent capacity.”

Still no reply. Not even a breath.

“That means being able to use both sides of your quirk. Your ice and your fire.”

The words hit the room like a dropped coin in an empty well. Small sound. Long echo. Todoroki’s eyes didn’t move, but Shota could see it—the instant drop in temperature, like a freezer door opening somewhere behind his gaze. His face didn’t change, not in any dramatic way. But something in it shut down. A veil. A freeze-frame. And suddenly, it felt like they weren’t just talking about combat optimization anymore.

He leaned forward again, slow and deliberate, watching the boy’s face with new precision. “You’ve got both for a reason,” he said, voice even. “And I’m not just talking genetics.”

Todoroki didn’t answer. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. That was the moment he lost him.

Shota didn’t know exactly where the line had been drawn—only that he had crossed it. It wasn’t dramatic. No raised voice, no slammed fist, no flaring temper. Just a shift. A quiet, internal recoil that seemed to seal the boy off from the conversation entirely. One second, Todoroki had been still and guarded but present; the next, he was… elsewhere . Gone, in some way Shota couldn’t quite trace.

And the worst part? He didn’t even know why .

It should’ve been obvious. He hadn’t yelled, hadn’t mocked, hadn’t accused. He’d made a valid point—a practical one. Hell, it was practically textbook: a hero costume that actively limits the use of one’s own quirk isn’t a good costume . That’s not opinion. It’s logic. Survival 101. So why did it feel like he’d stepped on a landmine?

Todoroki’s posture didn’t change drastically, but the tension in his shoulders became something else entirely—more rigid, more tightly wound, like a wire pulled taut to the point of strain. His mouth was a flat line, jaw clenched hard behind the neutral mask of his face. Shota could see it now, clearer than ever: the walls were up. And not just up. Reinforced.

He tried to pivot, soften. Mentioned the headpiece—its weight, the way it likely obstructed vision on the left. Meant it to be a lighter point, almost a practical aside. Something easier to fix, something to shift the tone.

That’s when Todoroki moved. Not much. But his mouth opened. Fast. As if instinctively. As if the words were right there —a protest, a defense, a correction, maybe something angrier. But whatever it was, it didn’t make it out. No sound escaped.

He caught himself, lips pressing shut so quickly it was almost painful to watch. His brows twitched once, his whole face pinching around the impulse, and then locking it down like a vault. Shota watched the boy’s throat bob with a swallow that looked more like restraint than nerves.

He wanted to say something. That much was clear. Maybe he even needed to. But for some reason, he didn’t—or couldn’t. Whatever it was—fear, defiance, pride—he’d deemed it safer to say nothing at all. And that silence was louder than anything he could’ve spoken.

Shota studied him, something uneasy pooling low in his chest. Todoroki wasn’t just quiet now. He wasn’t just distant. 

He looked trapped. His gaze had started to flick—barely, subtly—between the floor and the door, like he was mentally tracking the fastest way out of the room. Like the walls were closing in and he was already planning his retreat. And his eyes, those strangely heavy eyes, had taken on a kind of glint Shota recognized but rarely saw in students so early in the year.

It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t disrespect. It was something rawer. Wilder. It reminded him— uncomfortably —of a cornered stray. 

He wraps up the meeting quickly after that, uneasy now in a way he hadn’t expected to be.

He wasn’t rattled easily—especially not by students. He’d had more than his share of difficult cases over the years, kids who lashed out, shut down, fell apart, or pushed back with every ounce of rebellion they had in them. He knew how to hold a boundary, how to guide without coddling, how to wait out a silence. But this felt… different. Like he’d misjudged the depth of something buried. Like he’d grazed a live wire he hadn’t seen coming.

Still, he made one last attempt. He repeated his concerns about the costume—softer this time, gentler, his tone modulated as if trying not to spook a skittish animal. He framed it not as a critique but as a collaboration: you’re already powerful—let’s make sure your tools match . He didn’t mention the fire again. He figured once was enough.

He encouraged him—lightly, but clearly—to try connecting with the other students. Not even friendship, not yet. Just teamwork . Awareness. A nod of acknowledgment in the hallway, maybe. A willingness to step beside someone instead of always ahead.

Todoroki didn’t react to any of it. Didn’t argue, didn’t nod in agreement. Just stood there—so straight it looked painful—and listened. Or at least pretended to. Then, after a beat of silence long enough to be called strained, he bowed.

Not deeply. Not fluidly. Just a stiff, mechanical tilt at the waist, the kind that felt like it had been drilled into him. He murmured a thank you—soft, flat, utterly devoid of emotion—and turned so sharply toward the door it felt more like an escape than an exit.

He didn’t slam the door. Didn’t stomp. Didn’t make a single sound that could be labeled disrespectful or impolite.

But he fled. That was the only word Shota could find for it. He fled the room like it was burning down behind him, shoulders tight, head down, footsteps rapid but almost eerily quiet for how fast he was moving. As if even the sound of his departure had been trained out of him. 

And just like that, he was gone.

Shota sat back in his chair and exhaled slowly, a knot forming between his brows. He hadn’t expected to walk away from a fifteen-minute debrief with more questions than he started with. But that’s exactly where he was—watching the door swing gently closed, wondering how a boy so composed could carry that much tension under his skin.

Something was wrong. That much was clear. And whatever it was, it wasn’t just about a costume.

He couldn’t help but feel that he had somehow missed something important. 

He’s pretty sure Todoroki is avoiding him. Scratch that—he’s certain of it.

At first, he tried to write it off. Shota wasn’t in the habit of assuming ill intent from every odd behavior, especially not from a fifteen-year-old still settling into one of the most intense environments a kid could be thrown into. He told himself it could be coincidence, bad timing, general teenage aloofness. But after the third day in a row where Todoroki managed to leave class precisely thirty seconds before Shota finished speaking, after the fifth time he turned a corner only to glimpse the back of Todoroki’s head disappearing into a stairwell, he stopped making excuses.

It wasn’t subtle. Not exactly. But it was deliberate. And the effort was almost impressive.

It wasn’t easy to avoid your homeroom teacher—not when said teacher practically lived in the building, had a notoriously low tolerance for bullshit, and possessed a personality tailor-made for catching patterns and sniffing out problem behavior. Shota had spent years perfecting his ability to notice the cracks: the falter in a step, the flicker in a gaze, the twitch of a shoulder when something hit too close to home. He saw things other people missed. He was supposed to be unavoidable .

Still, Todoroki was trying his damned best—and Shota had to begrudgingly admit, he was doing a decent job of it.

He didn’t act out in class. Didn’t skip. Didn’t give him anything concrete to call him out on. He was polite, quiet, and unnervingly consistent. If anything, he acted more attentive than before, answering when called on, nodding in all the right places. But he kept his distance, surgically clean. Wouldn’t linger after lessons, wouldn’t make eye contact unless directly addressed, wouldn’t so much as pass Shota in the hall if he could help it.

It was evasive in the most strategic sense of the word. Not avoidance born of rebellion or laziness, but something sharper. More calculated.

In the beginning, Todoroki had been consistent. Almost too consistent. Predictable, even. The kind of steady presence that made you think you had him figured out before the semester had even really started. One of the earliest to arrive in the classroom every morning, he never missed his window to slip in ahead of most of the others. Not quite as punctual as Iida, who treated punctuality with near-religious reverence—always exact, always precise, as if the very concept of being late was an unforgivable sin—but Todoroki was close behind, reliably prompt in his own quiet way.

He would enter the room almost silently, as if he were a shadow moving just at the edge of the light, and take his seat without a word or glance to spare. His movements were deliberate, practiced—never hurried, never careless. The chair would scrape softly against the floor, the faintest sound, yet noticeable in the morning stillness of the classroom. He settled in with a posture that was rigid but not uncomfortable, like a statue carved from ice—upright and composed, shoulders squared but never tense, hands folded neatly in his lap or resting quietly on the desk.

That changed after the meeting.

Ever since Shota had pulled him aside to talk about the costume—and, by extension, the quirk—something in Todoroki had shifted. The steady, dependable routine of those early days began to unravel in subtle but unmistakable ways. It started with small delays, arriving just a few minutes later than usual, a missed early seat near the front, a slight slackening in the sharpness of his posture. Then the tardiness crept forward like a slow tide, until now, weeks later, Todoroki barely made it in time for the morning chime, slipping into the classroom almost as the bell rang—but never after.

At first, Shota told himself it was nothing more than typical teenage behavior. The initial excitement of a new school year had faded, the adrenaline of starting something fresh had worn off, and the kid was simply sleeping in, pushing the limits of discipline like any adolescent testing boundaries. That would have been an easy explanation, and one Shota would have accepted from most students.

But that theory unraveled the moment he spotted Todoroki off the usual paths, away from the main building.

There he was, early in the morning, well before first period started—loitering around campus like a ghost who didn’t want to be seen but couldn’t bring himself to leave. Shota saw him lingering in the carefully tended gardens, where the dew still clung to the petals and the air was thick with the scent of wet earth and blooming flowers. 

Sometimes Todoroki sat beneath the heavy shade of an old tree, arms crossed loosely over his knees, face tilted just enough to catch stray rays of light filtering through the leaves. Other mornings, he was perched along the edge of the training field, sitting on the worn grass or a low stone wall, his gaze distant and unfocused, eyes staring out past the horizon as if searching for something no one else could see.

He wasn’t sleeping in. He was just… waiting. Delaying. Avoiding.

And not subtly.

At this point, it had become a pattern so precise it was almost like clockwork. Todoroki had clearly taken the time to study Shota’s routines with an alarming degree of focus—almost as if he’d mapped out the exact moments and movements to evade any unwanted interaction. Shota caught on quickly, noticing how the boy slipped quietly into the classroom only once he was certain Shota was already stationed behind the podium, eyes trained elsewhere, unlikely to call on him or engage directly. It was a carefully choreographed entrance, low-profile and nearly invisible, as if the entire room were a stage and Todoroki was desperate to stay in the shadows.

And then, the moment the final bell rang, the transformation was complete. The kid was gone.

First out the door, practically bolting like he’d been holding back a storm all lesson long. Always with that same posture—shoulders hunched forward like a shell, head bowed low, eyes fixed on the floor as though trying to disappear entirely beneath the weight of the world. It wasn’t just a casual stride; it was a hurried retreat, a flight from something invisible but deeply felt. The way he moved suggested the classroom was hostile territory, and Shota himself, for whatever reason, had become a presence to be avoided at all costs.

There was something almost comical about it.

Shota couldn’t help but find it slightly amusing—watching the kid skitter out of the classroom like a small animal startled by a predator, every movement tight and controlled, as if he feared being caught or confronted. It was like watching a cat slip away when the room grew too loud, or a sparrow take wing at the hint of a shadow. The contrast between Todoroki’s calm, collected demeanor during lessons and this sudden, near-panicked exodus was stark; there was a type of humor to it. 

For now, it didn’t matter.

Because on paper, this was a non-issue.

Todoroki was showing up on time—well, as close to it as he could manage without missing the bell entirely. His academic performance was flawless, a steady stream of top marks and assignments turned in early, evidence of his sharp intellect and disciplined study habits. His combat proficiency, while wildly imbalanced—favoring his ice side almost exclusively—was nonetheless top-tier, bordering on exceptional. He executed every exercise with a cold precision that was both impressive and unsettling, never once showing signs of strain or hesitation.

He hadn’t broken any rules. Hadn’t caused any disruptions, big or small. If anything, he was perfectly well-behaved. From an administrative standpoint, there was nothing to complain about. No incidents to report, no disciplinary measures to consider. The kind of student every teacher hoped for on paper—a model pupil who followed orders, stayed out of trouble, and excelled where it counted.

So really, if the kid didn’t like him? That was fine.

​​Shota wasn’t in this job to be liked. He’d made peace with that fact a long time ago. The role of homeroom teacher, mentor, disciplinarian—none of it came with the guarantee of friendship or admiration. If anything, his reputation for blunt honesty and relentless standards often put him at odds with students early on, only to be grudgingly respected later. And if Todoroki’s cold shoulder was the price of admission, so be it.

So yeah. If Todoroki wanted to dislike him, avoid him, keep him at arm’s length? Shota could live with that. Because at the end of the day, he was here for something bigger than friendship or approval. 

Plus, if he were being completely honest with himself, he was starting to dislike the boy right back.

Not that he’d ever say it out loud. That would be unprofessional. Immature. And beneath his hard edges, Shota knew better than to let personal feelings cloud his judgment. But still—he wasn’t a saint, and Todoroki wasn’t exactly easy to like.

The kid was closed off. Aloof. Wrapped in an aura of detachment so thick it was practically a shield. There was a kind of arrogance there, too—the kind that only those who’ve grown up with power, privilege, or expectation could carry. It wasn’t the loud, brash arrogance of a Bakugou or a Kirishima, the kind that demanded attention and tried to dominate a room. No, Todoroki’s arrogance was quieter, colder—subtle, like a frost that creeps over everything without warning. It whispered, I am better. I don’t need you.

He never made an effort. Never reached out to his classmates, didn’t linger in the hallways, or share in casual conversations. He never joined in during group lunches or training cooldowns. Instead, he kept himself distant, always choosing the edge of the room, the shadow of a wall, or the farthest corner of the cafeteria where he could watch without being watched. His interactions, when they happened, were clipped and minimal, just enough to keep social obligations at bay. 

And Shota could see the effects of that distance—how it rippled outwards, fracturing the delicate social fabric of the classroom.

It wasn’t as if Todoroki’s classmates were cruel or deliberately excluding him. Far from it. It was something far more human—fatigue. Exhaustion born from repeated, unreciprocated effort. There’s only so many times you can ask someone how they’re doing, only so many times you can offer a friendly smile or an open seat at lunch, only so many invitations extended to join in conversation before you stop expecting an answer. Before the silence becomes deafening. Before you learn to stop expecting anything at all.

And eventually, people give up. They move on.

Groups had started to form—tight, familiar clusters of classmates who found comfort in each other’s company—and Todoroki wasn’t part of any of them. Sero and Kaminari had linked up with Kirishima, their easy camaraderie filling the spaces between them with loud laughter and shared energy. Yaoyorozu moved gracefully between groups, always polite, always engaging—but never gravitating toward Todoroki, as if some invisible barrier kept them apart. Even Iida, the most polite and persistent of all, had begun to give the boy his space, recognizing that his own efforts were met with polite detachment, and perhaps sensing the futility in pressing further.

Shota couldn’t blame them. He understood, perhaps better than anyone, how draining it was to reach out and be met with a wall of silence. How the repeated attempts to connect could wear down even the most patient souls. It was easier—safer, even—to accept the distance, to respect the boy’s silence as a choice, and to let him be.

But it was a shame, nonetheless. Because the kid could’ve had friends. He could’ve had support. A network of people who might have caught him if he ever stumbled, who might have lightened the weight he carried, who might have offered a small flicker of warmth against the cold walls he built around himself.

All he had to do was take the damn advice. Be nice. Reach out just a little. Let someone in. But Todoroki didn’t. And with each refusal, the gulf only widened.

Still, while Shota didn’t really mind being disliked by Todoroki—it was, after all, an occupational hazard he’d long since accepted—it did confuse him. There was something almost puzzling in the stubborn silence that stretched between them, like a wall neither was willing to tear down. Here they were: a stalemate of unspoken tension, a teacher and a student locked in a quiet battle of wills, both too proud, too cautious, or maybe just too weary to reach across the invisible space separating them.

And for what? Because Shota had pointed out the flaws in a costume? Because he’d dared to suggest—gently, carefully, with more concern than judgment—that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t heroic to refuse half your power out of some misplaced sense of pride or control?

He could understand that having his costume criticized might have wounded Todoroki’s pride. After all, a hero’s costume is more than fabric and function—it’s an extension of identity, a symbol, a statement. To have it questioned was to have a part of oneself questioned. That kind of critique wasn’t easy to hear, especially from a teacher, someone whose approval felt like both a goal and a burden.

But to avoid Shota to this extent? To treat him like an enemy or a shadow to be dodged? That seemed disproportionate. More than that, it felt like something deeper was tangled up in Todoroki’s silence—stubbornness.

That was what Shota kept coming back to. A stubbornness that wasn’t merely teenage defiance or petulance but something honed and sharpened over years of living under the unrelenting gaze of a father whose will had been carved into every part of his life.

Just like his father. Endeavor’s fire wasn’t just a quirk; it was a legacy—a torch passed down with all its heat and pressure. And Todoroki carried it like a shield, wielding his silence and distance like weapons.

Shota knew that kind of stubbornness well. It was the same iron resolve that made some students impossible to break but also capable of incredible growth. It was a double-edged sword—both a barrier and a weapon.

So here they were, locked in this silent standoff, each waiting for the other to blink first.

Shota leaned back in his chair, the worn leather creaking softly beneath him, one hand running through his disheveled hair as his tired eyes settled on the towering stack of assignments still waiting to be graded on his cluttered desk. The faint smell of stale coffee lingered in the air, mingling with the faint hum of fluorescent lights overhead. He was halfway tempted to push everything aside, just for a moment, to let his mind wander into a petty little fantasy that had been nagging at the edges of his thoughts all morning.

What if I just swapped him out? The idea nudged at him, almost mischievous in its simplicity. He imagined passing the responsibility of Todoroki off to Sekijiro, the fiery-tempered teacher who’d probably leap at the chance to have the Number Two Hero’s son in his class. Fame-hungry bastard that he was, Sekijiro would relish the opportunity to add that name to his roster, no doubt reveling in the notoriety and whispered gossip it would bring. The thought sparked a quiet chuckle from Shota—dry, low, and full of reluctant amusement.

But then reality slid back in like a cold gust of wind. Too much paperwork. Too complicated. Too many factors to untangle. The logistics alone were a nightmare, and there was no real justification to shuffle students around just because one of them was difficult to reach. Besides, it wasn’t like Todoroki was a problem in the traditional sense. Just… challenging. A different kind of challenge.

He dismissed the fantasy with a shake of his head, but the idea lingered, sweet and fleeting, like a half-remembered song drifting just out of reach. As he sifted through essays and project reports, the notion of a classroom free of Todoroki’s frosty silence felt, if only for a moment, like a relief—a quiet space where the tension between them didn’t simmer beneath every interaction.

And then his fingers paused. There, near the middle of the pile, lay Todoroki’s latest assignment, neatly stacked and pristine. He picked it up with a quiet sigh, flipping through the pages with practiced efficiency. His eyes scanned the answers—precise, methodical, flawless. A perfect score. Again.

A familiar knot tightened in Shota’s chest. No matter the distance, the silence, the cold exterior—Todoroki was exceptional. Brilliant, disciplined, talented beyond question. The kind of student who didn’t just meet expectations, but shattered them with quiet, unyielding force. And that made it harder. Harder to be frustrated. Harder to be angry. Harder to stay distant.

Shota leaned forward again, the weight of the stack forgotten for a moment as his mind wrestled with the complicated person staring back at him in neat, black-and-white ink

Shota’s patience had finally, truly worn thin.

He wasn’t a man prone to high emotional investment or theatrical outbursts; quite the opposite, in fact. He prided himself on maintaining an even keel, a steady calm that rarely cracked, no matter the storm raging around him. His usual approach was measured and detached, built from years of navigating chaos and adolescent volatility with quiet endurance. But watching Todoroki Shouto drag his feet through yet another grueling training session—cold fog billowing silently from the right side of his body while the left remained stubbornly inert—was beginning to gnaw at him like a persistent itch he couldn’t scratch.

It was a subtle, creeping frustration at first. The kind that tightened the muscles in his jaw and made his eyes narrow just a fraction longer than usual. But day after day, week after week, exercise after exercise, the pattern remained unchanged. Todoroki’s quirk was an imbalanced weapon—ice in full force, while fire was locked away like a forgotten secret. It was as if the boy was deliberately choosing to wield only half of what was at his disposal, like a swordsman who refused to draw one of his blades in battle.

And frankly? Shota was tired of watching it happen.

The thing was, Shota understood stubbornness. He lived it every day. But this was different. This wasn’t quiet pride or controlled restraint—it was something heavier, a weight pressing down on the boy’s very soul.

And Shota was running out of patience. Not because he wanted to punish or shame Todoroki, but because he feared what this self-imposed limitation meant for the boy’s future. The hero path wasn’t kind to those who held back, who refused to wield their full strength. And Shota, with his years of experience, had seen too many promising students fall because of pride, fear, or stubborn denial.

U.A. wasn’t a place for half-measures. From the moment a student stepped onto those grounds, the expectation was clear: if you wanted to become a hero, you had to commit every fiber of your being to the cause. There was no room for hesitation, no allowance for holding back, no space to coast on legacy or talent alone. This was a proving ground—a crucible designed to forge strength from sweat, determination, and relentless effort.

If the kid wanted to be a hero, then he was going to have to act like it.

Bakugou was a whirlwind of explosive energy and raw, brutal force, never sparing a moment or an ounce of power in his training. His intensity was a force of nature—wild, fierce, and utterly relentless. Midoriya, too, poured himself into every challenge with unwavering dedication, often pushing beyond his limits, his grit shining through even when his body begged for rest.

Even the support students—those who weren’t on the frontline but whose roles were just as critical—showed up each day bone-tired and sleep-deprived, their faces marked with exhaustion but their spirits unyielding. They gave their full effort, because they understood what was at stake.

All of his other students were putting in a hundred percent. No excuses. No shortcuts. Todoroki wasn’t special. He wasn’t exempt. His name—Endeavor’s son, the prodigy with a rare dual quirk—didn’t grant him immunity from the demands that shaped every hero in this academy. Legacy might open doors, but it didn’t replace hard work. It didn’t shield you from failure or forge character on its own.

If Todoroki wanted to act like a student of his, then he was going to give everything—every damn thing he had—just like the rest of the class. Because here, at U.A., the world wasn’t going to cut anyone slack. He wasn’t asking for perfection, nor was he demanding fire and ice be used equally in every exercise. What he needed was commitment. The willingness to face discomfort, to wrestle with fear, to push past limits—not just in bursts, but consistently. That was what made a hero. And if Todoroki wasn’t ready to do that, then he wasn’t ready to stand among the others.

Shota had given him a chance.

For weeks, he’d watched and waited. He’d let the tension simmer beneath the surface, silently observing from the sidelines as Todoroki navigated the routines and rituals of U.A. He’d hoped—maybe naively—that the boy simply needed time. Time to adjust. Time to find his footing in a world that demanded everything but offered little in return. Time to learn that strength wasn’t just about power, but about trust, connection, and the courage to face oneself fully.

But the time had passed. The quiet tolerance Shota had afforded was gone now, replaced by a hard-edged resolve. He was done waiting.

So when the morning sun streamed through the school’s wide windows and the rest of Class 1-A buzzed with excitement, suiting up in their vibrant hero gear for Toshinori’s outdoor lesson, Shota moved with purpose. His footsteps echoed down the hallway as he caught Todoroki just outside the locker rooms, the boy’s posture stiff, his expression as unreadable as ever.

Shota’s own face was a mask—flat, controlled, voice colder than the ice curling under Todoroki’s fingertips.

“You won’t be joining them today.”

The words hung heavy in the air. Todoroki blinked up at him, startled. His eyes, usually so guarded, widened with uncertainty, caught completely off guard by the bluntness of the statement.

“Sensei?”

Shota didn’t waver. Didn’t soften.

“Change into your gym uniform. You and I are going to do some private training in Gym Gamma.”

There was a pause. A fragile moment suspended in the air between them, thick with unspoken words and heavy with expectation.

Shota’s eyes flicked to the subtle twitch at the corner of Todoroki’s jaw, a small, involuntary movement betraying the rigid mask the boy wore so carefully. Behind those mismatched eyes—one a fiery crimson, the other an icy blue—Shota caught a flicker of something elusive. Uncertainty, maybe. Or dread. Perhaps a tangled mixture of both.

But whatever it was, it vanished almost instantly, swallowed by a wall of practiced restraint. Without a word of protest, without hesitation, Todoroki gave a slow, deliberate nod. His voice, when it came, was quiet and muted, stripped of any emotion. “Yes, Sensei.”

He trailed after the rest of the class at a deliberate distance, looking small, every line of his posture rigid with tension. Shota didn’t watch him go—he turned and left for the gym, knowing Todoroki would follow. The boy was too proud not to. Todoroki may be pompous, but he wasn’t disobedient. Shota had no doubts the kid would do as instructed.

He fell into step behind the rest of the class, keeping a deliberate distance—an island apart. The space around him seemed to contract, folding inward with the tension etched into every line of his posture. Shoulders squared but tight, movements careful, controlled, as if any sudden motion might shatter the fragile calm. The boy looked small—smaller than his age, smaller than the prodigy he was supposed to be. Vulnerable in a way.

Shota didn’t watch him go. Instead, he turned on his heel and headed straight for the gym, the sound of his footsteps echoing down the hallway. He knew Todoroki would follow—pride like that ran too deep to ignore a direct order. Todoroki might be cold, distant, even pompous, but he wasn’t disobedient. Not truly. There was a certainty in Shota’s mind, a quiet confidence that didn’t waver: the boy would do as he was told.

And he did.

Just as Shota expected, a few minutes later Todoroki appeared in the vast, cavernous space of Gym Gamma. The gym, usually bustling with energy and clatter, felt empty and cavernous today—echoing softly with the distant sounds of footsteps and muffled voices from the other parts of the school. The fluorescent lights above cast a harsh, sterile glow, highlighting every hard line and shadow in the room.

Todoroki was dressed down in the plain, utilitarian gym uniform, the fabric hanging on him loosely, almost like a punishment. The absence of his usual hero costume—so carefully designed, so heavily symbolic—seemed to strip away a layer of his usual armor, leaving him looking more vulnerable than Shota had ever seen.

His movements were stiff, uncertain, as if each step was a reluctant concession. He lingered just inside the doorway, shoulders slightly hunched, hands clenched tightly at his sides like he was trying to hold himself together. The boy looked out of place—like a deer caught in the glare of oncoming headlights, frozen for a moment before deciding whether to flee or stand his ground.

Shota didn’t greet him. He didn’t soften his expression or offer any welcoming gesture. Instead, he gave a half-hearted flick of his fingers—an invitation, or maybe a command. If he were honest with himself, the motion was closer to dismissive than inviting, a subtle but clear reminder that Todoroki was here to work, not to be coddled.

“I told you once already that the way your costume limits your quirk is an issue,” Shota began, cutting straight to the point without bothering with pleasantries or softening his tone. His voice was firm, carrying the weight of hard-earned experience and unyielding expectation.

Todoroki’s gaze sharpened, eyes narrowing just a fraction. His lips pressed tightly into a thin, unreadable line, but he remained silent. Good. Maybe this time, finally, he was ready to listen.

Shota’s eyes didn’t waver. “Obviously, that conversation had no impact on you, because I haven’t seen you use your fire even once since the start of the semester.”

He spoke quickly, not pausing to give Todoroki a chance to interrupt, even though he caught the faint movement of his mouth opening, a silent protest barely on the verge of forming. No interruptions. Not today.

“If you want to be a student at U.A., you’re going to have to train every aspect of being a hero. Not just the parts you’re comfortable with. Not just what you feel like showing off. You don’t get to pick and choose.”

His voice dropped slightly, sharper now, carrying an edge that cut through the sterile gym air. “I don’t personally care how you feel about it. Whether you want to or not, you’re going to use your fire.”

He took a step closer, his shadow falling long over the boy’s tense form. “And since you clearly aren’t capable of doing it on your own, you’re stuck with me today.”

Shota’s gaze bore into Todoroki, unwavering and resolute. “You and I are not leaving this gym until you get some practice in—until you start using both halves of your quirk—or until the school day ends. Do you understand me?”

All at once, the fight seemed to drain completely from Todoroki’s eyes. The sharp spark of defiance, the restless energy that had simmered just beneath the surface moments before, faded away as if snuffed out by an unseen hand. His mouth, which had hung open—poised to interrupt, to argue, to push back—snapped shut abruptly, cutting off the words before they could escape.

For a long beat, he simply stood there, the tension in his frame coiling and uncoiling like a tightly wound spring, struggling to find release but ultimately staying restrained.

Finally, in a voice that was low and flat, carrying a hollow emptiness that echoed through the silent gym, Todoroki replied: “Yes, Sensei. I understand.”

His eyes were dull, clouded with something closer to indifference than any real emotion Shota could place. There was no flicker of passion or resistance, only a quiet, resigned acceptance that settled like a shadow over the boy’s features. Shota studied him carefully, reading the stillness not as submission, but as a guarded withdrawal. It wasn’t defeat, not exactly. More like a lack of care.

Still, for Shota, that was good enough. He didn’t need enthusiasm or gratitude, not yet. What mattered was that Todoroki had heard him. That, at least for now, the boy was willing to engage—even if only on the surface. And sometimes, that was where change had to start.

What followed was not the kind of battle of wills Shota had braced himself for.

There was no argument, no stubborn refusal, no sharp retorts or excuses. Todoroki didn’t complain about the session or attempt to evade the exercises laid out before him. Instead, he moved with a quiet compliance—almost eerie in its steadiness. He obeyed every instruction without hesitation or resistance, his movements deliberate and precise, as silent and unobtrusive as a ghost slipping through the gym.

On paper, that should have made things easier. But it didn’t. Because what was meant to be a focused technical refinement—an opportunity to hone the finer points of his dual quirk—quickly morphed into something far more revealing, and far more troubling.

The moment Todoroki summoned flame for the first time, Shota’s stomach clenched. The fire didn’t obey him like the ice did—smooth, controlled, an extension of his will. Instead, it burst forth in jagged, erratic bursts: sudden explosions of heat that flared unpredictably, lashing out with uneven intensity. Sometimes the flames roared too hot, scorching everything in their path with reckless abandon. Other times they sputtered weakly, barely enough to singe a leaf, as if the boy’s control was fading in and out with every breath.

Todoroki’s entire body was jittery, taut with tension, as if he was trying to lift a weight he hadn’t touched in years—an old, unfamiliar burden. His hands trembled slightly as he struggled to modulate the fire, every attempt feeling labored and uncertain.

His aim was a mess. Blazing jets of flame veered off course, scorching the training dummies haphazardly, setting one ablaze after another with reckless disregard. Within minutes, half the targets were burnt to blackened ash, while others remained untouched, frustratingly out of reach.

His timing was equally off—sometimes firing too early, before the stance was properly set; other times hesitating too long, missing the moment entirely. The rhythm was broken, fractured, as if the fire had a will of its own that refused to be tamed.

There was no finesse in his fire at all. No practiced rhythm, no smooth flow from one movement to the next—only raw, unwieldy energy that seemed barely contained, like a wild beast straining against an invisible leash. The steady, fluid control he wielded with his ice was completely absent. Instead, each flare of flame was a jerky, unpredictable burst, lacking the grace or precision of true mastery.

Watching him was like witnessing someone attempt to train with a limb they never even realized they had—tentative, awkward, and painfully unnatural. His motions were hesitant, as if unsure of how to even begin commanding the power within him.

Every time the flames erupted from his palm, Todoroki’s whole body flinched, twitching with a reflexive tension that betrayed a deep-seated fear. It was as though he expected the fire to lash back at him, to strike him down in retaliation for wielding it. The way his muscles tensed and recoiled made it clear that, despite all his talent, he hadn’t yet reconciled with the heat coursing through his veins.

Shota’s gaze sharpened, eyes narrowing with an intensity born of both frustration and concern. This wasn’t merely a problem of insufficient practice or lack of effort. No, this was something far deeper—a fundamental disconnect, a fracture between Todoroki and one half of his own power. He didn’t know how to use it. Not really.

And that realization sent an eerie chill through Shota’s spine. There was something almost unnatural about it—watching such immense potential stifled by invisible chains. The flames that should have roared to life in harmony with the boy’s will instead sputtered and snapped, betraying the silent battle raging within.

And it made no damn sense.

This was the son of the Number Two Pro Hero in all of Japan—the youngest descendant of Endeavor himself. A man whose very name was synonymous with fire and power, whose career had been forged in the blaze of relentless ambition and unyielding training. If the rumors whispered in the halls were to be believed, Endeavor had been preparing his heir since the boy was barely able to walk—pushing him, drilling him, molding him from the moment he could grasp the smallest flicker of flame.

So how, Shota wondered bitterly, how in the hell was Todoroki this inexperienced? How was it possible that a child raised in the shadow of the country’s fiercest hero could stand here, struggling to summon even a fraction of the control his bloodline should have guaranteed? It was like watching a master painter’s apprentice who had never picked up a brush. Like witnessing the heir to a great legacy who was still fumbling with the basics of his craft. 

The disconnect gnawed at Shota’s mind, refusing to let go. Was it fear? Rebellion? Some secret wound buried deep beneath the surface? Or was it something else entirely—something darker and more complicated than he could yet understand?

He clenched his jaw, frustration and confusion warping into a knot of determination. Whatever the reason, this boy—this prodigy—was standing on the edge of a precipice, and it was Shota’s job to pull him back from the brink. Because if Todoroki couldn’t master both halves of his quirk, he wasn’t just limiting himself. He was risking everything. His future, his safety, and the lives of everyone who might one day count on him.

The training session had dragged on longer than either of them had anticipated, stretching thin the thread of patience that held the room together. It was an unpleasant experience for both of them—Shota with his mounting frustration and unspoken concern, and Todoroki with his silent, rigid endurance. The air between them was heavy, thick with unspoken words and bruised pride.

By the time Shota finally called it quits, letting the boy go earlier than he might have otherwise, it felt less like a victory and more like a reluctant retreat. The whole experience had left him with more questions than answers, a knot of unease tightening deep in his chest.

Todoroki didn’t waste a second. He nodded sharply at the dismissal—no hesitation, no relief, no gratitude. No request for feedback, no questions about what he could improve or how to fix the glaring gaps. Instead, he turned on his heel and moved quickly toward the exit, his steps brisk and sure, as if eager to escape the stifling atmosphere of the gym.

But then, just as the door loomed ahead and his back was still turned to Shota, the boy paused. His voice, low and almost casual, broke the tense silence.

“You know,” Todoroki said, the words dropping with unexpected weight, “you remind me of my father.”

And then, without another glance, he walked out the door and disappeared from sight.

Shota stood frozen for a moment, the sudden comparison echoing in the stillness around him. For some reason, the statement didn’t sit right. It lingered in the air, bitter and foreboding.

He didn’t think that it was a good thing.

Chapter Text

Denki Kaminari wasn’t exactly sure what he had expected when he dreamed of attending a school as famous as U.A. High School. Maybe somewhere deep down, he thought it would be like stepping into a hero manga—thrilling, electrifying, and filled with instant friendships and nonstop action. But the reality? That was still sinking in. Truthfully, he hadn’t even been sure he’d get accepted at all. The thought felt almost impossible, like a long shot thrown into the wind.

He kept telling himself it was partly luck. Pure dumb luck.

The written exam had been a disaster. Denki knew it the moment he saw the questions—he’d fumbled more than half of them, barely grasping the theory and concepts. Numbers and formulas blurred on the page. His heart had sunk, convinced he’d blown his chance before even starting.

But then came the practical test, and that was where his quirk had saved the day. Unlike the written exam, the practical portion played to his strengths. When those robotic targets started moving, his adrenaline kicked in. He zapped, sparked, and shocked his way through, subduing the robots with a mix of precision and raw power. Each successful strike sent a jolt of confidence through him. Somehow, he managed to score enough points in the practical test to make up for his less-than-stellar performance on paper.

Even now, with the acceptance letter stored like a keepsake in his binder and the U.A. campus sprawling before him, it still felt surreal—like some crazy dream he wasn’t sure he was awake for. Walking these halls, standing among the future heroes he’d only ever heard about on TV—it all felt bigger than anything he’d imagined.

Sometimes, when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in a classroom window or a shiny trophy case, he had to remind himself that this was real. That he really belonged here. 

Somehow, the most shocking part for Denki wasn’t the campus, or the acceptance, or even the strength of his classmates. 

It was Shouto Todoroki. And not intensity in his gaze, or the quiet, almost impenetrable aura the boy carried—it was the fact that Denki was actually taller than Todoroki.

Now, Denki knew he wasn’t exactly tall. He’d never been. Standing a bit below average among his peers had been something he’d been aware of for years—nothing drastic, not enough to stunt his confidence completely, but enough to be a source of light teasing from classmates and friends. Enough that he’d learned to brace himself for the occasional joke or ribbing about his height.

But Todoroki? Todoroki was supposed to be one of those guys who naturally commanded attention just by his presence. The son of Endeavor, the Number Two Hero in Japan—Denki had imagined him towering over most of the class like a flame-wreathed colossus. Not just because of pedigree, but because power seemed to demand a physical stature to match.

And yet, standing there in the hallway, Denki realized Todoroki wasn’t even an inch taller than him—if anything, Denki had a slight edge. It caught him completely off guard.

It was a strange feeling, a flicker of surprise that buzzed through his veins almost as intensely as his quirk. For a moment, Denki’s usual easy confidence wavered. Here was this boy who radiated quiet authority and cold intensity, and he was, physically speaking, smaller than Denki by just a hair.

That tiny discrepancy shouldn’t have mattered. It wasn’t like height defined strength or skill. But still, it rattled Denki more than the looming threat of expulsion had, or the intimidating aura of the top students. Somehow, that small, almost trivial fact punctured through all the nerves and pressure of being at U.A. High.

It made Todoroki seem more human, less like the untouchable legend Denki had imagined.

As soon as Denki stepped into the classroom that very first day, his eyes immediately caught on the unmistakable shock of hair. How could he not recognize it? There weren’t many pictures of Todoroki Shouto floating around online—his family was notoriously private—but the few that did make it out had gone viral more times than Denki could count. That split cascade of fiery red and stark white was practically iconic, a signature that stuck in the mind like a brand.

Even from across the room, that hair stood out like a beacon.

Denki had seen the pictures of Todoroki standing beside Endeavor—the blazing, hulking Number Two Pro Hero whose presence seemed to fill any frame. Todoroki had always looked kind of small next to his father, but honestly, everyone did, except maybe All Might. That was the family dynamic everyone talked about: the enormous, explosive hero overshadowing his son in every way imaginable.

So Denki hadn’t really thought much of it at first. He’d filed it away as “small in comparison,” a natural thing when standing next to a mountain like Endeavor.

But now, seeing Todoroki in person, there was no denying it—the kid really was just straight-up small. Not just in height, though that was part of it, but in the way he carried himself, the way his frame seemed compact and lean, almost fragile in contrast to the brash energy radiating from so many other students around them.

Denki blinked, surprised by the quiet gravity that smallness seemed to carry with it. There was more to this kid than the pictures and the rumors suggested. More complexity beneath that striking exterior.

It wasn’t just about inches on a measuring tape. It was the overall sense that Todoroki was contained, reserved, almost compressed. Like a flame caged inside a delicate glass vessel. 

At first, it had registered almost like a distant afterthought—something to file away in the back of his mind. A simple fact, like a footnote in a textbook. One of those details that might matter someday, somewhere down the line, but for now, felt almost irrelevant. Something barely worth pausing for.

At least… until today, their first Foundational Heroes Studies class. The whole class was buzzing with anticipation. By now, everyone knew the legendary All Might himself would be teaching them this year. The mere thought sent ripples of excitement and nervous energy through the halls. Rumors flew fast and thick—who would he be like? How strict? How inspiring? And yet, none of them had actually seen him in person yet. His presence was more of a promise than a reality, an electric undercurrent waiting to be unleashed.

Denki felt the excitement thrumming through the air like static, even before homeroom had officially started. It was contagious, and he couldn’t help but grin a little, caught up in the wave of anticipation sweeping through Class 1-A.

Since the start of the week, he’d already become fast friends with Kirishima and Ashido—two of the most approachable and genuine people in the class. So when he walked into the room, he headed straight toward their familiar huddle around Sero’s desk, eager to catch up and soak in some of the camaraderie. His bag was still slung over one shoulder, but he stopped briefly at his own desk just long enough to drop it off before joining the group.

The classroom buzzed with low chatter and laughter, punctuated by the occasional excited whisper about All Might. Denki felt a rush of belonging there, in the middle of the noise and friendship. 

“Oh man, dude—I mean, I heard rumors that All Might was gonna be teaching at UA,” Kirishima blurted, practically vibrating with energy. “But I honestly didn’t believe them! I figured even if it was true, he’d only teach, like, the third-years, or maybe the second-years at most. You know, the people who already have their provisional licenses or whatever.” He gestured wildly as he spoke, hands carving shapes in the air, his voice full of disbelief and excitement. “I can’t believe we’re actually about to meet him. Us! ”

Denki couldn’t help but grin. Kirishima’s enthusiasm was infectious, and honestly, a welcome distraction from the way Denki’s own nerves were starting to jitter under his skin.

Ashido was right next to him, nodding along to everything Kirishima said with an intensity that was almost absurd. Her pink hair bounced with the motion, and she folded her arms with exaggerated seriousness, twisting her mouth into a frown so theatrical it was clearly a joke. “We’re first-years , Kiri. Babies. Literal fresh-out-of-middle-school babies,” she said in a low, dramatic voice, as if narrating a documentary. “We’re not supposed to be in the same zip code as someone like All Might. I’m still not convinced this isn’t just some elaborate prank.”

Denki snorted, then clapped a hand over his mouth a second later when he realized how loud it was. A couple heads turned from other clusters of students, but no one seemed annoyed. Everyone was a little hyped up this morning.

“I mean, it is kind of insane,” Denki said, voice dropping into a half-whisper, half-squeak. “This guy basically built the modern era of heroics and now he’s gonna teach us ? Like, what if he makes us do some crazy, impossible endurance training on day one? What if he just… I don’t know, shows up and smiles and I short-circuit or something?”

He laughed nervously, rubbing the back of his neck as the tiniest spark snapped at his fingertips—harmless, but definitely noticeable. A tingle of electricity skated up his arms, not strong enough to discharge but enough to remind him that his quirk was never far from the surface when he was this worked up. He couldn’t even tell anymore whether it was his nerves causing his electricity to stir, or if the hum of his quirk was creating the anxiety like a self-feeding loop.

Ashido caught the spark and grinned. “Whoa there, Denki. Save the theatrics for the big guy, huh? Wouldn’t wanna meet your idol while mid-fry.”

“Yeah,” Kirishima chimed in with a grin, elbowing him playfully. “Try not to go full Pikachu before he even says hi.”

Denki groaned. “You know I hate that nickname.”

Which only made them laugh harder. But even as he laughed with them, something in his chest was tightening—not unpleasantly, just… a little too full. Anticipation, nerves, awe. The feeling that something big was about to happen, and he wasn’t entirely sure if he was ready for it.

“I wonder what he’s gonna be like,” Ashido mused aloud, her tone casual, but her eyes were sparkling with genuine curiosity. “Do you think he’s gonna be just like he is on TV?”

She rested her chin on her hand, elbow propped on Sero’s desk, her fingers absently twirling a strand of pink hair. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it carried in the quiet buzz of pre-homeroom chatter, drawing the group’s attention back in. “You know, all ‘fear not, citizens!’ and giant thumbs-ups and stuff. Think he’ll do the voice?”

Denki laughed under his breath, but the question made something in his chest clench—not in a bad way, exactly. More like anticipation coiling tighter. Because yeah, he was wondering that too. All Might, the All Might , was kind of larger than life. Always had been. He wasn’t just a hero—he was the hero. Smiling in the face of danger, indestructible, untouchable. An unstoppable wall of positivity and power. Seeing him on TV was like watching a real-life comic book come to life.

Denki couldn’t imagine him being any other way. And honestly? He didn’t want to.

He blinked, dragging himself out of the thought just in time to catch Sero shaking his head slowly in response to Ashido’s question. The tape user’s expression was thoughtful, brows drawn slightly together as he leaned back in his chair with his arms folded tightly over his chest.

“I don’t know,” Sero said, shrugging a little, “but I can’t lie—I’m a little nervous.”

Ashido raised an eyebrow, her expression skeptical. “ Nervous ? You?”

Denki glanced at him too, surprised. Sero was one of the chillest people he’d met all week—laid-back, dry-humored, totally unshakable. If he was nervous, that was saying something.

Sero offered a crooked smile, the kind that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Hey, even I’ve got limits. I mean…” he glanced around the room, voice lowering slightly, “there’s a reason people say you should never meet your heroes.”

That gave them all pause.

Denki frowned, the words settling a little heavy in the space between them. He shifted where he stood, his fingers twitching at his sides, that low static hum in his nerves coming back again.

“You think he’ll disappoint us?” Denki asked before he could stop himself. His voice came out a little too quiet, a little too earnest.

Sero was quick to answer. “Nah. Not disappoint exactly. Just… I think it’s hard, you know? When someone’s been a symbol your whole life. When you’ve built them up in your head so much that they stop being a person. That kind of pedestal? Nobody can stay on it forever.”

Denki swallowed. That made sense, he guessed. But he didn’t want it to. He liked believing that All Might was exactly who he appeared to be. Brave, unshakable, always smiling. The kind of person you could count on without question. The kind of person who made the world feel safe just by existing in it.

“I don’t know,” Ashido said eventually, softer now. “Maybe it’s true. But I think I’d rather know the real version of someone than just a pretty picture.”

Denki opened his mouth, sparks on the tip of his tongue—half a joke, half a nervous ramble, not even sure yet what he was going to say—but whatever thought had been forming fizzled out immediately when Iida Tenya’s voice rang out like a cannon blast over the low hum of conversation.

“Fellow students!” Iida declared, slicing the air with a karate-chop motion so forceful it made Ashido flinch. “The class bell rings in approximately thirty-five seconds! I implore you all to take your seats and direct your attention to the front where Mr. Aizawa is now present!”

He finished the announcement in a flurry of precise movement, all sharp angles and crisp efficiency, and promptly marched to his own desk like he was on some kind of mission, his back ramrod-straight. His chair scraped back with military punctuality, and he sat with the kind of discipline that made Denki wonder if the guy actually practiced sitting at home.

It took a second for the rest of the class to process the sudden shift in energy. There was a ripple of startled silence—then the sound of chairs scooting back, bags thudding lightly against desks, and a few muffled groans of reluctant compliance. Denki exchanged a glance with Kirishima, who shrugged and gave him a sheepish grin before moving toward his own seat. Ashido rolled her eyes with a smirk but didn’t argue either, hopping off Sero’s desk and stretching her arms high over her head as she sauntered back to her place.

Denki grabbed the strap of his bag, slinging it off the floor and onto his desk with a soft thump before sliding into his chair. The static running under his skin hadn’t gone away, not really—it still pulsed faintly through his fingers, tingling at the tips like a warning or a promise, he wasn’t sure which. His gaze flicked to the front of the room, half expecting to see All Might’s towering frame and shining grin.

But instead… there was just Mr. Aizawa. The man looked exactly as tired as he had every other morning, barely distinguishable from a sleep-deprived cryptid. His hair was even more of a tangled mess than usual, and his face was partially buried in the oversized collar of his capture weapon. He was hunched slightly behind his desk, a half-empty coffee mug in one hand and a tablet in the other, eyes skimming the screen like he couldn’t decide whether to be conscious or not.

Still, despite his utterly deadpan demeanor, the atmosphere had shifted. Everyone was watching. Everyone was waiting. The room went quiet in that strange, expectant way that only classrooms could manage—like the air itself had gone still, holding its breath. They were all thinking the same thing: Is it time? Is this it? Are we finally about to meet him?

“…Thank you, Iida,” Mr. Aizawa said dryly, the barest hint of exasperation leaking into his voice. He didn’t sigh, exactly, but the pause between words was heavy enough to imply it. His expression, half-hidden by the scarf looped around his neck, remained flat, though Denki could’ve sworn there was something vaguely pained in his eyes—as if Iida’s constant, booming enthusiasm had physically worn down his last nerve.

A moment passed. The class stilled.

“As I’m sure you’re all aware,” Aizawa continued, tone clipped but steady, “today marks your first Foundational Hero Studies class.”

The words landed with weight. Denki straightened unconsciously in his seat, a flicker of static dancing between his fingertips beneath the desk. Around him, he could feel the ripple of anticipation catch like kindling—subtle but growing. Even Bakugou, slouched aggressively in his seat near the window, tilted his head just slightly, his red eyes narrowing with interest.

“To participate in today’s class,” Aizawa said, “you’ll need to be wearing your hero costumes.”

Several students made audible noises—small gasps, a stifled whoop from Kirishima, a whispered “finally” from Ashido. Denki felt his pulse skip. He’d read the schedule, sure. Knew this was coming. But hearing it out loud , like this, made it real.

Aizawa’s gaze scanned the room. “I trust everyone submitted their costume request forms before the start of the school year.”

That comment seemed mostly rhetorical, but Denki saw a few people sit a little straighter as if suddenly uncertain about whether they'd done it right. A few nervous glances darted between classmates, and Sero muttered something under his breath that made Ojiro snort quietly beside him.

Just as the weight of that moment settled in, a soft whir echoed through the room.

Denki’s head turned toward the noise, and his eyes widened as narrow panels along the wall slid open with mechanical precision. One by one, twenty sleek, reinforced cases emerged, each bearing a glowing digital number that matched a student ID from the roster. The cases looked like something out of a sci-fi movie—black with silver accents, sealed tightly, some with visible cooling or locking mechanisms. His heart leapt into his throat.

“These contain your hero costumes,” Aizawa said, with all the emotion of someone announcing it was time for a dental cleaning. “The numbers correspond to the class number you were assigned. Collect your case, and make your way to Gym Gamma .”

He paused, letting the words settle in. There was a new energy now—excitement mixed with nerves. Chairs scraped against the floor as students began to rise in waves, chattering under their breath. Denki’s legs jittered with the effort of not leaping up immediately.

“There are locker rooms available there where you can change,” Aizawa added, already picking up his tablet again like he was done with them. Then, just as the first hand reached for a case—he spoke one last time.

“Oh,” he said, and for the first time that morning, his voice curved into something faintly amused. A smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth, so brief Denki nearly missed it. “And don’t worry.”

His eyes flicked up, sharp and unreadable. “All Might will meet you there.”

The reaction was instant. Gasps. Shouts. A shocked laugh from someone in the back. Even Bakugou froze, his hand inches from his case, mouth parting just slightly in surprise. A literal, electric jolt shot through Denki’s arms, and he slapped his hands down on the desk to ground himself, sparks crackling faintly against the wood.

“All Might?! There?! Like—he’s really gonna be teaching us?! ” Kirishima half-shouted, already clutching his case with both hands like it was a trophy.

“Holy crap, this is really happening, ” Ashido breathed, eyes gleaming. “Okay, okay, let’s go! I wanna see everyone's costumes too!”

Denki grabbed his own case—number seven—and hugged it to his chest. It was heavier than expected, cool to the touch. Something about the weight made it feel important. Real.

They were going to meet All Might. In costume. In Gym Gamma. His stomach flipped. His palms tingled. This… this was what he’d dreamed of.

There’s a current of excited chatter rippling through the group as they spill out of the main building and head down the path toward Gym Gamma. It’s not quite a stampede—no one’s running—but there’s an energy to the way they move, like a pack of kids trying really hard not to sprint toward a pile of birthday presents. Most of them aren’t even aware of how fast they’re walking, their voices rising in overlapping bursts of speculation, laughter, and awe.

Denki sticks close to Kirishima and Sero as they go, caught up in the buzz of it all. There’s a high, electric kind of anticipation buzzing just under his skin, a tingling mix of nerves and excitement that keeps sparking up in little bursts across his fingers. No one says it outright, but he knows they’re all thinking the same thing: This is it. This is real. Their first real step into what it means to become heroes.

Gym Gamma looms ahead, sleek and massive, the wide steel doors already propped open. The interior hums with artificial light, polished floors gleaming beneath the overhead fixtures. The locker rooms are located just off the main corridor—split into two wings, one for boys and one for girls. Denki follows the others into the left wing, trying not to let his steps turn into a jog.

The locker room is—well, way nicer than he expected. Definitely cleaner than the musty, mildew-scented ones back at his old middle school. Everything here looks brand-new. The tiles are pristine, the lights are bright, and the lockers themselves are tall, metallic, and numbered with neat digital displays. They’re wide enough to fit armor sets, with adjustable shelving and hooks inside for accessories or gear. A row of pristine showers lines the back wall behind a privacy partition, their chrome fixtures gleaming under the white lights. The air smells faintly of industrial soap and ozone.

“Dude, this is way nicer than what we had at my old school,” Sero whistles, tossing his case down and popping open his locker with a grin.

“No kidding,” Kirishima adds, already unzipping his uniform top and tugging it over his head in one fluid motion. “Everything’s so— polished! Man, I feel like I’m in a pro gym or something.”

Denki laughs, his fingers dancing over the locking mechanism of his case. “Right? I was expecting like, cracked benches and broken stalls, not… I don’t know, hero-grade locker rooms.”

They claim a row of lockers beside each other near the center of the room, and it quickly becomes a flurry of movement. Zippers, rustling fabric, excited shouts of “ No way, that’s yours? ” and “Dude, that looks awesome!” bounce off the tiled walls. Everyone’s too hyped to feel awkward—there’s a shared sense of vulnerability and pride in this moment. These are their costumes. The first ones. The ones they designed themselves.

Denki opens his case carefully and inhales a quick breath at the sight of it—his suit laid out neatly, each piece slotted into its own compartment. The colors pop more in person than they did on paper. He runs a hand over the fabric briefly, feeling the texture, the little lightning-bolt accents stitched into the lining. It’s real. He’s going to put this on.

“Whoa, Kaminari, that’s sick!” Kirishima exclaims from beside him, already halfway into his own outfit—an armored crimson harness crossing his chest and back. “Love the lightning theme! Super flashy!”

Denki grins. “Thanks, man. Yours looks intense—definitely rock-solid.”

“Pun intended?” Sero deadpans, pulling on his mask with a lopsided smirk.

“Absolutely,” Denki says proudly, slipping one leg into his pants.

They keep chatting as they change, sharing quick commentary on each other’s choices—how Denki’s boots have grounding soles to help stabilize his discharge, how Sero’s gear enhances his tape-launching range, how Kirishima’s outfit allows for maximum mobility despite its armored look.

To be honest, Denki isn’t paying any attention to Todoroki at all.

He’s too busy trying to smooth down the stubborn crease in the collar of his jacket, which seems determined to pop out at a weird angle no matter how many times he fixes it. He’s also still buzzing a little from the excitement of getting into costume for the first time—his gloves feel just slightly too tight in the fingers, and there’s a faint hum of static clinging to his sleeves that he doesn’t entirely trust not to zap someone by accident.

Around him, the locker room is full of movement and chatter. Someone’s laughing loudly, and there’s the soft hiss of lockers swinging closed, the metallic click of latches snapping into place. Fabric rustles, boots thump against tile, and there’s a general background buzz of nervous excitement as everyone finishes changing and starts mentally preparing themselves for whatever All Might has in store.

He doesn’t even realize Todoroki’s undressed until a sharp, shrill whistle slices through the room like a blade. Heads turn. Conversations stutter. The sound is followed almost immediately by a familiar voice, rough and scornful and impossible to ignore.

“God damn , Halfie,” Bakugou calls across the room, loud enough to make a few people flinch. “You look like a fucking toothpick.”

Denki blinks, attention snapping toward the far side of the room where Bakugou stands—already fully suited up, arms crossed, a dangerous smirk curling at his lips. His gaze is fixed on Todoroki, who’s crowded himself against the far end of the room, shirt dangling between clenched fists. 

And it is kind of a surprising look.

Not in a bad way, necessarily—just unexpected.

It’s a crass thing to say, and Bakugou is undoubtedly a dick. Denki had figured that out by, like, day two. The guy didn’t so much introduce himself as explode at someone for breathing too loudly. But still… even if the way he says it is rude as hell, Denki can’t totally disagree.

Todoroki had only taken off his shirt—quietly, matter-of-factly, like he wasn’t even thinking about it—but the sight of him had made Denki blink and do a bit of a double take. Because, honestly, the dude looks kind of… breakable.

Not weak, not exactly. There’s a kind of tension in the way he holds himself that feels dangerous, like something coiled up and waiting. But his body tells a different story. His ribs jut out in sharp, symmetrical lines beneath pale, almost papery skin. His collarbones form high ridges, and his shoulders—though squared—look almost too narrow for his height. When he moves, it’s clear he’s got muscle, but not the kind you get from lifting weights or bulking up. It’s lean, sinewy—ropey, even. Like cord pulled too tight. He looks less like a fighter and more like something starved into survival.

Denki doesn’t mean to stare, but there’s something eerie about it. Something not quite right.

Todoroki doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. He pulls the upper half of his costume on slowly, methodically—sliding his arms into the sleeves like someone who’s done this a thousand times. The gesture is smooth, practiced, but not particularly expressive. There’s a precision to it that feels almost clinical.

He’s not built like Bakugou, with his compact, explosion-ready frame and sharp, aggressive posture. He doesn’t have Kirishima’s broad, brawler’s shoulders or Sero’s tall, gangly ease. Todoroki’s… narrow . Self-contained. Like everything important is happening somewhere deep beneath the surface, where no one can reach.

Almost delicate-looking, Denki thinks, and then immediately feels weird about thinking it.

But clearly, Bakugou has zero intention of letting anything about Todoroki go unnoticed.

“Just because you want to act like a prissy fucking princess,” Bakugou coos with a cruel kind of sarcasm, his voice practically echoing through the locker room, “doesn’t mean you have to be built like one too.”

There’s a ripple in the room. A few people snort quietly, not really laughing at Todoroki, just reacting to Bakugou being Bakugou. A few others glance around, clearly waiting to see if Todoroki is going to respond. A couple of students glance at Todoroki, then back to Bakugou, uncertain whether to laugh or brace for a fight. Denki shifts awkwardly, unsure what to do with his face. 

Todoroki, for his part, doesn’t even flinch. He finishes zipping up his vest in one smooth motion, then turns his head just slightly, just enough to look at Bakugou out of the corner of his eye. His face is blank. Expressionless. He doesn’t respond. Doesn’t rise to the bait. Just adjusts the strap at his side and turns away again, like Bakugou doesn’t exist. Like the insult didn’t even register.

Privately, Denki feels a little bad for the guy—though he keeps that to himself.

Todoroki hadn’t really done much to make friends since the term started. He was quiet, distant. Never rude exactly, just… hard to read. He kept his head down, spoke only when spoken to, and even then, it was usually just a clipped nod or a soft-spoken, flat reply. There was a kind of wall around him, tall and silent and cold—not outwardly hostile, but built high enough that no one seemed especially eager to try climbing over it.

So no one did.

No one was rushing to his defense, either. Not now. Not when Bakugou’s words landed with all the grace of a dropped sledgehammer. A few of the guys laughed—not meanly, exactly, just awkwardly. The way people do when they’re not sure what the right response is and don’t want to become the next target. The rest of the room mostly fell into a quiet, vaguely uncomfortable shuffle.

Todoroki still didn’t say anything. He barely even reacted. He just kept changing, mouth pressed into a hard line, eyes fixed straight ahead. There was a stiffness in his shoulders now, though—something clipped and quick in the way he moved, like he was trying to fold himself out of his own skin and vanish. The top half of his suit went on in jerky, mechanical motions, zipped halfway up with one sharp pull. He didn’t look at anyone. Not Bakugou. Not the rest of the class. Just gathered the rest of his gear and walked, fast and purposeful, toward the exit.

Denki blinked. The guy was fast . Like—startlingly so. Not with the exaggerated, showy swagger of someone trying to make a point. More like a shadow slipping past light. Smooth and quiet and almost unsettling in how quickly he was gone.

The locker room door shut behind him with a soft slam —not quite loud enough to be called aggressive, but firm. Final. It left a faint echo in its wake, and a little silence that no one seemed to know how to fill.

Shinsou turned away from his own locker with a slow, almost lazy pivot, his towel still slung around his neck and his eyes cutting toward Bakugou like a flick of a blade. His expression was hard to pin down. It wasn’t exactly angry—but it wasn’t amused either. Something dry simmered beneath his gaze, unreadable. Detached. Cool.

“You’re an asshole,” Shinsou said flatly, his voice calm but sharp enough to slice.

He didn’t wait for a response—just turned back around and kept changing, tugging his uniform top over his head with unbothered ease.

Denki let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and exchanged a glance with Kirishima, who looked a little like he wanted to say something, but couldn’t quite find the words.

And yeah. Denki definitely agreed.

Bakugou didn’t look fazed. He just snorted, low and dismissive, and pulled on the gauntlets of his costume like he hadn’t just chased a classmate out of the room with a single sentence. Like none of it meant anything at all.

The whole exchange makes it even more surreal when, not an hour later, Todoroki proceeds to wipe the floor with all of them in the training exercise.

There’s no flourish to it. No dramatic pause, no big flashy display. It’s quick— clinical —over in mere seconds before most of them even get the chance to properly assess the setup. He doesn’t yell or posture or gloat. He just moves like someone who’s done this a hundred times before, who doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone because he already knows what he’s capable of. And that—somehow—is worse than trash talk.

Todoroki stands there like a statue, frost still crackling faintly at his feet. He doesn’t even look winded. And he definitely doesn’t look interested in anyone else’s reaction. He barely glances their way. Doesn’t acknowledge the gaping stares or hushed mutters or even Bakugou’s second-string tirade. Just nods once at Aizawa’s signal and turns, walking off the field with that same unreadable detachment he wore in the locker room, like he’s already somewhere else entirely. Like none of it— none of them—matter at all.

After that day, Todoroki doesn’t change in front of them anymore. Not once.

At first, no one really notices. Maybe they assume he’s just shy. Or modest. But then it starts happening every time. They’re all stripping down, suiting up, trading banter or barking over gauntlet straps and boots—and Todoroki is nowhere to be seen. He always shows up to training fully dressed, hair still damp, skin a little flushed like he’s been changing in a rush somewhere else. And afterward, when they return to the locker room, he either lingers in the training space longer than necessary or ducks out before anyone else can move.

Denki clocks it the third time it happens. After that, it becomes routine.

Todoroki starts timing his arrivals and exits like a soldier dodging surveillance. Some days, it’s subtle. Other days, it’s obvious. He’ll hover just outside the locker room entrance with his duffel bag slung over one shoulder, waiting silently, phone in hand, eyes trained on the floor like he’s willing time to pass faster. And if someone tries to speak to him—or even catches his eye—he just nods once, curt and unreadable, then vanishes the moment they cross the threshold.

More than once, he barely makes it to class before the bell.

Bakugou doesn’t call him on it. Denki doesn’t either. Neither does Kirishima or Sero. They just watch, occasionally glance at each other when it happens again and again, and then move on like nothing’s changed.

But it has changed. That much is clear.

After that, Denki starts paying a little more attention to Todoroki. Not in a weird way, or at least not that he’d call weird. More like… casual curiosity. Totally normal stuff. Observational, even. Like gathering intel on a mystery NPC in a video game.

He tells himself it’s not really a thing. Just—Todoroki stands out. Even in a class full of future heroes, half of whom have neon hair or are constantly exploding or turning invisible, the guy somehow manages to draw the eye. And not just because of the hair—though the red-and-white is basically a walking logo. It’s the way he carries himself. Like he’s in a different timezone from everyone else. Moving at some slower, quieter frequency.

But mostly, Denki pays attention because something just… doesn’t add up.

He’d figured that even if Todoroki hadn’t clicked with them , he’d have friends in other departments. Like maybe some upperclassmen who knew him from before UA. Or kids from Support or General who liked the broody loner vibe. Someone. Anyone.

But no.

The dude has zero friends. Denki watches him for a week straight at lunch just to be sure. And every day— every single day —Todoroki sits alone. Same spot. Same table, way over in the far corner of the cafeteria, like he’s exiled himself to the outskirts of society. Back straight, shoulders squared, like he’s posing for a picture no one’s taking.

It’s kind of unnerving, how quiet he is.

He doesn’t scroll through his phone like the rest of them. Doesn’t talk. Doesn’t glance up. Just sits there, eating with this weird, careful precision like every bite’s being graded. He opens his bento—neatly packed, obviously homemade—and eats the same thing every day, or at least something incredibly similar: perfectly portioned rice, grilled chicken, a few pale vegetables arranged like a sad little garden.

It’s a far cry from the chaotic towers of curry rice and fried chicken piling up on Denki’s tray, or the monstrosity of meat Kirishima usually brings. Even Iida lets loose enough to grab a smoothie on Thursdays.

But Todoroki? No variation. No socializing. No expression. Just… eat, sit, stare into the void.

Denki finds himself weirdly unsettled by it. Not in a judgmental way, just in the way you start feeling cold when you realize someone’s been standing in the shade too long.

It’s not like he wants the guy to be sad or anything. But it is strange, watching someone be that alone by choice. Watching someone who could probably have anything—and anyone —he wanted, just… choose not to. Every day.

And he always comes with a book. Not in a casual, kill-some-time kind of way either—the guy reads like it’s his job. Like the pages are oxygen. Like if he doesn’t get through a chapter during lunch, something essential will be missing from his day. It’s oddly intense. Kind of impressive, really.

Denki starts to notice the rhythm of it. For a few days, it’ll be the same cover propped up against his water bottle or held loosely in one hand while he eats with the other, his eyes flicking down between bites. Then, without ceremony, a new one will appear. No fanfare, no discussion—just swapped out one day like clockwork. Rinse and repeat.

What catches Denki off guard isn’t the fact that Todoroki reads—it’s what he reads.

He’d half-expected textbooks, maybe some dry history stuff, or thick, hyper-technical books on strategy or physics—something fitting the whole brooding genius prodigy thing Todoroki had going. But that’s not what he finds. At all.

The variety is… weirdly eclectic.

One day it’s a hardback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo , thick as a brick and old enough that the pages look yellowed around the edges. A few days later it’s some kind of minimalist poetry collection in a soft blue paperback, the title in elegant cursive. Then a book on philosophy. Then sci-fi. Then a war memoir. Then something Denki’s pretty sure is a young adult fantasy novel with a dragon on the cover.

And then, one day, Denki walks past the table and does a double take. Todoroki is sitting exactly like always—upright posture, perfectly centered bento in front of him, water bottle on the right, book just to the side—but this time the title on the cover reads The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

And that’s the first time Denki actually blinks and goes, Wait, seriously?

He’s never read it himself, but his older brother had to for his high school English class last year, and Denki remembers listening to him rant about it for twenty straight minutes in the car. Something about women, repression, feelings, and the ocean. It was one of those “deep” books that teachers get really excited about and students mostly pretend to understand.

It’s… not the kind of thing Denki ever imagined someone like Shouto Todoroki reading.

He doesn’t say anything, obviously. But it’s enough to scramble the vague profile he’d been forming in his head. Todoroki, who hardly talks to anyone, who can freeze a waterfall solid and apparently beat half the class in ten seconds flat, is voluntarily reading 19th-century feminist literature over rice and chicken like it’s just another Tuesday.

“What are you looking at?” Jirou’s voice cuts through the idle noise of the cafeteria, sharp but not unkind.

Denki startles a bit. He must’ve been staring longer than he thought. He tears his eyes away from Todoroki—still sitting alone in the corner, still reading with monk-like stillness—and scratches the back of his neck sheepishly.

“Oh… just… Todoroki…?” he mumbles, not really sure how else to phrase it. It comes out more like a question than a statement. Jirou raises an eyebrow at him, one of those slow, skeptical looks that could mean anything from seriously? to are you okay?

But, miraculously, she doesn’t press. She just shifts her attention back to her food, one earbud dangling down from the collar of her shirt, as if she’s already decided it’s not worth the trouble.

Before the moment can settle, Ashido leans dramatically across the table, seizing the opening like it’s the hottest piece of gossip she’s heard all day. “Dude, he’s really freaking weird, right?” she says, her eyes lighting up with curiosity. “Like, not in a bad way, I guess—but also, maybe in a bad way?”

Denki blinks. “I mean… I don’t know if I’d say weird exactly—”

“No, no, she’s got a point,” Kirishima cuts in, gesturing vaguely with his chopsticks before popping something into his mouth. He keeps talking, voice muffled around what couldn’t possibly be a fully chewed bite. “The dude is definitely strange. He barely talks at all. Even Koda talks more than he does.”

Jirou lets out a quiet sigh and shakes her head. “That’s kind of a mean way to put it, don’t you think?” she says, nudging her tray forward a few inches and folding her arms. “I mean, Kaminari is a weirdo too, and he’s okay.”

Denki whips his head toward her, eyes wide. “What did I do?” he protests, clearly wounded. “I’m, like, fun-weird! Charming-weird!”

“You tried to see if you could charge your phone with your teeth yesterday,” she replies flatly, not even looking up.

“That was an experiment, ” he insists, jabbing a finger in the air. “For science! ”

Ashido bursts out laughing. “No, no! It’s totally not the same, Jirou,” she says between giggles. “Denki’s like… normal-weird. Harmless-weird. Todoroki is just—like, mystery cryptid weird.”

“I’m just saying,” Kirishima adds, swallowing this time before speaking (thankfully) , “he’s… intense. Like, he’s always thinking about something but never says what it is. It’s kind of hard to get a read on him. You never know what that guy’s gonna do.”

“Exactly!” Ashido says, thumping her palm against the table. “He’s like—one of those NPCs in a game that gives you cryptic advice and then disappears for three quests.”

Denki can’t help but laugh at that. “Okay, yeah, that’s kind of accurate.”

All of them—almost in sync—steal a glance toward the other boy seated across the cafeteria, as if pulled by the same thread of unspoken curiosity.

Todoroki doesn’t seem to notice. Or if he does, he doesn’t let on. He’s hunched slightly over the book in his hands, one elbow braced against the table, fingers poised delicately on the page like he’s memorizing the words instead of just reading them. His expression, as always, is unreadable—somewhere between calm and hyper-focused.

His bento box sits neatly in front of him, the compartments completely spotless. Not a single grain of rice, not a drop of sauce left clinging to the lacquered sides. Denki notes—not for the first time—how Todoroki always eats the same way: fast, but not messy. Precise. Efficient. Like he’s on a timer and no one told the rest of them.

There’s a strange tension to it, Denki thinks. A sort of... urgency wrapped in practiced grace. Every movement is carefully measured, performed with exacting etiquette—never talking with his mouth full, always chewing with his lips closed, his chopsticks held perfectly, like he was trained to pass inspection. But beneath that is something... tighter. Like maybe if he doesn’t finish quickly, someone will take it away.

“Maybe he just likes to be quiet?” Sero offers after a beat, his voice light and casual, even as he reaches for another carton of juice. “Not everyone’s gotta be a loudmouth like you, Kirishima.”

Kirishima lets out a theatrical gasp, clutching at his chest like he’s been mortally wounded. “Dude! Rude!”

Sero only grins wider, leaning back in his seat as Kirishima throws a lazy swing at him. He ducks easily, laughing.

“I’m serious though,” Sero adds once the moment of dramatics fades. “Some people just vibe on their own, y’know? Doesn’t necessarily mean anything’s wrong with him.”

Ashido tilts her head, pouting thoughtfully. “Yeah, but like—he never talks. I don’t think I’ve even heard him laugh. Does he laugh?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Denki admits, then immediately feels kind of bad for saying it.

“Maybe he just doesn’t laugh because he doesn’t find any of us funny. Ever considered that one?”

Shinsou’s voice cuts in from the far end of the table, dry as ash. He doesn’t look up as he speaks, still hunched over his phone with his elbows braced on the table. The screen is dark. He hasn’t touched it in a while, and his fingers aren’t moving. It’s obvious now that he’s been listening the whole time—probably from the beginning—but only decided to weigh in once the conversation hit a nerve. Or maybe he just couldn’t resist the opportunity to be cynical.

Ashido snorts. “Oof. Brutal.”

Denki leans forward slightly, resting his chin in one hand. “I mean… Shinsou might have a point.”

“Hey!” Kirishima protests, just as his latest swipe at Sero goes wide. The force of the swing overbalances him and he nearly falls off the bench, one leg flailing before he catches himself with a hand slapped to the table. “Woah! Okay, okay. I deserved that one.” He rights himself with an exaggerated wince and rubs the back of his neck, laughing a little sheepishly. “But, seriously—yeah. I guess I’m just a little disappointed, you know?”

There’s a softness to his voice that wasn’t there a moment ago, the humor fading into something more thoughtful.

“When I saw him in our class that first day, I was stoked. ” He flashes a grin, but it’s lopsided, half-hearted. “I mean—Todoroki? The Shouto Todoroki ? Son of the number two pro hero? He’s practically famous already. Of course I was curious.”

He pauses, poking half-heartedly at his tray of food. “I was actually excited to get to know him. I thought—hell, I dunno. That he’d be cool, or at least interested in being part of the class. But it’s like… he’s not even trying. Like we’re invisible.”

Denki nods slowly, fiddling with the end of a straw wrapper between his fingers. He definitely gets where Kirishima’s coming from. It’s not just about the name or the reputation—it’s the vibe. The sense that Todoroki doesn’t just keep to himself, but actively avoids making connections.

“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” Denki admits. “He never really looks at people, y’know? Not for long. Not like he’s shy, more like... like he’s already decided there’s no point.”

Ashido hums thoughtfully. “That’s kinda sad when you think about it.”

Shinsou finally glances up from his phone, eyes sharp beneath the curtain of purple hair. “Or maybe it’s not that deep. Maybe he just doesn’t care.”

Sero shrugs, folding his arms behind his head. “Or maybe he cares too much and he’s just real bad at showing it.”

“Honestly, I think he seems pretty rude,” Jirou says, not mincing words. Her tone is flat, but there’s a subtle edge to it—just enough to hint at lingering irritation. She picks at her rice with her chopsticks, not looking up. “I mean, he doesn’t have to be our friend or anything, but the least he could do is be civil. Did you hear the way he snapped at Shoji during that training exercise with All Might? ‘Stay out of my way’—like, come on. ”

She lifts her gaze then, arching a brow like she’s daring someone to disagree. “We’re all here to learn. We’re teammates. That kind of attitude? It’s not just unfriendly. It’s uncool. Completely dominated the exercise like no one else even mattered.”

For a beat, no one responds. Across the table, Sero shifts awkwardly in his seat, scratching at the back of his neck. Kirishima glances down at his tray. Denki lets out a quiet breath and fiddles with the corner of his juice box, suddenly very focused on peeling the straw wrapper all the way off.

None of them had told the girls what happened in the locker room that day. It hadn’t felt… right. Like sharing it would’ve crossed some invisible line. It wasn’t like Todoroki had done anything wrong exactly—but there was something fragile about the way he’d moved. About the way he’d bolted out the door like he couldn’t get away fast enough. That image had stuck with Denki, more than he’d expected it to.

With that in mind, they couldn’t totally fault him for being on edge during that first exercise. Maybe he had overstepped. Maybe he had been cold. But it was hard to see it as simple arrogance when you were holding the memory of his spine jutting like a knife beneath his skin.

“I mean, yeah,” Sero says eventually, his voice careful. “That wasn’t his best moment. But... it was the first day. Everyone was a little intense.”

“He was more than intense,” Jirou mutters.

“Well...” Denki tries, squinting slightly. “Maybe he’s just used to working solo? That could explain why he doesn’t really… you know, click. ”

Ashido frowns thoughtfully. “Then what’s the point of being here? UA’s all about working together. If he’s not even trying to fit in, that kinda defeats the purpose, right?”

Kirishima straightens in his seat, placing his chopsticks down with a soft clack. His brows are furrowed, but not in anger—just a kind of stubborn, determined look that Denki has come to recognize. When Kirishima sets his mind to something, there’s no walking it back.

“Well, I for one haven’t given up!” he declares, his voice loud enough to make a few students at nearby tables glance over. He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

He claps his hands together with a loud bang, the sound sharp and cheerful in the echo of the cafeteria. “Todoroki’s gonna be my friend whether he wants to or not. I’ll make sure of it.”

Denki laughs despite himself. “That sounds like a threat.”

“It’s a promise! ” Kirishima says with a grin that could light up a room.

Jirou rolls her eyes, but her mouth twitches like she’s holding back a smile. “You guys are hopeless.”

“I prefer to think of us as emotionally persistent,” Sero replies, offering her a toothy grin.

Across the room, Todoroki flips another page in his book, face unreadable.

As the weeks slide by and the novelty of the new school year begins to wear off, something in the class settles into quiet resignation when it comes to Todoroki.

It’s not a dramatic shift—just a slow accumulation of silences, of glances quickly turned away. One day, someone tries to ask him what book he’s reading and gets a curt, almost disinterested response. The next, someone cracks a joke about his hair that goes unacknowledged entirely. And after that, it just stops. The conversations. The small talk. The attempts.

People start treating him like furniture—part of the classroom, always there, always quiet, but never included. Never engaged . No one approaches his desk to chat between lessons anymore. No one invites him to eat lunch with them or asks how his day’s going. He’s just there , like an odd, silent fixture at the edge of the room.

Well—except Kirishima. Kirishima, bless his optimistic heart, still waves at Todoroki every morning. Still tosses him casual “Hey man, good luck!”s before training. Still flashes him that wide, unshakable grin of his, even when Todoroki responds with nothing but a blink and a nod. It’s like trying to hug a wall, but Kirishima doesn’t give up. Denki’s pretty sure he never will.

But Kirishima is the outlier. For everyone else, there’s a creeping sense of frustration that’s started to take root. Any time someone is partnered with Todoroki for training, they groan about being ignored or overshadowed. Any time someone’s against him, they grumble about how it’s “not fair” because of “his ridiculous quirk.”

Denki hears them muttering—sometimes under their breath, sometimes not even trying to hide it.

“Why even bother trying when he’s just going to freeze the whole field in two seconds?”

“He doesn’t even talk to you. Might as well be fighting a robot.”

“Honestly, if he thinks he’s too good for all of us, he can go train alone.”

And the worst part is: Todoroki definitely hears them. His desk is right there. There’s no way he misses the huffs, the irritated sighs, the not-so-subtle comments. But if it bothers him, he never shows it. He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t roll his eyes. Doesn’t push back or explain.

He just keeps going—stoic and silent and seemingly untouched by all of it.

Everyone talks about how powerful his quirk is—and they’re not wrong. The ice alone is unbelievable. He’s reshaped entire landscapes in seconds, turned battlefields into frozen death traps that even Bakugou struggles to get around. But Denki can’t help feeling like he’s only ever watching half of what Todoroki can really do.

Every time he lifts his right arm, cold blooms and frost spreads—but his left hand just hangs there, limp and still. Like it doesn’t belong to him. And Denki wonders, not for the first time, what would it look like if he ever let it out?

Today, Denki gets what he would definitely call the short end of the stick—the unfortunate honor of being paired up with Todoroki for their Foundational Hero Studies class.

The assignment, according to Aizawa, is to simulate survival and response tactics in the midst of various natural disasters. Every student pair is assigned a different scenario—earthquakes, wildfires, floods, mudslides. It's not about flash or combat today; it’s about strategic thinking, teamwork, and endurance under pressure.

Denki slouches in his chair the moment Aizawa begins listing off the pairs. With each name called, he silently hopes to get Kirishima. Or Sero. Or, hell, even Bakugou. Anyone who at least talks to him. But of course, when his name is finally called, it's followed immediately by: “Todoroki.”

His stomach drops.

Todoroki, as always, gives no reaction whatsoever, just nods once and stands, apparently unbothered. Denki mutters a resigned “cool, cool, this is fine,” under his breath, but he’s already imagining how awkward this is going to be. The guy barely talks. Denki isn't even sure he knows what his voice sounds like at this point, outside of sharp commands during training.

Fortunately, the objective today isn’t rescue or evacuation. Aizawa had clarified earlier that rescue logistics would come later in the month, when they’d be taking a field trip to a specialized simulation facility—the USJ. Right now, it's just about survival.

“When people think of heroes,” All Might begins, his voice ringing through the training hall with that unmistakable larger-than-life cadence, “the first thing that comes to mind is combat . Fighting villains. Charging into danger with fists flying and explosions going off in the background.”

He paces slowly across the front of the room, his arms folded in front of him, posture tall and commanding. His shadow stretches long in the harsh white lighting of the simulation prep space, lending him even more of that mythic presence he carries like a second skin. His sharp gaze scans the room, sweeping over the rows of students suited up in their hero uniforms, until it lands—pointedly—on Denki.

Denki startles, posture straightening a little too fast. He wasn’t zoning out, not exactly , but he definitely hadn’t been giving All Might his full attention either. Now, under that scrutinizing stare, he feels like he’s been caught mid-yawn on national television.

“All that flash,” All Might continues, eyes narrowing slightly at him before finally moving on, “all that spectacle you see on TV— that is the type of hero work that gets the most media attention.”

A few students shift uncomfortably. Others—like Bakugou—look wholly unbothered, perhaps even smug.

“But,” All Might says, his tone dropping a degree, becoming more serious, more measured, “what you don’t often see is what makes up the bulk of the profession.”

He stops in place now, turning to face them all directly, arms crossing in front of his broad chest. His cape flutters slightly in the breeze from the ventilation system.

“Serious villains—high-level threats that require full hero intervention—are actually rare . They exist, yes. And when they appear, they’re dangerous. But they are the exception , not the norm.”

Aizawa, standing silently off to the side, gives a slight nod of agreement, as if to emphasize the point.

“All of you are training hard,” All Might continues, “to prepare for those rare moments when the worst does happen. But if you only prepare for villain combat, you’ll be neglecting the situations that are far more likely to claim lives if mishandled.”

He begins to pace again, slower this time, more thoughtful.

“Natural disasters. Large-scale accidents. Floods. Fires. Collapsed buildings. Chemical spills. Search and rescue. These are the incidents that fill a pro’s calendar. And unlike fighting a villain, where the threat is obvious, in disaster response, you can become the threat if you act without precision and care.”

He stops again and holds up a single finger. “For instance—would you send Endeavor to put out a forest fire?”

A small ripple of laughter passes through the class, hesitant at first, then more confident. Even Bakugou’s mouth twitches faintly.

All Might smiles lightly too, before his tone turns firm once more. “No. You wouldn’t. Not because Endeavor isn’t strong, but because he’s the wrong kind of strong . If you apply the wrong solution to the wrong situation, you don’t save lives—you endanger them.”

The laughter fades, replaced by silence and a faint hum of understanding.

“That is why,” he says, voice echoing with conviction now, “as young heroes, you must become adaptable. Intelligent. Calm under pressure. You must learn not just how to fight, but when not to. How to observe. How to triage. How to assist without causing more damage.”

He lets that sit with them for a moment, his eyes drifting across the room again, this time softer—measuring, not chastising.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asks, clearly expecting more than polite agreement.

The class nods in near unison, murmurs of understanding rolling through the room.

“Good,” he says, his booming tone returning. “Then we’ll begin.”

He pulls a tablet from the side panel of the wall and quickly flicks through the student pairings. “Aoyama, Shoji—you’re first. Head to Ground Omega to get started.”

Aoyama salutes with unnecessary flair, nearly blinding several classmates with a sparkle from his belt. Shoji just nods, already moving toward the door.

“The rest of you,” All Might continues, “join me in the observation room. Watching your classmates— really watching them—will teach you more than any textbook. Pay attention to how they communicate. How they adapt. How they recover from missteps.”

As the class begins to shuffle out, Denki finds himself moving slowly, lingering near the back of the group. His eyes flick toward Todoroki, who’s already striding ahead with the same quiet purpose he always seems to carry, like the world can shift around him and he’ll never budge.

He and Todoroki are the last pair to go.

The knowledge settles heavy in Denki’s chest like a rock, a weight of inevitability that only grows as each minute ticks by. With every team that goes before them—Kirishima and Ojiro, Iida and Uraraka, Shinsou and Midoriya—his nerves ratchet tighter, until he’s practically vibrating where he stands at the edge of the observation room. His fingers twitch at his sides, crackling with tiny, involuntary sparks that he tries to shake off without drawing too much attention. The faint buzz of electricity hums in his fingertips like a quiet warning, and he bounces back and forth on the balls of his feet, trying to work off the edge.

God, he wishes they would just call their names already.

The anticipation is worse than the actual exercise. Or—it will be, he’s sure of it. Once they’re out there, it’ll be easier. Or at least more active. Right now, all he can do is wait and think , which is never a good combination for him under pressure.

He glances over at Todoroki.

The other boy stands utterly still, arms crossed loosely over his chest, back straight, expression unreadable. His hair—half stark white, half that deep, unnatural red—is lit from behind by the monitor screens, casting a halo of artificial light around his head. He doesn’t fidget. Doesn’t tap his foot. Doesn’t glance at Denki or the screen or the instructors. He might as well be a statue. One carved from ice.

Denki swallows.

They haven’t said a word to each other all class. Not that that’s unusual—Todoroki doesn’t talk unless he has something specific to say. Still, Denki has been tempted more than once to lean over and break the silence, to say something casual like, “Any idea what we’re in for?” or “You ready to crush this?” or even just “Hey.”

But he never does. And not just because Todoroki would probably blink at him like he’s just spoken in Morse code.

Honestly, there’s no point. All Might had been clear when class started: none of them would be briefed in advance on what scenario they were about to walk into. Each pair would step into a randomized disaster simulation, designed to test their instincts, adaptability, and teamwork under pressure. That meant there was nothing to plan. No game plan to formulate, no strategy to run. Just raw reaction.

So yeah. Talking to Todoroki beforehand would be useless. Besides it’s not like he’ll be contributing much anyway. He has no illusions about how this is going to go.

Todoroki is Todoroki. The guy’s a one-man natural disaster in his own right. Ice walls that shoot up like tidal waves. Freezing half the field before Denki can even finish charging his quirk. He’s not just efficient—he’s clinical . Precise. Cold, both literally and otherwise. And Denki’s watched enough of his training matches to know how this ends: with everyone else floundering behind him while he bulldozes through the assignment without breaking a sweat.

If Denki laid down and took a nap in the middle of their simulation, he’s genuinely not sure it would affect their score.

Still, even knowing that, even expecting to be little more than background noise in Todoroki’s performance, Denki can’t stop the jittery energy fizzing beneath his skin. His nerves are practically singing , overcharged and restless, like static under his skin. He blows out a breath, trying to slow his heartbeat. It doesn’t work.

The worst part is that Todoroki doesn’t even seem anxious. Doesn’t look like someone waiting to be dropped into a potentially deadly disaster scenario. His face is blank, not relaxed but neutral. Controlled. Like he’s already there, already inside the problem, calmly calculating how to tear it apart from the inside.

Denki can’t tell if it’s impressive or infuriating. Maybe both.

Finally, it’s their turn.

All Might glances over and gives a nod, and Denki’s heart gives a single, sharp jolt in his chest. He startles slightly—he’d almost convinced himself they might run out of time before their round came up. No such luck.

He and Todoroki exchange a brief look—more reflex than anything else, because they don’t say a word—and then they’re moving, stepping through the reinforced doors that lead out of the observation deck and into Ground Omega.

The transition is immediate and jarring. The moment they cross the threshold, Denki’s breath catches in his throat. The cold hits first.

It slams into him like a wall, sharp and sudden, and he stumbles a half-step forward before catching himself. It’s a deep, biting cold—not just a chill, but the kind that cuts straight through his clothes and sinks into his bones. He instinctively hunches his shoulders, trying to tuck his chin down against the wind as it howls around them.

Snow whips across the air in wild, chaotic flurries, fat flakes stinging his cheeks and eyelashes. The wind is relentless, slicing sideways and dragging the snow in every direction at once. It makes it hard to tell what’s coming from where, and even harder to see. Denki blinks rapidly, his vision full of white static, the world narrowed down to a swirling, frozen blur.

He can barely make out Todoroki’s silhouette next to him—just a dark outline in the storm, unmoving, somehow standing perfectly steady despite the way the wind is trying to push them both off balance.

Ground Omega has been completely transformed. Gone are the neat city blocks and artificial concrete sprawl they’d seen earlier when other teams went in. In their place, a full blizzard rages, complete with jagged snowdrifts and ice-slicked rooftops. He recognizes the bones of the layout, but it’s been buried under several feet of white, like an entire world has been swallowed up.

Denki has to squint just to make out the shapes of the surrounding buildings. Everything is coated in a thick layer of frost. He wraps his arms around himself briefly, trying to preserve warmth, and then immediately regrets it—the motion nearly knocks him off balance again. He shifts his stance wide, knees bent, fingers spread for balance as the snow crunches unevenly beneath his boots.

The wind is alive. It tugs at his jacket, pulls at his sleeves, and claws into the gap at his collar. Every exposed inch of skin stings. His teeth chatter almost immediately, and it takes everything he has not to shout over the sound of the storm.

It’s… it’s incredible. If he didn’t know this was just a simulation—if All Might hadn’t explained earlier that the weather systems in Ground Omega were programmed and controlled by the school’s tech support team—he’d believe it was real. That they’d been dropped in the middle of Hokkaido during a brutal winter storm. The illusion is that convincing.

He glances toward Todoroki again, eyes watering from the cold and snow. The other boy hasn’t moved. Not an inch. He stands with his back to the wind, cloak of frost already beginning to settle into his hair and lashes, face utterly blank. Denki can’t even tell if he feels it—if he’s cold at all. Maybe he’s immune. Maybe he likes it.

Denki, meanwhile, is already shaking.

“Holy shit,” he mutters under his breath, half to himself, voice mostly swallowed by the storm. “They weren’t kidding.”

There’s a buzz in his chest now, and not just from the cold. It’s adrenaline, raw and urgent. This is it. Their test. Their survival scenario.

Luckily, they don’t have to figure out how to stop the natural disaster itself. Honestly, Denki isn’t even sure how anyone would go about that in a situation like this—stopping a blizzard? It’s not like flipping a switch or shutting off a villain’s quirk. Nature is messy, relentless, and this simulation is designed to be unforgiving. Their objective is far simpler, but no less challenging: they have to locate their target.

The target, as it turns out, is a large, heavy-duty canvas sack—about the size of a small duffel bag. But there’s nothing subtle about it. The front of the sack is emblazoned with a ridiculously cartoonish drawing of All Might, his signature grin wide and toothy, one arm stretched out in an exaggerated thumbs-up. The image is almost comically out of place amid the swirling snow and biting wind, a bright splash of yellow and blue in an otherwise monochrome world.

Once they find it, they have to transport it to the checkpoint—located on the far side of the training grounds. Denki’s already thinking about how tough that will be. Between the swirling storm and the uneven terrain hidden beneath the snow, every step will be a battle against the elements. And the sack probably isn’t light either, which will only make things harder.

A sudden static crackles over the speakers suspended high above the training ground, momentarily breaking the white noise of the blizzard. Then All Might’s unmistakable voice booms out, deep and confident, ringing with that characteristic heroism.

“As you start your careers, not every scenario you find yourself in will be ideal!” His voice fills the air, carrying with surprising clarity despite the storm. “That’s why it’s important to be adaptable and able to achieve your goal no matter the terrain! Good luck, young heroes, your classmates and I will be watching you!”

With a final, enthusiastic note, his voice cuts out, leaving behind only the howl of the wind and the crackle of snowflakes hitting their gear.

Denki swallows hard, his excitement mixing uneasily with the creeping weight of isolation. And just like that, it’s only him and Todoroki—alone in the middle of a goddamn blizzard. Fantastic.

Todoroki moves through the blizzard with an unsettling ease. His usual icy aura seems untouched by the biting cold swirling around them—as if the storm’s chill is nothing more than a mild inconvenience to him. Denki, on the other hand, feels the sting of the freezing wind cut through his layers, tugging at his hair and chilling his bones. It’s a small comfort, then, to see that the gusts buffet them both, knocking them slightly off balance at the same moments. Despite Todoroki’s composed exterior, the storm shows no favoritism.

​​As they trudge forward, Denki’s mind races with questions he’s been asking all semester. The way Todoroki had declined to use his fire—it was like watching a painter deliberately avoid half his palette. It didn’t make sense. How could he leave such a crucial part of his quirk unused, especially in a situation like this where his ice alone might not be enough?

Finally, unable to keep the thought inside any longer, Denki breaks the tense silence with a teasing edge to his voice, hoping to cut through the cold and the quiet.

“So… your ice isn’t really gonna be much help here, is it?”

His words carry a lightness that barely masks the seriousness of the question. Is Todoroki planning to use his fire today? Will he finally let go of whatever was holding him back all these months?

For the first time since the start of the school year, Todoroki meets Denki’s eyes directly. The usual guarded expression builds, just a fraction, but it’s enough to catch Denki off guard.

“Yes, I’ll have to get by without it.”

The answer is blunt, almost resigned. No flourish, no explanation. Just those words—short and final.

Denki blinks, confusion knotting in his chest. Does that mean Todoroki plans to push through the challenge without using his fire either, or will Denki finally get to see it? Should he have asked more directly? Was this an invitation or a wall?

The wind howls louder around them, drowning out the moment as both boys turn their attention back to the blizzard ahead, the unspoken tension lingering like frost in the air.

They begin making their way toward the center of the training grounds, boots crunching into snow already half-packed from the storm’s onslaught. Visibility is poor—maybe only a few meters ahead—and every step forward feels like a small act of resistance against the wind. Denki squints into the flurry, trying to spot anything familiar through the swirling white, but the target might as well be in another country for how impossible it is to see.

The cold, which had been uncomfortable before, is now setting in with a sharper bite. The air claws at any inch of exposed skin, and Denki feels like the chill has seeped through his clothes and straight into his bones. His gloves, while insulated, are quickly growing damp at the fingertips, and his ears sting from the cold. Every time he breathes, it’s like swallowing glass—each inhale raw and stinging, each exhale vanishing into the storm in a puff of vapor.

Todoroki walks ahead slightly, his pace even, posture straight, shoulders square like he doesn’t even notice the cold. His breath fogs the air like Denki’s does, but he doesn’t seem to hunch or shiver. He doesn’t even tuck his chin. Denki knows it’s because of his quirk—half his body is literally built for this—but it still makes him feel like a complete weakling by comparison.

By the time they reach what must be the halfway point, Denki’s shivering has grown so intense that his teeth begin to chatter uncontrollably, the rhythmic clack of them barely audible over the wind. His hands have lost most of their feeling, his knees trembling slightly with each step. It’s not just discomfort anymore—it’s bordering on the miserable.

And that’s when Todoroki finally glances back.

His eyes linger on Denki a beat longer than usual, scanning him from head to toe, before his brow furrows faintly. His expression isn’t quite concerned—more like puzzled. As if the idea that someone could actually be suffering in this weather is news to him.

“Are you… cold?” Todoroki asks slowly, voice nearly lost to the wind. He blinks, and for the first time all day, looks genuinely confused. Like the thought hadn't even occurred to him until this moment.

Denki stares at him, lips blue and fingers twitching, and lets out a short, incredulous laugh that immediately gets stolen by the wind.

“No shit I’m cold,” he mutters, but there’s no heat behind it—his voice is shaky, too numb to sound annoyed. “We’re in the middle of a blizzard and I’m wearing a leather jacket. I’m not an air conditioner like you, man. I’ve been freezing my ass off since we got here.”

Todoroki’s gaze lingers on him for a moment longer. He doesn’t respond, not right away. There’s something unreadable in his expression—something caught between apology and uncertainty. As though he’s processing a piece of information he doesn’t quite know what to do with.

A flicker of something unreadable crosses Todoroki’s face—uncertainty, maybe, or guilt—before he moves. It’s not a dramatic gesture, not something Denki would’ve even noticed if they weren’t standing so close together. But Todoroki takes a small step closer, just enough to close the space between them, and then gently bumps his left shoulder against Denki’s. He doesn’t pull away. In fact, he keeps it there, their arms brushing with every trudging step through the snow.

Denki almost trips. His boots skid slightly on a patch of hidden ice beneath the snow, and he stumbles just enough to make it look stupid, catching himself with an awkward flap of his arms. He turns to look at Todoroki, startled, but the other boy doesn’t even glance at him. His face is neutral, focused straight ahead, as though nothing’s happened at all.

But something has .

The contact, small as it is, is surprisingly grounding. Warmth begins to radiate from Todoroki’s left arm, where it presses lightly against Denki’s side. It’s not scalding or even hot—it’s a soft, steady warmth, the kind you feel when standing in sunlight after being stuck in shade too long. Gentle, but unmistakably there. And real. It takes Denki a second to realize what Todoroki’s doing. 

Ever since he skipped out on that one training day a few weeks back—the one where Aizawa had led him away before warm-ups even started—Todoroki’s costume had changed. It was still a fashion disaster of a white jumpsuit, but the thick shell of ice that used to sheath his entire left side had disappeared. Kirishima had noticed immediately (of course he had, he was basically the president of the ‘Make Todoroki Smile’ club), and had asked him about it in that loud, friendly way he always did.

Todoroki hadn’t answered. Just tightened his jaw and looked away. He hadn’t looked happy about the change. That much was obvious.

And now— now , with that same side pressed against him—Denki realizes the warmth isn’t some quirk of body heat or coincidence. Todoroki’s using his fire. On purpose. For him .

Denki presses in just slightly, shifting so more of his side aligns with Todoroki’s, curious if he’s imagining it. But the heat increases, as if in silent response. He can feel it soaking through the chill in his jacket, soothing the sting that had long since settled into his fingers and spine. His hands don’t hurt quite as much anymore. His breath stops puffing so sharply. It feels like curling up next to a radiator in winter—quietly lifesaving.

He doesn't say anything. He can’t.

Partly because the wind is still too loud, still biting around the edges of them, and partly because he doesn’t want to break it. This strange, quiet truce. A gesture of… what? Not friendship, exactly. But something like it. Something quiet and reluctant and deeply personal.

After that quiet shift between them, the rest of the exercise goes… surprisingly smoothly.

With Todoroki acting as a walking space heater at his side, the cold becomes far more tolerable—still biting around the edges, sure, but not the all-consuming ache it had been before. And with the two of them pressed shoulder-to-shoulder as they trek through the whiteout, braced together against the shrieking gusts of wind, it becomes easier to move forward in rhythm, to lean into the storm without getting knocked over. They’re steadier together, like a two-person tent in a hurricane—awkward, but functional.

There’s even something oddly natural about the way they fall into step, a quiet synchronicity that surprises Denki the longer it lasts.

At one point, just as they’re climbing over a fallen tree limb frozen stiff with ice, Todoroki’s foot slips out from under him on the packed snow. He stumbles without warning, a sharp, awkward lurch sideways—Denki catches him automatically, throwing an arm out and grabbing hold of his bicep before he can fall completely.

But then his brain catches up with what his hands are feeling. He almost drops him out of sheer reflex.

Because underneath Todoroki’s uniform—thick as it is—Denki’s fingers can nearly meet around his arm. There’s barely anything there. Not fat, not muscle, just a startling thinness, fragile in a way that makes Denki’s stomach flip a little. Like grabbing onto a stack of bird bones wrapped in fabric. He hadn’t expected that. Not from someone who fights the way Todoroki does.

As they get moving again, Denki lets his hand linger for just a second longer than he means to, steadying Todoroki as they trudge forward. He can feel every bump of ribcage beneath the suit where their sides connect. Like a xylophone. Hollow-sounding and sharp-edged in his imagination, like maybe if he knocked his knuckles there it would echo.

The shoulder bone is the same—jutting and hard, knocking against Denki’s collar with each step until it makes him flinch a little. He’s not sure why it unnerves him. Maybe because it doesn't fit the image he's had of Todoroki until now: the powerhouse, the ice prince, the stoic, flawless combatant who always looked like he had everything under control.

Still, Denki doesn’t pull away. If anything, he adjusts his stride so they stay in contact, even as his mind runs the math behind Todoroki’s weirdly light weight and what it might mean. The guy clearly didn’t stumble from fatigue—he was back upright in a heartbeat, no sign of breathlessness. But something about the moment sticks with Denki anyway, a lingering discomfort that settles in the back of his mind like a flickering bulb.

Still… it’s not bad , exactly. Not compared to how miserable he was at the start of the exercise. His fingertips have regained feeling. His jacket doesn’t feel frozen stiff anymore. And it’s easier, somehow, to keep pushing forward like this, flanked by steady heat and quiet determination. They don’t talk again, but the silence isn’t cold now. It’s something else.

When they finally reach the checkpoint—just a battered metal post sticking up through the snow with a blinking light on top to signal their success—it takes a moment for Denki to register that they’re actually done.

Done.They’ve made it.

As soon as they step across the invisible line that designates the boundary of Ground Omega, the blizzard simulation abruptly cuts out. One second, they’re being hammered by wind and ice; the next, it’s like someone hit the mute button on the world. The air goes still. The snow vanishes mid-fall. The sky lightens overhead in a sudden artificial shift, leaving only silence and the faint sound of their boots crunching across frosted ground as they slow to a stop.

Denki instinctively peels himself away from Todoroki’s side. He hadn’t even realized how closely they’d been walking until now. The loss of heat is immediate and sharp, and the cold that had crept into his bones starts to reassert itself in the space left behind. He shivers once, hard, as if his body is suddenly remembering how to be cold again.

Todoroki doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he does—Denki’s not sure. The other boy pauses just a few feet ahead of him, halfway turned, and gives Denki a look that’s hard to place. Not hostile. Not friendly. Just… unreadable. His mismatched eyes flicker across Denki’s face, catching briefly at his shoulder, then drop away like they weren’t really looking at all.

And then, without a word, Todoroki turns on his heel and heads off toward the changing rooms.

Gone. Just like that.

Denki watches him disappear around the corner, wondering for a split second if he imagined the whole thing. The body heat. The stumble. The awkward sort-of teamwork. But his jacket still carries the faint warmth of Todoroki’s quirk, and his side is still buzzing with residual heat, and his fingers still tingle faintly from gripping bone through a jumpsuit.

So yeah. It definitely happened.

Still, before he can really wrap his head around what any of it meant, he’s ambushed.

“Kaminari!” Kirishima barrels into him like a freight train, knocking the air from his lungs with a full-body hug and nearly taking them both to the ground. “Dude! That was so badass!”

Behind him, Sero and Mina are whooping, arms raised, Jirou grinning behind a half-hearted eye-roll. Even Bakugou, leaned back against the far wall with his arms crossed, gives a short, disbelieving snort that could maybe be interpreted as reluctant approval.

Denki blinks at them, wind-chapped and foggy-headed, still half-cold and barely able to process the sudden volume.

“You totally won that!” Sero says, clapping him on the back. “Todoroki didn’t even freeze you solid. That’s a victory in itself.”

“Seriously,” Mina adds, eyes wide. “I thought you were gonna turn into a Kaminari popsicle out there.”

Denki laughs, a little dazed. “Yeah, well. I, uh… mostly just stuck close to Todoroki and hoped for the best.”

Which, if he’s honest, is exactly what happened. Other than making sure Todoroki didn’t get blown away like a paper cutout, Denki hadn’t really contributed much. Not in the traditional sense. If he’d gone out there alone, he probably would’ve frozen to death in the first five minutes.

Still, there’s a strange kind of pride curling in his chest, however undeserved. Or maybe it’s not pride—maybe it’s just adrenaline, still wearing off. Or relief. 

Or maybe it’s bafflement. Because the one thing he is sure of—more than the cold, more than the awkward silence, more than the echo of Todoroki’s stare—is this:

Shouto Todoroki might be the weirdest person he’s ever met.

Chapter Text

 If there is one thing Shouto Todoroki knows for certain, it's that being alone is easier.

Quieter. Simpler. Predictable, even. There’s no need to decipher people’s intentions, no risk of saying the wrong thing or reacting improperly, no opportunity for anyone to touch something inside him he’s worked too hard to keep closed off. Alone, there’s control. Space to breathe. Room to think. Or to not think, when that’s the only thing keeping him from unraveling.

It wasn’t always like this.

When he was small—really small, in the soft, vague way early memories sometimes are—he remembers being curious about people. He remembers laughing. His siblings’ voices. The feel of his mother’s hand on his head, carding gently through his hair. The warm scent of miso in the kitchen. The tiny, bright world of childhood that hadn’t yet been poisoned.

He doesn’t remember when it stopped feeling that way. Not exactly.

But if he had to put a pin in it—if he had to name the moment something shifted, cracked open, and started bleeding out—it would be the day his mother disappeared from his life. When she was taken away. Or left. Or both. 

He doesn’t know which version hurts more.

It makes sense. That would’ve been the beginning of the end. The sharp edge of loneliness slid in then and never quite left, like a splinter under the skin. Everything changed after that. The house grew colder, quieter in a way that wasn't peaceful. His siblings became shadows on the edges of his awareness—figures ducking away behind walls, too afraid to speak, or too exhausted to try.

And his father—well. His father filled the silence. Not with comfort. Not with guidance. With demands. Drills. Timetables. Pain. With the unbearable pressure of perfection, pressed into every second of every day until the very concept of being known— truly known—started to feel like a threat.

So he stopped trying. Stopped wanting. Stopped needing anyone but himself. Being alone is easier. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t leave. Solitude feels like gravity—constant, grounding, inevitable. People complicate things. They ask questions. They make assumptions. They stare at him like they know who he is when they don’t. Not even close.

Up until that day— the day, the one that split his life into before and after —Shouto had prided himself on his control.

Even as a child, his aim was sharp. Precise. He could summon ice fast enough to trap toy soldiers in mid-battle, or extinguish a candle’s flame with a focused flick of cold air. His fire, though he used it sparingly, was always steady when it came. He understood the boundaries of his abilities the way most children understood playtime or snack schedules—intuitively, as a constant of his world. It came naturally to him. Too naturally, according to his mother.

“You shouldn’t be this good at your age,” she used to say, her voice low with worry, not pride. “You should be playing. Falling down and getting back up, not…” Her words would always trail off as she looked toward the training mats or the scorch marks on the ground. She never finished those sentences.

She didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. It wasn’t that he liked the training. It wasn’t fun, or fulfilling, or even satisfying. It was just necessary. The expectation was sewn into the marrow of his bones— this is why you were born. The sooner he excelled, the sooner it might all stop. Or change. Or at the very least, quiet.

And so he trained. He made it make sense. He gave the chaos in his home structure, turned the bruises and barking into rhythm. He perfected the routines. Made himself sharp enough not to be corrected.

But after she left—after she broke apart in front of him and disappeared behind white walls and silence—something in him shifted. Or cracked. Or maybe just slipped.

Suddenly, his quirk refused to reach the marks he’d always hit. He’d conjure it too slowly, or too fast, blazing through the air in a jagged, uncontrolled mess. Sometimes, it would bloom out of him like a reflex instead of a decision—panicked and unpredictable. It lashed wildly from his skin with no warning, singing more than it illuminated.

His aim was off. His control was off. Everything was off. It was infuriating. Embarrassing. And deeply, bitterly frightening.

He hated the feeling of it—fumbling, uncertain. It reminded him of before, of when he was four and barely knew what to do with his hands, let alone the power crawling under his skin. Before his father molded every second of his waking life into drills, before he understood that failure meant punishment. Before he was “the masterpiece.”

At first, his father was angry—but not surprised. He stood in the training room with his arms crossed, the artificial light catching the edge of his jaw in a way that made his expression look carved from stone. Still, he managed to keep his temper on a leash, at least in the beginning. He chalked up the sloppiness to temporary setbacks. “Your depth perception is off because of the bandages,” he said brusquely, as if the explanation itself were beneath him. “You’ll recalibrate once your vision returns. It’s just muscle memory.”

He said it like it was inevitable. Like recovery was a foregone conclusion. 

But it wasn’t.

Even after the bandages came off—weeks later, skin tender and pink around the ruined edge of his eye—his sight didn’t come back. The left side of the world stayed blurry, distorted. Shadows crept into the corner of his vision and never left. He didn’t have the words to explain what it felt like, only that something was missing. Something essential. When he finally tried to tell his father—quietly, uncertainly—that he couldn’t see, not really, not clearly, he remembered the way his father’s expression changed. Like a switch had been thrown.

The silence that followed wasn’t concern. It wasn’t even anger. It was cold, hollowing disappointment—tight-lipped and trembling with restraint. His father’s hands had curled into fists at his sides, knuckles pale, voice dropping into that flat tone that made Shouto’s stomach twist even before the first word left his mouth.

“Do you think excuses will make you stronger?” he said.

Shouto didn’t answer. He never did, not when his father got like that.

Afterward, he decided it was better not to bring it up again. To anyone. Not to the doctors who visited the estate, not to the trainers his father cycled through like cheap equipment, and not to his siblings, who had already learned the hard way that drawing attention to themselves led nowhere good.

Instead, he adapted.

He began to tilt his head slightly when he walked, subtly favoring his right side. He narrowed his focus to the areas he could see clearly, and ignored the flickering blur that hovered just out of reach on his left. He learned to anticipate the angles of his opponent’s movements, trained his muscle memory to overcompensate without thinking. 

He should have been able to adjust. He knew that. He’d trained himself past pain, past exhaustion, past the limits most kids his age hadn’t even begun to touch. This—this should have been nothing. Just a new variable. One he could calculate. Adapt around. Compensate for.

He told himself that over and over again, like a mantra, like a command. Fix your aim. Fix your quirk. Fix yourself.

But it never felt the same.

With his ice, it was easier. Not effortless—never that—but manageable. The angles and distances had to be recalibrated, sure, but ice was instinct. He understood it on a visceral level. It obeyed him with a kind of quiet immediacy. It didn’t lash out. It didn’t recoil. He could shape it with a glance, and it rarely betrayed him. Even with his narrowed field of vision, even with half the world missing, he could still hit his mark most of the time. Not as well as he used to—never as well—but well enough that no one else would notice.

He told himself that was good enough. But the fire was different. With the fire, none of that seemed to matter.

It didn’t care about strategy or control. It didn’t respond to precision. Fire wanted. It demanded space, air, heat, movement. It surged forward in whatever direction it pleased, and he couldn’t seem to direct it without something going wrong. His aim was irrelevant—he could stare straight at a target, calculate the distance, even mimic the exact motion from successful past training sessions—and the result would still be wrong. Off. Too wide. Too much. A wave when he needed a pinpoint. A flare when he needed a spark.

And sometimes—worse than all the rest—it just didn’t come at all.

He would call for it, try to reach that part of himself the way he used to, digging deep into the core of his chest where the heat lived. But instead of flaring up, it sputtered. Or disappeared entirely. Cold, not from the ice, but from the absence of fire. Like something inside him had gone hollow. Like the part of him that had once been flame had curled in on itself, resentful and unreachable.

Those were the worst moments. Not the ones where it misfired or came out wild, but the ones where it refused him altogether—silent and inert, like it knew he didn’t want it anymore.

Lately, this seemed to happen most frequently when his father was around. It didn’t matter if things had been going well a moment before—if he’d managed to coax out the smallest flicker of flame, if he’d felt the heat build up in his chest in that familiar way, if his control had felt steady, almost normal. The second he heard the telltale creak of the door, the sound of footsteps crossing the threshold, everything changed. Like a switch was flipped inside him. The fire shrank back instantly, retreating into whatever cavern it lived in, vanishing so completely that it left him hollow. Cold. Not from lack of heat, but from absence. Like a part of himself had fled at the first sign of danger.

He hated how consistent it had become. How the mere presence of his father was enough to undo him. To turn every nerve raw. To fracture every attempt at control. It was like trying to strike a match in a storm—impossible under his gaze, under the weight of those narrowed eyes, the simmering impatience barely contained behind his teeth.

And every time it happened—every time the flame failed, every time his hand dropped back to his side with nothing but a faint curl of smoke or an awkward silence—his father gave the same response.

A sharp exhale. Just a single breath through his nose, too quick and too sharp not to be deliberate. A jaw clenched tight enough to strain the muscle just beneath his cheekbone, like the sight of his son failing was something he physically had to grind his teeth against.

And then—always—the sigh. That sigh. Measured. Controlled. Weaponized. A single exhalation of breath, perfectly calibrated to express everything Endeavor didn’t bother to say aloud: This is disappointing. You are disappointing. I expected more. I built you for more.

That sound cut deeper than anything else. It didn’t yell. It didn’t scold. It dismissed.

And maybe that was the worst part—how easily that sound could make him feel small. Worthless. Like he was nothing more than a ruined prototype. A failed experiment. Not even worth raising his voice over anymore.

Shouto could take anger. He could take shouting. He could take bruises and burns and barked commands. But that sigh… that silence wrapped in disappointment… it stuck to his ribs like ice and refused to melt.

The man continued his relentless training regimen day after day, never relenting, never allowing for rest or mercy. Mornings bled into evenings, and evenings folded into restless nights, all punctuated by the harsh rhythm of drills and exercises designed to sharpen Shouto’s ice and force him to confront the fire he so stubbornly resisted. With icy precision, his father drilled him on control, endurance, and power, the expectation always clear: mastery of both halves of his quirk was non-negotiable.

Sometimes, the training took a brutal turn. His father would unleash torrents of flame so fierce, so scorching, that Shouto’s ice—his natural refuge—was rendered useless. The cold barrier would shatter and melt away in the blaze’s searing heat, evaporating before his very eyes, leaving him exposed and vulnerable. The air would shimmer with heat waves, the acrid smell of burnt ozone thick in his nostrils, and the sting of smoke would claw at his throat.

The only way to survive these infernos was to summon his own fire—an agonizing demand. To produce flames hot enough to rival his father’s, to fight fire with fire, to redirect the deadly blast instead of trying to freeze it solid. But coaxing his fire out was a battle in itself. It was as if every ember resisted him, fighting to stay buried beneath the surface, reluctant to obey his commands.

Needless to say, he got burned a lot.

Flames licked at his skin, leaving angry red marks that blossomed into painful scars. Each scorch was a reminder of his failures, a cruel lesson etched into his flesh. Yet the burns weren’t the worst wounds. The relentless pressure, the unyielding expectations, and the silent judgment in his father’s eyes weighed heavier than any pain.

But still, he endured. Because backing down wasn’t an option. Because this was the only path laid out before him.

But now… well, Shouto could only assume that his father had finally grown tired—tired of the brokenness he saw in him, tired of the quirk that refused to cooperate fully, tired of the constant reminders of failure. It had all culminated in a brusque, dismissive conversation less than a month before classes were set to begin. Without ceremony or warning, Endeavor had shoved him off onto UA, handing over the responsibility like a burden too heavy to carry any longer.

“UA will handle you,” his father had said, voice cold and clipped, as if discarding a piece of trash rather than speaking to his own son. There was no explanation, no encouragement, no trace of the relentless fire that once drove his training sessions—just a weary resignation that felt like a final verdict.

​​Shouto had never attended a real school before. His entire childhood had been a series of grueling lessons and exercises within the confines of his home, his every waking moment measured by drills and expectations. The idea of classrooms, hallways filled with other kids, lunchtime chatter—none of it felt familiar. Yet, it didn’t matter. He didn’t have any expectations. There was no excitement or dread waiting to bloom inside him.

Truthfully, he didn’t feel much of anything anymore.

The numbness had settled deep in his chest, like a cold, hard stone weighing down every thought. Emotion had been a luxury he could no longer afford—too dangerous, too unpredictable. Even fear seemed like a distant memory, a flicker extinguished long ago by years of pressure, disappointment, and isolation.

At least… until he actually started to attend.

He hadn’t known what to expect, not really. UA had always existed in his mind as a distant concept—prestigious, difficult to get into, an institution for the elite. A goal for those of lesser backgrounds than him. But now that he was inside it, living it, the reality was far more jarring than he’d anticipated. 

He still wasn’t sure how he felt about being a student there. The sensation was difficult to name—unease, maybe, or something heavier. It churned in his gut like a stormcloud, low and threatening. A dull, unfamiliar weight that settled in the base of his stomach and refused to leave. ​​He hadn’t felt something like that in years. Not since he was a child. Not since before everything had gone cold.

On one hand, there was relief. A small part of him—distant, quiet, and far too timid—recognized that this was a kind of freedom. A reprieve from the oppressive stillness of the estate, from the silence that filled every hallway, broken only by his father’s clipped commands and the echo of his own footsteps. At UA, he was away from that. Away from the weight of his expectations, even if only temporarily. For the first time in his life, he could go someplace on his own. Be around people his age. Sit in a room and maybe not immediately be expected to perform.

And yet, even that wasn’t entirely true.

He wasn’t alone. Not really. Every morning, the family driver still pulled up to the curb in a sleek black car that seemed to scream look at me in the middle of UA’s more casual drop-off chaos. The man didn’t speak, but he didn’t need to. Shouto could feel his eyes on him the entire time—as if waiting for him to turn back, to falter, to fail. Those eyes followed him until he disappeared inside the building, as though he might make a break for it otherwise. As though he could.

Still, there was a sliver of something in the air as he walked away from the car each day, something that tasted almost like freedom. Not the kind that came with fanfare or dramatic declarations, but something smaller, more private. The brush of wind against his uncovered face. The low murmur of other students greeting their friends. The sharp scent of freshly mowed grass that clung to the field outside the main entrance. All of it was foreign to him. All of it was... his , in a way that nothing in that sterile house had ever been.

He wasn’t sure what to do with it. He didn’t know how to belong in a place like this. 

And his classmates are… weird. And overwhelming.

They’re nothing like the characters in his books—the clean, predictable archetypes who say what they mean and do what they’re supposed to, whose actions make sense when viewed through the lens of structure and narrative logic. Those characters had roles. They had purpose. His classmates, on the other hand, are loud and contradictory and impossible to pin down. They change tone mid-sentence. They talk over each other. They laugh at things that don’t seem remotely funny, and they don’t seem to realize when they’re making fun of each other or when they’re offering something that sounds dangerously like kindness. 

It’s chaos.

He realizes quickly just how foolish it was to think real people would act like the ones he’d read about. His books had made social interaction seem simple—complicated in theory, maybe, but ultimately solvable. People wanted things, and once you knew what they wanted, you could figure out how to navigate around them, or through them. But these people… his classmates… they don’t make sense.

They’re unpredictable. Wild, even. One moment Bakugou is screaming at someone for breathing too loud, the next he’s stalking away in silence, refusing to speak. Midoriya trips over his words like he’s never had a coherent thought in his life, but then he’ll say something alarmingly perceptive that cuts straight to the bone. Kirishima somehow talks like he’s known everyone for years—even him, when they’ve barely exchanged a full sentence.

It puts him on edge. Deeply. Constantly. Because if he can’t anticipate people, he can’t prepare for them. And if he can’t prepare, he can’t protect himself.

Some things happen exactly the way he expected—comments about his father, whispered or overt, always present. Questions about his quirk. About the scar. About his training. About what he’s “like.” Those, at least, he saw coming. He’d braced himself for them in the car every morning, his jaw tight and his fingers flexing against the fabric of his uniform as the driver pulled to a stop in front of the school.

But then there are the things he didn’t anticipate. He doesn’t know what to do in those moments. Doesn’t know how to respond. His instinct is always the same: shut down. Go silent. Say the bare minimum. Avoid eye contact. But that only seems to confuse people more.

He always ends up floundering, unsure if he’s said the wrong thing or not enough, unsure if his silence is being taken for arrogance or if it makes him look like prey. He can’t tell. He’s never been good at reading people—not in the way his father expected him to be. His siblings could do it, to a degree. His mother, too. But Shouto… he was trained to react, not to relate. That part of his brain feels underdeveloped, like a muscle he never learned how to move.

And no matter how hard he tries, he never seems to get it right.

When Bakugou called him a toothpick in the locker rooms, he was mostly just… confused.

He’d been standing in front of his locker trying to ignore the noise bouncing around the tiled walls—laughter, banter, the shriek of sneaker soles, the hiss of showers running full blast. The word didn’t even register at first. Toothpick. He’d had to replay it in his head once or twice before realizing it had been directed at him.

The experience itself hadn’t been enjoyable, but not for the reason people might assume. He hadn’t felt offended, not exactly. Insulted, maybe, in the same way you might feel insulted by an equation that didn’t add up. It didn’t sting so much as it baffled him.

Every head in the room had turned—some laughing, some curious, some clearly trying not to look like they were looking. That many eyes on him at once made his skin crawl. He wanted to fold in on himself. To disappear into the floor, or back into his uniform, or into some hidden space between lockers where he couldn’t be seen.

He’d dressed quickly after that, covering his torso on instinct, trying not to react. But his thoughts were spiraling.

Yes, he was thin. That wasn’t new information. He knew what he looked like. His reflection didn’t surprise him anymore. His ribs were visible beneath his skin. His collarbones stuck out. His arms sleek. But… wasn’t that normal? Wasn’t he supposed to look like that?

They were hero students, after all. Training to be elite professionals. They ran drills every day, followed personalized nutrition plans, endured grueling exercises in every type of terrain and climate. Everything about their lives was engineered for optimization—speed, power, reflex, stamina. He had always assumed that meant staying lean. Keeping your body light. Controlling every variable that might slow you down. Fatigue. Bloat. Bulk that didn’t serve a purpose.

So… what was the problem? Was this another thing he was getting wrong?

He remembered glancing down at his own body then, as if seeing it from the outside. The faint shadows between his ribs. The skin looked even sharper in the fluorescent locker room lights. Unnatural. 

He didn’t know how others were supposed to look, not exactly—he hadn’t grown up in locker rooms. He hadn’t had teammates, classmates, benchmarks. But… he had never thought of his own appearance as being wrong, somehow. 

He hadn’t known what to say, so instead he just stared. Kept his eyes straight ahead, trying not to flinch as Bakugou shifted from across the room, muttering something else under his breath that Shouto didn’t quite catch. He hadn’t retaliated. Hadn’t said anything at all. Just kept his head down and finished changing. He was used to barbs. Used to noise. Used to silence. He could survive both.

But that word— toothpick —stuck in his head all the way through class. Not because it hurt. Not even because it felt cruel. But because, now, he had another thing to question. Another thing to call abnormal .

His father had never commented on his body—only on his performance. If he failed, he was lazy. If he succeeded, he was still behind. If he was hurt, he needed to toughen up. And diet was part of that. So he followed his plan. Ate his chicken. He didn’t skip meals. Not on purpose. He didn’t think he had, anyway. He was efficient. He was disciplined.

A good hero kept a good diet.

That’s what his father always said—drilled into him from the time he could hold chopsticks. Protein at every meal. Carbs timed around training. Never eat to fullness, only to fuel. Sugar dulled the senses. Salt thickened the blood. Water, water, water. No more than eight hours of sleep, no less than six. And never skip your morning routine, even on days you could barely stand.

Shouto had memorized it all early. Not because he wanted to. But because deviating from it meant consequences—corrections. “Discipline,” as his father called it.

And thus far, well… his father hadn’t seemed to be wrong about anything else.

Shouto was strong. Stronger than his classmates. Sharper. More precise. He didn’t need to showboat like Bakugou or scramble like Midoriya or throw himself around recklessly like Kaminari or Kirishima. His control, his awareness, the sheer efficiency of his movements—none of it had come from luck or talent. It had been carved into him.

By pain. By pressure. By repetition. By him.

His father always said he hurt Shouto to make him strong. And here he was. Strong. Easily the most skilled of the class, without contest.

So yes. Obviously, his father could be right sometimes .

The thought settled like a stone in his chest, heavy and unwelcome, but impossible to shake. It was strange—he knew he didn’t like the man. Hated him, even, on some days. Most days. But lately… lately, he was starting to miss him more than he felt comfortable admitting to himself.

He hated the house. Hated the long halls and the way every door clicked behind him, like a lock. Hated the training room and the smell of scorched mats. Hated the silence. But here at U.A., things were loud in a way he hadn’t expected. People laughed at things he didn’t understand. Asked questions he didn’t know how to answer. Touched him without warning, joked with him without knowing if he was listening. He wasn’t used to any of it.

At least his father had been predictable. You knew what would happen if you failed. If you showed weakness. If your performance dipped even slightly below expectation. There was something brutally simple in that. Something he could prepare for.

Aizawa kind of reminds Shouto of him, actually. Not in the obvious ways. Not in the voice, or the posture, or the expression—though Aizawa’s perpetual tiredness does sometimes echo that same detached, quiet menace Shouto grew up learning to read in the creases of his father's face.

No. It’s in the presence. That looming sense of evaluation. The weight of someone always watching, always judging, always waiting for something you haven’t yet given.

Aizawa doesn’t yell. Doesn’t scold, not loudly. But that somehow makes it worse. The man’s silences are sharp. Shouto knows exactly what it feels like to be cut to ribbons by someone who doesn’t need to raise their voice to hurt you.

He knows what it's like to chase approval you'll never earn.

So yes—Aizawa reminds him of his father. Not because he’s cruel. But because he’s… measured. Impossible to read. Cold in ways that sometimes look like control. And in a twisted way, it’s comfortingly familiar. That makes Shouto uneasy. It makes him distrust himself.

It also makes him shy away from the man whenever he can. He does it subtly, or at least he tries. Takes slightly longer to enter the classroom if Aizawa’s already seated. Picks spots in training that are just far enough to avoid direct eye contact. Keeps his answers brief when called on. Avoids lingering after class.

But the worst part is the loop it creates—because avoiding Aizawa tends to push him toward his classmates. They’re always there, loud and unpredictable and too much, offering him things he doesn’t know how to ask for: attention, warmth, belonging. It’s overwhelming, but it’s also magnetic, like standing near a fire you’ve spent your whole life afraid of and realizing—just for a second—that you might be getting burned.

Still, the moment he gets too close to them, too flustered or too exposed, he recoils. He fumbles a reply, turns too stiff, moves too fast to get away—and suddenly, like clockwork, he’s back in Aizawa’s line of sight again. Cool. Level. Watching. Not judging, not exactly… but aware.

It’s an exhausting dance, caught between two kinds of discomfort—one sharp and clinical, the other warm and smothering.

And Shouto wonders, not for the first time, why he cares at all.

His bedroom is on the second floor—quiet, cold, and always a little too clean. So is his father’s. It's just the two of them up there, occupying opposite ends of a long hallway that feels more like a corridor in some sterile hospital wing than part of a family home.

There’s something symbolic about that, Shouto thinks. The second floor is for the living ghosts—the ones still walking around, still speaking in clipped, necessary sentences, still pretending. His father’s footsteps are a constant presence, slow and deliberate, even when he’s not there. Shouto hears them in his sleep. In the walls. In the creak of wood beneath his own feet when he moves too loudly. The whole upper floor feels like a pressure chamber, tightly sealed, full of unspoken expectations and silent judgment.

Below them, the rest of the house breathes a little easier. Natsuo and Fuyumi’s rooms are on the first floor, where the windows open wider, and the sun reaches more easily across the hardwood. He sometimes hears their muffled conversations through the floorboards when the house is quiet—laughter, frustration, music, television. Life.

Even Touya has a room down there. Still. Untouched.

It’s always locked, but the key is still in the drawer by the front door, where their mother used to keep it. Shouto has known exactly where it is for years. Still, he has never once considered using it. That door might as well be made of steel. Sacred. Final. A memorial to everything they lost—and everything he helped destroy.

No one goes inside. Not even Fuyumi, who scrubs every other surface of the house as if trying to erase the past with Windex and elbow grease. Not even Natsuo, who barely comes home unless Fuyumi begs.

Shouto doesn’t blame them. There’s something hallowed about that room now. Something that demands distance. Even walking past it feels wrong. He avoids it when he can, cutting through the kitchen or slipping out the back door if he’s going downstairs. He’s mastered the art of ignoring it—but that doesn’t mean he forgets.

Because the truth—the ugly, unbearable truth—is that of everyone left in this fractured family, he has the least right to step foot in that room.

Touya died because of him.

Not directly, of course. No one’s ever said it out loud. Not even his father. But Shouto knows the story. He knows what he represents— who he was born to replace. His birth wasn’t a miracle. It was a strategy. A culmination. The final blow to a boy already unraveling. The moment his mother held him for the first time, Touya’s fate had already been sealed.

Touya burned, and Shouto thrived. That was the plan.

And maybe that’s why he can’t bring himself to touch the door. Because even now, all these years later, some small, selfish part of him is afraid of what he might find on the other side. Not clothes or photos or old notebooks—but judgment. Not from Touya, but from himself.

Either way, he finds himself yearning for a room downstairs. A different floor. A different life. Somewhere farther from him.

He knows it's a foolish thought. A selfish one. His siblings don’t want him down there. Not really. Fuyumi tries, in the way that people try to fix something already shattered beyond recognition—gently, but without hope. Natsuo barely even pretends. He never raises his voice, never says anything cruel, but Shouto doesn’t need him to. The way Natsuo stiffens when he enters a room, the way his eyes slide past him like he’s not even there, is somehow worse. Colder.

And Touya… well, Touya’s not there to want anything anymore.

Shouto tells himself they’re better off this way. That keeping his distance is the only kindness he can still offer. That he doesn’t deserve to be close. He tells himself that often—but it doesn’t quiet the ache in his chest when he hears Fuyumi laughing in the kitchen, or the faint sound of a TV show filtering up through the floorboards while he lies awake, staring at the ceiling.

His room—small, tidy, suffocating—feels more like a prison than a haven. The second floor is silent at night, save for the occasional creak of wood or the ghostly hum of a vent. The air feels heavy here. The kind of quiet that presses against your skin like wet fabric. It never breathes. Never releases.

There’s no lock on his bedroom door. There never has been. That, more than anything else, makes it hard to sleep.

Shouto has learned to listen. To strain for the sound of footsteps on carpet, of the door handle shifting, of the faintest disturbance that might mean he’s no longer alone. He lies awake, night after night, holding himself perfectly still under the covers, body tense and alert, heart thudding quietly against the hollow of his throat. Because at any moment, the door could open.

The man could walk in. Unannounced. Unapologetic. He could drag him from bed for a midnight training session. Or worse—find some misstep from the day to tear into. A failed exercise. A missed opportunity. A lack of focus. A single second where Shouto hesitated too long. Sometimes there isn’t even a reason. Just that heavy silence between them, broken by a command or a correction—his father's voice sharp as a whip crack in the dark.

He’s too old now to cry about it. He doesn’t. But sometimes he digs his nails into the underside of his mattress just to keep himself grounded. To remind himself that he’s awake, and that this is real, and that he’s still here. Still in this house. Still across the hall from the man who made him. And still waiting for a door to open. 

Some nights, he thinks it might be easier if it did open. At least then, the waiting would stop.

His siblings never come to the second floor. That’s an unspoken rule, like so many others in the Todoroki household. No one says it aloud—there’s no sign nailed to the stairs or anything like that—but it’s understood. That part of the house belongs to him and to their father, and nobody else wants any part of it.

Truthfully, Shouto rarely ever sees them at all. They drift through the house like ghosts, or maybe it’s him who’s the ghost—he isn’t sure anymore. The only real proof he has that they’re still living there, still going about their lives, is the occasional muffled voice through the floorboards or the sound of the front door opening and closing at uneven intervals.

But when he was younger—before he learned to stop hoping—they were his favorite thing to watch.

Sometimes, if he angled the curtains just right, he could see them through the windows. The view from his bedroom was limited, but it opened onto a sliver of the backyard, and in the spring and early summer, that space came alive. The grass would overgrow just a little before the gardener came to trim it. Birds gathered along the fence line. The old oak tree would spread its branches wide, casting dappled shadows across the lawn in soft, swaying patterns.

Fuyumi was his favorite to watch.

She had a habit of going outside whenever the weather allowed—always around the same time, late afternoon, once the sun had begun to dip low enough to make the heat bearable. She would take a book—sometimes two—and a blanket, and settle herself under the broadest branch of the oak. Her back always perfectly straight, her face tilted down just so, like she'd been born knowing how to hold serenity in her hands.

She didn’t fidget. She didn’t rush. She simply sat, turning pages with the kind of reverence people usually saved for prayer. Sometimes she would smile at the words. Sometimes she’d laugh, soft and unguarded, the sound floating up faintly through the breeze and reaching his window if he opened it just wide enough.

And Shouto would watch her. Pressing his forehead to the cool glass. Holding his breath. She always looked so peaceful. So normal. 

And he couldn’t help but be jealous.

Not in the loud, angry way his father got. It was quieter than that. A slow-burning ache that unfurled inside him like smoke. He wanted that peace. That freedom. That lightness. He wanted to know what it felt like to exist without being watched, weighed, measured against impossible standards.

He wanted to be the kind of person who could sit beneath a tree and read a book for no reason other than because they wanted to.

But instead, he watched from behind the glass. Alone. Upstairs. Pressing his fingers against the pane and pretending that maybe, if he tried hard enough, he could pull her peace through it and into himself.

Eventually, she must have noticed him watching.

He wasn’t sure exactly when—there was no single moment where their eyes met through the window, no knowing glance or raised hand—but one day, something changed. The next time he came downstairs, there was a book sitting oddly on the edge of the windowsill in the living room. Not shelved neatly like the rest. Not one of his father’s dense, self-aggrandizing autobiographies or tactical manuals either. Just… there. Slim and worn, its spine soft with use.

It hadn’t been there before. Of that, he was certain.

He hesitated to touch it at first. For all he knew, it could’ve been a trap—some sort of test from their father, one of his endless evaluations of character. But days passed, and no mention was made. The book remained. And finally, when the house was empty and still, Shouto took it.

After that, more began to appear.

Never handed to him directly. Never acknowledged aloud. But always tucked into the most careful, subtle hiding spots: between the couch cushions in the disused sitting room, beneath the loose corner of the hallway rug, inside the compartment of the broken tea table no one ever used. Places where their father would never think to look. Places only someone who had grown up learning to tiptoe through that house would think to hide something.

And from there, a quiet rhythm developed between them.

Fuyumi would finish a book and leave it behind like a breadcrumb, tucked lovingly out of sight. Shouto would wait until the perfect moment—when their father was out working or away for meetings—and creep downstairs barefoot to retrieve it, careful not to make the floors creak. He’d bring the book up to his room and devour it slowly over the next few days, reading by the dim light of his desk lamp well after midnight.

Then, once he was finished, he would return it. Not to a shelf, not even to the same hiding place exactly, but always somewhere nearby. Somewhere she’d know to look. And without fail, within a week or two, a new one would take its place.

They never spoke about it. Never acknowledged the quiet arrangement that had taken root between them. But in a house like theirs, where everything unspoken carried more weight than words, it meant something.

Shouto didn’t always understand the stories she left him. Some were abstract and philosophical, meandering through strange metaphors or unfamiliar settings. Others were more straightforward but no less odd—romances, fables, slice-of-life narratives about ordinary people doing ordinary things. A few were clearly meant to be funny, though the humor often escaped him.

And yet… he read every single one.

Not because he felt obligated, and not because he always enjoyed them—though occasionally, a line or character would lodge itself in his mind and echo there for days—but because each book felt like a piece of Fuyumi herself. A quiet extension of her hand. A way to talk to him without saying a word.

And in that small, hidden ritual, Shouto found something that almost resembled comfort.

They seldom spent time face to face. He doubted they ever would, not really. There were too many years between them now. Too many silences that stretched too wide. But through these books, they were sharing something. She was offering him a sliver of the outside world, and he was—tentatively, awkwardly—accepting it.

Fuyumi and Natsuo always eat together in the dining room. Shouto hears them sometimes—soft voices drifting up the stairs through the old vents, the occasional burst of laughter that makes something in his chest ache before he can help it. 

The two of them take turns cooking, from what he can tell. It’s a shared ritual, casual and unspoken. Whoever finishes work first usually starts the rice or marinates something in the fridge. Fuyumi likes soups and stews; Natsuo makes a mess when he bakes, but the smell of warm bread or burnt sugar occasionally wafts upstairs and lingers long into the night.

They don’t eat anything extravagant—just regular meals, normal food, full of spice and butter and careless, comforting portions.

But Shouto isn’t allowed to join them. His meals are prepared separately. Always have been.

There’s a private chef on staff, employed by his father specifically for him, though Shouto isn’t even sure the man has a name. They rarely speak. He’s more like an extension of a machine than a person—dutiful, silent, punctual to the second. He appears at mealtimes without fail, placing plated food in front of Shouto in the small, sterile sitting room attached to the second floor study. Not the dining room. Never the dining room.

The meals themselves are meticulously portioned, color-coded, and bland—high-protein, low-fat, and measured to the calorie. No excess carbs. No sugar. No sauces unless approved in advance by his father. Everything is steamed or grilled, rarely seasoned beyond salt and the occasional fleck of pepper. Not that he minds the taste. He doesn’t remember what food is supposed to taste like.

There are no conversations during meals. No laughter or bickering or casual sibling jokes. Just the sound of a fork scraping against porcelain. The ticking of the clock on the wall. The quiet hum of the ceiling fan as it spins in lazy circles overhead.

His father’s rules are clear and uncompromising: A good hero maintains a good diet. Food is fuel, nothing more. Eating should be efficient, purposeful. He is told that the plan has been designed to maximize his performance—optimize muscle retention, prevent fatigue, eliminate distractions.

And so, he eats what is placed in front of him. Always at the same time. Always alone.

Sometimes, when he finishes early, he walks slowly back toward the staircase and stands just out of sight at the landing, close enough to hear the soft clink of silverware below. The murmur of Fuyumi’s voice, low and kind, the way it used to be before everything fractured. Natsuo’s sharper, teasing laughter.

He never goes farther than that. He doesn’t need to. He knows his place. He’s not welcome at that table. Not because they said so—neither of them ever told him not to come—but because the rules were established long ago, carved deep into the foundation of the house: he trains, he eats, he obeys. He is separate. Different.

Most of the time, he’s still hungry when he finishes his meals, but he tells himself that’s probably normal. Heroes-in-training burn more calories than average. Between early morning workouts, specialized quirk drills, sparring sessions, and the constant stress of living under a microscope, he assumes his body must be adapting—needing more. It only makes sense.

Today is no exception. He’s exhausted from training—his limbs are heavy, sweat still drying at his temples, his stomach a slow, dull ache—and as he scrapes at the corners of the lacquered bento box in front of him, he can’t help but frown. He uses the tips of his chopsticks to gather the last stubborn clumps of rice from the grain-patterned grooves, pressing them together with delicate precision until he’s collected enough for a final bite.

He pops the small bundle into his mouth and lets it sit there. Doesn’t chew right away. Just holds it, tongue pressing the grains up against the roof of his mouth. He closes his eyes, barely breathing, savoring the tiny hint of something that lingers—starch, maybe?—though he can barely taste anything at all anymore. Still, he tries. He lets the blandness spread, slow and warm and unsatisfying.

He doesn’t want to swallow yet. Not quite.

It’s not about the food. Not really. It’s about the act of eating. The momentary illusion of fullness. The temporary stillness it offers. For a few seconds, it’s like he gets to exist just for the sake of something simple. Something basic. Something other than performance, obedience, or control. He imagines what it might be like if he could keep chewing—if he could draw the meal out longer, pretend he wasn’t already done.

He swallows. The moment is gone. The rice is gone. His hunger, of course, is not.

He places the chopsticks carefully back into their case and folds the now-empty box shut with practiced fingers. He doesn’t sigh. Doesn’t shift in his seat. He simply sits there for a few seconds longer, staring at the wall across from him as if it might offer something in return.

It doesn’t.

​​Once again, he’s finished his meal within the first few minutes of the thirty-minute lunch period. He doesn't bother trying to stretch it out this time—there’s no point. The food is gone, and the persistent emptiness in his stomach is something he’s learned to ignore, or at least quiet, like background noise. Instead, he wipes his fingers with the neatly folded napkin set beside his bento, returns everything to its assigned place in his bag, and pulls out the book his sister left for him earlier that week.

The Awakening , by Kate Chopin.

​​He hadn’t known what to expect when he first saw it tucked discreetly into the gap between two throw pillows in the unused living room, their unspoken drop-off spot as of right now. The cover was worn, its pages yellowing at the edges, clearly read more than once. That had surprised him. Most of the books Fuyumi left felt new—paperbacks bought on a whim and discarded just as quickly. This one felt... personal. Like it meant something to her.

At first glance, it hadn't seemed like the kind of story he would care about. A woman in the 1800s, suffocating under her husband’s expectations, longing for freedom and purpose beyond the roles assigned to her. He couldn’t imagine what his sister had thought he might relate to in that.

But by the time he was halfway through, he understood.

Now, seated at the table, the muted noise of the cafeteria buzzing around him like static, he opens to his bookmarked page and slips back into Edna Pontellier’s world.

It’s strange how quickly he’s come to feel connected to her. There’s a tension that threads through her thoughts, a quiet grief he recognizes. That persistent, low-grade hum of dissatisfaction. Of not being allowed to want more. Of not even knowing what wanting more would look like—just knowing that something inside feels wrong, and has for a very long time.

He doesn’t always understand the nuances of her world—social obligations, the pressures of polite society, the way women are supposed to behave—but he understands the weight of expectation. Of being molded into something before you had a say in it. Of being told who to be, what to value, how to behave. The same story, different century.

He understands the feeling of being watched. Of being catalogued, judged, monitored for deviation. His father, with his ever-watchful gaze, had made a science of it. His tutors, too. And lately… his classmates, even if they don’t realize it.

What surprises him most is the quiet, almost fragile way Edna pushes back. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t rage. She just… begins to notice the walls. And then, one by one, she starts to test them. Not always intentionally. Not always successfully. But with growing clarity.

And something about that makes his chest ache. He reads slowly, savoring each paragraph, almost afraid to reach the end too quickly.

The voices of his classmates rise and fall in the background—someone laughs, someone shouts across the room, someone teases Kaminari for spilling his drink again—and Shouto turns the page.

By the end of the lunch period, the book is finished.

He closes it slowly, fingers lingering on the last page as if somehow holding it open might keep the ending from settling in. The final lines echo in his chest like a bell struck in a deep well—quiet at first, but expanding outward, impossible to ignore. He stares at the small print for a long time, not really reading anymore, just absorbing.

He hadn’t expected it to end that way. And yet, he had. 

There’s something disturbingly peaceful about it. Edna walking into the sea, surrendering to the stillness, leaving everything behind—the expectations, the noise, the relentless judgment of a world that never saw her for who she really was.

Shouto presses his thumb to the book’s spine, eyes dropping to the floor. A part of him—some buried, half-frozen part he tries not to look at too closely—is envious.

He wishes, more than he wants to admit, that he could do the same. That he could just… float away. Let the water take him. Let the world blur and soften into silence. To be free from the weight of his quirk, from the pressure of being perfect, from the suffocating expectations curled around his every breath like barbed wire.

Even the good days—if they could be called that—were heavy. Lonely. The kind of tiredness that sleep didn’t fix. He rests his elbows on the table, letting the book sit closed in front of him like a shared secret.

Around him, the cafeteria is beginning to thin out. The worst of the lunchtime chaos is past, but the air still hums with leftover energy—crumpled wrappers being tossed into bins, trays being stacked, chairs scraping against linoleum, someone laughing too loud near the doors. He shrinks into himself without meaning to, shoulders subtly tensing.

Part of him is eager to get back to class—eager to get away from the noise, the unpredictable glances, the questions he never knows how to answer. The lunch room is overstimulating in ways he never could’ve imagined when his father first told him about UA. He’d assumed the hard part would be the curriculum. The quirk training. Combat scenarios.

But no one had warned him about the sheer intensity of being surrounded by so many people all the time. About how exhausting it would be to exist in such proximity. How it would feel like being constantly exposed, every glance another probe, every conversation a minefield he didn’t know how to navigate.

Still, returning to the classroom means other things too. It means being closer to his classmates—closer than he prefers. Sitting near Bakugou, who never seems to know how loud he is. Near Midoriya, who keeps looking at him like he wants to talk. Near Iida, who insists on treating him like a person instead of the half-empty ghost he sometimes feels like.

It’s too much. UA is too much. The uniform is itchy. The rules are strange. The people are confusing. And everything—every hour, every hallway, every damn smile—demands something from him. Sometimes he wonders if he can actually do this. If he can keep showing up every day, pretending to be a student, pretending he knows how to be around people.

He slips the book back into his bag, careful not to bend the corners, and stands just as the bell rings. His feet are heavy, but they move anyway. Back to class. Back to the noise. Back to the pretending.

At the very least, the students who sit around him aren’t very loud.

It’s a small mercy, but one he clings to like a frayed lifeline. After the chaos of lunch, after the clamor of the hallways and the ever-present tension in his shoulders from simply being at UA, the quiet that settles around his seat is one of the only things that allows him to breathe.

They don’t speak to him often, which is another blessing. He’s not sure what he would say if they did. He’s still trying to learn the rules—still trying to piece together the etiquette of small talk and casual interaction like some foreign language no one ever taught him. He listens carefully when others speak, cataloging tones, expressions, the way people respond, and when they choose to stay quiet. But observation and participation are two very different skills.

Still, he’s been doing his best to remember their names.

Not because he plans to use them. Not because he’s planning to talk. But because the idea of having to ask someone to reintroduce themselves—of facing that moment of polite confusion or awkward laughter—makes his skin itch. He would hate to fumble through something so basic. Knowing a person’s name feels like the bare minimum. A form of armor. A buffer between him and the consequences of his own silence.

Yaoyorozu is easy.

They haven’t spoken much, but they’ve crossed paths before—at a handful of those glittering, stiff-backed hero galas his father used to drag him to. She’d always seemed out of place there, much like he had. Overdressed, oversmiling, polite in the way of someone who has been trained to be. Their exchanges at those events had been minimal: a few formal greetings, a shared nod across a too-bright ballroom. But the memory of her—composed and dignified even under pressure—lingers in his mind. He finds her presence oddly reassuring now, a familiar shape in unfamiliar waters.

Then there’s Shinsou. Tokoyami. Koda. Sato.

Their names came slower, but he’s managed to pin each one to a face. He doesn’t have much of an opinion of them yet. And maybe that’s a good thing. They keep to themselves, mostly. Shinsou spends most of his time with Sero and Jirou, though he’s noticeably more subdued than either of them. Tokoyami is quiet in a way Shouto respects—intense and thoughtful, never filling the air just to fill it. Koda speaks so rarely Shouto isn’t even sure what his voice sounds like, but there’s something gentle about his posture, the way he interacts with animals during rescue drills. And Sato… well, Sato’s loudest when he’s baking, which isn’t something that tends to happen during math class, so Shouto counts it as a win.

He likes them more than some of the others. Not because he knows them better, but because they leave him be. Because they don’t take up all the oxygen in the room. Don’t pry. Don’t pepper him with questions he doesn’t know how to answer.

In a school full of shouting, bright personalities, and emotionally volatile teens, the students around him are quiet islands. And in that quiet, for a little while, Shouto can almost feel normal. Almost.

Yaoyorozu tries to speak to him at first.

Not in a pushy way—never unkind—but with a gentle, persistent optimism that he imagines might come naturally to someone like her. She always seemed to carry herself with that kind of soft-spoken confidence, the kind that made her classmates gravitate toward her. She would greet him in the mornings, offer a passing comment on the homework, or politely ask if he understood the lesson when the material got more difficult. Her tone was never condescending. If anything, it felt like she was trying to reach out—extend something that might resemble friendship, or at least camaraderie.

But after enough days of receiving nothing in return—just his flat, monosyllabic answers or stilted nods—she stops trying.

He doesn’t blame her.

None of the others try either. Which is good. He prefers it that way.

The last thing he needs is more people trying to breach the walls he’s built for himself. He doesn’t have the tools to maintain relationships, doesn’t know how to balance the performance of being “normal” with the exhaustion that already comes from simply existing day to day. He’s not equipped to be known. And he's seen what happens when people get too close.

So the silence is a gift. The space they give him—intentional or not—is the only thing keeping him from unraveling.

His seat at the back of the classroom helps, too. It was the first thing he noticed on the first day—where he’d been placed, how close or far everyone else would be. And back here, tucked into the corner against the wall, he can finally exhale. He doesn’t have to twist his body around to monitor what’s behind him. Doesn’t have to worry about the blind side that’s become such a constant point of anxiety ever since the damage to his eye.

He’s not sure he could sit through a full class every day if he had to keep track of someone in his periphery, where he wouldn’t be able to react fast enough—where he wouldn’t see it coming .

Here, at least, he has the wall at his back and every other student within his field of vision. It's the closest thing to peace he can get in a room full of people.

And for a little while, it almost feels safe. He almost lets himself believe that maybe he can settle into this routine—that maybe this school will be different, that maybe here, in this new environment, he can carve out something like stability.

But he knows better. He’s learned, over and over, that the moment he begins to feel safe, the moment he lets his guard down, the world finds a way to punish him for it. That’s how it’s always worked. The second he stops bracing for impact, the blow lands harder.

So no, he doesn’t let himself settle. Not really. Even when the classroom is quiet, even when the lessons drone on in that familiar rhythm, even when he’s momentarily lost in the dull scrape of pencil on paper—some part of him is always wound tight, waiting. Listening.

Because false security is still false. And he’s lived under someone else's roof long enough to know that comfort is not the same thing as safety.

And safety? Well, it’s not a luxury Shouto’s ever been afforded. 

Ever since Aizawa had called him into his office to discuss his costume, Shouto had been keeping a wide berth around the man—wider than usual. Not that he’d ever been especially eager to interact with his homeroom teacher before, but now, his efforts to avoid him had increased tenfold.

It wasn’t that he feared Aizawa, exactly. Not in the same way he feared him . But something about the man’s gaze—sharp, dry, too knowing—made Shouto feel seen in ways he didn’t want to be. Like Aizawa could take one glance and peel him back layer by layer until the rawest parts of him were exposed. 

That conversation had been too much. Too direct. Too close. And ever since, he’s taken great care to slip out of the room before he could be called on, to vanish into the crowd when classes changed, to leave no window for another conversation like that.

Up until today, it had worked. But now—now he feels the weight of that voice behind him, low and gravelly and impossible to pretend he didn’t hear. “Todoroki. With me.”

He doesn’t flinch. It’s a small miracle.

He doesn’t turn around at first—just lets the words settle like a lead weight in his stomach, before forcing himself to move. The hallway around him is loud and crowded, students laughing and talking as they head toward All Might’s class, a river of noise and energy that he’s never quite managed to step into fully. He’d been trying to slip into that current, to disappear into the middle of it. But Aizawa cuts him off before he can merge, like a dam coming down.

Shouto doesn’t argue. He never does. He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t protest. He doesn’t ask what the training is for, or why he’s the only one being pulled. He just nods once, shallow and mechanical, and follows.

Because he’s learned by now that arguing never helps. That hesitation, resistance, or even the appearance of reluctance only draws things out longer, makes people push harder. Better to just comply. To move, to do, to endure.

Aizawa instructs him to change into his gym uniform, and he does so wordlessly, numbly, walking to the locker room with stiff legs and fingers that don’t seem to work quite right.

His mind starts to go fuzzy. Not like it’s gone blank—more like it’s filled with static, like the volume’s been turned down on the world and all he can hear is the high whine of some internal alarm he can’t quite locate.

By the time he’s standing in front of his locker, pulling his shirt over his head, he notices that his hands are shaking.

He stares at them for a moment. They tremble as he grips the fabric of his gym shirt, then again when he fumbles with the drawstring of his pants. His grip is clumsy. Weak.

Why is he shaking? He’s trained before. He’s sparred a hundred times over. This shouldn’t be different. This shouldn’t feel different. And yet his chest is tight, like something’s pressing down on it from the inside, and he has to breathe carefully just to keep it from spilling out into something worse.

He doesn’t understand. Why is this happening? 

He’s frustrated. Furious, almost. At his body for betraying him. At himself for being so unprepared. At Aizawa for calling him out. At everything. Everything is frustrating. Everything feels wrong. And worst of all, he can’t even figure out why .

Aizawa is already waiting for him by the time he gets to Gym Gamma.

He’s standing just off-center on the practice mat, arms crossed tight over his chest, one foot tapping against the floor in a slow, irregular rhythm. His hair is tied back, his goggles are hanging loose around his neck, and his expression is the same unreadable wall Shouto’s come to expect from him—sharp eyes, slack mouth, an overall sense of restrained irritation that never quite seems to go away.

The first thing Shouto registers is the stillness. The gym is empty save for the two of them, the echo of his own footsteps stretching loud and awkward across the polished floors. The second thing he registers is the posture—Aizawa’s posture.

It’s the posture of a man who’s already waited longer than he wanted to. The posture of someone who doesn’t care if you know he’s annoyed. It’s familiar. Far too familiar.

There’s something about the tension in the man’s jaw, the expectant tilt of his chin, the subtle clench in his hands that conjures up a vision he didn’t ask for. Not Aizawa anymore—but someone else. Someone larger, louder, more volatile. Someone standing in a similar stance across the sparring mat at home, flames lapping at his shoulders, waiting for Shouto to make the first move so he could punish him for making it wrong.

It’s not the same. It’s not even close. But the resemblance hits hard enough that for a fraction of a second, it knocks the breath out of him.

Shouto blinks. For the briefest of moments, he nearly laughs.

The impulse is sudden and sharp and has no business being there, bubbling up from some hidden, twisted part of him that finds bitter humor in the comparison. Of course Aizawa looks like that. Of course this is how he’s standing. Of course Shouto’s been summoned here for something he can’t entirely predict, and now has to brace for the inevitable fallout. Why wouldn’t today spiral like this?

But the laugh doesn’t make it out. His lips twitch and clamp shut before the sound can escape. Instead, his teeth catch the inside of his lower lip, biting down just hard enough to focus his thoughts, just hard enough to taste the metallic tang of blood.

He swallows it. He doesn’t need to give Aizawa another reason to be irritated with him. He’s probably already late. Already too slow. Already underperforming in some way he hasn’t yet identified. No point in making it worse by seeming uncooperative . Or worse— unhinged .

He keeps his eyes on the floor as he approaches the mat, stopping at the designated distance, waiting to be addressed. The silence stretches.

Aizawa’s foot has stopped tapping now, but Shouto can still feel the weight of his stare, like a low hum crawling across his shoulders. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move. He just waits and tries not to let his mind fill the silence with all the possible ways this could go wrong.

Continuing his apparent Endeavor impersonation, Aizawa launches directly into a lecture.

His voice is calm, even, and quiet—but somehow that only makes it worse. There’s no yelling, no overt anger. Just that low, dispassionate tone, the kind that slices clean through the space between them with surgical precision. The kind that implies he’s already made up his mind. That there’s no room for debate.

The words come quickly, clipped and clinical. About his costume. Again. About how it’s impractical, how it puts him at a disadvantage, how it reflects a refusal to use the full scope of his potential. About how UA doesn’t have the time—or the resources—to coddle a student who’s unwilling to make rational decisions about his own effectiveness in the field.

About his quirk. About his choices .

Except they’re not really choices, are they?

Aizawa spells it out with no room for misinterpretation: This isn’t optional . Not here. Not if he wants to succeed. Not if he wants to be taken seriously.

“If you want to be a student at U.A., you’re going to have to train every aspect of being a hero.” the man says evenly, like it’s a reminder, like it’s something Shouto should already know. “Not just the parts you’re comfortable with.”

The implication hangs heavy in the air between them, so thick it might as well be choking him. He hears the words—he understands the logic—but all he can do is nod, stiffly, keeping his face locked in that neutral, unreadable mask he’s practiced for years. It’s the same expression he wore every time his father stood across from him and declared his disappointment, or told him what was required. What was expected. What had to be done.

Aizawa doesn’t yell, but Shouto’s body reacts like he did anyway. His shoulders are tense. His spine is tight. There’s a faint buzzing in the back of his skull, and something hot and sour rising in his throat that he swallows down out of sheer habit.

His hands curl into loose fists at his sides. He tries to breathe through it. Because here’s the truth of it: this lecture—this entire conversation—is so eerily familiar it makes his skin crawl. He doesn’t even disagree with it. Not really. It’s just—

It’s the way Aizawa says it. The way he looks at him. Like a weapon still sheathed. Like a tool not yet properly sharpened. Like he’s wasting everyone’s time by refusing to be what he was made to be.

And the worst part? The most twisted, confusing, gut-churning part?

There’s a strange, sick kind of comfort in it.

The edges of his eyes sting before he can stop them, and he blinks, fast and furious, biting hard on the inside of his cheek to keep everything down. No tears. Not here. Not now. Especially not in front of Aizawa.

But the familiarity of it is so deep-rooted it feels like coming home and being slapped in the face at the front door.

He knows how to survive this kind of conversation. He knows what to say. When to nod. When to keep quiet. He knows how to suppress the part of himself that still dares to want, to resist, to imagine something different.

So he stands there, straight and still, and takes it. And somewhere, buried beneath the embarrassment and the rage and the confusion, a bitter, broken little voice whispers: See? This is what you’re good at. This is what you were built for.

And for one terrifying second, he almost cries. Not out of sadness. But out of sheer relief.

Since the day he started at UA, something had changed between them. His father—once an ever-present force in his life, commanding every move, every breath—had suddenly become distant. It was almost as if Endeavor had made it his personal mission to avoid Shouto whenever possible, leaving him to navigate this new world alone.

There were fewer exchanges, fewer sharp instructions, and almost no unsolicited visits or surprise training sessions. The man who had once been a constant shadow, looming over every moment of Shouto’s existence, now seemed to vanish into the background, indifferent or perhaps too busy with other pursuits.

For someone like Shouto, whose entire sense of self had been forged in the furnace of his father’s expectations, this absence was terrifying. He had always relied on Endeavor to tell him who to be, what to think, and how to feel—clear, uncompromising commands that left no room for doubt or hesitation. His father’s voice was a guiding, if harsh, compass.

Now, without that voice ringing in his ears, he felt untethered. Adrift in a sea of uncertainty. There was no one laying down the rules, no one reminding him to be perfect, to be strong, to be the hero his father demanded. No one to scold him when he faltered or to push him when he slacked.

Instead, there was only silence. A silence that weighed heavier than any shouted command.

Without his father’s presence, he felt a hollow ache inside—a yawning emptiness where purpose and direction had once lived. He wrestled with a loneliness deeper than mere isolation; it was the loss of a foundation he’d never thought to question until it disappeared.

So beneath the surface of Aizawa’s blunt, no-nonsense reprimands, there’s a strange comfort that seeps into Shouto’s chest. The harshness—the sharp edge to the words, the uncompromising tone—it reminds him of something familiar, something grounding. It’s a reminder that at least someone is paying attention, that his struggles aren’t invisible, even if they’re met with frustration rather than sympathy. There’s a small, aching part of him that finds solace in this sternness, as if punishment or pressure are the only things that make him feel real, that tether him to the world.

Yet, that fragile comfort is swiftly overwhelmed by a far heavier weight—an all-consuming terror that claws at the edges of his mind.

Up until now, he has carefully guarded the one part of himself that makes him utterly unacceptable: his fire. He has kept it locked away, buried beneath layers of control and willpower, afraid that if anyone glimpsed that side of him, the weakness and brokenness it represents would be laid bare for all to see. Using his fire means risking exposure—of every failure, every crack in his carefully constructed armor.

He’s terrified of what that would mean. What it would say about him. About how useless and flawed he truly is beneath the surface. The idea of showing his teacher—or worse, his classmates—this broken, faltering side feels like stepping off a cliff into a void where judgment and rejection wait below.

And yet, here is Aizawa, demanding that he face it head-on, refusing to let him hide behind the facade any longer.

The pressure squeezes tighter, making his heart pound with anxiety and dread. Because while part of him craves the clarity that comes from being forced to confront his fears, another part just wants to run, to shrink back into the shadows and pretend that the fire doesn’t exist at all.

Still, despite the knot of dread tightening in his chest, Shouto knows deep down that he has no choice. There’s no escaping this moment—no sidestepping the expectations, no hiding behind cold walls or silent detachment. Aizawa’s voice, curt and unyielding, leaves no room for argument. The path is set, and Shouto must follow it, no matter how heavy the weight pressing down on him.

When Aizawa finally points toward the target—a simple, unassuming mark set up about fifteen feet away—Shouto’s eyes flicker to it, narrowing as he tries to steady his breath. His body moves almost mechanically, as if detached from the storm of emotions swirling inside him. He squares his feet beneath him, feeling the firm grip of the floor through his shoes, grounding him even as his mind races.

His fingers twitch slightly, a faint tremor betraying the tension coiling through his limbs. He draws in a slow breath, willing his heart to slow from the rapid drumming that echoes in his ears. The cold sting of anxiety curls in his stomach, twisting like a tightening coil. 

In the back of his mind, a dark voice whispers, painting vivid images of what’s to come: Aizawa’s sharp tone cutting through the silence, the crackling frustration behind every word, the sigh of bitter disappointment that will surely follow any failure.

He tries to brace himself for it—mentally preparing for the sound of Aizawa’s anger, the harshness of that ever-present critique. What will it feel like this time? Will it crush him under its weight, or will it just leave him cold and numb?

Shouto’s gaze flicks back to the target, unwavering despite the storm inside. His jaw tightens, his hands clenching into fists as he silently steels himself to face whatever comes next.

Aizawa doesn’t shift or say a word when Shouto’s first attempt misses the target by a wide margin. Instead, his gaze sharpens, dark and unyielding, locking onto Shouto like he’s trying to dissect every fragment of his being—every hesitation, every flicker of doubt, every hidden fracture beneath the surface. It’s an unnerving feeling, as if the man is peeling him open from the inside out, searching for the part that’s broken or weak, the part that explains why Shouto can’t get this right.

That quiet scrutiny weighs heavier than any raised voice could. It presses in on him, tightening around his chest, making it hard to breathe, to think. The silence stretches out interminably, and Shouto can almost hear the echo of his own heartbeat pounding in his ears, loud and ragged.

He forces himself to focus, but the knot in his stomach only tightens.

​​By the time he’s missed the fourth shot, the space between him and the target filled with failure and frustration, Aizawa exhales—a low, drawn-out sigh that carries all the weight of disappointment and exhaustion. It’s not just a breath; it’s a sentence, an indictment.

And in that moment, everything shifts. The world blurs, and Shouto feels himself shrinking, as if the years peel away and he’s no longer a student in UA’s training gym, but a frightened five-year-old boy again. 

The crushing weight of expectation, the sharp sting of failure, the coldness of his father’s disapproval—all rush back in with brutal clarity. The sigh isn’t just from Aizawa anymore; it’s the same exhale he heard so often in that suffocating house, the sound that followed every misstep, every missed mark, every failure to be perfect.

He’s five years old again—blind to the world around him, swallowed by darkness that wasn’t supposed to be there. Not so long ago, the world had color, light, shapes he could reach for. But now, the shadows press in too tightly, mocking his helplessness. His eye—his once reliable eye—has betrayed him, and that terrifying truth twists deep inside his chest. Panic blooms like wildfire in his small, fragile body.

His mother is gone. She’s vanished from his life, like a fading memory slipping through his fingers. Gone—gone—gone—he whispers in his mind, the word pounding like a relentless drum, a painful echo that settles heavy in his bones.

Above him, looming and unyielding, stands his father. The man’s cold gaze is fixed on the small, flickering flame that dances weakly in the palm of Shouto’s trembling hand. The flame wavers, struggling for life, then falters—fizzling out until there is nothing but blackness where light had been moments before.

Shouto’s heart crashes against his ribs, a desperate beat that cannot will the fire back to life.

His father exhales, a sound thick with frustration and disappointment, the same breath that has followed every failure, every imperfect attempt. Without a word, he turns sharply, his footsteps heavy as he strides to the door. The sharp click of the lock sliding home cuts through the silence like a blade, sealing Shouto in his dark prison.

Alone. Cold. Abandoned. The oppressive quiet wraps around him, thick and suffocating, broken only by the haunting echo of that sigh—the weight of a father’s disapproval pressing down like a stone on his chest.

And in that moment, Aizawa’s voice, stern and cutting, pierces through the years, indistinguishable from his father’s. Disappointment isn’t just a sound. It’s a living thing, and it’s followed Shouto here.

Suddenly, the flames sputter weakly in Shouto’s palm, flickering like a candle struggling against a draft. Then, without warning, they die completely. The fiery warmth that once radiated from his left side vanishes, leaving behind an aching coldness that spreads like a hollow emptiness through his chest and limbs. It’s a sensation he knows all too well—the sinking, weightless void that settles when his fire retreats, as if a vital part of himself has been ripped away.

He knows, without needing to think, that the flames won’t return anytime soon. Not today, not this week—maybe not even this month. The stubborn flicker of hope that they might somehow reignite is crushed beneath the reality of his quirk’s fragile state.

Across the room, Aizawa watches silently, his dark eyes unreadable but sharp as ever. To Shouto’s relief, the man seems to accept the sudden loss of fire as a signal that the session is over for now. There’s no impatient demand, no sharp command to keep going. Instead, Aizawa simply lets the moment hang in the cold air, his expression settling into a mix of resignation and tired understanding.

Shouto feels a deep gratitude swell quietly within him. Because if Aizawa had insisted they continue—if the man had pressed for explanations or questioned his failure—Shouto isn’t sure he could have found the strength to respond. The thought of having to verbalize why his fire refuses to come, to admit that he is broken and weak, makes his throat tighten painfully.

He’s not ready for that conversation. Not today.

He almost slumps with relief the moment the man finally says he can leave. The tension that’s been coiled tight in his chest begins to unravel, but Shouto forces himself to straighten up, determined to keep his composure. He knows better than to show weakness now—not until he’s safely out of sight. Each step away from the room feels like shedding a layer of suffocating weight, but even as he moves, his body remains taut, on edge.

Just before reaching the door, something stops him. He doesn’t know why exactly—maybe it’s hesitation, or a strange urge to linger just a moment longer in this unbearable silence. His eyes drop instinctively to the floor; he can’t bear to meet Aizawa’s gaze anymore. The thought of looking at him—really looking—makes his stomach twist into knots, a sudden wave of nausea threatening to rise. The air feels thick, heavy, like the room is closing in around him.

Something unbidden stirs inside him—a mixture of resentment and reluctant recognition—and without quite knowing why, he stops and speaks softly, his voice barely above a whisper. “You know… You remind me of my father.”

The words hang heavy in the quiet room, startling even himself. He doesn’t know if Aizawa hears the tremor beneath his calm tone, or if the comment is a compliment or an accusation. Part of him hates the comparison, the reminder of all the pain and pressure he’s endured. But another part finds a strange, unsettling comfort in the familiar hardness of Aizawa’s presence—so much like the man who shaped his life, for better or worse.

Shouto swallows hard, heart pounding, then turns and steps out into the hallway, carrying the weight of his confession with him. He doesn’t linger. Doesn’t the other the room to respond.

Isn’t sure he could handle it.

Aizawa doesn’t bother him again after that.

No more private training sessions. No more lectures. No more offhand comments or unreadable looks from across the classroom. Just a wide berth, averted eyes, and the kind of silence that feels too deliberate to be accidental. It should be a relief. And in some ways, it is.

But it also feels… damning. Like a quiet verdict passed without ceremony.

Shouto tries not to care. Really, he does. He tells himself it’s what he wanted—to be left alone, to be invisible. He’d spent so long carefully constructing walls that it was almost satisfying to watch someone finally take the hint. But the longer Aizawa’s absence stretches on, the heavier it sits in his chest. Has the man given up on him already? Was one misstep—one bad day, one failed exercise—all it took to be written off?

Has the man truly given up on him? If that’s the case, Shouto can admit that he’s probably made the right choice. 

​​It wouldn’t be the first time. His father had given up on him in countless little ways long before he ever left home. And now, even in the rare phone calls or sterile media appearances, the man barely acknowledges his existence. His classmates don’t either—not really. Some of them nod in his direction out of obligation, others don’t even bother. No one tries to sit with him. No one asks him to partner up. There are no check-ins, no casual jokes thrown his way, no invitations to join in on whatever post-class chaos they always seem to be buzzing about.

He is alone. Utterly and entirely. And yet, he’s not sure if it’s loneliness or something worse—something quieter—that’s been creeping in around the edges lately. Something like confirmation. As though the world has looked at him, taken a long, hard breath, and agreed: Yes. This is exactly what you deserve.

Still, he tries to frame it as a win.

He does his best to bask in the calm that comes with being forgotten, like stepping into a snow-covered forest where no one’s been in years. There’s a kind of beauty in it—the stillness, the quiet, the certainty that no one will come looking. No need to perform. No need to explain. No risk of being seen.

He doesn’t need anyone. He’s always known that. Strength comes from solitude, from clarity, from knowing that no one can hurt you if you never let them close. And now—finally—everyone else seems to understand that too.

The only times he interacts with his classmates now are during training exercises—mandatory pair work where choice is stripped away and proximity becomes a necessity. Those moments are few and far between, but they’re enough to remind him of exactly where he stands.

Even then, they don’t talk to him. Not directly. Never directly. Instead, they talk around him, over him, about him—as though he can’t hear, or doesn’t matter, or maybe both. Their voices lower just enough to feign discretion, but loud enough that the message lands exactly where it’s meant to. He hears it all.

“He doesn’t even try to work with you.”

“Total ice block—good luck.”

“Just focus on your part and let him do his own thing.”

Their tone isn’t cruel. Not exactly. It’s dismissive. Detached. As if being stuck with him is just another inconvenience in the day—like a pop quiz or a sore ankle. And that’s worse, somehow. He could handle cruelty. He was raised in it. But indifference? That eats at something deeper.

Sometimes, before the pairings are even called out, he watches them gather in quiet clusters, hands folded in silent prayer, fingers crossed, lips whispering names that aren’t his. He sees the small sag of relief when someone else’s name is read alongside his. He hears the groan—short, sharp, unmistakable—when it’s theirs.

It never fails. Not once.

He doesn’t blame them. He knows he makes things harder. He doesn’t speak unless absolutely necessary. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t banter or strategize or offer encouragement. He’s a dead weight in conversation, a stranger with too many walls and too few expressions. He doesn’t try to change that anymore.

After all, it’s easier this way. Cleaner. More manageable.

He doesn’t really understand. Not entirely. Not in the way that might let him fix it, or at least accept it without flinching. He knows they don’t like him—he’s not oblivious. He’s not naïve enough to pretend he fits in here. And that’s okay. He’s used to not being liked.

But what confuses him—what gnaws at the edges of his chest in a slow, constant ache—is that he tries.

He does his best to be quiet. To be small. To stay out of their way. He speaks only when absolutely necessary, gives orders only when asked, and never raises his voice. He listens. He follows. He compromises. He tries to make himself as unintrusive and efficient as possible, the kind of person you forget is there until he’s needed—and then he performs.

Because if he’s nothing else, he is useful.

His team always passes. Always. Sometimes by a wide margin. Sometimes just barely. But the results are consistent. Predictable. He knows the terrain, he understands strategy, he’s powerful, precise, and ruthless when he needs to be. And if it means shouldering the brunt of the fight—burning through his stamina, sprinting through hailfire, covering for a teammate who hesitates one second too long—then fine. That’s what he’s there for.

That’s what makes a person worth keeping around.

But no matter how much he gives, how much damage he takes or targets he downs, it never seems to matter. Every time the exercise ends—every time the final buzzer sounds or the last hostage is secured or the last villain is down—he turns to find his teammates walking away from him. Always a few steps ahead. Always too far to catch up. They shake their heads, sigh like they’ve just endured something exhausting, mutter to one another in clipped, tired voices that trail off the moment he gets too close.

What more is he supposed to do? He keeps thinking there must be some secret rule he’s missed, some invisible line he keeps crossing. Maybe he says the wrong things. Maybe he doesn’t say enough. Maybe it’s just him—something fundamental and unfixable, something etched too deep beneath the surface to scrub clean.

He watches them from behind as they file off the field in little groups, nudging one another, whispering, complaining. Their shoulders are loose, their mouths pulled in tired frowns, but even their irritation is shared, communal, offered like water from a cup passed between them.

They leave him behind. Like always. 

Except… not like today. Today is different.

The moment Aizawa announces they’ll be shifting focus to large-scale natural disaster training, something in Shouto coils tight. A muscle behind his ribs pulls taut, almost instinctively. He doesn’t show it—his face remains blank, still—but his breath comes a little shallower. His fingers curl subtly at his sides.

Natural disaster training. It sounds innocuous, almost clinical, but the reality of it is anything but. Chaos. Unpredictability. Collapsing structures, crying civilians, smoke and debris clouding the air. Moving parts. Noise. Screams. Panic. Loss of control.

His control. And that’s the part that puts him most on edge.

This isn’t like the sparring matches they’ve been doing up to this point—those he can handle. Sparring is clean. Contained. A duel between two people under observation, within boundaries. There are rules. Measurable outcomes. He knows how to calculate risk, how to pace his movements and suppress just enough to keep from causing too much damage. He knows how to win, and more importantly, he knows how not to lose.

But this? This is messier. Bigger. Looser around the edges. It isn’t something he’s trained for—at least not in any meaningful sense.

His father may be powerful, and he may have forced years of brutal combat training down Shouto’s throat, but there’s only so much one man can simulate in a private estate. Endeavor never had the infrastructure for anything like large-scale urban catastrophes. No collapsing buildings, no runaway fires, no panicked crowd simulations, no real-world hero rescue drills. Just tightly regimented combat, pain tolerance, endurance, and control. Always control.

There were no actors. No unpredictability. No variables. Which meant no preparation for the thing that matters most in disaster response: uncertainty.

And Shouto knows—deep down, with a sickening kind of certainty—that he doesn’t do well when things are uncertain. He doesn't trust himself to improvise. He doesn't know what version of himself might emerge when things fall apart. There are too many variables he hasn’t tested. Too many things he's been avoiding.

His flames. His instincts. His limits. And now he’s being told he’ll have to engage with all of them, in front of everyone, in the middle of a simulation designed to replicate a complete and total breakdown.

He swallows hard and doesn’t say a word. Just clenches his jaw and keeps staring straight ahead, willing himself not to shake. He’s just like everyone else today—completely clueless. And worse than that: he’s terrified.

It hits him in a wave that is familiar but not welcome—tight in his throat and cold in his fingertips. His legs feel leaden as he walks, like the soles of his shoes are catching on the ground, dragging invisible weight behind them. He can already picture a fake city sprawled out ahead of them in disrepair—shattered windows, smoking craters, overturned vehicles, the kind of chaotic stage meant to mimic disaster. But it feels too real. The scale of it disorients him. There are too many angles. Too many unknowns. And no matter how much he tries to tell himself it’s just a simulation, the unease doesn’t budge.

He doesn’t know what’s coming. He doesn’t know what to expect. He’s never been allowed not to know. 

Even the worst of his training under his father had rules—twisted rules, harsh and punishing ones, but rules all the same. If he failed to meet expectations, there were consequences. But he could anticipate those. He could predict the shape of the punishment. He could prepare himself.

This… this is worse. This is unpredictability wrapped in performance. This is chaos with an audience.

His heart kicks hard against his ribs. Is this what it feels like for everyone else all the time?

The thought stops him cold. It’s never really occurred to him before—how it might feel to walk into training without the safety net of certainty, without the cold comfort of knowing exactly what failure will cost you. For a long time, he thought he was the only one who suffered under pressure. That no one else had to bear the constant weight of expectation the way he did. But now, standing here with adrenaline in his throat and dread hollowing out his chest, he’s beginning to understand.

Maybe the others have always felt this way. Nervous. Unsure. Scared. It’s such a foreign sensation, this sudden spike of empathy. It's awkward. Clumsy. But sincere.

If this is what they go through every time they suit up for something new—every time they face off against a villain, or prepare to charge headlong into disaster—then… he thinks maybe he feels a little bad for them.

Watching the other students’ matches gives him a false sense of confidence. He stands quietly at the edge of the observation deck, arms folded tight across his chest, eyes locked on the artificial city as it shifts and morphs between scenarios. There’s a sharpness to the air around him—static anticipation, tension curling in his gut—but he tells himself it’s fine.

A tsunami? That wouldn’t be so bad. He could freeze it mid-surge, encase the wave in ice before it ever made landfall. He’s done that before in simulations, at least on a smaller scale. Fire? Even easier. Ice blooms instinctively from his right side; it’s second nature, a shield he can summon without thinking. Earthquake… well, he’s less sure about that one. He doesn’t really know what he’d do if the ground split open beneath his feet. Still, he’s calm. Confident, even. He’s been trained to handle disaster—one way or another.

But when his turn is called and the holographic city resets, his stomach drops.

A blizzard. White-out conditions engulf them almost immediately, snow whipping violently sideways in sheets thick enough to obscure entire buildings. His vision narrows to nothing but pale static and biting wind, and for a moment, he just stands there—frozen.

​​It’s almost laughable. The irony. He can stop fire with ease. Turn water to ice before it touches him. But when the cold turns violent—when it surrounds him, swallows him whole—he has no defense. Not unless…

His gaze shifts instinctively to his left side, to the faint, dormant warmth just beneath his skin. But the thought alone is enough to make his stomach churn. He swallows hard. He’s not sure it would respond, even if he did call upon it. 

No. He won’t think about that now.

Still, the creeping knowledge settles over him like a second frost. Without his fire, he has no visibility. No way to clear a path through the mounting snow or burn away the cutting wind. Ice against ice won’t help him now—it’ll only get him buried faster.

For a fleeting, bitter second, he wonders if Aizawa arranged this on purpose. If it’s some kind of twisted punishment. A calculated test meant to force his hand, to push him into using the quirk that he's not even sure truly belongs to him anymore.

But then again, that would require the man to care enough about him to bother. And Shouto doesn’t think that’s the case. Not anymore. Not really. So maybe it’s just coincidence. Or maybe it’s fate.

Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that unless he somehow learns to control his left side in the next few minutes, he’s going to be all but useless out there. A ghost in the snow. A failure, stumbling blindly through a scenario he’s completely unprepared for.

It doesn’t help that Kaminari wastes no time before pointing it out. The moment the scenario becomes obvious and the artificial snow begins to fall, Kaminari lets out an exaggerated groan and throws a glance in Shouto’s direction that’s impossible to misinterpret.

“So… your ice isn’t really gonna be much help here, is it?”

Shouto doesn't flinch, doesn't look up. Just stares at the ground, lips pressed tight together, trying not to let his face betray anything. It’s not like it surprises him. He’s known for a while now that most of his classmates don’t like him. They avoid him during breaks, never seek him out during partner exercises, speak about him like he's not there even when he’s standing right beside them. He’s not stupid. He notices.

But still—he never goes out of his way to harass them. Never makes comments about the way Kaminari shorts out during prolonged fights, or how his quirk makes him useless for several minutes after a single miscalculation. He keeps to himself, quiet, careful, respectful. He tries to stay out of the way. He tries to be good.

So why do they go out of their way to kick him when he’s already down?

The injustice of it makes something hot coil in his chest, ugly and childish. He feels petulant—like some bratty kid who wants to scream that it isn’t fair. And the worst part is, some stupid, bitter part of him wants to say it back. Wants to throw something—anything—at Kaminari. Something sharp. Something mean. Something like, “What the hell do you think electricity’s going to do in a snowstorm?”

But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He bites his tongue hard enough to taste iron and gives the other boy a shallow nod, the barest acknowledgment. “Yes,” he says flatly. “I’ll have to get by without it.”

The words sting on the way out. Not because they’re untrue, but because they are. And because he said them out loud.

Kaminari doesn’t say anything else after that—maybe because he got what he wanted. Maybe because there’s nothing more satisfying than watching someone agree with you when you call them useless to their face.

​​Considering neither of their quirks is particularly suited to the conditions, there isn’t much to do except move forward. Slowly. Blindly. Step by grueling step. There’s no clever strategy to lean on here, no flashy power to cut through the chaos—just the two of them and the wind and the white.

So they walk.

Side by side, kind of—though it’s hard to tell. The snow drives so thick and fast around them that Shouto can barely see more than a few feet ahead, and his partner quickly becomes just a hunched silhouette in the swirling white. Every breath feels like inhaling shards of glass. The air burns his throat and the inside of his nose, steals the moisture from his lips, numbs the edges of his ears.

The cold itself isn’t the problem. Not for him, at least. His left side may be unreliable, weakened and trembling under the weight of whatever’s been broken in him for months now, but he can still regulate his temperature. Can still do the small stuff. He can manage a low, steady burn through his core—a small pocket of warmth tucked tight against the storm. It keeps his fingers from going numb. Keeps frostbite at bay. Keeps him moving.

But the wind. The wind is relentless.

It tears at his body like it wants to rip the skin from his bones, slamming into him in violent, directionless gusts that stagger him every few steps. His hair whips around his face, soaked and freezing, clinging to his forehead and jaw. His eyes water reflexively against the cold, and every time he tries to blink the sting away, snow gets in.

Just staying upright requires every ounce of focus he has. Every muscle in his legs burns with the effort of keeping him grounded. His arms stay tight at his sides, fists clenched inside damp gloves, trying to conserve as much heat and energy as possible.

They don’t talk. There’s no point. Words would be ripped straight from their mouths and scattered into the wind before they reached each other. And besides, there’s nothing to say. Their objective is simple: locate the target. But with visibility this low and no idea where to even begin looking, it’s like being trapped in a snow globe someone won’t stop shaking.

Time loses meaning quickly in the blizzard. Minutes stretch out like hours. Every step feels like it leads nowhere, and for the first time since the exercise began, Shouto feels something like doubt creeping in beneath the chill.

What if they don’t find the target? What if they fail?

He grits his teeth against the thought and leans harder into the wind, head down, shoulders hunched. There’s no room for failure. Not for him.

Kaminari walks on his left side. Which means Shouto can’t see him. 

And with the thick wall of snow and wind between them, it’s like Kaminari barely exists at all. The blizzard swallows everything that isn’t directly in front of him. The trees, the horizon, the world—it’s all vanished into white. But he can still hear him. Not clearly, not all the time, but enough. The steady crunch of boots beside his own. The uneven rhythm of his partner’s breathing, strained and shallow as they push through the cold.

That’s the only reason he knows Kaminari is still there. The footsteps.

So he keeps his head down, focusing on those sounds, using them as a kind of tether in the storm.

It takes a while for him to realize something’s wrong.

At first, it’s subtle—a slight tremble in the cadence of those footsteps. A faint, irregular hitch in the other boy’s breath. But the signs grow sharper. Louder. The faint stutter of movement becomes a full-body shiver, and then, eventually, the sound of teeth clicking rapidly together begins to cut through the wind.

It’s grating. A dry, rapid-fire clatter that sets Shouto’s teeth on edge. He blinks and finally processes what it means. Kaminari is shivering. Badly. It hadn’t even occurred to him.

Shouto had been so consumed with holding himself together—fighting the wind, keeping his own body warm, trying not to fall behind—that he hadn’t once stopped to think about how much worse this must be for someone without a built-in furnace stitched into their core.

Kaminari doesn’t have heat to fall back on. Doesn’t have the luxury of a quirk that burns through the chill from the inside out. He’s just… a kid in a costume, out in the middle of a staged natural disaster, without enough insulation or energy reserves to fight off nature’s violence.

And Shouto hadn’t even noticed.

He feels a twist of guilt coil low in his stomach, bitter and tight. The kind of guilt that makes him clench his jaw a little harder and stare into the snow with more force than focus. He should’ve said something earlier. Asked. Offered something. Even just acknowledged it.

But now the shaking is getting worse. Kaminari’s breath stutters out in bursts. That annoying rattle of his teeth becomes nearly constant, even above the wind, even through the hiss of snow against snow. It sounds painful.

Shouto swallows against the lump building in his throat. He doesn’t know what to do. He never knows what to do.

But still—he can’t pretend he doesn’t hear it anymore. Can't pretend the suffering of the person walking beside him doesn’t exist just because it’s on the side of his body he’s learned to ignore. He slows his pace a little, tilting his head slightly toward the boy he still can’t quite see.

“Are you…cold?” He says, then hesitates. The wind eats the words instantly. They sound small. Stupid. And too late.

Of course Kaminari is cold. He’s freezing. And Shouto had forgotten to care.

He feels guilty. And stupid. But mostly, he just feels like a failure. The shame sinks into his chest like a stone, heavy and unrelenting, weighing down every breath he takes as they trudge forward through the snow. He tells himself that he should’ve thought of this. That he should have known better. That it’s literally his job to know better.

What kind of hero is he supposed to be if he can’t even keep his own teammates safe?

It’s not some complex scenario. It’s not like they were caught in some unpredictable villain attack or a freak accident. It’s cold. Just cold. A rudimentary, fundamental threat—something that exists in the background of every winter, every survival textbook. And the worst part is that this —temperature, heat, cold—this is supposed to be his thing. His entire thing.

And yet here he is, walking side by side with a classmate who’s trembling so hard he sounds like a wind-up toy on the verge of breaking, while Shouto burns quietly at the core, completely unaffected.

He clenches his teeth and looks down, heart squeezing inside his chest.

That guilt—gnawing, persistent—is probably what makes him do it. Without really thinking, he leans slightly to the left and bumps his shoulder against Kaminari’s. It’s not hard. Barely a nudge. But he doesn’t pull away.

He stays there, shoulder to shoulder, skin brushing against fabric, a steady, quiet source of heat pressed up against the boy who so clearly needs it. He has no idea if he’s actually putting off enough warmth to make a difference. His flames are dormant now—nothing visual, nothing visible—but his left side still radiates a low-grade heat, something ambient, steady, something that’s always been there even when his fire isn’t active.

He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t look at him.

His eyes stay fixed ahead, locked on the white void stretching out in front of them. He doesn’t want to know what Kaminari’s expression looks like. Doesn’t want to see confusion or discomfort—or worse, pity. He can imagine how Kaminari might flinch, or stare, or side-eye him. Can imagine him taking a subtle step away. That’s what people do when he gets too close.

And he’s pretty sure, as the seconds drag out, that he should move. Should create some distance. Should apologize, maybe, or at least give Kaminari the chance to walk without someone like him clinging to his side like a useless, half-melted radiator.

He goes to do just that, the motion almost automatic — a reflex to the vulnerability of contact he rarely allows himself. His mind floods with the usual doubts, the whispered warnings: Don’t get close. Don’t rely on anyone. Don’t be weak.

But just as he begins to shift away, Kaminari surprises him. Without hesitation, the other boy leans in, pressing their sides together more firmly, closing the small space Shouto was creating between them. The movement is subtle but deliberate, a silent invitation to stay.

His shivering, which had been fierce enough moments ago to rattle his teeth, has now quieted noticeably. The sharp clattering sound is gone, replaced by a softer, steadier rhythm of breath. It’s enough to catch Shouto’s attention, enough to make him hold still.

For the first time in a while, he notices just how cold the air is around them—how the chill gnaws at exposed skin and steals warmth from bones. And then, almost instinctively, Shouto summons a little more heat from his left side. It’s not a blaze—far from it—but a gentle, steady warmth that radiates through the thin fabric of his jumpsuit.

The subtle rise in temperature is like a balm, and Shouto feels it ripple outward, the heat pooling between them. Almost immediately, some of the tension in Kaminari’s body seems to dissolve. His shoulders relax slightly, the stiff rigidity of cold replaced by a faint ease.

They continue trudging forward like this, side by side, the cold pressing in on them from all directions. Kaminari doesn’t say a word about their close proximity, and Shouto finds himself quietly grateful for that. Words would only complicate things—would only make the moment more awkward or fragile. Silence suits him better. It allows him to focus on each breath, each step against the biting wind.

Then, without warning, a fierce gust howls through the blizzard, catching Shouto completely off guard as he climbs over a fallen tree. The ground beneath him shifts as a sudden rush of icy wind forces his footing to give way. Time seems to slow, and his eyes widen in alarm as he sees a jagged rock hurtling toward his face, propelled by the storm.

He braces for impact, his body curling instinctively to shield himself as he falls toward the snow-covered ground. But the rock never lands where he feared. Instead, a firm grip wraps around his arm—strong and steady, pulling him back upright before he even hits the earth.

Shock floods him. No one has ever caught him before. When he trips, he falls. It’s a rule he’s long accepted. That’s just how it is: he’s responsible for himself, no one’s there to save him. To rely on someone else, to be saved—that’s a vulnerability he’s never allowed.

But here, now, Kaminari’s hand is steady, unshaken, anchoring him. There’s no hesitation in the gesture, no trace of surprise. Kaminari simply mumbles, “That was close,” his voice low and casual, as if saving a classmate from a fall was the most ordinary thing in the world.

Without waiting for a response, Kaminari presses his side right back against Shouto’s, closing the small gap again as they face the storm together. Shouto can feel the solid presence of the other boy, grounding him, offering a silent reassurance amidst the chaos of the blizzard.

By the time they finally emerge from the brutal confines of the simulated blizzard, Shouto is so utterly disoriented that the relief of stepping outside barely registers. The sharp contrast between the biting cold inside Ground Omega and the comparatively milder air outside blurs into a haze around him. His mind feels foggy, his limbs heavy, as if the storm had torn something loose inside him.

But the moment Kaminari steps away—breaking the physical connection they’d maintained through the biting wind—Shouto is hit with a sudden, unsettling awareness. The spot where Kaminari’s side had pressed against his own now tingles sharply, a strange combination of chill and electric sparks that skitter across his skin like restless fireflies. It’s an odd sensation, neither comforting nor painful, but deeply disquieting. His skin prickles, crawling with static, as if Kaminari’s quirk had left an imprint on him—an invisible charge lingering just beneath the surface.

Shouto’s stomach twists with a strange urgency. He longs for the clean slate of a hot shower, imagining the water washing away the prickling, the residual heat, the weight of the day’s exhaustion. He wants to scrub off the lingering feeling—not just the physical sensation, but whatever else it might mean. The thought that something intangible could cling to him so stubbornly is almost unbearable.

He turns back for one last glance at Kaminari, who stands there casually, as innocuous and relaxed as ever—his face open and unguarded, with no hint of the silent influence he’s had over Shouto’s mood and body. That nonchalance only deepens Shouto’s confusion. What exactly does Kaminari want from him? Why does the proximity of that boy, so brash and confident in so many ways, affect him so profoundly?

That question gnaws at him, cold and sharp, more terrifying than the blizzard itself. Because if Shouto doesn’t understand what Kaminari wants from him—or why he’s so affected—how can he ever hope to brace for it?

Chapter Text

He would say that going to U.A. had always been his dream. But that wouldn’t be quite right. Dreams were for people like Deku—soft, naïve idiots with their heads in the clouds and their hearts beating out fantasies they’d never have the guts to chase. Dreams were fragile things: hopeful, breakable, and uncertain, like glass waiting to be shattered under someone’s heel.

He didn’t do fragile. He didn’t waste time on uncertainty. What he had wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t something he scribbled in a notebook or stuck on a wall with glossy posters of All Might like some starry-eyed moron. What he had was a plan—solid, undeniable, carved into the very core of who he was. He wasn’t hoping to get into U.A.; he was going to. Period. End of story. The world could burn to ash before he let it be any other way.

So no, Katsuki Bakugou didn’t dream. He decided.

U.A. wasn’t some distant star he craned his neck toward in the dead of night, whispering wishes to the universe like some pathetic extra waiting for scraps. U.A. wasn’t a maybe. It wasn’t a hope. It wasn’t fragile enough to break under the weight of reality, because he refused to let it be.

U.A. was his destiny—his concrete, non-negotiable future. Not a flicker of possibility, but a roaring, explosive certainty. A straight road paved in sweat and blood that he was already sprinting down while everyone else was still fumbling for a map. There was nothing lofty about it, nothing romantic. He’d never had to sit there and think, “I hope I make it.” That kind of thinking belonged to weaklings like Deku, losers with notebooks and backup plans.

For him, U.A. wasn’t a thing to reach for. It was a thing to claim. A thing with his name already burned into it like detonation marks scorched into concrete. It wasn’t a dream because dreams were fragile—dreams shattered. His resolve? That was iron. It was nitroglycerin. It was unbreakable, because it had to be.

It wasn’t ambition anymore. It was identity. A promise etched into his bones, wired into his muscles, stitched into every explosive beat of his heart. He was going to U.A., and not just to attend—he was going to dominate it. To walk in and set the standard so high no one else could even see it. To make the world burn with his name.

From the moment he was old enough to understand what being a hero truly meant, the path had been carved in stone. Not dreamed up in some hazy, starry-eyed fantasy. Not scribbled in a journal or hidden under his bed like a secret hope. No—Bakugou didn’t hope . He didn’t imagine .

He knew. Knew, down to the marrow in his bones, that one day he would walk the hallowed halls of U.A. High—the premier academy for the strongest, the brightest, the best. He could picture it even as a kid: the polished floors echoing under his boots, his name whispered like a storm in every corner of every classroom.

He would ace the entrance exam, not scrape by with a pass, not settle for “good enough.” He would obliterate the competition. Every obstacle, every opponent, every smug bastard who thought they could stand in his way—he’d blow them out of existence and leave nothing but smoke in their lungs. And when the dust cleared? When the smoke settled and the echoes of his victories still rattled the walls? They’d all see him standing there—unshaken, untouchable, untamed. 

Not just good. Not just great. The best. Unmistakably. Unquestionably. Undeniably.

Only one of those things ended up happening.

Obviously, he crushed the entrance exam. That had never even been a point of doubt—not for him, not for anyone who’d ever seen what he could do. It wasn’t a challenge; it wasn’t even interesting. The entire test felt like someone had handed him a children’s puzzle and asked him to act impressed when he solved it.

By the time the dust settled, he was buzzing with energy that had nowhere to go, his palms still tingling from the explosions he’d let loose. The proctors had stared at him like they’d never seen anyone tear through the course so ruthlessly, and he’d eaten that look up, let it burn like gasoline in his veins.

He’d walked out of the testing grounds practically bored out of his mind, shoulders loose, head high, adrenaline still crawling under his skin like electricity with no outlet. Half of him wished the test had been harder. Bigger. That someone—anyone—had been strong enough to push back, to make it feel like something other than another foregone conclusion.

But whatever. That was fine. Because as far as he was concerned, the test wasn’t the real fight. It was just the opening act. The warm-up. The first step on a road that was already paved in his name.

He could already see it in his head as he strode out into the sunlight—the scoreboard flashing, his name lit up in bold letters at the very top where it belonged. Katsuki Bakugou: Number One. No one even close. Everyone else scrambling behind him like bugs while he stood at the summit, untouchable.

It wasn’t just confidence. It was a fact. An inevitability. 

Or so he thought.

He hadn’t thought there would be any question of being the best. Not for a second. He’d expected the others to trail behind him, stumbling and scrambling to keep up, their eyes wide with awe as he lapped them again and again. That wasn’t arrogance—it was math. It was a foregone conclusion, a law of nature as unshakable as gravity.

He hadn’t expected any competition at all. 

Let alone this—some quiet, stiff bastard with a face like carved stone—expression so flat it felt like an insult just to look at. A guy who moved like nothing around him mattered, like he could barely be bothered to exist, let alone compete. Who the hell did that? At least Deku wore his desperation like a badge. At least he bled for it. But this guy? This guy didn’t even twitch.

And the hair—half white, half red—like he couldn’t even commit to a single fucking color. Like the bastard got halfway through being born and decided, nah, that’s enough. He looked like a goddamn glitch in the system. Wrong. Unfinished.

And yet, somehow, he wasn’t wrong at all. Somehow, he stood there in that perfect split of light and shadow and didn’t have to try. Didn’t have to sweat or strain or claw his way to the top because the top was already bending toward him, making room like it knew who belonged there.

Though how could anyone have expected the enigma that is Shouto Todoroki? 

Someone who didn’t even try to be impressive and yet somehow was. Effortlessly. Like breathing. Like gravity. Like a law of nature Bakugou didn’t fucking agree to.

And maybe that’s what pissed him off the most—because for the first time in his life, Katsuki Bakugou looked at someone and thought: What the hell am I supposed to do with you?

Todoroki always took first. Always. Like it was his birthright. Like the universe had penciled his name in before the ink on the exam even dried.

And Katsuki—Katsuki fucking Bakugou—was left to scrape out second place.

Second. Fucking. Place.

Every single time.

It wasn’t just losing. Katsuki could stomach losing—if the other guy bled for it. If he earned it. If he clawed his way up and fought tooth and nail for every inch. If he burned like Katsuki burned.

But Todoroki? Todoroki didn’t fight for shit. He didn’t strain, didn’t sweat, didn’t even flinch. He just walked onto the field, moved his hand, and the world bent for him. Ice bloomed, people bent to him, and it was over before it even started. Clean. Effortless. Clinical.

And what made it worse—what made it unbearable—was that Todoroki didn’t even seem to notice. Didn’t celebrate. Didn’t smirk. Didn’t gloat.

Like Katsuki wasn’t even on his radar. Like he wasn’t competition at all. Like second place was the only place Katsuki Bakugou had ever belonged.

It was a chokehold, the way that burned. Because Katsuki could’ve handled being beaten by someone who gave a shit—someone who looked him in the eye and said, I see you, and I’m going to crush you. But Todoroki? Todoroki didn’t even look at him. Didn’t waste the energy. Didn’t care enough to hate him.

And that… that made Katsuki want to tear his own skin off just to feel something besides this blistering fury.

And everyone else? They were just as bad. Maybe worse.

Those first few weeks at UA were a kind of hell Katsuki hadn’t even known existed. He had expected to stand out—he’d always stood out. Always been the one they talked about, the one they followed. People used to fight over who got to stand on his team during group drills back in middle school. Teachers used to smile and nod like they were already imagining his face on the front page of Hero Weekly.

That was what he was used to—respect. Admiration. The kind that dripped off people in waves when he walked by. The kind that fed that fire in his gut and told him he was right, he was the best, and everyone knew it.

UA didn’t give him any of that.

​​Nobody cared about him. Not like before. They didn’t flock to him. Didn’t fall over themselves to say how strong he was or how cool his Quirk looked in action. Didn’t beg to be on his team because everyone knew if you rolled with Bakugou, you fucking won. No—here, he was just another name on the roster. Just another kid in the uniform.

And all anyone wanted to talk about—anyone—was Todoroki.

Todoroki, Todoroki, Todoroki.

The prodigy. The perfect ice prince. The son of fucking Endeavor. The one who walked through every exercise like it was a joke. The one who beat Katsuki. Over and over and over again.

It burned. Not just in his palms—though they twitched constantly now, itching for something, anything to blow apart—but in his gut. In that raw, bitter place that had never been touched before. A place that tasted like rust and bile and… what the hell was this? Was this… humiliation?

Katsuki Bakugou had never in his life felt this unimportant.

Was this what Deku felt like all the goddamn time? That sick, sour ache in his chest, like the world had looked at him and shrugged, like he didn’t even matter?

No wonder the nerd cried so much.

It was disgusting. Katsuki wanted to tear it out of himself. Burn it to ashes and scatter it in the wind. But no matter how hard he clenched his fists, no matter how much smoke hissed between his fingers, the feeling stayed. Lodged in his ribs like shrapnel.

Luckily, Todoroki was the least likable person on the planet. Maybe even more so than Katsuki himself—which was saying something. Impressive, really. The guy had perfected the art of being an antisocial asshole without even trying. Didn’t talk unless he had to. Didn’t joke, didn’t laugh, didn’t even look at people unless there was some tactical reason behind it.

He walked through the halls like a fucking ghost—cold, stiff, and untouchable.

For the first few weeks, though, everyone tried. Katsuki watched it happen from the sidelines like it was some kind of slow-motion train wreck. Uraraka with her soft voice and sugar-sweet smile, asking him if he wanted to sit with them at lunch. Kaminari cracking joke after joke, tossing out one-liners like bait on a hook. Even Kirishima—the friendliest bastard Katsuki had ever met—failed to chip away at that frozen wall with his never-ending enthusiasm.

Todoroki didn’t budge. Not an inch. He just sat there, looking vaguely irritated, like people speaking to him was the greatest inconvenience in the world. He didn’t even give them the satisfaction of anger—just that flat, blank stare that said, Why are you still talking?

And after a few weeks of that? After day after day of the guy acting like he was too good, too busy, too fucking bored to acknowledge any of them? They gave up. All at once, like some silent pact had been made.

And just like that, the tide turned. Awe curdled into irritation. Curiosity into contempt. All those wide-eyed looks and whispered compliments turned into side-eye and muttered complaints. What’s his problem? Thinks he’s hot shit just because his dad’s Endeavor.

Now, Todoroki wasn’t the golden boy anymore—he was a cold, distant bastard everyone hated. And honestly? Katsuki could live with that. Hell, he could thrive on that. Because now, other than the guy literally everyone despised, Katsuki was the best in class. The strongest. The one worth paying attention to.

Second place still tasted like ash in his mouth, but at least the guy above him wasn’t everyone’s fucking favorite anymore.

Those first few weeks, Katsuki had also been given a pretty cold shoulder. And it had thrown him more than he’d ever admit out loud. Hell, more than he’d even admit to himself if he didn’t want to choke on the truth.

Up until UA, he’d never had to try. Not once. He’d never had to be nice to be likable. Never had to fake-smile or play dumb or sugarcoat his words so people would want to be around him. Why the hell would he? He was Katsuki Bakugou—people came to him. They lined up like moths to a flame, practically tripping over themselves for a scrap of his attention. They’d beg to sit next to him, beg to be on his team, beg to be seen as someone worthy of his time.

And why wouldn’t they? He was strong. He was brilliant. He was the best. That had always been enough. That had always been everything. He didn’t need a good personality when he had power dripping from his hands in the form of pure, explosive dominance. Didn’t need charm when everyone in his shitty middle school whispered his name with a mix of fear and admiration.

People craved him. Respected him. Feared him. And Katsuki liked it that way. 

So walking into UA— his territory, the school that was supposed to be his throne—and getting nothing ? No awe, no fear, no people bending over backwards to cling to him? It was like walking into a room where gravity didn’t work anymore. Like the rules of the world had changed and no one bothered to fucking tell him.

They didn’t care about him. They weren’t impressed. Hell, some of them even looked annoyed when he opened his mouth. Annoyed. At him.

And it shouldn’t have mattered—he didn’t need friends, he didn’t want their approval—but that first week, when people didn’t flock to him like they were supposed to, like they always had… it stung. Just for a second. Just enough to make him angry as hell.

Plus, after getting bested over and over by that completely indifferent half-and-half bastard— and getting humiliated by fucking Deku of all people during their first goddamn class with All Might—he’d been forced to shut his damn mouth a little bit.

Not because he didn’t believe what he’d said. Hell no. He was going to be the best. That wasn’t up for debate. It wasn’t even an option to him—it was a fact waiting to happen. A guarantee written in stone.

But right now? Right now he wasn’t.

And he hated that. Hated it so much his teeth ached from how hard he ground them at night. It felt like chewing on broken glass every time the thought crossed his mind, but that didn’t make it less true. He wasn’t number one. Not yet.

And the fact that everyone fucking knew it? That they’d seen him lose— lose —and worse than that, lose to Deku in front of All Might, in front of the whole damn class? It made him want to tear the sky down with his bare hands. It made him want to scream until the air shattered.

So yeah. Maybe he’d stopped running his mouth as much. For now. Not because he was giving up. Never that.

Just… what was the point in bragging when he didn’t have the wins to back it up yet? What was the point in making promises when the only thing people would hear is empty words ? He wasn’t going to hand them that satisfaction. He wasn’t going to let them think he was all talk.

If he couldn’t shove their faces in the dirt right this second, then fine. He’d stay quiet. He’d wait. He’d work harder. 

And then, when the time came? When he crushed them all so hard they couldn’t even fucking breathe through their own shame? Then he’d talk. Then he’d remind them of every single word he’d ever said—and they’d fucking worship him for it.

He’d get there. He would carve his way there if he had to bleed for it. He would be the best. Not “someday,” not “maybe,” not “if things work out.” No conditions. No doubts. It was a law of the universe as far as he was concerned. And when it happened, when he stood where he was supposed to stand, when he took back what should have been his from day one—

They’d all see it. Todoroki. Deku. Every last one of them.

He wouldn’t have to scream it anymore. Wouldn’t have to spit fire and ash just to make them understand what he already knew. He wouldn’t need to shout because the proof would be right there in their faces, carved into every victory, every broken record, every single time they came up short against him.

By the time he was finished—by the time he was through tearing through every obstacle, every smug little face that dared to look down on him—they’d just know .

He wouldn’t need words for Todoroki to know he’d been beaten. For Deku to know he’d been left choking in the dust where he belonged. He wouldn’t need to brag or boast or explain, because it would be undeniable .

By the time he was through with Todoroki—through with all of them —the air itself would hum with it. They’d feel it in their bones, in that deep, ugly place inside that hates losing: that Katsuki Bakugou wasn’t just better. He was inevitable.

Better than them. Better than everyone .

But he doesn’t voice this opinion anymore. It’s not worth it—not right now. Every time he used to snap or brag or throw a grenade of words into the middle of the room, it blew up in his face. And hell, maybe he deserved some of that, but it didn’t make swallowing it any easier. So, he learned to choke it down, all that heat and noise, until it sat like a bomb in his gut instead of out in the open where everyone could poke at it.

And in the silence, something weird started to happen. Something he didn’t notice right away, not until it was too late to stop it. Somewhere between trying not to scream every single day and biting his tongue so hard it nearly bled, Katsuki found himself... tolerated. Which was bad enough. But then—somehow—accepted. And then, even worse, even weirder: liked.

Not by everyone. Obviously. Half the extras still can’t stand him, and that’s fine—they don’t matter. But the loudmouths—Kirishima, Mina, even that idiot Kaminari—they didn’t just put up with him. They started… hanging around. Talking to him like he was a person and not just a walking explosion. Inviting him to lunch. Dragging him into dumb conversations about nothing. Laughing like they actually wanted him there.

At first, he tried to ignore them. That was easy enough—just crank up the scowl, keep his head down, and pretend they didn’t exist. No eye contact. No openings. They’d get the message eventually. 

Except they didn’t.

So he tried the next best thing: snapping at them until they left. Barking insults like grenades, tossing them over his shoulder in rapid fire. “Shut up.” “Get lost.” “I’m not your friend, dumbass.” Every time they tried to rope him into some stupid conversation or crack a joke at his expense, he made sure to hit back hard, sharp enough to draw blood. That always worked before. Back in middle school, a glare and a few well-placed explosions could clear a room in seconds.

But not here. Not with them.

They just… kept coming back. Like cockroaches that didn’t know when to quit. Joking. Laughing. Acting like his temper was some kind of entertainment instead of a warning. They didn’t just put up with him—they seemed to like it. Like they enjoyed poking the bear just to see how loud he’d roar. Like they thought it was funny.

They’re loud—gratingly loud—the kind of loud that drills straight through his skull and makes his teeth ache. It’s constant, like background static that never shuts up, punctuated by bursts of laughter so sharp they make him want to blow something up just to drown it out.

Kaminari never runs out of dumb shit to say, like his entire personality is just words, words, words with no filter, no brake pedal, just pure brain-to-mouth chaos. He’s all stupid grins and bad jokes and a voice that carries across the damn room whether Katsuki wants to hear it or not.

Ashido’s no better—always chiming in with some high-pitched commentary or dragging people into whatever random thought just zipped through her pink head. She laughs at everything, even when it’s not funny, like her life depends on filling every second of silence with noise.

Sero at least pretends to be chill most of the time, hanging back with that lazy grin like he’s too cool to get worked up about anything. But then they —the other two—infect him with whatever brain-melting energy disease they’re carrying, and suddenly he’s just as bad. Louder, even. Like once Sero decides to cut loose, it’s a full-on epidemic.

And when that happens? When all three of them get going at once—laughing and shouting and talking over each other like they’ve all got a quota to hit before dinner—they’re unbearable. A living, breathing swarm of bugs buzzing in his ear. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how many death glares he throws or how many sharp-edged curses he spits, they never scatter. He can’t swat them away.

Sometimes Shinsou shows up, drifting into the chaos like a dark cloud that got yanked out of the sky against its will. He never comes on his own. He always looks like someone dragged him there kicking and screaming, though in Shinsou’s case, the screaming is just an even flatter deadpan than usual. Ashido’s usually the culprit, her pink arm hooked through his like she’s leading a cat to a bathtub. He moves about as willingly too—heels digging in, eyes narrowed like he’s plotting her untimely demise the second she turns her back.

At first, Katsuki pegged him as a total drag. A guy with that tired, bored stare, like he’s two seconds away from taking a nap in the middle of the hallway. Always hunched like the weight of existence is a little too heavy on his skinny ass shoulders. Every word out of his mouth came coated in sarcasm so dry it could catch fire if you looked at it too long.

But… the bastard grew on him.

​​The first time Katsuki really noticed it was when he’d made that comment—just stating the obvious, really. About how Half-and-Half looked like a cancer patient. He personally thought he was pretty gentle in his delivery, actually, considering just how gross the dude looked

Shinsou had called him an asshole without blinking, without flinching. He didn’t look scared like everyone else does when Katsuki opens his mouth and breathes fire. Just deadpanned it like it was the weather report. Like it was a fact of life, something as ordinary as sunrise and taxes. No fear. No sucking up. No pretending. Just… honesty. Brutal, boring honesty.

Maybe that’s why Shinsou’s fast becoming Katsuki’s favorite out of the group. The guy’s sharp in his own quiet way, throws verbal punches without breaking a sweat, and somehow makes it look easy. Plus, he doesn’t fill the air with useless noise like the rest of them. He just sits there, all heavy-lidded and unimpressed, tossing in one-liners that hit like precision grenades.

Shinsou didn’t pretend. Didn’t sugarcoat, didn’t smile when he didn’t feel like it, didn’t bother wasting time trying to be liked. He just was. Quiet. Blunt. Solid in a way most people weren’t. No desperate edge to him, no neediness, no stupid posturing for attention like half the idiots in this class. He didn’t act like he cared about being liked. He just existed. Quietly. Unapologetically. 

And, hell, the guy was funny—not loud, obnoxious funny like Kaminari, but sharp funny. Dry. Blunt. A little cruel sometimes in that lazy, deadpan way that made it hit harder. He’d drop some offhand comment that sounded like it had been pulled straight out of Katsuki’s own brain and then just go back to staring off like he hadn’t just dismantled someone’s ego with a single sentence. Katsuki respected that.

But the thing Katsuki liked most? Shinsou didn’t fuck around with bullshit. No fake smiles. No small talk. No energy wasted on meaningless filler words. When he spoke, it was deliberate—low, steady, right to the goddamn point. Half the time it was worth agreeing with, which was saying something, considering Katsuki disagreed with everyone on principle.

And Kirishima—God, Kirishima was the worst offender. The guy was relentless. Always smiling, always encouraging, always there like some kind of overgrown golden retriever in red hair and too much optimism. He had this way of showing up at the exact moment Katsuki thought he’d shaken him off—grinning like they were already friends, like that wasn’t something that had to be earned.

Persistent didn’t even begin to cover it. Kirishima was inevitable.

The bastard didn’t flinch when Katsuki barked at him. Didn’t back off when Katsuki told him to screw himself. He just grinned wider, like Katsuki’s temper was proof they were getting somewhere. Like the explosions were his version of a wagging tail.

It made Katsuki crazy. It made him want to blow something up—sometimes Kirishima himself—just to prove a point.

And worse than that? They dragged him in. Bit by bit. Word by word. Until one day he realized he wasn’t just enduring their conversations—he was part of them. Snapping back, trading insults, letting his voice slip into their rhythm without meaning to.

He hated that. He hated how easy it was. How stupid it felt to catch himself laughing at some dumb joke, to feel that little pull in his chest when they clapped him on the back or threw him a grin. It was infuriating.

And he let them. Hell, he didn’t just let them—he stayed. He didn’t blow them off or tell them to screw themselves. He stayed and… talked. About nothing. About everything. About music, food, stupid TV shows. He even… laughed. Once or twice. Maybe more. He can’t remember.

And when they called him “part of the squad”—like it was obvious, like it was something that had happened without him noticing—he didn’t correct them.

​​He made… friends. Maybe. Sort of. Kinda. And if that word feels weird in his head, if it makes him itch like a sweater that doesn’t fit, he ignores it. He pretends it’s nothing. Just part of the deal of being stuck in the same dorm with these people. Just convenience.

They weren’t like the so-called friends he had at his old school—the ones who hovered around him like flies on sugar. Those guys didn’t give a damn about him . They cared about what came with him. Protection. A homework lifeline. The privilege of standing in his shadow and soaking up the scraps of his reputation. It was all transactional—smiles and praise paid for with borrowed strength. Katsuki had always known it, even if he never said it out loud.

But these people? They weren’t like that. Not even close. They didn’t orbit him like he was the sun. They didn’t whisper behind his back about how lucky they were to be on his side. They didn’t look at him like he was untouchable or like being near him was some kind of golden ticket.

They didn’t look at him like anything special at all.

And that should piss him off. It did piss him off—at least at first. Because what the hell? He was Katsuki Bakugou. He was special. The strongest, the smartest, the one destined for the top. He’d spent his whole life carving that truth into the world with his bare hands. So why didn’t they see it? Why didn’t they treat him like it?

​​But they didn’t. And, maybe the worst part—maybe the best part—is that they didn’t expect anything from him either. Not his protection. Not his homework. Not his strength. Not even his approval. They didn’t need him to be anything but… there.

At first, he hated that—hated how it made him feel like all the work he’d put into becoming the best didn’t matter to them. But the longer he sat with it, the more uncomfortable something else started to creep in underneath the anger. Something quiet. Something that felt a little like… relief.

Because if they didn’t expect anything, then for once in his life, he didn’t have to perform. He didn’t have to prove. He didn’t have to be on all the damn time, teeth bared, chest out, ready to bite and burn to keep his throne. For once, he could just… be. And nobody gave a shit. 

Honestly, it’s… kind of nice. Not that he’d ever say that out loud—hell no. But sometimes, when the classroom noise softens into a dull hum and he catches Kaminari laughing at one of his own dumb jokes or Ashido leaning across the desk to tell him something pointless but somehow funny anyway, it hits him in the gut in a way he’s not prepared for. He hasn’t felt this in a long time—like he belongs somewhere without having to fight for it.

Still, that doesn’t mean he can relax. If anything, it means he has to work twice as hard to keep the image up. The yelling, the eye rolls, the endless swearing—it’s armor. His oldest, strongest shield. He knows how to wear it, how to sharpen it when people get too close. Because if he lets it slip—even for a second—what then? They might start expecting more from him. Real conversations. Real feelings. Shit he doesn’t know how to give.

Or worse—much worse—they might see through him. See that underneath all the explosions and bravado, he’s not unshakable. That he bleeds. That failure eats him alive. That he’s terrified of being second best.

He can’t let that happen.

So he stays sharp. Stays angry. Keeps the walls high and the fuse short because that’s who he is. That’s who he’s always been. Because even if, against all odds, he’s somehow making friends—real ones, probably—he can’t forget the bigger picture. He can’t forget why he’s here, why he gets out of bed every morning with fire in his chest and grit in his teeth. He has a goal. He has something to prove. To himself. To everyone.

Especially to Todoroki.

It’s infuriating. Because while Todoroki might be a complete failure at being a normal human being, he’s still winning everywhere else. Top of the class in academics. Untouchable in combat drills. The guy doesn’t even try, and he still wipes the floor with everyone. It’s like he came out of the womb ready to ace the hero rankings.

Still while he’s cleaning house literally everywhere else—Katsuki’s winning in the social department. 

Katsuki’s not saying he’s some kind of social butterfly—hell no—but compared to Todoroki? He’s practically Mr. Congeniality. At least people talk to him. At least people laugh at his jokes, even if they’re mostly insults. At least people invite him to hang out, to train, to eat lunch together.

Todoroki? Forget it. The guy has the social skills of a brick wall and the charm of a wet sock. Actually, scratch that—at least a wet sock has a purpose. Todoroki’s like… a tax form. Something you have to deal with but never want to. He’s a walking personality vacuum. If there were a spectrum of charisma, this guy fell off it, rolled into a ditch, and got buried there for good measure.

No one talks to him unless they absolutely have to. No one sits by him at lunch, no one invites him to group study sessions, no one even tries. He doesn’t exactly make it easy either, with that constant dead-eyed stare and the voice that sounds like it’s been put through a blender set to “bored.” The guy could announce the end of the world and make it sound like the weather report.

If social hierarchies were a ladder, Todoroki didn’t just fall off. He fell off, smacked every rung on the way down, broke the ladder, and then kept digging until he was in a hole so deep you’d need ground-penetrating radar to find him. He is the Mariana Trench of social standing.

It makes Katsuki feel warm inside. All tingly and satisfied, like he just downed a shot of pure adrenaline. The world could be so goddamn wonderful sometimes. Watching everyone else finally ignore the half-and-half bastard, watching the spotlight swing away from him—it’s poetic justice. Hell, it almost makes UA bearable.

Almost.

Because as warm and fuzzy as it should make him to see Todoroki fade into the background, Katsuki isn’t quite on board with this new social order. Because even though the rest of the class had moved on from Todoroki, Katsuki hadn’t. He couldn’t. It wasn’t in his DNA to let something like this go.

It’s like the universe looked at him and said: Here’s your rival. Also, he’s an emotionless wall with perfect hair. Good luck.

And fuck if that didn’t feel like some cosmic joke aimed squarely at his face.

Todoroki still hasn’t acknowledged him. Not once. Hasn’t seen him— really seen him—not even during the times Katsuki knows he’s earned it. It’s like Katsuki doesn’t exist at all, like all his noise and fire and fury don’t even register on the guy’s radar.

And that? That digs under his skin like shrapnel. It festers. It itches. It drives him insane in a way he doesn’t have words for. He wants to grab him by the collar and shake him, set him on fire if that’s what it takes, just to force something—anything—out of him. A spark. A smirk. A goddamn glare. Anything to show Katsuki exists in his perfect little half-frozen, half-flaming world.

It makes his palms prickle with heat until tiny pops and sparks snap against his skin. Makes his teeth grind so hard his jaw aches. Makes his throat burn with words he wants to spit, to scream, to hurl like grenades across the room.

Just look at me, you fucking bastard. SEE me.

But he didn’t say them. Not anymore.

The words clawed at the back of his throat like broken glass, burning and bitter, but he swallowed them down every time. Because screaming for attention— begging for it—was pathetic. And Katsuki Bakugou wasn’t pathetic.

He didn’t want Todoroki’s gaze handed out like a pity prize, tossed his way because he was loud enough, desperate enough. He didn’t want to be seen because he demanded it, because he forced it down Todoroki’s throat until the bastard had no choice but to acknowledge him. That wasn’t how this was going to go.

He wanted Todoroki to look at him and know . To feel it in his bones that Katsuki was the one who beat him, broke him, outpaced him in every way. That Katsuki was the name he couldn’t ignore, the one he’d be chasing for the rest of his life.

Not because Katsuki screamed for it. Not because he threw a tantrum and begged for scraps. Because he made it impossible not to.

He wanted to earn it.

And he would.

Todoroki would see him. Would recognize him. Would understand that Katsuki Bakugou wasn’t just some name scrawled under his on the rankings sheet—an afterthought, a footnote. No. Katsuki was coming for him. Relentlessly. Unstoppably. Like a goddamn natural disaster Todoroki wouldn’t see coming until it was too late.

And when that day came—when those cold, mismatched eyes finally locked onto him, not with that empty disinterest, not like he was a piece of furniture in the room, but with something real—respect, rivalry, maybe even fear—Katsuki would be ready.

He’d be standing there, every inch the person he promised himself he’d become. Stronger, faster, sharper than anyone had any right to be. Because this wasn’t just about winning anymore. It wasn’t even about being the best. It was about being undeniable. About setting himself on fire and making the whole world burn bright enough that even someone like Todoroki couldn’t look away.

He was going to force his way onto Todoroki’s radar, burn his name into his memory, brand it so deep it would ache every time he heard it. Katsuki Bakugou wasn’t just going to exist in Todoroki’s world—he was going to carve out a space there and stay for good.

He wasn’t going anywhere. Katsuki would make him look. Make him see. And once he did, once that flicker of acknowledgment sparked behind those blank, polite eyes—Katsuki was going to turn it into a fucking inferno.

And Todoroki? He didn’t get a fucking choice. 

They were in All Might’s class—but All Might wasn’t here.

Instead, it was Aizawa. The man stood like he’d been dropped there against his will, posture curved in that familiar, almost boneless slouch, hands shoved deep into the folds of his pockets. The faint shadows under his eyes looked darker than usual, almost bruised in the stark sweep of mid-morning sunlight. His hair—wild and matted like it hadn’t seen a comb in days—cast jagged lines across his face, cutting his expression into something harsher, hollower. If All Might radiated blinding, golden warmth, Aizawa was the opposite: cold, gray, funereal. Like he’d crawled out of a grave, dragged himself across the dirt, and was already irritated to be back among the living.

The PE grounds stretched out around them, vast and open, the earth still damp from an early morning watering. The sky above was a sharp, crystalline blue, sunlight angling down just enough to throw long, spidery shadows across the field. The air smelled faintly of grass and warm soil, stirred by a soft breeze that tugged at their loose sleeves. 

They’d all noticed the first oddity immediately: gym uniforms, not hero costumes. Bright, casual colors instead of polished armor and reinforced fabric. It had sparked a murmur of confusion as they changed in the locker rooms, a ripple of curiosity that hadn’t fully died down even now.

No one had questioned it out loud—not to Aizawa’s face. Not yet. But Katsuki could feel the unspoken questions thick in the air, humming through the group like static: Why? What’s the point? Where the hell’s All Might?

Even Kaminari had gone quiet, bouncing on his heels with restless energy instead of running his mouth. Yaoyorozu’s brows were drawn, thoughtful and precise, as though she were assembling a hypothesis in her head. Mina whispered something to Jirou behind her hand; Jirou only shrugged, the cord of her earjacks twitching like a nervous tail.

The only sound was the faint hiss of wind cutting over the field and the uneven scuff of sneakers shifting against packed dirt. It was too still, too expectant, the kind of stillness that made your pulse tick a little faster because you knew— you knew —it wasn’t going to last.

And then Aizawa exhaled. A long, thin thread of breath. His eyes opened wider, just a fraction, catching the light like a pair of dulled knives.

“I’m sure you have many questions,” Aizawa began, his voice rolling out in that same deadpan drawl that somehow managed to sound both lazy and cutting at once. It was calm, but there was an edge under it—thin, sharp, like a blade hidden in a sleeve. “For one, All Might is fine. He’s just busy today, so you’re all stuck with me.”

The words fell like a stone into the silence, heavy and final. A few shoulders visibly sagged in relief at the confirmation that nothing catastrophic had happened to All Might—Yaoyorozu let out a slow, almost imperceptible breath. Kaminari muttered a soft, “Oh, thank God,” under his breath, though Aizawa didn’t so much as twitch at the comment.

Then it happened—the grin. That grin. The one Katsuki always noticed because it was rare, almost unnatural on the man’s face. It curled slow and deliberate at the corner of Aizawa’s mouth, tugging like it didn’t quite belong there. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t reassuring. It was sharp, a cruel little slash of expression that promised nothing good.

It was a smirk that said, You’re going to regret ever being happy I showed up.

Katsuki felt the reaction ripple through the class like static. Some of them stiffened—Mina made a small sound that might’ve been a nervous laugh; Kaminari scratched the back of his neck with an uneasy grin. Even Todoroki tilted his head slightly, that blank, unreadable stare narrowing by a fraction, as though filing the grin away for later analysis.

But Katsuki? His lips twitched, curling upward before he could stop them. It wasn’t a full smile—he didn’t do full smiles—but the corners of his mouth pulled just enough to bare a hint of teeth. Because he knew that grin. He understood it in a way the rest of these idiots didn’t. It was the kind of sadistic smirk that promised suffering

And hell, Katsuki respected that. He liked their homeroom teacher. Really liked him, in fact—something he’d never admit out loud because, fuck that, he wasn’t sentimental. But Aizawa didn’t bullshit. He didn’t sugarcoat. He didn’t drown them in fake encouragement like All Might did, didn’t look at them like they were fragile little eggs that needed coddling. Aizawa told you when you sucked and made damn sure you stopped sucking.

“Today,” Aizawa began, his tone as flat and unbothered as if he were announcing the weather, “I want you to work through some basic sparring matches. Without the use of your quirks.”

The words hung in the air for half a second—long enough for the meaning to land—and then it was like tossing a firecracker into a daycare full of over-caffeinated toddlers. The eruption was instant.

“What? What?! Come on, Sensei—what’s the point of that?” Kaminari’s voice cracked halfway through his protest, hands flinging up dramatically as if the injustice of this demand might physically crush him. His blond hair stood even messier than usual, almost like the very concept of fighting without his quirk had electrocuted him from the inside.

“Without quirks? That’s not even realistic!” Sero jumped in, leaning forward on his heels, arms flailing for emphasis. His tape dispensers glinted in the sunlight as if mocking him—what good were they without his quirk?

Mina let out a long, exaggerated groan, dragging it out like she was in physical pain. “C’mon, Aizawa-sensei, that’s boring.” She stuck her bottom lip out in a pout that would’ve looked cute if it wasn’t paired with the absolute devastation in her eyes, like someone had just canceled Christmas.

Katsuki stood with his arms crossed, taking it all in with a sharp curl tugging at his lip. The collective whining was almost deafening—like a swarm of gnats buzzing around his ears—but beneath the irritation was a flicker of something else. Excitement. Because unlike these extras, he didn’t give a shit about fighting without quirks. He didn’t need his quirk to win. He could break every single one of these idiots with his bare hands and walk away smiling.

He liked the idea. Hell, he fucking loved it. Let them cry. Let them panic. He’d show them what real strength looked like when you stripped everything else away.

Aizawa bulldozed through the rising tide of complaints without so much as a flicker of irritation. His voice cut through the noise like a blade—flat, firm, absolute.

“There are going to be situations,” he began, tone as dry as kindling and twice as unforgiving, “where your quirk may not be an asset to you. Or where it won’t be available at all—”

He didn’t bother finishing the sentence before proving his point. The red gleam of his eyes snapped open, burning faintly through the curtain of his hair, and Katsuki felt it before he even registered the look. That split-second of connection, the unrelenting stare—and then the sensation hit.

Immediate. Total. It was like a switch being ripped from the wall inside his body. A violent click. A wrongness. The heat that normally simmered in his veins winked out in an instant, replaced by something hollow and suffocating. His palms—always warm, always alive with the promise of ignition—felt cold. Dead.

Katsuki’s scowl carved deeper into his face. A creeping chill crawled up his forearms where sweat should have been, burrowed into his shoulders like icy worms. His hands curled into fists automatically, knuckles popping under the strain, as if clenching harder could force the power back. But there was nothing. Just emptiness, heavy and mocking.

He hated this. Hated him for doing it. It wasn’t fear—no, fuck that—but it was damn close. A feral, teeth-grinding discomfort that made his skin itch like it didn’t fit right. Katsuki would rather swallow glass than admit it, but the truth burned in his gut: when Aizawa did this, it felt like drowning.

“-So it’s important,” Aizawa continued as if nothing had happened, voice cutting through the suffocating silence Katsuki was choking on, “that you are well-versed in combat without them.”

As suddenly as it vanished, his quirk snapped off. Katsuki felt the return of his power like a gasp of air after being held under too long—heat roaring back through his blood, the tiny chemical sparks at his palms flaring to life. He resisted the urge to flex his hands, resisted the temptation to reassure himself it was still there. 

Around him, the class shifted uneasily, every single one of them feeling the phantom sting of vulnerability. Jaws tightened. Shoulders hunched. Nobody liked being reminded how breakable they were without their quirks—how human.

“A hero who relies too heavily on their power,” Aizawa finished, letting his sharp gaze drag across the group like barbed wire, “can quickly become a dead hero.”

The words hit harder than a punch to the gut—blunt and merciless, but impossible to argue with. And just like that, the grumbling quieted.

Aizawa let the silence hang for an extra beat—long enough for the weight of his words to settle like wet concrete. Then, finally, one dark eyebrow ticked upward.

“Good.” His tone carried the same dry finality as a gavel. “Now, I’ll be assigning partners.”

The class stirred, energy rippling through the group in a nervous wave. Katsuki barely noticed. He wasn’t interested in the chatter or the tiny sounds of relief and dread as names started falling from Aizawa’s mouth like stones. Pair after pair. One boring combo after another. He tuned them out, white noise against the pounding rush in his ears.

He didn’t care who it was. Didn’t matter. He just wanted someone to hit. He needed it—the tight coil of tension in his chest demanded release. If he didn’t get to knock someone down soon, he was going to blow.

But then Aizawa said it: “Bakugou and Todoroki.”

And he realized maybe he did care. For half a second, the world seemed to sharpen—crystal-clear, like glass under pressure. Katsuki’s head snapped up, and his grin spread across his face, slow and feral, slicing across his features like a scar. His teeth flashed white in the sunlight, sharp as the thrill spiking through his veins.

His eyes found Todoroki instantly. Locked on. There he was—the ice prince himself. Cool, collected, and standing with that same detached expression that made Katsuki want to set something on fire just to see him react. Todoroki didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. Just stood there with his arms loose at his sides like this was nothing, like he didn’t even care.

That was fine. Better, even. Because Katsuki cared enough for both of them.

Todoroki’s ice might’ve been flashy. Intimidating. Maybe even beautiful in a way Katsuki would never admit out loud. But now? Stripped of his quirk? He was just another guy in a pair of UA gym sweats. And up close, without the armor of frost glittering at his heels, Todoroki looked almost delicate. 

Shorter than Katsuki. Slighter. Narrow shoulders, sharp collarbones visible where the neckline of his shirt gaped. Lean muscle, sure, but lean was the key word. He wasn’t built for brute force—not like Kirishima, not like Sato. He was all long lines and cool elegance, like a damn porcelain statue.

Hell, from where Katsuki was standing, he looked like you could knock him over with a strong gust of wind. And now, without the security of his elements? Without the power that made everyone else tiptoe around him, whispering about prodigies and perfect control? He was nothing.

​​Katsuki rolled his shoulders, slow and deliberate, feeling the tension hum through him like a live wire. Heat curled under his skin—not from his quirk, but from something sharper, hungrier.

He was going to enjoy this. Enjoy cracking that blank mask in half. Enjoy showing Half-and-Half just how far he could fall without his precious ice to catch him.

He was going to have fun beating him into the goddamn ground.

“Woah, Baku-bro, you look scary as hell.” Kirishima’s voice carried a teasing edge, but his eyes were genuinely a little cautious, as if unsure what kind of storm was brewing beneath Katsuki’s usual explosive swagger.

Katsuki threw his head back and laughed—loud, sharp, and completely unhinged. It echoed off the gym walls like a crack of thunder. “Yeah? I hope that half-and-half bastard thinks so too.”

The words dripped with venom, raw and charged. It wasn’t just about the match—it was personal. Todoroki had become more than just a rival; he was the spark to Katsuki’s fury, the silent challenge that kept his temper blazing hotter than ever.

Kirishima didn’t say anything else—didn’t have to. Instead, he clapped a solid hand down on Katsuki’s shoulder with a firm, brotherly thud, the kind that said I get you . Then, with a wide, encouraging grin, he called out loud enough to cut through the gym noise, “Good luck!”

Without waiting for a reply, Kirishima jogged off, his bright red hair bouncing with each step, heading straight toward his own partner—Deku. The green-haired boy was already waiting on the mat, bouncing on the balls of his feet like some over-caffeinated squirrel, energy practically radiating around him.

Katsuki barely spared them a glance. Luck was for the weak. For people who needed chances handed to them. He didn’t need luck. Not today. All he needed were his fists and that fiery determination that burned sharper than any flame. Today, he was going to show Todoroki exactly what it meant to be the best .

He stalked toward his mat like a wolf zeroing in on prey—slow, deliberate, every step heavy with barely contained aggression. The gym noise faded into a dull hum behind the sharp beat of his own pulse. His eyes locked onto his target, burning with a mixture of rivalry and raw, simmering fury.

Todoroki was already there, waiting with that infuriating calm that made Katsuki want to scream. He stood just beside the sparring mat, posture impeccable and relaxed—arms hanging loose at his sides, like he wasn’t about to throw down but instead just waiting for the next boring lecture.

His face was unreadable as always—expression flat, eyes distant, gaze unfocused as if his mind was somewhere far away, not on the match that was about to unfold. His mouth was set in a slight frown, not angry or frustrated, just a crease that seemed to carry the weight of endless disinterest.

He picked absently at his fingernails, a mindless habit that made Katsuki’s skin crawl. Like Todoroki was preparing to solve a dull math problem instead of spar with him, like this was just another mundane task rather than the battle Katsuki was itching for.

It drove Katsuki insane—the way Todoroki looked completely unaffected. No fire in his eyes, no tension in his stance, no hint that he saw Katsuki as a real threat. Like this was just routine for him, like he wasn’t about to utterly crush Katsuki’s pride.

Katsuki’s fists clenched so tight his knuckles whitened, nails digging into his palms, as he stopped just a few paces away, refusing to look away. His glare was open, sharp—challenging, raw. Every inch of him screamed that he wasn’t here to lose.

He wanted Todoroki to feel the heat of his anger, to recognize the storm he was about to face. Because this wasn’t just a sparring match. This was a battle for respect, for dominance, for a claim on the throne Katsuki had always believed was his—and he wasn’t about to back down without a fight.

“Hope you’re ready to get your ass kicked, Icyhot,” Katsuki spat, voice sharp and laced with venom. It was a challenge, a provocation, but Todoroki didn’t even glance his way—not fully, anyway. His eyes flickered briefly, indifferent and cold, like Katsuki’s words were little more than background noise to him.

Without a word, Todoroki stepped onto the mat with a calm, measured grace. His movements were quiet and precise, betraying no emotion, no hint of eagerness or fear. He dropped into a loose stance—not defensive, not aggressive, just neutral—like he was simply going through the motions of some meaningless drill.

It was maddening.

It was as if this fight, this moment, didn’t matter at all to him. As if Katsuki himself didn’t matter.

That thought alone sent a hot surge through Katsuki’s veins, boiling beneath his skin and threatening to spill over. He clenched his fists tightly, nails biting into his palms as he pushed down the furious storm inside him.

He kicked off his shoes, each movement deliberate, mirroring Todoroki’s slow, methodical steps onto the mat. Then he squared himself across from the other boy, planting his feet firmly on the ground, rolling his broad shoulders back, and lowering into a fighting stance that radiated raw power and barely restrained violence.

He was muscle and tension and threat—a loaded gun, cocked and ready to fire at a moment’s notice. And there, across from him stood—

A child playing soldier. A boy trying on his father’s armor without the fire to fill it.

Todoroki’s stance lacked the heat, the passion, the hunger that Katsuki wore like a second skin. He moved like someone stepping into a role someone else had written for him, not a warrior fighting for his own place.

It was frustrating beyond words—seeing a boy with so much raw talent, yet so much distance, so much cold detachment.

Katsuki’s heart hammered in his chest, not with fear, but with a fierce need to break through that icy shell. To prove that beneath all the frost, the fire still burned—and that he was the one who would outlast, outfight, and outshine him.

Now that they were standing face to face, the contrast between them was impossible to ignore—like fire against ice, strength against fragility. Katsuki’s frame was solid and unyielding: thick, powerful legs planted firmly on the ground, arms like coiled steel cables, muscles taut and ready to explode at a moment’s notice. Every inch of him screamed raw, untamed force, a living weapon honed by years of relentless training and sheer will.

Todoroki seemed almost delicate—his build lean and slight, almost fragile. He looked like he could be snapped in two with a well-aimed blow, lacking the bulk or brute power that Katsuki carried so naturally. There was a certain lightness in his stance, a subtle grace that didn’t rely on physical dominance but rather precision and control. Definitely not someone who won fights with brute force. 

The way Todoroki squared up, rigid but somehow unreadable, was almost comical. It reminded him of an angry kitten puffing itself up to seem bigger than it was, or a child who had snuck into their parents’ oversized clothes and was now trying desperately to walk with authority in shoes far too large. The whole image clashed harshly with the towering, fiery presence of Endeavor—the fierce, commanding figure.

That contrast wasn’t just physical; it echoed deeper truths about them. Katsuki embodied blunt power, raw aggression, and explosive passion. Todoroki was more subtle, reserved, a study in restraint and quiet intensity. And standing there, side by side, those differences felt like worlds apart.

Aizawa stood off to the side, his arms crossed over his chest, an unreadable expression etched beneath those heavy, tired eyes. His voice cut through the charged silence of the gym like a blade—flat, low, and absolutely authoritative. “You’ll start on my mark. No quirks. No broken bones—” He paused, narrowing his gaze specifically on Katsuki, a warning hanging in the air between them. “—at least, not on purpose.”

Katsuki’s grin widened, sharp and fierce, the kind that promised nothing but trouble. His blood thrummed with adrenaline, the familiar buzz of a fight igniting his nerves like dry tinder catching flame.

“Begin.”

Without hesitation, Katsuki exploded forward like a coiled spring finally released. His muscles tensed and surged as he closed the distance between himself and Todoroki in a heartbeat. His fist swung out, aimed precisely at Todoroki’s ribs—a quick, clean hit meant to knock the breath out of him, maybe stagger him enough to gain the upper hand.

But—nothing. His fist sliced through empty air, the solid resistance he expected replaced by cold, vacant space. Todoroki wasn’t there.

The unexpected miss threw Katsuki off balance for a heartbeat, the residual energy from his arm’s explosive motion nearly sending him careening forward. That almost-disorienting moment, the sting of having been outmaneuvered, sent a sharp thrill through him.

So Todoroki could move. Could dodge. Could think on his feet.

Good.

Katsuki’s grin spread wide, sharp and hungry, a fierce spark of exhilaration igniting deep in his chest. The rush of adrenaline buzzed through his veins, fueling the fire that already roared beneath his skin. Without wasting a breath, he surged forward again, this time sharper, more calculated, his movements a blur of controlled aggression.

He unleashed a rapid one-two combo, fists slicing through the air in a brutal rhythm aimed squarely at Todoroki’s center—first a powerful jab, then a swift follow-up straight punch meant to catch the other boy off guard and break through his guard.

But both strikes were met with nothing but empty space. The first punch sliced past where Todoroki had been just a fraction of a second before, his body slipping away with effortless grace. The second followed the same fate—dodged with an ease that was almost infuriating.

But the boy didn’t even try to counter. The silence stretched between them, charged with unspoken challenge and simmering tension.

Katsuki’s eyes narrowed, sharp and calculating. There was no spark of fury or urgency in Todoroki’s gaze, no rush to retaliate or punish. Instead, the other boy seemed eerily calm, like a predator watching patiently from the shadows.

Todoroki danced just out of reach, moving fluidly around Katsuki’s aggressive strikes with the precision and smoothness of water flowing over rocks—never rigid, never hurried, always patient. 

“You always this fucking passive?” Katsuki snarled, his voice edged with frustration and disbelief. His movements grew sharper, faster, fueled by irritation as much as determination.

But Todoroki gave no response. No flash of anger, no retaliatory strike. Just another subtle side-step, a quiet block, a graceful weave through the storm of Katsuki’s onslaught. His expression remained unreadable—calm, detached, like he was simply waiting for something. Waiting for Katsuki to make the next move.

And that thought gnawed at Katsuki, sharpening the sting of his own impatience.

It didn’t take long—hell, maybe thirty seconds—for it to become obvious. Todoroki wasn’t actually that strong. He didn’t have the kind of body built for brute force. His frame was lean, too lean, all sharp angles and long lines without the solid bulk that spoke of raw power. Even under the loose fabric of the gym uniform, Katsuki could see it—thin arms, narrow shoulders, a chest that barely filled the shirt. When Todoroki shifted his stance, Katsuki caught the faint outline of his ribs pressing against the cotton, stark and pale, like bones straining against paper.

He looked… fragile. Breakable in a way Katsuki wasn’t used to seeing, especially in someone ranked so high above him.

And as for skill? That was another thing entirely. When Todoroki finally decided to throw a punch—slow, deliberate, measured—Katsuki almost laughed. The movement was too clean. Too textbook. Like something pulled straight from a training manual instead of forged in the chaos of a real fight. It was neat and efficient, sure, but it screamed inexperience. It was telegraphed from a mile away, and Katsuki batted it aside without breaking a sweat.

It made sense, though. It all made sense. A guy like Todoroki didn’t need to know how to fight up close. Why bother learning to scrap when you could turn the ground into a glacier and freeze your enemies solid before they even thought about touching you? His quirk did all the heavy lifting. He could sit back, calm and detached, while the world bent to his will with a flick of his wrist. He never had to bleed for a win. Never had to claw for it.

And that reliance? That was weakness. Katsuki could taste it, bitter and sweet all at once, rolling over his tongue like the first lick of flame before an explosion.

Weak.

And Katsuki ate the weak for breakfast.

He lived for moments like this—the raw thrill of an opponent being stripped down to size, all their shiny armor torn away to reveal nothing but skin and bone. He thrived on it. Consumed it. There was something almost primal about it, the way his muscles thrummed with anticipation, the way victory gleamed like firelight in his mind.

Todoroki might be top of the class on paper. But here, in the dirt and sweat, stripped of the ice and fire that made him untouchable? He was prey. And Katsuki was already moving in for the kill.

But damn it, the bastard was fast. Annoyingly fast. Not explosive speed—no, it wasn’t that—but this quiet, slippery kind of quickness. Fluid. Every time Katsuki lunged, every time he swung, Todoroki was just… gone. A sidestep. A shift of weight. A tilt of the shoulder so subtle it made Katsuki want to scream. Always just out of reach, like smoke between his fingers.

But Katsuki was nothing if not relentless. Persistence was in his blood, his bones, his goddamn DNA. He didn’t give up. He didn’t slow down. If anything, every dodge only sharpened his focus, only stoked the fire already roaring in his veins. He was faster. He was stronger. He had more power in his fists than Todoroki had in his entire body.

If he just kept attacking—just kept pressing forward, cutting off every exit, forcing him to dance closer and closer to the edge—eventually…eventually, the bastard would slip.

And he did. A feint gone wrong. A split-second hesitation, barely a stutter in Todoroki’s movement. Maybe his foot caught on the mat. Maybe his timing faltered for the first time. Whatever it was, it was all Katsuki needed. He saw it—the opening—and his body moved before the thought even finished forming.

His hand shot out like a viper, snapping around Todoroki’s wrist in a bruising grip. He yanked, hard, putting his whole damn shoulder into it, and the sudden force ripped Todoroki off balance. The sound that came out of him—soft, startled, unplanned—was music. A sharp, breathy little noise that Katsuki could feel crackling in his chest like electricity.

Before the other boy could recover, Katsuki swept his leg low, hooking Todoroki’s ankles with ruthless precision. He drove forward, using Todoroki’s own momentum against him, and the boy hit the mat hard. The dull, satisfying thud reverberated up Katsuki’s arms as he followed him down. The breath whooshed out of Todoroki in a sharp exhale, chest collapsing beneath the sudden weight.

And Katsuki didn’t waste a second. He pinned him instantly, body surging with raw, vicious triumph. Both hands clamped around Todoroki’s wrists, slamming them above his head, muscles straining as he pressed them into the mat. His knee dug hard into Todoroki’s stomach, grinding into the soft muscle until he felt the faint tremor of resistance falter. Katsuki leaned in, close enough that his breath ghosted over Todoroki’s cheek, heat rolling off him in waves even without his quirk.

Pinned. Helpless. Exactly where Katsuki wanted him.

And Todoroki… he just laid there. Flat on his back, arms pinned beneath Katsuki’s grip, chest rising and falling in steady, measured breaths that sounded maddeningly calm for someone who’d just been slammed into the mat. His expression didn’t change. Not a flicker. No flare of anger. No grit of teeth. Not even the satisfaction of being beaten.

Just those distant eyes staring past him like Katsuki wasn’t even there. Todoroki didn’t struggle.  Didn’t kick. Didn’t twist. Didn’t even twitch. Didn’t fight back. Didn’t act like this meant anything at all. He just… accepted it.

And that—that was worse than losing.

Katsuki froze above him, muscles locked, heart slamming against his ribs like a caged thing. For a split second, the roar in his ears went silent, and all he could hear was his own breathing—harsh, ragged—against Todoroki’s quiet, even inhale.

Had he just… let him win?

The thought hit like a sucker punch to the gut, a sick, ugly weight dropping heavy in his stomach. Katsuki’s grip tightened around Todoroki’s wrists until his knuckles turned white, until the bones beneath his fingers ground together, because no. No fucking way.

But the longer he stared down at him, the harder it was to deny.

Todoroki’s gaze wasn’t angry. Wasn’t defeated. It wasn’t anything. Blank as winter sky. His mouth curved neither up nor down, the same infuriating neutrality he’d worn since the start of the match. Like this—like Katsuki —didn’t matter enough to warrant a reaction.

Something inside Katsuki twisted. Hard. Violent. The idea of Todoroki giving up—of him not caring, of him deciding that fighting Katsuki wasn’t worth the effort—burned hotter than any loss ever could. It scorched through his veins like acid, like wildfire, consuming every inch of him until his jaw ached from how hard he clenched it.

Because if Todoroki didn’t give a shit? If this was him holding back —if Katsuki Bakugou wasn’t even worth his full strength—That wasn’t victory. That was humiliation. And humiliation tasted worse than blood.

His teeth ground together so hard it felt like they might splinter. A low, feral sound built in the back of his throat, and before he even registered it, his grip had tightened around Todoroki’s wrists until the bones shifted faintly beneath his palms. He could feel the pulse there—steady, maddeningly calm. Like this wasn’t even a fight to him. Like he wasn’t seconds away from Katsuki tearing his arms clean out of their sockets.

“What the fuck was that?” Katsuki snarled, the words cracking sharp and hot through the air. His breath came hard, ragged with the leftover adrenaline pounding through his body. The words came out low at first—more a growl than speech, jagged and vibrating with the fury thrumming in his chest. Spit clung to his teeth as he hissed the question through clenched jaws.

Todoroki didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink. He just lay there, flat on his back with Katsuki straddling his hips and a knee digging into his ribs, staring up at him with those mismatched eyes that always looked like they were seeing something far away. Cold. Detached. Unfazed by the weight pinning him down.

He didn’t struggle. Didn’t so much as twitch against the hold. Just studied Katsuki’s face in silence for a beat too long, as if calculating something, or maybe trying to decide if answering was even worth the effort. Then, finally, he spoke. That same infuriatingly calm tone.

 “You won.”

Like it was the simplest thing in the world. Like that explained anything.

“The hell I did,” Katsuki spat back, his voice splitting sharp as broken glass. Heat flared in his throat, climbing fast, choking him on the sheer outrage of it. “You didn’t even try.”

If that got any kind of rise out of him, it was microscopic—a flicker at the edge of his brow, gone before it could fully form. So subtle Katsuki almost thought he imagined it.

“You landed the pin.” Todoroki’s voice didn’t rise, didn’t harden, didn’t do anything. Just that same fucking even tone, steady as a metronome. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

​​Katsuki froze, just for a second, staring down at him like he’d just said the most brain-dead shit in existence. His pulse hammered against his throat, a deafening, relentless thud that made it hard to think, hard to breathe past the heat clawing its way up his chest. Blood roared in his ears, a hot, furious tide that drowned out everything else. 

Was this guy serious?

He searched Todoroki’s expression for anything—smugness, irritation, shame—but there was nothing. No emotion. No fight. Just that flat, almost vacant look, like none of this mattered. Like Katsuki didn’t matter.

And that thought—more than anything—made his grip tighten until the tendons in Todoroki’s wrists strained white against his skin. The pressure crept up Katsuki’s arms, into his shoulders, sharp and buzzing, demanding release. His teeth bared in something feral, animalistic.

Because if Todoroki had let him win—if this was pity, if this was fucking charity—then Katsuki wasn’t sure if he wanted to scream in his face or tear the floor apart with his fists.

Todoroki’s gaze drifted, slow and deliberate, away from Katsuki’s face. Those mismatched eyes slid sideways, tracking something far beyond the mat, far beyond the moment. Up toward the open sky above them. Wisps of clouds drifted lazily across the blue, curling like smoke in the sunlight. He stared at them like they mattered more than the weight pinning him down. Like Katsuki wasn’t there at all.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet. Almost too quiet—soft enough that Katsuki had to lean in a fraction to catch the words.

 “I don’t like fighting hand-to-hand.”

The laugh ripped out of Katsuki like shrapnel, harsh and sharp and bitter. 

 “No shit. You suck at it.”

It should’ve stung. Should’ve lit a spark in those deadpan eyes, wiped that calm right off his face. But if it did? Todoroki didn’t show it. Didn’t even twitch. Just blinked slow, lashes cutting soft shadows against his cheeks.

“I know.” He said it like a fact, not an admission. Like it didn’t bother him in the slightest. “I’m working on it.”

Something in Katsuki’s jaw locked so tight it hurt. His fingers tightened unconsciously around Todoroki’s wrists before he shoved down hard, a sharp, punishing motion that drove the other boy deeper into the mat with a muted thud. He felt the breath push out of him, saw the faint hitch in his chest—and still, Todoroki didn’t fight back. Didn’t curse. Didn’t even glare.

That cold, infuriating stillness was worse than any insult.

Katsuki pushed off him like the contact burned, his palms slamming against the mat as he shoved himself upright in one explosive movement. His breath tore out in ragged bursts, chest rising and falling like a storm trying to rip its way free of him.

He didn’t look at Todoroki again. Couldn’t. Not when his throat was thick with heat and his hands still itched for something to break. Instead, he turned on his heel and stalked off the mat, boots scuffing hard against the floor.

His chest was a vice. His blood a furnace. And he made no effort to hide the scowl carved deep into his face. Let them all see. Let them all know how fucked this was.

Bad at hand-to-hand or not, that bastard hadn’t even tried.

That? That wasn’t a fight.

That was a fucking insult.

Because if Todoroki wasn’t going to fight him for real—of he wasn’t going to look at him, acknowledge him, bleed for it the way Katsuki would—

Then Katsuki wanted no goddamn part of the match at all.

Chapter Text

His list of people to avoid had gotten longer with each week that passed.

Well—technically, that was a little misleading. If he were being completely honest with himself, the list hadn’t so much grown as it had crystallized into something sharper, clearer, more deliberate. It wasn’t that more people had earned their way onto it. The truth was, Shouto had always wanted to avoid everyone. Always. From the start.

The idea of closeness—of letting someone step into his orbit, share his air, breathe his name—felt wrong. Alien. Dangerous. It wasn’t a balm, the way it seemed to be for others. It wasn’t comfort. It wasn’t warmth. It was confinement. A cage disguised as company.

Being near people—really near them—meant pressure. It meant weight pressing in on all sides: their expectations, their stares, the shifting weather of their moods, brushing up against his skin until he couldn’t tell where he ended and they began. The gaze alone was suffocating. He could feel it—hot, constant—searing like fire against his back, even when no one touched him.

Existing alongside others meant performance. Calculation. Anticipation. He had to be careful with his words, careful with his silences, careful with his face—because any of those things, used wrong, could become a weapon. Or a weakness. Or an invitation he didn’t want to give. It was exhausting work, to hold that balance every second of every day.

It felt like balancing on a wire stretched tight over an endless abyss. The kind that yawns wide, black and hungry, swallowing sound and light alike. One wrong move, one miscalculation, and he would go over. Free-fall into nothing, into a shattering that would strip him bare.

He couldn’t afford that. He couldn’t afford the weight of hands trying to pull him back up, or worse, the look in their eyes when they realized he was broken beyond repair. So no—his list wasn’t longer now. It was the same list it had always been. 

But even avoidance took strategy. It wasn’t as simple as turning away. Not here. Not at UA, where the walls felt thinner, where the spaces were too small and the people too persistent. He had learned quickly that some people required more effort than others. Some didn’t just stop at the barricades he built. They didn’t take the hint when he laid down silence like a minefield. They didn’t leave when he made himself sharp-edged and unwelcoming.

They knocked. They circled. They scraped at the mortar with restless fingernails, picking at the weak points, patient and relentless. Some pressed their palms to the glass and peered inside, fogging the surface with their breath, leaving smudges he couldn’t scrub away no matter how hard he tried.

And with their presence came heat. Warmth that wasn’t gentle but scorching—too much, too close. Heat seeped through the cracks, curling into the hollows he’d carved out for himself, filling them against his will. He had no tolerance left for burning. Not from the outside. Not from anyone else.

So he adapted. He learned to prioritize. To triage.

He was grateful for how simple his classmates made it. Grateful in a way that felt like breathing room in a life that rarely gave him any. Most of them had quietly, almost mercifully, given up on trying to interact with him after those first few weeks. Whatever curiosity they’d carried into the start of the term—the wide-eyed interest in the prodigy, in Endeavor’s son—had burned out fast, smothered by the weight of his silence and the frost of his indifference.

Now, they mostly stared. Sometimes whispered behind his back when they thought he couldn’t hear. He always could. The words were soft, brittle little things, fragments of speculation that skittered across the edges of his awareness like dry leaves in the wind. He didn’t mind. That kind of attention was tolerable. Familiar, even. It was background noise—easy to filter out, easy to ignore.

What wasn’t tolerable—what made his skin crawl—was when they tried to close the distance. When they spoke to him. When the voices weren’t floating behind him in hushed tones but aimed directly at him, sharp as arrows. When the air between them felt too thin, saturated with expectation.

That was the part he hated—the expectation. The silent insistence in their gazes, the weight of a question hanging like a blade over his head: Answer. Participate. Be part of this thing you never asked for. Every time, it set his nerves on fire. A slow, insidious burn beneath his skin, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. It crawled up his arms and across his scalp, tugging at the edges of the walls he’d built so carefully, so desperately, to keep himself contained.

The list wasn’t formal, of course. No names scribbled in the margins of a notebook, no secret notes tucked under his mattress, no encrypted digital files locked behind layers of passwords. Nothing so tangible. Just a quiet, meticulous accounting—mental, invisible—etched into the architecture of his mind. A hierarchy of hazards. A catalog of the people most likely to breach the fragile perimeter he’d built around himself. Those who posed the greatest threat. Those who had the power—not just the strength, but the persistence—to knock him off balance, to pry open the seams of his carefully manufactured neutrality.

At first, it wasn’t even a list. A single name doesn’t qualify as a list. It was just one. One person who loomed so large in the shape of his new world that even trying not to think about him felt like trying not to see the sun.

All Might.

The Symbol of Peace. The number one hero. The man whose name drew entire cities into his orbit, whose smile was so bright it burned. The man everyone loved. The man Endeavor hated. The man Shouto had been raised to surpass.

He’d wanted to avoid him long before he even set foot on UA’s campus—not because he disliked him, but because he couldn’t afford to look at him for too long without feeling the weight of every expectation ever pressed into his bones. Avoidance, in this case, wasn’t just self-preservation. It was survival. Because every time his eyes landed on that towering frame, every time he heard the booming cadence of that voice, he felt his father’s shadow crawling up his spine. He felt his own inadequacy humming like static in his veins.

He had never actually met the man in person, and truthfully, he had no desire to. All Might existed on a level that felt almost unreal—more legend than human, more myth than man. Everything about him was too big, too bright, too loud; a towering presence that filled every room long before he stepped through the door. To Shouto, All Might was the embodiment of everything Endeavor despised. A shining beacon of hope that clashed sharply against the harsh, grueling standards his father had set—a reminder of the ideals Shouto was both expected to embrace and resist.

All Might wasn’t just a person; he was a symbol. A living, breathing icon wrapped in layers of bright colors and an unyielding grin so wide it seemed almost too forced, too rehearsed to be genuine. Behind that smile, Shouto suspected, was something more complicated—something carefully hidden. A shadow in the shape of a person, cast long and impossible to outrun.

And yet, this symbol—the very definition of heroism to the world—had been reduced to a schoolteacher. A position that, on its face, should have felt grounding, normal. But to Shouto, it felt like the cruelest kind of irony. The universe’s twisted sense of humor.

When he first heard that All Might would be teaching at UA, it hit him like a punch to the gut. The man who was supposed to inspire, to lead, was now standing in the same classrooms, walking the same halls, sharing the same spaces as students like him. It was as if the universe was laughing behind his back, much like the snickering whispers of his classmates. A joke at his expense, a cosmic joke where the mighty symbol of peace was now just another face in the crowd—yet one impossible to ignore.

Shouto went out of his way to avoid All Might like the plague. Thankfully, that was easier than initially expected—because outside of class, the hero was practically nonexistent. More myth than man in the hallways of UA, All Might was like a ghost, slipping in and out of the school with the fluidity of a shadow. Always gone on some urgent mission, some critical rescue or crisis that only he could handle. He was rarely seen except in fleeting moments—arriving to greet the students with that overwhelming smile, or stepping back into the shadows just as quickly, leaving behind nothing but a faint echo of his presence.

Yet, even when he wasn’t physically there, All Might’s presence seemed to permeate every corner of the building. It was like the air itself thickened around the spaces he frequented, as if his reputation and sheer force of will pushed the atmosphere aside like parting a sea. The very idea of him was enough to bend the energy of the school, an invisible gravitational pull that weighed on every student, teacher, and hallway alike.

Shouto could feel it, even when the rooms were empty—an almost tangible pressure, a silent expectation hanging heavy in the air. It wasn’t just All Might’s physical presence that was imposing; it was the legend, the symbol, the impossible standard he represented. The space he occupied wasn’t just measured in feet and inches, but in stories told in hushed reverence and unspoken challenges. The aura of a hero who had saved countless lives, who had shaped the very idea of what it meant to be a symbol of peace.

And Shouto, despite himself, found that weight suffocating. It pressed on his chest like a storm cloud, a reminder of everything he was supposed to be and, more importantly, everything he was expected to never become. So he kept his distance, avoided the hallways where All Might’s laughter still seemed to echo, and tried not to let the shadow of the hero creep into the corners of his own mind.

Then came Aizawa. His arrival into Shouto’s mental list of people to avoid was swift and almost instinctual—an automatic response that settled deep and fast after their first Foundational Hero Studies class together. It wasn’t marked by any grand showdown, no explosive confrontation or fierce shouting match that would have been easier to process. Instead, it was subtle. Quiet. A confrontation without noise, without spectacle.

He had been summoned to Aizawa’s office—not for punishment, not for praise, but for something far more unsettling. The kind of meeting that leaves no room for argument, just a slow, suffocating sense of being measured and found wanting. Aizawa’s gaze was calm, but it was sharp and unrelenting, like a blade sliding beneath skin to cut something out. It wasn’t the fire of anger that blazed in his father’s eyes, but the cold, precise chill of disappointment that settled in the room like a heavy fog. That quiet stillness that followed a storm, the eerie calm after the wreckage.

In many ways, it was worse than his father’s yelling. Because it wasn’t loud—it was a weight pressing down on his chest, a silent judgment that left no space for defense or retaliation. It was the kind of quiet that screamed. Shouto found himself unable to look away from those steady eyes, the slow burn of Aizawa’s attention fixing him in place, weighing him down. If fear were something that could take shape, he thought maybe it would curl itself like smoke in the stillness of that office, tangible and suffocating.

And just like that, without a word raised above a whisper, Aizawa had earned a place on Shouto’s list—another person whose presence he would dodge, avoid, and brace for, just like he had with his father.

Kaminari followed soon after, but his approach was different—softer in delivery, yet somehow just as piercing in its effect. Where others wielded sharp words or cold indifference like weapons, Kaminari’s presence was a slow, insidious erosion of the barriers Shouto had spent years building. Their training match in the midst of that unforgiving blizzard had stripped something away from Shouto—something he hadn’t intended to show or even admit existed.

It wasn’t pain in the traditional sense. There was no sharp edge or sudden flare of agony. Instead, it was a gentler, far more dangerous sensation. A vulnerability that crept quietly beneath the surface, unassuming but relentless. It was softness—a fragile, tender thing—mistaken for connection. Warmth mistaken for weakness.

He hated how effortlessly Kaminari had burrowed beneath his defenses, how he’d been there when Shouto faltered, catching him with no hesitation, pulling him back from the edge like he was fragile, like he needed saving. That moment had twisted something inside Shouto, leaving an ache that wasn’t quite pain, but wasn’t far from it either.

The sheer unexpectedness of it all unsettled him—Kaminari’s easy laughter, the casual kindness he showed without expecting anything in return. It was a kind of soft brutality, tearing through Shouto’s cold armor not with force, but with persistent warmth and presence. And Shouto wanted nothing more than to slam those walls back up, to shut it all out. He hated the vulnerability Kaminari had drawn out of him. Hated how it unsettled his carefully maintained isolation.  

Not to mention the way he had felt after touching the other boy—how his skin had instantly crawled and sparked, as if a colony of invisible fire ants were burrowing beneath the surface, gnawing and stinging with relentless ferocity. The sensation wasn’t just physical; it was an assault on every nerve ending, a burning itch that refused to be scratched, a maddening buzz that seemed to crawl deeper with every passing second.

He had barely made it to the shower before the heat beneath his skin became unbearable. The water ran hot, but it barely dulled the torment. He scrubbed and scrubbed, over and over, desperate to wash away whatever unseen poison had taken root in his flesh. When he finally emerged, his skin was rubbed raw—pink and tender, dotted with angry red marks that cracked and flaked like the pages of a burned book left too long in the sun. Each movement sent fresh waves of sensitivity racing beneath his skin, and he kept his arms wrapped tightly around himself, as if to shield what felt like a battlefield.

He was pretty sure—no, more than sure—that the other boy had used his quirk on him. But why? That was the question that gnawed at him just as relentlessly. He knew well enough that all of his classmates disliked him, but he hadn’t thought it would go this far. He hadn’t believed the animosity could manifest in such a direct, physical attack. Was it a joke? Some twisted prank meant to unsettle or humiliate? Or was it simply because the other boy could—because sometimes, people hurt others without rhyme or reason, just to remind themselves they had power.

Shouto had learned that lesson early on. People didn’t always need reasons to inflict pain. Sometimes cruelty was just a fact of existence—a cold, biting reality as unavoidable as the air he breathed. And yet, even knowing this, the sting of the attack lingered far longer than the physical marks, settling deep into his bones like an unwelcome reminder that in this world, vulnerability was a dangerous thing.

Bakugou was the most recent addition to the list. He hadn’t been there at the very beginning—no, that was reserved for people like All Might or his father—but over time, Katsuki had carved a place for himself in Shouto’s cautious mental ledger.

Shouto had certainly noticed him before. How could he not? Bakugou was impossible to ignore. He was loud, brash, and unapologetically aggressive in a way that tore through the ambient noise of the classroom like a storm. The other boy’s voice was always just a bit too sharp, a bit too commanding, and his presence filled any space he entered with a kind of combustible energy.

And yet, beyond the noise, there was undeniable competence. Bakugou’s power was raw and flashy, explosive in the literal sense—both figuratively and physically. His quirk was the kind that demanded attention, the kind that left scorch marks on the battlefield and lingering echoes in the minds of those who faced him. His strikes were fast and brutal, and his tactical mind was sharp beneath the bluster.

His temper was notoriously short, flaring up at the smallest provocation. His words came out fast and sharp, often cutting more than they intended, his mouth a constant barrage of insults, challenges, and defiance. But it wasn’t just anger or bluster—it was ambition. Pure, unyielding ambition that radiated off him like heat from a furnace. 

There was something too loud about him, too volatile—like a firework blazing brightly and dangerously, but destined to fizzle out. Shouto preferred to keep his distance, to observe quietly and precisely rather than engage with the chaos Bakugou seemed to embody.

But as weeks turned into months, and the subtle battles of rankings and reputation played out day after day, Katsuki Bakugou grew more than just a blip on that mental ledger. He became a presence, a force—a puzzle to be reckoned with, if not yet understood.

Still, despite all of that—his overwhelming presence, his explosive power, and that relentless drive that seemed to burn hotter than anyone else’s—Shouto hadn’t really paid him much mind at first. Bakugou was, in many ways, just another blustering classmate, loud and aggressive and impossible to ignore but ultimately predictable in his volatility. He was the loudest storm in a sea of students, but one that Shouto thought he could simply navigate around without much effort.

Until recently.

Somewhere, slowly and almost imperceptibly, something had shifted. Between the start of the semester and now, Bakugou had transformed in Shouto’s eyes. He had gone from being just another overly aggressive boy who yelled too much and threw himself at everything with reckless abandon, to something… different. More precise. Sharper. Focused in a way that cut through the noise and reached directly toward him.

It wasn’t just the general atmosphere of Bakugou’s intensity—it was something more personal. Something aimed at Shouto specifically. Shouto couldn’t say when exactly it started, but over time, he became painfully aware of that burning, watchful gaze that seemed to linger a little too long. The subtle narrowing of Bakugou’s eyes when they crossed paths, like a predator sizing up its prey or an opponent who refused to be ignored.

He didn’t know why.

Bakugou never made it easy to understand his thoughts or intentions. They never spoke unless forced—only the bare minimum of words exchanged, mostly during those mandatory team-ups where circumstance rather than choice drew them together. Even then, Bakugou’s words were clipped, impatient, and sharp, as if he were perpetually annoyed at having to waste breath on someone who wasn’t quite fitting into his expectations.

What made it worse was the way Bakugou never seemed satisfied with Shouto’s performance, like he was trying to solve a puzzle that both fascinated and frustrated him. It was as if Shouto was this quiet, inscrutable equation that Bakugou had been forced to confront and just couldn’t figure out how to break down. A problem he didn’t want to waste time on but couldn’t quite stop himself from obsessing over. And Shouto hated how much it unnerved him.

Lately, that scrutiny had become impossible to ignore. It settled over Shouto like a shadow, thick and unyielding, pressing down on him with the weight of a storm just on the verge of breaking loose. It wasn’t subtle anymore—no longer the kind of casual, half-attentive observation one might expect between classmates. It was heavy. Irritated. Relentless.

Shouto felt it in every moment they shared—whether they were sparring in training or sitting silently in class. It was there in the way Bakugou’s gaze burned into him, never wavering, like a predator circling its prey just before the strike. That storm cloud of attention hovered constantly at the edges of Shouto’s awareness, crackling with an unspoken promise of thunder, waiting, watching, weighing him.

But it wasn’t just that Bakugou had begun to watch him more closely—it was how he watched. There was no casual curiosity behind those sharp, calculating eyes. No mere idle rivalry or distant respect. Instead, it was something harsher, rawer. Judgment. A fierce, feral kind of judgment that felt like it could sear through flesh and bone even from across the room. It was the kind of stare that made Shouto’s skin prick and crawl, as if he were being dissected alive beneath the weight of those relentless eyes.

Every time Shouto dared to glance in Bakugou’s direction, his gaze was already there—like a trap snapping shut. Pinning him down, breaking him apart piece by piece with cold, clinical precision. Searching. Always searching. Looking for any crack in his armor. Hunting for weakness.

And maybe Bakugou wasn’t wrong to look.

Because the truth was, Shouto did have those cracks. They were hidden beneath the controlled exterior, beneath the carefully measured words and neutral expression. Vulnerabilities he kept locked away—weaknesses carved out by his past, by the unbearable weight of expectations, by the parts of himself he refused to show.

During their sparring match, everything that had been simmering beneath the surface finally boiled over. The tension between them wasn’t just a quiet undercurrent anymore—it was a raging current, impossible to ignore.

Bakugou’s movements were something else entirely that day. They weren’t reckless or wild—far from it. Instead, they were razor-sharp, precise, and charged with an intensity that made every strike feel like it was powered by more than just raw muscle or quirk. There was a fire behind each blow, something fierce and dangerous, something that went beyond competition. Hatred, maybe. Or something even more complicated: a desperate, gnawing anger that clawed its way out with every snap of his fists.

The look in Bakugou’s eyes—his smoldering gaze locked onto Shouto with a ferocity that was almost painful—brought something unwelcome and raw to Shouto’s mind. It was a look he recognized all too well. It was the same look Natsuo wears whenever he’s allowed to see his brother. That same haunted glare, filled with a brittle mixture of pain and fury, like Shouto’s very presence was enough to rip open old wounds.

That look—like grief barely held together by the jagged shards of fury. Like every piece of it was raw and festering beneath a fragile skin, threatening to burst open at any moment. It was the look of someone who was trying to make sense of loss and confusion by setting something else ablaze—trying to burn away the ache by burning someone else down in turn.

Natsuo had never been able to hide his feelings, not for a second. His emotions were worn openly and unapologetically—like a suit of armor forged from raw rage and heartbreak. Every word he spoke seemed soaked in bitter frustration, every glare cut sharper than any blade, and every slammed door echoed like a thunderclap announcing the storm inside him. Even in the quietest moments, when his jaw clenched tight or when silence stretched thick between words, the weight of his pain and resentment pressed heavily in the air around him. Whenever Shouto was near, even if Natsuo didn’t voice his anger outright, Shouto could still feel the heavy undercurrent of resentment pulsing just beneath the surface, like a low hum vibrating through the walls.  

Bakugou’s rage was different—not the same kind of grief, but it carried a brutal intensity all its own. It was sharper, more focused, but no less dangerous. It was an obsession that burned bright and aimless all at once—a relentless hunger that sought an outlet, even if it wasn’t always clear why or where. That kind of rage wasn’t unfamiliar to Shouto. He recognized it, not because he shared it, but because he had been the target of it many times before. That cutting edge of fury, aimed so directly at him, was a language he knew all too well.

And during that sparring match, he felt it again with brutal clarity. It was like being slammed headfirst into a raging current—a raw, unforgiving force of anger and hatred funneled so intensely that it felt as if it could shred him apart. It was like being caught in the stream of a pressure washer, the relentless spray hammering against his skin, pushing him back with a force he couldn’t easily resist. That unyielding, burning rage wasn’t just around him—it was focused on him, seeking to overwhelm, to dominate, to erase.

In that moment, Shouto wasn’t just fighting Bakugou’s fists or tactics—he was facing the weight of a raw, elemental fury aimed straight at him, a tide he had no choice but to endure.

He didn’t even know why.

He’d turned the thought over once or twice, considered it in passing, like a sharp stone rolling around in his pocket—uncomfortable, but not enough to hold on to. Maybe Bakugou hated him on principle. That kind of thing wasn’t new. It happened a lot. Existing as himself was usually enough to earn that kind of resentment.

But the reason didn’t matter. It never mattered. Shouto didn’t need to understand something to avoid it. That was his rule. His method. His survival tactic. Avoidance as preservation. Distance as a shield. Pretend the fire isn’t real, and maybe you won’t get burned. Ignore. Divert. Disappear.

So, yes. Bakugou had made the list. Quietly, inevitably, like a storm cloud shifting into place on the horizon. Avoiding Bakugou wasn’t about fear—not exactly. It wasn’t hatred either. Shouto didn’t have the time or energy for something as consuming as hate. No, this was simpler. Cleaner. It was about self-preservation.

Because Bakugou wasn’t just loud. He wasn’t just volatile. He was heat. Raw, blistering heat. The kind that burned whether you touched it or not. And Shouto had spent his entire life trying to escape fire.

It was looking more and more like Kirishima, too, would have to be added to that list.

That realization settled into Shouto like a stone sinking through water—slow, inevitable, heavy enough to leave ripples in its wake. He didn’t want it to be true. Kirishima had always seemed… simple. Not in an unkind way—just uncomplicated. Bright where Shouto was shadow. A voice like sunlight, all warmth and blunt sincerity, with nothing hiding underneath. Or so he thought.

But lately, there had been something else in Kirishima’s persistence—an edge Shouto couldn’t quite define. Not sharp, like Bakugou’s jagged rage. Not invasive in the way Kaminari’s warmth had been. It was softer than both, but no less dangerous for it. Because softness was unpredictable. Softness seeped through cracks you didn’t know you had until it was too late.

Kaminari, at least, had backed off. Whether it was because he’d picked up on the signs, or just lost interest, Shouto didn’t know—and didn’t care enough to question. His absence was a relief. Bakugou, on the other hand… Bakugou’s cutting anger and sharp-edged fixation had almost become familiar by now. Like a background hum, irritating but predictable. Shouto could manage predictable.

But the thought of adding another name to the mental list—another person to watch, to anticipate, to navigate around—left a deep exhaustion in his bones. The kind that sleep didn’t touch. The kind that settled in his joints and weighed down his steps, like gravity had found something extra to cling to inside him.

Avoidance took energy. Planning routes, calculating exits, parsing tone and intent before a single word left his mouth—it all demanded something of him. And he was so, so tired of giving pieces of himself away just to keep the world at arm’s length.

The more time passed, the more Shouto realized how little he had understood about the other boy. Kirishima’s presence was deceptively smooth, like a current running under still water—unseen, unnoticed, until you felt the pull against your legs and realized you were being dragged somewhere you hadn’t agreed to go.

At first, he had seemed harmless. Safe, even. Kirishima was loud, yes—but not in the same way Bakugou was. Not like an explosion detonating in a confined space, not like something that shook you to your bones and demanded all your defenses at once. His energy wasn’t jagged. It didn’t slam into Shouto’s walls like a battering ram. It slid through cracks instead—quiet, almost lazy in its persistence.

He didn’t press with sharp elbows or barbed words. No aggression, no snapping teeth. Kirishima didn’t fight his way in. He smiled his way in. And that was worse. So much worse. Because Kirishima was… too nice. Too easy. Too friendly in a way that felt like a trap. And Shouto hated traps.

Kirishima’s attacks weren’t attacks in the usual sense. They were different. Subtle. Underhanded. No shouting, no threats—just warmth, layered over patience, offered like a hand you didn’t realize was pulling you forward until you were already halfway through the door.

There was a cleverness in that, even if no one else saw it. A sharpness hidden behind that open grin, that easy laugh. A kind of patience that didn’t feel natural. It wasn’t the restless, reckless energy of someone who spoke without thinking. No, Kirishima thought. He waited. He chose his moments like someone setting snares in the dark.

It had to be intentional. It felt intentional. The way his words always landed just soft enough to sound sincere, the way he never pushed too hard—but never stopped trying, either. That wasn’t randomness. That was a pattern. That was control.

It was manipulation. Maybe not in the obvious way—no threats, no guilt, no overt demands—but in something quieter, stickier. In the way he created warmth and then offered Shouto a place in it, as if that were something Shouto wanted. Needed.

There was nothing in Kirishima’s behavior that could be categorized as outward hostility. Nothing sharp, nothing that could be pinned down and called aggression. On the surface, it was all smiles and good intentions—warmth packaged in something that looked safe. But underneath that softness, Shouto sensed something else. Something stubborn. Something that refused to let go.

It wasn’t kindness. Not really. It was persistence. Relentless, grinding persistence that came dressed as concern, wrapped in casual jokes and effortless laughter. He would corner Shouto in the hallway under the guise of a friendly chat, blocking the path with his easy stance and his stupid grin that didn’t seem to waver, no matter how flat Shouto’s responses were.

He hovered over his desk during breaks, leaning against the wood with elbows planted like roots, like he intended to stay. His voice would cut through the dull classroom hum, pulling Shouto into conversations he never volunteered for. Sometimes it was harmless small talk. Sometimes it was jokes, little bursts of brightness that made everyone else laugh—even Bakugou, once or twice, against his will. 

And then there were the invitations. Lunch in the cafeteria. Training together after class. Hanging out in the with the others after school. Always phrased casually, like it didn’t matter, like Shouto could say no. But when he did, the requests didn’t stop. They never stopped. That was the part that got to him—the insistence. The sheer, maddening consistency of it.

It wasn’t just that Kirishima was friendly. It was that he didn’t back down. He didn’t take the hint. He didn’t flinch at Shouto’s silence or turn away when his answers were clipped and cold. He just… stayed. Again and again, like a tide wearing away at a cliff face.

And Shouto could feel it. That slow erosion. The way every knock on his walls echoed louder than the last. The way every joke, every laugh, every invitation felt like another drop of water against stone—small on its own, but over time, powerful enough to carve through.

He didn’t understand why it bothered him so much. Maybe because it felt calculated, even if it wasn’t. Maybe because it worked—because lately, Shouto found himself answering, sometimes without meaning to. Found himself listening when he should have tuned it out. That wasn’t safety. That wasn’t friendship. That was a trap.

It wasn’t a loud kind of intimidation. Kirishima didn’t stomp or shout or snarl like Bakugou, didn’t barrel through walls or shove his presence down your throat until you couldn’t breathe. No—Kirishima’s version of intimidation was something subtler, something that worked its way in like smoke under a door.

It was warmth. That was the part that unsettled Shouto the most—that creeping, clinging warmth that slid under his skin without permission. It didn’t burn, not like fire. It smothered. Wrapped itself around his ribs until his breaths felt shallow, until every word he didn’t say tasted like guilt.

Because that’s what Kirishima did—he made silence feel wrong. Made rejection feel like cruelty. Every time Shouto ignored him, every time he cut him down with a clipped answer or stared blankly instead of smiling, it was like throwing a stone into water and watching it ripple out across that unwavering grin. Kirishima never looked hurt—never frowned, never scowled—but the possibility that he could, that one day he might, settled like lead in Shouto’s stomach.

And that was the trap, wasn’t it? That unspoken expectation. That quiet pressure to be something he wasn’t. Always being watched, always being measured—not in the harsh, blazing way of his father, but in something softer, more insidious.

Shouto didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand why this boy, of all people, insisted on pushing against walls he should have known were there for a reason. Was this calculated? Some kind of strategy to get him to lower his guard? A trick to make him pliant, so that when the strike finally came, Shouto wouldn’t see it coming?

It sounded paranoid when he thought it like that, but paranoia was survival. He knew what came after smiles. He’d seen this tactic before—too many times to count. Soft smiles. Gentle hands. Voices so warm they could melt frost. Until they didn’t. Until that warmth coiled tighter and tighter until it wasn’t a blanket anymore, but a rope.

A scarf turned noose.

He had plenty of experience with false kindness. It was a language he’d been fluent in since childhood—a dialect of smiles sharpened into blades, of gentle tones laced with poison. He had seen it before, over and over, from people far more dangerous than Kirishima could ever dream of being. People who wore kindness like a costume, every word and gesture stitched together with bright thread to hide the black rot beneath.

He knew the signs. He remembered. A hand, warm and steady, reaching down to help him up after training—only for those same fingers to curl into a fist, swinging down, splitting skin and leaving purple blooming across his jaw. A soft laugh, an arm looping loosely around his shoulders—before it tightened. Tightened and tightened, until it was a vice, until his ribs ground together like gears in a broken machine and he couldn’t breathe no matter how hard he clawed at the grip.

And worse, so much worse, was the way the warmth always came first. Always lured him in with something soft, something that felt like safety. Like a sunbeam breaking through frost. Until it burned.

Until it blistered, hot-hot-hot, searing through the layers of control he had wrapped around himself like armor. Until it turned cold, so cold, freezing him in place with the knowledge that he had been fooled again. Trapped again. That no matter how hard he tried to anticipate it, no matter how high he built his walls, it would always come.

A mother turned to fire. Burns. Freezes. Hurts. Hurts. Hurts— He could feel the echoes of it even now, crawling down the backs of his arms, prickling in his fingers like frostbite and fire sharing the same space. That was what Kirishima’s persistence tasted like. Not warmth. Not kindness. A promise. A warning. A ticking clock. A screaming kettle.

He had learned—burned, branded into his memory—the hard way that warmth was never free. There was always a cost, always a hook buried in the soft flesh of it, waiting to rip. Kindness wasn’t a gift; it was a weapon. A lure meant to draw you close, lower your guard, make you pliant and open. And then—when you were soft enough, trusting enough—the strike came. It always came.

It didn’t matter if it was real or not. Genuine kindness could still kill you. Maybe that made it worse—when it was real. When it felt so good you let yourself believe, even for a second, that you deserved it. That it wouldn’t vanish like smoke or turn sharp and cut you to ribbons. That maybe this time was different. He’d been that fool before, and the scars still glowed every time the memory touched him. 

So now, when he saw warmth, he didn’t feel comfort. He felt teeth.

And Kirishima… Kirishima was all teeth behind a grin, whether he knew it or not. The way he reached out, the way he smiled like sunlight breaking through clouds, the way he refused to let go no matter how many walls Shouto stacked between them—it was wrong. It was familiar in a way that made his stomach knot and his pulse stutter in his throat. That persistence, that relentless optimism—it was a slow-acting poison disguised as sugar.

Shouto wasn’t going to drink it. He wasn’t going to let Kirishima pull him close just to watch him break. He wouldn’t be fooled again. Wouldn’t be dragged back into that old game of warmth and ruin. He’d been there once—felt it in his skin, in his bones, in the places where his mother’s love had burned red, then iced over blue until he couldn’t tell which part hurt worse.

He would not let history repeat. He would not let Kirishima trick him the way his mother had.

Distance. That was the only safe choice. Stay on his side of the glass, where no one’s hands could reach in and tangle him up, where no warmth could slip past the cracks in his armor and spread like infection. For his own safety, he would keep the line. And if that meant being cold, distant, cruel—then so be it.

He just wished the other boy would take the hint. 

For as long as Shouto could remember, his father’s presence had been the only constant in a world that otherwise shifted like sand beneath his feet. It wasn’t the gentle steadiness most children might imagine when they thought of a parent’s presence; it was a harsh, blistering kind of constancy—unyielding, merciless, as consuming as wildfire. His father’s demands had filled every corner of his life like smoke in a sealed room, choking out anything soft, anything free. The weight of it was crushing, yes, but at least it was there—a structure, a frame, a rigid spine he could brace against.

And now? Now it was gone. Vanished so abruptly it was disorienting, like stepping off a stair that wasn’t there. One moment, that searing force pressed down on him, shaping him with every word, every order, every expectation—and the next, it had slipped away like smoke curling from a dying flame. No grand departure. No warning. Just absence. An emptiness so sharp it felt wrong.

The sudden quiet of it made his ears ring. The silence wasn’t relief—not in the way he’d thought it would be. It was something stranger, something colder. A hollow ache that stretched wide inside his chest, echoing in places he didn’t know existed until they were empty. It was like someone had stripped the heat from his bones, leaving only frost in its wake.

For years, that heat—scalding, oppressive, inescapable—had anchored him. It had told him who to be, what to want, what to hate. It had been unbearable, but it had also been purpose. A brutal, relentless sort of purpose, yes, but purpose nonetheless. And now, without it, he felt unmoored—adrift in a vast, indifferent ocean with no land in sight. No father’s voice to steer him, no suffocating presence to rage against. Just emptiness. Just cold. 

After everything—after all the years he had spent wishing for freedom—he couldn’t even recognize what to do with it now that it was his.

Before Shouto had ever stepped through the doors of UA, his life had been ruled by ritual. Not just a schedule—a doctrine, something carved into his bones so deeply that it no longer felt like choice but inevitability. The routine wasn’t just structure; it was survival. It was certainty in a house that offered none. It was the only constant in a world where everything else was sharp edges and sudden firestorms.

Every morning began the same way. Before the sun. Before the birds. Before the world even remembered how to breathe. The alarm would blink its harsh, crimson glow across the dark room, each number bleeding into the next— 5:00 AM , unwavering and merciless. The first time, years ago, that number had felt monstrous to him. It was an hour made for shadows, not for waking. Back then, his small body had ached for more sleep, for softness, for anything warm enough to cling to. But over time, the ache had dulled. Sleep became a weakness, a thing for lesser people, and he was not allowed to be lesser.

He learned to rise at that hour without hesitation. Learned to fold away exhaustion like another layer of clothes he didn’t need. The darkness stopped feeling heavy; it became familiar. A second skin. The cold of the floorboards beneath his bare feet stopped biting and instead became grounding—a reminder that pain was normal, pain was fine, pain was safe if it meant progress.

He memorized the house at that hour: the silence so thick it felt like glass, the faint hum of the refrigerator in the distance, the creak of his father’s steps pacing the hall like a metronome to which Shouto’s life kept time. There was a rhythm to those mornings, a cadence carved from discipline and demand, and Shouto learned to match it perfectly. Wake. Dress. Stretch until muscles screamed. Push until lungs burned. Ice, fire, ice, fire—control, control, control until nothing slipped.

The world before dawn belonged to them—him and his father—and in some twisted way, that had been a comfort. The routine was a leash, yes, but it was also a lifeline. It gave him a purpose so consuming there was no room for doubt. No room for questions. No room for… anything else.

They would sit together in the study for breakfast, a room that never felt like a room meant for living—too pristine, too calculated, like every inch of it had been designed for control rather than comfort. The air was always too still, almost brittle, like one wrong word might make it shatter.

Even there, even in that forced proximity, there was a distance so sharp it felt like a blade. They didn’t speak. They never spoke—not really. The silence wasn’t companionable; it was suffocating, thick with everything that went unsaid. Every breath felt measured, every small sound magnified: the scrape of cutlery against porcelain, the soft clink of a teacup meeting its saucer, the faint rustle of newspaper pages as they were turned with methodical precision.

And always, always that current of expectation—taut and humming—pressing against his skin like static. It wasn’t loud, but it was relentless. An unspoken command to sit straight, to eat neatly, to be perfect without being told.

They never ate the same thing. Never shared food the way other families did. There were no passing dishes, no casual requests, no overlap. It was segregation disguised as civility. His father’s plate always heavy, full of protein and power—meat seared dark, steaming rice, greens dressed with something sharp. A soldier’s fuel.

Shouto’s was different. Always the same. His own ritual, carved out like a small island in a sea of control: one slice of multigrain toast, plain, and a single boiled egg perched like a pale stone on the plate. No salt. No butter. Nothing unnecessary. It was simple, predictable—utterly devoid of indulgence.

And he clung to that simplicity like a talisman. The repetition grounded him. The blandness was a shield. It was something he could control when everything else in his life was dictated by someone else’s will. The taste never changed—dry toast that crumbled at the edges, the faint sulfur bite of egg yolk. It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t even comfort, not really. But it was familiar. Familiar was as close to comfort as he could allow himself.

The study’s clock ticked like a metronome through it all, marking the seconds of silence, until breakfast was finished and another day of training—or punishment, or both—began.

His father, on the other hand, never settled for the bare minimum. His meals were lavish affairs, as carefully curated and commanding as everything else he did. The aroma of his food would drift into the room like an unspoken announcement—thick and intoxicating, a warm, rich promise that teased Shouto’s senses but was never offered to him.

There were thick, juicy steaks, seared just right so the edges curled and caramelized into a perfect crust, the scent of sizzling fat mingling with hints of rosemary and garlic. Stacks of golden pancakes, fluffy and inviting, would be piled high, their surface glistening with melting butter and syrup that pooled like liquid amber around their base. The sharp, smoky tang of bacon crisped to perfection cut through the sweetness, a contrast that made the whole table smell like indulgence itself. Eggs scrambled in decadent butter, creamy and rich, seemed to ooze luxury from the plate.

Each morning, the scents wove through the air, filling the study with a kind of richness that Shouto was painfully aware he was barred from tasting. His mouth would water involuntarily, and his stomach would tighten, growling quietly—an echo of longing and hunger he dared not acknowledge aloud.

Yet, despite the hunger and the tantalizing smells, Shouto remained silent. His hands steady, his jaw clenched, he nibbled on his slice of plain multigrain toast, every bite dry and unremarkable in contrast to the feast before him. He did not speak. He did not complain. He simply watched. Watched his father eat with a detached sort of enjoyment, the kind of self-satisfied ease that came from absolute power and control.

His father’s presence at the table was as commanding as his meals—calm but authoritative, the way he cut his food precise and deliberate, savoring each bite in a way that seemed to mock Shouto’s own sparing existence. That silent, unyielding control made Shouto feel even smaller—like a shadow tucked away in the corner of a room meant for kings.

It made a harsh kind of sense, really. His father was a hero in the truest, most tangible sense—someone who bore the weight of responsibility on his broad shoulders every single day. The kind of hero who fought villains in the streets, saved lives teetering on the edge of death, and faced dangers that would break most people. His strength wasn’t just physical; it was endurance and focus, honed over years of brutal, unyielding effort. His father’s life was a battlefield, and every victory was carved out with sweat, pain, and sacrifice.

He had earned everything he took—every lavish meal, every sharp glance of authority, every inch of respect and power. There was no question about that. It was as natural and inevitable as the sun rising.

And then there was Shouto. What had he earned? What had he done to deserve anything more than the cold crumbs left in his wake? He was still just a boy. A boy stumbling through expectations so colossal they felt like mountains crushing his chest. A boy whose very existence seemed to be measured against an impossible standard, one crafted by the unrelenting hands of his father.

No matter how fiercely he pushed himself, how many hours he spent training alone in the cold, how many times he forced the flames within to roar and obey—nothing ever seemed enough. The flames faltered; his control slipped; the power that should have been his birthright betrayed him time and time again.

He was flawed. Incomplete. A failure in the eyes of the man who mattered most. His efforts, no matter how unyielding, were never more than half-measures compared to the relentless perfection his father demanded.

His father’s work was important, and so too was the reward that came with it. The meals his father ate, rich and abundant, were tokens of a life earned through sacrifice and glory. And Shouto? What did he have? Only his training—a ceaseless cycle of flawed attempts, the sting of unmet expectations, and the bitter taste of failure that clung to his skin like ash.

It was a daily, unspoken reminder of the vast, yawning gulf that stretched between them—between the towering expectations laid upon his shoulders and the meager achievements he could claim. Between the raw, undeniable power his father wielded with effortless authority, and the quiet submission Shouto felt compelled to embody. Between the man his father was—unstoppable, revered, commanding—and the boy he was expected to become, a mere reflection forged in the shadow of impossible standards.

Of course, the man deserved larger meals, richer meals, the kind of sustenance that fueled legends. The disparity was obvious, painfully so: his father’s plate was piled high with thick, savory cuts of meat, golden stacks of syrup-drenched pancakes, and crispy bacon sizzling with the promise of indulgence. Meanwhile, Shouto’s modest slice of plain multigrain toast and solitary boiled egg felt like a token, a small offering from a world he was never quite allowed to fully inhabit.

The divide wasn’t just in the food—it was in the space between them during those quiet mornings. The sharp contrast of their worlds settled heavily in the silence that enveloped the breakfast table, thick enough to suffocate. Yet, in that silence, Shouto learned to mask the turmoil within. He forced himself to accept the gulf, to shove down the gnawing ache of inadequacy, and endure the cold sting of knowing that, no matter what, he might never be enough.

He learned to swallow the bitter taste of failure with the same mechanical precision as he chewed his bland breakfast. After the last bite, he rose quietly, without a word, collecting their plates with deliberate care. His movements were practiced, fluid—always without so much as a glance toward his father, always without any hint of acknowledgment. The weight of unspoken rules pressed down on him, heavier than any spoken rebuke.

His father, in turn, would finish his meal and leave without a word, his departure as routine and expected as the rising sun. No goodbyes. No parting advice. Just a silent exit, an unspoken command that the day had begun and it was time to fulfill their separate roles once more.

The routine was rigid, unmoving, carved into their lives like stone. And Shouto had long since learned that in this carefully choreographed dance, words were unnecessary. They were replaced by an understanding forged in cold necessity—the understanding that distance, both physical and emotional, was not just a space but a boundary he dared not cross.

They both knew what was expected of Shouto in his father’s absence, though no words were ever exchanged to articulate it. The expectation hung heavy in the air, an unspoken command etched into the fabric of their daily lives. It wasn’t something that needed to be said aloud—both of them understood perfectly well what the routine demanded.

Shouto moved toward the kitchen with the quiet inevitability of a clockwork mechanism, his steps measured and unhesitating. Washing the dishes had become more than a chore—it was a ritual, a steady rhythm that he had come to depend on when everything else in his world felt disordered and uncertain. The hot water splashing over his hands, the sound of soap bubbles popping, the rhythmic swish of his arms scrubbing each plate and glass—it was a tangible sequence that grounded him, tethering him to some semblance of order amid the chaos of expectation and disappointment.

There was no emotion in the task. No room for bitterness or sorrow. Just movement. Just action. The familiarity of the motions carved a protective barrier around him, a shield from the swirling currents of judgment and unspoken resentment that filled the house. This was something he could control, something he could accomplish without faltering.

He wasn’t good enough in his father’s eyes. He wasn’t the perfect son or the ideal successor. He was a flawed, uneven piece in a puzzle that never quite fit. Yet here, in this simple act of washing dishes, there was a quiet victory. At least the plates were spotless. At least the glasses shone with clarity. At least something in this fractured household was clean, whole, and unbreakable. In this small task, Shouto found a fragment of dignity. He wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t what his father had wanted. But the dishes were clean. At least he could manage that. 

Once the dishes were cleaned and the table cleared of all remnants of breakfast, Shouto would retreat silently from the kitchen, moving with the same mechanical precision that marked all his actions. Without a word, without hesitation, he made his way to the training room—a small, austere space tucked away from the rest of the house, where light filtered through high windows and the cold air was tinged faintly with the scent of burnt embers and sweat. It was here, away from prying eyes and spoken expectations, that Shouto faced the relentless demands his father had set before him.

The room was sparse but functional: a worn training dummy scarred with countless strikes, a mirror that reflected every flaw in his stance and every twitch of tension in his muscles, and the bare floor where he traced the movements again and again until they became instinct. He moved into position, his fingers curling slowly as he summoned the flame that always seemed to burn just beyond his full control. Some days, it was nothing more than a timid flicker, a hesitant dance of heat that barely warmed his palms.

But on those rare days when his focus sharpened and his body remembered every lesson burned into him, the flames would come alive—bright and steady, curling around his hands like obedient serpents. He could feel the power surge beneath his skin, that familiar heat that was supposed to be his strength, his legacy. The flames would snap forward in precise arcs, cutting through the stale air and hitting the intended targets with satisfying accuracy.

In those moments, there was a flicker of something rare—a fragile hope—that he was moving closer to the impossible ideal his father demanded. Every successful strike, every perfect burst of flame was a step toward mastery, toward earning that elusive respect and approval that always seemed just out of reach.

But even then, the progress was tentative. The fire could still falter, sputter, and die out unexpectedly, reminding him that despite his efforts, perfection was a distant goal, always slipping further away. Still, Shouto practiced with quiet determination, driven by the unspoken need to prove himself—not just to his father, but to the part of himself that longed for acceptance, for validation, for the warmth he had been denied.

When his father returned home in the evening, the very air seemed to shift with his arrival. His presence filled the doorway like a looming shadow, stretching across the room and swallowing the light. Even before the heavy footsteps crossed the threshold, Shouto could feel the weight of his gaze descending upon him—a silent, piercing scrutiny that cut deeper than any words ever could. His father’s eyes moved with a surgeon’s precision, sharp and unforgiving, as if he were not looking at a son but at a project, a problem to be analyzed and reshaped.

That look wasn’t warm or kind; it was clinical and exacting, as though every small detail of Shouto’s posture, his expression, the faint tremble in his fingers, were being cataloged for failure or success. In those moments, Shouto felt less like a boy and more like a specimen on display in a laboratory—something to be examined under harsh light, picked apart for imperfections, something to be fixed, molded, and perfected according to an impossibly high standard.

The intensity of that gaze was suffocating. It crushed whatever flicker of confidence or hope he had managed to nurture throughout the day. As his father’s eyes swept over him, the fire within Shouto—the small, stubborn flame that had given him even a shred of warmth or purpose—would instantly sputter and die, leaving behind a hollow, aching emptiness. It was a familiar void, one that had taken root long ago and grew deeper with every encounter.

That emptiness was not just physical, but emotional—an echoing hollow inside his chest where pride, comfort, and self-worth should have lived. Instead, it was cold and vast, a cavern where dreams went to suffocate. The crushing silence that followed was heavier than any words, a quiet that spoke volumes of unspoken disappointment and unattainable expectations.

Shouto would stand there, motionless and small, as though shrinking away from the shadow that was his father’s presence—waiting, enduring, knowing that this was the price of belonging to a legacy he both feared and longed to inherit.

Unfortunately, words alone were never enough for his father. No matter how much Shouto pleaded ( argued , his father would say), how fervently he tried to explain the progress he had made, how sincerely he defended the small victories, or how passionately he promised to push himself harder—the response was always the same: cold dismissal. What Shouto considered proof of growth was met with skepticism or outright refusal. His father didn’t want to hear about progress in vague terms or through secondhand accounts; he demanded to see it with his own eyes, to witness the strength and mastery that he believed his son was capable of achieving.

He never did.  

It was unpleasant for both of them. 

The cycle repeated itself day after day, a rhythm so steady and predictable that it had become the backbone of Shouto’s existence. Every morning began the same way—the cold, relentless alarm pulling him from restless sleep, the quiet shuffle to the kitchen, the mechanical act of eating breakfast in silence, the solitary cleanup, the hours spent in training—all of it carved into his life like grooves worn deep by constant use. It wasn’t a happy life by any measure; far from it. There was no joy in the repetition, no warmth in the ritual. But there was contentment—a cold, quiet contentment that came from knowing exactly what to expect, from living within the bounds of something safe and familiar. That routine was his refuge, a fragile shield against the chaos of a world that often felt too large, too loud, and too demanding.

Within those rigid patterns, Shouto found a measure of control, a sense that even if nothing else in his life was certain or kind, he could at least count on this. The routine was predictable, and that predictability was a small mercy. It was the foundation that held him steady when everything else threatened to unravel.

Then UA came along, and everything changed.

Suddenly, the familiar rhythms that had grounded him were shattered. The early mornings with his father, the silent breakfasts, the long hours of solitary training—those anchors were ripped away, replaced by a barrage of new faces, unpredictable social dynamics, and expectations that felt both overwhelming and alien. The structure he had clung to for so long was fractured by the relentless pace of classes, team exercises, and the unspoken pressures of fitting in or standing out.

The safety of his routine was gone, vanished as if it had never existed at all. In its place was uncertainty—chaos disguised as opportunity—and Shouto felt himself adrift in a sea that offered no familiar shores. What had once been a predictable, if cold, certainty was now a swirling storm of unknowns.

He wasn’t just lost. He was unmoored. The absence of routine left a hollow ache inside him, an emptiness that no amount of training or new challenges could fill. The world beyond his carefully constructed habits demanded things he didn’t know how to give—friendship, openness, vulnerability. He had no blueprint for this new life, no map to guide him through the shifting landscape of UA. For the first time in years, Shouto was forced to face a truth that he had never truly been prepared for: that comfort and safety were illusions.

Now that Shouto was enrolled at UA, the distance between him and his father had grown wider than ever. His father barely spared him a glance these days, his attention consumed by bigger battles and loftier ambitions. Where once there had been a shared morning ritual—a silent, almost sacred time spent sitting together at the breakfast table—now there was only absence. The small, tangible connection of eating side by side, of sharing the quiet moments before the day’s demands took over, had been erased. It was a subtle thing, almost easy to overlook, but its loss cut deeper than any harsh word or punishment ever had.

Despite the change, Shouto’s body refused to adapt. His internal clock, forged by years of relentless discipline and rigid expectation, still jolted him awake at exactly 5:00 AM each morning. It was an ingrained reflex, a programmed response his mind and body clung to even when the meaning behind it had vanished. He would lie in bed, staring at the ceiling in the dimness before dawn, feeling the familiar hollow knot in his chest—the silent reminder that the man who once stood beside him at that hour was no longer there.

Shouto still went through the motions: rising, dressing, preparing himself for the day ahead. But the ritual had lost its warmth, its purpose. The kitchen was quiet in a way that felt unnatural, the air heavy with unspoken words and absent presence. No longer did the clink of his father’s cutlery punctuate the morning, no longer did the faint steam rise from a plate set across from his own. The absence was a sharp void that seemed to expand with each passing day, reminding Shouto of what had been taken from him—not by words, but by neglect.

That simple act of sharing breakfast—a moment so small and ordinary to others—had once been a lifeline, a fragile thread of connection amid a sea of cold expectations. Now, it was gone. Taken away silently, without fanfare or explanation, leaving Shouto alone with his thoughts and the gnawing emptiness that came from being so close, yet so utterly distant. 

The first time Shouto attempted to sit down at the breakfast table after starting at UA, he was met with an icy, cutting glance from his father—so sharp, so heavy with unspoken contempt, it felt like a blade twisting deep inside his chest. That single look spoke volumes, louder than any harsh words could have been: he was not welcome here. His presence was an unwelcome disruption, a reminder of some inconvenient truth his father wished to ignore. The warmth that had once lingered, however faint, was utterly gone—replaced by a cold dismissal that radiated from his father’s eyes like a frozen wind.

Shouto didn’t argue or protest. He didn’t even hesitate. The message was undeniable, clear as crystal, and it crushed something fragile inside him. So he withdrew silently, his movements small and careful, as if trying not to disturb the brittle stillness that had settled between them. Instead of joining his father at the table, he collected his breakfast from the kitchen counter—simple, unadorned, like the routine itself had lost its meaning—and retreated to his bedroom. The door closed behind him with a soft click, sealing him away from the cold distance of his father’s disapproval and the heavy weight of unspoken rejection. 

​​Sitting alone in the quiet of his room, Shouto felt the loneliness press in on him from all sides. The meal, eaten in solitude, tasted bland and hollow. There was no shared silence, no mutual presence to anchor him through the morning. Instead, there was only the echo of absence, a stark reminder that the fragile connection they once had had been severed.

Yet, even in this quiet exile, there was a small, begrudging acknowledgment. His father still left his dishes for Shouto to wash after breakfast—an indirect recognition that, despite everything, Shouto was still present in the household, still expected to carry out the mundane tasks that maintained its fragile order. It was a cold kind of validation, but validation nonetheless. At least that much remained constant in a world that had already shifted beneath his feet.

Even though his father no longer appeared beside him in the training room, no longer lingered to watch or offer critique, the crushing weight of expectations remained firmly in place. Shouto kept to his routine with quiet determination, moving through each exercise with mechanical precision, as if by sheer force of will he could pretend that nothing had changed. The rhythms of training—the flicker of flame in his palms, the controlled release of heat, the endless repetition—offered a fragile thread of familiarity in a world that was shifting beneath his feet.

But beneath the surface, everything was different now. The absence of his father’s presence was not a relief; it was a wound that throbbed with quiet pain. Without the watchful eyes, the sharp instructions, or even the scolding disappointment, Shouto was left alone with a silence so loud it swallowed every flicker of hope. That silence wasn’t peaceful or empty—it was deafening, thick with neglect and the unbearable weight of abandonment. It pressed down on him, suffocating and cold, far harsher than any harsh words or angry rebukes ever had been.

His father had stopped caring. More than that, he had stopped pretending to care. No more false encouragements, no more empty promises of belief. The pretense that Shouto was making progress, that he was still worthy of his father’s attention, had crumbled like brittle ice. The look in his father’s eyes whenever they met was vacant now, void of the spark that once demanded excellence but at least acknowledged his existence. Instead, there was only the unmistakable weight of resignation.

Shouto felt that resignation settle deep inside him, twisting his insides in ways he didn’t have words for. It hurt—more than he could say, more than he could allow himself to admit. It was a quiet ache, a hollow space inside his chest where something essential had been stripped away. He wanted to scream, to fight back, to demand that his father see him, recognize him, believe in him. But instead, he bore it alone, swallowing the pain with clenched teeth and a stiffened spine. The man who had once been the axis of his world had turned away, and in that turning, Shouto’s world tilted dangerously off balance.

At night, dinner became yet another stark reminder of how profoundly alone Shouto had become. The upstairs study—a place of gatherings and shared moments—felt like a cavernous space, echoing with absence. His father was never there; usually off somewhere else, absorbed in work or training, leaving Shouto to silently retrieve his plate from the kitchen. The weight of solitude settled over him as he carried his food, each step heavy with the knowledge that this was his existence now—a solitary routine devoid of warmth or connection.

As he moved past the doorway to the dining room, the faint murmur of voices would spill out like a current—Natsuo and Fuyumi’s voices mingling effortlessly, rich with easy conversation and laughter. Their words wove together in a tapestry of familial intimacy that was so natural, so unforced, it only underscored Shouto’s own exclusion. The laughter sounded like a melody from a distant world, one where he had no place, no role to play. It was a warmth he could hear but never feel, a comfort that only deepened the hollow ache inside him. In those moments, Shouto felt painfully aware of his status as an outsider—an invisible ghost haunting a home that was not truly his own.

Sometimes, perhaps when his footsteps were louder than intended or a floorboard creaked beneath his weight, they would notice him. A sudden silence would fall over the room like a drawn curtain, a pause so sharp it cut through the easy atmosphere. He would catch a glance flicker toward the doorway—brief, hesitant, filled with a quiet recognition tinged with discomfort. The voices would falter, conversations abruptly ending, replaced by the heavy stillness of unspoken thoughts. That silence lingered until he was already out of sight, having rounded the corner and begun the slow climb up the stairs, retreating far, far away from the warmth and light he was never meant to share.

In those moments, Shouto’s heart clenched—not from anger or resentment, but from a profound loneliness that settled deep into his bones. He wasn’t part of their world. He never had been. And the echo of their laughter, the softness of their voices, was a constant, painful reminder of the distance between who he was and who they were—between the family he longed for and the isolation that had become his reality. 

His bedroom sat directly above the dining room, and on the nights when the loneliness felt heavier than usual—pressing down on him like a weighted blanket—he would sometimes find himself lowering his plate to the floor, setting his ear against the cool wooden boards beneath him. The grain of the floor would bite faintly against his skin, but he didn’t care. If he stayed still, if he held his breath and strained hard enough, he could catch the faint hum of voices rising up from below. Soft murmurs, laughter now and then, the delicate clinking of cutlery against porcelain plates—all the fragile, intimate sounds of a family he had never truly belonged to.

If he focused, really focused, the murmurs would begin to take shape. He could almost hear their words, though they were often fragmented, smudged at the edges by distance. Sometimes it was just the cadence of their conversation, the lilting rise and fall that spoke of comfort and ease—of love freely given and received without condition. Other times, he would catch actual words: Natsuo teasing Fuyumi about something trivial, Fuyumi’s soft laugh in response, the kind of laugh that felt like it could warm the entire house. Those sounds would seep through the floorboards like heat from a fire, curling into his cold room and setting something aching deep in his chest.

And it hurt. It hurt so much more than he ever let himself admit. To feel so close, and yet so impossibly far. To know that no matter how much he longed for it—no matter how fiercely some broken, starved part of him craved that warmth—he would never truly be invited into it. Not really. Even if he walked downstairs right now and sat at the table, even if they smiled and said his name and pulled out a chair, it wouldn’t change the truth. They would never speak to him the way they spoke to each other—with that casual, unthinking companionship, that easy intimacy forged from years of trust and safety he had never been allowed to share.

He would always be different. Other. The reminder of everything ugly that had burned through their lives and scarred them all.

And still, he couldn’t bring himself to stop listening. Even as his chest tightened to the point of pain, even as his stomach knotted and tears—silent, searing, relentless—slipped from his eyes and traced down his cheeks in delicate rivers he hadn’t even known were still possible for him. Even then, with his throat thick and raw from holding back sound, he pressed his ear closer. He drank in every word, every laugh, every small, ordinary sound, like a starving man clawing for scraps at the edge of a feast.

Because even scraps were better than nothing. Because even if he couldn’t have it, even if it gutted him, it was something. And through it all, through every second of that quiet, private agony, one truth circled endlessly in the hollow space of his chest.

He just wished his father would look at him again.

Chapter Text

Eijiro Kirishima liked to think of himself as a friendly guy.

Scratch that—he was a friendly guy. There was no “liked to think” about it. It wasn’t an act, it wasn’t a strategy. It was who he was, down to his bones. He was the kind of person who didn’t just tolerate other people’s company—he thrived in it. He drank it in like oxygen, like sunlight through a window after days of rain. The easy flow of conversation, the sharp edge of banter tossed back and forth like a ball, the hearty laughs that burst out in the middle of the hallway, echoing loud and unrestrained—those things fueled him. They were the moments that made everything else—training, exhaustion, bruises—worth it.

He was built for it: for connection. For warmth. He loved the little things, the stuff that most people probably didn’t think twice about. A shoulder punch in the hallway after a tough class. A quick high-five after a sparring match, palms slapping together with a satisfying sting. Even the simple act of walking side by side with someone between classes, bumping elbows, sharing some dumb joke about Aizawa’s perpetually tired glare. That was the stuff that mattered. That was what made a day feel like a good one.

He didn’t do well with silence. Not the heavy kind, anyway. He could handle a pause in a conversation. He could handle a little quiet when everyone was focused on their notes before an exam. But the kind of silence that hung like a weight in the air? The kind that pressed down on your shoulders and made the room feel smaller, colder? That wasn’t him. That wasn’t his world. 

He’d never had any issues making friends in the past. It wasn’t something he had to work at—it just happened, as naturally as breathing. He was easy to be around. Or at least, that’s what people told him, and honestly, he believed it. Sure, he could admit he had a tendency to be a little loud sometimes, but it wasn’t the kind of loud that grated on people’s nerves. Not the kind that demanded attention for the sake of it. His loudness had warmth in it—like a campfire in winter, crackling and bright, something people could gather around and feel good in the glow of. 

And people didn’t seem to mind. If anything, they welcomed it. He was the guy people invited to stuff without hesitation. The group chat always had his name in it when plans were made. He was the guy someone would slide up to after class just to vent about a crappy quiz or an annoying teacher. The guy who could turn a bad mood around with a dumb joke or a stupid story that wasn’t even that funny, but somehow still made people laugh because he meant it to.

And if someone needed a hype man—someone to tell them they could crush it, someone to believe in them even when they didn’t believe in themselves—well, that was his specialty. That was him, through and through. He was that guy who’d shout encouragement from the sidelines, clap the loudest when someone nailed a move, grin so wide it made other people grin too. He liked being that guy. It felt good to lift people up, to see the light in their eyes when they realized someone was in their corner. That was his whole thing—he wanted to be the guy people could count on. The one who made other people feel strong.

It wasn’t like Eijiro expected every person he met to instantly become best friends with him. That would’ve been stupid—and honestly, kind of creepy. He wasn’t naïve. He knew people were different. People had their own quirks, their own baggage, their own walls. And that was fine. That was more than fine—it was part of what made people interesting. The differences, the rough edges, the things you had to work around to really know someone.

Some people just needed a little more time. A little more patience. He understood that. Hell, he respected it. Not everyone opened up like a book the second you said hi. Some people were puzzles, and he liked puzzles. He didn’t mind putting in the effort to figure someone out, to show them he wasn’t going anywhere, that they could trust him. He wasn’t pushy about it—at least, he didn’t think he was. He just… liked sticking around. Liked proving to people that friendship wasn’t conditional.

And yeah, it usually worked. Eventually, he got somewhere. Maybe it started small—a smirk during training when he cracked a joke, a laugh at something dumb he said, that little glimmer in someone’s eyes that said, Hey, maybe you’re not so bad. That spark that told him, Yeah. We get each other now. We’re good.

That's why this? This whole Todoroki situation? It sucked. Because no matter what he did, no matter how many tries he gave it, that spark never came. Not even close.

He’d made friends at UA, sure. A lot of them, if he was being honest. People seemed to like him—he wasn’t exactly struggling in the social department. He had his crew, people he could joke with, train with, eat lunch with. People who didn’t mind his energy, who gave it back and made everything feel easy. And that was great. Really, it was.

But still.

There were two people—two very specific people—he’d set his heart on befriending from the start. People who stood out like sparks in the dark, not because they were easy to talk to, or because they gave any hint that they wanted a friend. No. It was the exact opposite.

Todoroki and Bakugou.

From day one, both of them had been nothing but sharp edges. They were hard to approach, hard to read, like they’d been carved out of stone and weren’t about to let anyone chip their way in. They didn’t smile like the others, didn’t laugh easily, didn’t give you much to work with at all. But there was something about that—about the way they carried themselves—that grabbed Eijiro and wouldn’t let go.

They weren’t just quiet or angry for no reason. No, there was something deeper there. Something heavy. Like they carried entire worlds behind their eyes—whole galaxies of hurt and history and fire that Eijiro couldn’t begin to name, let alone understand. And maybe that would’ve scared some people off. Maybe most people saw that and thought, no thanks.

But not him.

Eijiro had never been the type to shy away from hard things. He wasn’t wired like that. He liked challenges. Lived for them. When he saw a wall, his first instinct wasn’t to walk away—it was to see how hard he could hit it before it broke. And these two? They were the biggest walls in the class. The hardest, thickest, most impossible walls he’d ever seen.

And something in him wanted— needed —to break through.

At first, it had kind of been a joke. A mission. Something he’d thrown out there with a grin one day at lunch, half-serious, half-daring himself to see it through. Like a gauntlet thrown at his own feet.

“I’m gonna be friends with those two,” he’d announced, his voice carrying just enough weight to make Kaminari look up mid-bite. He punctuated the claim by pointing his chopsticks across the table like twin blades, stabbing the air with confidence. “Both of ’em. Mark my words.”

The declaration was met with immediate chaos.

Kaminari choked so hard on his rice that his face went pink, coughing into his sleeve and fumbling for his water bottle like he’d just been personally attacked by the concept. Ashido practically collapsed against the table, her laughter ringing out loud and sharp, the kind that made other people glance over.

“You?” she gasped between cackles, slapping her palm against the wood as if to ground herself. “You’re gonna—oh my god—Kirishima, no. No way. That’s—pfft—that’s suicide!”

Sero leaned in like he was settling in for a live drama, his straw hanging from his mouth as he gave Eijiro a look somewhere between entertained and horrified. “Hold on, hold on. Both of them? Both Bakugou and Todoroki? Like… at the same time?” He shook his head slowly, like someone watching a man step off a cliff in slow motion. “Bro, that’s not just ambitious, that’s—”

“Delusional,” Jirou cut in flatly, one earbud dangling, her unimpressed stare cutting sharper than Ashido’s laughter. “You’re aiming for emotional constipation and cold detachment at the same time. Bold of you.”

“Hey,” Eijiro said, throwing his hands up in mock offense, but the grin stretching across his face didn’t budge. In fact, it widened, bright and reckless.

Because a few tables over, Bakugou was mid-scream at Midoriya for something—loud and explosive, voice spiking through the cafeteria like an air raid siren. His palms cracked with tiny pops of heat as he slammed his hands on the table for emphasis, rattling the trays while Midoriya sputtered frantic apologies in response. Every second word was either a curse or a threat to murder someone, and Bakugou delivered both with the kind of conviction that could make strangers take cover.

And Eijiro? He just grinned wider, eyes tracking the fiery mess of a boy like a climber staring up at the biggest mountain on the horizon. Because Bakugou? He was loud, sure. Volatile, absolutely. But at least with Bakugou, you knew where you stood.

Bakugou’s walls weren’t subtle. They weren’t quiet or polite. They were loud and jagged and came with a built-in soundtrack of explosions and profanity. He didn’t play games. He didn’t hide behind fake smiles or half-truths. If Bakugou didn’t like you, you’d know before you even finished introducing yourself.

And that? That made him easier. Predictable, in a way.

And weirdly enough, that one had worked out.

It hadn’t been easy—far from it. It took time. Patience. Persistence. A whole lot of moments where he had to bite back his own frustration and remind himself, Don’t take it personally, man. It took learning to translate Bakugou-speak—deciphering the difference between “I’ll kill you” as a casual greeting versus a promise of actual bodily harm. It meant hearing what Bakugou meant, not just what he said. Reading the sharp angles of his tone, the grudging respect buried in all the noise, the way “You’re not completely useless” was actually high praise coming from him.

But eventually, Bakugou let him in. Slowly. Reluctantly. Like a wild animal circling the same trap for weeks before deciding maybe—just maybe—it wasn’t baited. And somewhere along the way, their weird, spiky dynamic had shifted into something that felt... solid. Real.

Friendship carved out of sparks and scraped knuckles. Late-night strategy talks that devolved into shouting matches, followed by grudging laughter. Team-ups that started as disasters and ended with Bakugou muttering, “Not bad, shitty hair,” like it was the highest compliment known to man.

Of the two, Bakugou was actually easy.

It was like comparing a thunderstorm to a hurricane.

Sure, Bakugou had been difficult—loud, volatile, exhausting—but at least you could see him coming. You could hear him from a mile away, feel the warning rumble under your feet before the sky split open.

Todoroki? Todoroki was impossible.

So, that’s one of them down. A good fifty percent. Not bad, if he said so himself. Definitely better than zero. But still—not good enough. Not when the mission wasn’t complete. Not when the second half of his self-imposed challenge was still standing there like an unscalable wall.

Because so far? He hadn’t managed to make any leeway with Todoroki at all. None. Zip. Not even a toe in the door. And he can’t lie—yeah, it stings. Hurts his pride in a way he doesn’t want to admit out loud.

After all, he’d declared—loudly, confidently, and more than once, to anyone who would listen—that he was gonna pull this off. That he would succeed. No hesitation, no room for doubt. He’d practically carved it in stone at this point.

And the reactions? Predictable.

Bakugou was adamantly, explosively against it—like Eijiro had suggested committing a felony. “Stay the hell away from him, Shitty Hair — he’s not worth your time! And don’t drag me into your idiot crusade!” He said it at least once a week, usually with enough volume to turn heads in the cafeteria.

Shinsou didn’t say much about it. Just raised an eyebrow the one time it came up and muttered something dry like, “Good luck with that,” in a tone that didn’t exactly inspire confidence. But Shinsou didn’t really talk much in general, so Eijiro didn’t take it personally.

Kaminari, Ashido, Jirou, and Sero? They didn’t hold back. They’d just laugh, every single time, like he’d told the funniest joke in the world. Kaminari would clutch his stomach like he was in pain. Ashido would literally cry from laughing so hard. Jirou, deadpan as ever, would just shake her head and say something like, “You know some walls aren’t meant to come down, right?”

Sero was the worst, honestly. Every time Eijiro tried to talk about strategy—about making progress—he’d lean back in his chair, grin, and say, “Man, you should just give it up already. It’s never gonna happen.”

They all said that.

It’s never gonna happen.

And every time he heard it, every time he saw that look in their eyes—amused, smug, like they thought the idea of cracking Todoroki was a joke—it just made him dig in harder. Because Eijiro Kirishima didn’t quit. Not ever.

But so far, they’ve been right.

Every single day, without fail, Eijiro tries. He shows up. He puts in the effort. Throws the proverbial ball—over and over—only to watch it drop right at Todoroki’s feet, untouched, like it never even existed in the first place.

A smile here, bright and easy, thrown across the room like a lifeline. A casual, “Yo, Todoroki!” there, voice pitched just loud enough to catch his attention without sounding desperate. A quick wave in the hallway. An invitation to lunch. A seat saved during breaks. An offer to walk together after class.

The small gestures. The things that work on everyone else.

But Todoroki? Todoroki never bites. He doesn’t react with hostility—that would almost be easier. It’s not a glare or a scoff or some sharp retort that sends Eijiro packing. No. Todoroki doesn’t even give him that much. He just… absorbs the effort and gives nothing back.

Not even disinterest, not really. It’s worse than that. It’s this perfect, impenetrable blankness, like a wall of glass with nothing behind it. He’ll look at Eijiro when spoken to—sometimes—but there’s no spark in his eyes, no flicker of recognition that says I see you, I hear you, I care enough to respond.

Sometimes he nods. Sometimes he hums in acknowledgment, this low sound that could mean anything—or nothing. And then he turns back to whatever he was doing, shutting the door without ever having opened it in the first place.

It’s like trying to hold a conversation with snow. Beautiful, sure—but cold. Silent. Untouchable. And every time that blank stare meets him—polite but empty—it chips at Eijiro in a way he doesn’t want to admit.

It wasn’t that he was unfriendly, per se. Todoroki didn’t scowl at him or snap or tell him to buzz off—not once. He wasn’t hostile in the way Bakugou had been at first, all teeth and fire and threats that sounded like promises. No, Todoroki was something else entirely.

He was just... untouchable. Like trying to talk to a statue that occasionally blinked.

Eijiro had gone in expecting some hesitation—maybe even a few awkward starts. That would’ve made sense. Not everyone was a people person, and he could work with shy. He could work with quiet. He’d done it before, with people who just needed time to warm up. He had patience for that.

What he hadn’t expected was the total absence of response. Not coldness—just nothing. No spark, no flicker, no sign that his words were making any kind of impact. 

No real eye contact—none that lasted more than a fraction of a second. Todoroki’s gaze would slide off him like water over stone, slipping away before Eijiro could catch it. No change in expression, no twitch of a smile, no crease of a frown. It was like everything Eijiro said dissolved in the air before it even reached the guy’s ears, vanishing into some void between them.

Every “Hey, man,” every “Yo, wanna join us?”—they didn’t just go unanswered. They went unacknowledged. And that, more than anything else, messed with him. Because Eijiro could handle rejection. He could handle a flat-out “No.” Hell, he could handle Bakugou screaming obscenities in his face and telling him to drop dead. At least that meant he mattered enough to piss off.

But this? This hollow, glassy indifference? It was like Todoroki was a pane of frosted glass, and Eijiro could pound on it all day with both fists, shouting, grinning, trying to break through—and never even make a crack.

Like he didn’t matter at all. 

At first, Eijiro tried to laugh it off. He’ll warm up, he told himself. Everyone does eventually. He believed that, too—because in his experience, it had always been true. No one stayed a total stranger forever. You just had to keep showing up, keep throwing out those little lifelines—smiles, jokes, an easy “Hey, man.” Eventually, they’d catch one.

But the more time passed, the harder it was to keep telling himself that. Weeks slid by like beads on a string, and Todoroki? Still the same. A blank slate. A sealed vault.

From the beginning, there’d been something unreadable about him. Not just quiet, but carefully quiet. Like his words weren’t just absent—they were locked away, tucked somewhere deep and unreachable. Every motion was deliberate, controlled. Every glance felt like it cost something.

Eijiro had met silence before. He knew what it looked like when someone just wasn’t naturally talkative, when they needed time and space to figure out how to fit. He respected that. Hell, he’d been there himself, back when he was all nerves and doubt, back before he decided to live loud and bright. So at first, he didn’t think much of it. Everyone had their own stuff. He got that better than most. 

But with Todoroki, it wasn’t just silence. It was distance. Cold, deliberate distance. It wasn’t shyness—it was something heavier, something sharper, like a wall made of glass: invisible but unyielding. Every attempt Eijiro made slid off it without leaving so much as a smudge. No warmth, no hint of thaw. Todoroki wasn’t just quiet—he was unreachable.

And the way he did it… God, it was almost uncanny. He wasn’t rude about it. He didn’t glare, didn’t tell Eijiro to back off, didn’t even frown. If he had, it would’ve been easier. At least then Eijiro would know where he stood.

Instead, Todoroki was like a mirror. A perfect, polished surface that reflected everything back without ever letting anything in. Eijiro could throw all his energy at him—grins, greetings, open gestures—and all he’d get was his own effort staring back at him, hollow and unanswered.

Untouchable.

Still, Eijiro tried.

Not because he pitied the guy—hell no. That wasn’t what this was about. Pity felt wrong. Pity meant looking down on someone, and Eijiro didn’t do that. Not to his classmates, not to anyone.

But because... well, he was kind of pitiful himself, and it made him sad. He couldn’t deny there was something about Todoroki that tugged at him, something that felt heavy and lonely in a way that made his chest ache. It wasn’t obvious—not to most people, maybe—but Eijiro had always been good at reading the spaces between words, at spotting the quiet weight someone carried. And Todoroki? He carried a lot.

So Eijiro cared. That was just who he was. It wasn’t something he had to force or think about—it was as natural as breathing.

He’d nudge a smile his way in the mornings, bright and easy, just a little spark to start the day. He’d toss a casual “Yo, Todoroki!” across the hall, hand raised in greeting. He’d make sure there was always a spot at the lunch table, wave him over with a grin that said, C’mon, man, join us. During training, he’d crack a joke, light enough to float, hoping maybe—just maybe—it would coax the smallest flicker of a smile in return.

And sometimes, it worked. Sort of. Sometimes, Todoroki would give him a nod. A tiny dip of the head, so slight you could almost miss it if you blinked. Sometimes, there’d be this quick flick of eye contact—just a glance before he turned away again. And on a really good day? A single, flat word in response.

But most of the time? Nothing. Like his words dissolved in the air before they reached him. Like the distance between them wasn’t just physical—it was a chasm.

Still, Eijiro kept trying. Because the more Todoroki stayed on his own, the more it gnawed at him, the more it felt wrong. No one should be that alone—not here, not when they were supposed to be building each other up, training side by side, becoming heroes together. 

So he kept throwing those lifelines, hoping one would catch. Hoping maybe Todoroki just needed time. Because that’s what this was about. Not pity. Not obligation. Just this stubborn, unshakable need to let him know— Hey, man. You’re not alone.

Except… somewhere along the way, Eijiro started to realize something he didn’t want to admit. Todoroki didn’t seem to want that. Not his smiles. Not his jokes. Not the open invitations he offered without strings attached. It wasn’t just that Todoroki didn’t notice. It was that he noticed—and still turned away.

And it stung more than he thought it would.

Eijiro wasn’t exactly fragile—he could take rejection, shrug things off, keep moving. That was kind of his whole deal: roll with the punches, stay upbeat, keep trying. But this? The quiet, deliberate way Todoroki shut him out? That hit different.

He hadn’t expected the sheer intensity of it—Todoroki’s allergy to friendship, the way it seemed hardwired into his DNA. The way his shoulders would stiffen if Eijiro got too close, like physical proximity was an annoyance. How he’d pause mid-step in the hallway if Eijiro called his name, his body going taut like he was bracing for a particularly unpleasant experience—like Eijiro was the gum Todoroki was picking out from the soles of his shoes. 

​​And the look in his eyes when that happened? That blank, controlled stillness? It wasn’t annoyance, not really. It was something quieter than that. Something heavier. Resentment, maybe.

Eijiro didn’t know. And that was the worst part—not knowing. Because he didn’t want this to feel personal. He didn’t want to make it about himself. That wasn’t fair, and he knew it. Maybe Todoroki was just private. Maybe he needed space. That was okay. Eijiro understood boundaries. He respected them.

But—God, something about Todoroki’s detachment scratched at something raw and insecure inside him.

He prided himself on being genuine. On being the guy who could break through walls without breaking people. On being someone others could count on, someone who made things lighter instead of heavier. And usually, that worked. People liked him. He could connect with almost anyone, if he just put in the time and effort.

Hell—even Bakugou. Especially Bakugou. That had meant something. It still did. Getting through to Bakugou—earning his respect, his friendship—that had been like chiseling through stone with bare hands. And he’d done it. He’d proved to himself that persistence mattered, that heart mattered.

But with Todoroki? Every effort fell flat. Every attempt just bounced off that quiet, frozen wall like a punch against steel. And yeah—maybe it was stupid, but that hurt. More than he wanted to admit.

So, though deep down he knew he probably shouldn’t—knew he ought to respect Todoroki’s clear, unspoken wish to be left alone—Eijiro couldn’t bring himself to back off. It gnawed at him, this stubborn spark inside that refused to quit. Because if there was one thing he was, it was determined to break through walls, no matter how high or cold they were built.

He doubled down on his efforts, pushing past every silent dismissal, every cold glance, every vague brush-off. He kept asking Todoroki to eat lunch with him, day after day, like a mantra, like a challenge he was daring himself to win. Not just with empty words, but with small gestures of kindness and patience, hoping something would chip away at the ice around the other boy.

One afternoon, in a moment of boldness, Eijiro even offered to ditch the rest of the aptly named Bakusquad—the loud, explosive group that Todoroki clearly found unpleasant—if it would make the other guy feel more comfortable sitting with just him. Maybe it was naive, maybe it was desperate, but he figured it was worth a shot. He wanted Todoroki to know he wasn’t just some noisy distraction; that he could be someone quieter, someone who could respect boundaries.

The response he got was painfully awkward. Todoroki’s eyes settled on him, steady and unreadable, like Eijiro had just claimed he could fly or performed some foolish magic trick. There was a brief pause, pregnant with unspoken judgment, as if Todoroki was trying to process why anyone would make such an offer—and why he should even consider it.

Then Todoroki spoke, his voice low and calm, the words sharp in their bluntness.

“Why would you abandon your friends in order to eat with a virtual stranger?”

His eyes didn’t waver, cold and steady.

“Moreover,” he continued, “why would I accept? Your friends bother me no more, or less, than you do. Whether or not they are present has no influence over my answer.”

It wasn’t just a refusal—it was a dismantling of the entire idea. A subtle but unmistakable dismissal that cut deeper than any shouted insult. Eijiro felt the weight of those words settle over him like a heavy cloak. Because if this was the mountain he had to climb, then he wasn’t so confident that he was capable anymore. 

It was probably the most words he’d ever heard Todoroki string together in a single sentence—hell, maybe even the most words he’d ever heard the guy say at all. And yet, instead of feeling relieved to finally get some kind of response, Eijiro found himself reeling under the weight of those words.

Wow. Yeah. That one definitely stung.

The bluntness of Todoroki’s dismissal cut through him sharper than any insult Bakugou had ever hurled. There was no anger, no malice, no hidden meaning—just cold, hard fact laid bare with surgical precision. Like Todoroki was delivering a verdict rather than a conversation.

So, that was it. Eijiro was the problem. The annoying pest who didn’t belong. Todoroki had just confirmed it without even trying to soften the blow. The guy really just didn’t like him.

The thought swirled in Eijiro’s chest, sour and heavy. He could almost feel the invisible line Todoroki had drawn, and Eijiro was on the wrong side of it—completely and utterly unwelcome.

And the worst part? Todoroki didn’t even look like he was trying to be mean. Not like Bakugou, whose anger was loud and jagged and impossible to ignore. No, Todoroki’s expression was flat, almost bored, as if he were stating an unchangeable fact about the weather or the time of day. Factual. Blunt. Straight to the point.

God, did this dude even have a soul?

​​Eijiro swallowed hard, trying to wrestle down the sudden pang of doubt that crept into his mind. Did he really see any trace of warmth or softness beneath that frozen exterior? Sometimes, when Todoroki’s eyes flickered for a split second, he thought maybe there was something there—something fragile and hidden. But right now, with those cold words hanging in the air, that flicker felt more like a cruel trick.

“I’m sorry, but could you move? I would like to make it to the lunchroom before all of the tables are full.”

The words came out quietly, almost as if they were an afterthought, yet there was an unmistakable firmness beneath the calmness—a subtle command wrapped in polite phrasing.

Eijiro blinked, the suddenness of the request catching him completely off guard. For a moment, he’d been standing frozen, rooted right in the middle of the crowded hallway like a lost puppy, his mind still reeling from the last conversation, still hoping for some kind of breakthrough.

He had no idea how long he’d been blocking the way.

Almost sheepishly, Eijiro shifted his weight and stepped aside with a hurried shuffle, the scrape of his shoes on the linoleum echoing faintly in the near-empty corridor. His cheeks flushed—part embarrassment, part the sting of realizing just how oblivious he’d been.

He offered a quick, awkward nod, barely managing to meet Todoroki’s eyes before the other boy slipped past without so much as a glance back. No anger. No irritation. Not even a hint of frustration. Just a cold, unreadable disinterest that settled like a fog between them, thick and impenetrable.

Eijiro swallowed hard, the silence afterward hanging heavy in the air as Todoroki’s figure disappeared around the corner, leaving him standing alone—small, exposed, and still grasping at the fleeting hope of connection that seemed to slip further away with every step the other boy took.

He figured he should probably move on, go join his friends like he usually did. They’d be saving a seat for him at the lunch table, the familiar buzz of their voices a comfort he could normally count on. But for a moment, he let himself linger there, rooted in place by the weight of the encounter. The silence Todoroki left behind stretched out, sharp and cold, and he wasn’t ready to close the distance between them just yet.

He didn’t want to have to walk right behind Todoroki—not after that curt, almost dismissive interaction. The memory of Todoroki’s flat tone, the disinterest masked as politeness, still echoed in his ears. The chill that clung to the air around the other boy seemed to seep into his skin, turning the normally crowded corridor into an empty, drafty space that pressed against him like a physical thing.

So he stayed where he was, his gaze fixed on Todoroki’s retreating back, watching the steady rhythm of his steps fade down the hall. There was something final about the way Todoroki moved away—like a door closing quietly but unmistakably shut.

Eijiro took a slow breath, trying to steady himself. He needed a moment—just a brief pause to regroup. To let the sting of the rejection dull from sharp and immediate pain to something more manageable, less raw. He felt the cracks in his dignity spread beneath his feet, like shards of glass scattered across the floor, and he had to gather them carefully, one by one, before stepping forward again.

Because this time, the coldness, the disinterest, had felt different. This time, it had felt personal.

And for once, Eijiro didn’t have a clear next move. He wasn’t sure how to fix this, or even what fixing it would look like. He wasn’t even sure that he should fix it. That there was anything to cook at all. 

Lunch tasted like nothing. Not unpleasant, not spoiled—just utterly devoid of flavor or satisfaction. The food felt strange in his mouth, soft and insubstantial, like biting into packing foam that squished between his teeth without breaking apart. Each chew was a mechanical action rather than a sensory experience. Eijiro poked at the rice lazily with his chopsticks, watching the grains shift but not caring enough to pick up more than a few. When he finally forced a bite in, it slid down his throat like bitter medicine, scraping the back of his throat and lodging there stubbornly.

He was conscious of where he sat—far enough out at the edge of the long table that it wouldn’t be glaringly obvious he was trying to be invisible, but close enough to avoid suspicion. It was a delicate balance: not so far away that anyone would ask why he was isolating himself, but just enough to mask the truth. Because the truth was, he’d dragged his feet getting there, reluctant to join the group until he was certain there was no other option.

He hadn’t wanted to come to the table at all after that encounter. Instead, he’d wandered the hallways alone for the last ten minutes, pacing, twisting the words Todoroki had said over and over in his mind. He kept telling himself he wasn’t stalling, that he was just killing time—delaying the inevitable—but deep down he knew it was avoidance.

Now sitting there, his chopsticks hovered uncertainly over his food, and his mind wandered far away from the bustling chatter of his friends around him. The laughter, the easy banter—it all felt distant, like it was happening in another room. His stomach grumbled quietly, but it wasn’t hunger. It was the ache of disappointment, the heaviness of rejection tucked in beneath the bland, tasteless lunch.

“Dude, where were you?” Kaminari said the second Eijiro sat down, practically flinging his arms in the air like he’d just spun the jackpot wheel on a game show. His voice was bright and cutting through the lunchtime chatter, loud enough that a few people at the next table turned to look. His grin was wide, golden, and familiar—the kind of grin that didn’t need answers, didn’t expect explanations. It was just Kaminari being Kaminari: easy, warm, relentless. 

Ashido leaned in close, all sharp elbows and a grin to match his. She bumped his shoulder with her own, rocking him slightly off balance. “We thought you ditched us for your ice prince crush,” she sing-songed, dragging out the last word with gleeful precision. Her voice carried, like she wanted the entire cafeteria to hear—and judging by the way heads turned, they probably did.

Eijiro felt his ears heat instantly.

 “Crush,” Sero repeated like a predator locking onto prey, eyes gleaming with unholy amusement. He slapped the table with his palm like the joke was too good to hold in. “You gonna start leaving love notes on his desk, man? Maybe some flowers in his shoe locker? Classic rom-com moves!” He was practically wheezing now, shoulders shaking with laughter.

Jirou snorted into her carton of milk, muttering something low and dry about “melodramatic brooding types,” but Eijiro swore he saw the corner of her mouth twitch. Yeah. That was definitely a smirk. Great. Everyone was in on this now.

Even Bakugou looked up. Just for a second—but that second was worse than all the others combined. That scoff—sharp, derisive, and silent—said more than words ever could. You’re an idiot. It didn’t even need sound to slice straight through him.

And Shinsou—quiet, perpetual observer Shinsou—didn’t even bother hiding the snort that escaped him. He was slouched at the far end of the table, pretending to scroll on his phone like he didn’t care, but the faint twitch at his lips gave him away. Of course he was listening. They all were.

The table erupted with laughter, easy and merciless, washing over him in a wave he couldn’t quite fight against. And Eijiro laughed, too. Because that was what he did. Laughed. Brushed things off. The sound felt stiff and foreign in his throat, and he reached for his chopsticks like maybe if he focused on stabbing his rice enough times, they’d move on. But the heat crawling up his neck burned hotter than any chili pepper, and no amount of fake nonchalance could put that out.

“No dice,” he said lightly, forcing a grin that felt a little too tight at the corners. He stabbed his chopsticks into the rice and bit down like it didn’t taste like sandpaper scraping against his tongue. “Still emotionally constipated. Even upgraded to a full-on verbal rejection this time, though, so hey—progress!”

That earned a ripple of laughter down the table. The kind that came easy to everyone but him. Sero let out a low whistle and lobbed a crumpled napkin at his head like a paper missile. “Ouch. Brutal, man. You need some aloe for that burn?”

Jirou didn’t even glance up from her food, deadpan as ever, though Eijiro caught the ghost of a smirk tugging at her mouth. “You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take,” she muttered, stabbing her straw into her juice box with a little too much force.

“Unless you’re Kirishima,” Kaminari cut in, already leaning into the bit like it was his calling. He reached over dramatically and slid his half-eaten pudding cup across the table with both hands, face solemn, like he was passing down some sacred relic. “For your loss,” he intoned gravely, clapping Eijiro on the shoulder with all the weight of a priest performing last rites. “You died a noble death.”

Eijiro snorted despite himself, the sound sharp and a little too loud, but he rolled with it. He stood from his chair, sweeping the pudding up in both hands like it was a trophy, and bowed low enough to nearly crack his forehead on the table. “Tell my story,” he said, pitching his voice into that mock-heroic tone Bakugou hated so much. “Let the world know I tried.”

That broke them. Laughter tore down the table like dominoes falling, quick and bright and loud. Even Bakugou—though he didn’t laugh—snorted hard enough to count as an acknowledgment before returning to annihilating his katsudon like it owed him money.

And for a moment, it did help. The sting loosened its grip on his chest, just a little. The ache eased under the weight of all that noise and warmth and easy chaos. It actually did make him feel a lot better.

Almost.

Because even as he grinned and scraped the last of the pudding out with his spoon, something in his chest still felt heavy. Not because they’d teased him—they always teased him—but because deep down, he wasn’t sure why it mattered so much. Why Todoroki’s cold shoulder hurt worse than any punch he’d ever taken in training.

After that, he backed off in his attempts to be Todoroki’s friend.

Not all at once. There wasn’t some dramatic moment where he threw up his hands and swore to give up, no big declaration of defeat that his friends could laugh about later. It just… happened. A slow, quiet easing off, like water pulling back from the shore.

He still said hello when their paths crossed—because that was just who he was, and ignoring someone completely would feel wrong. He still offered a nod during training, maybe a thumbs-up if Todoroki landed something clean. But that was it. No more cheerful “Yo, Todoroki!” echoing down the hallway. No more trying to wedge himself into that frosty silence with warm laughter and dumb jokes.

The invitations stopped. He quit saving him seats at lunch, stopped tossing him casual “You coming with us?” whenever the group headed out. He didn’t hover at his desk anymore before class, didn’t try to strike up conversations about the weather or training or literally anything just to fill the quiet. The extra effort faded, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but bare courtesy.

He let Todoroki be.

Or at least, he told himself that’s what he was doing—letting him be, giving him the space he so clearly wanted. Not licking his wounds. Not giving up. Definitely not taking it personally. Except, sometimes, in the middle of a noisy lunchroom, with his friends laughing around him and Bakugou yelling over something stupid, he’d glance across the room and catch sight of that same figure: sitting alone, head bent, eating in perfect silence like nothing in the world could touch him.

And every single time, something in Eijiro’s chest itched.

It wasn’t the first time he had failed at something. Of course it wasn’t. Failure was no stranger to him—it had been tagging along like an annoying younger sibling for as long as he could remember. He’d bombed tests before, stared down at red ink bleeding across his papers like a crime scene. He’d missed punches in sparring, swung wide and stumbled, left openings so big an amateur could’ve taken him down. He’d blurted the wrong thing at the worst possible moment—words tumbling out too fast, too loud, catching on the jagged edge of his own enthusiasm until they turned awkward and sharp.

He’d embarrassed himself more times than he could count. Tripped over his own intentions. Said too much when he should’ve shut up, said too little when it mattered most. Come off too strong, too desperate, like someone who didn’t know when to quit.

​​That’s just life, though, right? That’s what he always told himself. People mess up. People fail. The world doesn’t stop spinning because you face-plant in the middle of the hallway or because someone looks at you like you’re trying too hard.

And as a kid, the answer had always been simple: Get back up. Try again. Try harder. Work harder. Push through. Keep going. Never give up.

That mantra had been burned into him, letter by letter, carved deep into the grain of who he was. It wasn’t just something he said—it was something he lived by, the bedrock of everything he wanted to become. Heroes didn’t quit. Heroes didn’t fold. Heroes stood back up, no matter how hard they got knocked down.

That’s who he wanted to be. Red Riot wasn’t someone who gave up. Red Riot endured. He believed in persistence, in second chances, in third chances if that’s what it took. In the strength of a heart that kept reaching out even after it got bruised, even after it bled. He believed that if you just kept trying, kept showing up, kept being there, then eventually—eventually—it would matter. It would mean something.

As he’d gotten a little older, he’d realized not all failures were like that. Not all of them had a purpose. Not all of them were stepping stones on the way to something better. Some failures didn’t make you stronger. Some didn’t teach you anything except how much it hurt.

Some failures just were . Flat. Final. Immutable. Like a door closing softly in your face and never opening again.

No amount of effort, no amount of grit or optimism or stubborn persistence could pry that door back open. No amount of training, no pep talks in the mirror, no “I’ll try again tomorrow” could make the other side want you there.

He’d learned that the hard way. Slowly. Piece by piece. Because some failures weren’t loud or dramatic or life-shattering. They weren’t the kind that left you bleeding on the floor with your lungs on fire. They were quieter than that. Simpler. Human.

You reached out, and someone didn’t reach back. You cared, and someone didn’t want to be cared about. Or maybe—just maybe—they didn’t want to be cared about by you. And that was the sharpest edge of all. That quiet possibility that it wasn’t about timing, or circumstance, or misunderstanding. It was about you. Your voice, your presence, your everything—just… wrong for them.

Sometimes people didn’t change their minds. Sometimes they didn’t want to. Sometimes it didn’t matter how patient you were, how much of yourself you laid bare in the hope that they’d see it and understand. It didn’t matter if you were genuine, if your heart was in the right place, if all you wanted was to make someone feel less alone.

Because some walls weren’t meant to be climbed. Some gates weren’t meant to open for you. And some people—no matter how much you wanted them to—didn’t want you on the other side.

And maybe that was okay. Maybe it had to be okay.

After all, he wasn’t lonely. Not really. He had plenty of friends already—good ones. People who had taken him as he was, without hesitation. People who didn’t make him work so hard just to be seen. People who made space for him at the table without him having to ask. He loved them for that. God, he really did.

Ashido, with her wild, unstoppable energy that could pull even the most stubborn clouds apart. She had this way of lighting up a room like she’d plugged herself straight into the sun, and Eijiro swore her laugh was loud enough to scare bad moods back into hiding.

Kaminari—chaotic to his core, loyal in a way that felt almost reckless. A guy who’d fail every test in the world and still show up with a smile. Kaminari would ride into hell for you, no questions asked, even if his quirk fizzled halfway through the first mile.

And Sero. Laid-back, always quick with a joke that made you groan before you laughed. The guy you could sit with and just… exist. No pressure to talk, no weight to carry. Just quiet companionship and the occasional roll of tape flicked at your head because he’d gotten bored.

Jirou, who’d roll her eyes so hard it was a miracle they didn’t get stuck, but still let him ramble about dumb workout routines or the new band he found. She’d sigh like he was the biggest inconvenience in the world, but she never left. She always stayed.

Even Shinsou, quiet and sharp-edged and lost in a way that mirrored things Eijiro didn’t talk about. The two of them had this unspoken understanding, something steady and unshakable that didn’t need big words or dramatic promises. Just a look, a nod, and the knowledge that neither of them was going anywhere.

And Bakugou… Bakugou was his own storm. His own damn planet. Brash and loud and impossible to reason with. He’d bark, he’d bite, he’d throw sparks like his bones were wired to detonate—but underneath all of that? There was loyalty. Brutal, unwavering loyalty that you couldn’t buy or beg for. You had to earn it. Bleed for it. Prove you were worth standing beside when everything went to hell.

Eijiro had done that. He’d fought for it. And somehow, Bakugou—Katsuki Bakugou, who trusted no one and tolerated even fewer—had chosen him back. Not in words, not in any way you could pin down, but in the way he stayed. In the way he didn’t walk away when it counted. In the way he yelled at him like he expected him to keep up.

That mattered.

He didn’t need Todoroki to be his friend.

He told himself that more than once, like a mantra meant to stick. And for the most part, he believed it. His life wasn’t empty. Far from it. He had people who cared about him, people who made him laugh, who made the world feel bright even on the worst days. So, no—he didn’t need Todoroki’s friendship.

But he still wanted it.

Not in the way he wanted a new pair of shoes or a cool hero poster for his wall. No, it was something quieter than that. Stranger. A pull he couldn’t quite name. Something about Todoroki lingered in his mind, like an itch buried too deep to scratch, always there in the background no matter how much he tried to ignore it. A mystery. A puzzle with pieces he couldn’t find.

He’d always liked figuring people out—not to expose them, not to tear them open, but to understand . To find the thread that made them human, the little spark that made them laugh, the thing that made their eyes light up like fireworks. It wasn’t about conquering walls. It was about connection. About seeing someone for real and letting them see you back.

And with Todoroki? That wall felt endless. Not brick or stone, but glass. He could see through it sometimes—the flicker of something behind those mismatched eyes, something soft and complicated—but he could never reach it. And for a long time, he thought maybe he just needed to try harder. Be louder. Be warmer. Shine brighter until the glass cracked.

But maybe that wasn’t what Todoroki wanted.

And Eijiro could want without chasing. He could care without pushing. Because caring, at the end of the day, didn’t always mean persistence. It didn’t always mean forcing doors open or hammering down walls. Sometimes it meant standing back. Sometimes it meant respect—giving someone the space they asked for, even if they didn’t spell it out in words.

And in this case? Todoroki had more than spelled it out. He’d said it clear as day, blunt as a blade: No, thank you.

So Eijiro would respect that. He let go. Gently. Quietly. Not like a dramatic cut, not like ripping a bandage off—just a slow, careful unclenching. Like holding water in your hands and finally letting it run back into the river where it belonged.

And it didn’t hurt the way he thought it would. Not really. It stung, sure, in that small, sharp way that unspoken hopes always do. But it wasn’t the kind of hurt that hollowed you out. It was just… a sigh in his chest. A weight lifting, even if it left him a little empty for a while.

And hey—if failure came with a consolation pudding cup? If it came with laughter around a table full of people who did want him there, people who teased him and cared about him and called him their friend? Well. That wasn’t so bad.

Yeah. He could live with it.

Still, just because he doesn’t bother Todoroki anymore doesn’t mean he doesn’t watch him.

Maybe it’s a little creepy. Okay, yeah—it’s definitely a little creepy. He can admit that much to himself. He’s not proud of it. It’s not like he’s lurking behind corners with binoculars and a trench coat or anything. He’s not that guy. But he can’t help the way his eyes wander sometimes. The way they seem to drift toward Todoroki in class without him even realizing it. Like muscle memory. Like a reflex that refuses to die, even when the fight is over.

At first, he told himself it was habit. Just the leftover momentum from all those weeks of trying. His brain hadn’t gotten the memo yet, that’s all. But the longer it went on, the harder it was to keep believing that. Because it wasn’t just absent-minded glances. It wasn’t background noise. It was deliberate. Not always, not in a way anyone else would notice, but in the quiet moments—when Aizawa droned on at the front of the room, when pens scratched softly against paper, when the world stilled just enough for him to get lost in thought—his gaze would drift. And land on him. Always on him.

And every time, he’d catch himself and look away fast, heat prickling up the back of his neck like guilt. Like he’d been caught doing something wrong, even though no one saw. Even though Todoroki never looked back.

Because if he were being really honest with himself—and he almost never was, not about this—it wasn’t just a habit. It wasn’t just a bad reflex. It was something softer than that. Something quieter. Something he didn’t want to name.

That kind of longing you feel when there’s a locked door, and you know you’re not supposed to open it, but you can’t stop wondering what’s behind it anyway. A door that promises nothing and still calls to you anyway. You tell yourself you’re just curious. You tell yourself you just want to understand. But the truth? The truth sits heavy in your chest and curls hot in your throat, and you don’t say it out loud because once you do, you can’t take it back.

He respects Todoroki’s decision not to be friends. He really does. He heard it loud and clear.

You bother me no more, or less, than your friends do.

Yeah. Got it. Thanks for clarifying. Message received, point driven home with all the elegance of a sledgehammer.

But respect doesn’t mean understanding. And Eijiro? Eijiro has always wanted to understand people.

It’s kind of his thing, honestly. Reading people. Finding the thread between what someone says and what they mean. What they show and what they hide. The difference between I’m fine and I’m drowning but I don’t want to burden you. He’s good at it. Always has been.

Maybe it comes from being the kind of kid who used to hover on the outside of groups, awkward and unsure, desperate to get it right so people would let him in. When you grow up like that—always second-guessing your words, always wondering if the joke will land or if you’re just going to embarrass yourself—you learn to read the room. Fast. You pick up on tone shifts. The way someone’s eyes flick when they’re nervous. The slight tilt of a mouth that means they’re amused versus annoyed. You become fluent in body language, in silences, in all the invisible things that fill the space between words.

And that’s always been Eijiro’s strength. He’s good at people. He’s good at getting them.

But Todoroki?

Todoroki’s like a locked box inside a vault inside a concrete bunker at the bottom of the ocean. Layers on layers of steel and silence, cold and heavy, like he built himself to be impenetrable. Cold steel around cold thoughts. No cracks to peek through. No seams to pry at. Just smooth, featureless walls and a single sign that reads KEEP OUT in letters so sharp they might as well cut you for trying.

No tells. No hints. No loose edges to pull at.

Just that same unreadable expression, day after day, like he’s playing a game no one else knows the rules to—hell, like maybe he’s the only player, and everyone else is just background noise. It’s the kind of face that makes you feel stupid for even trying to read it. Like staring at a statue that occasionally blinks just to remind you it’s alive.

Still—even if Eijiro wasn’t dealing with what was clearly some kind of weird, possibly unhealthy personal investment—he thinks he’d still be watching Todoroki.

Because the dude is just… so fucking weird.

​​And Eijiro knows that’s not exactly a hot take. Like, at this point, it’s basically the consensus across the entire class—a quiet, unanimous agreement that bubbles up in corners of the room whenever Todoroki is near but no one says outright. It’s the kind of truth everyone feels but no one wants to put too bluntly, as if speaking it aloud might break some unspoken rule.

Ashido was the first to say it out loud, loud and proud, without a hint of shame. It happened during one of those chaotic lunch breaks when Kaminari got caught staring, the conversation twisting and folding itself inevitably toward Todoroki.

“He’s not just regular weird,” Ashido had declared, jabbing a finger in Kaminari’s direction like a referee calling a foul. “He’s weird -weird.”

And now that Eijiro had been watching Todoroki more closely—really paying attention, as opposed to just glancing over in passing or overhearing bits of conversation—he had to admit: Ashido was right.

​​There was something about Todoroki that didn’t add up. It wasn’t simply the aloofness that everyone talked about. It wasn’t just the deliberate silence or the way he seemed to fold himself inward, like a tightly sealed origami crane, refusing to unfold. No, it was something subtler, something more unnerving. Something off. Like a radio station that’s always just a hair out of tune, the sound warbling and crackling beneath a static buzz that you can’t quite block out.

On the surface, he looked normal enough. Walked the same halls as everyone else. Breathed the same thick, recycled air. Smiled when he had to, said the bare minimum when called upon. But when you watched him—really watched him—the illusion of normalcy started to crack. There was a different rhythm playing in his head, a silent pulse no one else could hear.

His movements were precise, too measured, as if he was walking a tightrope stretched across two worlds—one that everyone else inhabited, and another locked away deep inside himself. His eyes flickered with something hidden, a storm barely contained beneath the calm surface, but he never let it spill over.

It was unsettling. Abnormal. Like a clock that runs just a little too fast or too slow, throwing off the entire day’s schedule without anyone knowing why.

Eijiro knows he probably shouldn’t be stealing glances the way he does. It’s not like he’s trying to be obvious—he tells himself that, at least—but Todoroki sits just behind him, so every time he turns his head even a little, it feels like the movement stretches longer and louder than he wants it to. He’s pretty sure it’s more obvious than he lets on, but he can’t seem to help it. There’s a pull there, subtle but persistent, like a magnet buried under layers of concrete.

He tells himself he’s being subtle. He’s just stretching his neck, that’s all. Trying to loosen the tightness that’s been building up all week, like a rope pulled too tight around his spine. Or maybe he’s just checking the clock, making sure class isn’t dragging on too long. Except the clock isn’t behind him—he knows that—so that excuse falls flat every time.

​​And look, he should be focusing. His own grades aren’t exactly anything to write home about. The last time Aizawa handed back a test, Eijiro seriously considered writing a formal apology letter to the entire math department. His shoulders had slumped so low he probably looked like he was carrying the weight of the world. He knows he needs to pay attention. He wants to. But the second he tries to lock in, to tune into the lesson, his mind slips away. A stray thought, a flicker in the corner of his eye, and suddenly he’s somewhere else.

Back to Todoroki.

Because Todoroki never writes anything down. Never.

It’s one of those little things that Eijiro can’t help but notice—a small rebellion against what everyone else is doing. While the rest of the class scribbles frantically, their pens scratching and their notebooks filling with notes, Todoroki sits still, hands folded or resting lightly on his desk. No underlining, no highlighting, no frantic shorthand or messy arrows. Nothing. Just quiet attention, like he’s storing everything somewhere deep inside, locked away and ready to be summoned whenever it’s needed.

And his grades? Perfect. Not just “pretty good” or “solid pass”—perfect. Like a laser beam of precision cutting through every test, every assignment, every quiz without a single miss. Eijiro has caught more than one glimpse of those returned papers. Neat, crisp sheets of paper, the edges sharp and uncreased, with bright red 100s stamped or circled at the top. Elegant, almost delicate little “Well done” comments written by the teachers in careful script, as if they’re admiring a work of art.

And yet—Todoroki never seems to look at them. Not once does he pause to savor the praise or even acknowledge the perfect scores. He just slides the papers effortlessly into his folder, the motion so smooth it looks rehearsed, like a quiet dismissal of the achievement itself. No smile, no flicker of satisfaction, no glance at the teacher’s remarks—just cold efficiency.

It baffles Eijiro. How does someone manage that? How can you carry all that knowledge in your head, without spilling a single drop onto paper? Without ever jotting down a single note? Does it come easy for him? Or is there some secret method, some unseen hours of practice behind the scenes? Or maybe… maybe it’s not about effort or skill at all. Maybe for Todoroki, the grades aren’t the point.

Eijiro finds himself wondering what it must feel like—to be so detached from the little markers everyone else fights for, to carry success so lightly that it doesn’t even register as an event worth pausing for. It’s like watching someone walk through a fire unscathed, calm and collected while everyone else scrambles to find water.

It’s infuriating. It’s fascinating. It’s maddening.

So Eijiro figured maybe Todoroki just didn’t need notes. Some people were like that—different learning styles, different ways of soaking in information. Take Kaminari, for example. He sometimes completely zones out during class, eyes glazed over, mind drifting miles away, but somehow, through sheer charisma, last-minute cram sessions, and group study marathons, he scrapes by just fine. Then there’s Ashido, who spends half the lecture doodling wild, weird aliens in the margins of her notebook, colors splashed everywhere, but once class is over, she switches gears completely and hits the books with fierce determination. Everyone had their quirks.

But Todoroki? He didn’t fit any of those patterns. No doodles. No whispered side conversations with classmates. No glazed eyes, no slouched posture, no signs of boredom or distraction. No secret naps or sneaky glances at the clock.

He just… sat there.

Completely still. Back perfectly straight, shoulders squared but not stiff—more like poised, controlled, deliberate. Eyes fixed straight ahead, unmoving and unblinking, absorbing without flicker or hesitation. His pencil rests lightly between his fingers, poised as if ready to move into action at any moment, yet it remains utterly frozen, an extension of his unmoving hand rather than an active tool.

The page beneath it lies pristine and untouched, an untouched canvas that somehow feels heavier than the thickest textbook. Not a single word, not a single note, no stray marks or tentative sketches. Blank. Waiting. Silent.

When class begins, Todoroki slips seamlessly into this strange stillness, as though it’s a role he has rehearsed endlessly in a private theater only he attends. Every movement measured, every breath controlled—there’s no nervous fidgeting, no restless tapping of fingers, no distracted gazes toward the clock or classmates. He doesn’t shuffle papers or adjust his seat. He simply exists, as if presence alone fulfills some unspoken requirement.

It’s as if being there, in the room, listening, is already enough. As if the very act of sitting still, of not needing to take notes, signals mastery or indifference. Maybe he’s already memorized it all. Maybe the details blur beneath a layer of quiet detachment, because to him, none of it really matters.

It’s not bored detachment. It’s not laziness, laziness would have some spark—some flicker of impatience or irritation. It’s not even arrogance, the kind of confident disdain that makes people tune out. No, it’s something else entirely.

Something that unsettles Eijiro the longer he watches it. That kind of silence that doesn’t just fill the room, but seems to hollow it out, like a shadow stretching beneath the surface of things. It’s not peaceful, not calm or meditative. It’s emptiness, cold and cavernous, like an echo chamber where sound goes to vanish without a trace.

It’s as if Todoroki has made a habit of absence—not just physically present but mentally withdrawn, like a ghost lingering behind glass. Like he’s mastered the art of detaching himself from his own body, floating somewhere just behind his eyes, a silent observer rather than a participant in the world around him.

And despite everything—despite the distance, despite the blunt refusals, despite the coldness—Eijiro still wants to know why. Still wants to understand him. Not to fix him. Not to pry or push or force something that isn’t there. But just… to know. Because that kind of silence never comes from nowhere. There’s a story folded inside it, a weight beneath the stillness that doesn’t make itself obvious to anyone.

Maybe Todoroki never wants to talk about it. Maybe he never will. Maybe the silence is a shield he’s not ready to lower. But if he does—if there’s ever a moment when those walls crack, even just a sliver—Eijiro wants to be paying attention. He wants to be there, ready to listen, even if the words never come.

He doesn’t know why it sticks with him so much—that blank notebook, that pencil that never moves, frozen in place as if waiting for a signal that never comes. It’s not just the image itself, but the weight behind it, like a quiet echo that refuses to fade. Maybe it’s because it reminds him of something he’s tried so hard to bury, or forget—the part of himself that still struggles under the weight of doubt and invisibility.

He remembers a time when he used to do the same thing. Not exactly the same, of course. Eijiro has always had a little more noise in him, a little more bounce in his knees, a little more restless energy bubbling just beneath the surface, pushing him to move, to fidget, to keep busy as a way to manage the nerves. But back then—back in middle school, before Red Riot, before UA, before he made the choice to fight his way out of that hole—there were plenty of days when he’d sit in class, pencil poised uselessly over the page, frozen by a storm of thoughts and fears. Wanting to write something down, to try, to prove something—to himself more than anyone else. But he was too caught up in the fear of getting it wrong, of looking stupid, of being noticed for all the wrong reasons.

He remembers staring at the board, the teacher’s voice turning into a blurred hum, words washing over him like static on a broken radio. Everything felt distant, disconnected, as if he were floating in a space between wanting to be there and needing to disappear. And in that space, a dark thought crept in, relentless and crushing: What’s the point? Why bother?

It wasn’t because he didn’t care. That wasn’t it at all. In fact, it was the exact opposite. He cared too much—about every mistake, every misstep, every glance that passed him by without recognition. He cared that he wasn’t strong enough, that his quirk wasn’t flashy or powerful, that the other kids were faster, louder, cooler, more everything than him. He cared that when people looked at him, they didn’t really see anything worth paying attention to. Just another background kid with a boring quirk and a shy, uncertain smile. Easy to overlook. Easy to forget.

And when you feel like you don’t matter, it becomes terrifyingly easy to start acting like you don’t. To shrink into yourself so small you almost disappear. To fall silent, to leave your page blank, as if erasing yourself from the world might somehow protect you from the disappointment of being ignored. 

So yeah. He gets it, in a strange, complicated way. There’s something about Todoroki—so composed, so still, like a sculpture carved out of frost, flawless and cold—that pulls at something deep inside Eijiro. Watching him, it’s impossible not to wonder if that quiet, that silence, is the same kind he once knew. The kind that looks calm on the outside but is really just fear turned inward, tightly wound and locked away. A fear so deep it never got a name, only a heavy weight pressing down in the chest, making every breath feel a little harder to take.

Maybe Todoroki’s silence isn’t about not caring. Maybe he does care, but he just doesn’t know what to do with it, or how to show it. That thought—the idea that beneath that stoic exterior there might be a restless, confused heart—bothers Eijiro more than he’s willing to admit. 

Because he knows, all too well, how easy it is to slip into that kind of silence. He had almost stayed there himself—almost let himself believe that shrinking down, disappearing into the background, was safer than standing out and risking the sting of rejection. He had nearly convinced himself that trying was pointless, that being small was better than being seen and turned away. That it was easier to fold up inside than to stretch out and reach for something more.

But the only reason he didn’t stay that way—the only reason he found the strength to push through—was because someone saw him first. Not in a dramatic, movie-like moment. No grand speeches or life-altering battles. Just small, quiet moments. A classmate, once after school, asking if he wanted to walk home together, breaking through the silence with simple companionship. A teacher offering a sincere “Good job” on a quiz he thought he’d failed, a rare flicker of acknowledgment that felt like a spark in the dark. Just one person, really—one person seeing something in him that he couldn’t yet see for himself. Someone believing in him when he wasn’t ready to believe.

He thinks about that a lot. Especially now, when the weight of everything feels heavier than ever, and the silence between them stretches wide like an unbridgeable gap. Because deep down, he’d wanted to be that person for Todoroki—the one who showed up no matter what, who didn’t back down or give up, who made himself easy to reach even when it seemed like there was no point. In his own clumsy, cheerful, overeager way, Eijiro had tried to be the steady hand, the constant presence. The guy who might break through the walls, if only just a crack.

But maybe Todoroki wasn’t ready. Maybe he never wanted that from Eijiro in the first place. And that’s okay. It has to be okay. Everyone has the right to choose their own boundaries, to protect themselves the way they need to. To keep their doors locked tight if that’s what feels safest. And as much as it stings, Eijiro understands that. Respects it, even if it hurts.

Still… he can’t help but hold onto a quiet, private hope. A fragile, stubborn thread of hope that someday, somehow, someone will be that person for Todoroki. Someone he lets in without hesitation. Someone who reaches through the silence and the cold, who sees past the stillness and the unreadable gaze, and who stays—steady, patient, unyielding.

And even if that person isn’t him—especially if it isn’t him—Eijiro hopes he notices. Hopes he feels that presence, that warmth, that acceptance. Because that kind of change, that kind of healing, it doesn’t come in a blaze of glory or a shouted confession. It’s quiet. So quiet that sometimes it barely feels like anything at all.

It starts small. A pencil finally moving across the page. A blank sheet slowly filling in, line by careful line. A tentative smile when no one’s looking. A door left slightly ajar instead of slammed shut. The first, trembling steps toward trust.

And Eijiro knows better than anyone how hard that first step is. How terrifying it can be to start reaching out. How every little movement forward can feel like the weight of the world.

But he also knows it’s worth it. That even the smallest flicker of light can grow into a blaze that burns away the cold. That the struggle, the pain, the fear—they don’t have to be the end of the story. That healing is possible.

He knows. And in the quiet hope of that knowledge, he finds the strength to keep watching, to keep hoping, and maybe— maybe —one day, to keep reaching again.

Chapter Text

Though the familiar routine of his old life had been stripped away piece by piece, somehow, Shouto had fallen into a new one. Not by choice. Not by design. It wasn’t deliberate, wasn’t crafted to anchor him or give him stability. It just... happened. Like vines creeping up the walls of an abandoned house, curling into every gap until the shape was covered, unrecognizable. Like moss growing over a stone—slow, silent, inevitable.

He didn’t cling to it the way he once clung to the rigid structure of his father’s schedules, those early mornings and measured meals and punishing hours in the training room. No, this was different. This wasn’t control. This wasn’t order. It was emptier than that. He didn’t choose this routine. He didn’t fight for it. He simply sank into it, let it shape him without resistance.

He didn’t linger on the why of it. Didn’t examine the hollow repetition for meaning. There was no comfort in the pattern, no safety in the monotony, no warmth in the predictability. It wasn’t a lifeline. It wasn’t a coping strategy. It was just… existence. Motion without thought. Breathing because bodies breathe, eating because hunger insists, moving because time refuses to stop even when you want it to.

If he had to put words to it—and he didn’t, because no one asked—he would say he felt like a phantom. Something pressed into the vague outline of a boy. Going through motions, tracing steps he didn’t remember deciding to take. No resistance. No urgency. Just the soft, relentless hum of habit.

And maybe that was the scariest part. Not the loneliness, not the silence, but how easy it was to let life carry him without ever really touching it. How natural it felt to float. To fade. To vanish behind the shape of a routine that wasn’t really his, but wore him like a mask all the same.

Each morning began the same. Always the same.

He would wake before the sun, before even the faintest hint of gray crept into the sky. Long before his alarm had the chance to sound, he was already staring into the dark. It wasn’t discipline that pulled him from sleep—not anymore. Discipline had been part of the old routine, the one his father carved into him like a commandment. But this? This was something different. Something worse. He woke early now because his body no longer understood what rest was supposed to feel like.

Sleep came in broken shards, jagged and sharp, scattered across the night like shattered glass. A few minutes here. An hour there. Sometimes nothing at all. He would drift under for a little while, only to claw his way back up, lungs tight, heart hammering for reasons he couldn’t name. When he did manage to sleep deeply, it was never merciful. The dreams always came. Some were twisted, heavy with heat and flame and voices he didn’t want to hear. Others were quieter, but somehow worse—moments that never happened, things he never had, warmth that dissolved when he reached for it. He would wake from those drenched in sweat, chest hollow, fingers curled into fists that left little crescents in his palms.

And so, most nights bled into mornings without him noticing. When he opened his eyes, the world outside his window was always dark—silent, still, waiting. The ceiling above him was a pale blur, his vision unfocused, his breath slow and shallow as if he were trying not to disturb something fragile.

He would lie there for minutes. Hours. Time stretched and collapsed in on itself in that gray space between sleep and wakefulness, so warped that he couldn’t tell the difference anymore. Sometimes it felt like whole nights vanished in the span of a single blink, and other times it felt like centuries passed between one breath and the next.

And in that stretch of emptiness, he always tried to remember why he should get up. Not just for the day ahead—not for class, or training, or breakfast. For anything. Why move? Why bother? The answers never came easily. Sometimes they didn’t come at all.

Eventually, he would move. Not all at once, not with any urgency, but in the slow, deliberate way of someone piecing themselves together in silence. He would swing his legs over the edge of the bed and sit there for a while, staring at the floor, fingers curling and uncurling like they were practicing the idea of motion. Then, finally, he would stand—quietly, always quietly. Like if he made too much noise, if he broke the brittle hush that wrapped around him, the whole fragile structure of his day would come crashing down before it even began.

His bedroom at home always felt coldest in those early hours. Not just in temperature, but in atmosphere. Hollow. Unlived in. It clung to him like frost as he slipped into his uniform, buttoning each button with precision, tying his tie until it sat perfectly against his collarbone. Every movement was methodical, careful, like a ritual he didn’t quite believe in but couldn’t stop performing.

​​When he opened the door, the halls were still and muted, the kind of silence that felt heavy enough to bend the air. It settled thick, like dust on old furniture in a forgotten room, clinging to the edges of his sleeves as he walked. Even the floorboards seemed reluctant to creak under his weight, as though the house itself was complicit in keeping him small, contained, quiet.

He would pad down to the kitchen on soft feet, moving like a shadow, always avoiding the patches of light that spilled through the slats of the blinds. And there—always there—his father would be. Seated at the table with perfect posture, already halfway through his breakfast, the steam from his tea curling into the air like a warning signal.

His father never looked up. Not once. Not in all those mornings that stretched together into something shapeless and endless. His eyes stayed fixed on the paper or his phone, the curve of his jaw hard, his mouth pressed into that familiar flat line of disapproval he wore like a second face. Even when Shouto entered the room, even when he crossed the floor and pulled out his chair, the man’s gaze never shifted. Not toward him. Not even past him.

They existed in parallel—two figures sharing the same space without ever truly touching it, like shadows cast in opposite directions. Even the staff knew better than to speak to him. They moved like ghosts around the edges of the room, wordless and precise, their presence barely there at all. Because everyone knew: words had no place here.

So, he would collect his lonely plate—always waiting for him at the edge of the counter, never on the table—and carry it to his room like contraband, careful not to make a sound. No footsteps echoing too loud. No scrape of chair legs against tile. No chance of disturbing the thin, brittle quiet that held the house together.

There was no good morning. There hadn’t been for a long time. No passing glance, no nod, not even the flicker of recognition in his father’s eyes when he reached for the plate. Just the cold silhouette of a man still seated at the table, absorbed in his paper.

And that was fine. Really, it was.

He didn’t need words. He didn’t need warmth. Those were things other people needed—people who didn’t understand how silence could become its own kind of language. And this silence? This was fluent. Sharp and clean, cutting through everything that might have lingered between them.

When he ate, it wasn’t a meal. It was a process. A mechanical sequence of motions that required no thought, no awareness, no appetite. He would sit cross-legged on his bed, the plate balanced on his lap, and stare at the wall as he lifted one bite after another. His eyes never focused on the food. The taste didn’t register anymore—not the salt of the miso, not the faint bitterness of green tea. It was just texture, weight on his tongue, something to move through because the alternative—doing nothing—felt worse.

​​Sometimes, in those blank stretches of thought, he would forget the act of chewing altogether. His jaw would still, the food sitting heavy like wet paper in his mouth, and he’d have to remind himself to move, to grind it down, to swallow. To breathe.

He always finished, though. Every bite of bread. Every shred of egg. Because he was hungry—hunger was a familiar, shapeless thing by now, it never left. And because, deep down, some old, relentless instinct kept telling him to fill the hollow space inside him before it swallowed him whole.

But it never worked. No matter how much he ate, the emptiness stayed. Not just the emptiness of an empty stomach, but something deeper. Something rooted in his bones. He would eat until the food turned sour and heavy in his gut, twisting like it didn’t belong there, and still—still—he would feel that gnawing ache that had nothing to do with hunger at all. 

By the time he came back down, his father wasn’t there. The chair was empty, the newspaper folded neatly, the faint trace of cologne already fading into the air like smoke. But the dishes were there, stacked in their usual place on the edge of the counter, a silent command waiting for him.

It was the only part of his old routine that had survived the quiet collapse of everything else. The only ritual left untouched when his father stripped away their mornings together, when the training sessions stopped, when even a glance of acknowledgment became too much to give.

And so, Shouto approached the sink with something almost like reverence. Not eagerness—not joy—but a hollow sort of devotion. He rolled up his sleeves carefully, precisely, folding each cuff into a perfect square before running the water. The pipes groaned in protest, and then warm water rushed over his fingers, steam curling up in pale ribbons.

He poured soap into his palm, rubbed until the suds swelled between his fingers, and then pressed the sponge to porcelain. The first swipe made that sharp, clean sound—ceramic against sponge, a rhythm he’d memorized long ago. Scrape, rinse, repeat. Over and over, until the world narrowed down to that small, simple cadence.

It was grounding, in its way. Something he could touch. Something real, something he could finish. A task with a clear beginning, middle, and end—a luxury in a life where everything else felt endless, formless, unfinished. He could complete this. He could do this right. He could get it perfect .

Because if his father had wanted to, he could have given this job to the staff. Could have handed it off without a thought, the same way he had handed off everything else that used to belong to them. He could have done it himself, quickly, efficiently, without hesitation. But he hadn’t.

He left it for Shouto. Trusted him with it. Expected it of him. And that mattered. More than he wanted it to. It was the only faith his father still put in him—the last flicker of belief that Shouto could be counted on for something, even something this small. And so, he clung to it with quiet desperation, like a man clutching a splintered lifejacket in a black, endless sea.

Because maybe—if he could keep doing this one thing—maybe he hadn’t completely failed. Not yet. 

Afterward, he would get dressed for school. The uniform was always waiting for him, perfectly pressed, the starch in the fabric biting faintly against his fingertips when he touched it. Shirt first. Always the shirt. He slid his arms into the sleeves with mechanical precision, smoothing the fabric down over his chest until it lay flat. Then the pants, crisp and rigid, the waistband closing with a quiet snap. Socks, black and thin, tugged over feet that still felt cold no matter how warm the water had been when he washed the dishes.

The motions were automatic now—memorized muscle movements that required no thought. Button by button. Tug and straighten. Pull the tie into a knot, the fabric sliding like silk rope through his fingers. He adjusted it until it sat flush against his throat, tight enough to feel but not enough to choke.

When he was finished, he stood in front of the mirror. Staring. Or maybe not staring—maybe just letting his eyes rest on the glass without truly focusing. His reflection looked back at him, but it didn’t feel like a reflection. It felt… delayed. Disconnected. Like a poorly synced film reel, like someone had spliced together his face with someone else’s life and called it good enough.

Sometimes he tilted his head, slowly, from one side to the other, just to see if the boy in the glass would follow. He always did. The same movements, mirrored back, crisp and obedient. But the confirmation never satisfied him. It didn’t stop the quiet, creeping question: Is that really me?

​​He didn’t know anymore.

When he was finished with the charade, he sat at the edge of the bed. Perfect posture, hands resting on his knees at first, then folding together in his lap. He didn’t reach for his phone. Didn’t check the clock. Didn’t fidget.

He just… waited. Waited for time to pass. Waited for the driver to arrive. Waited for the day to start, for someone—anyone—to need something from him again. The silence in those moments was dense, almost physical. Pressing against his ribs, filling his lungs until breathing felt like dragging air through wet cloth.

Often, his gaze would drop to his hands. He’d flex them slowly, opening and closing his fingers, watching the pale stretch of skin shift over the bones beneath. The motion fascinated him in a detached way, like he was observing someone else’s body instead of commanding his own.

They didn’t always feel like his. Nothing did, really.

He made sure to be outside at the same time every day. Not a second off. Not early enough to seem eager—because eagerness, in his father’s world, was weakness. Not late enough to inconvenience the driver—because lateness was failure. Precision was the only acceptable option. So he timed it perfectly. Jacket on, shoes polished, bag slung over one shoulder, footsteps steady on the stone path as he approached the sleek black car waiting like a shadow at the curb.

The driver always stepped out to open the door. Always polite, never warm. A slight bow of the head, a murmured good morning that Shouto never returned. He would slide into the backseat without a word, the leather cold against his palms as he set them on either side of him. Then the door would close with a soft, final click.

And then… silence.

Not the kind of silence that feels calm, or soft, or safe. Not the kind that lets you breathe. This was the other kind—the kind that pressed in on you, thick and heavy, until it filled your throat and settled in your chest. The kind that made every sound louder. The hum of the engine. The faint squeak of the leather when he shifted. The whisper of his own breathing.

He never spoke. The driver didn’t try. It was an unspoken rule, one both of them seemed perfectly willing to follow. The quiet stretched between them like glass—clear, brittle, easy to shatter if anyone so much as breathed wrong. It gave him too much space to think, but truthfully, he found himself thinking less and less these days. His mind always full of something that sounded like static and felt like cotton.

Outside the window, the world moved on.

Buildings slid by in long gray slabs, and people blurred past like watercolors dragged too thin. Everything moved too fast—colors smeared into one another, lights streaking, shadows collapsing and re-forming before his eyes could catch up. It was disorienting, the way the world could move so quickly when he felt so still. Like standing in the eye of a storm, watching everything spin without ever touching him.

He would lean his temple against the glass and feel the faint vibration of the engine thrum against his skull, a hollow echo in his bones. The chill of the window seeped into his skin, numbing. Dulling.

Sometimes—when the blur of faces outside became too much—he would try to pick one. Just one. A stranger on the sidewalk. A man with a briefcase. A woman tugging a child across the crosswalk. A student rushing with their scarf flapping behind them.

And for a second—just a second—he’d imagine being them. A different life. A different name. A body that didn’t feel like a cage. A skin that didn’t press so tightly against his bones, suffocating him from the inside out.

He never let himself linger on the thought for long. It felt dangerous. Like pressing on a bruise that might never stop bleeding if you pushed too hard. So instead, he sat back. Stared straight ahead. And let the blur swallow him whole.

At school, he drifted.

From hallway to hallway, classroom to classroom, moving like a shadow poured into human shape. His feet carried him where he was supposed to go, but he barely felt the ground beneath them. It was all muscle memory by now—the rhythm of bells, the tidal pull of the crowd—but none of it touched him. He walked with his arms drawn in close, shoulders squared just enough to look like composure. Eyes straight ahead. Neutral face. Don’t draw attention. Don’t break the illusion.

There were too many people. Always too many. Voices ricocheted off the walls like shards of glass, sharp and relentless. Laughter, chatter, footsteps pounding down the corridor—every sound stacked on top of the last until it built something too big, too heavy, pressing down on him until his ribs felt brittle. The hum of the crowd lived under his skin like static electricity, prickling, crawling. Sometimes it made his teeth ache, like the pressure had wormed its way into his jaw.

It felt like his head had been stuffed with insects. Not a swarm he could swat away—something worse. Inside his skull, buzzing and buzzing, vibrating against the bone, a soundless scream he couldn’t get rid of. It didn’t stop. It never stopped.

​​When it got too much—when the sound filled him to the brim and his lungs forgot how to work—he hid.

Bathrooms. Empty classrooms. The far corners of the library where no one looked. Once, even under a stairwell, crouched in the shadow of cold metal until his legs went numb. Anywhere the light didn’t reach. Anywhere that felt small enough to hold him together when everything else threatened to rip him apart.

He hid just to breathe.

Because the raw, itchy feeling wouldn’t leave him alone—the one that came from being perceived. From being visible. From knowing eyes could land on him at any second, could see too much or nothing at all. He hated that feeling. Hated it so much he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.

So he anchored himself. Counted the tiles on the wall. The cracks in the ceiling. The seconds between drips in a leaky faucet. His breaths, one by one, in and out, until the air stopped catching in his throat like fishhooks. Anything to remind himself he was real. That the floor beneath him was solid. That this wasn’t some warped dream he’d failed to wake up from.

And when the bell rang—when the bees in his skull quieted just enough for him to move again—he’d stand. Straighten his uniform. Smooth his hair with trembling fingers. And walk back into the current, letting it carry him along like driftwood in a storm.

He would time his entrance into class with quiet precision, slipping through the door at the exact chime of the bell—not early enough to be noticed, not late enough to draw attention. Just… invisible. Minimizing. Every step calculated to shrink the space he occupied. To spend the least possible amount of time under anyone’s eyes.

But even when he made it to his seat, even when he sank into the desk and let the murmur of voices dim into background noise, he didn’t feel grounded. The chair was solid beneath him, but somehow it wasn’t. The floor wasn’t. Nothing was. He felt untethered, like the string that tied him to the world had frayed and snapped, leaving him floating just a fraction out of sync with reality. Like he was watching the world through a sheet of glass and no one else could tell.

He tried to pay attention. He really did.  Forced his eyes to the board. Forced his mind to hook onto the words spilling from the teacher’s mouth. But it was like trying to catch smoke with bare hands. The harder he tried, the faster it slipped away. And every failure tightened something in his chest until it felt like his ribs couldn’t stretch far enough to let the air in.

Sometimes his vision went blurry around the edges, a white static creeping inward. Not enough to blind him, but enough to make the shapes of letters warp and curl like they were melting. His mind would tip sideways without warning, like the ground had tilted and everyone else was still standing straight. The words—on the board, in the air, in the teacher’s voice—they didn’t stick. They didn’t land. They slid down the walls, pooled on the floor, never reaching him. Like they’d never been meant for him in the first place.

Time didn’t move right, either. It warped and twisted, refusing to obey. Sometimes it collapsed in on itself like a black hole—he’d blink and class would be over, pages flipped, assignments handed out, laughter echoing as chairs scraped against the floor, and he’d missed all of it. Entire chunks of time gone, like someone had cut them out with scissors and left him with ragged holes.

Other times, it dragged so slowly it hurt. Dragged until every second stretched like gum pulled too thin, until the weight of it pressed down on him like lead. Those were the worst. Because then he noticed wrong things—small, stupid things that grew too big in the silence of his head.

The trembling of his pencil between his fingers, so faint at first, then harder, faster, until he had to set it down before it rattled onto the desk. The sharp edges of the paper digging into the heel of his hand. The way the fibers snagged against his skin when he shifted. The harsh fluorescent hum above him, constant, drilling into his skull like a mosquito he couldn’t swat.

His breathing, too—always wrong. Sometimes too shallow, quick little gasps like he’d been running, though he hadn’t moved in minutes. Sometimes too deep, gulping air like he’d been drowning and only just found the surface. He counted the teacher’s throat clears. One. Two. Three. Mapped out the rhythm like it mattered, like holding onto that sound would keep him tethered.

And all the while, the world moved on without him. His classmates laughed, whispered, scribbled notes. Hands raised, answers given. And he sat there, silent and still, a hollow body in a chair, watching life pass by through fogged glass, trying to remember how to feel like a person. To figure out if he ever had.

He very quickly realized that taking notes was all but useless. It wasn’t for lack of trying—at least, not at first. The first few weeks, his notebook bore the evidence of his efforts in jagged, uneven lines of ink. Pages scarred with half-formed thoughts, sentences that started strong and ended mid-word, letters that blurred into one another like water-stained ink. Entire lines would trail off into nothing, as though his mind had simply… left in the middle of writing them.

Sometimes he would flip back through those pages later, trying to make sense of what he’d written, and feel his stomach knot tighter with every glance. The words were barely words—shapes that resembled letters, but no longer carried meaning. Whatever information he’d been trying to capture had dissolved somewhere between intention and execution, scattered in the gap between hearing and understanding, between thought and movement.

​​Important details slipped through his fingers like water. He would sit there, pencil poised, forcing his hand to keep moving even when his brain felt locked behind glass, only to find later that he’d been writing nonsense. Dates without context. Numbers without formulas. A word like “important” underlined three times, circled, but without any clue what it was meant to point to. Like a breadcrumb trail that ended in an empty clearing.

He should take better notes. He knew that. Everyone else managed it. He watched them sometimes—how easily their hands moved across the page, how neat their columns of text looked, how fast they shifted between listening and writing without missing a beat. They weren’t struggling to make their brains stay in their bodies. They weren’t battling static every time a sentence started.

He should be able to concentrate. He should be able to listen and write and understand like a normal person. He should be focused. He should be engaged. He should be better.

There were so many things Shouto should be. But wasn’t.

And the worst part? He wasn’t even sure when he’d stopped trying to fix it. When the fight bled out of him and was replaced by something colder, quieter. Resignation. Because at some point, he stopped opening his notebook with the intention of learning. He started opening it for show. A prop in the play of normalcy. Pencil in hand, page blank, posture perfect. A student who looked like he belonged—even if he didn’t.

His lack of notes seemed to be okay, though. At least on the surface. Because there were tutors. Expensive ones. Supposedly the best money could buy. Professionals with polished credentials and impeccable recommendations—handpicked by his father, brought in with the unspoken expectation that they would plug the holes he couldn’t fill himself. Those tutors had always been his. His private lifeline in a world that refused to wait for him to catch up.

Back when he wasn’t allowed to attend school like Natsuo or Fuyumi or any other normal kid, those tutors had been everything. The only access he had to the classroom knowledge his siblings received effortlessly. They arrived in the Todoroki household with neat briefcases and patient smiles, sat across from him at the polished kitchen table, and tried their best to coax answers out of his silences and half-formed thoughts. They handed him worksheets, explained complex concepts, drilled facts and formulas into his head until they stuck.

Academic failure was not tolerated in the Todoroki household. It simply could not happen. It was a line that was never crossed, an outcome that was utterly unacceptable. So academic failure did not occur. Not on paper, anyway. Grades were immaculate, perfect scores stamped in bright red across clean pages. Test results came back flawless, transcripts gleamed with honors and distinctions. All meticulously curated to reflect a picture of achievement, of success, of a boy who was doing exactly as he was supposed to do.

So while the pages in his notebook might have been blank, and the classroom lessons might have slipped through his grasp, the Todoroki name was never tarnished by poor marks. The appearance of competence was maintained with surgical precision.

Still, that didn’t make it feel any less like failure. Because knowing the answers wasn’t the same as being present. It didn’t erase the heavy fog that clouded his mind most days, making even the simplest tasks feel like mountains too steep to climb. His brain often felt like a dense haze, sluggish and distant, where thoughts floated just out of reach like shadows in mist. The relentless struggle to focus made every moment a quiet battlefield, each second stretching longer as he fought to hold onto whatever thread of concentration he could grasp.

He couldn’t try the way other people could — with ease, with confidence, with a steady pulse of effort that felt natural and reliable. For him, every action was weighed down by an invisible resistance, a suffocating weight that made even breathing feel like a precarious act. Every simple thing—listening to the teacher, raising his hand, following the lesson—felt like a test he was quietly failing. A test with no clear instructions and no promise of mercy.

It was such a simple failure on the surface, but to Shouto it felt like a massive blow, piled on top of every other defeat he’d carried inside him for years. Not just academic failures, but the emotional ones, the invisible ones that no one acknowledged. The ones that whispered, “You’re not enough,” in voices too faint to challenge but too persistent to ignore.

He couldn’t even take notes. Couldn’t even stay attentive in class. Couldn’t even breathe right on some days without feeling like he was fraying at the edges, unraveling thread by thread until there was nothing left but a hollow shell. The pressure pressed down harder every day, an unyielding force that chipped away at his resolve.

And in the quiet moments when no one was watching, when the mask slipped just enough, he hated himself for it. For not being able to do the one thing that seemed so basic to everyone else. For being trapped in a body and mind that betrayed him in ways no one could see. For feeling like a failure even when the world thought he was perfect.

Stupid Shouto.  

Stupid.

They’re about to leave the main campus. 

Apparently. 

At least, that was what everyone else seemed to already be expecting. There had been a briefing—somewhere in the fog of his days—maybe during homeroom, maybe yesterday, maybe even last week. Details had been mentioned in passing: something about a field trip, an outing, a change of scenery. Aizawa had referred to it as “the USJ,” tossing the acronym out casually, like it was supposed to instantly click for everyone. For the others, it did.

The buzz of excitement had already spread like wildfire, rippling through the classroom in waves of whispers, smiles, and quick exchanges near desks and doorways. The other students spoke of it as if it were a shared secret, a long-anticipated event. They had names, rumors, expectations, and plans, their voices bright with anticipation. Their bodies leaned forward in eagerness, their eyes glinting with curiosity and a hint of adrenaline. The field trip wasn’t just a simple outing—it was an event that had already taken on a life of its own in their imaginations.

But Shouto? As usual, he was adrift. The details slipped past him like water through fingers. He hadn’t registered the significance of “USJ” or what it stood for. While others spoke excitedly about what they would see, do, and experience, he remained quiet, distant, his mind a blank slate in this particular moment. The chatter was noise around him, but it didn’t penetrate the fog that dulled his focus. He had no plans, no expectations, no part in the growing enthusiasm.

He observed from the sidelines, the way he often did—present but not quite present. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to care. It was just that the whole thing felt like another layer of noise he couldn’t quite decode, another thing everyone else understood but him. And so, as the preparations unfolded around him, Shouto simply stayed still, caught somewhere between curiosity and detachment, a quiet observer of a world that always seemed one step ahead.

He should have known. Should have remembered. Should have written it down, marked it carefully in his planner, set a reminder, done something—anything—to prepare. But somewhere along the way, the thread of his focus unraveled, slipping through his fingers like sand, leaving him grasping at fragments of scattered thoughts. The thought alone sent a sour taste curling in his gut, a tight spiral of unease coiling beneath his ribs and twisting into a silent knot.

How many moments had slipped past him unnoticed, like whispers fading on the wind? How many important things was he missing when he…  

… well he’s not really sure what should call it.  

He thought about the way time itself seemed to bend and warp around him, stretching and compressing in ways no one else noticed. How the noise around him fractured into extremes—one moment unbearably loud, every word and footstep hammering against his eardrums; the next, suffocatingly quiet, as if the world had muted itself, leaving only an eerie stillness that pressed against his senses. His own breath, sharp and frantic, echoed in his skull like a gathering storm, thunderous and relentless. Faces blurred into indistinct shapes, their expressions melting into shadows he couldn’t grasp. The room tilted and shifted beneath him, angles skewed and unsteady, as if the floor had turned to water and he was drowning in place.

It was in those moments—those terrible, slipping-away moments—that he stopped being fully present. His body stayed there, but his mind drifted, untethered and lost. He vanished into a hollow place inside himself, a quiet void where everything familiar turned strange and unreachable.

That was how he chose to name it. Simple, straightforward, easy to grasp: Whenever he stopped being there.

He liked that. Easy and clean. He liked clean.Something he could hold onto. Because life was complicated enough without adding another word that felt heavy and tangled. This way, at least, it was simple. And simplicity was something he desperately needed.

The bus situation is… a problem. A glaring, awkward problem. There just aren’t enough seats for him to claim one alone, and that realization sinks in the moment the bus comes into view. It’s parked at the curb, a single, beaten-up school bus—smudged windows, faded paint peeling at the edges—looking like some tired relic of a normal life, one he doens’t belong to.

His classmates are already flowing toward it, like a river breaking into multiple channels. They move in pairs and small clusters, effortlessly falling into the easy rhythm of friendship—sidling up to someone, slapping backs, dropping into seats side by side. It’s a fluid dance he’s never managed to replicate. Friends finding friends. Voices bouncing and overlapping, loud and carefree, echoing off the metal walls of the bus. Laughter rings out in bright bursts, sharp jabs and quick comebacks flitting like invisible threads tying them all together. Inside jokes float on the air, looping around him in circles he’s never been invited to cross.

No one looks his way. No one reaches out with an unoccupied seat or a gesture that says, “Come sit here.” Usually, that’s how he likes it. The absence of attention—an invisible cloak of anonymity—is a kind of comfort, a buffer against the noise and the pressure of social expectation. But right now, it leaves him feeling lost. Aimless. Untethered.

It’s as if he’s stepped into a swift-moving current without knowing where to plant his feet, without a hand to grab for balance. His body lingers awkwardly near the entrance, shifting weight from one foot to the other, scanning the growing crowd of pairs and groups but seeing only spaces already filled, connections already made. He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go, or what he’s supposed to do next.

This is the kind of moment Shouto never handles well. Without clear instruction or direction, he becomes small, invisible, hesitant. Like a ship without a rudder, drifting in the tides of something he can’t quite control.

He steps onto the bus anyway, every movement controlled and stiff, his breath shallow and tight like it’s caught behind a clenched jaw. His fingers curl lightly around the strap of his bag, knuckles paling. His eyes dart left and right, scanning the rows with single-minded urgency for the one thing that matters right now: a vacant seat. Anywhere to claim, anywhere that doesn’t mean standing awkwardly or feeling exposed.

There’s only one left. Just one empty space amid the sea of settled bodies, laughter, and whispered conversations. The window seat in the back, right next to Shinsou.

The moment sinks into him like ice water. Shouto pauses at the front of the bus, his heart hammering in his chest, suddenly unsure if he should move forward or retreat. That small pulse in his throat feels like a skip, a crack in the brittle calm he’s spent the morning weaving around himself.

Shinsou seated in the aisle seat with that lazy, half-lean against the armrest that makes him look like he’s halfway to somewhere else. His head is tilted back slightly, eyes closed or maybe just lowered, earbuds hanging loose from his ears—but not playing anything, Shouto notices. The faint rise and fall of his chest is steady, casual. His posture is relaxed, easy, effortless even.

But Shouto knows better. He knows that quiet stillness isn’t peace. Shinsou always looks like that—calm, unfazed, tuned out—until he isn’t. There’s a tension just beneath the surface, a tight wire ready to snap if pulled too hard. The kind of quiet that’s not really quiet at all, but more like a held breath waiting for the next exhale.

Shouto swallows hard, his feet suddenly heavy, heart pounding in a rhythm he can’t quite steady. 

Shinsou’s quirk terrifies Shouto more than any other power in their class. It’s not the flashy explosions that Bakugou wields with fiery intensity, nor Kaminari’s unpredictable lightning crackling in quick bursts. It’s not even the way Midoriya studies people with a calculating gaze, as if trying to dissect their very souls like a complex math problem. No—Shinsou’s ability is something else entirely.

It’s invisible. Silent. Insidious.

The thought alone sends a cold wave through Shouto’s chest. Shinsou’s quirk could take over your body without a single sound or sign. It could slip inside your mind like a thief in the night, hijack your limbs, and force you to move against your will—all while your true consciousness is trapped behind an invisible barrier, helpless and screaming in silence, a prisoner locked inside your own skin.

That loss of control—the fundamental violation of autonomy—feels like a slow, suffocating noose tightening around Shouto’s throat. It’s a fear that claws at the edges of his mind, making his breath catch and his chest constrict. He clings to control with bleeding fingertips and chipped nails, every ounce of his will focused on holding onto what’s his: his body, his thoughts, his identity.

Control is everything. It’s the thin, fragile thread keeping him tethered to the ground, to reality, to himself. Without it, he’s adrift—a ghost in a body he no longer commands. And the very idea that someone could snatch that away at any moment is enough to make his hands tremble and his heart race in a relentless panic.

But it’s the last seat left on the bus. There’s no room for hesitation, no escape route. So, he swallows the sharp shards of fear like glass scraping his throat, grits his teeth and forces his legs to move forward. Each step feels heavier than the last, like walking through water that pulls at his resolve.

Shinsou doesn’t even flinch or shift to make room. The space between them feels rigid, unyielding, like two opposing magnets stuck together with reluctant force. Shouto has to press himself in close, knees brushing awkwardly, almost painfully, as he slides into the window seat beside Shinsou. The proximity is jarring—too close, too intimate for someone he barely knows, someone whose power unsettles him this deeply. It’s wrong .

Two immediate problems announce themselves like flashing warning signs.

First, Shinsou is seated on Shouto’s left side. That means he’s in Shouto’s blind spot, a shadow lurking just beyond his careful gaze. Shouto can’t see him. He can’t watch the way Shinsou moves, can’t monitor the subtle shifts in his posture or the flicker of his eyes. He can’t keep an eye out for that dreaded moment when the atmosphere sours—the moment when Shinsou might do something unpredictable, something that makes the air itself feel heavy and wrong.

Shouto isn’t even sure what he fears Shinsou would do in that moment. The possibilities swirl in his mind—dark, uncertain, and unsettling. The unknown is a gnawing ache in his gut. He doesn’t want to find out, doesn’t want to be caught off guard like that. But sitting so close, with no escape, he knows he might have to.

The second problem hits him like a punch to the chest: he’s utterly trapped. There’s no wiggle room, no gap to slip through. On one side, Shinsou sits firm and unmoving, his presence close enough that Shouto can feel the faint heat radiating off him, the subtle rhythm of his breath brushing against Shouto’s arm. On the other side, the cold, hard barrier of the bus window presses against Shouto’s other elbow and side, confining him in a narrow cage of metal and glass.

There’s no clear exit, no way to shift or slide away without awkwardly disturbing the balance of this cramped space. Every movement feels amplified, every inch of space taken. The bus hums with the chatter and laughter of other students, but for Shouto, the noise feels distant and muffled, swallowed by the claustrophobic tension in this tiny corner.

The warmth of Shinsou’s breath, the faint scrape of fabric as they accidentally brush against each other—none of it is welcome. Instead, it tightens the knot of unease twisting inside Shouto’s chest. He’s caught between two immovable objects: a silent, unreadable presence on one side, and the unforgiving cold barrier on the other.

He feels boxed in, hemmed in by circumstances he can’t control, stuck in a space that feels too small for the weight of his own thoughts. The seat, the bus, the whole world shrinks down to this narrow corridor where escape seems impossible. And in that moment, the very air feels thick, almost suffocating, as if the space itself conspires to trap him in place.

He doesn’t remember exactly when it started — the unconscious motion of his fingers inching toward each other, nails catching on skin, a subtle but persistent picking at the edges of his fingertips. But by the time the bus lurches away from the curb and the city blurs past the windows, his hands rest heavily in his lap, trembling just a little. His nails dig into already raw, flayed cuticles, a dull, persistent ache that barely registers but somehow slices through the haze that clouds his mind. It’s a quiet, manageable pain — enough to pull him back from the fog of his thoughts, from the spinning static that fills his head.

Then, without meaning to, he pulls too hard. A sharp sting splits through his finger as the skin tears. 

Bright, immediate blood wells up, rich and crimson, a bead that slides slowly down his fingertip, catching the flickering light through the bus window. The color is startling — vivid and alive in a way that feels intrusive, as if the wound itself is shouting, demanding to be noticed. Sometimes, when the world feels too bleak, he’s almost drawn to the sight of blood, reminded of the rose bush in their yard, his mother tending its sharp thorns and fragile blossoms with patient care. But not now. Not when the blood means mess , when it means drawing eyes and thoughts he’s desperately trying to avoid. 

Panic blooms swiftly, sharp and hot like a wildfire in his chest. His hands jerk instinctively, rubbing at the cut with the sleeve of his uniform in a frantic, hurried motion. The white fabric turns pink, then deeper red, smearing the bright color in wide, ugly streaks that seem impossible to hide. The stain spreads, a loud, glaring mark against the sterile uniform—a visible crack in the mask he wears every day. It’s ugly. Obvious. 

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Shinsou is staring at him with a quiet, guarded concern that feels almost palpable in the tight space between them. The weight of that gaze presses down on Shouto’s chest, a mix of neutral curiosity, faint confusion, and cautious wariness all folded beneath a deeply furrowed brow. It’s as if Shinsou is carefully inspecting him, picking him apart with his eyes, trying to figure out exactly what kind of unpredictable, dangerous thing he’s dealing with. Like Shouto is some kind of rabid dog. Like he’s crazy.  

That look—the one people give wild animals.

It’s a look Shouto knows too well. The same look his mother had worn in the days before everything shattered. Before she left . Before the silence grew thick between them and the warmth drained out of the house. Her eyes, once soft and bright, hardened into something sharp and unfamiliar. She looked at him like he was no longer the son she had raised but a creature she couldn’t recognize anymore. Something foreign. Something dangerous. Something to fear.

That memory presses against his mind like a wound reopened, raw and aching. The look on Shinsou’s face, distant yet so close, echoes that same cold distance. ​​And just like then, Shouto wants to disappear. To fold himself into nothing and vanish before he can be judged, labeled, or feared.

He couldn’t help but wonder how he must look right now—dazed, pale, shaking with a jittery kind of anxiety that felt like it was clawing its way up his spine and settling deep in his chest. His fingers trembled uncontrollably, smeared with bright, sticky blood that seeped through the fabric of his sleeve, spreading out like a dark, living stain. He was painfully aware of every careless smear, every drop that glistened too sharply in the light, like a flashing beacon that screamed, Look at me. Look at how broken I am.

He couldn’t meet the other’s eyes. Was sure that if he did, the weight of that wary gaze might shatter whatever fragile composure he was trying to hold onto. Instead, he shoved the wounded finger into his mouth before he could think better of it, biting down on the raw skin despite the sharp metallic tang that filled his senses—blood mixed with shame and panic. The bitter taste clung to his tongue and coated his throat, but he didn’t care. Not really.

His gaze drifted out the window, fixed on the blur of passing trees and buildings. He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe deeply. He just stared, trying to anchor himself to something outside his spiraling thoughts. The world beyond the glass was moving too fast, too far away from the storm brewing inside him.

Shinsou didn’t say a word. The quiet stretched between them, heavy and brittle—like a fragile glass thread pulling taut, ready to snap at any moment. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, exactly, but it was loaded with unspoken things: hesitation, wariness, maybe even an unvoiced understanding. It settled over Shouto like a weight, pressing down and making it harder to breathe, harder to think, harder to be.

By the time the bus finally rumbled to a stop outside the looming, industrial complex of the USJ, the bleeding from his fingertip had mercifully stopped. The sharp, bright pain had dulled into a constant, throbbing ache nestled deep around the nail bed—raw and sensitive, every subtle movement sending a fresh jolt of discomfort coursing through his hand. He could almost feel the beginnings of an ugly, crusted scab forming there now, tightening his skin and pulling at the tender flesh beneath.

That small, inconsequential thought—the slow, creeping formation of a scab—hit harder than expected. For a brief moment, it stirred an unexpected lump in his throat, a fragile surge of emotion so quiet yet so overwhelming that he blinked rapidly, fighting the sting of tears that threatened to spill. It wasn’t like him to be overwhelmed by something so minor, something so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. And yet, the weight of exhaustion and frustration wrapped around his chest like a vise, tightening with every passing second.

Why did everything have to be so hard?

Why was it that even the simplest things—something as small as picking at his cuticle, something as mundane as enduring a bus ride next to someone who unsettled him—felt like an impossible mountain to climb? Why did his own body betray him in the smallest ways, reminding him constantly of the cracks beneath the surface?

The ache in his finger was a whisper of the chaos inside, the quiet, simmering turmoil he carried beneath his calm exterior. It was a reminder that no matter how much he tried to control or hold himself together, some things slipped through his grasp like sand through fingers.

He swallowed hard, turning his gaze away from the world outside and focusing instead on steadying the thump of his pulse beneath the skin. The USJ stood before him—massive, intimidating

They’re ushered off the bus in a loose cluster, bodies shifting and murmuring quietly as they step onto the cracked pavement. Thirteen moves with brisk efficiency, leading the way, while Mr. Aizawa follows close behind, his ever-present tired expression settling over the group like a low cloud. Shouto falls into the line without really thinking, his mind half-caught in the hum of voices, half-drifting somewhere else entirely.

At the entrance, the large glass doors slide open silently, revealing a cavernous, sunlit atrium inside. The group gathers near the front, where Aizawa clears his throat and begins to explain the exercise ahead, his voice low and steady, but full of that unmistakable edge—serious, expectant. Shouto strains to focus on the words, to catch every instruction, every warning. He knows this isn’t just another class outing; it’s a test, a trial.

But no matter how hard he tries, the words seem to slip through his grasp like water. They become distant, a low static that fades behind the thrum of his own thoughts.

His eyes wander, drifting upward. There, above the wide expanse of the atrium, a skylight stretches out like a window to the sky itself—vast and open, untouched by the walls that cage the rest of the building.

The sky is endless here.

Clouds float in soft, swirling shapes, shifting with gentle grace across the bright canvas. One drifts lazily, its fluffy form resembling a duck with a slightly crooked beak, quirkily imperfect. Another curls and twists into the improbable shape of a bicycle, its wheels comically small, as if someone had drawn it with a child's whimsical imagination.

It’s hypnotic.

For a brief, suspended moment, the world narrows to nothing but those drifting clouds and the serene blue beyond. The quiet peace of that sky feels like a balm, a fragile, fleeting pocket of calm inside the tense, charged atmosphere of the day.

It’s pretty. It’s peaceful.

Then—it’s quiet .

Too quiet. The kind of silence that presses heavy against his ears, muffling even the softest sound. The usual chaos, the excited chatter, the shifting footsteps—they all vanish, swallowed by something dark and waiting.

His classmates have dropped into hushed, panicked murmurs. Voices so low and tense they sound like whispers caught in a storm. Confused glances exchange like secret warnings, eyes darting toward whatever is brewing just beyond sight.

Then Aizawa’s voice slices through the thick silence—sharp, commanding, immediate.

“Everyone, stay back.”

Shouto blinks, his heart flipping wildly in his chest. The sharp command anchors him for a moment, but his breath still catches like it’s trapped. He forces his eyes forward, pushing past the fog of disbelief and dissociation that had been his constant companion all day.

There.

There’s a portal. A swirling, shifting mass of black and purple—darkness twisting with streaks of violet lightning, rippling and warping the air around it like heat shimmering off scorching asphalt. The edges of it seem to vibrate and hum with an eerie, unnatural energy.

And from that portal—they come. People. Too many of them. Masked. Armed. Wrong. They move with cold purpose, like shadows made flesh. Their presence turns the air brittle, turning the moment sharp and raw.

And Shouto, despite all the dissociation, despite all the times his mind had slipped away during the day—despite all the times he wasn’t there —he’s pretty sure this isn’t part of the lesson plan.

He knows he’s not supposed to move.

Aizawa’s words echo sharply in his mind, cutting through the fog of his racing thoughts like a sudden lightning strike. Stay back. The command is clear, unyielding, impossible to ignore. It carries an authority that reverberates through the tense air, jolting Shouto from the haze of disbelief that’s been creeping over him all day.

And so, Shouto doesn’t move.  He stands frozen exactly where he is, feet planted firmly on the cold floor as if rooted to the spot by invisible chains. His body feels heavy and numb all at once, like he’s caught somewhere between paralysis and instinct. Breath is caught high in his throat, shallow and ragged, making it hard to think or even fully feel. His eyes are locked onto the impossible scene unfolding before him, every muscle straining to process what should be impossible.

The portal pulses in relentless rhythm, a dark, sickly heart beating in the middle of the sterile USJ hallway. Its edges flicker and warp like a corrupted screen on a broken television, crackling with unseen energy that distorts the very air around it. The colors shift—black bleeding into deep purples and bruised blues—like a wound in reality itself, breathing and alive.

From that twisted gateway, figures spill forth.They’re dressed in mismatched gear, an unsettling patchwork of dark fabrics, heavy gloves, and grotesque masks that hide every human trace beneath a cold, alien façade. The way they move, purposeful and predatory, sends a ripple of instinctual terror through Shouto’s veins.

Villains. He doesn’t need Aizawa to say the word aloud to know the truth. The weight of it crashes down inside him, locking every part of his body tight with a cold, unyielding fear. His heart hammers against his ribs, yet his limbs refuse to obey.

Everything inside him locks up.

The rest of the class buzzes with murmurs, low and frantic, a tense undercurrent threading through the crowd like electricity before a storm. Voices rise and fall in overlapping whispers, edged with growing panic and disbelief. The atmosphere feels thick, almost suffocating, as if everyone is holding their breath together, waiting for the impossible to snap back into some kind of reality they understand.

Someone’s voice cuts through the haze, shaky but desperate for reassurance: “Is this some kind of simulation? Like, a drill?”

Another voice—louder, rougher—cuts in, raw with fear and certainty: “No way. This isn’t a drill.” The words hang heavy in the air, too real, too heavy to ignore.

And then Kirishima’s voice breaks through the growing noise, filled with disbelief and a desperate hope that saying it aloud might somehow push it away. “Are those... real villains?” His question trembles, as if speaking it might make it less true, less terrifying.

Around him, heads nod subtly, eyes wide and fixed on the chaotic scene unraveling beyond the portal. There’s an unspoken acknowledgment in the silence that follows—that this isn’t practice, this isn’t training, this is the kind of nightmare they’ve been warned about but never truly expected to face.

Shouto’s mind feels like it’s unraveling, slipping from the edges of control. The world around him begins to tilt and distort, the solid floor beneath his feet softening as if it’s made of melting wax, threatening to fold beneath him at any moment. His vision refuses to hold steady; the edges blur and pulse, shadows stretching and contracting like dark water rippling in a breeze. The sounds assault him in unpredictable waves—one moment they surge in, crashing like a tidal roar, overwhelming and disorienting, then they retreat into silence so complete it feels like his ears are filled with a high, persistent ringing, a sharp whistle cutting through the quiet like a distant storm.

​​He forces himself to breathe—deep, deliberate breaths in through his nose, slow counts of four in his mind, steadying himself as best he can. Then out, careful and controlled, as if the rhythm might anchor him back to solid ground. He’s drilled for this. Years of training have taught him what to do in emergencies like this—how to stay calm, how to assess, how to fight. The knowledge is there, clear in his mind.

But his body betrays him. His hands, which should be steady, which should move without hesitation, remain frozen at his sides. The nerves scream for action, but the muscles refuse to obey. They sit, heavy and still, like stone. The disconnect between mind and body is a sharp, painful ache.

Aizawa steps forward with a calm that feels unshakable amid the chaos. His movements are precise, sure—grounded in a confidence that comes from years of experience and countless battles faced head-on. The way he activates his quirk is seamless, fluid, as natural and automatic as breathing. There’s no hesitation, no wasted motion. With a swift pull, he yanks down his signature goggles, the fabric of his scarf catching the air and trailing behind him like a dark war banner announcing his arrival.

The moment his feet hit the ground, Aizawa becomes a blur of controlled violence. He darts forward with lightning speed, faster than Shouto’s eyes can follow. A flick of his wrists, a controlled release of his quirk, and one villain collapses, incapacitated in an instant. Without pause, he flows into the next target, his movements a lethal dance of efficiency and raw power—each strike decisive, each motion deliberate. The villains falter under his assault, but there’s no mercy, no room for error.

Though his fighting style differs from the harsh, imposing presence of Shouto’s father, Aizawa commands attention and instills fear just the same. There’s an undeniable authority in his presence, a palpable force that fills the space and shifts the tide of the fight.

As the battle unfolds, Thirteen steps up and begins to speak, her voice cutting through the noise—calm but urgent, steady enough to ground the panicked students around her. “Students, listen to me. This is a real attack. You must evacuate immediately. Stay together and follow my instructions exactly. We have protocols in place. You will be okay. Just listen carefully.” Her words offer a fragile thread of hope, a lifeline amidst the swirling panic, but they carry the weight of grim reality.

Shouto turns his head slowly, the movement feeling leaden and deliberate, as if every ounce of his body is weighed down by an invisible force. His limbs feel foreign—heavy, sluggish, like they belong to someone else. Breathing is no easier; each inhale feels thick, as though the air itself has lost its usual lightness. Even his thoughts seem clouded, swimming in a fog so dense that focusing feels like trying to grasp smoke with bare hands.

He’s trying—fighting—to stay present, to anchor himself to this moment, but his mind resists. It slips sideways, darting off into quiet, uncharted corners where panic and confusion lurk, leaving him fragmented. Every sharp noise—raised voices, hurried footsteps, the scrape of shoes on linoleum—makes his skin crawl, setting his nerves on edge. Each sudden movement nearby jerks his attention in too fast, too hard, as if his brain is a step behind, struggling to catch up, always lagging behind reality’s rhythm.

Around him, the class begins to stir, a wave of motion breaking the stasis. Students huddle together instinctively, backing toward the exit in a disorganized shuffle that’s equal parts desperation and fear. Some faces are streaked with tears, raw and trembling, while others shout frantically over the rising din, voices fraying under the weight of terror. Shinsou’s voice cuts through the chaos—a sharp, reasoned command—yelling instructions that seem meant to steady the group. But the words dissolve quickly into the overwhelming buzz of panic, unheard or ignored.

Shouto strains to summon the same raw fear that grips his classmates, to feel something real and urgent coursing through his veins. To ignite that primal fight-or-flight spark. But the sensation remains elusive, like trying to catch a flickering shadow. His chest tightens, throat raw, but still no motion follows. 

He doesn’t run. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t even shift. He just stands frozen, caught in the eye of the storm, unmoving and silent amidst the chaos that swells all around him.

Something fractures inside Shouto—a fragile barrier he hadn’t realized was holding, suddenly giving way with a sharp, shattering crack. The noise slices through the tense air—a sudden, sharp pop. At first, his heart lurches, racing to register gunfire, the violent snap of a weapon discharged. But no. It isn’t quite that.

It’s something else.

The space near the swirling portal ripples, the air shimmering like heat waves distorting the view on a scorching summer day. From the flickering darkness emerges a figure, stepping deliberately through the tear between worlds. Unlike the chaotic rush of villains that spilled out moments ago, these ones moves with purpose, calm and menacing.

A man steps forward, slow and unhurried, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched as if burdened by more than just the weight of his body. His skin seems to have been pieced together from ash and shadows, stitched in jagged seams that catch the dim light and give him an otherworldly, almost unnatural look. His eyes are the most unsettling of all—cold and sharp, flickering with cruel amusement and something feral, something primal, like a predator savoring the hunt.

Behind him, looming and dreadful, is something monstrous. A grotesque shape that defies easy description—a writhing mass with too many hands, clawed and twitching, and too many teeth, sharp and gleaming in the murky gloom. The creature’s presence is oppressive, an overwhelming force that seems to suck the warmth from the room, replacing it with icy dread.

And then, as Shouto’s brain struggles to comprehend the horror before him, he realizes with a sick, sinking certainty that the sound—the sharp pop that shattered the tense silence—had been the heavy footsteps of that thing. Each step a brutal thud that echoes in his chest like a death toll. It’s as if his stomach drops out of his body, plummeting downward and splattering coldly on the floor beneath him, the world tilting dangerously as fear crashes over him in a tidal wave.

Shinsou’s grip on Shouto’s wrist is sudden and firm, almost startling in its intensity. It’s the kind of hold that leaves no room for hesitation—hard enough to jolt him out of the fog settling over his mind, but not cruel or reckless. There’s urgency packed into the pressure, a silent command that resonates deeper than words could.

“We have to go!” Shinsou yells, his voice cracking through the chaos like a whip cracking in a quiet room. The words hit Shouto like heavy stones dropped into still water, sending ripples through the numbness that had been wrapping around him. It’s sharp, real, undeniable.

Shinsou’s eyes lock onto his, not just a glance but a focused, penetrating look. There’s something raw in that gaze, and it cuts through Shouto’s paralysis. The warmth of Shinsou’s hand, steady and grounding, is an anchor thrown out into the stormy sea inside Shouto’s chest. It roots him in the moment, tethers him to the here and now when every instinct is telling him to disappear.

Without really thinking, without taking time to process or analyze, Shouto lets himself be pulled along. He moves because the grip demands it, because the eyes demand it, because somewhere beneath the weight of panic and confusion, a small part of him still remembers what it means to follow, to survive, to keep moving forward.

He doesn’t question. He doesn’t resist. He just follows.

Suddenly, the swirling black and purple portal looms right in front of them, its edges crackling and shimmering like a living wound in the fabric of reality. The air pulses with a strange energy—tense, electric, thick with the scent of ozone and something darker, like burnt metal and smoke. It feels like the world itself is holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

Without hesitation, Bakugou and Kirishima launch forward, muscles coiled and ready. Their movements are explosive, precise—Bakugou’s fists already crackling with volatile energy, Kirishima’s stance solid and unyielding, like an unbreakable wall. They embody the raw, unfiltered spirit of heroes, charging headfirst into the unknown without a second thought.

Shouto watches them, a flicker of something like admiration—or maybe envy—stirring in the pit of his stomach. He knows deep down that he should move too. That’s what his father would expect. That’s what the hero in him is supposed to do. Step forward, take control, be the cold, unyielding force that stands against chaos.

But his body betrays him. His feet feel rooted to the spot, as if invisible chains have wrapped themselves tight around his ankles. His throat tightens, constricting like a vice, making every breath shallow and ragged. Panic curls in his chest, a silent scream muffled by the thick fog swallowing his mind.

He doesn’t even register the moment the ground drops out beneath him.

He’s falling—plummeting through that chaotic vortex of swirling purple and black, the air twisting and folding around him like a living thing intent on tearing him apart. It’s a nauseating, disorienting free-fall, as if he’s been swallowed whole by some dark storm and is being chewed up inside its endless maw, only to be spat back out into a world that feels impossibly distant and alien. The edges of his vision blur and distort, the sky above fragmented into shards of shifting color, as the ground rushes up to meet him with relentless inevitability.

Deep down, somewhere beneath the haze of fear and shock, he knows exactly what he should do. His instincts scream for him to fight back—twist his body mid-air, plant his feet beneath him to absorb the impact, shield the vulnerable spots he knows will crack if they hit the ground too hard. He could right himself, could catch this fall, could control it. He should .

But he doesn’t bother. Not this time. Not now.

Instead, he lets his body go limp, surrendering to the fall as if he’s a leaf caught in a cruel wind, tumbling without resistance. His eyes remain open, fixed on the drifting clouds above—the same ones he had watched before, serene and indifferent, floating lazily in endless blue. It’s almost as if nothing is happening at all. No chaos. No danger. Just the slow, silent descent, the steady passage of time marked by the gentle drift of clouds, and him, suspended in the quiet storm of his own numbness.

He lands hard on his back against the unforgiving concrete, the impact jarring his entire body like a thunderclap. The breath is instantly ripped from his lungs, leaving him gasping, chest heaving as if the air itself has been sucked away. His vision blurs around the edges, everything tilting and warping, colors bleeding into one another like a watercolor left out in the rain. It’s the same dizzying haze he remembers from his father’s strikes—when a blow lands just right, snapping a rib and making every breath a razor-sharp stab inside his chest.

Pain blooms, hot and jagged, shooting through his side with each shallow inhale, like shards of glass lining his lungs, cutting deeper every time he forces his ribs to expand. His muscles tremble, weakness pooling in his limbs as his body fights to steady itself against the shock. 

But despite the fire burning in his ribs, despite the tight band of agony squeezing his chest, he forces himself up. Slowly, painfully. His fingers press against the rough concrete for balance as he pushes his weight forward, breath rasping and uneven.

Every inhale feels like dragging broken air through torn fabric. Like trying to force air back into lungs that feel like popped balloons. Every exhale a battle against his own body’s rebellion. Still, he tries to steady his gaze, to take stock of where he is, what’s happening around him. The world doesn’t stop moving, even if his lungs want to. He fights to summon strength, to anchor himself in this moment, desperate to reclaim even the smallest measure of control. Because collapsing here, giving in to the pain or the dizziness—that’s not an option. Not now. Not ever.

Oh. He’s not alone. That realization hits him slowly, like a faint pulse beneath the chaos. 

It makes sense. The tight grip Shinsou had on his wrist—the steady anchor pulling him from the edge of collapse—had been the only thing keeping him moving. Reminding him to put one foot in front of the other, to fight the urge to just drop and curl into himself, to disappear into the safety of stillness or even surrender to exhaustion with a heavy, defeated nap.

Shouto’s eyes flicker sideways, and there’s Shinsou—equally ungraceful, equally battered. The other boy lies sprawled on the concrete, his chest heaving with uneven, ragged breaths. His body twitches involuntarily, limbs jerking in spasms that ripple through him like a painful, uncontrolled dance. One hand presses tight against his ribs, fingers digging in as if trying to hold the pain together, while the other scrabbles at the ground, claws scratching uselessly at the unforgiving pavement.

He curls inward, folding himself like he’s trying to protect some fragile core, only to jerk back abruptly, eyes squeezed shut and teeth clenched. The repetitive motion is almost hypnotic, a fragile oscillation between collapse and resistance.

For a moment, a strange, dark flicker of laughter bubbles up inside Shouto. Quiet. Hysterical. Not a full laugh, but a raw, breathless tension trying to break free. It claws at his throat, a mixture of relief, disbelief, and something unnamable.

As if anything about this — this chaos, this fear, this brokenness — is funny.

He clamps his jaw tight, forcing the laughter back down, swallowing the bitter absurdity of it all. Because no matter how much he wants to, he can’t let himself fall apart here. Not now. Not in front of anyone. Not ever.

They’d landed in what looked like the aftermath of some catastrophic quake—a landslide rendered in steel and plaster, but no less treacherous for its artificiality. Shattered slabs of rock sprawled across the incline like discarded bones, jagged edges catching the dim light. Dust hung thick in the air, gritty against the tongue, clogging the back of his throat until every breath felt like inhaling sandpaper. The silence was punctuated by the occasional groan of shifting debris, the faint grind of rubble settling under its own weight.

Chunks of simulated concrete loomed overhead, some balanced so precariously it seemed a single wrong move might send them tumbling. Slabs of faux terrain jutted upward at grotesque angles, cracked seams spiderwebbing through their surfaces. Their edges were sharp enough to draw blood if touched the wrong way. The ground under his feet wasn’t ground at all—just layered instability, an illusion of solid earth that shuddered if he lingered too long in one place.

Above them, metal scaffolding clung to the walls like an exposed skeleton, its beams warped and leaning under their own rusted weight. They groaned occasionally, a metallic protest that carried like a warning through the hollow space. The overhead lights cut through in fractured beams, bending against clouds of suspended dust until every ray looked jagged, splintered.

And the sky. Still that endless, painted blue—but now it felt cruel. Unreal. An imposter sky stitched together behind glass, mocking them with its perfect clouds while everything beneath it tilted toward collapse. It was a diorama of disaster, beautiful in the way broken things are when you know they can’t hurt you—except this could.

The entire zone was built like a grave waiting to happen—a wide, yawning basin sunk deep into the earth, its slopes fractured and unstable by design. There were no clean exits here, no gentle inclines leading up and out. Just jagged ledges, sheer walls, and loose rock ready to avalanche at the wrong vibration. Every shadow looked like a hiding place. Every slope, a place to be buried.

Shinsou made a noise—low, rough, dragged out through clenched teeth—and it snapped Shouto’s attention back to the present like a slap. He turned his head slowly, like it weighed more than it should, and found the other boy curled halfway onto his side, pushing himself upright on one trembling elbow. His breath came uneven and shallow, hitching every time his ribs moved.

He was breathing, at least. That was something. No obvious blood, no limbs bent at wrong angles, but his face was pale under the dust, jaw locked so tight a tendon twitched visibly along his neck. His free hand clutched his side hard enough to whiten the knuckles, fingers digging in like he could hold the pain in place through sheer force of will.

For a second, Shouto just stared at him, brain blank, like his thoughts were still scattered somewhere back on the bus. The sound of his own pulse filled his ears, heavy and arrhythmic. He knew he should say something, do something, but all he managed was a blink. Two.

“Ribs,” Shinsou ground out, voice hoarse, raw in a way that made Shouto’s own lungs ache in sympathy. “Think I—” His words fractured on a sharp breath, a curse strangled halfway out. “—cracked something. Fuck.”

The words hung in the dusty air, harsh and human and grounding in a way that made Shouto flinch. It was too real. Too alive. And the way Shinsou said it—half snarl, half gasp—like it must hurt just to speak.

Somewhere above them, a loose chunk of concrete shifted with a groan, dropping a thin stream of dust that curled through the stale air like smoke.

Shouto stared a second too long—long enough for the moment to become strange, brittle—before the realization hit like a cold slap. He should do something . That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? When someone’s hurt. When they’re sprawled in the dirt clutching their ribs and hissing through clenched teeth like the pain might break them in half. You help. You check for injuries. You… something.

But when he told his body to move, nothing happened. His limbs felt wrong—disconnected, like he was a marionette someone had forgotten to pick back up. Strings tangled, head tilted too far back, knees hovering somewhere above the floor of his thoughts. He could feel the shape of himself, but it didn’t feel attached. Didn’t feel real.

His heart was trying to make up for the rest of him, pounding a brutal rhythm behind his ribs, every thud sharp enough to rattle his bones. He could hear it in his ears, drowning out everything else. A low roar, pulsing and relentless, filling the hollow spaces in his skull until sound stopped being sound and turned into pressure. It made it hard to think. Hard to breathe.

He opened his mouth anyway, forcing his jaw to unlock with a little click he felt more than heard. Air moved in. Words didn’t. His tongue sat heavy in his mouth, a lump of useless flesh, stuck somewhere between intention and execution.

Say something. Anything. Ask if he can walk. Ask if he can breathe. Offer your shoulder. Do what a hero should do.

Nothing came.

So he just stood there, knees stiff, fingers limp at his sides, watching while his mind flailed in a slow-motion panic. Watching the way Shinsou’s arm shook under his own weight, muscles jumping with effort. Watching the quick, shallow rise and fall of his chest, the uneven drag of breath that sounded too much like gasps. Watching the way every exhale broke jagged, a raw edge scraping the air.

The sound made something coil tight in Shouto’s throat. He swallowed hard against it, but it didn’t help.

He should move. Should kneel. Should reach out. He pictured it—his hand stretching toward Shinsou’s shoulder, the offer of steady contact—but the image stayed stuck in his head, flat and two-dimensional, like a page in a book. The actual movement never came.

So he just… stayed. Frozen. Heart hammering so hard he thought it might leave bruises on his ribs, nails biting into his palms without him noticing, and his eyes fixed on the tremor in Shinsou’s arm like that single detail had trapped him.

Finally— finally —his knees obey. There’s a split-second where it feels like prying rusted hinges apart, the motion stiff and foreign, but they move. He leans forward, shifting his weight off the rock under his boot, and takes a step toward Shinsou. What he plans to do when he gets there, he doesn’t know. A hand on his shoulder? Check his breathing? Something, anything to make himself useful, to feel like he isn’t just standing here like furniture.

The second step never comes.

Because Shinsou’s expression—still tight with pain just a moment ago—snaps into something sharp, wide-eyed, and wrong . His mouth opens around a sound that doesn’t make it to Shouto’s ears. Too far. Too late. All Shouto catches is the shape of his lips, the barest edge of panic, and the way his gaze flicks hard to the left.

And then—impact. Something slams into his ribs with a force that seems to turn the world inside out. For half a heartbeat, his mind doesn’t connect the dots. Doesn’t register pain, just movement—a sudden, feral shove that wrenches the ground out from under him and sends him spinning into weightlessness.

He’s airborne before the thought even forms. Flying. Weightless. Floaty. And it’s nice .

In that broken, jagged corner of his brain that hasn’t shut up since the portal opened, there’s a flicker of something like relief. Like surrender. The pressure in his chest lifts, the roaring in his ears drops to a hush, and for the barest second, it almost feels like floating in water. Like being suspended in nothing, no weight, no choices, no expectations. Like a dream.

Then the ground comes for him like a hammer. He hits mud first—cold, wet, sucking greedily at his clothes—and then the rest of him folds into the tumble, rolling hard, momentum tossing him like he’s nothing more than a rag doll someone got bored of. The world blurs: gray rock, brown sludge, a flash of steel scaffolding overhead, the pale smear of fake sky. Over and over until—

Crack.

His head smacks something solid and unyielding. A jagged outcrop of rock. White pain detonates behind his eyes, bright enough to blind, sharp enough to steal the breath from his throat. His teeth clack together hard enough to bite his tongue, copper flooding his mouth.

Then the spinning slows. Stops. He’s on his back, mud sucking at his spine, the sky wheeling drunkenly overhead in fractured smears of blue and steel. The pain in his skull throbs like a second heartbeat, deep and mean, echoing through his jaw and down the cords of his neck. There’s a taste like dirt and blood on his tongue. His vision fuzzes at the edges, rippling like heat over asphalt.

Immediately, warmth bursts across his forehead like someone cracked an egg on his skull and let the yolk spill down. Thick and hot and sticky, it gushes fast, trailing over his temple, into his eyebrow, slipping past his lashes until the world swims crimson at the edges. He blinks and it smears, iron-heavy, salt-slick, tangling in his lashes before it spills lower, dripping from his chin in fat, scarlet drops that splatter on his shirt.

They bloom there, first as tiny blossoms, then spreading like spilled ink until they swallow the fabric in jagged, bleeding petals. Too much—way too much for it to be fine—but his brain doesn’t wrap around that. Doesn’t panic. Doesn’t care.

Because all he can bring himself to do—lying there half-buried in muck, the sky spinning and his pulse pounding behind his teeth—is laugh .

And it’s not even a choice. It’s not something he wills or controls. It rips out of him sudden and sharp, bubbling up from some cracked place deep in his chest. A sound that feels too big for his lungs. Hysterical and broken and bright. It startles him, how loud it is, how it burns his throat raw on the way out, how his shoulders start shaking with it like his body is trying to cough out all the panic he never let surface.

It flows out like floodwater after a dam finally snaps—violent and unstoppable, sweeping everything else with it. The fear, the static, the pressure that’s been crammed into the hollow of his ribs since morning. Since before morning. Maybe since forever.

And to think he’d been so terrified over that tiny dot of blood earlier, that one neat little bead glistening on his sleeve like the worst thing he could imagine. To think he’d rubbed at it frantic, tried to hide it like a stain could ruin him.

Now? His shirt isn’t white anymore. It’s red . Not just dotted or splattered, but drenched, soaked through, dyed in something alive and vivid and wrong. His collar clings, heavy and wet. The iron stink hangs thick around him, curling up his nose, catching on his tongue. And all he can do is laugh harder.

Ugly, wheezing bursts that claw their way out of his throat until his lungs ache and his ribs spasm, and still it won’t stop. Because something about it is just so funny . So violently, hideously funny. 

He can’t stop laughing .

And then—through the haze of spinning sky and crimson blur and the raw ache pounding at the back of his skull—there’s a jolt at his wrist. A sudden, firm grip that snaps against his pulse like a hook sinking into flesh. Fingers clamp down hard, urgent, and then pull.

The world lurches sideways. He blinks, sluggish, disoriented, and Shinsou’s face swims into focus—or something close to focus—pale and tight with strain, his teeth bared like an animal’s in a grimace that’s all frustration and pain. Sweat beads at his temple, streaking down through the grime. His jaw works as he spits out something that sounds like, “Jesus—fuck—get it together, man, seriously—” Each word jagged and bitten off, carried on ragged breaths that hitch when he moves too fast.

His voice cuts through the laughter only halfway—sharp enough to scrape but not deep enough to root. Shouto registers the words the way you register thunder in the distance: a noise, a vibration, something happening somewhere far away.

And Shinsou keeps talking, cursing between clenched teeth about his ribs—something about “swear to God, they’re broken, and you’re not helping” —but he doesn’t stop moving. Doesn’t stop dragging. His grip on Shouto’s wrist is iron now, biting into skin like it’s the only tether keeping either of them above water. His other arm is shaking, braced against the mud as he scrambles forward in jerky, desperate lunges, boots slipping, sliding, finding no purchase on the slick, churned-up earth.

The mud sucks at their knees, at their ankles, greedy and thick, spattering up their sides in wet, ugly streaks. Every tug on Shouto’s arm makes his shoulder wrench, sends little bursts of white across his vision, but it’s distant. Everything’s distant except the heat in his throat where the laughter rips through, wild and sharp and burning, unstoppable.

He can feel it shaking him now—his whole chest hitching, convulsing, as if every breath wants to come out as another burst of sound. He bites down on it, tries to swallow, but it claws its way up anyway, bubbling against his teeth until he’s choking on it, tasting blood and mud and hysteria all at once.

Shinsou throws a glance back at him—sharp, desperate, almost scared—and it only makes it worse. Because Shinsou looks like he’s dying, face twisted in pain, dragging them both through hell on pure stubborn spite, and Shouto is laughing.

Laughing like it’s the funniest goddamn thing in the world.

​​“Come on, dude—I know you got hit in the head, but what the fuck is wrong with you? I need your help here, please!”

The words hit like cold water. Sharp. Jarring. There’s a crack in Shinsou’s voice—thin and ragged at the edges—that shouldn’t be there. He sounds desperate in a way that punches right through the haze wrapping Shouto’s mind like cotton.

And maybe it’s that desperation. Or maybe it’s just the delayed aftershock of reality finally catching up and slamming down on him like a falling beam, but something in him snaps back into place. Not all the way—he’s still drifting, still trembling—but enough. Enough to make him blink, force his vision to settle, drag himself through the static long enough to look at the other boy. Really look .

Shinsou looks… awful . Not the casual, cool, slouched-over kid he always projects. Not even the sharp-eyed, calculating guy who plays verbal chess with their teachers like it’s a sport. No—this version is stripped raw. Pale under the grime, lips pressed tight like they’re holding back something dangerous, something broken. His breath comes short, shallow, uneven in a way that sounds wrong. Every exhale stutters like it costs him something.

His right arm is clamped across his ribs, fingers digging in hard like he’s trying to physically hold himself together. Blood stains the knuckles where they’ve scraped against something—rock, maybe, or his own damn bones. The pain is etched deep into his face, twisting his features into something ugly and honest.

And then there’s his shoulder. Off. Wrong. Sitting at a crooked angle that makes Shouto’s stomach tilt just to look at it. He can’t remember it being like that before. Can’t remember when it happened, or how, or whether Shinsou made a sound when it did—whether he cried out and Shouto didn’t hear it because he was too busy laughing .

That thought hits like a blade between his ribs. Cold. Precise.

Was he laughing while that was happening? While Shinsou’s bones were grinding out of place, while something inside him was cracking apart—was Shouto curled up in the mud, blood in his teeth, losing himself to some hysterical break?

The shame is sudden and sharp, a spike driven straight through the fog. It makes him want to fold in on himself. Makes him afraid to even open his mouth because he doesn’t know what would come out—an apology, or another broken sound that doesn’t belong in a moment like this.

 He was scared to know the answer. 

“W-what… happened?”

The words scraped out of his throat like rusted nails dragged over stone, breaking halfway through like they’d forgotten how to exist. His tongue felt dry. Heavy. His voice sounded like something that hadn’t been used in years—like he’d unearthed it from the bottom of a well.

And as soon as they left his mouth, he wondered—when was the last time he spoke? On the bus? No. Before that? In class? At breakfast? His memory stuttered like a bad reel, skipping frames until all he had was static and silence. The question sat bitter on his tongue.

Judging by Shinsou’s face, it wasn’t the right thing to say. His expression twisted tighter—pain, yes, but something else bleeding through now. Something sharp-edged and alarming that made Shouto’s stomach sink. His eyes, already too wide from pain, sparked with something like—fear ? Or maybe anger. Maybe both.

“What?” Shinsou’s voice cracked like a whip. “How hard did you hit your head? For real—you’re kind of freaking me out right now.”

The words hit hard. Too real. They burned through the fog and lit something cold and hollow in his chest.

Freaking me out.

Of course he was. Of course he was freaking him out. He was doing that thing again—being wrong, being broken in ways he couldn’t cover up.

Shinsou’s hand moved suddenly, reaching for him—hesitant but urgent. The movement was clumsy, shaky with pain, but determined, fingers outstretched like he meant to check for blood, to feel for the dent or fracture that must be hiding under all the mess. Like he didn’t trust Shouto’s answer—didn’t trust him at all—because clearly, he wasn’t making sense.

The sight of that hand coming toward him made Shouto’s breath catch sharp in his throat. Every instinct screamed to pull back. To move. To get away. Because that hand—open, reaching—looked too much like—

No. Not now. But his body didn’t care. It flinched anyway, an involuntary jerk like a marionette tugged on by frayed strings. His pulse spiked so fast it made his vision tilt.

And in the back of his mind, something ugly bloomed: don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t—

Shouto reacted before he could think—his body moving on instinct like a startled animal. His hand shot up, batting Shinsou’s away with a sharp smack that echoed far louder than it should have in the empty expanse of the landslide zone. The sound ricocheted off the shattered rock around them, a brittle clap that hung in the air for what felt like too long.

The sting came next. Immediate. His palm burned from the force of the hit, nerves buzzing like live wires. He hadn’t meant for it to be that hard. Hadn’t meant for it to feel like… rejection. But it did. The air between them went tight—stretched thin like a thread pulled too far.

Shinsou flinched back hard, his face screwing up in a flash of raw irritation and pain—though maybe not just from the hit. His injured ribs made the movement jagged, awkward, like every breath cost him something.

“Ow! What the fuck?” The words snapped out of him sharp enough to cut. He jerked his hand back like it had been burned, glaring at Shouto with eyes gone dark and narrow. His voice rose again, brittle with anger that sounded like it was holding something heavier underneath. “Fine, whatever. Don’t let me see. I hope you bleed out.”

The bite in his tone landed harder than Shouto expected. It hit in a way that felt personal, even though he knew it wasn’t meant to—not really. Shinsou sounded frustrated, and of course he was. He was hurt, breathing through gritted teeth, dragging dead weight through mud while villains swarmed somewhere above them. He was in pain. And Shouto… Shouto wasn’t helping.

Because he is frustrating. He knows that. Knows it in the marrow of his bones, in every jagged edge of his own reflection. People have been telling him that his whole life—in words, in looks, in long silences that said more than shouting ever could. And now here was Shinsou, proving the point all over again.

Shouto stood there frozen, palm still tingling from the hit, staring down at his own hand like it belonged to someone else. His throat felt tight, hot. A sour taste crept up the back of his tongue, bitter and metallic. He wanted to say something. Anything . A word, an apology, something to stitch up the tear he’d just ripped open between them. But his mouth stayed shut, teeth clamped hard.

Because what could he say? What could possibly make this less wrong?

“That guy came up behind you—such a loser move, I—I—”

Shinsou’s voice broke off like it had hit a wall. The words hung there unfinished, brittle and raw, and when Shouto turned his head, he caught the look on his face. It wasn’t irritation anymore. It wasn’t the sharp-edged sarcasm Shouto had come to expect from him, that easy, cutting tone that slid under your skin but never quite drew blood. 

This was something heavier. Something stripped bare. Grave. That was the word. Grave and quiet in a way that made Shouto’s stomach pitch like the ground had just dropped out from under him. His skin prickled. The hair at the back of his neck lifted.

“For a minute,” Shinsou said slowly, voice lower now—rough around the edges like it had been dragged across gravel—“I thought you were dead.”

The sentence landed like a weight dropped onto his chest. For a second, Shouto couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t look away from the unflinching dark of Shinsou’s eyes, from the sharp lines of his face set in something too serious to joke about. There was no room for humor in it. No room for anything but that awful, aching honesty.

And then, just as quickly, it cracked.

“At least,” Shinsou muttered, his mouth curling in something that wasn’t quite a smile—too bitter, too shaky—“until you started laughing like a fucking psycho.”

The grave look slipped off his face like melting ice, replaced by something easier, safer. Sarcasm creeping back in like armor. And Shouto… Shouto was grateful. Grateful in a way that hit him too hard, too deep, because the weight of that look—had settled in his bones like a chill he couldn’t shake.

“I tried to run over to you, but the guy grabbed me—twisted my arm up really nicely. I’ll have to thank him later,” Shinsou said with a grim smirk, though the pain in his voice betrayed the joke. His breath was still a little ragged, each inhale sharp against the aching ribs he held onto. “I managed to get him talking, though, which means these guys don’t know our quirks. If they did, he wouldn’t have responded.”

He left out the part that made the whole thing feel more dangerous than he let on—how it was common knowledge that Shouto’s quirk was well-known. Everyone in the school knew the Todoroki name, the fire and ice that could level a battlefield. The fact that the villains had gone for Shouto first probably wasn’t an accident; they’d seen him as the bigger threat, the one who could take them down quickest if he got a chance.

Glancing over at the boy across from him—shaken, battered, and still managing to look composed even in this mess—the idea of Shouto being the strong one felt almost laughable. 

“We need to get back to the entrance. It’s our best bet to regroup and get out of here,” Shinsou said, his voice steady but edged with urgency. “We’re probably going to run into more villains on the way, so I need to know how bad your head is. I need to know if you can fight.”

Shouto blinked, the question hanging in the air heavier than it should. If he can fight? Why would his injury matter for that? The pain in his head pulsed like a dull drumbeat, but wasn’t that what being a hero was about—pushing through pain, no matter what?

“Of course I can fight,” Shouto said, voice quieter than he intended.

Shinsou gave a curt nod, his expression shifting slightly, as if he was weighing Shouto’s words against the ragged, battered person standing beside him. Then, without another word, he loosened his grip and stepped back, finally trusting Shouto to walk on his own.

Shouto could walk, sure. His legs felt shaky, and his senses were still fuzzy, but he could manage it. What he wasn’t sure about was where exactly they were going. The ruins of the landslide around them blurred into one another, a chaotic maze of rubble and shadow. Without Shinsou’s lead, he would be lost in seconds.

So, almost without thinking, he fell into step behind Shinsou, his pace unsteady, eyes flickering between the path ahead and the boy who’d just reluctantly let go. He followed because he had no better option, because despite everything, there was something about Shinsou’s quiet confidence that he wanted to hide behind.

They run into a handful of villains along the way, but between both of their quirks, they make steady progress. The villains were small-time—none of them wielding powers that could truly threaten them—but the ease with which Shinsou subdued each one was unsettling in its own right. Just a single word, delivered with quiet authority, and the enemy would falter, freeze, or obediently collapse. Watching that control unfold sent a cold shiver crawling down Shouto’s spine.

Despite the danger, the encounters felt almost routine, clinical. There was a strange comfort in the predictability of it all—no surprises, no chaos beyond the expected. Shinsou doesn’t speak to him during the fights, doesn’t reach out or check in. Doesn’t try to touch him again. He simply lets Shouto drift beside him, carried by the tide of his own fragmented thoughts and the dull fog that had settled in his mind. 

It’s peaceful. 

When they finally make it back to the entrance, the fragile calm Shouto had clung to shatters like glass underfoot. The air thickens immediately—charged with urgency and something darker, heavier.

Mr. Aizawa lies sprawled across the cold, hard floor like a corpse. Motionless and pale, a ghost drained of all warmth. A dark river of blood pools beneath him, stark against the sterile tiles. Around him, a tight circle of classmates hovers anxiously, faces etched with worry and fear, voices low and trembling as they try to assess the situation. Their concern is raw, immediate—a sudden jolt to the system that rattles the fragile mask of control Shouto had been maintaining.

In the middle of the lobby, All Might stands like a beacon, locked in a brutal battle against that monstrous thing—the one with too many hands and too many teeth. His powerful frame moves with practiced precision, each strike a force of nature in it’s own right. His stance never wavers, never falters.

Kirishima and Bakugou are there too, faces set with determination, ready to fight, to defend .. Their movements are sharp and purposeful, echoing the raw energy of heroes who refuse to back down, no matter the cost.

Just like earlier.  

Even Midoriya is present—his body marked with fresh fractures and bruises, evidence of battles past. Yet, despite the pain etched into every line of his face, he stands tall, eyes burning with fierce resolve, still pushing forward.

Still helping, still fighting .

Shouto watches it all—the chaos, the courage, the camaraderie—and feels a hollow ache gnawing inside him. He feels small, disconnected, like a spectator behind glass while the real fight rages on just out of reach. The weight of inadequacy presses down, sharper and colder than any physical wound.

He doesn’t feel like much of a hero at all. 

Chapter Text

Hitoshi could admit, without hesitation, that he didn’t pay much attention to his classmates. 

It wasn’t because he was cruel or arrogant—far from it. Rather, it stemmed from a quiet, almost clinical sense of practicality. In his mind, every moment spent on idle chatter, on fleeting social connections, was time lost—time he couldn’t afford to waste.

His place at UA was fragile, always felt like it was hanging by a thread, never guaranteed. Distractions weren’t a luxury he could indulge in; not when his entire future depended on proving himself. He hadn’t come to UA to gossip in the halls, to share awkward laughs over lunchboxes, or to seek the camaraderie that others seemed to find so naturally.

He wasn’t here for friends. He wasn’t here for fame. He certainly wasn’t here for the glittering, glossy image of heroism that flashed on the evening news or the hero magazines that idolized flashy quirks and dramatic rescues. No—Hitoshi had something far more singular and urgent driving him: the need to prove, beyond any doubt, that he could be a hero. Even with a quirk like his. Even with the crushing weight of societal prejudice that followed him like a shadow, whispering that he was destined for villainy, that his power marked him as dangerous, as untrustworthy.

“A villain’s quirk,” they had called it, sneered it, and some still did—behind backs, in hushed tones, in pointed glances that carried accusations no one dared say aloud. That label was like a chain wrapped tight around his potential, a constant reminder that no matter how hard he trained or how fiercely he pushed himself, the world expected him to fail.

He hadn’t expected to pass the entrance practical. Not really. Deep down, he knew the odds were stacked against him from the very start. It had felt like a long shot—an impossible roll of the dice with stakes so high that even admitting them aloud seemed like tempting fate. When the exam was explained in stark, clinical terms, and the hulking robots rolled out onto the field like something straight out of a low-budget action flick, all Hitoshi felt was an overwhelming, crushing dread.

It wasn’t just nervousness or anticipation—it was real, gut-wrenching fear. That kind of dread that sinks like a stone in your stomach, dragging down your chest and wrapping you up in a suffocating weight. The kind that presses cold and heavy, like wet cement settling, sealing you into place and whispering cruel truths you don’t want to hear but can’t ignore. The bitter, relentless whisper that slithered into his thoughts: of course it was a combat test. Of course. What else would it be?

He wasn’t naïve. He understood why. This was UA, the premier academy for heroes. Strength, skill, courage in the face of danger—those were the marks of a true hero. But his quirk? His power didn’t come with a flashy spectacle or an undeniable edge. It wasn’t explosive or earth-shattering. It was subtle, silent.

 He hadn’t stood a chance.

And underneath that thick, suffocating dread, there was something else—something hotter. A burn that started low in his gut and worked its way up, searing through his chest, catching in his throat like a live wire: rage. Bitter, scalding, electric rage that pulsed with every beat of his heart.

What an unfair test. What a joke.

They claimed the point was to showcase a student’s capabilities, but the entire setup was a sham—a rigged game masquerading as meritocracy. The battlefield wasn’t built for versatility or ingenuity. It wasn’t a test of adaptability or creative problem-solving like they pretended it was in the glossy brochures. No, it was designed to reward one thing and one thing only: raw, destructive firepower.

There was no room for subtlety in a stage like that. No room for quirks like his. It was chaos incarnate—metal giants stomping across fractured pavement, fists flying, explosions ripping through the air like thunderclaps. It was a spectacle. A warzone built to favor those who could tear down walls and rip apart steel with their bare hands. Those born with quirks that lit up the sky, that demanded attention, that screamed power.

Not people like him.

This wasn’t a stage for cleverness, for patience, for tactics that required precision. It wasn’t about turning the tide with a few well-placed words, or about making someone underestimate you before you struck. It wasn’t about brains or strategy. It was a playground—a blood sport for the gifted. For the chosen. For people who had been told from birth that they were meant to be heroes because their quirks were shiny and loud and impossible to ignore.

And in a place like that, people like Hitoshi Shinsou? They didn’t stand a chance. They weren’t supposed to.

He hadn’t scored a single point. Not one. Not even a mercy kill on a half-crumbled bot, not a scrap from a straggler limping along the battlefield, nothing. No pity point for effort. No feel-good nod to participation. Just zero. A perfect, hollow, mocking zero staring back at him from the scoreboard like an accusation.

And sure—he’d told himself he was prepared for that outcome. Had repeated it like a mantra in the weeks leading up to the exam. You’ll probably fail. It’s stacked against you. Don’t expect anything. Don’t get your hopes up. He’d gone in with his jaw clenched, ready for the inevitable. Ready for the humiliation.

But being ready didn’t make it hurt less. The failure didn’t just sting; it sank in. It crawled under his skin like an infection, settling deep and festering, a bruise he couldn’t stop pressing just to feel the ache. Every time he thought about it, his chest tightened, like his ribs were a vise squeezing his lungs.

He could feel it in his bones, in the marrow—the truth he’d been running from, laid bare by a scoreboard and a system that didn’t give a damn about subtlety: You don’t belong here.

The words weren’t new. They’d been whispered before—in crowded hallways, in the quiet side glances of his middle school teachers, in the sharp-edged laughter of kids who thought villain jokes were funny. He’d spent years swatting those whispers away, building up walls, convincing himself he could outwork, outthink, outlast the bias that clung to him like smoke.

But standing in the wreckage of that mock battlefield with nothing—no points, no proof, no hope—it felt like the world was laughing in his face. Like the universe had been waiting for this moment to slam the door and lock it tight.

​​But then, there was that kid. The one with the purple puffballs glued to his head like some kind of last-minute cosplay disaster—or maybe a bowl of meatballs dunked in radioactive grape dye. He was tiny, jittery, and had this look in his eyes like he was in on a joke no one else wanted to hear. His presence was almost comical against the backdrop of sparking metal and collapsing debris. Like someone had dragged a gag character out of a gag manga and dropped him into the middle of an apocalypse.

And then there was Midoriya.

The green-haired guy he’d written off immediately—too scrawny, too polite. One of those kids who looked like he’d apologize to a chair for bumping into it. The kind who said “sorry” when someone else stepped on his foot. 

Midoriya looked fragile, like he’d snap in a stiff breeze. No muscle, no stance, none of that feral confidence that clung to people like Bakugou like a second skin. He stood there hunched over, hands twitching like nervous birds, muttering under his breath like he was studying for an exam in real-time. His whole vibe screamed extra. A background character who’d wandered too far out of frame and was now hopelessly lost.

Hitoshi had dismissed him instantly. Didn’t even waste brain space wondering what his quirk was. Probably something soft. Something useless. Something that would land him at the bottom of the scoreboard, same as Hitoshi.

Then Midoriya went and rewrote his entire character in a single, jarring, whiplash-inducing moment. One second, he was that jittery green bean of a kid muttering equations under his breath, and the next—

He moved.

Not just moved—he launched. Like a missile. Like a live grenade hurled straight into chaos, detonating with sheer willpower. There was no calculation in it, no safety net, no plan B—hell, Hitoshi doubted there’d even been a plan A. Just raw, blistering courage packed into one scrawny frame and flung at the impossible. He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t stall or second-guess. Just sprinted headlong into the open jaws of failure, eyes blazing with something Hitoshi couldn’t name but felt like standing too close to a bonfire.

The zero-pointer loomed like a skyscraper on legs, steel groaning as its shadow swallowed the street. Everyone else scattered, because of course they did—it was suicide to stand your ground against something that big. But Midoriya didn’t scatter. He charged. And then—God, Hitoshi could still picture it—he leapt. Higher than should’ve been physically possible for someone built like an underfed alley cat. He soared , twisting midair, pulling his arm back like he was about to punch the sun out of the sky.

And then he did.

One strike. One earth-shattering, bone-crunching, physics-breaking blow that drove straight through steel and circuits and brought that monster down like a felled titan. Dust bloomed. The ground shook. And there he was, hanging in the air for a heartbeat like some tragic hero out of a myth, glowing against the light, every tendon in his arm screaming under the weight of what he’d just done. Like he was trying to make the world notice him even if it killed him.  

And wow. Okay. Plot twist.

But it was big, and big things fall hard. That was the one undeniable law of physics rattling around in his brain as the zero-pointer tilted like a dying skyscraper, joints screaming in protest, whole steel-plated body groaning under its own impossible weight. It swayed once. Twice. Then started its inevitable descent toward the street below.

And right in the kill zone, rooted to the spot like his shoes had been soldered to the asphalt, was that other kid. The one with the purple meatballs glued to his head like some tragic arts-and-crafts accident. Just standing there. Mouth hanging open, eyes wide and glassy, every neuron clearly short-circuiting under the panic.

Frozen. Completely frozen in that special, paralyzing flavor of fear that makes your brain forget the basic mechanics of survival. Fight or flight? Nope. This was full-on deer in headlights mode. Watching a couple of tons of mechanized death come crashing down like a wrecking ball straight out of a nightmare.

And for a second—just a second—Hitoshi stared too. Because what the hell else do you do when faced with that much raw, inevitable force? It was like watching a train derail in slow motion. The screech of metal. The shuddering ground. The long, drawn-out groan of reality about to snap in half.

It was going to kill him. Not hypothetically. Not eventually. Not in some abstract, worst-case-scenario way. No—literally about to turn him into a crimson pancake on the pavement in the next three seconds.

And Hitoshi—well. He didn’t think. Not about the risk. Not about the odds. Not about what the hell he was doing. Instinct grabbed him by the throat and yanked the words out before his brain could even slap a filter on them. His voice cut through the chaos like a whipcrack, sharp and biting and ragged with adrenaline:

“What the hell are you doing?!”

Not exactly heroic. Not the kind of thing you read in comics, some noble rally cry that would echo through history. No, this was pure, unvarnished desperation—a verbal gut-punch meant to snap the idiot out of his trance.

And it worked.

The kid’s head jerked toward him, eyes focusing just long enough for the hook to sink in. For that one, razor-thin window where his brain went quiet, his defenses dropped—and Hitoshi felt it. That subtle shift like a key turning in a lock. That click of control sliding into place.

It didn’t get more than an idiotic-sounding, startled “Huh?” in response—but honestly? No reply had ever sounded so sweet.

That little syllable, dumb and hollow and hanging in the air, meant everything. It meant the thread had caught. The lock had clicked. The command was sinking its teeth in, dragging the other kid’s body away from the shadow of that falling giant.

The kid blinked like he’d just been slapped across the face by reality, eyes clearing in a way that made Hitoshi’s pulse spike with relief. And then—he moved. Not much at first, just a stutter-step, like his muscles were remembering what to do after being petrified in amber. But then he scrambled. Clumsy, flailing, arms pinwheeling as chunks of metal started raining down around him like shrapnel. He stumbled over his own feet, nearly kissed the asphalt twice, but then—he was running.

Running because Hitoshi told him to.

That realization hit harder than the chaos screaming around them. It was raw and electric and terrifying all at once—because it worked. His voice. His words. His quirk. It saved someone. Not metaphorically. Not in some half-measure. He had pulled another person out of death’s jaws and thrown them back onto the side of the living with nothing but a question barked into the noise.

The zero-pointer collapsed. The sound was apocalyptic. A skyscraper-sized groan followed by the crunch of steel on steel, the street buckling under the impact. The ground heaved like something alive, tossing them both onto their knees as debris screamed past their ears. Dust punched the air out of Hitoshi’s lungs, coated his teeth in grit, filled the back of his throat until every breath felt like swallowing concrete.

They didn’t die. They both lived .

 “Rescue points,” they called it later, like that was supposed to mean something. Like it was supposed to take the bitter edge off the fact that his scoreboard was still a string of zeros stacked like gravestones. All Hitoshi heard was the truth slinking underneath, cold and cruel:

You barely made it.

You didn’t win. You didn’t crush robots or rack up kills or prove to anyone— yourself included —that you belonged here. You just… survived. You pulled someone else along for the ride and the system tossed you a pity bone for the effort.

Still, it was enough.

Just barely, but enough. A sliver of light through a door that had been welded shut since the day he was born. A hairline fracture in a wall that had loomed over him his entire life, whispering the same mantra over and over: you don’t belong here.

But now—now there was a crack. Small. Fragile. The kind of thing that could vanish with one wrong move, one bad day. But it was there, and that made it real.

That had been his first miracle.

No that wasn’t right. It wasn’t luck. Not grace. Not some cosmic nod of approval. No—miracles like that didn’t happen to people like him. This one had been carved out with his own voice, his own will, sharp enough to cut through panic and hesitation and wedge the door open just wide enough for him to squeeze through.

And from that moment forward, Hitoshi knew exactly what it would take to stay.

Relentless effort. Constant calculation. Teeth bared, jaw locked, always pushing against the weight of a world waiting for him to slip. He couldn’t afford to drift. Couldn’t afford mistakes, or softness, or distractions. Every second would have to be proof. Every breath, a declaration that he belonged here—even if he had to scream it with his fists and bleed it out in bruises to make anyone listen.

So no—he didn’t care about his classmates. Didn’t have the luxury. Didn’t have the time or energy to care about who was laughing in the cafeteria or who had their desk pushed close to whose. Bonds were for people with safety nets. With names that opened doors. With quirks that earned applause instead of suspicion. He wasn’t here to play at friendship or bask in the glow of some teenage dream.

He was here to survive. To prove himself. To force his way into a story that had no intention of making room for him. To shove his foot so far into the door of a world that didn’t want him, they’d have to break his ankle to get him out.

Plus, he hadn’t really expected anyone to want to be his friend. Why would they? His quirk had seen to that a long time ago. It stamped the word dangerous across his forehead before he’d even learned how to spell it. Before he knew what that meant. Most people didn’t even bother pretending otherwise. They gave him space the way you give space to live wires or open flames—just enough to feel safe, but not enough to forget the risk.

He could see it in the way they moved. The subtle tells most people never notice. The way conversations stiffened when he entered a room. The sidelong glances. The half-smiles that didn’t reach their eyes. How their voices suddenly sounded too careful, like they were measuring every syllable before it left their mouths.

Even now, even here, at a school that was supposed to train heroes, they skittered around him like mice around a trap—skittish and tight, every instinct screaming to keep a buffer of space. Eyes darting. Lips sealed. Posture sharp enough to cut.

Like they thought if they let their guard down for even a second, if they said the wrong thing, breathed the wrong way, he’d slip inside their head and hollow them out. Make them marionettes with painted smiles. Make them do things they’d regret, things they couldn’t take back.

He didn’t blame them, really. That fear wasn’t new. He’d seen it all his life—teachers, kids on the playground, even strangers on the street when they caught wind of what he could do. That split-second flicker in their eyes, the way it shifted their face into something brittle and cold.

He didn’t want to be their puppeteer. He didn’t want control. Hell, he barely wanted to talk to most people. But it didn’t matter. To them, he was a threat. Always had been. Probably always would be. And if he was being honest—he’d stopped hoping for anything else a long time ago.

Still, he’d made a few friends anyway.

Not the kind he’d gone looking for—hell, he hadn’t been looking for any. Friendship wasn’t on his checklist. It wasn’t even in the same room as his goals. But somehow, somewhere along the line, a few people had decided to… stick.

Not in the loud, overbearing way he’d seen others do. Not the “we’re best friends forever” type who barged into your life like they owned a spare key to your front door. No, these were quieter friendships. Easier ones. The kind that didn’t demand too much of him.