Chapter 2: Stand Tall!
Nemuri let herself relax and allowed Midnight to bleed away on her walk toward the teacher's lounge. At this early hour there was no one to see her except the few support students who had managed to avoid Power Loader's nightly sweeps to send them home. As much as she loved her hero persona, most didn't realize there was anything behind it and she really did not feel like putting on a show for others at the moment. She was a woman on a mission and she felt like the answers were just out of her reach.
Why the hell was Midoriya so skittish? She had no doubts that he had a legitimate anxiety disorder, probably untreated, but a lot of his behaviors still sent up red flags in her mind. They seemed like learned behaviors, and for the life of her, she couldn't understand the reason for it. Kids, especially middle schoolers, could be cruel and vicious creatures, sure. But they were also easily distracted by things that were bright and flashy and Midoriya's quirk certainly fit that mold. He was sweet, had a good head on his shoulders, and clearly had a heart of gold. So why did it seem like he was so damn scared of her?
It wasn't always. He seemed to relax more and more over the course of their first lesson yesterday and when they were sitting and talking he looked calm and collected. But whenever she moved too quickly in a way he wasn't expecting, he flinched. When she asked him a question he would clench his jaw as if he was chewing on the words to determine what he should say. When he noticed he started rambling he would slap his hand over his mouth and his eyes would widen in fear . If she was being honest, she had noticed some of the signs earlier in the year, too. Whenever his classmates laughed aloud he would whip his gaze in their direction like he expected them to be laughing at him. When someone spoke too loud or startled him he would curl into himself like he was anticipating a hit.
When Bakugou entered a room he had a full-body shudder.
Those were clearly signs that something was wrong and she was going to find out what it was. She had hoped that Shouta would fix whatever it was that was going on between them because he was their homeroom teacher and he knew his kids best, but this was the same man who considered a proper meal a jelly pouch and thought things like shaving or wearing clothes other than his hero costume were irrational . Knowing Shouta, he would either ignore the problem or force them to fight against All Might to try and make them overcome their issues. … oh he was going to hear about it from her if he did that for their finals.
Nemuri pushes the door to the teacher's lounge open, making her way to the filing cabinet where the student records were held. Hopefully there was something in Midoriya's middle school file that would shed some light on things. Finally finding it in the back of the drawer she stopped and gaped at the size of it. It was twice as big as any of the others. Well, that was fine, right? Maybe someone just wrote him a really long letter of character or something like that.
It was nothing like that. A dozen pages of citations and detentions for picking fights with other students, disrupting class, reckless and disrespectful behavior, taunting and antagonizing his peers. Nemuri flipped back to the name on the file and double checked the picture they had. This was Midoriya's file? Her Midoriya? This read like a juvie record from an S class villain not the sweet young man who couldn't stop himself from tacking honorifics onto her name. She leafed through the file more, dread coiling in her stomach. The letters from his homeroom teacher and the principal were damning. About a page in length, both detailed the many failings and flaws that they had seen in his time at their school. Skimming quickly, Nemuri narrowed her eyes. Toward the end of the letters, each had an identical phrase:
Midoriya Izuku is a troublemaker who cannot and should not be in a classroom of future heroes. He is a distraction to others and goes out of his way to antagonize them due to bitterness over his Quirkless status.
Quirkless? Nemuri sat back into her chair trying to process this new bombshell. He must have been a late-bloomer , she thought. And if they presumed he was quirkless … well, discrimination was a bitch and she knew quirkless discrimination in Japan was through the roof. Most of it was nearly untraceable because victims were too scared and bystanders usually just refused to report it. Even if it was reported, she had met a lot of cops in her time that would dismiss the charges out of hand. She knew how bad it had been for her when she was younger, and knew both Hizashi and Shouta had their own horror stories about the prejudices of others. But they all had quirks to rely on. Izuku probably had no one in his corner , she thought. Poor kid… Her attention was drawn briefly back to the file and caught on his grades. He had exactly the same score in every class.
Paging through his whole transcript, Nemuri saw identical marks in every class dating back to elementary school. Exactly enough points to pass the class and advance a year and not a point more. They were doctoring his grades. Nemuri felt her nails dig into the table but ignored the creaking protests of the wood. They weren't just turning a blind eye to this, they were actively participating. Suddenly, she felt sick. It's a miracle that this kid trusts any adult at all.
Gathering the folder in her hands, Nemuri jumped up and rushed to the door before continuing deeper into the halls of UA toward Nezu's office. Midoriya, you may have been failed by every other adult in your life, but I'll make damn sure that I do right by you. Nemuri tried and failed to be surprised by the fact that Nezu's door opened before she could knock and the principal was waiting for her with a hot cup of tea. What did surprise her was that three cups had been prepared, and the tall skeletal form of All Might who looked equally shocked to see her.
"Ah, Kayama, I am very glad you could join us. Would you care to sit?" Nemuri stiffly sat and All Might settled back into his chair as well. Nezu smiled. "Before we begin this meeting, would you like any cream or sugar with your tea?"
"You knew," she said, ignoring his offer. "You knew that I would look through Midoriya's file today and you knew what I would find." Nezu had the gall to look mildly offended.
"But of course I did! I am the principal, after all." He stirred a single packet of sugar into her cup before offering it to her. Damn rat. "I knew you were having a private lesson with Midoriya yesterday, and I was confident that you would spot the same concerning behaviors as I had. You are a fair bit more emotionally observant than Aizawa despite his claim to situational awareness." Neither fixing her tea just how she liked nor the flattery did anything to calm Nemuri down.
"If you had spotted the signs then why the hell is Aldera Junior High still standing?" She placed the file on the desk in exchange for the teacup. "It's unlike you to leave any institution like that in place." Nezu chuckled.
"Unfortunately, there are some extenuating circumstances, and no, we cannot tell you all of the answers right now." Nemuri frowned and looked at All Might before turning back to Nezu with a raised eyebrow. "Suffice it to say, Midoriya Izuku is a bit of a special case. If we were to handle this as publicly as my usual methods it would draw too much attention to him." Nemuri's frown deepened.
"Commision attention?"
Nezu nodded. "For one, yes. Though there are other forces at work that it would be best to not alert as well." Nemuri couldn't help but shudder at that. The Commision was often bad enough. It was an open secret that not everything they were doing was above board. But these other forces , especially if they were enough to make Nezu nervous, had to be bad. "Right now, our best option is to focus on training and supporting Midoriya and wait until the mitigating factors have subsided before handling the situation quietly."
"So we just wait?" She hissed. "We're supposed to ignore it?"
"By all means, no." Nezu replied calmly. "Continue doing what you're doing now, Kayama. Get close to Midoriya, see if he will open up to you. There is not much we would be able to do without his cooperation in any circumstance."
"I would ask," All Might spoke up for the first time. "If you could not let young Midoriya know that you know of his past. It is a bit of a sore point for the boy, especially due to the, ah, present circumstances. If he opens up to you that is great, but please let him come to you on his own time."
"I know," Nemuri murmured. Her anger was starting to subside and she was able to really think it through. If she just went to Midoriya and told him that she knew, it could break a lot of the meager trust that she had built with him. It was better to wait for him to tell her himself, but it did nothing to chase away the protective fury that threatened to tear out of her chest. "This isn't our first situation at UA like this, but still…"
"I know that you empathize with his situation, Kayama." Nezu placed his cup down and laid a paw over the folder. "I too, wish we could do more. But Midoriya is in a delicate position. For now, we will watch over him and try to protect him in the future."
Nemuri took a moment to collect herself before nodding. She stood and bowed to Nezu before leaving the office toward her next class. As her footsteps faded, All Might turned to the principal. "Do you think we should have told her about One for All?" Nezu's grin returned, feral and mischievous.
"Kayama Nemuri was the third personal student I have ever taken on here at UA. I think she'll figure it out for herself soon enough."
The Morning Is Here! The Morning Is Here! The Morning Is Here! Izuku couldn't help the groan that escaped his lips. Yesterday had not been the worst day of training he had ever endured (that title singularly belonged to the day he had dragged All Might in his muscle form across the beach while the man sat on a fridge). In fact he really enjoyed his lesson with Midnight, but there was something about knowing that he had to go out into the world and actually try to put those lessons into practice that made him want to burrow back deeper in his bed.
But Midnight had given him the tools to use and if Izuku was honest with himself, he kind of wanted to see if he could do it. It was an interesting challenge. He had never, as far as he could remember, been confident and outgoing in the easy sort of ways that some of his classmates were even before they sentenced him to be the local pariah. He had always been a little envious of them in the way they could just exist within themselves. The way that they could simply be at peace with themselves felt so far out of his reach. If being able to do that, to calm the constant maelstrom of negative thoughts in his head, meant forcing himself out of his comfort zone then he wanted to at least try it. Even if it made him scared. Moving through his morning routine, Izuku grabbed the gym bag he had prepared the night before and went into the kitchen where his mom was busy preparing breakfast for the both of them.
"Good morning, mom."
"Good morning, sweetheart." Inko didn't turn from the stovetop where the eggs were cooking, merely accepting the kiss on the cheek from Izuku. "Your protein shake is on the counter near your bento. I went ahead and added a few honey packets in there as well. Did you know that some powerlifters are switching over to honey as a pre-workout snack? It has easily digestible sugars and it's pretty easy to-" Inko stopped in her tracks as she turned toward her son. Her eyes, the same green she had passed on to Izuku, narrowed in confusion. "Izuku, honey, did you grow a little over night? Is this the growth spurt that Yagi-san mentioned might come?"
"Ah, no, not really." Izuku rubbed the back of his head at the assumption. "I'm just, uh, not slouching as much I guess? It was something that Midnight-sensei suggested might help with my confidence."
His mom hums and turns back to the stove top. "I might have to send her a fruit basket or something as thanks then. I never realized quite how tall you had gotten." Izuku's face flushed in embarrassment. Was it really that much of a difference? Just standing up a little straighter? As he ate his breakfast alongside his mom, stopping to grab the food she had prepared, and made his way toward the station the thought kept reverberating in his head. Its presence never fully faded even as he boarded his train.
It was hard to recognize himself from the flashes of his reflection in the windows as Musutafu passed behind them. Ten months of training from hell, another month and a half of being in UA's hero course, had turned him from a skinny sack of bones into a muscular hero in training, but it wasn't just his muscles that had changed. Izuku bore the results of his adventures in the scars on his skin. Little nicks and cuts from his fight with stain littered his body along with a slight burn mark on his ear from Bakugo's all out attack on the first day. Most prominent though, were the marks that One for All itself had left on him. His gnarled and crooked hand was quick to ache at the end of a school day and all his limbs bore marks from where the bone had pierced it or from the uncontainable lightning that now resided within him. His new appearance, combined with his new posture, made the version of him in the window look older. He looked more confident, more mature, maybe even a little rugged.
He looked like his father.
There were few photos of Hisashi Midoriya at home and Izuku often couldn't bring himself to ask about the man. Whenever he had asked when he was younger, his mother would just look so unbearably sad and tell him that he was working abroad. Eventually Izuku stopped asking. The mysterious father he had never known faded into memory. Izuku's coloring was all from Inko and everyone who had met them both had told him that he looked exactly like his mother. But Izuku could see the subtleties in their differences. His hair was curlier, messy and wild in a way that Inko's hair wasn't. It was also a shade darker, closer to black in low light. His jaw was a touch more narrow than hers, his nose slightly larger, his cheekbones a bit higher. His eyes, while the same vibrant green, were sharper, slightly more angular than his mother's. He could admit, here in the privacy of his own mind and nowhere near his friends, that he could see Todoroki's points about his relationship to All Might. He and his mentor shared the same intensity in their eyes, a similar slope to their shoulders. Yagi's hair had certainly been wilder in his younger days, Izuku had seen many posts in the various fan groups he was a member of comparing his hair to a lion's mane, and even more so in his smaller form. In fact, with the slight height increase from not slouching and his shoulders squared back he did share a fairly damning resemblance to his predecessor's thin frame.
A small shiver went down his back. Todoroki can never find out about this.
The announcement that his stop was coming up was enough to put the thought out of his mind for now. It wouldn't do to have himself distracted. He already had to often remind himself to stand up straighter and to stop mumbling and speak up when talking to others. There were only six weeks until final exams and while midterms had gone well, Izuku knew just how quickly the time could pass if he wasn't careful.
He did his best to focus on the upcoming lessons and how soon he needed to start preparing for exams. It felt weird to be doing so. The past month and a half had been truly insane, filled with villains and killers and several people declaring war on him. But now he was worried over finals and whether or not he could talk without stuttering in front of his classmates. It felt like he was a normal high school student. Well, a high school student in possession of several national secrets and a two-hundred year old quirk, who is being hunted by a quirk-stealing monster of the underground who had nearly eviscerated the nation's symbol of peace. Normal, right?
Izuku sighed and adjusted his backpack. How was he supposed to pretend to be normal and confident when everything in his life felt like it was straight out of a manga? Izuku let himself wallow a little in self-pity as his feet carried him along the familiar path to school. Unbidden, Midnight's voice echoed in his mind. If you think you can't, then you won't. You can't beat villains if you're constantly fighting your own head, Midoriya. Keep a positive attitude! Right, he just had to do his best. Letting himself get caught up in what-ifs and potential pitfalls wouldn't help him succeed, it would just drag him down. More settled, Izuku nodded to himself and picked up his pace.
And stop slouching! His mental-sensei shouted. Izuku straightened up before sighing. This was going to be a long semester.
Most people didn't believe it, but Uraraka Ochako was smart. Deceived by her bubbly personality and her girl-next-door looks, Ochako knew that most people tended to overlook her intelligence. Her quirk required a fairly intimate knowledge of the laws of physics to use properly and she had spent her entire life on construction sites learning the applications. She could always tell when something was bothering her parents too. If it was stress from work or problems with money, Ochako had learned how to read people fairly well.
It was why she was so confused by Deku.
Her first sight of him had been ethereal. She would never forget the way he looked, suspended in air by the jump that had shattered his legs. He hung in the sky like he belonged more there than on the ground. Like he was made from something lighter than anyone else. Something otherworldly. If she were more religious she would consider likening him to an angel, but it drew to mind something of even greater importance to her. He looked like a hero that had stepped off the pages of those pre-quirk comic books. Like with a smile and a wave of his hand he could save the day and change the world.
It wasn't the only time that she had been amazed by her first and best friend at UA. It felt like every time she looked he was doing incredible, if also terrifying, things. At the USJ and in their first battle trials she had admired his incredible resolve and courage. But during the sports festival there were moments she was almost convinced that Deku wasn't human. That her friend really was an angel made flesh. How could anyone endure what he did to himself in his fight with Todoroki? How could a person break themselves over and over just to prove a point? How could anyone smile while in that much pain?
And then he fought Stain. He mastered that colossal power that shattered his limbs and tamed it into something usable. He fought and held out against the Hero Killer, a man whose name sent shivers down the spines of most pros. They couldn't talk about what had happened, the three boys who were in that alley, but she knew Deku. If Stain had been there fighting others then Deku was throwing himself into the fight too, she had no doubts. Midoriya Izuku was a hero through and through, to the very depths of his being.
Yet why couldn't he see it?
Deku was skittish and shy, quick to pile praise on others but denied and deflected when anyone tried to return a compliment. It made no sense for a person that strong and powerful to be that shy. But that was okay with Ochako. She adored her easily flustered and anxious friend. The duality of Deku in classes and social situations with the Deku that grinned fiercely during training was what made him so special to her. If Izuku couldn't see himself as a hero, couldn't believe in himself in the way that she thought he deserved, then she could do it for him. She would prop him up with her support until one day he could stand on his own.
Her care and concern for her friend was what let her see the difference in him as soon as he walked through the 1-A door. His back was straight. His shoulders were relaxed and pulled back instead of bunched up to his ears. His chin was up, gaze locked ahead instead of down at his feet. She wondered for a moment if Izuku had a twin that she hadn't known about until she spotted his wild hair and strangled tie. It was definitely her Deku. No one else could mess up a tie that badly. But he looked taller with the changes. Confident, like he was ready to take on the day and prove himself a hero. It wasn't a look she was familiar with outside of training or emergencies.
He looked hot.
Ochako slapped her rapidly flushing cheeks, cursing her complexion. How could she think that? That was her best friend! That was Deku! She wasn't allowed to think about him like that! Still though, she couldn't help but observe her friend over the course of the day. He sat straighter in class, occasionally slouching before rapidly sitting up again. He laughed a little louder at lunch when Todoroki made his weekly attempt to convince the group that All Might was Deku's father. Even in that day's exercise he didn't shrink away when All Might complimented him. He beamed . Those rare smiles she managed to pull from Izuku that felt like the sun or a warm hug from her mom.
She couldn't take it anymore. She had to figure out what happened! People didn't just change overnight. Something had to have sparked this newfound confidence in him and Ochako was going to get to the bottom of it.
"Deku-kun!" Ochako raced after her fluffy-haired friend as soon as the final bell had rung.
"Oh, hey Uraraka-san!" His smile was bright and her traitorous heart couldn't help but beat faster at the sight of it. "What's up?"
"Oh, I, uh, well I was wondering-"
"Midoriya-kun!" The two looked up to see Midnight making her way towards them. "This afternoon we won't be meeting in the gym. Instead meet me by the staff parking lot, okay?"
"Yes, ma'am." Midnight nodded and walked past the two before calling over her shoulder, "Oh, we do have an appointment to keep so try not to take too long with your liaison , okay?" Ochako's face lit up scarlet and Deku let out a few awkward chuckles. The R-rated heroine disappeared beyond the corner leaving the two in an uncomfortable silence.
"I should-" "Deku-kun -" both laughed as they spoke over one another. "Sorry," Izuku said. "Go ahead."
"I, um, I was just wondering-" "Move it, extras!" Bakugo shoved his way past, knocking Ochako directly into her friend's chest. "Get the hell out of my way!" After the walking bomb had passed, Ochako looked up at Deku, one hand pressed against his chest, the other around his hip just above his belt. Her blush returned in a frenzy.
"I- Ijustwantedtosayyoudidreallygoodtodayokaybye!" Uraraka peeled herself from his grasp and sped off leaving a confused Izuku behind her. Once she was safely away around the corner, she peeked back around to watch as her friend softly smiled to himself before walking in the direction Midnight had disappeared in. She waited a few seconds to make sure he was fully gone before sighing in relief.
"My, my, mon amie, you certainly seem flushed." Ochako was not proud of the eep she let out. Spinning, she found the sparkling smirk of Aoyama behind her. "Is it because you love him?"
Crap, not good! "Hahaha, what? What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about our shining star, Izuku Midoriya of course. So, are you in love with him?"
Her mind went completely blank. Act dumb, Ochako. "Who's Izuku?" Not that dumb! Abandoning her voice along with her hope, Ochako turned and sprinted as far from the scene as she could. Well, I guess transferring to Ketsubutsu is always a possibility…