Middle school looked exactly like the anime.
Same halls. Same lockers. Same kids performing social hierarchies like it was a second career and they had tuition to justify.
He stood in the entrance of Aldera Junior High for approximately four seconds and catalogued all of it.
....
He had picked his desk before homeroom started.
Third row from the back, second from the left window. Clean sightlines to both doors. The faculty room was forty-three steps down the hall and one left turn. He'd clocked it on the way in, out of habit more than necessity.
The teacher was still writing the class schedule on the board.
'Same handwriting as the anime,' he thought. 'Wild.'
He sat down, folded his hands, and waited.
....
Introductions went around the room the way they always did — name, quirk, vague future aspiration delivered with the confidence of someone who had never genuinely suffered.
The girl with the frog quirk said she wanted to be a rescue hero. A boy with a tail said he was still figuring it out. Bakugou said he was going to be the best, because of course he did.
He filed each quirk automatically. Activation time estimates. Physical tells. The frog quirk required full postural commitment — the stance gave it away by about a second. He wasn't going to need that information for years. He filed it anyway.
His turn.
He stood up. "Midoriya Izuku. No quirk. I like strategy games." He sat down.
Two kids whispered to each other. The teacher moved on.
Good.
....
The cafeteria was loud in the specific way middle school cafeterias were loud — a hundred conversations at the same frequency, none of them interesting, all of them operating under the unspoken logic of: be seen with the right people.
He found a corner seat, opened his book, and ate.
The social geography arranged itself without any input from him. Bakugou's table was across the room — center-left, gravitational, already the thing around which everything else was loosely orbiting. He tracked it once with the practiced peripheral scan he'd been running since he was seven and then went back to his page.
'The Magic Knight academies had this same structure,' he noted. 'Except there, the table with the most gravity was also the most likely to produce a lateral curse accident and take out two tables next to it.'
He ate his rice.
He turned the page.
'At least no one here has a grimoire.'
....
At some point during lunch Bakugou looked at him across the room.
He didn't look back immediately. He finished the sentence he was reading. Then he looked up, met the look, held it for exactly one second, and went back to his book.
Bakugou's expression, in that one second, was the one he'd been watching develop for eight years.
Why aren't you running.
He turned another page.
The answer wasn't complicated. He just wasn't going to say it out loud.
....
First homework assignment: three paragraphs on a hero of their choice.
He read the prompt twice.
'In my second life,' he thought, staring at the sheet, 'I wrote a full strategic assessment of the Diamond Kingdom campaign under intermittent fire, on borrowed paper, with a broken left hand, while something with too many limbs was trying to find us in the dark.'
He picked up his pencil.
'This is three paragraphs.'
He stared at the prompt for another second.
'Okay.'
He wrote about All Might. He kept it factual. He knew too much and used almost none of it. He handed it in on time and went home.
....
End of day three.
He was at his locker working the combination when he heard the shift in the hallway — the particular quality of silence that meant something was being staged rather than happening naturally.
Three older students. Probably second-years. Moving to cut off the path back toward the main exit.
He finished working the combination. Retrieved his bag. Turned around.
They were positioned the way people who had done this before positioned themselves: one by the wall, one mid-corridor, one blocking the locker exit back toward the stairs. Standard three-point cutoff. Designed to make you feel like there was nowhere to go.
He looked at the nearest one.
'Textbook,' he thought. 'Genuinely textbook.'
The nearest one said something about quirkless kids taking up space, the general theme of it — he'd heard the script before. He waited for the sentence to finish.
Then he just stood there.
This was apparently not the expected response.
The nearest one stepped forward.
He didn't step back.
The boy's momentum actually stuttered. You could see it — the weight shift, the moment of recalibration, because the target had not moved. He was supposed to move. That was the first act of the script and the whole second act depended on it.
He looked at the boy with the mild, patient expression of someone who had somewhere to be and was allowing this a finite amount of time.
The boy pushed him.
Not hard. More of a shove — the kind designed to produce a stumble, a rebalancing, the visual of someone losing their footing. The opening.
He didn't stumble.
He moved back about two centimeters, absorbed it, and returned to the same position. He hadn't put his bag down. He hadn't changed his expression.
The three of them exchanged a look.
He waited.
The hallway was quiet for about four seconds.
Then the one by the wall said something about how he wasn't worth it, and the three of them moved off toward the stairs, not quickly enough to look like running but quickly enough to mean the same thing.
He watched them go.
'Hm.'
....
He walked home.
The evening air was the same temperature it was in the anime. That was still mildly unsettling.
He ran the review as he walked: no escalation. No injury. Calibration held. His weight was right during the shove — he'd dropped his center without making it visible, which meant six years of foundation work was at least doing something.
The locker encounter was going to close wrong for whoever those three boys told about it tonight.
That was, technically, a problem for later.
He turned the corner onto his street.
Inko had the window light on. She'd mentioned she was making curry.
He walked a little faster.
....
---
Across town.
One of the second-years — the one who had pushed — was sitting at his desk not doing his homework.
He'd told his friends the story twice, and both times it came out wrong.
The quirkless kid hadn't run.
He hadn't fought, either — you could say "fought" and imply something happened, make it sound like the kid had gotten lucky or pushed back or something. But nothing had happened.
He'd just... stood there.
Like it wasn't anything.
Three of them. Three second-years. And the kid had looked at him the way you looked at something small and inconvenient, like a pebble in your shoe, and waited to see if it was going to resolve itself.
He couldn't figure out what to do with that.
He stared at his unfinished homework for a while.
'Maybe he just didn't understand the situation,' one of his friends had said.
He didn't think that was it.
He thought the kid had understood the situation perfectly.
That was worse.
--
TO BE CONTINUED