Chapter Text
When the letter from U.A. comes, Enji doesn’t bother with hesitating. Either he got in or he didn’t. He wasn’t foolish enough not to apply to multiple hero courses—because he is going to be a hero, it’s all there is for him—and it's inevitable he got into at least one.
He tears open the envelope carefully, though whatever is in it isn’t easily ripped paper, but some sort of disk. Doesn’t hurt to be careful, though. He’ll never admit it to anyone, but he flinches when the disk leaps out of the envelope and onto his kitchen counter. A hazy blue light emits from the disk and Enji is quick to recognize it as a hologram. The animal form of Prinicple Nezu fills the air before him, proudly displaying his result from the written exam along with the score board of the practical exam.
Enji notices two columns. One for the villain points—which he is unsurprised to see at 52 points—but the second one does surprise him. It’s marked as rescue points, which he supposes does make sense for a hero course entrance exam. He has to wonder, though, why they weren’t mentioned during the orientation prior to the exam.
As if reading his mind, Nezu begins to explain. “If we had told you of this secondary point system prior to the exam students, you would naturally strive to rescue your fellow students. And while that is the spirit of heroism, we, the scorers, want to know of your true natural tendencies when in the heat of the moment—not caught up in exam points or statistics.”
Enji considers for a moment. If this is an accurate representation to how he’ll behave in the the field, he supposes a 21 is well enough in regards to the other scores, many of which below that threshold, but it could certainly be better. He’ll just have to work on that, he supposes. Nonetheless, being in the top ten—by a rather high margin, too, with 73 points—definitely secures him as the highest in his class. Which means he’ll be dealing with people buddying up to him for help. Great .
Walking into 1-A on the first day tells him two things. One: he was exactly right in his prediction. Two: his homeroom teacher—an underground hero he’s never heard of—is going to be a pain in the ass all year. At the risk of repeating himself: great.
By the end of the week he’s made another deduction: he doesn’t know when it will happen, but one of these days he is going to throttle Nishimura. The boy isn’t obnoxious, per se, but he has a tendency to stare. It’s not just at Enji, he stares at the other students too, but he can’t help but feel like he gets the brunt of it.
It’s not like it's sleezy or anything, and he doesn’t really stare that much, but it’s enough to annoy Enji. He knows it's likely the nature of Nishimura’s Quirk, but he isn’t sure if that makes it better or worse. He isn’t aware of the ins-and-out of it, but he knows it’s an empathy Quirk which means he can probably see right through him.
He’s not sure how a guy like that got into the hero course either… but who is he to judge. His mom can barely pay for this school. Everyone else in this room probably goes home to a house with actual heating and–
He forces down the thought and refrains from banging his head on the desk.
Ayumu doesn’t mean to stare, he swears . It’s a habit of his to assess the emotional state of those around him, but that’s just surface level, it doesn’t even need more than a glance to do so. However. Todoroki has his emotions buried so deep he can’t even sense boredom from him. And he knows he’s bored, it’s permeating the whole damn room, there’s no way he isn’t bored.
The only way to get through a wall of apathy like that is to dig, and doing that requires visualization. If he weren’t in class he’d close his eyes because it’s easiest and least invasive—outwardly—but he needs to at least look like he’s paying attention. So he does the next easiest thing and looks at Todoroki—he does not stare.
It just seems like staring. From the outside.
Aside from the dubious ethics of using his Quirk on a classmate—it's technically the passive aspect, he argues—what he finds is pretty fascinating. Sad. But fascinating.
Here’s the thing. Todoroki has a fire Quirk. Like, a powerful one. And yeah, sure, he doesn’t talk all that much, but everyone in the class knows he’s gonna be a good hero and that he’s determined to be one, too. He is, for lack of a better term, fiery —and hot, but that’s besides the point.
Except behind that cold wall of apathy isn’t even a single flame. Just a pulsating ocean of grief so heavy it makes it difficult for Ayumu to breathe.
For that matter, so does Todoroki’s glare when he stalks up to him before lunch one day. He decides then and there he’s gonna befriend the heck out of this guy.
Nishimura is staring at him. Again. They’ve been in school for about a month at this point, and the staring has died down considerably, but today it's come back and it feels unusually intense. He thinks he might even be able to feel him poking around in his head if he concentrates hard enough.
Speaking of concentration, the feeling of Nishimura's gaze is distracting enough that the teacher calls him out on his attempt at breaking the floor with his stare alone. How Nishimura isn't called out for his own shameless staring–at another person, no less—he has no clue. Enji tries to make a point of that, but his teacher only turns around to continue the lesson, muttering something about young love.
He pointedly doesn't read too far into that, hero school isn't a place for romance or goofing around. He's here to become a hero, to stop what happened to his father from happening to others. He can't have any distractions. Despite this sentiment, approximately twenty minutes later Enji finds himself struggling to form a coherent thought.
After the bell rings and the class is dismissed for lunch, Enji stalks up to Nishimura. He wants answers, and to not be started at. Behind him, his classmate whispered amongst themselves; while well-liked, most students in 1-A understand him to be something of a lone wolf, and to see him willingly start a conversation with anyone leads to theories . He thinks he caught something about finding Nishimura's burnt corpse in a ditch somewhere. He nearly scoffs. Enji isn't violent , or at least not unnecessarily.
He waits for his classmates to file out of the classroom before speaking. In the meantime, he stares the much shorter boy down. He almost looks smug. It might just be the lopsided smile Nishimura wears literally all the time. Enji wants to punch him.
"Why were you staring at me all class?" he asks instead. He’s pretty sure he Nishimura manages to smile even wider.
"Because I can?"
"That wasn't an answer. In fact, I'm pretty sure that was a question," he accuses Nishimura then puts a hand to his chin, pretending to think–he's under the impression the other boy is incapable of intelligent thought at this point–two seconds into their only real conversation since school started a month ago. Finally, his eyes light up as if he finally found a real answer.
"Maybe I just like the view."
Enji nearly bursts into flames, not expecting to be blatantly flirted with. He gapes at Nishimura for a second, turns on his heel, and tells himself he's not running with his tail between his legs as he speedwalks down to the cafeteria. Speedwalks, he is not running.
He doesn’t turn around to see the way Nishimura’s smile drops.
Enji gets home and promptly faceplants into his bed. His mother will want him to make dinner soon and he has an essay to write for English, but right now, he feels the overwhelming need to scream. Enji does not scream, it would upset his mother and anger the man next door and he's in no headspace to deal with that.
Instead of screaming, he reminds himself that he's in U.A. to become a hero. He's not there for friends or to be ogled at. He can't risk the distractions. Paying for U.A. already put a lot of stress on his mother and he can't risk fucking up and wasting his mother's time and money.
Eventually, Enji picks himself off his bed and changes out of his school uniform. When he walks to the kitchen to get started on dinner, he has carefully tucked away all thought of Nishimura and his stupid grin.
Ayumu can't sleep.
The image of red creeping across Todoroki’s cheeks and the small spike of panic accompanied by a burst of warmth which came and went so fast Ayumu is almost convinced he imagined it is playing on repeat in his mind. Originally, his interest in Todoroki was purely curious. He wanted to know the story behind the wall of ice hiding the weariness churning within his heart.
Now, here lies Nishimura Ayumu waxing poetic about a boy who genuinely looked prepared to commit a murder despite the absolute apathy settled just beneath the surface. Ayumu wants to see the ice melt away, to see the weariness beyond his years to dissipate until it is nothing but a distant memory. In short, he has a massive fucking crush on Todoroki and the patterns on his ceiling are burned into his memory. He doesn’t even have a ceiling fan to watch spin.
Ayumu just wants to sleep, for the love of all things holy. And maybe for Todoroki to actually kill him, if only because that might mean the coldness of his psyche was overshadowed by some real and tangible emotion just for a moment. He isn’t in love with someone he talked to for all of half a minute. He just has an empathy Quirk, and, honestly, Todoroki is kinda pretty in an untouchable sort of way.
The reality of it is that Ayumu has been feeling everyone’s emotions except for his own since he was four and he’s afraid that the insatiable and cold apathy Todoroki Enji carries around might be something akin to what he carries around himself. Scarier moreso is the idea that every emotion he has ever considered his own is not really his—just something borrowed from someone else. Ayumu could be a totally empty husk and the only way he would ever know is if some other empathy Quirked person walked up to him and told him that that cold, cold, cold follwed him around also.
His mind wanders back to the red on Todoroki’s cheeks, the way his eyes bore into him like he could read Ayumu as well as Ayumu reads everyone else, he thinks about the ice in his eyes and shrouding his heart, and then he thinks of the spark of warmth that passed far too quickly. He thinks that maybe Todoroki is just lonely.
Just like me .