When is a Door Not a Door?

by The_Lazuli_Witch

Summary:

Graduation is two weeks away. Izuku should be focused on packing, saying his goodbyes, or maybe, just maybe, finally asking out the boy he's been crushing on for the past three-ish years. But when said, boy, Shoto Todoroki, comes in Izuku's room offering help with the packing. Something strange happens.

Todoroki believes it's a ghost. But Izuku knows ghosts, and he doesn't think that's possible.

Maybe it’s a prank. Maybe it’s a villain. Or maybe it’s Izuku himself, and One For All is acting out. With only two weeks of school left, Izuku worries what that means for him, he can't relearn how to use his quirk all over again.

But what if, it isn't him, what if it's something worse altogether? What if his friends get hurt because he doesn't find a way to fix this?

Or: five times something impossible happens, and one time the impossible is explained.

Notes:

• For sabertoothhousecat.

Pew Pew!!! SABER!!!

I hope you like this rendering of your prompt: Ghost!

 

Happy Fic Fight!

CW: Gore, Panic attacks, blood, near character death (no one dies), superstition, mistrust of judgement

This was my first real attempt at "horror" and though I definitely tried to go for something a little campier, the trigger warnings are still applicable, so maybe find a safe space, read with the lights on, and avoid clicking on this fic on any particular dark and stormy nights :)

Hope you enjoy! <3

I. 

For some reason, Izuku’s classmates got it in their heads that he is a genius. This is blatant falsehood, as Izuku cannot be a genius, not when he had the idea to tape his rare, special edition, expensive All Might posters on his wall.  He picks at the tape with his nail (cut short, because long nails are inconvenient and painful), but the edges of the tape refuses to lift, not even a hair.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. 

If he rips the poster, he’s done, goodbye UA, goodbye heroics, that will be his villain arc. He’ll break Spinner out of jail, and they can be villains together. 

“Really kid?” He hears Nana’s voice ring through his head. full of judgment. “That’s your breaking point?” 

He squints at the wall, but he directs the squint at her internally, and he is greeted with a wave of cruel amusement towards him.  “Yes,” he says out loud. All he gets back is a snort. He rolls his eyes and starts picking at the tape again. If he could just get his nail under—

 A knock on the door startles him. Izuku jumps, breath hitching, and outside the door he hears, “Midoriya? Are you busy?”

Todoroki. Izuku’s heart flags in his chest, as he pushes himself away from the wall, the poster.  Izuku nods.

A snicker, and he can hear Banjo making fun of him. “He can’t see you, Loverboy.” Crap. Another reason he is not a genius. 

“Yes!” he yells out much too loudly. God. It’s just Todoroki. It’s literally just Todoroki. He needs his heart to stop.  There’s a beat of silence. “Wait! No! I’m not busy. Come in.” Izuku runs to the door, swings it open, and the hinges make an annoying squeak. Izuku winces, eyes squeezing shut.

“You never fixed your door?” Todoroki asks, voice completely even. “I could help with that?”

Izuku snaps his eyes open, his cheeks reddening. “Yeah! Thanks, that’d be great actually.”

Nana points out, cruelly, “You have barely two weeks left before graduating? What’s the point?”  

Izuku has gotten very good at not shushing her out loud, but his mouth straightens into a line.   “So, whatchu doing here?” and Izuku, foolish, a one-hundred-percent-not-a genius Izuku does the stupidest thing possible. He shoots finger guns at Todoroki, clicking his tongue for sound effect.

Todoroki stares at him, face completely blank. While Izuku’s head is full of judgmental silence prodding him from Nana and Banjo who seem to use Izuku’s life as a replacement for television. At least they aren’t laughing. Izuku seldom wants a villain attack. But as Izuku stares at Todoroki, and he fidgets under Todoroki’s eyes, which holds a blistering intensity that breathes heat into Izuku’s cheeks and electricity in his pulsing heart, Izuku wants it to last forever, but at the same time he prays for a villain attack just to cut the embarrassing moment short. Will a villain attack wipe the memory of the finger guns from both their memories?

Silence. Naturally. 

“I was curious if you needed any help? I packed up most of my room, and—” Todoroki sweeps his gaze over Izuku’s which is politely put in a disaster of cardboard boxes and there’s a pile of unfolded clothes on top of his suitcase— “you tend to leave these things to the last minute.” 

A strange worm of emotion wiggles inside of Izuku’s belly, a hybrid between pride and indignation, because on one hand he’s at least not leaving packing up to the last minute, but on the other hand; rude. The worst part of it all is how right Todoroki is. 

“And here I thought my ego was safe with you,” he says, as he pulls the door all the way open. Todoroki’s eyebrows furrow, but says nothing as he walks right in, observing Izuku’s dorm room with the attention of a laser. Great.  Izuku can’t help but rub the back of his neck when Todoroki’s gaze sweeps over the tangled sheets so twisted they have become a rope of primary colors. “I’ll admit I’m a bit systemless right now,” he adds. Is it hot in here or is it just him?
“Just you,” Banjo says. Izuku will learn one day how to strangle a disembodied voice. That day will be his favorite day. He’ll celebrate it like a second birthday. “Stop being dramatic, kid.”

Todoroki clears his voice, and Izuku whips his attention back up to him. “Do you want one?”

“Want what?”

“A plan? Or uh a system? Do you want one?”

No. Izuku doesn’t. Cleaning plans and battle plans are different entities and Izuku has only room for one in his heart. Besides, Izuku needs chaos to keep him going, if he stays comfortable for even a second, the need to move and keep going will fizzle out of him like the screeching helium venting from a poorly-tied balloon. He needs that sweet, sweet cortisol to keep him hypervigilant, on edge, and functioning. Nana says that’s ‘bad for him’ and he needs to ‘learn healthy coping mechanisms’ but that requires time. Izuku does not have time nor patience to relearn how to be a healthy human being. 

“Uh, sure,” Izuku says. When Iida asked the same question, Izuku basically ran the other direction. For everyone’s sake he hopes Iida never finds out how little convincing Todoroki needed beside his pretty face. “A system’s good. Yeah. Yeah.” 

Todoroki stares at him. For a moment, Todoroki looks like he is about to plop himself on Izuku’s bed, but decides not to, and instead grabs the corner of the wall. “What do you think is taking up the most space in here?” With his right-hand palm-side up, he makes a sweeping gesture to refer to the whole room.  

“My bed?”

Todoroki squints. “No. Well yes. But no. I mean of the mess?”

Izuku tries to look his room with the lenses of another person. Especially a person like Todoroki, who seems to dislike chaos so profusely, that chaos is afraid of him. The doors on Izuku’s balcony are open, shining a square of afternoon light onto the ground. Even though the air is chilly, wrought with late winter air, Izuku runs warm, and he couldn’t stand the stuffy heat of his bedroom. UA won’t turn off the heat until April, and they will all be moved out by then.

His curtains have already been dismantled and are now folded into one of the boxes, and he realizes that it does change his room. Without the ultramarine blues that bounced on the walls from the light that shined through them, the room seems stark, bleached, and boring. Izuku can picture it still, and it’s weird how such a small change, changes so much. Most of his clothes are sitting on a pile on the floor, or they’re dirty and tossed haphazardly into the bulging twill hamper that sits in the corner of his room. He’s decided not to touch it until after all his clothes are packed, and since now that he has not done laundry in two weeks, and they only have two weeks left, he knows everything in there is stuff he’ll wear. And everything clean should probably go home. 

“The clothes?” Izuku asks, and Todoroki gives him a look that reads either ‘you are pathetic’ or ‘you are adorable’ and knowing Todoroki, Izuku feels it’s probably the former. Izuku wants the floor to open up now. Please. Thank you. 

“No. The boxes. Are you just packing up as you go?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Izuku shrugs. And stops himself from saying the first thing that comes to mind. That it’s easier. And is it easier? Well, no, probably not. But it is how he’s getting it done at all, which makes it just left of easier as the only way he can do it. 

“I hadn’t really thought about why.” Not even when Kudo nagged him on all the ways he could be cleaning up differently. Izuku decides to add on, “Don’t ask me if any of the boxes have a category either, they don’t. I was told to do that. But I ignored it.”

“OK,” Todoroki says, nodding, and something about his voice betrays the deadpan look on his face. He’s amused. Which might be worse to the alternatives. “So, I think let’s”— Todoroki walks around, stepping over the maze of clutter — “do one thing at a time. Your clothes may be the easiest. What were you doing when I came?”

“I was going to take down my posters?” His voice lilts up like a question. Huh. Now that Izuku says that out loud, he realizes he might have been just adding to the mess.  Todoroki kindly doesn’t point this out and instead sits crisscrossed near the buried suitcase. 

“Okay that might be a good last thing to do.” Todoroki picks up an inside-out blue and gray raglan shirt, with the embroidered ‘hospital gown’ stitchwork black and fuzzy.  “For now, let’s just deal with this.” 

“It’s clean,” he says quickly. Todoroki cocks up an eyebrow at him, then glances at the hamper about to explode in his room. 

Todoroki chuckles, “I’m aware.” When Izuku feels himself explode right there. Todoroki says, “You haven’t worn any of this in a while. Speaking of, do you turn your clothes back inside out after doing laundry.” The clean, inside-out shirt in his hand is the smoking gun that Izuku doesn't.

“I don’t really fold my clothes at all,” Izuku admits.

Todoroki nods. “Weird.”  Todoroki starts to fold the shirt, keeping it in its inside-out form, and Izuku wonders if that’s intentional. Unable to hold in his nervous laugh, Izuku sits down across from him.

Izuku doesn’t know why letting Todoroki take the lead doesn’t irk him. 

He doesn’t give people the reins often. Ever. Izuku hates it, and he hates the feeling of another person trying to lead him, control him, think they can corral him by the nose, it makes Izuku feel… raw, fragile, like a wound opening after the stitches were supposed to keep him together. Izuku isn’t a brittle piece of stone someone can hack into any shape they want. Izuku has been both the leader and the follower in his life hitherto, and he’s been a follower enough times to know how the jab of a chisel from someone else’s hand feels like. If he wants to be the happy-go-lucky person he has spent his years at UA becoming, the optimist and the leader, he has to prove he’s not that scared kid anymore. That kid wouldn’t survive what he has, probably hasn’t, Izuku wouldn’t be surprised if the person he was once upon a time ago, died a long time ago.    Izuku’s okay at being broken, at being a mess, and as long as he can control where the fracture points are hit, he doesn’t care if he’s broken or. The only one who can control Izuku is Izuku. No matter how small the blow, no matter how insignificant the break. Izuku’s destiny is carved out by him alone. 

But sometimes, he catches himself, handing the chisel to Todoroki. Like now. He doesn’t trust Todoroki to hold the chisel.  Todoroki doesn’t really want to be here. He doesn’t want this.  Izuku should end this now. How does he apologize, how does he send his friend away? Izuku starts to smile softly to soften the blow. But the one Todoroki returns are softer than the bed shirts and the fleece plants in the pile of laundry they started folding together. Izuku’s heart flutters. Would it really hurt that badly if he let someone hold the chisel, if he knows they’ll never hurt him? Would Todoroki? Izuku gulps, his cheeks red, and Todoroki’s Adam's apple bobs ever so slightly. 

The lights go out. Darkness rolls over every crevice of the room so completely, the entire room is a vacuum of light. Izuku can’t see. He feels. The fabric in his hand, the fear that spikes through him sharp as ice.  Is this a power outage? No. No. This sort of darkness isn’t possible. He feels his body still, he’s still here, still in his room, he just can’t see anything. Shit. It’s daytime too, this isn’t possible.

He hears a terrified sound come from Todoroki, a grunt of sorts, but a little more panicked and higher pitched. If Izuku wasn’t such a great friend, he would call it a whimper. But he is a good friend, and for Todoroki’s pride, it’s a terrified grunt. “I can’t see,” Todoroki whispers, voice straining with fear. “Midoriya, I can’t see.” Izuku feels hands on his wrists, one cold, one hot, and it grounds him enough. Izuku’s breathing is shallow. Fast. Breathe. He’s a better hero than this. Breathe.

“Me neither.” And maybe knowing that they are both being affected, is enough to calm them. Izuku feels Todoroki’s grip loosen on his wrists, and his own heart slows. 

Izuku’s best friend, cortisol, not Todoroki, takes the wheel. Anxiety might be the only force in the world, Izuku lets’ fully control him. Because at least he knows fear is something real, it keeps a person alive, and Izuku doesn’t have enough impulse control to not have a chronic anxiety disorder. Funny. One would think they cancel each other out. 

His other best friend, Todoroki, jumps to his feet, and Izuku can picture the fighting stance Todoroki has entered. Izuku glances at where the balcony door should be, and it’s the same pure uncanny darkness as the rest of the room.

Izuku stands up too. He’s cold. Ice cold. If the darkness snaps away and his room is covered in ice, he’d not be surprised. “Is that you?” he asks, voice higher than he’d like, his teeth rattling. “The cold?”

“No,” Todoroki says. “Maybe. I don’t know.” 

Izuku summons his quirk, the thrum of power crackles below his skin. But the darkness, it doesn’t dull under the green lines of light One for All usually beckons. Izuku bites back a curse. He doesn’t want to use his quirk on an enemy he can’t see. 

“My quirk isn’t making any light?” He mutters. “And even with One for All increasing my senses, I don’t sense anyone nearby.” Wait. “Anyone. You're the only one I can sense. I can hear you. And I felt your hands… but I can't with anyone else, anything else.” Like the only things he can perceive are things he already knows are there. Fuck what kind of quirk can do that? 

Todoroki hums, “right. Okay…” there’s a pause, and Izuku feels the heat enter his room, he can hear the crackle of flame. “Mine neither.” The heat lessens, and Izuku can smell the strange vinegar-scented smoke that follows Todoroki’s fire. It’s frankly all he can smell, besides the expensive cologne Todoroki wears, has been for weeks for a PR stunt. Todoroki hates it, but Izuku is grateful for the notes of amber and tobacco right now, they ground him enough from not losing his mind.

“Tokoyami?” Izuku calls out, heart shuddering his chest. Izuku is eighteen years old, and he is not afraid of the dark. “Is everything okay?” 

No answer. Izuku is about to propel him through the wall to make sure Tokoyami is okay, when a chilly hand grabs his wrist. Todoroki says, “He’s not here. He’s with his parents.”  That does less to reassure him than it should. “Besides, Dark Shadow doesn’t… she can’t drown out your senses like this.” 

“I know. I know. Just got to cross our bases right. This is—” 

“A seriously powerful quirk. I can’t convince myself of it.”

 Izuku doesn’t say anything. He can’t either. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. His senses are normal. They are. “Hit me.”

“No.”

“Todoroki hit me. We spare all the time, just hit—” a light trickle of pain shoots on his palm. “You pinched me?” Either pain isn’t the answer, or it wasn’t enough. Either way, Izuku’s whole world is still black and cold. 

“I’m not hitting you, not here, not in your bedroom.” Todoroki’s voice is final. 

“Right. I’m sorry.” Izuku sighs. Todoroki has rules about his own bedrooms. And it’s not a door, or walls, or the pretense of privacy that those thin walls create which make a bedroom a safe place, not for Todoroki, and Izuku knows this. He knows how important those rules are. And in a strange way, even outside of Todoroki’s bedroom, and inside of Izuku’s, having Todoroki hit him would be a violation. Izuku for a second is grateful the darkness hides the shame painted on Izuku’s face with red blotchy cheeks and glassy eyes. “We need to find something to fix this, like–” The light comes back, and Izuku hisses at the pain shooting through his eyes. He blinks away the tears, blurbs of color refocusing into objects he can parse. 

Todoroki has a hand over his eyes, and Izuku watches blurrily, as Todoroki slowly pries his fingers away. A frigid gust of wind snakes through the room. It’s an odd sensation, wind that isn’t wind, it has five appendages almost, it’s sort of the shape of a– No. Not that. Anything but that. Gooseflesh stipples his arms. He gulps. “There’s no alarm,” Izuku says, between gasps of breath. The alarms have updated. The sensors aren’t as easily hacked into. Villains can’t just break in. They can’t. They just can’t.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Todoroki bites out. “That wind—”

“I know.” 

“It felt like—”

“I know.”

“It felt like a hand, Midoriya.”  No. No. No. Izuku nods, jaw tight and something sharp grows inside his temples. 

“I know,” Izuku chokes out. “Todoroki, I know.”

Izuku isn’t a genius. He isn’t. But when the air goes still, stale again, his heart clams, his lungs relax, and a part of him wants to ignore what happened. “Let’s go… check on people,” he says. What was that? What in the world was that?

“Yeah, OK, good idea,” Todoroki says. They both nearly trip trying to escape his room. 

 

II.

The Hag presses a wet kiss to his cheek. The Old Man puts another box in the car, and Katsuki hears the closing of trunk behind him, as he tries pushing himself away from the Hag.

“And are you sure you have enough for the next two weeks?” The Hag asks, pulling away. “Clothes? Groceries?” She tugs on the collar of his jacket, and he rolls his eyes when she adjusts his hat.

“I’m fine.” Katsuki swats away her fretting hand. “Stop hounding me. God.”

“Stop being a brat.” She rubs a thumb over his cheek, only because Katsuki allows it, but he scowls through the whole thing. She then squishes her face into a slight moue, her eyes softening into something disgusting. Affection. “I’m just worried. It’s my job to worry. No matter how powerful you think you are. Speaking of, are you sure you don’t want your nightlight–”

“I will fucking end you, stop.” Katsuki glares at her. He hates her, actually. He fucking hates her.  

“Language kid, and don’t use that fucking tone with me,” she snaps. Her face smooths out, and she may think it belies the demon possessing her, but Katsuki knows his mother is the devil. 

Mitsuki rolls her eyes and clears her throat, and she gives him a full body look, eyes scanning him up and down. “I just know how much the light helped you with the nightma–” the word, whatever it was, turns into a sharp squeal, when the Old Man places a hand on her shoulder – “Fuck! Masaru!” She makes a clutching pearls gesture as her hand flies up to her chest, her breath shuddering out rapid fire.  “Don’t! Don’t sneak up on me like that! You scared me shitless.” 

“That scared you,” Katsuki asked. “The Old Man? Seriously?”

“I don’t know son, I can be scary.” The Old Man gives him a mischievous grin, it’s a bit uncanny on the man who is the love child of oatmeal and some other ridiculously blandly innocent thing, like wool mittens or something. “I’m like a ninja.” 

 “I hate it. I regret every day now not putting a bell on you when we got married.” And The Hag does something terrible. Horrifying frankly. She bats her eyelashes and kisses the Old Man on the cheek.

“I’m sorry Dear,” The Old Man says, and he looks pleased with himself. Katsuki hates this family.

“You just got to make up for it —” 

“God! Stop! Ew. Gross! Just both of you stop fucking talking,” Katsuki yells, gagging. Holy fucking god. “I change my mind, give me the night light. I’m having nightmares for the rest of my life. Thanks for that.” He nods his head thrice before pivoting around on his feet to flee before his parents give him another dose of PTSD, and frankly Katsuki has enough of that to have a documentary film about him. 

“Oi!” His mom snaps her fingers. Twice. Katsuki rolls his eyes as he turns to face them. The Hag hooks her finger into a ‘come hither’ gesture. “You better not be leaving with a goodbye to your father.” 

“Bye,” Katsuki grunts and turns on his heel, stomping back to campus

“Hug him,” The Hag orders, damn this woman. Katsuki sneers, but if it’ll make them leave, he’ll doing anything. But he won’t be happy about it. Fuck that.

“Dear, it’s fine.”

Katsuki ignores The Old Man, the pathetic little pout, it’s complete manipulation frankly. He’s trying to pull at Katsuki’s heartstrings. It’s not working, Katsuki knows the pulled lip on The Old Man’s face is a ruse, he’ll just do the hug goodbye crap to satisfy his annoying hag of a mother.

“Shush. Our son needs to learn how to express his emotions better. It’s shameful, he’s as emotionally useless and affectionate as a porcupine.” Katsuki flips her off, but he strides over to The Old Man and wraps him in a hug. The Hag barks out a laugh.

“Well actually dear, porcupines are quite sweet.” The Old Man says, fondness dripping from his voice as he pats Katsuki on the back. Enough of this.  Katsuki pulls out of it quickly, and he hopes the scowl on his face shows just how much their antics exasperate him. The Old Man then, with a smug expression, says, “Very cuddly creatures.” 

Katsuki would like to have a porcupine to squish his face into right now. With his eyes open. “Well, I’m glad you’re both having a grand ole time going senile. Since watching animal documentaries is the first sign of going geriatric.”

“Geriatric, really?” The Hag asks. “Well, you know what that means, with us getting old and senile, you’re just going to have to take care of us.” Her smile is shit-eating. He hates it, because it’s the sort of smile he has seen in the mirror a few times. Katsuki cuts her off before she can say anything fucking weird.

“Right. Tell me when you pick up knitting, so I can finally start coffin shopping.” Katsuki takes a few backward steps, before they can make any more foul plays, like sneak another hug. The Hag raises an eyebrow at him but stuffs her hands in her champagne-brown coat, and The Old Man puts an arm around her shoulder. “Or maybe I’ll call a nursing home---so then I don’t have to deal with it. So, move along before you both need canes to walk, or diapers. I know that I won’t be the sweet, shit-cleaning son that wipes your asses when you both are too old and decrepit to be do it by yourselves. So, let’s not risk it by waiting for it here. Now Toodle-fucking-loo, I hear bingo’s on tonight.” With his most innocuous of smiles, chock-full of gritted teeth and topped with a twitching eye, he waves them another goodbye. 

Katsuki has had enough domesticity with the parents to last three lifetimes and five days. He’s going to go upstairs to his dorm room now stripped away of all his things, looking as bare as a newborn’s ass. Katsuki has always kept his room a clean and sterile place. He’s always been partial to a neat space, but it was odd to see his identity wiped clean. Katsuki rather not spends any time sitting in his dorm room. All it does is remind him in all the ways he isn’t permanent. Katsuki has so many memories in there, too many. All the nights he’s lurched upright from sleep, breathing hard, as the traces of a nightmare suffocates him with fear, until the smell of his room, his detergent of the sheets swimming in the inherit school smell and the sugary notes of his sweat, ground him enough to bring him back to the real world. Katsuki has spent countless of nights, slick, sweaty, scared tracing the outline of his drawers with his eyes, his bookshelves, the posters on the wall, and yes, even the All Might nightlight emitting a soft scarlet glow. Pathetic and dumb, but Katsuki knows that room, or the room it was, was the safe space he pictures in his mind with every panic attack, every lurch of fear, because it’s the space where his demons are never real. He’s had first kisses in that room. There are hair dye stains on his comforters. There are photographs he framed and hid under his bed, but made home there, nonetheless.

That dorm room has been his home, for three whole years. Three fucking, fleeting years has Katsuki lived here. But ‘here’ will live in him for the rest of his life.

Despite it all, Katsuki will probably have a more enjoyable and riveting time in there than with hisfucking delightful hag of a mother and his sweet, sweet senile father. Oh, how Katsuki would rather break into a museum and read all the dead people’s names in the yellow pages than spend any more time with his parents today.

He hears a loud sigh behind him. “Love you too, Katsuki.” He hears a smile in her voice, and he rolls his eyes. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he calls back. “Whatever makes you sleep at night.”

He hears the jangle of keys and car doors opening. He walks up the stairs. The sun beating down on him is surprisingly nice, but the spring air is wrought with a bone deep chill. The scar tissue under his jacket screams a bit, wanting the warmth of indoors, but he waits, a split second, just to hear the rumble of the engine before opening the Height Alliance’s door. The car, a stupid red Toyota Voxy, almost as old as him, roars to life. 

Thank God, they’re leaving now. He looks behind him, for a second, just to make sure. His mom is looking at him from the side mirrors in the passenger seat. “Ha! I told you he’d look back,” she yells at the Old Man. The fucking window is rolled down. “Bye Katsuki! Love you!” 

 He stomps into the kitchen. Stupid parents. Stupid graduation. Stupid everything.

“Bakugou,” a deep, melodic voice, interrupts his very important thoughts, and he swivels around to see Bird Brain dressed in a black raincoat, which is strange as the sky when he saw it was only dotted with a few wispy cirrus clouds over what was mostly a powder blue. “You seem to be carrying less darkness in your soul today. Has something occurred to lift your spirits, perhaps?”

“The fuck?” He’s so not in the mood for melodramatic fuckers who listen to only MCR and Peirce the Veil. Which is why he is going to make himself a cup of coffee, black, and then for the fuck of it, run around campus for a few laps so he can always drown out his own thoughts. Unfortunately, he and Bird Brain share a taste in music. “Where did you even come from?” 

“My parents just dropped me off. I will say you and your parents never fail to amuse me.”

“You fucking saw that?”

“Yes. And there is nothing to be ashamed about sleeping with a nightlight. I know what it is light to fear the demons that haunt the–”

“You like riddles, don’t you? So, when I ask you what has two thumbs, a quirk that is simply just being emo, a rapidly decreasing life span as fast as my thinning patience, and also a brain the size of a pigeon, you do know what I am talking about right?”

“Message received.” Bird Brain opens his beak to say some more stupid but is interrupted by fuckers one and two barreling down the stairs, whipping their heads around wildly. Deku makes a bee line for Bird Brain, his eyes are bulging basically from his head. Icy Hot does not look much better.

“Was that you?” Deku asks, panting. Did he get a concussion? It wouldn’t be the first time, which is concerning since Deku can’t afford to lose any more brain cells. Katsuki is going to have to start worrying about him. Which Ew. Gross. No.

“Was that me?” Bird Brain asks, thankfully dropping his stupid as shit theatrics, assessing the same panic on Deku and Icy Hot that Katsuki currently is.

Icy Hot chimes in, “the darkness. The wind. It was… not natural.”

A concerned expression washes over Bird Brain. “I just got back.” 

“Did you?” Katsuki asked. “What does Pikachu have on you to prank these two?”

“Nothing,” Bird Brain says. “Whatever chaos has occurred here, I had no part in. I can promise that. What sort of darkness?”

“It was complete. Our senses were almost completely nulled out, depleted to basically zero. All we could feel was what we knew was there. It wasn’t like any quirk I know or have felt before, like I knew I was in my room, so I should have been able to perceive it, but the only thing I could sense was the direct stuff, but actually now that I think about it I don’t think I felt my shoes or my hair or any like aches, like for a split second I think I was completely painless and I—”

“Shut the fuck up.” Deku’s rambling cuts off, but it’s Icy Hot who glares at him. Deku just narrows his eyes at Katsuki, like he knows Katsuki has something to say. Which he does. “If there is a villain here, what are you two idiots doing standing around? Fucking do something.”

“We are,” Icy Hot says. “It’s not like we can find whoever did this, not with their ability to skew our senses. First things first are, figure out who has been affected and if everyone is okay.”

“And what have you two figured out?” Katsuki asks, “besides a fuck ton of nothing?”

They both look uncomfortable. They shift side to side, and it’s a bit off putting seeing Icy Hot so disheveled. Icy Hot’s face is ashen, pale and bloodless, as if something has terribly spooked him. If it weren’t Icy Hot, the annoying flavor of fucker to rarely show a molecule of fear, Katsuki would have laughed. 

“Nothing. Everyone we talked to is either clueless, or not here,” Deku sighs. He pinches his nose, “And with Kaminari and Ashido not picking up their phones it’s probably…” he trails off looking pained. 

“A prank,” Icy Hot finishes curtly. 

“I called them five times thinking maybe they were in trouble,” Deku says, pulling out a chair in the kitchen. He sits down with a defeated expression on his face. It’s one of the only expressions Katsuki likes to see on him, well it would be, if he didn’t look so fucking pathetic. “I mean, how could they do something like that. They aren’t… they don’t exactly have the quirks for it.” Deku’s brows knit together. “This can’t be just a really good prank.”

“Yes. It can be. And one that you two idiots fell for,” Katsuki points out. He turns back to Bird Brain, “and seriously ‘I was with my parents all day’--” he pitches up his voice to sound mocking — “that’s the most obvious alibi in the book. It’s a little convenient that the only people who can confirm your whereabouts are people none of us can contact, and how did I not notice you outside earlier. You were scouting from here.” 

Bird brain scoffs, “I assure you; I had nothing to do with this. Maybe Kuroiro aided in Kaminari’s typical mischief, but I was with my parents.” 

“So that’s it, you both think this was just a prank?” Icy Hot asks. “Aren’t either of you concerned that maybe the school is under threat by villains.”

“Fucking how? The school alarms are not exactly something you can avoid tripping. Nedzu buffs the security every three days, there is no way in hell, not after our first year that a villain is getting on campus. And what villain is stupid enough to attack our class? Us?”

“I don’t know Kacchan, there’s a lot of stupid people out there,” Deku says weakly, but adds, “but you make a point. A villain wouldn’t be able to get in.”

“There is no way you think this is a prank,” Icy Hot says, staring dead into Deku’s eyes. Deku blushes, looking all virginal and flustered, as he covers his face in his hand. Katsuki prays that there is a villain, just to tear him away from that. 

“No, no!” Deku says. “I don’t know what this is. Neither option makes sense.”

“Well,” Icy Hot starts, his voice low as he draws out the word. “There is a third possibility.”

“And what may that be?” Bird Brain asks, and frankly Katsuki wonders too. Icy Hot for all his faults, his many annoying faults, unfortunately is a brilliant tactician, and even if his brain is dense as a brick, he has a sturdy amount of acumen evening out. Icy Hot ponders on his words for a moment, seemingly weighing the validity of his idea. 

“Todoroki?” Deku questions. 

“Does anyone here,” Icy Hot starts, “believe in ghosts?” 

A beat of silence. A couple beats more. Katsuki waits for the wires in his brain to reconnect, so his synapses can start to fire again after being shot through with a shock of such utter stupidity. 

“Believe in what?” he asks, laughing a mordant chuckle as he shoots Icy Hot a glare. 

Even Deku slowly turns to Icy Hot, his mouth agape, and eyes narrowed to green slits of barely hidden exasperation, or disappointment. It’s a bit amusing to see Deku like this. Deku drums his fingers on the table. “Huh, um… I don’t know how to answer that question, actually,” Deku says eventually. “But I do know they prefer souls of the damned, ‘ghost’ is apparently super offensive.” Deku nods his head firmly, twice, and Katsuki actually has to hold in a laugh. 

Deku just said something funny. Maybe the world is ending. 

“You’re fucking with me.” Icy Hot realizes. 

“Nope, Banjo just said so. He thinks of himself as quote ‘a damned soul if he has to be tethered to stupid teenagers for the rest of his life.’ Which I think is a horrible way of saying he doesn’t think I’ll live past nineteen.”

“You probably won’t,” Katsuki says. “Either you do something stupid, and a villain kills you, or you do something stupid, and I kill you. Either way that soul of the damned is correct.” He knows Banjo can hear him through Deku and out of all the fuckers Katsuki favors him. 

“Ha ha, both of you, pay attention,” Icy Hot interrupts. “And what about you, Tokoyami? Any thoughts on this?”

“Everything is haunted, everyone, and though that does not mean the veil of the dead is visible to us.” Tokoyami then looks to Deku, with a protuberant and pensive look. “Some people have more sight than others.”

“Helpful,” Katsuki bites out through gritted teeth. He doesn’t give a crap about what it means to be haunted, not really. There is no point in waxing philosophical bullshit about what everyone already knows, no point in dressing redundant truths in pretty words, because yeah, they all have demons, haunting them in either the scar tissue left on their skin to the bags under their eyes.  

“What are you saying?” Deku croaks, looking ten-years-older, and there is no mistaking that if ghosts, supernatural ghosts, are real that Deku is a soul haunted. At first Katsuki thought his question was directed at Bird brain, but the way Deku stares off into the air, not quite through anything but not at anything either, Katsuki realizes that Deku is listening to the vestiges. Deku gulps, and he looks mildly febrile, as his eyes squeeze together. “Oh.”

“Midoriya?” Icy Hot’s voice is stupidly soft, and he careens his head to the side, kneeling gently down. “What did they say?”

Deku shakes his head, exhaustion placid as day. “Just that, maybe, maybe your theory holds substance. Ghosts. Well, no, I mean… me? My ghosts. How do I explain this,” he grumbles looking at his lap. “It’s um… It’s…”

Katsuki rolls his eyes, at the way something annoyingly similar to sympathy takes an awl at his heart, making him want to help. 

“Midoriya,” Bird brain starts, “spinning words into reason has never been a strength of yours. We will not judge if you take a few tries, especially as we are aware of the welter that revels around your mind.”

Deku laughs, wryly. “Yeah, yeah.”

Icy Hot does something gross, and grabs Deku’s hand. They glance at each other, for a second much too long, and the Icy Hot whispers, “He’s right. Speak in draft. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Deku nods, “Nana says that because One for All is not a stable quirk… It’s always adapting, changing, mutating, I guess. That what happened, could be, well, me. My ghosts are entering the real world. But I don’t think so, because well, it affected you. My quirk isn’t mental. The vestiges are a complicated side effect of phantom limb syndrome, so there is no way my quirk is creating real world consequences in the real world, that’s not possible. If I was the only one affected maybe, but I wasn’t, and I guess what if… what if maybe it’s not my quirk, what if…ghosts are real.” 

Katsuki holds back a scoff. The absurdity of it all is not possible. Ghosts aren’t real. Not past the logistics of quirks and vestiges. That’s not how the world works. And he’s not going to pretend ghosts exist either to humor whatever paranoia is spinning fantasies into plausible reality for those two.

“You mean souls of the damned, right?” Icy Hot asks out after a long beat filled with only the soft hum of the fridge and the buzz of fluorescent lights. A half smile tugs his lips, and Katsuki soldiers through the desire to strangle him. This is not the time for flirting. 

Deku snorts. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“What if Shimura is right, and it is your quirk?” Icy Hot asks, voice growing serious once again. “She might have a point.” 

“You can’t actually be considering that?” Katsuki bites out. “Your quirk isn’t changing, if it was it would be a whole lot similar to the pace it’s been changing and you would have noticed, the vestiges would have noticed. And guess fucking what! Ghosts are not real. Don’t lose your fucking minds over nothing. Not until you have actual proof that this could be anything! Anything fucking else! Geez.”

“Bakugou,” Bird Brain starts, voice firm and cold, “are you seriously considering that this is still one of Kaminari’s pranks?”

“I still think it might be ghosts,” Icy Hot says. “Honestly.”

“No,” Katsuki says, ignoring Icy Hot, just to save him the headache, by looking directly at Bird Brain, “but there is a rational solution that isn’t mutating quirks or what, fictional creatures. If you three want to, what? Become Ghost Busters, fine, I’m not going to waste my fucking time and stop you, but if you actually want to figure out what the hell happened, maybe I don’t know, use your fucking heads.” He turns to Deku, then, “And you, I expected you to be the logical one. Shane and Ryan here might think they have found a variable conclusion, but to me it’s just a bunch of superstitious bullshit. So just fucking, get a grip, and actually be a hero.” He throws his arms in the arm spurned by all the bullshit in the room. If idiocy had a smell, he’d be throwing up and gagging right now.

Deku purses his lips. He looks pained. Good. “I don’t know what to think. But… maybe All Might does.”

“Finally,” Katsuki mutters. “An actual idea that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my fucking eyes. Let’s go.”

III.

Momo wipes the sweat off her brow with a lacy handkerchief. She stuffs it into the pocket of her puffer jacket. Her muscles are steeped with a deep soreness, and she falls onto the bench, and unzips her jacket to vent out some heat from the manifold of layers pressed against her. She overdressed. Momo expected the March air to be crisp and chilly, and she dressed for it with a white button up under an argyle sweater vest of red and gray, tucked into black capri pants. She had a lapse of judgement and didn’t think that the amount of moving around and lifting heavy objects would accrue enough to heat to leave her now, sweaty and breathing heavy in the tepid air. 

“Yaomomo,” the voice jerks her up, but the exhaustion thankfully softens the flinch enough to make it look like Momo simply perked at the voice. Ochako stands in the dirt trail, dressed in pink leggings and a matching track jacket. Her hair is pulled up, tightly, and it looks nearly painful. “You look pooped!” 

“That would be an understatement,” Momo says, smiling. “I just got my bedframe into the moving truck, that and my wardrobe, dresser, and my vanity.” Her gorgeous antique vanity of walnut wood-stained ivory white, with a gilt chinoiserie trim. Oh, it pains her to go without it for two weeks, but she will manage. But with writing her valedictorian speech, an upcoming mission, and the fact she was asked to plan the graduating’s class’s gala this year, Momo has dwindling time. She had an opportune window of time today, to remove all the heavy furniture and vacate her room of everything that made it uniquely hers. 

Momo nibbles her lip, she has no point to feel the melancholy that slithers into her belly, leaving her cold, lonely. She pats the seat beside her, for Ochako to sit. “I’m surprised how strange it feels,” she says.

“What feels?” Ochako asks, blinking. 

“Moving out,” she says. Ochako makes an ah sound, nodding her head. 

“I get that. I haven’t actually started moving out yet. It sorts of hit me today that it won’t be like it was, in the past, and I actually have a life here to pack away.” 

“I get what you mean,” Momo says. When she had packed up her childhood bedroom the first time, she felt nothing but excitement, probably the root of her overzealous packing. Even then, she had a feeling it would be a goodbye to her childhood home, goodbye to a view over the family rose gardens, a goodbye to maids bringing her morning tea, goodbye to professional chefs and goodbye to her parents, but it felt like a beginning, a first step into the real world which she craved so terribly. Yet, today, every moment, every action she took to truncate her very soul from her dorm, to hollow it out into what was once her home for three amazing, terrifying, heartbreakingly wonderful years, and into a hermit crab shell, void of life and abandoned for either a new soul to adopt or to be destroyed by the sea. She hopes for the former. 

A part of her is forever in that room. She doubts all the formaldehyde can hide the smell of her perfume that has been dried into the plaster of the walls. Eyeshadow fragments have been stamped in the carpet. And not to mention dead skin cells and stray hairs. A part of Momo will always find a home there, and she never thought of that when she moved out of childhood bedroom. 

“You do?” Ochako asks, incredulous. 

“I imagine differently,” Momo says, “but I had things. But did you know Mina got pen ink on my bed posts once, Denki burned a hole into one of the curtains, and Kyoka and I spent hours repainting the dressers just for the hell of it. I’m sure my parents will have a heart attack seeing we painted over the Nippon flowers, but I prefer it.”

Ochako’s brown eyes soften. “That’s sort of it. It used to be easy to pack up my life. There was very little of me I could leave behind. But I think, this time, it won’t be so easy.”

“The place will haunt you as much as you haunt the place,” Momo says. 

“Exactly.” Ochako’s smile falls, it turns into a grimace, and Momo worries that maybe she misstepped somewhere. 

“Did I say something wrong?”

Ochako falters, jumping at the words, like Momo screamed in her face. “No! No! I just… I don’t like thinking about um… ghosts.” She winces, like the word pains her. “Me problem.” 

“I see,” Momo says. She purses her lips, not knowing what else to say.  Ochako’s tracksuit has a bit of mud on the knee, and her shoes are miry and brown. Had she gone running through the forest on campus? “I hope I didn’t interrupt your work out?”

“No, of course not. I was actually heading back to the dorms. For a bath actually.”

“A bath sounds heavenly,” Momo admits heaving out a shaking sigh of want. “Would you enjoy some company?” Ochako grins, causing relief to wash over Momo. 

“I’d love some,” Ochako says. “I know Tsu is heading back shortly. She had some work at the agency she had to tend to, but I know she’s on her way. Maybe we can invite her?” 

Momo nods, welcoming the idea of a communal bath. Momo needs to wash away the melancholy with hot water, and to scrub away the lingering ache in her muscle. She smiles. “A lovely idea. Let’s head to the dorms.” She cocks her head to the dorms, which is admittedly a good walk away still, especially with her aching limbs. She could probably hide the whole building with her palm at this distance, but before she tries, she sees the doors swing open. Is that Midoriya, Bakugou, Shoto, and Tokoyami exiting the building? They are too far to wave too, and if Momo a rowdier person, she may attempt yelling their names. She half expects Ochako too, but Ochako simply stills at the sight with an eyebrow raised.

“Huh,” Ochako says. “They seem to be in a hurry?”

“I wonder if it has to do with the question Midoriya asked in the group chat?” Momo asks, pulling out her phone. “He asked if anyone at the dorm noticed something strange?” She says reading it over again. There are a few responses, but most of the class is away, or mentioning nothing is awry.  

“Yeah, I saw that too? But didn’t Sato and Ojirou confirm that they hadn’t?” Ochako says pulling out her phone as well. 

“So did Sero and Hagakure,” Momo adds. 

“They did,” Ochako says, “but I don’t trust them. Class clowns and all that.” She laughs. And fair. It’s possible that those four are being pranked. Momo watches them walk down the path towards the teacher dorms. The pace they walk isn’t too worrisome, it’s urgent, but no one is activating quirks to get there. 

“I’m sure everything is fine,” Momo says.

“Right.” Ochako grits her teeth. “But well… It is Deku. And Todoroki. And Bakugou.” That doesn’t read exactly a good sign. 

Momo purses her lips. “True. And Shoto did mention wanting to acquire some alone time with Midoriya.” She winks at Ochako to imply the meaning. And Ochako grins. 

“Awww, really?” Ochako squeals. But a frown returns and deflating like a balloon, Ochako sags at the shoulders. “Oh no. You don’t think…”

“That the universe decided to interrupt what could have been a very happy moment for those two, because it’s those two.”

“Yeah… that?”

“I would not cross that off the list of ideas. Let's get clean first. I’m sure if the dorms were dangerous, we would be told.” 

Ochako nods, “agreed. Thinking is hard when all is grimy and gross.”

 

Steam hovers over the glassy-surface of the bath water. It smells of tulsi rose bath salts with hints of pear and camelia. Momo doesn’t mind the aroma, even if it’s thick and a bit cloying in the poorly ventilated bathroom. At the very least it smells clean. She still has her bathrobe on, tied tightly to her fast, the belt digging into her. She runs the brush through her hair some more, as she waits for Tsu and Ochako. Tsu arrived not that long ago, seemingly in a mood, speaking in terse sentences and more rabbits than words. Momo thinks a bath will be good for all of them.

She worries if maybe she spilled too much of the bath salts, just to finish off her bottle. It’s quite intense. 

The door sluices open, and the bath water ripples from the change in the air pressure.  There is a din of dripping water. Without looking who entered, Momo says, “I hope the smell isn’t too intense I–” she stops, when she realizes she hears no breathing behind her, and no footsteps either. She turns her head and sees no one on the threshold. “Ochako? Tsu?” She asks, hugging her robe tighter. Only girls can even be on this side of the dorm. Only their keycards allow entrance. She pushes the horrible thought that Mineta has returned to his old licentious habits and managed to do something horrible, like sneak into the baths. 

Would he? Risk that so close to graduation. No, no. Momo heaves out a breath to calm herself. A splash of water cuts through the air, and she shrills out a squeaky breath, and on instinct makes a steel rod. She burned away so many calories today already, the act makes her feel lightheaded and woozy, but she turns around, entering a bellicose stance. “Who's there?” she demands, evening her voice into something firm, calm, poised. The ripples in the water are larger, speaking of a much larger disturbance than the fast opening of the door, and the rim around the bathes are glossy and wet. Momo narrows her eyes.

“Toru?” She asks. “Is that you? I’m sure you're aware that this sort of prank is completely unfunny.” She hates to accuse, but who else could it be?

Did Toru overhear Ochako and Momo speaking about ghosts and hauntings and think it would be funny to play one on them? It’s entirely possible. No, but Ochako mentioned in that very conversation that ghosts made her uncomfortable, and Toru is too good of a person to play on that. Right? Toru might be one to get wrapped in the mischief fun that Denki and Mina are ought to veer towards, but none of them would be cruel. 

A breeze threads through her hair, blowing the fruity and floral scent of steam right up her nose, and Momo gags. Another splash of water, right to her face, she wacks it with her staff on instinct, but all it does is increase the pressure of the water to her face. She shuts her eyes in time, and spits out the salty, scented bath water, coughing only a little. 

Ochako comes running in at that moment. She’s wearing a yellow robe; it has butterflies embroidered on the shoulders. “Yaomomo? I heard you—” she gasps, probably at the ridiculous picture Momo has become. Momo drops the staff, and it falls to the ground with a clank. “What happened? Tsu heard something fall and came running, when I heard you scream I— where’s Tsu?” 

“Tsu isn’t here?” Momo gasps, wiping the water in her eyes, taking a step away from the bath. “What do you mean she came running?” 

“I saw her a second ago… wait I—” Ochako takes her phone out of the pocket in her robe. “I’m checking Tsu’s location… it’s still in… She hasn’t arrived on campus yet.” Her voice goes shrill. “But I saw her. I saw her. Here. Tsu came running and she… spoke to me.” Ochako’s eyes are wide as plates, her body trembling. 

Momo wants to reach for her, to ground Ochako, but she recognizes the feral look in her eyes, she understands the gasping for breath, the increasing signs of panic. “She isn’t here,” Momo says firmly. The she in question referring not to Tsu, but to the name Momo is positive ringing through Ochako’s head. Himiko Toga. “This is a very creative prank,” Momo says, her words tasting sour in her own mouth. 

Ochako whips her head around, “do you smell that?” Her breathing has stilled, but the look in her eye, it remains animalistic, afraid, and worse, it appears hopeful. Momo shakes her head. 

“All I smell is the bath water, I’m sorry, I–”

“No, not that. Blood? Do you smell…” Ochako sniffs the air, and Momo pales. Blood?  That’s a certain sign for panic. And she breathes in the soapy air, and deep inside the soapy steamy air is a metallic twang of something irrefutably sanguine. 

“Oh, oh no,” she says on exhale. Momo can’t pinpoint where it is, where it comes from, but then the smell gets deeper, heavier, and suddenly Momo chokes on the fetid smell of iron. She gags, unable to breathe any more of the palpable morbid horrible scent. 

Then Ochako screams. Momo flinches, and slowly turns her head to the bath, glassy and reflective, and wine-dark red. Blood. The bath is filled with blood. 

Momo gasps, stumbling backwards. In all her days, in all her years, never has she seen anything like this. “Shit,” she mutters under her breath, unable to think of anything more appropriate. 

She turns her gaze back to Ochako. She can’t look at that. She can’t. How did this happen? Who did this? The smell, it’s so real. It strangles her, ropes of disgusting hot smell have her frozen and overwhelmed, but the look on Ochako’s face, it’s worse. Ochako’s brown eyes are glazed over, as she stares at the horror scene in before them. Momo shakes Ochako’s frame, but she’s stiff, solid, a petrified statue of marble. Momo opens her mouth to say something, but she nearly vomits when the taste of blood enters her mouth. Ochako’s lips are pursed and white, and her fists are balled so tight, her knuckles are colorless and protuberant. 

“Why?” Ochako whispers, eventually, voice cracking like marble hit hard by a chisel and left to simply crumble to the ground. “How?” 

“Ochako,” Momo rasps, sound not much better herself. She gathers the strength to grab Ochako’s shoulder, and Momo tugs at her frame, hoping that she can break her out of the stupor by jostling the fulcrum of her joint. “Please. We should leave. We need to report this.” 

“Why?” Ochako asks again, eyes still fixed on blood in the bath. Ochako wouldn’t go in that would she? She knows that Ochako has a strange relationship with blood, and Momo doesn’t blame her for it, but still, she wouldn’t go that far. 

“We are heroes,” Momo reminds her. She tugs at Ochako’s shoulder again, and Ochako blinks at her lazily. “Come on, Ochako please we—”

The blood ripples, and to make things worse, something floats outside of it. Momo swallows the bile rising to her throat. What now? She hates gore. She really does. She likes being a hero to save people from pain, from pain, from the horrible sights of seeing puddles of blood and torn limbs. And as much as she wants to run, she isn’t going to leave her friend. 

Momo is a hero. Fear be damned. She summons a gas mask over her mouth, and one in her hand. She secures it on Ochako’s face the best she can. It helps a little, but the smell remains a palpable thing, assaulting her deeply. The thing floating in the air, drips with blood, drops slapping the viscous surface of red, and she realizes with horror and disgust that the thing that came from the bath was none other than a hand. A floating hand and forearm torn from the elbow. It flies at her face, and she quickly ducks under it, faster than the attacking. She pulls Ochako down with her thankfully, and Ochako grunts, whimpering slightly. 

She waits for a second attack, and her grip on her staff tightens. But the hand, stained crimson and in the light the shine appears orpiment on the veins and knuckles. It draws a red line on the wall, and then slowly in slipshod katakana it says, “boo.” Then the hand flips them off. 

“Asshole,” Ochako mumbles, snapping out her stupor. For a brief second Momo experiences relief, but that relief is short-lived as she turns to see Ochako’s face still stark white, like she’s been bleached of all color and life. The floating, severed, and blood-covered hand points at Ochako, before wiggling around in a ‘no’ gesture like it’s offended. Momo braces for the attack it directs at them next, rushing over fast as a bullet, but they both roll over to opposite directions, dodging it. Maybe it’s the Shigaraki trauma, but the idea of it touching them leaves Momo with a severe rush of dread. Momo reaches for the staff she dropped earlier, and winces as the metal scraping the tile floor alerts to the hand (that can hear them apparently) to her idea.  

“Maybe provoking the villain is a bad idea?” Momo whispers. The gas mask she attempted to put on Ochako has fallen off, and she realizes in her panic she made it much too large.

“They provoked us first.” Ochako seethes, anger raw in her voice. “What kind of quirk is this?”  The hand goes straight for her, but Ochako pulls Momo’s staff out of her hand, so fast, that Momo barely registers the metal slipping out of her hands. Ochako swings the staff in a wide, careless arch, but she bats the hand right back into the bath with a loud splash that splatters blood over both of them. Momo exhales a deep breath, and cranes her head over the bathroom, everything is a bit of a mess, as blood has managed to stipple itself over most surfaces.

 Ochako pants, then cracks a wry and mirthless grin. “I think they call that move a bunt in baseball,” she says. Blood now coats the top of Momo’s staff, and there is a diagonal line of blood over Ochako’s face. Ochako licks the blood off her lips. Momo holds in the bile that nearly spills from her throat.

“I’ll take your word on that.” She tears her gaze over the wolfish expression on Ochako’s face, and to the bath. “We need to get out of here. Tell someone.” She stumbles upwards, when something slimy and warm grabs her ankle. She squeals, and something wrong vibrates through her. She can’t move the leg, but as she cranes her head around, she sees a different hand, considering the placement of the fingers, this one is a left hand, secured tightly on her ankle. She moved to pry it off, but her fingers freeze to the hand like it’s glue. 

“Ochako,” she screams. “Help.” Ochako grabs Momo’s free hand, but the floating ghost hand drags her to the edge of the bath. No. No. No. Her vision blurs, and she feels her limbs touch the hot, bath filled of sticky blood, breaking the surface. She screams, her heart racing painfully in her chest. 

Even with Ochako’s quirk on her, the hand still has her, pulling her easily into the bath. 

Ochako grunts, pulling harder, and it hurts. Momo whimpers. And Ochako stops, her hands still firmly gripping Ochako’s wrist. The floating hand pulls harder, and Momo is halfway submerged in the blood. “I can’t. I can’t. Momo, I don’t know what to do.” A knot in her chest tightens, and everything feels numb, wrong, hot and gross, her leg and the arm she has awkwardly folded under the surface feel numb and yet fuzzy, so far away and yet in so much pain. God. 

“Get help,” Momo slurs the words together. The blood has climbed up Ochako’s arms, and to Momo’s stomach, and water is streaming from Ochako’s eyes. The water flickers, looking red, if not for a second, before looking like tears again. What?

“No, no, I can’t leave you,” Ochako says, hiccupping. But Momo sees the other hand fly out of the bath. Momo squeals. There us to be a way out of this. There has to be. She just has to trust herself. Trust her gut. Wait.

“You have to--,” she says, the blood cresting over her mouth as she tries to finish her sentence. She angles her chin, and shuts her eyes, and before taking a deep breath she yells, “Run!” 

Momo fully submerges, and her body gets fuzzier, feels farther and farther away. Momo will survive this. She has too. She lungs prickle with needle-like pain, her breath bubbled up in her chest, as she struggles to hold on to it for just a few seconds longer. Momo needs to get out of this, needs to tell them what this…pain. Momo feels pain, and then nothing at all.

IV.

Ochako runs. She runs and runs. She doesn’t care about the footprints of blood she tracks through the dorms. She doesn’t care about the stains they will leave in the carpet, a scar for the future tenets to fear. She doesn't care. She doesn't care. 

“Help!” She screams. Why is no one coming? She is screaming so loudly her voice is raw. And she knows people are here. She knows.  If this is a prank, she will have detention until past graduation with what she might do, and if this is a villain she’s going to get arrested. Ochako shudders a deep breath out. “Goddammitt! Help!” 

She is soaked with blood, and it’s bringing her back to a time she can’t not go back. The ghosts she already knows, the ghosts that haunt her every day and every second scare her whole lot more than whatever horror show this quirk has planning.

She swings open the front door, and the air is crisp and raw, and she doesn’t care, she runs. “Where is everyone!” She yells. Wait in the teachers’ dorms, she sees Deku and Todoroki and the others, she can’t remember who right now nor does she really care, and she bolts that direction when she slams right into Aizawa. 

“Finally!” She screams and grabs his wrist. “I can explain everything, but you have to come. Momo she’s gone. She fell in the…in the… I know this looks bad, but I am not, I’m not who you need to worry about right now. Please Sensei,” She rambles, even if she’s getting blood on him, and a part of her feels bad, but not now. “It’s not my blood. This blood isn’t mine, so I don’t need to go to the infirmary but she’s under, Momo she, she’s under, she is going to drown.” She tugs at his arm again. He doesn’t budge. “Sensei?” She blinks and he’s a tree. A sturdy red maple tree with spindly bare branches and covered with her bloody handprints. “No. No. no.” She cries. A pitched sob spills from her mouth, but no, she can’t waste time here. She turns around, whimpering, the world around her smearing like the feathering ink of a watercolor landscape. Ochako has no time for that, Momo doesn’t have time for that. Ochako runs. She needs to get to the teacher’s dorms. That’s where she needs to be. Ochako needs to go there. 

Something sharp splinters up from her feet, but she’s been through worse, and even as a pained keen bubbles out her throat, she keeps running. Ochako has to. Momo’s life is on the line. She soldiers through it and continues onward, even as the wind whips at her hair, and it feels almost like pushing her backwards, Ochako keeps going. 

She recalls back to tests she made up, all of the ‘are you, you’ tests she saved up in a piggy bank and never needed to use. When she finds someone, she’ll be ready. She'll make sure they're real and then she’ll bring them to Momo, and they can save her and get rid of the villain.  

Even with every step more painful than last, she propels herself further, her vision clouds, and brightens, and she is a little further than she thought, like her brain is blacking out parts of her journey to make it just a little easier. Like a strobe light in a haunted house. How ironic. She gasps at the sight of the teacher’s dorms, and freezes, because what if it’s not real? What if it’s another illusion or hallucination? She knows hallucinations and they are not that real, at least the ones she endured aren’t. Ochako stumbles up the stairs, limping, and dragging blood up the railing. The smell feels less far way now, but her brain has always been good at blocking out the smell of metal and being in that room with the scent so thick, all she could recall was the last time she bathed in a pool of blood, the last time the scent was so close she could kiss it with bloody lips. She wipes her eyes, a bad idea, when she pulls away and remembers how coated her hands are from trying to pull Momo out. 

Ochako bursts through the doors, gasping, unable to string any words together. She sees a bunch of heads turn towards her, eyes widening with horror, concern, and the only sound able to spill from her mouth is a scream.

 

V.

Hitoshi is having a bad day.

It started with the awkward angle his body had contorted into while he was asleep, with his chin hooked over his wrist, and his body weight thrusted on top of his shoulder for most of the night. He woke with a shooting pain in his joints, and no amount of digging his fingers into the left wing of his arm could manage to work the tension out. He has rolled the ball of his shoulder over and over, all day, and each time he heard the grinding of his joint there would be for one blissful second only the good kind of pain, before the annoying pain settled right back with a vengeance, haunting him.

Hitoshi’s day then got worse.

He had been sparring with Iida earlier, and now he has a bruise on his cheek purple as his hair, and the whole trip to the infirmary and back, Iida kept up with an annoying litany of apologies. Iida spewed the word out, like water from a fountain, but no amount of wishful thinking was about to undo the bruise on Hitoshi’s cheek.  

And Hitoshi gets it. Accidents happen! Water under the bridge. But sorry isn’t a magical healing spell that will zap all the pain away, it’s not a coin that can be tossed into the well to make things better. The difference between sorry and a coin, is that coin has worth. A person doesn’t lose anything from apologizing, all it does is reaffirm you aren’t a heartless asshole. Which Hitoshi already knew Iida wasn’t.

To escape Iida, Hitoshi decided to run to the teacher dorms, which Aizawa told him he could always find some reprieve in if needed. Hitoshi knew special treatment, usually for seeing it from afar, as it was dished out to others back in the days of middle school and the beginning of his first year. Hitoshi admits he definitely enjoyed the warm and fuzzy feeling he got when he realized that he was one of the students to get special treatment. At UA of all places.

The only other people he sees in the teacher’s dorm would be Midoriya and Bakugou, spending lunches and occasionally dinners with All Might. The list of students to visit the teacher dorms outside of emergency or a scheduled meeting ends with the three of them.

So, imagine Hitoshi’s wild shock, when following Midoriya and Bakugou was Todoroki and Tokoyami. Hitoshi just poured hot water into a mug, the mild scent of honey and chamomile blending together, as he set the mug beside his laptop, when the doors swing open to reveal his classmates. Hitoshi has one more essay to write before he’s done with all his academic finals. He wants to start training for the important heroic finals as soon as possible, and he doesn’t want to procrastinate the final two paragraphs of the essay. But seeing them here, he sort of wants to invite him to join him.

He’s about to greet them, when he sees the expressions on each of their faces. Bakugou of course, appears angry, with a scowl twisting up his features, and his brows a V on his face. But there is a twitchiness that Hitoshi immediately notices, and it isn’t only Bakugou twitching his head around like a ship careening in a mercurial sea, avoiding jagged rocks.

Midoriya has the same intensity, though minus the anger, he seems to be snapping his head around searching for someone like a bloodhound. While Todoroki and Tokoyami seem to be swiveling their heads in near slow-motion sync, wearing more deadpan looks, Hitoshi sees one thing in each of them that immediately sets a chilly feeling inside of him. A cross between fear and urgency that doesn’t quite seem like either, but it can't be delineated as simple anxiety either. 

“Who are you looking for?” Hitoshi asks in lieu of a greeting. Aizawa had stepped out for a second into the courtyard to ask Mic a question as he smoked a cigarette, which means in the teacher common rooms, sits only Hitoshi. 

“All Might,” Midoriya answers, in a tone that seems both distant and mildly patronizing. Like it’s obvious. Maybe it is, but a group of four, rather than the normal pair, clearly jittery and possibly up to something, reads more Aizawa territory than anything. 

“He’s not here,” Hitoshi says. “I thought you knew this.” 

Midoriya for a second looks terribly confused, when the realization hits him. Midoriya’s face morphs into several things, the surprising is a flash of what looks almost like anger, before it settles into acceptance. Did he just experience all five stages of grief or something? Midoriya sighs, “right, his checkup.” 

“Checkup?” Bakugou asks, snapping at Midoriya. “For what? He was at the doctor’s two weeks ago, and he’s been out of PT for months now.”

Midoriya exhales and grumbles out, not even trying to hide the annoyance, “Nothing Kacchan, he’s just having trouble with heart, that's all.”

“And he told you this?” Bakugou’s face does something strange. If the strange thing it does, wasn’t form a pained expression, Hitoshi may have been amused by it. His opinions on Bakugou are, tumultuous at best, swinging from good to bad, or circling around indifferent, like a pendulum. But Hitoshi can image the ache in Bakugou’s chest, simply by the difficulty Bakugou has schooling his expression back to anger.

Bakugo’s lips go straight, his eyes yearning, but they flick away from Midoriya, like a mosquito dodging the slap of a hand, when Midoriya answers, his voice even, far away. “Yes, he told me.”  Midoriya oblivious the spurn on Bakugou’s face, which for Midoriya is a sign that something is wrong.

“Is everything, okay?” He asks.

“Shinsou,” Todoroki steps forward. “Do you know where Aizawa is then?”

“What’s wrong?” Shinsou narrows his eyes at them, and dread lowers the pitch of his voice.

Izuku chews his lips, “I’m sure nothing, but—”

“Ghosts,” Todoroki interrupts. 

“Not ghost, stop fucking saying that,” Bakugou barks out. The anger louder than before.

“It is possible,” Tokoyami interjects, “that the dorms are being visited by some particularly mischievous spirits.”

Hitoshi snorts, what are they talking about? “You mean like what, a poltergeist?” He can’t help the smile tugging at his lips, especially with how grave Todoroki starts to look, nodding like what Hitoshi just asked was a very plausible thing. “No,” Hitoshi adds, laughing the word out. “Just no.”

“Yes,” Tokoyami says. 

“You’re playing with them, right? Like this is just a bad prank. Is Yanagi and Hagakure on it? I mean good big or go home, last few weeks and all that, but are you sure you want to drag Mr. Aizawa in this?” He scoffs at the absurdity, but if Tokoyami was going to plant a prank this is a pretty good one. 

“I’m not involved,” Tokoyami says. “If it is actually just a prank. But no one’s quirks make sense if it is.”

“So that doesn't mean ghosts,” Hitoshi says. “It means literally anything else, actually.”

Bakugou laughs, it’s a shrill sound, not the sort of laugh he expects from Bakugou, and Hitoshi heart skips about five beats. He thinks Bakugou just shaved a solid decade off his life, and Hitoshi needed that time with his increasing caffeine addiction. “Thank you,” Bakugou says, and there goes another decade of Hitoshi’s life. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard those two words uttered from Bakugou before, and to think Bakugou is directing them at Hitoshi. 

“For…what?” he asks very slowly. 

“For being the only one with working brain cells left at this god forsaken school,” Bakugou says, glaring at the other three. Izuku still looks side-tracked, and Hitoshi feels a pang of worry in his gut. 

“Midoriya?” Hitoshi asks. Midoriya shakes himself out of a stupor, blinking at Hitoshi.

“Yeah, sorry, headache.” Midoriya grimaces. “It’s kind of like, but it’s not like—” he groans, throwing his arms in the air. “My Danger Sense is weird right now.”

Hitoshi freezes. “Are we in danger?” He feels himself grow hyper aware of his surroundings. The four with their backs facing the front door, the glass wall of windows to the courtyard. He’s sitting on the floor currently, his back against the couch, and if he needs to the table, his pens, and even the hot water in his breakable, white China mug can be used as a weapon. Even if the four in front of him have power beyond his understanding, and Hitoshi knows he will never reach to the constellations already forming to decorate their legacy way up in the sky, he at least knows he can smash a mug of hot tea on someone’s skull and cause some minor damage, if that’s mild burns, a concussion, or brain damage,  well he’s deal with later. 

“No,” Midoriya says, “not dangerous, but it’s all weird… like I can quite sense it, maybe my senses are still all shot.”

“Or your quirk doesn’t reach through the veil,” Todoroki says dramatically. Tokoyami nods. 

“Or my quirk is on the fritz,” Midoriya mumbles. “I don’t exactly have much time as a student left.”

The courtyard door slides open. Aizawa and Mic step in, both of them staring at the extra students with surprised looks. 

“Oh no, four of the most problematic problem children,” Aizawa sighs. “This can’t be good.”

“Trust me,” Bakugou groans. “If you think you’re annoyed now, sit down, the bullshit you’re about to hear is record breaking.”

Aizawa pinches the bridge of his nose and walks over to them. “Clearly. M’kay, is it broken bones? Vigilantism? None of you killed someone, right?”

“No!” Midoriya yells. “This time it’s none of that!”

“You see, Midoriya, the worst part of that sentence is the ‘this time’ and with you there is so much room for worse.” 

“OK, I deserve that, but… if this is my fault, then it just affected me and Todoroki…” Izuku trails off wincing. “Okay let’s start from the beginning.” 

 

By the time Midoriya finishes explaining the situation, both Mic and Aizawa go silent. Hitoshi feels his brow furrowed, a migraine settling deep inside his head. It’s hard to decide which theory feels the most real, but Hitoshi almost wants it to be paranormal. At least then it can’t be chalked up as mere bad luck, rather than a villain to catch, or worse a prankster to punish, and he really doesn’t want it to be another thing Izuku has to struggle with, has to blame himself for, another thing for Izuku Midoriya to feel victimized by when really it’s another fuck ton of power he gets wield at his fingertips.

Hitoshi frows, he doesn’t want the envy, not of his friend, but goddammit can Midoriya’s shadow stop growing? Midoriya’s shadow has been a vacuum since the day they met, absorbing all the light into his golden heart and even brighter smiles. Hitoshi knows he can’t blame Midoriya for the shadow he casts over the rest of them, and it’s not Midoriya’s fault that he’s the gold star in the sky, the sun, someone so powerful and permanent, that his legacy will only be forgotten when the world collapses under the weight of it

Heroes are either ghosts during their career, or they become ghosts after. Hitoshi has accepted his future as a ghost, his name will haunt a newspaper or so, and his work will be done quietly, until he is only known to those who go bump in the night. Until he is one of those who goes bump in the night. His power works best if he remains a ghost, but that means once he’s gone, dead and buried, he won’t be remembered. Hitoshi’s okay with that. He is. He is a hero than be remembered. He isn’t Midoriya, Bakugou, Todoroki, or even Tokoyami, heroes who are bright, alive, who names are feared loudly, and celebrated fiercely, who are loved so powerfully, that they will haunt society in every signature, poster, and playing card. They get to be ghosts after they die.

Only the good or the great get remembered and made into ghosts. Chances are, the only ghosts haunting them, are ghosts like Hitoshi. The alive sort of ghost.  

“And you said no one else noticed something odd?” Aizawa asks.

“No,” Midoriya says. “Everyone who texted back, seemed blissfully clueless.” 

“And you two,” Aizawa lifts his gaze to Todoroki and Tokoyami, “think that this is a haunting?” The doneness in Aizawa’s voice is near unbearable, which is just another sign that yes, ghosts don’t really exist, they are just insecurities and traumas and everything shitty in-between that sticks to a person, and slowly eats you away, until eventually you die. At least that’s how it's been for Hitoshi all his life. If anything, he’s intimately aware of ghosts, and that’s why of course this wouldn’t be a haunting. Nothing is ever easy. He holds in a sigh, and watches as Aizawa’s face goes pensive with thought. 

It’s probably a good thing All Might is a way. Hitoshi doesn’t think the man is exactly equipped for this sort of situation.  

Mic had made tea for them all. Hitoshi had been slowly nursing on the cup he made right before, and now as he brings the mug to his lips, the tea bag touches his nose, the mug now empty. Well, there goes half of the useless little weapon. It would be useless anyways, not when he is still objectively the weakest person here. 

There’s a thump outside, against the door, like a body fell against the wood. The doorknob twists open, and every lunge up. It could be anyone. Hell, All Might could be coming home from an appointment to any other teacher. But something wrong twists, cold and painful in his gut, and he isn’t the only one, as all of them seem ready to pounce on whatever falls through the doors. 

The doors creaks, before Uraraka falls through, sopping wet, in only a yellow fuzzy bathrobe.  She smells of soap and dirt. But she stares at them, eyes bulging, animalistic. The hem of the bathrobe is striped with mud, and the tips of her fingers are purple from the cold. 

Uraraka stares at them, and the second, it nearly lasts forever. But she opens her mouth, panting, catching her breath. He waits for her to speak, to tell them what the hell is going on. But she screams. A high-pitched, visceral scream that echoes off the walls. Likes it all she can do. 

Midoriya rushes to her first. One second, he’s at the couches, the next he is beside her. A bullet of electric green. He puts her hands on her shoulders, and she flinches. 

Her screams falter, and turn into gibberish blubbering out her, and then into whimpering sobs. “No, no, no,” she eventually gets out. “Not me. You…you have to…Not me,” she cries. “Her. Help.”

“Ochako, your feet are bleeding,” Izuku says.

She shakes her head, “No, no, it's not mine. I’m sorry the blood is everywhere, but you have to… Momo.” She shrills out the name. 

“Midoriya let her go.” Aizawa’s voice is stern. “Now.” Midoriya’s fingers slowly remove themselves from Uraraka. Something akin to protective anger flickers in Midoriya’s eyes before softening into something else.

“Where’s Yaoyorozu?” He asks, voice icy, and also desperate. 

“Are you a tree?” Uraraka replies instead, staring up at him. 

Aizawa falters but shakes his head. “Mic makes sure she’s okay. I’m going to find Yaoyorozu. None of you leave, you hear me?” 

“You can’t be serious if someone’s in danger—” Aizawa puts a hand up in front of Midoriya. 

“I’m so serious right now. You stay with Uraraka.” Midoriya nods at that. And Aizawa runs out the doors. Hitoshi can hear the winds increasing.

 “Deku,” Uraraka croaks. “What’s…what’s the color of my… what’s the color of my favorite T-shirt. Deku answer, please.” Her breath evens slowly, but the wild look in her eyes doesn’t go away. 

Midoriya’s throat bobs. His voice cracks when he answers her. “It’s yellow. Like um, it’s pastel.” 

Uraraka laughs, “yeah. Yeah. Yellow. Bakugou, you told me that we shared a favorite song… what is it?”

Bakugou, staring at her like a deer in the headlights, jumps out of a stupor. “Fuck. I share that with you in confidence, Round Face. It’s Yeah Boy and Doll Face.”

Uraraka relaxes, her smile growing larger. “Todoroki, what’s the anime series we watch together?”

“Madoka Magica,” Todoroki says without missing a beat. Uraraka nods. If Hitoshi were less scared shitless currently, he’d probably laugh at the picture of Todoroki watching something about magical girls. Or frankly any anime at all. Hitoshi did not peg Todoroki as an otaku, but he’ll hold the laughter at that for later. Uraraka’s eyes land distinctly on him.

“Tokoyami, Shinsou, what did you get for your birthdays?”

Hitoshi breathes, “Uh you got me a candle, it smells like the ocean?” He doesn’t mean to question it, but it did smell horrible, and he never lit it. Like ever. Uraraka nods though, relaxing. He realizes a beat later, if she had answered out loud, he would have been able to help her with his quirk. Did she avoid it intentionally

“A tarot deck,” Tokoyami says last. And Uraraka nods, taking a deep breath.

“You’re all you?” She squeaks. Hitoshi wants to throw up. Was that a test for that, not, breaking out of a panic attack? Oh god, does she think Himiko Toga is back or something. 

“We’re us, Ochako.” Midoriya grabs her hand, and Uraraka smiles warmly at him.

“Really?” She sounds so weak. It hurts, because she is the best combatant in their class hand to hand and she is one of those stars that shines so brightly, he’d make wishes on her if he could. 

“Really.” A glassiness fogs Midoriya’s eyes, and they seem more like a murky sea during a storm than verdant blue-green. “What happened?”

Uraraka attempts to stand, but she hisses in pain. Midoriya picks her up, but she tries to push him away.  “No! I don’t want to get blood on you.” Midoriya’s brows draw together, and Hitoshi understands the flummoxed expression that wrinkles Midoriya’s forehead. He notices Midoriya’s grip on Uraraka loosen, like he’s considering putting her down, but then his eyes flick back to her bloodied feet.

“It’s Ochako, your feet aren’t even touching me,” Midoriya says. Uraraka though starts to squirm and thrash.

“No,” she whispers. “No, it’s not. Deku, look at me. Look at the blood. Look.” She nearly pokes one of Midoriya’s eyes out, miry and purpled fingers. She’s freezing, and the dampness to her clothes, the droplets of water on her skin, it’s not doing her any favors. She needs warmth.

“Careful,” Mic says. “Midoriya bring her to the couch, and Todoroki create a small flame.”

They both nod. Uraraka protests this. If not for the crackle of green light circling Midoriya’s limbs, Hitoshi is positive Uraraka would have escaped his bridal carry. He sets her on the couch. And Todoroki kneels beside her, making a small flame.

Hitoshi feels useless. But an idea strikes him, when he takes the spirals of Uraraka’s wet hair that web on side of the couch, “Hey Mic, does anyone have extra clothes or something for her?” Hitoshi asks.  Mic nods.

“Yeah. I have some of Nem---Midnight’s old pajamas boxed up still in my closet. I trust you all not to skedaddle, don’t make me regret that.” 

Hitoshi nods at Mic who walks briskly to the elevator, but Hitoshi’s attention is brought back to Uraraka saying, “No. No. I shouldn’t be on the couch, Deku. I’ll stain it. Don’t you see it all. I’m soaked through,” she says. “Don’t you see?” 

“Of water, yeah but—”

“No, Deku, it’s blood. I’m covered in blood. It’s all I can smell and—” she starts to cry again. “Are you sure you’re you?” Uraraka’s eyes go wide then, like she’s seeing through Midoriya completely. She whimpers. “no. no. Not this. Not you? Is it really you?”

Hitoshi backs away, and he watches as Midoriya’s face goes white. What’s scarier, the fact Uraraka believes she’s soaked in blood or the hope in her voice, like she wants them to be someone else. Uraraka’s eyes squeeze shut, “is my smile cute?” 

A sharp noise whistles out from Midoriya’s throat, and he wipes the wet hair sticking to her forehead. Tears are running down her temples.

“Uraraka,” Hitoshi whispers. “Are you still cold?”

She peers at him, there’s a trace alacrity, just a trace that ghosts over her lips. “Shinsou?” she gasps. “Yes. I’m still cold.”

A tickle in the back of his head, a sensation of an imaginary string, connecting his mind to hers. He smiles, strained and faked. “Alright. How about you get some rest now.”

Uraraka nods, another tear slipping down her skin, and her eyes flutter closed.

Midoriya stands up abruptly. His eyes are locked on her. “I’m getting first aid.”  

Midoriya starts to back away from her, side-stepping around the couch, when Todoroki puts a hand on his shoulder. Midoriya shakes it away as anger rolls off him. “Midoriya,” Todoroki says. “She’ll be okay.” 

“Why…how did this happen?” Midoriya rasps. “Everything was normal earlier, and then that thing happened, which might have been because of me,” he chokes out, voice getting louder with each word. “And now this? Coincidences don’t exist. They don’t. What if this is my fault, Todoroki? She’s freezing, sopping wet, and her feet… God, she tore them to shreds running out here.” 

“She’ll be okay. It’s Uraraka,” Hitoshi interjects. Todoroki nods.

“Midoriya, this wasn’t your fault. This could still be–” Todoroki says, as Midoriya wanders closer to the kitchen.

“Don’t say ghosts,” Midoriya snaps. “I know ghosts. Trust me. Half the time they are useless,” he bites out. Midoriya whips his head to the side, and yells at one of the vestiges. “Well, if you have anything helpful to share, please, go for it!” Midoriya scoffs. “Nothing. Like I thought.” He kicks a chair, and crashes into the wall, denting the plaster. “Dammit.” Midoriya washes a hand over his face. Hitoshi doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Oi! Deku, they aren’t at fault for this. Don’t lash out at them,” Bakugou yells. “They might be part of your quirk, but they aren’t you, don’t treat them with your usual bout of self-loathing. If you don’t deserve it, they sure as hell don’t.” 

Todoroki grabs Midoriya’s shoulder again, “and not everything is your fault.” 

Midoriya’s eyes soften, he sniffles, and his jaw tightens. “Right, you’re right. I’m sorry.”  Midoriya puts a hand on top of Todoroki for a second, and Hitoshi watches as they gaze into each other’s eyes. Hitoshi tears his attention away from that and sees that Tokoyami has put a fuzzy blanket on top of her. 

“She’s stopped shivering,” Tokoyami says, staring at him, but his voice is grim. “I think you should try and wake her up.”

“Fuck,” Bakugou yells. “Fuck. This is such a flying shit show. Icy Hot, get your ass over here. Round Face is too good to die from fucking hypothermia. If I try, I risk sending her into shock.” Todoroki nods and pulls away from Midoriya, before quickly whispering something his ear. Hitoshi bites his tongue from asking what, as Todoroki walks up to the couch once more. He summons another flame in his palm.

Uraraka’s skin is pale. She looks, well, ghostly, all the blood seemingly drained from her face. Usually cold brings out the redness, but instead she seems almost bluish-white, like snow reflecting day. It’s uncanny. Is she getting... paler?

Her eyes snap open, the sclera pearly white, and frost patterns swirl over her cheeks. Is she turning into ice? This isn’t possible. What the hell.

“Uraraka?” Hitoshi asks, and her head, suddenly clear and crystal, cocks to the side in a mechanical motion. “Are you, you?”

“Holy shit,” Bakugou screams, his voice pitching up to an octave probably only those castrated can reach. Explosions start to pop out his hands, but Izuku slaps them away. 

“Don’t,” Midoriya yells. “What if it’s still Ochako?”

“She’s made of fucking ice,” Bakugou protests. “Look at her Deku, that isn’t Round Face. And if it is, and she tries to attack us, Round Face would want us to take care of it. Not pull fucking punches.”  

“Listen to the boy.” Uraraka says, and it’s her voice, ringing through the room, the sound feathering out unnaturally. “Fight me, you might even win, but in my fights winning means one side is dead. Do you want your friend to die?”  Her voice cracks, rattling like the shifting ice in a glacier.

“I used my quirk on her,” Hitoshi says. “This shouldn’t be… I still feel it activated.”

“Use it,” Tokoyami orders. “Wake Uraraka.”

“She won’t see you,” Not-Uraraka says. “Like you can’t see Present Mic. And he can’t see you. He thinks you all ran off to help the other girl. I might even make the real Uraraka, that’s her name, right? Fight you? See you as the enemy. I can make anything I want to happen. Whatever I believe is real, is real.” White clouds shudder around each word Not-Uraraka makes.

“Wanna bet, you Elsa Wannabe? Seeing something don’t always mean believing.” Bakugou yells---but his scream becomes one of agony, and blood cuts on his chest.

“No, but feeling something usually does,” She laughs. “And pain is the best teacher.”

The lights shudder out on her words. Hitoshi eyes his surroundings. Fighting her directly means possibly hurting Uraraka. And waking Uraraka might put her in more danger. She might kill him later for keeping her in the dark, but, well he rather Uraraka kill him than this villain. That means she’s alive. Moral victory and all that.

“Stop!” Midoriya yells, the One for All lightning sticks to his skin, but he looks like a kid in his hoodie and jeans, without the green glow of power. Doubt lodges in Hitoshi’s throat, because for the first time, Midoriya looks almost weak.

“Attack me, and I will kill him,” Not-Uraraka threatens. Midoriya glares at her with something colder than the ice she seems sculpted from. But he doesn’t move.

The darkness that surrounds them, is not the pitch blackness Midoriya described with Todoroki earlier, but everything is stained with deep shadows that stretch over every surface. Cold needles at his skin, biting like a dog with rabies, because it makes Hitoshi sick.

Todoroki summons a flame, but it emits no light.  Dark Shadow makes a gurgling sound, Tokoyami probably straining to keep her leash, the shadows seem to dance, growing more intense. “Stop,” Tokoyami says. “Stop. Dark Shadow please.” 

“How much control do you have over yourself,” Not-Uraraka says, to the Tokoyami, but her voice washing over all of them like ice water. “How much do you trust yourself?

The newspapers on the table flutter with wind, wind that shouldn’t exist inside. The newspapers kept as tokens to remember heroes who died in the war. The heroes who became ghosts too early. Like Midnight. One of her memorials flies through the wind, and around the room. She’s taunting them.  

Hitoshi is having a really bad day. 

 

+ VI.

Shota has a feeling that whatever happened, happened in the girls’ bathroom with how Uraraka came bursting through the front doors with bloodied feet and wearing a bathrobe. 

Shota’s relationship with fear is one of biblical proportions, he felt a spike of it, like an awl to the heart, when he saw four of his students standing jittery in the Teacher dorms. But when he saw Uraraka, with her wild eyes and feral expression, fear wrested at his soul with fang and tooth, and he felt the splintering of it still, digging deeper and deeper. 

The dorms smell cleaner, like Clorox and other chemicals, like cleaning has already started. He sees Asui sitting on the couch, her brow drawn taut. 

“Mr. Aizawa?” she greets, wearing a wobbly-line for a smile. “Is something the matter?” 

“Have you noticed any odd behavior?” He asks her, and he watches the concern grow clearer on her face. 

“Ribbit? No, nothing odd here.” Her movements are fluid, awkward. 

“That isn’t going to work,” he says curtly. “Whatever this is.”

Asui blinks up at him, “Mr. Aizawa?” Her eyes are slightly crossed, and her mouth closes too soon, before the sound finishes. 

“Where is my student?” He yells, throwing his voice in the air. 

“Right here,” Not-Asui says, and it’s not quite her voice. Fine. He flashes his quirk, with his good eye, but nothing happens. The Not-Asui remains there, uncanny. Her shoulders aren’t rising up and down. There is no susurrant sound of breath.
“I assure you, I recognize when my students are real.”  She’s gone. In a flicker, a second. He didn’t blink, he’s better than that. He turns around, and finds the dorms emptier, like a few weeks have past, like how it should look when they are all packed and moved out. There’s no bowel of fruit on the counter. No books tossed on the coffee table. No random pair of house shoes sitting awkwardly near the courtyard doors. 

The stains they left are still there. Cup rings are etched into the grain in the table wood. He sees a few mystery stains on the couch. He can still smell them, haunting the air, permeating the space. 

“So that’s how it is?” He asks. “You can, what, alter the perception? Some advanced illusion quirk? Or is it something else?” 

He feels something fly past him, he can’t see it, but he avoids it by a hair, by pivoting on his good foot. He may have lost an eye and a leg, but his ears still work. 

“Are you trying to freak out my students? What exactly are you trying to prove?” He bites out. “That they aren't invincible? Or something cruller than that?”  He ducks at another invisible attack. “You want them to stop trusting their minds?” He steps to the side. It feels like something is trying to grab him. If only he could see his attacker. It feels small. And it clearly has a disregard of gravity. What kind of quirk is this? It makes no sense.  “I can assure you; my students have developed an unfortunate lack of trust in their own judgement; they don’t need the likes of pathetic vermin like yourself to develop that.”

His one regret is not teaching them to trust themselves. Over three years, they have barely learned to trust each other, seldom accepting any shred of help, but even his students who remain the hungriest for control, can’t manage to trust themselves. 

But it took him a long time to learn to walk again, to get over that even he could feel his leg, that instinct to step on what wasn’t there, wasn’t his own mind betraying him. But he managed, he took his steps, one day at a time, and learned to trust himself, one step at a time. 

He walks over to the door to the stairs and yanks it open. A cold wind rushes out. Wind. Illusion. Fuck. “Shiketsu.”

 

Izuku closes his eyes. Back in his room, when he lost all senses, he could only sense what he knew was there. Something about how quickly Ochako turned blue and then to ice doesn’t sit right with him. Kacchan, Shinsou, and Tokoyami seem more under the spell, like it befell them more gradually than him. But Izuku was distracted. He let himself stare into Todoroki’s eyes, just for a second, just to let the kind expression so warm and directed at him wash over him and thaw away at the anger still knotted in Izuku’s chest. Someone hurt Ochako. His best friend. And Izuku fears that if he finds out whom, he’s not going to be a hero. 

So better to focus on things that make him happy, and that being the hopeful, gentle expression Todoroki and only Todoroki can make, and with only his eyes. Then Todoroki whispered, “trust yourself as much as I trust you.” Izuku felt compelled to kiss him. Right there and then. He didn’t.

He let the words wash over him. And they feel like a chisel to his heart, and instead of breaking it, he feels something beautiful being carved out inside of him. He lets that calm the fear that’s been bubbling inside him, like water boiling in a pot, about to spill over. Izuku knows that right now, fear needs to take second stage.

Then when the icy version of Ochako, said those words, “How much do you trust yourself?” Izuku wanted to laugh, it felt like twisting the knife, but the knife had two-sides, it wasn’t that she overheard them, it was that she, and Izuku knows that this is she, has been manipulation them all day. The sentiment of trust, it was fracturing, and maybe if Izuku didn’t have such a great friend like Todoroki by his side to utter the right words, at the right moment, he’d have felt her question as the final straw, the nail on his coffin.

Then the newspapers fluttered. The attacks weren’t random. Get the stronger students to doubt themselves, then against each other. Get the teachers separated. She wasn’t after Uraraka, or even him, no, there was only a few targets. Yaoyorozu, Aizawa, Mic. Then hit them where it hurts.

Plant the seeds of doubt. Plant the seeds of a haunting. Of course.

The newspapers fluttered, and on it Izuku sees Midnight’s lift from the pile. Her Obituary. A summary of her career from her first major take-down to eventually her heroic defeat. This was about ghosts. Ghosts with unfinished business and a hankering for revenge from a villain who escaped Tartarus a long time ago. They never were able to catch her

Izuku closes his eyes as he sends a mental apology to the vestiges. He’s already in the doghouse with him, so he doesn’t want them to think he’s avoiding that with what he does next. 

He puts the walls up. When the war ended a year ago. He put a wall up, blocking him from the quirk completely. Some subconscious mental block to protect himself. After some therapy, he realized he wasn’t losing his quirk at all, and with time learned to remove the wall, to put the wall back up, and then to turn the wall into a door. He closes his eyes, and locks the door, blocking himself away from One for All. 

Quiet. His senses and natural abilities have overtime been augmented by the quirk. Even without One for All turned on. But in that moment, every sense, every ounce of power, evaporates from within. 

He’s not a genius. Never has been. But if he’s right, then the only danger Kacchan and Uraraka are in, is if any of them trust the illusion. They could easily be forced into her hurting the other. Into killing the other. Izuku’s best bet right now, is being powerless.  

Izuku keeps his eyes shut. He can’t reach for danger sense, right now, but he instinctively calls for it. The fact he feels nothing from it, does weirdly calm him, like he’s been palov-ed. He can’t hear any breathing, nor the faint thumps of heartbeats he can hear with full cowl and strained ears, he retreats far enough into his thoughts to not even hear talking. He stumbles over to the couch, snatches his hand away when someone’s right hand grabs his wrist. Tokoyami maybe, as it is softer than Shinsou’s and much warmer than Todoroki’s

He doesn’t know where the ice version of Ochako is. He can’t hear her. He can’t feel her. He doesn’t think she’s actually there. Trusts she isn’t there. He pats the couch, finds Ochako’s hand, and it’s cold, yes, but he feels her skin, he feels her nails, he feels the pads on her fingertips. 

He opens his eyes, and he sees the real Ochako. The one underneath the illusion. Look at that, he was right.

 

Shota climbs up the stairs. Fear has left, replaced by only anger. This was not part of the plan. This was not how this was supposed to happen. His metal feet slams on metal step, his steps thunderous. 

When he gets to the girls’ wing, he taps it with his keycard, and the door snaps open. He enters. There are wet spots in the carpet, left most likely by Uraraka.  

He closes his good eye as he opens the door to the girl’s bathing room. A horrible fruity scent hits his nose. “Is anyone here?” He calls, eyes still shut. When there’s no response, he pries open his eyes and sees a condensed ball of flesh and black hair, tied in a fuzzy white bathrobe.  The ground is damp, and there's a metal staff floating in the bath water, and too gas masks. The fruity scent clogging his nose is bad, but not gas mask bad. 

“Yaoyorozu,” he says, and she makes a whimpering sound. He’s always hated this quirk, from the moment he heard about it, he hated it. Shishikura and his grotesque body horror quirk.  

 

Shota finds a few other of his students turned into meatballs, including Asui, Sero, and Kirishima. Who he doesn’t find are those Shiketsu students. Wind, Meatball, and Illusion. It’s a week early to the prank night between schools, but he wouldn’t be surprised if this was idiotic attempt at a prank to better fool his students. He doesn’t remember exactly how Shishikura’s quirk works, if there’s a time limit, but he wakes for them to turn back.  Doesn’t he have to be nearby? He thinks of Uraraka, someone so strong, yet so afraid. This has long surpassed that of a prank.

He’s relieved his students here are okay, but Uraraka had serious wounds on her feet. Real injury, and a real panic attack. That will have serious consequences, not to imagine the amount of energy it will take from preventing Midoriya from enacting said consequences. He peeks his head around the dorms some more, searching for any other students who might have been kneaded into a ball of flesh. Shota shudders. 

Nothing. He returns to the common room, hoping to find his students back to normal. When the door cracks open. Asui walks through the door. She looks normal, bundled up in a light-weight coat and a knit-dress, hands stuffed into pockets. There’s something about seeing the wrinkles in her clothes, the fly-away hairs, the minute expression of worry creeping on her face, that leaves no room for doubt. That’s Asui.

“Mr. Aizawa?” She greets him. She doesn’t ask about the meat-ball forms of her classmates resting on the couch, when he remembers that she is supposed to be one of them.

“Fuck,” he mutters, whipping his head around, and he doesn’t see anyone on the couch. “Where have you been?

“Ryukyu’s agency, what’s going on?” She croaks. “Does this have to do with Uraraka and Yaoyorozu not returning my calls?” Guilt flashes over her face, and he gets it, he does.

“Yes. Probably. The campus is under attack,” he says, the dreaded words, a prank was hopeful thinking. This is not the work of those Shiketsu kids, is it? But why make it seem like that? Was it after or before he said school’s name that the villain controlling this quirk decide to look like them?  

“Does Uraraka have any enemies? Ones that want her to suffer?” He asks Tsu.

“Not currently, no.” Tsu ribbits. “Where is everyone? Is she okay?”

“I’m not sure,” he says, hating himself for letting his students fall into danger, again. “But I need your help here.”

Tsu nods. “Yes sir. Ribbit.”

“Finding Yaoyorozu is the objective, Uraraka said she was---”

A chilling laugher rings through the school. And limping forward, is Yaoyorozu drenched in red ribbons of blood. Her eyes are shut, cheeks sunken, like she’s been starving for days. Around her neck is the hand of a short-statured villain, dressed in a white trench-coat, with a pumpkin for a head. The expression carved on the pumpkin is a jagged-smile, the eyes diamond-slits. Now that’s a face he hasn’t seen in a long while.

“You,” he seethes. The villain, what’s her name, laughs, the mouth changing shape, her tongue seems to be a flame.

“Me!” She says. “I can’t believe Midnight’s dead. It took me a little to gather the power, but I decided to haunt the last place she lived. This girl her she seemed to have a soft spot for.”

Asui seems ready to pounce, but he stops her, “don’t. It may not be really her.”  

 

One moment Hizashi was alone, cursing his trust in those kids and leaving them alone, and the next they are standing around him, like they never left. He bites his tongue to hold his scream, because he’s an adult, but ever since Todoroki started talking ghosts, Hizashi has felt a sort of dread. Like a ball is about to drop.

He helps Midoriya bound Uraraka’s feet, and she limps her way to the bathroom to change in Nemuri’s Pajamas. A set-pair of a white silk collared shirt and long pants, covered in bright pink hearts. It felt strange to poke around that old box of things they packed away. But only he and Shota had any reason to keep it, her family was never going to come, and Hizashi loved her like a sister enough to hold on to it. Even if Shota thought the nostalgia was mushy, he never made much fuss about it.

When Uraraka comes back, the silk drapes over her feet. She limps but refuses the fretting.

“I feel better,” Uraraka says. “I think whatever quirk that was, it was adding to the pain there too.”

Hizashi still wants her to be careful.

“I have an idea,” Midoriya pipes up. He then dares a look at Hizashi, “But I need to let me leave and help Mr. Aizawa.”

Hizashi sighs, “You heard him. You might be graduating soon, but that means unless you have a job lined up after this, no hero work. And I know that you currently don’t have one.”  

“But I can help,” Midoriya says. “Please.”

Hizashi sighs, in all his years teaching, this class came with the most complications of all. “What do you think, this is?”

“This sort of illusion quirk, if wielded right, could make us kill each other.” Midoriya says. “And I’m worried, that might happen to Mr. Aizawa. This isn’t a quirk he can erase, I think. You might remember her, but there was a villain who broke out of Tartarus, Morrigan, and she’s still out there. That’s because her quirk was about trust. The less you trust your own judgement the more she can make you believe what she wants. The more trust people have in what they think the situation is, the more real it is, to them.” Midoriya gives him a look. “You remember it, right, because the first time she’d been arrested, it was by Midnight. She was put to sleep.” 

Hizashi feels his face drain of blood. The memory of this villain’s captures is fuzzy. It’s a high school memory. But from what Hizashi recalls, he can say, “that’s correct.” 

“So, she’s still out there,” Midoriya says, slowly. “Still out here.” 

“The only way to catch her, is by finding someone with total trust in their judgement,” Hizashi tells them. “Which as much as I trust you all to be heroes. Heroes I trust to fight beside. Trust in your own judgement is a fleeting thing, and I can tell you with certainty not even I have.” 

“I think I can do it,” Midoriya says. “I just have to trust…”



Izuku sighs, standing on the path, right before his and his classmates dorm building. Before he climbs up the steps, Izuku unlocks the mental door. One for All crackles beneath his skin.  “I’m sorry,” he says, gripping the railing

“That was a rude thing to say to us,” Nana says, appearing in front of him. 

“I know.” Izuku grimaces, guilt a hot ember in his chest. “I don’t find any of you useless. I really don't.” 

Nana smiles, one that doesn’t reach her eyes. “I know, kiddo.” A pensive expression washes over her. “I’m sorry too. I don’t always trust this quirk, even though it’s stood by me, by Toshinori, by you for quite some time now. I told you that this quirk, might have been the problem, because I thought one day it would. But in doing so, I made you lose trust in yourself, and in us.”

“I trust you,” he tells her, and not for the first time, he wishes he could hug her. If he ever finds out how, that’ll be the best day of his life. Nana strains another smile, more real than the last.

“I trust you too.”

“Be my eyes?” He asks her, climbing up the steps.

“Of course.”

Izuku twists the handle on the front door and pushes it ajar.

 

 

Notes:

(Izuku does manage to save the day! But I may write a part 2 in the future to show that!)

Thank you so much for reading! And thank you to all the event planners of NWA for creating another amazing year of fic fight! The community we have is incredible, and this has been a wonderful year!

Thank you Saber for the wonderful prompt! I tried to hide a few of your others inside her, just for fun!
Also I apologize for the grammar disaster this probably was, I didn't allow myself much time on the editing for this one!

 

I hope everyone had a fun time reading this fic! It was a one-shot on the longer side, so now that you have finished, make sure to drink some water, or some tea, have a walk, and get some fresh air!

Also want to credit Savannah Gilbo, and her wonderful six key scenes resource! It really helped give me direction with this 5+1 fic.

If you want to check out the one I used, here it is: The 6 Scenes Every Horror Novel Needs

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Fic Fight 2025 <3