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Hitoshi manages nine days in the hero course before the class is attacked by villains. Given 1-A's reputation, he's not sure if he should count himself lucky or unlucky.
His mother, in one of her quarterly phone calls that he never quite manages to look forward to, had raised concerns about him joining 1-A, asking if he couldn't specifically request to join the other class instead once his transfer had been approved. "It's the hero course," Hitoshi had replied, expressionless, or trying to be. "I'm not going to quibble."
What he hadn't said was that although the angry, defiant part of him wanted to say he'd belonged in the hero course since day one, that it was everyone else's fault for not recognising this, he still didn't relish the idea of walking into a class full of students who really had belonged from the very start. He didn't say that the idea of having Aizawa as his homeroom teacher - Aizawa, who had demonstrated through hours of effort that he believed in Hitoshi and what he could do - was one of the few things that made him feel better about joining so late. He'd be in the hero course with a teacher who thought he belonged there, who'd fought for his place there. Everything else, he could deal. He'd done it plenty of times before.
Anyway, this particular attack turned into an almost laughable non-event. They'd been on the way back from a field trip, taking a brief pause at a rest stop, when a handful of villains tried to pull off a poorly-planned robbery. Some of them didn't look much older than Hitoshi, which left him with a brief plummeting sadness he didn't want to look at any further.
Whatever their plan had been, it hadn't accounted for a bus full of hero students being parked outside, or a pro hero currently carrying all the rage of a man who'd been on a bus with twenty teenagers for four hours.
The closest Hitoshi gets to any of the action is when Aizawa sends one of the villains crashing into a wall in front of him. As the man topples over, he reaches out a hand in an oddly purposeful way. Hitoshi flinches, but the man completes his fall and nothing happens. He doesn't get back up.
Hitoshi is backing away when he feels a swift, sharp pain in each of his temples, then a line of heat in between like something is shearing its way through. By the time he's reached up a hand to his head, the pain is gone as if it had never been. The fight concludes soon after.
In hindsight, Hitoshi's first mistake had been choosing not to tell Aizawa about that moment of strange pain. His second had been failing to notice Midoriya on the other side of the parking lot, lifting a hand to his head, frowning as if in pain.
Hitoshi is familiar with the feeling of waking in the middle of the night, the gritty, baffled exhaustion that lets him know it's only been an hour or so since he first went to sleep. What he's not familiar with is the haze of primary colours that surrounds him when he opens his eyes, the peculiar ache spreading through both his forearms, and the patterns on the ceiling that even after only nine days, Hitoshi can tell aren't the same as the ones in his dorm room.
For a moment, he genuinely debates going back to sleep, because having been kidnapped isn't a concept he wants to try and process at god knows what hour in the morning. Maybe it's just weird, belated hazing, he wonders. Maybe he's a moron and he somehow fell asleep in someone else's room without noticing.
Opening his eyes and looking around quickly dispels this notion. He's tangled in brightly coloured sheets that aren't his own, and the body tangled in them sets off alarm bells he didn't even know he possessed, because it's not his body. He's looking down at legs that are too short to be his own, arms laced with scars, and the fuzz of messy hair in his peripheral vision is green.
Dreaming, then, Hitoshi thinks as he looks up from the not-his body to the astonishing amount of All Might merch surrounding him on all sides. Dreaming about Midoriya, apparently. He's never seen Midoriya's room before, but apparently he'd taken one look at Midoriya and subconsciously judged him as an obsessive All Might fan, and also kind of a pack rat. Most people seemed like pack rats in comparison to Hitoshi, in fairness.
He had actually been offered a tour of the rest of the class’s rooms, in a roundabout kind of way.
"It's a shame Shinsou didn't get to be part of the room king contest," Uraraka had said one morning over a hasty breakfast.
"We could do a second round," Ashido mused aloud. "It was fun, plus we might be able to barge our way into Bakugou's room this time."
"Over your dead body, Raccoon Eyes," Bakugou yelled from the corner, hunched over his coffee not unlike a defensive raccoon himself.
"One," Hitoshi had said, when it became clear that the girls were waiting for his input, "I don't know what you're talking about. B, don't go in my room."
The others shrugged this off, and Hitoshi supposed a class with Bakugou in it must be pretty used to hostility by now.
So, he'd never seen Midoriya's room, and this was apparently how he imagined it. Curious, unsure if this would turn into one of those normal-landscape-but-slowly-distorting nightmares, he rises up on strange legs, switches on a lamp, once again aware of the ache spreading down his arms, and walks slowly to the small mirror in the corner.
Yep. That sure is a face that isn't his, staring back at him, perplexed. He takes it in for a moment - it's weird seeing someone this close for this long, without the usual awkwardness that would make him turn away. Midoriya's freckles are both smaller and more frequent here than Hitoshi had thought - and isn't that weird, that he's dreaming in contradiction to his own impressions? This feels like the times he's gotten close to lucid dreaming, aware enough that he's dreaming to choose where he goes within the dream, but not able to actually change or control the landscape of the dream itself.
He's a little annoyed at the obviousness of the dream's meaning - like yeah, he gets it, he wishes he was the hero course's golden child, favoured by All Might, blessed with a flashy, obviously heroic quirk. What next, he'd be dreaming he was Todoroki, heir to the throne of the number one hero?
He looks down from his strange face to his strange, aching arms. He'd seen vague impressions of scars from a distance, but his mind has apparently magnified them into large, spiraling fissures stretching from hand to elbow. He runs a thumb over the fingers Midoriya had broken in the sports festival, the end of Hitoshi's ambitions of proving himself in that arena. No scars there, but even that simple movement of the hand sends little sparks of pain through his wrists. Is his subconscious trying to reassure him now, show him that even perfect strength quirks have downsides? The whole world's gotten a sharp reminder lately of how much damage can be done to your body even if your quirk makes you seem untouchable.
Hitoshi sighs, rubbing a hand over his eyes, angry at his own jealousy, angry that he's still exhausted even within an actual dream, angry that every movement reminds him that these aren't his muscles, this isn't his body. If he's going to dream about being Midoriya, couldn't he summon the peppy attitude too? If he's going to dream about being in another body, couldn't he imagine that he belongs there, instead of being an unwelcome stranger in someone else's skin?
He considers leaving the room altogether, roaming some dream version of the dorms, but he's still not convinced things aren't about to disintegrate the way they so often do when he manages to sleep, familiar landscapes draining away like sand, floors he's walked a thousand times suddenly giving way, dark things rising up out of the shadows.
Those dreams are worst when they're in places he knows, leaving him uneasy for days afterwards in whatever place they've decided to ruin this time. Better to stay in his invented version of Midoriya's room, even if it makes him feel bitter, and then bitter at his own bitterness. He's your classmate now, Hitoshi reminds himself. The scales are still vastly unbalanced, but for once he's moving in the right direction.
He tries to distract himself by snooping, unsure who he’ll really be learning more about. Mostly he gets the impression of an overwhelming amount of stuff. Hitoshi knows his own attitude to possessions isn’t exactly typical. He’d moved so often growing up that he’d started to take a kind of spiteful satisfaction in adding more and more of his things to the ‘give away’ pile with each move, insisting his parents couldn’t make him pack anything he didn’t want, looking around at his sparse, personality-less room and feeling like one thing was within his control.
It was partly why he hadn’t wanted anyone in his UA dorm room - he had school supplies tucked away in drawers, the bare minimum of clothes secluded in closets, and that was mostly it. Even with books, which he loved, he’d gotten used to getting from libraries rather than keeping any. He had plain black sheets on the bed.
The thought of changing things, of adding more stuff, even when he was in theory going to be in the same place for the next two and half years, made him feel twitchy and strange.
His imagined version of Midoriya’s room is the opposite extreme. Every wall is adorned with posters, every surface covered with mostly All Might themed memorabilia, but also books, lamps, trinkets. He inspects dream-Midoriya’s book collection, finding a surprising amount of nonfiction, and also an intriguing stack of worn notebooks, at least a dozen. He snags one from the pile at random and flips it open.
It takes him a while to make out the small, messy handwriting, and even longer to start drawing meaning from the scribbled, lengthy notes, written in a way that suggests the writer wasn’t trying to make them comprehensible for anyone except his future self. For the most part, the notebook is full of narrative regarding current active pro heroes - descriptions of fights witnessed in person or from internet footage; analysis of techniques, costumes, approach to publicity and interviews, varying between the kinds of paragraphs that wouldn’t seem out of place in a school essay to more personal, over-excited commentary. There are drawings too, every now and then, detailed ones that are better than anything Hitoshi could do.
He flips through half the notebook before the unease rising in his gut goes past the point that he can ignore it, and he has to stop, someone else’s hands gripping someone else’s book, and begin to admit the things he’s realising.
First, it’s that Hitoshi recognises the kind of person who would write this way. He’d always loved books, but as he grew older he stopped being able to tolerate stories about people his own age, reading about similar but painfully different lives. He stopped wanting to read about other children, with lives full of school and friends and family they were happy to see at the end of the day, because it just made his own life feel more alien. Even the physical presence of those kids - energised, able to sleep at night, running off on adventures - made Hitoshi feel diminished instead of transported. He preferred to read about things as far from his own life as possible, particularly science fiction that took far away, alien things and made them feel close and familiar.
With these notebooks, there was no jarring sense of mismatch. Hitoshi recognised the way words came out when you’d spent too long shut up inside yourself, no one to talk to, no one who might want to listen to what you have to say. This was the passion of someone who lived on nothing else.
Second, there was obsessive, detailed analysis here of so many quirks, mostly heroes but also classmates, even a section on Midoriya’s mother’s telekinesis quirk - but nothing about strength stockpiling. Nothing about the quirk that had catapulted Midoriya to exactly where Hitoshi had always wanted to be. Nothing about mishaps from early quirk use. Nothing about his own quirk at all.
Third, and most important, was that none of that should bother Hitoshi if he really was dreaming. Of course he’d recognise the voice of those notebooks, since they were essentially being written by his own mind. Of course their content wouldn’t be complete or accurate, because that wasn’t how dreams worked, even lucid ones. Dreams skipped around, like a bored editor scrubbing through footage. They changed their mind, changed scenes, dipped back and forth from memories to stories to fears.
Regardless of the notebook’s content, Hitoshi was struck by how wrong it was that he was able to sit there and read, methodically, page by page, each moment passing by steadily and orderly like...like he was awake. Like this was real, and he was in his classmates’ body, reading his private thoughts.
Hitoshi starts thumbing through the rest of the pages, guilty and confused but needing any kind of distraction so he doesn’t completely lose it, and a few seconds later he gets one. The later pages of the notebook are defaced, large characters written diagonally across each page, carefully spelling out ‘FREAK.’ He keeps turning the pages and it’s on every one, thickly coloured in to obscure as much text as possible, some of the pages torn from how viciously the culprit had been scribbling.
The dread he’s been trying to hide from rises in his gut as he flips through the defaced notebook. Every so often, he spots little addendums written around the letters in the original writer’s careful hand. There are small numbers, like footnotes, which specify where certain passages have been written out again. Something about the resignation there, the reaction not of shock or sadness but worn-down, weary acceptance, finally makes Hitoshi drop the notebook and put his head - not his head - in his hands; which aren’t his fucking hands.
This is real. It can’t be real, but it is. No dream has ever felt like this. He’d gone to sleep and woken up as someone else, and he has no way of knowing when it will stop, no way of knowing if his own body if being puppeted around somewhere or if he’s just had his consciousness shoved inside this one like a parasite.
He draws gasping, panicked breaths into someone else’s lungs. He’d been taught ways to deal with this, in a normal situation. Aizawa had firmly, compassionately directed him towards both counselling and self-help resources after his first panic attack during one of their training sessions, the former of which he’d refused and the latter of which he’d somewhat reluctantly investigated.
Grounding exercises helped the most, but those were about reminding himself of his physical presence in the present moment, distinct from the spiraling dread in his mind - his presence, using his senses. Now he was seeing the world through stolen eyes, present in a room he had no right to be in, in a body that hurt and moved wrong and wasn’t the one he’d been in for sixteen years.
Hitoshi shoves the notebook back on the shelf and returns to the bed, turning out the light and hiding under the covers like a child. If he can’t ground himself, he can at least reduce the input, stay in the dark where he can almost pretend he’s still himself. The air is cloying and warm under the sheets, but he doesn’t want to see this room anymore. He wants someone to tell him everything will be okay, but the thought of going to find someone and having them look at him and see someone else is a new kind of frightening.
Hitoshi breathes, ragged and afraid, until between one breath and the next he slides back into sleep.
When Hitoshi wakes again, the world is still dark, he’s still exhausted, but he can immediately tell that he’s himself again. He stretches out, the dozen little inputs and sensations he hadn’t realised could be different until he left his body back in place, down to the soreness in his lower back but blessedly pain-free arms.
He hauls himself up immediately, switching on the light, grabbing his phone and tapping half-blind until some random music starts up. When his eyes adjust, he sees that it’s still only just after five in the morning, but there’s no way he’s risking sleep again when he has no idea who he’ll wake up as.
He looks at the far wall, wondering what would happen if he left the room and knocked on the next door over; Midoriya’s room. He doesn’t get up, just flexes his fingers and looks up at the patterns on his ceiling, familiar and right again.
The next day, Hitoshi makes a valiant effort to ignore the problem. He doesn’t see Midoriya before classes, and if that’s because he crammed down a granola bar in his room instead of going down for breakfast, that’s between him and his regrettably uncaffeinated state when he makes it to class.
Midoriya is already there, and Hitoshi manages not to look at him for almost three whole seconds. When he does, he sees dark circles under his eyes and immediately looks away again, telling himself there’s no way he could address this in a classroom with eighteen other people anyway, so this is totally justifiable avoidance.
Hitoshi listens through morning classes about as well as the sleep-deprived and profoundly distracted ever do. He gathers his things woodenly as the others head for lunch, and forces himself to call Midoriya’s name just as he’s about to follow his friends out of the room.
Midoriya looks both unsurprised but a little worried to have been called on, and mumbles an excuse to the others before heading back into the classroom now only occupied by the two of them.
“So,” Hitoshi starts, somewhere between sarcastic and chipper. “Sleep well last night?”
Midoriya’s eyes widen. “Oh no,” he says softly.
“Yep,” Hitoshi replies, sinking back into his chair. At least that confirms that.
“You-” Midoriya says, making his way over to Hitoshi. “You had the same - I mean, the opposite, but-”
“I woke up last night looking a whole lot like you,” Hitoshi cuts in. “In the All Might shrine that I assume was your room.”
Midoriya blushes even through his panicked calculations. Hitoshi may as well have his fun now before he has to listen to Midoriya’s judgements on his own barren living space, from him and whoever else in class he decides to repeat them to. So much for not letting people see.
“Um, yeah,” Midoriya replies, taking a seat on the desk opposite. “I had the same thing - waking up in your room. I wasn’t sure it was real until just now.”
Hitoshi nods stiffly. The thing is, his completely unadorned room is its own kind of secret, one he wouldn’t have shown to anyone in this class if he could avoid it - but it also meant that Midoriya couldn’t possibly have delved as deep into Hitoshi’s thoughts and Hitoshi did into his. Blank space was just that - revealing that something was off, but a far cry from effectively reading someone’s diary.
“I wasn’t sure it was real either,” Hitoshi says, and winces a little before he continues - man, he wishes he was even more of an asshole and could just keep this next part to himself. “I kind of...looked through your stuff,” he admits, telling himself he’ll look Midoriya in the eyes once it’s all out in the open. “One of your notebooks - pretty much all of it.” He swallows. “Sorry.”
He looks up at Midoriya to find him looking uncomfortable but not angry. “Yeah,” he says, “I thought the shelves looked different.”
How could you tell, Hitoshi wants to ask, when you have so much stuff?
“It’s okay,” Midoriya adds, and he’s still blushing a little but otherwise seems genuine. “Like I said, I didn’t know what was really happening either. I - I guess it was something to do with the villains yesterday? I felt something kind of strange at the time, but, uh, I didn’t think it was...this.”
Hitoshi nods again, unsure where to go from there. Eventually they’ll need to go to Aizawa, try and figure out exactly what happened and how to stop it happening again - but he’s looking at this strange, meek kid, with those tiny, numerous freckles and those deep, painful scars - and it just feels wrong to leave it like this, even if he has no right to pry any further.
“That notebook,” Hitoshi says, and he’s not sure if he imagines the way Midoriya braces himself a little. “You...you never talked about your own quirk.”
Midoriya nods, thinking, visibly nervous but unsurprised by the implicit question. “I didn’t have it then,” he says. “Or, I didn’t know I had it. My quirk only manifested after all the training I did leading up to the UA entrance exam - before, everyone thought I was quirkless.”
It’s not a nice word, even in Midoriya’s soft, hesitant voice. It makes sense of the wrongness Hitoshi had been sensing, without making things any easier or kinder. It’s a word that calls up a specific memory, one he wishes he could leave behind.
Hitoshi is thirteen, and he’s at his third school in less than a year. He’s heading for his locker when he rounds a corner to find two kids from the year below shoving another up against the lockers, pulling his hair and laughing. Even Hitoshi, new as he is, knows the boy they’re tormenting is quirkless.
The others are facing away from him, but the quirkless boy catches sight of him and his eyes widen. For a few seconds he seems caught between humiliation and hope, the latter gradually fading away as Hitoshi just stands there, unmoving.
The thing is, this school hasn’t been bad so far. Hitoshi’s managed to keep his head down, stay under the radar, be unpopular but not a target. He’s kept his status as a nonentity, strategies that failed at other schools inexplicably holding up here. For now. Hitoshi knows better than anyone how quickly these things can plummet. And making waves by interfering with what’s happening right now - it’s asking for trouble.
Hitoshi stands there as the kid’s eyes drop back down, as one of the others shoves him harder against the locker while the second starts going through his bag, and he can’t bring himself to move. You don’t even need to get to your locker, a traitorous voice inside him says. Just take your books home. Come back tomorrow like nothing happened. The sound of the bullies’ laughter makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Hitoshi remembers the dozen times he’s been in that kid’s place, remembers the footage of heroes he’d poured over in dark times, and finds himself starting forward. “Hey, dipshits,” he calls.
“What-” the one going through the backpack starts, and a second later his eyes glaze over.
“Drop that and tackle your friend,” Hitoshi says, and the worst, best part is the thrill that goes through him when the kid obeys easily, gladly. For just a second, Hitoshi is in control, and everything he wants to stop is stopping, the world spinning on his terms.
Then the tackled kid shoves his friend back and the control breaks. Thankfully, the quirkless boy has already snatched his backpack and is sprinting away down the corridor, Hitoshi turning to do the same. The moment of confusion and indecision as the two left behind are unsure who to chase after is enough to let them both get away.
The following day, Hitoshi had almost bumped into the quirkless boy in the corridor, and he’d been about to offer a rare smile when he took in the fear in his eyes. It hurts all the more because it’s so familiar; it’s the same fear that’s made class after class treat Hitoshi like a bomb waiting to go off. Is this going to be his whole life, Hitoshi wonders, even the people he saves looking at him like he’s a villain?
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t see the kid getting picked on again, in the weeks before they pack up and move on again. He honestly doesn’t know what he’d have done if he had.
Back in the present, Hitoshi sees wariness in Midoriya’s eyes, too. Maybe it’s the time he spent looking at that face in the mirror, but Hitoshi doesn’t think Midoriya is afraid of him . Or, he is, but not because it’s Hitoshi in particular - there’s that flash of recognition again, of the reflexive fear that comes when you’re just used to anticipating blows, pleasantly surprised each time they don’t come, but always on the watch for when things turn again.
For the first time, it makes Hitoshi wonder if that quirkless boy had really been afraid of him either, or if he’d just learned enough about the world to know that kindness was a rare gift, not something to rely on before it had arrived. Something in his chest uncurls just a little, the same feeling he gets from letting go of tension in his jaw he hadn’t known he was holding - it’s strange and warm to find that things might be just a little bit kinder than he’d expected.
“I, uh, won’t tell anyone,” Hitoshi finds himself saying. “Just, if you were worried about that. I won’t.”
“Thank you,” Midoriya says quietly. “Not that I...thank you.”
Hitoshi gives an awkward nod.
“I won’t tell anyone about anything I saw in your room,” Midoriya adds hastily. “Not that there was...well…”
“Anything really in there, yeah,” Hitoshi says, and it’s surprisingly easy to keep any anger from his voice. He’s starting to get the impression that if anyone in their class was going to get a look at Hitoshi’s life behind closed doors, he’s glad it was Midoriya. “I...have a thing about stuff,” he adds, figuring it’s fair turnabout for Midoriya’s own confession, even if it sounds stupid and vague spoken aloud.
Midoriya nods as though this makes perfect sense. “I guess I do, too, just...in the opposite direction.”
Hitoshi huffs a laugh. “We...should probably go find Aizawa,” he says. “Tell him what happened. I’m not really down for waking up in anyone’s bed but mine tonight, if we can help it.”
“Yeah,” Midoriya says, with a small sigh. “He’s definitely going to call me a problem child again.”
Hitoshi finds a small smile playing over his face. “He may have a point. Do you know how often this kind of thing happened to me before I joined this class?”
Midoriya honest-to-god pouts, and Hitoshi suppresses another laugh. “Sometimes we have normal weeks!” he insists. “Plus, it’s your class too now - it’s sort of...official now.”
“Neat,” Hitoshi replies. “I’m one of the disaster gang now.”
Midoriya beams at him, and Hitoshi thinks he must be smiling back. They get up to go and find Aizawa, and as they do Hitoshi’s eyes land on the scars on Midoriya’s arms again, so obvious now that he’s seen them up close that he doesn’t understand how he’d overlooked them before. Seeing what he expected to see, maybe - the hero course’s golden child, All Might’s favourite. The loud, angry scrawlings of ‘FREAK’ over Midoriya’s careful analysis overlay that image in his mind, showing just how incomplete of a picture he’d been working with.
“So...your arms hurt a lot, huh?” Hitoshi says as they make for the staff room.
Midoriya shrugs slightly. “I honestly hadn’t noticed that much until I was...you, and it wasn’t there anymore.” He flexes his hand, looking down at the scars there. “I guess you just...get used to things, you know?”
Hitoshi hums in agreement, because he does know. “You could tell Aizawa about that, too,” he adds. “If you wanted. He’s…” He pauses, trying to think how to put into words what Aizawa was. Aizawa didn’t seem to acknowledge that he even had feelings most days, but he’d work for hours, off the clock, just to help one kid - and when Hitoshi did something that impressed him, he’d lay a hand on his shoulder and something around his eyes would soften, not quite a smile but somehow more gratifying. Those little moments meant more to Hitoshi than most of his memories with his actual parents, and if that made him kind of sad then it was a hopeful kind of sadness, that it was possible to find your people anywhere.
“He’s nicer than he seems, a lot of the time,” Hitoshi continues at last.
“He’s the best teacher I’ve ever had,” Midoriya admits quietly.
“Same,” Hitoshi says.
They exchange another shy smile, and Hitoshi has a strange feeling, like something blocked up and pressurised inside of him is unspooling, relaxing. He thinks about those notebooks, that sense of a person with no one to offer their thoughts to but cold paper, and the fact that he rarely sees Midoriya alone these days, always surrounded by one member of class 1-A or another. For the first time, he feels glad and not at all envious.
Hitoshi manages nine days in the hero course before the class is attacked by villains, and ten days before he makes a friend.