Summary:
field of view: (n.) The circle of sky that you see when you look through a telescope or binoculars. Generally, the lower the magnification, the wider the field of view.
Despite all attempts otherwise, Shouto is unintentionally heroic.
"They're still talking to you, right? Then they're friends."
"They talk to me," I tell my sister patiently, "about schoolwork."
"But they're still talking to you."
"Red and Four Arms talk to other people, too," I add, because that's an important detail. "They talk to them more than they do to me."
"Everyone talks to other people," Fuyumi-nee says. "Also, you know their names, don't you?"
I'd memorized it when Homeroom Teacher had first performed roll call. "Kirishima Eijirou and Shouji Mezou."
"Well, there you go." There's a rustling noise, as Fuyumi-nee resettles at her kitchen table. "Plus you know that other boy's name. The one who went to the other school?"
Yoarashi, who is special if only for the fact that he is the first person outside of Fuyumi-nee and Natsuo-nii to ask for my cell phone number. Not even this class of U.A. has done so yet.
I must have stayed quiet for too long, because Fuyumi-nee adds, "And you wouldn't be calling me in the middle of the week if you didn't think of them as friends."
…what?
"I know I – we, failed you." There's no doubt as to what my sister means by we, as though she or Natsuo-nii could have explained relationships and politeness and social niceties and manners any better when Father restricted their interactions with me so much. "But you're honestly doing well on your own, Shouto. Be more confident in yourself."
"…I'll call you this weekend," I say, in lieu of anything else. But Fuyumi-nee is my sister. She gets it.
She hums as she hangs up, a distracted little sound she would never have made while she'd still lived under our Father's roof, and the proof of her content makes me smile.
Homeroom Teacher introduces something called a Class Representative. This is something that Fuyumi-nee talks about, too; something more done in high schools than in the elementary that she teaches, but a part of school life nonetheless.
From what the rest of the class shouts about, the Class Representative needs to fulfill specific roles and duties. I listen to each of the candidates as they put themselves forward and try to convince the others. They're all eager for the position. As if it's not just another duty.
This is a class of wannabe heroes, I remember. Of course they'd chase after responsibility. They probably live and breathe duty and the want to help other people, in the fashion of those heroes that Father calls weak and shallow-minded: always chasing after public approval.
To represent a class of the best, one would need to be the best. It's a miniature heroic ranking, partly graded on aptitude, partly graded on popularity. The latter, I can't say much for, but the former – well.
The girl sitting next to me took first at the Apprehension Test by smarts and by skill, and she has her family name to back her up besides: aptitude and popularity, all in one.
I write Yaoyorozu Momo on my slip of paper and leave it at that.
Green Hair is voted as Class President. He shakes like a leaf in a windstorm in front of the class. The words come to me unbidden: Father would never have allowed him to be voted. I glance at Homeroom Teacher, but no. He's not going to do anything. He's just going to let this happen.
And then we break for lunch, and then something happens that sets off a false alarm – I'm still not sure what – and Green Hair resigns to put the Loud Guy who likes to yell at everyone, even Spiky, in his place.
Well then. I ignore them all, because apparently, like the rest of the school who had panicked at the false alarm, they're all being ridiculous.
"Today you'll be doing Rescue Training."
After that, I tune out. Homeroom Teacher isn't an idiot, and neither is U.A. They're the best Heroics high school for a reason. There's a lot that a Quirk like mine can do, but rescue in high stakes situations is not one of them, as Father likes to preach. At its most basic ice can be a great defense, fire a great offense, and allows me to perform crowd control, but rescue?
You will be the Number One Hero, Father says to me every night. You won't have to worry about things like rescue – that's what sidekicks and lower-ranked heroes are for. You will be the one neutralizing enemies. Never lose sight of your purpose.
I snort to myself. The rest of the preparation and subsequent travel to the off-campus facility by bus goes in a blur. (The bus is new and novel but loses its interest after more than a minute of the class shouting all the way there.)
By the time we get off the bus I have to work through my body-check exercises again: these are my hands, and they're cold. These are my feet, and the toes of the boots are tight through all the insulation. These are my arms where the heroics costume scratches against my skin.
Here is the facility, large and domed and apparently run by the mystery hero Homeroom Teacher had hinted at: Thirteen.
Thirteen is a hero in the top hundred. Thirteen is a rescue hero, lecturing about the dangers of Quirks.
Oh I would pay for you to tell that to Father, I think to myself at the back of the class. My hands are tucked behind my back, my feet shoulder-width apart, the way Father likes me to be when he's lecturing. No one has noticed, but this, I know. This, I'm comfortable with.
I wonder how Thirteen's Quirk works, though. Black Hole is a pretty descriptive name but if there truly were a black hole being generated then we would all be dead immediately, no matter the amount of control they have over it. But the people who name Quirks aren't scientists or physicists, and like Gravity Girl's Quirk they must have named Thirteen's with the closest thing to the truth as they could get that the average civilian would still understand.
The Quirk Black Hole must follow the apparent layman's rules of a black hole, which might also explain why Thirteen wears that costume that no one has ever seen them without. A Quirk like theirs set loose without control… it would level the city, if not screw over locality.
Einstein must be crying about his general theory of relativity somewhere, I think to myself -
There's a shiver in the air.
Homeroom Teacher tells everyone to stay back. Not engage. Beyond him, barely visible as specks in the distance but drawing closer, is a surge of people. They're not dressed as civilians.
"What, villains?"
Unlike the main campus, there are no alarms. No sensors have gone off. "They're not dumb," I tell the class, because unlike the Apprehension Test this is not a situation where information withheld will be for the sake of a competition. "This was a carefully planned surprise attack."
These are children who have only recently been allowed to use their Quirks at school.
They're distracted by the frontal assault and by Homeroom Teacher heading off to engage. I move forward into the thick of the class, then to one side. They startle and make way.
Usually it's not a good idea to stay this close to a group of people. Father's training tells me I should back away, give myself space, make it clear to the others that I won't be responsible for any collateral damage.
Here, now, one of the villains phases over and proceeds to monologue at Thirteen. He's talking about – All Might? An ambush? A part he has to play.
Two of the class are rushing forward – Spiky and Red – no.
I sweep my right foot in a half-circle, my right hand in the same direction, and they're swept up in a gust of icy wind – there's no time for me to fine tune the temperature, I'm going to have to make up for it with actual solid ice – but I get them down. "Now, Thirteen!"
Thirteen directs their black hole over Spiky and Red's heads, the latter two of whom are now staring in my direction and yelling at me.
"Shut up," I tell them, and thankfully they do. "You're in the way of Thirteen's Quirk. Move back."
But, no, too late – the villain spreads his gaseous form, like wind, like fog if fog were dark –
The ground beneath my feet shifts –
And then I'm somewhere else.
The first thing I register is that there are people. Civilians? The class? No, more villains. Some of them have weapons; others are clearly mutant and ready for a fight.
Other than the incorporeal floating gloves with matching shoes – which I've made sure to memorize the look of, after the bout during the Battle Trials where I could have given Invisible Girl hypothermia if I hadn't made sure to manipulate the heat of walls, people, and things only ankle-high instead of letting the ice do what was easiest – there's no one else.
"Stay behind me, Hagakure," I say, and ignore the sputtering. In the next, I've reached out with my right side – my endothermic side – and frozen them all to the ground.
This is familiar. I dig my fingers into the palms of my hands, and it's not right, but it's familiar. If there's one good thing that Father's training has ever done for me, it's how to keep calm in the middle of a fight.
"Todoroki!" Invisible Girl says, and I duck, ready for a backstab; but no. There she goes, shoes skidding a little on the ice, not staying back like I'd told her to. She trips people, tries to smack around others, but I remember the outline of her school uniform. She's fairly short – one of the shorter members of the class – and her Quirk must be acting like camouflage, light refraction, bodily transparency equivalent to the whole of her like a pane of glass, or a mixture of all three. She's not built for combat, nor trained like I am.
I reach for one of her hands because I don't know where her shirt is, pull her bodily back, and freeze the rest of the villains in place.
"…I can't tell if you're shivering or not."
"Believe me, I am," Invisible Girl says without hesitation. "I'm not wearing anything."
…wait, what?
"But-"
"My Quirk turns me invisible," she huffs, "not whatever I'm wearing. So. You're smart. Do the math."
"That can't be legal," is the first thing that comes to mind. "You – you have no protection! No armor!"
"I know, right?" There's no body language for me to read her shoulders and hips off of, the places that are always tells for if someone is about to engage in another round. Her gloves float, but it's not the same. "The supply company's trying, but apparently it's really hard."
If I'd tried to pull what Invisible Girl is pulling, Fuyumi-nee would have reamed me out for it until we were both old and grey. "Okay," I say, and then because the first time didn't work: "Okay. We're fixing that as soon as we get out of here."
There's surprise in her voice – more apparent, since I'm listening harder to it than paying attention to her hands and her eyes and what she's going to do next – when she replies, "We are?"
"We are." If nothing else I'm pretty sure I could just tell Fuyumi-nee about this, and she would come down with the wrath of, well, Fuyumi-nee on the support company on behalf of Invisible Girl in the same way she'd come down on them on behalf of me. "If nothing else, you need a proper costume that'll allow you a radio and knee and elbow protection."
"Knee and elbow protection?"
"Training is hard on the joints," I reply, and start looking for the exit of this biome instead of staying to listen to Fuyumi-nee tell me You need to take better care of yourself, Shouto.
"Hey, hey," Invisible Girl says, "that was cool! But shouldn't we ask them some questions?"
Yes, I almost tell her. But I'm not going to because you're here. Because that would be a heroic act. Because actually seeing this through and finding out why they think they can defeat All Might, and then besting that as proof that I'm stronger, would be something Father expects me to do.
"We'll leave that for the Pros," I tell her instead. "We were separated from the group, so it's safe to say that the others were, too. We need to rejoin them in case they run into trouble."
"Looking out for your classmates, huh?" She starts skipping to the edge of the biome, like this were a class field trip instead of a life-or-death situation. Which, well, it had supposed to be, and I don't think she's ever gotten training that hadn't come from this school, so I can't blame her too much. "I thought you were really cold, Todoroki-kun, but you're really not!"
It's really more about the fact that I had to stop Spiky and Red from rushing the villain while they were clearly still in the line of friendly fire – which, seriously, had they never had situational awareness training? It had been one of the first things that Father had trained into me – and that for all we know, the villain could have warped them onto the roof. He could have warped them into a nearby volcano.
Wherever the others were sent, some of them manage to escape or neutralize the villains in the same amount of time that Invisible Girl and I leave the landslide biome.
The accomplishment – of Green Hair and Frog Girl, both of whom didn't start using their Quirks seriously until recently, as non-recommendation students, plus whoever… the small child with weird purple hair…? is – is overshined by the fact that Homeroom Teacher is having a one-on-one fight with one of the villains who'd hung back at the first frontal assault, and is losing.
He's injured. His movements haven't slowed, but he's bleeding. From where we're pressed against the boundary between the biome and the rest of the facility, Invisible Girl is a heavy weight at my side, and this close I can hear her breathing. "Aizawa-sensei –"
"Quiet," I hiss at her, and haul her by the hand again so we can duck under the edge of the barrier. I don't know where her mouth is but I press the index finger of my free hand to my lips and stare at where I think her head is.
One moment passes by. Two. No one comes. We weren't noticed, then, or the villains are content to wait.
"We have to be quiet," I whisper to her, because the sounds of the fight have become one-sided now. It's a distinctive sound: someone pounding something, over and over again, with no rapid or deep or whatever hitting sounds back. No cadence.
Homeroom Teacher isn't on the billboards nor is his hero name, revealed by Green Hair at the Apprehension Test, one I recognize. That makes him an Underground Hero, and his Quirk is Erasure – for all his efforts at the beginning of the ambush, he is not a close quarters fighter.
But you are, aren't you, Shouto? That's what I made you to be. That's what I've trained you to be.
The smart move would be to stay here and let what will happen, happen. Whether Homeroom Teacher lives or dies, interfering here would weaken my case for transferring into General Education due to a personality and temperament unsuitability for heroism.
If Fuyumi-nee were here she'd tell me to keep my head down. It's not your place, Shouto. You're still a student. They're the Pros. Let them do their jobs.
But the Pros aren't here, and there's been no word from Thirteen or the rest of the class, and if Father finds out that I've hidden during a villain attack like a coward –
He –
He'll –
I shut down the thought. The only way to make my plan to escape Father succeed would be to have U.A. on my side.
"Are we going to help him or not?" Invisible Girl hisses, squeezing my hand so hard that her gloved fingers scrunch up the material and numbs my fingers.
The villains are here to kill All Might; they'd admitted to it. They'd bragged about it, which means that they have a trick up their sleeves. Most likely it's the thing that's fighting Homeroom Teacher, because what better way to control a fight than to strike at the enemy's morale?
Kill the shepherd, Father has said before, and the sheep will scatter. Villains follow a leader, and so do civilians, Shouto. Control the leader, and you will control the herd.
"Okay," I tell Invisible Girl, and in an effort to regain some feeling in my fingers I squeeze her hand back. "Here's what we'll do."
The timing will be tight, but there's nothing for it. Homeroom Teacher looks worse and worse the longer we wait, and the bus ride here might have been relatively short but half an hour on the outside means life or death in a fight with Father. It means life or death here.
I go high, Invisible Girl goes low, and the handsy villain lunges for the more flashy target: me.
"Don't let him touch you!" someone shouts, and vaguely I recognize it as Green Hair. "It speeds up the passage of time!"
Clothing, bodies, injuries, dust. I hadn't seen it happen but I believe Green Hair – he's always muttering about something or another, and he's usually muttering about people and their Quirks. Like me, if more verbal in examination than mental.
But he hasn't been wrong yet, and I duck and roll and bring up a wall of ice with my knees to cover for Invisible Girl.
Handsy villain reaches out for me – too quick – no wonder he'd been sent here as part of the group who'd hung back, presumably waiting for All Might – and I have a moment to think I'm sorry, Fuyumi-nee, Natsuo-nii –
And then handsy villain – Handsy – is saying, "Oh, you're just so cool."
That's not for me. That's for someone else. Handsy doesn't have eyes to read intention off of but he does have shoulders and hips and fingertips and hands, and in the brief moment Handsy's distraction buys me I've slammed up another wall of ice and wheeled around.
When I look back, Invisible Girl's done her job. She's snuck around, my jacket folded as small as it'll go in her hands, her trajectory still towards the spot I'd pointed out earlier. Yes. It'll work.
The path from my foot to Homeroom Teacher is as thin as I can make it to avoid detection, but it curls up toward and up and around and, yes, there it is.
I grow an ice version of Fuyumi-nee's favorite sakura tree, all upwards spreading branches without roots, and it spears the monster in multiple places. Right after, right as planned, Homeroom Teacher is picked up by an invisible figure and hurried away, my Kevlar-reinforced jacket thrown over both their backs.
In the moment after, someone slams into the dirt next to me – Green Hair, I curl the instinctive ice around instead of directly at – and vaguely, in the distance, I can hear a deep thud.
I can't see what's going on – I've brought up ice in a dome, self-defense, the one thing that Father hates because he can try and melt it all he likes but all the flash-melt flash-freeze does is create sublimation gas which – Not now, pay attention Shouto –
"Oh," Handsy breathes, close and dark and intent. "We're getting a continue."
And then, the class: "All Might!"
"Shut up," I hiss at Green Hair before he can say a word, put my mouth next to his ear because the ice might be a meter thick but there's no sense in gambling with whether or not the villain can hear us. "We need to leave. Follow me."
I wait for Green Hair to meet my eyes – there's no nod, no indication of understanding, but we need to move now now now – and then I've touched a finger to my ice and concentrated all the heat to a fine, singular point.
Distracted as the villains are, they don't react when I break us out of my ice dome and start making a run for it.
"All Might is here," Green Hair whispers behind my shoulder; and then, louder, "All Might is here."
He won't have arrived alone. If the Number One Hero is here after the alarms in this facility didn't go off, then the main campus must have been notified. Belayed, silenced or discreet alarms, or another student getting a signal out.
Then someone is grabbing at me – at us – and I almost ice them on instinct but Green Hair's huff of breath is startled, not frightened. And whoever'd picked us up is warm.
"Everyone," they say, putting us down after a fast-enough movement to give me momentary motion sickness. "Go to the entrance. Watch after your classmate's back."
It is indeed All Might. That bulky form of his is distinctive, even from – especially from – the back. The classmate he mentions must have been Invisible Girl, who is halfway back to the stairs and the entrance. Faster than I'd expected based on her fifty-meter dash. Endorphins, adrenalin, or fear; probably the first two. She'd been pretty eager to carry out my plan when I'd explained it to her.
Green Hair is busy trying to give All Might advice, and I take the moment to see who else was rescued. Froggy Girl, apparently, and the weird super-short purple guy. But Green Hair is mercifully brief – You won't have time to hesitate on the field, Shouto. Be quick, be decisive, and don't look back. – and then we're evacuating like proper students.
But Green Hair – Midoriya Izuku – hesitates. He's not as quick as he should be even as Froggy Girl and Purple Guy catch up to Invisible Girl and help her carry Homeroom Teacher properly. He looks back.
I look back with him, and ah. The villain – the monster, really – has already regenerated from my ice-tree attack, his skin closed over, moving as gracefully as if his muscles hadn't been pierced and frozen around the wound, the cells dying in the extreme cold.
That's… a problem.
Not my problem. This is what Pros are for. Homeroom Teacher and Invisible Girl had been different, because if I hadn't shaped her actions then the latter would definitely have gotten herself killed trying to help.
(It exhausts me, just looking at them, at the students near the entrance cheering All Might on. How can they have such faith? How can they be so light-hearted? Heroism is paid violence with a pretty varnish over it; violence performed by humans for the sake of other humans. Just look at Father with his collateral damage, his casualty count.)
Then Green Hair goes from standing still to flat out running, right back into the fray.
My fighting style is like Thirteen's: I can do close or mid or long-range, but the collateral damage, the area of effect, is large. Control requires concentration. Control requires that none of the others are dumb and stop rushing in, like Spiky and Red who have, apparently, made their way from wherever they'd been teleported and learned from their lesson from back with Thirteen.
Spiky goes after Fog Guy. Red goes after Handsy, which, okay, from what Red's bragged about his Quirk might actually be a decent matchup. Good instincts on those guys.
All Might is still pinned down, though, and even with two more in the fray these are still children. Non-recommendation students. They won't have trained, they won't know how to fight against adults that are looking to kill them.
But you do, don't you, Shouto? My greatest weapon; my greatest pride.
I walk forward, right foot first, and frost over the ground. It doesn't matter what law-bending physics that Fog Guy is doing if the molecules are frozen in ground state without heat-energy to excite them. It has the added benefit of freezing the monster that has All Might in its grip, who, in true Number One Hero fashion, takes advantage of the brief opening it gives him to escape.
"What?" Handsy shouts, concerned, when Fog Guy condenses down into a vague human-like form, leaving behind the portal and the monster half-in half-out of it. "Why can't he move?"
"Did you –" Green Hair looks over at me, but I can't afford to look back. "Did you stop molecular activity?!"
Green Hair is in the physical education workout uniform, he doesn't have any armor. What the hell he's thinking, running in to fight the monster and the villain who'd almost killed Homeroom Teacher, I don't know.
"WHY ARE YOU RUNNING, BITCH?" Spiky shouts. Oh. He's still sparring with Fog. "YOU MADE YOURSELF OUT TO BE INVINCIBLE OR SOME SHIT –"
And then he shuts up. He's thinking. Good for him, but right now there are other priorities.
"I can't keep it for long," I tell Green, but even Spiky tilts his head the slightest of amounts at me. "You'll have to neutralize him sooner or later." Subzero temperatures of limited areas of effect are easily started with enough training – which Father had assured – but taking it as close as I can get to absolute zero is extremely hard. Even as I talk, I'm still working to lower the temp and widen the range from portal-center outwards. "You have one minute."
With my other hand, bodily concealed from the villains, I flick two of my fingers. Green Hair catches the movement – he's on the right side for it – but Spiky, and the rest, take me at my word.
Handsy gets back into the fight, probably thinking that he can hold out against All Might for that minute while the monster in the portal flails. It looks to be roughly bisected, and the lack of heat from the frozen portal will travel as the molecules attempt to equalize; it'll cause nerve damage sooner rather than later. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Spiky change tactics and start going for the one obvious piece in the villain's outfit.
Which, of course, is his weak spot. Why are adults such idiots these days?
Or, no, I have to give the guy some credit. It's a flashy piece of armor, but it's armor. Better than our resident muscle idiots like All Might and Green Hair, who regularly go into a fight with none. Even Spiky and Red have armor, as minimalistic as it might be.
But the distraction costs us. Spiky pins down Fog Guy by the neck, but the monster – he –
Monster is an apt name. It tears itself in half, sacrificing its lower body, and it's somehow still moving.
No. It's doing more than moving. It's regenerating.
All Might makes a sound in surprise. "I thought you said his Quirk was shock-absorption?"
"I didn't say that's all he had," Handsy says, and, oh.
Oh, hell . No wonder he didn't go after me the moment he could; not only is All Might in the way, anything I did wouldn't have mattered.
"Nomu," Handsy says, like he's commanding a sidekick. "Go fetch Kurogiri, would you?"
There's a blur – the rush of wind from a displaced body – then a brief vacuum as the air pressure equalizes – someone's yelling.
I dig my toes into the ground – damn, that's pretty good traction, and I send brief mental thanks to whoever designed these at the support company – and tense my calves, lower my hips to lower my center of gravity.
When the dust clears, Spiky is on the ground with us. It's All Might who's in the dust, forearms braced in guard position.
…okay, then. If he can tank a full-on shoulder-check from a monster like Nomu, then he might not need the armor after all. Rather, he might be like me instead: trained without armor in the first place, and now it might only slow him down.
All Might truly deserves the name of Number One. And this is the man that Father wants to surpass?
No wonder he hasn't managed it, even after all these years.
Like something out of fiction, All Might punches the monster into the sky, breaking the ceiling in the process.
That's it. I breathe in, feel my chest expand, hold it there for a moment before releasing. That's the monster, out of the picture. Now for the rest. Which will be easily handled by All Might, because he isn't the Number One hero for nothing.
But All Might isn't engaging, which might be because of us. We're still in range, but once we leave it even Fog Guy will take a moment to grab a hostage. We need to leave, though I might have to grab Green Hair by the shirt to get him to move –
He grabs me first. "Todoroki-kun," he hisses, "you have a minute left, don't you?"
His eyes are on Handsy, who's rushing forward towards an unmoving All Might – he's not intending on moving at all? – and, yes. Objectively, close range versus long range is a better matchup. Green Hair is right, and where it looks like All Might is hesitating for some reason or another, there's no reason why I can't take the clear shot.
I reach out and ice Handsy where he stands, put in the extra effort to make it subzero, leach out all heat. But heat has to go somewhere, and it escapes Handsy in steam that's quickly frozen as murky ice. I flex my fingers – I'm going to have to start using my gloves again, and Natsuo-nii is going to laugh so hard at me – to try and regain some feeling. They haven't turned dark yet, but they're pale and chilly.
Green Hair is already gone, launching himself toward Fog Guy. Because of course he does. At least he's on the correct trajectory for striking at Fog Guy's established weak point.
Handsy continues to shriek about something, Green Hair fails to land the blow because Fog Guy isn't stupid and manages to dodge, and All Might lunges to catch Green when he lands.
In the next moment, there's the sound of something sharp. Tap tap tap. Gunshots. I whirl around – thirty seconds left, but it doesn't matter, Fog Guy has already regrouped with Handsy, and shit, the ground is unsteady under my feet – but there's a large group by the entrance. Bustling, not aggressive, no sounds or dust clouds of destruction from students fighting back.
"Reinforcements are here!" Red says, and he catches me by the elbow when I slump as if he's afraid that I'll fall over. "Shit, man, you're cold."
There's nothing for it. Heat travels, but inducing an endothermic process requires energy. Energy that I've ran through faster than I would have in a spar with Father. Maybe he's right and I need more training – no, think about something else.
"Subzero temps have to start from somewhere," I manage to mutter, which is true. Let alone the near absolute zero I'd had to take Fog Guy to. Red's body heat is practically a bonfire compared to the chill of my arm, now that I'm jacketless.
Do I still have hands? I flex fingers – my fingers – and yes. I do.
I shake him off and resettle myself – feet shoulder-width apart, hands loose and ready at my sides – and wait for the Pros to start their cleanup.
I hadn't wanted to fight. I hadn't wanted to be heroic. But the brain doesn't discriminate between what habits it encourages, and after years of Father's training, fighting back is a habit. He would have accepted no less.
Damn him. Damn him.
"I'm okay," I tell the paramedics who ask, and repeat it until they believe me and go away.
Invisible Girl sticks to my side for some reason, Red keeps glances my way, and I don't understand either of them.
Things still don't feel quite… real. I believe in what I see – the Pros arriving, the students evacuating, the paramedics that rush Homeroom Teacher and Thirteen to the hospital – but I'm still cold.
I clasp my right hand with my left and turn the heat inward, try and warm myself back up again.
Body-check. My hands are gripping each other; I can feel the pressure. My toes flex in my boots. I don't have my jacket – Invisible Girl is still wearing it, though it's caked with Homeroom Teacher's blood – but I remember the body-memory of Red's hand on my elbow, the warmth he'd brought with him as though he'd been a furnace.
There are nineteen students here, at least eight police officers in sight, the handful of Pro teachers who are here and guarding instead of in the facility and walking about as part of cleanup. I don't have any hard candies on me. I'm going to have to ask the support company to sneak more hidden pockets into this outfit, or get me a utility belt, or something –
Why am I thinking about hero costumes at a time like this?
Because Father will be satisfied at my part in this emergency. Because he will take it as further proof that I am well on my way to being a hero.
Well, let him believe that. I might have failed my plan at the first step – prove your inadequacy as a hero by showing that you don't have the personality or temperament for it – but there will be more opportunities. Fuyumi-nee had been right, after all. This will be a patience game.
Invisible Girl leans against me, the line of my jacket on her shoulders warning me of the contact when otherwise she would have gone unseen, and I let her.
Notes:
Tooru: Huh. Todoroki isn't stuck-up, he's just super shy. But he cares a lot!
Tooru:
Tooru: He's a cat.
Tooru: I'm gonna be friends with him.
Shouto is a lot more careful with his ice in this fic than he is in canon, because he knows what he's doing on the molecular level of it now. Of course, with how scarily proficient he is at creating ice walls and such in canon, this just makes him even more scarily good at exploiting the implications of his Quirk.