He woke up to the smell of antiseptic and chalk dust.
A ceiling fan clicked overhead, wobbling on a bent bracket, pushing warm air that didn't quite reach his skin. His ribs hurt when he breathed. His lip tasted like pennies. Voices drifted from the corridor—kids, laughing too loudly, the kind of laugh that always had a target.
He blinked at the fluorescent lights until they quit being twin suns, and the room resolved: the school infirmary. A faded poster about Quirk safety peeled off one corner. Bandage rolls in a cloudy plastic bin. A cracked window where a sticker of All Might gave a thumbs-up, color bleached to pastel.
"Good. You're awake."
A woman appeared beside him, hair in a messy bun, clipboard tucked under her arm. She wore a nurse's armband and the kind of hidden exhaustion people in hero society grew behind their eyes.
"How many fingers?" She held up three.
"Three," he croaked. The word felt like it had to climb through two throats.
She tilted her head. "Name?"
He swallowed. Two answers rose at once—one from a life that broke at a crosswalk, the other from this body, bruised and small and already afraid.
"Harry." A beat. "Harry… Potter."
The nurse didn't blink at the name. She scratched a note. "You took a fall down the stairs. Again. Try not to fall onto fists next time." Her mouth tightened. "Drink."
He accepted the paper cup with shaking hands. The water was lukewarm, and it was the best thing he'd ever tasted.
"Rest here until the bell," she said. "And Harry?" She met his eyes. "You don't deserve this."
He didn't know what to say to that. She left. The door sighed shut.
Silence pressed in. He lay there, cataloging aches—shoulder, right; knee, left; jaw, everywhere. And behind the pain, something stranger. Memories that didn't fit tried to plug themselves into each other. An adult life: rent due, late nights, screens full of half-watched episodes, headlines about a manga with heroes and quirks and a boy who smiled even when he broke. A shock of white headlights, the heavy thunk of a hood, weightless once, then none.
A child's life: a drafty dorm room at an orphanage funded by a hero charity; a paper file folder with his name on it and "parents deceased—incident involving All For One" stamped diagonally in red; the smell of cheap detergent and rice; laughter that went quiet when he walked in; kids with spark hands and stretchy fingers and little flame tongues who ate at one table while the "quirkless" sat at the other. A teacher's note on his report that called him "bright but unmotivated," a polite way to write off boys who learned early that effort didn't buy safety.
Both lives pressed together until he groaned and cradled his head. Two realities, trying to braid themselves.
He was here. He was… eleven? Almost. The calendar on the wall had a scribble: "School Festival Meeting—Thursday." Thursday was tomorrow. His birthday was tomorrow. Harry's birthday.
He pushed himself up on his elbows. The motion made his ribs flare. The mirror above the sink caught him: a small boy with a mess of black hair that refused to lie flat, skin sallow under fluorescent lights, and a thin lightning-shaped scar above his right eyebrow. He leaned closer. The scar looked too neat to be a wound; it looked like punctuation.
The name. The hair. The scar.
Harry stared at himself until his eyes watered. "No way."
But the thought landed anyway and didn't leave: Harry Potter. Not a Harry. That Harry. In the wrong world.
He looked away, suddenly cold despite the stale heat. If this was the world of quirks, of heroes who ripped the sky with their voices and villains who dissolved people with a touch, then the name was a joke told to a quiet room. In the hero society, power decided your place. He knew that much, even from the half-remembered scenes in the life he'd left: crowds cheering, UA letters, kids with explosions in their palms. And here, in this body's memory, his "Quirk Registration" form was a blank line with a zero typed neatly in it.
"Quirkless," he whispered. He couldn't stop the tremor in the word.
The bell rang. The hallway erupted. The nurse stuck her head back in. "You're cleared. Try to avoid… stairs," she said, and didn't pretend. He slid from the cot and swayed but stayed upright. His shoes squeaked on the tile.
Outside, the hallway smelled like shoe boxes and sweat. Two boys leaned against the lockers, watching him. One of them—a broad-shouldered kid with a spray of acne and a tiny quirk that made his knuckles click louder than they should—grinned.
"Look, it's Scarface," the boy said. "Trip over your own feet again?"
Harry kept walking. The boys peeled off the lockers and slid into pace beside him.
"Hey, say something, Scarface," the second one said. He wiggled his fingers; the tips stretched an inch too far and snapped back. "Or did that quirkless brain short out?"
Harry said nothing. Every muscle in his abdomen pulled tight.
"Cat got your tongue, orphan?" the first kid said, voice low and lazy. "Heard your parents ran toward a fight they couldn't win. Guess stupidity runs in families."
Something flared under Harry's sternum—anger that belonged to both lives. He stopped. The air around him tightened as if the hallway itself was holding its breath.
The first boy's smirk trembled. "What—"
A teacher's cough cut through. The boys slid away with practiced innocence.
Harry let his breath out slowly. His hands had clenched so hard his nails drew crescent moons in his palms.
He made it through the rest of the day on muscle memory. The world sat a half step to the left of where it should be. In history, the teacher talked about the first Quirk appearances and the restructuring of society. In math, numbers behaved, silent and loyal in a way people weren't. On the walk home to the orphanage, the city gleamed with hero billboards and convenience store signs. A boy on a rooftop practiced a wind quirk; his laughter blew dust across the street. Harry's chest hurt.
He waited until lights-out. The dorm buzzed with whispers and phone screens under blankets. He lay on the top bunk, staring at the cracked ceiling. He had a name that meant magic and a scar that meant destiny, and in this world both were cosplay.
Unless they weren't.
He rolled onto his side. He tucked his hands under his pillow, closed his eyes, and tried to remember the shape of a word. Lumos. He didn't know why his mouth formed it with reverence—some leftover bone memory of a story that did not belong to this universe. His breath fogged the pillowcase. He tried to imagine a tiny bead of light perched on his fingertip, warm as a candle. He whispered, "Lumos," once, then again, and again.
Nothing.
He tried harder, willing something into his hand, drawing every scrap of focus into the word, the idea, the promise.
Nothing.
The quiet laughter in the room seemed to get louder. He pressed his face into the pillow and felt the humiliation hot in his throat. "Right. Of course," he muttered, so low even he barely heard it. "Wrong world. Wrong rules."
He stayed there until his breathing slowed. The fan ticked. Somewhere, a siren yawned through the city and faded. He thought of UA—of a letter in the mailbox with his name on it. He thought of how ridiculous that image was for a kid who had to count coins to buy pencils. He thought of All Might's bleached sticker thumbs-up on the infirmary window, faded and persistent.
He slept.
Sometime past midnight, when the room had settled into the deep breathing of a hundred dreams, something turned in him like a key in a lock. It wasn't loud. It wasn't cinematic. It was a soft alignment, a sensation of… space making room.
His scar warmed. Not burning, not pain. Like a palm held near a mug of tea. For three heartbeats it pulsed, a soft heat that told him yes. Then it cooled. His fingers twitched in his sleep. He didn't wake.
Morning came with the cafeteria rice porridge and the smell of miso and too-sweet milk. He took his tray and found his usual seat in the corner near the window where the sunlight pooled. The city outside was crisp, heroes already ants on distant rooftops. He lifted his spoon carefully—his ribs still complained—and almost dropped it when the boy from yesterday thunked his tray down across from him.
"Morning, Scarface," the boy said, voice bright like they were friends. His buddy hovered at his shoulder. "We missed you in the stairwell."
Harry took a mouthful of porridge and chewed like it was armor.
"You know," the boy continued, "I've been thinking. You're… what's the polite word? Defective." He laughed at his own joke. "So you oughta learn to say please when I decide to help you toughen up. Training, right? Heroes train."
Harry set the spoon down. Calm. Calm was a shelf he could climb. "I'm going to be late," he said, and stood.
They followed him out. The morning light sharpened everything—the scuff marks on the hallway floor, the noticeboard where the hero safety poster curled at the corners, the way his shadow bent wrong over the stairwell because the bulb was dying.
"Where you going, Scarface?" the buddy said. "Thought you were going to thank us."
The first boy reached to shove him between the shoulder blades.
Harry spun faster than he intended. The movement yanked his ribs and tears sparked briefly at the corners of his eyes. The boy's hand froze an inch from his chest. For a heartbeat, they just stared at each other.
"Don't touch me," Harry said. His voice came out low and even. He wanted it to sound brave. It sounded tired.
"Or what?" The hand shoved.
Something inside him snapped taut, not like a breaking string but like one being pulled into tune. Heat surged under his skin—different from anger, cleaner, like striking flint. The world did a small, bright ping.
Air moved. Not wind, not a blast, just… pressure shifting. The push never landed. It slid off him like oil on water. Desks along the hall rattled. A stack of test papers flared off a teacher's desk and fluttered like startled birds. The boy who'd shoved him stumbled as if the ground had changed slope and sat down hard, legs splayed, a comic 'oof' knocked out of him he'd never live down.
Silence held for one, two, three seconds. Then the buddy swore. "What—what was that?"
Harry stared at his own hands. They trembled, sure, but not from fear. His skin felt like it fit him again.
"I don't… I didn't…" he started.
A teacher opened a classroom door. "What is going on out—" She took in the papers, the boys, Harry. Her eyes narrowed. The boys scrambled up with the innocent speed of experts.
"Nothing, sensei," the first one blurted. "We just tripped." He shot Harry a look that promised tomorrow. Or later today.
They slunk away. The teacher gave Harry the long, tired inspection of someone whose day had too many of these moments and not enough solutions. "Class," she said at last, to all three and none of them, and shut the door.
Harry stood alone in the hall until the buzzing in his bones quieted. His heart pounded. He pressed his palm against his ribs, winced, and laughed—short, disbelieving, almost giddy.
It was me. It was me.
He ducked into the boys' bathroom and locked a stall. The fluorescent light hummed. He stared at his reflection in the small, merciless mirror screwed to the wall.
"Magic," he whispered. His grin felt like someone else's face. "I did magic."
As if answering, a sensation slid through his head, thin and cold as a draft under a door. A faint hiss curled at the edge of hearing.
…mine…
He blinked. "What?"
Nothing. Just the buzz of the light and his own breath.
The thrill shivered again, and with it, a thought that was less thrill and more weight. The grin faltered. He looked at the scar. It looked back, quiet.
"Right," he said softly, and the word wiped condensation from the mirror inside him. "Okay. Magic. Great. But… no Hogwarts." He said the word like he was testing it for balance, and it tipped. "No Diagon Alley. No Ollivander waiting with a speech and a wand that chooses me."
He held up his hand and willed the earlier moment back. Nothing lit. No warm orb. No obedient glow.
"What happened out there was…" He swallowed. "An accident. A surge. I can't throw accidents in a fight."
The bathroom seemed to lean in around him. Someone banged into a locker outside and swore. A siren moaned distant and thin.
He looked down at his knuckles, then at the notebook peeking from his bag. The paper edges were chewed soft from handling. He could see it in his head: blank pages, a pencil's first hesitant line.
"All right," he said, like he was agreeing to something hard. He tucked the notebook under his arm. "No wand. No school. Fine. I'll build it."
His pulse steadied as he said it. The fear didn't leave, not really, but it made room for something with teeth.
He turned away from the mirror. In the glass, for a second, the scar seemed to glow—not red, just… warmer than the rest of him, a reminder and a promise. Then it was ordinary again.
He unlocked the stall and stepped into the day.