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Mei was aware that she wasn’t the best judge of normalcy. “Normal” was such a fleeting, easily twisted term prone to misinterpretation and weaponization, but sometimes you didn’t need to be a good judge of normalcy to conclude that one of your classmates was weird. There were things that no amount of misinterpretation or twisting could justify.
The newcomer seemed off to her when he strolled through the door into support class 1-H, cocking his head as he took in his new classmates. Long, fluffy curls of shockingly intense emerald rolled over his shoulders, the luscious sheen seeming to reflect a host of similar shades, as if someone had picked up a chunk of ocean and woven it into the keratin strands. That wasn’t possible, of course, unless that chunk of ocean were an iceberg in which case there wasn’t anything unusual about it whatsoever but this… that hair was really, really unusual, nothing nearly so mundane as ice. The way he moved, too, he seemed to arrive at his desk altogether too quickly and yet he didn’t move any faster than any other high school kid, it was as if the very distance he traveled were not as great, as if he had stepped along a path shorter than a straight line. And, well, you could do that if you were working in a non-Euclidean geometry, sure but… this wasn’t like how you could cut distance by tunneling through a sphere rather than walking on its surface. No, this was nothing so common and there was definitely no tunneling involved; the concrete floor of the support classroom would be impervious to anything less than a MCUI Industrial Mole Machine 3000.
Mei had owned one of those. Briefly. Her mother made her get rid of it because she wasn’t technically licensed to own something with that degree of destructive potential. Mei had pointed out that Mr. Mole was broken , he didn’t work , he was technically just scrap, like the UA entrance course robots that ended up at their junkyard from time to time. There was nothing wrong with Mei having Mr. Mole… and her mother had pointed out that Mei was going to fix him and then he wouldn’t be scrap anymore and… well, that might be true but it still wasn’t fair.
“Hey!” Mei greeted her mysterious classmate. No one else was close enough for her to talk to without awkward shouting. “I’m Hatsume Mei,” she stuck out a hand across the aisle. She hadn’t initially planned to shake hands… but sure? Why not? She wasn’t completely convinced the newcomer was real. He could be some kind of hologram. A handshake would at least let her know if he were solid. “What’s your name?”
“Midoriya Izuku,” he told her. He wasn’t cold nor was he slimy. The physical sensation was identical to any other friendly handshake and yet her brain processed the event in the same way it would process clasping fingers with the flipper of a soggy seal. It was… utterly bizarre.
“What’s your quirk?” Mei asked him. That was probably a bit forward, even by her standards, but she just had to know what was going on with this kid.
“Quirkless,” he replied without care.
Mei’s mouth dropped open and stayed there. “Nooo,” she said. No, just no. Nobody could be as weird as this kid and not have a quirk.
Midoriya raised an eyebrow. “You can let go of my hand now if you like,” he pointed out. She did and the greenette fetched a notebook and began to organize the rest of his school supplies for morning classes.
“Are you sure you’re quirkless?”
Midoriya gave her a very unamused look and didn’t bother to respond. Power Loader entered their classroom abruptly and began taking roll.
“No way! That’s not! How did you do that?” Mei glanced curiously at the hubbub, making out Midoriya in the center of a clot of twenty or so students ranging from business to heroics and first year to third.
“It’s a gift,” Midoriya replied. Mei could hear the smirk in his voice.
“But… I know how this trick is done! And you’re… you can’t make it work like this!” protested a third year heroics student. “Is your quirk pulling playing cards out of thin air with no indication that that’s what you’re doing?”
“No,” Midoriya replied. Mei, managing to find a gap she could gaze through, watched the greenette pick up his deck and shuffle it with the kind of terrifyingly professional dexterity usually only witnessed in movies about full-time gamblers. “Anybody else want to try? Pick a card. I’ll let you shuffle the deck yourself this time if you like.”
Mei watched intently, using her quirk to zoom in on the hands of the third year shuffling the cards then on Midoriya’s hands as her classmate effortlessly pulled the chosen entry from the stack. “Is this the one?” Midoriya asked.
“How are you doing that?”
“A good magician never reveals his secrets,” the greenette replied. Despite her excellent eyesight and intense focus, Mei hadn’t the slightest idea how Midoriya had pulled any of this off.
“Anyway, it’s always a pleasure to befuddle my peers,” Midoriya grinned and his small crowd laughed, “but we’re all going to miss lunch and I for one am starving. I’ll be here all year, though.”
As the watchers began to disperse, Mei continued staring at the greenette’s hands as he absently shuffled his deck again and again. Abruptly Midoriya’s head swiveled and his piercing gaze locked onto hers as if laser-guided. She watched him like a curious classmate. He watched her like an osprey, his predatory gaze forced to pierce through the glare of the sun and the churn of choppy water to find her. Midoriya cocked his head in that peculiar way of his and she shivered, understanding the cold fear of a trout that catches a hint of a raptor’s shadow dancing across the surface of a shallow stream. There was no way someone that scary could be quirkless. In the following days she said as much to several of her peers.
Midoriya didn’t work on the same kinds of things that Mei did. He had an eye for subtlety. The greenette’s workbench looked more like research and development at a spy school straight out of James Bond than anything else. Mind games. Drugs. Hidden weapons. Obscured armor. Silent advantages. During the first week (while Mei was building her very first baby jet pack) Midoriya found a way to lace a tiny knife with a liquid imitation of Midnight’s quirk; the weapon carried ten doses and a single nick was enough to knock out a bruiser the size of Hound Dog. The next week the greenette managed to fit a military grade air purifier in a bow tie, although this design necessitated the owner running around with a bow tie in his or her mouth during active use. Mei didn’t know many heroes who would be able to pull that off and keep their reputations intact. It looked… very silly. During the third week Power Loader forbid the greenette from continuing work on a “bioweapon, bodyheat activated, designed to rapidly digest synthetic fibers resulting in destruction of clothing and equipment.”
“But I filled out all the proper forms,” Midoriya protested. “I have them all authorized here.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a veritable Everest of paperwork; bioweapons research was highly regulated and barely legal at best requiring an immense amount of preparation. “I already have the proper strain isolated and I have the plasmids prepared already.”
“But I don’t want anyone working on bioweapons or defenses against them until third year at least. You may have the proper knowledge, but you haven’t had the classes yet.” Midoriya looked as put out as a drenched velociraptor, but set about freezing his specimens without further protest.
“See you guys in a year or two,” he said, slipping the canister into deep freeze. Nobody else had a freezer like that in their workspace. They didn’t need it, nor did they need their own fume hoods, a hoard of reaction vessels, or access to the GCMS and HPLC equipment in the next building over.
During the fourth week, Mei heard Midoriya begging Power Loader for help getting access to an NMR facility. UA didn’t have one of those?
“What’s the matter with the one we have?” Powerloader asked Midoriya, eyebrow raised.
“Magnet’s not strong enough. I can’t resolve any of these peaks,” the greenette complained quietly.
Power Loader sighed. “You can apply for time on the machine at the university. I’ll get you the forms. You might have to wait a long time, though.”
“That’s fine,” Midoriya replied. “I have other things to work on.”
Power Loader shook his head as the greenette returned to work. “I find it hard to believe he’s quirkless when he looks at me like that… feel like he’s planning to eat me,” the instructor muttered under his breath. Yeah. Him and Mei both.
“What’ve you got there?” Mei asked him, watching the greenette put some final touches on a pair of black and silver, lace up boots. The Sports Festival was only a week away, so everyone was finishing the projects they hoped to show off in front of the crowds.
“Spring loaded shoes. They generate kinetic energy when you land, store it in the bend of the polymer sheets, release it when you take off,” he muttered rapidly under his breath, “add an extra ten percent power to every step you take. That means a tenth again to your stride, your speed, you jump length, and you can’t event tell looking at them. Should give me an edge whatever happens in the Sports Festival. There’s usually some kind of agility and speed based challenge. The polymer wasn’t for shoes originally. It was a failure when I was trying to make the fibers for my jacket but I got those right now, too. They’ll take the force from blows or even bullets or emitter quirks and dissipate it as heat and sound, but it won’t work on forceful stabs because a blade can get between the fibers and pull them apart so don’t let yourself get stabbed. It’s super light, too, not like the heavy, metal armors that you usually have to wear to keep yourself safe from rifle bullets…” His rapid-fire voice was unnerving, too, wasn’t it? Midoriya spoke to her from a great distance despite standing only a meter from her. His voice echoed between worlds, like a landslide below the sea sending out a ripple whose message finally arrived above water in the form of an overwhelming tsunami.
“Wow,” Mei decided, choosing to interrupt once the muttering became incomprehensible. “I just barely managed to finish my new jet pack design in time. I got it to stop exploding yesterday!”
Midoriya nodded thoughtfully. “Good for you.”
“This is all…” Mei considered, “really high level stuff and that’s… I mean everyone here thinks I’m crazy. Are you sure you don’t have an analysis quirk like Nedzu, or…?”
Midoriya’s eyes narrowed and, again, she felt like a trout in an osprey’s sight, reflecting in terror on the bloody tracks those black talons could carve through her tender scales. “Yes, Hatsume. I am quirkless. Why is it so difficult for you people to believe that just because I’m good at support design?”
Midoriya stormed away, leaving his shoes for another time, before Mei managed to piece together the nuances of that sentence. She wasn’t any good at picking up social cues, never had been. At least she knew she was bad at it… in any case, it was obvious after considering the words several times that the greenette thought Mei was being bigoted against quirkless people, that she had insulted him somehow… but she had to ask her mother for help to understand what exactly it was that she had said.
It was fairly obvious in retrospect. Insisting he couldn’t be quirkless because he was so unbelievably good at his work hadn’t been taken as a compliment, hadn’t been seen as praise of near superhuman skill. It had been seen as derision of the quirkless, as Mei saying quirkless people couldn’t possibly be good at science or technology.
That was not at all what she meant of course. She just hadn’t considered how the school’s pervasive “Midoriya Izuku secretly has an intelligence quirk” rumors would make the greenette feel. She might not want to be close friends with him given that she found him primally terrifying at times, but she certainly hadn’t meant to insult him, or anyone. Her own quirk had nothing to do with her career choices (except in the sense that she didn’t need equipment to inspect tiny circuits) and she had always considered herself to be open-minded, uninterested in that kind of petty conflict. After all, science dictated the laws of the universe regardless of one’s gender, ethnicity, nationality, or upbringing. Mei ought to be impartial. Like science. But apparently she wasn’t like science at all and she hadn’t even known.
She tried to apologize to Midoriya and explain but he just said noncommittal things like “yes, yes,” and “fine,” whenever she tried. It was unclear if he paid her any attention.
It rained during the Sports Festival. It was not supposed to rain during the Sports Festival. Everyone was extremely unhappy about this, everyone except Midoriya who skipped to the starting line for the first event, an obstacle course, wearing the broadest smile Mei had ever seen on his face. The greenette grinned at the sky, allowing the rain to soak into his hair and stain it sleek black. Droplets of water rolled down his cheeks like gloss and when he gazed back at her, his eyes glittered like searchlights reflecting on a still, dark harbor.
Midnight called "go," voice piercing the rough hiss of rain droplets pounding the dirt to mud, and the runners were off. Mei’s jet pack served her well, powering her towards the front of the crowd. She left Midoriya behind. Perhaps his spring-loaded shoes would give him the advantage needed to cut ahead of the pack or perhaps not, but he would certainly be behind her. He couldn’t simply power himself across the huge chasm that served as their second obstacle, after all, and Nedzu’s killer robots and mine field were bound to give him trouble.
Mei crossed the finish line grinning. She might be totally soaked from flying at high speed through what had rapidly become a downpour, but she had made it to the next round. She would get to show off her babies front and center to all these executives and investors. She could see the job and funding offers already!
The last of the forty students qualified for the next round passed the finish line. No rain-blackened hair… Too bad. Midoriya was definitely a showman. He certainly could have put on a great act for the investors. Well, there was always next year. The greenette was so good at what he did and what he did was so specialized he likely wouldn’t have any trouble finding sponsors even if he never showed well at the Sports Festival.
“How the hell did you do that, Deku?” someone shouted.
“A good magician never reveals his secrets, Kacchan,” a familiar voice laughed playfully. There was a different echoing quality this time, as if every single rain droplet between Midoriya’s tongue and Mei’s ears caught and refracted the sound wave, bouncing it around and crystallizing it until it seemed the greenette spoke from every direction at once.
“How?” Mei whispered. How had Midoriya arrived here before her? He was… he didn’t have any equipment that would let him fly. Subtlety was his art, his elegant but lethal weapon. How had he pulled this off?
“Is it magic, Deku? It is it? Or a quirk or just… how did you do that?”
“You know I’m quirkless, but then again, magics, quirks, what’s the difference?”
“Argh!” Snarled the irritable, blonde hero student Midoriya spoke to. “Why do you keep saying that? It doesn’t make any sense!”
The greenette gave a wry smile and shrugged. “Sorry, Kacchan. There’s not much else I can say.”
The blonde grumbled, “why are you like this?” as the mysterious support student slipped away into the crowd.
During the second activity, Mei’s team, led by a hero student named Todoroki, had aggressively stolen a large number of victory point headbands from other students. Meanwhile, Midoriya’s team had vanished into the rain-born mist and struck like a silent assassin--an osprey from a fog bank--only once or twice during the entire second round of the Sports Festival. It had been enough for them to qualify for the third activity and no one had even tried to steal headbands back from Midoriya’s group. It was hard to steal from people if you couldn’t even find them. The rest of the groups were like a school of confused fish trying to search for a hunting hawk; they might have searched the entire available area, but there was a whole other dimension totally inaccessible to them.
The rain stopped before the single elimination tournament. That was for the best; it had made the first two rounds interesting but it would obscure the fights and keep people from seeing all of Mei’s babies in action. She fought to show off, allowing Iida--who had been so helpful and such an amazingly good sport--to advance to the next round once she had demonstrated all of her gadgets.
Midoriya, though, he fought to win. He showed off his equipment alright, but he showed off his equipment in a style less fitting for an infomercial and more fitting for a battlefield.
The greenette, still soaked but apparently unperturbed by this, fought Tetsutetsu first. The support student attacked with a fist-sized electromagnet, pinning the metallic hero student to the ground and forcing the enemy to forswear his quirk or be immobilized. The moment Tetsutetsu turned his quirk off, Midoriya was behind him with an Imitation Midnight Knife. His opponent was down for the count in seconds.
The triumphant support student tossed his long, dripping hair in a subtle celebration of victory that, none the less, conveyed to the entire crowd just how viscerally pleased with himself Midoriya was.
Shiozaki, Midoriya’s next opponent, looked utterly bemused when the greenette pulled a fire extinguisher out of a pocket. The hero student attacked, vines flying forward in a thorny arc. The greenette pulled the pin and squeezed the trigger of his weapon. Vines didn’t freeze. Mei had assumed that this was a CO2 extinguisher (despite the fact that it looked like standard ABC foam safety equipment) and Midoriya planned to freeze some of the vines but whatever was in that extinguisher it was definitely not CO2 and definitely not standard foam. Shiozaki’s vines twitched and flopped on the ground as if all the fibers had suddenly lost integrity. The greenette stabbed one of the vines with a knife--whether it was his standard Imitation Midnight Knife or not Mei had no idea--and Shiozaki fell groggily to the ground with no further ceremony.
Brutal and efficient as his tactics might be, the greenette couldn’t take down everyone. Midoriya managed to crack two of Todoroki’s summoned glaciers with high-energy sonic devices, but the hero student caught him promptly after that.
Mei hadn’t known about half of this stuff and why should she? It wasn’t as if they were friends. Why would Midoriya tell her about all of his inventions? She might want to know but why would he want her to know?
She should give him a reason. The greenette was… quite possibly some sort of eldritch monster walking the line between two disparate worlds, but when had a little thing like that stopped Mei from following the whims of her curiosity? She just had to figure out how to become his friend. Yes. She would do this. She could build flying machines and tanks and borderline perpetual motion machines. How much harder could building friendships be?
Her first, second, and third attempts at friendship involved various offers of collaboration, tools, or components. Midoriya gave her suspicious looks and never accepted anything and, well, fair. They worked in such different fields that most of what she could offer wasn’t of much interest to him. The Tardis wouldn't need a flux capacitor, after all, would it?
Her fourth attempt involved a bakery. She purchased a cake with purple icing and a cheerful. “Hello! Have Some Sugar and Be My Friend!” written on it. For some reason the salesman gave her a strange look when she told him what she wanted the icing to say. Whatever. Some people were just weird like that.
Mei presented the cake to Midoriya the next time she saw him at lunch. He stared at it, blinking in confusion. “Uh…” the greenettte said. “Why?”
“I want to be friends,” she explained. Didn’t the icing make this clear?
Midoriya thanked her awkwardly. He did have a slice but then invited a good quarter of the school to take slices as well. Mei wasn’t sure if that meant the gesture was accepted or not.
The cake's success was unclear; there was insufficient data. Mei continued to go out of her way to be friendly. She paid enough attention to her surroundings to bid Midoriya a cheerful “hello” when he arrived and a solemn “goodbye” when he left. When the greenette was on a break, Mei talked with him about his babies (although he didn’t call them that for some reason). Over the coming weeks, he began to look at her less like how an osprey looks at a trout and more like how an osprey looks at a large turtle--as if she were of interest but more as part of the scenery than potential prey.
A ferocious storm developed over the afternoon. Midoriya worked furiously on a project write up. Why? It wasn’t as if he had anywhere to go. Who would want to walk home in this deluge? Why not take his time? Occasionally the greenette raised his eldritch gaze to the windows as if longingly searching for something. Midoriya hit “submit,” on his forms, slapped down the screen of his laptop, packed up his bag in a hurry, and made for the doors.
“You’re not seriously going out in that are you?” Mei demanded.
“I… have somewhere to be,” Midoriya said, voice distant and distracted. “Someone to meet…”
“Oh? Who? I’d love to meet your friend! You can have them come here then we could all be dry--”
“No, not… not that kind of friend,” Midoriya mumbled, heading for the door already.
“Midoriya!” Mei called chasing after him. “Midoriya?” She threw open the exterior door, staring out into the raging bluster of a thunderstorm in full swing. Lightning arced in nimble, blue circuits across the sky and thunder shouted in angry reply. Rain pounded down in silvery sheets, great clouds of mist rising up from the swamp-soaked grass. Midoriya… was nowhere to be seen.
Mei looked in every direction, zooming in when necessary to make her check thorough. He wasn’t there. He just wasn’t there as if he’d spread his wings and lifted away from the pond that served as available space for mortal creatures.
“Midoriya?” she called again. Nothing. How? How? She was a creature of science… she thought bizarre things about Midoriya, thought he was beyond strange, unnatural almost but he was… regardless of how he seemed inhuman sometimes Mei had never truly believed her classmate was anything more than… a bit abnormal. When she’d mused that he was some sort of eldritch monster she had kept those thoughts to herself, stored in the most ethereal of forms, because she wasn’t serious. It… “Probably just a trick. A good magician never reveals those, right? That’s what he’ll say when he gets back… a good magician…”
The storm rumbled on until well after twilight. Mei had plenty of things to do. She was in no danger of boredom… certainly not with all these confused thoughts about her classmate churning around in her head. She happened to glance up from a long soldering task. Movement caught her eye and she zoomed in on a hill half a kilometer away. Framed between the dark pillars of two trees, blurred by the onslaught of the rain, she made out the distinct, rain-blackened mane of Midoriya Izuku's hair tossing side to side as he danced to the rhythm of some unknowable song and there was… she shivered. It looked like a horse, a horse dancing with Midoriya. And yet she was very sure, in the way that one was sure that a tiger was not a house cat, that that thing her classmate danced beside in the wind-whipped rain was no horse.