Izuku stared at the blank white board, the marker heavy in his hand.
A name, he thought. A name is a promise.
For years, his name had been "Deku" a slur, a mark of uselessness. Then it had become a secret, "The Ninth," a vessel for a legacy he didn't feel he earned. And now, it was a haunted house, shared with the cold, silent ghost of Yoshi Abara.
He thought about the "thuds" on the barrier. He thought about the man who gave him this power, the ultimate victor. If he chose All Might's name, he'd be a shadow. If he chose his own, he'd be a target. He wanted a name that acted as a defiance. Not just a hero who saves, but a hero who wins, who wins for the people who can't even get into the fight.
He thought of the people on the plane. They needed someone to fight for them when gravity itself was the enemy. They needed a Champion.
Champion, Izuku wrote, the letters bold and sharp. Because I will be the one who stands when everyone else is forced to their knees. Because a champion doesn't just hold the trophy, they carry the hope of the people who put them on the pedestal.
"A Champion?" Yoshi's voice was a needle-thin whisper in his mind, dripping with apathetic irony. "You want to be the gold standard for a world that bleeds in the grass? Careful, Midoriya. The higher the pedestal, the better the view for the sniper."
Izuku ignored the chill in his marrow. He capped the marker with a definitive snap.
"I'm leaving the room to Iida," Aizawa announced, his voice snapping Izuku back to reality. "Discuss your choices. Be respectful. If you can't handle the weight of a name, you won't handle the weight of the cape. Iida, the floor is yours."
Aizawa walked out, the door sliding shut with a clinical click. The room stayed silent for a few moments, the air thick with the realization that this was the first "normal" school activity they'd done since the massacre.
Tenya Iida stood at the front. He looked... different. His posture was still rigid, but his eyes were unfocused, staring at a point somewhere past the back wall. He seemed to be performing the role of Class Representative through sheer muscle memory, his mind clearly miles away.
"Let us... let us begin," Iida said, his voice strangely hollow. "Please, present your names."
One by one, they stood.
"Uravity," Ochaco said, her smile small and a little strained.
"Froppy," Tsuyu followed, her usual "kero" sounding more like a nervous tic.
"Red Riot," Kirishima declared, trying to summon his usual manliness, though his hands shook slightly.
When it was Izuku's turn, he stood slowly. He held up the board. "Champion," he said. His voice didn't waver. "I want to be the hero who wins for everyone who thinks they've already lost."
The class applauded, but it wasn't the boisterous cheering of the first week of school. It was a polite, somber acknowledgment.
"Champion," Denki Kaminari repeated, leaning back in his chair. He let out a long, jagged sigh. "Man... everything just feels so weird, doesn't it?"
The room went still. Denki, usually the class clown, was looking out the window toward the new security drones circling the perimeter.
"I didn't expect my UA journey to be like this," Denki continued, his voice dropping. "I wanted to be a hero because I thought it would be cool. I thought I'd get a cool costume and some fans. I still want to be here, I really do, but every time I walk into this building, I find myself... counting."
"Counting what?" Jiro asked quietly.
"The exits," Denki said. "The distance to the nearest 'hard' cover. If a door opens too fast, my heart nearly jumps out of my chest. I catch myself looking at the ceiling, wondering... Does anyone else do that? Or am I just the only one who's a mess?"
"No," Momo Yaoyorozu said, her voice trembling. "I've mapped out the safest structural corners in every classroom we use. If there's an explosion, I know exactly where the load-bearing walls are. It's... it's all I've been thinking about."
The conversation shifted, taking on a heavy, haunting tone. They weren't talking about quirks or rankings anymore, they were talking about the logistics of staying alive in a place that was supposed to be a sanctuary.
"I heard my parents talking about 'active villain drills,'" Mina whispered. "Like the fire drills we did in middle school. It made me feel sick. This is a school. We're fifteen."
Shoto Todoroki remained silent, his mismatched eyes fixed on his desk. He looked like a statue of ice and fire, frozen in a world that was melting around him. Iida, too, stayed quiet, his jaw set so tight it looked like it might crack. He was the Class Rep, but he had no words of comfort for a trauma he was currently drowning in himself.
"It's not fair," Uraraka said, her eyes welling with tears. "It's just not fair. We were supposed to be worrying about midterms and crushes. Now we're worrying about actual killers."
Kirishima slammed his fist into his palm, though there was no spark in it. "That's why we have to be heroes, right? Because if we feel this way, imagine how the people who aren't us feel in these situations. We're the only ones who can stop this from becoming the 'new normal.'"
He looked around the room, his red hair bright against the sterile grey of the classroom. "I'm scared too. I'm terrified. But I'm staying. And I want to see every single one of you in three years. I want to see all twenty of us walk across that stage at graduation."
"I'm not leaving," Tsuyu said, her voice firm.
"Me neither," Sato added.
One by one, the students of Class 1-A began to nod. The fear didn't leave the room, but it was forced into a corner by a new, collective resolve. They were no longer just a class, they were a unit, forged in the heat of a tragedy that society was still trying to name.
Izuku looked at his board again. Champion.
"We'll make it," Izuku said, looking at his classmates. "All of us. We'll be the class that didn't break."
___
In the cold, sunless grey of Izuku Midoriya's subconscious, Yoshi Abara did not sleep, he drifted. But lately, the drift had been interrupted by something violent. Something heavy.
The dream began with a crushing, absolute darkness. It wasn't the empty dark of the mind-scape, it was the dark of a confined space, smelling of rot and stagnant air. Yoshi felt his body moving, not walking, but jerking with an intense, frantic rhythm. His lungs burned. He tried to draw a breath, but his airway felt like it had been fused shut by a jagged, invisible plug.
He reached up, his fingers clawing at his own throat. He felt it there, a stump, a cold, hard obstruction buried deep in the flesh of his neck. He pulled at it, his phantom nails digging into skin that felt like cold wax, but the more he struggled, the more the world vibrated. There was no blood. There was only the sensation of being a discarded thing, a piece of meat left to spoil in a box.
Yoshi's eyes snapped open.
He was staring at the grey horizon of the "Dark World." It was a landscape of ash and silence, a purgatory between Izuku's waking life and the void. Yoshi sat up, a deep, ugly scowl carving lines into his youthful. His breath came in sharp, agitated hisses.
"What was that?" he spat, the sound of his own voice echoing flatly against the grey clouds.
He touched his neck. It was smooth. Whole. But the phantom sensation of the puncture lingered, a memory that his mind refused to fully render. He was annoyed, more than usual. The apathy that usually acted as his armor was cracked, replaced by a jagged, restless hunger for the truth.
He began to pace, his bare feet leaving no prints in the dust. He had been watching through Izuku's eyes. He had been lurking in the back of the boy's mind while the "Champion" pored over old textbooks and digital archives in the new UA dorms. The brat was obsessed with history, with myths, with trying to understand the world he now stood in.
Yoshi leaned on the fragments of Izuku's knowledge, sifting through the folklore and Shinto beliefs the boy had absorbed. Some more recently after learning of Yoshi's inhabitance.
Reikon. The soul that leaves the body at the moment of death.
Shiryō. The spirit of a person who has passed, tethered to the living world by a grudge or an unfinished task.
Onryō. A vengeful ghost capable of causing harm to the world that discarded it.
"A ghost," Yoshi whispered, his eyes narrowing. "A literal, god-damn ghost."
It made sense. The pieces clicked together with the cold finality of a prison lock. He remembered the shed. He remembered the smell of a corpse. He remembered the hunger. If he were just a quirk anomaly, he would be a part of Izuku, a split personality, a glitch in the DNA or maybe even a twin. But he was separate. He was a passenger. He was a soul that had missed its flight to the Yomi... afterlife, because of the sheer, concentrated weight of his hate.
He wasn't just "inside" Midoriya. He was inhabiting a host.
A dark, clinical thought bloomed in his mind. If he was a Shiryō, then his current existence was an error, a displacement. To "correct" himself, he needed a body that belonged to him. He needed his own skin, his own bones. But if those were gone... i
He looked at the grey sky, his lip curling in disgust.
"This vessel is too loud," Yoshi muttered.
He needed a more suitable house. A host that couldn't override him. A freshly dead corpse, something empty and hollow that he could handle his Ripple Effect into until the heart started beating again by sheer force of will. Or, he had to find where his corpse rested. He had to reclaim the body that had died.
The frustration boiled over. Yoshi didn't just feel angry, he felt insane, trapped in a grey box while the world outside moved on without him.
He spun around, a snarl ripping from his throat, and slammed his foot down. The Ripple Effect surged through the mental landscape, not a calculated expansion, but a raw, violent burst of hate.
BOOM.
A massive, jagged crater exploded into the "roof" of the hospital building he was on, cracks spider-webbing across the ground. For a second, the stability of Izuku's subconscious buckled.
Then, as quickly as it had broken, the crater began to knit itself back together. The grey dust settled.
Yoshi watched the floor repair itself, his chest heaving. He let out a long, shuddering sigh and smoothed back his hair, his scowl returning to a mask of cold.
"Fine," he whispered to the silence.
He sat back down in the dust, staring toward the horizon where Izuku's waking thoughts flickered like distant lightning.
"I just have to master patience," Yoshi said, his voice a low promise of violence. "The Champion will trip eventually. And when he falls... I'll be the one who picks up the pieces."
___
Once, in a land where the sun forgot to rise, there was a boy made of glass who lived in a house of needles.
The boy had a sister made of silk, and they lived in a small, quiet box. But one day, a Man of Iron came. The Man of Iron had a smile like a trap and a heart like a grave. He tore the silk sister into pieces and threw the glass boy into a shed where the spiders kept the secrets of the dead.
The boy did not cry. He had no air to cry. He sat in the dark and watched his own reflection shatter until there was nothing left but a Shadow.
The Shadow was very hungry. It was so hungry that when a Golden Child walked by, the Shadow did not ask for a seat, it simply crawled through the Golden Child's ear and settled in the attic of his heart.
The Golden Child was warm. The Golden Child was bright. But the Shadow was cold, and the Shadow was tired. The Shadow wanted to go home, but his house was gone, and his body was a heap of white stones buried under the Man of Iron's porch.
In the old scrolls, it is said that a soul without a skin is like a bird without wings. It can sing, but it can never fly. To fly again, the bird must find its old nest and weave a new coat of feathers.
First, the Shadow must find the White Stones. In the folklore of the Yellow Springs, the bones are the foundation of the spirit. If the bones are scattered, the soul will always be a drifter. The Shadow must gather every fragment, the ribs that held his breath, the skull that held his dreams, and wash them in the salt of a mother's tear. This is the Hone-Kara, the Rebirth of Bone.
Second, the Shadow must find the Red Thread. Blood is the river that carries the soul. To return to the world of the living, the Shadow must steal a drop of blood from the one who broke him. He must tie this red thread to the White Stones, binding the past to the present. This is the Chi-Musubi, the Blood-Binding.
Third, the Shadow must find the Vessel of Clay. A ghost cannot simply walk back into a house, he must build a new one or reclaim the old ruin. To do this, he must find a place where the barrier between the sun and the moon is thin. He must stand in the center of the dark and call his name until the earth trembles. He must push the Golden Child out of the light, or he must find a body that is empty, a body that has already forgotten how to breathe.
But the scrolls warn of the price.
A soul that returns from the dark is no longer a boy of glass. He is a Kishin, a demon-god. He will have his body back, but he will have forgotten how to feel the warmth of the sun. He will have his sister's silk, but it will be stained with the mud of the grave.
The Shadow sits in the Golden Child's attic and listens to the heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
It is a beautiful sound, but it is not his.
The Shadow closes its eyes and dreams of the White Stones. He dreams of the Red Thread. He is mastering patience, for he knows that every house eventually decays, and every Golden Child eventually stumbles.
And when the Golden Child falls, the Shadow will be there to catch the bones.
___
The late afternoon sun bled through the reinforced windows of the UA faculty lounge, casting long, skeletal shadows across the floor. Toshinori Yagi, All Might, sat in a low armchair, his frame looking smaller than ever in the vastness of the room. When the door opened and Izuku stepped in, the silence between them felt like a physical weight, heavy with the things they hadn't said since the grass of the stadium turned red.
"Young Midoriya," All Might said, his voice a dry rasp. "It... it feels like ages since we last truly spoke."
Izuku hovered by the door for a second before walking over, his shoulders tense. "I'm sorry, All Might. For not answering the messages. For being... away. I've just been busy with the move to the dorms and... everything else."
All Might waved a frail hand, a sad smile touching his lips. "Don't apologize. I understand better than most. I should have been the one to reach out more. I should have been there for you in the immediate aftermath. I am sorry, Izuku."
Izuku blinked, caught off guard by the use of his first name. "For what? You didn't do anything wrong."
"I am the Symbol of Peace," All Might said, and for a moment, the old authority returned to his eyes, shadowed by a profound grief. "And I failed. On the day of the festival, I... failed."
"I hear the thuds..." Izuku whispered, looking down at his scarred palms. "The thuds. The sound of Bakugo hitting the grass. I keep thinking that if I had been in more control of One For All, if I hadn't frozen... maybe I could have done more."
"No," All Might said firmly, leaning forward. "No one was expecting that of you, Izuku. You are a student. You are a child who needs nurturing and guidance, not the weight of eighty lives on your shoulders. You did exactly what you could, you protected the attendees. It was I who failed the standard. But..."
All Might gripped the armrests of his chair, his knuckles white. "I do not plan on failing like that again. I will keep moving forward. I have to. That is the mark of a hero, and it is the only standard I have left to give you. We cannot change the blood on the grass, but we can change the world that allowed it to be spilled."
Izuku nodded, feeling a spark of that old, familiar fire return to his chest.
"Moving on from that," All Might's expression turned clinical, "we need to discuss Yoshi Abara."
The air in the room seemed to chill. Izuku felt a faint, phantom itch on his cheek, as if the ghost were listening.
"I've spent the last month digging," All Might continued. "The police reports, the medical records from the Seaside Serenity Institute... it's disturbing, Izuku. The boy went missing three months ago after escaping the psych ward. But there's more. Investigations into his time at the institute suggest his brain scans showed signs of external interference, as if his memories or his perceptions were being influenced by a quirk."
Izuku frowned, his brow furrowing. "Influenced? Like... mind control?"
"Perhaps," All Might said. "The staff reported him as delusional and prone to unexplained outbursts of hate."
"That doesn't fit," Izuku said, his voice dropping. "I've spent time with him, or, well, he's spent time in my head. He's arrogant, cold, and incredibly self-assured. From the way he speaks, he doesn't seem like the type of person who could be taken over like that. He's too... sharp. He views everyone else as beneath him. To be a puppet? That doesn't sound like the Yoshi in there."
"He was also supposedly being watched by strange figures," All Might added, his eyes narrowing. "Unidentified men loitering around his sister's old apartment. It suggests he was being targeted long before he died."
"I want in," Izuku said suddenly, his voice ringing with a new resolve. "I want to be part of this investigation. Instead of a normal internship, I want to work on finding out what happened to him."
All Might started to shake his head. "Izuku, the internships are meant for your development as a hero..."
"I have a right to know!" Izuku countered, stepping forward. "He is inhabiting my body, All Might. He's not a quirk, he's a person. I want him out as much as he wants to get out. He's... he's persistent. He can manifest a mouth on my skin, he can speak to me, he taunts me. He's probably listening right now."
All Might raised his eyebrows, glancing at Izuku's cheek as if expecting the ghost to appear. "He can speak for himself?"
"He can. He usually doesn't... I think he finds you 'annoying' but he's more than capable of finding out what's going on on his end. If we're going to solve this, I can't just be the vessel. I need to be the one who finds the truth."
All Might looked at his successor for a long time, seeing the "Champion" beginning to eclipse the boy he had met those few years ago. Finally, he nodded.
"I can't let you skip the curriculum obviously," All Might said. "But I can bend the rules. School policy says students can't intern with their own teachers, but as the Number One, I have a certain... flexibility with the Hero Commission. I will arrange it so that you are assigned to an agency close to my own operations. We will work together on this, Izuku. Off the books."
"Thank you," Izuku breathed. He hesitated, then looked up at All Might. "There's one more thing. During the festival... just before I helped the crowd, I heard another voice. It wasn't Yoshi."
All Might's face clouded with worry, his hand instinctively going to his side. "Another one? Like the boy?"
"No," Izuku said, a small, genuine smile finally breaking through. "It was a woman. Her voice was... calm. Uplifting. She spoke with a pattern that sounded a lot like yours, actually. She told me to rise up. She helped me push past the fear when the bodies were falling. It felt like... like she was a part of the power itself."
All Might's breath hitched. His eyes softened, a look of profound, bittersweet recognition crossing his face. He looked at Izuku not as a teacher, but as someone witnessing a miracle.
"A woman," All Might whispered, his voice thick with emotion. "Brave... and calm."
"You know who she is?"
All Might shook his head slowly, though his eyes were shimmering. "It seems to be another one of the many mysteries of One For All, Young Midoriya. Perhaps the past isn't as silent as we thought."
He stood up, placing a hand on Izuku's shoulder. "Go back to the dorms. Rest. We have much to do before the month is out. I will see you soon."