Shouta scowls across his new class of hopefuls as they run, jump and throw their way onto the leaderboards. He can see the potential in all of them, a rarity in the wake of such an irrational entrance exam.
For some, the potential is in their quirks and bogged down by their personality flaws, and he will have his work cut out for him to iron out those flaws.
For others, their personalities do the heavy lifting, and it's Shouta's job to simply build up their quirks and their knowledge, and tear down their insecurities.
A few pull stunts that he hadn't expected, showcasing new applications for quirks and minds that he wouldn't have otherwise pegged as capable.
For one, it's... strange.
Midoriya Izuku's is a quirk that few would call powerful, but he has seen his own potential in a way that few children can, and he seems to have built it up to a point that many pro-heroes struggle with. He turns the limitations to his quirk to his advantage, takes into account synergies with his peers, and finds loopholes in its functioning to apply it to a greater range of situations.
All the makings of a hero.
And yet...
His name is at the bottom.
It starts halfway up the list, stays there with the 50m dash and briefly rises further after his flight (flight. With a storage quirk.), breaking the top ten. But then he just... gives up.
As in, actively sabotages himself.
He jogs for the endurance run, but he fakes a limp and quits before anyone else (besides Hagakure, who cuts off half of each lap, by the rustling in the grass, and has 'completed seven laps' by the time she taps out). He fakes the injury well (almost), but he messes up the timing near the end and Shouta knows that on an actual twisted ankle that would hurt like Hell.
If that were all, Shouta would write off the limp as a result of the botched flight, the stumble as adrenaline-fueled painlessness, and the early quitting as a rational decision to avoid damaging the ankle further when he might need it for future tests.
But that isn't all.
The grip strength, he comes second-to-last in, ahead only of Mineta, and only by a few points. Shouta isn't stupid; Midoriya's body is diligently honed under that PE uniform. Unless Hagakure is secretly ripped, Midoriya is holding back a lot. And that's ignoring his quirk - surely he must carry around string or elastic or wires to wrap around the grip-tester.
He sandbags his situps score. He trips partway through the side-to-side steps, citing his 'hurt' ankle. He actually tries in the seated toe-touch, but only because he knows he can't do it.
He's wonderfully attentive. Between tests, when he isn't talking to the less physically-oriented students (trying to gauge their middle-school scores, likely) he watches and listens for other scores to base his own off, trying to get a grasp for where to let his score land for minimum points without being suspicious.
But if he actively tries to lose, then he has no potential, no matter how skilled he is. Any student who doesn't want to be here threatens the development of the rest. Could threaten the lives of the rest, in the future.
So the test ends, and Shouta calls up the results, and Midoriya's name is on the bottom.
"Midoriya."
The child's face flattens from something oddly relieved into tense fear, before pulling itself into a grimace. He swallows deeply.
There are whispers from other classmates. He levels an unimpressed glare at Midoriya, ignoring them.
"You have no potential. Get out."
One of the girls gasps loudly at that, having thought this to be a ruse. He ignores her. There's always one.
"Wait, you can't do that!" It isn't Midoriya or the girl who speaks up, which is all that gives Shouta pause. Instead, it's a panicked Mineta Minoru, breaking free of the crowd with a leap powered by his bouncy shoes.
"Give me one good reason."
"He helped me! Without him... I-I would've come last!" Mineta sniffles at this admission, rubbing scared tears from his eyes. Clearly he expects to be expelled in Midoriya's place.
There's a second of silence as he processes this revelation. Midoriya's breathing shudders in an effort of forced calm.
"Me too!" comes another voice, and it takes him a moment to pin voice to face. Then he realises that's because there's no face to pin it to; it's Hagakure. "He helped me with my racing scores!"
Those racing scores are not insubstantial, and her method took the kind of thinking that he encourages. That's a point for Midoriya.
"And this!" Mineta adds, raising the sole of his shoe to Shouta, revealing four sand-coated orbs on the bottom. Come to think of it, that is distinctly Midoriya in its genius.
"He gave me the idea for the grip tester thing!" Kaminari speaks up, stepping forward.
Kouda steps forward too. He raises his hands as if to sign something, then seems to think better of it. Something to return to. Instead, he joins the other students in the front, nodding along emphatically.
Uraraka steps up too, and Shouta thinks it's about the exam before she says, "I helped Jirou-chan because of him!"
Jirou blinks, then steps forward too. "Can't argue with that," she shrugs.
Shouta counts the heads. Five. No, six, counting Hagakure. Seven, as Asui hops up alongside.
Eight, as Iida steps up, chopping the air. "Midoriya-kun was the highest-scorer ever in the exam. If he doesn't deserve to be here, I don't believe any of us can claim that right!"
"That just isn't manly!" Kirishima decides, joining them all.
"Enough," Shouta says finally, and the hard quiet in his tone silences them all. He turns back to a shellshocked Midoriya, picking him apart with his eyes, searching so thoroughly that his quirk tries to snap into place.
Midoriya Izuku, the one who failed the written exam on a technicality, and got in anyway on another one. The boy who blew All Might's practical exam record out of the water, squeezing all the use out of his storage quirk that he possibly could. The one, now, who helped his classmates become better versions of themselves, who convinced another to do the same, within a single morning.
But most importantly, the one who threw all his progress, all his advantages away for...
"...Why?" Shouta asks, the only question he can think to ask. It makes no sense; he's missing something, he knows it, and he wants to know what.
Midoriya calms a little at the question, surreptitiously rubbing away tears, and when he uncovers his face it's a mask of confidence as he pulls his hands behind his back.
"Because everyone here has potential," he says simply.
And then Shouta understands.
'The person with the lowest score overall will be deemed devoid of potential, and expelled,' he'd said. Shouta has seen nothing but potential from this boy, but he's the one with the lowest score.
Midoriya engineered exactly this situation, right down to the outcry from his classmates. Shouta's hands are tied. He can't expel anyone.
At least, in Midoriya's mind. Shouta is not Midoriya.
"If you hadn't given Hagakure that idea, she would have come last," Shouta deadpans. He knows that that honor likely would have gone to Mineta, but Hagakure's case is more compelling because, thanks to Midoriya's interference, she's fourth on the leaderboard. "Explain why I shouldn't expel her instead."
There's a pause. "The invisible girl," he clarifies tiredly and sudden understanding flashes across Midoriya's face. He didn't even know their names?
"Can you prove she'd come last?" Midoriya counters, which Shouta can't. "Besides, she'll see opportunities like that in everything from now on. As long as she isn't talking, she could use context clues to make people think she's anywhere. That's her potential now."
Shouta blinks, realising that he's right. A simple suggestion, when it worked, must have opened up all sorts of possibilities in Hagakure's mind. "And Mineta?"
Mineta cringes at the attention, but Midoriya stands strong. "He can use his quirk for bouncing instead of just sticking, now. And he has great mobility. And he was the first one to stand up for me."
"And again, why shouldn't I expel you? A student who doesn't try their hardest has no potential, regardless of anything else."
It's a bluff, but Midoriya's mouth drops open anyway. But then he schools his expression, and says boldly, head raised high, "This is trying my hardest. If you do expel me, then you should, because I'd have nothing to learn from a teacher that doesn't understand that."
Sheer guts aside, he has Shouta there. If Shouta were such a blind, braindead idiot that he couldn't see the overwhelming potential oozing from Midoriya's being, and the pains he has gone through to construct this 'everybody wins' scenario, then he would hang up his teaching license without a second thought.
And if Shouta expelled him now despite all he's seen... He glances over the half of the class still stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Midoriya.
There would be blood.
"Welcome to Class 1-A," he grins madly.
"Dude, that was so badass!" Kaminari proclaims loudly as they walk back, heedless of the teacher listening in. "You totally had him beat!"
Pulling from years of underground hero work, Shouta very carefully does not look towards him. This budding conversation feels enlightening, somehow.
"O-oh, thanks!" Midoriya replies, glowing with embarrassment, and maybe a little pride. "I wasn't sure it would work, actually, but I think Principal Nedzu would've backed me up if I explained it to him."
Yes, he would have done. The rat adores those kinds of mind-games, and judging by Midoriya's trust, they're acquainted and on good terms.
A relieved sigh escapes him, unbidden. That would be a shitshow; he'd lose that argument (swayed by the mere fact that Midoriya actually had a fallback plan), and they'd never take his threats of expulsion seriously again.
"How... How did you know everyone had potential?" Mineta asks, like he's afraid of the answer. Given that his score is one of the lowest despite his improvements, it isn't surprising.
"Everyone has potential," Midoriya says like it's obvious, emboldened by his success. "The only way to not have potential is to give up on finding it. Or just have a bad personality for hero work, I guess."
Kaminari frowns. "But what if your quirk is something like... I dunno, something a hero can't use?"
"Name one," he fires back immediately, with no hesitation.
Oh how naive, to make a challenge so bold where the teacher can hear him. "Chromatic Eye," Shouta cuts in, to various yelps and yells of surprise. "Your eye-color changes depending on your mood."
It's his grandmother's quirk, and it's one of the few that even Shouta struggles to find uses for in the hero industry. Anything he can think of is just too situational, or won't actually work due to the color-change being restricted to the user's mood instead of directly controlled.
And Midoriya lights up when he hears it.
"That's a 100% accurate physical sign of your mood! A hero with that quirk would appear way more trustworthy, and it'd be nearly impossible to impersonate them properly even with mimicking and quirk-copying quirks, because nobody can copy their mind! Plus you could hook up an eye to a sensor, and have a hero costume that changes color to match your eyes, to make you harder to see in certain situations, or to act as dazzle camoflage!
You could have systems in place to manipulate your emotions to keep you calm when you need to be, or to automatically deploy anaesthetic when you're in pain so you can fight for longer. If you get good at keeping your emotions in check, you could have a hero costume that changes shape depending on your mood, to make you more intimidating when you're angry, or more approachable when you're trying to calm someone down... you could base an entire hero gimmick on that, maybe a blue-eyed folk hero/yellow-eyed dragon dichotomy... and you could switch fighting styles to match your mood with a costume that responds to improve your current style, which would throw villains off..."
He devolves into a murmuring tangent about how an eye would actually accomplish the color-change and whether it would be possible to harvest those pigments or create them at a faster rate, not noticing everyone else's stunned silence.
He did it. The problem child actually did it. He thought up better uses for that quirk - the very quirk that taught Shouta that pretending anyone could be a hero was an irrational over-simplification - than Shouta had in his entire life, in the span of two minutes. Without so much as a stutter.
And better yet, Shouta caught a recording of the whole conversation.
"Dekiru-kun, you're mumbling again," Nice Girl prods gently, and Izuku snaps back into reality, apologising as he simultaneously realises that he's not sure where they are. "Never mind that! Can you really do that for any quirk you hear about? That's so cool!"
He blinks. "I guess so... It's kind of a reflex at this point. It's easier for some quirks than for others, because a lot of the time the same effect can have a lot of different causes, and that changes how the cause could be repurposed to get a different effect."
Nice Girl stares uncomprehendingly, and he sighs. "Okay, take Chromatic Eye. The change in eye color could be caused by a material in the iris that reacts to electrical impulses to change its color. In this case, if you can safely harvest some of that material from the eye and synthesise more of it, you could make a color-changing suit, and that could be applied to your image as a hero.
But if the color change was caused by something else, you wouldn't be able to do that, but other things might be possible instead. Some quirks are just hard to define, even if you see them in action."
She's nodding intently as his explanation comes to an end, and he has a moment to muse how gratifying it is to have someone listening to - and following along with - their thoughts for once.
Maybe they'd make a good teacher, sometime in the future.
"But what about something like my quirk?" Nice Girl prompts after a moment. He levels her with a knowing look and she has the decency to look chastised. "Okay, so I'm curious, so sue me."
He chuckles. "I've actually been meaning to talk with you about that. I don't think your quirk is what you think it is."
She's lost for words for a moment. "...How so?"
"Well, when you were swinging that street light around in the exam, what kind of damage did it cause?"
Her confusion doesn't waver. "Crushing, right? It crushed them."
"It's not a trick question, yeah. But... if it crushes things, then that means it still has mass, right? Which means you're making it ignore gravity instead."
"Right. My quirk makes things float."
"But if you're just making it ignore gravity... how do you swing it?" Her face begins to show the beginnings of realisation, so he presses on, "If it still has mass, it's too heavy to swing. But if it doesn't have mass, it's too light to do any damage!"
Nice Girl's mouth works without the cooperation of her brain for a moment.
"But then, what is it, right?" he asks for her, and she nods helplessly. "It's Assistive Telekinesis! When you touch something, you're actually imbuing it with telekinetic power, which then assists you by making the object act as if it were weightless! That raises so many questions! Do you- uh, Nice Girl?"
She's stopped walking at some point, Izuku abruptly realises when he turns and she isn't there anymore. Instead she's leaning against a half-open door, a white-knuckled hand on the handle, pale-faced and breathing deeply.
Incongruously, her pinky is raised.
...Oh god, they've really screwed this up, haven't they? You don't just drop that kind of revelation on someone, not when quirks are so woven into people's identities.
What do you say in a situation like this?
Wait, Aizawa-sensei's a pro-hero, he could-
He's gone, along with the rest of the class, probably already back in the classroom, and Izuku still doesn't know their way around. Great.
Not knowing what else to do, Izuku flits back to Nice Girl's side, pulls her from the doorway and gently pushes down on her shaking shoulder. "Come on, let's sit down for a bit, okay?"
She nods wordlessly, swallowing, and sinks to the floor, her back to the wall. Now unburdened, her foot taps listlessly to no beat in particular, but her breathing begins to even out as the minutes pass.
And as the minutes pass, it slowly dawns on Izuku...
What were they THINKING?!
They just purposely bombed a test on the first day of UA, on a HUNCH! On a whim, a plan with an entire three seconds of thought behind it! What if Aizawa-sensei hadn't listened to the other students? What if he'd just sent them home, what if he didn't need to go through Nedzu at all? What if Nedzu didn't agree with them, didn't help them out, because he expected better of them than to make such a stupid-
"Dekiru-kun. Calm."
Someone takes his hand and squeezes it. Slowly, Nice Girl's voice filters in, and they reconstruct the scenario in their head. Right, they're sitting on the floor of an unknown hallway... being comforted by the person whose worldview they just tilted.
"So, who goes first?" is the first thing that rolls out of his mouth, before he thinks to shut it, when they've both somewhat recovered from their simultaneous panic attacks. Nice Girl laughs a little too hard and he's not really sure what's funny, but the pause gives him a chance to regain his wits. "You first, I think that makes most sense."
Talking about Nice Girl's quirk will put her at ease, and it's a comfort zone for Izuku. They can deal with the expulsion thing later.
"I just... my quirk's called Zero Gravity and... I've always loved the stars, and my quirk made me feel like I was... closer to them, I guess? But if it's just telekinesis instead... I lose that." She rubs her head, grinning sheepishly. "It sounds stupid when I say it out loud, doesn't it?"
"Not really. Quirks are a part of you, learning they aren't what you thought they were is a bit like..."
A bit like learning that you're trans, their mind supplies. They try to shake it away, but the thought clings, driving out anything less... anything they could use to fill the gaps.
"It's like challenging your identity, right?" he finally settles on, settling further and rubbing tears from his eyes for the umpteenth time today. He's practically lying down now, and Nice Girl is the same, and he's thirsty. Probably from all the crying. He pulls a pair of bottled mineral water from storage and hands one to Nice Girl, who smiles and pops it open.
A hearty swig later, and they're both a little more grounded in reality.
"So... Telekinesis?" Nice Girl finally prompts. "You said it was... uh, what was it?"
"Assistive Telekinesis. It assists you in moving things, so..." he trails off, unsure where he was going with the sentence.
"So..." she echoes, "what does that change?"
"Well, it depends how it works. Even if we know it's telekinesis, we don't know how much of it is based on your perception and expectations, and how much is set in stone. For all we know, if you touch an object expecting it to become super heavy, it might do that. Or you might be able to make things move at will, or tell when an object under your control is being moved by something else... there's all sorts of possibilities. For now though..."
He was going to suggest having a fan blow on the object, but they'd need the creation girl for that, and for that they'd need to find the-
They're skipping class! On the first day!
"Uh, we need to go!"
"Ah! You're right!"