A/N: The child abuse is very present in this chapter. Please mind the warnings!

Disclaimer: I own all of my insecurities and not much else.

Quirk testing, huh.

After Aizawa-sensei (Aizawa Shota, or Aizawa-sensei as he ordered them to call him) handed them their uniforms and left them to change, they were ushered out to one of U.A.'s many outdoor running tracks. Shoto eyed his fellow students as their homeroom teacher explained what they would be doing.

His own experiences with private education, outside of the tutoring he had received at home for most of his life, hadn't included physical tests. With Endeavor? That had been a weekly occurrence. Shoto knew his times with running, walking, tossing, jumping-throwing-kicking-punching; his fire remained a mystery, but his ice he knew down to the last atom. He had gotten and was still receiving full-body checks weekly from the family doctor (who was apparently being paid enough, or had so few morals, that he looked past the burns and bruises like they weren't even there), who was mostly kept available to patch him up after bad sessions.

How Aizawa-sensei planned to test their quirks was something he could admit to being curious about—

BOOM-WHUUUSH.

Aizawa-sensei looked down at the device in his hand, before pointing the screen in their direction. "705.2 meters. Knowing your limits is the first, rational step to finding out what sort of hero you have the potential to become."

("You are BETTER THAN THIS!"

Shoto flew into the wall as he failed to block the kick, catching the foot to his stomach full-force. Upon landing, he immediately vomited, coughing on bile as his empty stomach protested at having to lose its meager contents for the fifth time in as many hours.

"This is NOT YOUR LIMIT! Once you become a hero, you'll run into countless situations where the villains have the upper hand, where you've been beaten into a corner, where you're outnumbered, near to collapsing and your quirk overloaded. That is exactly the moment when you must get back up and FIGHT! Will you let your weakness, your inability to man up and keep fighting, be your excuse for failure? Not on my watch, boy. Get up, Shoto! On your feet!"

Shoto gagged on stomach acid one last time. Getting to his feet was torture, but the anger churning in his gut gave him the tiniest spark of energy he needed to heave himself to his feet.

"Find your limit, meet your limit, then burn right on past it! Your destiny calls for you to be the best, boy, but how can you be the best when you can't even stay on your feet? Again!")

Limits.

Shouto knew his limits, intimately. He became reacquainted with them each time Endeavor dragged him to the edge of them, then over; when he was coughing up blood into the crook of his elbow, but getting up the next second, because failure was worse than any potential training program could ever be; when all he wanted to do was curl up into a ball and disappear, but he had to stand tall and fight back, because showing weakness to Endeavor was like releasing blood into an ocean teeming with sharks.

Speaking of sharks, a boy—with sharp-looking teeth like that of a shark and bright red hair—chose that moment to begin rubbing his hands together, nearly elbowing his neighbor (a boy with a large, pale-skinned tail that looked to be all muscle) as he loudly commented that the test seemed like fun.

Shoto felt his upper lip curl up into a sneer. Fun? What was fun, when everything they could possibly learn in the next three years may be the one thing that would, at some point in their careers, save their lives, and approaching it all like a game was a sure-fire way to miss that one important piece?

As his classmates stood around him, talking and laughing with a general air of excitement exuding from the lot of them, Shoto felt momentarily as if he stood alone in the middle of a room of people, all talking around him—about him, at him—but never with him. It was as isolating as it was exhilarating, because Shoto was reminded again of how his childhood had molded him in a way these children would never have the fortune (or misfortune) to experience.

(What was fun, when you were gagging on your own blood, when you were tripping and falling onto your face and having to drag yourself up under your own power because nobody would help you—because you were going to be better, be the best, and once you were at the top, you stood alone.)

Shoto was grimly satisfied to see that Aizawa-sensei was of the same mind: when a few more students started to boast and express their general excitement over the potential 'fun', their Sensei's tired eyes narrowed, and his whole demeanor took on a dark, sinister air that sent his classmates (and if he was honest, himself as well) into a collective shiver of dread.

When Aizawa-sensei announced (with a terrifying smile of sadistic glee) that the one with the lowest times would be expelled, Shoto had a sudden, very strange thought:

Would it be so bad, if I was failed out?

The next moment, a wave of heart-stopping dread swept through him, leaving him scrambling to control full-body shudders, glad his classmates were making such a racket that his strange behavior was unlikely to be noticed.

No. No. If he failed now, after coming all this way, it would be like signing his own death warrant. Though even he had to acknowledge that it was unlikely Father would outright kill him (though he couldn't say the same for Endeavor), what he would be subjected to would doubtless make him long for death instead.

Failing was not an option. Shoto looked about him at his classmates and felt his heartbeat pick up at the way each innocent face suddenly looked like a threat.

There, that boy, the one who kept interspersing his speech with odd, foreign-sounding words: what secrets were his strange syntax hiding? There, the girl with the floating clothes and wildly gesturing hands: what shocking talent could be hiding within her invisible form? What of that student, the one with the purple balls for hair? Could their quirk be a miraculous physical change, one that would give them the musculature they were so obviously lacking, therefore giving them an unexpected boost at the eleventh hour?

Thankfully, rational thought prevailed after a few wild seconds and reminded Shoto that he had trained and trained entirely for the sake of coming out on top in competitions like these. Short of deliberately failing, he was unlikely to fall below the top three.

The trembling subsided, and Shoto took a steadying breath and moved along with his classmates to begin the exercise.

So Shoto doggedly competed alongside his fellow students in the 50-Meter-Dash, the Grip Strength test, the Standing Long Jump and Repeated Side-steps, all of them exercises Shoto had a vague familiarity with and had full confidence in his ability to pass with flying colors.

It took him a bit of time to notice, but when he did, Shoto was mildly surprised to realize that, in spite of putting only a moderate amount of effort into actually competing, he was staying rather more ahead of the pack than he had originally anticipated.

His right side wasn't entirely suited to a lot of the exercises, but where his quirk didn't come in handy, his training did:

For the 50-Meter-Dash, an explosion of ice behind his back threw him far enough that upon landing, all he had to do was drop into a roll and come up at the finish line, to finish at 4.7 seconds.

For the Grip Strength, he managed a decent 60 kilograms—still behind a few of the students with a strength-augmenting type quirk, but still easily in the top five.

For the Standing Long Jump, another quick burst of his quirk sent him high and smoothly over the sandbox, without once touching the ground.

For the Repeated Side-steps, the often repetitive nature of his training with his father kicked in. The absence of the pain usually present in his training had the added effect of making every jump smoother, each landing easily blending into the next movement, the next jump, to the point where Shoto was almost surprised when Sensei called time.

It was at the ball toss that things got really interesting.

When Shoto's turn arrived, Shoto… cheated, a little bit (if making his father happy, and himself vaguely ill, could be considered cheating):

Once standing in the circle, Shoto spent a good, careful few minutes simply running through the calculations in his mind (ignoring the gradual build in his classmates' whispering, and in his teacher's interest). During that focused period of thought, Shoto wavered between his left hand and the right, before finally switching to the right and telling himself that it was okay, just this once, because if it was for his future it was okay, itwouldbeokay—

When he'd stalled long enough that Shoto deemed his classmates to be getting too restless, Shoto drew his left arm back, and let heat form, setting his hand aglow. Wind immediately began to gather as he pulled oxygen to his hand, but didn't yet touch on hydrogen; when the wind began to grow strong enough to toss up the corners of his blazer and send his hair flying, Shoto tossed the ball into his glowing left hand, drew back, aimed, and gathered hydrogen and the spark that would ignite his flames as he let the ball fly.

The resulting explosion sent the ball flying, probably didn't destroy it in the process, and nearly knocked a few of the students on their backs.

As for himself, Shoto stumbled, only slightly, and somehow managed to keep both upright and his face straight, and to not immediately set about clawing at the buzzing sensation running through his entire left side. When the device beeped, and Aizawa-sensei showed him and the class the results (722.3 meters) Shoto thought he saw an approving look in his eye. His success nearly balanced out the desire to run out of there, right now, and find a shower to scrub the skin off his entire skeleton, just, get every itching, tingling millimeter of it off—

But what was really interesting was what came next.

As Shoto stood waiting with the other students for the remaining three to finish their turns (and doing his best to avoid touching anyone without appearing like he was doing so, which was a lot harder than it sounded), the brown-haired girl who'd shown up second-to-last the first day (her name had a 'U' in it, that much he was sure of) drew her arm back, tensed, and threw.

And the ball went up, and up, and up. And up.

The device beeped, and Aizawa-sensei looked down at it before raising his eyebrows in surprise. He pointed it in their direction, and there was a collective inhale of shocked-awe.

"Infinity?" someone blurted out.

"No way! She got the infinity symbol? Is that even possible?"

"So cool…"

She stepped back out of the circle, shy pleasure in the lines of her body. Shoto looked her over subtly as she walked his way, a contemplative line between his brows. She stepped into line not very far down from him, and he took the chance to take a guess at her specs; the results were average, at best, and he pressed into his left hip with his thumbnail, contemplative.

Gravity manipulation, huh? That was certainly a useful quirk. Off the top of his head, he could think of two-dozen practical applications for hero work with a quirk like that, even taking into consideration what her limits might be. Rescue, apprehension, all-out fights—having the ability to take away someone's gravity was an excellent ace in the hole.

If she spent the next three years bringing up the rest of her physical specs, the pro-hero agencies would be fighting at the bit to get their hands on her.

Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Tensing, but not knowing quite why, Shoto snapped his head around to face the direction the feeling had come from—what he had caught out of the corner of his eye: Aizawa-sensei's off-white scarf was floating around his head, to match his rising hair and the menacing look in his suddenly bright-red eyes, reminiscent of his declaration to expel the lowest ranked student.

Shoto found himself wanting to take a step back, and that look wasn't even aimed at him. He tensed all of his muscles in the next instant, freezing his body in the harshest way he knew, to keep himself from giving in to the temptation to show such blatant weakness. Some of his fellow students weren't quite as disciplined, and few of them gasped as they flinched back.

"That's the Pro-Hero Eraserhead!"

"Eraserhead? Never heard of him…"

"He sounds kind of familiar though? I feel like I've heard his name come up on tv before—"

"I think I've heard of him too! He's an underground hero, I'm pretty sure!"

He found himself, for the first time in a long time, feeling intimidated by an adult other than Endeavor. It wasn't quite the same fear (that bone-deep dread, that instinctive full-body flinch away from the slightest hint of contact, eyes that always went straight to large, calloused hands the second the man entered the room) but it was something like it. A healthy fear, perhaps, if there was such a thing, that could turn to respect given time.

For now, Shoto kept a wary eye on his teacher's hair until it finally floated downwards as he let go of his quirk. The green-haired student he had wrapped in his scarf (which Shoto was beginning to suspect wasn't a scarf at all) was let loose in an instant, and any sign of the intimidating hero they had all gotten the smallest glimpse of disappeared, leaving behind a scruffy, tired—and above all, bored-looking man in his place.

Shoto's attention lingered on Aizawa-sensei for another moment, feeling oddly disappointed; but he shrugged the feeling off a moment later, and mentally categorized the thought as irrelevant.

The student geared up to deliver his throw, this time with his Quirk. Shoto felt a sudden flare of interest as the boy's quirk caused a massive burst of power, almost familiar in a way Shoto couldn't place, and sent his ball shooting into the sky and out of sight.

A curiously strong quirk. Shoto wondered why the boy hadn't bothered to use his quirk before now. He didn't stand out in Shoto's memory in any of the previous tests, which said a lot about how he had faired up until this point. It was interesting that he had only chosen the final test to showcase his true power—

The boy grinned at Sensei, pain in his eyes, and a purple, oddly-bent finger clenched in one trembling fist.

—Ah. That made sense. If utilizing his quirk caused such serious injury every time, it was no wonder he'd chosen to first try his best without it.

The air coalesced in one spot at the edge of his vision. Shoto instinctively leaped to the side, and luckily managed to dodge a student—the one with purple balls for hair—as they fell, screeching, from the force of the explosion the blond boy with anger-management issues let out as he lunged towards the green-haired student... a student who was currently nursing a broken finger and a terrified expression.

As the blond went hurtling at the hapless boy, hands popping countless explosions and yelling at the top of his lungs, he was thankfully stopped, halfway there, by Sensei's mysterious scarf. Shoto scooted inconspicuously away from a still-screeching Purple Balls, and did his best to hide his disgusted looks at the both of them. His side begged to be freed of the insufferable tingling, and Shoto indulged it with a quick, brutal jab with blunt fingernails.

"What the—the fuck is… this! This cloth is stiff!"

"That scarf you're failing to get out of is called a 'capture weapon', brat, and its made of carbon fibers and a special steel-alloy wire," Aizawa-sensei explained dryly, looking exasperated and on the edge of fed up. "Now stop using your quirk already, I'm getting dry-eye over here."

The boy finally stopped struggling, and Sensei released him with a sigh.

"What a waste of time. Do that again, and I'll fail you. Let's move on to the next event."

Shoto obediently moved with the crowd, using the time to mentally sift through all the things of note that he had learned about his classmates and ranking them all in order of Most Dangerous, to Least (Sensei, of course, made the top of that list). A girl with long, dangling earlobes brushed against him as she moved past, and he glanced after her as they moved towards Auditorium 3, trying to recall seeing her in the classroom. He kneaded the skin of his upper arm as they were split up to finish the exercises, and let the vague thought drift past him.

To round off the exercises, they did two more: the Seated Toe-Touch and Sit Ups. For both the exercises, Shoto again fell into the top three. While the boy with four-winged, tentacle-like growths attached to his arms (the boy that Shoto had made note of in the classroom) had easily five times Shoto's muscle mass, Shoto had eleven years of painstaking blood-sweat-and-tears behind him, and that history helped to put them at nearly even rank.

Anger-Management Issues kept pace with him for the final two rounds, as well. It was possible that he'd been there from the start, but Shoto had, frankly, not cared enough to notice. Now that he had a certain awareness for his fellow student, beyond the fact that he was someone to keep an eye on in the future and to avoid with extreme prejudice, he was very aware of the furious looks being sent in his direction as Shoto managed to finish just a step or two higher than the boy in both exercises.

(Shoto, of course, ignored this, and made sure not to make eye contact or acknowledge him in any way at all.)

When the timer beeped for the final time, Aizawa-sensei called them all together to announce the rankings.

It was hard not to feel a smug sense of superiority as AMI seethed and quietly swore under his breath next to him when Shoto's name appeared above his, to rank Second over-all ("Whoa, Bakugo, you got Third, huh? Your quirk is really so cool!" "Fuck off, dick head!"). After a moment's thought, Shoto realized he had no real reason not to, and so he allowed himself to bask in the smugness for a few minutes, letting the feeling temporarily wash away the sting of, once again, failing to achieve number one.

No doubt that would hit him hard, later, when he had the time and the privacy to really think about it; if Endeavor found out about this, that 'hitting' would no doubt manifest in an entirely physical way. But for now, Shoto let AMI's glare roll over him as Sensei announced that, actually, no one was getting expelled because it had all been a logical ruse, and his classmates again erupted into unnecessarily loud exclamations.

His left side throbbed and ached, phantom fire burning under his skin and begging to be released. Shoto did his level best to his burrow his way into his ribcage with the heel of his palm, determined not to let the burning overwhelm him, and imagined soft, powdery snow, piling up and up and up until there was nothing left in the world dry enough to burn.

And so the first day of his Hero Highschool Academy life began, and ended, in a short-half day that had been completely unpredictable and so unlike what he had been expecting, Shoto was actually happy, for once, to see the family estate appear in the car's front windows as the sun slowly set behind them.

All in all, for a day that had started so horribly, it had not gone nearly as terribly as Shoto had expected.

(…Or so Shoto thought, until he stepped through the house and found what awaited him there.)

Tap, tap. Tap-tap. tap. Taptap.

Shoto looked up from his phone at the sound. He turned his nightlight on to its lowest setting, flipped the covers off his legs and shuffled to the door, fighting a yawn.

He knocked once on the wooden doorpost, quietly, before sliding open the shoji door just-wide enough to let a slim person pass through. Fuyumi slipped through the gap a second later, her socked-feet silent on the wood paneling of the hallway floor, and barely raising a rustle on the tatami.

(He's asleep. Come in, yes/no? Her knock had said.

Yes, his had said simply in reply.)

He slid the door closed the rest of the way, careful to be slow enough that it wouldn't tap too loudly against the door frame at the end. Then he followed Fuyumi to his laid-out futon bed and folded his legs into a crisscross next to her.

Fuyumi turned to face him once he had sat down, their knees nearly touching. The shadows cast by the lamp darkened the hollows of her face, making her look nearly gaunt, and terribly drained. But she smiled at him, and most of the shadows, imagined or otherwise, were chased away.

"Congratulations, Shoto," she whispered, ever mindful of the way sound could carry, even in the privacy of his bedroom, "you got through your first day! I'm sorry I wasn't able to see you when you got home, I heard you had a half-day?"

"Hn," Shoto grunted, too tired to bother forming words. That half-day had given Father the idea that if he had the time to train, then he obviously must have the necessary energy for it. That had resulted in a four-hour beat-down where Shoto had learned a half-useful skill, failed to keep standing in the face of the Number Two Hero's quirk, failed to satisfy his father, and overused his quirk to the point of quirk exhaustion.

All in all, not a terrible outcome for a training session. He just hadn't been expecting to have a lesson at all, which was his first mistake. Somehow, he'd been under the strange impression that, as he would now be going out in public on a regular basis and actually being in the same room as a number of pro-heroes throughout the week, Father would let up on the training, at least during weekdays. He had been under this unfortunately mistaken assumption when he allowed the driver to open the car door for him, his mood acceptably mellow enough not to bother arguing. The contented peace that had settled after the successful morning shattered abruptly the second he slid open the shoji doors to the main sitting room, to find Father sitting at the table, an empty cup of tea and snack plate before him, having obviously been waiting for him for quite some time.

The man had been careful not to mark his face, at least—Shoto would give him that. Still, it was hard to feel grateful like he probably should, not when his ribs sent shooting pain through his side with every ill-thought movement and his whole left side stung with healing frostbite, shivers from near-hypothermia shaking his whole body periodically.

The pain served to make the exhaustion twice as heavy, and it was with great effort that Shoto forced his eyes and his focus to stay alert long enough to find out what his sister wanted.

Fuyumi, like she always had, was quick to notice his predicament. Her smile, for a moment, turned sad, before she visibly rallied herself and resolved not to comment.

Shoto appreciated that, immensely. It was going to be hard enough getting out of bed tomorrow with the way his body felt; he didn't need the added mental weight.

"I promise to make this quick," she murmured reassuringly. She picked up something from next to her that rustled quietly against the bedspread, and placed it gently in his lap.

"Congratulations on getting through your first day, and for making into U.A., Shoto."

He touched the package in his lap delicately. It was wrapped in soft, powdery blue wrapping paper with little black paw prints winding round and round it in random patterns. Shoto followed the path of the prints for a moment, before delicately beginning the process of unwrapping it, going slow so as to keep the noise down.

The paper unfolded to reveal a picture frame, and for a moment, the world froze.

Two eyes—one piercing blue, one dark gray—traced the faces in the images with a desperate urgency: a boy, no older than ten, messy white hair cut short, leaning against a wall with a sly grin on his face; a girl, equally-white hair shot through with red and a hand covering her mouth, her eyes smiling brightly as she bent nearly in half with the force of her amusement; another boy, this one with crimson hair, eyes squinted shut with laughter as he pulled his arms tight around the small person sitting in his lap. Heterochromatic-eyes found matching ones in a small boy, hair split evenly down the middle—one side red, the other white.

The boy in the picture with matching eyes had on an earsplitting grin, one that seemed to take over his whole face. He looked happy. They all… looked happy.

Shoto blinked, once, twice. Something wet dripped onto the laminated surface of the picture, blurring it and all the faces in it until it was all one blobby, shapeless mess.

He wondered what the joke was, to make them laugh like that. He wished he could be in on it, wished he could… be there.

"I tried to find one with Mom in it, but the best I could find was—oh, Shoto," Fuyumi sighed, from somewhere far away. A hand came to rest gently on his head, and Shoto inhaled harshly, once, before exhaling with a rough sob.

"Thank you," he said, some indeterminate time later, and he didn't mean just for the photo. Fuyumi patted his head once in reply, and handed him a tissue, not saying anything. She knew him the best, by now, the best out of anyone in the world, and she knew that the last thing he wanted right now was an acknowledgment of his loss of control.

He took the tissue and wiped his face, wincing when he wasn't careful enough and his nail scratched the edge of his scar.

A hand caught his (gently, always gently) and placed it in his lap. Shoto let Fuyumi wipe away the last of the evidence of his weakness, and when she'd finished, they spent a few, silent moments together, looking back on a time when there had been fewer tears and fewer scars—back in simpler, happier times.

Then Shoto slowly got up and placed the picture in the small chest of drawers he kept under his writing desk, careful to put it under a few other things, so it wouldn't be immediately visible upon opening.

Then, by unspoken agreement, they both walked to the door.

"Shoto…" Fuyumi hesitated, one hand on the door. She opened her mouth once, closed it, and bit her lip.

Shoto had a pretty good feeling of what she was trying to say, and gave a tired, understanding huff.

"I get it, Nee-san. Don't worry, I'm not gonna put it where… anyone can see it." He gave her a meaningful look, sure she would understand what he meant by 'anyone'.

She nodded, relief flitting over her face. She slipped out silently a second later, and Shota slid the shoji doors quietly shut behind her.

Exhaustion pulled at him, aching in the corners of his eyes and in a throat that felt swollen from having to form words, trying to pull his limbs down to the ground against his will.

Shoto did it one better, and let gravity and his tiredness pull him down onto his bed, where he barely managed to crawl under the covers.

He realized he hadn't turned off his light once he was already in the bed, and the mere thought of twisting his aching ribcage to reach up above his head for the switch almost brought him to tears again.

The light's not so bad, I guess, Shoto thought grudgingly, and let out a deep, long yawn that nearly cracked his jaw. He wiggled to get comfortable, and somewhere between thinking it was a good thing he always set his alarm to go off weekly and wondering what tomorrow's lessons would be like, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.