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"I AM HERE—"

Slouched shoulders stiffening and spine straightening like someone had jabbed him harshly in the back, Shoto rigidly controlled the sudden skyrocketing of tension throughout his entire body.

"—COMING THROUGH THE DOOR LIKE A NORMAL PERSON!"

There was the sudden feeling of a whole room inhaling at the same time; then a building chorus of awed, excited voices rose up in its wake.

"Oh my god, it's really him—"

"My cousin would never believe me if I told her I actually get to be taught by the Symbol of Peace—"

"Look at his costume, isn't that from the Silver Age? What a classic, it's incredible to see it outside of old, variety re-runs—"

Even the up-until-now solemn Crow Boy's shimmery-black crest was raised in excitement (or so Shoto assumed, as this was the second time he'd seen it happen in relation to an exciting event, and there were no other obvious changes noticeable in his face). A glance to his left showed Yaoyorozu with glowing eyes and a warm flush to her face; a glance to his right showed his neighbor hammering his table, caught up in the general air of disbelieving joy.

It was a bit like stepping into a library with a group full of illiterates, you alone able to delve into the wonders hidden within bindings full of knowledge. If his fellow students wanted to gaze up in mindless wonder at the Number One Hero, ignoring the wealth of potential information sitting right in front of them, that was their prerogative; he would happily take whatever advantage he could get.

Shoto relaxed his spine and leaned forward on his desk with his elbows, feeling the nearly-physical impression of his mind sharpening as he took in All Might—the universally recognized Symbol of Peace and the Number One Hero—from head to toe, drinking in every detail.

There was something about All Might that was, simply put, different. There was a sense about him of innate goodness, dependability, and god-like strength (because while strength wasn't the main thing, as there were endless varieties of strength and not all of them worthy, it could not be denied that the man had it in spades). Shoto felt, at that moment, a resounding relief that that insurmountable strength had never been successfully replicated, though many had tried.

(This, he knew from painful experience).

His bi-colored eyes shot from one point to the next, trying, even if it were in vain, to identify what it was that made All Might so different. Knowing what had made the man who he was today was the first step in figuring out how to beat him to the top.

All Might beamed down at them all, his smile as radiant as a piercing sunbeam taken straight to the eye, and nearly as painful to behold. He stared into it for one, two seconds before it became too much and he was forced to look away, sourly thinking that if his smile was the special touch that made All Might the incredible being that he was, Shoto was already destined to fail.

Still, even with a well of bitterness mixing with the determination in his chest, he couldn't deny the slightest swell of excitement because—well.

Because this was All Might.

"I teach basic training! This subject is one where you will train in a variety of different ways, in order to learn the basics of being a hero! In this subject, you'll be taking the most units out of any of the other ones you will be taking, and it will generally occur in the second period of the school day. Let's get right into it, shall we? Today we will be doing—"

He flashed a card reading: BATTLE.

"Battle." Shoto thought he heard Anger-Management Issues breathe out, gleeful, and he definitely heard the dread in someone else's voice as they repeated, with faint horror: "Battle…"

"—Combat training! And to go with that aaaarrre these!"

All Might pointed at a section of the wall, where the sounds of whirring gears announced the opening of hitherto-unseen shelving units, which slid smoothly open to reveal decent-sized storage slots in a numbered sequence.

"These are your Costumes! Before applying for entering the hero course, when you filled in your Quirk Registration Forms, you were asked to fill out a Costume Request Form as well! I hope they are all to your satisfaction!"

The class gave an ecstatic roar, the sound bouncing off the walls to create an unholy racket. Shoto flicked his eyes to the storage units and swiftly back, felt the anticipation turn his body jittery with restless energy, and was surprised to realize that he almost wanted to join in. A chance to see his classmates in action (allowing him to categorize weaknesses and liabilities), plus the chance to potentially see parts of the great and powerful All Might that the public never got to see? What was not to like?

All Might grinned at them, seeming not in the least intimidated or irritated by the noise, and looking equally as excited. "Get yourself changed, and when you're finished, I will see you at Ground Beta!"

"Yes, sir!"

Shoto's costume fit as comfortably as he had expected it to.

Father had been the one to commission the designs, in the end, but in spite of that, Shoto had to grudging admit that it served its purpose:

The dark blue jacket, with its silver accents, was created specifically to resist extreme heat, in order to (very optimistically, Shoto couldn't help the snide thought) avoid Shoto burning it up with his flames. The built-in collar (silver in color and created from a special quirk-created alloy) would sense his body temperature, and either cool it down or heat it up to keep it regulated. A functional utility belt, with pockets containing small capsules of water, pain medication, and disinfectant, bisected his waste, while dark blue pants with built-in protective knee pads of the same make made the set. White utility boots going up to mid-calve had thick treads and small, spiked soles to enable Shoto to walk on frozen ground.

Sleek, functional, understated. There were more days where he despised and hated Endeavor than there were not, but just for today, Shoto could admit to a grudging appreciation for the man's professional tastes.

His original design had been a simple white, functional and plain, with a material made specifically to withstand cold—no mention of fire, there. He had thought to cast ice over the left side of his body, putting a physical barrier between his ice and the part of himself he would love to be allowed to forget.

Father hadn't been about to let that stand—even after an extensive argument which, while it may not have ended well for Shoto, had done an unusual amount of damage to his opponent. That wasn't an accomplishment Shoto could often lay claim to, and it had helped limit some of the sting at losing the chance to push his own designs through.

Still, there was still time to add a little modification of his own...

"Yo, man, sweet outfit!"

Shoto glanced up from his contemplation to see some of the boys gathering into a loose circle around Anger-Management Issues to admire his costume. The boy himself was obviously enjoying the attention: Shoto could practically see the superiority-complex puffing up his chest, the ego in the upwards-tilt to his chin, the arrogance in his smirking mouth.

His own mouth pursing in a moue of distaste, Shoto slipped off his blazer and began unbuttoning his shirt.

"Fuckin' right it is!" AMI boasted, his overly-loud voice echoing across the long line of metal doors. He brought one red-soled black boot up to slam on the locker-room bench beside him, red clashing with pale, washed-out blue, and thumped a fist against the black straps crisscrossing his chest.

"If I'm gonna be a hero, you bet your ass I'm gonna be unforgettable! So don't get in my way, extras!"

The urge to roll his eyes was quite impossible to ignore… But Shoto had been raised to be a polite, quiet boy, with excellent manners and a calm demeanor. He had also been raised to be seen and not heard, which Shoto thought he had learned the best out of all his lessons, and served him well in this particular instance:

He turned his head away, so as not to be seen or heard, and rolled his eyes as hard as he pleased, his mouth pulling down into a sharp scowl of exasperation. The small outward expression did a lot to sooth the underlying anxiety at the thought of having to change in front of so many potential gazes, and it helped Shoto move onto the actual removing of clothes. With only the shortest of pauses, he undid the last button on his shirt and pulled it off. He made sure to keep his body turned to the side, exposing as little of his upper-body to the room as he could, and quickly slipped the new jacket over his undershirt.

His locker was wide and roomy, with a door that swung open to reveal a full-length mirror, something Shoto fully took advantage of to keep everyone in his sights and to keep as much of his body hidden from view, both. Most of his scars weren't easily visible unless they caught the light wrong, and the ones that were were concentrated mostly on his upper arms, chest, and stomach. Luckily, no one had chosen the lockers to his right or left, nor the one directly across from him, so as long as he kept his upper back at an angle to most of the room, and his torso hunched, he would most likely be in the clear.

That knowledge didn't stop the building itch crawling up his body with every set of eyes that accidentally passed over his exposed skin.

Shoto checked around him after he had finished, just in case, and was relieved to find that everyone had either been occupied with training or with the spectacle Anger-Management Issues was making of himself.

"I think my suit turned out pretty good," another student commented, not actually sounding too sure about that. He had the large, pouty sort of lips Shoto vaguely remembered seeing in an 18+ magazine one time (a magazine that had been discarded discreetly in the rubbish pile, back when Shoto's large house had contained one more teenage boy); brown eyes and short, spiky hair; and a pretty large build. He was also quite tall, the tips of his hair nearly of the same height as his locker. He held a bright-yellow suit in his hand, a functional belt with white utility pockets in the other, and a slight frown on his face.

Shoto looked him up and down, and abruptly recalled that they were, in fact, desk-neighbors. Had they been introduced? Would he have remembered, if they had?

Another boy, this one with longish black hair ending in uneven spikes about his neck and a bulging, circular shape to his elbows, slapped an encouraging hand on Big Lips's back.

"You haven't even tried it on yet, stop sounding so doubtful! Mine's looking a bit different from what I asked for, but this is UA, you know? They can afford some really decent modifications, Yaoyorozu was talking about some of the companies they have on contract."

He had on a skin-tight black and white bodysuit with half sleeves and yellow accents, perfectly coordinated to match white boots with yellow accents that ended just below the knee. There was a helmet tucked into his right arm, and Elbows clapped the other boy playfully on the back as he passed him on his way towards the doors.

"I think mine is quite merveilleux!" Shimmering purple material twirled, giving off the impression of a thousand twinkling stars glittering in the firmament—if the firmament were purple, and if the firmament were attached to a gaudy, tasteless metal suit of armor, with even more tasteless accents. "I look absolutely fabuleux!"

Elbows did a double-take, then hesitantly gave the glittery, twinkle-eyed blond the high-five his eagerly raised hand was clearly asking for. Then he stared down at his own hand, looking confused.

That was a feeling Shoto earnestly related to when he actually found himself physically leaning back, as if distance would be enough to protect himself from that unfortunate collection of disturbing annoyances. He quickly decided that he wasn't even going to think about touching that, the mere thought sending his skin crawling, and pretended he hadn't seen anything.

"Don't dawdle too long changing, or you'll be late for our first lesson with All Might!" Elbows called over his shoulder as he walked towards the exit, and gave a cheeky grin.

Fiddling with the collar of his jacket as he realized that, yet again, he had no idea who that boy was, Shoto wondered, with no little exasperation, where all these damn people had come from.

Anger-Management Issues (Shoto mentally paused, rearranged his thinking, and dubbed AMI 'Explosions' instead, as it was considerably shorter)—'Explosions' had large, ominously grenade-looking apparatuses attached to his arms; when he snarled in reply to what Elbows had said, and released little pop-pop-popping sounds from his gloved hands to emphasize his displeasure, his appearance quickly went from ominous to menacing. The sound wasn't much louder than the hiss and pop of a firecracker, but Shoto, only half his attention on pulling his pants up over his hips, caught the way another student flinched at the sound, his arms going instinctively to cover his face. The student froze and dropped his hands a moment later, but the familiar sight had been unmistakable.

Shoto's eyes flicked over to the student, then away. Unlike with Elbows and Big Lips—Elbows had already left the room, and while Big Lips was busy muttering to himself as he struggled to get into skin-tight yellow—he deliberately didn't catalog any details about the boy. Shoto tugged lightly at his belt, checking to make sure it was secure and fought to forget the way his stomach had swooped upwards into his throat, and his skin had begun to feel like a nearly-hatched spider egg had broken across it, at having born witness to such a humiliating, intimate, entirely familiar and unwelcome sight.

Then it was time put his things neatly away in his locker, tug on socks and boots and make his way outside, and Shoto forgot all about the boy with the wild green hair and freckles on his face as he walked out into the sun.

(Later, when the boy was getting chased down by Explosions in a very one-sided, familiar manner, Shoto would force himself to clench his jaw against the urge to shake All Might and shout, Are you blind, you stupid fool? Stop this already, he's going to kill him! Later, he would remember the boy from the Apprehension test, whose Quirk hurt him the way Shoto's had hurt himself and others, and would see the way the boy turned a terrible beating into a triumphant win. But as they passed through the hallways and out into the sun, he and his fellow students wearing the first step to a bright future, all Shoto cared about was All Might telling them they were heroes, and feeling the unstoppable swelling of pride in his chest.)

In the end, it was rather... anti-climatic.

The 'battle', as it were, was between a Villain Team and a Hero Team, to be decided by lottery. After being forced to stand still and without reacting as they watched the disaster of a first battle (Explosions and Iida vs. Gravity and Freckles), Shoto was glad to be allowed to head into the training facility and toward the abandoned building where he and his teammate, the boy with the extra arms (Tentacles), would play the heroes for the purpose of the exercise, against Team B (Invisible Girl and… Tails, the guy with the tail). They had fifteen minutes to complete their objective: take the 'bomb' from the villains (which could be accomplished simply by touching it), or capture them both before the buzzer rang.

Watching the first battle had been, simply put: awful.

The facility was full of cameras, if not microphones; Shoto's eyes had tracked the long line of screens, each one connected to a camera positioned to capture as much imagery as possible, and hadn't been able to stop the way his twitching fingers pushed further and further into the side of this thigh in time with his fluctuating emotions. The way Explosions had so obviously set off after Freckles sparked the first twinge of concern; that had quickly risen to anger and full-on discomfort as the boy (with such an obviously powerful, well-trained quirk) utilized his position as the more capable fighter to violently throw down his less-talented classmate (who was, understandably if rather worryingly, not using his quirk) with a malicious sort of fury that threatened to throw Shoto's icy calm out the window. The different degrees of Shoto's outrage had also fought vehemently with his determination to block the fight from his mind entirely—because recognizing an abusive relationship was one thing, but being forced to actively view it was something entirely different. It didn't help that Shoto could read lips with moderate proficiency, and what he was reading was awful enough that Shoto couldn't stop the occasional incredulous, bewildered glance at All Might, who was watching the same screens he was, with the same dialogue actually running through his ears via an earpiece... and was doing nothing.

When the hero team—Freckles's team—somehow eked out a win, Shoto was surprisingly relieved, enough that his tongue loosened and he was able to make a relatively cool and unemotional comment about the different teams and their successes and losses. But the emotions that had been stirred up within him were like the mud lying at the bottom of a shallow pond: once stirred up, the water took a long while to settle. These unpleasant, murky feelings followed Shoto with him into his battle, erasing what little had remained of his former excitement over this opportunity to finally learn from, and about, the Number One Hero. As he and Tentacles walked to the building and stopped a short way into it, waiting for their cue to start, all Shoto could think was that he hoped to get it over with quickly.

"Combat training match, second battle: START!"

Tentacles immediately spread his extra limbs, the ends of two of them turning into ears that quickly switched to mouths that said: "There's one on the North-side of the fourth-floor hallway—"

Half of Shoto's struggling equilibrium urged him to hear the boy out. Allies were of immense importance to a hero, and it was never too soon to start cultivating them; if he brushed Tentacles off now, he risked alienating him and causing fiction between them in any future activities.

The other fifty-percent of Shoto was a squirming mess of maggots crawling through his intestines, digging into soft flesh and sending nerves tingling, doing their very best to break their way up and out; it was this side of him that pushed the plan that had vaguely settled in his head into solid form, winning out over caution and good sense.

He began, first, by walking. "Go wait outside. It's not going to be safe here in a minute," he cut off Tentacles mid-sentence, his mind grimly focusing around the knowledge that he needed to finish this, now. Without checking to see if Tentacles was doing as he'd been told, Shoto placed his right-hand flat against the wall beside him, and let the icy tendrils of his quirk flow through the tips of his fingers and out across the wall.

Crystals of ice formed and layered and spread out from his right foot and his right hand both, and in a matter of seconds, the floor had been covered—then the ceiling, then the walls, then the entirety of the long, dark hallway before him. Shoto tilted his head, counting silent seconds until a light tickle of coldness in his right shoulder and the numbers in his head told him he had expelled enough ice to cover the whole of the building.

The 'Villains' were either preparing for an ambush, waiting to begin a daring face-to-face fight with the 'Heroes', or were hoping to turn this into a battle of attrition.

"Either way," Shoto murmured to himself, feeling as cold as the ice trailing from his body, "they don't stand a chance."

As an afterthought, Shoto removed his hand from the wall and placed it on his left-side; the half-formed idea that had entered his head in the changing room bloomed to life as vapor froze across the entirety of his left side, from the tips of his white boots to the roots of his red hair, and thickened, covering all the parts of himself he hated to see in a comforting layer of cold. Some of the insects burrowing their way into his insides seemed to settle, then, as Shoto breathed out white clouds of air and moved purposefully in the direction of the villain team.

Ice crunched beneath his feet as he entered the room. Tentacles had shouted out the location of the second person he had sensed from somewhere near the front of the building, and Shoto had obligingly headed in their direction, a guilty thought that he could have tried a little harder to listen before dismissing his partner flitting through his head and out again instantly. Once in the room, Shoto paused a moment to eye Tails, who was in a defensive stance Shoto recognized from his own training and had a nervous, but determined look in his eyes.

Dark amusement floated through his mind, and Shoto told the boy mildly: "You can move, or try to, if you like; but you should probably consider how useful you'll actually be once you've torn the skin off of both of your feet."

He smiled—a cold, tight smile—and was rewarded when the boy shrank back and didn't make a move when Shoto walked past him.

His left hand touched down on frozen metal, and All Might's voice over the loudspeakers called: "HERO TEAM, WIIIIIIN!"

With only a second's hesitation after the words rang throughout the concrete room, Shoto let his left-side rush out of him in the form of direct heat. Ice began to melt, turning the room nearly invisible from the resulting steam. Shoto watched it disperse, the ice turning to water, and commented mildly to the motionless boy behind him, without turning around: "With the difference in our levels of ability, there was no way you would have won. Don't take it personally."

Having done what he needed to do, Shoto turned on his heel and left. He walked past Tentacles (whose stare he could feel on him as he passed, and subsequently ignored), through the operations center, past the central viewing room and into the first utility closet he could find, wherein he allowed himself a few, precious seconds to chase away discombobulation with the comforting familiarity of pain.

Then he got to his feet, rearranged his face into a cool, inscrutable mask, and went to hear the no-doubt uninspiring opinions of his peers.

(His building disappointment with someone he had secretly admired for most of his life he tucked away, deep, deep, deep down inside him, and tried his hardest to pretend he hadn't felt it in the first place.)