This is basically a continuation of last chapter that I put off writing because I was also juggling writing other fics. I've finally had a fic hit 1k favorites (hurrah), but now I should stop neglecting my other creations. If you don't exactly remember what happened, I advise you to reread at least the last chapter.
Have fun reading!
-SpiritOfErebus
As soon as I got lost, wandered for about thirty minutes, and finally found home after the awkward conversation that took place, something floated out of High Priestess, before slamming me against a wall. An ethereal figure was pressing me against the fragile closet doors, making the wood creak in protest.
"Listen here, you coward. Now, I don't know why you're trying to expose your own uselessness, but I exist because of it. And if your cover is broken, then I… disappear."
"…Okay?" I croaked, my brain still reeling from the revelation.
"So if you ever mess up again, and spill our secret to somebody else, I will slit your throat before your lies get out."
The dam cat was still looking up at me, though it was slightly wary of something that it couldn't sense.
"Do. You. Understand?"
My thoughts took a turn, a somersault, and then finally got back to me.
"Basically, you're a stand that will kill me if I ever say you don't exist, right?"
"And how would I know what a stand is?" I could feel a metaphorical eyebrow being raised.
"You're… a part of me. Your creation was based off of the impressions of other, but most fundamentally, probably had me as an origin. So, naturally, you would have all the knowledge I had when you were first created out of… whoever's expectations."
"Oddly intelligent of you." The voice said.
I was able to slump down to the hardwood floor, my sneakers slowly dragging over the carpet and creating crease.
"Still, telling somebody may be the correct move." The voice said. "If you had an ally that aided you in keeping the secret, it may be better for both our survival."
"…Both?" I said, looking at the patch of air next to me. That was probably where they were, right?
"If your quirk stops working, I die. But before I fade away, I'll slit your throat and take you with me."
There was a tense silence. 'What was the fixation of slitting throats about?' I thought, mildly confused. I never had these thoughts.
"Yohaku Tenshin, what in tarnation is going on?" my mom shouted from the kitchen.
"Quirk stuff!" I shouted back.
"You don't have to hide the fact from your family too, idiot." The voice scoffed. "I am you. I know that your family already knows. Also, I'm over here, you idiot."
I turned, and saw the dust in the air fly around in a configuration that resembled…. Me?
"That expression on your face now… you must be wondering why I look like you."
"Did you just quote a video game?"
"Not important. Anyways, the reason is…"
"Yes?" I asked, leaning towards the spirit. Maybe it was a deep psychological reason, or maybe some subconscious hinting that we could both be affected by expectations, and if I fade out of the public view, I would be forgotten and-
"…There is no reason." The spirit said lamely.
"That's so lame…" I said, shaking my head and smirking. "You were so serious before-"
"It's because of you! You're the one I learned to be lame from!" the spirit accused, pointing a finger at me.
"Is everything all right?" my mother walked over, her hair color swapping to a dusty color before she looked at my doppelganger.
"I'm… not even going to ask." She said, before walking away slowly.
"It's probably best that you don't… for your sanity."
My brother chose that moment to come back from school. He took a look at me and my doppelganger, before walking into the house.
Then, he paused for a bit, before running over to the kitchen.
"Kaa-san! Don't worry! The grey is just the color of dust! You're not old!"
Turning around, he glared at my doppelganger, who had the grace to look sheepish (well, as sheepish as a cloud of humanoid dust could look). Obviously, my brother probably read the spirit's thoughts, because he actually understood the expression, before he ran off to comfort my mother and her insecurities.
I sat in the doorway, looked at the dust devil sitting besides me, and scratched my head.
"This is going to be awkward, isn't it?"
…
It was a bit disconcerting to have an animal in your bag as you traveled. You could feel them fidget, and you also felt an urge to be more cautions and not squeeze into crowds, lest the rabid beast bite anybody.
Luckily, the cat-earth spirit fusion was anything but rabid. However, I could feel their irritation build as I squeezed past crowds of businessmen, avoided crowds of schoolgirls, and all the while tried not to impale the cat with a loose pencil.
Thankfully, being in the time where expectations began to slowly apply themselves, my figure slowly buffed up. My new three inches of height carried me to new… heights, and saved the cat from brushing sides with other backpacks or sling bags slung over shoulders (seriously, what is with that cliché in anime? Sling bags were meant to be worn across the shoulders, not to stress the arm and the shoulder).
Disregarding brief mental monologues about the proper orientation of bags, I and the earth spirit-cat fusion finally arrived at UA. That was a sentence I never thought I had to think, but with a quirk like mine, you get used to it.
It had been a couple of days since I had spilled my secret, and UA had been tough to attend to in the meanwhile. With frequent headaches and extreme drowsiness, which I had associated with quirk exhaustion, I was forced to bring … it… to school. With my doppelganger, who I began to call Dust for convenience, I now let him do my homework and fill out paperwork.
"Why did I agree to this?" A low hissing of the wind said. I could see the vague sillouette of Dust hovering near my face.
"If I can't keep up with hero school, I get busted and you disappear." I whispered, vaguely positive expression still on my face.
Before I knew it, my feet had taken me around to the classroom. As usual, I had absolutely no idea how I got there.
"I could just memorize a map if you want." Dust whispered dully.
"You're as hopeless with directions as me." I whispered back, bringing a finger up to my lips to signal silence as I opened the door.
Unknown to me, somebody heard the silent conversation. I noticed Jirou raising an eyebrow as I entered the room. Dust became a little more visible, and in response, he promptly dispersed into a pile of lint and zoomed into my pockets.
"Is she onto us?" I almost said, before biting back my words. My face took on a rather constipated look for a second, before I went to hide behind Shoji as the one, solitary gaze seemed like a little too much. I nodded hello just as he raised a tentacle to form a mouth.
"Hello, Tehshin-san."
"Hello, Shoji-san. How was your evening yesterday?"
"Not that exciting. I had to brush up on biology."
"Oh, yeah. We have that test… on Friday?"
"Yeah. After the field trip. By the way, are you excited for something like that?"
"I don't think I'll be able to do much." I said, scratching my head. "My quirk takes a lot of preparation to use correctly, and in that time, any second not spent rescuing is somewhat inefficient."
"Still, just without setting up your quirk, you should be able to at least have some sort of control over the elements, correct?"
I nodded. "If worse comes to worst, I'll just pack some charms to form a makeshift moonlit gap. I have to draw each of those by hand, though, so I probably will save those for the real emergencies."
I would have to remember to print out a couple for Thursday.
Then, Toru walked into the room. I nodded in her direction as I turned to get some notebook out of my bag to write down whatever announcement Aizawa-sensei wanted to say today.
A dry lecture began as Aizawa-sensei shambled into the room, leaned on the lectern-like object in front of the room, and talked about reminders to sign the field trip form, not to slack off, some vague life lessons, and stuff that I generally didn't pay attention to. I allowed Dust to take control of my arm and scribble down the notes while I mentally checked the schedule today, to think about what acts I had to pull off in order to fulfill the criteria for the practical lessons today.
Then, my distracted self was struck by a phrase that Aizawa-sensei said like a lightning bolt.
"-elect a class president."
I suppressed a coughing fit. Dust lost control of my arm, and my pencil marred the pristine notebook paper with a searing slash of graphite.
"C-class president?" Dust whispered. One of Shoji's tentacles turned into an eye and looked at me, and Dust immediately shut up.
It kind of sucked to have classmates with super hearing.
I took control of my hand and scribbled something in a corner.
"Write to communicate." I wrote in the smallest and faintest kanji possible. No offense, Shoji-san, but your senses are really annoying to deal with. I could feel a slight gust at the back of my neck as Dust made himself the upper half of his forehead appear. From somewhere in the room, Tokoyami's Dark Shadow peeked out ominously from under his seat.
As Iida shouted about democratic elections, I began to sweat in my uniform. This was exactly the type of situation that might actually get me elected. I could already know some of the people that would probably vote for me.
As I absent mindedly voted for Iida, I observed the votes being collected, expressions growing more and more confident, and nervous fidgeting intensify.
Iida took up a piece of chalk and began to tally the votes. As he wrote all of our names and began to tag on votes quickly, a single line after my name made me begin to sweat.
If I actually became class president, my situation would get even worse than it had already been. Instead of suffering migraines and, occasionally, split personality disorder (mainly on holidays, presumably whenever people outside of the class made assumptions about me), I would probably collapse right after I was out of the public eye. I was considering painkillers, and wondered if the expectations of being an upstanding hero student would cancel out possibly getting addicted.
Still, the best course of action was just… to avoid being elected in the first place. I couldn't modify the votes of other people, obviously. I could just come clean about my quirk and dying to sharp rock to throat (courtesy of Dust), but maybe I could modify… the chalkboard.
"Can you manipulate chalk?" I wrote on the paper.
Pocket lint slowly crept out of my pocket and formed an inconspicuous check mark between two of the college ruled lines.
"Good. Switch my results and Iida's results if I get more than one vote." I scribbled.
The check mark just shifted to the right, before disappearing. All the while, a tentacle with an eye watched this in slight confusion. I could literally feel the confusion searing through my mind, giving me a rapid headache as Shoji's thoughts probably flew across the spectrum of doubt and distrust. Dust's form shuddered inside my pockets, no doubt affected as well.
"Yoz has to chanfe it." I struggled to write the kanji this time, the letters turning out shaky. My vision was blurring, and my eyesight literally split the notebook into two. Waves of color split(?) across my vision.
"This didn't happen when I told Toru this…" I thought, pretending that everything was normal on the outside. I didn't even dare to close my eyes or massage my forehead. Maybe it was just the rapidly changing expectations? That didn't make sense either…
I slightly squinted my swimming vision at the chalkboard, and found my heart stop as Iida tagged on a second line next to my name with one quick stroke. The two lines of chalk seemed like a death sentence to me now, a sword of Damocles hanging above my aching head. It fit quite literally, being a warning about the perils of being in a position of power.
It came as a sigh of relief when the letters on the board slowly began to wiggle- or was it just my imagination? The kanji for Iida Tensei slowly morphed into Yohaku Tenshin, the chalk dust shifting like pieces of a puzzle. My name did the same thing, and although the characters were a bit more complicated and Dust was probably experiencing a headache as well, the arrangement looked almost perfect.
Iida looked down on the list of names and paused for a second. Sweat began to pool in my brow, but it flowed anyways in spite of shifting expectations, because everybody was supposed to be nervous during elections… right?
At last, Iida looked away from the shifted names and continued adding tallies. In the end Midoriya ended up with two votes, Yaoyorozu ended up with three, and Iida himself got the two votes that were technically mine. Most other people received one vote, and the people that didn't get any votes at least got the honor of not being selfish.
With the one, solitary vote besides my name, I knew that only I had voted for Iida. Then, since I switched Iida's name and my name, I technically voted for myself.
It was sort of a reminder that without my quirk, only I believed in myself.
As Iida and Midoriya debated over who should get the position (with Midoriya heavily protesting while Iida, though incredibly eager to be vice president, still tried to push the position onto Midoriya), I could feel the expectations on me specifically subside, though the headache and mild quirk exhaustion persisted.
"You're going to have to do a lot of the moving today." I whispered to Dust. "Somehow, I'm already exhausted."
"I'm already exhausted from moving that chalk. And you basically are me. If you get a headache, I get one too." Dust whispered back.
"You're supposed to be a spirit. You don't get tired."
…
While Dust staggered his way with my body (that sounded weird) through English and science class, I was instead just… meditating. It didn't exactly help a lot. In fact, it just kind of made the situation worse. Still, I was way too tired to pay attention to something as boring as English.
Right after science, I shoved everything into my backpack, remembered that I didn't actually have to because it was lunch next, and then walked out after a majority of the other students. Toru stayed behind as well, citing a fictitious assignment that she had to do for math.
Once everybody else filed out of the room, with Kaminari and Tokoyami consoling me about the fact that I had lost the election, I finally collapsed.
Toru walked over with slight degree of haste.
"What's going on?" she asked. "Quirk problems?"
"Honestly, all of my problems are-"
"So you're calling me a problem now?" Dust appeared, waving an appendage at Toru. "Hi, by the way."
"So you can do that now, huh?"
"Stop ignoring me!" Dust said. "I exist as much as he does."
"Is it… normal for parts of your quirk to gain sentience, or is it another thing with the cats?"
"I have no idea." I said. "Well, things can't possibly get worse."
There was an awkward silence, before I thought about something that could happen.
"Maybe somebody could discover the election fraud by reading over the ripped votes in the recycling bin, or the two people that voted for me could find each other."
"That's actually pretty unlikely." Toru said. "I didn't vote for you, so… maybe Tokoyami?"
"I don't know." I said, shrugging. "But whatever happens, the positions are already set in stone."
…
"Who did you entrust the sacred position of class president to?" Tokoyami said to a hapless Kaminari. Amidst the hubbub of the cafeteria, the two searched for a certain person.
"Uh… what did you say?" Kaminari said, clearly not used to talking to a hardcore chuuni like Tokoyami.
The bird-headed student sighed. "Who did you vote for ing the class president election?"
"Oh! Why didn't you just say that in the first place? I voted for-"
Then, the alarms started to blare.
Now, our MC was saved by the… bell? Alarm?
It's literally been three months, or a quarter of a year since the last update. Sorry. I've had to reacquaint myself to the beginning of BNHA since I haven't really done anything pertaining to BNHA recently.
If you want to remind me to actually write stuff, join the Discord and annoy me.
Link: discord . gg / 9t9MK3jHmV
Hope you enjoyed, and happy (late) Thanksgiving to you Yankees out there!
-SpiritOfErebus