Izuku spent a very long time sitting on his bed with an open notebook, staring at three pages of details he had noted down about the two dreams. It might just be gobbledygook like he told Aizawa... or maybe it wasn't. He couldn't remember much about the first dream. It had been short and, in retrospect, blurry although it had felt crystal clear at the time. He had a lot more notes written for the second.

"Freshman (at a university? I don't think he was in high school). I recognized the school colors and logo, but I can't remember what the logo was. The school color was red and... white? Silver? Can't tell on the second one. Could have been yellow. The bridge I was on was a pedestrian bridge only, no cars, and it looked very old. There was the dam, of course, and there was another bridge visible, a suspension bridge, and this one did have cars on it." He had sketched a loose map of the breeding range of bald eagles, so the northern US and Canada. How did you tell the difference between Americans and Canadians? How did you tell if you were a Canadian?

An internet search informed Izuku that "Canadians, unlike Americans, will insist that curling is a real sport." Izuku was pretty sure that was supposed to be a joke. He looked up videos of curling. It seemed like a real sport. Apparently Izuku was a Canadian.

Were these dreams actually repressed memories? Were they his memories or were they borrowed from another? Izuku felt like he knew this Chris, but was that because Izuku actually knew him? If so, did he meet the man before or after his disappearance? When he stood by the bridge railing, Izuku was talking and thinking as if he had been away from home for a long time, so if these were actually the greenette's memories... had he really been gone just a week? Izuku had heard that time-travel quirks existed, but he didn't know what rules they followed, whether whatever you changed in the past would be how things happened anyway, whether parallel timelines could be created or whether it was possible to erase yourself with a paradox.

There wasn't enough information. There were no answers to be had. It was enough to make him pull on his (still too short) hair. It was a good thing it was Sunday... or he would have been so late for school.

Izuku and Katsuki took a day off from running and walked home together from class on Wednesday for the first time in years. They didn't decide to walk together. It just happened. Conversation was still somewhat stilted, but it wasn't really awkward.

As the two of them passed by a grocery store, a teen with a blonde tail stepped out into the street carrying several heavy, cloth bags on his shoulder and apparently consulting his phone for GPS directions. The monotonic voice informed him to take a left. His school must get out earlier than theirs and be some distance away because Izuku didn't recognize the uniform. The student looked up, his eyes widened and he dropped two of his bags with a clatter. "You!" he yelled, pointing at Izuku.

What in the world? "Me?" Izuku pointed at Izuku.

"It's you!" He didn't sound particularly angry

"Who the hell is this, Izuku?" Kacchan asked.

Izuku shook his head. "I t-think you have me m-mistaken for someone else," the greenette stuttered out.

"I do not!"

"Alright, calm the fuck down, extra," Kacchan stepped in front of Izuku, crossing his arms. "Who are you and what's your problem? He sure as hell doesn't know you."

"You jumped into the middle of a mugging and knocked the attacker senseless right in front of me," the unknown student said more calmly. "You weren't even wearing a mask. You expect me not to remember you?"

Izuku blinked. "I did what?"

"When was this?" Kacchan demanded.

"I don't remember the date, like two months ago. It was on a Tuesday."

Tuesday the fifteenth. One of the days Izuku didn't remember. "What's your name?" Kacchan demanded of the other student.

"Ojiro Mashirao," he replied, now looking abashed, perhaps by his outburst.

"Alright. I'm Bakugou Katsuki, that's Midoriya Izuku, and he has no idea where he was that day or any other day in that goddamned hell week, so you're going to come with us and sit down at the park down the block and you're going to explain to us everything you know about where this guy was that day, alright?" Ojiro did not seem to think it was "alright."

"Please," Izuku begged. "You're the first person I know of who saw me at all that week. I have no idea where I was or why."

Ojiro looked like this was all well above his usual pay grade, but picked up his fallen groceries with a sigh and motioned for Bakugou to lead the way down the street.

The trio seated themselves at a rundown picnic table well in sight of two dozen witnesses. Izuku pulled out the notebook where he had written out the details of his dreams. "Could you tell me

exactly what happened please? And when?"

"Only if you promise me a full explanation of what is going on here."

Katsuki took over. "He showed up as normal for school on the Monday before you saw him, apparently escaped from a villain on his way home, met All Might and then vanished off the face of the planet for a week. He turned up in a back alley without even realizing a week had passed and, of course, ran to school 'cause he thought he was going to be late for class and didn't even notice anything was up until we all had a fit when he showed. That's all. Police don't know anything. He doesn't know anything. Nobody knows anything, except maybe you."

Ojiro glanced uncertainly between the two of them. "This is for real?"

"Yeah," Izuku sighed. "Yeah, it's for real. I don't think it made the papers anywhere..." so it wouldn't be easy for them to prove everything if Ojiro was convinced they were lying.

"Alright. Sure. I'll believe you for now. It's not as if I have much to say. I was on my way to school, taking a short cut which I no longer take." Izuku interrupted to get the exact address--it was more than sixty kilometers away--and time from Ojiro--apparently this happened at exactly 7:43 am. "From the timestamp on a text I sent out a few seconds before hand.

"There was an older man walking in front of me. A heavy-set figure in a hoodie and a medical mask reached out of a doorway and pulled a knife on the man. I... was mostly petrified, not sure if I should intervene or not. I'm great at knife defense--been practicing a decade--but I was pretty far away, still... and I couldn't remember in the heat of the moment what self-defense laws would permit me to do. There's this sudden movement on the neighboring roof and this black blur jumps down into the alley from the top of a second story building," Izuku was surprised he hadn't broken an ankle; maybe Ojiro was exaggerating or maybe Izuku had been wearing some kind of specialized footwear. Impact-absorbing boots did exist... if you had the money, but a lot of them were considered "combat support items" and the trade was very carefully regulated by the Cage Match Act (yes, that was the law's real name). "The blur is on the mugger in an instant, grabs his wrist and disarms him just like I've been taught to do, maybe better. The mugger tries to punch the blur and the blur dodges then kicks him in the leg. The mugger goes down and then the blur elbow-whips him in the head. The blur looks up at me and the blur is you. You wave at me, toss the knife onto a dumpster across the street and take off."

"Was my hair this length?" Izuku asked. "What?"

"My hair used to be much longer. I cut off my curls during that missing week. Did I still have them?"

"No, your hair was short."

"What was I wearing?"

"Black," Ojiro repeated. "I couldn't see any details." "Boots or tennis shoes?" Izuku asked.

"Combat boots," Ojiro nodded. "Those were noticeable. They might have been support equipment of some kind. That would explain how you managed to land without breaking a foot after leaping from that height." It seemed their trains of thought were arriving at the same station.

"It might," Izuku nodded.

"The police already know about this, then? I don't need to make a report? I mean, I did at the time but I didn't know who you were."

Izuku shook his head, then considered. "It might be helpful if you could call..." he fished for a business card In his backpack, copying down Tsukauchi's number and name onto a small piece of paper. "The detective from my case would want to know, I'm sure."

"Where did you learn to fight like that? To move like that? I've been practicing most of my life and I don't think I could have done that... not in practice anyway. It's easier in, well, actual practice if you know what I mean."

Izuku shook his head. "I didn't know any of that stuff before I disappeared." "Wait. What? That's not... that's not possible."

Kacchan snorted. "Pretty much anything is possible with quirks."

Ojiro considered this. "Can you still fight like that?" Izuku nodded, carefully scribbling down a few more details in his notebook. "But you don't remember learning?" The greenette shook his head. "Would you show me?"

"This ought to be good," Katsuki smiled, leaning back and clasping his hands.

Given that they just met, it was more than a little odd, but Kacchan had been looking for new sparing partners. "Uh, sure? Don't... actually try to hurt each other or anything."

Ojiro was an incredibly skilled fighter. Izuku knew that from the way the other student moved (although Izuku didn't know exactly what tipped him off). Izuku--this new version of him--was every bit as good.

"Any chance you'd be interested in sparring again?" the tailed boy asked after calling a halt. "I'm trying to apply to UA and it's good practice... and plenty of fun."

"Huh. What are the odds?" Kacchan mused.

"Odds of what?"

"Of all three of us planning to apply to UA," Izuku answered. "Huh. Hero course I presume?"

"Hell yes," Katsuki smirked.

The three exchanged phone numbers. Ojiro looked at the time. "Oh, I'm so late! My cousin is going to kill me! I promised her I'd bring ingredients for dessert!" Ojiro took off in a panic down the street, shopping bags streaming behind him.

Katsuki stared after the other student for a moment. "Well, that was weird."

"On many levels," Izuku agreed.

"What are the odds we run into someone who saw you?"

Izuku snorted. "The real weird thing is that I wasn't seen. Though it's a bit of a coincidence that

he's planning to apply to UA, it's not that unusual; UA receives five times more applications every year than any other school in the country."

"Still weird," Katsuki declared.

"Less weird than everything else happening to me right now, but still weird, sure," Izuku sighed.

"So you got brainwashed into being a vigilante for a week and then forgot about it, that's old news." Izuku couldn't tell if Katsuki was joking or not.

"The Nakayma Act on Public Quirk Use defines vigilantism as using a quirk to attack villains without a license; civilians are permitted to use their quirks in public to save oneself or another from injury, death or kidnapping provided the quirk is not intentionally used to injure another person in any way or cause any kind of property damage. I don't have a quirk, so I wasn't a vigilante."

"Yeah, I know... but would Ojiro have been guilty of vigilantism if he had attacked the guy with the knife? I mean, his quirk doesn't turn off."

"The rules for mutation and companion quirks are subtle," Izuku replied. "As long as he did not use his quirk in an "intentional and instinctually controllable way" he wouldn't have been doing anything wrong."

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you have all that stuff memorized."

They walked in silence for a time. Brainwashed vigilante... well, there were many, many worse things he could have been doing. This seemed to suggest that whoever had a hold of him wasn't a complete monster, though who knew what Izuku's shadow had been thinking when he rescued the old man? This was all so... he needed to get something off his chest. "I keep having weird dreams," Izuku said, admitting it to another for the first time. He didn't want to worry my mother. "Lucid dreams. I never had those before. I had another one last night."

Katsuki gave him an incredulous look. "You think they're your lost memories or something?" "I don't know what to think. The one last night... I was at an anime club."

Katsuki coughed. "I'm sorry, what?"

"I was at an anime club with this exchange student who calls himself Chris and our other friend Kuma and Kuma was complaining about not having enough popcorn even though she still had half a bowl and we were watching a really old anime, I knew the series but I can't quite place it now. It was mecha anime. There were other people there--it was a big club... twenty or thirty people at least?"

"You have weird ass dreams."

"I already said that," Izuku replied.

"What others have you had?"

"There was one where I was in a military mess hall and one where I was on a bridge meeting Chris and watching a bald eagle..."

Katsuki raised an eyebrow. "So just those three so far?"

"Just those that I remember anyway."

"Those don't sound like they could possibly be your memories, unless you time traveled or went to an alternate dimension or some crazy shit like that. Did you ever see your face in a mirror or something?" Izuku shook his head. He had never been that lucky.

Once upon a time, Izuku had dreaded dodgeball. It had been his least favorite part of physical education, not that he really liked any part of physical education. He was small and he was quirkless and it was a prime time for people to point that out. Now, however, dodgeball dreaded him. He didn't want to show off how he had changed, didn't want people to know, but suddenly revealing himself to be good at dodgeball was unlikely to raise many questions.

Izuku caught the first ball thrown at him effortlessly with one hand, the second ball with the other. Katsuki--standing on the opposite side of the gym--stared at Izuku with wide eyes. "You'd better be afraid," the greenette preened, throwing first one ball and then the other--because he was suddenly cool and ambidextrous like that--striking Ono and Ishida on the ankles. They stared at him in disbelief, as did a number of others. "We're doomed, aren't we?" Katsuki said in the relative quiet between barrages.

"Doomed," Izuku replied, grinning wildly. He dodged two projectiles and nailed Kacchan in the shin.

This must be what it was like to have a quirk, to suddenly realize there was something you could do that no one else could, not quite like you anyway. It was joyous.