Chapter 9: Dorm Life
Chapter Text
After UA issued several press releases and several top heroes spoke in interviews in which they fully supported Izuku, the press died down. Major news publications didn't want to be denied future exclusives with the top school in Japan or popular heroes. So after a while, the only really terrible things being said about him were on smaller websites and in comments online. After his address was leaked, it was easy for them to dig into his life. Their mistake was seeing that he was the son of a single mother in a run down apartment building and assuming they didn't have the resources to do anything about it themselves. They should have dug just a bit deeper.
Inko Midoriya was a well known name in the legal community, she owned a small legal firm with a select few lawyers hand picked by herself (and vetted by her son and his contacts). They specialized in discrimination related cases and were ruthless in going after schools, landlords, and companies unlucky enough to find themselves across from one of her lawyers in a court room. She had a reputation for taking only pennies of the large sums of money granted to her clients, just enough to pay her employees and keep her son fed. All of her staff were feared, but seeing that head of green hair next to the person suing your client made every lawyer in Japan shake in their overpriced shoes.
So when Inko herself filed lawsuits against all the people involved in publishing discriminatory articles or videos for discrimination and harassment of a minor, they advised their clients to settle out and apologize and maybe change their names and flee the country. The first few didn't listen and she tore them all apart in court. One of the largest news companies in Japan was put completely out of business in less than a month. The trials ended in record time, all in her favor and suddenly, clients were willing to sign away their souls if it meant avoiding seeing her in court.
Word spread about what happened to people who dared to come after the quirkless kid and there were few people who wanted to end up like that. The Midoriya family was suddenly very wealthy from all the millions Inko had won in court. No one with a brain published anything about Izuku anymore. The only issues the boy had were strangers on the street glaring or throwing insults at him, but he could handle that. Life had been so amazing since the dorms were instituted that Izuku couldn't be bothered to care about the words of strangers.
Within a week of the original media shitshow, they were moved into the dorms. Izuku's room was next to Katsuki's with Shinso and Todoroki across the hall. They were on the top floor, Kirishima, Kaminari, Tokoyami, and Shoji below them. Then Iida, Sato, Kouda, and Aoyama took the last floor between Izuku and Sero and Ojiro. The girls' side was made up of Mina, Jirou, Momo, and Asui so each girl was assigned a room on their own floor.
Aizawa explained when they moved in that rooms were assigned to prevent any further issues within the class. The elevators required a thumb print from a student registered as living on the floor selected before it would take you to that floor. The doors to the stairs wouldn't allow anyone not on that floor through either. If someone wanted to visit someone that stayed on another floor, they had to be accompanied by someone on that floor. The common areas all had mics and cameras and Aizawa stressed that they were run by an AI that would report any misconduct to him immediately and that the teacher's dorm building was less than a minute walk from the student's. It was obvious to everyone that Izuku Midoriya was being carefully protected and none of them wanted to end up like Uraraka, so there were no complaints.
Uraraka's friend group had been given a last chance to change. All of them were on probation for the rest of the year. They could be expelled at any moment if they so much as looked at another student wrong and had to take classes twice a week after school on discrimination and ethics. The rest of the class had steered clear of the probationary students and Izuku was presented with a stack of letters by Iida from them voicing apologies about not standing up for him and offers to study together in the common room or library. He took them up on the offers, discovering quickly that Shoji, Tokyami, Sato, and Kouda were just quiet people who didn't make a lot of effort to be social and weren't quirksists avoiding him.
Mina had joined Izuku and his friends for lunch one day. Turned out she had a friend in support that introduced her to Hatsume the first day and the pink girl had quickly developed a crush so she'd been spending all her free time trying to woo the inventor. After the scene in class she'd decided to spend more time with her classmates, starting with Izuku because "You're smart and cute and if you can put up with blasty over there you can't be a bad guy!"
The small explosion that followed that statement surprised no one. Kirishima later confided in Izuku that he was relieved that the girl whose bravery inspired him in middle school didn't turn out to be "a quirksist monster". Mina was very pleased when Hatsume started sitting with them as well, eager to harass Izuku into testing her inventions. Momo and Iida also sat at their table regularly, a bit formal but that might just be their upbringing so it was overlooked. The more quiet students in their class didn't often join them for lunch, preferring to eat in peace and quiet, but they studied together regularly now so Izuku was happy.
One day, after leaving tea with Nezu a bit before lunch ended, they returned to the class early to find Aoyama eating in the classroom with a Monoma Neito from class 1B. The cousins had wanted to let Izuku know they were with him, Monoma having a 'villain' quirk and Aoyama having been teased for his fashion choices and quirk drawback, but they weren't used to approaching people. So they'd stuck together and tried to figure out how to go about befriending the quirkless boy. Luckily for them, Izuku was good at getting people to reveal their secrets and, after hearing all that, they were both dragged to lunch with his friends daily.
Monoma quickly developed a friendly rivalry with Katsuki, both boys fighting to be the best but ready to eviscerate anyone who talked shit to or about their friends. For the first time in his life, Izuku had more friends than he knew what to do with. He didn't need to know what to do with them, they quickly realized that Katsuki had been Izuku's only friend and the two of them had been the first to befriend both Shinso and Todoroki. Kirishima and Kaminari quickly had a mission to let them experience all the friend things they'd missed out on. So they spent their time off campus at arcades, museums, amusement parks, and cafes. They went shopping and watched movies eating overpriced snacks and poking fun at terrible plot lines. In the dorms, they played video games, binged shows, and got yelled at by Katsuki for messing up the kitchen trying to bake.
Todoroki started a tiktok account at Kaminari's insistence and it quickly gained millions of followers. The son of the number two hero joining social media was enough to have people flocking to his account. However, it was the wild conspiracy videos and the look into dorm life that kept them around. It had the very nice side effect of lessening the hate toward Izuku since he was very heavily featured in Todoroki's videos.
Standing on the other side of the corkboard covered in papers and red string helping explain how exactly the government was controlling birth rates via the water supply. Dancing around after dominating a mario kart tournament. Covered in flower and giggling as Katsuki used a fire extinguisher on their latest attempt at making souffle. Bursting into the room while Todoroki answered FAQs shouting about the ghost haunting the showers. All of it helped the world see that Izuku was a normal teenager and not just a freak of nature to be hated.
Life at the dorms would have been perfect if not for one thing. With all his friends taking up so much time and not being allowed to leave campus without another student or a teacher present, it was hard for Izuku to get away for his ZNetwork responsibilities. Thankfully, most of his work was online, but Izuku couldn't go to going away parties in person very easily. Curfew made the parties at night impossible and the reasons Izuku and Katsuki gave for needing to leave campus had to be innocuous. That made it easy for their classmates to try to invite themselves when they overheard the two saying they were going to a movie or cafe after school.
So Nova was stepping up to deliver the packages and Izuku was so thankful for them he could cry. It was reassuring to see that the network could function if anything ever happened to him. Hopefully that meant it could continue until the day it wasn't necessary anymore.