Creation began on 05-17-23
Creation ended on 05-20-23
Neon Genesis Evangelion
My Hero, Shinji Ikari: Dorm Rooms
A/N: We've all seen the episode of MHA where Class 1-A viewed the rooms of their respective classmates, but in this chapter, what were Shinji and Rumiko's reactions to their classmates' rooms when they were situated with them?
It was just a suggestion, but since they were going to be here at U.A. with the rest of them, it was not a bad idea for Shinji Ikari and Rumiko Gaidoku to get a better understanding of their new classmates of 1-A. For once, Mineta had suggested something that was actually beneficial to the pair's personal and social recovery.
"Who's first?" Rumiko asks, and suddenly all eyes were on Midoriya.
"The fanboy," Kaminari tells them.
"Fanboy?" Shinji questions.
Midoriya's room was definitely a fanboy's room. Practically every space depicted All Might from his glory days of being a hero. You could tell that the young man had great ambitions about being just like him. Of course, Midoriya became embarrassed by their perception of him.
"Well, he is the nation's greatest hero," Shinji expresses as Shado looks at the figures of All Might on a small cabinet.
"The way his face looks, it's like he's wearing a mask," his daughter states, and then Toya comes over to look at the figures beside her.
"A hero who doesn't need a mask is among the best," he tells her.
Shinji looks up at a poster of All Might, actually impressed that this world he was now living in had a hero that people could look up to and be proud of for helping them in situations of great difficulty. Even if the man that he heard was teaching here was past his prime and no longer the great hero that he was once before, Shinji couldn't fault anyone for still having admiration for him. At the end of the day, heroes were still people, and people were not invincible.
"Hey, Midoriya, you have a nice room," he praises the boy. "Really."
"Thank you," Midoriya replies.
"Tokoyami's next!" Hagakure cheers.
However, Tokoyami's room was a no-go zone for Shado and Toya, due to it being limited in lighting and both toddlers disliking the dark a little. This left their parents to examine his room for themselves.
"So, you two don't like the dark?" Uraraka asks the toddlers while their parents were looking around Tokoyami's room.
"No," Toya states. "The dark is where the monsters thrive…and we've been locked in the dark for long periods."
That's when she and Hagakure understood that Gendo had likely tortured the children by locking them in dark rooms.
"I'm sorry," Hagakure apologizes to them.
Shinji and Rumiko come out of Tokoyami's room, both with expressions of concern, but for different reasons; Shinji's because he noticed an authentic sword on display in his room…and Rumiko because she had recently learned of what his Quirk was capable of.
"Dark," Shinji tells her.
"Dark," she repeats.
"Friendly?" Toya asks them.
"Don't go in there alone," they both tell him and Shado.
They barely spent two minutes in Aoyama's room due to its many mirrors and brightness, something Shado found to be…off. The next room was Ojiro's, which surprised Shinji because it looked so…ordinary.
"Wow, I didn't expect this room to be so…regular," he says.
"Regular?" Ojiro questions, confused.
"I've not seen rooms that look ordinary in a long time. It's really nice."
"Thank you."
Shado went over to Ojiro's desk and touched the wooden structure. For most of her life, her environment had been an underground series of hallways made of metal and glass, limiting her exposure to the mundaneness of wooden objects.
"I like it," she tells Ojiro.
The next room was, after careful thinking and determining what wouldn't bother their kids, Sato's, which reminded Shinji of a kitchen for some reason.
"You cook in here?" Rumiko asks Sato.
"Uh, yeah," he answers her. "It helps with my Quirk and stuff."
Sniff-sniff. Toya smells around the room and points to the microwave oven.
"Did you make something in there earlier?" He asks Sato, and the teen went over to open it.
"It was a cake, but…that was three hours ago," he reveals, surprised that the little boy could still smell the unfinished product.
"What is that?" Shado asks, pointing to a tray of strange rings with various coverings.
"Those are doughnuts. You've never had a doughnut?"
"No."
Sato offered the quartet doughnuts, earning a smile from Shado when she told him the chocolate one was tasty.
"It seems like everyone's got their personal preferences in decoration and aesthetics," Rumiko tells Shinji after they came of Asui's room, "and I've never realized that there were people that had rooms designed to accommodate their Quirks."
"Same here," Shinji replies; because Asui had a superpower that made her similar to a frog, her room was like a wetland. And she doesn't really look like a frog. I mean, she looks like a regular person in every sense of the word.
It was still strange for Shinji to adjust to the fact that when it came to the people of this world, the widespread diversity of Quirks or superhuman abilities had made people different over the generations. From what he was able to comprehend so far, and from what he learned from Aizawa and Midnight, along with the random memories of his deceased, alternate self, people with Mutant-Type Quirks were the majority of society that were the most discriminated against because most of them have appearances that leave them unappealing to varying degrees. He, Shado and his father were among the rare minority that possessed Mutant Quirks…but were able to fit in because they looked like regular people. But Shinji obviously had no idea of what it meant to be a regular person; he felt anything but regular or ordinary.
"Huh?" He went as he notices Shado holding a lily pad in her left hand. "Shado, where'd you get that lily pad?"
"It was stuck to my left leg," she responds, and then it dries up and crumbles to dust. "Aww."
"Yeah, they do that when they don't have access to water," went Asui to them. "Where's Gaidoku? She was just here."
"She…went downstairs…to that boy's room," Toya revealed the whereabouts of his mother.
-x-
It was probably the worst choice of her time here, but Rumiko decided to bite the bullet and get it out of the way; to learn that none of the other women within Class 1-A never went into Mineta's room was like staying away from a house that had a lot of negative gossip. But one thing was for certain now that she was in his room…and that was how much Mineta was probably the only boy in the class that showed such a desperation to be liked by the women…and to want to be close to one, even if only for a few precious seconds. Stepping out of his room, Rumiko found Shinji, his daughter and her son standing out in the hallway.
"Please, tell me he didn't try anything to you while you were in there," Shinji asks her.
She looks at him, then at their children…and responds, "He stayed four feet away and pointed at every poster he has in there. At first, I was expecting him to be dirty like what most of the girls insinuated and his room to be an extension of his behavior, but in the brief time I spent in there, that wasn't so much the case with him."
"Huh?!" Uraraka, Jiro, Hagakure and Ashido gasped as they came to see them. "What do you mean?! What does he have in there?!"
"Don't get the wrong idea," she explains. "He's still girl-crazy, probably has pictures of girls that he doesn't want anyone else seeing, but his room isn't all that dissimilar from Midoriya's, just…different interests. Did any of you know he has posters of some of lesser-known heroines across the nation and other parts of the world?"
"We've never gone in there because he's…creepy," Hagakure pointed out, and then noticed Mineta looking at them through his half-opened door. "What heroines?"
"The Luna Sisters, Madam Solaris, Lady Tsunami, Quake Queen, Javelinnia…"
"But…those heroines are all…" Jiro utters, but doesn't finish because it was unusual for someone, even someone like Mineta, to have posters of heroines…from that long ago.
"I'm sorry, but what is wrong here?" Shinji asks them; he didn't know what was going on here.
Rumiko sighs and explains, "They're all women from around the country and other parts of the world that were around more than a century ago. They weren't powerful, but they were known for being attractive to most criminal men that they went after. Most of the men they captured surrendered in exchange for a kiss from them, others committed crimes just to be defeated by them. They were…questionable…but had a sense of justice."
"Okay, so he likes girls a lot," Shinji confirms.
"Not exactly, but yes."
"I don't follow."
"He may be more attracted towards women than girls. In his mind, if a girl is head-over-heels attractive, she's a woman. If she's not all that appealing, he may just look elsewhere. Unfortunately, I don't believe he can do the second one."
"Why not, Mommy?" Toya asks.
"Because every girl in his class is the equivalent of an upcoming supermodel."
Shinji then looks at the girls of 1-A…and immediately turns away.
"You just…put an image in my head that is difficult to get around," he says.
Toya looks over at Mineta and points at his face.
"You stay away from my mother," he tells him, reminding the boy who wanted to be a hero that Rumiko was not looking for romance because she was a parent and therefore off limits.
Mineta closed his door and then slipped something out from underneath it and it slid across the floor to where Rumiko stood.
Rumiko picked it up and sighs.
"Love letter?" Yaoyorozu asks her.
"You wish," she responds, and shows her.
It was a small picture of a woman dressed in red armor and cloth with a whip ending in a lightning bolt tip, dealing in defeat to seven men in black suits.
"The Scarlet Bolt?" Ashido gasps. "I can't believe he knows about her! She was from eighty-seven years ago and was from the Philippines!"
"He must really like heroines more than he does heroes," Shinji suggests.
-x-
The only room they didn't see was Bakugo's; because he was perhaps the most violent classmate within Class 1-A, Shinji and Rumiko decided that he had to be looked past in order to protect Shado and Toya's mental health and recovery. Mostly Shado's because she was tortured by Gendo the most because of his hatred towards her.
"Kind of hard to believe that not too long ago, U.A. was like regular schools that taught young people how to follow the path of the hero," Rumiko says to Shinji as he sat on the couch in their dorm house. "Every day, they would come from their homes, meet and greet, study, practice with their Quirks, have fun, and then go home."
"And because of the increase in criminal activity and behavior," Shinji responds, "they're trying to protect their students better and ensure the new generation of heroes. Having second thoughts about being here, Rumiko?"
"No. And…even if I did…I don't want to go back to Hokkaido. I don't want Toya to hear…whatever my relatives have to say about me and feel like I did something to be viewed as a disappointment or something."
"You didn't do anything wrong, Rumiko. You were taken advantage of. You were being held captive and managed to escape with Toya and get help. Anyone would be proud of what you did that day."
"Thank you, Shinji."
"So…whose room was the best out of 1-A?"
"Hmm? Does it really have to be a popularity contest?"
"No. I mean, whose room did you like the most out of our classmates? That's what I meant."
"Oh. Well, I… I don't really have one that I like more than the rest, but the ones I liked were Uraraka, Ojiro, Shoji, Hagakure and Todoroki's. Each appealed to me in different way. You?"
"Kirishima, Shoji, Hagakure, Ojiro, Sero, Uraraka, Todoroki and Midoriya's. Like you, they appealed to me in different ways. Is it odd for me to find their rooms more appealing than mine currently is?"
"No. We're still working on the way our rooms look. It is feng shui in a way; people try to decorate their spaces in ways that make them feel more at ease. Shoji's room reminds me of the time when we…didn't have anything. Hagakure, Todoroki and Ojiro's rooms remind me of the lives we had before your father… And Uraraka's is a representation of what we have right now."
"Rebuilding our lives, you mean?"
"Yeah."
"Rebuilding them is…better than not having them at all."
"Yeah. But here's the question that drives my current sense of living: How do you rebuild…when you feel broken into so many pieces?"
"My simple answer: One piece at a time…until you start to feel a little less broken."
Rumiko smiles and nods her head.
"Thanks, Shinji," she tells him.
"You're welcome," he responds.
To be continued…
A/N: Since Shinji's presence in the story changes things, what if his presence enables Mineta to get at least one of the girls from Class 1-A to take a look in his dorm room and we get a different idea of what he has in there and how it's described? I get that Mineta's perverted, but he'll likely keep his distance from Rumiko sometimes because he doesn't want to experience a world of hurt from trying to get familiar with someone's mother or childhood friend from another universe. And what if he had a thing for heroines from other parts of the world and from decades ago? What do you think?