Chapter Text
“What? A quirk that erases memories?”
“Yeah,” Midoriya says, hand on the back of his head, “that’s what they tell me. I’m sorry, but I don’t remember anyone, um...?”
“Oh!” the girl he’s talking to says, “I’m Uraraka! We’re friends, I, um, I have a anti-gravity quirk? That’s Iida over there,” she gestures to a boy with glasses on the other side of the room, “and… well, I guess you’ll meet everyone when class starts. Is Aizawa-sensei going to make an announcement?”
“Yes, that’s what they tell me,” Midoriya says with a smile. “The teacher with the black hair, right? He said I should make my way to class, and he’d fill everyone in when he got here.”
“Well, he’s usually kind of late,” Uraraka says, “but I can introduce you now if you want? That’s Todoroki- that’s Bakugo- over there are Sero, Kaminari, and Kirishima- and this is Tsuyu-chan!” she says brightly, gesturing to a small girl with long black hair making her way over to them.
“Hi,” Asui says, frog eyes open wide like usual, “you seem different.”
“He’s lost his memory to a quirk!” Uraraka says, gesturing in the air. “Did they say how long it’ll last, Deku?”
Midoriya glances around. Keeps looking. No one is answering. He glances back at Uraraka. She’s still looking at him.
He blinks. “Who, me?”
“Oh!” Uraraka says, blushing slightly. “Oh, I’m sorry, it’s a nickname! Bakugo gave it to you to be mean,” she gestures at the light-haired student on the other side of the room, “but you decided to use it as your hero name so now some of us call you that?” Asui nods sagely in agreement. “I can stop if you don’t like it, though!”
“No, that’s okay,” Midoriya says with a blinding smile. “I wanted to use it, so it must have some meaning for me. I don’t mind!”
“He’s still nice even without his memories,” Asui says, frog eyes staring like usual.
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The student with glasses- Iida, also a friend, and the class rep, apparently- shows Midoriya to his seat when Aizawa-sensei comes in. It turns out that his seat is right behind the light-haired guy that gave him the nickname, but he doesn’t have a chance to say hi before Aizawa-sensei starts class.
“First off, we have an announcement about one of your classmates,” he says in a bored tone through the scarf piled around his neck. “Midoriya Izuku-” Midoriya feels the eyes of the whole class turn to him- “has been struck by a memory-erasing quirk during a showdown with villains at his internship, and will need your support in all classes. Please remind him of any rules and particulars of UA and answer his questions if he gets stuck.”
The whole class starts whispering around him, and the guy in the seat in front of his turns around and- with the worst attitude Midoriya has ever seen- says “what the fuck is this, you shitty nerd? You trying to drag the rest of us down?”
Midoriya forms an opinion immediately. This guy must be the class bully. Gives people rude nicknames and insults them? There’s no way they get along.
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“What did you say to me, Deku??!” the guy says, swinging around in his chair.
“You heard what I said,” Midoriya says with a determined face- quietly, so that Aizawa-sensei won’t turn around from where he’s writing on the board. “Also, Uraraka told me that some people use Deku as a nickname for me, but you say it like an insult. You can call me Midoriya or not speak to me at all.”
The light-haired guy, looking shell-shocked, actually jerks back in his chair a little. As the teacher turns back around, Midoriya says “nice to meet you, Bakugo,” and the guy’s mouth falls open as Aizawa-sensei calls on him to begin the lesson.
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At lunch time, Midoriya can feel unfriendly eyes on him, but it turns out that literally everyone in the class is nice besides his rowmate. As soon as the break starts, his classmates come up to him in waves, asking about how he’s feeling and introducing themselves in increasingly confusing ways. He can’t remember who has an acid quirk and who’s named “keep sparkling,” but he gets the impression that Midoriya Izuku gets along with pretty much everyone. The short guy with the bird head just came up to him and silently nodded, but he feels like it was a friendly silence. This class is pretty nice.
“Midoriya-chan,” says Asui, “can you still use your quirk?”
“Yeah!” Midoriya says with a smile. “I had to use it for the end of the battle where they took my memory, even though I didn’t remember why I was fighting.”
“Oh, that’s a relief!” the guy with the bright red hair says. “No broken bones!”
“Huh?” Midoriya says, looking around at a sea of faces nodding sagely. What?
“Yeah!” the girl who’s invisible says, apparently bracing herself on the shoulders of the people in front of her, by how they flinch with her weight. “When you first came here you were always breaking stuff!”
“Yeah, like every day or two you’d end up in the nurse’s office,” adds the boy who had a… tape quirk? He can’t remember.
Wait. Every few days, he’d been in the nurse’s office? All Might had taken him aside and told him the secret of his power when he got back to the school, and that he absolutely couldn’t reveal it to anyone else, but he hadn’t mentioned that!
“Ha ha, well that’s… a relief,” he says, laughing nervously. All Might!! Be more clear about these things!!
He feels the boy with the light hair’s eyes on him the rest of the lunch period, but he doesn’t care. That guy’s got nothing to do with him- he doesn’t have anything important to say to him.
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“Did All Might tell you that your power came from him?” the guy asks, appearing behind Midoriya as he’s leaving the school.
“What?!! Haha what are you- that’s not-” Deku blinks hard, clenches his teeth, and turns around. “What are you talking about, that’s not true!” he says at loud volume with a strained smile on his face.
“Quiet down, idiot, you told me two years ago,” the guy says with a frown. Midoriya glances him up and down, mind going a mile a minute. What does he know about this guy again? He’s mean and kind of good at school, if what he saw in class today is any indication. That’s it though. He doesn’t even know what his quirk is.
“What’s your quirk, anyway?” he asks with a frown, distracted from the subject.
“Haaa??!!” the guy says, glaring and clenching his fist like he’s barely restraining himself from punching Midoriya. What an overreaction. He opens his hand and an explosion bursts forth with a crackling noise. “You don’t remember my fucking quirk?!”
“I don’t remember anything,” Midoriya says with a frown. “An explosion quirk, huh? Seems like a kind of limited application, but you could do some cool stuff with it if you were able to redirect it.”
The guy is literally shaking with anger, so mad that no words are coming out of his open mouth. What’s his deal?
“At any rate,” Midoriya says, shaking his head, “please don’t tell anyone about-”
“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU YOU SHITTY-ASS NERD,” the dude explodes, sticking his finger all the way into Midoriya’s face. “LIMITED APPLICATION??? FIGHT ME RIGHT NOW AND WE’LL SEE HOW LIMITED I AM YOU LITTLE SHIT!!!”
Midoriya knocks Bakugo’s hand out of his face with a determined frown. “Don’t talk to me like that. You’re being really rude.”
“I- you’re-” Bakugo sputters, turning bright red. “You little- fuck you, Deku!”
“It’s Midoriya,” he says with a frown. “I don’t want to talk to you unless you’re going to be respectful about it.” Shrugging his backpack tighter over his shoulders, he turns around, saying “see you tomorrow, Bakugo,” over his shoulder as he leaves.
He doesn’t look back to see Bakugo left standing with a fist up, mouth open, completely bowled over.
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It’s a few weeks later, and he’s gotten a better idea of the dynamics of their class’s fighting strategies. A lot of quirks that seemed kind of limited- hardening, electricity, sound- are just stupidly strong, and some of the others- the sticky ball quirk, the sound-broadcasting one, Uraraka’s anti-gravity quirk- are incredibly effective when used strategically. Bakugo’s quirk is a combination of the two- stupidly strong by itself, but also useful for maneuvering and defense- so Midoriya gets, now, why he was proud of it. He seems to be outclassed, though, by the quiet boy with the fire and ice quirk, and the tall girl with the creation quirk, who both win every sparring match they participate in. Bakugo has only lost one match, and it was to Yaoyorozu, whose limited physical mobility was counterbalanced by the vast quantities of nitroglycerine that she surrounded him in, rendering his quirk too dangerous to use.
“That was amazing!” Uraraka is saying to Iida, after watching their match. “She’s come so far, she didn’t have the confidence to fight on that level against someone like Bakugo when she started!”
“Well, none of us really did,” Iida says in response, pushing his glasses up his face. “He’s pretty intense.”
“Except for you, Uraraka,” the sparkling guy- Aoyama- says, appearing from nowhere behind them. “You fought with him during the sports festival.”
“That’s right!” Iida says, hitting his fist in his hand, “I watched the footage after! An excellent match!”
“Aw, you guys!” Uraraka says with a laugh, humbly. What a great friend. Midoriya really lucked out.
“Look at that!” Kirishima yells to their side. Hagakure’s invisibility, which also lets her refract light, usually allows her to blind her opponents, but in her matchup against Tokoyami she’s been using it to cut off all avenues of escape for Dark Shadow. Her control is still a little wild, so Tokoyami has been on the run, Dark Shadow swinging around frantically to avoid the beams of light. Kirishima’s yell was prompted by Hagakure’s switch from directed energy to a diffuse yet blindingly powerful light from her whole body, which completely negates her stealth advantage but is crushingly effective against Dark Shadow, who sinks to the ground with Tokoyami.
“Give!” Tokoyami yells, panting, and Aizawa-sensei ends the match as Hagakure jumps in the air, cheering, invisible again.
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Midoriya comes off the field after a match against Todoroki that went surprisingly well. He’s had to do a lot of catch-up, figuring out people’s strategies for their quirks starting from a base of no knowledge, but whatever training he’s been doing seems to be paying off. (He’s still a little caught up thinking about how All Might didn’t say anything about breaking his bones, but it’s all working out. Nothing’s broken yet.)
In their match today he was able to move much faster than Todoroki, and even when one boot got frozen to the ground, he was able to kick himself free with the other one before the ice could spread enough to root him. The steam that Todoroki created to hide in by flash-heating ice was easy to blow away with the force of a Detroit Smash, and if not for the heat of Todoroki’s flames melting the ice beneath Midoriya and making him slip face-first onto the ground, he probably would have won.
“That was amazing, Todoroki!” Midoriya says with a grin as they walk back to join the rest of the class. “Do you usually use that strategy, making people slip on the ice like that?”
“...No,” Todoroki says, looking down at the ground blankly. “That was an accident.”
“Oh!” Midoriya says. “Well, it seems like a strong move! You could totally include it in your fighting style!” he says with a smile, as they come up to the group of spectators, Aizawa-sensei already designating the next matchup.
“Hmm,” Todoroki says, looking like he’s thinking hard. Midoriya has learned, in the few weeks he’s been around him, that what seems like standoffishness on Todoroki’s part is actually probably just social awkwardness. One time he borrowed Todoroki’s notes, and found taped in the front of his binder a drawing of Todoroki, dated two years ago, that looks suspiciously like his own art. It was labeled in Todoroki’s handwriting as “The Handcrusher,” but Todoroki got embarrassed and refused to answer his questions about it. Midoriya guesses that they’re friends, though.
“Hey, c’mere,” a voice growls as they come back to the group.
Looking towards the back of the group, Midoriya sees Bakugo glaring at him, and when he makes no move to walk over, Bakugo pulls his hands out of his pockets and gestures impatiently towards the trees at the edge of the field.
Frowning slightly, Midoriya walks over to stand a few feet from him, and slowly matches Bakugo’s pace as he walks towards the trees. “What is it?”
“I wanna fucking talk to you,” Bakugo says, glaring at sky. “Shitty nerd Deku.”
“I told you that it’s Midoriya,” Midoriya says, stopping. “You can call me my name, or I’m going back now.”
“Fine, what the fuck ever, I won’t call you Deku,” Bakugo says with a sneer. “You happy now?”
“No,” Midoriya says firmly. “Call me by my name, or I’m going back now.”
“What?” Bakugo sputters, spinning to face him.
“Call me Midoriya, or I don’t want to talk to you,” Midoriya says, frowning determinedly.
Bakugo stares at him, not saying anything. Midoriya says “fine,” and turns to go.
“I… Izuku.”
“Huh?” Midoriya says, turning back. What was that?
Bakugo is glaring off to the side, cheeks slightly red. “We’ve known each other since we were three, saying Midoriya sounds like I’m talking to your fucking mom.”
Wait, what?!
“Since we were three?!” Midoriya says, mouth falling open. “I didn’t know that!”
“Yeah, well, whatever,” Bakugo says with a frown. “It doesn’t matter. I called you by your fucking name, are you happy now?”
That explains a lot- like why he would have told Bakugo about his power and All Might- but doesn’t explain why Bakugo is so mean. It also doesn’t explain why-
He catches himself muttering out loud and stops, seeing Bakugo’s glare. “I- wait, what do I usually call you?” he asks.
“Wha-” Bakugo jerks back. “I’m- you don’t-”
Midoriya watches his flailing. Weird. “What’s your first name? Katsuki?”
Bakugo stops moving and his face starts filling with color.
He shouldn’t be surprised that Midoriya knows his first name, though. Midoriya looked up everyone’s full names and quirks and wrote them down after meeting them for the first time. Well, for the second time, but it’s the first time that he remembers. He has names, quirks, and a few other details on each student in their class. ...Okay, a lot of other details. He has a few notebooks with observations and inferences about every member of their class, but that’s not weird.
“Fucking- do what you want! I don’t give a fuck what you call me,” Bakugo snaps, looking away from him, his face red.
“Katsuki,” Midoriya says testingly, and Bakugo lets out a strangled scream and starts walking fast back towards the group.
“Wait, what did you want to talk about?” Midoriya yells after him, and Bakugo says “NOTHING,” and shoves his way past the other students to watch the current match from the front of the group.