Chapter Text
Denki inhales sharply before releasing a potent shock under his skin.
Glowing arcs of electricity unload in a flash in his vision. For a moment he sees nothing but white as the currents rush hungrily through his nerves and the objects around him, a static taste of the binary layer world hidden below the metal and aluminium. Beneath his feet, rapid glitches of energy power the cables and computers. Out of experience, he guesses that the force is sufficient to charge numerous phones and laptops, or accidently stir light bulbs that were peacefully sleeping.
His phone vibrates urgently, dling! The screen lights up as an avalanche of gray text boxes cascade downward one after another: ‘Thanks for charging my phone lol’ and ‘I’m going to destroy you, I was sleeping!’ or ‘Dude srsly now?? I was in the middle of a race!!!’ The rest are veiled by the lack of space on the lock screen, but they’re of the same fashion.
Ouch…
Denki sags into the chair and tries to breathe through his mouth. A whimper curls at the base of his throat, and dies. The sound falls into the pit of his stomach, sitting there heavily—a plump hunk of rancor and affliction. The currents travel under his skin, racing his blood stream.
A breath in.
A breath out.
Zap.
Numbness. All of the bothersome perceptions dissolve into a hollow feeling, or rather, lack of a feeling. Which is better, he supposes. A clear mind, empty of redundant thoughts, is better than the plethora of emotions he experiences daily. Blocking it helps him to focus on his tasks, such as cramming the night before a nasty math test.
A sense of metal wraps his bones and presses on them. The low waves of vexation he was fighting with the whole evening, together with the hole pressing his stomach to his spine for not eating anything, are replaced by restive comfort.
Clenching his pen, like the last thread of the slipping reality, he stares at a vacant dot in space before another shock stirs his neurons. He jerks. Finally, Denki looks down at the notebook, teeth catching his sore lower lip.
Something isn’t right. The answer in the book is different. The angle is supposed to be 67.29 degrees, but he gets 35.74. Then 109.42, which is worse. Maybe he is supposed to use tangent instead of cosine? Shit. Perhaps the edge AB is not 10.31 cm after all? Fuck. He scratches the paper, messy blue lines from the ball tip, and suddenly it tears when he pulls too hard.
Bitter taste of rotten lemon fills Denki’s mouth as he rips off the page and aggressively chucks it into the trash can. Only then he realizes that the previous task is on the other side of the paper. If he hadn’t blocked out human emotions, he would have probably started crying. It proves that he’s too dumb for this school, too dumb to save lives, too dumb to do anything, he’s just— too dumb.
Mindlessly, he grabs the water bottle filled to one-quarter and chugs it whole. The cool liquid seeps down his throat—a pillar of fire—and he should feel comfort, but he doesn’t.
He feels nothing.
The book is wide open and mockingly calls his name to get back to studying, the pen is begging to be used and the numbers laugh at his misery. Defeated, he grabs the ruler to guide his shaking hand as it scribbles the geometrical shape again, nosediving into work.
This is going to be a long night.
---
There’s no sensation in his fingertips, Denki realizes after handing the test to Ectoplasm.
Halting his stuff packing, he gazes down in puzzlement and presses five fingers to the other five. The weight of skin-to-skin contact is there but featherlight—as if his neurons successively fossilize. Rubbing his numb fingertips against each other feels like through layers of embossed paper.
Even when he digs the ball of an ink pen into the pad of his thumb, no pain blooms alongside a blue blotch spreading on his skin.
Swallowing down a lump of nerves, Denki’s right eye twitches. Resonance of panic starts burbling in his navel. The ground seems to momentarily disappear from under his feet as the room tilts on its axis. Denki has to thump the sharp edges of his hips against the hard rim of the table to maintain balance as fear rakes sharp fangs over his scalp.
He should say something but his feet are rooted into the tile imbricating the classroom’s flooring as black blotches the periphery of his vision but then—an unintentional current jabs him head-to-toe. Instant tranquility drizzles into the rigid muscles clenching under his skin, and Denki automatically releases the lungful of condensed air stored in his tight chest.
His chest burns as oxygen filters down the length of his throat. Lacing with a familiar undertone of mint—Mashirao and his skunky deodorant again. Denki should remind him to stop using it when neither the windows or door are open.
Stepping out of the classroom, he ignores the wary look Ectoplasms briefly sends his way.
He’s not the last one to finish the test—Mina, Eijirou, Izuku, Fumikage and Torou are still planted into their seats with the cogs of their brains working overtime. They always stay until the last second, and perhaps if he was intellectually gifted, he would have utilized the three and a half hours they’re given better, like Izuku. But after two hours, even if he didn’t finish the test, he can’t bring himself to concentrate. The material he’s been memorizing for years is shouldered aside by the suddenly enthralling structure of the wall.
His singular point of pride is that he never walks out before going over the test three times at least. A tedious process ranging from forty minutes onward, if he can stay focused and doesn’t start daydreaming about the possibility of a meteor crashing through the wall. Does U.A’s insurance cover such a possibility? He counts how many blinks it takes before he loses track of what he’s reading. This is the kind of stuff you do instead of answering the questions posing like models under your eyes. These questions, you and them—know who is better.
It’s not you. It’s not Denki.
The question knows at least one answer. The once specific answers for what is asks. What do you know? What does Denki know?
Denki knows that no matter what he does, what kind of a study hack he finds on Instagram or TikTok, nothing helps. Nothing to cure his scores from being lumps of pittines marked on a wrinkled paper. Do better next time. But “next time” is like tomorrow—it never comes.
The moment he steps out of the sultry room, he takes out his phone and checks for messages. Test forgotten. Dejection pushed down. The extended group chat that contains the Bakusquad, Jirou, Yaoyorozu, Ojiro and Tokoyami is at the top, spammed with eighty-three new messages. Denki chuckles. The next one is 1-A’s group chat, and then comes the private chats that he’s going to give a look at later.
Later, that stands for: the moment he can force himself into the plastic bubble of happiness he likes more, much more than whatever is this. He isn’t sure when this started, but he knows that it ruins his aesthetic and he doesn’t like it.
That being said, his will to socialize is buried six feet under, but he also misses his friends. The last weeks were nerve-racking, too busy to be considered a piece of a man. No time to hang out. Study, cram, learn. Sleep. Scratch your head at your to-do list. Eat. Study some more. He scolds himself for wanting to be alone and forces his oddly sluggish legs to carry him to the library.
He hopes that this odd state wears off before he gets to his destination. The zap from earlier—like all of the previous ones he experienced during the last three, four weeks?—erases any threads of emotions from his brain. He can’t come to his friends like that, he can’t show them that this is how he deals with his dumb, hopeless self.
Denki can’t let them see him in this shabby state.
Slowing down, he eyes wander around the half empty corridor. An attempt to distract himself from the numbness in his chest.
Students from other classes walk out, discussing in low voices the harsh test they just had. It’s relieving to overhear that he isn’t the only one who is going to fail. Albeit, some pricks dare to say that the test is alright. Those monsters. He wants to laugh at the thought but he can’t.
His face is a stone—muscles refuse to form a smile and vocal cords don’t cooperate with his brain. His skin itches and a microwave noise buzzes in his ears; not unlike popping electricity from a machine on the fritz.
Denki goes for a smile yet fails to even angle his lips upwards. Deep down, he thinks that it should be alarming, but he’s calm. Unbothered.
It dawns on him, painfully slow, that his surroundings mash into a mixture of colors and sluggish figures. The ground once again disappears from under his shoes, but this time it doesn’t reappear when he presses down his useless weight of existence to the bottom of his feet. Panic doesn’t come rushing with his bloodstream like it usually does. However, his breath quickens as his lungs grow heavy in his tight chest like there’s water condensing in them. Denki swallows. At least he thinks he does.
Something shaped like a human appears in his eyesight.
“Hey—”
Thump!
---
“...hear m…?”
Denki groans in distress as something buzzes in his ears like the static noise of a radio. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t mute the channel. An irritated groan vibrates in his sore throat, and he almost chokes on his own saliva when he tries to swallow phlegm down.
“...you hear me?”
A voice. Is something talking to him? His slow brain flips in his skull and finally his blurry eyesight stabilizes.
The first thing he sees is an arrangement of gray tiles, a familiar ceiling. It takes another moment before it hits him that he’s lying in a soft bed, his head sinking into the comforting pillow underneath. A warm blanket envelopes his exhausted, heavy body, and he’s almost ready to close his eyes and drift into sleep—when suddenly he fixates on a flying head of an old lady above him.
Recovery Girl.
A very concerned Recovery Girl.
“What—?”
The first attempt at speaking disrupts via a wave of throat-burning coughs. Jolting up, he slams his palm on his chest, heaving.
Recovery Girl pats his back. “Easy there,” she murmurs softly, offering him a glass of water. He thanks her shakily. Water grants instant relief, and after making sure nothing is lurking to strangle him again, Denki slumps back on the bed and covers his face with his palms.
“What happened?”
The old lady sighs, the most weary sigh the world has heard. “You collapsed.”
Denki’s brain falters. “I…what?”
“You collapsed after taking your math test, got caught by a student in the middle of the corridor, and brought here by him and one of his classmates,” she elaborates, and he feels a knot forming in his stomach. Well, that’s embarrassing, totally something an idiot like Denki is capable of. “I know you tend to stress out a lot during exams, like most of the students. Are you eating properly? Sleeping enough?”
Like most of the students.
He’s not special, he’s just the only weakling to collapse because of it. Is that what she implies?
Denki’s brain feels like cotton and he drags it back to reality with some difficulty. “I was—am stressed, sure, nothing unusual.” It’s not a lie if he doesn’t know. When he’s stressed, he tends to skip meals and forgets to eat until one of his friends yells and shoves food down his throat. Like keeping watch over a baby. So he’s pretty sure that his squad keeps in check that he eats properly. Sleeping is a whole issue entirely.
Recovery Girl hums, then skips out of the chair and paces to the table at the side of the room. “Were you overusing your quirk lately?”
Everyday? “Not really,” he lies because it’s easier. Explaining to Recovery Girl what he’s been committing to in order to concentrate on his studies, to not slack off and keep up with the rest makes it sound like an addiction. He’s not addicted, just desperate. It could be drugs, he tells himself.
“Okay.” He hears ruffling and shuffling, wheels wheezing against a tile flooring and he finally removes his hands from his face to look at the nurse. “Take a day off today and rest. Eat. Go to sleep early, take a hot bath. Do you need more Rescue?”
“No, I still have half a bottle left.”
She nods, donning a kind smile on her pleating face. “Make sure to eat something sweet right now to uplevel your sugar.” She pauses, then shakes her head. “And maybe you should thank the nice kids that dragged you here.”
Denki frowns. “And they are?”
“Both kids are from class 1-C. Gladly, I’m unfamiliar with the other guy; but the one to catch you is Shinsou Hitoshi. I assume you’re already familiar with each other?”
His stomach jumps to his throat at the name.
Crap.
---
His heart is not beating rapidly against his rib cage.
A little odd but…meh.
He is tizzy, but not because he’s about to express his wholehearted gratitude to one of his many meaningless crushes and offer him something already rejected since yesterday. Fiddling with the hem of his uniform jacket is habitual rather than essential. Throwing a look over his shoulder, he spots Eijirou standing over the corridor, sporting the usual, supportive thumb-ups and mouthing: “Good luck, dude!”
Denki tries to smile but he’s not sure his mouth cooperates. Eijirou doesn’t stop beaming, which means his stone-like facial muscles do their job.
Instead of figuring out what is wrong with him, because the answer is everything, Denki mentally shakes himself and pushes those thoughts aside as he takes a step closer to the door, reaching out to open it with a surprisingly steady hand.
The door is nearly torn off its hinges before he has the chance to touch it, and for a moment his vision blanches like a camera lens immersed in mud. A feeling not unlike a deer caught in the headlights engulfs him upon being revealed wide open in front of a class full of strangers. The difference is that there is no crash, no collision, but an equally confused student from class 1-C that Denki has never seen before.
They stare at each other for what feels like a whole minute before he suddenly exclaims: “Hey! It’s Shinsou’s sleeping beauty!”
Denki chokes on his own saliva. “Shinsou’s who what now?!”
Wow. He visualizes Shakespeare flipping in his grave. Vocabulary 100.
“Did you mean Shinsou’s slipping beauty?” Someone titters from inside the room, and soon enough Denki finds himself under the light spot like a prized iPhone on its launch day. All eyes on him, and he squirms, the familiar circulation of radioactive electricity trickling through his body. Just briefly but he feels the perplexity knocking on the back side of his mind, as if asking why his quirk activates itself without him giving it the command to; but it is pushed coarsely aside by said energy. Trust me, I know what I’m doing, it says, and suddenly he’s calm, might even say: he doesn’t give a fuck at the bazillion pairs of eyes digging in his flesh.
A heavy gut feeling tells him that he should be concerned, that it is wrong, unnatural. He doesn’t dare think sinister, it’s a whole new level of self-pity he doesn’t entertain. Fact is, he can’t be bothered enough. So instead he flashes his brightest smile and laughs with the rest. It’s easy. It’s natural.
“Shinsou, wake up!”
Denki glances at the direction of whoever summons the cause of his headache, watching as an indigo tuft of hair rises from the table. Groggy eyes gaze at their direction, a layer of misty sleepiness reflects in them as he tries to blink it away. There is a barely noticeable stream of drool at the side of his mouth that he cleans with a sharp dab of his wrist as a classmate approaches him.
The sight does nothing to Denki, which is a good sign, isn’t it? The rejection isn’t going to be as upsetting as he thought it would be. In fact, he’s clean of bubbling emotions while looking at the boy.
Which is even better! Right?
Right?
Hitoshi rubs his face as if getting rid of the last threads of the realm of dreamland, and slowly wobbles to his feet. He’s towering above Denki, taller than what Denki recalls from the joint training. Or is he? Oh, what does it matter?
Not waiting for the invitation no one is going to give him anyway, Denki makes his way toward him, beaming.
But it feels wrong and fake, plastic. Yet he doesn’t pay attention to those nudging thoughts, especially because they bounce off his brain as fast as they appear.
“Dude!”
Hitoshi blinks, pinching his brows. As if he cannot decide whether he’s fully awake or if Denki is a nightmare to disappear once the bell tolls.
“I’m so sorry for falling over you, I didn’t charge myself the day before so, oops, I guess? Anyway, as an apology I can treat you to a coffee or something!”
Pressing his lips tightly to each other, Hitoshi’s eyes jerk sideways.
“Uh…”
---
He’s not upset that Hitoshi rejects him. More correctly, he doesn’t care. It flies out of his left ear the moment he exits the class and meets Eijirou in the corridor to proceed onward with their day.
Well, almost.
Generally, it can be described as a light switch abused by an amused kid that thinks it’s funny to flicker on and off the lights. Each few hours a zap abruptly shoots through his nerves and shuts down the system in charge of his emotions and senses, leaving him numb and unfeeling. A doll at the disposal of a cruel manufacturer bearings, just install the program, as you please.
Once it happened while he was cutting a tomato. If Eijirou hadn't screamed at the top of his lungs for Hanta, the closest to Denki at the most crucial moment, to snatch the knife out of his hand—his pinky would have been chopped off. The most terrific thing about it is that he wouldn’t have even felt it. Now, a plaster wraps his itching pinky, which at least means that his nerves are back to normal.
It creeps him out. He still hasn’t told anyone because he is not sure how to address such a peculiar phenomenon. Is it a glitch of his quirk? Mayhaps. For a loser like him, it’s just to be expected, but it doesn’t make it any less embarrassing. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t told anybody yet. They will laugh and fairly so. They will mock and point out that he cannot control his own goddamn quirk even after almost a full year at the Hero Course.
(You brainless bum.)
A chunk of bitterness forms in his chest, but he tries to stamp over it. The moment he concentrates on his will to erase the feeling, something crackles in his ears. He strains in his place, as a sudden wave rolls through him. Again, his quirk activates without him commanding it to, and his face pales for a single moment—but then, everything falls into harmony. The demons in his brain settle down, leaving him alone, and the blond nonchalantly leans on his arms. The itch in his pinky is gone.
All the threads of worry and insecurity sweep out of his system, leaving a trail of ash and dust.
Palms on the table, he pulls his focus back to the whiteboard. If there’s a good outcome out of this, well, it’s the fact he can actually listen to lectures. When his mind is clear and no thought is flying there to disturb him. It’s good, benefiting. Who cares that he’s emotionally numb and—
There’s no sensation in his palm.
Denki's eyes droop to his hand. The plaster gazes back at him from its respective place around his pinky, and it dawns on him that not only the itching is gone—when he presses his weight on it, he feels nothing.
Shit?
No matter how hard he sinks his nails into his palm, there’s no alert of his brain to halt the offending action. His mind is haggard, blurry, messy—only half conscious. He tears off the plaster and scratches the fresh cut until it starts bleeding, until his flesh is pink, yet—nothing happens. There should be a tingle of panic, it should worry him and he needs to ask Aizawa to visit Recovery Girl, to take care of it but he doesn’t.
Impulsively, Denki grabs the scissors from his pencil case. Everything feels as if in slow-motion, yet swift. Before he knows it, he swings up his arm. Weak light from the window shines through the silver blades of the scissors, yellow rays kiss it lazily as he throws his arm down and—
Someone screams his name. A chair abruptly screeches as its legs scrape the floor, but he doesn’t heed it, all of his focus is dedicated to the motion.
The scissors cut the air in a whistle at the speed of lighting.
A pause.
Splash!
---
There’s that moment of being aware and unaware of what’s happening simultaneously.
Like—like when you’re shoved on a stage, unprepared, without even knowing you’d end up performing in front of a crowd of keen people. When you know everyone is around you, watching you, but the lights of the stage darken everything so you see nothing more than rows of black shadows.
And you know what? Fuck that moment.