Chapter Text
Wrong, something was wrong, too much, everything. All of it was wrong.
Shouta’s mind reeled, sitting on the tailgate of an ambulance next to a paramedic that kept wrapping a stupid foil blanket around his shoulders. He wasn’t in shock, he knew what was wrong but no one would listen to him, not even his work study mentor. But why would they? They didn’t know what he knew, or see what he could see.
No matter how much the pros on scene said otherwise, Shouta knew Oboro, one of his only closest friends wasn’t dead. He could see the soul lingering at the scene, a portly, balding, confused middle aged man, practically the furthest from the bright, flyaway (in more ways than one) sixteen year old boy whose body appeared to be pulled from the rubble. Shouta didn’t know how or why it looked like Oboro, but souls didn’t lie.
It was a very tightly kept secret, but the hero student with an ‘erasure’ quirk didn’t actually have a quirk- you had to be human to have one of those. Aizawa Shouta wasn’t even, technically speaking alive.
He was a Grim Reaper, technically an apprentice in training with a specialty in battlefield deaths, and like all reapers he walked the liminal path between the living and the dead. One day he’d guide passed souls on their way to the afterlife or deal with souls who chose to linger if/when they became malicious. That day might be a long way off, but that didn’t stop him from being able to see the souls lingering in aftermath of the building collapse.
Shouta was training to be a hero outright as he trained to be a reaper, as was tradition. All reapers learned how to fight (it was a useful skill to have when dealing with poltergeists and malicious spirits) but battlefield reapers were on a whole other level, plus it was customary to learn the ins and outs of the relevant era’s warriors firsthand.
So he worked hard to get into UA’s hero course, which on it’s own had been a fight. Part of that was due to biases against his faked quirk (although he didn’t erase quirks, he was technically temporarily killing the part of a human’s brain that their quirk stemmed from when applicable. It didn’t work for everything- a lot of people’s quirks were so inherently a part of them they’d die if they were erased). Most of it was because he accidentally overcompensated trying to match how skilled the human teenagers would be in the entrance exam.
He’d been training almost since he could walk and was trying not to draw too much attention. It was a minor setback, barely a blip on the radar because he knew he could get into the hero course through the sports festival. (Honestly, drawing Nedzu’s attention because the chimera could see his potential was a bigger issue. The chimera wasn’t called the smartest creature on the planet for nothing, and Shouta was and would continue struggling to hide the truth of his existence from him for years).
That’s how he met his human friends- fellow hero hopefuls Yamada Hizashi, Kayama Nemuri, Iida Tensei, and Shirakumo Oboro. He and Shirakumo had been sent to the same hero for their work studies, which brought them to today; the day that didn’t make sense.
The building shouldn’t have collapsed. Villain attacks were villain attacks and they often ended in damage, but the damage here didn’t make sense. The initial point that started the collapse wasn’t to the degree or in the right place to result in a total collapse, yet the entire building had gone down. Thankfully, Oboro was the only ‘casualty’; but it wasn’t Oboro’s soul, and there had been a presence, Shouta wasn’t sure how to explain it, that felt like it was lurking around every corner. It wasn’t a spirit, it had a distinctly different feeling, but it also wasn’t a human soul or anything else Shouta had ever encountered.
Obviously these things were connected, but everyone, even His Royal Highness (their mentor), just chalked it up to shock and grief from losing his friend. Shouta couldn’t explain the body being swapped or faked somehow; it wasn’t something he should have known.
He’d discuss it later, with his reaper mentor and the reaper who’d appeared for the middle aged man; but while they believed him and would investigate, nothing would come of it. That didn’t mean Shouta would ever stop investigating on his own, but at some point his investigation had to be put on the back-burner as he took on his duties as a pro hero and active reaper. Even for reapers, there were only so many hours in the day, and after so many dead-ends there just wasn’t anything else to investigate.
Despite that, Shouta never forgot about it. And he never stopped looking.