Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Neito’s quirk first comes in, everything changes, and yet for a while, it seems like nothing does. 

Neito just seems to get a bit more clingy, always wanting hugs from everyone and reaching for his mother’s hand at the most inconvenient of times. He slips out of bed at all hours, climbing into bed first with his parents and then after they start locking their door, with his siblings. 

“It’s so annoying!” his big sister wails, her hands flashing back and forth from mirror to skin to mirror again in her agitation. “I want a lock on my door too!”

“Yeah,” his oldest brother mumbles, pouring himself his third cup of coffee this morning alone. “I wouldn’t mind sharing the bed if that was all the little sh— guy wanted. But he keeps fu— fricking touching me, and every time, it activates my quirk and wakes me up.”

“Oh please!” his sister huffs, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes at him. “You always have to make this about yourself! What does your quirk even change when he touches you huh? He’s practically a spitting image of you!”

“…he has thinner eyebrows.”

His sister starts laughing, and his brother starts yelling, and little baby Neito sits quietly in a corner, thumb in his mouth, way too small and little to be able to explain how utterly and completely empty he feels.

“It fu—freaking itches okay? You try having your face rearrange itself to copy whoever touches you the second they make contact! There’s a reason I don’t like people touching me without permission!”

“Yeah? Well at least you’re both boys! I’m a girl! I don’t need a snot nosed little boy sneaking into my room at night like a literal creep!”

“THAT’S YOUR BROTHER!!!”

“HE’S YOUR BROTHER TOO! I DON’T SEE YOU VOLUNTEERING!”

“WELL AT LEAST I’M NOT INSINUATING HE’S A—“

“Stop it both of you.”

Their mother’s voice is soft and quiet and yet somehow it’s enough to silence the both of them. She turns towards Neito and gentles her voice even further. “Neito? Why do you keep snea— going into your siblings’ rooms?”

She’s talking to him kindly, smiling at him with care. But she doesn’t approach him, doesn’t reach out to touch, or come closer to pick him up. 

And little baby Neito shrinks into himself even further. “Get cold.” he mumbles around the finger still in his mouth, the words the only thing he can think to say even though it feels like that’s not really it at all. 

His mother nods though and turns away satisfied. “See? It’s simple. He just needs warmer pajamas, maybe a cozy blanket and some fuzzy stuffies to hold. Everyone just calm down.”

And everyone does. 

His sister buys him a soft little puppy doll and his brother gets him a weighted blanket and his mother lets them both lock their doors at night. 

And Neito learns to keep the hole in his chest a secret. 

Yet it only gets worse when he enters elementary school later that year. Coming into such close proximity with dozens of quirks every single day only makes the empty void harder to bear when he’s constantly plagued by both the wanting and the knowledge that he shouldn’t, he can’t, he isn’t allowed to. 

Of course, it doesn’t help that the icebreaker on the first day of Homeroom is ‘say your name, quirk, and a fun fact about yourself’. Once Neito’s classmates learn what his own quirk is and realize how, exactly, it works- well, they put two and two together rapidly. 

When the other kids are showing off their newly-acquired abilities, Neito’s denied the chance to bask in the glory of being the center of attention. 

He quickly comes to understand that when one is made to feel special, they don’t like another person having that supposedly unique power as well.

“Sensei!” The girl who sits two seats in front of him and can change her skin color like a chameleon cries out as she sprints away. “He’s stealing my quirk!” 

“I’m not stealing, I’m copying!” Neito insists, just as he does every time this happens. “It’s different, you still have your quirk but I can use it too!” 

“But it’s my quirk! Mine, not yours, you cheater! And besides, you look stupid doing it— you don’t even know how to make it work properly so you should just leave it for me to use!”  

Most of the time, Neito isn’t even actively trying to Copy; he’s more occupied with attempting to keep the urge suppressed. He can never quite prevent its tendency to activate on its own at the slightest physical contact—a brush of bare skin in the hallway, strands of hair from a long swinging ponytail catching on his fingers, even a mean-spirited shove or smack in the wrong spot—as if his quirk is so starved that it seizes any and all opportunities to hold a copy. 

No amount of explanation makes them understand, makes them even begin to see that all quirks aren’t exactly the gift they are made out to be.

By the time middle school rolls around, Neito’s classmates decide that touching him, even the barest of contact, is a cardinal sin, a violation of the first rule in ‘The Ultimate Guide to Middle School’ — a book that Neito was sure everyone except him had a school-distributed copy of. 

At the beginning of his first year of middle school, Neito meets a girl named Sumika, small in height and even smaller in build with big black eyes and long silky black hair that Neito thought looked like the ocean in the moonlight. She had this amazing ability to draw joy and laughter from Neito, even on his emptiest days. She somehow became a momentary cure for the seemingly ever growing void within his soul.

But good things never last, especially not for those destined to be villains.

The singular friend he manages to make only lasts for about a month. The harassment and ostracization she garnered from being quirkless was brutal on its own, but once word got out that she was now hanging around Neito, the boy who had been oh so affectionately dubbed ‘The Maniac’ by his classmates (which he could only assume was derived from the word ‘kleptomaniac’), her world got so much worse.

Last Neito heard, her family moved to Wisconsin.

With his only friend gone, and the joy and laughter with her, he survives on the crumbs of quirks he gains from the small, momentary contacts with citizens on the street and classmates within the halls of the prison called school. But even that too comes to an end eventually, when a brush contact on the street sends him into wave after wave of blinding pain.

His first experience with a sensory input quirk isn’t a pleasant one, and the pain, the confusion, all of it, terrifies him just enough to begin outright refusing to copy quirks unless he knows exactly what they are. 

And now he keeps that void in his heart constant, empty, and without a means to fill the heavy silence. 

He goes through the rest of middle school like this, not copying unless he knows what the quirk is. And even if he does, he wouldn’t dare copy it. The risk was just too big for him to copy his classmates' quirks; there is no knowing what may be hiding in the intricacies of the owner’s power. So he stays closed off, avoiding all physical contact.

He’s used to it anyway. His family rarely provided it for him, so this was no different. That lack of attention…that exclusion, it’s always been a part of him. But still, it always seems to hurt him more than the emptiness that always settled in the depths of his heart. 

Graduation comes, and now he is at UA, one of the top hero schools in the nation. Yet, the void persists. But Neito moves forward. He’s going to become a hero, even with his quirk. And now, after all this time, he would be surrounded by quirks—and for the first time, he could copy freely because he finally had a pass. 

At least at school, he won’t feel as empty, and maybe here he can be accepted. 

Well…maybe.

Outside is a different story—he can deal with that. But here, he can finally live how he wants to without this annoyance. However, he doesn’t want to tell them about this because what if—

“Hey man, are you okay?” Tetsutetsu asks one day as he, Kendo, and Neito walk down the hallway, heading to their classroom after lunch.

“Huh?” The sudden comment catches Neito off guard, but he masks it with his usual sly smile. “What do you mean? I’m doing just fine as you can see.”

“Hmmm, I don’t know. I just…have this feeling that you are hiding something. I don’t know you that well, so sorry if this is out of line, but you always look… sad, kind of empty, whenever I see you on the train to school.” Tetsutetsu elaborates. 

“Oh.” Neito did not expect his new classmate to be so attentive, but he has to hide it. They can’t know about this side of him. But before he can reply, Kendo speaks.

“It’s his quirk.”

The way she says it, so matter of fact, like she hasn’t just turned his world on his ear, throws him for a loop that draws him up short.

It takes a few steps for both of them to realize that he is not walking with them anymore. That they have instead left him behind. And once they do, Kendo looks kind of puzzled as she says, “It is your quirk right? The reason why you make sure you never touch any of us?”

“Uh, yeah,” Neito says, too taken aback to even consider trying to lie. Not that it would do him any kind of good, clearly. Kendo has him all figured out already apparently.

“Oh man, is that why you’ve been so squirrelly about it?” Tetsutetsu asks, a hand behind his head as he rubs at his hair. “I’m sorry dude, I thought you were just embarrassed about it or something.”

“I’m not,” Neito tells them both. Because he isn’t. Not really. His quirk is a part of him, maybe the best part of him. It’s the reactions of everyone else, of the way their quirks interact with his, that’s what he has to be wary of. But his quirk? Neito loves his quirk. Has learned to love his quirk in a way no one else ever has.

Even though it comes with drawbacks.

“Is there another reason you don’t talk about your quirk then?” Tetsutetsu asks, seemingly genuinely curious now.

Neito opens his mouth to spout off some meaningless drivel that will throw them off the scent of his quirk, buy him a few more days of anonymity before the truth of his quirk is revealed and he has to come face to face with his classmates who will no doubt start to avoid him in an effort to keep their quirks unique. Just like everyone else has.

Only…

Only Neito was telling the truth when he told them that he was not embarrassed about his quirk. And when he entered U.A., he had promised himself that he was not going to be ashamed of it ever again, that no one would ever make him ashamed of the quirk that is going to make him a hero one day. That all starts with telling people what it is, with refusing to hide it.

“I can copy the quirks of other people when I touch them,” he says, bracing himself for the impact that he knows will follow.

“Woah? Really? That’s so cool!” Tetsutetsu shouts, suddenly laser focused on Neito, and with a sun-bright smile stretched out on his face as he practically shoves his arm in Neito’s face. “Can you copy mine right now?”

“Back off, Tetsutetsu, we don’t know what the drawbacks are,” Kendou says, enlarging her fist so that she can bodily drag the other boy back a few feet, neatly ensuring that he is no longer quite so in Neito’s space.

“Oh, right, sorry,” Tetsutetsu says, looking sheepish once again.

Neito just stares at the both of them, unsure of how exactly he should respond given this uncharted territory he’s suddenly found himself in. He’s never had someone react so enthusiastically to the idea of him copying their one-of-a-kind quirk before. It makes him feel a little like he’s standing on unsteady ground.

But at the same time, he knows that the promise of warmth, of the possibility of filling that little hole in his chest, the one that never really goes away, is right there. He wants it.

Neito wants it so badly.

And Tetsutetsu offered.

So Neito reaches out and brushes his fingertips along Tetsutetsu’s arm, still outstretched between Kendou’s fingers.

He copies it and something clicks home in his chest.

Then he holds out his arm and shows Tetsutetsu his skin, which has transformed into shining metal. An exact copy of Tetsutetsu’s quirk.

“Dude! Dude that’s so cool!” Tetsutetsu shouts. Neito can’t help the small, pleased little smile that stretches across his face. But he doesn’t think he wants to either.

“Of course it is,” he makes himself say, puffing out his chest in a clear show of pride. He’s not sure how long the acceptance will last but surely projecting an air of confidence about it is the way to go.

And then Tetsutetsu is holding out his own arm, pressing it flush against Neito’s as he excitedly notes the similarities and the differences, the colors and the contrasts.

Neito is no longer listening.

There’s skin touching his, cold and hard though the feel of it may be, and the mental timer in his head keeps resetting and resetting as his hold on Testutetsu’s quirk isn’t given the chance to even begin to wear off. 

His entire world feels narrowed down to the press of Tetsu’s arm against his, that point of contact the only thing he can focus on.

He’s–

Uncomfortable.

Ecstatic.

It’s too much.

It’s not enough.

“Monoma? You feeling okay?”

The voice seems to come from far away and right beside him all at once and Neito has to struggle to make sense of it.

The words register slowly and then he is abruptly aware of his classmates’ faces watching him with blatant concern.

He shakes his head to clear it, blinks like waking from a dream and then carefully takes a purposeful step back and away. “Yup.” he finally responds, the words coming slower and more hesitant than he would like. “Never better.”

And somehow that last statement feels truer than he’d meant it to be. There’s a part of him practically purring in contentment– almost like there’s a dragon in his chest that’s curling protectively around his hold on Tetsu’s quirk for as long as his copy will last.

It feels different somehow from the brief snatches of quirks that he’d managed to catch over the years and Neito can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t just because he’d finally gotten permission.

“If you’re sure,” Kendou says back, her head tilting a bit to one side as she watches him, her tone thoughtful and musing. 

And then she thrusts out her own hand expectantly.

Neito blinks at it in confusion. “Uh…”

Kendou huffs and rolls her eyes but it feels like she’s not really annoyed with him. Not completely anyway.

“It’s my turn dummy. I wanna see if your hand gets bigger than mine or if the size cap stays the same regardless of original hand size.”

“Oh…” 

He eyes her hand for a second, trying and failing to find the trap in it. Surely she isn’t just goading him into something right? Not after Tetsu’s genuine enthusiasm right? 

But can he risk it?

Kendou slowly starts to lower her hand back down. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought it could be good to try it out first before hero training officially starts.”

Oh, that’s right.

This is UA, not his shitty old schools. And while the other courses might still treat his quirk like a pariah, this is his class. If they can’t put aside their differences and work together, they’ll fail. It's in Class B’s own interest to accept him and work with him no matter what they really think of his quirk.

He can trust that at least.

Right?

Before he can overthink it any longer, Neito tentatively reaches out a single finger and pokes at the back of Kendou’s hand. The copy settles in his chest beside his dwindling hold on Tetsutetsu’s and–

And Kendou huffs again and makes a grab for him. “Do it properly you dummy. I wouldn’t have offered, if I minded.” 

Her hand feels warm and soft as her fingers slip between his own, palms pressing flush and…

And the dragon in his chest hums happily, wings curling protectively around the multiple quirks in its hoard.

Satiated.

Full. 

Oh.

Slowly, hesitantly, Neito curls his fingers over the back of her hand and gently squeezes back.

Maybe being in Class B will be different from the rest of the world after all.