Midoriya groaned as he woke up. Why was his bed so uncomfortable? He opened his eyes, and he quickly sat up when he realized he was actually on the floor. "Eri?" he asked. He looked to his bed; it was empty. He shot to his feet, adrenaline filling his limbs, and ran down the stairs. All For One hadn't gotten his filthy hands on her, had he?
He stopped in his tracks as he heard her voice from the bar room. He opened the door and came out, and he nearly sagged in relief when he saw Kurogiri and even Shigaraki entertaining her. "Wow," she said in awe, reaching her hand through one of Kurogiri's portals and jumping a little when she poked herself in the back.
"Hey, guys," Midoriya said, stretching out his arms as he walked towards them. Eri's eyes lit up, and she jumped up and ran over to him, throwing her arms around him.
"You really did it!" she cried, burying her face into his shirt. "I thought you were going to die, just like everyone else. But you did it! You saved me!"
"Hey, Midoriya. Care to explain who little Eri is and why you brought her here?" Shigaraki asked. He sounded mildly annoyed, but not nearly as angry as he probably would have been before actually meeting Eri.
"Eri is my new little sister," he declared. Eri looked up at him, eyes wide.
"Really?" she gasped. "Can I?"
"Of course," he said with a smile, ruffling her hair. "You can call me big brother, if you want. You'll be staying with me from now on, except probably when I'm at school."
Her eyes were shining, but she lowered her head. "You should take me back," she whispered. "I'm cursed; I killed my own father with my quirk. I can't control it, and the only one who can stop me once I start using it is Overhaul."
"How does he do that?" Midoriya asked. "I'll bet we can do it better."
"He—" She shuddered. "He disassembles me. Then he puts me back together."
Midoriya didn't say anything for a minute, trying to get his temper under control. He was going to murder Overhaul, but he didn't want Eri to know that he'd killed someone for her. "Well, our way is definitely better than that," he said, his voice disgusted. "What's your quirk?"
"My quirk is called Rewind," she murmured. "I can reverse time for people and animals. Not objects, though. That's why it's so hard to train me."
One For All's voice crackled over the stereo. "Don't worry, little one," he said. "I am young Midoriya's teacher, you could say. Overhaul may be powerful, but he is no match for me. As for your curse, you would not be the first I have saved from a dangerous quirk they could not control." Tomura looked away, hands fidgeting as he consciously kept himself from scratching at his neck and face.
"Unfortunately, you're not allowed to touch her," Midoriya said firmly, tightening his hold around Eri. "I'll figure it out myself. Now, I've got to go to school, so Kurogiri and Shigaraki are going to take care of you, okay?" he said, turning to her.
"Will you come back?" she asked, eyes wide and intent.
"Of course I will!" Midoriya said, giving her a smile. "I'll come back every day, right after my classes are over."
"Midoriya, we have things to do today. Did you forget? Sensei may not be a hero, but he's never used a child like that. You'll have to trust him with Eri's safety if you want to protect her from Overhaul, and I'd suggest letting him train her quirk, as well. There's no one with a wider knowledge of quirks, you know."
Midoriya gritted his teeth, but he nodded. "If you hurt her, you'll regret it," he said darkly, letting Wrath to the surface for a moment. Kurogiri and Tomura paused in surprise, never having felt that kind of presence from him before. Pushing off the questions, he used Disguise to turn back into Michi and threw his clothes on before hurrying to make it on time to school.
* * *
"Hey, you! Excuse me, but would you mind telling us about what it's like having All Might as a teacher?" a reporter asked, shoving a microphone into Michi's face. He gave her a charming grin.
"Of course, it's amazing! I've only had him for one class so far, so I can't say how talented he is at teaching, but just having him there is inspiring." He was animated, but still very calm and controlled. Excited at having someone actually talk to them about it, other reporters crowded around him, trying to get him to say something.
"I honestly don't know why he hasn't talked to you himself yet," Michi said. "He usually loves talking to the people." When they kept pressing forward, he laughed awkwardly. "I'm sorry, but I should really get to class. I don't want to be late on the third day of school."
He managed to break away, and he saw them target Iida, which made him laugh. Iida began giving them a lecture on how he was "realizing anew that the school he attended was for the best of the best" and such, and he went on for long enough to somehow bore even the press.
Michi got into the school and went to his classroom, and he had to admit that using the swarm of reporters was a very intelligent and convenient way to discreetly break into the school. He wondered if Shigaraki had come up with it himself.
He decided to talk with Shoto again until everyone arrived. "How's it going, Shoto?" he said with a grin. "I gotta say, you were pretty awesome in the combat training yesterday."
"I'm doing well," Shoto said, nodding. "Thank you. You did fairly well yourself."
"What high praise!" Michi said, laughing. "Anyway, how did you get past the press this morning? There's no way they would pass up the opportunity to ask you about what it's like being taught by the top two heroes in the country."
"I came early," he said simply.
Michi shrugged. "That's fair. What do you do when you're not at school, anyway?"
Shoto frowned. "What do you mean? I do my schoolwork and I train. What else would I be doing?"
"Do you even know how to have fun?" Michi laughed. That question was seriously hypocritical, coming from him, but his point still stands. "Listen, I'll talk to some of our other classmates and we can all go somewhere together. I'm not sure where, maybe a movie? I was thinking we could bring Mina, so probably not the mall. Any ideas?"
Shoto looked up at him blankly. "I don't think that's going to work," he said.
"What, because of your dad?" Michi scoffed. "He'll get over himself. Live a little, man! I'll bet I could talk him into it."
He sighed. "Good luck. I'll go with you if you can get permission for me."
"Awesome!" Michi said grinning at him. "Trust me, you'll enjoy it. If you're anything like me, you don't get enough happiness in your life." Shoto rolled his eyes at that, but he didn't refute it. And even if he did, Michi knew it was true.
He went back to his desk as Aizawa stood up, and Aizawa started the class. "Good work on yesterday's combat training," he said. "I saw the videos and results. Bakugo, you're talented, but if you don't get a reign on your temper you'll become predictable. Hamasaki, good work on your predictions, but you should be aware that you won't always know so much about your enemies. Uraraka, you did fantastic. Good job. I don't have time to go through everyone, but you all did well."
Ochako beamed, and Bakugo scowled. Michi just nodded. "Now, let's get down to homeroom business."
"To defeat the homeroom Huns," Michi muttered under his breath.
"Sorry about the late notice, but today I'll have you decide on a class representative," Mr. Aizawa continued, not hearing his comment. The class let out a collective sigh of relief when he didn't surprise them with another huge test.
"I want to be class rep!" Kirishima volunteered immediately, jumping to his feet. "Pick me!"
Of course, Kaminari was right behind him. "Me too!" he said excitedly, but he at least stayed in his seat.
"I want to do it, too," Jiro said, rolling her eyes at the two boys' antics and raising her hand calmly.
Aoyama stood up with a flare, striking a pose. "It's a job made for m—"
"I'll be the leader!" Mina interrupted, jumping up right in front of him.
The rest of the class went crazy, everyone volunteering, until Iida managed to get everyone to shut up. Michi had already made his way to the front of the class next to Aizawa.
"Thank you, Iida," Michi said, pulling everyone's attention forward. "If it's alright with Aizawa, I think Iida and I had the same idea: we should put it to a vote. We might not have known each other for very long, but I think we've already seen some leadership qualities in every student here. That is why we're all in the Hero Course at U.A., after all. Before we vote, I'd like to make a couple of endorsements, and anyone can endorse someone after I'm done if you'd like."
He looked to Aizawa, who just shrugged. "I don't care," he said, zipping up his sleeping bag and flopping to the floor. "Just have it done before Homeroom is over."
Michi nodded, turning back to address. "Since this is a leadership position, I don't think we should be able to endorse ourselves, so here are my recommendations. First, Momo Yaoyorozu. She's proven to have impressive deductive reasoning skills, and she adequately displayed her intelligence yesterday during the Combat Training." Momo smiled slightly, sitting up straighter in her seat.
"Second, I'll endorse Tenya Iida. He can obviously get all of you to be quiet and grab your attention, so he'll be very competent in that role, and I don't think any of us can doubt that he'll take the job seriously and try to be the best class rep for us that he can. Now, if anyone wants to recommend someone else that is not themselves, they can go ahead." He walked back to his seat and sat down.
After a moment, Ochako stood up and walked to the front. "Well, if no one else is going to do it, I'll obviously endorse Michi Hamasaki. I don't really have that much to say, but you've seen his leadership skills and his intelligence. I just think he'd do a good job, I guess." She sat back down.
There was a longer pause, and after a while, Kaminari stood up. "I guess the fact that no one will vouch for me says enough about my qualifications," he said with a chuckle, and some the other students nodded glumly. "I'd like to go ahead and say that Eijiro Kirishima would probably do a good job. His passion and enthusiasm would make him a great class rep."
Kirishima shot to his feet, a huge grin on his face. "Yes! Thanks, Denki!" he cheered. "You know what, I think Denki Kaminari would be good, too, because..."
He trailed off. Denki groaned, plopping his head into his hands. "You didn't have to say anything," he said sourly. The class laughed.
After that, it was time to vote. Everyone wrote who they thought would do the best on a slip of paper, and Michi voted for Tenya. He did want to do it himself, but he wouldn't be nearly as proud of the accomplishment if one of his votes was his own.
When everyone had voted, they were counted up and the results were written on the board. Tenya and Kirishima had each gotten three votes, Momo had received four, and Michi had gotten five. Shoto got two votes, and Bakugo, Aoyama, and Kaminari got one. Everyone else got zero, and Michi was surprised that so many people had voted for someone else.
"I got a vote!" Kaminari cheered. "I didn't even vote for myself, but I got one!"
Apparently, Michi was the only one to notice Jiro ducking her head and blushing.
* * *
It was lunch time. Michi took a minute to chat with all of his friends before ducking out so he could talk to the media when they broke through. Michi winced when he felt Shoto's eyes on him yet again—the boy was way too observant. Probably because he was never distracted by things like talking to friends.
He was sitting under a tree outside, inconspicuously eating his lunch, when the alarm went off. He sighed to himself, but he shot to his feet like he was alarmed. Of course, being a hero in training, it was only natural for him to dart to the entrance, where reporters and their camera crews were flooding through the inexplicably open gates.
Aizawa and President Mic were holding them back at the entrance, with President Mic shouting thinly veiled insults as he tried to tell them to back off.
"Mr. Aizawa, what's going on?" Michi asked when he got there, slightly out of breath from the run.
"Hamasaki?" Aizawa said, raising his eyebrows. "What are you doing out here?"
"I was eating my lunch under that tree; I wanted a bit of quiet time outside. How did the news reporters get in?"
"That's what we'd like to know," Aizawa said grimly. "Something isn't right."
"Excuse me, first year student! Can we get your name? Please, share some more of what it's like to have All Might as a teacher!" one of the reporters called out to Michi.
Michi glanced at Aizawa. "Should I?" he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. "I'm pretty good with people, I might be able to keep them distracted until the cops get here."
Aizawa and President Mic exchanged a glance. "How good are you at trolling, kid?" Mic asked. "What I really want to do is beat them all up for trespassing illegally onto U.A. grounds, since they're technically villains, but Aizawa says that's a bad idea. I'll settle for you trolling them, if you can."
Michi grinned. "Watch, and be amazed," he said. "Trolling is my second best skill, right after table tennis." He left the two heroes to puzzle over how his epic table tennis skills related to manipulating the media, and he walked forward to be immediately surrounded by reporters pushing microphones into his face. He acted unbothered, winking at all of the cameras he could see.
"Sir, what is your name?" one called out.
"You can call me Michi," he said playfully, keeping a charming smile on his face. He was going for a persona somewhere between Hawks and All Might.
"That'a a rather informal introduction," another said.
"Well, I'd say this is a pretty informal situation, wouldn't you?" he joked. "Should I pretend I'm already a hero? I could pose here and tell you about myself, if you want." He made an exaggeratedly serious expression, straightening his back and talking in a deeper voice. "Well, it all started when I was but a child," he said, staring dramatically into the distance. "All Might's debut astounded me, and when he shouted 'I am here!' I cried and peed my pants a little because I was four years old."
He broke character and started laughing, and the reporters and cameramen around him joined in; apparently he'd at least succeeded in getting their attention and making a good joke. He was fairly confident he'd be able to keep their attention; he'd had a while to plan for this little act, after all.
"What can you say about All Might as a teacher? What kinds of things has he taught you so far?" one person asked.
Michi grinned. It was time to exaggerate about everything that had happened in the Combat Training. "Well, yesterday was only our second day of school, so you'd think I wouldn't have very many cool stories yet, right? You'd be wrong. We had combat training yesterday, and you'd never guess how All Might set it up."
He made sure to make plenty of animated hand gestures and energy into the story, and he could tell the reporters were just eating it up. President Mic looked like he was enjoying the show as well, and even Aizawa looked like he was interested.
"We were split into groups of two, and then we were assigned roles: half the teams were heroes, and half the team were villains. It sounds totally crazy, making hero students of all people pretend to be villains, but it really helped us get inside their heads and consider what they might be thinking or doing. Half the battle is knowing what your opponent will do, you know?" He hoped Shigaraki was watching right now, because he would probably be laughing his ass off at the irony of Midoriya, of all people, talking about getting in a villain's shoes.
"What did you do in the exercise?" another reporter spoke up.
"There was a huge paper machete model of a bomb that the villains had to keep away from the heroes for the time limit, while the heroes had to either secure the bomb or capture the villains. The building that the bomb was hidden in changed for each round, and both teams also had to memorize the layout of the building so they could take advantage of surprise attacks, or even just so they didn't get lost."
All of the reporters started trying to talk over each other in an effort to ask him something else, but he managed to hear one say, "Did any of your classmates stand out to you?"
"Of course, all of my classmates are amazing, as expected in the U.A. hero course. But I'm sure that they would agree with me in saying that Bakugo, Todoroki, and Yaoyorozu were incredible. Todoroki froze an entire building without breaking a sweat! His round was over the fastest out of all of them, he was unstoppable," Michi said. "But I guess you'd expect that from Endeavor's son, especially now that he's being trained by All Might too. Imagine how amazing he'll be as a hero, being trained by both of the top two heroes!"
"What about the other two you mentioned?" someone asked. "Can you tell us about them?"
Michi could have laughed; his plan was going perfectly. It seemed they'd become so interested in what he was telling them, they'd forgotten that they were only there for information on All Might.
"Well, Yaororozu and Todoroki both got into U.A. through recommendations. Yaoyorozu's quirk isn't as flashy as some, but it's versatility seems honestly infinite and she is definitely intelligent enough to use it to its fullest extent," he said, determined not to sell her short of her full ability. "If she has an understanding of something, she can create it from lipids in her body. Incredible, right? As crazy as this is going to sound, I would say that her intelligence and analysis skills honestly seemed even more impressive. She's a literal genius."
He grinned, not worried at all about selling this last one short. "Bakugo, though... he's a real piece of work, if I'm being honest," he admitted. The press, which he'd come to consider as more of an audience than his hosts, laughed at his blunt statement. "His quirk is Explosion, and it fits his personality perfectly. He seems more violent than you'd expect from a hopeful hero, but hopefully he'll grow out of it. Regardless of his attitude, though, no one can question his passion or his skill. His control over his quirk and his body are phenomenal, and he has more finely tuned battle instincts already than some pros I've seen. He was actually one of the first place scorers in the entire practical entrance exam."
"He sounds like he could really become a great hero," a reporter said. "May I ask what you mean by 'one of the first place scorers'?"
"Well, there was a tie for first place," Michi elaborated, pretending to look reluctant to talk about it.
"Who was the other person?"
"Well..." he said, hesitating a bit. He sighed in resignation. "It was me," he admitted. "I don't like to say it myself, because I don't like to sound like I'm bragging. Another one of my classmates, Uraraka, was the one that really deserved the credit. She actually deserves to be mentioned as someone that stood out in the combat training, too; she managed to stand up to Bakugo and fight him for quite a while, even though her quirk is more oriented for rescue than for combat."
The reporters all looked like they had quite a bit more they wanted to ask him, and he couldn't stop his smug smirk when he heard that none of them were actually still about All Might, but the police had finally arrived. The press was dragged from the property, and Michi shook his head with a bemused smile on his face as he finally turned back to Aizawa and President Mic.
"That was totally wicked!" President Mic said, smiling from ear to ear. "By the end of that, they weren't even asking about All Might! I've gotta take some notes from you, my man. You lead them on a wild goose chase and they were invested the entire time!"
"It was quite enjoyable to watch the media chase their tail in a circle," Aizawa admitted, much more reserved but still smirking proudly. "I'd still recommend becoming an underground hero to avoid all of the trouble, but it almost seems like a shame to suggest that to someone so naturally skilled in making the press look like the fools they are."
Michi swelled in pride. He'd just gotten an actual compliment from Eraser Head! And it looked like President Mic had taken quite a liking to him as well. Both of those things were really just bonuses to his real goal of distracting everyone while the League of Villains broke in, but nobody would ever know that anyway.
"Oh, shoot!" he suddenly realized. "Lunch is almost over and I haven't finished my food!"
With that, he left both heroes looking amused and rushed to finish his lunch before the bell rang. It was a very close call.