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As a child, Izuku had always liked being outside.
He loved greenery. Trees, flowers, any kind of plant. He would pretend to have a quirk that made them grow, always excited when his father taught him about their names and characteristics. Any chance he got, he would play in their garden, his parents watching him fondly from the open screens of their traditional styled home.
After the divorce and subsequent move to a smaller apartment, Izuku had to get used to the more urban environment. He used to beg his mother constantly to go to the park, but her job didn´t always leave time for her to take him.
“I´m sorry Izukkun! We can´t go today”, she would tell him, closing her own eyes against his teary ones, knowing that if she looked now, she would show up at work with smudged make-up.
Looking for a way to let Izuku spend his afternoons outside while she had to get back to work after their local children´s group closed had led Inko to get to know Bakugou Mitsuki, who had taken a break from her modeling job to raise her own child.
“I´m sure our brats will get along great!”, Mitsuki had grinned, rough, but warm in everything she did. Kacchan became Izuku´s whole world for a while. Happy and active Izuku shot up several inches during the following summer, basking in the fresh air beneath the glare of the Musutafu sun.
Then their quirk, or lack of it, made itself known. Their friendship broke and Izuku convinced his mom that he would be okay on his own, while aunt Mitsuki could still have an eye on him and requiring of him to check in with her regularly. Not knowing how to deal with their children not wanting to spend time together anymore, Inko and Mitsuki allowed for it.
Izuku spent every possible second outside, sometimes joining in on the games of the other kids, sometimes keeping to himself to read or daydream about heroes.
After his last growth spurt, Izuku had gone from one of the smallest kids in his elementary school class to one of the tallest. Even if his classmates picked on him for his quirklessness, they shied away from getting physical with him.
It was one of the many things Kacchan didn´t like about him, even back then.
Later, as school and exams got tougher and some of the older students started looking for more violent outlets for their frustrations, Izuku started spending more time in the library. That didn´t always make it possible to avoid getting hurt, but it helped and so he stayed inside until they got bored waiting for him at the gate.
He stopped growing as much.
As the years passed, Izuku didn´t notice things that would have been obvious, had any adult in his life besides his mother, who was used to some of his weirder tendencies, actually cared to pay attention to the quirkless child in front of them. Scars, which should by all rights have littered his arms from his classmate´s quirks, disappeared, slowly but without a trace, skin knitting together in invisible patterns of fiber.
During one wet winter after Izuku had turned eleven, when the sun didn´t show itself for weeks, he started getting thinner and thinner, no matter how much he ate. His mother took him to a medical professional, who couldn´t find anything wrong and told her to just make him eat more.
Once, it got bad enough that Izuku collapsed during one of the gym sessions at school. The school nurse chewed him out for not eating enough and not staying in shape. All Izuku could do was stare blankly at her and think about the hearty breakfast of egg, salmon, rice and vegetables his mother had lovingly prepared for him that morning and how he could still feel it filling his stomach. The energy the meal should have given him never reached him.
There was a white fuzz covering some strands of his curly hair. No one paid any mind to it and it went away on its own after a while.
He tried to spend as much time as he was able to outside, catching hero fights or reading in the parks littered around their neighborhood. But each winter, he got lethargic and weak and no matter how much he exercised to get back in shape by summer, come next winter he was back at the starting point.
By spring of his last year of middle school, before he was able to start training with All Might, Izuku had stopped trying to gain more muscles than he usually developed running around Musutafu in the summer.
He was tired.
And it wasn´t like anyone would be disappointed in him if he gave up.
*
UA had been a blessing for Izuku.
He felt challenged by every class and his developing friendships made every day seem unique and new.
The move into the dorms had felt sudden but exciting and Izuku couldn´t wait to see how they would fit together, as people and as heroes.
They shared dinner in the communal dining space, after cooking together for the first time, with much input from Sato and Kacchan. Most likely smelling the impending disaster of their class´ missing culinary skills, the latter had come back down from retiring early, yelling. Seeing him grab a chef´s hat from Kirishima, which Yaomomo had made for him on a whim, had been a highlight of Izuku´s evening. Even if he didn´t risk showing that in front of Kacchan.
But as much fun as they had talking and joking, school would still take place at the same time the next day, so they turned in at a semi-reasonable time eventually. Sleep came easily to Izuku as class 1-A settled down for the evening.
A few hours later, Izuku woke up feeling refreshed and ready to start his day, as usual.
First, he opened Rebbit on his still plugged in phone, trying to catch up on the latest hero news and checking to see if his fight analysis of Wash vs Gobbler had sparked some interest in the small analysis community he was part of. Afterwards, he got ready for his usual workout routine, opening the dorm door and taking a deep breath of the fresh morning air. It was dark and quiet, just like he had expected it to be.
He heard the screech of a door behind him and he stopped in his tracks.
“What are you doing out here, Problem Child?”, his teacher´s voice echoed through the cold morning air, growl becoming progressively more pronounced with each syllable. Izuku slowly turned around.
Aizawa-sensei´s eyes were red and bruised. He didn´t look like he´d slept and his clothes indicated a night of late patrols. There was blood on his sleeve.
“It´s two in the morning, kid. There´s a reason you have a curfew. Go back to sleep.”
Izuku didn´t shy away from his teacher´s prompt grip on his elbow, apparently trying to bodily drag him back to bed.
“But I already slept Aizawa-sensei!”, he protested. What had the curfew times been again?
Aizawa looked at him curiously, cocking his head just a bit to the side.
And it was true, Izuku didn´t look tired. He was used to getting little sleep and it had never bothered him before. So he kept waking up early and his mom had to concede some liberties for his teenage self. Too bad he would have to establish some new habits now, if they wouldn´t allow him to leave the dorm at his usual time. Did they have a gym in the basement? If not, would he be allowed to use one of the leftover rooms instead? How would he be able to keep up with his running regimen so his legs got enough of a workout, because squats didn´t do much for running endurance-
“Calm down, Problem Child, I won´t demand for you to neglect your training just for a curfew.”, Aizawa interrupted him. “I just need to know where you are and when, so that in an emergency, we won´t have to look for you. And I´m sure you know to stay on campus.”
He shot another dubious look at Izuku´s complexion, still a bit pale and maybe greenish in the light of Height Alliance´s porch lamp. “Are you sure this isn´t nightmares keeping you up? You kids have been through a lot these past few months. You know that Hound Dog has time slots kept open especially for this kind of thing?”
Izuku was taken aback for a moment, having forgotten that such a thing as counselors were a thing heroes were expected to visit. Supposedly, there had been one at Aldera, but Izuku had never seen them.
“I´m fine, sensei! I don´t need much sleep and I would rather do something productive with the time”, he nervously explained, “I-Is that okay?”
Aizawa considered him once more and turned to the door. “Do what you want, you have my permission for training. But if I see you slacking off in class, I will not hesitate to revoke it.” The door closed before Izuku could thank him and wish him a good night. Then there was silence.
He didn´t notice a purple-headed general studies student watching him make his rounds from the balcony of the building a few paces over and resolving to up his workout regimen.
*
The joint training had been an embarrassment for his quirk control due to the unleashing of Black Whip and Izuku just wanted to curl up in bed and sleep forever.
His brain would not let him though. And so, having gone to sleep at his usual time, Izuku was wide awake at two in the morning. He scratched at his lightly itching scalp and debated the merits of just not getting up for once. He thought of All Might´s disappointed face to properly motivate himself into getting his workout routine done. He mostly managed it by trying out an especially aggressive alternative playlist curated by Jirou and Tokoyami a few days before.
Afterwards, sighing at the pleasant warmth left over by a hot shower, he wiped the mirror clean to at least attempt to get some order into his mess of a bedhead before it dried like that. Grabbing a brush, which was indeed something he owned, thanks Kacchan, he paused just before straightening the curls falling into his face.
He had to look twice. The glaring bathroom light hurt his eyes.
His roots were coming in darker.
What.
His hair was green naturally. So why was it growing out like that? Izuku put the brush back down and put his head between his arms, gripping the sink just tightly enough not to break it off and allowed himself to panic just a bit.
Then he took a deep breath and looked closer.
The color was a bit strange. Slightly brown, more of a greenish violet. It didn´t affect his whole head and looked natural enough. Hopefully Kacchan wouldn´t accuse him of having dyed his hair his whole life.
He should probably go see Recovery Girl for this. A color change following the appearance of a new quirk was unsettling, but maybe there were precedents. Children´s bodies changed sometimes if their quirk came in drastically. Not everyone was born with the mutations that their quirk would eventually develop for them. He knew, from one late night study session on quirk biology for their midterm exams, that Iida hadn´t been born with metal engines in his legs. They had started growing after he had turned three, compared to Tokoyami, who had always had a bird head. His avian features had been inherited and had nothing to do with his actual quirk, which made Dark Shadow so interesting for quirk specialists.
Briefly, Izuku considered the emergence of Black Whip.
The Fifth´s appearance, bald as he had been before Izuku, gave him no clues as to what was happening, but it also didn´t disprove a connection. Oh god, he really hoped the spreading dark roots weren´t a sign he was going to lose his hair soon. His ears were too big to sell that kind of look.
He took another breath and forced down his unease.
After he finished drying his hair, Izuku sat down in front of his computer and cracked his fingers. Time to research. He had some time to kill before he was able to bother Recovery Girl about the latest One for All problem and he might as well use it wisely. Maybe he wouldn´t need to go to her at all with this. Everything had a rational explanation.
Only the chime of his phone made him look up again, signaling that it was time to join his friends for breakfast. He hopped down the stairs to the dining area, eager for some of Yaomomo´s expertly brewed tea. Blowing slightly over his steaming cup, he had almost forgotten about his hair dilemma, head still swimming with stages of quirk development in children and genome expression.
“Midoriya, why didn´t you tell me you were dying your hair?” Ashido exclaimed next to his ear. He jumped, letting out a small “eep” in surprise and almost spilled tea all over his shirt. “How did you get the gradient so well done? That must have taken hours!” She ran her fingers over the tips, tone getting even more excited as she looked closer.
Izuku hid his blushing cheeks behind his tea. “I didn´t dye it, Ashido-san”, he mumbled.
Kirishima looked at him strangely. “Dude, that color is nowhere near what your hair looked like yesterday. How is that not dyed?” The redhead got an exhausted grimace for his troubles.
“I´m planning on visiting Recovery Girl later. It´s probably weird quirk stuff again.” Izuku replied. He got shoved aside by Kacchan, who grabbed the saltshaker and hot pepper flakes package from behind Izuku to season his unusually frugal breakfast of eggs and rice. Izuku was craving fish now. But he had seen katsudon on the lunch menu and he couldn´t just skip over his favourite like that- “I like the new hairstyle Deku-kun!”, Uraraka called while passing him, dragging him to the opened rice cooker and shoving a bowl into his hands while Iida heaved leftover vegetables onto a plate.
Looking around, Izuku couldn´t find any fish nor meat. Todoroki pushed the jar of protein powder he had just been using in his direction. “We used up the last of the meat for dinner yesterday and Tokoyami took the leftovers.”, he told him, barely glancing up from his glass of juice. Their bird headed classmate exclaimed a “I said I was sorry, but Dark Shadow was craving a midnight snack!”, grabbing his own bowl.
The usual chaos continued and followed them into the classroom. He forgot about his hair troubles and it wasn´t spoken of again. The day continued as normal.
Overwhelmed with love for his friends and the contentment of another fulfilling day of the rest of his life, Izuku closed his eyes and breathed.
*
Lots of sun and salt water made people´s hair lighter.
That was something that Ochako had always been aware of. She envied her middle school classmates their holidays, made clear for having been spent at the sea via tanned skin and bleached streaks of hair.
Considering how much All Might doted on Deku and what a great quirk her friend had, she didn´t bat an eye when she noticed him coming to school with lighter and lighter hair as summer approached and the weather became scorching, the boy smelling of salt and sand.
She was a bit disappointed that he never talked about it with her and Iida, but maybe he didn´t want to flaunt his privilege? Deku had always been too humble for his own good, even going so far as to let Bakugou push him around.
Summer continued and Ochako couldn´t help staring at Deku´s hair once in a while.
It had gotten slightly longer, looking like he hadn´t bothered with a haircut. It poofed out in the humid summer air, catching the light and reflecting in vibrant shades of green, a foliage of soft curls, almost unfurling during the day. In the evening, it flopped over weakly and he always looked exhausted during the night even if he told them he wasn´t tired, but then again, their curriculum was nothing to scoff at, so everyone looked like that. Sometimes it seemed to her his hair heralded his mood and she thought it cute.
When Deku´s hair changed again halfway during their second semester, she took it as him trying out something new and maybe being too embarrassed to say anything about it. She had seen him eye Tokoyami´s décor the last time they had been invited to play cards in his dorm room. Hair dye was a popular subject in their class as well as age group. She knew for a fact that Kaminari was a brunette by his eyebrows and Kirishima couldn´t hide the boxes of hair dye he got sent by his parents on post days. She supported his new style wholeheartedly. The dark violet at the center of tufts of green reminded her of an exotic office plant her father had gifted her mother during better times.
Away from the chaos outside their school gates, everything was fine.
Ochako watched Deku scarf down the content of his lunch box in dissatisfaction.
They had just finished a brutal circuit training to the beat of a new and very annoying pop song while Midnight and Present Mic lobbed softballs at them and Ochako knew that Deku´s calorie intake didn´t match his evasion rate. He had way less bruises than her or Iida. Especially since they weren´t allowed to use their quirks during this training, which Aizawa-sensei was ensuring by himself training his quirk.
Deku moved on to his water bottle, which he had been to refill twice since the start of their break. Ochako worried he would make himself sick with how much he had been drinking.
She knew that her friend was an avid believer in staying hydrated and that with being a teenager training like a maniac every day, he sweat a lot and needed the liquid in his system. But sometimes she wondered where he put it all. Was his blood pressure okay? She didn´t see him running off to use the facilities that often, compared to some others in their class who drank more than seemed healthy to her. Like Aoyama or Sato, one of which had chronic stomach problems and the other who had to fuel his quirk with so much sugar he needed to balance out the taste and had been scolded for using coffee instead of water before.
The only other person who drank as much as Deku currently was Bakugou and his quirk depended on him sweating a lot.
And did she just imagine it or had Bakugou taken a look at how much Deku drank and upped his own water intake?
She would never understand boys.
*
Thanks to the countless villain attacks they had gone through, getting permission to go to the Seven-Eleven to pick up some groceries was a thing of near impossibility.
They usually got a collective delivery at the beginning of the week, but, being very active teenagers with occasional weird cravings made it difficult to plan for all meal eventualities.
So on Friday evening, Uraraka and Midoriya volunteered to go and pick up whatever was missing for the weekend. Aizawa had looked at them sternly and told them “not to cause trouble" in that grumpy tone that let them know he cared. Overhearing and just having left the communal baths, Shouto got permission to go with them. The list of things they needed to get had grown exponentially after some of their classmates had heard that they would be making the trip. More than half the list consisted of snacks. Recovery Girl wouldn´t approve.
Being outside the UA campus for the first time in a while was slightly overwhelming for Shouto. He had opted out of going home and his father was too busy as the new number one to care.
Standing in front of the small gift section, Uraraka caught up to Midoriya mumbling up a storm. “What are you looking at, Deku-kun?”, she asked him, realizing what he was staring so intently at. It was a flowerpot, with many small, light blue blossoms peeking over the rim.
“I used to have a pet flower, a violet, before I started training for UA.”, Midoriya told her. Shouto looked over his shoulder at the flower selection. “Used to?”, he questioned his friend.
“I neglected her a bit after I started training. The schedule was super tight and I didn´t have much time to think and forgot to water her. Whenever I didn´t, I gave her too much. She didn´t like that”, Midoriya said, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. He smiled. “Mom knew I had forgotten and watered her too. We drowned her a little. I miss her.”
Shouto was amazed at how much of an emotional connection his friend could build to a plant. He had attempted to name the koi fish in their pond when he was little, but there were so many he constantly lost track of which was which.
Checking his wallet, Midoriya gave the plant section another glassy look before hanging his head and moving on.
Shouto eyed a poster next to the cash register proclaiming “Preorder Our Authentic Christmas Fried Chicken Boxes here!” and remembering that Iida and Yaoyorozu had set up a gift exchange for December. He made sure his friend had moved on before turning to Uraraka.
“Are flowers an appropriate gift for the exchange thing?”
*
Though it´s a western tradition, giving gifts on Christmas Eve had become a Japanese custom as well since the rise of quirks.
Izuku never had anyone besides his mom give him gifts around this time. His dad sometimes remembered to send a souvenir from wherever he spent the season, always on the move as he was with his job as a botanist for quirked plants. Most of the time he just sent his mom some money so she could pick out a gift that would come “from both of his parents”.
For years, Izuku would try to remember what his father looked like and come up blank. And if his father preferred plants over his family, who would blame Izuku if he never thought about him in return? Izuku didn´t try to send him gifts either.
So their class´ Secret Santa event was a novel experience for Izuku. He didn´t consider himself a very good gift giver, but he tried getting something for each of his friends, after hearing them plan for each other and being asked what he would gift whom.
He was still surprised when Uraraka and Todoroki shoved an open box into his hands, her laughing and his other friend´s expression as soft as it ever got.
It was a pot of flowers, delicate petals glowing a vibrant purple and overflowing from the colorful cardboard enveloping the pot. Violets were not a common flower in Japan but he had always liked them. The flowers were beautifully captivating in their simplicity.
“I-Is this for me?”, Izuku asked, his rational brain knowing that had to be the case but deep down remembering all the times a classmate had given him a wrapped box, only for him to find tacks or rotten fruit inside.
“Who else would it be for?”, Uraraka laughed and threw her arms around him at his resulting bright smile. “Merry Christmas!”, she yelled and her cry was returned in varying degrees of bad English accents by the whole class.
Izuku quietly thanked her and Todoroki and tried to pretend that his eyes weren´t leaking.
He thought of the empty flowerpot at home, dark green and shaped like a grenade, a gag gift his aunt Mitsuki had picked out and told him he would appreciate when he was older. A sentimental leftover from a childhood when their parents had still had the impression that Kacchan and him were close. He wondered if Kacchan still had the small kitchen herb garden his mom had helped Izuku put together back then to give him.
He didn´t catch Kacchan looking at the flowers and remembering with a start what had started his interest in the culinary arts a long, long time ago.
*
Winters in Musutafu were usually dry and cold. Tsuyu dreaded those times of the year. The dry air made her eyes and skin itch and she just couldn´t seem to stay awake. A few days in, Midoriya had started joining her for her midday naps on the common room couch or in the break room that had been provided for the hero students at the UA campus.
“I hope he isn´t getting sick”, Uraraka commented when she came to collect Tsuyu for the next class and found Midoriya still asleep. “Maybe we should just let him sleep?”
Tsuyu considered their friend´s exhausted face for a second. He had been pretty busy with his internship for the past few weeks. She knew from her own how stressful it could be. “I´m sure Aizawa won´t mind if we explain it to him”, she shrugged. Their teacher had been more lenient for their health´s sake for some time now.
She cast one look back at Midoriya as they quietly closed the door behind them. It was eerie, seeing their classmate so still. Some rest would hopefully do him some good.
Back in their classroom, Aizawa raised an eyebrow at them.
“The problem child hasn´t been sleeping?”, he asked them incredulously.
Ochako wrung her hands. “Well, the thing is, he has? Been sleeping I mean. More than usual. We´ve had to wake him up for breakfast a lot. He has been missing his alarm.”
Aizawa paused for a moment. “If he doesn´t show any other signs of being sick or overworked by the end of the week, I´ll talk to him. If he gets worse, tell me or get Recovery Girl.”
Midoriya continued to be lethargic for weeks. With the warmer spring weather, he regained a lot of his energy and his friends stopped worrying. Aizawa had indeed talked to him about his sudden change in sleeping habits, but Midoriya himself had not been able to explain it, besides giving a “Winter is always like this” and shrugging.
Recovery Girl prescribed him a bottle of vitamin D and prayed that he was just having a light winter depression from a lack of sunlight like most people.
*
Class 2-B had never been of serious interest to Izuku besides the students being in their year and having interesting quirks.
But after the raid at the end of their first year, he had started to see the merit in getting to know them more as people. Fighting one of the world´s most dangerous villains together and working to rebuild after the Tartarus mass outbreak had managed to make them put aside any differences and build a solid camaraderie.
They had also started sharing more training spaces after the public had questioned why a hero school received such a large portion of Japan´s military budget and UA had to rent out some of their training spaces to newly emerging hero agencies.
These new agencies mostly consisted of their own alumni, who didn´t get support from the HPSC anymore. The HPSC had made clear independent heroes would only receive such if they acted under their direct supervision.
Nedzu had reacted by expanding heroics classes to prepare his students even better for life after graduation. That extended to rotating different hero team combinations every few months between classes.
The curated teams would share all heroics classes and spend extra hours after school working on different tasks as well as special assignments to improve in areas their principal expected them to excel in.
For Izuku, that meant that he spent a lot more time with Shiozaki Ibara and Komori Kinoko from 2-B.
Shiozaki liked talking about other cultures and gardening during lunch. Sometimes she would eye Izuku´s hair with a fond smile, mutter an excuse, reach out her hand and move a few stray strands this way or that, arranging it and whenever she did that, Izuku could feel an incoming headache alleviate.
Komori had started sitting with them whenever they hung out to talk shop about gardens and smiled each time, so much more genuine than when they trained. She had confidentially told Izuku after a recent one-on-one sparring session that she had mostly joined the hero course so she could practice with her quirk. She knew her dream of becoming a hero idol was short lived. What she actually wanted to do was retire a few years into her career, just late enough that she wouldn´t have to repay the state sponsored tuition that made it mandatory for any hero student to serve at least as a sidekick for a set number of years and go to university to study biology, botany and phytology.
The reminder of his father sent a pang of nostalgic longing through him, but he wholeheartedly wished her the best. He thought her ambitions were wonderful.
Izuku wasn´t quite sure why Nedzu had put them together.
They all liked plants? Maybe, but he also feared the amount of social management assignments they had received from Midnight. But no matter the reason, he was determined to make the best out of his first assigned team. Plus Ultra!
*
With another winter approaching, classes had picked up pace again to make up for the lack of official internships that were allowed to hero students after the disaster of the past year. Instead, they were made to work rigorously on their techniques, rescue skills and strategic thinking. They would be called out for disaster relief duty at random, helping with flooding, certain villain attacks or rebuilding afterwards, their quirks being the deciding factor for who the HPSC would request.
It made Aizawa fume but he made them work all the harder on their skills for it. One evening after another disaster, when five of his classmates had just made it out of a villain attack alive, he had told them about his own school days. And he had promised them he would do his damnest to make sure they lived to found their own agencies.
They had lost some people since then.
But life continued on and the remainders of classes A and B trained and trained and trained.
Izuku didn´t feel all that good today, sitting with Shiozaki and Komori again after their team-up lesson. He wasn´t one to get sick easily but he had been feeling under the weather for a few days now. “You should go rest”, Komori told him, watching him with badly hidden concern. He waved her off. He couldn´t slack off now. She herself had just returned on duty after a strong cold that had sent her sneezing spores everywhere last week. Shiozaki warily eyed the dull color of his hair. It was starting to turn slightly yellow.
Izuku got weaker over the next few days. No matter how much time he spent sleeping or outside in the sun, he was always tired. He ate and drank more than usual, but it didn´t feel like he did.
He lost weight quickly, as well as energy. He tried to keep up his training regimen, but it started to take a toll on him and his performance in class was affected. He was told to take the next few days off on Friday.
He went back to his dorm room and slept for two days.
When he was woken up by a concerned Uraraka knocking on his door on Monday morning to ask if he was well enough to return to class, he didn´t respond. His throat felt too tight.
“I will get you something to eat after class, okay?”, Uraraka told him through the door. His friend took his silence as a sign that he was still asleep and left.
There was white fuzz covering his hair.
He tried getting up but his eyes were cloudy and he was dizzy. It had spread to his skin, his arms covered in pale mold. He was too tired to be horrified.
He made his way to their Math and Economics class late that day.
He opened the door.
Ectoplasm turned from the board to greet him.
Izuku´s shoulder caught on the doorway. He felt something rip beneath his school uniform. He slowly moved his hand up to see what it was, disconnected from the sudden sounds around him. His hand came back wet. But where there once might have been blood was now a clear, slightly sticky substance. Someone shook the shoulder that he could still feel, but it was far away as he stared at his hand. His fingers dripped.
His eyes slid shut and he-
*
-collapsed, fluid leaking from his shoulder, source obscured by his rapidly darkening school uniform. Ectoplasm wasted no time picking Midoriya up, leaving a clone to try to calm down his panicked class and carrying his student to the school nurse´s office. He sent a clone forward to open the door but made the command urgent enough that it almost broke it down with how much force was put behind the movement.
Recovery Girl was finishing up tending to another student, a girl from 2-B. “What is it this time?”, she exasperatedly asked, paling as she turned around and saw the serious face of her coworker and the state of the student he was carrying.
She quickly and decidedly pointed to the nearest cot, grabbing a pair of medical shears and removing Midoriya´s school uniform, taking note of his complexion and the strange white fuzz covering his body and hair.
The wound on his shoulder was strange. Recovery Girl frowned. “How did that happen?”, she asked the teacher next to her. He shook his head. “He only bumped against the doorway”, Ectoplasm told her, rubbing a hand over his eyes. His clone back at the classroom was sending him distress signals.
Ectoplasm chanced a look at the wound. It was still leaking that almost clear fluid, like glue and he could see dark flesh, like his student had been cut by a jagged knife or just been ripped open along a seam.
“I have never seen a wound like this”, Recovery Girl muttered. She made an effort to staunch the flow of the fluid that seemed to be Midoriya´s current equivalent of blood, but the student who had been her previous patient stopped her.
“Please, let me see that for a second!”, she cried, fear in her eyes. The vines that made up her hair lashed out nervously.
She gave him once over and her hands hovered over the wound helplessly and Recovery Girl was on the verge of getting really angry at Shiozaki for not letting her help her patient, when the girl who had brought her here ten minutes ago with a sprained ankle returned with two cans of green tea from the vending machines the next building over.
“Ibara-chan, I got you-“, Komori started and promptly choked off what she had wanted to say. She didn´t drop the cans, but clenched them even closer to her chest, when she laid eyes on Midoriya.
“It´s Erysiphe Cichoracearum”, she exclaimed, shock coloring her voice. “How is that even possible?” The nurse´s eyes narrowed in consideration.
“Explain!”, Recovery Girl demanded, finally pushing past Shiozaki to get another look at her patient´s shoulder.
“I-It´s a fungus. Powdery mildew. It usually affects squash plants. It shouldn´t have any effects on humans!”
“You didn´t know he had a plant quirk?”, Shiozaki´s eyebrows raised in surprise. “I thought that was obvious. He showed all the same signs my family uses to tell early if the quirk was passed on.”
“I don´t think even Midoriya knew.”, Recovery Girl told them, shoving the staunching pad she had been using into Ectoplasms hands and instructing him to continue holding it to the wound. She herself moved over to a tablet PC that was mounted on a rollable table, made to be used in emergencies requiring special attention to quirk anatomy and mutations.
Shiozaki made a face. “Well, it can be dangerous for people with plant quirks to get into contact with fungi”, she looked at them, hand clenched together in front of her in a mockery of a prayer. “When I was younger, my parents had to take garden shears to my hair because I caught aphids. I also lost one of my uncles on my mother´s side to a regular garden fungus. Almost everyone on that side of the family has some kind of plant mutation. It wasn´t pretty. He had to be quarantined and my mom wasn´t allowed to be with him in his final moments. The risk of infection was too high for her.”
“What can we do then?”, Recovery Girl said, resignation in her tone.
Shiozaki averted her eyes. “If you have a moldy plant, the only way to save it is to cut away the infected areas.”, Komori told them instead.
“Cut away?”, their school nurse exclaimed, angry. “There will be nothing left of him!”
“With how little actual blood there is, his mutation should be severe enough for that to not be a problem but- Komori, do you remember him bleeding normally?”- “He bled red during our first team exercise, but I don´t think he got cut much since then, only pulled muscles or bruises.”
“I´m calling a specialist”, Recovery Girl cut in. There was no way she would execute such a drastic procedure without input from another professional, not at her age.
With Midoriya more or less stable, wounds temporarily dressed and supplied with a nutrient-rich drip, the nurse resolved to call All Might and give him hell for never telling her the boy had some kind of plant mutation.
*
Izuku returned to school two weeks later, devastated to have missed so many classes.
His friends were enraged how lightly he was taking it all, but he knew that if he started thinking about the Incident in detail, it would drive him crazy.
A plant mutation. And it had not been a part of OFA. It had always been there.
Recovery Girl had helped a quirk specialist to remove six percent of his whole body, to get rid of the fungus. And one of his arms from the shoulder down.
He had spent a week in a coma. They had buried him in soil and watered him like a regular plant. Save for a slight discoloration, everything had grown back seamlessly. Even his arm. All Might had promised him a lecture on how being able to regrow lost limbs would not justify using his quirk at full capacity in the future.
Nedzu had mandated extra courses on plant care and quirk biology for his class. Izuku´s classmates would never look at his botany books the same way again.
He was glad to still be alive.
He could only hope OFA would stop throwing quirks at him now.
He sneezed.
A cloud of glitter erupted in front of him.
He stared at it, shrugged, and went to class.
They would deal with it. Somehow.