The door slid open and the noise of the hallway cut off like a switch.
Twenty desks. Twenty chairs. A chalkboard at the front with nothing written on it yet, the windows along the left wall letting in the specific quality of April light that made institutional spaces look briefly like they might be something more than that. Yami walked to Seat 20 — the back corner, last on the roster, assigned position for the lowest exam score in the accepted class — set his bag down, and sat.
He did not look at the room all at once. That would have been too much.
He looked at it in pieces.
A boy with blond hair had both feet on the desk in front of his and an expression that suggested this was not the first morning he'd started with a structural defiance of wherever he was. Iida was already at his seat, spine at exactly the right angle, chopping a hand in the blond boy's direction with the specific body language of someone who finds the world's deviation from correct procedure genuinely intolerable. A girl came in bouncing — the word was accurate, she bounced, every other step lighter than gravity strictly required — spotted Yami in the back corner before she'd found her own seat, and her face did something with recognition that he hadn't been prepared for.
She waved. A real wave, not a polite one.
He raised a hand back, the minimum required to acknowledge it.
She sat two rows up and one over and kept the smile through the process of unpacking her bag, and Yami looked at the desk surface in front of him and thought: she watched me die. She was five meters away and she watched the zero-pointer come down and she was already far enough back that she was safe, and she watched, and whatever that was for her it clearly wasn't simple.
Neither is this.
He looked at the rest of the room while he still had the angle.
Todoroki Shoto: window seat, third row, the left side of his face doing nothing and the right side doing slightly less. Not unfriendly. Not anything. Already somewhere else inside.
Yaoyorozu Momo: front row center, a position she'd either claimed early or been given by some ambient social pressure that recognized organization in a person and defaulted to it. She had the syllabus out. The school hadn't distributed it yet. She'd obtained it through some prior channel and was reading it with the attention of someone who treats informational preparation as a basic courtesy to herself.
Kirishima Eijiro: three seats up from Yami, already sideways in his chair talking to the boy beside him, one hand going through a gesture that required the full extension of both arms to complete. Grinning with the quality of a person who woke up having decided the day was going to be good and was now making it so by treating everyone in proximity as a potential ally rather than a stranger.
He knew them all. Knew their quirks, their backstories, their arcs, their breaking points, the moments that would define them across the next two years. Sitting in a room with them and knowing this was the double-vision he'd expected since December — the screen-memory overlay on physical reality — but the weight of it in practice was something different from the weight of it in theory.
These are people, the practical part of his brain noted, with the slightly belated quality of an update arriving after the original request. Actual people, not reference files.
He was still adjusting to the gap.
The door opened again and the room's ambient noise reduced itself in the way rooms responded to authority entering, even authority that wore it casually.
Aizawa Shota entered in a sleeping bag.
This was also something the screen had shown and the room was now confirming, but the sleeping bag in person had the quality of a deliberate choice rather than an eccentricity — a man who had decided that if he was going to stand at the front of a room full of teenagers at eight in the morning, he was going to do it on his own terms, and his terms included full-body enclosure in yellow fabric. He shuffled to the front and stood there and looked at them with the specific gaze of someone assessing variables rather than greeting students.
His eyes moved across the room in a pattern. Not left-to-right — diagonal, the way you tracked multiple movement vectors, prioritizing positions rather than sequential order. When they reached Seat 20, they paused.
One second. Maybe less.
Yami didn't look away.
Aizawa continued his scan. "I'm your homeroom teacher, Aizawa. Don't call me anything else." He produced a clipboard from the sleeping bag with the kind of logistical precision that suggested it had been there the whole time. "We're going outside. Quirk Apprehension Test. Now. Change into PE uniforms."
Iida's hand went up.
"No," Aizawa said, answering the question without hearing it.
Iida lowered his hand with the expression of someone adjusting their operational framework in real time.
The class moved toward the locker rooms in the way classes moved when a teacher communicated that pace was not optional, and Uraraka caught Yami in the corridor outside, falling into step beside him with the easy naturalness of someone who had already made a social decision and was now executing it.
"I never got to thank you," she said. Her voice was quiet — the specific volume of a person saying something that belonged to them rather than to the corridor. "At the exam. You pulled me out and then you—"
"You were already here," he said. "That was the point."
She looked at him sideways. "That's a weird way to say you're welcome."
"I'm working on it."
She let out a small laugh — brief, a little uncertain — and they reached the locker room split and went their separate ways, and Yami changed into the UA PE uniform and stood in front of the narrow mirror above the sink and looked at the face that was still not his face and which had been not his face for four months now, and thought about whether there was a version of you're welcome that didn't contain the subtext of I was also using you as a prop in a plan that required me to die in front of cameras. He didn't find one.
The field was already set up. Aizawa was standing in the center of it with a clipboard and a softball, and the sleeping bag was gone — a detail that registered as faintly threatening in the way that any shift from a baseline establishes escalation.
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