The cafeteria at UA operated at a scale that made sense only if you assumed the building had been designed by someone who believed in the possibility of a hundred hungry students arriving simultaneously and deserving actual food. The rice was the same quality it had been every day: good. The curry option had a rotating component that kept it from being repetitive. The lunch lady at the second station remembered that Yami had asked for extra pickled vegetables on Monday and provided them without being asked on Thursday.
He was still adjusting to this.
His tray landed across from Kirishima at the table Kirishima had apparently claimed as a default position sometime in the first week and which had subsequently accumulated a consistent population: Kaminari on the right, Sero halfway through a yakisoba, and Ashido arriving with the energy of someone who had been in the middle of three conversations and was continuing all of them simultaneously.
"—but the question is whether hardening counts as a physical enhancement for the grip test," Kaminari was saying, "or whether it's more like a tool, because if it's a tool then it's different from like, someone who just has big hands—"
"My hands aren't big," Kirishima said, with the tone of someone making a factual clarification.
"Your hands are objectively large, man—"
"They're proportional—"
"To what?" Sero asked, and the table made a sound.
Yami set his tray down and ate a spoonful of rice and watched the argument continue around the pivot of Kirishima's hand size with the attention of someone who was genuinely enjoying being present for something that had no stakes and no subtext and required nothing from him except occasional eye contact.
"New kid, settle this," Ashido said, pointing at him with her chopsticks. "Do Kirishima's hands look big to you?"
He looked at Kirishima's hands. Then at his face. "Average."
Kirishima's expression confirmed that this was the correct answer and that he had known this all along.
"They look proportional is what they look," Sero said, "which means nothing because you're built like a person who deliberately maximizes all proportions—"
"That's called training—"
The argument continued. Yami ate the curry. Across the table, Kaminari was explaining the theory he'd developed about grip strength rankings and whether they accurately represented useful combat grip or just represented the ability to apply force in one specific direction, and somewhere in the middle of this explanation he said something about the Apprehension Test results that made Ashido argue about the standing jump metric instead, and the whole thing moved with the specific velocity of a conversation that had no destination and wasn't looking for one.
He told a joke. A dry one, specifically timed between Sero's objection and Kirishima's response, and the way it landed — the quarter-second before anyone laughed, the laugh that came from genuine surprise — told him the timing had worked. He'd learned timing in an open-plan office between age twenty-two and twenty-four, in the specific social climate of a workplace where being interesting without being memorable was a survival skill. Fifteen-year-olds apparently read the same jokes differently: mature rather than practiced.
He could work with that.
The path between the main building and the support classroom complex took him past the chain-link perimeter that divided the Hero Course outdoor areas from the General Studies secondary yard, and he was three meters past the relevant section of fence before the figure in the opposite yard registered in his peripheral vision and made him stop.
Midoriya Izuku was sitting on the concrete steps of the General Studies building with his notebook open across his knees and his pencil moving in the specific way that meant active notation rather than drafting. He was wearing the standard UA uniform and his hair was doing the same thing it always did, which was everything simultaneously, and he had the expression of someone in the middle of thinking that they hadn't noticed was visible on their face.
Then he looked up.
Their eyes met through thirty meters of April air and chain-link diamond patterns.
Deku's face reorganized itself into a smile. The open, genuine kind — the kind that arrived before he'd decided to produce it. He raised a hand.
Yami raised his.
Neither of them moved. The fence between them was eight feet of steel mesh and neither of them was going to cross it and they both understood this without discussing it, and the wave was the exact right gesture for the distance they were at and the distance that existed below the architectural one. Yami had given this boy a sports drink four months ago on a beach he'd cleaned, and received a sticker on a note in return, and the sticker was still in his jacket pocket in the form of a piece of paper he hadn't been able to discard and hadn't examined too closely his reasons for keeping.
He walked on.
The notebook, when he'd had the angle to see it before Deku noticed him, had been open to a page dense with sketches and notation. He'd caught a glimpse of the top of the visible page: Class 1-A figures, small but detailed, movement trajectories marked in red ink. A note at the top that he'd read without wanting to.
Seat 20 — Resurrection? (physical enhancement component?) See: AP Test softball data.
Deku was still analyzing hero course students from General Studies. Still building the database. Still doing it from the outside.
The weight of this sat in his chest for the rest of the walk between buildings and didn't resolve into anything he could do anything about, which was the category most of his feelings about Midoriya Izuku fell into.
Hound Dog's office had a poster on the wall that said YOUR FEELINGS ARE VALID in aggressive capital letters above an illustration of a dog demonstrating several facial expressions, and the cognitive dissonance of receiving this message in an office that smelled genuinely of dog and determination was either intentional or the result of someone who had stopped noticing their own environment.
"How are you sleeping?" Hound Dog asked.
"Fine."
"Dreams?"
"Occasionally." Yami kept his posture at the neutral end of relaxed — engaged enough not to communicate avoidance, loose enough not to communicate tension. "Normal ones. Nothing that wakes me up."
Hound Dog's pen moved. He had the specific quality of attention that came from a profession built on listening to what people didn't say, and he applied it with the patience of someone who had time. "When you die — in your experience of it — what's the gap between death and resurrection like?"
This question was new. The previous session had stayed on the surface layer of do you fear death, do you seek it, can you function after dying. This was a different stratum.
"Dark," Yami said. "Quiet. Not painful — the pain is in the dying. The gap itself is nothing. Like being turned off."
"Does that disturb you?"
"Less than it should, probably." He considered this. "I've done it twice. The first time I was scared. The second time I was just — waiting to come back." He watched Hound Dog's pen. "Is that a bad sign?"
"It's a data point," Hound Dog said. "Normalization of the experience could indicate adaptive processing or desensitization. We watch for which direction it develops." He wrote something. "You use the word 'waiting.' Passive tense. Not 'hoping' or 'planning.'"
"Because I didn't have plans. I woke up in an empty arena."
"If you had been somewhere more dangerous, would you have been scared?"
Yami thought about the Nomu and said: "Yes."
Hound Dog wrote that down too, and marked "no immediate psychological concerns" in the assessment column, and scheduled the third session for the following Wednesday.
He took the long way home.
The beach path wasn't the most direct route from UA to his apartment, but it added twelve minutes and he'd been adding twelve minutes more often than not since school started. The sand was the same as it had been when he'd left it — when he and All Might had stood on clean ground and Yami had eaten a meat bun and been given a hair and understood that the whole architecture of his plan had just been accepted as a valid foundation for a future. The same beach, minus several tons of debris, plus evening light.
A man was walking a golden retriever along the waterline. The dog was investigating a piece of seaweed with the complete absorption of a creature for whom seaweed was the current most important thing in existence. The man waited with the patient expression of someone who had made peace with their dog's timeline.
The submarine thriller he'd found on Dagobah in week two was still on his apartment windowsill. He still hadn't found out how it ended. The water damage had taken three pages out of the final parts, and he'd considered looking it up online and decided not to, which was a decision he was aware was slightly irrational and had made anyway.
He walked until the dog and its owner were out of sight and then turned toward home, and the evening light on the clean sand was the kind of small thing he made a point of noticing because noticing it cost nothing.
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