The first day back at school felt different—and not in the way Aoi had hoped.
His bandages had been replaced with thinner gauze, and his mother had sewn extra padding into his gloves. He could move his hands again without pain, but every touch still felt uncertain. Delicate. Like the world had turned to glass, and he was the hammer.
The classroom looked the same. Same chalkboard. Same cluster of desks. Same yellow backpack hanging off the back of his chair. But when he stepped inside, the air shifted.
People stared.
Some subtly. Others didn't bother hiding it.
He caught one boy nudging another and whispering. A girl looked at his gloved hands and quickly turned away. The teacher smiled politely, too brightly, like he was trying to pretend the railing outside the yard hadn't been taped off and replaced within a week.
Aoi sat at his desk and said nothing.
During lunch, no one sat next to him.
He ate slowly, methodically, the way he always did. His bento was exactly measured—four compartments, arranged by temperature. But the food tasted flat.
Across the yard, the same boys from before stood in a circle, laughing about something. One of them still had a small bandage on his cheek. He didn't look at Aoi.
Aoi didn't look back.
That night, he stared at his hands beneath the gloves. Thin, pale, stitched up like paper. He turned one over in the light and held it there for a while, waiting to see if anything would happen. A pulse. A shimmer. A flicker of energy beneath the skin.
Nothing.
Maybe that was worse.
He pulled his sketchbook closer.
Inside were diagrams: pressure angles, crystal stress points, tensile strength charts. He didn't know why he had started drawing them—just that it helped. It was like trying to explain something to himself in a language only he understood.
Each page was a question. A hypothesis.
Why had the railing shattered?
How long did the structure remain intact before failing?
What caused the refraction pattern to split so violently?
He hadn't hurt anyone on purpose.
But he had hurt them.
And that meant the cost of using his Quirk was higher than he could afford.
The school counselor asked to meet with him the following week.
She smiled gently, offered tea, and asked him if he wanted to talk about his Quirk.
"No," he said.
"Are you afraid of it?"
Aoi hesitated. "I'm afraid of using it wrong."
She tilted her head. "Do you think that means you shouldn't use it at all?"
He didn't answer.
She let the silence sit for a while before offering him a packet about U.A. High School's Support Course and how quirks like his could be "refined with the right tools and guidance." But the words felt too light, too detached—like someone trying to paint over a crack instead of repairing the wall underneath.
He tucked the packet into his bag but never opened it.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
By the time the school year rolled toward its end, the incident had faded into whispers. People stopped bringing it up directly. But Aoi still heard the edge in their voices when someone mentioned "dangerous quirks" in class discussions. Still saw the subtle way students shifted when passing him in the halls.
He stopped trying to join group projects. Stopped raising his hand during Quirk Theory lessons. Instead, he focused on physics. On chemistry. On light and energy and molecular structure. He needed to know everything about what had happened.
Because if he didn't…
It might happen again.
Late at night, when the house was quiet, he began to experiment.
He'd go to the back shed—once a workspace for his father's concrete modeling—and set a box of scrap materials on the table. His gloves came off slowly, carefully, like removing something sacred.
Metal.
Plastic.
Wood.
He'd press a single finger to the surface.
Some nights, nothing happened.
Other nights, the change was instant: metal would crackle into clarity beneath his hand, light splitting across the tiny shed like it had that first time.
But he never let it grow. He pulled back before the transformation could spread. He didn't trust it to hold.
And always, always, he wore eye protection. The memory of temporary blindness from that first burst still haunted him in flashes—ribbons of light behind his eyelids that refused to fade.
Sometimes, when he looked too long into the glass, he felt something stir behind his eyes. Like a memory. A flicker.
He called it a "flare."
One night, a shard cracked unexpectedly while he was testing pressure tolerance. The noise echoed through the shed like a gunshot, and the edge of the splinter flew straight past his cheek, cutting it open.
He didn't even flinch.
He simply stared at the blood in the broken reflection, and thought: That's what I get for going too fast.
By the end of that year, Aoi Tsukishiro was known for three things:
He was quiet.
He was smart.
And he always, always wore gloves.
Not many people talked to him, but teachers praised his discipline. He always turned in assignments early. He never lost his temper. And when he spoke, it was with calm precision—measured, cautious, controlled.
No one had seen his Quirk since the day it awakened.
Some wondered if he was even allowed to use it anymore.
Aoi didn't correct them.
Let them wonder.
Let them think it was sealed or suppressed or too dangerous to show.
Because deep down, he was still scared of it, too.
But fear wasn't enough.
Not anymore.
Because beneath that fear—beneath the calculations, the drawings, the reinforced gloves—was a quiet, burning resolve:
If I can't stop this Quirk from hurting people… then I'll master it until it never does again.
Not because I want to shine.
Not because I want to be powerful.
But because I want to be the kind of person someone can trust to stand beside them…
…and not break.