Rei follows him to school the next day.
There is nothing odd about this. She's followed him to school ever since that day in the second grade. It won't happen again, Izuku tells her, but she still follows. After years of practice, Izuku is the master of sitting still and perfectly attentive as she scampers to and fro, blowing papers off of desks to watch the students scramble to retrieve them, making the lights flicker so that some of them jump, or standing at the front of the room with the teacher and mimicking his poses and gestures. Izuku used to get in trouble for laughing, but not anymore.
Today, Izuku is silent in the midst of his rowdier classmates, smiling slightly on the outside and cracking up on the inside, as she performs the Hare Hare Yukai dance on Hanamura's desk three seats down, when his teacher's voice sends ice water shooting through his veins.
"Now that you mention it, didn't Midoriya want to go to Yuuei as well?"
Izuku's been to a lot of cemeteries. The next few seconds of silence makes him remember each one.
Then all at once, the room erupts into roars of laughter. Izuku stares straight ahead, letting his classmates' scorn lash at him from all sides. Rei gets angry then, her shriek of fury piping above their voices, but Izuku faces the front of the classroom and keeps staring until a miniature explosion blossoms up from his desk and sends him tumbling back to the floor.
"Forget having a weak-ass quirk." The voice makes Izuku's limbs lock where they are. He tries to look Bakugou in the eye; he really, really tries. "You don't even have a fucking quirk! So where do you get off putting yourself on the same level as me?"
Looking at his face is too much, so Izuku goes back to staring straight ahead. "I'm just applying to a school," he says. "It has nothing to do with you."
"Fuck that, Deku, I know a challenge when I see one!" A step forward, and Izuku stares straight ahead and waits. "Are you trying to fucking die?"
"No," Izuku says. "I'm trying to get into a school. That's all. I'm just… trying. There's nothing wrong with trying."
The class jeers with derisive laughter. Rei screams and claws at his tormentor to no avail, and it's a while before order is restored again.
By the time class is over, Izuku immerses himself in the safety of online news reports. Videos, photographs, and eyewitness accounts of heroics put him at ease, and the gross, ugly feelings die down as he reminds himself of his goals.
But Rei's warning hiss brings him back to the present, and on instinct he starts grabbing his belongings. As a familiar shadow falls across his desk and his ghostly friend's hiss becomes a threatening snarl, Izuku grabs his notebook and tries to shove it into his bag. The faster he gets his things together, the easier he can escape.
The notebook is snatched out of his hands and out of his reach. Rei lunges, clawlike fingers outstretched, but she passes harmlessly through Bakugou's face and chest and arms, and not once does he bat an eye. With a shriek of frustration she sends papers flying from nearby desks, and neither Bakugou nor any of his friends seem to notice.
"We're not done, Deku."
Rei's frustration might be contagious, because Izuku feels it welling up within himself. "It's just a high school app." He makes a grab for the notebook, to no avail. Bakugou twitches it out of his reach.
"Here's the thing, Deku. Try and get this through your tiny little quirkless brain. I'm gonna be the first and only student from this crappy school to get into Yuuei." A palm-sized explosion rips through the notebook, and Izuku makes a noise like he's just been punched in the stomach. "So I don't like it when a useless nobody like you comes along and challenges that."
He's too close. Rei doesn't like that very much, and he can see out of the corner of his eye what she turns into. It's hard to describe, and harder still to look at it for long without feeling his lunch creep back up his esophagus. He turns his eyes away from her and back to his classmates, and his brain immediately starts to scrub itself clean of the image, until all that sticks is dark, writhing hair and black pits where eyes should be. There's no blocking out the sounds, though. Izuku will take those sounds to the grave.
If nothing else, it puts things into perspective a little. The tightness in his chest loosens, and the power of speech returns to him. "If I'm so useless, then why do you think I'm a threat?" he asks.
"You're not!" The desk takes more abuse with another explosive punch. "Don't you ever fucking forget that! You're not a threat to me! You're nothing and you'll always be nothing! Try and remember that next time you try to pull shit like this!"
She's angry, so angry. Sometimes Izuku has to avert his eyes and remind himself that she can't hurt Bakugou, even if she tries. (And she has tried.)