Chapter Text
Eri was struggling with her quirk. Shouta knew it, Nezu knew it, everyone at U.A. knew it, and no one knew what to do about it. After her second time almost rewinding Toogata out of existence, Shouta decided to take matters into his own hands. He started looking for quirk specialists outside of U.A., anyone who could help a little girl learn to control her quirk.
There was only one result that looked even marginally acceptable, a little office that apparently had an incredibly talented quirk therapist in their staff. There wasn’t information on which staff member that was exactly, so Shouta picked the first one on the list, a Hoshino, and hoped for the best.
The day of the appointment, he crouched down in front of Eri and explained what was going to happen. They were going to go to a little building and there was going to be a person who would ask her questions about her quirk. It was okay for her to say whatever she wanted to the person asking questions, because they’d be able to help her be less scared of her quirk. She nodded seriously.
Shouta drove to the therapist’s office, Eri sitting quietly in the back, watching the streets pass by. He parked in the lot and led her into the small building.
“An appointment for Aizawa Eri and Shouta to see Hoshino?” he said to the receptionist at the desk. The receptionist pointed him to a little room to the side and he pushed the door open, nudging Eri in with one hand.
Inside, there was a boy, a distinctly young boy, short and probably about the age of Shouta’s class, with curly green hair and big green eyes. His face was freckled and was sporting a huge smile, which seemed to be a habitual expression. He was sitting behind a desk much too big for him, reading over an open notebook. When the door open, he glanced up, flashing a blinding smile at Shouta and Eri.
“Are you Aizawa Shouta and Eri?” he asked, hopping out of the chair and coming around the front of the desk.
“We are,” Shouta confirmed, gently shutting the door behind him. “Are you… Hoshino?” He seriously doubted that this little bean sprout could be Hoshino, a quirk therapist with a collegiate degree.
He waved his hands in front of him with a laugh. “No, no, I’m Midoriya Izuku,” he said brightly, bowing a little. “Hoshino-san’s out right now, so you can either wait about a half hour or I can try to help! I’m her intern and I know all sorts of things about quirk therapy.”
“It’s a confidential matter,” Shouta explained, keeping his voice as emotionless as possible to hide his disappointment. He’d been genuinely interested in how such a little kid had gotten a degree in quirk therapy. And he didn’t want to have to wait a half hour because some lazy quirk therapist was running errands.
“Sure, sure,” the kid agreed, head bobbing up and down. “It’s just that, if it’s a matter of quirk control, the problem is most likely that she has too much energy stored up. I would assume her quirk is an emitter type, based on the horn, and if she hasn’t been using it at all then she’s probably having trouble with quirk overflow.”
Shouta blinked at Midoriya, shocked at how quickly he’d figured all that out, especially since he hadn’t been given any information.
“If it is a problem with quirk overflow,” Midoriya continued, resting his chin between his index finger and thumb and turning to address Eri, “then just make sure to use your quirk every day and practice it. That way you won’t ever have too much energy to let it spiral out of control.”
Eri clutched Shouta’s pant leg, pulling herself closer to him and behind. Her eyes dropped to the ground and she murmured. “My quirk is a curse.”
“Interesting theory,” Midoriya responded, nodding thoughtfully. “Could you explain why?”
“Because it hurts people,” Eri whispered before Shouta could stop her.
Midoriya considered, finally asking, “Does it hurt people because you can’t control it?”
She nodded.
“So don’t you think learning to control it would make it not hurt people?”
Eri stilled, clearly thinking hard about that. After a moment of deep thought, she turned and looked up at Shouta, wonder brimming in her large red eyes. “Do you think I can teach my quirk not to hurt people?”
Smiling at her, Shouta nodded. “Of course you can, Eri-chan.” He turned away to glare at Midoriya. Who was this kid?
“How?” Eri asked Midoriya, pulling away from Shouta the smallest bit to take a step toward the green kid.
“Well, like I said! You have to practice using it.”
“But it will hurt people while I’m practicing,” Eri argued, reasonably enough.
“Well, I would give you tips but unfortunately the information I’d need to do that is ‘confidential,’” Midoriya answered snarkily, shooting Shouta an unimpressed look.
“My quirk is called rewind and it makes animals and people go back in time,” Eri blurted out, completely ignoring Shouta’s attempts to shush her.
The kid’s eyes lit up immediately, darting around Eri’s face like he was reading her. Shouta got the eerie feeling that Midoriya was reading her, that even with the relatively minor information Eri had given him, he could now see the whole picture.
“Isn’t that interesting…” he murmured, green eyes finally stilling on Eri’s. She held them bravely, holding her hands in fists at her sides. And then suddenly he was in motion again, practically flying across the room and grabbing a notebook, flipping it open and writing so fast the pencil was almost like a blur on the page.
“So does it work on all living things or just animals and people?” he muttered to himself as he scribbled. “If it’s anything, you could always practice on plants. I wonder if there’s some sort of built in protector against rewinding yourself… Can you focus it on one area of the body or do you rewind the whole body at once? Maybe something that could come with practice, although it could be a problem if you rewound someone too far, like making them have a baby arm with an adult body. I wonder if it's a bad thing to use on younger people too, since they're still in development. Does it have any effect on memory? Touch activated? No, the horn, maybe a physical range thing which means you could rewind a lot of people at once, although touch would probably make the process faster. You could probably practice on bugs too if it doesn’t work on plants. But they’re maybe too small and they’d disappear too fast… really you want something you could rewind for just a day or so and then let it grow for a day and then rewind it again, like a bunny maybe? You might want to invest in a support animal,” he said, breaking out of his mutter storm to look Shouta in the eye.
Shouta crossed his arms. He really didn’t want this kid’s help.
But Eri was enthralled. “Can I really make my quirk into a nice quirk?”
“Sure!” Midoriya said, setting his notebook down on what Shouta assumed was Hoshino’s desk and crouching down in front of Eri. “Do you mind if I touch your horn?”
She shook her head, practically butting her horn into his outstretched hand.
“So interesting,” he said, looking it over thoughtfully. “I wonder why it’s a horn in particular. Want to do some unicorn research with me?”
“Yes!” Eri enthused.
Midoriya nodded and walked around the desk, flipping open the computer. “Give me a moment to hack into this,” he said almost apologetically, plugging in a flash drive and tapping away at the keyboard. "I don't have the password because apparently 'I can't be trusted with such things.' I don't see why that is, seeing how no one likes the advice Hoshino-san gives. Maybe I should have full access to a computer and we can hide the password from Hoshino-san instead."
Shouta wanted to turn and bang his head into the wall. Hoshino had better show up soon.
Giggling, Eri trotted around the desk after Midoriya, climbing up into the swivel chair when he gestured that it was okay for her to do so.
“Ok, let’s see,” he said, having successfully hacked into Hoshino’s computer.
Feeling marginally curious, Shouta managed to shift so he was standing at an angle which made it possible for him to see the screen too.
“It says here that unicorns have healing powers!” Midoriya informed Eri.
“Healing powers?” she repeated, reaching up and touching her horn thoughtfully. “I’m a healing unicorn?”
“Yes! Unicorns are beautiful,” Midoriya said, pulling up a lot of pictures. “See? They’re like you, except for with a horse body instead!”
“And they have my color hair!” Eri said, pointing.
“They’re supposedly pure and wild at the same time,” Shouta said grouchily. Midoriya looked up at him in surprise at his contribution. Eri beamed. “They’re supposed to be untamable, but they are healers in mythology.”
A smile started across Midoriya’s lips and Shouta scowled at him, trying to cut it off before it could finish. It continued growing undeterred. “Right,” he confirmed, nodding and beaming. Shouta rolled his eyes.
“So I’m a beautiful unicorn,” Eri said thoughtfully, “with a broken quirk.”
“No, with a young quirk,” Midoriya corrected, pulling his notebook over. “Your quirk is like a baby unicorn that just learned to run. They don’t know when to stop yet, so they run into things and sometimes hurt things. Sometimes when they heal, they go too far. But it can grow into an adult unicorn! A unicorn that heals whoever it wants to!”
“Do people ever hurt unicorns?” Eri asked abruptly.
Midoriya’s eyes widened in alarm. He glanced up at Shouta, finally seeming to want his judgment on how to proceed. Shouta raised his eyebrows at him, mostly because he wanted to see how Midoriya would answer, but also because he didn’t know how to answer either.
When he saw that Shouta wasn’t planning on being helpful, Midoriya turned back to Eri and said seriously, “People do hurt unicorns sometimes, yes. Because people without power always seem to think they’d be able to do better things with power than those who have it do.”
“But wouldn't they?”
“Maybe,” Midoriya answered. “But I like to think everyone has their own special power. Like how you can light up a room with that smile.” Eri blushed. “Or how Eraserhead over there is good at fighting.” Shouta blinked. He hadn’t introduced himself. At all. “Or how I spend every day looking at people with baby quirks like yours.”
“It’s a baby quirk,” Eri repeated in a whisper.
Midoriya nodded seriously. “A baby quirk that needs a lot of food and care.”
“And you say… it’s not a curse?”
“Not a curse,” he affirmed. He grabbed a plant off the desk and nudged it in front of her. “Want to try on that?”
She stared at the plant like it was going to attack her. Shouta opened his mouth to scold the kid for pushing Eri to use her quirk before she was ready, but before he could say anything, she gave a firm nod and pulled the plant closer to her. Her little horn started to extend and, to his credit, the kid took a few wary steps away. The power of Eri’s quirk was nothing to laugh at.
Golden light erupted from her forehead, showering the room in gold. The plant shriveled in on itself and disappeared. Shouta activated his quirk before she could rewind anything-- or anyone-- else and the golden light vanished.
Eri’s chin wobbled.
“That was really good!” Midoriya gushed.
Her head popped up and she stared at him. “But I killed the plant!”
“Yeah, I figured you would,” he said dismissively. “Would you tell me what it feels like? When your quirk goes off?”
“Like a… hose?” she suggested, reaching up and touching her horn with a frown. “Or a waterfall. But also kind of like fire.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a build up of pressure,” he said contemplatively, tapping his chin. He straightened up abruptly. “Give me one second,” he flung the door open and disappeared around the corner. A moment later he returned, arms full of potted plants. “Want to try again?”
Eri, to Shouta’s surprise, nodded again, a determined expression on her face.
“So I want you to do one more plant exactly how you just did it,” he said, setting the plants down on the desk and nudging one closer to her. “Rewind it completely out of existence.”
She nodded and, faster than last time, her horn started to glow.
Moments later, the plant was gone. Shouta moved to remove her quirk, but before he could, it shut off by itself.
“That’s what I thought!” Midoriya enthused, bouncing on his toes.
“I turned it off!” Eri gasped, sounding excited. “I made my quirk stop!”
“You did,” Midoriya agreed, pushing another plant across the desk towards her. “Do it again, but this time try to focus on making it feel more like a trickle, instead of a waterfall. And stop whenever you can.”
She nodded, eyebrows furrowed with focus. Her horn started to glow, golden sparks floating out of it, but it was slower than usual and when Shouta felt for her quirk, it had a different sensation than usual. This wasn’t the usual, wild energy he tended to feel around Eri. It was quiet-- sluggish, almost, like a muddy stream instead of a jet.
The plant started to collapse in on itself, and then suddenly it stopped. Eri had both hands cupped over her horn. She slowly pulled them away, clearly ready to slam them back again if her horn went off again. Nothing happened. Her horn wasn’t glowing anymore.
Eyes wide, Eri turned and looked at Midoriya, who was grinning from ear to ear.
“I did it,” she whispered. “I made my quirk stop. I told it to stop and it did.”
“You did,” he agreed.
Chin wobbling again, she dived forward and wrapped her skinny arms around his waist. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” he said, laughing. “You’re the one starting to teach your quirk.”
“My baby quirk is learning,” Eri said.
“Right.”
“What’s your quirk?” Shouta asked. He hated to interrupt the admittedly adorable moment, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. Surely Midoriya had some sort of analysis quirk, something that made it easier for him to see solutions to problems. But when Shouta felt for the kid’s quirk, trying to reach for something to turn off, he couldn’t feel anything. It was like there was a vacancy. He usually only felt this for mutant type quirks, but Midoriya didn’t have any visible mutations.
Midoriya just smiled and said, “I don’t have one.”
The door slammed open to reveal a very out of breath, red haired woman. “I’m so sorry,” she panted. “I had errands and I was running late and Midoriya Izuku what did you do to my plant?”
“I destroyed it,” he said casually, scooping up the other plants in his arms and heading for the door. “It was nice to meet you both!” he said, grinning at Eri. “I hope that was helpful.”
“Thank you Midoriya-san!” Eri chirped. He laughed as the door closed behind him.
The woman, who Shouta could logically guess was Hoshino, set her bag down behind her desk and clasped her hands in front of her chest. “Now, what can I help you with?”
Shouta and Eri shared a look.
“I think we’re all set,” Shouta said.
Eri nodded in agreement.