The several-mile stretch of cityscape was called the Ghost Quarter, because nobody lived there. It was a remnant from one of Japan’s earliest big-threat villains, named Seismic, whose ability to control earth and ground-matter was still one of the strongest recorded Elemental Quirks to ever exist. The Ghost Quarter was the site of the final battle to take him down. It had been hard and gruesome. A shudderingly high casualty number. The damage to the city itself had been astronomical.

Class 1-A had gone there as part of a unit on minimizing collateral damage. They had been hit by a very powerful Fear Inducer Quirk.

Go in. Find your students, one at a time. Knock them out by breaking a capsule of Midnight’s Somnambulist, which could last about a half hour away from her body. Send up a single, and another teacher would carefully pick their way to the sleeping kid and bring them to the base outside the Ghost Quarter while you moved on to the next one. Simple plan. A good plan, even.

It was common knowledge, within the faculty of UA, that Shoto Todoroki was hiding something. Something awful and painful and too delicate to talk about, which also meant that it was also too delicate for all of them to press on. They knew this because Todoroki told it to them, in his strange, flinching reactions

You stared at the door of a coat closet, at the end of a hallway in a broken, abandoned apartment. You reached out, grasped the handle and pulled the door open.

Todoroki had both hands clasped over his nose and mouth, to muffle any sound even his breathing could make. Above them, his eyes were open and wild and very, very young

He was pushed to the very back of the closet, tucked in to himself to become the smallest target possible. As if he wanted to fold himself completely out of existence. He shook. When the light hit his face, he whimpered.

“He’s going to-” He said, in a voice that was small and muffled and nothing like the Todoroki you saw every day “He’s going to f-find me.”