Shinso detention

[moonshadows]

“So I’m told there was an altercation with some students from another class.”

Silence.

“Business class, second year. Verbally provoked you into lashing out.”

One sullen glance in my direction, and then more silence.

“This isn’t a punishment, Shinso. This is an attempt to figure out what happened, and why, so we can prevent it from happening again. Do you want to talk about it?”

He glares at me. “I don’t see what me talking is going to accomplish. Isn’t that the whole problem? That any time I talk, I might be angling to control the person I’m talking to? How are you going to prevent this from happening again when the problem is other people’s reactions to me?”

“Education,” I answer promptly. “If the problem is the actions of other students, then they’ll be the ones sitting here with me next week.”

He fumes silently for a minute, and I let him. 

“UA doesn’t tolerate bullying,” I say gently. 

That gets me a furious glare. “Easy for you to say,” he snaps. “You’ve never had to deal with people not trusting you just because of your quirk.”

For a long moment, my throat closes up. Then I stand, not sure my decision is wise, but knowing that I can’t not.

“Come on,” I tell Shinso. “I want to show you something.”

I can tell he’s not convinced, but this is unexpected enough that I’ve thrown him off-balance. He nods jerkily and follows as I leave the room.

 

It’s a trek, getting to my scream tower, but that’s why I have the electric scooter tucked away. Except I’m not alone, so I grab one of the souped-up golf cart things and gesture Shinso into the passenger’s seat. The emergency dorm is on the way - not a coincidence - and his confusion deepens as I park out front and go inside.

The ride to the third floor is utterly silent. 

My feet remember the way, even though it’s been over ten years, and in seconds we’re standing in front of-

“Why are we at my room?” Shinso asks.

“Is it?” I say as my eyes read the name on the door. It is. Of course it is, Nezu would absolutely have jumped on the opportunity. “When I was a student, it was my room.”

Shinso starts. So, he knows that everyone in the dorm is there because their home, their family....

“I was given to foster parents when I was a year and a half old, but under the condition that when I was old enough to attend UA, my birth parents would get custody back.”

He mulls that over as I lead him back downstairs and to the cart and neither of us says anything the rest of the way to the scream tower.

 

“The training grounds?” Shinso asks as I pull up to the tower. “You wanted to show me...”

“The tower,” I correct him. 

More curious than confused, he follows me inside. We ride the elevator up and go through the short hall to the stairs, emerging onto the platform that overlooks, well, everything. Shinso cautiously goes to one edge and looks down, taking in the sight of all the training grounds spread out neatly like plots in some industrial garden. Then he looks back at the rest of UA, a little awed to see that we’re higher than the main buildings. He looks out into town. He looks out to sea. Then he looks back at me and starts because while he did that, I took off the directional speaker and zipped my jacket up to cover my neck. Just being up here is relaxing in a way that’s hard to describe, but I imagine he can see it in my posture.

“My birth parents performed three quirk surgeries on me,” I start quietly. “I don’t make any secret of that, but I usually don’t go into detail, either.”

Despite himself, he’s intrigued. 

“The first one was the day I was born. Apparently, I made the ears of everyone in the room bleed with my first cry, so they silenced me before I’d even had my first meal.”

Shinso’s eyes widen; one quirk surgery would land my bio-parents in jail for life, doing hard labor in quirk-suppression collars. Three of them is almost unthinkable.

“Most people don’t know, but your quirk organ? It grows back. Heals. So when my voice came back, they did it again. And again. The fourth time, the nurse grabbed me and ran.”

“But you were...”

“Given to foster parents at a year and a half,” I confirm. “It took my vocal cords six months to repair themselves. My foster-father is deaf. The preschool I went to was for deaf children, and I learned to sign before I was three. I didn’t properly learn how to talk until after I was old enough to control myself and not cry out accidentally.”

I can see in his eyes that he’s re-thinking everything about me, and probably thinking that whatever his family situation was, at least they never tried to straight-up silence him. 

“I worked very hard to keep my quirk under control as a child. The way I’m talking to you now? I was ten before I could do that.”

“But then what did you...”

“I talked like this,” I say in tinyvoice, keeping my mouth open and still just to emphasize the difference. “My vocal cords are much more complex than normal, and I can talk without moving my mouth like a parrot does.”

“That’s pretty cool,” Shinso says, reluctantly impressed.

“...I had to talk like that because the tube in my throat meant air didn’t pass through my vocal cords,” I say quietly in my Counselor Voice. “It didn’t come out until I was four, almost five. Because until I could control my vocal reactions, it wasn’t safe to let me use my voice - my quirk freely.”

Shinso looks a little uncomfortable. “Wasn’t safe?”

“My first cry caused physical damage. What sort of destruction could have come out of my mouth if I had actually tried?”

He thinks about that for a long minute. I guess he’s heard babies screaming. Then he looks about to say something, but closes his mouth instead. 

“You can’t turn it off,” he says slowly. It’s almost a question. 

I nod. “I can’t turn it off. Every sound that leaves my mouth is my quirk in action.”

“And you had to work to control it. What would happen if you didn’t?”

I hesitate for a moment before saying, “When I hit puberty and my voice started to change, it threw all my control out the window. It was like if you grew an extra pair of arms - while you’re learning how to control them, they’re flailing around hitting things. Only instead of arms, it was vocal cords for ranges higher and lower than I’d been able to reach before. When a normal guy’s voice cracks, it’s a moment of humiliation. When my voice cracked, something got damaged. I had to revert entirely to my childhood voice until things settled and I learned how to keep them under control. Another thing I don’t keep secret is that when I was thirteen and my voice started to change, I wanted to seriously harm or kill myself. So to answer your initial assertion,” I say while he winces, “I do, in fact, know what it’s like to be judged on what you could do with your quirk instead of what you actually do with it.”

“I apologize for my rash words,” he says, very formally, with a deep and very crisp bow. “I had no idea. But that was the idea, wasn’t it,” he finishes in an oddly soft voice.

I think I broke something in Shinso’s brain, but something that needed to be broken.

“If people found out what Voice is capable of - what I could do if I wanted to - I’d probably have to go into hiding. I’d be finished as a pro hero, and Nezu would probably have to take Present Mic off the staff of UA.”

Shinso swallows. “What...?”

“This tower,” I say with a sweeping gesture that ends with my back to him, looking out to sea, “was built so that I would have a place where it was safe for me to scream as loud as I wanted.”

That’s the only warning he gets before I draw a deep breath and let out a sustained shout, not as loud as I can go but loud enough that the birds in the wooded area below the path of my voice startle into flight. It’s a raw shout, unformed, unshaped, all my vocal cords active and adding their own layer of sound to it, like hearing every instrument in an orchestra playing at the same time, a veritable stampede of sound. When it ends, I don’t move to face Shinso. I just stand there, staring out to sea, waiting.

“Is that...” He trails off, searching for words before continuing, “...your...full voice? You said...you said vocal cords for ranges. That implies you have more than one set. Is that- was that you using all of them?”

“YES,” I say to the ocean in the distance, a single syllable that sounds like a multitude, the voice of God echoing down from the heavens. When I turn around, Shinso is staring at me in wide-eyed awe and probably a little bit of terror. “My birth parents tried to silence me. My own quirk made me want to kill myself. I became a hero because not everyone who needs one is being threatened by a villain, and I wanted to be the hero people like me needed. A voice that could be heard around the world, telling people that it’s okay if they’re not be perfect like All Might. That things aren’t as dark as the mass media makes them sound. That you don’t need to be a pro to be somebody’s hero.”

“That’s what I want to do,” he declares, and then the enthusiasm drains out of him. “But what kind of pro hero would I be? I’m not loud and outgoing. I don’t want to be famous. I just want to help people and prove that a quirk like mine isn’t just good for being a villain. What pro hero is dark and quiet and...and...” He gestures in frustration.

“Eraserhead,” I chirp, startling him. “Dark; check. Quiet; check. Not outgoing; double check. Quirk that seems like it would be better suited to villainy? Well, his quirk is the ability to turn yours off. You tell me.”

I can see from the confusion on his face that the name means nothing to him, and he’s scrambling to think of a hero like the one I described.

“Aizawa-sensei,” I say gently. “Homeroom teacher for 1-A. We were in the same class together. His room was the one right across from mine - yours.” Something occurs to me. I wonder- “Did they take the soundproofing out of the closet, or...?”

Shinso’s head snaps up as my question knocks him out of whatever thoughts were distracting him. “The closet? Is that why the walls are...weird?”

I nod. “Soundproofing. I’ve had a scream closet or room ever since I was little, because sometimes I just need to have a place where I won’t damage anything if my control slips.”

“Oh.” He stares at nothing for a long minute, processing what I’ve said, before focusing on my face again. “Do you think I could be a hero like Aizawa-sensei?”

“An underground hero, working in darker neighborhoods and back alleys, hunting down human cruelty instead of waiting for it to make a move first? I think you have the determination and the disposition for it,” I tell him, “but are you capable of the physical aspects? I know you want to transfer into the hero course. It doesn’t matter what kind of hero you plan to be when you graduate; you’ll have to prove yourself and keep proving yourself in order to even make it to graduation. And that’s assuming you manage to transfer in the first place.”

“I want to try,” he says stubbornly. “I want to do something useful with my quirk, something to help people, and how could I do that except by being a hero?”

“You could join the police force,” I point out dryly. “Undercover cop isn’t much different from undercover hero. A little less physically demanding, a little less dangerous, and you get a gun.”

Shinso wasn’t expecting that. He blinks for a moment, then gives me a sharp look. “You thought about that,” he half-accuses. “You had that answer ready before I even asked the question.”

Unrepentantly, I grin and spread my hands. “Guilty! I do a lot of thinking about all the students I teach. Not everyone can be a pro hero, but there’s tons of ways to help people without being one, and most of the time those paths are both more attainable and would have a greater impact on society, but we as a culture are so hero-crazy that people forget there are other options.”

He thinks about that for a minute and I let him, turning around to put the directional speaker back on.

“I still want to go for it,” he says when I turn back. “If I don’t make it, the attempt will make me more attractive to the police. But if I do...”

I clap his shoulder encouragingly. “Let’s go back to my office and talk.”

Slowly, hesitantly, he smiles.