Shinji slammed into the countertop with a gasp, his good arm grasping at his chest. Everything felt suffocating; he had barely made it out of training before his body started cashing in on whatever adrenaline had been holding him together, and now the kitchen of his dorm room felt smaller than it had any right to. His breathing came in jagged, too-short pulls, his ribs aching under the compression of the training suit, so he fumbled with the upper half, dragging it down past his shoulders with shaking fingers until the material bunched around his waist.
It didn't help enough. The air was there, but his lungs kept demanding more.
His heart was pounding so violently his chest had started to ache from the inside out, a deep, rhythmic throb that crawled up into his throat and made it harder to swallow. He pushed himself off the counter, wanting distance from the small space, wanting to move because staying still felt like drowning with nowhere to go. He turned toward the hallway and got about two steps before the trailing half of the training suit snagged hard on the corner of an open drawer.
The fabric yanked taut behind him; his momentum kept going, causing the drawer to come with him as well.
The whole thing went sideways fast, his footing gone before he could catch it, and he hit the kitchen floor with his shoulder, the drawer ripping free of its rail and crashing down beside him, its contents scattering across the tiles in a clatter of cutlery and miscellaneous junk that sounded enormous in the small space. He lay there with the suit still tangled around his lower half, the drawer upended against his leg, his shoulder throbbing where it had taken the floor.
He vaguely remembered that the knives and forks scattered across his legs were only cold steel and plastic, but his skin refused to agree, every point of contact flaring hot and heavy against his thighs and shins until the whole pile felt like it was pressing him into the tiles. He tried to move his leg to shrug it off, and the effort sent a wave of heat up through his stomach, so he stopped halfway, his foot twitching uselessly against the drawer, and went back to dragging air in through his mouth.
The air kept coming up short. Each breath went in fast and left just as fast, and the tightness in his chest had spread into his arms and down into his fingers, which had started to tingle against the floor. His heart was hammering so hard that he could feel it in his teeth, in the base of his skull, in the sore shoulder he had landed on, a rapid pulse that seemed to come from everywhere at once and drown out the quiet hum of the fridge across the kitchen.
Then the static began; it started as a faint hiss at the edges of his hearing, like a television left on between channels in another room, and he assumed at first that it was the blood rushing in his ears. But the hiss grew with every beat of his heart, thickening and spreading until it filled the space behind his eyes, a dry, grinding static that scrubbed over every thought as soon as it formed. He tried to think about the training field, about Yu, Aizawa, about anything with an edge he could hold onto, and each picture came apart into grainy white noise before he could finish looking at it.
He wanted to say something, even if only his own name out loud to see if his voice still worked, and his mouth opened and closed around nothing. The static swallowed the intention before it reached his tongue. His thoughts came in broken pieces now, a word here, half an image there, the cold of the tile, the shine of a fork near his face, all of it sliding away from him in the noise.
The ceiling began to tilt. He was already flat on the floor, but the lights above him swung slowly to the left and then back again, and the room followed them, the cabinets leaning in and pulling away, the edges of the counter stretching long and thin. His stomach rolled with it. He squeezed his eyes shut to stop the motion and found that it was worse in the dark, the whole floor seeming to slide out from under his back like a deck in heavy seas, so he opened them again and fixed his gaze on the underside of the sink, on a single dark stain in the wood that wobbled in and out of focus no matter how hard he stared at it.
His good hand clawed at the tile, fingers spreading and curling against the grit, searching for something to hold that wouldn't move. The tips had gone numb. The static pressed in tighter, and the stain in the wood smeared into the cabinet behind it, and the cabinet smeared into the dim light, and somewhere in the middle of all that grey, his breath hitched and stuttered and tried to start over again, faster than before.
His head lolled slightly to the side. The cutlery near his cheek blurred into a single bright streak, and the roar in his ears climbed higher and higher, a pressure building in his skull like the moment before something broke.
The static vanished in an instant as there were three soft, hesitant knocks on the door, followed by a voice Shinji knew all too well. "Eh-uhm, Takeyama. Are you in there?" Midoriya said. Followed by some hushed whispering.
"Y-Yeah, it's open. You can come in." Shinji stammered out in a panic, doing his best to keep his voice steady. He tried to rise, only to place his good hand on a knife, and as he put pressure, it slid, and he lost his balance again and fell with a smaller clatter. Just as the door opened.
Midoriya was through the doorway first, with Iida a half step behind him, and Ochako and Yaoyorozu stopped just inside the threshold with the hallway light spilling in around them. Midoriya's mouth was already open to say something about the training session, but the words stopped when he saw the kitchen, the open cabinet, the drawer lying on its side, the cutlery strewn across the floor, and Shinji sprawled in the middle of it with the top half of his training suit bunched around his waist.
"Uh…hi?" Shinji said after a moment of silence. The greeting hung in the kitchen for a moment longer. He lifted his good hand off the floor in what was probably meant to be a wave, and it wobbled in the air for a second before dropping back onto the tile with a soft slap. His chest kept rising and falling in quick, shallow pulls, the sound of it loud in the small room.
Midoriya was the first to move. He crossed the threshold with his hands half raised in front of him and stopped a few feet from the overturned drawer, his eyes going from the scattered cutlery to Shinji's bare, heaving ribs and back up to his face. "Shinji, what happened? Did you fall?"
"Y-Yeah, it's open; you can come in." Shinji stammered it out in a panic, doing his best to keep his voice steady. He tried to rise, only to plant his good hand on a knife lying loose against the tile, and as he put his weight on it, the blade slid out from under his palm, and he lost his balance again, dropping back to the floor with a smaller clatter than the first. The door swung open right as he landed.
Midoriya was through the doorway first, with Iida a half step behind him, and Ochako and Yaoyorozu stopped just inside the threshold with the hallway light spilling in around them. Midoriya's mouth was already open to say something about the training session, but the words stopped when he saw the kitchen, the open cabinet, the drawer lying on its side, the cutlery strewn across the floor, and Shinji sprawled in the middle of it with the top half of his training suit bunched around his waist and one arm held tight against his ribs.
"Uh, hi?" Shinji said after a moment of silence.
Nobody answered him right away. Midoriya's eyes traveled from the drawer to the splintered rail to the torn fabric trailing across the tile. "Shinji, what happened?" Midoriya finally asked, crossing the threshold with his hands half raised in front of him. He stepped carefully around a scattering of spoons and stopped beside the overturned drawer. "Are you hurt? Why are you on the floor?"
"Calm down, Midoriya," Shinji laughed, far too easily for what had really happened, and he waved his good hand lazily in the air above him. "The sleeve of my suit caught on the drawer, and I don't exactly have both arms to catch myself with." He said it with a lopsided grin aimed at the ceiling, and he ignored the tightness in his chest at how easily that had come out.
"You were pulling the suit off in the kitchen?" Ochako asked, and she had already knelt beside his legs, picking forks and knives up off his shins one at a time and setting them in a neat line on the tile beside her. "Instead of your bedroom?"
"You've never—" Shinji started, and then he stopped and gave a short laugh at the ceiling. "Oh right, girl thing, probably. It's not uncommon for us guys to take our shirts off when we get home, at least I don't think it is? And it's not like the training suits are exactly comfortable. I figured I'd do the hard part first."
"Oh," Ochako said, and she paused with a fork halfway to the line she had been building on the tile, her cheeks coloring faintly. "Right. I guess I've just never thought about it from that side. We change in our rooms, usually, with the door closed."
"That's fair, I wasn't thinking about how it looked." Shinji gave a short laugh and shifted his good hand flat against the floor beside his hip. "I live alone out here, so I kind of forget the house isn't a locker room. I'll put a shirt on in a second, I promise."
"You could just wait until we leave," Iida suggested, and he had gone slightly stiff in his crouch, his eyes politely fixed on a point somewhere above Shinji's left shoulder. "There is no need to rush."
"Nah, I should get up. Lying on the kitchen floor in front of you guys is a bad look no matter how I explain it." He pressed his palm into the tile and pushed, bringing his upper body off the dish towel in one smooth motion, and he got as far as sitting before the room swung out from under him. The cabinets slid sideways and the light fixture smeared into a long white streak, and his stomach dropped as if the floor had been pulled away. He caught himself on his elbow, and it wasn't enough to hold his whole body weight, so he tipped hard to the right, but a hand closed around his upper arm before he hit the tile.
"Whoa, easy," Midoriya said. He had moved so fast that his knees were still skidding on the floor, and he held Shinji's arm in both hands, steadying him with a grip that was gentle and very firm. "Don't get up that quickly. Just stay sitting for a bit."
"That hasn't happened in a while," Shinji said, and he closed his eyes tightly and let his head fall back against the cabinet door. The wood was cool against his neck, and behind his eyelids the dark kept sliding in slow, lazy arcs. Another thing to add to a bad day, which had already managed to fit a kaiju, a lecture, an awkward lunch and a drawer into the same twelve hours.
"What hasn't?" Ochako asked. She had set down the forks in her lap and shifted closer, kneeling at his knee with her hands hovering near his leg like she wasn't sure where it was safe to put them. "Shinji, you keep saying it's nothing, but your hand was shaking so hard you couldn't hold a glass. That doesn't look like nothing."
"It's not a heart thing, or a head thing, I promise." He cracked one eye open and found four worried faces arranged around him in a loose half circle, Iida standing rigid with his hands behind his back, Midoriya close enough that Shinji could see the sweat starting at his hairline. He sighed and let the eye drift shut again. "Okay, so, you guys know how big Redeemer is at full size, right?"
"Seventy-six meters," Midoriya answered at once, and then he winced at himself. "Sorry. I remember when you told us before the USJ."
"Seventy-six meters, yeah." Shinji lifted his good hand off the tile and drew a vague line through the air above him, up toward the ceiling, and let it fall again. "Well, one of the side effects of my... vacation, I guess, is... I don't remember the wording they used. Something about spatial awareness. It was a long word, and the doctor only said it twice."
"Proprioception," Yaoyorozu offered quietly.
"That sounds right, yeah." He huffed out a short laugh. "Basically, I was big for so long that sometimes my body still thinks I am. Every time I stand up, there's this half second where it expects my head to be way higher than it actually is, and my hands to be a lot further away, and the floor to be a lot further down. Then the rest of me catches up, and everything snaps back to normal size, and for a while my brain doesn't know where any of it is supposed to be."
Nobody spoke. Ochako's hand finally settled on his knee, light and warm through the fabric, and Iida's brows had drawn together in a deep, serious crease, and Midoriya's grip on his shoulder tightened a fraction without him seeming to notice. Out in the hall, the evening wind pushed the front door a few inches further open, and it knocked softly against the wall.
"C-can you tell us what it was like?" Midoriya asked, and the second the words left his mouth, his face went bright red from his collar to his hairline. He let go of Shinji's shoulder as if it had burned him and scrambled backward across the tile on his knees, sending a handful of spoons skittering under the stove, his hands flapping in front of him. "I mean, that's— I didn't mean to—you don't have to answer that, I'm so sorry, that was really rude of me to ask right now."
"Deku!" Ochako exclaimed, twisting around to stare at him with her mouth hanging open.
"Midoriya, that was entirely inappropriate," Iida said, and his arm chopped through the air in a stiff, horrified line.
"Honestly, Midoriya, I expected better from you," Yaoyorozu added, though her voice had more weariness than reproach in it, and she pressed two fingers against the bridge of her nose. "Please apologize to him."
"I am, I'm apologizing, I'm really sorry, Shinji, I swear I wasn't thinking," Midoriya blurted, and he had folded himself nearly in half, forehead hovering inches from the floor, his ears glowing red.
"Hey," Shinji cut in before it could get any worse.
The voices stopped. All four of them turned toward him, and Midoriya slowly straightened up from his bow, still kneeling a few feet away with his hands clenched in his lap. Shinji kept his head resting against the cabinet door and looked at the ceiling for a few seconds, listening to the faint rattle of a spoon settling somewhere under the stove, and then he lowered his gaze and found Midoriya's.
"It's fine," he said. "Really. It's a fair thing to be curious about."
"But I shouldn't have," Midoriya started.
"You should have, honestly, and so should the rest of you." Shinji lifted his hand and rubbed it slowly over his face, and the tremor in his fingers made the motion a little jerky. When he lowered it again, his voice had steadied, and he spoke to all of them at once, his eyes moving from Midoriya to Ochako to Iida and finally to Yaoyorozu. "Think about it for a second. You guys came to UA to become heroes. You wanted to learn how to fight villains and save people and get your licenses. And before you can even start, you get told that your class is stuck babysitting a guy, a few years older than you, and completely messed up."
"That isn't how any of us see it," Iida said.
"Maybe not, but it's still what's been happening." Shinji shrugged his shoulder against the wood. "You've sat through my lectures when I haven't been able to finish a sentence. You've watched me lose it in the middle of class, and you've actually sewn me back together. Nobody asked you to do any of that. You just kept showing up, and none of you has ever once made me feel like a burden for it. So if you're curious about what it's like, I think that's more than fair," Shinji went on, and the corner of his mouth lifted into a small, crooked line. "You've put up with a lot of weird stuff from me. You get to ask a few questions in return, and I'd rather you ask than sit there wondering about it for the next three years." He let his head roll to the side against the cabinet and looked at Midoriya properly. "Just give me a minute to let the room stop spinning first, and then get changed… besides, I'm supposed to talk about it somewhat or im getting a proper therapist and I can't deal with that right now."
It took longer than he would have liked to get his legs under him, and he did it in stages, one hand braced on the cabinet and the other held out for balance, with Midoriya hovering close enough to catch him and wise enough not to try. When the kitchen finally held still around him, he took a slow step toward the hallway, then another, and waved off the offer of an arm from Iida with a tired grin.
"Make yourselves at home," he said. "The couch is in the living room, there's tea in the cupboard above the kettle if anyone wants some, and the remote is probably under a cushion. I'll be five minutes."
He made his way down the hall with one hand trailing along the wall, the paint cool under his fingers, and closed his bedroom door behind him with a soft click. The room was dim and quiet, the blinds half drawn against the evening light, and he lowered himself onto the edge of the bed and sat there for a moment with his elbows on his knees, listening to the muffled sound of voices drifting in from the kitchen. The rest of the training suit came off in a slow, clumsy tangle, and he balled it up and dropped it in the corner by the laundry basket, pulled a plain black shirt over his head, and tugged on a pair of loose shorts from the drawer beside the bed. His hand had mostly stopped shaking by then, and he flexed the fingers a few times in front of his face, watching them curl and open, before he stood and went back out.
The kitchen looked different when he stepped into it. The drawer had been set back on its rail, a little crooked, with the splintered corner turned toward the wall, and every fork and spoon and knife had been gathered up and stacked in a neat pile on the counter next to the sink. In the living room, the lamp was on, and Ochako and Yaoyorozu sat side by side on the couch with mugs of tea cradled in their hands, while Iida stood near the bookshelf with his hands behind his back, studying the spines of the few books Shinji owned with the same seriousness he gave to everything. Midoriya was perched on the very edge of the armchair across from them, his knees pressed together and his hands clasped between them, and he shot to his feet as soon as Shinji appeared in the doorway.
"You didn't have to clean up," Shinji said, glancing back toward the kitchen. "I was going to do that."
"It was no trouble at all," Iida replied. "We found a place for everything, though I am not certain the utensil drawer belongs in that position. The rail appears damaged."
"That doesn't surprise me. I'll see if I can fix it, or I'll ask Nezu or something if I can't." He crossed the room and dropped onto the far end of the couch, and the cushion sank beneath him with a soft whoosh of air. Ochako slid a second mug across the low table toward him, steam curling off the top, and he picked it up and held it close against his chest without drinking. The warmth of it seeped through the ceramic into his palms. "Thanks. For all of it, really. The kitchen, and the tea, and not calling Recovery Girl on me."
"We were close to it," Yaoyorozu admitted, and she smiled at him over the rim of her mug. "But you looked much better once you were sitting up, so we decided to wait."
"That was generous of you." He took a sip, and the tea was hot and a little too sweet, and he let it sit on his tongue for a moment before he swallowed. Then he glanced across the table at Midoriya, who was still standing stiff as a post beside the armchair, his ears already tinting pink again. "Midoriya, sit down. You look like you're about to give a speech at a funeral."
"Right, sorry." Midoriya folded himself back into the chair, hands clamped together between his knees, and for a while nobody said anything at all. Outside the window, the sky had turned a deep orange, and the long shadows of the trees stretched across the lawn and up the side of the porch. A bird called somewhere in the branches. Ochako shifted on the cushion, and her mug clinked softly against the table.
"You can ask now," Shinji said. "I did say I would."
"Uhm... what was it like then? In the Breach?" Surprisingly, it wasn't Midoriya who spoke first. Yaoyorozu had set her mug down on the low table, and she kept both hands folded in her lap while she waited, still keeping the picture of politeness, even with such an invasive question.
"That's vague, on purpose, I guess?" Shinji asked, and he waited for her nod before he went on. "Well, I figure you've all seen my videos by now, or whatever you want to call them." They nodded, though he hadn't phrased it as a question. "I'll spare you the answer of hell." He closed his eyes and did his best to block out the worst of the memories, the roaring, the burning blue and endless gray. "It was beautiful, actually. The sky was always gray, one flat sheet of it from horizon to horizon, and it never broke into clouds or cleared up, but the forest and the dunes were always so colorful."
His mind locked onto the dunes, and he gave a partially amused sigh. "Oh, im so getting a talk for this." he squeezed his eyes closed for a moment before he opened them again. "There was this one kaiju… and I'm sure you'll tell Aizawa, and I don't blame you, but I kinda miss a certain one.
A shocked, choking sound filled the living room all at once. Ochako had inhaled a mouthful of tea and doubled over, fist against her sternum, coughing hard enough to rattle the mug in her other hand, while Iida stood beside the couch with one arm chopping through the air and his mouth opening and closing without producing a single word. Midoriya had slid so far forward in the armchair that his knees were nearly touching the low table, and Yaoyorozu had frozen with her cup halfway to her lips, her eyes wide and fixed on Shinji's face.
Shinji could not help the snort that came out of him. It escaped through his nose before he could stop it, and then he pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth to smother the rest, his shoulders shaking, and for a moment he had to look at the lamp instead of at any of them.
"You miss it?" Iida managed at last, and his voice cracked in the middle of the sentence. He pushed his glasses up his nose with two fingers, and they slid right back down again. "You miss a kaiju? One of the creatures that have killed an incalculable number of people, and traumatized you for life?"
"I told you that you'd want to tell Aizawa," Shinji said, lowering his hand. His grin faded into something smaller and more tired, though it stayed on his face. "And you can. He's probably going to hear about this one way or another, and I'd rather it came from someone who heard it straight from me. But let me explain before anyone starts drafting a report."
Ochako finally stopped coughing and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, setting her mug down on the table with a shaky clink. "Okay," she wheezed. "Okay, I'm listening. But I reserve the right to be confused."
"Oh, that's fine, I'm sure it's definitely some version of, what was it called again? Stock syndrome or something." Shinji snapped his fingers twice in the air like the word might drop out of the lamplight if he called it, and he squinted at the ceiling while he searched for the rest of it.
"Stockholm syndrome," Yaoyorozu said gently, and she set her cup down on the low table and folded her hands in her lap. "Though I would argue that it does not quite fit what you are describing. Stockholm syndrome is a bond that forms between a captive and a captor, usually because the captive depends on the captor for survival or kindness. I doubt you were actually held captive by a kaiju; if you were, I doubt you'd be here right now."
"Huh... right," Shinji said, drawing out the last word until it trailed off into a long, thoughtful hum. He lifted his head off his knee and pointed a finger at Yaoyorozu, squinting at her across the low table. "I forgot you're the smart one. And here I was, not wanting a therapist, when I could have just kept you around and asked you every time my brain did something weird."
Yaoyorozu's cheeks pinked, and she lifted her cup to hide behind it. "I would be happy to explain what I can, but I would be a poor substitute for someone trained to help you. I have only read about these things. I have never lived through them."
"That's the part where I'm supposed to say you have a point," Shinji said, and he let his head fall back against the cushion with an exaggerated groan. "Nezu already warned me about this. He said that every time I found an excuse to skip it, he would find a better reason for me to go."
Ochako had finally caught her breath, and she tucked her legs up under herself on the couch and turned to face him, a small grin tugging at her mouth. "Maybe it would not be so bad," she offered. "You have been talking to us for five minutes, and nobody has run out of the room yet."
"That is because you are all too polite to run," Shinji said, though the corner of his mouth had lifted. Iida had finally sat down properly beside Ochako and was nodding at the floor with grave approval, and Midoriya was scribbling something on the back of his own hand with an invisible pen, his lips moving silently, until he noticed everyone watching him and curled the hand into a fist.
"Anyway," Shinji said, and he rubbed his face with his palm before letting it fall into his lap. "Where was I? Right, the kaiju. Well. To start, this one was one of the few times I actually nearly died, and yes, I know that doesn't make me miss it any worse."