Work Text:
Within every UA class, there inevitably will be a self-proclaimed prank squad. In Class 1-A, there’s Midoriya Izuku and Uraraka Ochako—sometimes with the unexpected (but should be expected by now) addition of Todoroki Shouto.
However, before all of their shenanigans, there was only one who was titled the ‘Prank King’ in the entirety of UA’s Students, and that king strikes when you least expect it.
—
The grounds of UA are quiet for the most part—it’s Saturday, and most aren’t around, instead out with friends for lunch and the like. It’s in the middle of the day, the sun is still shining brightly in the sky—and it’s also the time when UA’s King Of Pranks, Master Of Trickery, Stupid Fucking Asshole Prankster (a nickname courtesy of one angry Bakugou Katsuki after a particularly well timed prank) decides to strike.
He takes his time choosing who will be first, a grin pulling on his face. He hums, before his eyes narrow in on the perfect place to strike.
Being a hero means that you’re actively searching to do good. Which means you should be able to spot and work out a proper plan of where to strike and how much damage it’ll cause to the area around you. You should be able to read everything you need to know from your opponent in the blink of an eye—faster than that if you want to save as many people as possible.
This means that, when playing a prank, a hero in training such as the King of Pranks would know who to go to and how to get the best reaction.
The first victim is a first year student named Takara Rin from the Support course who’s enjoying the sun, laying on the grass with a big sigh. She’s tired—it’s evident by the sweat on her face that she’s exhausted from her training, ready for a good nap in the sun to recharge her. There is no one on this side of campus, so she goes undisturbed.
Unaware she’s being watched.
For a hero—even their support members— this is no good. So the Prank King is going to have to teach her a lesson on spatial awareness.
Takara rolls over, eyes closed and dark hair splayed on the grass, basking in the sun like a cat. The grass near her shifts, and she scrunches her nose, like the thought of being interrupted in this blissful moment is unsightly. When she begrudgingly lifts her head, and her eyes open, she sees a face in the grace.
At first, she thinks it’s a costume mask or something. A really detailed mask, with dark eyes and a bright smile. And then she leans in to inspect it, and the face says, “Hi!” in a really cheery voice, and Takara, naturally, shrieks in response.
The face starts morphing into a head, and Takara keeps screaming even as she realizes that the head now has blonde hair, and he looks oddly familiar. She scrambles back as fast as she can, and she feels the effects of her Quirk—the temperature around them drops significantly, and snowflakes are now falling around them. No matter how hard Takara tries to rein it in, it just keeps snowing harder and harder.
The head now sits on a pair of broad shoulders, and the body just keeps… growing from the ground. The face is smiling at her, and Takara thinks oh my god, I’m going to die, and then feels her head getting light.
And then she promptly passes out on the grass.
Toogata Mirio stands over Takara’s body, sheepish. It’s still snowing, covering the green grass around them in white that keeps trying to melt in the spring sun, but can’t quite do it.
“Well… oops.”
—
Later, when Mirio returns to the 3-B dorms, Tamaki stares at the still-melting snow that covers Mirio’s shoulders from his spot on the common room couch.
“What…”
“I pranked a first year,” Mirio says with a grin. He sits on the unoccupied side of the couch next to Tamaki, crossing one leg over the other, arm resting on the back of the couch. “She had a weather related Quirk. I feel bad—she kept screaming after she saw me, but I didn’t know if it’d make it worse if I kept talking, so I just kind of… didn’t. But then she passed out, so I took her to the infirmary.”
Tamaki stares. Stares some more. And then, without a word, he gets up from the couch, strides across the room, and hides his face in the safety of the wall. Mirio has learned that usually Tamaki only does this when in front of people he doesn’t know, but sometimes if he feels enough secondhand embarrassment (most likely from something Mirio has done), then he can’t help himself.
“You—you…,” Tamaki is saying into the wall. Mirio is sure his face is all kinds of red. “That poor first year…”
“Oh, come on, Tamaki, she’s fine! Just a little harmless scare.”
“She—she passed out though!”
As Tamaki is having a second-hand mental breakdown in the corner, one of their classmates walks in, takes one look at Tamaki, and then gives Mirio a pointed look. “Did you do that?”
Mirio puts his hands up. “I didn’t even say anything bad to him!”
Their classmate rolls their eyes, unbelieving. “I’m getting Nejire.”
“Please don’t get Nejire.”
But they don’t listen. They disappear around the corner. Mirio thinks about going after them, but Tamaki is still mumbling to himself at the wall, and Mirio thinks it’d be a bad idea to leave him behind. So, instead, Mirio sighs and resigns himself to his fate.
He doesn’t have to wait long.
This time when someone rounds the corner, it’s Nejire, dressed in her pajamas like she’s just gotten out of bed despite it being four in the afternoon. She looks at Tamaki still hiding his face in the wall, then the snow on Mirio’s shoulders, and says, “Okay, I thought I could put it together in just one look, but I can’t. What happened here?”
Mirio smiles. “I pranked a first year. She… didn’t care for it. And now Tamaki is embarrassed.”
“Y-you made her pass out—!”
“I took her to the infirmary! She’s fine.”
Nejire, who looks torn between berating him and laughing, finally gives in to her laughter, covering her mouth with one hand like it’ll stop the giggles from coming out. “Did you—did you do that thing where you sit with your face through the wall?”
“I did it on the grounds, actually. She was taking a nap in the sun, and then she sort of freaked out and lost control of her Quirk.”
Nejire grins and holds up her hand for a fist bump. Mirio bumps it with his own.
“Nice. Now, come on, Tamaki, it’s not that bad…”
—
Monoma Neita is straggling behind his classmates—it’s become a new policy that Neita has to stay behind while classes get out to avoid him running into Class 1-A. Neita is perfectly capable of controlling himself, mind you, but after Neita ended up upsetting Bakugou last week (always one for violence and attention, that one—Neita maintains that wasn’t his fault), his classmates had forcefully told him he would be waiting five minutes after the bell to leave so that another incident didn’t happen. Neita would normally not listen to this, but Kendou’s blows hurt and sometimes cause him migraines, and he’d rather not deal with that every day. Not because he’s a little scared of her. Not at all.
So Neita waits, and two minutes into his wait time, he looks over at one of the classroom walls by pure chance, and just sees… a nose. Lodged in the wall.
Logically, after startling, Neita goes to investigate.
It has to be a fake one, Neita decides as he studies the thing, hand on his chin in deep thought. It’s a very good one, he allows, but it has to be fake. Unless someone is stuck in a hole in the wall…? But then why are they not calling for help?
Neita leans in, studies it a little more, and decides he has to touch it to truly know. It’s when he goes to touch it that everything starts to get a little weird.
Neita touches the nose on the tip, and it… it feels like human skin. And he starts to feel a little weird about it, because that’s weird. That’s weird, right? No costume should feel this real.
And then the nose crinkles , and Neita jumps back with a scream.
“What the fuck is happening?! ”
But then the nose straightens out. Neita is about to convince himself that he made it up in his head and he should leave right now. But then it starts moving.
The nose scales up and down the wall, and moves all around, and Neita screams, falling back into a few desks in his panic to get as far away as possible. He trips backwards on one of them, and screams a little more.
“Heathen!” Neita screams, trying to crawl over the mound of desks and chairs. “Get away from me—! ”
The nose in the wall morphs into a face in the wall, one that looks oddly familiar and winks at him, before moving back into the wall and traveling all around the surface of it. Neita screams, now in frustration instead of fear, when he realizes it’s someone’s Quirk. He vaguely recognizes the face as a third year of one of the Big Three and then belatedly remembers what his Quirk does, and then he’s up on his feet trying to grab the nose.
“Get back here!” Neita screams, jumping as he tries to grab the nose on the wall, fumbling it over and over as it gets higher. It moves to the left, away from Neita and down, taunting him. Neita lunges for it. “Fuck you, get back here!”
The nose does not comply. It dances higher and higher, further and further out of Neita’s reach.
And then, once it finally reaches the ceiling after taunting him for a good five minutes, the third year’s head fully forms out of the ceiling, completely upside down, his hair reaching towards the ground, and he smiles at Neita.
“This was fun,” Toogata Mirio says to Neita, who is so very clearly not having fun. “See you around!”
And then he’s gone.
Neita stares at the spot in the wall where he disappeared, baffled. Then he shakes his hands in the air, screams his frustration into the empty classroom, and lets his anger out on the nearest desk.
—
Shinso Hitoshi is simply minding his own business one day, avoiding his classmates in the General Studies course, when an arm stops him in the hallway. Shinsou obeys the indirect command to stop, and stares at it in disbelief. Someone stopping him is… weird, for sure, because no one cares to talk to the loner boy who can brainwash people into doing what he wants. But what’s even more weird is that he’s keeping to the edge of the hallway, where no one should be able to fit in between him and the wall.
Hitoshi follows the arm towards what should be a shoulder…but ends up just being the wall, as he thought. Hitoshi jerks back, eyes wide and heart racing.
The arm readjusts itself and waves.
“What,” Hitoshi deadpans, staring at the arm in disbelief. The arm pulls itself back into the wall.
Then, a fully clothed butt pokes out of the wall this time. Hitoshi just stares. The butt moves around, swaying this way and that, and then pulls back into the wall again.
Clearly, this is someone with a weird Quirk fucking with him. What’s the Quirk, though? Combining with the wall? Hitoshi leans back, staring at it to see if the wall has left any clue of what just happened, but it’s smooth. No blemishes in sight. Hitoshi isn’t even sure where the arm that had stopped him was before. With a frown, he leans forward to get a better look, only to be met with the sudden sight of someone’s face. In the wall.
Hitoshi pedals backwards, cursing. The face smiles.
“You’re not easily scared, huh?”
Hitoshi narrows his eyes. He recognizes that face. “Not really.”
The face makes a gesture, almost like he’s shrugging. “Oh well. Still funny.”
Hitoshi narrows his eyes again. “What—”
But the face is gone. The wall is smooth once again, and Hitoshi is left staring at where the face left.
—
Midoriya Izuku is alone, outside, by one of the gyms, in an attempt to breathe a little. Between classes and the recent developments with… all of the villain stuff going on, he’s found it a bit difficult to focus. There’s always a little bit of anxiety following him now, coloring all of his interactions with his classmates in gray, nervous fuzz. Keeping a secret from them, knowing what’s out there, keeps Izuku on edge.
He likes being with his friends, though. Class 1-A is always full of surprises—fun ones, most of the time. Sometimes he just has to… sneak away. Be alone for a bit.
So there he is, leaning against one of the gym building’s walls, when a foot pokes out of the wall. Izuku stares at it for a long moment, and then smiles.
“Hello, Mirio-senpai,” Izuku says kindly.
The foot pulls back. Mirio pokes his head out of the wall with a smile.
“Doesn’t work on you anymore?”
Izuku shrugs. “Perhaps after sixteen times, I’ve… gotten used to it?”
Mirio hums, obviously disappointed. But then he shrugs and slides out of the wall, coming to stand beside Izuku nonchalantly. Izuku admires the way his Quirk works so effortlessly—Mirio manages it like he was born doing it, when Izuku knows Mirio went through tons of training to get where he is now. He wants to take notes on it—his fingers itch to do that—but he’s already seen Mirio do that a ton by now. The notes are a force of habit, but it’s still awe-inspiring to see it at work.
“Well,” Mirio says, “I saw you were hanging out over here, so I wanted to check in on my kouhai. Why are you… here, of all places?”
“A deep breath,” Izuku provides, trying to hide the gnawing anxiety. “I’m fine now, I was just about to go back to the dorms. What are you doing out here, Mirio-senpai?”
Mirio studies Izuku for a moment. When he speaks, he completely ignores the question: “Hero work getting to be too much?”
A pause.
“A bit.” Izuku feels his smile get strained. He tries to hide it by looking away. “How’d you know?”
“I had a hunch.”
Izuku can sense as Mirio leans back on the wall beside him, but doesn’t dare look. Another moment of quiet passes between them, the only sounds being the chattering of birds or a bristle of leaves, before Mirio speaks again.
“You know, sometimes when all you can do is wait, I find it’s nice to have something else to focus on. Something that’s fun, preferably, but just… different from what you’re nervous about. Pick up a hobby that doesn’t involve hero work, or something.”
Izuku raises an eyebrow and looks up at his senpai in curiosity. “What do you do then, Mirio-senpai?”
He doesn’t miss Mirio’s mischievous grin. “I pull pranks. Doesn’t work so well on you, anymore, but there are plenty of first years who haven’t seen my Quirk in action. So, sometimes, I just roam around and wait for someone unsuspecting!”
Izuku tilts his head, thinking. Actually, that’s not a bad idea… “Pranks, huh.”
Suddenly, Mirio looks a little off put. “It doesn’t have to be pranks, it could be like… uh—reading, maybe? Or like—”
“Thanks, Mirio-senpai,” Izuku says distractedly, cutting Mirio off. He pulls out his notebook and starts muttering to himself. Suddenly, his brain is churning with ideas. “Mirio-senpai uses his Quirk to pull pranks, but mine wouldn’t do much good, but I think we could use Uraraka ’s Quirk for something. Uraraka would do it, I think, but we have to figure out a time and place that would be appropriate. What will everyone else think is funny though—”
Izuku doesn’t realize he’s being watched until suddenly, he feels the absence of watchful eyes. He looks up, and Mirio is gone. Izuku stares, for a second, where Mirio had been standing, and then his mind is inevitably drawn back to his notebook.
—
In the 3-B dorms, Nejire is sitting on the couch with a book, sipping on some tea when Mirio slips through the walls. Unlike some of their other classmates who still jump when he doesn’t use a door, Nejire is no longer affected by his disdain for them. She does raise an eyebrow at the look on his face, though.
“What gives?” Nejire asks. Mirio looks at her as he crosses the room, and lets the frown pulling at his mouth form.
“I think I might have just let loose a prankster in Class 1-A,” Mirio says candidly. He sits down beside her, puzzled. “I don’t know how to feel about it.”
When he finishes recounting his conversation with Midoriya, Nejire laughs mischievously.
“Oh, they’re about to have fun, I’m sure,” Nejire says, turning back to her book. She lets Mirio lean on her, taking his weight without complaint, and turns the page. “Midoriya-kun will have them up in arms in no time.”
Mirio frowns harder, and then looks out the common room’s windows, pensive. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
But that? That was a worry for another time.