Dying isn't like in the movies. It's not peaceful. It's not quick. It's cold seeping into your bones while your brain screams at nerves that won't respond. It's copper in your mouth and darkness at the edges of your vision.
"Should've just given us the drive."
I tried to speak, but blood bubbled past my lips instead. The warehouse lights dimmed, flickered.
My last thought wasn't profound. Wasn't about revenge or regret.
I just didn't want to die on this dirty warehouse floor.
Then everything went black.
And then...
The warehouse lights snapped back into fluorescent clarity. A piece of chalk hung suspended in the air, inches from my face. Not sodium lights. Not concrete floor. Not blood and cordite.
Classroom. Desk. Morning sunlight.
"NAKAMURA!"
Tanaka-sensei's voice could've stripped paint. She stood at the front of class 2-B, arm still extended from throwing the chalk, face twisted in that special kind of teacher fury reserved for sleeping students.
My brain refused to process the transition. One moment, dying on a warehouse floor. Next moment, staring at floating chalk while thirty classmates tried not to laugh.
The chalk dropped into my palm. I blinked at it.
"Care to explain why my lesson on modern literature is less engaging than your nap?" Tanaka-sensei's glasses caught the light.
"I..." Words failed me. The phantom taste of copper lingered on my tongue. My chest still ached where the bullets had hit. But my uniform was clean. No blood. No holes. "Sorry, sensei."
She crossed her arms. "Perhaps you'd like to share with the class what was so exhausting about your weekend that you couldn't stay awake for Monday morning?"
The weekend. What had I actually done this weekend? The memory slipped away like smoke. Something about studying? Training? The details felt wrong, overlapped with images of black suits and gunfire.
"I was..." I scratched my head. "Training?"
Snickers from the class. Tanaka-sensei's eye twitched.
"Training. I see." She turned back to the board. "Since you're so dedicated to your physical education, you can run laps during lunch break. Now, as I was saying about the symbolism in chapter four..."
I stared at my notebook. Blank pages. No blood stains. No bullet holes. Just clean paper waiting for notes I hadn't taken.
The guy next to me – Yamamoto? Yamazaki? – leaned over. "Dude, you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Yeah." I rubbed my chest where phantom bullets had torn through. "Just a weird dream."
"Must've been intense. You were muttering something about hitmen."
The girl in front of me turned around. Suzuki Mei. "Classic Nakamura. Probably dreaming about being a hero again while drooling on his textbook."
"I wasn't drooling." I checked my textbook. Okay, maybe a little.
"You were talking about drives and millions in crypto," Yamamoto-or-maybe-Yamazaki said. "Sounded more like a yakuza movie than hero work."
The dream was already fading, but something about it nagged at me. The names on the drive. The bigger picture. It had seemed so important, so real.
"Nakamura!" Tanaka-sensei's voice cracked like a whip. "Since you're so chatty now, perhaps you'd like to explain the author's use of unreliable narration in this passage?"
I stood, frantically scanning the open textbook. The words swam before my eyes. "The narrator... uh..."
"Page ninety-four, Nakamura."
I flipped pages, buying time. "The narrator presents events from their perspective, but..." Another student snickered. "But we can't trust everything they say because..."
"Because?"
"Because memory is unreliable?" The words came out before I could think about them. "We see what we want to see. Remember what we want to remember. Or maybe what someone else wants us to remember."
Silence fell over the classroom. Tanaka-sensei raised an eyebrow.
"An... interesting interpretation." She adjusted her glasses. "Though I suspect it owes more to your nap than actual analysis of the text. Sit down."
I dropped into my seat, head spinning. Where had that come from? The dream lingered like a bad taste, mixing with reality until I wasn't sure which was which.
The rest of the morning blurred past. English. Math. Something about vectors and conjugations that might as well have been another language. My notes were a mess of half-finished sentences and doodles of guns I didn't remember drawing.
Between classes, I caught fragments of conversation:
"Did you hear about the villain at Tatooin Station?"
"...some kind of giant villain..."
"...did you see how nice Mt. Lady's ass looked though..."
Each snippet sent weird echoes through my head, like déjà vu but backwards. Like remembering something that hadn't happened yet.
Lunch break came. I stood to head for the cafeteria, but Tanaka-sensei stopped me at the door.
"Nakamura." Her voice was softer now, concerned. "Is everything alright? You've seemed... distracted lately."
"I'm fine, sensei." The lie came easily. Too easily? "Just tired from training."
She studied me for a long moment. "Your quirk... it's not causing you any problems, is it?"
"No." Another lie? I wasn't sure anymore. What was my quirk, exactly? The answer sat just out of reach, like a word on the tip of my tongue. "Everything's normal."
"Hmm." She didn't look convinced. "Well, try to stay awake in class. Whatever's going on in that head of yours, you won't make it into UA if you don't focus."
I nodded and headed for the door. As I reached for the handle, she spoke again.
"Oh, and Nakamura? That bit about unreliable narrators and memory? Not bad. Maybe you absorb more than you realize, even while sleeping."
The hallway was packed with students heading to lunch. Faces I should know. Names I couldn't quite remember. Everything felt slightly off, like a photo taken from the wrong angle.
I found myself in the bathroom, splashing water on my face.
I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, water dripping from my chin. The face looking back wasn't the one I remembered. Wasn't the one I should have.
My eyes.
Silver-grey sclera shimmered with an otherworldly depth, like staring into infinite space. A twelve-petaled lotus pattern bloomed in luminescent blue-white, spinning lazily around pupils that pulsed with inner light.
"What the..." I stumbled back from the sink. My heart hammered against my ribs. These weren't my eyes. Couldn't be my eyes. Yet they moved when I blinked.
The lotus pattern spun faster as my pulse quickened. Each petal left trailing afterimages, like looking through a kaleidoscope into forever.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until stars burst behind my eyelids. When I looked again, the strange eyes remained. If anything, they glowed brighter, responding to my distress.
A student I didn't recognize entered the bathroom. For a split second, my body tensed, combat instincts screaming danger. Then reality reasserted itself. Just a kid washing his hands. Not a hitman. Not here.
But where had those instincts come from?
=======
[Next time on "Yoichi's Hero Academia"]
I sat cross-legged on a stool wearing an oversized lab coat, spinning a model of an atom between my hands.
"Next chapter," I squinted at the floating teleprompter, "we dive into the mystery of my... wait, what?" I leaned forward. "My questionable sanity? Who wrote this?"
"Just read the script!" someone hissed off-camera.
I flipped through papers scattered across the desk. "Nah, boring. Let's talk about these cool lotus eyes instead." I pointed at my eyes, the pattern spinning lazily. "Pretty neat, right? Though they're kinda freaking me out. One minute I'm dying in a warehouse—"
"That's not in the preview!"
"—next thing I know, I'm drooling in class." I tossed the atom model over my shoulder. It crashed into something expensive-sounding. "Oops. Anyway, I don't even know what my quirk is supposed to be. Am I a teleporter? Mind reader? OH CAN I DO A RASENGAN?!?"
A production assistant slid into frame, pushing a diagram labeled "NEXT EPISODE" toward me.
"Fine, fine." I glanced at it. "Next time: I continue being confused about reality, meet some students who may or may not be important later, and... try to figure out why I have memories of getting shot? That can't be right."
The assistant frantically pointed at different notes on the page.
"Oh, there's also something about entrance exams and..." I squinted. "Is that a sludge monster? Weird. Tune in to find out if I'm actually losing my mind or just stuck in some weird meta-narrative where nothing makes sense!"
"That's not—"
"Hey, quick question before we go." I leaned toward the camera, voice dropping conspiratorially. "Has anyone else noticed how everything feels slightly... fictional? No? Just me? Cool cool cool."
"CUT!"