Chapter 5: Dry Skin?

A/N: And here it comes. The plot point I've been building up to. (Lol, have fun Toushiro)

Thank you all for your reviews, favorites, and follows last chapter!

After settling into his dorm room, being given a set of uniforms, and being provided with a few spare sets of clothing by concerned faculty members – mostly All Might – Hitsugaya was finally allowed to sit down in the dorms, Hyourinmaru's sheathed length lying over his knees. The blade had been locked closed by set of steel cuffs, one on the hilt and one on the sheath, but he wasn't complaining. It wasn't as if the humans knew that the sheath was dissolvable at his will, and he wasn't planning on letting them know this about him.

A sudden spike of pain shot through his temples, fading as soon as it had come, and he grunted in annoyance at the discomfort. The foreign spiritual hum had increased in strength since he'd arrived at the U.A. and it seemed the exposure was finally starting to take its toll on him. Slowly, he leaned forward, considering the unfamiliar almost-reiatsu with calculating precision, even as it made his skin itch violently. He'd been able to pinpoint the source today, and hadn't been surprised to find that the source of strange reiatsu came from All Might. It had also, oddly enough, emanated from one of his new classmates, and he got the vague impression of disembodied souls dancing around their heads.

If it hadn't been affecting his reishi-made body, he wouldn't have considered it so threatening. It rather gave off the same feel as a Zanpakutou, like All Might and the plain-looking kid with the green hair were drawing strength from other, half-separate souls. But whatever is was, its aura was seeping into his reishi and slowly saturating it.

Absently, he scratched at his wrist where the itch was worst, the silky-hard texture of Hyourinmaru's scales rippling under his nails. And then he froze and slowly lowered his gaze to his wrist. A soft breath escaped him, wonder and concern mixed into the same solitary gasp. A patch of pale, silver-blue scales covered his wrist, spreading over the underside of his palm and trailing about midway down his forearm before his gold-tinged skin reappeared. Gingerly, he prodded the scaled surface and was shocked to find that it felt hard, like diamond or steel, and that it also flexed slightly under his touch. But he could also feel the softness of his fingertip and the scritchy talc of his fingernail with the scaled-over patch on his forearm.

What was going on?

Carefully, he relaxed, and felt some sort of shiver travel through his skin. Almost instantly, the scales seemed to fold inward on themselves, revealing his skin seamlessly. In less than a second he couldn't see even the faintest sign of scales. And then it hit him. Was this the result of the odd reiatsu emitted by All Might and the green-haired boy? And if so, what exactly was happening to him? Obviously his reishi was reacting somehow.

Curious, he tried to reach for that feeling again, to flex whatever muscle had pulled scales to the surface of his skin. It took a few tries to trigger it, but when it happened the second time the patch of scales had spread nearly over his entire arm, all the way up to the shoulder. He yelped in surprise, pulling back the short sleeve of his t-shirt to expose the pale silver-blue scales covering his skin. Gingerly, he tapped the scales again, surprised by the tough layer of protection that they formed despite being soft and silky to the touch. Then as a final test he relaxed again, watching in awe as the scales vanished. While it looked like the strange spiritual energy emitting from All Might and the plain boy had already started to affect him, he was at least confident that the side effects thus far were controllable.

Then he shook himself and stood up, slinging Hyourinmaru's sheathed length over his back with the length of soft, dark teal leather that the school had attached the sheath to. The dragon's blade settled comfortably between his shoulder blades, the ice drake's voice a pleasant hum in the back of his mind. The dragon had been quiet lately, observing the strangeness of the new dimension and watching his master's actions keenly.

"You're troubled, little one."

Hitsugaya paused for a moment, then huffed irritably and started up the stairs to his dorm room, limping along on the crutches he'd been commanded to use by the kissy old lady. A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth despite himself.

"You're still calling me little one even though I'm tall enough to wear you on my hip now?"

Hyourinmaru laughed at him – the only creature who ever could and get away with it without being frozen solid.

"Don't fool yourself, you know full well my sheath would still be hitting your ankles. I'm not a blade made to be worn at your hip – even at your adult height I am too long," the Zanpakutou spirit teased gently. Then the dragon sobered, becoming gentle. "I speak of the bracelet on your wrist. You are troubled by what it says."

Toushiro tensed, a hand on his doorknob. Slowly, his fingers started to tighten, knuckles turning white. Hyourinmaru's knowledge was the one thing he knew he'd never be able to escape, and though the dragon would not do more than nudge him in the right direction, he would not be steered wrong. The young captain swallowed.

"…yes. Yes, I am," he replied, easing the door open carefully and flopping down on his stomach on the bed. Hesitantly, he glanced once again at the stiff plastic band on his wrist, the one with the medical warning about the traumatic retrograde amnesia and the misdiagnosed PTSD label. The accusing letters stared back, and he broke off his gaze. "I don't believe it."

"Little one…" Hyourinmaru's disapproval was a punch to the gut. Toushiro closed his eyes tightly, trying to shut out the dragon's displeasure futilely.

"It's been twenty years, Hyourinmaru. I think I'm over it by now."

"You have shut yourself down for all of that time, and Hinamori's avoidance of you did not help," the Zanpakutou rebuked gently. "You have always been remarkably accomplished at avoiding things you fear, and the horrors the wars inflicted upon you are easy to cope with when you do not think about them."

Toushiro slid Hyourinmaru's sheath over his head and placed the long blade beside him on the mattress. A sort of numbness was stealing the strength from his limbs, mostly due to the other half of his soul pointing out a number of facts he didn't want to face.

"I'll just continue to not think about it then," he decided, "I can't afford to be sidelined. Not now, not ever. PTSD – maybe I had it, at one point. Maybe I'm displaying a few symptoms. But now I'm fine; I've learned to deal with it."

"But not to confront it and heal from it."

Toushiro's stomach twisted painfully, and he curled on his side, facing the wall. His Soul Phone, designed to look like an iPhone 7 – which a charger had been found for, somehow – lay on the nightstand, an alarm already set. It was all the thing was good for now anyway – the signal didn't reach Seireitei, making it a glorified noisemaker. He had his first day of school tomorrow, and he needed rest to deal with errant children and continue searching for whatever Quirk had pulled him into this new dimension.

"Toushiro…"

"Good night, Hyourinmaru."

The next morning, he woke up to the soft jingling of his alarm clock playing an old lullaby from Rukongai. He'd managed to record Hinamori singing it in her hospital room after Aizen's betrayal and had used it to wake himself up ever since. He got up gingerly, the wrapped bandages around his thigh itching his skin. The wound should be nearly healed by now, he knew, but he had the sneaking suspicion that removing the bandaging now without permission from the people watching him would only make them more suspicious of his mental state.

He showered in the bathroom he shared with the empty room next door and dressed quickly, fumbling a bit with the tie before managing to completely smooth the uniform out. With a pass of his hand and flicker of his reiatsu, he froze the water in his hair, then shook his head, sending the powdery snow tinkling to the floor and leaving his white hair completely dry. Then he picked up the messenger-style bag in which he'd put the notebooks and pencils he'd been given for study purposes, threw it over his shoulder, and without a moment's hesitation seized Hyourinmaru as well. Then he left, buckling the blade over his shoulder as he fluidly descended the stairs and left the dorms.

Other students gaped as he loped past them, his steps effortlessly light as he ran toward the main building. He'd abandoned the crutches in his room, unwilling to needlessly hamper himself when he was perfectly well aware that the only remnant of his wound was faint pink line of split skin. It would likely aggravate the people keeping an eye on him, but he had at least left the bandages on, and he was well acquainted with the exaggerated speed of his healing, being so prone to violent incidents. If anyone protested – well, at the least, he would be correct concerning his own body.

He vaulted effortlessly over a railing, startling a girl with long greenish hair and large round eyes, then slowed his pace to a brisk walk. The endless sprinting run he was so used to would seem abnormally fast to the humans here, which would fit well with his supposed 'Quirk', but he'd already gotten in trouble once for breaking the law regarding public Quirk usage. It would probably be better to restrict his physical limits to those of the humans for now.

He headed off to the large cafeteria, where a few of the sporadic other boarding students were filling plates with rice and buttered toast and grilled fish among other things. Hitsugaya took a bowl of rice porridge and some pickles for himself, eating in the hurried but neat manner he'd learned in the Rukongai with his Granny, then put the dishes up and made his way to the classroom he'd been showed yesterday. Pausing outside the door, he gritted his teeth quietly, cursing the lack of information concerning possible wielders of dimensional Quirks that he'd picked up on. The law forbidding the public use of Quirks for anything other than self-defense was proving very problematic for his search, and he could only hope that he would be allowed greater leeway to nose around as a 'hero-in-training'.

But first he had to open the door.

The soft chatter of voices on the other side of the massive door was clearly audible with his keen shinigami hearing, and the sound of the cheerful voices froze him in place. A sort of weight settled on his shoulders, cold realization chilling his blood. If he hadn't become a shinigami, he could have had this sort of easy camaraderie with friends his psychological age. If he hadn't become a captain, he could have had this easy friendship with the members of his division. And now here he was, a seasoned warrior who had killed in cold blood, an experienced, jaded fighter all too aware of the childhood he'd lost, about to enter a world of children where he no longer belonged.

The thought made a bitter smile cross his face, but just as he had lifted his foot to step forward and open the door, the young man with green hair trotted around the corner and offered a nervous smile. Hitsugaya paused, the itching, now slightly pleasant burn of the strange aura surrounding this young man only slightly off-putting, and after a hesitant moment, he tried to force a smile back. It didn't really work, but at the sight of his lips quirking upwards even that fractional amount, the green-haired kid appeared to relax and walked directly up to the door.

"A-ah, you're…you're Hitsugaya-kun, right?" the broccoli-headed kid asked, his chunky red sneakers squeaking a little bit on the tile floor. Slowly, Toushiro nodded once, simultaneously wary of engaging the teenager in conversation but also a hair curious about one of the twenty other students he'd have to put up with until he found his way home. The small movement was enough for the curly-haired boy, whose smile then grew into something much more cheerful than nervous.

"I'm Midoriya Izuku," he introduced himself, the happy bounce in the other boy's tone of voice blending well with the telltale neutral calmness of someone with an earnest, honest heart. Hitsugaya blinked at the green-haired boy in front of him, noticing a smattering of cute freckles sprinkled on the other teenager's cheeks. Midoriya was a just a hair shorter than him, but the almost-curl in his dark green hair made up for the faint height difference. Toushiro swallowed hard, dropping his gaze from the teenager's face to the floor.

"…pleased to make your acquaintance, Midoriya-san," Hitsugaya replied after a moment, still unsure of how he wanted to deal with the odd predicament he found himself in. But Midoriya, as if magically sensing his hesitancy and confusion, chose then to open the door and step into the classroom. The boy looked back over his shoulder with a hint of cheerful expectation, ignoring the way his classmates all turned to stare at the stranger in the doorway.

"C-come on, Hitsugaya-kun. I can introduce you to the class representative," he offered, another smile on the boy's face, this one ridiculously bright. It was like a sucker punch to the gut, the guileless kind-heartedness of that smile so terribly familiar and yet so foreign. He hadn't seen a smile like that since Aizen had defected.

Shiro-chan, I got you some watermelon – Mou, Shiro-chan, that's mean! Quit spitting seeds at me!

Without realizing it, Hitsugaya noticeably softened, the hard slant of his icy emerald glare melting around the edges, and as he quietly followed Midoriya over to Iida's desk, the rest of the class stifled their laughter. Sero leaned back in his chair, grinning back at Tokoyami, Todoroki, and Yaoyorozu.

"Midoriya-kun sniped another one with that sunshine effect of his," the human tape dispenser whispered through the low rumble of conversation, and Yaoyorozu giggled behind hand at the observation. Tokoyami also stifled a smile on his beak. Even Todoroki, who had brooded over Hitsugaya's appearance since the rescue, looked amused by how easily the white-haired boy had been taken in by Midoriya's unintentional magnetism. Only Bakugo was still scowling. Tokoyami shook his head, feathers rustling, a sort of resignation on his face.

"I suppose it's good to know that, whoever he is, he's not immune to Midoriya's sunshine," the birdlike teenager said with a sigh.

Then the door opened again, revealing a sleeping-bag clad Aizawa, and within a single heartbeat everyone in the class had taken their seats. The dark-haired man rolled into the room, only standing up and unzipping the sleeping bag when he was behind the teacher's podium. The man rubbed at his eyes sleepily. And then he stared, eyes locking onto the newest student in the class.

"Hitsugaya-kun, where are your crutches?" he asked, his voice quite toneless. Instantly, the entire class let out small noises of surprise and disapproval, but Hitsugaya just shrugged his shoulders carelessly.

"I no longer require assistance to walk," he replied simply, and when Aizawa opened his mouth to speak the white-haired boy held up a hand, a sort of nameless warning flickering across the green of his eyes. "I know myself. A simple slice such as that injury will take me at most six days to heal fully."

The class gaped at his claim, and then stiffened in surprise when Aizawa's eyes narrowed in thought and there was no immediate rebuttal.

"…Am I to assume you know this-"

"From prior experience. Yes."

Hitsugaya's tone was curt, and he laced his fingers together with all the poise of a well-polished businessman prepared to end a set of fruitless negotiations. But Aizawa's expression, far from becoming sour considering the harshness of the teenager's tone, inexplicably relaxed into concern and quiet understanding. A sort of sadness invaded his tired features.

"Make sure to see Recovery Girl during lunch then, just to have her confirm that you're clear."

Whatever Hitsugaya had been expecting, it wasn't that. The ease with which Aizawa had dropped the issue caught him off guard, leaving a strange sort of confused vulnerability on the white-haired boy's face, as if he wasn't used to being treated with such trust. But almost as quickly as it had come, the flash of human vulnerability faded back into the blank mask of emotionless apathy.

"I will."

After that, class continued on as usual. Aizawa took about fifteen minutes to explain that the upcoming internships were serious business, and that the students would soon be receiving lists of the various hero agencies where they could undergo their field training. This, of course, left the class in a tizzy, with everyone excitedly chattering on about what they expected to get out of their field training. Hitsugaya, from his seat at the very back of the room, listened with mild interest, wondering if he would be able to use that time to better search for people with dimension-warping Quirks. If not, then he wasn't really interested in the extra effort required.

And then some guy with an obnoxiously loud voice and a swoop of spiked yellow hair walked in, trading spots with Aizawa, who rolled back into his yellow sleeping bag and flopped out the door. The students all pulled out notebooks and pencils, looking expectantly up at the teacher in their midst as he began writing on the board. Toushiro had to stifle a groan of resignation. English. They were learning English. This was almost unfair to the poor kids. Shinigami, as literal human souls, had the unique ability to speak, read, and write in almost every language due the innate human ability to communicate. And Hitsugaya was especially practiced in European languages, having patrolled there many times as a seated officer in the Tenth Division.

And in addition to that…if the students were actually studying high-school level material, then he'd be lightyears ahead of them in anything with a practical application, like math, science, or languages. His Advanced Kido Theory course at the Shinou Academy had taught him how to apply physics and calculate multivariable calculus functions in seconds, and the basic Healing Kido class had been fraught with chemical mixtures for antidotes and complex biological concepts to evaluate cellular reconstruction.

That being said, his highly analytical brain had utterly fallen short in any sort of subjective course, such as Japanese Literature, or any of the art classes Shinou Academy had required as electives. He could deal well enough with political nuance and language, but when it came to stupid commentary on the human condition? Not a chance. He didn't have the patience.

So as he watched the loud blonde man carefully go over the uses of the gerund, he opened one of his notebooks and started writing down everything he knew about the dimension he was trapped in, carefully cataloguing the information in his neat handwriting. He needed some way to access a database of all the criminals caught using their Quirks in public in the past few weeks to truly start making headway, but accessing that kind of data would likely be difficult, and he knew he didn't have enough experience with computers to hack for that kind of data. Frowning, he kept writing, Hyourinmaru humming in the back of head. Slowly, a nascent plan began to form in the back of head – but it required a hell of a lot of acting to pull off, and he wasn't exactly the best at hiding his true emotions.

His skin itched – the same wrist that had been so problematic and scaly last night – and he glanced down in consternation to see that his tension had caused whatever that little trigger was to be pulled, allowing the patch of scales to spread across his skin again. This time the scales had covered his knuckles and fingers, his nails turning cold and white and pointed, protruding from his fingertips like claws. This time the itch had also spread across his back, and as he felt the skin there ripple into scales, a sort of twisting, pulling sensation stretched the taut muscle of his back. He froze, then took a deep breath and relaxed the strange not-quite muscle that had triggered the change, watching with trepidation as his skin once again cleared of any reptilian armor. Then, once he was absolutely sure he'd seen it, he turned back to his notes.

And with a sudden, slightly terrifying apprehension, he wrote down the only thing that would explain his sudden change.

Am I developing a "Quirk?"

Hopefully nobody saw that coming. XD

And before you all ask me, "Wait, where is the logic in this?! Why are you giving the OP character here a powerup?!" then remember - Izuku is technically OP as well, by that definition. And YES - there is a logical reason as to why Hitsugaya has developed the Quirk. I've already dropped some hints. The full explanation will come later in the story and is related to the plot, so NO I am not spoiling it now.

Also,

Merry Christmas, Happy (belated) Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy every other winter holiday I can't think of :)