Hellooo :) It's 2018 and I'm back with a new story featuring our amazing heroes in BNHA! I really couldn't resist... This will mainly follow the anime, so there won't be any manga spoilers. Side note: Eraserhead and co. will be slightly older (~35-40) in this fic. Hope you guys enjoy ❤

Disclaimer: Boku no Hero Academia characters and plot events belongs to Horikoshi Kohei | Warning: Bakugou will swear like a sailor throughout this fic.

To Be a Hero

this is what it takes

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The day that she was born was the day he wished she'd never existed.

The cawing of crows could be hear as they flew overhead and everything was still, saved for the few small creatures scurrying about in the woods. In the middle of it all, a girl with silver blue hair stood while exhaling tired huffs of breath. Her eyes were closed as she tried to sense for a certain presence, but she furrowed her brows when several moments passed and she got nothing. Ugh. After all these attacks he suddenly went hide-and-seek on me!

With a cluck of her tongue, she opened her eyes to reveal striking ruby orbs with the right one swirling with a white marking resembling a dial. That should up my chances of finding him at least, she thought as she quickly made her way towards the direction of her target. Jumping from one low branch to another to avoid the prickly underbrush, she let her legs move as if she was being led. A flash of black and white caught the corner of her eyes and she smirked widely.

...Gotcha!

However, finding someone and catching someone was two different things. The man was still too fast for her to catch up. Growling, this time her left eye swirled with the same marking but black and the branch that her target was jumping to cracked and crumbled under his weight, faltering his movements momentarily. This allowed her to get close enough to propel her leg towards him for a gut kick.

"Take this!" she shouted, but at that split second, the white bandages around the man's neck shot forward towards her. Her left eye immediately began to swirl again and she redirected her foot while the other one kicked up, but he was still one step ahead of her and restrained it with his bandages. Not wanting to give up just yet despite running out of steam, she forced herself to concentrate fully at her capture as her eyes started to glow. However, before she could do anything, her capture activated his own Quirk and her ruby eyes abruptly faded back to normal.

Finding what was left of her power leave her body, she allowed herself to dangle upside down in defeat and blew at a lock of hair that was sticking to her cheek from the sweat.

The man, hanging onto a branch himself, lowered both of them to the ground safely before blinking again. He pulled out a stopwatch from his pocket and before the girl spoke another word, he showed her the numbers on the small device.

"5 minutes and 43 seconds. It took you longer to find me than usual and your moves lagged, Shiro."

"It's hard keeping up with all of your bandages whipping around and your totally unfair Quirk that keeps canceling out mine every time I use it," the girl huffed with arms crossed. "I was running out of energy."

"That's precisely why I told you to use your Quirk wisely. That last ditch effort would've depleted your energy completely and left you out in the open for more attack. You need to incorporate more of your physical strength," Aizawa Shota droned with boredom. "At this rate, you won't be able to keep up with the other examinees. Your potential is questionable at this point. Drop out of the exam."

"As if!" Shiro stuck her tongue out at her mentor and guardian. He simply looked at her coldly before turning to head out of the woods. Following behind with a skip, she vowed to defeat him one day. "First I'll pass the exam with flying colors, and then I'll become a Pro Hero before you can blink!"

"I can keep my eyes open for a very long time," he replied.

She snorted at his response and caught up to the man to return home together. People would often be surprised to find that the Pro Hero had raised her from when she was four, since he often expressed how much he disliked kids because they were "annoying and a pain in the ass". It wasn't like he was allowed to refuse anyway because the government ordered for him to take her in for reasons unknown to her, but most likely it was concerning her real family... Shiro couldn't remember anything about them, though. Not having a clue as to what happened to her family was always disheartening, but the feeling always dissipated when she realize just how much Aizawa cared for her in their stead.

"You'll be watching during the exam, right?"

"Yeah. Why are you asking?"

"Because!" she said quickly without looking at the man. There was a small blush coloring her cheeks, "...I want to make you proud, Eraserhead." She felt the Pro Hero's hand on her head and she smiled. She knew that was his own way of silently encouraging her.

Sure, the man was stern and lacked a word filter whenever he talked, but real family or not, Aizawa Shota was as close to it as that got.

8:40 A.M.

Shiro stood in front of the entrance of U.A. High School's hero course exam location and inhaled deeply. This school was a training ground for those whose goal is to acquire the necessary qualifications needed for pro heroes. Among similar courses across the country, theirs is the most popular and most competitive, and their acceptance rate is less than one in three hundred ever year. The nation's top three Pro Heroes all graduated from this school, so expectations for prospects were through the roof. Thus, the ones who pass the entrance exam must either show great potential or receive recommendation from powerful Pro Heroes themselves.

Unknown to the girl, she would've gotten in without taking the exam because of her affiliation with Aizawa and the nature of her training and Quirk use. However, that would've been taking the easy way in, and Aizawa secretly declined that possibility for her because he knew she was looking forward to showing how much she had improved.

Not wanting to fall behind all of the other students, Shiro entered the gates and was immediately overtaken by how grand the school was. Woaaah, this place is so big! Her ruby eyes darted around the area before landing on two guys ahead of her. The blonde one sounded grouchy as he ordered the more timid guy with curly black hair and cute freckles to move out of his way. That guy is intense, she thought but shrugged and was about to be on her way again when the timid guy tripped on his own feet.

...Seriously? Shiro blinked and immediately her left eye swirled. The guy stopped his face-plant midway and she watched as a cute brunette went to ask if he was okay after holding him up with what looked like a gravity-defying Quirk. "He's gonna need some luck," she muttered to herself before heading into the stadium for the exam orientation.

"For all you examinee listeners tuning in, welcome to my show today! Everybody say 'Hey'!" the voice hero, Present Mic, shouted as everyone situated themselves in the stadium chairs. Shiro stifled a chuckle when the eccentric man received no response.

"What a refined response!" he continued on. "Then I'll quickly present to you the rundown on the practical exam! Are you ready!" The cycle continued with silence from the audience as he presented crucial exam information while still being surprisingly energetic. When he mentioned the different exam locations and point system for the faux villains, Shiro peeked at her exam slip.

Hm, my battle location is—

"May I ask a question?" A clear voice projected from within the audience, cutting off her thoughts. Present Mic pointed to the general direction and everyone looked over to see a well-built teen with glasses stand up stiffly at being called on. "There are four types of villains on the printout, but you only mentioned three types that will gain us points. If this is a misprint, then U.A., the most prominent school in Japan, should be ashamed of that foolish mistake. We examinees are here in this place because we wish to be molded into exemplary heroes! In addition," he suddenly turned and pointed to the curly haired guy Shiro saw at the school's entrance. "You with the curly hair! You've been muttering this whole time. It's distracting! If you're here on a pleasure trip, then you should leave immediately!"

As Present Mic tried to settle down the giggling crowd and went on explaining the significance of the fourth faux villain, the ruby eyed girl focused on the flustered boy and his irritated blonde haired friend with a slight frown. "He's not gonna make it..." she mused at last before looking away.

"What is this?"

"It's like a city!"

"And they have more than one of these on the school grounds? U.A.'s amazing!"

Shiro looked up at the barrier that enclosed her assigned battle ground with surprise as well. Looking around, she saw many unfamiliar faces all containing nervousness or excitement or both as they waited for the start of the 10-minute mock battle. Though, one face did stick out from the rest because it contained sheer murderous intent. It's the intense blonde guy! she blinked, wondering if getting the same battle ground as him was a good thing or not.

As if he could sense her staring, he whipped his head around and sneered at her with pure menace. "What're you looking at, Pigtails?"

Surprised and just a little offended, she opened her mouth just as Present Mic shouted out of the blue for the examinees to start. At the hero's command, the blonde immediately turned back around and "move you fucking extras!" was the last thing she heard from him before he disappeared within the crowd.

Though she wanted to say something snarky back to the unpleasant blonde, that will have to wait until after she was done destroying these faux villains. I can't get behind already!

Like the other students, Shiro split from the group to use her own technique to find and lure out the villains, and she didn't need to get too far before an explosion blasted from her right. "Two pointer!" she shouted and got ready to attack. Remembering Aizawa's words, she quickly picked up a broken metal pipe from the crumbling building as the villain raised its large arm at her and slammed down. The smoke cleared as the crumbled cement below the metal arm revealed no one. The girl had propelled herself in the air just seconds before the arm landed and now it was her turn to attack. Using the metal pipe, she swung it with full force and the head blew off into the distance, effectively destroying the villain and earning herself two points.

"I'd say that was a homerun," she landed back on the ground with a satisfied nod.

It went on like this for the next three minutes as she found multiple one and two pointers the farther she ran into the city. Explosions sounded left and right as the villains went down with each blow from different people, but the most distinct one she heard quite frequently was the one that sounded like firecrackers and followed by a "die!". She knew that had to be the unpleasant blonde, and although she didn't want to admit it, he was really good. From the sound of it, he was racking up more points than anyone in this battle ground.

Shaking her head, she focused back on herself. Many faux villains have been struck down already and it was getting harder to find alive ones with so many examinees around. Allowing her right eye to activate, she turned a corner towards a villain only to witness a gray haired guy literally perforate through a one pointer with his own body. What the... His body is made of steel!

"That's 32! Hell yeah!" the gray haired guy shouted victoriously as the bot fell. On the other side, a ginger haired girl used her gigantic hand to smash another villain before dashing off.

I need to catch up! Shiro frowned and quickened her pace towards the direction leading directly to another one point villain. Destroying it along with what remained of her metal pipe, she was forced to quickly search for a new weapon. As she bent down to pick one up, a three pointer burst out from the side and nearly crushed her with its robotic arm. She rolled away unscathed and grinned. "Still slower than Eraserhead... But when I destroy you, I'll have 30 points!" she jumped towards the wrecked building to gain height above the villain. "D—"

"DIE!"

The body of the bot blew apart into pieces as the blonde from before jumped out from the smoke of his firecracker explosion. His sharp red eyes flashed towards her disbelieving ones before a scowl made its way to his already angry face. "What?" he barked before picking up movement of another villain nearby. "Don't get in my way, Pigtails!" he ordered and dashed off.

...That's it!

Shiro let out a growl and followed behind him. If he was going to take her points, she was going to do the same! She tightened the grip on the new pipe in her hand and spotted the villain—a three pointer. What was it that Present Mic said? They weren't allowed to use their Quirk to harm other examinees... So this'll have to do! The black dial in her left eye swirled wildly as she concentrated, and before the blonde was able to land his attack, the bot suddenly adverted itself away from him and plowed straight towards her instead.

"What the hell?!" he shouted as he chased behind the bot, but Shiro was now closer. In one powerful swing, the head broke off and the body malfunctioned. "What?!"

Satisfied at how pissed off her fellow examinee looked, she turned away from him and flipped a long pigtail over her shoulder. "Don't get in my way, Prickhead!" she shot back and jumped off the heap of shattered villain parts.

"You fucking shit—!"

"THREE MORE MINUTES!"

"After I'm done with these fucking bots, I'm gonna fucking tear off those pigtails, Pigtails!" he shouted behind her. Shiro chose to ignore him for the time being because she needed to focus on finding more villains to destroy before time was up. She doubted 30 points was going to cut it, especially since Prickhead was sure to have way more than her.

Switching to use her right eye again, she focused on finding the locations of the remaining villains. There were fewer explosions that signaled a defeat of a bot, so she knew that the numbers were dwindling. She just had to find the last ones and destroy it before the rest of the examinees did.

Suddenly, there was a loud rumble and the entire ground shook. The transmission lines ahead of her began to snap and smoke rose to the air as that particular block of infrastructure began to crumble from the disturbance. A villain many times the size of the other three combined was the source of it all, and it was starting to wreak havoc as it headed toward where all the other examinees were running.

"No way, is that...?"

"The obstacle that Present Mic advised us to avoid. The zero pointer."

Shiro snapped her head at the voice besides her. A male with messy indigo hair and baggy eyes was looking up at the monster villain before tuning to her with a bored look. While the other examinees, including herself, showed visible signs that they've been running around killing bots for the past seven and a half minutes, he looked as if he hadn't moved a hair on his body this entire time.

"I've noticed you fighting the villains with weapons from the debris, though it doesn't look like you possess super strength or enhanced ability when using it to hit your targets," he noted with a hint of curiosity. "Are you even using a Quirk? Or are you Quirkless?"

She was just about to say something when the giant knocked a chunk of wall from a brick building and it was flying towards them at full speed.

"Watch out!" she shouted instead, and the indigo haired male got his answer when he saw her left eye glow faintly with the spinning dial and she pushed him away just far enough so that the debris wouldn't crush them. However, while she managed to keep him from harm completely, she unavoidably had the corner of the wall slam into her right shoulder.

He stumbled a few feet back from shock when she released him, "Why did you do that—?"

"We're trying to be heroes, aren't we? That's what we're supposed to do," Shiro replied with a small hiss of pain when she shrugged.

Bad idea, she thought. How was she going to fight villains now that her dominant limb hurt every time she moved it? But since she couldn't find herself to regret her choice of action, she decided she'll just have to internalize the pain and do the best she can with what was left on the clock.

"By the way, I'm not Quirkless. I just can't use mine the same way most heroes use their Quirks, but that's not going to stop me from becoming a hero, y'know? Anyway, see ya around!" she answered before setting off, not realizing how much her words resonated with the male.

"TIME'S UP!"

A siren rung across all of the battle grounds as Present Mic announced that the first part of the exam was over. The examinees either looked victorious because they felt they gained enough points, or defeated because they didn't.

Shiro gritted her teeth. She only managed to defeat one more two pointer because of her injury. She probabily could've knocked at least two more out if it didn't feel like her right arm was going to fall off any second... As she made her way to the front where everyone else was gathering, she saw that Prickhead was looking pretty smug with his villain haul.

...Will 32 points possibly be enough to pass? she frowned, too scared to use her Quirk to figure that one out.

After the practical exam, Recovery Girl had healed Shiro's shoulder up and it was like the injury never took place. The old woman stated that the impact of the debris had actually cracked her shoulder blade bone, so she wouldn't have been able to continue to swing at those villains with full force anyway.

When she returned home after completing the written part of U.A.'s exam that day, she was greeted with a note from Aizawa excusing his absence for the next week because of his duty as one of the monitors of the entrance exam. He and a panel of other Pro Heroes were finalizing the scores from both the practical and the written and determining who passed or not.

Realization of what that meant had hit her like a brick and she was barely recovering from this one.

With "What if my score was too low to pass?!" and "Eraserhead saw the entire thing!" constantly swirling around in her mind, she lived her week out like a walking zombie. It wasn't that being rejected by U.A. was what scared her the most, it was more so that she didn't want to disappoint Aizawa. Especially after she talked all that big talk about becoming a pro...

There was a single knock on the front door and she slid herself off the sofa slowly before realizing that it was around the time the mailman came around. Scrambling to open the door, she was greeted with a small stack of mail on the top step. Sandwiched neatly between the others was a small, but thick white envelope with U.A.'s wax seal on it.

I-It's here...!

She barely made it past the living room before she ripped the envelope and a metal device rolled out and landed on the floor. Immediately, it glowed a bright white light and projected a hologram of All Might.

"Young Aizawa Shiragiku! Wait, it's Aisaka? Why didn't she just take your family name? Eh? Eh?"

Shiro blinked with wide eyes at the projection of the number one Pro Hero who seemed to be looking off-screen and talking to someone; she knew immediately that he was talking to Aizawa because of his questions. "Shiragiku" was her actual given name, but it was Aizawa who started calling her "Shiro" for short, and it stuck. And since she never knew her real family name and there was a rebel period in her childhood in which she refused to take "Aizawa" because the Pro Hero was so strict and mean, she declared her own. Though, it was obvious even back then that she looked up to him from the similarity.

"Alright... Ehem!" All Might then cleared his throat and continued with his announcement after being rushed to hurry up. "Young Aisaka! You passed the written exam with an exceptional score, but the points you got from the practical exam was just average."

There was a longer than necessary pause on the hero's part and Shiro bit her lips nervously.

"However! Like I told another young hero, a hero course cannot reject people who saved others and do the right thing. As you know, there was a panel of judges who overlooked each examinee's performance, but what you didn't know was that they have the ability to give out rescue points! Eraserhead was of course excluded from your assessment, but your selfless action for Young Shinso showed the judges one of other basic abilities we at U.A. look at!"

Wait, so is he saying...?

"Aisaka Shiragiku, you received 45 rescue points! In other words, you pass," All Might announced with a grin while the image of the top ten leaderboard flashed before her eyes. She saw some of the names on the list and grew curious at this "Midoriya Izuku" person who got zero villain points but 60 rescue points. But more surprising than that... Her final score was tied with this "Bakugou Katsuki" person who was first with his score of 77 villain points and zero rescue points!

Am I just imagining this? she wondered and pinched her cheek. It hurt. T-This is real life!

"Before I go, Young Aisaka, there is one more thing..."

Shiro leaned in with anticipation as the Pro Hero once again stalled for a few moments. But instead of finally revealing what it was that he wanted to say, he held up his hand in a "hold on" motion. There was a sound of the door opening, but she quickly realized that it wasn't from the hologram when she felt a presence walk up from behind and she turned around in surprise. "...Eraserhead?"

The tired looking Pro Hero gave her a grin and ruffled her hair.

"Welcome to U.A., kid."

How was it? Please leave a review :) Shiro's Quirk wil be revealed in the next chapter; for now, here is her personal profile!

Name: Aisaka Shiragiku (相坂 白菊) | Shiro (白)

Birthday: December 21

Age: 15

Gender: Female

Height: 162 cm (5'4")

Hair color: Silver blue

Eye color: Red

Blood type: AB

Quirk: TBA

Birthplace: Unknown

Family: Aizawa Shota (guardian/mentor)

Affiliation: U.A. High School