Koki Terumoto

Scars ring Koki's mouth, left behind where his relatives stitched his lips together. He is slight, with black hair falling messily to his shoulders and round eyes in a brownish red. His fingertips usually carry a black stain from the Darkness Quirk, rendered as dark purple in the anime.

At his introduction he wore a ragged white shirt with the sleeves and hem torn away, zip ties fastened around each upper arm, and shredded black trousers.

The eight-year jump leaves him taller and older, his hair cropped shorter, the mouth scars still there, and the standard U.A. uniform on his back. For hero work he takes to a broad gray cloak that hides everything but his head and forearms.

Trauma defines Koki. His family branded his power a freak variant, shunned him for it, and shut him away, and the damage from that treatment sits close to the surface.

Freedom after the Final War brought no relief at first. Wandering among crowds already smiling as ordinary life resumed only sharpened his confusion, and he kept turning over the question of why the suffering had landed on him and no one else, in a form that cruel. He was on the verge of turning his Quirk loose on everything around him when an elderly woman took his hand and told him he would be all right because she had come to help. Being reached for at last brought him to tears.

Koki was still small when his Quirk first surfaced, flooding the family living room with a dark sludge. Told the ability matched nothing in their bloodline, the head of the Terumoto house worried over the family reputation instead of the boy and called for him to be killed and disposed of. One relative objected that he had done nothing to deserve it. The elder settled on a compromise hardly better: stage his death, lock him out of sight, and permit him no sound at all, not even a whimper.

Labeled a disappointment, he was confined to the basement while the rest of the household turned cold toward him. His crying and calls for help earned him a gag and a sewn-shut mouth. Years passed that way. Eventually the family announced that the country was finished, dumped water and baked goods on him, and vanished.

In the wreckage after the Final War he cut himself loose from his bindings with a pair of scissors and escaped the ruined house. The old woman who stopped him on the street was carrying guilt of her own: sixteen years earlier she had passed by another child in need, and the memory of walking away still cost her sleep. Her intervention drew more bystanders in to help. Eight years later Koki attends U.A., where Izuku Midoriya teaches him, and he appears with a box in his arms while Kota Izumi hails the man at the front of the class.