Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Winter arrived not in violence, but with a quiet dominion.

Snow fell in slow, deliberate spirals, each fragile fragment surrendering to gravity with solemn grace. The world lay wrapped in a suffocating hush, as if sound itself had frozen mid-breath. Streets once loud with careless laughter now stretched empty and pale beneath a sky the color of faded steel. The air bit sharply at exposed skin, carrying with it the sterile scent of frost and distant chimney smoke—a scent both clean and lonely.

It was a beautiful kind of desolation.

The trees stood skeletal and unmoving, their branches heavy with delicate white burdens, while the wind whispered through them like a lingering memory. Snow gathered along the sidewalks in untouched drifts, smooth and pr istine, concealing the imperfections of the world beneath a fragile, temporary purity.

Winter did not erase. But the snow covered what lay beneath. At the edge of a quiet road, Izuku Midoriya stood motionless beneath the falling snow. His small figure seemed almost swallowed by the vast whiteness around him. Emerald curls, dampened by melting flakes, clung to his forehead. His fingers trembled—whether from cold or something deeper, even he could not tell.

At his feet lay the remnants of a dream.

Pages scattered across the frozen pavement like wounded birds, ink bleeding into slush, paper torn beyond recognition. The once meticulous handwriting had been fractured into jagged fragments—diagrams split in half, observations severed mid-sentence, careful annotations rendered meaningless by soaked pulp.

Hours upon hours of work. Months of observation.

Reduced to debris with the single motion. Tarnished by the hand of a person who he once considered his friend.

The winter wind stirred, careless and indifferent, sending a loose page skidding across the ground. It fluttered weakly before collapsing against a frozen gutter. Izuku stared at it. His gaze was not one of surprise—this was not an unexpected tragedy. Rather, it held the heavy stillness of inevitability, the quiet recognition of something long anticipated finally coming to pass.

Of course, it had happened.

It always did.

Behind him, distant laughter echoed—sharp, mocking, already fading into the frozen air. The sound carried the explosive arrogance of Katsuki Bakugo, lingering like smoke after a blast.

Even now, the pavement bore faint scorch marks where the earlier explosion had torn through snow and paper alike. The violence had been brief. Casual. Effortless.

As if the notebook had never mattered.

As if he had never mattered.

Izuku exhaled slowly. The breath left him in a trembling cloud, dissolving into the cold.

Then, with deliberate care, he knelt.

The snow soaked through his uniform trousers instantly, but he paid it no mind. One by one, he gathered the ruined pages. His movements were precise, almost reverent—as though each scrap were something sacred.

A half-destroyed hero analysis.

A diagram of quirk application patterns.

A carefully written heading, now torn in two:

Future Strategies.

His hands paused. The paper had split directly through the word future. For a brief moment, something fragile flickered across his face—a quiet ache too familiar to name. Then the expression vanished, replaced by careful neutrality.

He folded the fragments anyway.

Each piece was gently pressed together, aligned as best as possible, and tucked into his backpack. Soaked ink smeared across his fingers like faint bruises.

The process took time.

Winter waited patiently.

By the time he finished, the world had grown darker, the early evening swallowing what little warmth the day had offered. Streetlights flickered to life, casting pale halos across the snow. Izuku rose slowly. His backpack hung heavier now, burdened not by weight but by what remained inside—the fragile remnants of a conviction the world had already declared impossible.

He adjusted the straps and began walking home. A slight limp in the wake of his step.

The streets stretched long and lonely before him. Old leaves crunched softly beneath fresh snow. His footprints marked a solitary path through untouched whiteness, temporary impressions destined to vanish beneath the next snowfall.

Much like everything else.

He walked with the careful posture of someone accustomed to minimizing presence—shoulders slightly drawn inward, gaze lowered, movements small. A lifetime of shrinking himself had carved the habit deep into muscle memory.

His mind, however, was anything but still.

The events of the afternoon replayed with relentless clarity. The laughter. The explosion. The familiar sting of words designed to crush possibility.

You? A hero?

The question had long since ceased to be rhetorical. It was a verdict.

He had entered middle school believing—stubbornly, naively—that things might change. A new environment. New people. A fresh beginning unburdened by elementary school reputations.

Instead, the cruelty had sharpened.

Where childish teasing once existed, calculated torment had taken root. The difference between the powerful and the powerless had grown more defined, more merciless. Quirks were no longer curiosities—they were hierarchies made manifest.

The absence defined him more completely than any power ever could. Yet even beneath layers of humiliation and fear, something within him remained unbroken. A fragile, persistent flame that refused extinction.

Logic insisted surrender would bring peace. Experience demonstrated persistence only invited suffering. Reality provided no evidence that his dream could ever be realized.

Still, he continued. Izuku Midoryia will be a hero.

Because abandoning the dream would mean abandoning himself. Ignoring the messages that All Might had passed down upon him. His reverence would be in vein.

Izuku's fingers tightened slightly around the strap of his bag. The notebook could be repaired. Pages could be reconstructed. Ink could be rewritten. Observations could be recorded again, more carefully this time. He would salvage what remained and begin anew.

He always did.

The path of a hero was not defined solely by victory. It was defined by endurance and persistence. A lesson that All Might had repeated repeatedly.

He smiled into the wind, resisting his own chattering teeth. 

By the time he reached home, night had fully claimed the sky. Warm light glowed from the apartment windows, a fragile refuge against the winter's vast indifference. Snow had gathered along the doorstep in soft mounds, undisturbed until his arrival.

He paused briefly before entering. Inside awaited something far more difficult than cold.

The door slid open with a quiet sound. Warmth rushed forward, carrying the familiar scents of home—simmering food, laundry detergent, the faint sweetness of lingering incense. The contrast was overwhelming after the grimy air outside.

From the kitchen came a gentle voice.

"Izuku? You're home late..."

His mother appeared moments later, wiping her hands on a towel. Inko Midoriya's face brightened instinctively at the sight of him—relief, love, and worry woven seamlessly together.

Her smile faltered almost immediately. Mothers noticed what others overlooked. The damp uniform. The trembling hands. The downcast eyes. The silence heavier than usual.

Something was wrong.

She knew it.

He knew she knew.

Yet between them stood walls built over years—fragile at first, then reinforced through repetition. Each day of forced reassurance, each false smile, each quiet retreat had laid another brick. Concern pressed against those walls.

It never broke through.

"Welcome back," she replied gently.

"It's good to be home," he replied.

The exchange was routine, rehearsed, safe.

She searched his face for explanation. He offered none. A practiced smile, small and convincing enough to discourage further inquiry, settled into place.

The moment stretched—tension disguised as normalcy.

Then, as always, the ritual continued. "I'll be in my room," he murmured.

A brief nod. A soft acknowledgment. An unspoken surrender. "Dinner will be ready soon. Make sure you come and eat."

He retreated down the hallway.

His room remained unchanged. The walls were covered almost entirely with images of All Might—smiling in triumph, standing victorious, radiating impossible confidence. Action figures lined the shelves with careful precision. Posters bore the  marks of years yet remained meticulously preserved.

A shrine to hope. A monument to an ideal untouched by reality.

Izuku removed his backpack slowly and placed it upon the desk. The familiar creak of the chair sounded unusually loud as he sat. For several moments, he did nothing.

Then, with hesitant hands, he opened the bag. The ruined notebook lay within like a wounded thing.

He lifted it carefully. Waterlogged pages sagged beneath their own weight. Ink had bled into shapeless shadows, erasing countless observations. Entire sections had fused together beyond separation.

The damage was extensive.

Despair settled quietly in his chest, heavy and suffocating. The room felt smaller, the air thinner. All Might's brilliant smile seemed distant now, belonging to a world forever beyond reach.

His hands trembled. For the briefest moment, the thought surfaced—a dangerous, forbidden whisper.

Maybe they're right.

Maybe the dream was impossible. Maybe persistence was nothing more than self-inflicted pain. Maybe some people were simply never meant to become heroes. Maybe the mere circumstance of his birth was a rejection of his dream.

Snow continued to fall outside the window, blanketing the world in indifferent beauty. At his desk, surrounded by symbols of a future slipping steadily beyond his grasp, Izuku Midoriya sat motionless—a boy poised between surrender and resolve, staring into the fractured remains of the only path he had ever known.

Dawn bled slowly across the sky in muted shades of grey and silver, casting long, skeletal shadows across the frostbitten streets. The world remained hushed, the air brittle with cold that gnawed persistently at bone and breath alike.

Izuku left home earlier than necessary. He chose the longer route to school—a winding path through narrow residential streets and snow-laden sidewalks where few people passed at this hour. The detour added nearly twenty minutes to his commute, but it ensured he would avoid a particular apartment complex along the usual route.

The residence of Katsuki Bakugo. Even the possibility of crossing paths with him in the quiet vulnerability of morning was enough to tighten something deep within Izuku's chest. Timing could not always be predicted. Departure schedules shifted. Chance encounters happened.

Precaution, therefore, was necessary.

He walked carefully, his breath forming fragile clouds before him as the winter wind whispered along empty streets. Snow crunched beneath each measured step, marking a solitary path that would soon vanish beneath fresh snowfall.

Inside his bag rested something warm. Before he had left, Inko Midoriya had prepared a special lunch. She had not announced it outright—mothers like her rarely did. Instead, she had woken earlier than usual, moving quietly through the kitchen with deliberate care. Rice steamed gently. Vegetables were cut into careful shapes. The arrangement had been thoughtful, balanced, almost artistic.

A carefully prepared bento.

That morning had unfolded with delicate tension.

Izuku had emerged from his room to find her already waiting by the table, her posture attentive yet deliberately casual, as though she wished to appear unassuming despite the worry written plainly across her face.

"I made something special today," she had said gently, sliding the bento toward him.

The box had been wrapped neatly in cloth patterned with small heroes in flight—fabric worn from years of use, carefully preserved.

He had thanked her, voice soft, eyes lowered.

She watched him as he prepared to leave, hands clasped tightly before her apron. Concern lingered in the subtle furrow of her brow, in the hesitation of her breath.

Then, with careful tenderness, she offered a suggestion.

"Izuku... have you ever thought about joining a club at school?"

The words had been spoken lightly, almost casually, yet carried the weight of quiet hope.

"A club?" he repeated.

"Yes," she said, nodding quickly, encouraged by his response. "You might meet new friends. People who share your interests. Maybe... a hero appreciation club? I'm sure others admire All Might just as much as you do."

The idea had been presented as a possibility, not an instruction—a gentle door opened rather than a path demanded.

Izuku nodded, forcing another smile. "That sounds nice."

But inside, the thought collapsed beneath harsh reality.

Hero fans admired strength. They celebrated power.

To them, quirklessness was not an unfortunate circumstance—it was the absence of what made a hero. A deficiency. A contradiction to the very essence of heroism itself.

A stain that could not be ignored. He had learned this lesson repeatedly.

Inko must have noticed the fleeting change in his expression—the subtle dimming of his eyes, the stiffness in his posture—because she quickly offered alternatives. "There are many kinds of clubs," she continued softly. "Reading clubs. Art clubs. Maybe a science group? You always loved analyzing things when you were little. You're so smart, I'm sure you could do whichever one you'd like."

Each suggestion was offered with growing caution, as though she feared pressing too firmly might shatter something fragile between them. Izuku listened quietly, nodding at appropriate moments.

Eventually, she stopped.

"Well," she said gently, adjusting the cloth around the bento, "just think about it, alright?"

He bowed his head.

"I will."

It was not a lie.

But it was not the truth.

He thanked her again, accepted the lunch with careful hands, and stepped out into the winter morning. The memory lingered like a quiet ache.

The bento's warmth seeped faintly through his bag as he continued on his path to school, a fragile reminder of home's gentle concern—a small, persistent comfort against the cold indifference of the world beyond.

Snow drifted lazily from the sky, catching in his hair and melting against flushed skin. The long route proved quieter than usual, granting him the anonymity he desired. Passing strangers paid him no attention. The city moved around him with detached indifference.

By the time the school building emerged in the distance—tall, grey, and imposing against the pale horizon—his fingers had grown numb inside his gloves.

The day proceeded with predictable monotony. Classes came and went in indistinct succession. Lessons blurred into one another—mathematics delivered in sterile precision, history recited in tired monotone, lectures about quirk application that served only to emphasize the absence that defined him.

He listened attentively. He took careful notes. He spoke to no one.

Isolation had long since become routine. The hours passed like the drifting snow—silent, weightless, and cold. When lunch arrived, students flooded the halls with restless energy. Conversations erupted in vibrant clusters. Laughter echoed through corridors warmed by human presence.

Izuku moved in the opposite direction.

He exited the building and made his way toward the farthest corner of the school yard—a quiet stretch of fence where winter's touch remained undisturbed. Few students ventured so far in such cold. The wind here swept unhindered across open ground, sharp and merciless.

He settled onto a frozen bench, the metal biting harshly through his uniform. Removing the carefully wrapped bento from his bag, he paused briefly, appreciating the delicate arrangement inside. Rice is shaped into small, rounded portions. Vegetables arranged with gentle precision. A pork cutlet sliced down the middle and stacked against the far corner.

A simple meal, prepared with profound care. For a moment, warmth replaced the cold.

But it wasn't much longer before a shadow fell across him. The change in atmosphere was immediate—a sudden heaviness in the air, the unmistakable presence of those who thrived on dominance. A hand seized the bento without warning.

The box vanished from his grasp. One of Bakugo's companions stood before him, holding the lunch high overhead like a stolen prize. His grin was wide, eyes gleaming with casual cruelty.

"Well, look at this," the boy mocked. "Mommy packed you a little treat?"

Izuku rose quickly, panic tightening his voice.

"Please—give that back."

The plea only widened the boy's smile.

"Come and get it, Deku," he taunted, tossing the lid to the side. For a moment, the boy examined the contents with exaggerated interest—then, without hesitation, he overturned the box.

Rice, vegetables, and sauce cascaded downward, all over Izuku's head.

Heat struck first—sudden, startling, the warmth of freshly prepared food against chilled skin. Rice clung to his hair. Sauce slid down his face and collar. The shock stole his breath, forcing a sharp gasp from his throat.

Laughter erupted.

Izuku stood frozen, trembling as the heat faded into cold humiliation. The boy dropped the empty container at his feet and walked away, amusement already fading as boredom replaced it.

The yard returned to silence.

Snow continued to fall. Izuku wiped his eyes slowly, hands shaking. A grimace crossed his features—not from pain, but from the exhausting familiarity of the moment.

He bent, retrieved the container, and hurried back inside.

The school bathroom was empty. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, their sterile glow reflecting off polished tile. The warmth inside contrasted sharply with the bitter cold outside, causing steam to rise faintly from his damp uniform.

He washed in silence. Rice fell into the sink. Sauce swirled down the drain in muted spirals. He scrubbed carefully, methodically, removing every trace until only faint redness remained on his skin. When he finished, he braced both hands against the porcelain sink and lifted his gaze.

The mirror reflected a boy he barely recognized.

Long, messy green hair. Freckled cheeks flushed from cold and humiliation. Eyes shadowed by exhaustion beyond his years. His fingers tightened against the edge of the sink, knuckles whitening from the pressure.

"Cmon, Izuku... what would All Might do..."

For a long moment, his expression remained hollow.

Then, with immense effort, he forced his lips upward.

A big smile.

Heroes smiled in the face of adversity. All Might smiled no matter what.

All Might would laugh in the face of stupid bully—bold, fearless, unyielding. If he wished to become a hero, then he, too, must endure. The smile held for several seconds before trembling and fading.

His mother's words surfaced quietly within his thoughts.

A club.

A place to belong.

A space to share interests.

The idea felt impossible.

And yet—something within him stirred. Not hope, exactly, but a restless curiosity. A quiet longing for something different from the endless repetition of solitude and pain.

Slowly, he straightened.

After drying his hands, he left the bathroom and made his way toward the school's main lobby.

Large bulletin boards lined the walls, covered with notices and announcements. Sheets of paper fluttered gently in the warm indoor air—club advertisements, activity schedules, sign-up forms inviting participation..

He stopped before them, eyes scanning the pages.

Every sheet was filled.

Names crowded each page in tight clusters of ink—confident signatures, casual scrawls, bold declarations of belonging. Hero study groups. Athletic clubs. Music ensembles. Cultural societies. Academic committees. Each line represented connection, acceptance, and community.

Each line represented a door already closed.

It was not surprising. The school year was already months underway. Bonds had been formed early, positions claimed, spaces secured. Late arrivals found little room among established circles.

He acknowledged the reality without resistance.

Of course, they were full.

Reality rarely surprised him anymore. With a small exhale, he turned to leave, prepared to abandon the fragile curiosity that had brought him here.

Then something caught his eye. A single sheet of paper that would eventually warp the path of his entire life. 

It remained entirely untouched. It hung slightly apart from the others, its pristine surface unmarred by the dense crowd of names that filled every surrounding page. A single signature sat alone at the top—hastily written, almost uncertain, as if placed there without expectation of company.

He leaned in, scanning the modest description beneath the title.

The Loner Club

For students who struggle to make friends or seek a quiet place to work. All Welcome.

He blinked.

The words seemed almost unreal—as though someone had reached directly into his thoughts and transcribed a private wish. A place without expectation. Without pressure. A space defined not by strength or popularity, but by solitude itself.

It sounded too perfect.

His gaze shifted instinctively to the space beneath the lone name. The untouched lines stretched downward in silent invitation, yet no one had accepted. The absence troubled him.

A club without members was rarely a welcoming place. There was usually a reason that nobody would want to sign up for it. They often concealed something undesirable—a reputation, perhaps, or an environment others had learned to avoid.

He read further.

A room number was listed. Meeting times followed.

Three hours after school.

Monday through Friday.

His concern deepened. Few clubs demanded such prolonged commitment, especially one without participants. The rigid schedule suggested unusual circumstances—or unusual leadership.

A quiet space. Minimal interaction. Time to work undisturbed. A refuge from the relentless noise of daily life. The idea settled warmly in his chest. Which meant it would likely prove disappointing. Izuku understood his own tendencies well enough. His mind possessed an unfortunate habit of nurturing hope in even the most minute of possibilities, only to watch reality dismantle those fragile constructions with effortless precision.

Expectation invited pain. Still, something within him stirred—not naive optimism, but a cautious resolve.

One day could not hurt. Not more than a blast from Ka-chan, anyway.

He would attend once. Observe quietly. Use the time to repair his notes, perhaps begin work on Volume Eight of his hero analysis journal. If the environment proved hostile or unwelcoming, he would simply leave. Rejection, after all, was familiar territory.

The decision formed slowly, like frost gathering across glass—delicate, deliberate, inevitable.

He reached out and carefully copied the information into his notebook, preserving the room number and schedule with meticulous precision. The motion itself felt significant, a small act of defiance against the suffocating predictability of his isolation.

Perhaps the club's name meant exactly what it claimed.

Or perhaps it did not.

Either way, he would see for himself.

Izuku straightened as he turned from the board and continued down the corridor, carrying with him the fragile possibility of something different—a small, uncertain step forward into territory both unfamiliar and quietly terrifying. Behind him, the lonely sheet fluttered gently in the warm indoor air, its single name waiting. Winter light filtered through the high windows, pale and distant, as though the world itself watched with silent anticipation.

After school, the restless tide of students emptied slowly from the building, leaving behind only fading echoes—distant footsteps, locker doors closing in muted succession, the low mechanical hum of lights reclaiming dominion over long corridors. The warmth of human presence thinned, replaced by an unfamiliar stillness that seemed to settle into the walls themselves.

Izuku Midoriya moved through that silence with careful steps.

The same practiced smile rested upon his face—gentle, fragile, maintained through deliberate effort. It was not joy, nor even comfort, but armour. A thin barrier against whatever disappointment awaited.

The room number weighed heavily on his thoughts. Each turn of the hallway brought him closer to it. His heart responded accordingly, quickening with every passing step. The bento incident still lingered upon his mind, the humiliation of the day clinging stubbornly to his nerves. To seek something new—to risk rejection yet again—demanded a courage he did not naturally possess.

Yet he walked on.

Eventually, he found it.

The classroom door stood at the far end of a quiet corridor, separated from the more active club rooms clustered elsewhere. It appeared almost forgotten—polished wood gleaming faintly beneath sterile overhead lights, its surface smooth and undisturbed by constant use. No voices sounded from within. No movement stirred beneath the frame.

Just silence.

Izuku stopped several steps away.

His body trembled.

He stared at the door as though it were a barrier far greater than simple wood and metal. His reflection wavered faintly upon its polished surface—small, uncertain, barely occupying the space before it.

Minutes passed.

Time stretched thin beneath the weight of hesitation.

His thoughts spiralled through familiar paths—rehearsing possible outcomes, imagining rejection, preparing responses, constructing defences against disappointment before it could strike. Expecting failure, he reasoned, would lessen its impact when it arrived.

If he anticipated the fall, the landing might hurt less.

His fingers curled slowly at his sides. A deep breath filled his lungs, cold air burning faintly within his chest. He thought of All Might again—of his unwavering confidence, of his fearless resolve, of a hero who stepped forward without hesitation even when faced with overwhelming adversity.

Borrowed courage.

Borrowed strength.

Borrowed resolve.

With a sudden motion, he reached forward.

His trembling hand closed around the handle.

The metal felt cold beneath his palm.

Plus Ultra, he whispered silently to himself.

He pushed.

The door opened with a soft creak that seemed thunderous in the empty corridor.

Summoning every fragment of courage he possessed, Izuku stepped forward with exaggerated determination. His chest puffed outward, shoulders squared, posture rigid with effort as he crossed the threshold. With all the force he could muster, he declared:

"I–I am h-here!"

One hand shot upward toward the ceiling in an awkward imitation of heroic announcement, voice trembling despite his effort to sound bold.

Silence answered him.

The room was empty.

Desks lined the walls in careful arrangement, their surfaces pristine and untouched. Chairs sat neatly pushed inward, aligned with deliberate precision as though awaiting occupants who never arrived. Dustless windows admitted pale winter light that stretched across the polished floor in cold rectangles.

At the front of the room stood a blank chalkboard.

Upon it, written in careful, elegant kanji, were two simple words:

Loner Club.

The characters were precise—deliberate strokes placed with strong intention, neither decorative nor careless. They existed simply to state a fact.

This was a place for solitude. Relief, warm and unexpected, loosened the tension within his chest. No curious stares greeted him. No judgmental whispers filled the air. No hostile presence waited to challenge his existence.

There was only stillness.

Only space.

Only quiet.

He lowered his raised hand and stepped fully inside, the door closing behind him with a soft click that sealed the room in isolation. His footsteps echoed faintly as he approached the nearest desk, chosen instinctively for its proximity to the exit—a habit born from experience.

Carefully, he set down his bag. The chair scraped softly as he pulled it out and sat, movements tentative at first, as though he feared the silence itself might shatter. But nothing disturbed the room. The quiet welcomed him without condition.

He exhaled into the empty room. Letting out a breath, he wasn't even aware he was holding. After giving his heart a second to settle, his hands moved to his backpack, fingers hesitating briefly before withdrawing the damaged notebook first. The pages remained warped and fragile, ink still blurred where water had seeped deep into paper fibres. The sight stirred a familiar ache.

Yet here, in this empty room, the despair felt less suffocating. He then retrieved a new notebook and placed it carefully upon the desk next to the old one. Torn pages revealed fractured observations, incomplete diagrams, dreams wounded but not extinguished.

The simple act of preparation steadied him.

Winter wind pressed faintly against the windows. Inside, the Loner Club remained silent— patient, unmoving, offering nothing but space as he began to work. Copying what he could from the damaged notebook, intending to improve on what he had written before.

His mechanical pencil rested cool between trembling fingers.

Click.

The sharp sound echoed faintly in the empty room.

Click.

Graphite extended while his breathing slowed. The world narrowed to the space before him. He began tracing the faint outlines of a face, constructing the rough foundation of the first entry he intended to restore. Careful strokes shaped the curve of a jaw, the angle of a heroic expression, the beginnings of observation made tangible.

The motion carried him.

Each line deepened his focus, pulling him gently into the familiar rhythm of analysis and creation. Here, in quiet concentration, his anxieties loosened their grip. The cold cruelty of the outside world receded. There was only the scratch of pencil against paper, the steady flow of thought, the fragile comfort of purpose.

For several minutes, he existed in peace.

Click.

The sound of the door opening shattered the stillness.

The noise was soft, but it struck like thunder in the silent room.

Izuku froze. His pencil halted mid-stroke. His spine stiffened. The quiet sanctuary he had so carefully entered fractured instantly, replaced by a surge of raw, instinctive panic. His mind scrambled for explanation—Someone else? A teacher? A mistake? Was he not supposed to be here?

He did not turn immediately. Fear rooted him in place.

"You."

A girl stood in the doorway.

Izuku blemished the second his eyes fell upon her.

She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

Bright light streamed through the corridor behind her, forming a gentle halo around her figure. Her hair—a striking periwinkle blue—framed her face in short, delicate layers that curved along the line of her neck, catching the light like rippling water. Her eyes shone with a clear, curious brilliance, wide with mild confusion as they fixed upon him.

She regarded him as one might regard someone hopelessly lost.

"You have the wrong classroom."

Her voice was calm, neither unkind nor dismissive—simply certain. She stepped slightly forward and gestured toward the chalkboard at the front of the room. As she moved, strands of her soft blue hair followed the graceful motion of her neck.

"This room is reserved for the Loner Club members."

Izuku's mind ceased functioning. A pretty girl was speaking to him. She was looking directly at him. She was waiting for a response.

A violent heat surged to his face, spreading rapidly from his ears down his neck. His heart pounded with such force he feared she might hear it echoing in the silence. Words gathered in his throat only to collapse into formless sounds.

"I–uhm—I—uhn—"

His tongue refused cooperation. His thoughts scattered like frightened birds.

Yet she waited. She did not sigh. She did not turn away. She did not laugh.

She simply watched him with patient curiosity, her expression open and attentive in a way utterly unfamiliar to him. No irritation creased her brow. No mockery colored her gaze. She allowed his struggle to unfold without interruption. The simple act of patience was more disorienting than cruelty.

He swallowed hard, forcing air into his lungs.

"I..." he tried again, voice trembling. "I... am here! To... join... the Loner... Club."

The declaration emerged in broken fragments, each word carried by visible effort.

Her expression shifted slightly.

"Oh."

Surprise flickered across her face, followed by something quieter—recognition, perhaps, or understanding. "Well," she said, stepping fully into the room and closing the door gently behind her, "there aren't any other members. So you'll be the second."

She paused briefly, then added, "I'm the president."

She approached with light, unhurried steps and stopped beside his desk, offering a small, polite bow."Nejire Hado. Class 3-A. It's a pleasure."

The name settled into the air between them.

Izuku stared.

President.

The sole member.

The founder of this quiet sanctuary.

The realization struck him with overwhelming force—this radiant, extraordinary presence was the lone occupant of a club devoted to isolation. The contradiction was staggering. Someone so effortlessly captivating, so naturally brilliant in presence, should have been surrounded by admirers.

And yet she stood here.

Alone.

Words failed him once more.

"I–I'm Midoriya," he managed at last, voice barely above a whisper. "Izuku Midoriya. Class 1-D"

His hands clenched tightly against the desk to steady their trembling.

Nejire tilted her head slightly, studying him with a closed-off curiosity. Her gaze moved with intensity—not invasive, but deeply attentive, as though she were carefully observing every detail of his existence. There was no malice in her expression, only a profound and almost overwhelming interest. He was very familiar with the feeling of being so interested in something, and all too familiar with having to restrain yourself for the sake of others.

Her eyes lingered on his worn notebook, the trembling of his fingers, the faint redness around his eyes, the tension in his posture.

Observing.

Questioning.

Understanding.

A long silence followed—not uncomfortable, but dense with unspoken thought.

Her eyes lingered on the worn notebook clutched between his fingers—the frayed edges, the obsessive scribbles crowding every margin, the way his thumb rubbed nervously at the spiral binding as if grounding himself in it. She noticed the tremor in his hands, the faint redness around his eyes like he hadn't slept properly in days, maybe weeks. The stiffness in his shoulders. The way he sat too straight, as though bracing for impact.

The quiet stretched between them. Not awkward. Not empty. Just heavy—like snow gathering on a rooftop, quiet but threatening collapse if too much is accumulated.

"If you're here to join... then I suppose I owe you a welcome." She bowed. "Thank you for joining my club."

The words were delivered lightly, but there was a thin layer of sincerity beneath them, something fragile she wasn't quite prepared to expose.

Izuku nearly knocked over his chair trying to stand. "I-i-it's a-a-an h-h-honour, Hado-senpai ma'am!"

Her lips twitched.

"You're quite the strange one, aren't you, kouhai?"

He froze mid-bow, face burning so hot he was certain steam might start rising from his ears. "S-s-sorry!"

"I didn't say that was a bad thing." She drifted toward the back of the room. Finding her seat in the corner. She rested her chin in her palm, elbow propped lazily on the sill, gaze turning outward to the world painted in white.

She watched with delicate eyes as snow fell in slow spirals.

For a moment, he thought she had already forgotten about him.

Then he heard her murmur, barely louder than the wind tapping against the glass. "Wish I could ask you more."

He wasn't sure what to make of it, but his eyes refused to peel away from her. He could feeel his heart thundering against his ribs. She looked unreal, framed in that winter light, like someone out of one of his hero magazines. Radiant. Unreachable. But beneath the softness of her posture, he caught something else. A loneliness that mirrored the club's name a little too well.

"H-Hado-senpai," he ventured, fingers tightening around his notebook. "U-uhm... since you're the p-president... y-you should know that I'm a d-deku."

She didn't turn to face him. "A what?"

"They call me that because I'm q-quirkless. So if you don't want me h-here, I can leave."

"Why would that matter?"

He blinked.

"Anyone is welcome here. It says so on the application sheet."

Shock coursed through him so sharply he swore his heart skipped a beat. No hesitation. No pitying look. No awkward silence filled with carefully chosen consolation words.

Just... acceptance.

The words settled gently inside his chest, stirring something fragile and unfamiliar—a warmth not born of charity, not born of obligation, but of permission. Permission to exist without explanation. Without apology.

He swallowed, voice trembling. "B-but I'm q-quirkless? I don't really b-belong a-anywhere."

Now she turned.

Her eyes were clearer than he expected.

"You don't need a Quirk to sit in a room," she said. "You don't need one to think. Or to care." Her gaze dropped briefly to the notebook in his hands. "You don't need one to dream. And you definitely don't need one to be lonely."

She turned back to the window as though the matter was closed."

He couldn't breathe. For years, every adult conversation had ended the same way—gentle smiles, careful suggestions, realistic expectations. Bakugo's laughter still echoed in his ears on some nights. The world had already written him off in ink that wouldn't wash away.

But she hadn't.

Everything about her was radiant and attractive. She was even kind enough to care about a loser like him.

So that begged the question.

How the hell does someone so perfect end up creating the Lonely Club?

"A-are you lonely, Nejire-Senpai?"

He saw her gaze narrow in the reflection of the glass. "If you need to ask me that, you probably shouldn't be asking it."

A shaky laugh escaped him before he could stop it. He lowered himself back into his chair, hands resting over his notebook like it was something sacred. The silence returned, but it felt different now. Less oppressive. More shared.

Minutes passed. He found himself sketching again—rough outlines of a hero costume concept, annotations crowding the page. He hesitated, then glanced toward her.

"Hado-senpai?"

"Hm?"

"Thank you. I would l-love to keep being a member of your club. If y-you'll let me."

She didn't respond immediately.

But he saw it—the faintest shift in her shoulders. The smallest smile reflected in the window glass.

"No problem, Kohai."

The Loner Club, it seemed, had gained a second member.

Chapter Text

Night settled gently over the city, blanketing it in a quiet that felt almost sacred.

Snow stained the thin glass of the bedroom window. Flakes tumbled lazily through the glow of distant streetlights before disappearing into the growing white sheet that covered rooftops and sidewalks alike. The world outside had softened beneath winter's hand, every harsh edge buried beneath powder and silence.

A pair of pale curtains hung over the window, thin enough that the city lights bled through them in muted shades of gold and orange. They cast faint shifting patterns across the walls whenever the wind stirred the falling snow, making the room feel like it was breathing slowly in the dark.

Nejire Hado lay curled atop her bed. She hadn't bothered to change out of her school uniform.

Her shoes had been kicked off somewhere near the door hours ago. One sock hung half off her heel. Her short cut periwinkle hair spread messily across the pillow beneath her head, strands catching the dim light as she stared blankly at the ceiling.

The room itself was tidy in the way lonely rooms often were.

No posters covered the walls. No cluttered desk full of hobbies.

Just a neatly stacked pile of schoolbooks, a small lamp that had long since been switched off, and a single chair beside the window where she sometimes sat to watch the snowfall when sleep refused to come.

Tonight was one of those nights.

But she hadn't made it to the chair.

Even so, her mind refused to quiet.

It buzzed endlessly, thoughts chasing each other in frantic circles the way they always did when something new entered her life.

And today, something new had walked through the door of the Loner Club.

Izuku Midoriya was that new something.

Nejire rolled onto her side, staring toward the window where the snow continued its slow descent through the glow of the city.

Her fingers curled lightly in the blanket. He had been trembling.

That had been the first thing she noticed.

Not the hair. Not the freckles. Not the awkward stutter that tangled every sentence he tried to form.

It was the trembling.

The way his hands shook when he held that notebook. The way his shoulders had been stiff like someone bracing for a strike that hadn't come yet.

She had seen that posture before. People who expected rejection before they even spoke.

People who had learned—through repetition and experience—that the safest assumption was always disappointment. Her chest tightened slightly.

An all too familiar feeling.

"...I probably scared him already."

Her voice barely rose above a whisper.

The words disappeared into the air almost instantly.

Nejire turned onto her back again, staring at the ceiling as the faint glow from outside painted soft lines across the plaster. Her thoughts replayed the moment she first stumbled across him.

She watched from down the hall as a stranger sat in front of her clubroom door, slowly whispering to himself before he opened the door with a tiny heroic declaration.

"I-i am here!"

She almost smiled at the memory. 

Almost.

Her expression faded just as quickly.

It always started the same way.

People approached her.

Curious. Interested.

Drawn in by the features she had been blessed with. And by the novelty of someone who spoke too quickly, asked too many questions, and seemed endlessly fascinated by every tiny detail of the world.

At first, they laughed.

They humoured her questions.

Sometimes they even answered them.

But eventually...

Eventually, the looks changed.

Smiles turned forced. Responses grew short and tempered.

People stopped coming back.

Her questions became exhausting. Her curiosity became intrusive.

Her personality—too much.

Too loud. Too strange. 

"You're so weird, Hado-san." 

Her fingers tightened slightly against the blanket.

The Loner Club had been her band-aid solution.

A place where expectations were clear from the beginning.

No social obligations or forced friendships. Just a quiet room where people who didn't quite fit anywhere else could exist without explanation.

But even that had failed. Every student who tried to join lasted at most a day.

Sometimes less.

Nejire slowly rolled onto her side again, curling slightly toward the window.

Snowflakes continued drifting past the glass. The city lights made them glow briefly before they vanished into the darkness below. The scene hadn't changed, and neither had she.

"I should avoid asking too many questions..."

She spoke the thought quietly, testing the shape of it.

The idea felt unnatural the moment it left her lips. Questions were how she understood people. How she understood the world. 

Without them, she felt like she was standing in a room with the lights turned off, blindly reaching for shapes she couldn't see.

But if she asked too many, the scene would play out the same as always. Maybe even faster than normal, given how the boy was rather meek.

Her mind replayed the way he had clutched that notebook. As if it were something precious. Like it contained pieces of himself he wasn't ready to show anyone yet.

She really wanted to ask about it.

What was he drawing?

Why did the pages look so full?

Why did he take notes like someone documenting a field study?

Why did he want to join a club meant for loners when he looked like someone who still believed people could be good?

Her fingers twitched against the blanket.

So many questions.

Too many.

Her lips pressed together softly.

Light moved across her face.

Nejire watched the snow for a long time that night. Long enough that the world outside seemed to slow into something dreamlike.

Her fingers slowly reached toward the edge of her pillow, tracing invisible circles in the fabric.

"I would l-love to keep being a member of your club. If y-you'll let me."

A faint breath of laughter escaped her.

"Silly boy...You shouldn't say things you don't mean." 

 Her eyes found the frosted glass of the window again. Snow continued falling, while the city lights blurred and bent around the thin layer of tears.

For a moment, she imagined the quiet classroom again.

The empty desks.

The still air. The boy sitting near the door had his head bent over a notebook, probably full of impossible dreams.

Her chest tightened in a way she didn't quite understand.

"Please stay longer than the others."

"And if we graph this as a function, F of x tends towards-"

The second hand of the clock scraped its way around the face with agonizing slowness.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Each movement sounded louder than the last in his ears.

He sat perfectly straight at his desk, but nothing about him was still. His pencil tapped once against the edge of his desk before he caught himself. His fingers immediately folded together in his lap instead, rubbing nervously against each other like he was trying to polish the anxiety off his skin.

His eyes flicked to the clock again.

Three minutes.

Three minutes until the bell.

Three minutes until he could leave.

The classroom buzzed with the usual after-school restlessness—chairs creaking, students whispering about training, hero rankings, or what snacks they were grabbing on the way home. Conversations drifted lazily through the air.

Izuku heard none of it.

His attention remained locked on the clock.

Tick.

Two minutes.

His backpack already sat half-open beside his desk. Books were stacked neatly inside, aligned with almost obsessive care. Every few seconds, he would reach down to adjust something that didn't need adjusting—straightening a notebook, checking that his pencil case was zipped, sliding his All Might keychain deeper into the pocket as if it might somehow fall out without supervision.

He wasn't rushing.

He couldn't risk looking like he was rushing.

But he was ready.

More than ready.

The moment that bell rang, he would be out the door before anyone had the chance to—

"You're being weird."

The voice came from his right.

Flat. Suspicious. Quiet so that nobody else could hear. 

Izuku froze.

Slowly—oh so very slowly—he turned his head.

Bakugo sat slouched in his chair beside him, one arm hooked lazily over the backrest like he owned the entire row. His sharp crimson eyes weren't on the board, or his desk, or anything remotely related to class.

They were on Izuku.

Studying him.

Analyzing him.

Bakugo's gaze was the kind that made people feel like insects pinned under glass.

Izuku swallowed. 

"O-oh! I—uh—am I?" he laughed nervously, the sound thin and awkward even to his own ears. "I guess I'm just a weird d-deku,  huh?" 

Bakugo didn't laugh.

Didn't blink.

Didn't move.

His eyes flicked down to Izuku's already packed bag. Then to the clock. Then back to Izuku's twitching hands.

He said nothing. But the way his brow furrowed slightly made it clear he was putting something together.

Izuku quickly looked forward again, trying to pretend the conversation had never happened.

Thirty seconds.

Tick.

His leg bounced under the desk.

Tick.

He grabbed his knee to force it still.

Tick.

The bell rang.

Izuku moved instantly. His bag was already slung over his shoulder before half the class had even stood up. He slipped between desks with surprising speed for someone who normally shrank away from attention, weaving through the small crowd forming near the door.

Bakugo remained seated, eyes lingering as the green-haired boy was swallowed by the hallway.

Izuku, panicked, didn't stop moving until the classroom was several hallways behind him.

He checked over his shoulder multiple times, making sure that nobody had followed him.

But footsteps grew distant instead of close. At this hour, most students were heading toward the exits, leaving the academic floors oddly calm in the late afternoon light. 

Bakugo wasn't following him. He was in the clear.

His nervous energy changed. The anxiety still lingered, now mixing with something new. 

Anticipation, maybe. 

He finally stopped. His body hesitated at the notion of passing through a door that most students walked past without even noticing. 

Izuku stared at it for a moment. Mind still racing. Would Hado-senpai think it's weird if I come before her again? Should I wait for her out here? What if she's already inside? 

His fingers tightened slightly around the strap of his bag before he steeled his resolve and pushed anyway. The large wooden panel opened slowly as it squealed against rusted hinges.

The chalkboard still bore the same two elegant kanji characters. Meeting the author had since changed his perspective on the strokes.

She even writes beautifully. 

He chose the same desk as Monday and arranged his things with perhaps more precision than was necessary. Fresh notebook on the left. Damaged notebook on the right, open to the last salvageable page. Pencil case aligned with the edge of the desk. Eraser placed within easy reach.

A feeling burned quietly beneath his skin as he waited. The same one that ate at him in the classroom. The same one that the Kachan had been picking up on. 

He would probably have to pay for that later. Not that he minded at the moment. 

A few minutes passed before the door opened again. Nejire Hado entered without ceremony, unwinding a pale scarf from her neck as she walked. Her blue hair was slightly windswept, one strand crossing her cheek, and she was looking somewhere over his head with the expression of someone still finishing a thought they'd started in the hallway. 

His heart did something unreasonable in his chest—not because of anything she did specifically, but simply because she had arrived. It was as if her presence alone could warp the very fabric of reality, and thirteen-year-old Midoryia Izuku was hardly able to comprehend how someone like that could even exist within the same radius as him. Let alone know that he exists, and not be repulsed by his very nature.

She didn't say anything at first, only affording him a glancing side-eye as she made her way to the back of the class and folded herself into the chair with her legs tucked beneath her, as though desks were designed with this arrangement in mind.

"You came back," she said, now facing him with striking eyes. 

"I said I-I would, didn't I?"

A small pause. "You did."

He puffed his chest in a thinly veiled attempt at bravado that convinced neither of them. "A g-good hero would never break his p-promise!"

"I suppose that's true." Apparently satisfied with this answer, she turned to the window, and the soft grey light fell across the line of her profile in a way that he immediately stopped looking at.

Izuku opened his notebook and got to work. He pretended not to think about how thoroughly he had just embarrassed himself. Again.

Eventually, they drifted into a quiet rhythm—the comfortable kind, the sort that didn't require maintenance. Time bled needlessly into the evening as neither dared to start a real conversation, content to simply occupy the same silence. 

Before they knew it, the three hours had dissolved, and she was already standing at the door, scarf rewound, bag over one shoulder.

"Club activities are over for tonight."

He scrambled to pack his things. "R-right."

She waited with the particular patience of someone who was not in a hurry and had no intention of pretending otherwise, watching him collect his notebooks and pencils with a calm that made his fumbling feel more visible somehow, though she did not indicate judging it.

When they were both standing near the door, the height difference between them registered with new clarity. She was taller than him by enough to matter. He was acutely aware of this in the way he was aware of most things he couldn't do anything about.

"Will you be returning tomorrow?"

"I will be." He steadied his voice with effort. "I e-enjoy the club. Even if it's m-mostly quiet."

She regarded him with a serious expression that lived behind her eyes rather than on her face—something considered, something that had been turning a thought over and had arrived at a conclusion."Then I'll see you after school tomorrow," she said. "I look forward to it."

The words were delivered evenly, without performance. Which somehow made them more difficult to receive.

"Y-yes," he managed. "I l-look forward to it as well."

The day after passed in much the same way—graphite scratching against paper, the occasional sound of pages turning, the muffled noise of the school slowly emptying itself beyond the door. Once, Izuku's eraser rolled off the desk and bounced twice before coming to rest near the leg of a chair three rows over. He retrieved it with a level of caution that was probably unnecessary.

Nejire watched him do this. He caught her watching. She looked back at the window.

The third day came and went. The fourth followed.

But on this fourth day, something changed.

He had been working for forty minutes—deep in reconstructing a four-page analysis of Thirteen's Quirk, which he was fairly certain he remembered well enough to reproduce from memory—when her voice broke the quiet.

"...Do you always take notes by hand?"

He looked up. She was still facing the window, chin in her palm, but her eyes had moved toward him with the quality of attention she brought to everything—complete, unhurried, genuinely curious.

"Oh—y-yes," he said, after a beat of surprise. "I find it h-helps me remember things better. When I write them myself. There's something about the a-act of—" He stopped himself. "S-sorry. You probably didn't want the whole explanation."

"I did, actually," she said simply. "Or I wouldn't have asked."

He blinked. "Right. Sorry. Uh—yes. By h-hand. Always. It w-works for m-me and I like it."

She seemed to consider this with the seriousness she gave most things. "How many notebooks do you have?"

"Filled ones?"

Her expression confirmed this was exactly what she meant.

"Seven," he said. "Used to be eight."

Something moved across her face—a brief, bright flicker that was there and gone in the span of a second, like light catching water. She turned back to the window.

"That's a lot," she said.

"Oh." He looked down at the half-completed page he was working on. "Is it?" 

"I didn't say it was bad. I admire your work ethic."

He ducked his head over his notebook to hide the fact that his ears had gone comprehensively red, and returned to his work with the focused attention of someone pretending they hadn't just been told something that mattered to them.

By the friday, Izuku had begun to relax.

Not entirely. Not in the way he was relaxed at home, in his own room with the door closed and All Might watching benevolently from seventeen different wall posters. But enough that he no longer triple-checked the angle of his pencil case. Enough that when his train of thought led somewhere interesting, he occasionally muttered fragments of it aloud without immediately pressing his hand over his mouth in horror.

He hadn't even realized he was doing it now—mumbling under his breath as he worked through an analysis of Hawks, a young hero who had just burst onto the scene with a Quirk that had been generating significant discussion in the circles Izuku paid attention to. He filled in the shadows of a falling feather as he considered the aerodynamics of it, the way the man generated lift with a wingspan that seemed, relative to body mass, wholly insufficient for the speed he demonstrated. There was something in the feather tensility that the mainstream analysis kept glossing over. He wrote the word tensility and then underlined it twice.

Izuku was deep enough into it that he almost missed the scratch of a chair shifting against the waxed tile.

He looked up, startled back into the room. Nejire had turned to face him fully, elbow on her desk, her chin resting in both hands. She was watching him with the focused attention of someone observing something genuinely interesting—not politely, not in the way of someone waiting for him to finish so she could speak, but with real absorption. As though he were a problem she had been wanting to examine.

He closed his mouth.

"Don't stop," she said.

"I wasn't—I mean—I was j-just thinking out loud. Sorry. I d-do that."

"I've noticed." She tilted her head. The motion sent a strand of blue hair sliding across her cheek. "You talk to yourself when you're interested in something. The stutter goes away."

The observation landed precisely because it was accurate and because she said it without making anything of it—just a thing she had noticed, stated plainly, the way she stated everything.

"Is it—does it b-bother you? I can stop."

"I just said don't stop."

He considered her for a moment. There was something in her expression that wasn't quite patience—patience implied effort, the conscious decision to wait. What she had was more instinctive than that. She simply looked at him, and he got the strange impression she could have kept looking for quite a long time, without needing anything from him in return.

"You've been p-paying attention to me?" he asked, before he could think better of it.

She blinked. A barely perceptible pause—so brief he might have imagined it. "I pay attention to everything," she said. And then, very deliberately, she turned back to the window.

Izuku stared at the back of her head for three full seconds. 

Good going, Izuku. Just proving Kachan right with every word, aren't you?

He looked back at his notebook and absolutely did not smile. He was distantly aware that Kacchan would find this entire situation deeply contemptible—the idea that the only person who had ever voluntarily paid sustained attention to Izuku Midoriya was a girl who had done it while looking out a window and then ended the conversation by turning away. 

Though Bakugo's own track record with keeping anyone's attention was not notably better. It was, in fact, one of the only things they still had in common. Girls dodged them both like the plague, albeit for entirely different reasons.

He strained against the paper, snapping a pencil lead by mistake. 

She hadn't said another word to him that night.

"My baby... you've been coming home so late these days."

Izuku froze as he stepped through the door, one foot still on the welcome mat, guilt arriving before he'd even processed what she'd said. The setting sun laid a warm sheen across his dark school uniform. Snow had come in on his shoes, leaving small wet impressions on the mat.

"I'm sorry, Mom."

She was already untying her apron, fingers moving with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had decided to have a conversation and was preparing the room for it. "Izuku, is something happening at school? What's going on—?"

He closed the door and kicked off his shoes. "Mom. I promise it's nothing."

"Then why do you look so—"

"I joined a club," he said. "It runs for three hours after school."

She went still.

The genuine surprise on her face had a quality he hadn't been expecting—not performed, not the careful brightness she sometimes assembled to encourage him. Actual surprise, the kind that required a moment to process. "You... joined a club? Like with... people?"

He looked away. "You make me sound pathetic—"

"I didn't mean it like that!" She crossed the small distance between them quickly, cupping his face in both hands the way she had since he was small enough for it to be unremarkable—when the gesture had been about comfort more than assessment. Now it was both. Her thumbs brushed his cheeks, and her eyes moved across his face with the careful attention of someone reading something important, looking for the thing beneath the thing he was saying. "I just—you never mentioned it. I've been worried."

"I know."

"Who's in the club? Have you made some good friends, then?"

He hesitated for exactly one second too long.

Inko's hands stayed where they were, but her expression shifted—the brightness still there but repositioned now, less encouraging and more watchful. The particular attentiveness of a mother who had learned to read the negative space in her son's answers.

"It's a small club," he said. "Study group, mostly. We work on different things, but it's—it's quiet. It's good."

"We," she repeated.

"There's another member."

"Just one?"

"It's a small club, Mom."

She searched his face for another moment, her thumbs still warm against his cheeks. Whatever she found there, she seemed to make a decision about, because her hands dropped gently and she turned back toward the kitchen—the movement of someone choosing, deliberately and with some effort, not to press further.

"I'll heat up your plate," she said. "Go wash your hands. They're all smudged."

He toed his shoes neatly against the wall—habit, years old—and started down the hallway.

"Izuku."

He stopped.

"This other member." Her voice was carefully light, directed at the stove. "Are they kind to you?"

The question arrived somewhere unexpected. He stood in the hallway with his jacket half-unzipped and thought about a desk moved from the back of a room to the one beside his, without discussion. About questions asked without cruelty. About patience that required no effort because it came from genuine interest rather than obligation.

"...yes," he said. She at least treats me like a human.

Inko nodded, her back still to him, and turned on the burner with a quiet click.

"Good," she said simply. "Now go."

He went to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and looked at himself in the mirror with the brief, evaluative attention he sometimes brought to this—the ink on his fingers that never fully washed out anymore, present in the whorls of his fingertips like a permanent record of the work. While the graphite of the smeared pencil work stained the sides of his hands in a dark grey.

He washed his hands of it all.

They ate together in the small warm kitchen, she asking about his classes and he answering, he asking about her day and she telling him, the comfortable domestic rhythm of two people who had learned each other's conversational textures over years of meals like this one. Neither of them returned to the subject of the club. The subject didn't need to be returned to. It sat between them as something understood.

Later, after the dishes were done and he had retreated to his room, Inko Midoriya stood at the kitchen sink and looked at her own faint reflection in the dark window above it. She stood there for a while, dishcloth in hand, not quite ready to move.

She did not want to make too much of it. Things were fragile, in her experience, when you made too much of them—hope in particular had a way of collapsing under the weight of too much attention. Especially for the kinds of people who rely on it for their own well-being.

 But the way he'd said yes—not the careful, rehearsed reassurance she'd learned to recognize, the answer designed to stop her worrying rather than to tell her anything true. Just a simple, honest yes, with something behind it she hadn't heard in longer than she could precisely measure.

She turned off the kitchen light, as she told herself not to make too much of it.

But she couldn't help but smile a little bit on the way to her room.

The following Monday arrived, and Izuku had officially gone a week without incident involving Kacchan or his associates, aside from the minor interaction in class. 

This was not nothing. He noted it in the margins of his morning without making a significant thing of it.

But the tension in the clubroom had not faded.

It had been there since the beginning—an unspoken, tautly strung thing that occupied the space between their desks, present in the quality of silences that were comfortable in some ways and charged in others. He had catalogued the signs with the same careful attention he applied to everything, the accumulation of them building into a pattern he recognized but hadn't yet named.

The way her eyes moved to him every few minutes—landing on the page he was working on, or his hands, or his face—and then deliberately looked away again, with the specific quality of a decision being made and remade. The way she had twice opened her mouth, the breath drawn for speech, and then closed it again. Her jaw tightened faintly, like someone applying physical force to a thought to prevent its escape.

He recognized the mechanism. It was his own, running differently but from the same source—something inside her pressing hard against whatever she'd built to contain it.

For whatever reason, it finally broke on this lovely Monday afternoon, softly, the way things that have been held too long finally give.

"Are you cold?"

He looked up. "S-sorry?"

"Your hands." Her chin was still in her palm, but her eyes were fully on him—direct, attentive, the window forgotten. "You keep rubbing them together between paragraphs. Are you cold? Or is that a nervous habit?"

He looked at his hands. He genuinely hadn't been aware of the motion. "I—I think a bit of both, maybe."

She nodded slowly, with the expression of someone updating a small internal document. Then, after a pause that lasted exactly long enough to feel like a held breath, she spoke again.

"...How long does it take you to fill a notebook?"

"Uh—it d-depends on the subject. Anywhere from t-three weeks to t-two months. The longer o-ones are usually—"

And again.

"What do you write about?"

"H-heroes, mostly. Quirk a-analyses. Sometimes support tech. Occasionally, r-rescue strategies—"

And again. But Izuku did not mind in the slightest. 

"What's your favourite Quirk you've ever analyzed?"

"Oh." He brought a hand to his chin, as if falling into deep thought. She picked up on this, letting him think.

 "Probably Thirteen's. Her Quirk g-generates localized singularities—black holes, in the simplified version—which sounds straightforward until you consider that she can't possibly have the mass in her f-fingertips to generate anything approaching a real singularity. So there has to be an additional mechanism. A Quirk-generated phenomenon that mimics the gravitational effects without the underlying physics. Which means the rescue applications are completely different from what most people assume." He paused. "I really want to ask her about it someday."

He had not noticed that the stutter had dissolved somewhere in the middle of his answer.

 He had not noticed the way Nejire was watching him—the quality of it, the particular brightness.

He had not noticed how the girl had begun to light up.

"Do you have a favourite hero?" she asked, more excited. "Is it All Might?"

"Yes!" he said, without any hesitation at all. It had always been All Might. It would always be All Might.

Something softened—a visible easing between them, like a room where someone has opened a window. She leaned forward slightly, both arms folding on the desk. 

"Why All Might, specifically? I get that he's exceptionally powerful, but that seems too simple for someone who thinks the way you do."

And that was how it started.

The answer arrived without planning, the way things did when a topic had been living close enough to the surface for long enough to know the route out.

"He's—" Izuku stopped. Started again, finding the slower path to it. "When I was little, I watched a video. An old rescue clip—a collapsed structure in Niigata, hundreds of people trapped. The pros were still establishing a perimeter. The situation had the particular quality of situations that aren't going to resolve well." He paused. "And then he arrived. And he pulled everyone out. In under ten minutes."

Unlike Izuku, Nejire had noticed the exact moment the nervousness left his voice—replaced by something quieter and more fundamental, the tone of someone speaking from a place below performance.

He was speaking from his heart—sharp resolve lining every word. 

"He was smiling the whole time. Not for the cameras—you could tell because his eyes matched his mouth. He meant it. He was genuinely happy to be there. Happy to be the one doing it." He turned his pencil over in his hands, a slow revolution, the movement of thought finding its shape. "People always talk about how powerful he is. And he is—he's the most powerful person alive, by any measure. But that's not the reason. The reason he's the Symbol of Peace isn't because he can hit hard. It's because when people see him, they feel safe. He makes everyone around him braver. He proves that heroism isn't just a profession."

He exhaled slowly. His eyes found hers briefly, green meeting blue, before sliding away toward the middle distance—the particular evasion of someone saying something true and not quite brave enough to watch it land.

"There will always be people who need help. And I want to be the one who goes toward that instead of away. I admire him so much."

Nejire had not moved throughout any of this. The habitual small shifts of her posture—the tilting and retilting of her chin, the restless attention that usually kept some part of her in motion—had gone entirely still. She was concentrated and private, as though she were committing each word to some internal record that mattered.

He deflated slightly, the momentum of it fading. "Sorry. That w-was—I know how it sounds. Especially for someone who's q-quirkless." The word arrived with a particular flatness. "It probably—"

"It doesn't sound like anything except what you mean," she said. "I think you're a noble person, Midoriya-kun. But I don't admire All Might, I admire you."

Her voice was even. Matter-of-fact. Not consoling—not the careful softness of someone trying to prevent embarrassment. She was telling him there was nothing to be embarrassed about, which was a different thing entirely, and she said it the way she said everything that was simply true.

He looked at her. Shock written all over his face.

"You're so brave—for speaking from your heart like that." 

A shaking thumb pointed toward himself. "M-m-me? B-brave?" 

She nodded. "You just told me your dream. That is brave." 

He simply stared. 

"Do you mind..." She looked back, and there was something in her expression that he didn't yet have a name for, but that registered somewhere he wasn't examining. "...can I keep asking questions? Are you uncomfortable?"

"I'm not u-uncomfortable," he said, finally finding words. 

"Really?"

He nodded rapidly.

Her heart began to beat. Faster than she knew it could. She had never heard those words before. Not directed at her. Not in that tone.

"Your notebook," she said, after a moment that had a quality to it. "You analyze Quirks in there. What do you look for?"

"E-everything." He turned the book toward her slightly—neat columns of close writing, rough diagrams in the margins, arrows connecting observed phenomena to hypothetical applications, the whole dense architecture of attention applied to something he loved. "Mechanisms. Range. C-conditions that affect output: temperature, stress, and concentration. How the quirk affects the user,  a-and then the applications they m-might not have considered. Adjacent uses. H-how it interacts with standard rescue scenarios or combat v-variables." 

He paused. "Sometimes you can see things from the outside that the user is too close to notice. Patterns in their own Quirk that have become i-invisible through familiarity. Not that I'd ever get to tell them. But, it also acts as a form of study. "

She was looking at the page with an intensity that made him feel visible in a way that wasn't uncomfortable—just unfamiliar. As though being seen had arrived before he'd had time to perform anything for the occasion.

"You like this," she said. Not a question.

"It's the t-thing I like most," he said honestly. Possibly the most honest sentence he'd said to another person in recent memory. "Aside f-from All Might, I think." 

A beat of quiet. Then she looked up from the page and directly at him, with the clear decisive quality she had when she'd arrived at something.

"...Would you like to know about mine?"

It was his turn to have a rushing heart, now. 

"Y-y-your Q-q-quirk? Is that... okay?"

"Wave Motion." She said it simply, as a statement of fact. "That's what my family called it—the official registration has a longer technical description. I convert vitality into energy. My own internal stamina becomes spiral shockwaves." She laced her fingers together with the ease of someone explaining something they've thought about carefully.

"I can release them from my hands. From my feet, if I angle it correctly. The flying is newer—I've only been doing it for a few months. The footwork is still something I'm working out."

Izuku's hand was already moving toward his pencil.

"C-can I see it?" The words came out before the thought was fully formed, propelled by the same below-language enthusiasm that had been driving most of his better decisions lately.

Something shifted in her expression—a loosening, private warmth. "Don't move anything you're attached to," she said. 

Yellow-gold energy began to wrap around her limbs in gentle spirals, rising from the surface of her skin with a quality that was somehow both luminous and physical—not light exactly, but not quite force either, occupying the ambiguous space between. He could feel how the temperature around her rose slightly. 

Likely a byproduct of energy conversion laws. He mentally noted through the excitement that was now surging through his veins. 

 She lifted from her chair with the unhurried ease of someone stepping onto familiar ground, suspending herself in the amber afternoon air of the Loner Club, her blue hair drifting slightly with the disturbance of it. 

Then she raised her arm, aiming it at his pencil case sitting at the edge of the desk. It skidded hard off the surface and hit the floor with a clatter that echoed in the empty room.

She descended, folding back into her chair as though she'd simply sat down. "That was heavily restrained. I didn't want to damage school property."

Izuku was in awe. Thousands of ideas surged through his brain. 

Then, in a motion so rapid it was practically a single gesture, he flipped through his notebook to the first blank page, pencil already extended.

"Could I—" He caught himself. "I'm sorry, is it alright if I—"

"Please, go ahead," she said. 

She was watching him with a new expression—openly anticipatory, the expression of someone who had been asked a question they'd been waiting a long time for someone to ask.

He wrote.

The way he wrote when something had fully seized him—quickly, the handwriting losing its neatness as his thoughts outpaced his hand, the pencil moving with the urgency of thought trying to get itself down before any of it escaped.  His mutters filled the silence between strokes of the pencil.

"Vitality-to-energy conversion. Cost is stamina, not Quirk Factor depletion in a traditional sense. This may imply upper limit scales with physical conditioning, with no inherent power ceiling, which is significantly trainable."

"Sorry," he said, not looking up. "Give me a moment—"

He kept writing. He kept muttering.

"Release from feet explains propulsion. Mass conversion from vitality? Then the spiral would create thrust if angled correctly against a surface or against air—but air is compressible, so the shockwave needs sufficient density. She mentioned speed is the limitation; the spiral travels slower than a direct linear blast because the path length is longer, despite covering the same distance But if she generated multiple waves in sequence and they reinforced each other through constructive interference, the velocity would be additive."

 The words were not quite directed at her and not quite not, the running commentary of a mind working at full speed with the throttle off.

"Close-range applications are actually where the spiral works best. If the full spiral hasn't propagated yet, you're delivering the raw rotational energy at the point of contact. Train the transition between range and close-range deliberately, most opponents would assume a ranged Quirk and position accordingly—"

Two pages were already filled.

On the third page, a diagram emerged—a figure suspended in flight, arrows indicating force vectors at three positions, annotated with his precise small handwriting. A second diagram beside it: a spiral mapped onto a timeline, labelled propagation delay and constructive stacking potential (theoretical). He underlined theoretical twice.

Eventually, the muttering stopped, and his pen fell to the side. 

Eighteen minutes had passed within the blink of an eye, and Izuku Midoryia could feel his face growing hot. 

"I was worried you were never going to come up for air." She was amused that his breathing was marginally faster than usual.

Nejire had timed it on the clock above the door, watching the second hand complete its circuits with an expression that had moved over the course of those eighteen minutes.

He looked up.

She had not moved from her place. Her eyes were fixed on him with an expression he had not seen on her face before. Or not quite—he had seen the components of it, assembled differently. 

The deep attentiveness was familiar. The quality of observation that made her gaze feel substantial was familiar. But the warmth underneath all of it was new, or rather newly visible, something that had been present at some remove and had, in the last eleven minutes, moved considerably closer to the surface.

"You, my dear Kouhai," she said, "are exactly like me."

"I'm—what?" He blinked, confused. Heart still rushing without permission.

"Different in your personality," she said immediately, allowing the distinction. "Obviously. But—" She stopped. Tilted her head, the familiar gesture but softer in it than usual—less studied, less performed. "Not so much that I would call us unlike."

She crossed her legs in her seat.  "I think about things constantly. Form quirks to people to concepts. I ask too many questions, and it makes people uncomfortable. But it's not something I can turn off, you know? When something interests me, I need to understand it completely. I always have."

Her eyes went to the three pages of notes before falling back to him.

"You're the same," she said. "Just—your something is different from mine."

Izuku looked at the pages in front of him. At the diagrams. At a week's worth of carefully imposed restraint—the muttering apologized for, the monologues cut short, the enthusiasm dialled back to whatever he thought was acceptable for a room he was new to. He thought about the long route to school, the desk near the exit, the practiced smile that fit poorly but stayed on through habit.

"Yes," he said quietly. "I t-think you might be right."

Nejire uncurled from her chair.

She moved to the desk beside his—not across, beside, closing the distance that had been maintained for two weeks with the decisive motion of someone who has finished deliberating—and set her notebook down with a finality that seemed to close a particular door on whatever arrangement they'd had before. She looked at his diagram of the spiral propagation. Looked at the close-range notes. Then she looked up, and something in her expression had released completely—whatever careful clasp she'd been maintaining, set aside.

"Can you help me, Midoryia-kun? I think... I want to be a hero."

Izuku's brain stalled. Then exploded. Excitement overtook surprise.

"You want to be a hero, too?!" he blurted.

His voice carried far louder than he intended. Nejire immediately raised a finger to her lips.

"Yes," she said calmly, "but keep it down, would you?"

Izuku clamped both hands over his mouth so fast his chair squeaked against the floor.

"R-right—! I'm so sorry—!"

The words came out muffled through his fingers.

An involuntary chuckle slipped from her lips before she could stop it.

The sound startled her almost as much as it did him.

 "My bad." She spoke through an enchanting smile. "That was just... very enthusiastic."

Izuku lowered his hands slowly, face burning bright red. "I get carried away sometimes."

"So I've noticed. But,  you seem to know more about my quirk than I do," she said thoughtfully. "And I've had it for eleven years. I have to say, I'm impressed."

Izuku immediately looked down at the notebook like it had betrayed him.

"Well... I made a lot of assumptions."

"A lot of right assumptions," she corrected.

He hesitated. His pencil tapped lightly against the paper as he struggled with the thought forming in his chest. "Do you...Really want my help?" he asked quietly. "I'm not sure how much I'd be able to contribute."

Nejire tilted her head slightly.

"Anything is helpful," she said simply. "And I wouldn't expect you to help me for free."

Izuku shook his head instantly.

"No! I mean—I would be happy to help you for free. R-Really."

Her head tilted further to the side, curiosity returning to her eyes.

"Oh? Why's that?"

The answer came out almost automatically.

"Because that's what All Might would do."

The name seemed to hang in the air between them. Nejire studied him for a long moment.

Then she shook her head.

"No," she said.

Izuku blinked.

"I don't think so."

His confusion was immediate. "Of course he would—!"

Again, she shook her head, but softer this time.

"Nuh-uh."

She leaned forward slightly, "That's what you would do."

The words were spoken gently.

Without hesitation.

"Because you are a special person."

Izuku froze. "S-s-special? Me?! But I'm—you b-barely know me."

"Maybe. But you're my friend." The sentence landed so naturally, she didn't even realize the weight of it until it had already been said. "My first friend, to be exact."

The room went very quiet.

Izuku stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. 

"That alone," she continued softly, "makes you a special person. In the very least, it makes you a special person to me."

He raised a shaky finger toward his own chest.

"M-me?"

Nejire pointed at him in return, mirroring the gesture.

"You, Midoriya Izuku," she said, "are not just special."

Her smile widened slightly.

"I think you are extraordinary."

The word seemed to strike him like lightning.

Nejire felt something strange twist in her chest as she watched him struggle. A few nights ago, she couldn't even imagine speaking to someone beyond a handful of careful sentences.

And now...she was telling a boy he was extraordinary.

She pushed the thought aside before it could make her nervous.

"So," she said lightly, leaning back in her chair. "What do you say?"

He blinked at her. 

"I graduate in two months," she continued. "So you don't have to for very long. And if you don't want to, that's totally cool-" 

This time, it was he cutting her off. 

"D-do you mean it?" he asked quietly.

"Mean what?"

"That I'm your... friend?"

Something in his voice made the question feel fragile.

Nejire smiled as brightly as she could manage.

"Absolutely."

A tear slipped from the corner of his eye before he could stop it.

He wiped it quickly, embarrassed.

"T-then how could I p-possibly say no."

Nejire felt her true self beginning to surface. 

But instead of fighting it, of denying who she was, she simply embraced it. 

Nejire Hado could just be Nejire when this boy was around. 

So, she scooted closer to him. No longer fearing something that never existed. 

"H-Hado-senpai," he said, suddenly feeling intruded upon. "I-Isn't that a little close?" 

"You can drop the senpai," she said, eyes now looking up into his. 

Izuku thought that his heart could give out at any moment. All of this was far too much. "Sure thing, Hado-san."

"Actually... I think I prefer Nejire."

He went red but nodded. "N-N-N-N-Nejire, t-then." 

"Thank you, Midoriya," she said, accepting the implicit agreement. "Are you okay if I call you by your first name, as well?" 

"I-I-If that's w-what you p-prefer!" 

"Izuku, then!" 

Good god, I don't think my heart can take this. He thought, while practically vibrating in his seat. Is this the true Hado-senpai?

She then turned toward the pages on his desk. "To start... why don't you tell me what you think about the flight mechanism?"

The girl began to float in her seat, with a big smile on her face. Her finger traced over some of the words he had written. "The shockwave from the feet creating thrust—what's the optimal angle? Because right now it feels like I'm fighting the spiral rather than using it."

He pulled the notebook closer. But not without catching a few glances at her again. 

I think that I really like this version of her. She seems... happier.

"O-Okay, sure," he said. "S-So the thing about s-spirals is—"

Outside the classroom door, the last footsteps eventually faded into silence, while the winter evening deepened without permission, time slipping past unnoticed.

Streetlights flickered on outside.

Inside the small classroom at the end of the corridor, ideas layered on ideas. Possibilities branching outward faster than either of them could track.

And just like that—Nejire Hado had set something into motion that would one day change the fate of the greatest hero the world had ever seen.

But for now, he was simply—newly—Izuku.

A nervous boy with a notebook full of ideas and knowledge. 

And as Nejire watched him talk—hands moving frantically as he tried to explain a spiral propulsion adjustment he had just thought of—she found herself thinking something unexpected.

For a nerdy kouhai...Izuku was actually pretty damn cute.

Chapter Text

"Hey—Nejire. Can I a-ask you something?"

She looked up from her notebook. She'd been working on an assignment for her math class—picking away at a pretty gnarly looking integral—with her chin propped on her hand. She turned toward him with the full rotation she gave most things—not a glance, a proper reorientation, the way she had of making whoever she was looking at feel like the most interesting thing in the room.

Or really, she just made him feel like the most important thing in the universe.

"Of course." She tapped her fingers against the desk. "What's up?"

He looked at his own notebook. The equation he'd been working on was spread across the bottom third of the page—something to do with lift generation, a modification he'd been turning over for three days. He hadn't meant to ask it now. He'd been sitting quietly for twenty minutes and the question had just arrived at the surface, the way things did when he'd been alone with his thoughts long enough.

He was still getting used to the way she said his name. It was a small thing and he knew it was a small thing, which didn't make it smaller. Most of the people who used his name anymore used it the way you said something unpleasant—not quite spitting it but close, like the syllables were something to be gotten rid of rather than held. His given name in his own head had started to sound like that. Like a word that had been overwritten by the way it was most commonly spoken.

When Nejire said it, the word sounded like itself again.

"Do y-you believe in the gods?" he asked.

She placed one finger beneath her chin, tilting her head. She appeared to take the question completely seriously, which was one of the things about her that still caught him off guard—her willingness to follow a thought wherever it went without first deciding if it was the kind of thought worth following.

"Hmm," she said. "What a peculiar question." A pause, genuine consideration. "I can't say I know for certain. But I don't think it's impossible that there's some greater power out there. Something that imposed the rules." She tilted her head the other direction. "Why?"

He looked back at his equation.

"Quirks b-break things," he said. "Every physical law we have—thermodynamics, c-conservation of mass, energy, the basic mechanics of the human genome—quirks just don't observe or comply with any of it. The energy conversion rates alone should be impossible. A person who generates fire from nothing, a person whose body restructures its own cellular composition in real time—by every scientific framework we have, n-none of this should be able to exist, let alone persist across generations."

 He pressed his pen flat against the page. "And then there are quirks that don't just break the laws. They change them. The number one hero in America—she can alter the state of physical reality. That's not bending a rule. That's rewriting it from the source." He looked up. "If the laws of physics can be rewritten, it makes me wonder if they were ever laws at all. Or if they're just—the current settings. And if someone set them, and someone can change them—"

He stopped. He was aware he had been talking for longer than he'd meant to.

Nejire was watching him with her eyes, doing the thing they did when she was genuinely absorbed in something—bright, slightly wide, the internal machinery visible in them.

"All that science-y stuff just falls apart in the face of quirk logic, doesn't it?" she said.

"Completely." He exhaled. "Which either means the universe is fundamentally stranger than we thought, or we're living in something that was imposed. Designed. Some kind of deviated system that has its own logic but it's not the logic we inherited from the world before." He looked at the equation again. "It keeps me up at night, sometimes."

He'd expected her to nod and return to her notebook. That was what usually happened when he said too much—a polite acknowledgment, a subject change, the particular social cue that meant I have heard enough of this. He had learned to read it early and to wind down before it arrived.

She leaned forward instead.

"But doesn't that make it amazing?" she said. "Think about it—two hundred years ago, if you'd told someone that a man with a spray nozzle for a head was going to walk down the street, they would have called you insane. Not just strange. Insane. Because it would have been physically impossible. It would have violated everything true about bodies and faces and how humans were constructed."

 She spread her hands. "And yet I have a classmate whose mouth is the nozzle. He drinks from his own head at lunch. That's just what the world is now."

"Y-yeah," Izuku said slowly. "That's what I mean." 

"So maybe the question isn't why it doesn't follow the rules. Maybe the question is—" She tilted her head. "Aren't we so lucky as to live in a world where anything is possible. Doesn't that feel like an upgrade?"

A world where anything is possible.

He turned the sentence over. It was simple. It was the kind of thing people said without meaning it fullyan expression, a figure of speech, the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

But she meant it.

He could see that she meant it. There was nothing casual in her face, nothing performing optimism. She was telling him something she had actually thought about and arrived at and decided to believe.

"Do you really believe that?" he asked. His voice came out quieter than he'd intended.

She gave a thumbs-up. "Of course."

And just like that—with a thumbs up, in the clubroom, at the end of a Tuesday, with her radiant smile, Nejire Hado rewrote something in him.

He had spent years building a philosophy of limitation. He had done it carefully, over time, because it was the rational response to the evidence. 

He was quirkless. He had understood, at a precise moment in a doctor's office, that the door he had most wanted to walk through was not going to open for him, and he had spent the years since that moment learning, slowly and thoroughly, to stop standing in front of it. Because standing in front of it was the thing that hurt. And limiting yourself was how you stopped getting hurt.

It also didn't help that the world seemed to keep beating the fact into him, but Izuku had still built the whole structure of himself around the management of that single fact.

And here was this girl—radiant, brilliant, entirely uncontainable girl—sitting across from him in a room full of empty desks, telling him without hesitation that the world was a place where anything was possible. Not as consolation. Not as pity. As a fact she had considered and accepted and was now stating plainly, the way you state things that seem so obvious to you it hadn't occurred to you that they might need arguing.

He brushed at the corner of his eye with the back of his hand. Fast, before she could see.

"Izuku?" She had seen. Of course, she had. "Are you okay?"

He looked down at her—she was slightly shorter, even seated, and had to tilt her head up a fraction to meet his eyes—and found he was smiling. Genuinely. The kind of smile that arrived before you could manage it.

"Nothing's wrong," he said. "Nothing at all."

He gripped the pencil. "I actually think things are... great." 

That night, the moonlight came in through the thin red curtains.

All Might beamed from the poster on the wall, frozen mid-action, permanent and confident and exactly as he always was. Izuku had stopped really seeing the poster months ago—it had become ambient, part of the room's texture. He barely registered it anymore unless he was specifically looking for it.

 He had his notebook open on the desk and his pen moving, and he was working through the lift modification he'd been developing for the past three days—a change to the pulse rhythm of Nejire's unblanced float that he thought might change the efficiency calculation. He'd been running it in the margins all evening, crossing versions out, refining.

The equation resolved at twenty past eleven, and for a moment, he just looked at it.

Long nights on physics forums, quirk analysis websites, and HeroTube had led him here.

Underneath it, the working. Underneath that, the diagram. He drew it in the careful, cross-referenced way he drew things he wanted her to be able to follow. 

He sat back, rolling the pen between his fingers on instinct. 

The house was quiet. His mother had gone to bed two hours ago, after knocking once at his door and leaving a glass of water on the side table without comment, which was her way of saying I know you're still up and I'm not going to argue with it, but drink something.

He took a drink.

It had become a routine. That was the word he kept coming back to, with a kind of private, slightly disbelieving warmth—routine. A word for ordinary life, for things that happened predictably, for the architecture of days that had structure in them. He had not had a routine with another person in it in a very long time. He had had habits, which were different. Habits were things you did alone.

This was different.

He thought about everything from today's meeting and what he would bring tomorrow. He thought about the question she'd ask when she saw the new diagram—he could almost predict it, the specific angle she'd come from, the follow-up question that would come three seconds after he answered the first one. 

He thought about her face when something clicked, the open, lit-up quality of it, the way the room itself seemed to change when she was pleased about a thing.

He turned to a fresh page and wrote the date at the top.

Pulse rhythm modification—practical test parameters. She's going to ask about the ceiling first. Prepare ahead of time for other questions she might have.

He wrote without stopping for another thirty minutes, and the writing had the quality it had when the ideas were coming right—fast and clear and slightly ahead of his hand, the pen struggling to keep pace. He filled two pages and started a third before he slowed.

He looked at what he'd written. Lines filled and margins covered—all of carefully constructed ideas delicately woven into something tangible for somebody he could now call a friend. 

A friend. 

I made a friend.

I'm so happy.

The thought arrived the same way it always did now—not with the comfortable certainty of something long-established, but with the slightly cautious wonder of something he was still learning to trust. Like testing weight on ice. Each time he came back to it and it held, he believed it a fraction more.

His mother had started meeting him at the door in the evenings with a different face than she'd worn for years. He hadn't said much—he'd told her there was a girl, another member, that they'd been training together. He hadn't described the sessions or the notebooks or the hours after the janitor had come and gone. But she had understood something from the version he'd given her, and her face in the mornings had been different. Brighter. Like she had access to a feeling she'd been keeping in reserve.

He hadn't wanted to look at that too directly. It made something in his chest ache in a way that wasn't quite pain.

He put the pen down. He closed the notebook.

On the wall above him, All Might smiled his permanent, inextinguishable smile at the middle distance.

A world where anything is possible.

He thought about the thumbs up. The total sincerity of it.

He had joined the loner club to hide from something.

He had found, in hiding, something larger than the thing he was hiding from.

He was aware of this. He was aware of it with the precise, slightly vertiginous awareness of someone who has been given something they didn't ask for and can feel how much it will cost if it goes away.

He turned the lamp off.

The moonlight came in through the curtains, red-tinted and quiet.

He lay in the dark and thought about lift equations and the number one hero in America who could rewrite physical law and the question of whether the world had rules or merely suggestions, and a girl with spiral hair who had answered every question he'd ever been too afraid to ask because asking meant expecting to be heard.

He fell asleep with the notebook on the desk, open to a fresh page. He had completly forgot about the sweet nothings he had written in the corners of each of Nejire's entries. Little notes about things that set his heart ablaze, but would never make it out of the confines of the paper. 

The gym was cold in the mornings and warm by midafternoon, and at the specific hour that Nejire had claimed it—three-fifteen on Wednesday and Fridays, signed off in the club activity ledger under the name General Research and Practical Application, which was vague enough that nobody had ever questioned it—the light came in through the high windows at exactly the angle that turned the floorboards amber.

She liked that. She liked the way it made the room feel like it was on the edge of something. Like the gym existed at a hinge point between the day and the evening, and everything that happened inside it was slightly removed from the ordinary run of things.

She stood in the center of the floor, ten feet from the far wall, and let the Wave build.

It started, as it always did, somewhere below her sternum. Not the chest, not the stomach—the specific point between them that she'd never been able to name, anatomically, but that she'd known the location of since she was four years old and had accidentally taken out her mother's kitchen cabinet. It gathered like a breath held too long. It pressed outward from that unnamed place in all directions at once, and if she let it go without thinking—if she just opened herself to it—it left her in a full-body discharge that was loud and bright and about as precise as a sneeze.

She did not let it go without thinking.

She breathed in. She set her feet at shoulder width. She tried, as she had been trying for the past three weeks, to think of her right shoulder as a fixed point. A hinge. The thing everything else swung around.

She let the Wave go.

It hit the reinforced concrete training wall with a crack that rang through the empty gym and came back at her in a diminished echo. She stumbled two steps to the left—better than last week, when she'd gone down entirely—and caught herself with one foot before she fell.

"Your h-hip broke from your stance too early."

She turned around.

Izuku was standing near the door with his bag still over one shoulder and his notebook already open. He was looking at the spot on the floor where she'd been standing with the expression she'd come to recognize—the one where his eyes went slightly inward and the pen began moving before he was consciously aware of it. Like his hand and his brain had developed a private working relationship that didn't require the rest of him to be consulted.

He had, she noted, come in without knocking. That was new. Last week he'd knocked, which she still found funny—it was a gym, not a bedroom, there was no door that constituted a personal boundary in any meaningful sense. But she'd watched him do it and hadn't said anything, because she understood, the way you understand things about people who tell you things indirectly, that knocking meant something to him.

Not knocking meant something different.

"My hip... broke early," she repeated.

"Yeah. Y-You're compensating through the hip instead of the shoulder now. Which is better than leading with the shoulder on the wrong side, but—" He crossed the gym to her in a few quick strides and crouched near the floor, squinting at the scuff mark her right foot had left in the dust near the baseline. "You shifted your w-weight before the Wave fully released. So it's still pulling left. Just later in the sequence."

"That's a more subtle problem than the last one."

"Yeah." He looked up at her. He was still crouched, notebook balanced on one knee, pen moving. "Progress."

She tilted her head. "That's your version of congratulations? You've gotten so bold lately, Kouhai~"

"That's—I mean." He stood, slightly flushed. "You should feel good about it. The hip compensation is what you do when you've solved the shoulder problem, and your body's trying to fill the gap. It means the s-shoulder is actually working. So. Congratulations. On creating a new problem because you fixed the first one. You're making such incredible progress."

She laughed. He blinked at her, like he wasn't sure whether he'd said something funny or not.

"Okay," she said, turning back to her position. "What do I do with the hip?"

WAVE MOTION ANALYSIS — TRAINING NOTES — SESSION 4

Hip compensation: weight transferring through left hip at approximately 70% of full Wave release. Origin of problem: shoulder anchor (right) is holding, which is progress, but now the body is searching for a new release valve for the lateral pressure. It found the hip.

Working theory: Wave Motion's output is consistent—the body wants to equalize. Every time we solve one compensation point, the energy finds somewhere else to express itself. This is actually a standard biomechanics problem and not unique to emission-type quirks. The solution might not be technical. It might be postural.

Question: can she learn to treat the Wave's lateral pressure as part of the output rather than something to correct for? If she thinks of the leftward pull as directional information instead of a mistake, can she use it?

Need to think about this more.

Side note: She laughed at the thing I said about creating a new problem. I don't know if it was funny. I was being accurate. I'll think about it later.

Her laugh has become my favourite song.

Now it was Thursday, and the clubroom was quiet, and the fluorescent overhead light buzzed faintly at a frequency that Izuku had stopped noticing three weeks ago.

"The problem," Nejire said, from her side of the two pushed-together desks, "is that the Wave doesn't feel like it's going left. It feels like it's going straight."

"That's proprioception." Izuku didn't look up from his notes. 

He had two notebooks open: his primary analysis volume and a new, thinner one specifically for Wave Motion. He was cross-referencing a section on emission quirk mechanics he'd transcribed from a sports medicine journal he'd found in the library.

"Your body's map of itself doesn't match what's actually happening. Which makes sense—y-you've been compensating since you were a kid. The compensation feels like neutral."

"So I don't even know when it's happening."

"Not reliably. Yet." He turned the sports medicine notebook toward her and tapped a diagram of a figure mid-rotation. "This is a description of the same problem in pitchers. Their arm does something mechanically wrong that produces consistent results, so they never correct it, and then they have to unlearn a t-throw they've been doing for a decade."

She leaned over the desk to look at the diagram. She smelled like shampoo and the faint metallic-clean smell of the gym that she apparently hadn't been able to wash fully out of her hair yet. Izuku noted this fact and then immediately redirected his attention to the diagram.

"The solution in pitchers," he continued, at a slightly faster pace than strictly necessary, "is external feedback. Because proprioception is internal and compromised, you need something outside your own body to tell you what's actually happening. That's—that's what I'm trying to be, when I call it out. But calling it out after the fact means you've already fired the Wave. By then it's too late."

Nejire looked at the diagram for a moment longer. Then she sat back and looked at him.

"When we are training, is there anyway you can be a little louder?" 

He blinked. "Pardon?"

"You call it out, but you call it out after. And your voice—" She made a small, affectionate gesture with her hand. "You go quiet when you're concentrating. I can't always hear you across the gym."

"Oh." He looked down at the notebook. "Sorry. I'll—I can be louder."

"Don't apologize, just be louder." She tapped her own notebook. "And tell me before. Like, if you can see me shifting weight too early, say something before I fire. Give me something to correct in real time."

"The timing window for that is really narrow."

"I know. But—" She shrugged with one shoulder, lightly, the way she did when she was certain about something and didn't feel the need to argue it extensively. "I trust your timing."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. We can try it Friday."

She smiled and went back to her notebook, and Izuku looked at the sports medicine diagram for a moment without reading it.

"Also... I just want to hear your cute voice~" 

If you hadn't known any better, you might think Izuku to be a tomato, rather than a human. Perhaps that was his true quirk all along. 

On Friday, the gym was warm again—warmer than Tuesday, because the heating system in the east wing had finally been fixed, or possibly because of something Izuku didn't want to think about too carefully. He stood ten feet to the right of Nejire's usual position, near enough to see the details of her form, far enough to observe the full arc of the Wave.

"R-Ready?" she called.

"Ready."

She set her feet. He watched her exhale slowly and felt the change in the room the way you feel a shift in atmospheric pressure—not the Wave itself, not yet, but the gathering of it. The moment before.

Her left hip started to rotate forward.

"Hip," he said. Loud. Clear. The word arrived at her before the movement completed.

She adjusted. The hip stilled. The rotation found its axis elsewhere.

The Wave left her and crossed the gym and hit the far wall with a crack that was clean and straight, and the echo came back without the lateralized warble that had been present in every previous session. A pure return. Like the room itself had decided to cooperate.

Nejire stumbled forward one step, caught herself, and stood very still for a moment.

Then she said, quietly, "That was different."

"Yeah," Izuku said. He realized he'd taken several steps forward without noticing. His pen was moving. "The trailing edge—"

"I felt it." She turned around, and her face had the quality it got when something had clicked—open, slightly stunned, still processing. "I actually felt it go straight. I could feel the difference."

"Because the hip held. The left side of the Wave didn't lose momentum relative to the right, so—"

"No, I mean—" She pressed one hand to her sternum. "Here. It felt different here. Like—when it goes crooked, there's this resistance right at the moment of release, like something catching. And just now there wasn't."

Izuku stopped writing.

He looked at her hand on her sternum and then at his notebook and then back at her.

"That's incredible," he said slowly. If you can feel the resistance—"

"Then I don't need you to tell me beforehand." She dropped her hand. Her eyes were bright. "I can feel when it's about to catch. I just never—I always assumed that was just what it felt like. I didn't know it was something wrong."

He was writing. Fast, cramped, the handwriting that appeared when his brain was working faster than his hand. "So the proprioceptive problem isn't total. You have internal information about the moment of compensation—you just didn't have the framework to know what it was telling you."

"Right."

"Which means—"

"I can do this myself." She said it with a sudden, wide grin. "Once I know what I'm feeling for."

He looked up from the notebook and found her already looking at him, grinning, and something in his chest did a thing he didn't examine too closely. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, you can."

She turned back to her position.

"Again," she said.

In the corner of the page, he wrote something small. 

Nejire's smile of triumph is brighter than the sun.

She fired eight more times that session. Five of them were clean.

The other three—she felt the catch and told him about it afterward, and they stood over his notebook and reconstructed what had happened, and he drew diagrams, and she asked questions that were always more precise than he expected, and he answered them and she immediately asked follow-up questions, and he answered those too, and by the time they left the gym it was twenty past five and Izuku had filled four more pages and his hand ached pleasantly from the writing.

"Why are you using two notebooks now?" she asked, on the way back up the corridor.

"Oh—this one—" He held up the thinner one. "Is just for Wave Motion. And this one—" The worn primary volume. "Is everything else. Analysis on other people's quirks, things I see, and questions I want to follow up on. I had to split them up because your entry was getting too long."

She leaned slightly sideways to look at the spine of the primary volume. He resisted the instinct to pull it away.

He looked away, embarrassed. "Y-you don't think it's w-weird, do you?" 

She beamed. He did his best not to melt in place. "Definitely not! I think it's incredible. You're only a first year, yet you're so..."

"Strange? O-Obessive?" 

"...intelligent and kind."

This girl. 

"So, for your main notebook, you're on volume eight? When did you start writing them?" 

She began to float alongside him, instead of just in place. The manifestation of their hard work showing itself without intention.

"I started early," he said, which was technically accurate.

"How early?"

"I was... F-Five." He tucked both notebooks back into his bag. "I couldn't write properly yet, so it was mostly drawings. The analysis was not rigorous. Or existent.  It was mostly just hard-to-see All Might murals."

She laughed. He'd been expecting her to say something about how many notebooks that was, which was the response he usually got when he mentioned the volumes. She didn't. She just laughed, warm and easy, the way she laughed at things she genuinely found charming rather than funny.

"I want to see the drawings sometime," she said.

"You really don't."

To his right, her fingers tugged his sleeve. "I really do."

He was smiling before he'd registered the decision to smile. He looked at the floor of the corridor and let it happen.

The following Wednesday, it rained.

The rain made the gym windows fog at the corners and lent the whole session a slightly different quality—the light was grey instead of amber, the sound of the Wave hit the walls differently in the changed air pressure, and Nejire came in slightly damp across the shoulders because she'd crossed the courtyard without an umbrella.

"Your h-hair's wet," Izuku said, trying his best not to stare at the way it highlighted her features in ways his mind had a hard time suppressing. 

"I know," she said, cheerfully. "I hate umbrellas."

"C-can I ask w-why?"

"They take up too much hand." She twisted her hair out from under her collar and pulled it forward in a small, impractical ponytail. "I'd rather just be wet."

He considered this. "That's... a t-terrible reason."

"It's a consistent reason."

"Consistency doesn't make it less terrible."

She pointed at him. "You really are getting bolder."

He opened his notebook and looked at it. "I don't know what you mean."

"You bantered with me."

He had, he realized. He thought about this briefly and decided it didn't require a response. He uncapped his pen.

She laughed at him—not meanly, never meanly; there was a particular quality to the way Nejire laughed at things, which was that it always sounded like she was inviting you to find them funny too, rather than pointing out something you should be embarrassed by. He was still adjusting to it. But adjusting, he noticed. 

"This is horrible. Where did my cute nevous Kouhai disspear too~~!" 

This was the first time that someone had ever called him horrible in a way that made his face flush red. She was teasing him. 

A girl was teasing him without being mean. 

But he buried his head back into the pages. But not before writing another small note. She is playfully teasing me. What does this mean? 

 They worked for forty minutes before she hit a new problem.

She was mid-sequence on a sweep maneuver—broader arc, more lateral spread, the new technique they'd been developing out of the hip correction—when something misfired. The Wave left her at the wrong angle, and the backlash was sharper than expected, and she spun forty-five degrees and went down hard on one knee.

"Nejire." He was across the gym before he'd consciously decided to move. He crouched at her side with his hand half-extended—not quite touching, hovering. "Are you—"

"I'm fine." She was already pushing herself back to her feet, brushing her knee off. "Knee's okay. What did I do?"

"You—" He stood, scanned his memory of what he'd seen. "You started the sweep arc before the Wave had fully gathered. It was released partway through the arc instead of at the beginning, so the angle was—"

"Off by about some degrees, yeah." She rolled her knee experimentally. "I felt that. It was like trying to throw something before you've finished winding up."

"Exactly." He wrote it down. "The sweep needs a longer gather time than the direct burst. Your instinct is still timed for the burst."

"Muscle memory."

"Yeah."

She looked at the far wall. Calculating something. He waited.

"What if I change the cue?" she said.

"The... cue?"

"Right now, the cue for release is momentum—like, the feeling of the arc starting. What if I tie the release to something longer? Something I have to wait for?"

He thought about it. "Like a breath cycle?"

"Maybe." She tried the position again, not firing, just running through the motion. "What's long enough? A full inhale?"

"Full inhale, then release at the start of the exhale. That gives you—" He counted. "Three, maybe four seconds of gather time. For a sweep, that should be close."

Her body fell over his. She used his back as support. 

He lit up like a flare in the dead of night.

She acted like it was no big deal, eventually rolling off.

"Okay!" She began to float again. "Let's try that again." 

Izuku was already writing and trying not to look like he wanted to take a victory lap around the gym. 

SESSION 6 — SWEEP MANEUVER

Breath-cycle release timing: confirmed effective. Gather time ~3.5 seconds on average. Wave arc covers approximately 70° lateral spread at the current power level. Left-corner and right-corner impacts within 15cm of each other—effectively symmetrical.

Notable: the sweep is a fundamentally different tool from the burst. The burst is a precise force. The sweep is an area denial. Nejire hasn't fully processed this yet—she's still thinking of the sweep as a wide burst. But if she starts thinking about it differently, the applications change significantly.

Her hair whips around, catching the light everytime she spins. God, she's so beatiful-

"What are you writing?" she asked, appearing at his shoulder.

He snapped the notebook shut. Fast.

She looked at the closed notebook. Then at his face.

"Nothing," he said.

"Sure," she said.

"It was just—"

"Mm-hm."

"Observations."

"Mm-hm."

He looked at the window of the loner club room. It was still raining. "T-T-The sweep is ready to integrate into full sequences," he said, at a volume and pace that firmly suggested he considered this topic change decisive.

She sat on the edge of the nearest desk. "How do you mean?"

He opened the correct notebook—the Wave Motion one, not the other one—and turned it so she could see. "Right now you've been working on individual techniques in isolation. But what makes Wave Motion at its best is what happens between techniques. The transitions." He pointed to a rough timing diagram he'd drawn earlier in the week. "The burst is immediate but the sweep is three-and-a-half seconds. If you're mixing them in a sequence, you need to manage that timing gap."

She pulled her own notebook from her bag and cross-referenced something. "So if I do a burst first and then go into a sweep—"

"Three seconds is forever." He circled the gap on the timing diagram. "In any real application, you'd need to either fill that time or control your position so you're not exposed during the gather phase. Which means footwork. Which means movement. Which means—"

"Oh." She looked at the diagram. "Oh, the whole mobility thing."

"Yeah."

She leaned in further over the notebook, and her hair fell forward across her cheek. Izuku kept his eyes on the diagram with the focused determination of someone choosing not to look at anything else.

"What if the movement is the gather?" she said. "Like—I use the three seconds to reposition. I'm not just standing there waiting. I'm using the gathering as travel time."

He was quiet for a moment, genuinely thinking.

"That could work," he said slowly. "If the gather can happen during movement — if it's not position-dependent—then the three seconds become useful instead of vulnerable."

"It's not position-dependent. I think." She stood up from the desk and moved to the center of the gym floor, notebook open in one hand. "The gathering starts when I decide it starts. As long as I'm not actively firing, it builds whether I'm moving or not." She paced experimentally, still holding the notebook. "Yeah. Yeah, I can feel it building when I walk."

"Walk to the far wall," he said.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Just walk?"

"Walk, gather, and fire at the far wall when you arrive. Let the travel be the gathering."

She looked at him for a moment—that look she had, the one that meant she was assessing something quickly and thoroughly. Then she turned and walked toward the far wall, loose and unhurried. At ten feet out, she fired.

Clean arc. Both corners. Marginally—marginally—cleaner than the static version, because the slight forward momentum in her hips was, accidentally, correcting for the old compensation pattern.

She turned around with the same look she'd had after the hip correction. The open, slightly stunned one. The one that meant something had happened that she needed a moment to believe.

"I went faster, and it was better?"

"Your forward momentum was compensating for the hip drift," he said. He was writing so fast that the letters were barely recognizable. "Nejire, this is—the movement isn't just filling the gap, it's actively improving the output. If this holds—"

"The whole sequence changes." She crossed back toward him. "If movement improves it, then the ideal isn't to be still. The ideal is to be moving between every technique."

"Constant mobility."

"Constant mobility." She looked at his notebook over his shoulder. She was close enough that he was aware of the warmth of her presence in the way you're aware of a fire—not uncomfortable, just there, the temperature changed. "Write that down."

"I am writing it down."

"Write it bigger."

He wrote CONSTANT MOBILITY in letters slightly larger than his normal hand.

"Happy?" he said.

"Thrilled!" she jumped.

Two weeks passed.

The sessions accumulated. He had finished updating volume eight, while the dedicated volume for Nejire grew denser. A vocabulary emerged between them, a shorthand that had developed out of repeated use: the catch meant the proprioceptive feedback before a misfire. The gap was the sweep's gather phase. Forward bias was what they called the slight improvement in her output when she was moving rather than static. They used these terms without explanation now, mid-session, and the session would continue without breaking stride.

Izuku stopped apologizing for his observations.

This happened gradually, the way temperature changes—no single moment he could point to, just a general drift. He'd apologized twice in session four when he'd interrupted her mid-sequence to correct something. He'd apologized once in session five. By session six he'd stopped mid-apology and looked at his notebook and continued with the correction without finishing the sentence, which Nejire had noted silently and said nothing about, because she'd learned that noting things aloud too soon caused him to fold back into himself.

By session eight, he called corrections across the gym at full volume, immediately, without preamble, and didn't apologize afterward.

She considered this an unqualified success.

"Shoulder," he called.

She adjusted.

"Better. Again."

She fired. Clean.

"Again."

She fired. 

The Wave hit the wall, and the return echo came back straight.

"I know." She turned back toward him, still walking. "I felt it come off clean."

"The catch has been absent for the last three reps."

"I know that too." She passed him and turned to set up her next position. "It's like I'm getting more reliable internal feedback."

He contemplated something for a moment. "Hmm. That does seem consistent with what the sports medicine notes said about retraining timescales."

"How long did those say?"

"Four to six weeks for a basic motor pattern correction."

She looked at him over her shoulder. "So I'm on schedule."

"You're on schedule." He paused. "Actually, you're ahead of schedule. The sports medicine study was measuring competitive athletes doing deliberate retraining with a coach. You're doing this with a—" He stopped.

She waited.

"With me," he finished, quieter.

She turned fully to face him. "And?"

"And I'm not a coach. I'm just—" He made a vague gesture with the pen. "Keeping notes."

She tilted her head at him. "Izuku."

"What?"

"You're the only coach I want."

He opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at the notebook.

"Well then, what are we waiting for?" He feigned indifference despite his skipping more than a few beats. "Ready?" 

"Ready."

SESSION 9 — GENERAL NOTES

Arc consistency: 7 of 8 reps produced target-quality output. One deviation, caught by Nejire. internally before firing, corrected in pre-release phase. External correction from me: zero times required.

This is significant. She's operating independently now. The proprioceptive framework is stable enough that she doesn't need my call-outs for quality control. My role in sessions is shifting—less correction, more sequencing, more strategy.

Application notes: the burst-sweep-burst sequence works at full tempo. Gap management via forward bias confirmed across three consecutive run-throughs. Total sequence time: approximately twelve seconds for full rotation.

Twelve seconds is still long for any real application scenario. Discussed this. Her response: "I'll get faster." I believe her.

I believe her about most things she says, I've noticed.

If she told me she was from Mars, I'd believe her. 

If she said blue was green, I'd trust her without hesitation.

She's the human incarnation of radiance and grace.

I'll burn this page later.

[Please don't burn this page]

They had a disagreement on a Thursday.

It was a minor disagreement—the kind that existed entirely on a technical level and had no emotional content whatsoever, except that by the time it had been going on for twenty minutes, it had developed a certain heat that was probably not purely technical.

The question was her ability to float during combat.

Nejire could, under ideal conditions, achieve a sustained hover—Wave Motion directed downward in controlled pulses, giving her effective levitation for short durations. She'd been doing it instinctively since middle school. It was flashy, powerful, and according to Izuku's analysis, deeply inefficient. She had even begun to float instead of walk, when her instincts took over. 

"You're losing twenty percent of your potential output to maintaining altitude," he said. "Every unit of energy you put into the float is not available for your offensive or defensive techniques."

"I know that," she said. "I've always known that."

"So—"

"So the float isn't about power efficiency."

"Then what's it about?"

She leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. "Positioning. If I'm on the ground, I'm in the same plane as everything else. If I'm in the air, I can—" She spread her hands upward, a gesture that clearly indicated something spatial she didn't have words for. "I can choose where I am. I can put myself above a problem and look at it differently."

Izuku's pen was still. He was looking at her with the slightly-inward expression.

"That's not inefficiency," she said. "That's a trade-off. I spend power on altitude to gain options. The analysis looks like waste if you're only counting offensive output."

The pen was still for another moment.

Then he wrote something.

"You're right," he said.

She blinked. She'd been prepared for more argument. "I'm—"

"You're right. I was measuring the float against a metric that assumes offensive output is the primary goal. But if the goal is positional advantage, the efficiency calculation is different." He was writing, but slower than usual—the way he wrote when he was reconstructing something rather than recording something. "I've been modelling your quirk like it's a weapon. It's not only a weapon."

"No," she agreed. "It's not."

"I'm sorry."

She gripped his arm. "Don't apologize for doing nothing wrong. You're just trying to help." 

So much for his first argument with a friend. 

He looked at what he'd written. "The float creates a third dimension of movement. Ground-based opponents can't easily track vertical repositioning. You can fire from positions they can't reach. The power cost is real, but it's buying—" He searched for the word. "Geometry."

"Geometry," she repeated. She liked that. "I like that you—" She looked for the right words. "You take it seriously. My quirk. You treat it like something worth understanding."

He was quiet.

"It is worth understanding," he said, after a moment. "It's extraordinary."

"Wave Motion?"

He didn't answer right away. He was looking at the notebook. "Yeah," he said, at last. "Wave Motion."

Something about the way he said it made her decide to look out the window rather than at his face.

"Maybe not just wave motion." 

Her heart did a flip..

The gym was amber again, because the weather had cleared, and Nejire was airborne.

Not high—four feet off the ground, hovering at the edge of the float's efficient range—but in the air, and from the air she was a different entity entirely. Izuku had seen her work from the ground for weeks now and had built a detailed, careful model of her patterns. Aerial Nejire was operating from a different set of rules. Her balance shifted, her whole axis reoriented, and the Wave didn't have a floor or a wall to define its relationship to—it had open space, and it responded to open space differently.

"Burst from altitude," he called.

She fired. The Wave sheeted downward at an angle and impacted the floor in a spreading arc that covered three times the surface area of the ground-level version.

Izuku stared at his notebook.

He stared at the impact mark on the floor.

He stared back at his notebook.

"That's..." he started.

"Different from the ground version," she said, from four feet up. She drifted forward slightly, examining the floor impact. "The angle changes everything. From the ground, you're fighting the floor. From up here it's all open."

"The dispersal pattern is completely different." He was moving across the floor, measuring the radius of the impact arc with his steps. "Fourteen feet across at least. From the ground, you get nine, nine-and-a-half. The altitude is—" He stopped. Looked up at her floating at eye level. "Nejire."

"Yeah?"

"I was so wrong. The float isn't a power cost. It's a multiplier."

She looked at him. Then at the floor. Then back at him.

"Oh?" she said. "That's quite the switch-up, isn't it?" 

"The trade-off isn't efficiency for position. The altitude changes the mechanics of the output. You're not losing power to the float and spending the remainder on technique. You're spending power on the float and getting more out of the technique than you would on the ground." He was writing. Fast. "The geometry isn't just spatial. It's mechanical. The angle of emission from elevation means the Wave interacts with more surface area, which means—"

"More effect per unit of output," she finished.

"Which means your actual efficiency while floating might be—"

"Net positive." She descended, landing light as a question. "So every time I've been treating the float as a last resort because it costs too much power—"

"You may have been leaving your most efficient mode unused."

She stood in front of him with her arms loose at her sides and looked at him with the open, stunned expression. The one that meant she needed a moment.

"You're telling me I've been using my quirk wrong for my whole life," she said.

"You've been using it in a suboptimal mode," he said, carefully. "That's different. Everything you've done has worked. You've gotten remarkably far on ground-level technique alone."

"But."

"But." He looked at the floor impact mark. "Aerial is where your ceiling actually is."

Silence. The gym hummed faintly with the heating.

Then she laughed. The big one, the whole-face one that started in her eyes.

"I can't believe," she said, "I've been landing this whole time."

"I can't believe I thought it was something else." 

He couldn't even do the one thing he was good at properly. 

Stupid Deku.

After that, things accelerated.

Not because anything changed structurally—the sessions were still the same, the clubroom meetings were still the same, the notebooks were still the notebooks. But something had unlocked, and the work moved faster for it. She came into the gym on Tuesdays already flight-ready, already thinking about angles and surfaces and how to use the space above her. He came in with new diagrams, new questions, new things he'd read the night before that he wanted to test.

The conversation had expanded too.

It had always been conversation—from the very beginning, the sessions had never been silent, never purely transactional. She talked constantly, and he listened constantly and then gradually, by some process neither of them could have exactly described, he'd started talking back. First about the work. Then about adjacent things. Then, about things that were further away from the work.

The last session of the month was on a Friday, clear and cold, the amber light coming in low and sharp from the winter sun.

She'd made a decision somewhere in the week between sessions that she didn't explain to him and didn't need to—he saw it in the way she stepped onto the gym floor and simply went up, easy and natural, like someone who had finally stopped apologizing for the way their body preferred to be. Four feet. Six. She drifted toward the center of the gym at a height that put the top of the far wall in her sightline.

He stood below and to the right of her and opened the notebook.

"Let's try that sequence," he said.

She ran the burst-sweep-burst sequence from altitude.

The first burst sheeted down and out and covered the floor in the wide pattern they'd documented two sessions ago. The sweep came out of the burst's recoil, using the momentum of her slight drift forward—the gather built during two steps of aerial movement, just as they'd designed it. The second burst came from the swept position and hit the corner wall at precisely the calculated angle.

Three techniques. Twelve seconds. Clean, clean, clean.

She descended slowly and looked at him.

He was staring at the impact marks on the floor and the wall.

"Izuku."

He looked up. He had the expression—the one where his brain had been somewhere else and his face was slightly behind it. But underneath the processing look there was something else. Something uncomplicated and bright.

"That was it!" he was practically jumping in place. Excitement buzzing through every word. 

"Yeah?" She floated down. An odd look crossed her features. 

"That was the whole sequence. Every element is clean. The timing—" He looked at his notes. "Eleven seconds. You shaved a second off the gather!"

"The movement's getting more automatic." She rolled her shoulder. "I'm not thinking about the gathering consciously anymore. It's starting to just happen."

"That's the recalibration consolidating." He was writing. "It's yours now. It's not a correction anymore, it's just how you move."

She looked at him. The amber light was behind him, and it caught the edges of his notebook pages and turned them gold.

"Notebook check," she said.

He blinked at her. It was something she said at the end of sessions sometimes—a ritual they hadn't formally agreed on, but that had become expected. He showed her the Wave Motion notebook, open to that session's page.

She read the notes. The diagrams. The numbers, the observations, the timings. He was always careful to hold the book in odd ways in order to block the small, personal comments that he made with his fingers. 

But he had been clumsy today, and she grabbed the notebook from his hands without permission.

"Helping her is the best part of my day-" 

She spoke at the words. Then, she looked up at him.

He'd already realized what she was reading. His ears had gone slightly pink.

"That... wasn't m-meant to be on the formal notes page," he said.

"But it is," she said. "You wrote it right there." 

"I wrote it without—I was thinking about something else, and it came out, and I should—"

"Don't cross it out."

He stopped.

She handed the notebook back.

He looked at the words on the page and then at her and then at the window and back at the notebook. The amber light lay across the floorboards between them in long rectangles.

"Okay," he said. Quietly. Not quite a question.

"Okay," she agreed.

Outside, the light was beginning to fail—the brief winter afternoon fading into the soft blue-grey of early evening. The far wall had three overlapping impact marks on it, and the floor had two more, and the notebooks between them had more pages than she could count, and neither of them made any particular move to leave.

The school yard was half-buried in the kind of wet, heavy snow that arrived in late January without warning and stayed too long—packed against the walls and piled along the fence in dingy grey ridges, worn flat where students had been crossing it all morning. Most people were eating inside. 

The cold had cleared the yard down to stragglers.  A cluster of second-years near the gym doors, two girls sharing an umbrella by the bicycle racks, and the specific solitude of someone who had learned, years ago, that eating outside was safer than eating inside.

Izuku had changed spots since the last incident, opting instead to sit on the concrete steps at the side entrance that faced away from the majority of the yard. Most kids remained indoors during the winter, so most days he went unnoticed. 

Like most lunch breaks these days, he had Nejire's volume spread open across his knee. 

He'd been working yet another variation of the lift equation through third period as well—in the margins of his math notes, small enough to look like working if anyone glanced over. He'd gotten somewhere new around the second hour of history class, a modification to the pulse frequency he hadn't tried yet, and he wanted to get the working down properly while it was still fresh.

He pressed his pen flat against the page and traced the curve of the interval graph, checking the logic of it.

If the float's efficiency is positional—if altitude multiplies output rather than reducing it—then the energy spent per pulse doesn't need to increase at the ceiling. The ceiling isn't a wall, it's a question of—but I should be sure that I don't mess it up again—

"Oi, Deku."

The words landed like a match on dry paper.

His pen stopped moving. His body, independently and without consulting him, went very still in the specific way it went still when it needed a second to process something it had already recognized as a threat.

He looked up slowly.

Katsuki Bakugo stood at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his pockets and his jaw set and his red eyes trained on Izuku with the particular focus of someone who has been looking for something and has found it. He was alone, which was unusual. Bakugo with an audience performed cruelty. Bakugo without one was something different—more direct, less theatrical, and in some ways worse.

He was also already angry, which was his default state, but there was a specific quality to this anger that Izuku recognized from long practice. It wasn't the sharp, impulsive kind that burst and subsided. It was the slower kind. The kind that had been sitting with something.

"Kacchan," Izuku said carefully.

"Don't." Bakugo's eyes dropped to the notebook on Izuku's knee, and something in his expression shifted slightly. Not softer. Sharper. The sharpness of someone arriving at a conclusion they'd been working toward. 

Izuku's hand moved, slightly, toward the notebook. He stopped himself.

"You've been running out after class," Bakugo said. It wasn't a question. "Every day. Where are you going, Deku? Why are you so goddamn eager all day. "

"That's—" He kept his voice level. "That's not your concern."

"The hell it isn't." A small explosion crackled between his fingers, reflexive, the physical expression of the thought he hadn't finished yet. "You've been different. I've noticed."

"W-why are you watching me? I thought that I was just a pebble to be k-kicked aside?"

"Oh, you are. I'm simply observant." He said it without embarrassment, which was the particular unpleasant directness that had always been Bakugo's signature. Not a threat, exactly. An observation he hadn't decided how to feel about yet. 

"But now I'm curious. You've got your head buried in that damn noteball all day. And you've been giddy." His eyes narrowed. "So, what the hell have you been doing?"

Izuku said nothing.

"Is it that girl? The one you've been lingering around. I saw your name pinned up next to hers on the club boards."

The air changed. 

Izuku realized that he had not managed to keep his face neutral with the cold clarity of something too late.

Bakugo saw it. 

The expression on his face resolved into something ugly and certain. 

"Oh," he said. "It is." 

He looked at the notebook again. Then back at Izuku. "The third-year." He said it with the tone of someone solving a simple equation. "Hado. I've seen her."

"Don't," Izuku said.

The word came out sharper than he'd intended. Bakugo's eyebrows went up half a millimetre.

"Don't what?" He was watching him now the way he watched things he didn't fully understand but intended to. "I'm just talking. What's in the notebook, Deku?"

"Nothing."

"You're holding it like it's nothing?"

"It's quirk analysis. It's what I do."

Silence.

Bakugo looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed—short, sharp, the particular laugh that meant he'd found the answer he'd been testing for. "You're doing analysis for her. You, quirkless, sitting out here in the snow writing equations for the one third-year who'll let you in the room with her." He shook his head. "That is pathetic, Deku. Even by your standard." 

"She asked me to help her train." His voice had gone steady in a way that sometimes happened when something past a certain threshold was being threatened—a quiet that was not calm but its opposite. "I'm good at it. She knows I'm good at it."

"She's using you and you're just eating it all up cuz she's showing you a little attention."

"She's not."

"A girl like that has nothing to gain from a quirkless—"

"She told me I was ahead of any coach she'd ever had." The words came out with a flatness that surprised him. "She said I changed how she understood her own quirk. She said that." He looked at Bakugo steadily. "So don't tell me what she gets from it. I know I'm not useless. Not to her, anyway."

Something moved across Bakugo's face. Not the reaction Izuku had been expecting—not escalation, not immediate contempt. Something more complicated. Something that looked, briefly, almost like being caught off guard.

Then it closed.

"Give me the notebook," Bakugo said.

"No."

"I'm not asking, Deku."

"I know you're not." Izuku held the notebook. His hands had gone white-knuckled around the cover and he was aware of this and didn't move. "I'm telling you no."

For a moment, they were just looking at each other.

Then Bakugo came up the steps.

Izuku moved—he'd been expecting it and moved fast, body first, but Bakugo was faster and bigger and had been waiting for him to move, and when his hand closed around Izuku's arm and twisted, the momentum of Izuku's own motion worked against him and they went down the steps together into the snow.

The impact was sideways and hard, the wet cold of it immediate through his uniform jacket. He lost his grip on the notebook and it skidded three feet across the packed ice of the yard.

He scrambled after it.

Bakugo let him get close.

His hand came down on the notebook first—palm flat, weight behind it, pinning it to the ground with the easy authority of someone who knows how this ends. His fingers closed around the spine.

"Let go," Izuku said. He had both hands on the notebook. His knees were in the snow. "Kacchan, let go of it—why are you so insistent—"

An explosion went off directly in front of his face.

The shockwave snapped his head back and the heat of it scored his cheek in a white-bright line, and he let go. Not a decision. His hands opened on reflex, the way hands open when the instruction comes from somewhere deeper and older than thought.

He hit the snow on his back.

For a second the sky above him was a flat, white-grey morning sky, and the cold was in his hair, and he could smell the particular acrid smell of the after-blast—the specific smell that had been part of his life for as long as he could remember, that meant Kacchan is angry at you specifically, and which he had never entirely learned to brace against.

He sat up.

Bakugo had the notebook.

He was standing three feet away in the snow, the notebook open in one hand, flipping pages with the other with the same brutal carelessness of someone who has never once been taught to handle things gently. His jacket was dusted with snow and his expression was back to the analytical one, the one that meant he was reading.

"Stop," Izuku said. His voice came thin. "Please stop."

Bakugo turned a page. His eyes moved across it. He said nothing.

"Kacchan—"

"You did this?" He held the notebook up slightly, the page facing Izuku. The lift equation. The diagram from session eight. "You worked this out yourself?"

The question was genuine. That was the thing about Bakugo that nobody who hadn't grown up next to him would ever quite understand—the genuine moments were in there, irregular and disorienting, surfacing through the rest of it. He was actually looking at the work. Actually reading it.

"Yes," Izuku said.

Bakugo looked at the page for another moment. Something in his jaw shifted. "It's good."

The acknowledgment landed strangely. It always did. Izuku had spent years understanding that Bakugo saying something was good was not the same as it being safe.

"Then give it back," he said.

Bakugo turned another page.

He was in the margin section now. Izuku knew the progression of the notebook—knew exactly where the analysis ended and the other things began, the private things, the things he'd written in the small hours when he'd stopped pretending it was all professional and let himself be honest in the only place he could afford to be.

"Kacchan—"

Bakugo read aloud.

"She filled the whole room with her. I don't mean literally. I mean she changed the temperature of it. Like the room was one thing before she was paying attention and a different thing after."

His voice was not mocking, at first. That was the worst part. He read with the flat, factual tone of someone reading something they are genuinely trying to understand, which meant the words arrived with full weight, unmediated, and what the words said was.

"I have never been in a room with someone and felt like the room was better for it."

A pause.

"God, she's so beautiful."

Another pause. 

"I think I might like her, but-" 

Bakugo stopped.

The school yard was very quiet. The girls by the bicycle rack had moved on. The second-years near the gym were inside now. There was nothing between them and the white-grey sky and the snow and the words still in the air.

Bakugo looked at him.

Izuku looked back at him. His face was doing nothing. He had locked it down the way he locked things down when they were past a certain point, the specific stillness of someone who has been here before and knows the only way through is through.

"So this  is what you've been doing," Bakugo said. Very quietly. "You've been sitting in that room with her—"

"Give me the notebook."

"—writing this heart-eyed slop."

"Give it back." 

Izuku reached, desperate.

Bakugo's palm cracked outward hit Izuku square in the jaw. A right hook with his free hand. Izuku fumbled back into place, beneath the person he had once named a friend.

Bakugo looked at the open notebook in his hand.

Then, with the methodical patience that was somehow worse than rage—a patient cruelty, deliberate in the way of something that has decided—he turned to the first page.

"No," Izuku said.

The first page came out.

Izuku lunged. Bakugo's hand shot out, palm warning him back with a crackle of heat, and Izuku froze with the threat of it in his face, and in that frozen second the second page came out.

"Stop—please."

The third. The fourth.

"Please, Kacchan, please—"

Bakugo tore with the same flat, focused attention he brought to everything he committed to. Page after page, unhurried, letting each one fall to the snow. He was not looking at Izuku. He was looking at the notebook, moving through it methodically, and the pages came loose one by one and settled on the grey-white ground between them.

The lift equation. He watched it go.

Session four's diagram. He watched it go.

He watched the margin note go—watched the specific page, the one that said she isn't nothing to me, she's the furthest possible thing from nothing, watched it leave Bakugo's fingers and spin once in the cold air before it landed face-up on the snow, his own handwriting looking back at him, dark against white.

He was on his knees.

He hadn't made the decision to be on his knees. His legs had simply arrived at this conclusion without him, the way the shaking was arriving now, starting in his hands and working inward, and he was in the snow looking at the remains of three weeks of late nights and the pages were settling around him and he could smell the blast residue and his cheek still stung where the heat had caught it and he was looking at his own handwriting in the snow.

Bakugo dropped the cover.

It landed on top of the pile. Intact, the way it always was—the cover was the last thing, the marker.

The yard was very quiet.

Bakugo stood over him and said nothing for a moment. His hands were at his sides. 

"Word around school is that she's strong as it is. She's probably going to UA or some big-shot school next year," Bakugo said, finally. His voice was quieter than it had been. Not gentle. Just quiet. "You know that, right? She's going to UA, and you're going to have to wait two years, only to end up rejected all the same."

Izuku looked at the snow.

"Whatever this is." Bakugo gestured, once, at the pages around Izuku's knees. "It ends at graduation. You know it ends at graduation."

"I know," Izuku said.

The words came out very small.

"Then what are you doing?" Not cruel, this time. Something rawer than cruel. "What are you doing, Deku? Fuck, I'm probably doing you a favour by ripping your heart out before she has the chance to stop all over it."

Izuku had no answer for this. He had answers for a lot of things. He had been building answers all his life—for every argument against him, every closed door, every equation that didn't work out. He had a philosophy of limitation and he had built it carefully and he had tried, since December, to believe that it might be wrong.

He had no answer for what are you doing.

Bakugo looked at him for another moment. Then he turned and walked away, back toward the main building, hands in his pockets, and the snow crunched under his shoes, and the yard was empty again.

Izuku knelt in the snow and looked at the pages.

At his feet lay the remants of a dream. 

Torn up infront of him again, powerless to stop it. 

He gathered them up the way you gather things that are broken—not sorting, not looking at them, just collecting, the physical motion of it, something to do with his hands. He got them all. He got the margin note, his handwriting face-up in the snow, and he put it in with the rest.

He stood, torn pages in hand. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last. 

His uniform was wet through at the knees. His cheek stung. His hands were shaking and cold.

He went inside.

The bathroom at the end of the second-floor east corridor was the one nobody used after noon.

He had catalogued every bathroom in the school the way he catalogued things that were relevant to his daily survival—which ones were trafficked, which ones were avoided, which ones had lock latches that actually worked. This one was near the old science storage rooms that had been unused since the renovation, and the fluorescent tube in the third fixture had been flickering for a semester and nobody had replaced it, and the result was a slightly irregular light and a room that most people found uncomfortable to stand in.

Izuku found it fine.

He stood at the sink and ran cold water over his knuckles and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink, taking stock.

The cheek was the worst of it—a red line from the edge of the blast, not burned, not blistered, but raw enough to be visible and to sting in the specific way that things stung when the heat had been very close. It would be less obvious by tomorrow. He'd had worse and had learned, by necessity, how to judge the graduation between bad and visible.

This was visible.

He cupped water in his hands and pressed it against his cheek and held it there.

His uniform jacket had soot on the left shoulder, grey-black and faint but present, the kind that didn't come out with water and would require actual laundry before it stopped being obvious. He had a spare at home. He tried to remember if his mother had washed it yet and couldn't.

He stopped working at the soot after is was clear it was not coming off.

At some point, hands on either side of the sink and looked at himself in the uneven, flickering light.

In his bag, the torn pages of were bundled inside the cover. He'd put them in carefully, not because it mattered—they were torn, the carefulness was for nothing—but because he hadn't known what else to do with his hands while his brain was still doing the thing it did after Bakugo. The specific processing delay. The way it took time to arrive back at himself after an encounter with someone who had known him since before he'd known himself and who had used every piece of that knowledge to take him apart.

She's going to UA next year. You know that, right? 

He pressed his hands harder against the sink.

He had known this. He had known it since the beginning—it was one of the first things he'd understood about the situation, one of the first calculations he'd done. Third-year. Different school next year. The season of this was always going to be finite, and he'd known it, and he had found, apparently, that knowing a thing and having it said aloud in a school yard by Bakugo specifically were not the same experience.

Whatever this is. It ends at graduation.

The flickering light caught the edge of the mirror and gave him back a version of his face that was slightly uneven, slightly wrong. Red-lined cheek. Wet hair from where he'd splashed water. The expression of someone who had been holding something up for a long time and was very tired.

He thought about the equation.

The lift modification—the one he'd been working through third period, the pulse frequency variant. He could remember most of it. The logic had been sound. He could reconstruct the working from the bones of it, given an hour and a new notebook, and he could bring it to the gym at four-fifteen and show her, and they could test it on Friday, and the session would go the way sessions went, and then she would go home and he would go home and that would be another day.

What are you doing, Deku.

He put his forehead against the mirror.

The glass was cold.

He stayed like that for a while.

All of it was too much.

Nejire Hado sat alone at the back of the Loner Club.

The room was exactly as it always was—the frosted windows, the waxed floors, the two desks she'd pushed together at the window that were now simply their desks, the green chalkboard with the club's name in her own handwriting. Everything where it should be.

Everything except him.

She was not looking at anything. Her gaze had drifted to the grey clouds through the frosted glass somewhere around four-twenty, and she'd let them hold it because it was easier to look at clouds than to look at the clock. Looking at the clock required acknowledging what the clock said. The clouds just sat there, indifferent and unhurried, and asked nothing of her.

The clock ticked.

She was aware of it. The seconds accumulating, each one a small weight added to the pile she was refusing to acknowledge.

She picked up history notebook.

She put the notebook away.

The quiet of the room was a different kind of quiet than it used to be. Two months ago, this was just the loner club's quiet—the quiet of a space that belonged to nobody, ambient and empty and uncomplicated. She'd sat in this quiet for a school year and a half and never found it lacking, because she was good at being alone in the way that people who are comfortable with themselves are good at it.

He's fine, she told herself. He probably got held up. He's probably in the corridor right now.

She believed this with decreasing conviction.

She turned this over in her mind the way you turn a stone to see what's under it.

Over time, she noticed things about Izuku Midoriya that she hadn't mentioned because they felt like his to keep until he chose otherwise.

The way he always took the long route to the gym, avoiding the main corridors during transition times. The way he flinched, sometimes, at sounds from outside the clubroom door.

She hadn't pushed. She'd decided to let him come to her, because she could see that he was someone who needed to know a door was safe before he'd walk through it. She'd tried to make the door look safe.

But now she was sitting in the loner club at four forty-seven, and the door was still closed, and the question she didn't want to look at directly was sitting in her peripheral vision, getting harder to ignore.

What if this time it isn't just held up?

She pressed her face down against the desk. The wood was cool against her forehead.

What if I scared him off? The thought arrived with a specific, sinking quality, the feeling of a thing you've been trying not to think, finally making it past the perimeter. What if I pushed too hard? Was it last night? I was talking about how it feels to fly for an hour. Was that it? Was it too much? Did I—

"I'm sorry," she said, quietly, to the empty room. "Please come back."

The words sat in the air.

The clock ticked. Time moved, crawling with the turning of the second hand. Worry built with each rotation of the minute hand.

Anxiety intertwined with her soul.

She thought about everything she'd been looking forward to telling him today. Some odd things about her quirk, other things about how she had discovered a new manga that was super duper interesting.

She'd been looking forward to it all day.

Stop it, she told herself. You don't know anything yet. Maybe-

The hinges creaked in the same way they always did.

Her neck snapped up.

The door opened slowly, like it weighed more than it should.

He came back. The relief was physical, immediate, dissolving the tightness in her chest so fast she felt slightly light-headed with it. He came back, he actually came back, I was overreacting, he's—

She looked at him.

The word that came out of her was not the word she'd planned.

"What the fuck—"

He was soaking wet. Not from rain—it was the middle of winter. His uniform was saturated from the collar down, water still dripping from his hair onto the waxed floor, each drop a small sound in the quiet room. His blazer clung to his arms. There was water on his eyelashes. And his face—a bruise blooming along the left side of his jaw, still fresh enough to be at the red-purple stage. Soot dusting along the left shoulder, grey-black and smeared like someone had tried and failed to clean it. His skin was pink, with peeling around the creases of his usually smooth features.

"H-hey," he said. The smile was in place. "Sorry, I'm late."

She stopped in front of him.

The smile did not reach anything above his mouth.

"What happened."Not a question. The kind of statement that means I'm not moving until you tell me.

"Oh—I, um. I fell." He made a vague gesture. "Into the sink. I know it sounds—"

"Izuku."

He stopped. The way she spoke his name no longer sounded sweet.

"I'm not going to believe that." She kept her voice level. She was doing the thing she'd learned to do in situations that required her to function—keeping the loudest part of herself quiet, because sometimes noise was not what was needed. "Look at me and tell me that again."

He didn't look at her.

His gaze dropped to the floor.

And that was when she saw his hands, loose at his sides, and what they were holding. Or what remained of it.

The notebook. Her notebook.

Except—not. Not the notebook. The cover of the notebook, and a sheaf of torn pages bundled inside it, crumpled and damp at the corners. She recognized the cover instantly, having seen it every session for weeks.

It was the notebook he had bought to help her. For her. Because that was the kind of person he was.

Her chest did something that wasn't quite describable.

She looked at the torn pages in his hands. She looked at his face. She looked at the bruise on his jaw and the water in his hair and the smile that was still there on his mouth like a flag planted in hostile territory, stubborn and increasingly alone.

"Izuku," she said, and her voice came out different this time. Softer. "What happened?"

Something in his face moved.

It was small—just a shift, a microscopic change in the set of his eyes—but she saw it. She had been watching his face for weeks without letting herself acknowledge how carefully she'd been doing it, and she saw it clearly. The agony behind the smile, showing itself just for a second before he could get it back under control.

His throat moved.

"I—" he started.

Then his legs folded.

She moved fast—she was in front of him and then she was beside him and then she was on her knees on the floor next to him, and he was on his knees too, the torn pages of scattered between them, and his shoulders were shaking, and the smile was gone because he didn't have anything left to hold it up with.

"I can't," he said. The words came out frayed at the edges. "I'm sorry. He tore it up. I spent so long—I lost so much sleep—and he tore it like it was nothing. Garbage."

She pulled his head close to her chest. Not a concious descition, more a reflex to help someone who meant so much to her. Maybe pulling him closer to her heart was her own way of messaging that. Not that he would notice through freshly spilt tears that stained her uniform.

"I just... wanted to be useful for once."

"You're so useful-"

He pulled away, back falling against the wood. Nejire had barely registered how cold the room suddenly felt.

"He read it," he said. Very quietly. "He read the parts I wrote about you in the margin notes. Out loud. Things I never wanted to be seen."

The room was very quiet.

"Izuku," she said.

He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the floor, and his shoulders were still shaking, and his hands were white-knuckled around the ruined notebook cover.

"I know how it sounds," he said, voice barely audible. "I know I shouldn't have written—I know you don't think of me like that, I know you're not—I know I'm not—I was just, it was late and I was working and I thought it was safe to write it down because I wasn't going to—" He stopped again. Swallowed hard. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I know it's weird, I know it must be strange that I even—I don't expect you to—you don't have to say anything about it, I just—"

"Izuku."

"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, I'll go—"

"Izuku." Her hand found his wrist.

He went still. The shaking in his shoulders slowed.

She waited until she was sure he could hear her.

"You don't get to apologize for that," she said. "Not the notebook. Not the—not any of what you wrote. You don't owe me an apology for any of that."

He was looking at her hand on his wrist.

"I need you to listen to me," she said. "Can you do that?"

A pause. A very small nod.

She gathered herself. She thought about what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it, because this was one of those moments where the wrong words would do damage that the right words couldn't undo, and she wanted to get it right.

She put the pieces together as she talked.

"You have spent weeks," she said, "coming here. Working on this." She gestured at the notebook pages on the floor between them. "I know been staying up at night. You've been more tired lately."

His eyes widened enough to inspire hope.

"You've been thinking about my quirk when you were at home, when you had no reason to be doing that, when nobody was asking you to do that. You came up with ideas and you brought them here and you—" Her voice tightened slightly, involuntarily. "You were so careful with them. You were so careful with me."

He was very still.

"And I want to tell you," she continued, "that I know. I know how hard you worked. Maybe I didn't say it enough—maybe I didn't say it at all, and if that's true then that's something I should have done differently. But I want you to know that I see it. I've seen it every time you walked in here. Every session. Every page." She looked at the torn pages on the floor. Something moved through her chest, sharp-edged and certain. "What he did—"

Her jaw tightened. She was unsure of who this 'he' was. But it could wait.

"What he did to you today—" She stopped. Reset. "I'm going to raise hell about this. I want you to know that. I'm going to find out who it was and I'm going to—"

"Nejire—"

"I'm going to lose my mind about this in a minute, but right now I'm talking to you, so—" She took a breath. Let it out. "Right now I just need you to know that everything you did mattered. It matters. Whatever he destroyed today does not erase what you did or why you did it. You can't tear up the weeks. You can't tear up what we worked on together."

He was looking at her.

She wasn't sure when he'd looked up, but he was looking at her now, with an expression she hadn't seen on him before—something stripped down, with none of the layers he usually kept in place. Young, in the way that word means, this is what's underneath.

"You make me better," she said, simply. "At my quirk. At thinking about my quirk. At believing that my quirk is worth thinking about seriously. You did that. In—" She counted. "A few weeks, you did that. And he can tear up every notebook you've got, and it will still be true. Because it's in here." She touched her sternum. "You changed how I think. You don't get to take that back and they don't get to take it away. You came in here and changed my entire life without even trying."

The last of his held breath came out in a shudder.

She watched him try to hold himself together and watched him fail, and she did not look away from it, because she thought that looking away might mean something she didn't want it to mean. She sat on the floor of the loner club next to the boy who had been soaked and hit and had his private heart read aloud by people who found it funny, and she did not look away.

"I don't—" he started, and stopped. His voice was very rough. "I don't know why you're being this kind to me."

"Because you deserve it," she said. "And because whoever did this to you didn't give you any, and that's not something the world should just let pass."

"You don't know who did it."

"I'll figure it out." She said it with a certainty that was not performance. "And when I do, I'm going to say things that will make it very clear to them what a mistake they made. I have a very big voice and a very long memory and I'm not—" She stopped. "I'm not scared of them. However big they think they are."

Something crossed his face.

Despite everything—despite his wet uniform and his bruised jaw and the pages on the floor between them—something twitched at the corner of his mouth.

"Nejire—"

"I know. I'm going to be calm for another few minutes." She settled herself more comfortably on the floor, crossing her legs. "Talk to me. Tell me what happened."

"You don't have to—"

"I want to." She held his look. "I want to know. Not so I can be angry—although I am, I should be honest about that, I'm very angry—but because I want to know what happened to you today. Because I'm your friend." She said it plainly, without decoration. "And that's what that means."

The word—friend—did something to his expression that she couldn't entirely parse. Something that went very deep and then came back up to the surface with a different quality.

So she sat on the waxed floor of the loner club with the grey light coming through the frosted windows, and she waited, and after a long moment, he started to talk.

It came out in pieces. He told her about the school yard. The notebook. The reading aloud of things she would have been delighted to hear at another time, in spite of what could have been his embarrassment.

She listened to all of it.

When he finished, the room was quiet again. Outside, the sky through the frosted windows was the deep blue-grey of late afternoon edging toward evening.

"I was thinking," he said, "about quitting the club."

She looked at him.

"Before today," he added. "I wasn't—I'm not saying today made it worse. I was thinking about it before." He looked at the floor. "I kept thinking—what am I doing here? What am I actually giving you? I'm quirkless. I can't demonstrate anything. I can't do anything. I just stand in the corner and take notes and tell you things that any decent coach could tell you, and I kept wondering if—" He stopped. "If you were just being kind. Because that's what you do. Because you're the kind of person who's kind to things that are small and lonely and—"

"Stop." Her voice came out firm. Not unkind, but firm.

He stopped.

"That's not what this is," she said. "Listen to me very carefully. I have been training Wave Motion since I was four years old. I have had three different teachers, two physical trainers, and a quirk counselor. None of them ever told me about the hip compensation. None of them ever noticed the proprioception problem. None of them ever told me that aerial mode is mechanically superior, that the float is a multiplier and not a cost." She kept her eyes on his. "You figured that out in six weeks. By watching. By thinking." She leaned forward slightly. "That is not nothing. That is not something any decent coach would have given me. That is you. Specifically you."

He was very still.

"You asked me once if I believed in the gods," she said.

He blinked. The non-sequitur had its intended effect—she saw him recalibrate, the tears retreating slightly behind the sudden curiosity.

"Y-yeah," he said, uncertain.

"I told you I thought there might be some greater power." She tilted her head. "I've been thinking about what you said. About quirks breaking physical laws. About the way they shouldn't exist according to the rules of the universe we're supposedly in."

She reached out and picked up one of the torn pages from the floor. She held it up. His handwriting, cramped and careful, the wave-motion equation from session four. "You said it keeps you up at night."

"It does."

"Me too," she said. "Now. Because of you." She set the page down again. "Before you, I just used my quirk. I didn't think about it. I fired it and it went where it went and I worked around the problems I couldn't fix. You made me think about it. You made me think about it the way you think about things, from the inside, from first principles."

She paused. "That changed something in me. And that's not something they can tear up."

"He read them aloud, Nejire. In the yard. Where anyone could have—" He stopped. "Not that anyone was there. But anyone could have been."

"I know," she said again.

"I know you know I wrote things. I know you saw the notebook. I'm not—" He looked at the desk. "I'm not trying to make it awkward. I just want you to know that I know that he read them, so if you want to—if this changes anything, I understand."

She looked at him.

He was doing it again—the thing he did, the preemptive acceptance of a version of events that hadn't happened yet, the bracing for the outcome he'd already decided was most likely. She had grown familiar enough with this pattern to know that pushing back on it directly sometimes worked and sometimes made him fold further in, and she took a moment to consider which direction today needed.

"Izuku," she said. "Look at me. Actually look at me."

He looked up. A blue-haired angel stared back in his direction.

"Nothing is changed," she said. "I mean that precisely. Not the club. Not the work. Not—" She held his gaze. "Not anything. What he did today doesn't change any of it. Not for me."

He looked at her for a moment with the expression that meant he was deciding whether to believe something.

"He said it ends at graduation," he said.

"He's not wrong about the timeline," she said. "But that doesn't mean..."

"Yeah." He looked at the desk again. "Yeah, I know."

The cloth had warmed against his cheek. She watched him lower it.

"He also did this to you in a school yard," she said, and there was a quality in her voice that she was not completely managing, "in front of the building, in the snow, and he blasted you, and he tore up weeks of your work, and I would like you to know that I have not forgotten any of that and I will not forget any of it, and he is going to hear my very specific thoughts about his behavior at a time of my choosing."

Something twitched at the corner of Izuku's mouth.

"Nejire—"

"Not today," she said. "Today I'm here with you. But I want it on record."

His throat worked. "Don't."

It was her turn to be taken back.

 "He's... He's going to be a great hero one day. I don't want to take that away from him."

She wanted to object. To say the thing that any rational person would say. Someone like that doesn't deserve to be a hero.

But she couldn't refute him. Not when he was staring at her with such desperate emerald eyes.

"I'm going to help you rewrite the notebook," she said. "Tonight. I'll do it with you if you want, or I'll wait until you want to, but I'm telling you right now—we're going to rewrite it. Everything that was in it. You'll remember the equations, I'll remember what the sessions felt like, and we'll put it back together. Better, even. Because you've thought of new things since you wrote the old version."

He looked at her.

"You... want to rewrite it?" he said. Like the idea was something he hadn't been able to form on his own.

"I want to sit in this room with you and fill up a new notebook," she said. "Because that's what we do. And I'm not going to let some idiot with bad intentions take that from us."

The clock ticked. The light through the frosted windows was going grey-blue, the afternoon sliding toward evening.

"Okay," he said. Very quietly. "Okay."

She stood up. She extended her hand.

He looked at it. Then he took it, and she pulled him up, and they stood in the loner club with the torn pages around their feet and the light going dim, and she didn't let go of his hand right away. She gave it one firm, deliberate squeeze—the kind that means I mean what I said — and then she let go.

"Sit down," she said. "I'll find a new notebook."

He sat.

She went to her bag and found the spare spiral-bound she always kept, because she burned through notebooks at a rate that made keeping spares necessary. She brought it back and set it on the desk between them. She put her pen next to it.

He looked at the blank cover.

She watched him look at it.

Then she watched him pick up the pen.

They stayed until the janitor came.

He knocked on the open door at seven past eight and found them bent over the desk with the notebook between them. It was long past their reserved club time.

The janitor looked at the boy. At the bruise on his cheek, the soot visible on his jacket, the way he was leaning over the notebook with the expression of someone fully absorbed in something that mattered. He looked at the girl, who had her own notebook open beside the shared one and was pointing at something with her pen while the boy nodded rapidly and began writing.

"Ten minutes," the janitor said.

"Yes, sorry," Nejire said, not looking up. "Thank you."

The janitor nodded once and continued his route.

They gathered their things eleven minutes later and walked down the empty corridor together, and the school was quiet around them, and neither of them said much—the session had taken what needed to be said and turned it into something on the page, and what was left was the specific quiet of two people who have done that and are still sitting inside it.

At the school gate, she stopped.

"Izuku."

He turned.

She looked at him. The cheek was less red than it had been. The soot was still on the jacket. He was holding his bag with one hand instead of two, which she had learned was a reliable indicator of where he was.

"You should ice that properly when you get home," she said.

"I... will."

"And Izuku." She held his eyes. "What he said—about my graduation." She said it plainly, because she had thought about it for the full two hours of the session and had arrived at something she wanted to say correctly. "He's not wrong that things change. But he was telling you that to take something from you, not because he cared what happened to it. Those are different things." She paused. "The work is real. What we've done here is real. I don't want you going home tonight and deciding it isn't because he said so."

He looked at her for a long moment in the cold outside the school gate, the evening dark around them, his breath dissolving in the air.

"Okay," he said. Very quietly.

She nodded. Once, the way she nodded when something had been settled.

He began to walk one way. She began to walk in the other.  

Wave Motion — Volume 2 —  Entry 0

Pale Blue

Like the ocean's gentle waves, I admire your soul

I set sail amongst the raging waves, unyielding

Stitch by stitch, my sail is torn 

Are you my light?

Pitch Black

A storm brews, for I'm only honest when it rains 

My deck is worn, my mast is fallen 

Dear angel with the curiosity of a scholar 

I want to love you, but I'm lost at sea

Are you my siren song?

She turned back.

There was one more thing she needed him to know before she let the evening end.

"You were really brave today, Izuku."

He was looking at the ground, at the thin layer of snow that had settled on the path between the school gate and the road. His bag hung from one shoulder. He hadn't moved to leave.

"You've been saying that," he said. "You don't have to keep saying it."

"I'm not saying it to make you feel better." She kept her voice steady. "I'm saying it because it's what I observed. Those are different things."

He said nothing.

She took two steps back toward him. Slowly, the way you approached something that might startle. She put one hand on his shoulder—not the bruised side, the other one. She could feel the slight tensing of it under her palm, the reflex of someone who had learned to interpret physical contact as a precursor to something bad and was still, even now, in the middle of unlearning that.

"You've done so much," she said. "More than you know. More than I've probably told you." She thought about how to say the next part correctly. "There's a version of me that existed before December and she was—fine. But she was lonely Too scared to be who she was, for she was shunned without mercy. She told herself that was enough because it was all she knew how to want." She paused. "You changed what I know how to want. That's a significant thing. And I don't think you understand what that actually means yet."

He was still looking at the ground.

"I feel sick," he said. Very quietly.

"I know."

"When you say things like that—" He stopped. "I feel like I'm waiting for the part where it turns out not to be true."

"When have I ever told you something that wasn't true?"

Silence. The question sat in it.

"I don't know," he said, finally. "I can't think of a time."

"Then wait for that time before you decide I'm lying to you."

He didn't respond right away. She gave him the moment. She'd learned to give him his moments—the small pauses he needed to absorb things, to let the words past whatever she was starting to understand was a very practiced defence.

"There's something else," he said.

He still wasn't looking at her. His jaw had the tight set of someone preparing themselves for the delivery of information they'd rather not deliver.

"The m-margin notes," he said. "In the notebook. I know some of them... weren't about quirk mechanics." A pause. "Please don't think too much about them."

She blinked.

He said it with such careful neutrality. Please don't think too much about them. The same tone he used when he was trying very hard to have the correct reaction to something he was not managing to have the correct reaction to.

She looked at him—at the side of his face, the bruise on his cheek, the way he was holding his bag—and thought about everything she knew about how Izuku Midoriya communicated.

Indirectly, through the things he wrote at two in the morning that he assumed were private, through diagrams and margin notes and the careful architecture of a person who had learned that direct expression cost more than he could usually afford.

She had a choice here.

She could let it pass. Let him bury it the way he was already trying to bury it and get home and go to bed and let it be a thing that had almost been said and wasn't.

Or.

"If I didn't know any better," she said, lightly, "it sounds like someone might have a little crush on their senpai."

It was a small offering. Easily deflected. She set it down gently and waited to see what he did with it.

He turned his head.

He looked at her directly, which he did not always do, and his expression was not the embarrassed retreat she'd been anticipating. It was something else. The expression he wore when he had already had a conversation with himself about something and was now simply reporting the outcome.

"Yeah," he said. "I think so."

She stared at him.

He didn't look away. "I've been trying to figure out if it's something real or if it's just—I spent weeks sitting across from the most extraordinary person who has ever looked at me like I was worth looking at, and I can't fully separate those two things. But." He turned his eyes back to the ground. "Yes. Probably."

She opened her mouth.

"I'm not—I'm not telling you because I want you to do anything about it." He said it before she could speak, gently but with the firmness of someone who had rehearsed this. "I'm telling you because you were teasing me and if I'd laughed it off I would have been lying, and I've been lying by omission about this for weeks, and I'm tired. I'm just tired of knowing something and pretending I don't." He shook his head once. "We're senpai and kouhai. You're going to UA. I'm—I'm whatever I am. I know what the shape of this is. I knew when I started feeling it."

A car passed on the road beyond the gate. Its headlights moved across the snow pavement, reflecting the sheen of something temporary into the night air.

"So please don't worry about it," he said. "I'll put it somewhere and leave it there. I've been putting things places and leaving them there my whole life. I'm very good at it."

She felt, somewhere behind her sternum, the specific ache of watching someone be fluent in a skill they should never have had to develop.

I'm very good at it.

Said plainly. Not for pity. As a simple fact about himself. The same way he'd said I haven't been hugged like that before—with the tone of a person reporting a feature of their own existence that they have stopped being angry about.

"Izuku," she said.

"Please don't—"

"You say that like you never had a chance." She said it before he could redirect. "Like the outcome was already fixed before you even got to the question."

He looked at her. His brow furrowed slightly. "Wasn't it?"

"Was it?"

He opened his mouth. Closed it. "I don't—what are you—"

"What if you were wrong? What would you do then?"

He went very still.

She watched him process this. She watched the processing get stuck—the specific short-circuit of someone who had built their assumptions so deeply into the foundation of how they understood things that a single question aimed at the foundation didn't immediately register as a question. It registered as a malfunction.

"I'd pinch myself," he said, slowly. "To make sure I was awake. Because that's not—that doesn't happen to me. Things like that don't happen to people like me. That's a story that exists for other people and I watched enough of it growing up to know I'm not the kind of person it happens to—"

She stepped forward and pinched his arm. Hard. The skin between her fingers went red immediately and he recoiled with a sound that was half-pain and half-pure-shock, grabbing the spot, eyes suddenly wet at the corners from the involuntary sting of it.

"That—that hurt—"

"Well? Are you awake?" 

He looked at her. His eyes were bright from the shock of the pain, and she was close now, close enough that he would be able to see that her eyes were also doing something, the very beginning of something she hadn't given herself permission to do yet but which was apparently happening anyway.

His mouth opened.

"That was—I said hypothetically—"

She pinched him again. The same spot.

He made a sound of pure, undignified anguish. "—okay, why do you keep—"

"Because you keep telling yourself a story about what's possible," she said, "and the story is wrong, and I'm trying to interrupt it."

He stared at her.

She closed the remaining distance between them and put her arms around him.

He stopped breathing.

She could feel it—the absolute halt of him, the full-body suspension of a person who had walked into something their nervous system had no category for. She held on. She kept her arms around him and she did not let go and she waited, because she had learned by now that Izuku Midoriya required patience at the threshold of anything good. That he needed a moment to believe that good things did not require a catch.

His hands were at his sides. Then his arms, slowly, came up. Tentative. The way you touched something you were afraid of breaking, or afraid of having taken away.

When they separated, she stepped back and looked at him.

He had both hands raised slightly, hovering near where they'd been against her back, like he hadn't fully instructed them to stop yet. His face was wet in the way faces got when you hadn't noticed you were crying until someone else could see it. He looked at his own fingers with an expression of complete bewilderment, the way you looked at evidence of a thing that didn't fit the theory you'd been working from.

He touched his cheek. Looked at his hand. Back at her.

"I didn't know I was doing that," he said. Very softly.

She looked at him—at all of him, at the wet uniform and the healed cheek and the tears he hadn't known were happening and the hands that still didn't know what to do with themselves —and she thought about the boy who had walked into her empty clubroom in December with his notebooks and his questions and his particular, careful way of making people feel like the room was organized around them.

She grabbed his face between her hands. Both palms against his cheeks, which pulled a startled sound out of him and made his eyes go very wide and direct, giving her his complete and undivided attention, which was what she required.

"Your confession," she said, looking at him squarely, "was the most depressing thing I have ever heard in my life."

His mouth moved. "I—"

"You told me you'd made your peace with it. You used the words destined to be alone. You thanked me, in advance, for getting over your own feelings." She watched his expression. "Do you understand how upsetting that is? From the outside?"

He looked like he was reassessing something.

"I—hadn't thought about it from—"

"You didn't think about it at all. You just surrendered." She kept her eyes on his. "That is not allowed. You do not get to surrender things before they've been properly fought for. That is a rule I'm introducing right now."

His face, between her hands, had gone an extraordinary colour.

She turned in place, hair fluttering in the sputtering evening wind.

"You never know. Maybe your senpai likes you back. You shouldn't give up before you try... I mean, what would All Might think?"

"Nejire—"

"Tomorrow," she said. "Six o'clock. Meet me at the school doors. You're taking me on a date, and you're going to figure out where between now and then, and you're not going to spend the intervening hours convincing yourself that I don't mean it."

"I — a date—"

"A date." She released his face. "Because you are allowed to have things, Izuku. That's also a rule I'm introducing."

She stepped back and picked up her bag strap.

The road stretched out ahead of her in the evening dark, the streetlights doing what streetlights did, the city going about its ordinary indifferent business around the specific improbable fact of this moment. She started walking.

"Don't be late." 

She left him there.  Heart stammering in his hands, face flushed, world spinning.

He could only watch as she fell away, jaw hanging on the floor, his mind long past whatever torment had been placed upon him that day.

With one fell swoop, Nejire Hado had changed his entire life once again.

It was something only a girl like her could do.

And she seemed to do it whenever she could. 

Chapter Text

Nejire stood outside the door to her house and simply breathed.

The cold was deep tonight—the kind that pressed itself against your face and demanded to be acknowledged rather than managed. Her breath came out in small dissolving clouds. She watched them go and did not move.

The Hado residence occupied the end of a quiet street in the nicest part of the neighbourhood, set back from the road behind a low stone wall and a garden her mother maintained with the same enthusiastic imprecision she brought to most things—flowers planted in careful patterns tracing along a winding stone path to the front door.

In summer, the garden was riotous with life and floral colour.

But deep into January, it was bare and skeletal, the pruned branches of a plum tree reaching upward against the dark sky, and the stone path was faintly dusted with snow that hadn't been swept since yesterday.

The house itself was large, like those built to impress, but over the years of actual habitation, it had become something warmer and less architectural.

Pale render, dark wood accents, two stories with a wide engawa, where her father sat on in summer evenings, now empty and slightly frosted. Windows that her mother had hung things in front of without much concern for how they looked from the outside. A wind chime by the front door, still in the windless night. A small potted pine on the step with a lean to it that had never been corrected.

From inside, warm light. The amber glow of a house where people were still awake.

She checked the time.

Nine forty-two.

She stood on the stone path for another moment, adjusting the strap of her bag, and looked at the front door with the expression of someone arriving at a decision they have already made.

She breathed in, breathed out, and went inside.

The entry hall received her with its smell—hinoki wood and the lingering warmth of dinner and the particular dryness of a house that kept its heating on generously. The shoe rack beside the door had long since exceeded its original capacity and spilled sideways into a secondary arrangement. Her mother's shoes occupied three times the space that logic would suggest.

She had barely finished removing her own shoes when the sitting room door slid open.

Her father filled the doorframe.

Kenji Hado was tall and broad-shouldered, with the build of someone who had been seriously athletic in his youth and had maintained most of it into his mid-forties through discipline rather than vanity.

His hair was dark with silver beginning at the temples, cut short and kept neat. He had a strong jaw and his daughter's eyes—that particular shade of periwinkle blue, clear and direct, though where hers moved with restless curiosity, his rested with the measured assessment of a man accustomed to taking the measure of things before speaking about them.

He was in his house clothes—the grey sweater and the reading glasses pushed up on his forehead in the manner of a man who had been reading for a while. He was holding a mug of tea, but no steam rose from it. The tea had clearly gone cold some time ago.

He looked at her with a careful, measured glance. Not something she was used to, in the rare circumstances where it had occurred before. She had never quite figured out how to look unremarkable under it.

"It's nearly ten o'clock," he said.

His voice was level. Kenji did not raise his voice at her. He didn't need to—the weight of his attention did the work that volume would have done in a different person, and because he so rarely deployed it with any force, when he did, it arrived fully.

"I know," she said. "I'm sorry, Papa."

"The sun set at six-twenty."

"I know."

He looked at her for another moment. Then something in his posture settled—the particular easing of a man who has been holding a tension and has now, with evidence, been given permission to put it down. He stepped back from the doorframe. "Come in. Sit down."

The sitting room was warm and familiar and arranged in the way that meant it had been a full day in it—the comfortable, accumulated disorder of a house genuinely lived in. The good sofa with the throw blanket on the armchair that had never, in Nejire's living memory, been folded. Books displaced from their shelves and left open on side tables. The small grate with the evening's fire burned down to a steady orange. The framed print on the wall that her mother had hung slightly crooked five years ago and that her father had straightened so many times that there was now a faint smudge on the wall beside it from his thumb.

Her mother was on the sofa.

Satsuki Hado was small—significantly smaller than her husband, smaller than her daughter, who had already outgrown her by a comfortable margin—with the compact, energetic quality of someone who generated more force per square centimetre than was strictly warranted.

She was pretty in a way that made heads turn on a swivel, and she wore it with the complete unconscious ease of someone who had never given it much thought. Her honey-brown hair was cut to her shoulders and was currently somewhat escaping its arrangement. The yellow cardigan she wore in the evenings was slightly loose at the shoulder from hours of wear.

She looked up when Nejire came in, and her expression moved through several things quickly before settling somewhere careful and warm.

Nejire sat on the sofa. Her mother settled beside her.

"Are you all right?" her mother said. First thing, before the curfew.

"I'm fine." She meant it. "Something kept me after. I should have called."

"Yes," her father said, from the armchair where he had returned with his cold tea. "You should have." Not sharp—the weight of a man who had been pacing the mental equivalent of this room for two hours and was only now able to put the pacing down. "Are you hurt?"

"No, Papa. I'm fine. A friend needed help. I stayed." She looked at her hands. "I'm sorry."

He nodded once—the nod that settled things—and reached for his book.

"Are you hungry? There's rice still in the pot."

"I'm fine, thank you." She stood. "...I should do homework."

"Of course." Her mother's voice was entirely neutral, which was its own kind of information.

"Goodnight, Papa."

Her father made a sound that was half acknowledgment, and half the specific paternal frequency of you will explain this to me eventually.

But he put up no fight as she turned toward the staircase.

Her room was at the end of the upper hallway—the smallest one, but with the best view of the garden, which she absolutely adored.

She sat at the desk and opened her notebook for her introduction to calculus.

On the page were eloquently written equations she had been learning on her own time, trying to keep up with Izuku's rigorous research into the matter. Specifically, time-based derivatives of lift and energy conversion equations.

She also had the new equation that Izuku had worked out tonight in the rewriting—better than the original because he had thought of three new things in the time since he'd first written it, and the new version had his handwriting in it and also hers, interleaved on the same page the way their contributions had been appearing in the notebook for weeks.

Nejire looked at the page.

She was not, she realized, thinking about the equations. Instead, her mind lingered on the very same boy who had been impossible to get out of her head. The very same boy she had just asked out on a date.

The very same boy who had changed her life within the span of a few short weeks.

Calloused fingers gently traced alongside the work that he had done.

Before she’s able to collect herself in order to write anything, a gentle knock emanates from around her room. It's the soft kind—one that asks rather than announces.

Nejire stared at the door for two long minutes before another knock came.

"Come in," she finally spoke. Surprised at the croak of her own voice.

Her mother entered with two cups of tea carried in one hand, the practiced grip of someone who had been performing this specific act of care for long enough that it had become economic.

“Hey there,” she said, “care for some tea?”

She set one on the corner of the desk without further comment and settled on the edge of the bed as she always did—feet tucked up beneath her, the yellow cardigan loose at the shoulder, entirely at home.

She held her tea in both hands.

She looked at Nejire.

She did not say anything for a moment. Her mother's silences were not absent—they were pointed, the particular silence of someone who had arrived somewhere and was making it comfortable for you to arrive too, setting out the furniture of the conversation before anyone had to commit to sitting down.

"You've been different lately," she said.

Nejire looked at her tea.

Steam rose from this cup. The steam swirled gently in the air before disappearing into nothingness. "How do you mean?"

"Since December." Her mother tilted her head—her own gesture, the one Nejire had inherited so completely that she sometimes caught herself doing it mid-sentence. "You come with a smile. You hum in the kitchen sometimes. Last week, I passed your room at eleven, and you were asleep at your desk—" A small pause, a smile contained in it. "But you were smiling."

Nejire looked at the notebook on the desk.

"I suppose I've been sleeping well," she said.

"Mm."

The fire was only a sound from downstairs now, faint through the floor. Outside the window, the plum tree was bare and still against the dark.

"My dear," her mother said. "I was not born yesterday."

Nejire said nothing.

"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, either." She looked at her daughter with the clear, unfeigned warmth that was her specific frequency of love. "There's a boy, isn't there?"

It arrived with the gentle certainty of something that had already been established and was now simply being confirmed.

Nejire looked at the notebook. At the interleaved handwriting on the open page.

His and hers.

"Yes," she said.

Her mother made a sound that was warm and entirely unsurprised—the sound of something expected finally arriving. "You remind me much of myself when I first met your father. It’s like staring into a distant memory."

She settled more comfortably on the edge of the bed. "So…tell me about him, would you?"

Nejire turned her chair to face her mother and drew her knees up to her chest.

They mimicked each other in their vulnerable moments. A learned behaviour that survived the years without turmoil.

The younger of the Hado women was quiet for a moment, finding where to start.

"...His name is Izuku Midoriya," she said. "He's a first-year. He joined the loner club in December. He's a shy, nervous boy.” She paused.

"He does hero analysis. Notebooks—he numbers them, he calls them volumes. He's on volume eight. He started when he was five. The early ones are mostly drawings." She looked at her knees. “He told me that, but then he looked like he regretted telling me. He's careful about what he lets people see."

"Why does he need to be careful?" her mother said.

Nejire was quiet for a moment. "He's had to be," she said. "For a long time."

Her mother absorbed the statement without pressing it.

“I can’t tell you why, but he started helping me with Wave Motion," Nejire continued. "He noticed things—I don't mean he was helpful, I mean he saw things that nobody had ever seen. He looked for six weeks and found the hip compensation that's been in my form since I was four." She shook her head. "He explained it in the language of sports medicine research before breaking it down further for me to understand, despite being his senior."

She fiddled with her thumbs. "...He also never gets the look."

Her mother tilted her head. "The look?"

"The one where someone has heard enough. The small eye roll, followed by the faint breath, means they're being patient." She pressed her thumb against her fingertip. "He doesn't have it. He has the opposite of it. He has the look of someone who is afraid I might stop."

Her mother was very still.

"He works on my training," Nejire said. "Not because I asked for more than I asked for. I asked for help with one specific problem, and he went home and filled half a notebook. He ended up creating a volume just for me."

The gentle dusting of red that fell upon her cheeks was swallowed by the limelight.

"He stays up late, learning for my sake. I know because the handwriting gets smaller when he's tired, the margins fill up with side thoughts he doesn't mean to write." She paused. "He does it because that's who he is. His brain finds a problem and wants to solve it. When the problem is mine, he works harder than he works on anything else."

"How do you know the difference?" her mother said.

"Because I've seen both notebooks," Nejire said. "His general analysis volume and the Wave Motion one. The Wave Motion one is denser. More margin notes. The handwriting loses its control more often, which means he's more absorbed." She looked at the notebook on her desk. "He works harder for me than for anything else. I can see it in the ink. In the way his hands are covered in smudges, and how his middle finger is always red from the pressure of the pen."

Her mother's expression had settled into something quiet and certain.

"Nejire," she said.

She looked up.

"It sounds like the boy is infatuated with you."

Nejire looked at the notebook.

"Yes," she said.

Her mother let this sit for a moment. The house had gone quiet around them, the faint warmth of the downstairs fire still present through the floor.

"I'm glad," her mother said. "Genuinely. You're adept at being alone, I know that. But being good at something and wanting it are not the same thing." She held her daughter's gaze. "It sounds like someone reminded you of the difference."

Nejire felt the sentence land precisely in the place it was aimed.

"Yes," she said. "That's—yes."

Her mother gave her a moment of silence.

"Tell me the rest."

Nejire looked at her.

"There's more," her mother said. "I can see it."

A pause. Nejire looked at the window. At the dark garden. At the bare branches.

"He had a difficult day today," she said. "A bully. His notebook was taken. Torn up." She pressed her fingers flat against the desk. "He came to the club room with a smile on his face that was made entirely of glass—" She stopped. "I've never seen someone work that hard to be just fine. And then he wasn't. We stayed. I helped him fix what was broken. And when we left, I told him at the gate that what we'd done together was real and that nothing could take that away."

She paused. "And then I told him things I'd been meaning to tell him for a while. " Another pause. "And… then I asked him on a date."

Her mother's expression was very carefully doing nothing.

"You asked him on a date," she said.

"Yes."

"After a confession on his part?"

Nejire looked at her sharply.

"I'm inferring," her mother said, with the particular serenity of someone who infers correctly on a regular basis. "He told you how he felt."

"He said he'd already made his peace with being alone," Nejire said. "He said I shouldn't worry because he'd get over it." She looked at her hands.

Her mother was quiet.

"I pinched him first," Nejire said, fully embarrassed. "Twice. Because he said it felt like a dream.

Her mother pressed her lips together very firmly. "And then asked him on a date."

"Yes. Tomorrow. Six o'clock, school doors. He has until then to figure out where he's taking me."

Her mother set her tea down.

She looked at her daughter for a long moment.

"He sounds wonderful," she said. Simply. "What you've described—the questions, the answering, the work he does for you without being asked—that's not nothing. That's the kind of thing you hold onto." She held her daughter's gaze with the directness she reserved for things she wanted to be heard clearly. "You should not let something like this go. Not without knowing what it is."

Nejire was quiet.

"But," her mother said.

"There it is," Nejire said.

"But." Her mother's voice was even. "You're fifteen years old, Nejire. Three months from an entrance exam for a program that will define the next several years of your life. And you are standing at the beginning of something with a boy who is—from everything you've described—someone who will require a great deal of you. Not deliberately. Not as a demand. Simply because caring about someone the way you're already caring about this one takes something of you, and that something doesn't come from nowhere."

She let the sentence settle.

"I'm not telling you not to go," she said. "I'll cover for you—I'll tell your father you're going for extra tutoring tomorrow night. But you will be home by nine-thirty, and we will not discuss the specifics."

She paused. "But I need you to keep everything in the back of your mind. The exam. Your training. The future you have been working toward." She held Nejire's eyes. "The feeling is real. He sounds real. Just make sure you take both things seriously, not only the one that feels better right now."

Nejire was quiet for a moment.

"He wants to be a hero," she said. "That's why all the notebooks. All the analysis. He wants to be a hero."

Something moved through her mother's expression—brief, careful, and the particular movement of someone who has arrived at a thought and is deciding how much of it to give.

"Then you have something in common," she said. "And something to protect in each other." She tilted her head. "That's a better foundation than most."

She grabbed Nejire’s face with a gentle hand, lifting her chin and running her thumb along a dried streak of tears. “Good grief, you’re growing up so fast.”

Then, the older woman stood with the easy motion she always had.

"Go to bed at a reasonable hour," she said. "And Nejire."

She looked up.

"Never forget that it takes a tremendous amount of courage to speak your heart," her mother said. "Especially someone you're afraid of losing." She paused.

"...Some people never manage it."

She left.

The door clicked.

Nejire sat in the lamplight.

She thought about a boy who had told her the truth about how he felt, his voice sounding as if he were filing a report.

She thought about her mother's face when she said he wants to be a hero—that careful movement, the thought decided against. She had not been able to name it at the time. Sitting here now, alone, she thought she could.

I never told her that he's quirkless. What would she say then?

Sleep hadn't come until deep into the night.

She spotted him from twenty feet away.

He was standing at the school gate in civilian clothes, looking in the wrong direction—turned toward the road rather than toward the path she always came down, which meant he had been waiting long enough to start convincing himself she was coming from somewhere else.

His hands were buried in the pockets of a dark green jacket that was slightly too large for him, the kind that had been bought with the optimism of growth not yet arrived at, the sleeves coming down past his wrists when his arms hung straight.

His posture had the precise, effortful quality of someone who was extremely nervous and had decided that the best available response to extreme nervousness was to stop moving entirely.

He had combed his hair. She could tell because several pieces had already staged a full revolt against whatever effort he'd made and were going their own way above the rest, which was, she had decided some time ago, simply the natural state of his hair regardless of intervention.

She walked up behind him. He heard her at about three feet out and turned, and his expression went through several things in rapid sequence—relief, embarrassment at having been caught looking the wrong direction, and something more complicated that settled, eventually, into a smile that didn't quite fit any of the standard categories.

"Hi," she said.

"H-hi."

She waited.

The oak trees along the campus perimeter were bare and skeletal against the pale winter sky, their branches moving in the slow way of things that are not quite windless, a kind of ambient restlessness. The cold pressed against her face with the honest persistence it had maintained for weeks.

Izuku took a breath.

"S-skating," he said.

She considered this. "Skating?"

"Skating."

"Hmm." She tucked her hands into her coat pockets. "Do you know how to skate, Izuku?"

A pause. Then, with a smile that did not exactly inspire confidence, "B-barely."

"That's a very bold choice for a first date."

The smile flickered. "O-oh. Should I have—I can change it. There are other options; I made a list of—"

"Stop," she said.

He stopped.

"You picked it. Be sure about it." She tilted her head. "Take me there."

He drew a breath. Set his jaw. Then he turned to her and held out his hand—gloved, slightly too large in the palm—and arranged his face into the most theatrical expression she had seen on him: a goofy, overblown grin with his chin slightly raised, something that had clearly come from a manga or an old film.

"S-shall we go, my fairest lady?"

A laugh escaped her before she could contain it—genuine, from the chest. "Izuku. That's a little too confident—"

But he held it. The smile wavered at the edges, but he held the hand, posture, and theatrical dignity. "C-come now," he said. "We shall not miss the carriage."

She was laughing into the cold air, her breath coming in quick, dissolving clouds.

That's so corny. That is objectively, genuinely, and completely corny.

...And also, somehow, impossibly, a little bit adorable.

She stepped forward and wrapped both hands around his outstretched arm and pressed herself against his side—a decision she had made without formally making it. "Well, of course, my dearest prince."

His face went the colour of the postboxes at the end of her street.

She could feel him tense and then very carefully not move, and she thought: he is aware of exactly where my arm is, and he is thinking extremely loudly about it.

She held on anyway, and they walked like that the whole way to the station.

He was muttering.

Not about anything she could make out—low-level vocalization, several incomplete sentences, and at least one very emphatic internal correction. She walked beside him and let the muttering happen and felt, to her own surprise, entirely content.

The streets near the school were quiet at this hour on a Saturday—a woman walking a dog, a couple coming out of a convenience store with coffee cups, the bright windows of shops passing in sequence. Their breath made small clouds. Their footsteps made the particular sound of boots on cold pavement.

The oak trees gave way to a stretch of road without trees and then a crossing before the station entrance.

On the train, she released his arm.

He folded into the seat beside her with the specific relief of someone whose nervous system had been operating at capacity and had been permitted to stand down. Then she grabbed both of his cheeks.

"C-COLD—!!"

She laughed. A few passengers looked up. She didn't particularly mind. "Shhh."

He clapped both hands over his mouth. "O-oops," he said, muffled.

She patted his hair, which had already fully reverted to its natural state; the combing had apparently been a temporary condition. "I suppose that my noble prince is still a little shy at heart~"

He lowered his hands slowly, the embarrassment in full display. "S-sorry. I don't know what came over me."

She smiled.

The smile was its own thing—genuine, unheld, the kind that happened before the decision to smile. She watched the effect of it on him with a specific private warmth: the way his expression stilled, almost imperceptibly, as though the smile were something he was registering in a place below language.

"It's okay," she said. "I like shy boys, too."

He turned toward her. She could see something building in the way his shoulders suddenly rose up.

"...You're so b-beautiful, Nejire. Sorry, I didn't say it when you first s-showed up."

It was her turn. The heat arrived in her face before she'd finished processing the sentence. She ran her hand through her hair—pinned up today, cut to a short bob that had been swaying around her jaw since she was twelve and that she had never seriously considered changing. "G-geez. You can't just say that."

"Why not?" The question was genuine.

"Because you're supposed to—there's a build-up to it. You don't just—"

"After last night," he said, a clenched fist sat in his lap. "I think we're past building up."

She looked at him.

He was right. That was the particularly annoying thing—he was exactly right, and he knew he was right, and the slight uncertainty in his expression was not about whether he was right but about whether saying so was allowed.

She looked out the window. "Fine," she said. "You... also look nice today. The jacket is good."

"It was my dad's," he said.

"Well, I think it looks good on you."

A beat. "Thank you," he said. Very quietly.

The city moved past the window. She was aware of him beside her—the warmth of him, the specific fact of his presence, the way the carriage felt different with him in it than it would have felt with anyone else.

A hollow pit opened within the depths of her stomach. She was thinking about something she didn't want to be thinking about.

It had arrived mid-sentence—An image, quick and precise. The school yard, the pages on the snow, the mathematics of it. The specific gap between what Izuku had and what the thing he was trying to do would require.

If he can't stand up to a bully—

She pressed her thumbnail against her finger.

She did not finish the thought. She could see it from the outside—the shape of it, the trajectory—and she put it down the way you put down something that is not the right moment. Not because it wasn't worth thinking about. Because there was a time for that thought, and this was not the time.

Her mind really liked to impose itself on quiet moments without permission.

Izuku, from her peripheral vision, was watching.

"N-Nejire? Is something wrong? You just went quiet."

She turned back to him. "Nothing," she said. "I'm just thinking."

She meant it. It was just a thought.

He looked at her for a moment—and then, with the particular grace he sometimes had, he accepted it without pushing.

"The rink," he said, finding the thread again. "Outdoor. It's a new place—it hasn't gotten much traction yet, so it should be quiet."

"Good," she said. "I don't like crowds when I'm doing something badly."

"I t-thought you said you could skate."

"I can skate. It's just been a few years, and I also don't have them with me, so we're both relying on rentals, which is an entirely different beast."

"R-Right! But the rink does have rentals," he said, with the sudden confidence of someone who has researched this specifically. "I checked."

She smiled.

They arrived without having recovered the warmth of the arm-walk, and neither of them mentioned that there had been anything to recover.

The rink was carved from the empty lot behind a glass-fronted city building—the building itself dark for the weekend, serving now only as a windbreak on the northern side. Strings of warm-white lights ran between wooden posts driven into the surrounding concrete, close enough to the ice that their reflection stretched and shimmered in the fresh surface. A Zamboni sat parked at the near end with its engine off, having recently passed—the ice was still slightly glossy with the new water layer, almost luminescent under the lights.

There was no one else on it.

Almost no one anywhere. A couple was visible through the chain-link at the far end, walking past without stopping. The city beyond the rink was present in a muffled way, the particular compression of urban sound in deep winter that made everything feel farther away than it was. Above, the sky had the quality it got when the cold was deepest—very dark, very clear at the edges, the moon partially obscured by a thick, slow-moving bank of cloud that had been building since the afternoon.

Nejire stood at the edge and looked at it.

The ice, the lights, the darkness beyond the lights. The stillness of it.

"You picked a beautiful place," she said.

Beside her, Izuku was wiggling his toes inside his rental skates with the expression of someone taking inventory. "I d-did my best. Given the constraints."

"I didn't give you much time."

He scratched at the back of his neck. "If you'd given me more, I would have just spent more time panicking. It balances out." He looked at the ice. Then at her. "Even the i-idea of a date with you stirs me up."

"Is that so?" she said.

"Still waiting for this dream to end, if I'm honest."

She turned to look at him, and he saw it coming—his arm came up reflexively—but she only pinched him through the thick sleeve of his jacket, which barely registered as a sensation.

Emerald eyes met periwinkle.

"Still think it's a dream?" she said.

He held her gaze for a moment—the expression that was not quite any of the catalogued ones—something without a label.

"No," he said. Quietly. “But it’s still a fantasy.”

She held his gaze a moment longer. Then she stepped onto the ice.

The blade met the surface with a faint, clean sound. She pushed forward slightly, testing the particular balance point coming back to her, the micro-adjustments of ankle and shin and hip that you forgot you knew until your feet reminded you. She turned back and held out her hand.

He looked at it. Then at the ice. Then at her hand again.

“Come, my dear prince. Our voyage awaits.”

He flinched before reaching forward. “You’re not going to let that go anytime soon, a-are you?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

His hand found hers, so he took it—and stepped.

The first blade touched down cleanly. A small, cautious sound.

The second blade followed.

For approximately half a second, physics held.

Then it did not.

His feet went in two different directions simultaneously, his arms deployed in the instinctive windmill of someone trying to locate their centre of gravity after it has abandoned them without notice, and he went down—sideways and fully, not a controlled descent but the genuine article—and she went with him, pulled by the hand she was still holding, landing on top of him with considerably less grace than she would have preferred.

The ice was cold and hard, and they were both on it.

She pushed herself up on her hands and looked down at him.

He was flat on his back with his arms still partially deployed in the windmill position, his hair now actively defying gravity, and his face cycling through several things simultaneously.

Her face was very close to his. Close enough that she felt rather than heard his sharp intake of breath.

"Jeez, Izuku," she said. "You really cannot skate at all, can you?"

"N-no," he said. "I s-said barely."

"Barely implies some."

"I may have o-overstated. B-Barley"

She laughed. She couldn't help it—the laugh came from the same place as the one at the station, unguarded and genuine, and she felt him go slightly still under her, not with alarm but with the quality of someone who has been handed something good and is afraid to move in case it stops.

She put her hands flat on the ice on either side of his head and looked at him. He was looking back at her with the expression of someone who has been hit by a truck and is trying to determine if they survived.

"It's okay," she said, and leaned in close to say it near his ear, because she could, because it was a first date and the rink was empty and the lights were beautiful. "I'll teach you."

He made a sound that was not a particular word.

She pushed herself upright and found her feet on the ice with minimal effort, reaching down with both hands. "Let's try that again."

It took approximately twenty minutes of what could generously be described as assisted navigation—her black mittens gripped in both of his hands, her skating backwards while he shuffled forward with the anxious concentration of someone defusing something—before he found the way; you had to commit to the push rather than timidly suggesting it and hoping the ice would agree.

"You're fighting it," she said.

"I'm not—"

"You are. You're tightening every time you push. Skating is like—" She thought about how to describe it. "It's like the Wave. You have to actually commit to the momentum, or it won't go anywhere."

He looked at her. "You're comparing skating to physics."

"Am I wrong?"

A pause. Then, with visible reluctance, "N-no."

"Good. Now—push!"

Push he did—a real effort, putting weight into it, committing to the direction. The blade caught, and he moved, and for three seconds he was skating, actually skating, the ice passing properly under him and his arms loose at his sides rather than deployed in anticipatory catastrophe-prevention.

Three seconds of grace before the inevitable came to pass.

His weight shifted awkwardly, and she caught his arm before he fell again, bringing them to a stop near the edge.

"That was it," she said. "That was the thing."

"For three seconds."

"Three seconds is how you start." She adjusted her grip on his hands. "Again."

They went around. And around again. The rink was quiet around them—just the sound of their blades and their breath and occasional words. The cold had an edge to it, but the movement managed it.

Around the sixth circuit, she let go of one hand.

He noticed immediately but didn't reach for it back, and they did half a circuit with only her left hand in his right, and then she let go of that too, and she skated a foot beside him, and he didn't fall.

"There," she said.

He was concentrating very hard and did not respond.

"Izuku."

"I'm skating," he said, with the intensity of a man performing surgery.

"I know. You can breathe."

"I'm breathing," he said. "I'm just also thinking about breathing."

She laughed, and the laugh made him smile, and the smile made his concentration wobble, and he caught himself—barely—on the wobble and kept going. The smile stayed.

She watched it.

This is a person discovering something.

Not the skating specifically—the skating was incidental. The discovery was the experience of doing something poorly in front of someone and having it be fine. Of being laughed at and finding the laugh warm rather than cutting. It was a specific lightness that came from not being evaluated.

She had been watching him manage himself for weeks. The careful calibration of how much to show and how much to keep private, the practiced fine-tuning of a boy who had spent years understanding that exposure was risk.

She had watched him arrive at the Loner Club for weeks before he'd stopped apologizing for his observations. Weeks before, the knock disappeared from the gym door. He had learned to trust her by increments, and each increment had cost him something, and he had paid it anyway.

This was different.

He was bad at skating, and he knew it, and she knew it, and it didn't seem to matter to either of them, and she could watch him figure out that it didn't matter in real time.

I know what I want, mom.

Not for the first time. But with a specific clarity that came from watching him concentrate on the ice with his hair abandoned to its natural state and both hands slightly out from his sides for balance.

The moon emerged from the cloud bank at some point in the second hour—not dramatically, just gradually present, the thick cloud thinning and pulling back until the sky above the rink had a different quality, a silver-blue that made the ice change colour. The string lights seemed dimmer against it, the warmth of them more intimate by contrast.

Izuku had, by this point, achieved a state that could be described as functionally independent motion. Not elegant—he still held his shoulders slightly too high, and his arms were never quite relaxed—but genuinely his own. Forward motion without assistance. The occasional correction, but not the constant catastrophe prevention of the first half hour.

They were doing slow circles together, the kind of easy movement that stopped being about technique and started being about the thing itself—the rhythm of it, the cold air moving past, the ice under them.

She had been quiet for a while.

He noticed. He always noticed.

"What are you thinking about?" he said.

She looked at him. "What makes you think I'm thinking about something?"

"You get quiet in a specific way when you're working something out," he said. "It's different from ordinary quiet. There's a texture to it."

She looked at him for a moment. "That's a very specific observation."

"You're worth paying attention to," he said. Simply. Not as a compliment—as a fact.

She was quiet for another moment. They made a slow turn at the far end of the rink, the building's dark glass passing on their left, the string lights pulling them back in.

"I was thinking about December," she said. "The first time. When you sat outside the door for ten minutes before you knocked."

All colour evacuated his face. "You saw that?!"

"It was very cute."

He turned the corner without falling.

"That's m-mortifying."

"I don't think so." She looked at the ice. "I remember thinking: whoever this is, they're taking it seriously. Like it mattered whether they were welcome." She paused. "Most people don't knock."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Most people don't have the same relationship with doors that I do," he said—accurate, understated, and carrying more weight than it announced.

They skated another full circuit without talking. The city moved behind the fence and the lights and the dark.

She let the next turn happen and then said the thing she had been circling toward.

"I want us to start training together. Properly. Not just the Wave Motion sessions." She kept her voice easy, conversational. "Conditioning. Strength work. Something consistent a few times a week."

He looked at her. Not alarmed—curious. "The Wave Motion analysis isn't enough?"

"The Wave Motion analysis is for me," she said. "This would be for you."

"Oh," he said.

She let him sit with the shape of it. He was quiet for most of the next circuit, his blade sounds even and steady now, the ice working under him the way it was supposed to.

When he spoke, his voice was careful in the way it got when he was deciding how honestly to answer something.

"You're thinking about what happened," he said.

"Not exactly. I'm thinking about what you want to do," she said. "And what that requires."

Not exactly the same thing. She was thinking about the image that had arrived on the train and that she had put down without finishing. But it forced itself to finish now, quietly, in the part of herself that processed things while the rest of her kept moving.

If he can't stand up to a bully, what does that mean for the field of hero work? What happens if he encounters a villain with more brawn than brain?

"You're smart," she said. "You're probably the smartest person I've met. But being smart doesn't keep you standing when something physical is happening. And you want to be in situations where physical things are happening." She looked at him steadily. "So let's make sure you're more than one thing."

He was quiet.

She watched his face do the thing it did when he was processing something he had known for a long time and was hearing said aloud for the first time by someone who was not saying it to diminish him.

"Okay," he said, between overtly heavy breaths.

"Okay?"

"Yeah." He looked at the ice. "You're right. I have been telling myself that the analysis was the most important thing. That if I understood hero work well enough, the physical gap would be—" He stopped. "Secondary," he said. Which was not the word he had started with. "I know it's not secondary."

"It's not secondary," she agreed.

"So. Okay." He turned the corner, clean. "...When do we start?"

"Monday," she said. "There's a facility near the school that does early slots before class. I've been meaning to use it anyway—the resistance training. This girl wants to put on some muscle too."

He looked at her sideways. "You've been thinking about this for weeks."

"...I suppose that I just usually blurt things out."

"I know." Something in his voice—not resentment, not surprise. Something warmer than either. "But it's one of those things about you. The way you're so curious and passionate about everything. It's admirable. You have such an honest personality."

She was quiet for a moment.

"That's a generous way to describe something I do," she said. "Most people find it annoying."

"You know b-better than anyone that I'm not most people," he sighed. "For all the good and the bad."

She looked at the ice. "Fair. But I really like the good."

This is what I mean. This is what I keep meaning.

The angle he found that nobody else was looking from. The angle that was always slightly more true than the one she'd come in with.

"Monday," she said.

"Monday," he agreed.

They skated the next circuit in the easy quiet that their silences had started to have—the kind that was not empty but full, the kind that didn't require filling. The moon was fully clear now, its light moving on the ice as they moved. She could see both their reflections in the surface below—elongated, shifting, and overlapping at the edges where they were skating close.

She looked at the reflections.

She looked up.

He stopped skating.

She stopped too, instinctively following the change in momentum.

They were in the middle of the ice with the moon above them and the lights around them and the city sitting beyond all of it.

They were looking at each other in the way that had no particular category—not the processing look, or the training look, or any of the looks she had learned to read.

Something was present in the air between them. Not quite nothing and not quite something you could name. The specific quality of a moment that neither of them would ever forget.

Both of them refused to move.

The cloud bank had pulled back fully now. The sky above the rink was very clear, the moon round and exact, and its light lay across the ice in a long, clean line that ran between them like a seam. The string lights were amber and warm. Their breath dissolved upward in small, simultaneous clouds.

You found someone who doesn't flinch when you're yourself...Some people never will.

He was looking at her with an expression she had seen once before—the fully unguarded version, the one that appeared when he had stopped managing himself and had not yet put something back in place. Younger than his usual expression and more honest, and she held it carefully, the way you hold something you understand is fragile.

She did not lean forward.

He did not lean forward.

"Your ears are red," she said.

"The t-temperature is dropping," he said. His voice was slightly different.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go sit down."

The benches ran along the near side of the rink, made of wooden slats bolted to a metal frame, sheltered slightly by the overhang of a small awning the rink had strung along its length. They sat next to each other with focused downward attention, frigid fingers working frayed laces, followed by the immediate, specific relief of getting your own shoes back.

She worked the last lace free and straightened.

He was still working on his—tongue between his teeth in the concentrated way he had when something required manual precision, and he was trying to give it appropriate care.

She watched him for a moment.

I want to tell him something true.

Not about the ice or the sessions or the analysis or any of the things that lived in the notebooks. Something else. Something from the other side of all of that.

"Izuku," she said.

He looked up. Still slightly undone from the ice—the hair, the cold-flushed cheeks, the particular warmth in his expression that came from a few hours of being laughed at and catching himself and finding that none of it had been what he'd been braced for.

"I'm so glad you walked into the club room in December," she said.

He held her gaze.

“I'm so glad that I did, too.”

The rink was fully empty now. The last of the few skaters had left in the past half hour, departing one by one until it was just them, the lights, and the ice. The city beyond was present in its muffled way—ambient traffic, the faint bass of something from a bar a few streets over. But the rink itself had the quality of a space that had been vacated specifically for them.

He was looking at her.

She was looking at him.

They kept catching each other. The two most important people in the world, together on a night that had a melody of romance.

She was about to say something—she was not entirely sure what, something true, something from the heart, when the heavy footsteps of someone passing on the far side of the fence cut her off.

She looked up.

A figure was approaching along the near side of the rink, hands in the pockets of a heavy jacket, unhurried in the way of someone who has decided they have nowhere particular to be and considers that arrangement permanent.

He was tall, with broad shoulders. He was somewhere between seventeen and eighteen, with dark hair pushed back from his face and a jaw that had arrived early and set in with confidence.

He was looking at Nejire.

He had not looked at Izuku.

She felt, beside her, the very slight change in the quality of Izuku's stillness—the specific version of it that was not peaceful but alert, the body registering something before the brain had finished deciding what to do about it.

The figure stopped. He smiled.

"Hey there," he said.

The word was directed entirely at her.

She looked at him with the stillness she kept for situations that were asking something of her. "Hi," she said, with exactly enough.

He looked at the ice, then back at her, with the easy assessment of someone who had decided the situation was already settled in his favour and was just confirming details.

"Didn't expect to find anyone here this late." The smile widened slightly. "And I definitely didn't expect to find someone like you."

She did not smile back.

Izuku set his skates down carefully on the bench.

The figure stepped slightly closer—not quite at the benches yet, still a few feet back, a position that was exactly calculated to be closer than comfortable without being close enough to name. His gaze moved to Izuku for the first time, then swept over him with the brevity of someone completing an inventory and finding nothing of interest.

"You here with your little brother?" he said. The question was aimed back at her before he'd finished asking it. He bent forward slightly at the waist, the way adults addressed small children, and added, with the breezy condescension of someone who had never once been told to stop, "Hey there, little guy. Still learning how to skate? Keep at it, yeah?"

The air did not change temperature.

Izuku's hands, on the bench, went very still.

She looked at the figure with an expression that did not flicker. "He's not my brother," she said. Flat. Precise.

"Oh." The smile had a quality to it now. "My bad."

He was no longer looking at Izuku. "I'm Ryūsei, by the way. Third year at Shiketsu." He said the school name the way some people said it—as a weight put on the table, something intended to do work in the sentence. "Haven't seen you around before. What's a blue-haired angel like you doing in a place like this?"

"I'm on a date," she said. “Actually.”

"Are you?" He looked around with the theatricality of someone performing a search. His gaze passed over Izuku without registering him as a candidate. "...Did he ditch you or something?"

"We're on a date."

Izuku's voice. Quiet. Clear. He had moved—without her noticing exactly when—to stand slightly in front of her, his hands loose at his sides, his shoulders set with the deliberate straightness of someone who had made a decision and was now inhabiting it.

Nejire pretended like she couldn’t see him, fighting back the tremble in his hands.

"The hell?" He glanced back toward the far end of the rink as though checking for cameras. "Am I being punked right now?"

He laughed. Not loud. Not mean in the obvious theatrical way. Just the short, specific laugh of someone who has been given information they find categorically implausible and is deciding how to be sporting about it.

"Right, uh—anyway." His eyes went back to Nejire, looking directly over Izuku's head as though the boy were a lamppost he was navigating around. Already back, already resettled, already treating the exchange as resolved.

"Listen, I was going to grab something to eat—there's a ramen place two streets over, open late. You should come with."

"He said we're on a date," Nejire said. "Do your ears not work? Is that why they're so large? Or is that part of your quirk—the one that squishes your brain enough that properly listening to people becomes impossible?"

Her voice had not changed volume. The temperature of it had.

Ryūsei's smile adjusted. Recalibrated. He looked between them—the girl with the periwinkle hair looking at him with the expression of someone who has already categorized him and found the category unremarkable, and the boy standing in front of her who came up to approximately his collarbone—and his expression settled into the patient amusement of someone managing a situation he considered only mildly complicated.

"Okay," he said, addressing Izuku for the first time with something like attention. He tilted his head, genuinely curious in the way of someone examining something unexpected in a rock they've picked up. "No offense, kid, but—" His gaze moved from Izuku to Nejire and back again, making the comparison slowly and without any attempt to be subtle about it. "Really?"

The word landed with the specific weight of something that didn't need to be expanded upon.

Izuku said nothing. His jaw had gone tight.

"I mean—" Ryūsei spread his hands, the gesture of someone being reasonable. "You seem like a nice enough guy. But she's—" He looked at Nejire, the kind of look that evaluated rather than saw. "And you're—" The pause did more work than a sentence would have. "I'm just saying, she's a little out of your weight class, yeah? No shame in that. I guess some of us are just built differently."

He tapped his own chest once, lightly, as though the point illustrated itself.

Izuku looked at him.

The specific quality of the look was not anger—not the hot, reactive kind. It was something older than anger, something that had been sitting with this particular species of conversation for a long time and had developed a very specific relationship with it. The look of someone who has heard every variation of this sentence that exists and has learned that responding to most of them doesn't produce anything worth the cost.

"I'm here with her," Izuku said. His voice was steady in the way that things were steady when the steadiness was costing something. "That's all I have to say about it. So g-get lost, would you?"

Something in Ryūsei's expression shifted—not softer, not harder. More interested. The way a person got more interested when the expected response didn't arrive.

He looked at Nejire.

She was looking back at him with the stillness that had been there since he'd arrived, which had not flickered once, and which he was beginning to understand was not passive but directional—aimed at him specifically, the kind of stillness that meant she had already decided something and was waiting with complete patience for him to catch up to the fact that the decision had been made.

The smile didn't disappear. But something behind it recalculated.

"Alright," he said. The word came out slightly differently than his previous ones—flatter, with less performance in it.

"Your loss, babe, try not to regret it when I’m a big-shot hero," he said, with the ease of someone who needed that sentence to be true and was going to keep saying it until it was. Then he turned, hands back in his pockets, and walked the way he had come—unhurried, with the same studied ease, the jacket slightly too stiff to be fully convincing.

She watched him go until the fence cut him from view.

Izuku was still standing slightly in front of her, shoulders set, looking at the place where Ryūsei had been.

His hands were no longer shaking.

She said his name quietly. "Izuku."

He turned.

His face was doing the careful neutral—the one she knew now, the one that appeared when something had happened that he had decided not to let be visible. She had learned to read what lived behind it. What she found there, tonight, was not anger or embarrassment or bravado attempting to reconstruct itself. It was something simpler and heavier than any of those.

A calculation, completed. An answer he had already known and had been hoping, for a few hours, to set aside.

"I know," he said.

His voice was quiet, "I know what it looked like. I know what it is. He wasn't—he was just saying what everyone thinks. What's true." He looked at his hands briefly; the way he looked at things, he was assessing rather than seeing. "I stood in front of you and he just—he didn't even—"

He stopped.

She waited.

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. She had watched Ryūsei's gaze pass over Izuku like he was furniture, had watched the comparison be made and the conclusion be reached in approximately two seconds, and had watched Izuku's steadiness cost him something it shouldn't have had to cost.

I know what he's thinking.

She looked at him.

"Izuku," she said. "Look at me."

If only he could see himself through my eyes.

He looked up. The careful neutral held, but only barely, the way things held when they were at the edge of what they could sustain.

"You stood in front of me," she said. "That's what you did. You asked him to leave when it cost you something to say it." She held his gaze steadily. "You stood up to protect what's yours. You stood up to protect me.”

His heart was racing, but his mind raced faster.

"H-He was bigger," he said. Not an argument—a fact. The specific flatness of someone reading a measurement.

"Yes," she said.

"He could have—I couldn't have done anything."

"No," she said. "You couldn't have."

He blinked. She could see it—the slight surprise of someone who had been braced for reassurance and had been given honesty instead.

"That's the part we're going to fix," she said. "That's Monday. That's why Monday." She tilted her head. "But that part—the part where you stood there anyway, knowing you couldn't—" She paused. "That's not a problem. That's actually the whole point."

He looked at her for a long moment.

Something in his expression moved. Not resolved—she didn't pretend to resolve things that weren't resolved. But shifted. Like a weight redistributed rather than put down.

"Monday," he said.

"Monday," she said.

The rink was quiet around them. The lights made their amber circles in the ice. Their breath dissolved in the cold.

She reached out and put her hand over his on the bench.

He looked at it. Then at her.

She didn't say anything else.

He turned his hand over carefully and held hers.

They sat like that for a while in the cold, the city echoing muffled sounds beyond the fence. Neither of them said anything, and the silence was not empty but full—full of the things that were real and would need to be returned to, and full of the things that could be held, for now, exactly as they were.

Chapter Text

The gym smelled like iron and effort.

The scent was the first thing Izuku noticed. Not the rows of machines lined against the far wall, not the high industrial ceiling with its exposed ductwork or the particular quality of fluorescent light that made everything seem simultaneously sharper and more washed out than ordinary life.

The specific compound of metal and chalk dust, along with the faint, honest undercurrent of sweat, had been absorbed into the rubber matting over years of accumulated use. It was not a bad smell. It was the manifestation of something that had been used for its intended purpose, over and over, without apology. It was the smell of intention made physical. Of the gap between what you were and what you wanted to be, populated by consistent effort.

It was the aroma of becoming.

He stood in the doorway for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

He had been to this building before—or at least, he had been past it. Sunrise Fitness occupied the ground floor of a narrow building wedged between a dry cleaner and a print shop four blocks from the Musutafu city centre, on a street that Izuku had walked perhaps a hundred times since middle school.

He had noted its existence before writing it off all the same. Perhaps some part of him knows that it’s a fruitless endeavor. But now he was out of options. Nejire had told him to come. And it wasn't like he could say no to her. Even if he wanted to.

So this was it. Four point two stars on the review application he had checked last night. Membership plans starting at twenty-eight hundred yen per month. The kind of place where the people inside had decided to be different from the people they were outside by the mechanism of arriving here and doing the work.

He had always known, in the peripheral way that you knew things about places that were not for you, that he was not the kind of person who went into gyms. Gyms were for people who had somewhere specific to arrive. 

For people with a plan, with a body worth training, with quirks that needed physical support, or with strength that needed building to be deployed. He had watched people go in and out of this building without particularly registering them, the way you move through a city that is full of doors you are not going to open.

He was, he reminded himself, no longer operating on old frameworks.

This choice was a decision he had made, or was making, in the ongoing way of decisions that were not single moments but accumulated practice. 

The decision to not look away from a door before you tried it. The decision to not construct the argument against a thing before you allowed the thing to happen. He had built the argument against this gym over two days—I am not someone who goes to gyms; people at gyms will notice I don't belong; I will look exactly as weak as I am; this was a thing I agreed to out of—Out of—

Out of—something.

He had not finished that thought, and he was not going to finish it in the doorway of a gym at five-twenty-five on a Monday morning. Especially not when the main subject was hovering just behind him. 

Nejire stepped around him and through the door.

She moved with the specific decisiveness she brought to thresholds like these—not exactly impulsive, but definitely not patient or cautionary, either.

He followed. 

The door swung closed behind them, and the ambient noise changed—the low thrum of a treadmill at the far end of the room, the rhythmic percussion of someone lifting in the corner station, and a pop song at moderate volume coming from a speaker mounted above the reception window. The song was something current that Izuku did not know the name of, with a bass line that the speaker reproduced with more enthusiasm than fidelity.

A woman was running on the third treadmill with the metronomic ease of someone who had logged so many miles on treadmills that the motion had become a kind of standing. At the squat rack near the mirrored wall, a man with short dark hair was working through a warm-up set with light plates, watching his own form in the mirror with the precise, evaluative attention of someone who was not looking at himself but at what himself was doing. 

A distinction Izuku knew well.

The air was noticeably warmer inside than outside. Drier, too. The rubber matting on the floor had the faint give of something purpose-built—a material that existed solely to serve a specific function, to absorb the impact of dropped weights and provide grip for braced feet. The walls were covered in a chipped neutral pale grey that was neither industrial nor welcoming.

To the left, the dumbbell rack ran the full length of the wall. Pairs arranged in ascending order from two kilograms up to five hundred—likely for the mutant quirk users and those with natural strength enchantment. The five-hundred-kilogram dumbbells were enormous in a way that felt almost theoretical—the idea that a human hand would close around one of them and move it seemed architectural rather than athletic, the way very large feats seemed when you were standing close to the physical evidence of them. 

Below each pair, a small metal plate with the weight etched into it. Everything organized in a way that seemed too meticulous for such a busy area with so many moving parts.  

On the right, the cardio section: treadmills, two rowing machines, and a stationary bike with a currently dark screen. Beyond that, a stretch of open floor with bands and cables and small accessories organized in labeled bins, the kind of equipment that had specific uses and knew it.

Ahead, the cable machine section. The free weight area behind it, where the squat racks and bench press stations were arranged with practical geometry. 

Izuku looked at all of it.

He looked at the man doing squat warm-ups and the woman on the treadmill and the equipment organized with such functional clarity. He looked at it the way he looked at the first page of a textbook in a subject he hadn't studied. The whole system present, legible in outline but not yet readable in detail.

He decided to start with what he knows.

But first—changing room. 

Every system has rules, and the rules could be learned.

He found the instruction diagrams on the sides of the machines. He found the weight plates labeled. He found the mirrors and understood them—proprioceptive feedback. A word that had kept finding its way back to him despite having little initial relevance. The external view of a movement that the internal felt-sense could not reliably provide.

Watching Nejire work had taught him the gap between what a body believed it was doing and what it was actually doing.

He was already analyzing.

He was, he realized, doing it again—the thing he did when he was nervous, which was to find the system and analyze it, which gave his mind something to do that was not the nervousness itself. A reasonable coping mechanism, probably. He filed this observation with the others.

"I have literally never done this before," he said.

"I know," Nejire said. She was looking at the cable machine section with the purposeful expression of someone making initial assessments. "Neither have I, Izuku. But that's the point."

He turned toward her. 

She had pinned her hair up this morning—the periwinkle weight of it gathered and secured with what appeared to be a single clip that was doing significant structural work—though several strands had already escaped at her temples in the specific way her hair had of suggesting that full containment was, at best, a temporary condition.

 She was wearing a pale grey long-sleeved fitted shirt and dark training trousers that stopped just below the knee, and she looked—

Well, like Nejire. 

Radiant. Beautiful. Perfect. As she was. Effortless in her splendor; graceful in pulchritude.

He drifted back to the cable machines.

The cable machines were a considerably safer subject.

"The point of going somewhere you've never been before," he said, "is that you've never been there before?"

"The point," she said, turning toward him, "of doing something you've never done before is that you might become someone you've never been!" She tilted her head. "That's the whole point of everything, Izuku. At least, that’s what I think."

He opened his mouth.

He looked at her face.

He closed his mouth.

"Right," he said. "Fair enough."

The young man at the reception window wore a polo shirt, company lanyard, the amiably professional expression of someone at the beginning of their shift who had not yet had enough of the day to have an opinion about it. He explained the trial-day process, confirmed membership availability, and handed them each a temporary access card with the ease of someone who had done this enough times that the friction had been entirely worn away.

Izuku paid with the money he had set aside specifically for this: the weekly allowance his mother gave him, redirected from its usual purpose of buying school suplies and All Might merch.

The trial card was laminated and orange.

He turned it over in his hand once, then tucked it into his bag.

They started at the cable machine because it was the machine Izuku had read the most about, and reading about something first was his default strategy when confronting the unfamiliar. Build the conceptual framework before the practical application so the application has somewhere to land. 

Map the territory before walking through it. Yet another concept Izuku had all to much experience in dealing. 

He had read about lat pulldowns and cable rows the night before. He had read enough to even understand the conceptual mechanics—which muscles were intended to do the work at each phase, what the correct path of motion looked like in three dimensions, why the most common errors were errors and what they produced—but reading mechanics was not the same as inhabiting them. A distinction he understood more than most, from months of understanding the mechanics of Wave Motion in theory and then watching Nejire test those mechanics against reality and finding new information at every intersection.

The model and the action were related but never identical. You needed both.

The cable machine stood like an architectural feature: two upright columns connected by a crossbar, the cable running from an adjustable pulley through a guide, ending at a carabiner where handles and attachments could be swapped. The weight stack ran between the uprights—a column of heavy iron plates, each one numbered, a pin to set the load. 

He found the correct bar attachment and clipped it in. He adjusted the seat—the instructions on the laminated diagram suggested shoulder height—and positioned himself.

He selected eight kilograms. A light weight that should be easy for any beginner. 

With a single movement, he took the bar and pulled.

His elbows went wrong immediately.

Not dramatically—not the kind of error that involved any sound or visible incident. 

They went subtly wrong, like it was two or three degrees off the intended path, the joint tracking slightly out of the correct plane. He could feel—vaguely—that something was not tracking correctly. The motion felt ungainly in a way he couldn't name yet.

He did not know that this error, compounded over hundreds of reps, produced a specific and predictable problem in the rotator cuff. He would learn this later. For now he only felt the ungainliness.

"Your elbows," Nejire said, from slightly behind his right shoulder. She had been watching him with the concentrated attention that he normally occupied in their training sessions.

 Being on the receiving end of it was strange. 

"They're going out to the sides. Like—" She demonstrated with her own arms, extending them and showing the lateral flare she was describing. "Instead of—" She brought her elbows in and down beside her ribcage, the wings-folded position. "Try that."

"Wings folding," he said. 

"Like a landing bird." She held the position for a moment. "The elbows come in and down. Not out."

Holy freaking hell she looks so cute like that. Like a pawing kitty—definitely not a bird.

He killed the thought, but not before adorning it with a light blush. He drew in a deep breath and adjusted and pulled again.

It was immediately and obviously different. Something in his upper back engaged—a distinct layer, further from his arms, located somewhere between and below his shoulder blades—that had not engaged before. The pull felt different. It felt, he thought, like it was doing something rather than pulling something. The work was landing in the right place.

He did four more reps at this weight. The movement felt unfamiliar, akin to the way things feel when they demand something from muscles that haven't recently been asked for much. Not painful—unfamiliar. A pain he would come to enjoy.

"Better," Nejire said. She uncrossed her arms. "Your left side has less stability than the right. There's a slight lean to the right at the bottom of each rep."

"I know," he said. "I'm m-mostly right-handed. I suppose I should have e-expect a bilateral imbalance from years of a-asymmetric use."

She looked at him with the slightly-forward attention that meant she was interested in this as information rather than as a thing to be managed.

Then, she smiled. "That's a funny way of saying you have a dominant arm."

He sighed. "S-Sorry."

She came up close behind him. Close enough that he knees were only inches from the backs of his thighs. Close enough that the space between had become unfamiliar. "Just what are you sorry for?"

He pulled down a shaky rep.

"I... I don't know."

Eventually, she took her turn.

She approached the cable machine with focused posture and grace. Even the smallest of her movements were like a song, practiced and melodic, with a rhythm that could capture and disrupt his beating heart.

Her hands found the bar—the same attachment, the same weight—and pulled.

The motion she produced was smoother than his initial attempt. This was partially the advantage of having watched him make the errors and the corrections and partially the result of her longer arms giving her more torque around the pivot point.

She was also probably stronger than him. Which was both expected and embarrassing. At least for Izuku.

The rest of her sets concluded with relative ease. Izuku could tell that she was built for it. To be someone strong, to be someone amazing. 

A destiny that gleamed. 

As she wiped some sweat off her brow and stood up from the seat, subtly motioning for him to take over, he found himself thinking only one thing in that moment.

I need to get stronger.

The thought arrived in a cold wave, crashing over his withered soul; but he knew not if it came from a place of envy, or somewhere even less desirable.

January became February. Their schedule had changed, but it had only become more intertwined as they fell into an even more comfortable routine.

Sunrise gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings from five-thirty until six-thirty. The loner club on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and alternating Wednesdays, fitting in training sessions for Nejire's quirk whenever they could book the gymnasium at school for it, but with the volleyball season starting up, their time had become more limited.

Weights and Wave Motion had become an accumulating language.

The city remained cold and pale, gradually considering the possibility of eventually becoming something warmer.

Late afternoon light came through the high windows of their school’s gymnasium at an angle that made the dust motes visible—small, suspended things drifting in the warmth above the floor.

Nejire had been in the air for forty minutes.

Not continuously. She came down between sets, touched the floor with the particular lightness of someone for whom landing had become a secondary skill—managed rather than felt—and then went back up. 

The sessions had a rhythm now. Izuku had given them one without meaning to, through the sheer consistency of his notation. Sets of six, two minutes of flight, ninety seconds grounded. Recovery mapped against output. He had three weeks of this data and had started graphing it in the margins.

She came down now, and the wave energy dissipated from her heels in the way it always did—the gold-amber spiral unwinding, going out like a light. She landed three feet from where Izuku was standing with his notebook.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

This was new.

They had always been comfortable in silence. But there was a new quality of it. Something had changed the texture of the air between them since the rink, since the bench, since she had taken his hand and he had turned his over carefully and held hers, and neither of them had named it and neither of them were going to, not here, not yet, possibly not for a long time. But it was present the way temperature was present—not visible, not stated, simply there in every breath.

"Left hip," Izuku said, not looking up from his notebook.

Nejire turned her head toward him.

"You're still compensating," he said. "Third set. Every time you angle into the spiral for the upward phase, you shift left. It's slight—less than last week—but it's still there. It's become load-bearing, I think."

"I know," she said.

"You've built the aerial sequence around it."

"I know, Izuku."

He looked up then—the specific look of someone who had not been expecting his name, delivered in that particular tone, and had not had time to prepare a neutral expression for it. She was watching him with one hand resting on her hip, breath slightly elevated from the set, strands of blue hair coming loose from whatever she'd done to them this morning. 

The afternoon light was doing something to the colour of her eyes.

He looked back at his notebook.

"The sequence works," he said carefully. "The compensation isn't breaking anything. But it's limiting your ceiling. If we leave it, it becomes permanent form." He turned a page. "You've been doing it since you were four. It's going to take longer to undo than it took to build."

"I know that too."

"I'm not being critical."

"I know you're not."

Another silence. Nejire crouched to adjust her shoe. Izuku made a note, or pretended to.

"Again?" he asked.

She straightened. "Again."

She lifted.

She was working on the hip correction now—deliberately. He could see it in the way she moved, the fraction of extra conscious effort she applied to the right side, the way the spiral unwound slightly differently when she was monitoring her own form. Not wrong. Just effortful in a way that was eventually going to become natural, and was not natural yet.

He noted the degree of correction. The time stamp. The consistency.

Session 21 

Hip correction — conscious application, right side. Compensation still present, degree reduced approx 30% from Session 11. 

Not yet internalised — still deliberate rather than instinctive. This is expected at this stage. The internalisation lag is normal.

He paused. Then, in smaller writing, he wrote beneath the new paragraph.

She's working harder than she's letting on. She doesn't show effort. I only know because of the way the spiral changes when she's monitoring herself. It loses the automatic quality. Such behavior is probably something she was taught not to show.

Good lord my arms are sore.

"Izuku."

Her voice from above. He tilted his head back. She was hovering with both arms extended, testing something in the angle of her elbows. "Come here."

He crossed the floor. He stopped below her—she was perhaps fifteen feet up, not her full height, the kind of altitude she used when she wanted to demonstrate something to him directly.

But she was threatening the ceiling height of the gym more consistently. 

"Watch the foot," she said.

She angled her right foot, the wave energy visibly shifting, the spiral tightening at the heel. The result was a lateral adjustment — subtle, maybe four degrees, a sideways drift she immediately corrected.

"That's the compensation," she said. "When I try to correct the hip, the foot over-adjusts. They're connected."

Izuku was already writing. "Show me the uncorrected version."

She did. The drift was less. The hip compensation absorbed it.

"Right," he said, mostly to himself. "They're load-sharing. The foot drift is secondary—it developed to handle what the hip was creating. If the hip corrects without the foot correcting simultaneously, the foot becomes a problem."

"Which is why it's been feeling worse," she said, with the tone of someone who has been sitting with this for several days and is relieved to have it confirmed by someone external.

"You should have said."

"I was waiting to see if you noticed."

He looked up at her.

"You always notice," she added with a lightness that was almost—not quite—teasing. “I’ve learned to rely on it. I’ve learned to rely on you.”

Something happened in his chest. He looked at his notebook, found the page, and made a note that was only partially about the foot.

She came down. All of the way until she was practically hanging off his shoulder.

"What's the correction?" she asked.

She was too close. 

Not inappropriately—not more than they were sometimes close during form correction, which required proximity, which was a professional necessity. Something that was entirely different from this, except that it was possibly not entirely different from this, and he was hyperaware of that. 

My thoughts have been all over the place. This girl seriously drives me for a loop. 

"D-Deliberate," he said. His voice came out evenly. "Both corrections at the same time. You've been treating them as separate because they feel separate, but they're one problem. You can't fix the hip and wait for the foot to follow. You have to correct them as a single unit."

She tilted her head—the familiar gesture, the one that meant she was testing an idea against something internal.

"Show me what you mean," she said. "With the spiral."

"I can't—"

"Sorry, I meant describe it."

He thought for a moment. He thought about the way the spiral distributed force, the rotational axis, the way the hip and the ankle shared a torque load that was currently uneven. He had diagrams of this. He turned his notebook toward her and pointed.

She leaned in to look. Her shoulder came close to his. He was aware of this in the way he was aware of things he was trying not to be specifically aware of.

"Here," he said, tracing the diagram. "The spiral generates force distributed outward from this axis. If the hip is off by this much—" he marked it with his pencil, "—the distribution skews left. The ankle has been compensating by skewing right. They're cancelling each other out, which is why the net result looks almost correct from outside. But internally, you're using energy for the correction that should be going to output."

She was quiet for a moment, studying the diagram. He could see her working through it, applying it to the feeling she knew her own quirk to have.

"That's why I'm tired at the end of sessions," she said.

"I think so. You're spending approximately—" He paused. He had done this calculation. "—somewhere between five and eight percent of your output, maintaining a compensation that shouldn't exist."

She stared at the diagram. Then she looked at him. "You estimated that. Wow."

"I graphed it. I can show you—"

"Izuku." There was something in her voice. Not surprise—past surprise, into the territory of something she was still in the process of having a feeling about. "You graphed my energy efficiency."

"I've been tracking output across sessions," he said, carefully. "I can explain the methodology—"

"I know you can," she said. Something moved through her expression that she didn't pursue. She looked at the diagram again. "Okay. Show me the correction."

They worked for another forty minutes.

He guided the correction verbally—he had learned how she processed instruction, that she needed the physical logic before she could apply the change, and that telling her what to do without telling her why the body did the other thing resulted in conscious compliance without internalization. So he explained. She adjusted. He watched, noted, and adjusted his explanation. She tried again.

The third attempt, something clicked. He could see it in the spiral—the quality of it changed, the distribution evened, and the drift resolved on both sides simultaneously.

"There," he said. "How did that feel?" 

She considered this with the seriousness she gave most things. "Less," she said.

"Less?"

"Less effort. It felt like less." She looked at her hands, where the residual energy was still dissipating in faint traces. "That's the right answer, isn't it."

"That's the right answer," he confirmed.

She smiled—the specific one, the one that had appeared sometime in the last several weeks and was different from the others he had catalogued. Smaller and less performed. The kind of smile that happened before she'd decided to smile, which he had learned to distinguish from the kind she assembled because it was appropriate.

He wrote it down. Then he stopped writing it down. Some things were not for the notebook.

They gathered their things at the edge of the gym, Nejire rewinding her scarf by the door, Izuku consolidating his notebooks into his bag with the care he always took—not slowness, just precision, each item going where it went.

The session had run long. The gym had gone quiet around them, the last of the other students having left twenty minutes ago, the building settling into its after-school emptiness. Izuku's shoulder bag clinked faintly as he adjusted the strap.

Nejire watched him do up the zip. She had been watching him for a minute, in the way she sometimes did when she wasn't monitoring the fact that she was doing it—with the full, undefended attention she gave things that genuinely interested her, which was not the managed attention she brought to things she was choosing to be interested in.

"You're wearing the same jacket as the rink," she said.

He looked at his jacket. "Oh."

 A pause. "I suppose I am."

"Something happen to your other one?"

"...n-no? I just wanted to wear this one. T-That’s all.” 

"Mm." She pulled on her own coat—longer, a pale grey that had faded slightly at the shoulders. She looked at the floor, then at him, with the directness she reserved for things she had decided on. "Good session."

It was not what she had been about to say. He had learned to recognize that too—the sentence that appeared in the place of the sentence that had been there a moment ago.

"Good session," he agreed.

She pushed the gym door open with one shoulder. Winter air moved against them, immediate and cold, carrying the particular smell of a clear Febuary evening—frost and distant woodsmoke and the neutral scent of city pavement.

They stood for a moment in the doorway.

The path stretched ahead, splitting at the gate—her way and his way, the division they performed at the end of every session, the familiar geography of this.

She had not moved toward her direction.

He had not moved toward his.

"You should ice the hip tonight," he said. "The joint has been working hard. Fifteen minutes, i-if you have a pack."

"I have a pack," she said.

"Good." He adjusted his bag strap. "Good."

The cold sat between them, patient and entirely indifferent.

"Izuku," she said.

He looked at her. The gym light fell from behind them, casting their shadows long and thin across the snow-dusted path ahead.

"Yes?"

She looked at him for a moment in the way that held something she was still deciding on. The winter had gone very still around them—no wind, no sound from the road yet, just the quality of early evening settling.

"Nothing," she said. "Walk safe."

"You too," he said.

She turned toward her path. He watched her go—three steps, four—and then turned toward his. He made it perhaps ten paces before the cold surrounded him, the gym door swung closed behind them both, the path was just a path again, the evening was just an evening, and the thing that hadn't been said sat precisely where it always sat, patient as winter, waiting for whoever moved first.

He pulled his collar up against the cold and kept walking.

The weeks had a shape now.

Izuku had not expected that. He had expected the club to be what it had always been—a quiet room, a desk near the exit, the particular comfort of being somewhere nobody was looking for him. He had not expected it to develop grammar. But it had, the way things developed grammars when the same people occupied the same space with enough consistency—a structure that didn't need to be negotiated because it had simply accreted, the way frost accreted, quietly and overnight, until one morning you looked and it was just there.

The desk near the exit had become their desk. The two chairs that faced the window had been pushed to a specific angle—not quite toward each other, not quite toward the glass—that neither of them had arranged deliberately and neither of them ever adjusted. His pencil case lived on the left side. Her calculus notes accumulated on the right. The chalkboard still bore the same two kanji in her handwriting, and she had stopped writing anything new on it. He had never asked why, as he understood that some things were left alone because touching them would change what they meant.

The afternoons folded into each other.

Wave Motion — Volume 2 — Entry 20 — Tuesday

Vitality-to-energy conversion: continued observation.

Working hypothesis: output ceiling is not fixed. The previous assumption—that the ceiling represented a hard limit of stored vitality—appears incomplete. Evidence from sessions 14–17 suggests the ceiling is dynamic, scaling with physical conditioning rather than representing an absolute biological maximum.

She is not limited by how much she can produce. She is limited by how much she can safely convert without depleting reserves needed for basic cellular function. This is a different kind of limit. This kind—unlike a hard ceiling—appears trainable.

Every improvement in cardiovascular conditioning raises the floor of her reserve. Which means the ceiling moves up with it. Which means there is no ceiling.

I need to test this properly. Will design a session around output-to-exhaustion measurement, if she agrees. 

The hip correction has been holding for six consecutive sessions since the last time I brought it up. She has stopped contemplating it. I can tell because the spiral is automatic again—the quality of unconscious movement returned sometime around session 15. She doesn't know this yet. I'm waiting for the right moment to tell her.

She brought two teas today. Left mine on the corner of the desk without saying anything. It was still warm. How did she managed to get warm tea to school?

Late February arrived without announcement.

Snow was still present—not the heavy, accumulating snowfall of December, but the thin, tired snow of a winter that had been going on long enough to lose its drama. It stuck to window ledges and the north-facing sides of buildings and melted by noon on most days. The sky was the particular grey of late winter, the kind that was not quite threatening and not quite lifting, perpetually in between.

In the Loner Club, the light through the frosted windows had shifted. The sun was returning by fractions of degree each day, the afternoon sessions ending in something closer to dusk than full dark. Izuku had noticed. He had noted it, because he noted things, and he had not mentioned it because there was no useful reason to mention it.

Nejire had started bringing more books from her upper-level coursework. Not the textbooks—those had always been present. But the supplementary reading, the broader things: a book on wave mechanics she had sourced from the school library's science section, a collection of papers on energy conversion that was clearly beyond what anyone had assigned her, photocopied and annotated in her own hand. He had looked at the annotations once—brief, mostly questions, the kind of questions that demonstrated the person asking them already understood the answer and was using the question to pressure-test it.

He had not said anything about this either.

But when she left the room to refill her water bottle one afternoon and left the book open on the desk, he had read three pages of her annotations with the feeling of someone being given a gift they hadn't known was being prepared.

It feels wonderful to know that Nejire was studying hard, too. She was doing her own work to support his. 

The training sessions had deepened because of this. 

They hadn’t grown longer—Izuku had been careful about duration, tracking fatigue indicators against session quality and noting the point at which additional time produced diminishing returns. He had a chart. The chart was in the Wave Motion notebook. He had shown it to her once and she had looked at it for a long time without speaking and then said geez, you even made a chart of my tiredness in a tone he hadn't fully been able to interpret.

What had deepened was the precision. The language they had developed for the work—shorthand, the way collaborative work accreted shorthand—had grown specific enough that a full session could pass with very few complete sentences. Left side, third set. The angle again. Better — hold it. Good.

She had started explaining what things felt like, which she had not done at the beginning. At the beginning she had described her quirk with the factual efficiency of someone reading a specification sheet—accurate but external, the description of a person reporting on a thing they had not yet fully claimed. Now she used words like it feels like the spiral is pulling from the wrong place and there's a delay in the left hand that isn't in the right, like the signal arrives late, and he had learned that this language—the felt sense of the quirk from the inside—was more diagnostic than anything he could observe from the outside, and he had started asking for it deliberately.

Tell me what that felt like, he would say. 

And she would.

He thought sometimes about the fact that she had never been asked this before. Not in eleven years of having the quirk. He thought about her past and then he thought about other things because thinking about it too long produced a feeling in his chest that he had not found a category for.

He also thought about the fact that another date had never come up. 

Or he had never asked her. 

Was she waiting?

Wave Motion — Volume 2 — Entry 27 — Thursday

Vitality conversion rate — continued.

New data point: conversion efficiency appears to vary with emotional state. This is difficult to quantify but the pattern is consistent enough across five sessions to warrant recording.

High-focus states (problem-solving, active correction, technical discussion) correlate with increased output per unit of fatigue. Low-focus or distracted states show reduced efficiency at equivalent physical effort. This suggests the conversion mechanism is not purely physical—there is a cognitive or attentional component that affects the rate.

Hypothesis: concentration functions as a multiplier on the conversion rate. The vitality-to-energy pathway is most efficient when attention is directed toward the output. This would explain the variance in early sessions versus recent ones—she is more focused now. She has become more present in her work.

Practical implication: mental conditioning is as relevant as physical conditioning. This is consistent with the broader literature on performance, though the specific mechanism via quirk conversion is novel, as far as I can find.

...

She laughed today, really loud. The real one, the one that surprises her. Because I dropped my notebook trying to catch her pencil case when she knocked it off the desk. She said 'Reflexes, Kouhai,' and I said 'in my defense you weren't supposed to need saving, the desk was supposed to do that' and she laughed again.

I think the conversion efficiency goes up when she's happy. I don't have the methodology to prove this. I'm recording it anyway.

Maybe I just need an excuse to try and make her happy. What does that say about me?

There was an afternoon in the fourth week of February when it snowed again—properly, the way it had in December, thick and deliberate and silencing.

They had both looked up at the same time when it started, drawn by the change in the window light, the world going uniformly soft and white behind the frosted glass. Nejire had set her pen down. Izuku had stopped mid-sentence. They had looked at the snow for perhaps thirty seconds, and neither of them had said anything, and it had been one of the most complete silences he could remember.

He thought about it later. The specific quality of it—two people looking at snow without needing to agree about what they were doing. He thought about how long it had taken him to understand that this was what it meant to be comfortable with someone. Not the absence of tension, which he had always known. The presence of something that didn't need filling.

He wrote this in the margins of Volume 2, in the smallest writing he used, in the corner of a page otherwise occupied by conversion rate calculations.

He did not think she would find it there.

But he had stopped being certain she wouldn't.

Perhaps some part of him wanted her to find them.

March arrived.

Nejire had sixty-three days until her UA entrance exam.

She had not said this to Izuku. But he knew—he had counted from the date she had mentioned once in passing, with the specific casualness of someone mentioning something they were actively not making a large thing of. He had gone home that evening and counted twice and arrived at sixty-three, and sat with that number for longer than was useful.

He did not bring it up.

She did not bring it up.

The club continued. The training continued. The notebooks accumulated. His handwriting, she had once told him, got smaller when he was tired; it had also, he had noticed, gotten smaller in the sections about her. He was not sure what that meant. He suspected it meant something he was not yet ready to examine.

But the afternoons still had their grammar. The tea appeared on the corner of the desk. The pencil case lived on the left. The two chairs sat at their specific angle, and the late winter light came through the frosted glass, and outside the snow was retreating by fractions, and inside the Loner Club, the weeks continued to fold into each other—warm and finite and unrepeatable, in the specific way of things that are both of those things simultaneously and can only be understood as such from a distance neither of them had yet reached.

Neither of them was in any hurry to reach it.

It was Nejire who suggested it.

This was, in retrospect, a detail Izuku would return to—not because it mattered to the outcome, but because it was characteristic of the specific geometry of how things happened with her.

She proposed things as though they had already been decided and were merely being announced. 

"Walk with me," she said, as they came through the sunrise gym doors into the cold.

Not do you want to walk with me. 

Not if you're going this way.

Just the proposal, offered as cleanly as a fact.

"Okay," he said.

They fell into step. The evening was clear and cold—the kind of cold that had an edge to it rather than weight, sharp rather than heavy. The sky had gone the particular deep blue of seven o'clock in early March, the last trace of pink from the sunset still present at the western horizon, dimming. Their breath came out in thin clouds that dissolved quickly in the dry air.

Neither of them had planned a conversation. This was fine. They had never needed to plan conversations—they either happened or they didn't, and either way the silence was not a problem to be solved.

Nejire's hands were in her coat pockets. Izuku's bag hung from one shoulder, the Wave Motion notebook near the top where he'd put it at the end of the session, and he could feel its faint weight against his spine.

"The hip held through the full sequence today," he said, after a block and a half.

"I know," she said.

"Six full sets. No drift on any of them."

"I noticed."

"I just wanted to—"

"I know you just wanted to." She glanced sideways at him. Not unkindly. "You've been waiting to tell me since the fourth set."

He had been waiting since the third set, but there was no useful reason to correct this.

They turned onto the main commercial street—broader, lit, the particular liveness of a neighbourhood in the early evening. Shopfronts warm and yellow behind glass. A convenience store spilling light and synthetic warmth onto the pavement. A woman coming the other way with a pushchair, navigating around a stretch of ice with the focused attention of the task. Salarymen moving in the direction of the station in the efficient formation of commuters who had made this walk enough times to do it on autopilot.

Izuku had spent enough years navigating public space to be perpetually half-aware of his surroundings—exits, distances, and the specific social geometry of who was looking at whom. It was not heroism. It was a survival habit, the situational awareness of someone who had learned that trouble usually arrived from a direction he hadn't been watching.

He had not, in this case, been watching the alley mouth thirty feet ahead on the left.

So it was the sound that arrived first.

The percussive clatter of a hollow metal cane striking pavement. Then a voice—a woman's voice, high and startled, in the particular register of surprise that hadn't yet processed into fear.

This was followed by a man's voice, lower, with the specific quick cadence of someone trying to conclude something before it could be interrupted.

Izuku's feet slowed. 

A man in his late twenties, ordinary build, wearing a stained red jacket and black pants with holes in the sides. The torn stitching was visible even from Izuku’s distance. 

The man also had a bag. 

The bag was not his. 

The woman whose bag it had been was on the ground, one hand on the pavement, attempting to get up but failing on her own. 

Her cane was on the pavement four feet away. She was seventy, perhaps, with the thin silver hair and the deliberate posture of someone who had worked at maintaining it for a long time and was currently unable to.

The man had not run yet. This was the part that didn't fit the pattern Izuku's mind had assigned to it—the man had the bag, the woman was down, and he had not run, which meant something was still unresolved, which meant

The woman made a sound and reached toward her cane.

The man turned. His hand came down.

The specific casual violence of someone who was not trying to hurt, just trying to stop. But she was seventy, and she was on the ground, and her hands were thin, and when his hand connected with her shoulder, she went sideways with a sound that was more air than voice, and the cane skidded further, and she was on the pavement, and she was not getting up quickly.

The whole thing had taken perhaps four seconds.

Izuku stopped moving.

Everything in him stopped—not from fear exactly, though fear was present, the cold sharp kind that arrived in the hands first.

 It was something more fundamental than fear. It was the short-circuit that happened when the thing in front of you arrived faster than the category you had prepared for it. 

The sensation was not the threat of Bakugo, which his body was accustomed to over years of harsh harassment. This event was something else.

Something had simply occurred, complete and indifferent, thirty feet ahead of him on a street he had walked down without expecting anything to happen.

A person was in need of saving.

Beside him, Nejire had gone entirely still.

He knew she could end the fight in a moment. The knowledge sat in him as a plain fact—she was carrying enough output to drop the man without effort, without danger, from a distance that would keep her safe. She had the training. She had the raw power. She was, in every objective sense, the most prepared person on this street for this situation.

She had also gone the colour of the snow on the pavement, and her hands were in her pocket. Her eyes were hollow, riddled with indecision. There was also the consideration of illegal quirk usage. 

He would think about this later. He would think about what it meant that power and readiness were not the same thing, that training prepared you for training and real violence was its own entirely different thing, that the specific ugliness and suddenness of a person striking an old woman in a commercial street at seven in the evening was not something any amount of practice could fully pre-load.

He was not thinking about any of these issues now.

What happened next came from a place that bypassed the rational part of his brain.

His bag was off his shoulder.

His arm was moving.

The notebook—the Wave Motion notebook, the one he had stayed up until two in the morning three nights running to fill—was somewhere in the bag, but the bag was already leaving his hands, and his arm was completing the arc it had apparently decided to complete independently of any executive function he had been consulted about.

“Leave her alone!”

The boot of the bag connected with the side of the man's head.

It was not a devastating impact. Izuku was not built for devastating impacts. It was the impact of a moderately heavy canvas bag carrying two notebooks, a pencil case, an eraser, and three weeks' worth of session documentation, thrown by a thirteen-year-old boy who had been operating on pure substrate and adrenaline.

The man staggered.

He went sideways rather than down—one step, two, catching himself against the alley wall with a hand, the stolen bag still in his other hand, his face turned toward the source of the impact with an expression that moved rapidly through surprise and landed on something uglier.

Izuku did not have a plan for this part.

“You aren’t a very smart kid, are ya?” 

The man lunged. Izuku fell back. 

He inched forward; Izuku inched back. 

Nejire remained frozen.

Time slowed. 

Izuku had two options. Fight or flight. 

Naturally, he chose option three. 

What was option three, you might ask?

“I NEED A HERO! THERE’S A VILLIANNNN!!!!!!!!” 

The words ripped from his throat. Raw and full of panic and fear. But it was loud. The intense volume of someone who needed to be heard immediately and was going to be heard through sheer biological urgency. 

It was enough.

The man Izuku had classified as a villain stumbled back, in complete shock. Heads turned. People were on the commercial street. Commuters, the shoppers. A shopfront door opened. A man came out.

And from the cross-street forty feet down, moving at the specific unhurried velocity of a hero who has heard something and is already in motion, a figure in green and purple.

Slidin' Go processed the situation in approximately one and a half seconds—the man with the bag, the woman on the ground, the cane, the boy in the middle of the street with his hands up and no bag. The hero's quirk activated before his feet had finished their last stride, the frictionless surface extending outward from him, and he crossed the remaining distance in a controlled slide that placed him precisely between the man and Izuku.

"Evening," Slidin' Go said, to the man. Very pleasantly. “There seem to be a problem here?” 

The deranged man looked at him. At the woman on the ground. At the growing audience.

He gave up quick after that. 

The sequence after that was procedural and slow in the way of official things—the administrative pace of the aftermath, governed by protocols rather than urgency. Izuku sat on the curb while a younger officer spoke with Nejire on the other side of the police vehicle. The paramedics were with older woman, Hashimoto Eiko. She was sitting up—he had checked twice since they'd arrived, and checked again now—holding her. She recovered the cane and spoke to the paramedic in the focused, slightly irritated tones of a woman who considered the level of fuss disproportionate to the situation and did not hide this assessment.

Izuku was cold. 

His coat was in his bag and his bag was somewhere across the street. Meanwhile, the March evening was conducting its business against his school blazer with complete indifference to his internal temperature.

At some point, hands had stopped shaking sometime in the last ten minutes. He had not noticed the exact moment. He noticed the absence now, looking at them where they rested on his knees, and found he could not determine whether they had stopped because the adrenaline had cleared or simply because there was nothing left to sustain them.

"Izuku."

Nejire sat beside him on the curb without asking—simply crossed from the other side of the vehicle and folded herself down with the unconscious ease she brought to most physical things. She still had her coat. He was aware of this in a mild, peripheral way; he was aware of most things right now.

She didn't say anything for a moment.

"Are you hurt?" she asked.

"No. Are you—"

"I'm fine." A pause that carried more weight than the word had. "I did nothing, remember."

She said it lightly. The lightness was slightly off—not enough for most people to notice, placed carefully over something that wasn't light at all. He noticed because he had spent months learning the difference between her registers.

"You threw your bag," she said.

"I know."

"At a villain."

"He wasn't really a—"

"Izuku." Not unkind. Just certain. "He hit an old woman. He qualifies."

He looked at his hands again. "I didn't decide to," he said. "I mean—once I was already throwing it, I meant to. But the first part, the part where I picked it up—I didn't decide that. My body just moved on its own."

Nejire was quiet beside him.

The ambulance lights pulsed amber against the shopfronts, casting everything in an intermittent warm glow that softened the street and made the whole scene feel slightly unreal, like something glimpsed through water. He looked at her in it and found her face doing the thing he recognized—not blank, not visibly distressed, but occupied in the deep way it got when she was working through something that required her full interior machinery and wasn't finished yet.

"Are you okay?" he asked. "You seem more troubled than I am."

"I'm thinking," she said.

He left it there. He had learned to leave it there.

They sat in the March cold together, the amber lights moving, the street making its ordinary sounds around the extraordinary shape the last twenty minutes had cut into the evening, and waited for whatever came next.

Slidin' Go had a particular quality of stillness once a situation was resolved—not the stillness of someone standing down, but the professional composure of a person who had already filed the incident in his head and was now managing the administrative tail of it. He had the perpetrator seated against the alley wall with the patient authority of someone who had done this many times and expected no further difficulty, and he had assessed both of them in the first thirty seconds of arrival—a single look, brief and complete—and said stay here in the tone of someone whose instructions were not suggestions.

Watanabe arrived with the second officer four minutes later.

He was mid-forties, built with the particular solidity of a man who had been large in his youth and had not lost much of it to time. His face had the weathered patience of someone who had absorbed two decades of incident reports and had stopped being surprised by their contents without stopping caring about them. He assessed the perpetrator first—said something brief to the second officer, who took over—and then crossed to the curb where they were sitting and looked down at both of them.

He looked at Izuku. Then at Nejire. Then back at Izuku with the expression of someone quietly revising their initial read of a situation.

He crouched—the practical, deliberate crouch of a large man choosing to be at eye level—and looked at Izuku with the unhurried attention of someone who had decided this required more than a cursory exchange.

"Which one of you threw the bag?" he said.

Izuku raised his hand slightly. The gesture had the reflexive quality of a student answering a register.

Watanabe looked at him. At the round, freckled face. The green curls. The old bruise on the jaw and the healed burn along the cheek that were not from tonight and were not his business and were nonetheless present. He looked at the way the boy was sitting—straight-backed, composed, hands resting on his knees with a stillness that was not the stillness of a frightened child.

"How old are you, kid?" he said.

"T-Thirteen," Izuku said.

Something moved through the officer's face. He kept it where it was.

"Walk me through it," he said. "From the moment you saw it. In order."

Izuku walked him through it. He was precise—gave the sequence correctly, flagged the points where he was certain and the points where the speed of events had outpaced his ability to track them cleanly. When he reached the moment of the throw, he said my body moved before I decided with the flat, careful accuracy of someone reporting an observed fact rather than constructing a narrative in his favour. He did not editorialize. He did not apologize. But he had fumbled every other word.

Watanabe listened until he was done. 

When Izuku finished, the officer was quiet for a moment. Behind them, Hashimoto Eiko said something sharp to the paramedic beside her and indicated the alley with her cane in the manner of a woman making a point. The paramedic nodded with the professional patience of someone accustomed to making points back at people who did not want them made.

"You don’t have a quirk, do ya?" Watanabe asked.

"N-No."

The officer exhaled slowly through his nose. He looked at the school bag sitting on the pavement beside Izuku—canvas, regulation issue, one handle twisted from the arc of the throw. Then he looked back at Izuku's face, at the burn mark and the old bruise, and his expression settled into the specific patience of a man who was going to say something clearly and was not going to be hurried.

"Midoriya-kun," he said. "What you did tonight was brave. And it was stupid. And I need you to understand that both of those things are entirely true at the same time, and the second one is what we're here to discuss."

Izuku said nothing. He was listening with the quality of attention he brought to things he intended to keep.

"His quirk is a grip enhancement," Watanabe said. "Low classification, not combat-applicable against a trained respondent. You can see that for yourself by the fact that Slidin' Go is standing fifteen feet away looking mildly bored." He didn't gesture. He didn't need to. "You did not know that when you threw the bag. You were looking at an unknown adult male who had already put a seventy-four-year-old woman on the ground. He could have had an impact amplifier. A reflex enhancement. A speed quirk. Any number of things that would have put you on the pavement before that bag cleared your hand, and there would have been nothing between you and that outcome except the ground." He let this settle. "You have no quirk. You are thirteen years old. There is no version of that scenario where you walk away well."

"I k-know," Izuku said.

"Tell me what you know," Watanabe said.

A pause. Not a long one. The outcome was good, and my contribution to making it good was m-mostly luck. The flatness in his voice was not defiance—it was the sound of someone who had already had this argument with himself and reached this conclusion without assistance. "The s-shout was useful but lucky. Slidin' Go was already on the cross-street. The bag was also luck."

Watanabe looked at him.

He was quiet for three full seconds, which was longer than he usually allowed himself.

This child, he thought, speaks like someone who has been having conversations in their own head for a very long time and gotten very precise at them. The thought was not comfortable.

"You're not in further trouble tonight," he said. There is no quirk involved, so there is nothing to pursue under the Use Act, and since you are a minor, pursuing assault charges would be pointless. The outcome—" He glanced toward Eiko, who was now apparently cross-examining the paramedic about something. 

"The outcome is what it is. But you're receiving a formal verbal warning, and I need you to hear it rather than just accept it: do not do this again. Not like this again. There is a reason we have laws against vigilantism. Usually, people with good intentions make things worse instead of better."

 His voice was not raised. It didn't need to be raised. "The world has enough people who meant well and couldn't finish it. I've written those reports. Please don't make me write one about you."

"Yes," Izuku said. "I u-understand."

Watanabe held his gaze for a moment longer—the look of a man checking whether yes I understand was real or reflexive. Whatever he found, he nodded once and turned to Nejire.

The shift in register was not dramatic, but it was there—a slight easing, the adjustment of a man moving from one kind of conversation to a different one. He looked at her with the straightforward attention he gave to witnesses.

"Hado-san," he said. "You were registered in our data base. Your quirk was Wave Motion, right."

"Yes."

"So I take it you held back."

"Yes."

"Good." The word was unambiguous and he did not dress it up. "Ambiguous threat level, civilian situation, unknown classification, a registered pro already responding. Holding and assessing was the correct call. The situation resolved without requiring additional powered intervention." He looked at her steadily, the look of someone making sure a statement lands properly. "You stayed calm. That matters."

Nejire said nothing.

Her gaze held evenly, hands still in her coat pockets. Her posture had not changed since Slidin' Go had arrived and the shape of the evening had resolved around them. 

Watanabe would not have seen her thumbnail pressing into the skin of her opposite palm, steady and deliberate, in the pocket of her coat where no one could see it.

He stood, taking out his notebook. "I'm going to need guardian contacts from both of you, now."

Beside her, Izuku went slightly pale in the specific way of a thirteen-year-old who had just fully remembered that his mother existed and did not yet know about this evening. The colour left his face in a way that was almost endearing given everything else he had managed in the last half hour.

"Yes," he said. "Of c-course."

Watanabe had the notebook open. He paused—the pause of a man who had thought of something and was deciding whether it fell within the scope of what he was supposed to say and had decided it did.

"The woman," he said, addressing the space between them rather than either of them directly—the tone of someone delivering something that sat slightly outside his usual register, managing it with the practiced economy of a professional who had done this before. "Hashimoto Eiko. She asked the paramedic to make sure—" A brief clearing of the throat. "She asked them to make sure the boy with the green hair was told she wanted to thank him."

He looked at Izuku for a moment. Then he held out the pen.

"Guardian numbers," he said. "Both of you. I won’t ask a second time."

Izuku took the pen.

He wrote his mother's number with a steady hand, and his face was doing the careful neutral—the one that appeared when something had happened that he had decided not to let be visible. But underneath it, in the particular quality of his stillness, something had shifted. Not resolved—he was not the kind of person who resolved things quickly, and tonight had given him too much to resolve. But shifted, the way weight redistributed rather than disappeared.

Nejire watched him write. 

When it was her turn, she jotted down her father's number quickly before handing the pad back.

She also watched Watanabe step away toward the vehicle to make the calls. She even watched Eiko across the street gesturing at the paramedic with her recovered cane—alive, present, and annoyed, exactly as she had been before the evening interrupted her, Nejire assumed.

Nejire sat with all of this around her, the amber lights and the cold and the ordinary sounds of the street reasserting themselves now that the extraordinary part was done, and felt the officer's words moving through her like something searching for where they were heaviest.

You stayed calm. That was the right call.

The space beside her held its specific warmth. She did not look at him. She looked at the ground between her feet, at a thin crack in the pavement running from the stone curb toward the drain, at the way the amber light caught the edge of it and made it look deeper than it was.

She had been standing right next to him.

She had enough output in her hands—she had always had enough— to have ended it before the woman hit the pavement. Before any of it. She had the training and the power and the range to have stepped forward and rendered the entire sequence irrelevant, and instead a thirteen-year-old boy with no quirk and a canvas bag full of notebooks had thrown himself into the gap she had left open, and an old woman's gratitude was sitting in his chest right now where it didn't belong to him any more than the bruise on his jaw had.

She pressed her thumbnail even harder into her palm. The flow of something warm began to trickle down her finger in response. 

The amber lights pulsed. Watanabe's voice carried from the vehicle in a low, professional murmur. Across the street, Eiko said something, and the paramedic laughed, unexpectedly. The sound was ordinary and warm and entirely out of place with the shape the last half hour had cut into the evening.

Finally, she built up the courage to look at him. Izuku, the boy that he was, sat with his hands in his lap.

He was not looking at anything in particular—his gaze was somewhere in the middle distance, turned inward in the way of someone still turning something over, working through the texture of a thing that had not finished arriving yet. She knew that look.

He was somewhere between the event and his understanding of it, moving through the space between with the careful, methodical attention he brought to anything that mattered to him.

She wanted to say something.

She didn't have the words yet, or she had the words and didn't trust them. Or maybe she had the words and trusted them and couldn't make herself say them out loud while the ambulance lights were still going. 

She looked at the crack in the pavement, again. That was easier. 

They waited for their parents.

He heard her before he saw her.

This was characteristic. Inko Midoriya did not arrive quietly in situations that had involved her son, a police station, and an hour and a half of unanswered calls to his phone. She arrived with the specific volume of a woman whose love for her child had a direct and unmediated relationship with her nervous system.

"MY BABY IZUKU—"

She came through the station doors fast—the particular fast of someone who has been walking quickly for long enough that fast has stopped feeling like an effort and become the only available gear. She found him in approximately one second, covered the distance in two more, and then her hands were on his face with the weight and warmth of a gesture she had been performing since he was small enough that it required her to crouch.

"Are you hurt? Where are you hurt—"

"Mom." He reached up and wrapped his hands around her wrists gently, a gesture of both comfort and mild restraint. "I'm fine. I'm okay. I promise I'm okay."

"Your phone—I couldn't get through—"

"I didn't have my bag. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I should have found another way to—"

"Why would you do that—" Her voice broke on the last word, then reassembled. She was looking at his face with the full, searching attention of someone running a damage assessment that went significantly deeper than the physical. Her thumbs moved against his cheeks. "Izuku, you could have been—"

"I know," he said. "I know, Mom. I know."

She pulled him forward and held him with the particular force of someone who had been maintaining composure for an hour and a half in a car and was no longer required to. He let her. His chin rested somewhere near her shoulder and he closed his eyes for a moment and let the situation be exactly what it was.

Across the small car park, a black car had pulled in behind Inko's. Kenji Hado opened the driver's door and stepped out with the unhurried, deliberate movement of a man who had been behind the wheel of a vehicle long enough to exit it gracefully regardless of the circumstances. He was wearing the charcoal coat he kept near the front door.

Satsuki came around from the passenger side. She had the specific quick-moving energy she always had, compressed slightly by the evening's events into something more directed. She crossed the car park and put her hand on Nejire's shoulder first—one firm, warm contact, the gesture of a mother who had assessed that her daughter was physically unhurt and was now engaged in the second layer of assessment.

"Are you alright?" she said. Quietly.

"...Yes," Nejire said.

Satsuki looked at her in the way she had—the full, clear look that her daughter had inherited and deployed and was now on the receiving end of. "Tell me later," she said, which was not a question.

Kenji had stopped beside his wife. He looked at Nejire with the measured assessment that characterized him, then at the boy being held by his mother near the station doors, then back at Nejire with a question in his expression that he did not ask with words.

Nejire's gaze had drifted to Izuku.

She was watching the way Inko held him—the fierceness of it, the barely-contained relief, the hands that kept moving to his face and his shoulders to verify through touch what she could already see with her eyes. And she was watching Izuku's expression, which had gone soft in a way she had not seen on him before. 

The expression sat in her chest in a way she couldn't move.

She was aware of her mother standing beside her. She was aware of her father slightly further away. She was aware of the March cold and the station lights and the distance between herself and the boy who had thrown his bag at someone for an old woman he didn't know.

Inko released Izuku and immediately began the damage assessment in earnest—hands moving to his arms, his jacket, his face again, the voice going from the compressed relief of the first contact into the sustained, recursive concern of a mother in full operational mode.

"What were you thinking—no, don't answer that, I know what you were thinking, you never think, you just go. Is this from before? This mark on your face—"

"That's from before, Mom, that's been healing—"

"Then why does it look like it's from—Izuku, just what in the world is going on with you?!"

"Because it's still healing, it looks worse before it looks—"

They were speaking simultaneously in the particular overlapping way of two people who had the same conversation on a regular basis and had given up on taking turns. The words were different. The structure was entirely familiar.

Nejire watched.

Inko became aware of her.

It happened in the way of things that Inko did—suddenly and completely, attention pivoting with the uncontained energy of a woman to whom focus was an act of will rather than a default. She turned. She found Nejire with her eyes. She took her in—the blue hair, the pale coat, the height, the expression that was more contained than anything Inko had produced in the last ten minutes.

She crossed the distance.

"You must be—Izuku has said—" She seemed to be recalibrating as she went, the words reorganizing around some threshold of composure she was attempting to locate. "He hasn't said much. Wow you really are pretty. He's been very—are you all right? Are you hurt? Were you there when it.”

"I'm unhurt," Nejire said. "I was there. Izuku saw it before I did." She kept her voice even. "He acted before I could assess the situation. He's much faster than I am," she added, which was true in a specific and limited way that she felt was also true in a broader sense she was still thinking about.

Inko's eyes were wet. They had been wet since she came through the doors, and she had not done anything about this because there was no time to do anything about it and it did not seem relevant. "You're his—you're from the club? You train together, he said—he told me there was someone he trained with—"

"Yes," Nejire said. "I'm Hado Nejire." A pause. The pause lasted approximately one second too long—the specific duration of a hesitation that was audible without being a silence. "I'm Izuku's ...friend."

The word came out correctly. It was the correct word. She had used it before — to Slidin' Go, to the officer, once when Satsuki had asked how she would describe herself to others.

But there was something in the pause before it that she had not been able to prevent.

Inko held her gaze. The wet eyes cleared slightly with the specific focus of a woman who had, underneath the emotion, the attentive precision of a person who noticed things. “You called him by his first name…”

She looked at Nejire for a moment with a look that was warm and was also taking something in.

"He talks about you," Inko said. Softly. "Not very much. But the way he does—" She stopped. She seemed to be deciding how much of this sentence to give. "Thank you," she said instead. "For being there. For—I know you couldn't have—I know it was sudden—"

"It was," Nejire said. "Very."

A beat. Then Inko reached out and briefly, firmly, held Nejire's hand in both of hers—the same gesture she had given Izuku's face, compressed and transferred—and let go.

Nejire did not say anything.

Satsuki, standing two feet back, had watched the entire exchange. She had also seen the pause. She had the particular expression she wore when she had arrived at a conclusion and was choosing to set it aside for later.

Kenji stood beside his wife, and he had been watching the boy.

Izuku Midoyra had been watching Nejire speak to his mother with an expression. Kenji had not been expecting embarrassment or the particular anxiety of a teenager caught in a social situation. Something quieter. Something careful.

Instead, he was watching her the way you looked at something precious. Something incredibly dear to you. 

Kenji had seen this expression before. He had produced it himself, once, a long time ago, on a street in a different city, when he first met a woman with periwinkle hair.

He said nothing.

He looked at the station. Then at his daughter's face—the surface of it, which was composed, and the layer beneath the surface, which was not composed and was not attempting to be because she believed no one was reading it.

He had been reading her since she was four years old.

He helped his wife back into the car, said a brief and appropriate thing to the Midoriya mother—something genuine, something that acknowledged the evening without prolonging it—and got behind the wheel. 

Nejire had already gotten into the back seat, and the door had closed, and she was looking out the window at the Midoriya mother and her son as the car park moved them further from the station lights.

The city passed the windows in segments.

Shopfronts. A stretch of residences. The long overpass that Nejire had never learned the name of, that she had crossed in this car hundreds of times and could navigate by feel in the dark. The familiar topography of home approaching at its familiar pace, the streets narrowing toward the quiet end of the neighborhood where the houses had gardens and the pavements were wide enough that you could walk two abreast without thinking about it.

Satsuki had her hands folded in her lap. She was looking at the road ahead with the expression of someone who had a great deal to say and was in the process of determining how much of it belonged to her in this particular car, on this particular night.

Kenji drove.

He drove the way he did everything deliberate—without wasted motion, without performance. He had not said anything since they'd pulled out of the car park. He drove for nine minutes through the city in silence, which was longer than his usual silence, and a lot longer than either of the girls in his car could hold. In their house, a prolonged silence usually  meant something was deeply wrong.

Nejire watched the shopfronts give way to residential, and residential give way to the long, dark stretch of the overpass.

"You never told me your friend was quirkless."

She did not look away from the window. "Why would I."

"That isn't an answer."

"It didn't come up. It doesn't matter."

He adjusted his grip on the wheel. "A thing like that doesn't come up, or a thing like that doesn't seem worth mentioning?"

She said nothing.

"Your mother told me he wants to be a hero."

"He does."

"And he's quirkless."

"I'm aware of the circumstances." The flatness in her voice was the controlled kind—temperature deliberately removed, the way you took a flame away from something you didn't want to ignite. "What of it."

"A quirkless boy who wants to be a hero," Kenji said. "That's not just an unlikely combination, Nejire. It isn't even oil and water. It's oil and fire."

"He's smarter than anyone else I've trained with." She turned from the window slightly—not all the way, not yet. "He identified a compensation in my form that three different coaches missed in eleven years. He rebuilt the way I understand my own quirk from the ground up. He did it in six weeks with no training, no background, just—he read things and he thought about them and he was right. " A pause. "Every time."

"I don't doubt his intelligence."

"Then what are you doubting?"

"The hero world doesn't give points for intelligence, my dear."

A traffic light changed ahead, and he brought the car to a smooth stop. The red light lay itself in a long, even stripe across the bonnet.

In the passenger seat, Satsuki had gone very still in the particular way she went still when she had decided to let something run without her—not absent, not uninvested, just deliberately outside the perimeter of it. Nejire noticed this and found it strange. Her mother was not a woman who withdrew from conversations. The withdrawal itself was a kind of signal.

The brown-haired woman almost never kept herself out of discussion.

"He was involved with the police," Kenji said. "Being questioned about an incident with a low-level criminal."

"He helped someone." Her grip tightened on the door handle, the cold of it coming through her coat sleeve. "An old woman. He helped her when no one else did. Didn’t they give you the run down? I was also involved."

"They did. They also told me he put himself between himself and something he had no capacity to handle. That is not the same thing as helping." His voice was not raised. It never needed to be raised. "That is an admirable impulse with a catastrophic ceiling."

The light changed. He drove.

Nejire turned back to the window. The houses stretched. The streets narrowing, the parked cars collapsing, and the warm rectangles of lit windows passing one after another like pages turning. "He's thirteen, Papa." 

Something in her voice had shifted, the careful flatness giving way to something underneath it, younger and more exposed. "He's thirteen years old and he's in middle school and he's already the best analyst I've ever worked with. He's exceptional. By the time he's my age—"

"If he reaches your age."

Kenji said it simply. Not as a threat, not as cruelty. As the specific weight of someone who had held this particular thought long enough to have made a peace with saying it aloud, which was somehow worse than either of the other things it could have been.

Satsuki's hands remained folded in her lap. The road received her attention entirely.

Nejire looked at her father's face in profile—the strong jaw, the silver threading through dark hair at the temples, and the line of his mouth carrying something she did not have a precise word for.

 She had always known her father carried a weight. Not in an obvious way—Kenji Hado was not a man who wore things visibly—but in the way of a room where furniture has been moved and the old arrangement is still present in the marks on the floor. Something had been set down long ago. She had grown up knowing where it was but not what it was.

"Just say what you're going to say," she said.

He drove another block. Then another. The words found their way out slowly, in the manner of something that had been carried a long time and was being set down overly carefully.

"...I had a quirkless friend once."

The inside of the car changed.

Not in any observable way. The road was still the road. The streetlights made their ordinary pools on the pavement. But the air shifted in the specific way of a conversation that had just become something different from what it had been.

"His name was Shin," Kenji said. "We'd known each other since birth. Your grandmother and his mother were college friends who happened to get pregnant at the same time. We grew up on the same street. We were in the same class from the time we started school."

Nejire felt something drop in her chest.

She knew the grave. The one in central Tokyo her father visited every year at the same time, the quiet that settled over the household in those few days leading up to it—not dramatic, not openly grieving, just heavy in the way of a house where someone is thinking about something they don't speak aloud. She had never asked. It had always felt like the kind of thing that would be said when it was ready.

Apparently, now was that time.

"When we were children," Kenji said, "we used to dream about becoming heroes. The two of us. Together." The indicator clicked as he changed lanes. "Then came the day of our diagnosis."

Nejire pressed herself back into the seat slightly, as though making room for what was coming.

"They told me I had a quirk that converted food into energy at a higher efficiency rate than normal. Useful for an athlete, they said. Completely incompatible with hero work." A pause. "They told Shin he had nothing. Both of us, in different ways, were told the same thing—the door was closed."

The overpass had given way to the residential stretch now. Home was close. She could feel the familiar geometry of it, the turns she knew by feel.

"I grieved it and moved on," Kenji said. "I was a child. I found other things to want. A career. A life… Your mother, among other things." The faintest thing moved through his expression—not quite a smile, not quite not. "But Shin never moved on. Every rejection letter, every door closed in his face, every person who told him it was impossible—he laughed it off. Literally laughed. He said that not even that could stop him.”

 His knuckles whitened slightly on the wheel. "He was brilliant. Genuinely exceptional, the way you describe your friend. Heart of gold. And a body that was not built for what he wanted to do with it."

"He became a vigilante," Kenji said. "I didn't know until it was too late. He hadn't told me. I think he knew what I'd say." He was quiet for a moment. "He ran into someone whose quirk was nothing sophisticated. Brute force enhancement—the kind of thing a trained hero handles without breaking stride. All they recovered was—"

He stopped.

"They recovered enough to know what had happened," he said.

The car turned onto their street. The stone wall of their house appeared at the end of it, the bare plum tree visible above it against the dark sky.

"He wanted to save everyone," Kenji said. "Always. It was the thing about him that I admired most and feared most in equal measure. He told me that he couldn't stop himself from running toward things." He brought the car to a stop at the curb.

 He didn't turn off the engine immediately. His hands stayed on the wheel, and he looked at the front of their house—the stone path, the frost-dusted garden, the wind chime hanging motionless in the still night. "Does that sound familiar to you?"

Nejire looked at her hands in her lap.

She didn't answer, because she didn't need to.

"The truth is," he said, "I hate that you want to be a hero."

She looked up.

"You're so incredible." He said it simply, the way he said things that were plainly true. "My daughter. My only one. You're radiant in every sense of the word, and it has nothing to do with your quirk or your ability; it's just—it's just who you are, and it has been since the day you were born." 

He exhaled slowly. "When you told us you wanted to be a hero, it felt like fate had come to the door. I was terrified. I am still terrified, every day. But your mother helped me understand that the strength you carry is real, and I have learned to believe it. I know what you'll become."

A pause.

"Then I met that young man tonight."

He turned, then, and looked at her in the back seat—his daughter, who had her mother's eyes and his jaw and a quality of feeling that was entirely her own and that he had never quite been able to account for.

"I can see it in him," he said. "The same thing that was in Shin. The same look. The same certainty." He paused. "He tell you something like that? He couldn’t look away? He couldn’t stop?"

She nodded.

"That he wants to be a hero no matter what?"

She nodded again.

"Do you think you could change his mind?"

She didn't have to think about it. The answer was already there, had been there since December, since the first time she had watched him speak about All Might without a stutter, with the absolute unguarded certainty of someone speaking from the deepest part of themselves. 

"No," she said. "It's the only thing I've ever heard him say with complete confidence. There's no version of this where that changes."

Kenji looked at her for a long moment.

"Then you need to be prepared," he said, "for when the day comes."

He turned off the engine.

The car went quiet. Outside, the wind chime shifted once in a breath of air and then stilled. The stone path stretched from the gate to the front door with its dusting of frost, the plum tree casting its thin, bare shadow across it in the light from the engawa.

Nejire did not move.

Satsuki had turned in her seat. Nejire looked back at her mother's face and found she had nothing to give back yet. The story was still finding its weight in her, settling into the places it was going to be heaviest, which were not the places she would have predicted.

Nejire got out of the car.

She walked up the stone path between her parents. She did not manage to say anything else that evening.

She only managed to change out of her school clothes and sit at the desk.

The calculus notebook was in front of her—the one with his handwriting threaded through hers on the open page, the equations from last week's session that she'd copied while he talked through the logic, his corrections in the margins in the smaller hand he used when he was being precise. She looked at it. She looked at the place where their two scripts met on the same line, his pencil and her pen, the different weights of them visible even from here.

She didn't open it further.

After a while she moved to the bed and sat on the edge of it with her arms loosely around her knees, looking at the window. The garden was dark. The plum tree stood bare against the sky, its branches the articulated geometry of something between seasons—stripped of everything, waiting, not yet wrong for it. The wind chime her mother had hung by the front door was just audible from up here when a car passed on the road below, a single displaced note, and then silence.

She thought about Shin.

She had no image for him. No face, no voice, no texture—only the outline her father had drawn in the car, which was specific and careful and true. 

He had done it on purpose. So she couldn’t stop herself from placing blame on someone she knew in considerable detail. A boy who laughed off rejection letters. A boy whose body moved on its own. A boy whose certainty ran so deep it had no bottom to it, the kind that couldn't be argued with because it wasn't an argument; it was just what the person was made of.

Do you think you could change his mind?

She had not had to think about it.

She stood. She went to the window. She pressed her hand flat against the cold glass and looked at the plum tree and thought about a grave in central Tokyo that her father visited every year at the same time, about the quiet that settled over the house in those days like weather moving in. She had grown up knowing the shape of that grief without knowing its name. She knew its name now.

She thought about the curb outside the police vehicle. His hands in his lap, no longer shaking. The bag across the street, twisted at the handle from the arc of the throw. Watanabe's voice, delivering the warning with the patient precision of someone who had given it before and expected to give it again—the world has enough people who meant well and couldn't finish it—and Izuku receiving it with his spine straight and his face composed and the specific stillness of someone absorbing something fully without flinching from it.

My body just moved on its own.

Delivered without drama. Without pride. The plain report of a person observing himself from the outside, the same tone he used for everything he catalogued, as though what his body had done was simply data to be recorded alongside the rest.

She moved from the window to the desk and back to the bed, not quite consciously pacing, arriving at the window again and finding herself there with a mild surprise. The movement wasn't restless exactly—it was the movement of a person who had too much in them to sit still but not enough resolution to do anything about it.

She thought about her father's hands on the wheel, his knuckles going pale. She thought about the way he'd said, "If he reaches your age"—not cruelly, not as a weapon, just as the weight of a thing he had already carried long enough to say aloud without his voice breaking. She had never heard her father's voice threaten to break. She had not heard it tonight either. That was, in some ways, the most frightening part.

The wind chime sounded once more from below.

She thought about the Wave Motion notebook sitting in the twisted bag across the street from where she'd been sitting and about the way he'd asked her, "Are you okay, you seem more troubled than me”—sitting on the curb, cold, coatless, having just been thrown down by a man twice his size, and his first coherent thought had been to check on her. She pressed her fingers against the bedspread, against the familiar texture of it, and held onto that thought until it became too much to hold.

Then you need to be prepared for when the day comes.

She wiped the blood from her palm against grey sheets.

Her eyes found the calculus notebook on the desk. At the interleaved handwriting on the open page. His and hers, following the same equation from opposite sides, the two scripts learning the shape of the same idea together across weeks of late afternoons in a room at the end of a quiet corridor.

She lay back.

The ceiling was the same as it always was. The lamp made its rectangle of soft light on the plaster. Outside, the plum tree didn't move. The night had gone entirely still, the kind of still that only arrived after midnight when even the city had quieted, and the silence had a quality to it—full rather than empty, the way silences were full when they were holding something just out of reach.

She closed her eyes.

The dark came in at the edges first, the way it always did when she was too tired to resist it—the thoughts losing their edges, the weight of the evening releasing its hold in increments, her body making the quiet and unilateral decision to be done with the day regardless of whether she was finished with it.

She was not finished with it.

But she did not get a say.

The dark took her gently, the way it took people who had thought too much and felt too much and had nothing left to keep themselves above the surface with, and somewhere in the space below waking, something was already beginning to move. Something that had the shape of a street in winter and the sound of a bag hitting the pavement and a face she knew turned the wrong way, toward something she couldn't reach from where she was standing.

She did not know it yet.

But she was already gone.

Chapter Text

She was already running when she heard the scream that ripped through the howling wind.

The storm had started ten minutes ago. Ominous clouds rolled over the sky like a warning that had arrived too late to matter. Her hair was already flat against the back of her neck. The pavement was dark and slick, and she could see her own reflection in it, fractured by each drop, a hundred small versions of herself all running in the same direction.

She came around the corner.

She saw the villain first—large, standing at the mouth of an alley, facing something she couldn't see yet. Then she saw a child. A little boy, maybe seven years old, pressed against the alley wall with both arms folded over his head, his whole body contracted into itself the way children contracted when they were trying to make themselves smaller than they were.

He wasn't moving. He wasn't making any sound at all. He was simply withdrawn into himself, waiting—pleading—for it to be over.

He was not hurt.

She began calculating: the distance to the villain, the angle, the child's position relative to the blast radius of a Wave Motion discharge. It was the kind of rapid structural analysis that had become reflex over years of training, the thought arriving before she'd consciously chosen to have it.

Then she stopped calculating.

She saw what was between her and the villain and the thinking stopped entirely.

Izuku was on the ground.

Her Izuku.

His back was to the wet black pavement, and he was wearing the blue All Might hoodie. 

She had seen it a dozen times. The pale blue one that had been washed too many times and had faded around the cuffs and the collar, the one he wore on Saturdays when they weren't in school. 

But, the pale blue had gone purple. The purple spread from the centre of his chest in a slow radius, the rain thinning it at the edges, and the pavement beneath him held a dark mirror of it.

The villain was already running.

She let him run.

She was across the street and on her knees before she had made the decision to be there. Her trembling hands went to his chest, pressing, finding the wound through the wet fabric. 

It was enormous, a gaping, open thing. She pressed hard. The warmth of it came through her hands, soaking them instantly with the crimson liquid much thicker than rain, and she pressed harder.

"Izuku?! Izuku!"

His eyes were closed.

"Izuku! It's me, Nejire! Open your eyes, please!" Her voice came out desperate and uncontrolled, swallowed by the distant wail of sirens and the crashing percussion of thunder overhead.

His eyelids moved.

Slowly, emerald shone through the rain.

He looked up at her from the wet pavement with the rain falling into his face, his curls dark and matted at his temples, some pulled away from their usual shape and pressed flat against the pavement. His face was very pale. The pallor of him against the dark concrete was wrong in a way she couldn't name and didn't try to.

She pressed her hands harder.

Somehow, through all of it, he found her.

"Nejire?" he said. The words came in frayed whispers, like something unravelling at the edges. "Is that...you?"

A thin stream of red ran from the corner of his mouth. The rain diluted it as it moved, carrying it in a slow crawl across his jaw toward the pavement. She watched it happen. She could not look away from it.

"Hey there, Izuku," she said. Her voice was doing something she couldn't stop. "Do me a favour and focus on my voice, okay?"

"M'kay," he said. Like a greeting. Like she had arrived somewhere he had been waiting for her.

"Come on—Izuku, I need you to—"

His fingers found her wrist.

His hand was bloodied—she didn't know whose blood, didn't let herself think about whose blood—and his grip was loose, the grip of a hand that was working with what it had left. 

His trembling fingers wrapped around her so gently that she could barely feel them.

She pressed harder against his chest. The wound was too large. She knew this. All she was doing was buying time—fleeting seconds in a window that was already closing. She pressed harder anyway because the alternative was not something she was able to choose.

"It's...okay," he said. “I don’t like seeing you cry.” 

"It is not okay—"

"Nejire." His voice was calm. That was the wrong thing about it. The specific quality of calm that should not have been there, that had no business being in his voice right now, and yet there it was. "I knew what I was doing."

"You knew—" She couldn't finish this sentence.

"Fighting a villain...without a quirk," he said. He said it the way he said things he had already thought all the way through—not confessing, not explaining, just reporting. "I…knew. I wen’t and did it again."

She had no idea how he could still be thinking clearly. How any part of him was still operating. But she was grateful that he was holding on.

"Then why— hy did you—Izuku, you idiot—why did you throw yourself into this? You could have—I'm the pro hero here, you could have called me, you could have waited, you could have—"

"There wasn't time," he said.

"There was time—"

"Nejire." His thumb moved against the inside of her wrist. Back and forth a few times. Small. Deliberate. "There wasn't time."

She looked at the little boy against the alley wall. He was still folded into himself, still not moving, watching her and not watching her in the way of children who were present for something they were not able to process. His eyes were very wide. She looked at him and then she looked at Izuku.

"He's okay," Izuku said. He had tracked her gaze. "He's okay. I checked."

"I don't care about—" She stopped. She pressed. "I care about you. I need you to stay with me. I need you to stay. Just stay—just hold on—"

His free hand came up.

It came up slowly, with the specific deliberateness of a motion that was costing something considerable, and she felt it before she saw it—the back of his fingers, finding the side of her face. She didn't move. His fingers grazed her cheek and she felt the smear of it, warm and then cooling against her skin.

"Hey," he said, softly. "I saw him. I saw the kid. He was in danger."

"You should have—"

"I saw him and I—" A breath. The breath cost something audible. "My body moved on its own."

He paused. The rain fell. His fingers were still against her cheek.

"Just hang on," she said. The words came out like something being held up by force. "Just—please, Izuku, just hang on, okay? You hang on. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. You don't get to—you can't leave, I don't want to be alone again, please, I have been alone for a very long time and you fixed that, you fixed it, so you don't get to—"

"Nejire."

She pressed harder. The wound was too large.

"I’m not going anywhere."

She couldn't speak.

A pause followed by a sputtering breath. "Since December. You had me since December. That doesn't—" He stopped. "That doesn't go anywhere. Even if—that stays."

The rain came down.

His hand was still against her face. Growing heavier—not from intention, but from the weight of a hand that was becoming difficult to hold up.

"I'm sorry," he said. His voice had changed quality. Very low now, and very even. She understood what that meant, and she pressed as hard as she could, and it did not matter how hard she pressed. "I'm sorry it's like this. I would have—I wanted to do it better. I had plans. I had—" A faint something at the corner of his mouth. "I had a whole list, Nejire. Things I was going to tell you. Things I was going to—"

"Tell me now," she said. "Tell me right now. I'm listening. Tell me everything on the list."

His eyes were very bright.

"There's no time," he said. His voice had gone somewhere quieter than quiet. "Just remember me, okay? Remember the part of me that was brave. The part of me that saved him. The part of me that was brave enough to become your friend."

He trailed off between more wet, splattering coughs. Each one cost something visible.

"You know, I just—" he said, very slowly. "I had to tell him."

"What, Izuku? What did you have to tell him?"

"That I—" He stopped. A breath that didn't come fully. "That I am here."

His hand slipped from her cheek.

She caught it before it reached the pavement, and she held it against her face. No part of her was ready to be severed from his touch, nor his presence. 

Her other hand remained pressed against his chest but the wound was too large.

His eyes lost hers. 

Izuku's face was peaceful.

He was looking at the sky above her. The grey, heavy sky, and the rain coming down out of it. He was looking at it with an expression she had never seen on him before and would see only this once: something without a name that lived on the other side of all the things he usually felt, beyond the careful neutrality, beyond the cautious wonder, beyond the particular brightness of him when something interested him.

He was smiling.

Not the practiced smile. Not the small convincing smile he deployed when he was managing something difficult. Something she had never seen. Something he had apparently been keeping behind everything else.

A smile that would follow her for years. Even if it was only a conjured image of her own mind.

Because he died with it on his face.

Her eyes snapped open.

A wave discharged before she was fully conscious—a full-body release, uncontrolled, the kind that hadn't happened to her since she was seven years old. Yellow energy shattered outward from her in all directions at once, hitting the four walls of her bedroom, rattling the window in its frame. The lamp on her desk skidded off the edge and crashed onto the wooden floor.

The light it made was enormous in the dark room. Painting the walls in her own colour, her own frequency.

Then it fell back to grey, pale moonlight filtering through the window as it always had.

She sat upright in the ruin of her bed with her chest heaving and her hands in front of her, still trembling as if continuing from the dream. 

Wave Motion crackled at her fingertips, not yet fully recalled, not yet finished deciding whether it was done. The discharge had blown the duvet half off the bed. The pillow behind her was against the wall. Her ears rang before the silence rushed back in to fill the space.

Her palms were faintly luminous from the discharge residue—the faint blue-white of the afterglow, fading already. She watched it fade. She watched until her hands were simply her hands.

After, she became aware of how soaked she was.

Not the mild damp of a restless night. Soaked—completely, thoroughly. The sheets under her were saturated. Her shirt clung to her body. The pillow she now held against her chest, having not yet decided to pick it up, was drenched through. She had sweated through everything that could be sweated through, and the cold of it was already setting in—the clammy, specific cold of soaked fabric in a room closed all night.

She had never woken up like this. Not once, not ever.

She had had bad dreams before. The kind that left residue. The kind that sat in the chest for a day and coloured everything they touched. She had woken up fast from dreams, heart loud, the low alarm of the body responding to something it had experienced as real.

But she had never discharged in her sleep. Not even when she was but a mere child. She had never woken up having to pull the Wave Motion back into herself like something that had gotten away from her. She had never had to count back from the ceiling to remember where she was.

She sat on the edge of the wet bed and put her head in her hands.

His face was still there, lingering in the front of her mind. The specific configuration of it—the rain, the pale blue fading to purple, the smile she had never seen. The warmth of his hand against her cheek and the particular weight of it when it stopped being held up. 

And the words that she could not get out of her head.

My body moved on its own.

The words that lived in her chest like something with weight. 

She sat there for a long time before gaining to the strength to stand.

The window was dark. The clock on the desk—tilted now, the discharge having moved it—read three forty-seven. She straightened the clock. She picked the lamp up off the floor and put it back on the desk. She pulled the duvet back onto the bed, looked at it for a moment, pulled it off again, balled it, left it on the floor in the far corner.

She changed the sheets in the dark, by feel, not turning the lamp on because she would rather not see the full extent of it in actual light. 

She worked through the familiar geography of her own bed, the tuck, the fold. She also pulled a fresh shirt from the drawer.

Sleep would fail to find her again.

She found the chair by the window instead—the one she kept there for exactly this kind of night, the kind where the bed became wrong and sitting was the only option. She pulled her knees to her chest and she looked out. Her most familiar pose, in the least familiar way.

Winter was ending. She could tell by the pale yellow grass beginning to emerge through the last of the snow, which was thinning along the garden paths and retreating from the stone fountain below. The red garden gnome hats her neighbour put out every December were showing their tops above the white. The world below was beginning to remember itself. The blanket of white being pulled back.

She looked at these things and did not see them.

She thought about a purse snatcher tripping on a curb. She thought about his shaking hands that moved despite his fear. She thought about the smile she had never seen before on his face and could not now unsee.

She thought about what her father had said in the car.

If he reaches your age.

She thought about what he had said after.

Then you need to be prepared for when the day comes.

She had pushed it away then, in the car, with the practiced reflex she deployed against her father's particular brand of love—the kind that arrived as warning, as pre-emptive grief, as the statement of outcomes before they had been earned. 

She had pushed it away and she had been angry at him for saying it and she had thought he was wrong. Because she knew it was, at least, cruel. 

But is he wrong?

That was the thing she could not outrun. She had tried, to frame the dream as only a dream—a product of stress, of the particular intensity of the incident with the purse snatcher, of her own vivid and relentless imagination. She had very nearly succeeded.

But her father had not been wrong.

A boy who ran into alleys without quirks, without plans, without anything except the conviction that someone nearby was in need and therefore he was required. Not because he was reckless or foolish but because he was made that way, structured that way, the same way a compass was structured to point north.

He couldn't not. She had understood this about him since December. She understood it now at a different depth.

The light came very slowly.

His smile would follow her for years. Even if it were only a conjured image of her mind.

There was no pulling an image like that back out of herself.

Earlier that same night, a floor below where Nejire sat with her knees pulled to her chest, her parents had said things to each other that neither of them would fully take back.

Not that the poor girl would ever know. 

Satsuki had found Kanji in the kitchen. He was standing at the counter with a glass of water he wasn't drinking, and he had the particular stillness of a man who knew he had done something wrong and had not yet decided how to exist inside that knowledge.

"You could have handled that better," Satsuki said, choosing to take a direct approach.

"I'm not going to lie to my only daughter."

Satsuki swirled around her own cup of tea. "You say that as if you haven't been lying to her for years."

"That's different. That lie is candy-coated. It's to protect her."

She stared at her husband. She hardly recognized the man he had become around this particular subject—the way a fear, held long enough, reshaped a person into something harder and less navigable than the person they had started as. "Nejire isn't weak. She's not a young girl anymore. She's a strong, capable young woman coming into her own. She's on the verge of her first love. And here you come, shooting it all down. Did you see the look on her face? What the hell, Kenji?"

The man crossed his arms. "Don't tell me how to parent my daughter."

The words stung.

"She's my daughter, too."

"She's—"

The brown-haired woman crossed to him. She was shorter by half a head but she had learned, over the years, that presence was not a question of height. She pressed a single finger into the centre of his chest. "I have been with Nejire since she spoke her first words. I raised her as my own, stepping up to take care of your unfortunate mistakes. Do not lecture me about her as if she were only yours."

Kenji took a step back. She did not follow.

"Stop pushing your pain and your trauma onto her," she said. Her voice was level in the way of someone who had said the angry version of this many times before and had learned that the level version carried further. "In the car tonight, you sounded like a real dick. Apologize to her before she does something she regrets."

Kenji rolled his eyes. "If you really cared that much, you would have spoken up in the car. Or after. Come off it."

"You're unbelievable."

"Sure."

He put the glass down.

He walked out of the kitchen without looking at her.

She stood at the counter alone. 

The cabinet walls pressed in on her as she stared at her reflection in the rippling bronze liquid. 

The look on Nejire’s face after she stepped out of the car lingered in her mind. But Satsuki found no words to give the girl. 

After all, she wasn’t Nejire’s real mother. Who was she to impose her mannerisms, lessons, and ideals onto her? 

Kenji had made that clear. 

Satsuki saw herself in the girl. 

But maybe she shouldn’t. 

She rubbed the temples of her forehead before shutting off the kitchen light. She did not follow him to their room. 

He told himself there was a reasonable explanation.

He told himself this with the careful, methodical conviction of someone who had identified the conclusion they did not want to reach and was working deliberately away from it. He had spent a long time learning to work away from conclusions that frightened him. The skill had its uses. It had kept him functional through middle school. It was serving him now, mostly.

The reasonable explanation was almost certainly the exam.

The UA entrance exam was close. The preparation pressure was real—she had mentioned the practical assessment components weeks ago, had said the final months would require more of her time. He had filed it away. He had told himself, when the first session disappeared, that this circumstance was a temporary narrowing of available time that did not specifically involve him.

He kept telling himself this.

But when Tuesday came, the loner club remained as it was. Empty chairs. A clock on the wall. A very specific, freezing cold truth. The room felt hollow without her. 

She filled the space so naturally, with so much warmth and presence, that he had grown unfamiliar to the sensation of life without her. 

He hated what it felt like without her. 

So when he arrived at the usual time, things had been normal. He had made a habit of showing up first, not wanting to leave her in wait. 

He switched on the light, caught a glimpse of her hand-written Kanji still lingering on the board, pushed the desks together by the door, and sat on the desk to the left.

 The small ritual of arrival that had become so ingrained he performed it without active thought. 

He sat like that for a time. He opened the notebook to the current working page. He picked up the pen.

He waited.

He wrote.

He waited some more. 

He wrote some more.

The clock on the wall made its sound, which it always made, which he usually did not hear because there was enough else happening to cover it. He heard it now, growing louder with each mechanical tick. 

Ten minutes.

He worked on the conversion model—the regulatory threshold data from the early march sessions, the efficiency numbers, the implications of the document framework for the next phase of the experiment. He wrote with the focused automaticity of someone whose hand had learned to move without requiring the brain to be entirely present. He filled most of a page.

He looked at what he'd written.

He could not remember writing any of it.

He put the pen down.

Twenty-five minutes.

He thought about her face, and the expressions that she had been wearing recently. Specifically, the one she wore while speaking with her scary-looking father.

It was the same one she wore while her mother held her on her shoulder and the same one that cracked as she stepped into the backseat of their car. 

He closed the notebook. The table creaked.

Anxiety-riddled worry raced through him, as he tried to beat it back the best he could. Rationally, he knew that unchecked worry was not productive and produced only more worry.

He was methodical about most things. So he tried to be methodical about this.

Nejire was not like him. Nejire always had an explanation for everything. Nejire was not someone who disappeared without reason. Nejire was just busy—she was busy, it was the exam, it was the preparation, it was the particular crunch of a third-year's final months—

He pushed the seats back apart, tucked his notebook back into his bag and left the room.

Nejire is just busy. I’ll head home.

He repeated this to himself on the long walk to his aparment.

He repeated it on the very same path that he had walked four months ago, an entirely different individual.

He repeated it three more times as he turned onto his street and arrived at the apartment building where his mother was waiting. He had promised her that he would come straight home after the incident with the purse snatcher.

Even still, his hand hovered over the handle for a good long minute as he stared at the door. 

I’m sorry, mom. 

He had broken the promise.

He had meant to keep it; he truly had.

But something was pulling him away. A feeling deep within the core of his very being. Something he couldn’t ignore. 

He dropped his bag at the door and ran the opposite direction. Down the stairs, down the path he had just walked, and toward the nearest train station.

He found himself on a train that he had been on before. He watched different streets pass by the window while his phone accumulated increasingly urgent messages from his mother, to which he did not yet have the right words to respond.

Somehow, he knew. Because she was here. Where they had gone on their date.

She was on the ice.

Not training, not drilling anything specific. Just skating. Moving in slow circuits around the near end of the rink, alone in the late afternoon, the rink nearly empty at this hour. She was wearing the dark coat she wore on weekends, the hood down, her hair loose, moving through the cold air with the meditative quality of someone who had come somewhere to be alone with a thing they were carrying.

He stood at the fence.

He watched her for a moment—the circuit, the slow, graceful, even motion of it, the way she turned at the corner without breaking pace. She moved with a fluidity that only someone like Nejire could. Flawless, her radiance shining brighter than the string lights that hung around them.

He briefly thought about the last time he had stood at this fence, which had been in the context of Ryūsei and the conversation afterward. He thought about sitting on the bench with her in the cold, her hand over his on the wood, and the silence that had been full rather than empty.

Eventually, he opened the gate and made his way toward the skate stand.

He laced the rental skates with hands that fumbled slightly from the cold. Then he stepped onto the ice. 

She saw him when he was ten feet away. He watched her register him—the slight pause in her stride, the small recalibration of her expression that she recovered from quickly, not quite fast enough. She slowed and they came to a stop near the boards on the east side of the rink.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Cold air sat against her face, highlighting her cheeks in a blush that didn’t exist.

"Hi," she said. 

"Hi," he said.

The silence between them had a quality. Not neutral, not empty. Something in it that both of them could feel.

"You weren't at the club," he said.

"I know." She looked at the ice. "I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry."

"I know that too."

A pause.

“How did you know I was here?” 

He fumbled with his gloves. “I…I don’t know. I j-just, knew?” 

He had prepared things to say—running the exchange ahead of his actual arrival, modelling possible responses, and building enough structural scaffolding so that he would not show up empty-handed. It was as if he had no doubt that he would find her here. But it's not as if he had reason to believe that she would be here. 

As he stood in front of her, the world seemed to fade away. So too did any words he had prepared. 

She was looking at the ice instead of at him.

Whatever she was thinking remained unclear. 

"...Are you okay?" he said. “Something is bothering you, right?”

She looked up. Her eyes found his and then—not quickly, not decisively—looked slightly away again. The fractional redirect of a person who has looked at something and found it too direct to hold.

"...I've been thinking about some things," she said.

"O-okay. What kind of things?"

"Big things." She said it carefully, the word doing more work than it usually did. "About the exam. About next year. About what everything looks like. I haven't been—" She stopped. Started again. "I've been a bit inside my own head."

"That's okay," he said. “I’m always in my head, haha. As far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty normal.” 

"I know you've noticed," she said. “The change." 

He was quiet.

"I know you've been giving me room," she said, a little softer. "That's—" She paused. "That's a very 'you' thing to do. Izuku, such is the sweet Kouhai that you are."

Something moved in his chest at that. He held still.

"N-Nejire," he said.

She looked at him. This time she held it.

His face was doing the thing it did when he was about to say something that cost him something—the slight bracing, the gathering quality, the way his hands went very still at his sides.

"I was thinking," he said, "that maybe—if you wanted to—we could go somewhere again. On another date."

He said it carefully. Not tentatively. There was a distinction. Tentative was not knowing whether you wanted to say it. Carefulness was knowing exactly what you were saying and choosing the delivery precisely because the delivery mattered.

"We could make some new memories," he added. “If something is weighing on your mind. Let me help you carry it.”

She looked at him.

He watched her take a breath.

He watched her proceed to not use it.

The silence stretched beyond the point where it could hold anything.

He understood. Not in the analytical way he understood things he had thought through, but in the simpler, older way of understanding that didn't require processing.

The rudimentary understanding that arrived before language, in the body rather than the mind. He had known what certain silences meant for a long time.

"You don't have to," he said. His voice came out level. He had not decided to make it level; it simply was.

"Izuku—" she started.

"It's okay," he said.

"It's not—I'm not—" She stopped. She looked at the ice again. He watched her jaw set in the way it set when she was deciding something she had not wanted to decide. "I don't know what I want to say right now."

"Then don't say anything," he said. "You don't owe me a conversation. You don't owe me anything." He looked at his skates against the ice. "Your presence was enough to change my life."

Something crossed her face at that—a quick motion, there and gone. Something that lived in the category of that landed wrong and she wants to say so. 

She didn't say so.

They stood on the ice.

The cold was honest about itself. At the far end of the rink, two children were attempting spins with limited success, their laughter carrying across the empty ice in the particular uncomplicated way that children's laughter carried—uninflected, not performing anything, just the sound of something that found something funny.

He thought about before. The two of them were on this same ice, him barely upright, her gliding backward to face him because forward had apparently not been enough of a challenge. Her hand pulling him when he listed. The particular way she had laughed when he went down. The way their faces were so close yet so far, her hot breath tickling his nose in a way that sent shivered down his spine.

He thought about the bench afterward. The cold. Her hand over his.

He thought about her. Everything that she was. 

Everything that she wasn’t now. 

“Why are you so interested in me?” 

Izuku was not prepared for the question. “W-Why?” 

She nodded. "Why?" 

He drew in a breath. “I… when you first walked into the Loner Club, I was enraptured. Never in my life had I seen someone so effortlessly beautiful. So inherently radiant. You redefined my understanding of grandeur.” 

Her left hand fiddled with a bandage that laid across her right palm. Izuku hadn’t seen that bandage before. “So it was my looks?” 

He waved his hands in a sudden panic. “No! No-well yes- but no-? It was—you didn’t hate me for existing, you know?” 

Something shifted behind her eyes. 

Oh, those eyes. 

"You came into the room and you looked at me like I was a person who was worth looking at. Like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Like the thing that everyone had spent years treating as the defining fact of me—didn't even register as a fact worth noting." He exhaled slowly. "You told me I didn't need a quirk to dream. And you said it like it was obvious. Like I was the one being strange for not already believing it."

His eyes began to search for something to hold onto, but they always fell back to the same place. To hers. As if they had their own gravitational pull. 

"It was the first time in my life," he said, "that I didn't want to look away from someone. Because you made me not want to."

The string lights above them swayed slightly in the air circulated by the building's ventilation. The amber of them moved across her hair, across her face. The children at the far end were still laughing.

Izuku never would find out if the pink in her cheeks was from the kiss of the cold wind or from his words that spilled from a place he wasn’t aware existed until that very moment.

“...Do you love me?” 

Izuku stumbled before nodding. “I t-think so. But maybe love is a little b-bold right now.” 

She skated up to him and latched both hands onto his face. “Hey. I’m going to kiss you now.”

She was bent over, matching her height to his.

“W-what?! Isnt’t that—aren’t you going—” 

Her lips found his. 

They pressed and matched, but neither fell into it. 

She pulled away. 

“Still feel that way?” 

Izuku was lost. 

“I…I…Nejire, what?” 

She began to glide backwards. She hadn’t made any purposeful movement in particular; she simply narrowed her blades inward on an instinct.

“That’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to say when a girl kisses you, Izuku.” 

He touched his fingers to his lips. He could feel it still—the warmth of the contact against the cold of everything around it.

Cherry?

“S-Sorry. I was taken by surprise.” 

She titled her head. “Mhm. I suppose it was rather sudden. I just had to make sure.” 

His heart was racing, but for the wrong reasons. 

“Nejire…what did you have to make sure of?” 

She waved her finger in the air. “Sorry, Izuku, but that’s a secret.” 

There was a smile on her face that he had never seen before. 

But there was something about it that didn't sit right. He opened his mouth to speak, but quickly shut it. He did not push because he could tell that she was far enough away as it was. 

"I think I should head home," she said. “My mom may worry.” 

"Y-Yeah, sure. Okay.” 

She didn't move yet. She stood there looking at the far end of the rink where the children were laughing, and her expression had the quality of someone watching something from a very long distance—not absent, not unfeeling. Just removed. Looking at something through glass.

"Izuku," she said.

"Yeah."

She turned to him. Finally, she gave him the full look, no fractional redirect. The look she had given him from the beginning—the complete rotation, making him feel like the only thing in the room. Like he was the most important thing in the world. 

"You're a good person," she said. 

He opened his mouth.

"I mean it," she said. "I just… I just need you to know that."

He closed his mouth.

She held his eyes for one moment more.

“I’m glad I decided to kiss you.” 

Then she turned and skated to the boards, stepped off the ice, handed her skates back. She put her shoes on, pulled her coat straight and walked toward the exit without looking back.

He stood on the ice and watched her go. The children at the far end were still laughing. The refrigeration hum continued its work. The cold pressed against his face with the patient honesty that it had.

He stood there for a long time. Lost in his world. He had just had his first kiss. Something that was supposed to be a pivotal moment in any person's life. Something that he should be proud of, in the very least.

So why did it feel like everything was crumbling?

His locker was the third from the left in the second row, the one with the small dent in the upper-right corner from some impact that predated him. He had been opening it every school day for months. The motion was completely automatic—the combination, the handle, the swing of the door.

He opened the door and there it was—sitting on top of his textbooks at an angle, positioned to be the first thing visible. White envelope. Standard size. Nothing on the front.

He stood looking at it.

The corridor moved around him. Students, morning sounds, none of it registering. He was looking at the envelope in the way you looked at things when your body understood something your mind was still constructing.

He took it out and turned it over.

On the back, in her handwriting—the deliberate, looping script he had been reading for months in session notes and notebook margins and shared diagrams, the script of someone who pressed slightly too hard, but was careful with how their hand sat upon the paper. 

Written was his name.

Just his name.

It was heavy. Several pages, at least. He could feel the weight of them through the paper walls.

He thought about yesterday. Her on the ice. The string lights. Her hands on his face. The warmth of it against the cold, the specific quality of that warmth. Her lips against his.

I just had to make sure.

He tucked the envelope into his bag.

Are you going to tell me what you’re truly thinking? 

He sat through the rest of the school day with his mind returning to it at fixed intervals, the way a tongue returned to a loose tooth—drawn, compulsive, unable to leave it alone. His notes for the afternoon were three lines of the same equation written slightly differently each time, as if repetition might resolve something that had nothing to do with equations.

Maybe it's a love confession.

He thought this with the cautious optimism of someone who had learned not to want things too openly in case the wanting made them less likely to arrive.

As it turned out, he was not entirely wrong.

He opened it in the loner club.

He had not planned this. He had gone there because it was where he went, because it was thursday and his feet knew the route, because the room was quiet and he could not have read it on the train home with people on either side of him and the ordinary motion of the city going past the window.

He sat down at his desk.

He took the envelope out of his bag.

He held it for a moment—the same way he had held it that morning, both hands, the weight of the pages inside. Then he worked the flap open carefully, the way he handled things he was not sure yet how to receive. He drew the pages out. They were folded in thirds, as if she had folded and unfolded them several times before sealing them. The creases were soft. The paper had memory.

He laid the pages flat on the desk.

He began to read.

Dear Izuku,

This is probably the fourteenth draft of this letter. Honestly, I can still barely believe I'm writing it. But here I am.

Firstly, I wanted to thank you. 

Since I've met you, my life has changed. You injected colour into the grey. You knocked down my walls as if they were made of paper, and you reminded me of who Nejire is supposed to be.

You pulled the real Nejire out of her shell. The one who had been hiding, scared to face rejection, and who had built the loner club because she was lonely and couldn't figure out how to stop being. You pulled her out just by being you, without ever trying to, without asking for anything in return.

Not only that, but you worked tirelessly for me. Your fingers blistered and your mind ran ragged on my behalf. I never asked you to do any of it. You did it anyway. Because that's just who you are.

It's only natural for a girl to fall for a boy like that, you know?

And fall, I did.

All that's to say, Izuku Midoriya: I think I'm in love with you.

I think I've been in love with you for weeks. Maybe longer. I don't know exactly when it happened. I only know that it did, and I was helpless to stop it. Every time I saw you, something in my chest did something I didn't have a name for. It was a feeling that surged and crashed, akin to a tide repeatedly flooding in.

It was the best thing I had felt in a long time.

Until it wasn't.

Because being around you taught me something I didn't want to know. Something I would give anything to unknow. Something I wish I could forget. But it lingers like foul stench that I’m unable to wash away. 

All men are not created equal.

I never let the fact that you're quirkless get in the way of my feelings. In fact, it had never even crossed my mind until you collapsed in front of me. That day something changed. I learned a lesson about the cruelties of this world that went well beyond anything I had experienced in my own life.

If there's one thing I know about you with absolute certainty, it's that you want to be a hero. Like All Might. I know nothing I say could ever change that. It is simply and completely who you are.

And Izuku, I am terrified of that.

You are powerless. Literally. You have no quirk to protect you. No barrier between yourself and a villain who has decided, in that moment, that you are an obstacle rather than a person. You have nothing but your hands and your heart and the fact that your body moves before your mind can stop it.

If you keep down this path, I think you will die. I don't say this to be cruel. I say it because I have thought about it. It keeps me up at night. No matter how deep I look, I cannot find a version of this story where the ending is different. The world is full of people with power. The villains have it. The heroes have it. Everyone in the fight has it.

And you don’t. 

You will die in some back alley or on the street, trying to save someone who needed saving, and you won't be able to help it, because you cannot refuse to help someone in need. You proved that to me the other day. You proved it without meaning to, which is the most you thing about it.

And I'm furious about it.

Not at you. I couldn't be angry at you for being what you are. I'm furious at whatever made the world this way, at whoever decided that a person could be given a heart like yours and a body without the means to protect it. It's the most unjust thing I know. I keep turning it over and I cannot make it fair.

I’m furious at myself for being such coward. 

Do you know why? Because I knew.

I knew you were looking for someone who would believe in you. It was written in everything you did. Every notebook, every late night, every time you sat in the loner club and tried not to want too much. You were waiting for someone to tell you that you could. That it was real. That the dream wasn't stupid.

And I sat across from you, trying. I said anything is possible. I gave you the thumbs-up. I meant it when I said it. I need you to believe that, I need you to know that I was not performing something I didn't feel. I genuinely, in that moment, believed it.

But when I replay that conversation now, what I feel is rage. At the gods or the universe or whatever runs this broken system. That they would give you the heart of a hero and make the path to it almost impossible to survive. 

That they would let me sit in that room and tell you the world was full of possibility and then show me, three months later, what possibility looks like when it has no protection behind it.

When you were sitting on that curb getting questioned for doing the right thing while I was praised for doing nothing—I wanted to tell you. I wanted to say: you were the hero here. You are the hero.

But the moment I thought it out loud, I realized I didn't fully believe it. Not in the way you needed me to believe it. Not in the way that would have been worth anything to you.

I couldn't lie to you. I couldn't give you the sentence you deserved and not mean it completely. And I couldn't tell you the truth, which is that I don't think the world is going to let you do this. I couldn't watch your face while I said it.

So I said nothing. And I am still a coward for it.

I think I always have been. I built the loner club because I was too afraid to face the people who drove me away. I told myself it was a refuge for others as well as myself. In reality, it was just a hiding place. 

Nejire Hado, for all her noise and questions and brightness, runs from the things that scare her.

And you scare me, Izuku. Not in the way villains scare people. In the way that things scare you when you love them and you understand how badly they can be taken away.

I'm going to take the UA entrance exam. I know I'll pass. Everything you taught me has made that a certainty, which is either deeply ironic or fitting, I can't decide. I'm going to become a hero. I've decided to do it for both of us, since only one of us can.

Maybe one day we can find each other again. If you don't hate me by then, I would love to start over. I'll wait for that, if you'll let me.

But if you want nothing to do with me, I understand. As much as it hurts. As much as I know every word I write is laced with selfish desire.

Just please don't die. Choose anything else. You are one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. You could go to the top of any field you chose. Whether it be research, quirk mechanics, analysis, business, or first response. I know you’’ll be extraordinary at it. You already are.

But I would rather you hate me for saying this than spend whatever time we might have had together waiting for the day your luck runs out.

Please don't try to become a hero.

Please don't die.

I'm sorry.

Nejire

He read it once, straight through, without stopping. 

He read it again.

He got to all men are not created equal and stopped. 

He read it again from that point. He read you will die and he read the most unjust thing I know and he read I realized I didn't fully believe it and each sentence landed in a different part of him, some in the chest and some further down, the kind of landing that was less like impact and more like the slow realisation that the ground had given way some time ago and you were only now noticing you were falling.

I would rather you hate me for saying this.

He read it a third time.

The third time something in his face broke open.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just—the thing he had been holding since morning, since the locker, since the weight of the envelope in his hands, since the rink and you're a very good person. The way she hadn't looked back—the thing he had been holding since all of it—finally found the seam it had been looking for and came through.

His hands were shaking.

He pressed them flat against the desk and they shook anyway, a fine involuntary trembling that had nothing to do with cold pressing in from the exterior wall. 

I realized I didn't fully believe it.

He had looked at her face. He had seen that she meant it. He had staked something on it—had rebuilt himself, partially, around the fact of it, around the specific quality of sincerity in her face when she said of course, around the idea that this person had looked at him and seen something possible.

She had meant it.

She had also not believed it.

Both things had been true at the same time, in the same moment, in this same room. He had not known there was a second thing. He had only known the first one. He had carried the first one for months like something precious and not known it was sitting directly on top of the second one, like a floor with nothing underneath it.

The tears, when they came, came the way things came when they had been held at bay for too long—not gently, not manageable. They arrived with a completeness that he could not argue with, could not negotiate, could not redirect into something less visible. He was alone in the room. There was no one to perform being fine for.

He read the letter again. Ignoring how the droplets of his display marked the pages with stains that would never fully fade. 

He could not stop reading it. Some part of him kept returning to it with the specific compulsion of someone pressing a bruise—not because it helped, because he couldn't make his hands stop. The words were memorising themselves against his will, each reading pressing them further in, powerless, powerless, die, die, die, I would rather you hate me—

He put his face in his hands.

His shoulders were shaking. The broken sobs that leached from his mouth fell on deaf ears.

He thought about December.

He thought about the pavement outside school, the scorch marks, and the notebook torn to pieces in Bakugo's hands and scattered across the snow. He had knelt down. He had gathered every page—every scrap, every smeared and waterlogged fragment—with the careful reverence of someone who understood that the work inside the pages mattered even when the pages themselves were destroyed.

He had brought what remained here.

He had sat on the floor of this room, and she had been there. 

Whatever he destroyed today does not erase what you did or why you did it. You can't tear up the weeks. You can't tear up what we worked on together

He had believed her. He had taken that in the way he took things that were given freely and completely—receiving them as real, filing them as real, building on them as if they would hold weight indefinitely.

She had said that.

She had also just told him, in the fourteenth draft of a letter, that she had been sitting across from him in this room for months and had not truly believed he could be a hero.

He looked at his hands.

The ink on his fingers. The callus. The burn scars. The hands that had filled nine hero volumes and almost two wave motion volumes.

Not for her, he thought. You didn't do it for her. It was for you. To get better.

But the thought arrived wrong. Came out hollow. He had not done it for her—that was technically accurate—but she had been the reason the doing had felt possible. She had been in the room where it happened. She had been the person who looked at what he was doing and took it seriously when no one else had ever taken it seriously, and the doing and the person and the room had become so thoroughly intertwined over four months that separating them now felt like separating something structural from the building it was holding up.

He picked up the letter.

Nejire Hado runs from the things that scare her.

She had written that about herself. Had put it in the letter as a confession—I am a coward, I always have been, I built the loner club because I was too afraid. She had diagnosed herself accurately, which was almost worse than if she had been unaware of it. She had seen clearly what she was doing and done it anyway.

He had built the loner club too, in his own way. Had installed himself in it as a refuge from the corridors, had sat in its warmth while the school moved around it without touching it. Had let himself want things in the quiet of that room that he would never have allowed himself to want in the open. Had believed things in that room that he would never have allowed himself to believe in the ordinary light of ordinary life.

He had believed her when she said he was extraordinary. 

The tears reached the surface once more.

He read the letter again.

I would rather you hate me for saying this than spend whatever time we might have had together waiting for the day your luck runs out.

The fury arrived underneath the grief, the way the ground arrived underneath a fall—unexpected, total, and completely solid.

She had given him the thumbs-up that changed his entire life in a singular motion. 

She had let him believe her.

She had let him stake things on it—had let him carry the belief home, had let him write about it in his notebook, had let him rebuild himself partially around the fact of her sincerity—and then she had decided, at some point between the thumbs-up and the fourteenth draft, that she couldn't carry it.

And then she left. 

He understood that the letter was the kindest version of this, that she had tried to leave kindly, had tried to say the true thing rather than the easy thing, had spent fourteen attempts finding the words. He understood all of this.

He understood it and it did not help.

He crumpled the letter.

The sound it made was very loud in the empty room.

He pressed the crumpled pages against his eyes and stayed like that. The paper was damp where it touched his face and then damper. He did not move for a long time.

Eventually, he put the pages down. His mind had not quieted in the least. 

She was thinking about leaving me when I was trying to ask her on another date.

He opened the Wave Motion notebook.

She was thinking about leaving me when she grabbed my faced and kissed ME.

He looked at it—Volume Two, half-full, her handwriting still lingering on the right half of pages.  It was the record of everything they had built together in this room and the gym and the corridors and the rink. The threshold data. The document model. The session notes with the taiyaki entry in the margin. Four months of both of them, side by side.

You can't tear up the weeks.

He put his fingers on the page.

Yes, I can.

He tore it out.

Not the way Bakugo had done it—not with contempt, but instead, with rage. Bakugo had never understood that the pages mattered. He had torn them like they were nothing because to him they were nothing, because the people who made them were nothing. It was simply to break him.

She had understood. Nejire understood the wieght that the pages carried. 

She had gathered the pages off the floor of this room with him. She had helped him reconstruct the lost sessions from memory. She had known what the work cost him and she had called it important. 

You never meant any of it, did you?

He tore the page out, ripping it down the middle. 

He turned to the next one.

Tore it out.

His jaw was tight. 

The pages accumulated beside him.

His session notes. Her observations. His margin notes. The small digressive entry about the crow on the fence outside the science block. The entry where she had articulated the document model in one sentence before he had managed to say it in four pages. The marginal note from February where she had described the threshold as a room with a very high ceiling, I can see the ceiling now.

He tore out the ceiling.

He tore out the crow.

The memories came as the pages came out. Not the analysis memories—not the data and the frameworks and the equations—but the other ones, the ones that had accumulated in the margins of the work. Her face when something clicked, the specific open brightness of it. The umbrella was in the rain, and she was holding it so he could write, despite her contempt for concepts of the device. 

The rink, her hand on his, the silence that had been full rather than empty.

He tore them all out.

He tore out the conversation about gods and quirks—the one she had referenced in the letter, the one where she had said anything is possible with the total sincerity he had staked something on. He tore out the entries from the following weeks, which had been written in the warmth of his belief. He tore out the careful cross-referenced diagram he had drawn for her at twenty past eleven because the equation had resolved and he had wanted to give it to her in a form she could follow.

He had lost sleep on these pages.

He had missed meals for these pages.

I would rather you hate me.

He tore out the last page and set it on the stack with the others.

 His eyes fell to the gutted notebook—the gaps where her pages had been, the raw edges of the binding.

He looked at the crumpled letter on the desk, sitting alongside it. 

Something in him was very, very quiet.

"DAMN IT!"

His arm swung, and they crashed onto the floor alongside his pencil case. An invuletnary impulse that he had been able to keep himself from doing. 

He stumbled out of his seat and stood at the side of his desk.

Once again, he stared down at his feet. At the torn pages. At the months of hard work. The prep, research, planning and execution. The margin notes he had written with a racing heart.

He thought of how broken he felt when Kacchan tore out a few. How she held him and helped him fix them. 

It all changed so fast. 

It came and went. Like the cold blanket of winter before it fully melts away in the changing season.

At his feet lay the remnants of a dream. 

And once again, he was alone. 

He wiped at his face with the sleeve of his jacket. The same jacket. The same jacket that she had said looked good on him. 

Was she lying about that, too?

His eyes found chalkboard.

Loner Club.

Her handwriting. The careful kanji he had once thought beautiful. 

Now it sat there without any appeal. It served as an almost repulsive reminder.

He gathered up the notes and stuffed them into the bottom of the bag. 

The room went cold. Everything washed out as the evening bled in through the souless windows. Now sitting inside his back, torn from the book but not discarded was everything that had once mattered to Izuku Midoryia.

He shut off the lights to the loner club and slammed the door closed. 

The weeks that followed had a quality he did not have a word for.

Not depression—that word implied a single stable state, a trough you had fallen into with a definable bottom. What he had was less stable than that. It moved. It arrived in the morning with different faces: some days the flat, hollowed-out face of someone running on the residue of motivation rather than the thing itself, going through the motions because the motions were what remained when everything else had been taken out.

Some days the bruised, tender face of something freshly wounded that kept getting knocked against things. Some days—the worst days—nothing. Just absence. The specific white noise of a mind that had shut something down to protect itself and was now operating below the line of feeling because feeling had been too expensive.

He went to school.

He went to the gym every morning now, at exactly five-thirty because stopping would have required a decision he did not have the energy to make, and inertia was easier than decision. He went alone. He did the work.

He did not think about conversion rates or document models or the regulatory threshold. He thought about nothing in particular, other than her face and words when they forced their way into his mind without consent.

He ate, when he remembered to.

He slept, after a fashion.

He did not go to the loner club.

Sometimes, he would document the occasional observation, noted out of habit. Mostly fragments of sentences that did not resolve into anything.

On one page, in the small careful letters he used for the things that were true and not for anyone else, he had written.

She meant it.

He looked at this for a while. Before writing 'She also didn't believe it' beneath it.

He did not write anything else on that page.

He sat with the two sentences for a long time over the following days—returning to them, reading them in the early morning before the gym and  the late evenings when there was nothing else to require his attention. 

She had meant it.

She had also not believed it.

He had spent four months building something on the first sentence without knowing the second was underneath it. That was not her crime. She had not deceived him deliberately. She had given him the most sincere version of what she felt in the moment, and what she felt had been real. The second sentence had arrived later, from below, the way the real depths of things arrived later.

He understood this.

He understood it and it did not undo what it had undone.

He ran his morning sprints.

He did his cable rows.

He kept his own gym records in a green notebook. Week 7. Posterior chain stable. Bilateral asymmetry reduced. Grip consistent. The data accumulating with the patient indifference of data, which did not care what had happened in the loner club and continued generating itself regardless.

All Men are not created equal. 

Moonlight filtered in through the very same red curtains. With a shaking hand, he put the crumbled letter away in the back of his desk drawer, where it crunched against more of the same balled up pages.

Truly, he had meant to throw it out. To toss it away along with the rest. 

But he had never been good at letting go.

He drew in a deep breath as he turned off the lamp.

He lay in the dark.

It's the day of her entrance exam. 

On the wall above him, All Might smiled his permanent smile at the middle distance. Frozen mid-action, permanent and confident and exactly as he always was, at a remove from the concerns of the room below him. Izuku had stopped seeing the poster months ago. It had become part of the room's texture, like the desk and the window and the crack in the plaster he'd never bothered to report.

He looked at it now.

Why do I even care?

He looked at it for a long time.

She left me.

He lay in the dark with all three of these things and did not try to resolve them, because they did not resolve. They were simply all true at the same time, in the same room, in the same drawer with the letter.

She left me because I’m weak.

That was the humiliating truth of it. 

It wouldn’t be for another fourteen months before everything changed again. 

“Young man,” All Might was in front of him, the setting sun lighting up the sky in a blazing orange around them. Izuku was on his knees, tears falling down the side of his face. “You can become a hero!” 

Izuku had always thought that Nejire would be the one who would tell him those five simple words. 

But Nejire was just like the others. 

“Do you really believe that? That anything is possible?” 

“Of course.” 

Nejire Hado is a liar.

I hate her.

End of Prologue: Colder Weather

Chapter Text

2 Years Later

Mustafu moved as it always did—restless, alive, and just a little too loud to ever truly feel at peace.

Traffic hummed through the streets in steady streams, neon signs flickered against glass storefronts, and distant chatter blended into a constant, low murmur. It was the kind of city that never stopped moving, even when something had gone terribly wrong.

Like now.

A villain—if one could still call him that after what had just occurred—was bound tightly against a streetlight, thick coils of reinforced capture tape digging into scaled skin. His gills flared uselessly at the sides of his neck, his breath coming in uneven, exhausted bursts.

It had not been a good day.

First, the bank job had failed spectacularly.

Then came the Dragoon Hero to foil his escape… along with her stupendously chatty sidekick.

“Well if you’re a fish-man, how do you breathe air?”

The villain blinked slowly.

“Do you have lungs and gills? Or is it like—one switches depending on the environment? Oh! What do you even eat? Like regular food or fish food? Do you drink water, or is that just like… Breathing for you? And why rob a bank? That seems kind of fishy—Say, how do you even pull the trigger of a gun without disposable thumbs?"

The barrage didn’t stop. It didn’t slow. It came like a tidal wave of curiosity—unrelenting and entirely unconcerned with the concept of mercy.

The villain, who had just minutes ago attempted the armed robbery, now looked seconds away from tears.

“I—I don’t—can you stop talking?!”

“Hmm?” The girl leaned in closer, eyes practically sparkling. “Oh! So you can talk? What about underwater? Or does it get all bubbly and weird? Wait—if you scream underwater, does it even make a sound? Or is it like—blubblublub—”

A massive claw wrapped gently—but firmly—around the back of the girl’s uniform and yanked her straight up into the air.

“Come now, Nejire-chan,” a calm, slightly exasperated voice rumbled. “Leave the interrogation to the police.”

Suspended several feet above the ground, Nejire Hado crossed her arms immediately, cheeks puffing out in protest.

“Aww~~~ but I wanted to ask him more questions!”

Below, the bound villain sagged in visible relief. 

The Dragoon Hero loomed behind him in full transformation—towering, scaled, and unmistakably powerful. Even at rest, her presence pressed against the street like a held storm, wings half-furled and tail swaying lazily behind her.

The claw released. Nejire flipped effortlessly midair, a ripple of yellow energy spiraling beneath her feet as she caught herself. 

“Like—if you’re a fish,” she continued, pointing down at the man as if the interruption had never happened, “do you have more human parts or more fish parts? And can you eat fish food? Hey mister villian—can you eat fish food?”

The villain stared up at her.

Silence.

Pure, empty, defeated silence.

After a long moment, the Dragoon Hero’s massive form began to shift. Scales receded, wings folded into nothingness, and the towering presence condensed into something far more human.

Ryukyu exhaled, one clawed hand finishing its transition into fingers as she pinched the bridge of her nose.

Her sharp teeth caught the light as she sighed.

“Nejire-chan. Please do not disregard direct orders.”

 Nejire’s shoulders dipped as she looked around. “But I dont see any police—”

As if summoned by the statement, distant sirens began to echo through the streets, growing louder with each passing second.

Nejire floated in place for a moment longer before turning her gaze back down toward the villain. 

He had seen that look before. Open, unfiltered curiosity.

“…So is that a yes on the fish food, fish boy?”

“I DON’T LIKE FISH FOOD!” the man snapped, voice cracking.

Nejire lit up. “Ohhh, so you have tried it before—”

Ryukyu reached up to place a hand on the floating girl's shoulder. She was only hovering six inches above the pavement. “Nejire-chan. If you aspire to be my sidekick after graduation, you must learn to hold your tongue. Riling up the villain will only make it more difficult for the police to question him.” 

Nejire pouted but allowed herself to be guided back toward the sidewalk, her energy only dimming slightly—like a storm forced to wait rather than disperse.

Behind them, the villain slumped against the pole, staring blankly at the sky.

“He doesn’t seem to mind tho—” 

“You must be joking.” 

The girl twirled a stray strand of her hair. A cheeky grin adorned her face. “Maybe a little.”  

“So, you've found your successor?”

The question drifted lightly through the room, carried on an air that felt almost too still—too curated to be natural.

Nezu’s office was less a workspace and more a carefully constructed statement. Sunlight poured through tall, arched windows, softened by sheer ivory curtains that diffused the glow into something gentle and deliberate. It painted the room in warm golds and quiet ambers, glinting off polished surfaces with restrained elegance.

The desk between them—broad, mahogany, and mirror-smooth—reflected that light like a still body of water, undisturbed and pristine. Not a single scratch marred its surface. Not a single paper lay out of place.

Bookshelves lined the walls in perfect symmetry, their contents arranged not just by subject, but by size and colour, forming a pattern so precise it bordered on obsessive. 

Leather-bound spines sat untouched by dust, their presence more ornamental than practical. Even the potted plants tucked between them seemed managed—each leaf angled toward the light as though trained to grow that way.

Everything in the room had intent.

Everything had a specific, fine-tuned balance.

And at the center of it all sat Nezu—small, composed, and entirely at home within the quiet perfection.

Across from him, Toshinori Yagi felt like the only irregularity in the space.

He coughed into his hand, the harsh, uneven sound breaking the room’s delicate stillness in a way that felt almost intrusive. When it passed, he gave a small nod.

“I take it you will not be considering the candidates from U.A. has to offer, then?”

Toshinori shook his head. “I'm sorry, Nezu.”

For a moment, the office fell into a quiet stillness. Sunlight filtered through the tall windows, catching against the polished mahogany desk between them. Papers were arranged with surgical precision, every object in its place—except for the man sitting across from him, worn thin and running out of time.

Nezu folded his paws neatly atop the desk.

“Very well then,” he said. “I must admit that I do find myself a tad disappointed.”

Yagi let out a weary sigh, leaning back slightly. “And why's that?”

Without answering immediately, Nezu reached to the side and produced three standard files. They slid smoothly across the desk, stopping just within Toshinori’s reach.

“I have three students about to graduate their second year,” Nezu said. “Each of them is truly exceptional.”

Toshinori glanced down but didn’t pick them up just yet. “Well, there have always been exemplary students at U.A.,” he replied.

Nezu’s eyes glinted. “I see not even time has tempered your ego.”

That got a quiet huff of amusement out of him—but it didn’t last. His gaze dropped to the files.

Slowly, he picked up the first sheet of paper and turned it over. A blonde boy with a cartoonish face.

“Ah,” he murmured. “I see the boy Mirai recommended is also one of these students.”

“Mhm,” Nezu hummed. “Mirio Togata. He stands above the rest—not just in ability, but in spirit. A kind heart, relentless drive… the sort of person who inspires others simply by existing.”

There was no exaggeration in his tone. Just a fact.

“With or without One For All,” Nezu continued, “he will become a top hero.”

Toshinori nodded faintly. He could see it even from a picture—the posture, the smile, the ease. A boy who could withstand the light without being overwhelmed. Given Nighteye's strong endorsement, this was to be expected.

His hand shifted to the next page.

A boy with dark hair. Eyes shadowed. Posture slightly hunched, as if apologizing for taking up space.

“This one seems…” Toshinori hesitated. “Timid. I’m not sure he's the type to burn bright and declare ‘I am here’ to a crowd.”

“A fair assessment,” Nezu said easily. “Tamaki Amajiki is shy, yes. Painfully so, at times.”

There was a pause before he added, “But he may possess the most raw potential of the three.”

Toshinori glanced up slightly.

“His quirk is extraordinarily versatile,” Nezu continued. “And more importantly, he thinks. Constantly. Strategically. Where others rush forward, he calculates. Where others rely on instinct, he adapts. Occasionally, there’s value in hesitation. Not everyone can charge ahead recklessly.”

All Might ignored the jab.

A small smile curled at Nezu’s lips. “He lacks confidence. Not capability. Something that can be taught.”

Toshinori gave a thoughtful hum, then reached for the final file.

“And what of her?”

The moment the page turned, something… shifted. He felt it the second he saw her image. A feeling pricked at the back of his mind. Like a long-forgotten memory threatening to surface, with no tangible image ever forming or reason as to why.

It was a girl with long, wavy hair. Bright eyes. A smile that seemed almost too bright. 

“Nejire Hado,” Nezu said. “She is currently the strongest amongst them. Her quick is exceptional; her control refined. In terms of pure combat capability, she surpasses both Togata and Amajiki.”

Toshinori’s eyes lingered on the image.

Nezu’s gaze sharpened slightly. “But her progression has slowed since enrolling here. During her entrance exam, she excelled, standing head and shoulders above her peers, but the gap has continued to narrow.”

Toshinori frowned faintly. “And what of her character?”

This time, Nezu didn’t answer immediately.

He leaned back slightly in his chair, paws folding together once more. His expression remained pleasant—unchanged, even—but something behind it glimmered distantly.

“Not much to mention,” he said at last. “She’s often described as an airhead. Energetic. Friendly. Possessing a strong heart. Most things she does can be perceived as effortless.”

Another pause. “But between us, it’s easy to see she carries something heavy. I worry how it may affect her career going forward. Perhaps it’s the reason for her slow progression.”

His eyes flicked toward Toshinori.

The room felt smaller, suddenly.

Toshinori’s brow furrowed. “And you don’t know what it is?”

That earned him a smile.

Not a warm one.

Not a kind one.

Nezu’s grin stretched just a little too wide, just a little too knowing. A little too Nezu. 

“Why so curious, All Might? After all, I’m just a school principal.”

A chill crept down Toshinori’s spine.

It was a familiar feeling—the same instinct that had saved his life countless times before. The quiet warning indicated a misalignment between the surface and what lay beneath.

He considered the question.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But it feels like I… know her. Or something. The word for the specific feeling eludes me.”

Nezu’s grin widened.

How interesting.

“Is that so? Perhaps you’ve crossed her once before?”

All Might stared for a moment longer. His eyes were unable to tear away from the ones on the page.

“I…don’t think so?” 

The words lingered in the air, carrying implications neither of them voiced. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the tension shifted.

“And this successor of yours,” Nezu continued, tone light once more. “You’ve already passed on your quirk?”

A brief silence followed.

“…I have. 6 months ago, in fact.”

Toshinori’s grip tightened slightly on the file in his hand. "Why?”

“Come now,” Nezu said, smiling again—pleasant, harmless, unreadable. “Surely this boy will be taking the entrance exam tomorrow. I should know what to expect from my future students, no?”

The principal's soft ears twitched.

“Especially one that carries such a pivotal power.”

Toshinori hesitated. “Ah, I was actually wishing to speak with you about that.” 

“Oh?”

Long, slender fingers tapped nervously against his thigh. “Actually… nevermind.” 

“Very well then.”

Nezu gestured lightly toward the door with his paw. 

“Thanks for agreeing to meet with me. I’m glad we were able to iron out the last details of your teaching contract and have this little discussion. It was most informative."

Toshinori stood from his seat and headed for the door. “Farewell, Nezu. I’ll see you at the start of the semester." 

By the time Nejire reached the stone path to her front door, the plum tree had already begun its riot of blossoms in the dark—white and pale pink against a sky that was its own specific colour of late April. Too deep to be navy, not quite purple, the sky of a city that never went fully dark and had arranged this ambiguity into something almost beautiful. 

The blossoms moved in a light wind she could barely feel.

The tree had been bare when she came home in December two years ago, bare when she dropped a letter through the slits of his locker door, and bare when the year ended and she understood, at last, what she had traded for her peace of mind.

It was not bare now.

She had been standing on this path for long enough that she was aware of her own feet aching—the deep, patient ache of joints that had been doing their job for too many hours. 

Callused fingers adjusted the strap of her agency bag. 

Her eyes found the front of the house. No longer did she consider it a home.

Despite that, Satsuki’s wind chime by the door moved once. 

One of the downstairs windows was lit. The sitting room—the amber warmth of the lamp her father kept on when he was reading.  

The entry hall smelled wrong.

Not awful—just wrong. The hinoki was still there, and the ghost of dinner past that left a lingering aroma. But the smells of home had thinned out, and her mother's perfume had faded from the fabric of the cushions and the curtains, replaced by something drier. Stale air cycled through the dusty lungs of an outdated HVAC unit.

Nejire removed her shoes. She placed them beside an empty space on the rack that usually filled. 

The sitting room door was open while Kenji sat in his chair. His head was tilted slightly downward—not the angle of a man reading, but the angle of a man who had stopped reading some time ago and had not moved since.

She went to the kitchen and turned on the kettle.

"You're late."

His voice came flat through the open doorway. The voice of a room that had been quiet for hours. It seems he had finally found the capacity to use his words.

"Internship ran over," she said while shifting her backpack over her shoulder. 

"You had your final exam today."

"And an internship shift after." She got a mug from the cabinet. One mug. "I know my schedule, Papa."

Silence.

Not the silence their house used to produce—the easy, breathable silence of a family that had been together long enough that quiet was simply another register of conversation. This silence had a sharp edge. She was aware of his presence on the other side of the wall, lingering and unwanted.

The chair creaked.

He filled the doorway a moment later. Grey sweater, fraying at the left cuff. Reading glasses shoved up on his forehead. In one hand he held a glass. It was made of crystal, the kind he brought out for company and now apparently for evenings spent alone. Whatever had been in it was gone. The ice had melted to a thin disc at the bottom, stained in an amber hue.

She kept her eyes on the kettle.

"You passed?" he said.

"I don't have scores yet, obviously."

"You passed."

She didn't answer.

He moved to lean against the counter, not quite entering the kitchen, keeping himself at its edge. She felt him looking at her the way she always felt it—patient and thorough, the habit of a man who had been reading her face since she was four years old and had not stopped.

"I can't believe Ryukyuu has you on late shifts again. It’s like she doesn’t understand you’re still a child who has school in the morning."

"End-of-semester filing. She wanted everything closed properly before the break, and she wants me to reapply to do my third year of work studies there as well."

"You need sleep before third year starts."

"I know."

"You don't look like you've been sleeping."

She turned from the counter and looked at him directly—at the empty glass, at the red sitting just beneath the skin of his face, at the slightly unfocused quality behind his eyes that had nothing to do with tiredness.

"I look like I had a long day," she said. "Looks like you’re not a stranger to bad days, either."

Something crossed his face. He set the glass down on the counter with a sound that was slightly too deliberate.

"Have you eaten?"

"At the agency."

He nodded. 

The kettle reached temperature. She turned to pour, giving herself the moment.

"Are you going to tell me where Mom went? She’s never gone at this hour.”

A beat of silence that told her everything before he opened his mouth.

"She is staying at her sister's place.”

Nejire found it odd that he said "sister" and not "aunt." Her mother only had one sister, Auntie Kira. But she did not push the subject.

"Just for a while. While things settle."

Nejire set the kettle down. She did not turn around. She looked at the steam rising from the mug and kept her voice level. "How long is a while?"

"We're still… talking things out." A pause. "These things take time."

She turned then, because she needed to see his face. He was looking at the counter rather than at her—jaw set, the empty glass within arm's reach, his shoulders carrying a weight that had reorganized itself into something permanent-looking since she'd last been home.

“I’m sure they do.” 

She wanted to ask what happened. She wanted to ask if it was the car, if it was the months before the car, if it was all the things that had been sitting under the surface of this house for years, quietly warping the floorboards. 

She wanted to ask if her mother had cried when she packed, or if she had been too angry to cry, or if she had been neither because she had made her decision long before she made the call to her sister.

She asked for none of it because the truth would always be worth more than whatever she could construct inside of her mind. 

His face, when he finally looked up, was that of a man who was holding something together by deciding to do so, and the decision was costing him something visible. 

"She'll be back," he said.

She looked at him—at the crystal glas—and she felt the conversation trying to close itself around her. The pivot was deliberate. She recognized it.

"Okay," she said.

He exhaled slightly.

She picked up the mug.

"If you’re done, I'm going to get some sleep," she said. "Goodnight, Papa. Sorry for getting home late."

He looked at her for a moment with something moving behind his eyes that did not make it to his mouth. It was something that had become all too common these days.

"Goodnight," he said.

She went upstairs and did not go back down.

She hadn’t heard her father slump against the counter, nor had she heard crystal crash against tile. 

Hero Volume 11 — One For All — Entry 47

I've had OFA for six months now.

My body has been able to handle approximately twenty percent when distributed continuously. This allows for substantially powerful punches and kicks, enough to visually displace air and shatter concrete.

All Might told me that the power grows with each user, and it seems to be a non-linear progression. The higher the percentage, the more output. So my twenty percent is probably closer to All Might's 25 percent, but I suspect that my one hundred percent will be at least 140 percent of All Might's. This is merely speculation, however.

The real question is whether or not I'll be able to pack on enough muscle to handle it. My manifestation of the power is different. My body secretes literal lightning that is both bioluminescent and somewhat tangible. Although it doesn't seem to carry much current.

This phenomenon is likely a result of an overflow of energy. All Might's version seems to manifest differently. Perhaps that's why he can puff up and down like he does. The excess energy goes into his body, fluffing up his muscles and skeleton.

That would explain why he was able to handle its full power right away. It's hard to tell, since All Might is usually too busy to stick around to answer questions.

He just watches me clean the beach and helps modify my gym routine.

If I find myself running into a cap later, it might be worth considering a supplemental steroid to elevate the artificially imposed muscular limit of my body. But the side effects of cycling hormones may end up outweighing the benefit. Something to consider once I'm in my twenties, perhaps.

For now, All Might seems convinced that twenty percent is enough to do well in the entrance exam and allow me to keep up.

I can’t afford to fail him.

Izuku had not expected One For All to feel like this.

He had expected weight. Akin to the sensation of receiving something enormous—a torch passed from one bearer to the next—the way All Might described it. Something ancient and already burning when it arrived.

Instead, it just felt like a warm flow of energy. 

Similar to water finding its channels without being asked, bending to the architecture of him, and running through the shape he had spent years building from nothing into something that could, at last, bear it. 

The first time he had activated it properly, he had not felt powerful. He had felt clarified. He felt as though the version of himself that had moved through the world before that moment was a rough draft, while the current running through him now was the sentence he had always been trying to write.

Twenty percent was where he lived now. Not that he was particularly satisfied.

"Manchester SMASH!"

The word came out higher than he expected as the heel of his boot came down with everything he could put behind it. 

The sand around them detonated.

The wave of it moved outward from the point of impact in a perfect ring, grains catching the early morning light as they rose and spread, and for a moment the beach around them existed entirely inside the geometry of what he had done—a circle drawn by sheer force. 

A lesser person would have been folded in half. 

All Might did not move. He absorbed it.

That was the only word for it—absorbed, the way a stone absorbs weather. 

He caught Izuku’s leg at the bottom of its arc, one enormous hand closing around his ankle. The impact traveled through him and distributed itself somewhere deep in the ground. 

Izuku hung suspended in the morning air, horizontal, held by a single hand. The scattered sand was still settling around them.

He was not surprised. He had known, even as he committed to the strike, that it would not be enough. 

He clenched his jaw

Suspended in the air, he twisted along one axis and drove his free leg toward All Might's wrist. His shin collided with the knuckles of the number one hero.

It was enough for the grip to falter. A millimeter, perhaps; the adjustment too small and too fast for him to track except as an aftermath.

The grip resettled. He was still in the air. All Might was still standing in the center of the settling circle of sand.

"Did you really think that would work, young man?"

"No," Izuku said. He was already elsewhere. “But this might.” 

His hand flew into the pocket of his training shorts. From it, he grabbed a handful of sand. 

He threw it as hard as he could straight into All Might's eyes.

Surprise overtook the pro hero. The iron grip on his ankle loosened for a fraction of a second. 

The opening was enough. Izuku pushed every available percentage through a single, unambiguous surge. He launched himself backward from the suspended position, the momentum from the arrested fall converted into something else entirely, something he had spent three weeks learning to trust.

He landed in a crouch, knees absorbing the impact. He was upright before the motion finished, just as water continues to move after the wave has passed.

All Might wiped sand from his eyes. On his face was an expression Izuku had never seen. An annoyed but equally prideful smile.

"That was a dirty trick," he said.

"I know."

"You had it in your pocket the whole time?"

"Since I saw your truck pull in."

Blue eyes shone with absolute power. 

"I needed the right angle," Izuku said. "So the sand caught both eyes and not just one. Otherwise, you would have never slipped up." He straightened. 

"You've been studying my weaknesses. ’"

"I watch everything," Izuku said. "But I've been studying you as long as I can speak."

All Might laughed. The sound moved across the clean beach, over the water, and dissolved somewhere in the morning. "Getting a little creepy there, fanboy."

He cracked his knuckles and rolled his neck. Izuku heard a series of pops and cracks that were loud enough to pierce his ears from meters away. “Now let's see how you do with me on the offensive.” 

“Oh, no.” 

 They sat on the dock afterward without deciding to. 

Beneath them, the water stretched out in a muted sheet of early-morning grey, the horizon barely distinguishable from the sky as light slowly climbed its way upward, brushing color into the world in hesitant strokes. The air carried the scent of salt and damp wood. The quiet lapping of waves against the supports below gave the whole place a steady, grounding rhythm.

All Might had long since shrunk back into himself, the transformation leaving behind a man who looked almost too small for the space he occupied. 

The juice box in his hands seemed oddly mundane—an object stripped of any grandeur, made almost absurd when compared to the power those same hands had wielded not even half an hour ago. He turned it idly between his fingers, saying nothing, allowing the silence to settle.

Beside him, Izuku sat forward slightly, elbows resting against his knees, eyes fixed on the water as though there were something in its endless, shifting surface that demanded his attention. His posture wasn’t tense, not exactly—but there was a weight to it. A subtle stiffness that hadn’t been there earlier, when he had been moving, training, and thinking only in terms of motion and control.

Stillness did this to him.

It made space.

“Is twenty percent really enough?"

It didn’t come out like a question, even though it happened to be. There was no upward lilt, no expectation of reassurance. It had slipped free from the chains of his mind.

Toshinori glanced at him, then back at the water, turning the juice box once more between his fingers.

“Enough for what?”

Izuku’s gaze didn’t shift. “To not mess this up.”

The words landed heavier than the first. Not analytical. Not detached. There was something quieter in them. Something closer to the truth of what he was actually asking.

A small wave rolled in beneath the dock, tapping against the wood with a hollow knock.

“The entrance exam,” Izuku continued, almost absently. “First impressions matter. You said that. If I don’t show enough, if I hold back too much—then I fail before I even start.” 

His fingers pressed lightly into the edge of the dock, tracing the rough grain there. “But if I use too much—if I lose control even once…”

He didn’t finish that either.

He didn’t need to.

Toshinori let out a slow breath, setting the juice box down beside him. “I asked you to show them who you are,” he said, voice even. “Not to perform at your absolute limit.”

Izuku’s hand stilled.

“That distinction matters,” Toshinori added.

Another pause settled between them, but this one felt different. Thinner. Less complete.

The water shifted again, light beginning to catch along its surface as the sun finally crested the horizon. The world brightened by degrees, soft and gradual.

Izuku didn’t seem to notice. "I've only reached twenty percent. That's so far behind—"

"Behind what?" Toshinori asked. "Behind who?"

The water moved. A gull went over them without interest in either.

"There is no race," Toshinori said. "There are people on other timelines, yes. People who have had quirks for a decade, trained in programs built specifically for this purpose, and received instruction refined across generations. They are on their timelines." The hand came down on Izuku's shoulder, light and specific, the way important things were placed rather than dropped. 

"You are on yours. Don't compare the timelines. Run the race you're in."

Izuku looked at the clean beach.

He thought, without intending to, about a girl who had once told him that a world where anything was possible was an upgrade. About the way he had built something on that sentence. 

He had also torn those pages out around that.

“…There’s more,” Toshinori said. “I’ve seen it written into the faces you think I don’t see, young man.” 

It wasn’t a question.

Izuku’s shoulders tightened—barely, but enough. His fingers curled more firmly against the wood now, knuckles paling just slightly as his grip increased.

For a moment, it seemed like he wouldn’t respond. A wave struck the dock a little harder than the others, the hollow sound echoing up through the planks beneath them.

“All Might,” Izuku said quietly, “I… I lied to you.”

Toshinori’s head turned, attention sharpening. “Hmm?”

Izuku swallowed, his gaze still locked forward, as if looking anywhere else would make the words impossible to say.

“I… I shouldn’t have accepted your power.”

The sentence came out strained—tight around the edges, like it had resisted being spoken for a long time.

His grip on the dock tightened further.

“I have hate in my heart for somebody,” he continued, his voice lower now. “Somebody who told me something that I wish I never heard.” His jaw clenched faintly. “I hate them for it.”

The words hung in the air between them, heavier than anything said so far that morning.

Another wave crashed against the supports below.

“You say the heart of a hero burns in me,” Izuku went on, the tension in his voice finally breaking through, “but this ugly feeling is something I can’t seem to let go of.” His fingers dug into the wood, grounding himself against something solid. “That’s not very heroic, is it?”

Silence followed.

Not the easy kind.

Toshinori studied him carefully, his sunken eyes narrowing just slightly as something deeper flickered behind them. For a moment, he didn’t speak at all. The weight of the admission deserved more than an immediate answer.

When he did speak, his voice was quieter—but firmer.

“I expect you to be a hero,” he said.

Izuku’s shoulders stiffened.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t get to be a human.”

The words didn’t soften as they landed. They weren’t meant to.

Toshinori’s hand curled into a fist at his side, knuckles paling faintly under thin skin. “I, too, have hate in my heart for somebody.”

Izuku blinked, the tension in his expression faltering just slightly as his head turned—just enough to glance at him from the corner of his eye.

Toshinori didn’t look away.

“But I saw the way your body moved,” he continued. “Back then. Before you had anything. Before this power.” His gaze sharpened. “A young man was in danger, and you ran toward it without hesitation. You didn’t stop to think. You didn’t weigh outcomes. You acted.”

The moment was something neither of them needed described in detail.

“You inspired action out of me,” Toshinori said plainly. “When even the other heroes present hesitated.”

The dock creaked softly beneath a shifting wave.

“It matters not whether you have hate in your heart,” he went on, voice steady, “but what you choose to do with it.”

He rose then, slowly, joints protesting just slightly as he straightened. The movement wasn’t grand, wasn’t dramatic—but it carried weight all the same. He stepped forward, closing the small distance between them before placing a hand on Izuku’s shoulder.

Firm.

Grounding.

“Tell me,” he said.

Izuku’s breath caught faintly.

“This person you hate…” Toshinori continued, gaze unwavering. “If they were in danger, would you save them?”

The question didn’t leave room for deflection.

Izuku froze.

Not physically—his body remained exactly where it was—but something inside him stalled, caught between instinct and emotion and something far less defined. The answer wasn’t immediate.

It should have been.

That was the problem.

His grip tightened again, then loosened slightly as he forced himself to breathe.

The image came unbidden.

Bright eyes.

A voice full of careless certainty.

His jaw tightened.

“…I would,” he said at last.

Quiet.

Certain.

Toshinori’s expression didn’t change immediately—but something in his posture eased, just slightly.

“Then you’re already a far greater hero than you believe yourself to be,” he said.

Izuku’s eyes widened faintly, the words hitting somewhere deeper than he expected.

Izuku shook, his composure slipping just enough for it to show. “B-but…” His voice wavered. “Then I’m proving them right. That I was useless without power.”

“You forget,” he said, voice shifting—lifting, gaining that familiar weight, that presence that seemed too large for the frail body it came from, “whose power it is you carry.”

The air changed.

It always did.

In a sudden burst, smoke billowed outward as his form expanded—muscle and strength returning in an instant, posture straightening, presence filling the space around them like a rising tide.

All Might stood there—truly stood there.

“For it matters not what others think!” he declared, his voice ringing out across the water. “You determine your destiny, young man!”

The sun had fully risen now, light catching along the edges of his silhouette, turning something already larger-than-life into something almost mythic.

“So tell me—” he continued, grin sharp and unwavering, “will you seize it?”

Just as suddenly, the form collapsed again, the strength leaving him in a rush as he returned to his smaller frame, a splutter of blood escaping his lips as the strain caught up to him.

“…or will you let it slip?” he finished, quieter now—but no less certain.

Izuku stared at him.

For a moment, everything else faded—the water, the dock, the weight pressing against his chest.

There was only that question.

Only that choice.

"And I couldn't tell you the truth, which is that I don't think the world is going to let you do this."

Nejire's voice continued to linger. Her words remained a pitiful stain on any new memory, refusing to fade away. Even with the crashing of the tide.

His fingers slowly loosened their grip on the dock.

A breath left him—steady this time.

“You’re right,” he said.

I’ll show her. 

“I’ll make you proud, All Might.” 

“I know you will, kid.” 

Mustafu’s restless pulse faded behind him the further he walked, though it never truly disappeared. The city clung to its noise the way heat clings to asphalt—sirens still cried out somewhere in the distance, traffic still rolled in steady currents, and voices bled together into that constant hum of life that refused to quiet. 

Even now, if he listened closely, he could almost hear the lingering echoes of the earlier commotion—the failed robbery, the crowd, the overwhelming presence of pro heroes doing what they always did. Restoring order. Moving on. The world didn’t stop for small things. It never had.

But here, at the edge of U.A. High, something shifted.

Izuku Midoriya slowed as the gates came into view, his steps losing their rhythm until they stopped entirely. He stood there for a moment longer than necessary, as if something unseen had pressed a hand against his chest and asked him to wait.

The campus stretched before him in clean, deliberate lines—steel, glass, and stone arranged with purpose rather than decoration. Trees and greenery softened the edges, but they didn’t diminish the presence of the structure at its heart. The main building rose high and steady, a slab of concrete and glass that seemed less constructed and more declared. It didn’t simply exist.

It stood.

Unmoving. Unyielding.

A monument not just to heroism, but to expectation. To the quiet, suffocating pressure of becoming something greater than yourself… or being crushed under the weight of trying.

The gates were open, welcoming in the most literal sense, yet the space beyond them felt anything but casual. Students passed through without hesitation, laughing, talking, carrying themselves with the effortless confidence of those who believed they belonged. And maybe they did. But only forty of the hundred students applying would ever be able to prove it.

Izuku remained where he was.

For just a moment longer.

Then—without thinking too hard about it—he let the power come.

A faint pulse ran beneath his skin, subtle but undeniable, like a second heartbeat syncing with the first.

Full cowling flickered into place, spreading through him in quiet currents. It threaded through his muscles, coiled in his limbs, sharpened everything just enough to remind him it was there.

The air felt different against his skin.

The ground beneath his feet felt… lighter.

Every detail came into focus. The shift of fabric as someone passed behind him, the distant clang of a gate closing somewhere deeper in the campus, the low murmur of voices layered over one another in indistinct waves.

Power. Something that was very new to Izuku Midoryia.

He held it there for a second—no more, no less—then let it fade just as easily as it came. The energy receded without resistance, settling back into its place like it had never left. No strain followed. No pain. Just the quiet echo of something vast resting beneath the surface.

A reminder.

He exhaled slowly, his gaze lifting once more to the building ahead.

U.A. hadn’t changed.

But he had.

The boy who once stood in the snow, clutching ruined pages and convincing himself that endurance alone would be enough… that boy walked this path long before his body ever did. He had smiled through things that should have broken him. He had endured things that no one ever acknowledged. He had believed—fiercely, stubbornly—in something the world had already decided he would never become.

Now he stood here with something far heavier than belief.

His fingers curled slightly at his side as his eyes traced the edges of the structure, following the clean lines upward until they disappeared into the pale sky. For a brief moment, something stirred at the edge of his thoughts. 

A memory.

Her memory. 

Again.

Short, spiraling hair catching the light in uneven strands.

Bright eyes that never seemed to settle, always searching, always curious.

A voice that filled silence without hesitation—questions spilling one after another, unfiltered and relentless in a way that should have been overwhelming… but never was.

Nejire Hado.

A small, forgotten classroom.

Two people who didn’t quite belong anywhere else.

For a brief stretch of time, the world had been quieter there.

Simpler.

Izuku’s jaw tightened ever so slightly, the memory dissolving before it could take shape. Years had passed since then. People changed. Paths split. Whatever that connection had been, whatever meaning it might have held once—it belonged to a version of himself that no longer existed.

There was no use lingering on it. 

Not now.

Not here.

Not when his future was in reach. The very same future she had turned away.

He shifted forward, the hesitation breaking as his foot crossed the invisible line between outside and in. One step became another, his pace steady. Students moved around him more frequently now—groups forming and breaking apart, voices overlapping in easy conversation, laughter slipping into the air without resistance.

He moved through it all without really engaging, his focus remaining ahead, on the path, on the building and the open gates—until something interrupted that forward momentum.

A soft impact.

It was barely enough to register as anything more than a gentle misstep, yet it was enough to distract him from his thoughts. The girl he had bumped into staggered slightly, her balance tilting for just a second before correcting itself.

Izuku stepped back immediately, posture straightening as awareness snapped fully into place. One For All whisked away as he bent down, a gentle panic ripping through him. 

"S-Sorry about that!" he apologized.

Looking back at him was a brown-haired girl with round cheeks and a short bob.

“O-oh! It’s okay! No worries! I’m a bit clumsy, so I wasn’t watching where I was going.” 

Both of them stood in place. She smiled at him.

"Hi there! It's nice to meet you. My name is Ochaco Uraraka!"

"Nejire Hado. Class 3-A. It's a pleasure."

Izuku stared for a moment before reaching his hand out. "Izuku Midoriya. It's a pleasure."

Chapter Text

She didn't move. His fingers grazed her cheek and she felt the smear of it, warm and then cooling against her skin.

"Hey," he said, softly. "I saw him. I saw the kid. He was in danger."

"You should have—"

"I saw him and I—" A breath. The breath cost something audible. "My body moved on its own."

He paused. The rain fell. His fingers were still against her cheek.

"Just hang on," she said. The words came out like something being held up by force. "Just—please, Izuku, just hang on, okay? You hang on. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. You don't get to—you can't leave, I don't want to be alone again, please, I have been alone for a very long time and you fixed that, you fixed it, so you don't get to—"

"Nejire."

She pressed harder. The wound was too large.

"I’m not going anywhere."

His hand slipped from her cheek.

She caught it before it reached the pavement, and she held it against her face. No part of her was ready to be severed from his touch, nor his presence. 

Her other hand remained pressed against his chest but the wound was too large.

His eyes lost hers. 

Izuku's face was peaceful.

The air smelled like smoke, burnt rubber, and motor oil—acrid and industrial. 

The testing area spread out before the gathered examinees like something torn from the pages of a disaster film. Cracked asphalt, concrete facades, wide intersections built to approximate the layout of a real urban district. Water towers. Fire escapes. 

The hollow shells of buildings stood just long enough to be used as cover, vaulted over, or torn apart entirely, depending on what you were capable of.

Dependent on what you were born with.

Two boys had drifted together near the middle of Block B. They stood with their hands at their sides and their heads turned toward the green-lit chaos cutting through the mock city ahead of them.

"No fair. That guy's quirk is so overpowered."

The larger boy, whose quirk likely related to his body, tracked the movement with his eyes. The second one crossed his arms. A flash of green, a blur that barely touched the ground before it was somewhere else. Three meters. Then twelve. Then it vanished behind a collapsed facade.

"Talk about lucky. Some people will never know the struggle of having to work your way up from the bottom. I mean, he's taking all the robots." His voice had the particular flatness of someone who had said some variation of this before. “What are we supposed to do? Typical bastard, leaving us with the scraps."

The green streak reappeared atop a one-pointer's head, and then the one-pointer did not exist anymore.

"Standing around won't help your case either."

They both turned.

The boy behind them was tall for his age. His posture was immaculate—spine straight, shoulders level. His hair was a dark, trimmed navy, and his eyes behind the frames of his glasses were sharp and direct. His uniform bore the crest of Soumei Middle School.

"And just who are you?" the first boy said. It was not entirely a question.

"My name is Tenya Iida." He adjusted his glasses with two fingers, a motion so clean it seemed practiced. "And I suggest you take this exam seriously. Your future is at stake here."

One of the boys pointed at him. "I don’t see you out pacing that green-haired kid! Who are you to tell us what to do, eh?"

The man shook his head—not dismissively, as if he were addressing a logical error. "Nonsense. I was simply giving my engines a moment to cool down. I would never have lasted this long otherwise." He glanced toward the receding green blur, then back at them with the directness of someone who had assessed the situation and arrived at a conclusion they found obvious. "That's when I observed you two standing here discussing the boy with the green hair. He moves forward while you remain static. Best get going..."

"How?! He's taking all the damn robots."

Iida straightened further, which hardly seemed possible. “Improvise! What precisely do you think they are testing you on?" He swept one arm across the breadth of the mock city, taking in the crumbling facades, the overturned cars, the half-collapsed infrastructure, the way the environment itself had become a variable rather than a backdrop. "It is not simply your combat ability. Consider the context. Consider what a hero does."

There was a small click from somewhere around his calves. A mechanical sound, precise, the kind that did not happen by accident.

"Very well then." Something in his posture shifted from stationary to imminent. "I am rearing to go. Farewell. I suspect we shall not meet again."

With that, he was gone. The exhaust from his engines left a faint heat shimmer in the air where he had been standing.

The two boys gazed at the vacant space left in his wake.

Izuku was on top of the world.

Robot after robot fell to his hand. It was like tearing paper.

He felt strong. 

He felt fast.

He felt powerful in a way that was entirely new to him—not the theoretical power of equations and projections, not the controlled power of morning sessions on a cold beach, but something real and tangible in his actions. 

Something that answered back when he called on it. He moved through the mock city on borrowed gravity, bouncing off walls, channeling the force through his legs and into the ground.

He hit a three-pointer with an open palm, and the robot folded backward and inward with a sound like a hydraulic collapse. Utter devastation with every motion.

Not only that, but people were looking at him.

The attention was the part he hadn't prepared for. It was profoundly strange. The stares that followed him had nothing to do with pity, contempt, or the specific boredom of someone looking through him.

They were looking at him.

But they weren't seeing Deku. They weren't seeing the loser that he had been for his entire life. Not the quirkless, useless fixture of corridors and schoolyards who had been defined by absence as completely as if absence were its form of identity. 

Not the boy who had knelt in snow gathering torn pages with the patient resignation of someone who had done this before and expected to do it again.

Not the boy who had sat on the floor of a quiet room reading fourteen drafts of a letter that had unmade everything he had built with careful hands

No. Nejire Hado was not on his mind. 

I don't think the world is going to let you do this.

He hit another robot. Then another. The ire dissolved. Her image went with it, dissolving like heat into the morning air. 

All Izuku saw was what was in front of him.

Shattered glass, bent metal, spilled oil, and nothing else.

It felt amazing. Addicting. Something he had no prior framework for, because there had never been a version of this before. Sparring with All Might had been its own form of education. 

There had been the beach—months and months of the beach, during incremental accumulation of a body that could handle what he was asking of it. 

But this was the first time he had used One For All on something that fought back for real. All Might always pulled his punches, often times resorting to simply countering his moves. 

For a brief, radiant moment, all the anxiety washed away. All the questions without answers—the worries that lived in the back of his mind like low-grade static, always present, never entirely resolved. The fears that arrived at two in the morning and refused to leave until dawn.

He felt free. 

He bounced off the face of a building, cleared eight meters to his left, and landed on a two-pointer's shoulder joint with both feet. The joint gave. He was already moving before the robot finished falling.

This is it, he thought, in the wordless way that clarity. This is what it was supposed to feel like.

Then, it suddenly fell apart. Like always.

A rumble traveled through the ground before it reached his ears. It was a subsonic pressure that registered in the soles of his feet through to his sternum all at once.

He landed in a crouch and looked up.

The Zero Pointer was enormous.

He had read the briefing. He had listened carefully as Present Mic spoke of the rules and regulations of the competition. 

He had known that there would be a zero-point robot in the exam—a massive machine not intended as a target but as an obstacle, something to be evaded, something that existed to test a different kind of capability. The briefing had included dimensions. He had processed those dimensions as numbers.

Numbers were not the same as the thing itself.

The machine rose from a side street like something geological—a structure rather than a mechanism, its body an accumulation of mass and industrial purpose that blocked the sky in the direction it faced. 

Hydraulic limbs the size of transit vehicles that shook the earth with each step. A head—if it could be called that—from which sensors swept in slow, comprehensive arcs. Every movement it made was felt before it was seen.

The examinees near it scattered.

He was already calculating. Twenty percent distributed continuously through his legs gave him a speed that could clear most of this street. He could outpace the robot's movement easily. 

He was halfway through this calculation when he saw her.

A girl, pinned beneath a chunk of fallen facade—a piece of the mock city's infrastructure that the Zero Pointer's approach had dislodged. Not a large piece. Not a piece that would kill her. But a piece that had caught her ankle and was holding her in place with implacable indifference.

Round cheeks, short brown hair, eyes wide with fear. She was not screaming. It was Ochaco Uraraka. The girl he had bumped into earlier. 

He stopped running.

He had stopped before the decision fully formed—the same way that it had been since long before he had any power to act on it. His body moved first. 

But this time was different. He can do something about it. 

His mind arrived three seconds later and found him already pointing himself in the right direction.

Ochaco Uraraka was in danger.

A girl was in danger.

Somebody needed to be saved.

For a brief moment—a fraction of a second, the duration of an involuntary thought before he crushed it—she came back. 

I don't think the world is going to let you do this.

He shoved the thought out.

Twenty percent was not enough to pierce the hull of a machine this size. Perhaps in another situation, he could have taken a different approach—worked at the extremities, targeted the hydraulics mechanisms one by one, or used his speed and strength to dismantle it methodically from the outside in. 

He had actually considered this possibility in his pre-exam analysis. But that strategy required time and a clear path around the machine, and neither of those things existed here.

The robot's foot was in the air.

If he were faster, he might have been able to get to her and pull her clear before the foot came down. But she was too far, the debris around her was too dense, and there was no guarantee he could pull her from the rubble before the machine's foot reached the ground.

He had understood this before Nejire left. He understood it better now.

He did what he had to.

For the first time in months—since the beach, since he had crashed onto the sand and lain there with electricity sparking from every surface of his skin. 

He reached past forty. 

Past sixty.

Past eighty.

This is going to hurt like hell.

His training had been oriented, in part, around the goal of eventually being able to handle higher percentages without the damage becoming catastrophic. 

He was not there yet. Years of conditioning had brought him to a point where twenty percent was sustainable and thirty percent was… survivable, but the number he was reaching toward now was a different category entirely.

He launched.

Full cowling ignited through him, and the world contracted to a single point of purpose. 

He hit the nearest building facade at an angle, ricocheting off the concrete with enough force to leave a crater in it, and the vector change launched him upward along a path that brought him level with the machine's chest.

His arm came back.

Every muscle in his body oriented itself toward a single motion. The power coiled. He could feel it building—the specific pressure of One For All concentrated beyond what he had ever channeled into a single point, gathering at his fist, his wrist, his forearm.

"SMAAASSSHHHHHH!"

The world detonated.

For a moment there was only the impact—a sound that was less a sound than a physical event, a concussive wave that moved outward from his fist in every direction simultaneously, shaking the loose rubble in the streets below and rattling the surviving facade of the mock city's buildings into further collapse.

The Zero Pointer flew back.

It left the ground.

Two hundred tons of machine, engineered to resist the best quirks of U.A.'s student body, simply left the ground. It flew back and struck the far end of the testing zone's perimeter wall and exploded from its core.

Izuku floated in the air for a moment, observing the casualty of his singular bunch. 

He smiled. 

And then the floor came rushing upward.

The infirmary smelled like antiseptic and something sweeter underneath it, the same as it always did. He had been in this room before—twice, during the early months of training, when the gap between what he was asking of his body and what his body could actually do had expressed itself in ways that required… severe medical attention. Recovery Girl had not been pleased either time.

She was definitely not pleased now.

WACK

The bunt of her cane came down hard and fast. 

He flinched and rubbed at the wrist of his arm. The one that hadn’t been broken. She had some mercy, at least. 

"I can’t believe you’re in here again, sonny."

"Recovery Girl, I—"

"I told you," she spoke with clipped precision. "The last time you were in this chair, I told you that I would not keep healing reckless applications of an ability your body is not yet built to handle." 

She was examining the arm that was still in the process of healing. "And here you are. Once again."

"Here I am," he agreed whistfully.

"Three fractures in your right arm."

She looked at him over the rims of her glasses. Concern wore exasperation like a coat because it was less efficient.

"Sit still," she said.

He sat still. She grumbled.

“I’m going to crucify that oaf.” 

“That m-might be a little—” 

"You knew this was going to happen," she said. Not an accusation. Closer to a confirmation.

He sighed. “...Yes.” 

"That’s quite reckless. You need not make a habit of copying that buffoon. Even if he’s your mentor, trying to emulate his successes while you have a different set of shortcomings will only harm you in the long run.”

“I’m s-sorry, ma’am.” 

She was quiet for a moment.

Her hands moved over the healed arm with careful attention.

"I heard you blew away that zero-point robot." From the infirmary window, he could hear the distant sounds of the exam's aftermath—voices, movement, and the ordinary noise of a large number of people processing a shared experience.

"Yes."

Another pause. She set his arm down and straightened. He had the sense not to try to deflect.

"I will give you this," she said, at last, and the words came out with the careful quality of someone making a concession they had not originally planned to make. 

“You didn't break both of your legs. Not like the last time, anyway."

He blinked. "I—"

"Don't." She held up a hand. "I have been doing this job for a very long time. I have watched a great many young people come through that door with a great many injuries sustained in the service of a great many impulses they have chosen to describe to me as ‘necessary’ or ‘unavoidable.'" 

The hand came down. "It’s obvious that Toshinori chose someone who is like himself. Heroic to a fault. Ever the egoist, that man. I’m sure somebody was in danger, and you felt like you had no other choice."

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

"Yeah," he admitted. "Something like that."

“They say the most sublime act is to set another before you. But I disagree with such a notion. At least in the context of self-sacrifice. I hope you take this as a lesson.” 

She turned to the small cabinet behind her and retrieved a packet of gummies from the dish that lived there, placing them on the table beside him with a small decisive sound. "Eat these. The sugar will help with the fatigue from the healing."

He took them. The same ones that she had given him last time. They were aggressively fruity. He ate them anyway.

"I am going to speak to All Might," she said, turning back to her counter.

"Recovery Girl—"

"I am going to speak to All Might," she repeated, in the tone of someone who had made a decision and was informing him of it rather than inviting discussion, "about what it means to raise a successor. About the responsibility that comes with cultivating a person from the ground up. And I would like to have a conversation with him about the philosophy he has apparently been passing on."

Izuku stared at the packet of gummies in his lap.

“I-It’s not like that. All Might has been a wonderful mentor. It’s my fault—” 

“Hush now," she waved him off. “You are but a child. It’s his job to teach you these lessons. Not mine.” 

"Rest," she said, again, before he could respond. You should wait forty-eight hours before putting any significant load on that arm. The bone is healed, but the surrounding tissue remembers what happened to it, and it is not interested in a repeat performance. Got it?"

He nodded and got up from his seat. The second he did, a deep exhaustion crashed over him like a wave. He almost staggered in his step.

"Go home. Eat something that isn't gummies. Sleep." She glanced at him once more over the rims of her glasses. "And Midoriya."

He paused in the doorway.

"I don’t want to see you in here again. You’ve got much better control of that power of yours. Utilize it and become the hero you’re destined to be."

He stood in the doorway for a moment.

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

He went.

Outside, the UA campus was quieter now. The dust had dispersed into the bright morning air, and the exam had folded itself into the past tense.

He could still see some other examinees lingering about, but he moved through them without stopping.

At the gate he paused.

Not long. Just long enough to look back at the building—at the clean lines of it against the sky, at the gate standing open behind him.

He had walked in through that gate a few hours ago as a person trying to become something.

He was not sure, exactly, what he was walking out as. The distinction felt important but not yet defined. Something to be understood later, at a desk, in a notebook, where he could organize his thoughts.

He turned and began the walk home.

Surely, I did well enough to place in the top twenty.

…Right?

"...Congratulations, young Midoriya! With 83 villain points and sixty rescue points, you surpassed the competition and secured the top spot! 143 points places you at the top of all candidates!"

Hologram All Might pretended to wipe sweat from his brow.

"You were only two points behind my own record, which has stood for almost forty years. I have to say I was getting a little nervous there. HA HA!"

The camera shifted. "Suffice it to say, Izuku Midoriya—UA will be your hero academy!"

Izuku watched the video hologram over twenty times within the confines of his room. Each time, the words remained unchanged and the outcome the same.

He did it.

Tears pricked at his eyes. He wiped them away with the sleeve of his green night coat.

He had spent the last week in agony. Sure, he felt confident leaving the exam. But with each passing night, each text that All Might had not read, and each workout he did alone in the gym, his anxiety grew steadily

He knew he had performed well in his bracket, but that didn't mean the other kids in sectors he couldn't see hadn't blown him out of the water entirely.

The doubt built and built until his mother burst through his bedroom door an hour ago, letter in hand, already crying. He had almost dropped the fifty-pound dumbbell on his toes out of sheer surprise.

The results were beyond anything he had allowed himself to expect.

He placed first.

He read it again. First.

Kacchan only got 77 points. I beat him in villain points alone. Not only that, I was only two points back of All Might's record.

The thought sat in his chest with a warmth he did not entirely know what to do with. He let it sit there anyway.

For good measure, he watched the hologram one last time before his phone lit up on the desk beside him.

A simple text from his radio-silent mentor.

Beach. 18:00.

The sun had mostly finished its business by the time Izuku arrived.

The sky above the water held the last bruised purple of a day going dark when the city had pulled back from its edges.

All Might was already there. Toshinori, thin and bundled against the evening chill with his hands in his pockets. He was standing at the waterline with his shoes getting wet and apparently not minding, looking out at the water with the stillness of someone who had been using the extra time to think.

He heard Izuku's footsteps on the sand and turned.

The smile was immediate and unmistakably his. The very same one that had kept Izuku going through everything. And the one that lived underneath all of that.

"There you are," he said, practically beaming.

Izuku stopped a few feet away.

"You watched the hologram," Toshinori said. It was not a question.

"A couple times," Izuku admitted. 

A laugh—genuine, warm, the kind that came from somewhere real. He shook his head slowly, still smiling. "I recorded that thing four times before I was satisfied with the delivery. Kept fluffing the line about the record."

"You were nervous about the delivery?”

"I wanted it to be right." He said it simply, without embarrassment. "I would have praised you more, but they were calling me biased. Can you believe that? HAHA!”

They stood for a moment in the sound of the water. Izuku looked at the beach—at the clean, open expanse of it, at the sand that had once been buried under something enormous and was now just sand again.

"So let me tell you in person. I'm proud of you," Toshinori said. The words came out quietly, weighted with something that had clearly been waiting to be said. "I want you to know that I mean it—not as your mentor, not as the person who gave you this power—but as someone who has watched you work for months to earn every last bit of this moment.” 

He paused. "143 points. First place. And you nearly matched a record that has stood for forty years. You truly are incredible, young man."

"Nearly," Izuku said. “I still missed your score by two points.” 

All Might turned his head inward for a brief moment. "It’s only two points. You finished more than sixty points above second place.” 

"Two points is two points, All Might."

Toshinori looked at him sideways. "I'm trying to tell you that what you did was extraordinary. You’re allowed to take a compliment, you know?” 

Izuku looked at the water. He could feel the warmth trying to find its proper place in his chest and not quite landing.

"There was a girl," he said.

"I…know.” Toshinori's voice was easy. "Recovery Girl made that part quite clear."

Izuku winced slightly. "She contacted you already?"

"She did." A pause that contained something rueful. "She had a great deal to say."

"I tried to defend you—"

"She told me that as well. She was not moved, evidently." He exhaled slowly through his nose, the sound of a man who had received a thorough talking-to and was processing it with the dignity available to him. "She is right, of course. That's what makes it difficult." He glanced at Izuku. "Why did you go to one hundred percent? You had the points. You could have evaded."

"She was pinned," Izuku said. "The foot was coming down on her. I wouldn't be fast enough. Not at twenty percent. It was the only option that worked."

Toshinori was quiet for a moment.

"Ah," he said. "So that's what this is about..."

"Sorry?"

All Might closed the distance between them. He placed a hand upon Izuku’s shoulder. 

"You haven't failed, young man. You did not let me down. Not even in the slightest." 

Izuku looked at him.

You shouldn’t say things you don't mean, All Might. She used to do that, too. 

The water came in. Went out. The last of the purple faded from the sky and left it a clean, deep dark, the city lights beginning their own answer to the absent sun.

"There is one more thing," Izuku said, changing the subject. “Why were you in the video? Why did you go quiet for an entire week?

All Might was not smiling, exactly. He had the expression of someone who had been holding a piece of information with some difficulty and had arrived at the moment of setting it down.

 He looked at the water. "I was in meetings. Paperwork. Contracts. The bureaucratic machinery that I have spent most of my career delegating to people whose patience exceeds mine." He let the sentence settle. "I was integrating into my new position and dealing with some administrata.”

Izuku went very still.

"At U.A.," Toshinori said, in the tone of someone completing a sentence they had been building toward for some time. "Starting next semester. I will be teaching the Foundational Hero Studies course." He turned to look at Izuku directly. "Your course."

The beach was quiet.

"You're going to be my teacher," Izuku said. The words came out with the careful quality of someone testing whether a sentence was structurally sound.

"I have already been you teacher."

"At U.A. All Might. Teaching?!”

"Indeed."

"You—" He stopped. Started again. "You're going to be standing in a classroom. Teaching. A class. That I am in."

"That is a mostly accurate summary of the situation, yes."

Izuku looked at the sand. Then he looked at the part of the sky that was dark and did not offer any particular guidance.

"I don't know what to say," he said.

"That's a first. You do like to go on your odd ramble every now and then."

"I'm serious, All Might."

"I have given you everything I have to give, Young Midoriya. The power. The training. The hard and fast lessons of his beach." He gestured at it—at the clean expanse of it, the open sky above it. 

"What I have not given you is what comes after. The structure of it. The theory. The practical education that turns a heroic person into a hero." He paused. "I intend to give you that as well. For as long as I am able."

Izuku was quiet for a long time.

The water came in again. It went out again.

“...Thank you, All Might.” 

For a brief second, Izuku allowed himself to feel the warmth that he had been so desperately craving. To receive meaningful words from the person he admired most. 

“Seriously though, you need to stop hurting yourself,” All Might shattered his isolation. “That old woman is scary.” 

“I’m going to tell her you called her old.” 

“Young Midoriya," his voice boomed, mostly in a joking tone. “I did not take you for a traitor.” 

Izuku laughed. 

It was weak. But it was real. 

Mostly.

The weeks slipped past so quickly they barely felt real. 

One moment, Izuku had been training, planning, trying to prepare himself for something he still wasn’t sure he deserved—and the next, he was standing in front of a mirror, awkwardly wrestling with a tie that refused to sit straight.

His fingers fumbled with the fabric for longer than he cared to admit. It felt stiff, unfamiliar—like it belonged to someone else. Someone more put-together. Someone who actually fit here.

Eventually, he exhaled in frustration and settled for something passable.

Good enough.

The walk to U.A. was quieter than he expected, but not calm. Students passed him in small groups, voices overlapping in bursts of laughter and nervous excitement. The massive campus loomed ahead, all clean lines and polished glass, reflecting the pale morning light in a way that made everything feel distant—almost untouchable.

Izuku kept his gaze forward, his steps measured, even as his thoughts churned.

By the time he stepped inside, the atmosphere shifted. The air felt cooler, controlled. The floors gleamed beneath his shoes, and every sound—footsteps, voices, the faint hum of activity—echoed just enough to remind him how large this place really was.

Finding the first-year classroom was easy. Almost too easy.

The hallway leading to it was wide, lined with reinforced walls and high ceilings that made the space feel even larger than necessary. And at the end of it were a massive pair of doors. They were enormous. Taller and thicker than any standard classroom entrance, built with heavy materials that suggested they could withstand far more than daily wear and tear.

They weren’t just doors.

They were a statement. Just as everything at UA seemed to be.

Izuku slowed as he approached, his chest tightening slightly.

And then he saw her.

The brown-haired girl from the entrance exam stood just off to the side, shifting her weight as she looked around. The moment her eyes landed on him, recognition lit up her expression, and she stepped forward with an energy that felt almost too bright for the quiet hallway.

“Hey there, Midoriya, right?”

Izuku froze slightly as she leaned in, her presence warm, immediate and unwelcome.

“Y-yeah. It’s Midoriya. You’re Uraraka-san, right?”

Ochaco Uraraka nodded. “I’m surprised you remembered. We didn’t get to talk much before they hauled you away.”

Izuku rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “Y-yeah.”

The girl then bowed, unprompted.

“Thank you for saving me back then.”

He fumbled with his own feet, slightly embarrassed. The cheek she had slapped to break his fall stung ever so slightly. “Thanks for saving me back.”

She smiled and looked toward the door to the classroom. “Geez, the doors are massive, aren’t they?”

Izuku nodded, following her gaze. “I imagine it’s for mutant-type quirks. They’re probably fairly common here.”

Ochaco seemed to agree with him immediately. “Yeah, you’re right!”

That… was strange.

Izuku’s gaze dropped to his palm, his thumb brushing over the faint scar that ran along it.

Nobody ever agreed with him before.

Does she agree with me because I’m making a good point… or because I have power now?

Would she have agreed with me two years ago?

“Let’s go in, Midoriya-kun,” she said. “I don’t want to be late on our first day.”

He nodded. “Sure.”

As he stepped forward, unease twisted in his chest.

Does it matter? I’m not Deku anymore, and it’s not like anyone here knows—

“DEKU!?”

Izuku froze mid-step.

Of course.

How, just how, did he forget? 

The classroom was almost disappointingly normal at first glance. Rows of desks were arranged neatly across the floor, each paired with a simple chair. A green chalkboard stretched across the front wall, and a wooden podium stood off to the side.

It looked ordinary, but the thick tension that hung in the air made it anything but.

At one of the desks, a boy Izuku was all too familiar with shot upright. His feet had been planted on the desk in front of him, much to the dismay of a stern-looking student with blue hair and glasses.

“Holy shit—so that Izuku Midoriya I saw really was you.”

“Hey you! You best watch your language; this is a high—”

“Shove it, four-eyes!”

“How vulgar and immature—!”

Katsuki Bakugo shot up from his desk and physically pushed the stern-looking boy back without hesitation.

He closed the distance between himself and Izuku within seconds, each step sharp and deliberate. Beside him, Ochaco went from slightly confused to visibly concerned.

Izuku felt himself shrink back as the taller boy looked him over.

“What did you do to doctor your scores, huh? Which faculty member did you bribe?”

“I didn’t bribe anyone, Kacchan. I placed first fair and square—”

A series of emotions flickered across Bakugo’s face before settling into anger. His hand shot forward, grabbing Izuku by the collar.

“Don’t fuck with me, Deku. A hero academy has no place for cheaters, you know—”

“A hero academy also has no place for bullies.”

A voice cut cleanly through the tension.

Izuku turned slightly as a man stepped forward from behind him—tired-looking, with long black hair and a shaggy beard, his posture loose but his presence commanding.

“Katsuki Bakugo, was it? I suggest you tread carefully when choosing your next words. I won’t hesitate to expel you if you so much as breathe wrong.”

Bakugo dropped Izuku’s collar. “Huh—who’re you?”

“Shota Aizawa. But you’ll be referring to me as Aizawa-sensei.”

Bakugo clicked his tongue.

“So, can I ask why you have a student by the collar? Classes haven’t even started yet.”

Katsuki crossed his arms. “Deku here is a goddamn cheater. He’s a fraud who faked his entrance exam scores. I bet he paid off a faculty member or something.”

Aizawa stepped between Izuku and Bakugo, his expression unreadable.

“Doctoring your score would be highly illogical. If you lack competence, you simply wouldn’t be able to keep up and would fall behind. Besides, that boy you’re insulting was the only person who scored higher than you on the entrance exam, right? So what is the issue really about?”

Katsuki’s expression darkened further with each word.

“What the hell are you talking about? Obviously he cheated, Deku is—”

Aizawa raised a hand.

“Didn’t I tell you to hold your tongue? I watched the entire entrance exam. Midoriya did exemplary work on his own. No cheating or external influence of any kind. I suggest you choose your next words carefully. Throwing around allegations without evidence is almost as damaging as the violation you’re suggesting occurred.”

The classroom had gone completely silent.

Every eye was on them.

But Izuku could barely hear anything over the pounding of his own heart.

He hadn’t planned for this. Hadn’t planned what he would say to Bakugo.

Because for all his faults—Kacchan was sharp.

And Izuku?

Izuku was a terrible liar.

Bakugo looked like he was about to explode, tension coiling through his frame. But somehow, by some miracle, he held it in.

“Tch.”

He spat out a half-hearted apology before turning away and returning to his seat.

Aizawa watched him for a moment longer before dragging a tired hand down his face. “Ugh. I don’t get paid enough for this.”

He turned to the rest of the class. His tone shifted from a quiet grumble to a much more assertive announcement. 

“The rest of you ruffians can take your seats.”

Chairs scraped softly as students hurried to comply.

Izuku sat down slowly, his pulse still racing.

The bell rang, sharp and echoing through the room. Aizawa didn’t raise his voice, but it carried anyway.

“Starting from this day forward, if you’re not planted in your seat once that bell goes…”

He paused, letting the silence stretch.

“…you’ll be expelled.”

The words settled heavily over the room.

No one spoke.

No one moved.

And just like that—

“Welcome to UA.” 

—Everything began.

The cherry blossoms along the main avenue had peaked the week before and were now in their second act—the petals falling rather than opening, the brief perfection of departure. 

They came down in slow spirals when the wind was gentle and in brief, chaotic bursts when it was not, and the stone paths that ran along the avenue were drifted at the edges in pale pink,

The air was too clean for winter, too bright for the months before it. 

Nejire arrived from the west gate.

She was wearing the standard uniform—the blazer ironed and buttoned, the skirt at the correct length, and periwinkle hair hanging loose and spiraling all the way down to her waistline. Her agency bag was over her right shoulder.

She found Mirio at the junction of the west path and the main avenue.

He stood with his face turned up toward the cherry blossoms, his expression reflecting genuine communion with the natural world. He was also in uniform. But his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows.

"Nejire!" He brought his face down from the blossoms and deployed the smile—the one that occupied his entire face, from the jaw upward. "How was your break? Keep busy?"

"Yep!" She fell into step beside him. "I kept working shifts with Ryuku."

"Of course you were. Such a hard worker." He said this with complete sincerity, which was also characteristic. Mirio did not perform humility. He also did not perform false modesty about the people he cared about. "Sir had me on the job constantly too. But it was fun the entire time. So I got no complaints, you know?"

Mirio and Nejire were similar in many ways. 

But unlike her, Mirio never had to pretend to be somebody that he’s not. 

This was one of the things she valued most about him.

Tamaki appeared from the direction of the main avenue, with the specific posture of someone who had been awake for too long.

"Tamaki," Mirio said, with warmth. 

"H-hey, Mirio," Tamaki said. “Nejire.”

Yuyu materialized from behind him. She was carrying two coffees, one in each hand. She handed one to Tamaki without being asked. He received it with grace and a look that screamed how appreciative he was.

"Morning guys," Yuyu said, inserting herself into the group's structure beside Nejire. "Ready for our last year at UA?"

"N-no."

Togata laughed. “Come on, Tamaki! Aren’t you ready to get out there and be a pro?" 

He shook his head. "No. I’ll have to meet so many new people.” 

"Come on, man," Yuyu took a sip of her coffee. "You have meet new people all the time. Especially now that a whole new flock of freshmen are coming."

“D-Don’t remind me.” 

They had turned onto the main avenue now, and the cherry blossoms were directly above them, the pale petals coming down in the specific way they came down when the light was at this angle—almost golden, each petal catching a frame of light before continuing its descent. 

Below, on the path ahead, the incoming first-year cohort was gathering near the administration block: a cluster of students in new uniforms, carrying their bags with varying degrees of affected nonchalance.

She found herself looking at them longer than was necessary. Eyes sifting from one head to the next.

The first-year cohort was too far away for individual faces. What she could see was arrangement—heights, postures, and the way the different types sorted themselves. There were the ones who moved toward the front with easy confidence. The ones who held positions toward the outer edge with careful neutrality. The ones in between. And the ones who weren’t quite sure where they belonged.

She looked away.

Mirio spoke again. 

"I heard this year's intake is particularly strong! Rumor around campus is that one kid almost beat All Might's record during the entrance exam." A pause. “I also heard that Endeavour's son enrolled based on a recommendation.

Tamaki seemed to shrink in on himself. 

"E-Endevours son?" he continued. “I was on a patrol with Fat Gum once. He..." He stopped. Made a small sound. "Endeavor gives me the—the h-hebie jeebies."

Nejire walked beside him, a natural forward motion in her step. "Everything gives you the hebie jeebies, Tamaki."

She leaned in slightly. He recoiled. “Don't. Too close."

"You're so quirky, Tami-kun," she said.

"You a-absolutely cannot call me that."

Yuyu threw an arm across Nejire's shoulder from the other side, the easy proprietary weight of a person who had decided some time ago that Nejire Hado's immediate airspace was available to her. "You're one to talk, Nejire. You're quite the oddball yourself."

"I'm an absolute delight," Nejire said with a bright smile.

"You absolutely are," Yuyu agreed. "A delightful, adorably cute oddball."

Mirio, who had been walking alongside them with his hands behind his head and the expression of a man enjoying a very pleasant morning, made a sound of warm contentment. "I suppose that makes me the only normal one here."

Tamaki's expression moved through several things. Something reached his face that was very nearly a smile before it was carefully managed into neutrality. "I've seen your—your wee-wee enough times to d-disprove that argument."

Nejire stopped walking.

She covered her face with both hands.

"He said wee-wee," 

Yuyu had turned away and was shaking.

Tamaki had gone scarlet. He was looking at the path in front of his feet with the rigid attention of a man who had said a thing and was now assessing the structural integrity of the ground and finding it insufficient. "I—I w-was referring to the—when you phase through the—"

"I know what you were referring to," Mirio said, with great dignity. "And I think you should be grateful that you’ve seen such a marvelous package."

Nejire laughed even harder. Tamaki shook his head. Yuyu looked like she wanted to dunk his head in a lake. 

“Not even an ounce of shame exists in you, does it?” 

“That’s right,” Mirio declared. “Life’s too short! Humor is all you need.”

They resumed walking. Nejire's shoulders were still moving as they found a new rhythm. 

Mirio stopped suddenly. 

He was looking at the building across the courtyard with a specific expression. He was staring at the first years now, too. 

"Say," he said. "Aizawa-sensei' is teaching first year again, right? He'll be running the application assessment." He tilted his head at the building. "Why don't we go take a look? See what we're working with this year. Maybe we can catch that powerful guy in action. Or the Todoroki son."

Tamaki shook his head. Repeatedly. "I would r-rather die than see a Todoroki again." A beat. "S-so scary. Or that guy who was close enough to catch All Might’s record. N-No thank you. I don’t need to be humbled by a couple first years."

"You literally have one of the most powerful quirks in the school, dude" Yuyu said. “I don’t think a bunch of first years should give you any issue.

"O-obviously," Tamaki said, to his feet. “But it’s still—”

"So are we going or not?" Mirio turned to the group with the raised-arms energy of someone who had decided the answer was yes but was performing the consultation.

Yuyu shook her head. "Nah, man. Sounds boring."

Nejire opened her mouth.

She was going to say yes. She had been going to say yes on instinct—she had been the one to drag Mirio to the same thing last year. 

She closed her mouth.

"Not this time," she said. "Sorry. I have… something. Plus, the detention for that was pretty intense."

Mirio looked at her.

The look lasted about a second and a half. She saw, in that second and a half, exactly what he was doing—he was leaving this one ajar.

"Fair enough," he said, finally. He turned toward Tamaki. "Looks like it's just the two of—"

"No." Tamaki said.

"—us." Mirio nodded, undeterred. "Just me, then. I'll report back."

He walked toward the assessment arena with the stride of a man who had chosen a direction and was following it, while cherry blossoms fell around him without regard for the scene they framed.

Tamaki watched him go, his expression reflecting a man who loved someone yet found them equally exhausting.

"He's going to get detention again," Tamaki said. “That guy.” 

"Probably," Yuyu agreed.

They walked toward the homeroom building. The three of them in the natural arrangement they had settled into over two years—Tamaki on the left, Yuyu on the right, Nejire between them—somehow became the center of the group's energy and its organizing principle. 

Yuyu's arm was still around her shoulders.

She was not letting go.

"You know, I heard something else," Yuyu said, as they walked. Conversationally. The tone of someone noting a thing that had come to their attention without particular editorial weight. "About the first-placed kid. Apparently, he destroyed the zero pointer.” 

Nejire looked ahead.

"He went for it?" Tamaki said. "The zero—but that's—"

"Very stupid," Yuyu finished. “Guy is strong, but he’s probably not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Nejire jumped in. “Come on, Yuyu! Maybe there was a reason?” 

“I bet he just wanted to show off. Damn first-year brats always trying to show us up.” 

Nejire titled her head to the side. “Hmm. I wonder.” 

After taking attendance, Shota Aizawa wasted no time in moving them outside.

The transition from classroom to training grounds was abrupt. Concrete hallways gave way to open air, and the structured quiet of the building was replaced by a brown expanse that felt unnaturally empty.

The field stretched endlessly—dry, uneven, and coated in a fine layer of dust that shifted with every step. There were no obstacles, no structures beyond the distant walls that enclosed the area. Just a wide, desolate training ground beneath an open sky.

The class gathered loosely, unsure of where to stand or what to expect, forming a rough semicircle around Aizawa as he began to speak. Some students shifted their weight nervously; others whispered under their breath, but no one dared interrupt.

Dust stirred faintly around their feet, carried by a lazy breeze that did little to ease the tension. Unseen by all of them, however, they were not alone.

Beyond the field, behind thick concrete walls and around blind corners—they were being watched.

Through the solid barrier of a nearby structure, Mirio Togata leaned forward slightly, his body partially phased through the surface as he observed with quiet curiosity. Not far from him, tucked just out of sight around the edge of a wall, All Might crouched low, his massive frame somehow attempting subtlety as he peered toward the field. 

“Midoriya,” Aizawa spoke finally, his voice cutting through the idle tension. “You placed first on the entrance exam.”

Izuku straightened slightly. “Yes.”

“Come up here.”

A flicker of hesitation crossed his face, but he nodded anyway and stepped forward.

The ground shifted under his shoes as he walked, fine dust kicking up with each step. The further he moved from the group, the more aware he became of the weight behind him.

Eighteen pairs of eyes, curious and measuring.

And one other pair, burning a hole straight through the back of his head. 

Izuku stepped into a small, marked circle in the center of the field, its boundary faintly etched into the dirt. He kept his gaze forward, forcing himself not to turn around.

Aizawa reached into a bag and tossed something toward him.

A softball. It spun lazily through the air, a thin strip of electronic material wrapped tightly around its surface, glinting faintly in the sunlight.

Izuku barely managed to catch it, fumbling slightly as it hit his palm.

“Midoriya. How far did you throw it during middle school?”

“Thirty-eight meters…I think.”

“Okay,” Aizawa said. “Now, using your quirk, throw that ball as far as you can. Just stay inside the circle.”

Izuku looked down at the ball in his hand.

For a moment, everything else seemed to fade—the wind, the murmurs, the weight of expectation pressing in from all sides. He adjusted his grip, fingers tightening around the worn surface, and took a slow step back within the circle.

Then, without meaning to—His eyes drifted.

Back toward the group. Back toward him.

Bakugo stood near the front now, arms tense at his sides, his posture rigid with focus. His eyes were narrowed, locked entirely on Izuku—watching, analyzing, waiting.

Daring him. A small, ever so faint smile tugged at Izuku’s lips.

Then he called on it. One For All surged through his body in an instant.

Full Cowling spread across him like a second skin—familiar now, no longer foreign or overwhelming or heavily fluctuating. The power settled into his muscles, humming just beneath the surface, stronger and steadier than it had been during the entrance exam.

He shifted his stance, planting his feet firmly into the dirt as he drew his arm back, muscles coiling with contained force.

Watch this, Kacchan.

He threw.

The ball didn’t just leave his hand—it exploded from it. A sharp crack split the air as a burst of wind tore outward from the force of the throw, kicking up a violent spiral of dust around him. The ground beneath his feet trembled slightly from the release of power.

The ball shot skyward, carving a clean arc through the air so fast it became little more than a blur.

Higher.

Farther.

Until it disappeared entirely. Izuku lowered his arm slowly, his breath steady despite the force he’d just unleashed.

All eyes were on him now. Again.

Aizawa glanced down at the small device in his hand, its screen flickering as it calculated the result.

“2324 meters," he said. “Impressive power.”

A ripple of shock moved through the class. Aizawa turned back toward them, his expression as unreadable as ever.

“In real life, situations will call for you to use any and all of the tools at your disposal. With someone like Midoriya amongst you, a physical apprehension test may seem unfair—but that’s the nature of life—”

“What in the fuck was that?!”

The outburst shattered the moment. Bakugo pushed forward through the group, his composure gone entirely now, anger flaring openly across his face.

“Have you been holding out on me, you damn nerd—”

There was a blur of motion. A soft snap. Capture tape wrapped tightly around him, binding his arms in place before he could take another step.

Aizawa didn’t even look at him as he held the line steady.

“This is your last warning, Bakugo,” he said flatly. “I’m not sure what your grievance is with Midorya, but let’s keep personal matters personal. You have potential, which is the only reason you're still here. Do. Not. Test. Me.”

The dust settled slowly around them.

But the tension?

That lingered for the rest of the apprehension test. 

The training grounds had long since emptied, but the lingering tension of the day clung to Izuku like the dust and sweat on his uniform.

The sun had begun its slow descent, casting long shadows across the campus pathways. The air was cooler now, quieter—most students already heading home or gathering in small groups, their voices distant and indistinct.

Izuku walked with no real destination in mind other than home.

“Hey there, Midoriya-kun! You really didn’t hold back during that exam, did you?”

Her voice broke through his thoughts. Walking beside him, matching his pace with an easy stride, was Ochaco Uraraka. He hadn’t even noticed when she caught up. To be honest, he didn’t really feel like talking.

“Yeah, well. I didn’t want to get expelled, you know? His logical ruse was quite the motivator.”

She nodded, hands clasped loosely behind her back as she leaned forward slightly. “That makes sense. But you easily placed first. Only that black-haired girl came close.”

Izuku rubbed his chin, eyes drifting as he replayed the exam in his mind. “She definitely did. I was surprised. She has the most versatile quirk I’ve ever seen. So many applications…”

As he spoke, something in his tone shifted—subtle, but present. A quiet fascination slipped through despite himself.

Ochaco slowed, then stepped slightly ahead of him, turning just enough that he could see the edge of her expression. There was something different about her smile now.

“Do you like quirks, Midoriya-kun?”

Izuku’s steps faltered for half a second before he recovered.

He stared at her back as she continued walking.

His heart began to pick up speed.

"What's your favorite quirk you've ever analyzed?"

His hand clenched at his side, fingers tightening slowly into his palm.

“I don’t really think about them that often,” he lied, forcing the words out evenly. “Like anyone else, I find them mildly intriguing, I s-suppose.”

There was a brief silence.

Ochaco glanced back at him, her gaze narrowing just slightly, as if weighing his words. But just as quickly, it was gone.

“Fair enough,” she said, her tone light again. “I’m much the same!”

The moment passed. But not entirely.

“Good evening!” A new voice cut in from behind them, sharp and formal enough to make both of them turn. Approaching with rigid posture was the same navy-haired boy from earlier—the one who had clashed with Bakugo in the classroom.

Tenya Iida.

“Midoriya-kun and Uraraka-chan? Those were your names, correct?"

“I was wanting to speak with you, if you two don’t mind."

Ochaco brightened immediately, her earlier tension seemingly forgotten. “I’m always happy to make new friends!”

Izuku simply nodded, his expression more reserved. “What d-did you want to talk about?”

Iida adjusted his glasses with a precise motion, posture straightening even further as he spoke.

“That aggressive rebel from before—you two seem to have a history.”

The words were direct.

Too direct. Without meaning to, Izuku’s hand rose to his cheek, fingers brushing lightly against the faint scorch mark that lingered there—a quiet, permanent reminder.

“Something like that,” he said. “Why?”

“I was wondering what caused him to keep flipping out on you.”

Izuku didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, he stared ahead, his gaze unfocused as his thoughts churned.

What could he say?

What should he say?

“…I’m not sure,” he said at last. “I barely knew him.”

Iida’s brows furrowed slightly as he pushed his glasses up again, clearly unconvinced.

“That, I highly doubt. He seemed to shout something about you cheating during the exam. I find that highly illogical, given I was in the same testing block as you. Your quirk is powerful, yet he behaved as if that were not the case.”

Izuku’s gaze dropped to his hand again.

“My quirk didn’t manifest until later in life,” he said. “He grew up thinking I was quirkless. I think he was just… surprised.”

That caught Ochaco’s attention immediately.

She leaned in slightly, curiosity lighting up her expression. “Your quirk didn’t manifest until later? Why?”

Izuku didn’t even hesitate.

He sidestepped it.

“Who’s to say?” he replied lightly. “These things are complicated.”

Iida wasn’t satisfied.

“When did your power manifest, then? What could possibly cause a reaction like that?”

Izuku stopped walking.

The shift was subtle but firm. Then he stepped forward again, just enough to create distance.

“Is there a reason you’re intruding on my personal life, Iida-kun?”

The words weren’t loud. But they were sharp.

Iida paused, clearly taken aback. For a moment, he seemed to process the exchange, his rigid composure faltering just slightly.

Then he bowed.

“My apologies, Midoriya-kun," he said. “I was only attempting to better understand my classmates and establish stronger relations.” He straightened, expression returning to its usual seriousness.

“Hopefully we can start on the right foot tomorrow. Good day.”

He turned toward Ochaco and bowed again, just as formally.

“Farewell to you as well, Uraraka-chan.”

“B-bye, Iida-kun,” she replied, a little more hesitant now.

And just like that, he was gone.

Walking away with stiff, mechanical precision, his arms swinging sharply at his sides as if each movement had been carefully calculated in advance.

Ochaco glanced at Izuku, uncertainty creeping into her expression.

“T-that was kind of rude, Midoriya-kun…”

Izuku didn’t respond.

His gaze remained forward.

Distant.

And whatever thoughts were running through his mind—he kept them entirely to himself. They would spill onto a page later. Ochaco Uraraka, at least, would not be made a martyr.

The place had no name worth remembering. More so because he only saw it through whiskey glasses.

Or rather, it had a name—painted in faded kanji above the door, the red lacquer cracked and weather-split, the last stroke of the final character entirely absent from years of rain running off the overhang above. 

The sign read something, but the legibility had long since succumbed to the rust and grime. The locals called it the Hole, which was accurate in every sense that mattered.

It was not a place people went to be seen. It was a place people went to not be anywhere else.

The interior was low-ceilinged and amber-lit. The wooden bar top was gouged and stained. A row of bottles lined the back shelf with no particular organizing logic. It smelled of cigarette smoke, spilled shochu and something underneath it all that might have been cedar. 

A sound system no larger than a shoebox produced music that was just comprehensible enough to feel like company and just distorted enough to be ignored.

Kenji Hado occupied a corner of the bar with the particular arrangement of a man who has decided not to move for some time.

He was twenty-six years old, and he looked older. Not in the way of men who had aged poorly—Kenji had the kind of bone structure that would persist well into old age with minimal argument—but in the way of men who were carrying something that didn't belong to them. 

There was a quality to his posture that spoke of a weight recently acquired, settled across his shoulders with the permanence of weather. He had been there since before the dinner crowd arrived. Now it was the kind of late that only survived itself on alcohol and low conversation.

He had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol, which had produced no observable effect. His quirk—a metabolic conversion mechanism that routed chemical energy inputs through a cellular translation. His doctors had variously described it as remarkable, bewildering, and aggressively inconvenient—processed ethanol into simple vitality. 

Sugars, proteins, stimulants, depressants. They became warmth in his blood, low-grade strength in his muscles, and unwanted clarity in his mind. Rather than dulling it around the edges.

He had explained this, without being asked, to the bartender approximately forty minutes ago.

"So the more you drink," the bartender had said, "the more sober you get."

"The more alert," Kenji had corrected. "Not the same thing. But the outcome is similar and equally unwelcome." He had raised the empty glass. "Come on. Another."

The bartender had given him a look. But he poured again anyway. Kenji drank it in two swallows and set the glass down on the counter.

It was the point of the night where he had stopped counting.

The conversations around him came and went in half-overheard waves. He did not participate in any. 

He was not there to participate. He was there to locate, through the ever-lucrative ritual of repeated drinking in a public space—some version of solitude that his apartment could not provide. 

The apartment had windows that faced east. 

He was thinking about Shin.

He was always thinking about Shin.

Shin loved that view from his apartment.

Kenji was so lost, he did not notice her at first.

She was not the kind of person one failed to notice. 

She had positioned herself at the far end of the bar, with a glass of something pale in front of her. She was simply there, the way the lights were there and the way the music was there. Part of the composition of the room that the eye adjusted to without demanding explanation.

Except that she was not like the lights. She was not like anything else in the room.

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Her hair was the colour of a periwinkle field in low light, a soft, layered blue that caught the amber of the bar and turned it lavender, falling in short curves along the line of her jaw in a way that seemed entirely accidental.

Her eyes—he could see the white of her irises, the particular luminescence of them, clear and pale as winter light on still water.

She was dressed simply. The effect was not simple.

There was a radiance to her that had nothing to do with the lighting. She simply pulled you in by her mere existence. 

He looked up again.

She was watching him, now. 

He met her eyes. She did not look away. She raised her glass slightly in something that was either a greeting or an acknowledgment. Then, she turned to look at the bottles behind the bar.

He looked at his drink. Was this ten? Maybe twelve?

He drank it.

He signaled for another while she got up from her seat and moved to the stool nearest to his. 

She settled with the same composure, set her glass on the bar, and looked at it.

She did not speak.

Neither did he.

The music moved through the room between them. A slow, low thing—a bass note that felt like a door being eased open. He drank his drink. She drank hers. The bartender moved to and fro behind the counter.

The silence extended. He was not uncomfortable in it. 

"Nervous?" she said.

She did not look at him when she said it.

He considered the question with more sincerity than it probably deserved. "No," he said. He placed his empty glass down. "Can't a man drown his sorrows in peace?"

She looked at him then. The corner of her mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile, though it was in the neighborhood.

"He can," she said. "But what good is peace without someone to share it with?"

He looked at her.

He thought of twelve reasonable responses, arranged them in order of probability, and discarded all of them.

"I suppose," he said.

He raised one finger toward the bartender. "One for her too—" He paused. "What are you—"

"I'll have what he's having," she said.

The bartender poured without comment. 

They talked for a long time.

It began in the careful way for their own reasons. A kind of mutual extension, with neither of them naming it as such.

He learned that she was an overly curious mind He had suspected as much, from the directness of her attention, but it was different to experience it at proximity. The way she leaned slightly forward when a topic interested her, the way her eyes moved with real engagement whenever he spoke of simple topics. 

She asked questions the way people breathed—without the usual social friction of wondering whether a question was appropriate. She simply asked. When he answered, she listened with a quality of attention that made him think she was probably retaining every word, filing it somewhere, building something from it that she had not yet shown him.

He told her things he had not planned to tell anyone.

Not all of it—but the surface things, the shape of his life at the present moment. The work that had stopped feeling like work. The apartment with the east-facing windows. The sense of having arrived at twenty-six without having gotten anywhere. 

She listened. She did not offer consolation. She did not tell him it would be fine.

"You're not going to tell me it gets better?” He said at some point. “That seems like the comforting thing to do.” 

"I don't know you well enough to know whether it will," she said. "And you're smart enough to know when someone's just saying things to make the air less heavy." A pause. "Is the air less heavy?"

"No," he said.

"Then let's leave it as it is," she said, "and just keep talking anyway."

The music continued. The bar thinned. The bartender, who had been on the edge of cutting Kenji off at least twice, had by now apparently abandoned the project.

Kenji hadn’t even realized that he had smiled for the first time in many years.

“Sorry, I didn’t get your name?” 

“It’s Chihiro. And yours?” 

“Kenji Hado… It’s a pleasure.” 

Chapter Text

Izuku sat in his seat in the third row with his notebook open. 

His pen was moving, and his attention, as far as anyone could tell, was entirely on whatever he was writing.

His bag was already unpacked. His books were stacked in the correct order. He had arrived before most of the class. The pen moved in precise bursts followed by longer, uninterrupted stretches. The handwriting was dense. Marginal annotations crowded the edges in a second, smaller notion of compressed observations or ideas that would never bleed onto the main page. But nothing personal. A mistake he wouldn’t make in a notebook that left his room again. 

Kirishima plopped into the seat beside him with a generous momentum. The sudden action pulled Izuku from his state of concentration. 

The rowdy boy crossed his arms and leaned forward on the desk with his elbows. He angled himself toward Izuku with an openness that was concerning. His sharpened teeth caught the light when he smiled.

"Hey there, Midoriya." His smile was shark-like. "You doin’ anything for lunch?"

Izuku looked up from the notebook. The movement was slow, almost startled. He held the pen still.

"No," he said. "Why?"

"Kaminari and Sero were talking about going to the cafeteria as a group. You should come if we do."

Izuku looked at him for a moment. His expression was attentive. He was genuinely processing the invitation, weighing it against something internal that Kirishima could not see. There was a brief pause.

"I appreciate it," Izuku said, eventually. "But I have some things I want to finish during lunch. Sorry."

He gestured toward the notebook with the pen. The motion was matter-of-fact, not apologetic.

Kirishima looked at the notebook. Dense handwriting and complex-looking diagrams were sprinkled between words he couldn't read from this angle.

"Alright," Kirishima said. He kept his voice easy. "Maybe another time, then?"

"Maybe," Izuku said. Not unkindly, but in a way that suggests maybe it was more like a no.

He looked back at the notebook. The pen resumed its motion.

Kirishima leaned back in the chair, arms crossing loosely over his chest. He didn't look bothered. But something in the set of his jaw was doing quiet work.

Across the room, Momo Yaoyorozu had been watching. Not obviously—her own notebook was open, her own pen in hand, her posture prim and composed. Anyone who glanced her way would see a model student engaged in pre-lesson preparation.

Only she knew that the page beneath her pen had not received a single mark.

Ochaco came in from the corridor with Iida a half step behind her. They were in the middle of a conversation. Her voice was animated—hands gesturing, words coming quickly. She slowed as she passed Izuku's desk.

He looked up. Something in his expression shifted—barely, at the surface—in a way that registered as acknowledgment without quite becoming warmth. Yet another acknowledgment rather than a greeting.

"Hey," Ochaco said. She had pitched her voice slightly lower than her normal register. 

"Hey," he said back.

Iida straightened into the exchange with characteristic formality, positioning himself with the upright precision of someone who considered posture a form of respect. "Good morning, Midoriya! How are you?"

Izuku's gaze moved to him and then spoke with measured brevity, "Well."

Iida pressed forward. The man was constitutionally incapable of reading the temperature of a room when he believed an inquiry was warranted. 

"I'm glad to hear it! What have you been writing about? We haven’t received any homework yet, so I imagine something unrelated to school?"

A coolness found its way into Izuku’s expression. It was faint but legible, passing through his eyes like a cloud's shadow drifting over water. "Didn't I tell you to butt out, Iida?"

There was no venom in it. It was more like a fact being restated.

"Ah, yes." Iida brought himself upright, the social equivalent of snapping to attention. "My apologies."

Ochaco looked between them and sighed. She moved to her own seat, and Iida followed after a beat. 

The morning proceeded as mornings do, even though a silent Bakugo had also observed it all without appearing to. He said nothing and made no mention. 

When it came time for lunch, Izuku opted to let some fraction of the class filter out before he joined the massive tide of students in the hallway. 

The remaining students settled amongst themselves. 

Kaminari was laughing at something on Sero's phone, shoulders shaking, craning his neck toward the screen. Momo sat with her elaborate lunchbox open before her, eating with careful attention to every portion. Jiro, Ochaco, and Mina had gathered in a loose cluster, talking in lowered voices about some music group making their debut—Mina's hands moving expressively, Jiro occasionally tilting her phone to show something on screen.

Then Kirishima put his phone down. 

The clatter was loud enough that it drew everyone's attention. "Okay," he said. He wasn't loud about it. "I'm just going to say it."

"Please don't," said Sero, without conviction.

He spoke anyway, "There's something going on with that guy." 

The atmosphere of the room shifted subtly.

Momo lowered her pen.

Kirishima leaned forward with his elbows on the desk again, but the easy looseness was gone. He was frowning now. It made him look older. "It's not that he's unfriendly. But he's—"

"Behind glass," Momo said quietly. 

Kirishima looked at her. The words had named the thing with more precision than he'd been reaching for. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. He was so manly during that quirk assessment, but I haven’t really heard him talk much."

Momo set the pen down entirely. It rested at an angle against the notebook, untethered. "He scored 143 points on the entrance exam, you know. Mysterious, quiet, and reserved. It’s quite the oddity, I suppose. But Todoroki is much the same."

"Now that you mention it," Kaminari started, leaning back with the air of someone performing a recollection, "I don’t think I’ve seen either of those guys smile."

The observation landed with more weight than he had probably intended. The room held it for a moment.

"Mhmm. It also appears that Bakugo and Midoriya share some sort of history." Momo turned the thought inward, her gaze going slightly distant. "I know the chances are slim, but do any of you have any insight about that?” 

"You don't have to worry." Ochaco's voice cut through cleanly. She hadn't spoken until now, and the room noticed.

Mina's dark eyes shifted toward her with mild surprise. "Ochaco? Are you saying that 'cuz you've been hanging around him?"

The brown-haired girl nodded. There was something settled in her expression. "Yeah. Midoriya is a good guy. He saved me during the entrance exam." She paused, looking for the right words and choosing them with care. "I think he just... sucks with people. Somebody who prefers to keep things to himself, you know? Or that’s the impression I get."

Kirishima was quiet for a moment. His jaw worked on something. "Has he said anything to you? About himself? About anything?" He turned his palm up, empty. "He's an enigma like Todoroki. But neither of them seems keen on talkin’ with me.”

Ochaco thought about it honestly. "I think he likes quirks." She paused again. "I noticed him paying close attention while other people did their apprehension tests. And I know that he isn’t cold. He's—"

"Careful," Iida said from the doorway.

Nobody had heard him open it.

He moved to stand slightly closer to the cluster. His presence was both intrusive and strangely appropriate at once.

"He is being careful," Iida said. "Cold may suggest indifference. Careful suggests awareness." A beat. "Midoriya is acutely aware of the people around him. He is confrontational when something personal is brought up. Much to my dismay, as I wish to get to know him."

"Okay, but why is he like that?" Kirishima asked. He shifted forward again, the earnestness in him pushing against the edges of polite restraint. "Look, I'm all for respecting that people have their stuff. But he was out there competing with All Might's record, right? The symbol of peace. People with a lot of power are never... like that. The guy doesn't even seem to have an ego." He spread his hands. "I mean, look at Bakugo. That guy is strong, and he wants everyone to know. Or look at Yaoyorozu. Quiet pride, you know?"

Momo blinked. A faint colour moved to her cheeks before she could stop it. "Oh. Thank you."

He gave a thumbs up. "No problem, you're manly as hell!"

The blush fell off her face entirely, replaced by something between bewilderment and offence. "What?"

Sero laughed. Mina waved a placating hand in Momo's direction. "He calls anything he thinks is cool manly. He didn't mean it the way you took it, Yaoyorozu. Pinky promise."

“I see what you did there,” Kaminari interjected.

"Still, you shouldn't call girls manly." Jiro's voice was flat. Certain. The voice of someone delivering a verdict that did not require argument. "Especially the prim and proper type like Momo."

Sero nodded with the conviction of an official seconding a motion. "Mhm-hmm. Not cool, man."

Kirishima shook his head and flexed his arm. "Nah! She is manly as hell. I think you're super awesome, Yaoyorozu!"

"This guy just doesn't get it. Brick for brains."

"It's funny you say that—"

A few more laughs filled the quiet. Neither Ochaco nor Iida were among the laughing. Eventually, as laughter always does, it spent itself. The room settled back into silence.

Kirishima looked at his desk. His jaw was working on something again—the same motion as before. It was as if he was chewing on a thought that hadn't been resolved. 

"It's still worrying, you know," he said quietly. Not to anyone in particular. "Three powerful guys like that, all withdrawn. All unreachable."

Momo looked out the window. Her eyes found the cherry blossoms still coming down outside. Each petal relinquishing itself to the air without apparent resistance.

"I'm not sure we can do anything about it," she said. "There might be a reason Midoriya-kun is that way. Or maybe that's just his personality. The same goes for the other two." She paused. "The reality is—it's not our place to interfere. Let's just support them the best we can."

Nobody disagreed.

The blossoms continued to fall. The room held its quietude.

The third year homeroom was different 

High ceilings arched upward into clean, institutional space. Comfortable rolling chairs sat around large wooden desks designed for pairs rather than singles, a deliberate architectural nudge toward collaboration.

The classroom was mostly empty during lunch break, but a few students lingered in the back, filling the airways with the sounds of their low voices and rustling wrappers.

Near the windows, the four of them had gathered. Yuyu and Nejire occupied one side of the paired desk, Mirio and Tamaki the other.

Mirio had three silver bento boxes arranged before him in a neat row, each one containing a variation of lean protein and rice, differentiated by sauce. Tamaki was absorbed in a seafood dish of his own, eating with the quiet concentration of someone who preferred meals to be private. Yuyu's lunch was smaller and more eclectic. A well-assembled collection of things that didn't necessarily belong together but had clearly been chosen with preference rather than convenience.

Nejire had an old protein bar she had found at the bottom of her agency work bag. It had the slightly desiccated quality of something that had been in there for longer than was ideal.

Mirio was inhaling a significant portion of his first box. Yuyu was giving Nejire a particular side-eye—the kind that had its own established vocabulary between them, one that Yuyu could deploy without turning her head more than a few degrees.

She made the first move. "So, Mirio. Glad to see you didn't receive any detention."

Mirio laughed between bites, a full sound that required him to briefly set down his chopsticks. Tamaki grimaced at the sight.

"Yeah! I was extra sneaky this time."

Tamaki's expression moved carefully toward a question. "You weren't... naked... were you?"

Mirio's grin was immediate. "You wish."

A look of profound reluctance crossed Tamaki's face. He directed it at his seafood. No longer did the dish seem appetizing. 

Yuyu set her fork down. "So. Anything actually worth seeing? Or did you bail on us for no reason?"

Mirio lifted a shoulder. "I did see something interesting. All Might was there." He reached for his second bento. "He was watching them perform their assessment. But he was being all sneaky-sneaky about it."

Nejire flinched. It was small—barely visible—a brief, involuntary contraction of the shoulders, the kind of movement the body makes when a nerve is struck before the mind has time to prepare a response.

Yuyu caught it in her peripheral vision. She said nothing. It was an interesting pattern she had come to recognize in the year she had considered Nejire her best friend—the way certain names, certain references, produced these small, involuntary responses. Like a bruise that had been covered carefully but reacted when pressure was applied unexpectedly.

"All Might?" Yuyu turned back to her plate. “Like the All Might?"

Tamaki seemed to lighten up from something. "Mirio was probably seeing things again.” 

Mirio crossed his arms. “I was not… well, maybe. I went over after, and there was just a sickly-looking dude standing there. Totally weird. Maybe I thought it was him because they were both blond and tall.” 

Yuyu seemed disappointed. “Way to stretch the truth. Maybe you need to get your eyes checked." 

“It’s possible I let my control slip on permeation a bit. Maybe I activated it on some part of my cornea or something so it distorted the light. I used to have that problem before.”  

Nejire tucked the protein bar back into the inside pocket of her uniform jacket before she jumped back into the conversation. "Anything else, Mirio?" Her voice carried the tone of someone who already had a theory and was just looking for confirmation. "Did you see the Todoroki son? Or that strong one? Or any other cool quirks? Come on, tell us!"

Mirio nodded, setting down the now empty second bento and drawing the third toward him. "Hmmm, well, I can say that this crop of first years is looking very impressive!"

"The Todoroki son was pretty reserved from what I could tell. It looked like he was barely trying. But he still managed to place in the top five. Quite the ice quirk he’s got." He paused to eat, then continued without particular ceremony. "There's also that kid who placed second on the entrance exam with the explosion quirk—definitely a bit of a hothead, but he's got an incredible handle on his power. He knows exactly what he's doing." He took another bite. "There was a black-haired girl who was, well, drop-dead gorgeous, if I'm being honest. She was able to create any item directly from her skin."

"Pervert," Yuyu said, without looking up from her plate. The word arrived the way facts arrive—stated rather than accused.

"I've never heard him call anyone pretty before," Nejire noted, with genuine curiosity. “But that’s not really pervy, Yuyu.” 

“I know, I know." Yuyu threw an arm around Nejire and pulled her close in a practiced, easy motion. "You’re right. I’ve never heard this guy call pretty before. Maybe it's 'cause he doesn't have the eye for cuteness like me."

"C'mon, Yuyu, you're teasing me too much."

"Sorry, sorry."

She didn't sound especially sorry.

Mirio restarted from his last point, undeterred. "Anyway—she was showing quite a lot of skin in order to use it, so it was kind of hard not to notice. Kinda like Midnight-sensei."

A beat.

"Oh wow," Yuyu said. "You really are a pervert."

"Nah. Just a watchful observer."

"Dude," Tamaki said, pushing past his own reluctance. "You're not making your case better."

Mirio rubbed at his eyes in mock exhaustion, the theatrical weariness of someone who had decided to lean into the verdict rather than fight it. He straightened again. "And then I'm pretty sure I found the kid who matched All Might's record." A slight pause—for effect, or perhaps genuine consideration of what he was about to say. "Safe to say he lives up to the hype. Interestingly enough, he has about the same power set. Super strength and super speed. Nothing complicated. But the scope of it is pretty insane." He shook his head. “The guy threw a softball two kilometers and did a forty-metre sprint in under a second. Honestly, he'd probably give me a run for my money in a fight."

That landed differently than the rest.

Tamaki looked up. "Seriously? But you have the perfect counter to his quirk."

Mirio shook his head. The gesture was not dismissive; it was considered. "He was so fast. I'm not sure I'd be able to keep up with him for long. And if he's got advanced durability on top of that, it would be quite tough."

Nejire was impressed. She could feel it; Mirio had some form of genuine admiration—it sat differently than its performed version. “What else did you notice?” 

Mirio turned his third bento to get at the food stuck in the corner of it. “He doesn't really stand out much in terms of looks. Not that it matters with a power like that."

Tamaki let his head fall forward slowly until his chin nearly reached the desk. "So lucky," he said, into the wood grain. "My power makes me stand out too much."

Nejire's laugh threaded through Yuyu's more controlled amusement.

"What do you mean?" Nejire said. "A guy with literal chicken legs and lobster claws on the same body is perfectly normal and not out of the ordinary at all, Tami-kun." She giggled at the small sound of protest the nickname produced. “It’s not even that weird. I once knew a guy with a spray nozzle for a head—”

"And yet I have a classmate whose mouth is the nozzle. He drinks from his own head at lunch. That's just what the world is now….So maybe the question isn't why it doesn't follow the rules. Maybe the question is—aren't we so lucky as to live in a world where anything is possible? Doesn't that feel like an upgrade?"

Like a hammer to her chest, the memory struck without warning. Not outside of her—inside. Below the surface. 

It was like a hand around her throat or pressure in her chest. Something closing off at the base of her lungs. It was lying between the other memories, familiar in the way of wounds that have never fully closed. A smear of cold light masking a lie, a face she did not look at directly, and a silence so oppressive it could drown her.

Three pairs of concerned eyes fell on her.

She could feel them, the weight of their attention converging, but she couldn't seem to make her face do anything useful. The sounds that came out of her were wrong—small and strange, nothing like language. She was aware of it and could not stop it.

"Nejire?" She wasn't even sure who was speaking. Probably Yuyu. Or Mirio. Mirio was nice like that.

Her shoulders had drawn up without her noticing. Her eyes had begun to move, darting back and forth between their concerned expressions, scanning and finding nothing that helped, a search with no objective.

"S-sorry." She was on her feet before the decision reached her. The chair rolled back sharply as she pushed away from the desk, the sound a clean, hard clatter in the quiet room. Her voice came out too bright and too quick, stretched thin over something she was not going to name. "I just… I need a second. I'm going to the bathroom. Be back in a jiffy. I want to hear about the other students later, yeah? Yeah. Okay."

She was out of the classroom before any of them could protest.

The door slammed shut behind her.

Seeing All Might in a classroom setting was something Izuku wasn't sure he would ever become accustomed to. It was strange in the way that artifacts were strange—objects that existed in front of you despite all available evidence suggesting they shouldn't. The silver age costume didn't help. Neither did the way he filled the doorframe with the same casual, world-saving presence he occupied on every poster Izuku had owned since he was four years old.

Four months of beach training, six months of sparring, and his admirations still ran just as deep. As fundamental to his being as the need to breathe. However, any excitement that the costume produced was swept away almost immediately by a sickening turn in his stomach.

The pairings had gone up, and it was like somebody had dropped a bowling ball in his stomach. 

Getting Uraraka as his partner was a relief, given she was the only person he really didn’t mind speaking with. He trusted her. She was kind; she didn't push or intrude without warning. 

The second pairing he had not needed to read twice. Iida and Bakugo were about the only pair he wasn’t interested in facing off with. 

The simulated building was plain concrete from floor to ceiling—no cracks, no wear, no texture that might indicate a history of use. The walls were a muted, flat grey. The air inside was still and slightly stale, recycled through concrete lungs and sealed windows. 

The five-minute timer was already running.

"It's a stroke of luck that the two of us were stuck together, isn’t it?"

Izuku stared ahead at the empty hall. "Yeah," he said. "I suppose it was."

"So, did you want to come up with a plan?"

He tapped his foot against the floor. The sound was small in the silence. "I can guess the opposition's approach. Kacchan will come for me—there's no version of this where he follows Iida's lead or stays calm long enough to coordinate. He'll leave Iida exposed."

He paused. "I can handle Kacchan. Can you get to Iida before he locks down the bomb room?"

Ochaco looked at him. Uncertainty and determination stirred in honest eyes. "I don't know. But I can try."

"That's all I'm asking."

She seemed like she wanted to say something else. Some part of her contemplated whether or not she wanted to say it before her lips moved again. "I know you're really strong, Midoriya-kun. But that Bakugo guy is really scary. You should be careful."

The timer on his watch beeped once—announcing the start of the trial. 

"Believe me," Izuku said. "I know."

They split at the fork in the corridor—Ochaco went left, a long way around, and Izuku moved right. The plan didn't need more words than had already been given. He walked slowly, deliberately, letting his footsteps carry in the stillness. The reverb moved through the concrete in small, even pulses.

He reached up to his earpiece. "Uraraka-san? I'm going to create a distraction, now—"

"No need, Deku!"

He spun.

He was a moment too late. The explosion caught him full in the face, and the kickback took his feet out from under him in the same instant, the world tilting on its axis before he hit the floor.

Once again, Izuku found himself underneath Katsuki Bakugo.

The symmetry of it was not lost on him.

"Not so tough without a teacher defending you, eh—?"

Wordlessly, Izuku lashed out with both legs and knocked Bakugo's feet out from under him. No quirk.

Bakugo caught himself with an explosion from his left palm—a precise, practiced motion that arrested his fall half a meter from the ground. He landed in a low crouch, eyes already back on Izuku, already calculating.

"Did you really think that would work?"

"No."

The split second Bakugo spent reorienting was all Izuku needed. One For All came online. Lightning crept along the outside of his body in quiet, branching threads.

He felt Bakugo go still.

They stood apart by only a few feet. Equal height. Equal spacing.

Not equal power.

"Are you sure you want to do this, Kacchan?"

"You know the answer to that, DEKU!"

Two explosions ripped from his palms towards Izuku. Rather than dodge, Izuku charged through them.

He had taken point-blank blasts without the passive durability of One For All behind him. At twenty percent, they were uncomfortable at most, akin to a shove from a very large hand. Like a gentle heat and pressure that resolved itself.

He was already inside Bakugo's guard before the smoke cleared.

He'll lead with the right hook. He always leads with the right hook.

Izuku caught the incoming arm by the elbow, high above the large gauntlets that were decorated like large grenades.

He pulled Bakugo in—one sharp motion, closing the distance to nothing—and drove his elbow into the center of his chest.

Bakugo flew.

He crashed into the wall to their left. Concrete spiderwebbed outward from the point of impact in a clean, widening ring. Dust came off the ceiling in a thin curtain.

Wide, red eyes stared back from the crater.

For a moment, Bakugo's face held something Izuku had almost never seen on it—sheer, unprocessed disbelief. His brain was still doing the math. His body already knew the answer and didn't like it.

Then the disbelief turned inward.

And became something much more familiar.

Izuku crossed the distance before Bakugo had finished standing. He caught both of the boy’s wrists and rotated them inward—palms facing upward, the joints locked at an angle that made detonation self-defeating. Bakugo's own hands were pointed straight at his own face.

"Please, Kacchan." His voice came out quiet. Steady. Not that he expected it to. "I don't want to hurt you."

Bakugo screamed. "Don't look down on me!"

The words tore from his throat as his palms detonated. The blast shook the floor and blew the wall behind him open into a dark, squared-off room. Izuku’s grip snapped away through sheer concussive force.

Bakugo had blown up his own face in the process.

Izuku stared at the space where the wall used to be. The smoke was still clearing. "You're lucky that wall wasn't load-bearing."

Bakugo landed in the next room, already upright, blood on his chin, one eye slightly swollen. Still grinning.

The pressure bruised him, but he’s also immune to the heat. That makes sense. I was only gambling on that move, anyway.

 "Quit your yapping and FIGHT ME!” 

Asphalt and concrete shattered beneath Bakugo, the ground cracking outward as he propelled himself forward in a violent burst.

“Why, Kacchan?” Izuku said. “Why can’t you just be normal for once?"

Bakugoo shot out of the empty room, straight back into the hallway. 

As he passed back over the hole in the wall, he fired off another blast aimed straight at Izuku’s head. Reaching, Izuku dropped low. 

There came a single, critical juncture where Bakugo was suspended in mid-air, palm facing the opposite wall of the hallway, while Izuku was perfectly beneath him. 

He wouldn’t have enough time to react without way to pivot. Seizing his chance, Izuku planted a hand on the ground mid-movement and twisted. Lighting crackled as his body snapped upward in a fluid motion, legs whipping over like a breakdancer’s spin.

Both of his heels drove straight into Bakugo’s stomach.

Bakugo’s body folded around the strike, air leaving him in a sharp, involuntary burst before the force carried through.

He slammed into the ceiling.

Air kicked from the boy's lungs before gravity took him back down. 

Bakugo dropped. 

He used another explosion to catch his fall, canceling the momentum.

He gently plopped down onto the floor. It took him a moment to catch his breath between ragged heaves. Eventually, he was able to push himself up. 

Izuku found the irony of the situation to be borderline painful. 

“Didn’t I tell you to stop looking down on me!” 

Izuku was taken back by his tenacity for a moment. Bakugo had just been heaving against concrete, winded and bruised from a kick powerful enough to slice through a tree. 

And yet, here he is. Still yelling, still angry, still fighting. 

Bakugo launched forward again. Having learned from his last encounter, he faked a right hook, opting to swing up with an open palm instead. 

Izuku had plenty of time to react with One For All’s enhanced perception. Using his leverage, Izuku’s forearm cut across Bakugo’s gauntlet just as the blast went off, knocking the angle a fraction off of its target. The explosion roared past his shoulder instead of through his chest, heat tearing at the sleeve of the hero costume his mom had made for him, leaving it in scorched tatters. 

A brief bout of irritation pulled on his heart. But he tried not to dwell on it, as his other hand snapped forward. A straight punch drove into Bakugo’s ribs mid-descent. 

Bakugo twisted through it, teeth bared, forcing another blast. Izuku stayed inside the arc.

A step to the left. A pivot. His hand slid along Bakugo’s arm, still guiding instead of stopping, bleeding the force off just enough that the next explosion came out wrong again.

The heel of Izuku’s shoe snapped into Bakugo’s knee. He buckled because of it.

Izuku’s shoulder drove forward, slamming into Bakugo’s centerline, carrying him sideways. wall met them in a crash. 

"You know what's funny?" Words from Bakugo were spoken directly into concrete. Izuku had his face pinned against the wall. 

Bakugo wasn't fighting the grip anymore. He was breathing hard, blood still on his chin from the self-inflicted blast. 

"It’s like you didn’t even notice how I decided to leave you alone for two whole years."

He hadn't noticed. He had spent the years lost in his own mind. Bakugo had been noise at the edge of that. He had processed him as a problem to be managed and moved on.

He said nothing. But his grip loosened, ever so slightly. 

"Do you know why?" Bakugo’s head moved against the wall. Izuku had been holding him with one hand behind his neck and the other right behind his elbow.

Izuku could catch a glimpse of his eyes as he attempted to swivel his head back in the loosened hold. He could tell that Bakugo was not looking for an opening anymore. He was looking at Izuku. "Because I actually felt some pity for you."

The hall was very quiet. It seems he was changing his approach. 

"That day you came back. After. You looked like somebody had ripped your heart straight out of your chest. Walked around like a ghost for weeks." Something flickered in the red of his eyes—not kindness, never kindness from Kacchan, but something adjacent to recognition, which was in some ways worse. "It was so obvious what happened."

Izuku said nothing. Bakugo kept pushing. His voice dropped slightly.

"She did exactly what I told you she would do, didn't she? Used your brain, wrung you dry, and disappeared the second she graduated. And you fell for it—hook, line, and sinker." A pause. "God, you're such an idiot."

Izuku knew it was bait. He had known from the first sentence that it was bait, and he knew from long, expensive experience exactly what it felt like to take it.

Despite that, his chest was doing something he hadn't planned for.

"You're right," Izuku said. His voice came out even. "She lied to me."

He looked at Bakugo.

He pushed him agains the hall harder. He could feel the man’s body begin to squirm under the pressure as he struggled to make room in his lungs. 

"But this isn't just about me, is it? You're angry she ruined your perfect origin story. She came to this school. I came to this school."

Something crossed Bakugo's face.

"I don't give a damn about that!" The words came out more strained than he probably intended. "I'll surpass her. I'll surpass every person here and become a better hero than a coward like her could ever hope to be—"

Izuku dropped his hold and stepped back. 

Katsuki stumbled a bit as he turned. His back was leaning against the wall. Of course, he was still grinning. 

"I just want to know." Bakugo looked at him from across the rubble-strewn floor with the bright, ugly eyes of someone who has found the crack and is putting a crowbar in with no intention of stopping. "Does it still hurt? Knowing that when you were filling those pages—with all that heart-eyed slop—that she never even cared about you? Do you still think about it?" His voice climbed. "Is that why you're like this now? Does it tear up your heart to know that at least I had the decency to be honest with you? How does it feel to know I was right all along? You should be thanking me for trying to warn you! How fucking funny is that!"

"Stop it."

"What's that, Deku? Care to speak up?” 

Izuku clenched both fists. He was barley in a fighting stance anymore. His thoughts were running rampant, and he could feel the anger building in every word. 

It was overwhelming. 

“I said shut up, Kacchan! Stop it!” 

Bakugo’s grin slinked upwards. “Eh? It seems you’ve grown a backbone now that you’ve stopped hiding your power. But it’s too little, too late, Deku. In just one day, you've got the whole class scared to breathe wrong around you—" His gauntlet sparked, charge building, his voice rising with it. "How tragic! Gonna go cry to your girlfriend about it… oh… wait—YOU CAN’T! SO IF YOU WANT ME TO STOP, COME AND MAKE ME–!"

"I SAID SHUT UP!"

Izuku swung. 

The fury built on the ire and exploded all at once. 

His fist hadn’t even connected, but Izuku had lost control of the cap. 

A torrent of compressed air sent Bakugo flying into the wall at the far end of the corridor.

Izuku's right arm burned from the shoulder down. It wasn’t broken. But he had used somewhere around forty percent. Every muscle in the limb sang with agony.

But the pain was distant. Supplemented by his emotional state and adrenaline. 

Bakugo recovered quickly. He shot to his feet and ripped the pin from the second gauntlet loose. He aimed straight down the hallway and detonated it—a full-power blast, the kind he had been saving, the kind that had the entire hallway in its radius.

Izuku went through, stepping fully into the blast and racing toward Katsuki with no regard for how his one arm still burned.

His unaffected right arm connected with Katsuki's ribcage on the other side.

The crunch was very loud in the enclosed space.

Blood left Bakugo's mouth in a dark arc. His body hit the floor while he somehow laughed. It was a ragged, gasping sound. "Look at you,” he forced out harsh words between breaths. “What the hell did she do to make you like this?! What did she SAY?! Where did sweet little Izuku go—"

Izuku wasn’t listening anymore. The backside of his fist caught Bakugo across the jaw. The joint dislocated with a sick crunch that Izuku felt in his own teeth. Bakugo's head snapped sideways.

The anger in his eyes disappeared.

It rushed out the way heat dissipates from one of his explosions, replaced by something that Izuku had only seen one other time in his many years of knowing Katsuki Bakugo. 

Fear. 

Genuine and unguarded fear. 

Izuku raised his hand again. The lightning was still crawling up his arm, green and crackling, and his vision had narrowed to a single point. 

He swung again, but his arm was forced to a halt.

The hand that closed around his wrist was enormous. The force behind it was absolute and unwavering. 

"Young Midoriya."

Everything stopped.

The lightning receded. The narrow point of his vision widened and widened until the hallway came back—the rubble, the cracked walls, the dust still settling from the detonation, Bakugo on the floor with his jaw displaced and his eyes wide, and the fear still in them.

Izuku turned his head.

All Might looked back. His hulking form standing over his shoulder. 

He was right there. Eyes deep, shining with a power that shook Izuku to his core.

"Uraraka secured the bomb four minutes ago." His voice filled the corridor without effort. “I have been on the intercom for three, telling you both to quit it."

A pause.

"This is a hero academy." The words were level. They were not a performance. "We do not tolerate excessive violence. You're going to stop now, young man. Do you understand me?"

The question was quiet. It was also not a question.

Every remaining fragment of fight dissolved from Izuku's body all at once, leaving behind only the weight of the last few minutes. It all stacked on top of the weight of the last two years, which was already stacked on top of the weight of everything that came before that.

His legs bent.

He surrendered. 

In Nezu's many years of running UA, a great number of extraordinary things had crossed his desk.

None of them had quite the particular oddity of this.

His top first-year student had just brutally assaulted another student during their very first training session, after the assaulted student had gone overboard himself. The only reason it seems one-sided is the sheer discrepancy in the injury report. 

Both boys had gone to the same middle school and elementary school, and both boys lived in the same neighborhood. 

Both boys had been involved in the infamous sludge villain incident ten months prior.

In which a powerless teenager had thrown himself at a dangerous quirk user in a public street to save a classmate who was suffocating—a detail that most outlets had omitted from their coverage. 

And the boy who had done the assaulting today was, as a small additional detail, the next inheritor of One For All.

He had beaten the teeth out of a boy he had once charged into traffic to save.

Nezu found this genuinely interesting. He was self-aware enough to know that most people would not have described their primary response to this situation as interesting, which was one of the reasons he ran the school and most people didn't. 

He stood at the window, paws folded behind his back as he looked out over the view of the campus. Without giving any indication of where his focus was, he used the reflection of his office in the glass to observe the room.

Aizawa occupied the chair across from him. His legs were crossed, his arms were crossed, and his expression had a compressed quality to it. Like someone managing a series of emotions that he wanted to unload on his fellow coworker but hadn’t, for the sake of professionalism.

He had also declined tea. Not that the last part was out of the ordinary. 

Toshinori stood to the side of the room near the bookshelf, still in the silver age costume, which was several sizes too large for the frame currently occupying it. He was looking at the floor.

Aizawa spoke first.

"Why in the hell did you let them fight in the first place?" Aizawa spoke to the skinny form of the number one hero. "Given their obvious history, something like this was inevitable. You handed them the environment and stood back. Seriously, what were you thinking?"

All Might exhaled slowly. "I wasn't aware there was a history."

"Bullshit." Aizawa uncrossed his arms long enough to massage the bridge of his nose. "You were watching my assessment. You saw how Bakugo engages with Midoriya—he was ready to put his hands on him with me standing right there. If you missed the subtext, I ought to question your intelligence, All Might."

"They both seemed like they needed to get it out of their systems." All Might's voice carried something slightly apologetic underneath the certainty, though the certainty was still there. "You know how boys can be."

Aizawa looked at him for a long, quiet moment. "You have a student in the infirmary with serious injuries on your very first teaching shift—”

"Now, now." Nezu's voice moved through the room without effort, and both men settled reflexively. He turned from the window, where he had been observing the courtyard below with his paws clasped behind his back. "Have you spoken with Midoriya or Bakugo yet, Toshinori?"

"I didn't get the chance," he paused. "I was managing the aftermath."

Nezu nodded once and moved toward the desk. He settled into his chair with the unhurried ease of a man returning to familiar ground, folded his paws on the surface, and looked at Aizawa. "Are you personally aware of the history between the two boys? Beyond what you observed yesterday?"

Aizawa's jaw worked slightly. "It's obvious they have one. I don't know the specifics."

Nezu reached to the left side of the desk and slid two documents across the mahogany surface. One was an official record bearing the seal of Aldera Middle School across the header in bold institutional font. The other was a printed news article, slightly creased, the image at the top grainy from the resolution of the original source.

He gave both men a moment to register them.

"These boys shared a middle school," Nezu said. "And an elementary school. And, as of last week when I checked, they have lived on the same street for the entirety of their lives.” He tilted his head. "I think it would be reasonable to assume some degree of prior relationship."

Aizawa reached forward and picked up the article without being invited to. He read the first paragraph. His expression did not change.

"This news report," Nezu continued, placing one flat paw on the official record, "outlines an incident in which a rampant quirk user attempted to take over Katsuki Bakugo's body in the streets of Musutafu. He was subsequently saved by All Might—who happened to be in the area.” 

He paused for a precise beat. "What most outlets failed to report was that a civilian minor was also on the scene. He had attempted to intervene before All Might's arrival. Threw himself directly at the villain. No quirk. No protection." He looked at Aizawa. "I imagine you can guess who that was."

Aizawa set the article down. "Midoriya."

"Excellent detective work."

"Don't patronize me."

Nezu's ears shifted. "My apologies." He did not sound particularly apologetic. "Tell me—from your limited observation yesterday, does Midoriya strike you as the type who lashes out?"

Aizawa was quiet for a moment. He looked at the report rather than at either of them. "No," he said finally. "He's reserved. Closed off in a way I haven't entirely placed yet. But not volatile. Bakugo was the one I was watching.”

"So you have a working hypothesis about who the instigator was."

"Educated guess. But how do you know?"

Nezu simply smiled.

Aizawa met the smile for a moment, read what was in it, and evidently decided not to pursue the line of inquiry. "That being said." His voice shifted to the register of a man making an argument regardless of how it was going to be received. "I want it on record that I find the handling of this situation troubling. From both of you."

All Might looked up from the floor.

"It seems to me," Aizawa continued, "that there is a degree of latitude being extended to Midoriya that I wouldn't see applied to any other student in identical circumstances. You've both seen his quirk and how powerful—how similar—it is. I would be naive not to think that this has some degree of influence in the conversation. All I see is a student who dislocated a classmate's jaw and broke six of his ribs in a facility that is supposed to produce heroes. That warrants consequences. Possibly serious ones."

"I won't allow expulsion." Nezu's voice remained pleasant. "For either of them."

"And suspension?"

"Also no."

Aizawa's eye twitched. It was a very small movement and very deliberately controlled. "Then what, exactly, are you suggesting I do with them?"

Nezu regarded him for a moment. There was something in the expression that lived behind the perpetual pleasantness. "I'm suggesting you teach them," he said. "That is, I believe, what we brought you here to do. I'll have Hound Dog assist with counseling—both of them separately, of course, and together if he thinks it productive. But the classroom is yours, Aizawa. Your entire cohort this year is raw but brimming with extraordinary amounts of potential. Despite their uneven foundations. Isn't that what you've been asking me to find you for the past several years?"

Aizawa said nothing.

"Here they are," Nezu said simply. "Mold them into heroes. Prove to me that you deserve the room. All Might made a mistake on his first shift. Do not act as if you are or were without faults."

A long silence.

“This is ridiculous.” Aizawa reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of eye drops. He administered one to both eyes before he stood. He straightened his capture weapon. He looked at neither of them as he moved toward the door.

"I'm going to check on Bakugo," he said.

He left without further sound. His footsteps making no sound against the tile floor—a skill Nezu had always privately respected.

The door clicked shut.

All Might let out a breath. It was long and slightly unsteady. 

"Thank you," he said.

Nezu looked at him.

The smile fell away entirely. "Your successor is carrying something heavy," he said. "And I don't mean the power you gave him. That part, he appears to be managing." He folded his paws carefully on the desk. "Midoriya will have to be punished in some way. But you need to speak with him first. Find out why he lashed out like that."

All Might's gaze dropped.

"He won't open up to me," he said quietly. "I've tried."

Nezu was silent for a moment.

"Toshinori," he said. "During the entrance exam, when Midoriya struck the zero-pointer—" He paused. "Are you aware of what he yelled?"

All Might looked up.

Nezu held his gaze.

"He screamed, 'Smash.' at the top of his lungs.” Nezu stood on his chair. “He looks up to you. He wants to be like you. He admires you and what you are. And he has your power.” 

All Might stood very still.

"If anyone can help him, why can’t it be you? The very same All Might that I’m sure he’s looked up to his entire life.” 

All Might clenched his fist. 

The office All Might had been given was small.

It was the kind of small that suggested it had been assigned rather than chosen—a room at the end of a corridor that the school had been using for storage until about three weeks ago. It had been hastily cleared out and furnished with the minimum required to constitute a workspace. A desk. Two chairs. A window that faced west and caught the end of the day in long, amber strips across the floor. There was a potted plant on the windowsill that gave the bare walls some life. 

Izuku sat in one of the chairs and looked at his hands.

They were not shaking anymore. The shaking had stopped sometime between the corridor and here. The ache in his arm had dulled. A low hum of exhaustion came after adrenaline finished its work. 

All Might stood near the window in his diminished form. He had changed out of the Silver Age costume, now adorned in a suit that seemed to be missing a tie. Even still, it was far too loose for his smaller fram.

He turned from the window.

"You have to talk to me, young man."

Izuku shook his head. It was not a defiant movement. It was the small, exhausted movement of someone who had run out of the particular energy that words required. "I can't."

All Might looked at him for a long moment before pulling the second chair away from the desk. He turned it around and sat with his thin elbows resting on the metal frame. He did not arrange himself with any particular dignity. He just sat, close and level, in the late light of a room that smelled faintly of old cardboard and some strange cleaning chemical that he could not place.

"Then don't talk to me as your teacher," he said. "Talk to me. Mentor to protégé."

"You don't have to play the charade, All Might."

Something moved through Toshinori's expression. 

Izuku reached up. The motion was quiet and deliberate. He took a single strand of hair from his own head and held it out across the space between them, his hand steady, his face doing nothing in particular.

The late sun caught the strand and held it. It shimmered. 

"Just take it back already, would you?"

Toshinori looked at the hair for a long moment.

Izuku's voice came out flat and empty. "I know I don't deserve this. I never did. I've—" He stopped. Started again. "I've ruined everything. Everything you gave me, everything you believed. I lost control of myself completely, and somebody is in the infirmary because of it, and I—" His jaw tightened. "Please. Just take it. Give it to someone who won't—won’t be like me."

Toshinori reached out and took the strand of hair from his hand.

Then he let it fall to the floor.

Izuku stared at it.

"No," Toshinori said.

"N-No?"

"I am not taking it back. And you are not going to pass it to anyone else."

Izuku looked up. His eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with composure.

Toshinori did not look away from it.

"I told you before. You are going to become a hero," he said. "I chose you for a reason. For qualities that cannot be passed on. Because of who you are and how your heart can’t turn away from somebody in need." 

Izuku looked at the hair on the floor.

"What happened in that hallway today was not malice," Toshinori said. "That was not what I saw in your face when I stepped between you." 

He leaned forward slightly, thin shoulders angled toward his successor.

“I can see the regret in you right now. It's burning a hole through your heart.” His eyes were very blue in the failing light. "You would not hurt someone without reason. Certainly not someone you were willing to throw your life away for a mere ten months ago.” He was quiet for a moment. "But I do need to know the why. What happened in that hallway?"

Izuku said nothing.

The plant on the windowsill moved faintly in a draft.

"The audio cut out when you charged through the blast and when Bakugo exploded his own face. I wasn’t able to hear what was being said. So, young man, just what did he say to you?"

Izuku’s shoulders dropped.

It was a small movement. A millimetre, perhaps. But Toshinori did not miss it. 

“He…I can’t, I can’t tell you, All Might. I’m sorry.” 

“What can you tell me? Is there anything you can say?” 

Izuku stared at his own hands. At the single scar from saving Uraraka. Where the calluses from writing in her notebook for hours into the night had remained, but for an entirely different purpose.

“...He and I, we grew up together.” 

All Might leaned back. But his eyes never left Izuku. 

“We both admired you. A lot. It sparked a friendship that collapsed around that very same fact. We were going to be heroes like you. But you can’t be a quirkless hero, right?” 

Regret began to find its way deep into the heart of All Might, their interaction on the rooftop reminded him of exactly why he would never be the teacher Izuku deserved. 

“Kacch—Bakugo always had an ego. It exploded, literally, when he got his quirk. We followed him like mindless drones. Somebody so gifted that it was only natural he would succeed. So, I spent years chasing after him, and once he knocked my hand away, I spent even more alone.” 

Izuku’s hands began to shake. 

“Then I met a girl.” 

Painful memories. 

The centre of all his negative emotions. 

Somebody who had torn his heart in two. 

The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Nobody has ever, or will ever, live up to the way she effortlessly enraptured him. 

Toshinori made no indication. But he felt One For All pull on him. Like the sea calls a sailor who’s long since given up the mast. He could feel how stirred up his successor was. There was something that tugged at his heart. Something familiar. A colour, maybe, one that he couldn’t quite name—but he could definitely recognize. 

“Looking back, it was small. Something that was barreling down toward an inevitable end. But I grasped onto it for dear life. I had nothing else at the time. Or that’s what it felt like, anyway.” 

“What happened?” 

He turned his hand over. He grabbed it with the other one. Both still shook anyway. “It ended. Like all good things always do. She wasn’t the person I thought she was. Before, she was the one I told you I hated. He… He used that against me because he knew. He wanted to get back at me because he thinks I lied to him about not having a quirk.” 

Lighting flashed across his form. "Maybe some part of him is upset that we couldn’t become heroes together—like he had wanted to before my biology failed me. Or maybe that’s too generous an interpretation. I honestly can’t tell anymore.” 

He pressed both hands flat against his thighs and looked at the floor.

Even telling All Might the vague outline was enough to rip open old scars. 

When you were sitting on that curb getting questioned for doing the right thing while I was praised for doing nothing—I wanted to tell you. But the moment I thought it out loud, I realized I didn't fully believe it. Not in the way you needed me to believe it. Not in the way that would have been worth anything to you.

Something in Izuku's face broke open within that moment. 

A quiet collapse of something that had been held up for a very long time—a small, involuntary sound.

Toshinori let it happen, and he did not produce platitudes. He simply sat in the small office in the failing light and let the boy in the chair across from him be the age he actually was. 

“She told me she loved me, All Might.” 

After a while, he reached across the space between the chairs and put one large, thin-knuckled hand on Izuku's back. 

“Why? Why did she lie to me like that?” 

The amber had gone out of the sky completely now. What remained through the window was the blue-gray of full evening. The plant on the windowsill had lost its shape to the dimness and become a silhouette of itself.

Toshinori’s hand did not move from Izuku’s back.

He didn’t answer the question—not because he didn’t care, but because there wasn’t a clean answer to give. Not one that would hold under the weight Izuku had put into it. Not one he could give without further context.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly.

The honesty of it settled into the room without resistance.

“There are many reasons people lie,” he continued after a moment. “Some reasons are kind. Some reasons are selfish. Some of them… are simply because, in that moment, they believe it themselves.”

Izuku’s shoulders tensed under his hand.

“That doesn’t make it feel any less like a lie when it ends,” Toshinori added.

Silence returned, but it was a different kind now—less sharp, more heavy.

“I wish I could give you something clearer,” he said. “Something you could hold onto and say, this is why it happened. But the truth is… people are not always consistent. Especially when they’re young. Especially when they don’t yet understand their own hearts.”

Izuku didn’t respond.

His breathing had evened out, but it wasn’t calm—it was controlled. Held in place.

Toshinori watched him for a moment, then looked down slightly, his voice lowering.

“When I was younger, I believed that if I could just become strong enough, steady enough… then the people around me would never falter. That I could be something they could rely on without question.”

A faint, humorless exhale.

“The maiden of time would very soon teach me how that isn’t how people work. They change. They learn doubt. They find ways to hope. They say things they mean. They say things they don’t. Sometimes they aren’t even sure themselves. Sometimes just because they’re still growing.”

Izuku’s fingers curled slightly against his sleeves, but he didn’t lift his head. “You don’t get it, All Might. You don’t know.” 

“I don’t know because you won’t tell me.” 

Toshinori shifted, just slightly, leaning a fraction closer. “But I do know that what you felt wasn’t wrong,” he said. “What you believed wasn’t foolish. You cared about someone, and you trusted them. That is not a failure. There’s nothing wrong with you. Wounds of the heart can often last a lifetime—but there’s a lesson in every scar.”

He pointed toward Izuku’s hand. “Something you’ve learned already, and I’m sure you’ll come to learn again.”

The words hung there.

They should have landed.

They didn’t.

Izuku’s shoulders rose and fell once, shallowly.

“I misread everything,” he said, his voice hoarse but steady. “That’s what it means. I thought I understood her. I thought—” He stopped, his jaw tightening again. “I was wrong to think she was different from the rest.”

Toshinori opened his mouth, then paused.

There was a distance in Izuku now that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago—not physical, but something quieter and more difficult to reach. Like a door that hadn’t been shut, but no longer stood open.

“You’re drawing a very final conclusion,” Toshinori said carefully. “From something that may not be as absolute as it feels right now.”

No response.

“You’re only fifteen,” he added, softer. “You’re still—”

“I’m old enough to know when I’ve been made a fool of, All Might. And I’m old enough to know I got played. Old enough to know that I hate her.”

Toshinori fell quiet again.

“The reason I got so mad is because I knew he was right.” 

Izuku leaned back so Toshinori’s hand could no longer cling to his shoulder. 

The number one hero felt the temperature in the air change. 

“Is there anything I can do for you? I want to be there, but you’re closing yourself off.” 

Izuku let out a quiet breath.

“I’m not closing myself off,” he said.

Another small pause.

“I’m just….”

The word he was searching for failed to find its place on his tongue.

Toshinori studied him, something uneasy settling in his chest.

“Izuku—”

“I’ll be fine,” Izuku said before he could continue.

Too quick.

Too clean.

He lowered his hands from his face finally, and when he looked up, his eyes were still red—but steady in a way that didn’t match the rest of him.

“I just need to be more careful,” he added. “That’s all.”

Toshinori knew that tone.

He had heard it before—from people who had already decided something and were no longer looking to be persuaded otherwise.

His hand hesitated slightly against Izuku’s back before settling again.

“…Do you really intend to run from this forever, young man?” he asked.

Izuku didn’t answer.

The last of the evening light is gone from the window. The plant was nothing but a shadow. The office felt smaller for it.

“You don’t have to carry this alone. Please, at least let me help you.”

Izuku nodded.

But it wasn’t agreement.

It was acknowledgment.

And somehow, that was worse.

“Am I getting kicked out of UA?” 

“No.” 

“Am I going to be suspended?" 

“No.” 

“Why?” 

“Because Nezu determined it would not be a fitting punishment.” 

Izuku stood up and created space between them. His eyes pulled away and settled somewhere in the distance. 

“Why? Did you… pull some strings or something?” 

All Might shook his head. He felt the distance between them grow,  even without movement from either. “Nezu decided this on his own. We don’t know what your punishment will be. But you will be able to keep attending here. So, try not to fret about that for now.” 

Izuku nodded faintly. "Okay," he said. Very quietly. 

Toshinori stood. He moved to the window and looked out at the campus for a moment—at the lights coming on in the buildings, at the cherry blossoms that were still visible in the dark as pale shapes along the main avenue, and the rising moon that was beginning to peak over the buildings. 

"I suspect this conversation has overstayed it’s welcome. We can talk another time," he said. 

Izuku almost smiled.

It didn't quite make it. But the shape of it was there.

He picked up his bag.

He walked to the door.

"All Might."

Toshinori turned.

Izuku had his hand on the frame. He was looking at the floor, then up—the quick upward look of someone delivering something they mean and are slightly afraid of the delivery of.

"Thank you," he said. “For trying. Sorry I can’t be the successor you needed." 

Then he went.

Toshinori raied his arm suddenly. “Wait—!” 

He was already gone. 

The hurried footsteps receded down the corridor. Faster than a spent All Might could ever hope to catch. 

Damn it.

His skeletal hand slammed against his leg. 

I’ve been his hero for ten years, and I can’t even save him this one time. 

I really am pathetic.

The following days proceeded regularly. 

He sat in his seat. He unpacked his bag in the correct order. He took notes during the morning lecture and answered the questions directed at him. He said please and thank you, while keeping himself similarly distanced. 

The only real difference was the quality of the room when he was in it. 

Izuku could feel the way they looked at him each time he entered and exited. Each time Bakugo adjusted the additional layer of bandages for the wounds Recovery Girl had to tend to over several days.

They looked scared. 

As if he were some rabid animal or an unstable element ready to undergo fission. 

Izuku did not feel a need to correct their fear or prove them wrong, because they all saw it on the cameras. 

He was exactly what they were scared of. 

A freak. 

A Deku with power. 

His entire existence was an unfunny oxymoron. 

How poetic.