Awkward Energy - MinaDeku

Waiting For A Chime

Mina wasn't exactly a morning person even at the best of times. Sure, she could normally handle a morning alright before she'd had her usual intake of caffeine that she required before she was really ready to start the day, but after the trial by fire that had been the Yuuei Sports Festival that she'd been through yesterday, she felt perfectly justified in sleeping in the next morning. That was what the time off given to them had been for, right? To relax. To recharge. To replenish her normally unlimited energy. And also for the second and third years to have their days in the spotlight, but mostly for them to relax!

So when she woke up, opening only one eye groggily, getting a small glimpse of her walls and roof, heavily decorated with photographs and posters of all sorts of things, she immediately closed it once again, yawned, and shuffled to a more comfortable sleeping position.

Still, now she was awake, her thoughts began to come back to her.

Yesterday had certainly been intense, but it had also been incredibly fun, as far as she was concerned. Sure, she'd lost, but she'd shown what she was made of to all the professionals. That had to be worth something, didn't it? She'd made it the the final events, even finished in the top 8! Top 8! That had been far more than she'd ever expected to achieve, especially with a Quirk like hers. Granted, against Fumikage, her Quirk had basically been useless, but she'd at least managed to give him a good fight. When given a matchup as bad as that, she couldn't really have asked for much more.

And then there was Midori.

She couldn't stop herself from smiling when she thought about that nickname she had given him. Pleasantly surprised that he hadn't seemed too uncomfortable with it, Mina decided that that was now her name for him. Like how Uraraka called him Deku, she would call him Midori.

Mina had been perfectly aware as to how little they had spoken until yesterday. She was very much aware of that fact. She'd not made it a secret that she respected him as a classmate and a student, not even slightly hiding the admiration she had for his intellect and his attitude towards becoming a Hero. Anyone would be hard-pressed to find someone in their class who didn't, if you excluded Bakugou, of course.

But she really didn't know him all that well. In fact, she knew Todoroki better than she knew Midoriya, and she'd had perhaps one and a half conversations with the Half-Hot-Half-Cold Quirk user. He was the strongest in their class, even without his fire powers. She had honestly been rooting for him when the match began.

But how quickly her support had changed.

She had become engrossed by the sheer levels of determination and the remarkable, indomitable will that meek, shy Midoriya had shown. He'd burst out of his shell like a hand grenade, and given the biggest display of strength and power of anyone there that day. She didn't care who disagreed with her on that, or what their reasons were. The Sports Day Festival belonged to Midoriya and his fight with Todoroki.

But it was far more than that. They should have been fighting. But Midoriya had pushed their bi-hair-coloured classmate, pausing aside what held him back. He'd made him use his fire powers. All while breaking his bones just to use his Quirk, and even then, he kept using it on his shattered arms to carry on a fight he couldn't possibly have won.

How could she not have been inspired by that?

She'd had to talk to him after that. She just had to. There wasn't any way that she couldn't say something to him! Seeing him walking alone had been her chance, and she had taken it gladly and without any hesitation. She was a social creature, it was in her nature to converse with people whenever she could, and she'd discovered that Midori made for entertaining company. Sure he was a little awkward, and a massive nerd, but she'd come to expect those things from the boy whose curly green hair rivalled her own pink mess in terms of curliness and presumed difficulty to make behave. Not that Mina ever really tried to get hers under control, much to her mothers chagrin. If her mother thought she would be able to tame the jungle that was Mina Ashido's hair, she clearly had no idea who she was dealing with!