Flea

Chapter Thirteen

Apologies all the story arch is moving slowly at the moment so I'm updating it more frequently than usual to pick up the pace. I usually update twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. Keep with me! It should speed up again after this chapter with the sports festival but all the filler stuff is necessary just trust me haha. Flea as a book might be more slow moving than you're used to, but I promise it is worth it if you keep going (and if not well sorry you can roast me in the comments). Thanks for reading and the support xo

"So you're telling me that if I do well enough in the sports festival, you could arrange to get me into the heroics course?" Shinso asked, watching curry get heaped on his rice.

"Yep... You've got to be joking," Maeve said. The purple haired boy glanced down at her, confused, before realising she was talking to the server. They'd placed a small amount of curry on her plate, obviously assuming from her size she wouldn't be wanting much. To be fair to them, she did look practically anorexic.

"I need about five times that at the least," Maeve sighed, looking at the ceiling. The server hurriedly began filling up her plate. Shinso raised an eyebrow, suppressing amusement as his tiny teacher twiddled her gloved fingers and said "keep going," whenever the new member of kitchen staff tried to stop ladling food. When her plate was on the point of overflowing, Maeve beamed and acknowledged it was finally enough.

"Shinso, if you could find us a seat that would be awesome. I just need to talk to Lunch Rush about taking some food to go for my Dad."

With that, she grabbed her tray and disappeared, leaving Shinso to give a pained smile to the lunch server. They didn't return it.

Maeve was an anomaly and a half. When she first came into the classroom, Shinso had been just as shocked as the rest of the class at her appearance. The grey haired girl looked reasonably insane. Her forehead was covered by white fabric which looped around her skull to form a kind of morbid headband, and though she wore a high turtleneck, bruising around her throat from the USJ incident peeked out the top. It was obvious she found it painful to talk and yet she hadn't shut up since she walked into their classroom. It was intimidating, actually.

Shinso had seen her straight after the villain attack, 1C were one of the first classes to be evacuated. Maeve had been unbelievably calm, giving instructions to a whole crowd of people while being hosed down in white liquid and scrubbing her bloody head. The right side of her face was coated in a red sheet, already congealing.

He'd heard of Recovery Girl before, obviously. Especially because of his father. The guy was a psychiatrist who got called into the hospital sometimes, so he mentioned her occasionally. Which was strange, actually, dad never usually talked about his work. Nevertheless, Hitoshi hadn't ever given her much thought. She was the child genius who healed people all day; just another prodigy to remind him how mediocre his own skillset was. Any old photos he saw of her were of a small girl with curly brown hair and glasses writing complex equations on a blackboard in front of university professors. He could get behind someone being a fellow nerd, but that was too much.

But now he'd met her, she definitely wasn't what he was expecting. Maeve was tiny, obviously unwell, and looked just as tired as he did. Which was pretty impressive, he survived on a solid 3 hours of sleep a night. And she didn't.. Act smart? She definitely didn't come across as dumb, but it was like she was so confident in her own genius she didn't feel the need to showcase it. That or she'd learned the hard way to constantly tone down how intelligent she really was. It was weird that she had a sense of humour. Shinso had always assumed she'd just act like a walking encyclopaedia. Maeve also wasn't put off by his quirk, which was a first.

And she'd told him she could get him on the hero course.. The emotions that bubbled up inside him were so mixed at that thought he tried to steer clear of it. For now.