As it turned out, Mina had far more experience when it came to cooking and making food than Izuku ever did. Be it because she learned in school, her parents taught her, or she taught herself, was unclear, but the fact was that she was good. Very good. Far better than Izuku in any sense of the word.
It was primarily thanks to her knowledge and skill when it came to cooking that the curry Izuku had made actually turned from being nearly burnt, to actually something serviceable, and actually rather enjoyable, given their circumstances.
Not that that part was particularly difficult. Given their circumstances, burnt curry on burnt rice would have been enjoyable. No one was in any mood to complain.
Once all of the food was completed by everyone around them – A case which took a bit longer for the curly haired pair, since more food within the containers meant it would take longer to heat up, in a case of basic physics – it was all placed onto a single able, on which everyone was able to pick and choose what exactly they wanted to eat, sort of like an all service buffet. The logic behind said buffet was, as Iida had phrased it, because Heroes would need to be able to provide sustenance for trapped civilians. In those sorts of situations, usually in the cases of the natural disasters which hit Japan frequently, Heroes would help prepare and supervise recovery operations along with rescue workers and national relief efforts. That meant that everyone would be able to get however much food they needed.
That was true... But Mina had a feeling that he might just be overthinking things a bit in this particular case. Given how some people rolled their eyes at the Engine Quirk user, she had a feeling that she wasn't alone in this particular thought.
Everyone around them was stuffing their faces with as much food as they possibly could, half-starved from training all day on essentially empty stomachs, burning all of their reserves in fat and food through rigorous exercise and Quirk extension practice. Entire plates were devoured in minutes by some of the more gluttonous students within the first year students, before grabbing more just afterwards from the pile of available seconds.
The only real exception to this rule was both Izuku and Mina. Both of them ate normally, rather slowly compared to everyone else. While they sat next to one another, neither of them spoke to the other. Neither knew what to say. What it was that they should talk about when they were in the state they were currently in tight now. Feelings of awkwardness, uncertainty.
Primary cause for the reasons they were so quiet was Mina's statement that she wanted to wait until she'd cooled off before they discussed their disagreement. Izuku, for how curt an answer it was, felt that it was a smart idea. The last thing that he wanted was some sort of uncontrolled shouting match with Mina. Frankly, he didn't think he had it in him to start yelling at her, but if they reached that point.... It'd worry him.
So letting one another just calm down after that whole event... It was smart. Izuku felt he would have suggested the same thing, were their roles reversed.
But that wasn't so say that Mina had meant that she wanted to stop talking altogether, though. When she had said that she didn't want to talk about things until she'd calmed herself down, she didn't mean for that to translate to her not wanting to talk at all. Izuku had apparently taken her request that they just held off on talking about her confrontation with Bakugou
She stole a glance of Izuku in the corner of her eye, before returning to look at her food. She scooped up some with her spoon and shoved it into her mouth. She wasn't particularly hungry right now, and judging by how slowly Izuku was eating, he wasn't either. Their reasons for doing so were the same as the others.
Both might not have eaten all day, but their interactions with one another left them worried. Left that feeling of dread in their stomachs as they thought about the implications of their argument.
Part of Mina knew that she was thinking too much into this. Her parents fought at times, but they were still close, in spite of their arguments and disagreements. She'd seen plenty, and they made up every time. It was something that couples would inevitably do, not out of malice or hatred of the other, but because these things just had to happen. Disagreements and arguments happened.
That was all there was to it. They were unavoidable. No two people were the exact same, especially not in this world of Quirks. Conflicts were inevitable. They would happen. Frankly, Mina was actually pleasantly surprised that they had lasted as long as they had without ending up in a disagreement or fight.... Though that in itself made it hurt that bit more that they had finally had one, and it was over Bakugou's treatment of Izuku. Had Bakugou not treated him so poorly, they still wouldn't have had a fight.
Just another thing Mina blamed the Explosion Quirk user for, on top of his lack of ethics, violent tendencies, constant yelling, and all around just being a terrible person that, in a just world, would have been born Quirkless while Izuku received the Explosion Quirk.
But they didn't live in a just world. That was why Heroes even existed in the first place. The past was already in the past. They had fought, and now they had to live with it
What mattered was how they dealt with it now. It was natural for a couple to fight sometimes, but in doing so, they had to learn to close those wounds to get back to how things were. It was something that Mina had seen her parents do. They'd just not discuss the issue until they'd calmed down, and then would resume discussion in a calmer fashion. For the two of them, it worked pretty well, even if there were a few hiccups in the road. Sometimes they would get irritated with one another even when they moved on from that topic. It wasn't a perfect system, but it did work for them.
And that seemed healthy to their kids, Mina and Micha in particular. The horned girl's older brother applied the same logic with his girlfriend, and they had been together for quite a while. So it wasn't like Mina didn't see how well it worked.
Mina rested her head in her left hand, and looked over to the side, not really paying much attention to her surroundings. Since Izuku had taken it as being silent between the two, she couldn't even talk to the guy. While telling him that she didn't mean for him to just permanently shut up would probably resolve the issue, she felt like he was uncomfortable with even speaking to her right now, which she supposed she could understand. Forcing him into conversation wasn't going to fix the issue. In the short term, it could just make things worse. She let out a long sigh, chewing on her food absently. Her vision blurred as she lacked focus on anything in particular, fading more into memory than anything else.
All of the times that he and she had been on dates.
Their mutual confession towards one another.
Their first kiss.
His confession regarding his Quirkless origins.
Finding him held hostage by Shigaraki.
Deciding to form a Hero Team.
Just getting to the training camp.
In the short few months that they'd been dating, they'd done a lot together, and been through more than most couples would do throughout their entire lives. The lives of those who aspired to be Heroes were like that, she knew, but it didn't change the fact that they had been through the wringer together. Fought villains and trained together. That life of combat and not knowing what the next day was going to bring had always kept the two of them on their toes.
It had only made them grow closer.
Her anger towards Bakugou was totally justified – She knew this, and she certainly wasn't going to forgive him just because Izuku didn't feel it was worth a fight over. Were it down to her, she would have quite eagerly taken him on in that fight he had issued, even if she knew that she wasn't going to win. That was all there, and that wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.
...Not that it was worth fighting Izuku over.
The entire point of her confrontation was to figure out why Bakugou treated Izuku like dirt, and shut him down from doing it again. It hadn't been to start a brawl, and it certainly hadn't been intended for Izuku to get caught up in the crossfire.
Would it have been a better idea to speak to Izuku first before confronting Bakugou?
To get her boyfriend's perspective on things?
Learn what it was that he wanted?
Probably. Actually, the more she thought about it, the more Mina felt that she was the one who had made the bad call.
That was really what this came to. A bad call. Acting without thinking, getting emotional, and then taking it out on those around her, and herself. Making her eyesight focus in again, she looked towards her bandaged hands, scarred from the attacks she'd unleashed on the rocks. Those weren't going to go away. They'd be faint, but they'd be there to remind her of her anger fuelled mistake.
Did a Hero make mistakes like that? Did they allow their feelings to get in the way of their duties? Did a Hero get a break when they lashed out at their allies due to stress, animosity, vehement anger or fatigue?
No.
They couldn't afford to. If they did, who knew how many people would end up injured or dead? If they did, the lines between Villain and Hero would become blurry at best, and none-existent at worst. Should she desire to become a Hero, or even just a decent person in this super powered society, she couldn't just lash out.
Rare an event as it was...
Though, think as she might about the practicality of anger, justification towards her resentment for Izuku's childhood friend, her pushing her Quirk well past the reasonable limits just to vent frustration, one fact stood out above everything else that made her feel regret.
She didn't want to fight with Izuku.
There wasn't any other real reason that she could honestly state that she cared about more than that. The fact was, Izuku meant so much to her, the idea of having to get into some sort of heated argument with him was just one that she didn't want to entertain. Not over Bakugou, vermin though he might be. Not over that.
No matter how much Bakugou deserved it, it wasn't worth fighting Izuku over.
When she thought about it like that... she was the one at fault, without question.
"...Hey, Izuku?" Quietly, she tried to address the green haired boy to her side. Her head turned to look at him. "I wanted to – "
He wasn't there though.
"What the – " Surprised, the black eyed girl shot her glances throughout the area in search for the missing boy, finding nothing to suggest to her where it was that he'd disappeared off to. He was nowhere to be seen in any of the usual places, like friends or classmates, or in any of the unusual places for that matter.
Where he actually was, Mina had no idea. She'd spent such a long time zoned out, that she had barely noticed her surroundings change with time. Izuku had apparently already finished and left Mina on her own, without so much as a word to his girlfriend at all before he left. The odd thing aside from this was the fact that no one else had left either, so it wasn't like she'd just remained there long after everyone else had left either.
Izuku had apparently made the deliberate choice to leave here there, for some unknown reason.
Barely having eaten, though not to too much particular care from the pink girl, she stood up and away from the table, hoping to get a clearer angle above the heads of the other students to reveal that he was just outside her field of view. This proved false though, leaving her clues.
When she lowered her head, however, to look down to the ground, by chance, she saw footprints in the dirt below her.
The dirt was freshly turned, probably thanks to Pixie-Bob's Earth Flow Quirk, and Izuku's shoes were particularly bulky, as far as shoes went, anyway. They left clear, distinctive markings on the ground as he walked that Mina would have missed had she not looked to her feet. His choice of footwear had often peaked the curiosity of the horned girl – Why someone willingly wore shoes that seemed to be twice the size of their foot was something she didn't think that she was going to understand, but at this point, she was thankful for his choice in shoe ware.
An easy to follow trail was observed with just her eyesight – Towards the buffet table once again, and then into a forest path, far away from everyone else. So he'd gotten some more food and then decided to go and eat in the Beats Forest again? Why the hell he wanted to do something like that, she didn't know.
Instead of questioning herself for answers that were never going to come, however, she decided that she'd go and get those answers herself, and followed her boyfriend's footprints into the densely packed collection of trees and vegetation.
Mina was fully aware that her boyfriend was full of quirks, of the none super-powered variety. He had all sorts of oddities and personality traits about him that made him stand out, even if his origins were totally none unique. The fact remained that he was one of the more quirky people that she'd ever met, despite possessing no natural Quirk of his own. Those were the fun things about him, that made him different to everyone else around her. It was one of the many things that she did genuinely love about him. Normal people, in her mind, were boring.
Granted, it was difficult to be considered normal in a society where virtually everyone had a unique superhuman ability, but when Mina said normal, she meant in terms of sociability. While she was a very open and talkative person, she was aware of a standard set of actions that people normally abided by that defined them as normal. People who hid their distinctive personality ticks. That didn't try to stand out.
Because in their minds, their Quirks were enough to make them stand out.
For better or worse, Izuku didn't seem to have that filter. He just did what he did, but while he was socially conscious, and that did lead him towards embarrassment, he kept on keeping on, doing what he did to help him improve himself. He muttered up a tornado, and when called out, yes, it made him go scarlet red, but he didn't force himself to keep quiet. Muttering like that helped him think, so he didn't try to hide that particular trait of his. It was just one of the many examples that made him special and unique.
But.
There was a limit to how much Mina was willing to take. Wondering off into the forest with some food, a fair distance from the actual lodge site, and then climbing up a steep hill with no real reason whatsoever behind doing so?
That was something that Mina was going to have to seriously question. This went beyond the realms of him just being a bizarre individual and into the realms of Mina seriously questioning if there was something wrong that they needed to address.
Once she reached the end of the steep climb though, Mina found herself on a cliff-side that overlooked the entire forest, and most of the area that the Pussycats owned. The viewing distance presented before her had to stretch to at least a few miles, a seemingly endless sea of trees and greenery. It was a nice view, but at the same time, just being here made her feel lonely.
Nature had that effect on her in the more recent months. She didn't particularly like or dislike nature, but it made her feel lonely. This was only something that had begun to occur within the last two months, and she'd noticed it happen quite actively. Especially in this situation, she felt like she was completely and utterly all alone.
Green reminded her of Izuku, after all. It was his colour.
"Did Mandalay tell you?!"
"No! I mean... I'm sorry, I just... We were talking and, from the conversation... It just seemed to add up!"
Izuku's voice, and that of the child that had gut punched him, Kota, if Mina remembered the name right. Brought back from the sight to her actual task at hand, Mina quickly followed the path further, until she found a part of the side where it slightly curved. Behind that curve, was her missing boyfriend, and a very angry child.
Had Izuku not spoken a second before, Mina would have immediately left the space behind the wall and gone up towards him.
"I... Remember hearing about Water Hose. It... Shouldn't have happened like that."
Water Hose. A two person Hero Team that both worked with Water based Quirks, both died in the line of duty not too long ago. Mina didn't remember exactly how long ago it was. Somewhere between two years and a year and a half ago. Still, for the young girl, practicing and studying already to get accepted into Yuuei to train to be a Hero, this was a story that she had followed. She had vivid memories about it.
Rare was it for Heroes to outright die while on duty. It was why story was so publically shared, due to the absolute infrequency that it happened. The two had died honourable, befitting deaths for Heroes. The world was less for their loss. Mina truly believed that, back then, and she still did now. If a Hero had to die in the line of duty, then doing so while staying true to their calling and in the defence of others, it had to be the best way to go.
It was the way she wanted to go out, if that was what it came to.
"Shut up." Not that Kota saw it that way. And who could blame him? Young, too young to understand the world around him... Robbed of his parents by the profession known as Heroes, and the mutation and manifestations known as Quirks. Shown a harsh reality that he didn't want to believe in when he was only just starting to understand certain things about the world. All he knew about his parent's death was that their job was what caused them to die, and they were killed by the superpowers that dominated the current society.
It was too easy to forget that Kota was still just a kid. The words he used, and the jaded cynicism that he harboured... He acted more like a teenager than a five year old.
"You're all freaking nuts. You all call yourselves Heroes and Villains like idiots, and kill each other while showing of your Quirks... You're all idiots."
At the same time... Mina couldn't imagine what Izuku would feel when told all of this.
Quirkless from birth, and lucky enough to meet All Might like he did, lucky enough to learn how All Might's Quirk worked, and lucky enough to inherit such a devastating power, so he could pursue his dream to be a Hero... He'd told Mina, time and time again that he felt blessed by such an opportunity, by such luck and help from the people around him. That he didn't deserve this sort of opportunity, nor did he even feel like he'd earned it at times, despite what those around him said.
To be flatly told all of this from someone who probably did have a Quirk hidden away somewhere... Who so openly opposed the concept of Quirks at all...
"What's your problem?!" Kota yelled, surprisingly loud for such a small kid. "If you're not gonna say anything else, then just go!"
Was there really anything to be gained from this?
Mina knew the way Izuku's mind worked, probably better than anyone else did. She knew the sort of person that he was, what he wanted to do for people, and why he wanted to. She knew all about his altruistic tendencies, and the pain he felt regarding the state of the world that treated him so poorly. The empathy that had given him...
He wanted to ease Kota's suffering and pain. Because he knew what it was like to live hating the way that the world was. To live, hating everyone around him because he was just born unlucky. To feel like the entire world was against him, that everyone else was an enemy in the waiting, ready to strike and take everything away that he'd managed to cling onto...
All he wanted to do was help... But in order to help someone... Didn't they have to want to be helped?
In this particular case, it didn't seem like anything that was said to this kid was going to change his mind. Faced with a brutal childhood...
She stepped out from behind the extrusion in the wall and walked towards the pair. She was spotted by Kota who switched his glare towards her. Not that she was difficult to spot anyway, she knew. Judging by the way Izuku's body seemed to straighten up, Mina could guess that his curiosity was to what Kota was looking at behind him. Before he got the chance to turn around and look for himself though, she spoke clearly when she was within earshot of the pair. "Izuku."
Now his body rotated to face her, and his eyes widened with surprise. As he did so, Mina noticed that his hands were full, a bowl filled up with curry in his palms. Why he was here made perfect sense now.
"Mina? What the – What're you doing here?"
"I was gonna ask the same question.... But I think I've got the gist of things."
The black haired child quickly turned his head away from the pink haired girl, causing confusion to both curly haired teenagers, until they remembered that Mina was the one Kota had seen naked back in the Hot Springs. Seeing her again seemed to cause him some embarrassment, and an inability to even look at her.
If he wasn't such a jaded kid, Mina would have honestly found his sudden shyness cute. "How did you even find my secret base?" He demanded, trying to sound threatening, but failing, since he couldn't even bring himself to look at the girl in front of him.
"Pretty much in the same way he did, I'm guessing." Mina pointed at Izuku, before moving her pupils to look towards him. "Followed your foot prints. Your boots leave pretty easy to follow tracks." Narrowing her eyes lightly, she posed a question to him. "Why'd you up and leave without telling me? I was worried about you."
"I-"
"Will both of you get lost?!" Kota yelled loudly at the paid of them, though he still couldn't find it in him to look at the teenage girl. "Neither of you are even allowed here, so don't come up here and start acting like you two own this place!"
Both the Hero course students looked at one another again, this time with more sombre looks in their eyes each. Mina knew that Izuku's intentions were noble – Of course she did. Izuku was the sort of person who really meant it when he said that he wanted to help someone. He felt that urge to help, even when he wasn't welcome to do so. That was what had inspired him to do what he did when he fought against Todoroki. She didn't doubt his intentions...
But she did doubt the person who received them.
Kota simply didn't want to talk to Heroes, or anyone who trained to become one. Hearing how noble his parent's deaths were from Heroes was going to fall on flat ears. What could they say to him to make him accept Heroes in their world? To ease his pain?
What could they say that he would accept from people like them?
Tugging on Izuku's hand lightly, Mina spoke to him softly. "Come on. Let's go, Izuku. If the kid isn't gonna listen..."
There was no point in making Izuku feel worse for his inability to help the kid. It wasn't like he hadn't tried... But sometimes, people's minds just couldn't be changed. That was why so many people turned out to be Villains, and why so many more turned out to be Heroes. Some people simple had one track minds that couldn't be swayed no matter what. Especially when it came to kids who had no other frame of reference. Trying to get her younger siblings to listen to her at times felt akin to trying to suck blood out of a stone.
She could still see the hesitation in his eyes though, as he looked down to the food in his hands, wanting, desperately searching for the right words to say to help. To think of something that he could say, to offer some advice, to...
Do anything, really. To do anything to help the kid in some way.
"...I... Have a friend who... Didn't inherit a Quirk from his parents."
Even that, apparently.
The statement caused Mina more surprise than it seemed to do to Kota. She knew he was talking about himself. Anyone who knew the truth about his Quirklessness would know that.
"Huh?" For the first time since Mina had arrived, Kota turned his head to look at Izuku, though his intense glare remained.
"It's a birth defect..." Izuku continued, gulping as he did so. "It's really rare, but it meant that he was born without any powers... But he admired Heroes, even though he didn't have any powers. He wanted to be one... But if you don't have a Quirk.... It's.... Just not something that you can do. And... For a long time.... He just couldn't accept the truth. So... He trained. He tried to pull things towards him telekinetically... Breathing fire.... But, obviously, it didn't work like that..."
"Izuku..."
Being Quirkless, and wanting to be a Hero... They were a recipe for self-destruction, Mina knew. Self-loathing, and trying, in vain, for hours, to activate a power that was never going to activate. There was a lot more to this though, more than Izuku even meant to say.
It was one of those things that Izuku just didn't do. He disliked talking about himself and his early childhood. When he was a kid. Not even to Mina had he spoken about it, aside from the bullying he received for years on years. Quirks manifested at the age of four, and never past that, so when that happened to Izuku... that would be when his world came crashing down. When he hit rock bottom, and realized that his dreams of becoming a Hero... Just couldn't happen.
He never spoke of that time in his life. Not even to Mina, for reasons that she understood. Having to go back into those memories, even thought they were a decade old and long in the past...
She couldn't imagine how much it would hurt.
"Everyone looks at Quirks in a different way..."
The horned girl wasn't Quirkless. She wouldn't ever know that feeling of dread and heart breaking gut wretch that came with having her dreams crushed when she was four years old. She never would.
"Nothing about Quirks is absolute... But..."
She wouldn't know the pain of trying, with tears in her eyes, to make something, anything, happen. To use some sort of Quirk that just wasn't going to happen. She didn't know what that was like, and she'd never even thought about that before. There had to be people who were like Izuku, who had done this throughout their lives. Trying to do something that they were unlucky enough to lack.
Izuku didn't bring these memories up for good reason. Because....
"... If you keep trying to reject everything... At the end, the only person that you're going to hurt is yourself."
He understood Kota. Maybe not the exact way he felt... But he understood why Kota was hurting. They had opposite perspectives on the world, but they felt the same sorts of anguish. The kid was like him in reverse. Izuku's pain in life had come from never having a Quirk, and Heroes bring so far from his reach. Kota's pain had come from being too close to Heroes, and Quirks were what took his family away from him. One of them had starved to have one, dreamed of the day his Quirk activated so he could follow what he wanted to do, and the other hating them, and wanting them all to just disappear.
Mina would never understand the pain of being Quirkless...
But she understood Izuku.
"You just don't know when to shut up, do you?!" When it came to Kota's understanding though, he evidentially felt very different. "Just go! Leave me alone!"
"...I've been rambling. Sorry." With a lowered head, Izuku relented. He knew that he wasn't going to get anywhere with words, because he couldn't find the right ones, and all he seemed to do was just make the kid more and more angry. He couldn't think of anything else to do or say...
Other than to just leave him alone.
"I'll leave the curry here..." He said, kneeling down and leaving the food, now lukewarm, on the floor by his feet. Letting out a small sigh of what felt like defeat, he didn't look back at the child again. He had failed to offer any valuable advice, or the words that he needed to hear when he was at the lowest point of his life.
It wasn't any of his business, but he felt like he'd failed this kid, even though he didn't know him at all.
"...Come on, Izuku." Mina said, offering her hand for him to hold. "Let's go back."
Accepting her hand, Izuku was pulled up by his girlfriend, and the two of them left the young boy on his own, with nothing else to say. As they walked, Mina looked over towards Izuku, his eyes dulled and clearly still in thought. In distress. Disappointment and regret that he couldn't do anything.
He didn't say anything. Just thought.
The only thing that his girlfriend could think to do to support him was squeeze his hand tighter. "You did your best."
I know a lot of you were looking forward to the girl's night chapter, but here's the thing... First, it was on the first day of the training camp, so that's out, and I can't come up with anything to fit it into the narrative. I had a flashback thing written out, but it just felt like filler and a waste of time, so I axed it. Hope you guys can forgive that, sorry :/ I'll probably throw in a reference or two to it later on.
It's tricky to get this sort of thing correct when I'm staying so close to the manga, and with what I'm having go down in this particular moment. I enjoy it, but it's a very difficult thing to pull off, I find. I hope that you found it enjoyable though.
Also, this was just sent to me about an hour before I updated – Awkward Energy has a freakin' TV Tropes Page! Which to me is just, completely unreal. I've wanted to get something of mine on TV Tropes for a while now, and it happened with this story! I don't know if the person who sent me the message made it, or if one of you guys made it – but to whoever did, I wanna say a huge public thank you very much! Hope to be able to create an even better story for you ^_^
The next chapter is gonna be one that I've been thinking over for a while, and the next few is gonna be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to the next couple of months ^_^
I'll see you next time, as always – See ya!