A/N: Honestly didn't know what to title this, and it doesn't capture the idea of the chapter very well. I had a lot of trouble writing this one and I was editing it for a while, but it still didn't meet my expectations. I'm worried the dialogue is cringy and the characterization is off, but I did my best. I'm super excited to write the next couple of chapters, but it might be a long wait since winter break is ending for me and I'm not going to have a lot of free time. Enjoy it!
~+~+~
"Is it cool if I eat lunch with you today, Midoriya?"
He was this close to jumping out of his seat when he heard a voice arise out of thin air, but when he met eyes with a familiar shade of pink, he breathed a small sigh of relief. It was only Mina, standing over his desk eagerly with this huge smile on her face, bouncing on her toes in a way that made her seem impatient.
Izuku took a second to reassess the question, shoving his books into his desk all the while. But he knew what his answer would be without even thinking about it. The two of them had been getting a lot friendlier lately, talking about the universe and his improving dance moves and other not-so-important things, so he wasn't opposed to the idea. In fact, it was starting to get a little boring, only surrounded by five people he actually talked to during lunch break, and he knew she would be the perfect person to stir the pot. "Sure," he said, getting up and meeting his friends at the doorway. He beckoned Mina over when they all turned to leave. None of them seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary yet.
It wasn't until he was out of the classroom and heading to the cafeteria that he remembered something important. "Where are you gonna sit, Ashido?"
"Can't I just sit next to you?"
He hesitated for a few seconds too long, wondering how to put it into simple terms. She had asked to sit next to him, after all. As much as he wouldn't have minded sitting next to her, he didn't want to upset Uraraka. "W-well, Uraraka is kinda sitting next to me."
Mina's eyes traveled to the ground, feeling like an idiot for not realizing the obvious. "Oh, yeah, I can't believe I didn't think of that before. I could just sit with Ochako or Tsuyu anyway."
"I don't know how many open seats there will be. Maybe I can get Iida to push down one."
"Whatever. I can always just figure it out when I get there," she said, shrugging as a soft sigh escaped her lips. She'd been betting on sitting next to him. But she really shouldn't have cared as much as she did, because she could always just sit next to Uraraka or Asui anyway.
When they arrived in the cafeteria, Izuku's friends finally seemed to take notice of her presence. She wasn't really bothered by it, though, because even if these weren't the people she hung out with in a regular basis, she knew everyone in class to at least a certain extent. Even Iida, who she thought was a stick-in-the-mud who needed to let loose a little.
"Y-you guys don't mind if Ashido sits with us, right? For today at least?" he asked, noticing the glances thrown her way. Most of them smiled and shook their heads, probably more glad than anything.
Seating was established more easily than expected, and Mina wondered if it was her lucky day because she ended up across from Izuku. Uraraka was next to him, of course, talking to Asui about something she couldn't make out over the sound of people's voices echoing off of the cafeteria walls.
It was really loud in there, and that became especially prominent when she couldn't make out a word of what Izuku said even when she saw his lips moving. And the tables were very wide, and she noticed Uraraka was much closer to him than she was.
"So, ribbit, why'd you decide to sit over here today?" Asui asked, glancing at Mina and raising her voice a little.
"Well I've been sitting in the same spot for the longest time, y'know? And I kinda needed a break from them." Mina's group of friends was sitting at the opposite end of the table, yet sometimes she could still hear Bakugo shouting despite the newfound distance. She noticed Kirishima and Kaminari eyeing her, and she smirked and stuck her tongue out at them.
She made Uraraka smile with that, and Asui let a subtle laugh slip even though she tried to cover it up. Iida ate in relative silence, his glasses fogging up as he reviewed his notes without paying any attention to her, and Todoroki was just Todoroki, stoic and unfazed. Her eyes automatically turned to Izuku for some form of entertainment. He, unsurprisingly, had his notebook open, flipped to a page about Ectoplasm. He was their math teacher. They had that class after lunch.
He was flipping between multiple pages now, mumbling under his breath. "What'cha reading, Midoriya?" she asked.
"Nothing." He was about to hold his notebook close, but two pink hands beat him to it as they reached out and stole it from his arms. "W-what are you doing, A-Ashido?"
"I've been wondering what you've been writing in here," she said, pulling at the corner of the first page.
He was red in the face but gave her a nod anyway. He would let her look through his notebook just this once. It wasn't like he had any personal notes inside or anything about the secrets of his Quirk; these notes were just the ones he carried around in school about the Quirks of his teachers and fellow classmates. And he really didn't mind if Mina looked, just like he didn't mind if Iida or Uraraka or any of his other friends did.
"Wow. You have notes on, like, everything in here, Midoriya! I don't think I've taken this many notes in my whole life," she said, shuffling through the names of some heroes she couldn't recognize until she found notes about Class 1-A. "I wonder if I'm in here."
She found herself, eventually, after a whole lot of page-turning. There were notes about her Quirk at the top of the page, and a quick sketch of her in her hero costume in the center. He wrote that her Quirk was strong, good to have during a situation of attack.
And that's when her eyes traveled to the bottom corner of the page, a spot she was thankful she didn't miss. He'd drawn her in the middle of breakdancing, a few little sketches being enough to bring her moves to life even on the two-dimensional plain of a piece of paper, and in very, very small print underneath, he'd written something that made her heart beat just a little bit harder.
She's an incredible dancer.
Butterflies were budding in her stomach, but she swallowed them down before they got to be too much. She'd been noticing them lately, becoming more and more prominent since that night they were talking about the universe not too long ago. Making it a habit to ignore them was something she sought out to do.
"Where do you find the time to write all of this?" she asked.
"Usually, I write them down at lunch, or whenever I'm in a good mood."
"And I can't even find the time to finish a full page of math notes." She let out an exaggerated sigh, one that made Izuku laugh.
Mina felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned to see Iida looking stern as he pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. "Ashido, I think it's important you get those done in class."
"Believe me. I try to, but sometimes I just don't have the motivation."
"I can understand why it might be stressful, but please try and work on it."
She nodded, a little relieved when Iida went back to minding his own business. Izuku whispered her name quietly enough so that she was the only one who could hear, and she leaned against the table to get a little closer to him. "D-don't tell Iida I said this, but sometimes I lose motivation, too. That's... kinda how I end up going through so many notebooks. I work on them in school," he said.
"I don't believe that."
"But it's true. Honest."
"But you have, like, some of the best grades in the class!"
He looked down at his notebook. She'd given it back a few moments earlier, and he wasn't about to let it go again. "School kinda comes easy for me."
Mina noticed something when he peered back up at her—a grain of rice. "Midoriya, there's something on your cheek."
"O-oh, there is?" He brought his hand up to his face, but nothing came off. "Did I not get it?"
She should've been more specific. "No, it's on the other—"
But she couldn't say anything else, because her voice was cut off by the girl sitting beside him. "H-here, I'll get it," Uraraka said, fetching a handkerchief and bringing it up to his cheek. His ears became red as her hand grazed his skin; the thought of a girl being so close to him had always seemed foreign until now. Neither of them caught on to the fact that their friends were looking at them.
Todoroki cleared his throat, and that's when the pair remembered they were still in public. Mina wanted to tease the two of them as they both turned this unnaturally bright shade of red, but her gut was telling her not to. She ended up ignoring it and getting up to buy another bottle of water instead.
~+~
Once lunch had ended, everyone made their way back to class, waiting for word from their teacher that they'd have to focus on schoolwork again.
"I want everyone looking up to the front of the classroom."
Their voices ceased suddenly as they turned their attention to Mr. Aizawa, his orders becoming the number one thing on their minds. All Might was standing next to him, folding his arms in a way that made him look rather antsy to speak up. He cleared his throat. "Alright, young heroes, it's important that I have your attention, because you're about to get a training exercise in order to prepare you all for final exams." He turned the projector on, the board displaying a layout of Ground Beta. "You'll be assigned to work with a partner. Now before anyone asks, we've already picked the teams at random, so there will be no choosing your partners." A few members of the class groaned, but most of them just shrugged and waited for further instructions. The only one who seemed to pipe up was Mineta, unsurprisingly.
Iida raised his hand. "What exactly does this exercise entail, sir?"
"I was just about to get to that, young Iida! It's going to be both a form of rescue training and combat training, in the sense that each team will get a flag that they will have to protect. Your team will try to steal as many of the other flags as possible while also protecting your own, because if your flag gets stolen, your team is eliminated."
Mina tilted her head to the side, the general idea of the assignment sounding oddly familiar to her. "So then... it's like a giant game of capture the flag."
"Precisely, young Ashido. Your total score will be calculated by averaging the number of flags your team stole and which place your team was eliminated in. The exercise will take place next Monday at Ground Beta, giving you the weekend to come up with a plan. As a class, you'll be heading to Gym Gamma after school today to practice."
Mr. Aizawa sat up a little straighter. "Your partners are on the board," he said before bundling in his sleeping bag, leaving All Might to be bombarded with questions he didn't want to answer himself.
Izuku's eyes were glued to the chalkboard at the front of the room, roaming down the list in search of his name. He let out a huge sigh of relief when he realized he wasn't paired up with Bakugo, because he would've ended up dead before the match even started. Knowing that he was paired up with Uraraka made him feel a lot better.
Mina turned around and met eyes with red. She found Kirishima was looking right back at her, clenching his fists confidently as he smiled a toothy grin. There wasn't really anyone more fit to be her partner than him, and with Quirks that contrasted each other perfectly, she had a feeling this exercise would be a piece of cake.
~+~
Class 1-A headed over to Gym Gamma to train that afternoon, work with their Quirks and come up with a strategy. The battlefield had already been manipulated to their liking, a lot like the urban streets of Ground Beta where the exercise would officially take place.
"I'm really glad we got paired up, Deku!" Uraraka said, hands bundled up at her chest as she gave him a warm smile. They were sitting atop a rock, somewhere comfortable where they could devise a strategy.
"S-so am I."
"The chances we'd end up as partners were pretty slim, huh?"
He nodded, and then the sound of explosions caught his attention. "I figured out a plan during class."
Uraraka smiled. "Already?"
"Yeah. I was thinking about it all day. I think one of us could be on offense and one of us could be on defense."
"I'm guessing I'm on defense?"
"That's what the plan is. Y-you could use your Quirk to make a barrier of debris around our flag, and then if anyone got close, they'd have to waste a lot of time breaking through. And if anyone did manage to break through, you could use your Quirk to release rocks from the sky like you did in the Sports Festival. Or you could just make the person float if that doesn't work."
Her eyebrows furrowed once she took the time to really process his idea. "That's great and all, Deku, but we're gonna be on Ground Beta. There aren't really any rocks there, so what am I gonna use?"
"Well, I'm sure there will be plenty of debris made during battle. And maybe I'll stay on the defensive with you until someone attacks, so that way you can use the debris from that fight to make a wall. I-I kinda have a feeling that Kacchan might attack us pretty early, and he can be reckless."
He flashed her the kind of smile that made her feel warm, almost like it was infectious, and she thought her cheeks would catch fire. She could never come up with a plan like that in such a short time, and he'd already thought it out so thoroughly, too. But he was Izuku, after all. "That sounds good!" she said, giving him a thumbs up.
"W-we should start training now, Uraraka. Maybe you can figure out how much you can lift at once and I can work on close combat skills—"
"There's something that I want to ask you first, though."
Izuku wiped the smile off his face when he noticed she wasn't looking at him anymore. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"Um, please don't get mad at me for asking, but it's about Mina. It's just... I've noticed you talking to her a lot lately. A-and it's just been bothering me." Uraraka was twirling her hair around her fingers now, every so often meeting his eyes as she waited for an answer. She was worried she was coming off as jealous.
"Uraraka, are you saying..."
His voice trailed off for a moment, and so she continued. "You two are just friends, right?"
Uraraka figured she'd gone off into the deep end by now, ventured past the point of no return, and she felt like she should've shut her mouth a long time ago. But to her surprise, she heard something that sounded like laughter. No, it was laughter. Izuku was actually laughing at her, like he thought it was a joke. "Seriously, Uraraka, you have nothing to worry about. She's just a friend."
She lost her words for a moment, fiddling with her fingers in her lap. "O-oh, yeah, I kinda just wanted to ask since she sat with us at lunch today and everything, and it just kinda surprised me when you two became friends so—"
"There's nothing going on with us, Uraraka. I-it's just because of the whole dancing thing. She's a great friend, but there's nothing more to it," he said, the little bit of laughter in his voice earlier suddenly vanishing. Somewhere in the middle of all that, though, he felt like he wanted to smile. He thought it would be a good way to reassure her, so he did.
"Well, okay, but she just seems kinda—"
"Uraraka."
"Sorry, sorry. Just forget I said anything."
He remembered something, something he'd wanted to ask for a while. "Can I ask you a question?"
"What is it?"
"W-why do you like me so much?"
He was expecting her to get flustered, go red in the face maybe, but instead she just let this content kind of smile spread over her lips, looking up at the sky and then back at him. "I've liked you for a while, Deku. Um, I-I guess it stemmed from admiration. I thought you were cool, a real hero with real motives and morals." She was tapping her fingers together again, eyes down on her lap as her smile got a little brighter. "And then I got to know you more, and I started having feelings for you."
He just stared at her for a second, sitting there with his lips parted, almost like he'd fallen flat off the face of the Earth and was too taken aback to think of something to say next. He never could've imagined a girl would like him like that, have so much sincerity in her words as she spoke of him like a role model, like someone she truly felt for. He really hoped she wouldn't ask him the same thing back, because he wasn't sure he'd be able to come up with something as heartfelt as she did. "That's—wow. T-that's a lot."
"Yeah," she replied.
There was a heavy silence. "I-I think we should really start training. We've already wasted a lot of time," he said.
She stood up and let out the bundle of nerves she'd been harboring in one quick breath. "Okay. Let's get started, Deku!"
~+~
Mina buried her knees into her chest further, trying her damnedest to rule out the god-awful silence as it surrounded her like a heavy cloud. Maybe that would help her think of something worthwhile to say.
She knew she needed to focus, but she didn't feel all that guilty about being devoid of any ideas because Kirishima wasn't saying anything either, and coming up with a plan was hard. And it wasn't like she was half-assing her attempt to think of with something. It was just that neither of them were all that bright.
"Maybe we should just wing it. Who says we wouldn't do better that way?" Mina suggested, groaning as she leaned back against the sharp edge of a stone. It was a pretty lackluster attempt to model the side of a building, but it was probably the best one they'd get until the exercise on Ground Beta.
"Gotta agree with you on that one. I'm drawing a blank, and we have all weekend anyway. We can come up with something later," Kirishima said.
"But still... we got all that homework, and I really don't wanna be stressing over something else on top of that."
He furrowed his eyebrows as he turned to face her. "Right. So then here's a question that could help us: are we gonna stick together or are we doing this separately?"
"What do you mean?"
"Are we gonna get the flags as a team, or is one of us gonna stay and defend?"
She brought a finger to her chin and let her eyes wander. "Well your Quirk is best suited for defense, and mine is best for offense, so then I think we should do it separately. But I don't know if I can get a lot of flags by myself."
He smiled, his lips turning up ever so slightly. "Sure you can. Haven't you seen yourself in battle?"
She shrugged. "I don't know—I guess so. It kinda depends on who I'm up against."
"You'll do fine, Ashido. I'll keep up a solid defense. Not even Bakugo is gonna get through me."
"Okay, if that's what you think. But you're gonna have to, like, buy me a smoothie or something if you're the reason we get an F."
"A smoothie?"
"Yeah, a smoothie!"
He laughed, and it was the moment he snorted—accidently, he'd add, if she'd given him the chance—that made Mina start laughing, too. He took a breather before composing himself enough to say, "So we're pretty much winging it otherwise, then?"
She shrugged again. "We can if you want. But we might be able to think of something before Monday."
"Maybe. Whatever happens happens, I guess," he said. There was a short silence before he brought up something new. "Okay, but can we talk about you abandoning us at lunch today? To sit with Midoriya?"
"Yeah, uh, sorry about that." She rubbed the back of her neck, starting to sweat a little. "I wasn't really planning on it, but in homeroom I started thinking, 'why not?' So I decided to ask him, and when he said okay, I guess I had no reason not to. His table was pretty nice, actually," she admitted.
Kirishima smirked, and it was the kind of smirk that made her feel a little uneasy. "You really like him, huh?"
"W-what's that supposed to mean?"
"Uh, as a friend? What did you think it was supposed to mean?"
Mina watched him raise an eyebrow, and she couldn't believe how fast she'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. She noticed Izuku in her peripheral vision, training his heart out with Uraraka not too far away from him, and for some reason she didn't want to look back at Kirishima in fear of what face he'd be making. Still looking away, she said, "Oh, n-nothing. Of course I like him as a friend."
She was about to meet eyes with Kirishima again, but she had to stop and do a double-take. Since when did she stutter?
The sound of rocks clattering against the ground drew Mina's attention to the fact that they were still sitting on this rock, unmoving. "You wanna start training before it's too late?"
He stood up confidently, swimming in an aura of ambition. "Can't believe you had to ask before I did, Ashido."
~+~
It was getting late, and most of Class 1-A wanted to live out the rest of their Friday night before it was too late. They all agreed to head back to the dorms at around the same time.
Mina snuck up behind Izuku and popped out by his side, hands curled neatly behind her back. "Hey, Midoriya! You come up with a plan yet? You wanna tell me about it?"
He stood a little taller. He'd expected Mina to surprise him this time. "We've got a plan, but i-it's supposed to be a secret."
For what seemed like the millionth time in the last few weeks, she realized she was smiling. It was like something that had become a habit, something she'd do even when the time didn't call for it. "That's a let down. You probably don't wanna hear ours, because—guess what—we don't really have one!"
"You're with Kirishima, right? I'm sure you guys will think of something."
"I don't know about that. Maybe it'll come to me later when I'm trying to fall asleep, but who really knows?"
"Don't think about it too much, and I bet it will come to you," he said, smiling.
She realized he had a very nice smile. Something about it made her heart beat a little faster, made her return his with one of her own until her cheeks hurt too much for her to keep it up.
As they got closer and closer to the dorms, she split up with him and found her friends, thinking that whatever it was that was making her feel this way was actually pretty nice.