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Chapter Text

It's a week and a half after Izuku's fourth birthday, and he starts every morning by checking to see if he can levitate objects, breath fire, control gravity, or perform any number of other miraculous feats in some way related to telekinesis or heat. The days stretch on, one by one, and each time he feels a little less eager, a little more desperate as he waits for that fated day where he can walk to school and say "I have a quirk!" and watch Kacchan's gaze, which seems to drift farther and farther away from his own by the day, snap back into focus, where Izuku so desperately wants it to be, needs it to be - on him.

He knows what the adults think, though the kids in his class don't even consider it. He can see it in the lines on their faces (though maybe that's just his mother - her cheeks only ever seem to sink deeper, ever since his father left) hear it on their pursed lips always on the verge of whispering quirkless, the word adults don't say anymore, at least when Izuku is in earshot.

He's fully prepared to start this day, too, 11 nights since his birthday, just as he had every other. Wake up, close his eyes and focus on the pen across the room, imagine it lifting up into the air or bursting into flames or perhaps flying away towards the wall. He's okay with this, really, repeating this same ritual day after day until the end of time.

Instead, he wakes up, shivers and then screams, because he can feel it, somehow, the heat radiating off of every tiny droplet in the summer air, the fire flickering above the oven, the relative peace of the icebox above his fridge, and his mother, too, her soothing warmth - it's all around him, like a map of the universe, or his universe, anyway, depicted solely through heat vision and it's all too much, surrounding him, choking him from the inside and-

He hears the clang of metal (some kind of utensil?) hitting the floor and then his mother's footsteps rushing up the stairs, and how long has it been since he woke? One second? Two? An eternity? He can't tell, and it's all blending together in a storm of sensory input where nothing remains, not even time-

"Izuku!" His mother bursts through the door and falls to the floor beside him, cradling him in her arms and pressing him into her chest. Sweet, blissful darkness, and his cries are smothered to quiet sob while Inko's body presses Izuku's own tears into his face and covers his eyes.

Izuku can hear a faint sound that sounds kind of like words and Oh, that's mom. 

"-ku, what happened!?" He only hears the tail end of her sentence, but even with the pain and the sensory overload, it's easy enough to tell what she meant. Responding, of course, is another matter.

"I could - I could feel everything, mom. It was- the fire and the icebox, and-" Izuku pauses for a moment, trying to collect himself and stop his body from shaking so violently. "-and the air itself and it's too much! It hurts, mom!" Izuku chokes a bit on his own saliva and is painfully aware that what he just said makes absolutely no sense.

"It- it's like I can feel everything's heat, like a radar, and there's too much, everywhere, and-" Izuku is cut off by his mother silencing him as she strokes his hair softly.

"Izuku, we're- we're going to go see a doctor, okay? They're going to look at you and figure out what's wrong and make it better."

Izuku nods, even though he knows it's a lie. There aren't many things he's very sure of right now, but he's fully aware that this is his quirk, his power, and isn't that distasteful - and he knows his mother knows too. In the end, this is all he had been waiting for, really. A quirk that does nothing but help him sense things, and even then, using it is impossible - he may as well be quirkless. At least then he wouldn't be taunted by a useless power he can never use.

Izuku stands up, with his mother's help, on two shaky legs, get's dressed with his eyes closed (and his mother's help) and tries very, very, hard not to open them.

Or to cry.

The cab to the doctor occurs in relative silence, aside from his mother booking an appointment ("It's urgent, please!" Inko pleads, and the doctor's relent quickly - quirks that need immediate attention aren't too uncommon, and they inform a father his appointment has to be pushed back by a few hours because a child with a quirk potentially harmful to himself needs an appointment immediately, and "Yes sir, we're sorry, it won't happen again, sir, calling your lawyers won't be necessary-"). Izuku spends most of the ride eyes shut, burying his face into his mother's side and trying to ignore the annoying hum of the engine's heat radiating outwards. There's a dull throb in the back of his head, and Izuku just wants this day to be over.

He makes a point to avoiding actually seeing what the doctor's office looks like, but it feels cold and clinical. Almost every utensil has been sterilized, and it's in direct contrast to the frantic heat of the outside world, always moving, shifting, changing. The world is dynamic. The hospital is sterile.

Izuku hates it.

The doctors lead him and his mother into a room near the back of the hospital and introduce him to the  and it doesn't take long for the professional inside to realize that Izuku covering his eyes has nothing to do with being shy. His mother gently sits him down onto the chair, careful to continue to cover his eyes as much as possible, though Izuku privately thinks it's not enough - the doctor shuffles around his office, and Izuku can hear desks opening and closing until the doctor eventually pulls out what Izuku thinks might be... a rectangle?

Regardless, he approaches Izuku, obviously making an attempt to be as friendly as possible, and brings what Izuku is now pretty sure is a rectangle near his eyes.

"It hurts to open you're eyes, right? We're just going to place this blindfold over you for a little bit, and you'll be back to normal in no time. This way you don't have to worry about any sunlight, and this is much better than just shutting your eyes!"

Izuku nods meekly (to be fair, he's always meek when he's not with his mother, playing with Katsuki, or talking about heroes) and lets the doctor wrap some kind of cloth around his head to cover his eyes and oh.

This is better. Much better, and it gives Izuku a chance to relax and just feel - feel the small differences in heat between his mother and the doctor, the way ice stands out like fluid white sheet in a world stuffed to the brim with heat, and when he focuses for a bit, he can almost feel outlines, of a sort, the vague shape of a person in front of and next to him. He can feel a small smile spreading across his face, and wonders if perhaps it could have been worse.

This isn't quite being quirkless, really. His quirk is very little, minuscule, almost invisible.

But it's still greater than zero.

The doctor essentially interviews Izuku about the day's events and how he feels, and Izuku get's a bit more comfortable, a bit more excited with each question because just a bit more of the world is opened to him by the second, and soon he's practically bouncing up and down.

"See?" the doctor - Izuku's pretty sure his name is Suzuki? He's a little bit distracted right now - says. "Told you it would get better."

Izuku smiles, and hums in agreement.

He doesn't smile quite as much when the doctor tells him that getting his quirk has increased his body temperature by quite a bit, meaning he needs to be cooled down.

Meaning he needs to use an ice pack.

Izuku likes to think of himself as an agreeable kid, and hopes most people would agree. He eats anything his mother feeds him, and goes to bed when she tells him to, and when she asks him to help carry something, even though he knows she's just doing it to get him some exercise and not because she needs it, and he plays the villain every time when Kacchan asks, even though he really, really wants to be the hero ("How can you be the hero if you don't have a quirk yet!" Kacchan asks, even though he isn't really asking.)

Ice packs are an exception. He hates them. He hates how they feel, both as an object (they're all wet, like a weird, gross, water balloon!) and he hates the feeling of a cold burn on his skin, and he doesn't like the idea of it, forcing his body to cool down. Everything about them grates on him.

His new quirk really, really isn't helping. The ice is like a cold blanket of death, creeping ever closer like a void in the world, and while it's interesting far away, it's kind of terrifying up close, and Izuku wonders if he's going to be swallowed whole by it, though he's aware that's ridiculous.

The ice pack and the doctor's hand creep closer and closer (It's swallowing his hand! Izuku thinks, as he watches the cold of the ice spread across the mans hand and yes, he knows he's being melodramatic but he just hates these things!) and all Izuku can think about is how much he wants that pack of ice and it's cold, deadly grip as far away from him as possible. He tenses his eyes, and narrows in on the pack as it get's closer and closer and-

And then it isn't. And then the creeping cold recedes much faster than it had come. And suddenly Izuku is being pressed back into the chair by his own body, very lightly, like incredibly weak recoil.

Inko voices Izuku's suspicions: "It... it flew across the room?"

The doctor hums, apparently used to this kind of thing - that is, realizing that a quirk does more than they first thought - and turns to Izuku. "Looks like your quirk has quite a bit more too it then we first though, eh?"

Izuku grins so hard it hurts.

Temperature Magnet: A variation of the quirk Attraction that can both attract and repel objects. It creates a bond, not unlike magnetism with the wielder and a chosen object. Depending on the object, the bond either causes the object to fly towards the user, or be thrown away from him. As a result of the influence of the quirk Fire Breath, whether an object is attracted or repulsed is based on the temperature of the object - if hotter than the user, they are attracted. If the object is colder than the user, it is repulsed. Additionally, the quirk seems to have the abilities of the quirk of a paternal grandparent of the one currently known user called Sense Heat, which allows the user to sense the temperature of nearby objects.

Wielder: Midoriya Izuku

Izuku's mother recounts the definition for her son yet again as he thumbs one of his fingers over the text. Suzuki laughs, and mother and son both turn towards him. He hands out a pack of blindfolds to Inko, each one labeled with a different number, from one to eight.

"Izuku is likely still sensitive to light, and it'll take some time for him to acclimate to his new sense. Every day, switch out his blindfold and apply the one after it, meaning you start with blindfold one, and the next day move on to two, and then three, and so on. Honestly, considering Izuku is taking to his quirk like a duck to water, you can probably ditch them entirely in less than a school week. If Izuku says he doesn't feel any discomfort with his eyes open while a blindfold is applied, try testing out the next one. If he says it hurts, move back. Also, this probably goes without saying, but he should probably take off of school or daycare until the blindfolds are gone. Come back if you have any complications, of course. Oh! And one last thing."

While the man searches his coats for something - a business card, maybe? - Inko can't help but cheer silently. She had been... well, she had been worried her son would be quirkless. And it's not that she would really care! Honestly, Izuku's quirk doesn't matter much to her, and quirkless people aren't that uncommon, though they are overwhelmingly elderly. But Izuku... well, had he been quirkless, neither he nor his friends would take it well. To Inko, a quirk is a meaningless thing - no more important then the color of your hair. To her son, it's the center of the universe. 

And she has always orbited around Izuku. What he follows, she must too, if only by accident.

Inko's introspection is broken by Suzuki handing her a card.

"This has my personal cell - consider it a shortcut if you or Izuku ever need me for any kind of medical emergency."

Inko blushes, a little bit, and then feels a bit sad considering this is the first number she's gotten in the five months since she and Hizashi unofficially - well, it's no longer unofficial - divorced, and its for medical purposes, but mostly she's simply grateful that a virtual stranger was kind enough to spare his time and resources for Izuku.

Inko bows, thanks him, and then she and Izuku take their leave while Izuku waves over her shoulder.

The cab ride home is actually cheerful, which is certainly not what Inko expected walking in to the hospital.

Izuku has the blindfolds off after 3 days. Those 3 days are... interesting. Izuku's sensory abilities, while certainly useful (especially in conjunction with the rest of his quirk, his brain supplies, and Izuku is definitely getting a notebook for this) are not a replacement for sight. He spends a lot of time wandering around his apartment, bumping into various objects or pushing pens away with his quirk very, very slowly.

Each new blindfold is a little bit more transparent then the last, and a little more light returns to him every day, but honestly, he's tired of being cooped up in his room. He loves talking with his mother, of course, but he wants to see again, to walk outside and go to school and play, and he especially wants to see Kacchan.

This is why it's with great excitement when the last blindfold is finally removed, permanently, and though he has to squint for a moment because it's so bright, the minute he can actually keep his eyes open, he immediately looks out his window at the yard, and he feels like, for the first time since he got his quirk, he's finally home.

The first thing he does, after he's done taken in the sights - though, honestly, after three days of effectively being blind Izuku will take just about anything - is ask his mother if he can go play with Katsuki.

His mother responds with a simple "Sure, honey," and he can't even contain his excitement. He practically bolts out of the door, stumbles down the stairs of his complex, up the stairs of the apartments next door, and runs over to the Bakugou's.

He stands as tall as he can and knocks on the door a few times, and he's so excited he's practically vibrating out of his own clothes. Mitsuki Bakugou answers the door, and Izuku almost forgets to say hello, which he thinks would be both rude and potentially deadly, even though Kacchan's mom is always nice to him.

Mitsuki beats him to the punch, and before he can even open his mouth she's greeting him. Her voice booms, as always, a resounding "Yo!" She's as informal as ever, and Izuku feels simultaneously intimidated and comfortable around her, a mixture of raw power and casual affection.

"Can I see Kacchan!?" Izuku yells, and then he realizes he just yelled at Mitsuki Bakugou, why does he do this to himself-

"'Course! He probably won't show it, but he's been wondering where you are." Mitsuki turns around cups a hand around her voice, and shouts so loudly Izuku flinches. "Oi! Brat! Get down here!"

Kacchan, equally as energetic (and violent) screams back. "What is it now!?" 

"Stop being such an ungrateful brat and get down here! Izuku is here to see you!" Katsuki doesn't respond verbally, though Izuku does here the thump of his feat and he definitely sees him practically jump down a flight of stairs and nearly crack the floor. Katsuki scrambles to the doorway, and is obviously about to say something before his mother smacks him lightly on the head.

"Are you a moron!? Do you want to get yourself killed!?" 

"I don't have to listen to you, hag!"

This is when Izuku takes four (or five, or six, or ten) steps back, because, to be honest, a confrontation between Kacchan and his mom is the most terrifying thing Izuku has ever seen, but the fight is luckily quickly aborted when Mitsuki notices his fear (and impatience, much as he tries to hide it). She sighs, and pushes Katsuki out the door, and he protests in response.

"Get out and play, brat." It sounds kind of fond, so Izuku knows that Kacchan is probably safe. Katsuki sends one last quip back at his mother before he grabs Izuku's arm and drags him down the stairs. When they reach the bottom, and then corner of their street, and then eventually their favorite park, just a block away from their apartments, Katsuki finally slows his pace.

It's obvious Kacchan has about a million questions, but Izuku expects the first one out of his mouth. "Why were you out of school?" It's a rare occasion when Kacchan sounds neither angry nor excited, but simply curious, and Izuku is happy to oblige.

"It's because I got my quirk!" Izuku responds, and Katsuki begins to grin, and a small part of Izuku, a part of himself he hates, thinks I deserve this. Izuku imagines telling it to shut up.

Izuku smiles, and describes his quirk as simply as he can. "It basically lets me pull things that are hot towards me, and push things that are cold away from me." Katsuki frowns.

"That sounds a little lame." Izuku's smile drops. "Show me how strong it is first." 

Izuku turns away, and he knows that this is his one chance, that no matter how much better he gets or how hard he practices, if he fails now, Kacchan will never care, never look at him again, and he knows that he has to do something, anything, to prove himself. He turns towards a nearby tree and focuses on the bark, stares at it, imagines the cold bark flying back just like he did with the pen. A moment passes, and Izuku begins to get a little nervous because if he fails-

He focuses, harder, harder, until all that's left is him and the bark. He tries his best to ignore the heat radiating off of everything around him, tries to ignore the drops of water in the air and the bugs in the ground and the leaves in the wind and imagines narrowing his map of the world to this single tree and nothing else, because there can't be anything else, not if he fails, and he feels it, suddenly. A tiny, tiny, tiny crack in his target's guard, as if the invisible hand pushing the tree away made just a tiny inch of progress and a second latter the energy he's been building up bursts out. The force pushes him back, slightly, and he very nearly falls over, but that's much less shocking then the results of his quirk. There's bark everywhere, scattered all across the ground, sticking out of the ground and the force tore the surrounding plants to shreds. It looks like someone punched a hole straight through the side of the tree, and he thinks 'I did this?' and tries not to feel proud, because something like this shouldn't make him feel happy but yet-

A part of him whispers yes, this was you, this is your power and he tries to silence it again. He doesn't need thoughts like that. He doesn't need stand up straight and stare down at the world and think I'm important. He doesn't need to feel special. He just wants Kacchan to look at him, to stare at him, to stay with him, even if he has to sacrifice the trees or the plants or the ground because this is it, really. This is all he needs.

Izuku turns around, and just as he does, Katsuki runs up to his side. "It's pretty cool!" Kacchan says. Izuku smiles, big and wide, because this is all he wants, really.

Izuku swallows, and tilts his head up to meet Katsuki's eyes. "T-Thanks Kacchan!" Kacchan praised him. Kacchan recognized him.

"It's not as good as my quirk, obviously, but you'd make a pretty good sidekick!" Katsuki's voice is loud and commanding, much like his mother, and Izuku tries very hard to believe him. He crushes the part of himself that whispers I don't want to be your sidekick. 

(This is okay. This is enough.)

Chapter Text

Izuku's world is built out of maxims. It's not that complicated, really - Izuku likes to think of himself as at least a little intelligent, but you don't need to know much to see that reality isn't comprised of things, but laws. That the world is held together by forces far beyond any one person's control, mechanisms that will ground your head into the dirt and laugh about it because they are simply undeniable facts, and no amount of strength can resist them. Izuku learns his first two, and most central maxims, a few months after his fifth birthday.

Actually, that's kind of a lie. He had learned them before then, many times over. It had just taken him an unreasonably long time to grasp them. The two most basic facts five-going-on-six Izuku knows are this:

One, Bakugou Katsuki was not, is not, and never will be Izuku's friend. Two, humans can't gain anything without sacrificing first. Put more simply, everything has a price.

This is the core of Izuku's reality, and it doesn't take very long for him to stop resisting.

 Five year old Midoriya Izuku spends most of his time crying, practicing with his quirk, or following Bakugou Katsuki, and often some combination of the three.

It's been a year and several months since he got his quirk, and he's learned a lot about it. Firstly, the greater the difference in temperature between his body and the object he's pulling, the less force and effort he needs to push or pull it. In other words, he works well with extremes. Secondly, the easiest way to train his sensory powers is to close his eyes and maneuver using temperature alone. The rate of success ranges from "Help, I'm falling down the stairs" to "Help, I just accidentally collapsed onto a chair and now my left leg really hurts." Izuku is okay with this, because broken chairs a relatively insignificant price to pay for not accidentally using too much force when experimenting with fire and giving himself first degree burns.

(Kacchan laughs at him when he sees his red skin, and Izuku imagines punching him in the jaw, and then hates himself for it.)

It takes him a while to get the courage to try again, but when he does, he notices that he can focus his quirk enough to pull a single part of the flame, and if he uses a small enough amount of force (which he always does, ever since he literally got burned by his own quirk) the bottom portion of the flame stays stationary. When he releases his quirk, the portion of the flame he pulls on snaps back into it's previous position. He can't really think of any use for this information, aside from some incredibly situational scenarios involving enemies with flame quirks, but it's nice to know, at least.

Additionally, the amount of force he can apply increased rather rapidly, too. While he's not toppling buildings, and likely won't be for a long, long time (or ever, really) he can definitely apply far more pressure than he use to.

The best example of this is likely when he accidentally throws a few dozen kilograms of snow off of his rooftop and onto the backyard of his apartment complex, the recoil of which nearly shoves him off his own rooftop, and he remembers why his mother tells every man she goes on a date with that he's "a bit of a problem child."

(It's probably a fair assessment, all things considered.)

Plus, he's now amazing at snowball fights, considering he can basically shoot snow out as a rocket, so his team always wins, occasionally to Katsuki's chagrin (or anger, on more unpleasant days.)

Overall, quirk wise, Izuku has improved rather significantly from his days of literally screaming because of a part of it he couldn't even turn off.

His relationship with Katsuki has... not.

It's obvious that, to Katsuki, Izuku's improvement is in no way impressive, and it seems like now he sneers or scowls at Izuku just as much as he smiles at him. Izuku trails along anyway, because Katsuki is Izuku's friend, and Izuku loves him, even if Katsuki doesn't necessarily reciprocate.

It doesn't take long to learn that Katsuki doesn't reciprocate.

It's spring break, and they're playing on a bridge when it happens. It's a stupid idea. The bridge has no safety net and is directly over a powerful river and they're still clumsy children, much as they loath to admit it. They're honestly lucky they didn't suffer any injuries, though they come far too close for comfort.

Katsuki, Izuku, and several and their friends are standing on the bridge despite Izuku's misgivings. It looks as rickety as it feels and Izuku is worried it's going to collapse under their collective weight, or tip over and kill them all or something. Honestly, can't they just climb one of the nearby trees? It's green, and pretty, and their large enough that Izuku thinks they're much less likely to get them all killed, and then Katsuki is jumping up and down on the bridge.

Izuku freezes for a second, and is about to shout "Kacchan, stop!" when Katsuki botches a landing. It's not that his landing hurt him, or anything, but he clearly isn't steady, and suddenly his feet give out and Katsuki is slipping backwards, hips first, and Izuku knows exactly what's going to happen. He runs as fast as his underdeveloped legs can take him, which isn't fast enough, of course, and he watches Katsuki slip through the flimsy rope keeping the bridge above the river beneath them, falling faster and faster towards the abyss below. Izuku can't do anything but pull, try desperately to keep Katsuki's warmth from receding any further, because he can see what'll happen if he doesn't, can hear the crack of Katsuki's spine as it collides with the river beneath them before he's anywhere near the water.

And suddenly Katsuki stops receding, stops falling, begins to reverse course and fly up back towards the bridge, and suddenly he and Izuku are crashing into each other, the force of Katsuki's weight and the recoil from his quirk pushing Izuku back.

I'm a moron, Izuku thinks, when he realizes he and Katsuki are both about to die. He doesn't even have time to cry before someone's weight is pushing him back, stabilizing him and keeping him upright and remembers that he and Katsuki aren't the only people there.

Sugawara is strong, stronger than either Izuku or Katsuki going by pure muscle alone (what little of it 5 or 6 year olds can have, anyway) and if he wasn't there, Izuku and Katsuki would both be splattered against the bottom of a river, but Izuku doesn't have a chance to thank him because Katsuki almost died.

Izuku shouts "Kacchan, are you okay!?" and Katsuki doesn't reply, shock evident on his face.

And then his muscles contort in rage, and he's screaming.

"I don't need your help, you shitty loser!" and Izuku collides with the bridge, jaw red from the force of Katsuki's fist.

Kacchan runs away.

They don't talk for a week and a half. Actually, they don't even look at each other for a week and a half, and despite their mutual friend's attempt to mediate Izuku is pretty sure they aren't going to recover from this for a long time. For the first time, Izuku is angry with Kacchan, really, truly angry.

It's not fair. It isn't fair. Izuku's always trying so hard, bowing his head, complimenting, staring, and he's tired. He's tired of sitting at Katsuki's knees. He's tired of the sneers mixed in among the smiles, of the condescension. He's tired of being Bakugou Katsuki's friend.

Is that so wrong? Is it wrong that a part of him hates Katsuki? Is it wrong that every day the whisper in the back of his mind telling him You deserve better get's louder and louder, and that sometimes he finds himself agreeing?

Is it wrong that a part of him doesn't care?

School starts again, and Katsuki is still angry. Izuku is still angry too, so he supposes that's fair.

They have a short test on addition, and he takes visceral pleasure at watching Bakugou's face contort when he see's the rankings. 1: Midoriya Izuku. 

Guilt pools up in his gut.

He tells it to shut up.

During lunch Bakugou shoves someone from another class. Izuku doesn't know the kids name, or why Katsuki is attacking him. Izuku still wants to be a hero though, and a part of him whispers that Bakugou Katsuki is a villain. Izuku isn't sure if he wants to believe it or not.

Regardless, Izuku wants to be a hero, and a hero would, in this moment, stop Katsuki. Izuku starts walking towards him - Kacchan pretends not to notice, but Izuku is sure he's aware he's coming - and grabs Katsuki's arm just as he's about to lunge for the other kid's shirt.

Katsuki pauses, and turns to him. They don't say anything for a moment, and suddenly Katsuki's other arm connects with Izuku' jaw.

This time, Izuku doesn't fall, which just makes Katsuki angrier.

Izuku pulls back his right arm and feels a part of his subconscious pull on Katsuki's face, and rams his fist directly into Katsuki's nose, hears a sickening crack, though Izuku hopes that's a light fracture and not a broken nose.

He can feel Bakugou's blood pooling on his fist. It's disgusting and sticky and it's mere existence laughs at Izuku and says "You did this, you made someone bleed," and Izuku feels like the lowest scum and wonders if he's going to vomit. Katsuki is just as stunned as he is, and probably in shock, considering Midoriya Izuku, most passive human being on the planet and official Disney princess of Musutafu just punched him in the face so hard he bled. They can both distantly hear a teacher shouting in the background and running towards them, but it's muffled by the blood pounding in their ears.

Katsuki's face tenses in rage, and then he slams his foot into Izuku's shin, and a long, bloody gash tears his leg open. Izuku hisses in pain, and feels tears welling up in the corner of his eyes, but he absolutely refuses to cry. He won't give him the satisfaction of winning. Bakugou moves to hit Izuku again, and Izuku tries to retaliate, to kick or punch or ram into Katsuki but his efforts are simply ineffective; he's just too weak to stand up to Bakugou Katsuki. It makes Izuku want to scream, both in pain and frustration, because he's never quite good enough, and Bakugou's arm is about to slam into his stomach-

Suddenly, strong arms are pulling them apart, and Izuku stands there, limp, while Katsuki screams in rage. One of the other classes' teacher drags both of them to the principals office, Izuku as limp as Katsuki is resistant, saying something about his "record" or whatever new fascination he has now Izuku can't bring himself to care about. They're sat on opposite ends of the office, for obvious reasons, and the vice principal calls their parents. Mitsuki and Inko are equally horrified in completely different ways, but their children's mutual anger doesn't seem to have impacted their friendship (both are just apologetic to the other) which Izuku is glad about. His mother deserves friends, even if he doesn't. 

They get suspended for three days. They take a cab back to their apartment. His mother glances over at him periodically and asks questions with her eyes Izuku can't answer. Instead, he curls up in his seatbelt and cries.

He mutters, fast and low, "I'm sorry."

Inko takes a deep breath.

"I'm sorry."

"Izuku, what happened between you and Katsuki? You don't- this isn't like you at all. What's going on?"

"I'm sorry."

His mother sighs, shakily. "Izuku, you have to tell me what's going on! We can't... you can't do things like this. You know that. You have to help me understand, or I can't help you."

Tears run down Izuku's face and he whispers "I'm sorry," through his injured jaw, and tightens his grip on his knees.

Izuku wakes up the next morning.

He must have slept for at least 12 hours, considering the time, but his eyes are still red and he feels exhausted. He walks down the stairs, with some effort, and seats himself at the table, where a simply bowl of cereal waits him. His mother probably didn't have enough energy to cook anything.

As he struggles to bring the spoon to his mouth - and to keep his eyes on his mother, ashamed as he is - he feels terrible for asking anything of Inko, but he doesn't have much of a choice.

He opens his mouth, which feels as dry as the Sahara desert, and manages to squeak out a pitiful "Mom?"

His mother turns to him and plasters on a smile that reminds him of the months after his father left and god, he's disgusting.

"Can I-" he starts, and then closes his mouth, because he's trying to find the way to phrase this that won't make hurt his mother. That way doesn't exist, of course, because this is a selfish thing to ask for:

"Can I take self defense lessons?" And the smile drops from Inko's face.

His mother hides her face in her hands, but Izuku can feel the heat radiating off of her tears anyway, and he's vaguely aware that he's crying, too.

He's the worst.

Izuku turns 6 several months later. By this time, any of the friends he and Katsuki had gave up on trying to manage the two and had left both boys completely. Katsuki got new friends - Izuku did not.

(It hurts to be alone.)

He spends a lot of time wondering why.

Why did he become friends with Bakugou? Why did he spend so much, waste so much, give so much to be friends with Bakugou, despite how obviously terrible of an idea it is? Why did he throw away everything that could have been for wounds that'll never fully heal?

(One answer is that he truly was that desperate, that alone, had needed others that much, but Izuku tries very hard not to entertain that thought for long.)

A few days before his birthday, he and his mother went shopping for both groceries and ingredients.

(Izuku asked if he could help bake his cake this year, both because he enjoys baking and thinks his mother does more than she should, really. He's not worth all the effort she puts in.)

He was curious, as he often is, and asked Inko how she chooses what she should and shouldn't buy - this has nothing to do with his desire to bake something for her to cheer her up after her last date - while shopping.

His mother had given him a simple answer: "You have to make choices based on two things: Firstly, how much do you want or need something. Secondly, how much can you give. In other words, you have to decide if how much you can get from something is greater than how much need to give to do so."

And suddenly it had all clicked into place, right there, in the middle of a supermarket.

You can't spend too much, as Izuku had. You can't give someone more and more until you have nothing left to give. But you also can't give away nothing, or else you can't form a bond at all.

The middle is the answer. A shallow connection.

That's the solution Izuku had been searching for. He knows, now, that being alone is painful. But friendship is also painful. If too much hurts, but so does too little, you need to aim for right in between.

He needs to make friends where he's giving just enough as he can handle, and getting just as much connection as he needs.

The answer had been simple, obvious, even. He'd just been ignoring it.

He decides that he'll at least try, because anything is better than this. 

His mother buys him a new notebook and crouches down, and she grasps him tightly in her arms and he hugs back with everything he had, feels her warmth - her body had always been slightly higher in temperature than Izuku's, for reasons Izuku frankly couldn't care less about - and he thinks'There have to be some exceptions,' because he couldn't stop loving his mother with everything in him, no matter how hard he tried.

School starts a few months later. Izuku and Katsuki are not placed in the same class, likely because of their fight, which is neither unexpected nor unwelcome. He makes some new, tentative friends, and he doesn't smile as much as his classmates do, and he still longs for the attention of his new friends, despite his best efforts, which is a bit sobering. Shallow bonds are neither cost free nor benefit heavy. Obviously, he hasn't solved pain itself.

But he doesn't cry like Tanaka, or Shun, or Misato after their friends move away or move on, and he doesn't have to switch classrooms like last year, and he doesn't have to swallow his pride or quiver in fear like Bakugou's new friends, doesn't have to spend all his time chasing after someone's back and praying that they turn around, doesn't bite his lip to stop himself from saying something he knows would anger his friends, and he thinks that light pain is better than the alternative. The highs of friendship don't make up for the lows.

He does start taekwondo, which he takes to with both joy and ease, and soon he's reached low yellow, and he's not all that far off from high yellow, or yellow green, which is pretty impressive for someone who started not 5 months ago. He's one of the best practitioners in both his age group and belt level, and he's proud of that. He doesn't have to pretend he's content with second place anymore, which is nice. He's also one of, if not the best, in his class at academics. 

He's not a genius at these things, or anything. It's just that friends take a lot of time, and he spends that time on martial arts and school instead. He doesn't really have anything better to do.

He's content with this. He's not happy, not really, but he's content.

"This is okay." he whispers to himself, late at night, sometimes. "This is enough."

Chapter Text

Izuku is, unfortunately, very bad at not making friends.

Actually, that is definitely a lie. He's not actually popular, or anything, nor are people falling at his feet for the chance to befriend him. What he's actually very bad at is not getting attached. 

He spends a lot of time reminding himself that Bakugou Katsuki exists and kind of ruined his life for a year and a half, and while everyone is not Bakugou Katsuki, Izuku firmly believes there is a Bakugou Katsuki within everyone, and getting attached to someone is really asking for them to channel the legend himself and crush you underneath their metaphorical boot.

This, unfortunately, does not work.

The end result is that he is forced to make a few tactical retreats out of some people's lives throughout the course of elementary school and try hard not to cry, and his rates of success at the latter make a pretty appalling track record. These retreats don't ever seem to hurt the other, except in one case during his penultimate year in which an untimely crush someone else harbored was shot down. Izuku has trouble understanding why someone would crush on him of all people, but he supposes that some people are just into very strange things, like, say, emotionally distant, short 10 year olds with little to no social skills.

Doomed affections aside, Izuku enters junior high relatively content, much as he had his second year of primary school. 

Izuku is pretty good at taekwondo, he hopes, considering he's a 2nd poom, and that probably counts for something.

The system goes a little something like this:

Each belt has two versions of itself, low and high, with the high version being a belt with a stripe of the color of the next rank on it. There's white, yellow, green, blue, red, and black. With red, you need to pass three tests to get three individual black stripes, and then you can move on to black belt. There has to be a test between each belt and rank, and you have to wait, at minimum, three months to take the next test. Once you hit black belts, you can do dans, which are basically just the next rank up, from 1 to 9.

Actually, you have to be 15 or older to have a dan.

For those under 15, you can take pooms, which are basically mini dans that can be converted into a dan once you hit the appropriate age. To be first or second dan, you need to be 15, and so once you turn 15, you can turn your first or second poom into a first or second dan. At 16 you can hit third dan, so you can turn your third poom into a third dan at 16.

(Izuku privately thinks this system is stupid and needlessly complicated, but what his instructors don't know won't hurt them.)

Izuku tries to take every test as soon as he can, because he doubts he'll have any time for taekwondo if (when) he goes to a hero focused high school.

He's 12, and he's about to hit 3rd poom, which is apparently supposed to be impressive. When pressed, Izuku says that anyone can do it if they dedicate enough time to it. Some of the other students glare at him because he's so far ahead, but it's true, really.

If they spent four hours a day practicing, they would find it easy too.

Regardless, he entered middle school not long ago and it's an eerie experience. He's completely shed any of the baggage held at his old school, because few people here actually remember Izuku Midoriya, 5 year old professional crybaby that fractured Bakugou Katsuki's nose.

He's (somehow) actually considered to be "cool" at this school, and then Izuku remembers they haven't seen him fall down the stairs at 6 in the morning because he accidentally used his quirk on a moth and scared himself so much he jumped, hit his head on the stairs and then slid down them.

He can kind of see it, he supposes. He's comparatively fit because of all the martial arts, but it's not like he's ripped or anything, and he isn't exceptionally attractive.

"Coolness," of course, doesn't actually translate into popularity, and he functions mostly as a somewhat interesting kid with a strong quirk who's aiming to become a hero. Izuku remains near or at the top of his class academically - what else is there to do? The other kids stare at him as if he's an alien sometimes, and honestly, he's okay with that. He lives a relatively peaceful life.

Or he would, if his junior high's administration had been even somewhat intelligent, because they actually put him and Bakugou Katsuki in the same classroom. On opposite ends, to be fair, but in the same classroom still.

Izuku thinks his elementary school must have wiped "the incident" from their records, because no human being could possible know of it and think putting them together was anything approaching a good idea.

Izuku sits several rows behind Katsuki, which makes it difficult for the blond to spend all day glaring at him in a hope to set upon him the worst curse known to man, or whatever he does in his free time. Izuku avoids him as best he can, partially because he detests the idea of communicating with Katsuki, but also because he still hears the crack of a broken bone every time he looks at him, still remembers how sticky and warm Bakugou's blood felt on his hand.

They don't interact, mostly, for a long time. They compete, of course, in academics, and every time Izuku beats Bakugou he still feels a tiny, tiny rush of pleasure which he should probably feel bad about, but Bakugou looks like he's about to drown a puppy every time he comes in second, so really, they're equally petty.

Izuku still harbors a bit of a grudge, sue him. He never claimed to be emotionally mature.

And so life continues on, as bland and boring as ever.

Summer break - and Izuku's birthday - creep up on him. He spends a lot of time exercising his quirk, mostly in little ways. He practices on objects by heating them to a degree warmer or cooler than his body. He tries to use his quirk on different things at the same time, or to use different amounts of force on different objects at the same time. It's hard, and kind of tedious, but he thinks it's a worthwhile investment.

His instructors occasionally allow him to spar with someone using their quirks, albeit under heavy protective gear, even heavier supervision, and the promise that they would restrict themselves to very, very light practice. He wins these fights, as he should, honestly, considering he has entire notebooks dedicated to nothing but analyzing other people's quirks and occasionally his own, though that's mostly done through experiments of questionable quality and safety.

(It was, in retrospect, probably not entirely safe to put on a fire proof body suit and attempt to coat himself in flames, but hey, just because he nearly got himself killed doesn't mean he actually did, and his mom's boyfriend promised not to tell upon threats of death and public humiliation.) 

He takes the 3rd poom test. It isn't that hard, not really. Memorization is the tough part, and if you do anything enough, you're bound to remember it.

Really, it's just practice.

Knifehand opening block. 

Izuku doesn't really even do anything while doing poomsae. He simply runs on autopilot, which he supposes is the result of practicing the exact same routine several dozen times

Front kick, double punch. 

Izuku's always found the moral lessons of taekwondo to be a little bit hollow. Each test is supposed to represent the acquisition of a new virtue, or some kind of growth as a person, but this is frankly pretty false.

Back stance, diamond block.

Izuku is supposed to be wise, supposed to be grounded, supposed to be unbreakable, but he isn't any of those things, not really, and no one expects him to be. Everyone's just playing at maturity, at respect and responsibility.

Side kick with punch. 

The instructors always say he's learning not just how to fight, but how to be a proper person, a respectable member of society, as if the dojo is some microcosm of reality.

Outwards backfist strike . Scissor block, front kick, double punch.

(Izuku feels the air glide against his arm and fist, and suddenly, he can feel the sensation of Katsuki's blood seeping between his fingers.) All he's learning here is how to hurt people.

Rotate 180 degrees, right punch, face center, front stance.

Well, in a sense, that is what he signed up for.

Izuku scores an 89 on his 3rd poom test, with a 60 or above being a pass. The other two portions of the exam are Kyorugi, or sparring, and Kyokpa, or a power test.

He wins the spar, which is a pretty much expected of him at this point. The Kyokpa takes the form of breaking thick wooden boards, as usual. Pure strength has always been Izuku's biggest failure, and he suspects this is where he lost the most points.

Oh, well. One can't have everything.

Izuku's first year of junior high is relatively uneventful. He really just goes on as he always had - more taekwondo, more school, more time and energy spent on things he cares about only vaguely, but this really, this is expected.

His second year passes much the same way. He isn't eligible to advance to the next poom until he's already over 15 anyway, meaning he'll basically be stuck at 3rd dan until he turns 18 since you can't take additional poom tests when you're over 15 but you can't take the 4th dan test until you hit 18, but he's okay with this. He isn't planning on continuing taekwondo after he gets into U.A, anyway, considering he simply won't have enough time.

Too little time. 

That's an alien idea to Izuku, at this point. Izuku has too much time. Far too much time and far too little to do, because no amount of practicing and studying and eating and sleeping can fully fill the void that is "daily life." Life is simply too long.

The one event of real note is his mother introducing an actual boyfriend instead of a "let's-go-on-one-date-and-never-talk-again" boyfriend.

Izuku is pretty sure his name is Takahashi, or something. He's kind of a dormat, but he's nice enough, so Izuku doesn't really care.

Both his mother and her boyfriend expect him to be apprehensive for some reason, which is just confusing.

The boyfriend he can understand, but his mother is fully aware of how little Midoriya Hizashi means to him. Izuku's father literally may as well not exist - Izuku can't remember him, can't remember caring about him, and he certainly isn't longing for him to return, and Inko knows all of this. 

Maybe they think he's apprehensive about the boyfriend, which is fair, but Izuku isn't going to treat his mother like broken glass. She doesn't need him to defend her from theoretical offenders of her innocence. 

(In all honesty, Izuku needs her help far more than the reverse, considering his social skills.)

Either way, they're clearly nervous about the meeting, which Izuku isn't exactly happy about, considering it makes the whole encounter painfully awkward, and he's practically cringing the whole time. He and his mother help make the food together, and it's pretty good, which makes at least something salvageable about the entire affair.

Overall, it goes pretty well, considering what it could have been according to internet chat rooms.

His third year starts in earnest, and aside from prepping for the entrance exam into U.A. - and some other top high schools as back up, he may be awkward and a little bit idealistic but Izuku isn't a fool - it seems as though it's going to be just as uneventful as his previous two.

This is, of course, not the case, and it's when he's attacked by a giant ball of slime in the first two weeks of school that he realizes this school year is surely going to be cursed.

He feels it before he sees it, as he does with most things, and it's by less than a fraction of a second that he dodges the sludge's first attack, fueled by a combination of his pure instinct to get as far way from the thing as possible and his quirks accidental (life-saving) activation just out of pure shock. Either way, he flies forward, and the sludge back, and when he turns around and sees what the fuck just tried to strangle him, he thinks that, yes, sure, he might be a 14 year old boy, but he also has a pretty strong quirk, relatively, and its a perfect match up against this creature, and there's no way he's letting in run around town strangling children who can't fight back.

Izuku settles into the front stance. Even if he can't necessarily beat him, his quirk is definitely developed enough to push this guy back. This is basically his first real test.

He's half scared to death, but better him then some five year old and their mother, right?

"Come on kid, don't resist! It'll only hurt for about 45 seconds."

Oh, right. Izuku Midoriya is fighting a giant pile of sludge, and he should probably stop thinking about hypotheticals and focus a bit more on trying not to die.

Izuku realizes that he has absolutely no idea how to defeat this thing. Is it even possible to knock it out? Can you do anything but trap it? Should he try to-

The slime lunges for him, and Izuku realizes that he doesn't have much of an option but containment. The villain probably won't let him live, considering how risky it would be to let someone run around with your description if you're an evil mastermind, or whatever, so the sludge can't very well just up and leave.

He has to stall for time. Keep him away long enough to get the authorities or to find away to trap him.

The slime villain's body is cold enough that Izuku has no trouble throwing him back every time it tries to go on the offensive, so it looks like time won't be an issue, though apparently Izuku's nerves don't realize this because they're shaking like crazy and he feels like he's going to vibrate out of his own body. The slime villain is obviously getting frustrated at this point.

"You'd make a great skin suit if you'd just fucking sit still!" And then he's lunging for Izuku's legs and Izuku thinks, 'I've got this' because he should have this. He knows exactly what to do. Right now he's positions almost directly above the slime villain, and if he just uses his quirk he could shove this thing straight into the floor and trap it until someone arrives, or he could even just call the police himself. This is not what happens, because, as Izuku will later think of every time this day comes even vaguely near his mind, Midoriya Izuku is a fucking moron. 

Instead, he stands there, quaking in his god damn boots, and the sludge grabs hold of his legs and oh, no. 

Half a second later the green slime wraps around his body and mouth and suddenly, he's choking to death, and he can feel slime on his tongue, and it's so disgusting he gags and nearly vomits, and all Izuku can think about is getting this thing away from him, but there are black spots on the edges of his vision and he can't seem to focus his quirk at all, much less use it on such a powerful force, and then he realizes he's going to die.

And then he's gasping violently and sucking in as much air as he can possibly take, and barely, just barely, he stays awake.

And suddenly, seven and a half feet of pure muscle are standing above him, and he realizes he is literally staring at the most powerful human being on the planet, and that the overwhelming pressure he felt for a split second in between being choked by the sludge and being free was not, in fact, the product of his oxygen deprived brain, but literally the strongest punch known to mankind. 

(All Might could throw stronger punches, obviously, but the point still stands.)

The next minute and a half is kind of a daze, but by the time he's come to, All Might signed a notebook that had been in Izuku's bag the entire time (how did he know it was even there?) has capture the villain in what clearly used to be soda bottles and Izuku has humiliated himself in front of his idol.

(His idol doesn't seem to care all that much, but Izuku is devastated, okay, he just got gagged in front of All Might.)

The greatest hero to ever live then promptly waves, says "Goodbye," in English for no apparent reason, and then literally jumps across an entire fucking city.

He should go home.

He does not go home. Instead, he goes shopping for groceries and then almost gets himself killed, again. 

He has absolutely no fucking clue how the sludge villain managed to escape those bottles in the span of a few hours, but god damnit, he did, and someone is screaming and all of these pro heroes are just standing around like they can't do a damn thing - maybe they can't  do a damn thing, what the hell does he know - but Izuku is pretty fucking sure he can.

It is, naturally, just his luck that he sees Bakugou Katsuki, crying, being choked to death by green sludge. Izuku's not even really sure what's happening before he's running towards Bakugou and the slime. He can vaguely hear people crying out "What the hell, kid!?" and a few other, more vulgar, variants but he's not going to let his (former) first (and only) friend die, even if he is kind of a giant asshole. He's about a meter away from Bakugou, now, and the sludge villain narrows it's eyes and screams "You!" but by then Izuku's already sunken a fist deep into the sludge.

Izuku simply pushes, puts everything he has into shoving the slime as far away from him and Katsuki as he can, and then he's pulling Bakugou towards him. They crash, and for a moment Izuku gets the worst sense of deja-vu, but while he skids back this time, he doesn't fall. 

He lays Katsuki, still in shock, on the ground as gently as he can considering the circumstances, and then he rushes forwards until he's standing just above the slime, lifts his fist upwards, and brings it crashing down directly above the villain. Direct contact makes his quirk stronger, as you might expect, and the sludge is slammed directly into the ground so hard it cracks the concrete. The villain tenses, bundles together his excess slime and aims to lunge with everything he has, and honestly, Izuku is pretty sure that with all his force behind him, the villain's slime is stronger than Izuku's quirk, which he probably should have spent more time training, but of course he didn't and now he's going to die because what else can he do? He can't just run away, can't just leave, can't leave Katsuki for dead, no matter how much he hates him-

Izuku feels his quirk's grip on the villain falter, and for a split second the sludge lurches forward but before Izuku even knows what's happened the villain is suddenly limp, probably because he just got split into a hundred different pieces. He distantly feels rain land on his head and shoulder, and then he realizes.

All Might.

The press ask him what his quirk is, and he recites it on autopilot, though he's mumbling at what's practically a whisper, and at the speed he's talking at he doubts anyone has any idea what he said.

Katsuki rages at him, and his words go in one ear and out the other before he runs off, probably to express his fury in some sufficiently Katsuki-esque manner.

After a few exhausting minute's he's returned to his mother's arms and tears as "Local Hero defends innocents while pro-heroes stand back and do nothing!" or some equally newsworthy headline. His mother is saying something, but he's still in shock so he's not really sure what words are coming out of her mouth. While he mutely observes his house and surroundings, which feel somehow unreal, now, like he's watching a dream and in reality he's still standing there, waiting to die, he's surprised to see Takahashi crying, too. Takahashi crying over Izuku, as if he cares, as Izuku means something to him, and Izuku realizes he likes it - he likes watching someone crying over him, kneeling and sobbing and telling him they were worried, they were scared. He likes knowing that his pain made someone feel.

He likes knowing he was able to hurt someone just because they care.

That night, he see's the stains of his mother's tears on his shirt, and before he goes to sleep he thinks that he's probably a bad person, because he would do it again.

Chapter Text

Despite Izuku's fears, little of note happens for the rest of the term. Bakugou hates him with an even greater intensity now, meaning Izuku is pretty sure he's attempted to learn black magic of the internet for the sole purpose of developing an Izuku shaped voodoo doll and has already attempted to sacrifice his soul to Beelzebub or something, but there are no more villain attacks, no more surprise arrivals from All Might, and no new tears shed over Izuku's nonexistent suffering by him, his mother, or his mother's partner. Somewhere in there his birthday comes and goes, and some of his pooms are converted into dans, but he can't really bring himself to feel much about it considering how little of an actual effect that has on his life - maybe if he was intent on pursuing taekwondo professionally, but as it is, it's really more of a symbolic birthday present.

In other words, he has more or less nothing to do aside from studying and training his quirk, and on the latter front, all he can really do is apply the painful, humiliating lesson he was taught by the sludge villain.

He's weak. Much weaker then he expected. He had assumed that almost all quirk strengthening would occur in high school, but that had been a foolish assumption. Logically, the deciding factor for determining how to get into U.A is likely the strength of your quirk. Even if most people do get exponentially stronger during their stay at U.A, they still need to be exponentially stronger than the average teenager to even get in, and he honestly doesn't have a clue what an average teen can do.

To be frank, he had been arrogant. He had far more faith in himself than he should have had. He had...

He had been like Bakugou. He had let himself stroke his ego because he had been "the best" in his relatively average middle school. He had been the biggest fish (not including Katsuki) in what was effectively a puddle. With U.A, the standards were suddenly much, much higher, and his competition was, in effect, all of Japan. At his current level, he simply didn't cut it.

He should have been practicing.

There is, luckily, a perfect spot for practicing.

Dagobah Municipal Beach Park is possibly the greatest stretch of unpopulated land in Musutafu. Whether or not this is actually true Izuku is unsure, but it isn't hard to believe it, considering the mountain of trash piled across the shoreline. This means that, theoretically, he can do just about anything that doesn't involve actually harming someone. In other words, it's the perfect playground for testing and strengthening his quirk.

Really, Izuku has a simple plan. The more a quirk is used, the stronger it becomes, so Izuku is going to use his. A lot.

He gets a lot stronger, and Musutafu gets an actual beach back (litterers are also villains and Izuku will devote his life's work to stopping them from ruining every nice place in Japan!) so it seems to be a win for everybody.

He checked google maps, and apparently there's a waste disposal site nearby, so all Izuku has to do is deliver few thousand tons or so - okay, maybe he isn't sure exactly how much trash he has to push, sue him - into the site, which is apparently close enough to be seen from the naked eye at the edge of the beach. He just needs to move a few thousand tons about a mile at worst, and about 5 blocks at best.

Izuku can do this. Totally.

Over the course of the first week Izuku develops an efficient system, or at least the most efficient one he can think of. He designates the portion of the beach closest to the waste site as a sort of launch pad. He then moves as much trash as possible to that piece of land, and then just has to position himself properly to launch all of the waste into the garbage disposal site with his quirk, and then repeat.

Repeat for what feels like forever.

By the end of the week he's about a fifteenth of the way through. In effect, it's a conveyor belt. It's just an incredibly slow, incredibly tedious conveyor belt, that moves very small portions of trash at a time.

It goes without saying that Izuku hadn't had a very enjoyable week, aside from his blissful nightly showers which he had really learned to appreciate after hauling around garbage 12 hours a day.

Still, Izuku's quirk was practically designed for this, and if he couldn't manage to push trash than he probably wouldn't be getting into U.A anytime soon. He may only be a fifteenth of the way through, but a fifteenth of the way in one week isn't all that bad, and he's definitely speeding up, not to mention his dramatically improved control.

From what Izuku can see, his quirk is sort of like a rubber band. When he pushes an object, especially a large one, he's like a rubber band being stretched to his limit. The more he pulls or pushes, the more tension he generates and that means that if - when, if he's being honest - he gives, the resulting snap contains a lot more force, and sends trash - and Izuku himself - flying in all directions.

At the beginning, the real struggle had been figuring out how to move the trash in a straight line without it flying out, but luckily, necessity is the mother of invention, and Izuku gets used to figuring out just how far he can stretch his quirk before it gives and ends up flinging garbage into his face.

Unfortunately, this means he has to deliver much smaller portions of trash at a time than he would like, and it slows his progress considerably.

However, as Izuku begins to use his quirk more and more, that tense sensation in his gut that emerges every time he uses a considerable amount of force with his quirk begins to recede further and further until it's more a whisper in the back of his mind than an uneasy feeling, and suddenly - though when he stops to think about it, it really hadn't been all that sudden at all - he's shoving what seems like a metric ton of trash at a time without worry.

Actually, it's possible that his quirk is less of a rubber band and more of a resistance band. The more he uses his quirk, the stronger and thicker the band gets, meaning it can support more and more force - though conversely, the recoil if he does let it snap gets worse, as he learns after he accidentally launches himself 10 meters backwards (and becomes far more familiar with the taste of sand than he would like) when he tries to throw an actual metric ton of trash.

Regardless, 13 weeks later, and a a fourth of the way through his summer break, Dagobah beach is clean - really, he probably could have cut it down by a few weeks if his mother hadn't remarried right as he was cleaning, but there's nothing he can do about that. It's a small, simple ceremony, with only about two dozen attendants. Some people are crying, and Izuku can kind of understand why - it's a symbolic achievement for his mother, he supposes - but mostly he's just tired. Very, very tired.

(He'll never be able to think of Takahashi as "dad." The concept of fatherhood is, at this point, too alien for Izuku to really be comfortable with, and he's fine with that.)

He finishes a week after the wedding or so. In celebration, both of finishing his self imposed duty and of his mother's wedding (even if it is to a man he barely knows, much less a potential new father), he tries to get a rough estimate of how strong he's actually become, he decides to attempt to throw a small car - probably around 4/5ths of a ton - from one end of waste site to the other, which really can't be much more than a block. Leaning on his back against another, much larger car (with that one, he had to push it by the wheels in a mockery of actual driving just to get it to move) for support - and the cancel out the recoil as best he can - he puts one hand out, palming the car, and imagines power filing through his arm into the car like air into a vacuum and pushes with his very soul in a way he'll never be able to convey properly. Suddenly, his back slams against the truck so hard his body leaves an indent, and the car flips over before it starts flying through the air at a speed that would probably kill Izuku.

Watching his quirk in action is always a strange experience, like when you throw a ball attached to a string with all your might, and the string reaches it's full length and stretches. The result of his quirk always seems to be the aftermath of that, as if the object he's using it on is simply being pulled back to where it belongs. At the end of it, the car has been crushed into something only vaguely recognizing it's previous shape, and Izuku is panting so hard he sounds like his lungs just collapsed, simply staring at the mangled object in slight awe over what quirks are capable of. He feels sweat pooling in his hair, dripping down his face and pooling around his eyebrows. His back hurts like hell, too, and he's starting to think that he really needs to get better at dealing with recoil because ow. But even then, it doesn't really seem to matter all that much - it's a price well worth paying for that kind of strength.

And then he looks again, and the moment is over because he definitely overshot.

He overshot, and now he's running all the way across the literal heaps of trash in a drenched shirt with an incredibly sore back so he can nudge a single, mangled car a few meters back, and honestly, this is probably what he should have expected.

Izuku can't be too annoyed, though, because overshooting really just means he was too strong, in a sense, so it certainly isn't the worst thing in the world and besides - for the first time since... well, since far before Izuku's birth, Dagobah Beach is something approaching clean.

When he manages to get back to the center of the beach, the first thing he does is simply collapse in the sand - yes, it's gross and sweaty and he really wants to get home, but that can wait for a moment. He wants to a least admire the fruits of his labor for a moment.

The water is practically shining as it reflects the light from the now rising sun, and the moist summer air feels comforting as it envelopes his arms and legs, and for the first time he can remember, Izuku thinks that he'd be satisfied with this, if it were the last mark he were to leave on Earth. If this was the only proof that he ever lived, that really wouldn't be all that bad.

Legacy. Izuku rolls the word around in his mouth, feels the weight of it on his tongue, and smiles softly.

The rest of summer break is not so much uneventful as it is unmemorable. No single event leaves a mark in his mind - the days seem to blend together in a mess of cram school text books and strained muscles while he attempts to pile on as much quirk training as possible. He doesn't have memories so much as fleeting senses - the sensation of his finger resting on crinkled textbook paper, or the scent of ocean water mixing with his sweat, or sometimes the image of his mother gently kissing Takahashi and the simmering feeling in his gut that comes with it.

(Some part of him whispers in his ear begging for a father he knows he doesn't have, and he wants it to lock it up and throw away the key because he's gone, he's gone forever, and that's a blessing because who would want someone like that-)

He's vaguely aware of what he does on a day to day basis - he practices, he trains, but most of all, he crams.

Izuku had barely had to cram at all for most of junior high, but betting everything he has on getting into U.A is obviously not the most informed decision, so he spends day after day after day pouring as much information as he can into his brain, again and again and again until the specific memories vanish and all that's left is the muscle memory guiding him through binomial theorems and sinusoidal models and he's pretty sure that he can recount the Nihon Shoki word for word, and at this point he's definitely memorized his entire world history textbook, index and all.

With so much of his time split between cramming and training he barely has any time to eat or sleep. He hadn't even known he could eat that much food, but it turns out if you take 18 hours breaks between eating anything 5 days in a row, eventually hunger catches up to you.

Izuku's - well, he's not necessarily confident about his chances, but he's hopeful, and privately, he thinks that this is kind of overkill, and that whoever created cramming could not have possibly intended for it to be a full time occupation.

It's not like Izuku has much a choice, considering that one, if his mother had ever been strict about anything it was studying, and two, he's not actually arrogant enough to put all his eggs in a basket as flimsy as "U.A High School."

Banking entirely on getting into one of the most selective schools in the nation is what one might politely call a bad idea.

So Izuku spends the rest of his summer split roughly between cramming for entrance exams and training his quirk in any minute way he can, mainly to ensure that when the time comes he doesn't accidentally crush himself with an oven or something, which he supposes would be a fittingly ridiculous end for someone as generally lame as he is.

A big part of the self-training regimen he shamelessly stole from the internet had been going back to the very essence of what his quirk even actually is and using his significantly more developed brain to figure out how to use them. Most people get their quirks at a very young age, and they simplify them into a more simple to understand version of itself which may eschew much of the actual nuance. When you go back to the basics you often find your quirk is a good bit more versatile than you may have thought. A good example: body temperature.

Body temperature isn't quite universal throughout your body. Some parts are naturally just hotter or colder than others, though the difference between them is so small that even if he could push some objects with his hand instead of his gut or something, the difference in temperature would be so tiny he would barely be able to do anything. While this information itself ends up being useless, it does lead to an actually important discovery. Izuku can pull an object not just towards his body in general, but to even specific limbs. 

In other words, Izuku doesn't necessarily have to pull things towards his entire body.

Fire, for instance. Stretch his arm outwards, pull the fire to his hand to guide it slightly off course and then jump as far away as he can - at worst, he burns his hand, which, while still really, really painful, won't end his life, and hopefully he can manage to jump away before the flames touch him, meaning he actually has a rudimentary method for neutralizing fire quirks, or at least surviving them.

Alternatively, he possibly could have defeat the sludge villain far more easily than he ultimately did - simply hover his hand over it's body and push as hard as he can, and he could, in theory, restrain him.

In theory.

Unfortunately, when he uses a small portion of his body, the force Izuku exerts gets weaker. Exponentially weaker. Izuku is pretty sure that even with his heightened strength, his quirk, with just a single hand, still wouldn't be anywhere near strong enough to hold back that particular enemy, so maybe Izuku wouldn't have been smart enough to train his quirk before his encounter.

Either way, there's not much he can do about it now, so it ultimately doesn't really matter.

The second term starts up and Katsuki's rage has settled, in the way that a wildfire settles once it runs out of forest to burn. Izuku continues to cram, he continues to train, and the days fly by even faster than the summer. He remains effectively friendless - the few (strictly platonic) relationships he had crumble under the weight of Izuku's new regimen, because he simply doesn't have time. They don't look too hurt, anyway, which is really what you should expect. He was simply there, floating on the periphery, and really, no one would feel all that bad about him vanishing from all his social circles except for possibly his mother, and what she doesn't know can't hurt her - even if she kind of knows already.

(Izuku tries very hard not to think about how he feels about this.)

The second term comes to close, and the third term goes much as it does. Study, train, repeat. Izuku doesn't have time for friends.

He doesn't need friends, in the first place.

The school year comes and goes, and as it begins to come to a close, the event Izuku had been preparing for all this time draws into focus. The week before the teacher, as expected, announces that nearly everyone wants to grow up to be a hero. Izuku doesn't say that a lot of them frankly aren't going to make it, because that would be mean, but it's the truth. Also as expected, no one but Katsuki and Izuku is going to attempt to get into U.A, probably scared out of it by Katsuki's pointless claims about "creating an origin story" or whatever fantasy he holds this day of the week.

Izuku scowls. Clearly they didn't care that much if a 15 year old was able to scare them out of it. A violent 15 year old, yes, but if they really wanted to get into U.A, Bakugou Katsuki wouldn't be able to scare them off.

When Katsuki learns of Izuku's plan, he turns back towards him and glares with all his might, as if he hadn't already known. He, however, doesn't have an outburst. Izuku figures Bakugou intends to watch him fail from the sidelines.

Izuku has no intention of allowing him to do so.

The day of the U.A entrance exam creeps up on him, and Izuku strangely isn't all that nervous. A bit apprehensive, yes, but not nervous, not really.

He arrives at the extremely impressive campus (honestly, U.A looks more like a college than a high school) and walks up the long flight of stairs with a pack of far more than a hundred students until he reaches the front gates. The group is shuffled into the auditorium where he's seated next to Bakugou, god fucking damn it-

He sighs, and then attempts to pretend Bakugou isn't glaring at him like he wants to murder him on the spot, and tries to focus on Present Mic (and hopefully avoid muttering too loudly) as he explains the one point, two point, and three point robots. Present Mic is incredibly loud, which is, while expected, kind of painful to listen to, and then he's spontaneously interrupted by an examinee with blue hair that begins giving a long, obnoxious, unnecessary speech that Izuku mostly tunes out (something about a misprint? Couldn't he have waited until the end like a normal person?)

Of course, because that's just Izuku's luck, the boy turns to him, points directly at his face, and begins to shout, with his loud, booming voice: "And you!"

Izuku blinks, as if to say "Me?"

"Please stop muttering so loudly! It is a distraction unbefitting a candidate for the entrance exam of a school a prestigious as that of U.A!"

Izuku stares at him, wide-eyed, both mortified and incensed. Bakugou looks like he wants to laugh.

Izuku wants to die.

Izuku manages to refocus on Present Mic as he begins to explain the concept of the zero point robot, which is basically an environmental hazard (Izuku thinks it's illogical to have a robot worth zero points in what's supposed to be a simulation - with a real villain, wouldn't it make more sense to have the small fries that can't do much be worth nothing instead of the one's that pose a much greater threat to civilians. There's probably something going on there, though he doesn't have any time to figure out what.) 

Once Present Mic concludes his speech, everyone is taken outside, split up into four groups and lined up to begin the practical test, which lasts a mere ten minutes. Izuku doesn't have any time to waste.

And then Present Mic's voice is booming out of the loudspeakers. "Start!" he screams, and Izuku is confused for a single moment, but then he sees four or five other candidates rush out and begins to follow them as fast as he can. He can't afford to spend precious seconds listening to Present Mic berate him for waiting - he'll do that once he's done.

Izuku immediately comes across a one point robot and he can tell that these things are going to be really, really easy to destroy. They alternate between super cold in some areas and extremely hot in others. In other words, he can both push and pull them with ease. All he has to do is pull on the core, push the near frozen surroundings, and it'll simply pop out of place. Done. With individual humans Izuku can't the difference between different body parts at all - it just kind of blends together into one warm figure.

In other words, he got lucky being paired against robots.

About five seconds have passed since Present Mic started, and the 90% of students that neither started immediately nor followed right after begin to attempt to catch up. Izuku simply lifts he hand up in the direction of a robot, a few meters away and clearly coming closer by the second, and then he simply pulls, mostly, though he pushes a bit too and it just falls apart, limp. Present Mic shouts something about a first casualty, but Izuku doesn't really listen. There's another one pointer, no more than 20 meters away, and he just runs a bit closer and repeats the process again. One more point. It's easy. Simple.

Izuku is confidant about his chances.

 Izuku realized that robots were being sent out in waves rather quickly. At first, he only found one pointers but after no more than a minute has passed two pointers start appearing too, and about four minutes after that, three pointers. In other words, your best chance to rack up points is at the end, but the zero point robots must be coming out sometime soon as well. Banking on the three pointers is high risk, high reward, for more than one reason.

Izuku tries to tally up points in his head. He thinks he's at about the 8 or 9 mark when the two pointers come in, and then by the three pointers he must be around 33 or so. It's easy to destroy these things, and Izuku wonders if they weren't built so shoddily on purpose. Surely they could have reinforced the core better, though at the same time it makes sense that the best machines U.A has to offer aren't being sent after them, considering the danger they could pose to a group of untrained or possibly self trained 15 year old.

Izuku isn't going to complain, and continues to calmly rack up points. He thinks he's at around 65 points or so - he probably could have gotten more, but he'd spent a decent bit of time helping other candidates not get crushed by several tons of metal, which one would hope U.A would have a fail-safe against. They're nearing the end, though he still has enough time to get another 10 or 15 points when, with one minute left, they come in.

Izuku had been wondering when they would let out the zero pointers, but he finds himself shocked. They're enormous, as tall as a large building with giant, hulking, mechanical limbs that make Izuku wonder how they even support all that weight - any natural organism would collapse under their own weight at that point. Everyone begins to run, and Izuku thinks that that seems like a really good idea when he notices a small girl - one as short as him, which is a sadly rare thing - trapped under the rubble. The concrete itself likely can't hurt her, but the giant robot certainly can. Izuku considers trying the same trick he used on all the previous robots but he instantly realizes that it's not a workable plan. The robots collapse after he uses his quirk on them, and there's a very likely possibility of it collapsing onto the girl, which completely defeats the point.

No, Izuku thinks, even as the last of his fellow candidates have just fled from the robot. There are no more than 30 seconds left on the exam.

Izuku has to move the zero pointer. He has to move it with his quirk, but at this distance his push will be weaker than his pull. In other words, he has to pull a giant robot the size of a building towards him at a deadly speed.

This is not how he imagined going out, but he doesn't really have much of a choice unless he wants to watch a 15 year old girl be crushed to death.

Izuku pulls everything he can possibly manage out of himself. He pulls until there's nothing but the dregs of his energy left, and then he pulls on those too, and he lifts his hand up and tries to remember what he did to that car.

Like air filling a void, he thinks.

Like a string snapping back.

And then he's pulling, not just on himself but on the robot too, and it begins to skid off  balance, toppling towards the ground twisting as it falls and shatters apart. The lower half of it's left leg tears off of the rest of the mangled mess of wires and metal and beings flying towards him. He stumbles forward, for just a moment, and suddenly he wonders if he's honestly going to die here. He can practically feel his pupils dilating as he staggers back and puts his arm to his face, as if he's going to block a giant fucking robot leg. And then suddenly, like a string pulled to it's breaking point, or a resistance band stretched as far as it can go, it halts. Izuku feels the air generated by it's rapid deceleration nearly knock him over and then he's actually being knocked over because just as fast as the leg flew towards him it's flying back, thrown out to where it came from just as fast as it came, the force of it all ripping it apart, and that's all Izuku sees because then he's flying back too.

He's thrown back first but doesn't have nearly enough height to avoid skidding the ground, and the friction rips and tears at the skin of his arms and then suddenly he's loosing the small amount of air he has. He curls up tightly, instinctively, and attempts to use his arm to shield the rapidly impending collision.

He must have flown back at least several dozen meters, and the force all comes crashing back as he slams into the pavement. His upper arm and hand takes some damage, and he's fairly certain his ulna is broken, but that's nothing, comparatively.

He can feel his radius shatter, and his mouth opens but no sound comes out aside from an agonizing wheeze. He can practically see the bone being ground into dust, and he's certain he's torn muscle. The pain is so indescribably bad that he feels as though he's floating out of his own body, his nerves so overwhelmed he nearly passes out instantly.

And then suddenly he remembers why he actual just shattered his fucking bone and thinks 'The girl!' but he can't even attempt to get up. He's pretty sure he vomits, though he can barely even see anything through the sensory overload, so he can't exactly check, and then he's out.

Izuku wakes up in a nurse's office, though from what little he remembers he should actually be in the ER, trying desperately to salvage his bones which he thinks may actually have been ground to dust. The tears on his skin are gone, and he isn't even in a cast. In fact, he feels, while terminally exhausted, otherwise okay.

This is completely incomprehensible, and he settles for staring at the ceiling, mutely.

5 minutes later Recovery Girl walks in, and the words healing quirk blare like a siren in his mind.

'That makes more sense.' he thinks, and doesn't say. Recovery Girl sighs like she wants to say something, but before she gets the chance, Izuku shoots up, though he's not really sure it qualifies as "shooting up" considering he went from lying at 180 degrees to around 160.

"Is she okay!?" He semi shouts, though it's less a shout and more a torrent of words tumbling out of his mouth at a relatively loud volume.

She averts her gaze and tenses her eyelids like she has a headache, and begins to mutter to herself quietly. Izuku can't really hear what she's saying aside from brief snippets-

"one of those-"

-but after a moment she stops. Recovery Girl sighs again, and starts to speak.

"You are aware that none of the examinees are in any actual danger during our test, correct?" and then Izuku feels his face heat up and his mouth slack-jawed, contorts into what probably looks as mortified as he feels, so he resumes lying down and starting at the ceiling in what is possibly the most humiliating moment of his life.

Recovery Girl sighs again, and informs him that he's coming for the written exam in less than a week and he should probably get back home.

He gets home about 40 minutes later, and he figures it's probably around 10 at night. His mother hugs him tightly and is relieved to see he hasn't managed to injure himself (he resolves to never, ever tell her about the events that just transpired) while Takahashi stands behind her awkwardly and averts his eyes when Izuku meets his gaze.

His mother is desperate to know how he did, and he tells her that he's pretty confidant he did good enough, at least, to get in if he does well on the written examination, to which she immediately sends him to bed so he can rest. She doesn't ask why he took so long to get home, though Izuku is pretty sure she has a rough idea.

He's still exhausted after using his quirk at what's basically 100% and having recovery girl heal him, and he honestly intends to sleep for all of the next day, considering the written exam is the day after.

Izuku really doesn't feel like he's having a very good week.

 Izuku aces the written exam, which one would hope after cramming for two hours a day at the very least for a year. He's not as great at English conversationally, but that isn't so bad since everything was written anyway, and he's pretty sure he did fine, and the rest of the exams were frankly jokes. Their results arrive with the letter the next day, except instead of a letter it's a hologram for reasons Izuku can't decipher.

The staff announces his written exam result - a 98 out of 100, placing him within the top 15 - and, more interestingly, his practical score.

The written exam is important, but the school openly admits it's weighted lower than the practical exam. Whether or not he got in will be determined by the latter score far more than the first.

Suddenly, the hologram switches to All Might alone, and Izuku, somewhat pathetically, starts sweating because he's being personally addressed by All Might, even if it is through a prerecorded message.

All Might's voice is incredibly imposing on it's own, and Izuku is trying desperately not to be scared of a hologram but to be honest, it's not going well.

"Young Midoriya!" the hologram booms, because Izuku can't really think of another way to describe it.

"I would like to congratulate you on astounding performance in the practical exam!" And that's it, Izuku's dead, he's dead and he's floating to heaven-

"You received a more than respectable 63 points, putting you in second place based on that alone!"

-he's floating to heaven because this is impossible, this isn't happening, All Might didn't personally congratulate him on his score-

"However!"

-Izuku's soul is pulled back down to Earth and there's no way that's a good however he definitely didn't make it in he's totally doomed-

"Villain points were not the only factor determining your final score! Indeed, there was another factor - Rescue points! And on that front, you performed even more admirably! In addition to the 63 Villain Points you received, we are awarding you with an additional 45 rescue points due to your bravery in facing the zero point robot, reckless as it was!"

Oh. Oh.

"This brings your total to a full 108 points, a full 30 points above the second place candidate, making you the best scoring examinee of this year!"

Izuku thinks he may actually faint.

The exam results are posted online, and people connect Izuku back to the sludge incident rather quickly, as he finds out on the hero forums. While it's kind of nice to be praised, he's mostly just embarrassed that both that humiliating event and the awful, awful interview have laid both his relative lack of actual power and his inability to properly communicate bare for the universe to see.

Additionally, he can literally hear Katsuki's (who placed second) screams from another building. He might even feel some smug sense of satisfaction at beating him if he wasn't unironically scared for his life, though he's still basically on Cloud Nine because he got into U.A, but he didn't just get into U.A, he placed first.

Him!

And so right now even the demon that is Bakugou Katsuki can not ruin Izuku's day right now, even if Bakugou is intent on ruining literally everything else.

The next day is the last day of school before spring break starts and he leaves middle school forever, a fact for which he is grateful, because being treated by a celebrity after years of his own self-imposed isolation is more than a little uncomfortable. Their homeroom teacher is ecstatic about sending not one but two students to the most prestigious high school in Japan, occupying both the first and second place in the practical exam. 

Izuku can't really blame him, because anyone would be excited about such an amazing boost to their career, but the attention is honestly unwelcome. Izuku stays for about an extra hour to avoid any of his "fans," which is a nice way to put "miniature paparazzi." 

So he really isn't expecting Bakugou Katsuki to be waiting outside the school for him.

Izuku isn't optimistic about his chances of making up, and after nearly 10 years of animosity he's not sure if he even wants to make up. 

Luckily, he doesn't have to have that uncomfortable internal debate at all, because, well, he's talking to Bakugou Katsuki. He's not going to pretend that the blond in front of him has had a change of heart.

When Bakugou punches him in the cheek, again, he's not all that surprised, but he doesn't react all the same.

Bakugou grabs him by the collar and lifts him up while Izuku remains limp, spouting some unwanted, unprompted rant about his origin story or whatever and how it'd been ruined by trash like him, and Izuku can't bring himself to care.

Instead, he lifts his hand up, curls it up into a fist, knuckles facing skyward, and punches Bakugou in the gut. There's a short wheeze, and Izuku's collar is released, but Katsuki has no time to recover or counterattack before another fist is planted, this time firmly in his nose. Izuku enters into fighting stance, and Bakugou responds by charging him.

It really is a repeat of their first ever fist fight, in the end. Izuku has no intention of letting it end the same way though, and he slides out of Katsuki's line of fire only being occasionally grazed by his fist.

Izuku tries to move in to attack himself, but his jab is narrowly blocked, and Katsuki grabs his arm before he can move away, pulling him inwards to elbow him in the chest. Izuku wheezes, but refuses to let up and brings his knee up. Katsuki is clearly expecting him to roundhouse kick and tries to move to block him, but Izuku grabs his shirt and pulls Katsuki's side directly into his knee.

The fight continues, gradually devolving into a violent brawl as they attempt to maul each other into submission, gradually losing any form to their attacks until they're both out of energy, aimlessly flailing. Bakugou shoves him against the wall, violently, and another elbow to Izuku's face smears blood across his cheek. Izuku counters, kicking Katsuki's right leg, and Bakugou buckles slightly. Izuku uses the brief opportunity to lift his knee up and throw his foot at Bakugou in an honestly pathetic facsimile of a front kick.

Bakugou falls back on to the floor, landing directly on his ass and Izuku slumps back against the wall.

They remain that way for a few moments, bloody and bruised with swollen faces, and then Katsuki stands up, and turns to leave.

"Running away is just like you, Kacchan." Izuku rasps, in the closest approximation of a sneer he can give.

Come on, he thinks. It really is just like him. Izuku's 15, bitter, his own blood drying in his mouth, but he's also five, lonely and hopeful, and now, too, Katsuki averts his eyes. Pretends he isn't looking. Walks away like he doesn't care.

It isn't fair, Izuku thinks. He's been living in Bakugou's shadow, growing, clawing, fighting because of him. His entire life is one giant fucking response.

Bakugou Katsuki doesn't get to break him and walk away.

Bakugou glares and bites his lip until it bleeds, and then he does just that.

Izuku wants to scream.

After what's probably five minutes but feels like an eternity has passed, he pulls his phone out, which is mercifully still intact. He checks his contacts.

'Mom' and 'Takahashi.' There's no way he can go back home looking like this, not while his mother is there."I don't need friends, huh?" Izuku rasps, and slumps against the wall.

It feels like it would be real fucking nice to have some right now.

Izuku coughs, and scowls, mostly at himself. 

What a load of shit.

He tries to limp back to his apartment, though it takes longer than usual due to the painful kicks Bakugou had given to his legs, and then he ducks into an alleyway and dials his mother.

"Uh, Mom?" He says, trying very hard to sound like he doesn't have a swollen cheek, a split lip, a black eye, and a few dozen other injuries.

"Could you go to the store for me, and pick up some baking supplies? I dunno, I just kind of felt like celebrating?"

His mother agrees, happily (does this qualify as a success? he wonders, because lying to his mother to avoid her finding out about his injuries wasn't really on his to do list when he woke up this morning) and he sighs in relief.

"Oh, by the way," he starts, because he doesn't need her asking any questions about where he's been.

"I'm sorry I took so long to get home. I just started feeling... nostalgic, I guess? I was wandering around the school and didn't realize how late it got."

He licks his bloody lips. "Uh, yeah, thanks. I should be home soon."

His mother assures him it's fine, tells him not to worry, and congratulates him again, which does generate a warm feeling in his stomach, even if it's kind of hard to appreciate in combination with the guilt from lying to her.

"Yeah. See you soon." He breaths a sigh of relief as soon as the call ends.

A few minutes pass, just to be safe, and then Izuku sprints - as much as one can sprint while limping, anyway - up to the apartment building, up the stairs, and into his apartment. Takahashi, thankfully, is seemingly aware that Izuku really, really doesn't want his mother to realize he just got into a violent fight (and now that he's aware of Izuku's life story, is probably also aware that this was a fight with Bakugou) and overcomes his initial shock quite easily. He sighs, probably because his stepson suddenly became a possible top tier hero and also apparently gets into fist fights with other potential top tier heroes and comes back covered in blood, and then puts a hand on Izuku's shoulder.

"Take a very short shower. You have to be done before you're mother get's home."

Izuku nods.

"I'll..." Takahashi bites his lip. "I'll tell your mother you were so exhausted you collapsed as soon as you got home. Try to actually fall asleep, okay? And do it facing away from the door."

Izuku nods, again, genuinely thankful because while Takahashi is never going to be his father, he certainly doesn't hate the guy, and dashes as best he can into the bathroom.

Turning on the shower and undressing, Izuku takes the shortest shower of his life (even though he literally never wants to get out) and attempts to dry off as best he can in a minute flat. He spends another 40 seconds applying band aids to the few cuts and scrapes he got during their brawl, and changes into the most comfortable clothes he has once he's in his room.

The emotions he's been repressing for the past ten years bubbling to the surface would ordinarily keep him awake, but he's so exhausted that even the shit generated by this awful fucking week (aside from, you know, getting into U.A) can't stop him from collapsing.

Chapter Text

When Izuku wakes up the next day it's roughly 4:30 in the morning, and he feels like he caught seven different strains of the flu simultaneously.

The string of seven days between March 18th and March 25th should go down as legendary, in Izuku's humble opinion. It's quite possible that literally no one in human history has managed to both succeed in the one concrete goal they've been nurturing for ten years straight while also having what could actually be the worst week of their life - a life that has involved being drowned by a giant pile of sludge. Twice. In one day. 

Yet he has somehow managed. Truly, the embodiment of his new school's motto.

Izuku groans, and then turns to lie on his stomach, sagging into his bed like a limpet to rock.

God, what is he doing?

He's supposed to... he's supposed to be a hero-in-training! He got in to the most prestigious hero school in the nation, placed number one on the entrance exam!

And heroes in training don't- don't get into fights, no, brawls with their former friends over some sort of childish rage! They don't lie to their mothers to ensure that said mothers don't find out about their brawl!

The worst part, probably (aside from lying to his mother to avoid freaking her out again, god, he's a terrible son) is that he wanted more. Wants more. He got some kind of sick sense of satisfaction out of the whole thing, like he was so desperate for Katsuki's attention that he was disappointed when he stopped trying to beat Izuku to death.

It's like there's some kind of alien in his brain, or something, or maybe more like he's the alien and all he'd been doing is pretending that he didn't want friends (Katsuki), that he didn't care, or whatever, like he'd been deluding himself into thinking he didn't need other people. The truth was - is - probably that he was just childish and bitter and afraid.

He'd always taken a kind of perverse pleasure in Katsuki's hatred, hadn't he? The glares, the flashes of rage when Bakugou did worse on a test, the sensation of his former friend's fist connecting with his jaw-

Izuku had wanted it. He'd needed it.

Really, yesterday had just been the crescendo of it all. He'd said it himself.

His entire life is just one giant fucking response. He'd just been trying to wring a reaction, to draw some kind of response out of Kacchan all along. Despite the training, the fighting, the shitty rationalizations he masked as some sort of philosophy, the Izuku Midoriya of 11 years ago wasn't all that different from the Izuku of today. At the center of it all had just been a needy child, willing to settle for just about anything if only the same fucking person would deign to look back and care.

Maybe that's really why he'd been telling himself didn't need friends. After all, he hadn't really been friends with Bakugou for quite a while before that moment on the school playground. The momentous shift he'd been convinced had happened was just a change in perception - a new way to justify it all to himself. Another reason to be a fucking circus for Bakugou Katsuki, center of the galaxy, who's orbit he can't hope to escape.

The thought of it leaves a vile taste in his mouth, and with a grimace he remembers that his own blood has long since dried against his tongue. He should probably move to wash the sticky liquid off of his face, and the coppery tang out of his mouth, but his bones feel like lead and an attempt to sit up has what feels like bile churning in his stomach and his vision blurring, afterimages dancing across his eyes.

He needs ibuprofen. Aspirin. Something.

(He wonders if he actually does have a cold.)

He really needs to get these cuts and bruises healed before his mother comes in and realizes he got into a violent brawl on the last day of junior high, which means he has to get up and out the door before his mother wakes up, which is less time than you might think, so he tries to ignore the way the weight of his own bones seem to drag him to the floor.

Izuku sits up, and tries not to vomit.

Healing quirks are a blessing. A blessing. 

Most of them simply accelerate the body's natural regeneration, and generally won't work on anything stronger than a black eye or a torn muscle. But for Izuku's current purposes - that is, trying to make sure his mother never, ever, ever learns of his fight with Katsuki - they fit perfectly. He's pretty sure he doesn't have any broken bones, though he thinks he might have bruised his jaw or something. Either way, irrelevant. All that matters is that any superficial wounds are gone by the time he's back in his apartment.

He brings along as much of his allowance as he can, which is around 35,000 yen or so. He's really glad he couldn't think of much to spend it on, considering he doesn't think he could actually take the guilt of stealing cash from his mother or Takahashi.

Luckily, healing minor wounds (bruises and cuts and the like) are apparently set to a flat rate of 5,000 yen nationwide, and while most private clinicians just stack on any "extra" (compulsory) bonuses so they can set their own price, government clinics don't. Izuku can't help but wince when he hands over a full seventh of his allowance in one fell swoop, but it's still better than the alternative.

The clinic itself is relatively small, but it's clean enough. The white ceiling is unfamiliar, but at the same time it gives Izuku a sense of deja-vu. It's unpleasant, as clinics often are, and it reminds Izuku of the overwhelming sensation of awakening his quirk and drowning in the world around him. He's long since become accustomed to the sensory input, and he privately likens it to cosmic background radiation - a kind of radio wave all around him, mapping out the temperature of the world as a dull hum in the back of his mind.

Still, he remembers waking up and shutting his eyes in an attempt to block it all out, and the clinic brings those memories to the forefront of his mind. Something about Orudera General Clinicians... 

Oh. 

Izuku supposes that it makes sense. There's a kind of irony in ending right where you began, really, or at least closing a chapter there. Midoriya Izuku was born here, the beginnings of a chain reaction that would be the starting point for everything he's ever been. There's something poetic about it, healing wounds given by Katsuki's hand in here, of all places.

He licks his lips and sighs.

Izuku isn't lead to the back, this time. Instead he enters a relatively small room, about 4 doors to the right of the reception. It's not unlike the nurse's office at his middle school or even the one at U.A. The young man (mid twenties, possibly?) sitting there is probably an assistant and not a professional doctor, because, well, age, but also as he visibly reacts to Izuku's wounds which firstly, aren't that bad and is, secondly, not exactly professional behavior.

The first step in the process is apparently (Izuku isn't exactly familiar with it) numbering and recording all the wounds on the patient. Izuku thinks of it like an autopsy, except it's on a living person.

"A bruised jaw, a black eye, lacerations and abrasions on hands, abrasion and in some areas slight avulsion on the back, several lacerations on the right side of the jaw and the right cheek, puncture wounds on the thenar eminence - the palm of your hand - femoral abrasions and lacerations, and plenty of other more minor injuries. Serious peripheral edema - swelling in your legs."

Izuku winces, and the doctor brings a hand to the bridge of his nose and massages it like he can feel a headache coming.

"How, exactly, did you manage to get these injuries?" he says, though Izuku honestly thinks that the doctor already knows.

Izuku tries to find a way to phrase "I got into a childish fight with my former only friend because I'm subconsciously desperate for his attention and affirmation even though I also pretty much hate him, and then I snuck out of my house at 4:50 in the morning so my mom wouldn't find out." He shuffles his feet for a moment, and settles for a listless shrug.

The doctor - nurse, whatever - sighs again, but doesn't say anything. Izuku thinks he's probably just given up, which is generally good advice when it comes to dealing with Izuku Midoriya. There's probably no force on the planet capable of stopping him from hurting himself via poor decision making and deeply buried complexes.

The actual process of healing itself is strange. Recovery Girl's healing is much faster acting than this man's quirk.

He places a hand on Izuku and it's like the wounds are being absorbed out from the top of his head. He actually feels the swelling recede, the cuts stitch themselves back together, flesh and tissue pressing against each other and entwining.

It's an unpleasant feeling, like his body is being dragged back in time while his mind stands still, and by the end of it the dull throb in the back of his head and the painful ache in his joints remains.

He didn't come here to feel better, though, and he's pretty sure he can pass off any swooning as sickness now that the bruises Katsuki's given him have been reduced in number. In the end, Izuku doesn't really need to heal. He just needs to appear as though he has. On that front, he got what he payed for.

Izuku slips back on to the floor and tries to remain steady. The silence would probably be stifling if Izuku wanted anything other than more sleep at the moment, but as he is it's really not much of a problem. The doctor clears his throat, somewhat awkwardly, and tells Izuku to be more careful on his way out.

Izuku doesn't look back, because what is he supposed to say? He spends all his time training to get better at fighting. He's going to a school explicitly designed to teach him to fight.

He doesn't really have many options.

It turns out that Izuku actually does have a cold. He sleeps off the fever for the next two days, and thinks that if he was going to get sick he's lucky that it at least happened when he didn't have school.

He flits in and out of consciousness, generally sleeping for an hour or two at a time before waking up for 20 minutes and falling back into sleep.

His mother is nearly constantly worried about him, cycling through cold compress after cold compress, feeding him spoonfuls of soup and generally watching over him while he sleeps.

Takahashi observes in the background.

By the fourth day of spring break, Izuku is more or less fully recovered.

It's readily apparent that Izuku's biggest weakness is that, unlike most hero's quirks, he can't actually generate power on his own. In other words, it's hard for him to actually deal damage, and he also suffers from low mobility.

It's frustrating, to say the least. He may have topped the entrance exam, but he topped it because his quirk was perfectly suited to it. In actual combat, he needs offensive power.

Rather, he needs a weapon. Some way to do enough damage to knock a person out. The only problem is that he has no real training with any of said weapons. Basically, he needs a weapon that can be wielded easily, is compatible with his quirk, but doesn't interfere with hand to hand combat when he needs to, you know, punch someone.

Izuku bites his lip in frustration.

If you need something done right, do it yourself.

Izuku starts the first day of school far more nervous than he usually is. He's at "About to start entrance exam for top school in the nation" levels of nervous.

Now that he's basically admitted that he does, kind of, sort of want friends, and has resolved to try to make some, he's struck with the peculiar notion that he doesn't actually understand friendships.

His frame of reference is awkwardly retreating from any attempts his schoolmates made to connect and his "friendship" with Bakugou, which is so dysfunctional that it probably doesn't even count.

Izuku hovers uncomfortably by the door to his classroom.

He starts making a mental list of things that friends do.

Friends share their feelings with each other. Friends enjoy spending time around each other. Friends don't attempt to kill each other after school.

He really doesn't feel like this is going to go well.

"Hey!" A feminine voice drags him back to reality. He's not ready for this. He's absolutely not ready for this and he was probably muttering, wasn't he? Everyone's going to realize he's an absolute freak and he literally hasn't even spoken to them before-

"I'm Uraraka Ochako! You're the boy that saved me during the entrance exam!"

It is, in fact, Uraraka Ochako. She is, in direct contrast to her appearance during the exam, seemingly very neat. She's only a little bit shorter than Izuku, a height difference he really isn't used to but one he finds entirely welcome, and she has a somewhat round face.

Izuku splutters, and then blushes, and then hates himself for both of those things. "I'm Midoriya. Uh, Midoriya Izuku."

This isn't going well.

Uraraka seems oblivious to the fact that it isn't going very well, though, so Izuku thinks it can't be that bad, and she probably has way more experience in this department then he does, so who is he to judge?

"Um, thanks! For saving me. I asked the proctors if I could give you some of my points, because I would just feel bad if you ended up loosing points because you saved me instead of fighting other robots, but, I mean, you didn't need them. Obviously."

"Thanks." Izuku shuffles his feet, slightly, and tries to think of what to say next. The silence is slightly awkward, and he has to say something, right?

Izuku is saved from his dilemma by the sound of footsteps echoing behind them. A blue haired boy - the one from the entrance exam, Izuku thinks - walks up to them, stops, and them turns to face Izuku, standing astoundingly straight. The boy then proceeds to bend his body into a bow, and Izuku thinks he must have a talent of some sort, because this is the first time a bow has seemed violent or imposing to him.

"I sincerely apologize!" comes bursting out of the boy's mouth, and it's loud enough that it should be a yell, but Izuku get's the feeling that this is the person he's looking at's version of an indoor voice. Izuku is about to ask "For what?" but isn't given the chance.

"Just before the entrance exam I shamefully admonished you! However, you were, in actuality, analyzing the situation! You discovered the existence of rescue points during the course of the test! In actuality, I should have been humiliated, not you, for I was unable to properly understand the true nature of the test!" Izuku thinks this is supposed to come out as soft, as it's at a slightly lower volume than before, but it's still really, really loud. Not Katsuki loud, no. But definitely loud.

(Izuku doesn't even want to think of how the person in front of him is going to react to Bakugou Katsuki. If he's lucky, they'll be in different classes. Please.)

"I appreciate the sentiment, but you have nothing to apologize for! Uh..." 

"Iida Tenya."

Ah. A legacy child, though U.A doesn't officially determine admissions based on it. Either way, going to school with Ingenium's brother is, if nothing else, pretty cool.

"I'm Midoriya Izuku. It's nice to meet you, Iida." And it is, sort of. Iida is loud, yeah, but he's at least has a conscience, and does feel legitimately bad about yelling at Izuku. "I, uh, didn't actually figure out that rescue points existed?" Izuku blurts out, accompanied by a self deprecating laugh that seems to die before it gets out of his throat.

Iida doesn't say anything, but his hand gestures and confused expression convey the message well enough.

"I just, you know, saw the zero pointer coming down on Uraraka and I thought that I had to do something, you know?" Izuku rambles. Uraraka smiles. "I mean, it'd be awful if she got hurt, obviously, so I mean I just sort of, um. My legs moved on my own?" This really isn't going well. Izuku managed to make two friends, or at least two acquaintances well on their way to becoming friends and his old habits are already coming back in full force. He's always been like this, brain moving faster than mouth, a constant stream of consciousness that never quite manages to move from place to place in his words as it does in his mind.

Izuku smoothly transitions from rambling to full on mumbles. "In retrospect it probably wasn't very smart, though, because U.A obviously wouldn't let any robots actually hurt a student or anything, otherwise the government would definitely have shut down such a dangerous test-"

His torrent of (mostly unintelligible) babble is interrupted by Iida, enthusiasm bolstered by this revelation. "I see!" Iida half-says-half-shouts, and his arms start flying at breakneck speeds, re-positioning again and again and again into newer, ever harsher angels.

Iida looks like he's going to elaborate on Izuku's altruism or nobility or something along those lines, but he's interrupted by the sound of a man that has not slept in the past 10 weeks groaning.

Some sort of cross between a human and a caterpillar that Izuku vaguely recognizes as an adult male rolling around in a sleeping bag is on the floor, and Izuku thinks that he may be talking to them but none of the words are really registering properly, and he wonders if maybe he should call the police because there's literally no way this person was allowed on campus. 

It turns out that Aizawa Shota is, in fact, allowed on campus, because the faculty of U.A are collectively blind to why this is a bad idea, reason number one being that Aizawa Shota really, really loves to fuck with the minds of mostly innocent teenagers.

Class 1-A is immediately dragged out on to a nearby field, and Aizawa points at Izuku.

"You." Aizawa says, as cool (read, uncaring) as ever.

'Me?' Izuku thinks, but doesn't dare to say.

"You scored first place on the entrance exam, right? What was your record on the softball throw?"

Izuku can't think of why this information is relevant right now, but it's not like he can say "I don't feel like telling," so instead he nods, and forces the words "around 55 meters?" out of his throat.

Aizawa beckons Izuku with his index finger, and after a second or so Izuku realizes that he's asking him to come stand in the center of the white circle. His teacher hands him a softball, and simply tells him, "Throw it. With your quirk, this time."

And then Izuku is pretty sure he get's it. The entrance exam was simply there to cull those unfit for U.A, not to test the applicants capabilities. That's why it was the first activity of their day. Aizawa is basically telling him "Show me what you've got."

Izuku knows how to respond, in those terms.

He takes a stance not dissimilar to that of a standard position, right foot behind his left, pointed outwards. He takes the softball in both his hands, pulls his arms back like he's about to pitch, and then takes a step forward. Just as he released the ball, only the tips of his fingertips still touching, he pushes outwards as best he can, by this point as natural as moving a joint. It's not everything he has, not by a long shot, but it's about as much energy as one would expect a dedicated student to put into throwing a softball in gym class.

The ball goes literally blasting away, the force of it creating a gust of wind that isn't going to knock anyone over, or anything, but is at least enough to make a good number of his classmates close their eyes.

Bakugou just looks pissed, but that's his default appearance, so it's to be expected.

Aizawa turns to show the class the results, and even Izuku is surprised.

"1130.3 meters!?"

"That's so cool."

Aizawa's expression sours for a moment, but it quickly shifts to a grin that would look mischievous on most people but just looks flat out malicious on Izuku's teacher.

"'Cool,' huh... If that's the attitude you're going to approach the 3 years of training you're being given, then you may as well drop out now. In fact, in that case..."

His teacher clears his throat. "The person who places last after averaging out everyone's rankings in all eight categories is going to be expelled from U.A!"

Izuku, along with half of the class, freezes. Most of the rest gasp. A solitary few (Bakugou) grin.

"Well, let's get started. There's no time to waste!" Aizawa drawls.

Despite Aizawa's threats towards anyone who tried to "make friends," a boy with spiky red hair comes up to Izuku more or less immediately after his softball throw.

"You scored the highest on the entrance exam, right? I'm Kirishima Eijirou! That throw was so manly! I can definitely see how you got first place!" Izuku has known Kirishima for all of 3 seconds, but it's starting to become abundantly clear that "constant half-yelling" is going to become a running theme in this class. It's kind of nice to see someone so excited, though, and Kirishima doesn't have it that bad, so he thinks it's fine.

"Oh! Um, yeah. I'm Midoriya Izuku. Thanks, but, uh, it wasn't really all that impressive. Basically all I can do is pull hot things towards me and push cold things away." Izuku laughs, a little bashfully. "I'm actually really worried about these tests, you know? Most of them are probably going to be normal gym activities, and my quirk doesn't do much for me there.

Izuku wasn't expecting Kirishima to agree or anything, but the fervor with which he says "No way!" is still surprising.

"Your quirk is super strong, though! You through that softball so far, and you even beat the zero point robot! My quirk isn't flashy at all. All I can do is harden my skin." As if to make a point, Kirishima hardens the skin on his arm.

Izuku hesitates, and then responds. "I think that your quirk is great for heroics! If you beat the robots it can definitely take a lot of damage, and is probably stronger than a normal punch as well, not to mention..." Izuku reflexively runs a finger across Kirishima's arm, testing the texture of his hardened skin. Kirishima feels a faint blush rise to his cheeks because, you know someone's running their finger across his skin gently but Izuku doesn't seem to notice.

"...the texture is rough, too. Maybe collision with Kirishima's skin both cuts and bruises? That helps to explain how he defeated all those robots beyond plain super strength." Izuku, has, at this point, brought a finger to his chin, probably reflexively. A few other students are watching on in curiosity, while Bakugou glares in disdain, which is slightly different from the normal state of his face, which is glaring in vague anger.

Izuku suddenly jolts, then freezes. He knows he's blushing. "I- sorry! I just, uh, do that sometimes? The mumbling. I had really thought I had gotten over that but sometimes when I'm seeing a quirk up close I just start doing it reflexively and-"

"It's fine, dude! No worries. If anything, it's kind of cool how focused you just got." Kirishima smiles. and Izuku takes a breath.

"Oh. Uh, thanks. Analyzing quirks is just a habit, I guess? I used to do it a lot more when I was younger, but I don't really have much time anymore. I just find them interesting, I suppose."

"Were you really able to tell so much about my quirk from a simple glance, though? It's a super manly habit!" Izuku isn't really sure what 'manly' actually means, but he's pretty sure it's a compliment, so he's not going to ask. Kirishima continues barreling on. "What about your quirk? You must know a lot about it, then, if you're so good at analyzing this stuff."

"Uh, my quirk isn't really all that special. Basically, I can draw things to me that are hotter than my body, and push things that are colder away from it. The greater the difference in temperature, the easier it is to move it around. Oh, and I can draw things to specific body parts as well, but the force is honestly pretty weak, so it's not all that useful. The only reason I was able to beat so many robots is because my quirk works very well on them. Honestly, I got pretty lucky..."

Kirishima frowns. "That's definitely not true, Midoriya! Everyone in this class is super manly, I think. You got in here because you deserved it!"

Izuku can't help but smile. "Thanks Kirishi-"

He's interrupted by the sound of Aizawa's voice booming through a microphone, likely to stop any conversations along the lines of Izuku and Kirishima's. "The last test was done one at a time, but all the rest are going to be done in groups, so get ready."

Izuku tries to swallow his nervousness.

Aizawa quickly lines everyone up for the 50 meter dash, and it establishes a running theme for most of the test. Izuku does... okay? 5.53 seconds is decent, yeah, and better than many of the other competitors, but he's not exceeding anyone who's quirks are specialized for the event. The same is true of the grip strength test, and repeated side jumps, and really almost all of the other events aside from the softball throw, endurance run, and sit-ups. The softball throw, he does well in (3rd, behind Uraraka and Yaoyorozu, much to Katsuki's chagrin) and basically no one has a quirk really specialized for sit-ups or the distance run, and in terms of pure endurance he's near the top of the class just from his own training.

In the end, he placaes at a respectable 11th place, which is pretty good for someone who's quirk isn't very useful for what is effectively gym with quirks, but that applies to plenty of other people in the class, so he's not particularly unique in that regard.

Izuku's heart kind of breaks when he sees Mineta's face, though. He looks truly and utterly devastated, but at the same time, Izuku can't really bring himself to actually disagree with Aizawa's decision. He hasn't spent much time around Mineta, but it's incredibly obvious that he has no real interest in heroics beyond it's sex appeal, and to Izuku, that's frankly pretty disgusting, on top of the fact that he really doesn't want to be classmates with a borderline sexual predator that's willing to harass people and just generally be inappropriate.

In the end, Aizawa said it himself. There's nothing cruel about ending a half-baked dream.

At the end of the day, Izuku is simultaneously exhausted and bursting with energy. He's emotionally drained, in a sense, but at the same time he really, really wants to do more. Learn more.

Izuku sighs, and is about to get out of his chair when Kirishima flags him down.

"Midoriya!"

Izuku turns to Kirishima and makes a noise of vague affirmation. "Hm?"

"Hey, Midoriya, how do you get home?"

Izuku blinks, confused, and decides to just go along with it.

"Uh, I take the Hokuso line to Shin-Kamagaya, and then transfer to the Tobu Urban Park Line and take it to Musutafu."

Kirishima smiles. "Same here! That means you live in Musutafu, right? I transfer to the Sōbu Rapid Line and go to Tsudanuma. I live in Narashino."

Fuck it, Izuku is taking the initiative. He doesn't have to be constantly awkward!

"Want to go home together, then?" Kirishima's grin gets even wider, because he's the most positive person Izuku has ever seen.

"Sure!"

"Man, Aizawa-sensei is so cruel! I can't believe he expelled someone on the first day just because they didn't do well on one test!" They spend most of the walk to the train making general small talk - discussing their families, how they did on the entrance exam, their first day, that sort of thing - before the conversation wanders to Mineta's expulsion.

Kirishima continues. "I mean, I don't really like Mineta - he's kind of a creep, ya'know? - but expelling him is way too hasty, right?"

Midoriya pauses, and hums for a moment. "I see where you're coming from, obviously, and it was pretty cruel, but I don't think Aizawa-sensei was necessarily wrong for expelling Mineta. I think it's true, kind of. That it isn't cruel to end a half-baked dream. At least, the way I see it, heroes have a responsibility to sacrifice themselves, I guess? Not, like, literally dying, of course, but you know. Being a hero involves suffering, right? It's hard. And I don't think that Mineta... really wants that. I don't think he really wants to be a hero."

Kirishima frowns. "Yeah, I guess, but..."

Izuku takes a deep breath. "I think that, in effect, Aizawa-sensei was saying that if you don't really care about being a hero, you don't deserve to be here. Or I guess, don't waste people's time for nothing."

"I guess... It's true, kinda. If Mineta doesn't really want to be a hero, then letting him become one before he realizes what it means..."

Izuku nods. "Exactly! It's... you're just hurting him more in the long run."

Kirishima rubs the back of his neck absentmindedly. "Man, this stuff is kind of complicated. I'm no good when it comes to that kind of thing. I just do what feels right, ya'know? In that sense, I'm not all that different, in the end..."

Frowning, Izuku tries to counter. "Don't say stuff like that! Doing what you think is right is admirable. I think it just means that you care so much you don't even have to think about it. Like, it's so important to you, or doing the right thing just comes so naturally to you that you don't even have to think about it."

Kirishima clenches his fist and pumps it, eye level. "Thanks, Midoriya! For what it's worth, I think you'll make a super manly hero!"

Izuku blushes, and turns to face forwards, eyeballs slanted downwards. "Thanks, Kirishima," he mumbles.

They spend around half a minute walking in content silence, eventually broken by Kirishima (somewhat awkwardly) clearing his throat.

"Hey, Midoriya. What kind of people do you like?" Kirishima pauses for a moment. "Ah, as friends! Like, platonically." 

Izuku thinks for a moment. What kind of people does he like...?

"Uh, I guess I like everyone I don't dislike? I mean, I'm fine with just about anyone." Kirishima laughs.

"Okay, then. What kind of people do you dislike?" 

Izuku tries to think of way to say Bakugou Katsuki without actually saying the words 'Bakugou Katsuki.'

"Uh, aside from villains? I guess... I dislike people that don't understand where they came from? Or... that didn't really make any sense. I guess... a good metaphor for it would be something like a car that thinks it drives itself, or something like that. Not a self driving car, I mean. A car that doesn't drive itself that thinks it drives itself." Izuku feels himself blushing and slaps a hand on to his face. "That really didn't make, like, any sense. Crap."

"Or, I guess another way to put it is people that don't understand how they got where they are. People that think they made themselves all on their own. Or that ignore the people that helped them, I guess. People who take other people's time and effort and don't give anything back. I find people like that to be... frustrating."

Kirishima sighs. "Man, Midoriya, you put way more thought into this stuff than I do. It makes me feel, I dunno. Ignorant, or something. Like I should be thinking harder."

Pursing his lips, Izuku sighs back. "Honestly, I think I just overthink this stuff. It's a lot of time spent that doesn't get you much in return, really."

"I think it's manly, though, to think about stuff like that. It's a sign of passion, right?"

Izuku smiles.

It's an odd experience, having a friend. There's something almost cozy about the whole thing, almost like sitting next to a fire or something, this general air of contentedness all around him, and Izuku thinks he really should have done this sooner.

His mother asks him how his first day at school went.

Izuku responds, simply, "I made a friend."

She just smiles knowingly.

"Also, someone got expelled." Takahashi raises an eyebrow.

"Not you, I hope?"

Izuku grins, a little bit. "Thankfully, no. This one kid named Mineta. Aizawa-sensei expelled him because 'There's nothing cruel about ending a half-baked dream.'" Izuku hopes he got his deadpan right.

Either way, Takahashi seems delighted.

Izuku had, foolishly, expected the second day to be slightly easier.

It looks like it's going to be, at first. They start off the day with English with Present Mic, which is almost like a normal class, aside from the fact that their teacher is... well, a bit eccentric, but also capable of murdering all of them.

Then All Might shows up.

There's a collective gasp from all of the class, Izuku included, because the number one hero, the symbol of peace himself is standing before them, wearing a costume from over two decades ago and informing them that he's going to be teaching the most common class on their curriculum.

And then All Might says "Combat training!" in the incredibly loud, awe-inspiring attention grabbing way he says everything else.

'Combat training!' Bakugou thinks, and grins.

'Combat training!' Izuku thinks, and then watches his life flash before his eyes as he stares at the back of Bakugou Katsuki.

They get their costumes, at least.

Izuku's is relatively simple - he's not fond of overly flashing clothing, especially when it restricts movement. He decided to go for a black under-suit made of relatively strong mesh, shoulders and chest covered with a more solid, light plating. The armor itself is colored a soft reddish-orange. Mostly, it's just there to provide extra protection for his most sensitive body parts. His legs are covered in a supportive brace, with the same coloring as the upper armor, that connects directly to his boots. His back is covered with an additional layer of what he can only describe as half mesh, half armor - it's stronger and more solid than the mesh, but more flexible than the armor. Attached to his belt are two balls made of some kind of metal that no one but the support team can identify, and they're very obvious colored purposefully to look like twin stars.

Attached to his left arm is a dull tan machine that resembles artillery, but the hole is significantly smaller compared to the rest of it.

Izuku is broken out of his halfhearted analysis of his own costume by Uraraka's excited beckoning.

"Midoriya! Midoriya!"

Izuku turns to face her. "Yeah, Uraraka?"

She's clearly excited - enthusiastic, really. "You went for a space theme too, right? The sun?"

Izuku grins. "Ah, yeah! I figured it made sense - the sun is kind of gets at both parts of my quirk, you know?"

"Yeah! I can't quite put it into words, but it just somehow fits, you know?"

Izuku sighs in relief. At least one person thinks his design (though it honestly belongs to the support department just as much, if not more so) works.

"But what about those two balls on your belt?" Uraraka points to the two brightly colored spheres.

"Oh! That's... I guess we'll call it a secret? You'll see during the exercise!"

Uraraka lets a faux-mischievous grin pass over her face. "Oho?" 

Honestly, Izuku is proud of himself. Positive human interaction with his peers! That doesn't involve violence! Humor!

This is a success story. He's pretty sure of it.

His happiness is, unfortunately, interrupted by the sound of All Might explaining the rules. It's pretty simple - teams of two, hero or villain, villains have to stop heroes from touching the MacGuffin, heroes have to touch the MacGuffin in five minutes, add in some capture tape, done.

And Izuku got paired with Uraraka! Fate is smiling on him.

"Team A, heroes-" Izuku even gets to be the hero, which is a role he's more comfortable with than defending the bomb. "versus Team D, villains."

Oh. A few seconds of painful, painful silence permeate throughout the room.

Oh.

"Midoriya and Uraraka, to the first floor! Sero and Bakugou, to the fourth!" Despite the volume of All Might's voice, Izuku feels like you could hear a pin drop. The sad part is that no one else has a clue, aside from Bakugou's incredibly malicious grin.

Their one minute of prep time goes by quickly. "Uraraka, you know the plan, right?"

She gives Izuku a thumbs up.

"Aaaaaaaand, START!"

Katsuki is going to immediately charge for Izuku. This is fact. However, Sero will likely remain behind to guard the bomb. In other words, the best case scenario is that Izuku and Uraraka both make it to the top floor without Bakugou.

The first thing they do is charge for the staircase. They can likely reach the second floor before Katsuki can, and clearing a full floor is actually quite a bit of progress. Unfortunately, they don't have any time to climb another.

"Oi, Deku! Get ready, you shitty nerd!" Deku? Huh. That's a new one. "I'm gonna grind you into fucking dust!" Katsuki's screaming echoes throughout the hall. It's a perfect metaphor for the larger than life thing that is Bakugou Katsuki, who famously professed his desire to be named "King Explosion Murder" in the third grade.

"Uraraka!"

"Yeah!"

Their plan is this: Uraraka provides support while Izuku handles direct hand to hand combat, at least for their first encounter. Izuku knows Katsuki's tells like the back of his hand, so he's going to give Uraraka as much observation time as possible. The first few seconds are a general flurry of blows, none of which are able to cause any serious damage beyond light bruising. Izuku isn't going to bother going deep, or attempting any knifehands or anything. He knows they aren't going to land. Katsuki's getting impatient, though, because he apparently wants Izuku blown to pieces immediately, so he starts going for a point blank shot.

The thing about Katsuki is that once he's prepared a shot like that, he has to commit, he can move his arm if he wants, but because of how precise he has to be to actually effectively launch those shots, he can't change his course too much, and he can't stop the explosion once he's already set it in motion.

"Now!"

The other thing about Katsuki is that despite his great battle sense, he has no experience fighting Uraraka, or any real understanding of how her quirk works.

These two things, together, don't bold well for Bakugou. Izuku gets ready to jump, except instead of jumping backwards, he jumps directly upwards. Uraraka's quirk, combined with the force of both of them, together, is more than enough to throw them out of the range of Katsuki's blast.

The last thing about Katsuki is that he's never had the back of his neck kicked by someone wearing bracers for their legs before.

Izuku, with Uraraka's help, manages to twist his body enough to get himself at what's more or less a 90 degree angle, and from there it's only a split second before he's jumping off the back of Katsuki's neck, Uraraka in tow.

Uraraka immediately deactivates her quirk, but they have more than enough airtime to get a decent lead on Katsuki. Unfortunately, this only enrages him more, and he's now soaring back towards both of them, propelled by a combination of nitroglycerin explosions and visceral rage. Luckily, the second floor isn't nearly as open as the first, and Bakugou doesn't work well with sharp turns.

Sero tries to communicate through the earpiece, but he doesn't hear much beyond "DIE!" or "I'm gonna fucking kill you!" and more or less gives up.

Izuku and Uraraka manage to reach the staircase without being caught, but Bakugou is hot on their tail.

"Midoriya, I'm gonna do it!"

"Got it!" A moment later, Izuku and his teammate are flying through the air, going farther and farther upwards

Uraraka can't deal with her quirk being activated on two people for long, so they have to be as efficient as possible with their usage. In other words, one more activation. Anything beyond that and it's no longer fully reliable. 

They very barely reach the third floor, mere moments before Bakugou, and it frankly isn't enough time. How much longer do they have. Around 3 minutes and 10 seconds?

Uraraka backs up further. Their only real choice is to simply repeat the pattern they took on the floor below them and see if they can get more precious few seconds. Unfortunately, Bakugou has no intention of letting them, and before Izuku is even fully aware of it Katsuki's managed to wedge himself in between Uraraka and Izuku. This would, ordinarily, be a terrible position, but with Uraraka running on such little steam it's really not as unbalanced as it should be. Izuku manages to put a few more meters of distance between them, but he's going in the opposite direction of the staircase, and Bakugou is suddenly blasting towards him, full throttle.

Izuku steps to the side, intent on grappling Katsuki. 

And then Katsuki responds by readjusting his gauntlet, as if to blast right over Izuku.

Katsuki prepares his next explosion apparently intent on avoiding Izuku's counter. Izuku smiles.

He can make use of this.

He positions his left hand  directly over his left sphere, and then Katsuki is directly above him, and all Izuku has to do is pull. 

The latches keeping the ball attached tightly to his belt release, and the sphere begins to spin, throwing itself in the direction of Izuku's left hand. If he positions it correctly, and stops pulling at just the right moment, the leftover momentum will send it careening upwards. Directly into Bakugou's gut. Izuku twists his body, pulling on the released sphere with his right arm and then his left fist is positioned perpendicular to Katsuki's rib-cage. He has precious few seconds left, so he may as well use every trick he has. There's a lever, or a barrier of sorts, placed directly into the cannon on Izuku's arm, and all he has to do is pull it with his quirk and push the ball away, slightly, and it goes soaring out, impacting the flesh right beneath Katsuki's solar plexus, the pellet sticking to Bakugou's clothes.

Izuku immediately breaks out into a run, intent on capitalizing the small window of time he just bought himself. He and Uraraka make a break for it, running past the hallway they're in and into the large room containing the staircase.and by the time Katsuki's fully recovered, Uraraka's in position against the wall and he's ready to reach the fourth floor.

Katsuki attempts to follow, but is blocked off by Uraraka's hand suddenly emerging from behind the wall in an attempt to touch him. He immediately jumps back, and then lunges when she comes out to face him, keeping his distance just out of her range. This means that he can't damage her easily either, the force of his explosions too weak to deal real damage, at least not if she continues to dodge.

Meanwhile, Izuku's already up the stairs, just about to emerge in the room containing the bomb. However, he's fighting against Sero, who's quirk appears to allow him to shoot tape out of his elbows, and it's entirely possible that his enemy has tried to tape up the entrance. He has to be cautious. Additionally, Izuku's quirk has never been great for sensing actual figures or shapes, so he doesn't trust it too often, but there's clearly a temperature difference between the area near the door and the rest of the room.

He just needs Uraraka to stall for around half a minute, and if she can pull it off, they can probably win.

I'm counting on you, Uraraka !

Izuku thinks he can probably bend the tape enough to create a slit he can enter through. Using each hand to push the top and bottom halves of the many pieces of tape apart, Izuku manages to just barely avoid touching the tape. Sero's reaction is noticably delayed, so Izuku dodges the tape he sends out until he reaches the center of the room.

"Uraraka, are you in position?" He whispers through the headpiece.

"Yeah. There's at least 8 meters between me and Bakugou."

"Nice job. I'm starting."

Izuku pushes one hand to the ground, and pushes on the concrete with his quirk, jumping to the side at the same time. The building is generally decrepit, and most of the material is weak enough that if he tries hard enough, Izuku can create openings large enough for a human to fit through. By the time the floor is out of the way, Uraraka is already more than halfway there, and Katsuki is still on the floor.

Still Bakugou is incredibly perceptive, and he realizes what they're planning nearly instantly. The blond shoots up with his quirk, propelling himself through the air as fast as he possibly can, and by the time Uraraka's a few meters above the hole, Katsuki is nearly up there with them.

This is where Izuku comes in. Leaping right above the hole and placing himself directly in between Katsuki and Uraraka, he focuses as hard as he can on the pellet clinging to Bakugou's costume and shoves with everything he has in him, the recoil giving him slightly more elevation and nearly throwing him totally off balance. While Katsuki himself could have easily resisted Izuku's quirk, his attempts don't stop the pellet itself, and he only manages to lose his balance and position completely as the projectile is crushed and shattered, sending Katsuki flying towards the floor against his will. Izuku gets back on his feet soon enough, and Uraraka's more or less hit the ceiling. Sero attempts to throw his tape towards Izuku's teammate, and so Izuku pulls on his two projectiles, releasing them from his belt and sending them flying towards Sero's tape as they very nearly skin his hands.

Uraraka deactivates her quirk and before Sero has a chance to respond Izuku throws himself at him, both of them crashing directly into the floor. 

Katsuki manages to get his head into the bomb room but at that point it's far too late.

By the time he's landed back on the floor Uraraka's already holding on to the bomb.

Izuku gets up first, and holds a hand out to Sero, which the other boy gladly takes. 

"Nice job, Midoriya!"

Katsuki crumples. Izuku tries not to watch.

Izuku is given a flurry of praise by his classmates, and is apparently given the title of "Best Performance" during the test, which he supposes is nice, but he's honestly kind of out of it.

The period ends after what feels like an instant, and it's weird to go from "every second is an eternity" to "an eternity feels like a second" so quickly. Either way, by the end of the day he's more or less back to normal.

Katsuki walks out the second the school day ends. Well, he always does that, but he's significantly more hasty this time.

Izuku follows.

Katsuki normally walks at a speed of "slow enough to ensure he gets to see the face of everyone cowering near him, but not so slow they think they deserve to be in his presence."

Izuku tries to maintain the same general pace, standing a few meters behind him.

Katsuki speeds up. Izuku does too. He thinks he hears Katsuki grunt.

The process repeats a few times until by the end of it their basically dashing down the stairs and out the door.

Just as Katsuki is about to get through the gates Izuku calls out.

"Are you running away again?"

Katsuki stops, and pauses for a few seconds. He turns around.

"I lost." It's strangely neutral for the blond, almost flat in tone.

"You did."

"You beat me."

"I did."

Katsuki takes a breath. "Next time I'm going to fucking win!"

Izuku's face morphs from anger into a smile. "You can try."

Katsuki scowls, and squints at Izuku. "You always know just what to say to fucking piss me off."

"Do I? Lately it seems it hasn't been working well."

"You're such a little shit. I'm gonna fucking grind you into dust next time, you hear me? This is just my fucking starting line. I'm gonna fucking blast right past you, you bastard!"

"It's mine too, you know. I'll keep up."

Katsuki scoffs, but it's strangely... not fond, but neutral-ish, for the boy. "Shut up, nerd."

Izuku turns away, content.

He was probably ridiculous for doubting him in the first place. Bakugou Katsuki would never stop walking because of such a minor pebble, even if he did stumble, and that's honestly how Izuku prefers it.

Chapter Text

They elect class presidents the next day, which is almost surreal normal considering how their first and second day went, what with the violent combat and expulsion. Izuku has absolutely no interest in being the representative - he wins anyway, dragging the rest of the classroom down into chaos with him.

"I didn't even vote for myself!"

"See, that's exactly it!" Kirishima seems excited about the whole thing. "We voted for you because you're the kind of guy that wouldn't vote for yourself!"

"I didn't vote for myself because I'd make a terrible class president!"

Bakugou scoffs. "He's right, you know. He's a Deku for a reason - he's totally useless when it comes to other people."

Izuku bites down a remark about about how Katsuki isn't exactly one to talk, considering his track record, because they've settled into a vague antagonism that involves emotions and reactions other than burning fury, and yes, okay, that's not exactly an achievement, but Izuku believes in the power of baby steps!

"Actually, aren't you even worse, Bakugou?" Kirishima says it plainly, no malice in his voice, but it doesn't make much of a difference in regards to Bakugou's rage, and it's certainly not helped by Kaminari's smirk and agreement.

"You wanna fucking die, shitty hair!?"

Aizawa groans, and closes his eyes as if the very sight of his students personally offends him.

A loud voice booms from behind Izuku. "I must concur with Kirishima!" Iida says (yells), clamping a hand down on Izuku's shoulder, and Izuku jumps in surprise. "Also, murder is unbecoming of student of U.A, Bakugou!"

"You too, Iida!? Why can't you be the class president instead?"

"While I must admit that I do wish to represent the class, you are clearly more suited to the role! The class requires an adept general to lead it to prosperity, and you have proven your strategic abilities!" Every word is accented by the erratic swerves of Iida's arms.

Izuku whines. "I'm not that good at tactics anyway! And in that case, I 'd be a strategist and not a general. I'm terrible at leading people and rallying the class and... stuff."

"Stuff," Bakugou repeats dryly, and snickers, ignoring Iida's disapproving glare - privately, Izuku thinks that Bakugou is fueled by other people's glares, and sobbing puppies, or something, and that's why he's so powerful.

Izuku points at the blond and shouts, somewhat hysterically, "See!? You be the general! I'm sure you're way better at directing people than me, anyway!" Izuku absolutely refuses to become the class representative, because he is, one, very scared of being technically responsible for his classmates (Bakugou and Kaminari is frankly impossible), and two, can barely handle having three friends and some amiable acquaintances, much less an entire class of 19.

Aizawa groans again. "If he doesn't want to do it then I'm not going to bother. Iida, you be his replacement - you've got the enthusiasm, if nothing else." Iida either purposefully ignores or actually doesn't notice the insult, though maybe he's just come to accept that everything out of Aizawa's mouth will be, in some way, degrading.

"Th-thank you, Aizawa-sensei! I will do my upmost to prove that you have made the correct decision." Izuku isn't sure, but he thinks Iida might actually be holding back tears, considering how tightly his fists are clenched. Izuku thinks that Aizawa definitely wasn't wrong in saying that Iida wasn't lacking in enthusiasm. The raven-haired boy turns to Izuku. "And I would be honored to have you as my tactician, Midoriya! We should perhaps review battle strategies at some point to ensure-"

Izuku tries to tune Iida out because the other boy doesn't mean to be rude or anything, but Izuku really can't handle this much attention. Uraraka pats Iida's back and laughs halfheartedly, glancing at Izuku sympathetically.

"-perhaps we should consider the synergies of individual members quirks too, for the purpose of insuring safety even in the event that we are divided into smaller groups!"

Izuku tries to smile, managing to bring out a half-grimace.

"Iida, you're taking the metaphor too literally."

Izuku sighs in relief when Iida stops to apologize, and thanks the universe for having made Asui Tsuyu so mercifully, mercifully blunt. All is right with the world.

For half an hour.

 Izuku hates the media. He loathes them.

"I hope the writers of Aera get shot into the sun," Kaminari seethes, and Izuku finds himself reluctantly agreeing.

Sero groans. "How have they already managed to get one up on the most prestigious high school in Japan? It's been three days!"

The upshot is that, if nothing else, Iida seems to have settled into his role as class representative as comfortably as you physically can over the course of forty five minutes.

It's not much of an upshot.

"Guys, look at Twitter!" Izuku closes his eyes and prepares for a migraine because why, Ashido? Why would he look at Twitter? If Izuku has a single piece of advice for every human being on earth it's that you should never check twitter. He checks twitter anyway, of course, and now people are posting half-joking tier lists that rank 'paparazzi' as more powerful than All Might merchandise. It might be funny if Izuku had actually gotten to eat, or maybe was allowed to go days at a time without some sort of sign of the end-times coming up to make him miserable.

"Good job, Iida," Izuku says weakly. He tries to give Iida a smile, though it probably comes out as a cryptic cry for help.

Iida is apparently unaffected by getting his lunch break cut short, or from nearly having a media-induced heart attack at the thought of facing villains that are capable of infiltrating U.A. Kirishima seems like he's trying even harder to remain somewhat positive than Izuku is, in the wake of recent developments. Uraraka is vaguely worried, both for herself, her classmates, and the general state of U.A Bakugou seems stuck between complete apathy, because tiny things like "compromised locations" and "possible invasion" mean nothing to the Lord of Explodokills, and unadulterated rage because he has a legitimate excuse this time.

Ashido, who had been quite worried at the beginning but had settled down seemingly instantly, waves her phone in Izuku's face. "Look! Someone edited a photo of the whole thing to replace the paparazzi with actual villains!"

Izuku grinds his teeth.

Fucking-

A sigh manages to escape his lips.

"Twitter," he moans.

 Izuku is sure that there is a very logical explanation as to why they are riding in a bus to what is literally Universal Studios Japan with a different name, but it is kind of hard to think of anything over the sound of Katsuki being vaguely antagonistic while Tsuyu eggs him on purely by being her own painfully blunt self, as Kirishima tries (in vain) to befriend Bakugou. Izuku is stuck in the middle of all of this, because the universe hates him and these seats were assigned randomly. He manages to almost have a conversation with Kirishima, so he considers it about as much of a success as he can expect. 

"Wait, you've never played a video game? Or done a sport? Or any club?" Kirishima sounds conflicted - he probably can't decide whether Izuku's conviction is 'manly' or sad, which, okay, fair.

"Okay, first of all, taekwondo is a sport. Two, I've played video games before!"

Bakugou uses the opportunity to inject, because humiliating Izuku takes precedence over screaming at Tsuyu. "I don't think playing my Gameboy Advanced 10 years ago counts, Deku," he drawls.

Kirishima turns to Bakugou, and then turns back, shrugging apologetically. "Sorry, dude."

Izuku pouts, slightly. "I- I can play video games if I want! Stop looking at me like that! And where did Deku come from, Katsuki - sorry, Kacchan?" Bakugou growls, and Kaminari turns over to stare at them behind his seat.

"Wha- wait, Kacchan!?" Kaminari ekes out between laughs. Bakugou growls.

"Shut the fuck up, Sparky!" Kaminari throws his hands up, in piece, and Bakugou turns to Izuku. "And I didn't know you couldn't read Kanji, Deku." It comes with Bakugou's trademark sneer, but it somehow lacks some of the bite - maybe Izuku's just finally gotten used to Katsuki's prickly personality.

Izuku turns away towards the window, and responds, dryly. "Hilarious."

Kirishima, not yet used to their dynamic, apparently does not understand that this is exceptionally civil for Izuku and Katsuki, and desperately tries to get the conversation back on track.

"Anyway, Midoriya! After this you have to come over to my house, or something! There's no way you can graduate high school without ever having played a video game. Sorry, having played a video game in the last 10 years."

Izuku bites his lip, and really, really hopes the heat in his cheeks isn't visible, because how fucking embarrassing would it be to start freaking out because he hasn't been to a friend's house in 10 years, considering he hasn't actually had friends for 10 years?

"Uh, sure?"

"Cool! You gotta play Super Smash Bros! Wait, do you know what Smash is?" Izuku is kind of shocked that this is an honest question.

"Kirishima, I wasn't a hermit."

Bakugou takes this as a golden opportunity. "So he says."

They file into USJ, a bumbling mess of excitement and apprehension, and Izuku can instantly feels something is off. There's a strange mass of heat in the center that almost resembles a crowd, though he probably wouldn't even have noticed if Thirteen hadn't specifically said it was empty. Despite it all, in the very center of the mass is a being that can't be described as anything beyond cold - it seems to have absolutely no heat in it, as if there's nothing even there to be hot in the first place, like staring into space.

He opens his mouth, and the very beginnings of a question are coming out before Izuku feels the beginnings of bile rising in his throat. There's something on top of him, some kind of black miasma, obviously, but it's not just that because it's cold - freezing cold. The mist coats his body and he feels nothing yet he can tell, he feels, he knows that there's nothing there, that he's touching the coldest thing he knows and yet - and yet his quirk isn't working, the mist unmoving despite his efforts. He feels his knees buckle, his eyes widen, and suddenly he's a child again, screaming for his mother because it's all too much, this disconnect between everything he knows, he sees, and everything he can feel, the heat radiating off of every tiny droplet in the late-winter air, and it all seems to be clawing inside him, as if he's being suffocated from the inside-

And somehow he see's Ashido's face, the mixture of terror and horror across her normally bubbly face, and some part of him screams that he needs to move. And then his legs are tensing, his knees shifting, eyes beginning to narrow and it's the very beginning of a jump and-

Chilly.

He's on the floor on all fours, gasping for lost breath, and he doesn't understand what the fuck just happened but he can clearly tell that his surroundings have changed drastically, so-

Some kind of warp quirk? Teleportation? A period of temporary immobility?

Izuku pushes himself to his feet - he can muse about the enemy's quirk later. Right now he has more pressing issues. Namely, the several dozen villains staring him down in an empty apartment building. The room he's in itself seems to be around the size of a 50 meter swimming pool, or so, with a few shaky pillars holding up the ceiling above it. The first villain is already charging, a man with what appears to be a strength enhancement quirk, judging by his muscles.

He obviously isn't trained, though. A fist comes flying towards Izuku's face, but it's shaky, unsure. It's easy enough to dodge to the side, and he watches the man attempt to recover. Izuku has no intention of giving him a chance, however, and he grabs hold of the mans arm with his fist, swerves his foot around to connect with the man's right leg, and the pressure from Izuku's kick combined with his arm pulling his enemy forward knocks the man off his feat, and then he's tumbling through the air, landing cleanly on his back.

The next man is just as sloppy, holding a metal rod and backed up by a weak pyromancer in the back. Izuku doesn't even have to bother dodging the pyromancer's attacks, probably there more to limit his range of movement then to deal any real damage, but assuming that Izuku needs to bother dodging so wide is a poor assumption. The man charging him tries to attack with an overhead swing, but Izuku simply steps in to his attack, and before the man can bring the pipe down on Izuku's face (not that he couldn't simply deflect it with his quirk) an elbow is placed firmly in his chest, and the man is doubling over, clutching his stomach. A quick strike to the back of his neck and he's out cold.

His next attacker attempts to join the rank of the pyromancer and attack from the back with weak icicles. Izuku cleanly dodges the flame's weak attempts to actually strike him, and simply raises an eyebrow at the icicle charging towards him, not even needing to raise an arm to shatter it into pieces. Clearly, these people weren't aware of his quirk.

Well, no matter. Izuku rushes the pyromancer and ducks under a wave of dull fire. The ice user manages to recover from his initial shock by the time Izuku's knee is halfway between the ground and his enemy's face, but the weak shards he throws are easily deflected, and the small chunks flown back at the user actually end up obscuring his vision. Izuku's kind of impressed - it's rare to see someone capable of accomplishing literally nothing beyond obscuring their own vision with their quirk. Izuku's knee connects with the flame user's chin, and he feels a bit of blood splatter against his pants, which is just... gross. Izuku swerves around and begins a middle roundhouse kick directly to the icicle users ribs, and the force of it knocks the wind out of Izuku's opponent. A quick jab to the man's face and he's hitting the ground, out cold.

By the time he's back to a more neutral position a man with a mutant quirk - some kind of Lizard? - is charging at Izuku, but a step-in followed by a well placed punch to the stomach is, in conjunction with his quirk, enough to send the cold-blooded foe flying at least 15 meters backwards.

Despite the number of participants in the whole exchange, it doesn't take more than half a minute, and by the end of it Izuku catches both the traces of that dark purple mist and the flash of recognizable red hair.

"Kirishima!" Izuku calls out as he lands a kick to another enemy's shin that sends it crumpling towards the floor, followed by an elbow strike to it's (now stomach level) face.

The other student grasps the situation quickly, and before long Kirishima is joining Izuku with an enthusiastic "Yeah!", hardened skin cutting through the enemies' weapons like butter and sending them reeling.

Izuku sends a predatory grin to Kirishima. "I wouldn't recommend worrying. These guys are more yanki then actual villain." 

Kirishima grins. "Well, you're not having any trouble!" Some of the thugs growl, rushing towards both boys, including one with the ability to stretch their limbs. Izuku punches one in the side, launching him away, and Kirishima intercepts the stretching arm with a sharp (literally) jab to the forearm. The force sends the the arm reeling, and then it returns to it's original form, the man clenching it like's it's broken. Kirishima winces.

Izuku absentmindedly ponders what's going on there. "His quirk must weaken his limbs after they are extended - the force used there shouldn't have been enough to break a bone..."

"Save it for after the fight!" Kirishima flashes a thumbs up, which Izuku gladly returns. Standing back to back, wave after wave of enemy charges them, and wave after wave fail to do much beyond waste their energy, until a full five minutes have passed and there don't seem to be any enemies left aside from one that appears to be camouflaging - unfortunately, invisibility isn't all that effective against someone that basically has heat vision too.

"Midoriya, let's go around and help the others! I'm worried about people with less offensive quirks. Oh, and you missed this cause you got teleported first, but Aizawa-sensei is fighting this guy with hands - like, he has these fake hand things all over his body - and a giant monster!"

"I think we should charge straight to Aizawa-sensei. It could take a while to locate everyone else, and if the villains in the center manage to take him-"

A screeching voice suddenly emerges from the heat. "Stop all your chit chat! You left your guard down you-"

Izuku pulls on the ball with his quirk, detaching it from his belt as it begins to rotate rapidly, and he uses his quirk to drag the ball alongside the palm of his hand, almost chopping his opponent as he guides the sphere directly into his hand, the force of it knocking the knife out of his hand and possibly breaking a bone or two. He follows up by titling his hand so that the ball is directly facing his enemy and simply pushing, throwing it directly into their face, knocking them out. "Shut up for a moment, please."

"Midoriya, what even are those things!? You used them during the battle trial, too - they're super manly!" Kirishima, excited, asks.

"I call them 'suns.' You know, cause of my, um. Motif." Izuku literally feels the heat radiating off his cheeks. "Using my quirk I can basically direct them where I want them to go. Some parts are hot and some parts are cold, so I can use both aspects of my quirk on it. Uh, anyway, if the villains manage to take out Aizawa then everyone else will be in a lot of danger too. I think we should go to support him if we can."

Kirishima, somewhat reluctantly, agrees. As cool as he thinks it would be to run around saving the class, if everyone is fighting street thugs like that they don't really need to worry. Aizawa-sensei is up against the warp dude, the leader, and the giant monster they brought.

"Kirishima, could you handle a fall off a three story building?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah. Why."

"Let's go up to the roof. I 'm not actually sure where we are in the collapse zone, and it's probably faster that way."

Kirishima nods, and when they hit the roof it's easy to get a rough estimate of their position within USJ, and from there, a route back to their teacher. Kirishima holds his arms out behind his back, and Izuku climbs on, though he's not quite able to resist the rising embarrassment at the thought of riding on someone else's back.

"You good?" Kirishima asks, and Izuku nods, and then they're flying off the roof Kirishima landing cleanly - the force of the jump crushes the concrete beneath them. Izuku climbs off the other boy's back, impressed, and after dusting off their legs both of them break out into a run, conversing as they dash throughout the park.

About half a minute ticks by before Kirishima turns his head to face Izuku. "So I get what your suns are for, but what about that cannon thing on your arm? You used it against Bakugou in the battle trial, too."

"Oh! Uh, the actual engineering behind how it operates is too confusing for me to really comprehend, but basically I can use my quirk to release a latch, and that shoots out a tiny pellet thing that sticks to whatever it hits. The pellet basically has a really cold center, so I can use my quirk on it to throw who or what it's attached to away. I can use it to throw people back, or to get them off-balance. It's how I threw Katsuki back down to the floor when he tried to jump after Uraraka, during the battle trial. The force of my quirk crushes it though, so it's one use only, and I can only store about 15 of them in the gun at a time, so I have to be careful about when I use it."

"That's so cool! You're costume is so manly, and it supports your quirk perfectly! Mine's so simple." Kirishima's excitement trails off, and Izuku's hands flail.

"No! It just means that your quirk is already strong on it's own - I need support from a costume to make mine as effective as it can be, but you can do all that on your own."

Kirishima grins, almost bashfully. "Thanks, Midoriya! I think your quirk is super manly, though!"

Izuku can't help but smile at that.

They manage to exit the collapse zone, and Aizawa and the villains are within eyesight - a crowd of thugs, probably not much stronger than the ones Izuku and Kirishima faced, line the ground, Aizawa's victims. Aizawa himself has his elbow placed firmly in the white haired villains hands, attempting to pull away from the man's grasp. Kirishima tries to charge in, but Izuku holds up an arm in front of him, because at this distance they definitely can't reach the villains in time to save Aizawa themselves, and adding students in would only distract Aizawa. They need to let Aizawa get out of reach so their attack doesn't compromise him.

And then Izuku sees the skin of Aizawa's elbow begin to crumble, the red flesh of his muscles exposed, and suddenly Izuku understands what kind of villain they're dealing with.

"Kirishima," Izuku manages to eke out. "Don't go for the white haired villain under any circumstances. His quirk - you saw it, right? I have better range. I-"

Izuku sees Kirishima tense, a small growl emitting from his lips, teeth grinding. Pupils dilated, mouth shaking almost violently, Izuku begs, staring into Kirishima's red eyes as they dilate and widen.

"Please." Izuku doesn't know how to convey it in words, the desperation he feels, the images flashing in his mind of Kirishima's skin slowly rotting away-

Izuku isn't sure how many seconds pass, but his and Kirishima's staring competition is interrupted by a violent grunt from the center of USJ, and Izuku turns to see's Aizawa's arm, bloody and twisted like the bone itself was crushed to dust.

Izuku bites back a scream. "Aizawa-sensei didn't nullify his quirk? There's no way-"

And then a second arm crumples, limp, and Aizawa doesn't scream, but Izuku can see his pain on his face. Aizawa had definitely been erasing his quirk that time. The only answer left is the most horrifying one they could arrive at.

"...He's just that strong." Izuku doesn't know how to fight against something like that, doesn't think he can fight against something like that, and then he hears the white haired villains voice, faintly. "This is a weapon designed to kill All Might!" The man is grinning happily, and Izuku thinks that if he doesn't do something, anything, then something that can kill All Might will be crushing Aizawa to death, bones cracking and then shattering under the sheer force of the monster, and Recovery Girl can't heal something like that-

Izuku closes the distance between himself and the villains quickly, until there can't be more than a few meters between him and Aizawa, and his enemies surprise quickly gives way to a cold determination. There's very obviously no way he can win this fight. In fact, he's nearly guaranteed to die, but even so, if he can just buy a few seconds, there's a sliver of a chance that someone, anyone in his class, might be saved, so he doesn't really have much of a choice.

The white haired man opens his mouth. "Kurogiri," he says simply, and the meaning behind the order is obvious enough. The warp gate quickly moves between Izuku and the monster and near-instantaneously opens a portal in his body. Izuku nearly halts, for a moment, because it was obvious that Kurogiri needed about a second to open the portal to teleport Izuku, and then it hits him. As Izuku charges Kurogiri, he tilts his body to the left, and then swerves to rush the hand-covered villain directly. Kurogiri's yellow slits widen, and then narrow, mist shooting out of his body to envelop Izuku's body, covering the meter or so between them.

Just as Izuku had hoped, he doesn't teleport, not instantly. Izuku turns around to face the man directly, swerving his leg until it connects directly with the body the miasma originates from, and then he pushes with everything he has until the man doubles over, mist evaporating into the air. Kurogiri's body flies backwards, practically flailing in the wind and landing ungracefully on it's side around 50 meters away. Izuku turns to face the white haired villain, who suddenly begins to scratch as his neck violently, tearing off flakes of skin.

Izuku laughs, shakily. "My prediction was right. The warp gate can only create defensive portals instantaneously. There's a window between when his mist envelops you and when he actually teleports you when he's vulnerable. I'm lucky that he had a body, though - I guessed because of the metal clothing he used to cover his face." The white haired mans scratching gets even more violent until tiny chunks of skin and flesh begin to fly off of his neck, small trickles of blood running down his hand.

"A secret extra enemy? We got ambushed? That's bullshit! We didn't even get a turn to attack before he got rid of my warp gate!" The villain begins whispering to himself, muttering and twitching erratically. "Nomu, change of plans." The monster releases Aizawa and comes to it's feet. "Kill the green haired kid. Smash his face in." Any indifference the villain might have had is long gone, replaced with rage and bloodlust. Izuku tries very, very hard not to run away, though it's hard to know if he could, even if he wanted to. He feels frozen in place, glued to the ground. He took out the warp gate, he distracted the monster, he bought everyone some time. He's done what he came here for. He tries very hard to be content with himself.

The thing pulls back it's arm, still several meters away, and gets ready to bring it crashing down into Izuku's face-

(Kirishima sees what's going to happen before it does, here's the "crunch" of Izuku's bones being turned to dust, sees his face pulverized again and again until there's nothing left but a bloody mess, and he thinks that he needs to stop him somehow, even if it kills him.

He remembers a figure looming over those two girls from his middle school, how intimidating he was, how desperately Kirishima told his legs to move and how they didn't, and thinks that there is no Ashido Mina to save Izuku, right now.

He's aware that stepping in between him and the Nomu probably won't change much, but he'd rather die than watch from the sidelines and fail again. His skin ripples, threading itself into ever harder, ever more jagged edges, and the Nomu's fist connects with his chest. The force of it sends Kirishima's feet digging into the ground, but even so, he doesn't fall. He's not actually hurt at all.

He stopped the punch.)

Kirishima's hardened limbs normally seems something like wood, to Izuku, flesh turned hard blocks, but now it seems almost like a lattice of jagged edges dancing across his skin, like he would cut the air itself if he moved. It's very obviously more than a little stronger than usual.

But more importantly, it stopped the Nomu in it's tracks.

Izuku thinks he hears the white haired villain screaming, something about cheat codes, but he's in too much shock to care, because Kirishima just stopped Nomu.

Kirishima just stopped a punch made for All Might.

Then the red-head's legs wobble, his skin returns to normal and he topples over, landing cleanly on his side, and any hope Izuku had of ending the fight there vanishes into thin air. The Nomu pulls back his fist again, and Izuku is kind of pissed off that he has to prepare himself to die all over again, but at this point he's kind of gone numb.

It's with even greater surprise, followed by pure, overwhelming, unadulterated joy when the entrance to USJ suddenly bursts open, because sometimes miracles really do come true, and apparently it can happen twice in one day. Regardless, they absolutely cannot die, now, because though the usual smile is absent from his face in an incredibly menacing scowl, Izuku still hears it.

"It is fine now!" comes bursting out of All Might's mouth, ringing throughout USJ, and Izuku believes him.

And then suddenly Izuku sitting down on the floor, several dozen meters away from where he was with Kirishima, still out cold, leaning against Izuku's chest. Izuku is, distantly, aware that All Might just moved them, but he doesn't have much time to process it before Aizawa's lying next to them, too. The difference in speed is staggering, and it only reinforces both the difference between Izuku and his classmates and the pros, but it also reminds Izuku that he was just fighting against something of that speed, and he really is suicidally reckless, isn't he? If Kirishima hadn't pulled out something like that at the end, something completely unaccounted for, a total anomaly - in other words, a miracle - he would have been crushed to dust. It's sobering, honestly, to realize just how useless he is in comparison to the pros.

'Deku it is, huh?'

"Hey! Hey, nerd! Shitty hair!" Speak of the devil, and he shall appear, apparently.

Bakugou stomps over to Izuku, aggravated. "What the fuck happened here? Why the fuck is shitty hair out? What happened to Aizawa-sensei? Actually wait, fuck off. Where's the warp gate?"

Izuku tries to laugh, but it gets caught in his throat and something somewhere in between a scoff and a giggle comes out instead. "Uh, it's kind of a long story. Kirishima overexerted himself, I think, and went into a form that was so tough that even a punch from that monster thing - Nomu, apparently - couldn't hurt him, but then he passed out. Aizawa-sensei got into a fight with the Nomu. Uh, I already took out the warp gate. There's a period where he's vulnerable when he tries to use his quirk offensively-"

Katsuki sighs. "God, you really are a total Deku. Of all the fuckers you had to take out, it had to be one of mine? Whatever. Handsie over there will make a decent replacement, I guess."

Izuku giggles again. "Never change, Kacchan."

"The fuck did you just call me!? Hey, don't tell me you're out of it too, Deku! Deku? Deku, are you on painkillers or some shit!?" Izuku literally can't stop laughing, because he just got into a near-lethal fight with a group of villains, and Bakugou's first reaction is to complain that he didn't get the chance to take out one specific villain, and it's so quintessentially Bakugou that he can't help but appreciate it as a beacon of normality in this entire fucked up situation.

The rest of it is kind of a blur, to be honest. He vaguely understands that All Might is fighting the Nomu, and while Izuku is worried for him, it's All Might. If All Might can't beat the Nomu in a one on one fight, then there's nothing he can do about it, and the Symbol of Peace has both Bakugou and Todoroki focused on detaining the hand villain - Izuku's confident in their chances.

Just to be safe, though...

"Katsuki! Todoroki! The villain with hands can make anything decay if he touches it with his entire hand! Fight at a distance!"

Bakugou grunts. "Shut up, you fucknut! I've got this covered - go take hair-for-brains to the entrance. Frog girl is already bringing Aizawa-sensei!" Sure enough, Tsuyu is gradually dragging Aizawa's limp body to the front as best she can, with Uraraka's help. Slinging Kirishima over his shoulder, Izuku drags the red-head away from the fight very, very slowly, but he's interrupted by what seems like an earthquake but is actually the force of the Nomu being suplexed into the earth, nearly knocking Izuku off his feet.

"So, this creature is designed to take 100% of my strength, then? In that case..." All Might's voice seems to command a respect from the universe itself, like the laws of physics have made the world so that everyone will hang on to the hero's every word.

The Nomu groans, and the villain begins muttering under his breath.

"I'll simply have to override the limit of his force absorption by going beyond 100%!" All Might cocks back his fist, and the Nomu twists in the ground futilely.

An erratic voice screams. "Nomu! Nomu, get out of there! Stop him!" Izuku guesses that it needs direct commands to operate properly, but the creature can't hear the hand-covered man through the rock.

Suddenly Izuku is quite literally flying back, Kirishima in tow, along with the villain, Bakugou, and Todoroki. Punch after punch after punch pelts the Nomu, flesh rippling from the force of every impact, totally defenseless against All Might's fists. 

"Have you ever heard this phrase, villain?" By now the combatants are scattered among the field aside from All Might and the Nomu, Todoroki, Bakugou, and the white-haired villain far enough apart that they can't really fight. All Might's fist seems to literally glow with power, a bright star in an empty, empty world. "Go beyond!"

The force of the impact sends shock waves through the Nomu's body, violent vibrations deforming the creature, and somehow the punch seems to have actually generated heat with the sheer force of it's impact. Izuku can barely even see everything over the wave of wind throwing him backwards. The Nomu almost seems to detonate from the inside, and the sound of All Might's yell resounds throughout the air.

"Plus Ultra!"

The resulting impact blows apart the earth beneath them and sends chunks of rocks and dust in all direction. Izuku shifts Kirishima's face to press it into his chest - Kirishima breathing in all that dust would be bad, to say the least - and attempts to repel as much of it as he can with his quirk. As the glass in the dome shatters he manages to repel all of the actual stones and most of the dust, but by the end of it he's still coughing pretty badly. The dust in the air acts as a fog shielding All Might from the rest of the world, but the giant hole in USJ dome pretty much says it all considering the results of the fight. Now all that's left is the silver-haired villain himself.

The pros arrive right after and take out any of the remaining thugs, and Izuku is given the privilege of actually seeing Present Mic angry, a sight legitimately difficult to imagine but intensely frightening. The hero is shaking with visceral rage as his screams neutralize wave after wave after wave of villains in mere seconds. Snipe immediately begins aiming for the arms and legs of the white haired man, and Izuku is given the displeasure of seeing Kurogiri back on his feet - evidently, his strikes weren't as strong as he thought, or the warp gate is more resilient than he firsts appears. Izuku watches, Kirishima in tow, as Kurogiri shields the other villain as best he can. Thirteen, evidently hurt in combat, attempts to counter with his own quirk, but both villains manage to vanish into the air before they can be neutralized.

Izuku manages to carry Kirishima through the chaos to the entrance, exhausted as he is, and he places him gently on a stretcher. Izuku is pretty sure that Kirishima is just exhausted, but either way, he needs to have a place to actually rest other than the ground. He reunites with the rest of 1-A, and Uraraka comes up to give both Izuku and the still-asleep Kirishima a quick hug, complimenting both - "You were so brave! Who knows what would have happened if you hadn't saved Aizawa-sensei!?" Iida grasps Izuku's hand in his.

"I was regrettably not present to witness you defend Aizawa-sensei from the villains! However, I must give you my deepest gratitude, Midoriya. Thank you for valiantly defending the class while I was absent!" Izuku isn't even overwhelmed by Iida's energy, for once, and he simply laughs softly. What else can he do? He's alive.

They're alive.

That's enough, for now.

Soon after Todoroki and Bakugou both meet up with the rest of the class, and Izuku joins in with everyone else in showering them in praise.

"You did an amazing job, Todoroki! You too, Katsuki." Todoroki simply shrugs, and Bakugou scoffs.

"Whatever, nerd." Bakugou is as dismissive as ever, both of his own achievements and others.

That's the thing about Katsuki - he never seems to be satisfied at all, not with himself, and not with others. Izuku would find it sad if it were literally anyone else, but he's pretty sure that to the blond this is simply step 10 of his eighty part plan to take over the entire universe, and therefore inconsequential by virtue of the pebble-like nature of his foes.

Todoroki is... different, to say the least. "Not at all, Midoriya. I heard that you fought all three of them by yourself, and managed to take the warp quirk user out of commission for the duration of the fight." He says it simply - Todoroki says everything very simply, really. Izuku thinks it's much like his quirk, or at least one half of it.

Izuku rubs the back of his head sheepishly. "Ah. I actually probably would have died if Kirishima hadn't saved me?" It isn't meant to come out like a question, but it kind of does, at the end. "I really just made a gamble and got lucky."

Uraraka, listening in, shakes her head violently. "No way! You totally saved us, Deku!"

It's kind of a shock, coming from Uraraka, to the point where it actually kind of hurts. Izuku stares, and Uraraka blushes. "Oh my god! I'm so, so sorry, I just overheard Bakugou call you 'Deku,' and I started thinking that it sounds a lot like 'dekiru,' you know? Like, 'you can do it!' I really didn't mean it as an insult, honest!" Uraraka laughs sheepishly, and Izuku joins her.

"Um, no, it's fine! I hadn't made that connection before, but if you want to use it as a nickname, that's okay."

Uraraka groans. "I just- I can't believe I just blurted that out. I really am sorry!" Izuku laughs.

"Really, Uraraka, it's fine." Izuku turns back to face Todoroki to find that the other boy has already disappeared.

Tsukauchi gives everyone the rundown of Aizawa's injuries, which are thankfully mostly confined to his arms, and therefore, repairable. Afterwards, everyone sans Kirishima and Aizawa file back on to the bus in an orderly fashion, and drive they way back in silence, so concluding Izuku's first (and hopefully last) trip to Universal Studios Japan.

No one sees All Might for the rest of the day.

Izuku doesn't understand Takahashi at all, and he thinks he never will. His mother's tears are expected, her hug exactly as planned, but it's hard not to stare forwards blankly when a second set of arms wrap around both Izuku and his mother. Once, perhaps, it could be perceived as an anomaly, but twice?

For some reason, Takahashi cares. Izuku's step-father cares.

Izuku and him have never been particularly close. They rarely interact. Izuku is fully aware he's hard to get along with, or at least was for a very long time. Their only point of connection is in the form of Izuku's mother.

Izuku is the first to admit he's not all that great with others, but his mother's husband? Caring about him? 

(It doesn't line up with what Izuku knows about fathers at all.)

The two sets of arms clutch him tighter.

Izuku doesn't hug back.

The day after USJ Izuku and Kirishima meet up in front of a McDonald. It's not exactly the classiest place on earth, but neither of them are very interested in "high-class" food at the moment, and neither can afford it, either. They slide into a booth comfortably. Izuku orders a milkshake, and a burger and some fries. Kirishima orders... considerably more.

"I haven't eaten since I woke up yesterday," Kirishima says, by way of explanation.

Izuku's milkshake arrives first, and as he begins sipping it, Kirishima apprehensively opens his mouth.

"Hey, Midoriya. Do you still keep in touch with any of your friends from middle school?"

Izuku freezes, because ouch, and laughs sadly.

"I, um, didn't really have any? Not because the kids at my middle school were mean or anything! I just..." Izuku sucks in a deep breath, but he feels like if their going to keep nearly dying with each other he may as well spill it. That's what friends do, right? They tell each other secrets? They share their emotions?

"There's really not a nice way to put this, but I basically ran away from other people. I was afraid of them, I guess. It's... a long story."

Izuku isn't even sure where it all started, at this point. The easy answer would be when Bakugou Katsuki punched him in the face, but really, it probably started with fathers that don't come home, with crack after crack after crack in his and Bakugou's friendship slowly beginning to show. That moment on the courtyard was just when the weight of it all became to heavy to bare, when he couldn't handle it, any of it, so in response he ran away to a place where no one and nothing could hurt him, because no one and nothing was even really there.

Izuku can't help but feel that it looks childish in retrospect.

"Basically, I was afraid of happiness because it's fleeting, I think. I threw away any chance I could have had of it because I was worried that if it collapsed I would collapse with it. I choose lukewarm unhappiness because I thought that it would be easier and less scary than the alternative. If you want to put it more simply, I wanted to retreat into safety even if it hurt."

Izuku smiles sadly. "It's pretty foolish, I know. I kind of feel bad for tricking everyone at U.A into thinking I was nice, because for most of middle school I was kind of a little shit." Izuku is surprised by Kirishima's impassioned response, by a hand placed firmly on Izuku's shoulder.

"No way, Midoriya! I think that it's super manly to keep going, even if you were lonely!"

Kirishima pauses for a few moment. "I saw that incident with the sludge villain, you know, but I never put two and two together until yesterday. You were definitely super cool in middle school! You stood up to a villain and beat him! You helped people even if you didn't understand them, or if they didn't help you back. That's exactly what a hero would do!" Kirishima's smile wavers for a moment. "Besides, we're friends now, aren't we?"

Izuku honestly thinks he's going to cry, but he seriously thinks that the universe might wipe him out of existence, because if he was actually that big a loser he probably shouldn't be allowed to attend U.A.

Their food arrives at the same moment, and Kirishima wolfs down a burger. "If we're gonna air all our dirty laundry, I may as well spit it out now."

Izuku raises an eyebrow. He somehow doubts that Kirishima was part of a chain gang before entering U.A.

Kirishima sighs. "Before I was in U.A, I was honestly a total loser. I was always talking about being manly and stuff - you know, like the Crimson Riot? He's my inspiration. But I never really got it, you know? One time I saw this villain standing over these two girls that went to my middle school, and no matter how much I told myself to move it wouldn't happen at all. It made me realize how fake I had been. If I had really been manly I would have done something. I was a total fraud."

Kirishima grimaces. "So that's why I think that it doesn't matter what you were like before. Right now, I think you're the manliest person I know! And if you wanna be unhappy, or something... I'm not gonna let you!"

You deserve better goes unsaid.

Izuku's not sure why he expected any less from Kirishima.

(They go to Kirishima's house afterwards, and they do play Smash Bros. It turns out that Izuku is pretty great with Luigi, much to Kirishima's dismay.)

Chapter Text

School starts again two days after USJ, and despite the class' attempts to reacquire the casual, lighthearted air of the first few days, it's plain to see that a tension remains in the air, a weight on everyone's shoulders whispering that really, if they weren't safe at USJ, they might not be safe here, either. That the man with the warp quirk could, as far as they know, get them anywhere, at any time. Every laugh seems to trail off towards it's end, every smile a bit too forced. Normalcy is, to put it plainly, gone. No one is willing to be the first person to stop staring over their shoulder.

No one wants to be the first person to let their guard down.

Izuku is, as a consequence, almost excited for the Sports Festival. Is distracting yourself via engaging in violent combat with your fellow teenagers a healthy method of avoiding thinking about the lethal combat you just engaged in? No, probably not.

He's is going to do it anyway, though, and besides! Izuku thinks he's significantly better at punching a thing until it stops punching back then he is dealing with the confusing vortex of feelings related to... well, just about everything in his life. That talk with Kirishima is about all he can manage - he's putting all of that behind 25 layers of bright yellow 'Do not touch!' tape and hoping he gets to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.

Izuku sighs, because he has the feeling it's about to be a long few weeks. Kaminari places a hand on his shoulder in an attempt to reassure him - "Come on, Midoriya! You've got nothing to worry about. You're one of the strongest guys in this class! Just relax and enjoy the festival!" - and while the blond is wrong about the source of Izuku's worry, he can appreciate the sentiment, and flashes a weak thumbs up. Aizawa (covered in bandages like a parody of a mummy, because why wouldn't their homeroom teacher attempt to do his job with a broken everything?) dismisses them for the day, and just as Izuku's ready to go home and get some much needed rest, they're met with what can only be described as a torrent of students. The entire hallway is loaded to the brim with other first years, all obviously there to scout out the competition. Bakugou, unfortunately for everyone - including Bakugou - is the first to interact with the horde.

"Out of the way, extras." It's said with the same disinterested veneer Katsuki plasters over everything he sees until he's absolutely positive it's worth his time (it's all or nothing with him, honestly) and the rest of the students are obviously, and somewhat understandably, offended. The whispers of "Dick!" quickly become murmurs and are about to veer off into chants when a purple haired boy with the worst case of bedhead Izuku's ever seen attempts to confront the blond. He says he's disillusioned, though it's obvious he wasn't exactly fond of the hero course beforehand, and Izuku decides that it's high time he does damage control.

Grabbing a fistful of Katsuki's blazer, Izuku yanks it as hard as he can and smoothly steps out of the way.

"Kirishima, can you stop him before he manages to ruin our P.R any further?" The red head in question flails for a moment before he grapples on to Bakugou's arms, seemingly because there isn't much else to do, and hardens to brace for impact.

Ignoring the screams of "You shitty dick!" or "Die, asshole!" emanating from behind him, Izuku turns around, plasters a smile on his face, and extends a hand outwards.

"Hey! I'm Midoriya Izuku. I know you've obviously gotten off on the wrong foot with Bakugou, but even so, it's nice to meet you. Try not to hold it against him, okay? He's like that with everyone, me included, so it's really nothing personal."

The purple haired boy is clearly unimpressed which, okay, fair, but Izuku is trying! He opens his mouth and immediately begins to state what's effectively a deceleration of war.

"You know, some people would kill to be in the position your in - us general education students have only got three chances, in effect. This sports festival is the schools gift to us. Our chance to move up in the world. Of course, that means that some people can move down, too."

Izuku doesn't falter, and he's feeling a bit mean, at the moment, so he decides to respond in kind, albeit in a very different manner.

"I see." Izuku doesn't retract his hand. "Well, it's been a pleasure..."

No name is forthcoming.

"A pleasure, but I think I should probably be heading home, now. I hope to see you at the festival!"

The intent is clear.

You can try.

Home is, to put it frankly, awkward. The fragile balance between Izuku and his stepfather is broken, now, like an ever more elaborate house of cards with more and more and more piled on until it inevitably collapsed. Izuku doesn't want or need half-glances when Takahashi thinks he isn't looking, doesn't need those touches that linger a bit longer than would be normal for two casual acquaintances, doesn't need the older man stepping into that odd zone placed in between 'stranger' and 'father.' It's an intrusion, a foreign entity entering a world Izuku has kept sealed off, not in some vague hope that there will ever be reconnection, or to repair a relationship that never really existed in the first place but because he doesn't want it.

Izuku is pretty sure that the core of it all is that someone asks for an inch and he gives them a mile. He's made so vulnerable, so open, so totally disarmed by the world around him if he dares to let it too close because he can't help but care in way far more sincerely then he wants. He gives pieces of himself away, with that kind of connection, and he's come to terms with that in a sense. He's okay with sharing his very existence with Kirishima, or Uraraka, and he couldn't stop with his mother if he tried.

But the very idea of giving away something so fundamental, of finally opening the metaphorical lock on "Fatherhood" and handing it to a man he barely even understands, of giving himself over to his stepfather in the way he does his mother-

No.

He'll give away anything but that, anything but something that could break him so completely, create a fracture as final and terrible as it inevitably will.

Takahashi will only ever be stepfather, the man that loves his mother but who must always remain at a comfortable distance, flinch and falter and back off at every attempt to get close.

Izuku spends nearly all his time out of the house. He had gotten better about actually staying home and relaxing, a bit less skittish, but he's back to slinking off at every chance he can get, either hanging out with Kirishima or training. Takahashi may be a nice man, but Izuku thinks that his first impression of 'kind of a doormat' was pretty accurate, and he never manages to take any sort of real initiative in interaction. Inko is stuck in the middle, split between trying to mediate, comfort her son and deal with the fact that her only child nearly just died.

In a sense the Sports Festival is a sort of saving grace - hopefully, if Izuku wins it can give his mother something to celebrate and possibly restore some sense of normalcy.

U.A has specialized training grounds for quirks because of course, though it's honestly probably a good idea to give irresponsible, possibly deadly teenagers a place to both train their quirks and let out their aggression that won't, say, kill a hapless passerby.

Izuku has a problem, to say the least, regarding the upcoming Sports Festival. Unlike most Pro-Heroes, Izuku's quirk doesn't generate much power on it's own - in other words, it's situational. Unfortunately, the Sports Festival doesn't allow usage of costumes, and the environments can be pretty static. It's not the best scenario for a quirk like his - even rubble would be better than nothing, but not even that's a guarantee. Furthermore, mobility remains Izuku's greatest weakness. He, along with Kaminari and Kirishima, are some of the few members of the class that have no way to use their quirk for mobility. He needs a way to move when he needs to, both for the Sports Festival and in the future.

The only problem is that he doesn't have that move.

Izuku sighs, and bites down on his lip, mumbling at what's seems close to the speed of light to anyone unfamiliar with his habit, though at this point more than half the class is pretty much aware that he lives with one foot placed in another dimension, and his head usually isn't far behind.

"Midoriya!"

Izuku stops his muttering and turns to face Iida, smiling behind him. For once the other boy seems almost relaxed, at least in comparison to his attitude in class. It strikes Izuku that perhaps for Iida his actions as class president don't really come as naturally as they come, and a beat passes of silence. Iida doesn't falter, as steadfast as ever, and politely asks if Izuku would like to spar. He agrees readily, both because it's valuable experience and because he doesn't have much else to do - he's beginning to reach the upper threshold of training his quirk without more formal instruction, and it doesn't seem like throwing around trash is going to cut it anymore.

They walk through the practical training facility, Iida prattling on about anything and everything he knows about it - that is to say, everything - while Izuku listens dutifully, grateful both for the conversation and for the somewhat interesting trivia. Eventually they arrive in a small, circular arena, probably around 20 meters in diameter, with a rough, cracked dirt floor. They settle into their respective positions, and the casual air quickly vanishes in favor of a calculated anticipation, each waiting for a wordless signal.

Izuku starts first, ultimately, swerving his front foot from it's normal position in the front stance and ghosting it over the floor in a semicircular motion. Pressing diagonally downwards with his quirk he sends chunks of rubble and small plumes of dust flying forwards in an approximation of a smoke screen. Iida ignores the threat and bursts forward through the cloud, deftly avoiding any of the small rocks sent his way in an attempt to close in on Izuku. The green haired boy leaps to his left, flying narrowly out of Iida's range just as the other boy nears Izuku's original position in the ring. Swerving around to face where he had just been standing, Izuku slides backwards, hand gliding over the mostly smooth floor, as he begins to come to a stop he stretches his fingers outwards and pushes towards the center of his palm with the edges of his hand, the force of his quirk crushing the ground underneath them as Izuku's fingers dig into the earth to clench around the jagged pebbles being crushed into a ball.

Iida turns around in preparation of a follow up, but Izuku is already leaping towards him, crushed earth in hand, his knee eye level with Iida. Ducking slightly, Iida very narrowly avoids Izuku's attempted kick, but before he can capitalize on the opening Izuku's hand shifts so that the clump of rock is now facing Iida directly, and he shifts the delicate balance keeping the rocks contained to crush them into even smaller pieces, flying out in a torrent of earth resembling a geyser. Iida rolls out of the way of the strike, only barely being grazed by the edge of the rock but unable to properly respond with his quirk.

Izuku, seeing the opening, swerving as soon as he lands to face the still-prone Iida, and he charges in an attempt to close the distance. Leaping into the air and facing downwards, as his body passes over Iida, now surging to recover from the fall, Izuku manages to just barely brush Iida with the tips of his fingers, and he forces out his quirk. While a slight brush can't truly replicate the force he's capable of exerting, it's still powerful enough to stop Iida in his tracks and to depress the ground slightly as the other boy sinks into it.
Landing on his side, Izuku, rolls across the floor and lunges, somewhat clumsily, to place a hand against Iida's chest before he has the chance to recover.

Iida lets out a somewhat erratic breath, and then sags, slightly.

"I yield - excellent work, Midoriya!" Izuku extends a hand outwards and pulls the blue haired boy to his feet, both pausing for a moment to dust themselves off. "You outmaneuvered me expertly!"

"Not at all! I just got a bit lucky, that's all, and it was just a spar - I'm sure a real match would have turned out completely differently." Izuku isn't even lying - he's seen Iida's full speed, and it honestly feels more like Izuku was putting in more effort than Iida was rather than any real gap in ability.

"As humble as ever! In that case, I hope to fight against you more seriously at the sports festival!"

Izuku grins as they record their match - they have to, since the arena has to be repaired in between spars most of the time - and they both exit the room. Parting ways to go back to the rest of their routines (their routines being training half to death, naturally) Izuku can't help but grin - a real grin, where it comes from somewhere in your core and splits your face until you notice because its so wide it hurts.

It's a sensation he's gradually getting used to, despite it all.

Izuku buries his head in his hands while Bakugou practically cackles besides him.

"This is fucking karma, dickwad! Enjoy your shitty speech - that's what you get for being a showoff!" The blond is practically fucking screaming, and in the cafeteria which may as well be public considering how many strangers occupy it!

Izuku groans. "Evidently not, considering you're still standing." Uraraka pats his back in a manner that's probably supposed to be soothing but mostly just conveys immense amounts of pity.

"Also, where do you get off calling other people showoffs, King Of Explodokills? Are you seriously going to try to lay a claim to humility right now?"

Any response Bakugou could have had is drowned by endless, endless laughter, because Katsuki cares far more about Izuku's misery than he does his own rage, an immensely occurrence, comparable to, say, a full solar eclipse, or perhaps the bottom ring of hell. Izuku almost feels special, if by special you mean "like he's spiraling into the depths of despair."

Actually, scratch that. He is spiraling into the depths of despair.

Izuku loves Iida but god, the last thing he needs is his incredibly, painfully, eardrum burstingly loud encouragement double teaming him with Kirishima's boundless enthusiasm. Their whole group probably look like a mixture between a circus show and a Lovecraftian horror - the entire pitiful excuse for a friend group that has somehow formed around this twisted nightmare might actually be both of those things.

He groans, trying desperately to ignore the combination of pity and contempt positively radiating from every corner of the cafeteria, and buries his head in his arms.

The rest of the two weeks until the sports festival are a messy, unorganized flurry of training-practice-training-practice in a desperate attempt to ensure that Izuku manages to avoid failing either the sports festival or his speech. The days start to blur together, in a sense, each one crammed so full that there's nothing left to put in the next but more of the same until they all start to meld together. The only brief respite he has is a short intermission a mere two days before the festival, a group outing of Izuku's friend plus Bakugou-the-angry-wet-cat, coaxed out with promises of free food and public humiliation.

He doesn't appreciate the comparison much, but everyone else does, and really, Izuku can't resist ribbing.

It's so easy, Izuku thinks, and at the same time so hard to settle down into friendship after spending so long without it, like his whole life had been an intermission and really not much time at all had passed between the starry eyed four year old and the Izuku of today.

It's strange, so right and yet so wrong because he's all jagged edges that chafe and scratch against everything that comes close, like a half-dead cat that's lived for too long and doesn't know how to do anything but cut and run away and resign himself to the fact that his mother will never watch him leave with anything but apprehension, that he will never understand what it means to love a father, and somehow he wakes up everyday and people simply sit back and let his needles cut and chip.

It must be why he get's along so well with Kirishima, who doesn't even seem to notice when Izuku gives too little or too much, who just takes it and sits back and grins.

His friends are so much stronger then he his, and selfishly Izuku is glad that they don't ever see it, hopes they never realize that he takes so much more then he can give.

Izuku, privately, wishes that this calm between the storms would go on forever.

The speech goes all right, in Izuku's opinion, the obvious stream of "school unity" and "equal opportunity" and "competition" and how if everyone does as best as they possibly can then their generation of heroes can be just as promising as the one before it, and he barely knows what he's saying, most of it repeated so constantly that it's practically instinctual. Uraraka and Iida and Kirishima all compliment him as he gives a shaky sigh and a murmur of "thank god it's over," while Bakugou says that he really should have just admitted his defeat publicly to save himself the embarrassment. It's laden without a single death threat, and Izuku is pretty much an expert at telling the difference between "neutral Bakugou" and "die-you-lowly-shitstain Bakugou," so he doesn't take any offense, and just flashes a thumbs up in his own personal form of a retort.

Much more pressing is the upcoming announcement of the first of three events, which could range from alright (most types of combat) to the absolute worst (any sort of race) in terms of how suited they are to Izuku's abilities. While direct combat is usually pretty fine, when it comes to raw power or speed Izuku doesn't really have much in either category - he's really more of a utility guy then a force of the universe like Bakugou or Todoroki (god knows what's up with him, he's been staring at Izuku like he's contemplating murder for the past week) - so a lot of possible events could be really, really shitty.

He can only pray, he supposes, as he watches the (almost certainly fake) roulette spin to decide on the first event.

Midnight's voice echoes throughout the field, as... er, sultry as ever, though Izuku's suffered enough through "Modern Hero Arts" to find it frankly pretty ominous.

"Alright, everybody! I know you're all more than ready to see the first event! Previous years played this a little too straight for U.A's liking - so this, year, we're shaking it up! I'm happy to announce that this year's event will be..."

A frankly outright unpleasant grin spread across Midnight's face as the roulette comes to it's dramatic close.

"A vertical obstacle course!" Izuku is pretty sure more than a few students, possibly including him, pale.

"Oh, and our school's selling point is freedom - so naturally, you're free to, as long as you stay within the bound of the course, do whatever you want!"

As the enormous gates concealing the brightly illuminated pit, equipped with far too many cameras, begin to open, Izuku's mind immediately shifts into high gear.

U.A's reasoning seems logical enough - as far as Izuku's aware no one has a quirk giving them an obvious enormous advantage in this event, and it still fills the purpose of a preliminary race while forcing students to think on their feet. Aside from the early battle trial, which barely qualifies at all, it's a fairly safe bet to assume that few to no students have experience with large scale vertical movement, so for most it's a battle of adaptation and quick thinking.

Nevertheless, Izuku's quirk still isn't all that suited to mobility or large scale movement.

It's not... awful, by any stretch of the definition but he certainly wasn't given an optimal choice.

Midnight guides the students to surround the enormous pit. Camera's float around, both in the air and on the walls, recording the student's every move, and Izuku notices a second smaller gate not dissimilar to the first, though god knows what it leads to. Questions for later, Izuku guesses, though probably not much later, all things considered.

"All right everyone, before you start you'd better listen up! As you can see, the first obstacle is a free fall, with barriers covering small sections of the floor for you to land on. Every surface is covered in ultra durable elastic material that will absorb any force you can throw at it, meaning that you're not in any danger if you jump into them. The real obstacles are the gusts of wind that will shoot you towards the walls and off your course, and, of course, all of the other students you're competing against! The first 42 to reach the end get to move on to the second event!"

Everyone peers down into the borderline chasm below. While no one sees any gusts of wind it'd be virtual suicide to jump in immediately. It's entirely possible that the timing of the gusts is set based on the first person that enters below a certain depth, meaning the first person to jump in is probably going to be immediately knocked out of the first place spot, at least. In other words, the goal is to be the second or third one in, though Izuku's pretty sure that at least a good chunk of the competition isn't going to be willing to jump in so soon. Plus, while Izuku doesn't doubt U.A's ability to provide high-grade plastic support whatever to ensure that no students end up having their bones shatter into a trillion pieces and/or exit out their rib cage.

Like he said - first one in? Virtual suicide. If it weren't for Bakugou he'd bet a decent sum that the first few moments would be awkward standing around waiting for someone to take the plunge.

Well. Bakugou and Izuku.

Midnight's whip/flog/whatever (he's not well educated in medieval-torture-tools-turned-BDSM-toys, sue him) cracks down with a start, and the competition begins without countdown, as usual.

Immediately, Izuku, leaps forward down to the platform below him. See, while giant gusts of air attacking the first who dares to enter would normally be a pretty big disincentive, the nice thing is that gusts of air are usually, well-

Cold.

They are, very suddenly, not as threatening.

Izuku's free falling through the air and he's sure that Bakugou, and a good portion of Class 1-A (though he's not discounting 1-B or any of the general students just yet, because that would be both unwise and rude) are soon to follow. In fact, he can practically hear the blond's unholy grin-screech that he gets every time he is simultaneously in some way offended by Izuku, yet at the same time viscerally excited for the sure to follow retribution. Izuku feels the wind blowing with his quirk before it ever touches his skin and imagines a bubble around him, pushing it all around him like a tornado with an eye ever focused on Izuku's location, and accordingly the wind flies backwards in the direction it came from, fraying and bursting outwards like a maelstrom with any definite shape quickly lost after Izuku's intervention.

He sees several competitors out of the corner of his eye - Bakugou, quickly adjusting to the pressure from the wind, quickly launches small blasts of sweat to counteract the gust, though he curses as his trajectory is slightly (on accident!) thrown off by the additional thrust of air coming from Izuku's repelled obstacle. Todoroki, too, is on the move, adjusting his ice so to slide down it, twisting and turning in an attempt to form a sort of cone that protects him from the wind. Iida, Kirishima, Uraraka and several other students, either from his class, course, and more rarely, year, coming to join him. Izuku sees Kirishima get thrown into a wall pretty violently, and represses a small prick of worry. He's sure Kirishima is fine, what with the supposedly super non-threatening stuff covering the walls, and besides, upon closer look an ever present grin remains on the redhead's face. It looks like Kirishima hardened his body and uses the force generated by the wind shoving him into the wall to simply rebound downwards, and Izuku wonders if he plans to bounce from wall to wall to the bottom.

Izuku shifts his focus back towards the rapidly approaching platform, and reminds himself that his classmates don't need to be watched and coddled - he still has a tendency to plan way too many steps ahead like some kind of demented chess master puppeteer, but his friends neither want, need, nor should get his strategies right now. He can save the fun theorizing for later. He has a race to win.

Slamming into the floor, Izuku is pleasantly surprised. U.A wasn't lying; the thing really is ultra-durable, and the kickback he receives for his troubles is incredibly low, and in response he hops down to the next platform, deflecting another blast of air and ignoring Katsuki's cry of "God dammit, you fucker!" as he is yet again disrupted by Izuku's quirk. Letting the pleasant hum of adrenaline wash over him, Izuku notes that competition can actually be quite, well, fun when no one's lives and/or egos are at stake and he doesn't have to play 4D emotions chess in a futile attempt to produce an outcome through sheer force of meddlesome will.

When dealing with villains it's like he's a thousand little insects, each flying desperately in an attempt to distract, deter, hell, annoy the enemy into dropping even the slightest hint of weakness in the hopes that Izuku can exploit it for the sake of keeping someone, anyone, alive. Now it's as if all those flies have come together and melded into a single, blissfully simple charge of win. Izuku can't help the grin spreading over his face as Midnight announces the results with what sounds vaguely like glee, but Izuku can't really tell, and he keeps getting further and further away from the voice, each camera on the wall growing less and less noticeable as he bounds from platform to platform, each competitor hot on his trail until he can sometimes sense the heat of Bakugou's blast, Todoroki's ice very nearly nipping on his feet and each close call for the lead is exhilarating.

Nevertheless, Izuku has both a natural advantage and a rather obnoxious deterrent in the form of all his wayward gusts, so it's no surprise he's the first to reach the second stage, which is sort of like a reverse of the first, except this time the only obstacles are how quickly you reach the top, and, well.

Each other.

It seems to be structured as a large rectangular-ish building containing a series of several floors, though Izuku isn't quite sure how many until he reaches the top. He supposes that this was what was behind that fun little gate, or at least the top is what's behind the gate.

It's kind of pointless to dwell on anyway, and Izuku doesn't spend much more than half a second before rushing in. Once inside he sees that it really does seem to be a simple building, each floor containing several staircases - seven, or so, on the first floor - spaced out relatively evenly, each floor lit in ways Izuku still doesn't understand and, for once, doesn't really care too. It doesn't take long for Bakugou and Todoroki to catch up, followed by Kirishima, Sero, Iida, and a few Class B students that Izuku doesn't know much about aside from the fact that they seem pretty strong?

Regardless, he's practically high on adrenaline at this point, curving through staircase after staircase in a desperate attempt to stay in the lead, though he knows he's gradually losing ground to both Todoroki and especially Bakugou, who has a pretty clear advantage over him considering the activity.

They pass floor after floor after floor, and aside from Bakugou's occasional assassination attempt, Izuku barely interacts with his fellow students. There are really only 5 or 6 other students in his immediate area, and neither Izuku nor the girl with the vines (who seems to be his ever-closer shadow, at this point) really feel up for sabotage, even if she is barely a few meters behind him at this point. The distance between every competitor closes and closes as they get closer to the top, the same general path of vague antagonism-but-not-really occasionally spilling over into outright feuds, shifting the balance of power by mere meters that feel more like miles. That is, until they reach the penultimate floor.

Izuku, Bakugou, and Todoroki all reach it at around the same time, but while there's been three for the past few floors now there remains a simple two, and Bakugou lucked out in that respect - Izuku and Todoroki are, it seems, going to be fighting for the position of second-to-top-floor, after which there will be presumably a single staircase left, it alone determining the victor of the entire race.

Todoroki's eyes narrow and a ripple of ice shoots out over the floor, like crackling lightning in an attempt to chain Izuku to the floor, while he simultaneously rides a wave of ice towards the staircase. Izuku easily dodges the ground attack, though it does cover the entrance to their current floor for any unfortunate followers (i.e Kirishima and vine-girl). Izuku rushes for the staircase as Todoroki's wave ascends directly over Izuku's head, not engulfing him but soaring over him like a flying icicle, and Izuku knows that if he doesn't disrupt it immediately then Todoroki will ride it straight to victory. Gritting his teeth, Izuku ignores the sound of ice being smashes to pieces (Kirishima, most likely. Unfortunately for vine-girl, she wasn't able to clear the barrier before the red-head closes the distance between them, and semi-secretly Izuku is rooting for him).

Reaching for his quirk, Izuku pushes on the ice above him and Todoroki both, shattering it into what looks like shrapnel and sending Todoroki tumbling downwards, though he manages to regain a knee with a deft roll. Regardless, Izuku's already sprinting for the final staircase, and Bakugou is readying a final blast to send him soaring to victory, and Todoroki grimaces, readying and summoning a second wave of ice to send him towards the entrance.

Izuku knows, immediately, that he's not reaching the entrance first at this rate, and though he's already several steps up the stairs and inching there, Bakugou's closer and Todoroki's faster, and all Izuku can do is grab a leg flying straight past him. Bakugou releases a sound halfway between a yelp and a scream, and Izuku pulls the blond's warmer body towards him in a desperate attempt to stop him from snatching a win. Izuku is sent careening Todoroki and pushes him to the ground with his quirk just as Bakugou is released and sent towards the ground. Now both of his main competitors are on the ground, and the next are only just now coming up, but Izuku fucking slips, doesn't regain his footing quite fast enough and he's sent just a few small steps down.

It's still enough. Bakugou throws himself back using his quirk with wild abandon, a maniac grin on his face because he's fucking smart despite his general dickish behavior and he knows, Izuku can fucking see it in his eyes, that he's won. Izuku scrambles up the few remaining steps, a hand reaching out desperately in an attempt to beat the other two boys to the surface and Todoroki comes crashing into him on a wave of ice again, but this time he's gone too far, angled all wrong for Izuku to send him towards the ground, and all three boys are lunging forward, single arm stretched outwards.

Bakugou's there first, clearly, and Izuku grimaces because it's just a few fucking centimeters, but they are a very evident few centimeters. Him and Todoroki are practically laying on top of each other in a horrifying mess of limbs and they're both lurching forwards and before Izuku has any idea what the fuck just happened all three of them are rolling across the hard floor of the victory podium, settling in an eldritch horror of tangled, gangly, teenage limbs. Izuku moans and Bakugou hisses, batting an arm (Todoroki's? Izuku's? His own? Who the fuck knows?) away from his face. Todoroki lets out some sort of weird muffled groan because his face is stuck in Izuku's shirt, and he can barely even move since at least one arm and leg are being pinned to the floor by the weight of the two other teens.

Kirishima is the next person out, followed by Iida and vine-girl and a bunch of other faces that jumble together pretty quickly as the red-head lifts all three to their feet, asking questions that sound very concerned while looking very, very amused. Bakugou won, a fact for which he appears nearly unbearable smug, and Todoroki and Izuku are both privately seething, though Izuku really, really hopes he's masking his annoyance better than Todoroki is.

Izuku and Todoroki placed second and third respectively, though Izuku has played back the event more than a dozen times in the past two minutes or so as they wait for everyone else to finish up, and he still can't pin the moment when he actually wins, just an awkward, embarrassing tumble of limbs, and he kind of doubt's Present Mic's ability to accurately judge such a close call considering, well, he's not Snipe, but he's pretty sure that Present Mic made the call anyway. Maybe it'd just be a bit too ironic for the number two hero's kid to get number two on the podium.

The tabloids would have a field day.

Izuku refuses to grimace at the thought of it. Considering Todoroki's face at the moment (no doubt considering what Izuku is) he doesn't imagine it would go over too well.

The rules of the cavalry battle are explained, and Izuku is admittedly impressed by Bakugou's ability to trivialize even the most ridiculous of challenges - he looks more excited about having a giant target painted to his back than anything. Bakugou would ordinarily probably have a hard time finding any teammates, but his sheer force of will combined with his complete lack of regard for other's wants and/or needs enables him to rope Kaminari, Sero, and Ashido into teaming with him. Izuku himself finds a fair few offers, but finds himself quickly gravitating towards Uraraka, Kirishima, and Iida, a mixture of "Can I be on your team," and "Let's team up," and "I'd be honored to join you!"

Strategically, they make a good team - Izuku's current plan is still being drafted, but he's thinking something along the lines of using Uraraka and Kirishima to softened the kickback from Iida's quirk for the rest of them.

Kirishima pulls Izuku out of his own head, and he realizes he was probably muttering again, to his embarrassment. It's a habit he'd like to break, but he can't seem to quite stop himself. Izuku shakes his head, lightly, like an animal shaking water off it's fur, and climbs onto the collective backs of Kirishima, Uraraka, and Iida. The three of them tilt their heads towards him, slightly, ears ready for a plan Izuku is... somewhat sure he has.

Izuku quickly relays the sketch of a plan. Iida is positioned at the head of the triangle, with Izuku perched atop the arms of Uraraka to his left and Kirishima to his right. His job is that of the engine, the driving force that sends them to their targets at breakneck speeds. Uraraka will function like oil, keeping the whole thing running by levitating everyone except for Iida for a short moment, allowing him to go at top speed without worrying about accidentally killing everyone or something. Kirishima will be support, first propping everyone up for as long as possible to extend Iida's time to recipro-burst, and then acting as a break, hardening to cushion Uraraka and Izuku's fall. Izuku himself is playing the role of offense, the greatest threat to their target:

Todoroki.

It makes sense, logically. Ice quirks are pretty much totally nullified by Izuku's quirk, and Todoroki has shown absolutely no signs of being willing to use his fire side. Izuku doesn't know why, but he's honestly grateful - Todoroki is enough of a threat when he has the power of one ungodly powerful quirk, much less two. He's partnered himself with Tokoyami, Yaoyaozoru, and Jirou, none of which have any particular weaknesses to any member of Izuku's team, but none of whom are hard counters to Izuku either. He's reasonably sure that Kirishima can brave Dark Shadow, who seems to be rather small today (something about light? Daytime? More stuff Izuku has to research later, a list that seems to just keep growing and growing). With 735 points, even if they don't manage to take a headband, they still likely aren't in too much danger. Ultimately, Izuku's pretty confidant about his chances.

But not confidant enough not to bother safeguarding, because, well, Izuku's pretty sure that there's no such thing as "too confidant not to bother safeguarding."

And there are certainly targets that are easier than Todoroki. Izuku doesn't want to target 1-A, Todoroki not withstanding, and neither does anyone else on his team, but even then, 1-B still has several teams, and therefore, potential targets. There are five teams that don't have someone from Class 1-A on them, two of which aren't really even full teams, so neither of them are particularly lucrative. Of the three fully formed actual teams it seems like... well, it seems like the one headed by the blond kid is just the least competent of the bunch.

The other two seem far more determined to succeed, far more varied (and potentially versatile) in composition and generally more ready for combat in general. Izuku thinks that Team A - he doesn't know any of their names, but he needs to call them something - is probably just the safest bet overall, especially at the start of the match where they'll probably be the least prepared.

Izuku leans a little bit more on Iida, who tilts his head slightly to look upwards at both him and the headband. Uraraka does the same, and Izuku returns both glances with a nod. Kirishima grins, as optimistic as ever, and flashes a quick thumbs up that Izuku returns, a bit shakily.

But he returns it nonetheless. Pointing slightly at 'Team A' and it's members, at nearly the opposite end of the arena. Iida nods. Midnight raises her... flog (god, that can't be legal) and starts a countdown that echoes throughout the stadium.

"Three!" And an shark-like, toothy grin spreads across her face. "Two!" Izuku's line of sight zeroes in on the blond haired kid and his teammates, muscles tensing in preparation. They still look both none the readier and none the wiser to Izuku's offensive. "One!" The flog snaps downwards with a violent crack, and "Start!" bellows out and echoes throughout the arena.

Immediately, Iida revs his engines, small streams of hot air flowing out of them as his muscles tense, and Uraraka's grip on both Kirishima and Izuku tightens as they float to the air. Izuku snakes an arm around Iida both for support and he, Kirishima, and Uraraka's bodies all tense and clump together as a burst of violent energy flies out of Iida's legs with a screech. Iida takes an enormous step forwards and they're off, bodies tilting ever so slightly to the right as Iida dashes forward in the beginnings of a semicircular oval. Each step crashes into the ground with a visceral boom that leaves small pebbles and broken rocks flying backwards behind them. Their semicircle completes as they reach the halfway mark between them and their target and Iida lurches, this time tilting leftwards to complete a second one, the pattern they leave behind in dust and rock and wind like the beginnings of an incredibly, incredibly violent figure 8. By this point both the team their targeting and virtually everyone else are just beginning to start, all of their paths leading towards one Bakugou Katsuki and the ten million points on his headband.
Izuku and his team's victims stand like a deer caught in the headlights as Uraraka cancels her quirk and everyone is sent careening towards the ground, Iida nearly complete in his dash towards them. Izuku and Uraraka hold themselves upwards with Kirishima's support, clinging to the two other boys as Kirishima hardens himself and slams his legs into the ground. Dirt is sent flying behind them like a geyser, and Kirishima very nearly stumbles, and Iida is clearly having trouble balancing everyone's weight against the force of his forward momentum but for a first try it's more than enough, and it is, ultimately, a success, and Uraraka returns to the ground, a little shaky, yes, but by now they're on course for the blonde and his team.

The brown haired kid seems to snap out of it just in time to use his quirk, and when Iida gets within about a meter of the other team he staggers for a moment, like hitting some invisible snag - some sort of barrier, Izuku deduces, and then stops himself before he can get sucked into his own head in the middle of a competition. Revving his engines slightly, Iida take a breath, his mouth contouring to a tiny 'o,' and swerves his leg, cleanly cutting through the barrier-apparent. However, the motion leaves him partially turned to the enemy, the Iida-Kirishima-Uraraka triangle turned so that the Iida-Kirishima side instead of Iida himself faces the enemy, and a black haired boy sees this as the perfect opportunity. His arm seems to almost... twist, like some sort of drill or something, air swerving around it like a strange mini-tornado, and he lunges forward for Iida, arm poised to strike. Kirishima steps forward, crossing his arms and hardening them, intercepting the drill and pushing back against it.

As the gyrating arm slowly returns to a still Uraraka pushes back against Izuku, who launches off towards the team leader and his headband, leaning forward over his team and part of theirs, right hand stretched out and palm facing upwards as if to grab the points directly from the other boy's neck. The blond narrows his eyes and smirks, and Izuku feels a strange sort of block placed in the air in front of him. It's strange, because Izuku was nearly certain that the air barriers were being created by the brown haired kid he's currently perched above.

It ultimately doesn't make much of a difference, though, because the barrier is honestly pretty weak, and it doesn't take much more than a slight nudge with his quirk to shatter it like glass, which apparently surprises the other team's leader enough that he begins to lean back, though Izuku supposes that it might be a particularly ineffective form of retreat. Izuku's hand comes within few tiny inches of the headband, and at this angle he pushes upwards with his quirk, sending the headband eye level with the other boy who attempts to lean back further, trying to pull the headband with it. Shifting his right arm yet again, he moves it rightwards and manages to brush the edge of the band. The slight contact is more than enough, and, brow furrowing in concentration, Izuku nudges the band ever so slightly with his quirk so that it goes flying off the other boy's head to Izuku's left. The blond's eyes shift with Izuku's, but where the other boy's widen Izuku's narrow, like zeroing in on pray and his left arm shoots out to snatch the band from the air before it can blow away in the wind.

A hand pulls on his ankle, the feeling of weightlessness seeping back into him as he lurches backwards towards Iida, Kirishima, and Uraraka, everyone's eyes shifting with him and the other team's band. Snaking his right arm across Iida for support and shifting back into position as fast as they possibly, Uraraka and Kirishima begin to float with Izuku. Iida revs his engines yet again, muscles tensing, and streams of energy burst out from his legs, carrying him and the rest of Izuku's team far, far away from the other boy's.

They made off with their headband like bandits, really, which is kind of ironic considering their hopeful future occupation. Contradictions in goals notwithstanding, Izuku, Kirishima, Uraraka, and Iida are firmly on the other end of the arena, two headbands in tow, and not all that far from where they started. With an extra 280 or so points, they're now firmly in second place behind Bakugou, who's still fighting off the hordes of people trying to steal his headband.

Izuku leans down towards Iida and the rest of their team. "Let's retreat for the moment, guys. In all the chaos, it'd be easy to lose a headband while going for Todoroki."

Iida and Uraraka nod, one more reluctantly than the other, and Izuku can tell that Iida recognize the tactical logic behind it, but is still apprehensive. Kirishima grimaces, sighing.

"I know it makes sense, but... it's just not all that manly, y'know?" Izuku nods.

"I get what you mean, but still... just think of it like waiting for the big showdown, I guess? Like we're not retreating but waiting for Todoroki's team to get ready to fight."

The red-head's frown lightens, slightly, and he sighs again. "Yeah, I know." Taking a deep breath, Kirishima exhales, and then grins again. Izuku returns it, and then centers his vision in front of him. About two minutes have passed, and the initial wave of attacks against Bakugou have died down as many of the groups realized that each attempt was only losing headbands. Two groups have already been eliminated, though neither of them were from 1-A, and several more have lost their headbands to the the blond menace. Todoroki has, notably, managed to snag another headband, putting them at third place and only just barely below Izuku. It sends a pretty clear message - if they don't try to keep up, there's a very good chance that Izuku and his teammates are getting left in the dust.

If Izuku were cognizant enough, he would perhaps wonder if his pupils are blown wide. Instead, because he is high on adrenaline and close calls and the stench of crisp pain hovering in the air, he waits, and he does not. He lets the world roll over him in waves, twisting and contouring into a haze of twitch-twitch-twitch-twitch as muscles tense and bodies glide and the world burns, the universe losing it's shape as Izuku plays a thousand games of chess at once, all on instinct, and yet instinct born from flesh grazing flesh and muscles that ache as you force them to move and sweat turned to bitter ash is not so different from thought that they don't succeed anyway, gracefully dodging and weaving and winning, even stealing an additional headband that doesn't give them enough to outpace Todoroki (who's gained points too, of course) but let's them at least follow his dust before it dissipates. Izuku tastes it, all those sensations blending together, and he doesn't think before he has cleanly maneuvered out of another enemy's assault to send them flying to the ground, disqualified.

It's the other reason Izuku longs to be a hero, spends days and days toiling away in feverish nothings in the hopes of getting stronger, and he wants to lock it away and let it shrivel up and die and die and die because-

Because he shouldn't find some sort of sick thrill in life or death combat. Because he shouldn't feel exhilaration at the thought of a fight when it's serious, solemn because other people's lives rest upon it. Because it shouldn't feel so much more real.

(Because it's the part of him that begs, in it's own, subtle way, for Bakugou to hit him again, to feel skin scrape away skin and to lie in a pool of his own blood because he's so, so, alone, so achingly lonely in the velvet night, where the cracks in the concrete are as vast as the cosmos, and the space in between equally impossible to cross so-

And so he beckons for the back of those heads receding in the distance, watches them spit fire and relishes the burns, tastes the bitter fruit of knowledge, that someone can cross that, even if Izuku can only ever be a chain that forces them to do so.)

Izuku does not watch the time tick down on the clock, but he does feel it, somewhere inside of him, as the haze clears and the number of teams dwindles and the timer goes down, down, down until they have five minutes left.

Five minutes to defeat Todoroki.

Five minutes to get a headband.

 Izuku doesn't know why they're about to go attack Todoroki - there's six teams left, now, and Izuku's pretty sure it's mathematically impossible for them to lose if they just defend their headbands, so this is actually an incredibly strategically poor decision.

He tells himself this, but it's kind of hard to hear his own thoughts over the rhythmic thump of his pulse, and it seems to want more. His teammates seem to want more.

So.

They give themselves a moment to breath in, to collect themselves and maybe construct an actual plan of attack, but for once Izuku's mind is at a blank. He's never been good at actually devising a plan in the traditional sense - his usual method is to narrow down the best plan using some pretty simple cost-benefit analysis: what should he do next? And then: How can he get that done?

It's just that Izuku's mind answers the first question with 'Uh, defend and retreat?' and can't quite seem to get that Izuku is telling it that yes, okay, he knows, but how can he beat Todoroki? It's like talking to a child that can only respond with "Why?" to every question. He's sure that he could come up with a good plan if his brain would just stop and listen, but it seems like that's out of the question, apparently, so it looks like their winging this.

Izuku slides his tongue over his lips, like their chapped and dry or something, even though their really not. "Um, so. Does anyone have any suggestions?"

Uraraka and Iida look a little bit lost, and awkward, because they're... Izuku knows that they're smart, really smart, that even without him the team would honestly probably be fine. They don't need a strategist, not really, and they certainly don't need one to tell them that going after Todoroki isn't the best idea.

(Kirishima just looks out of it and dazed, which- it's not the surprising, when you think about Kirishima's accidentally designated role of "Team Tank," what with all the blows he's been taking.)

"Uh-" Izuku's voice doesn't... crack, exactly. It kind of just splutters.

"Okay. Let's-" Izuku's eyes dart over to Team Todoroki, currently fighting off an assault from Team... Shinsou, if Izuku remembers correctly. Those taunts end up going ignored - or at least, Shinsou is dealt with before anyone really has a chance to respond. Todoroki simply sends a giant pillar of ice his team's way (which only draws more attention to the biggest question Izuku has regarding that team: why are Aoyama and Ojiro on it? And why aren't they using their quirks properly?) and effortlessly knocks them over, disqualifying Shinsou, and Izuku actually feels kind of bad for the guy. Yeah, he was an asshole to Izuku's class, but to be fair Bakugou doesn't give the best first impressions, and Izuku can sympathize with him - it can't be fun being treated as a second-rate knockoff to the "real" heroes-in-training, and it's only fair that he feels frustrated by it. Besides, he made it pretty far, so it's fair to assume that he's more than decent skill wise. His quirk might just not be suited to robots.

Either way, Shinsou is out of the match now, and yeah, it's literally impossible for them to lose if they actually defend their headbands. The same is true of both Todoroki and Bakugou, and while he expects Bakugou to keep going anyway, Todoroki is generally calm enough to avoid unnecessary confrontation, and strategic enough to realize that the best option is simply to retreat. Izuku is about to turn to his teammates and tell them that honestly, maybe they shouldn't be going for Todoroki because this is a competition, and it would be a terrible idea to blow their chances just because they feel like fighting, and he's honestly expected agreement, because that barrage of ice is a pretty sobering display-

But then again.

Generally calm enough.

Because Izuku's attempt to calm his team down is interrupted by an absolute mountain of ice flying his way, shimmering deadly and sharp (god, Izuku hopes that's just his imagination) in the sun, and then Izuku remembers that he did beat Todoroki in the first event, if only barely, but maybe "if only barely" just makes it all the more frustrating. And maybe Todoroki isn't as composed as Izuku had assumed.

Motivations aside, there's now a giant wave of ice storming towards them, and Izuku doesn't know what to do but reach forward. It's kind of funny, actually, if only because Izuku never really overcame his distaste for ice all the way from childhood, that the start of everything he's been working for what amounts to his entire conscious life now seems to culminate here. In the end he's still not doing much more than pushing ice.

So he just leans forward, nearly falling off his teammates who are now looking at him with abject horror, and yeah, that's fair, honestly. Sweeping his arm forward and pushing against the ice does seem like a really, really bad idea at first, but Izuku can practically feel the cold of the thing as he starts to actually focus on it and he's somehow so, so sure that if he just tries then it won't touch him. Can't. That he's safe, somehow. Even so, his arm extends further and further and the ice does seem to crack a bit, near the front, but it doesn't stop, and Izuku faintly wonders if he's going to die in a sports festival. He tries pushing, harder and harder and harder and then-

He doesn't die. What he does, instead, is swerve his arm towards the ice until it reaches the apex of it's swing, and after that point it kind of becomes unclear. Izuku thinks, vaguely, that he may have grazed the ice for an instant, but it turns out that when he has his quirk already activated the "touch is way, way stronger" rule goes into full force literally instantaneously, because his team barely has any time to hold him in place despite the combined efforts of Uraraka, Kirishima, and Iida. It turns out that there is a lot of recoil for...

Well. For blowing Todoroki's 20 meter tall wave into pieces. The aftermath is almost like a steam explosion with the ice rapidly cooling the air around them, wind generated by the... blast, in effect, blowing the chilled air across the field, like water bursting from a dam. The air almost looks like mist, small chunks of ice spraying outwards towards Todoroki, which in conjunction with the mist force him to cover his face with an arm, like he's facing a blizzard. Ice is strewn across the ground, shatter into hundreds and thousands of tiny pieces.

Izuku knows that his mouth is open right now, because he had known that his quirk was strong, but he hadn't known that it was... this strong. When he fought the zero pointer in the entrance exam the force of it had basically almost killed Izuku, so he had just assumed that it was some sort of one time thing. Like a last resort that he could never actually tame.

Not something he could just... do.

Todoroki moves his arm back down to his side, mouth slightly agape and eyes wide, lip trembling ever so slightly - probably from the cold. Every team in the arena is standing frozen in shock. Grey and blue eyes stare into Izuku's own, and the only word for the entire experience that can describe it is surreal. 

And then, of course, Midnight declares that the second event is over, because when Izuku had said that every team had frozen, he must have been deluding himself.

As if Bakugou Katsuki would ever stop just because his maybe-rival on the other side of the arena semi-accidentally blew a wall of ice open, and so in the opening in which everyone, including a team from Class 1-B comprised entirely of girls, had been standing still, he had blasted the leader neatly off their spot perched atop their friends, gotten them disqualified, and with only four teams left, the event had ended.

Todoroki looks unsatisfied, to say the least.

Chapter Text

The dust settles, both figuratively and literally, as all the students wade out of the arena and spectator seats into the cafeteria. Squinting, Izuku raises his arm level to his face and smiles apologetically at Kirishima, who's treading towards the other boy. The grin on the redhead's face fades to a confused frown as he slows. Izuku knows him well enough by this point to guess that he's probably trying to beam his concern across the arena, and ask "What's wrong?" Kirishima's simply that kind of person - he always seems to care unconditionally, immediate investment and willingness to help that Izuku can't really say he has. Izuku's always run away from others, if he's being honest, was always afraid to ever reach a level of understanding that allows him that kind of investment. He'd been too afraid of the reverse, of the idea that another person could understand him, and consequentially, hurt him, whatever that might entail. Kirishima, on the other hand, is so quintessentially good that its hard to imagine a version of him that wouldn't have a shoulder to lean on.

Its something Izuku admired about him almost instantly, and sometimes he wonders if Kirishima isn't already a much better hero than he is.

Jabbing his thumb at Todoroki, who's slowly plodding towards the cafeteria with the rest of the student, Izuku hopes that Kirishima understands. The other boy's smile quickly recovers, and he turns around, though his head is still tilted slightly backwards. A bit of tension that he hadn't known was there flees from Izuku's body, and he flashes a thumbs up as a quick thank you before turning towards Todoroki and half-walking half-running towards him. Izuku would probably think of it as a power walk if that didn't sound totally, incongruously goofy considering the situation at hand.

Izuku catches up to the other boy quickly, and takes a short breath in preparation, closing his eyes momentarily.

"Todoroki."

Swerving around with an expression that might be described as "murderous" if one's feeling generous, the boy in question stops, along with a few passers by. Izuku clears his throat for a moment, and follows up with a tense "Can you come with me for a moment?" His tone is what Izuku hopes is pleasant, but the unspoken alone still hangs heavy in the air. Todoroki squints his eyes into what probably qualifies as a glare, but at the moment Izuku doesn't particularly care, and he nods his head.

Izuku turns and begins walking towards one of the many small, unused pathways (it reminds him of a tiny gate to a castle) within the arena and Todoroki follows, apparently feeling pliant after the enormous battle. Then again, Todoroki doesn't seem petty enough to actively avoid following such an inconsequential request, so perhaps Izuku is just too used to Bakugou. Once Izuku thinks they're sufficiently out of sight and ear of any of the other students, he turns around to face Todoroki again.

"It probably isn't my place to ask, but..." Izuku takes a deep breath, and stares into both of Todoroki's eyes. "Why don't you use your fire?" Todoroki wears an expression that very much looks like he's thinking 'Yes, it isn't your place to ask,' and his jaw clicks slightly like he's about to voice that idea, but Izuku barrels onward. "Or, when are you going to use it, rather? You can't ignore it forever - we both know that."

Todoroki clenches his fist at his side and lets out a shaky breath, though it's more unstable with rage than it is anxiety.

"In my memories, my mother is always crying." It's somehow inviting and yet final all at once, like the beginning of a story where the ending is so blatantly, unavoidably obvious that you may as well be watching a car crash unfold in slow motion. As soon as Todoroki mentions the phrase "quirk marriage" Izuku, on some level, knows the horrifying direction Todoroki is going.

The difference in their backgrounds is so stark it's almost enlightening - Todoroki is the protagonist, in all honestly. Izuku's relatively privileged, was blessed with a warm house and food and a kind mother, even if his own father had been less than ideal, and has been plodding onward through life at a comfortable pace ever since. Todoroki crawled, inch by cold, brutal inch. It makes what he's about to say next even more ironic, as he watches Todoroki walk away with barely contained rage - rage that must have always been there, boiling under the surface.

Izuku knows he has no real right to say it, but even so-

But even so.

"Todoroki, I think that-" Izuku gives himself a moment to clear his throat, more out of nervousness than anything else. "That as you are now, you're making the same mistake Endeavor is." The other boy turns around in a flash, looking just about ready to commit murder, which is in all honestly fair at this point. "The mark of a hero is being willing to give up everything you can for the sake of others..." Izuku tries to swallow the growing pocket of air in his throat. "Or at least, that's what I think. So even if you're motivation is probably stronger than mine, or maybe stronger than anyone else's here, seeing you half-ass it while everyone is doing their best to become a person capable of being a hero to others - watching everyone else try to dedicate themselves to helping the world while you're so focused on yourself..."

Izuku pauses for an long moment, and he thinks his jaw is shaking a little bit because this is awful, it's cruel, but it's the only way Izuku knows how to do things. These ideals are all he has to communicate himself to others, all he has to express himself, and he doesn't know how to convince Todoroki any other way. He doesn't really want to think of the sum total of his existence, of anyone's existence, as a combination of these vague axioms about the world, but when it comes down to it it's all he has, and Izuku can't help but think that as cruel as this is, it would be even crueler to let Todoroki wallow in his own misery while there remain those he could possibly save. Crueler to both the victims of that negligence, and to Todoroki himself.

"If you were put into a position in which the only way you could save someone is by using your left side, would you throw away your pride and your hatred, even if they are justified?" Todoroki doesn't react, doesn't respond.

Izuku bites his lip until it bleeds.

"Until you can say 'yes' to that question, I..."

Izuku bows and closes his eyes, taking in a deep breath. As he brings his body back upwards and opens his eyelids to face Todoroki directly, he lets the sound of air rushing in and out of his lungs reassure him. It's calming, in it's own way. It's shaky and unstable and could fail at any moment, but it's still real. Izuku is here, at U.A, and Todoroki is too.

"I can't let you win this tournament. Sorry for wasting your time."

Izuku treads towards the cafeteria, now already filled with students. Todoroki doesn't.

Logically, it's no surprise that Izuku feels more than a little antsy after his conversation with Todoroki, but it catches him off guard anyway. He's used to spending months on end practically drowning in time, and somehow he had gotten used to that pace, let a lethargic aura wrap him and grown comfortable with his position. It is, in retrospect, a really, really awful idea, because maybe complacency is not the road you want to take when preparing to fight off a group of deadly villains that can apparently challenge All Might. And yet it's only now that he feels something that had become alien to him - Izuku finds that he wants to win. He really, really wants to win, wants to prove to the world and to himself that he belongs here which is illogical, honestly, because he's performing pretty well both in class and in the tournament. He could get knocked out in the first round and no one would care all that much the next day, other than his mother (who might just be shell shocked that he's on national television in the first place) and Bakugou, though for two very different reasons.

But when Izuku thinks about it again he finds, unsettlingly, that maybe he doesn't deserve to be here. Todoroki might be here for what Izuku considers to be the wrong reasons, but he has concrete reasons. Bakugou wants to win, which is a terrible motivation, obviously, but it is a motivation, and Izuku knows that Bakugou would rather die than give it up. Izuku lets his eyes wander over the rest of his table - Uraraka, Iida, Kirishima, and Tsuyu - all eating lunch. There's a sense of overwhelming joy coming from the three who were on his team, all of whom look incredibly relieved that they made it on to the third round, in their own way.

Izuku tries to imagine how he would react if he had failed to advance, and he can't quite envision it, like it have never quite crossed his mind even though he hadn't been all that sure in his chances, but there's that sense of bemusement at the idea deep within him, like if it were to happen he'd go "wow, that sucks," and then forget about the whole thing, and the idea of it all seems to be more of curiosity than an actual threat.

Somehow, Izuku wonders if that isn't worse, because even if Todoroki dwells on the past at least he's dwelling on something - Izuku had simply been waiting, content.

Life goes onward, so why shouldn't he? What's wrong with not caring when it'll only ever hurt you in the end?

('Why should he need friends?' Izuku asks, tiny and young and alone and whispering to himself because really, loneliness isn't that harsh a burden to bear, is it?)

But if so, then what right does Izuku have to criticize Todoroki, someone who's gone through worse than Izuku, so much worse, and goes on anyway? How can he tell him he's wrong, that he has to try, because everyone else is too, when Izuku is perfectly content to sit back and half ass his way through his entire life?

'Someone else could have been here,' Izuku thinks. Someone that would have given anything. Someone that wants to be a hero so badly they'd die for it, who wants and needs and do anything they possibly could just to come to U.A because they want nothing more than to help people. Someone who isn't like Izuku.

After all, what does Izuku want?

When he asks himself he finds he doesn't know, and he doesn't know if he should be angry or disappointed because surely, there must be a reason, right? He had to have wanted something more than to watch the days pass by lazily, as if he was in a retirement home and not training to save people.

There's something a little bit disgusting about Izuku's lunch, now, though he's pretty sure it isn't the food itself, and he's a little more grateful than he should be when the bell rings and he's given an excuse to think about something else.

Standing up, Izuku and his friends, along with the rest of the cafeteria, funnel out of the lunch room and into the stadium once more. Most of the crowd, both spectators and students, is abuzz with excitement. For most of the Izuku's fellow first years, the experience isn't all that different from getting to watch the U.A sports festival live, and from that perspective he can see why everyone's so pumped up despite their losses. For the remaining students moving on to the third stage, there's a different air, for obvious reasons, Even Kirishima or (equally excitable, from what Izuku's seen of him) Tetsutestu appear more nervous than they do overjoyed, though there's obviously a current of the latter there too. Then again, it's not like every competitor is worried about their chances. Some (read: Bakugou) seem relatively carefree.

Gulping down a knot forming in his throat (oh God, he's in the top 16 of U.A, he's statistically pretty much fucked, how the fuck is he supposed to convince Todoroki to use his fire, why the fuck is he trying to convince Todoroki to use his fire-) Izuku turns to face Midnight, who's putting on an admittedly impressive, and likely not-entirely-legal, show of the whole process. The announcement of a tournament is neither surprising nor unwelcome, considering pushing people and things is kind of Izuku's specialty, and they do something at least slightly similar every year. The final round ultimately has to boil down to one on one fighting, when it comes to determining the strongest, well... fighter.

The real nerve-wracker here is going to be the brackets. An early match-up with Bakugou would be... unpleasant, if Izuku is being honest, for all parties involved (no doubt the blond's already started planning out some elaborate final showdown in which he proves his ultimate superiority over Izuku and... becomes the god of the known universe, or something). While facing Todoroki near the beginning wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, Izuku would prefer to have a little bit of time to collect himself before the... anything even vaguely related to that.

Luckily, when the brackets are revealed, he gets to let out a sight of relief. It's not like Izuku has any "good" match-ups (other than, ironically, Todoroki, and possibly Tetsutetsu) but he did manage to avoid dealing with anyone that seems too troublesome early on.

His first match, the second overall in the tournament, is with Juzo, who Izuku is pretty sure has some sort of liquification quirk. It doesn't seem too bad as a first opponent, and from there he could be fighting either Jirou or Iida. Again, neither have a quirk that hard counters Izuku's. He's not going to say that they're going to be easy battles, because, well, they aren't, but they're certainly doable.

(He hopes.)

Izuku is given a blissful few minutes to plan out the bones of a strategy against the three potential opponents he'll be facing in the first and second round, and it doesn't escape his notice that even the normally relaxed Kirishima, Sero, and Kaminari are all preparing in their own ways. It's not like any of the competitors would be able to have much fun while worrying so much over the matches, other than Bakugou (who wouldn't be caught dead actually enjoying himself with anyone else in any somewhat normal activity, anyway).

Turning to face the the projection of the bracket, his name placed in imposing bold font, Izuku thinks that first place really isn't that far away.

Izuku sucks in a deep breath as he watches the first match come to a close. Iida and Jirou had actually been pretty close in terms of ability, but the boy's greater mobility was making it difficult for Jirou to counterattack, and Iida had better stamina overall. Jirou was using her jacks as whips to control the space around her, knowing Iida wouldn't risk getting too close, but she was still slowly getting pushed back. She was, not unlike Izuku, pretty reliant on her costume for offense. With every opening Iida found with his immense speed she was forced to retreat just slightly further towards the edge.

Eventually, they reached the tipping point. Iida saw the gap between Jirou and the edge closed and decided to rush her, regardless of the strike he knew he would likely take from Jirou's jack. Charging into her, Iida managed to push her backwards, and she went tumbling through the air for a moment before landing (though it was a clean one) on her legs and side. The strike she managed to give to Iida in the chaos of the exchange had stalled him for a moment, forcing him to lean heavily on one leg and nearly drop to a knee as he tensed up, but he managed to recover just fast enough to send a quick, recipro-burst boosted kick in Jirou's general direction, one the boy had been saving up all match. The kick itself missed her by at least a meter, but the sheer force of the wind and the dust it brought with it forced her to stall her recovery for a moment.

The interval was just long enough for Iida to strike a second time. He rammed into Jirou, shoulders first, and while the strike itself was cleanly blocked with both of Jirou's arms the weight behind it pushed her backwards, ever so slightly above the ground. This time her landing was completely clean, on both two feet and ready to strike back, but at that point the match was already over - she had landed out of bounds.

Izuku had long since started blocking out Present Mic's commentary. Even while at home, as entertaining as it was, he had always preferred to ignore it in favor of peering over match after match after match between competitors. Quirk analysis had always been a passion of Izuku's, and when the time came he always liked to have the notebook on hand to jot down any observations and thoughts he had. Jirou and Iida were both sweating, flush with exertion, and Iida held out a hand to Jirou to lift her back onto the stage. It had been a good fight, and Izuku was glad that there were no hard feelings between the two - not that he expected it. Both were generally pretty mature, and no one in Class A was petty enough to legitimately resent anyone who did better than they did. That seemed to be Monoma's domain, and one he had pretty exclusive control over.

Kirishima patted Izuku on the back as he released a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding in. Coming to his feet, Izuku gave his friends a shaky smile, and let their reassurances calm him ever so slightly as he turned to walk out of the spectator's section.

A short flight of stairs brought Izuku down to ground level, connecting the seating to a long hallway that took on a strangely ominous aura, despite the bright lighting and nearly pastel coloring. Taking step after reluctant step, he watched the dull grey of the concrete arena, and the bright lighting that illuminated it and the red, rough terrain around it until he finally emerged out the tunnel and into the arena. He felt like a lab rat of some kind, tens of thousands of eyes in person alone, and no doubt many millions more on TV and online. He tried to let Present Mic's voice wash over him, calm him - he'd seen this before, after all. Watched this position many dozens of times, and honestly possibly more, and he'd been in a not similar scenario not an hour earlier, but at that point he'd been caught in the adrenaline of combat, and he hadn't felt quite so exposed with so many other students around him.

Izuku didn't have time to be thinking about that stuff, though, he reminded himself, because he was about to go up against one of the top students of Class 1-B and the entire first year student body, one who's quirk he knew little about, and one he had a pretty bare bones plan against. He couldn't afford to be distracted, not now, just mere meters on a leader board away from Todoroki. From something he needed to do, more than anything right now. From a job he'd given himself, because no one else seemed to be doing it..

From what could potentially be many thousands of lives saved.

He had to focus on the here and now if he wanted to get anywhere, so Izuku steeled his eyes on Juzo and took a bow, which was returned, and then with the violent crack of Midnight's flog, the match erupted, and Izuku with it.

Izuku felt his feet pound against the floor and he rushed towards Juzo, who seemed taken aback by his offensive maneuver for no more than a second, tops. Unfortunately, despite Class 1-B's relatively lack of combat experience, they were obviously no amateurs. Izuku wouldn't be overwhelming any of Juzo's openings, mental or physical, unless he created them himself.

It was slight, but Izuku definitely saw Juzo slide his foot slightly forwards. While no visible change occurred, that looked like exactly the kind of tell you would expect from a quirk that affected the ground. The distance between the two fighters closed as he rushed forwards, and Izuku grimaced as his suspicions were confirmed, feeling his foot sink slightly into the earth, like a mixture between slime and mud. Izuku glanced down quickly, and saw a long, thin line of sunken earth change appearance, stretching from Juzo's foot to Izuku's own. While it was possible that the mud didn't react unless a disruption occurred within close range, the strip between the two feet seemed to counter that theory, meaning Juzo likely had pretty precise control over his quirk, directing it to cover a specific, small piece of rock he predicted Izuku would step on. Not great.

However, the capillary-action like movement from point to point did indicate that Juzo had at least some limitations regarding what he could soften, and the thought bolstered Izuku. He wasn't facing some unmovable god, here - Juzo had his own shortcomings and restrictions, just like anyone else.

Izuku pivoted on both feet, a loud screech emerging from his sneakers as he did so, and used his quirk to push the mud-slush off his foot, bursting forwards nearly perpendicularly to his original direction and circling around Juzo with a speed that surprised even Izuku, as if he had been pushed before he had started running and the momentum had been channeled directly into his speed.

Juzo adapted quickly, but he was clearly unprepared for the disparity in speed between Izuku's normal movement and the burst he had received after pivoting - one probably nearing an additional meter per second - and Izuku adapted ever so slightly faster. By the time Juzo was ready to counterattack Izuku had stopped, no more than a few meters away, and had a palm laid against the floor of the arena. Pushing downwards with his quirk, Izuku forced small chunks of the concrete to break apart into fragments, and he collected the pebbles he crushed into his hand. As he came to his feet, Izuku watched Juzo realign with his opponent and place a single foot forward once more, obviously sending another wave towards Izuku, invisibly liquefying the floor.

Izuku took a deep breath, narrowing his eyes and rubbing a pebble between his thumb and forefinger. Tensing his fingers and squeezing down on the rock as if to push it out of the crevice he had locked it in, Izuku gave a light push, and watched as the rock shot out towards the floor, smashing against it uselessly. Biting his lip, Izuku jumped into motion, running to his side while making sure to keep his eyes on Juzo. The dance repeated again, and yet again Izuku shot out a rock towards the floor.

Stepping a few feet to his side and backing up, Izuku drew blood as he sunk his teeth into the side of his cheeks - he had lost the initiative he had managed to gain in the beginning of the match, and while he wasn't necessarily on the defensive, it was still a frustrating development. He watched yet again as Juzo stuck out his foot, trying to visualize the wave rippling through the floor, model the disruptions it created in his mind. Yet again forcing the rock out from between his fingers, he watched as it whizzed away from him, down diagonally towards the smooth concrete and colliding.

Except this time, with a splash. Izuku let the side of his mouth quirk up in a small smile. While the wave hadn't stopped, it was now clearly visible even as it skid across the ground with a surprising speed. Juzo looked momentarily surprised, and narrowed his eyes as Izuku easily dodged the small wave rushing towards him. Another step was taken, this time with more force behind it, and Izuku repeated the process, watching as the rock yet again hit its target.

It was inconsistent, to be sure, a fact backed up by the repeated failures Izuku saw in his attempts to hit the wave, but his rate of success, at least, showed that some level of regularity was at play, and it was a regularity Izuku watched his rocks predict with greater and greater surety, satisfaction - and relief - washing through him like a gentle tide. He had been worried about the unpredictable nature of Juzo's quirk, but really, no quirk was totally infallible, and while it was by no means a walk in the park, Izuku at least gained a rough idea of the speed and pattern of Juzo's waves.

The first, and most obvious thing, is that the waves moved fast. They spread through the ground and disrupted it with a pace that was frankly a little worrying and more than a little impressive, and even though he had a pretty good idea of its pace by now, several minutes spent carefully deducing it piece by piece, it still took him a little bit off guard. Secondly, while it wasn't huge, larger waves clearly moved slower than smaller ones, meaning that a sudden attack couldn't just be instantly countered with a huge wave. If Juzo attempted to cover a wide area on short notice, especially as a counter attack, Izuku could probably get in a strike, and throw Juzo off guard enough to potentially adjust to and push the liquefied concrete around, before the wave managed to actually submerge him.

Bolstered by his findings, Izuku restarted the assault he had abandoned at the start of the match. He approached more slowly, at first, but the more waves he dodged, or very nearly dodged the more confidant he became in his chances, and he began to pick up speed with his approach. The more Izuku dodged the more agitated Juzo became - he never became aggressive or careless, but just ever so slightly sloppier, a little bit less precise in his motions as he summoned a wave.

Izuku managed to inch closer and closer as the minutes ticked by, and at the 8 minute mark or so he was a few mere meters away. A single burst could cross that distance, and he would have an advantage in close quarters combat, something Juzo knew just as well as he did.

He began an approach but quickly aborted it and readied his stance as he watched Juzo send another wave, and judging from the force he kicked the ground with, and the slight tilt of the angle of his foot when Juzo did so, and the situation at hand, Izuku stood, and lifted his right foot ever so slightly and prayed, prayed, prayed that he read Juzo right. Waiting for a split moment in the hopes that his timing was just, just right, Izuku focused his stare down on Juzo, and slammed his foot into the ground with a decisive smack, as he impacted the surface of what Izuku was very, very glad was liquid. Pushing down with his quirk the moment he made impact, Izuku felt the tension build up the ground in the split second he held it there, and then watched with a brutal mix of glee and relief as the softened rock burst outwards into the air like an ink bomb. The wave was halted and nearly destroyed, but Izuku didn't waste a split second as he drew his right knee, fresh off of stopping the wave, upwards to his chest, and let his leg shoot out in a swift side kick.

Pushing with his quirk yet again, he redirected a small portion of the wave Juzo had sent to him - a small portion, yes, but still enough - directly back to its source, and he brought his leg back down to the ground. Watching as the wave he sent pushed Juzo back and disrupted the other boys momentum, Izuku immediately broke out into a sprint, a desperate yet highly calculated attempt to close the difference between the two - and, hopefully, the battle - in the only moment he was sure he truly could. Juzo recovered more quickly than Izuku had hoped, however, and managed to send out a second wave, less powerful than the first but still easily enough to stop Izuku in his tracks if he didn't find a way to avoid it.

It began as an almost subconscious mantra, a desperate, primal plea of please, please, please, please, please work as he slammed his foot into the ground, gritting his teeth as he jumped into the air not 20 centimeters before the solid rock transitioned into liquid, violently cracking the earth behind him just moments before it was swallowed whole by the tide Juzo produced.

Izuku watched as the liquid gap between him and Juzo closed, more and more and more as Juzo's eyes widened with surprise, meter after meter crossed as Izuku pulled his lower legs and knees upwards. Landing with a final, violent, crunch, Juzo took a small step backwards - after all, Izuku had landed where he just had been, nearly 8 meters of liquid crossed, and Izuku saw his chance.

He curled his right arm and swerved it upwards, in what at first seemed attempt to deliver an uppercut to Juzo's jaw that was very narrowly avoided. However, while Juzo managed to dodge the initial uppercut, Izuku stalled his elbow and began pulling it downwards in an attempt to crash the bone directly into Juzo's chest. While this second attempted strike was dodged too, Izuku's opponent curling his body ever so slightly, just barely managing to move far enough to Izuku's left to avoid the elbow, Izuku still had a good nearly eleven years of practice of Juzo in terms of raw, close quartered martial arts, and what options were shut down by the overwhelming force of Bakugou's blasts or Todoroki's ice were highly useful tools now.

Just as he had attempted to connect his arm and Juzo's chest, Izuku had tightened his left fist into a knifehand, poised like a snake, and tried for the last truly match-ending strike he knew he could pull off without giving Juzo an opportunity to escape and regroup - and in all honestly, probably the last match-ending strike he'd get period. Unfortunately for the other boy, while Juzo had seen Izuku's arm a moment before it connected, he hadn't had the time to even begin a proper response, and Izuku shoved the knuckles of his fingers straight into the lower half of Juzo's right side, forcing him to stagger and very nearly lose his footing.

Now completely disoriented, Juzo had become, in effect, easy pickings. Sliding his right leg forwards and stopping just short of interlocking it with Judo's left, Izuku quickly maneuvered his right arm and locked his hand with Judo's shirt. At the same moment, he took the hand that had plunged into Juzo's gut, unfurled it and placed its palm flat against the front of Judo's stomach, and literally swept Juzo off his feet, pulling him forward and knocking his ankles off the ground.

Taking his palm and pushing with his quirk, Izuku raised Juzo's body into the air as he pulled it towards him until the boy was sent spiraling over Izuku's head, lower body facing the sky, and then finally dragged back down on to the ground, slamming into his own liquefied concrete and sinking into it. Juzo wheezed, but tenaciously attempted to emerge from the ground and start a counterattack. Before he had the chance to even truly move, however, Izuku swept his feet above the ground and gentle skid across the top of the concrete, letting out a weak shove with his quirk just as his foot aligned atop Juzo's and sending the rock directly into his solar plexus. Izuku watched, sympathetically but firmly, as the wind was knocked out of Juzo, a somewhat raspy cough emerging from his mouth. The whole exchange must have lasted less than seven seconds.

Izuku's opponent's attempts to rise were commendable, really, but futile. Try as you might, a force like that will put you down and out for more than a moment, regardless of pain - that's kind of the point of the maneuver in the first place.

Juzo was literally down for the count, and after a tense ten seconds, Present Mic announced Izuku's victory.

Ignoring the chanting of the audience (he'd really rather not know, if he's being honest) Izuku extended a tentative hand towards Juzo, because while he had said that spite towards your opponents had been the domain of Monoma, it was obviously frustrating to reach the third stage of the sports festival just to get knocked out, and it's not like Izuku actually knows Juzo... well, at all.

Luckily, after a brief moment a hand is gripping around Izuku's own, and he pulls Juzo to his feet, extending a slightly nervous smile, which is thankfully returned. Izuku's never really been good in the aftermath of any sort of conflict, really, and he generally feels a little bit out of the loop when it comes to any sort of real social interaction with his peers (brawls with childhood friends-turned-enemies - frenemies, detestably? - notwithstanding) but while Juzo is groaning, he is still smiling, and it looks genuine enough. 

"No hard feelings, right?" Izuku asks tentatively, after they're both on their feet and the adrenaline high is slowly wearing off, and the effects of the exertion are just beginning to make themselves known. His breath a bit ragged, Juzo grins.

"None at all."

Letting a genuine smile spread across his face in return, Izuku gives a slight bow and a faint, relieved sigh escapes his mouth. Izuku compliments Juzo on his abilities, partially succeeding in his attempts to suppress his rapid-fire mumbling about quirks and completely failing to suppress his slight blush when he realizes that he's doing it again, god damn it, which is returned with twice the grace and equal enthusiasm. Izuku and Juzo give each other goodbyes, and Juzo wishes him good luck.

Izuku returns to his seat, to the smiles of his friends, Uraraka's positivity and kindness and support, Iida's sometimes overwhelming but always encouraging words, to Kirishima's grin-

To Kirishima's grin, somehow intensely focused and totally at ease at the same time, and his eyes, which always seem to be wide and focused, as if he wouldn't miss standing there and staring for the world, and the way his brow furrows inwards in what's almost like concentration whenever he's excited. To rough hands and gentle touches and callouses that leave a firm, pleasant warmth when they squeeze down as Izuku is pulled somewhere. To a person that always seems to be ready to move, ready to sprint, as if they want to go anywhere and everywhere at the same time and pour everything they have into it, and yet wait behind for Izuku as if they'd rather put it off and do it with him.

Sitting down and letting the tension bleed out of him, Izuku thinks that it couldn't have gone all that much better.

The rest of the fights are fun to watch but kind of uneventful - Ashido and Awase are the next match, and Izuku had initially thought it would go in Ashido's favor, considering the difficulty of applying weld, but apparently Awase had trained his flexibility and mobility, because he managed to consistently avoid the bursts of acid shot towards him, dodging and skidding across the ground. The more time passed the closer Awase got to Ashido, and eventually the boy managed to narrowly duck under a direct strike from Ashido and slam his palms against her foot and the floor, welding the two together.

Immediately, Ashido had started melting the bond with acid, but one foot soldered to the ground made it borderline impossible for her to move or even turn around, let alone actually dodge around Awase's strikes, and he was pretty quickly able to knock her off her feet. Landing on one hand, Ashido attempted to strike again, but Awase simply used his quirk to meld her to the ground. The more acid she used to melt the welt, the more separate welds he would create, and while the winner of a stamina battle was up for grabs (Izuku didn't have enough data on Awase to really know but he would bet on Ashido, from what he's seen of her results on physicals) 10 seconds simply wasn't long enough for either of them to run out of steam, and Awase got the match.

Interestingly, some of his strikes definitely seemed more like martial arts than they did simple brawls - Izuku might have to ask him about that later. Comparing notes between schools is always useful.

The next match, and the last one of Izuku's block (until the finals, obviously) was between Tokoyami and Todoroki, and it honestly made Izuku wince.

Todoroki obliterated his opponent. An enormous wave of ice, dwarfing the one he had sent towards Izuku in the cavalry battle, near instantaneously ending the match and encasing Tokoyami in a giant wall of ice before he was ever even really given a chance.

It was especially unfair for someone like Tokoyami, who already had problems getting sponsors simply because his quirk wasn't that flashy, and honestly, he didn't have the kind of attitude the hero industry would prioritize over someone they would think of as more easily "marketable."  Getting knocked out of the running wouldn't so much discredit him as draw all attention away from him, and while he had obviously demonstrated strength and competence earlier in the tournament, it seemed unfair to be destroyed by a quirk that was basically unmatched in terms of raw power by the entire class, and one that Izuku would never be able to actually counter if not for pure and simple luck getting him a quirk that was a more than excellent match-up against ice.

Needless to say, it was pretty intimidating, and honestly basically any fight in the first round that came after would have been overshadowed by it, especially if it followed it immediately.

That is, any fight not involving Bakugou Katsuki.

"You don't want any help strategizing or preparing, or anything? I know most of his weak points - childhood, uh, nemeses, I guess." Izuku offers, watching Cementoss repair the arena after it had been trashed by Todoroki's fucking glacier. 

Uraraka shook her head, smiling. "Nope! I wanna try doing this myself, even if I don't win. I can't rely on other people to win my battles for me, you know? It just feels like this is something I should do myself."

Izuku wants to say that few human beings can bare Bakugou Katsuki by themselves for more than 0.5 seconds and that, speaking from experience, he would recommend taking all the help you can but it isn't his place, and it's not like Uraraka doesn't have a point. It's good to help others achieve their dreams, yeah, but dependency is less than ideal.

He returns the smile, and gives a simple, "Okay, then! Do your best." There's not much he can do beyond give his support, but he's going to do that, at least. Iida and Tsuyu offer similar gestures, along with Kirishima, and Izuku internally gives thanks for the redhead's presence - he has the kind of effect on people Izuku simply can't replicate, the only person Izuku knows that can give total faith and support without it feeling like an expectation. Settling down in their seats, Izuku and his friends watch as both spectators emerge from each side of the arena, Present Mic rattling off a quick description - brand, slogan, Izuku's mind supplies - of each combatant. Izuku chuckles to himself, darkly, wondering if their description of Bakugou qualifies as false advertising.

Gripping his knee, Izuku feels a slight tremble in his leg and feels his lips shift, slightly, as he bites the side of his cheek. Kirishima, seemingly ever concerned about the people around him, notices.

Izuku feels Kirishima's hand take place itself gently on the thigh not covered by Izuku's trembling arm, and turns to see a worried frown on the redhead's face, brow crinkled in concern.

"Hey," Kirishima half-whispers, "you okay? You look bothered." It's uncharacteristically quiet, but Izuku thinks that Kirishima always carries that kind of softness with him, in his own way.

Turning his head downwards, Izuku mumbles back. "Ah, well..." His tone is almost apologetic, though Izuku doesn't know for what because it's not like he's actually done anything, and it sounds tinny and hollow, even to Izuku's ears.

Leaning back in his chair, Izuku rests his head against the back of the seat for a moment, before letting out a breath that he hadn't really known was building, turning back to focus on the match. "I'm fine, really." He says, and gives Kirishima a small half-smile, before his gaze flickers back to Uraraka and Bakugou. Even if he does have some... not entirely positive feelings seeing Bakugou standing on that stage, Izuku's not, and shouldn't be, important right now. 

Uraraka has a hell of a lot more to be worried about at the moment.

As soon as the match starts, Uraraka rushes her opponent immediately and-

Well, Izuku knows that Uraraka is smart, so it's not like he'd been expecting her to not know how to use her own quirk, but at the same time it's a relief to see that she's making what Izuku thinks is the only logically sound choice.

But at the same time, when Bakugou's blast knocks her backwards, that's not much of a surprise either. Close range fighters are nearly always at a disadvantage against Bakugou, simply because his explosions make any sort of approach nearly impossible. Izuku would be lying if he said that Bakugou's near immunity to close-quarters combat was totally uninvolved in his own decisions to focus on range with his costume.

The cycle repeats again and again and again, and the first waves of mumbled dissent begin to emerge from the audience, but at the same time Izuku pretty quickly notices that Uraraka is always, always hanging low to the ground and arms poised to swipe against it at any moment, which at first seems odd. It's not particularly energy efficient, and while it had first seemed like an obvious idea - avoid Bakugou's blasts by ducking under them, right? - it's not like it's a particularly unexpected, or successful, tactic at this point. Aside from Uraraka's usage of the jacket as a distraction, she had basically repeated the same losing strategy again and again, and like Izuku said, Uraraka is smart, so why?

And then he notices the unnaturally small amount of rubble on the floor. Izuku knows for a fact that Bakugou's blasts are strong enough to chip cement, so why isn't any of it there? 

Realization lighting up within him, Izuku's eyes dart upwards. Strewn across the sky like a tapestry, the beginnings of a cloud of rock and rubble is forming. Kirishima notices soon after, probably having similar doubts (Kirishima is smart, too, when it comes to strategy and combat) and quickly follows Izuku's gaze upwards, with Iida and Tsuyu coming not long afterwards, and as time passes by the small quantity of rock grows into a maelstrom.

Before the growing amount of rock in the air has a chance to actually do anything, though, though, a member of the audience - a pro hero, though Izuku honestly can't remember his name, and that's pretty rare - stands up, a culmination of the doubt and anger of the viewers that had been rippling throughout the audience up to that point. While Izuku can kind of understand his concern (and beyond that, Bakugou's overwhelming power is honestly just frustrating to watch in general) but it comes off as pretty... well, pretty ridiculous.

"Stop playing with the poor girl" is really what they have to say? "Huge difference in power" is what they're seeing? Don't they notice the giant cloud of rocks overhanging the arena, the way Uraraka has so uniquely positioned her body, see the tactics and strategy Uraraka is putting to use? See everything that she's putting into the match, how much of her soul she's shoved into every moment of this fight?

They're effectively telling everyone to put on their kiddy gloves, and they're telling Uraraka that they think her efforts are meaningless. That she doesn't deserve to be put on equal footing, as if the world needs to "hold back" because she's some fragile, weak thing. They're just disrespecting her, really.

Izuku says as much, but some of his classmates still seem unconvinced.

Sighing, Izuku elaborates. "I think one of Bakugou's positives, actually, is that he's like... uh, this. I guess to someone who doesn't know him well this probably seems pretty brutal, and it kind of is, but to Bakugou it's kind of... his own form of acknowledgement, I guess. Uraraka isn't weak, and Bakugou isn't holding back because he recognizes that. Letting his guard down would just be treating her as if she was insignificant - you guys have probably heard him call people 'extras,' right?" A few of the people listening in wince, clearly having been on the receiving end of it themselves.

"Well, this is kind of the opposite of that. You guys heard him call Uraraka 'round face' in the beginning, right? It seems insulting, I know, but it's kind of his own form of respect, the idea that someone is worthy of being remembered as unique. I've always thought that was one of the things he was best at, actually - even if everyone else coddles you, he's the kind of person that will always view you as an equal until you give up, you know? Like he won't ever stop thinking of someone as a competitor unless they say it to his face. Until then, he's gonna treat everyone just about the same. I think it would actually be way worse to give Uraraka pity, like all the effort she's put in is worth some kind of participation award, and not any serious attempt."

Izuku has to admit that he does feel a form of gratification when Aizawa stone-cold tells the patronizing hero in the audience to quit their profession outright - if they had actually cared about Uraraka, maybe they should have treated her like a competitor instead of someone destined to lose before the match was even over.

Schadenfreude - sometimes, he just can't resist, even if as a hero it's probably not something he should be getting into the habit of doing.

Aizawa's speech shuts up the peanut gallery in the audience pretty completely, and it gives Uraraka a moment to breath before she claps her palms together, and a quiet, pink light emits from her fingertips. Present Mic's exclamation of "A meteor shower!?" (faux-surprise because let's be honest - it's Present Mic. Izuku thinks it's safe to assume that he was more than aware of the rocks) only accentuates the sudden dash Uraraka makes for Bakugou, and Izuku finds a part of himself silently chanting win, win, win, because Uraraka is putting so, so much into the match, giving every part of herself she can, and more than anything, right now Izuku wants her to emerge victorious.

And yet as soon as Bakugou's eyes glance upwards, narrowing as his pupils dilate with surprise, and then contract ever so slightly with silent determination, Izuku can see it playing out in his mind, watches, mentally, as the outcome born from years and years and years of studying Kacchan and Katsuki and Bakugou give him a pretty obvious read.

The blond raises a single arm to the sky, readies his stance, crouching down in preparation for the recoil, and releases a violent blast, the force of it sending hot air spreading towards the audience. Almost involuntarily, Izuku shields Kirishima to his right and Iida to his left by pulling the hot air towards him (courtesy of his seldom used attraction abilities) not due to any actual danger but due to the sheer power that radiates from the explosion. It's more than impressive. If he's being honest, it's a little terrifying.

The force of it sends Uraraka flying back, and Izuku is actually surprised when she rises again, because that's more than a little bit impressive. Taking a blast like that up close would knock nearly anyone else out, including possibly Izuku.

Bakugou tenses, grinning, and begins to charge, and Uraraka is about to reciprocate, about to follow up, and then-

There's a slight twitch of her leg, one nearly imperceptible, one that Izuku almost misses entirely if not for the look on Uraraka's face when it happens, and then she's falling, almost crumpling to the ground with a painfully loud thump.

Bakugou stops walking.

While both Uraraka and Bakugou return to the stadium as the ring is fully repaired, the blond returns first for obvious reasons.

Every step he takes seems to thunder with an ominous clack, clack, clack as his boots hit the floor. He totally ignores Kaminari's commentary about "playing the villain," not even sparing it a quick "Fuck off," or even a "DIE!" It might seem completely normal to most, signature glower still on his face, but Izuku can tell that it's out of character for Bakugou.

The blond storms through the front aisle, ignoring Iida's protests before finally stopping just before Izuku and giving the smaller boy a glower that would probably be intimidating to someone that hasn't had many a year of acquaintance (and occasionally combat) with him.

"It was your plan, wasn't it, asshole? That annoying fucking rush at the end, and the rubble. You did all of it, didn't you? God, you just have to be a fucking Deku no matter what, don't you? Can't ever stop meddling and fucking things up-"

Izuku interrupts Bakugou's sneering rant with a sharp, cold, "Save it."

In response, Bakugou's eyes narrow.

"I had nothing to do with it. Uraraka made and executed that plan on all her own - if something about it annoyed you, then it just means that Uraraka challenged you. Nothing more, and nothing less. If you're going to complain, do it to her face, not mine."

Turning back to face the stadium, Izuku doesn't need to be watching to know that Bakugou's eyes narrow even further, a sharp, nearly spiteful grunt emerging from his lips as he stomps away, slouching all the while.

For all the progress Izuku might have thought they made, it's a sharp reminder that Bakugou Katsuki is Bakugou Katsuki, and that Midoriya Izuku is Midoriya Izuku, and ultimately, some things never change. He wonders, only a little bit sarcastically, if he should feel relieved.

(Faintly, Izuku can hear Kaminari attempt to diffuse the tension by asking how Bakugou could go all out on such a frail girl. Despite himself, Izuku feels a small smile curl the corner of his lips at Bakugou's response-

"What part of her was frail, exactly?")

The match between Kaminari and Shiozaki is almost boring, because it pretty much consists of Shiozaki Ibara metaphorically stomping Kaminari into the ground with little to no effort. Her quirk itself is the exact opposite, so Izuku decides to focus on that instead.

"...capable of suspending Kaminari several feet into the air, indicating high tensile strength. Form doesn't appear to be rigid but still stands straight even when not attached to her hair. Could indicate either remote control or increased rigidity when not attached. Are the individual vines strong enough to function as weapons? How similar are they to normal vines in terms of weakness - can they be cut or burnt? Kaminari's electricity didn't seem to cause any burning, but it's unknown whether his electricity is capable of starting a fire in the first place. There appear to be thorns on the vines, too, yet she doesn't appear to be physically harming Kaminari. Can the thorns be grown at will, or are they purely aesthetic? Limitations on growth are currently unknown - I'll have to observe more in her next fight. I should have brought a notebook, I'll have to rewatch-"

Izuku feels his face burn up and clamps his mouth tight, and he's aware his blush must be more than obvious. Most of Class 1-A is staring directly at him and he had been so sure he was starting to kick that habit and-

Burying his face in his hands for a moment, Izuku takes a sharp, deep breath, and resolutely ignores Bakugou's snickering.

He's honestly (despite Kirishima's reassurances that it was actually "impressive," which no, it's fucking weird and creepy and Izuku knows it and that's why he keeps trying to kick the habit) thankful when everyone's attention is drawn away from him and towards Kirishima and Sero, both of whom are called down to fight the next match.

Izuku doesn't think he's going to mutter this time, because to be honest he's a hell of a lot more invested in this match then the last, both because it's hopefully going to be a much more even fight, and (a little shamefully) he might care a bit more about Kirishima than he does Kaminari, on a personal level. A tad. A smidgen. 

He's a mix of nervous and excited when Kirishima and Sero both emerge from their respective entrances and come to stand on opposite sides of the stage. On a purely intellectual level, it's an interesting match up - Izuku is interested to see how Hardening interacts with Tape, and he wants to confirm whether or not Hardening literally transforms the epidermis or actually creates an entirely separate layer, a question Kirishima hadn't been able to answer at the time (will deactivating Hardening detach the tape from Kirishima?) - but he has to admit he's rooting for Kirishima here, which feels kind of shitty because it's not like Sero's done anything wrong, and he seems like a really nice person, but Izuku kind of can't help it.

So he may admit to leaning a little bit too forward in his seat in both trepidation and excitement as Present Mic builds up both fighters and finally starts the match.

Kirishima charges immediately, which is more or less what Izuku would have done, and Sero shoots out a fast line of tape to defer Kirishima's approach, which is also pretty much what Izuku would have done.

What's a little more surprising is Kirshima's immediate hardening of his right arm, which he swipes forward in a clean horizontal chop, slicing Sero's tape into two and breaking it's form as it falls to the floor, limp. Kirishima doesn't let up, strafing slightly as to avoid Sero's tape and either repeating the motion or dodging it when it comes slicing through the air towards him.

The closer Kirishima gets, though, the harder each reaction becomes, and eventually he's forced to halt his approach, a few meters from Sero's body as wave after wave is shot towards him, and it's all he can do to dodge, much less approach, and as the moments tick by and both boys repeat the dance again and again and again it's starting to look like it's going to be a stamina battle - something that Kirishima undoubtedly has an advantage in, and both boys know it.

Izuku isn't surprised when Kirishima tries to approach anyway, despite knowing that standing back and letting Sero go on the offensive, forcing the battle to prolong, would be a much more advantageous position, though he does let out a somewhat exasperated sigh. Kirishima and manliness;

He is going to have words. 

The redhead inches forward, slowly but surely, and while both boys are showing the effects of the fast paced fighting, it's obvious to pretty much anyone and everyone actually paying attention that while Kirishima has greater stamina, he's facing greater strain, too, and it's looking like a pretty close battle for a moment.

Both Kirishima and Sero are breathing heavily, at this point, and by the time Kirishima is just under a meter away any tape Sero shoots at him is going to be a guaranteed hit. When Sero does attempt a hit, Kirishima responds by taking it directly and instead charging before Sero has a chance to actually do anything with it - Sero needs at least a little bit of distance to effectively maneuver his opponent with his tape, so closing the distance before he has a chance to actually use his quirk properly isn't a bad idea at all. 

Sero is clearly expecting a direct strike, and for a brief moment surprise flickers across his face as Kirishima's arms widen rather than tense for a punch. He attempts to respond, but the small moments delay is enough, and Kirishima engulfs his opponent's body in a tackle, lifting Sero into the air and charging towards the edge of the arena at a speed that takes Izuku off guard - it's a beat faster than what he's use to from Kirishima.

Both boys approach the edge, and as a foot slams violently against the now-cracked tile, Kirishima hurls Sero forward with a loud grunt, and uses hardened skin to sever the tape linking Sero's body to his own. Without any time to recover, he manages to land on his feet, but Sero lands out of bounds nonetheless. Extending a hand downwards, Kirishima pulls him back up onto the stage with a grin.

Izuku lets out another sigh, a mixture of relief and some sort of 'honestly, Kirishima' and let's his head slump against the railing to the cheers of audience. Feeling Jirou's eyes narrow with confusion, Izuku quirks his head backwards to face her, mouths boys as if to say 'What can you do?' before turning back towards the stage to cheer with the audience, resolutely ignoring the slight, surprised giggle that comes from Jirou's lips. To be fair, he's not usually the one cracking jokes, but that doesn't mean he can't, and he'd be lying if he said it wasn't at least a little bit serious.

When Kirishima and Sero return back to the stage, the latter to consolation and the former to applause, Izuku can't help but tug on the redhead's sleeve.

He's half whispering when he says it. "I've said it before and I'll say it again, Kirishima. There's nothing wrong with your quirk. It's not flashy or explosive, but that doesn't mean you need to ignore it's strengths - I'm not the expert here, obviously, but I don't think manliness necessarily has to mean taking the hard way every time, y'know?"

A flash of surprise, followed by a sheepish, self-deprecating laugh, the kind that you let out when someone in your class is harassing you for something and you don't quite know how to tell them now, it's hollow and sharp, and Izuku can't help it.

Sighing, he leans forward and wraps an arm around Kirishima, snaking it across the redhead's side and placing his palm just atop the other boy's spine. As Kirishima stiffens between him in surprise and a small moment passes, Izuku slips away, and let's out a tiny chuckle

"All I'm saying is that you're stamina is just as cool as your ability to tackle Sero off of a stage, okay?"

Kirishima doesn't respond verbally, cheeks burning red with what Izuku assumes is embarrassment, and gives a small nod as both take their seats.

Uraraka finally comes back, scratched and slightly bruised but otherwise fine, moments after the end of a match that reminds Izuku that Yaoyaozoru Momo can be a very, very dangerous opponent if she ever wants to be.

The fight itself had began rather simply - Tetsutetsu had a quirk pretty similar to Kirishima's (though it didn't appear to have the razor-like qualities that Hardening did) and Izuku had originally been wondering how Yaoyozoru was going to counter it. Her quirk is highly versatile, yes, but it was incredibly difficult to use and required a near encyclopedic knowledge of what it was creating. Izuku had trouble thinking of something that Yaoyozoru - or Izuku himself, honestly - had the strength and the training to use.

Tetsutetsu began the match with an dash, charging forward at a breakneck pace and literally steeling himself, light glinting against his skin.

Izuku leaned forward and brought his hand to his mouth, watching Yaoyozoru intently - considering how calm she was, he was assuming she had something up her sleeve.

And then he saw the head of a taser emerge with a shimmering glow from the palm of Yaoyozoru's hand, and winced, because oh, yeah.

Steel is a metal.

While most would have shied away from the threat of a fist of actual, literal steel, Yaoyozoru just cleanly dodged Tetsutetsu's first strike, before shooting her arm outwards like a snake and bringing the taser to rest against Tetsutetsu's face.

"You're lucky I'm not Kaminari," she began, calmly, and Tetsutetsu froze. "I would recommend forfeiting now. Steel is a highly efficient conductor, after all - who knows if it's even totally non-lethal for you to face a shock of this level?"

Midnight quickly calls the battle in Yaoyozoru's favor before Tetsutetsu can take the chance to do something... less than smart, like, say, get himself electrocuted, and calls a short intermission between the first and second rounds, Uraraka arriving just as Midnight's speech ends.

Kirishima notices her first, waving her over, and Izuku and Iida both follow his line of sight. She comes to her seat wearing a tight, sheepish smile, and her attempts to wave off Iida's concerns with an "I'm fine!" ring painfully untrue to anyone that's known her for longer than an hour, as she settles into her chair with stilted unease.

"Uraraka..." Izuku begins, eyes flickering away from his friends gaze as she turns towards to him, and he trails off, not quite sure how to start. "Are- uh, are you sure you're alright?" He immediately sees another (painfully fake) reassurance rising out of her, and raises a palm upwards to face her. "Er, not that it's my place or anything! I just thought you looked a little down, or something..." Sighing, Izuku looks down for a moment, muttering a quick "God, I really am terrible at this, aren't I?" and turns to face Uraraka head on, back straightened. "Anyone would be frustrated, I think, after losing a match like that. You don't have to bottle it up, okay? There's nothing wrong with feeling angry."

Uraraka's breath hitches, for a moment, and she lets out a murmur that sounds vaguely like a soft "I..." before hunching for a moment, letting out a soft sniffle. Rubbing her eyes and turning back to face Izuku directly, her voice is hoarse, but clear.

"No, you're right. I... I want to do better. I want to win." She lets out a long, shaky breath. "You're good at this stuff, right, Deku? Can you... what could I have done to win? What should I have done differently?"

Izuku cringes. "Are you... um, do you really want me to?" He's given a grin in response.

"Yep! I... I'm not a kid, anymore, or at least I won't be for long, y'know? It'd be sad if I couldn't take advice, at this point."

Izuku remembers berating the audience in his head over treating Uraraka like a frail child, and he's starting to think he really needs to learn to follow his own advice.

Sucking in a breath, Izuku flashes a smile. "Okay!"

"Firstly, the moment you released those rocks could have been timed better. Instead of releasing it as soon as you accumulated enough to deal some damage, baiting Bakugou into creating another explosion would have provided a smoke screen for the attack - even if he was somehow able to react to it in time, I have a hard time imagining him releasing such a huge blast in such a short period of time. With the cover, you would have had a much greater chance at actually landing a direct hit. Also, you should try focusing on agility training - your speed itself is fine, but some more precise and economic movement probably could have-"

Izuku flinches as Present Mic's voice booms across the stadium, instructing the fighters, meaning Izuku and Iida, to get ready to start off the second round with a bang. Turning to Uraraka and smiling apologetically, he's giving an understanding grin in return, and a pat on the back from Kirishima. Turning to the redhead, Izuku feels his smile bloom into a real one, as Uraraka tells him to go to the stage.

"It's fine - go get ready, both of you!" Kirishima agrees readily, directing both Izuku and Iida out of the stands and into the hallways. Izuku turns to wave back at both of his friends, almost beaming, before curving his neck to face Iida.

"Let's have a good match!" comes out of the other boy's mouth as he extends a hand outward, which Izuku takes gladly. "Of course. What' happens happens, right?"

Iida's smile softens ever so slightly, and an unusually informal "No hard feelings" slipping out from between his lips. 

As the two separate, and Izuku heads down through the winding hallways to the arena, he reflects that for once it really is true - it's been a long time since Izuku's earnestly competed with someone (read: Bakugou) and felt that whichever direction luck flows, he'd be happy with it. There's something almost liberating about it, being able to say that he's built a bond deep enough that no competition is going to sever it.

At the same time, as he exits out on to the stage with a small grin to nearly deafening applause - he has absolutely no intention of losing.