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braunbakery · 3 years

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salvation, maybe (ii)

☞ reiner braun x reader [fem bodied] [chapter word count: 2.5k]

☞ sfw, angst, fluff, post-season 3 [after 4 year time jump], season 4 spoilers

☞ cross-posted on ao3 (very much ahead on ao3, just wanted to bring it to tumblr)

☞ fic plot: you have walked these streets many times before. you have passed this bench many times before. you have seen this man (lost in his thoughts, always drifting, always looking lost) many times before. but this time, this time you take a seat.

prev. next

ii. company

the glass clinks against the bar counter and reiner shifts idly in his seat as the bartender slowly pours him another drink. he watches you bring your glass to your lips in the bar stool next to him, your other hand rested on the counter. the orange lighting of the bar reflects off of the two glasses and, even though the bar is filled with the lazy chatter of other customers, reiner feels like he can hear your every movement.

he doesn't know how a walk through the streets of liberio wound up with him sitting with you at a bar in the middle of the night. he doesn't know how his daily trip to the bench in front of the fountain wound up with him sharing a drink with a stranger when he had been isolating himself since his return from paradis. he doesn't know how the hours passed so quickly, or why you had decided to spend an entire day with him. he can barely remember what you had talked about, faintly recalling sparse conversation about your family, about his family (about gabi and how there was definitely no one in liberio who didn't know her with the way her voice echoed around the alleyways.) he remembers a calm quiet settling between you two, he remembers visiting an empty, overgrown park. most of all, he remembers the feeling of your company.

his chest doesn't feel as hollow, his thoughts don't race as rapidly. and, even though his eye sockets are still full and his muscles are still tense, there is a part of him that is happy to not feel alone. even if just for a day.

and this relief that you offer him eats away at him like a parasite. he locks eyes with you and you offer him a small, kind smile, fully content to sit in the comfortable silence you have both accustomed yourself to. reiner doesn't know why he's letting himself have an escape. he doesn't want to find solace, he doesn't want to feel at peace, he doesn't want the warmth of someone else being with him and not expecting anything of him. he is guilty. in his head, he should always remain guilty, no matter the pain or the agony. no matter how dark the circles under his eyes become, or how tight his jaw clenches.

but, at this moment, he brings himself to ignore his self-condemnation as he watches you raise your glass once more to your lips. he doesn't know if it's just because you are a person, if anyone would have done, if it's because you seem like you would like the company too or if it's something particular about you that makes him want to stay. that makes him feel like it doesn't matter whether or not he deserves to stay. but he can't believe he had gone this entire time without the presence of this other someone with him.

"are you okay?" you ask him, noticing him slowly losing himself in his thoughts. reiner snaps out of his conflicted daze and loosens his tight grip on his glass.

"yeah, thinking about how they're going to beat my ass for not showing up at HQ today," he jokes, offering a cheeky grin. you laugh, pretending not to notice his genuine concern over the issue,"i-"

"reiner," a soft voice interrupts. a woman with dark, raven hair and large deep eyes slowly approaches the two of you on crutches. she dons the same uniform as reiner (the same off-white jacket and red armband, reiner's jacket is currently bundled up on the stool next to him), and reiner feels his grip on his glass tighten again.

"pieck," reiner responds, suddenly aware that his earlier joke is probably the reality. pieck smiles softly at him, and he knows that she holds no contempt for his absence today. but, that doesn't make the bundle of anxiety brewing in his stomach any less.

"where were you today? everyone was wondering where you'd gone off to," pieck slightly leans on her crutches, her head tilting to the side as she questions reiner good-naturedly.

"i..." reiner trails off. he can't find the words. how can he say that, hours ago, he had unconsciously made the decision that spending an entire day mostly in silence with a stanger he had just met seemed like more of a pressing matter than his duties to marley. as he struggles to find the words to express himself, pieck spares you a glance, finally taking note of your presence. she doesn't introduce herself, instead content to offer you another warm smile in greeting.

"maybe you should get home, yeah?" pieck suggests. behind her kind voice and sympathetic eyes, reiner easily recognises the sense of urgency in her words. it's a warning. he should probably get an early night's sleep before his attempts to offer a multitude of excuses when he goes into HQ the next morning. also, knowing pieck is here, it would be safe to assume that porco isn't far off. reiner had already pictured his smug face when he sees him tomorrow, probably feeling like his superiority over reiner had once again been proven. if porco finds him here, in this bar, reiner would never hear the end of it. it would just be another reason for porco to assert the fact that between them, he was the warrior and reiner was the coward. and even though reiner doesn't necessarily disagree (he doesn't really have the energy to think about it anymore), it doesn't mean he's particularly looking forward to it.

"yeah," reiner replies, nodding thankfully at pieck. pieck nods back and raises a hand from her left crutch, waving goodbye before going back to her table. but, she stops in her tracks and turns her head back, "don't worry, by the way. porco hasn't seen you." with that, she turns back and makes her way back to her table. reiner is thankful for her decency.

he scrapes back the bar stool and begins to stand up, getting ready to leave. but, as he reaches for his jacket, his vision blurs. you watch as reiner slightly stumbles forward, grabbing onto the bar stool for support. how many refills has he had?

he seems fine enough to speak normally, but as you watch him rapidly blink his eyes to regain his composure, you stand up, grab his jacket from the seat, and tug at his sleeve as you make your way to the exit of the bar. he seems okay now, walking normally behind you and reaching for his jacket from your grasp. once you finally leave the busy bar, the chilly night air meets your warm faces and the glow of the orange lighting inside reflects off your skin. reiner quickly pulls his jacket on and turns to you. you let go of his shirt sleeve that you didn't realise you were still holding.

"you don't have to leave with me," he says. in truth, he doesn't want to allow himself to be in your company anymore. this was just a break. a day where he could forget everything that he had to do and be, and it took all of his will to reject the consolation your presence offered. the reality was grim and brutal, and even if it was a reality where he was condemned to eternal guilt, it was still reality.

"i don't particularly want to be left alone in a bar," you say, already beginning to slowly make your way down the street. reiner tries to ignore the small relief he feels in knowing that you won't leave yet. that you don't want to leave yet. it was starting to prove tiring having to drag himself back to the guilt he felt lost without.

"do you live far? i can walk you back first," he says, sidling up next to you on the footpath. god, he was pathetic. for someone actively trying to isolate himself, he sure did manage to find every excuse to spend more time with you.

"i live on just the other side of market square," you say, recalling reiner telling you where his family home was, "it's close to yours. i'm walking you back first." in reiner's stumbled state (even though he had all but regained his composure now), you don't feel right making him walk you home and then himself. at least, that's the excuse you were telling yourself. in reality, you don't want to be alone. you're not ready to say goodbye. when reiner hears your adamance, he can't help but smile. he's too tired to argue, instead just humming in confirmation.

"are you going to be in much trouble tomorrow?" you ask. reiner turns his head towards you, and even though he had looked at you many times already, he never seems to get over the initial shock of someone else being there with him.

"it'll be fine," he says (he hopes.) maybe commander magath will just chalk it up to another tired day of being a warrior? maybe zeke had offered magath some sort of excuse in reiner's absence? maybe porco had shut the fuck up and not encouraged retribution for reiner's slight insubordination? reiner knows that you can tell from his clenched fists that he's lying and that he has no idea what's going to happen. but, he's grateful that you don't make an attempt to address this. reiner wonders if you know that he doesn't regret it.

"i'm guessing you have an early morning then?" you say, shoving your hands in the pockets of your jacket as the temperature of the night drops.

"ha," reiner laughs drily, "it's always an early morning." he watches you laugh at his disdain, the corners of his mouth curling upwards, "you as well?"

"yeah. i think i'm delivering papers tomorrow," you respond. you had told reiner that you worked as an assistant for the newspaper. the manager was an old man. he was kind, but you often found yourself doing a bunch of odd jobs that were either his responsibility or the requirement of someone he had yet to hire.

"do you have a permit to leave the internment zone for that?" reiner says without realising. the words are tumbling out of his mouth as soon as he thinks of them, and it scares him. he had spent years in paradis having to carefully think of everything before he said it, and now the words were just escaping his mouth and he had no restraint.

"yeah, just for an hour on the specific delivery days. we only really get delivery requests from the marleyan soldiers living just outside the fence." reiner nods.

"you should deliver a paper to us," reiner feels that he basically blurted that out and tries to save himself, "to HQ i mean."

"i didn't realise the people the paper is usually about took an interest in reading it," you joke. you're already planning your route to the warrior unit HQ, already planning what you're going to say to reiner when you deliver. even though it's just a suggestion on his behalf, you can feel the delight rushing through your body at some sort of insinuation that he wants to see you again. reiner chuckles at your comment, knowing full well that he's probably not going to read that paper and he'll probably just toss it off to zeke (if he doesn't end up spending the whole day being reprimanded for his antics.)

god, he can't stand himself. how can he ask to see you again? what's wrong with him? is he seriously so pathetic that after one day of enjoying someone else's company other than the warrior unit and the candidates (who, even though he appreciates them, are just a constant reminder of his mistakes and shortcomings and everything he fails to be) he can't go on without it? even though you hadn't given a straight answer, he can't ignore the feeling of blood rushing to his cheeks at the thought of seeing you again, no matter how hard he tries to pull himself together and scold himself for being such a half-assed piece of shit.

before he realises, his vision is blurring again and he's stumbling forward. instinctively, you reach out and grab his upper arm. your hand wraps around it, steadying him in place, and you didn't expect him to be so...warm. is that a titan shifter thing?

reiner mumbles a quiet 'thanks' in embarrassment and continues walking on. but, your grip on his arm never loosens and reiner realises (rather embarrassed with the fact that this is something he considers worth realising) that, other than the odd tug to his sleeve to beckon him forward, this is the first time you have actually touched him. his muscles relax under your hand. and it scares him.

reiner slightly pulls away at your grasp, pulling down at the armband on his opposite arm as an excuse to distance himself. he doesn't know why he's doing this (yes i do, he thinks, coward. you don't deserve this.) without thinking, he shrugs off his jacket and places it around your shoulders, his hands slightly brushing against your neck. even though he's warm, goosebumps form under his fleeting touch and you watch as he puts his armband back onto his arm.

"you looked cold," he says curtly, rubbing at the back of his neck and looking away. he realises that, in an attempt to use taking off his coat as an excuse to distance himself from your grip, he managed to just end up being closer to you. you can't help but smile as he tries to avoid your gaze.

a few more minutes pass, and you both find yourself outside reiner's house. reiner turns to you, opening his mouth and about to bid you goodbye, ready to spend the night wondering how he let a simple conversation at a bench this morning get this far.

"reiner," you say, before he can say anything. "i..." as you look at him, you realise how bad you don't want to say goodbye. and maybe it's just the fact that he really doesn't know you that well, or that if you really wanted to, you could very well ignore him for the rest of your life if things went wrong. or maybe it's the fact that you had lied earlier, and you don't actually live on the other side of market square, but the complete opposite direction that you had started walking from the bar, and if you said goodbye now you'd have to walk back all the way by yourself. alone.

alone.

"yeah?" reiner says, hand on the door knob, eager to get inside. he doesn't want to leave. really. it seems like he does, but the longer he stays out here, with you wearing his jacket and struggling to make the words come out of your mouth, the more he has to think about a life he can probably never have. but, what you say next takes him a minute to register, and takes you a minute to realise has actually come out of your mouth.

"can i...can i stay?"

#attack on titan #aot #shingeki no kyojin #aot x reader #aot fic #snk #reiner x reader #reiner fluff #reiner braun x reader #reiner fic #reiner braun #reiner brainrot

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miracufic · 6 years

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A Broken Window

Read it on AO3!

Look at LaLa’s wonderful art!

Look at Tachimon’s glorious art!

There are few things that Uraraka Ochako hates more than love at the moment.

In point of fact there are only two things. One of them is pity.

The other is poverty.

And of course because her life is such a wellspring of light and joy and fun fun fun she gets to experience all three right fucking now at the hands of one Midoriya Izuku, who had come sailing through her window not three seconds earlier, trailing ribbons of smoke.

“I am so sorry,” he says as he tries to extricate himself from the broken, tangled mess that had been her coffee table, television, and fan. Plastic crunches under his sneakers, and he winces.

“Oh, shoot,” he says. “Uraraka, I am—crud, I am so, so sorry, look, I can pay you back, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

He means well, she reminds herself. It was one of the things that makes him so—likeable, which was absolutely the word she’d been thinking of, he was earnest and compassionate and had a sense of responsibility that yes, sometimes was a touch on the broad side and she was spiraling again.

She takes in a deep breath and refocuses.

"Midoriya," she says, her voice much calmer than she thought was possible given the situation. “Go."

"Look, at least let me help clean this up for you—"

“I said go,” Uraraka repeats, and her voice snaps out this time, making Midoriya flinch away from her as though from a whip. He holds both his hands up as he backs towards the door, his palms towards her, until his back hits the smooth metal of her dormitory door. Then he reaches back and fumbles for the handle.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’m sorry.”

The lock clicks against the reinforced steel of the frame as he opens the door, and clicks again as he carefully pulls it shut.

Right. Now.

Uraraka breathes in and out steadily in the sudden quiet filling her room. Wind whistles in through the shattered window, carrying in the sounds of a raised voice—Bakugou, she guesses, from the number of expletives being thrown around—and several other, quieter voices, their register low.

It does little to keep the lid down on the roiling mess of her emotions.

First comes the rapid set of mental calculations and the grim, mathematical realization, following on the heels of her dismay, that she has maybe enough slack in her bank account to cover the cost of her coffee table. And that assumes that the local thrift stores have something, that she can survive taking a chunk out of her food budget for the next two weeks, and that the school isn’t going to charge her for damages to her dorm. Second is the billowing, seething hurt that Midoriya would dare to condescend to her like that. Pay? As if she wasn’t responsible enough to handle her own finances?

The whole mess is irrational, of course. Irrational and distracting and exactly what she doesn’t need when she’s dealing with schoolwork and the sudden uptick in villain activity and the ever-present, ever-looming, and now ever-growing threat of death at their hands, coming swiftly in the night or brightly by day, by accident or malice or a little of both—oh, and her stupid fucking period on top of all of that, because this is exactly the right time to be a crampy hormonal mess. It is therefore something that she is going to push to the back of the mind until she has the time and attention to spare to it. Which is probably going to be a while, given things.

It had been cruel of her though.

The thought sneaks in unbidden as she stares at the mess with overwhelmed tears blurring her vision. Others follow.

He had just been trying to help, after all. And she knows Deku like she knows her own Quirk, and he isn’t the type to just burst into someone’s room and wreck all their things on impulse or for some stupid joke or out of malice. Which means that this is an accident.

And isn’t it reasonable to expect him to make amends if he’d broken something on accident? So it’s reasonable for her to accept his offer of repayment. So it’s not pity, and it isn’t as though her bank account actually has enough padding at the moment to replace her TV. And if she doesn’t let Deku help, the guilt is going to eat at him for weeks, because he’s just the right combination of kind and generous and stupidly self-sacrificing for that to be the case.

And of course that thought makes her chest feel tight and her breath stick in her throat and her head feel fuzzy because fuck love.

A stray thought flickers through her awareness involving Izuku and that particular verb, and she nearly combusts on the spot.

Uraraka shakes her head a few times to clear it and hears a knocking at her door. She wipes at her eyes and straightens her clothing before she gets up, navigates around the patches of shattered glass on her floor, and opens it.

“Hey, Ura,” Ashido Mina says as she pokes her violently pink and enormously fluffy head in through the doorway. “I just saw Midoriya leaving, what happened?”

Her gaze takes in the trashed room and the breeze blowing in through the smashed window, pushing gently at the curtains, half-torn from their hangings. Her lips purse thoughtfully.

“Oh, wow,” she drawls as she steps into the room. “You and—wow. Using his Quirk too from the look of it, that’s kinky—“

“If you’re not going to help, Ashido, then fuck off,” Ochako snaps. She bites down on her tongue a second too late. Her hands ball into fists at her side as she forces a flat neutrality back onto her face.

Ashido’s lips purse further as she regards her trembling friend. She nods once, slowly. “Okay,” she says, holding her hands up as Midoriya had. She nods again before lowering them.

“How about I help you clean up and you tell me what happened, then?” she says.

Uraraka swallows and bows her head.

She and Mina set about cleaning up the glass, picking up the bigger pieces with their hands, sweeping up the smaller pieces with a brush and dustpan.

“Okay,” Mina says after they’ve swept the floor clean a final time and picked a few glittering fragments out of the gathered mess of lint and hair and dust. “So what happened? I mean, don’t need to say it twice, but this place is a wreck.”

Uraraka puffs out a breath and tucks a few stray bangs back behind her ear as she plops into her chair; Mina takes a seat on the bed.

“I was working on that essay on the development of the modern heroing system we have due Friday,” she says, her voice now steady, if somewhat hoarse. “I heard the boys shouting outside and I went to go close the window. Second later I’m ducking because Deku is flying right towards me, and then he goes through my window and trashes my room.”

Uraraka thinks she sees Mina’s expression flicker into an alien look of hard-edged fury, the edge of her lip twisting away to expose a gleaming incisor.

The moment passes. Her friend again has only the same blank look of open and neutral sympathy that she’d adopted at the start of their talk.

“And anyways,” Uraraka says after a pause, “that was basically it. He offered to help clean up, I told him to leave.”

Mina blinks at her. “Why?” she says.

Uraraka feels her lips twitch upwards into something resembling a smile in an instinctive and defensive reaction. For a second she considers trying to fight it down. Mina is a friend, after all, and you’re supposed to be able to talk to your friends about stuff like—like—not relationship issues, because she doesn’t have those, and not boy problems because she doesn’t have those.

She changes the subject.

“That reminds me,” she lies. She looks away from Mina and towards the shattered hole where her window had once been. “Who do you think we should contact to get that fixed?”

Mina looks at her askance but lets the subject drop. “I don’t know,” she says. “Probably one of the teachers knows. Let’s go ask Momo to make us some tarp or something we can use to cover it up first and then we’ll see.”

Later that night, the boys are thoroughly surprised when Mina barges into their common area and smacks Bakugou over the head.

“The fuck was that,” the boy snarls, turning to face her, but she’s already moving on. She hits Kirishima over the head to much the same reaction, then moves on to every other boy in turn, pausing only over Midoriya and Iida. The latter she eyes for a minute before giving him a light tap on the head; the former she pokes sharply in the head before pointing to the nearest door with the same finger.

“Out,” Mina orders.

Midoriya looks at her, then at everyone else, then back up at her, blinking bemusedly. “Um,” he says. “What’s going—“

“Out!”

He scurries out.

Mina watches him leave, then turns back to the group, who are by now either glaring at her or wearing expressions of bemusement.

“What the hell were you idiots thinking?” she hisses. “And don’t try to deny it. I know we have money riding on this bet but that was just going too damn far. For crying out loud, property damage? That’s Uraraka’s own stuff she’ll need to replace now thanks to you dumbasses.”

“What happened?” Iida asks, his usual demeanor subdued.

“Well, let’s see,” Mina says, her tone acidly sweet. “There’s a giant-ass hole in the wall where her window used to be, her TV is smashed, and her coffee table and her fan, and she was this close to breaking down and crying over all of it thanks to you morons, and I am this close to—to—“ she pauses, trying to think of an appropriately terrible revenge “—melting all of your shit and seeing how you like it!”

After a beat Kaminari points out, somewhat hesitantly, “Your fingers are touching, Ashido.”

“I know!”

Iida is on his feet and before her in a flash, bowing so deeply he looks like a sideways L. “My deepest apologies!” he belts out, forcing Mina to cover her ears to prevent an attack of deafness. “I was remiss in my duties as class president this afternoon and failed to rein in our classmates’ enthusiasm for ensuring that our friends find happiness in each other!”

“In each other,” Kaminari snickers. Mina glares at him, and his quiet sounds of amusement die away. He coughs and looks away from her.

“So here’s what you chuckleheads are going to do,” Mina says. “You’re going to buy a new TV for her. You’re going to buy a new fan for her. You’re going to buy a new coffee table for her, and—“ a vicious little smirk peels the corners of her lips up “—because it’d make someone suspicious if all of you showed up for no reason at all, you’ll send Midoriya and only Midoriya to deliver them to her.”

A chorus of grumbling comes up from the boys, but it dies away after a minute without much fuss.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Mina says, folding her arms across her chest, her ire somewhat fading now that petty vengeance had been dealt out. “I mean, the scheme to fake his heart attack and to get Uraraka to do rescue breathing on him was stupid enough, and the Twister game was—actually pretty good come to think of it. All right, throwing the two of them into a janitorial closet and locking the door was stupider. The heck was the idea here?”

Bakugou grunts and folds his arms across his chest, marinating in his own sullen wroth. Iida looks embarrassed and clams up, seating himself back on the couch with a thoroughly preoccupied air; Kaminari tries not to catch her eye. Everyone else in the room takes a sudden and intense interest in either the floor or the ceiling.

In the end, it’s Kirishima who ends up trying to explain.

“Right, so, uh,” he stammers out, looking around him for support and finding none. “Right, so we noticed that Midoriya was always really nervous around Uraraka, every time we got them close together, so we figured that, uh, maybe they just needed a bit of a push, to you know, get comfortable with each other—“ he pauses a moment, trying not to wilt under the force of Mina’s glare.

“—so we invited him out to the lawn for a quick free-for-all spar and then Katsuki blew him through Uraraka’s window,” he finishes in a rush. He drops back down onto his seat and fiddles nervously with his fingers.

“Do you guys ever think things through beyond step two?” Mina says into the awkward silence. “Or step one for that matter? Good grief, what did you think was going to happen, he falls into her lap and instantly seduces her and they’re making out in public by the end of the week?”

She sighs and shakes her head. “Look, whatever. Can we just agree not to do it again? No property damage, no psychological scarring, nothing like that. We just want them to get together, all right, we’re agreed on that?”

A silent chorus of nods passes around the room.

“All right,” Mina says. “End of the week for Uraraka’s replacement stuff, all right?”

She leaves.

“Fucking damnit,” Bakugou says after the door closes behind her. “All right, how much does a fucking TV cost.”

By the close of their first year, it was completely obvious to everyone in Class 1-A that of the potential romances in their social circle, the one growing between Midoriya Izuku and Uraraka Ochako was the most promising. Okay, sure, there was some mileage to be had in shipping Todoroki and Momo; there was always fun to be had when mentioning Momo to Jirou, of course. There was even something to be had between Bakugou and Kaminari, although given Bakugou’s propensity to try and murder you in as messily a manner as possible at the slightest provocation it was advised to poke that particular wolverine with a very long stick indeed.

So of course, it had taken all of two minutes for a betting pool to spring up.

The first two weeks were chaotic, as people tried to negotiate rates and odds and tried to negotiate exchange rates for favors, with at least one fistfight breaking out over an unfavorable bet—Bakugou, as it turned out, getting pissed that no one would accept his low, low offer of eternal servitude should “Chubby Cheeks” and “That Asshole” get together within the next year.

Iida and Momo made sure to take over after that, and quickly instituted a cash-only rule.

Things somehow managed to consolidate themselves after that, the various bets and bargains merging and growing until two distinct blocs had formed, with the boys opposite the girls.

And then, of course, the competition had started.

It had begun innocently enough, with Bakugou’s brag that he could easily arrange matters so that “those two fuckers” would be “eating each others’ dumb faces” by the end of the month. Iida had protested that it’d be unfair to the spirit in which the betting had begun—only with about two or three times as many words—Bakugou had flipped him off, and then while Momo and Todoroki were trying to keep that fight from breaking out, Ashido had countered that while he didn’t have a chance in hell, she was perfectly capable of pulling something like that off. Matters deteriorated from there.

They managed to quell the argument only when Jirou suggested that they turn the entire thing from a horse race into a competition.

Three months later it was debatable as to whether making everyone even more hyperfocused on trying to get their friends together, now that prestige and money were both on the line, had caused or solved more issues between them.

What wasn’t as debatable was that Midoriya and Uraraka were both stiff-necked idiots who couldn’t recognize their affections for one another if you got the both of them shitfaced drunk and shoved them in a closet together.

The time had therefore passed with little to no progress, and with increasing amounts of desperation from all participants. It was now less a matter of money and prestige, but a matter of honor and duty, at least for anyone who wasn’t Bakugou—or Mineta, but they’d banned him from participating at all after he’d half-buried Midoriya’s bed in condoms.

The situation was becoming dire. No one was willing to go so far as to outright tell either Midoriya or Ochako about the others’ affections—that would be rude, and besides, Iida had made it very clear that anyone even considering doing so would be given a lecture. But it was getting close to the point where they were willing to risk having the brains drilled out of their skulls by such punishment, if only to get those idiots together.

Still, there were options still available to them that didn’t involve a horrible, slow death at the hands of Iida; they would exercise them.

“Thanks for helping me set up everything, Deku,” Uraraka says.

“No, it was really no problem,” Midoriya says as he scratches at the back of his neck. “It’s the least I could do after wrecking your stuff.”

“About that,” she says. She coughs and kicks at the floorboards with the toes of one of her socked feet. “I heard the whole story from Mina, and I think that I owe you an apology for how I treated you the other day.”

“Oh, no—“

“No,” Uraraka says, cutting him off. “It wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t fair of me to treat you like everything was your fault, and I really do need to apologize. So, um, yeah. I’m sorry.”

They stand there at the threshold to Uraraka’s room for a little while, until Midoriya swallows down the lump in his throat and says, with entirely too much brightness, “Well, if there’s nothing else that you need me for, I’ll be off then. I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you later,” Uraraka says. “Uh, at class later, right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, “at class.”

Mina pops up about half a second after Midoriya rounds the corner.

“See,” she says reassuringly. “He doesn’t hate you.”

“Yes he does,” Uraraka moans, trudging back into her dorm. She doesn’t bother shutting the door behind her, and Mina takes it as the invitation it was intended to be and follows her in, throwing herself spread-eagled across the bed. “Did you see him? He couldn’t have gotten out of here faster if Iida had been dragging him by the legs.”

“I did watch him leave,” Mina says. “Although I must admit that I was focused more on his very nice butt than I was on whether he was trying to get out of here especially quickly.”

She grins toothily as she watches her friend’s face go completely blank.

“Relax, I’m not intending to steal him from you,” Mina says. “He’s really not my type.”

Uraraka’s face remains blankly neutral even as her cheeks color slightly.

“Although honestly,” Mina muses innocently, rolling herself upright and tapping her heels together, “he is really sweet and nice and thoughtful and everything. Kinda generically so, but there’s a lot of people out there who’d be fine with something like that.”

“Not me, certainly,” Uraraka says, a little too quickly. “Anyways, did you do the extra credit on the essay?”

“Nah,” Mina says with a dismissive flick of her hair. “The essay itself was enough of a chore, so I didn’t bother. I guess you did, what topic did you choose?”

“I had to choose a major case and explain how it helped to shape the legal powers given to us as heroes,” Uraraka says. “There was an argument that I was a little worried was too weak, do you mind if I run it by you and see what you think of it?”

Mina tries her best to follow her friend’s argument but finds her eyes glazing over as the stream of wherebys and therefores flow past her with only the minimum amount of comprehension.

“Ura,” Mina says after five minutes of this. “Ura!”

Uraraka stops. “It was weak, wasn’t it,” she says. “Ugh, I knew—“

“Ura, you’re one of the smartest and hardest-working people in our class,” Mina says. “I’m sure your argument’s fine, I just can’t make sense of it.”

Uraraka blinks at her. “So you do think it’s weak?”

“I’m saying that if you want some actual good feedback I’m probably not the best person to ask about this,” Mina says. “You should really be going to Iida or Todoroki or—“

A thought traces its way across the forefront of her thoughts like silent lightning, and she has to fight down the giant, shit-eating grin that threatens to bisect her face.

“—Midoriya,” Mina says. “Yeah, Midoriya is probably your best option, he’s smart and overachieving like you and he’s probably done with his essay so he’s got lots of free time, you should drop by and see if he’ll help, plus he’s probably still feeling really guilty over wrecking your room so you can totally guilt-trip him into helping even if he doesn’t have free time. And I mean you’re friendly with him and all, he’d totally help you.”

“I’m not going to bother him about this,” Ochako says, her expression set, her lips pressed together. “And Momo finished hers two days ago, I’ll run my argument by her.”

“Yeah but you know that she’ll just nitpick your argument to death,” Mina says quickly. “And I mean, neither of us want that, do we?”

“Uh,” Uraraka says as she closes her laptop and tucks it under an arm. “I mean, yes. It’ll make my essay stronger in the end if it can stand up even to Momo’s analysis. Look, thanks for your help, Mina, I’ll be back in a bit.”

Mina sits primly on the bed with her hands folded neatly in her lap, and does not dive desperately for her phone the instant the door closes.

“Don’t help her,” she hisses into her phone the moment that Momo picks up. “Do not! Help! Her!”

“What?” Momo says after a blank moment.

“Do not help Uraraka just trust me on this,” Mina says, and hangs up.

Momo calls back thirty seconds later. “Okay, so I told her that I was busy,” Momo says. “What is this all about?”

“We need her to go to Midoriya for help,” Mina says.

“Ah. I see.”

“Look, she might be going to Iida or Todoroki next,” Mina says.

“I’ll head off Todoroki,” Momo says.

“I’ll handle Iida,” Mina says. “Should we get the girls to run interference on anyone else?”

“Bakugou is the only other one I can think of, but he and Kaminari are over at the gym right now,” Momo says. “I can get Tsuyu to run surveillance on them in case they’re just finishing up, but we should be safe.”

“Cool,” Mina says. “If the situation with Ura changes I’ll update you.”

“Okay,” Uraraka says to herself. “I can do this, it’s just sitting in a room and going over some homework, and it’s not like we haven’t done it before.”

Of course, the other times they’d had other people around. And back then she’d at least been able to function halfway normally for three minutes together when in close proximity to Deku.

Fuck crushes. Fuck them sideways.

Still, everyone else was busy and she needs to get this stupid essay done, so she needs to get over herself right now.

She knocks on Deku’s door with a quick tap-tap-tap and steps back. After a second the door opens.

“Oh,” Midoriya says. He stares at her.

“Uh,” Uraraka says, waving her hand in front of his face. “Hey, Deku, are you okay?”

“Huh? Oh yes,” Midoriya says. “Oh, uh, sorry. Did you need something?”

She needs him to stop making her heart do backflips when he has that adorable look on his adorable face.

“Do you have a couple minutes?” she says. “I was having a little bit of trouble with the extra credit essay and I just needed to run through the argument with someone and try to work out the kinks in it, and everyone else seems to be busy with something else and I was hoping that you wouldn’t be.”

“I was, uh, actually planning on starting that myself,” Midoriya says. “Come in—oh, sorry, do you want to work in the common area?”

“No,” Uraraka says, trying to keep the word from coming out as a squeak. “There’s nothing wrong with—your room is fine.”

“So do you want anything to drink or anything?” Midoriya asks Uraraka as he ushers her in. “My mom brought some barley tea last weekend, do you want the chair?”

“I’ll take the bed,” Uraraka says, and perches herself on the very edge. “And thank you, I’ll take some tea.”

“Uh, okay,” Midoriya says. He kneels and pries open his minifridge and pulls out a glass bottle filled with an amber liquid. His other hand searches atop his desk and comes down with a relatively clean mug as he pops the bottle open with his thumb. He pours the mug half-full and hands it to Uraraka as he places the bottle back in the fridge.

“Right,” he says. “So, uh, what did you need to go over?”

“My extra credit essay,” Uraraka repeats after a moment and an askance look. “On the Tanaka v. Japan case, the one we skimmed over in class?” After another second without any response she adds “You know, the one that—“

“That eventually led to the establishment of the professional heroing system in Japan, yes,” Midoriya mutters to himself, his brows knitting together. “I did that too, what are you having trouble with?”

Uraraka sighs. “Not so much trouble, as—well, I’m just not sure that my argument makes any sense.”

He nods. “All right, walk me through it then.”

“Right, so background, this was when the use of Quirks was still banned nationwide, Tanaka was smuggling drugs into the country and was caught by a police officer with a mild telepathy Quirk. He appealed his case after his conviction, arguing that because there was no evidence of drugs or drug paraphernalia in the car the officer could only have had probable cause to search his car if he’d used his Quirk illegally to find out that he was smuggling, and when his appeal was denied he eventually managed to bring his case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the search was a violation of Article 34—”

“The ‘nor shall he be detained without adequate cause’ clause,” he says, nodding. “Right, right. Adequate cause was obtained but only through illegal means, so it was invalid.”

“—right, and that the use of the officer’s Quirk in general was a violation of Article 35, arguing that his private thoughts were covered under ‘effects’ in that article, and obviously since it was initially just a stop on the freeway there was never any warrant. Supreme Court eventually decided in favor of Tanaka.”

“Okay, so what argument are you making about the case?” he says.

“I’m arguing that the narrowly-worded decision that was eventually handed down by the court is what drove the development of heroes as privately-funded rather than government-funded organizations,” she says.

“What bit?” he says. He turns to his laptop and after a few seconds of searching brings up a copy of the decision. He hands the laptop to Uraraka, who sets her own computer to the side.

“Uh, this one here,” she says after a moment, highlighting the passage and passing the computer back to Midoriya.

He scans the screen, murmuring under his breath. “—whereby we recognize that the arresting officer’s actions were, given the legal standard previously set, et cetera et cetera—“

This goes on for about a minute or so. Uraraka amuses herself in the meantime by trying to count the freckles on Midoriya’s cheeks.

“Stop jostling,” Kaminari hisses as he, Bakugou, and Iida fight to get an ear to the door leading into Midoriya’s dorm room. “Stop it, they’ll hear.”

“Why don’t you fucking back off then,” Bakugou snaps. “I have better hearing than you do anyways.”

He elbows Kaminari out of the way with many a quiet protest and presses his ear against the door.

“What,” Jirou says, “are you idiots doing?”

The three of them turn to face her with expressions between surprise and irritation; she quirks an eyebrow at them in return, but otherwise remains expressionless.

“Round-cheeks went in a few minutes ago, we’re trying to see if she and Worthless are doing the nasty yet,” Bakugou answers. Behind him, Kaminari makes a number of quiet, frantic gestures which more or less translate to “no we are not”.

“We are trying to hear what our friends are conversing about,” Iida says, glancing towards Bakugou, “and yes, seeing if what they are conversing about concerns their relationship. I assume that Uraraka being here is part of your plans?”

“Not mine,” Jirou says with a shrug. “Momo or Mina’s probably, I’ll ask.”

“While you are here,” Iida says. “Do you mind if you assist us?” He gestures towards the door.

“Sure,” Jirou says. One of her earphones spools out and punches delicately through the drywall beside the door as the other raises itself and points towards the boys.

“—so the issue I have here is,” Midoriya says, his voice somewhat muffled but still understandable, “that it seems to me that your entire argument hinges on literally one word and some vague wording in the prior Yamamoto decision.”

“Right,” Uraraka shoots back, “but it’s an important one word, because by mentioning specifically public enforcers of the law in the Tanaka decision and with the whole “urgent need” clause they mention in Yamamoto it basically meant that privately-owned and –operated security companies could deliberately throw people into situations where they would be in mortal danger, have them use their Quirks, and then claim self-defense as their urgent need if they got slapped with any lawsuits.”

“Yeah, but they closed that loophole within a month of the first big companies starting to advertise their services,” Midoriya counters. “And besides—just playing devil’s advocate—that doesn’t explain why the police couldn’t do the same thing, since the Tanaka decision was interpreted as forbidding only the use of Quirks that could go against Articles 35 or 38, and being able to punch someone really hard or blow them up doesn’t really translate to unlawful search and seizure or compelling someone to confess.”

“Oh my god,” Bakugou gripes. “This is fucking useless.”

“No, no,” Iida says, nodding thoughtfully, “she makes a good point with the—“

“Oh fuck off,” Bakugou says. He gets up from his half-crouched position in front of the door and shambles away, his hands in his pockets.

“Well, those two are dense as hell,” Jirou says as she retracts both of her earphones. “Or maybe they’re just such enormous nerds that that’s their version of foreplay or something.”

“Or perhaps they really do merely want to focus on their academics,” Iida says.

“Eh?” Kaminari says.

“I am saying that perhaps the reason that our efforts have been fruitless up until now is because our friends are not interested in romance,” Iida explains. “And if that is the case then perhaps we—“

“Five words or less, Iida,” Jirou says. “We don’t have all day.”

He blinks at her, but takes a second and chooses his words carefully.

“They care about finishing school,” he says. “I accept that it doesn’t necessarily preclude the formation of a romance while we are here, but that is their focus, and they are driven and highly motivated, and given our current lack of success I find it difficult to imagine that they will shift that focus anytime soon.”

“Okay,” Kaminari says, clapping Iida on the back, “I think that was way more than five words, buddy, but yeah, sure, that sounds right.”

Jirou’s eyes go wide. “You idiot,” she hisses, “they heard that!”

“Scatter,” Iida orders. The three of them dive for cover.

A few seconds later Midoriya opens the door and glances from side to side, frowning slightly.

“Sorry, I must’ve imagined it,” he says as he turns and lets the door swing shut behind him. “Where were we?”

Iida, Kaminari, and Jirou peek out from around the corner they’d bolted around.

“How about we just leave them to it,” Kaminari suggests. “That was way too close.”

“For once I agree with you,” Jirou says. “Come on, let’s go see if anyone knows what’s actually going on.”

“Look, we’ve been arguing over details for the past three hours,” Midoriya says. “I think that your core argument is fine, and if you do lose any points it’ll be over little nitpicky things that even actual lawyers don’t really agree on.”

Uraraka’s mouth flattens into a line, almost a pout. “You’re sure about that?” she says.

“Positive,” he replies. “We’ve been over every word in this eight times and all we’ve changed is maybe a couple of sentences. It’s a good essay, it’s well-argued, you build it up logically, you cite appropriate precedents, it’s a really good essay, Uraraka. You can worry over it until next week but it’ll still be a good essay.”

He sighs as he sees her expression. “Look, if you insist, we’ll go over it one more time, okay?” he says. “Let’s just take a break, get something to eat or something, come back at this when we’re refreshed. There’s a new ramen bar that’s opened up not too far from here and Iida says that their prices aren’t bad—”

Midoriya’s teeth clack together as his exhausted brain catches up with his tongue and a blush works its way onto his cheeks. “—I mean,” he adds a little hastily, “if you want, or we can just go and grab something from the convenience store and come back.”

Uraraka’s brain takes a minute to break from its loop of “essay essay essay freckles essay essay legal jargon freckles”, but when it does she flushes riot red.

“Uh,” she says. “Um, sure. Ramen sounds good.” She closes her laptop with some care and stands up with it clutched before her like a talisman. “Let me just go grab my coat and my wallet.”

She scurries out.

“So I’ll see you in a few minutes?” Midoriya calls after her. He looks around his little room and runs a hand distractedly through his hair. Right, a comb maybe, and a clean shirt. Jeans, probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go out in sweatpants. Should he brush his teeth, no that would be dumb.

Mina brightens as Uraraka scurries into the common room.

“Hey, Ura, what’s the rush?” Mina asks as the girl hurries past, her laptop clutched to her chest.

She blinks and turns her head to follow Uraraka as she fails to slow or to even acknowledge the friendly greeting, but instead disappears down the hall leading into the girl’s dormitories.

“Uh,” she says. She turns to Momo, seated off to the side at one of the tables scattered around the room. “The heck was that all about?”

Momo doesn’t look up from where she’s typing away on her laptop. “Was what all about?”

“Ura just went through here like a shot.”

“Oh.”

Momo looks up as quick footsteps patter back across the carpet—Uraraka, now with one arm in a big, puffy coat, the other hanging onto a small clasp purse.

“Oh,” Momo repeats as Uraraka hurries past them with a kilometer stare. “A date.”

“Eh?”

“Coat and wallet, so she’s going out and she’s expecting to have to buy something, she’s gone completely stone-faced so something’s happened to make her emotionally overwrought, and really the only thing we might reasonably assume would do that these days is Midoriya.”

“Ah.”

“Also she’s headed straight for the boy’s dorms with her coat and wallet while being emotionally overwrought, and what does that all indicate for you?”

“Okay,” Mina says, nodding. “That makes sense.”

They fall silent again as Uraraka, now accompanied by a quietly red-faced Midoriya, pass them by and exit the building.

“Someone’s smug,” Momo notes as she turns back to Mina. “Well, it’ll hopefully be well-deserved.”

“I haven’t heard of them pulling anything,” Mina says, “that’ll be a yes.”

“You said that about your last three plans.”

“My last three plans weren’t sure-fire.”

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.

Uraraka tries to keep herself from losing it as she walks next to Midoriya, the chill in the air turning their breath into a fine mist that hangs in the air before them for a moment before floating away.

It isn’t a date that they’re on, it’s just a quick meal and then they’re heading back and finishing up their essays and there are zero romantic implications to this whatsoever.

Midoriya’s hand brushes hers and she nearly jumps off of the sidewalk and right into the path of a passing car. He jerks away so viciously that he nearly trips into the little concrete drainage trench bordering the road.

“So, uh,” he says a minute later. “I know it’s a bit early for that but are you looking at any agencies that you want to join up with?”

“Yes, actually,” Uraraka says, relieved at having something so utterly normal to talk about. “I spoke with No. 13 and he helped me get in touch with a few companies that do rapid response for disasters, rescue work mostly since that’s what my powers would probably be best for, lifting rubble off of people and everything—“

Okay, Ochako, get ahold of yourself, you’re starting to babble.

“—but I’m looking into groups that do more direct crime prevention and crime response too ever since I got some training from Gunhead,” she says. She mimes a couple of quick jabs and a rising uppercut and immediately feels foolish for it. “Some of them do community service and outreach, some work with the police and respond directly to urgent scenes, you know, the usual.”

She pauses to take a breath and asks brightly, “What about you?”

“I—well, I don’t know, actually,” Midoriya says. He looks down at the sidewalk and massages the back of his neck with a hand. “I haven’t really thought about it, ever since, uh. Ever since—we rescued Eri.”

He doesn’t need to tell her his real thoughts.

“But I was thinking that I’d find someone to take me on as a sidekick,” he says. “Get some street experience first, get my name out there before trying to sign on with an agency as a full hero.”

Uraraka can’t help herself—she chortles, sticking one of her hands over her mouth in a vain attempt to stifle the noise as Midoriya turns a bemused expression towards her.

“Um,” he says. “Sorry, did I say something?”

“No, no,” Uraraka says through a burst of giggling, “no. It’s just that you realize that you could walk up to any group and ask to be signed up as a hero and they’d write you a check on the spot, right?”

His expression becomes more bewildered, like that of a puppy confronted with an unfamiliar squeaky toy. Uraraka can’t help herself—again she bursts out giggling.

“You’ve been involved in three or four major fights at this point,” she explains. “Big-league guys too, and that’s making people sit up and take notice. I mean, every time I mentioned our class, the first thing that everyone said was ‘Oh, with that Deku boy?’”

She pauses, then adds “except that one guy who said ‘Oh, you’re in the same class as that insane kid?’ Look, my point is that people know you, and—okay, well most of them—think well of you. You could go up to any of them and ask and they’d give you a job just like that. You’re the guy who does the impossible, wins the unwinnable, uh, punches the unpunchable, I guess. You set your sights on a goal and you let literally nothing stop you from achieving it, and people admire that.”

Midoriya scoffs. “I think you’re overestimating me, Uraraka.”

Uraraka’s smile thins out to a line. “I think you’re underestimating yourself,” she says in soft rejoinder.

“Well, what about you, then?” Midoriya counters. “You helped take down Chisaki, and you’ve been doing as well or me or better academically. Your performance during the Sports Festival was a lot more impressive, too, since you actually used your head instead of just running straight in and breaking your arms and most of your fingers.”

“I lost that fight,” Uraraka says.

“There’s always going to be a fight that you can’t win,” Midoriya says. “And I lost to Todoroki, too.”

“Yeah, but you’ve also done a lot more winning than I have,” Uraraka says. “And let’s face it, you’re a lot more inspiring than I am.”

“Oh come on—“

“I mean it,” Uraraka says, continuing doggedly. “You inspire people to do things that they know they’re going to get in trouble for, you inspire them to keep fighting even when they would be perfectly justified in just lying down and letting someone else handle it, you inspire them to—to try to be better than they are.”

She flushes as she realizes that Midoriya is staring at her, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open very slightly.

“What?” she says. “I mean, it’s all true.”

“I didn’t know,” he says, looking down at his feet.

Silence descends again between them before Midoriya breaches it. “Um,” he says. “Do you feel like that?”

Before she can answer a man steps out in front of them from a darkened alley with something shiny and pointy in one clenched hand—a knife, more a machete, roughly the length of her forearm with a simple curving drop-point tip.

Uraraka feels something click into place in her head. She shifts her feet slightly apart and rises onto the balls of her feet, letting her purse drop away as her hands come up to the level of her waist.

“Wallets and purse,” the man says, the tip wavering between her and Midoriya. He licks his lips. “Now!”

Okay, so they just need to keep calm and not make any sudden moves and oh dear Midoriya is stepping in front of her and now he has a knife buried up to the hilt in his stomach.

Okay, so it is important to not freak out and now the mugger is pulling the knife out—

She darts forwards and kicks him in the knee; something makes an awful and satisfying crunch, and the mugger screams and drops the knife. He takes a roundhouse swing at her, which is ridiculous he’s well out of range and fuck her he’s got her with his nails or claws or something and now she’s got two or three hot streaks of pain across one cheek, but now she’s got a hold of his arm by his wrist and upper arm and twist—

The man feels his shoulder joint twist painfully before he hits the concrete face-first, hard enough that something crunches in his face. He screams in agony—at least until Uraraka kicks him sharply in the jaw, knocking him out cold.

Okay, primary threat has been neutralized. Now she can freak out.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” Uraraka babbles. She drops to her knees beside Midoriya as he curls up around the spreading red stain in his gut.

Oh god, what does she do? Pressure on the wound, right? Apply pressure with something, stop the bleeding—oh god, there’s so much blood—make sure he doesn’t pass out on her. She needs something to staunch the bleeding—not her down-stuffed coat, needs to be something with a dense weave, something that’ll help stop the bleeding

“Uraraka,” Midoriya hisses between gritted teeth.

She stares at him, wide-eyed.

“Recovery Girl,” he manages.

Fuck her, right. An ambulance wouldn’t take long to get here but the wound was deep and he was losing a lot of blood very quickly, and it was no guarantee that they’d be able to stitch him back up in time even if they got him to a trauma suite in the next five or ten minutes. His best chance of not bleeding to death here on the concrete was to get him to Recovery Girl—the teachers lived on campus now, after all. There was always the risk that she’d be off at the hospital of course, and wouldn’t that be deeply ironic if they fucked up and brought him back to campus only to find no Recovery Girl, only to have him bleed out there—fuck her if she’s going to spiral again.

She fumbles out her phone and dials Iida. It rings twice.

“Hello?” Iida answers.

It takes her a precious few seconds to explain, and another thirty seconds to get Iida to stop freaking out. Uraraka fights down the urge to scream.

“Just get here as soon as you fu—as you can,” she snaps. She tears Midoriya’s shirt off as gently as she can, but the movement still elicits a pained scream from him. “Sorry, Deku,” she says. “Stay with me, all right?”

Such a stupid thing to say, she thinks, as Iida hangs up. “Stay with me”, as if that would actually do anything to stop the fucking bleeding.

She folds the blood-stained shirt into a rough compress, trying to keep as much dirt off of it as possible.

“You are going to hate me in a moment,” she informs him. His eyes flicker down to the shirt in her hands.

Then she presses it hard against the wound.

He screams, his hands tightening into fists. She hears his knuckles pop.

Iida arrives at speed a couple minutes later with a rolled-up canvas stretcher tucked under an arm and a roll of duct tape around his wrist like a bracelet. He screeches to a halt and together they slide Midoriya onto the stretcher, secure the impromptu compress with several layers of tape, then secure Midoriya to the stretcher with the liberal application of more duct tape around his legs and shoulders.

“I sent Todoroki to inform Recovery Girl, she should be ready and waiting by the time we get back,” Iida says brusquely as Uraraka slaps her hand down onto the stretcher, then onto Midoriya. “I have also informed Momo, who is calling the police and directing them to the location of this criminal.”

“I’m coming with you,” Uraraka says. She slaps a hand onto her own shoulder and grabs the other end of the stretcher as she feels the familiar sense of queasiness come over her. She swallows hard.

“Of course,” Iida says, tucking the stretcher, Midoriya and all, under one arm. “Hold on tight.”

The three of them probably break a couple speed limits on the way back to campus, but Uraraka doesn’t care. They get back before Midoriya loses too much blood, and that’s what matters.

“He’ll be fine,” Recovery Girl tells them a few tense hours later, with the addition of a very worried and extremely teary Mrs. Midoriya. “My powers don’t do anything for blood loss, so I’m putting a few units of blood into him right now. My powers also don’t do much for infections, so in case that knife wound punctured anything I’m going to be putting him on intravenous antibiotics.”

“But he’ll be fine?” Iida asks.

“Yes,” Recovery Girl says. “Shouldn’t take more than a week before he’s out of here.”

She directs a little nod towards Uraraka. “You’ll also be pleased to know that the police picked up the man who tried to mug you. There will be some legal trouble undoubtedly, you did break his nose and his jaw, but I wouldn’t worry about that. We have an excellent legal team, and it was self-defense.”

“Is he awake?” Mrs. Midoriya asks.

“No,” Recovery Girl says. “But you’re welcome to stay with him until he wakes up. I’ll be in and out periodically to check on him, but feel free to call for me at any time.”

The three of them say their “thank yous” and “goodbyes”, and the diminutive little doctor nods at them and leaves for her office.

“Thank you so much,” Mrs. Midoriya says, bowing deeply and rapidly to Iida and Uraraka both. “Thank you, thank you, thank you—“

“No, no,” Uraraka says. “That’s not necessary.”

“He’s our friend,” Iida says.

“He would’ve done the same for us,” Uraraka says.

“Has done the same for us,” Iida says.

It takes them a few minutes of this before they convince Mrs. Midoriya that, no, there is nothing owed between them, no, no, really, it’s fine, there’s really nothing to, no, please stop prostrating yourself, please. Please.

“I’m going to go in and see him, then,” she says, sniffling a little. She dabs at her eyes with a soaked-through handkerchief and scurries in.

“You’re not coming?” Iida says as he turns to follow Mrs. Midoriya in and sees Uraraka turn to walk the other direction.

“No,” she says. “It’d be too crowded in there, you know how tiny those rooms are.”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No, no,” Uraraka says. “I wasn’t hurt, it was just Deku. I just need to think about some things.”

“If you’re sure,” Iida says. “I’ll text if he wakes up.”

“Thank you,” Uraraka says, and hurries out.

It’s only when she’s safely within the privacy of her own room that she lets herself break down and cry.

They’d been that close to just dying. Not in some big and meaningful fight, just a mugging gone bad, and it’d been that close. If she’d just been a second slower, had let the shock from Deku’s stabbing set in just that little fraction, then they both would’ve been goners. It had been that close, and then she would’ve died with so many things unsaid.

After a while, the tears slow, then stop. Uraraka curls up into a little ball and stares at the wall until sleep claims her.

The knock comes at Izuku’s window, in the dead of night.

He looks up, frowning, from his notes, and stares at his closed curtains.

A second later, the knock comes again, a frantic little rapping lasting maybe a second.

He waits and considers his options.

Well, the security around the school was good enough now that it probably wasn’t a villain trying to murder him. It was a possibility, sure, but not overly possible. And there’d probably be more screaming and explosions by now if it was.

“Deku, can you please open your window?”

Okay, so unless there’s a villain capable of perfectly mimicking or imitating Ochako’s voice—wait, wasn’t there that girl with the shapeshifting Quirk, Toga something or other?

Izuku shakes his head and stands, walking towards the window. Well, he could sit here and indulge his paranoia, or he could go and see what Ochako wanted at this time of night and why she was calling on him from outside instead of coming to his door.

Which, on second thought, doesn’t exactly do much for his paranoia.

He twitches aside the curtains and comes face-to-face with Ochako.

He blushes despite himself—she is really close, even if they’re separated by a window screen and a couple panes of insulated glass, and the sight of her expression, so focused and determined, sets his heart to skipping, and—oh for crying out loud, he shouldn’t be creeping on his friend like this. She wouldn’t want him to.

“We need to talk,” Ochako says. “Meet me on the training field in ten minutes?”

Izuku opens his mouth to say something, then thinks better of it and shuts it. He nods.

Ochako takes a deep breath and returns his nod. Then, she loosens her grip on the windowsill and drops gently away into the twilight.

Izuku quickly tugs on a sweatshirt and his shoes and slips out of his dorm. He closes the door carefully behind him so that the click of the lock doesn’t betray his exit, then makes his way down the corridors and stairways with his heart pounding in his ears and slips out of the dorms through a side door.

The campus grounds are quiet and cool past curfew, brightly lit by tall gold-shining lamps every few meters along its broad, winding paths. Izuku makes his way to the field by sticking to the edges of buildings and skirting the edges of shadows, alert for patrolling security and for other, more subtle sentries. After all, who knows what the inventors in the Department of Support might’ve dreamt up?

Still, he makes it to the field without incident and without any of the teachers popping up to reprimand him.

Ochako is waiting for him beside one of the long flights of stairs leading down to the field itself, at the edge of one of the pools of light cast by a lamp. Her eyes flicker up to meet his; her hands momentarily twist as they curl into fists around the hem of her shirt.

Izuku swallows, his mouth suddenly dry.

“Um,” he says after a minute or so of silence between them. “So, uh. Hi.”

Ochako meets his eyes again for a second, then looks down and away.

“So what did you want to talk about?” he says.

Silence. Her fists clench tighter.

“Are you okay?” he says.

Ochako finally replies, her voice quiet but firm and steady.

“I’m not,” she says.

Izuku takes a step closer to her, his hands half-raised to clasp her shoulders in a gesture of comfort. “What’s wrong, then?”

More silence. Izuku drops his hands back down to his sides even as Ochako’s loosen from their fists and drop down to hers.

“Uraraka?”

She finally looks up at him with tired but steady eyes, her expression resigned, her jaw set. The tension drops out of her shoulders completely, though she still looks hunched and small.

She just doesn’t look afraid anymore.

“You,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong.”

Izuku blinks.

“Or,” she amends hastily, “I should say that my feelings about you are what’s wrong.”

“Your feelings—“

“I love you,” Ochako says.

Izuku’s heart swells, so much so that he finds it hard to breathe or speak properly for a moment. His vision blurs. Oh, for crying out loud, he is not going to start crying now, he is not.

“I don’t know when I started seeing you as—as more than a friend,” Ochako continues. “All I know is that one day I woke up and—well, things were different.”

Her hands close into fists on the hem of her shirt again; she looks down and with a small effort forces her fingers to uncurl, one by one.

“You were just—“ she looks up at him, then back down to her hands again “—a light in my life, all of a sudden. And I wanted to be close to that light. So close.”

She looks up at him again, and holds his gaze. Izuku thinks his heart might explode from his chest when a smile, small and flickering, finds its way to her face again.

“I thought that would just go away,” she continues, standing a little straighter now. “And I tried to ignore it when it didn’t and I tried to just move on with things like everything was normal.”

She gives a little shrug. “And it didn’t work. Loving you is a hard habit to break.”

“Um, Ochako—“

She holds up a hand and Izuku stops. “Please, let me finish,�� she says. “I didn’t want to tell you this because I didn’t want to make things weird between us and I didn’t want to, well, make you feel like you had to respond or anything.”

“So what changed?” Izuku asks.

“I realized that I’d regret it more if, y’know, something bad happened to one of us and I never let you know,” Ochako says. “And a part of it, well, was just me needing to be honest with myself, just me needing to stop denying that I want to be with you. As more than a friend, I mean.”

She inhales deeply and then blows the breath out through her mouth, squaring her shoulders.

“So there,” she says. “I just needed to let you know. I mean, I don’t want to make you feel like you need to return my feelings or anything—”

“I love you too,” Izuku says.

Ochako freezes with her mouth open in a wide O, the words that had been about to escape coming out as a mere squeak instead.

“I didn’t know when I started to see you as more than a friend either,” he continues, as a blush scorches its way across her cheeks and lights the tips of her ears aflame. “I mean, I’ve admired you since the day we first met—your drive and determination, your kindness and selflessness—“

He stops, feeling his own blush creep up over his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he says, dropping his gaze. “I’m probably not saying this very—I’m probably not being very clear. I don’t really have a lot of experience—I’m not really used to this kind of thing.”

“Neither am I,” Ochako says, with a quiet smile that Izuku just sees in his peripheral vision. He blushes harder. “I mean, I’ve had crushes before, but I’ve never really felt anything this strongly before.”

“Honestly,” Izuku says, “I never thought that I’d ever be on the receiving end of something like this.”

They stand there for a minute more in silence, both of them almost glowing brighter than the lamp they’re under.

“So,” Uraraka says. “What do we do now?”

“I, uh,” Izuku says. “I don’t know. I never thought that I’d ever get this far with, uh, anyone.”

“This hasn’t ever been something that I’ve really thought was important,” Uraraka admits. “Until now, I mean.”

“So how do you want to go ahead with this?” Izuku asks.

Uraraka chews at her lower lip, and Izuku finds himself reflecting on just how ridiculously adorable the expression on her face is in an attempt to distract himself from his suddenly racing heart.

“Maybe just,” she says, “take it slow?”

“Take it a day at a time sort of thing?” he says.

“Do what comes natural?” she says.

“But keep it light and casual?” he says.

“Yeah,” she says, nodding perhaps a little too vigorously. “Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, we both still need to concentrate on school and stuff, and uh, stuff. We shouldn’t let, y’know, us get in the way of that.”

“Light and casual,” he repeats, nodding in sympathy with Uraraka. “Uh, Ochako?”

“You can call me by my first name,” Ochako says. “I mean, we’re, uh, together now, right?”

“Um,” Midoriya says. “Um, right. Well, you can call me Izuku, then.”

Again, there is a silence. The two of them try to fight down the tides of embarrassment and general, overwhelming emotion pouring over them and after a minute or two, mostly succeed.

“We are very, very new to this, aren’t we?” Ochako says.

“You’re honestly the first girl that I’ve been able to talk to for more than ten seconds without freezing up,” Izuku admits. “And maybe we don’t know each other as well as we’d—“

He searches for the word.

“Like?” Ochako suggests.

“—as well as we’d like,” Izuku says.

“Well, that’s what dating is supposed to be about, isn’t it?” Ochako says, giving him a small smile. “Getting to know each other?”

“Yeah,” Izuku says. He returns her smile, a little hesitantly. “So, uh. Do you want to get to know each other a little better, uh, next Saturday?”

Ochako’s smile widens into something brilliant and golden, and Izuku finds himself answering it with one of his own.

“I’d love to,” Ochako says.

“Oh my god,” Mina groans, flopping face-first into Momo’s bedspread.

“What is it now?” Momo says, not looking up from the article she’s idly scrolling through.

“Okay so Midoriya getting stabbed and all was horrible and awful and I really hope that it never happens again,” Mina says. “But come on, him being in mortal peril? Ura staying by his bed for a week all teary-eyed while Recovery Girl healed him back up and made sure that he wasn’t going to have an infection? The situation was perfect.”

“So?”

“So why aren’t they smooshing booties yet?”

Mina lets her head flop back down and screams into Momo’s bed.

“You’d better not be getting any spit on my sheets,” Momo says calmly.

“Okay, you know what we need to do?” Mina says after a minute, popping back up. She drops her fist into her open palm.

“Step up our—“

“Step up our game!” Mina declares. “We need to get these two adorable losers together at any cost.”

“Oh,” Momo says, without much enthusiasm. “Wonderful.”

Unbeknownst to them, in a clearing in the forest just outside of the main campus, Ochako and Izuku are laughing with each other, sitting side by side, their eyes bright and their smiles wide. Ochako’s hand sits atop Izuku’s, their fingers interlaced as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

The world is not well, they know. Outside of their little sanctuary the world seethes with hate and rage and cruelty.

But for now, in their own little world, all is well.

#uraraka ochako #midoriya izuku #bnha #uravity bang #long post

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gaysparklepires · 7 years

Text

19. Race

We made our flight with seconds to spare, and then the anxiety really hit. The plane sat idle on the tarmac while the flight attendants strolled—so casually—up and down the aisle, patting the bags in the overhead compartment to make sure everything fit. The pilots leaned out of the cockpit, chatting with them as they passed. Alice’s hand was hard on my shoulder, gently squeezing me when she sensed my anxiety spike.

“It’s faster than running,” she reminded me in a low voice.

I just nodded in response.

At last the plane rolled lazily from the gate, building speed with a gradual steadiness that tortured me further. I expected some kind of relief when we achieved liftoff, but my frenzied anxiety didn’t lessen.

Alice lifted the phone on the back of the seat in front of her before we’d stopped climbing, turning her back on the stewardess who eyes her with disapproval. Something about my expression stopped the stewardess from coming over to protest.

I tried to tune out what Alice was murmuring to Jasper; I didn’t want to add to my anxiousness, but some of the conversation reached my ears.

“I can’t be sure, I keep seeing him do different things, he keeps changing his mind…. A killing spree through the city, attacking the guard, lifting a car over his head in the main square… mostly things that would expose them—he knows that’s the fastest way to force a reaction….

“No, you can’t.” Alice’s voice dropped till it was nearly inaudible, though I was sitting inches from her. Contrarily, I listened harder. “Tell Emmett no… Well, go after Emmett and Royal and bring them back…. Think about it, Jasper. If he sees any of us, what do you think he will do?”

She nodded. “Exactly. I think Beau is the only chance—if there is a chance…. I’ll do everything that can be done, but prepare Carlisle; the odds aren’t good.”

She laughed then, and there was a catch in her voice. “I’ve thought of that…. Yes, I promise.” Her voice became pleading. “Don’t follow me. I promise, Jasper. One way or another, I’ll get out…. And I love you.”

She hung up, and leaned back in her seat with her eyes closed. “I hate lying to him.”

“Tell me everything, Alice,” I begged. “I don’t understand. Why did you tell Jasper to stop Emmett, why can’t they come help us?”

“Two reasons,” she whispered, her eyes still closed. “The first I told him. We could try to stop Edward ourselves—if Emmett could get his hands on him, we might be able to stop him long enough to convince him you’re alive. But we can’t sneak up on Edward. And if he sees us coming for him, he’ll just act that much faster. He’ll throw a Buick through a wall or something, and the Volturi will take him down.

“That’s the second reason of course, the reason I couldn’t say to Jasper. Because if they’re there and the Volturi kill Edward, they’ll fight them. Beau.” She opened her eyes and stared at me, beseeching. “If there were any chance we could win… if there were a way that the four of us could save my brother by fighting for him, maybe it would be different. But we can’t, and, Beau, I can’t lose Jasper like that.”

I realized why her eyes begged for my understanding. She was protecting Jasper, at our expense, and maybe at Edward’s, too. I understood, and I did not think badly of her. I nodded.

“Couldn’t Edward hear you, though?” I asked. “Wouldn’t he know, as soon as he heard your thoughts, that I was alive, and there was no point to this?”

Not that there was any justification, either way. I still couldn’t believe that he was so stupid as to react like this. It made no sense! I remembered with irritable clarity his words that day on the sofa, while we watched Romeo and Juliet kill themselves, one after the other. I wasn’t going to live without you, he’d said, as if it should be such an obvious conclusion. But the words he had spoken in the forest as he’d left me had canceled all that out—forcefully.

“If he were listening,” she explained. “But believe it or not, it’s possible to lie with your thoughts. If you had died, I would still try to stop him. And I would be thinking ‘he’s alive, he’s alive’ as hard as I could. He knows that.”

I ground my teeth in mute frustration.

“If there were any way to do this without you, Beau, I wouldn’t be endangering you like this. It’s very wrong of me.”

“I understand, Alice.” I replied. “But I have to do this. I can’t have the guilt haunting me for the rest of my life.” I decided to change the subject. “Tell me what you meant, about hating to lie to Jasper.”

She smiled a grim smile. “I promised him I would get out before they killed me, too. It’s not something I can guarantee—not by a long shot.” She raised her eyebrows, as if willing me to take the danger more seriously.

“Who are these Volturi?” I demanded in a whisper. “What makes them so much more dangerous than Emmett, Jasper, Royal, and you?” It was hard to imagine something scarier than that.

She took a deep breath, and then abruptly leveled a dark glance over my shoulder. I turned in time to see the man in the aisle seat looking away as if he wasn’t listening to us. He appeared to be a businessman, in a dark suit with a power tie and a laptop on his knees. While I stared at him with irritation, he opened the computer and very conspicuously put headphones on.

I leaned closer to Alice. Her lips were at my ears as she breathed the story.

“I was surprised that you recognized the name,” she said. “That you understood so immediately what it meant—when I said he was going to Italy. I thought I would have to explain. How much did Edward tell you?”

“He just said they were an old, powerful family—like royalty. That you didn’t antagonize them unless you wanted to… die,” I whispered. The last word was hard to choke out.

“You have to understand,” she said, her voice slower, measured now. “We Cullens are unique in more ways than you know. It’s abnormal for so many of us to live together in peace. It’s the same for Tanya’s family in the north, and Carlisle speculates that abstaining makes it easier for us to be civilized, to form bonds based on love rather than survival or convenience. Even James’s little coven of three was unusually large—and you saw how easily Laurent left them. Our kind travel alone, or in pairs, as a general rule. Carlisle’s family is the biggest in existence, as far as I know, with the one exception. The Volturi.

“There were three of them originally, Aro, Caius, and Marcus.”

“I’ve seen them,” I mumbled. “In the picture in Carlisle’s study.”

Alice nodded. “Two females joined them over time, and the five of them make up the family. I’m not sure, but I suspect their age is what gives them the ability to live peacefully together. They are well over three thousand years old. Or maybe it’s their gifts that give them extra tolerance. Like Edward and I, Aro and Marcus are… talented.”

She continued before I could ask. “Or maybe it’s just their love of power than binds them together. Royalty is an apt description.”

“But if there are only five—“

“Five that make up the family,” she corrected. “That doesn’t include their guard.”

I took a deep breath. “That sounds… serious.”

“Oh, it is,” she assured me. “There were nine members of the guard that were permanent, the last time we heard. Others are more… transitory. It changes. And many of them are gifted as well—with formidable gifts, gifts that make what I can do look like a parlor trick. The Volturi chose them for their abilities, physical or otherwise.

I opened my mouth, and then closed it. I didn’t think I wanted to know how bad the odds were.

She nodded again, as if she understood exactly what I was thinking. “They don’t get into too many confrontations. No one is stupid enough to mess with them. They stay in their city, leaving only as duty calls.”

“Duty?” I wondered.

“Didn’t Edward tell you what they do?”

“No,” I said, feeling the blank expression on my face.

Alice looked over my head again, toward the businessman, and put her wintry lips back to my ear.

“There’s a reason we call them royalty… the ruling class. Over the millennia, they have assumed the position of enforcing our rules—which actually translates to punishing transgressors. They fulfill that duty decisively.”

My eyes popped wide with shock. “There are rules?” I asked in a voice that was too loud.

“Shh!”

“Shouldn’t somebody have mentioned this to me earlier?” I whispered angrily. “I mean, I was so involved in your lives! Shouldn’t someone have explained the rules to me?”

Alice chuckled once at my reaction. “It’s not that complicated, Beau. There’s only one core restriction—and if you think about it, you can probably figure it out for yourself. You already follow it.”

I did think about it. “You have to keep what you are a secret?”

“Exactly, and you instinctively knew that.” She replied.

“Well, it is pretty obvious.”

“It makes sense, and most of us don’t need policing,” she continued. “But, after a few centuries, sometimes one of us gets bored. Or crazy. I don’t know. And then the Volturi step in before it can compromise them, or the rest of us.”

“So Edward…”

“Is planning to flout that in their own city—the city they’ve secretly held for three thousand years, since the time of the Etruscans. They are so protective of their city that they don’t allow hunting within its walls. Volterra is probably the safest city in the world—from vampire attack at the very least.”

“But you said they didn’t leave. How do they eat?”

“They don’t leave. They bring in their food from the outside, from quite far away sometimes. It gives their guard something to do when they’re not out annihilating mavericks. Or protecting Volterra from exposure…”

“From situations like this one, like Edward,” I finished her sentence. I couldn’t fathom how he could be so selfish and belligerent towards his family’s feelings. His death would devastate them. What’s more, it was entirely possible that the whole Cullen family could be held responsible for his actions. The anger flared anew.

“I doubt they’ve ever had a situation quite like this,” she muttered, disgusted. “You don’t get a lot of suicidal vampires.”

I realized I was shaking, I was so angry and frustrated. Alice seemed to understand. She wrapped her thin, strong arm around my shoulders.

“We’ll do what we can, Beau. It’s not over yet.”

“Not yet.” I let her comfort me, though I knew she thought our chances were poor. “But the Volturi will get us if we mess this up.”

Alice stiffened. “Yes, they will.”

I let out a groan of frustration.

“If you’ve changed your mind, we can turn around in New York and go back to Forks.”

“I haven’t changed my mind…” the hesitation was palpable in my voice.

“If you’re sure.” She was staring at me very intently.

“Alice, will you promise me something?”

She waited expectantly.

“Promise me—if we’re too late for Edward—that you’ll do everything you can to get me back to Charlie.” I could feel the intensity in my eyes.

“I’ll do my damnedest, Beau.”

“And you get yourself back to Jasper.” I added.

She nodded and we were silent for a moment.

“Alright, I need to concentrate, now. I need to try and see what he’s planning.”

She left her arm around me, but let her head fall back against the seat and closed her eyes. She pressed her free hand to the side of her face, rubbing her fingerprints against her temple.

I watched her in fascination for a long time. Eventually she became utterly motionless, her face like a stone sculpture. The minutes passed, and if I didn’t know better, I would have thought she’d fallen asleep. I didn’t dare interrupt her to ask what was going on.

Without Alice to distract me, my thoughts instantly flashed back to Forks. It was a testament to my feelings about everything I had left behind that my thoughts were preoccupied with Charlie and home more than the horrors we were headed for—the worse horrors we would find if we failed.

The truth was, my thoughts were not just centered on Charlie or home. My mind was racing with thoughts about Jacob. That last image of his sad face was burned into my memory. My heart ached from the fresh break I felt when I left him. I had to marvel at the fact that even though there was a chance—if we were very, very, very lucky—I would see Edward, save Edward, my thoughts were more on Jacob. Besides, nothing had changed between Edward and I—nothing had changed about our relationship. He still didn’t want me. There was no reason for me to want to see him.

But Jacob I did want to see. I wanted to beg his forgiveness, to apologize for leaving him like that—with so much unsaid between us. I couldn’t think about it for too long, it hurt too much.

They showed a movie, and my neighbor got headphones. Sometimes I watched the figures moving across the little screen, but I couldn’t even tell if the movie was supposed to be a romance or a horror film.

After an eternity, the plane began to descend toward New York City. Alice remained in her trance. I dithered, reaching out to touch her, only to pull my hand back again. This happened a dozen times before the plane touched down with a jarring impact.

“Alice,” I finally said. “Alice, we have to go.”

I touched her arm.

Her eyes came open very slowly. She shook her head from side to side for a moment.

“Anything new?” I asked in a low voice, conscious of the man listening on the other side of me.

“Not exactly,” she breathed in a voice I could barely catch. “He’s getting closer. He’s deciding how he’s going to ask.”

We had to run for our connection, but that was good—better than having to wait. As soon as the plane was in the air, Alice closed her eyes and slid back into the same stupor as before. I waited as patiently as I could. When it was dark again, I opened the window to stare out into the flat black that was no better then the window shade.

I found myself wondering what I could possibly say to Charlie when—I refused to think if—I got back. And Jacob? Poor sweet, Jacob. He’d promised to wait for me, but did that promise still apply? Would I end up home alone in Forks, with no one at all? Would Charlie even let me stay after this?

It felt like seconds later when Alice shook my shoulder—I hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep.

“Beau,” she hissed, her voice a little too loud in the darkened cabin full of sleeping humans.

I wasn’t disoriented—I hadn’t been out long enough for that.

“What’s wrong?”

Alice’s eyes gleamed in the dim light of a reading lamp in the row behind us.

“It’s not wrong.” She smiled fiercely. “It’s right. They’re deliberating, but they’ve decided to yell him no.”

“The Volturi?” I muttered, groggy.

“Of course, Beau, keep up now. I can see what they’re going to say.”

“Tell me.”

An attendant tiptoed down the aisle to us. “Can I get either of you a pillow?” His hushed whisper was a rebuke to our comparatively loud conversation.

“No, thank you.” Alice beamed up at him, her smile was shockingly lovely. The attendant’s expression was dazed as he turned and stumbled his way back.

“Tell me,” I breathed almost silently.

She whispered into my ear. “They’re interested in him—they think his talent could be useful. They’re going to offer him a place with them.”

“What will he say?”

“I can’t see that yet, but I’ll bet it’s colorful.” She grinned again. “This is the first good news—the first break. They’re intrigued; they truly don’t want to destroy him—‘wasteful,’ that’s the word Aro will use—and that may be enough to force him to get creative. The longer he spends on his plans, the better for us.”

It wasn’t quite enough to make me hopeful, to make me feel the relief she obviously felt. There were still so many ways that we could fail. And if we had to face the Volturi, I wouldn’t be able to see Charlie or Jacob again.

“Alice?”

“What?”

“I’m confused. How are you seeing this so clearly? And then other times, you see things far away—things that don’t happen?”

Her eyes tightened. I wondered what she was thinking of my question.

“It’s clear because it’s immediate and close, and I’m concentrating. The faraway things that come on their own—those are just glimpses, faint maybes. Plus, I see my kind more easily than yours. Edward is even easier because I’m so attuned to him.”

“You see me sometimes,” I reminded her.

She shook her head. “Not as clearly.”

I sighed. “Sometimes I wish you had seen that all this would happen. In the beginning, I mean.” I rubbed my temples. “Hell, you once even saw me becoming one of you someday.”

She sighed. “It was a possibility at the time.”

I laughed, once. It was a joyless laugh.

“Actually, Beau…” She hesitated, and then seemed to make a choice. “Honestly, I think it’s all gotten beyond ridiculous. I’m debating whether to just change you myself.”

I jumped and stared at her, frozen with shock.

“Did I scare you?” she wondered. “I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“I don’t know!” I gasped. “Maybe once I thought about it—considered it. I never decided for sure though and now, I don’t think it’s what I really want anymore.”

“Oh,” she seemed surprised. “Well, at least you’re being intelligent about it all.”

“Thanks?”

“It would be foolish, anyway,” she said, waving her hand. “Edward would be furious.”

“I think I’ll take my chances being the human amongst the vampires and werewolves, Alice.” I deadpanned.

She laughed at that. “You are so bizarre, even for a human.”

“Thanks, I try.”

“Well, there are more important things to worry about. Like, living through tomorrow.”

“Good point.” I wondered if I would want that—if I would want to be like the Cullens. Maybe I could be powerful and strong and Edward would want me back? Would I want that, though? When I could just be me, be human, and be with Jacob? I couldn’t think about all this. I didn’t have a future right now. I only had the present.

“Go back to sleep,” she encouraged me. “I’ll wake you up when there’s something new.”

“Right,” I mumbled, certain sleep was a lost cause now. Alice pulled her legs up on the seat, wrapping her arms around them and leaning her forehead against her knees. She rocked back and forth as she concentrated.

I rested my head against the seat, watching her, and the next thing I knew, she was snapping the shade closed against the faint brightening of the Eastern sky.

“What’s happening?” I mumbled.

“They’ve told him no,” she said quietly. I noticed at once that her enthusiasm was gone.

My voice was wary. “What’s he going to do?”

“It was chaotic at first. I was only getting flickers, he was changing plans so quickly.”

“What kinds of plans?” I pressed.

“There was a bad hour,” she whispered. “He’d decided to go hunting.”

She looked at me intently, and I understood.

“In the city,” I breathed.

“It got very close.” She continued. “He changed his mind at the last minute.”

“He wouldn’t want to disappoint Carlisle,” I mumbled. He’d break Carlisle’s heart getting himself killed, but he wouldn’t want to disappoint him.

“Probably,” she agreed.

“Will there be enough time?” As I spoke, there was a shift in the cabin pressure. I could feel the plane angling downward.

“I’m hoping so—if he sticks to his latest decision, maybe.”

“What is that?”

“He’s going to keep it simple. He’s just going to walk out into the sun.”

Just walk out into the sun. That was all.

It would be enough. The image of Edward in the meadow—glowing, shimmering like his skin was made of a million diamond facets—was burned into my memory. No human who saw that would ever forget. The Volturi couldn’t possibly allow it. Not if they wanted to keep their city inconspicuous.

I looked at the slight gray glow that shone through the opened windows. “We’ll be too late,” I whispered in frustration.

She shook her head. “Right now, he’s leaning towards the melodramatic.”

“Oh, is he? Wow, I’m shocked.” I glared at her.

She ignored me. “He wants the biggest audience possible, so he’ll choose the main plaza, under the clock tower. The walls are high there. He’ll wait till the sun is exactly overhead.”

“So we have till noon?”

“If we’re lucky. If he sticks with this decision.”

“He’ll go for the drama,” I sighed. “He’ll stick with it.”

The pilot came on over the intercom, announcing, first in Italian and then in English, our imminent landing. The seat belt lights dinged and flashed.

“How far is it from Florence to Volterra?”

“That depends on how fast you drive… Beau?”

“Yes?”

She eyed me speculatively. “How strongly are you opposed to grand theft auto?”

A bright yellow Porsche screamed to a stop a few feet in front of where I paced, the word TURBO scrawled in silver cursive across its back. Everyone beside me on the crowded airport sidewalk stared.

“Hurry, Beau!” Alice shouted impatiently through the open passenger window.

I ran to the door and threw myself in, feeling as though I might as well be wearing a black stocking over my head.

“Sheesh, Alice,” I complained. “Could you pick a more conspicuous car to steal?”

The interior was black leather, and the windows were tinted dark. It felt safer inside, like nighttime.

Alice was already weaving, too fast, through the thick airpot traffic—sliding through tiny spaces between the cars as I cringed and fumbled for my seat belt.

“The important question,” she corrected, “is whether I could have stolen a faster car, and I don’t think so. I got lucky.”

“I’m sure that will be very comforting at the roadblock.”

She trilled a laugh. “Trust me, Beau. If anyone sets up a roadblock, it will be behind us.” She hit the gas then, as if to prove her point.

I probably should have watched out the window as first the city of Florence and then the Tuscan landscape flashed past with blurring speed. This was my first trip anywhere, and maybe my last, too. But Alice’s driving frightened me, despite the fact that I knew I could trust her behind the wheel. Besides, I was too filled with anxiety to really see the hills or the walled towns that looked like castles in the distance.

“Do you see anything more?”

“There’s something going on,” Alice muttered. “Some kind of festival. The streets are full of people and red flags. What’s the date today?”

I wasn’t sure so I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check. “Uh, it’s the nineteenth.”

“Well, that’s ironic. It’s Saint Marcus Day.”

“Which means?”

She chuckled darkly. “The city holds a celebration every year. As the legend goes, a Christian missionary, a Father Marcus—Marcus of the Volturi, in fact—drove all the vampires from Volterra fifteen hundred years ago. The story claims he was martyred in Romania, still trying to drive away the vampire scourge. Of course that’s nonsense—he’s never left the city. But that’s where some of the superstitions about things like crosses and garlic come from. Father Marcus used them so successfully. And vampires don’t trouble Volterra, so they must work.” Her smile was sardonic. “It’s become more of a celebration of the city, and a recognition of the police force—after all, Volterra is an amazingly safe city. The police get the credit.”

I was realizing what she meant when she’d said ironic. “They’re not going to be very happy if Edward messes things up for them on St. Marcus Day, are they?”

She shook her head, her expression grim. “No. They’ll act very quickly.”

I looked away, fighting against my teeth as they tried to break through the skin of my lower lip. Bleeding was not the best idea right now.

The sun was terrifyingly high in the pale blue sky.

“He’s still planning on noon?” I checked.

“Yes. He’s decided to wait. And they’re waiting for him.”

“Tell me what I have to do.”

She kept her eyes on the winding road—the needle on the speedometer was touching the far right on the dial.

“You don’t have to do anything. He just has to see you before he moves into the light. And he has to see you before he sees me.”

“How are we going to work that?”

A small red car seemed to be racing backward as Alice zoomed around it.

“I’m going to get you as close as possible, and then you’re going to run in the direction I point you.”

I nodded.

“Try not to trip,” she added. “We don’t have time for a concussion today.”

I glared back at her.

The sun continued to climb in the sky while Alice raced against it. It was too bright, and that had me panicking.

Maybe he wouldn’t feel the need to wait for noon after all.

“There,” Alice said abruptly, pointing to the castle city atop the closest hill.

I stared at it, feeling the very first hint of a new kind of fear. Every minute since yesterday morning—it seemed like a week ago—since Alice had spoken Edward’s name at the foot of the stairs, I had been filled with nothing but fear and panic. And now, as I stared at the ancient sienna walls and towers crowning the peak of the steep hill, I felt that fear and panic reach a high I never before thought was possible.

I supposed the city was beautiful. It absolutely terrified me.

“Volterra,” Alice announced in a flat, icy voice.

#New Moon Revamped #New Moon #New Moon Reimagined #New Moon Rewrite #Twilight Revamped #Twilight Reimagined #Twilight Rewrite #The Twilight Saga #The Twilight Saga Revamped #The Twilight Saga Reimagined #The Twilight Saga Rewrite #Beau Swan #Alice Cullen #2.19

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