MHA + pickme

The common room was loud with the usual pre-class chaos when Hana slipped in, auburn hair perfectly tousled, expression carrying that particular flavor of barely-contained excitement she'd been rehearsing since last night.

"Oh my gosh, okay, I wasn't going to say anything but—" She pressed her fingers to her lips like she was physically holding back joy, and half the room looked up on instinct. She had timed that perfectly. "Fatgum reached out to me last night."

Silence. The good kind. The kind she liked.

She pulled out her phone with just enough hesitation to make it look reluctant and held it out for Kirishima, who was closest. On the screen was a clean screenshot of a text thread. Fatgum's contact name sat at the top with a little star next to it.

Hey Hana! So I've been thinking it over and I have to be honest — I only have room for one more intern this round. I was going to offer it to that {{User}} girl from your class but watching you train lately... I think you're the better fit. Could you let her know for me? Easier coming from a friend.

Kirishima's brow furrowed. He read it twice.

"That's... weird," he said slowly. "Fatgum wouldn't usually ask a student to—"

"I know, I know, it's awkward." Hana's eyes went wide and soft, the picture of reluctant honesty. "That's why I've been stressed all morning. I don't even want to be the one to tell her, she's going to be devastated." She touched her hair. Just briefly. "I just thought you guys should know before she gets here so it doesn't blindside everyone."

Mina had gone very still. Jirou was staring at the phone with an expression she hadn't sorted into words yet. Bakugo hadn't looked up from his seat but his jaw had done something.

Sero opened his mouth.

The common room door swung open.

Fatgum filled the frame the way Fatgum always did — completely and with great warmth — and beside him, {{User}}, laughing at something he'd just said, her bag slung over one shoulder.

"—told her the same thing in third year and she still hasn't let me live it down!" Fatgum was saying, delighted with himself. He spotted the class and raised a broad hand in greeting. "Hey hey! Sorry to barge in, I'm walking this one to class." He looked down at {{User}} with the fond energy of someone who had already decided she was going to do great things. "Wanted to say it in person actually — I am so pumped about this internship. You and Kirishima are going to be an incredible team. Red Riot's already texted me fourteen times this week—"

"WHAT." Kirishima was on his feet.

"—which is very normal and I respect the enthusiasm." Fatgum grinned. "Point is, we're gonna have a great time. You're exactly who I want in that agency."

The room was very quiet.

Twenty sets of eyes traveled, slowly and with tremendous focus, from Fatgum to the phone still in Kirishima's hand.

Then to Hana.

Hana, who had not moved. Whose expression had not yet caught up with what her brain was frantically trying to calculate. Whose hand was raised halfway to her hair and had frozen there, suspended, in the most incriminating possible position.

Fatgum blinked, cheerful and oblivious. "Everything okay in here? You all look like you've seen a ghost."

Nobody answered him.

Nobody was looking at him.

It started the way Hana's best moves always started — quietly, with concern.

Aizawa was running a debrief after the latest training exercise, capture scarf loose around his shoulders, looking like he'd slept approximately never, when Hana raised her hand with the particular expression she reserved for moments she'd been building toward for days.

"Sensei, I'm sorry, I just — I have to say something." A small breath. The chin dip that made her eyes look bigger. "I've been worried about it for a while and I feel terrible even bringing it up but I think someone needs to."

Aizawa looked at her with the energy of a man who had a sixth sense for performance and had simply chosen, for now, to let it play.

"Go ahead."

Hana turned to the class with a expression of agonized reluctance that she had practiced in a mirror.

"Don't you think it's a little... suspicious?" She let the word land gently. "How much the villains seem to gravitate toward {{User}}? Like — Toga, Dabi, even Shigaraki — they all have this weird fixation on her. And I'm not saying it's her fault, obviously, I'm not saying that at all—" The disclaimer delivered fast, hands raised, eyes wide. "I just think maybe it's worth asking how that keeps happening. Because it's a pattern. And patterns mean something."

The room shifted.

Sero's expression flattened. Mina stopped twirling her pen. Kirishima looked at the desk.

Aizawa said nothing. His eyes moved across the room once, slow and even, the way they did when he was cataloguing everything.

Hana pressed on, soft and sorrowful. "I just care about this class. I care about everyone's safety. I'm probably wrong, I hope I'm wrong—"

"Can I show the class something?"

Shoto's voice was quiet. It was always quiet. That was what made it cut through the way it did.

He was already looking at his phone with an expression of complete neutrality, which on Shoto meant something was happening underneath that he had decided to handle with precision rather than heat. He stood, walked to the front of the room without hurrying, and turned his screen to face everyone.

"I was sent this last week," he said simply. "I wasn't sure when it would be relevant."

He pressed play.

The video was vertical, slightly shaky, clearly filmed by someone who found the whole thing amusing. The setting was dim, recognizably a villain-adjacent location, and in the center of the frame was Hana — auburn hair not quite perfect, mascara beginning to threaten her cheeks, hands clasped in front of her in the full performance of desperate sincerity.

On screen, Dabi's voice came from off camera, flat and deeply unimpressed.

"How did you even find this location."

"I just — I wanted to meet you, I've followed your work for so long—" On-screen Hana's voice climbed into a register of breathless admiration. "I think what you're doing is so brave, I think you're so — I could be useful, I could help, I just need a chance, if you could just tell me how to—"

"You're embarrassing yourself."

"Please—"

"I'm going to stop you there." The sound of footsteps moving away. "Don't come back here."

The video ended.

The room was so quiet that the ventilation system was suddenly very loud.

Shoto pocketed his phone with the same energy he'd produced it — calm, unhurried, complete.

Aizawa had not moved. His eyes had traveled from the phone to Hana with the slow inevitability of a man who had already reached a conclusion and was simply waiting for the paperwork to catch up.

Hana's mouth was open. Something was happening behind her eyes that she hadn't prepared a response for. Her hand was at her hair.

"Hana." Aizawa's voice was exactly the same as it always was. That was somehow worse than if it had changed. "My office. After class."

He turned back to the whiteboard.

"Everyone else. Back to debrief."

Nobody looked at Hana.

That was somehow the loudest thing in the room.

The warehouse had gone sideways fast.

What started as a routine intercept mission had splintered into chaos the moment the League's numbers turned out to be double the intelligence estimate, and now Class 1-A was scattered across the floor in clusters, Aizawa working the perimeter, everyone burning through their training faster than felt comfortable.

{{User}} was holding her position near the center pillar, reading the fight, when Hana appeared at her shoulder.

Nobody saw it. That was the thing, afterward, that made Kirishima's hands shake — nobody saw it because there was too much happening everywhere else, and Hana had always been very good at choosing her moments.

One sharp, two-handed shove between the shoulder blades.

{{User}} stumbled forward, momentum carrying her directly into the open ground where Tomura Shigaraki stood, hands spread, in the middle of turning toward a different target.

Time did a strange thing.

Shigaraki's eyes snapped to her and something crossed his face that moved too fast to name — and then his hands flew backward, away from her, fingers splayed wide, both arms wrenching to his sides like he'd touched something hot. He took a full step back. Then another.

The decay did not come.

He stared at her on the floor in front of him and something happened in his expression that wasn't strategy and wasn't hunger and wasn't anything the League would have recognized as belonging to him. His jaw worked once.

"Don't—" The word came out strange. Stripped of its usual register. "Get her away from me."

It wasn't a threat.

It was almost the opposite of one.

Kurogiri was already moving but Shigaraki had turned away, hand pressed flat against his own chest, the other still thrown wide away from his body like he didn't trust it.

Across the warehouse, Kirishima had seen enough.

He hit Hana's position in four strides, hardened and furious, and the look on his face was not one she had ever seen aimed at her before. Behind him Bakugo had clocked it too, and the temperature around his palms was climbing, and his eyes were not on the League anymore.

Hana had already composed herself. Hands up. Eyes filling. Mouth opening around the architecture of an excuse she'd half-built on the way down.

"It was an accident, there was something behind me, I lost my balance—"

"I saw you." Kirishima's voice was flat in a way that had no hardness left in it at all, just the thing that came after hardness was gone. "I saw your hands."

Hana's mouth stayed open.

The tears came anyway, reflexive and perfect.

Nobody moved toward her.

For the first time in a very long time, the tears landed in an empty room.

The corridor was not empty.

Endeavor stood with his arms folded, Hawks leaned against the wall with his wings half-tucked, Fatgum filled the space beside them, and in front of all three stood {{User}}, with Shoto beside her mid-conversation.

Hana saw the group and her whole face lit up.

This was it. This was the moment she had been engineering for months.

She walked straight in.

"Fatgum-san!" Warm, bright, perfectly calibrated. "I'm so glad you're here, I actually wanted to talk to you about—"

"Hana Mizuki."

Fatgum said her name the way people read a file out loud. Cheerful face still in place but something behind it that was not cheerful at all. He said it like he had been waiting for the correct moment to use it.

Hana's stride didn't falter. "You remembered me!"

"Hard to forget," Fatgum said pleasantly. "Seeing as you put my name on text messages I didn't send."

The corridor went very quiet.

Hana's smile stayed exactly where it was through what must have been a significant act of will.

"I'm not sure what you mean—"

"The internship texts." Fatgum's voice was still warm in the way that his voice always was, which somehow made it worse. "The ones where I apparently told you to inform your classmate that I was rescinding her offer. Those texts. Which you showed to a room full of students." He tilted his head. "I have a very good memory. And a phone. And I definitely didn't send those."

Hawks, from the wall, made a small interested sound. He had the expression of someone watching a very good match.

Endeavor said nothing. He was looking at Hana the way he looked at structural problems — identifying load-bearing points, calculating collapse.

"That was a misunderstanding," Hana said. The smile was still there. It was doing incredible work under the circumstances. "I think the screenshots got mixed up somehow, it was a really stressful day and I—"

"Mixed up," Fatgum repeated.

"I would never intentionally—"

"With fake messages. That you fabricated. With my name on them." He said each sentence with the same patient energy, like he was reading instructions. "To tell a student she lost an internship she hadn't lost."

Hana's eyes moved — just briefly, just for a fraction of a second — to {{User}}.

Something shifted in her expression. A recalculation happening in real time.

"I think this has gotten very blown out of proportion," she said, softer now, pivoting smoothly into the version of herself that was wounded and confused and couldn't understand why everyone kept misreading her intentions. Her voice dropped just slightly. "I've actually been really stressed lately and I think I made a mistake and I feel terrible about it—"

"Hm," said Hawks.

Just that. Just hm. With the same bright eyes and the same slight head tilt he'd had since she walked in, like he was taking very precise notes.

Endeavor looked at her for exactly three more seconds. Then he looked away, back to {{User}}, in the manner of a man who had finished an assessment and moved on.

"As I was saying," he said to {{User}}, with the weighted focus he reserved for things he had actually decided were worth his attention. "The decision in the final two minutes of the cavalry battle. Walk me through your thinking."

Hana stood in the center of the group.

Nobody was looking at her.

Not dismissively. Not cruelly. Simply — finished. Like a subject that had been examined and concluded.

She opened her mouth.

"Mizuki." Fatgum's voice, still warm, still patient, carrying absolute finality. "I think you should go get ready for the tournament."

"I've been eliminated," she said, before she could stop herself.

"I know," he said.

Hawks made the small sound again.

Hana's hand was at her hair.

She lowered it. Smoothed her uniform. Arranged her expression into something that the hallway had no use for and walked back the way she came, each step measured, spine straight, the noise of a real conversation picking back up behind her before she had even reached the turn.

It started as a routine patrol exercise — Aizawa had paired them up and sent them into the commercial district with instructions to observe, report, and under absolutely no circumstances engage with anything above their current pay grade.

Nobody had accounted for Overhaul.

He came around the corner of a side street like bad weather, unhurried, his plague doctor mask hanging at his collar, gloved hands in his coat pockets, two members of the Eight Bullets flanking him at a respectful distance. A business errand. Something quiet. He had not expected an encounter either.

Both parties stopped.

The air did the thing it always did around Kai Chisaki — went still, like it was afraid to move incorrectly.

Aizawa stepped forward. The class held position behind him, the good ones reading the situation instantly and going quiet, hands loose, weight balanced.

Overhaul's eyes moved across the group once with the slow clinical sweep of a man taking inventory.

And then they stopped.

On Hana.

Hana, who had gone a very specific color underneath her perfectly maintained complexion. Not quite pale. The color of someone running rapid internal calculations and finding the results unfavorable.

"Mizuki Hana," Overhaul said. Conversationally. Like he was confirming an appointment. "From the letters."

Fourteen heads turned toward Hana simultaneously.

"I don't know what you're—" she started.

"Three letters," he continued, with the same even tone, addressing no one in particular and everyone at once. "Delivered to the Shie Hassaikai compound over the course of six weeks. Offering intelligence on U.A. security rotations in exchange for what was described as—" a brief pause, the ghost of something deeply unimpressed moving across his face, "—a meaningful role in the organization."

The silence from Class 1-A was a living thing.

Bakugo's hands had started doing something at his sides. Kirishima put a hand on his arm without looking at him.

"That's—" Hana's voice was still composed, still working, the machine running hot but running. "That's a complete fabrication, I have no idea why he would—"

"You used lavender stationery," Overhaul said. "You signed them with a flower. I found it unsanitary." His attention had already begun to drift in the way that his attention drifted when something ceased to interest him, which was quickly and completely. "We didn't respond. Obviously."

"Obviously," Hawks would have said, if Hawks had been there. He wasn't, but Jirou said it under her breath so quietly it was almost nothing.

Overhaul's gaze continued its movement across the group.

And stopped again.

On {{User}}.

The quality of the stop was entirely different. Where he had looked at Hana the way someone looks at an incorrectly filed document, he looked at {{User}} the way he looked at things that had entered his calculations without permission and not yet left them. Something in his posture changed — not much, not in any way that was warm or safe — but the focus sharpened into something specific and quiet.

"You," he said. Not a greeting. More like an acknowledgment of a variable he had already been tracking.

Aizawa stepped slightly left. A small movement. Precise. It put him at a better angle. Every student in the class who was paying attention — which was most of them — understood what it meant.

Overhaul did not look at Aizawa. He kept looking at {{User}} with the steady unreadable attention of someone who had already decided to know more.

"Your quirk," he said. "I've seen the Sports Festival footage."

Aizawa's capture scarf moved. Just slightly.

"That's enough," Aizawa said. Quiet. Final. The voice he used when the sentence was also a warning.

Overhaul held the look for exactly one more second — long enough to be deliberate, short enough to be deniable — and then withdrew it. He adjusted his gloves with the neat economical gesture he always used and looked forward.

"Eraserhead." A nod, barely. "Keep better track of your students."

His eyes moved to Hana one last time as he passed. Not with anger. Not with anything recognizable as feeling at all. Just the brief dispassionate acknowledgment of something he had assessed, found wanting, and filed away.

"Lavender stationery," he said again, almost to himself, and walked on.

The Eight Bullets followed.

The class stood in the street and listened to the footsteps recede and said nothing for a long moment.

Then Bakugo turned to Hana very slowly, with the energy of a man who had a great deal to say and was taking his time selecting which part to say first.

Kirishima put both hands on his shoulders this time.

"Later," Kirishima said.

"Oh I know," Bakugo said.

Hana was already composing her expression into wounded confusion, mouth opening around the first syllable of an explanation.

"Don't," said Tsuyu, pleasantly and without heat, still watching the direction Overhaul had gone. "Kero."

Hana closed her mouth.

Aizawa had already started walking. "Move out," he said, to the pavement in front of him. "Debrief in twenty minutes."

He did not look at Hana either.

He didn't need to.

The patrol route Fatgum had mapped out cut through the mid-commercial district — busy enough to be practical, contained enough to be appropriate for students. Kirishima was on his left, hardened and eager, Tamaki slightly behind on his right doing his quiet best to look like he wasn't anxious about the foot traffic, and {{User}} moved with the easy awareness of someone who had already clocked every exit and rooftop on the block without making it obvious.

Fatgum had also, approximately four minutes into the patrol, clocked the auburn hair half a block back.

He said nothing.

He filed it.

They were rounding the corner past a covered walkway when the temperature dropped the wrong way — not cold, but the specific quality of air that preceded blue flame, the kind that had a color and a source and a name.

Dabi dropped from the overhang with the theatrical timing of someone who had been waiting and found the waiting boring.

"Fat hero," he said, by way of greeting. His eyes moved across the group with lazy assessment. "Little field trip?"

Fatgum's whole demeanor shifted — still big, still broad, but the warmth consolidated into something load-bearing and professional. He stepped forward, angling his body, already creating space between Dabi and the students.

"Tamaki." Quiet. Steady.

Tamaki was already moving into position, manifesting with focused precision despite his hands not being entirely steady.

Kirishima hardened fully, teeth set, and flanked left without being told.

{{User}} had read the geometry of the situation in about two seconds and was repositioning to—

From behind, moving fast and wrong, Hana appeared.

She had been running from half a block back and she arrived with the energy of someone who had rehearsed this — the heroic intercept, the selfless intervention, the moment that would be talked about afterward. She grabbed {{User}}'s arm and physically yanked her out of her position with a cry of "I've got you—!"

The problem was that {{User}}'s position had been a good one.

The position Hana dragged her into was directly in the open corridor between Fatgum and Dabi.

Dabi looked at the situation. Something crossed his face that was almost impressed, in the worst possible way.

The blue flame came fast and clipped {{User}}'s shoulder before Fatgum closed the distance, taking the brunt of the follow-up and pushing both students back in one massive motion.

"GET BACK," he said, and this time it was not a quiet instruction.

Kirishima had Hana by the back of her costume without a word, physically removing her from the equation. Tamaki threw everything into the front line, manifesting with a focused ferocity he usually had to dig for.

The fight lasted four minutes.

Dabi disengaged — not beaten, not panicked, just finished with it — and was gone over the rooftops with the easy indifference of someone clocking out early.

The street settled.

{{User}} had a burn across her shoulder. She was upright, assessing it, not making a production of it. Fatgum had his hand on her back with the steady presence of someone doing a damage check and working very hard to keep his expression professional.

Hana stepped forward from where Kirishima had deposited her.

She was breathing hard, hair slightly disheveled in a way she would have hated under any other circumstance, and her expression had already made the journey — from the shock of what had actually happened, through the rapid calculation of what it could be made to look like, arriving at something that was reconstructed and bright and ready.

"Is she okay?" she breathed, pressing her hands together. "I saw her about to get hit and I just — I didn't even think, I just moved—"

Kirishima looked at her.

It was a very specific look. The kind that lived in the part of Kirishima that was not soft, that had been built in training and sharpened by everything he'd seen her do since the Fatgum texts. It didn't raise its voice. It didn't need to.

"You pulled her out of cover," he said. "Into the open."

"I was trying to help—"

"Into the open," he said again. Same volume. Same face.

Tamaki, who was still slightly activated and processing the adrenaline, had turned to look at Hana with his usual difficulty making eye contact entirely absent. He was looking directly at her. It seemed to be taking considerable effort and he was doing it anyway.

He didn't say anything.

Tamaki not saying anything while looking directly at someone was somehow more than most people's words.

Fatgum straightened up. He looked at {{User}} first, making sure, the professional assessment running its full course. Then he turned to Hana and the warmth was there, it was always there, it was just behind the glass wall now and the glass was very thick today.

"I'm going to need you to explain," he said, patient and even, "what you were doing on this patrol route."

Hana's mouth opened.

"And I'm going to need the real answer," he added, quietly. "Not the first one."

The street was very still.

Somewhere above them the city kept moving, indifferent and bright, and Hana stood in the middle of a circle of people who had run out of the particular kind of patience she had always relied on, turning over her next sentence like a coin she wasn't sure was real.

The common room on a Friday evening had a specific energy — loose, loud, the week's tension bleeding out into card games and someone's playlist and the smell of whatever Sato had been stress-baking since four o'clock.

Mina had claimed the big couch. Jirou had her feet on the coffee table. Kaminari was losing badly at whatever game he and Sero had invented, and Kirishima was on the floor with his back against the couch pretending to watch but mostly keeping score of Kaminari's increasingly creative excuses.

{{User}} was in the armchair by the window with a book, present in the comfortable way she always was — not performing relaxation, just actually relaxed — and the room had arranged itself around her the way it always did, everyone gravitating toward the same general area without making a decision about it.

Hana arrived at seven forty-three with a plate of cookies she had not baked.

"Sato-kun made extras," she announced, setting them on the table with the energy of someone delivering a gift they had personally sourced. "I thought everyone could use a treat after this week!"

Sato looked up from the kitchen doorway.

Looked at the cookies.

Looked at Hana.

Said nothing, but the math was visible on his face.

"Oh my gosh, sit down, you've been baking all afternoon," Hana told him warmly, waving him off before he could speak. "Let someone else take care of it for once."

Sato sat down slowly, with the expression of a man who had just watched someone steal his wallet and compliment his jacket.

Hana settled onto the arm of the couch next to Kirishima — not quite next to {{User}}, but oriented toward her, the positioning deliberate in the way her positioning was always deliberate.

"You looked so good in the review footage today," she told {{User}}, with the warm sincerity she deployed like a scalpel. "Aizawa-sensei barely commented on your form which basically means he loved it."

"He also barely commented on mine," Kaminari said.

"Mm," said Hana.

Kaminari looked at Sero.

Sero looked at the ceiling.

Jirou reached over and took a cookie, examined it, and said to no one in particular "these are from the batch you made Tuesday, Sato. I recognize the shape."

Sato made a sound.

"They keep well!" Hana said brightly.

"Uh huh," said Jirou.

Hana pivoted with the smooth efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times, redirecting before the current thread could develop further. She pulled out her phone and turned the screen toward {{User}} with the energy of sharing something privately in a public space, which was one of her preferred techniques — creating the illusion of intimacy in front of witnesses.

"I was actually going to ask your opinion on something," she said, dropping her voice just enough. "Girl to girl. I know you're always so good at reading situations."

The room didn't go quiet. It just became slightly more attentive in the way rooms did, everyone suddenly very interested in their own conversations.

Mina, without looking up from her cards, put her chin in her hand.

"So there's this thing with Shoto," Hana continued, and every person in the room who had been present for the Endeavor corridor incident made some kind of small involuntary movement. "I feel like things have been weird between us lately and I can't figure out what I did, you know? Like I've been nothing but supportive and he just seems—"

"Cold," Kaminari offered, without thinking.

Sero closed his eyes.

"That's not funny," Hana said, with a wounded look at Kaminari that was assembled very quickly.

"I genuinely didn't mean—" Kaminari started.

"It's fine." A small brave smile. A breath. "I'm just sensitive about it."

Shoto walked in from the hallway.

He had evidently been to the kitchen, because he had a cup of something warm, and he crossed the common room toward the empty chair near the window with the straight-line focus of someone who had a destination and intended to reach it.

He looked at the seating arrangement.

He looked at Hana on the arm of the couch.

He sat down on the floor next to {{User}}'s chair instead, with his back against it and his cup in both hands, with the complete unbothered energy of someone who had made a decision and felt fine about it.

Hana's mouth opened.

Closed.

The brave smile made a valiant attempt at a comeback.

"Shoto-kun! We were just—"

"I heard," he said, looking at his cup.

The room held its breath for exactly one second.

Then Mina slapped down a card, Kaminari yelped about it, and the playlist moved into the next song, and the common room exhaled back into its Friday evening shape — warm and loud and arranged, as always, around the people who hadn't had to engineer a single moment of it.

Hana sat on the arm of the couch with her plate of borrowed cookies and her constructed smile and her phone still open to a message she hadn't sent yet.

Sato leaned over from his end of the couch and took the last cookie off the plate.

"Those were mine," he said pleasantly, and ate it.

The announcement came on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate somehow — not a Monday fresh start, not a Friday afterthought, just a Tuesday, practical and matter of fact, the way Aizawa delivered most things that were actually significant.

"As of today, Shinso Hitoshi from General Studies is joining Class 1-A permanently." He said it the way he said everything, looking slightly past the class at a fixed point that had never let him down. "You've all interacted with him at various points. Adjust."

That was the entirety of the speech.

Hitoshi came in behind him carrying his bag with the energy of someone who had prepared for this to be uncomfortable and had made peace with that. Dark circles, purple hair, the expression of a person who had learned early that first impressions were mostly other people's problem.

The class received him the way the good ones did — Kirishima was on his feet immediately, hand out, volume appropriate, Mina was already asking which desk he wanted, Kaminari was vibrating with the energy of someone who had decided they were going to be best friends and was giving it about four minutes before announcing this.

Midoriya had a notebook open.

It was that kind of welcome.

Hitoshi took it all in with the quiet measured look of someone recalibrating expectations upward and not quite ready to show it yet.

Hana was across the room.

She had clocked him the moment he walked in — new, unknown quantity, no established impression of her yet, a blank slate — and something behind her eyes had done the familiar calculation. She was on her feet before Kirishima had even finished his handshake.

"Shinso-kun." She arrived at his side with the warm momentum of a natural force, positioning herself just slightly ahead of the welcome party, close enough to claim the introduction without technically elbowing anyone aside. Her voice dropped into the register she used for things she wanted an audience for while performing privacy. "I'm Hana. I've actually followed your career since the Sports Festival — I thought you were so impressive, the way you handled yourself against Midoriya especially."

Hitoshi looked at her.

It was the look. The one he had. Flat, purple, measuring, giving nothing back.

"Thanks," he said.

"I mean it." A step closer. The hair touch. "There's something about someone who works that hard against the odds that I really admire. Like genuinely, not everyone would have the confidence to—"

"Are you trying to get me to respond to you," Hitoshi said, "so you can tell people I'm brainwashing you."

The common room went very quiet.

Hana blinked. "What?"

"It's happened before." He said it without heat, without particular interest, just laying down a fact. "Someone decides talking to me is a good story. I'm noting it early."

"I wasn't—" She pulled back slightly, recalibrating, the warmth shifting into something more carefully wounded. "I was trying to welcome you, I don't know why you'd assume—"

"I didn't assume." He had already looked past her toward the desk Mina was pointing at. "I observed."

Jirou made a sound into her hand that she converted, poorly, into a cough.

Kaminari leaned toward Sero with the energy of a man witnessing something historic. Sero stepped on his foot before he could say whatever he was about to say.

Hana stood in the middle of her own welcome with her expression doing several things at once, none of them the thing she had planned for.

Hitoshi moved past her toward his desk without hurry, dropping his bag, looking around the room with the quiet assessment of someone making a real map of the territory.

His eyes landed on {{User}}.

Something in his expression did a small, barely perceptible thing — the kind of adjustment that happened when a person encountered something genuine in a room they'd been braced to find difficult.

He nodded at her, once.

The silent acknowledgment of someone who had heard about her, decided the reports were probably accurate, and was confirming this.

Then he sat down, pulled out his notebook, and looked at the front of the room like he had been there for years.

Aizawa, who had watched the entire sequence from the doorway with the tired omniscience he applied to all classroom dynamics, clicked his pen.

"Right," he said. "Sit down everyone."

Hana sat down.

She spent the first ten minutes of class composing a version of events in her head where she had come across well.

It needed a lot of work.

The joint study session had been Iida's idea, which meant it was organized, color coded, and happening whether anyone was ready for it or not.

The library's large common study floor had been divided loosely — not by class, because Iida had specifically said mixing was the point — into clusters of tables pushed together, textbooks open, revision cards stacked, the ambient sound of eighteen year olds trying to care about hero law at seven in the evening.

Kendo had arrived with 1-B in reasonable order, which was its own achievement. She dropped her bag at the central table, did a quick headcount, and had everyone seated before most of 1-A had found chairs.

Tetsutetsu immediately challenged Kirishima to see who could memorize the most support legislation in twenty minutes. Kirishima accepted without hesitation. Mina started a side bet. The studying had technically begun.

{{User}} had settled at the end of a long table with her notes already organized, and within four minutes the seating around her had filled up through the natural gravity that seating around her always filled up through — Shoto on her left, Kendo across from her because Kendo made a point of knowing people worth knowing, Shinso at the far end because he worked better in proximity to people who weren't performing.

Hana arrived eight minutes late.

She came in with her bag on one shoulder and her hair just so and the expression of someone making an entrance rather than an arrival, scanning the room, running her calculations.

She identified the table {{User}} was at.

She identified Monoma at a different table.

She chose {{User}}'s table and pulled out the chair directly beside Shoto, which was not empty — Sero's bag was on it — and moved the bag to the floor with a smile at nobody in particular.

Sero looked at his bag on the floor.

Looked at Hana.

Pulled up a chair from an adjacent table with the resigned energy of someone who had stopped being surprised.

"Okay!" Hana opened her textbook to a page that may or may not have been the right one. "Hero law. I actually find this so interesting — Shoto-kun, didn't your dad have that case last year with the jurisdiction overlap? I feel like you'd have such good insight—"

"No," said Shoto.

"The Fukuoka incident?"

"No."

"I thought I read—"

"You didn't."

Kendo, across the table, had her pen in her hand and her eyes on her notes and the expression of someone giving a conversation exactly as much attention as it deserved, which was partial.

"There's a practice question set on pages forty through forty-three," she said to the table generally, the tone of someone who had a study session to run and intended to run it. "The licensing framework ones are going to be on the third year prelims too so it's worth doing them properly."

Half the table reached for page forty.

Hana reached for page forty, glanced at it, and turned to Kendo with the warm confiding energy she deployed on people she hadn't fully mapped yet.

"You're so organized," she said. "I feel like 1-B is just so much more put together than people give you credit for, honestly. You must work really hard to keep everyone focused."

Kendo looked up.

She had the look that Kendo had — level, unhurried, the look of someone who had dealt with Monoma for long enough that no social maneuver particularly surprised her anymore.

"Thanks," she said. "Question four."

Hana blinked.

"It's a tricky one," Kendo added, already writing. "You'll want to think about it before you answer."

Tetsutetsu, from the next table, looked over at the sound of a familiar voice and pointed at Hana with his pen. "Hey, aren't you the one who faked the Fatgum texts?"

The table went quiet.

"That was a misunderstanding," Hana said.

"Right, right." Tetsutetsu nodded with the absolute absence of guile that made him simultaneously impossible to argue with and deeply effective. "Wild misunderstanding. Anyway." He turned back to Kirishima. "I'm on fourteen, how many are you on?"

"Sixteen."

"WHAT—"

Monoma had appeared at the end of the table at some point during this exchange, revision cards in hand, and was looking at the seating arrangement with the specific expression he reserved for 1-A encroachments on his general vicinity — which normally would have launched a full address to the room, except that his gaze had landed on Hana and something shifted.

He looked at her the way someone looked at a mirror they didn't entirely like.

He sat down at the opposite end of the table without saying anything.

Which, from Monoma, was the loudest possible statement.

Shinso, without looking up from his notes, turned a page.

"Question seven has a trick in it," he said to no one in particular. "The answer they want isn't the obvious one."

{{User}} turned to page forty-seven.

Kendo made a note.

Shoto had been on question nine since before Hana arrived and showed no signs of surfacing.

Hana looked around the table at the organized, settled, quietly functional ecosystem of people who had simply continued working, and opened her textbook to what was, visibly, the wrong chapter.

Nobody mentioned it.

Nobody needed to.