Then Taka Nobita feels a hand.
No, it's two hands. Their fingers rest gently on his face from above. Is it an angel? Is it Samantha? No, Samantha is still judging him out of the corner of his eye.
"Checkmate, Taka."
He recognizes that voice.
And that's the last thing he can think before her quirk takes effect. Rose Omoda had waited patiently for just the right moment. Despite Aizawa's prompting, she knew that she and Uraraka couldn't jump too soon. If they did, and Taka noticed them for just a second, he'd win. She hated herself for letting him hurt Midoriya-kun even more than he already has, but she'd hate herself even more than that if she failed. The two jumped from high atop one of the buildings, where Nobita couldn't possibly sense them, positioning themselves in just the right spot before taking the leap.
Uraraka didn't like this strategy. If she activated her quirk too early or too late, they'd either fail or die, but Rose trusted her. After all, if she could save Rose's life in the exact same way before, she could do it again.
And the plan works.
Nobita feels like his head is splitting apart. As Rose's quirk takes effect, he helplessly watches as every memory of Samantha Gardener escapes from him. The day they met, the day he realized he loved her, the sound of her laugh, the way the sun hit her blonde locks and made her glow, her abysmal grades and all the times he would imagine offering to tutor her. Her death, and the incident that caused it. All of it grew distant, until it seemed to disappear.
"RRRRROOOOOOOSSSSSSSEE!"
Rose remembers it all. The exchange blasts them apart, and Uraraka releases her quirk to let them land on the ground. "Omoda-senpai!" Rose looks like she's about to throw up as her tears erupt.
"Senpai!" Midoriya does her best to get up and hobble past a convulsing Taka Nobita up to her savior, kneeling in front of her. "You did it!" she huffs. But Rose doesn't answer. She can't. "Senpai? W-What memories did you take?"
"S… Samantha…"
Midoriya and Uraraka blink at her in shock and then look at Taka Nobita, who's slowly coming to.
"Senpai, don't tell me… All of them? Even when he…"
Rose nods, slowly regaining her own composure. As she stares at him, she has no choice but to relive it, the story of Taka Nobita's one and only real love.
When he was 4 and still hadn't manifested his quirk just yet, he was known as the quiet kid who kept to himself. He liked watching insects crawl along the sidewalk, ladybugs take flight off of shining blades of grass. By every definition, he was innocent. Which made him perfect prey for the not so innocent kids in his neighborhood.
"Ewww! He's looking at bugs again!" they taunted. "I bet he wants to be a bug!"
"Yeah! Bug Boy!" That's what they called him over and over. And even as he tried to ignore them, he'd start to cry when they kicked him and stepped on him and pretended that he was a bug staining their shoes when they "squished" him.
But one day, something different happened. "Knock it off!" a voice squeaked. From high atop the playground slide, she stood there, sun gleaming off of her brilliant blonde head. "HA HA HA! Stop, villains!" The bullies were caught off guard long enough for her to surf down the slide into a flying kick right at one of the bullies faces. He went down crying, and the other bullies stepped back in wide-eyed horror. She held up a tiny fist at them. "You want some a' this?!" They flinched and ran away screaming.
That was Taka Nobita's first memory of her, of a tiny war goddess who leapt onto the battlefield and inspired fear in the hearts of evildoers, even ones that were much bigger and more scary-looking than her. She turned to him and yelled, "Stop crying! Be a man!"
He stared at her in awe, and she must've been pleased with the look on his face, because she gave him a confident, toothy grin.
He was smitten. Before that, he'd only ever seen heroes on TV, and thought they were cool but that they felt kind of distant, like some fairy tale that only existed on the screen. But as he watched Samantha leave, never even learning her name, he thought, Heroes… Heroes are real!
It wasn't until 1st grade that he saw her again and recognized her immediately. They shared the same class, and he was ecstatic to finally learn her name and to approach her just to say, "Um! Thank you! You saved me!"
She gave him a puzzled look and said, "Who the heck are you?"
He froze as his stomach dropped to the floor. He took a little too long to answer and being that she had the attention span of, well, a 1st grader, she promptly ran off and went to play with the other kids.
She didn't remember him. Was it because he wasn't like her? An amazing, brave hero who left the bad guys quaking in their boots? Well, he didn't have it in him to be that kind of person. He was "Bug Boy", and she was… a goddess. And it made him angry. The bullies were one thing, but being thought of as "Bug Boy" or even worse, someone not worth remembering at all by his hero, left an awful taste in his mouth.
So when his parents came to pick him up, he angrily declared, "I'm gonna be a hero!" Then he turned to Samantha and caught her eye just long enough to defiantly stick out his tongue out at her and run away.
From then on, he avoided her for a while, and whenever bullies picked on him, he'd force himself to fight back, even when he got in trouble and his parents had to get involved. He wasn't going to be the creepy kid obsessed with bugs and nature anymore. And sure enough, he stopped spending so much time with bugs too. Instead, he spent time on his studies and on learning more about heroes. By their first year of middle school, he was easily top of his class, while her grades were at the bottom.
He'd often smirk to himself about it, how she must be feeling as bitter as he did that day. But the longer he continued to look at her from afar, the more he noticed something. She was always smiling, always surrounded by people, who were also always smiling. Whenever she walked into a room, the air brightened, and she could instantly turn a rainy pop quiz day into a summer vacation. And when he did well on those pop quizzes, he found that there was no one to share the news with. He was alone. Always alone.
And she still never seemed to notice him. But he wouldn't give up. At a teacher's suggestion, he decided to try tutoring and found he had an aptitude for it… until some of the older kids started bullying him into cheating. He refused, of course and promptly ratted them out to teachers, thinking it's what a hero would do, but obviously, that only led to more bullying.
One day when some of the bullies conspired to take his umbrella on a day of pouring rain, he caught them in the act, and something inside him just… snapped. All of the sudden he was using his quirk to whip them in the face over and over again, slam their heads together and tie their shoelaces together so they couldn't escape. Even when they apologized, he didn't want to stop. He was starting to enjoy it. But then he heard a laugh. He heard a familiar laugh just outside the exit. It was Samantha, guffawing at the bullies.
"Serves you right!" she cackled. She had been watching them, watching him. She stopped laughing eventually and finally noticed him staring at her.
She stuck out her tongue at him. Just like he had done all those years ago.
And just like that, he was smitten all over again.
Did she maybe remember him after all? All those years, he'd convinced himself that he couldn't forgive her, that he'd get his revenge against her, but after that day he started to realize that what he'd felt wasn't hate. It was a desire to be noticed by her, for her to see him as a man and a hero the same way he saw her as a woman and his hero. What he felt was loneliness every time she left the room, and relief whenever she entered it. He felt like maybe his life would amount to nothing if this one person never looked his way, never thought about him on sleepless nights like he did her, never imagined smiling at each other, laughing together, never imagined a future together. What he felt was love. All this time, he'd been in love with her.
But of course, simply realizing it was only half the battle. Confessing was a whole other beast, and no matter how much he thought about it, he never felt ready. Their whole lives, and she'd only ever looked at him a handful of times. If he was going to confess, he had to become someone she couldn't stop looking at, just like she was for him. And she deserved the best after all, so that's what he was going to be, the best. And he'd never even considered that those thoughts could ever lead him astray.
But there was one significant memory, and he couldn't quite figure out why. In their last year of middle school, he'd been in particularly high spirits after being accepted to UA's hero course and finding out that she'd been accepted too. And of course, the event he looked forward to the most was their class's field trip to a resort in the mountains. It was one of the most exciting and memorable experiences in his life, from learning how to chop firewood, to hunting for mushrooms that they'd later eat for dinner, to the big campfire party they held on the last day. Everything had been perfect, even despite the fact that he'd never talked to Samantha even once. Perhaps the experience had been even better knowing he could watch the clouds in the sky and then watch her reach out her hand to them, as if she could catch them like her hair caught the sunlight.
But that wasn't the memory that he questioned. No, that one foreboding memory that refused to leave him started with him watching her through the campfire. She sat across from him, but still never looked at him, having a great time talking to her friends next to her instead. She was just as beautiful illuminated by the light of the fire.
Then he saw a moth. It was dark, but he could just barely see its glowing white form flitting over the fire. After all these years, he still liked bugs, especially moths. He felt connected to them somehow, always drawn to the light, but never becoming one with it.
He watched as the moth flew too close to the flame, and one of its wings caught fire. It flittered desperately, and Nobita could almost feel its agony as it hazily floated away from the fire and into the sand. He watched it writhe in pain for a bit. Then something peculiar happened. It could no longer fly, so it started to crawl… towards the flame. Nobita wondered if anyone else was seeing this. What are you doing? he thought, a look of despair on his face. It already burned you once! Just stop! It continued to crawl desperately, as if its imminently fading life depended on it. For a solid minute, Nobita watched it. It seemed to be calling out to him. Calling out for a hero.
He glanced at Samantha Gardener. Then back to the moth. Feeling a strange calm he couldn't quite discern, he extended his fingers, gingerly picked up the poor creature, tossed it into the fire, watching it become one with the flames…
And smiled.