Toru's eyes opened slowly as she pulled herself out of sleep. Even with a full eight hours, she still felt like she could sneak an extra five minutes, or twenty. However, it didn't take long after she woke up for the revelations of the previous night to come back to her mind. It wasn't every day that you learned that one of your friends wrote fanfiction, but also that said fanfiction was likely inspired by her unrequited crush on another one of your friends. The second revelation was obviously far more significant than the first. Toru had had a little trouble falling asleep that night: her mind had been preoccupied with all sorts of questions. How long has this been going on? Does Momo like her back? Does Momo like Todoroki or another classmate and confessed her feelings for them to Jiro, prompting the plot of her fanfiction? ...Has Momo read it?
This last question was particularly concerning, and partially served to render Toru fully awake. She quickly grabbed her phone and texted a short message to Jiro:
Toru: Hey, when will you be free? I need to talk to you about something important.
After a couple minutes of Toru moving about her dorm room, getting ready for the day ahead, her phone chimed. She hurried to check it.
Jiro: Toru, I promise you, me and Midoriya are not dating, nor have we dated in the past, nor do either of us have any hopes of dating the other at some undefined point in the future. Drop it. Now.
Toru let out a worried mutter. Jiro was a lot more intimidating than she likely realized. She quickly moved to respond.
Toru: I know, I figured that out pretty fast. It's about something else.
Jiro: Like what?
Toru: ...It'll be easier to explain in person. Can I drop by your room rq?
Toru waited for a moment before Jiro eventually responded.
Jiro: Sure. Just give me a minute to get dressed.
Toru: Got it. I'll be over soon. As she got up ready to gather her things and leave her room, another thought occurred to her. She opened up her phone again and texted Jiro.
Toru: You might want to sit down for this.
"...What?"
Jiro sat in her desk chair, staring at Toru with an expression which made Toru far more nervous than if Jiro had been angry at her. She didn't look mad, or even all that upset. She just looked...shocked. Completely and utterly shocked. A shock that Toru got the sense could quickly devolve into complete catastrophic panic if she didn't do something.
"I'm sorry! I just, I was browsing around on Fandom Library last night, and this new story with solid numbers looked really interesting, so I looked at it, and things about it started adding up and..." She paused as she focused on Jiro, who was looking down at the floor with her head in her hands, clearly trying not to lose it. Toru began to panic. "I-I didn't read a word of it, I swear! I closed it as soon as I realized...what it might be about." She quieted down at the end of her sentence, leaving the two girls in silence for an agonizing moment. "I'm really sorry," Toru said earnestly, guilt clearly eating away at her piece by piece.
Jiro didn't respond for a couple seconds before she sighed deeply.
"It's not your fault," she said, suddenly feeling incredibly drained as she reflected on her error. "I was so wrapped up in whether or not people would like it to begin with that I never stopped to think..." She paused before looking up at Toru, energized enough to take whatever measures she had to to deal with the situation. "Do you think anyone else has found it?"
Toru mumbled to herself for a couple seconds, thinking. "Probably not? None of the other girls read that series except for Mina. Of course, she might find it at some point, and, well...you know how she is."
Jiro groaned. "Oh, God, I wouldn't hear the end of it. She'd try and set us up for weeks."
Toru chuckled a little, knowing her closest friend all too well, before her mind began dwelling on some of those questions from before. She fidgeted slightly. "So, uh...did you want to...maybe...I dunno, talk about-?"
"No," Jiro said firmly.
"Got it!"
Jiro sighed again, kicking herself for not having enough foresight when she made the decision to publish her fic. She found herself briefly angry at Izuku, but these feelings evaporated. He couldn't have known anyone on campus read fanfics of that series anymore than she had, and he probably figured she had taken that variable into account anyway. Now that she actually had, there was only one conclusion she could draw.
"It's too risky to keep it online," she said, taking out her laptop and placing it on the desk. "I need to-"
Suddenly, the sharp sound of a doorbell brought both of them out of their trains of thought and left them both startled and confused. After all, none of their dorms had doorbells.
"Jiro? Are you in there?" a voice could be heard from outside. Under ordinary circumstances, that voice would leave Jiro no better off than she had described Julia once in her story: "helplessly adrift, guided only by the sweet, calming melody of her every word." Under the present circumstances, however, the voice instead left Jiro anxious and panicky once more. In her shock over what Toru had revealed to her, she had forgotten about her daily breakfast with Momo.
"Just a sec!" she called out before hurriedly turning to Toru, who had reflexively closed her mouth shut with her hands. Wordlessly, she pointed to the laptop before moving to grab her backpack. Toru nodded, understanding what to do before doing her best to remain hidden from Momo's view. Jiro opened the door and greeted the tall girl with a smile, more than a little nervous. Momo smiled as well, which definitely did not help things. Jiro stepped out, closing the door behind her as the two girls began to walk towards the elevator. The two walked in silence for a couple seconds, an opportunity Jiro took to send a quick text to Toru.
Jiro: Pswd: Deepdope.
"You seem a bit tense," Momo said suddenly, making Jiro even more tense. "Is everything alright?"
Jiro quickly put her phone back into her back pocket and chuckled, attempting to calm down. "Yup, yup, everything's fine."
Her smile failed to convince Momo, however, who cocked her head slightly. "You tend to repeat words when you're nervous," she stated simply. "Also, you appear to be sweating profusely."
Jiro cursed in her head. "Why'd I have to go and fall for someone so observant?" a part of her mind thought cynically before being shut down. As Momo hit the button on the elevator to go down, she looked at Jiro with concern before a text alert chime brought her attention to Jiro's phone. Jiro herself quickly picked up the phone and held it at an angle so that Momo wasn't likely to see it.
Toru: I'm in.
Toru: Aww, your screensaver is that photo from the beach trip that's so cute!
Jiro muttered angrily under her breath. "Focus!" she texted quickly, Momo picking up on the tap of every key before Jiro tried to put the phone on silent and shoved it back in her pocket. Jiro looked back over at Momo, aware that she was looking at her intently, and for a brief second her mind wandered off to that beach trip they had gone on a couple months before. Almost immediately afterwards, Jiro quickly turned away from Momo, doing her best to hide how red her cheeks were becoming as the memories came back to her in vivid detail. "Aw, jeez!" she chided herself. "I'm almost as bad as Midoriya." Well, maybe not quite almost. He seemed to blush at almost anything.
"Jiro..." Momo said, breaking Jiro out of her latest tangent. Her voice was laced with concern, which only made Jiro feel worse. "Are you okay?"
Jiro took a deep breath before turning to her friend. "I'm fine, Momo," she said, her voice remaining steady. Momo looked at her once more before nodding.
"Very well," she said simply, just as the elevator doors opened. The two walked inside and remained silent as the doors shut and for some time afterwards. Eventually, however, a text chime could be heard once more, the sound distinct from when Jiro's phone went off. Momo reached into her pocket and pulled out her own phone, mulling over the text she had just received. "Hm...curious," she said, intriguing Jiro.
"What's up?"
"Oh, there's this story Kendo just recommended to me. Something called 'J Plus M?' One moment, she's sending me a link."
The elevator doors opened once more, and it was as if time slowed down to a crawl. While Momo remained focused on her phone, Jiro frantically pulled out her own and texted Toru, not worrying about whether or not her warning made any sense.
Jiro: SHE LOOK HURRY
Momo turned around to look at Jiro just as she put her phone away again, not quite fast enough for Momo not to notice her doing so. Before she could ponder Jiro's curious behavior any further, she received a new text: the link.
"Ah, here we are," she remarked, looking down at her phone and clicking on the link before Jiro could respond. Aware of what Momo had just done, all Jiro could do was pray that Toru had managed it. After a couple agonizing seconds of loading time, the phone arrived at the link Momo had tapped on...informing her that the page she was looking for no longer existed.
Jiro, who had been looking at Momo with apprehension, was left stunned when Momo instead looked down at her phone in confusion. "That's...odd," she muttered, typing out a response to Kendo to try and get answers. At that same moment, Jiro felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, and cursed herself for not silencing it earlier. The sound was enough to draw Momo's attention to Jiro, who moved to check her phone to keep up appearances.
Toru: I did it!
Jiro sighed. "And not a second too soon," she thought dryly. She was about to put it back in her pocket, silenced this time, when she noticed that Momo had moved on to the kitchen, assembling the components of her breakfast. A second later and another text came in.
Toru: Is everything okay?
Jiro looked up from the phone and into the kitchen, where Momo continued her work, laser-focused. She let out a short breath before looking back down.
Jiro: I hope so.
Jiro was hiding something.
Momo was sure of it. It was the only logical conclusion for her behavior. First, she had obviously been nervous about something while they were walking together in the morning. Then there were the constant texts being sent back and forth in the middle of their conversation, something Jiro wouldn't do under normal circumstances. And finally, there was the story Kendo had sent her, which suddenly didn't exist just as Momo had been about to read it. There had to be a connection.
Her immediate thought was to attempt to get more information about the story in question from Kendo. Fortunately, both she and her friend from Class 1-B had a few moments to spare before classes started, although this exchange didn't provide much in the way of information.
Momo: You said it was based on the book "Lakewood High," correct?
Kendo: Yeah. It was basically about these girls from the book, Julia and Mary. Julia has a crush on Mary, but Mary is crushing really hard on this guy Justin, leaving Julia conflicted.
Momo: Hm. I see. Is there anything you remember regarding the author?
Kendo: Uh...not really? They seemed pretty secretive. They didn't even leave much of an author's note aside from "Let me know what you guys think." Didn't have any other stories up, either.
Momo didn't respond for several seconds, too busy pondering the situation. She already had a hunch regarding the story's author, particularly given that she knew of Jiro's appreciation for that particular book, as well as the suspicious timing of the story's deletion. However, she could not yet be entirely certain of anything-
Kendo: Oh, wait, hang on!
Momo's eyes snapped back down onto her phone as a new message from Kendo came in, catching her attention.
Kendo: I just remembered! The author's username was, like, "Dope"...something. Dope...fan? Dope...girl? ...Ah, shoot, sorry, I don't remember what it was exactly, just that it started like that.
Momo stared at the words on the screen as she walked into her first class of the day, finding her way to her seat by memory as she mulled over what Kendo had managed to remember.
"Dope...dope...like Deep Dope," Momo thought to herself, looking up from the phone as her eyes widened slightly. She was tempted to continue texting Kendo when several other students walked into the room, prompting her to put her phone on silent and into her backpack. She could continue her investigation later, as soon as she found the time to talk to another friend of hers.
"Well...that sucked."
Jiro sat down at her desk, the combination of a particularly grueling school day and the events of that morning leaving her far more tired than usual. She had just finished deleting her profile on Fandom Library, an additional precaution she had only thought of doing once she had returned to her dorm, and now sat contemplating just how narrowly she had avoided catastrophe.
It was bad enough that Toru had discovered her secret, which would undoubtedly result in some awkward conversations. Even worse, however, was the lingering thought of just how much Momo had noticed that morning. If Momo was observant enough to know almost instantly when Jiro was nervous about something, then surely she must have noticed the texts Jiro had been getting, and probably half a dozen other things Jiro didn't even realize she was doing. A small part of her brain idly figured that that was what she deserved for crushing on a genius, a thought which immediately left her blushing, and completely unprepared for the knock she received at her door.
"Uh, y-yeah?" Jiro called out, a little more loud and panicky than she had probably intended as she scrambled to close the tabs on her computer. Her brain was already working as fast as it could to try and come up with good responses to any question Momo might have, only to realize that the person at the door wasn't Momo at all.
"S-sorry, is this a bad time?" Izuku asked through the door, in his usual timid fashion. Jiro breathed a sigh of relief.
"Nah, you're good. Come on in," she said. After a couple seconds, the timid boy had managed to open up the door and close it behind him, his hand shaking all the while. Jiro couldn't help but smirk. "Getting bold now, are we? Coming up to visit a girl all alone?" As she had hoped, Izuku immediately lit up red.
"W-what?! What are you saying, I'm not-!"
"Dude. Relax. You're fine," Jiro said, chuckling a bit. "I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist." Izuku grumbled slightly, still embarrassed and a little annoyed at Jiro's repeated teasing. She figured she probably ought to stop, but Izuku...he was just such an easy target sometimes. "So, what's up?" she said, hoping to change the topic. Izuku sighed, deciding to press on in spite of the teasing.
"So...I-I don't want to pry or anything, but...I tried to look for your story earlier today to see how it was doing, and..."
Jiro's face fell. She had figured he'd probably notice sooner or later.
"Yeah, I...I still feel a little bad about that, to be honest," Jiro admitted, a jack curling around her fingers in a somewhat sheepish manner. "It's just...somebody in our class found the story."
Izuku nodded, looking slightly concerned. "Did they figure out you wrote it?"
Jiro groaned. "Yup. That is going to be so awkward to deal with, you have no idea."
Izuku winced in sympathy, but attempted to offer his friend a reassuring smile. "Still, it could've been worse, right? Possibly? I mean, I don't know for sure that it could've been worse-"
"It could've been worse," Jiro confirmed with a tired chuckle, seeking to end that worried train of thought before it started. She let out another deep sigh and absentmindedly twisted her jacks around her fingers as she deliberated whether or not she should ask Izuku for help. Deciding to table that question for now, she instead asked, "So, did you just come by to ask about the story?"
Izuku looked at Jiro nervously for a second before responding. "Well, actually, I was gonna show you something, but now I dunno if this would just be pouring more salt on the wound or not." Jiro cocked her head a little in confusion, signaling him to elaborate. "I, uh, took a couple screenshots of some reviews I saw yesterday. I wasn't sure whether you had already seen them or not, and I was gonna text you, but then you deleted the story, so I thought I'd check on you in person." Izuku paused for a moment. "Would you like to see them?"
Jiro's eyes widened slightly as soon as Izuku said this. She hadn't bothered to check any reviews before she took the story down, but she did dimly recall Toru mentioning the story had been doing decently. Had people enjoyed it enough to leave reviews, or...was the opposite true? Jirou thought the problem over for a moment before nodding slowly. "Yeah, go ahead, show me."
Izuku walked up to where Jiro was sitting and handed her his phone after pulling up the screenshots. Not knowing whether it would be okay to sit down somewhere, he simply stood at her side, awkwardly looking around the room as Jiro read the reviews.
CuteKitty57: OMG THIS IS SO GOOD!
FaithfulGemini: The characterization is spot on, and the writing is solid. This is a really good debut chapter. I'm excited for more!
Guest: Great story, looking forward to more.
AlphaCentaurus: Julia in this fic honestly reminds me of how I was in high school, lmao. I didn't even *know*-
Guest: Can I just say that I love the title? How it fits both Julia/Mary and Justin/Mary, really clever.
JuliaKin: Everything about this, I just...my crops are watered, my depression is gone, and my day is excellent. You have a real gift. I'm eagerly awaiting the next chapter.
Jiro smiled. "Huh. Well, how about that?" she muttered. As she was preoccupied reading and re-reading the words on the screen, she failed to notice Izuku's eyes falling onto something in front of her, something which caused his entire face to turn red. With a flustered murmur of shock and embarrassment, Izuku turned away hurriedly, pretending to be interested in some posters on Jiro's wall. The noise was just enough to attract Jiro's attention, causing her to look up from his phone.
"Dude, I didn't even say anything, what are you...?" Her eyes fell onto her screensaver, that photo from the girls' beach trip that always gave her such a warm, fuzzy feeling whenever she looked at it. A smirk curled its way across her face as she began to get an inkling of what had left him so embarrassed. "Ohhh..." she began, in a slightly more teasing tone. "I see what's going on." Izuku's face reddened even further as Jiro's smirk widened. "Your crush is in that photo, isn't she?"
"Please no," Izuku mumbled as he buried his face in his hands, only serving to amuse Jiro even further before she held up her own in a conciliatory gesture.
"Alright, alright, I'll lay off. Just gonna go ahead and file that little tidbit away for later," she said, chuckling, while Izuku groaned at the prospect of even further teasing from Jiro. Eventually, however, her expression softened. "Seriously, though, thanks. Reading these is...bittersweet, admittedly, but still...nice to know some other people liked it, you know?"
Izuku nodded in agreement as Jiro handed him his phone back, and the two were left in silence long enough for him to take it as his cue to leave. "Well, like I said, just thought I'd check on you and show you those screenshots, so I'll go ahead and get out of your hair-"
"Wait," Jiro said, just as Izuku had turned around towards the door, causing him to pause. When he turned back around, Jiro's resolve faltered for a second. "Can, uh, can I ask you something? It's about the story...kinda."
Izuku nodded with a look of confusion on his face. Although he wanted to help, he wasn't quite sure what Jiro was getting at. "Uh, sure, ask away," he said, giving her the go ahead.
Jiro took a deep breath, not sure whether this was the best idea. "So, uh," she began, nervously twirling her jacks, "We kinda touched on it yesterday, but uh, this story is a bit..personal, for me. Sort of a coping mechanism, I guess; not the most healthy one, in retrospect, but after a while I felt like I just had to see the story through, you know?" Izuku nodded, seemingly following along, and so Jiro continued, a bit more embarrassed now. "And, uh, it's about something that's been happening with our classmates," she admitted, shrinking in on herself a bit as Izuku's eyes widened.
"Wait..." Izuku began, growing nervous as he connected the dots based on what he knew and what he could reasonably guess. "Does that mean you're 'Julia?'" he asked, to which Jiro could only nod, too embarrassed to outright say it. "So, um, that makes two of our classmates 'Justin' and, ah, 'Mary,' right?" Jiro nodded again, causing Izuku to look at her apprehensively. "Was 'Mary' the classmate who found the story last night, before you deleted it?"
At this question, Jiro sighed. "No, but she almost read it later, thanks to a friend of hers finding it and sending it to her," she confirmed. "Barely avoided that disaster."
Izuku nodded, slightly relieved, before another thought occurred to him. "Are you worried about her looking into it and tracing it back to you?" he asked, to which Jiro nodded after a pause.
"The person who found it last night figured out I wrote it just from reading the summary. If, uh, 'Mary' thinks to pry, she could totally find out what it was about and then she'll-"
The two of them were interrupted by a sound that was still out of place, yet more familiar now that Jiro had heard it again: the sound of a doorbell where none should have been, just outside of Jirou's door. A signal that Momo was just outside of her door.
"Jiro? Do you have a moment? There is...something I wish to discuss with you, if that is alright?" Momo asked from the other side of the door, evidently nervous about something and looking to choose her words carefully. Under other circumstances, Jiro would have found Momo's concern to be rather sweet, but under the bizarre circumstances she found herself in at the moment, all she could do was widen her eyes apprehensively and curse under her breath.
"Agh, son of a-just a minute!" she muttered before calling out to Momo in response, glancing hurriedly at Izuku with a look of panic and utter desperation. Izuku got the message immediately, already getting up to leave and hiding his phone while Jiro moved to open the door with a nervous smile on her face, which Momo returned in kind with only the slightest sign of trepidation in her own features.
"Hello, Jiro, and...Midoriya..." Momo began, pausing once she registered the timid boy's presence and cocking her head in confusion. "Is this not a good time for me to stop by?" she asked Jiro, prompting both her and Izuku to frantically shake their heads.
"No, nope, now's a perfect time for you to stop by, don't you worry about that!" Jiro replied hurriedly, causing Momo to become even more concerned as she glanced between the two of them. "Midoriya was just leaving! Right, Midoriya?" she asked, briefly glancing at Izuku in the hopes that he would be able to successfully bail her out of this situation. Fortunately, Midoriya quickly came up with an alibi to explain what he was doing in Jiro's dorm and an excuse to explain why he was leaving right at that moment. He was a surprisingly good liar, after all.
"Yup, yeah, I was, uh, just leaving. Jiro asked me to come help her out with her English homework, and lucky for you, we were just about wrapping up as soon as you got here," Midoriya replied, not entirely effective at disguising his nervousness, but nevertheless managing to convince Momo enough to drop the subject for the moment.
"I see," she replied simply, prompting both Izuku and Jiro to let out small sighs of relief. With an awkward clearing of his throat, Izuku brought his hands together in order to signal his imminent departure from the room.
"Well, anyway, it was nice seeing you both, but uh, you clearly have something important to talk about, so I'll go ahead and get out of your hair," Izuku carefully moving between the two girls as he made his way out of Jiro's dorm room and into the hallway while Momo took a couple hesitant steps inside the room. As he turned around to say one last goodbye to the two before leaving, he once again spotted Jiro's computer screen out of the corner of his eye before quickly turning his gaze just enough to where it was out of sight. Having caught another glimpse of it, however, he began to ponder just why Jiro had made that particular picture her screensaver. Izuku had initially assumed that she had chosen the picture because it represented fond memories of a relaxing trip she went on with her newfound friends, and while that could still easily be the case, Jiro's recent admission put that particular choice of picture in a different context.
"She said that two of our classmates were represented in the story by 'Justin' and 'Mary,' with 'Julia' representing herself, so 'Mary' must be one of the other girls in our class; that's, uh...probably another reason she chose a picture like that as her screensaver. So, then, which one...oh."
As soon as Izuku finished connecting the dots, he immediately flared up with a scarlet red blush all throughout his face while sweat began to drip down from his forehead. He was now fully and uncomfortably aware of just who among the girls in their class Jiro was crushing on so badly that she wrote a multi-chapter borderline-self-insert fanfiction as a coping mechanism to deal with what he could only assume was the bitter truth (or perhaps mere conjecture on Jiro's part) that her feelings for Momo were not reciprocated by the taller girl who had quickly become her closest friend. Needless to say, the sooner he could remove himself from what he was now certain would be a very awkward conversation between the two of them, the better, and for that reason, he came to the decision that such desperate times called for desperate measures.
"It was nice seeing you, talk to you later, bye!" Izuku stuttered out in a rush of words too fast for either of the girls to properly process, and before either of them knew it, he had activated Full Cowling and raced to close the door behind him at a speed faster than their eyes could track, the loud crack of the door slamming shut as clear a signal as any that they were now alone. If Izuku had not been so hasty to get away from this embarrassing situation, he might have noticed that Jiro had begun blushing as well, horror written all over her face as she quickly pieced together just what Izuku had figured out in the last twenty seconds that had made him so flustered and jumpy in the first place. Of course, as it turned out, this was not the only thing that Izuku would fail to notice in his haste to get away. He quickly came to realize this as soon as he arrived at the elevator down to the lobby and bumped into something he had not seen coming head on.
Or rather, someone he had not seen coming head on.
"Owww!" Toru cried out as she fell to the floor of the elevator, the movement of her sleeves indicating to Izuku that she was currently clutching her head in what he could readily assume was rather severe pain. One could easily guess that running into someone sprinting down a hallway at a speed that would make an Olympic sprinter look like an amateur by comparison would leave a mark.
"Agh, crap! Are you okay, Hagakure?" Izuku asked, quickly moving to her side and holding out a hand to help her up from the floor, which she took rather clumsily once the elevator doors closed and left the two of them alone as she stumbled in an attempt to get her bearings. Izuku watched her nervously, unable to tell whether or not Toru was bleeding from where he had collided with her or had any visible symptoms of a concussion for obvious reasons, and every second that ticked by without her responding to his question left him even more worried. He was about to repeat his question when Toru's stumbling caused her to briefly lose her balance, only managing to right herself by grabbing onto Izuku's shoulder for support. Izuku tensed up at the unexpected contact, and would have ignored it in order to repeat his question if not for what she said next.
"Y'know, I should've expected it, but damn, dude, you are jacked," Toru remarked playfully, giggling to herself a bit as she clutched onto Izuku's arm a little tighter. Izuku, for his part, struggled to maintain his composure as he assessed the situation. Even without taking Toru's slightly slurred speech into consideration, he figured that Toru flirting with him of all people was enough of a sign that his worst fears about her condition were not unfounded after all.
"Okay, I'm taking you to Recovery Girl!" Izuku said a little too quickly, both the suggestion and Izuku's flustered state causing Toru to giggle some more.
"Come on, Midoriya, I'm fiiine!" Toru replied, playfully squeezing Izuku's arm for the sole purpose of making him even more embarrassed. Nevertheless, he persevered.
"How many fingers am I holding up?" Izuku asked pointedly, holding up three fingers in front of Toru's invisible face. After staring at them for a moment, Toru hesitantly gave her answer.
"Uh, I'm gonna go with...six!" Toru replied, only for her face to fall as Izuku slowly shook his head. "Uh...three, but you're moving them super fast so they look like six?" she tried again, only to be met with the same result. After a couple seconds of awkward silence between the two of them, Toru eventually sighed in resignation. "Okay, so maybe I have a concussion," she admitted, causing Izuku to sigh in relief as he moved to push the button down to the ground floor.
"I'm glad I could get you to listen to reason," he remarked as the elevator began to descend. Toru simply giggled sheepishly before the two fell into an awkward silence once more, one that was swiftly broken once a question occurred to Toru.
"Say, what were you doing up in the girls' wing anyway? And why were you in such a hurry to leave?" Toru asked, causing Izuku to squirm slightly as he scrambled to fall back on the excuse that he had used before to get out of Jiro's room earlier.
"Oh, uh, I was just helping Jiro with her English homework, that's all!" Izuku replied before deciding to speak further. "But, uh, Yaoyorozu walked in on us because she wanted to talk to Jiro about something, so I figured I ought to give them some space. Sorry for running into you, again." Toru waved her invisible hand dismissively, her signal that it was all water under the bridge as far as she was concerned, but once she realized that Izuku's phrasing left him open to further teasing, she seized upon the opportunity presented to her.
"She 'walked in on us,' huh? Interesting choice of words there," Toru remarked, once more playfully giving Izuku's arm a squeeze as he flared up with embarrassment.
"It-it wasn't anything like that, I swear!" Izuku protested, causing Toru to laugh out loud as she decided to double down before throwing him a bone.
"Uh, sure. You two were just 'studying,' that's all," Toru replied, managing to keep enough of a straight face that Izuku was unable to tell that she was pulling his leg. As she predicted, he only became even more embarrassed as his skin turned a shade of red so deep that Toru was not entirely sure it was even humanly possible, although she was not exactly an expert on the subject herself considering that her blushes were not any visible shade of red to begin with. Eventually, Izuku managed to gather enough composure after taking a few deep breaths that he was able to respond.
"Toru, I-I promise you, me and Jiro are not dating or doing anything like that, alright?" Izuku said, hoping against hope that Toru would drop the subject and not finding her subsequent laughter at his expense to be particularly encouraging.
"Relax, dude, I figured that out yesterday. I just wanted to screw with you a bit," Toru replied before pausing for a second and giggling to herself a bit more as she noticed the unintentional double entendre she had just used and found yet another opportunity to push Izuku's buttons. "'Screw with' as in 'mess with,'" she clarified before positioning herself slightly closer to Izuku and readying the coup de grace. "Although~..." she finished in the most obnoxiously flirty tone she could possibly muster, a sinister grin on her face as she took in Izuku's reaction just as the elevator doors opened and the two of them were forced to step out into the common area.
It was going to be a long walk to Recovery Girl's office.
At long last...it has returned.
I'm not even going to try to justify why this story has been on the proverbial backburner for so long; all I'm going to say is that, between college and the pandemic and all the other fun stuff that's been going on for the last two years, the first half of this third chapter had sat abandoned in my Google Docs for months before I finally got around to picking up where I had left off in short, rough 250-300 word bursts over the past few weeks. Once I noticed that this was leaving my third chapter considerably longer than the previous ones, I decided that the scene transition between Izuku and Toru's awkward/surprisingly flirty elevator conversation and the dramatic scene between Jiro and Momo that I had just started writing was as good a spot as any to split what I had written into two chapters instead. So, yeah, current plan at the moment is for Chapter 4 to be the final chapter, so stay tuned for that!
Also, in response to one particular guest reviewer: although I had originally been planning on making Izuku's mysterious crush be Uraraka simply because I enjoy that ship the most (with Tododeku and Izumina being solid contenders as well), this latest chapters unexpected comedic detour involving an embarrassed Izuku and an extremely flirty concussed Toru has given me some ideas. Not sure whether much will really come of it or not given that we only have one chapter left, but hey, only way to find out is to stay tuned for the final chapter!
Anywho, with all that said, let me know what you think in the reviews below, thank you all for reading, have yourselves a fantastic night, wear a mask and get vaccinated if possible, and take care.