"...So...what, uh, what brings you here?"

A couple minutes prior to Izuku running into Toru and being left with no other option than to take her to Recovery Girl, Jiro and Momo stood awkwardly in Jiro's door. The former was left struggling to remain calm while simultaneously trying to process that Izuku now knows all about her crush on Momo and praying to God that Momo came to talk about literally anything other than the embarrassing and mildly creepy self-insert romance fanfiction she wrote about the two of them that Momo had very nearly read for herself had it not been for Toru's timely intervention. The latter was left in a state of confusion, certain by now that both Jiro and Izuku were hiding one or more things from her and highly suspecting that at least one of those things was the fanfiction about Jiro's favorite book series that had mysteriously been deleted right as Momo had been about to read it. With neither of them having much clue regarding what to do in this situation, it was Momo who eventually mustered the courage to get to the bottom of this mystery once and for all.

"As I said earlier, I was hoping to discuss something with you...something which I recognize is probably rather personal," Momo began, taking a second to study Jiro's reaction before continuing. "I must admit, this mystery has left me rather curious, but I do not wish for my own personal curiosity to get in the way of our friendship. Therefore, if you would rather that I not pursue this matter any further, simply say so, and we shall not discuss it again."

With her small speech finished, Momo simply stood in front of Jiro expectantly, and for some remarkably foolish reason, Jiro began to liken the situation they had found themselves in to the climactic confession scene that had started this whole mess. Of course, such a comparison was ludicrous on the face of it, for as much as Jiro may have wished otherwise, real life was nothing like her self-insert fanfiction. There was no possible way that Momo secretly reciprocated her feelings towards the brilliant, beautiful girl she was fortunate enough to call her best friend. This would have already been true had Momo not also had her own "Justin" in her life that, once again contradictory to Jiro's self-insert fanfiction, was actually really nice and likeable and handsome enough to be considered attractive by at least half of the girls in their class. Jiro was smart enough to know that she could not possibly compete with someone like that, a realization that had ultimately been the impetus for writing her escapist fanfiction in the first place. In retrospect, Jiro could have chosen a better method of coping with the fact that her feelings would never be reciprocated, but alas, she had done no such thing, and now she was left with the difficult task of figuring out what to do next now that she was being faced with the consequences of her actions.

On the one hand, Momo's offer was tempting. Jiro wanted nothing more than to be able to effectively plead the Fifth and go back to the way things were before; Jiro doing a terrible job of hiding her feelings for Momo behind her own questionable coping mechanisms while Momo somehow continued to remain oblivious. She thankfully wouldn't even need to lie to her best friend in order to get out of this sticky situation. All she would need to do was simply say that she didn't want to talk about it and leave it at that. She couldn't think of anything easier than that.

And yet, on the other hand...maybe it would be better to simply get it over with. Even though Momo had somehow not caught on to Jiro's feelings for her so far, Jiro knew that she still would not be able to keep them from her best friend forever. Perhaps God or fate or the universe or whatever dropped this situation into her lap for precisely that reason. Of course, coming clean definitely had its drawbacks when compared to simply staying quiet. Jiro was confident that the act of confessing her feelings on its own would not lead to anything significantly bad happening to her and Momo's friendship, save perhaps resulting in some residual awkwardness for a while when Momo inevitably turned her down as gently as she could. Jiro confessing her feelings at the same moment as she admits to writing thirty two thousand words of self-insert fanfiction in which her character and Momo's character wind up in a romantic relationship? That would be considerably more awkward, particularly if Momo read through the entire thing and found out just how bad of a person Jiro had written Todoroki's character as purely to make her ship canon. Jiro was not sure whether she would even be able to speak to Momo again after revealing all of that, assuming of course that Momo would even want to remain friends with her after having a bombshell like that dropped on her. Nightmarish scenarios such as that danced at the edge of Jiro's mind, leaving her too anxious to commit to one choice or another as she carefully attempted to stall.

"Well, uh, before I answer...w-what exactly is it that you wanted to talk about?" Jiro asked nervously, causing Momo to take a breath before responding.

"That story that I was telling you about this morning, the one Kendo recommended to me...I have reason to believe that you wrote it," Momo explained simply, causing Jiro's heart to sink. What little hope she had that this was somehow an unrelated thing had just been dashed against the metaphorical rocks. "Is this true?" Momo asked simply, causing Jiro to ponder her options once again before eventually letting out a sigh. Facing the music was going to suck, but at least this bizarre nightmare she had found herself in would finally be over and done with.

"Yeah...yeah, it is," Jiro reluctantly admitted, causing Momo to nod before asking the next question that popped into her head.

"And the fact that the story was coincidentally deleted the moment I attempted to read it-"

"That was Toru's doing, yeah," Jiro replied, prompting Momo to raise an eyebrow before Jiro explained further. "She, uh, accidentally found it last night and connected the dots, so she came by this morning to apologize and stuck around in my dorm room long enough to delete it from my computer before you or anyone else from our class could read it." As Jiro spoke, she anxiously twirled her ear jacks around her finger while Momo nodded along, thankful to be getting some answers to the questions that had taken up most of her day. However, there was still one question that Momo had to ask before she could put this mystery to rest.

"And why did you not want anyone from our class to read it?" Momo asked, causing Jiro to squirm slightly. "You did publish it onto that website, after all, so you obviously wanted people to read it, and it was evidently a rather lovely story considering that Kendo recommended it to me in the first place, so what was it about the story that you didn't want anyone from our class to see?" As Momo stood waiting for a response, Jiro took a couple deep breaths before eventually responding.

"I-I didn't want anyone to see it because it's...kinda about me and some people in our class," Jiro answered, causing Momo to cock her head in confusion before Jiro clarified what she meant. "One of them being you. Or, well, a character who's very much like you," she admitted, to which Momo looked somewhat stunned for a moment before giving Jiro a soft smile.

"Well, I hope you only had good things to write about me, at least," Momo remarked somewhat playfully, leaving Jiro confused while Momo continued. "I must admit, I would have appreciated you asking me first before deciding to write me into a story you were writing, but I'm not especially...upset..." Momo paused, reflecting upon what she knew of the story from Kendo and beginning to have an inkling regarding just why Jiro was so determined to keep the story a secret from anyone else and Momo in particular.

"Oh," Momo remarked simply, too stunned to think of anything else to say.

Beginning to blush as a result of her discovery, Momo suddenly found herself tongue-tied and unsure how to respond while Jiro simply stood there, realizing that Momo had connected the dots and unwilling to even look her in the eye as she closed in on herself in embarrassment. With neither girl knowing how to proceed in this uncomfortable situation, they were left with no choice but to sit in awkward silence for a couple of minutes before Jiro finally found the courage to speak up and attempt to apologize as best she could.

"Momo, I-"

"Jiro, it's..." Momo interjected, unsure what exactly to say before eventually finishing her sentence. "It's alright. Certainly...unexpected, to be sure, and...perhaps a little uncouth, if I'm being honest," Momo admitted, causing Jiro to look away in embarrassment once again as Momo continued. "However...I forgive you." At this statement, Jiro dared to look back at Momo with some slight hesitation on her face as she looked for signs of deception on Momo's part and found nothing save for some minor embarrassment. "That is, provided that you wrote nothing scandalous-"

"Oh, no, God no!" Jiro interjected, absolutely mortified at what Momo was implying.

"Ah, I see, thank you."

"Nothing more than light flirting towards the end."

"Well, that's a relief."

"Mhm, yeah, totally PG."

"Indeed."

"...Yeah."

"...Indeed."

With this, the two entered into another period of awkward silence, with Momo left struggling to figure out what to say next while Jiro was left nervously wondering when the other boot was going to drop. Revealing her embarrassing not-so-secret crush had gone...surprisingly well, all things considered, and Jiro did not trust it one bit. As such, she anxiously cleared her throat.

"I gotta be honest, I expected you to react a lot worse," Jiro admitted, her blunt remark catching Momo by surprise as the taller girl scrambled to respond.

"What do you mean by that?" Momo asked, causing Jiro to scoff.

"Uh, hello? Your best friend admits to secretly crushing on you for months and coping with the fact that you're clearly interested in someone else by writing thirty thousand words of self-insert romantic fanfiction with a character who's very much like you behind your back? I had assumed you would never want to see me again if I ever told you about all that." Jiro paused for a second as she finished her objection, only to look on rather surprised as Momo chuckled in response.

"Jiro, to be frank, you would have to do something far more serious than this to cause me to terminate our friendship. Although..." Momo cocked her head in confusion as she continued, "What gave you the impression that I was interested in someone else?"

At this question, Jiro became even more confused herself.

"Uh, excuse me? You've been crushing on Todoroki ever since you two teamed up for the final exams, what the hell do you mean 'What gave you the impression?'"

Momo, to Jiro's annoyance at this point, still looked confused. "No I'm not," she replied.

"...Yes, you are!" Jiro retorted, beginning to get frustrated.

"No, I'm not!" Momo snapped back, becoming somewhat frustrated herself.

"Girl, you were going on and on about how 'brilliant' and 'remarkable' he was for, like, a whole hour! How else was I supposed to take that?"

"Can I not express my admiration and respect for my fellow students?" Momo replied, not seeing how Jiro could have possibly drawn the conclusion she did.

"For a whole hour? About the guy that half the class thinks is some pretty boy heartthrob? Sure, you can 'express your admiration' or whatever, but don't get snippy when somebody mistakes that for you hopelessly crushing on him," Jiro answered sardonically. "I doubt I'm the only one."

"Jiro, I promise you, you and my mother are the only people who have ever been under the illusion that I am attracted to a man," Momo said, her tone unusually dry compared to how she usually spoke around Jiro and others. It was enough to give Jiro pause for a second, at which point she finally connected the dots and looked at Momo incredulously.

"Hang on, you're gay?!" Jiro asked, surprise written all over her face.

"Yes?! Was it not obvious? Did I need to wear a pride pin everywhere to dissuade you of the notion that I was infatuated with Todoroki of all people?" As Momo looked at Jiro with her hands on her hips, daring Jiro to come up with a counterargument, Jiro had to admit after a couple of seconds of thoughts that the signs had been there: namely, that aside from the occasional diatribes about Todoroki, Jiro had never heard her gush about a man ever.

"I, uh...I guess I was so worried about you finding out that I had a crush on you that I didn't really figure it out until now," Jiro admitted sheepishly, twirling her ear jacks with her fingers while Momo blushed and turned away in response to Jiro's comment, an unusual reaction which caused Jiro to resume her ridiculous comparison between the situation the two girls had found themselves in and the situation at the end of her own fanfiction. Looking to put such comparisons to rest, Jiro gulped nervously before asking the one question that had been in the back of her mind for some time. "Is there, um, anyone that you do have a crush on, then?"

To Jiro's surprise, although Momo blushed slightly more in response to Jiro's question, the taller girl eventually let out a bemused chuckle. "Oh, I wonder," she said in a joking tone. "Could it perhaps be the remarkable girl that I make a point of sharing breakfast with every day, whom I hardly go a day without being around, whose homework I am always willing to lend my assistance towards no matter the hour, and whose friendship I hold more dear than anything else in the world?" By the end of her brief speech, Momo was looking at Jiro with a wry smirk, while it took everything Jiro had not to melt into a puddle on the spot.

"You've gotta be kidding me," Jiro muttered, dumbfounded.

"I can assure you that I am not."

"The entire time?! The entire time that I was trying and failing to hide the fact that I was crushing on you, you were crushing on me and just decided not to say anything?!"

At this, Momo rubbed her shoulder somewhat awkwardly. "Well, to be honest...you did a better job of hiding it than you think. I hadn't suspected anything until you admitted it just now."

In response to Momo's admission, Jiro chuckled a bit. "Guess I'm not the only oblivious one, huh?" she asked rhetorically, to which Momo smiled.

"Indeed," Momo replied before the two of them fell into an awkward silence once more. Eventually, once it finally became too much for them to bear, Jiro found the courage to speak up.

"So, uh...what happens now?" Jiro asked, immediately looking away with a blush on her face. Momo pondered the question for a moment before smirking.

"I think I have an idea."

"Thanks again for taking me to see Recovery Girl, Midori!"

Izuku and Toru once again found themselves in the elevator leading up to the girls' dormitory wing, the latter feeling much better now that her concussion was gone while the former was once again left squirming with flustered embarrassment as Toru refused to let go of his arm for the entire journey back from Recovery Girl's office to the elevator.

"Uh, n-no problem, Hagakure. I'm g-glad to have helped," Izuku replied, internally grimacing to himself at how much he stuttered around Toru. It was a wonder he could even get a word out with how nervous he was under her touch.

This crush of his really was getting ridiculous.

Toru scoffed with a degree of fond exasperation behind it. "Midori, please, you can call me Toru! I've already told you that, like, five times by now!"

"To be fair, uh, that was while you were suffering from a concussion," Izuku pointed out, to which Toru rolled her invisible eyes in response.

"Yeah, well, I meant it on the way down to Recovery Girl's, too," Toru replied. "Really, I don't think any of the girls in our class would mind if you ditched the formalities already and called us by our first names, Midori. Especially not Uraraka; you two have been friends for, like, forever!"

Izuku rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "I suppose that is a fair point...Toru," Izuku replied with some evident hesitation in his voice. "I'll, uh, have to ask them, just to be safe."

"Oh, sure," Toru replied with a bemused tone, knowing that Izuku really didn't have anything to worry about on that front. Before the two of them could say much else, the elevator doors opened, and a quick handful of steps brought the two of them to Toru's door.

"Well, uh, we're here," Izuku said awkwardly. "You can let go of my arm now," he added, truthfully not really minding it much by this point.

"Awww, but I just got comfortable," Toru said with an exaggerated pout that Izuku heard rather than saw, having decided to use Izuku's arm as a pillow purely to mess with him further. After watching him squirm at the additional contact for a couple of seconds, Toru giggled at his expense and unhooked herself from his arm and took a step away from him. "Anywho, thanks for taking the time to walk me over there and back, Midori. It was nice having a sweet strong guy like you escorting me places," Toru said, giggling a bit more as Izuku blushed even further in response. "I should get myself injured more often if it gets me that kinda treatment."

"Please don't," Izuku replied, knowing it was a joke yet worried for her safety all the same.

"Oh, relax, I was just kidding. Mostly," Toru replied teasingly, only to fall silent for a moment before getting an idea that was just as much designed to mess with Izuku as it was designed to serve as an expression of the affection she had developed for the kind and considerate guy who went to all that trouble to make sure that she would be okay. With both of these objectives in mind, Toru drew herself up as tall as she could manage in order to plant a quick kiss on Izuku's cheek, breaking out into a gleeful grin as she watched Izuku's face grow so red as to resemble a ripe tomato when viewed in conjunction with his dark green hair. Before she could leave him with one final flirty remark to seal the deal, however, her plan was interrupted by the sound of laughter coming from Jiro's dorm room, a sound which snapped both Izuku and Toru out of their thoughts and turned their attention away from each other and towards the door of Jiro's room.

"Is that...Yaoyorozu?" Izuku asked out loud, interpreting the quick movements of Toru's shoulder straps to indicate that she was nodding her head in agreement. "Huh. I guess their talk went well, after all. That's a relief." Upon hearing Izuku mention a talk between the two girls, Toru began to connect the dots and turned towards him with an invisible look of surprise.

"Wait, do you think they were talking about, you know," Toru began before whispering the words "J+M?" into Izuku's ear, to which he was left confused for a moment before he realized that Toru must have been the one who stumbled onto the story and led to Jiro taking it down. Managing to regain his composure somewhat after that revelation, he simply nodded.

"Uh, yeah, probably," he said. "But anyway, we should probably leave them alone-"

Before Izuku could even finish his sentence, Toru had already broken off from him and tiptoed over to Jiro's door in order to place her ear up against it, prompting him to carefully follow her solely to drag her away before she overheard anything from the two girls on the other side.

"Toru!" Izuku hissed, doing his best to be as quiet as possible once he got in front of the door. Toru, for her part, simply blew a raspberry at him in defiance. Before he could think of anything else to say in response to that, Toru shushed him once she picked up the muffled sound of the two girls talking once Momo had finished her bout of laughter.

"Is it really that bad?" Toru heard Jiro asking, to which Momo was apparently concerned.

"Not at all! On the contrary, your command of prose is rather impressive, Kyoka!"

At this, both Izuku and Toru's eyes widened in surprise while Jiro awkwardly laughed.

"Heh, uh, thanks, Momo. It...means a lot coming from you."

Meanwhile, the two eavesdroppers outside the dorm room looked at each other with disbelief written all over their faces.

"Are they reading Jiro's story?" Izuku whispered, more confused than anything else.

"Did Momo just call her 'Kyoka?'" Toru whispered back, a gleeful grin developing on her face before she gasped and placed her hands on her cheeks in astonishment once she put the pieces together. "Oh my gosh, Midori, do you know what this means?!"

In response to Toru's enthusiastic statement, Izuku cocked his head in confusion. "That Momo is surprisingly cool with her having been the subject of a romantic self-insert fanfiction?"

"Well, that, but more importantly; she likes her back! There's no way she'd be casually hanging out with Jiro, reading the fanfiction she wrote about her, and calling her by her first name all of a sudden if she wasn't totally into her!"

Izuku put his fingers to his chin as he thought over what Toru was saying, and was forced to conclude that her reasoning made sense. However, this conclusion immediately led to him flaring up in embarrassment once he realized just what they had stumbled into. "In that case, we really need to leave them alone," he remarked, causing Toru to shoot him a sly grin.

"Why? Are you afraid we'll overhear them doing something naughty?" Toru asked teasingly.

"Very much so!" Izuku replied, his anxiety evident. "That's my friend and her maybe-girlfriend in there! I don't want that mental image in my head, alright? Now come on, we're leaving!" With that, he managed to grab Toru by one of her wrists while Toru struggled in vain to break free from Izuku's grip and prevent herself from being dragged away from the door.

"Come on, Midori, let go!"

"No! This has gone on long enough, and there is nothing you can say or do that will-"

Before Izuku could finish his sentence, Toru sneakily drew herself up again for another kiss on Izuku's cheek, making sure to make it the opposite cheek to the one she kissed last time.

"There's more where that came from if you let me go, cutie~," Toru said, laying it on as thick as she possibly could in hopes that she would be able to persuade him. Before she knew whether or not she had been successful, however, Izuku's embarrassment led to him stumbling backwards and making a mistake that would land both of them in trouble:

Opening the unlocked door to Jiro's dorm room.

As the two of them stumbled into the room, they found themselves looking into the eyes of Jiro and Momo laying down comfortably on Jiro's bed with the punk rocker's laptop held between them, Momo simply looking surprised and a little amused while Jiro looked at the pair of them with murderous intent in her eyes. After seconds of excruciatingly awkward silence, Jiro finally spoke.

"...If I weren't in an incredibly good mood right now, you'd both be dead, you realize that?"

Both Izuku and Toru nodded frantically, while Momo simply chuckled at the absurdity of the situation, dispelling enough of the awkward tension for Toru to ask the main question on her mind.

"So, are you two, you know...?" she began, to which Jiro turned away with a blush on her face while Momo simply nodded, causing Toru to squeal happily. "Aww, congratulations!"

"Yeah, um, congratulations, you two," Izuku added awkwardly.

"Thank you," Momo replied with a smile on her face before gently nudging Jiro.

"Hm? Oh, uh, yeah, thanks, I guess," she said, her blush having mostly subsided. "Just, ah, just don't go telling anybody, alright?"

"Oh, no, yeah, definitely," Izuku said nervously while Toru nodded along.

"Our lips are sealed!" she said, doing the classic "zipper across the mouth" gesture as best she could considering the fact that both her mouth and her fingers were invisible. With this, a less awkward silence persisted for a couple of seconds before Momo smirked at the two intruders.

"Well, speaking of relationships, am I correct in assuming that more congratulations are in order?" she asked, causing Izuku and Toru to blush as they realized they appeared to be holding hands, with Izuku promptly letting go of Toru's wrist as a result.

"Uh, well, I dunno about that-"

"Yeah, I mean, I kissed him on the cheek a couple times, but we hadn't really...talked about it..." Toru began before pausing and looking at Izuku with a question in her invisible eyes. "Do you, uh...wanna go out with me sometime?" Toru asked, somewhat nervous on account of her asking the question in front of Jiro and Momo. Izuku blushed and looked away for a moment before nodding.

"Yeah, I, uh...wouldn't be opposed to that," he remarked, trying to not let his nervousness show on his face and failing miserably while Jiro snickered in the background.

"Real smooth, Midoriya!" she called out teasingly, causing him to bristle somewhat.

"Says the girl who had me beta-read over thirty-thousand words of self-insert fanfiction about her crush instead of just talking to her like a normal person," he retorted, causing both Momo and Toru to smother their laughter as best they could while Jiro turned away in embarrassment.

"W-whatever, do you two wanna read it or not?" she asked, prompting the two of them to ponder the offer for a moment before nodding.

"I suppose as long as we're here, we might as well," he remarked as he moved to close the door behind him and move Jiro's desk chair over to where he could see over Jiro's shoulder before sitting down.

"Yeah, I wanna see what I missed out on last night!" Toru chimed in, quietly asking whether she could sit in Izuku's lap and rendering him a blushing mess in the process. Momo chuckled quietly at their antics while Jiro took a deep breath and navigated back to the first page.

"Alright then, from the beginning," she said before clearing her throat and beginning to read.

"It was a day like any other when Julia realized that she was in love."

And we're done! Whew, this is a rare feeling for me: actually finishing a multi-chapter fic. Silly as it might be to say, I'm a little proud of myself for that.

So yeah, turns out both Momojiro and Izutoru (or Midotoru, idk what the ship name is) are canon in this fic. Huzzah! As always, curious to hear y'all's thoughts on this story, particularly now that it's finally finished. Was the ending everything you could have hoped for, or were there aspects of it that could've been done better? Let me know what you all think in the reviews below. In the meantime, thank you all for reading, have a fantastic night, stay safe, wear a mask and get vaccinated if possible, and take care.