Pastimes of the Invisible Girl
By LoweFantasy
1
When no one looked, Toru recorded clever or hilarious insults in her diary-if one could call it that. She had been getting juicy ones since starting high school, thanks to a particularly explosive classmate.
'Take a hint, Shark Week, and go and chew on someone else's nerves!'
She giggled in her throat, silently, a talent she had acquired since finding her sense of humor wasn't exactly kind. Of course she didn't find it funny when other people were hurt (she was in the hero course), but there was something about the upfront abrasiveness of well-thought-out insults that tickled her fancy.
It probably had to do with the fact that she was invisible.
Bakugo, who had just snapped said one-liner, was still gnashing his teeth at said "Shark Week," his still smiling friend.
"Jeeze, Kirishima, why do you even bother?" said Mina from beside her.
"Despite what you may think," said the red-haired boy, slinging an arm around the neck of a feral Bakugo. "Katsuki-chan's super manly and pure. He always says what he means."
"I'm gonna kill you!" snarled said manly pure.
Toru had to slap an invisible hand to her nose to stifle the snort.
"Aw, come off it, Kaachan. I'm sorry for making you uncomfortable-"
"Uncomfortable is the least of it!" A beat. "DON'T CALL ME KAACHAN, DAMMIT!"
"Jeeze, do you always have to belt everything?" asked Jiro from a few seats away. From the way she had a hand to her ear, Toru suspected she had an earache. Something she was more prone to due to her hearing based Quirk.
"Uh oh, you said the no-no word. Only Midoriya can call him Kaachan," said Kaminari lazily, blowing a bubble with his gum and scratching at a tuft of his spiked blond hair.
"Can it, Pikachu!"
Midoriya slouched down in his seat, hiding his face behind his textbook.
"What did you ask him?" asked a bemused Ochaco.
Bakugo stiffened. "Don't you dare-"
"Just if he's ever had a girlfriend."
Every part of Bakugo seemed to rise like the hackles on a wolf...or the prickles on an adorable hedgehog, thought Toru.
"I doubt it," said Mina. "What girl would put up with him?"
"Does he even like girls?" whispered Mineta from the other side of the classroom. Toru had very good ears.
"Why is he even upset about that?" asked Momo with a cock of her head.
"Because my love life is nobody's damn business!"
"Seriously, can you speak at a normal volume for one damn day?!" snapped Jiro again from the front.
"I talk how I want!"
Toru reached for her diary just as Jiro twisted violently in her seat towards Bakugo and Akizawa-sensi stepped through the door.
"Quiet down," he drawled.
They all did so, though Mr. BlastFist kicked his foot against his desk and leaned back in his chair, default scowl in place. Akizawa didn't even spare him a glance.
'Pikachu, Kaminari,' wrote Toru. If only she could come up with nicknames on the fly like that.
Class went rather boring that day. They ended up watching a documentary about the development of the code of laws governing hero work and the need for licensing. It was amazing to Toru how someone could make murders and crimes sound like tofu left out in the sun a little too long, let alone be able to sell said documentary to the best school on this side of the country.
She yawned. Scratched her face. And fell into her next favorite pastime: classmate watching.
Being invisible had its quirks. Unless she was wearing sunglasses, no one could tell what she was looking at or what she was doing with her face. When her quirk had first kicked in when she was five (a year later than the usual), she had taken advantage of it and had all sorts of fun pulling faces and rude hand gestures at all her bullies. That being said, it still occurred to her bullies that she was quietly insulting them, even when she wasn't, and her joy had been short-lived.
She took her time, not wanting to run out of updates on her classmates before the video was over. Mineta had his phone opened up in his desk on low-light. She didn't linger too long there. You didn't have to be invisible to see what that creep got up to in his secret hours. Per the usual, Midoriya and Iida were the only ones alert and taking down notes as though the droning narrator didn't have a voice to neutralize insomniacs. Ochaco was drooling a little bit, as was want to happen sometimes when her mind completely checked out (Toru actually loved that about her friend-it was hilarious!). Jiro had her face in her desk, hands once more over her sore ears. The rest had mirroring levels of boredom, sadly, without the drool.
She left her favorite for last. Despite acting like a complete wacko, Bakugo actually looked like he was paying attention, though without the nerdy fervor of Midoriya and Iida. He did so still leaning back his chair, hands stuffed in his pockets, and his lower lip jutted out. She observed, with a smile, that the foot he had propped onto his desk had a clean slipper that didn't leave a single mark or speck of dust on its surface.
She put her invisible fingers to her grin. Such a good boy.
Oh how he would deny it until something ended up destroyed by his hands, all his efforts to not trail dust into the school ruined. Toru couldn't get enough of it.
But it did get her thinking as she sat at her pink vanity and brushed her hair (even if she was invisible, watching the brush move in the mirror was somehow meditative, especially since her curls became untameable and had to be cut out if she didn't keep them well brushed). She'd seen all the boys have a reaction of one kind or another towards girls, but never Bakugo. He reacted the same no matter the gender. She'd heard her friends mutter on separate occasions to this being yet more evidence that he was the most boorish man alive and would never get a wife, but Toru saw it in a different light. Out of all the boys in the class, Bakugo may be the only one who saw men and women as truly equal-or unequal, since the default nickname for most of them was 'extras.'
It made her smile. Who did he think he was? The hero of an epic film? Why 'extras' and not 'nobodies'? And why did he see fit to call anyone nicknames at all? Was it really because he didn't bother to remember their names? That would be hilariously arrogant.
Humming, she reached down and slipped out her secret diary from her backpack and cracked it open.
"Let's see," she slid her finger down the page. "Midoriya is 'Deku' or 'Shitty-Nerd' of course…"
It took only a few seconds before she was giggling, and this time out loud.
'Glitter Fuck,' he had called Aoyama. "I could never say that, that's horrible!" And she giggled even harder. "So glittery…"
Yeah. She was probably a horrible person finding these so funny.
But, then, most were horrible people.
Avoiding that thought, she skimmed back a few pages in her book for a happier memory. Comedy was, after all, the best key to bleaching out your brain of stupid depressing thoughts.
'I was once more using my shoes to make sure no one barged in on me using the toilet,' she read, her memory tingling with anticipation. When had she written this? 'When a girl took the stall next to me and begun to grunt the most polite cussings whenever she would let out the tiniest of farts even though the bathroom was empty. 'Oh 'Lanta,' 'Gracious me,' 'Oh my.' After just a few of these, she couldn't hold it in anymore and let it all out. The roar of her defecating was spectacular, but not nearly as much as her loud, almost orgasmic exclamation-'
Toru had to stop to throw her head back and laugh, even while she felt humiliated for that woman, as well as her choice of words-but she couldn't think of any better word to describe it.
Beginning to feel her side cramping, Toru closed her diary and all but limped onto her bed from her efforts to contain her giggles after turning off her lights.
"Bakugo would have thought of better words to describe it," she said, and no sooner had she thought it than she was rolling back and forth with laughter so loud, her mother would have been ashamed.
Eventually, her laughter wore down, and she found herself staring up at the squares of orange light on the ceiling from the campus below. The shadows stared back, comforting as friends never could be. It hid everything, not just the invisible.
"I wonder what kind of nickname he would give me," she said.
Nothing she thought of after that could make her laugh.
Credit to ThePastelHoodie from Wattpad for some of Bakugo's nicknames