III. All Or Nothing
She didn't go the next day either. The guilt slowly building up in her heart urged her to change that as soon as possible, but Momo just couldn't shake off the ugly feeling of self-doubt. How was it possible that in a world where she stood at the top, everything was just so... wrong? There were so many talented students in her class, so why? How had all of them been reduced to something below her own level, for nothing more than a selfish, self-indulgent desire that she could live without easily?
She shook her head, this was not something she should be thinking about during maths. The answer sheet in front of her was filled out already, her neat handwriting filling the blank spaces. They still had some time left, but she was used to finishing earlier. A sudden urge came across her fingers.
Slowly, hesitantly, she picked up the eraser, hovering over a question that she had most definitely answered correctly. One deep breath later, she dragged the eraser across the penciled numbers, quickly scribbling something else in its position.
What would change if she handed in a paper full of wrong answers? She would definitely lose the top spot, wouldn't she? Was that the solution?
But what if it wasn't? What if the way to break it was to maintain the top spot? Was she willing to take the risk?
She quickly came to the conclusion that yes, she was willing to risk it. The eraser was put to paper again, removing the truthful answers with desperation.
"I'm not sure what I'm looking at." Mr. Ectoplasm held up her answer sheet, frowning at the red markings littering the page. "Are you not feeling well today? You usually would never allow yourself to make mistakes such as these…"
"I have been feeling a bit under the weather lately… I'm not sure why though…" Momo put a hand to her chest and sighed theatrically. "But please do not worry about me, I will accept this grade and learn from my mistakes."
Her maths teacher furrowed his brows, at least that's what she assumed his expression was meant to convey. "It will put a dent in your perfect record, Yaoyorozu."
"I know." That was the plan, after all. Dent it, crack it, break it. Crumple it up and throw it away. If that's what it took to save him, she'd do it in a heartbeat.
Mr. Ectoplasm seemed hesitant. "I can make an exception and let you retake the test, you know?"
Momo shook her head with determination. "Please don't treat me any different than my classmates."
Momo had holed herself up in the library in the hopes of getting struck by a good idea. The familiar scent of paper and worn books helped ease her mind, but at the same time there was a certain restlessness deep within her soul.
What was she supposed to do? And even if she went to visit this world's Todoroki again, what would she tell him?
She sighed in frustration, pressing her fingertips into her temples as if it would stimulate her brain power. But she got nothing. Nada.
"Stupid, stupid." She muttered to herself, letting her head sink through her hands until her shoulders slumped and her forehead met the surface of the table with a soft thud. "Why was I so stupid?"
How would she feel if some over-privileged stranger waltzed into her life and declared they wanted to be friends? How would she feel if said stranger suddenly started spouting nonsense about being from an alternate timeline where circumstances are nice and rosy?
Clearly, she would be suspicious and apprehensive. Just as Todoroki was.
But she needed to do something, didn't she? She had to find a way to fix this. She had to.
Because, because…
Finding a logical, rational answer was harder than expected, but it just felt like it was wrong. Her heart was telling her it was wrong.
But her heart didn't have a solution either.
It took her a week to finally get on the bus and visit him again.
Seven days of walking to the bus stop and giving in to her own cowardice. Seven days of wrecking her brain over how to fix this. Seven days of making weak excuses for herself.
Seven days of brainstorming with no results.
But at the end of those seven days, she was sitting across of him in the same dimly lit, uninviting room. "Good afternoon."
He didn't answer.
It was unlike her to storm into a fight without a battle plan, but she just… couldn't do it.
She couldn't see this as a bonafide battle.
Her eyes drifted to his unkempt appearance, that nagging, accusatorial voice whispering at the back of her mind. That it was all her fault.
"How was your day?" She asked hastily, in a sad attempt to drown out the voice.
"...I woke up and ate my meals. You can leave now."
While the short and concise answer was true to Todoroki's character, it wasn't what she had been hoping to hear. She knew it was a far stretch to expect him to open up to her all of a sudden, but she would be lying if she said that hope hadn't crossed her heart.
"And if I want to talk to you?"
"You'd be bothering me." He answered flatly.
It went against her principles to bother people, especially her friends, but in a moment of hasty judgement, she decided to abandon those principles.
She pursed her lips, pressing on stubbornly. "Why won't you talk to me?"
"Because you're some random stranger spouting bullshit. I have nothing to say to you." Todoroki crossed his arms, eyes assessing her sceptically. "I don't get why you're trying so hard. Is it because of my family?"
His family was the last of topics she wanted to breach, especially in this world, but if it was the only way to keep the conversation going, she would be forced to-
A dismissive scoff broke that train of thought. "Don't bother. I don't know you or where you get your crazy ideas from, but do yourself a favour and don't bother coming back."
Momo huffed audibly. "You said I could do as I would. And I am here, doing just that."
"And I want this conversation to be over. In fact, it is over." He stood up before she could protest, breaking off her sentence with the loud screech of his metal chair being pushed across the floor.
He glanced back at her in the doorway, an unreadable expression on his face. "I mean it, don't bother with somebody like me."
[-]
"How do you, hypothetically, deal with an upset girl?" The hypothetical was because Shouto had no intentions of explaining the whole Yaoyorozu situation, and because it was a stylistic device he had seen his brother use a few times.
A part of him felt that this was an appropriate time to use it.
Midoriya didn't quite seem to share that sentiment, staring right back at him with clear confusion written on his face. "You're the last person I expected to have girl problems."
"Hypothetical girl problems."
"...right." Midoriya nervously glanced to the side. "Uh, I guess it'd depend on this, em, hypothetical, girl of yours. Erm, hypothetically?"
Of course there was no easy answer. There never was an easy answer to any of his problems. "You know what, forget it."
"Sorry, I'm not exactly an expert on this either." Midoriya did seem apologetic. He really did. But apologies wouldn't give Yaoyorozu back the ability to fulfil her dreams. Apologies couldn't fix physical scars. Apologies couldn't undo the past.
Shouto nodded, swallowing the heavy lump in his throat. "It's fine, don't worry about it."
"Are you here to visit Miss Yaoyorozu?"
Shouto had spent the last ten minutes staring at the safety regulations plate in the hospital's main hall, only looking away from it at the nurse's question.
Was he here to visit her? Technically, yes, but he had yet to actually do it. The main thing holding him back was the ever-burning question of what to say to her.
The nurse was still looking at him expectantly, awaiting an answer.
"I'll go up in a bit." He decided to answer. "Just need to… think about some stuff first."
He didn't visit her that day. Once the nurse had left the main hall, he had felt the sudden urge to walk out and leave.
It was an indescribable burst of anxiety and discomfort, something he rarely experienced, making it all the more unsettling.
It was as if some part of his soul and being was unable to face the girl in that hospital room.
And he could say with all sincerity that he hated this feeling.
It wasn't like he could do anything to fix it.
The moment that thought crossed his mind, he froze up. His pencil fell from his fingers, rolling across the desk's wooden surface until it clattered against the ground.
"Hey, you okay? You dropped your pencil."
"I'm fine." He almost snapped in response, picking up the utensil from the floor, doing his best to get his rattled emotions back into check.
No, he wasn't going to push away the blame.
He was going to persevere, like she would. He was going to keep going, like she would.
Just like Yaoyorozu would.
[-]
"You've really been out of it lately." Jirou remarked worriedly. her arms crossed in disapproval. "Is all the stress getting to you?"
"That's so weird though, you were never stressed out before." Hagakure chimed in, a floating eraser indicating her wild arm movements. "Not even when the physical exams rolled around. You were cool as ice back then."
"...ice?" Momo muttered, looking out the window. "What an odd comparison to make."
"You think? I don't find it all that weird." Ashido dragged a nearby chair to her table, plopping herself down on it once it was in place. "Oooh but you wanna hear something crazy?"
"Is it about your misadventures in reading maps again?" Jirou grinned innocently. "You sure seem to have a lot of those."
"First of all, rude. Second of all, no. This is actually about our class. Well, more like our year." She cleared her throat dramatically, preparing to tell an evidently long story. "Did you know there is a boy our age who's currently in the loony bin? He was supposed to attend UA, but a horrible incident prevented that."
Momo's attention peaked at that. Ashido wasn't talking about Todoroki, was she? But if she was…!
"So anyway, the story goes like this: The guy was a genius with an amazing quirk, able to use fire and and ice at the same time! And then-"
"Please, that's clearly made up." Jirou cut in pointedly. "That sounds like a walking contradiction, right, Yaomomo?"
"Huh? Oh, actually…" Momo wasn't entirely sure how to answer that. She knew it was true and real as can be, but Jirou doubting the story was not without fault either. "I think we should just let Ashido finish telling her story instead of nitpicking it."
"Yeah, Jirou, listen to Yaomomo. Now anyway, this guy had three siblings, all of them older than him, but since he was the youngest he was also the brattiest. One day, his older sister tried to reason with him, but the guy got so mad he activated his quirk and-"
Momo shut her eyes, as if it could drown out the words. No, she didn't want to hear it, not like this, not in this twisted story.
"-then his sister looked at her hands, only to find them set ablaze. I heard that she still can't use her right hand until this day. But anyway, the police and paramedics came and the guy was arrested, deemed insane and stuck in the loony bin."
One thing was for sure: Ashido's narrative skills were subpar. Momo cleared her throat, rasping out three words, "Mental rehabilitation facility."
"Huh? Mental what?"
"Please don't call it a loony bin. The correct term is mental reha-"
"Oooh, that sounds so smart. I'll be sure to use it as well!" Ashido seemed happy, excited and completely detached from the story she just told.
And she had the right to be. She didn't know Todoroki, or the hardships he's dealt with. All the things he had overcome. But… Momo knew.
"That's crazy though. Too crazy to be believable." Jirou commented, wagging a finger in disapproval. "You really need to stop believing these urban legends."
"It's true, I swear! The mental thingamajig isn't even that far from here."
"Coincidence.", the other girl shrugged, not buying into it, "a story like that would have made the news, don't you think?"
It did, actually, but Jirou was not one to spend too much time reading the news.
Hagakure was the next one to add her thoughts, her hunched posture giving away her demeanour. "It's still a bit disturbing, even if it's not true." Her tone was lower than usual, and the twists of fabric around her collar indicated her shaking her head. "Imagine if that crazy guy had been in our class."
"You really shouldn't say something like that about somebody you don't know." The words slipped off her tongue before she could stop herself. "We don't any of the real circumstances."
"Come on, Yaomomo, the dude burned his own sister's hand-"
"I'm sure there was a reason!" Her sudden outburst brought on a moment of silence among the girls, but her brain needed a few seconds to fully register what she had just done.
"Yaomomo? Are you okay?" Hagakure's voice was filled with worry and confusion but Momo could only blink rapidly, barely acknowledging their shocked faces.
And then, in a flash of pure brilliance and phenomenal problem-solving skills, she stood up abruptly and left the classroom with long, urgent strides.
Admittedly, snapping at her classmates and walking out angrily was not the ideal solution to the problem at hand. Admittedly, her arguments may have been a bit weak. Admittedly, she could have handled that a lot better.
She leaned against a nearby wall, letting out the long breath she had been holding in. There was a window next to her, leading into one of the bridges connecting the two towers. Had she walked all the way here? It was only a few more steps away, so she headed towards the glass bridge, coming to a stop in the centre of it.
She could see the other towers of UA's geometrical architecture from here, each one forming a symmetrical pillar to its counterpart. Every glass panel was polished to perfection, mirroring the sky in an infinite landscape of blue and white.
If only those glass panels could mirror her reality.
Her mind wandered back to Todoroki, both the one she knew and the one from this world. Maybe she should find a way to differentiate them? Hmmm… Obviously, the one she had come to know would be "Todoroki". Or perhaps "Todoroki 1"? Would that make the other one "Todoroki 2"? Or maybe…?
The Todoroki from this world was not the one she knew… so… Not-Todoroki? Not-oroki? No-doroki?
No-to No-doroki.
"Noto Nodoroki." She repeated out loud, humming in thought at the sound of it. Yes, the boy in the mental correctional facility was "Nodoroki" henceforth.
Speaking of which…
She balled her hands into fists, looking back out the window in front of her. Nodoroki probably didn't know this stunning view. Nodoroki never had the chance to see it.
And even if Nodoroki didn't let her be friends with him, she'd do at least one thing - make sure he knew that he was not the monster the stories made him out to be.
[-]
"It's you, again." Yaoyorozu seemed less apprehensive and more confused. "Honestly speaking, I didn't expect you to come back after… last time."
"I apologise for that." Shouto was still standing at the door, trying to keep as much respectful distance from her as he could.
"If there's something you want me to do for you, and you actually think I'm capable of doing it, please just tell me. The last thing I need are people walking on eggshells around me." Her lips pursed slightly, a raspy whisper following shortly. "It's not like my life can get any worse, anyway."
The main problem was that he didn't know all the details himself, in a way it felt like handing in an incomplete report at the end of the year. Except this time there nobody was there to sigh and share her notes regardless, and there was no teacher who would begrudgingly look over his small mistakes.
Yaoyorozu gestured to the visitor's chair next to her bed. "Please, take a seat. I'd offer to make tea and dessert, but for obvious reasons, we'll have to skip out on those."
One foot in front of the other, he crossed the hospital room and complied with her words. He sat down stiffly, taking a deep breath before finally meeting her eyes.
"You're right. I do have something I'd like to ask you to do for me."
"And why me, specifically?"
"Because you're the only one I can ask."
"That's…" Yaoyorozu seemed uncomfortable. "I'm not sure… I mean, we don't even know each other… At least, i'm pretty sure we don't…"
"We don't." Saying it out loud cemented the fact once and for all. "We have never met before. You know nothing about me."
"W-well, then why-"
"Because you're amazing. You're… you're the smartest person I know. You can find the solution to this madness." At the end of the day, Shouto reverted to the one tactic he knew. Just… telling the truth, straightforwardly and without detours. "I know I'll sound like a madman, and you don't have to believe me, but-"
"Do you really think that?" His mindless rant was interrupted by a curious whisper. He stopped talking immediately, letting her speak freely.
Her eyes were trained on her hands, which had begun fiddling with her blanket. "You… you think I'm amazing?"
"Yes. Because you are."
"H-How would you even know that? Nothing about me has ever been made public, and we've never met, so how can you just say that?" She spluttered in disbelief. "How-"
"You don't know me, that's true. But I know you." Shouto spoke calmly. "And I will fix this."
[-"I have a dream where I
strangle you with both of my hands."-]