Joe's Note: I'm not going to lie, I honestly pondered turning Izuku into Midoriya Izumi for this story just because I thought it would be interesting to explore how a truly sensational power couple would be received by the heroics-obsessed society that serves as the setting of My Hero Academia. But then I realized that it would be just plain too much power in a single package: finding things to challenge even a novice Izumi with Carol standing directly at her side would be too difficult. That being said, finding things to challenge the woman who didn't even blink when Thanos headbutt her is going to be pretty damn difficult. I'm not sure that I want to inject brand new foes that only Carol can handle because that'll just underscore how much more powerful she is than anyone else... but I don't know if I want this to be her largely unopposed romp through the universe of My Hero Academia. Something I'll have to figure out by the time Nomu rolls around, I suppose.
Dedications & Thanks: To Nicholas, Howard, Jade, Alexander, Tibor, Alonsis2, Daniel, Clark, Adrien, erlking, ridillin, Haematite, Charles, Jacky, Edward, Andrew, Roofcrawler, Wil, PbookR, Samuel, Mikey, Beverly, Daniel, Charles, Crygon20, Subtle, Christopher, Stephen, Fablesrogue, Morgan, Joseph, Jason, RileyWestfall, bloodylord, Marc, Ziryo, Chris, George, Koby, William, Devin, JJbelle, David, Gavin, TheTenthAncestor, Lookshy, Mauday, John, Roman, Warren, and Jess for sponsoring me on , and making it easier for me to spend more of my time writing.

Floating a few feet above the sand at the Dagobah Municipal Beach Park, Carol shook her head as she watched Midoriya Izuku drag a fridge across the sand. "C'mon, Small Might, you got this! That fridge isn't going to move itself! Work those muscles!"

The previous four months had passed in a blur of patrolling, punching things, and doing her best to learn Japanese so that she wouldn't be as reliant on her armor's cowl to communicate. The patrolling and punching had gone well enough, although she'd overdone it a few times and caused a bit more collateral damage than strictly advisable. Learning to speak and read Japanese, on the other hand... well, she was proficient enough to awkwardly flirt with the members of her burgeoning 'Carol Corps' who tended to turn up in at least small numbers whenever she publicly fought a villain, and had even gotten a few girls' phone numbers along the way. That had to count for something, right?

Carol still wasn't sure how she felt about flirting with people 'her age' among the local populace. They could have been her daughters or quite possibly even her granddaughters if she'd settled down on the young side. Given her apparent youth and galaxy-spanning adventures, she'd always taken a rather open-minded approach to companionship: her last girlfriend had been a Luphomoid roughly half her age, before which she'd dated a Xandarian man who was closer to being her peer at the time. But given that her body was for all intents and purposes back to being fourteen for the time being? Either she was going to have to drastically redefine what an acceptable partner was to her or she'd be stuck spending the foreseeable future alone.

And not just the next few years; she was looking at a decade or two of solitude before her body caught back up with what would have previously been a 'younger' partner to her. At which point she'd be mentally seventy and dating twenty-year-olds, which wasn't much better. Maybe... maybe finding companionship among her peers - if she could even find someone who she connected with - wouldn't be so bad. She was still pretty certain that she was going to be abstinent for the intervening years, though. Potentially dating a teenager at her age was questionable enough. Having sex with them? Absolutely not.

But for the time being, a girlfriend was the least of her concerns. She needed to reach at least a truly basic proficiency in Japanese in the next six months, figure out if her current combat style contained any other 'super moves' that she should name... and help All Might whip the truly pathetic Izuku into shape so that he could have One For All bestowed upon him without exploding in the process.

Carol still wasn't sure whether or not All Might was being hyperbolic when he said that.

Was it wrong of her that she kinda wanted to find out?

Izuku grunted with effort as he continued to haul the fridge toward a truck that was waiting at the edge of the beach. While One For All gave All Might the ability to somehow violate physics and literally compact trash out of existence, Izuku wasn't yet so lucky and so the trash that he was moving had to go somewhere. That realization had led to the acquisition - somehow, from somewhere - of a beat up dump truck that Izuku would load each day as part of his training. Someone was clearly emptying it each night but where the trash went and at whose hands, Carol had no idea. "That's easy for you to say. You're almost as strong as All Might!"

"And if you want to be as strong as me and All Might, you need to train those scrawny little arms so that they don't get blown off when he gives you One For All." Carol swooped down as the fridge bumped against the edge of the pavement, taking pity on Izuku and helping him hoist it into the back of the truck. As he tried to catch his breath, Carol made her way over to the cab of the truck and grabbed him a bottle of water from a seemingly endless stash that replenished itself each night when the truck got emptied. "Let's take a break. Get some water back into you. Besides, I have a question. How good are you at talking to girls?"

That earned her a choked laugh from Izuku, the greenette giving her a disbelieving look as she returned and handed him the water bottle. "Are you kidding me? I don't think I've ever talked to a girl other than my mother or Aunt Mitsuki in my entire life. Well, I mean, I've had female teachers before too, but I'm sure that doesn't count as talking to a girl, does it?" Raising an eyebrow, Carol gestured to herself, a move that Izuku waved off. "You're not a girl, you're-"

Carol turned and drew her arm back before unleashing a single punch in the direction of the ocean. "MISAWA SMASH!" The air displaced by her punch shot off into the water, parting the waves for several seconds before gravity managed to overcome the sheer power behind her punch and the ocean poured back into the void that she'd created with a thunderous crash of waves. Turning back to Izuku, she nodded in the direction of the water. "You wanna think real, real carefully before you finish that sentence, Midoriya?"

Gulping nervously, Izuku held up both hands placatingly. "Um, so obviously you're a girl, you're just not a normal girl. You're All Might's sidekick. Who's helping train me. Talking to you is completely different from talking to like, a girl at school or something. You and I have a very good reason to talk. What reason would a loser like me have to talk to a girl normally?"

"Same reason I would talk to a girl: because she's cute and you like her?" Carol chuckled softly at the dumbfounded look on Izuku's face. Ah, right. Evidently she hadn't shared that particular tidbit of information with him before. Then again... "Seriously, I've seen you show up at some of my villain fights. Why do you think I've been asking girls for their phone numbers? So we can get together and do the homework I don't have from the school that I don't go to?"

Still staring at her with a disbelieving expression, Izuku shook his head slowly before responding. "Wahh! This is terrible!" Carol narrowed her eyes at his reaction; was he a homophobe or something? How much trouble would she get in for punching All Might's protégé into the ocean? "You're a girl so you already have an unfair advantage when it comes to understanding girls. And you're really cool and confident and powerful to boot. I don't even want a girlfriend yet but when I do... how am I supposed to get one with you around?"

Carol's irritable expression morphed into surprise and then she burst out laughing. "Really? That's what you're taking away from this? That I'm the ultimate in competition? I mean in theory you're not wrong... but look at it another way. I'll probably get a girlfriend first and then I can be your wingman. Help you understand how girls' minds work. Put in a good word for you. That sort of thing."

"R-really?" Izuku stared at her with wide eyes, and Carol found herself almost immediately regretting the offer that she'd explicitly made. The boy was hopeless; even with her rapport born of experience when it came to the fairer sex serving as a backstop, it would be nigh impossible to find someone as socially stunted and awkward as Izuku a girlfriend. "You'd really help me out like that?"

Raising one hand, Carol wobbled it back and forth uncertainly. "You're going to have to do some of the work yourself. We need to kill that stutter of yours, and kill it hard. And the indecision; you need to figure out where you're hiding your supply of confidence and fast. But if you can learn to turn yourself into a functional human being by the time we hit U.A.? I'm pretty sure I can help you navigate the mystery that is the female mind."

Izuku grinned widely and thrust one fist up into the air. "Then I'll do it!" After a moment's thought, he slowly lowered his hand. "...how do I become more confident?"

Carol groaned and buried her face in her hands. "All I wanted was to ask if there were any customs or taboos that I should watch out for when trying to date an Earth girl." Or at least a girl from Japan. Unless things had really changed in the past two hundred years - and absolutely nothing seemed to have - she was pretty sure that she'd be okay if she tried to pick up a girl in America.

"And you thought I would know? Me? Have you met me?"

Floating lazily through the air as she drifted high above Musutafu, Carol spun in slow circles as she scanned the cityscape, waiting for something - or someone - to draw her eye. This was the worst part of being reduced from an interstellar hero to what was effectively a street-level hero: patrolling. She was used to showing up because something was happening, intervening, and handling the situation. Spending most of her day waiting for something to happen... it was killing her.

A sudden crash caught her attention and Carol whipped around, her lips quirking upward in a smile as she watched Mt. Lady - 'but you call me Yu' - thundering down the street as she stared intently down at... something. Carol was content to let the fellow blonde enjoy her moment in the limelight and was about to cast her eye elsewhere when Yu came to an abrupt stop and huffed. Looking up, she scanned the skies until she found Carol, beckoning at the younger blonde with an exasperated expression on her face. "Little help?"

Coasting through the air, Carol quickly closed the distance between them and peered downward. Yu had evidently managed to chase her perpetrator right into a dead end alleyway. A dead end alleyway that was far too small to accommodate her Gigantification quirk. So while the criminal couldn't get away... likewise Yu couldn't get to him to detain him without shrinking back down. "We really need to work on your hand-to-hand abilities so that you have something to fall back on in situations like this."

"Yeah, yeah, lecture me about my shortcomings later. Help me out now." Pausing, Yu blushed faintly as her expression shifted from annoyed to a mixture of apologetic and hopeful. "Please?"

From his spot at the end of the alley, an almost painfully average looking man - save for the fact that his fists were on fire - glared up at Carol. "I'm not going to surrender! You may have me cornered, but you get no respect in prison if you don't go down fighting like a real man!"

Carol cocked her head to the side, eyeing the man bemusedly. "You know, if you'd put as much thought into your life choices as you did into prison culture, maybe you wouldn't be headed there next?" Spiraling around Yu's gigantic form, Carol dove down and shot between the woman's legs as she entered the alley. The blonde rocketed through the air, dodging two hurried bursts of fire before pulling up short right in front of her opponent. "HYAKURI SMASH!"

And then she unloaded on the man with both fists, photon blasts picking him up and slamming him back into the wall behind him.

As the criminal crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, curls of smoke rising from his moaning form, Carol turned back to Yu and offered her a thumbs up. "Fear not, Yu, for-"

"I am here. Yeah. I know. I asked you to come over here, remember?" Shrinking back down to her normal height, Yu made her way into the alley as Carol extinguished the power flowing through her and dropped to the pavement. Staring down at the criminal, Yu raised one hand to high five Carol. "You know, we make a pretty good team. We should do this more often."

While Carol was of the opinion that the situation hadn't really been resolved with teamwork - she'd done what little work was necessary to actually capture the criminal after Yu ran afoul of the limitations of her quirk - she was still trying her best to network and forge connections among this world's superheroes... so she'd take it. "I agree. Just out of curiosity, how much longer do you have on patrol this afternoon?"

Digging her phone out of a carefully disguised pocket in her costume, Yu consulted it for a second before looking back up at Carol. "Technically I'm off-duty now. I went over while chasing that guy. Why?"

Three o'clock in the afternoon was an awfully weird time for a shift to end. Eight to four would have made more sense, or maybe the classic nine to five of office work. Who worked seven to three? Who was up and at work at seven? Then again, Yu was the head of her own agency - small as it currently was - and so she could set her own hours. Carol shook her head. Her mind went on the oddest tangents ever since she'd been deaged. Had she been this scatterbrained as a teenager the first time around? "I'm still trying to get to know people around here better and I'm all about girl power. I figured hanging out with you would be safer than hitting up Midnight for a girl's night."

Yu's face soured at the mention of her perpetual challenger for the rank of sexiest heroine in Japan, but remarkably she managed to keep her thoughts on the woman to herself and focus on the matter at hand. "I mean, if the options are hanging out with you or doing paperwork this afternoon, I think we both know which one I'm going to pick."