***Aki***

It'd been three weeks since Bakugo met my parents and mom wouldn't shut up about him. He surprisingly hadn't said a thing about any of it or the complete humiliation my family served me with dinner. My mom had the insane idea that Bakugo actually liked me and I hadn't laughed so hard in years. That thick headed jerk tolerated me and once our work study was done? I was sure I'd never see him, Midoriya or Shoto again until we were pros. I tried not to think about how much that bothered me. I'd come to see all three of them as friends after the amount of time we'd spent together training so far. Sure I might have had a teeny tiny crush on a certain hot head and enjoyed getting under his skin probably more than any sane person dared to, but Bakugo was more likely to put on a clown suit and entertain kids at a birthday party than have feelings other than irritation for me. So I shoved my stupid heart into a box and locked it in a closet with the rest of my useless emotions, like my hope that one day I'd see again. I scoffed at how unrealistic that was and returned my focus to Shoto as he continued to manipulate his flames into a cage around me. I'd been working with him every Sunday to improve his control over his left side since we didn't need to worry about me frying to a crisp if he lost control.

"You're thinking about it too much, Shoto. Don't focus so much about the intensity of your flames for now. Get the shape down and work on the size of the flames later." I said to him as he sighed in frustration. I didn't know the entire story, and it wasn't my business, but I knew there was bad blood between Shoto and his father. Something Endeavor had done to tear their family apart. Whatever had happened caused Shoto to have an unusual amount of resistance to his fire quirk. Almost like he was afraid to use it.

"I don't want to burn the room down." he muttered as he let the flames die.

Shaking my head, I released my own flames to surround myself in a loose circle with pillars of fire trapping myself within. "Lets try something else then. Build the cage just inside mine, if your quirk gets out of hand my flames will absorb yours."

"How? Adding fire will just make it more out of control." I could hear the confusion and doubt in his voice.

I shrugged. "My parents are both fire users and were strict about control as I was growing up. Kinda have to know control when your flames can literally turn a person to dust if they get hot enough. I know how to tone down my quirk as an outside source of fire is added to it, so I can maintain whatever shape and degree of heat I'm working with."

"That's incredible, I don't think my father even has that much control."

"Yea, well like I said. His flames can't turn a person to ashes... My quirk flirts with that very distinct line between Villain and Hero." I muttered. I never wanted to be responsible for taking a life so control had always been the most important thing in my life. "Enough about me, come on. Give it a shot."

After another hour of encouraging words and suggestions, he was able to maintain a solid shape with his flames. The intensity of them wavered depending on the complexity and distance he was controlling them but at least he had the foundation of control now. I smiled my thanks when he handed me a water bottle and glanced around to see most everyone was already gone for the day, even Midoriya and Bakugo.

"Sorry I'm not much help with your training." Shoto said as I followed him toward the exit.

"Don't worry about it. My improvement right now is more... on a personal level. I don't think anyone can really help me right now."

"What does that mean?"

I sighed. My new friends knew the basics of my quirk abilities but not many details. I tended to keep those to myself since I technically considered them weaknesses. "My parents aren't heroes, so growing up I was more taught to keep my quirk under wraps than actually use it for an extended period of time. They drilled into me how to shape my flames and use them for the same purposes they use their quirks for work, but that's it."

He hummed in understanding as we made our way to the locker rooms. "What do they do for work?"

"My mom owns a bakery, uses her fire quirk to bake all of her food. Says its a more 'even' bake than any oven can ever achieve." I rolled my eyes, even though I knew she was right. "And my dad is a welder."

"So what are you trying to do with your quirk that no one can help?" he asked as he lead me to the women's locker room and opened the door for me.

Stopping in the doorway, I shoved down my self doubt that he would think less of me when I gave him the truth. "I struggle to keep my flames going for long periods of time. Control isn't my problem, endurance is. Figuring out how to fly was one of the hardest things I've ever done and that's just maintaining a low intensity flame burning."

I resisted the urge to shy away from him when he rested a hand on my shoulder. I always felt like such a failure as a future hero that I wasn't stronger, couldn't use my quirk better. I could coach someone in control all day but ask me to keep a flame burning for more than five minutes at a time? I'd probably experience a rebirth on a daily basis. "You're stronger than you give yourself credit for Aki. You have incredible fighting skill and control. Endurance just takes training and experience. It'll come with time, just as you keep telling me for my control."

I felt a smile pull at my lips as he squeezed my shoulder reassuringly before releasing me and making his way toward the men's locker room. "Thanks Shoto, I'll see you next weekend."

***Aki***

"What's the situation?" Bakugo demanded once we joined the police gathered outside the bank. We'd been on our usual patrol when the agency dispatched us to an ongoing robbery, being that we were the closest and Endeavor was already dealing with another situation. We were informed several pros had also been called in but Bakugo and I would have more than enough time to assess the severity of the situation by the time they arrived.

An officer turned to us and sighed in relief that help had finally arrive. "A group of thieves entered the building about an hour ago and took hostages. There isn't much else we know, just that one of them likely has some type of electricity or tech quirk because the entire bank's security system and phone lines were disabled."

"At least that makes one that likely isn't combat oriented." I noted.

"Have they made any demands yet?" my partner asked impatiently. I was sure he wanted nothing more than to kick the door down and burst in there but this wasn't simulation training, actually lives were on the line.

The officer sighed in frustration. "They haven't attempted to make any contact outside of the bank yet. Are the pros on the way too?"

Bakugo scowled. "Who knows where the hell they're at. We don't need their help anyway."

I focused my gaze on the bank as the officer voiced his concern. "You kids can't go in there by yourselves, you could get hurt!"

"Don't worry about us, we have our provisional license, we can handle this. If we can't, we'll retreat until backup arrives." I smiled reassuringly. Feeling my partner's gaze focused on me, I tilted my head toward him. "We should sneak in through the back employee entrance. If the security system is down then that might be the safest point of entry. I'm not fond of waltzing right into a large open lobby."

I received no response as I watched his heat signature begin moving toward what I assumed was the back of the bank. Gazing at where I guessed the building was but not quite certain since the electricity was down so the power lines weren't radiating heat, I could make out a fairly large gathering of body heat but it didn't appear to be on the ground floor.

"I expected you to argue."

I jumped slightly at the sudden rumble of his voice. "Argue about what? Taking action instead of waiting for the pros? We got our licenses for a reason, so we can use our quirks and do more than just observe. Endeavor taught us to act, not sit around."

"Tsk, at least you're not a complete disappointment." I grinned at his compliment, knowing it was likely the best I'd ever get out of him. His pace slowed before he came to a stop and growled in frustration. "Of course it's fucking locked."

I leapt at him when I saw the aura around his hand beginning to glow brighter. Grabbing his arm and pulling it away from the door handle, I glared toward him. "Don't blast it! It might make too much noise. Didn't we just talk about stealth like a week ago?! "

"Then how the hell are we going to get in there, Bird Brain?"

Rolling my eyes at his dramatics, I felt around for the handle and melted the metal until all that was left of it was a puddle of brass on the ground. Silently pushing the door open, I smiled as I motioned for my impatient partner to take the lead. His displeasure at my peppy attitude practically pulsed from him as he silently entered the building. I followed until he came to a stop and seemed to be checking the area before turning toward me.

"Hear anything Bat Girl?"

I shook my head.

"I don't see anyone in the main lobby so they're likely on a higher floor." he mumbled under his breath.

"I could have at least told you that." I said absentmindedly as my gaze focused on the ceiling above. "I wouldn't have just let you stomp in here if I'd seen any heat signatures on this floor."

He growled in annoyance. "I do not stomp."

I choked on a laugh as I patted his arm. "You keep telling yourself that sweetie." I could feel him trying to contain his rage and resisted the urge to tease him further. Redirecting my attention on the ceiling, I tried to at least count how many people were in the building before sighing in defeat. "We're going to need to sweep each floor to figure out where they are."

"Can't you tell where they are with your heat vision?" he growled in irritation.

I shook my head. "I can only make out the shape of a body if I'm close, the further away, the more blurry a heat signature looks. It's extremely difficult to tell if they are very far away or just crouched on the ground which causes their aura to shrink up with the shape of their bodies."

"Useless."

"Funny how you thought relying on the blind student would benefit you." I retorted sarcastically.

"Shut up and get moving. Maybe your stupid heat vision will improve the closer we get."

Rolling my eyes, I swiftly reached to grab the back of his shirt before he could get too far ahead of me. Bakugo froze and I could feel him watching me impatiently, probably waiting for me to point out a threat nearby that he hadn't seen. I gave him a blank expression in return. "Based on your silent simmering, I'm assuming you're staring at me? Don't be dull Bakugo. You know I can only hear objects nearby if there is actual sound in the room. With us sneaking around, I can't sense anything around me. I need your lead so I don't have to watch your exact path the entire time."

Sighing, he turned back around and silently led us through the bottom floor of the bank in search of the stairs, not complaining about me holding onto his shirt like a toddler. He muttered to me that the elevator was ahead but only an idiot would take it, plus the power was out. The stairs were our only way up. He threw a quick warning to me before we slowly started to ascent the steps. Clearing the entire second floor, we could finally hear talking as we approached the stairs to the third floor. Before Bakugo could start up the steps, I tugged lightly on his shirt and shook my head. Taking a detour into a small office near the stairs, he silently shut the door behind us.

"There are seven people just above us but I don't think they have the hostages piled together. All seven are separate from each other, I can't tell which is thief or hostage... or how many thieves there are. They probably have them spread out to confuse any heroes that attempt a rescue."

"We can't go in there blind, we need some way of figuring out who is who." he growled. I shot him an unamused expression at his comment. "Shut up idiot! You know what I meant!"

Resisting a laugh, I paused when I heard the barest sound of breathing nearby. "Wait. Someone is on this floor." I followed the sound of the labored breathing and reached out.

"It's a closet, how can someone be in there? Your heat vision would have spotted it."

"Not if..." I felt around for the door knob and slowly opened the door, immediately feeling a chill breeze over my skin. "It's ok, we're here to help."

A woman flung herself out of the closet with a sob, hugging me. "Thank god, I was terrified they would find me in there." she whispered.

The woman pulled away from me and I smiled reassuringly. The only humans I couldn't see with my vision were those that were cold-blooded due to their quirk or ice users. The woman's skin felt like scales so I'd bet she was some type of reptile.

"Ma'am, do you know anything about what happened?" I questioned.

"It all happened so fast, if I didn't have my own office I probably wouldn't have been able to quickly hide in the closet. From what I heard, it sounded like two or three villains. They took the vault and teller employees hostage before sweeping through all of the second floor offices looking for a manager to open the vault. Then they took everyone to the top floor where the safety deposit boxes are held."

I nodded, glancing up at the ceiling. Returning my attention to the worker, I smiled once more. "We're going to get you out of here but I'll need us to switch clothes."

"What?" Bakugo snapped in confusion.

"We have to find out which are robbers and which are civilian. I'm going to let them catch me." I explained as I directed the worker to go back into the closet for some form of privacy while she undressed.

"The hell you are! That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard! We don't even know what kind of quirks they have!"

"Do you have a better idea?" I glanced toward him before beginning to remove my costume.

I heard his breath catch in his throat. "Fuck woman, where's your sense of dignity?!"

I shrugged, knowing he'd turned his back to me from how the volume of his voice diminished. "There's nowhere else in this office to change. It was either me or the civilian and I will always put a civilian before myself."

"Still could have given a damn warning before just taking off your clothes." he growled.

I smirked to myself. If I didn't know any better, it almost sounded like my partner was blushing. "You're not looking, are you?"

"OF COURSE NOT YOU IDIOT!" he whispered harshly.

I laughed softly as I squeezed my arm through the closet door to trade clothes with the woman. Quickly dressing, I spoke to the woman through the closed door. "Miss, when you start hearing explosions I want you to run down the stairs and out the front door as fast as you can. The police are outside waiting to help and will get you to safety."

"Thank you both... please be careful." she murmured through the door.

Turning toward where I remembered we'd entered the office, I began making my way toward the door. I stopped when a warm hand grabbed my arm.

"I'll kill you if you get yourself hurt, so you better figure out who is who damn quick or I'm comin up there."

I nodded and grabbed his hand still holding my arm. Cracking the office door open, I listened for any sound and checked for any heat signatures before pulling him out of the office and toward the center of the room. I smiled slightly as he bumped me this way and that to avoid any objects in my path that I couldn't see. Stopping nearly at the center of the floor, I looked up and pointed. "All seven people are in this general area. Once they take me up, I want you to stand right here and be ready."

"How are you going to tell me who's ass I need to kick?"

Rolling my eyes, I released his hand when I noticed I was still holding it tightly. "Oh don't worry, you'll know."

Growling at me, he moved to hide as he muttered about annoyingly cryptic bats. Once he was in position, I knocked over one of the desks and made enough noise that suddenly several storming footsteps came crashing down the stairs at the end of the hall. I made a show of my role as terrified supervisor as two villains snatched me up quickly and dragged my struggling form up the stairs.

"Please don't hurt me!" I cried out. I whimpered as someone threw me to the ground once we were on the third floor.

"How did we miss this bitch?" a masculine voice rumbled near me and I took in any small details of his aura so I could distinguish him from the rest.

"She must've been hiding in one of the offices, they did say only one supervisor was on duty." Another man said, I mentally tagged him as well.

"It doesn't matter, now we have someone to open these fucking boxes and the vault too if we have time." A woman snapped as she approached from across the room. Her aura glowed a dark orange, indicating she probably had some type of fire based quirk. I resisted the urge to smirk, that one would be easy to take down. Fire types had a tendency to think themselves stronger than most since just about everything burned. This poor woman was about to find out how useless and weak her fire actually was.

I put on an act of really milking my blindness, aimlessly looking around the room filled with voices. "Please don't do this. These boxes hold the precious valuables of people and their families. Heirlooms, inheritances, things of personal value!"

"Is she fucking blind? How the hell does a blind bitch work at a bank?"

"Her office is set up specially for her to efficiently do her work." a timid voice spoke up from my right. Clearly one of the hostages, and caught on to my plan surprisingly quick if he was already playing along with my ploy.

"It doesn't fucking MATTER! Get her ass over here to open these. We're running out of time." the woman snarled. One of the men roughly picked me up and shoved me toward the wall of security boxes. I purposefully tripped and fell multiple times in the general area to get a feel of what was around me in case it came down to a fight up here. "You better know the code to open these or your precious employees will regret it."

"Ok, please just don't hurt them." Feeling around for the code panel, I internally sighed in relief that they had standard brail. It would make my act as supervisor so much more believable. Pretending to feel around the panel, I turned in the direction the woman robber had been speaking from. "Our security panel requires three people to open as a safety protocol. Typically it is the customer, one employee and a supervisor. There is a desk with a computer over there somewhere right?"

I assumed the thieves must have nodded because the verbal confirmation was delayed as they realized I couldn't see their response. "Someone needs to sit at that computer, it will show a pop up window that requires confirmation within five seconds of the code being entered."

"I didn't know banks upgraded their security systems." one of the men mumbled and I had to resist smirking. I had zero clue of the security measures banks took with their safety deposit boxes, I'd pulled that protocol out of my ass so I could get all three of the baddiest exactly where I needed them.

One of the robbers spoke from my left. "I'll do it, what do I have to do with the pop up window?"

I shrugged, "Since I can't feel brail on a computer, usually one of the employees handles it. But it should be a simple 'Confirm' button you need to click."

"I'm not seeing how three people are required for this process." the woman said, suspicion in her voice.

"The third person; the customer, needs to be at the box door. It needs to be opened within five seconds of the computer authorization." I explained.

There was a moment of silence before I heard a growl of frustration. "Fine. You gather the hostages over there and watch them while we handle this. Hurry up with it bitch or I'll barbeque the entire lot of them in one ball of fire."

I turned back to the control panel to hide my triumphant smile. They'd just unknowingly confirmed there are only three of them, they'd gathered all the hostages into one area and each thief was in a stationary spot. They fell right into my trap. Before any of them could react, I hit the floor and slammed my hands down against the ground.

***Bakugo***

I resisted the urge to punch a hole through one of the cubicles as I paced the floor below where that stupid Batgirl was doing who the hell knew what. My patience was running very thin and I was seconds from bursting up the stairs after her. Listening to her cry out in pain and plead with those bastards not to hurt her had struck a nerve. It'd taken every ounce of willpower I had not to charge after them as they dragged her up the stairs. But I had to trust she knew what she was doing and could handle herself, it just pissed me off that I couldn't watch her back. Just when my patience hit it's limit and I began turning toward the stairwell, three circles of flame melted holes through the ceiling and three bodies collapsed around me. Aki dropped through seconds later and immediately pinned a dark haired woman down before she could recover. "Save the quirk cuffs for her!" she yelled before I leapt into action and quickly took care of the two remaining threats. Once they were secured in computer cords I'd pulled from a nearby desk, I returned to Batgirl to see her grinning down at the pissed off chick.

"Why the hell won't you BURN?!" she screeched in fury.

I scoffed, "You can't burn someone that's fire resistant, you idiot." Securing her in the quirk neutralizing cuffs, I dragged all three to sit close enough for Aki to surround them in her flames.

"Don't touch those unless you want to turn to ash." Aki warned but I could feel she'd kicked the intensity of the flames down.

"I've never seen white flames before..." one of the guys trapping in the flames murmured.

"Well don't fucking touch it, white is supposed to be the hottest and I'm not getting killed just because you idiots can't sit still." the woman snapped, glaring murderously at Batgirl.

"Took you fucking long enough Bird Brain. Let's take care of the hostages first, then we can come back for these idiots." I grabbed her hand without thinking and moved it to the straps at my back for her to grab so she wouldn't bitch about stumbling around as I lead the way to the third floor. The hostages were huddled together near the safety deposit boxes, a few startling when they saw me.

"You all were very brave and you're safe now. Follow us, the police are outside waiting to assist." Batgirl smiled as she peaked around me to speak to the workers. As they followed us down the stairs, one of the guys reached out to grab her shoulder. I had the irritating urge to rip his hand off her and shoved it down as she tilted her head to indicate she was acknowledging the person.

"Thank you for saving us, that was a brilliant ploy to work around your inability to see who was the threat."

"I'm impressed you caught on so quickly, if not for you that plan might not have worked so flawlessly." She grinned at him.

My anger boiled up again. "You idiot! You came up with a plan on the FLY?!"

She rolled her eyes. "How could I have come up with a plan in advance when I had no idea what the situation was? It all worked out just fine, if my plan had failed then I simply would have just caused a bit more damage than necessary. I was trying to minimize that, unlike SOMEONE I know." she jabbed.

"WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY BATGIRL?!" This chick really knew how to get under my damn skin.

She shrugged. "You can't deny you're destructive. It's cute sometimes how explosive you are." I nearly tripped over my own feet at her nonchalant comment as she laughed softly. "You're not blushing again are you?"

"SHUT THE HELL UP AND DIE." I snapped as I slapped her hand from my costume and stomped ahead to report to the pro heroes that had just arrived.

"He was certainly blushing." I heard one of the women giggle, causing Aki to laugh harder. My face was on fire and it pissed me off. Why the hell did she get to me so easily? I'd seen her get flustered at her parents house but if I even tried to pick at her like her mom did, it'd come off creepy and then she'd never let me live that down. She was so infuriating!

"There should be an ambulance, please all of you get checked out before going home." I heard her tell the civilians before she hurried after me.

I let the pros know where they could find the robbers and caught sight of the lizard woman we'd found in the office closet near one of the squad cars. Turning toward Aki, I shoved her shoulder so she was facing the chick wearing her costume. "That chick you traded clothes with is waiting for her shit back. Hurry up so we can leave." And so I can kick your stupid ass back at the agency for being a reckless idiot.