Chapter 7 – Kiss the Rain
When she woke up the next morning, Aine felt like a new world had opened up. It was the first night in years she had slept soundly without any fears or nightmares to disturb her. She looked out the window as she drank a cup of tea and watched the sky outside lighten with the sunrise.
After a quick shower and getting mostly dressed, Aine walked back into the kitchen ruffling her wet hair with her towel. She picked up her phone off the counter and, noticing no new notifications, put it in the pocket of her jeans.
She brushed her teeth and pulled on a purple long sleeved t-shirt. With nothing other than her "date" with Nemuri tonight on the agenda, she figured she could take a stroll around campus and get to know her new home. She shrugged on a light jacket, grabbed her keys off the table and went to head downstairs.
As she walked through the common room, she saw a very familiar body passed out cold on one of the couches. Pitying the hangover he was sure to experience when he woke, she decided to take a quick detour into the kitchen. Aine dug out the first aid kit and found 2 ibuprofen tablets, then she filled a glass with water. She set both of them on the table in front of the couches with a note:
Zashi:
Take these for the hangover.
She left the note unsigned and headed out the door for her walk. They must have had a hell of a time at the bar last night. She chuckled softly to herself.
The air was crisp against her cheeks as she walked along the paths on campus. The grounds really were beautiful with the fall foliage, and she could almost imagine what it would look like in the spring.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, students began to filter out of the dorms and mill around the courtyards. The campus slowly came to life as various groups of students went about their activities. Several groups had gathered around the grounds and were playing different games or chatting animatedly.
She went past the dorms into the small, wooded area behind them unnoticed by the teenagers. Aine didn't stop until she could no longer hear the sounds of the children and climbed up into a nearby tree.
Was it childish? Yes.
Did she care? No.
As she reached the final branches that she thought could hold her weight, she stopped and sat with her back against the trunk and one leg dangling down. She pulled out her phone and started scrolling through a shopping site ordering a few more outfits and personal effects for her apartment before absentmindedly scrolling through news websites.
Right as she started to think she was ready to head down, she heard voices below her.
Do I go ahead and head down now? What if it is a private conversation?
Aine decided that rather than be rude and accidentally eavesdrop, she would head down. As she started to descend from the tree, she heard the voices stop.
"Who's there?"
She dangled from her hands and then dropped from where she was rather than climb the rest of the way down.
"M-miss Satterfield!?"
Aine looked up and saw the greenette who had run into her outside the classroom yesterday staring in surprise and next to him – All Might himself.
"All Might! And it's Midoriya, correct?" she greeted the two while brushing the bits of bark off of herself. "Forgive my intrusion, I was just enjoying the sunshine." she rubbed the back of her neck with her hand feeling bits of bark and leaves falling from her curls. She could only imagine what she must look like.
"No harm at all Miss Satterfield. I apologize if we interrupted your..." the man offered a friendly smile as he waved his hand toward the tree.
Aine chuckled a little, "It's perfectly alright, I was getting ready to head back anyways. I'll see you Monday, Midoriya." She waved barely hearing his response before she headed back towards the dorms.
The rest of the afternoon was spent uneventfully in her apartment. A few more things had been ordered off the shopping app she had but otherwise she had spent most of her day reading and watching snippets of TV. Mostly, she was just enjoying a feeling of normalcy. Not having to worry about being able to run at a moments notice, not having to worry about who was going to show up at her door, not having to have five thousand backup plans if someone discovered where she was. For once, she could just exist.
It hadn't seemed very long before she saw the long shadows starting to cross her dining table as the sun went down. She decided to make a few snacks to go along with their movie time and set them on the small coffee table. Just as she picked a pre-quirk era cheesy rom-com movie from the streaming service, she heard her notification chime on her phone. It was a text from Nemuri:
"Do you mind if I bring someone with me?"
Her chest tightened a little.
Who is it?
"'Zashi"
Aine didn't know how to respond. Was she ready to talk to both of them? Was he going to rip into her again? At least this time, she could just kick him out. She sighed before responding.
Yeah, it's fine if he comes.
"Perfect! We will be there in 5."
True to her word, 5 minutes later Aine heard a knock at her door.
The air in the room was awkward to say the least. Aine, Hizashi and Nemuri were sitting around her kitchen table in silence as no one really knew how to start this conversation.
"Thank you for the…uhm….the medication this morning." Hizashi finally broke the silence.
Aine looked in shock for a split moment before responding, "How did you know it was me?"
He huffed out a short laugh, "One, there are only 3 people who ever call me 'Zashi'. Two, the handwriting was too nice to be Shouta and three, Nemuri was still passed out when I went by her apartment after I got up." Hizashi pulled the note out of his pocket, "Also, I don't think you realized you wrote in English too."
She took the note from him, "I was sure I…" her eyes fell on the note, "Oh…I sure did, didn't I? Thankfully it wasn't German." She laughed.
Conversation started to slowly trickle forward between the three and before long Nemuri and Hizashi were animatedly talking about the escapades of the group at the bar the night before.
"I'm not sure why that bartender allows you behind the bar. You're a menace to society!"
Nemuri poured another glass of wine for everyone, "I am not! You just fail to recognize my artistic expression! That last drink was delicious!"
"That last drink was basically lighter fluid! You could have burned down the bar if someone set of a spark near it!"
Aine delved into a poorly contained fit of giggles. Her third glass of wine starting to make her head buzz slightly. Her monitor chirped in the bedroom where she had left it, she knew it was alerting about her blood alcohol. "I'm quite aware I'm drinking alcohol you tattle-tale hunk of machinery!"
Now all three of them were laughing.
As the laughter died down, Aine looked at the wine glass in her hands.
Hizashi cleared his throat.
"Aine, I need to apologize for what I said." his eyes looking over the top of his glasses.
"Stop. You were right, in a way." Aine waved off his words and shook her head, "For three years, I've regretted how I left. Not that I left, just how I went about it. I should have told you all what was going on, but I was scared."
"Scared that we wouldn't believe you?" Nemuri had set her wine glass down.
"No, scared that you would. Let me start from the beginning."
As Aine finished explaining, both Hizashi and Nemuri sat thinking about all she had just said. After a short moment, Hizashi broke the silence once again, "You were right."
"Come again?"
"The reason why you left, how you left. That we wouldn't have let you leave had we known. We would have tried to get you to stay, insisted we could protect you but if it was connected to All for One..."
"We would have just been…" Nemuri started but didn't finish.
"Yeah." Hizashi's voice was barely noticeable as he gently spun the wine glass in front of him with his fingers.
Silence again descended on the room now that Aine's nightmares had been drug kicking and screaming into the light.
Nemuri looked up at Aine, her blue eyes set and serious, "You have to tell Shouta."
"I will, when I'm ready to talk to him about it all I promise I will." she gave a sad half-smile while looking at her glass.
Nemuri clapped her hands, "Okay! About that movie?" she hopped up and headed towards the living room.
The rest of the night passed with more wine, cheesy movies, and lots of colorful commentary from all three. Aine couldn't help the small ache that crossed her chest at the thought of how it should be four of them.
At some point in the night and after several glasses of wine apiece, the three had passed out in her living room. Aine woke up first, her stomach roiling with nausea. She maneuvered herself from underneath a heavily sleeping Nemuri, off the couch and carefully stepped over Hizashi's unconscious body. Heading into the kitchen, she started a pot of coffee as she grabbed her first aid kit from the cabinet, placing the bottle of ibuprofen on the counter.
She grabbed a sleeve of crackers, leaning against the counter nibbling on them while she waited for the coffee to brew. As her stomach began to calm little by little, she went about cleaning their mess from the night before trying to be as quiet as she could in order to not wake anyone.
It wasn't long before she heard a groan from the other room, she glanced over to see Hizashi trying to hide his face from the sunlight streaming in through her windows and Nemuri slowly sitting up on the couch.
"There's coffee and ibuprofen in the kitchen." she called over her shoulder as she grabbed the trash bag she had just filled and headed out the door.
As she came back up from throwing out the trash, both Hizashi and Nemuri were sitting on the couch a mug of coffee in each of their hands. The fresh air had done wonders for her stomach, so she felt significantly more human than they both looked.
"How are you two feeling?"
Hizashi groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand. Nemuri sipped on her coffee.
" 's not fair. You should be in just as much misery." she mused.
Aine smirked, "Okay, I'll trade you the hangover and you can have that stupid thing-" she waved at the monitor on the dining room table with the batteries removed, "-beeping at you for every little thing you do."
Picking up the monitor, she replaced the batteries and watched the screen come back to life, the typical readout flashing on the screen. Placing it in her pocket, she settled on the floor sitting cross-legged across from both of her hungover friends as they nursed their coffees.
"Anything else I can grab for you?"
Nemuri shook her head, "No, I think I'm going to head back to my apartment. I'll finish dying in my own bed."
Hizashi signed Same as he placed his mug on the coffee table and stood to leave. Aine saw them to the door, waving down the hallway as they both headed to the elevator.
The rest of the day was spent going over the notes she had made in her computer about the students she would be seeing on Monday. Especially the first name on her schedule:
Izuku Midoriya.