HINT #13- The time Kaminari just didn't care

"You'll be split up into groups." Aizawa spread his arms out in front of him, gesturing to the extensive plain filled with rubble, debris, and fallen buildings behind him. "You may pick them however you like, but I would advise steering away from friends or people you think might distract you. This is a serious exercise, and if you fail because you were goofing off, there will be serious consequences."

"We fuckin' know," Bakugou grumbled from Kaminari's side. He already had his arm wrapped around his shoulders, being decidedly gentler with him than he was with Kirishima, whose neck was partially getting crushed by the blond's bicep. Kaminari just smiled to himself.

He'd deduced long ago that Bakugou had taken it upon himself to make a conscious effort to be not quite as rough where scars littered his body, fingers always ghosting rather than grabbing and touching rather than pushing. It was obvious, really, with the way Bakugou practically punched Kirishima whenever he said something stupid but only gave him a glare whenever he did the same thing, but for the sake of both his friend's pride and his own mental sanity, Kaminari chose not to share the fact that he'd figured out Bakugou's little secret long ago. He...it may sound a little sad, but he couldn't remember the last time a person had handled him with so much care, and he wasn't about to give that up for the sake of teasing his friend; thank you very much.

"You tell us this every time," Bakugou muttered again under his breath, muscles tensing in annoyance. "Just tell us what the fuck we're doing so we can get on with it."

"Bakugou?" Aizawa cut himself off in the middle of his instruction, turning towards the trio to raise a deadpan eyebrow. "Is there something you need?"

"Yeah. Why the hell are we spending so much time explaining this. Just tell us what the fuck we're doing so we can get going already. It's been like three hours."

"It's been twenty minutes, Bakugou, and if you acted like this on a real mission briefing, you'd be fired faster than you could even sign your contract," Aizawa replied cooly, wholly unimpressed. "Now shut up and listen. We're doing something different today than we usually do."

"Really?" Midoriya chirped from across the room. He was grouped together with Uraraka, Iida, and Todoroki by the looks of it, not that it was a surprise or anything. They had their little squad going on, and Kaminari had his. It was chill. Plus, he and Todoroki had stayed up all night the night before tangled together and crying to random Spanish television dramas and every once in a while randomly professing their platonic love to one another after a particularly dramatic episode, so that was cool. A little irrelevant, but Kaminari liked to reassure himself of the bonds he had with people every once in a while. The feeling of being loved was nice.

He just wished he had the luxury of getting used to it.

"Why're we suddenly switching things up now?" Midoriya continued from inside their little circle. "We've been doing the same thing all year every single training day."

Aizawa shrugged, eyebags exceedingly prominent in the early morning sun. "Don't ask me, kid. They just hand me what I need to teach you, and I do it." He clapped his hands together. It sounded unenthusiastic. "Now, everyone, listen up. This lesson can be considered a little more dangerous than the regular destroying enemies and fighting simulations we usually do, so listen to what I say carefully."

He folded his hands together, regarding his students with pursed lips and serious eyes.

"As I already said, you'll divide yourself into teams. The only reason I'm letting you choose is so I can judge how you'd make decisions for team-ups in the professional world. If you choose your friends and you all work horribly together, that's a clear judgment of your character, and points will be deducted. If you choose based on someone's skill level and abilities you already know, whether they be your friends or not, and you do well, then that's full credit and no points off."

"How many people per group?" Sero inquired from the back. He was propped up on his tiptoes, eyes barely visible over Kirishima's spikes. "Can we, like, all team up or something?"

"No," Aizawa responded icily. "Four people is the maximum and the recommended amount. Any less will make this activity much more difficult than it needs to be."

The class was silent as everyone absorbed the words. Kaminari, in all honesty, didn't really care much. It was school, sure, and by extension, his only possible way to become a hero and get revenge on his parents, but training exercises like these were always challenges that he could've probably beaten when he was no more than a toddler. He'd tried actually listening to what Aizawa said once during one of these drills, and he'd found it'd required much more brainpower than it was worth.

"Anyway." Aizawa folded his hands together in front of him, clearly already fed up with today's activity but tolerating it nonetheless. "The exercise is simple. As you can see, there's a whole plain full of debris, trash, boulders, and generally just the remnants of a destroyed city as far as the eye can see. Each of you will start at different places in the rubble with no communication with the other teams. Somewhere in all of this destruction, you will found a table with two bottles on it. Both bottles are full of a clear liquid that smells the same, looks the same, and are generally indistinguishable from each other. However, inside one of those bottles is a poison so deadly that if even a single drop is ingested, your blood will quite literally clot at such an alarming rate that you'll die within seconds. Your mission is to work together and use the resources you and your team have to find the two bottles and figure out how to distinguish them from each other. You must provide clear, concrete proof. These are no guesses in the hero business."

"When will a stupid fucking situation like this ever come up in real life," Bakugou grumbled under his breath and then much louder to Aizawa himself. "In what world are we gonna have to split up with no communication and then have to figure out which fucking drink will put us to sleep for good. There's probably someone with a fucking quirk for that anyway."

"Don't be so naive, Bakugou," Aizawa responded, face as flat as his tone. "Anything could happen, and if you're really interested, this poison was recently discovered in an abandoned laboratory off the coast of the Bermuda Triangle that was believed to belong to a group of scientists looking for a way to destroy All Might back in his prime. It's considered the deadliest poison on the face of the planet, no one on record can withstand it for more than five seconds before dying on the spot, and it's been recently proven that villains have access to it."

"Yeah, well," Bakugou grumbled, turning his head to the side and sniffing indignantly. "I fucking knew that. Stupid fucker."

"Mr. Aizawa?" Midoriya put up his hand, eyes as wide and curious as ever. "If you don't mind me asking, what's this substance called? I've never heard of it before."

Aizawa scratched his cheek. "It would do you better not to find out why exactly this poison is named such a thing, but it's called the Immortal Lock."

"You're fucking kidding me." The words were out before Kaminari could stop himself, just barely audible to Bakugou, who so happened to be the person closest to him at the moment. Bakugou, thankfully, only spared him downturned lips and a raised eyebrow before turning his attention back to the debriefing, which Kaminari couldn't decide he was appreciative for or annoyed his friend couldn't give him anything else to focus on at the moment.

The Immortal Lock.

God, Kaminari hadn't heard that name in a long time. It was fitting, really, for whichever god up there obsessed with making his life miserable to bring back such an integral part of his childhood at such a random moment because apparently, the universe couldn't let Denki Kaminari have one moment of peace in this godforsaken hell-hole of a life he'd never asked to be born into.

The Immortal Lock. The world's deadliest poison, the most obscure creation in existence, and made solely for the purpose of 'training' seven-year-old Kaminari in a way his parents had sworn time and time again wasn't torture but a lesson, a lesson in resistance and how to handle excruciating amounts of pain flowing through one's bloodstream and rotting away blood cells.

A lesson in focusing all his mental energy on keeping his organs from disintegrating on the spot.

Out of all the tortures and indescribable horrors Kaminari had had to face during his time in captivity (it wasn't called home, it never was, not after he'd come to UA, not after his parents had said 'fuck all' and put a bounty on his head), the Immortal Lock might've been the worst.

The creation of the poison alone killed over one hundred mad scientists, all of which had been commissioned by his sick, twisted parents because their usual fear tactics with knives and whips weren't working anymore. By seven years old, a fucking kid whose spark had long since been extinguished and would've killed himself long ago had it not been for the promises Toga and Dabi had had him make, he'd been desensitized to all forms of torture, and his parents hated it.

So they'd decided to create a poison so deadly, so fast-acting, so painful that the few seconds it took for the consumer to die felt like hours of torturous agony, just to make their child, who was already the best, most skillful assassin in history at that point, even 'stronger.' Or, at least that's what they'd said when they'd handed their little blond boy a glass and instructed him to drink lest he wanted to be stabbed through the gut and made to sleep with the knife in.

Even back then, as a kid that hadn't known what real love felt like and knew nothing but blood, threats, and torture, he'd known the truth. His parents didn't care about his suffering. They'd readily encouraged it from day one if anything. All they'd ever wanted was to make an unbeatable superweapon, create an entity so skilled and smooth in every aspect of killing that they could defeat All Might, and they didn't care what they subjected Kaminari through to get that.

Kaminari still remembered the agony that had washed through his bones when he'd taken the first sip of that poison created especially to test his limits, and he still remembered opening his eyes to his parent's passive faces when he'd woken up alive and (relatively) okay.

That was another thing. His parents would've never intentionally killed him back then, oh no, they were far too sadistic and had worked far too hard torturing and 'training' Kaminari in ways from combat to pain tolerance, and when they did stab him through the stomach and watched the life drain from his eyes, they'd shock him back to life, and that would be that.

These, though, these little experiments and tests with different substances and tools, were trial runs. If Kaminari died during those, that was considered a failure. He was considered a weakling who couldn't withstand something, a botched creation, garbage worth being tossed out if he was unable to endure it.

Kaminari had never failed during those times, if not for the fact that he was much too stubborn to let himself die at the hands of his fuck-ass parents, then for the fact that just once, once, he'd like to hear one of them utter that they were proud of him for making it through their trials and torture.

That day never came, the experiments never stopped, the abuse never ended, and the training only made him stronger.

The poison stopped having any effect after a month.

The substance that could kill twenty elephants with a single drop was something Kaminari could chug like it was no tomorrow and not even get a queasy stomach.

And now it was here in UA, potentially a few feet in front of him.

Well, fuck that shit. He may be desensitized to pretty much everything the world could throw at him, but he knew first hand how fucking agonizing the poison was, and he'd taken it after years of having to endure endless torture, stabbings, and cruel, unusual punishments to build up his pain tolerance. If it had hurt that bad back then, if the phantom pain of the liquid sliding down his throat still possessed Kaminari to this day whenever he had a violent cough, he couldn't even begin to imagine what it would feel like to his naive, innocent, and oh so untainted classmates.

"Uh." Kaminari raised his hand, interrupting whatever rant Aizawa had been going on for the past three or so minutes. Aizawa raised his eyebrow in an unimpressed manner but paused and gestured for the blond to speak. "Isn't having what's basically the deadliest poison in the world around a bunch of teenagers kind of unnecessarily dangerous...?" He trailed off a little, looking at his teacher expectantly.

"Since when do you care about danger?" Sero commented from behind him. He ruffled the back of his hair, mussing up the golden strands at the base of his neck. "You'd probably jump off a cliff for a Fanta."

"Well, excuse me for being worried about our safety." Kaminari quipped back, sparing a brief glare. "I'd rather not die, thank you very much."

"No one's dying." Aizawa cut in quickly, monotone voice quickly silencing whatever witty retort had been about to come out of Sero's mouth. "Obviously, because this is a high school and you're all self-sacrificial morons, we don't have the actual Immortal Lock on the campus, but since the hero commission was determined to make this simulation as real as possible and assumed that you wouldn't all try to kill yourselves, we have the watered-down version that you're supposed to distinguish."

Kaminari pursed his lips. That was a start, but it didn't quell his worries completely, especially with people like Midoriya in his class, who would probably sacrifice his life just to be able to pass this exercise. For all he knew, that idiot would rip his arm off and dip it in the poison to see if it would disintegrate or not, and Kaminari'd seen enough severed limbs in his life to know that it would be far from a pretty sight, especially for his virgin-eyed classmates.

"Anyway." Aizawa trekked on. "As I was saying, you must use any means possible to distinguish the non-harmful liquid from the poison, and when you submit your answer, you must have a reliable reason and source. You are not allowed to just guess or make assumptions. Assumptions can mean death out there in the professional world." He crossed his arms and scanned the group. "I'd hope this goes without saying, but do not ingest it. Although this is watered down a good amount, the poison will send you into a coma for an indefinite amount of time and may even kill you if your immune system isn't strong enough. The rest of the tactics you use to figure out which substance is the poison is up to you, and I can offer no help."

The group was silent for a moment as everyone digested the words.

"Now." Aizawa clapped his hands together, the curve of a smile gracing his lips. Kaminari honestly doubted anyone but himself caught it. "Pick your teams and get into position."

xxx

This was so dumb.

Kaminari stood on his side of the rubble, accompanied by Bakugou, Kirishima, and Sero, two on his left side and one on his right. As usual, everyone had split into teams according to their own little groups, along with a few stragglers here and there picking up the slack and mixing together. He was sure he'd caught Aizawa's disproving scowl when everyone had immediately opted to team up together with their best friends and whatnot, but as long as they all worked well together, then no harm, no foul, right?

To be completely honest, the only reason Sero was on their team was because Mina had wanted to be with her girl friends instead of them. Sero was one of their best friends, obviously, and he was great and all, but in addition to being one of their best friends, Mina could literally destroy Sero any day of the week, so there was definitely a power advantage there.

Bakugou had made it very clear that Sero was the second choice while walking to their starting point. Sero had just flipped him the bird and resumed chatting Kirishima's ear off.

Kaminari quietly observed the people around him. Bakugou was zeroed in on the wall of rubble in front of them that they would ultimately have to traverse to enter the maze of building debris and destruction, arms and legs in runner's stance as if ready to bolt at any moment. Kirishima was more or less the same, eyes squinted and bouncing on the ball of his feet in anticipation. On his other side, Sero was a little bit less serious, but there was still that definite competitive glint and spark of uncertainty in his eyes that Kaminari didn't find the slightest bit comforting.

These idiots didn't even know what they were getting into.

Who was the genius in the hero commission that decided that making twenty highschoolers distinguish the difference between a harmless substance and the most dangerous poison in the world, no matter how watered down it was, was a good idea?

How fucking naive.

It sounded like some sick, twisted training exercise his parents would dream up to quell their own sadistic tendencies.

The parallels between the black market and the hero commission really were uncanny. Hawks had drilled that into his head since day one.

"Dunce Face." Bakugou snapped his fingers in Kaminari's face. Kaminari just blinked, far too well trained to show any signs of outward startle. "Focus, stupid. We could start at any second, and I wanna win this thing."

"There's no prize or anything if we complete it first," Kaminari replied after a moment, offering Bakugou a small smile and crinkle of his eyes. "We'll probably all end up working together anyway if no one figures out how to distinguish the two before everyone finds the bottles."

"I'm gonna win," Bakugou replied stubbornly, snapping his head to face forward again. "Deku's gonna have to pry this victory out of my cold, dead hands."

Sero scratched his cheek lazily. Kaminari took note of his twitching fingers, nerves clearly strung high and itching in anticipation. That wasn't good. They needed to be calm, cool, and collected to be able to get through this unharmed. The less clearheaded his moronic friends were, the higher the risk of one of them doing something stupid to figure out the poison and killing themselves.

"Dude, why're you so obsessed with Midoriya all the time? Just admit everyone likes him better than you and move on."

"EVERYONE DOES NOT LIKE HIM BETTER THAN ME AND I'M NOT FUCKING OBSESSED WITH HIM YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE I BARELY EVER THINK ABOUT HIM-"

"You could literally cut the sexual tension between you two with a butter knife."

"I'M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU. THAT'S NOT EVEN A FUNNY JOKE, THAT'S SO FUCKIGN DISGUSTING-"

The tell-tale sound of alarm bells rang throughout the grounds only moments before Bakugou had the opportunity to lunge at Sero, and suddenly, instincts all of 1-A (except for Denki, this kind of self-control and awareness they'd supposedly been 'taught' throughout the year was child's play) had developed after months of training exercises kicked into place.

Sero's teasing smile slipped off his face as quickly as it had appeared. Kirishima visibly straightened, back muscles immediately tightening in anticipation. Bakugou, though still clearly fuming at Sero's banter and probably planning his revenge for later, took a step back in a rare show of self-control and faced forward, expression pulled tight.

Kaminari pursed his lips and got into running stance himself, purposely making his form look as sloppy as possible if only for the fact that he knew Aizawa was somehow watching.

Then, after five seconds of waiting, the starting horn blared throughout the course, audible to all teams scattered around the massive maze of building debris and destroyed rubble.

The exercise was officially ago.

To no surprise, Bakugou immediately lunged for the massive piece of cracked rubble blocking their entrance to the actual maze bit they had to traverse through. He cleared it in a single blast, blowing the thing to smithereens without so much as a warning to his teammates about what his course of action was.

Kaminari's face was passive as he sidestepped a large chunk of stone coming straight for his head, leaving the scolding to his two other teammates, both of whom had nearly gotten taken out in the blast as well, which was precisely the problem. This was the kind of impulsiveness that worried Kaminari, the type of 'not looking before you leap' mentality that Bakugou (and, admittedly, half of their class) had.

This was something that could get them killed. Kaminari had had enough of his own experiences with mysterious liquids and possibilities of death to know that reckless behavior like what his classmates displayed daily was what could go so terribly wrong with a training exercise like this one. They were all so competitive, so desperate to win and prove themselves that they wouldn't even consider how horribly dangerous the poison was, the actual gravity of their situation.

Kaminari had had that senseless beaten out of him long ago.

"Bakugou!" Kirishima barked, hardening just in time for a stray rock to smash into his abdomen. "What the hell's wrong with you, man! You nearly killed us, and we haven't even made it into the maze yet!"

"Tough shit!" Bakugou yelled back. He was a good thirty meters ahead of them already, not even sparing them a glance as he presumably got his bearings. "You fuckers are just too slow! I wanna win this thing!"

"Too slow?" Kaminari replied, jogging up beside Bakugou and punching his shoulder. He didn't even blink when Bakugou, predictably, whirled on him, fist instinctively raised in retaliation. Kaminari just stared back, mouth set in a straight line and eyes hard. This was totally 'out of character' for him, he knew, totally different than the usual dumb, carefree persona he put on for the sake of his classmates, but this was a dangerous fucking exercise, and Bakugou needed to calm the fuck down. "Chill the hell out, man. No one gets a prize, and no one's gonna fucking care if we find wherever the liquids are first if we have holes in our stomachs from you being a moron. Just relax."

"Seriously, dude." Sero chimed in. That was good, at least. If Kaminari had to play the sensible one for once, then at least Sero could take on the role of defuser. "Let's take this slow, 'kay? Kami-bro's right. We're gonna want to be level-headed whenever we find the poison and whatever other substance there is so we don't screw up and end up either failing to identify them or killing ourselves. Just chill."

"I am chill," Bakugou grumbled. He slowly lowered his arm back down to his side, fingers still clenched together. "You're all just a bunch of pussies."

"And you're a fucking idiot." Kirishima came from behind and smacked Bakugou across the head, expertly ducking away before his fist could make contact with his face. "Calm down. I doubt anyone will finish distinguishing the two before everyone else finds the middle, so just relax. We'll all probably be held up at the same spot anyway."

There was a moment of silence.

"Fine." Bakugou shoved his hands in his pockets, and Kaminari swore he felt a physical weight being lifted off his chest. Finally, some common fucking sense. "We'll go at your own shitty pace, but if we get there and someone else's team has already figured it out, I'm blasting you three to hell."

"Fair," Kaminari replied, smoothly slinking away as Bakugou turned to glare at him. His signature dopey grin slid onto his face easily, all previous hardness melting away in an instant as his persona plastered itself expertly into place. "So, what super-duper safe plan do ya propose we do, boss man?"

"Boss man..." Bakugou mumbled under his breath, but the visible release of tension in his shoulders wasn't fooling anyone, least of all Kaminari. That was good. He'd become an expert at defusing situations over the years, perfecting the art of saying exactly what the other person wanted to hear in order to spare himself a knife to the arm or extra torture session.

He blinked and shook his head. It was an unnecessarily morbid way to describe it, but he supposed it was accurate at the end of the day, even though he could count just on one hand the number of whippings he'd been spared from by using that tactic.

Kaminari snorted to himself, which luckily went unnoticed by everyone else since they were all focused on Bakugou. All the memories were just coming back today, weren't they.

"So." Bakugou clapped his hands together loudly, making the three of them jump. "Here's what we're gonna do. Sero, you'll use your tape arms to hop up on the tallest piece of rubble or whatever shit this is to see if you can find where the liquid is. Then we'll clear a safe-" He glared at Kirishima. Kirishima stuck out his tongue. "-path to there and figure out the difference between the two liquids. Got it?"

"Sounds cool." Kaminari saluted without much enthusiasm, which just earned an eye-roll and half-hearted pat on the back from Bakugou (not a slap, never a slap, never too hard since he'd found out about his scars). "Let's get this show on the road, bitches!"

"Don't fuck this up, Sparky," Bakugou grumbled, but nonetheless followed as Kaminari picked a direction and started walking. "I want to win."

"What even is winning," Sero mumbled from behind.

"Shut the fuck up, or I'll blast your face in."

xxx

Kaminari was losing it.

He'd been trained in countless forms of martial arts. He could withstand the harshest physical and psychological tortures known to man without batting an eyelash. He could take down his entire class and probably half of his teachers blindfolded with one hand tied behind his back, and this was still one of the most painful things he thought he'd ever endured in all his years trapped in the underground surrounded by murderers and psychopaths.

He didn't know whether it was due to some manipulation quirk or just UA's sheer amount of wealth, but this rubble-filled plain was massive. Sero had swung them up to the highest point they could find in hopes of catching a glimpse of where they'd needed to go, and all they'd been met with was debris and stone as far as the eye could see.

Bakugou had nearly blown them all up right then and there.

But that wasn't even the worst of it. Sure, the maze was much, much bigger than expected, but if his teammates were to just use a little, a smidge, of common sense and logical thinking, they would've found the center with almost no problem in a fraction of the pace they were currently going in.

But not, of course not, because his best friends had decided to be absolute meatheads, and they weren't getting any smarter after aimlessly wandering around for three and a half hours.

Sure, Kaminari could help them, but every time he tried pointing them in the right direction without actually revealing how he knew it was the right direction (sending pulses of electricity through the ground to a concentrated source, which, as far as his classmates knew, he technically he was not strong enough to do yet), Bakugou or Kirishima would just write him off and start walking in the opposite direction or smashing through fallen buildings and some shit.

Frustrating. It was frustrating, infuriating, and for all of Kaminari's remarkable self-control, if Sero made one more shitty Maze Runner joke, he was gonna lose it.

"I'm telling you." Kaminari pointed to the left, noticeably away from where his teammates were headed. "We're close; I can feel it. It's over this way."

"Can it, Dunce Face." Bakugou scoffed. He didn't even spare a glance over his shoulder. "My instincts tell me it's just around this corner, and I'm never wrong."

Sero pursed his lips and shared a look with Kaminari. His annoyance had been steadily increasing over the passing hours as well, making Kaminari seem a bit less insane and a little more justified in his anger. Thank god for good ol' Hanta.

"Bakugou, just listen to Kami for once. He's been pointing us in the other direction and whole time, and we've gotten nowhere."

"Yeah, 'cause I'm going off facts." Bakugou crossed his arms and turned to stare the two down. Neither flinched. "What's Sparky going off of? Exactly, nothing."

"You said you were going off instinct." Kaminari countered, voice steady but fingers twitching. "And, as you've demonstrated these past few hours, your instincts are shit. Just let me lead the way."

"No."

"C'mon, bro." Kirishima slung his arm around Bakugou's shoulder. Bakugou shrugged it off. "Let Denks have his chance. You've been kind of a control freak this entire time anyway."

"You've been just as bad." Sero retorted, leaning up against a fallen piece of concrete.

"Anyway." Kirishima waved him off with narrowed eyes and a toothy grin.' "What's the worst that could happen? We've already been wandering around his place for what seems like forever. Why not give Kami a shot?"

"Fine," Bakugou mumbled after a moment. He eyed Kaminari up and down, impossibly judgemental. "I'll follow him. But if we end up at another wall of concrete and rubble, I'm blasting this place to pieces."

"Sounds good to me." In his annoyance, Kaminari didn't even both trying to hide the sarcasm lacing his voice. He simply waved the others in the right direction and set off, not particularly caring at this point whether they followed or not. He'd been up until four in the morning the night before training, and he did not have the patience to deal with this shit training exercise after getting approximately no sleep for five days, not having any proper meals for three, and running until his legs gave out for two. "C'mon. It's this way, and then we take two rights. I can hear everyone else."

"You can hear everyone else?" Sero replied, taking two giant steps forward so they could walk side by side. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah," Kaminari answered, barely sparing Sero a glance. He just wanted to get this over with. If it had invoked any form of adrenaline or challenge into his veins, then maybe he would've enjoyed this training exercise despite the concerning connections to his past and complete lack of self-care he'd been demonstrating, but it didn't. He was far too advanced. He probably could've made it to the center in five minutes if there'd been no one else around so he could actually try. "I hear Midoriya's green sparkly electric things. My ears pick up electric currents really easily."

"Oh, word?" Sero jerked his head a little bit. "That's actually kinda dope. So Mido's quirk is actually electricity-based?"

"No, I think it just takes a lot of energy from his core, which is why he gets those shiny green vein-like lines all over his body whenever he uses it." He actually had no way of knowing if that was true or not. He knew One for All like the back of his hand, had to since its properties had been drilled into his head a thousand times over accompanied by the slices and dices of knives, but whether it actually used electricity was unknown to him. He doubted Midoriya even knew. "I thought I was hearing something back a few hours, but I wasn't sure it was actually him until now. If he's not already at the liquids, at least we will have found another group to work with."

It was a gamble, honestly, because if Kaminari arrived at the middle and Midoriya's team was still far away, he'd have a lot of explaining to do, but he wasn't particularly anxious. The other teams had common sense. They probably would've made it ages ago.

"Sweet." Kirishima chimed in from behind. "Good job, Kaminari."

"Thanks." Kaminari's face split into an involuntary smile. Praise, as frequent as it was with his friends, still made his chest erupt in butterflies.

Oh, how he wished he could bask in it forever, but he already knew no matter what happened, the only end he could possibly have was a gruesome one.

Morbid. It was morbid, but Kaminari had a job to do and friends he loved and was desensitized to the point where it didn't really bother him anymore, so he simply turned to Sero, smiled a genuine, giddy smile, and launched into domestic conversation.

It was whatever. He could speak about it later. For now, he just had to focus on getting his moronic friends to pass this exercise.

Sure enough, ten minutes of chatting and banter later, the four students could hear the distinct sounds of frustration up ahead with only the passion Class 1-A possessed.

"Finally." Bakugou groaned, picking up his face a little as he jogged towards the noise. "Good fuckin' job, Kaminari. Looks like you're not useless after all."

"You're a dick," Kaminari responded automatically, but he ducked under a small gap between a fallen pillar and a pile of rubble anyway to reveal an open space filled with sixteen students, two identical bottles of liquid, and a whole bunch of curse words. "Guess we're the last ones."

"You know what? I don't even care." Bakugou stood back to observe the chaos. "Deku hasn't finished yet, so I can still win this shitty-ass training exercise and rub it in his face."

"You are so obsessed."

"I AM NOT OBSESSED."

Sero squealed as Bakugou leaped at him, missing tremendously as the former connected a piece of tape to the opposite wall and swung over his head, dropping smack in the middle of the crowd of their classmates huddled around the bottle. Kaminari followed with the other two team members hot on his heels, peeking over the fray of people puzzling over the two liquids.

"Hey, guys." Iida waved distractedly. "Good to finally see you."

"Shut the fuck up," Bakugou grumbled, but he peered over the younger's shoulder nonetheless. "Whaddaya fuckers got so far."

"Nothing," Uraraka responded sullenly, tapping the glass containing one of the liquids with her fingernail. "They have the same smell, same color, same appearance, same reactivity with dirt, same reactivity with stone, same reactivity with fire, same boiling point, and from what we can gather, the same density." He held her head in her hands. "It's hopeless. We're all gonna fail."

"What about reactivity with human flesh?" Kirishima inquired after a moment of silence. "I can harden one of my fingers and stick them in each vial. Worst case scenario, I have to go to recovery girl to grow a new fingertip."

"I guess." Yaoyorozu rubbed her temples and gestured hopelessly. "Go for it."

Kirishima nodded and tenses up his right pinky finger. Almost immediately, the appendage turned rock-solid, which did little for most people's comfort. They all watched apprehensively as the redhead dipped the tip of his finger into the first substance. He swirled it around a bit, and everyone let out a collective sigh of relief when he shook his head and removed his finger.

Kaminari just drummed his fingers on the table once, twice, before putting them back down to his sides, lips pursed. He hadn't been worried. Even if that had been the harmless liquid, he knew the poison didn't react to human flesh, skin, DNA, or any kind of physical feature. It wasn't known as the world's deadliest poison for nothing, one of those reasons being because it was so undetectable and hard to trace.

Though, that was another thing. Even with his heightened senses, he genuinely couldn't tell which poison was which by simply standing next to it. The Hero Commission had clearly spared no expense when funding this exercise, which was simultaneously impressive and pissed Kaminari off even more than he already was. If he, the most remarkable assassin the world had ever seen, couldn't tell the difference between the two substances at first glance, then that made the exercise all the more dangerous for ordinary people, ordinary just like his classmates.

Kaminari didn't like that. He didn't like that one bit.

"Whelp." Kirishima pulled his finger back from the second liquid, lips curved downward in disappointment. "No reaction to human flesh with either."

"This is so dumb." Mina groaned. She ran her hand down his face exasperatedly. "We've tried literally everything." Her eyes darted left at a quiet snicker. "What the hell you smirkin' for, Katsuki?"

"Nothing," Bakugou responded with a snort. "I just would've thought the proclaimed 'Class 1-A' would've figured this out already, or at least been a bit smarter about it."

"Oh, what, and you've got this perfect solution all worked out in your head?" Mina wrinkled her nose in disgust. "We're working together, Bakugou. Don't try and start stuff."

"I'm not trying to start stuff. I'm just saying you're all fucking incompetent."

"The hell's with you!" Jirou chimed in. "You're in the same boat as the rest of us here now, bro! We're a team from this point on, in case you haven't noticed."

"I don't want to be on a team with any of you extras!"

"Extras?!" Mina sprung up from where she'd been crouching on the ground. "Are you fucking kidding me?! I thought we were over this little superiority complex of yours, but I guess we were wrong."

"It's not a superiority complex if I am superior to all of you."

Tensions were rising now, more and more voices joining the shouting match as Bakugou egged them on by simply being an arrogant bastard and cocky in a way he hadn't been for months now.

Kaminari just watched as Bakugou, who was most likely frustrated with himself for doing the worst out of all them and as a defense mechanism deciding to take that anger at himself out on other people, and the rest of his classmates, the unfortunate victims of Bakugou's unfairly directed hatred, crumbled into angry, petulant messes, pointing fingers and spewing utter shit that they'd all clearly had to sit down and resolve once they cooled down and made it back to the dorm.

They were like a family, and as family sometimes did, especially since they were around each other all day every day, they fought occasionally, but it hadn't been this intense or out of the blue in a long time.

Kaminari's eye twitched.

Annoyance was bubbling just under his skin, threatening to burst at any moment.

Mina jammed a finger in Bakugou's chest. Bakugou's hands sparked.

Okay. That was the last straw.

Kaminari's hand darted out to grab a bottle, not particularly caring which one it was, and before anyone could tear their eyes away from the shouting match to see what he was doing, downed the entire contents.

The flashbacks hit him like a bullet train.

All at once, almost like clicking through a slideshow, memory after memory of choking on this stuff, gagging on it, throwing up after drinking it, waking up barely alive after consumption, flickered through his mind.

Although watered down, although he could withstand it like it was nothing, the poison still burned as it slid down his throat.

Then, all at once, as if the world had suddenly sped up, he was surrounded.

"Kaminari!" Todoroki's shrill, panicked voice drew him out of his inner monologue. He turned towards him, grimacing when he was met with teary eyes. "Ohmygod, Kaminari, that was so stupid of you, holy shit." His hands cupped his face with gentleness Kaminari had never received nor known Todoroki possessed before. "You scared us, you asshole. What if that had been the poison?!"

Oh yeah. He didn't die or pass out or anything, so his classmates obviously had automatically assumed he'd drank the harmless substance instead.

Well. Time to do what he did best. Emotional improv.

"Well, it wasn't, right?" Kaminari flashed a smile, all blinding and brilliant and joyful, and took a sweeping bow. "Ladies and gentlemen, you're welcome."

Kirishima took advantage of Kaminari's outstretched arms to grab onto them and yank him into his chest, sitting back on his haunches and wrapping him in his embrace with a shaky sigh. Kaminari let him, all too willing to let his friend do what he pleased lest he wanted to be scolded and yelled at instead.

"You suck so much, dude," Kirishima mumbled after a moment. There were murmurs of agreement. "I looked back, and I saw you chugging it, and then your eyes glazed over and...I don't know. I just fuckin'..." His shoulders deflated as he hung his head. "Don't ever do that again, man. That was way too risky."

"It was a fifty-fifty chance," Kaminari replied dumbly. He smiled weakly up at his classmates.

"Exactly." Mina's hand was over her heart, breathing erratically and eyes laced with easily distinguishable panic. "Way too risky. Why the hell'd you even do that, man? You don't...it's like you're more suicidal than Midoriya or something, and I really don't like it-" Her voice broke violently, and it took all Kaminari had not to wrench himself out of Kirishima's chest and throw his arms around her shoulders. "You just...you really seem to gamble with your life too easily, and I really don't think you know how much we care about you, Kami."

"Are you suicidal?" Bakugou asked quietly, but it was enough for Kaminari to twist in Kirishima's grasp with wide eyes. "Are you...are you sure-" He sounded unsure, more unsure and vulnerable than he'd ever sounded in his life.

"NO!" Kaminari shook his head forcefully. The last thing he needed was another repeat of the incident where they caught him during pain tolerance training and interpreting it as something it wasn't. "I swear to god I'm not, no, I would never. I've just been really fed up with this entire exercise and just wanted to get it over with, and then you all started fighting, and I just decided to fuck it and make an educated guess-"

"Educated guess?" Iida interrupted. His voice, once again, was quiet but hopeful. His classmates were looking for some reassurance, looking for some explanation as to why he could've thrown his life away (not that he would've actually died, obviously, since he was alive and well right now), based on only a wrong assumption. "What do you mean?"

"Electrons," Kaminari answered, brain whirring through a thousand possibilities and landing on one. "I have an electricity quirk, obviously, so I'm really sensitive to those things if I concentrate hard enough. The harmless substance I drank had fewer electrons in it overall than the poison over there, so I figured it must be made up of fewer components and therefore less deadly."

He paused, waiting for a reaction. Did that sound plausible? He had no idea; he sucked ass at chemistry.

Luckily, either because his explanation had somehow made perfect sense or everyone's senses were too clogged with relief to think straight, Yaoyorozu, the only one who could possibly call him out on his bullshit, just nodded along with his answer.

And good thing, too. Kaminari could practically see everyone's shoulders sag with relief.

"Ohmygod." Jirou's voice was thick with emotion. "I thought you'd just decided to yolo it and take the fifty-fifty chance."

"Of course not," Kaminari responded automatically, choosing to ignore the fact that he was blatantly lying to his friends. He hated that. There was nothing he despised more than straight-up fabricating a story with no elements of truth to it to the people he loved so much. "I would never. I probably startled you guys, didn't I."

"You have no idea." Midoriya breathed, extending an arm to help Kaminari up from Kirishima's lap. Kaminari accepted gratefully, quietly taking notice of how Midoriya gripped on a bit longer than necessary. "That was terrifying."

Everyone muttered in agreement, while in turn, Bakugou just trudged over and knocked their soldiers together, facing directly forward and refusing to make eye contact.

"Do that again, and I'll blast your legs off."

"Noted," Kaminari whispered back. He opened his mouth to say something else when-

"Kaminari!" Aizawa's scarf wrapped around one of his arms, pulling him straight to the teacher as he came sprinting towards them. "Are you an idiot?"

"Apparently." Kaminari chuckled weakly, smiling tightly under Aizawa's scrutinizing gaze. "I know it was reckless, but I had a reason, I swear!"

"I know." Aizawa hissed through gritted teeth, slowly releasing his scarf's hold on the blond's arm. "I heard."

"Uh, yeah." Kaminari smiled and shuffled back awkwardly, making sure to convey uncomfortableness as much as possible. The last thing he needed was his teacher interrogating him or looking a little too closely and finding out that he had, in fact, drank the Immortal Lock. "Sorry to give you a scare."

"Oh, you scared me, alright." Aizawa pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering unintelligible things to himself before making eye contact once more. "I could've sworn the bottles were switched, and the one you had was the poison. I thought I was about to have a kid in a coma on my hands."

"Sorry," Kaminari replied because, really, that was all he could do. Surrounded by panicked classmates and frightened teachers, apologies were the only thing that he could spit out without opening up a whole other box of lies. "I didn't mean to freak any of you out."

"It's fine." A new voice appeared behind Aizawa this time, two white, furry paws coming to stand beside the former. Nezu's eyes bore into Kaminari, challenge evident on his face. "I was watching everything by the monitors, and despite the fear this little incident has caused, your class has passed. I just ask that you don't pull anything like this again, Kaminari."

Kaminari's posture straightened almost reflexively, eyes narrowing the tiniest bit in a way he doubted anyone but Nezu could detect. "Don't worry, I won't."

"Mmhm." Nezu offered a crooked smile. "I'm counting on it."

There was an awkward pause.

"Anyway." Nezu's eyes roamed over the huddle of students, almost all of which were subtly trying to touch the electricity user in some shape or form. "I'm going to give you this news now since I assume this little fiasco shook all of you up a bit, and having something to look forward to and focus on sometimes helps quell those feelings quite a bit, but it's not out to the public nor the other classes yet, so I advise you to keep this under wraps."

He scanned the people around him, eyes landing on Kaminari and staying there for the briefest of seconds longer.

"We are getting a visit from some of the top heroes of Japan in the next two weeks, where you will be able to chat with them and ask questions as much as you like." Nezu's whiskers twitched. His eyes were trailing over everyone, but his body was positioned straight towards Kaminari. "They'll be interacting amongst you and staying at UA for three whole days, almost like a vacation and a field trip all rolled into one."

Oh.

Kaminari blinked in surprise as his classmates began cheering around him at the sudden bombshell, momentarily distracted from their panic from earlier.

He knew was Nezu was insinuating. It was pretty hard not to, given everything he'd told the principal about his life in the black market and everyone who'd helped him get through it.

Keigo Tamaki.

Hawks.

The fourth member to his, Touya's, and Himiko's trio.

After all these years, the gang would finally be back together.

All of the reasons he'd held on long enough to escape his parents, all the people who'd helped him get through years of torture and training, all in one place.

In a way, Kaminari was glad Nezu had let him know beforehand despite the undoubted chaos that would plague the dorm for the next few days.

Now, he had time to text Dabi and Toga about it, and possibly arrange something in advance. They really did have a lot to discuss, to be completely honest. After all, what would the hero commission think if they knew the number two hero was in cahoots with three of the most dangerous people in Japan?

Of course, that was all nonsense. They'd all been best friends long, long before they'd gotten those titles.