As May drew to a close and June announced itself early with unreasonably hot afternoons and bitterly cold mornings, the students of Class 1-A returned to their normal lives.
A week of work-studies had come and gone, leaving those who'd participated more experienced, knowledgeable and possessing just a tad of humility on what it means to be a hero.
Some were hardly changed while others found their horizons forever expanded.
And yet others still…
WHAM!
WHAM!
"Glad you guys made it back alive," Eijiro Kirishima barely felt the impact. Oh, he felt it. But thanks to his Quirk, he felt Bakugo dropping him to the ground and grabbing his throbbing and bruised hand far more than the guy's punch, "Seriously. I heard the hero killer was a real piece of work."
"Yeah, you guys were lucky Endeavor showed up and beat the snot out of him," half-paying attention to the volcano on the verge of erupting, Sato Rikido nodded.
"That's so cool!" a mixture of Japanese and English profanity filled the classroom as Toru wiggled her hips and cheered, "Just what I'd expect from the number two hero!"
Todoroki stared at the faint scratch marks on his desk.
There was so much wrong with Hagakure's praise that he honestly didn't know where to begin.
"Yeah," but with somber acceptance of the situation, he allowed the falsehood to further propagate, "He saved us."
"Hosu sounded pretty rough, but at least the hero killer wasn't anything like that blonde psycho working for the League of Villains," having escaped Bakugo for the moment, Kirishima clenched his hands and grimaced. He'd only caught a glimpse of Couturier after Ryuko punched her across the USJ. That had been bad enough. But watching the villain pull her head out of the ground and smile was unnerving, especially since he couldn't remember her smile, "To take out five pros without touching them. Glad I didn't have to fight her."
"It's difficult to imagine how Ryuko survived against such a villain not once, but twice," in contrast to his friends, Tokoyami couldn't recall learning anything of actual importance from his work-study. Hawks had done everything on his own, leaving him to clean up the hero's messes. And what little time he had with the hero revolved around answering any questions about the League of Villains.
"Sure, that psycho's crazy, don't get me wrong," Kaminari didn't want to think about Couturier any more than necessary, "But Stain's pretty evil. And super tenacious. I mean, you all saw Edgeshot's interview last night, right? It turns out Endeavor never would have caught the hero killer if Ryuko's old man hadn't figured out the guy's Quirk. That sort of makes him cool, don't you think?"
"Kaminari!"
It didn't take Izuku shouting for Kaminari to realize what he'd said, "Oh, sorry!"
"No, it's okay," Ida stared at the bandages underneath his sleeve, remnants of his mistakes, "You're fine. It's true he is quite a tenacious villain. I understand why people might think he is cool. But instead of helping the world, his beliefs led him to cold-blooded murder. No matter his motives, killing cannot be condoned," there was nobody he could blame besides himself for his injuries. Matoi had attempted to warn him about vengeance leaving one's heart empty and abandoned. And Manual deduced his intentions. Yet he'd pressed forward under the naïve assumption knowing Stain's Quirk while concealing his own would provide an insurmountable advantage. A mindset that almost got him killed, "Which is why to keep anyone from suffering a similar fate, I promise I will strive to be the perfect hero!"
"Let's do it!"
"IT'S TIME FOR CLASS TO BEGIN!" faster than his epiphany could settle, Ida shifted into third gear, "EVERYONE PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS!"
"He's back."
"This is your fault for talking about weird stuff."
"I'm sorry. I'm going to keep my mouth shut."
"Hey, that reminds me," having successfully brought Kaminari back to earth, Jiro addressed the elephant in the room, "Tsu, you know when Ryuko's coming back?"
"I think she said she was being released from the hospital tomorrow," Tsuyu turned a page in her book on amphibious and aquatic heroes, "Or today. It depends on what the hospital says. She was pretty beat up. Anyway, when we talked last night, Ryuko complained about the meat at the hospital being awful. Or maybe it was the hospital refusing to put any meat in her meals," she tipped a finger against her chin as Jiro and Mina leaned closer, "It was hard to tell. She was basically bored, which usually means she's fine."
"Well, I think we should head on over to her apartment and cheer her up!" an empty sleeve pumped the air as Toru spun around, "Hey, Mina, you have her address, right?"
"Sure do!"
The acidic hero-in-training pulled out a pink phone, "And I wrote down directions so we don't get lost like last time!"
"How did you get lost?" Kirishima scratched his head, "Doesn't she live, like, ten minutes from school or something?"
"It's not my fault!" a pinkish blush spread across Mina's face, "Someone put the wrong address into my phone!"
"You mean you put in the wrong address," perched on the edge of his desk, Tokoyami's hawk-like eyes snapped onto Mina.
"S-Shut up!"
"ENOUGH ALREADY!"
His patience with everyone, everyone and reality itself had reached its breaking point. It was bad enough he spent the last week getting groomed at that useless internship, but Matoi fighting Couturier was the final straw. And his parents asking if they were friends only boiled everything over into a frothing rage of annoyance and frustration, "Matoi's fine! So quit talking like she's dead!"
"Kacchan…"
"WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SAY, DEKU!?"
Just before Bakugo's frustration reached critical mass and went nuclear, the door at the front of the classroom slid open.
Only it wasn't their teacher.
"R-Ryuko!?" Izuku was the first, but not the only, person to blurt out her name.
To say that Ryuko Matoi had seen better days would be an understatement comparable to claiming All Might was the strongest hero in the country. Her uniform was pressed without so much as a single wrinkle. Yet her navy-blue hair was disheveled far more than unusual. Almost as if she'd rolled out of bed and immediately stumbled to school. Layers upon layers of bandages covered her forehead. More could be seen poking through her collar. But it was her right arm which drew the most attention. Several clean and goddamn painful breaks had left her arm stuck in an cast and held against her stomach by a sling she couldn't remove without re-experiencing that psycho villain kicking her over and over again.
"Yup, that's me."
Without another word, Ryuko slid the door shut, shuffled towards her desk and parked her ass down.
She wanted to be left alone.
But the awkward silence made that impossible.
"What?" everybody was staring at her, "Someone die?"
"We thought you were still in the hospital after fighting that crazy villain," Rikido blurted.
"I was," Ryuko clicked her tongue while sounding bored and irritated, "Got released last night. The docs said there was nothing else they could do. Ordered me to take it easy for the rest of the week, when this thing – " she motioned towards the cast covering most of her arm with her eyes, " – comes off."
Four days.
Four days of laying in the hospital bored out of her freaking mind.
Half a week of nothing but daytime dramas, soap operas and the news.
Rumi sneaking her phone into the hospital so she could text Tsuyu and Habuko had been the only thing that kept her from snapping.
"You look like shit."
Less angry that normal, yet somehow phenomenally more frustrated than half the heroes and villains in Musutafu, Bakugo shoulder checked Kirishima while ignoring the background characters whose names he'd forgotten. Or didn't bother learning in the first place, "Guessing you had trouble kicking that blonde freak's ass, huh?"
"Now hold on just a minute!" Ida slid into the picture, arm swinging and mouth moving, "That's completely out of line!"
"Tch, that your way of saying you were worried?" ignoring their class rep's attempt at stopping the inevitable, Ryuko scoffed, "Didn't know you cared."
"I don't," something must have happened during his work-study, because instead of falling into an unyielding rage, Bakugo ignored her taunt, "Just want to know if you gave as good as you got."
There wasn't any reason to say anything.
It wouldn't make her feel better.
"You remember hitting her point-blank with an explosion?" and it wouldn't piss off Bakugo, which pretty much left no other reason that she simply wanted to. End of story, "Did the same thing with her head. Blew it and her freaking smile clean off her shoulders."
"YOU DID WHAT!?"
Kirishima was the first to recover, "Hang on – what!?"
Followed by Kaminari and Mineta, "That's super hardcore!"
It was enough of a shock that Uraraka was dragged out of her Zen-like trance, whereupon sounds tangentially related to words escaped her mouth, "GAFAFA!? HUH!?"
Sitting at the front of the classroom, smiling on the outside while internally sweating, Aoyama struggled to retain his fabulous composure, "Oh my…"
"Woah," Jiro whistled, "Talk about serious overkill."
"I'm certain she didn't have any other alternative against such a dangerous villain," Yaoyorozu cupped her chin while glancing towards the windows.
"Hmm, that sounds excessive," nonplussed about her confession of attempted murder, Tokoyami nodded, "Although if Couturier's regeneration is as powerful as she and Bakugo say it is, hitting her with anything less than lethal force would have been tantamount to suicide."
"Can't say I wouldn't have done the same thing in her shoes," Kirishima agreed with some measure of reluctance.
"Seriously, you guys?" holding onto an earlobe, Jiro stared at Tokoyami and Kirishima like they'd collectively grown three heads and were breathing fire and lightning.
"Wait just a darn minute!"
Mina wasn't so much surprised as enthusiastically curious. And she didn't hesitate to make that known by slamming her hands against Ryuko's desk, "How the heck did you do that?"
Ryuko felt an eyebrow twitch, "Does it matter?"
She should have known that was the completely wrong thing to tell Mina.
"What!?" a measure of desperation clung to the acidic girl's crackling voice, "Of course, it does!"
"No, it doesn't," annoyed by the invasion of her personal space, Ryuko attempted to ignore Mina, hoping she'd give up and eventually go away, "Now go away."
"I'm not leaving until you tell me how you did it!" which was even worse than giving Mina something for the gossip portion of her mind to latch onto, "Because I gotta know!"
"No."
"Yes!"
"No!"
"YES!"
"Alright, fine," Ryuko finally snapped, not only because Mina wouldn't take the hint, but because Toru was inching closer by the second, "You want to know what I did?" one day out of the hospital and things were already completely back to normal. Bakugo was a jackass, Izuku muttered under his breath and Mina was too curious for her own freaking good. God damn it, she should have just kept her mouth shut, "I shot her. With a bullet. From my own blood. That answer your question?"
"WHAT!?"
"Wha…wha…wha…WHAT!?"
That was Mina leaning close enough to see the pinkish veins in her black and yellow eyes, "Since when could you do that!?"
"It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise," and that was Ida – no wait, that was Izuku, standing next to Ida and muttering under his breath, "Ryuko's Quirk gives her complete and total control over her blood. She can manipulate its shape and density into whatever she imagines. I'd presumed her Quirk was limited to short-ranged weaponry. Anything she could hold in her hands. But there shouldn't be anything stopping her from telekinetically firing spheres of blood at a target, which raises the question of whether or not the blood used for such attacks can be recovered…"
"That's enough."
The door separating Class 1-A's nonsense from UA's general insanity slid open with noticeable laziness, "We have a long week ahead of us," holding his sleeping bag beneath one arm while scratching his temple with the other, Shota Aizawa yawned while crawling towards the lectern at the front of the room, "And I'd rather not waste too much time talking."
Someone coughed.
Aizawa ignored them.
"It appears some of you had quite the interesting work-studies," he didn't name names. That wasn't necessary, "Oh, and Matoi – " said girl didn't say anything. Not with words. She merely adjusted her cast, rolled her eyes, leaned onto her functional arm and awaited his inevitable dressing down. Which was both insulting and accurate. His original plan had been to call her out. But learning the truth had quickly put a damper on that plan. It was one thing to throw away everything in pursuit of vengeance. It was something else entirely for the villain who killed your father to hunt you down while you were eating with the country's number five hero.
He couldn't scold Matoi since she hadn't done anything wrong.
At the same time, he couldn't not scold her.
" – you look terrible," he probably could have phrased that better, but Matoi really did look terrible. Had she escaped the hospital? Anyone else and he wouldn't have given that even a fraction of his attention. But this was Matoi, which meant the chances she had walked out of the hospital before her wounds were properly treated were fifty-fifty. At best, "You're in no condition to participate in today's practical lessons. That doesn't mean you can relax. Even if you can't physically participate, I expect you to attend All Might's lesson and write a summary of what you learned. Got it?"
She nodded.
"Great," after nodding back, Aizawa swept his exhausted eyes across the room, "As for the rest of you, your essays on everything you have learned during your work-studies are due by the end of the week. Five hundred words. Minimum," the usual suspects immediately went white as he reminded them about the written portion of their internships, "This includes you, Matoi. Recovering in the hospital is no excuse for falling behind on your schoolwork."