Fortunately, Akira is easy to calm down. The wellspring of her tears stems less from hurt, more from surprise. It's not as if Nejire's words had particularly struck her, she simply does not appreciate being yelled at.
Rather unfortunately, Izumi thinks it would have been significantlyeasier to cheer her up than it is to calm her down.
"No, Akira," she tells her, as her eyes again flee to the forest, "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to help you punch her."
"Just one good jab, that's all I'm asking for here. It's not much!" The eagle gives a soundless squawk and stomps its foot. Akira waves her hand and nods her head with him. "See? He agrees."
"You're in complete control of what he does," Izumi deadpans. The paper golems are sentient, not sapient. That is an important distinction. And one not critically important at the moment, there is somewhere she needs to be. Izumi checks the time on her phone and works her jaw. "I'm going to go find her, if we're not back by the time class is set to end just let Aizawa know that we're … getting some extra practice in or something. We should be back before the break is over."
"And if you're not?"
Izumi shrugs inelegantly as she shimmies between two bushes. "Then we're not."
The forest is quieter than she expects. The birds no longer sing and the winds no longer whirl. That isn't meant to foreshadow or forewarn, it's simply an hour-till noon on a mild October day. Still, she finds it eerie. Off-putting. The only sounds which fill the gaps between the trees are the crinkling of leaves under heel and the distant chirring of cicadas. They did little to quell the beating of her heart, nor ease the discomfort in her belly.
Wildflowers, ferns, sedges, and hakone grasses grow sporadically in the pockets of sunlight that breach the canopy, but it's the mosses and the lichens which truly hold dominion over the land. They creep over boulders and choke out the roots that snake across the forest floor. It's a world of green, offset only by the arrival of autumn's typical colors.
It's been dry lately and the air is crisp. She hums and sniffs and looks around, as unsure as she is hopeful. There's no discernable path anywhere, no trails to lead her this way or that, no way of knowing which direction to head nor where to start. In terms of tracking skills, she's a novice. Her experience is limited to what she's learned from video games, but there aren't any footprints or broken twigs to be found, nor a waypoint upon a compass to follow. Nejire had flown away, so Izumi's meager knowledge is more moot than ever.
There's a series of stair-stepped boulders that she treks up. It brings her no higher than she can jump, but she still peers around as if standing atop a high vantage point. "Nejire," she calls through cupped hands, "Can you hear me?"
There's a cough from somewhere behind her, then a laugh. "Maybe try walking a little deeper?" Akira suggests lightly.
Izumi harrumphs but finds no fault in the logic. She walks deeper, then deeper, then deeper still, occasionally calling out Nejire's name or something to that effect. It's an endlessly beautiful day with impossibly little to appreciate. The bugs are manic and her skin is something akin to a desert oasis, they won't leave her alone. She tries—believe her, she tries—but no amount of swatting or fleeing or cursing makes them go away. In the end, she just resolves to ignore them, but that only lasts as long as they stay far from her ears.
She huffs as she rounds a bend. "Nejire," she calls to the trees, but their branches give no reply. Beneath a fallen log crawl half a hundred little bugs and they remind her of someone, so to them she asks, "Wife?" They smarm and scuttle, but not in any way that's familiar. So, she departs and looks elsewhere.
"Honey?" she says to the sky and "Darling?" to the stones, "Sugar?" to the leaves and "Beloved?" to the lichens. There's a gnarled hole in a tree and she nears it only as much as she dares. The hollow is dark. She peers into the void and it peers back at her—or perhaps it's little more than a nesting bird. It witnesses her grin and snicker as she wonders, "Hado? Are you in there?"
It becomes a bit of a game to her. She flies until she reaches a clearing. There's lots of sunlight and tall grasses abound. If she were not within a walled campus, she could almost imagine a sika deer or two grazing there. She brings a hand to her cheek and calls "Sweetie?" to the idea of them.
It's 'pookie' to the slimy tree frog and 'shnookums' to a laboring dung beetle, 'doll' to the yellow bird overhead and 'peanut' to a fairy ring. She searches over here then tries over there. Atop a tree, inside a bush, around a chuhai burial site; no stone is unturned. And no stone turns up any leads.
A stream cuts through a hill and she follows it back to a pond, but Nejire is nowhere to be seen among the marimo beneath its waters. 'Sunshine,' is the name she then chooses to call.
There's a brushstroke of wild lilies up ahead and she crouches down to ask each of them if they've seen the blue-eyed girl. When she's not given any particularly satisfactory answers, she plucks one that's pink and pretty and tucks it behind her ear in retribution. It's all she can do to steal her mind away from the aching of her wandering toes or the wondering of why she's even doing this.
Through the air she circles around a grove and grimaces when her ring finger twinges. The earth is soft where she sets down and she bounces from one foot to the other, clenching and unclenching her fists as she tries to work some blood back to their tips. She blows a raspberry and looks around, finding nothing of importance.
It frustrates her, her search has seen neither fruit nor purpose. But she takes that frustration and pushes it down, bottles it tight, tight, tight within her—tucks it away somewhere in her chest. It's deep, right beside the labored beating of her heart. She feels it when she takes a breath; and she uses it when she's yelling.
For the first time since her hunt began, there's more than silence. She bellows something out, and a voice echoes back. An impossibility with the mosses and the peats and the lichens and the what else have yous. The environment is too soft, too plush. It's its own little world, and it's a world of quiet. Tranquil and infuriating.
Izumi ignores the pinch of pain that expands in each of her fingers and once again floats up, straining her quirk just a little more as she flies in the direction of that echo.
"Oh, great," a voice grumbles through an eventual thicket, before she even has the chance to spot its source. "It's you."
As luck would have it, she knows said voice. "Lovely to see you too, princess." It takes her a moment to circle around and find a spot to land, but she relishes the chance once it comes. She ignores her wife for a spell and tries to rub her fingers together as subtly as she can. In her sneakers, her toes curl and bounce much the same, but nobody else would ever see it. "How have you been?"
Their eyes meet, yet not for long. She scans the other girl's body from top to bottom. There's a shallow-yet-wide scrape on one shoulder, but she seems otherwise fine. It's dirty and the hero in her urges her legs to clean it, but she can't bring herself to move closer. When Nejire keeps her silence, her attention drifts back up to the girl's face and she frowns. "Akira wanted to punch you."
"Wanted." Her wife hums from where she lounges against a plush stone. "So, I guess she doesn't want to anymore?"
She recalls with a grimace the shadow boxing Akari had been doing as she'd turned to leave. "I wouldn't."
Nejire raises her brow with the same audacity as one would roll their eyes. "Well, consider me warned. So, if that's all," she does a little shooing motion with her hands, "You're free to go. Your good deed of the day has been done. You can journal about it, or whatever."
Izumi doesn't leave—to the other girl's great dismay—never really planned to. Instead, she meanders over to the trunk of a cherry tree and leans against it. "Lovely weather," she drawls, peering up into the branches and leaves. "Perfect for a hike." If only she'd brought her fanny pack with her for some snacks; it's nearly time for lunch and she's starved.
Nejire again refuses to reply, as is her right, so Izumi joins her in silence. One minute passes, then two. Three then four, four then five. They wait without speaking, occasionally making awkward and prolonged eye contact, but neither moving, hardly even breathing.
Eventually, Izumi has enough and devises a plan. "That sweater you wore a few days ago," she mentions offhandedly before intentionally trailing off.
Nejire frowns and looks at her. Good, she has her attention. "What about it?"
"No, no. It's nothing. Forget I said anything."
"Uh? Screw that, tell me!"
She scratches behind her ear in embarrassment. Reservedly, she says, "Well, it was just … a bit tacky? I guess?"
"Tacky?" Fashion was a bit of a frequent point of contention between herself and Nejire. "Tacky? Your shirt says 'pants' on it!"
"Wow." She knows she started this, but still! She likes this shirt! "I was just trying to be helpful, why are you coming after my favorite shirt?"
"Focus on getting a fashion sense before you start judging somebody with one, then! Half your shirts are abominations. Borderline criminal."
"I wasn't even the one who said it! Screw me for trying to be helpful, I guess. Last time I try."
Nejire's pupils dilate, like a tiger with a watering mouth and an empty stomach. Izumi is the bunny rabbit on her metaphorical plate. "Who," she growls, "Who said my sweater was tacky?"
"I'm not sure I should say." Izumi plays demure, tucking a bang behind her ear as she looks away.
"Just tell me! I demand that you tell me this instant!"
Oh, she demands it. Demands it. Mentally, Izumi crows, thinking something along the lines of sure thing, Miss Hoity-Toity. She'll get right on that. Absolutely. "It just feels a little bit like I'd be betraying them, don't you think? I gave my word and everything."
She gasps. "You gave your word—?" Suddenly, and without warning, golden fractals shatter the ground around Nejire. The boulder she leans against splinters into a million pieces, almost melting in the way its shards cascade over the ground. The force sends her wife lurching into the air and only practice has her arranging her feet beneath her.
Her mouth opens, no doubt to say something rude, but her foot touches down before it can. It's bruised. Her ankle, that is, not her mouth. Although, that does still have a cut on it. No doubt it hurts, again, the ankle; Izumi can think of no other reason for why Nejire would risk being late to class. It hurts, it must. Enough for her to become a landlocked castaway. And yet, she lands upon it without thinking.
So, whatever she planned to say is lost in the yipe that leaves her lips as her knee buckles and her body goes with it. It might have been a nasty spill had Izumi not been there and expecting it.
"Baka," she names her now, even as she throws one of her wife's arms over her shoulders and uses her other arm to hook around her waist. "Did you forget you were hurt or what?"
Nejire lets herself be supported, hopping around on her uninjured ankle until she's more upright. "Shut up." She leads the other girl out from behind the thicket, actively mapping the flattest route through the forest before them. "I don't need your help."
Izumi lets out a harsh breath, blowing her bangs from the sweat on her forehead and eyeing Nejire in her periphery. "Say the word, I'll drop you right now." Unsurprisingly, she hears no more pleas for release. "You should have called me."
"And what?" Nejire scoffs. "You would have come running?"
"I'm here now, aren't I?"
Her wife has nothing to say to that. They fall to silence, as they often do, it's better than war. The terrain is treacherous, it'd be easier to fly but she cannot do so with the burden of another. She's already overworked her quirk as is.
There were more hills than she'd noticed when in the air, and she's forced to bear more and more of her wife's weight as her hopping tires her out. It becomes an awkward tug-o-war between supporting and carrying, and even she's not certain what will win out in the end. Nejire is tenacious, even more so in her presence, but everybody has a limit.
Izumi mumbles something cruel under her breath, completely accidentally, and prays she doesn't catch it. She's never been a particularly lucky person. Nejire turns lethargic eyes to her and blinks slowly at her cheek. "Sorry," she murmurs through a heavy breath; it dusts across the line of Izumi's jaw, and some of it dips lower, warming her neck. The flush of her face is from exertion, you have to trust her on that.
As they make their way toward the forest's edge, Izumi lifts her hand from Nejire's waist to her shoulder, being careful not to touch the scrape there. With a gentle beckoning of her fingers, she encourages any dirt or debris to lift from the wound, floating it up to her palm before dropping to the ground. Then, once that's done, she offers Nejire a choice. "Either climb on my back or I'm picking you up, we won't even make it back by sunset at this rate."
She scoffs. "Over my dead body will I let you carry me."
"Dude," Izumi groans, "I'm already carrying you."
"You're supporting me," Nejire clarifies, but it's hardly true. Over half her weight is being held up by Izumi, they both know it.
Izumi gives her ample time to consider, but her wife fails to reach a satisfying conclusion, so she takes matters into her own hands.
"I cannot believe you."
If only said wife would let her hear the end of it. If she had known dropping her would end like this, she might have given the consequences more consideration. "Yeah, well, believe it, sister."
"You dropped me."
"I know." She got it. They were both there, it didn't need to be explained.
Nejire disagreed. "Like on the ground, Midoriya! It really hurt!"
"Yeah, well, so does my head, so if you would please stop yelling in my ear that would be swell. Or next time I suppose I could throw you instead? My arms sure are feeling tired." She pretends to let her fingers slip, relishing the way her carry-on yelps and scrambles to shift her body weight forward.
"Okay, okay! Please don't do it." Nejire's arms wrap tightly around her neck, pressing more firmly and urgently into her sternum. Her murmured words ripple across Izumi's skin. "I'll shut up, I'll shut up."
There's no stopping the self-satisfied hum that escapes her throat, nor any hiding it. Nejire is so wrapped around her that the sound is practically hers; Izumi expects retaliation. A light slap or an offended gasp or something, yet nothing comes. The silence actually spans for such a long time that Izumi tilts and turns her head, eyeing the other girl through her lashes. "Unbelievable," she mutters to the chorus of quiet snores and then, with the softest of sighs, she carefully shifts her position to temporarily free one hand. With it, she plucks the flower from above her ear and threads it behind Nejire's.
The rest of the journey is slow, yet peaceful. She's huffing and puffing by the end of it, but the end does come. Eventually. And miraculously, she exits the forest exactly where she'd entered. It means there's an actual chance she can ferry them both back to class in time. And a chance is all she needs.
"Midoriya," a voice calls from the wayside, stealing away with her chance, her smile, and any hopes for future happiness.
Izumi freezes midstep, eyes flickering to her left to where her professor stood with arms crossed. "Mister Aizawa," she half greets, half chuckles, half sobs. How she manages is anybody else's guess, she had bigger problems at present. "We were just getting some extra training in."
His eyes slide from one face to the next. "Right," he drawls. Yeah. Yeah, there's not a single chance he believes her. Eventually, he sighs and jerks his head back toward the main hub of campus."Get yourselves to the nurse."
"Sir?"
"I will not lecture you on safety and timeliness while you're injured. That's illogical. Just hurry to the nurse, if she discharges you then return promptly to the Gym Gamma. There are still things I wish to speak with you of."
"Ah." Her heart does a weird sinking thing at that, but that's a problem for future Izumi. "Yes, sir."
He grunts a dismissal and she hurries along to see the nurse as instructed.