' a festival for champions. '

━━━━━

Yuko forgot that it was nearly time for that event. Only when Iida Tenya— the boy wearing glasses, the one who chastised her the day before— reminded everyone to be in best behavior during the festival.

"W—Where are you going, Yuko-san?" Kouda, her kind, soft spoken classmate asks her.

"The teacher's lounge, I have something to say," she answered with a cordial smile. "And you can just call me Yuko, no need for the formalities. You're like the nicest person in this class."

The boy blushes at the compliment, smiles, then says, "Keep safe."

Yuko nodded.

Yuko loathed the festival. It was a juvenile event in all senses, a cliché, a waste of money and time, a target for those with evil deeds, a compromising event. But, that really wasn't the case 'cause you see, the festival, it was an event in which Yuko was very bad at.

Yuko always had troubles with tracks and she's never been proud of how clumsily she uses her quirk. A painful recoil for a painless quirk. Yuko thought that it wasn't fair. Especially when others around her managed to do all those fascinating things with only nausea to worry about.

It stole her breath and even the slightest, most miniscule moment spent in that agony felt like a vacuum, a black hole attached to her mouth and sucking everything up and filling her up with a pain that she wished to be gone but was not.

So, being the charismatic student that she is, she sets her plan into motion. Free period, an hour before lunch, she heads to the Faculty Room, rehearsing her convincing argument and practicing the most pitiful look her face could morph into.

Of course, when the moment came, she froze like water sealed in plastic bags inside the freezer. She'd counted at least four transgressions with Aizawa Shota today and she doubts that he would be in a good if she made another one again.

Do it.

Unwilling and incapable of letting her Fate rest unto various coincidences and luck, she slid the door open and headed to her teacher's table. The older man was cocooned in blankets, his appearance more alike to a pitiful middle aged man who only had television and his dog for company.

Not the proud heroes the school boasted of producing. She felt a surge of pity for the poor man. He looked bleak, probably financially bleak, his love life bleak. She wondered if introducing Aizawa to a woman would better her chances. Yuko was desperate so she swore to use every weapon in her arsenal.

"Consultations only happen during classes," the man said in a gruff voice. "Hold that question and never come back."

Yuko frowned, clicking her tongue in dismay and Aizawa mirrored her appearance after she refused to leave. The professional hero sighed. "What is it?" he asked.

Yuko beamed.

"Turn down the beaming please," Aizawa muttered.

She didn't.

"It's a very pleasant morning, Aizawa-sensei!" she began, with that signature Yuko smile. "So I woke up this morning, and then this strange, fascinating, little thought came to me. I unpeeled the covers, savored the morning breeze and then when I took a shower—"

"Akihisa, if you don't get to the point in five seconds, I'm giving you detention for five months," the threat was real. She could feel it crawling up her bones.

Yuko put her palms out in front of her, a wry smile on her lips. "Calm down, sensei. It's not like—"

"Seven months."

Yuko groaned, tucked an errant strand of hair from her face to behind her ear. "So I was thinking that maybe, possibly, hopefully, since I've been here last year, enjoying the complements of a school life befitting—"

"Ten months."

Yuko cursed under her breath. "Why don't you just send me to detention for the rest of the school year?" But she continued on, getting straight to the point. "I need you to rescind my participation for the U.A. Sports Festival."

A steely glare and then, the impending and much anticipated, "No."

When Yuko was outside the Faculty, she came upon Cementoss and she nodded politely at him, and when the hallways turned desolate and the fury raging in her eyes, she shrieked.

"Go back to your classroom, Akihisa or it'll be twelve—" was her teacher's unfinished words because the moment the Faculty door slid open, Yuko had sprinted back to the classroom, leaving a cloud of dust in her wake.

"By All Might's hair," she muttered, entering the classroom through the expansive doors and to her luck [not], the students were beginning to exit too so she was pushed back by the wave.

"Great," she muttered to herself and Yuko thought that she would have been trapped in that bubble of bad thoughts and exasperation if it weren't for the memory of the previous evening. She had something with a semblance to a friend. With Todoroki Shouto!

Her eyes were immediately lit with a sort of expression that would have made the galaxy envious, a pulsing, bright glow like the corona of the sun and the nonexistent twinkling of the stars. Corners of her mouth had lifted, lips open revealing a set of white teeth and only one missing tooth that you would miss if you didn't look closely.

She was holding her breath in anticipation, watching her classmates empty the classroom with their respective cliques, sometimes in pairs, trios and rarely, alone. The classroom was already almost empty when she entered, Shouto nowhere to be seen and she released a breathe.

Already, her heart was sinking and it would have splintered into thousand shards if Ochaco Uraraka— an angel!— didn't wave her over and offer her a seat at their lunch table.

Yuko looked like a lunatic when she said yes. (In fact, she did not just say yes, it was more like a chain of yesyesyesyesyes, that of course, didn't make her look desperate.)

"The rice is tasty here, isn't it?" Uraraka asked and Yuko nodded furiously. The rice was divine. So divine that she remembered contemplating becoming a lunch hero like Lunch Rush during the first time she tasted it. Of course that was utterly ruined when she realized that she could only cook instant noodles and barely managed to not burn the rice. She told Uraraka exactly that and the occupants of the table began laughing.

God, she felt like she was in her element. Telling stories, exchanging emails (which she declined because she had no phone) and getting to know one another. In fact, Tenya Iida— for all his chastising and uptight attitude— was actually someone who worried over his classmates and was very polite. The freckled boy— Midoriya Izuku— even told Yuko the story of how Iida's bravery saved a lot of students and prevent further harm due to a stampede Yuko had failed to join because of her presence at the principal's office.

She felt stupid for not even considering this trio to be her friends. They meshed well with Yuko.

Hero Training that day proved to be... interesting, for a lack of a better word. Among twenty one students, two were chosen to be respective leaders of groups— of course it was Iida Tenya and Yaoyorozu Momo (as far as Yuko was concerned, Momo was one of the coolest girls in class) — and tasked with choosing members. Nine for Iida since he lost at the rock paper scissors and ten for Momo.

Yuko, along with Midoriya, Katsuki (she opted to call him that because every time she thought of her last name, she always found a way to twist it to her liking), Uraraka (yes!), Ojiro (she had no idea who this was, only heard his last name being called by All Might), Hagakure (another unknown), Sero (again, another unknown), Sato (by now, Yuko was very much aware that she was a terrible classmate) and Tokoyami (she knew this one! The bird guy!) belonged to Iida's group while the remaining went to Momo's.

The game was simple: Capture the Flag with the permission to use quirks to heart's contents as long as they didn't inflict major damages on their opponents. The goal was 'to capture the flag'. And the flag was a human.

It was picked on random of course, and Yuko hated random. Of all the twenty one students, forty two pairs of eyes and ears. She just had to be the flag for their team. She was all in for drama, she was actually excited about the prospect of being the center of attention at first but when the game droned on and on with no action on her side, Yuko had began cursing.

"Silence, Yuko-san," Tokoyami said, crouching underneath a pile of rubble next to Yuko, his shadow servant (?) 'Dark Shadow' lurking in between the dark spots to find traces of the enemy. Yuko thought it was a smart move at first but after minutes piling up, she secretly wished that the enemy would find them.

She was such a selfish thing.

Looping her arms over her chest, Yuko released another a groan of exasperation. She wished that this would be just over. If it didn't end in the next two hours, she was going to be late for her new job! That was when the floor began to be covered by ice.

"Damn!" Yuko shouted, leaping towards the debris, followed by a startled Tokoyami. It was a good thing their reaction times were adequate enough to evade the attack.

"We didn't see him coming," Tokoyami murmured, eyes darting towards the incoming boy. Cold and apathetic like the ice he wielded. No traces of the boy she talked to about beards and late night walks. Just a hero in training determined to win. "Todoroki."

"Run, Yuko-san," Tokoyami murmured, fingers grappling the shadows. "It'll be over once you're captured."

Yuko's steely gaze trailed towards the ice boy, his staunch demeanor, unfeeling eyes and the precision with which he used his quirk.

"No," she responded, readying her fighting stance. "Judging from the way he appears to be looking for something even when we're out open means that he's still unaware that I'm the flag. If we manage to act as if we're trying to prevent him from reaching someplace, he'll do everything in his own power to move from here. Get away from us and find the flag or whatever."

She turned to Tokoyami, inquiring his inputs but then the bird headed boy looked at her, mouth ajar and clearly confused. Yuko raised an eyebrow, "What?"

Tokoyami coughed, turns his head away from her. "It seems as if I completely misjudged you. Apologies, Yuko-san."

Yuko smiled at that, fighting the errant pinprick of pain that stabbed her gut. She wasn't petty. That was water under the bridge. She proved him wrong, alright?

"It's okay," she said, eyes flicking to Todoroki who was still regarding them with a sort of icy calm. "You're not wrong. I'm really pretty stupid. I've just—"

Her sentence was interrupted by a barrage of icicles and immediately, Yuko circled back to their earlier position, summoning her quirk.

At first, the gust of air was cool, then she directed the breeze to his backside, then thwap! she released the strong gust and he toppled over. Tokoyami was next although unlike Yuko, he wasn't very fortunate.

The floor underneath him was immediately frozen, his feet glued and something resembling an igloo covered his entire form. Yuko was next, helpless as Todoroki froze her to the knee. Damn it!

She had enough strength to actually lay their plan in motion and when the boy was gone, Yuko immediately broke the ice with a pile of rocks from nearby, crawling over to Tokoyami whose Dark Shadow had apparently gotten stronger.

Minutes passed and the duo weren't stupid enough to remain there, choosing to convene with the others since they were totally at the mercy of powerful opponents like Todoroki.

God bless Bakugo!

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— s e r e n d i p i t y