' fire tempers steel '

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Monotone flashes and Modern Literature ends. Cementoss dismisses the class, tells them that they have no more classes with the other teachers for the rest of the day so they can train for the upcoming Sports Festival.

Yuko is not excited, not by the least. Even when Uraraka seemed to be so fired up and even admitted that through being a professional, she could help her parents with money.

( Yuko might be needing money, but she aspired to be a hero for a different reason entirely. )

Even when she's in the gymnasium, clad in her blue PE uniform and doing cardiovascular exercises to improve her resistance to the recoil of her quirk.

She absolutely loathed the festival. Brief flashes of last year were still fresh in her mind, reminding her of how much physical pain, wasted time and utter humiliation she spent.

Yuko hopes to be strong, but she knows she's not. Unlike Katsuki, Todoroki, Midoriya, Tokoyami and Iida, Yuko doesn't strive to win, she strives to survive. She's a blot in the existence of Class A, being the first student to get eliminated during the second half of the challenges last year.

She remembers facing off against one of her classmates that year, a 6'2 male whose quirk enabled him to stretch limbs. In less than five seconds, Yuko was thrown out of the ring, landing butt first on the sand and hearing the chorus of laughter from the spectators.

She remembers sporting numerous cuts and bruises from the first trial, damaged by the swarm of mechanical bees they sent that year. If it weren't for the help of her classmates, Yuko would have been thrown out almost immediately.

She was weak. Utterly and hopelessly.

"Get out of the way!" a familiar voice calls and Yuko turns around to watch a dashing Bakugou and a trail of smoke after him. He was fast, she'd give him credit for that and when he overtook Yuko, she could see his rippling back muscles and the way they've been honed to the best condition.

By the time Yuko finished her first jog around the campus, Bakugou had done five. Fueled by a slight twinge of insecurity over the speed and endurance of the blond, Yuko decided to make ten more rounds and when she reached ten, Bakugou had headed to the gymnasium and she's fallen to the ground.

Curious, the white haired girl had followed after him after resting, wanting to figure out what could he possibly doing after that exhausting jog.

"Katsuki!" she called and watched as the crimson eyed entity positioned himself in the corner of the gymnasium flexing his hands.

When he looked up from his squatting position to see her, he merely gruffed and said, "Oh. It's you. Dog Girl."

"Dog Girl?" she asked, horrified. That was like calling her a bitch!

He didn't respond, just continued his stretching. "Move it, woman," he said. "Unless you can help in my training then you're just being a damn nuisance."

"Jeez, how very sensitive of you, Katsuki," she said to lighten up the hostile mood. "And how many times do I have to remind you, it's Yuko."

He didn't reply.

After having several encounters with Katsuki over the week, and knowing that he'd probably explode in anger if she continued bugging him, she decided to head to another corner of the gymnasium to try our her quirk. Just four or five times, she chanted to herself. Let's see if you can reach five.

First she approached one of the tall, metal contraptions used for pull ups and hung paper targets. She repeated this until she had five targets in total.

Taking a deep breath, Yuko positioned herself a couple of feet away, the ponytail she tucked her hair into swinging to and fro. Steadying her heartbeat, Yuko imagined what she wanted the air to do. A piercing bolt that can strike through anything.

Raising both hands, she began gathering air in front of her, condensing the gust to a smaller form until she was sure that it was the width of her three fingers and the length of her palms to her elbows.

It was a costing move, she thought, but she remembered the surge of excitement she felt the moment she thought of this move. Instead of gusts that only meant to blow away enemies, this would cause physical fatalities. Besides, she needed to add more moves to her cache.

She could remove the oxygen of things, that was one. And the second was to create powerful gusts of air. The third was create miniscule spheres that when used to cover her under water, prove to be sufficient air supply- of course for five to ten minutes only. Depending on her emotional and physical state.

Pulling her left hand back as if holding an arrow, the air object also pulled back and began to amass force. And then Yuko let go, the object- air arrow, she corrected herself, liking the name already- hit the outermost circle of the target. A sigh escaped her lips and sweat trickled from her forehead to her collarbones.

"Almost there," she murmured to herself, moving on to the next target. "I can do it."

Her breath stilled, brows furrowed in concentration as she aimed another air arrow, at the next target, determined to hit the center this time and when she failed- this time it didn't even hit a part of the target- she put on a smile and released her breath.

Creating the arrow was hard enough as it is since creating something so thin from lots of air required too much concentration and power. Yuko walked towards the direction of the first arrow, wincing when she realized that she had put a hole on the wall a meter away from the target.

Too much air pressure, powerful but so taxing.

In her bout of concentration, she even forgot the presence of a certain blond kid who was toasting various dummies with his powerful quirk.

Already, Yuko had been tired and breathless so she decided to go into the bleachers and watch Katsuki with his quirk. He seemed so in his environment, pummeling the dummies and even extending the distance of his explosions.

Yuko could feel the power, the might, everything in him. Katsuki Bakugou was on another level and she found herself watching his every move, breathing patterns, slight twitches and his eyes, that hunger for domination and power and of course, she noticed it when he flinched and turned at her direction.

A glare met her steady gaze and Yuko blinked at him. "What are you looking at, Dog Girl?" he asked with furrowed eyebrows, almost as if he was... afraid.

Yuko shook her head, offering a mild smile and decided that she had enough rest and went back to training. Him? Afraid of her? Ludicrous.

She could do it. Maybe three air arrows for today?

Just like earlier, Yuko focused on what she could do, breathing still, eyebrows furrowed in concentration and she let the arrow loose, only this time, something went wrong with it and it swerved and eyes widened, "Katsuki, watch out!"

He looked at her, pissed but then realized the urgency of the situation. He couldn't see it first but then his reaction time was still fast so he managed to put up a huge explosion which made the arrow swerve and hit a wall instead.

"Sorry!" she yelled. "I swear I didn't- by Aizawa's dry eyes, you're bleeding!"

A part of the arrow had hit a part of his shoulder, creating a tear in the fabric of his cloth. Just a scratch, hopefully. "Katsuki! I'm sorry."

He seemed annoyed at first but his face reverted to neutral and soon enough, he was removing his top- "Have some decency, Katsuki!" -and inspecting the scratch.

"I swear I didn't mean it," she said, approaching him and wary of an explosion that might meet her face. "Do you want me to get the first aid kit?"

He shook his head, wiped the traces of the blood that flowed from the cut and turned to her. His gaze made her tremble, like iron being hammered in flames to sharpen.

"You... have no control over your quirk," he said. It was puzzling how she wasn't offended by the words he said. He used his good arm and reached for her fists, clenched tightly and trembling.

"You're too focused on having total control and increasing power, but you're afraid, rightly so," he said and began unclenching her fingers, revealing bloody crescent moons on tarnished flesh. "Stop being fucking narrow minded and think."

"What?" she asked, dumbfounded and palms still in midair. She could still feel his hands on hers and it felt good good good.

He scoffed, slung his discarded shirt over his good shoulder and headed to the bleachers to clean the wound. Yuko would have followed if she wasn't assaulted with a tumult of curses saying that if she helped, he'll blow her fucking face off.

Yuko decided to head to another corner and think about what Katsuki meant, slightly afraid to fire those arrows again. This time they may hit something more than shoulders and she wouldn't be too happy about it.

"Stop being narrow minded," she repeated, and a small portion of air twirled in her palms and unconsciously, she turned it into another arrow.

Yuko screamed, Katsuki's words dawning in on her and when she saw the annoyed boy at the other side of the gymnasium, she ran over to him.

"Katsuki, you won't believe this!" she said, like a little girl showing him a rare species of some insect. "Look, look! I figured it out."

He seemed to be placing a band-aid over the cut but couldn't place it properly and the sticky part kept on hitting his skin and the cotton didn't cover the wound properly.

Since her earlier proclamations were ignored, Yuko decided to take matters into her own hands. She took the band-aid, placed it carefully over the cut and when she was thanked with, "I could've done it by myself!", Yuko merely shrugged in true Yuko fashion and said, "You're welcome."

"So what?" he asked after a few moments of silence.

"What?" Yuko asked.

"That damn thing, what you were about to show me or some shit," he replied and put his shirt on, covering the taut muscles on his body.

"Oh..." Yuko said and smiled. "What you said a couple of minutes ago. I got it."

"Got what, Dog Girl?"

Yuko was about to answer but decided better because she felt very uncomfortable at the nickname. True, Weak Girl was worse, but Dog Girl didn't bade well with her.

"Stop calling me Dog Girl Katsuki or I swear I'll... I'll call you Bakuhoe!"

"W-What the fuck, Dog Girl?!" he screamed and stood up from his seat with that seething fury.

But Yuko was Yuko, a girl who excelled at infuriating other people and demanded the world even when it owed her nothing, who broke barriers and did whatever she wanted despite the repercussions. "What ever do you mean, Bakuhoe?"

"I swear I'll-" Sparks appeared in his open palms but Yuko swallowed the fear away and continued talking.

"Or would you rather have, Bakagou?" she asked with a curt smile.

"Shut the fuck up!" he screeched like a banshee albeit a very attractive one.

"Then say my name properly, because I really don't appreciate the nicknames," she said with a no-nonsense face (and since Yuko was Yuko, she had to try very hard).

"You're-!"

Yuko smiled at him, but there was an undercurrent of intimidation. Head tilted to the side and fringes of grey covered some parts of her face. "What?"

"Yu-"

"I don't really get why you're always stuttering and stumbling when I-"

"Yuko!" he cut her off.

Her name felt like ambrosia for the Gods. Sweet. Tasted like the best memories. Felt like friendship. "Thank you," she screamed. "Bakagou-kun!"

"Dumbass."

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