Work Text:
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Ochako continued to tap her pencil on the table, staring down intensely at the numbers that littered her paper. She had decided to come down to the common area to do her homework. Mostly because if she needed any help, there would probably be someone readily available. If she was in her room, she would have to message people or even need to go as far as seeking them out.
Yes, this was the preferable option. Especially when lots of Class 1-A’s students would rather work in here than their own rooms. And in the hour or two before this, it had been teeming with her classmates—not everyone was doing homework though. Food was a popular reason to come down to the first floor. But the amount of students had tapered down, the later it became.
She had been so engrossed in her papers, that the quieted atmosphere was the only reason she knew that she was one of the final few left downstairs. Maybe the last one now. It wasn’t important enough to check. What was important was tackling the problems printed in front of her and getting this done.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She had been staring down at this particular page for the last ten minutes. Her irises had been locked in a death grip with each of the varying questions, jumping from one to another and hoping to find one that she could conquer. Needless to say, she had been unsuccessful thus far.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t understand the problems set before her. No, she understood each of them. But the moment the girl would try to square up against one—it was like her brain was stuffed up. It had bounced from subject to subject since her arrival in the common room, paying no mind to her surroundings unless someone had addressed her directly. So now when she tried to continue that and keep her intensity locked to a single point. It just couldn’t connect. Like there was some kind of fuzz blanketing it and keeping the answer just out of reach.
Tap. Tap—
The pencil clattered unceremoniously to the table, her hands shooting back to run through the back of her bobbed hair. She leaned her head as far back as it would go as she groaned like someone had nabbed the last piece of mochi from right under her nose. “This is bad!”
Usually if she got like this, it meant it was time to drop the work and pick it up another day. Look at it with refreshed eyes and everything would fall into place effortlessly! But Ochako had been bad at managing her time with schoolwork recently. And she didn’t have the option to postpone these problems. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, her fingers still threading through her own brown hair, as her head straightened back up. “How’m I s’pposed to focus like this…?”
“Uraraka-san?” She didn’t need to open her eyes to see who said that. Only one of her classmates ever referred to her that way. He was always so formal with everyone. Nevertheless, she squinted an eye open to find a familiar freckled face at the same table. It looked as though he had been hunched over a book only moments before but now he had a frown that was obviously directed at her. “Are you alright?”
“Deku-kun…” She elongated his name with a sigh as she dropped her elbows onto the table, her fingers stopping in threading her hair to instead clutch at the strands caught between them. He said her name with more concern at that, stuttering as he did. She didn’t blame him, she must have looked deranged. She certainly felt like it. “If I keep lookin’ over these problems, I’m gonna lose my mind…!”
“Um.” His worry certainly dissipated a little when she had cleared up just what was wrong; but he looked a little lost as far as where to go from here. “M-maybe you should…take a break?” Deku nodded at his own words soon after saying them, “Yeah! Even Iida-kun says that—”
“I caaaaaaaaan’t.” She dropped her forehead to the table—he shouted her name again at the action—it was pressed down on the homework she had abandoned working on. “I don’t have time to do this after tonight. I can’t ever wake up early enough!”
“Well, it, it doesn’t need to be a long one?” He was trying very hard to help. She couldn’t keep from smiling a bit in spite of her situation—he was a great friend to have. “Maybe just a few minutes of doing something else can…help make things clearer?”
Ochako considered the idea. Working on homework nonstop was pretty boring. “Mm. Maybe you’re right.” It was so simple but she couldn’t think of it on her own. Which made it even more obvious how necessary a break probably was.
What could she do for a few minutes? She had already paused to eat earlier. And she wasn’t really thirsty. Watching TV would just make her lose track of time…
She sat upright, finally removing her hands from her head, in order to point one finger upwards. “That’s it!” She set her other hand upon the table, while the finger flew through the air in a fluid motion to land on her companion. “Deku-kun!”
“Huh?”
“Tell me a funny story!”
“Eh?”
She lowered the finger pad she had directed toward him as she said, “If I go do somethin’ else, there’s no guarantee that I’ll come back right away. And even if you have a longer story—there’s no way it’d go on for too long, and it’ll definitely stop me from being so bogged down by my homework!”
“I…I guess…” He glanced down at the book in front of him, sliding one of his papers inside it before closing the cover. The fingers of his scarred hand drummed across it while the other reached up to cradle his chin. “A funny story…well, one time Kacchan—”
“No,” Ochako interrupted, wagging her finger before resting that arm on the table between them as well. “I want you to tell me a funny story about you .”
“A-about me?” His cheeks turned the slightest bit pink.
She hummed in the affirmative, glancing down at the table as she mused, “We’re friends and all; but I feel like all you and me ever do is talk about school or bein’ a hero so…” Ochako raised her chin again, beaming brightly at him in a close-eyed smile. “I think it would be nice to hear about somethin’ you thought was fun!”
When her brown eyes had opened again, Deku was giving her that same ugly expression from the sports festival. She decided not to comment on it to him this time, but instead wondered aloud if maybe she was asking too much. “N-no, it’s fine,” he insisted, his unmarred hand covering his mouth as he glanced away. “I can think of something.”
The girl waited for him to settle on a subject, deciding to fiddle with the pencil that fell earlier. First, she twirled it between her fingers. The second attempt to twirl nearly caused her to drop it, so she opted to touch it with her finger pads instead, watching as it began to hover and then eventually float upwards on its own.
It hadn’t gotten too high when Deku had spoken up again. So she touched her fingertips together and caught it as it came down. “When me, Iida-kun, and the others went to try to rescue Kacchan…” He seemed to pause awkwardly and she wondered, from the way his eyes had narrowed slightly, if he perhaps felt bad bringing that up.
“Yes?”
Her responding in a positive way seemed to kick start him again. “Well, um, Yaoyorozu-san pointed out that the League knew our faces and that it wasn’t a good idea to just wander around Kamino.”
Oh. She hadn’t really considered that. Maybe because she hadn’t been there. And admittedly, because it was still hard to wrap her head around the fact that so many strangers could recognize them now after the UA Sports Festival.
He went on to say how Momo had pointed out a Donki Oote shop nearby, and they all went and bought new outfits to blend in. He talked about each of their friend’s disguises in detail. The mental image of Iida as a barber—at least as Deku described him—was too hilarious to keep from laughing. And if she had gone with them, she didn’t know if she could have handled the ridiculousness of it all.
“I couldn’t even recognize Todoroki-kun,” he said, cracking up himself. “I would see him and be like ‘Ah, who’s that?!’ before I would remember and calm back down. It was too weird without the scar!”
“What about you?”
“Eh?”
“Your disguise?” she said, leaning forward for but a moment before returning back to how she had been sitting previously. “You talked about everyone else’s. And haven’t said anything about yours.”
“W-well, that’s…” His laugh was forced and awkward. And it did nothing to cease her curiosity. She kept trying to urge it out of him. It was only fair if he was telling a story, right? To give all the details? Right? “Okay, I was—I was dressed as a…a gangster…”
The word hung in the air between them and she could only blink for a moment. And then it was like she had deactivated her quirk on the word. Returning the gravity of what exactly a gangster was. It was so unequivocally, unbelievably not Deku . So utterly perfect as a disguise and just…just…!
“A gangster ?” She was practically crying, she was laughing so hard. Ochako wasn’t even sure, even in the right outfit if he could pull that off. It was just so not him. In every conceivable way. “Deku-kun, oh man, that’s hilarious!” She crossed her arms leaning forward on the table as she asked about his own outfit.
He gave a wobbly smile as his face had changed color again. He deliberately avoided looking at her. “After that, you really should get back to your homework.”
“I will, I will! C’mon, can’t just leave me hangin’ like that!”