Chapter Text
It was winter that first day they met.
He hadn’t been dressed for it. Perhaps cold didn’t affect him as strongly as it did her. Despite being a winter baby, she always had to bundle up, even on the warmest mornings of the season, with her coat and scarf. She couldn’t wear that in the exam though. It would weigh her down and hinder her actions, so she was left to shiver in her much thinner workout clothes. But Ochako couldn’t afford to lose over something so cheap.
This was the first step of her dream. To getting her parents that easy life that they so deserved. The first time she would truly show just what she was capable of—even if so many brushed off her quirk’s potential for hero work, she knew it was possible. She wanted to prove that.
If she had to deal with the goosebumps running along her skin, her cheeks stinging from the iciness in the air, and chattering teeth all the while—then so be it. She would become one with the cold. Ochako would become winter itself: uncompromising, focused, but above all relentless. She had to leave her kindness outside of the gate if she really wanted to improve her parent’s state of living. That was what she told herself.
Those thoughts overcame her during the test. Nothing else mattered as she touched her hands to the various robots, floating them up only to crash them right back down to the cement. She knew she was overdoing it—that she was wearing herself out with their weight—but the exam was only ten minutes! Surely, overusing her quirk shouldn’t have mattered so much, right?
Well, how was she supposed to know the zero pointer would come in after that—pinning her to the ground with the debris it left in its wake? In that moment, her façade had crumbled away. She wasn’t ice itself. She was nothing but a girl: frightened, freezing and in far too over her head.
Ochako didn’t have the chance to wallow in that failure, when a sudden burst of wind blew her hair every which way and forced her gaze upward. She didn’t know if she could ever forget that moment. You read about those sorts of things in books or saw them play out in movies. But it was surreal to see someone leap into a dangerous situation for you in real life.
As she watched him fall, she became hyper-aware of the warmth inside her. Her blood had been running cold during the test, forcing it to frost for her own benefit. Her cheeks still stung from the winter air, but now her veins were boiling under the surface. Someone else’s selfless actions spurring the heat inside of her; warming her from head to toe and combating the cold rather than simply bearing it as she had been before.
She had thought that the exam was a self-centered ordeal. That trying to get in meant that she had to think of herself and the task at hand first, and everything else came second. But the results of that exam taught her that was wrong. The majority of her points were not from her self-interested actions during the test. But when she pushed herself to her limit in order to protect someone else. When she shed that selfish approach, and instead thought of nothing but being able to save the life of someone else—no matter the difficulty.
It was winter when they met; but for the first time, the biting chill of the season surrounded her, and she learned to radiate her own warmth. All she had needed to understand was that simple spark of inspiration.