Chapter Text
He wakes up after Mina but before Ochako, not of his own volition.
“I’m stuck,” Mina whispers, her face inches from his own. “You losers are bookending me.”
“So you decided to wake me up,” he mumbles, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes.
“Yeah, obviously. Her alarm’s gonna go off in like twenty minutes anyway.”
“And twenty minutes of sleep makes absolutely no difference?” Normally he’d be sort of annoyed, but Mina’s voice sounds like she’s in love, and he allows himself to pretend it’s with him, just for a moment.
“Duh. Get up, lazy.”
He pushes himself up slowly, helps her crawl out of bed without disturbing Ochako.
“Your hands are fucked up,” she whispers.
“I use them when I swing around. Just cause it’s tape doesn’t mean I don’t build up calluses.”
She runs her fingertips over his palms, laces their fingers together and guides him out to the living room.
He doesn’t know the lay of the apartment nearly as well as she does, and it looks different in the morning light anyway. So when she starts flitting around, bouncing on the balls of her feet like she didn’t wake up less than ten minutes ago, he follows her. Nothing better to do.
“Start making coffee,” she instructs, pointing to Ochako’s machine in the corner of the kitchen counter. “I’m gonna go pick up breakfast.”
“Huh? Leaving me?”
“There’s a shop less than five minutes from the building. I might be back before you’re even done.”
She doesn’t give him any more time to protest before she bails, and he’s left alone in Ochako’s apartment with a coffee maker he barely knows how to operate. It doesn’t take him long to search up a refresher course and get a decent pot of coffee going, but it takes long enough that he starts to think Mina might actually beat him like she said.
“Morning.”
Hanta remembers one time years ago when Shouto had glanced over his shoulder while he was watching a movie at just the wrong moment. He hadn’t made fun of him, but it had still sent a surprised, embarrassed jolt down Hanta’s spine when he realized what had been on.
He’s feeling something similar now.
“Ah, Ochako, hi. Good morning.” He feels caught, doesn’t know why.
“I didn’t know you drank coffee?” Her voice is soft and lower than normal. A sound like fingers running through his hair.
“Mina told me to get going on some,” he shrugs. “The two of you drink it.”
“I have tea too, if you want.”
She stands up on her tiptoes to grab a box from the cupboard, and for a second, he considers getting it for her. Maybe she would look up at him softly, thank him, maybe she would say his name in her morning voice. But she reaches it without too much difficulty, so he doesn’t.
He just nods, and she starts boiling water. He makes the two of them coffee, and she makes him tea, and he wonders whether it’ll feel different drinking tea made by someone who makes him feel this way.
Hanta hears the door on the other side of the half wall open, hears Mina’s sunny, “Honeys, I’m home!”
It sounds a little clunky, but he appreciates her commitment to the line. Appreciates being included in it.
“Breakfast,” she announces, holding a brown paper bag over the counter for Ochako.
“You went in pajamas?” she laughs.
“Of course,” she answers. “Who would I be if I had taken the time to change into socially acceptable clothes before I walked less than a block for muffins?”
“Point taken,” Ochako shrugs, digging through the bag.
Mina gets three mugs around and fills two with coffee, one with water. Tosses Hanta one of the tea bags and says, “I got you a gross vegan one.”
“I’m really not vegan,” he laughs.
“It’s cranberry orange.”
“I love those ones.” He can’t remember whether he ever told her that. Did she guess, or is it something she’s remembered all these years?
They eat quickly, and the two of them promise Hanta they’ll hold down the fort at the agency while he goes home to change. It’s a comfortable morning, more comfortable than he had expected after sleeping over with a couple.
On the drive back to his place, he lets himself think about what it would mean if they really did see him as a part of them .
The dog tags click together when he pulls off his shirt. Already, they feel like a part of him .
~
He never takes them off. For a while, he even forgets they’re there, they feel so much like an extension of himself. He and Ochako and Mina spend even more time together, more time outside of work, and he rarely goes home to spend an entire night alone in the dark. One of his plants dies because he forgets to water it after one too many late nights cooking in Mina’s kitchen.
And now he has to look at it all the time, brown and dry with withered leaves. He hasn’t gotten rid of it yet, and he hasn’t heard anything about dinner with the intergalactic duo in a while.
The radio silence was sort of sudden. Weeks after the dinner party (though at first that had been what he thought caused it, inviting himself into their private lives)-
(But they had invited him , right?)
But it all turned on a dime, it feels like. It had been the three of them. It had been their matching dog tags and Ochako’s hair ties on Hanta’s wrists and Mina’s legs thrown over the two of them while they watched movies together. It had been the three of them, and now Hanta’s headed home after another night of not being invited to dinner.
They said they were going on a date, and who is he to dispute that? Despite what he had let himself believe catching muffin crumbs at a table that wasn’t his, he isn’t part of their relationship.
They work together, and they’re friends, and they don’t treat him any different. That’s the most perplexing part. He tries not to overthink (found it never helped much back in school), but he gets hung up on it when he eats alone. Just around two weeks now since they pulled away, but he keeps circling back to how, other than no longer deliberately including him in their every moment together, they treat him the same.
Sometimes he thinks that means the time they spent together like three people in something-like-love just didn’t mean the same to them.
They hadn’t been nervous about him sleeping with them in Ochako’s bed. That should have been a sign.
When he lets himself think too much about it, it starts to make sense, and it stirs up some of his old fear of mediocrity, not as long settled as he had insisted to Mina. He’s grown up now, a pro hero, and he spends so much time in the sky, and it still isn’t enough to reach the stars. If it were, he’d be up there with them, right? So it must be something about him, right? Some reason he can’t keep up with them or his friends or a blue-haired mom he remembers from so long ago.
He tries not to dwell on it.
At least his plants are doing better now that he spends all his evenings at his own place.
They go on patrols together more often, just the two of them, and he tries to be a good friend. Because nothing has changed, and that’s what they always were.
He wonders if they even noticed the shift. They still see him every day, and they’re still his friends, and he tries to stay good to them. A good hero, a good friend, even if he wants to be something else when he’s honest with himself, a good person. A good enough person to be happy for them when they walk out of the agency hand-in-hand and to keep the rest of his plants from dying.
He envies Shouto again, so he calls him up and talks to him until he feels like he can go to sleep.
Counts himself lucky to have so many good friends.
~
“Keep up, Office Depot!”
He’s grown a lot since starting this agency, mostly in the PR department. He doesn’t even break his smile-and-wave routine with a civilian across the street when he bites back, “Be nice or I’ll tape your mouth shut.”
She laughs, and he reminds himself that everyone feels happy when they make a friend laugh; he doesn’t have to misconstrue their relationship anymore, to lead himself on just because she won’t.
“I wanna get this patrol done.”
He looks down at her at his side (it hadn’t taken him any time to catch up, and he doesn’t think she had really been worried, thinks she just wanted to call him a name) and scrunches up his eyebrows. She bites back a laugh, and he says, “Patrol is your favorite part. Of a normal day, at least.”
“Eh,” she shrugs. “Today’s a little different… I actually… after this patrol, when we’re back at the agency, can Ochako and I talk to you about something?”
His stomach drops to his knees. It’s quick as the snap of fingers, the blink of an eye. It’s them telling him he overstepped. It’s them asking why he still wears the dog tags (they’re only a month or so old, spanning the rise and fall of everything beyond friends he thought they could be), he knows it is.
And it’s something else, some frustration bubbling up. Been simmering for… for who knows how long, and now it’s all curling up to the surface, and they’re still on patrol, so he has to be Cellophane, that comforting heroic personality.
“Uh… yeah.” And he almost manages to bite all of it back, but he still adds, “Always you and Ochako. Can’t you just tell me yourself?”
He had hoped to keep his tone light and innocent as if the answer doesn’t matter, as if it’s something he just now thought of. But she knows him too well for that. Even years of being apart, connected only through occasional lunches and text message exchanges, couldn’t separate them in any way where they couldn’t rebuild. They have rebuilt, and Hanta doesn’t want to ruin it, but he needs to know.
When he meets her eyes, they’re wide. Inky black pools he’s spent so long looking into, years of his life, probably. She’s surprised. He didn’t play it off well enough.
“What do you mean ‘always me and Ochako’?”
He feels like a kid, making a big deal out of nothing. Mountains instead of molehills, the one thing he always tries to avoid. “I-” But it’s how he feels, isn’t it? Isn’t he supposed to be able to ask? “I just mean… obviously you two will spend more time with each other than with-” It sounds so childish , but- “than with me. Obviously. But… I feel like recently…”
Smiling softly, always looking out for his heart (in her many different ways), she asks, “Recently?”
“Uh,” he says, tempted to put his helmet on. Hide from the world and from Mina while he tries to articulate feelings he always intended to avoid having. “I just feel like we had… gotten to a point where we were together a lot. And just, the past couple weeks I guess, it hasn’t been quite the same. Which is fine-”
“Not to cut you off,” she says, focused on him. She’s always focused wholly on patrol, waving to people and observing for small wrongs to right, and Hanta bets she would kiss babies if they ever encountered them, but now she’s just looking at him, “but Ochako and I- I know what you’re talking about.”
Somehow, that’s even more embarrassing. The acknowledgment that it’s true, that they know they’ve left him high and dry. “Oh, great.” And he hadn’t meant to be sarcastic, but-
“The thing we wanted to talk to you about, it’s actually related to that in a way. So if you’ll just hear us out-”
“Why wouldn’t I hear you out?”
“She wanted to be there too. It’s something that involves all three of us.”
“Okay, I’ll listen.”
“Okay.”
An agreement.
He hasn’t worked much with bomb situations, but this is how he imagines it might feel after one is diffused. Maybe just a small threat, but enough to leave the two of them wondering where to go once it’s gone.
Hanta begins to worry about patrol being uncomfortable, the two of them being crushed under the awkwardness of the wait to talk about something that (apparently) is bigger than he had thought. But soon enough they run into a little girl in a windbreaker with the same print as Mina’s costume and pause to take a picture with her, and afterward, they find their footing with not-too-distracting conversation until they’re back at the agency.
Back at the agency, where Ochako leans in the doorway of their lawyer’s secluded little office with dog tags around her neck and a stray convenience store receipt with a recipe Hanta scrawled on it three weeks ago sticking out of the pocket of her cardigan.
He can see the curiosity in her eyes the second she turns and sees him.
He hopes he hasn’t overstepped. Or hopes they can forgive him.
Doesn’t want to be melodramatic, but he doesn’t know what he’ll do if they ask him to leave the agency. Doesn’t know why they would, but when he sees Ochako’s soft (concerned?) eyes, it’s all he can think about. About how maybe he had been overstaying his welcome all those weeks before they pulled away and how he doesn’t want to lose what he stole.
“Got a minute?” she asks.
Hanta lets Mina respond for him. That little voice U.A. hammered into him says that they shouldn’t all be occupied with something at once, just in case something comes up. That, as on-duty pro heroes, they should be more flexible. But they’ve broken that rule time and time again, so when Mina says of course they could all talk, he just nods.
The little voice says they should wait to do things like this until the work day is over. But when does it really end? So he leans back in one of the wicker chairs he dragged back to a more private nook of the agency space and he looks from Mina to Ochako and back again and waits for one of them to start.
Ochako reaches up and grabs the chain around her neck, rolls the metal between her fingertips. She’s still wearing her tags.
She smiles, looks excited. Hanta rolls his head back and takes a breath. Everything is fine.
“Mina and I have been talking recently. A couple weeks now I guess, but for a while before that too. Casually then, but now-”
“Losing the point,” Mina cuts in softly, pressing lightly on Ochako’s wrist.
She nods, smiles, says, “Anyways, the two of us have been talking a lot lately about our relationship. The way it affects the agency, but mostly just about what we want from it.”
Mina nods along beside her, relaxed. She doesn’t look like someone about to ask a friend to step away from their joint hero agency.
“And we were wondering,” Ochako continues, “whether you’d be interested in joining us?”
If Hanta lived in a slice-of-life romance, the scene would have been more dramatic. They would probably be doing this at night, for one. And somewhere other than their office. And the silence would have stretched, and they would have wrung their hands and bit their lips while the realization hit him on a close-up. Unbearably sweet, everything romantic, the way some people live.
But he doesn’t live a life like that, so Mina jumps in and clarifies, “Like, join our relationship. Date us.”
“You can take some time to think about it,” Ochako says, firmer now. Drawing from that steely confidence of hers he loves so much. Something he never quite had down here in Earth’s atmosphere.
They’re asking him to float with them. Dog tags around their necks, star charts on the wall, the zero-gravity girl and her alien queen want him up with them where no one can reach.
He thinks he’ll get to curl up in Ochako’s bed again. Make coffee he doesn’t drink. Kiss the place where Mina’s curls rest against her neck and the tops of Ochako’s rosy cheeks.
“I- how would it work?” he makes himself ask before he can blurt out something that would change everything.
They glance at each other before looking back to him, and Mina says, “We’re new to this too. So it would be a learning thing. A lot of communication, and probably learning to do a lot of relationship things differently.”
“But it would be worth it for us,” Ochako assures. “Again, we’ve been talking about this in different ways for a while.”
“I… so we would all be dating each other? The three of us, just the three of us?”
“That’s what we were hoping,” Mina answers. “It’s something I did for around a month two years ago. And it was a challenge, I guess, but not really more than any other relationship. And I think the three of us would make it work. We have been making it work.”
“That night you stayed over, Hanta, that was… I guess it feels weird to say, but it was sort of a test run,” Ochako admits, only half abashed. “And I’m not sure whether you felt the same thing-”
“I did,” he nods. And now he wonders how he can explain it to them, the way he’s been spending more time in his head than he has in years, debating with himself about feelings that could ruin things and anxieties about not following the right path in the right amount of time, and especially the way that giving himself one could destroy his chances at the other. He doesn’t know how to tell them all of that without taking the conversation somewhere unhappy, so he just says what he can.
“I’ve had feelings for you for… a while, I guess. I’m not a stranger or anything to liking multiple people at once-” (that earns a laugh from Mina), “but I still wasn’t sure whether it would even be worth it to tell you. I just…”
He wishes he were more eloquent. But he doesn’t think that’s what Mina and Ochako expect from him. Knowing that makes his neck warm, makes him feel okay.
“I didn’t want to mess anything up. But it’s what I want.”
“Yeah?” Ochako asks, hope in her eyes.
“We… we can try,” he says, rolling his shoulders, hoping to chase the tension away.
“Fuck yeah,” Mina smiles, elbowing Ochako. “God, this is gonna be fun.”
Hanta thinks she’s right.
~
They had been right when they said there would be a learning curve. He feels like a teenager again with how many firsts he finds in even just the first week with the two of them. He’s had unconventional relationships in the past, skirted the expectations of nearly everyone around him. And still, after everything, Ochako and Mina are something different.
Ochako had always been less physically affectionate with him, unable to catch up with the history he and Mina built before they all had to make their own lives. But if he were on the outside looking in now, he’d never be able to tell. Now, she squeezes his hand over the desk at the agency, hangs off his shoulder in line when they go out to eat. She makes him try the stupid games she downloads on her phone and laughs at him when he loses, and she’s the first to learn about the spot under his ear that makes him melt.
Sometimes he sees Mina watching the two of them in her kitchen (surprisingly not as pink as Ochako’s), and he can’t remember the last time he saw someone with such a fond look in their eyes. In those moments he smiles wide and holds his arms out; she only hugs him about half the time, but she more than makes up for it when she smiles against his mouth at the door on his way out. She calls him every pet name she can think of and grins when he complains (always halfheartedly). She plays with his hair and his callused hands, reads him like a book and always uses what she finds for good.
And after a while, after a million mistakes and jokes and moments he hopes he won’t ever have to forget, he can’t even remember why he was worried. What made him take up so much anxiety about them, about the future. About whether he’d have one at the same time as everyone else, whether it would look right. After a while, it’s all sky.
When he looks up, he sees the stars.
His own hang over Ochako’s couch now, next to theirs. Three prints of the universe watch over them as they break through the atmosphere together, floating away.