Work Text:
The last thing Ochako expects at the surprise training camp with the Wild Wild Pussycats Aizawa-sensei sprung up on them (though really, they absolutely should have expected this level of madness from the man) is to find a kid there.
But as Mandalay quietly reveals his story — how Kouta lost his parents to a villain two years ago, how the Wild Wild Pussycats are the only ones left to care for him — things start to make more sense.
Of course Kouta would stay there, even if having to maneuver around two classes of hero students trying to strengthen their quirks can’t be the safest thing for him.
Or the easiest thing to bear with, considering the kid loudly proclaims to hate all heroes, and especially them, for choosing to become heroes.
Ochako can see some of her classmates bristle at that, but all Kouta’s rage really manages is to make her chest hurt.
How much pain must he be in, to lash out like this? Ochako can’t imagine losing her parents, much less and after. Just thinking about it feels like a nightmare — but her nightmare is Kouta’s reality.
It makes her want to reach out to him, even if she can’t quite figure out how.
Even if the training part of their trip is exhausting, Ochako loves it. She can feel herself becoming stronger, feel herself becoming that much closer to becoming a great hero.
But her favorite parts are still the moments around the training. All the girls share a dorm to sleep in, and it feels almost like a sleepover, something Ochako’s never gotten before.
Of course, they’re usually too exhausted to do what Ochako thinks are traditional sleepover activities, but it’s still… really nice, having people around. Ochako’s missed that, living alone and so far away from her parents to she can go to UA.
She doesn’t regret her choice, of course, but sometimes, she wakes up in the middle of the night and it’s… lonely.
Well, it’s not lonely here. Ochako doesn’t think it could be, when Class 1-B’s Pony mumbles softly in incomprehensible English as she sleeps, or when Ashido snores, just a little, if she ends up on her back.
And then there’s Tsuyu, who has the lightest sleep of anyone Ochako’s ever known, and who seems to always wake up when Ochako does.
(She feels kind of bad about this, actually, even though Tsuyu has told her several times that it was something she’d gotten used at home, caring for her siblings.)
Tonight, though, Ochako didn’t wake up — she just can’t sleep.
“... What is it, kero?”
Ochako rolls around in her sleeping bag to face her. “Sorry… Did I wake you?”
Tsuyu yawns widely and shakes her head. “It’s fine, kero. But I can hear you thinking from here.”
Tsuyu blinks slowly. In the dim light, her eyes seem somehow bigger and brighter.
Ochako swallows. “I just… I can’t stop thinking about that kid. Kouta.”
Tsuyu blinks again. “He’s very sad, kero.”
Ochako’s lips quirk up into a humorless smile. “Most people would say angry,” she points out.
Tsuyu shrugs, her sleeping bag rustling around her. In the quiet of the night, it sounds louder than it should. “He’s angry too, kero.”
Ochako heaves a long sigh. “Yeah… I just… I want to help him, you know? But it’s just… It’s so big — how do you even help someone with something like that?”
“I don’t know, kero.”
“Yeah, I don’t know either.” Ochako shifts in her sleeping bag again. “So it’s just been… keeping me up.”
Tsuyu hums. “You’ll figure it out, kero.”
Ochako’s smile returns, truer this time. “You think so?”
“‘course, kero. And we’re all here if you need help too.”
“Thanks.”
Tsuyu quiets down after that, most likely falling asleep.
Ochako takes a little longer to finally drift off, but not as long as she’d feared — talking to Tsuyu helped. She feels lighter for it, but also steadier. It shouldn’t matter, really, that someone else believes she can do this, but it does.
Her first opportunity to help comes along by chance, really.
It’s dinner time and Ochako’s busy helping gather up enough plates for everyone — well, making sure they have enough, at least — when she sees Kouta scowl up at their gathered group and duck away into the forest.
“Ochako!” a laughing voice calls out. “It’s your turn — come grab your plate before the boys eat everything!”
“One moment!” Ochako calls back distractedly, walking away.
Her feet lead her to Mandalay. The older hero’s standing a little by the side, the far-away look on her face saying she’s using her quirk to say something — that, or she’s just lost in thought.
“M-Mandalay?” Ochako asks.
Brown eyes blink down at her, and Ochako falters, suddenly unsure of her earlier resolve.
“What is it, kitten?”
Ochako swallows and squares up her shoulders. “It’s… Kouta. I saw him leave and…”
Mandalay’s eyes soften in understanding. “He does that, yes.” She sighs. “It’s… He’s got a hiding place. He goes there to feel safe, I think.” Her eyes widen, like she hadn’t meant to say that, and she adds, “I mean—”
Ochako nods, and Mandalay cuts herself off. WIth a gentle nod, she prompts Ochako further.
“It’s just… Has he eaten? Because we made enough for everyone, but since he left…”
Mandalay shakes her head. That far away look on her face returns. Up close, it looks… sadder than Ochako had thought.
Perhaps Mandalay isn’t using her quirk after all.
“I… No. It’s been… hard. For him.” Mandalay swallows. “Aah, could you— would you mind if I bothered you to set a plate aside for him? He’ll be back soon.”
But she doesn’t know, Ochako can tell.
“Of course!” Ochako replies, smiling brightly.
Mandalay smiles back. It reaches her eyes, just a little, and a weight Ochako hadn’t even realized was there eases from around her lungs.
“Thank you,” Mandalay breathes.
“Of course,” Ochako repeats, and leaves.
Kouta doesn’t thank her for the food. He doesn’t move to take the plate Ochako offers her either, but he also doesn’t reject it entirely.
The sight of him like that, curled up into a ball at the edge of a cliff, a lone silhouette cut against the empty night sky, makes Ochako’s chest ache again.
It makes her want to stay.
Kouta might actually hit her if she tried, though, and the last thing Ochako wants to do is to taint his safe place like that.
“I’m leaving this here,” she says instead, pasting on a smile that is softer than the ones she’s been practicing to show the world and putting the plate down next to him.
Kouta doesn’t make a sound, but his eyes follow her hands as she does. “There’s more back at the camp if you’re still hungry,” she adds in a soft tone, because Ochako knows hunger, and she wouldn’t wish it on anyone, much less this lost, angry kid.
(That’s part of why she needed so badly to come here, why she had to go to Mandalay — Ochako hadn’t had a choice, not really, not any of the time where she’d been hungry, but Kouta does.
And a warm meal in your stomach can solve more problems than it seems it should at times.
It’s not much, but it’s something, and something’s always better than nothing. It’s probably too much to ask Kouta to realize that now, but…
Maybe one day.)
Ochako leaves him alone after that. She doesn’t look back, but just as the trees close in over her head, she hears the telltale scratch of a plate getting dragged across stone, and she smiles.
And then…
And then, everything goes wrong.
The thing is— The thing is, nobody but her knows where Kouta’s hiding spot is. Which makes Ochako the only person who can go out to find him when the villains start to swarm the forest.
A test of courage, she thinks hysterically as she runs, hoping, praying Kouta will be fine.
The forest, around her, seems to fill up with screams and smoke and so, so much danger, and Ochako wraps her resolve around herself like a blanket.
She bursts through the trees like a comet, to find Kouta’s tear-streaked face staring back at her and a giant of a man laughing and sneering down at them.
“Get away from from him!” Ochako snarls, even as her blood freezes in her veins. To Kouta, she says, “Get behind me.”
The man — Muscular, of course she recognizes him, how could she not after she’d around until someone had managed to track down what had happened to the Water Hose duo — laughs again.
“You’re not on the list,” he says, and the metallic eye distorting his face glints madly back at her.
What list? Ochako thinks, but—
No, that doesn’t matter.
She rushes forward, hand extended — all she needs, after all, is one touch.
One touch, and she can send this man, this villain— this monster flying far, far away, where he can never ever harm Kouta again.
But Kouta screams and Muscular twists out of the way, muscles bulging as he swings an arm at her and—
misses.
Or does he?
Something rumbles, so loud it drowns out all the thoughts in Ochako’s head, and Kouta screams louder, some kind of wordless warning Ochako can’t quite parse out.
“I—” she starts, but then the ground drops from underneath her feet, or perhaps the sky falls on her head and all she can do is raise her hands above her head.
It feels like a useless gesture.
It is what saves her in the end.
Get up, Ochako, get up!
Her eyes burn with tears and her stomach roils with bile — Ochako has never carried anything as heavy as this. She hadn’t even known she could use her quirk like this: that she could rely on the things she had managed to touch to keep everything else away.
If it wasn’t for this week’s training… Ochako could never have done this. She would have been crushed, the way Muscular no doubt intended, and Kouta…
Ochako grunts, a feral dry kind of sound that rasps in her throat, where dust tastes like iron.
She heaves herself to her hands and her knees, her nails digging into the ground and scraping against stone. It hurts, but this pain is nothing compared to the weight surrounding her, pressing in close, threatening to overwhelm her.
This pain, tiny and jarring, is almost a comfort, and Ochako snarls wordlessly again, digging her fingers harder into the stone. Her nails break and her skin tears, but Ochako manages to sit up.
Get up! she repeats to herself, a mantra inside her own mind — with air so dust-filled here, she doesn’t dare speak out loud — and finally heaves herself on shaking legs.
The cocoon of floating rocks around her flutters and presses in closer, and Ochako’s heart kicks up a notch in her chest as she rasps out an hysterical laugh.
She’s always loved her quirk, but right now, it suddenly feels insufficient. What if it’s not enough? What if delaying the inevitable is all she can do?
Her knees shake harder at the thought, and Ochako grits her teeth and clenches her hands into tight fists. Her broken nails dig into her palms painfully, but it’s nothing falling down hasn’t done already.
If she strains her ears, Ochako thinks she can hear sound coming from outside, and her heart starts to race a little faster. How long has it been? It can’t have been long, if Ochako had really blacked out her quirk would have failed and she would have been crushed.
She would have died.
Ochako swallows past the lump in her throat, and raises her arms as high as they will go. The gesture pulls at her ribs and her back, but she grits her teeth and bears with it.
Kouta’s out there. He’s out there and in danger, and no one else is coming.
Ochako lays her hands flat against the stone above her head, the one that’s supporting however much of the cliffside Muscular’s hit had brought down on her head. Like this, it’s easier to feel the way her quirk holds it, and other fragments, up.
Come on, Ochako thinks, mouthing it silently as her eyes burn and her vision blurs. Come on!
The stone above her head rumbles and shifts, sending dust cascading around her. Some of it trickles down her back, but Ochako only grits her teeth harder, splaying her fingers wider.
It doesn’t really change anything, of course, but she likes to think it helps her connect to her quirk better.
Lighter, she thinks. I need all of this to be lighter.
It would be easier if she could… touch everything. She can’t, obviously — half of what’s on top of her is probably no more than dust, really, and even so, there’s still her floating barrier standing between what she can touch and what she needs to reach.
All Ochako really has to work with is what she managed to touch when she’d reacted before — but then, how had she managed to reach so much of it?
Perhaps…
Hope ignites like a fuse inside her chest, and Ochako chokes down a sob.
Please, she thinks, a half-thought prayer sent out to the cosmos, and she reaches down inside herself, grabbing at her quirk with mental fingers and pulling. Can she feel a difference — are her fingers tingling, perhaps? Is the weight she can feel straining her mind growing lighter?
Maybe, maybe.
A high-pitched scream filters in through the cracks — well, it’s now or never, Ochako thinks ruefully.
She takes a deep dust-filled breath, holds in her cough, and pushes.
And the sky moves with her.
Ochako bursts free in a shower of rock and dust. It feels all too easy to slap the first part of Muscular she can reach and send him up and up and up, even if putting so much strain on her quirk is making her dizzy and unsteady.
Her lips feel wet and Ochako tastes iron on her tongue, but when she takes a stumbling step forward, and then another, and finds Kouta there, shaken and scrapped up and crying but alive, she can’t fight back her grin.
“You okay?” she gasps out.
Kouta’s eyes are so wide they’re almost as black as the sky. “I— Why would you do that?” he sobs out. He stands frozen for a moment before running straight at her— and stopping right in front of her. “You… You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine,” Ochako counters, even though there isn’t a single part of her that isn’t aching at her to lie down and just… stop. “Come on, we shouldn’t stay here.”
Kouta sends a dubious glance at the gutted-out cliff face behind her and blanches, nodding. “Okay,” he says, shuffling closer.
Ochako takes a moment to wipe her face — her nose, it seems, appears to have stopped bleeding, though her nausea and dizziness have now merged with a pulsating headache.
She is still keeping Muscular hovering above them. She could send him higher — could make sure he never comes back down, but… That’s not the kind of person Ochako wants to be — even if thinking about him makes her angrier than she’s ever been before.
Besides, even if she wanted to, Ochako’s keeping hold of her quirk by the thinnest string right now — if she pushed harder, it would probably snap. The best she can probably hope for now is that when it does, they’ll be far enough away that Muscular’s fall won’t affect them, and that the fall will knock him out.
It feels like a lot to hope for but, well, Ochako just took on a mountain and won.
Laughter bubbles up in her throat, mad and hysterical, and Kouta shoots her an odd look when it slips out.
“What’s so funny?” he asks. He’s frowning, but his fists are all clenched up and his lips are trembling like he’s about to start crying again.
Ochako sobers up. “N-Nothing. Just… nerves. I can’t believe we’re okay.”
“You saved me.” Kouta’s eyes are still so wide as he stares at up her it feels unreal.
Ochako lets out a chuckle and ruffles his hair gently, dislodging some dust. “I did, didn’t I?”
She holds out a hand, and Kouta shoots her a disbelieving look.
“Wh— Oh, no, it’s safe.” This time, her laughter feels real. She wiggles her fingers. “You’re safe, I promise. I’m not going to float you anywhere — I mean, not unless you want to.” She adds a wink for the fun of it, and her lips stretch into a smile when Kouta seems to relax.
“Okay,” he says.
He takes her hand.