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Sero is good at a little bit of everything.
They grew up pretty lonely, with a single mum working full-time and maybe one or two friendly faces their age to chat with in school.
This left them with plenty of time to pick up hobbies. Inexpensive, of course, since even as a child Sero understood that their mum didn’t have the money to chuck at the newest thing. Especially not when Sero ran through hobbies like candy floss dissolving in water.
Knitting and crocheting. Watercolours and gymnastics. They picked things up with seemingly no rhyme or reason, seeing what looks interesting and spending a few days or weeks dedicating themselves to learning from HeroTube tutorial videos and blogs.
It wasn’t always successful, but when it was the skills stuck in the same way their tape would, clinging to some corner of their brain ready to be dusted off at a moment's notice and brought up in some conversation or task that would make people go ‘ooo’ for a second before turning away once more.
Getting their ADHD diagnosed made a lot of things make sense. The flitting between hobbies, the lower grades, the steady fall behind their classmates, even if they promised that they were putting in just as much effort.
Even if they were young enough that they didn’t really understand what it meant right away, when their mum explained it at home over a cup of warm tea it felt like someone had lifted a blindfold from over their eyes. They hadn’t even realised it was there, but the world made a little more sense with it gone.
Most of the behaviours improved quite a lot by the time they hit middle school. Their mum was taking shorter shifts where she could, and the teachers at school paid more attention when they were lagging behind. It felt pretty good to finally be back on the same sort of path as their peers.
The hobbies remained though, no matter what they tried; it was like mixing water and oil when they tried to get anything to stick. That wasn’t too bad though. They didn’t have a lot of friends because none of their hobbies matched theirs, or they did but only for a fraction of the time the others did.
Realising they were nonbinary didn’t help much with that either, nor did moving to Tokyo for their mum’s new job. Having to be introduced to a whole class of kids halfway through the school year wasn’t exactly conducive to strong friendships.
At least they got to have a hobby room! A room filled with shelves and cabinets and clearly labelled boxes in all sorts of bright colours and patterns from when Sero took up oil paints and stencils that one time.
Yuuei didn’t exactly start off great, all things considered. The few classmates Sero had managed to bond with almost immediately had their lives threatened at the USJ. Then again, later in the forest training camp, which definitely wasn’t stressful and didn’t make them want to curl up on a sofa with their mum hugging them tightly, not at all.
The dorms felt like both a blessing and a curse.
They got to share a building with the first actual friend group they’d had, well, basically ever. That was a plus! They also had to leave behind their mum and hobby room. That was less of a plus.
Another plus was the number of times their random collection of skills came in handy, making them one of the ‘go-to-guys’ when basically anything happened. Kaminari was another of them, because of course he was, but his skills were more niche, more intense and laser-focused in a way that Sero learnt from him was because they were his special interests.
It felt pretty nice to hear someone else talk so unashamedly about how their brain was different, how they were not quite the same. They felt less alone. Ashido and Kirishima both jumping in with their proclamations of ADHD made the whole thing a lot less stressful when Sero told them about themself.
Even Bakugou -not saying anything but obviously relating at least a bit- lurked around when they would rant in a circle of soft pillows and blankets, puzzles, random fidgets and various hobby bits strewn across someone’s floor.
It felt like they found their people.
They’d grown a lot over the years, through a journey of anxiety and loneliness and nick-nacks and little pinches of knowledge here and there.
They were just glad they didn’t have to keep going like that. That if they dropped a hobby the chances of someone else picking it up for themselves were high enough to chase away the guilt that came with wasted money and time and energy.
Life was going pretty well. For the first time in a while, Sero felt excited about what was going to come next.