Chapter Text
Yachi Hitoka liked to think that she was fairly normal. She woke up at seven every morning, took the train to and from school every day, and got fairly good grades - although she was a perfectionist and always wanted them to be better. She hadn’t experienced anything in her fifteen years that was really out of the ordinary - she had a routine and she stuck to it without fail. And she was fine with that.
Before a certain Friday evening in late June, she never had any excuse to associate with the elusive Miyagi Duo, as they hadn’t crossed paths in the three months they’d been doing their job, and they had no reason to. Yachi never got into trouble; rather, she just avoided it. She always happened to be in the right place at the wrong time, and she was always surprised when the department store she’d been shopping at just three hours ago showed up on TV, usually completely disorganized and nothing like it had been when she was there.
Rather, she just admired them from afar, like probably every other teenager in the prefecture. While she didn’t think that they were perfect boyfriend material like everyone else did, she did think they were at least somewhat cute, and she definitely considered herself a fan. She spent most Friday nights glued to the television as soon as she got home, watching their exploits and adventures live from a city far away, as flashes of lightning consistently lit up the screen. She read reviews as soon as they came out, and was consistently disgruntled whenever she did, largely becoming a part of the Twitter-based “Midori Defense Squad” every weekend.
But on that certain Friday evening in late June, she realized, or rather found out, that afar was much closer than she thought it was.
She had just entered the train station, thoroughly tired after both school and practice, and was looking forward to just sitting on the train and reading for the half-hour journey. She’d just picked up a new book at the library yesterday and she hadn’t had the time to start it until now. She made her way to the turnstile, getting out her fare just like every other day. She fed it into the machine, the gate led her through, and she started walking over to the stairs leading down to the platform.
Before she reached it, however, her entire night flipped upside down at the sound of a huge crash from the doors of the station.
Whipping her head around to look back behind her, she realized two things at around the same time. One, she was the closest person to the station entrance beside the turnstile guard, despite already being a ways inside. Two, there was some robotic monster thing that had just shattered the glass doors and was now inside. Sirens started going off, but they didn’t seem to faze it one bit.
While people around her started screaming and running down to the platform, Yachi stayed right where she was, frozen in the commotion of the situation. As the robot started getting ever closer, she found that she was too scared to move. She’d never experienced anything like this in her life, and she didn’t think it could happen to someone like her. She didn’t think it could happen in Torono, period. It was just a small town no one really noticed, why would something like this happen?
Yachi finally got her legs to move just as the robot reached the turnstile. She didn’t know where to go; it was blocking the entrance, and her train wasn’t supposed to come for another ten minutes, so going down to the platform didn’t do her much good. She could just go down and take the first train out of here, but she wouldn’t know where she’d end up and who knew when that train would come?
After a split second of decision-making, she decided to try to run around the upper floor, right above the platform. It went in a circle around the stairs leading down to the platform, and it was lined with vending machines and ATMs. She thought that if the robot thing followed her, she could go back around to the entrance and try to run out. It sounded like the best idea at the time, so she started running, not looking back.
The robot cut her off at the pass, turning clockwise while she ran counterclockwise and staying right near the turnstile gate. She realized with complete horror that she was completely at its mercy, just waiting for it to kidnap her, or kill her, or worse. She stood there, frozen once again as she contemplated what exactly it could do.
The robot shot something out of its hand, which turned out to be a weird sort of net. The net wrapped itself around her, leaving her practically immobile on the ground. There wasn’t anyone else around.
Yachi couldn’t have predicted that she’d think her own name and the phrase “damsel in distress” in the same sentence, but here she was.
“Are we splitting up for this or what?” Someone’s voice cut through the silence. It sounded unsure.
“Sure.” The other voice that Yachi heard had a much greater presence. “There isn’t really another way to do this.”
“All right!”
“This doesn’t seem that hard.” The second person paused“Wait, there’s someone over there.”
“Huh?” The first person stopped for a second. “Ah, yeah. I’ll take care of that, you go beat the robot thing.”
“Fine.” The second person sighed. “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re going to give me a heart attack someday.”
The first person laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t!” There was the pitter-patter of rushed footsteps. “Good luck!”
It was only a few seconds before someone appeared in Yachi’s field of vision, dressed in all black with the exception of a bright green mask covering his eyes. He immediately crouched down by her side and stiffened for a split-second - Yachi didn’t know the reason why - before he started looking at the net that was keeping her from moving.
“Hey.” He smiled. “Are you all right?”
Yachi quickly nodded. This guy looked familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen him before.
“Um, okay.” He chuckled nervously, scratching the back of his head. “I’m not exactly great at this whole ‘saving the damsel in distress’ thing.”
“Uh, that’s okay!” Yachi gave a tiny smile.
“Well, my name’s Midori, and -” The boy sounded distracted, like he was taking in the situation around him. “How am I going to do this?”
“Do what?”
He scrunched his lips up into a tight frown for a second before he sighed. “Okay, so this is going to be a little weird, but what I’m going to do is get you out of here and then we’ll try to figure out how this net thing works. That sound okay?”
“Um, okay.” Yachi slowly nodded. This was so weird.
“All right.” Midori scooped her up off the ground like it was nothing, which wasn’t all that surprising, considering how light Yachi was. After a few seconds he started to rise up into the air, and before long, he was outright flying, shooting through the train station at an almost terrifying speed.
“I know this feels really weird,” Midori said, laughing to himself. “It’s happened to me a couple of times, too.”
Before long, they were almost all the way out of the train station, and the world was passing Yachi by in a blur. But just before the two of them got to the entrance, she realized exactly what had seemed so familiar about him.
“Y-Yamaguchi-kun?” Yachi asked, trying to keep her voice down simply out of curiosity.
He paused for a second, and Yachi could easily see that he was trying to hold his breath. “H-Hi, Yachi-san.”
Yachi knew that this was entirely the wrong time for something like this, but she couldn’t exactly control her inner fangirl at the moment. She screamed. It wasn’t really a scream, but it was loud enough to completely startle Yamaguchi enough so that he dropped her. Right before she hit the ground, she felt herself being pulled up, like she was attached to a bungee cord. After a few seconds of remaining in the air on her own, she softly floated down to the ground again. Yamaguchi dropped down next to her, just a few feet away from the doors.
“Um, sorry about that.” Yamaguchi chuckled nervously. “I didn’t mean to-”
“No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that, that was all my fault,” Yachi stammered.
“It’s okay, really.”
There was a loud crackling sound from behind them, back by the turnstile, and Yamaguchi grinned as he whipped his head around to see what all the commotion was. “Looks like we’re done here!”
“Yeah.” The other voice Yachi had heard earlier was back again, and she now had a sneaking suspicion as to who it belonged to.
Yachi sat up as much as she could while she was still tied up to see none other than Tsukishima jogging over towards the two of them, eyes wide once he saw Yachi. He looked considerably different than he did at school, but maybe that was just because of the uniform change.
“Hi!” Yachi smiled.
“...Hi.” Tsukishima narrowed his eyes. “I assume you know now.”
“Yeah, I guess I do.” Yachi giggled. “It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone.”
“Better you than some other people.”
There was an awkward silence before Yamaguchi broke it with a possibly-even-more-awkward chuckle. “I’ll get to work on getting this net thing off, Yachi-san!”
“Oh!” Yachi’s eyes brightened. “Thanks!”
A few minutes later, the three of them were standing at the top of the stairs, as Yachi tried desperately not to reach out and hug them on the spot.
“Um, it was nice meeting you two!” Yachi laughed. “That sounded weird, but you know what I mean. Thanks.”
“No problem.” Yamaguchi fiddled with something in the pocket of his jacket. “You’re just going to take the train home, right?”
“Yeah.” She turned around to go down the stairs before she looked back up at them. “If you need any help with
anything, just ask me.” She giggled. “I mean, I’m busy, but it would be great to be a part of this if you want me to.”
“Oh.” Yamaguchi looked over at Tsukishima for a second before they shared a shrug. “We’ll let you know. Thanks.”
“No problem!” Yachi waved before going all the way down the stairs to the platform.
As she got on the train, she realized that she was saying goodbye to her fairly normal life, but all in all, she didn’t really mind. This could be a lot of fun.