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Jirou hated where she sat in class.
She had asked—no, begged Aizawa to please change the seating arrangement, but he’d shot her a concerned look and asked her for a reason, and she hadn’t had the confidence to tell him the reason was that Bakugou and Midoriya were driving her absolutely fucking nuts.
There was only so much! There was only so much pining a person could withstand. And Bakugou and Midoriya had hit the limit and then surpassed the limit several weeks ago.
But Jirou could not express this annoyance to Aizawa because how do you say to your teacher “Oh, I’m just pissed because Bakugou and Midoriya keep making moon eyes at each other in class and I’m sick of it.”
Well, technically Jirou couldn’t see Midoriya, since he sat behind her. And Bakugou was not one for making moon eyes, most of the time, but he did have a tendency to cast vaguely lost looks over his shoulder every once in a while, and he did often threaten Midoriya in a way that could very easily be mistaken for flirting, and, if it hadn’t been mentioned, all of this was driving her nuts.
How two people with so many good things going for themselves could circle each other like idiots for entire months was beyond her. The Kamino drama had come and gone and both of them were still completely oblivious, and Jirou was at her wits end. It was so bad she’d almost gone to Mina for help a couple times. She hadn’t, but she had considered it. More often than she’d ever admit.
This morning was no exception.
“Get out of my way,” Bakugou snapped at Midoriya, who was already sitting in his desk and therefore completely out of the way.
Jirou set about opening all her notebooks as loudly as possible to drown them out. It didn’t work—she had impeccable hearing.
“I’m not in the way,” Midoriya said, correctly.
Bakugou dropped into his desk with an irritated huff. “Shut up.”
Midoriya muttered something vaguely derogatory and Bakugou whipped around in his desk to glare at him. “What was that?” Bakugou snapped.
“You need hearing aids,” Midoriya said.
“I do not!”
“You do.”
“I do not!”
“Your mom says so,” Midoriya said, leaning forward to examine Bakugou’s ears. Bakugou slapped both hands over his ears before he could get very far. “Let me see.”
“There’s nothing to fucking see,” Bakugou snapped.
“Then there shouldn’t be any harm in me looking,” Midoriya shot back. “Let me see.”
“No.”
Midoriya started attempting to pry Bakugou’s hands away from his ears.
Jirou was going to kill somebody. Two somebodies, if she could manage it, and then she was going to get expelled from school and sent to prison. She’d get out early on good behavior and use her new prison connections to join a gang. This gang would be made only of aroace people, like herself, and in this gang she would not ever have to experience this hell again.
Aizawa walked in, thank God, and started class.
Peace reigned over the classroom for precisely thirty minutes, and then Bakugou and Midoriya started passing notes.
Jirou stared at the ceiling tiles above her head and prayed their rat of a principal would erupt from them and put her out of her misery. She prayed that the fire alarms would go off. She prayed that there was asbestos in the ceiling and they would all come down sick and be free from school for a week.
Only one of those prayers was answered, and only in part.
Midoriya got sick.
This, shockingly, did not ease her misery at all. In fact, it might have made it worse, because now she had to deal with a pining, worried, and emotionally repressed Bakugou 24/7. Without Midoriya to temper him down, Bakugou was like a re-exploding bomb. The type of bomb where, every time it went off, it reset. And also the type of bomb with a very short fuse. Which, obviously, meant he was more unpleasant to be around than usual.
The worst of it was when they were in their new dorms. Bakugou stormed around the place yelling at people to be quiet, and then yelling at them more when they asked why. Jirou knew why, even if Bakugou clearly didn’t. It was because he was worried about Midoriya, and he wanted everything to be quiet for him. When Todoroki, whose turn it was to make food, started cooking, Bakugou fully booted him out of the kitchen, telling him he’d just mess everything up. He then made an elaborate meal consisting of many courses, and brought a good quarter of it upstairs to Midoriya, who definitely could not eat that much, leaving the rest of the class to fend for themselves.
Class 1-A had always been resourceful. They took the food over to the table without any further need for assistance.
“What’s up with Bakugou today?” Kaminari asked, reaching across the table for the soy sauce. “He’s being more prickly than usual.”
“It’s because Midoriya is sick,” Kirishima said.
“Oh, really? Why’s he mad about that?”
A glimmer of hope came to life in Jirou’s heart. Maybe she wasn’t as alone in her suffering as she’d thought initially. Maybe her classmates saw the same things she did and were equally pained by it, and maybe at long last she would be able to share her opinions on this topic in full. She needed to have a good rant.
“I think they’re half-siblings,” Todoroki said.
Jirou choked on a noodle. Yaomomo gave her a tentative pat on the back, but she was beyond help. “You what? ” she spluttered at Todoroki. She broke down into another coughing fit before shouting, “They look nothing alike!”
Although clearly unsettled by Jirou’s outburst (Jirou, who never raised her voice for anything). Satou put in, “Yeah, man, I don’t know about that.
Todoroki’s head drifted slightly to the side. “We’ve never met their parents, though.”
“You’ve never met my parents either,” Yaomomo pointed out.
“Are you related to them too?”
Jirou wanted to cry. She really, really wanted to cry. Luckily, at the very moment she felt herself start to slip, Bakugou returned.
She had never been so pleased to see the guy in her entire life.
“Bakugou,” she rasped, “We have a question.”
She relapsed into yet another fit of coughing and reached for her water to soothe her throat. Yaomomo took the questioning responsibilities for her. “Are you related to Midoriya?” she asked. From her tone it was obvious she doubted it, and Bakugou’s expression alone was enough that it was immediately clear he was both insulted and taken aback by the question.
“What? No. It’s not like that.”
“But it is like something,” Todoroki said sagely.
Jirou choked on her water and excused herself from the table before this could get any worse.
Midoriya recovered quickly from his sickness. He was always doing that—recovering from stuff. One would think that on one of these occasions he’d learn to take preventative steps, but he was evidently too focused on dodging around his feelings for Bakugou to think about such things.
It was nice having him around the common spaces again, to a certain degree, if only because his presence around the dorms meant Bakugou chilled out again.
Half the class was in the common room studying when Midoriya and Bakugou started fighting again. Jirou resolved to tune it out this time, but Mina interrupted before it could get very far. “So, you two like each other, right?” She pointed between Midoriya and Bakugou.
Jirou’s ears perked up—literally, the jacks curling upward in excitement. Was this it? The end of her torment?
“Me?” Bakugou screeched. “Him?”
“Yeah, no,” Midoriya said over the sound of Bakugou’s disgusted retching noises. “We’ve just known each other a long time.”
“Right,” Mina said. She smiled knowingly. “Right.”
“No, seriously,” Midoriya said.
The sad part was he was being completely, one hundred percent serious. He truly believed there was nothing between him and Bakugou. That was the sad part. The other sad part was that Jirou still sat next to the two of them in class.
“What are you doing?” Midoriya hissed at Bakugou in the middle of English when Bakugou turned around without prompting and stole Midoriya’s notebook right off his desk.
Jirou dropped her head down on her desk with a loud thump. Present Mic didn’t seem to notice. The wood was cool on her forehead.
“It’s mine now,” Bakugou told Midoriya.
Dear Lord, Jirou began, I am not Christian nor have I ever been nor will I ever be, but if you please save me from this eternal torment, I will consider committing myself to a nunnery.
Nunneries seemed cool, she reasoned. There were nuns in them. And they were Bakugou-and-Midoriya free, which was her main reason for wanting to go. And they were quiet.
“Give me that back,” Midoriya whispered.
“No.”
“Kacchan!”
It was like watching toddlers, that’s what it was. Like watching two idiot toddlers.
Jirou turned her head away from the two of them and locked eyes with Mina, who evidently was watching the same interaction; although, in contrast to Jirou, Mina looked absolutely ecstatic. The difference was that Mina didn’t have to sit next to the two of them. She had no idea.
The next time Jirou saw Aizawa, she asked hopefully, “Can I trade seats with Mina-san?”
He gave her a disgusted look. “Ashido-san and Hagakure-san can’t sit anywhere near each other.”
Which was a valid point, but then what on earth were Bakugou and Midoriya doing in adjacent seats?
Jirou considered asking to swap with Yaomomo, and then remembered Mineta, and then decided maybe she should just keep her mouth shut tight.
“I have a plan,” Mina said, and thank goodness she’d decided to step in, because Jirou had started crafting complex murder plans in her head during class and one of these days Aizawa was going to notice that her notebooks contained several graphic doodles. On the bright side, this newfound obsession she had with murder meant that she was getting very good at figuring out villain motivations and methods in their practical heroics course.
“It’s foolproof,” Mina said, and Jirou started to doubt her previous confidence in Mina’s abilities.
“Okay, what is it?”
“We lock them into a room together,” Mina said, “preferably a very small room, and—”
“You watch too many romance movies.”
“It’s foolproof, Kyoka-san.”
Jirou left Mina alone to plot and plan for herself. She wanted nothing to do with all that. She wanted nothing to do with anything. She wanted to quit going to school at UA and move to America, on one of the coasts, so that she could sit on the beach and watch the seagulls all day. Seagulls didn’t dance around each other for months before hooking up. Seagulls were totally reasonable. And Jirou was tired.
Mina attempted several “foolproof” plans. Locking them in a room together (the room would never be the same), messages from a secret admirer (“I know this was you, Raccoon Eyes, what the fuck?”), getting them into detention together (sadly, she landed herself in detention too, which “ruined the mood”). Whenever someone had to go get groceries, Mina sent Midoriya and Bakugou in their stead—or she did up until Aizawa banned Midoriya from going to get groceries, since every time he left, he got attacked.
What did it, finally, was so stupid it almost had Jirou packing her things and moving to Antarctica out of protest.
It wasn’t Mina—not even Mina could cook up something this idiotic.
What happened was Todoroki, being Todoroki, lit something on fire in the kitchen, and Midoriya, being Midoriya, leapt in to save him without thinking first that there was something on fire that needed to be put out as soon as possible, or that Todoroki was fireproof and didn't need saving. So Midoriya (being Midoriya) got lit on fire .
Like a fucking dumbass.
And before he could stop drop and roll or whatever, Bakugou (being Bakugou) tackled him.
Jirou had left before the rest of it. She didn’t want to see. She didn’t want to hear. She didn’t want to know.
But the next time Bakugou and Midoriya came to class, they came together, and they were holding hands. And in that moment, Jirou realized how naive she had been. Very, very naive. The most naive.
They were together. They were holding hands.
And why had she thought that them getting together would be the end of all the nonsense and shit she had to put up with every day, sitting next to the two of them? Where had she gotten that clearly stupid notion into her head?
They sat down in their desks. Midoriya murmured something to Bakugou. Bakugou twisted around in his desk, slammed his hands down on Midoriya’s desk with those little popping sounds his quirk made, and yelled, “Hah?”
“I said,” Midoriya said calmly, “your shirt is still untucked.”
“Do I look like I give two flying shits? Huh?”
“Well, maybe I give two flying shits,” Midoriya pointed out. “Maybe because you like me and care about me, you should consider my needs too.”
“Why the fuck would I do that?”
Jirou slammed her head down on her desk. “Would both of you,” she groaned into the cool wood, “please shut up.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” Bakugou yelled, at the same time that Midoriya said, “Oh, sorry Jirou-san!”
Silence settled over the classroom for two blissful seconds.
And then, from all the way across the room, Mina said, “This is so much better than I ever could have dreamed.”
And chaos erupted again.