Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

wabi-sabi (n.)

1. worldview; aesthetic.
2. muted beauty found in the imperfect, the impermanent and the incomplete.
3. representative of a longing for wisdom, for genuineness, for shared history.

✯

 JULY

Momo is eighteen when she falls in love with art theory.

She’d taken her first art course halfway into freshman year, an elective she’d chosen with Shouto in hopes that their combined background in traditional lessons would come in handy and save them from unfortunate work pile-up. Dr. Uwabami’s Ph.D had been freshly earned, but it was by no means undeserved—she took her job seriously, her celebrity status among the arts department no surprise, and she took to the field of traditional Japanese aesthetics with even more zeal. She’d been heavily fixated on wabi-sabi, on the relationship art had with beauty of the incomplete and impermanent kind, and she had spent weeks talking about pottery and zen gardens and flower arrangement and how all of it, somehow, related back to the imperfection of all things.

None of it, in retrospect, had been anything Momo was unfamiliar with; she’d grown up well-versed in ikebana and tea ceremonies, in the syncretic nature of Japanese worldviews—but Dr. Uwabami had broken wabi-sabi down to one idea: that nothing lasts, nothing is ever complete, and nothing is perfect, but that it was beautiful all the same. It had been an out-of-place perspective for Momo, for someone that had gone into university studying math, assured in its certainty and perfection and significance to all things, but she’d gone home with stars in her eyes and a fascination she hadn’t been able to curb, and she’d ended that school year with mathematics and art conjoined under her belt.

Art is fascinating within the context of mathematics, and having those two things together had settled her, had established balance she hadn’t realized she needed within the context of school.

Wandering around the Todorokis’ home now, she thinks of wabi-sabi.

She’s not sure what the occasion is behind the gathering; Momo knows it’s not within Todoroki Enji’s whims to throw things like this without justifiable reason, the same way it isn’t within his son’s, but it doesn’t change the fact that the celebration is a little too grandiose beneath the understated facade of the Todorokis’ traditional home. It’s quiet—the polite, light-hearted chatter getting increasingly muted as Momo excuses herself from her parents—but the faux simplicity doesn’t take her attention away from the expensive wine and loaded buffet table standing at the root of it all.

The Todorokis’ zen garden sits serenely in the middle of the green, undisturbed even as waiters from the hired catering team rush across the stone pathways around it. Momo knows for a fact that it’s carefully and consistently maintained—which, she thinks, is ironic for something meant to be artistically flawed. She doesn’t understand the concept of traditional aesthetics from an artist’s mind, could understand its structure only in the way she understands most things—mathematically, scientifically, logically—but she’s sure that the design of the Todoroki family home has less to do with its patriarch’s appreciation for art theory and more with his penchant for keeping up appearances.

Ironic, then, that wabi-sabi—a world-view so wholly centered on the idea of imperfection—would be found in a house with obsession and perfection so unabashedly rooted in its walls. Momo’s house is no different, but this sort of situation is more clearly something Shouto would not and did not take nicely to, if only because something so shamelessly convoluted has his father’s name and political campaign written all over it.

Sure enough, Momo spots him standing by the koi pond alone, hands folded and hidden within the dark folds of his summer kimono.

He looks deep in thought, even from this far away, eyebrows not so much furrowed as they are kept together in concentration, and Momo hesitates, doubling back out of practiced courtesy—only to knock into someone behind her.

There’s a squeak, and then a horrible sound: something—a lot of things—clattering to the floor, one by one. The back hall is empty save for a pair of guests passing by from the bathroom, but Momo winces anyway, averting her eyes from their surprised stares as she takes in the packs of table napkins and disposable utensils having scattered around her in a perfect circle. The girl she’d knocked into moves fast though, frantic, and Momo had barely taken in the bubblegum pink hair and the catering team uniform before the girl’s back on her feet. Her nametag reads Ashido Mina. ”I-I’m sorry about that, I—"

"It’s no problem," Momo tries to say as kindly as she can, expression wrinkling as Ashido visibly struggles with the packs she’d piled up in her own arms, wobbly and unsteady. "Do you—do you need help with those?"

"I’m totally good!" Ashido beams, looking far happier than someone who’d just dropped a set of utensils and was barely able to gather them back together. "We’re just in a bit of a rush, is all—"

"Oh, yes—of course." Momo moves to let Ashido through, but the packs fall back to the floor, starting from the top of the pile and toppling over in its entirety before Ashido can tighten her grip on them. They both watch as it all re-scatters, and they sigh in tandem.

When Momo bends over to pick them up this time, she asks, "Where do you want me to bring these?"

Ashido, for a moment, looks like she’s going to reject the offer again, but she changes her mind, straightening with an armful of packaged plastic forks. "The kitchen," she says, in a more subdued version of her joyful tone, sheepish. "Um—this way?"

Momo doesn’t need directions; she’d grown up in this house, one way or another, though maybe not in the exact same regard Shouto had, whose childhood had been fraught with enough hostility for him never to have been one to talk of this house as his home. As such, she thought of it the way he did—a house, nothing more and nothing less—a place she’d been to often enough with her family that she’s no stranger to the way the panelled walls awkwardly turn a corner on the way to the kitchen, and the way it abruptly opens up to make space for the multitude of wide windows and traditional dark brown counter spaces.

She’s never seen it like this, though: crowded and busy and—

"Is that steam?" Momo says when it registers, a bit too loudly in her surprise. "Is something burning?"

Everyone in the room is quick to freeze in place. There’s a split second where even Momo freezes, but the room snaps back into action just as quickly, a familiar face popping into Momo’s vision as a girl with uneven bangs and earphones plugged in runs to the oven muttering, "The cheesecake, the cheesecake, the cheesecake."

Kendou Itsuka is the last person Momo had been expecting to see tonight, much less donning a placating smile and holding a platter of hamachi. The smile wavers visibly when she takes in the plastic utensils. "Ashido," she says, somehow managing to sound both wronged and apologetic. "Ashido, what are these?"

"You asked for—" There’s a pause. "For disposable chopsticks."

Momo had shared Dr. Uwabami’s course with Kendou; they didn’t know each other well, had known each other in passing and through a common interest in interning for their professor—and that makes Momo’s most vivid memory of Kendou one of her face when Dr. Uwabami had politely told them both she wasn’t currently looking for research assistants.

It’s the same look she has on her face now: dejected but nevertheless taking the news in stride.

"Kaminari," she calls behind her, without turning. "Could you go with Ojiro back to the van, please? We need chopsticks."

"I—" Momo starts, but Kendou’s smile looks pained, and she lets the packs be taken out of her arms and dropped onto a nearby countertop while two male members of the catering team disappear back into the hall. Momo watches them go, and averts her eyes as Kendou sends Ashido off somewhere else. "I could have gone with Ashido-san."

"They’re perfectly capable of taking care of themselves," Kendou tells her, but even she doesn’t sound too confident. She offers up the platter again. "I’m really sorry for the inconvenience."

"I didn’t mind, really, it’s—" Momo frowns around the kitchen. The girl with the earphones is now cutting the cheesecake into surprisingly even slices, the oven door open behind her. "You look like you could use the help," she adds quietly.

"Yeah, we—" Kendou takes a second to search for words, but she doesn’t seem to find any. "We’re a bit short-staffed. We weren’t expecting to be called in today for a job, so we’re kinda just having to make do as we go along—which is no excuse, honestly, why am I telling you this—are you—a guest? Or—"

Momo thinks of Shouto—Shouto who had been staring intently at the koi pond—and settles for, "A family friend, you could say."

Kendou opens her mouth to reply—but there’s a loud clang behind them, and they both turn to see Ashido on the floor, a tray lying face-down parallel to her lap. Instead of replying to Momo, Kendou says, "Were those the meatballs?"

Ashido grins nervously. "Sorry?"

"Yaoyorozu," Kendou says carefully, in the same voice she used when she’d asked questions in lectures. "Have you made cheese puffs before?"

For someone majoring in health sciences, Shouto’s evening has involved a little too much politics and art theory.

Politics should be no surprise—expecting to be free of it is no different from asking to be free of the connotations that come with his own last name, and nothing in life ever comes so easily and freely.  He’d grown up as much a fixture in political circles as his father is: the trophy son, groomed into perfection, into being worthy of pride and high regard the way his siblings had been deemed not. His accomplishments have always been for the media to report and for political associates to gush at, and they have, at some point, also been there to cover up cracks within his family’s behind the scenes situation. His father seems to think that was something Shouto should be proud of, that being different from the rest of his family should be something treasured about himself instead of rejected the way Shouto has always tried to, but more than a decade of being suffocated by expectations that were less familial and more superficial has at the very least trained Shouto to hold anything involving politics in whatever emotion lies between disdain and contempt.

Contempt that is, in the fullest capacity Shouto can muster, always saved for his father.

The problem with defining his own self by his spite for his father is that it feels like a funhouse mirror—distorted images reflecting his face back at him, a face equally unsure of where the need to displease his father ends and where his own personal, innocent wants begin. His childhood had been that: he’d shown up to traditional lessons with kids from other well-to-do families, but made sure to minimize socializing, no matter how badly that reflected on his father. His high school years had been that: he’d attended galas and casual meetings with his father by the time he turned fourteen, but he’d always excused himself at the nearest opportunity to find Momo. University is like that now, too: his father had wanted him to major in something prolific, and while he did, Shouto made sure not to touch a single class that could in any way be applied to politics.

Shouto’s good at that, if nothing else; while his father’s good at running and hiding—sending Shouto’s brothers abroad, admitting Shouto’s mother to a hospital—Shouto’s good at compromising, escaping his father’s clutches by the barest minimum, though never being free from it. He’s resourceful, in that sense, which is ironic, he thinks, for someone so seemingly privileged on the surface.

He’s always thought of his house in easily the same way: its zen gardens the picture of privilege, but its dark wooden walls prison bars.

It’s cruel juxtaposition, and with Dr. Uwabami’s voice disappointedly clucking wabi-sabi is about simplicity and modesty in the back of his head, Shouto’s kimono feels heavy around his body.

"What has the zen garden done to offend you?"

Shouto blinks, looking up to come face-to-face with Yaoyorozu Momo’s stare. Her hair is pulled back away from her face tonight, away from the collar of her kimono, and when she blinks back at him, it leaves her curiosity bare and palpable on her face.

"I was enjoying the view," he says, carefully scooting over as she gathers her clothes and sits gingerly beside him. "Hello. Your family came?"

"Of course. Your kimono looks nice," Momo says, equally careful as she appraises the dark fabric of Shouto’s summer kimono. She sounds out of breath, somehow, but he doesn’t point it out. "You’ve been here quite a while."

The party is almost over; the last of the guests are trickling out, Momo’s family included, it seems, because she waves her phone screen at him in question, wondering whether she should text the taxi service for a ride back to their apartment building. He nods.

"I saw you—earlier." Behind Momo, the bamboo tilts in place under the weight of the water. She looks different, always, in this sort of setting, even with a phone in hand; then again, she’s always been more at home in her family’s tradition than Shouto had ever been in his. "I thought it might have been rude to disturb you."

He stares at her, and she stares back when she sends the message, the bamboo finally giving way and smacking noisily against the rock on the other side.

Momo caves in first, smiling around a stifled laugh. "We sound like we don’t live together," she says, putting her hands together on her lap as her phone disappears back somewhere in her kimono. "Things like this do that to you, I suppose. You looked really serious there, appreciating the view. Will you be joining my faculty soon?"

"Of course not." Momo’s transition from sole mathematics had been slow but steady—it started with math theory classes, then traditional design and art classes, until she eventually found a compromise for her own contradictory gifts and settled into a traditional architecture program that combined math, science and design. Momo had always been brilliant, for as long as Shouto has known her, since they’ve both been kids putting tea leaves in a pot, and he means it with his own brand of fondness when he says, "Knowing how everything works and creating beautiful things with that knowledge has always been your thing, not mine."

Momo blinks, surprised—hearing things like that from him still takes her aback, he can tell, even years after they’d established mutual respect on both sides of their then budding friendship. He waits patiently as she blinks her way back to regaining her composure. When she does, she smiles, with more fondness than Shouto can muster into his own smiles on a good day. "What were you really thinking about?"

"Wabi-sabi," Shouto says, the syllables awkward on his tongue. He’d been enrolled in traditional classes for most of his childhood, one fact shared with Momo among many, but while Momo had been genuinely passionate about tea ceremonies and ikebana, Shouto had been hard-pressed to find anything he liked past Japanese poetry. Poetry had always been his mother’s, and everything else his father’s, and though it’s Dr. Uwabami that he hears in his head when he pronounces wa-bi-sa-bi, the idea of zen gardens and bonsai still makes him think of his father and the stifling quiet in his own traditional home. Quiet that had been there even during the party, and quiet that grows steadily now, a reminder of why he’d been so eager to leave home when the chance became available. "I was thinking about that art class."

"Wabi-sabi," Momo murmurs. It sounds right, in her voice, like an agreement. He doesn’t need her to clarify to suspect she must have been thinking similarly. "Any particular reason?"

"Isn’t it ironic?" Shouto raises a hand as a general gesture at the flurry dying down around them. "Wabi-sabi is underplayed and quiet, and this—"

Momo shakes her head. "A Japanese garden is hardly the place to be throwing something so garish, is it?"

"No," Shouto agrees quietly. "Kind of defeats the purpose."

"You’re awfully philosophical tonight," Momo says, and her voice creeps easily towards concern when she tilts her head at him. "Did something happen?"

"Other than the fact that I don’t want to be here? No," Shouto says shortly. He smooths out the fabric on his lap. "Why did you really refrain from approaching me earlier?"

"I ran into some trouble," Momo says. "I helped out with the catering team."

"The catering team?" Shouto had woken up to his sister’s frazzled call this morning, Fuyumi getting increasingly panicked in between appeals for him to come home that evening because I don’t know what to do, this is so sudden and Dad wants you here. He’d seen the bright catering agency flyer on the apartment building’s bulletin board the day before when he’d gotten the mail, and his sister hadn’t questioned it at all when he’d sent her the contact details. "What did they need help with?"

Momo hesitates for the briefest of moments. "Cooking."

"Cooking," Shouto repeats blankly.

"Don’t give me that look." Momo frowns down at her own lap. "Do you remember Kendou-san from that art class you took with me? She was with them, she looked like she needed help, and you know I can’t—"

"Refuse things like that," Shouto finishes, fighting back a small smirk. "Of course. It’s like high school all over again, inviting everyone over to your place to study for finals."

"Including you," Momo points out.

"Including me," Shouto relents, pointedly ignoring the fact that he’d never actually shown up to group study sessions. "Was it only just now that they let you go?"

"Don’t make it sound like they arrested me," Momo says, slightly scandalized. "It was fun."

"Fun," Shouto repeats again, this time incredulously. "Why did they even need you to—"

"Shouto?"

His sister’s frown clears when both he and Momo look up at her, her glasses slightly askew and hair strands slipping out of her ponytail as she hovers by the wall. "He wants—he wants to see you."

She doesn’t specify, and Shouto doesn’t need her to.

"I mean, you don’t have to," Fuyumi says. Her white dress shirt is tucked in, pristine if not for the slight wrinkle around the cuffs as she fiddles with the buttons. "I can tell him you left already, if you want, I—" She breaks off, waves in the general direction of their father’s office. "All of this is so impromptu, I know, so there’s kind of—"

"It’s fine," Shouto cuts in, standing and ignoring Momo and Fuyumi’s eyes on him. "I understand."

Fuyumi blinks at him, eyes blown wide in surprise. His sister has a nervous disposition on any given day, a personality trait not helped by the nature of their family and the hereditary involvement with politics and the media, and it shows on the little things—like how she presses her hands together in front of her now, looking unsure if she should let him handle this.

Shouto makes the decision for her. "Where is he?"

"H-His office," she says, the reply delayed in her contemplation. "Shouto, you don’t have to—"

"I just need to pretend to give a shit for five minutes, right?" he says, already turning away. "I can do that much."

Shouto doesn’t knock, elbowing the door open to come face-to-face with his father’s looming figure behind the desk. He’d half-expected for people to be there, had half-hoped to see his father stumble through nervous laughter and shallow apologies for Shouto’s supposed rebellion, but they’re alone in the office as Shouto kicks the door closed behind him.

"I wasn’t expecting you to come today," his father says, voice too gravelly for someone who’s done nothing but talk all evening.

"I came because my sister asked," Shouto says, pushing the emphasis past his teeth. His family, not his father’s; he doesn’t think Todoroki Enji has ever regarded family the way it was meant to be. The thought rankles him, and he shoves his clenched fists into the opposite sleeves of his kimono. "I didn’t come for you to waste my time—"

"Your mother was released from the hospital today," his father interrupts, tone entirely too conversational. Shouto bites down on his tongue. "I’m having her moved to an apartment in the west end of Musutafu, somewhere quieter. Peaceful. Nice area, I heard." When he doesn’t get an immediate reply, his father asks, the way someone else would have said how are you? "Will you finally stop acting out now?"

Shouto grits his teeth—grits his teeth because his father never learns, never learns to stop referring to his wife like a chess piece, never learns that Shouto’s defiance isn’t a rebellious phase with an expiration date, never learns to stop sugar-coating words for a son he’d raised to be able to decipher them. "Send me the address."

"And you’ll what? Visit her?" His father raises an eyebrow, and Shouto, for an incoherent moment, wants to punch him. "What would you achieve by that?"

"It’s none of your business what I do," Shouto bites out. His father doesn’t look like he believes him. "If you’re worried about me telling the media—clearly you don’t know me well."

His father’s face twitches, in the way it does when frustration’s gaining on his desperate grasp on his composure. "You’ve got to stop this at some point, Shouto. Abandon this childish whining—"

"I’ve been whining about the press since I could talk. Don’t waste your time expecting that to change." Shouto turns away, hand already on the door knob. He thinks he hears his father’s sharp intake of breath at the blatant show of disrespect; maybe in frustration, maybe in exasperation, maybe in anger. When he pushes the door open, it hits the opposite side, sends the frames balanced on one of the nearest shelves wobbling precariously. "Call it acting out, but I don’t give a shit about feeding the flesh-eating piranhas you like to keep in a filtered aquarium. I want them nowhere near my mother, and I want you nowhere near her."

Shouto slams the door behind him.

The look on Fuyumi’s face tells him they’d been talking loud enough for her to hear, but she doesn’t say anything as she sends him out the front door to Momo, who’s waiting outside by the idling taxi.

Momo doesn’t ask, either, and Shouto stares out the window the entire ride home.

Momo likes lists.

It’s less about remembering and more about sorting things out; lists put them all in one place, in neat categories and tagged folders that she can keep somewhere—an app on her phone, on a corkboard by her desk, in a specific space in her brain. Having similar things together makes them easier to find and eventually peruse, the same way a library is easier to navigate when it’s organized the way it should be, and being easy to examine makes questions easier to answer and problems easier to solve.

Her experience with the catering team last week isn’t a problem, per se, but it’s proven itself in the last few days as a question that needed to be thought about. The night at the Todorokis’ house is blurry at best, days later, but she does remember Kendou, simultaneously composed and resigned in that distinct way of hers, thanking her with a platter of sweetened mochi.

"You know, Yaoyorozu," she’d said, laughing a little as Momo had tried to smoothen out creases in her kimono before she went back out to go find Shouto. "I knew you were some sort of gifted genius, but I didn’t think I’d ever be standing here and saying you have a bright future in catering. " She’d paused, watching Ashido pile up foil trays with a concentration that hints at justifiable reason to be concerned. Then she’d smiled kindly at Momo. "That doesn’t mean much, though, it’s stress upon stress upon stress. But tell me if you need a little chaos in your life and I’ll have a job all yours, okay?"

It was a joke, probably, now that Momo thinks about it, but it is nonetheless a joke that she’s hard-pressed to forget, especially when she examines her summer and finds nothing occupying the long weeks she has until school starts back up for the next term. A part of her knows she’s free to go home, but a bigger part is more aware of the fact that Shouto would never do that, would rather stay in an abandoned warehouse than willingly go back to his family’s house at this point—and Momo can’t leave him alone, not when Shouto had killed two of their plants and especially not when he’d once boiled away all the water he’d needed to cook.

As it is, the idea of trying out a part-time job, albeit unorthodox for her first time, is gaining in appeal.

Momo narrows it all down to three advantages:

1. It’s an easy way to gain workplace experience; it’s a guaranteed job that will give her the justified excuse to put key words like teamwork and good under pressure and multi-tasking on her resume. Her parents are also fond of things like this—of visiting the civic centre as a family when her father had run for mayor, of her mother advertising her four-year long period as a member of the fast-food restaurant scene. Getting their approval on something like this isn’t a question, as it usually isn’t with most of Momo’s choices, and knowing that rounds out this particular pro.
2. There’s logic, somehow, to catering—a routine—and Momo likes routines as much as she likes lists. There’s a rhythm to the task that had been assigned to her: follow Kendou’s instructions to the tee, lay out the food in neat rows on a tray, send it over for one of the waiters to bring out to the buffet table. It’s like solving a formula on a worksheet, her brain working almost intuitively, and she feels a little satisfied being part of a machine that works with well-oiled gears the way the catering team, at the end of the day, ultimately had. It’s simultaneously stepping out of her comfort zone and staying within her structural boundaries, and she doesn’t think she’ll find an entry level job who can promise the same.
3. As much as there is routine, catering isn’t dull. Calling it careless would be an understatement, but calling it chaos would be an exaggeration—she thinks of it as something more along the lines of organized chaos, a force of nature to be reckoned with but a force of nature that nonetheless offers structure when someone cares to look for it. It’s like mathematic theory, in that sense, like wabi-sabi in its under-the-surface perfection, and those two things have appealed to Momo more than anything else has. It seems wrong, then, to deny that catering appeals to her in the same vein.

She compiles all of this into a mental rolodex before she confronts Shouto about it.

"I was thinking about getting a part-time job."

Shouto, to his credit, only looks vaguely alarmed—or maybe he's just surprised; Momo still isn't able to tell what's enough cause for alarm when it comes to him.

In his defense, it isn’t fair for her to be broaching this issue minutes before he leaves to visit his mother’s new apartment.

She waits patiently as he fills up a mug with coffee.

"Why?" Shouto eventually says, calm and unperturbed now as a dry summer day. "Is there something going on?"

"No?" Momo replies slowly, before his implication registers. "Oh. No, nothing like that at all. It's fine—I'm fine. I'm not—"

"Disowned?" Shouto guesses, in the voice of someone who has likely fantasized about it more than he's worried about it. "I’m not attempting to discourage it. I just want to understand why. It's so sudden."

"It is," Momo agrees quietly. "I’ve never had a job before."

"Is that why?"

Shouto, for all that he claims not to care about the more distant things in life, has a habit of breaking things down—information into simpler facts, his own feelings into a step-by-step guide, other people's decisions into a set of reasons. It's a habit that stems from being raised within a structural system, and while Momo has that in common with him, she'd at least regularly gotten answers to curiosity after curiosity while Shouto had been left without answers to most of his childhood why's. Their backgrounds are similar on the surface, but there’s something different somewhere behind that, because it shows in the way they view things: clinical at first glance, but they both ultimately deviate from it—Momo with an attraction to the logical, and Shouto with a penchant for the straightforward.

Case in point: Momo likes lists, and Shouto likes candid honesty. So she says, like she had last week, "I had fun."

"I see." This time, it triggers something short of a smile out of Shouto, his eyes sharp over the rim of his mug. "Well, you don’t need my permission for it, do you? Just like you don’t need to give me a list of rational reasons. If you want to do it, I don’t see why not."

"That’s true, but—" Momo frowns, hand tightening around the phone in her hand. She’d been hoping, a little, that he’ll have more to say about it; she values Shouto’s opinions, more than she sometimes regards her own and more than he probably knows, and she’d been relying on the fact that he might have some cons to present to discourage her. He doesn’t offer any, though, and she realizes she hadn’t thought it this far. "So I should do it?"

Shouto looks confused. "Yes? If you really want to—"

"What if it doesn’t work out?" Momo blurts out. It’s a habit from high school she’s never been able to grow out of, from a time when Shouto had been the one person to hold confidence where she’d lacked it. It’s been years since, and she’d gotten to know Shouto enough to know he isn’t always confident, not in the way she’d thought he was, and that while Shouto has perfected some aspects of life, he was yet to figure out others; it doesn’t change the fact, however, that she often still feels compelled to search for his reassurance.

He knows that, too, maybe, because he puts down his mug on the sink and peers at her. "Momo, you’re—" he begins, in the voice he only uses when he’s about to point out something she’d failed to see. Momo readies her mental list just in case, but all he says is, "Is there any way you can just give it another trial run?"

She blinks at him. "That’s—a possibility I hadn’t considered."

Shouto looks at her strangely at that, curious. They favor each other in that expression, a curiosity they can only recognize in each other because they’ve seen it reflected back at them in the mirror. "I’m going," he says abruptly.

Momo nods, clutching the phone against her chest. "Yeah. I’ll lock the door behind you."

Shouto stops at the entryway to look back at her, their front door half-open. He’s still looking at her curiously, as if trying to figure something out but missing the last puzzle piece he needs for it. His smile is tight and small, but Momo knows to spot it all the same. "You’ll be fine, you know? You always are. Go for it, if you really want to."

He doesn’t give her time to answer, closing the door behind him with a soft click.

✯

Momo hadn’t been expecting the bus to drop her off in a residential neighborhood.

Kendou hadn’t sounded surprised at all when Momo had called—she didn’t sound like anything, exactly, nothing but kind as she rattles off an address and asks Momo if she can show up there by six in the evening. 

"What are you doing, Momo?" She murmurs to herself in between reading the numbers off the mailboxes lining either side of the empty road. Her time window to question her own choices is long over, though, and all she can do right now is take things in stride as best as she can, even as she second guesses whether or not she heard Kendou right, and even as she wishes she hadn’t thought about this at all.

When she gets to the house, distinct only because of the car after car parked in its driveway, she hesitates.

There’s a white van right by the garage door, reading Yuuei Catering in neat paint even while the rest of the vehicle calls for a fresh layer.

"Is this the right thing to do?" she asks the newly painted van. 

Doubt is such a foreign feeling—it’s unfamiliar, floating around somewhere between confidence and excitement, and it’s unusual for such an irresolute emotion to take hold of her as much as it has this time. She knows when she’s good at doing things, and she has no problem displaying so, but there are no lessons, no books, no tutorials on catering, of all things, and there is certainly no step-by-step guide for something as impromptu as this half-thought out act of joining one.

Gathering enough courage for one final burst of motivation, she walks up the driveway—

—at the exact same time someone rounds the van, coming from behind with two boxes in their arms.

The stranger yelps, one box toppling over as they take a hasty step back. "Oh my god." It’s half deja vu, half a new round of horrified apologies for Momo, but the girl’s voice is a surprisingly calm one, if not raspy from surprise. "You scared me—my bad."

Momo recognizes the uneven bangs immediately, recognizes the earphones hanging around the girl’s neck from the week before. The concentrated frown is the same, too, but now it’s directed towards the packs of table napkins instead of the cheesecake in the oven.

The Yuuei team must have some sort of thorough training in picking up dropped things, because the girl grabs them like it’s some sort of rewardable arcade game—fast enough that by the time Momo gets down to help, there’s nothing left but exactly one pack of alarmingly green table napkins.

"Hi," she says, tentatively, as she hands the napkin over.

"Thanks." The girl frowns up at her; it’s not unfriendly, but the confusion is palpable as she piles the packs back into the fallen boxes. "Sorry about this—are you one of the guests?"

The deja vu is definitely present now. "Guests?"

"Yeah? The birthday party?" The cheesecake burner dusts off the front of her clothes. Under the white collar, Momo can spot Fuck That, the rest of the statement lost underneath the white catering team apron. "We’re the catering team?"

"Oh—yeah—about that—" Momo stumbles over her words, and for a moment she’s startled by herself. Half consciously, she takes a step back, briefly taking a deep breath and tugging at her usual composure. "I’m looking for Jirou Kyouka-san?"

"That’s us." The girl blinks. "Hi—uh, I’m Jirou."

"Yaoyorozu—"

"Momo. Yaoyorozu Momo. Right. The job. Thought I heard Kendou wrong," Jirou says, sounding like it’s mostly for her own sake than it is for Momo’s. There’s something about her that’s quiet—quiet but not understated, calm in a way that’s different from Shouto’s calm, and certainly unlike Momo’s own form of it. "Uh. Nice to meet you."

Momo, for lack of anything to say past the customary you as well, nods again. She watches as Jirou arranges the boxes in the back of a van like a routine well-learned, and she reminds herself this is the job she’s applying for. Despite the deftness, everything about Jirou’s movements are leisurely; leisurely in a way that Momo doesn’t think she’s ever seen someone be, and leisurely in a way she hadn’t expected after the chaotic display from last week.

There’s a reassurance to it, to something as mundane as stacking boxes—even if Jirou, technically, is taking forever to return to a team that most likely needs her.

"Hey." Turning back to her, Jirou visibly hesitates. "Don’t look so tense. You’re as good as hired, okay?"

The reassurance is, nevertheless, a quality she’s only seen before in Shouto, and though the difference is striking, it still, somehow, settles Momo.

"And sorry to ask this of you—" Jirou looks amused, almost, as she hands over a stack of paper plates. It’s like an unspoken contract, sealed as soon as the pack’s plastic touches Momo’s arms. "But we’ve got a lot of carrying to do."

Shouto spends a whole ten minutes in the lobby before he, eventually, gathers up the courage—

—to leave the building.

He almost bumps into a person coming in, and he receives an odd look before he’s back outside in direct sunlight, the double entrance doors closing pointedly behind him. He makes it across the street from the apartment building before he heaves a sigh and slumps against the nearest wall.

His mother’s new place is right at the outskirts of Musutafu, right by the harbor and almost an hour away from the heart of downtown, and his father was right, Shouto notes grudgingly, about it being a quiet neighborhood. It’s the kind of area that’s only accessible through the last stop of an infrequent bus line, and it shows—some of the buildings still have wide spaces left in between them, awkward makeshift alleys that are much cleaner and welcoming than the ones near his own apartment building, and a lot of the stores lining the sidewalk still sport a variety of Opening Soon!, Now Hiring and For Lease signs. Cars don’t pass by often; the only constant sounds are birds chirping, and, if he listens closely enough, telltale noises from the harborfront. It’s quiet, but while he’d always imagined his father’s version of quiet to mean lonesome—empty—the place is surprisingly quaint, if a little unsettling in its peace.

The silence doesn’t help, though, as he comes down from whatever impulsive thought had had him leaving his mother’s new building and speedwalking away.

It’s been a week since his mother had moved in, and he knows he shouldn’t be taking this long in the first place, not when Fuyumi has already gone the week before to help their mother move in and unpack, not when she’s reported, over and over, having brought flowers as never-ending housewarming gifts. Shouto thinks his sister knows their mother differently than he does, and it’s not fair to compare his own feelings about this new arrangement to Fuyumi’s own—especially not when he examines exactly what he’s feeling and wonders if it might, after all, be fear.

Fear of seeing his mother again, maybe. Fear of what she’ll say.

Or maybe it’s just fear of not knowing what to do, in that kind of situation.

Hating his father is easy because he’d never known anything else; it was never something he’d questioned, growing up, nor something he’d doubted. It is a fact, and facts are easier to confront when his own feelings about them are equally coherent and concrete. Hating his father is easy but loving his mother is not, because the concept of love is a tricky thing in all its forms, and his relationship with his mother had been over far before it took any coherent or concrete shape in Shouto’s head. Things are easier when they’re just a thought—when they’re something he can file away and examine any which way he can, and whenever he’s ready to do so. It’s not easy at all in practice; not when he stands in front of the buzzer system, letting his hand hesitate in dialling his mother’s new apartment, and realizes that there’s nothing at all that could make him ready for this.

"Um—um, are you okay?"

For a moment, Shouto just stares.

He hadn’t heard the door open, but he blinks and realizes the wall he’d been leaning against isn’t a wall at all, but a glass window—a glass window that, upon closer look, belongs to a narrow three-story building that has Harborfront Cultural Center painted above the entrance. Someone had opened the front door, a guy with prominent freckles and slightly messy hair, to peer at Shouto, somehow managing to look unabashedly curious and innocently concerned at the same time.

Shouto blinks again and takes in the juxtaposition of the building: only the first floor has glass windows, and the rest of the center is composed of brick walls and bizarrely mismatched windows. It looks, in the barest of statements, like an old house half-heartedly converted into something fitting for a center, and, for another long moment, he just stares at that, too, mildly confused.

He’s been quiet too long, probably, because the guy startles, letting go of the door and waving his hands around. "I mean—it’s none of my business but—I saw you come out of nowhere and just—just slump down? So—I mean—are you alright—should I call an ambulance—or, I guess—" He trails off, mumbling gaining simultaneously in speed and incoherence.

"I’m fine," Shouto cuts in, squinting against the sunlight to try and read the nametag pinned against the stranger’s shirt. Midoriya Izuku, it reads in Arial, and underneath that, in smaller letters; Information Desk. ”No need to call an ambulance."

"Are you—are you sure?" Midoriya doesn’t look like he believes him. "You don’t—you don’t look fine." Shouto just stares at him, and he seems to take it as an opportunity to keep talking. "Is it the heat? Is it heatstroke? You look really pale. Are you bad with heat? Should I—do you want to come in for a bit? We’re air-conditioned."

Shouto, despite himself, looks up at that. He doesn’t think air-conditioning has ever sounded so appealing, and it must show in some way in his expression, because Midoriya stops mid-mumbling.

"I—We have iced tea."

Shouto doesn’t understand why Midoriya brings it up, why he says that instead of just gesturing Shouto in, but it works, because Shouto straightens up and relieves Midoriya of having to keep the door open in humid July heat.

Ten minutes later and Shouto still doesn’t understand what exactly is going on, but he sits down, at Midoriya’s stammered invitation, around a coffee table in the middle of a makeshift library—a small square room with shelves lined up on each wall, author names getting increasingly unfamiliar the farther the shelf gets from Shouto.

"Um, can I do anything for you? Should I call someone? Give you directions?"

Midoriya, Shouto thinks, talks exactly like someone who works the information desk. "I’m not lost."

"Oh." Midoriya recoils a bit at that, hesitating visibly as he brings the tea over in a tray. He sits down across from Shouto and pours tea into medium-sized mismatched traditional cups. "Did you just—happen by the area, then?"

The way he phrases the question makes it sound like no one just happens by the area, like no one comes here without a purpose, and considering how inaccessible this neighborhood is to the rest of Musutafu, Shouto can understand. It doesn’t make it any less jarring, though—the difference between here and there, and the difference, even, between the room he’s in and the sidewalk he’d just been standing on minutes earlier.

Curiously, he gives the room another 360 glance.  It’s cozy, if only because all the colors are muted: earth colors, browns that range from the color of wood to the color of dust. There are vases lining the room’s one window, and it’s a cruelly startling contrast against the blatantly newly installed glass. "Was this a house before?"

Midoriya, to his credit, doesn’t look surprised to be asked. "Um, yeah. Something like that. A lot of the buildings here were houses some time before, but since it’s getting harder to find—um, sorry, here’s your tea—" He slides a cup over, and Shouto doesn’t question the unnecessary apology. "Since it’s getting harder to find space for stores downtown, people are starting to look around here?" Then, as if only suddenly remembering, he pours himself a cup. "This building has always been like this, though? Everything you see here now has always been here. Except now it’s, um, open to the public, I guess."

Shouto’s eyes find their way back to the vases. "The windows, too?"

"The windo—oh, oh, oh no. No, no, those are new. They don’t really, um, match the rest of the building, huh."

Midoriya has a nervous laugh, the same way everything else about him is nervous, and coming from the kind of world Shouto had grown up in, it’s a little intriguing.

Momo can pass as composed even at her most anxious, and it takes someone who knows her well to be able to recognize panic in her eyes. But Midoriya’s an open book—his mannerisms twitchy and his face very open even as he seems to studiously avoid eye contact. "I—sorry—but you’re not—you’re not here for illegal business, are you, because all the important artifacts have been transferred to the Heritage Museum, and I have, um, nothing for you to sell to the black market—not that I think you’re suspicious, but it’s just—not a lot of people come around here unless it’s for something specific—and you look stressed enough that maybe you just ran away from a deal gone wrong—"

"Midoriya." Not once, in his life, has Shouto ever been mistaken for a criminal. He grimaces. "I’m not interested in—whatever you think I’m interested in."

Midoriya’s eyes are wide. "How do you know my name?"

A little wearily, Shouto gestures at the name tag.

Midoriya’s mouth falls open in a perfectly round oh. "Um—" He blinks up at Shouto. "Your name—I don’t know your name."

Shouto bites back a Of course you don’t. "Todoroki. Todoroki Shouto."

Midoriya’s mouth doesn’t close, and his eyes remain wide. Shouto knows that look of recognition, has seen it from people in his own faculty, and he frowns as he finally reaches out to bring the tea cup closer. It’s iced sencha, he can tell from the smell alone, and the cup is Raku ware identifiable to him only after four months of listening to Dr. Uwabami talk about wabi-sabi. He stares down at, a bit grumpily, as he waits for the inevitable mention of his father’s name.

"Are you—You’re not Todoroki-san’s son, by any chance, are you?" Midoriya begins, faltering only a little, and Shouto fights really, really hard not to think of his father. He fails. He succeeds, at the very least, at not saying I wish I wasn’t out loud. He nods robotically instead. "She’s... very good at pottery."

Shouto almost knocks the cup over. This time, he directs his frown straight at Midoriya. "She—Pottery?"

"Y-Yeah, um—" Midoriya, absently, moves Shouto’s cup away from hands that can jostle it. "Is that—is that why you’re here? Pottery’s on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons only, so if—if you want to take pottery sessions with her—I can sign you up for next week—"

"Pottery?" Shouto repeats, blankly. "My mother?"

"P-Pottery," Midoriya confirms, blinking at him. "Unless—unless we’re talking about different people—but—but she lives across the street, so I thought—is that why you’re in the area—"

Somehow, Shouto finds it in himself to say, "Yes."

"Oh!" When Midoriya brightens, every part of his face follows—his eyes light up, and his smile does, too. "That’s nice. She’s a very sweet lady."

Shouto wouldn’t know, he thinks. The curiosity wins, though, and he asks, voice quieter than he’d like, "You’ve met my mother?"

"Only—only a couple of times?" Midoriya tilts his head. "She started pottery last week, so I’ve only met her those, uh, two times."

"Pottery," Shouto says, a third time.

Midoriya twiddles his thumbs around his teacup. "Um—Is that a problem?"

"Pottery?" The word, at this point, sounds wrong. Shouto wants to sigh. "No, it’s not a problem. I didn’t know she was doing pottery."

It’s the truth, and Midoriya, for his part, doesn’t criticize it. Then again, Shouto’s beginning to suspect Midoriya’s not that type of person at all. "She mentioned something—something about therapeutic pottery? I think—I—I’m not really the one in charge of the actual pottery, so."

Shouto had never met his mother’s doctor, but therapeutic pottery, in some sort of twisted logic, makes sense. "How did she—" He catches himself, for a brief moment, but again, curiosity wins. "How did she seem?"

Midoriya frowns. "What do you—what do you mean?"

"My mother was recently released from the hospital," Shouto says. He doesn’t know why the truth finds its way out so easily and so candidly, but it’s there, and he doesn’t try taking it back. It’s an irrelevant piece of information, at its root, and he doesn’t think Midoriya will really bother thinking too much about it. "I haven’t had the chance to visit her."

"Why not?" Midoriya looks genuinely confused, but then he blinks, apparently startled, and starts waving his hands around again. Shouto briefly considers moving his cup. "I mean—right—none of my business—she just—you—she seems well? I think? A little pale? But—she smiles a lot—and—she looks a lot like you and—I—I don’t really know what to say."

"No, that’s—that’s sufficient," Shouto says. It sounds a little stiff, even to him, so he adds, "Thank you."

Midoriya’s smile comes freely. "No problem!"

"Are you here everyday?" Shouto peers at him. "Do you work here everyday?"

"Yeah, it’s just—a summer job, I guess you could say." Midoriya looks almost sheepish. "I live kinda far from here, though." Then, as if realizing he shouldn’t have volunteered that information, he stammers out a, "This is a nice neighborhood, though—I—your mother—is—very—She made a good choice."

"It wasn’t her that made the choice," Shouto says flatly.

That’s a little unfair, probably, because Midoriya deflates. "Well, it’s—It’s a nice neighborhood anyway."

To compensate, Shouto acquiesces. "It is."

Midoriya takes it. "It’s really hard to get here from downtown, though."

"It is," Shouto says again.

Midoriya’s lips twitch in something that looks like a smile—Shouto, however, doesn’t think he’d said anything funny. He doesn’t get the chance to point it out, because Midoriya says, "The intervals between buses just get, um—worse?—as time goes by. I would advise—The next one comes in about six minutes, so if you—I mean, I’m not sending you away, but it just sounds like it’s your first time here, so I thought I should—tell you?"

It’s not meant to be a dismissal, but Shouto also knows an opportunity to excuse himself when he sees it, so he finishes the rest of his tea and gingerly places it back on the tray. "Thank you," he tells Midoriya a second time.

Midoriya shakes his head, finishing his own tea and picking up the tray. "Information desk," he says, by way of explanation.

Shouto doesn’t reply to that, but just before Shouto steps out, Midoriya calls;

"Todoroki-kun?"

His name sounds odd, with that honorific, but Shouto turns back.

"You’re always—um—welcome here, just so you know. You’re certainly welcome to, you know, join your mother."

Midoriya, in his defence, doesn’t really know the significance of what he’s saying. No one else but Shouto really does, because no one else will understand his relationship with his mother the way Shouto himself sees it. And it’s probably that knowledge, the assurance that Midoriya’s offer is innocent, indiscriminate, that has Shouto nodding and replying;

"I’ll keep that in mind."

✯

On the bus ride home, Shouto replays what Midoriya had said.

She looks a lot like you.

Then he replays it again, and again and again, until it’s Midoriya’s voice—Midoriya who he’d just met, Midoriya who would never survive in the Todorokis’ world, Midoriya who knows Shouto’s mother—that plays in an endless loop at the back of his thoughts.

It usually doesn’t take Momo long to master something, but this particular situation deserves to be in its own category.

When she’d started playing the piano, it took at least a month for her to feel like she’s truly ready to play an entire piece in front of a live audience. When she’d mastered tea ceremonies, it took a week of long nights of concentrated practicing until it felt like second nature.

At Yuuei, training took all of five minutes, with no time for Momo to even think about whether she is truly ready for it.

Meeting the rest of the crew had been a quick, quick blur—Ashido’s pink hair darting from one side of the kitchen to the other, an unfamiliar face in a waiter uniform flying in and out with trays.

"Job’s yours if you want it," Jirou had said, immediately, after letting Momo have a beat to take it all in. "Uh, schedule tends to be all over the place, but Kendou tries to notify you at least two or three days in advance? She’s sorta unofficially in charge of all those administrative things. Everyone, this is Yaomomo—" Momo starts at that, but Jirou doesn’t even bat an eyelash, "—she worked with us last time and she’ll be working with us today—Denki, Jesus Christ—" This is directed at Kaminari, standing by the oven with his eyes on his phone screen instead of what seems to be potentially burning tarts. "Oh, damn it, whatever, I’ll do official introductions later—"

No one’s really listening. The tarts are burning; and someone comes over—Ojiro, if Momo remembers correctly—to nudge Kaminari back to awareness. Jirou doesn’t spare them a glance, acts like this is a normal happening. "There’s a lot of other important things la la la and all that stuff but for now—" She breaks off as the unfamiliar waiter slides in through the double doors, almost knocking over both Jirou and Momo. "This is—"

"Yaomomo, was it?" The waiter says. "We really need servers—"

Kaminari, from the other side of the kitchen, calls over, "I say there’s no better way to learn than do. So—"

"I got it, I got it." Jirou sounds annoyed in a way that’s almost fond, and when Momo turns back to her, head spinning a little, Jirou’s already grabbed a new tray; she’s standing by the kitchen doors, rumpled apron already on as she grabs one for Momo as well. She tosses it over, looking half-apologetic. "What do you say, Yaomomo? Showtime."

The waiter grins at Momo. "Welcome aboard."

The first rule in catering, Momo learns right away, is that you’re invisible. People crowd around her for the food, not her, never her—for once, the attention isn’t on what she’s doing, what she’s done, the questions not about her. The inquiries are always about the food she’s bringing, and that—that, she can answer easily.

Jirou’s right beside her all the way, adjusting her hold on the tray—higher,  higher, don’t worry, your arms will get used to it—and gesturing to shortcuts back to the kitchen. "One other rule," she adds at some point during the event, whispering with a half-smile, "Is to not think, just do. Walk around, let yourself go. Smile a little, too, there’s nothing to overthink about offering people food. Let the chefs in the kitchen worry about it."

The kitchen is a battlefield: busy, busy, busy. Sero’s nowhere in sight, but Ojiro—You can drop the -san, Yaoyorozu, smiled over another tray slid across the counter—is hard at work unwrapping foil after foil, revealing chicken, potatoes, smoked salmon, with half his attention focused on making sure Kaminari’s not burning another set of baked dessert. There’s a crackling energy in the air—time’s flying fast, fast, fast and everything is a blur at the edge of Momo’s vision, there as soon as she comes in and gone once she’s back out with another tray. It’s an easy pattern to fall into, especially with Jirou and another server—Sero Hanta is the full name she'd heard Jirou yell angrily from halfway across the room, before he'd disappeared yet again—falling into step with her without fail.

In two hours, she’s done more and spent more time with these co-workers than she has this summer with anyone that wasn’t Shouto and didn’t involve staying home for the most part. It’s an almost saddening parallel.

Sero reappears once the last of the cupcakes have been rolled out, red velvet cupcakes gone within ten minutes flat. No one seems to point it out—no one really has the energy to, all busy tiredly packing up the leftovers or sprawled all over the kitchen in varying levels of exhaustion. Kendou shows up, too, with a clipboard and a chipper smile as she talks to the party’s hosts.

Kendou approaches Momo right after, expectant.

Momo pulls foil over a tray of leftover beef steak. She stops, puts her hands down. "I—"

"We could really use the extra pair of hands. Especially responsible ones." Kendou follows Momo’s gaze to Jirou. "Poor Jirou’s got her hands full dealing with these kids. Ojiro, too. Another reliable person would be nice every now and then." She takes over the foil, pressing it around the edges. "If you want to leave, that’s alright, too, don’t worry. We don’t really do interviews anymore since Jirou pointed out that people tend to drop out after their first time on the floor—can’t take the business, maybe. I don’t blame them. But you were good out there today. We'd love to have you."

Behind her, Kaminari and Jirou are squabbling over who gets to take the last cupcake. Momo frowns. "Thanks to them."

"Jirou tells me you’re like some catering prodigy." Kendou smiles. "I don’t have much to sell you, honestly—you can probably get a more impressive paycheck somewhere else, your co-workers aren’t the best. Ashido has her moments, and Kaminari and Sero are something else when they’re together." A good-natured shrug. "Things never go smoothly with us, but that’s life. It’s a bad business, maybe, but there’s a reason all six of us are still around." Kendou’s smile is soft, encouraging. "So. It’s entirely to you if you want to find out what that reason is."

Kaminari and Ashido are listening in on their conversation now, sulking, having lost the battle for the cupcake to a triumphant Jirou. Momo looks at them, and they smile back at her. She thinks of the way they’d moved earlier, of the almost childish reassurance that had them trusting Ojiro to get the tray ready, for Jirou to come around when they needed her, of the faith that things would work out. It’s naivety that’s almost blind; reflected at someone that lacks the virtue in that same form.

But she hesitates anyway, fingers gripping the marble countertop.

"May I—May I have time to think about it?"

✯

It’s a silly question, probably, because Momo gets her answer as soon as she boards the bus, feet sore and arms aching. The two hours are a blur, like an old television affected by bad signal, images on screen crackling in between black and white photos and static.

For a moment, though, when she closes her eyes, she thinks she understands Kaminari and Ashido’s smiles.

Shouto comes home to Momo having a crisis in their living room.

He’d seen a lot of people through their various crises—adults hesitating before knocking on his father’s office door, his high school classmates gathering around Momo’s desk two days before exam season starts; he’d had his own, technically, earlier that day, but everything pales in comparison to how Momo’s worry manifests. Momo is brilliant at taking things in stride no matter what comes her way—but there are things, every now and then, that take even Yaoyorozu Momo aback, and leave her in her own version of a crisis: sitting in front of what usually functions as their kotatsu in the winter, surrounded by paper dragons and her tea still steaming right beside a stack of origami paper. Shouto had been a source of stress for Momo at some point, and he knows not to be alarmed when Momo doesn’t even look up until he’d kneeled down across from her.

When she does notice, it takes her a while to find the words. "Hello. Welcome back."

"I’m home," Shouto replies dutifully, if a little monotone.

"How is your mother?"

"I don’t know. I didn’t visit her," he answers, droll. Momo frowns at that, but he gestures at the dragons. "Would you like to discuss this?"

"I’d like to come to a definite answer whether or not I should join the catering team," Momo reports, smoothing out a crease on one of the flaps. "The pros and cons I listed last time didn’t prove relevant to the actual act of doing the catering."

Shouto frowns, grabbing his own piece of paper and folding it diagonally. "Was it bad?"

"Yes," Momo says, without hesitation. She’s only ever this blunt when her mind’s going too fast to spare thought for anything else but indiscriminate output of facts and conclusions, and Shouto takes that into consideration as she adds, "It was very different than what I was expecting. It was very busy, very crowded, very chaotic—I—cooking for them is not the same thing as actually being part of the team, it seems."

Shouto waits for more. When it doesn’t come, he prompts, "But?"

"But it was fun, nonetheless." Momo folds a crimp onto her dragon and sighs. "So now, I am conflicted."

"Understandable," Shouto says, though it really isn’t to him. Busy, crowded, chaotic: no other combination of words would be quicker to scare him away. He folds his paper one more time, then gives up. "You’d like to come back, though?"

"I’d—" Momo pauses, and goes back to frowning down at her dragon’s tail flap.

Ah. "That’s the crisis," Shouto concludes, unhelpfully.

"It is," Momo confirms dejectedly.

This—this is how Shouto had first gotten to know Momo, at age seven, sitting across from each other at lessons and hearing her sigh as he’d fought the urge to roll up his kimono sleeves. This is how he’d first gotten to know her, facing each other and waiting out her thought process. His relationship with Momo had always been like that: waiting on each other, trying to understand how each other’s mind works because that was always easier than figuring out someone completely from the get-go. At seven years old, though, he’d been impatient and crude in his own way, and he hadn’t listened to Momo at all: it nags at him years later, a constant reminder to stop and listen because rashness has its consequences no matter how small.

He hadn’t improved entirely, and it’s a habit he’s yet to entirely shake, but knowing Momo is intuitive now, herself an extension of him the same way he is of her, and he’s learned at least that Momo’s silence isn’t always a cue for him to take over and make decisions and plans for her—she just needs time to fully think things over, because for all the things that Momo is a prodigy at, unfamiliar, inarticulable emotions are in their own way harder than memorizing the entire periodic table.

Momo hadn’t been decisive around Shouto, at the age they’d met, and there are still times nowadays when she isn’t, but the one thing he knows for her sure is that origami will help; it will help the way doing always helps Momo. Creating for her is parallel to thinking, second nature even when her brain is going a mile a minute, and he understands—he respects that—so he stares out their living room window until she finishes her dragon and places it between them.

"It really is different," she says.

Shouto picks up the dragon with one hand and places it on the palm of the other. "Momo," he says. It’s rare that he pauses after saying her name, and it’s his own particular way of asking for permission, his own particular way of warning Momo. He’s not very animated, physically, but he’s sure that the little peculiarities he’d allowed himself to adopt have never escaped Momo’s bright, observant eyes. When he looks up at her, she looks expectant, a student ready to answer whatever question the teacher is about to throw at her. "Do you not think that… you’re thinking about this too hard?"

For a long, hard moment, Momo looks like she actually searches for an appropriate answer, and when the question actually registers, she looks, for another moment, like a lost, vulnerable child. "What do you mean?" she asks, voice small.

"I mean," Shouto says carefully. "It’s catering. You’re searching for some sort of how-to to help you come to a decision, but maybe that’s not it at all. That’s what I think. Some things don’t come with guidelines." Like my family, he thinks.

When Momo doesn’t immediately reply, he leans forward and adds, "There are things that don’t have to be thought about, because doing will give you answers that your mind can’t. Easier said than done, I realize, but you don’t want to miss out on something that you consider fun—" He must frown, because Momo’s own frown clears in response. "—just because there isn’t a list of reliable guidelines to decide that for you. It’s catering, Momo."

It feels hypocritical, saying all of that, not when he understands her hesitation more than anything, and not when he’s able to process her fear of not being able to easily follow a step-by-step guide for once. He has the opposite problem—whereas Momo’s thinking too much, he, probably, isn’t thinking about the rationality of his situation at all, responding instinctively to the desire to see his mother only to get a rough reality check when he gets there and realizes it’s more complicated then he gave it credit for.

And yet—comparing Momo’s situation to his own with his mother is, in its own way, a far-fetched notion, but as different as it might be, he and Momo have always paralleled each other, have always understood each other even when they hadn’t directly been in the exact same predicament. They’re each other’s greatest confidantes, and hypocritical it might be, but all he knows is that Momo’s asking for his advice, and he needs to give her something, even while his failure to gather up the courage to reunite with his mother leaves something bitter in his mouth.

Shouto has always functioned in halves—perpetually conflicted, perpetually confused. This is no different; the half he’s giving Momo in saying that is the half that wants to be a good friend, not the half that has failed, possibly, in being a good son.

He places the dragon back in front of her.

"I read that the Japanese dragon symbolizes mastery and success," he says.

That makes Momo smile, if hesitantly: they communicate like this, too, because there’s sentiment to be found in shared tradition. "Where did you read that?"

"Wikipedia," Shouto admits. "It symbolizes wisdom, too. Wisdom and strength and good fortune."

"I hadn’t known that," she replies quietly.

"It suits you," Shouto says, shrugging.

Momo picks up the dragon, cradles it in her own palms. Even quieter, she says, "Does it?"

"I’ve never known you not to be wise and strong and lucky, so yes, I’d say it does." Shouto’s tone is light, and Momo’s smile loses the hesitation. He sort of wants to smile, knowing he’d made her smile. "May it be school, flower arrangement, or, in this case, catering—I know you enough to be able to vouch that you won’t stop until you’ve mastered that, too. Am I wrong?"

"No," Momo says. "No, you’re not wrong."

Chapter Text

 AUGUST

In retrospect, Jirou makes the decision for Momo.

Momo’s at the grocery store—armed with only her phone, her wallet, and a list of things to buy written out in Shouto’s heavy-handed scrawl—when she bumps into Jirou, earphones plugged in and reaching out for a jar of peanut butter on the top shelf.

Reaching out and, Momo realizes belatedly, failing.

Before she can think too much about it, she grabs the jar and holds it out, smiling a little as Jirou blinks at her, then at the jar, then back at her.

"Oh," Jirou says, cutting off eye contact abruptly. "Hey. Thanks."

"No problem," Momo says kindly. She peers into the basket at Jirou’s feet. "That’s—quite a lot of peanut butter."

That has Jirou looking back up at her. "We, uh, ran out. We’re facing a bit of an understaffed sandwich crisis."

Despite herself, Momo’s mouth twitches at that. "A sandwich crisis?"

"Yeah," Jirou says, blinking herself away from whatever had made her so flustered. She frowns slightly, as if remembering something, and pulls out one earbud. "Hey, uh, how come I haven’t worked another job with you? We catered a kid’s party the other day. Total mess. Really fun, though."

It’s a strangely personal question, like they’d been working together for much longer than the two hours from the job before. Jirou’s eyes are oddly arresting—they’re not particularly bright nor curious, nor is Jirou particularly the enthusiastic type, but there’s an unabashed interest in the way she looks at Momo, like she could listen and look at her for hours and come away no worse for wear than when she’d started.

It makes Momo feel cornered.

"I’m not really working for Yuuei yet, actually. I asked Kendou if I could have some time to think about it."

"Right." Jirou’s frown deepens, for a moment, before it clears completely, leaves her face blank as she considers Momo’s reply. "You know, if you’re worried about if you’re cut out for catering—" It’s Momo’s turn to frown at that, because something about the way Jirou articulates it makes Momo’s situation sound so much simpler, "—I think you just need more time on the floor."

Momo wills her frown away. "Maybe so."

"Not that I’m trying to, like, boss around your life or whatever," Jirou adds, picking up her basket. "But it’s not like you have to throw yourself headfirst in our business and expect yourself to be cool with adapting to something new overnight, yeah? You can do it with, like, baby steps. Bit by bit. A job here, a job there, maybe a bit of assistance during an understaffed sandwich crisis, you know, whichever."

Momo had been in the middle of thinking but that’s how I always do things when Jirou’s last point registers. She blinks. "Is that an invitation?"

"Funny you’d call it that," Jirou says, and for once, Momo recognizes the tiny quirk to Jirou’s mouth as amusement. "I’m actually trying to guilt-trip you into helping us when we could really use it."

"I don’t mind," Momo says, immediately, and then wonders if she’d replied too eagerly.

But Jirou looks like she’d won the parley, as much as she can look triumphant, and she gestures vaguely at Momo. "Cool. I’ll meet you by the cashier?"

The next time Shouto talks to Midoriya, it’s completely by accident.

He takes the bus to the harborfront conflicted—half of him already knows he’s not going to ring his mother’s doorbell, but the other half is stubbornly wanting to keep up appearances, at least, and to humor the part of him that does want to go despite knowing full well how difficult it had been to stand there and ring for a mother he hadn’t talked to since he’d been in elementary school.

The bus stops right in front of what he now recognizes as the Cultural Center, and he gets off right as a familiar figure topples over, bringing two boxes over with him as he tilts—

Shouto catches Midoriya by the arm, his other hand reaching out to steady the boxes in Midoriya’s hands. A little gruffly, he says; "Careful there."

"Thank you—" Midoriya, for the longest of beats, just stares up at him, then at the hand Shouto has around his left arm. "Todoroki-kun. H-Hello."

"Hello," Shouto says, then, pointedly, he pulls at Midoriya’s arm, bringing both him and the boxes upright. "Why all this?"

"Um. Bowls." Midoriya, for his part, doesn’t move away, and he doesn’t point it out either when Shouto finally deems it appropriate to let go. "We—uh—there’s an exhibition going on in the second floor starting next week, and we’re putting in the, uh, finishing touches."

"I see." Shouto stares at Midoriya for a full ten seconds, wondering if he should clarify. Midoriya stares back expectantly, and Shouto decides he should; "What I meant was, why are you bringing in these boxes all by yourself?"

"Oh!" Midoriya adjusts his hold on the boxes. "I—only three people work here regularly, and one of them—Ochako, my coworker—she’s, um, usually the one in charge of the deliveries and the lifting. She has two jobs, so she only ever works the morning to noon shift—I take over after her—and this delivery came in later than it should have. So. I’m just, um, trying to bring these in so she can sort it out for her shift tomorrow."

Shouto frowns, miraculously following Midoriya's scattered explanation. "What about the third?"

"The third?—oh, Iida-kun is holding a little book club on the third floor right now. I didn’t want to interrupt." Midoriya smiles nervously. "Are you—um—back to visit your mother—"

"I’ll help you," Shouto cuts in abruptly, if only for an excuse to turn away from the look Midoriya is giving him. Midoriya has a way of looking at someone like he has expectations—like there’s something he’s searching for, cataloguing, writing and sorting out in his head. It makes Shouto feel bizarrely observed, though it doesn’t feel so much like being a guinea pig as it does being read like a straightforward children’s book. It’s off-putting, from someone he’d only met once before, and Shouto doesn’t even wait for Midoriya’s answer before he brushes past him towards the stack of boxes piled in front of one of the center’s glass walls. "These ones, right?"

"Yes, but—Todoroki-kun, you don’t have to!" Midoriya sounds way too insistent for someone struggling to open the door for himself, and Shouto looks up at him, unimpressed. "I’m sure you have other things to do?"

Briefly, Shouto looks across the street—at his mother’s building, up to the third floor where he knows her apartment must be. He searches himself for the desire to run up there, and while he finds it, it’s swallowed easily by the tug at his stomach and the inevitable nervousness that is, at this point, an emotion he associates with the mere thought of his mother. He doesn’t understand how people can do something so spontaneous, something with so much potential to be life-changing; he doesn’t understand the thought process that leads to someone taking the plunge and doing something despite the anxiety that comes with stepping out of a comfort zone he hadn’t thought he’d ever have to leave like this.

Frankly, helping a near-stranger carry boxes sounds a lot less demanding than reconnecting with his mother.

In a lot less words, he tells Midoriya; "I have time."

"I—" Midoriya still hesitates, wobbling in place. "I-If you’re sure."

"I am," Shouto says shortly, and finds that he means it. It’s more cowardly, probably, to run away when he’s so close to the finish line, more cowardly than it is had he just never come at all, but he finds his throat dry and his heartbeat nervous, and that takes top priority when it comes to something he, essentially, isn’t required to do. "Is there an order I have to pick these up in?"

"N-No." Midoriya finally manages to kick and elbow the entrance doors open. Bleakly, he adds; "Thank you, Todoroki-kun."

Shouto picks up two boxes, bringing them higher in his arms with one knee. "It’s fine."

It isn’t, really, but it’s easier to run away from something when it’s his second time that month doing it.

Midoriya leads Shouto inside and up a flight of stairs he hadn’t noticed his last time there, and the second floor opens up to a much bigger version of the receiving room. There are still shelves and rows of vases lining up every wall, and a table right in the middle of the room, but there’s more space—space that is, at the moment, taken up by the boxes.

It takes them forty-five minutes of constantly going up and down the stairs to bring up all the boxes. Midoriya’s quiet the whole time, though Shouto has to pretend not to see the glances Midoriya sends his way every five minutes or so. It doesn’t feel nosy, but Shouto’s not exactly sure how he feels about being watched the way Midoriya watches him: like Midoriya’s not sure if he should say something, even though the words are so clearly itching to be said.

When Shouto puts down the last box on top of a stack of two, he looks up pointedly at Midoriya, who fidgets by the doorway. "What?"

Midoriya does something between a flinch and a wince, playing with the hem of his shirt. "Um. It’s none—none of my business, really."

This is draining Shouto faster than the heat outside is. "Just spit it out."

That seems to be all the invitation Midoriya needs, because the words come easily and speedily; "Are you—are you alright? You look pale, that’s all, and you look like you didn’t—you look like you hadn’t slept at all. I don’t know you w-well at all but you—just—don’t seem okay. I—Do you want to talk about it? Not that I’m forcing you or anything, but—if there’s anything I can do—"

Midoriya, Shouto realizes, is alarmingly observant. It doesn’t seem to be something Midoriya himself is acutely aware of, but Shouto also realizes that Midoriya’s constant staring had been bizarre exactly because it’s something that is second nature to Midoriya. He’s not watching Shouto because he’s searching for something specific, exactly, but because something feels off and he must, in some way, feel the need to figure out what it is and sort it out. Momo is the same way, albeit more direct in her approach, because when Momo searches, it’s for something detailed and particular.

Midoriya just searches, precisely because he, to Shouto, seems like the type who’s caring enough to want to help someone out regardless of who that someone might be.

So Shouto states the obvious. "You don’t know me."

"I—" This takes Midoriya aback visibly, and Shouto has to wonder if he’s the first person to turn down Midoriya’s help. The expression that crosses Midoriya’s face next, however, immediately disproves that theory. "R-Right. I’m—I’m sorry."

Shouto, not for the first time that day, heaves a sigh and sits down on the box. "You keep asking."

It’s unfair, considering this is the second time they’re talking, and Midoriya repeats the half-flinch. "I-I know. It’s just—Ochako always says it helps to talk it out. There’s no use—um—being strong for yourself. That’s just—that’s just lying, and no one deserves to have to lie to their own selves."

His coworker, Shouto remembers distantly. He stares blankly at Midoriya. "I’m not lying to myself."

"I d-didn’t say that," Midoriya says, sounding strangled. "It’s just—when I asked you if you were okay, you didn’t look like—you looked like you didn’t know how to answer."

Shouto doesn’t know what to say that. He doesn’t have to say anything, though, because Midoriya suddenly excuses himself and runs back down.

Shouto listens to him leave, leaving in his place an empty doorway and someone’s voice from the third floor passionately reciting poetry; Casting wide my gaze, neither flowers nor—

That must be the third co-worker—the reason Shouto is here helping out—only that’s not fair either, because he looks out the window and sees, again, his mother’s building. He’s here because he doesn’t want to be there, because the prospect of being rejected by his mother is much scarier than being kicked out by someone like Midoriya, who looks at Shouto like he expects him to be like someone else, only Shouto keeps proving him wrong. He doesn’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but he leans more towards the former as Midoriya comes back with a tray holding a traditional tea set, held out like some sort of peace offering.

Shouto stays quiet as Midoriya lays it all out on the table. It’s unnatural, the silence it leaves behind, and this must rub Midoriya wrong because he says, conversationally; "The pottery and porcelain in these boxes are here for an art exhibit happening in September—it’s—the plan is to showcase these with the pottery from the, um, students." He looks at Shouto at that, but he’s equally quick to look away. "Some of those boxes contain authentic Raku tea bowls—which probably doesn’t mean much to you—I guess—but—"

"I can recognize Raku ware," Shouto says. It comes out with no inflection whatsoever, and even he’s surprised. "You served me tea in the same kind last time. You were very careful that I didn’t knock them over. Fair, considering how expensive they are."

"You—oh—" Midoriya blinks, absently steadying a tea bowl now, too. "I didn’t think you—you just didn’t seem to be—"

"The type to pay attention to that sort of thing?" Shouto finishes, though even he’s not sure which sort of thing he means. "I took an art class my first year. My prof was obsessed with wabi-sabi."

Midoriya frowns. "What was—what was the professor’s name?"

"Dr. Uwabami," Shouto says, at the same Midoriya mouths the same name to himself. "Do we go to the same university?"

It sounds silly, as soon as the question is out of his mouth, because Midoriya had mentioned this job being exclusively summer-only, and had talked about downtown Musutafu like he’d lived there.

"I—I took that class, too," Midoriya admits, voice hushed as he pours the tea. Shouto takes that as his cue to sit down across from him. "It was kind of—kind of a prerequisite to taking this job."

"I took it because my friend was taking it." It feels a little strange referring to Momo this way—he’s never had to talk about her to someone who doesn’t already know her, he thinks, and it’s a weird concept to grasp. "It was very informative."

That makes Midoriya laugh softly, like he’d laughed last time—as if Shouto had said a joke that he himself is missing. "It was. I’m not exactly a tea bowl person—" Midoriya giggles at himself at that, and Shouto feels whatever had brought in the tense air between them clear. "—But it was very interesting."

"If you’re not a tea bowl person," Shouto says, taking a sip of his tea. "What are you then?"

Midoriya looks a little surprised to be asked. "Um, poetry, mostly," he says quietly. "Nothing serious, though, but my mother used to read some to me, and it was just—um—"

"Something that was there," Shouto finds himself filling in. The surprise that Midoriya more concretely directs at him this time is something Shouto feels mirrored in himself, and he clears his throat to clear that away, too. "My mother used to do the same."

Midoriya cradles his tea bowl. "She—she quoted Shiki Masaoka the other day."

It’s not a particularly impressive sentence, but registering it sends Shouto’s stomach dropping.

He swallows down tea with some difficulty.

His mother had been very fond of wisteria, and while his sister has memories of playing with their brothers in the garden, Shouto only has memories of walking with their mother amidst wisteria blossoms falling in clusters. It sounds lonely, in retrospect, but he recalls little more now than his mother’s love for wisteria and her even greater love for Shiki Masaoka, whose haikus featured wisteria heavily. Shouto had kept an anthology by his bedside in childhood, and when she can, his mother had read poems out loud to him. He doesn’t know if it’s a genuine love for the poems that he remembers now, or if it’s simply his mother—beside him, smiling as she read, kissing his forehead good night.

"Todoroki-kun? I’m sorry—should I not have—"

Out loud, Shouto repeats; "My mother used to do the same." It dislodges something in his throat, and he manages to add, seemingly senselessly; "Wisteria was her favorite flower."

Is, he has to internally correct himself, though he has no way of knowing for sure, right now. He fights the urge to look back out the window.

"She—she mentioned that." Midoriya visibly spaces out for three whole seconds, before he continues; "The purple of the wisteria that moves like waves, if made into a painting—"

"—would have to be a deep, deep purple." Shouto traces the rim of his bowl with his thumb, his chest heavy. "Was that the one she quoted?"

"Y-Yes," Midoriya says, again looking guilty. "I didn’t—I didn’t tell her you come by, if that’s—if that’s what you’re concerned about."

Come by, he says, as if it’s a regular thing. Dryly, Shouto says; "I hardly considered that a possibility."

"O-Oh, well, that’s—" Midoriya shifts. "That’s a good thing, I—I would never rat you out. I don’t really understand, but, I won’t—"

"My relationship with my parents is complicated," Shouto says, which sounds to him, in a way, like an understatement. "I haven’t talked to my mother for a long time. I don’t think it would make a difference whether or not she finds out about me coming here and not going to visit her." It sounds dry, too, like that, like regurgitated facts drolly reported over the radio instead of Entertainment Gossip Daily.

"And yet you still—you still haven’t gone over to that building," Midoriya says quietly. That, too, is simply a restatement of a fact they both know, but it sounds different, coming from him. "Can I—can I ask why?"

It’s counterproductive to phrase it that way, when he did ask, and Shouto has to come to terms with the fact that he searches himself and finds that no part of him wants to say, no you can’t. So he says; "I don’t know how to."

It’s quiet at once, after that, a sudden plunge into silence as Midoriya’s co-worker once again takes over from upstairs with a muffled spiel about Jukou Murata.

Midoriya doesn’t stir at all, just stares down at his tea like Shouto’s reply has personally surprised him. "I—" He begins, and as usual, he cuts himself off, taking a deep breath and restarting; "I think it’s—I think it’s impressive anyway. I think it’s impressive that you—that you still come here."

That strikes Shouto as wrong. "That I come all the way down here just to change my mind while I’m right outside that building?"

The aggression in the statement doesn’t seem to deter Midoriya in the slightest, surprisingly, because he looks up to meet Shouto’s eyes directly. "Yes."

Shouto drains the rest of his tea. "That doesn’t make sense."

Midoriya frowns, shifting again in that nervous way of his. "Maybe not—to you, but—I think it’s productive that you still try. I think—I think it’s worth more that you take a step closer, even if you don’t exactly get there. Things don’t happen overnight—is—is what I think—so, this, really, is better than nothing?" He hesitates, before finishing with a softer; "Giving up is not doing anything at all. This isn’t that, because I—I don’t know you at all, Todoroki-kun, y-you’re right, but—I can tell how much you want to see your mother. You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t just dismiss that."

Midoriya has a way with words, Shouto decides, that Shouto can’t understand. It’s not comforting in the way that Momo is encouraging, but instead it’s solace in the barest sense—he makes things simpler, just by phrasing it so, and it makes Shouto feel a little stunned, to hear that from someone and be certain, somehow, that they mean it with the most genuine of intentions.

Midoriya’s words are as straightforward as he, as a whole, is genuine, and Shouto has always appreciated that best in people.

He knows he should say something, only words don’t come easily to him the way it seemed to have for Midoriya.

Again, though, he’s spared when, startling both him and Midoriya, a voice calls out; "Hello?"

Midoriya’s on his feet at once. "That’s—I—I shouldn’t have left the first floor unattended, sorry—excuse me—" Shouto moves to get up, too, but Midoriya shakes his head. "Um—you can stay, if you want, I—This is a public space, you know—so—if you want—do you want to stay?"

Keeping up with how closely Midoriya’s words match his thought process must be a learned skill, because Shouto registers the invitation easily. He hesitates, hand around his tea bowl, but the look on Midoriya’s face, somehow, has him saying; "If that’s alright."

Midoriya smiles, wide and bright but brief, because he’s running back down the stairs just as quickly, muttering sorry, sorry, sorry under his breath.

Shouto, again, listens to him go.

The understaffed sandwich crisis finds Momo in the Kaminaris’ kitchen with Jirou—which constitutes, really, facing a table decorated with loaves of bread, mountains of ham and lettuce and containers of watercress and cream cheese. Everyone else is in the backyard—she can hear them, Ojiro by the grill, voted most likely not to burn the barbecue dinner, and Ashido exiled to cutting the sandwiches into little triangles because she couldn’t be trusted not to knock the jam and peanut butter jars over.

By contrast, it’s quiet in the kitchen, too many layers of silence between the two of them. Jirou’s hard at work spreading the cream cheese over whole wheat, slicing them in half, arranging them around a plate without a word, not even a glance at Momo.

It makes her restless; it feels wrong, for this kind of silence to be associated with Yuuei.

Fireflies are hanging around just outside the window; the few ones left as the year enters August—it's odd seeing them, somehow, and it makes her wonder how many of them she’d missed before, spending evenings locking herself in her and Shouto’s apartment.

It’s mid-summer, late evening; pink sunsets and a cool breeze under the darkening sky.

It’s her favorite time of the year—yet this is the first time she’s been out to see the sky like this all summer.

"Oh, hey, it’s Yaomomo!"

Momo jumps, almost dropping the bread knife. It’s Kaminari, dropping his backpack at the doorway and grinning in greeting.

"You’re late," Jirou accuses at once, narrowing her eyes and unabashedly pointing her knife at Kaminari.

"I have summer classes, give me a break," he says, wounded, reaching around her to grab half a ham and cheese sandwich. Jirou elbows him neatly, but he pops the sandwich into his mouth before he could drop it. "Calm down, jeez, this is my house—" He trails off, blinking at Momo.  "You okay?"

The question catches Momo off-guard. She swallows, breaking eye contact. "Yeah. Yes. Yes, I’m okay. Sorry. You surprised me, that’s all."

Jirou smiles her amused little smile. "That’s for what you did to me last time."

"I did not do it on purpose." Momo objects, instinctively; before recoiling, reaching over to open another plastic bag.

Both Jirou and Kaminari laugh—Kaminari loud, Jirou subdued—and it leaves her flustered.

"Say, Yaomomo, you ever played Truth?"

Jirou frowns. "Why are you—"

"Truth or Dare?" Momo asks.

"Nope." Kaminari pops his p, smiling as he unwraps a package of turkey. "As in Truth. Just Truth. Kinda like 21 Questions. But without a number limit. You ask the person a question, they ask you, and ta-da you keep going like that. It’s kind of like a water-breaker."

"Ice-breaker, idiot," Jirou mutters, stopping halfway through dipping her spreader into cream cheese.

Kaminari waves a hand in dismissal.

Momo considers it. "Is there a way to win this?"

There’s a whistle, teasing. Jirou smiles, too. "Competitive."

"It’s not a game," Momo points out, "If you can’t win it."

"True." Kaminari raises both hands, throws them up in the air. It's alarming with a bread knife in hand. "Guess you win when the other person refuses to answer your question. First person to break the cycle loses. Fair enough, yeah?"

"That’s barbaric." Jirou brings her knife down on the loaf hard, still frowning.

"I think it’s good for getting to know people." Kaminari grins.  "Come on, the silence is bothering you, right? And if you’re going to be part of the team—"

Momo shakes her head. "I never said—"

Kaminari finishes a whole tray of sandwiches and he slides it over to an empty counter. "Okay, you can ask the first question!"

Jirou sighs. It’s a tired, tired sound, the same one Momo had heard from Ojiro so many times during the first catering job, only this too is tinged with so much fondness—a fond kind of exasperation. She grabs a piece of bread. "Listen, you don’t have to—"

"No, I want to, I’m intrigued." Momo finishes her own tray of sandwiches. "Fine. How old are you—"

Kaminari makes a buzzer sound. "No, no, Yaomomo, come on, let’s not ask such juvenile questions."

Momo frowns. "Juvenile?"

"Yeah. We’re all adults here, ask more serious questions." Kaminari nods at her, as if some sort of sign of shared courage. "I’m nineteen. I can take whatever you throw at me."

"Anything?" Momo levels her gaze at him. She thinks Jirou snickers at them. "You answered my question, though. Your turn. Let’s see what kind of serious question you ask me."

Kaminari whines, a childish little sigh. "We’ve only started and you’re already cheating. How old are you, Yaomomo?"

"The same age."

Both Kaminari and Jirou peer more closely at her at that. "Whoa," Kaminari says, setting down his bread knife. "You—you’re really mature for your age—"

"No, you just act like a child," Jirou mutters, elbowing him again and looking absolutely unapologetic when she manages to hit Kaminari’s cheek. "Leave Yaomomo alone, seriously."

"I don’t mind it," Momo says, mildly, and finds that she means it.

"It’s your turn," Kaminari says, dodging the hand Jirou reaches out to try and cover his mouth.

Momo watches them for a few minutes, at the easy way they jostle elbows and mimic each other’s voices in a higher pitch as they bicker over whether ham and cheese is better than turkey and cheese. There’s familiarity in the way they talk to each other, familiarity that’s so clearly the product of long-time intimate friendship, and when Jirou says Shut up, Denki, what the hell, Momo doesn’t even think about her question before she asks; "Are you two—going out?"

"What?" Jirou sounds downright scandalized—it’s the most emotion Momo has ever heard from her, and for a moment, she’s concerned she’d genuinely offended Jirou. But Jirou makes a face that makes Momo think this isn’t the first time she’s been asked this. "Ew? Yuck? Gross—no, god no—not in a million years—we’re so not compatible—that’s crazy, why would anyone—"

"She’s like a brother to me," Kaminari cuts in solemnly.

"A bro—" Jirou frowns. "I’m obviously the older brother."

"You’re too early to be anyone’s older brother, Kyou—" Jirou kicks him right in the shin, and Kaminari winces. "—Sure, fine, you’re the older one."

When Jirou turns to look back at Momo, she looks flustered, her cheeks dusted pink and her eyes hesitant as she reaches for butter. "We just—we grew up together. We’re practically family."

Momo stops again, this time in the middle of spreading butter. "I—I’m sorry for assuming—"

"They get that a lot," Sero says, ambling in with an armful of peanut butter jars. He stops by the doorway, taking in the four jars Jirou has lined up on the counter beside her. "Crap. Wait—"

Jirou groans, not even bothering to greet him properly. "I told you I was gonna—"

"Shit, it slipped my mind?" Sero looks sincerely confused. "My bad?"

"What are we gonna do with all this peanut butter?"

Kaminari grins. "This is just like old times, huh. We used to eat peanut butter sandwiches all the time when all of us were too lazy to make anything else." To Momo, he says; "Hanta grew up with us, too. We’re like—what did my sisters used to call us—"

"A little gang of rascals," Sero tells Momo, smiling in greeting as he dumps the jars right beside the ones Jirou had bought. "Sorry I’m late, guys, what did I miss?"

"A rousing game of Truth between Yaomomo and I," Kaminari tells him, ignoring Jirou’s muttered he called it a water-breaker. "We were just getting to the juicy part."

"Is the juicy part whether or not you and Kyouka are dating?" Sero snorts. "Because I’m pretty sure we established a long time ago that you’re not her type."

Momo, somehow, startles at that—at the same time Jirou finishes a plate of peanut butter sandwiches. She eyes it disdainfully as she slides it across the counter behind her. She sighs, shifting her weight from one foot to another. When she catches Momo looking, she offers her a smile that’s half apologetic, half legitimately amused. "Sorry, we’re a rowdy bunch. It’s always been like this, whenever all of us were together in one place."

That makes Momo smile, too. "I can imagine," she says. "My childhood was pretty quiet."

"Only child?" Sero guesses. When he gets an affirmative, he nods. "A lot of cartoon-watching, then?"

Momo frowns at him. "Not exactly."

"Books?" Kaminari tries.

"Well—well, yes."

Jirou peers at her curiously. "What kind? You don’t strike me as the fairy tale kind of person."

"Well," Momo says slowly. "Japanese plays, mostly, if I wanted fiction. If not, I’ll read up on art and physics. My parents were very fond of giving me those How Do Things Work booklets, and I vividly remember reading them."

For a long beat after Momo finishes, all the other three are quiet.

"No cartoons?" Sero asks, at the same time Kaminari says; "What about peanut butter sandwiches?"

"No," Momo says, to both counts.

Jirou looks thoughtful, continuing to stare at Momo curiously. "Is your family, like, the traditional type?"

"I—" Momo hesitates. "You could say that."

It isn’t really, not in the same way Shouto’s family is, but at the end of the day, Momo thinks her childhood and Shouto’s must belong to a separate category together, from the way Sero reacts now, mock-cradling his chin and saying; "Interesting."

"Weird, man." Kaminari rolls up aluminum foil and launched it at the trash bin like he would have a basketball.

Sero, candid, says; "Do you even call that childhood?"

"It wasn’t a bad childhood," Momo says, fighting the urge to bristle.

Sero blinks at her, easily dodging Jirou’s hand as it reaches out to slap his arm. "Not what I said, though."

"S’what it sounded like, dude," Kaminari stage-whispers. "Sorry, god, he’s so vulgar."

"You’re making it worse." Jirou fixes them both an unimpressed look, reaching past Momo to grab a new pack of wheat bread. "What they’re trying to say is—it’s just a different childhood from ours."

Momo frowns, peanut butter momentarily forgotten. "What do you mean?"

"The three of us, we—we had too much childhood?" Jirou makes a face, but both Sero and Kaminari grin at each other. It’s a smile of nostalgia, one that she recognizes only because she and Shouto have a private one of their own, small and conspiratorial even in the stuffiest of settings. "Denki’s the youngest kid in his family, and his sisters are, like, way older, so he was seriously spoiled. It’s why he’s still such a baby now."

"Hey," Kaminari protests, drowned out by Sero’s somber Yeah, he was.

"Because we were friends with him, guess you could say we were spoiled, too? Denki’s place was, like, kid central all the time. Endless supply of band-aids, microwaveable everything if no one was home to cook food." Jirou, finally, grins back at the other two. "We rode our bikes there all the time. Sometimes I didn’t even go home ’til the next day. Practically lived in that house."

"Same." Sero’s nod somehow looks thoughtful, in its own way. "Kickball everyday—"

"Cartoon marathons," Kaminari says, eyes bright with fond reminiscing. "Oh, man. We should get back the old gang one of these days and play a round—"

"Anyway," Jirou says, turning to Momo. "We fulfilled every childhood stereotype, I’m pretty sure. I’m sure you had a happy childhood, but it’s just—it’s just different from ours. So it’s a little weird for us to be hearing about it."

"It’s sorta like a movie," Sero clarifies, not unkindly.

That, Momo can see. Childhood for her had been kimono measurements, discovering a passion for science and math, reaffirming gifts and skills she knows she can cultivate, and Shouto—meeting Shouto, becoming friends with Shouto, eventually recognizing that Shouto is an equal, a confidante and a partner she can trust and rely on instead of feeling overshadowed by. Childhood for either of them had not been harmless bruises and colorful band-aids, going too fast on swings and building pillow forts—it’s different altogether, and the idea feels distant to her, because the only childhood she knows is the kind she’d at least shared with Shouto.

It does feel like a movie, their childhood, if only because it’s something she’s able to recognize not because she’s experienced it, but because she’s heard about it.

"As an apology, then," Jirou finally says, "for Denki running his annoying mouth and offending you—"

"You didn’t—" Momo tries to say.

"How ‘bout we pass on our turn and give you another question?" Jirou suggests. Momo doesn’t know when Kaminari had become a we for Jirou, but it’s a sentiment that a part of her understands.

"That’s alright," Momo tries again, but Sero shakes his head.

"That’s fair. Ask us a big one."

Momo finds that she doesn’t have to think hard about it at all. She clears her throat. "Why do you work here? For Yuuei?"

Whereas Kaminari and Sero share a surprised look, like it’s not a question they’d ever thought anyone would ask, Jirou doesn’t look taken aback at the slightest.

It’s Kaminari who speaks first, though. "I think it’s because the work is so easy?"

"I wouldn’t call it easy, exactly. But it works out, so—yeah, I guess, same for me?" Sero hums, noncommittal. He and Kaminari share another look, and Momo realizes that while Sero appears to be the calmer one of the two, he also serves as the mouth-piece—the one with the means to articulate what Kaminari, in all his playfulness and penchant for laughter, can’t seem to express. They both shrug at Momo. "It’s always different, for us. Every job is different, you know?"

Jirou puts her spreader down and stretches her hands over the table. "Look, it’s all a mess most of the time and it can get stressful, but everything still gets settled at some point, and that’s more than enough for me—us, I guess. We like it. There’s always something new every time—and, like, there’s something about that that’s fun."

It’s gone completely silent outside, a comfortable kind of quiet matching the half-darkened sky.

"Half the time, we just go in there and hope things work out. And they do. Things don’t always have to be structured and planned to turn out well, you know? This team’s a constant reminder of that." Jirou pauses, drums one finger and looks up at Momo almost shyly. "Does that make sense?"

Momo thinks about the two hours she’d spent with them; thinks about how many problems came up in that time, little disasters coming up and reaching their climax before any of them can blink, stress levels rising and falling and crackling in the air like tiny thunderbolts moving fast enough to leave whiplash. But all of them were solved just as quickly, there then gone like everything else. And all five of them knew it, considered it a given that when problems arise, sometimes they just have to work through them and somehow find a way to make things work.

Dr. Uwabami once said that wabi-sabi depended on being able to slow down and learn to rely on being instead of doing, to accept that things will happen even when people didn’t want them to, and that expecting to perfect something instead of acknowledging it and working around it often goes against the concept. Momo had not known how that had been relevant to what they were studying, but it feels now like less of art philosophy and more of Dr. Uwabami simply breaking down life in a way her students had come to understand.

We just go in there and hope things work out, Jirou had said. And they do.

And that, Momo thinks she understands as well.

"Guys, guys—" It’s Ashido, coming in from the back door with a handful of paper plates. "Ojiro-kun says dinner’s ready. Wanna take a break?"

Kaminari and Sero are quick to drop everything and pile out with an equally energetic Ashido, but Jirou hesitates, much as she had when she’d led Momo into her first catering job. "I get the hesitation," she says. "I do, trust me. But that’s the thing—sometimes you gotta trust us. There aren’t guarantees to this job, which—I know sounds dramatic when it’s just catering—but I don’t think you’re gonna, like, come to a definite decision if you keep relying on question-and-answer portions to give you the feedback you need. It’s a choice, Yaomomo, and you gotta trust your gut, too, and make it, you know?"

Jirou hesitates for the briefest of moments, but she reaches out to pry the bread knife out of Momo’s hands. In its place, she holds out a hand.

She smiles, close-mouthed but kind. "Let’s go?"

There are things that don’t have to be thought about, Shouto had told Momo, because doing will give you answers that your mind can’t.

She takes Jirou’s hand.

Shouto must have fallen asleep.

When he comes to, the room is dark, illuminated only by the lamp post directly outside the window.

Midoriya had been right about not getting enough sleep—he’d been up late for the past few nights, sitting in the living room and flipping idly through channels until he finds one unobtrusive enough to play quietly in the background as he thinks. He’s never been much for TV, but it’s comforting; he can’t imagine mulling over his relationship with his mother in the dead silence of their apartment as Momo’s room remains equally quiet. Silence is a friend to people who need to focus and concentrate, but it’s also an enemy to those who are prone to overthinking.

Shouto jolts as he registers the footsteps coming up the stairs. Three seconds later and Midoriya, barely visible in the dim light, shows up at the doorway.

"Oh, Todoroki-kun, you’re awake!" he says. He has a monstrously yellow backpack hanging from his back, the only bright thing among all the shadowed things in Shouto’s vision. "I—Did you have somewhere to be because—you were sleeping so peacefully and I didn’t want to wake you up?"

Shouto checks his phone for the time. It’s dead, the battery already low when he’d left the apartment. "How long was I asleep?"

"About—about three hours?" Midoriya fidgets in the doorway, pulling at his bag straps. "Um—I’m closing the center in a bit, though, so—"

"Oh." Shouto immediately stands up; his bones creak in complaint from being unused, and he stretches drowsily. "Are you—" He begins, at the same time Midoriya says;

"Did you, um, sleep well—oh, sorry—"

"No, I—" Shouto says. He cuts himself off immediately, at the same time Midoriya does, and for three seconds, they just stare at each other.

And then Midoriya laughs—it sounds like it was surprised out of him, the laughter starting off sheepishly amused before it rises in volume. "I can understand? I don't sleep until 3am nowadays, either. I work the closing shift so—without school, I have the excuse to stay up late and—wake up late."

Shouto wonders if Midoriya overthinks as well—it seems likely, because information is never lost on someone like him, as far as Shouto can tell.

He just continues staring at Midoriya, at the shadowed outline, but then Midoriya’s turning back, coughing out the last of his laughter.

"I’m—headed out now, are you all set to go?"

"Yeah," Shouto says, voice rough from sleep. He clears his throat and follows Midoriya down to the first floor and out the center. He watches Midoriya turn off the last of the lights and lock the front door. "Do you do this every night?"

"Hm?" Midoriya looks extremely focused for someone just turning the key back to secure the lock. He smiles triumphantly at himself when it clicks, the quirk to his mouth this time illuminated by the lamppost behind them instead of shadowed. "Uh—yes, I do. I volunteered for this shift, so, um, yeah."

"Every day?" Shouto says, letting his arms hang on either side as he falls into step beside Midoriya.

"Every day," Midoriya confirms. "Or—except weekends. Do you—do you have a job, too, Todoroki-kun?"

Shouto considers how to answer that, but eventually he says; "No, I don’t."

Midoriya hums and takes that as it is. "You must have a lot of free time—this summer."

It doesn’t sound like a dig at him, the way Midoriya says it, but Shouto raises an eyebrow anyway and turns his head to look at Midoriya more fully. "Are you teasing me?"

"Teasing—" Midoriya says, frowning in surprise up at him before breaking off into a yelp when they make eye contact. "I—no—of course not. A break—from school—is good."

"I’ve never thought about it," Shouto says honestly. "Getting part-time work."

"This is my first summer in college where I’m not taking summer classes, so—" Midoriya shrugs, adjusting his bag straps around his shoulder as he comes to a stop. "This is me—this is my bus stop."

Shouto blinks. "It’s mine as well."

"Oh—oh, right. Let me just—check when it’s coming—" Midoriya smiles, pulling out his phone—a smile that falls quickly as he scans his phone screen. "Oh."

"Do we have to wait an hour?" Shouto asks, half-weary.

"No, more like—" Midoriya turns his phone around to show Shouto.

Accident, detour, no bus service in specific stops all swim in his vision, settling in the realization that—

"I guess—I guess I’m walking home?" Midoriya worries at his bottom lip, pocketing his phone when he notices that Shouto’s no longer looking at it. "I—what about you, Todoroki-kun?"

Shouto, for some reason, internally panics. "What about a cab?"

"A—" Midoriya frowns as he thinks about it. "I don’t really want to pay for—a cab? I’m really fine with walking, it’s a nice night out?" When Shouto doesn’t reply to that, Midoriya tugs at his bag again. It’s probably a nervous habit, the same way he always seems to tug at something when he’s working through hesitation. "Would you—"

Shouto looks at him, and again, Midoriya looks at him like he’s searching—this time, though, he smiles, a small half-smile, and Shouto wonders if Midoriya had found what he was looking for.

"Um, would you wanna walk with me?"

"Too much childhood," Jirou says again later, on the bus home, both of them full from dinner and with arms sore from mindless sandwich-spreading.

"Too much?" Momo doesn’t take this bus line often, but Jirou acts like she doesn’t even have to think about where to go, where to sit, how to wave her hand at the driver as she runs her card across the sensor. She follows easily though, looking around as she takes the seat that Jirou pats in indication beside her. It’s slightly intimidating—if only because Jirou seems so clearly used to being in other people’s space and others in hers that it seems more unnatural for Momo to not take up the unspoken invitation. She frowns at Jirou now. "How can there possibly be too much childhood?"

"You’d be surprised, seriously," Jirou says, pulling at her backpack straps as she moves it from her back to her lap. It has three peanut butter jars in it, all unopened; Momo herself had barely managed to excuse herself before Sero had snuck a fourth one into hers. "All we really did was play, have fun, goof around. It sounds nice and cool in theory but you get to this age and it’s like, what do I do now?"

"I see." Momo has never thought about it that way—she’s always known what to do, even though some things had been less concrete than others. Art and design had come out of nowhere, only buoyed by her already existing love for math and science, but it hadn’t been a problem, not when she’d so easily come to a compromise she could pursue. It feels like a privilege now, for something like that to come and go unquestioned. "Continue to have fun, I suppose?"

That makes Jirou laugh—a short sound that resembles a happy bark more than it does a chuckle. "That’s what the catering team is for, I guess?"

"Whose idea was it initially?" Momo says, balancing her own bag on her lap. "To join?"

"Ah, Yaomomo." Jirou smiles; a tiny one, mock-sly. "Would this count for Truth?"

Momo had completely forgotten it—she considers it, relents when she finds that she doesn’t mind at all. "Of course," she says, sitting up straighter. "I don’t play games I’m not out to win, Jirou-san."

"I’ll remember that." Jirou’s smile stays, loses the playfulness for more genuine amusement. "Well, uh—we have another friend—Kirishima—who’s been friends with Mina since middle school." Ashido-san, Momo’s brain supplies. "Denki used to work at this breakfast place with him, down at the other end—uh, I guess Denki started catering first, because he knew Kirishima, who knew Mina, and they both managed to hook Denki up with a job that one time he’d spent his gap year living in Hanta’s linen closet because he kept getting fired—"

"No," Momo says, horrified.

"Yeah," Jirou returns, somber for all of five seconds before an unsympathetic scoff escapes her. "Okay, no, he only got fired from that one place—"

"Kaminari-san actually got fired?"

"Oh hell yeah. He got caught smuggling home leftovers after his shift—which is ridiculous, honestly, like, no one’s gonna eat them anyway?"

Jirou takes a second to fume, still keeping her face mostly blank, before realizing that Momo has noticed. For all that she pretends not to care about what happens to Kaminari, Momo thinks, Jirou is oddly protective; a special kind of I can hit him but you can’t mentality that makes Momo, somehow, feel warm to be privy to.

"Anyway, Kirishima asks Mina to bring Denki over to Yuuei, and Hanta, who'd been suffering through our first year jobless, goes along with it because it’s Hanta and he’ll bathe in the sewers if it’s more convenient than his leaking shower."

Momo stops trying to fight back her smile. She laughs a little into her hand. "And you, Jirou-san? What’s your Yuuei origin story?"

"My origin story—" Jirou, too, spares another two-second laugh into her own hand. "I was working at this vintage record store down at the harborfront, at the time, but it was too far from campus and it was a pain commuting to and fro during the school year. So when I found out both Denki and Hanta were doing this catering thing, I thought, why not?"

"‘Why not’," Momo repeats. "That seems to be the general attitude towards this job, isn’t it?"

"How many people do you know say ‘Oh, yeah, I cater part-time’? We’re sorta dysfunctional—other teams would be working for restaurants, but we just go along with whoever will have us. And Ojiro cooks whatever that day’s patron wants him to make, we do the job, rinse, repeat, do another job. All of us are good at that, I think. Starting over from scratch each time and somehow having fun with it."

"I’m not," Momo says honestly. "Although not the having fun part, per se, I do have fun—"

"Sure." Jirou nods agreeably. "The starting over from scratch, then? It’s a convenient thing to be able to do. The thing with having too much childhood is that you kinda learn to take each day as it is, like carpe die or something—"

"Diem," Momo corrects patiently. "Not ‘die’, that’s—it’s dee-ehm, Jirou-san—"

"Diem," Jirou relents. "That’s us. Everyday. We, uh, whatever that means. I’m sure it’s the same sentiment, though."

"You seize the day," Momo says. "That sounds an awful lot like Yuuei. You mentioned it’s one of the things you’re on the team for. It must be refreshing, then, being able to experience something like that."

"You could, too," Jirou says, fiddling with the charm on her bag. She sneaks a look at Momo, looks away again when she finds Momo looking back. "I mean. Just saying."

Momo smiles. "I suppose."

"Okay, I say that, but—" Jirou hesitates, shrugging down at herself. "I guess maybe I really just joined because Denki and Hanta did."

Momo considers that. "Wanting to work with people you already know?"

"Yeah, sorta?" Jirou leans back, pressing her shoulder against the window as she cradles one side of her face on one hand. "But also—" There’s a pause, a little embarrassed. "We’ve just all been together for so long, it’s hard to come to terms with—with not being with them."

Momo considers that, too, and finds that it’s a harder concept than it sounds. She doesn’t have long to think about it, though—nothing past a fleeting image of seven-year-old Shouto murmuring I’m sorry, I should have listened to you earlier quietly—because Jirou adjusts her sitting position, again, looking curiously up at Momo. "So. My turn to ask, yeah?"

Momo adjusts her posture, too. She nods. "Yes."

Jirou thinks about it for a long minute. "Do you have one of those? Someone like Denki and Hanta are to me? A childhood friend—though I guess that’s a pretty vague term, huh, but someone who you’ve had a close friendship with since you’re young—"

"I do," Momo says, and the memory of a younger Shouto rises up clearer and more vivid this time. "I live with him right now."

"With him?" Jirou repeats, looking genuinely stumped.

That, somehow, has Momo rushing in to say; "It’s not like that. Please, Jirou-san." It sounds hasty, so she clears her throat and says; "Just because we’re living together and he’s—"

"No, no, not what I meant," Jirou says, though there’s relief in her eyes that Momo doesn’t exactly comprehend past the initial observation. "You just didn’t strike me as the roommate type. He must be handy to have around."

"Oh—oh, no." Momo thinks of Shouto leaving a single plate on the sink when he could very well have washed it himself, of Shouto sometimes spacing out and leaving the milk carton out on the table. "Though that’s not fair, I suppose. He’s a very good friend, and it could—it could be worse."

Jirou grins at that. "Not the dishwashing type?"

"Not at all," Momo admits. "Shouto has only recently moved out of the house, though. I do think he’s still adjusting to domestic life without the convenience of having someone do little things like that for him. We both are, really."

"Are you two—" Jirou’s face scrunches up curiously. "Are you two, like, rich?"

Momo flushes, despite herself. "I—well—"

"The rich type, huh," Jirou drags the sentence out, the same way Kaminari often does when he’s teasing Ashido. "I figured. So high class."

"Pardon?" Momo blinks. "The rich type?"

"Yeah. The young master type," Jirou points out, and as much as Momo wants to defend Shouto, she can’t when it’s very clear he probably doesn’t know how to fold his own shirts. He hangs up even his home wear. "That’s kinda neat."

"What is?"

"Coming from a background like that. It explains a lot." Momo wonders if she should be offended, but Jirou’s grin returns, and she doesn’t have it in her to do anything but stare. Jirou Kyouka has a nice smile. "I’m not making fun of you—doesn’t matter to me, just good to know. Everyone’s rich in something, right?"

"I—Well, it seems to me that you and Kaminari-san and Sero-san are all rich in fun memories," Momo says, because it’s true, from the look on Jirou’s face every time she thinks about it—it’s the look of someone stifling laughter because they know it’s going to be too loud and too raucous once they let themselves start laughing, and it’s a good look on Jirou.

It’s the look on her face now. "I guess. We’re all rich in love and fun memories and stupid stories."

"I hardly think they’re stupid," Momo says honestly. She hasn’t heard a story directly, but she can imagine the kind of thing they would have been up to at that age, a young Jirou, Kaminari and Sero riding their bikes down a narrow street and yelling and laughing and—

"You ever gone bowling, Yaomomo?" Jirou asks, abrupt. "Not like a Truth question, just a casual question."

Momo, a little stumped, shakes her head.

"No? Ran around a sprinkler?" Another head shake. "Stayed out past midnight? Baked with a friend? Picnic?" Jirou cuts herself off, tilts her head and stares at Momo. "Would you—would you want to?"

The question is, in retrospect, something out of the blue. Momo pictures it: riding a bike everywhere in the hot summer sun, eating ice cream she’d chased after, sprawling out on a treehouse floor. It’s something so different to the childhood she’d had, and while she doesn’t begrudge it in the slightest, this new idea feels bright and novel, and she realizes that her answer to Jirou’s question is that she doesn’t mind at all.

Momo nods.

Jirou visibly brightens up at that—it’s a nice look on her, too, though Momo seems to be thinking that about every expression that crosses Jirou’s face today. "A lot of the high school stuff is overrated, though, seriously. But the simple things—I like ‘em. The dumb simple things."

Momo wants to reply, but the bus driver’s voice comes over the speaker before she could;

"Excuse me, passengers, there’s been an accident up ahead and the next intersection has been closed off by emergency responders.  This bus will be taking a detour to accommodate the blockage. I repeat; this bus will be taking a detour—"

Jirou blinks. "My stop is second to the last. I think I’m good? You, Yaomomo?"

"The last stop," Momo says.

Jirou smiles, quick and conspiratorial. "Cool. Guess you’re stuck with me for a bit longer than planned."

Momo finds it hard not to smile back. "I suppose I am."

She also finds that she doesn’t mind this—talking to Jirou, sitting beside Jirou, smiling back at Jirou—either.

Midoriya is calming to be around.

By the time they’ve been walking for forty minutes, Shouto has thought this statement through about three times and decided that yes, there’s something about Midoriya that puts him at ease. It’s comfortable, walking beside Midoriya and listening to him talk and work his way around Shouto’s more clipped answers, and there’s ease to be found in the careful familiarity with which Midoriya navigates Musutafu—clearly no stranger to its shortcuts and districts, and a friend to its late night eccentricities.

Shouto imagines this must be what walking home with someone after class would have been like in high school; waiting for each other to finish up in the classroom, walking back to the station. It’s a bit of a dramatic thought, he muses when the comparison settles, but then again, he and Momo had always gotten rides back home if their families could help it, and he doesn’t have much to go by except for the way Midoriya keeps tugging at his bag and gesturing.

"I used to, um, go to this 24-hour book shop near my old neighborhood," Midoriya says now, thoughtful as they pass by a 24/7 coffee shop. "It was a converted house—a lot of the places in that area are, um, older houses turned shops to accomodate the amount of tourists that end up staying at the inns there. I—I would read and read and sometimes I would take a notebook with me and jot down these—notes?—on the things I read and learn."

Shouto tilts his head. "Do you still have those notebooks?"

"I—" Midoriya blinks, surprised. "Yeah, I—I still do. I also—I still keep notes on things. Nowadays."

That strikes Shouto as intriguing. "On things?"

"Yeah—all sorts of things, I—I guess," Midoriya says. "There—there's a lot of history when you stick around a place that used to—to be someone else's house. A lot of history to be found in family. And other people's childhood—no, I mean, there’s a lot of interesting things around—if you, um, care to look."

Midoriya’s words are unpredictable; some sentences are spoken softly, others firmly, and sometimes he would stammer, other times he would say something particularly clearly. Shouto had chalked it up to a naturally nervous disposition, not unlike Fuyumi’s, and while that appears true, it seems that Midoriya’s just an especially passionate person—it’s not obvious at first glance, but he has a lot to say and a lot to think about, and often, there’s so much of it that his words stumble over each other in an effort to express what he’s thinking about. It’s faded a bit, in the long minutes Shouto has spent listening to Midoriya, but it’s a quality he nonetheless finds refreshing, and he feels satisfied to realize that he hadn’t been wrong about assuming that Midoriya Izuku is a genuine person at heart.

"Interesting things?" Shouto echoes now. "Like what?"

"Like—" Midoriya waves them over past an intersection. "Like food stalls that are open late? Um—"

"Interesting," Shouto repeats. "Food stalls."

Midoriya flushes at that. "I—I find them interesting."

"How so?" Shouto asks, and finds that it’s one of the most heartfelt questions he’s asked anyone lately.

"Well, I—My sleeping schedule has been terrible lately, with the adjustment to the later shift and everything, so—by the time I get home, at times like this, the only things open will be places like that? And it’s just—" Midoriya gestures aimlessly, giving his words a trial run in his head by the looks of it. "It’s like all these places stay awake—businessmen are still around when my bus passes by—while the rest of the city—um—sleeps? Not to be cliche, but there’s just—it’s a different kind of world?"

"At night."

Midoriya nods, squinting at a street sign and murmuring this way back to the main campus, I think. "Y-Yeah. At night."

Shouto hums. He’s had his fair share of walking around at night; though that had only been in his neighborhood, his only company the strays cats in the playground and the flickering lampposts lining the street. "There’s a disconnect, huh."

"In a way," Midoriya agrees. "It’s just—I feel kinda small, when I walk around at night like—like this."

"Midoriya," Shouto says. "Do you do this often?"

Midoriya jolts visibly at that. He laughs nervously. "Not—not recently."

Shouto peers at Midoriya and tries to imagine him walking around at night, possibly taking notes, for all he knows; it fits, though, in his head, and there’s a tug in Shouto’s chest at the image. "That’s so—wabi-sabi must appeal to you, then."

"It does!" Midoriya says, with vigor. "Wabi-sabi is—I agree with it? I agree with seeing something special in the smallest things—no matter how old, no matter how broken." He frowns as he gestures for Shouto to take a left. "Or—no, broken is not the right word. Nothing’s ever broken. I just—Iida-kun, my co-worker—he says nothing ever needs fixing, just—just a little polishing. Wabi-sabi’s sorta like that? Sometimes—sometimes, things aren’t bright or particularly beautiful, but that’s—that’s kinda what makes them so much worthy of appreciation. Y-You know?"

Shouto hadn’t realized he’d been staring at Midoriya all this time. Midoriya looks back at him, growing increasingly self-conscious the more time Shouto spends not talking.

"I see," he says, finally, which doesn’t feel like much of an appropriate response at all. "I’ve never thought about it like that, exactly. My father has a penchant for the showy kind."

"Your father," Midoriya repeats slowly. They turn another corner, and the surroundings, this time, are familiar to Shouto, who recognizes the nondescript buildings in the outskirts of their university’s main campus.

"He’s all about covering up cracks, hiding the old, dirty things," Shouto says. When he smiles, it’s a little bitter. "Wabi-sabi would definitely not be his kind of aesthetic, I don’t think."

If Midoriya notices the sharpness of the smile, he doesn’t point it out. "It’s mine," is all he says, softly. He smiles back.

And Shouto can’t hold on to the idea of his father when Midoriya’s smiling at him like they’d just shared a private joke. "Is that why you’re working for the Center, then?"

"Kind of?" Midoriya frowns. "I—I just thought it would be interesting."

"You and interesting," Shouto says. "The Center must get exciting, if you put it like that."

"It—It really doesn’t." Midoriya flashes a toothy smile, hangdog. "It gets pretty slow, most days." They turn one last corner, and it brings them right to the middle of campus—to the fountain in the middle of the green, turned off for the night. "We made it."

"We made it," Shouto echoes. "Thank you."

It takes Midoriya by surprise, but he recovers with yet another smile and a tug at his backpack strap. "Thank you—for walking with me. And l-listening."

Shouto blinks at him. "It was no problem—"

"Todoroki-kun," Midoriya blurts out, abruptly loud in the middle of the empty central courtyard. "I—it gets really slow at the Center, really—so if—if you want to keep coming by—I don’t mind at all. Not that I would have minded, I don’t—I don’t own the place—but I know it must be uncomfortable coming around and—and feeling like you didn’t do what you came all the way there for but—but I mean it, I think it’s brave that you keep coming anyway and if the Center can help you get your bearings back or to ready yourself or for just some air-conditioning, I want you to know you’re always welcome and I will be happy to—"

"Midoriya," Shouto interrupts, because Midoriya’s rambling is rapidly gaining in speed, and he’s surprised to recognize the blatant amusement in his own voice. He considers the offer—and finds that it isn’t a bad one, not at all. Something about Midoriya eases Shouto’s nervousness, reassurance where Shouto hadn’t been looking for it and Midoriya hadn’t been offering it. There’s a calm in the idea of spending his days at the Center drinking tea and listening to Midoriya’s co-worker rant passionately about dead poets, and it feels like a nice compromise running away from his mother there compared to running away from his mother at home. "I’ll take you up on that."

"You—You will?" Midoriya says; his eyes light up with his smile, and that, if anything, only makes Shouto more relieved he’d replied the way he did.

They part ways right there, Shouto going left from the fountain and Midoriya right. Just as the yellow backpack disappears from view, though—Shouto turning back, for some reason, to watch Midoriya walk towards his own side of the campus—Midoriya calls his name, waving. "Thank you, by the way, for earlier!" he says, and even from this far, Shouto can see his smile.

Shouto doesn’t immediately realize what Midoriya means—by the time he does, recalling that the boxes were from this morning and not the day before, Midoriya had long since disappeared, his voice still seemingly echoing in the quiet of the empty campus.

"Momo?"

Momo looks up from the hallway mirror as Shouto walks out of their kitchen, still towelling his hair dry from a late shower. This, as far as Momo can recall, is the first time she’d gotten home before Shouto—and she searches her roommate’s face for any signs that this late arrival might be a bad thing, but all she finds is genuine confusion.

"Why do we have so much peanut butter?" Shouto’s face scrunches up as he looks over his shoulder and back into their kitchen. "Smooth, too, not crunchy. Did you win these?"

"No, they’re—" Momo pauses, tugging at her hair tie. "I did a bit of a job with the catering team today. They’re leftovers, in a way."

"The catering team?" Shouto pads over to the dining table, where Momo had left two sheets: a Yuuei flyer taken from their refrigerator door, a crumpled time table of scheduled jobs that Jirou had produced out of her backpack before getting off the bus and waving good night.

She’d felt a little wistful, waving back her goodbye, but she hasn’t had the time to figure out why. Thinking about Jirou makes Momo smile, though—the way she’d told stories and asked questions with a grudging kind of animation in her gestures and facial expressions, the way her voice had remained a steady timber constantly throughout their continued game. It makes her smile, and Shouto notices, because he leaves the towel balanced on top of his head and asks; "You’ve decided?"

"In—in a way," Momo says, breaking eye contact as she roots around for a brush. It feels bizarre, saying it, and she expects Shouto to say something about it—anything about it; how impromptu the decision is, how sudden and unforeseen. But he keeps quiet, giving the sheets another cursory glance. He’s been quiet since he’d gotten back, his mind so clearly somewhere else. Shouto’s a quietly contemplative person by nature, but he’s as equally governed by his emotions as he is by his thought processes; it shows on his face now, because he only ever gets a certain kind of pensive when he doesn’t know which half to give into. "Shouto?"

He doesn’t look up. "Yes?"

"Do we need to talk?"

"Talk?" At that, Shouto turns to her, eyes curious as he watches her brush her hair. "Talk about what?"

There’s a fold right where Momo had tied her hair all day, and she runs the brush through that, meeting Shouto’s eyes through the mirror. "Have you been—have you been visiting your mother?"

Shouto doesn’t recoil at that; he’s never been the kind to do so, but Momo still takes it as a good sign. "I haven’t. Is that what you wanted to talk about?"

"If you want to," she says quietly.

Her friendship with Shouto, Momo thinks, is unique in the sense that their worlds exist apart and yet beside each other. Jirou’s world had grown and developed intertwined with those of her childhood friends’, but Momo and Shouto’s worlds revolve and orbit around the other’s, magnetized by a kind of understanding for which she had yet to find a word for.

At its core, both Momo and Jirou’s childhoods are defined by memories and backgrounds shared with their respective childhood friends, but while Jirou had grown up a sibling to Kaminari and Sero, Momo and Shouto’s relationship are less familial than it is a partnership. Their friendship had been established by that mutual understanding of how the other operates and the assurance that they’ll always have each other to turn to, and while they have sweetened mochi instead of peanut butter sandwiches, telepathically communicating at dinner parties instead of racing down each other’s driveway, Momo looks at Shouto now—at the way he looks back at her and begs her not to ask, not yet—and understands why Jirou had so readily followed her friends to Yuuei.

Momo smiles at Shouto, before she looks away. She brushes her hair wordlessly as he gets up, shuffling the sheets back into a neat stack on the table before stalking off to his room with a yawn. He hesitates at his door, though, inching it open, only to look back at Momo.

"Good night, Shouto," she says softly.

Shouto nods, hand already against the doorway. Momo hadn’t been expecting one, but he gives her a smile—small but genuine.

"Good night." 

Chapter Text

SEPTEMBER

It takes Momo close to a month to realize what Kendou was doing.

She’s never officially told anyone but Shouto that she wanted to be part of the team—since her first few jobs, no one has asked her if she was staying, and neither has anyone really bothered telling her to declare whatever decision she’s come to. But the calls from Kendou remained consistent—asking for her help on days when the team was understaffed and Momo was free, which happened to be most days of the week—and her encounters with the team remained just as constant.

The team is handled by a conglomerate company whose main business is sending out restaurant consultants for workplace-related emergencies; Yuuei functions the same way, coming in for when catering teams from actual restaurants were not available.  Three weeks and four days later and Momo has worked six other jobs with Yuuei—a business brunch, an engagement cocktail party, and an 18-year-old’s birthday party, all on top of occasionally being summoned to someone’s house to do a variety of things ranging from frosting cupcakes to grocery shopping.

Every event is a mess both routine and still foreign to her; disasters one moment, averted the next, and she feels like a new gear attached to a machine, slowly starting to ease into the synchronized circular motion everyone else participates in. In every job, there's always something that makes her second guess everything—second guess her unspoken decision, second guess wanting something different—but by the time the job is done, that second-guessing always fades, hides back under whatever reason she’s trying to grasp for coming and being there in the first place. A weird kind of calmness arrives to replace it, a sense of peace she still hasn’t quite figured out yet, like knots slowly coming undone.

The members of the team are all familiar faces by now—their little quirks and habits come naturally to her at this point, from Ojiro’s perpetual weary half-smile to Sero being half-asleep most of the time he’s needed to Kaminari’s way of talking Ashido into always, always, always barging in butt-first with a stack of dirty plates she can barely support. Kendou never joins them, only ever around to take care of the administrative portion of the job, and no one seems to question that, either, so Momo doesn’t.

By contrast, Jirou is the one member of the team that takes it upon herself to commandeer the team into semi-organization, snapping at Kaminari and making sure Ashido doesn’t take the wrong dishes out to the floor. It makes it easier on Ojiro, and by the fourth job, Momo’s sure that this system is in place for that very reason.

Jirou herself has been as much a constant in Momo’s life in the past few weeks as Yuuei had been; it’s her that usually ends up coming with Momo on grocery store runs, and it’s her that’s never missed a shift, even when all three of the other usual servers have had to turn down jobs to attend their summer classes. Talking to Jirou is easy; she always looks up at Momo like she’s curious about everything she wants to say, and it’s a nice feeling, especially when even her oldest memories feel new and fresh when she’s telling them to Jirou. Their game of Truth had continued relentlessly, to Momo’s surprise, and while the questions have never taken them towards anything particularly life-changing nor humiliating, she’s learned a lot about Jirou through the game—from a musically-oriented family to majoring in Music Performance to a comfortable relationship with her father, who at one point had had to pick up her and Kaminari from the police station after they’d been accused of inappropriate graffiti.

Jirou’s different, in so many ways, and Momo, in equally many ways, is fascinated. She feels like something Momo has to constantly relearn, day in and day out, and Jirou keeps surprising her, whether it’s playing a beat with turned over plastic containers or offering one earbud to Momo when they take the bus home. It’s often enough, feeling transfixed by the unique things that Jirou does without thinking, that Momo often misses it when she has to wave goodbye to Jirou as she gets off the bus. Momo has never really felt like that about anyone, not when she and Shouto have always been in the same room if they could help it in most instances, and certainly not that they live together now—but it’s a novel new feeling with Jirou each time, feeling her heart lighten when she walks into a job and Jirou looks up and grins at her, and looking forward to working with the rest of Yuuei and watching Jirou joke around with the rest of the team.

Momo’s dynamic with the rest of the crew has settled, too; they orbit around her instead of swerving around her presence, and it’s nice. She’s never had people like Kaminari bumping into her on campus and shouting a loud, Hey, it’s Yaomomo! across the green, nor Ashido opening Ojiro’s front door for her and beaming as she asks if she can hug her in greeting—but she does now. It’s different from everything she’s used to, but never in a bad way; the open affection and never-ending excited chatter energizes Momo in ways she’s never expected, and she makes sure to give the team no reason to ever think they’re offending her.

They’re all genuinely good people to be around, and that, more than anything, is something Momo can never regret choosing.

"Yaomomo, don’t you think you’ve been somehow tricked into joining?" Kaminari asks now, raising his voice over the loud crackling of tin foil as he covers empty containers and rolls them back out to the van. "This is what, your third job with us? If you still think you’re not officially part of Yuuei—"

"You’re not?" Sero blinks, accidentally ripping apart a piece of tin foil too small for the huge brownie container in front of him. "But Kendou already has a list of your available days up in her office—"

"What?" Jirou looks up at the exact moment Kaminari hisses, "She has an office?" And they look at each other, twin frowns on their faces.

Momo recovers first. "I—"

"I don’t see what the problem is." Ashido pouts, flicking off a frozen piece of leftover fudge.  "You wouldn’t be coming with us every time if you have a problem with being here, would you, Yaomomo?"

"Now, see, here." Jirou plants a hand on her hip, a brave attempt at trying to act taller than the rest of their co-workers, and one that she usually defaults to during jobs when it’s too busy for everyone to be acting like children. "Unlike us, Yaomomo is a very productive member of society. She has responsibilities to her family, and she works really hard during the year." She sounds oddly like she’s showing off, like she’s the one handling two degrees. It makes Momo smile to herself. "And she’s very busy. This probably tires her out, you know?"

"It’s fine, really," Momo gives in, before she can help herself. She shrugs, smiles at all of them in turn. "The extra money is good, and it isn’t as if—it surely isn’t like I need that much more free time."

Sero nods. "There we go."

"See?" Ashido holds out her hands and arms in an all-encompassing gesture. "You’re one of us."

Ojiro calls for her from outside, by the van, and she jumps—Momo jumping with her in surprise. Ashido yells back, before disappearing with another grin in Momo’s direction.

"We should celebrate," Kaminari suddenly says.

Sero nods again. "You read my mind."

"Celebrate?" Momo asks, adjusting the crease of the foil on a cupcake container. "Celebrate what?"

"You officially being part of the team," Sero says, frowning as Kaminari shuffles behind him with the last roll of aluminum foil. "We do it for everyone."

"I’m pretty sure she’s been part of the team since her first day," Jirou points out, a small smile settling in at the corners of her mouth. When she sees Momo looking at her, it turns to a grin, almost private and theirs alone. "But yeah, we do have to celebrate."

"We don’t have to," Momo starts, but Kaminari wags a finger at her.

"Yaomomo, you clearly didn’t get the memo so let us spell it out for you," he says, kissing his teeth disapprovingly. "You always gotta find things to celebrate—good things, the right things. You always gotta find ways to have fun with something. Drives someone crazy if they don’t, you know? This is worth celebrating. So we’re gonna celebrate." Then, without missing a beat, he adds, "Right now. Are you free right now?"

"Right now?" Momo repeats, startled. "Well, yes—but—"

Jirou reaches across the table to point at her. "The best things in life are sometimes the unplanned ones, Yaomomo."

"I’m not free right now, though," Sero announces, checking his phone for the time. "I have plans—" He trails off, before frowning at Kaminari. "With you, actually. Wait. Weren’t we gonna go—"

"Yeah," Kaminari says, but he’s looking at Jirou, who, for once, is easily grinning back at him. "But we’re taking Yaomomo with us tonight."

✯

"Just throw it down, Yaomomo."

Momo lets go of the ball instinctively, swinging it out from under her and watching as it flies out—and lands with a thud on the neighboring lane, which, luckily, happens to be Kaminari and Sero’s.

"It flew," they chorus, deadpan, as it rolls off to the side.

"I-I’m so sorry," Momo apologizes, flushing as she turns back to Jirou, who’s turned away with blatantly shaking shoulders. Momo walks over with a mock frown, and that only sends Jirou laughing out loud, giggles turning into loud laughter as she turns back to look at Momo’s face.

"Oh—gosh—Yaomomo—that was so good—"

"I’m not—" Momo wills the warmth off her face, but she doesn’t think it works. "I’m not good at this sort of thing."

Jirou sobers up with visible effort, wiping at her eyes and coughing away the last of her giggles. "Because you’ve never done it before, is all," she says, picking up a ball herself. She takes her place by the start of the lane, calling out over her shoulder, "Even prodigies need practice."

Not me, Momo wants to say—but that’s not entirely true. Just because she’s able to try something and somehow succeed at it, she thinks, doesn’t necessarily mean she’s automatically amazing at everything she tries; being acceptable at something from the beginning is one thing, and she’s proud to say she’s usually in that category, never one to fail even during her first time at something, but there are things that require constant reviewing in order to be perfected.

She’s no stranger to perfection, to flawless accomplishments and accolades to be proud of, but she isn’t like Shouto, who functions the way he does simply because he’d been raised to be able to think that way and act accordingly. Shouto does things because he feels like he has to, because it’s a given that being a Todoroki comes with obligations that he’s bound to no matter what, but for Momo, things have to come naturally—a genuine curiosity, a genuine passion—for her to truly feel like she’s able to do it at the level it’s meant to.

There are things that don’t come naturally, and things she has to keep thinking about in order to understand: bowling, it seems, is one of them, and so is Jirou Kyouka.

Momo blinks and watches all the pins fall, one by one, in Jirou’s lane, and she’s smiling and clapping before Jirou has even completely turned back, fists in the air. Kaminari reaches over to high five her, and though she slaps it away, she laughs good-naturedly. "Beat that, sucker," she says, before skipping back to Momo. "See that?"

"That was great," Momo says, because it was.

Jirou’s an enigma, not because of anything she’s ever done, not because she’s mysterious in any way—but because Momo can’t seem to figure out the why’s and how’s of Jirou Kyouka, who sings under her breath when she’s getting ready to go back out on the floor, who has Momo smiling back at her before Momo can think about it, who touches Momo’s shoulder or taps her arm or pats her hand and leaves the spot she’d touched feeling warm.

Jirou makes Momo feel warm, and it’s something almost confusing in its frequency and severity, and while Momo knows there must be an explanation for it somewhere, she’s yet to figure out what that is, because these things—interacting with Jirou, reaching this level of familiarity with her and the rest of Yuuei in roughly a month—does not come naturally the way gravity laws do to her.

"Wanna try again?" Jirou’s doing it now, confusing Momo as she holds her hand and hands the ball to her. "Let go earlier this time."

When Jirou lets go, Momo takes a deep breath—she doesn’t know if it’s because Jirou had moved away or because bowling isn’t something she can run away from—and stands by the lane. Kaminari and Sero stop to watch, too, stopping in the middle of their attempts to knock the ball from the other’s hand before they can send it down.

Momo closes her eyes and takes another breath. It’s a game, she thinks, Something you can win, Momo.

She steps forward and releases the ball; a little earlier, just like Jirou said. It’s much smoother this time, rolling easily down the lane and—

"Five, six, seven—" Kaminari counts, voice getting increasingly louder. "Holy shit, Yaomomo."

"Is that—" Momo peers at her scoreboard, then at Kaminari’s face. "Is that good?"

He’s waving Jirou over. "Give her another one—"

"I bet my dad’s car keys she’s gonna get a spare." Jirou’s already there, giving the ball to Momo and sticking her tongue out at Kaminari, who groans, shaking his head.

"I’m not gonna take you up on that, are you serious—"

Fortunately, too, because Momo manages to knock down the other three pins; it isn’t pretty, this time, slow and wobbly, but it hits the corner it needed to, and when Momo turns around, she’s grinning, matching the grins both Kaminari and Sero sport as they take turns high-fiving her. Jirou’s grinning, too, sitting down on one of the plastic seats and shaking her head like she can’t believe what she just saw.

"A bowling prodigy, too, huh," she says, as Momo sits beside her.

"Hardly," Momo replies, tightening her ponytail. She can’t fight off the grin on her face, and Jirou keeps staring, equally unable to stop smiling. "I’m really happy," she says.

Jirou blinks, twice, thrice, before laughing into her hand. "Well, I’m happy to hear that."

"Thank you," Momo says, abrupt. When Jirou just continues blinking at her, she adds, "For this. For Yuuei."

"For Yuuei?" Jirou asks, dropping her hand to her lap as she leans back on the chair. "That was all you. Your decision."

"No, but—" Momo folds her own hands in her lap, watching absently as Kaminari and Sero go back to trying to make each other fail miserably. "You made me realize a lot of things."

She can’t see Jirou, but she hears her move. "Like what?"

Momo tilts her head up to look at the ceiling, at the wires criss-crossing over to the hanging scoreboards. She closes her eyes for a couple of seconds, listens to Kaminari and Sero’s loud whooping, and when she opens them, it’s to the lights flashing above pins, the lane leading to them worn with use. "Such as…" 

It must have been something else, being a child and going here the way Jirou and her friends had; being small and unconcerned with the world and the future and everything else in between, and, for a moment, Momo lets herself wish she’d been one of them.

"When I was a child," Momo says, pressing her palms together, "My father hired a campaign manager to come take a look at the house. She’d walked around, looked at every room, at every corner, taken a look at everything." She remembers sitting in the living room in a uncomfortable pink dress, playing with a Matryoshka doll. "Then she’d come back and told my family something I’ve never forgotten: ‘We have to give the public what they want to see. And for that to happen, you have to be what they want you to be.’ So we’d gotten rid of one of the extra guest rooms. We’d sold one of the cars. My father enrolled me in traditional classes to represent how much he cares about tapping into cultural roots. My mother would come to pick me up, we’d take family trips together."

Momo pauses, searching her words for the point of what she wanted to say, but she sighs and shrugs at Jirou—Jirou who smiles, and Jirou who Momo smiles back at. "I was a very happy child, and I’m more than glad to be the daughter my parents have never had a problem with," she says honestly. "But now I do wonder what it would have been like to have had a different experience, growing up."

Momo expects Jirou to be quiet, contemplative, but she shrugs, looking down at her lap and running her thumbs over each other. "We wouldn’t be the people we are now if it isn’t for that, yeah?"

"No," Momo agrees.

"It’s never too late to do the stupid things, you know," Jirou says. "I told you this. You can always stay out late—you’ve been doing it for a month now, kinda, going home past midnight with the rest of us. You can always have fun. Just because—just because you’ve spent your life, you know, being perfect, doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate things that, I don’t know, aren’t so grand? It’s always in the simple things anyway, right?"

"Right." Momo nods, and when Jirou seems taken aback by how much she agrees, she continues, "There’s this idea called wabi-sabi, and it comes from a young man named Sen no Rikyu. He was asked by a tea-master to rake a garden—so Rikyu does until it’s perfect, every part of it clean and beautiful. But then, before calling back the tea-master, he’d shaken a cherry tree and let a few leaves fall around the garden he’d just cleaned. That’s wabi-sabi in a nutshell. It’s appreciating the small, authentic things. The imperfect things."

This time, Jirou is quiet, only not for long. "Gives it character, huh. Sounds to me like this Rikyu character knows what he’s talking ‘bout." That makes Momo laugh, and Jirou joins in. "I don’t really got a fancy term for it, but I think that’s just how life works. You can’t be perfect all the time, you know? Not you, not the world. Isn’t that why we appreciate the good things? We appreciate them because we’ve seen bad things, and you know, maybe, that guy really is on to something. How could you appreciate beauty in things if you’ve never seen flaws? Up, down, up, down, all that stuff."

Jirou looks at Kaminari—at Kaminari who, despite how playful and easily distracted he can be, so clearly loves the catering team as much as the rest of them, probably more. Kaminari who’s experienced what it’s like to have a job he didn’t like, and lose that, only to come back from it with a job that he now offers everything to—his time, his attention, even his house—and a team he can laugh with and play with. She shrugs at Momo, who can’t find it in herself to say that wabi-sabi isn’t that, exactly. "Everyone needs a little bit of disorganization in their life, yeah? If things are smooth like butter all the time, you can’t really appreciate it when things go right."

Momo blinks. "Is butter smooth?"

Jirou looks back at her oddly. "Is this a Truth question? One of those philosophy things?"

Momo laughs. "No, no, no." She looks at Jirou, and she thinks—she thinks maybe she doesn’t have to think about this, after all, because it’s fine just looking at Jirou and feeling at ease enough to know she doesn’t have to be perfect.

"There are a lot of good things, Jirou-san," Momo says now, "that I don’t appreciate enough. But I think—I think I’m starting to."

Jirou grins—she’s grinning a lot tonight, today, lately. "Not Jirou-san," she says. "Kyouka."

Momo blinks again.

"Kyouka," Jirou repeats. "We’re close enough now, right? So. Kyouka’s fine."

Momo opens her mouth, but no sound comes out, strangled in her throat.

"Can I call you Momo?"

Momo, still unable to speak, nods.

"Nice—"

"Hey, we’re paying for a full two hours here, you two!"

Jirou’s smile crumples immediately into a glare as she turns to Kaminari, but she pats Momo’s knee and gives her a thumbs up. "Momo," she tries, as she stands up and stretches. "Momo. Your name is so nice."

She moves off to grab a ball, but Momo sits there for another minute, cheeks too warm to the touch and heart beating fast.

"Midoriya, do you—hey—" Shouto frowns, stopping and tugging at Midoriya’s wrist before he could walk straight onto the road.

"T-Thank you," Midoriya says, frowning up at the pedestrian red light. "I-I didn’t see."

"No, you didn’t," Shouto agrees, waiting until Midoriya directs the frown away from the traffic lights and up at him. "Do you really not talk about me to my mother?"

Almost a month since they’d met and Midoriya has somehow fallen into place in Shouto’s life, a constant source of random facts and easy laughter in what had otherwise been a quiet day-to-day. He sits with Midoriya behind the front desk now—he hadn’t even realized the center had one until his fifth time there—and most days, he waits for Midoriya to finish his shift so they can walk home together, the unreliable bus route entirely ruled out as an option since the incident.

Shouto hasn’t really thought about the reasons behind this sudden change aside from a few options that he hadn’t really pursued past a fleeting suspicion. It could be because Midoriya keeps him up-to-date with how his mother is doing, his reports on her pottery visits brief but substantial, or it could be because Midoriya fills Shouto’s days now that Momo’s usually out of the house for work. It could be because anything he does with Midoriya feels new in only the good ways, from walking around Musutafu at night to finally finishing an origami butterfly under Midoriya’s tutelage after Momo had tried multiple times and failed, or it could be because Midoriya seems to always understand even without knowing the full picture—he pieces everything together for himself, without pressing Shouto for the finer details, and Shouto appreciates that, a welcome break from his sister’s increasingly frequent calls about why he’s not visiting their mother.

Or it could be something else entirely, judging by the way his heart jumps and swells whenever Midoriya leans too close and smiles too bright, and the way Shouto hesitates before letting go of Midoriya’s wrist.

Shouto doesn’t have much reliable experience with people—for all that he’d been raised to handle diplomacy and firm handshakes, he doesn’t know how to deal with someone like Midoriya, who talks about superhero comics in the same tone he uses to describe poetry from the Man’yoshu and always looks at Shouto, when he thinks Shouto isn’t looking, like he’s yearning to do something. That, too, is new, but having Midoriya around is a kind of comfort that thrums like something warm and familiar now, a product of something that’s both different and routinely, and one would be hard-pressed to ask Shouto to give it up at this point.

"I—I don’t," Midoriya says, finally, when the light turns green. They walk forward. "I was sure—I was sure you didn’t want me to." He hesitates. "Do you want me to?"

"No," Shouto tells him, but it doesn’t sound as firm as it did in his head. "I’m not even—does she ever—" It’s unlike him to stumble over his words like this, and he quiets down as they slow down to a stop in front of another set of pedestrian lights.

Midoriya twiddles his thumbs. "Todoroki-kun, how do—how many siblings do you have?"

Shouto blinks. "I have an older sister, and two brothers."

"A—A big family, huh," Midoriya says. "I—That’s amazing."

"I don’t know my brothers very well," Shouto admits as they move forward once again. "It’s really always been just me and my sister."

Midoriya looks at him. Shouto has learned to keep track of Midoriya’s various levels of curiosity and thought processes, and he’s slowly gaining experience in being able to roughly gauge what Midoriya’s thinking, and he recognizes this one for the way Midoriya looks when he’s not sure if he should say something.

Shouto looks back at him.

Midoriya stares back down at his shoes, tugging at his bag. "She—Your mother talks about you—her children—sometimes."

It’s quiet in this area of Musutafu, the districts right before the more lively ones near campus, and Shouto hears nothing but his and Midoriya’s footsteps now, heavy against the pavement as they both audibly hesitate—Shouto from responding, Midoriya from saying any more.

Eventually, Shouto finds it in himself to ask, "What does she say?"

"She—" Midoriya’s not looking at him. "I think she—I think she misses you." In a smaller voice, he asks, "Do none of you visit her at all?"

From anyone else, it would have sounded like an accusation, but from Midoriya, it’s a question, plain and simple, and that makes it simultaneously easier and harder for Shouto to answer. "My sister does," he says, slowly. "My brothers—they’re not really—they’ve been sent to study abroad before I was old enough to actually remember them."

Two birds with one stone, he thinks now; send them away and improve public image by having two children studying overseas. His father’s a con man, right beneath it all, and that, maybe, is what makes him the second most loved politician in Musutafu.

When he looks up, Midoriya is staring at him. "And—and you?"

"Me?" They almost miss a turn, a testament to Midoriya paying attention to the conversation, and Shouto gives the yellow backpack a couple of tugs to usher them both towards a left turn. "Me—I’m here. With you." It sounds too frail, even in the restless quiet as they enter campus. "Here, in Musutafu. No longer living in that house, but still—" A Todoroki, he almost says, but that means nothing, probably, to someone who’d latched on to his mother’s pottery classes instead of his father’s political career. So he says, "My father’s son."

Even though that has always been the last thing he wants to be and the first thing he rejects about all of this.

Midoriya’s quiet for a while.

"Your father doesn’t sound very child-friendly," he finally says, then stops walking, abruptly, as his own words seem to sink in, "That—That was very tactless—"

"Good thing I’m no longer a child," Shouto points out, stopping as well to look back at Midoriya.

Midoriya looks contemplative, staring down at the sidewalk. He stares down a lot, when he’s thinking, and Shouto knows now to expect the string of muttered words that this overthinking usually produces. But Midoriya only says, suddenly less thoughtful and more wary, "My mom told me once that you’ll always be a child around your parents."

Shouto mulls that over, shoving his hands into his pockets. It’s an uncharacteristic gesture, but something about the way Midoriya so casually refers to his own mother makes Shouto restless. "Always?"

Midoriya blinks at the question, clearly not having expected Shouto to take the statement apart and pick that, of all things. "W-Well, I—" He frowns at Shouto, and he looks, under the light of the lamppost, almost sad. "Unless your parents act like children, then—then—" He lowers his voice, makes it soft, almost inaudible to Shouto from an arm’s length away. "Then I guess you don’t really get the chance to be a child."

Shouto hadn’t been expecting that; Midoriya’s frown is a new expression altogether, the kind of face he must make before an emotional outburst, and Shouto can’t bear the thought of going home knowing he’d made Midoriya look like that. He wants Midoriya’s smile back, he realizes distantly, so he clears his throat around the surprise.

"I’ve been a child, Midoriya," he says, still half-turned, hands in his pockets. "I’ve run away from home, I’ve broken curfew, I’ve been petty and rejected dinner and locked myself up in my room. I’ve been a child. I’ve acted like one." He’s still acting like one, possibly. "I got my chance."

It isn’t that he missed his chance to be a child, exactly, but that he missed his chance to really feel like anyone’s son.

He starts walking when Midoriya’s expression finally clears, and Midoriya follows, footsteps somehow managing to sound hesitant. "Being a child isn’t just about acting like one," he says quietly.

"Then what is it about?" Shouto asks, feeling the need to keep his voice equally quiet. "Hide and seek? Bedtime stories?" He’d gotten tea ceremony classes and Shiki Masaoka haikus. "Believing there’s a monster under my bed?"

Midoriya’s staring at him again, and Shouto wonders if he, too, hears the edge in Shouto’s voice, the rough non-understanding. He does, probably, because Midoriya always notices. "Childhood—it’s not about that, it’s—it’s not what you do, I—childhood is about feeling safe, Todoroki-kun."

Loved, is what he wants to say. Shouto can see it in Midoriya’s eyes, clear and big and wide.

And Shouto wants to crumble, at that, at the way Midoriya looks at him. He looks away.

"Still," Midoriya says, as they reach the main campus plaza. This is a cue, usually, for goodbyes, but tonight, Midoriya stops and stares at Shouto like he doesn’t even notice they’ve arrived where they usually part. "There is such a thing as—as growing up too early, Todoroki-kun. There’s—There is such a thing as being too young to grow up."

Shouto stares down at the cement underneath them. "But?" He prompts. "There’s a but—isn’t there?"

He thinks he hears Midoriya smile, a soft little breath released as he attempts it, and when he looks up, Midoriya is smiling, if visibly wistful. "But—but you’re never too old to be your mother’s child, you know. If—if you want to be."

And no, Shouto hasn’t really thought about the reasons behind whatever this is that he has with Midoriya, and it could be so many things, it could be anything: it could be because Midoriya has made running away easier for Shouto since they’d met—

Or it could be because Midoriya, in doing things like this without thinking about it, in dragging out someone else’s problem and blowing them right open, helps Shouto come to terms with maybe not running away anymore.

Midoriya jolts, suddenly, waving his hands so fast it almost hits Shouto.

"It’s fine," Shouto says, before Midoriya can apologize. It is fine, despite the slight heaviness in his heart, despite the part of him that just wants to stare at Midoriya, to keep staring and staring at him. It is fine, because it makes sense, somehow—something about this makes sense, and though he can’t seem to figure out what that something is, it feels right, at the very least, when he says, "Thank you."

Midoriya shakes his head, more insistently than the situation really calls for. "I—don’t—don’t thank me, Todoroki-kun."

Shouto blinks. "But—"

"I—That’s just what I t-think, I—Good night," Midoriya says abruptly; he’s a little pink, and Shouto, absently, had leaned forward. Midoriya takes a step back, slightly wobbly, tugging at his backpack straps. "I—Good night, Todoroki-kun."

Shouto doesn’t move back, but he nods. "Good night."

Midoriya, for the briefest of moments, looks back at him, still pink, mouth slightly parted. But he shakes his head again, at himself, at the ground, and he’s off.

Shouto doesn’t move away from his spot by the fountain until there’s no sign of the yellow backpack anymore.

But when he turns back to head to his own apartment, Midoriya’s good night still fresh in his head, there’s a small smile on his face.

If Momo had known Jirou would be coming over that morning alongside the daily mail, she would have bought another dozen of eggs.

As it is, when Jirou shows up in front of Momo and Shouto’s apartment the week before school starts back up, the only breakfast Momo is able to offer her are scrambled eggs and toast. She spares a silent prayer that Shouto doesn’t wake up early enough to ask for breakfast before leaving.

But Jirou hadn’t been bothered at all, stepping over the threshold with a box of donuts. "What are you talking about? This is a royal feast compared to the things I’d had to eat at Denki’s."

Momo wants to say that doesn’t mean much, because it is Kaminari.

With school starting back up soon, Sero, Kaminari and Ashido are approaching the end of their summer remedial classes—which has made them all largely unavailable this weekend. This leaves Momo and Jirou alone to make Ojiro’s life easier during their catering job on Tuesday, even if that means Jirou showing up without much warning at Momo’s front door with two plastic bags’ worth of ingredients for Oreo cream cheese truffles.

Jirou claims that it’s because Momo’s more likely to have a fridge big enough to hold the truffles until Tuesday, but Momo suspects Jirou just doesn’t want Momo to meet her father.

Momo has enough experience of that with Shouto, albeit on the opposite side of the spectrum, so she doesn’t question it.

An hour after Jirou arrives, they set up in the joint dining room and kitchen, breakfast eaten and ingredients placed on the table. Momo had taken a look at the recipe Ojiro had e-mailed her and summarized it down to a concise list of ingredients and steps, which Jirou attaches against the fridge using a magnet that one of Shouto’s brothers had sent from the U.S with an impersonal postcard.

Momo’s put in charge of rolling the cream cheese into little balls, gloved hands expertly running them between her palms, which makes Jirou in charge of crunching the Oreo into little bits that they can roll all the cream cheese balls over.

Jirou had taken to putting the Oreo into a ziplock bag and slamming it repeatedly against the wall when Shouto walks out of his bedroom.

For a whole ten seconds, it’s quiet, the ziplock bag hanging limply from Jirou’s hand as Shouto rubs sleep away from his eyes.

"Did we wake you?" Momo says—which might be silly, really, because she, too, would have woken up to the sound of someone barbarically hitting Oreos against their kitchen wall.

Shouto’s hand drops back to his side. He bows, low and polite. "Hello."

Jirou, more frazzled than Momo has ever seen her, dips down to a bow as well. "I’m sorry for the racket."

"It’s alright," Shouto says, awkward in the way he usually is around people their age. Momo knows for a fact that he’s much better with adults, had been raised exactly to be good with the kind of polite talk that goes on at formal dinners; it’s not something that even his middle and high school years have been able to curb, and while Momo herself is slightly better at talking to classmates, she understands. He’s a quiet person on the surface, usually the type not to initiate conversation unless absolutely necessary, and he hovers now, too, silent by the doorway. "Is this for the—"

"The catering," Momo says, nodding. It feels stiff, even to her, and Shouto raises an eyebrow. He looks at Jirou, then at her, as if trying to connect something. This, somehow, makes Momo panic. "There’s—there’s mail for you," she adds, hurriedly. "From Fuyumi-san. It’s by—it’s where the mail usually is. Over there."

She can’t be sure if Shouto recognizes this for the weak diversion that it is, or if his curiosity is genuinely piqued by a letter from his sister, but he bows one more time at Jirou before shuffling to the entryway.

"He’s really—" Jirou frowns as he walks away. "Your friend is really calm."

Jirou’s trying to keep her voice down, but Momo winces anyway. "Is that bad?"

"No, just—I know I’ve been expecting a young master type, but that—"

"Shouto can be quite—" Momo stares at the entrance hallway that Shouto disappeared out to. "High school classmates have thought he was cold," she says, in an attempt to be objective. "He’s really not—"

"He just seemed awkward to me." Jirou shakes her head, resuming her Oreo-crunching. "Like he’s never been out late in his life, ever."

"He hasn’t—" Momo begins, then cuts herself off. This isn’t true, because teenage Shouto had had his moments of running out of the house to wander at night. Momo never did find out where he went—her only warnings about events like that had been worried calls from Fuyumi—but he’d always come back. Lately, too, now that Momo thinks about it, Shouto has been getting home increasingly late; Momo would already be in bed and half-asleep by the time she hears him shuffle in, or other times he’d be in the shower by the time she gets home.

It’s an unexpected change in their usual routine around each other, and Momo’s surprised it took her this long to realize the strangeness of this adjustment between the two of them.

Shouto pads back into the kitchen, bedhead sticking out in different directions. He studiously ignores Jirou’s dutiful aggression as he goes to read the letter by the window.

He frowns, eyes skimming over the letter, and Momo watches in concern to the background noise of Oreos crunching against the wall.

"Is everything alright at home—" Momo asks, then catches herself. "With Fuyumi-san?"

Jirou, for her part, casually pretends to keep going about her own business.

"Yes," Shouto says, stilted. "My father—" Momo pauses in the middle of rolling a cream cheese ball. "My father’s attending the opening of an exhibition at the art museum on campus. He wants me to attend. My sister says—" He holds up the letter to squint at it in better light. "‘I know it’s short notice, but I’ve included two tickets. Take Momo-san with you, if that will make it better.’ Everything is short notice with him lately," he huffs. "Why can’t he send me an e-mail? What if the letter didn’t get here on time?"

He doesn’t sound particularly upset, nor angry—which is a good sign, she thinks, considering Shouto tends to hover over more negative feelings around things involving his father. Momo deems it safe to continue her line of questioning. "Are you going?"

Shouto stares back down at the letter. "I don’t want to go by myself," he says, tone dry.

"I could—" Momo almost says, then looks down at the cream cheese roll in her hands. "I—"

He holds up the hand holding the letter. "Don’t apologize. I don’t particularly want to go."

"Well, yes, but—" Jirou has emptied the Oreo crumbs into a bowl and plugged in her earphones. She starts casually whistling as she refills the ziplock bag with new Oreos. Momo looks back at Shouto. "Would you—would you be able to take someone else with you?"

She knows it’s a shot in the dark as soon as she says it; Shouto isn’t the type to make friends he could hang out with. He isn’t the type to hang out with people, exactly, not even the type to hang out with Momo, but she feels the need to suggest it anyway, because it feels more polite to do that than to completely shut down the idea of Shouto inviting out someone else from campus.

To her surprise, though, he looks contemplative. He holds the expression for a long minute, long enough for Jirou to start crunching the new Oreos. He doesn’t say anything before disappearing back to his room, and Momo thinks he dials a number before he closes the door. All Momo hears before it shuts behind Shouto is a quiet, "Midoriya?"

Momo stares at the closed door.

"You look like you’ve seen a ghost," Jirou says. When Momo turns to her, she has one earphone unplugged. "Everything alright?"

"I—Yes." Momo blinks, then resumes her rolling. "I think so."

"Huh. Whose turn is it?" Jirou asks suddenly. "Yours?"

It takes Momo a total of ten seconds, back to staring at Shouto’s bedroom door, before she realizes what Jirou means. "Oh," she says. The last time they’ve played Truth had been on the way home from bowling, squished against each other on the bus. "No, I believe—We were talking about your music, before you’d gotten off. That was my question." She’d asked Jirou about what she loved about music, and the answer had been It helps me be myself, simple as most things are when it comes Jirou’s likes and dislikes. "Your turn, then."

"Cool," Jirou says, propping herself up on top of a counter as she starts evening out the crumbs with her hands around the ziplock bag. "How did you two meet? You and your friend?"

"How did—" Momo hums, pushing out a seat with one leg so she can sit on it. She can hear Shouto’s voice, murmuring low, from his room, and she can feel curiosity thrumming in her own voice even as she considers the answer to Jirou’s question. "You know how I mentioned—before—that my father had me taking traditional classes at the suggestion of his campaign manager? That involved tea ceremony rituals, calligraphy, ikebana, even playing karuta."

"Karuta?"

"The card game?"

"No, I know. But—"

"We didn’t question it at the time, exactly." Momo shrugs, a little sheepish. "The first time I met Shouto, technically, we were up against each other for karuta. He won." Shouto had been intimidating, even at age seven, though Momo looks back at it now and wonders what exactly had been so intimidating to her. It had been the confidence, maybe, because even at that age, Shouto had had a way of holding himself regally, eyes carefully giving nothing away, and that had been new, even if Momo knows enough now to suspect Shouto’s only thought at the time might have been how hot it was in the kimonos they had to wear. "But we didn’t actually talk until we got paired up for a tea ceremony ritual."

"When you were seven?"

"We were mature children," Momo feels compelled to say. Jirou snickers. In a softer voice, Momo adds, "We had to be."

Jirou’s expression softens at that, and she smiles. "Good thing you had each other, huh. If I’d had to do something like that with my childhood pals, it wouldn’t have turned out well—" She makes a face. "It did turn out well, right?"

Momo nods. Shouto had taken charge, for the most part, and Momo had let him. He’d been used to working by himself, hadn’t even bothered listening to Momo at first. He’d eventually looked at Momo and asked for her opinion, though, and Momo has never forgotten that—the way Shouto looked at her when she’d been sure he hadn’t even been paying attention to her presence at all, the way he recognized her and acknowledged her, just like that, and apologized for not asking her sooner. It isn’t kindness, from Shouto’s party, nor pity, nor an apology, it’s Shouto taking the time to realize something he’d failed to do, and figuring out the best way to deal with that. To a seven-year-old Momo, however, compliments and apologies from Todoroki Shouto had meant the world; and that, maybe, is what solidified the early stages of their friendship. She’d admired Shouto, admiration that turned into respect, and respect that now manifests as understanding and affection.

Shouto hasn’t changed much, since then—he still keeps to himself, he still doesn’t share information unless he’s thought long and hard about volunteering it to someone. Shouto exists in his own island, his own little world, and Momo has never begrudged him for that, not even when they were seven and she’d been sure Shouto alone can get them through something they haven’t even been taught yet. She has faith in him, a kind of trust that she doesn’t think she’ll ever have with someone else, and, looking back at Jirou, it feels like too much to be able to properly express out loud.

So she says, "We’ve always been together since then. Our families knew each other. We went to the same middle school and high school—"

"Moved in together, still go to school together." Jirou hums. She understands, Momo can tell, just like Momo had understood why Jirou had wanted to do something alongside Sero and Kaminari. "It just felt natural to do that, huh. I get that."

"I suppose. Shouto has always wanted to move out, for as long as I’ve known him—" Momo almost drops the cream cheese ball as Shouto steps out of his room, distracted. "You’re going?"

It takes Shouto a while to look at her, still staring down at his phone. "Yes, I am. I’ll be using the bathroom first."

"O-Okay," Momo says, confused, as he spins around and closes the bathroom door behind him. "Take your time," she adds, out of habit, even as the water starts running from inside the bathroom. She blinks at Jirou. "Sorry. I’m just not used to him being like that."

Jirou frowns. "Is he, like, not cool with me being here?" 

"Oh no, no," Momo tells her. "Nothing like that. I meant—" She herself isn’t sure what he means, but there’s something about this Shouto that’s different; he looks almost excited to leave, and it’s hard for her to associate the easiness to his expression to the idea of an exhibition he’d been invited to as his father’s son. "It’s not you, honestly, Jirou-san."

Jirou fixes her a look.

Momo flushes. "K-Kyouka..san. Kyouka-san."

That makes Jirou laugh, almost spilling the Oreo crumbs as she empties the last batch into another bowl. "Give me some cream cheese, I’ll help you."

By the time Shouto has gotten out of the bathroom and gotten dressed, Momo and Jirou have already used up almost all of their cream cheese, a hundred thumb-sized balls sitting on the huge tray between the two of them. Shouto helps himself to a donut at some point, before hesitating in front of the living room mirror.

He stares at his reflection for a long time, fiddling with the collar of his dress shirt, tucked in for once.

Momo considers asking him what’s wrong, but Jirou, after a long minute of visibly talking herself out of saying anything, tells him, "Open."

Shouto’s shoulders twitch, and he stares at Jirou like he’s seeing her for the first time.

"O-Open," Jirou says again, losing the conviction that had been in her voice earlier. "It’s less—It’s less stuffy? Not that I’m calling you—It’s just—" She waves at his general direction. "You’d look like you’re suffocating. This is fine. You’re good."

Shouto gives her a long look, then his own reflection, before he nods. His hands drop away from his collar. "Thanks."

Jirou clearly isn’t expecting the gratitude, and she looks as confused as Momo feels about this exchange. "N-No problem."

Shouto pockets his phone without another word, turning back only to murmur a quiet, "I’m off. I’ll lock the door so don’t worry about it."

"I—Take care," Momo manages past her befuddled daze. "I’ll see you later."

Shouto bows towards Jirou before disappearing back into their entry hall.

"Sorry, what did I miss?" Momo asks, when they hear the door close.

"Huh? He was trying to figure out if he should leave the last button open or closed. I voted open—this isn’t meet-the-parents. At least, I don’t think so. Is it?" Jirou sighs when Momo shakes her head slowly. "Is he dating someone?"

"No—" Momo pauses. "No?" She tries again, weakly. Their routines haven’t overlapped in only a month, but Momo thinks it’s very possible that there might have been a development in Shouto’s life that she’s yet to be privy to. It’s an uncomfortable thought, albeit a viable one, to know that he could very well have been seeing someone this whole time. It makes sense, in its own way—getting home late, always being out despite staunchly claiming he never visits his mother, inviting someone else to the gala—

"Oh," Momo says. "Oh."

Shouto spots Midoriya immediately, even hidden behind at least three layers of people lined up in front of the entrance.

He’d spent a long time, earlier, wondering if he should invite Midoriya, but Shouto can’t deny the flicker of relief that he feels when Midoriya spots him, as if sensing Shouto’s eyes on him, and waves, smiling wide and bright.

"We don’t have to line up," Shouto says, in lieu of a hello. He tries not to stare too long at Midoriya, but it’s probably a little too late for that now, and it’s too hard not to when Midoriya’s hair looks like it’s still a little damp from a shower and the hem of his shirt is a little wrinkled from where he must have been nervously tugging down at it. His own dress shirt is buttoned to the very top, and Momo’s friend from catering had been right, it does look like Midoriya might be suffocating.

Or maybe that’s just Midoriya being Midoriya.

Before he can think too much about it, Shouto reaches out with both hands, taking a step forward to unclasp the top button of Midoriya’s dress shirt. "Don’t be nervous," he says, low enough to be private but loud enough to be heard over the chatter from the queue. "It’s just me."

Midoriya looks up at him, mouth slightly open. "R-Right."

The exhibition is on Japanese pottery, most likely the primary reason why Fuyumi had sent two tickets with Momo in mind, and Midoriya visibly relaxes once he takes this in, the gallery no different from what he usually sees at the Center. "All we need is tea," Shouto says, when the usher looks at their ticket, does a double take at Shouto, and waves them in.

Midoriya makes a face at him. "Oh, that’s—that’s funny, Todoroki-kun. You’re real funny."

"Next thing I know, you’re going to be quoting a haiku on me," Shouto continues, murmuring a quiet excuse me as he and Midoriya maneuver around groups of people with VIP passes as well. "Give me a haiku about pottery."

"Do you really want me to?" Midoriya asks. 

For some reason, Shouto wants to smile at that. "No," he relents. Midoriya leads them through an entrance in the right side of the exhibition—it’s strangely reminiscent of him leading Shouto back to campus. "Did you research this place right after I called you?"

"W-What—" Midoriya’s hands go up defensively, but then he lets out two sheepish chuckles. "I—Yes."

Now, Shouto really wants to smile. He feels a little triumphant, bringing Midoriya somewhere that’s clearly putting the sparkle there in his eyes, and though he’s never been the type to appreciate the kind of things his father is up to, this one is worth it if it means seeing Midoriya walk the place in a half-daze, too overwhelmed to even start talking. "How predictable of you, Midoriya."

"T-Thank you, by the way," Midoriya says, without making eye contact as he does a 180 to scrutinize the list of artifacts headlining the first section of the gallery. He stops, eventually, to briefly look at Shouto. "For, um, inviting me. I wasn’t expecting you to actually—to actually call me at all."

Midoriya had given Shouto his number on an Information Desk business card, and while Shouto has never imagined he would ever have cause to call Midoriya when they basically see each other every day except Tuesdays and Thursdays, the card had sat on Shouto’s bedside table since the day he got it, the first thing he sees when he gets out of the bed and the last he sees before he turns off the bedside lamp. He’d found that he’d almost memorized the number when he’d called Midoriya that morning.

He says none of this out loud. "Thank you for coming," he tells Midoriya instead.

Midoriya smiles at him, close-mouthed, but he doesn’t say anything. He steps back instinctively, narrowly avoiding bumping into someone, and Shouto, instinctively, reaches out to steady him. He puts a hand on the small of Midoriya’s back—and Midoriya, without looking up, leans against it, briefly, before murmuring his Sorry to the stranger he’d almost elbowed and moving past.

Shouto stares at his hand and tries to ignore the strange pitter patter his heart seems to be set on doing.

Midoriya is as good as any tour guide. Shouto decides he likes it best seeing Midoriya like this—gesturing to a tea bowl and talking about how you can clearly see how much it’s been used by the changes from its original color, pointing out the asymmetry of a cup, all in the same breath as describing the one time he’d chipped a cup from his mother’s Hagi tea set. It’s comforting, somehow, to be with Midoriya in a different setting and still see him the way he always is for Shouto, excitedly gesturing at things when they’re out and about Musutafu, chattering on as he pours tea for Shouto at the center. It feels like something calming and familiar, and Shouto has absolutely no qualms letting Midoriya go ahead of him, turning back every now and then to smile at him about something.

Shouto can stare at him all day like this, he thinks, can listen to him and watch him all day.

"We make it sound like wabi-sabi is something visual—and—and I guess it is," Midoriya is saying now, as Shouto dutifully follows him from one exhibit to the next. "But I think—um—whether or not you like art—" At this, he looks at Shouto, who blinks back at him. "I just think it’s a good mindset? Seeing things as they are is kind of—it helps, I think, to engage in life better, instead of being caught up in—"

"Unnecessary obsessions?" Shouto says. This, here—Shouto’s presence, courtesy of his father’s fixation on public image—is the product, almost, of an unnecessary obsession. But the thought of his father fades quickly and easily, and he shrugs at Midoriya. "Like perfection."

Midoriya blinks at him. "I-I guess. Yeah. It’s just—sometimes, I think it’s fine to be fine with the not-so-perfect things, to—to crave the quieter things, the more genuine things. I don’t think—I don’t think anyone should ever have to live without experiencing that kind of—peace, I guess, with the world." In a softer voice, he adds, "That much I’ve learned. So far."

Shouto looks at Midoriya and thinks it’s ironic, then, that Shouto has spent life with exactly that mindset. There are few things in the world that Shouto truly craves: peace and quiet is one of them, freedom from his father’s obsession with success and perfection is another. Recently, he’s figured out that a conversation with his mother is also one—spending every day a street’s width away from her has made him incredibly conscious of what he’s really scared of; it isn’t seeing her, it isn’t being rejected by her, and instead it’s not knowing what to say to her, when the time comes, because words couldn’t possibly be enough to make up for all the years he lost with her.

He also constantly craves, lately, this kind of calm that he only feels around Midoriya.

Midoriya had wandered away, jolting Shouto out of his thoughts, over to a section that’s been barricaded for kids twelve and younger. There’s an origami lesson going on, and the little girl on the far corner visibly struggling with her paper butterfly seems to have caught Midoriya’s single-minded attention. The crowd has thickened in the past hour they’d been in the gallery, the queue they’d encountered upon arrival already being let in in groups, but Midoriya’s curious enough that he doesn’t seem to notice the thick throng of people he has to get through to get to that section. It’s the same look he gets on his face the few times the Center has held lessons for children, and Shouto understands that Midoriya’s first instinct now is to see if he can do anything for the docent leading the lesson.

Out of instinct that’s starting to become habit, Shouto grabs Midoriya’s hand and tugs him back before he bumps into someone again.

"The entrance to the kids section is over there," Shouto says, as Midoriya stumbles back against him. He tilts his head to the other side of the gallery as Midoriya looks back at him. "You wanted to go there, right?"

Midoriya blinks at him, surprised. He’s warm, Shouto thinks, with his back against Shouto. "Am I—Am I allowed to—"

"To go in?" Shouto doesn’t let Midoriya’s hand go. "I’m sure. Don’t go through here, though," he says, searching the gallery for a way around the crowd—

—and making direct eye contact with his father, right across the gallery.

His eyes are on the hand Shouto has around Midoriya’s.

Shouto stares back for a long moment, his stomach dropping. "Midoriya," he eventually manages. "On second thought, go on ahead without me."

Midoriya tenses up against Shouto as he follows his gaze. "Oh. Is that—oh, isn’t that—"

"Yeah," Shouto says. He sighs. "Did you really not know?"

Midoriya shakes his head. "I don’t—No."

The feeling in Shouto’s stomach settles a bit at the characteristic answer, and it’s only with a slightly heavy chest that he gently pushes Midoriya off him and towards a break in the crowd. "I’ll meet you over there later. Go help that kid."

Shouto waits until Midoriya’s no longer looking worriedly back at him before he walks over to his father and bows stiffly. He maintains eye contact.

"Thank you for the invite," he says, tone bordering on blatantly scathing. His father is alone—a welcome surprise, when the reason Shouto had been so hesitant about going is that he’d suspected it would involve his father trying to sell him off as a potential face in politics. "We’re enjoying the exhibit very much."

"Clearly." His father’s suit is buttoned up until the top, and Shouto allows himself to wish for a moment that it feels as suffocating as it looks. "Fuyumi gave me the impression you would be inviting the Yaoyorozus’ daughter."

"Momo is busy today," Shouto says, pushing out the words with faux difficulty. He feels warm, anger thrumming from somewhere distant. It’s been a while since he’d thought of his father, and the surprise at bumping into him like this doesn’t seem to be helping. He clenches his fists behind him. "She’s with her friends," he adds, hardly blinking. "As am I."

"Your ‘friend’." His father pronounces the word like it’s something vulgar—no surprise, Shouto thinks, coming from someone who can’t even carry on a conversation with his son without pissing him off. It’s hard to think of his father as having friends; it’s always associates, assistants, acquaintances. His father probably thinks Shouto’s only friends with Momo out of convenience and circumstance, the same way he himself is with Momo’s parents. "Then. You’re not.. involved, are you?"

Shouto’s thought process screeches to a stop.

From the corner of his eye, he can still see Midoriya, kneeling beside the little girl, who’s warily playing with her baseball cap. She has band-aids all over her knees, and Midoriya seems to be asking her about it in the middle of folding one side of the girl’s origami butterfly, much as he’d done for Shouto weeks ago. Midoriya’s smiling sheepishly at her, and the smile only wavers when he straightens back up, dusting off his knees and looking at Shouto.

Shouto looks away. He turns to his father and says, "If we were?"

His father turns silent and unmoving as a statue.

The sense of triumph is fleeting but potent. "Can we stop acting like you still have control over my life? I’ve moved out. I’m not touching anything political," Shouto says, voice steady. "I’m not following after you, the same way all my siblings didn’t. We’re not pets you can expect to train."

His father’s eyebrows twitch, the only sign of movement from him. "You’re my son, Shouto. You’ve spent too long acting like a child."

Shouto manages a bitter smile. His father isn’t wrong—Shouto has never known a life that hasn’t been defined by his father, by his expectations, by Shouto’s feelings towards him. It is a funhouse mirror, in more ways than one, and it’s almost impressive how one man can complicate the way Shouto looks at things—himself, his life, his mother and his relationship with her. He’s spent too long rejecting his father, convinced of his influence in everything that Shouto has always considered his.

It’s tiring, he realizes, looking at his father now.

Maybe it isn’t a funhouse at all—just one mirror, a mirror he’s been too busy checking for his father’s shadow to realize it’s just been his reflection all along, staring back at him, like it had that morning before he’d left the apartment.

But—but you’re never too old to be your mother’s child, you know. If—if you want to be.

Shouto wants to be.

"I’m my mother’s son, too," he says. "And a brother to my siblings." His father doesn’t look impressed, and Shouto doesn’t expect him to be, not when he’s never understood it, never understood this. "I barely thought about you in the past month. It felt really good. I want nothing to do with this, nor you. I’m not my sister. I can’t live in that house. I’m not my brothers. I’m not obedient enough to go away somewhere because you want me to. You know this. You’ve always known this."

Shouto watches the way his father’s lip curls at that, and he tries again for another smile.

Distantly, he knows his father will never cut him off—he expects too much of Shouto to do that, has always expected too much. He shouldn’t, really, because a part of Shouto has already started coming to terms with the fact that he doesn’t have to let his father be in every facet of his life. His relationship with Midoriya, his friendship with Momo, his reunion with his mother—all of it is his, and his father doesn’t have anything to do with it. He never has.

It feels, almost, liberating.

"You’re my son," his father says again. Shouto can feel his nails digging against his palms as he clenches his fists tighter. "No matter what you try to do. Why is it so hard for you to stop resisting when this is something you’ve done since you were a child? Accept—"

"Why is it so hard for you to accept he doesn’t want that?"

It takes Shouto three whole seconds to realize the question hadn’t been in his head, and when he does, his father’s already staring at Midoriya like a bird had swooped down from the sky to read a sonnet to him. Midoriya’s standing with his hands cupped around something—an origami piece—and he makes for a interesting picture, standing in front of Todoroki Enji with a cat made of paper sitting on his palms.

"Todoroki-kun—" Midoriya continues, when no one says anything. "Todoroki-kun isn’t you. You shouldn’t expect him to be. Maybe he’s not perfect the way you want him to be, but—" He’s studiously not looking at Shouto. "He’s a good person. He doesn’t realize when he says something funny, but he knows when to make someone smile. He doesn’t always say much, but he always listens. He deserves all the things he wants, and he does not deserve to be held back just because you don’t agree with what he wants to do. He’s your son, and I don’t understand why you’re the one—why you’re the one acting like a child."

Midoriya takes a deep breath after that, but then his own words seem to dawn on him. He pales visibly, and in one motion, he closes one hand around the origami cat and grabs Shouto’s arm with the other, bowing to Shouto’s father half-heartedly before walking away—much more speedily than Shouto has ever seen him in all the times they’ve walked home together—and out of the gallery.

"I—He’s not going to—Is he going to sue me?" Midoriya asks, when they get back under the warm September sun. "Todoroki-kun—"

He stops, and Shouto realizes he’s smiling up at Midoriya, mouth hidden behind one hand as he tries not to laugh.

"Todoroki-kun, you find this funny."

Shouto thinks of Midoriya and the origami cat, and yeah, he does. The smile widens, and Shouto takes a moment to turn away from Midoriya, coughing into a hand.

"I think that was the first time he’d heard someone talk to him like that," Shouto says honestly, when he turns back to Midoriya.

Midoriya doesn’t seem to take that as a good sign. "Will he get me—"

"You’re not going to jail," Shouto tells him, raising an eyebrow. "That was impressive though."

"Stop." Midoriya colors, fist tightening around the cat. Shouto reaches out for Midoriya’s hand, uncurling each of his fingers so he can pry the origami piece out. "It’s—it’s a cat."

"So I see," Shouto says, placing the crumpled cat on his palm and straightening out its body. Momo has never done cats—it’s always been dragons and cranes, fitting for someone with her wisdom and grace. "What does it mean?"

Midoriya fidgets; if he’d had his backpack with him, he’d be tugging at it now. "It means—it represents independence and balance. It’s—it’s strong and self-assured, and it’s—" He looks at Shouto. "It reminded me—of you."

Shouto doesn’t know what to make of that, at all—doesn’t know what to make of what just happened, and the significance of what both he and Midoriya had said to his father—but Midoriya, as usual, doesn’t let him dwell on it.

Instead, Midoriya tries for one of his usual smiles and asks, "Todoroki-kun, how do you feel about donburi?"

"You said—you said your friend has always wanted to move out?"

Momo looks up, but Jirou’s already getting up, taking off her plastic gloves and dragging a pack of chocolate chips over to the stove.

"Shouto," Momo says, hesitating. "Shouto has a complicated relationship with his family."

"Ah. I figured. From the last name," Jirou says, rooting around the cupboards for a saucepan. "What about you?"

"Me?" Momo frowns. She’s never thought about it in those terms; she hadn’t felt anything extreme when it came to moving out. "My relationship with my family is fairly—it’s fairly good. If Shouto hadn’t wanted to, I don’t think I would have thought about it at all."

"Your family, huh," Jirou says. Momo knows a lot about Jirou’s family; her father, in particular, and the kind of place her house usually is. It’s not something that’s easy for Momo to imagine, but seeing the way Jirou interacts with her childhood friends, she can kind of get a clue. "You know, Momo—"

Momo startles at her name.

"What’s the deal with you and perfection?"

Momo blinks.

"I mean—It’s not a bad thing." Jirou holds up a hand as she pours the chocolate chips onto a bowl she can heat. Momo stands up and walks over to help her, but Jirou waves her off. "And you mentioned your deal with your family and all that. But I’ve been thinking, and it’s, like, why is being perfect really important to you?"

The question, somehow, makes Momo’s mind blank out.

She stares at the kitchen ceiling for a long minute, leaning back against the counter.

"It’s not," Momo says.

Jirou raises an eyebrow, unimpressed.

"It’s not about being perfect, I don’t think," Momo continues, looking away and back up at the ceiling. "It’s about being—being organized. Being in control, being able to accomplish everything seamlessly." It’s why catering works, probably; the chaos is something she can organize, something she can control. "I like things that I can neatly deal with."

Jirou hums, turning on the stove. "Figures."

Jirou had already reassured her, but Momo still asks, "Is that bad?"

"Wanting to deal with things that you can deal with? ‘Course not," Jirou says, in a tone she uses when she’s popping gum. "It just, you know, gets me wondering—what do you do when things don’t work out? When you, like, encounter things that don’t fit?"

It should be a simple question, and Momo’s answer, equally simple, "I’ve never had to encounter things like that," should have been enough.

Only it isn’t. It feels wrong when she says it, even when that’s how she’s always answered things. She’s never had to deal with something that she couldn’t in some way rationalize her way through. Momo’s likes lists, Momo likes being able to reason things out, and it has always worked.

There are things that don’t have to be thought about, because doing will give you answers that your mind can’t.

Momo moves her gaze off the ceiling and towards Jirou, who’s stirring the chocolate into melting, and realizes no, it hasn’t always worked.

Yuuei—the catering, her friendship with the servers, Jirou—is proof itself of the fact that it hasn’t always worked. For all that her lists and her mental categorizing have helped her with the job, thinking has been the one thing catering has redefined for her. One month with the team has allowed her to just be, to be mindless in the things she does in ways she’s never been able to with all the other things in her life. Shouto had told her, a month ago, that there’s no use to thinking too much about something like catering, and he’d been right without meaning to, because Yuuei currently stands as the one thing that Momo can’t rationalize her way through with expectations the way everything else has been defined by the perfection that has defined her.

She cuts that train of thought off, and feels a little dizzy.

Jirou is the same way—she’s not someone that Momo can think her way around. She’s always known this, had solidified it the night they went bowling, but she wonders now if, maybe, she’d been running away from that. If she’d been running away from the idea of dealing with all the things she feels around Jirou exactly because it doesn’t involve thinking the way she usually does it. Jirou has always been different, part of a world apart from Momo’s, and she requires a different kind of thought process—or not a thought process at all, because Momo meets Jirou’s eyes now and recognizes, for the first time, the skip in her heartbeat for what it is.

"I think," Momo says out loud, because Jirou still doesn’t look satisfied from the question she’d asked earlier. "I think I moved out because I was looking for another kind of experience."

Jirou looks at her, expectant.

"I mean—" Momo pauses, taking a moment to search herself for what she’s trying to say. It isn’t that she’s been scared of stepping out of her comfort zone, but Shouto’s invitation had provided Momo with the chance to consider it, to consider not living in a huge house, to consider making breakfast for herself and Shouto, to consider being able to walk to and from her classes. It had its own offers of freedom, of something new, the way art had been alongside math, and yet she’d spent her first semesters in university the way she’d spent high school: looking at her world through lens that she and Shouto had been brought up wearing. "I think I was looking for a different kind of world. Nothing drastic, but something different."

It isn’t that Momo cares so much about perfection; it’s that it’s all she’s ever known.

Only maybe she’d been subconsciously looking, just like Shouto had been, for something a little different.

"Did you find it?" Jirou says, grabbing a spoon to try the melted chocolate. She holds out the spoon. "Try it?"

Momo tilts her head. Hesitantly, she moves forward, before bending over to try the chocolate. Jirou doesn’t let go of the spoon, and her hand is warm in Momo’s as Momo curls her own hand around it.

"Did you find the thing you’re looking for?" Jirou clarifies, her voice steadier than Momo suddenly feels. "The thing that’s different?"

Momo leans back again, the chocolate sweet in her mouth—and she stays like that, watching Jirou work. She’d been right, her first official day with Yuuei, about Jirou having a leisurely quality to the way she moves. It should go without saying, probably, for someone who constantly has her earphones plugged in, whose life requires music as such a vital constant. Jirou never talks about music as something she’d learned—it’s just a given for her, handed down from her parents, a given as much as sticking with Kaminari and Sero is.

It’s a given to Jirou the same way that her faith that things will work out is a given, and that had always been the main difference between her and Momo. Momo takes it upon herself, upon people like her and Shouto, to work things out for themselves, because it has always been expected of them to be able to handle things from a young age. But Jirou has always had people to rely on, people like Shouto was for Momo at seven-year-old, and it’s jarring for Momo to realize three things as she watches Jirou:

1. For all that she and Shouto have been exposed to traditional lessons growing up, for all that they have been exposed to cooking recipes from Europe and Russian war philosophy, their world has always been small. Their world has often only included each other and each other alone, regardless of their respective relationships with their families and all that that entails for them. They are partners, and while Jirou’s world has expanded through Kaminari and Sero, Shouto and Momo had instead found silent camaraderie in each other, safe in the knowledge that they will have each other if no one else.
2. But this relationship with Shouto has been changing, slowly, in the past month they’ve been living lives away from each other. Momo has Yuuei now, has chaotic catering jobs and grocery store lists that she doesn’t want to delete or throw away because they’re souvenirs from every job she does with the team. Momo has people like Kaminari and Ashido and Sero, who fill her days with energy where they’d been occupied with reading by the window in a quiet apartment. Momo has Jirou now; Jirou who moves through life like she’s dancing along to music only she can hear. It’s different, completely separate from Shouto’s late nights, and while this realization makes her miss Shouto, a little bit, it also makes Momo look at Jirou differently. Jirou who raises an eyebrow at her now, laughing and shaking her head when Momo smiles back.
3. And Momo realizes, most of all, that she can watch Jirou forever—watch her move around the kitchen, humming to herself, miming drumsticks against the stove as she waits for the pan to heat up more. She can do this for as long as she can; spend time with Jirou and stay beside Jirou and listen to Jirou. She wants to be part of Jirou’s world, and she never wants this to end. She never thought that stepping out of the world she’s grown up in could feel so warm and still so familiar, but Jirou is proof of all that—of something different and novel, and yet nonetheless enough to make Momo feel calm and content, just watching.

"Am I doing something wrong?"

Jirou’s looking at her like she always does, watching and waiting, always a hand reached out to Momo even when she doesn’t have to physically do it. Something about Jirou always looks so ready to welcome Momo, and, for a moment, Momo hopes.

But she shakes her head, at herself, at Jirou, at the melting chocolate, and the moment scatters.

"You never have," Momo says.

She’ll try to reconstruct the moment again, in her head, later, but for now she moves away from the counter takes her place once more beside Jirou.

"I don’t get it," Shouto confesses, after a long minute of watching Midoriya scrutinize the menu fixed up on the wall.

"Of—get what?" Midoriya turns to him, blinking away the strain from squinting at the tiny chalkboard letters. They’d ended up at a streetside donburi shop, squished side by side at the very end of the bar. "I—did you want to go home? You said—"

"No," Shouto says slowly. "That’s not what I meant."

"Then—do you not like street food?"

"This is my first time," Shouto tells him, watching the inevitable frown take over Midoriya’s face. "Which makes me wonder—Why do people go to restaurants when there are places like these?"

"That’s—" Midoriya laughs, turning away for a few seconds to cover his mouth with a hand. It lasts ten whole seconds, his laughter turning shaky at the edges. He’s still laughing when the server finally comes to their side of the table, Shouto not having even taken a single look at the menu, and he just offers a dry I’ll have what he’s having as Midoriya giggles around his katsudon order. When the server leaves, looking utterly unimpressed, Midoriya turns pink, rubbing sheepishly at his cheeks as he says, "That’s such a young master thing to say, Todoroki-kun."

"Young master?" Shouto blinks. "I’m not—"

"No, I know, but—" Midoriya bites around a smile, failing to hide it. He does this a lot; Shouto’s concerned that Midoriya mistakes him for the kind of teasing joker that Shouto is absolutely not, but he doesn’t mind, he thinks, if it makes Midoriya smile like this, eyes bright and cheeks flushed as he considers Shouto’s question more carefully. "Different places have different vibes—I guess? Uh—CEOs just don’t typically go to—to places like this? Or, uh, a politician wouldn’t take his friends here, he would—I don’t know—what would a politician do—"

"Throw a party at his house. Cause panic for his daughter. Summon his son so he can tell him to stop acting out when he’d passed teen rebellion age at least three years ago." Shouto shrugs. "Something like that."

"That’s—really specific," Midoriya observes. He’d sobered up, the laughter dying down completely, and—and Shouto doesn’t like that he’d caused that. "What did the son say to the politician?"

"This sounds like the set-up for a rather tasteless joke, Midoriya," Shouto says, leaning back on his stool. Midoriya lets out a hah, quiet and genuine, and Shouto wants to smile at the spike of triumph that he feels at that. "The son punched the politician."

Midoriya’s next hah is more horrified than amused. "W-What?"

"He didn’t," Shouto’s quick to amend. "He only thought about it. It happened in a dream. Many dreams."

"The party?"

"The punching," Shouto clarifies. He props his chin on one hand over the wooden surface of the bar. "The son hates the politician a lot. He wants to punch him very much. He’s the reason the son hasn’t seen his mother in a long time."

"Oh," Midoriya says, looking down at the wood. He starts tracing kanji, most of them written too fast for Shouto to recognize. "Well—is the son forbidden from seeing his mother?"

"No," Shouto replies, quiet. "He’s not forbidden. It’s not a convenient fairytale."

Midoriya hums. "Then how exactly—how exactly is the son being stopped by the politician?"

Shouto sees the server coming over to their side, and he doesn’t reply—he stays quiet as two bowls are left in front of him and Midoriya, steaming, and it’s not until it’s just again the two of them, the middle-aged businessman on Midoriya’s side drunk on a Friday night, that Shouto says, "My mother gave me this scar."

Midoriya’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t look up from the kanji he’s tracing. Shouto takes that as his cue to continue, picking up his chopsticks and swallowing past a lump in his throat;

"The short story is that she hates my father. I would, too, in her position." His voice is calm, even as his hands hold the chopsticks a little bit too tightly. "My father isn’t a good man—kind of a shitty person, really. I mean—"

"I figured," Midoriya says, quietly. "Saw it—for myself."

"Yeah." Shouto nods. "That’s never been something I questioned. But he raised me to be the kind of person he is. I’ve never questioned that, either. I can hate him all I want, but there are things that I can’t distinguish myself from—my family name, my father’s expectations, my mother’s hatred for all of that. So happens that I represent all of those things she hated."

Shouto looks at Midoriya—at Midoriya who smiles when he quotes poetry that Shouto’s mother had mentioned, at Midoriya who brightens up as well when he has a particularly good story to tell about the outcome of that week’s pottery classes. Midoriya is Shouto’s only access to his mother’s new life—her new life away from the Todorokis’ traditional home, her prison as much as it had been Shouto’s, her new life away from everything that Shouto still hates every day of his life, everything that Shouto still can’t escape even after moving out—and Shouto can’t bring himself to take a step forward and stop using Midoriya as a shield.

"My mother has a new life now," Shouto says. "I don’t want to go in there and bring back everything she’s spent years in a hospital to forget."

Midoriya’s silent for a long beat, then he frowns. "But you’re not—you’re not your father."

Shouto frowns, too. "You said that, too—earlier."

"I—You looked like you were thinking it," Midoriya admits, surprising Shouto. "I—I don’t know, I looked at you from across the room and—You just didn’t seem like you wanted that, anymore. Whatever—Whatever that was. So, I—You just looked like you were seeing your father differently—for the first time."

"I don’t." Shouto is aware of how observant Midoriya can be, how observant Midoriya is, but there are still moments, like this, where Midoriya takes him aback. Only Momo ever does this, reply to things Shouto doesn’t say out loud, but Midoriya has been doing it from the day they’d met. "I don’t want that anymore."

Midoriya stares at him, and then he smiles—it’s a sad smile, but it’s also Midoriya’s smile, kind.

"Todoroki-kun," he says. "Can I—Can I invite you to an art exhibition as well?"

Shouto blinks.

Midoriya hesitates for the briefest of moments. "There’s an exhibit at the Center next Tuesday—would—would you come? I know you don’t usually go on Tuesdays, but—it’s in the evening, and I—I want to repay the favor."

Shouto’s hands still as his chopsticks hover over his own katsudon. He doesn’t go on Tuesdays for a reason, but he looks at Midoriya’s expectant look and thinks he couldn’t ever refuse him, not anymore.

He hasn’t really been able to, since they’d first met.

"I’ll go," he says, and this, too, is worth it for the smile it puts on Midoriya’s face.

✯

When Shouto gets back, the light in the kitchen is on. He stops in the front hallway, socks sliding against the floor.

"Momo?"

"In here," he hears her call, weak. He can hear the frown in her voice, and when he walks over, she’s taken over the dining table, the ingredients from earlier gone and their fruit bowl relegated to one of the counters to make space for a finished puzzle, glued onto a frame, and one in progress, laid out in front of Momo.

"What is—"

"Hokusai," Momo says, by way of explanation, even though it does nothing to explain the situation at all. "Did you know his paintings featured themes that were similar to Monet and Renoir? Did you know his wood blocks were collected by people like Degas and Van Gogh and Ma—"

Shouto spins around in the middle of her sentence and makes a beeline for the kettle.

When he gets back, surprisingly succeeding at making tea for both of them, Momo looks less likely to take her stress out on him by listing art facts, which means she wouldn’t be naming chemicals and hormones to explain her feelings—which, also, while comprehensible to Shouto, is really not how he wants to spend the first night in a long time he’d seen Momo without either of them about to go to bed.

"Tea?" She blinks, eyeing him. "You’re making tea. You made tea."

"I know how to make tea," Shouto says slowly.

"No, I know—" Momo takes the mug with a soft thank you. "This is just rare. For you."

"I’ve been drinking a lot of tea in the past month," he admits. Midoriya has never once missed making tea for Shouto in the month he’s been coming and going to the Center, and while this tea isn’t served in Raku ware that he’s sure Momo would appreciate a lot more than him, he hopes to convey the same amount of comfort and familiarity that Midoriya’s green tea always seems to give Shouto. "I can do this much."

The tea works its wonders, because by the time she takes her third sip, Momo seems marginally calmer. Shouto wants to smile at that, because this, too, reminds him of Midoriya, who has a habit of not carrying out a full conversation with Shouto without making tea for the two of them first.

"Is this where we talk?" Shouto says, pulling up a chair for himself across from Momo. He considers taking the puzzle piece and glue gun out of her hands, but instead he lays his hands flat in front of him. "This is where we talk."

Momo sighs and finally puts down the glue gun—Shouto takes the latter as a good sign, the former not as much—and levels Shouto with a look. "You’ve been home late all month."

"So have you," Shouto points out politely.

"I work."

"Ah, yes." Shouto drags his own mug over. "We haven’t seen each other much lately. Even though we live together."

"We haven’t," Momo agrees. She sighs again. It sounds familiar, her sigh, a sound he’s heard enough to be able to recognize it in his sleep, and when he looks up at her, her smile, too, is familiar. "How are you?"

"Good," Shouto says, and finds that he means it. This, he knows, would have been awkward with anyone else, but Momo is his best conversation partner, and communicating with her is a dance he can do even without music. "How is work?"

At this, Momo is quiet.

Two long minutes pass, and Shouto spends all of it staring out the window to a rather picturesque view of the empty park behind their apartment.

"Momo," Shouto cuts in, when it hits the three minute mark. "What—"

"I think I like her!" Momo blurts out, dropping the puzzle piece in her hand.

It makes a sound as it hits the floor, and for a long moment, it’s the only noise in the entire apartment.

And then Momo groans and covers her face with both hands.

Shouto spends another long minute staring out the window.

It’s an odd, sudden thought, to realize that he has no idea who Momo is talking about—it’s even more bizarre when coupled with the realization that Momo wouldn’t recognize Midoriya’s name, either, if Shouto brings him up right now. It feels out-of-place, this kind of reality, because this sort of thing has never been a problem with Momo. They met each other at seven-years-old, they officially became friends at eight. They had their issues, Shouto with the commitment that comes with considering someone his best friend and Momo with insecurities, at age fourteen. They graduated together—moved out and in together, started university together—at eighteen. That in itself is a brief summary of Shouto’s entire life, which, save, for his relationship with his parents in early childhood, had not been a flat, dry blur of nothing only because Momo had been around; a reliable comrade at parties, a familiar seat mate in high school. This ensured that every part of Shouto’s life, every aspect of his personality and his thought processes, have at one point been shared with Momo, who has always been beside him every step of the way from the moment they’d gotten paired together for their first tea ceremony.

And yet in one month they’d already missed out on each other’s life. It’s an alarming thought, he registers, because it’s never happened before. His world has always overlapped with Momo’s, magnetized together, and it’s startling to realize that they have no idea what each other has been up to in the past summer.

Less eloquently, he asks, "Her?"

"The girl you met earlier," she says, feeble.

Shouto peers at Momo and wonders, briefly, if the startled frown on her face means she’d come to the same conclusion he has; it does, because her voice is gently and subtly apologetic as the story stumbles out, bit by bit, from her first day at Yuuei to bowling the other night. He watches as she steadily gets pinker, her hands eventually moving away from her mug to go on either cheek, her mouth slightly parted as she stumbles over Kyouka, Kyouka, Kyouka.

"You’ve grown up a lot," Shouto says, when she finishes, matching the face to the name. He holds his own mug close. "This past month."

Momo startles visibly at that. "On the contrary," she replies, quiet. "I think I’m only starting to realize what it means to be a child."

"I think," Shouto begins, the words slipping out of him without full voluntary thought. He hesitates, but he sees Momo’s expectant stare, Momo who had poured out her side of the story—their story, probably, because everything in their lives has always been theirs together—and he manages, "I am as well."

He doesn’t find anything in himself to say next. It’s tricky, trying to express everything out loud—why he still hasn’t visited his mother, why he keeps wanting to go see Midoriya, why he’d so badly wanted to ask Midoriya when the opportunity arose—when he’s yet to understand it himself. But he’s never had to do that, with Momo.

Midoriya is the same way, almost, only it’s not so much the way Momo has always stood by Shouto’s side; Midoriya reaches for Shouto, for the part of Shouto that he himself refuses to confront out of an excuse he’d solidified as a child. But they both understand him, they both see him through observant eyes and listen to him in a way that assures him he can trust them.

He examines the tug at his chest at the thought of Midoriya, and he looks at Momo with her pink cheeks and bright eyes, at Momo who had just earlier been so sure that she likes someone.

"Momo," he says, quieter than she’d been. "How do you know you like her?"

It’s rare that he takes Momo aback with a question, but he’s doing it a lot lately. This is no different, because Momo takes her time, drinking at least half from her mug before saying, looking out the window now, too. "I used to think this was fine. I used to think it was fine just being—us," she says. "Growing up, I had a huge room. I had people making everything for me. I did well in everything I tried—piano, ballet, flower arrangement, school. I was good at things, and I’ve never had cause to feel less privileged than I was."

Shouto doesn’t say anything.

"I met you, and I thought—You know, when we were children, I thought you were perfect." Momo doesn’t look at him, so Shouto looks out the window, too. "I always thought you did everything with more confidence than I ever will. Son of a popular politician. Everyone knew you were gifted. Everyone was intimidated by the kind of person you were. When we became friends, I realized a lot of things." She laughs, a little bit. "The admired Todoroki Shouto, running away from home, forgetting his pencil case, unable to boil water. And then I thought—this is fine. Shouto understands. This is our world—the politics, the smiling for the media, the doing well in classes—it’s ours, you know? We grew up in it. We lived in it. We still do."

Shouto knows. He nods, staring back down to his mug to take a sip.

Momo looks distracted now, her tea abandoned. "Yuuei—Yuuei feels like it belongs to another world. I’ve always thought it was enough having our world, because we were—we were—"

"Partners," Shouto supplies.

"Yes," Momo says, a little breathlessly. "We were partners in everything. And nothing was foreign or unfamiliar when I knew you must have done the same thing, must have felt the same way. My world felt validated because yours functioned the same way—I was always thankful for that."

"Was?"

"I still am," Momo hurries to say. "I’m still thankful. But—there’s a whole other world out there. Other people had different experiences growing up. Other people don’t understand the need for perfection, the need to be good at everything. Some people just live life as it is—as it is, no matter how imperfect or impermanent things can be in life. I—" She pauses. "I’m only starting to realize that, lately. Ironic, maybe, for all the work we did on wabi-sabi. But—"

Shouto watches her, at the way Momo looks down at her own hands—this is new, he thinks, this is a new side to a friend he’d known for more than a decade. It isn’t the Momo that frantically folds origami, it isn’t the Momo that breezes through chemistry worksheets. It’s Momo liking someone, it’s Momo stepping into a new world that she doesn’t share with him; it’s Momo growing up, even at nineteen, and letting herself be vulnerable.

He looks away.

"Jirou-sa—Kyouka makes me feel like it’s okay to just be. She feels like someone I—Someone I’ve known all my life. I can listen to her talk everyday, I look forward to seeing her smile, I can talk to her for the rest of my life. She makes me feel—"

"Quiet," Shouto says, soft into his mug. He looks down at his own reflection, in the tea, and he hears Midoriya say Childhood is about feeling safe. Loved. "Quiet and safe. They feel familiar."

Momo finally looks at him. "Y-Yes," she says. "That’s it."

Shouto keeps staring down at his tea. He thinks of Midoriya—of Midoriya’s laugh, his smile, his frown, the way he gestures when pointing something out to Shouto, the way he fills Shouto’s world seemingly without meaning to. He thinks of how Midoriya feels warm and familiar and close, how he can be able to look Shouto in the eye and say things like I think it’s brave, Todoroki-kun. He thinks of Midoriya single-handedly blowing past Shouto’s excuse for running away, all while pouring him tea and talking to him about pottery and poetry.

And he laughs—Shouto laughs, startling Momo; he laughs, sharp amused barks, into his mug, into his hand, into the crook of his arm as he slumps against the table.

You’re not.. involved, are you? His father had asked.

Shouto thinks, now, well, what if I want us to be?

"We’re pieces of work," he says, around a smile. "You and I."

"Are you—" Momo’s staring at him—he can’t blame her, but he can’t make himself stop, a long while’s worth of quiet laughter—but she’s smiling, the heaviness on her shoulders gone. The smile, eventually, widens into something of a grin, and they’re smiling at each other, shoulders shaking a little with laughter.

Shouto looks at her. He looks at her and realizes that he misses her, that no one, after all, can beat the understanding he naturally shares with her—understanding that they don’t need to label, understanding that they don’t need words to recognize and acknowledge. There’s a term, probably, for meeting your best friend at age seven without knowing it, for getting to know and finding a trusted partner in the years to follow, and to be living with that person now; there’s a term for everything, but all Shouto knows is that this—sharing an apartment with Momo, being able to admit things without fear of her not understanding nor not knowing, being able to look at Momo, at someone who’s been with him for largely every step of almost his entire life—is something that words will never be able to cover, to encompass. 

"Shouto," Momo says, suddenly, softly. "I’m really glad we’re friends."

Shouto had thought, once, that he'll always have to think of his parents' house as his home until he'd physically moved out—but he thinks maybe Momo had been family, already, long before they'd moved in together.

So he crooks a smile at her—small and as unpracticed as his laughter, but there and genuine nonetheless.

"I am, too."

"I can’t believe I’m saying this but I think you guys were doing too well out there."

For a moment, they all stared at Kendou and her customary clipboard, tucked under one arm as she does a 360 to scrutinize the kitchen Yuuei had been using as headquarters.

This is the first lunch job Momo has ever worked—most of the other ones had been during dinnertime, full of polite talk and formal wear—and the lack of chaos in this one is almost startling compared to all the other mishaps she’s seen happen in her time at Yuuei. It was a children’s outdoor birthday party, set up in the backyard of a house much smaller than Momo’s but apparently big enough to warrant Ashido’s constant cooing, and by the time 3PM rolled around, the party was mostly done.

There hadn’t been a single problem during the job—no dropped plates, because the children had used paper plates, no burnt anything, because the family provided the birthday cake and Momo and Jirou had made the truffles ahead of time, and no bumping into anyone, because their only job had been to make sure the buffet table was stocked at all times. It’s almost alarming in its calm, and Momo can understand Kendou’s surprise.

"Look, nothing has happened," Sero says, thoughtfully eating the free leftover cake the party’s hosts had given the team. "We’re doing super well. The one time this happens and you say something like that. We’re hurt."

Jirou looks equally contemplative. "Isn’t it—isn’t it kinda too peaceful?"

"Tell me about it," Ojiro says, smiling weakly at each of them as he helps himself to some cake. "That was the first time I’ve gotten to cook here and not be worried at all about you guys."

"Aw," Ashido coos as she passes by on her way out to the van. "You worry about us?"

"Who wouldn’t be?" Jirou mutters, even though—or maybe because—Ashido couldn’t hear her. "We’re a mess."

"But we’re each other’s mess," Sero says, grinning. There’s frosting on one side of his mouth, and Jirou throws a table napkin at him. "Okay, no?"

"No," Jirou tells him. Half-heartedly, she says, "Shut up."

It’s a little silly, probably, to be a little drunk on the success of pulling off the kind of job they’ve been all been doing for a while now—but Momo gets it. It’s bizarre, for all of them to be unused to something going perfectly well, and it’s refreshing for Momo to realize that she, also, feels the same amount of longing for their usual chaos.

Jirou holds up a hand. "It’s almost like a job isn’t complete without a lil’ bit of our usual pandemonium, don’t you think?"

Ojirou hushes her. "You’re going to jinx it."

But Momo looks at Jirou, who smiles back at her like she’d said it exactly because she knew Momo was thinking it.

Momo stares, thinking back to her conversation with Shouto the other night, and feels her cheeks warm.

Jirou blinks, looking like she’s about to say something, but—

"Guys," Kaminari says, walking in, solemn. "They turned on the sprinklers in the backyard."

Jirou freezes at that. She and Kaminari exchange a glance. "Denki," she says slowly. "Are you thinking what I’m thinking?"

He nods, still solemn. "Heck yeah."

To Momo’s surprise, Jirou holds out a hand towards her, palm up, a complete unspoken question. Momo looks at it, then at her, and feels something settle in herself—conviction of some sort, a realization, a final understanding of what this is—and she takes Jirou’s hand.

It’s cold, from the dessert containers Jirou had been covering with foil, but Momo feels Jirou’s hand tighten around hers.

She doesn’t let go, even as they all pile out onto the backyard.

Momo has exactly two seconds to realize what’s happening before Kaminari picks up a house and sprays Jirou—drenching Momo in the process.

Jirou yells—it sounds more like a battle cry, to Momo’s ears—and then she’s charging, tugging Momo forward with her as they dash past the two sprinklers running, counterproductively trying to avoid Kaminari’s attacks. Sero and Ashido are somewhere in the fray, rolling around the grass whole-heartedly, and from the corner of her eye, Momo thinks she sees Kendou and Ojiro eating their cake from the back porch and laughing, possibly, at the picture they make.

Overhead, Momo can see rainclouds in the distance, in stark contrast to the blue skies still above the yard, but it fades back out from her vision as everything else becomes water around her, Jirou’s hand on hers, and grass under her bare feet from where her flats had fallen off in the commotion.

It feels, almost, like it shouldn’t be real.

Like a movie, Sero had said, once, about Momo’s childhood.

It sums up, Momo thinks, this entire part of her summer—everything from helping out the catering team at the party at Shouto’s family home, to the late nights with the team, to Jirou and the way hearing her laugh makes everything feel surreal. Her voice is soft and loud all at the same time, a song in itself, background music to the way everything else blurs around Momo, a blur of Jirou and Yuuei and summer, summer, summer.

Jirou doesn’t see it, or maybe Momo doesn’t, but Jirou trips, bringing Momo down with her.

They’re laughing as they go down, rolling around each other on the grass the same way Ashido and Sero are somewhere across the yard, and Momo is still laughing, laughing, laughing as they roll to a stop.

Her clothes are drenched, her ponytail feels loose, but she laughs—she laughs because Jirou is laughing, she laughs because Jirou is beside her.

She’s still laughing when she opens her eyes, teary from laughter, to see Jirou staring at her, mouth parted.

They stare at each other, a breath apart.

I like her, Momo thinks. I really, really like her.

Somewhere behind Momo, Ashido’s shrieking at Kaminari, and maybe Sero’s still rolling, but it feels distant, too far away from the way Jirou takes Momo’s hand. "I—"

There’s muffled ringing noise, and Jirou blinks, at Momo first, then at the front pocket of Momo’s apron, where she stuffs her phone during jobs.

It takes Momo long to realize what this means, too distracted staring at Jirou’s face.

When she pulls out her phone and sees Shouto’s name flashing, though, she feels her stomach drop.

"Are you alright?" she asks as soon as she picks up, automatic.

"I’m fine," Shouto replies. He doesn’t sound upset nor hurt, but there’s a frazzled undertone in the calm in his voice, puncturing through Momo’s daze easily. "Are you with your catering team right now?"

"Y-Yes." Momo looks at Jirou, who’s frowning in concern. She squeezes Jirou’s hand—and feels a little triumphant at that, because she can do this, maybe she hadn’t been hoping for nothing—

"Would you guys be available to work this evening?"

"Midoriya," Shouto says, walking in through the Center’s entrance doors. "For something like this—text me more information."

Shouto feels pleasantly gratified by the way Midoriya lights up when he sees him, running over from behind the information desk. "I’m sorry—Ochako said there was an emergency and she had to leave—and then there actually was an emergency—I didn’t know who else to call—"

Shouto feels gratified by that, too. The fact that Midoriya, when faced with a crisis, had texted Shouto first—‘Do you know a catering team?’—makes Shouto feel oddly proud. The catering team for the Center’s art exhibition that Tuesday has cancelled last minute because of unexpected rain that night, and Midoriya had sounded frazzled when Shouto had deemed it best to call Midoriya back and ask about the situation.

Midoriya had only asked for Shouto to come to the Center as soon as possible, and Shouto, always unable to refuse, had taken a cab to the harborfront.

"I got in contact—with the catering team you called for me," Midoriya says now, visibly hassled. He’s distracted, as he usually is when he’s thinking thoroughly and talking at the exact same time. He'd been left to handle the entire Center by himself for the night, and it shows in the intensive way he looks around every inch of the place. "They—They’re coming, as soon as possible. So. Thank you, Todoroki-kun."

"Thank my friend for me when they get here," Shouto says. "I did nothing."

"No, don’t say that!" Midoriya finally seems to stop his overthinking, for a moment, to shake his head at Shouto. "You’ve done so much—"

"Midoriya," Shouto interrupts. One of Midoriya’s collars is creased, and, absently, Shouto reaches out smoothen it out, his thumb brushing against Midoriya’s neck. This is becoming habit, but Shouto can’t help himself. "You’re the one that’s been doing so much. Don’t thank me."

It feels unfairly insufficient, to say that after all that Midoriya has said to him, but it’s enough, for now, because Midoriya smiles.

And then the smile falls. "Todoroki-kun." His voice is unusually quiet, not the kind of quiet Midoriya usually is. It’s nervous, hesitant, but silently determined in the way Shouto has only seen Midoriya be. "Could you—could you check on the second floor for me?"

Shouto frowns, slightly, and he lets his hand drop back to his side. "Sure," he says, unable to keep the confusion out of his voice.

Navigating the Center is second nature to him now, its twists and turns as familiar as the ones in his family home. He doesn’t have to think too much about it as he walks up the stairs to the bigger library, where he and Midoriya had brought up the boxes to, once.

Thankfully, too, because everything comes to a halt for a long second as he stops at the second floor landing and finds himself face-to-face with his mother.

The pottery and porcelain in these boxes are here for an art exhibit happening in September, Midoriya had said. The plan is to showcase these with the pottery from the students.

There’s a reason Shouto doesn’t go to the Center on Tuesdays, especially not in the afternoon, and this, right here, is it.

"Shouto?"

"Mo—" It catches in his throat like a language he’d learned growing up but had allowed to fall out of use. "Mom."

Everything, somehow, happens in quick snapshots. She reaches for him. Shouto can’t move. She pulls him in—for a hug, he thinks.

Shouto still can’t move.

She’s warm and smells like she always had in Shouto’s memories, and still, he can’t move.

"Mom," he says again.

"Hello," she answers, like they’d just seen each other the week before. Like it hasn’t been years since, like the last time Shouto had seen her hadn’t been when he was small, running after her in a purple garden—he towers over her now, and he has to look down as she reaches up to touch his cheek. "Hello," she repeats.

Shouto’s voice isn’t working; nothing is working, his mind, his body. Everything is boiling down to his mother’s hand on his cheek, to the warmth in her hug. Behind her, he can see a medium-sized clay pot, glazed like Raku ware. There are scratches on it, tiny designs that Shouto can’t make out. His pupils feel excessively dilated; there’s too much light, and he closes his eyes for a couple of seconds, leaning in to his mother’s touch.

When he opens them, he realizes there are tears.

He blinks them away, easily, as his mother pulls away to look at him. She looks exactly as Shouto remembers—only more tired at the edges. But where she’d look worn down in Shouto’s memories from childhood, she looks more like the mother Fuyumi describes now, kind and beautiful and—

Free, Shouto thinks. She looks free, no longer looking out into the distance like she wants to be somewhere else, as she often did during their walks in the garden, and no longer speaking like she had when she’d read Shiki Masaoka to Shouto, pronouncing the words like she wants the poetry to take her away.

She looks free, and present—here, right here, not a memory, not a dream, just Shouto’s mother right in front of him.

She follows his gaze to the pot. "I’m not very good at art, you see," she says. "But they asked me to design the pot with something I’m proud to show off for the exhibition, and I had to try."

Shouto blinks again; he manages to make out four figures, running across the expanse of the pot’s surface.

Four children. Three boys, one girl.

His mother’s smile is sad when she sees it dawn on him. "I’m proud to call you my son, Shouto," she says, soft. She runs the back of her knuckles against Shouto’s face, and her touch is feather-light. "I always have been."

Shouto’s voice still doesn’t work, and his throat feels dry. But he nods, nods against his mother’s hand, and she looks, he thinks, relieved.

He doesn’t understand why, but he feels the same way—the relief simultaneously cool and warm as it spreads through him. His knees feel weak, and he can hear it drizzling outside, tapping against the window to signal that night’s rain. He can’t look at it, but it sounds like the skies are crying, slowly, and that, too, is something he understands in that moment.

"Izuku-kun caved in," his mother says. "He’s been asking me a lot about you. He tries to make it sound like it was out of curiosity, but—" She smiles, and Shouto knows that smile; he wants to smile exactly like that, when he thinks about Midoriya. "I asked him, the other day, about you."

Shouto, miraculously, finds his voice. "What did he say?"

"He really likes you." His mother laughs, muted but full and genuine. "Once I asked him, it was all he could talk about. You two are very close, aren’t you?"

Shouto feels strangled. "Are we?"

His mother hums, and she’s close enough that Shouto feels the sound travel. "I was—I was thankful to realize you had someone who cares so much about you."

"That guy—" Shouto thinks of Midoriya, as he often does now, as he always does now. He thinks of Midoriya’s hesitation earlier; he’d known, and he’d been worried, probably, about how it would change their relationship. But he hadn’t backed out, because that was the one thing Midoriya never did when he sets his mind on to something, and it’s the best thing Shouto has learned from him, this entire summer. He thinks, too, of Midoriya approaching the little girl struggling with origami, of Midoriya talking back to Shouto’s father. "He has a habit of taking other people’s problems and dealing with them."

His mother’s smile is knowing, even after years apart. "Do you mind it?"

And Shouto shakes his head. "No. Not at all."

It feels surreal, all of this. His mother, right here. Shouto, searching himself for what he feels for Midoriya and understanding, clearer than he had even after talking to Momo about it. It’s like everything falling into place, even though it’s raining outside and this hadn’t been the setting Shouto had in mind when he’d imagined reuniting with his mother, but it fits.

It isn’t what he’d been expecting, and it’s nowhere close to what he’d had in mind all those weeks ago, practicing in that apartment building’s lobby, but it fits.

It fits, in the way only the imperfect things do.

"Ah, yes, Yuuei, back at it again with the—" Kaminari sings on his way out, barely dodging as Jirou throws an entire empty tupperware container at him, "—impromptu jobs. Hey."

"Well, jeez, I’m sorry," Jirou snaps, looking close to forcibly kicking him back out. "Memes are hard to find funny when there are more pressing things to deal with."

"Then maybe you and Yaomomo can flirt some other time, then, yeah?" Kaminari counters, balancing one tray expertly on one hand. "Some of us are actually working here!"

Jirou actually does kick him out, kneeing him in the back and sliding the door closed behind him. Then she turns to Momo, opening her mouth at the same time Momo asks;

"Can we talk?"

Jirou stops mid-way to where she’d been arranging sweetened mochi on a tray. She looks at Momo, then away, then back at her. "Y-Yeah. ‘Course."

Momo had yet to see Shouto, but a worker from the Harborfront Cultural Center had welcomed the team instead, simultaneously apologizing and thanking them as he ushers everyone into what looks like a small library. Sero and Ashido hadn’t been able to come, but Kendou’s outside, helping out with the actual art exhibition going on, and Ojiro had driven over to the store to buy sweets for the tea they’re serving.

They’d stopped at the Kaminaris’ house—the nearest one to the site of the birthday party—to change, and one of Kaminari’s sister’s lace blouses hangs on Momo now, a welcome reprieve from the damp catering aprons. Jirou herself is in one Kaminari’s band shirts, the sleeves rolled up to accommodate her height. Their clothes feels severely out of place in the Center, with its earth brown walls and traditional vases, and for once, Momo does feel like she’s standing out amongst all of these things—the calligraphy hanging on the walls, the yellowed poetry books, the pottery.

Right now, it’s just her and Jirou.

And the mochi—one of which Jirou pops into her mouth. "I—Hi."

"Hi," Momo says. It sounds awkward, and she smiles. Jirou smiles back, and the tension disappears. "You’ve been cheating me at Truth, lately."

It isn’t what Jirou had been expecting, because she frowns, confused. "I have?"

Momo hums. "I asked you about music, and you’d taken the turn after by asking me how Shouto and I met. But then, after that—" She holds up a hand and brings a finger down. "You asked about my family and moving in with Shouto. And then you asked about why I cared so much about perfection." She brings two more fingers down, leaving her ring and pinky finger raised. "That’s two turns you took without giving me a chance, Kyouka-san."

Jirou turns as pink as the mochi in her hand. "My.. My bad?"

It’s nice, Momo thinks. It’s nice to be on the other end, for once. It’s nice that she’s making Jirou flustered, it’s nice that she’s making Jirou blush—it makes Momo feel less alone, less lost with all her own feelings, with all the realizations she’s had about Jirou in the past few days, and it’s nice because it means, maybe, that Jirou feels the same way.

"Can I take two turns, then?" Momo asks.

Jirou blinks at her, mochi abandoned. "Okay," she says, slowly, watching Momo.

Momo takes a deep breath.

"During the understaffed sandwich crisis," she finds it in herself to say. "What did Sero-san mean when he said Kaminari-san wasn’t your type?"

Jirou’s mouth falls open, a perfect o. "He meant—" She begins, cuts herself off, restarts, looking everywhere but at Momo, "He meant that I’m not interested. In people like Denki."

Momo holds her breath. "And?"

"And," Jirou continues, eyes finding their way to Momo’s and holding. "And instead, what I’m interested in is—is you."

Momo exhales, slowly, shakily.

There are no guidelines for this sort of thing, no step-by-step guides. Shouto had been right about that, too. There will be things that, for people like them, will be difficult to do because feelings are hard on any given day, and harder when there’s no example to follow. Instead, they’re just groping around in the dark, and following the one thing they’ve always prioritized thinking over: their feelings.

This is difficult—this is difficult because this is new, because this is something she should be thinking about more. But if there’s anything Momo has learned this summer, if there’s anything she’s learned with Yuuei, it’s that sometimes it’s better to just be.

So when Jirou asks, hopeful, "What’s your second question?"

—Momo smiles. "I’d like to know if I can kiss you."

She’s still smiling when Jirou leans in.

Kissing Jirou doesn’t feel like kissing so much as it does kissing Jirou; she tastes like birthday cake, still, and her hand is soft as it reaches up to touch Momo’s cheek. Momo is good at a lot of things, she’s good at knowing, at figuring things out, but nothing, she thinks, could have prepared her for the way Jirou’s lips feel nice and warm against Momo’s.

Momo knows she can watch Jirou forever—she can do this, forever, too, because Jirou feels nice against her, fitting perfectly even over the table between them, and Momo could really, really get used to this. And Momo can learn all the ways their mouths fit together, all the ways they fit together.

Jirou’s mouth is responsive, like everything else about her is. She loses the initial reluctance, kissing Momo back, and Momo melts into it, parting her mouth as Jirou, too, curls into the kiss. For all that Jirou has her rough edges, her quiet defiance, kissing her is soft and sweet, and Momo realizes maybe she’s been wanting to do this for longer than she thought.

Jirou’s redder than Momo has ever seen her when they both lean back.

"That’s a yes," Jirou says, turning away with her wrist against her mouth. "If—if you couldn’t tell."

And Momo laughs—she and Jirou laugh like they’d laughed earlier, and they laugh until Ojiro arrives with more mochi.

This, too, feels like it shouldn’t be real. But it is, it’s always been something real and tangible and Momo’s for the taking, and when Jirou smiles privately at Momo, it feels like a checked-off list, a finished puzzle, a perfect origami crane.

So, as always, she smiles back.

Later, Momo will kiss her, again and again, but this, as it is, feels more than enough.

Shouto finds Midoriya in the back porch after the exhibition.

He’s staring off into the rain, visibly winding down from the stressful chaos of the evening, and he doesn’t even stir until Shouto stands beside him, holding out his hand from under the roof to feel the raindrops.

It’s cold, against his skin.

"Todoroki-kun," Midoriya says, surprised. "I—"

"I’m not upset. I feel okay. I talked to my mother." Shouto’s voice comes out evenly, nowhere close to how off-kilter he feels internally. Midoriya looks at him, and Shouto wonders when he’d gotten as good at reading Midoriya as Midoriya has always been when it comes to reading Shouto. "Thank you. For everything."

"You have nothing—Nothing to thank me for, Todoroki-kun. Really." Midoriya takes a long look at him—and it’s a familiar look, one that Shouto has known for what feels like years now, one that Shouto can still see if he closes his eyes, one that Shouto knows will be there when he dreams. Midoriya is everywhere, now, occupying every thought, calling for every emotion Shouto has never had to feel before, and it’s that realization, maybe, that makes this real for Shouto.

He thinks, for a moment, what Momo would do in this situation. He thinks back to her at the beginning of this summer, to the lists she’d written, to her need to do something with her hands.

Shouto drops one hand and reaches for Midoriya with the other.

Midoriya’s staring at him, eyes wide, but he doesn’t react to Shouto’s touch—just lets Shouto take his hand, flattening out his palm.

"Do I make you nervous, Midoriya?"

Midoriya, for a quick second, looks like he would have said yes. But he shakes his head, once, twice. "Not you, Todoroki-kun."

Shouto’s heart is beating fast—he can hear his blood rushing to his ears, can feel his own heartbeat drumming in his head. He blames that when he lifts Midoriya’s hand up to his lips and kisses Midoriya’s pinky finger.

Midoriya would have jumped, probably, if Shouto didn’t have a hand around his wrist. "T-Todoroki-kun—"

"This is for letting me into the Center that day," Shouto says. "For the tea. For the air-conditioning. This is for that day and all the days that came after that."

He kisses Midoriya’s ring finger. "This is for asking me to walk home with you, every night. For all the late nights and all the parts of this city that you shared with me." Middle finger. "This is for telling me about my mother. For understanding. For doing whatever you did, tonight." Index finger. "This is for the day at the gallery. For coming with me. For what you said to my father. For the donburi."

Shouto moves on to Midoriya’s thumb, urging him a step closer. Midoriya’s hands are shaking a little, and Shouto’s hand around Midoriya’s wrist must be, too, but Shouto doesn’t hesitate in his kiss. "And thank you for being you. For all the times you talked to me. For all the times you listened. For all the times you cared."

Shouto thinks back to himself at the beginning of that summer, at the part of him that couldn’t bear to be in his father’s house, at the part of him that still feels alight with bitterness at the mere idea of his father. But that has been fading, recently, still is; he doesn’t think of his father as much as he did, and for that, he, too, has Midoriya to thank.

Midoriya’s quiet, still, but he’s looking at Shouto—he keeps looking, even as Shouto lets go of Midoriya’s wrist and moves his hand under Midoriya’s chin. "And this—this is going to be for making me feel calm," he says softly. "For making me feel safe."

Known. Understood. Even when he himself had no idea.

"Going to be?" Midoriya whispers, voice audible only with him so close.

"I’m going to kiss you," Shouto whispers back.

Midoriya would have replied, but Shouto tugs him forward. It’s a gentle brushing of lips, at first, and it’s Midoriya—Midoriya warm even with the cold rain so close, kind Midoriya who’d helped a stranger when he’d thought they’d had heat stroke. But Midoriya tugs Shouto forward, too, closer, and he deepens the kiss, humming when Shouto’s hand finds its way to Midoriya’s jaw.

This is something Shouto can get used to, he thinks, tilting his head. He must do something right, because Midoriya releases a pleasant exhale, a soft sound that makes Shouto’s toes curl. He shudders—or thinks he does—before pulling away slightly.

"What happens now?" he murmurs, catching Midoriya’s lip between his teeth. Midoriya sighs and kisses him again, but he doesn’t complain when Shouto leans back. Shouto would have complained out loud.

Midoriya blinks back at him, slightly dazed. "Um. A bit more?"

"I think," Shouto does say out loud. "I think I can kiss you forever."

Midoriya leans forward to kiss him, both of his hands on either side of Shouto’s face. "Then—Please do."

"You information desk people," Shouto says, smiling into the kiss. "You always have the answers."

Momo likes lists.

When the rain stops, Momo waits outside the Center with Shouto.

As she does, she arranges the past summer into three points:

1. This summer, she’d started her first part-time job. She’d made friends. She’d stepped out of the bubble of perfect order that she’s known all her life and she’d liked it. She’d gone bowling for the first time, she’d stayed out past midnight, she’d baked with Jirou, she’d ran around a sprinkler at age nineteen. Her world had been redefined by the one choice she’d made, calling Kendou and not backing out of Yuuei, and she looks back at it now, to last July, and wonders how different it would be if she hadn’t. Yuuei’s chaos feels like something welcoming and knowable now, and yet it still feels new, every time.
2. This summer, she and Shouto had taken their first steps towards different worlds. Only it doesn’t change anything at all, she thinks, because she and Shouto had always been partners in everything, parallels in all that they do and think and feel, and there will never come a time when they won’t be able to look at each other and know. There’s too much shared history between them, too much simple authenticity that had been the backbone of their friendship in a world lacking it, and Momo, always, will love Shouto as she knows him to be—the Shouto she’d met at age seven, yes, but also the Shouto that stared a little too long at teenage romance novels when they went to bookstores in high school, the Shouto that looks at Momo now with all the things he hadn’t said out loud, just like he had during their first tea ceremony, looking at Momo properly for the first time and somehow managing to express I’m sorry and Thank you in the ways only Todoroki Shouto ever can.
3. This summer, she’d met Jirou. Jirou who smiles at her from inside the Center, Jirou who’d taken Momo’s worldview and turned it upside down. There is no right or wrong, when it comes to finding people that make her feel the way Jirou does, and it’s something warm that settles in Momo when she realizes she doesn’t know where this is going, with Jirou, but that it’s okay. It’s more than okay, because this summer had taught her that it’s alright to just be, to accept the simpler, quieter things in life, and, most of all, to appreciate the world for what it is—imperfect.

"Summer’s almost over," Shouto says. "We go back to school next week."

"It doesn’t feel real," Momo replies, because it feels good to say it out loud. It always does, when it comes to Shouto.

He smiles at her, a small tug at one side of his lips, as he leans against the glass window. He looks at home, here, Momo thinks, and it’s both a startling and sobering realization. She looks past him and into the store, at Jirou who’d insisted she and Kaminari will take care of the rest, at Kendou with her clipboard talking to the person that had welcomed them—Midoriya, Shouto had called him.

She looks at Shouto, and he, too, is looking at Midoriya.

"You have a lot to tell me," she says.

Shouto looks at her, then at the apartment building across the street, then back at Midoriya. "I do."

His voice is soft, muted, but it sounds full, genuine. Momo hadn’t realized how little of Shouto there had been when the summer started, not even when she’d seen him that evening in July looking out at the koi pond. They know never to question each other, and understanding without words has always been enough, but there are things that do need to be said, even after twelve years of friendship.

"You said you thought I was perfect, when we were kids," Shouto says. "What about now?"

Momo turns to him. You’d grown up a lot this summer, he’d told her.

He had, too, she thinks. But he looks lighter, softer, younger.

Momo smiles at him—awkward Shouto, who speaks like he’s straddling a line between polite talk and teenage slang, who’s defensive about making tea despite only figuring out how to turn on their stove three months after moving in. "You’re just my best friend now."

Shouto blinks, at himself, at her. "Well," he says. "I wouldn’t want to be anyone else."

Momo laughs, a little incredulous as she stares up at the stars—more of them are visible here, away from the smoke downtown. "How smooth of you. I didn’t think you had it in you, to say sentiments like that."

Shouto clears his throat, flustered only to trained ears. "I kind of got a crash course this summer," he says. "When it comes to saying those things." He pauses. "I got a crash course on a lot of things."

Momo looks at the dark evening sky and thanks it, quietly, for seeing her and Shouto from the beginning of their summer to now. Shouto’s own adventures, Momo’s games of Truth with Jirou, and all the late nights they spent out in Musutafu, letting their world expand for the first time.

When Momo finally looks away from the sky, Shouto is looking at her.

She smiles at him. "I did, too."