Chapter Text
The training room smelled like sweat, metal polish, and the chalk dust nobody had bothered to sweep up from yesterday's drills. It was, by any reasonable measure, a completely ordinary morning — which should have been everyone's first warning, because nothing involving Midoriya and Kaminari ever stayed ordinary for long.
It started, as these things tend to, with Midoriya not paying attention to his own mouth.
He'd slumped onto a bench near the edge of the mats, staring at his hands like they'd personally wronged him, and said, with no warning to anyone, including himself: "I'm just a man."
Kaminari froze mid-sip of his water bottle. "...Did you just—"
"Did what?" Midoriya looked up, genuinely confused, which somehow made it funnier.
"That." Kaminari set the bottle down slowly, the way someone sets down a winning hand of cards. "You know exactly what that was."
Midoriya's face went red in about half a second. "I — I didn't mean to say that out loud."
If there was one thing a year of friendly, low-stakes, entirely unnecessary competition had taught Kaminari about Midoriya, it was that there was no version of this where he was going to just let it go. They'd been doing this in one form or another since their first month as classmates — who could land more hits in a spar, who could finish a written exam faster, who could make Aizawa's eyebrow twitch first. None of it ever really mattered. That was sort of the whole point.
Kaminari's grin spread slow and a little dangerous. "You know what this calls for?"
"No," Midoriya said immediately. "Whatever it is, no."
"Why not make it a game?"
Across the room, Kirishima elbowed Bakugo. "Dude. Did you see that? It's like they just sealed some kind of pact."
Bakugo, sprawled out with his arms behind his head, snorted without opening his eyes. "Extras."
Near the wall, Tokoyami murmured to Dark Shadow, "I feel like I should be taking notes."
Mina, cross-legged on a nearby mat, had already pulled her phone out. "Oh, this is definitely worth recording."
Beside her, Jiro's earphone jacks twitched. She squinted at the two boys across the room. "Wait. Are they quoting *Epic*?"
Mina blinked. "The musical?"
"The Odyssey one. With the sea god and the cyclops." Jiro crossed her arms, already looking far more invested than someone who claimed not to care had any business looking. "I didn't think anyone else in this class even knew that existed."
That one sentence was the spark. By the time training officially started, Mina had opened a notes app titled, with great confidence, **THE TALLY**, and Jiro had reluctantly agreed to be her "official judge," on the condition that nobody ever brought it up again.
The rest of the class, blissfully unaware, kept stretching and chatting about yesterday's match. Pairings were announced, training began, and the day proceeded like a perfectly normal one — if normal included Midoriya internally screaming at himself the entire time.
*Don't say anything weird. Just don't say anything weird.*
He held it together for almost eleven minutes, which he privately considered a personal best.