Ultimate Santa

Mukuro Ikusaba was not a matchmaker. She was not a wingman. She was not even a third wheel. She was a soldier, and a damn good one, at that. As a member of Fenrir, she taken jobs from presidents and priests both, starved and suffered through months long conflicts, and proved her worth over and over again, all without taking a single scratch. She was the perfect warrior. But no amount of combat training could have prepared her for her latest assignment.

She had not lifted an eyebrow when Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu of class 77-B had stopped her in the hallway and asked for a private word in an unused classroom. She was aware of Kuzuryuu’s moniker, and what it implied. As part of Fenrir, she had acted in support of many organizations with less than stellar reputations, and she had expected that this was to be another such operation. Nor was she surprised to enter the room and see him flanked by Peko Pekoyama, who, according to the intelligence Fenrir had on the Kuzuryuu family, was likely his personal bodyguard. But she could not have expected to see Kuzuryuu’s expression falter as he’d stammered through an explanation of what he wished to hire her for, nor could she have prepared for the exact job he wished her to complete.

“I want you to investigate Hajime Hinata from the reserve course. His likes, his dislikes, his hobbies, the works. A-And, it has to be in complete secrecy. If he finds out what you’re up to, it won’t just be your pinky you’ll have to pay me back with!” Kuzuryuu said.

As if he could catch up with her to do so. Still, she wasn’t going to test her luck or reflexes, and it was better to maintain a friendly relationship with the Kuzuryuu family so long as she was attending Hope’s Peak. Still, the request seemed… odd. There was something strange about the blush on Kuzuryuu’s face as he asked that. And about how Pekoyama was hiding her smile behind her hand. And as far as she knew, beyond a few shared gym classes and some occasional interactions, the 77-B students and the Reserve course students rarely interacted, and there was no reason for Kuzuryuu to show such sudden interest in a perfectly average reserve course student.

Unless.

“Are you using me as a romantic intermediary?”

Kuzuryuu’s face flushed bright red. Pekoyama snorted behind her hand, doubling over and turning away from her master in a single motion.

“That’s none of your goddamn business! Now get to it! And make sure you come back to me for part two!” Kuzuryuu ordered, shooing Mukuro away.

“Very well.” Flatfaced, she turned away and walked out of the room, and once the door was closed, she leaned against the wall and started to contemplate what she’d been asked to do.

She supposed that, if she were the Ultimate Negotiator, or even a decent negotiator on her own, she could have pried more about the job out of Kuzuryuu. Or asked why he had asked the Ultimate Soldier, of all people, to do this for him. But she supposed those were questions for her sister.

“Oh. My. God.”

Junko flopped back onto her bed, looking upside down over at Mukuro, holding a scientific journal above her chest, before letting that too flop down onto it. She had returned to their dorm room after meeting with Kuzuryuu to seek her younger sister’s guidance, and found her trying to keep herself busy, as was usual. She seemed to have welcomed Mukuro’s delivery of saucy relationship details.

“He totally wants into Hinata’s pants. There’s no doubt about it. Guys like him are too proud to admit their feelings until they’re absolutely sure nothing will go wrong. That’s why he wants you to do all of the hard work for him,” she said, rolling over onto her stomach. She kicked her feet in the air, giving Mukuro a dreamy look. “So, are you going to do it? Come on, spill!”

Mukuro crossed her arms. “I don’t understand why he needs me to do it. It doesn’t seem like his bodyguard has any problems with the relationship.”

“It’s because she, like, goes crazy over cute things. She’d break her cover in five seconds,” Junko said, tilting her head to the side. “And he can’t go to anyone else about it because he can’t count on them to keep quiet about it. Either they’re too afraid of him to even consider it, or they’d blab immediately. He’s got a lot of really loud people in his class, after all.”

Mukuro made a small, indeterminate noise. Junko raised an eyebrow at her, and then rolled over to the side of the bed, pulling out a black and white bear plushie from under it, and then rolled back into place. She held the bear up in front of her face, moving the arms as she spoke in a mock-cartoon voice.

“Boy howdy! It sure seems to me like you really, really, really, really, really, wanna get out of doing it, huh? This poor, little boy just wants to show his love, and his heart’s bursting out of his chest because of how strong it is! What’ll he do without you? He’ll just burst into tears instead! How positively dreadful!” Junko moved the bear’s arms up to its mouth. “Upupupupupu!”

Mukuro sighed as Junko lowered the bear from in front of her, still covering her mouth with the bear’s head as she rocked back and forth on the bed, staring up at her with puppy-dog eyes. Finally, Mukuro stepped forward and tugged the bear out of Junko’s hands.

“Kyaaaaa! You’re going to rip out all of my stuffing! Your brute strength’s too much for me!”

“Fine,” Mukuro said, throwing the bear back toward Junko. Still grinning, Junko stuffed the bear back under her bed. It would be back out before the end of the night to bully her again. Mukuro, feeling somewhat annoyed, turned toward the door, and Junko rolled back onto her back.

“Going to get an early start? Good choice!”

Without responding, Mukuro stepped out of the room.

Hajime Hinata, as Mukuro quickly discovered, was an incredibly average individual, aside from one aspect: his high respect for the institution of Hope’s Peak itself. While Mukuro didn’t know much about sex appeal, she was fairly certain that wasn’t why Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu was attracted to him. What she did discover fairly quickly was that he was a fairly likeable individual. How he and Kuzuryuu had met became fairly obvious to Mukuro on her first day of observation, as she caught Chiaki Nanami and Hinata playing video games together by the fountain out in front of the school, shortly before Hinata dragged Nanami off to meet with the other students from 77-B.

(Why didn’t he just ask Nanami? She thought to herself, once more, before continuing her observation.)

Observing Hinata had been easy enough. Neither he nor the people he spent time with spent much time inside the school building, which made covertly tracking him easy, and since Hope’s Peak didn’t require Ultimate students to attend classes every day, skipping class to keep an eye on Hinata was not an issue. Hinata’s interactions with the 77-B students were, surprisingly, very pleasant. He seemed surprisingly accepting of their eccentricities, and they seemed to relax around him, as well. To a degree, anyways. At the very least, there wasn’t any obvious tension between him and the other students, even with the more overbearing ones, like the buff gym teacher looking student and the bratty dancer girl, two students who Mukuro found herself questioning the actual ages of – both looked to be wildly outside of Hope’s Peak’s target age range.

And at every venture was Kuzuryuu, awkwardly stammering his way through conversations and puffing himself up to the point that he less resembled the dragon he was named for, and more resembled a puffer-fish. Mukuro was also equally sure that if she were to vocally share that opinion around him, she’d lose more than just her pinkies, so she kept that to herself.

From there had been observing him in his personal life. When he was outside of school, Hinata was just as average of an individual. He stayed in a dormitory off of campus. When she picked his lock and snuck into his dorm while he was away one day, she found a small, very lived in room, with a pile of half-read manga magazines, ready to be taken to the trash; a folded up futon, with dirty magazines predictably stuck into the folds; and the ingredients for some simple meals in the cabinets, such as rice and curry sauce. Nothing that suggested personal likes beyond a cursory interest in shonen manga.

She watched from afar as he interacted with his other Reserve course students, noting his abrasive interactions with Kuzuryuu’s sister. Outside of class, he bought a few melon breads from the school store and stopped by the library, where a tittery Reserve course girl offered to help Hinata study. As Mukuro slipped behind a bookshelf, she watched as the girl fluttered all over him, pressing up very close to Hinata. She was very clearly hitting on him.

…This could be a telling moment, Mukuro thought, and pressed her back against the bookshelf.

“…And I was thinking, maybe we could study and figure this out… together? It might be fun!” the girl said.

“That would be nice. I could use some help getting my math grades up.”

“Sure, sure, but we could study… other things too?”

“That wouldn’t be too bad. We could get a study group together if you want.”

“Ah, no, I was thinking… alone?”

…He’s completely oblivious, Mukuro thought to herself. She marked that down as she peeled herself off of the bookshelf. Job or no, she wasn’t going to witness this poor girl be murdered via obliviousness. Without a word, she exited the library, and just as she turned the corner, she heard the library door slam. She turned to look around the corner and saw the girl storming down the hallway, half in tears.

Silently, Mukuro marked that down too.

“…he prefers Weekly Shonen Jump over CoroCoro, he wears boxers instead of briefs, and the subject he’s worst at is Math,” Mukuro read from the notepad. “He’s easily agreeable, and his sexual preferences are both men and women. He’s a virgin, and he has never had a partner. He’s somewhat oblivious to hints or sexual innuendo directed toward him, so the direct approach is best.”

She handed the notepad over to Kuzuryuu. He took it, immediately fumbled it, and then caught it before it could hit the ground, letting out a sigh of relief. This was immediately followed by him glaring up at Mukuro as he shoved the notepad into his jacket pocket. It was a good thing that they were in the abandoned classroom again, and that Peko wasn’t here this time – if they’d been in the hallway, she had a feeling that his pride would have required him to bark at everyone to prove his dominance despite the fumble.

Kuzuryuu cleared his throat. “Very– Very good. Now listen. I need one last thing from you. It’s – the last thing I need you to do, okay?”

He reached back into his jacket, and pulled out a small, black envelope.

“I need you to take this and… put this in his shoebox tomorrow morning,” he said, scratching the back of his head as he handed it over to Mukuro.

The words escaped her mouth before she could stop herself. “That’s adorable.”

“Sh-Shut up! I’m not a kid, dammit!” Kuzuryuu barked, his face looking remarkably like a tomato. A very, very cute tomato. “You’d better not screw this up! I’ll sell your ass to a—a pachinko parlor! You’ll be selling beer to old men for the rest of your life!”

…Adorable, Mukuro thought to herself, before promising she would do this right, and then exiting the room.

Dropping off the envelope went off without a hitch. She made it to Hope’s Peak before Hinata left his dormitory, and made it to his shoebox before anyone could catch her in the act. She observed him picking it up from afar, and then retreated for the day.

After classes let out, she followed Hinata to the back of the school, where Kuzuryuu was waiting for him under a blossoming cherry blossom tree, and she slipped behind a nearby tree. She waited. She listened.