Lyra Amano

The chapters will also be published in English on Quotev: https://www.quotev.com/story/17454371/Bungo-Stray-Dogs-Headcanons-x-Reader/2 And in French on Wattpad: www.wattpad.com/Asuna_Orihara?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_profile"

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Katsuki

The air smelled of pulverized concrete and blood, that metallic and dusty mixture that (y/n) (l/n) had come to associate, after two years of service, with the very smell of danger. The administrative district of Shizuoka-West was nothing but a mass of gutted structures. A villain with seismic powers had panicked at the sight of heroes arriving, and three floors had collapsed like a house of cards.

She was already running between two stretchers when an orange detonation tore through the air about ten meters away, raising a cloud of rubble and smoke. She didn't flinch. Not for a long time.

- Clear the way, damn it!

The voice preceded the man by a few seconds. Katsuki Bakugo emerged from the cloud, an unconscious civilian tucked under one arm like an unwieldy object, his other hand still smoking with explosion residue.

The whole country knew him. (Y/n) too. The images from the Final War had been playing on a loop for years: him, dragging All Might out of All For One's reach at inhuman speed; him, rising despite a stopped heart to finish the fight. The fourth hero in the national rankings, barely twenty, still technically under the sidekick label at Genius Office. She knew all that. She didn't care, in the present moment. There was a man bleeding who needed immediate attention.

- Put him there, she said, pointing to the free stretcher without even looking up at him.

Katsuki assessed her with a brief, annoyed glance at being given an order, but he obeyed anyway, letting the injured man down with less gentleness than she would have wanted.

- A beam fell on him. Barely breathing.

- Weak pulse, she murmured, fingers pressed against the man's neck. Airway clear, at least—

- That's not enough, is it?

- I said clear, not stable.

She was already tilting the head back, without stopping to look at him. Katsuki stared at her for a second, as if evaluating something, then his gaze slid elsewhere. One more rescue worker on one more disaster site. It didn't change his general opinion about the extras who populated this kind of intervention.

He left without another word, in another detonation.

***

He came back four minutes later with two casualties at once, without stopping to put them down gently this time either.

- That one's bleeding from the skull, he said in passing. The other's the wrist, nothing serious.

- Alright.

She was already on her knees, pressing a gauze pad against the wound. A third explosion further away barely made her flinch. She focused on the wound, the pad reddening under her fingers, when a cry heavier than the others cut through the ambient noise. Not an ordinary cry of panic, but the kind of sound she had learned to recognize in training as a sign of a body tipping into something serious.

She looked up just in time to see Katsuki coming back at a run. Not flying this time, no explosions under his hands, just running, which said a lot about the urgency.

- You.

He pointed a finger at her, almost accusatory.

- There's a guy trapped under the east stairwell. Leg crushed under a beam for twenty minutes, maybe more. Conscious, coherent. But I'm not freeing him until I have someone with me.

- Why? You could get him out in a second.

- Exactly. That's the problem.

Katsuki's jaw tightened, visibly annoyed by his own limitation more than by the question.

- A limb crushed too long, you free it all at once, everything that's built up inside goes straight into the bloodstream. It can stop a heart in seconds. I know that exists. What I don't know is the exact protocol. Tourniquet, monitoring, all that precise medical stuff.

(Y/n) felt her stomach clench. Crush syndrome. Exactly what she dreaded. The fact that he had identified it himself, without her having to explain anything, surprised her almost as much as the emergency itself.

- You're right not to pull him out like that. You need a tourniquet before extraction, monitor the heart during, and an IV drip right after.

- And you know how to do that?

- The tourniquet and monitoring, yes. The IV, no, I don't have the equipment, we'll need an ambulance right after.

Katsuki stared at her a second too long, jaw still clenched. Not with admiration. More the expression of someone used to solving everything alone, with explosions and superhuman reflexes, confronted with a problem where he had identified the danger but not the solution, and who viscerally hated having to rely on someone else to fill that gap.

- Move then, damn it. We don't have all night.

***

The east stairwell was barely standing, an improbable angle of twisted metal beams wedged under blocks of collapsed concrete. A man in his forties was half-buried, his face grey with pain but perfectly conscious, his left leg disappearing under a steel beam that must have weighed several hundred kilos.

- Sir, my name is (l/n), I'm a rescue worker. We're going to get you out of there, but I need you to tell me exactly how long you've been trapped.

- I... I'm not really sure... When the building shook I was on the phone. Maybe twenty minutes...? More?

Twenty minutes. Enough for the risk to be real, not yet catastrophic. She turned to Katsuki.

- I need a tight tourniquet just above the knee before you touch the beam. Then you lift it slowly. Not a brutal explosion, a controlled movement, and I monitor his pulse while we free him.

- Slowly, he repeated, as if the word was physically unpleasant to him.

- Can you do that or not?

A brief silence. Then a grunt.

- Obviously, damn it.

She took out her tourniquet, attached it firmly to the man's thigh, tightening until he grimaced.

- Sorry, this is going to hurt.

- It's nothing compared to— ah, damn—

- Good, she called to Katsuki. Go ahead, but slowly. Centimeter by centimeter if needed.

Katsuki knelt, placing his hands under the beam. No explosion this time. Just brute and controlled force, his muscles contracting with the effort, the metal groaning as he lifted it millimeter by millimeter. (Y/n) kept two fingers on the man's wrist, counting his pulse aloud, eyes fixed on his face watching for the slightest sign of distress.

- Seventy-two... seventy-five... keep going, it's stable.

- I don't need you to commentate every damn second.

- Yes you do, actually. If his pulse suddenly spikes or crashes, I need to know right away, and you need to stop right away.

He didn't respond, but she noticed he slowed his movement even further, almost imperceptibly.

The beam finally lifted enough to free the leg. (Y/n) rushed to examine it. Deformed, probably fractured, but the skin color still correct, not that waxy grey that would have signaled imminent catastrophe.

- Pulse still stable.

- Stabilize him for transport. Move.

They worked in silence for a few minutes. The ordinary silence of two people finishing a job, nothing more. Katsuki lifting the man with a precision she wouldn't have suspected in someone so seemingly brutal, while she attached the makeshift splint around the broken leg. Once the injured man was evacuated to the nearest ambulance, Katsuki straightened up, swept the area with his gaze, already visibly looking for the next hot spot.

His gaze stopped for a fraction of a second on her hands, stained with the casualty's blood, covered in fresh scratches adding to others, older, almost healed. There was nothing to say about it. Just an observation.

- Workshop hands.

He pointed to her palms with a sharp movement of his head, almost disdainful. The same categorical way he labeled anyone else on a site, like sticking a label on a box. Not an affectionate nickname. Just a raw observation, thrown there without further consideration.

- I'd prefer (l/n).

- Don't care.

He was already heading toward a new unstable section of wall, without a backward glance, leaving her alone with a saved casualty, blood-stained hands, and the dull annoyance of having inherited a nickname she had absolutely not asked for.

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Izuku

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Aid post number four smelled of disinfectant, cold coffee and concrete dust.

(Y/n) (l/n) had stopped really noticing it after the second day. Like the sounds: the generators, the radio calls, the debris trucks that shook the ground every twenty minutes. The brain ended up sorting. Keep the useful, let go of the rest.

She was twenty. She was in her third year of nursing training. She had volunteered because her hands knew how to do useful things, and watching the images on television without moving was physically unbearable to her.

Her mother had said be careful in a voice that meant don't go. She had said yes mom and she had gone anyway.

Behind her makeshift table, she was carefully lining up the last first aid kits. Outside, the late afternoon sun grazed the ruins, tinting everything a dusty orange. Two hours before the shift change. She noted mentally what was missing—antiseptic, medium elastic bandages, sterile compresses—and wrote it in her notebook in neat, tight handwriting.

That's when she heard it.

A young voice, slightly breathless, carrying from outside with the particular quality of people who think aloud without realizing it.

- ...the ankle is swollen on the external face but without abnormal angulation, which suggests a sprain rather than a fracture, and she answered all my questions correctly after losing consciousness—name, date, how many fingers—so the risk of concussion is probably low but it would be worth monitoring, and her pulse was stable at a hundred and two when I found her but now I'd say more like ninety, which is better, and—

(Y/n) put down her pen.

She came out of the tent.

A boy was walking toward her carrying a woman in her sixties against his chest.

(Y/n) recognized him immediately.

Everyone recognized him. Izuku Midoriya. The boy who saved the world. That's what the newspapers called him, with photos showing him in heroic poses. She had watched the final battle like everyone else, sitting on the edge of her bed at three in the morning in the common room of her nursing school, surrounded by her classmates who were holding their breath.

She had thought at that moment that he was going to die live in front of them.

He hadn't died.

And now he was in front of her with an old lady in his arms and concrete dust in his hair. He was wearing what looked like his hero costume. A dark green suit with gold trim, visibly worn, patched in places. What was visible above the collar was his face. A fine scar that ran from his eye to his jawline. On the right side of his skull, the hair had been cut short, a scar running through it. The rest was a mass of dark green curls that fell in every direction.

He looked exhausted in a deep, structural way that had nothing to do with a bad night.

He was still muttering.

- ...if it's an anterior talofibular ligament sprain it's better not to mobilize it further but the wall was threatening to—

- Hey.

He stopped short. His green eyes, wide, with that quality of total attention of someone brutally pulled from their own thoughts, settled on her.

(Y/n) took half a second.

At twenty she hadn't yet learned to put everything at a distance. She didn't yet have the years of emergency ward shifts, the accumulated sleepless nights, the patients you don't save and have to keep living with. She was still close enough to certain things that feeling them wasn't a problem, just a given.

And what she felt seeing Izuku Midoriya standing before her was gratitude. Real, simple, without embellishment. The kind of gratitude you don't really know how to express and don't try to express because the words are never adequate.

But this was neither the time nor the place.

There was an injured woman in his arms.

- Bring her here, she said. Left stretcher.

***

He obeyed immediately, which told her he knew how to tell the difference between a situation that required discussion and one that didn't. He guided the old lady to the stretcher with almost excessive care, checking that her head was well-positioned, pulling up the thermal blanket he'd had the presence of mind to bring.

- Her name is Mrs. Fujita, he said. Haruki Fujita. I found her on Hanamura Street, under a section of wall. There was a structural stability issue and I estimated moving her was less risky than waiting, but if I misjudged and it's a fracture—

- You did the right thing, (y/n) said simply.

He stopped.

She leaned toward the old lady without giving him time to respond.

- Mrs. Fujita? My name is (l/n), I'm a volunteer care aide. I'm going to look after you. Tell me if I hurt you.

The woman nodded with the exhausted dignity of someone who had decided not to be defeated. Her eyes slid briefly toward the boy behind (y/n) and something in her expression softened.

- He never let go of me once, she murmured. From the moment he found me.

(Y/n) palpated the ankle methodically. Swollen on the external face, painful on palpation, but no visible deformation, no cracking. Probable sprain, grade two, maybe three. She checked the peripheral pulses, sensitivity, mobility within tolerable limits.

- Have you had any nausea since you regained consciousness?

- No. Just a little dizziness at first.

- Headaches?

- Mild.

- Have they improved or worsened since?

- Improved.

- Good.

(Y/n) straightened up and went to get her equipment. Behind her, she heard Izuku say in a low voice to Mrs. Fujita you see, I told you with such barely disguised relief that it became almost touching.

She began immobilizing the ankle with precise and economical movements, explaining what she was doing as she went. Then, when that was done, she turned around.

He had stayed. Standing slightly back, hands along his body, his eyes making the rounds of the tent with that air of automatic observation of someone whose brain never really stopped. His gloves were damaged, torn at the knuckles, and through the tears, (y/n) glimpsed scars. Old and deep. The kind that doesn't come from a single wound.

She also noticed a superficial cut on his forehead that he probably hadn't noticed himself.

- You, she said.

He blinked.

- Me?

- The cut on your forehead. Sit down here.

- It's really nothing, I—

- I know. Sit down anyway.

A silence of exactly two seconds. Then he sat on the stool she was pointing to, with the quiet resignation of someone who had understood that certain people didn't joke.

(Y/n) grabbed a compress and antiseptic.

- It's superficial, she said, approaching. It doesn't need stitches.

- I suspected as much.

- How did you get it?

- I don't know exactly. At one point something struck the side of my head and after that it bled a little.

- At one point.

- There were a lot of things striking a lot of different places, he said with a disarming naturalness.

(Y/n) cleaned the wound. He didn't move a millimeter. Still as someone who had long experience with pain and had learned to put it elsewhere. She noticed that up close his drawn features were even more evident. The way he was holding his shoulders. A slight protection in his posture on the right side, barely perceptible.

She couldn't access it, his suit covered everything. But she noted it.

- How long have you been on patrol?

- Since yesterday morning.

- Have you eaten anything?

A hesitation.

- A cereal bar around ten.

- So nothing since this morning?

- ...yes.

(Y/n) applied a small bandage over the cut, stepped back, and took from the pocket of her apron a cereal bar that she placed in his hand without preamble.

He looked at it. Looked at her.

At this distance their eyes were almost level. He was slightly taller than her, two or three centimeters, no more. (Y/n) held his gaze with her (e/c) eyes without wavering.

- Eat. And sleep at least two hours before heading back out.

- I—

- That's not a suggestion.

A beat. Then something in his eyes changed. A thwarted expectation, perhaps, followed by a relief that had nothing heroic about it and absolutely everything human, and the corner of his lips moved slightly.

- Alright, he said softly. Thank you.

(Y/n) nodded.

- I'm Deku.

There was something in the way he said it. Not with ostentation, more with the hesitation of someone who was no longer entirely sure of the effect his name had on people and had stopped trying to control it.

(Y/n) looked at him.

She knew exactly who he was. She had watched his fight live, she had seen the images of the end. The sky clearing above two continents, a boy falling back into the void after having given everything. The gratitude she had felt that evening was real and still existed somewhere in her chest, intact.

But now he was in front of her with a small bandage on his forehead and a cereal bar in his hand, and he looked like a boy who needed to sleep.

Those two things could coexist.

- (Y/n) (l/n), she said. Volunteer, Kamino section.

She didn't say I know who you are. She didn't say thank you for what you did even though those words were true. It was neither the time nor the place, and above all it wasn't what he needed then.

What she saw in his eyes in response—that slight release, almost imperceptible—told her she had been right.

- It's a beautiful thing you're doing here, he said.

- We all do something.

A silence passed. A comfortable silence, which was unexpected.

- She talked to me about her cat, he said suddenly. Mrs. Fujita. An orange one. His name is Noisette. She left him in the apartment when the wall gave way and she...

He stopped. Something crossed his face. Not pity, something softer than that and more concrete.

- I'll look for him while I'm patrolling.

(Y/n) looked at him for a long second.

- Come back and tell me if you find him, she said.

He rose from the stool. He was slightly taller than her standing, shoulders a little rounded, that way of holding his body that didn't at all match what was expected of him.

- I'll come back, he said simply.

And he went out into the orange light of late afternoon.

***

Thirty-five minutes later, (y/n) heard a plaintive meowing from outside.

She came out.

Izuku Midoriya was crouched in the dust in front of Mrs. Fujita's stretcher, a ginger and manifestly unhappy cat clutched against him, and he was holding it out to the old lady with a delicacy that had absolutely nothing to do with someone who had just stopped a storm above two continents.

Mrs. Fujita took the cat. She said something in a low voice. The cat struggled for two seconds then decided that was good enough and began to purr with the serene placidity of animals who don't quite understand the circumstances, but accept being grateful for them.

Izuku Midoriya, crouched in the dust, smiled.

His eyes were shining a little.

He thought nobody was watching.

He was wrong.

(Y/n) went back into the tent and noted in her notebook with slightly heavier handwriting than usual:

Antiseptic. Medium bandages. Sterile compresses.

She hesitated. Added beneath:

Cereal bars.

She underlined the last item. Twice.

Then she got back to work.

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Shoto

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The neighborhood still smelled of new concrete.

It was a smell you ended up recognizing among all others. The smell of cities in the process of rebuilding, a mixture of dry dust, fresh paint and sawn wood. (Y/n) had gotten so used to it these past months that she barely noticed it anymore. The scaffolding had grown on facades like metallic exoskeletons, the streets kept their scars under new layers of asphalt, and yet people had come back. The shops had reopened. Life had resumed with that quiet obstinacy that belongs to neighborhoods that have survived something great.

"Kenji's" was one of those survivors.

The hand-painted wooden sign by his uncle himself had been presiding over the sliding door for longer than (y/n) could remember. About ten seats, a wooden counter polished by years of use, smells of broth that had soaked into the walls to the fiber. Her uncle had been cooking since dawn and (y/n) had been serving since the age when she could hold a tray without catastrophe. That evening, the dining room was almost empty. Two men at the end of the table finishing their beers in silence, an old lady alone near the window with her newspaper. (Y/n) was methodically wiping bowls behind the counter when the door slid open.

She looked up by reflex.

And stopped.

The hair was the first thing everyone noticed, invariably. The white half on the right, the scarlet red half on the left, separated with an almost geometric cleanness. The scar, too. That old burn that ran along the left side of his face, discreet but undeniable even in the warm and dim lighting of the restaurant. He was taller than (y/n) would have intuitively imagined, broader in the shoulders too. The quiet build of someone who has been constructed over time rather than in urgency. A navy blue coat closed up to the collar, hands in his pockets. He had the air of someone coming home after a very long day, who had long since accepted that his days would always be very long.

Shoto Todoroki.

(Y/n) didn't need to think to put a name to that face. Nobody in Japan did. Eight years ago his name had saturated the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Todoroki family, Dabi, the live revelation during the war, the empire-building father and the eldest son consumed by his own flame. (Y/n) remembered very precisely the evening she had watched the news with her uncle, both sitting in front of the small kitchen screen, and the way her uncle had put down his glass murmuring what a waste in a voice that asked for no response. She had been sixteen. She remembered the images. The two-toned boy standing in the rubble, his arms covered in frost and burns, holding the half-charred body of his eldest brother in an embrace that resembled an arrest as much as anything else.

Eight years. Today he was number two in the national rankings, he ran his father's agency, and the newspapers described him as someone people were finally beginning to see for himself rather than as Endeavor's son.

And now he was in her uncle's restaurant, on a Tuesday evening, looking around him with the careful calm of someone automatically checking that the room is small enough that people will leave him in peace.

Get it together.

(Y/n) put down the bowl she was holding before she stupidly dropped it.

- Good evening, he said.

His voice was sober and measured. Not cold. Really not, there was a nuance and (y/n) noted it immediately. But direct, without the polite inflation one sometimes puts into courtesy formulas to pad them with nothing.

- Good evening, she replied with the smile she reserved for customers. Take a seat wherever you like, we're not full tonight.

He nodded once, briefly swept the room with his gaze, and chose the stool at the end of the counter. The furthest from the door, the least exposed. (Y/n) noted the detail without dwelling on it. She slid him the laminated menu and he took it without a word too many.

He read seriously.

Really seriously. Eyes going line by line, the expression of someone who doesn't skim things even when they're simple things. But (y/n) also noticed something else. A slight tension in his shoulders, a way he had of not quite leaning against the back of the stool, as if his body hadn't yet received the message that it was allowed to stop. She had seen that in people who worked too much. That inability to let go of something you were no longer holding.

She pretended to busy herself with the paper napkins that were already perfectly aligned so as not to stare at him.

It's strange, she thought. Seeing him here. Like this.

She had an image of him built from newspapers, news bulletins, press photographs. An image made of fragments. The closed face behind the microphone at official press conferences, the flames and ice intertwined at Kamino in blurry videos filmed by witnesses who were trembling, the Yomiuri Shimbun headline: TODOROKI SHOTO, HERO NUMBER EIGHT AT PROFESSIONAL DEBUT. A public and monumental image, built in pixels and columns of ink.

Not this. Not a twenty-four-year-old man slightly tense reading the menu of a neighborhood restaurant with the same seriousness he would have read a field report.

- Do you have cold soba?

The question arrived directly, without introduction.

- Yes, (y/n) said. With tsuyu broth, with slices of nori and a soft-boiled egg. My uncle makes the noodles himself. The broth recipe comes from his father, it's really a family affair.

Something subtle passed over Shoto Todoroki's face. Not a wide smile, nothing as demonstrative, but the features softened slightly, a minute relaxation at the corners of his mouth, and (y/n) had the fleeting impression that this was something involuntary.

- That one, he said.

(Y/n) noted the order, poked her head into the kitchen to let her uncle know, and came back to fill a glass of water she placed in front of him. He was looking at the counter. Not at his phone—and that was perhaps the most striking thing, this absence of a phone taken out automatically the way everyone did in silences—just at the polished wood in front of him, hands flat on either side of the glass, the air of someone actively trying not to think about something else and only half succeeding.

- Long day? (y/n) said without really thinking.

Why are you saying that.

But he looked up at her, and his irises—one turquoise, the other dark grey, that detail she had known intellectually for years but which was still striking in reality, in the real light of a real room—met hers with frank and direct attention.

- Patrol this morning," he said. "Incident in the Minato district early afternoon. Coordination meeting afterward that lasted two hours longer than expected. And I have a report to submit tomorrow morning.

It was very precise. Much more precise than the question called for. (Y/n) had the feeling he wasn't entirely used to people asking him this kind of question in this kind of context. Or perhaps he simply hadn't decompressed enough yet to calibrate the answer to the person he was talking to.

- Ah, she said. Meetings are really the most underestimated supervillain of the modern world.

Is that the best you had to say?

He looked at her for a fraction of a second. Neither amused nor annoyed, just attentive, with that way of taking time to process information even when it was silly. A silence of one or two seconds, during which (y/n) wondered if she had missed something.

- That's one way of looking at things, he finally said. Not entirely wrong.

It wasn't exactly the reaction you expected to a joke. But it wasn't the polite and empty look of someone waiting for it to be over either. He seemed to have actually considered the proposition.

(Y/n) decided that was his way, and didn't look any further.

She went to check unnecessarily that the cutlery on the back table was properly in place. Behind her, she heard the discreet sound of his glass being set back on the counter. Then silence.

***

The soba arrived less than ten minutes later. Her uncle cooked quickly when the room was quiet. (Y/n) placed the bowl in front of him and he looked at it first with that concentration he seemed to bring to everything, before picking up his chopsticks.

What happened next was difficult to describe precisely. Shoto Todoroki's shoulders lowered by a centimeter, maybe two. The way he had been holding his back relaxed imperceptibly. (Y/n) might not have noticed it if she hadn't already noted the initial tension. But she had noted it, and the comparison was striking. It was the kind of release you don't really control, that comes on its own when something is exactly as it should be.

The broth, she thought, with a quiet pride that was only half hers.

The silence that followed had its own texture. That of the end of evenings in small restaurants, with the muffled sound of the street outside, her uncle's voice humming something indistinct in the kitchen, the clink of the old lady's chopsticks near the window. (Y/n) kept herself busy without really keeping busy, and she wasn't looking in his direction, but she was aware of him the way you're aware of a stable presence in a room. Not because he was doing anything to attract attention, but precisely because he wasn't.

- It's really good.

(Y/n) turned around. He had said that without emphasis, eyes still on his bowl, with the quiet conviction of someone who doesn't say things for nothing.

- My uncle will be pleased, she said. He takes great pride in the broth. I'll leave you to it, let me know if you need anything else.

He nodded, and this time there was something in his gaze. Not a smile exactly, but a brief and sincere warmth, the kind that arrives without warning and disappears quickly, as if he himself hadn't quite seen it coming.

***

He finished his soba to the last milliliter of broth, placed his chopsticks parallel on the rim of the bowl with a care that almost made (y/n) smile without her knowing exactly why, and took out his wallet.

- How much?

She told him the price. He paid, placed the bills on the counter precisely, waited for the change.

A second of silence. He seemed to hesitate, which was the first time since he had entered that he gave an impression of hesitation.

- Your uncle, he finally said, has he been cooking here long?

The question was asked with care, like someone who isn't entirely sure how small talk works but tries anyway.

- Since before I was born, (y/n) said. It's a real family thing. The restaurant, the recipes, everything.

He nodded slowly, in that way he had of seeming to deposit information somewhere careful. Then, after a beat:

- You can tell.

And this time the smile was there—discreet, almost imperceptible, the corner of the mouth barely rising—before disappearing as quickly as it had come. He got up, straightened his coat with a habitual gesture, and headed toward the exit. Stopped just before sliding the door open.

- Good evening, he said without turning around completely. And thank you.

The door slid softly in its frame.

(Y/n) remained motionless for a moment, the cloth hanging between her fingers. In the kitchen, her uncle was still humming. The two men at the end of the table were asking for the check. The old lady was turning a page of her newspaper.

She looked at the empty stool at the end of the counter. The empty bowl, the chopsticks placed with that slightly touching care, the glass of water he hadn't finished.

She had thought, without having really consciously considered it, that people who had been through that kind of thing carried something visible. A weight in the shoulders. A different way of occupying space.

She had seen something else. Someone who answered simple questions too precisely. Who hesitated a second before making conversation, as if looking for the right register. Who didn't quite know what to do with silence but settled into it anyway. And whose shoulders had ended up coming down two centimeters over a bowl of soba.

You can tell, he had said about her uncle's broth.

(Y/n) resumed wiping the bowls and thought about nothing particular for a long while.

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Author's Note — First Meeting (Part 1)

Three meetings. Three ways of entering someone's life through a door you hadn't planned to open.

On Katsuki's side: I worked on the paradox. A brutal boy who knows about crush syndrome and comes looking for help without ever formulating the word "help." The nickname "Workshop Hands" isn't a term of affection, it's just his way of labeling people he has integrated into his radar. What occupied me most was the moment he imperceptibly slows his movement under the beam. He doesn't talk about it. She notices anyway.

On Izuku's side: the internal monologue that escapes aloud mattered a lot to me. He's someone who analyzes in real time and doesn't always know it's audible. What I wanted to preserve is that she doesn't thank him. Not because she doesn't mean it, she really does, but because she intuitively understands that isn't what he needs there. The cereal bar says more. The bars underlined twice in the notebook say even more.

On Shoto's side: everything was in the two centimeters. The shoulders that come down over a bowl of soba. It took me a while to find the right level of discretion for that moment, neither too signaled nor invisible. And his way of making conversation, too precise, a little off-register, searching for the right tone. He tries. That's what counts.

Question of the day: which of the three moments stopped you the most? The slowdown under the beam, the cereal bars underlined twice, or the two centimeters? 💕