#ribbit.text

Ha, did he really think he could get through this without some sort of resistance from her? Think again, Kaminari. It wasn’t out of any spite or malice that she pushed back, of course, but out of concern for him. He could not solely focus on her, not when he had his own troubles to tend to. Seemingly unaffected by the way he stuck his lip out, she stared him down.

“How do I... do my hair?”

No doubt. That was the look of an analytical madman. He had to be questioning the physics of her hair, asking questions she had long since abandoned. Weight and volume had no meaning. Traditional metrics held no stock. They could not stand up against eldritch-esque properties. Why? This was her hair.

“Don’t know. It just comes together at some point. I’ve had years to practice on my siblings and myself.”

Industrial grade combs, super-strength hair spray, and muscle. That, combined with abounding patience. Time and concentration worked their magic. Rapunzel had nothing on her – where was the challenge in not styling her hair?

Training sessions ended in their usual fashion; with bumps, bruises, and howls about the indignity of having to deal with a poor partner and even poorer circumstances. 

Gloved fingers brushed a spatter of gravel from the folds of her clothes. She fell into the bumped and bruised categories, and not so much the complaining one. Even then, but a few light scuffs littered her skin and outfit. All around, not a bad day.

The last item on her daily checklist was a brief chat with a teacher. An informative meet-and-greet – nothing more, nothing less.

Or, it should have been. Her evaluator? Oh, only one of the best heroes of all time. As far as teachers went, All Might stood among the less reserved. She suspected his friendliness would lead to more chatter than strictly necessary. It would be nice to get to know an experienced hero and to have him expound on what she needed to develop, but she had to wonder how much fluff she’d have to dig through first. His enthusiasm, she anticipated, would be both a blessing and a curse.

In spite of the scrawnier stature he possessed these days, she spotted him by the gym’s entrance easily enough. That yellow suit made a wonderful, if eyesore-worthy, beacon.

(And, it looked ten times less horrendous on him in this form. Maybe that was just because there was less yellow to look at.)

After striding over to him, her hair swished with the movement of a brief bow.

When it came down to it, Tsuyu never considered herself to be a picky person. She could roll with the punches, go with the flow, and so on. But, as with anyone, there were certain situations she refused to touch with a ten, no, twenty foot pole, held by her fully extended tongue.

Translation: She really did not want to be paired up with Katsuki Bakugo on something as mundane as a book report.

He would probably reduce the book to ashes, anyways.

When the teacher announced their pair of names, she could only stare ahead and keep her typical, blank composure. This would be interesting, at the very least, even if her fists clenched at the probability of finishing this project with nothing left but a chunk of singed hair. Whatever. Roll with it. She could tie her remaining hair into an even smaller bow, or something. Wouldn’t that be cute?

She was

C O L D seeped through the fibers of her clothes, through her skin, through her being. Every muscle and tendon faced a deep, threatening freeze in their future. Lungs shrank. Limbs tensed. All the systems in her body begged for a reprieve.

. . . Seeped was not the right word, she decided a nanosecond after the wall of icy air swallowed her, no warning given, no preparation allowed. The C O L D did not seep. It did not bleed or creep or crawl. The C O L D was merciless. It knew no subtlety. All or nothing, as she understood it. And she? She found herself on the receiving end of all.

No matter how much she clapped her hands, triggering a muffled echo in the snow-ridden plane, her nerves refused to send back a response. Her toes were a lost cause as of two minutes ago. The only things that had kept her extremities in the land of the living thus far, were her blessedly insulated gloves and shoes. While intended to be worn underwater, the extensions of her wetsuit held out nicely in the bitter C O L D.

Except, C O L D wasn’t bitter. In the spirit of taking things from her, such as the feeling of her own skin, it had no taste, no sound, no form. She had nothing to fight against as it ripped the very air from her lungs, her voice from her throat. Outstretched hands grasped wisps of precipitation, and nothing more came of it. Why couldn’t she be anywhere else right now?

At 0 °C, or even before it, most frogs retreated beneath the earth to hibernate, coaxing warmth from the dirt and drawing in oxygen through their skin. Instinct and evolution kept them strong and alive as their body temperature sank lower and lower. 

She was not most frogs.

(She wasn't even a frog. She was a human. Humans could stand a lower temperature threshold so why was she freezing why was she dying why was her body shutting down down down.) 

     (It probably had something to do with the fact that it was below 0 °F. Either way, the temperature had fallen below 0 ° on both scales – first one, then the other. Pull it together, Tsu.)

Whatever the case, she knew the clock was ticking before her feet, wearily trudging through the snow, would refuse to move anymore. She was C O L D and

L O S T in the woods, she couldn’t even dredge up a sense of how long she had been out here. Here. Somewhere.

At this point, she wasn’t even sure if these were woods. A chilly fog muddled her memory, leaving her with the fleeting image of a few trees, and the faint sensation of the pads of her gloves catching on brittle bark. Part of her questioned whether it would be safer to stick it out her (she still didn’t know where here was, called the lucid portion of her mind) or to trek on. Could someone find her? Could she find her way? As it stood now, it looked as though she would remain L O S T in this imaginary labyrinth she had created for herself.

Picking a path to familiarity should not have been a remotely daunting task. Not long ago she had been in good company. Then, a flurry of snow and chaos. While everything else happened at seemingly superhuman speeds, her mind got caught in the icy quicksand, slowing down to the same rate as her heart. Before she could make heads or tails of the situation, she got turned around, and an endless expanse of white separated her from anything, anyone, she knew, and she was gone.

She was out of her comfort zone, L O S T in this climate. She was not meant to be here, much less survive here. Out of her element didn’t begin to describe it. Fish out of water was but a painful understatement. Frog dunked in a bucket of ice in the middle of nowhere struck her as a bit on the nose, but it fit. She was C O L D and L O S T and

A F R A I D she stood, but not in the frazzled, irrational way one tended to feel when they faced their end.

She had faced D e a t h head-on before, his hand so close to her face she could feel her breath reflecting off his palm. Twice, even, after sharp eyes thwarted D e a t h ‘ s first attempt. He would have had her that second time, her attention divided between pushing one and pulling another out of danger, were it not for yet another miracle.

D e a t h hadn’t S C A R E D her that time, not truly. So caught up in the moment, adrenaline driving her thoughts, D e a t h had been an empty threat. (Dying was out of the question, she had told herself. Even if the biggest deus ex machina of all time had to swoop in, she would survive. And she did.)

No. This F E A R was wholly rational. Clinical, almost. This time, she had no fail-safes. No miracles. No one to fall back on when she slipped. No childish hope for someone else to come along and save the day. If she let go, she ensured her own end.

At this point, everything pointed to one certainty.

(Her slowing pulse her ringing ears her unfeeling hands her clumsy feet.)

A reminder of her morality. And so, she was C O L D and L O S T and A F R A I D.

C O L D and F E A R burned through her gloves and knees as she fell. With no one to pull her out of the snowy sea, her hands and feet drowned in the mounting freeze. Given time, even her mass of hair would find itself blending in with the landscape.

For someone who took each day in stride (and in great, froggy leaps), another day of intense testing was not as much of a source of anxiety for Tsuyu. As for Ochaco... She knew Ochaco sometimes agonized over the little things, but in the end, she always managed to pull through.

There was nothing she loved more than a reliable teammate.

Having already brought herself to the very brink of the chasm, she curled her toes on the edge. It was deep, alarmingly so. She assumed that was what brought on Ochaco’s fleeting hesitation. Not that it mattered, anyways. The keyword was fleeting, after all. She flicked her gaze up from the choking void, then flashed her partner a quick, closed-lip smile. Her tongue lolled out a split second after.

“Good! Come on, then. We can do this.”