Chapter 35: Eighteen at Heart, Fifteen in Practice.

The mess hall smelled like heaven and Class 1-B ate like their piece of heaven might be taken away.

Nobody had said much for the first four minutes. Four minutes was how long it took twenty teenagers who'd brawled across a forest for four hours to remember they had mouths for talking and not just for shoveling. The Pussycats' kitchen had laid out a feast made for an army, rice in steaming towers, grilled fish, curry, mountains of vegetables some were treating as a food eating contest, and the class descended on it like scavengers.

"I think I'm going to eat until I die." Tsuburaba said, around a mouthful

"You'll die before me. I'm pacing myself." Tetsutetsu said, three bowls deep.

"That's pacing yourself?"

"I could go faster."

"Don't!" said half the table at once.

Manga had his bubble drawn into a ferocious monster and was eating just as crazily as everyone else.

"Okay, no lying. How many beasts did everyone get?" Awase announced, jabbing his chopsticks at the group.

"Forty." Tetsutetsu said instantly.

"No you did not get forty."

"Forty-ish."

"There weren't forty beasts in the whole forest near you."

"There were like a thousand beasts total, Awase, I got forty of the thousand, I’m actually being modest if I say so myself."

"A thousand?" Kaibara put his bowl down. "Who counted a thousand???"

"Nobody counted, that's my point, so my forty is as real as your number."

"My number is eleven and I actually counted."

"Nobody believes your eleven."

"I believe his eleven." Honenuki said.

"Thank you, Honenuki."

"Kamakiri got the most," Pony declared, "because Kamakiri was a literal blender, I saw him do like six at once."

"I don't count." Kamakiri said, leaning back, picking something out of his teeth with a mini-blade. "Counting's for people who need to prove it. I just know."

"Mr. Badass over here." Tokage giggled.

"Thank you." Kamakiri grinned.

"Wasn't a compliment either." Tokage was very much making fun of him.

Komori, who had mushrooms still tangled in her hair from the giant-ball-level chaos of the boss fight and had not bothered to remove them, raised a small hand. "I got one! I want that on the record. My quirk is bad at dirt and I had a great time anyway."

"Komori got one and the best attitude." Kendo supported her and Komori beamed.

The argument never resolved. Half of them were inflating and the other half were lying about not inflating, and the only firm number in the entire conversation was Kaibara's eleven, which nobody accepted on principle.

"Okay but the combo move." Tetsutetsu put both fists on the table. "The big one. On the giant. That needs a name and it needs it tonight."

"Class B Annihilation Cannon." Monoma said instantly.

"I still say that rules." Kamakiri said.

"It does rule."

"It sounds like a finishing move from a fantasy game." Honenuki said.

"YEAH IT DOES!" Tetsutetsu said, delighted, missing that it wasn't a compliment. "That's why it's good."

"What about individual ones?" Awase said. "Like, personal super moves. Everybody should have one. I'll go first. Mine's, okay, when I weld a guy to a wall and leave him there, that's, uh." He thought. "Walled."

The class erupted into laughs.

"Walled?!" Kaibara had food flying from his mouth.

"It's a work in progress, okay?!"

"You welded a beast's hand to its own face today. Call it that." Tokage said

"Call it 'hand to its own face'?"

"Self Five, could work." Manga said.

"Self Five? Eh.. idk. " Awase wasn’t feeling it. "Plus just using my quirk normally isn’t really a special move. It should be like something flashy and impressive."

…

The hot spring was the single greatest thing that had ever happened to any of them, and the boys' side celebrated by immediately turning it into a war zone.

It started, as these things start, with a towel.

Awase snapped his at Tsuburaba's backside on the walk in, a clean crack of terrycloth on skin, and Tsuburaba's yelp hit a pitch that scattered birds off the roof, and after that there were no rules. Kaibara caught Awase across the shoulder blades in retaliation on Tsuburaba's behalf, purely for the love of the game. Tetsutetsu wound his towel into a rope and began hunting Kamakiri around the washing stations, while Kamakiri threatened everyone at large that the next towel to touch him was getting shredded, which everyone incorrectly understood to be a bluff because even Kamakiri wasn't dumb enough to grow blades in a bathhouse. It wasn’t a bluff.

Monoma got Rin across the back of the thigh with a snap he'd clearly been practicing, crowed "SUPERIOR TECHNIQUE," and was immediately hit from three directions at once by Rin, Tsuburaba, and, betrayal of betrayals, Shoda, who apologized while doing it.

"Sorry. Sorry. It was right there."

"SHODA! You're supposed to be the trustworthy one..."

"I'm reasonably good at towel whipping, it turns out."

Shishida walked through the entire battlefield untouched, glasses off, towel folded over one arm, with the unhurried dignity of a gentleman crossing a war. Nobody snapped at Shishida. There was an understanding. Bondo trailed behind him using Shishida as a shield, and Kuroiro simply was not there and then was, already at the water's edge, having crossed the room through the shadows specifically to avoid participating.

"Coward!" Awase called.

"Survivor." Kuroiro corrected him, and slipped into the darkest corner of the spring like ink returning to a bottle.

"CEASEFIRE!" Honenuki called from the water, already in, already soaking, already done with all of them. "Get in before Vlad hears us and makes tomorrow worse."

The threat worked where decency hadn't. Boys piled in with splashes that violated every posted rule about no diving, and the steam swallowed the war, and for about ninety seconds there was peace.

"THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!" Tetsutetsu announced to the sky, sunk to his neck. "I fought a forest of monsters. I ate four bowls of rice. Now I'm in a hot spring!"

"It's not bad at all." Kaibara said, eyes closed.

"The water is exceptional," Shishida agreed from the deep end, where he sat like a contented boulder, steam rising off his shoulders. "My family frequents an onsen in Hakone. This compares favorably. The mineral content is superb for the coat." A pause. "For the skin. Superb for the skin."

"You said coat." said five boys at once.

"I said skin."

A wooden wall ran down the middle of the spring, tall and solid, splitting the bath in two, boys on this side, girls on the other, steam drifting over the top into a sky going purple with dusk. Bondo sat very still in the shallowest part, submerged to the waist and no further.

"You good, Bondo?" Rin asked, drifting past on his back.

"...T-testing something." Bondo lifted one huge hand out of the water and examined it with real scientific attention. "If I dissolve in hot water, I, um. I want to find out slowly."

"Do you dissolve in hot water?" Tsuburaba sat up in alarm.

"...We're finding out. Slowly."

"He's fine." Honenuki said. "If he starts foaming, someone grab him."

"That's the plan?"

"That's the plan."

Rin and Tsuburaba went under for a breath-holding contest. Tsuburaba won, twice, on account of his quirk relying on his breath. 

Rin was upset. "In my hometown we did this in a river with a current. This was supposed to be easy mode."

“You can’t challenge a guy who needs his breath for his quirk to a breath-holding match!” Tsuburaba told him. “Your arrogance pierces the sky, Young Rin!”

Rin splashed him with water.

And Manga was wrestling Kamakiri, because the towel war had to go somewhere and it went into the water.

It had started as a shove before it escalated and now the two of them were locked up in waist-deep water, Manga's low center and absurd strength-to-weight against Kamakiri's reach and total lack of restraint, both slipping on wet stone and refusing to let go, while Monoma provided unsolicited commentary from a safe distance.

"Fukidashi has the underhooks. Kamakiri's base is garbage. This is over. I've seen girls with better balance."

"COPY MY QUIRK AND SAY THAT!" Kamakiri snarled.

"I don't wrestle dudes in the bath, I have standards."

Manga dumped him. Got the angle, got under, put Kamakiri flat into the water with a splash that soaked three uninvolved bystanders, and came up with his bubble blazing a trophy while Kamakiri surfaced spitting spring water and promising murder.

"You saying I don’t have standards, Monoma?!" Manga roared after his victory.

“I said no such thing.” Monoma immediately turned away.

“I think we need to see just how far Mirko pushed you during your internship.” Manga slowly stalked forward.

“I think we need to relax and enjoy our moment of rare leisure considering the hard training we have tomorrow.” Monoma rambled.

“Kamakiri, you suck bro.”

"I'll drown every last one of you. Manga is a freak, but the rest of you are fair game!" Kamakiri shouted.

Manga sank back into the heat with his muscles singing their gratitude, bubble settling to a warm content glow, day complete. Steam. Purple sky.

Which was, of course, when Kaibara surfaced and started talking.

"Okay. Now that we're all relaxed. Fukidashi. Tokage. Details. Now."

Manga's bubble had a red exclamation mark pop up.

"There are no details."

"There are definitely details. You've been dating since the sports festival. That's months, basically. And you've told us jack squat. It's damn criminal is what it is." Awase said, drifting over with new hunger in his eyes.

"There's nothing to tell."

"She confessed to you on national television," Kaibara said, not opening his eyes. "While punching you. Forty thousand people live. You had the most famous confession in U.A. history and you say 'nothing to tell.'"

"As the man who has known you the second longest, and as the teammate who carried your ten million points on his own throat, I am owed this. We are all owed this. The class demands gossip." Monoma said, gliding in like a lawyer approaching the bench.

"The class can demand whatever it wants."

"What's it like?!" Tsuburaba pressed, paddling closer. "Having a girlfriend. Is it different? Do you feel different? What do you even do?"

"We hang out."

"HE HANGS OUT!" Awase reported to the spring at large, disgusted.

"We go to the mall. To the park. Arcades. We train. She cheats at claw machines. It's awesome." Manga's bubble showed him and Setsuna together doing different activities.

"I think it's admirable." Shishida offered from the deep end. "A gentleman doesn't discuss a lady. Fukidashi is conducting himself with discretion."

"Thank you, Shishida-"

"Although, I confess even I am curious what bubble boy does." Shishida continued, settling deeper.

"Et tu, Shishida?!" Manga felt betrayed!

"I just said what everyone was thinking. Even decorum has limits."

"Have you kissed her?" Tetsutetsu asked.

The bubble cracked.

It tried. It genuinely tried. It held blank for a full second, and then a small red flush bloomed at one edge like ink dropped in water, and spread, and the harder its owner fought it the deeper it went, and the boys' side of the spring rose as one screaming organism.

"THE BUBBLE WENT RED!"

"HE CAN'T HIDE IT, HE CAN NEVER HIDE IT!"

“RED ALERT! RED ALERT! OUR BUBBLE BOY BE MAKING OUT!!!”

"That's the freaking steam." Manga said. "It's a heat thing. Basic physics people."

"BULLSHIT!" The boys cried out.

"Wait! How the hell do you even kiss?!" Tetsutesu asked a very important question that all the other boys wanted to know as well.

“A gentlemen doesn’t kiss and tell.” Manga declared with some class before he sank into the water until only the bubble showed above the surface, glowing a steady mortified red in the steam like a paper lantern of shame, and the boys circled it, howling.

The same conversation was happening on the opposite side of the wall. It had just taken a different road to get there.

The girls' side was calmer by design, the same steam, the same purple sky, less warfare. Kendo soaked with her eyes shut. Shiozaki had found a stone shelf and sat with her hands folded and her vines fanned out to drift in the hot water around her like a garden, which she declared, with rare open pleasure, "The vines love it here. They're very happy. We are all very happy."

"That's so cute," Komori said. "Do they feel things?"

"They feel warmth. And the Lord's grace."

"In the water?"

"The Lord is also in the water."

Komori had finally consented to have the mushrooms picked out of her hair, and Pony was doing the picking, and Yanagi had arranged the removed mushrooms in a neat row along the stone lip of the spring and was floating them, one at a time, in a slow orbit above the water, for reasons she did not explain and no one asked about, because everyone privately agreed it was kind of soothing.

Kodai sat neck-deep near the wall, silent, at ease, her hair up, watching the steam curl. Pony had tried twice to draw her into conversation and gotten two serene "Mm"s, which by Kodai standards was gushing.

And then, from over the wall, thirteen boys' voices rose at once, and out of the noise one line punched through the steam clear as a siren.

"RED ALERT! RED ALERT! OUR BUBBLE BOY BE MAKING OUT!!!"

Every girl in the water turned, slowly, to look at Setsuna.

"What?" she said.

"There’s only one bubble boy in our class." Pony said, delighted, a mushroom still in her hand. "That's Fukidashi. That's a hundred percent about you and Fukidashi, they're grilling him over there right now."

"You don't know that."

"MAKING OUT, Tokage!"

"Could mean anything. Boys scream about everything. Tetsutetsu screamed about rice for ten minutes at dinner."

"Mm!" Kodai added, her eyes shining.

"Not you too..." Setsuna sighed.

"Mm." Meaning: especially me.

"Then let's ask you." Kendo decided. "How's it going? You and Fukidashi. Since you're already the topic."

Setsuna lounged back against the rock. "It's going great. Obviously. Have you seen us?"

"That's not an answer, that's a brag."

"It is an answer."

"What's it like!?" Komori asked, sunk to her nose. "Having a boyfriend. A real one. Is it weird? I'd be nervous the whole time. I'd combust."

"It's easy. He’s head over heels for me. I’m all about him. He's a foot shorter than me and his head tells me everything he's thinking. There has never been a boy easier to date in the history of boys."

"That's actually so unfair. He can't hide anything from you." Pony said.

"I know. Best boyfriend option in the school." She grinned.

"Does he ever surprise you, though?" Yanagi asked, drifting a mushroom in a lazy circle. Her flat gray gaze settled on Setsuna with unsettling directness. "If you always know what he’s thinking. Doesn't that get boring? Like reading a book where every page is already open."

“No. Because knowing what he thinks isn't the same as knowing what he'll do. He feels everything right out loud and then he does something better than what I guessed anyway. Every time." She smiled. "Also he's funny, so that’s always a plus."

"Is he a good kisser?" Kendo asked.

The water went silent. Every head turned. Kendo cracked one eye, entirely unrepentant. "What? I'm curious. He has a speech bubble for a head. We all have the same question, I'm just the one who asked it."

"I was going to ask." Pony nodded her head rapidly.

"I was praying someone would." Shiozaki admitted, from her shelf, eyes closed, vines drifting.

"SHIOZAKI?!"

"Curiosity is not a sin."

And Setsuna, who had walked into a live confession on national television without her heart rate ticking up until she'd chosen to let it, faltered. A centimeter of the cool slipped.

"...He's fine."

"FINE?! That's the WORST answer." Pony shrieked.

"He's better than fine." Setsuna amended, against every survival instinct she had, feeling her face warm past what the spring accounted for. "He's. Okay. You know how the bubble does the thing. Shows his thoughts. He can't control it. So every single time, you know exactly what he's feeling, all of it, right there over his face, he couldn't play it cool if his life depended on it, and it's." She heard herself. Stopped. The entire girls' side was leaning in, rapt. Even the mushroom orbit had stopped. "It's amazing…" She was already thinking about secretly meeting him after they’re done in the hot springs.

"That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard." Shiozaki said serenely.

"It's not bad." Setsuna was living it up.

"You love it." Kendo said.

"Mm." Kodai nodded, devastatingly.

"Okay, enough about my love life. That’s all you’re getting out of me tonight." Setsuna declared.

Inside her head she was thinking that he was right there. Three meters and a wooden wall. And she could split. It would take nothing. One eye, popped loose, floated up over the top of the wall through the steam, one look, three seconds, back down, reattached, done. Nobody would ever know.

One detached eye. Thirteen boys in the water, at least six of whom would spot a floating eyeball instantly, because a floating eyeball was not subtle and every person on this mountain knew exactly whose it was. Manga's face when he found out. Learning his girlfriend peeked at him in the bath at fifteen. Kendo's face. Vlad's face. The story getting out, and it would get out, and living at every class gathering until they were all eighty. Her entire carefully built reputation, torched in one evening, for one look.

She controlled herself.

She didn't need to steal a look at something she intended to see eventually. They were fifteen. There was a lifetime ahead for them. Some things you waited for, and the waiting was part that made it worth it.

The eye stayed in her head. The wall stayed a wall.

"What are you smiling about?" Komori asked.

"Nothing." Setsuna said, and meant everything.

"Probably planning on smooching Fukidashi after the bath."

"No I’m not!" Setuna rose, exposing her full glory, with a faint blush on her face.

“Look at that reaction! She was!” Pony exclaimed.

Lights-out was a suggestion to the boys.

Thirteen futons in the big tatami room, in the dark, and not one boy within an hour of sleeping, because Tsuburaba had said the words "truth or dare" into the black, and that was that.

It started tame. A dare to eat the leftover snack-bag horrors from the bus, which Tetsutetsu completed without noticing they were a punishment. Kamakiri was dared to do twenty push-ups, which he did one-armed, in the dark, radiating smugness. Kuroiro dared to say something cheerful, which was something cheerful about darkness. Then Tsuburaba, emboldened, tried "truth: is there a girl you like," and the answer was that Kuroiro was suddenly not in his futon. Just gone. A Kuroiro-shaped absence in the dark, the shadows in the corner marginally deeper than they'd been a second ago.

"...Did he just phase into the floor to avoid a question?"

"He did. Which is an answer."Honenuki said.

"IT IS AN ANSWER!" Awase hissed, delighted. "WHO IS IT?!"

The shadows did not comment. Monoma, dared to say one nice thing about Class A, physically could not, stammering, stuttering, and took a punishment instead. Shishida truthfully confessed the most embarrassing thing his family called him at home, which was "Juju." and which the room would deploy at the worst possible moment someday, everyone knew, even Shishida, who had accepted his fate with dignity. Bondo, dared to glue Tsuburaba's futon to the ceiling, said "...no," and everyone respected it. Rin took a truth about whether he'd ever used his scales to cheat at anything and said his quirk isn’t really good for cheating, so no.

"DARE!" Awase answered when asked.

It was the wrong sentence to say in a dark room full of teenage boys, and he knew it, and he said it anyway, because Yosetsu Awase was not a coward.

"Okay." Kamakiri said slowly, and you could hear the grin travel through the dark. "Okay. Dare. Sneak to the girls' side of the building. Knock on their door. Come back. Without getting caught."

The room went electric.

"That's a get-expelled dare. That's a get-thrown-off-the-mountain dare." Honenuki said from his futon, not moving.

"Nobody's peeking at anything, chill out." Kamakiri clarified over the objections. "It's a simple stealth run. Knock on the door, come back, prove you can. We literally just had a stealth exercise. This is homework."

"That is not what the exam was for…" said Shoda's tired voice.

"Statistically," Monoma observed from his futon, delighted, "Awase posted two detections on that exam. I posted two as well, but mine were Kendo's fault. His were his own."

"I PASSED that exam!"

"Barely."

"Watch! I’ve grown since that class." The futon rustled. A shape rose in the dark.

"Awase, you’re freaking nuts dude. Not even I’m ballsy enough to think I can slip past multiple Pro Heroes undetected."

"I got this in the bag." And he slid the door open a crack and poured himself into the hall.

The room held its breath.

Ten seconds. Twenty. The faint sound of a boy moving down a wooden hallway with real care, and, credit where due, doing a decent job of it. A kid who could genuinely move when his pride was on the line. Tsuburaba was vibrating with suppressed laughter. Manga and most of the other boys were no different. Shoda and Shishida being the only two who were worried they would be caught up in this.

"He's going to make it." Rin whispered.

"He's not going to make it." Kaibara whispered.

"Five hundred yen says he doesn't." Kuroiro whispered, from the dark, startling everyone, because nobody had known Kuroiro gambled.

Forty seconds.

"And where do you think you're going?"

A pause. A very small voice.

"...Bathroom?"

"The bathroom's the other way. You know it's the other way. I know it's the other way." A tired sigh. "Get back to your room."

Footsteps, unhurried. The door slid open. The silhouette of Vlad King filled the whole frame, and hanging from one of his hands, held by the back of his shirt like a kitten that had disappointed him, was Yosetsu Awase, toes just brushing the floor.

"Get to your futon." Vlad said.

And he tossed him.

Awase sailed across the dark room and landed in a heap on his own futon with an "OOF", and the room detonated, every boy who'd held his breath for a minute straight losing it at once into pillows and forearms, bodies shaking, absolutely forbidden from laughing out loud because the source of all authority in the universe was still standing in the doorway.

Vlad looked at them. Twelve fifteen-year-olds pretending to be asleep and failing catastrophically, plus one heap.

He couldn’t smile. He had to be the authority figure.

"Get to sleep. All of you. Training starts early and it’ll make today's hike look like a joke. Anyone who's tired tomorrow because of tonight doesn’t get to cry later." He informed them.

The laughter died instantly.

"Goodnight." The door slid shut.

A long, disciplined silence.

"...Two detections…" Awase whispered from his heap, to no one, defending his record to the end, and the room lost it all over again, quieter, into the pillows, until the laughter wore down to breathing and the breathing wore down to sleep, thirteen exhausted kids going under one by one, full of food, aching from a forest, a hard dawn coming for all of them and not one of them dreaming about it yet.