Lightning Serenade

Chapter 19: Rude Awakening

A blow horn woke the trio up.

A blow horn woke the trio up?

A blow horn. Woke the trio up.

Or, more specifically, Touya, holding the button down on a blow horn, woke the trio up. No where was safe from his tyrannical training. Not even Hitoshi's foster home the morning after his first ever birthday party since entering the foster care system.

"You're burning daylight!" Touya yelled in his best deep-voice no-nonsense Endeavor impression. "Let's go! Move, move, move!"

Once the boys were all standing up, wide eyed and hair mussed from their sleep, staring at Touya like they just knew they had to be dreaming, Touya started giving off orders of jumping jacks, laps around the yard outside barefoot (to get those calluses up to where they need to be, of course), and push-ups. The strain from their arms and abdomens during the plank competition threw away any hopeful remnants of the idea that they might be dreaming.

Touya was proud to say that he did get Neito swearing again but was disappointed that there were no technicians to shoot him a dirty glare. To add fuel to the fire, Touya added thirty sit-ups to every curse that left Neito's mouth. After Touya changed the number to ninety sit-ups, Neito quickly learned to give scathing glares that spoke volumes but did not let another curse leave his lips.

"What's with the look, Raion? Lion got your tongue? Go ahead and curse me all you want. I won't mind! It's your core that will suffer..." Touya warned with manic eyes and a grin stretching across his face. Yeah, Touya was in his element, all right.

Neito smartly kept his mouth shut.

To be honest, Touya was impressed, even for being forced into a heavy workout first thing in the morning after being abruptly awoken, they were all holding their own. He figured that they would slack off after he was not there to guide them, but by how much they had improved since they last saw each other, it was obvious that they all had strictly followed Touya's workout regimen that he had sent them home with.

Denki distracted himself by once again picturing himself swimming in the ocean blue of Touya's eyes, imagining himself being pulled into the black of his pupil by a lazy, but strong, whirlpool, and being dumped into another dimension where everyone's quirks were switched around. He imagined himself with Neito's quirk, failing at every quirk where Neito so easily succeeds. He imagined himself with Hitoshi's quirk and wondered if he'd even be able to control it so flawlessly. Neito handled it so perfectly and so quickly, but everything seemed to come easily to Neito.

Neito distracted himself by remembering the look on his mother's face when she caught him in her study, her contact book open to Endeavor's page. Neito had to swear up and down that he wasn't trying to prank call Endeavor, but that he needed his household number for another reason entirely. He could still hear the wariness of the girl's voice he heard on the other line when he asked for the super-cool, awesome hero trainer that had blue fire to be put on the phone. His heart hurt for Touya when she had responded that "Shouto doesn't have blue fire." Neito quickly dropped the act and demanded she put Touya on the phone immediately. How the hell was Touya so overlooked that when blue fire was mentioned, they thought that Neito had made a mistake about the color of the fire quirk instead of realizing that he was talking about Touya? The fury Neito felt kept him going a lot longer than he normally would have lasted, and the competition between the boys fueled him even more. Neito felt like he could last in a sturdy plank position for hours on rage and competition alone.

Hitoshi distracted himself during the plank by letting his thoughts wander to what happened overnight because Neito rudely refused to brainwash him so that he didn't have to actually put mental effort into the workout because then no one would be available to brainwash Neito, then. So, they both had to power through with the other not willing to put the other under Hitoshi's quirk just in case the other changed their mind about putting the other one under. Yeah, that thought process didn't make much sense to Hitoshi, either. He was struggling, so his thoughts wandered to what he had dreamed the night before. Was it a dream?