Izuocha's Love Stories

15 - STARING DOWN THE SUN

By Sugar Magic

NOTE: This story linked to Chapter 7

After he bursts from his room to exclaim to his mom that he's gotten into U.A., after she knocks the wind out of him with a hug and gets his hair wet with her hysterical tears, Izuku returns to his bedroom and slumps against his desk, emotionally drained with his cheek pressed to the surface and grinning like a fool. He did it. He really, really did it. He fans his fingers out across the desk he's been studying at for the past ten months, trying to relieve a bit of the giddy tension buzzing inside of him. His pinky finger brushes something solid and chilly, and whatever it is, Izuku lifts his head to grin at it, happy enough to have a smile for anything.

As it turns out, it's the holo-disc from U.A. His acceptance letter to the school of his dreams, he thinks with a note of lingering disbelief, despite the holo-disc being solid and real and right there in front of him. It's still turned on, though the screen has since vanished into standby mode. Izuku curls his hand around it to drag it towards him, then pushes the play button simply because he can.

All Might appears in the holograph, and Izuku re-watches his hero telling him he failed, of course, with zero points. He has a different perspective now that he knows All Might doesn't mean it like that, knows that there's more to the story. Without the cloud of despair fogging up his interpretation, he can take in little details, like the fact the stripes on All Might's tie run perpendicular to the ones on his suit. He traces All Might's loud movements with his eyes until the screen changes targets, and then the holograph is projecting the girl. Izuku takes his head off of the desk.

"Uh... Excuse me, hi," she says.

His first guilty though is that she's so cute, even cuter than she is in his memory. She's got rosy pink cheeks and toes that point inward in that feminine posture he's seen on idols in magazines but never in real life, never on someone who wasn't trying to do it. Her tawny eyes and tawny hair are the exact same color, both reminding him of over-steeped tea that's been left in the cup too long. She's got the jacket she was wearing when he first met her tucked over her arm, and he scans the visible skin of her face and arms for scrapes, bruises, anything. But she looks completely fine like it never even happened, and he sighs out a breath that he feels like he's been holding all week. He mutters a few words of gratitude to the universe because he wondered about this girl a lot, worried that there was a possibility that she's wasn't okay.

"Uhh, sorry to bother you, but... Do you know the boy with curly hair? He has freckles, and, he's got, uh, a sort of plain look... Do you know who I'm talking about...?"

She's pantomiming the shape of his hair on-screen in expressive gestures. It's pretty accurate, actually, and he's happily surprised that his super-average look was memorable to her at all. For his part, he doesn't remember the last moments of the exam very well. He's tried to scrape together shreds of what he can recall from the end of the exam, tried to quilt them into some meaningful sense of what occurred. But there are gaps in his memory and the pieces he has don't quite fit together right, leaving him questioning what parts even happened and which parts his brain just made up. The last ten minutes are a mess, blurring together in a frantic rush of panic. There's just that one flashbulb moment that shines crystal clear, when he had been running away from the robot with the rest of the test-takers, looked over his shoulder and saw her there on the ground, trying to push herself up onto her quivering arms before the machine brought its massive foot down to crush her. That, he knows, that had been real.

"Would it be possible to share some of my points with him?"

He watches the girl in the hologram vouch for him and tries to guess what it is she saw him do. He remembers the punch, the blowback, falling, falling, and then suddenly not, stopping dead in the air like the Earth's physics were on pause. It was her quirk, he realizes, saving him from colliding face-first with the ground for the second time that day. He had hovered and then dropped to the pavement, and it's around that time that his memory fizzles out. He thinks somebody ended up throwing up, too, but he isn't sure if it was she who did it or himself. He can't remember. He had barely had time to cry and scream out in agony before waking up in U.A.'s infirmary. He really, really hopes he hadn't been lying there unconscious in a slurry of his blood and vomit, in front of the very first girl who ever really talked to him, the first girl to think that it would be worthwhile to speak words to him.

"He said something like 'If only I'd gotten a single point!' so I gleaned from that that he hadn't earned any at all...! Please at least give him the number of points he lost because of me!"

Watching her make this case for him swamps his mind with speechless fascination, and his thoughts shut down just to study her. Blood is roaring in his ears and he wishes it would shut up – he doesn't want that static interfering with her speech. Her eyebrows knit together just a little and she holds up a fist in front of her chest, a vision of determined goodwill. His heart aches for a chance to tell her how much he appreciates her doing this, how much it means to him. He's so, so grateful for her words, for all of it. He doesn't realize he's crying until he feels a tear splash against his forearms. He drags his wrist across his cheeks and feels distantly surprised when it comes back completely wet, swallowing down on the thick lump in his throat.

"That boy saved my life!"

It's a generous perspective; The truth is she saved him. He was the one who got rescued - the swat of her fingertips against his cheek was the only thing that kept him from falling to his death. He knows that he didn't really save her, but still, his heart is pounding in his throat and he feels dizzy with the realization that he inspired those words. He stares at her in dumb wonder and thinks, 'Wow. Wow, this is probably what being a hero feels like.'

All Might takes over the hologram from there, announcing Izuku's 60 point total before adding, "And while we're at it, Uraraka Ochako: 45 points!"

Izuku mouths the name silently – Uraraka Ochako. "Nice to meet you, Uraraka-san," he whispers. All Might declares that U.A. is now his hero academia in the last seconds of the video, and Izuku immediately mashes the reload button, starting it all over again.

By the fourth replay, he's crying in earnest abandon, not even bothering to constrain his hiccuping sobs or his wet, shaky breathing. In the hologram, Uraraka-san is asking if she can share her points with him again, even though that could hurt her chances of getting in, and Izuku whimpers, hands cupped over his mouth. She doesn't even know him and she could be giving up her enrollment for him, how can she be that nice? He sniffles and wipes his tears and runny nose on the lapel of his jinbei. No one has ever been that kind to him in his entire life - or at least, no one his age. How in the world has a quirkless nerd like him been so blessed to have all these amazing strangers suddenly materializing into his life?

He tips his head back to stare at the ceiling as the hologram runs, breathing through his mouth, trying to calm himself down. His mind frantically wonders at so many hopes and possibilities – He wonders what the teachers will be like. He wonders if he can do this. He wonders if he'll run into Uraraka-san at school. He wonders what her quirk does, what the mechanics of it are. He wonders if he'll make friends with his classmates. He wonders if love, at first sight, is maybe real.

He breathes and breathes with his head back until his tears are a little more manageable at least, loosely listening to the voice of All Might until it swaps to Uraraka-san. She's asking Present Mic to "Please at least give him the points he lost because of me," making that insistent face and balling up her fist. It could be that in this is the moment, his dream is coming true: he feels a lot like a hero, even if what he did was mostly useless and self-destructive. He'd break his body just the same way if he found her like that again, legs trapped under the rubble, scared and hurt. More than that - he wants to do it again. He wants to be a hero, a courageous hero that saves people with a smile. On the hologram, Uraraka-san's huge brown eyes squeeze shut in determination.

"That boy saved my life!"

And he feels like he actually can.