Need You (ShinDeku)

Ch. 68 - Partner

A/N: ...yeah, Mido's idea of good flirting is to complement a person's heroic potential. The problem; he regularly complements all of his classmates in this way, so you can imagine Shinso is having a hard time figuring out whether Midoriya actually has any interest in him whatsoever. (Regardless, the validation is nice.) He's also a little busy trying to gauge whether his newly acquired friends approve of his interest in Midoriya, so he's showing off that interest in a way that he knows only Midoriya himself will be oblivious to.
Have fun reading!

Midoriya POV

"Hello Midoriya, it's good to see you standing on your feet outside of physical therapy!" Iida says warmly, arms full of food. To his left is a bubbly Uraraka, bouncing on the balls of her feet with her own arms full of food.

"Thanks! You two come on in! You can leave the food on my desk here." I pat the desk next to me, smiling.

Uraraka dumps a bag of potato chips, tortilla chips, a box of cookies, gummy worms, a bottle of soda, and a bag of popcorn onto the table unceremoniously.

"I wiped our whole kitchen for this stuff." She she stated smugly. "Our classmates are surprisingly healthy so this stuff was hard to find." Next to her, Iida sets down a container of guacamole—for the tortilla chips maybe?—, a gallon of water with paper cups, and six identical tupperware containers.

"If you don't mind me asking... what is that?" Hitoshi asks, coming from behind me and resting his chin on my shoulder.

"Iida insisted that we should all have a healthy balanced meal instead of just snacks all night. I still thought we should have snacks because it's a special night so we compromised and made mini-meals so we would be able to eat both." Uraraka is happy to answer his question.

"That's right! Uraraka helped me make dinner for the six of us, but in smaller portions so that we can indulge in less healthy snacks later." Iida looked proud.

"Oh cool, thanks guys. So what's for dinner?"

"A small portion of soba noodles—cold for Todoroki—with steamed gyoza and edamame. It's not the healthiest, but I'd say it's an acceptable dinner for tonight."

"Thank you, Iida." Todoroki nods politely at him.

There's another knock on the door and Uraraka rushes to grab it.

"Tsu!"

"Hey guys, Kero. Where should I set up the projector?" She asks, giving Uraraka a small hug.

Hitoshi comes to the rescue, carrying one of our desk chairs over the futon to the back of the room. My shoulder has a cold spot where his chin was sitting. "We can prop it on here and project it onto that wall." He suggested, pointing to the opposite wall with the door into the room.

I excused myself to change into something to sleep in, choosing a PJ set with long pants. I was still feeling a bit nervous about my friends seeing me with how scarred I am, but decided that long sleeves would be too hot so short sleeves would have to do. Besides, I was scarred before and they never said anything. There's just more now.

     While alone in the bathroom I took a few moments to just breathe and think through the day. Todoroki knows now. It makes me feel so guilty, knowing that he realized I was acting different around him and Uraraka. Now he's going to stress about trying to make me comfortable and I know I should appreciate it but it only makes me feel terrible. Why can't I just get better?

I remind myself not to think about it right now and to just enjoy this quality time I get to have with my friends. I put on a smile and walked out of the bathroom.