AMATEURS [Tenya Iida x OC]

Chapter 25 - The One at the Sports Festival

-

Most of the class knew it was coming, saw it from a mile away...

The Sports Festival arrived without much warning.

But Peri had no idea what to expect. How intense class would become. How friends would turn on each other, and suddenly all information was privileged. Groups went on recon missions, trying to gather info on their own friends and students from other classes.

Aizawa pulled Peri aside the week before the Sports Festival during a scrimmage with bad news. She wasn't allowed to participate because of her status as a foreign exchange student at UA between school years.

So on the day of, Peri cheered extra hard, alone the stands. With her hair pulled up in two curly pigtails and a huge UA sweatshirt on over a warm sweater dress, Peri did her best to scream her hardest and be the best support system possible for her whole class. She rooted for her friends and tried not to let it bother her that she wasn't out there with them.

Even though it definitely did.

The first two rounds breezed by, a whirlwind of names and stats and shouting. Peri welcomed her classmates with hugs and feedback, only leaving the stands to eat lunch with Tenya. She wanted all of the secrets and details from the playing field, but she didn't want to bother him with her silly things when he'd been running on full blast for the whole morning. So Peri held his hand and made sure Tenya drank plenty of orange juice... and maybe glued a few good luck kisses to his face before the final round.

The finale was an all-out brawl between Midoriya, Todoroki, Bakugo, and Tenya after a long bracket of 2v2 that eliminated the rest of their friends and classmates. Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki ended up in the top three, with Tenya placing a close fourth; He'd been seconds from beating Todoroki out for the third place spot, but hadn't been able to stay in the ring after a huge barrage of icicles knocked him into the cement retaining wall with a slam that Peri felt reverberate in her chest.

Vision tunneling, Peri flew to her feet and caught the railing of the stands, vertigo swirling in her stomach as she watched Tenya go flying off of the stage, dust and smoke and debris flying where he crashed. "No," Peri whispered, tears jumping to her throat, "Get up, love. Get up. Come on." Her breathing came out ragged as she waited for signs of life from below.

Tsu placed her hand on Peri's, leaning forward in her seat and trying to ground them both, but mostly to control her friend's shaking. "He's fine," Tsu murmured, the smallest ribbit slipping out in the pause of her sentence, "Todoroki wouldn't actually hurt him."

Peri gnawed on her lip, craning her neck, reaching up on tiptoes to see where Tenya had landed. "Not on purpose," she muttered, squeezing Tsu's hand once before darting toward the stairs, jumping them in threes and fours.

Something was wrong.

Her eyes never left the dust cloud as it settled, as she ran, as her heart stilled in her chest. Peri's mind went to the worst places possible, berating herself for not being there, for not protecting Tenya, for not saving him. For not being better. Her feet slipped down a few concrete stairs, sending her to her butt for a painful moment, but she got back up before she could even register the fall.

She didn't have time to worry about herself.

In the background, she could vaguely sense that something had happened, something had changed. But her eyes were still locked on that cloud of settling smoke, waiting for her favorite hero to emerge from the haze like he was in a movie.

He didn't.

Peri skipped whole flights of stairs near the bottom, vaulting herself over rails and ledges to reach Tenya faster. She didn't care if she'd get in trouble. He was worth it. Every second counted.

The faint sirens of Recovery Girl's medical robots filtered into her senses, and Peri snapped her attention away from the last place she'd seen Tenya. Robots gathered around Todoroki and Bakugo at the other end of the ring, trying to cart them off.

Midoriya bounded in the same direction as Peri.

In a fit of desperation, Peri jumped the final wall rather than find the last flight of stairs, tucking and rolling when she hit the chalky red dirt on the ground. "TENYA!" she screamed, his name tearing out of her throat with claws and tears and teeth, "Tenya, please!" She tore to her feet, scrambling toward the dust cloud in desperation.

"He's still not up?" Midoriya asked, jogging to a stop beside Peri.

She shook her head, afraid to open her mouth again... lest she find out what would come pouring out. Peri bit her lip and failed to hold back her tears, acting on a split-second thought. A crackling, lime green force field jumped up, surrounding her in a crystalline bubble. Peri slipped into the fog without a word.

"Peri, wait!" Midoriya's voice got lost in the smoke, "There could be structural damage or some-"

It didn't matter.

All that mattered... was him.

-

Tenya woke in his room.

Confusion rolled in like fog as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, vision blurry without his glasses. His whole body pulsed with pain like a human-sized bruise. Memory hazy, Tenya reached back and back through the videotape of his mind, searching for the last thing he remembered.

And it floated in on a whisper... Peri's voice.

Tenya, please. Wake up.

Her words stirred his heart, the pain in her voice bringing tears to his eyes at the scrap of memory alone. Muscles straining, Tenya lifted a hand and searched in the dark for his glasses, finally finding them on his endstand among a plethora of foreign objects. He shoved them onto his face, accidentally poking himself in the eye only once, and managed to sit up.

Peri was asleep on his floor, clutching one of his pillows to her chest and murmuring in her sleep, hair haloed in a curly blonde mess across a crumpled blanket beneath her. Relief flooded Tenya's veins in a wave of honeyed chamomile and lavender. His furrowed brow softened, watching the gentle rise and fall of Peri's chest as she dreamed.

It was just then, when he pushed himself higher up, that he caught the flash of color.

A cast. On Peri's arm.

Tenya's stomach twisted in sailor's knots, his mouth suddenly drier than the surface of the sun. He fumbled for his phone on his bedside table, unlocking it and scrolling through the endless texts, finally finding what he wanted: a video of what had happened.

Memories pasted back together like a sloppy collage, bits and pieces jarring as they overlapped with the differently-angled video from Ochaco. Todoroki caught Tenya by surprise with a fleet of icicles the size of sequoias, slamming Tenya out of the ring and into the concrete wall surrounding. The video cut away to Peri for a split second, showing her up at the rail, white-knuckled, before taking off toward the smoke and dust.

A stone of guilt and understanding settled in Tenya's stomach as he vacantly processed the rest of the video. Peri pulled him from the rubble because no one else had... and gotten hurt in the process.

Phone falling limply to the comforter, Tenya assessed his injuries and found himself relatively unscathed, save for a pounding headache and the whole-body muscle soreness, both of which he was sure would fade with time. The stone in his gut grew heavier, pointier, as Tenya berated himself, cursing himself for not being stronger. For not being the boyfriend that Peri deserved.

His gaze fell upon her sleeping form once more, vision blurring with tears, and swallowed against the lump in his throat.

He knew what he had to do.