Chapter Text
“Why’re you doing this?” Minoru looked at him like he had set fire to their diplomas. “We just graduated three hours ago, why did you have to do this now?”
“Because we just graduated and I didn’t want to lose the opportunity.” Hanta already knew that this wasn’t going to go the way he wanted. Not when he knew that his best friend was in a happy relationship with a girl. “No other time felt appropriate.”
“It’s not appropriate now!”
“Okay, fine, I was scared to say anything when we were still stuck together in class.”
Because Hanta had been in love with Minoru since the start of second year and didn’t have the courage to say anything. It wasn’t fair to place this bomb in their friendship but he had finally mustered up the nerve to confess. It just happened to be right after their graduation. When he didn’t have to see the boy again when it inevitably went sour between them.
Minoru didn’t and would never feel the same. His best friend had never shied away from who he was as a person and so Hanta knew exactly who the boy was attracted to. It wasn’t him. He wasn’t eye-catching or particularly pretty, unique or interesting, strong or loud. In all of those cases, he was the exact opposite. Plain, boring, and generally rather quiet. Unassuming and annoyingly uninteresting. The only thing remotely attention catching about him was his weird elbows. Nothing about him appealed to what his best friend was attracted to but he had still fallen in love with him like an idiot.
“How do you want me to respond to this?” Minoru asked, expression anything but welcoming. It hurt but it wasn’t unexpected. “I have a girlfriend and you’re my best friend, Hanta. Why would you tell me this?”
“I just had to say it,” Hanta said, voice not nearly as strong as he hoped, “I don’t expect anything from you.”
“Good,” the other boy nearly snapped, “’cause I’ve got nothing to give you.”
“We can still be friends, right?”
“I need a long minute on this.” Minoru sighed and looked up at him. “Just…give me some time.”
All Hanta could do was nod in response. There was another long look given to him before the short boy turned away to walk back into the restaurant their entire class was celebrating in. A chilly early Spring breeze had him shivering but he made no move to rejoin the party. In fact, he completely turned away and headed down the street instead.
The thing was he had never truly felt like he was part of the class. Not like everyone else was. They were all so close to each other in a way more like family than friends. He had his best friend and sometimes Kaminari and Kirishima included him in with them, Bakugou, Ashido, and Jiro. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried. In honest truth, he had spent the better part of their first year trying to be friends with everyone. High school was supposed to be different from middle school and elementary and while he at least had a friend this time, it wasn’t all that different. He was still the same forgettable boy he had been his entire life.
What was that saying about middle children? The unimportant second. Hanta was almost tempted to seek out his older sister in Jaku City but took the familiar path home instead. Where all of his things from the dorms had been moved back to in the last week. It wasn’t even seven o’clock at night and he was ready to call it. To curl up in his hammock and try again tomorrow.
There was no surprise in finding his parents spending time with his younger sister when he stepped into the house. On his graduation day that they had barely bothered to come see. It was a selfish thought that had Hanta shoving it away as he slipped up the stairs for his bedroom. His utterly silent phone was tossed onto his bed before he changed into something less fit for public and replaced the sun nose ring for a plain one. (He had gotten the piercing on a dare a few months ago.) Then he dragged himself through a night routine and fell into the hammock to end the night.
It was an empty phone that greeted him in the morning. Expected but still enough to sting. Hanta dropped the phone out of the hammock with a cough into his arm. That would just be his luck to come down with a cold. The itchy sensation in the back of his throat had him digging around in the weighted blanket for a water bottle. He always kept one in the hammock.
The rather lukewarm water did nothing for his throat. It actually had him curling up with a spike of pain in his chest and harsher cough ripped from him. Something disgustingly wet landed on his hand that he had used to cover his mouth. Hanta grimaced as he lowered it from his face. Sitting in his palm was a bloody flower petal. White and rather small for its length. He stared for probably too long at the thing before he lifted his clear bottle to see if his little sister had stuffed something inside. She did that a lot with his bottles.
There was nothing but clear water to be found. The realization that the petal came from him didn’t register for a long moment. Then Hanta was scrambling to find his phone to look up what the fuck was going on so he didn’t have to beg his parents to care enough to help him set up a doctor’s appointment. Because he was eighteen but that didn’t mean he knew how to do any of that yet.
What he found after a good two hours was that he was screwed. Coughing up flowers when it wasn’t quirk related meant medical issue and going down that avenue led to certain doom. Hanta pressed a corner of the phone to his forehead as he breathed through the rising panic. Hanahaki Disease - he actually hated that name - wasn’t something heavily documented after the appearance of quirks apparently. It seemed to have been an illness that died down to less than a single case a year. In the entire world. Which meant that finding a cure or someone to treat it was near impossible.
Hanta knew he was screwed because there were two ways - two known ways, that is - on how to cure Hanahaki. One was to have this unrequited love be returned and the other was a surgery that resulted in memory loss, for whatever fucking reason. He thought it was ridiculous. There were how many healing quirks in the world and how many years spent in medical research, and this surgery still took away the recipient’s memories? That was insane and he sure as shit was not doing that.
But without it, according the internet, he was inevitably going to die. Which he didn’t give much merit because he knew how absurd the internet could get. The only way he could believe that this weird illness would kill him was if he saw it written in a medical paper. Several of which he had skimmed and never found a conclusive answer. Mainly because the patients with Hanahaki the doctor’s had used for their studies either committed suicide or got the cure. That, in and of itself, was terrifying but Hanta tried to not let it get to him. After all, it had only been one little petal. For all he knew he could have eaten a flower at some point.
It meant that after a very short spiral, he went about his day like it hadn’t happened. He brushed his teeth and got dressed before throwing out a text to Mt. Lady asking if she needed a side-kick. Edgeshot was his initial choice but the hero had only just returned to hero work. There wasn’t an expectation to for her to say yes but he could hope. It had been a good two years of being a work study under her and Kamui Woods, and he genuinely wanted to work alongside her.
But after that he didn’t really know what to do with himself. Several agencies had sent him offers to join them after he graduated that were on the back-burner for if things didn’t pan out with Mt. Lady so he wasn’t worried about his career after UA. Many of his classmates would probably be starting out their first days as interns or side-kicks. Minoru was moving in with his girlfriend today and he was supposed to help, but it was probably best that he didn’t. It left him with little to do. And boredom only had Hanta feeling terrible because he wasn’t doing anything.
To his bubbling horror he ended up pulling three more flower petals off his tongue by the end of the day. Each of them a different kind from the first. It had him placing them in an empty bottle on his desk. It was probably weird but he wanted to keep them for comparison as he looked up flowers. There was no hope in finding out what they were with a single petal each to go off of but he tried anyway. Unsurprisingly he found nothing by the time he was going to bed.
The next morning he woke up to Mt. Lady calling. Her rather enthusiastic agreement to take him on as a side-kick brightened the shitty day he could feel was coming with how much his throat itched. There was some paperwork needed to be done together with the HPSC that they set up a time to complete for later in the afternoon. Hanta could have cried when the call ended. He was officially a hero.
Three days later his hero name alongside Mt. Lady’s was trending. It was a common occurrence for heroes but it felt more prominent now that he was a side-kick instead of a student. Hanta had long since learned to handle the publicity that came with this career and took the pictures and questions with a grace Mt. Lady had taught him over the years.
It was a soft high that had him grinning well after coming home. He greatly enjoyed doing this stuff. Many heroes probably didn’t like the publicity that came with the profession but he had learned to take joy in interacting with people. To talk with journalists and photographers, to be friendly with civilians and first responders, to make acquaintances with police officers and firefighters. Mt. Lady called it networking but he viewed it as making himself open and safe to those around him. He genuinely liked helping people and that meant more than just stopping robberies or attempted murder or car accidents. It meant being someone that people trusted to come to for help.
The only problem Hanta could foresee about being a hero was the way he kept coughing up flower petals. Often in the bathroom or on a roof to hide from anyone looking. Bloody petals were left over their patrol area for the wind to pick up and carry away. He had to constantly shake out his helmet when they’d be coughed up during a fight or take down. It had only been four days and he was already seeing how this could get him seriously injured or someone else relying on him.
Late in the night a week after graduation there was a text from Ashido sitting on his phone. Hanta was barely out of the shower when he skimmed the message. The girl wanted to meet up tomorrow morning. Having literally lived with her for almost three years of his life, he knew that wasn’t a new thing for her. She tended to make plans and then ask someone to come with her. Very rarely was that him. Once or twice in their third year but it had never been anything more than her wanting someone to get a morning coffee with. Even though he only drank tea.
He left the message unanswered as he got dressed for bed and brushed his teeth. His entire night routine was taken care of before he fell into his bed with an answer for the pink girl. Simply putting it, he had work. From six-thirty in the morning to five in the evening, on average. Sometimes it went on a little longer with Mt. Lady chatting and them getting dinner after patrol. Unless Ashido wanted to meet up at five in the morning, he didn’t have time until closer to seven in the evening. Not that he didn’t want to see her, he was just busy.
Right before he fell asleep Ashido replied. Asking if five-fifteen at her favorite twenty-four hour cafe worked. Hanta was a little confused as he agreed that that was fine. No one tried that hard to spend time with him. Not unless they had needed him for capture training or something of the like. Even Minoru hung out with him when it was convenient.
It left him feeling a little odd the next morning. He arrived at the cafe before Ashido already dressed for work in his hero suit and was sipping on an iced chai as he waited for her. A couple minutes after five-twenty the girl waltzed in the building. Dressed up in a cute romper with her hair pinned back in a small tail; she had been growing it out recently. Hanta offered her a wave of his fingers and not so subtly nudged the coffee he ordered for her towards the edge of the table. It wasn’t hard to remember what she liked to drink.
“Sero, babe,” Ashido greeted him brightly as she fell into the seat across from him, “you weren’t kidding about having work, huh?”
“Nah, Mt. Lady likes to get an early start.” Well, it was a normal time to start work for most people but rather early for daytime heroes. “I think we’re meeting with Kamui and Edgeshot later today.”
“I’m a little surprise you’re actually working this soon after graduation.”
“Er, you are?”
Hanta resisted the urge to hide behind his tea as anxiety slapped him in the face. Why would she be surprised by him working? Had she thought that no one would want to take him on or something? Or that he hadn’t been serious about being hero? Maybe she thought he hadn’t been motivated or ready for what being hero was like after school. Not that she would know that.
“Uh, yeah!” Ashido exclaimed with a toss of her hands. “The rest of us don’t start for another week or two. Ya know, a party week for graduating.” Her foot nudged his under the table as she grinned around the straw in her cup.
“Oh.” Hanta hadn’t expected that. “Well, that’s not really my thing. I kinda just wanted to get started.”
“We know,” the girl said with a wide grin, “Cellophane and Mt. Lady were all over the news with that capture a couple days ago. It’s pretty cool that she took you on as a side-kick.”
“Yeah, I really enjoyed studying under her.”
They chatted about his work with Mt. Lady for another few minutes before Hanta got the feeling that Ashido wanted to talk about something else. It was one he got often when speaking with people and slowly faded off what he was saying. Leaving room for her to bring up what she wanted. Most likely it was the reason for why she had wanted to get a drink this early in the morning with him.
“So, the girls and I were talking,” Ashido started while leaning forward with her elbows on the table, “about renting a house near your neighborhood.”
“Mm, there’s some good ones,” Hanta replied. She wanted to talk about moving in with the other girls of their class? While that in and of itself wasn’t surprising considering the six of them had been dating since second year, it was surprising that she was talking to him about it. “It’s a quiet place. I don’t really know anything about rent prices, though.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at,” the girl said with a toothy grin. “We wanted to see if you would move in with us and help pay for rent.”
“Eh?” What in the world? “I doubt rent is high enough you need seven people to pay it.”
“Yeah, okay,” Ashido agreed with a dim to her grin, “we kinda just wanted you to live with us.” She twisted her cup on the table and dipped her head to sip on the coffee.
Hanta narrowed his eyes at that. That was suspicious. “Why?” The girls wanting him to live with them made zero sense. They weren’t even friends.
“Oh, this and that,” she said, resting her chin on her cup. He only held her eyes without a change in his expression. It had her making a face and sighing. “Alright, you’re the last of our class not moving out to live with someone. Baku and Midoriya are moving in with Todoroki and Iida, Kiri and Kami have a place picked out together. Sato, Koda, and Shoji are apartment shopping. Tokoyami agreed to live with Aoyama and Shinso and Ojiro have some sort of agreement with Monoma. And we all know Mineta has moved in with his girlfriend.”
Oh, this was pity. The girls were offering him a place with them because no one else in the class even considered making plans after graduation with him. That stung. Hanta didn’t know how he had missed all of that being decided around him but he could guess that no one wanted him to know. Kept him out of earshot to not deal with the chance of him getting curious. It was tactic he was well familiar with. If he didn’t hear it then it had nothing to do with him.
“And, ya know, we were all talking,” Ashido carried on, “about you not coming back to our graduation dinner.” Hanta lifted his chai while glancing out the window at the first signs of the commuters going to work. “It kinda feels like you’re distancing from us already and it’s only been a week. I guess we just wanted to keep hold of you for a little longer.”
“Uh-huh.” They weren’t friends. They weren’t family. Why in the world would the girls want to keep him around? “It’s…a nice gesture. I really appreciate the consideration.”
“Hey, c’mon, babe,” the girl reached across the table to grab his wrist, “we really want you to move in with us.”
“I just…” Hanta sighed and closed his eyes for a long moment. “Give me a minute to think about this, alright?” He opened his eyes to glance at his phone on the table. “I gotta get moving. Mt. Lady and I usually get breakfast before patrol.” Ashido’s eyes followed him as he got to his feet. “I…I’ll let you know, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
He knew she was still watching him as he left the cafe. There was only about fifteen minutes left until he had to meet Mt. Lady. It had him slipping his helmet on over his head and swinging up over the buildings to take the shortest route. What Ashido and the other girls wanted was a lot to think about. And not something he could do until after work.