I like to think Lunch Rush and Sato get along

MLA May AUs (Parts 7+8/31)

Intro Post

5/7: come join the feast

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5/8: keep it on ice

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come join the feast

The first three days after the disastrous raid were complete chaos, perhaps even worse than the raid itself had been.  That, at least, had been a mission: one knew that there would be risks, could be unforeseen turns.  School life, however, was meant to be predictable, routine.

It was now anything but.

A print-out had come to the 1-A Heights dorm that morning bearing the announcement that, effective immediately and indefinitely, students would now be helping the UA cafeteria staff to prepare meals for both the students themselves and the refugees.  It was to boost communal morale, encourage empathy, and help with the strain on school staff and resources.  A roster had been attached, and so, that afternoon, Ojiro had dutifully reported to the cafeteria alongside Iida and Uraraka.

They met up with Kendo, Shoda and Tokage and, before they had time to do more than exchange greetings, were swept into the kitchens by the cafeteria staff, absent the one Ojiro had most been expecting.

“Where’s Lunch Rush?” Uraraka whispered when she and Ojiro wound up sharing a counter to scoop rice and slice carrots.  Ojiro shrugged and shook his head, frowning.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back.  “Do you think something happened?”

“Wouldn’t it have said so in the announcement…?”  Uraraka leveled another scoop of grains before pouring it into the bowl of the biggest rice cooker Ojiro had ever seen.

“I don’t mind helping at all,” he said, feeling petty even as he said it.  “It’s just—is our cooking really going to help morale more than his would?”

“It—”  She broke off as Shoda came over, nudging over a foot stool and stepping up to the counter as well, laden down with onions.

The three continued working in silence for another minute before before Shouda spoke, his voice quiet and level.

“He was arrested.” The knife came down against the cutting board and rocked up again.  “Lunch Rush.”

Uraraka slapped one hand over her mouth to muffle her gasp as Ojiro yelped, “Arrested?!”

Sound in the kitchen died; in the horrible silence, he could feel every gaze turn on them.  Shoda stared at the knife and doggedly continued cutting.

“Uraraka-san!” scolded one of the kitchen ladies, tone harsh against the contours of the sucking, too-attentive quiet.  “Don’t touch your mouth while cooking!  Go and wash your hands again!”

“Yes, ma’am!”  Guiltily, Uraraka dashed off toward the sinks.

Shoda waited for the clang and clatter of food preparation to resume before he spoke again.  “Yes.  In the raids. He was a sympathizer.”  His voice had gone hard now.  “Shishida overheard some of the third-years talking about it yesterday. They say he had a brother in the Liberation Front.”

Ojiro swallowed, trying to find his words.  I never thought—he always seemed so…

If food’s made with heart, it always tastes good.  The line came back to him all at once, though he couldn’t think where he’d heard it—a TV show?  A comic? One of those cooking programs his grandma watched?  And Lunch Rush’s food had always been sogood.  And…

And Ojiro had never thought about it much beyond the general sense of nebulous pride, that he went to a school that was served food by the Cook Hero.

He looked at the pot of rice left behind on the counter, looked around at the kitchen workers, throwing themselves into making bigger meals than they’d probably ever had to make before, for the people coming to UA for shelter, hundreds already and more every day.

“Watch your hands,” Shoda said more gently and, when Ojiro looked at him, gave him a crooked smile. “We need all the hands we’ve got.”

Ojiro swallowed down the sting of self-recrimination, nodded, and got back to the carrots.

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Content Warnings: I’ll be upfront about this one: it’s Rei.  Therefore, expect talk of the Todoroki family situation, references to domestic abuse, murder, the insufficiencies of the legal system, and the early stages of cult recruitment targeting the vulnerable.

This fill features Twice’s number 3, this gal: 

keep it on ice

“He’d have hunted me to the ends of the earth if I’d taken the children, called me a kidnapper, mentally unstable.  I couldn’t go back to my parents; if I’d gone to the police, word would have gotten out. I just didn’t know what to do anymore.” Rei curled her fingers around the warm cup of honey-laden tea.

“I killed mine,” her host confided, and leaned over to pat her hand.  At Rei’s flinch and shocked look, Kairiki Kanai shrugged her sloping shoulders, smile unperturbed.  “He was threatening me and my little girl.  It was self-defense.”  A beat of silence, then, “Proactive self-defense.”

“You’re not…  There wasn’t any—legal trouble?”  Rei pulled the cup back across the table and held it near her face.  The steam and the scent of spearmint rolled over her cheeks.  The kitchen felt at once homey and too full of things that could become weapons.  She gripped the cup tighter.

“I had good lawyers, my dear.  People who want to change how toothless the laws are against domestic abuse are in this country.  They heard about my case and offered their help.”  Apparently unoffended, Kanai climbed back to her feet and returned to the stove.  “You never thought about it?”

“The laws?”

“Self-defense.”  She aimed a smile over her shoulder; it dimpled her cheeks.  Rei’s unease didn’t lessen, but a morbid fascination began to stir in her as well.

“He’s the—a hero,” she corrected herself.  While Kanai had been nothing but welcoming since Rei had arrived at her home after being secreted away from the shelter, she still didn’t know Rei’s real name—she seemed perfectly content to go on using the alias Rei had given.  But there wasn’t really anyone who wouldn’t know who the Number 2 Hero was; Enji had held the position for over two decades, after all. And it was—nice, to be someone other than Rei for now, even if the woman going by that name still wept inside her, paralyzed with guilt over the children she still didn’t know how to help.  “I could never…”

“Did he eat your food? Lie beside you at night?”  Kanai pulled the lid off the pot and peered at the simmering gyoza nabe inside; the smell of garlic and dashi washed through the room on the rising steam.  When Rei didn’t answer, she clicked her tongue and replaced the lid.  “Ah, I’m sorry; don’t mind me.  I just hate to see people thinking of themselves as so helpless.”

“Aren’t we?” Rei found herself asking, the words pulled out of her on a plaintive sigh.

“Not if we don’t want to be, my dear.  And make no mistake, anyone who tells you different is no one you should be trusting.”

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(Excessive) Notes for Lunch Rush: 

• Helping in the cafeteria: In Japan, in basically all elementary schools and most middle schools, kids prepare and serve their own meals to their classmates in rotating lunch team assignments.  It’s less universally practiced in high schools, apparently, but definitely still a relatively common practice.  UA doesn’t do that–UA very prominently has a famous chef/hero that does all that for them.  There’s likewise never any suggestion that they clean their own classrooms, which is a near-universal thing in Japanese high schools.  This all kind of contributes to the feeling of UA as this elite school where the students don’t have to do plebe work like serving meals and cleaning.  We know they’ve been helping around the school since the war aftermath, though, so I wanted to look at a specific way that could have manifested if we ever got to see more of that material during the time Deku was away.
• First day teams: My first impulse was to include Shouto and Shishida in their respective class groups, but I thought that the first day should include both class presidents so they can get an idea of how things work and relay the information back to their classes; also that the cafeteria staff should be able to iron out how to incorporate the student help without having to also wrangle e.g. a kid who is notably bad at cooking and a kid who is covered in hair.  For the same reason, the first kids chosen besides the class presidents are all fairly mid-grade on their energy levels.  Not too high energy, not too low, just steady and reliable.  …But I do still like the comic image of Shishida covered head to toe in masks and hairnets.  He’ll just have to come later in the rotation, once the routine is set enough that the staff can start dealing with personalities/quirks that make cafeteria work more complex.
• Go and wash your hands again!:  If you’ve never done food preparation or service in a professional/commercial environment, they really are huge sticklers about this.  Which is not to say that it’s going to get properly done every time, but certainly if an appropriately exacting manager spots you touching your face in the kitchen and then not immediately moving towards a sink, you will probably get barked at.
• They say he had a brother in the Liberation Front:  Please look at these two and tell me I’m wrong.

• Also, I remain forever salty that the series never touches on how daily life is going to be impacted, not by the failure of heroes, not by the escape of a bunch of violent criminals, but by the arrest of 115,000seemingly normal, everyday people, some number of whom were in positions of influence in civilian infrastructure they can no longer fill because of being, you know, arrested.  Lunch Rush makes a good example of the kind of person In Your Neighborhood who just gets disappeared by the government one day and how that looks to the people left behind.
• If food’s made with heart, it always tastes good:  I don’t know if there’s a standardized aphorism for this, but it’s a sentiment I see around all the time in anime and elsewhere, applied to food, to music, to art.  The idea is that if something is beautiful or affecting or delicious enough, it cannot possibly have been made by a bad person; that if you put your feelings into your art, You Will Surely Be Able To Reach People.  Well, there’s no falsity in MLA!Lunch Rush’s cooking, and that’s surprising to kids who have not yet learned to recognize that their opponents have motivations beyond Evil For Evil’s Sake.

(Rambly) Notes for Rei: 

• MLA!Rei, obviously, doesn’t get into the MLA via the quirk supremacy vector like Geten.  Rather, her angle is that the laws limiting quirk use to heroes-only warps society, influencing everyday people to think of themselves as helpless, pitting heroes against each other in competition for limited resources and limited public attention, leading them to prioritize all the wrong parts of the job.  It’s a similar sentiment as Shigaraki’s manifesto at Jakku, but tracking the rot back to the quirk use laws, rather than heroes.  If everyone could use their quirks freely, if there wasn’t this dreadful ranking system, then her husband wouldn’t have been so obsessed with proving that he was number one–after all, he would have had no metric to compare himself against!  (Whether or not she’s rightabout this is largely immaterial; what’s important is getting another warrior for the cause, and one with sucha compelling story, too.)
• Kairiki Kanai, meaning something to the tune of Monstrous Strength Housewife.  While I don’t think she’s lying about her deceased husband, I do think her account is somewhat self-serving.  It was an extremely premeditated murder, I suspect.  I haven’t decided on her codename, though my sis-in-law’s suggestion of Ursadoes have some appeal.  Kanai’s daughter is the other bindi gal, the one with the out-of-control sweater neck who most recently cropped up in that panel of escaped PLF types.
• The laws about domestic abuse in Japan classify it as a civil issue, not a criminal one.  Domestic abuse being a keep-it-in-the-family thing, a man’s prerogative if his wife isn’t obeying him, or even not being an issue at all because men in Japan aren’t “violent” like Western men: all are views that activist groups have spent decades struggling against.  The first law against domestic abuse was passed only in 2001 (the US’s was in 1994, by the way, so not much better, though the US’s law also made a number of domestic abuses actual criminal offenses, rather than civil ones), and while it’s been expanded on a number of times since, there are still some pretty gaping holes in it, including the continued lack of criminal consequences for offenders–right now, it’s all still focused on fines and restraining orders and the like, not jail time.
• Horikoshi, of course, is not obligated to hew to real life law in his fantasy-future Japan setting, especially on behavior he clearly portrays as wrong!  Nor are Western fans obligated to swallow their discomfort because of a handwave of “it’s just the Japanese culture,” especially when Japanese activists are still working hard today to improve this state of affairs.  But it makes for valuable context all the same, especially when the main characters involved–Rei and Enji–are both older and have very Traditional sensibilities, exactly the sort of people that activists say are least likely to believe domestic abuse warrants a police report.
• As I’ve said before, I think the MLA sets themselves up to catch people falling through the social safety nets–ex-cons, abuse victims, orphans, the homeless.  They think of it as being there for people who the current system cannot or will not save, and they really do believe that!  But it’s predatory recruiting all the same, going on in all the places Heroes are least likely to intervene.