specific tw: canon-typical violence, bullying, and injury (midoriya breaking his bones), brief mention of uraraka throwing up in line with canon, bakugo does call reader a bitch just in case anyone has some gender issues w that. see masterpost for genre + genre tw.
notes: bakugo is a bully here, but fear not i will be doing my best to do him justice in this series.
the UA lecture hall looms in front of you, and you’re not going inside of it. not because you’re avoiding the written exam, or because you want to stay out here with all of the other people – loud, chattering, grating on your ears. no. you’re out here because it’s sunny and warm, and, both fortunately and unfortunately, loud. this is the best place to charge your quirk for the physical exam.
you watch the other students arrive as you bask in the heat and light and noise, observing the ways they walk and talk and approach each other: ankle injury, probably acts rashly, touching her hair to calm herself down; nervous, shy, doesn’t like his smile. easy to figure out. you move on to observing the next group of students – might as well, there’s nothing else to do while you wait.
specific tw: canon-typical violence, bullying, and injury (midoriya breaking his bones), brief mention of uraraka throwing up in line with canon, bakugo does call reader a bitch just in case anyone has some gender issues w that. see masterpost for genre + genre tw.
notes: bakugo is a bully here, but fear not i will be doing my best to do him justice in this series.
the UA lecture hall looms in front of you, and you’re not going inside of it. not because you’re avoiding the written exam, or because you want to stay out here with all of the other people – loud, chattering, grating on your ears. no. you’re out here because it’s sunny and warm, and, both fortunately and unfortunately, loud. this is the best place to charge your quirk for the physical exam.
you watch the other students arrive as you bask in the heat and light and noise, observing the ways they walk and talk and approach each other: ankle injury, probably acts rashly, touching her hair to calm herself down; nervous, shy, doesn’t like his smile. easy to figure out. you move on to observing the next group of students – might as well, there’s nothing else to do while you wait.
specific tw: canon-typical violence, bullying, and injury (midoriya breaking his bones), brief mention of uraraka throwing up in line with canon, bakugo does call reader a bitch just in case anyone has some gender issues w that. see masterpost for genre + genre tw.
notes: bakugo is a bully here, but fear not i will be doing my best to do him justice in this series.
the UA lecture hall looms in front of you, and you’re not going inside of it. not because you’re avoiding the written exam, or because you want to stay out here with all of the other people – loud, chattering, grating on your ears. no. you’re out here because it’s sunny and warm, and, both fortunately and unfortunately, loud. this is the best place to charge your quirk for the physical exam.
you watch the other students arrive as you bask in the heat and light and noise, observing the ways they walk and talk and approach each other: ankle injury, probably acts rashly, touching her hair to calm herself down; nervous, shy, doesn’t like his smile. easy to figure out. you move on to observing the next group of students – might as well, there’s nothing else to do while you wait.
a blonde man with spiky hair walks through the gate, scowling, hands shoved in his pockets. you watch as he zeroes in on another man – solidly built, with green hair and a curled-in sort of posture – standing by himself near the steps, about ten feet away. you want to say they’re friends, but that doesn’t seem right, with the way the first guy is practically stomping toward the other one. maybe not friends, but they definitely know each other.
the blonde grabs the other boy by a backpack strap and yanks him forward, “what are you doing here, nerd? trying to one-up me, hah?”
yeah, they definitely know each other, and they definitely aren’t friends.
the guy with green hair is shaking and trying to push the other man’s hand off of his bag. “i’m just here to take the exam, i have the right to apply, kacchan–”
“and do what? cheat to get in? you’re not good enough to get in, so what’s the point in trying, deku?”
fuck it.
you’re over there in a flash; the sunlight and conserving your quirk for the past few days has made it easy to use bursts of kinetic energy like that.
the blonde man – angry guy, you decide – sees you approach and whirls around, still gripping the other guy by the strap of his backpack. “fuck off, extra. this is between me and deku.”
you blink at him. “no.”
the nervous guy – deku – starts scrambling to get out of the angry guy’s grip, and the blonde’s hand starts popping with what look like small explosions. he looks like he’s about to start some kind of tirade, so you cut him off.
“look, i don’t know who either of you are, or what you,” you jab a finger at angry guy, “think you’re doing, but you shouldn’t be getting in people’s heads before the exam. it’s underhanded and nasty to undermine someone’s performance like that.”
deku, green hair, whatever his name is, is whipping his head back and forth between the two of you, looking like a deer in the headlights of two oncoming cars, not knowing which direction to run. “uhhh–”
angry guy snarls. “i am bakugo katsuki, and this is deku, and you’re a nosey bitch that i’m going to turn into a stain on the ground.”
you grab him by the shirt and suck the heat and noise and light right out of his palms. “no,” you hiss, “i’m the nosey bitch that you don’t want to mess with. leave, or i report you and you don’t get to take the exam.” you pry his hand off of deku’s backpack and shove angry guy away. “get.”
he stumbles back, switching between glaring at you and his smoking palms, which he shoves back into his pockets. he’s hiding his hands; unnerved, then. “fine. i’ll see you after, deku, when they’re not around to get in the way,” he throws another scowl over his shoulder and stalks off, into the exam hall.
you turn back to deku, who is staring after the other boy, stunned. “are you okay?” it comes out so stiff that you can hear your parents telling you to talk nicer.
he shakes his head and looks back at you. he still looks dazed, eyes flitting around your face, swallowing nervously. “yeah, yeah, i’m fine. mhm. just fine. totally.”
“do you want me to report him? i know the proctor, and he’ll kick that guy out for bullying.”
he shakes his head even harder, taking a step back and waving his hands in a frenzy of activity, flushed, “no! no, you don’t need to report him, i promise he doesn’t mean anything by it, kacchan has been my friend my whole life, he just shows it a little differently, you really don’t need to report him – he needs to take this exam, he’s perfect for the hero course, really. yeah. i promise, you don’t need to report him.”
you look him over, eyes narrowed, skeptical. “mhm.” he looks like he’s going to combust. you switch directions before you have to deal with even more awkwardness, “i’m [surname] [first name].”
he visibly relaxes. clearly he’s glad to have moved on from potentially reporting his ‘childhood friend.’ “midoriya izuku, and it’s great to meet you!”
midoriya’s smile is so bright that you wonder if you could use it to fuel your quirk. the thought makes you smile, just a little. “yeah, good to meet you too.”
you stand there and watch him fidget. the conversation might be dry and awkward as hell, but nothing gets people to talk like silence, and he keeps looking like he’s going to reach for something in his bag.
“can i…” he chews his lip, then brightens, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. “can i ask some questions? about what you did to kacchan’s quirk?”
your smile almost drops, but you keep it up. he can use this information against you, if the exam is structured that way. he doesn’t look like the type, but… it’s not smart to share that type of thing. you don’t owe him anything – you just saved his ass, and his friend’s ass by way of not reporting him; if anyone owes anyone, he owes you. and you’d really prefer not to discuss this, anyways.
midoriya is almost vibrating with excitement. he gets a notebook and pen out so fast that he almost drops them. the look on his face is so hopeful, bright; it makes it hard to say no.
“fine.”
“so, you extinguished his explosions, right?”
you nod.
“did you deactivate his quirk? can you put fires out? is it an oxygen manipulation quirk? or a chemical reaction manipulation quirk? maybe you’re planning to work with water hose as a rescue hero?”
the variety of guesses, the possibilities, they make your head buzz, so much to think about. you file those away for later, when you can look them over in detail. “no deactivation, yes i can put fires out, no oxygen manipulation, and it doesn’t work too well for being a rescue hero.”
midoriya scribbles frantically, smile splitting his face, glancing up at you and nodding in between notes. after a while he stops and cocks his head. probably waiting for you to explain. you could toy with him and make him guess, which is what you usually did to people at school. but he just wants to know for the sake of knowing. that much is obvious, just from the pure excitement he’s exhibiting over basic questions. it’s stupid to do this, you remind yourself, if the exam pits us against each other, he’ll be fully capable of taking me down – or at least of planning to take me down. it’s stupid – but he looks so happy, and you may not be in the same exam section, so you do it anyway. you give, just the tiniest bit.
“it’s energy manipulation.” i won’t answer any more questions after this.
“i have so many questions– can you–”
present mic yells from inside the hall – the presentation on the written exam is about to start. the other students start to make their way inside.
his face falls – god, he wears everything on his sleeve, doesn’t he – and it makes your chest tighten. weird.
“i can explain after the exam, if you want.” it makes the weird chest feeling go away, at least.
just like that, he’s beaming, pen flipping in his hands, writing something down before tearing the paper out of his notebook and handing it to you. “i’m not sure, uh, if there’ll be an opportunity to talk after the exam? so here’s my number?”
you take the paper. he freezes and abruptly goes bright red, obviously realizing something.
“oh my god i did not– i totally did not mean it like that i just wanted to talk to you about– i’m so sorry that was so rude i promise– i wasn’t– i uh–” he covers his face with his hands. “i cannot believe i just. oh my god.”
you just put the paper in the outside pocket of your bag. “i didn’t think you meant it that way, so it’s fine.”
“thank god,” he mumbles, still hiding behind his hands.
that’s not something you’re gonna try and read into. you point toward the hall. “midoriya, we should probably go inside. the exam information session is gonna start and i’d rather not miss it.” it sounds awkward, stiff, but it’s the best you can manage.
“right, right! crap!”
—
this is almost too easy, you think, downing robots with localized electromagnetic pulses. it’s quick work, and it doesn’t take too much energy. you didn’t even need your capture weapon for this – it just makes it easier to maneuver, but you would’ve been fine without it.
still, you are starting to run out of energy. you’d refused yamada’s offer to charge you by screaming positive statements at you – you were going to pass this exam without help, thank you very much – and as much as electricity was a great charging source, it really concerned your parents and your mentors when you used electrical outets. fire was, similarly, out of the question. the point is, sunlight only does so much, and your palms stung from all of those electromagnetic pulses, and you’d absolutely wiped the floor with the rest of the contestants – you stopped the twenty initial robots dead in their tracks with a giant pulse right off the bat. so yeah, your battery capacity is running a little low.
of course that’s when a giant, towering, zero point robot shows up. there’s a woman trapped under rubble left behind by one of the more destructive candidates, she’s struggling to push it off. energy thrums under your skin and you’re off like a shot, speeding toward her in a blur of kinetic energy and the robot is approaching and you’re almost there and–
and the energy runs out and you fall hard, still going some unholy speed, tumbling across the pavement with the force of your momentum like you’ve been thrown from a speeding car. you land in a heap next to the young woman. you sit up – completely fine, and slightly recharged from the impact – and start trying to dig her out from under the slabs of metal and concrete. you have to pump kinetic energy into your limbs and back to lift the rubble. your bones are starting to feel a little brittle.
“if i can touch it with my hands, i can float it away,” she says, jerking her chin towards the rubble on top of her. she seems remarkably calm, even if her jaw is clearly tense – from pain or fear or both, you’re not sure.
either way, you nod and focus on the chunk of concrete pinning one of her arms. the ground is shaking as the robot gets closer. you need to hurry.
a flash of green flies by. you keep pushing the rubble until she has a full range of motion, and she floats the rubble off of her.
there’s a terrible crunching noise – you look up. midoriya is falling from the sky. the robot is incapacitated. and you are out of energy again. you have maybe five seconds. your capture weapon can’t reach that high, and it has more than enough tensile strength to hold him, but you’d risk his momentum slamming him into the ground at such a short distance.
you turn to the woman next to you – thankfully she’s visibly unharmed, other than a few cuts and bruises. “hey, can you float people too?”
she nods, exhausted and draped over a floating piece of rubble, one that had been under her when she was trapped. you shove her and the rubble through the air, approximating where midoriya will land – she reaches out to grab him just before he hits the ground.
everything falls out of the air. you’re grateful your feet were out of the way of the cement chunk. she throws up over the side of it. you’re even more glad that you were out of the way.
midoriya is lying on the ground, limbs twisted at awful angles, miraculously alive and not passed out or dead. you sit next to him on the pavement, careful not to touch him, because frankly his arm looks like the bones have been liquified.
“i’ve got some questions about your quirk, dude, never mind mine,” you say, wondering why the absolutefuck someone with a bone breaking quirk would want to ask about yours, which was comparatively pretty straightforward.
“yeah, me too.” it’s strained, but either he can’t feel anything or he’s got an insanely high pain tolerance, because he should be passed the fuck out from using a quirk that intensely. for his sake, you hope his brain has decided to cut off all those pain signals.
“you can still talk? while your arm and legs look like they’ve gone through a meat grinder?”
he winces. “is it that bad?”
“worse.”
“hopefully recovery girl gets here soon.”
you wonder if you should even ask, but he seems like he’s willing to respond to most things. anything. “so you’re telling me… you didn’t know your quirk was going to do that to you?”
“yeah.” he goes along with the topic u-turn, like you’d predicted.
“you propelled yourself hundreds of feet in the air and punched a giant metal robot in the face, not knowing what your quirk would do?”
“otherwise both of you would’ve been crushed. i couldn’t just let that happen!”
“thanks, i guess? although, since you’re so interested in it,” you huff a laugh, “you ought to know that my quirk would’ve protected both of us. you kind of broke your bones for nothing.”
he’s quiet. you get the feeling he’d be putting his hands over his face again right about now, if his arm wasn’t pulverized.
“but i appreciate it. not letting people you’ve just met get crushed by a giant robot. and now we’re even, too.”
you watch a watery smile flicker across his face, but it’s not a grimace. he can’t feel his arm and legs, then, at least. the thought soothes you.
recovery girl arrives, and you stand up. she can take care of midoriya and gravity girl. “see you at UA.”
you hear him say something like, “but i didn’t score any points!” as you walk away. rescue heroes exist for a reason, midoriya. and there is no separate exam for them.
you can only hope you’re right.
reblogs and comments are very much appreciated!! ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* main taglist here,series taglisthere. back to gt&h masterpost.
Hi! Below are the links to the fics I wrote for Whumptober this month. I went the route of combining many prompts into few stories rather than writing stories for a lot of prompts, which is why there are only a couple!
When Bucky first ended up in Zola’s lab, it was by chance - he’d been sick with pneumonia, too worn down to be of use to HYDRA in any other capacity but as a test subject. Zola’s experiments, among other things, cured him.
What if Steve found him sooner, still sick, before Zola had the chance to intervene?
Fills “choking,” “coughing up a lung”
[warnings for graphic depictions of illness, including respiratory illness - more detailed warnings in tags!]
It’s December of 1944. Bucky’s been overseas for nearly three years, and the hardship is starting to get to him. Not helping is the fact that his unit is stranded in the middle of nowhere, caught between hope for an impossible rescue and the dread of impending capture.
When Bucky’s badly injured on top of everything else, he’s left starving, exhausted, and in intense pain. He’s forced to confront his mortality - as well as some yet-unspoken feelings - as he tries to reconcile what he wanted his life to have been with the future he’s about to face.
Fills “hunger,” “dread,” “too weak to move,” “bleeding through the bandages,” “left for dead”
[warningsfor canon-typical violence, mild depictions of illness, and graphic depictions of injury - more detailed warnings in tags!]
