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As soon as she hears the words ‘summer camp’, Mina is already planning a mall day. Class 1A really hadn’t hung out outside of class, and this was the perfect opportunity. While most of the group had split up (Uraraka was shopping with Deku—so cute!), she stuck around with Jirou, Kaminari, Bakugou, Kirishima, and Sero. They were her closest friends in class, but she has to admit—they’re boring shoppers. Seriously, Kaminari couldn’t decide what to buy to save his life, and Mina was getting bored. Quickly.
“Alright, I’m going to get something to eat. Anyone want anything?” she asks.
“Nah, I’m good,” Jirou says.
“Same, I ate before we got here,” Sero says.
“Are you sure you want to go by yourself? We can go with you,” offers Kirishima.
“I’m alright, thanks. See you in a minute!” she shouts, winking. She turns and exits the store, plugging in her earbuds and dancing as she walks. She wanders aimlessly through the mall before reaching a courtyard and sitting at one of the benches. Someone grabs her neck and she freezes, debating what to do. What to think. She tries to run through the self-defense maneuvers she learned in hero training, but her mind is blank with panic.
“I wouldn’t move if I were you.”
Mina recognizes that voice.
“I’ve got four fingers on your neck. One more, and you're dust,” Shigaraki says. Mina nods, just barely, not wanting to risk that last finger grazing her neck.
“Good, so we understand each other.”
“What do you want from me? If it’s information, I won’t snitch on my friends,” Mina says defiantly. She’s afraid, but defending her friends takes precedent. She can ignore fear for now.
Shigaraki chuckles.
“Oh it’s nothing like that. I wanted to have a conversation with one of the fledgling heroes.”
A conversation?
“And why did you choose me?”
Mina can’t see Shigaraki’s face, but she can tell by the tone of his voice that he’s smiling.
“UA keeps their records public. You’re one of the most unremarkable, underachieving students in your class. No one’s going to question that you’re gone. No one’s worried about you.”
That stings because it’s probably true.
“I’m not underachieving,” she snaps. He’s touched a nerve.
“Really? Your class is full of powerful students with high aspirations. They don’t want to just be heroes, no, they want to be number one,” he explains with unhinged glee. “But you? I read your student profile. You just want to be a run of the mill rescue hero, you don’t even want combat training. Do you even care at all? Do you know how lame that choice is?”
“It’s my only choice.”
Shigaraki’s finally at a loss.
“Interesting. What do you mean by that?”
“Our quirks are quite similar, haven’t you noticed?”
“Decay and acid.”
“Right. So if I’m anything but a rescue hero, I’ll either disfigure or kill my opponent. That’s not a hero. That’s you.”
“Touche.”
Mina pauses before speaking again—her mind is racing a million miles a minute.
“What’s to stop me from breaking your arm and dragging your ass to the heroes?”
Shigaraki laughs at that.
“Even if you were successful in escaping me, which I highly doubt, I could take out at least five people before a hero intervened.”
Mina looks around. At the ice cream parlor in front of her, a family is splitting an ice cream sundae. A couple of girls are laughing at something on their phones. A woman kisses her girlfriend on the cheek as they walk past a jewelry store.
“So safe, so secure,” Shigaraki continues. “They’re so unaware of the danger they’re in.”
I won’t let them get hurt because I was a coward.
“I’ve got to say, you clearly didn’t think this through,” she says. The scraps of an escape plan are forming in her head.
“What, you think I should be afraid of you? A puny, little weakling?”
Bitch.
“I could disintegrate you just as fast as you could disintegrate me,” she snarls, grabbing the arm by her throat. It’s a threat. Heroes don’t make threats.
“Yes, I suppose you could,” Shigaraki muses thoughtfully. He lets go; Mina knows it’s not out of fear, but respect. She doesn’t know how to feel about that. “Would you look at that, I underestimated the underachiever.”
He turns and walks away, just as Kaminari enters the area.
“Oh, Mina! There you are, you had us all worried, I was looking everywhere for you and you weren’t responding to my texts!” Kaminari exclaims. His eyes narrow, looking at the panicked expression on her face. “What happened?”
***
To Mina’s credit, she holds it all together for a while. But try as she may to deny it, she’s been thinking about her conversation with the supervillain more than she’d like.
“Mina!” Sero shouts, snapping his fingers in front of her face. “You spaced out there for a minute. You doing alright?”
Mina has a choice here—lie, like normal, or take a chance on Sero and risk getting hurt.
(She should have lied.)
“I was thinking about that day with Shigaraki at the mall.”
“Oh. I can't believe that happened! I can’t imagine how scary that was.”
So far, so good.
“Thank you, Sero.”
“Yeah, the dude’s super scary. All he has to do is touch something and it dies,” Sero says with a shiver. “No wonder he’s a villain.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
“Yeah, haha…”
Sero notices the shift in tone. “Oh man, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about him if you’re worried, I should be distracting you.”
That wasn’t the problem, you absolute idiot.
“No, it’s fine, really.”
It isn’t.
Sero clears his throat. “Um, we should probably head over to training. Aizawa’s gonna kick our asses if we’re late again.”
Mina smiles carefreely, but she feels like she’s about to boil over. It’s like all of her emotions are tucked underneath her skin and trying to burn through like her acid. It’s no surprise that she finally explodes.
Summer camp is all about strengthening quirks. Aizawa’s got them training for hours and hours everyday, doing everything they can to get stronger. And then after that, Mina and a bunch of her friends have additional training at night because they failed finals. Mina’s tired, she’s stressed.
“Ashido, you’re not trying hard enough.”
Oh Aizawa, blunt as ever. You shouldn’t have been blunt today. That was my last straw.
She whips around so fast even Aizawa seems surprised.
“Don’t give me that crap!”
Mina never shouts. She doesn’t raise her voice or talk back to teachers. Mina smiles, she laughs. When she falls, she gets back up with a joke on her tongue. She’s carefree, she’s stupid, she’s lazy. That’s what everyone sees and she hates that no one’s ever noticed how she really is.
Her outburst has summoned a crowd. Let them watch. Let them listen. It’s about time someone noticed something was wrong.
“I don’t see what the issue is,” Aizawa says with a raised brow. “You’re clearly not giving it your all. You’re never going to get better if you refuse to try.”
“No shit Sherlock, don’t you think there’s a reason? There’s always been a goddamn reason for it!”
Everyone’s staring at her. Everyone’s watching and it hurts.
“What do you mean by that?” Aizawa says gently, as if she were a wounded animal. Or a bomb.
“I don’t want to strengthen my quirk, sir.”
“Why?”
Such a simple question. Such a complicated answer.
“I want to save people, not kill them,” she begins. She’s looking down at her hands, disgusted, as if they’re toxic. (They are.) “With my quirk the strength it is now, I could dissolve a human down to their skeleton within five minutes. Why would I want to strengthen this?”
No one responds, and that’s fine. She’s not done.
“My quirk is really similar to Shigaraki’s. Don’t tell me none of you have noticed that! And you know what most people talk about when they talk about how horrible Shigaraki is? Not his personality, not his motives—his quirk. His damn quirk. And my conversation with him at the mall made me realize something and it sucks but there’s no way around it: I’m doomed to be a sidekick. I can never be a real hero, just the support to one, because I’ll never be able to take the offensive side in a battle. So, I disagree, Aizawa. I am trying hard. I got into UA for a reason, I’m not stupid. All of my lack of effort in quirk training was on purpose. I put my ideals as a hero above my potential for villainy.”
“Ashido…” Sero trails off.
“I’m not done. I want to be Bakugou. I want to be Deku, or Kirishima. Hell, I want to be All-Might. I want to run headfirst into battle and bring the villains down to justice, I want to save the day like a classic hero. But the ironic thing is that I can’t. I’m the only person in this goddamn class that can’t do that! My quirk won’t let me.”
“I wish you’d told me this sooner,” Aizawa says flatly, after a pause.
“Don’t turn this on me! You’re the teacher, it’s literally your job to figure out what your students need,” Mina shouts, angry tears streaming down her face. She wipes them away with the back of her hand. “I need some time to think.”
She doesn’t, she needs someone, anyone to understand. Anyone that isn’t a supervillain. She stomps away to the woods, sitting with her back against a tree, wondering just how much she’s messed everything up. She wraps her arms around her knees and puts her head down.
“Hey, Ashido?”
She lifts her head to see Kaminari, smiling down at her.
“What?”
She didn’t mean to snap. She didn’t mean to, but Kaminari seems unfazed, sitting down next to her.
“I understood what you were talking about back there.”
“Really?”
He nods, resting his head against the tree trunk. She notes how relaxed he is.
He’s not afraid of me. Not even a little bit.
“I know our quirks aren’t very similar, but I get it. I’m not...I’m not great at using my quirk. I usually hurt myself and use the wrong amount of electricity, and when I’m in a fight, I always chicken out; I’m always worried I’m going to take it too far. I’m worried I’m going to do more than shock someone unconscious.”
He doesn’t say it, but the implication is still there—he’s worried about killing his opponent.
“Kaminari, I’m sorry...I didn’t know.”
He laughs, but there’s a tinge of sadness there.
“If anyone’s apologizing, it should be me. I can’t believe I didn’t notice what you were going through.”
That’s not your fault.
“It’s okay. I don’t really talk about that kind of stuff, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
They don’t say anything for a minute, listening as the wind rustles through the trees.
“Thanks for being a good friend, Kaminari.”
“Thanks for being a better one,” he says with a lopsided grin. “We should probably get back to camp, huh?”
Mina smiles, taking his hand.
“Let’s do this.”