Chapter Text
“So what is it exactly. Like a game?”
Uraraka peered interestedly over Izuku’s shoulder from where he was perched on the couch, hunched over his phone. It was a slow sort of Thursday evening, the kind where everyone seemed content to settle into the warm golden hush of each other’s company. The common room was filled with the lazy sounds of pen on paper, the quiet murmuring of conversation.
“Not exactly…” Izuku fiddled with the search bar, inputting the URL Present Mic had given him earlier that day. Kirishima joined Uraraka on Izuku’s other side.
“A game? Let me see.”
“Well, it’s more of a puzzle than a game really. Present Mic recommended it to help me learn some new English words.”
Now that Izuku was thinking about it, it sounded an awful lot like he was being tricked into doing extra work.
“What? A puzzle-game that teaches you English? That sounds so cool man, sign me up.” Izuku watched Kirishima rub his hands together excitedly in his periphery and turned to him, beaming.
“Yeah! That’s exactly what I thought! I should encounter at least one unfamiliar English word per day using this, and I always struggle to remember the spelling of everything and where all the vowels go but with the way this program is formatted it really forces you into committing the letter placement to memory, pity they don’t have a pronunciation feature attached– ”
“Goddamit Deku!”
From the corner of the room, Katsuki slammed a smoking hand onto his innocent maths homework, which shrivelled sadly in response.
“Some of us are trying to work here, y’know. Take your dumb mumbling and moronic squad of D-list extras somewhere else.” He paused. “Not you, shitty hair. You have homework to get done for tomorrow and I ain’t letting you copy mine before class!”
Katsuki resolutely flipped the burnt worksheet to the other side and glowered angrily at the equations as if it were their fault they were now illegible.
“’Moronic,’” Kirishima hummed thoughtfully, “That’s a pretty big word Bakubro. How many big words do you know in English? Maybe you should come help us?”
“No, please,” Izuku whispered, white-lipped with fear, “he’s going to explode my head. And then barbeque the rest of me.”
Katsuki grinned down at his papers. It was horrifying. He had abnormally sharp canines. Izuku tried his best not to physically gulp, and looked back at his phone screen.
The URL had bought him to a page with a simple green and yellow graphic, and some English lettering that took him a while to decipher.
“Wordle. Get… 6… uh, what’s that one mean?”
By that point, Todoroki had wandered over and squashed himself next to Izuku on the couch.
“Chances. It means opportunities. Plural of chance.”
“Wow! How did you know that? Do you mind if I run and grab my notebook, that’s a new word for me I would love to write it down– ”
“Get it later. I’ll remind you of it. Keep reading.”
“Right! Yes! Chances. To guess… like, guess? Oh, it’s a guessing game.”
Kirishima pumped the air with his fist. “Hell yeah! I love guessing games!”
“Me too! To guess a 5-letter word. That sounds cool!”
“And easy,” Katsuki mumbled, “bunch of idiots.” Izuku politely ignored him.
“This will be fun!” Uraraka clapped her hands together in delight. The rest of the class had moved imperceptibly closer, leaning into the conversation. Kaminari piped up from somewhere around Izuku’s feet.
“Tell us the words you guess!” Izuku shot him a thumbs up and clicked how to play. After some struggling, they figured that a guess would mean typing a 5-letter word into the available boxes and hitting Enter. If the letters went yellow, it meant they existed elsewhere in the word. Green, right letter, right position. Black, incorrect.
By the time they had finished reading the rules, most of the class had surrounded the little couch like a jostling prayer circle.
Six rows of five boxes unfolded like origami. The class cooed at it like it was some brilliant display of 4D graphics. Over Jirou’s shoulder, Izuku saw Katsuki roll his eyes like they were the stupidest group he ever had the displeasure of being in the same room as.
“We should start with a word that covers a lot of common English letters,” Todoroki quietly suggested, “at the very least it will eliminate a large chunk of potential candidates.”
“Oh! What about Manly?” Kirishima’s chest puffed out in pride, “I learnt that word the other week. And ‘A’ is pretty common, right?”
Izuku dutifully typed it in. Yellow N.
“Yes! Score!”
The suggestions came thick and fast.
“Try noise!”
“What about round?”
“Or lunch!”
“Not lunch, the ‘N’ is in the same place as before.”
“Oh, you’re right!”
“Izuku try angry? Wait, that has a ‘Y’ and an ‘A’. It can’t be that one.”
“Count?”
“Knows?”
“Nerds!” (Katsuki, from the corner).
Izuku’s fingers were itching for his notebook at the sound of all these new words gleaming with the promise of speaking to an English news reporter one day or reading an English article about how much Izuku’s generation of heroes had changed the world. Kirishima clapped a firm hand to his shoulder, punching the breath out of him.
“It’s only the second, err, chance, as you say. Put in whatever you want Mido!”
Izuku frowned and wracked his brains. Distractedly, he noticed the way the artificial light caught in the soft-looking hair at the base of Katsuki’s neck. In unrelated news, Izuku decided he had settled on his next word.
Carefully, he spelled out blond on the boxy, multicoloured keyboard. Green B, still Yellow N. Kirishima whooped right in his ear.
The class exploded into chatter again, vehemently debating which word could possibly fit the criteria they had uncovered. The room swiftly dissolved into team ‘ending with ‘N’’ and ‘beginning with ‘BN’’
“But how do you know there are no English words that start with ‘BN’?” Kirishima.
“Because I just do! They don’t make sense together. It needs a vowel!” Iida.
“Well, what about banana, then? Doesn’t that star with ‘BN’?” Momo, finger pressed indignantly against Iida’s chest.
“No! There’s an ‘A’ in between!” Iida was flapping his arms now, “don’t you know anything?”
Momo, red-faced, opened her mouth to respond, but was interrupted by the detonation of two ominous explosions. The ruckus died like it had been shot. Katsuki rose from his seat, a tsunami ready and eager to level a city.
“Useless, shit-for-brains, dumbass motherfuckers!” he roared, stalking over and reaching a hand towards Izuku. Faintly, Izuku watched his life flash before his eyes. But instead of decorating the walls with the mushy insides of his skull, Katsuki plucked the phone from his hand and flipped it around.
“It’s so goddamn obvious, do the lot of you have fuckin' cotton balls stuffed in your eyes?! ‘BN’ isn’t real, you steaming piles of shit, it’s gotta end with ‘N’, GET THE FUCK OFF MY ELBOW ROUND-FACE, and there’s no ‘A’ so the only options are begin or begun. If you goddamn extras did you homework you would know that ‘I’ is used a fuckton more than ‘U’, so if the dumbass game designers want to make this the slightest bit difficult they would choose begun.” he eyed the lot of them with contempt, and flung the phone into Izuku’s lap.
A cheerful, apple-green ‘BEGUN’ winked up at them in the shocked silence. Nineteen pairs of wide eyes swivelled to a shifting Katsuki, who glared back and awkwardly stuffed his hands into his pockets.
“What are you meatbags looking at!? Just because I have two braincells to rub together…”
Without looking at anyone, he stormed back to his desk and violently shoved his things into his work bag. His poor, carbonated maths worksheet let out a pathetic-sounding crunch. Katsuki cast one last, hostile look at the group of still-gaping classmates, and thundered out.
Izuku finally picked up the phone from his lap, half-expecting it to bite him, just as Kirishima, bless him, spoke like a sounding beacon for the whole class.
“D-did… did Katsuki just help out Izuku? With a game?!”
No one responded for a few, agonising seconds.
“I… yes. I believe that is what we just witnessed. Collectively.” Todoroki’s eyes had widened imperceptibly. Izuku knew that meant the guy was practically catatonic.
“Group hallucination?” Uraraka suggested tentatively.
BEGUN still stretched gleefully across his screen like a satisfied cat. Izuku buried his head in his forearms and groaned, feeling a headache start to reverberate around his skull.
***
Katsuki was in the gym, the skin of his knuckles pink and sensitive from the punching bag he was assaulting, muscles in his shoulders, back and calves screaming in protest, working as hard as he physically could without activating his quirk, but he still couldn’t fucking focus.
Why? Because in between sets of benching nearly all the plates in the gym, shitty Deku was staring down at his phone.
Which, like, what the fuck ever, the nerd could do whatever he damn pleased. But this was not normal Deku behaviour. And fine, sue him for noticing, but it was impossible not to when the idiot’s gym routine consisted of tossing around frankly alarming amounts of weight, and then hunching in a ball over one of his creepy-ass notebooks and muttering to himself as he scribbled in page after page during his breaks. Probably something inane like the aerodynamics of his stupid hair in his set of backflips, or which muscle fibre had twitched on his last lift blah blah blah.
Katsuki shot a vicious right-hook at his punching bag.
Point being, the nerd had never pulled out his phone while training. He was pretty sure the damn thing had never even left the locker room.
Gritting his teeth, Katsuki turned his focus inwards.
‘Who cares,’ he thought mulishly, ‘Let the little fucker slack off. No skin off my nose. Better yet, let him slack so hard that the number one spot practically falls into my lap.’
But then, from the corner of his eye, Katsuki watched as Deku frowned at the twinkling alarm that went off to signal the end of his break, and then turned it off with an absent-minded finger.
What the fuck.
Katsuki vaulted over to the weights section with fucking fantastic speed and agility, because of course he did, and snatched the phone out of dumb Deku’s hands, ignoring the surprised little squeak the nerd let out.
“K- Kacchan–”
“Don’t you “Kacchan” me, shitty Deku. The fuck you glued to your phone for? In training? You popped a blood vessel in that thick head of yours huh?!”
“What – I’m not glued to anything! I was just trying to finish something…”
Katsuki scoffed and rolled his eyes, typing in the phone password he knew Deku hadn’t changed since middle school, and we met with that god-awful English game that Deku had shown the class a couple of days earlier.
This was what had distracted Deku from his notoriously obsessive workout? Katsuki leaned forward to check Deku’s pupils.
“Are you high right now?”
The nerd’s cheeks bloomed an angry pink.
“N- no! Kacchan give me back my phone– ”
“Okay,” Katsuki said slowly, making sure he enunciated every syllable, “then why the fuck are you, you specifically, playing a game in the middle of hero training?!”
Despite his best efforts (read: he gave no fucks, actually, but damn don’t send him back to Aizawa for an ‘indoor volume, outdoor volume’ lesson he would rather eat his own foot), Katsuki’s voice got louder and louder, and Deku seemed more and more frantic to get his phone out of Katsuki’s potentially explosive hands.
The rest of the degenerate class had noticed the little spectacle and were inching towards them like piranhas. Nosy bunch of chucklefuckers.
“I’m so sorry,” Deku moaned, dragging his hands over his face, “it’s just, well it’s crazy addictive and I’m learning so many new words and there’s still heaps I don’t know, and I still haven’t figured out today’s answer yet!”
Katsuki looked back down at the puzzle.
Oh for –
“You’re terrible at this.” He said, a little gleefully, and ignored the swift kick he got to the shins in retribution.
The sequence in which Deku had input the English words was frankly embarrassing, with no pattern except maybe use up the remaining letters. There was one line left, but the word was right in front of him, all coloured in in the wrong shade of green.
“It’s piece. I put it in. It’s correct.”
Deku plucked the phone from his hand and ogled shamelessly at the screen. His damn eyes were so big and shiny that Katsuki could literally see the reflection of the game off his weirdly expressive eyeballs.
“How did you know?! I’ve been at this for like half an hour! And you barely listen in Present Mic’s classes– ” Deku cut himself off and shot Katsuki a suspicious, narrow-eyed look. “You’re not cheating are you Kacchan?”
“Cheating? The fuck d'you mean by cheating?” He crossed his arms and glowered down at Deku, who was slowly sliding himself to the corner of the benchpress. Good.
“Ahh… nothing.”
“Are you underestimating me you asswipe?”
“…No…”
Katsuki raised one, unimpressed eyebrow.
“Well… you seriously never listen in class…”
“Why would I need to listen in class when I’m fluent?”
Deku’s eyes widened comically. “What, in English?”
“No in fuckin' braille, yes of course in English! What is wrong with you Deku!? You finally annoyed that last braincell to death or something?”
“B-but how– ”
“My parents are fashion designers who work all over the world. You know that.”
“So they taught. You English.”
Katsuki felt the other eyebrow disappear into his hairline and bit down the urge to grab the nerd and shake him until he stopped acting like he needed a bloody software reboot.
“And French.”
“French…” Deku whispered faintly, staring down at his phone like he had never seen it before.
“Is that a problem, dick? Oiy! Deku! Earth to your empty fuckin' head– ”
“Can you teach me English?”
Katsuki blinked. And then blinked again. And the nerd was still there, looking up at him imploringly with those round, glossy eyes. Katsuki felt a finger of something warm and breathless touch down the notches of his spine.
“W-what, no, fuck you. And your stupid game. And dumb Bambi eyes.”
Katsuki had exited (calmly and slowly all right, stop breathing down his fucking neck) the gym before Deku could notice how red his ears had become.