Chapter Text
"You wanna be a hero?"
The smaller boy— despite his hanging head— nodded furiously, both his hands clutched by his sides.
The taller teen sneered before raising her right hand and using it to grab a fistful of her classmate's green locks.
With her hold, the blonde forced her peer to look into her wrathful rubies, flames of ire seemingly dancing behind them.
"Then let me give you a bit of friendly advice."
First, the girl kneed her classmate in the stomach, sending him crumbling to the ground with his hands around his gut.
"Tip 1: Stop being a whiny nerd."
From her position above him, the blonde kicked her victim in the ribs, eliciting a squeal of pain from the boy.
"Tip 2: Get a quirk!"
Another kick to the ribs, this one resulting in a sickening crunch that filled the room.
After crouching down, the red-eyed teen rested a slender hand atop the boy's chest before sending a minor heat to it.
"Tip 3: When you can't get a quirk, die and pray for one in the next life."
With a final slap to the face with her free hand, the blonde began to rise from her crouched position, slowly killing the accrued heat in her palm as she did so.
Until a loud bang hit her ears.
"KATSUMI BAKUGOU! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU-"
The teacher was incapable of finishing the question as a second, much louder bang flooded the room.
In a mix of fear and poorish quirk mastery, the teen had set off an explosion in a knee jerk reaction to the sudden noise.
An explosion that connected square with the smaller boy's chest.
"Hi! My name is Mei Hatsume. Your face looks kinda weird!"
Despite her comment, Mei stuck out her hand, expectantly waiting for the other teen to accept it.
Very slowly, very fearfully, the greenette did so, completing the handshake with a loose, limp grip.
"I-I'm Izuk-ku Midoriya…"
His voice was somehow smaller than him while his eyes refused to see anything but the wooden floor beneath him.
Retracting her hand, the dreadhead wiped them off on her cargo pants before moving them to the workbench beside her.
"So why'd your family move you to America? Do they have business here like mine— is that why our dads are talking to each other?"
"K-Kinda…"
The pink-haired girl fought off a sigh before turning her focus to the project splayed before her.
For upwards of two hours the two sat in silence— their fathers in a business meeting— as Mei tinkered at her workbench laptop and Izuku stayed silent.
Eventually— however— that silence was broken as a very frustrated sigh rang out in the workshop.
"Why. Won't. You. Work?!"
A thud— courtesy of two angry fists hitting the wooden bench— echoed in the room causing her green-haired guest to visibly flinch and attempt to make himself smaller.
Gifted with enhanced vision— via her quirk—, Mei caught the motion and turned to face the boy she'd honestly forgotten was there.
"Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."
Her voice was flat— almost disinterested— but she really did mean it.
Her guest began to unfurl himself in response, still refusing to meet her eyesight.
"It's a-alright…W-What're you w-working on?"
She watched as his eyes drifted to the mess of electric parts and metal splayed across the workbench before smiling.
"I wanna make a tool that I can use to jab into a computer and take control of it. Before I can actually figure out what shape I want the tool to be, I have to code the program it'll run. Problem is I fucking suck at programming and every time I load the backdoor onto the virtual machine it gets detected and wiped. Without that backdoor, I can't bring my baby to life."
By the end of her rant, her voice had shifted from excitement at the projects premise to frustration at its execution.
Turning back toward her laptop, the teen mentally prepared herself for another round of exhaustive trial and error.
Before she could make so much as a keystroke, however, her eyes caught the boy moving up closer, his seemingly perpetual fear replaced by concentration.
"Have you tried hiding the rootkit? Like burying it into a spoofed update file to trick the machine into thinking it's a required file."
His eyes looked at her expectantly, the nervousness present moments prior now gone.
Mei thought his words over for a moment before slapping herself in the face, a disappointed sigh escaping her lips.
No, she had not.
She didn't respond to her guest, only doing as he instructed and hiding her rootkit beneath a false system update.
"Of course, it fucking works."
Her voice betrayed her as a mix of joy and excitement filtered into it.
Out of the corner of her eye, the pinkette caught her assistant trying to create distance between the two.
She couldn't allow that.
Faster than he could perceive, Mei wrapped the smaller boy in an embrace while dragging him back to the workbench.
"You're pretty smart! Since I have you, I have a few more programming issues I could use some help with."
"D-Do I-"
"Yes. Yes, you have to."