The locker room had the tinny echo of a gym before class: excited voices, nervous laughter, fabric rasping as sleeves slid over forearms. My costume hung like a dare—green lines, knee pads, gloves that were supposed to make me look like I knew where my hands belonged. I counted the stitches along the edge of my hood until my heart stopped sprinting.
Harry's costume looked like a clever plan pretending to be fabric. A charcoal robe with deep green piping, a cowl, a half-mask, and—this was the part that made something in me vibrate with organization joy—pockets. Pouches nested along the inner lining like secret compartments in a puzzle box. His satchel sat across his body like it had always belonged there. Wizard-ish. Support-heavy. Exactly him.
"Wizard drip," Kaminari said.
"Functional," Iida corrected, because of course.
Harry finger-tapped three places along his sleeve and a scroll glanced into view and out again. It was like watching a magician rehearse truthfully. When he caught me staring, he lifted a shoulder in a tiny shrug, like it's not flashy, it just works.
The screen on the wall lit. "WELCOME, YOUNG HEROES!" boomed All Might. I jolted, almost saluting with my whole body. Indoor battle trial. Teams. Rules. Don't destroy the building. (Bakugo was already scowling.)
I got paired with Harry. Bakugo got Iida. My stomach dropped and then floated back up to where it should be, which I realized later was exactly what Harry's magic would feel like.
We had sixty seconds. Harry's eyes fixed on mine, steady. "No duels for me," he said, crisp and quiet. "You take Bakugo and keep him busy. Close quarters is your language. I'll handle the objective. I flood the building with smoke; you fight in the mess. You can do that."
I could. The thought slid into place like a piece I hadn't noticed was missing. "I can pull him into tight angles," I said, words getting faster. "Rails, doors, blind corners—reduce his blast cones."
"I'll buff you," he said. "Light legs. Quicker stops and starts."
"Feather." The word made my brain catch; it sounded like something from a storybook, but Harry's work had a different grammar: models, constraints, parameters. It fit.
"Buffs are easy to share," he said, already indexing scrolls into the sleeves of his robe. "If you feel floaty, don't fight it. Guide it."
"Right," I said, and felt my mouth do that thing where it looked like a smile but was actually me bracing.
He held out his fist. We bumped. My knuckles didn't shake.
We ran.
The building swallowed us. The stairwell smelled like dust, iron, and the memory of a hundred shoes. Harry stopped us on the landing, glanced at my legs as if he could see the vector map I was trying too hard to draw.
"Feather," he murmured, touching his fingers to my forearm.
It wasn't a surge. It wasn't a weight dropped into my veins. It was like somebody had quietly removed a brick from my pockets. My calves felt… cooperative. Not stronger—just more willing to change their minds quickly.
"Test it," he said.
I bounced on my toes. Loser thought: I could run away faster now. Hero thought: I can arrive at people faster, too.
From above: laughter like an insult. Bakugo. He'd found our trajectory like he always did—a smell, a shadow, a mean little miracle. "DEKU!" he bellowed, like a slur he wasn't going to outgrow.
"Take main," Harry said. "I'll cut off sightlines."
I nodded and kicked upward, keeping my center low. The first explosion hit the stairwell with an angry clap—white-orange, a heat that wanted my eyebrows. Bakugo vaulted the next landing, palms smoking, grin feral and beautiful if it hadn't been pointed at me.
"Found you," he said, like it was a hobby and not a habit. He blasted downward; the air burned toward my face.
"Shield!" Harry's voice cracked in my ear. The barrier unfolded a meter in front of me with a noise like glass thinking better of itself. The blast chewed it, threw dust and sound at my teeth; I flinched, then felt the pressure lift like a hand off a bruise.
"Go!" Harry shouted. A wall of smoke spilled past me—thick, cool, obedient to him the way wind is obedient to doors.
Bakugo cursed—pure vowel. I darted low under the edge of the barrier, Feathers in my knees, and kicked hard left into the shadow of a doorway. Blast heat kissed the wall where my head had been.
"COME BACK HERE!" Bakugo's voice snapped. He hated having to aim twice.
I didn't. I gave him something better: me, in the exact angle where his radius would jam against concrete if he took it. He took it anyway. He always did.
The next minute happened in hard corners and short breaths.
I let him see my shoulder. He exploded toward it; I shifted one step—not extra, not less—Feather letting me change faster than I had any right to. His palm went past my head and cratered plaster; my elbow found a railing; I pivoted around it and slid under his arm, hearing his breath like oil on a stove.
He wasn't used to me being anywhere but in the way of his explosions. I was a bad smell he'd never been able to shake. Now I was a draft. He hated drafts.
"STOP RUNNING," he snarled, blasting the corner. Concrete dust gasped. I countered with no quirk—just footwork and the Feather's suggestion. In-tight, out-tight. He wanted to make the room big. I kept making it small.
Harry's smokes multiplied through the corridors like fog that had plans. I let it live between us; Feather let me dart into and out of it without losing my own feet. Every smoke bank was a chance to exit a line of fire and enter a new one on my terms. If I timed right, he'd be recovering from recoil when I appeared here instead of there.
"TCH—COWARD!" Bakugo's voice ragged now, the edges tearing. He wasn't wrong. It was a coward's tactic. It was also a soldier's.
He went high on the next doorway. I ducked and slid the other way. My palm caught the edge of a metal frame; Feather let me punch off it without committing my weight. Bakugo's blast lanced where I'd been, annihilating paint into ghost-ash.
"How are you—" he started, offended at physics. "What is this floaty—"
"Me," I said, because I wanted him to hate me exactly and not in general.
I saw his tell—the micro-curl of fingers before he threw a tighter explosion, the sentence his shoulders wrote before his hand punctuated it. I timing-sliced across his forward foot, my left leg catching his shin, not to topple but to break his rhythm. He stumbled half a second, adjusted by sheer fury. His palm finally found my sleeve and burned. I yelped. The scent of scorched fabric flipped my stomach. Feather wavered. Hero thought: If I lose the buff I'll lose the angle.
"Harry?" I hissed into the comm, dodging a close-range blast that clipped my ear with heat.
"Busy," Harry whispered back, weirdly calm and very occupied in his way. "Thirty seconds."
"Right." I had to buy them. The math was ugly. I made it simpler: don't die for thirty seconds.
Bakugo hit me with a mid-chest shove and a blast-stutter that sent me into a wall. The thump emptied me. I saw stars that weren't on the ceiling. He lunged to pin with his forearm. I slid down the wall, let the momentum keep going, and popped under his elbow. He re-anchored with an explosion that turned the wall into angry chalk. My left side went numb with percussion. My right hand found a railing again.
"YOU'RE DEAD!" he told me, like a promise.
"Not today," I said, breath gone strange.
He laughed without humor. He tried to take a full swing. That told me he was getting angry enough to trade precision for power. I cut inside the arc, got too close for him to get full extension. For a moment we were just two kids grappling in a hallway, except one of us was a grenade.
He twisted his wrist for a micro-blast. I jammed the heel of my palm into the joint; the blast flashed past my hip instead of under my ribs. It still felt like somebody punched me with sunshine.
Something else slid in: Harry's Feather. The buff fluttered where my breath did. If I told it to make me lighter instead of just letting it, my feet landed kinder and left sooner. So I told it. My legs understood. Feather didn't make me strong. It made me available to my own decisions faster.
I thought of page margins full of angled arrows. I thought of the way I'd drawn Bakugo ten thousand times—polished arcs, violent vectors, perfect radius around a fury. I'd always drawn myself as a dot in the middle of that circle, a thing to be blown off the paper. Now I drew a second circle: smaller, jittery, green lines that cut his radius into pieces. It felt like blasphemy. It felt like learning.
He lunged. I cut step. He blasted. I used the rail to reverse like a kicked door. He howled, palm snapping for my face. I went low and took his waist with my shoulder—not to tackle (he'd explode me off), but to move him where I wanted.
The smoke thinned and thickened as if someone was breathing it in and out—which, I realized with a small, hysterical laugh, Harry was. Every time it thinned, I saw just enough of a new line to pick a better dirtier one.
Bakugo overcommitted for a fraction. A door frame to our right had given up on being a door. I bore him, not hard but with the exactness of leverage, into the frame and used the geometry to stop him. He blasted to free himself; the frame ate it with a noise like old furniture having enough. He snarled. I clamped arms and hips, a clinch I'd practiced lonely and secret and stupid with a chair in my room.
"GET OFF ME!"
"No," I said, and for once my voice didn't tremble.
He improvised a palm-blast sideways along the floor—smart, terrifying—and the recoil tried to turn us into a roll. I let it half-turn me and reset the clinch tighter. He was stronger; that wasn't the point. The point was angles. The point was seconds. The point was thirty.
"You really—" he panted, fury-frayed, "think—smoke and—cheap tricks—"
"Are part of the field," I said, because Harry had said it better, and because it made Bakugo madder.
A strobing white flash bled through the smoke from down the hall—Harry's flashbang—and a flat crack clapped my nerves. Bakugo flinched a breath; I didn't (just luck). In that half-second I stepped off the frame and dumped him. It wasn't a throw so much as a suggestion to gravity that Bakugo accepted because he hadn't expected me to make a suggestion.
He hit with a sound like a bookshelf falling. I backpedaled, hands up out of instinct and bad movies. He rolled, palms already bright with anger. I didn't chase. That was the best decision I made all day, and also the hardest thing I'd ever not done.
Silence collapsed into my ear.
"HERO TEAM WINS!" the PA announced, All Might's joy bulldozing the air.
Everything I'd been holding dropped out of me at once. My knees wanted to negotiate with the floor. Bakugo froze mid-crackle, then looked at me as if the announcement had mispronounced his name.
"What," he said, small and lethal.
"Objective," I said, also small. My chest hurt in a way that would forget, later.
He pushed himself up with a blast that carved a strip off the floor. "YOU DIDN'T EVEN—" He swallowed the rest of the sentence like it had broken his teeth. He shook, smoke spooling from his palms like insulted steam.
I made the mistake of pity—for a second—because losing hadn't been in his world-building. He saw it on my face and almost took my head off out of principle. I didn't flinch. Maybe because the Feather was still whispering stay; maybe because I was too tired to obey.
Steps clattered. Iida ran in, visor tilted, form impeccable even in defeat. He bowed at Harry—not performative, genuinely impressed—and called the foam "vexing." I wanted to clap. I also wanted to lie down forever.
Harry appeared behind him like smoke with posture. Mask down around his neck, eyes bright with the worst kind of happiness: the practical sort. He had bits of extinguishing foam on his robe hem. He looked at me, quick head-to-toe scan that checked for blood and damage and maybe dignity. I gave him a thumbs-up because words had deserted me.
We filed back under the fluorescent hum. Kaminari tried to high-five me and then thought better of it because my sleeve was scorched. "Dude," he said anyway, affectionate awe in a single syllable. Ochako pressed fists to her cheeks and hopped once; I could tell she was trying not to, which made it dearer. Todoroki watched like a weather report.
The control room was crowded with glances. All Might shouted compliments about complementary strategies. Aizawa said things in the tone of a resignation letter stapled to wisdom. "Midoriya," he said, deadpan like a storm. "You won without breaking yourself. Make that the rule."
"Yes, sir," I said, and meant it like prayer. Harry got "fewer steps, faster execution," which he wrote into his face as homework.
Bakugo stood in a corner stewing himself into something more reduced and more dangerous. His glare found me and refused to let go. "I'm not done with you," he said, voice quiet and jagged. It landed harder than the shouting.
"Okay," I said, because I couldn't say me either without therapy.
The hall outside the control room felt wider than it had before the fight. Maybe because I could breathe past my collarbone again. Harry tugged his half-mask down and exhaled like a man twenty years older.
"Your timing," I blurted, before my courage tripped, "with the Feather—it made stepping in and out—possible."
"You bought me thirty," he said. "I didn't have thirty to buy."
We stood there grinning at each other like idiots who had not just almost set each other on fire by proximity. We bumped fists, softer this time, because we'd earned the quiet.
I expected the adrenaline crash to feel like collapse. It felt like space. My brain started shoving fresh index cards at itself: Feather-buff protocol (callouts?); smoke hand signals; railings = friend; door frames = leverage; Bakugo tell: finger curl right before tight blast; keep lines short; count breath to keep buff cadence steady. I wanted my notebook. Failing that, I wrote on the inside of my mouth.
Harry drifted to a side bench in the locker room later and pulled a little tin from a pocket, emptying spent scroll casings into it with the kind of care that some people reserve for bones of saints. He opened his Tome and the pen flew. I didn't peek, but I knew words when I heard them landing.
I peeled my sleeve back where Bakugo had scored it; Recovery Girl would yell at me later if I presented with a burn I hadn't shown earlier. It wasn't bad—ugly, pink, already settling into the ache that politely waits its turn. Harry noticed, made a face that was apology and promise. I shook my head: you saved my face with Aegis; call it even. He rolled his eyes like: never even, try again, and went back to writing Map-Weave with little underlines under the v like he was pleased with the naming.
Bakugo passed us on his way out, shoulder a fist. I braced for the hit. Harry stepped just enough to make the contact slide, like oil on water. Bakugo snarled but didn't stop. I let out a breath I hoped didn't look like relief.
"We're not done," Bakugo said to the hallway. To the building. To fate.
"Okay," I said again. It was becoming my favorite answer.
Harry and I walked back toward class with a pace that felt…earned. I realized the Feather buff had long since faded, and my legs still felt light. Maybe that was what winning did when you didn't break yourself to do it.
In my head, on a crisp, invisible page, I wrote:
Rule: win without breaking.
Tool: friends who carry smoke and walls in their pockets.
Plan: learn to be where Bakugo's explosions don't want me to be.
Note: say thank you.
"Thanks," I said out loud, before I could forget.
Harry glanced over, like he'd been waiting for a test result that only counted if I said it first. "Anytime," he said.
And it sounded like a promise we'd both be around to keep.