The Seat Left Open

Training log updated.

Take a breath. The next test is already starting.

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By the fourth month, I had become very good at arriving just before the bell.

Not early enough to talk. Not late enough for a mark against me. I could cross Aldera's front court while the first warning chime sounded and reach homeroom with my tie straight, my homework in my bag, and whatever I'd done before dawn hidden under a clean shirt.

That morning, the chair beside mine was empty.

Haru Seki usually got there before I did. He liked the desk near the window because the radiator under it worked even when the others didn't. He also liked having someone beside him who could turn a messy practical exercise into neat diagrams. For most of the term, that had been enough for us to trade places on project days, lend each other notes, and eat lunch together when neither of us had somewhere better to be.

His bag was on the other side of the room. He sat with Fujita, both of them bent over a sheet of squared paper. Seki looked up when I entered. He didn't wave me over.

I took my seat and opened my notebook to the page titled evacuation route survey. The grid was clean. I had drawn every corridor on the plan the teacher gave us, labeled the exits, and calculated walking times from the classroom to the assembly point. The space for observations made outside class was blank.

We were supposed to do those together yesterday, between the end of lessons and the closing of the west practice stairwell. Seki had waited there. I had been at Dagobah, following the revised training sheet All Might and I had built after the eighth week: fewer loads, actual breaks, no pretending a missed day could be paid back. By month four the work had changed again, but it was still a timetable, and I had accepted yesterday's slot knowing the survey was due.

I had told Seki I would meet him at four. At three forty-five, All Might asked me to finish sorting a pile before the municipal truck came. I could have left. The truck's schedule wasn't mine to rescue. I stayed anyway, because the bags in front of me looked like a promise I could keep with one more trip.

At four twelve, I sent Seki a message: Running late. Start without me?

He had replied: They lock the stairwell at four thirty. I need your observations on the north landing.

I got to the school gate at four thirty-eight. The guard was already turning the key. Seki had sent another message while I was on the train: I did my half. I'm not signing yours.

I read it three times, then wrote Sorry. That had been the whole conversation.

In homeroom, Seki raised his hand before the teacher could collect our sheets.

"Sir, I changed partners for the presentation. Fujita and I have separate field notes. Midoriya has the route diagram, but he didn't attend the survey."

Our teacher glanced at the seating chart, then at me. "Is that accurate?"

The class had the peculiar hush it got when somebody else's trouble was almost interesting enough to interrupt first period. Bakugo sat two rows ahead, one arm over the back of his chair. He turned halfway around.

"Yes," I said.

"Your drawing is finished?"

"The drawing, yes. The observations aren't."

"Why not?"

I could say I had a commitment. I could mention an adult had kept me late. Both were true in the weak, slippery way that made them useful as excuses. All Might had asked, not ordered. I had looked at the clock. Seki had sent a warning in time for me to leave.

"I chose to stay somewhere else," I said. "I missed the access window."

The teacher waited, as if I might add a reason that changed the answer. I didn't.

"Then submit what you have. The field component is individual. Seki isn't responsible for it."

Seki's shoulders lowered by a fraction. Fujita slid him a pen. The chair beside me remained empty while our teacher moved on to attendance.

During the first break I carried my diagram to the front desk. The teacher checked the measurements against the printed plan. A few were good. One corridor width was guessed from an old building brochure and he circled it in red.

"The field notes would have caught this," he said.

"I know."

"You can still present the desk analysis. You won't receive credit for the survey you didn't do."

He wrote 0/20 in the field-work box and initialed it. The number occupied less paper than my route map. I held the sheet by its dry upper corner and went back to my desk.

Seki was standing there, collecting the ruler he'd left in my pencil case the week before. He took it without reaching across my notes.

"I didn't tell him about the other mornings," he said quietly.

"You didn't have to tell him anything."

"I know. That's why I told him what I did."

For a second I thought he meant the field survey. Then I heard the edge in his voice. Seki had covered for me before, in smaller ways I had let become routine: handing me a worksheet after I came in at the bell, saving a seat at lunch while I copied a missed instruction, saying we had divided a task evenly when he'd taken the first half because I'd left early. He had never asked what I was doing. I had made that seem like permission to keep accepting the help.

"I should have told you I couldn't make it," I said.

"You did tell me. Twenty-seven minutes after I needed you."

The precision hurt because he'd had to watch the clock alone. I had a dozen apologies ready, none useful. I set the marked sheet down.

"You were right not to sign."

He looked at the red zero. "I'm not trying to get you failed."

"I know."

"Then don't look at me like I did."

I hadn't realized I was. I looked at the empty chair instead. His name was still taped to its back from the last presentation. There was nothing dramatic about a different seat. Fujita had room; Seki had work to finish; the teacher had allowed the change. I had no claim on the chair because it had once been warm beside mine.

"I was looking at the mark," I said. "It's mine."

Seki took his ruler and returned to Fujita's table. He didn't say we'd talk later. He also didn't tell me to leave him alone. That was as much space as he could give me.

At lunch, I stayed in the classroom to check the rest of my diagram. I found two more assumptions I'd written as if they were measurements. The north landing was narrower than the plan suggested; I knew that from passing it every day, but I hadn't stopped there with a tape measure. I crossed out the numbers. The work looked worse and became more honest.

Bakugo arrived with his lunch in one hand and a stack of printed practice questions in the other. He saw the sheet on my desk before he saw me. His eyes caught on the red box.

"Zero?" he said.

"Field component."

"I can read."

He pulled Seki's empty chair back with his foot and let it strike the desk leg. The noise made two students by the door look over. Bakugo didn't sit.

"You spend all day scribbling rescue routes and forget to go look at one?"

It was a fair question from the wrong person. I moved my lunch away from the diagram.

"I missed the survey."

"Yeah. I heard that part." His gaze moved to the crossed-out widths. "You going to tell the examiners the building was inconvenient?"

"No."

"Going to tell them your partner should've lied for you?"

"No. Seki did his work."

Bakugo's mouth tightened. He had expected me to explain, perhaps to make Seki the villain. I could see him testing the answer against the last four months: the earlier arrivals, the new stamina, the way I could now finish a flight of stairs without searching for the railing. Those were things visible in school. Dagobah wasn't. He could make a theory about me from the evidence, but he couldn't see the beach through my uniform.

"Then what was more important?" he asked.

I looked at his hand on the chair back. A tiny spark snapped near the edge of Seki's name label. Bakugo saw my eyes move and lifted his hand. The label stayed intact.

"It doesn't change the mark," I said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I'm giving you."

He laughed once, sharp and humorless. "You get one decent rescue answer in class and start acting like the rules are for everyone else."

"The rule caught me. That's what the zero means."

For a moment, he seemed more irritated by that than by any excuse. He pushed the chair under the desk with enough force to make it scrape.

"Don't use that calm voice with me, Deku. If you want U.A., show up when it counts."

He walked out before I could answer. His lunch was still in his hand. The students at the door stepped aside.

I sat with the sheet until the red ink stopped looking like a threat and started looking like a measurement. Bakugo was wrong about why I had stayed away. He wasn't wrong that I had missed something I claimed mattered. I disliked that the two facts could share a page.

After classes, the presentation went ahead. Seki and Fujita had marked the turn at the north landing where traffic from two rooms would meet. Their photograph showed a waste bin narrowing the passage more than the printed plan did. I hadn't seen the bin because I hadn't been there. They proposed moving it before a drill and got a question about where to store it. Seki answered without looking at me.

I presented alone. My route diagram showed why the western exit seemed fastest on paper. I held up the teacher's red circle and said the width was unverified, then explained how that uncertainty changed the recommendation. Nobody applauded. The teacher gave me credit for the analysis I had actually done and left the field-work box at zero.

Seki listened. When I returned to my seat, he passed behind me on his way to the door. "You fixed the number," he said.

"I crossed it out."

"Better than leaving it."

He kept walking. I did not follow him to ask whether that meant we were fine. It didn't, and a five-second exchange in a crowded room couldn't make it so.

Outside, Bakugo was waiting by the shoe lockers, talking to two classmates. I heard my name once. When I came close, he stopped speaking. One of the others looked from him to me and then at the floor. Whatever story Bakugo had offered them, it hadn't required knowing where I spent my mornings.

He looked at the sheet in my hand. "Still carrying that around?"

"It has the feedback for the next assignment."

"There's always a next assignment with you."

"There is with school."

His eyes narrowed, but he let me pass. That was the whole encounter. I had wanted a verdict from him when I was younger, and feared one for almost as long. Today he had given me neither. He had seen a zero, heard an answer he disliked, and made sure the room knew he noticed.

On the train, I wrote Seki a message. I deleted the first version because it explained too much about why I'd stayed late. The second asked him to let me make up the field notes with him. That still put work on him. I deleted it too.

I sent: You were right not to sign. I won't ask you to cover another missed part. Thank you for doing your share yesterday.

He didn't answer before I got off. I had not sent it to buy an answer.

At home, Mom was at the table with the kitchen log open. She asked how school went, the way she always did. I put the marked sheet beside the log. She read the zero, the teacher's initials, and the short note about missing field observations. She did not ask me to show her the rest of the class's grades.

"Did training overlap?" she asked.

"I stayed past the time I'd agreed to leave. It was my choice."

"Have you told All Might?"

"Not yet. I will before tomorrow's session."

She slid the schoolwork column toward me. It had room for assignments, not explanations. I entered the survey as missed and the presentation as completed. There was no box that made Seki's chair come back if I filled it correctly.

My phone lit up. Seki had replied with two words: All right.

It wasn't forgiveness or an invitation. It was enough to tell me the message had reached the person it was for.

I clipped the graded sheet behind the next assignment, where I would have to see the zero again when I opened the folder. Then I wrote a departure time beside tomorrow's school task. Not a promise to train less forever. A time to leave if another ordinary person was waiting for me somewhere. The desk beside mine would be empty in the morning. I could still arrive before the bell.

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