Zero Gravity

Training log updated.

Take a breath. The next test is already starting.

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The first time I met Ochaco Uraraka, she was holding up a vending machine with both hands and swearing under her breath.

Canon had introduced her differently.

Fine. At least the universe still warned me when it started drifting.

It was late afternoon, six months into training, and Musutafu had settled into the kind of humid heat that made every school uniform feel like punishment. I had finished a shorter Dagobah session in the morning, survived classes, avoided Bakugo's eyes for exactly none of the day, and stopped near the station to buy sports tape with money I should probably have saved.

All Might still called the beach work candidate training when he wanted to keep me honest. One For All remained an if, not a prize waiting at the finish line. That word followed me everywhere. If.

Mom had watched me wrap my wrist that morning and asked whether heroes were supposed to look that tired before entrance exams. I had laughed badly. She had not.

The crash happened before I reached the store. Metal screamed. Someone shouted.

The crowd turned as one body toward the side street beside a small construction supply shop. My feet moved before I finished thinking.

Progress, All Might would have said.

Concern, Inko would have countered.

Both correct.

A delivery truck had clipped a temporary rack of metal frames outside the shop. The rack had tipped into the sidewalk, knocking over a vending machine and trapping a man's leg beneath the base. Not crushed completely, from the look of it. Pinned. Bleeding. Panicking.

The vending machine should have fallen farther.

It didn't.

A girl in a brown hoodie and U.A. entrance prep badge had both palms pressed against the side, face pale with effort. Pink pads on her fingertips.

Short brown hair stuck to her cheeks. Ochaco Uraraka.

Eighteen or nineteen in this version, if the academy age shift held. Real, sweating, and currently one bad tremor away from a rescue turning into an injury report.

"Someone call emergency services!" she snapped.

Three people immediately looked at their phones as if she had reminded them those could do more than record. She had already taken command. I slowed instead of charging in.

That felt wrong.

It was right.

Running straight at unstable metal helped nobody. Neither did standing there because the future had put a familiar face in the wrong place.

[Hero Analysis Log]

Incident: crush risk

Observed Quirk: contact-based load reduction, inferred

Priority: stabilize load before extraction

The system didn't tell me her name. Small mercy. I looked at the scene. Vending machine tilted but lightened. Metal frames tangled against the truck. Victim's leg pinned under the corner. Uraraka's elbows shaking.

Driver frozen in the street, blood on his forehead, muttering apologies to nobody useful.

"You!" I pointed at a man in a delivery uniform. "Wheel chocks."

He blinked.

Too technical. Bad.

"Blocks," I snapped. "Bricks. Anything heavy under the tires so the truck does not roll."

That worked. He moved.

I pointed at two bystanders. "Keep people back. If that rack slides, it sweeps the sidewalk."

They looked offended by being useful, but they did it. I took one step toward the machine.

"Not there," Uraraka said.

I froze.

Her eyes flicked down. "Frame shifts left when I breathe out. Your foot is in the stupid place."

Right. Good. Embarrassing, but good.

I moved half a meter. "Better?"

"Less stupid."

"I'll take it."

Then I crouched near her, not too close to the metal.

"Can you keep it light?"

Her eyes flicked to me. Wide. Focused.

"I can, but if I let go, it drops."

"Nausea?"

Her face tightened. Too much.

"How do you know that?"

Idiot.

"Your balance," I said quickly. "You're locking your jaw like you're trying not to throw up."

"Wow," she said, breath strained. "You are very comforting."

"I am told that often."

"By liars?"

"Mostly."

Her mouth twitched despite the sweat on her face. Good. Still responsive. Still thinking. I looked at the pinned man.

"Sir, can you feel your foot?"

"Yes! It hurts!"

"Hurting is good right now."

"It doesn't feel good!"

"Fair."

The metal frame groaned. Uraraka's arms dipped half an inch.

I slid my backpack off and shoved it beneath one exposed corner of the machine, not as support, just enough to create a visible marker.

"Do not let it touch my bag."

"That is your plan?"

"My plan is to give your arms an enemy."

She made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had more oxygen.

"We need leverage," I said. "Not lifting. Tilting."

Uraraka swallowed hard.

"I can make the machine weightless. Not the rack. I touched the machine."

"That's enough. Can you release one hand for one second?"

"Maybe."

"Do not maybe with gravity."

"You asked!"

The sirens weren't here yet. My hands wanted to shake. I let them, then used them anyway.

There was a long metal bar near the scattered frames. Too heavy to swing. Fine. I only needed it to become a lever.

I kicked a broken paving stone under the bar first. Ugly fulcrum. Better than my spine.

"On three, shift the machine toward the truck. Small angle. I wedge the bar under the base. You retouch with both hands."

Uraraka stared at me.

"You are really calm for someone random."

"I'm terrified."

"Could have fooled me."

"That's unhealthy."

Her laugh this time was real, short and breathless.

"Three," I said.

"Wait, you skipped one and two!"

"Thinking about it made it worse."

"Then wait for me." Her fingers pressed harder against the metal. "It swings when I exhale."

Right again.

We waited through one breath. Two. On the third, she shifted.

The machine floated just enough.

I jammed the bar under the base and threw my weight onto the end. The first angle was wrong. The bar scraped, jumped, and nearly kicked free.

For half a second I saw my hand crushed flat in a future that had not happened yet.

"Lower!" Uraraka barked.

I dropped my grip, shoulder screaming, and the bar caught against the stone. Training mattered. Not because I was strong.

Because I knew exactly how weak I still was and where not to put my spine.

The base lifted an inch.

"Pull him!" I shouted.

The delivery man and one bystander grabbed the pinned victim under the arms. He screamed as they dragged him clear. Ugly. Alive.

"Clear!" someone yelled.

"Let go slowly," I told Uraraka.

"You first."

"If I move first, it drops on the bar and kicks it out."

"I hate that you sound like you know."

"Same."

I eased pressure off the lever while she released her Quirk in stages, fingertips trembling against the metal.

The vending machine came down with a heavy thud that shook the sidewalk but crushed nothing important. For one second, everyone froze. Then the crowd remembered sound. People clapped.

Someone cried.

The victim cursed like a man delighted to still have enough leg to complain about. Uraraka took one step back. Her face went green.

I grabbed a trash can and slid it in front of her just in time. She threw up with heroic precision. The applause became awkward.

I turned my back to block the view as much as possible.

"Do not record her," I said to the nearest phone.

The teenager holding it lowered the screen fast. She coughed.

"Thanks," she rasped.

"For the trash can or the privacy?"

"I am deciding."

Emergency services arrived in a rush of uniforms, questions, and professional efficiency. A rescue worker checked the victim. A police officer took statements. The truck driver apologized until someone made him sit down.

The first responder who looked at my wrist frowned.

"You hurt?"

"No."

He looked at the scraped tape, then at my face.

"Try again."

"Not enough to matter."

"That is not a medical category."

Uraraka made a weak sound from the curb. "He's like this with words too."

"I noticed," the responder said.

She sat on the curb with a bottled tea someone had given her, both hands wrapped around it like the world might float away if she let go. I stood a few feet away, flexing my fingers where the tape had torn loose, trying not to stare.

Canon knowledge supplied the profile whether I wanted it or not.

Uraraka Ochaco. Zero Gravity. U.A. entrance exam. The girl who was supposed to save Izuku from falling.

Hero work because money mattered, family mattered, and poverty didn't become less heavy because dreams were noble. Knowing that didn't make talking easier.

It made every possible sentence feel stolen.

She looked up first.

"You go to Aldera, right?"

My stomach tightened.

"Yeah."

"I saw the badge on your bag." She tilted her head. "You're applying to U.A. too?"

"Trying to."

"No try. Applying."

That sounded like All Might with softer edges.

"Applying," I corrected.

She smiled. It was smaller than the canon smile in my head. More tired. Better.

"Ochaco Uraraka," she said.

"Izuku Midoriya."

"Thanks for not doing the thing."

"The thing?"

"The thing where a guy sees a girl using a Quirk and immediately explains her own ability back to her."

I almost choked.

"That sounds terrible."

"It happens."

"I was very tempted to explain leverage."

"Leverage is allowed. Gravity is mine."

"Noted."

She took another sip of tea and made a face.

"Gross. Helpful, but gross."

"Emergency tea has limits."

For a moment, the conversation sat between us, fragile and ordinary.

Then her eyes dropped to the sports tape sticking out of my shopping bag.

"Training injury?"

"Injury prevention."

"That's what people say before injury."

"You sound experienced."

Her smile thinned.

"My parents run a construction company. Everybody sounds tough until a beam lands wrong."

Underneath sat her life. Not trivia. Not a line from a profile page.

"Is that why U.A.?" I asked.

Her thumb rubbed at the label on the tea bottle.

"Partly."

Then she glanced at me like she had decided something and hated that the decision mattered.

"People get weird when I say money."

"Money is real."

"Yeah, but heroes are supposed to say justice first."

"Justice doesn't pay medical bills."

She stared. I realized too late how flat the sentence had come out.

Too old. Too practiced.

Her stare held a beat too long. I had answered like someone older than the face I was wearing, and the silence made my shoulders tighten.

She didn't laugh. She looked down the street toward the rescue lights.

"My parents work hard," she said. "Really hard. They tell me not to worry, which is parent language for please worry quietly somewhere else."

That one made me think of Inko.

"So you want to help them."

"I want them to rest." She smiled, embarrassed by the honesty but not ashamed of it. "And I want to save people. Both. I don't think wanting both should make me less heroic."

"It doesn't."

The answer came faster than caution. She looked at me again.

"You say that like you are correcting someone."

"Maybe I am."

"Who?"

A dozen answers crowded in: society, people with clean ideals, the part of me that still thought money made heroism less pure.

"Myself, mostly."

Safe enough. Also true enough to hurt. She considered me over the rim of the bottle.

"What about you?"

"Me?"

"Why U.A.?"

The question was canon-simple and impossible.

All Might's name almost left my mouth. So did the power that was still conditional, the future I had no right to summarize, and the dream this body had carried before I arrived.

"Because someone told me no," I said.

Her brows lifted.

"That is spite."

"Motivation has layers."

She laughed.

The sound was quick and warm and dangerous for reasons that had nothing to do with Quirks.

"Okay," she said. "Layer one is spite. What's layer two?"

"I want to be useful when it counts."

"You were today."

"So were you."

"That's not an answer."

"It is if I am avoiding the question."

"At least you admit it."

She smiled again, but this one held curiosity. Not worship. Not destiny. Curiosity was much better.

"You helped fast," I said.

"So did you."

"You were first."

"You noticed what to do."

"You held up a vending machine."

"Made it lighter," she corrected. "Not stronger."

"Still counts."

She looked at me for a long second.

"You talk like someone who counts costs before dreams."

That hit too close.

"Dreams get expensive."

"Yeah," she said quietly. "They do."

A rescue worker called her over to confirm details. She stood, wobbled once, and pretended she hadn't. I pretended with her. Before she left, she turned back.

"Midoriya?"

"Yeah?"

"I hope I see you at the exam."

The old Izuku would have dissolved. I managed to nod like a functional person.

"Same."

She grinned then. Bright. Brief. Real.

"Try not to get pinned under anything before then."

"No promises."

"Bad answer."

"Working on it."

She walked away with the rescue worker, already asking if the victim's leg would heal cleanly and whether the truck driver needed a concussion check.

Of course she asked.

Of course she cared about everyone on the scene.

My phone buzzed.

For one terrifying second, I thought Bakugo had somehow sensed social development from across the city. It was All Might.

Training adjusted tomorrow. Recovery focus. No extra loads.

A second message arrived from Mom before I could answer.

Did you buy the tape? And eat something, please.

I looked at the street, the vending machine, the fading crowd, and the spot where she had stood. My shoulders hurt. My wrist stung. The tape in my bag had already been half-used by the day before I paid for it.

The system appeared quietly.

[Canon Divergence Registered]

Original First Contact: U.A. entrance venue

Current First Contact: pre-exam rescue

Connection Vector: active, unclassified

Unclassified. Good. People deserved better than being sorted into roles before they chose anything.

Still, as I walked toward the station with sports tape in my bag and her voice in my head, I felt the future shift another inch beneath my feet: not broken, not safe, just heavier, in exactly the way real things were.

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