After the Locker Slams

Training log updated.

Take a breath. The next test is already starting.

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Bakugo's locker door stopped vibrating. No one seemed eager to be the first person to make a normal amount of noise again.

I adjusted the strap of my bag on my good shoulder. The other one had gone from a sharp complaint to a steady, unpleasant argument. My ribs joined whenever I breathed too deeply. I had signed enough forms that morning to know neither ache was a secret, but knowing that and enjoying an audience were different things.

The hallway filled in around the silence. Shoes squeaked. Someone called for an elevator. A first-year from another course hurried past carrying a model bridge under both arms, wholly uninterested in the emotional weather of Class 1-A. I envied him for approximately three seconds.

Kaminari leaned against the lockers with his phone in his hand. He wasn't filming. He was looking at a message thread, thumb stalled over the screen.

"Everyone keeps asking which part we got to see," he said. "They think the wall shot is the whole match."

"Who is everyone?" Jiro asked.

"People who heard there was a wall shot."

"So, not people who watched the class replay."

"Right. I haven't sent anything."

He turned the phone so she could see the unsent reply. The movement also showed three requests from students I didn't recognize. One wanted to know whether Bakugo had really blown through concrete. One asked if Uraraka had flown. One had written, Was Midoriya actually hurt or just dramatic? with a laughing face that did not improve the question.

I looked away before Kaminari could think I wanted to answer any of them.

"You could say you didn't see the whole thing," I said.

"I did see the whole thing," he said. "That's the problem."

Jiro hooked an earphone jack around one finger. "We saw a replay in a supervised class. That's not a license to turn the part where he hits the wall into a hallway attraction."

Kaminari's eyes flicked to me, then back to her. "I said I didn't send it."

"I heard you. I'm saying it loudly enough for the next person who thinks asking is harmless."

Two classmates farther down the lockers turned their heads. Jiro did not lower her voice. She wasn't standing in front of me. Her expression said she had her own objection to people treating injury as a clip, and I happened to be the injured person nearest it.

"I don't need a public defender," I said.

"Good. I didn't apply." She pushed off the locker. "Also, you don't get to tell me I can't find something gross just because it happened to you."

That was fair, annoyingly. I could feel the old urge to tidy the conversation until everyone got the right impression. It had never worked on Bakugo. It wasn't going to work on Jiro.

Mina arrived with two empty drink bottles and an expression bright enough to try lifting the whole hall by force. "Did I miss something?"

"We're deciding whether a video exists outside the room where teachers showed it," Jiro said.

"It shouldn't," Mina said immediately. Then she looked at Kaminari. "Did you send one?"

"No. I don't even have a copy. It's a message about a copy."

"Ah." Mina tapped the bottles together. "Then I support your excellent current habit of not having one."

He made a face at his phone. "Could you all stop acting like I'm two seconds from doing it?"

"I can," Jiro said. "The people asking you can start too."

Kaminari typed, deleted, and locked the screen. He slid the phone into his pocket without sending a reply. That choice was his, not mine. He looked irritated by how many people had watched him make it.

At the other end of the lockers, Kirishima had been listening while trying to free a caught zipper from his gym bag. He came closer with the zipper finally in his hand.

"I want to ask something," he said. "Not for a clip."

Mina opened her mouth, perhaps to make a joke, and closed it when she saw his face.

"Ask," I said.

"In the room, when Aizawa said you went past your restriction, Uraraka found out at the same time as the rest of us. She already knew the limit." He glanced toward her, standing a little way off with her own bag. "I don't want the list of your injuries. I want to know what a teammate is supposed to ask before an exercise, without making it sound like they think the other person can't do the job."

It was a better question than Which move won? It was also harder to answer with a diagram.

"You can ask the teammate," Uraraka said, before I could give a perfect version of what she should have asked. "I was there."

Kirishima colored. "Right. Sorry."

"Don't apologize for including me. Just don't turn to him for my answer."

She pulled a folded form from her bag. The corner was stamped with the Support Course mark. Her glove seam had split during the trial, and she'd mentioned at lunch that the equipment desk closed early. I had forgotten. She hadn't.

"I've got to turn this in before they lock the desk," she said. "They'll need to see the glove, not hear about it tomorrow."

Mina held up a bottle. "I'll come with you. I have an equipment question too."

"You have a snack question," Uraraka said.

"Both can be true."

Uraraka looked at Kirishima once more. "Ask me about my part when I have time. I want you to. Just not while I'm on my way to fix a glove and everyone is watching Midoriya breathe."

"Okay," he said. "I will."

She glanced at me. There was no rescue in it, no permission to speak for her, and no punishment. She was choosing a task that belonged to her. Then she and Mina left, with Mina talking about whether a zipper counted as support equipment if it needed a rescue.

The hall felt emptier and less simple.

Kirishima rubbed the back of his neck. "That came out badly."

"Not all of it," I said.

"I asked you how to talk to a partner while the partner was standing there."

"You noticed."

"After she had to tell me."

Jiro gave him a look that was almost approval. "That's usually when noticing happens."

Kirishima glanced at her. "Was that encouragement?"

"Don't get greedy."

Kaminari took his phone back out, this time just to check the clock. "We should move before the doors start locking."

They didn't. U.A. was still full of students, and the sun was only beginning to come down. But the day's energy had changed. People had places to be that weren't centered on the four of us. That helped.

I tried to lift my bag by the short handle. My shoulder rejected the plan halfway through, and the bag dropped against my thigh. Jiro looked at it. Kirishima looked at me. Neither reached for it.

"I'm carrying it on the other side," I said.

"I wasn't going to take it," Kirishima replied.

"I know."

"You said that like you were arguing with someone."

"Probably myself. He's persistent."

I changed the strap to my good shoulder and waited for the pain to settle before walking. Reporting it later would be easier if I didn't pretend it had never happened. It was one of those lessons that got less charming every time it proved useful.

Kirishima fell into step beside me. Jiro and Kaminari went ahead, still disagreeing about whether an unsent message needed an answer. Nobody asked to see my folder. For once, the absence of a question didn't feel like ignorance.

"I was serious," Kirishima said. "What do you ask?"

"Before training?"

"Yeah. If I say, 'Can you handle this?' it sounds like I already decided no. If I don't ask, I miss something that matters."

My first answer was a list: injury, output, range, terrain, emergency stop. Aizawa would have approved the categories and hated my timing. Kirishima was asking what one person could say to another, not for the form I'd signed in Faculty Room B. He didn't know what was in that room. I couldn't use it to win an argument in the hall.

"Ask what changes the plan," I said. "Not whether they're strong enough. If a limit affects you too, they need to tell you. Then believe the answer long enough to use it."

He thought about that. "And if they say they're fine when they're not?"

"You can ask again when what you see changes." I swallowed. "You can also say what you're seeing. But you can't make them honest by guessing louder."

"You sound like you've tried."

"I sound like someone who was the one saying fine."

He looked at me. I kept my eyes on the floor ahead, where the afternoon light made every scuff visible.

"You don't owe me details," Kirishima said.

"I do owe a partner limits that change their risk. That's different."

"Yeah." He let that sit. "Thanks."

There were several easy ways to make it a joke. I wanted one. My shoulder and the memory of Uraraka's face in the observation room kept them all out of reach.

"I didn't tell her soon enough," I said. "You saw that part."

"I saw what the teachers showed us. I didn't know the rest."

"That's most of us," Jiro said from ahead without turning around.

I wasn't sure whether she meant ignorance was ordinary or that the class had been making judgments anyway. Probably both. The replay had made a win visible, not unanimous. Some people saw Uraraka's timing; some saw Bakugo's blast; some saw me getting hit and decided that was either brave or stupid. They were allowed to disagree. They weren't owed more footage of my body to settle it.

At the stairwell, Kaminari stopped. "For the record, I'm telling them I can't send footage. That's all. No dramatic speech about respecting privacy."

"Sounds fine," Jiro said.

"From you, that's a standing ovation."

"Don't get greedy either."

He grinned despite himself and headed down. Jiro followed, leaving Kirishima and me by the landing. A door opened below us, bringing up the smell of floor cleaner and someone's fried dinner from a lunch container.

Kirishima did not move right away. "I thought winning would make people stop looking at you like there was a question mark over your head."

"It gave them better questions."

"Some of them were lousy."

"Some weren't."

He looked back toward the lockers. "I can ask Uraraka tomorrow. About her choice. Not about your limits."

"You can. She said you could."

"And I can ask you before I decide what you meant on a screen."

That one took longer to answer. I had grown used to people either deciding without me or wanting my entire history as the price of not doing it. Kirishima had found an awkward space between those demands. It didn't make him a confidant. It made him someone who might ask directly next time.

"Yes," I said. "But I might not answer everything."

"Then tell me which part you can."

We started down the stairs. I let him go first, not because I needed escorting but because I needed one hand on the rail. My calf was quieter than my shoulder, until the third step reminded me it was still on the committee. I slowed. Kirishima noticed and kept walking at a pace I could match without announcing why.

By the ground floor, my ribs ached with each breath and nobody had asked for a replay. That was not a cure or a verdict on the match. It was one afternoon in which I had answered a question I could answer, left Uraraka's work to her, and let the rest of the class keep its own unfinished opinions.

Outside, evening had made the windows reflective. I caught sight of Kirishima beside me, not watching a screen or waiting for me to demonstrate anything. He pushed the exit door open and held it while I came through. Then he let it close behind us with an ordinary click.

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