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When Uraraka was ambushed on her way to the supermarket by two of the most notorious criminals she had the personal displeasure of knowing, promptly separated from her friends, and held hostage by the most unhinged and irritating girl she had ever in all her life met, she did not expect to find herself tricked into any kind of friendly company with said unhinged criminal.
Toga’s sharp grin when she’d cornered Uraraka into the side alley slipped into something more giddy and venomous when her gaze fell on an abandoned pack of half-worn sidewalk chalk on the concrete, left by some child or another by course of the day. It was almost evening. And Toga decided then, as Uraraka prepared mentally for what she thought might have been the biggest battle of her young life, that they were going to compete in a different kind of challenge.
And it all began with a taunt, because of course a villain wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Ooh. I bet I’m a way better artist than you are. D’ya think you could draw a better mural than me, Ochako?”
Maybe it was her fear of the coming fight that had Uraraka sitting numbly down on the sidewalk with Toga when the demon girl did, or maybe it was something else entirely unexplored, but Uraraka didn’t fully realize anything had happened at all until it ended. And end it did, loudly, with an explosion from inside the building opposite the sidewalk she and Toga were meant to be… well, not scribbling all over like children.
Uraraka jumped up to her feet and back, the cherry-blast red stick slipping from her grip onto the concrete, where it snapped in two. Toga’s yellow eyes blinked as she looked up in surprise, as though this was what had understandably caught her off-guard, and not the blast and sequential trembling of the skeleton of a construction site where her teammates and Uraraka’s classmates were currently fighting for their lives. A piece of debris skittered across the road with a trail of dust in its wake, coming to a halt inches from the drawings scrawled like child’s paintings on the gravel canvas.
Toga’s rainbow was entirely pink. In fact, it was so pink that the color was not simply traced but caked over the concrete, leaving no tan rock in its wake and demoting the stick she held to half its original size. She kept her hold on it as she mirrored Uraraka and took her own stance, head tilted innocently as though asking why their play had been paused.
Innocence. Her eyes glinted with it. How could a pair of eyes glint with innocence, as though it were something malicious, and not the opposite entirely? Uraraka grit her teeth and tried to stave off the flush of embarrassment she could feel warming her cheeks, as it did so easily.
“Enough,” she snapped, shaking off the misplaced concentration. “I’m done. No more tricks. Tell me what you were doing following us.”
“Aw, please. You aren’t still hung up on that? We’re friends, doing friendly stuff, right? No need to get all huffy.”
“You wouldn’t know what friends do,” Uraraka responded irritably. Not her most inspired response, and certainly not her kindest, but her eyes were busy squinting through the dust at the half-constructed building, trying to spot a flash of a lime green or red t-shirt somewhere in the fog. Tsu couldn’t be at her best in this dry climate, and Momo… Momo was smart. But smart enough to see through the tricks of the very devil’s magician?
Yes, Uraraka decided. More than smart enough. And until reinforcement arrived, she’d have to be.
She turned back to Toga, sharpening the glare that she should have held fast to this entire encounter. The other girl was beginning to pout.
“You heroes are all the same,” Toga informed her. She rolled her eyes, waving the piece of filed chalk for emphasis like she habitually did with her knives. “Fight, fight, fight, good and bad, yadda yadda yadda. If we’re having fun doing this, why do we need to change the game? We’ll fight eventually .”
Uraraka considered responding to that, but all she could find suitable was a disbelieving kind of scoff that didn’t sound like her at all. God, this girl. Toga brought out sides to Uraraka that she herself hardly knew existed: rough, sharp-tongued sides, that felt all-too-easy to indulge.
“We don’t have to fight at all if you tell me what I need to know.”
“But that’s no fun at all, though.” Toga squinted at her, as though Uraraka might have been a little dense but she was willing to make an effort to get them on the same page. “And you broke the red, by the way. It’s a little rude to break someone’s chalk and then ask them to tell you things. Maybe it would make them not want to tell you anything. Or actually fight you.”
“What? This isn’t your chalk.”
“Sure it is. I found it.”
“We both—I mean, it clearly belongs to a kid living in one of these apartment buildings, Toga.”
“And now that kid will know what happens when people aren’t careful with their belongings,” Toga replied easily, her sharp canines glinting. “They become someone else’s.”
Uraraka wrinkled her nose at this rampant disregard for justice or any kind of logic that wasn’t snipped into a paper snowflake of holes. “Some people work hard for what they have.”
“Didn’t you learn the word ‘efficiency’ just last week in English class?”
The building shook, and shrapnel fell down in a mess of dust and gravel onto the street below, sending a smattering of concrete scrapings to half-obscure the chalk drawings beneath Uraraka and Toga’s feet. Toga made a noise of discontent, scraping her shoe over the chalk and only smearing it. Somewhere in the building, there was an angry yell that was all-too-recognizable, followed by the consequential blast of a cannon, which only triggered more tremors through the ground.
Uraraka didn’t wait for Toga to focus before she was running straight for her. The other girl only finally looked up when a couple feet of distance remained between them, swiftly closing.
Uraraka’s first swing included all the force of gravity that she only applied at the moment of collision, only for that collision to be swiftly evaded. Golden eyes flashed backwards, light-footed villainess spinning away as though this were a dance, and the street a stage. She thought she felt a prick on her knuckle just before the momentum of her own punch yanked her in the opposite direction of where her opponent now stood, but the thin scratch barely registered amidst the lung-full of dust and healthy coating besides. She whirled back around. An accusation lit on the tip of her tongue, but the other girl beat her to it.
“Nuh-uh-uh, Ochako,” Toga sang, already veering too close again. “Not a good look for a hero, taking the first punch.”
“I’ll take the last, too,” she shot back, and earned a huff of a giggle in return.
It wasn’t easy to interrogate in between blows. Uraraka did her best. Toga wasted no time in introducing her knives to the fight, and Uraraka kept light on her own feet, blocking jabs with practiced kicks and evasion while picking up debris with anti-gravity, stacking the sharpest of shards above both of their heads, only for Toga to slip through the crash when it all came down.
It was difficult to find the right questions, too. Uraraka’s voice was unsteady. “How long have you been spying on us?”
Toga might have shrugged, but the movement was lost in another swipe of her knife, the blade barely knicking the fabric of Uraraka’s shirt. “Not us. Just you.”
She frowned, and barely missed another merciless stab. It was a minute before she was able to respond again, but the words pulsed through her head in tandem with the passing of seconds, marking the time.
“So what, you’ve become my incognito study buddy? And what about my friends up in that building, and all the others back at school? Deku? What exactly is it that you’re planning that’s going to put my friends at risk, you’d better tell—”
Suddenly, Uraraka was falling, and it didn’t matter that she had the time to switch off gravity because Toga was pushing her down. Her quirk did help to lessen the impact a bit, though, and where planets might have spun around her head on full impact, only vaguely-scattered stars crackled in the space between Toga’s eyes and her own. She blinked to clear her vision and opened her mouth with a scowl, making to push her opponent off, but didn’t get very far at all.
Fingers wrapped around her neck, pressing her spine down into the concrete. Uraraka was cut off with a hiccup, and she inhaled sharply. The air held the overpowering pungence of construction starch, laced with chalk dust. Toga’s hands were pink and felt softened, despite their clutch, soft all around with sidewalk chalk.
“I love being your study buddy!” Toga’s eyes were crescent moons. She looked ecstatic, current infliction of suffocation excluded. “I’m so happy you said that. Wow. That’s exactly what they are, you know. And nope, I said it’s just you, Ochaco. I don’t lie to people I like. How could we ever get close if I lied to you?”
Uraraka hoped that the only response she was able to give, in the form of a sputtering growl and a glare, was enough to tell Toga exactly what she thought of that.
“Then again,” she continued with a sigh that held all the dramatics a villain of her notoriety was entitled to, “Shigaraki would probably nail my head to a dashboard if I didn’t lie to you about some things. So don’t ask me too many questions.”
The half-constructed building to the side of their street was quiet. Uraraka hadn’t heard the blast of a cannon in several beats, she noticed suddenly. Her eyes drifted from Toga’s, finding the skeleton of the building again—or, what was left of it. Pressure lifted from her neck so quickly that she had no time to react—and then freeze, as something cool and hard found the skin of her temple.
Toga looked pleased to have her attention again, but that was quickly lost to the tightening of what was clearly borrowed time for her. “Looks like we don’t have long. Let’s be quick, then.”
Uraraka’s eyes widened. She wanted to close them, but Toga wouldn’t look away, and it felt impossible to be the one to break eye contact now, now that it had been snatched back. Toga’s weight on her stomach pressed the ridges of her spine into the concrete, and though it might have been easy to throw her off now that she could breathe again—Uraraka could envision a hundred helpful techniques to do so—it felt all the more impossible. That was probably because of the blade centimeters from her skull, and certainly had nothing to do with the honey-colored intensity of the eyes that had captured hers with some strange sort of electricity.
Toga began to press down hard, draw the blade down, over her eyebrow, cheekbone—Uraraka’s heart stilled as she waited for the pain to bite in, the blood to spill, she was certain her eyes revealed far more terror than she should have shown, her breath spiking, staccato through her throat, where Toga’s free hand still pressed—and then Toga reached her jaw, and ended with a satisfied flourish.
She brought the weapon up dramatically, the tip of it crushing pebbles into Uraraka’s chin.
No, not a weapon. Not a knife. No blade.
Just half of the cherry-blast chalk stick that Uraraka had held just minutes before.
Toga’s grin was impish. Uraraka would have been rich if relief was currency.
“So cute,” Toga cooed, leaning in closer. “Maybe at our next study session, I could do your makeup. Make you even cuter.”
“I wouldn’t trust you near my face with a blunt spoon,” Uraraka wheezed. Toga laughed, and the sound burrowed into Uraraka’s chest as she felt herself able to breathe normally again. Or, as normal as one could with a girl on their stomach.
That problem quickly became past when Toga jumped up, quick as she’d come, and stepped back from her offended victim. Despite the rushing in her ears coupled with the coughing from her own throat, Uraraka thought she heard some kind of sound from down the street, around the corner, some little prickle of energy that signaled another human presence; or perhaps a multitude.
Toga’s canines flashed. “See you soon, Ochako.”
And then she was darting down the street in the opposite direction, light hair bobbing, skirt flouncing as she danced around a corner. Uraraka watched her go, one hand at her throat. Toga wasn’t gone two seconds before everything whirled in chaos once more.
The concrete ground vibrated beneath Uraraka as heroes stampeded down the street, and she didn’t turn around to greet them. It wasn’t long before several had reached her anyway—Aizawa spared her an assessing glance as he flew past and seemed satisfied enough to continue in his trajectory towards where Toga had disappeared, about ten other pro-heroes swarming past with him in pursuit of the knife-happy blood vixen.
Somebody knelt next to Uraraka. She glanced up to meet the eyes of a vaguely-familiar medical hero that she couldn’t remember the name of, but who was nonetheless looking at her in concern. “Are you alright, Zero-Gravity?”
Uraraka felt herself nodding, but couldn’t force herself to maintain eye contact, even for cordiality. Her gaze wandered back to the far corner, before it was filled with two familiar faces coming in from the side, both Tsu and Momo looking as though they’d fist-fought a hurricane and given it a very black eye.
She tossed out routine assurances of her safety until their own satisfaction was reached, though Momo squinted a little longer than comfortable at the side of Uraraka’s face. It’s fine, she protested. I handled her just fine.
It wasn’t until Uraraka had risen shakily to her feet that her heel knocked against a small, half-crumbled rectangle left forgotten on the ground. She paused, before bending down to pick up the dust-mottled fragment of cherry-blast red sidewalk chalk.
“They’ll get her for certain, ribbit,” Tsu was saying. “You did a great job stalling her. Mr. Aizawa will take care of the rest.”
The shouts of heroes had dimmed into the buzz of medics and police. Wherever the chase was going, it was far away from here.
Uraraka glanced down at the red chalk in her hand. Her palm was stained. Somehow, she didn’t think they were going to catch Toga Himiko.
And somehow, that didn’t sound as horrible as it should.