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- Keeping rhythm
Jirou’s parents are an hour late picking them up from the mall, and somehow this has turned into Momo’s favourite part of the day. They’ve found a quiet corner of a huge department store, sitting on the floor out of the way, surrounded by shopping bags, hidden away by rows of shelves.
The place is so quiet that Momo doubts any of the staff would mind their presence even if they did spot them, but she still has a sense of getting away with something, that they’ve stolen these moments for themselves when if everything had gone to plan, Momo would have already been dropped off, Jirou-less for the rest of the day.
“Wow, this is actually a great song,” Jirou says quietly, and starts tapping out the rhythm against the leather of her boots, producing a satisfyingly deep, textured sound. Even Momo can tell this song isn’t the usual fare for a department store. She watches Jirou’s hand and finds herself smiling - she starts to be able to make out the beat, the predictable centre among all that shifting sound. Then Jirou’s hand pauses.
“Sorry, is that annoying?”
Momo shakes her head. “Not at all.” Momo has always found music beautiful but mystifying - she could read for hours about the way different instruments produce sound, the mathematics behind the timing of a piece, and still not be able to do what Jirou just did so naturally.
“I’ve never been able to hold a rhythm like that. Music teachers at school always used to find me exasperating,” Momo offers as Jirou picks up the rhythm again. “I think they thought I was being stubborn, but I’ve never been able to...make out which parts of a song are important? Which parts to listen for and which to let fall into the background.”
She shrugs, a little embarrassed, but if anything this seems to make Jirou happier. She stops tapping and holds out her hand to Momo. “Let me show you?”
Momo has always found herself drawn to people who love sharing knowledge. She’s never understood wanting to be the only person who knows something - information seemed so much richer and more alive when you were offering it to someone else, inviting them on to the secret.
Momo offers her hand, and Jirou shyly positions them so that her hand lies over Momo’s, fingers interlaced, and begins tapping out the rhythm again, her movements propelling Momo’s. They move together until Jirou gently draws her hand back, letting Momo continue - Momo almost startles from the loss, but tries to continue the pattern, listening for the notes that Jirou’s warm hand had drawn to the surface.
“There,” Jirou says, a light blush crossing her face - her embarrassment always seemed to grow the closer they got to her areas of passion and expertise. They were almost opposites in that way - Momo feeling nervous and inadequate when they left her realm of knowledge, and Jirou preferring to stay out of hers altogether, as though to be seen caring was always a risk. “You’ve got it.”
Momo meets her eyes and smiles, content in a way she rarely feels to be getting a glimpse of the world the way Jirou hears it, lively and new.
They both jump as Jirou’s phone buzzes, a message from her father flashing up on the screen. “I almost forgot we were waiting for anyone,” Jirou mumbles as they cast around for their bags. The last notes of the song play out as they leave.
- Accepting failure
Momo stares down at her math test, the little red ‘98/100’ refusing to change no matter how long she stares at it. She flips through the pages and lands immediately on the question she’d gotten wrong - and of course it was wrong. It was so obvious, even without Ectoplasm’s neatly-penned corrections. Momo had been using that formula correctly for over a year, so how-?
As the bell rings and other students pack up, she tries to remember the test itself and how this could have happened. She remembers finishing in plenty of time to do her usual double checks of each answer. Had she accidentally flipped two pages at once? How could she do quadratic equations but not be able to turn a page correctly?
“Earth to Momo?” comes Jirou’s quiet voice. She’s waiting in front of Momo’s desk, bag hanging off her shoulder.
“Sorry,” Momo says, blinking away tears of frustration. “How did you do?”
“Okay,” Jirou says, with a small shrug. “Better than last time, for sure.”
Momo nods encouragingly. There was no ‘better than last time’ in Momo’s world, because she was playing a game where perfection was the only right answer.
Jirou eyes her carefully. They’re the only two left in the classroom now and Momo knows she should start to gather her things, but when she looks down at the desk her eyes get stuck on that ‘98’ again. It’s such a stupid thing to be upset about, and that only makes her more upset.
Jirou seems to make a decision, and sinks into the desk next to her, pulling the chair a little closer. “What’s wrong?”
Momo shakes her head. “I just made a mistake,” she says, voice tight. “And it bothers me that I don’t know why. I don’t even remember answering that question.”
Jirou’s eyes drift over her paper. “You also made a bunch of not-mistakes?” she offers. “19 of them, actually. You did 19 questions perfectly - I bet no one else pulled that off.”
Momo nods, trying to pull herself together.
Jirou sighs, drumming her fingers, and what Momo might have interpreted as impatience a few months ago now seems obvious as frustration that Jirou can’t think of how to word what she wants to say.
“I’m not telling you not to be sad,” Jirou says finally. “But when you’re tutoring other people, you’re always so good...” Jirou turns red, the way she always does when offering any kind of compliment, as if noticing the good in everyone is her deepest darkest secret - “So good at encouraging everyone and telling them to build on their successes.” She shrugs. “I wish you could do that for you. Why should you feel bad over a 98 if you don’t think I should feel bad about my 87?”’
“I don’t think you should feel bad,” Momo clarifies quickly, because she’s always worried in the back of her mind that being harsh on her own grades implies she thinks everyone else is stupid.
“That’s what I’m saying, dork,” Jirou says fondly, nudging her arm. “So how’d you get there? Explain your working.”
Momo gives a tiny smile. She doesn’t know the full story of why she feels like this, even after all this time, and normally she doesn’t like to speak until she has her reasoning all in line - but something about Jirou makes her want to break that rule, to just talk and see what comes of it. “It’s just…” Momo starts, “there are people in class who are braver than me, and stronger, and better at thinking on their feet. People who are better at stealth, and recon, and close combat...but this?” She runs a finger over the ‘100’ in ‘98/100.’ “This is supposed to be what I can do, what I can bring. This is...my starting line.”
“Momo,” Jirou says quietly. “You know people don’t hang out with you just because you’re smart, right?”
Momo nods, but the words touch something vulnerable in her chest. In truth, she’s always had the sense that people spend time with her not because she’s intelligent, but because she’s easy - simple, straightforward Momo, who wouldn’t push or cause a scene or ask for more than she was given. Momo who’d been little and emotional and honest once, and had course-corrected, fine-tuned, smoothed over those parts of herself - to avoid being seen as spoiled, as an oddity, as too much of anything.
“I know,” she says, and hopes Jirou doesn’t ask anything more, because she has no idea why Jirou does hang out with her.
“You’re so much more than numbers on a page,” Jirou murmurs, and there’s that embarrassment again - like this is Jirou’s own version of never being too much, guarding anything as vulnerable as belief under the appearance of being ever on an even keel. But there she was, pushing herself out of that comfort zone for Momo’s sake - even if she doesn’t understand why, warmth blooms in Momo’s chest as she reflects that Jirou really is her friend. Jirou is there, seeing her and trying to make things better for her.
“Thank you,” Momo says quietly, blush spreading across her face to match Jirou’s. She sweeps the paper into her bag.
- Waiting it out
“Yaomomo,” Jirou murmurs when she finally opens the door. “Shit. I completely forgot.”
She blinks in the light as if surprised to find it’s still daytime. Her hair sticks up at the back, almost a full 180 degrees. There are little red marks on her face, like creased fabric, and she doesn’t seem to want to open her eyes all the way. Momo takes all this in as she shifts her folders from one arm to another, the rest of her study materials hanging in a tote bag from her shoulder.
“Nevermind that,” Momo says. “Are you alright?”
“Ugh,” Jirou says in response, turning on her heel but blocking the door open with one foot to signal that Momo should follow. “Heads are a scam. I’m returning mine to the store.”
Momo follows her inside and takes in the closed curtains, the sheets in disarray, the painkillers on the nightstand. “I didn’t know you suffered with headaches,” Momo says.
She spots a little pile of notebooks, science textbooks and a battered pencil case arranged on Jirou’s desk, and it makes something in her glow a little, to think that Jirou had remembered their plans at some point in the day. Momo knew Jirou was her friend, but it was always easier to feel it in the small, concrete things - the time she must have spent picking out the books they’d need, thinking about Momo when she wasn’t in the room.
Jirou sinks back down onto the edge of her bed. “I haven’t had a bad one in like…” She thinks, then glares and seems to give this up as a bad job. “Just, a miraculously long time.” She rubs a hand over her forehead and through her hair, which only makes it messier. “I don’t know if I fell asleep or just detached from reality for a while there, but either way, I don’t think I’ll be much use as a study partner.” She looks up at Momo, an apologetic expression taking over from her pained frown, just for a moment directing all her attention Momo’s way. It’s a little dazzling, every time. “I’m sorry.”
“Please, don’t worry about it,” Momo insists.
“No, you’ll always say that, but I know you hate when people flake out on plans at the last minute. We were just talking about it.”
Again, that little tangible reminder - a conversation they’d had last week about pet peeves, both of them admitting they’d rather be insulted than forgotten, carried forward in Jirou’s mind. A reminder that when Momo talks, Jirou doesn’t just nod and move on to whatever she’d wanted to say - she pays attention, the way Momo does to almost everyone but has learned not to expect in return.
“Jirou, you’re sick,” Momo says softly, setting her folders down carefully on Jirou’s desk. “That’s no one’s fault.”
Jirou slumps back, one hand rising to fidget with her earphone jacks. “Sometimes I forget how different you are to other people,” she says, staring up at the ceiling. “I got a migraine right before some awards thing I was supposed to go to with my parents, and from the way they went on you’d think I’d killed someone.”
Momo hovers, unsure whether to thank her when all she’s being praised for is not guilting her friend over a headache. She wishes she could say something funny, defuse the tension and make Jirou smile, but the thought of getting it wrong and causing her more pain instead pulls her back, and in the end she just comes a little further into the room and says, “you’ve taken something for the pain?”
Jirou nods. Usually she twirls her earphone jacks around her fingers, but now she’s holding the tips between her fingers, brushing over them gently as if to muffle things. “Yeah,” Jirou replies. “It’s not really doing much, but it’s only been…” She squints at the ceiling. “An amount of time? God.”
Momo remembers her own father’s headaches, the way their whole house fell even quieter than usual. Momo would find herself ushered from the room every time she tried to get near her father, first patiently and then with increasing frustration, until Momo opened her hand and showed her mother the present she’d been trying to bring to him, a little shard of quartz that glimmered in the light.
After that, her mother would agreeably act as a delivery service when her father was sequestered, taking the random trinkets Momo would bring with great solemnity. The next time she saw her father, he would place a gentle hand on top of her head and idly remark that he’d been visited by a kind fairy while he was sick, and she’d brought the nicest gifts.
Momo thought of those days fondly now, but it hadn’t provided her with much practical experience to help Jirou. She thinks of their quiet house and the way Jirou is still turning over the ends of her earphone jacks. “What else helps?” she asks, keeping her voice deliberately low.
“White noise, usually,” Jirou says, gesturing to her discarded phone on the other side of the bed. “But the audio on my phone keeps shorting out every ten minutes. Pro tip: don’t insult someone while they’re using their quirk to charge your phone. Accidents happen.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Momo says, a smile in her voice as she leans her tote bag up against the bedside table and pulls out her own phone. A few taps later and she hands it to Jirou. “This one seems to have lots of settings - I imagine that’s an advantage?”
Jirou eyes the phone in slight confusion before her mouth quirks into a tiny, warm smile - Momo is not collecting these smiles, because she’s fairly certain that would count as abnormal behaviour, but she does make a mental note that it’s one of the best Jirou smiles she’s received to date. Small and honest, like Jirou.
Jirou’s hands move the array of dials to the apparently optimum positions with practiced ease. “You don’t need your phone?” she asks.
Momo shrugs. “Not as much as you do.”
When she looks back at Jirou, she has a strange, open expression. Momo’s best guess is a kind of contented surprise, but she’s never been the best at interpreting faces. Jirou carefully sets the phone on the table, turning up the volume so the room floods with low, textured noise, the beating of rain just audible underneath a deep, shifting hum.
Jirou’s eyes close in satisfaction. Momo feels herself on the edge of a memory for several long moments before it finally manifests. The noise brings her back to a waterpark she’d visited as a child, with a fountain in the main pool that showered water out like the branches of a willow tree, so that you could huddle inside and hear distant happy yelling, far-off splashes from the waterslides, but most of all, just the roar of water landing all around. Blanketed in sound, loud but gentle, filling her ears without demanding any attention.
Momo comes back to the present and finds Jirou’s eyes are still closed, and it suddenly feels so intimate to be in her room with her resting this way. The dorms often felt a step removed from really living together, more like living alongside each other and periodically retreating to their own spaces, but this reminds Momo of living with her family, only somehow new and strange. She wonders if Jirou would really fall asleep with her standing here.
“Would you rather be alone?” Momo whispers.
“If you’ve got stuff to do, I don’t mind,” Jirou murmurs, not opening her eyes. “But I’m good with you here, too.” Momo isn’t sure she’s even seen someone blush with their eyes closed before. She sinks quietly into Jirou’s desk chair, settling gently to make sure it won’t creak and disturb her friend.
She tries, once again, to think of what she knows about headaches and what will relieve them. Wasn’t temperature a factor for some people? Jirou’s room isn’t especially warm, but Momo has always found the dorm’s thermostats slow and insensitive compared to the systems she was used to at home. Or perhaps the window should be open? Was fresh air good for headaches, or was that just something parents said?
Momo’s thoughts are interrupted as Jirou stretches an arm across the distance between them, tapping two fingers against Momo’s forehead. “You’re gonna give yourself a headache if you keep thinking that hard.”
Momo thinks that smile is new, too - crooked, playful. “I was just trying to think whether I know of any headache cures. I’m sure there must be a type of tea that helps to combat headaches - I keep coming back to lavender, but that can’t be for sleep and headaches too.”
Jirou huffs a laugh. “Not everything has a perfect type of tea. Or any solution at all, really. Did you know that if you take painkillers for headaches too often, it can actually give you worse headaches?”
Momo frowns, already wanting to look up the exact mechanisms of this but remembering her phone is currently a white noise machine. “That seems backwards.”
“Right! Like, hey, you clearly have a lot of headaches. Can I interest you in some more headaches?” Jirou lets her hands fall back by her sides, letting out a breath. “Anyway, what I meant was...sometimes you just have to wait it out.”
Momo thinks of the miniature first aid kit she’s carried in her backpack for years, diligently replacing anything that expired, bandaids, allergy tablets, painkillers and assorted other remedies laid out in neat rows. Sorting through its contents was a kind of balm to Momo in and of itself. It made her feel like little disasters that hadn’t even arisen yet were already solved.
“I suppose you’re right,” Momo says softly, and they stay wrapped up in the half-dark and the steady static until Jirou really does fall asleep, and Momo quietly gathers her things and leaves, her phone still resting on the bedside table.
- Another kind of hero
“If you had to choose,” Momo says, watching Jirou’s fingers glide over her guitar’s strings, “between hero work and music, which would you keep?”
Jirou squints at her across the clearing, as the spring breeze carries the music to Momo a little stronger, just for a moment. “You’re curious today.”
“I’m curious everyday,” Momo says, with a small neat smile. They’ve said these lines before, or some iteration of them, and it’s a nice feeling, walking a road she already liked with a friend she likes even more.
“Hmmm,” Jirou says, changing the tune to something a little more discordant, the sequence less predictable. “Pass?” she says at last. “I don’t think it would feel right, if people knew me for one and not the other. Though I guess it shouldn’t be all about what other people think - but ugh, I don’t know, music always has to have a listener to be really complete, you know?”
“You sound like Present Mic,” Momo says. Her own voice sounds a little dreamy, and it makes her aware of how calm she feels in this place, just on the edge of cold, clouds passing fast overhead, but little purple flowers in her vision, Jirou’s songs in her ears, nowhere to go for hours.
“Man, I’ll take that,” Jirou replies. “Dude’s got pipes.”
She keeps playing and Momo loses her sense of time for a while. The demands of her life often made it seem like she needed to be thinking three steps ahead, planning tutoring and studying and work studies, or looking back on past performance to figure out how she can improve faster. Today, she feels like the surface of a still pond, content to be exactly where she is, exactly when she is.
“I think that’s what I really want, though,” Jirou murmurs into the silence, attention still focused on the guitar strings. “To have it the way Present Mic has it. Like, he saves people, he’s in the top 100, but when people think of him, they think about his radio show.” The music slows down, notes dropping low and languid, until her hands still altogether. “Saving people is great, obviously. How could I not want to save people? But it isn’t…” She starts strumming again, a whole new tune. “Music is so personal, you know? When you write a song, it’s the same notes everyone else uses, but it’s yours. Totally yours.”
Jirou looks up from the guitar and gives Momo a sheepish smile - it reminds Momo that these confessions don’t come easily to her. That on another day, with another person, Jirou would probably have laughed the question off and kept her thoughts to herself. A little thrill goes through her, to think that she could be something special to Jirou, that she gets to be one of her listeners.
“I think you’re going to be amazing,” Momo says, before she can really decide whether or not she’s going to say it. “I think...in twenty years there will be other students like you, creating things, thinking that they want to follow your path and be known for both music and heroism.”
This time there’s no slowing down before the song cuts out. Jirou’s hands still and she looks at Momo with open wonder. She swallows and looks down at the grass. “I think you’re already amazing,” Jirou says, very softly, then starts playing again, letting the music carry the moment away.
- Lying with
“Sometimes I feel like Hagakure’s quirk is the most fucked up one in our class,” Jirou says. They’re laying on Momo’s enormous bed, their study session having gone on so long that it tipped into strange hours, honest hours. “Like, she can’t even see herself. Her mom’s never seen what her kid looks like. If there was an emergency and she was unconscious and not dressed, how would anyone find her?”
Momo traces the patterns on the ceiling, wondering if other first year classes think about things in this way - calculated, assessing, always keeping an eye on the worst case scenario. She wonders if it’s Aizawa’s influence, as paranoid as he is kind, or the many villain attacks they’ve faced. She wonders if UA is taking all of them to that mindset eventually, and her class have just arrived a little faster than usual, looking around and waiting for the others to catch up. “Only sometimes?” she asks.
She hears the rustle of the sheets as Jirou nods. “Other times, I’m kind of jealous.” Her hand comes up to fidget with one of her earphone jacks. “Like, if you could turn it on and off? If you only had to be seen when you wanted to…”
“Do you think that feeling goes away when we grow up?” Momo asks. “Miss Midnight doesn’t seem to mind being seen...though I sometimes think she’s sort of...making the joke before anyone else can.”
Jirou hums agreement. “Taking control of the stereotype by performing it. I get that.”
They lay in silence, just the whirr of the fans on Momo’s laptop, long abandoned on the other side of the bed. Momo wants to tell Jirou how much she loves this, how she’s always wanted someone she could talk to this way, but is afraid that pointing it out will shatter it somehow. Instead, she thinks about Midnight, and Hagakure, and being seen, and keeps talking.
“I feel like people either see me as a little girl who can’t do anything,” she says softly, “or as…” She trails off, thinking of her internship, of the looks Mineta sends her way twice as often as any of the other girls, of the looks she’s been getting from strangers on the street since she was eleven. “I don’t know,” she says, turning her head to meet Jirou’s intense, kind eyes. “Some kind of spectacle. Something...grown up, but not respected.”
Jirou looks so different in the grey half-light of Momo’s room. Her dark eyes seem vast and strange, but a comforting kind of strange, like looking down from a great height when you knew you were safe. “I wish I could flip a switch,” Jirou says at last. “And make them see you. Not that they deserve to, anyway.”
Momo smiles softly. Jirou’s expression is still heavy, mixing concern and anger and something unspoken.
“Sometimes,” Jirou continues, seeming faintly surprised to be saying the words at all, “I wish people wouldn’t see me as a girl at all.”
Momo nods, not so much because she feels the same but because it’s an easy adjustment to make somehow. Jirou seems both grander and more specific than that one category.
“And then I get mad,” Jirou continues. “Like I’m letting them chase me out of my own house. But maybe it was never mine anyway? Maybe I’d give it away even if it was?” She sighs in frustration, staring back up at the ceiling. “Do you ever feel like growing up just makes everything more and more complicated forever?”
“Yes,” Momo replies simply. Jirou laughs. “But it isn’t an assignment where I can put in more work or do more research...it’s as though the question is missing every third letter, and the paper is crumbling, and every time I think I’ve understood, something changes.”
When Momo tilts her head to look at Jirou again, she’s smiling in a way she’s never quite seen before. “That’s exactly what it’s like."
“I’m really glad that I met you,” Momo says, because Jirou makes her feel honest and uncareful, makes her sense another version of herself; imperfect, sometimes difficult, but happy and wanted.
In answer, Jirou turns over so that she’s lying on her side, facing Momo. Momo turns too, reflexively, to match, feeling that time slows down as she does so, that an important change of orbits is occurring. How can lying with her like this feel so different to lying next to her?
“I’m glad I met you too,” Jirou says, and there’s no creasing of her brow, no looking away in embarrassment. As though the truth of it is so evident that she can say it without shame.
Normally, before Momo goes to sleep, she washes her face, opens her window just a little, and lays out her clothes for the next day. She’d tried, in times of frustration, to just fall down on the bed and let it lie - but these particulars nagged at her until she made them right.
Now, she finds that she wouldn’t rise from this bed for anything. She feels an ease flow through her that she hadn’t known existed, and she lies there with Jirou, looking into her starlight eyes, until sleep pulls them both under.