Turning the Tables [Shoto Todoroki X Reader]

Chapter 1: Thanks?

Originally Posted: March 2020 (exact dates unknown)

Last Edited: April 5, 2021 

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Secrets were like cockroaches; they were awfully disturbing— the worst things imaginable, their existence was an embarrassment, and they lived forever. Not to mention, where one was found, there were always more around.

Which is why, like bugs, you were either to kill them off and forget, or catch them in jars that you hid in the back of your closet.

I couldn't say I was a fan of insects. I hadn't even known of them until somewhere around five years ago.

Four years, eleven months, and seventeen days ago. So basically five years.

It had been a small caterpillar, inching down one of the branches of a tree outside my window. I had stared in confusion as its body contracted, then lengthened, pulling itself along the bark. And, just as confused, I watched a bird swoop down and snatch it up.

It was only once I got myself a cellphone that I learned exactly what it was through a search: "what do birds eat."

I guess it would be odd that I had never learned of or even saw a single one, but growing up stuck indoors, in perfectly pristine rooms, I had never thought that bugs were something that existed. A child didn't possess the ability to comprehend that there was more to the world than what they saw.

What a child did possess, was limitless curiosity. Until they were taught that the unknown was always something to be scared of, like I was.

However, alone in my room and staring out the window at the flies that got caught in the spider's web outside my window, I found my curiosity rekindled.

The unknown was a lot less scary when held back by a pane of glass and lit with sunlight.

So, with unwound paper clips and damaged rubber bands, I did my best to try and make myself small mechanical spiders and caterpillars of my own. My unending attempts to make functioning limbs and matching body movements with the faulty materials I had on hand continued on; until I found myself secretly sliding items off counters, taking apart staplers for their springs, and stealing tweezers from the washroom cabinet.

The item-snatching escalated into pick-pocketing— which I had been doing before. Left out change disappeared, yen notes slipped out of wallets... but before it was more so out of necessity than anything else.

I was starting to bend the rules to a breaking point, indulging in my curiosity, in my wish to know and understand.

When you were restricted from having something, you wanted it all the more. No one knew that better than I did.

And when my parents forbid me from associating myself with any hero schools... Well, my first thought was, 'Heroes?'

Then, in the middle of the night, watching video after video of pro hero footage, came the thought: 'I want to do that. Give people hope, and bring them safety.'

So I took every chance I got to get where I wanted to be.

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Late night walks to the convenience store, the hardware store, the park. Gruelling training sessions which were embedded in my memory, tinkering in the middle of the night with a flashlight held between my teeth...

It had all led to this very moment.

By this very moment, I meant checking the mailbox. I had taken my entrance exams for both the hero course and the support course months ago.