It Struck A Heart String With Many (BNHA x OC)

Chapter 18

       After the Sports Festival, everything went relatively back to normal. Internships were supposed to start the following week and Ishi was conflicted. Usually, internship week was her favorite, because it meant that all of her favorite people had the week off. Of course, they were always still doing important work like grading and making lesson plans But, that work could be done from home, from Ishi's own bedroom. It helped her feel a little bit less alone, and she appreciated that. As much as she loved the snakes and all that they did for her her whole life, sometimes the constant hissing made her feel like she was going insane. Hearing other people do things, even if it was just breathing, helped break it up and pop the bubble that always seemed to form around her creating two distinct categories; her and everything else.

      Conversely, it meant that Tamaki would be absent as well. Ishi knew that he went to his internship most days, it was a job that way, at least for upper years. But they always did it more intensively after the sports festival. Sometimes it felt they used the sports festival as a metric to see what the students could do and what they need to improve upon, It also told the world what they could do, something Ishi never approved of, telling the bad guys your skill level never worked out for you. Though she assumed that's why they pushed the internships so hard, if you've shown all your cards, it's time to acquire a new one.

       She would be lonely, she knew it like she knew the sky was blue and like she knew Shouta loved her, and that Recovery Girl thought that All Might was a horrible mentor. She felt it as an ache in her chest and a black hole in her stomach.

       Which was exactly why he was over right now, sitting on her couch in the UA teacher dorms. Tucked into the end of the pillows with Ishi under his arm hiding from the barrage of texts from Nejire and Mirio and watching a documentary on butterfly migration while Ishi pretended she was asleep. She didn't want to let him go, to willingly hand him over to the world she knew was just itching to hurt him, to watch him burn. The world was cruel, this she knew intimately.

        Ishi had to share though, she wasn't allowed to keep Tamaki and protect him from everything, so she vowed to protect him and help him out when she could. She had already asked Nemuri to bring her over to Fatgum's agency a couple of times this upcoming week so she could bring some snacks. The idea of leaving UA was scary, but if she could leave to check on Shouta then she felt she had no excuse for not leaving to help Tamaki.

      Since the sports festival Shinsou has been coming over too, at first the staff thought it was because Shouta was training him. Which wasn't technically incorrect, because he was, but after seeing him helping Ishi prep ingredients in the kitchen or do his homework in the living room while she read a book in braille curled up on a couch, they realized he was attached.

       Shouta called it imprinting, that Shinsou had been exposed to someone who cared, really cared, and like a duckling opening its eyes for the first time, decided that Ishi was the most special person in the world. Ishi, of course, didn't know what to do with this, she wanted to be his friend and spend time with him, but after so much time alone followed by time with the big three trio of UA she wasn't sure how to interact with someone who didn't fill the silence. Tamaki, of course, didn't count because he was Tamaki and she didn't expect him to talk, his friends did enough for him too and she knew how to read him anyways. Shinsou was new and he had expectations of her, ones she didn't think she could live up to.

       Shinsou made her feel like a false god. An idol made of pyrite stood precariously on a pedestal waiting for the faintest breeze to knock her over. To shatter her and show her misguided follower just how broken and flawed she really was.

         But it also made her feel like she needed to do better, at least for him. It wasn't the first time she felt this way of course, whenever she loved someone she wanted to do better and be better for them. The difference was that Shinsou didn't know she was broken to begin with, with everyone else any improvement was an improvement from the broken crying desperate girl who killed a man and thought she should be killed too. Shinsou saw her at her best, anything he saw now would be a disappointment.