Announcement at the end of the Chapter!
OR Type Katsura369 in search bar to find Tumblr page with art and post schedule
CHAPTER 99: Interview
Sakura resisted the urge to squirm as she felt the brush going through her hair. Momo gave a polite apology as she attempted to tame the uneven strands on her head. While she had to hold back a sneeze as Mina and Toru came behind her with makeup brushes, begging to do a touch-up for the third time. A natural look, they promised, but with her observation skills, Sakura knew she'd be able to tell the makeup was on, and she didn't care to wear it. While it wasn't a personal offense, and even something her profession would call for as a kunoichi. Sakura didn't wear makeup on her everyday occasions, and this seemed like too much effort.
"Just a little eyeliner," Mina pleaded, holding up a pencil. "Nothing dramatic! Just enough to make your eyes pop for the cameras!"
"My eyes are fine the way they are."
"But the lighting-
"No."
"What about lip gloss?" Toru's invisible hands waved a tube in front of Sakura's face. "Just a subtle shine! You won't even notice it's there!"
"If I won't notice it, then why do I need it?"
"That's not, you're twisting my words!"
"Alright I think that's enough," Sakura said, trying not to swat everyone away as she stood up. "The boys aren't going through the same thing, are they?"
"Actually, Aizawa-sensei said he'd be checking in on them,"
Sakura fiddled with a piece of her bang that had been shifted a little too close to her eyes, "It's just one interview."
An interview that would discuss the heroic actions of Sakura, Shoto, and Katsuki. The reporters wanted to hear about their "exploits" that night, the incident with the thieves, right after receiving their provisional licenses. Apparently, three UA students stopping a coordinated robbery within hours of getting licensed was the kind of feel-good hero story that the media couldn't resist. The school had basically agreed to it before they got the students' consent, reminding them that this was also the norm of being a hero. And with the way society had been viewing their recent activity, they needed to regain the trust of the people, and apparently, the three were a good start to a promising future. As Endeavors son, and the kidnapped victims of All for One.
Unfortunately, this had also caused a great deal of worry not only amongst the teachers but also amongst their peers as well. Katsuki wasn't known for his subtle politeness. In fact, "subtle" and "Bakugo" existed in entirely separate dimensions of reality. There was a very real chance he'd tell a reporter to "shut the hell up" on live television.
Shouto was oblivious to many social cues. He'd answer questions with perfect honesty and zero awareness of subtext, which could lead to some…unfortunate sound bites.
And Sakura worried them for entirely different reasons, mainly because of everything she'd put them through, and the fact that she didn't seem to have any remorse, which made them understandably concerned about what she might say in an unscripted environment.
A sharp knock interrupted.
"Time to go," Shouta's voice came through the door, flat. "Now."
"Thanks for your help," she said to the girls, even though they seemed far from satisfied with their work.
"But we didn't even finish…." Mina started.
"I appreciate the effort," Sakura interrupted gently. "Really. But I don't want to go out there looking like anyone but myself."
Momo lowered her brush, understanding dawning in her expression. "You're right. I'm sorry. We got carried away."
"It's fine." Sakura checked her reflection in the mirror, hair somewhat tamed, face bare of makeup, uniform neat. She looked like herself. "This is good enough."
Sakura opened the door to find Shouta waiting in the hallway. Behind him stood Shouto and Katsuki.
"Remember what we discussed. Answer questions. Don't volunteer information that wasn't asked for."
"And Bakugo," Shouta turned his attention to the blonde. "If you threaten a single reporter, I'm putting you in detention for a month."
"Tch. I'm not gonna threaten anyone."
"You're already threatening them with your face." Sakura poked.
"WHAT'S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?!"
"And try not to aggravate each other on camera," Shouta warned, his eyes blaring red at them until everyone muttered a yes, sir.
'This is going to be fun,' Sakura rolled her eyes as they continued to make their way down the passage.
They had to listen to Shouta go on about being mindful of their words, not to do anything that would harm the school. Things were already tumultuous without them making trouble.
When they entered the sitting area, they could already hear the commotion as cameramen were setting up the area for them. Putting up lights and bustling about with the furniture until they were given the green light.
The reporter approached them, a young women, in a neat suit, with a practice smile, made to put people at ease.
She introduced herself, bowing politely. "I'll be conducting your interview today," she said warmly. "I'm really looking forward to hearing about your experiences as newly licensed heroes!"
She gestured toward the camera crew setting up their equipment, lights on stands, boom mics, and a camera positioned at the sofa.
"When you answer questions, please look at me rather than the camera. It'll feel more natural and conversational that way."
Shouto, Sakura, and Katsuki sat on the couch, and there was already a problem, because while Sakura, in the center, knew to sit with her knees together, hands laid out in her lap, she couldn't help but feel irked that the boys beside her were barely giving her leg room out of their own poor seating habits.
"Why does she have to be so close?" Katsuki asked.
"Maybe because the camera has to get all three of us in frame," Shouto said reasonably, already settling into his spot on the left side of the couch.
"I don't mind sitting next to Sakura. Do you want me to move, Bakugou?"
"I don't wanna sit next to you!" Katsuki hissed.
"But we sat like this in the car all the time."
"Shut-
Sakura gave Shouta a pointed look that said, 'I'm not going to be the problem this time.' In fact, there was a more sinister thought entering her mind.
The production crew did final adjustments before the camera finally started rolling. The rest of Class-A were off the side, watching everything, some with anxious stares.
The reporter spoke, "So not only 30 minutes after receiving your provisional licenses, you went to work and displayed some heroics that would've put pros to shame. You must get along really well during your regular training sessions, right?"
Katsuki was, unfortunately, the first to burst out, or rather, tried to deny. He wore a menacing look that only he could pull off, "If that's how you see it, you should get your damn eyes checked! Or your brain!"
Sakura, on the other hand, took a shift in gears before they even knew what was coming. She put on the same smile that she gave Sai before she clocked him across the road for bad mouthing Sasuke, and spoke, her tongue light and ironically more appropriate to her age than her regular tone of voice.
"Well, we do have a bit of history together! So of course you're right." She said, splaying her fingers over the front of her mouth like a fan and tilting her head. If the cameraman had looked just a little to the right, he would've caught the jaw drops from several of their classmates who were looking at their representative like they didn't know who she was.
"Yes," Shouto added, seemingly oblivious to the shift. "We are friends."
Katsuki jumped in to argue, "When in the hel-
"Shouto, Katsuki, and I, we're good classmates," Sakura continued smoothly, "who try to get along as best we can. And we help each other out when we need to." Then she looked down at her hands, clasping them together in feigned bashfulness, "I suppose, you could say the same for everyone from Class A, we're all this way because of our shared experiences. "
This reminder that Class A had been the first in the history of UA to endure all of their experiences, and implying that was what had been the adhesive for their bond.
Sakura looked back at Katsuki with that smile he genuinely wanted to dismantle piece by piece. Yes, somehow, for the first time, he didn't immediately jump in to argue against her.
"Oh, that's lovely! Did you three spend much time together outside of hero training and classes?"
Shouto considered this with the gravity of someone being asked to solve a complex equation. "Outside of training and classes?"
Katsuki huffed, "Are you going to ask stupid questions like that?"
The reporter gave a crooked smile, "I mean, before the dorms system was in place. Did you spend time together after school?"
Sakura was on her way to answer politely, denying that they had time for any involvement, when Shouto decided to answer.
"Not with Bakugou, but Sakura and I ate out together."
The room went visibly still, as if Shouto's response had frozen over everything.
The reporter, on the other hand, looked like she had been lit with a new power source. "I'm sorry, did you say you two went out?"
"We went to a restaurant for dinner," Shouto continued. Unaware of the expression he received, like someone who was about to walk into oncoming traffic without realizing it. and went to a restaurant for dinner."
Sakura covered her mouth with her hand. She felt like Shouto was about to drag them both into a minefield. Shouto didn't realize how that sounded. He couldn't have, his expression remained perfectly blank, perfectly unaware that he had just set fire to the entire interview. Everyone else, however, knew exactly how it sounded.
"So you went on a date?"
"A date?" Shouto repeated. He was genuinely confused, but with his talent of never changing his tone, you couldn't tell at first glance.
Katsuki turned to look at Sakura. "You went on a date with Icy Hot?"
He was getting her back. She could see it in every line of his face. All those pinches, all that redirecting, all that smile, he'd found his leverage, and he was holding it with both hands.
Sakura felt her eye twitch. She held onto the smile. She was absolutely not going to let herself be convicted of murdering her classmates on national television.
But then, against her will, the thought crept in from the back of her mind and spread forward like a stain. Looking back at it. It was a date.
She pressed her fingers more firmly against her mouth.
Like a shark smelling blood in the water, the reporter pressed forward. "Ah, is that why you address each other so familiarly by your first names?"
Sometimes it slipped her mind that tradition in Japan was to refer to each other by their last name, even friends.
"Sakura said we should all call her by her first name," Shouto said, and she had to hold back a hard exhale, as he unknowingly de-escalated the situation. Of course, the reporter wasn't letting go just yet.
"Oh, so then you are just friends?"
"Yes, we are," Sakura answered, determined not to let this go any further.
"Do you still spend time together, outside of the classroom?"
Shouto answered, "Sakura helps with our training."
The way he said 'our' perked Katsuki's ears and soured his expression, because he knew he fell into that category.
"Like hell she does!"
"Then what do you and Sakura do when you leave together?" Shouto asked, directing this at Katsuki with the blank-eyed innocence of someone about to unknowingly walk off a cliff. "You seem to spend
more time with Sakura than anyone lately,"
There were things Katsuki didn't talk about. The extra training sessions he'd requested. The early mornings before class, the late nights after it, the fact that those sessions had nearly resulted in one very dramatic incident that Shouta had documented in a report titled "Another Attempt to Destroy School Property."
They weren't discreet about it anymore, but that didn't mean he wanted it aired on camera.
Katsuki held out his palm, sparks already coming out, and ready to smoke the place. "I'm going to blow your head off, Icy Hot."
"Why?"
"WHY?! BECAUSE YOU KEEP SPOUTING BULL-
Sakura looked between Katsuki and Shouto, while one was ready to throw hands, the other looked as if he had no sense of danger. Then she looked at the camera, faithfully recording everything.
Then, without a word, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around Katsuki's wrist.
She turned to look at him directly, and her expression carried none of the teasing, none of the smile, none of the careful professional performance she'd been maintaining. Just a clear, quiet instruction:
Calm down.
And after all those training sessions together, Katsuki had come to recognize what she meant. He should've just blown up over this, acted as if she had stepped on a landmine, and gone off like he normally would with her. But to the surprise of everyone in the room, he just grunted and turned away.
Izuku's jaw was trying to kiss the floor. Ochaco had grabbed his arm without realizing it, watching the scene like she was watching the plot twist of a murder mystery that should've had an obvious culprit. Tenya's hand had frozen mid-chop.
Minoru commented, "Bakugou whisperer."
Even Katsuki himself couldn't understand why he had suddenly obeyed with just a look from her. To him, this should've felt like yielding, and to his greatest rival no less. But it occurred before he even registered what he did.
The interview continued from then on, without further interference or disorders.
"Do you have more questions?" Sakura asked, returning to her pleasant smile as she folded her hands back into her lap.
"Yes, of course!" She shuffled her notes. "Were any of you frightened when you confronted those villains? It must have been an intense situation, jumping straight from your exam into a real encounter."
"No," Sakura said.
"No," Shouto confirmed.
"Huh?" Katsuki looked at the reporter like she'd asked him if he breathed underwater. "Scared? Of those pathetic pickpockets? They were chumps."
The reporters smiled, twitched, as if she was trying to recover from the 360 that had just taken place. "Right! And did you coordinate your attack beforehand? Was there a strategy?"
"Why would I coordinate with those two?" Katsuki said, and somehow managed to make it sound like a statement of fact rather than an insult.
"We just got out of the car," Shouto said.
"We're more familiar with each other's fighting styles," Sakura added. "We didn't need to say much to fall into sync. After training together, you develop a sense of how the people around you move."
The reporter sat forward, genuinely intrigued now. "Oh, wow." She looked between the three of them. "So does that mean the three of you might work together in the future? As heroes?"
"Hell no," Katsuki said, without hesitation.
"I wouldn't mind," Shouto said, at the exact same moment.
Sakura let both answers settle before she spoke. "We don't know what the future holds," she said carefully. "But I believe I can put my trust in my classmates if the need arises."
Shouto tilted his head toward her. "Do you really think that? Even though you're strong enough on your own?"
"Of course," Sakura said. "One person can't do everything."
"That leads me to my next question, actually. Can you tell us a little about how you earned your provisional licenses? Were there particular skills that helped you with the capture that evening?"
And from there, the interview found its footing. Shouto, Katsuki anda Sakura answered the rest of the reporters' questions without further incident, much to the relief of their classmates.
..
..
..
The moment the reporter and her crew began packing up their equipment, Sakura's performance evaporated like morning dew. Her shoulders dropped. Her spine curved. Her neck rolled with a series of audible cracks that made everyone wince.
"Seriously," she muttered, working out the tension with her knuckles, "do you have to hold that much in every time you do one of these things? My jaw aches from all the smiling."
Mina appeared from the sidelines, pointing an accusatory finger. "You were faking this entire time?"
"Well, yeah," Sakura said it with an underlying message that should've been obvious.
"I thought you were just naturally good on camera!" Eijiro said.
"Nobody is naturally good on camera," argued Sato
"I am," Yuga puffed, nose in the air.
"Me too!" Denki chided, throwing his hand up.
"You told a reporter that your quirk sometimes makes you temporarily stupid," Jiro said flatly. "On record."
Momo came up to Sakura, hands clasped, eyes full of admiration, "You managed that so well, Sakura."
"Thanks," She stretched her arms above her head. "Any other time I'd have been the unreasonable one, but Katsuki had that role so thoroughly covered that I wasn't going to leave you stranded in the middle by also losing my manners."
Katsuki's eye twitched. "The hell's that supposed to mean?"
"It means you're welcome."
"Oh, yeah-
Mina's eyes suddenly lit up with a particular gleam. "We need to talk."
Sakura looked at her. "About?"
"About you and Todoroki." Everyone moved a little slower, quieter.
"And dating! How could you not mention that?!" Toru added, like Sakura had broken some kind of oath.
"It was one time!"
But Sakura was already being slowly surrounded, the girls closing in like a hunting formation, and she was distracted enough that she missed what was happening on the other side of the room.
Izuku had drifted toward Shouto. He glanced over at Sakura, currently raising both hands in a defensive gesture while Mina produced what appeared to be a notepad, then back at Shouto.
"So," Izuku said carefully. He didn't typically take on a direct approach to topics like this, and it made him very fluttery, uncomfortably so. Yet he couldn't help pressing on this matter. "You two... dated?"
Shouto looked at him, and Izuku could actually make out the small lines of confusion pulling at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
"What you said in the interview. You went to dinner together."
"We did."
"How did that even-
Shouto's gaze moved briefly to the window. He decided against mentioning that Sakura had been doing community service at his mother's hospital, which wasn't his information to share. He wasn't tackless, just oblivious.
"We ran into each other after the Sports Festival," he said instead. "We were both hungry."
From across the room, Denki and Minoru materialized, having caught the tail end of the conversation and being constitutionally incapable of letting anything go.
"A date," Denki breathed, like he was witnessing a historic event.
"Todoroki, you bastard. You went on an actual date."
Shouto looked at them both. Then he looked over at Sakura across the room, currently backed against the wall by the girls, arms crossed, losing ground in whatever argument she was attempting to win.
"I think so," he said simply. "It was nice."
"That's—okay, but—" Denki leaned in. "So you want to date Sakura?"
Shouto considered the question. The honest answer arrived.
"Yes?"
But Shouto, being Shouto, had not realized that his answer had been delivered at the volume needed to carry across the entire common room. Every head turned. Every conversation stopped.
What followed could only be described as a detonation.
"IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK!" Sakura's voice rose above the erupting chaos, one hand pressed to her forehead.
"Seriously!"
"Ha!" Katsuki barked, a sharp. "Gonna waste your time on something like that?"
Minoru spoke, apparently under the impression that whispering meant anything less than full volume. "Bakugo's got a pretty good face, but I honestly don't think he'd get anyone to date him either, so-
"WHO SAID I WAS EVEN INTERESTED IN THAT?!"
"I mean, no one did, which is why we' re all just kind of wondering-
"Don't tell me he swings the other-
"HAAA, YOU BASTARD!"
Shouta walked into the common area after hearing the ruckus from his room, going to check on his students, and what he saw was nothing short of chaos. Everyone was trying to talk over each other; there was some smoke coming from a lamp that was burning, so either Katsuki or Denki was likely a culprit. Sakura was standing in the middle, like she wanted to just sink into the floor.
"Wait. Sakura." Sakura looked around at the faces surrounding her, wearing the expressions of people navigating territory they'd never actually visited before. Something clicked. "Hold on. Has none of you actually? Have any of you ever dated anyone?"
The room went quiet. Seventeen teenagers found somewhere else to look.
"...Have you, Sakura?" Ochaco finally asked, in a very small voice.
"Sure," Sakura said.
Which was technically true. She'd been alone with Naruto plenty of times over the years. And while she'd been mostly humoring him, and while her standards for what constituted a date had never exactly been a precise science, there had been a few evenings that could, under a generous definition, qualify. Then again, if she looked like that, Hawks would also technically fit in the category, but she wasn't going to admit to that.
Shouto, who had been quietly observing the room's reaction to his earlier answer with an expression of genuine puzzlement, turned toward Sakura and said, with perfect calm and complete sincerity.
"So, can we go on a date again, Sakura?"
"WILL YOU COME OFF IT, ICY HOT?!"
PRIVATE MESSAGING: Available on Tumblr ONLY! I love when you guys reach out to me but it's hard to respond to everyone especially when I need to hop onto different platforms. If you want to reach out personally with questions or messages please do so via Tumblr. THANKS Loves!
Check out the SCHEDULE POSTS On Tumblr, and if you like my stories, want to give me some extra support to help the creations of new stories and can't wait for the latest chapters consider joining me as a special member of my seedling troupe:
TYPE: Katsura369 into the Search Bar Or
www. Tumblr . com / blog / katsura369
EARLY CHAPTERS FOR MEMBERS NOW: BUYMEACOFFEE
-Kunoichi amongst Heroes chapter (100, 101, 102, 103)
-Kunoichi amongst Pirates chapter (45, 46, 47)
-Crossroads of Fate chapter (36, 37, 38, 39)
-Through the Looking Glass chapter (48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53)
- (Bleach crossover) Kunoichi amongst Reapers: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
-Commission: Demon slayer x My hero academia (PART 1 & 2)
- Kunoichi amongst Benders (Avatar x Naruto crossover) (14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
-Kunoichi amongst Heroes WHAT IF SPIN OFF: Dorms and Exams
-SPECIAL HALLOWEEN CHAPTER: Shinigami amongst Shinobi
Thanks for tuning in but now I've gotta tune out!