The walk back to Yu's apartment was noticeably different from the walk there. The adrenaline from the debut and the tension of the chaotic alleyway encounter had dissolved in the warmth of the restaurant, replaced by a different atmosphere. It was a heavy silence, but strangely, it wasn't uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that follows a storm, heavy with the weight of unspoken words and the surreal events of the last few hours. They walked side-by-side under the neon lights of Musutafu, and the constant hum of the nocturnal city seemed like a distant soundtrack to the strange bubble that enveloped them.
Yu's brain was completely fried. She had spent her entire adolescence preparing to be a hero. She had memorized combat tactics, procedure manuals, laws on Quirk usage, and rescue protocols for every imaginable catastrophe. No one, in any of the theoretical or practical classes at U.A., had prepared her for a situation like dinner. The run-in with Nemuri had been an ambush of humiliation from which she still felt the aftershocks. And the worst part was that the boy walking beside her, the primary cause of all the chaos, seemed as serene as if they had just walked out of an action movie.
She couldn't take it anymore. She needed to break the silence before her own thoughts consumed her.
"Professional assistant to professional heroes?" she blurted out, the phrase dripping with a much thicker sarcasm than she had intended. "Seriously, Midoriya? Did you come up with that on the fly, or is that a line you rehearsed in front of the mirror for a special occasion?"
Izuku turned to her, and in the dim light of the street, intermittently illuminated by shop signs, she could see there wasn't a hint of embarrassment or irony on his face. Just his sincerity, so direct it was disconcerting.
"I have to start building my personal brand," he replied with the complete seriousness of a CEO discussing a new product launch. "First impressions are crucial in any sector. If Nemuri-san ever needs my consulting or assistance services, she now knows I'm a qualified professional and not just some amateur. It's about establishing credibility from the first contact."
Yu stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at him, hands on her hips. "Personal brand? You've been my assistant for less than six hours! Your only documented work experience so far consists of losing a poodle with a clear-cut case of anxiety and performing an unsolicited calibration of my butt in the middle of an alley. You don't have a 'brand,' you have a history of incidents!"
"Exactly," he nodded enthusiastically, as if she had just grasped a key point of his master plan. "And every incident is a learning experience. A data point. Now I know, for example, that cheap leashes have a lower-than-expected breaking point under the stress generated by a panicked four-kilogram canine. That's not a failure, it's future resource optimization. I will not make that material acquisition error again."
She opened her mouth to argue, to point out the absurdity of his logic, but snapped it shut. It was completely useless. Arguing with his worldview was like trying to punch the wind. She sighed, a long, resigned exhale, and started walking again, feeling a headache begin to form.
"You know," she said, changing the subject before she had an aneurysm, "setting aside your delusional business plan, for being a complete social disaster, you handled it pretty well tonight."
"Who are you referring to?"
"Nemuri," she specified, though it was insultingly obvious. "You weren't intimidated for a second. Most people shrink when she smiles at them like that. She's like a shark that smells blood in the water. She knows exactly where to press to make you fall apart."
"Why would I be intimidated?" Izuku asked with a curiosity so genuine that Yu found it irritating. "She's incredible. Her control of the environment is fascinating. The way she commands a room with her presence alone is a Quirk in itself, beyond her actual power to put people to sleep. It's pure charisma applied tactically. And her analysis of my theory on appetite as a performance factor was very insightful. She asked questions that forced me to reconsider some variables. She's very intelligent."
Yu glanced at him from the corner of her eye. He didn't see the rival, he didn't see the R-Rated Hero who used her image to destabilize her opponents, he didn't see the dangerous woman who enjoyed putting others in a tight spot. He saw the professional, the strategic asset. And, in some twisted way, that both annoyed and impressed her in equal measure. It was as if he saw the world on a layer of analysis she didn't even know existed.
"She was my senpai at U.A.," she confessed suddenly, the words coming out almost as a whisper, more to herself than to him. "She was always one step ahead. More popular, more controlled, more… everything. She was the perfect student. We competed for everything: the best scores on written exams, the fastest times on training circuits, the teachers' attention… It was exhausting. A constant battle."
"And did you ever beat her?" Izuku asked, his tone shifting from analytical to simply curious.
A small, bitter smile formed on Yu's lips as she remembered. "Once. Just once. At the sports festival in our final year, in the tournament finals. I caught her off guard with a move I'd been practicing in secret for months." The smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the weight of the memory. "It was the best day of my life. I felt invincible. And the next day, while I was still nursing my bruises, she was already signing a pre-contract with a high-profile modeling and hero agency. I, on the other hand, was still struggling to get a decent internship offer. She always knows how to win the war, even when she loses a battle."
The confession, so personal and laden with an old wound, seemed to take Izuku by surprise. He saw the vulnerability she tried so hard to hide.
"Well," he said softly after a moment of silence, "tonight, I think you won."
Yu stopped again, this time looking him directly in the face. "What? What are you talking about? She humiliated me in front of you."
"Her primary objective was to destabilize you," Izuku explained, returning to his logical mode but with a softer edge. "She came to your dinner with the intention of mocking you, of demonstrating her superiority. And she left having asked for my phone number and thinking I'm a potential genius. You, on the other hand, got the best dinner of your life, by your own words, and secured the services of a professional assistant with clear potential. From a strategic perspective, her objectives were not met, and yours were exceeded. I'd call that a crushing strategic victory."
She stared at him for a long moment. The logic was twisted, completely self-centered, and utterly absurd. And yet, she couldn't stop a genuine smile—the first real one of the entire night—from spreading across her face.
"You're an idiot," she said, but there wasn't a trace of venom in her words. Only an amused and complete resignation.
"Thank you," he replied, as if it were the highest compliment.
Finally, they reached the entrance of her building. The large glass door reflected the neon streetlights, creating a portal that separated the city's noise from the calm of her home. It was the end of the night. The moment of the inevitable goodbye. The bubble was about to burst.
"Well," Yu said, turning awkwardly toward him, not quite sure what to do with her hands. "Thanks for dinner, Midoriya. It was… unexpected."
"You're welcome, Takeyama-san. It was a pleasure. And very informative."
They stood there on the threshold, suspended in a silence that now did feel a little awkward. Social protocol, the unwritten rules that governed these situations, dictated that he should turn and leave; that she should go inside. But Izuku didn't move. He just stood there, looking at her. Not in a lewd or strange way, like so many other men had looked at her. He was observing her with that analytical intensity of his, as if he were trying to solve the universe's final puzzle, and that puzzle was her. His serious, focused green eyes scanned her face, her hair, her shoulders, as if he were memorizing every detail.
Yu started to feel incredibly nervous. Her heart, which had calmed down, began to beat a little faster, a dull drum in her chest.
What is he doing? she thought, her mind panicking. Why isn't he leaving? Why is he looking at me like that? Is he going to analyze the symmetry of my face? Is he going to say something else about the efficiency of my metabolism? Or about my butt? Oh God, he's going to say something about my butt, I know it. That's it. It's over. I'm firing him tomorrow. No, I can't, I just hired him. This is a nightmare. Just leave already! Please, leave!
One second. Two. Five. Ten long seconds of a silence so absolute she was sure he could hear her racing heartbeat. Each second stretched into an eternity.
Finally, he broke the silence. And what he said was so unexpected, so bold, and so fundamentally Izuku, that Yu's brain simply short-circuited.
"Aren't you going to kiss me?" he asked.
She stood there with her mouth agape, her eyes wide as saucers. The words bounced around in her mind, unable to find a place to land. Kiss him. Kiss him? Him? Here? Now?
"WHAT?!" she exclaimed, her voice a sharp, strangled shriek that shattered the night's calm and probably woke up a neighbor. "WHY THE HELL WOULD I DO THAT?!"
Izuku blinked a couple of times, as if she were the one being surprising. His expression was one of such pure, genuinely confused innocence that it was almost offensive.
"It's the end of the date," he explained in the tone of someone reciting a law of physics or a mathematical formula. "I have escorted you safely to your door. We have had a good conversation that included the exchange of emotional vulnerabilities. Based on 92% of the movies and TV series I've analyzed, this is the point where the protocol dictates the girl kisses the boy to conclude the social interaction. It's standard procedure."
Yu stared at him. At his serious face. He genuinely believed this was the next logical step in the sequence of events of a "date."
The tension in her shoulders vanished instantly, replaced by a wave of something she couldn't immediately identify. A wild mix of exasperation, disbelief, and a strange, very strange, tenderness.
She didn't know whether to laugh out loud, scream at him, or call security. She opted for the only response her short-circuited brain could formulate at that moment.
"Get out of here, Midoriya!" she snapped, though the command came out without the force she'd wanted. It sounded more like a desperate plea. "Get out of here before I fire you for insubordination!"
She spun around sharply, nearly tripping over her own feet, yanked open the main door, and slipped inside, letting it slam shut with a boom that echoed in the lobby. She leaned against the cool surface of the door, her heart hammering against her ribs as if trying to escape. She held her breath, listening to his footsteps fade down the sidewalk until the sound disappeared into the city's murmur.
When she heard nothing more, she let out the air in a long hiss. A tremor ran down her legs. She slowly slid down the door until she was sitting on the cold marble floor of the empty, silent lobby.
That boy… that boy is going to be the death of me, she thought, running a hand over her face.
She replayed the day in her mind, like watching a chaotic film. The debut, the humiliating fall, the alley, the "calibration," the dinner, Nemuri's ambush, the walk home, and now… the "dating protocol." It had been, without a doubt, the most stressful, embarrassing, baffling, and chaotic day of her entire professional life. And probably her personal life, too.
A broke teenager, an action figure collector, socially inept to an alarming degree, and with a dangerous obsession with butts, who had made her feel more things in a single day than she had felt in the entire past year. He had humiliated her, made her laugh out loud, angered her to the point of wanting to tear her hair out, listened to her, understood her in a way no one else had, and left her completely speechless at her front door.
A small, genuine, and tired smile appeared on her face in the dimness of the lobby.
"Hiring this pervert…" she whispered to herself, her voice barely audible, "was it the best or the worst idea of my life?"
She stood up with a sigh, brushing non-existent dust from her clothes. As she walked slowly toward the elevator, she realized something with a clarity that surprised her.
Despite all the chaos, the embarrassment, and the stress, dinner with Izuku Midoriya had been the best "date" she had ever had.
And also, she realized with a pang of something she didn't want to analyze right then, it had been her first.
"I want you in the office at nine o'clock sharp, Midoriya," she murmured into the air, her voice echoing in the silent lobby as the elevator doors opened. "And you'd better be on time."
For the first time in a long time, the idea of going to work the next day didn't feel like a burden. It seemed… like an adventure.