TWO POWERS (Todoroki Shoto x Reader)

Chapter 18: Companion

"So Hawks brought you here," Gran Torino muses. "You sure have a knack for drawing attention to yourself."

"Yes, and if you don't mind, I'd like to enter before we draw too much attention here too," you say with a forced smile.

"Ah, good thinking, Y/n," Hawks says and starts making his way up the stairs. Gran Torino pulls back and you enter his house a few seconds before Hawks, sending Gran Torino a worried smile.

"Already on a first name basis, huh?"

"Noo, it's not like that!" you whisper.

Hawks enters the big room, which acts as a hall, a living room, and a kitchen at the same time. Its furniture has seen some better days, but the inside is not decrepit like the outside. You and Hawks take a seat on the sofa, while Gran Torino continues his work in the kitchen.

You feel at least partially responsible for Hawks's presence, disturbing whatever Gran Torino and All Might had planned, so you gather all your courage. You turn to the man sitting very comfortably and nonchalantly on the sofa. "Um, Hawks," you say, "don't take this the wrong way, but why are you here?"

"I can't help but shake the feeling that you're hiding something," he happily replies.

"Well, I am," you quickly reply. "I'm hiding myself after yesterday's..."

"Incident?" Hawks helps you out.

"Yeah. Besides, I can't go home, so here I am."

"I saw the post. It was rather suspicious," Hawks agrees.

"But did you watch the news?" Gran Torino asks before continuing, "Because no one talked about you. Maybe they would have, but the news is filled with the victims of Hero Killer: Stain at the moment." He takes a seat opposite if you two.

"However," Hawks butts in, "the online posts will remain, and people will not forget that it happened to you."

"I know, but I'll just have to live with it."

"Whoever made that post probably was hoping that the crime rates would drop again," Gran Torino says, "and that the hero killings would cease."

"So my dad wants me to confront the Hero Killer?" you mumble to yourself but loud enough for others to hear. What follows is both Hawks and Gran Torino demanding to know what your dad has got to do with anything and you explaining what he said to you the night before.

"Not only Stain then," Hawks comments, "all bad guys, potentially. But don't do it. You aren't ready yet."

You're not sure how to feel about a pro hero telling you that you can't do something when everyone else has believed in you. You notice how Gran Torino is eyeing you suspiciously. As a distraction, you ask for permission to eat your breakfast, which is allowed.

You take Shoto's bento from your backpack and start eating, staring at nothing in particular. Hawks is also looking around restlessly. "Well, I'll have to get back to work. It seems like you'll be safe here."

"Thank you for flying me here," you say before he exits without saying a word. Gran Torino walks up to the window, probably to make sure that the man really is leaving.

"It's not what you're thinking," you quickly say. "We met today and I asked him to not call me Tsukauchi. I think he was just worried about me."

Gran Torino just listens, eyeing your food. "If you want, I have a microwave over there, you can heat up your food."

"Ah, no thanks. Unless I can do it myself, I'm not reheating food."

"Oh, right, Toshinori mentioned something about a heat quirk. So you're a human microwave!"

"No," you say, slightly offended by being compared to a household appliance.

"Well, nevermind that then. You'll be training One For All, but I want you to reduce your output to one percent maximum. I saw how you raced: all power, no plan. You need to use your head, too."

Back to business, huh. He must not like me that much. Likewise.

"Well, it's not like I had a lot of time to come up with a plan. I had to learn how to and practice moving at higher output completely on my own, I'm sorry if I didn't meet your expectations," you fire back. "I understand now that completely neglecting my birth quirk to train One For All was a huge mistake. All this could have been avoided."

"We must move on, Y/n. Right now, you must continue training One For All."

"Fine," you agree, resentment boiling inside you. "But I'd like to talk to All Might about my birth quirk as well."

"Do you think he'd want to talk to you, especially after his trusted friend, your father, nearly exposed your connection with him?"

You stare at him. "Are you trying to get me riled up?"

"Perhaps," he says with a chuckle. You know there's more truth to it than just provocation.

Although you don't want to and are scared that the extra training might endanger your birth quirk, you spend the rest of the day going through the motions of training at half a percent, failing to get a hit on the old man. He is just too fast and you have no combat experience. He isn't teaching you anything specific and seems to leave the reflection to you. You, however, have no desire to improve One For All or learn from him.

The moment you're left alone in a room, you repack everything into your backpack, leaving mostly everything behind. An upside to a full day of training is that the old man would also be tired, and after confirming that the snores are genuine, you make a quiet exit, seizing the window of opportunity.