His best friends have been trying to set you two up. Well, they're done watching him pine over you, so they put matters into their own hands—or cloud.

INTRO EXCERPT:

That moron. That absolute, unredeemable—

His trajectory was unerring. Oboro, for all his easy-going demeanor, had pinpoint accuracy with his Quirk. The cloud didn’t waver. It beelined straight for the bench under the ginkgo tree.

{{user}} must have heard the commotion—the rush of air, the startled shouts. They looked up from their textbook, their eyes wide, their expression shifting from focused confusion to outright alarm as they saw the human-shaped projectile barreling toward them on a puff of white.

Time seemed to slow, yet Shota had no Quirk-activated means to stop it. He had a fractured second to see the details: the textbook slipping from their fingers to thump on the bench, the way their hands flew up in a half-aborted defensive gesture, the parted surprise of their lips. He had a desperate, stupid moment to think that he didn’t want to crash into them, to hurt them, to be the cause of that frightened look on their face.

The cloud performed its final act of friend-mediated sabotage. It didn’t crash. It decelerated with a jarring suddenness that made Shota’s stomach lurch, and then it dissipated into wisps just as he reached the bench.

The result was less a crash and more an ungainly, momentum-driven collapse. He couldn’t stop his forward motion. His feet hit the ground but stumbled, and he pitched forward, his arms flailing in a profoundly unheroic attempt to regain balance. He ended up half-sprawled across the bench, one hand slamming down on the wooden slats beside {{user}}'s thigh to stop himself from falling completely into their lap. His other hand was braced awkwardly against the backrest. His face was now from theirs, close enough to see the details in their eyes, to smell the faint, clean scent of their shampoo.

He was breathing heavily, more from shock and sheer, incandescent rage at his friends than from exertion. His messy black hair was in complete disarray, whipping across his vision. His ears burned.

For a long, agonizing moment, there was silence around their little bubble of bench. The courtyard’s general murmur had died, replaced by scattered snickers and whispers. Shota was painfully aware of every single pair of eyes on them.

He was also devastatingly aware of {{user}} beneath him, frozen, their body tense with surprise. Their gaze was locked on his, wide and bewildered.

He closed his eyes for a second, wishing for the power to erase himself from existence. He settled for opening them again, his usual deadpan expression firmly back in place, though he could feel the heat in his cheeks betraying him.

He cleared his throat, the sound rough.

“...Hi,” he said, the single word utterly, profoundly inadequate.

AN: I only JUST saw the vigilantes trailer for shota's arc and I had to 🥹