Work Text:
“Wait, you can juggle?”
No one quite knows where the words come from, only that it's one of the class saying it. In fact, people don't really care.
No, people don't care because someone can juggle. And that's far more exciting than a disembodied voice. (Hagakure weeps, for she is forgotten once more.)
“Yes.” Comes Todoroki’s unnerving monotone, his words laced with a confusion so intense you can almost hear it. “My father believed that hand-eye coordination was very important.”
“So he taught you to juggle?”
“No.”
Todoroki keeps on juggling, the little sand-filled balls moving in a rhythm that nearly sends Shinsou to sleep. ‘Where did Todoroki get them?’ Is the question not a single person is asking. Of course, why would they when asking would mean they risk missing the show?
“How much can you juggle?” Asks the same disembodied voice from earlier. “Is it only three or can you go up to four?”
Todoroki can, in fact, go up to four. He can also go up to five, six, even seven, balls at once. Kaminari is dragged kicking and screaming out of the room when he mutters a quiet ‘That’s what she said-’ under his breath.
Where does he keep getting these balls?
People look to Yaoyorozu, but she's too busy staring in a mix of awe and horror to have done such a thing. The balls seem to come directly from Todoroki himself. (Kaminari can be heard making noises not dissimilar to a goose as Jirou throttles him in the next room over.)
“Any other talents you wanna share with the class?”
Pausing his impromptu juggling act, Todoroki looks to the ceiling as he squints. A small furrow in his brow has several people muttering about how dreamy he is when he's doing literally anything ever.
Everyone is doing their best to ignore Bakugou juggling sixteen balls in the background. He is crying.
A different voice, Asui, breaks the contemplative silence. Well. Asui breaks the silence by sneezing, or at least a noise mostly similar to a sneeze. It’s an odd croaky bellow, but if a bellow were whisper-quiet.
“Kero,” she sneezes, and the entire class, sans Todoroki — still thinking — and Bakugou — now up to struggling with twenty-three — turn to look at her as they say ‘bless you’ in unison. A brief facade of All Might’s face glimmers in a window, a thumbs-up remembered fondly by Midoriya from a middle school assembly on manners strong by a sparkling — très magnifique — smile at their good grace.
They turn back as one. Todoroki is on a unicycle.
Bakugou has fallen to his knees in defeat, a cascade of discarded juggling paraphernalia littered around him in a several-foot-wide radius.
The unicycle has a very silly horn that emits a very silly squeak. The students are greatly enamoured. Todoroki has not ceased his juggling. Bakugou is begrudgingly impressed, but in a way that makes it clear he still thinks he’s better.
Suddenly, Snipe appears. With a cartoonish ‘fwhip’ noise, he draws one of his many revolver-pistols from one of his many revolver-pistol holsters. Some say it came from his hip, some his thigh; Kaminari insists the revolver-pistol came from between his shoulders, but he wasn’t there, so his opinion is irrelevant right now.
A ‘click’ as the safety is turned off, and a succession of absurd ‘bang-pops’. Seven of them.
The juggling ball carcasses fall to the ground, their sandy innards spread wider than Bakugou’s circle (he is upset by this, greatly) by a long shot. Todoroki despairs, which really looks quite funny while he’s still balancing on his unicycle and honking the silly squeaky horn.
“That’s how we do it in Texas, yeehaw,” says Snipe as a wild west whistle plays and a tumbleweed tumbles by. Nobody believes Snipe has ever stepped foot outside of mainland Japan, but you don’t argue with a man who owns that many guns.
Jirou returns from the other room, having been summoned by Heroic Instinct away from her Kaminari wrangling duties by the sounds of gunfire.
Snipe tilts his cowboy hat in greeting, the hot pink one with tassels he got from the premiere showing of the Berbie movie. It matches Aizawa’s, not that anyone is brave enough to comment on that to their teacher’s face. This is wise, as he is unafraid to hurl detention slips through the air at the slightest provocation.
Perplexed, Jirou walks up to Snipe so she can also tilt his cowboy hat in greeting, as she doesn’t own one herself. Kaminari does, but he’s no longer with us, so it doesn’t matter. Snipe smiles, maybe. It’s hard to tell with the gas mask.
“They think they’re better than me!” Bakugou has recovered from his loser’s grief, somehow managing to convey shouting in uppercase despite his dialogue not being typed like that. “That dumbass” — Todoroki points to himself, since that feels like the correct action to take — “thinks having half a bike and some balls makes him better than me!”
All Might’s face reappears in the window just as Ojiro is about to say something worth a character tag, causing many people to disregard him entirely as they all point and gasp. His face is followed by the rest of his head, followed by his shoulders, knees and toes.
“All Might-sensei sir!” Midoriya throws his arms up in celebration.
All Might crows out his iconic catchphrase (“I am here!”) as he steps fully into the room; the glass shatters just as his feet come to a rest on the common room carpet. It’s all very dramatic; you really had to be there to appreciate it fully.
“Yes, Midoriya-shounen-kun, my boy! It is I!” With great flourish, All Might throws up a bicep curl so powerful that a halo of light backlights him and several more windows crumble in terror; the disembodied voice from earlier that may or may not have been Hagakure shrieks from where she was invisible within the blast zone. “All Might!”
“All Might! Woo!” The class as a whole parrots back, like a flock of birds that have nothing better to do than delight passersby at the zoo they’re kept in.
Snipe tips his hat again, which is now covered in glass dust so dazzlingly fabulous that Aoyama’s fingers inch towards it. Good thing Snipe’s wearing gloves, or that glass dust really could’ve hurt him. Ouch.
All Might salutes, proud of his American heritage. He is one of Snipe’s biggest fans, as the man truly embodies the Spirit of the American Dream. Whatever that means. Distantly, an eagle makes a noise like a seagull that swallowed a dog toy, since that’s the noise that bald eagles actually make. A red-tailed hawk makes the iconic eagle noise just after, though, so no one is overly disheartened. Kouda nods in silent pride at his quick thinking on that cover-up. You go, Kouda.
The two men quickly fall into a conversation about whether they should add a sixty-fourth state to the USA, and if that would mean they needed to update the flag again, since the stars really were getting rather crowded. The students, being Japanese high-schoolers, quickly tune them out.
Bakugou is raging again, because Todoroki has been gradually getting more and more elaborate in his unicycle tricks since his balls were destroyed. Todoroki is blissfully unaware of the ire being aimed at him, since he dealt with more ire-filled glares from his father when he was half this age, and Endeavor certainly hasn’t gotten less vexed as the years have gone by.
Todoroki lights several bowling pins on fire, but not the bowling bowling pins, the juggling bowling pins. It’d just be silly to juggle bowling pins designed for bowling, and completely unrealistic.
Bakugou roars like a lion, which actually does make noise like that, unlike the tricky bald eagle and its lies.
Todoroki juggles on.