"Is this seat taken?"
There's nobody else around, this late at night and out-of-the-way of the busier streets. You're hungry - it was a long morning filling out paperwork that's technically meant to be your sidekicks' job, and a longer afternoon moving chunks of rubble around, and you only got up from that blow to the head halfway through the evening, and had to stay late at the agency. You're pretty sure the question is redundant. But there's only two stools, at this dinky little stand huddled beneath the shadows of the towering city buildings, and it feels polite to ask.
The person on the occupied stool turns to you. She's younger than you thought she was, although perhaps that's your fault, for thinking those feathery, golden pigtails might be at home on a grown woman. She's all big eyes and round, pink cheeks, chewing away at her meal with all the great enthusiasm of a starving teenager. The smell of her ramen is potent; meat, and broth, and the spicy-sour that turns it all red.
"'s not," she says, the words slurred through her mouthful. "You can sit."
You take the seat, and glance at the space on the bench beside you. The girl's bowl is only a little emptied, but there's another next to it, drained to the last drop, little flecks of chili along the edges all that remains.
"'S good," she tells you, and swallows her rather large mouthful with some effort. "Best yuzu koshō ramen this side of town."
Normally you'd take a half-recommendation, offered so eagerly, but under the warm yellow lights, perched upon a low-quality stool at a run-down noodle stand, something nostalgia-shaped tugs at you like a child on your arm, so when the proprietor motions for you to order, you say, "One shio ramen, please," and hand over the money, and figure you can always try the spicy one later, if you want.
The girl doesn't comment on your choice. You think she's more intent on her food, at first, but then she looks at you sideways.
"Most grown-ups tell me to go home, at this time of night," she tells you, and crams another mouthful into her cheek. It's lopsided and hamster-like; you recognise the look, from your own high-school days. Food is good, and important, and when you get it you want to consume it all at once, even if that's not good for you, or practical, or frugal.
"I'm not going to tell you not to eat," you tell her, and it's true, because you remember being a teenager, and you remember being hungry. "And so long as you're safe - well. It's not my business."
She hums - takes another overlarge bite. "Well, thanks, Shio-san," she says. "I can't say I mind adults checking up on me. But I've got my own parents, y'know? And they wouldn't let me get hurt. 'Sides, I'm old enough to take care of myself."
She looks younger than your husband's students - and you've both had sniffly moments over how small they are. "You are, are you?" you ask, and she wrinkles her nose at you.
"Uh huh. M' gonna be in highschool, soon," she tells you imperiously. "My dad even lets me do the shopping without a list, and I'm old enough to know to stay away from hero fights, *and* I haven't bought my weight in chicken *once* this year. "
A memory blooms in your mind - springtime, cherry blossoms, friends all around you in casual clothes. Laying on the grass, groaning and holding your stomach, conceding defeat to Sero, of all people, in a mochi-eating competition. The indignity of it all. You couldn't look at the little pink sweets for weeks.
"Bought your weight in chicken?" you ask, because it reminds you of being younger, and the girl shrugs.
"I was, like, four. And it sounded like a good idea at the time," she tells you.
The proprietor puts your bowl in front of you; you thank them.
"It always sounds like a good idea," you say, taking your first bite, but she shakes her head.
"Sometimes you have ideas that come out bad from the beginning," she disagrees - twitches - ducks her head over her bowl. Embarrassed, you suppose - or nervous. It's a common enough look, in kids and rescue targets alike.
"You mean like the time one of my friends tried to fight a tanuki in his pyjamas and nearly lost a toe?" you ask, because you've told this story a million times, and no amount of enraged text messages from Bakugō will stop you from bringing it up again.
There's a quiet shuffling noise; you look down, and see the girl scuffing her shoes against the stool. "Maybe," she says; it's quiet, and you turn back to your noodles to leave some space. "I wonder what the tanuki thought about it."
"Oh," you say, and wonder what it must be like, to be a small, angry little creature, bent on rummaging through garbage and not much else. And then, because this feels almost like the sort of conversation Aizawa-sensei trained you to have, too little and too late, you say, "I suppose sometimes things are very biteable."
"They are," the girl agrees. You glance over, again; she's back to eating, as if nothing happened. Or perhaps she's even more enthusiastic than before; it's hard to tell. "Ramen, for one."
You pick up a piece of pork in your chopsticks. It's shiny with soup, little green shavings curling across the top. You put it in your mouth; it's good quality, strong-tasting and just the right sort of soft. "I think ramen's meant to be eaten, though," you point out. "So that doesn't count, because you're meant to do it."
"Ehh." The girl snickers to herself. "Ramen can't talk, you know. Maybe it feels pain, or something. Maybe we'll find out, sometimes in the future, that ramen's alive, and then we won't be able to eat it anymore."
It's a morbid thought, but... "People eat all sorts of things that can feel pain, at some point," you point out. "There's people who eat live octopus, you know. Or boil crabs straight from the tank. That kind of thing."
She frowns at you. "Well, yeah," she says. "But *we* wouldn't do that. Right?"
She's almost pouting at you. It's an adorable sort of peer pressure that you really don't need, as a woman in your thirties, but you do agree with the sentiment, so you nod around your mouthful. She looks smug; you send a quick apology to whichever adult she turns her frown on next.
It's silent, for a moment. Your ramen is good. Not how you remember shio ramen from a stand tasting, not quite; but it's been a long time, and it's good.
"You know, you look kinda familiar," the girl tells you, and tilts her head, like a bird investigating a pile of seeds. "Have I seen you before, Shio-san?"
You're out of uniform. It's basic policy; and you love your job, really, but the hours are long even without getting pulled into unpaid overtime, and everyone knows what you look like, in your suit or in marketable business-casual, so you've taken to dressing differently, when you don't have the public's eyes on you. It was a frustrating decision to make, the choice to separate Uravity-san and Uraraka Ochako by more than just a timesheet, but one that had to be made, nonetheless (and you think you understand All Might - Yagi-sensei - now). So you just shrug, and admit, "You might have. I do a lot of public work. People take videos of me, sometimes."
The girl's eyes sparkle. They're a light brown, you think, but under the sodium-yellow night-time glow they look more like honey. "Oh, that sounds fun," she tells you. "I've always wanted to be on camera, like that. Is it? Fun, I mean?"
You put your egg in your mouth; chew it while you think of your answer. It's warm and tender, the yolk buttery and smooth. Just a little thing, but they were always a treat, growing up, and you make sure to savour it, every time. "Sometimes," you tell her, and it's the truth. "Sometimes it's fun, or - or I'm just happy, being there."
Giving high-fives to toddlers is fun. Going to galas is fun. Successfully mitigating disaster, smiling at telling the cameras that everyone will be okay, is - not fun, but good, and that's close enough, when it comes to gainful employment.
The girl hums to herself, the sound loud in the midnight silence. "Only sometimes?" she asks.
Pulling the dead from the rubble is not fun. Being interrogated on your love life is not fun. Being accosted by tabloid reporters, sixteen years young, staring into the depths of endless bowls full of salt-water while they peddle accusations about people they can't understand, *won't* understand -
"Do you regret it?" The girl asks you. Her bowl is empty - she must have finished it, in the time you were staring at yours. There's little drops of red, around her mouth and smeared onto her lips and even on the tip of her nose, although her blouse and scarf seem to have escaped unscathed. She swings her legs, white socks below a pleated blue skirt.
"No," you tell her. "I don't regret it. Not for a moment."
She grins at you. Her teeth are very straight, and very shiny. "That's good!" she chirps. "I've always thought - too many people live their lives with regrets, you know? It's better to be who you want to be. Adults forget that, a lot."
You drain your bowl, all in one go. You got a lot of practice at it, in your last years of highschool; you're pleased to know you've still got it. "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
She laughs. "I don't know!" she tells you, and she sounds overjoyed at it. "But I've got time to find out, and - I know this, Shio-san. I want to love people, and I want to be loved - so I think I'm off to a good start, don'tcha think?"
She bounces off her seat; spins around on her toes. You can't help but smile at her, but it's not like you didn't want to, anyway. "I guess you are," you tell her, and she glows.
"Will you remember me, Shio-san? I know you probably meet people every day, but - I'll be on those cameras, with you, one day. Can you remember me, for when I meet you again?"
"You don't even know my job, or my name," you warn her - but she just laughs, again.
"Well," she tells you, "My name's Shinko Asuka - that's Asuka with a "mind", not with a "bird", okay! So now you know me. And you're Shio-san - so I know you! That's enough, right?"
It's so endearingly childish. When was the last time you met someone, just for brief moments, and remembered them forever?
She has a wide smile. It makes her eyes crinkle up and glitter in the lamplight, the same way it glitters off her spiky little pigtails. Firmly into teenhood - it's a little old for pigtails, really, but they suit her.
You know exactly when the last time you remembered someone forever was.
"Okay," you tell her. "I'll remember you, Asuka-kun. When we meet again."
She cheers, and skips up to you, and throws a hug around you. It's a tight squeeze - and then she's bounding off down the road, vanishing into the darkness before you can say goodbye. Flighty. It's almost an achievement, really. You haven't lost track of someone so easily in years.
"She's a good kid," the proprietor says quietly, and you turn to look at them. Their expression is - vague. Hard to read, like smoke in the wind. "She..."
They trail off, thoughtfully. Like they're grasping for a word they can't quite reach.
"She has potential," they settle on, eventually. A hand reaches out, picking up one of her discarded bowls; washes it clean, polishes it with a dishcloth until there's nothing left of the stains.
"They all do," you tell them.
They incline their head - or maybe it's all of them that moves. "Maybe," they say. "But I'm fond of this one."
Shio ramen is salty, but you can only taste everything else; meat and eggs and greenery.
"I can see why," you say. They don't smile - you don't know if they can - but something pleased emanates from them.
You turn away, to look up at the sky. It's dark and scattered with stars, all the way down to the shadows snuggled between the buildings and laid across the roads. A flash sparks across the sky, and you don't know if it's a hero or a stray meteor. You make a wish, anyway; the same wish you've always made, since you were sixteen.
You thank the proprietor, and hand them a tip, and walk off in the opposite direction to Asuka. You wonder, idly, if the girl would approve of your wish, and then the ramen store has vanished, and you let the darkness swallow you up.