Say what you will about the indignity of getting wet or getting mud in your shoes-when you needed it, rain was really good at filling in awkward silences. In its own way, the obnoxious pat, pat, pat on the windows drew her out of her own head, for once, and at no better moment, either. Right now, her head was a shitshow in a sold out theater nestled snugly at the corner of Panic and Sadness.

Unfortunately, the side effect of this is that, not being preoccupied with her own internal breakdown, she was left to ponder the turbulent emotions of the other girl in the room. And suddenly, her brain's encore performance of Julie Screwed the Pooch was far more appealing. She couldn't possibly imagine what was going through Mary's head right now.

No, wait, scratch that. She could totally imagine it. She could imagine every single response she could possibly make now that she'd really screwed the pooch. Now that everything was out in the open and up in the air. Now that she knew.

"Julia, you're my best friend, and I'm flattered, really, but I just...don't see you that way."

"Julia, I...please, don't take this the wrong way, but I need some time, to...process things. Okay?"

"Well, I was going to tell you that me and Justin are officially dating now, but on second thought, let's talk about this."

She doubted the last one very much-it seemed rather uncharacteristic of Mary to say something like that-but at this point, she'd sunk back into her own head, where the cast of JStP was hard at work acting out every scene, one by one, as the orchestra plays solemnly in the background.

She wanted to take it back. More than anything. She wanted to grab a time machine and travel back to exactly one minute and twenty-seven seconds ago, and force her past self to keep her heart stuffed tightly in her chest where it couldn't hurt anyone. Where it couldn't hurt her. Or, at least, not make things hurt any more. Her eyes bored into the floor so intensely she was half convinced it would melt underneath her feet, and she'd be able to fall right through, down into the kitchen and into the basement and punching through the ground, down down down, until she either melted in a pool of magma or came out upside down at the bottom of an ocean trench somewhere off the coast of Africa. Boiling alive, drowning, being crushed like a tin can-it was all preferable to having to look up into Mary's eyes as she drove a stake into her heart once and for all.

"Julia."

There it was. That hesitant "Julia." The moment where her hopes died and whatever would be left of that weirdly wonderful friendship she'd managed to maintain for three years would become little more than a hollow shell of its former self. She braced herself and balled up her fists ever so slightly, as if preparing to punch her own emotions.

For a moment, Mary was silent. For one drawn out, agonizing moment, the rain brought Julia back out of her head, while Mary tried several times to start a sentence.

"Julia," she said again, as if she'd been re-winded like a tape recorder. "I..."

"Jiro? What are you doing-we're going to be late!"

Hagakure's habitually loud voice cut through Jiro's introspection like a knife, and she glanced up from her laptop at the common area's clock to find that she had been staring at what she'd written so far for the last ten minutes.

"Crap! Coming!" she said, hurriedly setting her laptop onto the ottoman and gathering her backpack off of the couch as she stumbled out of the common area, Hagakure waiting patiently nearby.

"What was so important you had to retreat to the couch immediately after finishing breakfast?" Hagakure asked, prodding as she usually did on just about any subject.

"Just...typing up an email."

If Jiro could see her, she'd tell Hagakure was raising an eyebrow at her, but the invisible girl decided not to press the subject.

As Hagakure chatted on about whatever popped into her head, Jiro thought about Julia and Mary. What was she going to say? What did she want her to say? What would she say in that situation?

Of course, she knew the general course of how she wanted Mary to respond-that she cared for Julia right back. That Justin, no matter how hot and supposedly cool he was, didn't hold quite the same place in her heart. The problem lied in getting from Point A-Julia Screwed the Pooch-to Point B-Julia and Mary-in a way that makes sense and doesn't seem wildly out of character.

Jiro had to chuckle at that. Mary already made up with Justin and got together with him by the end of the book-just thinking about anyone else that way would be out of character, technically. Not that that was stopping her-nothing would convince her that that ending wasn't a major let-down. Of course, the same wasn't quite true for Julia. Jiro had seen the hints all throughout the novel, as had many others. Her crush on Mary was practically canon.

As they walked out of the dorms, however, Jiro scolded herself for allowing her mind to wander. She could think about all of this later-for now, she had to focus on her schoolwork. With that in mind, she put all thoughts of Julia and Mary aside and walked briskly to class, although she couldn't shake the feeling that she had forgotten to pack something important.

Izuku sighed as he and Bakugou began another long day of cleaning up the communal spaces, in what had become their daily routine following an ill-advised, yet perhaps well overdue, brawl between them. He walked about the common area, picking up various scraps and bits of trash from the other students' breakfast, wondering about what new and exciting things they were probably going to learn in class. Without question, he was going to be behind, and he hated himself with every second he lost.

He had been ruminating on this for quite some time when a large device caught his eye, evidently having been left open on the ottoman for a few minutes. It obviously belonged to one of the students, but not recognizing it immediately, he lightly tapped the trackpad, causing the screen to open immediately to the page it had last been on.

A quick inspection of the status icon in the bottom left corner would have revealed that this was, in fact, Jiro's laptop. However, his eyes couldn't help but be drawn to the document sitting squarely in the center of the screen. After a few seconds of letting the words on the page flow through his head, a loud noise brought him out of his enchantment.

"Oi! Deku! What is that?" Bakugou called out from the other side of the room, causing Izuku to jolt slightly.

"I think somebody left their laptop!" Izuku replied hastily, sweating nervously as he considered the ramifications of what he had just done.

Bakugou didn't seem to notice or care about Izuku's change in tone. "Do you know whose it is?"

"N-no," he answered.

Bakugou shrugged. "Just leave it there, then. We've got too much shit to clean up to worry about some idiot's missing laptop."

"A-are you sure? I could probably just take it up to their room-"

"Not if it's locked and you don't know whose it is," Bakugou replied, already walking away and muttering under his breath. "Dumbass."

Izuku gulped nervously before walking away from the couch and, with difficulty, returning to the task at hand. He had a feeling that, regardless of how awkward it may be, apologizing to...whoever it was preemptively would be better off in the long run compared to them approaching him later. Thus, he steeled himself to face the music upon his classmates' return.

Jiro half-walked, half-stumbled into the common area, exhausted by another long class day now that the second semester had gone into full swing. Her thoughts were occupied both by a longing for a late afternoon nap and the desire for all homework to be abolished forever. However, after a moment her thoughts returned to her work, and how, with another ten or twenty minutes in her room, she was certain to find the right line to keep things moving. She walked over to the couch, remembering that she had left the laptop open on the ottoman.

Then stopped when she saw that the laptop was closed.

"What the...? I-I left it there open. Why would it-?" She thought as her eyes widened.

Somebody had opened it.

Of course, without her password, after a certain amount of time nobody would be able to just access it simply by opening it. "But," she reasoned, "If they did it just a few minutes after we left..."

Her eyes snapped onto Bakugou and Izuku, who slumped down onto the couch after having finally cleaned out every inch of the other communal spaces in the facility. By sheer coincidence, Izuku had been idly glancing towards the area while Bakugou was looking away as he chatted with Kirishima. Both teens' eyes widened upon meeting the other, before settling into quiet fury on her end and panic on his.

Suddenly, facing the music seemed a lot less appealing.

Without wasting a second, Izuku got up and walked towards the exit just as Jiro fell into step behind him, both of them virtually unnoticed as the other students chatted or retreated to their rooms. Upon reaching the door, Jiro asked, "Got somewhere to be?" as casually as she could manage under the circumstances.

"Ha ha, yeah! Uh, Aizawa-sensei wanted us to turn in an apology for our fight the other night, so..." Izuku let the answer hang, sweating profusely as Jiro's calm facade obscured the eyes he could feel burning a hole in his soul.

"Heh. Left my phone in homeroom. Guess we're heading the same way, huh?" she replied amiably.

"G-guess so!" he replied, knowing she was lying yet unsure of what else to say.

As Izuku chuckled nervously and reached for the door handle, Jiro subtly wrapped one of her jacks around his wrist, squeezing it to let him know that he had no hope of escape. Izuku gulped, making it clear that he got the message, and Jiro swiftly released him. Without another word, Izuku and Jiro walked out the door, Jiro taking the lead as Izuku could only follow behind, dreading every second that passed as it drew him closer to experiencing her wrath.

After a few minutes, the pair had looped around to the garbage disposal area, where they could not be expected to attract attention from any of the other students. Jiro crossed her arms and stared Izuku down with that same gaze of quiet fury. Whatever calm he'd managed to maintain on the outside shattered in an instant.

"So."

"I'm really sorry I was just cleaning the lounge and I saw the laptop and I didn't know whose it was so I opened it to check what came up with the login page and then it was unlocked and I saw the story and it was really good and I'm sorry I'll do whatever you want me to just please don't hurt me!" By the end of it, he held his arms out in front of his face and seemed to be on the edge of tears.

Jiro shifted her head backwards somewhat in surprise. "Wow. I knew he was kind of a crybaby, but jeez." She also couldn't deny getting a kick out of how a guy who apparently kicked the shit out of Bakugou and somewhat regularly picked fights with some of the most dangerous people in Japan was this scared of her. Nevertheless, she felt bad.

"Whoa, dude. Relax."

Izuku lowered his arms ever so slightly as he looked into her eyes apprehensively. "Wait, so...you're not going to strangle me with your jacks? Or punch me in the face?"

Jiro sighed. "To be honest, I was thinking about punching you. Really, really hard. But, after...that...it just feels wrong. Like, 'kicking a puppy' levels of wrong." As Izuku began blushing profusely, her cold stare relaxed into one of extreme irritation, and Izuku allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief. "I'm still really frickin pissed, though," she cautioned.

"Oh, of course!"

"Like, extremely."

"Yeah, I understand."

"You totally invaded my privacy!"

"Again, I'm really, really sorry!"

"If you tell anyone, it's your ass. Got it?"

"Of course! I'd never do something like that!"

"Figured, but, you know-"

"Can't be too careful. I get it."

"Right."

"Y-yeah."

"...Okay."

The two settled into a tense silence, Jiro weighing what had just occurred and Izuku still not entirely certain he wasn't going to get hurt, before Jiro thought back to the earlier confession, and found herself asking a question without thinking.

"You really thought it was good?"

Izuku was caught off guard for a second, but nodded genuinely.

"Y-yeah. I did. F-from what I read, anyway. I only had a few seconds, but like, the part that I saw at the end was-"

"Okay, stop. I get it," Jiro replied with a chuckle. If it was out in the open, she figured, she might as well have some fun with it.

"I didn't think you had such a wide vocabulary, to be quite honest."

Jiro chuckled. "Heh, yeah. Seemed to come naturally."

"I-is it an original work, or...?"

"Hm? Oh, uh, no. It's, uh...based on a book," Jiro answered sheepishly. "Didn't like the ending." "Or the author's social media feed," she added to herself. "Yikes."

"Oh, so it's a fanfiction? Neat!"

Jiro couldn't stop herself from blushing a bit. "You...you don't think that's...weird?"

Surprisingly, Izuku looked back at her with a dry expression so similar to the look she got when talking to Kaminari or Sero sometimes that it was almost like looking at herself in the mirror.

"Say, you want to take a look at my hero notebooks? One of them's kinda wet and burnt, but the previous twelve are still in perfect condition," Izuku replied sarcastically.

Jiro had to burst into laughter at that. "Okay, okay! Point taken! Jeez!"

Izuku chuckled for a bit before continuing. "You know, I'm thinking of getting another one, actually. Writing about all of you guys, Class B, and the faculty has left me barely any room to write about all those new people from the exam."

"Wait, all of us?" Jiro raised an eyebrow. "I thought you just stuck to the people with interesting Quirks."

"All of your Quirks are interesting," Izuku replied before blushing slightly.

Jiro chuckled, but she could feel a slight tingling sensation along her cheeks. "Okay, now I'm really curious."

"Wait...you actually want to see them?" Izuku asked timidly, holding his arm.

"Yeah. They sound...kinda interesting," Jiro replied with a small smile. "Weird, but interesting."

"Hm..." Izuku muttered, thinking for a second before asking, "Will you let me read the rest of your fanfiction if I let you read my notebooks?"

Jiro's cheeks reddened further. "Y-you seriously want to read the rest of it?"

"Yeah! I'm already invested, and I don't even know who Julia and Mary are," Izuku replied, grinning.

Jiro found herself blushing even more, yet still managed a slight chuckle. "Only the most adorable couple in the universe."

Izuku chuckled and smiled back at her. "Well, I'll be happy to read all about it. Share it with me?"

Jiro paused for a moment. On the one hand, she hadn't intended on sharing what she was writing with anyone. It was all little more than a coping mechanism. A comforting fantasy she could lose herself in, knowing that it'd never happen in her actual life. Or, at least, that's how it had started before crossing the 30k word mark. And becoming progressively more fluffy and embarrassing with every finished chapter.

But on the other hand...he genuinely seemed interested. And he'd already proven twice over that he wasn't going to make fun of her for it, or consider her weird. He just wasn't that kind of person. Plus...hearing that it was actually good made her heart flutter for some odd reason. She didn't quite know how she'd describe it, but she knew one thing for certain: she liked it. A lot.

"Sure thing," she replied with a smile.

For a moment, Mary was silent. For one drawn out, agonizing moment, the rain brought Julia back out of her head, while Mary tried several times to start a sentence.

"Julia," she said again, as if she'd been re-winded like a tape recorder. "I..."

Jiro looked over the paragraph thoughtfully as she sat within the comforts of her dorm room. She could hear Hagakure snoring from across the hall, which told her that she was just about the only person awake in the entire building. She looked about the room idly before resting onto Hero Analysis For the Future #13, left open to her entry. She picked up its slightly worn pages and examined the two pages devoted to her-the full body illustration of her in her original costume, as well as the accompanying text about her Quirk and its capabilities.

"You know, he really is a good artist," she mused as she examined the illustrations. Apparently he drew it in around ten minutes, and yet it looked remarkably well detailed for what it was. To her amusement, he even noted in the illustration next to her wrists that "She should really place speakers here. Shorter distance from jacks = less time between attacks."

Chuckling to herself, she decided to return to her work, and stared at the words for a good couple of minutes. She looked down at her phone to where Izuku had texted his suggestions, once he'd gotten a small sampling of her work. One in particular caught her eye.

Have her interrupt in the confession scene. Makes for a more dramatic scene that way.

"Hm..." she mused to herself for a few seconds before inspiration struck. She got it.

In that moment, amidst the ever-present show in her head and the sound of the raindrops, Julia made a decision:

She was done bracing herself.

Jiro took a deep breath. What she was going to do next was pretty heavily non-canon(and probably a bit too mean, even for Justin), but, she reasoned, it'd work. She set to work, fully aware that she ought to finish this last chapter as soon as possible lest she wind up with only a few hours of sleep for school tomorrow.

"Julia," she said again, as if she'd been re-winded like a tape recorder. "I..."

"Stop it," Julia interrupted, catching Mary off guard.

"What-?"

"Stop trying to let me down easy," she said, more harshly this time.

"I-I don't understand-"

"Oh, I think you understand just fine!" Julia snapped. "I think we both know you could never be interested in me! I think we both know that you've been crushing on Justin from the moment you two met! Why else would you get so upset when he started dating Jennifer? Why else would you ditch me so you could go to that stupid party at Chris' place? Why else-?!" Her voice hitched unexpectedly as the memories of the last week reared their ugly head. "Why else would you shut me out for so long after the formal?"

Julia felt her eyes beginning to sting, and she hurriedly turned away before wiping her eyes with her sleeve. Mary, meanwhile, looked at her friend in complete and utter disbelief. "I...I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you, I just-"

"Thought Justin deserved your time more than I did," Julia spat at her.

"Julia, you know that's not true!"

Julia took a shaky breath before angling her head to look back at Mary. "Do I? I'm not sure what I know anymore, to be quite honest."

"Julia, stop!"

"For what it's worth, I hope I'm wrong about him," Julia interjected. "You deserve someone who cares about you more than anyone else in the world." She sniffed slightly as she turned away once more. "I don't know why I ever thought that someone could be me."

"Julia!"

Julia held her hand over the doorknob, seconds away from walking out of the room. "Give my best to Justin," she concluded bitterly.

"HE'S GONE!"

The sheer volume of Mary's cry, coupled with the sadness she could so clearly hear in her voice, stopped Julia right in her tracks. After a moment of silence, she turned around, a question on her lips.

"It happened the night of formal," she said, barely above a whisper. "We had been having a nice time-getting to know each other better, dancing together-it all seemed so...perfect. Then...Justin took me along with a few other couples to this motel, out of town."

"...Oh God," Julia said, putting a hand to her mouth.

"I-it was all happening so fast. He'd drunk, like, four beers by the time everything was sorted out. Everyone checked into their rooms, and before I could even say anything, he was..." her voice caught as that horrible night came rushing back to her. "I-I tried to tell him that it was too soon, but he just...laughed at me. Like I was an idiot for not just...letting it happen."

"W-what did you do?" Julia asked, concerned, as if her previous angry outburst had never occurred.

"First thing I thought to do: get out of there as fast as I could," she replied shakily. "I tried calling my mom, but he followed me for a whole block, yelling...all kinds of horrible things." Her voice hitched before returning in a moment. "I wanted to blame it on the alcohol, but...I'd already used that excuse before."

Mary's voice hitched once more, and she stopped as she let the few tears that had begun to pile up roll down her cheeks. "So, I decided I was done. I told him off, and he just...left. I haven't seen him since. As far as I'm concerned, the Justin I cared about is gone. That person calling himself Justin...is someone else entirely."

Julia was left to process everything Mary had told her, unsure how exactly to offer her condolences, yet, in an admittedly ill-considered plan, she decided to try and make light of the situation. "Like, some kind of Dark Justin."

Her eyes widened a second after the words escaped her, and she hurriedly moved to apologize before Mary chuckled. "Or an Evil Justin," she said with a sad smile.

At this, Julia had to chuckle a bit herself. "Bizarro Justin."

Mary laughed. "Mirror Justin!"

Before she knew it, Julia was laughing as well.

"The Anti-Justin!"

"Nitsuj!"

"Nega-Justin!"

"Darth Justin!"

"Justin's evil twin brother, Augustus!"

"Pfft! How did you get 'Augustus?!'"

"I was going for a rhyming name! It didn't work!"

By this point, both girls had fallen into a fit of laughter, timed precisely when both of them just about ran out of alternative names. As their laughter died down, silence seized them once more, and Julia carefully set herself down on the couch next to Mary.

"Look, I...really am sorry you had to go through all of that. And for...jumping to conclusions," Julia said sincerely.

"I know," Mary replied. "And...it's understandable. Honestly, I wanted to tell you sooner. I just...needed some time to...sort some things out."

Julia began to blush slightly. "W-what kinds of 'things'?"

Mary smiled, looking away shyly as her hand slowly came to rest on top of Julia's. Her face practically shifted skin tones into a deep pinkish-red.

"O-oh," she muttered. Mary giggled slightly as Julia got progressively more flustered. "S-so...you...?" she attempted to ask before Mary chuckled again.

"Took a week of soul-searching, but...I'm pretty sure," she replied, blushing slightly in turn.

"Ah. Okay," Julia blurted out, still trying to process everything.

"For the record, you're adorable when you're all flustered like this."

Which, of course, only served to make her even more flustered, to Mary's endless amusement.

"S-shut up!" Julia replied, appearing to wave her away with her arms and only further fueling Mary's laughter.

Although the exchange would continue for some time afterwards, truthfully, Julia was elated, perhaps more than she had ever been in her life. Somehow, against all conceivable odds, a person she liked seemed like she liked her back. It was a feeling far too complex to describe, but at the moment, attempting to do so was the furthest thing from her mind, compared to the desire to keep on feeling it, for as long as possible.

Once Mary's good humor had been more or less exhausted, Julia looked out the window and chuckled to herself. Right in her backyard was a large oak tree, upon which a messy signature had been scrawled and surrounded by a misshapen heart.

"J + M."

Julia sighed in contentedness before Mary's voice brought her out of her trance.

"What are you looking at?"

Julia chuckled.

"Nothing important."

Phew! Finally! This took way longer than a short fic based on a silly premise I thought up in five minutes to break out of writer's block should've taken, lmao.

Idk how exactly it came to my mind to have somebody in Class A write fanfic, but for some reason, having Jiro be that person made a weird sort of sense(especially given this one gag manga strip where she makes up a funny soap opera moment between Bakugou and Iida during the first training exercise). And from there, it just kind of evolved into a cute little Momojiro thing I wrote in my spare time, and the beginning of a small friendship between Jiro and Izuku. From my inspection of the MHA tag here, this site could use some more Momojirou. So, enjoy!

Sorry about the sheer abundance of fanfic pages for this-I know it can seem like a bunch of filler, but I wanted to use it as an opportunity to examine Jiro's writing style as well as demonstrate its value as an outlet for Jiro's feelings. Hopefully I wrote them well enough to not be too detrimental to the overall experience.

That being said, probably not going to make another chapter unless a lot of people are interested-I can see other things happening regarding Jiro and Momo, as well as Jiro and Izuku's friendship-but I feel like this is a solid enough fic on its own. So, let me know what you guys think in the reviews below, as always. Hope you guys have a fantastic night, and take care.