Chapter Text
U.A. High School, birthplace of heroes and the place to which so many heroes returned, was in many ways a hero itself. Everyone looked to it; its place in the city’s skyline was as familiar and unmistakable as the sun, and when the school year began its students were usually emboldened by the way that four-pronged building gleamed like lapis in the daylight, surrounded by its lush gardens. But as the second term ended and the winter air stripped the trees and turned every shadow skeletal, the school, too, seemed to grow gaunt, especially at night, when the sodium-vapor lamps printed their sweltering orange light on the windows. Viewed from a distance, and at the right angle, the school’s towers in that light resembled the barrels of four massive syringes plunged deep into the earth, a dark inoculation against the criminal influences strengthening their grip on society since All Might’s retirement.
And if the school was some kind of vaccine, then it mostly worked for Musutafu City. U.A.’s prestige leaked into everyone’s property values. Most of the neighborhood was shining and pristine, and even in these grimmer days, aspiring villains didn’t feel like pushing their luck anywhere near the school itself. But every neighborhood had its dingier side, the streets which housed the people who had to scrub everything else so clean, and Mosei Ward was one such place. Not a slum by any means, but home to plenty of trash-strewn alleyways where thick tendrils of mist curled and squirmed serpentine, where passersby would sometimes feel unseen eyes on them that only grew more vicious as the sun went down. Many of the heroes assigned to Musutafu centered their patrols in places like these.
So it was for Tarou Chikaze, hero name Kamaitachi, a recent graduate of U.A. itself. His Quirk was called “Breeze” and it was less innocuous than it sounded – moderate control and generation of wind, including the ability to gather it up and fling it out as numerous blades of cutting force. He was a wiry kid, his costume predominantly sky-blue with a cowl and cape specially balanced to catch the updrafts of his winds. He’d been at the job long enough to regret missing the Noumu assault on Hōsu and express quiet relief at missing the League of Villains raid and the recent assault on the Yakuza. He was still strictly a second-stringer and knew it. He was ambitious but humble.
Right now he was sprawled out in an alley, cheek against the pavement, his costume almost glowing in the dingy night. Slowly, he raised a hand and touched the other side of his head. It was warm and wet. Through his swimming vision he saw his fingers come away red.
He struggled back to his feet, breath coming out in white jets. He tried to be sanguine about the whole thing. Couldn’t keep missing out on trouble forever. He’d wind up as a headline if he wasn’t careful now.
The alley was crisscrossed with clotheslines, and the few clothes they still hung up had soaked in the moisture and were limp and still as discarded skins. There was no wind. Nothing moved. He didn’t even feel anyone watching him.
Then, a low scrape. Metal on stone, but from where he couldn’t tell. It was strangely muffled. Maybe he’d suffered some kind of hearing damage after that blow to the head.
“Show yourself,” he said. He didn’t sound very intimidating. He’d never gotten a handle on the authoritative-voice part of the job.
Another scrape. No way to know if closer or further. A needle caught in a record that only played dead air.
Chikaze flung out a hand and the stonework to his side was crosshatched with gashes as the wind howled. He struggled for his phone, to send his location, get backup like he should have had in the first place, but his movements were clumsy and his head was full of fog. The side of his cowl was staining crimson. Finally he got his fingers on the phone, but then there was a hotness on the back of his neck, a great light bursting like a star behind his eyes, and then nothing.
From the mouth of the alley came a series of crunching thuds. They went on for some time. Then they stopped, and there was only Chikaze’s body, left among the surrounding rubbish like a piece of broken bottleglass.
* * *
“How many times do I gotta tell you to walk behind me, goddamn it!?”
Not even strangers on the street turned their heads at that voice anymore. Word got around.
The afternoon sun was hatefully bright and most of the pedestrians in Musutafu’s shopping district had to shade their eyes just to keep from bumping into something, but that didn’t dampen anyone’s spirits any. The place was getting an early start on Christmas decorations as if to defy the recent spate of bad news. Tinsel was in abundance. Trees were delicately frosted. All of it had apparently made Bakugo’s legendarily bad mood even worse.
The procession: Shouto Todoroki leading the group, pointedly ignoring Bakugo’s voice. Bakugo stomping behind him with Kirishima in tow, the latter apologetically smiling at everyone, the former trying to hate-stare a hole through the back of Todoroki’s head. A loose group further behind – Midoriya and Uraraka marveling at the decorations, Kaminari and Mineta glancing down at their phones. And at the very back was Tokoyami, doing his best to look like all of this was beneath him.
“Hey, Icy Hot, I’m talkin’ to you!”
“If you want to walk ahead of me then speed up. I’m not going very fast.”
“Screw that! You slow down, asshole!”
“Really getting into the Christmas spirit, huh, dude?” Kirishima remarked, and then he shut up when Bakugo whirled on him, steam jetting from his nostrils like an overheated boiler.
“Is he like this every year?” Uraraka muttered to Midoriya. “I mean, he’s always like this, but lately it’s just, like, yikes.” No response. “Deku? Earth to Deku!”
He blinked. “Oh. Sorry. Zoned out for a minute.”
“Could’ve fooled me. You weren’t doing that muttering thing.”
“It’s about something different.” He smiled a little and tried to run his hand through the mad tangle of his hair. “Just wondering what to get my mom for Christmas, is all.”
Kaminari butted in. “Hell, dude, if you manage to go a full term without your skeleton exploding I think she’d be plenty happy with that. Saves money, too!”
“Uncouth,” Tokoyami said.
“What? It’s true! He hasn’t messed himself up too bad since that whole thing at summer camp.”
“Will you nerds shut up?” Bakugo growled. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“Pot and kettle much?” Mineta said, not looking up from his phone.
“I’ll pop you like a zit, you goddamn midget!”
Uraraka had a point – Bakugo seemed to be on edge even by Bakugo standards. And none of them needed Midoriya’s brainpower to understand why.
They were headed for Jon-X, a department store in the heart of the district. It had been Uraraka’s idea. She’d said it would help to get ahead of the Christmas shopping and blow off some steam before finals, but in truth it was more like these decorations, an act of defiance against current events. A noose was tightening. The crimes popping up at night still hadn’t been solved and were only getting worse. Aizawa had reluctantly signed off on this little outing provided they stick together, meet curfew, and remain in crowded places. Here the streets were absolutely mobbed, but they all still felt anxious. Kirishima did his best to change the subject.
“Yo, Todoroki, what’re you gonna get? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do anything for fun.”
“I never learned how.”
“Ouch. Harsh.”
“It’s fine. There are a few small things my mother and Fuyumi would like. I have a list.”
“What about dear ol’ dad?” Bakugo sneered, but Todoroki didn’t rise to the challenge.
“There’s a huge sale on hiking boots I gotta get on top of, myself,” Kirishima said. “Me an’ Bakugo are gonna hit the mountains hard soon as the weather thaws, right dude?” Bakugo spat out something unintelligible. “How about you guys in back?”
“Shoes,” Uraraka said. “It’s a cliché, I know.”
“Same, actually,” said Midoriya. Everyone stared. “What? There’s a new model! And I think I’m actually growing out of my old ones.”
“Better hope not,” Bakugo said. “I don’t think they can stack shit any higher.”
“I intend to purchase keychains, mostly,” Tokoyami said, quietly enough so that no one could hear him.
“I’m just window-shopping,” said Kaminari. “I do most of my stuff online anyway. How about you, Mineta?”
“Plebians, all of you.” He kept swiping through his phone, and Kaminari leaned over and saw him going through an exhaustive gallery of pictures he’d taken of girls on the street. “I’m people-watching. Some of us appreciate the finer things in life.” He panned the streets and his eyes lit up. “Ooh, look at that one. We match!”
He raised his phone and took aim at a somewhat disheveled girl with bruise-colored hair and matching overcoat. Kaminari groaned and pinched his nose. Asui was with a bunch of their classmates on a study group set up by Yayorozu and Iida, and the whipcrack of her tongue was sorely missed.
The girl didn’t notice them. She was staring at one of the jumbo TV screens embedded in the panoply of colors on the buildings above. Many others were looking at the same screen.
“-age twenty, was found severely beaten in an alley in the Mosei ward of Musutafu City, home of U.A. Academy. During his time in school, Chikaze was praised as a dedicated if unassuming student, and had already begun to amass a small fanbase despite his brief tenure. He remains in critical condition.”
The newscast flashed Chikaze’s graduation photo – broad smile, handsome features, if slightly rodentine. None of them had known him, but then they hadn’t had much of a chance to meet any U.A. graduates anyway.
“God damn, another?” Kaminari said. “This is like the eighth one so far.”
“The tenth,” said Tokoyami. “This is becoming untenable.”
“The police had no comment. However, Osamu Nakayama of the Ministry of Individuality offered the following statement.”
The screen now flipped to show a man who could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty, face weathered but curiously unlined, tousled black hair, hands folded in front of him but twitching like a pair of trapped birds. He spoke eloquently but his voice was a strange faint rasp, like a burlap sack dragged across the dirt.
“I want to offer my sincerest condolences to U.A. Academy for their recent tribulations,” said the man, “and express my full confidence that the criminal or criminals responsible for these attacks will be brought to justice. While neither the Hero Association nor the police have reached out to us – quite understandably, in my opinion – I wish for them to know that our door, so to speak, is always open. It is my hope that, in these uncertain times, a new kinship between heroes and the State may yet be born. We are prepared to offer assistance with any resources we can muster.”
“So it’s true,” Midoriya mused. “The M.o.I. really is making a comeback.”
“Who’re these guys again?” Kaminari asked. “I remember them coming up as an extra-credit question on an exam once, but it stumped me then, too.”
Todoroki cut in. “Back when Quirks were still in their fledgling state, the government created a new division responsible for their study and regulation, the Ministry of Individuality. The law against using Quirks in public, for example – that’s enforced by the police, but it was initially proposed and drafted by the M.o.I. Over time their responsibilities shifted to the police force and the Hero Public Safety Commission, and when All Might showed up they all but disappeared entirely. Looks like they’re on the rise again, now that All Might has fallen. I haven’t seen this Nakayama before.”
“I have,” said Midoriya. “I mean, not on TV. But he’s been their head for a while now.”
“Greasy prick,” Bakugo snapped.
“I don’t know, he seems nice,” Uraraka said hesitantly. “At least he’s trying to be helpful, right?”
The unspoken answer: And we might need the help.
It had started a month ago. A jewelry store had exploded in the dead of night, scattering its pieces across the street in brilliant constellations. No char marks or any other sign of an actual explosive; the building had simply detonated like an overfilled balloon. The first hero victim had been found a few days later, to be joined by nine others, all of them artlessly bludgeoned into unconsciousness but with no recollection of the attacker. Some of them were still in the hospital. Some of them didn’t know when they would leave.
And then there was the third thing. None of them liked to talk about it. Even the news didn’t dwell on it for very long. As though it was some kind of curse, so that speaking of it would draw its attention. The smashed windows and the charred and pitted brickwork. The gibbering in the streets. The sirens screaming into the dark.
A few members of Class 1A had insisted that they be allowed to investigate these happenings like they had with the Yakuza incident earlier than year. Bakugo, as usual, had been the loudest and sweariest among them. But Aizawa had shut them down hard.
“If you think running after villains is more important than your education at this school, then speak up now so I can expel you and do us both a favor,” he’d said. “While events this year might have given you the wrong impression, U.A. still exists to protect its students, not the other way around.”
No one had spoken up. Bakugo had quietly fumed, his knuckles clenched white at his desk. And ever since then he’d been even more sullen and snappish than usual.
“Come on, sweetheart, turn this way,” Mineta whispered. “Little more…just a little more…”
He was still taking photos. The girl glanced their way, and he managed to squeeze off one more before Kaminari grabbed him by the ear and pulled him along. Other people looked their way as they walked. Not all of the stares were friendly.
“I’m kind of starting to regret going out like this,” Uraraka said, pulling her coat around her.
“These crimes have been committed under U.A.’s watchful eye,” Tokoyami said. “It is understandable that the populace would harbor some resentment.”
Bakugo spat. “Fuck ‘em.”
“Mr. Aizawa’s been looking even more strung out than usual, I know that much,” said Kirishima. “I don’t really blame him for popping off on us like that, but come on, we’ve done more work than like half the teachers this year. It’s like, put me in, Coach.”
“When Kacchan got captured it seemed like everyone was going after U.A.,” Midoriya said, and ignored the muffled scream from Bakugo. “But after All Might and All for One fought, public opinion of us actually evened out for a while. Maybe because everyone was waking up to how serious the villains’ threat really was. This feels like an escalation. Striking as close to U.A. as they possibly can.”
“Poking our eye, basically,” Kaminari volunteered.
“Tweaking our nipple,” Mineta contributed.
“It’s a fool’s errand in any case,” said Todoroki. “The dragnet here is very wide and sifts very fine. Whoever’s doing this can’t stay hidden for much longer, even if they’re affiliated with the League of Villains.”
“Why don’t you tell that to the D-lister on the news today.” Bakugo spat again. “Bet it’d be a real load off his mind.”
No one could muster a reply to that.
Their spirits had dampened by the time they got to Jon-X, but the place’s décor perked them up again some – the store was four tiers high and glittered like the inside of a geode. The greeters smiled and bowed. Kirishima smiled back and waved. Kaminari deftly shoved Mineta’s phone back in his pocket.
They elbowed through the crowd until they reached the escalators and entered a huddle, Uraraka setting the timer on her phone.
“So the rule is for us to stick together, so I guess we’d better keep in pairs at least. Deku, we’re both basically looking for the same things. I can. Go. With you. Maybe?”
“Yeah. That sounds. Uh. Good.”
They’d both flushed around the collar. Kaminari and Mineta sniggered.
“Me n’ Bakugo’ll head off ourselves,” Kirishima said. “Anyone wanna come with?”
“You try and I’ll kill you,” Bakugo said.
“He won’t actually do that, no worries.”
“I’ll just stick with Mineta,” said Kaminari. “Make sure he doesn’t get collared by security for…y’know. Being the way he is.”
“That leave us,” Todoroki said to Tokoyami. “Want to come with? Sorry, but I’m not shopping for anything terribly interesting.”
“Er. Yes. That sounds reasonable.” He scratched the side of his beak and stole a nervous glance at the Darth Chic on the third floor. “I, too, have mundane tastes.”
“Meet back here in two hours or so, then.” Uraraka started the clock. “Okay, break. And Bakugo, try not to assault anyone.”
Bakugo threw a molten glare her way as she turned and left with the others.
“This is such bullshit,” he muttered.
“Why’d you want to come in the first place, man? I figured it’d help you blow off steam. Doesn’t seem to be working.”
“I ain’t gotta blow off steam! I’m calm as hell!”
“Yeah, sure. Exactly as calm as hell. What’re you looking at now?”
He’d turned back to the frosted wall of glass that made up the building’s front doors, squinting hard. Kirishima followed his gaze and saw nothing there. The crowd chattered and seethed and checked their phones. Christmas music seeped through the speakers. Everyone was smiling.
“Forget it.” Bakugo turned on his heel. “Let’s get going already. And you’d better walk behind-”
Something was wrong.
The light had changed. The sunny bulbs off all that glass. It was dim and gray and slanted. The world was slanted. The world was sideways. His face pressed against shattered linoleum. Warmth trickling down his skin. Teeth full of grit. The air was solid with dust. Sunlight where it shouldn’t be. Slanted and sideways. Through the holes that hadn’t been there. He couldn’t hear. Couldn’t hear.
All through his skull a singing. A high ringing note. The explosions he made sometimes rattled his bones but this sound was insufferable, it filled him to the brim. He wanted to crack his skull open and let it drain out. He tried to stand and couldn’t. Too hard to breathe. Kirishima over him like a planetoid, coat ripped, hair patinaed with grime, his skin cracked and hardened, screaming desperately in words he couldn’t hear. Bakugo shoved him aside and staggered upright and fell to his knees.
The department store was cracked like an egg. Bodies motionless and scattered like the baubles from the shopfronts, the ground a minefield of broken glass. As the ringing in his ears abated the screams and sobs came through like the sunlight through the newly ripped holes in the building’s façade. Everything gone gray with dust.
Not everything. As he lurched forward he saw. Past the spasming and sparking escalators the roof had caved in. Concrete taking quite a tumble. Uraraka there on her knees, screaming and clawing at the rocks. Bakugo stopped, wracked with tinnitus, eyes bloodshot and watering, and saw Midoriya’s shoes sticking out from the fallen masonry, bright as splotches of blood.
* * *
Mosei again. Nightfall again. It had happened again.
These scenes, marking the streets like obscene graffiti: flashing police siren-light pooling in the marks on apartment walls, gouged out, blown out, cracked with clawmarks or pocked with what looked like ball-bearings fired out at a great velocity. A street corner frozen solid, ice hanging from a lamp like a roosting bat. Windows shattered inward. Windows shattered outward. Fires burning through windows, their witchlight printing the ground. The sirens called and called. Two children shuddering beneath blankets, one of them charred all along half their body and the other with their cheek torn open. A man lying on his back as if stargazing, his face all red. A woman being guiding to a squad car, shivering and pale, hands grasping at something unseen.
Through these tableaus walked a figure, face hidden beneath the furred hood of a parka pulled low. In its arms was bundled something sleeping. Its step was unhurried and steady. It went unnoticed by all. At one point it passed a running officer close enough for the sleeves of their coats to brush together but the officer didn’t slow or glance behind. People wandered bloody through the ruin as if waking from awful dreams. The trespasser let them be.
The bundle in its arms stirred and moaned and it stopped and rocked it until it quieted. The trespasser stole a glance behind, taking in the devastation. The wind blew and carried the smell of iron and char. It inhaled deep. Then it was gone, and there were only the sirens, their senseless howls trailing up into the night sky.