Chapter Text
It started at 23:42, with a notification.
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Momo Yaoyorozu liked to keep up to date on current affairs, something that would be invaluable once she became a pro hero, but this notification took a lot longer for her to get around to. It was about two days after the Sports Festival and she had just finished re-watching her fight footage for the umpteenth time when it caused her phone to vibrate suddenly, which in turn caused her to fall off her chair with an undignified yelp.
Scrambling to her knees, she glanced at her phone, only to catch sight of the time. It was late, and she suddenly became aware of the fact that she hadn't washed her hair since the morning of the Sports Festival. The notification could wait; she needed to shower.
Momo picked up her phone from her desk and tossed it face down onto her bed before stretching and walking to her bathroom, her mouth opened for a yawn as she shut the door behind her.
Stepping out of the shower a few minutes later, hair and body wrapped in towels, she went to get her pyjamas when she remembered the notification from her news app. She reached for her phone and watched as the screen lit up in her favourite colours, displaying the notification on a plain-looking banner that—
The phone fell from her hand.
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Mitsuki Bakugou grinned at her son as he stomped through the house with much more force than was necessary. His face was the very picture of unpleasant, but if Mitsuki knew her son at all, then she knew he had a good day out with his friend—what was he called? Kirishima? Katsuki had endearing insults for them all, she thought, didn't he call Kirishima "shitty hair?" She smirked to herself, satisfied that, as much as he denied it, her son had good friends.
"Have a good time, brat?" she called after him.
There was a pause, then a couple more stomps, then a "Shut up, hag!" which Mitsuki took to mean that yes, he did, and smiled to herself.
She was sitting on the couch, watching some dumb show on the TV, waiting for him to get home. Now that he'd arrived, she flipped it to the news and cranked up the volume; she knew that Katsuki liked to keep up to date, as much as he insisted he didn't care, and the walls in their house weren't very soundproof. Katsuki took great pleasure in complaining about that fact, saying: "If I hear you fucking while I'm in the house I'll blow both your shitty asses to the next prefecture!" To which Mitsuki howled like a hyena, and Masaru turned a light shade of pink.
The news that night wasn't very interesting, just some reruns of the Sports Festival and the usual hero updates and politics, when her boring news was interrupted by a scene outside Endeavour's house.
Mitsuki frowned. The number two hero hadn't done anything particularly noteworthy lately, so why was "that fucker," as her son so eloquently called him, on TV? And wasn't his son—"half 'n' half" to Katsuki—in the final round of the Sports Festival against her own? She glanced at the headline just as the reporter on screen read it out loud and—
She dropped the remote and it clattered unceremoniously onto her coffee table, matching her son's thunderous footsteps as he stormed out of the house and, in his shock and anger, forgot to slam the door behind him.
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Izuku Midoriya liked to walk at night. He liked the cool air on his skin and the slight rush it gave him to be alone, yet not alone, as he walked through his favourite streets, lit up by store fronts and the headlights of the few cars still out.
Glancing at his phone, he saw the time and began to descend into a slight panic. His mum said to be home by eleven thirty! She was probably worrying now, he thought, firing off a quick text to tell her he'd lost track of time but that he was okay and on his way home.
He crossed the street as fast as he could, checking for what little life there might be. About two streets away from his house, he caught sight of distinctive red and white hair in the window of the electronics shop on a majority of the TVs.
"Why's Todoroki on TV? Did Endeavour do something?" he muttered, stepping closer to read the headline and then—
Izuku went stiff, feeling the heat rise up in his face and tears break from his eyes and race down his cheeks. This couldn't be true.
He heard a door open, a bell ringing in tandem with the sound, and the owner of the shop stuck her head out.
"Sir?" she questioned, standing up taller. "Are you alright? You've been standing there for about five minutes, and I need to close up now."
Izuku turned to her, well aware that his face didn't look anywhere near alright, with tear tracks crusty down his cheeks and eyes as red as—
"No, I don't—I don't think I'm okay, I—" He choked on the sob that rose in his throat, bending double and hacking out a disgusting amount of saliva. "I didn't know."
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Shouta Aizawa felt boredom creep into the corners of his mind as he slouched in his chair, feet propped up on the desk in a manner that his Class Representative would scold him for, even if he was a teacher and the Class Rep was a student. There hadn't been much crime for him to stop, just a single pickpocket who got off with a warning, and Shouta knew that this was something to celebrate over; less crime was always a good thing. However, less crime also meant that he no longer had a legitimate reason to stay up, and the urge to sleep was as strong as ever.
Fortunately, he had run into Tsukauchi, who had kindly offered to let him work on some of the cases at the police station for the remainder of his duty which was, thankfully, not long. So here he was, waiting for the detective to arrive with the case files and growing increasingly more bored by the minute.
Suddenly, he was snapped out of his musings by sharp thuds as someone ran towards the door to the room he was currently sitting in. Then, the door shot open and in came Detective Tsukauchi in a flurry of paper, looking more than a bit rattled.
Shouta sat up, noting the scared and sad look that crossed his friend's face as he dropped the files on the desk and sat himself down, head in his hands, not bothering to close the door. Shouta leaned over to him, resting a hand on his back and frowning.
"What happened?"
Tsukauchi sighed, rubbing his temples and shaking his head before looking up at Shouta. Shouta was terribly, desperately afraid of that look.
"What happened, Tsukauchi." It wasn't a question, that time.
And Tsukauchi, with what looked like all the weight of the world on his shoulders and all the pain of a broken heart in his eyes, told him exactly what he didn't want to know, before—
Shouta's own hands met his face. He didn't move for a long, long time.
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Rei Todoroki was sitting in her room, TV on to act as background noise, staring out of her window. Today, she was going to see Shouto again, and he was going to tell her about his classmates, like he'd promised last time. She was overjoyed that he was coming to see her after all this time, but she couldn't blame him. She's not sure she wouldn't have done the same, had their positions been reversed, but they were trying their best to move on now that they were ready to, and she could only hope it would go well.
The TV flickered and she brought her gaze over to the screen to see—
Rei screamed, and the hospital staff came running, but there was nothing they could do.
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The next morning, in every city in Japan, there would be only one headline in the newspapers that anyone cared about.
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PRO HERO ENDEAVOUR CAUSES DEATH OF SON SHOUTO IN TRAINING EXERCISE GONE WRONG
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Somewhere in Kamino, blue flames burned as loudly as the scream that followed them into the sky.