Chapter Text
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The sun burns the air, bleaching the sky. The haze frames the silhouettes of two men standing on an overlook in the shade of a cliff. The disused road behind them sits half-buried in silt that will swallow it entirely one of these years.
No one has stood here for decades.
The taller of the two moves, breaking the regimented stillness to dig through his breast pocket. He’s broad-shouldered, dressed in a crisp black suit. Unremarkable. Immaculate.
“Smoke?” he offers.
The one beside him couldn't be more different—slouched and slight. Disheveled, compared to the man in black.
This man blinks like a drugged animal, staring through wild bangs at the offered cigarettes. It's a long while before he turns away again.
“Suit yourself.”
It isn’t an inherently cruel statement, but it stings somehow. Salt in the wound. Bile and despair rise in his throat to the gritty schwick of the other man’s lighter. The road quavers where it meets the sky.
He thinks of Fried parameters and atmospheric seeing; stars that flicker as flames bend reality. Asphalt writhing like snakes.
Sweat prickles down his back. He wants to hurt someone.
Perhaps he could, if he tried. He’s stronger than he looks, but complacency has taken so much.
The mountains shimmer with heat, wind turbines scattered over them like matchsticks. Fallen sentries of a simpler time. The rusted bones undulate quietly; no sound from any people or cars. Nowhere to run to for a hundred miles.
He wouldn't make it to nightfall.
Those who die in the desert see water; sun and air playing cruel tricks on the mind. Staring at the ragged edge of the mountain range, it isn’t water that tantalizes him.
They used to build temples on those peaks. Shrines of glass and steel; parabolic mirrors raised to the gods to reap their fire. To know themselves. To see.
They don’t build observatories anymore.
Still, the mirage beckons. Gives its cold comfort in the illusion. Fiberglass corpses wavering—reforming into glistening domes and temenoi that stud the summit like rhinestones.
(He cannot think about them. He can’t.)
It really isn’t such a horrible place to die.
“Do you know what the ultimate force of progress is?” the man in black says. His eyes are cold. Indifferent.
The question hangs in the air between them like the smoke from his cigarette. The disheveled man doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.
Leave me alone, he wants to say. Just leave me in peace. Please…
He should know it won’t be that easy. The man in black turns; pins him with those glacial eyes as he waits for an answer.
Dragging a hand down his sallow, freckled face, the other sighs in defeat.
“Endurance,” he spitballs, voice rough and dry as the desert surrounding. The word tastes like ash in his mouth.
It’s a reasonable guess. Man is a persistence hunter. Man has delusions of grandeur. Man does not—cannot—give up.
His companion hums the way an adult might to a child; condescending and only mildly interested. Something echoes dully in the distance through the ravine. His heart sinks.
“That definitely helps,” says the other man, flicking his spent cigarette on the gravel. “But it is not the chief end.”
To the east, a cloud of dust is rising over the distant edge of the road.
“Enlighten me then,” he whispers back, voice quavering. The cloud blurs. Two engines, growing louder.
With one polished shoe, the man in black stamps out his cigarette.
“Sacrifice, Mr. Midoriya,” he says. “From the very first burn, suffered by the very first firebringer. Scientific progress demands sacrifice.”
Two cars pool over the horizon, molten and gleaming as mercury. One last time, he looks back at the peaks crowned with phantom meaning.
But Midoriya sees no mirage. No Mytikas. There are just dull hills—empty and cruel as only reality can be.
He closes his eyes to wait.
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