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“Smokestack!”
Shimura Nana digs through the rubble, frantic and sick with worry, because under this collapsed building is her baby brother. She shouldn’t have let him into heroics. She shouldn’t have filled his head with all her talk about smiling, about saving hearts from despair.
“En!” she shouts, scraping and scrabbling. “Don’t you die on me!”
Her partner is in the distance. Gran Torino’s hawkish eyes had caught sight of the villain, and he’s en-route to tangle with them before an actual rescue crew can arrive.
Nana knows her baby brother is under here because she and Gran Torino put him on this patrol route, and En raised the alarm before being brutally cut off. Because the first lungful of smoke did not clog her throat, as it would to anyone not of the Shimura line.
“C’mon,” Nana begs, eyes stinging, “c’mon, otouto, c’mon.”
And finally, a hoarse voice calls back, “Nee-san?”
She’s been digging in the right direction. And so Nana redoubles her efforts, the smoke En emits thickening like a protective shroud, or like an SOS signal. When she finds him, Nana wants to turn aside and scream.
That’s her baby brother. That can’t be her baby brother. Not him, not him, not him, half-buried under debris, one arm pulverized and the other miraculously intact. There’s too much blood for him to survive.
“No, no,” she whispers, kneeling across from the last of her family.
“You’ve caught me at a bad time,” he wheezes.
Nana rakes her eyes over her surroundings. There’s a way out. There has to be a way out for them. She promised to take care of him.
“I’m sorry,” En says. “I’m sorry, Banjo-senpai, I really thought I could hold out longer…”
What about this situation makes him think of Lariat?! What about this is making En convulsively reach back to his head, and—?!
Nana reaches for En’s hand intending to deter him, but he yanks out a handful of his short black hairs anyway, hard enough that he must have pulled the roots too.
“Nee-san, help,” he pants. “You have to help.”
Oh. She knows why he mentioned Lariat now. That bastard who had taken his junior, in the time before she and Gran Torino had folded En into their agency, and told him about One for All. The bastard who had fed En his blood, and subsequently obliged him to wrap bandages over the fissures cracking open his forearms.
“Not me,” Nana says. “I—wait until I get Sorahiko over here, he can take your stupid stockpile Quirk and make it better—”
“It has to be you,” says En unsteadily. “I want it to be you.”
“Because of a pun?!”
En’s laugh is a gurgle. His eyes curve into half-moon smiles. How the tables turn—now he is reassuring her. “Because you taught me to be a hero. You’re… you’re good. One for All should be held by those who are good.”
Numbly, Nana accepts the hairs.
“You know who the danger is,” En says, faint. “That’s the important part, I think.”
“I remember what you told me,” Nana confirms.
“Do you believe it? All of it?” At the mute nod, En breathes quicker. The smoke encircling them is growing denser. “Will you… will you eat the hairs now? I want… I want to know I succeeded.”
“Will the Quirk knock me out?”
“Nee-san is strong,” En answers. He has always found his own confidence through Nana; it terrifies her that she might fail his expectations in this. When En had accepted One for All, the stockpiled power had seethed under his skin. He had cried for days about invisible fires.
But he never once regretted his actions.
“Okay, otouto,” Nana says, inwardly panicking. She picks one hair out of the bunch En had given her, one with a visible white root, and she closes her eyes. She swallows it.
When nothing bursts alive in her stomach, or her veins, or even her head, Nana nervously cracks an eye open. She spots En’s mirthful expression.
“You have to digest it first,” he snickers wetly.
“Otouto!”
“Eat the rest, just to make sure.”
Nana pulls a face at him through her tears. “You really want to spend your last moments like this?! … Geez.” She scrubs her face with the back of her glove.
He continues smiling at her. “You… you need to get Torino-senpai. Run. I can distract All for One. Mislead him. He’s… he’s coming, nee-san. You need to go.”
“En—”
“Go,” he tells her, and Nana presses her hand to the top of En’s head, carding her fingers through the short locks. Wreathed in the protective smoke that so defined her baby brother, she lets it hug her. And then, Nana stands.
She doesn’t know it, but she escapes in the nick of time.