Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Suzanna Hemmings stared up at the ceiling of an otherwise empty warehouse. There were spiderwebs dripping from the windows, thousands of hours spun into webs of fine silk that glitter in golden sunlight. They sparkle with dew. Cracks in the ceiling let dying sunlight stream into the room, where dust dances in the beams.  

It’s beautiful, really. 

What is not beautiful is her sister, crouched over her body, laughing and screaming and sobbing all at once, snot and tears and splotchy red skin ruining what was a lovely face. 

What’s not beautiful is the knife sticking out of her chest, and the blood pooling under her back. Sticky, warm, and wet. She’d like this shirt too. 

Suzanna Hemmings is a detective. She is good at what she does, it barely takes a minute for her to drink in all the information from a crime scene she needs. She really loves tricky, messy murders that make her think, and complex heists that lead her on a run. 

That’s all because her father is good at what he does, and her sister is good at what their parents do. 

Suzanna Hemmings is the black sheep of the family. 

She had never cared for committing crimes. She liked to solve them, to put pieces back together and figure out the order of events and the motivations of everyone involved. She liked to watch people crack and panic when their carefully woven webs shred to pieces. There was nothing more fun than watching people who were certain they’d gotten away with murder pale with horror when she revealed that they’d failed. No thrill could compare to digging up money and watching wannabe thieves shake like leaf’s when she proved how they’d done it. 

Maddison had to stop her, of course. Suzanna had been about to turn over evidence that would prove that her sister’s fiance had conned a man out of a quarter of a billion dollars. 

Suzanna knows people. So she knows that Maddison didn’t come here with the intention of killing her, for all that she’d brought a knife with her, and she knows that she’s going to grieve and have to tell their parents what she did. That part, for Suzanna, isn’t punishment enough, but it’s all that she’s going to get. 

Death in a warehouse at the hands of her baby sister, all for money, all for greed. 

Suzanna Hemmings closes her eyes to the golden light in Maddison’s hair, and glittering tears on her cheeks. 

It’s cold, she thinks. So, so, cold. 

~

Kono Suzume grows up in a house of light and laughter. 

Her father is a bright man, Kono Sanjiro, with slitted red eyes and sharp teeth that gleamed when he smiled at his children and dripped literal venom the few times someone managed to truly spark his temper. Her mother Chiasa is a stern woman, but fair in her ways, with dark eyes and black nails that gleam with poison. 

She has five brothers, making her the youngest of six. 

The oldest is Takahiro, who by the time she is five has already moved out with his girlfriend. 

After that is Shisui, halfway through highschool and aiming for a business degree. 

Seiji and Satomi are twins in middle school, and Kaname is the closest to her in age, only two years older than her. 

Everyone in her family is amazing. All of them have some kind of incredible ability related to poison or venom. Kaname has both, his long teeth gleam with it and his sharp nails are kept in thick gloves when they go out, just in case. Mom wears the same ones. 

Suzume was once named Suzanna Hemmings, and so it didn’t take her long to figure out what had happened and where she was. She had had her existential crisis (or maybe a reverse existential crisis? If an existential crisis was being confronted with one's death, what do you call being confronted by one's second life?), accepted that she wasn’t going to be able to change what had happened or where she was, and grieved accordingly. 

Six years is a long time, the first two of them she had basically been a prisoner of her own body. There wasn’t much to do but think. She’d scared the life out of her parents, who had taken her to no less than four pediatricians when she was too quiet. Far quieter than any of her brothers had ever been, and quieter than any baby should be. 

She’d felt bad about it, really. 

But she had been in mourning, and in no mood to humor strangers, beyond demanding her necessities. 

She’d come out of it when she could finally walk properly, and talk, and terrorize her elder brothers. The twins were her favorite target. 

Ah, Cain instinct. She’d been the eldest before, a life full of ‘help your sister learn to be better’ and ‘you’re older, you should know better than to retaliate’. 

Now she was the baby, and she was fucking living for it. 

“Mom!” Kaname shrieked at the top of his lungs, “Suzume took my action figure!” 

“Kaname, you have to share with your sister,” Chiasa chided. She was flicking through the mail, sorting it into important stuff and junk when Kaname went tearing into the kitchen, Suzume on his heels and clutching a Crimson Riot action figure that was, indeed, her brothers.

“I do share with her! I share everything with her!” Kaname stomped his foot on the linoleum. Suzume hid behind their mothers leg, sticking her tongue out at Kaname. 

Seiji looked up from where he was building a model of a cell on the living room floor. “At least you don’t have to share your face.” 

Satomi kicked his leg from his place on the couch. “Please, everyone knows I’m the pretty one.” 

“ Boys .”

They both cringed at their mother’s tone.

They were supposed to be on their best behavior. Taka was coming home with his girlfriend, Rio, tonight and they were supposed to behave. Shisui was holed up in the room he shared with the twins, studying for his finals. Kaname and Suzume shared a room too, but it was currently covered in a city made of refurbished boxes and soda bottles, where heroes and villains collided. 

Kaname was a dreamer, and he wanted to be a hero more than anything. 

Suzume didn’t, but she played hero with him and they had silly names for each other. He was Krait, like the snake, and she was Suzumebachi even if they didn’t know what her quirk was yet. They’re just games. Suzume says she wants to be a hero, because that’s what all kids say at some point here. The truth is, she knows she’ll probably go back to being a detective, or maybe a lawyer. A doctor could be interesting. She’s not worried. 

“Here, Kan,” Suzume finally pushed the little hero in her hands into Kaname’s grasp. Crimson Riot was his favorite, and she’d just been teasing him. 

Kaname snatched it from her with a sniff. Suzume smiled at him regardless. 

Chiasa shook her head at the two of them. 

“Kaname, go clean up. Suzume here, start shucking this.” 

Chiasa shoved an armful of corn at her youngest daughter in a ploy to keep her out of trouble. 

Suzume wasn’t normally interested in kids toys, unless she was fucking with her brother. She liked video games, but the only ones she had the hand eye coordination for were way too low level to be interesting. All the books that she was allowed to read were for children, and therefor also boring. 

Chiasa had realized early on that if her daughter was bored, only trouble would follow. So she  always did her best to come up with a task for her, something to keep her idle hands from doing the devil's work in their house. Especially after the time she’d nearly flooded the basement. 

Suzume does as she’s told, and Chiasa goes back to sorting the mail. Their stack of bills keeps getting higher and higher. Chiasa couldn’t go to work with Suzume so young, but now that she's about to start elementary school maybe she can get a part time job, or something. Having six kids is not cheap. 

For his part Sanjiro works at night, and Suzume is pretty sure that whatever he does isn’t strictly legal. 

Not that she had any plans of bringing that up. 

No-siree. 

She did think it was ironic, though. Born into a criminal family twice? What are the odds? 

Apparently as good as being reborn period. 

The door opened and Taka came in with Rio, a lovely woman with white hair piled in thick waves on top of her head and bright, cheerful red eyes. She wasn’t very tall, and she was always dressed nicely. Some days she even had small rings draped on her little crown of horns. If Suzume noticed the knife in her boot, she never brought it up. 

Just as they came in, Sanjiro came out of his room, dressed casually, and Chiasa uttered a soft ‘oh’. 

It was enough to get everyone’s attention on her. 

“Mom?” Taka asked, coming over to kiss her cheek, ruffle Suzume’s hair, and peer over Chiasa’s shoulder. 

“It’s from the doctor. Suzume’s doctor.” 

Suzume paused her shucking of corn. They’d taken her to a doctor two weeks ago. They’d checked her blood, x-rayed her whole body and done all of her vitals, reflexes, and had her run on a treadmill for a bit. Then they asked about two million questions about her teeth, her nails, and prodded her lower jaw where Sanjiro had two small bulbs that held venom. 

It didn’t take a genius to know that they were looking for her quirk. At five with no quirk she’s considered a late bloomer, and considering that most of the quirks in her family are mutation type quirks it’s extra weird. 

“Is Suzume okay?” Rio asked immediately, her brows furrowing with worry. 

“Open it up, Chi,” Sanjiro encouraged. 

She ripped it open with her long nails and pulled out the packet of paper inside. Suzume’s test results. 

The corn was all bare, even the little hairs were gone, so she set that down and climbed onto a chair to try to look. 

Chiasa went pale as she read on. With shaking hands, she handed the papers to her husband. 

The color drained out of his face, too, and Taka took the packet impatiently. He looked just as worried as his fiance. 

“Am I gonna die?” Suzume asked, since no one would tell her what her own damn test results are. 

It was Rio who took a breath and composed herself first, while Taka looked horrified. At first Suzume thought it had something to do with the poison. Had she inherited poison, but not a resistance to it? She didn’t have fangs or long nails, which was unfair. She wanted those. 

But then Rio looked at her, so so sadly, but it wasn’t with fear or grief that would come from a death sentence on paper. 

Suzume realized when she was going to say a second before the words came out of her mouth. 

Rio didn’t have to crouch to meet Suzume’s eyes, since she was standing carefully on the chair still. 

“Oh dear,” she said with no small degree of kindness, “It’s your quirk. You don’t have one.” 

Quirkless. 

“Ah.” 

The twins stayed silent in the living room, horrified. Kaname stood at the door between the bedroom hall and the kitchen, Crimson Riot clutched in his hands. 

“But, if Suzume doesn’t have a quirk, how can she be a hero?” he asked, his lower lip starting to trembled. 

If anything, Rio looked sadder. 

“She can’t.” 

Chiasa broke into tears and Sanjiro rushed to comfort her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and holding on tight. The twins, stunned, grabbed each other’s hand and stared at her like it really was her death sentence on that paper.

Kaname’s Crimson Riot hit the ground and tears streaked down his face. Taka and Rio watched her sadly. 

Suzume stared at the paper still in Rio’s grasp. She didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. But she was pissed. 

Don’t I deserve fangs and claws? As a treat? 

What bullshit. 

~

Life is hard. That’s not new information for Suzume, really it isn’t. The first time around she had been raised by loving, wonderful parents who just so happened to like poking her with tacks so would cry and cause a scene and take attention off the jewelry story counter long enough to pocket a few diamonds, and had taught her to pick just about any lock by the time she turned eight. By twelve she could jack any car that wasn’t entirely electronic based, and even those it just took her a little longer and required more equipment. Mom had been a thief. Was a thief, always a thief. 

Dad cleaned up other people’s messes. An ‘extraction specialist’ he called himself, with a second major in clean up crew. He was very good at getting blood out of clothes. He’d brought Suzanne along with him sometimes, since she was small enough to get into places that he couldn’t and get evidence that was beyond his reach. It was because of him that she knew which way blood splattered, how to tell something unplanned from something premeditated, and where to look for needle marks between toes and under nail beds. 

By the time she was fifteen Suzanne hadn’t killed anyone, but she had gotten her fair share of exposure to corpses and bank vaults. 

She had been raised to be a criminal. She had learned on her father’s knee. She perfected herself under her mother’s hand. 

They were good parents, if not good people, and it was such a disappointment the first time she accidentally solved a criminal case while talking to a school friend whose dad just so happened to be the police chief. 

She’d seen more than she should have before she was out of high school. She knew life wasn’t fair. She knew to get what you wanted you had to take it. 

This life is a different kind of unfair. 

She has no quirk. 

Which means she’s at the very bottom rungs of society.

It doesn’t matter that a good chunk of people have quirks that aren’t visible, or powerful, or useful. She doesn’t have one at all, and for some stupid reason the teachers at school decide that it’s a fan-fucking tastic idea to go around the room on the first day and have everyone say their names, their quirks, and what they wanna be when they grow up. 

That’s when it starts. 

She should have lied, in retrospect. Said it was ‘detective’ or ‘mind reading’ or something boring or hard to prove. 

She does lie, sort of. 

“I’m Kono Suzume, I don’t have a quirk, and I want to be a hero.” 

She doesn’t, but she’s been saying that long enough that it comes out. Which starts the rest of the little kids on a truly insane tirade. 

“Someone without a quirk can’t be a hero!” 

“No quirk? That’s so lame!” 

“But heroes have to be strong and you can only be strong with a strong quirk! Like All Mights!” 

Suzume has to practice all of her self control not to tackle the most annoying child near her. 

It’s the start of a trend that will follow her for the rest of her life, she knows. Someone without a quirk will never be a hero. 

Kaname finds something similar in his class two years above her. 

Poison is a villain’s quirk, and therefore he can’t be a hero. 

(nevermind that their dad is definitely some kind of criminal, and Taka’s fiance is certainly breaking some laws. No one knows any of that and this is how they react? 

Is this why Sanjiro became a criminal in the first place? Because he has a villainous quirk?) 

Kaname responds, naturally, by starting as many fights as he can with anyone who insults him or his baby sister, insisting that they can be anything they want to be. 

And maybe if it was just her she would have changed routes. Maybe she would have decided to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a fucking mystery novelist. 

Instead, after two months of harassment and insults that teacher’s at this underfunded school do nothing to assuage, she finds herself sitting at a park between their house and the school, Kaname at her side, crying tears that look green and venomous. Poisonous? 

His lip is split and swollen, and he’s going to have a black eye tomorrow. He’d started another fight when someone pushed her down and called her something cruel. She doesn’t even remember what it was, the names all blur together, and she doesn’t really care. She doesn’t care what a bunch of little kids call her. 

What she cares about is the injustice of it all. The teachers do nothing to stop it. They children learn their cruelty from their parents and siblings. 

Society sees her as somehow less, somehow lacking, even though she is no less of a person simply because she doesn’t have six arms or fire for hair or anything else. 

More than that she’s angry for Kaname. 

He’s a dreamer with a good heart and dripping fangs. He sees the injustice in the world and refuses to accept it. He fights, and bleeds, all because other kids are mean and adults are useless. 

And Suzume- 

Rage bubbles in Suzume’s chest. 

She dabs his eyes and his bloody lip with her sleeves. They’re thin, even with Chiasa back to working they’re strapped for cash with five children and a wedding coming up. Suzume doesn’t know the whole story, but she knows that only Rio’s brother has been invited to the wedding. No one else from her family. 

“Maybe they’re right,” Kaname nearly chokes. He’d broken into wracking sobs as soon as they were far enough from the school that none of their classmates would see, tucked into a stack of bushes at the edge of the park. In the spring they’ll bloom with purple flowers, but for now the leaves are turning gold and red. 

“No,” Suzume said, firm and certain. Any silly sibling squabbles are forgotten, when it’s the two of them against the world. 

“Maybe we can’t be heroes,” Kaname doesn’t seem to have heard her. “I can only hurt people with my quirk. I can’t even hold your hand without gloves. And you don’t have a quirk at all.” 

“No!” Suzume snaps, louder and more forceful. Kaname’s head jerks around so fast to look at her she worries he’s given himself whiplash. They’re the same. Dark hair, dark eyes. His fang poked out against his bottom lip when he bites it. There’s and indent there from constant pressure. 

“No,” she says again, softening herself for Kaname. “They’re not right about us. We can do anything. We can be heroes, Kan. No matter what they say.” 

She’s not a charismatic person. If she had to describe herself it would be somewhere between annoying and practical. And stubborn. Very, very stubborn. 

But right then Kaname looks at her, a head shorter with her black hair spiking all over the place, like she’s offered to hang a new star in the sky just for him. 

“You really think so?” 

Of course she does. The world is stupid, and biased, and people can’t see past the shining lights that popular heroes cast to realize that not all of them have battle quirks, or even quirks that are all that useful. She thinks of All Mights side kicks, David Shield who’s quirk is bendy fucking fingers, and Sir Nighteye, who can see the future but only once a day and fights with his bare hands or small projectiles. They’re no less heroes than anyone else. 

Off the top of her head she can come up with a half a dozen others. 

“Yeah. We’ll just have to work harder to show them. Right?” 

Kaname starts to smile. It’s small, and his lip starts bleeding again with it, but it’s there all the same. 

“Okay. Let’s be heroes, Suzume.” 

“Mmm. Right.” 

Suzume doesn’t care about being a hero. She really doesn’t. But Kaname does. 

And, on top of that, it’s the best way she can think to tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself. 

~

Suzume doesn’t want to use their families' small funds up on something unnecessary, but the fact of the matter is if she and Kaname are going to be heroes they’re going to need training. Her especially. 

Suzanne had never been much of a fighter. She could manage if she absolutely had to, but it wasn’t her forte by any means. Now, she’s six years old and weak and defenseless. 

It’s not acceptable. 

While their parents don’t flat out refuse to let them become heroes, it’s obvious they aren’t fans of the idea. They dissuade them from too much hero merch, either because the price is too high or they don’t want to encourage a fixation she doesn’t know. 

It’s pretty obvious, at least to Suzume, that they don’t want their younger children knowing where Sanjiro goes at night. Taka has to know, his fiance most certainly has blood under her nails. But they want to protect their youngest, and Suzume can respect that. It’s entirely possible that this will make getting into hero school more difficult, but she will worry about that in eight years, when it’s actually relevant. 

So she has to be careful about asking to take martial arts. 

It’s not something that occurred to Kaname. Apparently it's not something that occurs to a lot of people, so focused are they on their quirks that martial arts are starting to die out. 

People are fucking stupid. 

Suzume hates asking, because she knows that they’re strapped for cash, but she has to ask any how. 

“Some of my friends are doing after school sports,” she starts one day at dinner. Kaname looks at her, surprised. He knows she doesn’t have friends at school. The other kids had realized that if they picked on her, her scary big brother would come after them, but she was still quirkless, still a freak, and her brother was creepy. 

Yeah, life wasn’t fair. What a bitch. 

“Oh yeah?” Sanjiro asks. For him it’s breakfast, but he always eats it with his remaining children. Shisui has been locked up in his room more and more lately, so he’s not there for that. Her second eldest brother feels so far away some times, locked up in the dark, buried in books, desperate for a way out. 

He definitely knows what Sanjiro does for a living. 

“Mhmm. Emi is starting to shoot a bow, and Momo is in ballet, and Hinawa is taking Aikido with Maki. They want me to come with them,” the last part is a lie. The first parts are true. 

Her parents exchange a look. 

“Kaname could come too. It would be so much fun!” 

“You want Kaname to learn ballet with you?” Chiasa asks, looking amused, and worried all at once. It’s impressive. 

“No!” Suzume makes a show out of puffing her cheeks out, and turns watery black eyes up at her mother. “Aikido!” 

Chiasa reaches over to ruffle her already wild hair. It’s barely held back by a headband. “Aikido is an expensive thing to be involved in, dear. I don’t think we have enough money this month for the two of you to go. I’m sorry.” 

Suzume had thought that might be the case. 

That doesn’t mean she likes it. It's probably not very heroic that she wishes her dad would break a few more laws so she can learn how to throat punch someone. 

“But Aikido teaches people how to fight. And I don’t have a quirk, so I can’t fight back if someone is picking on me, and Kaname-” 

“Is someone picking on you?” Sanjiro asks suddenly, his brows furrowing. Chias frowns deeper. Suzume hadn’t realized it, but she hadn’t told Sanjiro about their children. She hadn’t told him about the times she’d been called to pick them up from school early, or fetch a bag of frozen peas for Kaname’s black eye, or apply a little dinosaur themed bandaid to his scrapes. 

“Sometimes,” she admits, poking her chicken with her chopsticks. “I don’t have a quirk. Everyone is supposed to have a quirk. And Kaname doesn’t like people being mean to me.” 

Every word out of her mouth makes Sanjiro’s face tighten in carefully maintained anger. When he speaks again she can see his fangs dripping neon green venom. 

“You should have told me.” It’s aimed at Chiasa. 

“You already work too hard. I can handle the kids.” 

“You should have told me,” he repeated. “They’re my kids too. If something like this is happening…” 

She looks at Kaname, who looks back at her, his black eyes just as big as hers are. 

“ Sanjiro ,” there’s a warning in Chiasa’s voice. The kind she uses on the kids when they’re being to mischievous and about to break something. 

Seiji stands up suddenly and says, “We’ll do the dishes!” 

Satomi catches Suzume and Kaname by their wrists and tugs. “C’mon, you guys have homework to do.” 

“We do?” Kaname asks, confused. 

Suzume doesn’t fight the twins while they usher the pair from the room, and into their own. She even goes along with their games of heroes vs villains so they can distract Kaname. Even in the room, she can hear the argument building outside. 

It’s… concerning. 

She’s never seen her mother and father fight over anything more severe than laundry. She hadn’t expected this reaction of all things. 

She’s getting rusty. It’s been a long time since she’s had to read people, she’s been content to just let her family do as they would without her trying to predict their every move. She didn’t need to do that here. 

Except maybe she should have in this case. Maybe she should have kept quiet, knowing they didn’t have a lot of money to burn, knowing that Sanjiro has at least a little bit of a dangerous job. 

She wraps a thin towel around her shoulders like a cape and jumps on Satomi’s back with a battle cry. 

She’d known that money was tight, but around here most martial arts classes didn’t go over six thousand yen a month, roughly fifty dollars. To be that strapped for cash? 

Yeah. She feels bad for asking and getting her parents into this fight in the first place. 

Not that Suzume will let Kaname know. He’s older than her, sort of, but he’s so much sweeter, so much more innocent. 

He drops to his hands and knees behind Satomi, their villain, while she jumps at him from the front and trips him over their other brother. Satomi goes down, with Suzume on top of him in victory.  

Their parents are still fighting. 

They start another game. 

~

Chapter Text

Suzume doesn’t ask where they dug up the money Chiasa was sure they didn’t have enough of to start these classes. She doesn’t want to know. 

All she needs to know is that a week later, before he goes to work, Sanjiro leads them to a dojo crammed between two sprawling, tall buildings that can’t be more than three years old. The dojo itself is clearly old, small, and traditional. 

Sanjiro let’s them in and they leave their shoes next to six pairs already lined up. 

She can hear synchronized grunting through the walls even before they enter the next room. A line of four boys and two girls go through simultaneous kicks and punches in the middle of the room. A tall man with greying hair stands at the front of the room, in front of a full length mirror, watching the children with cold blue eyes. Beside him is a younger man with blond hair and light purple eyes. 

The class ends a few minutes after they walk in. The entire time Suzume and her brother watch them go through motions. None of the kids can be older than Kaname, but they’ve definitely been doing this longer. 

She wonders who they are. Children like her, who’s parents do shady things at night? Or just kids who found a cheap place to learn to throw punches? 

Sanjiro ushers his two youngest children away from the kids while they fetch their bags and put on their shoes to leave. 

It’s just the Kono’s and the two teachers now. 

And a little boy, with red hair and dull blue eyes, peaking out at them from behind a stack of plastic boards that fit together and can be kicked apart. She’d seen them before, during a case where a karate teacher was murdered in his own studio. Grisly, that one. 

“So, you did bring your kids around,” the old man grunts. He scowls down at the pair of them. Kaname takes a step back, but Suzume meets his gaze squarely. Or as squarely as she can, when she realizes that he’s blind. 

Oh. 

“I said I would. You said you have room in your class for two more, didn’t you?” 

“Just as long as you’ve got time in your schedule to fix the roof.” 

Was that how they were paying for lessons? Fixing the roof? What kind of criminal fixes roofs? 

Suzume just blinked slowly at the old man, then the younger one. 

“Of course I do, Tsushima,” he assured the old man. He nudged his children forwards with a warm hand on the back of either of their heads, and they both bowed politely. Suzume mumbled a ‘hello sir’. 

“Kids, this is Tsushima Yuzo, he owns this school, and this is his son Ryuhei. They’ve agreed to teach you to fight, so I expect you to listen to them and work hard. Got it?” 

“Yes!” Kaname smiled brightly at their father, all sharp teeth and bright eyes. Suzume nodded quickly in agreement. 

“Good. Now bow to the floor mat, go to the middle, and then bow to your new teachers.” 

Kaname rushed to do as he was told, with Suzume on his heels. The two men spoke quietly with their father for a couple more minutes, and when she looked the little boy from before was gone. 

The two Tsushima’s came to a halt in front of them. It was the son who spoke to them. 

“My esteemed father is a very busy man. He will over look any tests that you take. You’ll address him as Shihan, and I am, of course, sensei. Got it?” 

They nodded together. 

“Ryuhei will show you the first forms,” the elder said firmly. “I will check in on you at the end of class.” 

He turned and walked away, bowing to the mats once he stepped off of them, and disappeared into an office. Through the open door she saw the little boy again. 

“Okay,” Ryuhei clapped his hands together. “Let’s begin.” 

~

Ryuhei turns out to be a vicious taskmaster. He works them into the ground, until they leave aching and sweating and Kaname is close to tears. 

Suzume is grinning when they slide into the back seat of the car. Her dark hair is plastered to her skull, and she aches down to her bones, but it's a step in the right direction. 

“How was it?” Sanjiro asks, looking at them in the rearview mirror. 

Kaname mumbles something and slumps against the window. Suzume smiles at him, even exhausted, even sweaty and disgusting. 

“Can we come back tomorrow?” 

She tries not to read into the sadness in his eyes or the wavering curve of his smile. 

“Sure we can. But I don’t think your brother will be up for it.” 

He’s right, of course. Sanjiro is a smart man, and Kaname may be older and stronger than her, but Suzume is stubborn. 

Sanjiro takes her to the dojo after school again, and the little boy keeps watching her from the shadows while Ryuhei works her to her very bones, going through the same series of kicks and punches. They’re all basic, but Suzume knows the old saying. 

Do not fear the man that practices 1000 punches 1 time, but the man who practiced 1 punch 1000 times. 

She thinks it came from Bruce Lee. 

By the time Sanjiro comes to collect her she feels hollowed out and bleary, but when it’s just the two of them he lets her sit in the front seat, and she sinks into the leath with a small groan. Her muscles ache, and her lungs feel cold. 

Sanjiro presses something plastic into her hands. 

“Here you go, Suzy Q.” 

She looks down to find a little hostess cake in her hands, chocolate cake with white filling. Suzy Q. She grins at him and tears it open gladly. She tears it messily in half and gives one half to Sanjiro, who she keeps thinking of as ‘Dad’ more and more often. 

It becomes their thing. Kaname only attends half the amount of classes as she does, and Suzume throws herself into them with a frenzy that borders on rabid. Ryuhei responds to her enthusiasm by making her run and kick and punch until she can barely hold a pencil the next day. Her class work doesn’t suffer, if only because she already knows almost all of this. Math, science, language. The only thing that really suffers is her handwriting. 

Not for the first time is she glad that she’d been such a nerd that she had consumed as many language classes as she could the first time around. 

History is interesting enough that it holds her attention, and she starts reading history books in what little spare time she has. She doesn’t pick fight on school grounds, but she waits until her bullies are off campus to fight back. She doubts that Ryuhei will mind her using her lessons. It’s self defense, right? 

She goes from ‘quirkless, easy target’ to ‘spooky, angry reading girl’ in two years. 

Shisui graduates with flying colors and moves away as soon as he can, going into business school on the other side of the country. 

Suzume knows that it's because he’s afraid of what their parents will think about his boyfriend. She also knows that the fear is unfounded, but Shisui will come out in his own time. The twins move into his bedroom the summer before they start their first year of high school. 

Then comes the wedding, and the Yakuza come with it.

~

Taka and Rio’s wedding is the last time that all of them are together for years. 

It’s… interesting. 

The venue is beautiful, outdoors and away from the city that Suzume has grown up in. they’d had to drive high into the mountains to reach the small resort where Taka and Rio were waiting to wed at last. 

The ceremony itself will take place in a pavilion that overlooks steep waterfalls that glitter across ancient, well worn stones, where bursts of colorful flowers bloom along the sheer sides. It’s a lovely mix of traditional and western, an homage to the time Rio had spent studying abroad when she was young. 

Which was how Suzume ends up in a little red dress, a tiny copy of the three that the regular bridesmaids wore. All of her brothers were in western styled suits with deep red bow ties. They all matched Rio’s red eyes. 

Her brothers were all paired off with Rio’s girlfriends, and her baby cousin was the flower girl at only three. 

Rio had one bridesman to match Taka’s groomsmaid (being his baby sister, of course) and Suzume is lucky enough to walk in on a hushed argument between her and him shortly before the ceremony starts. He’d been busy with work during the rehearsal, so she’d walked down the aisle alone then, but he was going to be who she was paired with today. 

She’d had her suspicions, but walking in on Rio sitting beside a very young, but still very recognizable Kai Chisaki was a shock. 

Well. Guess that cements just about everything. 

“All you have to do is walk beside her. You don’t even have to touch her, or anyone here. Just. Walk. For me?” 

“I don’t like kids,” he argues. “They’re dirty, rude, they eat bugs-” 

“I do not!” Suzume snaps. They both twist around to see her standing in the door way, her right cheek puffed out with annoyance. “I take a shower every night, and I wash my hands plenty, and we’re all wearing gloves anyways,” Suzume flaps her white gloved hands at him like a particularly irritated bird. “It’s not like I run around London with a bunch of sixteenth century rats, thank you !” 

Rio tries (and fails) to smother her laughter behind her hand. She can’t imagine what she looks like, eight years old, in a puffy red gown, dressing down one of the most dangerous men in the country. 

It is, apparently, funny enough the Rio snaps a picture with her phone before Kai can stop her. 

“Quirks come from rats, so-” 

“She doesn’t have a quirk.” 

“She what ?” 

“Hey!” 

Suzume doesn’t miss the way his shoulders relax at that. Just a little bit, and the tight furrow in his brow eases enough that she remembers what she’d mostly forgotten. 

Rampant germaphobia. Hatred of quirks. Right. 

“So what if I don’t have a quirk?” Suzume crosses her arms over her chest and levels them with her best glare. “I still know how to kick someone in the balls!” 

Rio cracks up, her laughter so high and hysterical it comes out in breathy wheezes. 

Even Kai’s cheek twitches under the black mask he wears across his mouth. 

“Fine,” he stands up, brushing his dark suit free of imaginary dust. “If it’s her, I’ll walk with someone.” 

Rio finally catches her breath. Her smile is bright, her cheeks rosy. “I thought you’d feel that way. Your place at the table is on the corner, and she’s sitting next to you, too.” 

Kai narrowed his eyes at Suzume. “You better not make a mess eating.” 

“I won’t get anything on your fancy suit, pretty boy.” 

Rio dissolves into desperate laughter once more while Kai shakes his head at her, looking irritated. He keeps his temper though, probably for Rio’s sake. 

Suzume is getting more and more abrasive as time goes on, and she’s not about to change that for one dude with issues. 

“You should really get a therapist.” 

Rio nearly falls on the ground and ruins her pretty white dress she’s laughing so hard. Suzume thinks maybe she should be insulted, but it's become pretty clear that therapy here is vastly underrated. This is a world full of trauma-baskets. 

Maybe if they really won’t let her be a pro hero, she’ll try that out. God knows there’s plenty of people who need it. 

Suzume had never had to attend the quirk counseling that her brothers endured, but everything she knew about was… not great. 

Especially not for people with ‘villainous’ quirks like her family’s. It put too much emphasis on conforming and fitting into society and what was acceptable, and not enough of loving oneself even when they were born outside of the pale. At least the counseling that her brother’s had gotten, and her brother’s hadn’t even gotten the worst she’d heard of. 

There is a girl a year above her in school, with blonde hair and sharp teeth, who can no longer recognize herself in a mirror, and no one but Suzume seems to see a problem with it. 

On top of that, most therapists wouldn’t even look at a quirkless case. Chiasa had considered getting Suzume someone to talk to when the bullying got bad, but apparently no one was interested in someone without a quirk. 

Maybe it was just a regional thing. Hopefully it was just a regional thing. 

Either way, her point still stood. 

A knock comes from the door, breaking the trio of their conversation/minor roast. 

“Rio? Everyone is ready.” 

“Yeah,” Rio smoothed out her dress and tucked her hair back behind her crown of horns, which dripped with rubies and gold chains. Definitely not from Taka, it was way too expensive. But it was lovely, and that was what mattered. “We’re ready in here.” 

“We’re going to start in fifteen minutes. Everyone is in their seats,” Yosano, the wedding planner says. 

“You heard her,” Rio shooed at the both of them. “Out, our. Suzume, keep an eye on my baby brother.” 

“I’m taller than you,” Kai snapped irritably. 

“Yeah, and you’re still four years younger,” Rio retorted. “Go, go.” 

Suzume and Kai exchanged a look. Taka was going to have a fun rest of his life. 

They leave Rio alone to wait for her cue while they circled around the reception hall. Suzume stops by one of the massive windows to look outside. There is an older man standing out there in a nice three piece suit. Kai halts at her side and sucks in a startled breath through his mask. 

“Pops.” 

“Your guys’ dad?” Suzume peers up at Kai, who really does look like a boy of only eighteen. He’s not someone who walked out of a horror movie yet. He’s not a force of nature intent on twisting the world back the way it used to be. 

He’s just. 

A boy. 

A teenager. 

“He and Rio had a fight over her marrying Taka, didn’t they?” she waits until he nods, once. “Why?” 

“Your brother… he doesn’t like our family business.” 

“Mmmm, he wants to be a doctor.” 

“I’m aware. Rio is leaving the family business to marry him. Pops doesn’t like it.” 

Suzume had figured it was something like that. 

“But he still loves her,” Suzume points out. “Or he wouldn't be here. Even though he hurt her when he wasn’t happy about her and Taka, he still loves her, and she loves him. And you do too, or you wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t walk with me even if I don't have a quirk, cause you don’t like people. It’s just ‘cause Rio asked, right?” 

Kai glances towards her, his gold eyes eagle sharp. 

But Suzume just looks up at him, guileless and open. He huffs, this boy who would become a monster. 

“From the mouth of babes, huh?” 

“I’m gonna tell him to come inside,” Suzume decides, but Kai’s hand comes down in front of her, stopping her without laying a finger on her person. 

“I’ll talk to him,” he deflects. “You wait here.” 

Suzume shrugs and leans against the doorway, watching Kai go out to the man. He must not have a quirk, or Kai just trusts him to be clean that much, because Kai let’s him pat him on the shoulder and doesn’t have a complete breakdown. 

Suzume is stuck standing there, watching them talk quietly, until they both come walking towards her. 

‘Pops’ looks down at her. 

“So you’re Ryuhei’s little hero?” he sounds amused. 

Jeez, she really needs to figure out exactly how deep Sanjiro is in the yakuza. 

“Mhmm. That’s me and my brother Kaname too.”

“It’s not an easy life you’re chasing,” he warns. Suzume wonders if all yakuza talk to children like they’re just tiny people. Not that she’s complaining. 

She crosses her arms over her chest, looks up at a yakuza boss, and says firmly, “I’m gonna do what I want and the rest of the world can go fuck itself.” 

Which is how she finds out that Rio and Kai, despite not being blood related, share the same breathless wheeze of a laugh when startled. 

She should probably be offended, but the novelty of it is enough that she only pouts at him a little bit. 

“Pops. You should come watch the wedding,” Kai says when he finally gets himself back under control. “It’ll make Rio happy.” 

‘Pops’ looks at him, something strange and soft in his expression. “You’re right. I know I’m being stubborn, but I can’t say I’m happy about her choices.” 

“Does it matter?” 

They both look down at Suzume, who cocks her head. “If she’s your daughter, does it matter if her choices make you happy, as long as they make her happy? ‘Cause Taka loves her a lot. And he wants to work hard so she can live happy, even if he gets a different job than yours. Family’s more important than pride, right?” 

Pops let’s out a sigh, but there’s a smile tucked in the corner of his mouth. 

“What’s the world come to, where a man has to get lectured by an eight year old to go to his own daughter’s wedding?” he asks. “Alright, let’s go then. Is there still room for one stubborn old man?” 

“Mhmm! Rio left a seat for you.” 

“Then let’s get a move on, both of you.” 

Suzume nods quickly and leads the way through the reception hall out into the pavilion. 

This is going to be a very weird day . 

She’s right, of course. It is a very weird day, but a beautiful one too. Rio and Taka are so in love it's disgusting, and when she sees Pops sitting in a previously empty seat the tears she had been fighting back break free. 

It’s a good thing the mascara is waterproof. 

Suzume beams cheerfully for the camera’s when the pictures start snapping, and makes herself a teeny tiny pick to keep other people away from Kai, so no one ends up blood splattered on the ground. Most people already know he doesn’t like to be touched, so she doesn’t have to try hard, but it’s still fun. 

Suzume isn’t sure if her meddling has anything to do with Rio and her father talking long into the night, past the point when she, Kaname, and everyone else under 18 are herded out the door, but she likes to think she at least helps. 

It’s worth the teasing she gets for years to come about her ‘little crush’ on Kai.

Chapter Text

For the first year after the wedding she sees them in passing. Everyone packs into Taka and Rio’s condo for birthdays, Taka, Rio’s, and the birth of their little daughter summons everyone again. 

Suzume nearly shits herself when she peers into the cradle and sees a tiny, scrunched up potato looking face under a shock of white hair. There’s the tiniest horn on her forehead, and her eyes aren’t open but between Taka and Rio the only color she possibly has is red. 

“Her name is Eri,” Taka says proudly, while Rio sleeps in the other room. Apparently Eri had been up all night screaming. 

Now she’s quiet, and adorable, and sleeping. 

“Kono Eri?” 

“That’s right. She’s your very first niece,” Taka ruffled her hair. “You’re not the baby anymore.” 

“Does this mean that if I get scraped up Rio won’t fix it for me?” 

“No, no,” Taka promises. “Rio loves you. She’ll heal you if you ever need it, as long as you don’t tell your teachers or anyone.” 

Suzume nods solemnly. She peers into the bassinet, her brows furrowed. This was… interesting. Not wholly unexpected, but it’s been nearly nine years by then since she’s seen a show that she wasn’t paying all that much attention to in the first place. 

She wasn’t sure she even knew Eri was Kai’s niece. 

Fuck. 

This also meant that the healing quirk that Rio possessed wasn’t healing at all. It was a smaller time reversal. 

“I like Rio,” Suzume confesses. 

Taka smiles softly at her while Kaname comes over with his freshly washed hands to try to hold little Eri. 

It ends with her screaming, which isn’t a surprise. 

What is a surprise is a few months later when Sanjiro drops her off at the Yakuza compound in front of Kai Chisaki. 

She looks up at him. 

He looks down at her. 

“Uh. Hi?” 

“Come inside. Before you get dirty.” 

The big gate opens up into a courtyard of immaculately maintained trees. Office buildings rise up on either side of them and she just knows that they don't hold anything legitimate inside of them. 

Not that she tells Kai that, of course.

 She’s all of nine years old, and not supposed to know about the Yakuza at all. Sanjiro doesn’t talk much about it, and Ryuhei pushes her even harder than his other students, who are all probably mob born kids. 

Like her. 

Weird. 

Kai leads her into one of the buildings, one that was clearly converted for somewhere to live. The first floor is all offices, but the second floor is made up of a massive kitchen, ball rooms, what she suspects might be a full sized movie theatre, and storage. Above that is apartments. 

Kai takes her to his, where Kurono is waiting for them in a plain white hoodie, and a white mask. 

Suzume squints up at him. 

“ ‘m I supposed to wear a mask too? Dad didn’t send me with one.” 

“You’re cleaner than the rest of us,” Kai tells her, and sits at the couch. “But if we go out, I’ll find one for you.” 

“M’kay.” 

Suzume looks between him and an uncomfortable looking Kurono. 

“So… what are we doing today?” She asks. 

“What do you mean?” Kai frowns at her from under his mask. 

“I mean. Dad said you’re my baby sitters. Which is super weird, b t dubs. So what are we doing?” 

“I’m baby sitting you because Rio won’t let me see Eri until I can, quote, ‘watch a kid without killing it’. And you were convenient.” 

Kurono looks physically pained by his bluntness. 

Suzume blinks at him. 

She’s not totally surprised to be getting a new babysitter. Her brother’s had locked her in the pantry and left her there until Mom got home last week, and that was following up The Incident where they packed her in a box and shoved her down the stairs to see how fast she could get going and she ended up shooting through the open front door and nearly sprawling into traffic. 

But this was. Weird. 

Honestly, her brother’s are probably way safer than this man will ever be, even when she’s the only one with a brain cell. 

“You are… really not around kids a lot. You need to be nicer to them. Or else they’ll cry.” 

“You’re not counting yourself in that group?” Kai asks, arching a brow high. 

Suzume said blandly, “I am a very weird kid.” Neither of them argue with her. 

“Fine,” Kai spreads his hands out like he’s surrendered something to her. “What do you usually do with babysitters?” 

Considering they were mostly her brothers? 

“Terrorize them.” 

“...Aren’t you supposed to be trying to be a hero?” Kurono finally asks, his pale brows drawn together. He looks at her like she’s a particularly confusing puzzle. She wonders if they have that human lie detector around here yet. How many Shie Hessaiki and the eight precepts (or was it bullets? Something to do with buddha???) are already on Kai’s pay roll. 

“Yes. And?” 

“You’d fit in with the Yakuza better.” 

She knows he’s right. Still. 

“No thanks. But I guess what some babysitters have us do is draw. Mama doesn’t like us watching a whole lot of TV, so they don’t have us watch that much. There’s also board games, and my favorite ‘sitter likes to teach us songs and sing,” she lists off, tacking ideas on her fingers. “Going to the park is fun, but you don’t like other people, or outdoors.” 

“No, I don’t,” Kai grimaces. 

“Actually… It’s probably a bad idea for you to be alone with any kid. Especially real little ones. There’s no way you’re changing a diaper, or feeding them with your own hands.” 

“ Fuck no.” 

“Don’t swear in front of children.” 

“Right.” 

“But more than that,” Suzume’s brows furrow. “People need contact. Babies die if you don’t hold them.” 

Kai looks physically ill at the idea. Suzume wonders what happened the first time around. If Kai got ahold of Eri, then something bad happened to Rio and Taka. Had her quirk misfired? Had there been an accident? 

If she knew she was going to get isekai’d by her baby sister, she would have paid better attention! It definitely didn’t help that she’d cared more about the League of Villains than the Shie Hessaikai. 

Now if I had been reborn sorta-related-to one of them…  

Kai and Rio had seemed close at the wedding, but there was a wedge between them in the form of their father. Their father who did not, and still didn’t entirely, approve of Taka. 

The Suzume who was not a former detective/mischief maker probably hadn’t noticed him outside. Without that, would Kai have? Would he have convinced the old man to come see his daughter get married? Would anyone else have made a little speech about love? Or would that wedge have only grown bigger and the distance between their small family only grown larger? 

Without all that, would Kai have even cared about seeing Eri before her quirk came in? 

Would he have had the kind of network of emotional support/rage inducing companionship that came with siblings, or had that fallen apart entirely and left him surrounded by people who merely obeyed him, and let him spiral into a germaphobic madness? 

“So,” Suzume concludes. “You either need to get used to touching people, or you need to keep someone around who knows how to take care of kids. Got anyone like that?” 

Kai and Kurono look at each other, sharing a silent conversation. 

“Is there anyone who’s dealt with kids before that we trust to do it again?” Kurono asks at last, looking lost. 

Kai stands with a grunt. “ I guess we’ll find out. Come along.” 

“ Kay.” 

Suzume is pretty sure that he’s not supposed to lead little kids down into the belly of the beast, beneath the kitchen and the offices and into a hidden underground facility where the true nature of the organization comes to be obvious. 

It’s pretty familiar, all in all, although she doesn’t see stolen paintings anywhere. Her first mother had had a fondness for Monet’s. 

This is much more sparse. 

The Shie Hessaikai are a smaller Yakuza group, clearly, and with All Might sweeping up organized crime all over the place they’re only going to get smaller.  

Still, there’s staff roaming around, men and women in nice suits tailored to hide weaponry, all of whom bow politely to Kai as they walk past. 

Suzume makes a game of seeing how many guns she can count vs knives. It’s more fun than staring at Kai’s back the whole time. 

They come to a stop in front of an office door, where Mimikyu or whoever the fuck he is pokes his weird puppet head out. 

Suzume will give it to Kai, he cuts to the chase pretty quick after the typical ‘Good morning’s and ‘how are you?’s.

“Who do we know who has kids? Or who interacts with them. Ever.” 

It’s enough to make Mimikyu pause. 

Suzume takes the time to poke Kai’s leg. Both Kurono and Mimikyu freeze, and stare at her like she’d just rolled herself in honey and walked up to a grizzly bear. Which, she might as well have as far as they’re concerned. 

But Kai twitches and glares down at her. 

“Don’t touch me. What?” 

“If I wash my hands can I hold yours? ‘Cause if we ever go anywhere I’m gonna have to, and Eri will definitely have to, once she starts walking.” 

“ No . Is that really what you want?” 

“Well no, but I thought of it. I wanted to know who you’re talking to.” 

Because ‘Mimikyu’ is definitely wrong. 

“...ah. This is Irinaka Joi, our accountant. He signs checks and makes schedules.” 

“Pleased to meet you,” he dips a nod at Suzume, who bows politely in turn. 

“Same. I’m Suzume.” 

“And the reason we need someone who can watch a kid, I figure.” 

“E-yeah.” 

“Well. No one working today, sorry. Also, Kai, there’s been some trouble at a store that we, uh-” 

He glanced at Suzume, who did her best to look like she was interested in the base boards instead of the conversations. 

“Well anyways. It’s a bit more than the regular guys could take on. The call just came in.” 

Suzume quietly watched Kai out of the corner of her eye. Was she about to witness a murder? 

Apparently even he knew that you weren’t supposed to bring a nine year old to a crime scene. 

“Find me the names, and locations. I’ll take care of it once Suzume goes home for the day,” he orders shortly. There’a flash in his eyes, a set in his shoulders, and Suzume get’s a glimpse of what the others, those who follow Kai, see in him. 

This was the Kai raised to be a Yakuza. Someone who fought for them, constantly and viciously. Someone who would commit any atrocity if it meant that their place in existence was cemented. 

Steel in his bones, and darkness in his blood. 

Suzume wonders just what she’s gotten herself into. 

~

Kai ends up being her regular babysitter. 

Rarely will he take Kaname as well, and Suzume has started her own bastardized version of exposure therapy with him(Kurono calls it harassment and torture. She doesn’t disagree). Poking his legs to get his attention, demanding her hold her hand at a crosswalk on the rare occasions they do go to a park, playing cards that she and Kurono have touched with their bare hands. It’s small stuff, really, and if she had a quirk she’s pretty sure she’d never get away with it. 

But he doesn’t raise a single hand to her, just snaps at her now and again. 

Eventually he gets used to holding her hand outside, although he get’s her a little owl shaped hand sanitizer holder to carry around in her tiny purse. She counts it as a massive victory. 

Business can’t always wait, so more than once she’s left to sit in the car with Kurono while Kai disposes of someone crossing lines. It’s during those times that she figures out how to perfect her lock picking skills in this new body, something that Kurono vehemently denies ever teaching her. 

And if she’s taken up pick pocketing? What are they gonna do? Tell the heroes? 

When Eri is one year old Rio bathes her and dresses her in clean clothes, and passes her into Kai’s hands for the first time ever. 

He holds her for just a minute before giving her back and scrubbing his arms raw. 

It’s… progress, Suzume supposes. 

And he is nothing if not stubborn. Eri and Rio have managed to light a startling fire beneath him. He visits them twice a month, that Suzume knows of, and holds Eri at least one time during those visits. It never lasts more than a minute, but whenever Rio speaks of her brother her eyes go soft, and the gap between her and Kai never grows like Suzume knows it could have. 

Eri is his niece as much as she is Suzume’s, and as twisted as it can become Kai is a man dedicated to his family. 

The season’s pass on. 

More and more faintly familiar faces appear at Kai’s heels. Shin Nemoto is the first, a tall man who looks for lies at every turn. He doesn’t find any in Suzume, who might not talk about Before, but is a bit too blunt for her own good. 

After him stumbles in Kendo Rappa, fresh from some kind of underground fighting circuit. He won’t fight Suzume, he has some kind of weird honor system going on, but he plays tag with her and they only tear up a few rooms. 

Then comes Rikiya, who Suzume doesn’t care for and who feels exactly the same towards her. Deidoro is next, and he’s just as distant, if it’s by his own volition or an order from Kai is a toss up. She sees him on the rare occasions when he’s sober.

(On one memorable weekend while they’re staying over while her parents are out of town and the twins are on a school trip, he sits her and Kaname down in the living room with a bucket between his knees and gives them the most horrifyingly blunt description of alcoholism and addiction that even she’s ever heard.) 

Toya, Hojo, and Tabe come in from the cold so close to each other that if she hadn’t been paying attention she would have thought Kai found them all crammed in the same cardboard box on the side of the road. Toya is all dark circles under his eyes and long sleeves, desperate for companions but waiting for betrayal. Hojo is expecting the same, to be used and thrown away again. 

(He nearly breaks down when Suzume asks him why it matters if his crystals are worth money, when beauty has its own value.)

Tabe is an unfortunate test subject the week she decides she wants to teach herself how to cook and nearly caramelizes a crab. He still pats her head in his own strange praise. 

They’re all tragedies, rolled into nice suits and masks. She still sees Kai and Kurono more than anyone else, but even those visits grow further and further between as she gets busier with clubs and classes. 

Rio and Taka end up moving across the country, along with their little daughter, all bright red eyes and her growing shock of white hair. Suzume had been conspiring to get her to say a swear as her first word, but instead she says ‘wash’ followed quickly by ‘fuck’. Kai is succinctly blamed for everything. 

The day that they leave Kai holds Eri for a whole five minutes before he passes her back to her parents so he can go scrub his arms red. 

Shisui rarely calls home, but Suzume makes a point to email him whenever she has the chance. She doesn’t mention his boyfriend, Touji. He’ll introduce them when he’s ready. 

Satomi and Seiji enter high school, still thick as thieves and turning into just that. 

They do their best to hide it from their family, Kaname and Suzume in particular, but there’s not a lot that they can hide from Suzume once she’s looking for it. They’re not particularly subtle anyhow. Not by her standards. But their only brief run ins with officers don’t end with anything heavier than a slight scolding that Suzume only knows about because she hears them talking about it when they think everyone else is fast asleep. 

Kaname grows taller and taller, and applies for every hero school that he can possibly think of. His last year in junior high is Suzume’s first, and it gives her enough clout that no one tries bothering her. 

Spooky reading girl and villain quirk boy make quite the pair.  

Kaname practices hard too, but he has friends, few and far between as they might be. 

On top of going to a new school and getting new uniforms for it, she’s also becoming a terror in Ryuhei’s class, to the point that she’s also started teaching the newer classes. Ryuhei recommends her to a friend of his, one who teaches Baguazhang. 

So she’s going to be a goddamn airbender.  

He’s started inviting in friends of his with dangerous, tricky quirks so she can practice countering them. The hardest part is figuring out the details on the fly, but she’s getting good at that. Some days it seems like he actually thinks that she’ll make it as a hero. If nothing else he knows that she’s stubborn enough to pick fights, and not everyone is a play ground bully who will hold their quirks back in fear of legal retribution. 

In junior high she also joins the track and gymnastics teams. She barely ever stops moving. Her reading is done on the track field itself, her book held firmly while she sprints in a long oval. It’s not like she had a social life to begin with, so she’s not sacrificing a lot. Her teammates are only competition, people to push her to be faster, to jump higher, to perfect her flips. 

In the evenings she starts free running, whenever Kai isn’t looking after her and sometimes when he is. He ends up buying her a pair of sturdy leather gloves so she doesn’t get her hands dirty or hurt.   

(She tries to ignore the fact that they treat her like she’s not a hero-hopeful, because it means that they, like everyone else, think her dreams are mere delusions. There isn’t a person alive who believes she can really become a hero without a quirk, other than her brother.) 

One day there’s a small explosion in the Shie Hassaikai base. It’s not big enough to destroy everything but it puts a hole in the ground and Suzume and Kurono fall into the rubble. Her arm tears open on broken stone and twists at an unnatural angle, her knee snaps against metal supports, and her foot twists so far around its faced the wrong way. It hurts, in the numb way that things hurt when you’re in shock, when you can’t really feel anything at all but you know that someone is wrong. 

Kurono is slightly better off, but his shoulder is out of place and blood drips out of his coat far too close to his ribs. 

It’s Kai who finds them, the rubble shifting and reforming around him. His touch on the stone and metal is featherlight, and she can see hives breaking out on the back of his hands. 

His gold eyes zero in on the two of them, huddled amidst stone, and he crouches beside their broken bodies. 

Rio had healed Suzume a hundred times, from small cuts to rolled ankles. The touch of her quirk is soft and buzzing, like bees humming under her skin while soft golden lightning danced across her skin. It’s beautiful, and pleasant, and Rio is soft. 

Kai presses a piece of leather between her teeth and lays his bare hands on her broken, bloody body. 

“This will hurt,” he says honestly. 

Whatever pain she’d felt from her broken bones and blood is nothing compared to being unmade and reshaped under Kai’s hands. Every cell ripped apart and pieced back together, every molecule rent asunder and reassembled. 

It lasts only a second, but it’s enough time that her throat is raw from screaming and tears stream down her cheeks. 

It’s nothing like being healed by Rio. Being unmade is so much worse than having her time rewritten. 

Kurono manages slightly better than she does, if only because he doesn’t start crying. He’s Yakuza, and made of tougher stuff than a little girl. 

That doesn’t make him less pale when he picks her up and carries her on his back back to the living area. She’s almost too big for it to be easy, but she’s a bit shy of her growth spurt. 

It’s quiet. Kurono calls the twins to pick her up, doesn’t give them much information, and Kai stays in the shower for the better part of an hour. 

He re emerges in time to watch Satomi pile her into his and Seiji’s second hand car. 

Suzume waves goodbye to him.

It’s one of the last times he watches her.  

~

There comes the day when she ends up going home early for once in her life, her first period kicking the shit out of her, and there’s a knock on the door. It’s just Suzume and Sanjiro at home. 

And by a knock, she means that the door is blown clear off its hinges, sending wood and stone flying all over the place, and Suzume is left sitting at the kitchen table, a sandwich halfway to her mouth, staring at it. A piece of the door cuts her forehead, right next to her temple, and blood drips slowly down her cheek. 

She’s not sure what she’s expecting when the smoke clears. She should react. She should run. Instead she stares . 

Stares at a man in a bright red and blue costume that comes picking his way through the rubble. Next to him comes a much less flashy man in a tan trench coat. 

Oh dad. She thinks distantly, What did you get into this time?

She wants to lunge for her phone and call Kai, or Rio, or someone. 

But they can’t fight this. This man is a force of nature. 

“Hello?” she asks, squinting up at them. The air around them changes when they realize that there’s a kid sitting there, watching them. 

She watches sweat break across All Mights brow. 

“Uh hem. Is your uh. Your father home, young lady?” 

At least he’s polite? She wonders if her dad would have a chance in hell of running out the back and escaping but- 

No. 

All Might is number one for a reason. And her dad fixes roofs. 

He handles the lowest level of all Yakuza business. Disputes between shell companies, people picking fights in bars, punk kids stealing from stores that pay for protection. 

(Suzume isn’t supposed to know about any of this, of course. She thinks he used to do worse things, more dangerous things, but he hasn’t since Taka was born. Everything for the sake of his family.) 

So why is All Might of all people coming to speak with him? Coming to arrest him? 

“Yeah,” she says finally. “Come in.” 

As if they aren’t inside already. 

There’s no way out of this. 

Well. She could stab All Might in the crotch when he’s not expecting a junior high student to do it, but that might just make things worse. Tsukauchi probably has a gun. 

The back door bursts open a second late and Sanjiro bolts in, his eyes wild. There’s a knife in his hands that he’s never willingly let Suzume see before. 

“You-” His eyes dart between his daughter and the hero, and the detective of course. The viciousness in them changes. Before her very eyes she watches the fight leave his body. 

“This wasn’t how-” he stops, looks again at Suzume, then All Might, who’s jaw twitches. 

“We weren’t trying to frighten your daughter,” he says, apologetic. “We thought you were the only one home.” 

She’s supposed to be at a fighting class. She’s supposed to be out. If they’d been staking out the house they would know that she’d come home early. So they hadn’t been. They’d just known her schedule. Which is creepy, but not unheard of. 

Except that she didn’t keep to a perfect schedule every single week. It changed, at least slightly, every time. 

So. 

They weren’t watching. They just knew her schedule. Which they would only know if someone in her family told them. 

And they didn’t lunge for her dad either. Like he wasn’t a threat. Like the Number One goddamn Hero hadn’t crashed through the door, casual as you please, and made a big scene. 

There’s something not right here. 

Pieces are clicking into place, but her stomach hurts and her headaches and nausea is starting to set in. Maybe if she throws up on All Might’s shoes he’ll fuck off. 

“Just- Just give a minute. I’ll come quietly,” he promises, his red eyes on his only daughter. “Just. Let me.” 

All Might hesitates, but steps away from him all the same. 

Not outside, but far enough that Sanjiro can step up to his daughter. 

Heroes shouldn’t do that. He could take me hostage, if they think he’s really whatever horrible thing he’s being accused of. 

“Suzume, listen,” he places his hands on her shoulders and she can feel tears prick at her eyes. 

“Hey, no-” 

“Suzy Q,” he stops her with her nickname. His smile is horribly, horribly sad. “Listen to me now.” 

His grasp on her shoulders grew tighter. 

“This world will never let you be a hero.” 

It stabs into her heart. Words she’s heart a million times from a million people. So many of them, so many times. And she’s known! She knew that he didn’t think she could do it. She knew he always doubted her desire, even if he never said as much. 

But he paid for her classes, somehow. He picked her up, bruised and aching, and pressed cake into her hands. He- 

Tears slipped silently down her cheeks, turning pink on one side. 

He let’s go of her and steps back. He doesn’t fight when All Might snaps handcuffs on his wrists. Neither he nor Tsukauchi can make eye contact with her. 

The world will never let you become a hero.

Chapter Text

The sentencing almost kills Kaname. 

It’s light, all things considered. The charges are heavy. Murder in the first degree, conspiracy to commit murder, and a bunch of other things. He should go away for life, for sure, but there’s some kind of clerical error that no one tells her the full length of. Missing evidence, and a breach in his miranda rights. Instead of life in prison he gets five years. Suzume is relieved, but the family of his supposed victim is furious. 

Suzume sits with Kaname on the courthouse steps while their dad is pulled into a police car bound for a high security prison. 

She’s figured it out by now. 

Sanjiro had taken the fall for something that someone higher up in the Shie Hassaikai, and let himself be charged for murder in exchange for the Yakuza taking care of his family. Seiji and Satomi had given up on university, but Chiasa had handed them both stacks of pamphlets and told them to think about what they really wanted. Suzume had gotten brand new uniforms for school, and Kaname had gotten a laptop. 

(No one had told either of them they weren’t allowed in hero school.)

At the same time, he’d sold information to the police to get a lighter sentence, and to keep Seiji and Satomi from getting in trouble for their petty thefts. 

“It’s not fair,” Kaname bites out, staring hard at the police car where they can just see their father’s head, silhouetted through the windows. His red eyes are rimmed even further red. 

Suzume can’t find the tears that had flown so freely a month before. 

“No,” she agrees. “But there’s nothing we can do about it right now.” 

“How can they do this? Dad’s never killed anyone!” 

At least, he had never kill the woman in the pictures they showed in the court room. They’d tried to shuffle the children out before those were shown to the judge and jury, but it was too late. Her face had been bloated in death, once pretty, with bruises around her throat and her eyes dull and dead. 

“I know that. And you know that. But he plead guilty, and they found his hair and stuff.” 

“I hate it. I hate it!” His hands curl into fists and venom dyes his lips green. 

Suzume leans on his side, her head on his shoulder. “Me too.” 

The police car drives away, with their dad inside of it. Lawyers and defendants, police officers and heroes, march up and down the steps around them. Mom and the twins are somewhere inside, settling things up with their attorney. 

“He gave up five years for the lives of four children,” Suzume says quietly. She’s already told Kaname what she figured out. 

“I wish you wouldn’t say it like that.” 

“I’m not wrong, though.” 

He knows that. 

That doesn’t make his shoulders less tense or his eyes less red. 

Suzume takes his gloved hand in hers and squeezes it gently. 

“He’s a good man. He’s a good dad.” 

A good dad for sure. He was trying to be a good man these days, but she was certain that he had been worse in his youth. There was a look he got in his eyes some days that she had seen in her last life. Eyes that had witnessed blood.

“Yeah.” 

She saw All Might in the courthouse earlier. Well. She saw Toshinori Yagi in the courthouse, a scrawny skeleton walking around a suit a dozen sizes too big for him. He’d made eye contact for a split second before running off. 

Coward . 

The new scar on her temple throbs now and again. It won’t be going anywhere. 

“Hey, Kaname?” 

He shifts under her. 

“Hmmm?” 

“Does this change what you want to do?” 

Kaname is a dreamer. He is soft hearted and kind, even when he gets in more fights than she does. He sees what the world could be instead of what it is. She’s jealous, sometimes. 

He falls silent, and thinks about what she’s said for a long time. 

She can see a shadow falling just out of the corner of her eye. Tall, fluffy wings. Something red flutters closer to them. 

Finally, she feels him shake his head against her hair. 

“No. I still want to be a hero. They got the wrong person this time, so I’m going to be a hero who finds the right person.” 

“A hero of justice?” Suzume asks. 

He nods, and she smiles, a quiet, private thing. 

“It’ll be even harder now. You have a ‘villain quirk’, and I don’t have a quirk at all, and our dad is apparently a killer. Are you ready to face that?” 

“Mmmm. I’m not giving up. I’ll change things, just you watch.” 

Yes, her brother is a dreamer. 

She won’t be the one to kill those dreams. 

“And you?” 

Suzume let’s out a sigh. “Kan. You’re the only person in the world who thinks I’ll ever be a hero. This doesn’t change a thing. But the two of us… Kaname, we’re gonna change the world.” 

The shadow moves towards them, growing closer and closer until it falls across their heads. 

In unison they look up, and find a newly minted hero hovering over them. He’s all soft smiles and wind swept hair. Bright red wings hover over his shoulders, and the red feather that had flashed in the corner of Suzume’s eye returns to his wings. 

Hawks. 

He’s new to the hero scene, maybe eighteen at the absolute oldest. They’d watched his debut on TV a few months ago. A kind faced young man with brilliant red wings. 

He’s a pretty boy who gives off the feeling of someone way more laid back than they actually are. 

He’s as much a tragedy as anyone else. 

In some ways, Suzume thinks he might be their opposite. They are all three the children of criminals, but their father loved them and sacrificed himself for their sakes. They all dream of becoming heroes, but Suzume and Kaname have no one in their corner but each other, no one believing in them. 

Takami Keigo, from what she recalls, was born with a selfish shit stain of a father, and a mother who basically sold him to the public safety committee because they knew he would make a fine hero. 

If she ever knew the full extent of what that conditioning was, she’s forgotten it by now. 

She thinks she and Kaname are much better off than he is, anyways. 

She wouldn’t trade her family for all the quirks in the world. 

“Hey, are you kids lost?” he crouches in front of them, a kind smile on his face. Suzume eyes him. 

“We’re not really kids,” she mumbles, and sits a little straighter. They’re both on the smaller side, their whole family is, but curled together on the courthouse steps they must have looked tiny. 

“I’m fourteen, thanks,” Kaname adds. 

He’s actually a week or so away from being fourteen, but that’s beside the point. 

“And we aren’t lost,” Suzume adds. She holds her hand up to Hawks expectantly, and he pulls her to feet, bemused. “Our mom and brother’s are inside. We’re just waiting.” 

“Ah, my bad.” 

Kaname climbs to his feet as well, and dusts the dirt off the seat of his pants. 

“Still, I can at least walk you inside,” Hawks motions to the courthouse. “I bet the two of you have had a long day.” 

Suzume glances down the street, where the police car is long gone. 

“That’s one way to put it.” 

Suzume’s gaze is drawn to a flash of light and a pair of news vans. A crowd of reporters is about to descend on the police station, and there’s no doubt in her mind that at least a few of them would have swooped in to talk to Kono Sanjiro’s youngest children. Suzume has a fresh scar on her forehead, and her knuckles are busted and bandaged. Both she and Kaname had bruises under their clothes from Ryuhei’s classes. 

They would make quite the front page editions. 

Red wings sweep out, across her shoulders, and Kaname’s, when Hawks steps between them. His firm hands touch between her shoulder blades. 

“Let’s get you guys inside,” he says kindly. He doesn’t point out the reporters stepping out with their camera’s flashing and their rabid smiles. 

Suzume let’s him guide them inside, his red wings a shield on their backs. 

~ ~ ~ ~

“Are you angry with me?” 

Suzume cocks her head, her dark eyes on Osachi. The Shie Hassaikai boss, Rio and Kai’s father. They all sit in the base where she had spent countless afternoons and weekends, teaching Kai how to handle children and keep his temper. 

He’s… well. None of them are good people, but there’s an honor in the Shie Hassaikai and Osachi embodies it well. He had struck a deal with Sanjiro, and he had gone through with all of it. 

They had moved to a new house, a nice one in Sheeli, and changed their names to their mother’s maiden name, Yusada. 

Yusada Suzume didn’t sound as nice as Kono Suzume, but they were trying to avoid attention for now. 

They all had their own bedrooms, and Suzume had a new school and new uniforms. Ryuhei had recommended her to someone new who was closer than he was to continue her training, and  less involved in the Yakuza than he was. 

It was. 

Nice enough. 

If you didn’t count the fact that her father was rotting away in prison. 

And if you didn’t mention the part where an older girl had stepped up to defend Suzume from her very first bullies, and the next week had vanished after stabbing a boy to death and drinking his blood. 

“I mean. Yeah,” she says at last. Her legs are crossed under her on the couch in Kai’s livingroom. He sits at a barstool at the counter, pretending like he’s not listening to every word said while he beats the shit out of Kurono at checkers. 

“I never forced your father to take the deal. It was always his choice,” he says, quiet and firm, and Suzume knows he’s not lying. He doesn’t need to. 

“I know,” she promises. She sighs and toys with a stray strand of black hair. Most of it is tied back with a handkerchief. There’s a scrunchie on her wrist that holds lock picks, a birthday present from Kurono. “And I’m mad at him, too.” 

“I’m mad at you for offering the deal, I’m mad at him for taking it, I'm mad at All Might for arresting him, I’m mad at Bairei for killing that woman-” 

“How,” the boss cuts her off suddenly, “Did you know it was Bairei?” 

Suzume blinks at him. 

“Huh? Isn’t it obvious?” 

“We covered that up,” he points out, and Suzume has to bite the inside of her cheek. 

Now that she’s starting to pay attention to the world again, she’s forgotten that not everyone sees things the way she does.

“Yeah. You did. But there’s only a few people high enough up that you would be willing to trade my dads life for, and among them two of them are gay and this was absolutely a ‘crime of passion’. The woman died of strangulation, which marks out Nakahara, since he’s only got the one arm, and Tomoe, since she’s not strong enough physically to do that without drugs already being in the woman’s system. Which, the toxicology report showed none of, or it would have been mentioned during the court hearing, especially considering my father’s quirk.” 

“All of that narrows it down to three people. Akiko was in Kyushu when she died, visiting her daughter. Higuchi would have shot the woman to death. So, it was Bairei.” 

Osachi stares at her for a long minute. Finally, he asks, “How long did it take you to figure that out?” 

“I… dunno? As soon as they showed her picture in court. She looks like Bairei’s ex-wife, too.” 

“I see.” 

“Yeah,” Suzume glances over, and realizes that Kai and Kurono are staring at her too. 

“You might one day be a very dangerous person, Kono Suzume.” 

Suzume cracks the smallest smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment. You aren’t planning on keeping me and Kaname from trying to enter hero schools are you?” 

“You’re still thinking of that?” he asks. She nods. “No, we won’t interfere. It was part of your father’s deal, that after he takes the fall we support your family whatever way you choose to live your lives. If you and your brother are really determined to go down that path, I’ve already agreed not to interfere.” 

“ If they let either of us in.” 

“ If they let either of you in, yes. I admit, I would rather you join us than waste your life away chasing that dream.”

“It’s only a waste if I don’t get it done.”  

Suzume tilts her head back, her eyes narrowed in thought. They definitely didn’t know that her dad had sold them out to the heroes, or this conversation would be going very differently, and Sanjiro would already be dead as a traitor. 

“You know,” she begins. “I think I’m always angry.” 

“We know,” Kai says dryly from the counter. He ignores the dirty look she sends him in favor of winning his latest game. “That’s why you want to be a hero in the first place. Not because you care about justice, or protecting people, or anything else. You just want to prove people wrong. You’re the most vitriolic child I’ve ever met.” 

“Do you own a mirror?” 

Kurono turns away to hide the way his eyes curve behind his dark blue face mask, so Kai doesn’t see his smile. 

Osachi draws her attention again, his voice grave. “Despite what you just said, I already gave your father my word. We won’t interfere with your goal, but this is part of his deal as well; If either of you ever truly become heroes, we cut all ties with you, and we are Yakuza and hero. Nothing more. Takahiro and Rio’s Marriage means nothing.” 

It stings, but it isn’t a surprise. It’s comforting, actually. There’a measure of belief, however small, in there that this might be possible at all. 

This world will never let you be a hero.  

Suzume looks down at her hands. She turns the scrunchie on her wrist around and around. The lock picks are hard under the cloth, and familiar. 

“I understand.” 

She’s still angry. Angry at Osachi. Angry at her father. Angry at the world. 

They aren’t good people. She knows that. And she’s probably (definitely) already complicit in a few crimes. 

Suzume glances at Kai out of the corner of her eye. He hasn’t taken the name Overhaul yet. He’s Yakuza, not a villain. Not yet. 

She knows he can become something horrible. There are monsters under his skin, and darkness in his veins. His knuckles have broken open on the jaws of those who would badmouth the Shie Hassaikai. He’s willing to do anything to restore their honor and lift them back to their rightful place. 

In at least one timeline he went so far as to put his own father in a coma to bring that goal to life, and tortured his niece as well. 

But she’s seen him laugh so hard it’s breathless and shocked, she’s felt his bare hands on her skin take her apart but remake her anew, despite his own mysophobia. She’s seen him take in person after person, tools perhaps but ones that he takes care of all the same and people that he’s honest with. 

Suzume cannot assume that what happened before will happen here. It would be silly. She has no idea how much of an effect she’s had on, well, anything, or how much of an effect she’ll have. She had no idea how accurate her faded memories of this world are anymore at all, if they were perfectly accurate in the first place. 

So she’s just going to have to live, and see what happens. 

Anyone is capable of an atrocity, and anyone is capable of a kindness. She’s always known that. It’s no different now. 

(It’s cold in the warehouse, so, so cold and her blood cools under her body while her own baby sisters weeps above her with blood on her hands

Hard rock presses against her, her body is broken, everything hurt and doesn’t and a villain puts her back together with hives on his hands) 

Although she’s definitely going to be keeping an eye on Eri and her quirk. She doesn’t know what all she can do, she’s a quirkless twelve year old whose claim to fame is having Yakuza babysitters, but Eri is just a kid, and she doesn’t want anything to happen to Taka. 

 So. 

She’ll keep an eye on things. And if it comes to it… If it comes to Kai and Kurono and the people she’s spent so many years around, or the life of one little girl, the choice is pretty clear. 

Chapter Text

The Ketsubutsu uniform looks good on Kaname. 

Chiasa isn’t happy to see her youngest son in it, Suzume knows. 

She’s not in the house as much as she should be, but she’d heard a few arguments between the two of them about him going to any hero school at all. It’s his dream, yes, but heroes had broken their family apart from her point of view.

She hates heroes. 

But she loves her children, and she caves and let’s him apply. 

So he applies to every school he can think of, and in the end he’s offered acceptance letters from Ketsubutsu, Seijin, and a handful of others, but Ketsubutsu was where he ended up. 

He and Suzume sit up late into the night, designing his hero costume.Seiji and Satomi, freshly graduated and more than ready to leave the house, sat with them and made their own suggestions, curled up in Kaname’s bedroom.

They ended up with a dark grey bodysuit with a hood. Yellow and black stripes on the sleeves and on lines that spread down the sides, over his ribs to his knees.They decided on black combat boots and a black belt, and on the belt and on the chest were two small black triangles shaped like his fangs. They kept fingers off the gloves so his claws were free, and they picked a yellow visor for his eyes, one that would read heat signatures like a snake might. It kind of reminds her of a half forgotten CreepyPasta. 

It wasn’t extravagant, but it was functional. 

That summed their family up perfectly. 

The twins bracketed them on either side of Kaname’s bed. They were still identical, and they had made a game out of fucking with people, but they were such different people. 

Seiji loved video games. He was going to college for game design, now that they could afford it. He was a brilliant artist, and a clever young man. He’d come up with more games than Suzume could keep track of over the years for them to play. 

Satomi wasn’t meant for the city. They had garden boxes and in their last house they’d had enough of a backyard that he could bury his fingers in the dirt and grow something green and beautiful. Here their backyard was bigger, and it was already overrun with beautiful flowers and herbs. So it made perfect sense for him to be going to study agriculture. 

It was going to be the first time that the twins had lived apart since they were born. 

She had no idea how they were going to do, but she hoped that they would be okay. 

They deserved to be happy. 

She privately hoped they left the stealing behind. Or at least didn’t get caught. She was absolutely certain that their dad’s deal with All Might and Tsukauchi had something to do with erasing their short criminal records. There was more too it, but without more information even she couldn't predict what exactly he had asked for, or what he had given them in return. 

“One day,” Satomi says suddenly, when they’ve set their design aside and are setting up a four way game of mario kart, “I’m going to move out to the country, and I want everyone to come visit for a week in the summer.” 

“Just a week? That’s so mean. I thought you’d miss us,” Seiji teases. 

“I think if all of us were in the same house at the same time for longer than that there would be a murder,” Suzume admits, “With the six of us Kono’s, Rio, Eri, Mom,” and dad, eventually, “and whoever Shisui brings. Someone would wind up with a knife in their chest. “

“I mean. You did stab me the other day.” 

“You snuck into the kitchen while I was chopping onions!” 

“I almost needed stitches!” 

“Listen man, it’s your own fault you got stabbed.” 

“Satomi, help, our baby sister is gas lighting me.” 

“It’s not gas lighting if it’s true you dick!” 

“Well now you’re just being sexist.” 

“That’s not- You know what I meant!” 

Suzume tackles him off of the bed and they go crashing down with a shriek into the darkness. Mom is going to kill them, but Suzume is too busy trying to choke Seiji to death. 

Satomi reaches over their head to pop open the mini cooler and pull out a soda, showing no sympathy for his twin, who’s starting to turn blue. 

Suzume miiiiight still be mad about the time he locked her in the pantry. Maybe. Just a little. 

Finally, Mom knocks on the ceiling and it echoes under their feet. She’s in the livingroom, talking to Rio on the phone about Kaname getting into school. She’s stressed, worried, Suzume wishes she could change it but- 

Kaname is getting closer and closer to his dreams. 

She’s glad for him, even if a sliver of envy does slide under her skin at the fact that he’s made it in, and the fact that he’s one step closer to being a hero, while her own school councilor spent twenty minutes yesterday trying to convince her to be a firewoman instead. 

Suzume looks down at the floor. 

Sometimes it feels like their family is getting smaller and smaller. 

Taka has been gone since she was only four, when he moved out. Not he lives across the country with his wife and daughter. They have their own small family now, and they hadn’t even made it back for the sentencing and they’re probably not going to make the twin’s graduation. 

Shisui had always been distant, the secret in his heart a heavy burden for him to bear and Suzume wishes, sometimes, that she had told him that she knew he liked men. Would it have helped or hindered? Would it have encouraged him to open up to them more, or scared him back into his bedroom? The mortifying ordeal of being known for something she feared too. 

Now Satomi and Seiji are only months from going off to universities. Separate ones, at that. Satomi will go to Kyushu, far away from them. Satomi will be slightly closer, a few cities away at his art school. 

It’s just going to be her, Kaname, and Mom soon enough. 

What is she supposed to do with that? 

What is their mom supposed to do with that? 

She still works as a vet tech, and as her children rely on her less and less she spends more and more time there, fixing up animals. 

She could do people too, in a pinch. It was a story that they didn’t tell often, the one about how her mother and father met. He’d been scraped up and hurt, and she’d stumbled upon him on her way home from work. 

Chiasa was, in the end, a bleeding heart, and she’d taken him home like something out of a silly fanfiction to patch him up. He’d done his best to repay her, fixing squeaky hinges, repairing her leaking faucet, and putting down her new tiles. 

They fell in love, completely and irrevocably, and Taka was born not a year after they met. 

If it were anyone else, Suzume would suspect a shot gun wedding. 

But she knows her parents. Their love is real and true. 

How horrible must it be, to know they her husband had signed his life away for the future of their children. 

Suzume leans against Kaname while the dark of the night encroaches. They’ve stayed up entirely too late, and she’s going to be a massive bitch in the morning, but it’s worth it for the little time she has left with her brothers. 

~ ~ ~

Suzume is not a vigilante. 

She’s really, really not. 

But she does enjoy her free running, and she’s memorized hero patrol routes so she can do it without getting in any trouble. There’s nothing more freeing than springing off the edge of a building and landing, cat footed and silent on the next building over. She loves seeing the city, glittering and bright from high above everyone else. 

There’s no one on the rooftops telling her what she can and can’t be. There’s no one in the sky to mock her goal.

For years she did it under the watchful eye of Kai, but now she does it on her own, her heart beating harder with the knowledge that if she fucks up he’s not around to save her. She’s a little too old for baby sitting, and besides that…

He’s busy these days, watching over Eri. 

When her mother had told them at dinner nearly a year ago that Eri was being watched over by Kai now, Suzume had nearly been sick with relief and dread. On the one hand, she’s seen how fond he is of her. If he was more expressive he would have spoiled her rotten, and with Kai keeping an eye on her she knows Eri won’t be a danger to Taka or Rio, who still don’t come around very often. Neither of them had liked giving up their young daughter, however temporary it might be, to the only person who had a similar enough quirk to hers to help. 

But. 

But, the only way there is to cancel out Eri’s quirk going haywire is… not pretty. Suzume has been unmade and remade by Kai’s hands and she prays that he’s somehow gentler with Eri. It’s a small consolation that the few times they’ve all packed into a train and gone to visit Eri has been shy, and careful about touching her aunt, uncle, and grandmother, but there are no bandages on her skin and she smiles, small and honest at them. 

Suzume… can’t tell. She can’t tell if Kai is still trying to weaponize Eri’s quirk. Possibly, but there’s no physical evidence and Eri isn’t suffering under his care. She twitches when he reaches for her, but leans into his rare head pats. 

Suzume wishes she could see them more and understand what’s going on. It feels like the better she knows people the less she sees of their true intentions. 

That had been the truth before, hadn’t it? And she’d been killed for it. 

So she. Doesn’t act. As long as Eri is happy and safe, that’s the only part she actually cares about at this point. Her families happiness and becoming a hero. That’s all that matters to her. 

So no . She’s not a vigilante. Honest. She just likes hanging out on rooftops! 

It wasn’t her plan to hear someone shouting a few blocks away from where she was scaling up a drain pipe. It wasn’t her plan to launch herself towards the noise, or to leap from the rooftop of the restaurant down onto the head of an attacker. 

It’s. 

Swift. 

She’s off the roof in an instant and in thescant  seconds it takes her to reach the ground she drinks in the situation. A woman clutching her purse to her chest. Two men, one with a knife. Another man at the edge of the alley way. 

The first man goes down under the weight of her boots and she catches the other man’s wrist, nearly breaking it and forcing him to drop his knife. She brings her other hand sideways, and does break his elbow inwards before she drives her knee into his stomach and steps back. 

He collapses beside the first one. His shoulder is definitely out of place. 

The man near the edge of the ally turns and tries to make a run for it. 

“Shit,” her eyes dart across the alleyway. Trashcans, a dumpster, an abandoned box of dented metal plates- 

She snatches one of the plates off the ground and whips it at him. It smashes into his head and he falls into a heap on the ground. 

It takes a minute at the most, and it’s done. 

Her heart beats wildly in her chest, throbbing through her temples. Her hands are shaking. Her breath comes quick and hard. 

She takes a breath. 

Holds it.

Let’s it out again. 

“Are you good?” she asks the woman, carefully not turning around. She’s had a hood up and goggles on for the entire time, but she’s sure she can still be recognized, even in the dark. She would be able to recognize someone like that. 

“Y-yes,” the woman breathes. Suzume’s hands haven’t stilled, but the woman is shaking all over.  

“Then you should call the cops,” she double checks that none of the men are going to be getting up any time soon, and starts for the nearest fire escape. 

“H-hey, wait, please?” 

She pauses. 

“Yeah?” 

“Do you have a name?” 

“Everyone has a name,” Suzume says with no small amount of amusement. 

It’s enough to earn her a huff. Good. If the woman can laugh, she’s not too traumatized. 

“If you’re going to be like that, fine. But before you go, at least come inside and eat something while I wait for the police? I promise not to tell them it was you. I’ll just say that someone dropped from the sky and then left.” 

Suzume tilts her head to look at the woman. She looks earnest, her purse still held tight. 

“It’s my cafe,” she adds, “please.” 

Suzume should say ‘no’. If she was smart she would. 

But the woman isn’t lying. She can see it in her eyes. 

Suzume let’s out a breath. 

“Sure. But just ‘cause it’s cold out here.” 

The woman beams at her. Suzume pulls out her phone and shoots a text off to let everyone know that she’ll be late. 

Once the police have been called she follows the woman inside the cafe. she quietly accepts a cup of tea while they wait. 

She stays close to the emergency exit. Just in case. The booths are plush and comfortable, the tables are clean with chairs stacked on top of them. Artwork lines the dark brown walls. The chalkboard above the counter reads with drinks, specials, and pastries. 

The restaurant is closed this late at night, but between the two of them it’s still somehow warm, and the lights that hang overhead aren’t so bright they hurt. 

The woman, Yusa, goes out to talk to the police when they appear. 

At the exact same moment that they’re loading the three men into the car there’s a flash of red and yellow and Hawks is standing there, passing off a trussed up villain. 

She doesn’t mean to, but Suzume catches his eye in the window. 

She tucks her legs closer to her chest and hides her lower face behind the tea cup. She wouldn't be able to outrun him if it comes to it. 

It doesn’t. 

He looks from her to the men in the car then back again, but doesn’t do anything about it. Instead he chats with the officers, chats with Yusa, and takes off again. 

Everything tonight seems to be happening fast. 

Her act of vigilantism. Hawks. 

And the conversation with the officers too, who have Yusa sign something before they let her go back inside. 

When she steps back in, she freezes at the sight of Suzume. 

“My god,” she breathes. “You’re just a child!” 

Suzume puffs her cheeks out. “I’m a teenager, thanks.” 

She’s thirteen, almost fourteen, and in a month she’s going to be taking her high school entrance exams. Provided that any of the schools she’s applied to let her enter. She has the grades for it, but no quirk. 

The crux of her life's problems.  

“I let a child save me! A child fought villains!” Yusa clutched her hair, which looked more like cotton than anything else. 

“Teenager,” she says again. 

“I can’t believe it,” Yusa wails, horrified. 

Suzume sips her tea and watches her freak out. 

“Adults are so weird.” 

“Do your parents know that you’re doing these things?” 

Suzume shrugs. “Dunno.” 

“You don’t know?” 

“I haven’t told them, but I’m not keeping it a secret either. So. I don’t know.” 

“Gods,” she mumbles. “I can’t believe a kid like you saved me.” 

“ Teenager .” 

Yusa slams her hands on the table in front of Suzume, making her jump. 

“Here’s the deal-” 

“Oh boy, no, please-” 

“Anytime you’re in this area, I want you to come visit me. I’ll give you something to drink, and a snack. Then you can rest somewhere safe.” 

Suzume let’s out a sigh. “You really don’t have to.” 

“Yes, I do. You saved my life, so come back again, okay? The cafe closes at 6, but I live above it. So anytime you’re in the area, come knock on my door. Promise!” 

Suzume has no real choice here, does she? 

“... ‘Kay. I will.” 

Yusa beams at her, and pours her another cup of tea. 

It’s almost an hour after her curfew that Suzume finally gets back home. It’s starting to snow, and she took one of the metal plates out of the discarded box, the same kind that she’d thrown before. It’s only a few inches across. It was solid, and it had flown perfectly from her fingers. 

It gave her ideas. 

~ ~ ~

Suzume isn’t sure who is more surprised when she gets a letter telling her she’s been recommended for the UA Hero course. Her, her mom, or Kaname. 

None of them have any clue at all who did the recommending in the first place. All of her family's ties are to the Yakuza, not to any heroes or their affiliates, and it's not like heroes had babysat her. 

So who the fuck recomended her? 

Even Suzume couldn’t say. All Might maybe, in some kind of strange guilt?

Well. 

There was one other option. The only other hero she had ever seen up close. Someone she had seen twice, total. 

Hawks. 

He’d heard her vow to change the world. He’d seen her little act of vigilantism. 

But still, did he really have the clout to do that? He’d never attended any hero school at all, and he was barely twenty one. He’d only just started his own agency, even if he was already in the top ten heroes in the country. 

God, what the fucking mess. 

If she’d managed to get Hawks’ attention it could spell trouble. 

Sure, he was another pretty boy, and she knew he was more of an asshole than he let on, but he was also trouble. The world was heading towards trouble, and he was right in the thick of it. And if she passed this exam, she would be too. 

(She privately was still bitter about the unfairness of the world. Everyone seemed to be so pretty and unique, with gold eyes and sharp teeth and bright hair and she was just little Kono Suzume, with dark hair and dark eyes and shoulders that were a little too broad from working so long.) 

Her invitation comes with special permission to bring a form of support gear of her choice. She knows that there’s rulings like that for people with particular quirks, like Aoyama’s and his laser. Looks like they decided to give her the option too. 

It stings her pride, but she’s not stupid. 

There’s a practical exam and a written exam. That one she’s not worried about at all. But the practical… 

Regular students fought robots, but what had recommendation students done? 

If she knew she was gonna live here, she would have paid so much more attention! 

So she shows up on the day of the exam in sweat pants and a windbreaker, her hair tied into a spiky bun with a pen sticking out of it. Her bangs frame her soft looking face.  

She sits in a large room with faces familiar and unfamiliar, and even the familiar ones are faded in her memories. She had once considered writing down everything she knew, but in a house with five nosy brother’s there was nowhere she could put it that they wouldn’t find it, and she had not been willing to figure that out. 

So she only has vague memories to go on, and they aren’t a lot of help here. 

There’s a boy on either side of her, one with his jaw visible, his teeth hard and straight, and the other is split down the middle, fire and ice. Someone else might try to befriend him. Suzume is too busy making sure she gets into the school. She isn’t here to make friends, she’s hear to show the entire planet her middle fucking finger. 

The written test is, like she thought, easy. Math, science, language, history. She puts her pen down before everyone else and sits quietly, mentally trying to keep calm. 

She can do this. Whatever happens, she has it covered. She will get into this school. She has to. 

It’s Snipe who collects all of their tests once they’re finished, and leads them out of the main building and into a training ground, one of several that the school boasts. There’s twenty for of them, and Snipe hands them off to Present Mic, who is just as loud and attention grabbing as he’d seemed on tv and the radio. 

Suzume stands beside Yaoyarozu and the lizard girl, whatever her name was. Shadow boy is in their group too, and two more faces she doesn’t recognize. A girl with thin blades dangling from the edges of her hair, and a boy who looks like a very small Tom Holland, if Tom Holland had bright pink hair and an extra two sets of arms.  

Good. 

If she was in the same group as Todoroki and Yaorashi, she would be totally screwed. 

Instead, she stands between the two other girls with the number ‘08’ pinned to her chest. 

“Alright!” Present Mic grins out at them, “The written exam is over, and now it’s time for the practical. After that is the interview and you kids are done for the day. You’ll go six at a time for the practical. The practical is a 3 kilometer obstacle course. But, it's a course that you won't be able to finish if you just run. Use your quirks freely to reach the finish line!”

Suzume stares hard at the obstical course in front of her. Huge buildings and walkways, veritably mountains to climb with bridges suspended between them, and a waterfall cascading across a cliff at just the biggest portions. Her stomach drops out from under her. Is it too late to sign up to fight robots?

It’s… bad. It’s gonna be really, really bad. 

If the shadow boy uses his powers right, he’ll make it first, and lizard girl will probably be second. She doesn’t know the quirks of Knife Hair or Pink Tom. Yaoyarozu is a toss up. If she uses her quirk right, she’s a very dangerous person, but this early on will she be creative enough and fast enough to use it well?

All of this, and Suzume has only her one support item. 

A grappling gun. 

She lines up with the others. 

She’s always known she’ll have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Always, always, always. If she ends up in Gen Ed with Shinsou and a bunch of other nameless faces it’ll just be harder. Relegated to regular school, it’ll be an even harder fight to get into the hero course than this will be. 

She lowers herself into a sprinters crouch, the one she’s taken a thousand times on the track team. She’s the fastest in both schools she’s attended, and if she was more personable she’d probably be the captain. 

But she isn’t, so she’s not. She’s just. Fast. And stubborn. 

She digs her shoes into the ground. 

One step at a time. 

The world will never let you be a hero. 

“GO!” 

She bolts for it. 

There are arrows that show which way to go, a blessing in and of itself, and she shoots past Yaoyarozu and lizard girl, knife hair and Pink Tom, and sprints uphill into a patch of city they’ve marked off. She still expects there to be killer robots, but apparently that would be overboard for the arena. 

There’s still traps, and ruined roads. A wire snaps against her ankle and the wall of the building beside her tips sideways, and crashes behind her. She glances back long enough to make sure that the other’s haven’t gotten themselves killed, and when they come scrambling through the rubble she runs on. 

She knows better than to use up all of her energy at once, especially not at the very start. The city falls apart behind her, and she’s forced to scrambled up the side of tall spires of stone, a bright blue arrow pointing her up and up and up. She can’t see a good, reliable place to sink her grapple at the top, it’s too steep, so she has to climb. 

Stone bites into Suzume’s gloves and she drags herself up, foot by foot. She’s overtaken by Knife Hair, who’s clever enough to use the blades to sink into the stone and give her quick, reliable holds. 

Suzume crests the top and takes a moment to look out over whats left. Her lungs are cold fire and she’s breathing hard, this high up. She stretches her arms behind her head, forcing her ribs to expand and suck in more oxygen. Yaoyarozu finally catches up to her. She has no idea where shadow boy is. She can’t focus on him now anyhow. 

There’s five more spires of stone, with rope bridges suspended between them. The path picks up past them, with a waterfall. Knife Hair is cutting the bridges behind her. Even if she wasn’t Suzume watches a plank shoot out from under her foot, and Pink Tom swears violently where he’s gone after her. 

Suzume pulls her grappling gun out of the inside pocket of her windbreaker and shoots it at the furthest mountain. She yanks the line, double checking that it’s well and truly secure before she launches herself off the side of the mountain and let’s it whip her forwards. She swings, barely missing two of the mountain spires, and uses her feet scramble up the last few feet to the top of the furthest one. 

The rope bridge is unsteady and broken but she makes it to the waterfall, and the river that feeds it, in one pieces. Down below, past the initial pool of water, is an industrial maze of pipes and concrete, but past that she can see the long ramp that cuts through the rest of the water, made of steel, and ends abruptly at a pathway made of sunken logs standing upright. 

Suzume shoots down into the mess of pipe and jumps right off the water fall. 

Gravity tears her towards the ground, faster and faster, and right when it seems like she’s about to splatter into the water she activates the gun and it whips her forwards, nearly tearing her arm off when it goes taut. 

She skims across the water, twisting her weight and throwing her legs in front of her body to catch herself on the hard pavement. She rolls with the impact and loses her grip on the gun. It catches on a sheer wall of metal, between the wall and yet more pipes. She can hear something groan in protest, deep in the maze of steel. 

She checks. The gun is well and truly lodged, and the other’s are still running. 

So she cuts the line and stows the gun back in her jacket before she starts making her way through the maze. It’s… quiet. Much too quiet. All she can hear is the echoes of water rushing in pipes and her own blood pounding under her flushed skin. 

It feels like something is going to happen, but all that happens is she breaks out of the mess in time to see the shadow boy run onto the ramp. There’s no shadows for him to move in on it, it’s just hot metal in broad day light. 

Suzume briefly considers the merits of trying to drink the water. It looks cool and clear, but she has no idea what, or who, had been in it. 

She’s almost at the end, almost finished the race. She knows she’s not last. 

Will that be enough to get her in? 

Will second, or third, or fourth, be good enough for her to be the first ever quirkless hero student? 

Suzume brushes past shadow boy, who yelps in surprise. She doesn’t know why he’s stopped until the bridge tips precariously under her feet as soon as she’s on it. 

Suzume stills. It’s on some kind of axis. Like a plank of wood over a tube, and by some stroke of luck she’d managed to step right in the middle. 

Only. 

When it moves she can see a gap ahead, where it separates from the next portion. 

Fine. 

She’ll swim if she has to. 

Suzume walks steadily across the unsteady ground, and once she reaches the next sheet of metal she pushes down with her foot. It tips violently sideways, one part lifting while the other dips deep into the water. The middle is a few feet to her left.

She jumps from the first section to the axis of the second, and barely waits for it to stabilize beneath her before she starts on. There’s two more she can see. Water laps against her shoes. 

She makes it to the next section. The fourth splits into three more pieces, side by side, each one much less stable than any of those that came before. 

These ones stop when they’ve turned all the way out of the water, leaving only an inch of solid steel standing on edge, three feet out of the water. 

Suzume hops up like it’s an unreliable balance beam and walks across it. She’s going to send her gymnastics coach a goddamn gift basket. 

The logs feel like a cake walk, even though she nearly slips off of one when it’s wetter than she was expecting. There’s fewer and fewer the closer they get to shore. 

She lands on solid ground, her legs trembling faintly with the strain. A look over her shoulder reveals shadow boy starting at the logs, and Yaoyarozu halfway through the steel sheets. 

Suzume can’t stop now. She’s too close. 

She sprints dead the last half 500 meters, and finds the white tape already broken. Lizard girl had beaten her. She can’t say by how much. But she had. 

Second place. 

Suzume steps off to the side to cool down, and to nurse her injured pride. 

She doesn’t pay the other’s any mind, even when they start chatting with one another. They’re all in one piece, and Pink Tom and Knife Hair come in last, bemoaning everything. She finally finds out that Pink Tom can turn intangible. 

Present Mic scribbles down everyone’s time and sends them to clean up for their interviews. 

Suzume washes off quickly, scrubbing the sweat and dirt off of her body before changing into her interview clothes. Black slacks, a black blazer, and a red blouse. 

When she looks in the mirror she almost sees Suzanna Hemmings again. 

Almost. 

She ties her hair back into it’s spiky bun, stabs a pen through it, and grabs her folder from her locker. 

They hadn’t given them a lot of information about the interviews, but Suzume remembered enough about being an adult to remember how job interviews went. It shouldn’t be too different. She’d written down a few of her own questions too. 

UA is supposed to be the best hero school, but how is it continuing to improve over time? 

What is something you know now as a teacher that you wish you’d known as a student? 

Thinking back to previous students, what differentiated those that were successful from those that truly thrived? 

Will you really let me into the hero course?  

She probably won’t ask the last question, but the other three had always served her well in past job interviews. 

Present Mic lines them up in chairs outside the principals office, in order of their assigned numbers. Suzume is towards the front, with only a couple other’s behind her. It’s hard for her to sit still, and she misses the familiar comfort of her lock picks tucked against her wrist. 

Still, she waits for the first few interviews before she’s called in. 

Nezu sits behind his desk, Hound Dog beside him. 

Suzume says nothing about Nezu being a mouse, or a tiny bear, or adorable even though he totally is. She just sits in the chair ahead of them, back straight and dark eyes steady and level. 

“Good morning,” Nezu greets with a good deal more cheer than Suzume had been expecting. “I trust you didn’t find your earlier tests too taxing?” 

Is that a trick question? 

“Good morning. I did my best on both,” she settles on a non-answer. 

“I’m sure that you did. Your recommendations speak highly of your focus and drive.” 

Suzume feels a warm, startled flush crawl across her skin. 

It did? 

“All that’s left is a few questions that we have for you, and then any that you have for us. Please take your time, and don’t feel rushed. Are you ready?” 

Suzume nods. 

Nezu steeples his hand- er, paws, in front of him and begins. 

Most of them are standard. 

What are your hobbies? What did you find most difficult in middle school? What did you find easiest? Describe a time you overcame adversity. Why do you think UA is a good fit for you?

I like reading about history and spending time with my brothers, one of whom is currently attending Ketsubutsu. I didn’t have much trouble with course work, but when I changed schools halfway through it made making friends difficult. I’m not a very sociable person, but I’d like to work on that while I’m here. A time I overcame adversity would be two months ago when I won several races at a track and field meet. I think UA is a very well equipped hero school and attending would give me a leg up in my future career and important experience that I wouldn’t find in other hero schools. 

“Alright, I have one more question for you. Miss Yusada. Why do you want to be a hero?”

Why? 

Suzume considers her normal answers. The ones she’s given a half a hundred times. The blunt ones she’s given to yakuza and the bitter ones she’s thrown at classmates and teachers. 

She folds her hands in her lap and meets Nezu’s gaze evenly. 

“I want to be a hero because in the entire world, there is only one person who believes that I can be. I want to be a hero because for my entire life everyone I’ve ever known has told me that it’s not possible. That because I don’t have a quirk, I’ll never be up to snuff. I want to be a hero because-” 

She falters. Steels herself. Keeps going. 

One step at a time. One word at a time.  

“Because I’m not the only one. I’m not the only one who’s been told that this goal is impossible or foolhardy. If - When , I make it, I will be the first. There’s not a single hero without a quirk anywhere. Not in Japan, or America, or Europe. There are people like me who will never be afforded the opportunity to chase their dreams, all because of the circumstances of our birth. I’ve heard it touted as random chance, or even something as silly as destiny. Destined for mediocrity. It’s not right. All because of how I was born…”

Her fingers curl tightly in her lap and she looks up at the heroes, her jaw set. It’s a jumble of words, she’s not charismatic, but it all comes down to one thing, really. 

“If fate came at you swinging, wouldn’t you fight back?” 

Nezu stares at her, his eyes just as dark as her own. She doesn’t know if she said the right thing. She doesn’t think she could have said the right thing and been honest. But he smiles as her, and tells her that her letter will arrive in a few days time before sending her on her way home, dazed and exhausted. 

Chapter Text

Suzume does feel bad for their mother. Really, she does. 

Chiasa loves her children, and she has to watch as one by one they leave her, and her two youngest decide to follow a dangerous path in life that even people with exceedingly powerful quirks will struggle with. 

But she’s never forbidden them from it, not even Suzume, although she’s tried to talk them both out of it. 

It stings, and the conversation is one that Suzume does her best to forget about. 

But she doesn’t forbid them. She never stopped Suzume from fighting, or running, or going out late. It’s… confusing. 

Even when a reporter started harassing Kaname at Ketsubutsu, she never pulled him out, although the school did get involved with a minor lawsuit against him. 

Chiasa pulls her hair up like she hasn’t since Suzume was still too young and uncoordinated to do it herself, straightens her tie, and pretends she wasn’t crying last night before she loads Suzume into the car. 

Ketsubutsu is in the same city that they live in, Sheeli, but UA is a few cities over in Mustafu. So Chiasa pulls to a stop in front of the train station, her eyes rimmed red. 

“You know which stop it is, and you have something to eat on the way back, right?” 

They’re silly questions. They were both there when Suzume packed slices of lemon bread and beef jerky into her bag. Suzume always carried snacks in her backpack, and a water bottle swung leisurely from where it was clipped on one side. There were bandages and medical tape packed into it too, and her skirt tucked into the top. She hated wearing skirts, especially on trains, so she would swap her pants for her skirt once she got to Mustafu station. 

“Yes, and yes. I’ll be back around 5, and I don’t have any other classes today.” 

Chiasa tugged Suzume into a tight, crushing hug. For a second Suzume wondered which of them it was who could see the future, that she was so afraid for her daughter. She didn’t even know about all of the dangerous things that were on the horizon. 

Attacks, kidnappings, war. 

Suzume squeezes her mother tightly, and breaths in the familiar scent of dog fur and lilacs. 

“Be careful,” she begs. 

Suzume nods against her shoulder before she finally pulls away. She had always been closer to dad. Even two years after his sentencing that still feels true. That doesn’t mean she loves her mother any less. 

“I will. I’ll be back at five,” she says again. 

Suzume leaves her mother at the gate. She taps her phone to the turnstall and it lights up with her name when it reads her railpass and lets her through. She’s just in time to catch the train to Mustafu. 

It’s an hour ride to Mustafu, and another hour back in the afternoon. Suzume plans on using that hour for homework, but school hasn’t started yet, so she takes her seat, her backpack in her lap, and pulls out her latest history book. Her favorites are ones that focus on the rise of quirks, not-quite 200 years ago. 

She hasn’t gotten around to reading whatever that book by Destro is, but she’ll get there.

By the time the train comes to a stop in Mustafu, the sun is already rising, golden and bright. Suzume isn’t the only person in a UA uniform at the station. She doesn’t recognize anyone off the tops of her head when she comes back out from changing, so she turns her attention away and steps outside of the station. 

She looks east, towards the rising sun.  

Almost 8 city blocks away, is UA. She can just see the top of it rising up at the top of the hill that it lives on. She had climbed that same hill weeks ago, to take her test, but the school looks different, glittering in the morning glory. 

Maybe I should invest in a scooter. Or roller skates, so I can ride it down the hill on my way back. 

 Suzume takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and starts the long walk up to UA high school. 

It doesn’t feel real. 

Part of her expects to walk in to pick up her student ID and find that it says Gen Ed, or Business on it. 

Instead the woman in the front office, someone that Suzume doesn’t recognize at all, hands her a thin card with her name scrawled across it and ‘Hero Course’ underneath. 

It’s heavy in her hands and she has to step aside and just. Stare at it. For a few minutes. 

The space where it would list her quirk is blank. 

It seems like Suzume should feel something about that. Pride or bitterness or. Something. 

But she runs her thumb across the light bulge that marks where the identification chip on the card is and goes to find her classroom. 

It was no use wondering about where she would be in 1-A or 1-B anymore, or speculating on which one would be better. 

She steps into the classroom with a truly massive door and tucks herself into one of the open seats. Second from the back, next to the window. One the black board is their homeroom teacher’s phone number, and a few others printed beneath it. She opens up a notebook and lays a pen on it before starting on her book again. She’s almost halfway through now. 

Suzume will deny it until the day that she dies, but when Eraserhead walks into the room, looking more like a corpse than a person, she almost bounces in her seat. Eraserhead is one of her favorite heroes, Before and Now, and she’s so geeking out to see him in real life. 

He’s so cool! 

Cool, and strong, and clever and- 

And calling all of them out for a ‘Quirk Apprehension test’. 

Right. 

He’s cool, strong, clever, and Suzume has absolutely no idea what he’s going to think of a student without a quirk. 

He’d nearly expelled Midoriya, although he had a quirk by that point and it was one that would destroy his body. But he’d also trained Shinsou, who’s quirk was useful but not in a combat sense. 

What about Suzume? 

What about someone who didn’t have a quirk at all? 

She didn’t know. 

She had absolutely no idea. She wanted to say that he would judge her fairly, but was that the truth or was that what she wanted to believe? 

Suzume was used to people doubting her. They had her whole life. 

So it was silly. Really, really silly, for Suzume to- 

To what? 

Hope? 

Well that’s depressing.

It’s just like the entrance exam. She doesn’t look at or speak to any of the others, even when the other girls start chatting in the locker room. She watches on passively while Bakugou launches the ball with a wall of fire, something ugly and green and familiar curling in her ribs before she discards it. 

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t unexpected. Neither was Urakara’s infinite score, or the insane grip strength of Shoji, or the speed that Todoroki managed to display using just ice. 

She knew, she always knew that she wouldn’t be able to do this flashy shit. 

So she just did what she could. 

She ran, she jumped, she threw, and stretched. Suzume pushed herself as hard as she could, while watching her classmates out of the corner of her eye. 

She didn’t remember his name, but it looked like the little grape freak hadn’t made it into class. 

Fine by her. 

He was gross. 

In the end she stood next to Midoriya, who was nursing his newly broken finger, while Eraserhead, Aizawa-sensei, posted their results on a white board. 

1) Yaoyarozu

2)Todoroki

3) Bakugou

4) Iida

5) Yusada

6) Tokoyami

Five. 

She made fifth place, without a quirk to her name. Her shoulders drop in disbelief. She had outrun Uraraka and Koda sure, and she’d lapped Sato and Kirishima, and Bakugo had looked pissed when her grip strength was almost double his. She could have gone completely flat on the floor stretching, and sit ups were easy, and she out threw everyone without a physical quirk to help them but- 

Fifth place? 

Really? 

Was she the only one who had trained beforehand for this? 

She spends her free time hanging off ceiling ledges and crawling up the sides of buildings, but does that really mean that her basic physical abilities were so much… higher? Than the others? 

And how did Yaoyarozu get in first? 

It wasn’t like she made a canon and launched herself over the distance run. Yaoyorozu was… tricky. Maybe she had a secondary quirk that meant she won whatever she tried. Although Suzume had beat her in the entrance exam.  

Admittedly, there were so many times she’d watched her classmates just. Not use their quirks in an efficient way. Tokoyami could have used Dark Shadow to cross the finish line faster or get extra air in the long jump, but he’d only used his own body for that. Ojiro could have used his tail to squeeze the grip measurer. There’s a dozen small and large ways her classmates could have used their quirks that they just. Didn’t. 

And the ones without physical enhancement quirks? Like Hagakure, Koda, Jiro, and Kaminari? They had been so, so slow . It’s hard for her not to snap at them. Had any of them put any real training into getting in here? She’s worked her entire life just to claw her way in, and they- 

It doesn’t matter. Because it’s a quirk apprehension test, and she doesn’t even have a quirk. She’s surprised her name is even on the list.  

Even after he posts the results, even after Aizawa tells them the entire thing was ‘logical deception’ she waits for him to pull her aside and send her home. She waits to be told she’s expelled. 

He doesn’t. 

He dismisses them for the day and- 

And that’s it. 

She feels dizzy and wrong footed and it’s only when she stumbles back into the classroom that she realizes she’s managed to go an entire day without speaking to a single classmate. 

~ ~ ~ 

Suzume wonders what her mother thinks when she tells her that she could have been expelled today but wasn’t. When she tells her that she was in the top ten of her class in a quirk apprehension test.  

She has no idea because she’s too busy trying to keep Kaname from choking on his soup to see her expression. 

Suzume at least thinks it's pretty funny. 

Funny enough that she’s stull fighting a smile the next day in class anytime she thinks of it. Right up until the moment that All Might bursts through the door and strikes a pose. 

For an instant, just one instant, their eyes meet and she freezes. She can’t actually see the blue beneath the shadows of his face, but she can feel the weight of his gaze on her. 

For an instant she’s twelve again, bleeding from a cut on her forehead, watching her father surrender himself and leave her. 

The world will never let you become a hero. 

For an instant she’s twelve again, walking through the long halls of a court house with her brother shaking by her side while they watch their father be led away in chains, the imagine of a dead woman fresh in her mind. Toshinori is frozen at the edge of the hallway, his blue eyes on the children he’s broken, before he flees like a coward and- 

Suzume breaths. The cut is long healed, barely a scar these days. She is in a school, and she is fifteen, a hero-in-training. 

“I AM HERE!” he could burst windows with how loud he shouts it. “Coming through the door like a hero!” 

Suzume keeps herself quiet while he cheerfully tells everyone that they’re going to be doing a battle simulation, and hands out their costumes to get changed into. He doesn’t look directly at her again for the rest of the speech, or when they all make their way to the training grounds before splitting into the changing rooms. 

There’s guilt there. 

Good. 

Whether it was her fathers choice or not, he still took him from her. It’s as much his fault as Osachi’s. Or at least her heart says as much. 

She changes into the hero suit, the one that Kaname had helped her design. 

It’s a bit like his. A dark grey bodysuit that’s almost black, with a loose hood, where the arms are a dark yellow, nearly orange, and lead down to black leather gloves. From just above her hips to just above her knees, on the outside of her legs, were harder pads of more dark yellow that provided armor. Her shoes, thin soled, are the same color and the top is reinforced where it leads up to short shin guards. Small bands wrap around her ankles, to protect them and to offer extra, smaller pockets. 

She has a belt that wraps around to stop at her hips, a bit like Uraraka’s but more rectangular and practical. One each side was a thigh holster. 

Thanks to her not having a quirk they had let her have extra, smaller support items. In one thigh holster was a stun gun, in the other was a grappling gun like the one she’d used in her exam. Her belt was filled with small smoke bombs, bola’s, pepper spray, and thin throwing disks. She’d gotten the idea for those the night she’d helped out Yusa for the first time. They’re only two and half inches across, but they were weighted and they could do some damage if she needed them too. In the pockets on her ankles she stores her lock picks, some caltrops, a small flashlight and a butterfly knife. 

Strapped to her back, on top of the belt, is a collapsible bo staff that Ryuhei had sent her when she got accepted. 

Looking at herself in the mirror is… strange. 

It’s still her face. It’s still her dark eyes staring back and her black bangs framing her temples where the hood doesn’t quite cover her, but she looks less like plain, quirkless little Kono/Yusada Suzume and more like the person her brother thinks she is. Can become. 

She tugs her gloves on tighter. 

“Oh wow!” 

She jumps when Uraraka pops up next to her reflection. 

“That’s a pretty cool costume! I really like the amber color.” 

Suzume blinks at her, startled for a moment. “Oh. Thanks? I like yours too. The boots especially.” 

Uraraka beamed at her. “Thanks! They’re designed to help me land softly, and keep me from getting sick if I use my quirk too much.” 

“Ah, cool.” 

Which it is. Uraraka is a nice girl. And it isn ‘t like Suzume hates her or anything. She doesn’t really hate anyone in her class yet. It’s just that socializing isn’t her goal here. Not even close. 

But, still… 

“Does your quirk make you sick often?” 

Suzume let’s Uraraka tell her about how much anti-gravity fucks around with the inner ear canals, and about pressure points on the ankles, wrists, neck, and head while they walk out into the training ground. 

The sun shines warm on her dark suit, and she breathes in the scent of new leather and hot concrete. 

All Might still doesn’t really look at her while he explains the training exercise. It’s pretty simple, just capture the flag with quirks.  

They all line up and draw their lots. 

Suzume plucks a paper that says E on it. When she turns around, Kirishima has one that matches. 

“Hey,” he shoots her a crooked, sharp toothed smile that she’s immediately jealous of. “Looks like we’re on the same team!” 

“Yeah. Looks like it,” she agrees. 

Kaminari gasps loudly. “Holy crap! You can speak!” 

Suzume’s brow twitches. “What gave me away?” 

“Hey, hey, don’t get all irritated,” Kaminari holds his hands up, pacifying. A little B paper flutters between his fingers. “This is just the first time I’ve heard you say anything since school started.” 

Is it really? Sounds right. 

“You’re not exactly friendly,” Kaminari ads. 

Suzume tucks her paper into her belt. “That’s because I’m not here to make friends,” she says evenly, and turns to walk away, to where All Might has set up two boxes labelled ‘Heroes’ and ‘Villains’. 

She’s still in ear shot when Kaminari whistles, lowly. 

“Wow. Talk about intense.” 

The match ups are… interesting. 

Ashido and Todoroki make up A. B is Kaminari and Bakugo, C is Yaoyarozu and Shoji. D is Iida and Midoriya, Kirishima and Suzume are E, of course. F consists of Uraraka and Tsuyu, G of Jirou and Tokoyami. In H is Hanta and Aoyama, in I is Koda and Hagakure. And Sato and Ojiro are J. 

All Might digs around in the hero and villain boxes before he pulls out H from Villain and J from hero. 

Sato and Ojiro vs Hanta and Aoyama. 

They all filed into the observation room, save the four that started their battle. 

She wasn’t all that surprised when Hanta’s tape was used for booby traps all over the building. Ones that Sato mostly got caught in. Ojiro had better luck, and almost won, but Aoyama managed to blast him out the window. 

While the battle went on, Midoriya watched it with rapt attention, frantically scribbling in his notebook and mumbling all the while. It’s a little bit creepy, and a little bit cute. 

After them All Might draw C and G teams, and Yaoyarozu and Shoji run off to be villains while Jirou and Tokoyami plan their attack. 

Their turn takes longer. Jirou and Shoji are both talented at reconnaissance, and it takes several long minutes of dancing around eachother before Tokoyami goes in for an attack. Yaoyarozu had fortified the room well, but Dark Shadow broke through the door all the same and hit her hard while she struggled to adapt and counter. 

Shoji managed to capture Jirou, and held her hostage until Tokoyami surrendered. 

Then, All Might pulled out E and B. 

Suzume and Kirishima vs Kaminari and Bakugou. With Kaminari and Bakugou playing the villains. 

Suzume let’s out a breath. Great. Out of everyone in her class there are four people she’s absolutely sure she can’t take in a straight fight. Todoroki, Bakugou, Kaminari, and Iida. And now she’s going up against two of them. 

She’s going to have to rely on Kirishima, but how effective that’s going to be is debatable. He can hold up against explosions, but she can’t remember if he’s got any resistance to electricity. 

To make matters worse, Bakugou and Kaminari are the villains. Which means there’s no chance for them to try to force them to stay together and lessen their power output. She knows at this point in time that Kaminari can’t control which direction his electricity goes, so he has to hold back next to allies and- 

“This’ll be fun.” 

She pauses her internal, spinning thoughts to look at Kirishima. He’s grinning, his red eyes bright. 

“Fun.” She repeats. 

“Yeah. I mean we get to flex our quirks out there, do a sick practice run at being heroes, and there’s not some crazy penalty like with Aizawa. It’s kinda like playing capture the flag.” 

“Except for the part where we might get blown up.” 

“Well yeah, but still. You can’t tell me you aren’t at least a little bit pumped!” 

He grinned wider at her and, against her will, Suzume’s mouth twitched upwards. 

“Maybe,” she concedes at last. “But still… I really wanna win this.” 

“Hell yeah! We’ve totally got this. I was thinking that they’ll probably split up. Bakugou seems like a hot head, so I bet he’ll try to take us head on and leave Kaminari to guard the bomb. I bet between the two of us we can take him out, and then ambush Kaminari.” 

Suzume startles. 

She. 

Hadn’t been thinking like that. There had been a divide in her head, not just between her and the other team, but between her and Kirishima too. One where it was either her or him, not both of them together. Together… 

“Yeah,” she says at last, some of the tension bleeding out of her shoulders. “Yeah, that sounds good.” 

“Awesome.” 

Suzume follows him out towards the building. She keeps her eyes on the windows, but there’s not many on the side they approach from, and she doesn’t see movement in any of them. Bakugou and Kaminari are both kind of hard to miss. 

She pulls her grappling gun out of her holster. 

“Why don’t we start on the roof? They won’t expect us to come in from above.” 

“Oh sick, I didn’t know you had that. Good idea, Yusada.” 

She wants to tell him to call her Kono or even Suzume. Instead she offers him one arm and her grabs onto her, holding tight. She grips him around the middle and shoots up towards the roof, pulling the pair of them up onto it. She ignores the flustered look on Kirishima’s face when she lets go of him. He’s almost as red as his hair. 

It’s… kind of cute, actually. 

She stows her gun away and heads for the door to the stairwell, Kirishima at her side. 

“Okay. I can break down the door and-” 

“No need.” 

“Huh?” 

He looks at her when she kneels in front of the door and pulls a pair of thin tools from her ankle pouches. They’re thin enough the look more like ankle warmers she’d wear to the gym than actual hero equipment. 

“I’ll pick the lock. It’ll be quieter that way.” 

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Kirishima watches her with interest. It only takes a second before she’s turning the knob and letting them in, with her picks back where they belong. 

“It’s not hard.” 

She flicks on her flashlight. It’s barely big enough to fit in her palm, but it’s brilliant in the dark hallway and it gives them a little extra stealth. Suzume’s footsteps are quick and silent. Kirshima’s are much louder, but it’s not hard to hear past them into the rest of the building. 

She inhales slowly, testing the air. 

Kirishima watches her. “So. Whatcha doin?” 

“Trying to smell them.” 

“... what?” 

Suzume glances over at him. “Didn’t you notice? Kaminari always smells like ozone when he’s getting ready to use his quirk, or when he’s used it recently, and Bakugou always smells a little like burnt marshmallows and gunpowder.” 

“No, I didn’t notice that at all. Is that your quirk then, you uh. Smell people?” 

“Nope.” Kaname could. His snake-like traits had been getting more and more prominent lately, and with that came a stronger sense of smell that was starting to morph into something like heat vision. He’d really come a long way at Ketsubutsu. 

They creep around the corner. 

“It was a long shot, but I figured I might as well try.” 

“Fair enough…” Two floors down, the lights are on. 

Kirishima perked up. “Hey!” he whispered, a little too loud, “I smell ozone!” 

“Mhmm. Same. You’re not immune to electricity are you?”

Kirishima shook his head. “Nah. I’ve got more resistance to it when I’m hard, but it’s not a full insulation you know?” 

“Yeah, I get you. Do you think you can distract him, and I’ll come up from behind and get him with the capture tape?” 

“Sounds like a plan!” Kirishima holds out his fist. Suzume taps hers on top of it after a second. It feels weird. Being on a team like this. She doesn’t fight with other people at her side, she never has. All of her classes with Ryuhei and his friends, it had always been her vs someone else. Or many someone else's, with many different quirks.   

She still has scars on the back of her arm from when Tanro had ejected his ribs during a grappling session. 

Suzume is still small, like her whole family is, but she’s small enough  that she can slip in through the air vents while Kirishima goes in through the doors and plays distraction. It’s not hard, Kaminari is just as pumped up at Kirishima is, and he’s an easy person to get talking. Even when he’s trying to electrocute you. 

Suzume quietly drops out of the vents while his back is turned. She unsnaps one of her pockets open and double checks that bola is in there before she flings it at Kaminari and seals his arms to his sides. 

“Hey!” He yelps and twists, but he’s caught and even when he starts discharging electricity the pair of them just move away. He can’t get his legs up under him, and the lights flicker wildly above their heads, but he’s well and truly stuck. 

“Wow. That worked really well.” 

“Did you doubt us?” 

“A bit,” Suzume has the decency to look sheepish. Kirishima makes his way over to the missile. 

“Don’t. All we have to do is secure this thing and-” 

He’s cut off by an eruption from beneath their feet. Suzume shouts when the ground gives way beneath her, sending her tumblings into broken concrete. She drops two floors and lands hard enough to knock the wind out of her on a pile of stone. 

Bakugou stands above her, his palms sparking ominously. He looks every inch the villain here, his red eyes glowing in the throwing light, destruction falling around him and a grin with far too many teeth on his face. 

“I can’t believe you stupid extras thought you could win just by sneaking around. What, were you too scared to face me head on so you had to go after sparky up there?” 

“You are. So loud,” Suzume sits up slowly, rubbing the back of her neck. She glares at him. “If I end up with tinnitus because of your bark, I’m gonna be pissed.” 

“Hah?” he stomps close to her, his fingers flexing in an obvious threat. “You sure you wanna be mouthing off to me when I just knocked out three floors?” 

“Yep,” Suzume eyes him critically. Shouldn’t be too hard… 

He steps up again, close enough for her purposes and levels his palm at her face. 

“Give up before I blow your head off.” 

“Hey!” Kirishima shouts from above. “Isn’t that a little far for a training exercise?” 

“If she can’t handle it she shouldn’t be here!” Bakugou shouts back up, but he doesn’t look away from her. “I don’t know what kind of lame ass quirk you’ve got, but if you think it’ll measure up to mine you’re worse than Deku.” 

“Projecting much?” Suzume holds her hands up in mock surrender. She makes sure he’s watching them before she kicks out as hard as ten years of training will let her and drives her foot squarely between his legs. 

He drops. His palms go off weakly while he vomits onto the floor way too close to her. Suzume produces the capture tape and wraps it around his wrists once the sparks are gone, focing his palms flat against his butt. She ties a second length, for good measure, around his throat like a noose. He glares up at her, fury burning in his gaze. His face is pale and pained and he wheezes when she pulls the tape tighter. 

All Might’s voice breaks across the overhead. 

“TEAM E WINS?!” 

He doesn’t have to sound so surprised…  

Suzume gives Bakugou’s new leash a tug. “Like I said. All bark , puppy dog .” 

She stands and brushes herself off while he struggles to get his hands free or his legs back up under him. 

“Oh, by the way.” she smiles, a phantom, smug thing, and tilts her head. 

“I don’t have a quirk.”

Chapter Text

Suzume is pretty sure she’s broken Bakugou. 

She doesn’t feel that bad about it. He’s an asshole, first off, and second off a little existential crisis never hurt anyone. 

She could do without her classmates wanting to talk to her now though. 

“You really don’t have a quirk at all?” Mina asks, the third person since training ended for the day. She’s a ball of brightness, and her hair looks way too fluffy for someone who just came out of the shower. They’re all still faintly damp, and Suzume’s dark hair hangs just past her shoulders while she waits for it to dry enough to tie back again. Her usual pen is tucked behind her ear for the time being. 

“No. I’ve got the extra toe joint to prove it.” 

Mina actually looks down at her feet, even though they’re all dressed by now, on their way back to the classroom to pick up their bags and go home. Suzume’s costume is packed away, and her special boots in it, leaving her in just their school uniform. She’s started wearing leggings under her skirt. It’s cold in the winter and she may not be snake-like or venomous but she’s still not a fan. 

“Wow, it’s pretty cool that you got in then,” Mina said cheerfully. 

Suzume knew she meant it as a compliment but it. Kind of wasn’t. 

“Plenty of our classmates got in with quirks that wouldn't help them much in the entrance exams,” she points out. “And anyways, they repealed all the rules saying quirkless people can’t try for a spot in the hero course. I’m just the first one to make it in.” 

“Oh hey, I think I heard that,” Mina says brightly. “Yeah, yeah it was on the news in elementary school! My parents were talking about it.” 

“UA was one of the last schools to repeal,” Suzume recalls. And still, no one had ever been a hero without a quirk.   

“Wait,” Tsu taps her finger to her chin. “If you don’t have a quirk, how did you rank so high in the quirk apprehension test? 

Suzume pauses at the door to the classroom. 

“Honestly? I have no idea. I’m just glad I wasn’t expelled.” 

A shadow falls across her shoulder and she looks up to see Aizawa, looking exhausted as ever, peering down at them. 

“It’s because of how her numbers averaged out,” he says. “For most of you I wasn’t looking at your actual scores, how fast or strong you were, but how creative you were in using your quirks and what level of mastery and control you already had. For Yusada here, I went by her physical ability, which surpassed most of you entirely.” 

“O-oh,” Mina squeaks under his intense gaze. 

Suzume, contrarily, relaxes. It was good to hear. She’d had a few theories but… crime scenes were easier to understand than people were, especially people like Aizawa. 

“You’re all dismissed for the day. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Aizawa nods towards them and shuffles off, his sleeping bag slung over one shoulder. 

Suzume wonders if if she can keep her grades up high enough he’ll let her bring in one of her own.  

“Wow, he’s so intense…” Mina watches him go down the hallway beside Suzume. 

“He kind of reminds me of you, Yusada. It’s no wonder you get along.” 

“Yeah we- wait, what?” Suzume’s head snaps over to Tsu, but she’s already gone inside and Suzume is left at the door, trying to figure out what she meant by that.  

Eventually, Suzume shakes her head and goes to fetch her school bag.  

She’s aware of the fact that Bakugou is trying to burn a hole in the back of her head with his glare alone, but apparently being kicked in the balls hard enough to throw up is enough to deter even him from trying to start shit with her right away. 

He’s not the only one watching her. 

Midoriya is staring at her with something that’s a disturbing mix between awe and trepidation and she has no idea how to feel about it. 

So. 

She decides not to address it. It’s none of her business what he thinks of her. It doesn’t matter what any of them think of her. 

(It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t. She’s had over a decade of practice involving people who think she’s worthless or delicate or delusional, she doesn’t care - ) 

Suzume slings her bag over her shoulders and leaves quickly. 

The time it takes her to get to the train isn’t actually all that long, but her window is short and if she misses it she’ll be stuck in Mustafu for another three hours. Which was not ideal, in her own professional opinion. 

There’s something else that’s going to be happening soon. She only sort of remembers it. An attack on the school maybe? Or no, on a training ground. 

Right. Right, that was where Tomura was introduced. 

Suzume tried to very firmly remind herself not to start fangirling over the villains. It would be a bad look, and he wasn’t super cool yet! 

Once he had a few friends he would be better. And even then, he was probably going to be trying to kill her and her classmates. 

Man, humans really were just over glorified zoo animals. They needed pumpkin’s and friends or else they got real tetchy. 

She’s so lost in her own little world of humanity that nearly plows down a boy in the gray UA uniform who’s at least a head taller than she is. 

As it is she bounces off of him. He’s built like a brick wall. 

“Oh, sorry about that,” his voice is cheerful and blue eyes look down at her from beneath swept blond hair. “You okay?” 

Suzume manages to catch herself before she falls, her book clutched tightly in one hand. 

“Oh uh. Yeah. Yeah I’m fine. Thanks.” 

“It’s no problem,” he smiled at her. “I haven’t seen you before. Are you a first year?” he asked conversationally. 

Suzume glanced up. Five minutes till her train arrived. 

“I am. And you’re in your third year.” And familiar, too. 

“You got it! I’m Togata Mirio, nice to meet you.” 

That was why he was familiar. He’d once beaten the hell out of Kai, in years that had never happened and with any luck never would. 

Suzume was supposed to see Eri and Kai this weekend. She’d double check that things were going well then. 

“Yusada Suzume. Same.” 

She tilted her head. “I didn’t see you here the other day. Do you always take this train?” 

Togata shook his head. “Nope. Only every other day. I have an internship those days.” 

Right. With Nighteye. 

“Neat,” she says with a half hearted lift of her shoulder. Togata, who if she remembers right, hangs out with the world's most socially awkward turtle, is utterly unphased by her standoffishness. 

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool! I’m sure you’ll get a good one in your second year too. Oh, I mean if you’re in the hero course. Business and support have their own internships too, but those are different.” 

“Uh huh.” 

“I don’t know what Gen Ed has, but probably something similar,” he went on. Suzume let him talk, even let him sit next to her on the train. 

He was nice enough though that when she pulled out her homework he cooled his heels. 

The assignment was simple. Dissect what happened in their combat practice. Who won and why, who lost and why, and why were winner’s sometimes in the wrong. 

When Togata asks her how her very first battle simulation went, she even tells him, in her own painfully blunt way, that Todoroki was completely cheating when he covered the entire building in ice.  

“And how did you do?” he asks, his blue eyes bright. 

Suzume shrugs. “We won. I kicked a kid in the balls so hard he puked and we tied up the other one.” 

“Ouch, brutal.” 

“But effective.” 

“Very that.” 

Very that?  

What a dork. 

“If it works, it works. I don’t have the time to flip around unnecessarily. I just need to win and be done with it, right?” 

“Mmmm, for the most part that’ll work. Sometimes you might have to be a little more flashy though. Like if you’re trying to get sponsorships, you want to be seen in front of cameras. Some pros intentionally draw out relatively low risk fights to get more screen time, for instance. “

“You know I’m not surprised, but I also don’t think I like that. It seems like…” 

Suzume stops because she can get sanctimonious, but Togata prods her shoulder and she goes on. 

“It seems to me that the priority should be keeping people safe, and turning heroics into a popularity contest detracts from that and attracts people who are in it for fame and money instead of important things.” 

Togata looks surprised, and he leans back in his seat. 

Suzume thinks a lot more about the system, but they don’t have time for a ten hour lecture on the socio-economics behind crime. 

“Yeah. I see what you mean. There’s definitely some people who are like that, But, the celebrity status serves its own purpose. It makes heroes seem more like people than soldiers or cops, and like with All Might it can offer inspiration and hope.” 

Suzume doesn’t argue with him. He’s got his own points. Instead she shrugs. 

“I guess there’s good and bad in everything.” 

“Truth.” 

Suzume finishes her work before the next stop, her mind turning through the difference between inspiration and propaganda. 

~ ~ ~ 

 “So…” Seiji says slowly, looking down at her. “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m duct taped to the ceiling.” 

Suzume stares up at her brother, then looks at the clock on the wall. 4 AM. The refrigerator light is the only thing illuminating her and Seiji, who has been skillfully crucified to the kitchen ceiling sometime between when she went to bed and now. 

Faintly, she can hear the laundry washer running in the other room with a familiar rattle against the wall. 

“... Nope.” 

She grabs a bottle of water out of the fridge and chugs it quickly. 

“H-hey what do you mean no? Suzume, come on Suze, ask me how I got up here!” 

“Nope.” 

“At least let me down?” 

“Nu uh.” 

She crunches the water bottle and tosses it into the recycling before she pulls away from the door and let’s it swing shut. 

“Hey! Hey wait, it's dark in here! Suzume! Suzume !” 

His shouts follow her all the way back to her bedroom. 

She hears a crash from Kaname’s room and steps out of the way when he goes trooping past her, hissing under his breath. Good, he’s a better person than she is. 

…Although, he’s also probably the one who taped Seiji to the ceiling in the first place. 

Oh well. 

Not her problem. 

As it is she only gets a little more sleep before she has to get up and get ready for another day of school, and by the time she reaches the kitchen the only sign that Seiji had snuck in last night at all is a faint imprint on the ceiling. 

The man himself is gone, and the laundry room is empty. 

Suzume shakes her head and packs her bags before loading into the car with her mother, who insists on doing her hair again. 

It’s become a sort of thing between them, although it’s new. Suzume has always been the independent sort. Memories of another life will do that to a person, she supposes. 

It’s Chiasa trying to hold on to her children as they grow and prepare to step into a brave, dangerous new world. 

And Suzume, well, she’s not going to deny her it. Having her hair done by someone else is nice. It’s relaxing. 

The relaxation vanishes when she gets close enough to the school to see a media circus that’s formed outside the walls. 

Fuck. 

The reporters are ravenous dogs chomping at the students that try to make their way inside, shoving speaking and hurling questions at children. Suzume’s never much cared for media attention. And there’s no Hawks here to cover her back with his bright red wings. He’d really saved her and Kaname back then. News channels had been forced to use their school pictures instead of whatever footage they could have gotten of two grieving, furious children on the courthouse steps that day. 

There’s no one to guard her at all here. 

So be it. 

Suzume prowls around the outside of the crowd, looking for a weak spot to break through. 

Unfortunately, someone else sees her first. 

“Heeeeeeey.” a reporter turns to her. His eyes are camera lenses and his smile is way too wide. “I know you.” 

“No. You don’t,” she says, narrowing her eyes. She wonders how much trouble she’ll get in if she throat punches him. Probably enough that it isn’t worth it. Probably. 

“I do. You’re that Kono girl. I heard you got accepted here. Hard to believe a villains’ daughter is going to UA of all places. Although your brother did get into Ketsubutsu.” 

“Hard to believe that you’ve still got a job when you were sued for harassment and stalking a minor. Wanna make that a repeat offense?” 

He twitches away from her, but she can see other reporters have overheard and a few are turning their attention on her. 

Great. 

Just. 

Great. 

“If you try to publish anything with my name attached, I’ll take you and anyone else to court over publication of private facts and interviewing a minor without a guardian present,” she snaps viciously. 

Almost immediately anyone looking her way spins the opposite, and camera’s are pointed literally anywhere else. What she just spouted out probably isn’t even possible, but its enough to scare everyone, and that’s the part she cares about. 

She ducks away from the creepy reporter, who she desperately wants to break the lenses/eyes of, and makes her way to the back of the crowd. She ends up standing next to a young man, a few years older than she is probably, with a puff of pale blue hair falling mostly into his eyes. 

It takes every ounce of self control she has not to start fangirling. 

Instead, she turns to the shear wall that circles the school, and flings her backpack as hard as she can until it goes sailing up and over. 

She takes a few steps back and realizes that the guy is watching her, his red eyes nearly glowing under his pale hair. She can just barely see red lines snaking down his throat. 

She meets his gaze and shoots him a crooked, awkward smile. 

“Wish me luck?” 

He tilts his head ever so slightly. She wants to say he looks amused, but that might just be wishful thinking. 

“Luck,” he says, his voice a harsh contrast against the cacophony of reporters. 

Suzume sprints as fast and hard as she can and scrambled up the side of the wall. She barely gets enough finger holds in the rough stone to get her up to the ledge, and from there she mounts it like a horse to breath. It’s only the student ID in her pocket that keeps the barrier from coming up and sending her flying, and she needs to get inside before a stupid reporter triggered it. 

She waves at Tomura Shigaraki and drops over to the otherside. 

Suzume lands lightly on the ground, silent as a church mouse, and picks up her now dusty bag. 

She finds a familiar purple haired boy gaping at her, and waves awkwardly before going on her way. She’s not going to stand around explaining how she’s been doing parkour for the better part of six years. 

She spends the rest of the day thinking hard on everything she can remember happening at the training grounds. There’s an attack, and Tomura Shigaraki and Kurogiri are both there. It’s before the rest of the League of Villains really forms up. Aizawa get’s pretty fucked up during it.  

If this was America I bet I could get them to let me carry around a real gun. Would that hurt that Nomu? It absorbed shock I think? So. A knife would work better. 

Probably. 

She’s so busy thinking that when the intruder alarm goes off she doesn’t even get up and join the throng of panicking students. She just sits at her table in the cafeteria, chewing on a few apple slices and watching children run screaming while she figures out what to do about the monsters that are going to show up. 

She… wants to stop it. She does. But how is she supposed to get them to believe her without admitting to having bizarre, hazy memories of a future that might not even come to pass now? She doesn’t remember most things in enough detail to be convincing, and the future was malleable, no matter what Nighteye thought. There’s a chance that plenty of things won’t happen, although Tomura had shown up today, so the USJ incident was likely going to happen. 

And there. 

Is very little she can do about it.  

She can’t stop it on either side. There’s no proof if she tries to warn Nezu, and she’s got no chance of marching up to the villains and kindly asking them to please not attack a bunch of high schoolers. 

So. 

Maybe she can just cut the whole thing short instead of canceling it? 

Yeah, that’ll work just fine, she thinks. 

“Aren’t you going to run, too?” 

She blinks out of her thoughts, looking up to find Todoroki standing beside her table. He looks about as panicked as she feels, which is to say not at all. 

She points through the door, where over the packed crowd of yelling teenagers the light of camera’s flash and the long necks of microphones bob. 

“ ‘s just reporters. And you’re not running either.” 

“Panicking wouldn’t help anything even if it was an attack.” 

She’s kind of surprised he’s willingly talking to her. She thought getting him to interact with other humans was like pulling teeth. 

Well. She’s been wrong before. She's a detective, not omniscient. 

“You’re not wrong,” Suzume admits. The two of them watch as the chaos slowly falls into calm under the muffled shouting of Iida in the hallway. It’s kind of amazing, how some people react to stress and panic while others remain calm. 

To be fair. Suzume is cheating. It’s Todoroki who’s genuinely keeping his cool in this case. 

Eventually, the two both wander out to join their classmates once things have calmed down a bit, and Suzume texts her mother to let her know what happened, just to make sure she doesn't worry if she sees something on the news about the UA alarms going off. 

It’s a chaotic middle to an otherwise average day. 

Present Mic assigns them an assignment on English poetry, and Suzume quietly mourns the fact that even Before she had always preferred Nakahara to Frost. All Might instructs them to go over videos of their performance in their earlier training and Suzume grimaces at the sight of herself on screen. She’s never been a fan of her plain, boring reflection. Seeing a video wasn’t any better, even if the hero suit made it easier to pay attention to her strict for instead of her actual appearance. The hood makes it harder to see how broad her shoulders are, and the body suit’s armor draws attention away from her compact legs. 

She can focus on the perfect angles of her landings and the missteps in her climbing. 

By the time she’s joined on the train by Togata she’s very sick of looking at herself. 

So she looks at him, instead. He’s broad shouldered and powerful looking. It’s not a bad look on him. It’s not awkward on him like it is on her. 

She wonders, between conversations about the best places to eat lunch around campus and their feelings on airports, when she got so insecure. 

 “I’ll see you tomorrow?” Togata says when she stands up, shouldering her bag. 

She shoots him a smile. 

“Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow, hero,” she shoots him a two fingered salute and makes her way off the train. 

Chiasa is waiting in the car, her dark eyes fixed on her daughter. 

“So. A friend of yours?” she asks, nodding to the station. From where she’s parked they can watch the train pull away, and Suzume’s usual seat is in plain view. Along with Togata. 

“No. He just takes the same train. He’s an upperclassman, and he’s got a work study further down the line.” 

“I see…” 

Suzume frowns at her mother. “What?” 

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“But you were thinking something,” Suzume points out. 

Her mother smile’s, a crooked reflection of Suzume’s. 

“I was thinking of a lot of things,” she dismisses. 

Suzume huffs and leans back against the seat. Leather creaks under her weight. 

“Mo-om!” 

Chiasa laughs at her. She’s been tense and gloomy ever since school started, so it’s nice to hear. 

“It’s nothing for you to worry about, Suzy.” 

“Uh huh,” she squints at her dubiously. “When is Taka coming?” 

Her smile softens. “Taka and Rio will get in on thursday. Saturday, after you and Kaname get home, Kai should arrive with Eri, if they’re not there already.”

Suzume smiles. “Good. I missed them. I haven’t seen any of them in… hell, half a year?” 

“Don’t swear. But yes, that sounds about right. I know you miss Kai.” 

“I’ve never said that!” 

“You don’t have to,” she reaches over and gives Suzume’s bangs a tug. “A mother can tell.” 

“Oh my god, don’t start that stupid ‘Suzume’s crushing on Kai’ stuff again! It’s been like seven years!” 

Chiasa laughs. “I can’t help it. You were so cute when you were little. You knew he didn’t like to be touched so you chased people away like a little guard dog.” 

“ Mother !” 

“Don’t be so dramatic. He might as well  be your brother at this point, right? You certainly spent more time with him growing up than you did with Taka or Shisui.” 

Suzume puffs her cheeks out, but she can’t argue. 

Chiasa tugs her bangs again before turning her attention back to the road. 

“Either way, you can’t lie to your mother. I know you missed spending time with him.” 

“...yeah. Okay. So maybe I do. Him and Kurono are. I dunno. I like them? But I know we can’t hang out much anymore, especially now that me and Kaname are both in hero courses. It’s a conflict of interest on both our parts, even though I’m not like. Using them for information, and they don’t expect me to be a spy or anything.” 

“Mhmm. It’s not business, it’s family.” 

Suzume closes her eyes and leans her head back against the headrest. 

“I have a class tomorrow night, so you don’t have to pick me up from the station. I’ll probably walk straight to the dojo.”

“Will you be learning or teaching?” 

“Teaching. This years kids are so cute. Shigure, this little kid that barely comes up to my knee, she’s a vicious little monster. And Kagura has wings, so we’re having to adjust some of the stances to accommodate it and work them in. I keep waiting for Ize to trip over their own tail, but so far it hasn’t happened. And…” 

Chiasa listens while Suzume tells her about her cute little students, a faint smile on her face. 

Suzume doesn’t notice, but her gaze is terribly, terribly sad.

Chapter Text

Suzume is getting used to Togata sitting on the train with her. He said he has his work study every other day, but he’s on the train every single day instead, because Sir Nighteye had decided to bump up his work this year. 

Togata takes it all in good cheer, and happily chats with her whenever she’s not completely busy. He even helps her a couple of times, so it’s no real surprise when he notices that she’s glaring at the screen in front of her viciously, trying to remember one particular word that will not come to her mind. 

Rakish? Racus? Rackets? It starts with R and means loud and maybe annoying. Rapidash???   

“You doing alright over there Yusada?” 

She grunts, finally looking up at him. 

“I’m fine, I’m fine. This assignment is just giving me more trouble than I was thinking it was going to be.” 

“What is it?” Togata asks, peering over at her laptop screen. The title reads ‘In The Shadow Of The Birch’. 

Finn does not like the look of the trees. The black eyes on the white bark make him nervous, and the deep red leaves in winter remind him too much of blood. They are lucky, Tammy says, that there is no snow to block their way. Finn thinks it would be luckier if there was. If there was snow at least that would glow in the night, and they wouldn’t be left in night as dark as ink, the river of stars blotted out by thick red leaves and sparse pine needles. 

Tammy says, the fire will keep away the dark and the creatures that dwell within it. 

Finn does not say that the only time he’s ever seen the wrong shaped beasts, with too many legs and too-sharp antlers blossoming red, is during the light of the day. He doesn’t know what it means, but he knows it makes him nervous. He grips the dagger that Mother Adelaide had pressed into his hands before they left Bastion with hands that shake and sweat. 

He is meant to drive it into the breast of the Wolf, the Finalis, the End of All Things, the Beginning of All Sin-

“It’s supposed to be an English assignment. We write a script and then we read it aloud, record it, and he grades them. All he really said was get creative, and if we write about our dog he’ll fail us on principle.” 

“I remember that assignment! I’m pretty sure I wrote about crashing on an island. I was going through a Hatchet phase,” he laughs lightly at himself. “So, what did you pick?”

Suzume shrugs, playing with her scrunchie. 

“I dunno. I was playing around with horror fantasy, but like high fantasy you know? With magic and dragons and stuff?” 

Mirio looks curious. “Can I read it?” 

They do have an hour so… 

“If you really want to?” She pushes her lap top towards him, and pulls out her math homework. While she works on it she keeps glancing over at Mirio, watching him grow paler and paler the further along he goes. Finally, just as she’s pulling out her heroics law worksheet, he pushes the computer away. 

“Well?” She asks, genuinely curious. 

Mirio looks at her, his blue eyes huge. “That was terrifying but you have got to tell me how it ends.”  

Suzume can honestly say she’s surprised. She hadn’t meant for it to be that scary. 

“Well… In the end I was going to reveal that the narrator is the villain that they’re after in the first place. The Finalis. They’re a failed attempt of cleansing humanity of ‘inherent evils’ like greed, hatred, violence, etcetera, and instead of curing humanity of its sins the people who made them basically pulled a jekyll and hyde and made a semi-omnipresent creature that was born solely out of suffering, anger, selfishness and fear. It can never be killed with weapons, so in the end all of the rangers die at their hand and they turn the travelers bones and ashes into gems for their crown, and waits for the next batch to come.” 

Mirio is staring at her, his mouth open. 

“That’s… that’s insane. But wait, the narrator talks about the Rangers like they like them! Even though the whole story is basically the Wolf traumatizing everyone on their way to their lair. Tammy losing her eye was brutal. ” 

“They do. They love the rangers. But they’re not going to lay down and die, and the parts of the rangers that it loves are also the parts that it lusts after but can never have. The camaraderie, the warmth, the love. That’s not something that they were made for, and it’s something that has to be given freely and gladly. That’s not something that can be taken by force. So as much as they might be fond of the Rangers, that isolation and envy poisons their feelings. Although I think if someone was genuinely kind to them, they might melt into literal goo.”

Togata whistles. “You thought of all that in one day? Although, that’s pretty complicated for one short story. Especially one that you’ll have to read out loud.” 

Suzume makes a face and leans back heavily against the train seat. “Yeah, I know. My other idea was a pre-quirk detective noir.” 

She had about a hundred stories she could just pick out one of the shorter, more interesting ones and doctor it up with someone more interesting than she was. 

“That would be pretty cool too. But! I don’t think you should stop writing that creepy one. I’m definitely not going to be sleeping tonight,” he laughs brightly. 

“I’m not much of an author,” Suzume dismisses. Actually, she doesn’t have a lot of hobbies outside of reading and training. 

Thats. Kind of sad. 

She shakes her head. “But if you really think it’s that creepy, maybe I’ll at least finish and record it?” 

“Definitely do that. Do you have a spooky voice? Both of them are gonna be kinda creepy right?” 

Suzume works her jaw and clears her throat. She reads aloud to Eri sometimes, and the little girl is too fond of old Goosebumps for someone so little. So she picks the voice she uses for narrating. 

“ Westchase is a city on the coast that, like most, is home to thick fog and damp air that clogs the lungs in winter and freezes in thick sheets in the winter. This far inland, the smell of the sea would be hard to make out even if it wasn’t drowned out by the sticky, cloying scent of blood. 

The first time I had smelled the metallic stench I was five, and my pudgy hands held tight to my daddy’s briefcase. I didn’t know back then that it was heavy with bleach and sulfuric acid. It was the first dead body I saw.  I’ve never gotten used to the glassy, far away eyes, but I don’t think they’re following me anymore. 

Now,, twenty years later, it isn’t enough to make me more than wrinkle my nose. This woman’s eyes definitely won’t by following me, seeing as they’re gone. All that’s left are dark cavities where they once were. Unpleasant, but I’m not the one vomiting in the other room. The widow, Andy, is pale and shaking in the corner. A letter that I desperately need to read is clutched in her trembling fingers.”

She stops when she realizes that Togata is staring at her. 

Heat crawls across her cheeks. “What?” 

“Nothing, nothing. I just don’t think you need to worry about your grade in that class is all.” 

Suzume eyes him dubiously. Maybe she has too many brothers, because she’s trying to doubt his sincerity or find a way he’s going to use this to tease her later on. 

“You’re kind of weird, you know that?” 

He smiles at her. “I’m strangely okay with that.” 

Suzume pulls her laptop back to her and opens up a new document. What’s the lamest name for the noir detective she can think of? 

‘Jenny Hemlock’.

“You’re gonna let me read that stuff right?” 

“I didn’t know you were so into creepy stuff,” Suzume elbows Togata lightly when he leans too close to her. He backs off obediently. 

“I definitely prefer comedy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to read scary stuff every now and again. Especially when it’s an adventure, not just one gory scene after another, you know?” 

Suzume nods along, eying her computer. It’s time to pack up, and she still can’t remember the word she was looking for. 

“That makes sense. I should probably add some humor in here somewhere anyways. If all it is is a blood bath, no one’s gonna care who lives or dies.Horror needs humanity.” 

“Definitely. Who knows, maybe you’ll write a whole book, or start a podcast. Your voice was suuuper creepy.” 

“...I’m gonna take that as a compliment.” 

“Good, it was one.” 

~ ~ ~ 

Suzume doesn't know what’s going on this week, but she does know that she’s going to kill her brothers. 

It’s gotta be a full moon or something. Maybe everyone in her family but her is a werewolf and the moon makes them weirder than usual. Were wolf? Were snake? 

She doesn’t know, but she knows that she can hear Kaname sneaking out his window. Their moms room is on the other side of the house, on the ground floor, but Suzume and Kaname’s rooms are on the same side, right next to each other on the second story. The only light on is the rotating waves projected on her walls, illuminating old family pictures and a few scant posters that she owns. It spins lazily on her desk, shining at the mirror on the back of her closet door and throwing off strange shapes around her. 

Suzume is curled tightly beneath her blankets, warm and sleepy. 

The hiss of his window sliding open is enough to make her stir, but the scratching of his sneakers on the outside of their wall is what actually wakes her up. 

Suzume stares at the wall, hoping that if she glares hard enough her brother will spontaneously combust and fall in a pile of poison fire on the ground underneath as punishment for waking her up. 

No such thing happens. 

Instead she hears the bushes rustle beneath their windows, then nothing. A few minutes later a car starts down the street, and she can just barely hear Kaname go scampering off into the woods behind their house. He was never quite as quiet as she was, and he’s only trying to get away from their mom at this point. Not villains. 

Suzume waits a few more minutes before she closes her eyes and huddles further under her blankets, shutting her eyes and falling back into the bliss of unconsciousness. 

Although what once was dark oblivion, has now taken on a very strange tone. 

She spirals into the vertigo of a long string of cages that live beneath a theater stage. Inside of them stands costumes from musicals and theater performances. They move without actors, or anything inside them at all. Crowns hover above stoat cloaks, American revolutionary coats hold chairs above their heads. Props sit in separate cages. Couches with beetlejuice stripes, a barricade stacked high, and a Ford Model A sits beside a tire covered in cat hair. 

Suzume herself sits inside another cage at a table with a crystal ball sitting at the middle of it. 

Across from her sits a man. She thinks? He’s smiling at her with too many teeth, and his eyes (two? Twenty?) shine red at her from the right side of his face. The single one on the left side glows faintly green. There’s a flicker of orange above his head, two points that appear and vanish when he tilts his head. Horns. 

He pushes a mug at her across the table, one that steams between his too-long, too-sharp fingers. His bright hair looks like heat, rippling above his head. 

He looks like a headache. 

Suzume picks up the cup. It’s nearly burning in her hands when she takes a sip. 

“I don’t usually take my coffee black,” she muses, peering down at the dark liquid. 

“It isn’t coffee.” His voice sounds like the color violet. 

Suzume considers the cup before she looks back up at him. She stares straight in his eyes and starts chugging. The liquid pierces her tongue and burns her lungs. 

He gapes at her, a twist with too many teeth and too many mouths and- 

Her phone is buzzing. 

Suzume’s black eyes snap open in the darkness. She gropes for her phone, her fingers clumsy and her mouth still tasting like nightmares. 

She picks up her phone and squints at the horrific light that assaults her when it turns on. 

There’s a half dozen texts from her brother. 

Kaname : heok 

Kaname : Hghlp 

Kaname : S0s !!!! 

Kaname : Help 

Kaname : I kllieed som eone 

Kaname : I amt he woo ds

Suzume slowly sits up. Her hair is a wild spiky mess around her head and her eyes are wet with sleepy tears. 

For a long minute Suzume considers shutting her phone off and going back to sleep. Kaname doesn’t start school for another week and a half, but she had school in the morning. And if Kaname killed someone in the woods is that really her problem? 

… Of course it is. 

Kaname is her brother and this is the crossroads that all siblings come to. Ride or die. 

So she stands slowly, grimacing as her muscles protest the new movement. She stuffs her legs into sweat pants and her feet into boots and carefully slips out of her own window without a sound. 

There’s a path through the woods, which are really just a sharp grove of trees that cut them off from the neighborhood to the north. That’s probably where Kaname’s friends were waiting to pick him up with their car, so he didn’t get caught sneaking out. Normally they’re easy to navigate, and it’s a pretty straight shot from their house to the other neighborhood. There’s a small wooden bridge that goes above what could be called a creek if you were being generous, and a well beaten dirt path between the trees. 

She flips on the light of her phone and strolls into the woods, looking for a dead body sticking out from under the bushes or pinned to a tree or poisoned and crumpled somewhere. 

Instead she finds her brother, sitting in the dirt, bawling his eyes out next to a squashed frog. A frog the size of her head. 

“D-dead!” Kaname points to the frog frantically. His pupils are blown so wide his red eyes look closer to her own black. 

Just how drunk is he? 

At some point he must have put eyeliner on because it’s streaked down his cheeks and he looks scarier than whatever eldritch horror she had dreamed gave her nightmare coffee. 

“It is. Maybe dead,” Suzume agrees carefully, eying the frog. 

“It’s a heart!” 

“It’s definitely not a heart. It’s green.” 

“Heart can be green!” 

“No… No they cannot. Here, look,” she crouches down and picks the dead frog up, intending on spreading its legs to show him that it’s an animal, not an organ. 

But, it’s not only not a heart, but it’s also not dead . 

It croaks, belches against her wrist, and starts peeing. 

Suzume holds it out, and makes sure as much frog pee as possible ends up on Kaname’s torn pants instead of her hands. 

“Not a heart. Not dead.” 

“It’s leaking! Mom’s gonna kill me Suze.” 

“No one is going to die tonight,” she rolls her eyes and lets the poor traumatized frog go before she grabs Kaname’s hand with the one that had the most frog pee on it. 

“I can’t believe I dragged my butt out into the woods because you can’t tell the difference between a frog and a heart,” she grumbles, dragging him back towards the house. Whatever monsters live in the woods would probably love to eat her. Or drink her, like horror coffee. 

Kaname blubbers apologies at her until she shushes him viciously. 

It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done, dumping her drunk brother through a second story window without waking their mom up, but somehow she manages. They get inside just as rain starts pattering against the window. 

She takes a shower before she crawls back into bed, but she can still feel the slimy body of the frog in her hands. 

Gross. 

~ ~ ~

Wednesday morning rolls around with far too much moisture in the air. The ground is wet from a shower in the night, and Suzume nearly cracks her jaw from yawning so wide. All she wants to do  is crawl back under her covers and go back to sleep. Or maybe kill Kaname. Or both. 

Every muscle in her body aches, familiar as the pain might be, and the darkness is her only comfort when she drags herself into the bathroom for a shower. Another one. She still feels slimy. 

Her body is covered in bruises, and there’s a burn the shape of a handprint on her shoulder. It’ll fade in a few days, it was a lucky shot, but it still hurt like a bitch. She’d been so tired when she went out to get Kaname that she’d forgotten all about it. 

If Rio’s quirk wasn’t limited to just ‘recent’ injuries she would ask her sister-in-law to heal it when she sees her tomorrow, but as it is she’s just going to have to tough it out. Over years of trial and error Rio had figured out that her ‘healing’ quirk only worked for injuries that were less than four hours old. Anything older than that and she couldn’t do a whole lot to help. 

So by the time Suzume sees her the burn will be long out of her range. 

It shouldn’t leave a scar. Suzume doesn’t have a lot of scars in general, mostly callouses and a myriad of bruises, but she’s mostly lucked out of scars. 

And lucked out really is the right word. She’s been cut by claws, burned by too-hot-hands, stung by acids, and had her skin broken by sheer brute force before. 

It’s… not fun. She doesn’t like getting hurt, but it’s either collect her dues while training or possibly die in the field. So she takes on whatever new, interesting quirk that Ryuhei had found and thrown at her with grace and thanks. She knows he’s just trying to keep her alive. 

She’s his favorite student, even if he did spend plenty of time trying to convince her to give up heroics and come work for him back before they moved. Or rather, that was why he’d done his best to get her to change her life plans. 

She. 

Kind of misses him. 

Suzume comes out of the bathroom in time for Chiasa to brush her hair back and tie it up in her spiky bun. 

“You know which stop it is, and you have something to eat on the way back, right?” 

“Yes, and yes. I’ll be back late tonight, remember.” 

“I remember,” she promises. She tucks a pen into her only daughters hair and motions her towards the car. 

They’re starting to get into a routine. It’s nice. 

Although she’s still not sure what she thinks of her classmates talking with her. 

When she walks in and Kirishima is chatting with Mina at her desk, she has no idea what to think of it. But they don’t let her shove her nose back in her book like she wants. 

Instead, they talk to her about the day before. The reporters, the break in, and their new class rep. They ask about her family, and she reluctantly asks about theirs in return. It’s not like she hates them. Far from it. 

She’s just. Not here for friendship. She has work to focus on, and the entire conversation she’s waiting for them to press her about not having a quirk, or saying some weird backhanded compliment about it or- 

Or anything else she’s heard for literally her entire life. 

But they don’t. 

That doesn’t mean she sits by them at lunch though. She takes a seat in the far corner of the cafeteria, her book open in front of her once more. 

A shadow falls over her head. 

She does her best to ignore it. She’s already exhausted from last night, and short tempered as a result. Kirishima and Mina are good people, so she held it together for them, but the shadow is spiky and smells like burnt sugar, and she’s not sure how she’s going to stop herself from escalating the situation. 

“Hey, you!” 

Suzume ignores the too-loud voice from in front of her, and turns a page in her book. 

“I’m talking to you. Hey, you extra wannabe, pay attention!” 

Suzume slowly lifts her gaze to him. She’s only seeing Kaname’s blown eyes, keeping her from peace and bizarre dreams. 

Having siblings (or five) really gives a person the strangest interpersonal skills. And the weirdest morals. Nothing makes your brain do more back flips than having an intense ride or die relationships with someone who’s face you would gladly shove through the dining room table if they so much as touched your shoes, but at the same time would march into creepy woods in the middle of the night to bury a dead body for.

But. 

Even though they both have red eyes, and she’s sleep deprived, the snarl on his face is nothing like the soft lines of her brothers. 

“What?” she snaps her book shut loudly and glares up at him. 

“Don’t think that stupid training exercise meant anything,” he slams his hands down on the table and the smell of burnt sugar intensifies. “I was going easy on you and that other extra. It’s not gonna happen again. There’s no way I’ll lose to a quirkless loser like you!” 

“Again, you mean.” 

His face turns as red as his eyes. 

She can see Midoriya starting towards them, flanked by Iida and Uraraka. 

“What?!” he snarls at her. 

“Again. You don’t want to lose to me again , since it already happened once.” 

 “Listen here your quirkless little-” 

“Is that all you’re going to say?” she demands suddenly, standing up so fast she almost smashes her forehead into his nose. 

“Wha-” 

“That I’m quirkless, that you’re strong? That I’m just a little girl and you’re oh-so-powerful?” She mocks, her lip curling. 

Something in her seems to snap. Sleep deprivation or just anger. She doesn’t know. 

“Listen here, and listen well Bakugou. There is nothing you can say that I haven’t heard before, from people I respect a whole lot more than you. There is nothing you can do that I haven’t seen before. There’s no hit you can throw that I haven’t taken before. You seem to be under the impression that a few fireworks make you king shit of fuck mountain, but here’s the truth. You’re just a sorry bully, with your skull full of hot air and a mouth too big for your head.” 

“ There’s nothing special about you. ”

She sees it a second before it happens. A shifting of his weight. A tightening in his shoulders. 

She catches the right swing he takes at her head, ducking the blast that comes from his palm, and drives a phoenix fist into his arm pit. His arm falls limp beside him and he snarls at her and tries to hit her with his other hand, but something gray wraps around his wrist and he’s yanked away harshly. 

Suzume grimaces when she sees Aizawa strolling over to them. His eyes are red and his hair is levitating. 

He looks kind of pissed. 

Suzume carefully picks up her bag and tries to hide her hands in her pockets. She knows how this goes. This is the part where she gets scolded for starting trouble, and a long winded lecture about how people who think they can be heroes can’t get into fights like this, and how she really needs to just learn to ignore people. 

And a million other things. 

“My office,” Aizawa orders sharply. “Now.” 

Even Bakugou, who’s right arm still hangs limply at his side, doesn’t argue with that, but he’s still spitting mad and glaring furiously at Suzume when they make their way out of the now staring lunch room and through the halls to Aizawa’s office. Their teacher walks between them purposefully.

He stops them outside his office and points to one of three plastic chairs that line the hallway, for this very reason. 

“Sit,” he orders Suzume, who drops into the hard plastic without a word. “Bakugou, come with me.” 

Bakugou is still glaring viciously at her when the door shuts soundly, cutting them off. 

She waits, twisting her scrunchy around her wrist while they talk. 

And by talk she means Aizawa (presumably) talks and Bakugou shouts loudly. His words are muffled through the wall, so she can’t quite make them out, but she can take a few guesses. To her own surprise, it only takes a few minutes for all of the screaming to die down and the conversation to turn quiet. 

Suzume sits up straighter when Bakugou comes storming out, his face as red as his eyes. He doesn’t so much as look at her when he tears down the hallway, fury rolling off of him in waves. 

Suzume hesitates and moment before Aizawa calls her inside. 

His office is surprisingly neat. It’s not just his, he and some of the other teachers share the room, but they have their own cubicle sort of areas. Aizawa’s is populated by papers that need grading, what are very clearly police case files, and a trash can full of empty jelly packets. His laptop is shut, but a small tape recorder is running next to it. 

“Yusada. Take a seat,” he gestures to one of the chairs, Mic’s by the look of it, and she sinks into the massive piece of leather. 

She braces herself. 

“How are you?” 

Wait, what? 

“I’m… fine?” she blinks at him, confused. 

“You aren’t burnt anywhere?” 

She thinks of the burn on her shoulder, but shakes her head all the same. “Bakugou didn’t land a hit.” 

But she did. 

“Good,” he nods once at her. “I’ve already talked to him about his behavior before this. If he keeps bothering you, bring it straight to me. I’m hoping he’ll shape up before I have to expel him.” 

“Right,” Suzume carefully doesn’t frown. She’s heard that before. Teacher’s who complain that she never came to them about being picked on, and instead took things into her own hands. Even when she had gone to them with the issues the only thing they’d done was sit her across the room from the bullies, or tell her to ignore it and they’d lose interest. Her favorite was the time she was told to ‘talk it out’ with a boy who snapped her bra strap, and ended up nearly getting expelled when she broke his tooth. 

Except at UA teacher’s have a bit more freedom. And Aizawa has already stepped in once. 

It’s… stupid, the fluttering of hope in her chest. The beginnings of faith. 

He asks her a few more questions, before she finally breaks down. 

“Sorry but, what about me?” 

“What do you mean?” he arches a brow at her. 

“I mean, you scolded Bakugou pretty harshly. You threatened to expel him. I’m not looking for punishment but I’m. You know. Kinda confused?” 

The other eyebrow joins the first. 

“You were defending yourself,” he points out, “Punishing you for that is irrational.” 

She blinks at him. 

“Oh.” 

“Don’t get me wrong. We don’t encourage students to actively try to hurt each other, but Bakugou was at fault in this case. No one here is going to get you into trouble for this.” 

Suzume stares at him, stunned into silence. 

She has no idea what Aizawa thinks of her quiet, but he ends up standing and motioning her to do the same. 

“Now come on. We’ve still got a few more classes today.” 

A slow, honest smile spreads across her face. “Right!” 

Chapter Text

Suzume thinks she might be in love with Ichigo. 

Daiga Ichigo is a few years older than her, but she’s one of the best MMA  fighters in the country already, and she had been well on her way to that title when Ryuhei had first sent Suzume her way, just over two years ago now. She’s abrasive, and powerful, and Suzume’s first impression was watching her suplex a man three times her size into the floor. 

Ichigo, who’s quirk let’s her manipulate the ground, is strong and fast and utterly unafraid. She’s everything Suzume wishes she was, with brilliant pink-white hair and flashing green-on-black eyes. 

She’s also a vicious taskmaster, and might just kill Suzume before she has a chance to make her way into the hero world. 

“Get back up, Yusada,” she barked, kicking her heel on the floor. It rolls with her movement and tosses Suzume up, where she barely manages to get her feet up under her. Her eyes are drooping and no amount of energy drinks has helped her. 

Mitsuo and Tekito watch her try to shake herself off while Ichigo looms above them. 

“Get back at it! What are you gonna roll over and take a nap in the middle of a fight? Is that what they teach you at that soppy hero school? Get a move on! Fight! Fight! Fight!” 

Suzume grimaces and turns away from her, towards the boys. They’re older than her too, and Tekito stands a good head above her shoulders. His palms glow faintly and his typically yellow eyes burn red with the activation of his quirk. 

Mitsuo lifts his hands, his fingers poised as if he’s going to play piano. There’s the faintest flicker of light against threads, thin as spider silk that lead to his finger tips. 

They all pretend that using quirks like this (That training quirks period, outside of hero courses) isn’t entirely illegal. They’re training Suzume, is the justification. They can get away with a lot more that way than one would expect, and no one in here is a snitch. 

Most of the rest of the students have already gone by now. It’s just the four of them in the back room of Ichigo’s dojo. 

They don’t wait for Suzume to get ready before Tekito lunges for her, lashing out hard. She has to duck and dodge him carefully, the heat of his quirk beating against her skin where they almost connect. She dips behind him, carefully avoiding everything he throws at her. His heat can’t leave his body, but it’s still oppressive. She knows he’s not scared to burn her if he gets the chance. 

She can’t grab him or grapple him to the ground, she just has to avoid being touched by his cherry hot hands. 

Worse, is the faintest touches of silk strands against her skin that she has to twist away from and between. She can’t let it actually touch her, or it’s bound to leave deep cuts on her arms and back. She just has to dance between the wires she can’t even really see, and avoid the heat in front of her. 

At the same time, Tekito is also at risk from Mitsuo’s sharp threads, and the pair of them are working together. So that helps her. It means that the strings withdraw when Tekito gets close, but in that same measure staying too close to him puts her skin at risk. 

It’s hard, she won’t lie. She can’t let herself be touched a single time by anyone or anything. Not by the heat burning under Tekito’s skin or the tight lines of artificial threads that Mitsuo weaves around them. The ground moves faintly, changing texture wherever it’s about to shoot up and try to smack her in the face, curtesy of Ichigo. Although that one is indiscriminate, the boys are just as at risk as she is of the sudden spikes that shoot from the ground. 

She’s never been claustrophobic but now it feels like everything is starting to close in around her. They’re boxing her in, leaving only a little room to move. 

Suzume twists and ducks, minding the wires and carefully picking her steps. Each turn takes her further and further from where they started. The whole time Ichigo watches them, her green-black eyes sharp and observant. 

Tekito isn’t as patient as her. He’s starting to press his attack, pushing her harder and harder. 

And making it easier to lead him on. 

She’s sweating and starting to get dizzy when she finally picks her time. She knows that Mitsuo is nearly right behind her, he’d placed himself against the wall at the start and now there’s nowhere for him to go. The threads have hardened and closed together, making a barrier between them. 

It’s exactly what Suzume needs. 

She’s spent the entire time walking circles around Tekito, twisting under his arms, darting between his legs. 

Now she curls herself low, spins around his hip and catches his ankle with her own. She yanks, ripping his leg out from under him and sending his careening into the threads, which snap and retreat before they can do more than split his hair. 

Mitsuo’s focus is on Tekito. With the last of her strength Suzume launches herself up, catching one of the support beams on the open ceiling above them, and swings herself at him. Her shadow falling across his is the only warning Mitsuo get’s before she lands on top of him, her knees on his shoulders and her hands cupping his cheeks. 

She rests her thumbs gently just under his eyes. 

“Give?” 

Mitsuo stares at her, his chest heaving under her weight. His blue hair is sweat slicked to his forehead. Apparently using his quirk is as much  a physical strain as a mental one. 

“I- yeah. I give.” 

She turns to look at Tekito, who’s bleeding faintly from a few lines on his forehead. His right hand is cut slightly too. 

“I have your partner as a hostage. Will you give up?” 

Tekito, who somehow looks even worse for wear than she is, grunts. He thumps his head on the floor and the heat shimmering over his body fades. 

Suzume rolls off of Mitsuo with a groan. 

Ichigo looks pissed when she stands above them. 

“I’ve never seen the three of you so sloppy before. Suzume, you could have burnt your leg off in that last move, and if they were partners of convenience instead of partners because they’re friends you would have lost. Mitsuo should have cut you into pieces, and Tekito would have burned you up instead of letting you take a hostage. I know you can do better than that.” 

“Tekito, you need to watch your output more. Your surroundings almost caught on fire more than once, and you wasted way too much energy keeping yourself heated up the entire time. Look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t just cook part of your brain. Well?!” 

“And Mitsuo! You have the potential to have one of the most versatile quirks out there, but you use the same Bird Cage strategy every time. Ev-er-y. Time. You could have won from the very start, but you lack the creativity to do it.” 

All three of them get themselves on their knees in front of her while Ichigo tears them apart. She is right each time, of course, and even if she hadn’t been they all know better than to try to argue with her by now. 

She carefully rips them apart, picking at each mistake that they made. Suzume knows she made plenty, she’s too tired to even properly register every criticism that Ichigo gives her. 

Finally, Ichigo claps her hands together. 

“Okay. Get out.” 

They stand and bow to her before filing out, sweaty and tired. 

“I was starting to think that would never end,” Suzume admits. She tugs her hair out of it’s bun and shakes it out, running her fingers through it to try to cool down. 

“You’re telling me. You looked like a zombie when you walked in today and you still didn’t throw it,” Tekito shoves her shoulder, his hands cooled by now. 

“I’d never throw a match,” Suzume rolls her eyes at him. 

“Mhmm. You should know better. Suzume is stubborn.” 

“Traitor,” she grumbles at Mitsuo. 

He shoots her a quiet, harmless smile, just as mild as milk.  

“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” she promises, and walks out into the night with a small wave. 

She has no idea that it’s a total lie. 

~ ~ ~ 

“Rescue Simulation.” 

The words echo in Suzume’s ears. Her hands tighten into fists under her desk next to the window. She wasn’t expecting this to be so soon. It’s only been a few days since the incident with the media. And now they’re all going off to fight villains, even if she’s the only one who knows about that. 

The idea of telling someone surfaces again, but there are the same problems. So she’s going to have to stick to her plan. Which isn’t a very good one, by her own admission, but she’s low on other options. 

Their costume cases come out of the wall again, each one marked by their student numbers. 

“It's up to each of you whether or not you wear your costume. Some of your costumes probably aren't adapted to the task at hand, after all. The training area is fairly far away, so we'll take a bus to get there. That's all. Go get prepared.” 

Aizawa motions them all off and they clamor to get their cases and run off to the changing rooms. Suzume chooses her costume, almost everyone does but Midoriya, who’s suit had taken some damage during his practice match. It hadn’t been professionally made, apparently. 

Who knew? 

Once the comfortable weight of her utility belt is settled on her hips she makes her way out with the rest of the girls and piles onto the bus. 

School buses suck, that’s what Suzume has decided. 

Even ones for hero schools, as roomy as it might be, it’s still too hot and it bumps hard going down the road. Suzume sits between Kirishima and Tsu, and on Tsu’s other side is Midoriya, who has been sending her weird looks since their first battle training exercise. He hasn’t said anything to her yet though. 

What’s he even going to say? 

While Suzume is thinking about opening up her book and stuffing her face in it, Tsu turns to her other side. 

“You know Midoriya,” she begins, “Your quirk reminds me of All Might’s.” 

Suzume hides a smile when the boy pales and he starts frantically waving his hands in front of himself.  “I-is that s-so? But mine isn't all that much like his!” 

“Wait Tsu, he's right,” Kirishima jumps in, leaning around Suzume to talk to her, “All Might's quirk doesn't hurt him when he uses it. That's about where the likeness's end, right? Although, I'm actually kinda jealous of that kind of simple enhancement type quirk though! There's a lot you can do with one, and flashily too.” 

He lifts his hand up and his flesh splinters into something sharp and jagged. “Hardening isn't bad for punch-up's, but I wish it was a little less bland ya know?” 

Midoriya is quick to jump in and defend the quirk, “Well I think it's an awesome quirk! Definitely a heroes quirk, Kirishima!” 

“It will be a good quirk,” Aoyama grins, “but my naval laser is both flashy and strong!” 

“Just so long as your stomach doesn't give out, right?” Mina teases. His face falls. “If we're talking the double whammy of flashy and strong, I think Todoroki and Bakugou fit the bill.”

“Sure, but Bakugo is always angry, so he’ll never be that popular.” Tsu points out.

“What did you say? I’ll kick your ass!” Bakugo jumps out of his seat and snarls at the girl. 

“You see,” she points at him, unphased. Suzume’s trying hard not to laugh, while Midoriya looks bewildered. 

“You know we basically just met you, so it’s kind of telling that we all know your personality is like shit being steamed in a sewer.” Kaminari shoots Bakugou a crooked smile, and nearly get’s a bomb to his face. 

“You’re going to regret the day you applied to this school, you loser! I’ll kill you!” 

Suzume does laugh at that, startling herself as much as her classmates, and the absolute fury on Bakugou’s face makes it worth it. 

“You got something to say?” he snarls at Suzume, who responds by flipping him off. Before he can launch himself across the bus and try to kill her, Aizawa pipes up from the front. 

“We’re almost there. Stop messing around.”

They all calm down a little. Suzume tugs her gloves on over her amber sleeves, and the light catches them just right. 

“Oh hey, I didn’t notice those before,” Tsu motions to the lines on her arms and armor. They’re faint, a few shades darker than the rest of it. 

“Ah, yeah. They were supposed to be like hornet stripes, but the company made them darker amber instead of black.” 

“Hornet stripes?” 

“Mhmm. Like ‘suzumebachi’.” 

“Oh! That’s cool,” Tsu smiles at her and they all start crowding off the bus. 

Suzume startles when Kirishima bumps shoulders with her. 

“Hey,” he starts, looking a little chagrined. 

“Hi?” she tilts her head at him. 

“I uh. I wanted to apologize? For talking that way about our quirks when. You know.” 

“When I don’t have one,” she finishes for him.  

He cringes. “Yeah. That. I wasn’t trying to rub it in your face or anything. I mean, my quirk’s not flashy but you- shit, I mean- uh?” 

Suzume takes pity on him, and shakes her head. She’s a little bit touched that he’s even trying to apologize, even if it is awkward and a little patronizing. 

“Don’t worry so much about it. It’s not like I haven’t spent my entire life around people with quirks, or like I expected there to be anyone else without one here. You’re not going to hurt my feelings talking about yours. Honestly.” 

She might get a little jealous, or think they’re being silly, but she’s starting to realize that Kirishima at least means no harm. 

“Yeah?” he perks up a bit. 

“Yeah,” she promises. 

“Awesome,” Kirishima shoots her a sharp toothed grin. “I’m glad you know it’s not like we were trying to make fun of you or anything. I mean, it doesn't matter what your quirk is, if you've got a manly heart!” 

Suzume stares at him. 

What???  

“...Thanks?” 

He grins cheerfully at her and crowds out of the bus with everyone else. 

Suzume climbs out with the rest of them and slowly stretches out, so she’s the last one in the long line of students. Right before they step inside she pulls her phone out and sends off a text.

At the beginning of the year she had saved all of her teachers phone numbers in her real phone, and in a burner phone she’d gotten from Kai years ago. Now, prepared to get in trouble if her memories are wrong or if something has changed, she shoots off an SOS text to every single one of them and drops a pin from the burner. 

As soon as she steps foot inside the USJ her service cuts out. 

She doesn’t know if she’s relieved her memories are right or horrified. 

Both? 

Either way, she climbs up in between Iida and Kirishima while Thirteen gives a long, ‘Water is Wet’ speech about how quirks can be used to help or hurt people. 

The whole thing makes her want to roll her eyes at how silly it is. 

“All right. First things first…”

Abruptly, the lights flickered out. Suzume stiffened, and followed Aizawa’s gaze down to the fountain in the center of the plaza. A twist of shadows appeared before it started to slowly spread out over the area. Hands crawled out of the shadows, and a familiar head appeared. 

Suzume bounced lightly on her toes. Okay, so she had been mostly right. It still looks cool, in the same way that a lion would look cool right before it ripped your throat out. 

Aizawa spins towards the group. “Huddle together and don’t move!” he barks, his entire demeanor changing in an instant, “Thirteen, protect the students!”

Kirishima pokes his head up next to Suzume’s, looking down as more and more vague villains appear. “What is that? Is this like the training robots at the entrance exam?”

“Don't move!” Aizawa snaps again, “Those are real villains!”

“Eraserhead and Number Thirteen…” The shadows at the head of a pack turns his gaze across them. It falls upon Suzume like a physical, cold weight. The golden eyes of a walking corpse. “According to the teacher's curriculum we procured yesterday, All Might was meant to be here, and yet…”

“I knew it. So yesterday was your doing?” Aizawa pulls his goggles down over his face. 

“Where is he? We went through all this trouble. And rustled up so many npc's to bring along. You can't tell me that All Might isn't here today.” Tomura tilts his head, one hand crawls up to grip at his throat. 

“I wonder if he'll show up if we start killing kids?

“Thirteen, start the evacuation procedure and call the school. These villains know how to get around our security. There's a chance there's an electromagnetic quirk at work interfering, Kaminari, try contacting UA with your quirk.” The order’s come fast, and Suzume unclasps her holster. 

Midoriya looks horrified. “Sensei, are you really gonna fight them alone?! Even if you suppress all of their quirks, there's way too many of them! Your battle style is to capture villains after you've erased their quirks, with that many people-” 

“Midoriya,” he cut’s in swiftly, utterly calm, “Any hero worth their salt knows how to compensate for their own weaknesses. Thirteen, I'm counting on you. Protect these kids!” 

“Right! Everyone, let’s move!” Thirteen ushers them all towards the door. Suzume runs with the rest of them, right into the waiting cloud of Kurogiri. Who is weirdly polite about trying to kill a bunch of high schoolers. 

Bakugou and Kirishima launch themselves at him, tripping up Thirteen. It’s the only opening Kurogiri needs. 

Black mist whips out, cocooning Suzume before she can even think to dodge it. 

All at once she’s falling, falling, falling- 

It’s cold, when he drops them through the shadows and into darkness. 

Suzume can’t help it. She screams, the air leaving her lungs like it’s being sucked into a vacuum. She hits the ground hard, jarring the half healed burn on her shoulder. 

Suzume hisses and sits up. Fuck, that hurt. 

She looks around herself warily. They’re inside a building, what looks like it used to be an office, and outside the broken window she can see more busted buildings all over the place, stretching out to a good sized city scape.  Some of the buildings look like they’re inches from toppling to the ground, and others are missing whole chunks out of them. 

Kirishima and Bakugou come crashing out of the swirling mist after her, which is. 

Great. 

Awesome. 

“ Fuck .” 

Kirishima is fine, but couldn't she have been here with someone nicer than Bakugou? Or even Todoroki, who’s at least quiet. 

“Ah shit, what happened?” Kirishima rubs the back of his neck, looking around them. 

“Isn’t it obvious?” Bakugou scowls. “We got teleported by that jackass smoke guy.” 

Suzume tilts her head when she hears footsteps approaching from outside the room. 

“Look alive, boys,” Suzume reaches behind her and pulls her bo staff off her back. It extends with the softest of clicks to it’s full size. The weight is comfortable in her hands.  

Just like practice. 

Only the chance of dying is more serious. 

The door bursts open, and villains spill into the room of all shapes and sizes. A whole pack of adults, some of them with blades for hands and other’s circled by small pieces of metal, and all of them are intent on killing a bunch of kids. 

It’s not nearly as hard to take them down as Suzume had been fearing. They fall easily under Bakugou and Kirishima, who barely have any training at all, and Suzume hardly sweats, smacking them down over and over with fluid, practiced moves. 

The hardest part is avoiding Bakugou’s blasts while she dances between their opponents and breaks them down bone by bone and joint by joint. To her own irritation Bakugou takes down most of them, and he keeps looking at her, the smug asshole. 

It’s a little worrying that she’s done more permanent damage than either of the boys combined, but she doesn’t fuck around when it comes to fighting for her life. 

Dying once was enough, thank you. 

She stands above a villain with six limbs, which are now all twisted in the wrong direction, with her foot pinning him to the ground. 

“That was kind of sad, wasn’t it? Losing to a bunch of kids like us.” 

He doesn’t answer. He’s completely unconscious, after all. 

“I think that’s the last of these weaklings,” Bakugo says. He’s out of breath, but with each swing and each drop of sweat his power has built up. Still, Suzume can see the way he’s flexing his hands. It’s causing a strain on his body. 

“Alright, let’s go find the rest of our class. If we three are still in the USJ, then everyone else probably is too. And not all of them have the offensive skills we do.” Kirishima looks worried, and guilty. “We’ve gotta make sure they're safe, especially since we  were the ones who screwed things up when we got in the way earlier. If Thirteen had been able to suck up that villain, we’d never have been separated like this. We’ve got to make it up to the others.” 

Bakugou scoffs at him. “You wanna track everyone down, have fun. But I’m gonna go kill that warping bastard.”

“Huh? Our physical attacks didn’t hurt that guy. Come on, don’t be an idiot, man.” 

“Shut up! I’m going to take him down because he’s their way in and out. If I cut off their escape route, they’ll be stuck here and have to pay for what they’ve done. We’ll just have to figure it out when we get there.” 

Suzume doesn’t bother warning him about the rippling air over his shoulder. He doesn’t need a warning to smash the camouflage villain into the ground. 

She hates to admit it, but when he’s not being a total shit stain he’s kind of cool. 

“Anyway, if all these Villains are small fries like these guys were, then our classmates can handle them.” 

“Aaw,” Kirishima grins, “Sounds like you’ve got some faith in our classmates, huh Bakugou?” 

“Shut up! If this quirkless little shit can take on these losers then the rest of those extra’s shouldn’t have any trouble!” 

Aaaaand his coolness is gone again. 

“You say that like I haven’t beaten you twice, puppy .” 

“Shut your goddamn mouth wasp girl!” 

Wasp girl? She wonders, bewildered. Whatever, we don’t have time for this. 

Suzume kicks the window and smashes it the rest of the way out. 

“Kirishima, c’mere. It’s time for us to get back to the plaza.” 

“Huh?” he walks over to her curiously. She lifts one arm up like she’s offering to hug him. The other one holds her grappling gun. 

“Bakugou can use his explosions to propel himself, but we’ll be faster if we swing our way back. So hold on to me, okay?” 

“A-ah! Right, just like in training,” he still looks flustered when he wraps his arms around her shoulders. Suzume grips him tight around his middle. 

“Just like in training. Don’t let go of me, no matter what, okay?” 

“Got it.” 

“Try to keep up,” she glances at Bakugou before she shoots, and pushes them out the window. Wind whips around them, tearing at her hair and she hears Bakugou swear and the sound of explosions erupting behind them. 

When she looks back he’s only doing short bursts, exploding and then landing before taking off again. 

They land on a roof top before she picks another point, shoots, and they swing off again. 

They need to move faster. 

They need to get back. 

And they do, the group of them bursting out of their dome and into the plaza just in time to see Nomu bat Aizawa away from Shigaraki. Their teacher goes skipping like a stone across the hard ground. 

Suzume looks frantically towards the front door. Where are the other teachers? They had to have gotten her text message. They have to! 

The massive, grotesque creature takes hold of Aizawa’s already battered arm and starts to squeeze. 

Suzume doesn’t think. She lifts her grappling gun and shoots. 

It spears straight through one of the Nomu’s eyes. 

The scream that rips from its beak will haunt her nightmares for years to come. Blood spurts around the point, and it only increases when the hook deploys itself inside of its head. Suzume doesn’t have the presence of mind to let go when it pulls her forwards, dragging her towards the flailing beast. 

Shit! 

Thinking fast, she lets it yank her forwards and swings her weight low to catch hold of Aizawa before she finally let’s go, and the momentum carries the pair of them away from flailing limbs and screaming. 

They tumble to the ground, Aizawa bleeding badly with his arm twisted wrong and Suzume scrambling to crouch above him. 

“Damn it,” he groans beneath her. “Kid, you need to-” 

“If you tell me to run, I swear to god I’ll-” 

“Now that,” a voice hisses, cutting through them, “Was pretty brutal. Are you sure you’re a hero, little girl?” 

Suzume lifts her head to see Tomura Shigaraki looming over them. His hands twitch, his fingers curling and uncurling. 

The door bursts open, and the UA teachers pour into the room en masse. They’re early, and they’re all there.

“Nope,” Suzume grins up at him, vicious and victorious, “But they sure are.” 

Shigaraki lunges for her. 

Chapter Text

Even as the teachers burst onto the scene, Shigaraki went straight for her throat. Suzume loathed to leave Aizawa on the ground, his arm crushed and one of his legs bleeding along with his head, but she didn’t have a choice. 

She had to dodge, bouncing outside of Shigaraki’s guard and aiming a hard kick at his ribs. 

She had to yank her leg back just as fast and dart away when he almost caught her ankle. Half her attention was on Aizawa, trying to keep from stepping on him and leading Shigaraki away if she could.  

“Nomu!” Shigaraki hissed, but before the mammoth could interfere a wall of cement erupted between them and him, cutting the pair off from view. She did hear the very distinct ‘I Am Here!” 

First time in my life I’m glad to see All Might. 

“What?!” his head snapped towards the new wall, Suzume slipped behind him and kicked him between the legs as hard as she could, but her angle was wrong and he was already moving. Her blow was hard enough that he stumbled and hissed, but he didn’t collapse. 

Shame. 

“Vicious bitch,” he snapped, rounding on her again. His red eyes blazed.  

“You are literally trying to murder children, handsome,” she drawled, side stepping a lash of his open palm. It missed her by several inches. His other hand swept up from the side and she knocked it up and away before she twisted around his side and pulled her staff out once more. 

He stumbled in shock. 

“Hands-what?!” 

“Hand-some,” she repeated, motioned like she was going to put her hand on her face in a mockery of Father. “ Duh . Aren’t you supposed to be the mastermind?” 

Shigaraki swung for her again, growling curses under his breath. Suzume snickered at him, grinning crookedly. He was way too easy to rile up. She spun elegantly past his attack, and a tree bit the dust behind her, falling to left over pieces of wood and rotten leaves. She smacked the right side of his head, then the left with her staff. 

This, at least, was easy. She didn’t have to worry about grading or any one else's judgment. She just had to fight. She’s always had to fight. 

She tapped him between his shoulder blades, and ducked when he swung around. She slipped under his arm and elbowed him hard in the ribs on her way back behind him. 

“Yusada!” Kirishima shouted, running towards her with Bakugou. Kurogiri erupted between them, a wall of black mist, but this time Bakugou was ready, and aimed for the metal collar in his misty body. 

“You shouldn't look away!” Shigaraki’s rough hiss came. 

She was only distracted for a second, but it was long enough to feel her clothes loosen under the pressure of his hand and cold air rushed onto her side. She shouted, caught the wrist attached to the hand on her ribs, and twisted to launch Shigaraki into a tree. It cracked under the force of his body. 

He grunted, and stumbled at her again. He was scrawny, and not particularly fast or strong. On top of that, he was distracted and pissed. He still managed to land a hit. 

The remnants of her armor sloughed to the ground, and her belt hung looser around her hips.   

She swore, and brought up her staff to slam it roughly into his guts, a few inches left from dead center. There was a crack where one of his fake ribs must have given way under the force.  His fingers closed around her weapon and it cracked, hissed with ash, and crumbled to pieces. 

Suzume’s stomach dropped. Ryuhei had given her that! 

She didn’t have time to mourn her lost staff. 

When he reached again for her body, staying low to protect his ribs, she leaned back and let his hand come close to her face. She caught his wrist, cupped it in one hand, and slammed a chop into the opposite side with her other hand. 

He howled as the bone gave way under her blow, and swung at her with his other hand, but she was already behind him, sweeping his legs out from under him. 

Shigaraki spat insults at her, and kept coming. She danced around him, waiting for another opening. Say what you would, but he had a truly insane pain tolerance, even if he did clutch his broken arm carefully to his chest. 

That tolerance didn’t do him any good when pale mist spread across their battlefield, and swept up over the both of them. It tasted like chlorine. Suzume stumbled, the world growing hazy, and a careful hand touched her back. 

She swung and Midnight blocked the elbow she threw over her shoulder with a kind smile. 

“Sorry,” she said mildly, “You got caught up. Try to hold your breath, okay?” 

Suzume blinked heavily at her, a haze rolling through her mind. She tried to listen, honest she did. But in the end she dropped against a soft chest. 

When she came too, she had been set outside, under the sun, and a paramedic was looking her over and telling her how lucky she was to be alive, with decay coming so close to her lungs. 

It sent a shiver through her spine. 

After an hour Suzume sits alone outside the USJ, her hands hanging limp between her knees. Her hood is back, and her black hair is down around her shoulders, and the sun shines on her face. It’s warm and soft. 

A little ways away, Aizawa is being tended to by Recovery Girl and a group of paramedics. His elbow was broken, and he’s definitely concussed, but all in all it wasn’t too bad. Especially not compared to what it could have been. Her classmates float around her, moving from police officers to heroes, filing in details about what happened and helping to write and sign reports on it all. 

Suzume, who had spent far too much time in her past life forced to spell things out for people, hadn’t had to make any addendums to her own once it was all written out. Now she was just waiting for the bus, or for someone to call her mom. 

She hopes that they don’t. 

Chiasa will worry enough, it’s best she hears the whole story from Suzume first. 

There’s a thump, and she realizes that Kirishima has plopped himself down next to her.  On his other side is Bakugou, who’s being weirdly quiet. He looks… shaken. 

She doesn’t remember him being all that freaked out by this, but it’s been a long, long time, and what just happened was definitely traumatic for these kids. 

Hell, it was kind of traumatic for her. 

She doesn’t want to die. But more than that, she doesn’t want people she likes to die. Kirishima and Aizawa make that list. 

“Man, that was… intense,” Kirishima says after a long minute. He tilts his face up towards the sky, his red eyes far off. “Who knew this was gonna happen?” 

“The villains?” Suzume offer’s. 

He rolls his eyes at her. She watches Recovery Girl finally leave the unconscious Aizawa behind so she can go see Ojiro, who apparently took a knife to the tail during the fighting. 

“Okay, yeah, the villains knew what was gonna happen. Although I don’t think they were expecting you to go crazy like that.” 

“Me?” she looks offended. “You were fighting too!” 

“Yeah, but you shot that weird bird thing in the eye! How did you know it has a healing quirk?”  

Suzume bites her lip. Kirishima looks at her, his eyes huge. 

“Yusada. You did know, right?” 

“We-ell…” 

“Oh my god.” 

“I reacted, okay! Aizawa - sensei was in danger, and I had my grappling gun, and physical strikes were useless on it, so I shot. I wasn’t gonna stand there and do nothing. Christ, Kirishima. If we hesitated, we would have died.” 

He cringes. “I wasn’t trying to scold you, but that’s a lot! You could have-” 

Killed it. 

She sighs. “Yeah.” 

She still doesn’t regret it. The Nomu is fine, relatively. All Might beat the hell out of it, and the rest of the staff rounded up all the villains, including Kurogiri and Shigaraki. 

Although without Aizawa around to cancel out Warp Gate, she doubts they’ll be held for very long. 

A group of officers lead the last of the villains out of the USJ facility, carried on stretchers. They bear the marks of Bakugou and Kirishima, and herself as well. She almost feels bad for just how hard she went on some of them. Broken bones, shattered joints, concussions. 

Honestly, she could have killed them if she was just a little less careful. 

Meanwhile, she’s barely scratched. 

It’s really pathetic. She thinks she should feel worse about the damage she did, she should regret at least a little bit. But… 

“If we look back, we’re lost. If we hesitate, we’ll die. All that’s left is to fight.” 

She doesn’t remember where that’s from, but it makes her think of swords and shadows. 

“I guess so. That was pretty fucked up though,” Kirishima gestures to her side. The armor that had once stretched from her ribs to nearly her knee is disintegrated, and there’s a hole in her body suit over her ribs. She can just barely see the edge of her purple bra. It had been a very near thing. Worse, the staff Ryuhei had given her was now fractured pieces on the ground of the USJ. 

“I shouldn’t have let him touch me. He wasn’t very fast, or very strong. He relied entirely on his quirk.”

“Is that how you stayed behind him that whole time? Doing that weird spinning stuff?” 

“Baguazhang,” she corrects mildly, “And yeah. It’s pretty useful. It’s uh… circle walking,  basically. The whole idea is to get behind your opponent, and use whatever weapons you have on you to take them down. It's pretty well used against multiple people.” 

But she messed it up. She got cocky. She could have died. 

Fuck . 

Detective Tsukauchi and Sansa come and collect them, ushering towards the bus that Present Mic has taken over. If he recognizes Suzume at all, he doesn’t show any signs of it. Maybe he’s forgotten her, maybe he doesn’t know who she is. Maybe he’s just that good of an actor. Either way she’s not upset to be away from him. The burner phone, turned off now, is heavy in her pocket. If she turns it back on now it’ll get a signal that could potentially be tracked. 

She needs to find a good way to dispose of it. 

Present Mic looks a little rattled. There’s a furrow in his brow, worry for his friend, but he manages a smile for the kids in his care. 

“Alright! Let’s get you guys back to school, okay?” 

They all mumble something in agreement. The day has wiped out the entire class. Even the most chatty are subdued. Not broken, just quiet. Tired. 

It’s worrying. Suzume knows that they’ll all bounce back, one way or another, but they’re just kids. They shouldn’t have been put in this situation in the first place. 

Fuck. 

Fuck everything. 

She lets her head thump back against the glass of the window. 

All she wants to do is go home and get a decent night's sleep. 

Fortunately when they get back to school there’s a familiar motorcycle parked out front, one painted black with yellow stripes along the sides. The headlights slant back along the front like snake eyes. It’s sleek and modern. 

And on top of it sits her brother, in a dark brown leather jacket. 

She makes it two steps off the bus before he spots her, and stands up slowly. 

Something inside her breaks, and she takes off at a dead sprint. 

Kaname catches her as soon as she's close enough and yanks her hard into a hug. His gloved fingers tangle in her hair and she presses her face into his chest, clinging for all she’s worth. 

She’s not Suzanna Hemmings, she’s not a dead detective, or a vengeful spirit of powerlessness. 

She’s Suzume, and she almost died and lost her entire world again . And he is her brother, her constant protector. 

She hugs him as tight as she can. She halfway expects to start crying, but the tears never do come. 

He squeezes her tight before pushing her away so he can take stock. She’s not hurt, just a few bruises and missing parts of her outfit, but there’s no blood under the gap in her costume for him to fuss over. Even if there was, it would be gone by now. Recovery Girl was very good at her job. 

“Holy hell, Suze. You’re lucky I was the one who was home to answer the phone. Mom would have flipped if she got that call.” 

Suzume cringes. “You’re right. Better she hears it straight from me than from my teachers or the news, right?” 

“Right.. You’re okay?” 

She nods quickly. “I’m not hurt. Well. Nothing major. I was just… I dunno. I’ve never actually fought for my life before?” 

His mouth thins into a line. 

“Where were your teachers?” 

Suzume punches his side. “ Also fighting for my life. He got hurt way worse than I did, so don’t even think about trying to foist blame on him, got it?” 

Kaname huffs at her. “Fine. Got it. Do you need to sign out of school or…?” 

She shakes her head. 

“No, class is over for the day. They said we were all free to go home now.” 

“Good. I’m not eighteen yet, so I probably couldn’t sign you out anyways,” he picks a helmet out of his saddle bag thing and presses it into her hands. “Put this on. Let’s go home.” 

Suzume shoves the helmet onto her head and climbs on the back of the bike with Kaname. It had been a gift from his mentor, one Gang Orca, who Chiasa was still trying to badger into coming over for dinner so she could properly threaten him into taking care of her baby boy. 

It’s fast, and she knows there’s some tricks hidden inside of it, but all she really cares about is her brother in her arms and the fact that they are going home. 

~ ~ ~  

If Midoriya doesn’t stop staring at her, she’s going to fucking lose it. 

She really, really is. 

He’s been doing it ever since their first training day, when she’d taken down Bakugou (Something she was still a little bit proud of) and it had only gotten worse after the disaster at the USJ. 

He would just. Stare at her. For way too long, way too often, but every time she looked back at him he would squeak like a mouse and shove himself back in his notebooks before he started sweating. Or while he was sweating. 

That kid needed to carry a towel around. 

He keeps staring at her but he doesn’t talk to her and she’s starting to get really irritated by the whole thing. 

Not that she storms over to him and confronts him about how low key creepy behavior. She wouldn’t do something like that. That’s not her style. 

But it’s still getting on her nerves. 

Her mother is also getting on her nerves. 

After the USJ incident Chiasa had decided that Suzume needs to call her when she gets to school, at lunch, and once she leaves as well. It’s not unreasonable, but its the most control Chiasa has taken over Suzume’s life and the sudden change rankles her, especially when she just proved that she can handle herself in a dangerous situation. What’s Chiasa gonna do if she texts her that the school blew up, come save her? He mom is great, but she’s not a hero, or even Yakuza like her dad was. 

If shit hit the fan she was more likely to text Kaname, or even Rio or Kai, who could actually do something to help with the situation. 

And really, it's not like this is that much of a surprise. More so than most parents, Chiasa knew what her children were getting into when they decided to become heroes. 

Kaname fought his first villain last year, after he got his provisional license, and ever since then he’s been racking more and more up. Even before that he, and Suzume, have come home hurt worse than she had been at the USJ. 

All the same, she does as she’s told. 

When lunch rolls around two days after the incident, just after Aizawa announces the sports festival, she ducks away from her classmates and the mob that’s gathered to declare war on them and pulls out her phone. 

She has the feeling that they’re monitoring outgoing calls from the schools these days, but what are they gonna do? Tell her she can’t call her own mother during her down time? 

“ Suzume, there you are. I was waiting.” 

“Hi Mom. I had to stay after class to help clean up. I’m fine.” 

“Good, good. How is it going? Did you learn anything interesting? How’s that friend of yours, Kirihana?” 

“Kirishima, and he’s not my friend. I’m not here to make friends.” 

“Suzume,” She can practically see the furrow in her mother’s brow, and the displeased twist of her mouth. “No man is an island, and neither are you. You need to be friends with people your own age, especially heroes. It’s not good for you to be so standoffish and asocial.” 

“Mo-om,” Suzume purses her lips. “I’m fine. Honestly. I need to focus on class work, that’s all. I’ll make friends once I have my hero license.” 

Chiasa sighs on the other line. “ One day, you’ll find out that your mother was right. At least try to be friendly? Don’t start fights with your classmates.” 

“I don’t start fights,” Suzume grumbles. “I just finish them.” 

“ Suzume.” 

“I know, I know. I’ll do my best, okay?” 

“I know you will. You always do. Make sure you’re home on time tonight, Kai and Eri will be here, and Rio and Taka are trying to make dinner.” 

“Oh lord. Don’t let them burn the house down.” 

“ I won’t. I love you baby.” 

“Love you too mom. Bye.” 

“ Bye.” 

When she hangs up her phone and turns around she finds Midoriya standing at the end of the hallway. He freezes when he realizes that she’s seen him, and starts looking frantically left and right for any kind of escape he might be able to get. 

Suzume puts her hands on her hips, having finally had enough of him, and purses her lips. “Did you need something?” she demands, her voice sharper than she’d meant to be. Oh well, no taking it back now. 

He jumps, like he had thought maybe she didn’t know he was watching her, before he starts stammering something out too fast for her to fully understand. 

She stalks over to him, her shoes clicking solidly across the the tile floor beneath her. 

“What was that?” 

“I- uh, well that is I just want to. To talk to you?” he waves his hands in front of his face. 

She doesn’t remember him being this much of a nervous wreck, but okay. 

“Fine. Talk. What do you want?” 

“I just wanted to- to tell you how cool it is that you’re here!” He finally blurts out, his green eyes glittering. Suzume blinks at him. 

“...in the hallway?” 

“In U A!” 

What is happening here? 

“Uh huh. I’m glad you’re at UA too?” 

“No but- you don’t have a quirk so it’s great that, you know, that you got in here, even though you have that big disadvantage and you’re weaker- well no, that’s not right let me start again- uhm!” 

Suzume is too fascinated watching Midoriya shovel his grave deeper and deeper to even be properly offended. He’s steadily turning pink, his forehead beaded with sweat, and he waves his hands so fast she thinks she’s going to have to duck. His voice trails off at last into a weird squeak. 

“You know,” Suzume says slowly, “I always thought you were cooler.” 

He stares at her, bewildered. “What?” 

“...I’m going to lunch now,” she decides, and leaves him to his confusion. Her memories are hazy at best, but if there’s one thing she was absolutely certain was that Midoriya hadn’t had a quirk. He’d gotten it from All Might before school started. So what the hell was trying to say, calling her weak and saying she’s at a disadvantage? She beat Bakugou. She shot a Nomu. 

Fucking christ. 

“H-hey, wait, what?!” 

She pauses, her foot raised, before she glances back at him. Because it’s Midoriya, and only because it’s him, she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

“Try again when you can talk without insulting me, okay?” 

“O-oh, um, I didn’t mean-” 

She turns from him and goes to get her lunch, leaving Midoriya tripping over his own tongue again, staring at her back.

“Hey, Yusada! Over here!” 

She looks to see Kirishima waving her over to a table already populated by him and Kaminari. 

She considers ignoring him and sitting on her own. It’s quieter that way. She still has a book she wants to finish reading. 

But. 

She’s starting to get used to Kirishima’s easy smiles and sturdy presence. And Kaminari isn’t totally annoying. He’s well meaning, if nothing else. 

So, she relents and ends up spending her lunch listening to Kaminari chatter on about some TV show that she’s never even heard of, and reluctantly she ends up admitting that she doesn’t watch a lot of TV period. 

It’s nice. She wouldn’t go so far as to call them friends, but they aren’t bad company she supposes. 

She doesn’t say anything when Bakugou sits on the other end of the table, keeping Kaminari and Kirishima between the two of them. 

~ ~ ~ 

“I’m home!” 

Suzume drops her boots by the front door along with her backpack and pokes her head into the kitchen. She knows that that’s where everyone will be, and she’s right. 

Taka and Rio sit together at the counter, while Chiasa works at the island, mixing dry peppermint, lemon skin, lavender, ginger, and camomile together in a good sized bowl. A box of empty bags sits next to it, along with smaller bowls of dandelion, milk thistle, and skullcap. 

Chiasa has been making her own tea blends for Suzume’s entire life. 

Sitting beside her, with the same thick gloves that half of their family already wears, is little Eri. She can see Kai and Kurono sitting outside on the porch, chatting with Kaname. The gloves won’t actually stop her quirk, but they’re a placebo for the girl. 

They’re being watched. They all know it, there’s a black car on the other side of the street that doesn’t belong to any of their neighbors, and if they’re being honest police have never been very subtle. 

It’s always the shoes, but they all drive the same type of ‘nondescript’ cars. 

They would blend in easier if it was a bright red ferrari. 

Dip shits. 

It’s nothing new. Police observation had nearly vanished with Sanjiro’s arrest, but apparently they still follow Kai and Kurono around, waiting for a chance to prove what they’re doing. Chances are the ones tailing them are already paid off, and if they aren’t they’ve never born witness to anything more illegal than jaywalking.

The family dinner is a risk to both her and Kaname’s careers, but Eri is worth it. 

Suzume smiles sweetly at her, and Eri smiles back shyly and waves. 

“Hey, what did I miss?” she asks, coming around behind them. She takes Eri’s long, pale hair in her hands and starts brushing her fingers through it while her mom shows Eri how to hold the bag and a funnel. 

“Nothing interesting. How was school?” 

“Fine,” she starts slowly braiding Eri’s hair back. She looks the little girl over critically while she works, checking her arms for needle marks and her neck for bruises. Any sign at all that Kai isn’t treating her right. 

Eri is relaxed under her touch. She’s a soft spoken child, and she’s not very social, but she’s also barely met anyone outside of the Shie Hassaikai that aren’t a part of her own family. A little social awkwardness is to be expected. She doesn’t flinch when people move too fast, or when voices rise. She’s never shook in Kai’s presence, even though the only way he has of stopping her quirk is incredibly painful. 

The way Suzume sees it, that’s the best evidence that he’s treating her with his own brand of kindness that there could possibly be. 

Good. 

She would hate to have to kill him. 

“Eri, what did you do this weekend?” Suzume asks. She pulls out her own hair tie to finish off Eri’s long braid. It almost reaches her butt, and she looks adorable with it. Suzume wants to do pig tail braids next time. 

Then Eri would look like a little farmer girl with her red overalls. 

“I colored in the book Gran got me for my birthday,” she says softly. “There was a dog in it.” 

“Are dogs your favorite?” 

She shakes her head. “No, I like cats. The wrinkly ones.” 

“Sphinx cats? Those are pretty cool. You know they have to have a lot of lotion put on them?” 

“Really?” 

“Mhmm. Their skin dries out real easy.” 

Suzume takes a seat on Eri’s other side, and ties off the tea bag that Eri finishes filling up. They start a little line, and the smell of lemon and ginger is a calm comfort. Taka and Rio watch them, holding hands. They look so much older these days. They’re nearly thirty, but they look older than that. Taka is already getting grey temples. 

Having to be away from Eri is hard on them. 

The back door slides open and Kai, Kurono, and Kaname come tromping in. Suzume beams up at her old baby sitters. 

“Hey!” 

Kurono nods at her with a smile. “Hey kiddo. It’s been a minute.” 

“That’s still a stupid pun,” she puffs at him, but it’s ruined by a half a laugh. 

“I’ve been telling him that for years,” Kai says. He starts washing his hands. “He still hasn’t stopped saying it.” 

“What a lo-er,” she glances down at Eri, “Silly person.” 

Kurono turns around to hide a snort. 

Kai glances over his shoulder at her. “She’s heard the word ‘loser’ before.” 

“Well I don’t know that!” Suzume puffs her cheeks out. Kai’s mouth twitches. 

“I already know all the bad words,” Eri says helpfully. 

Rio’s brow twitches and she looks dangerously at her brother. “Is that so?” 

“Yeah. Loser, crap, and cheese and rice!” 

Suzume has to bite her lip hard to keep from laughing at the very serious child sitting next to her, nodding sagely like she’d just told them some terrible secret. 

Rio’s dark glower breaks and she chokes on a startled wheeze. 

The idea of a bunch of yakuza running around yelling ‘crap’ and ‘cheese and rice!’ is almost enough to kill her. 

Well I am the one who told them not to swear around children.  

“Those are, uh, truly ter-terrible words,” Taka coughs into his hand, struggling to keep a straight face. 

Eri nods gravely. “I’m only s’posed to use them in a amergency. Like a bee sting, or an accident.” 

“Wash your hands,” Kai orders Taka roughly before he looks at his charge again. “That’s right, only if it’s an emergency. And if you’re in danger?” 

“Scream really, really, really loud,” she recites dutifully. “And kick anyone mean to me between the legs.” 

“Good girl.” 

Eri smiles sweetly at him. 

“... so that’s where I get it,” Suzume shoots Kai a look. 

“I think it’s the other way around,” Kurono says helpfully. 

I can’t tell if that makes me a bad influence or not. 

“I’m strangely okay with that.” 

“You’re a menace is what you are,” Kaname rolls his eyes at her. 

She looks him dead in the eye. 

“Seen any frogs lately?” 

The color drains from his face and he looks away quickly. 

Chiasa looks between her youngest children while Taka snickers at their expense. 

“I… don’t want to know. Whatever you two are doing with frogs is your own business.” 

“I put a frog's leg back on it last week.” 

Suzume thinks it says a lot about their family that instead of being disturbed by the fact that Eri is apparently experimenting on frogs with her quirk, Rio and Taka are instead incredibly proud of her progress. 

From the phantom curve of his mouth, Kai is proud of her too. 

They pack up bags of tea and Eri tells them all about a movie she watched with Kurono the other day, happy to chat until the sky grows dim and the lightning bugs start to pop out. It’s a little bit early for them to be out, the weather is still cool, but they float into existence in the back yard all the same. Kaname finds a few jars and pokes holes in them and sends Eri on an adventure to catch as many as she can while the adults (plus Suzume and Kaname) sit on the porch.  

Once the little girl is running around and occupied, Kai looks at Suzume. 

“So. I heard you fought your first villains.” 

Suzume makes a face. 

“Ah. Yeah. That.” 

“You’re okay?” Kurono asks, looking her over. 

Suzume tries not to roll her eyes. His concern is touching, really. “Even if I wasn’t, Rio would have fixed me up already. But yeah, I didn’t get hurt very badly during the attack. Mostly it was. Well it was kind of terrifying?” 

“I’ll bet,” Kaname sits at her side on the wicker couch. “I didn’t see my first villains until my second year, when I started my work study with Gang Orca. And even then it was just a small time robbery. He kind of shoved me at them, I scratched their arm and it was over. It was nothing like that .” 

Being trapped in the USJ with no way out, surrounded by people who wanted to kill them. 

Suzume shrugs, and looks down at her hands. She fiddles with her scrunchy, rolling her lock picks beneath the soft material back and forth.  

“It sucked. But I lived, and I learned,” she finally says. “Seeing our teachers in action… It was insane. All Might was crazy strong, but it’s not like he’s the only one. Present Mic, Cementoss, Midnight. All of them were nuts to watch. I knew they had to be good to be UA teachers, but knowing and seeing are two different things, ya know?” 

“And your homeroom teacher, Eraserhead?” Chiasa frowns. It’s a sharp contrast to Suzume’s crooked smile. 

“Craziest one of all. He didn’t hesitate, he threw himself at a crowd of like fifty villains, and beat the hell out of most of them. We all got separated by this dude with a warp quirk…” 

She fills them in on the incident, but doesn’t tell them everything. She doesn’t talk about the smell of blood or the taste of ash, or the fear that thrummed under her skin the entire time. She doesn’t tell them how close, exactly, she came to dying. 

Her mom still looks pissed when she mentions that she shot a freaky bird man in the face and played a horrifying version of tag with the leader of the LoV. Who has, predictably, escapes custody by now. 

“I hate that you were in that situation.” 

“I know, mom, but I’m here. I survived, because you and dad let me learn how to fight.”

“It’s a testament to you that you did,” Kai says, his eyes slanted in a way that betrays a frown under his mask. “If I remember right, the League of Villains is affiliated with All for One, or was before he went to ground. They started recruited small time villains a month or so ago. Guess we know why now, but the point is that they were very dangerous people.” 

Suzume doesn’t have to fake her surprise. Kai knew who All for One was? The yakuza knew he was alive? 

“Oh.”

Taka sits back in the chair he and Rio are squeezed into. He hums, quietly. 

“I know it was scary. But I think… I think that’s just proof that you’re doing the right thing, Suze.” 

Everyone looks at him, none more startled than Suzume herself. “Huh?” 

“You said your instinct was to throw yourself into danger and protect your teacher, right?” 

She nods, slowly. 

“Well. There you have it. If you weren’t a hero, you’d be a vigilante, and we all know it. So you’re in the right school, in the right course. No matter what else, your heart was in that fight.” 

Suzume swallows thickly, her eyes stinging. 

He’s wrong. She’s in the hero course out of anger, out of spite, because she wants to prove to the world that it’s wrong about her. 

She can’t deny the warmth that curls in her chest at his words though. 

Even if Kai, and Kurono, and all the others would prefer her to be a vigilante. 

“We’ll see,” she clears her throat awkwardly and blinks the dust out of her eyes. “Oh, did I tell you that the sports festival is in a couple of weeks?” 

She steers the conversation away from silly sentiment, and watches Eri catch fireflies. This will be one of the last time’s that they can all get together. After this year, Kaname will graduate and become a hero, and Suzume is well on her own way now too. 

Chapter Text

Suzume has been coming back home later and later these days. 

With only two weeks until the Sports Festival she’s been spending every spare minute with Ichigo and anyone at the dojo willing to go against her in a fight. Admittedly, the number of people willing to fight her keeps decreasing steadily, so she finds herself up against Tekito and Mitsuo most of the times these days. 

They’re getting better too. Mitsuo in particular has been using his strings less like cheese cutters and more like spider webs.

Which is good for him, but it does mean that she ends up with cuts along her arms and hands on occasion. Something that Yusa fusses over whenever she finds her way to the cafe for something warm to drink while she runs across roof tops. 

Despite her insistence that she isn’t a vigilante, she now has a small pocket in her wind breaker full of business cards and phone numbers that she never plans to use, all curtesy of people who just happened to be around when Suzume started trouble. Drunks, idiot teenagers, or just desperate men who thought that anyone carried cash anymore, she’s gotten good at making quick work of them and going on her way. 

It’s getting more and more common for her to come in, crawl into bed, and pass out for as many hours as she can get before she has to get back up and go to school. 

Kaname is back in school, so she doesn’t have to worry about dragging him home again, but their mom has been falling asleep on the couch waiting for her to return. 

It’s. 

Worrying. 

She doesn’t want her mother to worry about her so much. 

But there’s also really nothing she can do about it. She’s not dropping out and Chiasa can’t just stop caring about her children. She loves them too much, just like Sanjiro. 

So it’s not actually that much of a surprise when Suzume pushes open the door to their house and her mother is sleeping on the couch in front of a TV showing reruns of old anime. All the lights are off. 

Suzume hesitates before she flips the lights on. 

Immediately, her mothers dark eyes snap open. 

“C’est pas Versailles ici!” 

Suzume freezes, her fingers still on the light switch. 

Since when does mom speak french? 

She flips the switch back off, plunging them back into darkness, and walks down the hall and up the stairs to her bedroom. Behind her, she can hear Chiasa stirring, but she doesn’t shout for her, so Suzume trots to Kaname’s bedroom. 

She knocks on his door and waits for a muffled ‘ S’open’ to push her way inside. 

His bed is pushed up against the far wall, and the middle of the room is occupied by a short table covered in a 3d map and tokens. Some kind of board game he and his friends play. His own character stands as a little hologram near an outcropping of mountains.

Suzume hasn’t played in a few years, but it’s basically a fancy D&D board. 

Kaname himself is laying sprawled on his bed, scrolling through MyFace.

He peers over at her. “You’re home late.” 

“I’m always home late,” she points out, and plants herself on his bed. 

“What’s up?” He doesn’t bother locking his phone. Suzume flops back against him, sprawling her torso over his back. 

“I just heard mom speak french. It was weird. Did you know she speaks french?” 

“Huh? No, I’ve never heard her speak anything other than English and Japanese. You sure it was french?” 

“Positive. And the way she said it, it wasn’t like she was doing it for fun or like she just picked it up or something. I surprised her and she spoke in French instead of Japanese. Like it was natural to her or something.” 

“That’s weird…” 

“E-yup.” 

They lay in silence for a couple of minutes. Kaname tapped away on his phone and Suzume followed the swirling lines on his ceiling. 

“You think Taka or Shisui knows?” 

“Shisui is still convinced telling her he has a boyfriend is a bad idea, so I’m gonna say no. Taka maybe.” 

“Too bad this didn’t happen before they visited last week.” 

“We do own cell phones, you know.” 

“Yeah, but talking over text and talking in real life are totally different things.” 

“True true. Text him anyways.” 

“Text him yourself.” 

“I’m not the one holding my phone.” 

“So pull out your phone and text him.” 

“I don’t want to.” 

“Why are you such an obstinate little shit?” 

She shrugs, and stretches her arms above her head until her shoulders pop. 

“You know what?” 

“Hmm?” 

“I don’t think I actually know that much about our parents. Like. I know their hobbies. I know what they do. Or did, I guess if we’re talking about Dad, but I don’t know much about their lives before we were born. Mom doesn’t have a lot of friends, and we’ve never met our grandparents. Are they dead? Are our parents orphans? Or did something happen and they don’t talk to them anymore?” 

He tilts his head to peer at her over his shoulder. “That’s depressing. You make it sound like our parents are anime protagonists.” 

“Anime protagonists aren’t single mothers or prisoners.” 

“That’s because anime isn’t diverse enough, now stop being a smartass.” 

“Better than a dumb ass.” 

Kaname reaches back and smacks her knee roughly. 

“I don’t know about them either. We were both pretty young when dad went away, and out of the two of them he was more open than mom. Mom was too busy trying to keep all six of us in line to be… I don’t want to say our friend. Because he was our dad, not our friend.” 

“I know what you mean though. I… kind of feel like a bad daughter. For not knowing more about them.” 

“I mean, they’re our parents. If they want us to know about them, they’ll tell us. And if dad wasn’t born into the Shie Hessaikai, I doubt he started working for them for the fun of it.”

Suzume let’s out a sigh. “And if they don’t tell us about it, it’s probably because they don’t want to talk about it, or because they think we’re too young to know whatever it is. Fuck. I’m texting Taka.” 

“Oh, so you’re actually gonna get your phone out?” 

Suzume kicks his head, and he shoves her off of him and onto the floor. “Get off me you fucking gremlin.”

Suzume rolls to her feet and sticks her tongue out at him, and get’s a pillow to the face for her troubles. 

“Get out!” 

“Fine! I don’t wanna be in your weird nerd room anyways!” 

She flings the pillow back and stalks out of the room dramatically. 

When she reaches her own room she freezes. There’s a package sitting on her desk, with her name scrawled across it. 

She opens it slowly, revealing inside three pieces of wood, all connected by short, sturdy chain. The two furthest edges are capped in hard metal, and on the inside of some pieces there’s small twists like a screw. 

It takes her a second to realize what it is. 

It’s a three section sansetsukon staff that connects to create a full staff. It’s a bit shorter than her last bo, only a little over five feet long as opposed to six. She’ll have to train with it to make sure she doesn’t expect more reach than she gets, but that’s okay. 

Sitting underneath is a small note. 

Be more careful with this one. 

~ ~ ~

The day of the sports festival dawned bright and sunny. 

It’s stupidly bright, actually, and Suzume low key hates it. 

She has to squint against the sunlight that spills down across her shoulders as they step out onto the field. A huge crowd is packed into the seat all around them, everyone turning up to watch this years newest class. The second and third years have their own competition in a separate arena somewhere. 

Mic’s voice blares across them. 

“Welcome everyone to the UA sports festival! Where the hero world's little eggs aim for each other's throats! Our Grand yearly melee!!! And let me guess, you all showed up to see the freshly formed miracle stars that shrugged off a mass villain assault with wills of steel! The hero course CLASS 1-A!” 

Suzume quietly cringes at the introduction. Little eggs? 

Mic is arguably their weirdest teacher, at least in terms of the crap that comes out of his mouth. He’s still a hell of a hype man. 

Suzume shakes her head when he introduces Midnight, and they call Bakugou up to the stand. He’s been weirdly quiet ever since the USJ. Suzume doesn’t have a lot of room to talk, but she’s been chatting with Kirishima and Kaminari more often, plus Tsu and sometimes Mina and Uraraka. 

It’s the closest thing to a social life she’s ever had. 

Bakugou climbs the stairs, his hands stuffed into his pockets. There’s no fanfare to him, no crowing or shouting. 

He just leans into the mic, his red eyes burning. 

“I just wanna say. I’m gonna win.” 

The other classes erupt around them, screaming at him for his declaration. 

Suzume twitches at the roar of insults and challenges from the other classes. Somehow, Bakugou managed to drag their entire class into his dramatics. Everyone around them looked ready to start a fight with their class at the drop of a hat. 

Midnight puts a stop to it with a snap of her whip. 

“That’s enough everyone! Eyes up here!” 

There’s grumbling, but everyone looks up at Midnight all the same. She stands high above them with a giant tv monitor behind her, spinning through options for their games. 

Games that are going to put them on national TV and might result in some serious injuries. 

“It's time to move on to our first event. The preliminaries this year starts with....” She slaps the monitor behind her, “an obstacle race! A race between all 11 classes, this course makes a nearly four kilometer ring around the stadium.”

A gate at the other end of the field folds itself out of the way, revealing a bottle neck path to the outside world. 

“We always sing about our freedom on campus, well this is what it's all about! You're free to do anything, anything as long as you remain within the course. There's no restriction on quirk use. Support course students, and students without quirks have been given the opportunity to choose a few pieces of equipment.”

Someone mumbles behind her, “They let quirkless people in here? Isn’t that kind of reckless?” 

“Yeah… is the principal really as smart as he’s supposed to be?” 

Suzume touches the holster on her thigh. They’d let her choose two pieces of equipment, and she’d picked her grappling gun and Ryuhei’s bo staff. 

“With all that said, let's get started! On your mark... get set... GO!”

Suzume bolts for the door. The now familiar feeling of the grappling gun in her hand is a comfort, and she shoots it at the ceiling above the entrance and goes sailing about her classmates and competition. 

She swings forwards, landing ahead of Todoroki and his ice path. 

He stares at her, startled. “You-” 

Suzume tilts her head at him but doesn’t slow as they come to a turn in the path. 

It’s just like track and field, just like her own entrance exam. 

One step at a time. 

The ground rumbles, and robots the size of small buildings come crashing out of nowhere. 

Suzume twists between them, nearly squishing herself between the treadmill of one, and comes careening out the other side just as Todoroki freezes them solid.

What an insane power. In barely a minute he took down a robot that would have killed most people.  

Two smaller ones shoot out in front of her and she twirls her staff out to full size before driving it viciously into one of their ‘eye’. It sparks and the thing shuts down, another following suit. 

Todoroki comes up at her heel right as a third come barreling out of the bushes ahead of them. 

Suzume whips out her gun and shoots, spearing the thing through the head and forcing Todoroki to stumble to avoid getting clothes lined before the gun whips her forwards and she takes back her lead, bouncing off the dead robot and landing in a run on the other side. 

When she had submitted her request form for her support gear, Aizawa had looked it over and told her, very firmly, ‘Try not to shoot anyone’s eye out’. It’s only the first event and she’s already broken that rule. 

Whoops. I mean, he did say try, right?  

She can hear Mic shouting something overhead, she hears her name and Todoroki’s and something about a ‘budding rivalry’, but she’s not interested in what he’s saying and it’s muffled by the wind whipping around her. 

The ground drops away into a canyon and she flings herself into the abyss, shooting for the furthest tower of rock and swinging for the other side. Overhead Todoroki passes her by, freezing one of the wires that had been suspended between plateaus and propelling himself with the ice. She nearly slips on a patch of it when she scrambles out of the canyon on his heels. When she looks over her shoulder she sees a girl with pink hair throw herself forwards with wire’s strapped to her sides. 

Suzume sucks in sharply. She needs to talk to that girl. Immediately. 

Something sparks inside her chest and Suzume has to beat it down. She can’t be focused on what her classmates are doing. All she needs to focus on is getting to the finish line as fast as she can. 

It’s like the practical exam all over again, only instead of rotating metal platforms and logs sticking out of the water, they come upon a minefield. 

Suzume. 

Laughs. 

Startled and so soft she almost doesn’t hear it herself. 

A minefield. 

Ichigo has spent months making her fight on ground that might betray her with significantly less warning than this. She can see the slight mounds in the earth where they were buried, and by extension she can see the path between them. 

“Bastard! Your declaration of war was to the wrong person!” 

Even better, Bakugou has finally caught up, and is trying to start a fist fight with Todoroki in the middle of the race, although the both stop for a second when she laughs. 

And runs right past them with light, sure steps. 

“Hell no! Get back here wasp girl!” 

Again with the wasps?  

Suzume spins away from him, her feet barely touching the ground as she dodges outside his blow. She dances between him, Todoroki, and the mines below. Bakugou twists mid air, his palms igniting over and over before he launches himself at them with one extended. It glows bright orange and the smell of burnt sugar is almost overwhelming. 

Suzume shoves herself off the ground and back flips over Todoroki’s shoulder. 

“Sorry,” she lies, landing lightly and sprinting off while Todoroki takes the brunt of the explosion. 

Bakugou screams after her, and she tries not to laugh again, that same spark in her chest. 

She frantically tamps it down and breaks for the last stretch. 

Something explodes in the back of the minefield. Suzume’s head snaps around to see Midoriya go soaring from behind, clutching a piece of sheet metal that came from the robots that Suzume had dodged. 

“Hell no!” Bakugou roars and charges after Midoriya, exploding faster and faster. Todoroki swears and freezes the ground to go after them, clearing the path for the rest of the teams. Suzume shakes her head and turns back to the front. Almost there. 

Suzume barely clears the area before there’s a second huge explosion and Midoriya passes her by like a bullet, launching straight through the gates to the finish line. Bakugou and Todoroki are hot on his tail, and Suzume grits her teeth and struggles to hold onto her lead. Something sharp catches her leg and she shouts, stumbling over the vine that had come out of nowhere while someone new goes rushing past. 

They burst out of the hallway and into the field again. 

Midoriya, Todoroki, Bakugou, Ibara, and Suzume. 

She kind of wants to scream. 

Instead she slumps against the wall while the rest of her class makes their way to the finish line. 

She tilts her head back against the wall and swallows thickly. It had been like the entrance exam, and she’d placed further down. 

Damn. 

Damn it. 

Suzume doesn’t need to be the number one hero. She doesn’t need to top the popularity charts or anything like that. All she needs is to become a hero, period. 

She can still do that even if she doesn’t get scouted here by heroic agencies, but it’ll make it all the harder if she doesn’t intern with a good company. And the lower she ranks,  the less of a chance there is of that. Most wouldn't take a chance on someone like her anyways, or if they did it would be a ‘diversity hire’ at best. 

She has to prove herself. 

She has to get a leg up and show the world, right here, right now, that she can keep up with people with insane quirks like Todoroki and Bakugou.

The world will never let you be a hero. 

There’s a soft thud beside her, and she glances over to see Todoroki himself, steam rising off of his skin, trying to catch his breath in the shade beside her. He looks about as happy as she feels.

There’s still frost along his right shoulder. She never noticed, but the gathering patterns are actually kind of pretty. 

“You might want to melt that before we get started with the next round.” 

Todoroki glances her way and then looks at his shoulder. His mouth thins into a line. 

“It’ll be fine. I’m not giving my old man the joy of seeing me use his quirk.” 

Suzume tried to stifle her snort, but apparently not well enough because his mis-matched eyes snap up to narrow at her. 

“Sorry,” she leans heavier against the wall. “That’s just a weird way to say it. Since it’s your quirk, not his.” 

“I got it from him. You know he’s-” 

“Endeavor, yeah. I know. But you heard Thirteen’s lecture. Quirks can be good or bad depending on how you use them. And your fire is yours, no matter who you inherited it from. So it’s your choice how to use it, or not, I suppose.” 

He stares at her, his mouth parted before he shuts it and changes whatever he was going to say. 

“What would you know about it?” 

Suzume resists a small wince of her own. It’s not like it's the meanest thing she’s ever heard. 

“Well, considering I haven’t inherited any type of quirk? Not much I guess. But my dad is a criminal, and my brother has the same color eyes and the same quirk as his. That doesn’t mean he’s going to gouge his own eyes out or rip out all his teeth.” 

She shrugs, and closes her eyes again. 

“Do what you want. Your life is your own, Todoroki.” 

He’s silent beside her, while the last of the stragglers finally stumble in. 

“Good job everyone! From here on out, only the top 42 students have earned the right to continue on. The second stage of the festival is about to begin. From here on out even the press will be teeming in a white heat of excitement. So go all out kids!”

Suzume cracks her eyes open to look over at Midnight. She’s not the only person looking displeased. Everyone who came in after her, and even the three that powered ahead, look irate. Only Midoriya seems happy, and he’s crying. 

Again. 

“Today's second event... The suspense is  killing me, and I already know what it is! A cavalry battle! Everyone get in teams of two to four people, and form a horseback configuration. Basically, it's the same as a normal cavalry battle. Swipe the enemy riders headbands and guard your own. Except for one thing. Everyone will receive points based on their performance in the last trial.”

“Those points will go up in increments of five, starting from the bottom. The only exception to that rule, is the first place winner of the race. Their point value will be… ten million!” 

The entire atmosphere shifts on a dime. 

Midoriya stands frozen, horror on his face. Ten million points. 

Everyone is going to be after him. 

Better him than her. Still, she needs to figure out a team. She doesn’t exactly have friends in this class. 

What’s worse, everyone else seems to be conglomerating already. 

She looks for Kirishima, or Kaminari, but both of them are already standing with three other people. Bakugou and Todoroki’s teams respectively. 

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit . 

“Hey Yusada.” 

Suzume falters mid mental-swear and looks over. Tsu walks towards her with Shoji and Hagakure. 

“Hey,” she looks at the three of them, a bit confused. “What’s up?” 

“We were hoping to get a fourth person for our team,” Hagakure bounces over. “Do you want to help us out?” 

Suzume’s legs go weak. 

My heroes. 

“Yes,” she says, a little too quickly. She clears her throat. “I’d like to be on your team.” 

“Awesome!” The invisible girl pumps her fist up. “This is gonna be so cool!” 

Suzume looks over the three of them. A few sorta crazy ideas are already popping into her head. 

“You might be right about that. Say, Hakagure, how good are you at jumping?” 

They press together, away from their classmates, and whisper their strategy for the remaining five minutes. It’s not much, it’s rushed together but between the four of them, it just might work. 

Midnight hands them a headband with their total number on it, 510. Hagakure had only gotten fifty points, Shoji had 145, Tsu had 150, and Suzume had 190. Despite that, Hagakure is their trump card. 

Suzume grips Shoji’s shoulder tightly. 

“Are you sure you can carry all three of us?” 

“None of you are very heavy, don’t worry about it,” he shoots her a curved eye smile over his shoulder. Or she assumes it’s a smile. His mouth is still covered, but years of reading Kai’s expression over his own constant mask, and the ones he makes his companions wear, has made it easier for her to tell.  

“Okay…” 

She’s just going to have to trust him on this. He leans forwards and bends his arms back, forming an umbrella over them. Their headband rests on Tsu’s forehead. 

“So, since everyone will be gunning for Midoriya, we just need to pick off the others. I’m pretty sure we stand a good chance against everyone who isn’t Todoroki and Bakugou’s teams, and they’ll probably be focused on him too.” 

“I don’t know about that,” Tsu taps her finger to her chin. “They might come after us, too.” 

“Why would they do that? I mean, we’ve got over 500 points, but they have no reason to target us in particular.” 

“Not us. You.” 

Suzume stares at her. 

“Huh?” 

Tsu stares back at her. 

“You know what. Nevermind.” 

She wants to ask Tsu to explain herself, but Midnight’s voice cuts through her question. 

“Everyone! BEGIN!” 

Almost everyone converges on Midoriya at once, but Todoroki freezes most of them in place before they can reach him. Shoji runs as quietly as he can behind them, and opens his arms long enough for Hagakure, now totally naked, to jump out and grab the headband off of 1-B’s weird praying mantis looking student. Tsu whips her tongue out and drags the invisible girl back in where it’s safe, and Hagakure passed the headband along to her. They flip over the point numbers, so no one can tell what their value is on the off chance someone actually makes it through their defenses. 

They’re vulnerable when Shoji opens his arms to let Hagakure out, but Tsu isn’t exactly helpless and Suzume is perfectly capable of defending them. 

She grips her new staff, hanging in its three pieces, and watches the teams around them. 

“Alright. Hagakure, ready to go again?” 

“Yeah!” Susume grips the three sections in both hands and holds them out. She feels Hagakure put her weight on the and invisible hands grasp her shoulders. 

“One, two, three!” Shoji parts his arms and Suzume launches Hagakure out. The only way they even knew where she was, was because Tsu could apparently see infrared light. Including where Hagakure was. 

Who knew? 

Tsu’s eyes track Hakagure while she sails over to land lightly on the shoulder of Honenuki, who stumbles to the side and throws the rest of his team off, and bounces back off again, with their headband snatched off Tetsutetsu’s head. Tsu’s tongue lashes out to catch her, just as a scaled arm comes in from the other side aiming at her head. 

Suzume twists on Shoji’s back and swings, catching the clawed hand on one section. She swings the other one at his face, forcing the 1-B dragon to dodge the hard metal cap. His ‘horse’ swings a furry arm up and Shoji dodges them to the side. The sudden weight of Hagakure against her back comes a second before his arms close around them, encasing the three girls in darkness again while he runs off. 

They add the head band to Tsu’s collections, and turn their attention onto their next target. 

The redhead. Kendo. 

Her team is totally frozen to the ground. 

This time Shoji makes sure that there’s no one else approaching them before opening his arms. Suzume launches Hagakure their way. The lizard girl from the entrance exam stumbles when new weight is added to her shoulder and shouts a warning. It’s a split second, but it’s all Kendo needs to lash out and grab Hagakure in her enlarged fist. 

“Hey! Let go!” Hagakure shrieks. 

“Crap,” Suzume grabs Shoji’s hand and crouches on his shoulders. “Throw me!” 

Tsu would be better for this, but they can’t risk her headbands. 

Shoji launches her so fast her eyes sting with the wind, and she lands a hard kick on Kendo’s face, forcing her to release Hagakure. Suzume jumps off of her, smashing her heel into the top of ghost girls head and taking off towards Shoji. Suzume whips out her gun and shoots, embedding the hook in the ground past Shoji. 

“Hagakure!” She reaches for the last place the invisible girl was and feels her hands grab onto her wrist. She pulls her into the tightest, most awkwards hold she can get, and they’re yanked forwards. 

The fly, inches off the ground, away from Kendo’s team. 

Shoji reaches down and scoops them up, barely saving them from disqualification. He deposits them onto his back and covers them again. 

“Holy crap!” Hagakure clings to Suzume’s shoulders. “That was insane!” 

Suzume lets out a breath and hugs her tighter. “Yeah. Shit, I didn’t grab their headband!” 

“It’s okay,” Tsu assures. 

Shoji pipes up, “There’s one more team close enough for us to try. Ready?” 

“Yeah!” 

“Who are we going for?” 

“Jiro.” 

They peak out to see their classmate sitting on the shoulders of Koda and Sato. The boys are big, and potentially dangerous, but Jirou is their actual challenge. Her hearing is insane, although it’s not much good without something to plug her jacks into, but more than that her quirks gives her a startling amount of range with how far it can extend. 

Suzume’s going to have to watch out for a counter attack. 

“Alright, let’s go!” 

“Right!” 

They make a run for Jiro, who turns when she hears them coming. Shoji tenses, prepared to open his arms and- 

Someone slips in behind her and snatches the headband right off. 

Wild purple hair. Shinsou. 

The timer goes off and they fall still. 

“He beat us…” Hagakure hugs Suzume, her head falling against her shoulder in defeat. Suzume thinks it’s weird, but she doesn’t shrug her off. 

“Mhmm. That’s one to watch out for.” 

Luckily, Hagakure doesn’t stay down for long. “Let’s go wait with everyone else. Shoji, can you cover me while I put my clothes back on?” 

“Uh, sure. Yeah. I can do that.” 

It doesn’t take long for them to tally up the points, and by the time Midnight is ready to announce them Hagakure is fully dressed again and standing between Shoji and Suzume. 

“What a beautiful, passionate demonstration!” Midnight clutches herself, “Absolutely breath taking students! Good job, all of you. You did your best out there, but only four teams can advance! Those four teams are…” 

“Team Todoroki, with 10,000,325 points. Team Suzume, with 1,285 points. Team Bakugou, with 1,260 points, and team Shinsou, with 885 points. They didn’t pass but they still gave it their all, Fifth place goes to team Midoriya, with 600 points, and sixth place goes to team Monoma, with 60 points.” 

“Alright!” Hagakure punches the air with a wild cheer. “We got second place!” 

Suzume smiles at her, but when she looks over the rest of their classmates she’s struck by the vicious glare Bakugou is leveling their way.  

Oh boy.

Chapter Text

The hour lunch break should give Suzume time to find somewhere quiet to rest for a while and enough time to eat and drink. She wanders the stadium corridors, trying to find an empty room somewhere. The day’s only half over and she’s already exhausted. 

On top of that, they’ve announced the brackets for the fight. 

She’s up against Yaoyarozu first. 

The finalists are made up almost entirely out of people from her class, with the exception of Shinsou, Shihai, the shadow boy from 1-B who had been on Shinsou’s team, and Shoda, a smaller, but significantly more tricky boy from the same class. 

The one on one fights are what she’s been worried about since the start. She knows she’s a good fighter. She’s spent her entire life fighting for every scrap of respect and dignity she could hold onto. 

But these in particular are going to put her at a disadvantage. 

The stage is elevated and clear of obstacles, so they’ll be fighting out in the open. Her grappling gun will only be so much use in this situation, since she’s trying not to shoot anyone else's eye out. Her staff is her greatest advantage. It’s reinforced to be sturdier than the last one, and while that makes it heavier it also adds power to it. 

Some of the people who advanced forwards she knows she can take in a fight, especially when such a huge part of that fight is the rink. Hagakure, Ashido, Tsu, Shinsou, and Kirishima for example. But the others are going to be… difficult. She beat Bakugou by taking him by surprise both times. Now that’s going to be significantly harder. Iida is stupidly fast, she won’t have a lot of time to react if she has to fight him, but she thinks she can manage if it comes to that. Kaminari will be her biggest problem. 

She’s a close range fighter with no real defense against electricity. The closest she’s got is her rubber soled shoes and her grappling gun. It’s made of some kind of monofilament imitation teflon, and it’s made not to conduct electricity in case the point embeds itself into a wire inside a wall or something like that. 

But again. She can’t actually shoot Kaminari. 

And Todoroki… she’s pretty sure she’s just straight up screwed if and when she has to fight him. If she can get a chance it’s going to be a slim one, and it depends entirely on how fast he can get his stupidly huge ice walls up, and her relying on the idea that he won’t burn her face off since he’s still in the middle of telling his dad to fuck off. 

It stings her pride that she might have to rely on him holding back, but so does the fact that she keeps getting to choose support equipment. And winning means more than a little bit of hurt feelings. 

She just has to- 

Her musings are cut off suddenly when a hand reaches out a grabs her shoulder. Another one covers her mouth and she reacts, slamming her elbow hard into whoever grabbed. 

“Ah- shit!” Bakugou hisses. Suzume pauses, her fist raised to break his nose next. 

“What are you-” 

“Sshh!” he hisses, and yanks her away from the corner she’d been about to turn. 

Suzume scowls at him and opens her mouth to snap before other, quiet voices reach her. 

“-you blindsided me. So much that I broke my own vow. I don't think any of our teammates notices it, but in that moment, I felt it. That power of yours... It's exactly like All Mights,” oh. It was Todoroki, talking to Midoriya. “So Midoriya, I have to ask. Are you secretly his love child or something?”

Suzume bit her lip and slapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. She pressed her back against the cool wall, next to Bakugou, who was still gripping her shoulder.  

“All Mights- What, no! It's nothing like that!” Midoriya rushed to assure. “A-although I guess if you were right that is what an illegitimate son would say too, if he was a secret and- But anyways! Why are you... I mean, why me...?”

There was a pause while Todoroki mulled that over. 

“If it's 'nothing like that' then it is 'something'. Isn't it? But whatever it is you can't talk about 'it'. Fine. You must know about my father, Endeavor. He's been the number two hero forever now. If you're connected to the number one hero, then that means I need to win all the more. See, my old man will do anything to advance his position…” 

Suzume stayed next to Bakugou while Todoroki laid his tragic back story out in front of them, describing his mother and the way he got his scar. It’s enough to make Suzume feel like some kind of creepy stalking voyeur, but it’s not like she didn’t already know. And Bakugou doesn’t seem inclined to let her go as horror slowly dawns across his face. 

“If you can't tell me anything, that's fine. Keep being All Mights something-or-other. And I'll climb over you using only my right side. Sorry I took  up your time,” Todoroki’s footsteps fade, out into the sunlight, but Midoriya rushes after him with a shout. 

“Wait! Everything you just said… The only way I got here was by being helped by other’s! And here at UA I’ve been helped even more. So I owe it to them, to everyone who risked themselves to help me get this far, to give it my all! So that declaration of war you made earlier? I’m returning it! I won’t lose!” 

Suzume waits until their footsteps fade before she pulls away from Bakugou at last. 

“Damn, this class is getting ridiculous,” Suzume tugs at the edges of her gloves. “The next thing you know I’m gonna be dumping my whole life story on someone.” 

Bakugou scoffs at her, but he still looks pale. 

“Whatever. You don’t look that surprised by what he said.” 

“I mean. I’m not,” Suzume shrugs. “Everything about that kid screams ‘child abuse’, although there’s not much that can be done about it considering who his father is. You can tell just by looking at him. Just like you can tell that Midoriya’s dad has been out of the picture for most of his life and he only developed his quirk recently, Tsu’s an oldest sister and had to help raise her siblings, and you’re an only child and a ‘gifted’ one at that.” 

He’s staring at her, his mouth open. 

“...what?” 

“How did you know all that?!” 

“Isn’t it obvious?” 

“No!” 

“Oh. Well uh. Let’s see,” She was technically cheating, but there were signs outside of that and what they just heard. 

“With Todoroki even besides the burn scar and him being the son of a fire hero, he’s pretty withdrawn, angry, and he acts like he was at least partially homeschooled. He’s isolating himself, whether it's intentional or an ingrained habit. It’s also possible he’s doing it because he doesn’t feel safe having friends with such a volatile parent. Even the media reports on Endeavor's temper and excessive force. Plus, he’s always the first one to get to class and the last one to leave. He doesn’t want to go home. At lunch he always eats something brought from home, and all of it is the kind of food you’d find in extreme athletic diets without any kind of deviation that would make it seem like it was what he chose, and- would you stop staring at me?” Suzume puffs her cheeks out. “It’s creepy.” 

“I’m creepy? You figured all that out and you barely even talk to the guy!” 

“Like I said. It’s obvious.” 

She has more to say. Things about his brother and his mother and the way he just barely twitches when people reach for him, or the stiffness in his shoulders when people touch him. She had things to say, about why she can’t do anything about it right now. Things about burnt bones in the woods and a dead eldest son and goddamn child abuse statistics-

Bakugou’s mouth twists into something that could potentially pass as a smile. 

“Are you sure you don’t have some kind of freaky observation quirk?” 

Suzume’s jaw clenches tightly and she steps away from him. “I told you, I don’t have any quirk. I never have, I never will. And I’m not the one spying on my competition’s private conversations.” 

“Whatever,” he stuffs his hands in his pockets and scowls at her. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll beat the both of them, and I’ll force that Icy Hot bastard to fight me with everything he’s got. Deku too!” 

They’re all obsessed. 

“Have fun with that. I’m going to go eat lunch.” 

Katsuki stamps on the ground, his shoulders hunched and his eyes locked onto her, freezing her in place for just a second. 

“Don’t think you’re exempt from that either! This time I’m gonna kick your ass, wasp girl, just you watch! You barely got more points than me in the cavalry battle, so this time there’s no way I’ll lose to you!” 

The spark is back in her chest, annoying and distracting and she pounds it down viciously. She needs to focus. This is serious work! 

“You’ve been saying that for over a month, and you still haven’t beaten me.” 

“This time I will,” he stamps closer, right up in her face. His red eyes are nearly glowing. “When I see you in the finals, I’ll beat the shit out of you.” 

Suzume narrows her eyes. In one smooth move she hooks her foot between his, catches his ankle, and yanks his legs out from under him, sending him sprawling to the ground. 

“Get out of my face, man. What’s with you and Midoriya trying to keep me from lunch?” 

“Huh? Deku? Why are you-” 

“Anyways. I’ll see you in the ring, puppy.” 

She waves her hand at him and leaves him on the ground, her lunch still uneaten and her plans no less firm. What a pain. 

I wonder why he’s acting so weird… 

~ ~ ~ 

Toshinori would be lying if he said that he wasn’t worried about his students. Especially after the rather alarming conversation he’d snagged from Endeavor during the lunch break. 

This was one of the most intense sports festivals in years, maybe since he’d been a student here, and the fact that a good chunk of the participants were students who had already gone toe to toe with real villains, and looked death in the face, didn’t make him feel any more at ease. 

Especially not now that those same students were going up against one another. 

Toshinori knew 1-A. They were going to give these fights everything that they had. And while he had faith that class 2-B’s participants would do their best as well, something changes in a person when they’re forced to fight for their survival.  

He wishes, desperately, that his students hadn’t had to face that kind of darkness already. 

But they did, and they had come out on top, stronger for it. 

There were some students that he was genuinely impressed that they had made it out unscathed. Kota and Hagakure in particular were ill suited for the type of sudden combat they had been forced into, but they had been clever and quick and they had been okay at the end of the day. 

Other’s he was less surprised to see them walk out hale and healthy. Bakugou, Todoroki, Yaoyarozu and Kirishima weren’t a shock. They were all very capable students, with versatile, powerful quirks. 

Even less surprising than them (Or perhaps more surprising than anyone at all) was Yusada Suzume. 

She was… a complicated person for him to be around. 

He remembers well the first day they met. She was a tiny, round faced pre-teen sitting in the settling dust of her front door. Blood rolled down her temple from a stray piece of wall. It was his own fault, and the scar still sits on her temple to this day. 

But she didn’t cry, or scream, or run. She just stared at them with dark, intense eyes. Toshinori felt like he was being dissected under them, and she was just a child. A child that wasn’t supposed to be there. Sanjirou (Who was brave for a villain, to somehow hunt down All Might’s personal phone number and beg his help for the sake of his children) had given them the family schedule earlier that week and the house should have been empty save the man himself. Perfect for staging a fight for the yakuza to see later. 

But something must have changed, because instead of coming in and staging a fight with him, he instead witnessed something that he, frankly, wishes he hadn’t. 

“Suzy Q. Listen to me now. This world will never let you be a hero.” 

It didn’t sit right with him, to leave her behind with tears slipping silently down her round cheeks, turning pink on one side from the blood. But what was he supposed to do to comfort her? He was already taking her father away. He wouldn’t give her false hope. Quirkless people couldn't be heroes, just as he’d told Midoriya. Besides, one of Sanjiro’s conditions for information was that All Might keep his children as safe as he could. 

And then, three years later, he had seen her in person again when he burst into his very first class. She had stared at him, the same way she did the day they first met, with dark, dissecting eyes, and won a match against two students, each with an incredibly powerful quirk. He kept waiting for her to find him after class or snap at him when he warned them about collateral damage but she never has. 

It’s rather unnerving, and he’d been very worried about letting her participate in some of their training. She was quirkless, after all, and he hasn’t necessarily changed his opinion on quirkless people being heroes since he told Midoriya to give up. 

But seeing her in action, and knowing how she handled herself during the USJ incident… 

( She’s so much like Midoriya, and his opposite in the same way. If he’d said to her what he said to him that very first day, she would have dug her teeth in even further. There would have been no tears, only that same steely determination.

“A pro is always laying their life on the line. So I just can't bring myself to tell you you can do it even without a quirk. If you aspire to save people, there's always the police force. They're not as glamorous, but they're still important. I won't mock dreaming but that being said, you need to see reality for what it is, kid.”

Was it really the kids who needed to see reality, when they were the ones now being trusted to shape it?)

Out of all of their students, she’s the one most likely to be the mole. But he can’t bring himself to believe that she actually is . No matter what Present Mic and Snipe said at the faculty meeting.  

She has all the motivation. She even has a reason to target him specifically, like the League of Villains had been trying to. He’d taken her father from her, villain or not. Not to mention that she’d spent a lot of time with a branch of the Yakuza, and while Sanjirou had assured them that it was just babysitting, there was always a chance that it had been more and he hadn’t known about it when he begged for All Might to protect his daughter. 

So it’s the logical conclusion that she would be the mole. 

But. 

But . 

Then there’s the part where she’d defended Aizawa, to the point that Tomura Shigaraki had nearly put a hole in her ribs. If her armor had been any thinner, he would have. There was the part where she was throwing her whole self into this competition, when if she was only here as an infiltrator it wouldn’t be necessary. 

There was the part where Nezu had shown them all the recommendation students interviews. 

“If fate came at you swinging, wouldn’t you fight back?”  

Maybe it’s the ghost of Toshinori Yagi, fourteen, quirkless, and just as hungry to step up to the plate. Maybe he’s just naive. But he wants to believe in this stubborn, quirkless girl. 

He thinks that, if he’d chosen to give All for One to someone else, she’s a little like what Midoriya would have been. 

Quieter, angrier , and significantly more trained, but they’re not so different in the end. They’re both fighting with everything they have to follow their dreams. They’ve both had the world against them since the day they decided to become heroes. 

(They’re opposites, though. Midoriya wants to save people, plain and simple, and Yusada, Kono Suzume, what does she want? To leave her roots behind? To prove herself?)

That’s probably why the boy has so much trouble talking to her. 

He’d told Toshinori about the stumbling attempt two weeks ago, and how he’d basically called her weak for not having a quirk. He probably shouldn’t have laughed at the boy, but when he’d told him he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true he’d gotten the strangest look on his face.  

He knows exactly how hard it is for young Midoriya, to know the type of challenges she’s faced just to get into the hero course, but to be unable to tell her that he understood. He had to constantly bite his tongue to keep from blurting out their shared secret. He’d already told Bakugou, although whether he believed them or not was debatable. 

It certainly doesn’t help that Yusada is stone faced most of the time. Her black eyes rarely betray what she’s thinking. Her face might be heart shaped and soft, but it’s smooth as stone most of the time, unless something manages to irritate her. He’s only seen her smile a few times. 

There was the vicious little grin she’d worn when she tied up Bakugou, the wide, nearly hysterical stretch of a smile when he and the other teachers had burst into the USJ, and earlier today, during the obstacle race when she’d danced between land mines to take the lead from Bakugou and Todoroki, before Midoriya overtook all three of them.

Toshinori is privately hoping that this festival will bring them together, and help smooth over the rocky patches. Although Midoriya had been crushed when his team was beat out… 

He perks up when they announce a change in the line up. 

Two members of team Shinsou, Ojiro and Shoda, both withdraw from the tournament, citing that they hadn’t been doing the fighting themselves, they’d just been led around by their noses by Shinsou. Midnight, instead, advances two members from the fifth place team. 

Midoriya and Tokoyami. 

Toshinori checks the new brackets. 

Midoriya vs Hagakure, Todoroki vs. Sero, Iida vs. Bakugou. Kirishima vs. Ashido. Shihai vs. Shoji,  Yusada vs. Yaoyorozu. Shinsou vs. Kaminari. And Tokoyami vs. Tsuyu.

Interesting. 

He knows he shouldn’t show favorites but- 

He’s so glad Midoriya made it into the finals! 

He still makes sure not to cheer too loudly for him while he brawls with Hagakure. The girl isn’t very strong, but it’s hard to block or dodge a punch that you can’t see. Never the less, Midoriya manages to knock her out of the ring within ten minutes. It’s not quite the bang most people would expect from the UA sports festivals, but it’s made up for in the second match. 

When Todoroki freezes Sero, along with half the stadium. 

Aizawa’s kids are all a little bit scary, Toshinori thinks to himself.  

The next two matches are longer and harder. Iida is powerful and fast, and he manages to dodge most of Bakugou’s explosions, but the blonde boy is nothing if not adaptable. All it takes is one good catch for him to snatch Iida’s leg and use his own momentum, and an overpowered explosion, to send him flying out of the ring and into a wall. 

It looks remarkable like one of the throws that Yusada has preformed in class. 

As for Kirishima and Ashido, theirs is a more fraught battle. From their files he knows they went to middle school together, and from the hard set of Kirishima’s jaw and the determination burning in both of them he gets the feeling that there’s more to this fight than just winning the sports festival. Ashido is fast, flexible, and clever, but Kirishima is powerful and his hardening gives him just enough resistance to her acid that he manages to overtake and pin her. 

Even though Shoji is significantly stronger than Shihai, the shadow of 1-B manages to knock him out of bounds after a long, drawn out fight that consists mostly of dodging before he takes advantage of the large shadow cast by Shoji’s arms, and vanishes into it. 

If Toshinori remembers right, Shihai’s quirk let’s him merge with anything dark, in terms of shadows or coloration. Out in the empty arena under the sun, he’s at a massive disadvantage. So the victory is certainly praise worthy, even if it is unrefined and more luck than skill.  

Yusada vs Yaoyorozu… 

It’s longer, and from an outside perspective it’s much closer than any of the previous matches. 

From his place in the teachers box, Toshinori can just see the displeased twist of Yusada’s mouth when Mic introduces her as the hero courses very first quirkless student. 

Yusada starts it by attacking Yaoyarozu, a break from her normal strategy that throws her classmate off guard enough she barely has time to get a shield up before Yusada is swinging her new segmented staff at her. The end works like a flail and lashes around the edge of the shield to hit Yaoyarozu’s arm hard, but she recovers and makes another on the other arm in time to block Yusada’s next attack, one aimed at her face. She discards the first shield and a staff appears in her hand, one that she swings with enough skill to force Yusada to flip back. The one handed back hand spring is flashier, and less practical, than anything Yusada had shown off in practice. 

Still, it get’s her enough distance to twist the segments into their places, and Toshinori knows at once that Yaoyarozu had picked the wrong weapon. 

He can see her focus on her quirk too much, and on the fight and her surroundings too little. He knows that creating anything takes incredible concentration, but the staff is Yusada’s preferred weapon, and as proficient as Yaoyorozu is, it doesn’t hold up against the elegant, easy mastery that Yusada displays. 

She spins and twists, each strike perfectly timed and solid. Toshinori had seen glimpses of it, but when she presses down on Yaoyorozu’s overhead block that power in her shoulders and arms becomes apparent. Whoever had taught her had known what they were doing. 

She’s fast, too. Too fast for Yaoyorozu to put the kind of thought into her quirk that she needs. In group combat it had been okay, her teammates bought her the time she needed, but here, one on one against someone who’s so many levels above her in combat… 

Yusada actually flips over Yaoyorozu’s head and drops neatly to the ground, sweeping her legs out from under her and sending her sprawling on top of her staff and a half formed shield. What looks like it would have been a net goes flying harmlessly to the side and settles in the grass. 

In an instant the shorter girl is upon her back, one leg digging into her thighs and the opposite knee hard on her lower back. The staff is held lightly over Yaoyorozu’s head. 

With a bit more training, Yaoyorozu would be able to create something on her back with enough force to dislodge Yusada. Maybe she can already and just doesn’t think of it, or is thinking too much to get it to work right. 

Either way, she’s forced to surrender her fight, shame and humiliation on her face. 

Toshinori may be putting too much thought into it, but the muttering in the crowd, not cheering, sounds ominous. 

Shinsou beats Kaminari within two minutes. All he had to do was get him to talk. It was almost unfair.  

Tokoyami also comes out on top, after knocking Tsuyu out of the ring with Dark Shadow. 

The next roster makes him worry a little bit. Maybe a lot a bit. 

Midoriya vs Todoroki, Bakugou vs Kirishima. Shihai vs. Yusada, and Shinsou vs Tokoyami

Oh dear. 

~ ~ ~ 

Suzume hadn’t watched the match between Todoroki and Midoriya. She remembered enough about it that she knew it was going to be brutal, and when they have to reconstruct the stage again and put off Bakugou and Kirishima’s match she knows she remembers right. 

There’s some things that are different. And some things that are the same. Are certain things just fate? Or pure luck? 

No. 

No, more likely than that there’s a hand at work here. 

Thinking about it, it’s a bit strange that in her memories and in this life some of the matches hadn’t changed, and some of them seemed nearly assured. Sure, Midoriya and Hagakure weren’t a match from before, but there was simply no way Hagakure was going to win in a one on one fight with Midoriya. Todoroki and Sero are an easy match too. Even Sero himself acknowledged that he had little chance to win. And Bakugou was nearly guaranteed to win against Iida, even if the fight was hard. 

Ah. She realizes. Nezu. 

It had to be easy to change the ‘random’ selection if you were the principal. He wasn’t directly involved with this years matches. He was the referee for the third years, like he apparently always was, but he could mess with the computer easy enough, and with the way everything was spaced out so people could watch the events of different classes if they wanted to it would give him enough time to make small changes here and there. 

She’s not sure why he would do all this, except maybe to pair some of them up against people who would make them think about what they were doing and how they were doing it. Some kind of strange teaching lesson. That’s what she was against Yaoyarozu then? A reminder that she needed to use her quirk faster and work on actually training with what she created. And Suzume? If she had lost to Yaoyorozu, what would her lesson have been? 

The jaded part of her whispers that it's to make her give up and leave. 

The logical part of her retorts that if that was the case he could have simply denied her entrance. 

The stupid, growing fragment of her that is made of hope chimes in that mauve its because he believes in her. 

She crushes that shred relentlessly, just like she’d crushed the weird spark in her chest earlier. She needs to focus. She doesn’t know Shihai’s quirk as well as her classmates, just what she’d gathered during the obstacle races. He can merge with anything dark, hes clever, but he’s not overtly great at physical stuff. 

Her staff isn’t dark, it’s deep golden and the chains are silver. Her grappling gun, and her shoes, are. So is her hair and eyes, so she’s going to have to keep her head away from him. Fine by her. Her gloves are dark too, so she’s going to have to leave them off. Like some kind of reverse Hagakure. 

Okay. 

She can do this. 

She peels her gloves off, and starts undoing the tape wrapped underneath them so she can tighten it. 

They call Bakugou and Kirishima to the arena, something she only hears faintly in the dressing room she’s taken over. It’s the quiet she wanted during lunch, but didn’t get because Bakugou is way creepier than she thought, and she ended up hearing her classmates tragic backstory. 

It’s quiet until the door opens, and Kaminari and Shoji walk in. 

She stares at them, and their conversation cuts off when they notice her. 

“Oh hey, Yusada, I didn’t know you were in here,” Kaminari says with a friendly grin. 

“Hey,” she says, hoping that they’ll leave. Instead, Shoji hisses through his teeth, his eyes huge over his mask. 

“What happened to your hands?!” 

Kaminari looks at them too and gapes. “Holy shit!” 

Suzume sets her jaw and frowns at the pair of them. It’s true, her hands are pretty beaten up. Between knuckles that had split enough times to scar, bruises that seem to never really go away even with protection, and a set of stitches that cross the back of her right hand, they’re going to be a nightmare when she’s older. 

“Haven’t you ever seen boxers hands?” she asks, and starts rewrapping with fresh tape. “Martial artists aren’t so different.” 

“Man, that must have hurt,” Kaminari whistles sharply. 

“Of course it did,” Suzume says dryly. “According to Shihan, ‘Pain builds character’.” 

“Never introduce him to Midoriya,” Kaminari says, equally dry. 

Suzume makes a face. “I genuinely don’t know how that would go. He’s an angry, ornery old man who hates children and soft things.” 

So he’d despise Midoriya, who cries at the drop of a hat and is somehow still squishy despite being well muscled by now. 

Suzume finishes with her hands and carefully picks up her gloves. They’re the same ones that Kai gave her all those years ago, well worn by now but not so much that she’ll need to get new ones soon. She quietly stows them in a locker. 

“I should get up there. My match will start pretty soon.” 

“Oh, yeah. You’re still in the competition,” Kaminari rubs the back of his head. “Man, that Shinsou guy beat me way too easy.” 

“You should learn to talk less,” Suzume advises, her mouth twitching. “Wish me luck.” 

“Break a leg,” Shoji offers her his hand, eyes curved in a faint smile. 

She startles briefly before high fiving him, the sparks trying valiantly to return to her chest. 

“Thanks.” 

She waves at the boys and exits, walking the long hallways towards the arena. 

Kirishima, his red hair smoking and his body bruised, limps out right as she gets to the entrance. When he sees her, his eyes light up and for a second Suzume is startled by how pretty he looks. In a beat up, sharp toothed, red eyed sort of way. He’s like a shark puppy or something. 

“Oh hey! Were you watching?” he asks, stopping in front of her. 

“I only caught a bit,” she lies, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “I was getting ready for my match too. How are you feeling?” 

“Huh? Not bad I guess. I was hoping I’d get further along, but I guess that’s Bakugou for you. When you beat Shihai, it’ll be your turn up against him.” 

Suzume’s cheeks warm with surprise. When? Not if ? 

“He was almost as bad at Todoroki. He’s fighting Tokoyami next, right?” 

Suzume blinks at him. “Did Tokoyami have his fight with Shinsou already?”  

“No, but Tokoyami’s way stronger than he is, and now that he knows what kind of quirk he has, he’ll probably win, right?”

“Maybe… it depends on if Shinsou can get him to talk, I suppose. Tokoyami’s pretty quiet, but he can be dramatic when he wants to be. This whole class can be.” 

“I don’t wanna hear that from you, Miss Shot-Nomu’s-Eye-Out.” 

“It grew back!” 

Kirishima laughs at her, and claps her roughly on the shoulder. “Yeah, yeah. Good luck out there. I know you’ll do your best!” 

For the second time that day, someone lifts their hand to her. Suzume, half smiling, slaps her palm against his as she passes him by, and steps out into the sunlight. 

Chapter Text

Suzume is a practical girl. She has to be. She showed off a little against Yaoyorozu, flipping around and dancing, but Shihai requires a different approach. 

She stops at the edge of the ring and takes off her black sneakers, leaving her in pale pink socks. Shihai won’t be able to merge with those. Now the only problems she’ll face are her hair, her eyes, and the shadows themselves. 

And her grappling gun. 

“Ready?” Midnight lifts her whip. Suzume grips her gun. 

“GO!” 

Suzume shoots. The line goes just over Shihai’s shoulder, an inch away from his cheek. It embeds itself in the wall of the stadium, outside the ring. He looks towards it, startled, and Suzume uses his distraction to whip forwards with the gun and kick him hard in the chest, driving towards the edge of the ring. 

“Shit!” he swears and grabs the line, his body vanishing into the black cord and the handle. 

Suzume tries not to grin and lets go. She lands on her feet, a yard or so away from the boundary line, and Shihai and her gun go flying out of bounds and into the wall. 

It’s over in less than a minute. Compared to the last two battles, it’s incredibly tame, maybe even boring for the onlookers. It takes Midnight a second of gaping before she lifts her whip again. 

“Yusada wins?” 

Shihai disentangles himself from her gun, looking stunned. 

“You tricked me!” He accuses, when she gets near enough to hear him. 

Suzume lifts a shoulder. 

“I guessed you would try to merge with whatever I was wearing or using if you could, to give you an advantage. It was either that or we fight hand to hand. I don’t cast the kind of shadows that Shoji does, I’m too small for that. I had to make up for it somehow, right?” 

She tugs the hook of her gun free and looks it over, to make sure it didn’t take damage when it hit the wall with Shihai still merged with it. 

“That was humiliating,” Shihai runs his fingers through his hair. 

Suzume shrugs, not really caring. 

“We’re both at a disadvantage somewhere like that stage. I just worked with what I had. If you wanna try again, we’ll have to do it in our free time.” 

Shihai blinks at her. “You want to fight me again?” 

Suzume pauses, looking up from the gun into his eyes, just as dark as hers. 

“Well, sure. Your quirk would be seriously dangerous, somewhere with more shadows and places to hide. Like that industrial part of the entrance exams race. There’s a reason you almost beat me there.” 

“Oh,” he looks startled. 

“If you want,” she adds, and leaves him there. Once she’s retrieved her shoes she passes Tokoyami on his way out to fight Shinsou, and goes to find her gloves. 

On one hand, she hopes Tokoyami wins. He’s a nice enough person, even if he and she haven’t talked much. 

On the other hand, she hopes Shinsou wins too. She’d always had a soft spot for him before, and living here as someone whose whole family is made up of ‘villainous’ quirks has only increased that fondness. Or maybe just kept it level. At the end of the day, he was exactly like most of her pears. Utterly reliant on his quirk. 

So all his complaints about losing the entrance exam-

Well. 

They don’t sit right with her. 

He should have trained more. They all should have trained more. 

Even Bakugou’s punches are more showy than they are effective. 

Suzume only climbs high enough into the stands to see the next few matches, sitting between a pair of pros who don’t seem to recognize her right off. In fairness to them, she’s not a very unique person, appearance wise. 

She doesn’t know who’s the most surprised when Shinsou manages to brainwash Dark Shadow and sic him on Tokoyami. Everyone in the stands, or Tokoyami himself. 

Suzume gapes while Tokoyami is forced out of bounds by his own quirk. 

Okay. So Shinsou is a little scarier than I thought he was. Holy shit. 

“Man, what an incredible quirk,” one of the pros next to her muttered to his partner. “Did they really put this kid in Gen Ed?” 

“Sometimes I wonder about UA. I mean, think about how useful that quirk would be for taking people in peacefully.” 

“Seriously. I’m almost jealous.” 

“If they ever get around to putting him in the hero course, I hope he’ll do his work study with me.” 

She tunes out the rest of their chatter while they draw up the next bracket on the big screen. Todoroki vs Shinsou, and Suzume vs Bakugou. 

Curious. 

Maybe Nezu isn’t as much of an interfering little bear-rat-thing as she initially thought. 

Or maybe he just wants to see if she and Todoroki can keep their mouths shut for the entire match. 

Not that that would be hard, she’d gone her entire first day without speaking to anyone at all. She could absolutely avoid speaking to Shinsou. And Todoroki was standoffish too, when he wasn’t challenging people to silly contests. 

What she was worried about, was if she could beat Bakugou, and after their probably Todoroki. The rest of her matches had been relatively straight forwards, but those two were going to be a major problem. 

Why couldn’t Shinsou fight Bakugou? He’d win even faster than he did against Kaminari…

She got up to leave again while Todoroki and Shinsou went at it. She didn’t expect it to be a very long match. She thought it would be like Sero’s.  

Then the roaring started. 

Suzume stopped halfway down the stairs and spun to jog back up. She grabbed the railing and leaned over, gaping out at the arena. 

Half of it is covered in yet another massive wall of ice, but part of it is already melted. Shinsou stands in the middle of a puddle of water, rubbing a hand that looks red from cold. 

Todoroki stands out of bounds, his left hand still covered in faint flames. 

Midnight looks utterly flabbergasted. 

“S-Shinsou wins!” She waves her wip frantically. “My, isn’t this year full of upsets?! What incredibly resourceful students!” 

“What the fuck is happening?” 

How in the hell did he get Todoroki of all people to talk to him? 

The stages shake with fierce screaming, shock rolling through the observers and praise for Shinsou. Seriously, putting him in general studies was one of the dumbest moves that could have ever been made. 

In the midst of the crowd of spectators, a small pillar of fire erupts across the stadium from her. 

Endeavor. 

Oh he’s mad . 

Suzume cover’s her mouth with her hand, a startled laugh starting to bubble up from her throat. 

Oh god. 

Endeavor looks fit to burn the entire place to the ground, and Suzume is struggling not to scream with laughter. 

She feels bad for the shell shocked Todoroki, honest she does, but seeing someone with a quirk like that get so far? 

It’s incredible. 

She knows that this is one of the most televised events in the country, and there’s plenty of people out there with ‘villainous’ quirks that have to be going ape shit over Shinsou. If he was a few years younger she knows that Kaname would have switched his favorite hero from Crimson Riot to Shinsou in a heart beat. 

Representation matters, after all, and Shinsou, a no name kid with a subtle quirk, taking down the son of fucking Endeavor? 

It’s going to make the news for sure. 

Midnight says something about cleaning up the excess ice, and she takes that as her cue to go back where she was going in the first place. 

She shakes off the awe that came from seeing Shinsou standing in the ring and Todoroki outside of it. 

She has her own fight. 

She’s trotting towards the arena when a flash of violet comes around the corner and pauses. 

Shinsou stands in the corridor, his drooping eye on her. 

Wish I have purple eyes. 

“Oh, it’s you,” he stops, his hands in his pockets. “You’re fighting that explosion kid. Yusada, right?” 

She pauses, debates how to answer, and then nods. 

His mouth twists into a facsimile of a smile. 

“Scared to answer me? Do you think I’ll brainwash you before your match?” 

Suzume pauses, then reaches into her pocket and fishes out her phone. She enters Shinsou’s name, and hands it over to him with an obvious request. 

“My number?” he asks, surprised.  

She nods. He shrugs, and enters it in. When she texts him he pulls his own phone out and reads it aloud. 

“ ‘I’m not afraid of you. But I know you’d have an easier time taking first place if you weren’t fighting me instead of Bakugou. He can’t keep his mouth shut if his life depended on it’. Isn’t that kind of rude to say about your own classmate?” 

She taps out her response. 

“ ‘Even if it is rude, it’s still true’. Huh. So you’re just gonna text me until after our match.” 

“ ‘Yeah. Seems safer that way. Once we’re done we can talk if you want, but right now I think you and I are-’ “ He paused. “ ‘far too much alike’ ? What do you mean?” 

He narrows his eyes at her. 

Suzume answers immediately. 

“ ‘You and I aren’t just fighting whoever is in the ring with us. Both of us are-’ oh. ‘Both of us are fighting the entire world’.”  

Whatever he was expecting her to say, that clearly isn’t it. 

He looks shocked by the comparison. 

Suzume shrugs. What else is she supposed to say? He may not be quirkless, and he’ll never know exactly how that feels, and she has the same feelings towards his reliance on his quirk and clear lack of real training that she does for all of her classmates who are the same. 

But. 

She’s also the daughter of a man with venom in his teeth, and a woman with claws that can rend and rot. 

She’s seen her brothers grow up in the shadow of poison. 

She’s watched Kaname fight just as hard to overcome quirk prejudices as she has. 

She knows the struggle that Shinsou faces, especially with a mental quirk on top of the ‘villainous’ attributes. 

The sound of stomping footsteps comes from behind her, and Suzume turns to find that Bakugou has kept his newly formed habit of eavesdropping. 

His lips are curled in a vicious glower. 

“You’re wrong,” Bakugou snaps, shouldering past both of them. He stares straight at Shinsou, then at her with burning red eyes. “The world might be watching, but whichever one of you is in the ring, the only person you're fighting in there is me, got it?!” 

They both gape at him. A few sparks crackle off of his palm, and he storms down the hallway, leaving the smell of burnt sugar behind him. 

Not for the first time today does Suzume wonder what the fuck is happening with him. 

“Wow,” Shinsou watches him go. “I guess he’s mad he’ll only get to fight one of his rivals.” 

Startled, Suzume’s head snaps to him. “Wait, what?” 

Shinsou doesn’t laugh at her slip up, or take advantage of it either. Instead he gives her an odd look. 

“It’s been pretty obvious the whole competition. He’s determined to beat Midoriya, Todoroki, and you.” 

“That’s not-” 

“They might come after us, too.” 

“Why would they do that? I mean, we’ve got over 500 points, but they have no reason to target us in particular.” 

“Not us. You.” 

Her? 

Suzume tugs at her gloves, staring after Bakugou. 

“God damn it,” she swears. 

“I don’t have time for these stupid wars and rivalries!” she groans. Bakugou pauses, and she can see his head tilt. Listening to her still. “I just want to be a hero.”

Shinsou eyes her. “Even so. When you do get there, don’t you want to be the best hero you can be?” 

Suzume sucks in sharply. 

When. 

“I-” 

All the air leaves her lungs. 

Without her say so, her arms go limp at her sides and the world grows far away. She can’t move her eyes to look at Shinsou, but she feels it when he pushes her shoulder. 

“Sorry about that. I really wasn’t planning on using my quirk on you outside the competition. But if you keep this up, we’ll never progress. Now… Stop panicking. Go win already.”

The words echo in her mind and her legs carry her forwards. Towards the light. Towards Bakugou. 

Towards her fight. 

Shinsou’s quirk can’t actually change her state of mind, but his words do enough that when the brainwashing breaks and she stands in the ring again, she’s calm. 

Or, not calm. 

Pretty pissed at Shinsou for dragging the trained control she had over her body from her, but it’s not the same bewildering swirl of emotions that had clogged her moments ago. She’ll get her revenge later. 

Bakugou saw her as some kind of rival? 

The crowd seems further away than it did in her last two fights. They’re watching her, waiting, but all her focus is on Bakugou. 

She grips her sansetsukon firmly. 

The spark is back in her chest, and this time she doesn’t beat it away as viciously. She lets it sit between her lungs, flickering and warm. 

Midnight calls them to a start. 

With an eruption of sparks and smoke, Bakugou crosses the distance between them in an instant, throwing a hard right hook at her, open palmed and burning with nitroglycerin. 

Suzume hooks his wrist in the joint of two segments and flips him over her hip. He blasts back at her before she can throw him out of bounds. 

He twists and blasts at her face, forcing her to back off or risk getting her nose burnt off. As it stands, her bangs are smoking when she lands and takes off again, orbiting clockwise around the arena. 

He chases her around it, swinging at her hard. Each explosion is a little bit bigger than the other, but she dances away from each one and spins past until she’s behind him again. They repeat the dance over and over.

Suzume beats her weapon against his shoulders with each pass. It doesn’t do much, but long term it will wear on his body and distract him. 

The ground tears asunder beneath the force of his blows. 

He’s trying to mess up my footwork. She realizes, If Ichigo hadn’t spent forever and a half making sure I wouldn't fall even in an earthquake, it would be a good strategy. As it is, it’s still inconvenient. 

Suzume lands a hard blow to his ribs from behind and bounces over his shoulder when he twists to try to blast her head off. She’s sweating now from the heat from the blasts and her own movements. 

Someone in the crowd starts booing. 

Suzume expects it to be aimed at her. 

Instead. 

It’s Bakugou. 

“Hey! What kind of hero candidate are you, throwing such huge attacks at a little quirkless girl like that?” Suzume’s cheek twitches and her temper flares. “Just knock her out of bounds if you're so strong! Toying with people is just plain wrong! Boo!” 

The voice carries far enough that others join in. 

What a vicious boy! 

That poor girl, she shouldn’t even be out there! 

What were they thinking, letting someone so cruel attack a defenseless little quirkless girl like that? She’s half his size! 

She’s not half his size! 

She comes up to his shoulder, damn it. 

Suzume ducks a blow from Bakugou, and aims her elbow at his ribs. Instead he brings his free hand down to his belly, level with her face, and blasts her away. The first solid hit either of them have landed the entire match. 

She flies away, blood trickling from a cut on her cheek and burns hissing along her shoulder. With a twist of her weight she flips in the air, toes going skywards and over, and lands on her feet. 

Aizawa snatches the mic from Mic, and silences the crowd in a single, sharp sentence. 

“Who just said that he's toying with her?” 

For a second even she and Bakugou pause, both of them breathing hard. They dare not take their eyes away from each other. 

Aizawa goes on. “Are you a pro? Or just shooting your mouth off? Either way, do us all a favor and get out of here. Bakugou clearly recognizes the strength of his opponent. This isn't their first fight against each other. That's why he's doing everything he can to win, and why Yusada is doing the exact same. They both refuse to pull their punches, out of respect for the other.” 

He’s right, Suzume realizes with surprise. 

The only person you're fighting in there is me, got it?!

Got it, she thinks. Sorry for making you wait, Bakugou. 

The sansetsukon blurs in her grasp, spinning just as surely and elegantly as she. Each swing rings true, and they’re reaching the point where it’s a battle of stamina and wills. 

Bakugou is brash and stubborn, it’s true. But his is a pride born of praise, and divine luck. 

Her gritted teeth tenacity was carved into her by every cruel word ever hurled against her skin, including his. 

His quirk is powerful, and his natural aptitude is insane. But it wears on his body, and he’s already used it more today than he usually ever has. 

Suzume has trained herself to keep standing, through burns and cuts and pain. On top of that, her last two fights were barely a challenge. Compared to Bakugou, she’s still fresh as a goddamn daisy. No matter that the more he sweats the stronger his blasts become, his body can only take so much. 

Explosions blast and heat glows around them in arcs of gold and orange. 

“Stop dancing around!” Bakugou roars. He blasts off the ground and tries to flip over her head, but it gives Suzume the opportunity to twirl on the balls of her feet and swing, the sansetsukon lashing against his cheek with steel heated from his own quirk. One of the links is decorated by charring. 

A red burn appears across his face, under his right eye.

“Hypocrite. You’re flying around just as much as I am!” 

Actually, if she thinks too much about it, he’s moving a bit like her too. More than before he’s taking advantage of the recoil from his quirk and spinning with it to line up his next attack. 

Suzume has trained, less formally, with segmented swords and urumi as well as her sansetsukon and traditional nunchucks. She’s familiar with taking advantage of centrifugal force. 

And that’s exactly what Bakugou has started doing. 

He doesn’t have her footwork or her grace, but they’re circling each other like wolves.  

Or maybe tops is a better comparison. 

As the smoke gathers Suzume uses it to her advantage. She doesn’t need to see to fight, Ichigo and Ryuhei made sure of that, although it certainly helps. She can hear, smell, and feel where her target is. The heat that radiates off of Bakugou only makes it easier, and she gets a few good hit-n-run blows in before he picks up on her new strategy. 

Bakugou throws both of his hands in front of him and blasts at her. Suzume jumps back, dodging and barely avoiding the out of bounds line. The smoke in between them starts to settle, but Bakugou hasn’t landed. 

“Come on already, Suzume!” 

She’s so thrown off by the fact that he used her name that at first she doesn’t realize what he’s doing. 

An explosion sends him spinning. Then another, and another, and he comes shooting at her in a twisting blast of force. 

Horror crosses her face. 

She remembers enough to know that he’d used that against Todoroki originally, against one of his giant ice shields and fuck is he actually trying to kill her ? 

Suzume doesn’t have time to panic, she only has one choice. 

She runs dead at him. She’ll only have one shot. 

She snaps her staff into existence, and lifts it like she’s going to try to drive the butt into Bakugou’s face while he spins at her like a terrible screw. At the very last second, she slams it into debris on the ground and vaults up. 

She skimms over his outstretched arm, half-hidden by the dust and smoke, and draws her gun as she lets her staff go flying. 

She shoots, the hook embeds itself into the ground and Bakugou releases a massive blast of fire and force where she had been standing second before. The force slams into her, whipping her hair clear out of it’s tie and threatening to untether entirely. 

The gun whines in her hand, and Bakugou hovers, caught between the force of his own explosions before and behind him. 

The blast clears, and she can’t see his face but she hears the startled confusion. 

His head snaps over, where her hook is clinging valiantly to the ground. The explosive force ebbs enough that the gun can wrench for forwards again, screaming towards his back. 

Suzume rears her fist back and punches Bakugou in the back of his head as hard as she can manage. 

He stumbles forwards, but manages to twist around and swing. 

There’s nothing she can do but lift her hand and try to protect her face. 

She hears the explosion, and the familiar crack of bone, and then she’s flying . 

Grass bites into her shoulders and she skips across the ground twice before she gets her feet up under her, just in time to hit the wall of the stadium with her back. 

The wall of the stadium. 

She’s out of bounds. 

Her heart sinks. 

The smoke slowly clears in silence, and Suzume sees what had made everyone else quiet in face of an end to the match. 

Bakugou lays on the ground, unmoving save the rise and fall of his chest. 

Midnight looks between them, and then up at Cementoss. 

“Well…Yusada is out of bounds, but Bakugou is unconscious. What do you think?” she asks, looking up at her coworker. 

He crosses his arms and looks out over them. 

“From what I saw, Bakugou collapsed right after his last attack. Before Yusada landed on the ground. So Bakugou was knocked out before she went out of bounds. I’d say… Yusada won.” 

Suzume gaps at him. 

“I… what?” 

Midnight accepts his answer, and repeats it louder for the rest of the crowd. 

If she thought that the audience exploded for Todoroki and Shinsou, it’s nothing compared to the eruption that sounds around them now. Disbelief, shock, and encouragement all meld into a cacophony of sound. 

Suzume picks her way over to the stage and climbs back up. She’s missing the shoulder of her jacket, and her cheek is starting to throb from the burn and cut. There’s other, smaller burns all over and she’s bruised where she hit the ground. 

She’s in better shape than Bakugou. 

By the time she gets back to Midnight’s side, both of them standing over him, he’s barely regained consciousness. He sits, slowly, looking pale and sick. 

Suzume doesn’t bother to offer him a hand up. 

For the second time since their match started, a voice in the crowd breaks through. Somehow, it sounds like the same man as before.