Archive of Our Own ^beta

Shouta slumps in an uncomfortable chair in one of the police station’s interrogation rooms. The perp across from him has bright blue eyes and hair that ripples like it’s underwater, and refuses to utter a word about how he found out when and where a rare set of jewels were being transported across the country.

The man is the latest in a line of criminals that seem to know more than they should. Just last week, Shouta arrived at a drug bust, only to realize there was nothing at the warehouse but a taunting note on the ground. There were only a few people who knew about it, and after asking around with Tsukauchi’s quirk, it was confirmed none of them leaked the information intentionally.

But here’s the problem: a one-off incident—fine. Maybe one of the officers had let the information slip out to a friend, or after one too many drinks at the bar. But it kept happening.

A criminal sneaking into a bank, disabling all the alarms with a code she shouldn’t know. Someone painting Endeavour’s office bright pink without triggering any of his traps—and oh, the media had a field day with that one. A villain targeting a hero’s injury despite it being sustained in a private fight, not leaked to the press. Vigilantes solving cases with evidence not even the police had, evidence they had neither the skill or talent to discover on their own. Little bits and pieces of people being too smart, too knowledgeable, knowing things they shouldn’t.

It adds up to this: a new player on the street. An information broker, maybe, someone who sells tactics and knowledge for bloodstained yen. This matches up with what Shouta’s informants have been whispering: someone who’ll sell any information for the right price.

So Shouta was surprised—pleasantly so—when someone who should know more about the mysterious information broker was brought in.

But he doesn’t talk. Well, he does, but not about what Shouta wants to hear.

“I found out about the jewels on my own,” the man says stubbornly.

The detective sighs, rubbing at his temples. He flicks open a notepad, consulting it. “Mizu Taki. Aged thirty-three. You’re set to spend sixty years in prison, for your past crimes of…” His eyes scan the paper as he rattles off crime after crime, from grand larceny to shoplifting. With every one, the perp’s eyes go slightly wider.

“Hey, hey,” Mizu says, cuffs clanking against the table as he leans forwards, “you can’t get me a deal?”

“We’ve offered you a deal,” cuts in Shouta, exasperated.

Mizu shifts his weight in his chair, seaweed-like hair pooling around his shoulders. “Yeah, well…” He swallows. “I can’t tell you about him.”

“We already know where he’s based,” Shouta says. They don’t.

Mizu attempts to throw up his hands in exasperation, but the chain linked to the table stops him, jerking his wrists down. “Why do I have to tell you he’s in Hosu if you already know?”

Tsukauchi slides a side-eye at Shouta. Hosu. Hosu. Hosu. “If you tell us where in Hosu,” Tsukauchi offers, “we can reduce your sentence.”

Mizu slumps back, gnawing on his bottom lip and tapping his fingers on the table. “I can’t tell you where he is,” he says slowly, “but I’ll tell you something about him in exchange for that reduced sentence.”

A smile stretches across Shouta’s lips.

“He sold me the information in a porn book.”

-

There’s a bookstore on the edge of Hosu. The place smells of fresh plants: of the aloe vera near windows and succulents propped up on counters, mingling with new-book smell. If you were to venture inside—past the ceramic bell that tinkles with the opening of the door—there’s a man who lounges on a chair behind the cashier’s desk, his feet propped up on a table and a well-worn paperback in hand. He’ll greet you with a lazy wave, not looking up from his orange-covered book.

Aizawa Shouta’s there to buy a book. A very specific one, in fact, one that he’s braved asking multiple shop owners for.

He enters with a narrowed-eyed gaze and a finger shifting over the white of his capture weapon. Then, steps quick and breathing quiet, he approaches the man slumping bonelessly in his chair, fingers thumbing idly through the pages of his novel.

“Hello,” he says pointedly. The man doesn’t look up. “I’d like to buy a book.”

“Which one, hm? There’s a lot of books.” The man glances across the shelves with a single eye, the other hidden behind a shock of pale white hair. Shouta can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not; the bottom half of his face is covered by a stretchy black mask, hiding any sort of tells the man might have.

Shouta follows the man’s gaze around the bookstore. There’s nobody inside. In a low voice nonetheless, he says, “I’d like to buy a copy of… Icha Icha Paradise, I think it’s called?”

The man immediately perks up, swinging his feet off the table and getting to his feet. When he stands and puts the book down, it reveals a nametag that says Kakashi pinned onto his right breast. “Over here.” Kakashi eats up the distance with long strides, rounding the desk and heading towards one of the back shelves. “This is my favourite book, you know,” he says conversationally, reaching up to a top shelf and tugging an orange book down. With his free hand, he waves his own well-used copy to accentuate his point.

Shouta trails after him stiffly.

“So,” says Kakashi, turning to face Shouta. “Were you looking for anything else, today?” He stacks his book and Shouta’s book together. His eye curves into a small smile.

“Information on the drug ring operating out of Musutafu. When their next meeting is.”

Kakashi cocks his head, eye squinting. “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

Kakashi shrugs, an absent tilt of the shoulders, and ducks behind the counter to grab a paper bag. “Here’s your book.” He pops back out, slides the book into the bag, rattling off a number far too big for the price of a single book, but Shouta smiles tightly and pays it all.

“My personal favorite was page thirty-seven.” Kakashi cocks his head at Shouta. “Hm… you seem like a good man who’d like it, too.”

-

When Shouta gets home, he sits on his bed. Sushi, curled up on his pillow, raises his head sleepily at his arrival, but ultimately dismisses him. Shouta reaches over to stroke the cat absent-mindedly, with his other hand flipping to page thirty-seven. His cheeks burn as he slogs his way through cheesy dialogue and a needlessly graphic picture. The woman smiles in it, coy, and says, Meet me on 25th street. I can’t wait to see your big—

Shouta scans the rest of the page, confusion heightening, his fingers pausing on Sushi’s fur. The only possible location is 25th street, but it looks like it was printed in. Unless it’s coded, somehow. He scrambles for another copy of the book Hizashi left on the nightstand and flips it open to page thirty-seven.

The street name is different.

Shouta, quickly, cross-references the rest of the books. All of them have the same address except for… his copy.

“Got you,” he says to no one. He takes out his phone, raises it above the page, and snaps a photo of it with a bright light that has him wincing away. He’d forgotten to turn off the flash after trying to photograph some kittens on patrol a few nights ago.

“Another porn book, Shouta?” Hizashi calls out from the kitchen, teasing. Dishes clatter and water runs, but Hizashi has never had a problem being loud.

Shouta stands and stacks the book onto a bookshelf beside the bed among the tens of other copies. “We’re going have to donate these all to Nemuri.” He sighs, running his fingers through his hair. Shooting off a quick text to Tsukauchi about the bust, he attaches the most recent photo.

He tosses his phone on the bed and heads to the bathroom, stretching his arms above his head. “I’m going to shower,” he says to Hizashi as he passes the kitchen.

Hizashi, with a smirk crawling across his lips and a stack of clean plates clutched in his hands, wiggles his eyebrows. “Sure you don’t want to recreate page fifty in there?”

Shouta shuts the bathroom door on Hizashi’s breathless cackles.

-

Aizawa: The information dealer goes by kakashi. Told me to flip to here and theres the drug ring’s next meeting

Tsukauchi: How do you know?

Aizawa: He told me. I sent u a picture

Tsukauchi: This is the same as any other copy of the book.

Aizawa: It’s not. It’s different.

Tsukauchi: Check the photo again.

Aizawa: Oh

-

“There is nothing on this guy,” Shouta grumbles, more than a little exasperated and exhausted after the successful drug bust. The files in front of him are spread out on the living room floor, the coffee table pushed to the side to make room. He uses the couch as a backrest, tipping his head back onto the cushions to watch Hizashi putter around behind him, his head bobbing in and out of view. “I’ve asked around, too, but nobody knows anything about a Kakashi. The internet only has farming tips for me.”

“Have another coffee.” Hizashi grins as he comes around the side of the couch. He presses a mug into Shouta’s hands and settles down beside him on the floor. “Don’t overwork yourself. The sports festival is in a week, you know, and you’re my commentary partner. What case are you looking at?” he says in one breath.

“The porn book one,” Shouta mutters. His hands curl around the warm cup as he blows on it, staring at a picture of Kakashi's smug face. “This is all we’ve officially got on him. Just his details from that one time he got arrested for vigilantism, but was eventually let go because… he’s quirkless. And it was technically self-defense, too.” He waves his hand restlessly. “Other than that, not even a speeding ticket.”

Hizashi leans forward, then pauses. “Mind if I…?”

“Go ahead.” Shouta takes a sip of the coffee and winces when it burns his tongue. He lowers it and blows onto the surface again, watching Hizashi sift through the papers with a furrow in his brow.

Sushi pads into the room, feet quiet, and nudges at Shouta’s side. Obligingly, Shouta raises his arm to make room for him. Sushi snuggles up close with a low purr.

“His file is frustratingly thin,” Shouta says by means of conversation. He stares at his rippling reflection in the surface of his coffee, breathing in the steam. “There’s not even much proof he is an information broker, and even after meeting him I still have next to nothing, since the edited book now matches the rest of the copies.” He laughs, quiet. “I guess it’s more than we had before, though.”

He remembers Kakashi’s old case file; a page it contained all the records of anything that they knew was connected to the mysterious information broker. Another page was filled with things suspected but not confirmed. The list of things suspected was notably longer. They didn’t even have a name for him, back then.

“Hey,” says Hizashi, after a moment, sitting back on his haunches. Something pops in his knee. He lifts up the picture of Kakashi. “Doesn’t he look… like, familiar?”

Shouta squints, his eyes blurry with lack of sleep. “Not really,” he admits shamelessly. “Well, he does, but that’s because I’ve seen him before.”

Hizashi hems and haws for a moment longer. He snaps loudly, startling Sushi into jerking his head up. “I got it!” he cries, shaking the paper triumphantly. “This guy went to Yuuei!”

Shouta drags a hand over his face, and says, muffled, “No damn way.”

“Yes, yes!” Hizashi scoots closer. “I remember him because when we watched the sports festival, Nemuri called him an old man. And then he beat out most of his competition, as a Gen Ed student. We compared him to you when you were little. He was… two years below us, I think.” He sits up, rubs at his temples. “He wasn’t named Kakashi, though. His name was something else. I can’t remember. But he definitely attended Yuuei.”

Shouta groans into his coffee. “All that thinking for nothing.”

-

Shouta lies flat on the ground near the podium; he blinks slowly, watching as half the class stills into silence and the other continues to talk, mindlessly chattering. Iida swells up his chest in a mimicry of a pufferfish and his hand comes up, scolding face set and ready, but Shouta catches his eye and shakes his head. Iida deflates, turning stiffly in his seat to face forwards.

“Did you guys hear about that new vigilante?” Kaminari smiles and jostles Jirou’s arm, unaware or uncaring of the way she winces, leaning away in her chair. Propping himself up on his elbows, he sets a phone in front of them. He presumably plays the gritty footage that has been making the rounds since a few days ago. Shouta would know; he’s been assigned to the case, though there isn’t much to go off of. It was probably a one-off incident—like the majority of vigilante escapades are—but if it were to happen again, Shouta’s the man to go to. Unfortunately, though, there’s video evidence of this one, which means the media won’t let it go easily.

Out of Kaminari’s tinny speakers echo the clashes and clangs of the vigilante’s makeshift weapon—a thin metal pole from a nearby construction site. Shouta closes his eyes, picturing the video in his mind’s eye: the vigilante accosted, the mugger bringing out a knife. The vigilante picking up a pole that’d been kicked to the street sometime during construction. Them using the pole like they’d been trained with it, twisting it around in their hands. The mugger launching the knife forwards with the flicker of a quirk, slicing across the vigilante’s shoulder and spinning out into the darkness as the vigilante shifts. The vigilante slamming the mugger over the head and vanishing into the night, leaving the unconscious man and pole behind.

Shouta arrived on-scene a few minutes later, but there’s no footage of that. He made sure of it.

“Isn’t it cool, Jirou-kun?” Kaminari clicks his phone off, smiling guilelessly. Jirou mutters something incomprehensible and puts her head on her hands.

Shouta clears his throat pointedly, getting to his feet. Kaminari jerks his head up with a sheepish smile, glancing around at the quiet class around him. He meets Shouta’s dead-eyed stare and scrambles back to his seat.

“Now that we’re done,” Shouta begins, “the sports festival is in a week.”

The rest of the class passes without incident, but Shouta glances over at Jirou more than once to see her nodding off. So when the bell rings, he says, “Jirou-san, stay here.”

The rest of the class packs up and leaves, chattering to themselves in low murmurs. Jirou pulls her head up, blinking wearily, and nods. “Don’t you have a class after, sensei?”

Shouta shakes his head. “Not for second block.” He swallows. He never knows what to say in these sorts of situations, but he steels himself; it's not that big of a deal. “Are you feeling okay, Jirou-san?”

She looks blindsided by the question. “Am I… okay?” she echoes. “Of course, sensei.”

“Are you injured in any way?”

“No.”

“You’re favoring one arm. I can’t make you get help, but Recovery Girl won’t ask too many questions if you go visit her.”

“Okay, sensei.” She yawns. “Can I go?”

“I’m your homeroom teacher. If anything’s wrong…” He thinks of that vigilante and their slight figure, raising a pole over their head. “If anything’s wrong, either at home or at school or anywhere else, please come to me, alright?”

“Got it.” She throws her bag over her shoulder, ducks her head in a sluggish bow, and trudges out the door.

-

“Nedzu.”

The stupid thing looks up serenely, its paws folded on its desk. Waiting for him.

Shouta pinches the bridge of his nose, where a headache is already beginning to form. “Here,” he says, and hands Nedzu a note. He’d written down his request in case he forgot to ask.

If Nezdu had eyebrows, they’d be arching right now. He folds the note into quarters without even looking at it, sliding a folder over his desk at Shouta. “This is the list you asked for,” Nezdu says, the smug bastard. He’d known what Shouta wanted all along.

“Thanks.” Shouta grabs the folder, opens it to see the single sheet of paper inside, and scans the list briefly.

“No problem!” Nezdu chirps. “You understand, of course, that anything beyond their names—which could be feasibly found with enough public research—is confidential.”

Shouta nods sharply.

He ducks out of there as fast as he can, Nedzu’s beady eyes settling along his spine. He shivers minutely. When he reaches the teacher’s lounge he slumps down on a seat, fight drained out of him. He pulls out his phone and sighs. Fingers tapping at the screen, he begins the tedious work of searching up every person’s name on the list and looking at their social media, photos of them online. Family accounts. Anywhere he might be able to identify them.

He makes it halfway down the list before a familiar face pops up in his search bar. His name is Nakatomi Hisao, says the article, and he looks almost exactly like Kakashi, albeit younger. The article is about the sports festival. Good. He’d been planning to watch it tonight, after school, so he bookmarks the article in a new tab.

His alarm to wake up blares suddenly, startling him so badly he nearly flings it across the room.

Since he’s got a free block in-between homeroom and his first class, he usually spends it catching up on his sleep. God knows that with his homeroom this year—not a single person expelled, plus the simmering rivalry between Bakugou and Midoriya—he’ll need the extra sleep more than ever.

During the USJ field trip, Bakugou refused to cooperate with Midoriya in saving the fake civilians, even when they partnered together. Shouta ended up separating them in the interest of actually moving on with the exercises they were supposed to be doing, but… he needs to nip that in the bud. A healthy rivalry never hurt anyone, but Bakugou just might. Hurt someone, that is.

He groans, clicking open a nearby pen and underlining Nakatomi Hisao’s name. Kakashi, he scribbles beside it, in case he forgets, and closes the folder. It’s left on his desk as he meanders his way to one of Yuuei’s many gyms.

The final bell rings as he steps inside. “Two laps of the gym and then ten pushups,” he says to the kids, leaving no room for disagreement. The General Education students groan in tandem and begin their run.

Once most of them have finished their laps and dropped down into their pushups, the door creaks open. A student slips inside, hair mussed and eyes half-lidded. Unashamedly, he yawns, bringing a hand up to his mouth demurely.

“Sensei.” He dips his head in acknowledgement.

“Hurry up, Shinsou-san,” Shouta says.

Shinsou grunts out an answer, feet dragging as he jogs around the gym. Shouta calls out, louder, the only way he can motivate the boy: “If you don’t speed up, two more laps!”

Shinsou, obligingly, speeds up. He finishes quickly, drops into ten shaky pushups, and ends with the last of the stragglers.

“Remember, the sports festival is in a week,” Shouta tells the class once they’ve sat down in a circle. He tucks his chin into his capture weapon. “Raise your hand if you know how to throw a proper punch.”

A few people raise their hands. Most, if not all, are the hero hopefuls. Shinsou closes his eyes like he can block out the world if he does so.

“Alright.” Shouta waves the hands down. “Who’s trying to transfer to the Hero Course?”

He’s greeted with blank stares.

Shouta sighs. “Did Yamada-sensei not tell you about this?”

“No,” a girl with leafy green hair replies, glowing faintly.

“If you do well enough in the Sports Festival, you can transfer into the Hero Course. This usually requires a place on the podium, but if you show potential, you may make it into the course without placing. Of course, this doesn’t mean you’ll be kicking another student out of the Hero Course, but it’s possible you will be.” Shouta takes a breath. “Often there are empty spaces from kids who’ve dropped out or have been expelled”—because of me, he doesn’t say—“so you’d be placed there.”

A boy with spiky hair raises a hand. “How many people can transfer?”

A smirk crawls across Shouta’s face. “One,” he says. The class murmurs.

“That’s not true,” Shinsou rebuffs without opening his eyes. “When you transferred to the Hero Course, there was another girl who did so with you.”

Shouta glances consideringly at the boy. Someone whispers. “You got me. There’s no real maximum, but you’re not as likely to get accepted if the hero class is still full. Moving on: around half the class knows how to throw a punch, so if you know how to, partner up with someone who doesn’t.”

The class scrambles for partners. Once they’ve settled down, Shouta begins to instruct them.

“Today we’re going to work on a bit of martial arts. Tomorrow I’m going to have another teacher in here to help you all out, but he’s only coming in after you learn how to not break your hands upon impact.”

-

Shouta trudges through the rest of the day slowly. He teaches a few more classes, escapes back to the teacher’s lounge for a quick nap and a quicker lunch, and goes back to teaching. The article about Kakashi is always close in his thoughts, when he’s grading essays or when has a moment alone.

When the last bell rings, Shouta could not be happier. He ducks out of the school after snagging Nedzu’s list of people, Hizashi on his heels. Hizashi drops him off at the apartment with a kiss on the cheek and peels off to his agency. He’s got a patrol lined up for today, if Shouta remembers correctly.

Shouta collapses on the couch, the file clutched tight in hand, and sighs. He is not looking forward to going through all the names.

But first…

Shouta taps his phone, impatiently waiting for it to unlock and load. He’d never seen the point of always buying the latest, top notch version that came out, but it would really be useful now.

He searches Sports festival, year 1. He forgets to add a year to it, though, and he furrows his brow and types in the year as fast as his fingers will allow.

He clicks on the first video that pops up, a recorded livestream of the sports festival.

“Hello and welcome to this year’s—”

Shouta sets the speed to x2, watching avidly as the sports festival whizzes by, the announcer rambling squeakily. First up are the solo battles. It looks like this one is a giant maze that wraps around the outside of the arena as well as within, peppered with drones that hover above you and robots scattered within. Three different colours of ribbons are tacked to the wall at random points, and to win you need to retrace your steps to the beginning, an intact ribbon in hand. Stealing allowed. All the walls are normal at the bottom, but as they go up, higher, they slope gradually into razor-thin points, likely to prevent students from walking on them. Except… well.

Shouta pauses and slows the video back to normal speed.

“—is he doing? A student has climbed on top of the wall!”

The crowd roars. The camera focuses on the boy’s lazy swagger as he balances across what might as well be a tightrope for how thin the walls are. Tied around his arm is a bright red ribbon.

“He looks to have an impeccable sense of balance! Look at him go. And he’s a Gen Ed student, too!”

His white hair gleams in the afternoon light, and he turns to the camera, walking backwards and raising a hand in greeting without so much as a stutter in his step. His hair still flops in front of his eye, even as a teenager. Shouta finds himself holding his breath; what if the boy—Kakashi—falls?

But he doesn’t. Instead he reaches the end of the maze—or beginning, depending on how you look at it.

His visible eye curves up into a smile, and his name appears on the scoreboard in first place.

The rest of the students filter in, slower. Shouta skips past it, keeping an eye on teenage Kakashi propped up against a wall, half in shadow.

The next event is a team one, as is the pattern. They’re divided up into teams of their colour of ribbon and directed to partner up into threes or fours within their colour groups.

Shouta keeps a close eye on Kakashi. The boy’s teammates consist of a squat sort of person and… a girl with bunny ears. The girl twists, flashes a glint of white teeth at the camera. He buries his head into his hands.

It’s the Rabbit Hero: Mirko, currently number 8 in the hero rankings. And their other team member… Shouta groans. Wash. He can’t remember his ranking right now, but it just so figures Kakashi would partner up with two future prolific pro-heroes.

The camera pans away, towards the hero on-stage. Shouta wants to skim past this, but he knows that he’ll have no clue what’s going on in the next stage, so he resigns himself to listening to the hero down by the stage monologue.

“You need to get one of each colour ribbon and head through the gate over there,” the hero says, motioning to a newly erected gate on one side of the arena. It’s really just an elaborate, very tall doorway.

Shouta recognizes her; he knows the green hair sweeping down her shoulders, the crown of flowers resting on her brow. Nemuri had the biggest crush on her back when they were students.

“Every time you take a ribbon, there’s a grace period of thirty seconds where you can’t enter the gate, where the opposing team can attempt to take the ribbons back.

“Ribbons must be on your head. Ropes will be provided to connect to your partners; you cannot stray too far from each other. If the rope breaks, you may hold hands or something similar. The ribbons cannot be hidden once taken.”

Shouta speeds the video up, following the jerky movements of the video. When the event begins, he slows it down to normal speed.

Wash starts it off with a bang, his bubbles filling up the arena and obscuring everyone’s vision. The camera view switches to an overhead one. Within the bubbles, Shouta can vaguely glimpse flashes of white hair darting around the arena, hand in hand. Wash is tied to Mirko’s back and still spewing bubbles.

Shouts and cries ring through the air. After a few more moments, the bubbles clear.

“And the first team through the gate consists of Mitarai Susugu, Usagiyama Rumi, and Nakatomi Hisao!” the announcer crows. Indeed, the three of them stand behind the gate, proud and tall.

Shouta fast forwards, keeps going after this until the third event begins. The one on one battles.

He skips too far, rewinds, presses play.

“—third event,” Kakashi says.

Shouta blinks. What? He rewinds a bit further to see Kakashi raise his hand. “I’d like to drop out of the third event,” Kakashi says, a pleasant smile curling across his eye.

The hero onstage falters. “I—I suppose that’s allowed,” she says, hesitant.

“Great!” Kakashi sweeps into a dramatic bow and saunters out, leaving silence behind him.

“That aside,” the hero says, “there’s an odd number. So—”

Shouta flicks through the rest of the footage. Nothing. Kakashi doesn’t show up again. Neither does he in the footage from the year after, or the one after that. After the initial buzz of the first sports festival—an obvious top contender dropping out after dominating the first two rounds—Kakashi seems to vanish.

Did he drop out?

Shouta switches to the article on Kakashi he’d saved earlier. It’s fairly short, actually, made mostly of short clips of Kakashi: one where he balances on top of the wall, one where he waves at the camera. There’s few important things on it, and with a groan he slams his phone down onto the table.

Without an easy way to gather information, he needs to now follow up on everyone on the list. God.

-

Transcript between Eraserhead (Pro Hero ID: XXXXXXX) and Interviewee (Haburashi Hamigakiko. See case file 17239D.) Unnecessary sounds, such as um or ah, will be removed from the following statement for the purpose of making the statement clearer.

ERASERHEAD: April 11th, 23XX. 5:34pm. I am Pro-Hero Eraserhead. Please state your name, age and quirk. You have agreed to be recorded.

HABURASHI: (Unintelligible)

ERASERHEAD: Louder, please.

HABURASHI: Haburashi Hamigakiko. I’m twenty eight. My quirk is (unintelligible)

ERASERHEAD: Please state it verbally.

HABURASHI: I can lengthen and change the shape of my fingernails at will. Heh. Not very impressive, I know.

ERASERHEAD: Do you recognize this man? [A file of the photo is attached below.] Can you tell me anything about him?

HABURASHI: Hm… he looks familiar.

ERASERHEAD: He was a classmate of yours back in highschool.

HABURASHI: Oh! Oh, I remember. [Clears throat.] He was super fucking—ah, am I allowed to swear on this?

ERASERHEAD: Yes. Please continue. Remember, anything about him helps.

HABURASHI: He was super fucking weird. On his first day he handed out—flyers, I think? Missing person ones. I don’t remember who was on there, but I threw mine away. I thought it was a joke.

ERASERHEAD: I see. Is there anything else you remember?

HABURASHI: Right. I think once the teacher took him outside and told him to stop being late or there would be repercussions. I know because there was someone in the class with a hearing quirk who liked to gossip—god, I don’t remember their name, but they had blue hair. Real blue hair. And then the next day, just before class started, he slid in through the open window.

ERASERHEAD: Mhm.

HABURASHI: The teacher kind of gave up on him after that, I think. I mean, he consistently placed high up—nearly always number one despite missing half his classes. And I suppose as long as he attended just enough classes and kept up his grades they had no real reason to correct his… chronic tardiness, he called it once.

ERASERHEAD: Did anything ever seem… strange about him? Other than his lateness.

HABURASHI: I mean, once he called All Might a posturing chicken.

ERASERHEAD: Mm.

HABURASHI: Why are you looking into him, Eraserhead-san?

ERASERHEAD: I can’t tell you that.

HABURASHI: Could you turn off the recording device, please? I no longer wish to—

End transcript.

-

Transcript between Eraserhead (Pro Hero ID: XXXXXXX) and Interviewee (Hanasha Kagami. See case file 17239D.) Unnecessary sounds, such as um or ah, will be removed from the following statement for the purpose of making the statement clearer.

ERASERHEAD: April 11th, 23XX. 7:35pm. I am Pro-Hero Eraserhead. Please state your name, age and quirk. You have agreed to be recorded.

HANASHA: My name is Hanasha Kagami. I’m twenty-eight years old, and my quirk is Physical Recall. I can remember everything I’ve done if I have an object that relates to the memory somehow.

ERASERHEAD: I’m sending you a photo. Do you recognize him? [A file of the photo is attached below.]

HANASHA: No. Wait. Yes. That’s the guy who everyone thought was a vigilante, right?

ERASERHEAD: Do you remember anything about him?

HANASHA: He handed out flyers on the very first day. I don’t remember who was on it, but I could tell you about it if I had a copy of it, probably. I’ve got a hoarding problem, see, one of the drawbacks of my quirk; every time I see something, I wonder: will I need it? I can check my old school things to see if it’s still there, but… not likely. The hoarding mostly started in second year.

ERASERHEAD: That would be great. Thank you very much. Is there anything else you remember about him?

HANASHA: He was always late. I remember thinking his hair was cool.

ERASERHEAD: Is that all?

HANASHA: Yeah, sorry.

End transcript.

-

Shouta does his best to arrange meetings with Kakashi’s former classmates, but he only manages to visit two today. One is named Haburashi Hamigakiko. Hanasha Kagami he manages to contact by phone. The rest are busy—out of the country or at work or simply unavailable until the next week at the earliest. Some don’t even pick up. So he turns his sights elsewhere: Mirko. She’s not on the list, but then again she was in the Hero Course and partnered with Kakashi in the Sports Festival. And she might know things about the ever-elusive Kakashi. So he visits her agency.

A receptionist taps away at her keyboard behind the desk. “Mirko Hero Office,” she says without looking up, “how may I help you?”

“Excuse me,” he replies, feeling out of place in this gleaming lobby with its tile flooring and cream walls, “can I see Mirko?”

The receptionist looks up at him through pink eyelashes, unimpressed. “Sorry, I’m not looking to buy any cookies.” She jerks a thumb at a sign behind her.

NO SOLICITORS!

Shouta rubs at his temples. “I’m not looking to sell cookies. I need to see Mirko. It’s important.”

“That’s what they all say, honey." Her gaze is already flitting back to her computer, dismissing him.

Wordlessly, Shouta taps on the counter with his hero license and hands it over.

Brow arched, she takes it. “This is a picture of a cat.” She flips the card around so Shouta can see the other side. It’s his stylized credit card Hizashi bought him as a joke, a photo of Sushi plastered across it.

His cheeks burn. “Sorry.” He fumbles for the real one, taking back his credit card and handing over his hero license.

“Seems legit enough,” the receptionist says after a moment. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here and I can let Mirko know?” She slides the license back over the counter.

“Tell her Aizawa Shouta is here. She owes me a favour.”

The receptionist hums. “Alright… she can see you… in four months. That seems about right.”

Shouta blanches. “Four months?”

“Mm. She’s a busy woman.”

Shouta smiles tightly. “You know what, thank you. I don’t need an appointment.”

He’ll have to find some other way to talk to her.

-

Two years ago.

Shouta braces his hands on his knees, watching as Mirko bounds into the fray, her long legs sweeping a kick at the villain. He takes a moment to collect himself, eyes watering with the dust and debris floating around in the villain’s tornado, but he catches a glimpse of the villain inside the windstorm and activates his quirk.

The objects drop and clatter to the ground. Mirko flashes into there, fighting with a sharp-toothed grin, but the woman inside recovers quickly and ducks, dodging Mirko’s powerful strikes. The villain is trained in hand to hand combat, not solely relying on her quirk, and that makes her a formidable opponent.

Shouta advances slowly, his hair still floating up above his head. He’s relegated to quirk-eraser while Mirko slams a vicious blow into the villain’s side. She whoops out a cheer. But he can see the fight is taking its toll; there’s a slice of red across her stomach—more on her arms—and he knows bruises are blooming under her suit.

Shouta can’t hold his quirk any longer.

He drops it, eyes throbbing, and just barely catches sight of a second figure emerging from behind the first before the storm swirls up again.

He swallows, and without a second thought, flings himself into the storm. It batters him from every side, and a slab of concrete nearly clips him in the head. Still, he presses on, eyes squinted. He falls into the eye of the storm and, as he falls, he glimpses metal heading for Mirko’s unprotected back. He blinks his quirk on. With his capture weapon he grabs tight around—something, maybe a building still standing in the storm—and he shoots himself forward into the knife, slamming into Mirko on the way down. Pain blossoms, and then—darkness.

Shouta wakes in the hospital, Hizashi holding his hand. “It was almost a fatal blow,” Hizashi tells him, trembling. “You could have died, there was poison on that knife. Thank god it was for Mirko, specifically… Meant it was weaker on you.” Shouta lifts his arm to cup Hizashi’s cheek, but on his arm, messily scrawled is:

i owe u. - M

-

Shouta visits the address listed on the paper Nedzu gave him, trying to see if Mirko still lives there, but the place was torn down three years ago. In place of it stands a huge concrete building and a large parking lot.

Shouta sighs, shoves his hands in his pockets, and reasons that he’ll have to go about this the hard way.

Namely—stalking. Well, he doesn’t like to call it stalking. Just… gathering information. It’s the kind of thing every underground hero has to do at some point. Only… Shouta is doing it to a fellow hero.

He doesn’t end up going through with it. She’s a daylight hero, in the spotlight. She catches villains while Shouta catches sleep under his desk. He doesn’t have the time nor the energy.

So instead he turns to someone he probably shouldn’t. He reasons that it’s killing two birds with one stone; he gets information on Mirko and another chance to evaluate Kakashi with his own eyes.

-

The shop bell tinkles. There’s nobody inside except the man behind a desk. He’s giggling at something in his orange book. A flare of heat crawls up to Shouta’s ears, and he looks away pointedly.

“I’d like to know where Mirko goes out in public as a civilian.”

Kakashi heaves himself up. “Hey! You’re back! Did you enjoy the book?” he asks, steamrolling over Shouta. He gives no indication he even heard him in the first place.

“The book was…” Shouta mulls over the words, for a moment. “It was alright,” he gives in.

Kakashi beams. “I have the next one in the series for you, if you’d like. Let me go grab one.” He gives no room for argument, instead jumping over to a bookshelf with a smile and picking out a book with a red cover. “This one’s called Icha Icha Violence.”

“Violence,” Shouta echoes.

Kakashi bobs his head in a nod. “If you liked the last one, you’re sure to like this one, maa?” He grabs a paper bag from under the desk, slides the book in, and rings it up. The price is exorbitant, but Shouta still pays for it all.

“Any… parts of the book you liked?” Shouta asks, nearly dreading Kakashi’s answer.

“Hm…” Kakashi taps at his lips, thoughtful. “I liked the part in chapter two, where they go out and…” He slaps a hand over his mouth, giggles spilling out. Turning his head away, almost bashful, he says, “You’ll have to see what happens!”

Shouta, dutifully, goes home, buries his head in Sushi’s fur for half an hour—he is so tired and Sushi is so soft—and sinks down onto the couch. Hizashi isn’t home to tease him about buying another porn book, thank god.

Shouta flicks on Put Your Hands Up Radio. Right now it’s playing some sort of pre-recorded music. Hizashi is probably getting ready for his show. Shouta snaps a few pictures of Sushi looking boneless, curled up beside him, and flips open the book.

Shouta regrets it almost immediately. But, managing to skim past the first chapter, he gets to the middle of the second, where the man asks the girl out on a date to a fried chicken place in Saitama, a nearby prefecture. He snaps a picture of it as evidence, but once again, when he looks at the photo it’s simply… not there. Well. It’s a different place, different time. It infuriates him. But Kakashi is quirkless; so who or what’s making the picture invisible to the camera?

“That would never work,” he says to Sushi, dropping his phone face-down on the couch. “Who asks out someone to a fried chicken place? No it wouldn’t work, no it wouldn’t, no, no, baby.” He scratches behind Sushi’s ears. Sushi purrs low in his throat, a vibrating sort of sound.

Still… Shouta returns his attention to the book. A fried chicken place. There’s no time to go tonight; darkness has already bloomed, and a trip to Saitama would be at least an hour long by bullet train.

”Friday night. The place with the fabulous wings. We’ll eat until we can’t anymore,” the man promises.

“I’d rather eat y—”

-

“Work on any homework you have,” Shouta says, then promptly curls under his desk for a nap. He can hear 1-A begin to talk and gossip, decidedly not doing homework. He just wants a damn nap, but Iida beats him to the scolding. His voice rings out through the class.

Good times, he thinks, and falls asleep.

He wakes right before the bell, blurry-eyed and with a yawn slipping out of him. He bunches up his sleeping bag and drags himself quietly up. Most of the students seem to be working—Bakugou is scribbling furiously on a sheet of paper, though still not as fast as Midoriya’s frantic mumbling and writing. Even Kaminari is focused, chewing on the end of his pencil.

Hizashi’s English essay must’ve stumped them.

But Jirou, again, has her head bobbing in sleep, catching herself every minute or so. Dark circles have begun to carve themselves under her eyes, Shouta can see that much.

Shouta can’t call her out on it. That would be hypocritical. So instead he watches carefully as she brushes against the corner of the desk with her arm and jerks up.

The bell rings. Class is over. Jirou wakes, blinking slowly, and exits with the rest of the class.

Shouta resolves to follow up on her in a week if her condition persists. In a week. Everything’s in a week; Sports festival, when he can follow up on the rest of his leads, the checkup on Jirou. Still, although he promised himself to wait a week, he ducks into Rescue Girl’s office on his way to the teacher’s lounge.

“No,” she says, cane tapping against the ground. “Jirou-san hasn’t come in. Should I be worried?”

Something tightening in his gut, Shouta says, “No. I’ve got it under control.”

-

“This is the pro-hero Ectoplasm, but I’m sure you all know him from math class.” Shouta waves a hand vaguely at Ectoplasm. “He’ll be helping us out with our combat today.”

Someone cheers. Shouta glares at his Gen Ed students until they quiet down. “Everyone pair up with an Ectoplasm, and he’ll help you with whatever you need. Go.”

Ectoplasm is already creating clones, wispy smoke fluttering into the air and consolidating into mimics of him, leading students away into their own space in the wide gym.

“Remember, grade my homework for two weeks,” the Ectoplasm next to Shouta says, insufferably smug.

Shouta grunts out an assent. “The things I do for my class,” he mutters, sweeping his gaze over the kids chatting or fighting or practicing stances with copies of Ectoplasm.

His vision catches on Shinsou, staring up at Ectoplasm like he’s seeing a stranger. Neither Ectoplasm or Shinsou seem to be talking.

He sighs and goes over. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” Shinsou says.

“He doesn’t want to do anything,” the Ectoplasm says. “I mean, if he doesn’t want to, there’s not much I can do.”

“You know you’re getting a grade for this class,” Shouta tells Shinsou.

“Yeah.”

“Alright,” says Shouta, and walks away. If Shinsou doesn’t want to try, there’s nothing Shouta can do to make him.

-

After school, Shouta takes the bullet train to Saitama. To blend in, he forgoes his jumpsuit in favour of a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. It makes him feel… exposed, without his capture weapon, so he shrugs it on before he leaves, along with a coat. Hopefully people assume it’s a weird scarf. Still, tension thrums through the lines of his body. He can’t sleep on the way there, even with his capture scarf as comfort.

The train slides to a halt. Rain patters over his head, light on the roof of the car—but when he disembarks and glances up at the sky, it’s as clear as could be. He ends up wandering for another half hour before he finally finds the place. Fabulous Wings, the sign reads in blazing neon, but the N isn’t lighting up properly, so it reads as Fabulous Wigs from a distance.

He heads inside. Music plays softly on the speakers, and he approaches the host.

“I’m here to meet a friend of mine,” he says, summoning his most charming smile. “Um, she’s about this tall”—he motions Mirko’s height with his hand—“and comes here every Friday…”

The host perks up. “Oh, you mean our regular, Akai Nishin?”

Smart of her to use a fake name. Shouta pretends to recognize it. “Yep, that’s the one! How did you know?”

The host preens, obviously pleased with the praise. “Here at Fabulous Wings, we pride ourselves in remembering our clientele. I’ll take you to her.”

Shouta nods, guileless, and follows her as she leads him to a booth tucked away in the corner. She leaves him with a nod and a smile.

Mirko’s decked out in civilian clothes, same as him, though her ears are covered by a red hood and her tail by baggy sweatpants. In front of her is a half-empty glass of beer, and pressed against the wall are two already empty ones. Absently, she rubs at the condensation on the cup.

“Hi,” Shouta says, sliding into the seat opposite Mirko.

She looks up. “Hi,” she says slowly. “You are…?” Recognition lights up her face and she leans back, clasping her hands on the table. “You’re Eraserhead, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

Mirko stretches her hands above her head, back cracking. “Dropped the homeless look, a bit. Nearly didn’t recognize you. What do you want?” She seems oddly amicable, probably slightly buzzed. She wasn’t this polite when Shouta worked with her two years ago.

“Back when I saved you,” he says delicately, “did you mean what you said? That you owed me a favour?”

“I don’t like owing things, but your greasy head probably saved me. So yeah.”

Shouta touches his hair and frowns.

Mirko leans forward on her elbows and takes the glass in her palms. “Make it quick. I’m supposed to meet someone, but they’re running late.”

“Do you remember someone named Nakatomi Hisao?” Kakashi, now.

Mirko pauses, the glass halfway up to her lips. She sets it down without taking a sip. “Well. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. What do you want to know?”

“Did he ever seem… suspicious? Off? Like he was hiding anything?”

“Is he a suspect in a case?” Mirko asks.

“Of a sort,” Shouta allows. “I can’t disclose more.”

Mirko gives a short, stiff nod. “Alright. I get it. You police and your stupid regulations.”

“I’m not a policeman—”

“Nakatomi was a weird kid. He was nothing special. But there were a bunch of rumors about him, I guess.”

“Like?”

Mirko takes a sip of her beer and hums into the glass. “Um… I don’t remember too much, but I think the most popular rumor was that he was a vigilante.”

“Vigilante?”

“Yeah. Since there was a few videos of a new vigilante circulating, and since Nakatomi always had this mask on, he matched the vague shots of the vigilante. I didn’t think so, though. He was kind of a nerd, and what kind of nerd goes out and fights crime? And he was really into drawing… always scribbling in his notebook. I took a peek, once, and it was all in Korean, or something. Not Japanese, that’s for sure. Maybe Chinese? But he was definitely injured all the time.”

“Do you know why he was injured?”

Mirko shrugs. “I thought he was just clumsy, honestly. He always had those stupidly thick glasses on, and after he got transferred to the hero course he kept walking into desks and the like. I remember because once he knocked my intern paperwork off my desk and it flew everywhere.” She takes a long sip of her beer. “I was pissed. But he offered to help organize it, again, so…”

But… “He didn’t have glasses during the sports festival.”

“Oh? You saw that? Dedicated, are you?”

Shouta makes a noncommittal sound.

“Yeah, I think he told me that he took them off for that.” She blinks. “A lot of words right there. He told me that he… took them off. He took them off for the Sports Festival. And during it… I think maybe I would have believed the rumors then, because damn was he fast and damn was he strong.”

“Are you two ready to order?” a waiter interrupts, appearing from nowhere. Her bright yellow eyes are alight with mirth, and she steals knowing looks between them.

“I won’t be getting anything,” says Shouta, moving to dismiss her when Mirko holds up a hand.

“A water for me.”

“Will that be all?”

“Yes,” Mirko replies, waving the girl off. She nods and takes her leave.

“You said there was more than one rumor,” Shouta says the moment the waiter looks to be out of earshot. “Do you remember any more?”

“Another rumor…” Mirko muses. “Hm. I think there was one where he had a kid? Yeah. On his first day he handed out missing posters to everyone, but the person in it was horribly hand-drawn.” She shrugs. “It was kind of funny because he was so serious about it, too.” She pitches her voice lower in a presumed mockery of Kakashi, says, “Yeah, here, looking for a kid, about yea high, and he’s named after a deer. You got that? Thanks. Here’s a photo of him that I drew myself.”

“Named after a deer?”

Mirko snaps her fingers. “Yeah. Yeah, named after a deer. I thought it was fake but didn’t want to say it to his face… he was so determined.”

“What was the name?” Shouta can’t help but lean forwards.

“Shikamaru Nara.” She laughs. “Ridiculous sort of name. Like naming your kid Toothbrush.”

“Is that all, do you think?”

Mirko taps her nails on the table and cocks her head. “Not that I remember…?”

Shouta nods shallowly. “If you remember anything at all, even the slightest thing like his eating habits, please call me.” He uncaps a pan from his pocket, scribbles a number on his napkin, and slides it over.

“Oh!” Mirko says, right before Shouta stands. “He never took off his mask. Never. Another rumor was that he was disfigured in some way, or scarred. The kids were kind of nasty.” She shrugs. “Either way, I never got a look at his face.”

“Thanks,” Shouta says, just as the waiter arrives, water balanced on her tray.

Mirko doesn’t wait for her to leave before she adds, “And he dropped out. Did you hear about that? He did the sports festival, got into the hero course. Every kid’s dream, but then he dropped out of school a few weeks later.” She eyes the lingering waiter as she leaves with a smile. “Something to think about,” she offers blandly.

“Thanks,” Shouta says again. “I owe you.”

Mirko does this sort of dry, humorless laugh. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m just repaying a debt, though it doesn’t feel like much in return for you saving my damn life.”

-

On the way back, Shouta stops at a store. He has time to kill before his train—not much, but enough that he doesn’t want to wait at the station for his ride. Glass crunches under his footsteps, but the sign in the shop declares them as open. Over the window are slats of wood, nailed firmly down. When he pushes open the door, it creaks loudly.

“Hello!” someone says. “Welcome. Sorry about the mess.” Straw-coloured hair tumbles down to his shoulders, and a guitar strap is strung over his back.

“No worries,” Shouta replies, already wondering if he can leave. He entered out of curiosity, but the music albums and instruments hung up on the walls don’t draw his interest.

“Was there anything you’re looking for?”

“Just browsing,” Shouta says, feet shifting to the door. “I think I’ll be off, then.” Awkwardness seeps into his voice, but nevertheless he turns on his heel and leaves, door creaking again to announce his exit.

Shouta steps out onto the road, fiddling with the cuff of his shirt, and heads back to the station. Bringing out his phone, he takes the time to google a route there and see how long it’ll take. It tells him to take a sharp detour into an alleyway instead of directly to the station, so he does so, backtracking to do it. For his troubles, he nearly crashes into someone.

“Woah,” he says, steadying them. The kid stiffens. He only catches a glimpse of dark purple hair and pale skin before they tear out of his light grasp. Yellow shoes scrambling for grip, they dart around the corner, quick as a flash. Shouta cocks his head and dismisses it.

His phone beeps at him and he glances down to see that if he doesn’t start walking soon, he might miss his train. Steps quickening, he makes his way to the station.

After he’s safely on the train and halfway back home, it rains again, a soft sort of pitter-pat gently tapping at the roof overhead. Slowly, Shouta blinks, and shifts his eyes to the city rushing by. The sky’s dark, clouds hanging low. “It’ll rain harder, soon,” he says to himself, but can’t help the sense of unease that roils in the pit of his stomach.

-

The rest of the week flashes by. Jirou nods off in class; Shinsou ignores the work he should be doing. Shouta sleeps some more, fights crime, and sits at the precinct for a few hours. He drinks coffee and cuddles with Sushi and sleeps.

All too soon, the sports festival is upon them.

“And the first event… begins!” Hizashi’s voice booms throughout the arena. Shouta’s eyes are fixed on the screen in front of him. The obstacle course starts with a bang and a wave of ice, freezing students to the ground inside the tunnel. Todoroki’s work.

The ones that reach the end of the starting tunnel first are mostly Shouta's 1A students. His eyes are drawn to Jirou, stumbling over the slick ice like she might fall apart at any moment, lagging just behind the main pack.

Suddenly, the view pans away, focusing on someone who hasn’t even moved from the starting line. Shinsou blinks, turning towards the camera. Hands slack by his side and accompanied by Hizashi’s confused commentary, he slowly makes his way into the tunnel, casual as could be.

The view cuts back to the head of the pack, Todoroki freezing the robots in precarious positions. “Unsafe.” Despite his words, pride flickers in his chest. “Smart,” he allows. The robots begin to teeter and fall, crashing onto the ground.

When Shinsou exits the tunnel, he’s settled into a light jog, still outpacing those stuck in the ice. He observes the fallen robots with a furrowed brow and picks his way through them as easy as an afternoon stroll, making his way past struggling students. He’s solidly in the middle of the pack, passing a struggling Jirou with hardly a sideways glance.

Jirou vanishes in the horde of people swarming the robots and doesn’t reappear.

Beside him, Hizashi comments on inane things like the colour of the sky and Midoriya’s brilliant technique, really, look at him go!

Shouta focuses, really looks at what he’s seeing, and grinds his teeth, Jirou forgotten. Midoriya, that reckless boy, catapults over his opponents with a sheet of metal and leaves smoke trailing behind him. The fight for first place is brutal and quicker than it would seem, Midoriya ending first with a wide grin, Todoroki and Bakugou in close pursuit.

“Back by the tightrope area,” Hizashi says, “it looks like one of the students has impeccable balance!”

The screen cuts to—Shinsou. The boy, maintaining his light jog, runs along the wires as if he were on regular ground. He’s halfway to the end and in the upper half of the contestants. A girl on the wire in front of him inches along it, clutching it with her entire body and pulling herself along. It’s impressive strength, but Shinsou simply hops over her white-knuckled grip and onto the next platform.

He doesn’t even look to be breathing heavily. As the view switches from camera to camera, Shouta stays alert for another glimpse of Shinsou, eyes flitting across the screen.

There.

Shinsou runs through the minefield. The mines—not all of them, but a lot—have long been detonated, but Shouta knows that after a few minutes, active mines are once more pushed to the surface, ready to trip up an unsuspecting student. Even so, Shinsou doesn’t touch a single one, his footsteps light and steady.

“And that’s the last one!” Hizashi bellows into the microphone. “After a short break, we’ll explain and begin the second event.”

Shinsou stands at the entrance, hand on the back of his neck. Number forty.

The microphone clicks off.

“Hey, hey,” Shouta says before Hizashi can say anything, “where’d Jirou go? She vanished in the first half. Where…?”

-

Shouta, as Jirou’s homeroom teacher, is called down to the nurse’s office. Recovery Girl is bustling around the area when he opens the door.

“You,” she snaps at the sight of him. “You asked about Jirou-san earlier this week. Said you had it under control, didn’t you?”

“I guess not,” Shouta says, but his gaze is already drifting around the room, over hospital beds with privacy curtains drawn tight and the faint blur of purple behind one of such curtains. “Can I see her?”

“Can I see her… oh, I’ve got it under control… fainted under one of the robots… my word…” Recovery Girl mutters to herself, tossing thinly veiled glares at him. “Yes, you can go see her, but I will be talking with you later.” Her tone says it’s not an option.

Shouta ducks his head in deference, stepping quietly over to Jirou’s bed. The television behind him chatters softly with Hizashi’s voice, a replay of all the “epic moments” that happened. Shouta tunes him out with the ease of long practice and clears his throat.

“Sensei,” comes Jirou’s hoarse voice. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re injured. Hurt. And you didn’t tell me.” From behind Shouta, Recovery Girl tsks.

“I didn’t think it mattered.”

“You didn’t—of course it matters.”

“Does it?”

“Of course. Of course. What happened?”

“I was… tired, I guess.”

“Can we talk face-to-face?” Shouta asks, hand coming up to the edge of the curtain.

“Uh—sure.”

Shouta swings open the curtain. Jirou stares back at him, skin papery and pale. Her eyes are half-lidded, bangs tangled over them. The covers are drawn up to her neck. She dredges up a smile. “Hey, sensei.” The glass on her bedside is nearly empty.

“I’ll fill that up for you,” Shouta says, eyes shifting over her sickly face one last time before he leans over and grabs it. He fills it up as quickly as he can from a water station in the room, swirls the water around, and sets it down next to her. Belatedly, he notices that Recovery Girl has left.

“Thanks,” she says, but makes no move for it.

“Why did you… why didn’t you come talk to me?”

“It didn’t seem important. Um. There was a villain attack near my dad’s music shop. It's just…” Her shoulders move in the barest imitation of a shrug. “It’s hard, you know? He’s stressed. Mom’s stressed. I need to help out more.”

Shouta blinks. “Do you live in… Saitama?”

Jirou shifts. “I… do, yeah. What about it?”

“Nothing,” Shouta says. So she must’ve bumped into him there and been too embarrassed to look him in the eye. He remembers… yellow shoes. She’d been wearing yellow shoes as she tore down the alley, hair peeking out of her hood—but he can’t spot any hint of shoes, yellow or otherwise. “I just remembered something.”

“Oh.”

“Please come to me if you need anything else. You shouldn’t be overworking yourself to the point of exhaustion.” Shouta runs a hand through his hair and glances at the television in the corner of the room. “I have to go, now. The second round is starting.”

“Okay,” Jirou says, subdued.

Shouta shifts his feet and rolls back his shoulders. “Are your parents here?”

“No. They’re busy.”

Shouta stands to leave. “And, oh,” he says, twisting back around, hand on the door, “did you get that cut healed?”

“It was troublesome, but yeah,” Jirou replies, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

-

The second event passes without fanfare. The third one, too. Nothing particularly interesting happens; Midoriya breaks some bones, Todoroki—loses?

To Shinsou.

Shinsou doesn’t even use his quirk, instead beating Todoroki with sheer skill. Hand to hand combat.

Shouta doesn’t gape, but it’s something close to it.

The rankings end like this:

Tokoyami, third place along with an absent Iida. Bakugou in second, spitting and snarling. Shinsou in… first.

All Might descends from the sky, metals gleaming in his hands. His smile is as bright as ever as he begins to bestow them, but before he can, a shimmering veil springs up around the podium. It circles the top students and All Might’s hulking form. Shouta, for a moment, thinks it’s a special effect. But his rational sense kicks in when a swirling purple portal spirals into existence above the ground. People pour out of it, villains and thugs, stampeding onto the ground. He even recognizes some of them—B rank criminals and bank robbers, ones that he’s done case files for or just seen on the news. They fan out onto the bubble they’re trapped in. No. They’re not trapped. The students are.

All Might steps protectively in front.

A villain mirrors All Might, striding to the front of the group, microphone clutched tight in his hand. Other hands—disembodied ones—cling tight to his body, one over his face acting like a mask. When he taps at the microphone, the sound it makes echoes through the arena's speakers.

“Testing, testing. Hello, heroes. Oh,” the villain says, dramatic-like and sweeping out an arm at the chaos in the stands, “all this for me?” A laugh rasps out of his throat. Heroes, to no avail, begin firing attacks at the hazy shield around the villains. A rippling wave of gold shivers across the shield whenever an attack hits, but nothing else changes.

The civilians murmur, but seem more interested in filming the going-on than getting themselves safe.

Shouta’s eyes widen. He stands, chair clattering to the ground behind him. Hizashi rushes to the door, banging at it. He can’t use his quirk in such an enclosed space with Shouta there, so he’s reduced to jiggling the doorknob and slamming at the wood. It’s useless; the door is frozen in place, shimmering mist lining the edges of it and preventing anything from moving.

“What do you want?” All Might asks. His voice echoes through the arena, microphone still attached to his chest.

With his capture weapon, Shouta draws his toppled chair closer, swings it behind him—careful not to hit Hizashi—and aims it at the glass in front of him. The announcer’s booth, unfortunately, is made specifically with material to withstand voice quirks like Hizashi’s, in case he gets too overzealous and begins to shatter things. So this means:

The chair bounces harmlessly off, like Hizashi’s fists on the wood. Shouta can’t break though. He can’t get out. He can’t protect his students.

“What I want?” the villain echoes. “I want you dead, All Might.” He raises a hand. “Attack.” The wave of criminals surge forwards. All Might leaps down from the podium, fists flashing and a smile bright on his face.

The civilians in the stands finally seem to recognize something is off. A cry goes up: VILLAIN-CRIMINALS-THE-HEROES-WILL-SAVE-US-HELP-ME-WHAT’S-GOING-ON-IS-THIS-A-TRICK—over and over people yelling and screaming themselves hoarse. Some of them scramble from their seats and run for the exits.

“Please stay calm,” Hizashi says into the microphone, but his voice doesn’t resound around the area, as it should. He curses, fingers flickering across buttons and switches.

Shouta doesn’t know the slightest thing about sound. “What if I just—smash it?” he asks, gaze darting from the ground to the soundboard. Hizashi shakes his head, focused.

Shouta tightens his grip on the capture weapon and steps over the toppled chair to the window, watching with a clenched heart as All Might does his best to defend the students. Still, some villains push past, though there aren’t many. He activates his quirk on the villains below. Some of them falter in surprise as they gesture or make movements and nothing happens. All Might makes quick work of those ones, flashing across the field. But more pour through the portal with every passing second. The ringleader with the microphone is nowhere to be seen.

Shouta grits his teeth—he can’t fight, he can’t do anything but stand there and erase quirks. But he does it anyways, feeling his hair lift off his shoulders and back down when the burn in his eyes becomes too much to handle. Again. Again. Again and again as he erases and deactivates and watches All Might toss people aside like they’re nothing but ash in his hands.

A conversation from earlier that day flashes into Shouta’s mind.

“Will All Might be okay?” Shouta takes out his phone, pointlessly glancing at the articles on it. “He’s stopped two crimes today. WIll he have enough time…?” They both know what he’s talking about. He can see Small Might in his mind’s eye; the skeletal bones peeking through skin, blood staining the edge of his lips.

“I never took you for the caring type,” Nedzu says. “All Might will have to be fine. He has no other choice.”

Something emerges from the portal. It doesn’t look human, with grotesquely large arms and legs, brain exposed for the world to see. A shiver trills down Shouta’s spine. It takes shambling steps, lurching forwards and back like a puppet on strings. Sometimes it’ll stutter, like it’s just relearned to walk.

All Might stands tall, but his chest rises and falls quickly. Shouta doesn’t know if he’s just imagining the sweat beading on his brow. A long, drawn out battle is bad. All Might’s weak from the crimes he stopped, today.

“Attack, Nomu,” the ringleader’s voice says from nowhere and everywhere, echoing through the speakers. Beside Shouta, Hizashi curses, slamming a fist on the soundboard.

The so-called Nomu bursts into life, barrelling towards All Might with sharp-edged teeth and an empty stare. Shouta erases its quirk but it doesn’t even slow. Its fist raises high, it slams into All Might. He blocks it, but only barely, skidding back and digging divots into the concrete.

And—villains begin to slip past All Might, full of mocking grins and curled lips. Towards the students.

They get closer, closer, until Bakugou snarls something and leaps into the fight, hands blazing. He detonates an explosion in an approaching villain’s face, shouting something that’s not picked up by any of the microphones. Begins to throw explosions left and right, hitting a man with a snakelike tail in the stomach.

Tokoyami, on the podium, raises his hands dramatically. Dark Shadow flickers out from his skin, raises itself to eye level, and Tokoymai nods assent. Shinsou rubs at the back of his neck and hops down, hands in pockets.

“Fuck,” Shouta says aloud, watching as his students actively endanger themselves. Bakugou fights recklessly, firing off bursts of light into the fray. Shinsou seems to be attempting to work his way towards All Might, but the man is busy blocking blows from Nomu. Blocking instead of dodging because if All Might dodged it might hit one of the students among the fray.

Nomu slams a particularly vicious blow into All Might’s midsection, and the man looks to be barely holding back blood. All Might’s back hits the shimmering wall behind him.

Shouta swears. Where is the quirk user who’s trapping them? Where? A powerful quirk like this… it would probably have some sort of weakness. A timer. Or a line of sight. Or a physical presence.

It’s a long shot, but Shouta diverts his attention to the stands, systematically erasing quirks section by section and seeing if the shield falls. He’s made it maybe halfway through when the ringleader emerges again.

“Nomu,” the ringleader calls. Nomu twists its head back at a sickening angle. All Might takes advantage of the momentary distraction to land a few blows in quick succession in Nomu’s stomach, then lifts the thing and slams it into the ground. The impact shakes the concrete, cracks spiraling out from the impact.

“Why don’t we try something new,” the ringleader says. He drops the microphone and sprints forwards himself instead of directing Nomu, hand reaching out for one of Shouta’s students. Shouta’s quirk is down, and his eyes ache something terrible, but he activates it and when the ringleader lands a five-fingered grip on a startled Tokoyami—the closest student to him—it does nothing.

Dark Shadow rises up. It hits the ringleader square in the stomach, sending him back in an undignified way. The microphone skids to the side with the screech of gravel. The ringleader rises, hand on his face dislodged, and he bares yellow teeth. He shivers—no, trembles with rage. His mouth moves, likely spitting out rapid-fire commands Shouta can’t hear.

The last thing Shouta sees before the ringleader adjusts the hand back on his face is a smug grin.

A portal swirls under Nomu’s head, embedded in the ground, and Nomu just… slips through. Startled, All Might loses hold of it, and Nomu plummets from the sky right on top of him. They go back to exchanging blows, wind blowing back All Might’s signature hair.

A blur of purple close to the ringleader. Shinsou. He fights fluid like water, ducking away and under and sending a jab right at someone’s throat. Grabbing hold of her hair, he slams her head into his knee. He lets her fall, blood staining his pants and dripping from her forehead. Dirty fighting. But then a second later, he whips out an elegant kick that sends another person stumbling back, and a series of moves that ends with a kick to the groin.

Shinsou gets closer and closer to the ringleader, and Shouta watches from the corner of his eye, still erasing quirks in the stands. His back is to Shouta, so he can’t tell if the kid says something, but the ringleader goes unnaturally still. He raises the microphone to his lips, says, “Nomu. Stop.”

Nomu stops halfway through a punch, fist raised high.

Shouta blinks his quirk off.

Someone stumbles into the ringleader. He shakes himself back into consciousness, glaring at Shinsou, and says, “Attack the purple kid, Nomu!”

Nomu springs forward, tearing away from All Might. Shouta activates his quirk on the next section of people and the shield goes down.

Too late. Always too late.

Nomu grabs hold of Shinsou in one giant hand. He seems so impossibly tiny, there. Nomu raises a hand up and up and swings him into the ground.

Blood sprays.

-

Shouta doesn’t really remember the rest of it. It’s all sort of a vague blur—opening the door, tearing down the steps, footsteps pounding in his ears. His breathing chokes him. He skids out into the arena to find Recovery Girl and heroes swarming the scene. Under Recovery Girl there’s—him. Splayed out and dead in appearance, if not for the slight rise and fall of his chest.

Later, he learns that All Might had succeeded in defeating Nomu—but only barely. All Might’s time as—well, All Might—had dwindled down to barely an hour. A tall man wreathed in purple smoke whisked the ringleader away kicking and screaming, shouting curses.

Kakashi said it would work, that hacker! You were supposed to be NPCs—no, no!

And the name that pops up, time and time again. Kakashi. Kakashi. The person who’d activated the shield said—Yeah, some guy named Kakashi hired me. I can’t take my shield down once it’s been up, I swear I didn’t know what was going to happen. It’s impenetrable, but I can only make one of that magnitude if I power up for a week. And it only lasts maybe a half hour.

Kakashi. Always him. His store is closed down when Shouta goes to visit. He can’t see inside; blackout curtains drape over the windows, and a sign on the door declares him closed.

Still, he loiters outside for the better part of an hour, staring at the door like it’ll open magically.

It doesn’t.

-

Shinsou’s placed into a coma so he can heal properly. He’s got internal bleeding, fractured ribs, the works. He heals for a few days, alone, until Hizashi tells Shouta to quit your pacing and go visit him.

So he does, fingers tapping anxiously at the wheel as he navigates late-night traffic. The receptionist lets him up to Shinsou’s room with a glance at his hero license. And…

Shouta stares at the door. He’d been working up the courage to go and see Shinsou for the better part of an hour. His chair squeaks under him. But… he hadn’t moved. So what made the sound?

Shouta frowns. He hadn’t moved. Hands fumbling, he sends a text off to Hizashi—If I don’t text back in two min call police—and yanks open the door.

Inside, moonlight spills into the room from an open window. It washes out the room and paints the looming figure in the room with shifting silver.

“Oh,” the man says, and Shouta recognizes him.

“Kakashi,” he whispers, like an accusation. Kakashi. The one who’d had a hand in the attack on the Sports Festival.

The man raises a slow hand. “Yo. Did you enjoy the last book?”

“Kakashi,” Shouta says again, and flares his quirk. His capture scarf lifts off his shoulders and launches towards Kakashi. It catches the man’s ankle, yanking him off-balance and away from Shinsou’s prone body. He stumbles across the room and crashes into the wall, sending medical tools tumbling onto the ground.

Kakashi sucks a breath in through his teeth, tugging against the scarf, but Shouta holds firm.

“What are you doing, Kakashi?” His voice is tight, strained as he glances down again at Shinsou’s serene face.

“I just—” Kakashi lets out a strangled breath. “Please, Aizawa.” They’ve both left off honorifics. “Please let me go, I need him.”

“What use would you have for a fourteen year old kid?” Shouta says. “What are you planning on doing?” His eyes begin to burn with the use of his quirk, and he steps forwards. He remembers, in bold letters on Kakashi’s file: Quirkless. He deactivates his quirk.

Kakashi tugs at the bond on his foot, as if testing it. He draws an odd-looking knife. A sort of blade with a circle at the end of the handle. Shouta tenses, but he just leans down, hair dropping over his eyes as he slices through Shouta’s capture weapon. Kakashi glances up, and Shouta can’t tell if he’s imagining the glint of red in his eye or not.

Shouta swears. “That’s not—”

“Please. Just let me have him.”

“Leave him alone.” Shouta steps forwards, now firmly in-between Kakashi and Shinsou. “Get out!”

Kakashi reaches into his pocket. Shouta whips his scarf at him. Kakashi dodges it smoothly, as if now he knows what to expect, and takes out another odd knife.

Shouta attacks again, but Kakashi darts in-between the curve of his scarf, throwing the knife at Shouta’s head in tandem with a punch. Shouta has to decide between getting impaled and getting hit in the head so he chooses neither; instead ducking down and aiming a blow at Kakashi’s midsection, knocking the breath out of Kakashi. Shouta springs up, aiming a hit at Kakashi’s nose but he tilts his head back to avoid it. Shouta manages to redirect at the last moment, landing a much weaker punch on the side of Kakashi’s ear.

Kakashi tries to hook a foot behind Shouta’s heel and send him tumbling, but Shouta shuffles quick-like out of the way, ducking close to Kakashi and knocking him off-balance. They trade blows, fists and kicks flying, until Shouta recognizes the fighting style. He nearly gets a right hook to the ear for his distraction as he stutters.

“You fight like Shinsou,” Shouta says, keeping his voice even despite the way his breath wants to rip out of his throat.

Kakashi cocks his head. “Shinsou,” he repeats. “So that’s the name Shikamaru has.”

“Shikamaru,” Shouta echoes, blocking a blow with an already-bruised arm. “That’s—”

“POLICE, HANDS UP!” In the doorway stand a squadron of police, their guns aimed at Kakashi. Kakashi casts one more, desperate glance at Shinsou.

“I’m sorry,” Kakashi says, and takes two long strides towards the window and jumps. He crashes through the window with his arms crossed to protect his face. Glass shatters, lifting up into the air like shards of mirror-dust in that one fairytale—and then the world speeds up back to normal, Kakashi vanishing into the night.

Shouta rushes over to the window. Looks down. There are three stories below him, an empty parking lot under that, and nowhere for Kakashi to hide.

But he’s gone.

-

Shinsou wakes up a day after, secure in a room without windows and a twenty four hour guard stationed around him. “Where am I,” is the first thing he says, then, eyes closing again in mock-sleep, “I guess it doesn’t matter. Hello, Aizawa-sensei.”

“Hello, problem child.” Without hesitation, he asks, “Do you know someone named Kakashi?”

Shinsou keeps his eyes closed. “Yeah, he’s my reincarnated ninja sensei from another dimension.”

“Shinsou,” Shouta says warningly. “This is serious.”

“I am serious,” Shinsou groans. “Shikamaru Nara. Did he use that name with me?” He props himself up on his bed, mouth stretching wide in a yawn. “I tell people, but they never believe me. Go ahead. Get that detective in here and he can tell you I truly believe in my delusion.”

Shouta doesn’t know what to do. “Ninja,” he says instead of anything helpful, sinking back into his plastic hospital chair.

Shinsou—Shikamaru?—yawns again. “This world is so ineffably troublesome.”

“Say I believe you,” Shouta starts. “Say I believe that you’re a ninja.”

“I am.”

“What do you want me to do? He tried to kidnap you.”

“You should have let him,” Shinsou says disapprovingly. “Would have made things so much easier.”

Shouta resists the urge to splutter in an undignified way. “I’m a pro hero—I can’t let a stranger kidnap you—”

“Hm,” Shinsou says.

“Look, kid,” Shouta grumbles, “why do you want him to kidnap you?”

Shouta cocks his head, like it’s obvious. “He needs to take us home. It’s been a while enough.”

“Home? Where’s home?”

“Konoha,” Kakashi says. “The seal is done. I had a few decades to work on it.” He tilts his shoulder in a half shrug. "Waiting on your sorry ass."

Shouta presses the panic button hidden in his scarf and stands, hands ready and scarf rising. “How’d you get in here?” He sets his feet into a fighting stance, wound tight like a spring.

“Aizawa-sensei. Do you believe me?” Shinsou asks.

“No,” Shouta replies, and the world goes dark.

-

Later, after Shouta's head stops aching, he’s given access to the security tapes along with the audio files from the hidden microphones.

Kakashi just… strolls past the guards. Their eyes slip over him like he’s not there. They don’t notice the creaking of the door as it opens, don’t notice Kakashi entering the room, easy as could be. In the tape, even Shouta doesn’t notice him until he speaks.

“Home? Where’s home?” the Shouta in the tape asks.

“Konoha,” Kakashi says. “The seal is done. I had a few decades to work on it.”

In the footage, Shouta jumps to his feet, ready for a fight. Kakashi stands like he has all the time in the world, hands stuffed into pockets and a smirk curling across his visible eye. “How’d you get in here?”

Shinsou slants a covert look at Kakashi, and the man tilts his head back. They have a split-second, silent conversation, then Shinsou says, “Aizawa-sensei. Do you believe me?”

“No,” Shouta replies, and then he goes slack. His eyes go blank and his hands fall by his sides.

Kakashi whistles. “Maa, what’d you do to him?” he asks, sauntering over to a prone Shinsou.

“It’s my quirk.” Shinsou stretches his hands up, yawns. “Brainwashing. I can make him do whatever I want. What’s yours?”

Kakashi shrugs. “Quirkless. Kind of. I’ve got the eye!” Shinsou seems to know what he means, nodding along. “It sort of… channels chakra from the Elemental Nations? I can use chakra but only in small amounts.” Kakashi takes Shinsou’s hands, yanks him out of bed and sets him on his feet. “Perfect for sealing. Maybe small genjutsus, which is, hey, how I’ve been running my business.”

“Sit back down,” Shinsou tells on-screen Shouta, and he obliges, sitting stiffly back down. “And… sleep. Don't wake up for another hour.”

“Out like a light,” Kakashi says admiringly. “Maa. I suppose we should get going?”

“I’m never going anywhere with you again.” Shinsou stumbles, weak from the medically-induced coma. “You’ll be doing your own paperwork for weeks. I’m going on vacation after this.”

They walk out of the room together, an odd look of concentration on Kakashi’s face, and slip past the team of heroes summoned by Shouta’s panic button. None of the heroes notice them, and soon they’re out of the building, safe as could be. On the cameras, they can be tracked until they enter a store and don’t come out. It takes a few hours to find their trail again—they’d exited the store from a window into an alley.

After, they catch a bullet train to Hosu. They don't buy tickets, though, instead clambering up onto the roof and lying there. It's so incredibly unsafe that Shouta wants to cry, but at the same time––watching Shinsou's sneakers tap against the roof as he walks––it's oddly familiar.

Shouta wonders if the feet against the rooftop sound like rain to the passengers.

The last shot of them is when they enter Kakashi's bookstore and don't come back out. Of course the bookstore is searched. But only about a day after, when their trail is tracked and they get a warrant for it. It's too late. The only things left in there are stacks of identical Icha Icha books, and, in the back room, a piece of parchment that spans the entire floor. On it is etched a strange set of words and symbols. It was sent to the analysis team, but something inside Shouta doubts that they'll find anything.

Laid down beside the symbols are a pair of shoes; one black, the other yellow.

It's the end. Kakashi is labeled a kidnapper and Shinsou delusional. Case gone cold. Shouta thinks he'll never see either of them again.

Until he does. But that’s a story for another time, maa?