Walking the streets was the best bet at finding another place to crash for the night. It was easy enough. Once you did it a few times, you even got good at it. If you didn’t, it was survival of the fittest. If you didn’t, it meant you were not part of the fittest, and you would not survive.

So Izuku figured out very quickly which alleys would accept kids like him, and which ones were too risky. He figured out which dumpsters belonged to the nearby cuisine place, and which ones actually had some food in them. He figured out what hours cops and heroes patrolled. He figured out which stores did not kick out scrappy children like him after seven at night. He figured out which cars belonged to which people. He figured out who worked what hours, what they bought at the local coffee shop. He figured out where they left their keys. He figured out where the security cameras were pointed.

And, of course, the most important thing: he figured out when he could do some risky shit like pickpocketing car keys for his own survival.

Izuku did not have to.

He would be fine if he slept on a roof or on a bench—even under one. He would survive a few nights in the row like that. There was no question regarding how far he was willing to twist his own neck if it meant taking a break or two along the way. It was just this: taking the car was his best bet at getting the hell out of Musutafu and into any other city. Hopefully, if there was enough gas in the tank, he could drive all the way to Tokyo.

The only thing pushing him to do this kind of thing was the buzzing in his skull. He was in a very nice position, if he did say so himself, and that meant he could take risks like this without having to be terribly aware of all the damage it might cause.

He would, of course, feel bad about it. By the end of things, he would call the cops and say he found the car once it was reported missing. As long as he took enough time and did not get caught, that was what he would do. Izuku had stolen many cars through the few years he had been on the streets. It was nothing fancy. Popping car keys and window tabs and slipping into the doors, especially at night, especially when no one was there to contradict him. Izuku did not do it for the adrenaline rush, as many people might claim. If he wanted a thrill down his spine he would try and take a chance at gambling in the darker parts of the underground. Some of those rings took bets on children—fights were fights, after all, all the blood spilt still went down the drain. Young or old. Skilled or not.

His issue, actually, was the fact he had no holding in any fight of his own. With how messed up his leg was, he was certain that if he did not get to Tokyo he would probably just sit around in the alleys and wait for death. There was not much else for him to do. He existed like this because there was nothing else for him. Not in any corners, not in any cities, not in any potential households.

Izuku knew that no one would come looking for him. No one could even expect it to be him. He had been dodging social workers and cops for most of his life, and even harder once he first ran from home.

It never took much, for kids like him.

That was the thing. There was no one to defend him, no one to vouch for him, and no one to take a look at him and say yeah, I know him, yeah, he’s mine. Izuku was a total lost cause in the eyes of the law, and it wasn’t even because of his vigilante behavior. It was because he was dead. It was because most of the kids who started off like him; known and appreciated by those close to him, were the very kids who went missing and were only looked for by a few people before the case was closed and the ends went dark.

Tipped tail lights, busted media, lost and found pictures swinging. That kind of thing.

Izuku had been a dead-end case for nearly three years. He had bounced around in several shady places, but the last time he got a chance like this was when he was still slinking around in the underground—

He was no vigilante. He had enough information to keep himself safe, and enough guts to take risks where others would never dare. Being legally dead had its perks. Not existing beyond anyone’s memory had its perks. Most importantly, being a convincing child with eyes had its perks.

It was nine at night. The woman who owned this car went in for her shift, left her keys behind the counter. She went into the back room to grab something. He took his chance. It was a small convenience store. No one ever really came in at this time. Izuku did not blame her for this decision, or her decision for buying an off brand Dr. Pepper. You know, save money where you can. Stuff like that. Izuku held no grudges to people just doing their best to survive—that was why he blacked out the cameras, sucked them dry of their energy, and took her keys.

He slipped out of the store. Static electricity danced along his hands, deep in his veins. It echoed in his brain. Cheered. Her car was parked just a little ways down the street. He knew the cameras would turn back on soon, knew that he had about six minutes before anyone really noticed anything.

Izuku unlocked the car, blinked when he popped the door open and found two backpacks in the passenger seat. He ignored them. A few moments passed, he slid into the driver’s seat and took a breath. Stealing and driving cars was his little party trick. He drove plenty of cars more complicated than this. He shut the driver’s door, put the key into the ignition and turned it. The car rumbled quietly. He watched as it lit up, as energy coiled through him.

Sorry, The boy apologized blankly. I’m sorry I’m taking your car. He shut his eyes for a brief moment before putting his hand on the wheel and checking his surroundings. Pressed his foot on the gas, carefully pulled out of the little parking place that the car had been in.

There was enough gas to get him pretty far. Musutafu to Tokyo was a pretty far distance.

He did not have enough cash to buy bus or train tickets. He hated cramped transportation, too, and hated being where too many people could see him at once. His quirk got finicky at times and so did police, especially because he looked like a delinquent. Because his hair was long and tangled around his neck and face. Because everything about him screamed runaway teen. Because he had not gone to any kind of school since he left his mom, and that meant running laps, that meant hiding in dumpsters and in forgotten baskets and never speaking too loudly.

Izuku swallowed thickly and drove. He had gotten terrifyingly good at it. He knew all the driving laws in this area, knew where to go and how to get there. He spent so much of his time just watching cars, watching them speed past him on the black roads.

Night came around and he knew to walk fast or to get hit. You get good at it, really, because if you don’t you are the first person targeted.

He liked practicing all the tricks he had.

Shooting off into the dark, swinging his legs above the fire-escape ladder most buildings had. Playing pogo-stick games with strangers in the dark, speaking in butchered tongues he never really learned but somehow figured out how to speak anyways. Learning the game, making it his to own and his to win. Watching. Sitting on rooftops, humming old songs, listening to near-dead radios. He kept his knees to his chest. He kept his dreams to himself.

The boy weighed his time at the first red light. His left leg throbbed steadily under the pressure. The light would turn green soon, he knew. He waited for the cars to pass by. Just some stragglers. Blue tint, grey tint, white tint.

Tinfoil cars, some gas operated, others electrical.

The one he was currently pirating ran on gasoline, sadly, but at least he could roll with it. He knew how. If he wanted an electric vehicle he would have had to wait until the next person at that convenience store came by, because that old man had a nice electric car. He knew that. But it would mean waiting in the near-cold for a few more hours and Izuku was tired. He was tired and hungry. Most of his time would be spent wasting every spare yen he had on painkillers and sleep aid. He would ditch the car somewhere else and trade out his current clothes for the ones in his bag. He would not steal anything from the car.

He just needed—the ride.

The moment to sit and drive and think while he started the long hours of going from this awful city to a mainstream one—as if it would be any better. The painkillers were for the aches he could not get rid of.

He fucked up his leg pretty badly because he got involved in the wrong crowd. When you are on your own, you cannot wait around and heal broken bones. Izuku just kept going. He dragged himself around the first few weeks, after the injury was given to him. He made a splint and kept walking. His shin was messed up, never healed right. Fractured bone, splintered, shattered. Something awful like that.

The light turned green. Izuku pressed his foot to the gas, gently moving along with the flow of traffic. The speed limit was forty, he was going thirty-eight. It was nine-twenty-three at night.

His mind was a racing hurtle, another thing to cross. He swallowed the grit in his mouth and reached for the radio—jabbed some random song on. There was a specific channel he liked to listen to at night. He could not recall what it was called, just that it was a something-something station that played old songs. Stuff from before quirks. The pre-quirk era of music, if you will.

It buzzed under his hands, zapped. He recoiled and turned on his blinker. He needed to switch lanes, make a turn up here in a few blocks. The radio hummed softly. Izuku did not know this song, but the beat was familiar. It reminded him of something good, something ugly but nice even when everyone else looked at it and died a little.

He changed lanes, breathing slowly. Musutafu to Tokyo. His life right here in front of him, wasting away.

Being legally dead meant no one was looking for him. He could live with that. The scars on his back and ribs could live with it. The damage to his skull could live with it, too.

When he thought too much about what it was like before the incident, he threw up. His head turned fuzzy. The world made too much noise. Figuring these kinds of things out meant struggling, shaking too hard to knwo any better. Just cold flashes of grey lights and ambulances, of a car crash and a wreck and metal inside of his body—electricity. He knew what his chances were. Kids like him.

The radio kept buzzing. It was a little staticky. He nudged the knob, turned it towards the left. The static crackled, got worse. The boy winced, biting at his lip. Sorry, Izuku apologized, again.

“You know, you gotta turn it to the right if you want the static to clear,” A voice said.

Izuku nearly slammed the brakes. He did no such thing. His hands didn’t even leave the wheel, and the car kept going at a steady, perfectly legal, pace. He blinked, looked in the rearview mirror. Someone was staring back at him with gold eyes, bright and amused. Discontorted, though, all things considered.

“Sorry?” Izuku tried, and he hated how it fanned out like a question, a stuttering. He—he should have checked the back of the car. He saw the bags. Why didn’t he check the backseat?

“Ah,” The other person said—their hair was sticking up in a billion directions. Golden, too, like their eyes. Nearly neon, fully alive. They were also a teenager. They looked to be about his age, really, and their voice was going high pitched as they spoke. “No, uhm, don’t be. I mean, be sorry for stealing the car, but not for the radio. It’s dumb, anyway. Barely plays music. Haha.”

Izuku bit his lip again, gaze sliding from the road to the person and back to the road. “Are you panicking?”

“What? No, of course not, haha,” They said, laughing again. A forced chuckle, rippling. It made Izuku feel awful. They looked like they just woke up, frazzled, to the car moving. “Did you mean—to, uhm, kidnap me? Kidnapping is a crime, dude, so, you should probably just let me get out of the car.”

He did not pull over. The road lasted for a while. He had to make a turn, in a few minutes.

“Sorry for taking your bedroom. I needed the ride,” The kid swallowed thickly. He lied straight out of his teeth—I didn’t need this car, I could have taken any car. To himself, he muttered: “Who sleeps in cars?”

The person was terribly offended by this, and swung for wads in their seat to poke their head between the passenger and driver seats. “Hey! Plenty of people sleep in cars, don’t act like it’s a small statistic. There’s nowhere else for me to sleep tonight, anyway, and that lady had been nice enough to let me stay with her! Now I have to try and go back and explain that I was kidnapped, and let her car get taken!”

Izuku heard a car honk at another shitty driver two lanes over. He squinted through the dark. Cars kept driving. So did he. Out of all of them, he wanted to say he was probably the only one going anywhere near the speed limit. He pressed harder on the gas, just to give a little kick—to blend in with the flow of traffic. He had done this plenty of times before. The car had a little screen to tell him the station of the radio and the time. It was nine-fifty-two. Time flew by when he was driving. He felt ill prepared to handle a discombobulated teenager in the backseat of a car he knowingly stole just to get to Tokyo.

“Do you have her number? She works at that convenience store from nine to twelve every night, from Monday to Friday,” Izuku said, dizzily, and refused to think about anything else that might be going on. The teenager’s head was right next to his. He could barely see a few freckles on their face, too.

The stranger groaned. “No, I don’t. How do you know that? Are you a stalker? Don’t tell me you’re a creep.”

“No and no,” The boy replied, lightning-fast. He could not feel his finger tips. The kid in the backseat was an electrical force, something his quirk was whining about, spinning in circles for. “I was watching the building because I needed to know if she put her keys where I could reach them. I only needed the car. I’m sorry for—for taking you with me.”

Silence, for a moment.

“You aren’t trying to kidnap me, right?” The person asked him, awkwardly. There was a panicked laugh trapped in their throat. “Or turn me in to the cops?”

“I hate cops,” Izuku confessed weakly, and finally took note of where he was supposed to turn. He switched the blinker on and waited for his chance, taking it as soon as it was available. He swabbed the lane and turned down the next road, blinking twice. “I don’t know you. I didn’t mean to take you with me. I don’t plan on doing anything to you, or with you. I promise I’ll pull over at the nearest gas station as soon as one’s available. So you can call someone. Most of the stations have phones.”

Cops were bad, for him. They did enough damage already. He did not have the guts to look at a police car and stay sane. He saw what they did. He knew not all of them were like the ones he met. That did not make him feel any less scared, any less violent and fearful, when he saw them patrol. It made him vigilant.

“No!” They blurted. Izuku flinched, clenched the wheel between his palms. Static buzzed in his head. The radio was still blearing creaky sounds. He pushed the knob to the right and the radio went perfectly sound. He could hear his heart thunder in his chest.

Silence, again, at another level. Izuku chewed through his lower lip and followed the rules of traffic. What was he, without them? He liked driving. He had never been pulled over by the cops and had never gotten caught by them, either. He was not about to break those good habits just because tonight was going in an unexpected direction.

“Don’t do that. Seriously,” They said, and it was quieter, more strained. Izuku did not blame them. He forced himself to relax his hands on the wheel, pressing on the brakes once he saw a red light up ahead. The other teenager kept talking. “I don’t have anyone to call, uhm, where are you headed?”

Izuku breathed. “Tokyo. Do you have a name?”

“Yeah,” The blonde agreed in a rush. They sounded finicky, too. “Denki. Do you have a name, mister let-me-steal-this-car?”

“Izuku,” The other kid said. Denki. First names. Given names. Okay. He could work with that. Who needed surnames, anyway? They just gave you away. He did not need anyone tracking down his legal records, either. Who knew. Both their names could be aliases to one another. They might not be real. He felt his heart ring, felt his quirk buzz and chitter.

Denki laughed again, brittle. Maybe it was a little worried. “Tokyo. Ah, that’s—so far. Hey. Would you mind if I just, stay with you for the trip?”

Izuku panicked a little, making a tea-kettle noise. He drove. The light had been green for three seconds too long. He was so under prepared for this. Why would anyone want to be in the same car as an underage driver? One they did not know in the slightest?

“Aren’t you worried I’ll kidnap you? Or poison you, or something?” He asked worriedly. The car could last on the road for a little while. Izuku’s backpack was thrown to the other seat. That made three bags. He felt like a lost kid, his first time in a clinic as a social worker talked to him, calling him honey and kiddo and holding his tiny, bandaged palms. He felt sick again. “What kind of kid sleeps in a stranger’s car and then decides their best choice is to go to Tokyo with the thief who stole that car?”

Denki did not have an easy answer for him. That was expected. There were freckles on Denki’s nose, just under his eyes. Izuku counted fourteen. There might be some on the boy’s neck, too, but he was not going to check. His head spun.

“I’m not that worried,” The teenager said meekly. He sat back down in the backseat, clicked a buckle over his lap. In the rearview mirror, Izuku could see he had a dark navy blue duffle bag next to him. “I needed to get out of the city, too, and you’re—you’re like my free chauffeur.”

“Ah,” Izuku replied, totally drawn out. “I can be your driver, yeah.”

He felt like he was going to cry. If he knew what to call the feeling, he would say madness—the oncoming spillage of tears and water and snot. No one ever told him what to do if he turned out like his mom. They all just told him what to do if he turned out like his father, which really wasn’t helpful at all.

“Are you panicking?” Denki asked, suddenly alert again. There was concern bleeding into his words. “Your voice sounds wet. Do you need to pull over? Did I say something wrong?”

The driver, a fifteen year old boy who had been on the run for three years, finally classified dead two years ago, just kept his eyes on the road. “No. You’re okay.”

Denki took a deep breath. He crossed his arms in his seat, staring directly into the rearview mirror. He started talking, filling in the silences that Izuku could never fill. “No one ever tells me when I do something wrong, so, if I do something wrong just tell me. Okay? Tokyo is really far away. Several hours. I’m going to—to chat your ear off. And you should tell me if I talk too much. If you’re my driver, I mean.”

“I’m your driver,” Izuku parroted back loyally. He just met this person and he was already hammer-fenced in. He was too much for himself. He swallowed thickly, kept driving as perfectly as he knew how. “I’ll tell you. You can talk all you want. It’s fine. I haven’t talked to anyone in a long time—a few weeks.”

A low whistle from the passenger. There was another loud honk several cars in front of them. Izuku nodded along, heard the buzz on the radio.

“That’s a long time to not talk to anyone,” The blonde said, quietly. He sounded a little sad, tangled up. His hands were lost in his sweatshirt, digging in. “Why do you need a car?”

“To leave,” The driver swallowed. He gripped the wheel. “To see a doctor.”

“Oh,” Denki echoed. “Are you sick?”

“No,” Izuku answered. He could talk and drive. He talked to himself all the time, though that was probably not something he should say. There was no one else to talk to, not when you were him. He had memories and nightmares and strangers. He tries to avoid the third the most. The other two were tolerable. “Someone messed up my leg. Sledgehammered it. I never let it heal right and I think it’s infected. So I’m going to Tokyo. They have better clinics than Musutafu.”

“Underground clinics, you mean?” The passenger asked, pointedly. He mumbled something about being sorry and then shook himself off. “Sledgehammered. Ouch. Did you piss someone off? Who whacks a kid with a sledgehammer?”

No reason in particular. There was no way to explain it. Izuku saw too much and made his escape too obvious. He heard too much, tried to get out too soon. Someone stronger and faster than him didn’t like it. Someone worse than him wanted him dead because of it, but someone stepped in and proposed a threat instead. Why kill a boy? He’s alone. He’s got no one to tell. Izuku had cried during it. He dragged himself away after. They should have just killed him. Snapping his bones and cracking them was worse. It was a lot worse.

But they were right. He had no one. He was alone. There was no one to tell and no one to go to. Izuku had no patent to rely on, and no friends, either. He had been on his own for too long to form any bonds like that.

“Cruel people,” He decided on saying. The radio was playing a pop song. The beat reminded him of his dad, before everything went wrong. He reached over and changed the channel, blurry. His eyes never left the road. “I made them mad. They knew I wouldn’t go tattling to the police, so they just let me off with a warning.”

“Were they villains?” Denki sank into his seat, laughing weakly. “Are you gonna tell me you’re some kind of villain’s son, next?”

“Uhm,” Izuku echoed, intelligently. No. He wasn’t. He was actually going to ask if Denki understood risks, or rules of the road, or if he ever got involved in the wrong crowds. If he was traveling with a stranger like this, surely the teenager was running? Probably in the foster system. Kids like them wore bags and never left anything behind. Everything they had could be carried with them.

A long pause, the trembling silence. Izuku’s quirk whirred like an electric fan that accidentally got unplugged. His heart was in his throat.

“Oh, god,” The other teenager said, and he sounded startled. “Are you?”

“No,” Izuku said, whispering. His voice was thin and brittle. He hated how scared it sounded, suddenly meek and worthless behind the steering wheel. He swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat. “No, I wasn’t. I just got involved in the wrong crowd. I’m not—not a villain’s kid.”

Inko did not count.

Neither did Hisashi, despite all the things he did.

He was not the child of a villain. He was just a child who got in with the wrong crowd. Izuku was another statistic and no one could tell anyone otherwise. He was not there to contradict it. He was a mystery to many. His case had been closed for a long time—he would know, he checked. Many, many, many times over the years.

His mom kept asking for updates, for a while. So did his dad. Then the questions stopped. Then the updates that meant virtually nothing stopped, too. Then everything stopped and Izuku knew that it meant they thought he was dead, or as good as dead. He knew it meant his dad got away with whatever he did. He knew it meant his mom was no longer present, and that meant he would never know if she got buried or cremated. She never talked about what she wanted to do with herself, after she was dead. If she preferred a casket or an urn.

“Wrong crowds, huh?” Denki asked, and his voice was high pitched again. “That’s fair. That’s really understandable, actually. I used to be in with the wrong crowds, too. They never hit me though. Yours sounds—bad.”

“It was bad,” Izuku admitted into the buzz of the music. “But I never stayed for long.”

The road was a winding path. It was ten at night already. Few people were still on the road, but the occasional car streamed past. There was a red vehicle behind them, not quite riding on the tail of their car but getting too close for comfort. Izuku swallowed again, nerves biting away at his insides. He turned on the blinker to switch lanes.

Denki laughed again, chirpy and quiet. He seemed like a chatterbox. Izuku used to be one, too, before the accident. He recalled a time where he loved to talk and to speak and to make noise. He still wanted to. Parts of him refused to agree, and his tongue got tied up, and the world turned into something too cruel to fight with. He knew his position meant he was vulnerable. He knew it meant running faster than others. That was all. He stopped talking as much because when you’re dead, you’re dead, you shouldn’t be talking.

“Are you,” The stranger started to say, but winced when the music crackled. Izuku waited. He bit his tongue again, kept his eyes on the road. Denki cleared his throat, probably plastered a curious smile on his face. “Are you running away?”

Izuku refused to look back at the rearview mirror to see.

“Not really,” He murmured. The radio continued to share its love for sound and awful music. The beat was bad. He swallowed thickly, wondering what song this was. It wasn’t in Japanese. He reached over and switched the station again, turning the knob. Static crackled. “Are you? Do I need to worry about cops coming after this vehicle because you’re in it?”

Cops were problematic. So we’re social workers and anyone else in the authority category. Izuku had gotten good at memorizing the Musutafu police’s patrol routes and timestamps, but he was going to have to start over for Tokyo’s own. It was either going to be easy or hard. He did not really want to know which.

“No! No cops after me, haha,” The blonde laughed. He did that a lot. It was a nice sound, really, blended into the mess of noise that this rickety car could produce. If they were just on the streets talking, Denki’s laughter would fit right in. “I’m not really running, it’s just no one’s going to look for me, is all. My foster parents haven’t noticed that I’m gone.”

Foster parents. You’re a foster kid. I used to be one of those. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Foster kids, too, then. Something bitter.

Izuku stopped wondering what it would be like in strangers’ homes after he ran off. He forgot—some people never got declared dead like he did, and were forever painted missing. They kept getting followed and tracked down. Some kids never got to vanish. They never got to just be done with it. Not like him, not like Izuku.

He bit his tongue. “Oh.”

Denki made a weak noise again, trying to cover up some other sound that had burst past his throat. “Yeah. Pretty shitty.”

“I used to be in the system,” Izuku said after a moment. Air left him in a rush, and his vision blurred. He did not fumble. He already switched lanes, and the asshole who had been going too fast behind him had already gone way ahead on the road. “Only for a little while. I’m sorry you got stuck with bad people. I’ll take you to Tokyo—with me, if that’s what you want. You might get dragged back later, though, uhm. I don’t know. Why were you with a stranger in her car?”

The other teenager just shrugged. “She let me stay with her. I didn’t know her, but it was either her or a bench and her car at least had heating. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Stranger danger?” Izuku offered lamely.

“Oh my god,” Denki snickered—and it was a genuine laugh, real amusement. Something other than nerves. Something other than the awkward tension of a potentially dangerous situation, proven to be anything but. He shuddered in the backseat, made a contemplative noise. “Are you a stickler for rules?”

“No, I always hated them,” He replied. “They never made much sense to me when all the other kids could break them, but I couldn’t. Seemed unfair.”

He switched lanes again. Someone was speeding. He was going at a reasonable speed, thank you. If a cop got on that person’s ass, that was their problem. Izuku’s hands spasmed on the wheel. An electric car flew past them, and he blinked. Barely watched it glide through the traffic. He pushed his mind aside and felt his quirk twist inside of him, coil up like a hundred feet of wiring just waiting to be untangled.

He craved the energy as much as he craved his supposed great escape. It wasn’t like he had been planning to do this for long. He just saw the opportunity and told himself to take it, take it now. Don’t let it slip away. Who knows when you’ll be able to do this again. What if you never do?

So he took his chance. Talking to kids his age was not terrible, in fact, he enjoyed it. Izuku knew he was a little blunt. He knew that his friendliness had drained right out of him when he was younger, so he sounded like an automated voice reply system most of the time. He tried to give more to whet against than his blank responses, but he just—he failed so often. To be kind was to risk another hour, another day, another week trying to cut loose and cut his ties before they choked him. It was survival. That was what it was like on the streets. You or them. He knew that quite well.

“Huh,” Denki hummed. “That’s fair. I think I never liked rules, either. I started breaking them when the rules became too complicated, you know? Like, hey, don’t do any of these things unless I’m here with you and it’s in the afternoon and it’s during the weekend.”

Izuku snorted, made a blubbering noise from his spot behind the wheel. “That sounds awful. Did all your foster parents have such specifics?”

“Most of them,” The blonde agreed. A long pause, then, and after a second Denki tapped the side of his head and smoothed his hair out. It still stuck out in a hundred different angles. “A few were nice. I guess you would understand that, right?”

“Sure,” The freckled kid said. They both had freckles, but Izuku had more. Hundreds, probably, all scattered along his back and shoulders and cheeks and arms. He had some on his stomach. He had a few more on his legs, hidden by angry scars and bruises that never really healed. Most were covered by socks and his pants and his shoes—boots he liked a bunch. They were rubber. They made his head spin in a good way. If his quirk had a mind, perhaps it would like the shoes, too. “Some of them.”

Not like Izuku could recall much of anything from that time period. He was returned to his biological parents and it all went right down the drain, anyway. Smoke to fire, electricity to the burst of random things moving. The system only ever had its way of making Izuku’s life worse than it already was.

He was passed around and that was it. Maybe Denki did not have that kind of trouble. Who knew, really? He was not about to ask for the specifics of the stranger’s maybe-not-maybe-yes terrible upbringing. It would be in bad tastes on his end to pry.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to pull over?” He asked again, just to make sure. The radio was pumping out wild notes, joyful and alive. It was distorting.

“No, don’t worry about it,” Denki dismissed, smiling a little. “I’ve always wanted to go to Tokyo.”

“Really?” Izuku asked, blinking twice. The light went green. He started off again, driving carefully. His head was refusing to cooperate with him—to get from this city to Tokyo, he just needed to keep to this road until the highway popped up or something. Then it would be smooth driving. “It’s far away from home. Expensive.”

The blonde shrugged again. “I don’t have a solid home base, anyway. And money has no value to me. Not like I have anything to buy.”

That was fair. Izuku had nothing, either. He had spare change and pocket cash he stole from strangers in dark alleys—tunnels that curves, visions that doubled in the electrical dark. Green and red and pale electricity. He took what he could get and made sure no one else got too much out of him. The information he had was his, and he knew that, which meant he was holding onto it until he had a chance to actually sell it for enough money to just leave. Not sure where. Just somewhere.

“Where’d you learn to drive?” Denki asked, after a moment. He sounded curious.

“The internet,” Izuku explained dutifully. He learned it in bits and pieces. Everywhere at once. “Arcades. I would watch cars and learn patterns. Then check signs to see speed limits and stuff.”

The stranger whistled, folded their hands into their sweatshirt again. Absently tugged at the seatbelt. “Damn. Do you like patterns, then?”

“I just recognize them,” He shook his head, busy keeping his foot on the correct pedal. It was late at night and yet there were so many drivers out on this road. Maybe they were college students. He forgot which area around here had nightclubs lined up and down the block. Izuku knew it was somewhere nearby, judging by all the half-drunken souls walking on the sidewalks while grinning and stumbling along. He swallowed thickly again,

“Oh, cool,” Came the reply. It was not judgmental. Izuku had sort of expected it, really. Most of the people who ever got to know him always found it weird that he recognized intricate patterns in such short amounts of time. They were always impressed at first, and then annoyed later once he did it too much. Denki cleared his throat, hooked his thumbs into the fabric of his shirt. “So. How old are you? I’m fifteen, but I’ll be sixteen in June. You look around my age.”

“I’m fifteen,” Izuku replied stiffly. He never knew people cared about all the specifics, let alone stuff like age. None of it really mattered when you would never see each other again, right? Maybe. Perhaps the stranger was asking because they wanted to know how bad their situation was, with an underage driver.

The blonde was smiling, though, so the driver kept up with the conversation. “I guessed correctly! Hey. What middle school did you go to?”

“Aldera,” He said. “What did you go to?”

Denki did a mock shudder, and gave a wider grin. It was genuine. “Aldera? Youch. I was homeschooled around that time.”

“Did that go well? Being homeschooled during foster-care?” He asked after a second. His time in the system was brief and blurry. He did not recall every face or every bad incident. He was returned to his parents in under a year, so it never made much sense. Everyone had kept him in the dark about it. He never bothered to ask, even after he was out and back in his mom and dad’s custody. His school had let him rejoin even after a near-year of absences. It had not been worthwhile.

After everything, he supposed he had it coming. School was never a place he enjoyed. Learning was simple enough, instructions handed to him by a teacher who did not want to waste time trying to actually teach. The classes were loud, covered in auras that made Izuku’s head hurt. The static electricity passed between papers and skin, flickering in his vision as he bit his tongue. The urge to pull it. The urge to rip it open and blackout the room. Sometimes he wished he had, back in school. Maybe it would have kept him safe from the nagging feeling of wrongness that always followed him around. His quirk had been a gossiping topic, and he had hated that the most.

“I guess,” Came the reply, sullen. “Never been much for school. My quirk always made it hard to focus.”

“My quirk makes it hard, too,” Izuku said. He was not sure what else he could say. His quirk made thinking harder, made living more complicated than it was worth. It meant needing electricity to thrive. He could move it in directions, blackout cameras and force lights to grow in power until the bulbs bursted.

The blonde nodded along, shrugging. “I figured.”

“Did you?” The driver asked quietly. No one really figured those things out. Never easily. Not unless you had a sensor quirk or something—foresight, mind reading, hypnosis, hive minds, such of the like.

Denki smiled a little, made his expression easily understood in the rearview mirror. “Your brain is fuzzy. I can hear all the synapses.”

The clicks and bursts and stirs. Izuku would never have guessed that anyone could have heard it. From one thing to another. If you can hear the synapses, the electricity that every human body had—the motions of the brain, the control and the order, it was a strange thing. A revelation. Izuku was not surprised to hear it, not really. He thought it was interesting.

Electricity existed within the human body. It was not a new phenomenon. What was strange was the ability to process it when it belonged to an organic form—lived, existed in the form. Izuku was not a scientist. He was probably lacking in nearly every educational category due to his own choices regarding school. Dropping out meant he got his information from trial and error or the library. Maybe the streets, if anyone wanted to bestow some kind of wisdom on him. An unlikely situation, by all means, but still one he tried to be prepared for.

“You can hear the electricity?” He mumbled, repeating it back in curiosity.

“Yeah?” Denki echoed, as if it was obvious. His brow pulled taut. “Can't you? You have an electricity quirk, too.”

“Can you sense them?” Izuku asked after a moment. He could hear his quirk chitter, feel it run up and down his spine. It was saying hello. He wished it would shut up. Some quirks were present if the host had a similar one—like how some people with mental quirks could identify others with mental quirks. “Not just hear them. But—see them, almost, as they move?”

The stranger in the backseat hummed agreeably. “Something like that. I guess I dunno how to describe it. No one ever really talks about the specifics. I don’t bother to explain it, so.”

Izuku made a considering noise and kept his focus on the road. A rock song was on. He had no clue what, but seeing as it was in English, he would assume that it came from the pre-quirk era, too. That was what the station played. Everything and anything from the time before meta abilities thrived in society. Back when life did not include superheroes but still had their fair share of supervillains. It was late in the night and here they were—two runaway teens listening to decades old songs in a stolen car, hijacked and moving like sugary sweet slush.

He knew he was a good driver. He did not need anyone to explain to him the rules of the road or what it meant to sit behind the wheel. He already knew all those things, the corners he could not cut and the paths he must take. So he sat behind the wheel and let the car tread into silence as he turned down another street and started the long trip to the highway—he knew why, he knew how, he knew where.

Through all the time on the streets, if he did not know these things he would be at risk for just about anything awful. Anything and everything. So Izuku kept up to date and kept himself alive, and that was how it had to go. Alone or with a group. He was in with the wrong crowds so often, and then he was alone, and then he was back with the people who bit at his heels and howled with laughter when he showed up hurt. So he let that sickness coil, let it cross over and cross together.

“What’s your quirk?” Denki asked. Five songs had played since they last talked—the conversation about schools and electricity fading into the background.

The driver clenched the wheel, felt his heart hammer in his chest. My quirk, Izuku thought plainly, poorly, Is a poor development of my mom’s bad decisions.

He did not say this.

“Electrical direction,” Izuku replied after a delay. Something like that. He blinked slowly. His head was swirling. He could taste ash on his tongue as he approached the next block. The boy sniffled, face souring at whatever smoke was billowing in the sky. Damaged property, a fight of some kind, probably. “Directing stuff. Taking it, moving it around. Currents. I can’t produce my own, I can only take it from another source.”

“Oh, no way!” The blonde sat up straighter, seeming to grow in excitement. “Dude. I can produce and absorb electricity, but I can’t really direct it anywhere! No way.”

There was a smile on the stranger’s face, now. Glimmering, alive, not nervous. He had been fidgeting in the silence whereas Izuku had grown tense with the quiet. He winced at the noise in the backseat, but mumbled an inquiry anyway. Noise was nothing new. He was just particular.

“Ah,” Came the reply, muddled. An observation to be said: “Then our quirks compliment one another.”

Izuku could feel energy. He knew where it thrived, knew that his own body seemed to require a surplus of it just to do basic tasks. He was a device always needing charging, essentially, which meant staying near electricity was his way of survival. Being away from it was going into the dark and never turning on a light, flicking on a flashlight of some kind. It meant silence. It meant facing cold drafts, no static, no noise. Denki buzzed like some kind of lightbulb, about to burst—there was energy all over him, written into his very existence. It made Izuku’s quirk want to flash and flicker.

“You ever think about being a hero?” The teenager asked from the backseat.

He was keeping up a conversation quite easily, making small talk without a problem. Izuku took notes, swallowing the sickness that was coiling in the back of his throat. He could taste the acid, just barely. It crawled slowly.

“Not really,” The driver said quietly. Heroes came and went in his mind, more like pictures than real dreams. He had no need to try and play a good person, not when he was dead. Not when he lived in fear. Being dead did that to you—not having somewhere safe to deposit yourself or any of your keepsakes. “I never really had that chance.”

“Oh,” Denki echoed. “Well. That’s fair.”

The car was silent except for the steady thump and mutter of the staticky radio.

—

“Hey, Denki,” Izuku whispered, looking back over the seat. They had already parked. Denki had been asleep for the past two hours, half-slumped, half-sitting. Izuku tapped the center console, knocking his knuckles on it loudly.

They were not in Tokyo quite yet. Somewhere nearby. He hadn’t been paying attention to the signs nearly as much as he should have been. All he knew was that Denki passed out, the car was low on gas, and he was hungry. If there was enough money between the two of them, Izuku would scrape enough together to buy something from the station. Right now, though, they were just in the parking lot. He would back out into one of the pumps after Denki woke up.

“Denki,” Izuku whispered again, and he knocked his knuckles on the console again. He knew what was inside it because he checked after pulling into the lot. Some gum with blue packaging, a few plastic packages of tissues, and some coins. Money was never bad. He would take the tissues and gum; spend the money at the station and see what was available.

A few moments passed by. Izuku’s heart was pounding, thundering.

“What?” Denki blinked his eyes open, groggily. He sat up, the duffel bag sliding off of his lap and nearly hitting the car’s floor—he grabbed it before it did. His hair was back to sticking up in all directions. “Huh? What’s wrong? Are we there?”

“No,” Izuku apologized. The boy gestured to the other’s boggled face, wincing. “We’re at a gas station. We need more gas, some food. You might want to use the restroom?”

The blonde blinked. “Oh, shit. I have some money—not much, but it might help.”

Denki started unzipping the duffle and rummaging through it. Izuku swallowed thickly. He glanced out the car windows and then back at the little clock. He knew it was dim, that it was not there because he turned the key in the ignition just to shut it off for a moment—but the time was around midnight. Maybe twelve-thirty.

“You’re okay,” The freckled kid mumbled. “I just thought I should wake you up. I had limited cash and no food, so I thought it would be wiser if we combined some cash together to pay for gas and whatever else.”

“No, no,” Came the reply, a muffled laugh as Denki pulled out a small, beat up wallet. He fumbled to get it open, squinting at it. “That’s smart. Sorry, I was just, really tired.”

Out came some cash, a few wads—not a lot, but far more than Izuku expected. He blinked, too, when Denki held out his hand full of the money and gestured for Izuku to just take it. Scarpe together some funds, get food and water, get gas. His mind was rumbling like a train, scrambling together like egg yolks and egg whites.

“Ah,” Izuku nodded slightly, hands still tight on the wheel. The key was in his right hand, on the wheel, and he slowly put it down on the center console. “How about you go in? Do you know how to work a gas pump?”

“I can do it,” The runaway said point blank. He waved a hand, then smoothed his hair back. Strands still stuck up wildly, and after a second, Denki gave up. “I helped my foster siblings before, it’s no prob. You can go in and grab something, yeah? Ask for the—money—on the pump. Can you back the car out to one of them?”

“Yes,” Izuku said agreeably, and took a breath before turning the keys again. The car sputtered on, gas to gas, and he looked around before curving the vehicle to a pump. He stopped on it, close, and carefully put it into park again. “I’ll go in. What do you want?”

He could hear, mostly just feel, the buzz of cameras. With enough energy, a bit of guts, he licked his lips and pressed his hands into the wheel. He could feel the currents move. His eyes burned at the motions in his vision, but after a moment, he heard the steady popping in the back of his head. The camera went black, directly over their pump. He felt the currents slip by, coiling to him, nearly invisible. Denki might be seeing them, feeling where they went—if it was true he could sense electricity.

The blonde didn’t comment on it, though, only looked up with an expression Izuku could only dare to call amused. “You mean food?”

He nodded, “Drinks, stuff. Snacks. Some are more expensive than others. I’ll see what’s there.”

“I don’t care what you grab. Anything’s fine. Don’t let any employees creep you out,” Denki advised with a crooked smile, shoving his duffel bag onto the leather of the backseat before popping open the back door and wriggling out to tend to the pump. “And, I bet you’ve done this before, don’t panic with them. They aren’t really that scary. It’s late, anyway, we can say we got back from a movie or something.”

Izuku nodded along. The cameras buzzed. This one, directed at the pump they were at, was shot down and blurred. Izuku was legally dead. What was someone going to do? Arrest him for illegal quirk use? How could a dead person do that, anyway?

It only took a moment before he slipped out of the driver’s seat and made his way to the station. It was late. There were only a few cars in the parking lot, even less on the road. They were near Tokyo, but it wasn’t like he had been looking at a map or anything. He memorized the roads he needed and all the turns—not the standoffs or drifting places—so Izuku only had his memory from his trips to libraries and observations to go off of.

He wandered the station’s food aisles and picked up a few things. Whatever was cheap and still made him think of home, or anything that might be tasty. Drinks came next. He fumbled a little with the hot tea and coffee machines, but it was easy enough after his own failure of reading the little labels on every button.

The kid ushered himself to the register after noticing only one person was visibly working. Someone was probably in the back, watching camera feeds. For measure, and his nerves, Izuku wheedled with one of the cameras in the store so it would flicker, pause and stumble. It came back on after a second. He could feel the energy, too, hear it zap and zittle in the air.

“Just these,” Izuku announced, as quietly and politely as he could. People, especially people who actually had jobs and real things going on, were not the kind he talked to. “And gas on pump two.”

He emptied his pockets of the wadded cash. Coins clattered to the counter, and he winced. This, of course, did not stop him from sliding the rolling metal back to him and straightening it all out. Yen galore, for someone like him. Denki was the one he had to thank for most of this. It actually meant being able to eat something, even if that something was gas station food. Anywhere else and it would be odd. Tokyo was pricey like that.

“A kid,” The cashier raised his brows, looking terribly bored and terribly underpaid. “With just a bunch of wadded cash.”

Izuku shrugged. “Parents and late nights.”

The cashier shrugged, indulging Izuku’s little comment and rolling her eyes. She nodded about the gas pump, and checked out the two bags of chips and the few drinks he had picked out. Coffee, tea. A cherry Coke that he liked but would give to Denki if asked. There had been pre-packaged onigiri so he plucked that off its refrigerated shelf and handed it to the person working the only active register, too.

She checked him out quickly. Only a few moments went by before she handed him a bag—and a few coins in change—and told him the gas would start filling in a few seconds. Izuku knew, based on his own calculations, that the gas was only enough for a little longer. It would get them to Tokyo, or right outside.

“Have a good night,” The cashier said, nodding at him as he moved to leave—she flashed him a small smile. “Make sure your parent doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Yeah,” He agreed.

A laugh bubbled past his throat, unwanted, and he made his way out of the station. The bell on the door chimed. He heard electricity buzz, pulsing deep in his brain. Walked crookedly back to the car—finding Denki at the pump squinting as the gallons rolled on the little screen.

“Denki?” Izuku asked, quietly. His head was steadily pounding. The camera was draining him, unfortunately, and he would blame that on his lack of sleep.

The blonde looked over his shoulder, and he smiled when he saw the bag that dangled off one of Izuku’s arms. In both hands was a different drink. He nodded at the pump, talking lightly. “Yeah? It’s almost full, I think. What did you get? Anything good?”

“Water, onigiri,” The freckled kid replied. He shrugged a little, almost helpless. Then he wandered towards the driver’s door and popped it open with a skilled maneuver not spilling a drop. He set the bags in the passenger’s seat, then the cusp in the cup holder. He would pass whatever Denki wanted back to the teen when they were both in the car. “Some chips. Hot tea and coffee. I didn’t know which you’d want.”

“Cool,” Denki smiled again. He kept his attention, mostly, on the pump. Once it looked like it was over, and no more gas would be distributed, he nodded to himself and hummed a tune as he set the things back aside and closed the dumb metal door that the pump went into on the car.

Izuku had no idea what the terms were. He just kind of knew what the things were, how to describe them, but never what their names were. His most crucial flaw: not knowing the details.

He slid into the driver seat and took the keys off the center console. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Denki agreed, and popped open his own door and slipped right back to where he had been sitting before they parked at the gas station. He buckled himself in after closing the door and yawned, covering his mouth with a hand. “You can have the coffee, if you want it. I never really drank much like that. Tea is fine.”

“Might be bitter,” The other kid warned, but took the tea and handed it to him. “Any snacks before I start going? I can just give you the bag.”

“Sure,” Came the reply, another shrug following right after. Denki extended his hand, ready to grab whatever Izuku gave him from the passenger seat. The plastic bag from the gas station crinkled as Izuku handed it over, but went pretty quiet when Denki set it by the duffel bag. He held a thumb up, smiling again. “I’m good to go. Thanks for getting the—the food, you know. Sorry it’s not some high quality stuff.”

“Don’t be,” Izuku said. He put the keys in the ignition and heard the car vibrate, felt in turn on. The radio popped back on, as well, buzzing in hello. This song was also in English. He blinked twice and then looked about. No one else was in the lot, and though cars were on the road, he was not there yet.

He pulled out and away from the pumps. It only took a moment to use his free hand and click his seatbelt in, a little delay from when he should have done it. No matter.

They were out of the gas station’s lot in a matter of half a minute.

—

“How often do you do stuff like this?” Denki asked after a while. Curiosity seemed to get the best of him quite often, always moving from one topic to another. It wasn’t terrible, even enjoyable. Talking with him was not a terrible feat.

“I don’t know,” Izuku hedged, awkwardly. “Enough times to do it right. I haven’t gotten caught yet.”

Izuku had stolen cars before. A few hundred times—or maybe just enough to count on one hand, perhaps both of his. He knew which roads to take and which to avoid. He knew how to greet others and how to walk away, but never how to run—part of him did, somewhere, back when he was still a foster kid or called his dad’s son. His mom’s son. Back before, or when. Or after. Something else. He knew that people talked about the high road and the road under the bridge. He knew that he could take it, could make either work if he really tried.

His broken bone said otherwise, most days, but that was because of his own issues. He made poor choices, took the wrong alleys. Got in with people who did not treat him right but smoked large cigars and talked about better things. Tokyo, Yokohama, Fiji, Florida, Thailand, Vietnam, Guatemala, Beijing.

They talked about cities and countries and states. Places to go. People to learn from or to run away from.

“Oh,” Denki laughed a little, not quite humored but amused by something. He sounded stilted, too, twisted too much like a wrung out rag. “You’re a professional carjacker?”

“Car thief,” Izuku corrected lamely, and swallowed his anxiety. His head spun in circles. The road was spiraling too much, his head was not in agreement. Not at all. Parts and pieces of him were on the highway and in the gas station and back in his mom’s kitchen under the table and under the chairs because he had been so young and so small back then. “Both. You aren’t wrong.”

A long silence, again.

“How are you going to pay for the doctor?” His passenger—friend, stranger—asked him curiously. Not a hint of judgment, just some poorly veiled concern.

“I’m not,” Izuku explained slowly. His eyes had been burning for the past three hours. It was currently four-twelve in the morning, and he had not planned to be stuck in some kind of traffic jam. “The doctor I’m trying to find is part of—the underworld. If I’m lucky, they’ll ask me to work off my debt, or I can trade treatment for information. I don’t mind it.”

“That’s still paying,” Denki laughed. He sounded tired, too, but he hadn’t fallen asleep since the gas station. Izuku had told him he could, if he wanted, that he didn’t need to keep him company. “I thought you were about to say some good news, like, oh, no, they’ll do it for free or something.”

Izuku sighed, tired and strung out. His leg had been throbbing in tandem with his head for a while now. He was just going to say it was infected by now. Healed wrong.

“I wish it were,” He agreed whimsically, voice a little butchered for someone behind a wheel. “Life’s expensive.”

Denki paused, seeming to flounder before leaning forwards in the seat and frowning. They had already drank the coffee and tea. Izuku had opened a water bottle and already drank half—so had Denki. The blonde ate a bag of chips. The rest of the food was still waiting to be consumed.

“Are you sure you can keep driving? I know we are near it, like very close right now, but you look sick,” He asked, talking quietly. The jam was a quaint little reason to talk more. The radio was nearly inaudible, turned to one of the lowest volumes. Denki’s voice sounded genuine when he spoke, maybe too nervous, maybe too awake again. As if it just clicked to say this idea. “And—haha, uhm—what if the cops are already looking for this lady’s car? We could walk, instead. It might be easier.”

A loud horn sounded. More honks followed. Even if the traffic cleared soon, it was so early in the morning. He knew that back in Musutafu that cops started patrolling during this hour. He also knew that it meant that the lady at the convenience store probably filed a missing car report by now.

“It’s Tokyo,” The driver mumbled. He bit at his tongue, at his cheek. Gnawed on his lower lip for a moment as he debated how much the ache and the sting would be worth it. Swallowed bile, the creeping acid, the thundering of his heart. Shrugged. “I haven’t gotten the chance to memorize patrol schedules yet. It might be better to stay in the car, even if it’s not as easy. We still have gas.”

“I know,” Denki agreed, a little dejectedly. Another moment, turned into a breath and a little click of the seat belt rubbing against the buckle of Denki’s belt. He sighed, made a moving motion with his hands. Awkward, stilted. “But, ah. I was thinking, you know, what if I went with you to this doctor you’re looking for?”

Izuku paused for a long moment. His hands spasmed on the steering wheel, again. The traffic was moving slowly. He wasn’t in a hurry.

It felt as if the world narrowed down for a moment. His vision tunneled, went dark and wary, turned into a soupy mixture of something called doubt. Izuku had been on his own for many years, even when the world had called him alive and a runner—a flight risk, a child with a strange living situation, that boy is going to grow up and never get rid of the feeling like he didn’t, like he never stopped being young. He had never had friends, never had people to wander with. He got in with crowds, kept to the crates and shadows, but that was not like having someone next to him on a roof watching stars or talking about heroes or quirks or books. That was not like living, like talking quietly.

He took a second before asking, “Why?”

“Well,” Denki fumbled with his words. A car honked twice in a row, loud and ear-splitting. Both teenagers winced in the car. After a second, he cleared his throat and started talking fast. “Well, I’m running, you said you were not really running but moving anyway, and I think we get along well. If you—you know what you’re doing, I think we could help each other.”

“Help each other,” Izuku echoed, trying to piece together such an idea without flinching away from the sounds that filled his head.

The buzz of static, the hum of his mom’s voice as she cut vegetables in the kitchen and he sat under the bar stool while smacking bandaids on the burns all along his arms, unbeknownst to her. The social worker talking to him in the car ride to his first foster parents house. The hours spent hiding, waiting. Watching his dad smoke and breathe ash and ask why Izuku was here if Inko was only ever his.

Learning that his dad was not his father, that his life was not the same as what was told to him.

The kid, not his kid. There were things Izuku could not escape. They hounded him and bit his heels and warned him, telling him to run faster and farther, to breathe harder or he would never keep up. He would never be the lead of the group.

At the front, at the finish line before everyone.

Memories that slipped past him at the mere mentions of help. He had to help himself from a young age, and learned very quickly how to do so with vibrant success. How to blackout security cameras, how to suck energy right out of phones and shove it into street lamps while walking away from civilians and hoping none ever bumped into him. Static electricity passed between his hands and his palms and his hair—stuck up in a hundred directions, tangled in its uneven and wild length.

“I know we don’t know each other well,” The blonde was saying, very fast. “And I know, I know that I’ll be found by authorities one way or another but I—I think it might work, for a little while.”

The traffic was moving again, and Izuku made the car inch along. His heart was in his throat.

“I don’t know how to keep anyone safe. I can barely keep myself safe,” He said, and his head wrung out like a silver bell, like the school finally saying it was time for lunch and ringing loudly for at least thirty seconds before going staticky and soft in the speakers. His hands shook. “I have to go to the doctor one way or another, Denki. I don’t know if you want to be dragged into that. I always mess with the wrong crowds, even when I know what they are.”

“So do I,” Denki said, still fast, maybe a little sharper. It was desperate, too, a rattling wheeze that was sputtering out. He looked lost, too, no longer peppy like he was in the first hours of this drive. “I get in with the wrong crowds too, there’s no option, sometimes. It’s taking the high road or being roadkill.”

Izuku swallowed thickly. “The high road might be too high, Denki.”

Saying names never felt right. He said them anyway. Called to the people who hurt him or kept him sheltered under tarps and wary sleeves. Kai, Monroe, Haru, Kaede, Itachi. Called to his mom, his dad. Called to a stranger that others were scared to name, that he did not know and did not want to name. If the high road was too high, then they would have to improvise. He knew who was who. He knew. Izuku always tried to know.

“Then we climb, we struggle,” Denki ushered. He gripped the seatbelt across his chest, frowned strongly. “We’ll do what we can. I have nowhere else to go. My foster parents might not report me missing until eight this morning, because who knows when they’ll look into the room they left me in and see nothing.”

His eyes were heavy, a little wild. They were red around the edges. His quirk was buzzing, too, just like Izuku’s own.

“It’s hard to say,” The freckled teenager said. Fifteen and legally dead. Fifteen and about to be dead, if his wound was actually infected and this traffic jam didn’t start moving along, if his life didn’t get planned out in the new city because the old one was going to kill him slowly. He swallowed bile, tasted his dad’s cigarettes. “I don’t want to be the reason a kid gets hurt.”

His traveling companion took a deep breath, hands tight. “You’re a kid. It’s better to have someone to watch your back than to be alone. If you’re hurt, someone helps. That’s what it would mean.”

Izuku’s eyes watered. His quirk buzzed, said hello, said there was power everywhere and he should probably direct it, take it, make it dance to his whim. His lip wobbled, and he screwed his eyes shut for a moment—flashes of red and green swirling by—before he pressed on the gas and moved forwards in the line.

“Okay,” He said, sounding an awful lot like his mom. Not at all like his dad, not at all like his father. “We can stay together. I’ll try and—and hide you.”

He wished he could turn out like her more than the other two.

“Thank you,” Denki said, and his breath rattled. He blinked twice. He laughed, then turned big and bright and blubbery. Red eyes around the edges, worn out and burning, too. “Haha, Izuku, thank you. This is going to be great, I promise.”

“Sure,” Izuku agreed, watery and far gone.

—

The morning sun rose steadily, burning red triangles into his freckled skin. Izuku dragged his backpack over his shoulder, scraped the soles of his shoes over the sidewalk.

Denki yawned, rubbed both his hands down his face and dragged his skin away. “Where is this magical doctor of yours?”

“I don’t know,” Izuku replied, having already set the keys on the center console. He had no phone, so he was going to use his reaming coins to call on a pay phone and get the cops to come pick up the lady’s car. I heard there was a missing car. Saw it in reports. It’s in a parking lot right now. Here’s the address. “I don’t know yet.”

Another moment, and then Denki laughed. It was seven in the morning. They spent the last how many hours driving, getting to Tokyo after leaving Musutafu.

Colors that swirled in his vision, sweat clinging to his palms and brows as a fever settled in. He hobbled upwards, adjusted his bag. His leg throbbed. His heart was in his throat. Denki’s duffle was slung over his shoulder, too.

“It’s fine,” The blonde said, bright as can be. They were in a parking lot. The car had about as much gas as it had the original timestamp Izuku stole it. Tokyo was a bustling thing, large and bright in color—people that wandered and talked in flashy clothes. “I’ll help you walk, if you need me to. We can just sit at a park for now. It’s fine—okay. It’s really fine.”

“Sure,” Izuku swallowed, and slowly turned on his heel. Deep breath in. He clicked the car door shut for the last time, nodding. “Sure, Denki.”

Denki just smiled. “So, we hit the high road?”