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Less than a year after his own arrest, a little under a month and a half after he turns sixteen, a week exact before Haiiro has her own sixteenth birthday, and twelve minutes into he and Haiiro’s third episode of Between the Devil for the day (sue them, they’re done with their assignments for the week), when his phone pings with a new message.
Amari: um
Amari: are you looking at the news?
Amari: i do not know if you want to but
Amari: i think you should
Amari: people in the groupchat are talking about it i think you should look yourself
He blinks, pressing his eyebrows together. Huh.
Absently, half-expecting something stupid, he swipes out of his messages, over to the first news app he had downloaded. He sees Haiiro glance over at him out of the corner of his eyes.
“Are you even paying attention?” she says, though there’s no real bite under her words. By the time Towa looks back up to meet her eyes, her hand is already hitting the spacebar on her laptop, pausing the episode. “What’s so important?”
Towa shrugs. “Something on the news that the groupchat is talking about. Amari told me to look at it.”
Haiiro raises an eyebrow. “Why?”
“I don’t know, he just said to look at it for myself.” He doesn’t continue the conversation any further, glancing back down at his phone, the news app long since finished loading.
It’s not the first listed article, not the second, but the third that catches his eye. His throat goes dry within the first two words.
Villains Kudakeru and X arrested two months after last attack.
Towa’s thumb hovers over it, the read more , the tiny thumbnail image that he can barely recognize as a picture of his parents.
“Tokukata?”
Haiiro’s voice sounds very far away, for being less than three feet to his left.
Towa tries to respond, mouth flapping open and closed, words failing him until Haiiro finally just leans closer and looks for herself.
“I think,” he says, quietly, “I need to go outside.” His mom’s Quirk is sitting unsteady under his skin, he’s hyperaware of how many people are in this building, and he needs to go outside.
Haiiro shuts her laptop and stands without another question.
Barely over a year after they graduate, four months before they manage to be the first graduates of V Class to open their own agency (with Yukiyo’s connections only partially to thank for the funding, since her mother was hesitant with giving any support), and with their first day off in months coming up the next day, Towa and Yukiyo hole themselves into Towa’s apartment to watch the new movie adaptation-sequel-whatever-monstrosity of Between the Devil with the lowest standards possible.
Towa likes to think that he’s not as shit of a cook as he was at fifteen, but Yukiyo refuses to take the chance. He’s pretty sure it’s half because she washes her hands no less than five times throughout the process. She does let him handle the microwave popcorn, at least, but other than that he’s abandoned to the task of setting up the TV.
“God, even the poster looks terrible,” Yukiyo complains as she walks in, handing Towa a dish he couldn’t name. He’s sure they’d tell him if he asked, but not without the fake superior-rich-person tone they always take on, the memory of what she was like when they first met only making it funnier. “Did they cast a single character accurately?”
“Did they write a single character accurately?” Towa asks, tilting his head at her, remembering the rant they’d shared during a lunch break on the day the trailer came out, only stopped by a villain attack down the street.
“Both of those are a resounding no.” They’d avoided seeing it in theaters, narrowly avoided spoilers online, but even then it was impossible to avoid the general discontent around how it had come out.
Yukiyo properly glances over at Towa for the first time since she walked in the room, her nose wrinkling. “You still have that? How does that even still fit?”
Towa grins, tugging at one of the two hoodies he still has from first year. “The benefits of not growing since I was fourteen.”
“Fucking seriously not growing, I think it fits you the same it did when I got you it.”
“Probably. Figured we should have something in the room to remind us of what had been while we witness whatever this is gonna be.”
“Yeah, okay, sure, move over so we can get it over with.”
Towa does, shifting just enough to the right for Yukiyo to fit.
Three months after his parents get arrested, a little under a month before they start their second year, and a month after the thing he doesn’t want to think about, Haiiro drags Towa out of his room despite his protests.
“I already reserved the training area,” they bite when he continues to tug against the grip they have on his arm. He has a feeling he knows which one. “Sensei’s on my side here, and she knows where we are, and we don’t even have to go inside, but you’re using your fucking Quirk.”
“It’s not mine, ” Towa responds, voice quieter despite the desperate plea in his voice. “Haiiro–”
“Are you going to find a way to get rid of it?” Haiiro asks, glaring back at him over her shoulder. “Are you going to go back to whatever his name is and get him to take it? You think that’s gonna go well for you? You have it and you’re not going to lose it, so you might as well accept that it’s yours and train it.”
Towa grits his teeth, and stops tugging back, if only because he knows it’s pointless. A few months ago, he didn’t even know that students could reserve Ground Beta. (Technically, they can’t. It’s just his mother’s Quirk that makes him an exception.)
They stop in the center of an intersection, and Towa can feel his heart pounding in his chest as his wrist is finally freed. “Haiiro–”
“I didn’t spend three months helping you with your Quirk for you to stop using it because you lose control one time,” she says, not letting him finish. “You know how often kids lose control of their Quirks, right? While they’re learning to use it?”
“Most kids don’t almost kill someone from losing control,” Towa responds, staring down at Haiiro’s feet. He can’t look her in the eyes, not now, not anymore.
Haiiro scoffs. “The kids who do ,” she retorts, pausing for emphasis, “statistically have better control and less accidents with control if they properly train it afterwards.”
You and your fucking statistics, Towa thinks, but doesn’t say, still staring at the ground. “I’m not a kid.”
“You’ve had this Quirk for as long as the average five year old has had theirs. The principle of it is the same.”
Towa doesn’t have a good comeback for that. Haiiro waits for one, and when it doesn’t come, she sighs, stepping back.
“You remember how you’ve been training it. Keep doing that, I’ll freeze it if it becomes dangerous, you know how it works.”
Towa’s hands curl into fists at his side. He shakes his head, still not looking up.
Haiiro gives him fifteen seconds of that, before she speaks again.
“You know damn well what happens if you lose control again,” she says, voice low. “If you get like that again, and you don’t know how to control your Quirk, maybe you’ll actually kill someone. Maybe you’ll actually kill me.”
Towa grits his teeth, muscles only growing tenser, shifting his gaze to the side. Haiiro doesn’t take it as a sign to stop. (When has she ever known how to shut her mouth?)
“Do you want me dead, Towa?” His vision wavers, he holds himself back, he does not react. He can’t. He can’t. “Were you trying to kill me? Do you want me dead? ”
He doesn’t know why the repeat is his last straw, why that’s what has his head snapping up, hands releasing from the fists he’d been holding them in. “No! I–!”
Zoning flashes green over his vision before he actually hears the crack, before he shoots around in the direction it came from, desperately raising his hand, knowing damn well once it’s collapsing it’s too late.
Except it’s not.
The building Structure Manipulation had hit freezes midair. The unnatural stillness that comes with Haiiro’s Quirk isn’t there. His entire body is twice as tense as it was before. X-Ray is flickering on and off as well, disorienting but not distracting, he can’t get distracted. He doesn’t think he can even blink, not without it coming down.
The stillness falls over everything. Haiiro taps him twice on the shoulder to confirm it. He doesn’t tear his eyes away from the building they were standing too close to to begin with, until finally, he takes two sharp, deep breaths, and lets go.
Nothing happens. It stays, still collapsing, suspended.
Still breathing heavy, body aching despite only holding it for a few seconds, he turns back to Haiiro. At the scar over her eyebrow matching his own and the other scars over her face that don’t match.
She has the biggest grin on her face, cocky and relieved at once. “That’s what I thought.”
Compared to her house, Yukiyo’s apartment is – well. Not what Towa expected.
He voices this much the first time he visits, and they raise an eyebrow. “What, you expected me to rent an entire floor or something? You remember how small our dorms were, right?”
“Still,” he says, looking out at the tiny planter box in the window, the various other plants taking up most of the apartment that isn’t taken up by actual life necessities. The only one that isn’t real is a LEGO bonsai tree, sitting in the corner of Yukiyo’s desk.
“When’d you get that?” he asks, pointing at it.
Yukiyo glances over at it. “Oh. Housewarming gift from my uncle.”
Towa raises an eyebrow. “The yakuza one?”
“Okay, you don’t get to lecture me on having questionable contacts, considering your background.” She pauses, looking back at him. “When was the last time you saw your parents, anyways?”
He grimaces. “Two– three months ago? …Four?”
Yukiyo looks unimpressed.
“I write to them every week,” they say, raising their hands in surrender.
“Yeah, okay,” she says, stepping over to her desk and adjusting the placement of the bonsai tree, the same way they’d noticed her adjusting her actual plants for proper sunlight before.
Absently, Towa watches, before a half-thought pops into his head about all the odd things he’s found out his Quirk counts as “structures.”
He grins, and twitches one of his fingers, eyes trained hard on the plastic tree. As he does, the top section of plastic brick leaves pops off.
Yukiyo flinches, staring at it for a second before glaring back at him, picking it up and clicking it back into place. “Asshole.”
“I was curious,” they say with a laugh. She doesn’t look impressed, minus the way the corner of her lip ticks up.
It’s two years after the thing Towa still doesn’t like thinking about, despite the scars being healed (and the mental ones still being dealt with in therapy) and his control of Structure Manipulation being so much better than it was, two months before they’ll officially get a professional hero license, and a month exact from Yukiyo’s eighteenth birthday, when they’re avoiding the chaos of the rest of the class by just stepping outside, sitting on the front stairs of the dorms.
It’s almost silent, except for the occasional quiet laugh before one of them tilts their phone screen towards the other. Eventually, there’s not even that, their phones set down, heads absently tilted towards the sky. More light pollution by the training field Amari likes to take him to, but Towa doesn’t mind the stars here, either.
“Fuck it,” Yukiyo mumbles, before turning to Towa and speaking up. “We have less than three months, what’s your plan?”
Towa blinks, looking back at her, quiet for a second before shrugging. “Heroics?”
“Yeah, duh, we’ve established that you’ve grown past your fifteen-year-old edgy phase. That’s not a plan.”
“I think it’s a plan.”
“I think it’s a career field. ”
They’re both quiet for a moment.
“What’s your plan, then?”
Yukiyo looks over at them. She scrunches her nose, narrowing her eyes. “Don’t call it stupid.”
Towa tilts his head, putting an unimpressed look on his face. “Based on how much help you’ve given me, I don’t think I can call anything you say stupid.”
Still, she’s quiet for a few seconds longer, before outright turning away from him and mumbling something.
Towa tilts his head again, in the opposite direction, without the unimpressed look. “What?”
“I thought, ” she says, louder this time, not quite turning back to him but no longer turning fully away from him, “that you might want to do hero work together. We work well in partner exercises, and my Quirk helps you maintain Structure Manipulation in ways you wouldn’t be able to do on your own even with training.”
Towa lets a sharp breath out through his nose. “Humble.”
“Shut up.”
She looks over at him after that, eye contact held for a minute. Towa tries not to, but a quiet laugh still slips.
“Oh, fuck you,” Yukiyo says, standing. Towa grabs her arm before she can actually walk away.
“You thought I’d think that was a stupid idea,” he says, smirking. “I think I can call that part stupid.”
Yukiyo opens her mouth to retort, before closing it again. “...You don’t think it’s stupid.”
“I kind of thought it was a given?” Maybe that’s his bad, actually. “You’re right about all the reasons. I figured once we both finished up our sidekick shit–”
“If you think I’m doing that for more than two years–”
“–Yeah, okay, whatever. Once we finish that, it would make sense for us to work together.”
Yukiyo narrows her eyes at him, as if it’s a trick. “...Yeah. Exactly.”
Towa narrows his eyes right back. “Exactly.”
They hold like that for a few seconds, before both breaking out into quiet laughter.
“Do we need a name for that, then?” Towa asks, still laughing. “Do we have to come up with that?”
“We can leave that for later, I’m not doing that right now.”
“I’m reserving my right to veto any of your suggestions.”
“But you won’t because I’m amazing at naming things.”
“Yeah, sure, like Mr. Wiggles.”
Yukiyo gasps, hitting Towa on the shoulder. “Do not disrespect Mr. Wiggles’ name like that.”
“As long as you don’t name our agency or hero duo or whatever after him–”
“That’s actually a great idea, asshole–”