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It had fallen to Toshinori to speak with both Tsukauchi and Gran Torino about Nighteye, since they had been on their own mission together when it happened. He’d cast about him desperately for another person who might reasonably be expected to deliver the news, but there was nobody else who was closely connected to all three of them. He had to do it.
With Tsukauchi it was not so terrible. “I’m sorry for your loss of a good friend,” Toshinori had said, so that Tsukauchi would not say it to him first.
“And I’m sorry for yours,” Tsukauchi had answered quietly. Hearing it second was easier, somehow. Tsukauchi made no attempt to compare their separate friendships with Nighteye, or to weigh the degree of grief each of them was permitted. He only said, treading a graceful path between formality and humanity, “He was… always very sure of himself, but never selfish or self-important. The spotlight didn’t matter to him. He was a true hero.”
“Yes,” said Toshinori. The way Tsukauchi handled it reminded him of why they had ended up becoming friends, and remaining so after things with Nighteye had ended. It also reminded him of how bitterly and often he had accused Mirai of being selfish, in their last days.
“If I quit now, while I’m still capable of more,” he’d demanded, “how many people do you think will die, who I could have saved? Their blood would be on my hands. And if you were to succeed in convincing me, on yours too.”
Nighteye struggled to keep his voice level. “One of the things my ability has forced me to accept is that failing to prevent an unfortunate outcome doesn’t make me responsible for it.”
“Well,” he answered with reproach, “that’s a difference between us.”
That had been one of their first fights about All Might’s future after his injury, in the hospital before Nighteye had admitted the truth about his terrible vision, and before he had vowed not to stay and wait to see it come to pass. After that, in Toshinori’s misery, Mirai’s selfishness had crossed from the philosophical to the personal.
“Staying until the end is what people who matter to each other do,” he had insisted from his impotent seat at the kitchen table while Mirai stood at the counter with his back to him. Mirai had brought him home, was continuing to make him eat and help him dress, all the while refusing to change his mind. “Love and help until death—it’s a promise people literally make to each other all the time.”
Mirai set a cup of tea down in front of him. His face was pale and tight. “It’s not a promise you’ve ever asked me to make to you, is it,” he said.
“What the hell is this argument about?” he’d demanded in anger—and then he’d suddenly wondered whether this, if nothing else, would make a difference. “Would you?” he asked, in an entirely different tone. “Is that something you would want?”
Mirai seemed to travel a similar course. At first his face twisted and his eyes flooded with tears—these days, if he was not stony he was crying—and he choked out, “You’re asking me this now?” But before Toshinori could answer, Mirai sat down in the chair next to him, clasped both of Toshinori’s hands in his. “If I did,” he said desperately, “would you change your mind? Would you accept everything you’ve accomplished, and just… try to be happy?”
He could hear the voice inside him that wanted to answer yes, yes. But he said stiffly, “You talk about my happiness, but it’s always on your terms.” Mirai released his hands and fled upstairs.
Gran Torino, unsurprisingly, did not respond with Tsukauchi’s tactful reserve. He and Toshinori spoke first about Gran Torino’s capture of Kurogiri, which had landed the old man in his own hospital room across town. Then, staring at the clouds from the hospital roof, Toshinori had no choice but to proceed. For a long time after, there was silence on the other line. The next thing Gran Torino said, in a voice rough with unshed tears, was “You gonna look out for the kid?”
“Of course,” he said, not comprehending at first.
The old man knew he’d been too ready with his answer. “I’m talking about his kid, blockhead.”
“Oh.” Awkwardly, he’d mumbled, “I’m not sure what I can do for him. He—”
“The boy lost his mentor, Toshinori. What you can do is step up.”
If he had not wanted Tsukauchi to cater to his feelings, he wanted a hard-nosed lecture from Gran Torino even less. “Maybe I should smack him around a little and tell him to be a man,” he said. “That the sort of thing you mean?” He tried to back away from sounding like a resentful adolescent, without much success. “Anyway, he… I don’t know what I could teach him. Young Togata was also a casualty. He doesn’t have the use of his quirk now.”
“Well, what do you know,” grumbled Gran Torino. “Maybe you two invalids could go for some goddamn ice cream.” Then he suddenly snapped, “Nighteye blamed himself, you know, for all of it. He never quit looking for ways to make amends, and Togata was part of that. It wasn’t spite—not only, anyway. He took responsibility, and he kept faith with you. Think about that.”
Toshinori thought about it, and he remembered again, this time a confrontation he’d begun while Mirai watched him practice walking, unassisted, from one side of the room to the other. “Have you considered—” He almost stopped himself, but his chest clenched bitterly and he did not stop. “Have you considered that by looking for this future, you may be the one who’s created it? You’re always saying—” He broke off again, kept going again. “You’re not a fool. You must have thought about it. Maybe you did this.”
For an instant Mirai’s face was pale and blank, like paper. Then, before his eyes, Toshinori watched it crumple into an expression he had never seen before and wished never to see again. After only a moment, Mirai shielded him from it, covering his face with his hands—but the gesture was accompanied by a terrible, wretched sound, like the pain of an animal or the anguish of a child. Mirai sank to his knees, and then lower, touching his hands and head to the cold hospital tile. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “All Might, I’m sorry. Oh god—please—”
The spectacle was unbearable. Toshinori got down on his own knees, gritting his teeth through the pain, and drew Mirai into his arms. “Stop. Darling, stop. It’s all right. It’s all right.” But even as he held him, the tightness in his chest would not subside. Neither would Mirai’s weeping.
“You have to let me try to change it,” he sobbed, again and again. “You have to let me try.” Toshinori almost protested that Mirai himself had always been adamant that trying did no good. But he had been ruthless enough already. So he had kept clutching Mirai close to him there on the floor, which kept either of them from having to look at the other.
“Are you finished?” he asked Gran Torino.
“What else can I be?” the old man muttered. He wasn’t, though. “I’d been holding out hope, especially lately… but what can you do. Both of you are stubborn children. Were. I don’t know.”
As Toshinori put his phone in his pocket, he wondered whether he had also been holding out hope, whether finding a way back had ever been possible. Plenty of times, Mirai had lashed out at him too, with the intent to hurt. “This is all down to your own massive ego,” he’d spat once. “We have a safety net built on the cooperation of hundreds of heroes, people who are giving everything they’ve got every day, and you act like they’re nothing without you.”
“Why did being by my side mean anything to you in the first place?” he retorted, and in his own ears his words sounded pleading, not haughty. “Have you forgotten who I am?”
“I know you inside and out, Toshinori. You’re a sad, scared man obsessed with the myth you’ve created about yourself. Everything is a performance with you. You’ve been playing All Might so long you don’t know who you are, and you don’t want to find out.”
But after that lashing he’d gotten from Gran Torino, all that really stood out in his memory was his own viciousness. “Do you think,” he’d said, all quiet fury in one of their final moments in the office at Might Tower, “that I’ll just fold, when you’re gone? I was doing this on my own for fifteen years, before you. Do you think I can’t go back to the way things were?”
Mirai’s eyes were dry, then, but his face was etched with lines of sorrow. “No,” he said. “I think that’s exactly what you’ll do.” He looked toward the door he’d walked through five years earlier. “I’ve been trying to make myself useful all this time, but I know you’ve never needed me. Not really.”
He took the stairs down from the roof and walked slowly to young Togata’s room. What would he say to him? I’m sorry your quirk is gone? I’m sorry your master is gone? Want to hang out with a washed-up has-been? He still hadn’t decided on anything when he reached the door. He was about to knock, but stopped his hand as he looked through the thin glass panel.
Izuku Midoriya was already there, wearing an awkward smile. Togata, miraculously, was laughing. It ought to mean something, he thought—the two of them together, fumbling towards happiness—but exactly what, he wasn’t sure. He watched them for a while before he turned away. Whatever he might find to say to Togata could wait till they were back at school.
***
It had felt strange to return to his office at UA and sit down at the desk where he’d gotten Bubble Girl’s call. It was an act he’d avoided as long as he could. The notes he’d been looking at were right where he’d left them. But he’d only been there a few minutes when something hard rapped against his door.
It turned out to be Gran Torino’s stick. He still wore a bandage around his head. “I’m not very good at apologies,” he said abruptly. “But I’m all right at telling the truth. You might not be a better teacher than me, Toshinori, but you’re a better man. You’d be kinder to that Togata boy than I was to you, after we lost Shimura. And… I let my affection for Mirai get in the way of my care for you. I’m sad and sorry as hell about him, but I figure you’ve got to be sadder and sorrier. I was too hard on you when everything was hard enough. Again.”
Coming from the old man, it was an admirable apology, even if no apology had technically been made. He thought about what Dave had said. “My sadness is mine, and yours is yours,” he told Gran Torino. “Nobody’s loss is easy. Do you want to sit down?”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” said Gran Torino quietly, hopping onto the chair opposite the desk. “You’ve got a gentle spirit, just like her. You forgive people. She’d be very proud of you.”
They were silent for a while. They had been connected by grief from the beginning, and they knew, at least, how to sit with it together.
Eventually Toshinori said, “He was more that way than me, underneath that hard-edged attitude he had. He even got around to forgiving me, I think, and I still… He was the gentler one.”
“Well. She’d have liked him too.”
He smiled a little. “I’ve always thought so.”
Gran Torino cleared his throat. “Aren’t you going to offer an old guy a snack? I’m starving.”