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Hizashi stuck his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers and kicked his shiny new shoes against a pebble. It clattered across the concrete, vanishing down a drain.
Beside him, Shouta was characteristically silent. He was slouched in his suit, hands stuffed in his own pockets, eyes carving a line through the pavement ahead of them.
It was an insultingly sunny day for a funeral. Not a fucking cloud in the sky.
“It was a nice service,” Hizashi mused as they walked. Shouta hummed his agreement. Hizashi could see the programme stuck haphazardly out of his jacket pocket, a cool blue. “Did you speak to his parents?”
“Yeah.”
Hizashi nodded. Nodded some more. He didn’t know how to do this. Not—not talk to Shouta. He had mastered the art of talking to Shouta, of peeling back the layers until he opened up. He’d done that a few years ago in the first weeks Shouta had joined their class after the Sports Festival. It was the rest of it he didn’t know how to do.
The context.
“I think the whole class was there,” Hizashi said. “And Mr Nezu. It was nice that he came.”
Shouta nodded. His hair fell from where it was tucked behind his ear, covering his eyes. He made no move to fix it.
“Do you, uh,” Hizashi started, before floundering. It was a beautiful day; it was a terrible one. Hizashi didn’t want to go home yet. “Do you want to get some ice cream or something? Go to the arcade?”
Shouta blinked and glanced over. Hizashi shrugged, continuing, “Or we could just walk around for a bit. We could go up the hill?”
Shouta turned his gaze in the hill’s direction. It sat, overlooking the city, speckled with trees. He nodded.
“Let’s go up the hill.”
“Cool! Cool.”
They swung a right inside of going straight, to where the bus stop would take them back to their homes. For a while, they didn’t say much, just walked. Hizashi thought about the service, about his friend and the gravestone and the incense lit in his honour. He thought about the prayers and the tradition and the way his parents cried up at the front.
His mother had hugged Hizashi so tight, then Shouta immediately afterward. Shouta, who rarely allowed himself to be touched on a good day, hadn’t pulled away.
You two boys were the best friends our Oboro could’ve had, she had said.
Hizashi blinked away tears, kept walking.
They hiked up the hill in a similar quiet, speaking softly every now and again to dodge a puddle or duck under a branch. Hizashi’s shiny new shoes were caked in mud around the edges; he couldn’t bring himself to care. His mother would surely throw a fit when he got home, but at least she had a son to throw a fit over, so he considered it a blessing.
About half way up, Shouta said, “I’ve asked to change work studies.”
“Oh, yeah?” Hizashi asked. Shouta was ahead; he could only see the back of his head, the way his skinny shoulders refused to fill out his suit jacket.
“Nezu agreed. Said he would give me a new work study placement on Monday.”
“That’s good,” Hizashi replied. “I’m glad.”
Hizashi had been beside Shouta at the hospital the night it happened. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but after he’d heard the news and seen images of the building collapse on the TV, he’d begged Mr Nezu to take him to the hospital too, to not let Shouta be alone. Mr Nezu, the softie, had allowed it, and Hizashi had found Shouta on the squeaky plastic chair in an innocuous hospital corridor, staring dead-eyed at the wall.
They had both cried in that corridor, but Shouta had done so in a way that made it seem like he was unaware he was even doing it. Hizashi, on the other hand, was a world class sobber. Patients three floors up knew he his friend was dead.
“Do you think you’ll be put on the same placement as someone else?” Hizashi asked.
Shouta exhaled, stepped over a downed branch. “I hope not.”
They lapsed into silence again until they reached the top of the hill, breaking out of the trees into the light of the field. It wasn’t very large, and the edge was fenced off with a steep incline on the other side, but the breeze was strong at that height, and the sun beat directly down without obstruction.
Hizashi rolled up the sleeves of his jacket. His forearms were bare except for the temporary tattoos his little sister had given him in her attempt at making him feel better the day before. All Might, Endeavour and Gang Orca sat across his skin.
Shouta almost smiled when he saw them, but instead he let his gaze drag away to the view before landing heavily in the grass. Hizashi joined him; the ground was warm and the grass soft. The view was expansive and clear.
He wished it were raining.
Hizashi said, “It feels so strange that he’s not here.” Shouta hummed. “Like, he should be next to us. Or floating above us. Or climbing over the fence and risking death with us. You know?”
Shouta nodded. He pulled his knees up to his chin, fixing his gaze on something far away. Hizashi slouched by his side with a sigh.
“Maybe it’s a stupid question, but…” he trailed off. The words sounded ridiculous in his mouth. He could imagine Shouta’s snarling too soon. But Shouta wasn’t the kind to snarl and Hizashi wasn’t the kind to baulk at being ridiculous.
Shouta said, “Ask your question.”
“No snarling.”
“When have I ever snarled?” The question was a sigh.
Hizashi nodded, trying for a smile and missing the mark. “Are we still going to have a hero agency together if Shirakumo isn’t with us?”
Shouta blinked, glanced over, looked back out at the view. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hizashi sighed. “Neither do I. It wouldn’t be the same without him, would it?”
“It wouldn’t.”
“And we are two vastly different types of heroes-to-be,” Hizashi continued. “I want to be flashy in the day and you want to hide out in the night.”
“Yeah,” Shouta agreed.
“Shirakumo bridged the gap. Maybe it wouldn’t work without him.”
“… Maybe.”
Hizashi rolled his lower lip into his mouth, nodded. His stomach felt like a pit, like the heaviest weight in the world had just dropped into it and broken out the other side. “Alright then,” he said. “No agency.”
Shouta blinked three times. “No agency,” he said.
Hizashi flopped onto his back. He didn’t care if he got dirt on his suit or in his hair. He wished there were clouds in the sky. He was also grateful there were none; he didn’t think he could stomach seeing a cloud and knowing that Shirakumo wasn’t riding it.
“No agency?” Shouta questioned, his voice harsh.
Hizashi jolted, glancing over. “Huh?”
Shouta was glaring down at him. “Just like that? No agency.”
“Well, I mean—”
“He’s been dead a week, ‘Zashi,” Shouta spat, and Hizashi launched himself upright.
“I know that,” he said. “Don’t think I don’t know that.”
“Then why are you already trying to forget him? Forget his—his friendship with us?” Shouta stumbled over the words, like he couldn’t place them all correctly. Hizashi fumbled himself, mouth opening and closing.
“I don’t want there to be no agency,” Hizashi promised.
“Well it sure took you only thirty seconds to get rid of it,” Shouta retorted. “The guests probably haven’t even all left the funeral yet.”
“Hey,” Hizashi warned with a glare.
Shouta glared back, eyes flickering red. Hizashi wasn’t even using his quirk, so this was all kinds of no fair.
For a moment, they glared at each other, and then Hizashi let out his breath and flopped onto his back once more.
“I’m not going to fight with you, Shouta,” he said.
“Fuck you,” Shouta replied.
“It’s not happening.”
“You want to ditch our agency?”
“You didn’t even want to be in our agency,” Hizashi retorted, mild. He closed his eyes so he couldn’t see the red of Shouta’s.
“Of course I did.”
“It was like pulling teeth to persuade you to join.”
Shotua grumbled something.
“What was that?” Hizashi asked, maybe a little edge of meanness to his tone. He didn’t want to fight, honest, but it was so easy with Shouta, so easy when they were both sad and lonely and their friend of perfect equilibrium was crushed under a fucking building. He thought about Shouta, in the ruins, untouched. He thought about Shouta in the hospital corridor, crying silent, unwitting tears.
Shouta said, “I’m just not good at having friends.”
Hizashi swallowed. “I know, Shouta.”
“I wanted to be in the agency with you guys,” Shouta said, voice soft in the breeze. “I wanted to be heroes with you both.”
Hizashi’s mouth twisted. “I know.”
He opened his eyes. The sky was so blue.
Shouta said, “I don’t want to lose you too.”
Hizashi sat up. “You won’t.”
“I don’t trust anyone else.”
“You won’t lose me.”
Shouta wouldn’t look at him. This was par for the course; he never looked at Hizashi when he was being honest or vulnerable. Usually, though, they were in his bedroom and music was playing, or they were on the roof of the school and Shirakumo was swinging his arm around Shouta’s shoulders and telling him just how much he enjoyed his company.
Hizashi looped his arm around Shouta’s shoulders and pulled him into his side. Shouta went willingly, pliant.
“You won’t lose me,” Hizashi swore. “And I won’t lose you, right?”
It was quiet: “Right.”
Hizashi hesitated, before pressing his cheek into Shouta’s hair. It was surprisingly soft. They stayed like that for a while, the breeze fluttering by, the city unaware to their very existence.
“We have a lot of time,” Hizashi said eventually, “to decide about the agency. Things are different now, so… we can think about it.”
“Okay,” Shouta whispered, barely audible.
“But either way… it’s you and me, okay? Still part of the three dumbigos, even if our third isn’t here anymore. We’ve got each other’s backs.”
“Right.”
Hizashi didn’t know what would happen to them. He didn’t know the world they would become heroes in, or how their lives would change. Didn’t know about the success of his radio show, or becoming teachers, or the war that was less than fifteen years away, Shirakumo’s death just one small piece of it. He didn’t know about his friend’s unrecovered body, sitting in a lab at that moment, being reborn into something terrible, something with only a sliver of Shirakumo’s memory inside.
He didn’t know that he and Shouta really wouldn’t have an agency together. That this death would reverberate across the rest of their lives. That even when they stayed together, tightly linked, through dirty apartments and mismatched confessions, that there would always be something missing, something slightly wrong.
For now, they just sat on a hill on the day of Shirakumo Oboro’s funeral, and grieved.
Eventually, Shouta looked up and said, “Oh, finally.”
“Hm?”
“A cloud.”